Desperate in Saint Martin Notes on Guillaume Coppier

This book on Guillaume Coppier (1606 – 1674), the early 17th-century French traveler, indentured servant, colonist, mariner, moralist, baroque chronicler, antiquarian, humanist, sometime pirate and slaver of sorts, is essentially a reading of Coppier, the man and his chronicle. Coppier’s Histoire et voyage des Indes Occidentales, et de plusieurs autres régions maritimes, & esloignées (History and Voyage to the West Indies and to Several Other Maritime and Faraway Regions) was published in Lyon in 1645. Given its objective and context, this effort—part amateur historiography and translation and part novice commentary and interpretation—is also a survey of past appraisals of Coppier’s chronicle. Like all such endeavors, this essay informs on the essayist; it is a sort of voyage, and a long one at that.