As early as 1715-1716 there was a general discrediting of the story of La Hontan, as will be seen by letters addressed by Bobé to De l’Isle, the French geographer, and printed in the Historical Magazine, iii. 231, 232; but the English geographer, Herman Moll, in his maps between 1710 and 1720, was under La Hontan’s influence. Another English cartographer, John Senex (1710), accepted the La Hontan story with considerable hesitation, and later rejected it. Daniel Coxe, in his Carolana (1727), quite unreservedly accepted it; and the Long River appears as Moingona in Popple’s Atlas, in 1733.
The German geographer, Homann, of Nuremberg, was in some degree influenced; and the French cartographer De l’Isle sometimes accepted these alleged discoveries, and again discarded them; but the careful work of Bellin, in Charlevoix’s Nouvelle France, did much to relegate La Hontan to oblivion. Charlevoix himself says: “The great liberty which La Hontan gives his pen has contributed greatly to make his book read by people not informed to separate truth from falsehood. It fails to teach the well-informed, and confuses others. The episode of the voyage up the Long River is as fabulous as the Barataria of Sancho Panza.” (Cf. Shea’s ed., i. 86, with Shea’s note, iii. 286.) The Long River some years later, however, figured in the map which illustrates Samuel Engel’s Extraits raisonnés des Voyages faits dans les parties septentrionales, published at Lausanne, and again in 1765, and again in 1779, and of which there is also a German translation. At a later date Carver accepted the accounts of this western river as genuine, and identified it with the St. Peter’s,—a belief which Long again, in his Expedition to St. Peter’s River, wholly rejected. (Cf. also J. H. Perkins in the North American Review (1839), vol. xlviii. no. 98, where it is thought possible; and the paper by H. Scadding in the Canadian Journal, 2d series, vol. xiii. pp. 240, 396.) Parkman expresses the present view of scholars when he says (La Salle, p. 458) that La Hontan’s account of the Long River is a sheer fabrication; but he did not, like Hennepin, add slander and plagiarism to mendacity. Again, in his Frontenac (p. 105), he calls La Hontan “a man in advance of his time, for he had the caustic, sceptical, and mocking spirit which a century later marked the approach of the great Revolution. He usually told the truth when he had no motive to do otherwise, and yet was capable at times of prodigious mendacity,” for his account of what “he saw in the colony is commonly in accord with the best contemporary evidence.” There are some exceptions to this view. Gravier speaks of La Hontan as “de bonne foi et de jugement sain”!
CHAPTER VI.
THE JESUITS, RECOLLECTS, AND THE INDIANS.
BY JOHN GILMARY SHEA, LL.D.
AT the time of the discovery of this portion of the northern continent, the missionary spirit was active in the Catholic Church. The labors of the earlier monks had been revived and continued in the East by the new zeal of the orders of friars, especially of the Franciscan and Dominican Fathers. The earlier voyages of explorations from Cabot’s day were accompanied by priests; and as soon as the condition and character of the inhabitants were known, projects were formed for their conversion. This work was looked upon as a duty by the kings of Spain, Portugal, and France, as well as by the hierarchy and religious orders. Coeval with the Spanish and French attempts to settle on the coast, were missionary efforts, often pushed with wonderful zeal and courage far into the interior by intrepid apostles, who, trusting their lives to Indian guides, sought fields of labor.
The mission lines on the map meet and cross, as, undeterred by the death of pioneers, others took up the task. In 1526, Dominicans reared a chapel on the banks of the James in Virginia; in 1539, the Italian Franciscan Mark, from Nice, penetrated to New Mexico; and soon after, Father Padilla, of the same order, died by the hands of the Indians near the waters of the Missouri. By 1559 Dominicans were traversing the territories of the Mobilian tribes from Pensacola to the Mississippi; and when Melendez founded St. Augustine, it became a mission centre whence the Jesuit missionaries threaded the Atlantic coast to Chesapeake Bay and the banks of the Rappahannock, before they left that field to the Franciscans, who dotted Florida and Georgia with their mission chapels.
The same spirit was seen pervading France, where the conversion of the Indians of the New World was regarded as a duty of the highest order. One of the first traces that we find of French voyages to the northern coast is the mention in an early edition of the Chronicle of Eusebius, in 1508, that Indians who had been brought from the new-found land received baptism within the walls of a cathedral in France.