These Relations will also be found entered under their respective authors in Sabin’s Dictionary and in Field’s Indian Bibliography.
The reason of the rarity of these books may lie in part in the smallness of the editions, but probably most in the avidity of readers, and consequent destruction; for Charlevoix says, “They were at the time extremely relished in France.” Of their character, the same authority says: “There is no other source to which we can apply for instruction as to the progress of religion among the savages, or for a knowledge of these people, all of whose languages the Jesuits spoke. The style of these Relations is extremely simple; but this simplicity itself has not contributed less to give them a great celebrity than the curious and edifying matter they contain.” Father Martin, in his translation of Bressani, speaks (p. 8) Of these Relations as the most precious monument, and sometimes the only source, of the history of Canada, and praises the impartial use made of them by Bancroft and Sparks. Parkman says of them: “Though the productions of men of scholastic training, they are simple and often crude in style, as might be expected of narratives hastily written in Indian lodges or rude mission-houses in the forest, amid annoyances and interruptions of all kinds. In respect to the value of their contents, they are exceedingly unequal.... The closest examination has left me no doubt that these missionaries wrote in perfect good faith, and that the Relations hold a high place as authentic and trustworthy historical documents. They are very scarce, and no complete collection of them exists in America.” Shea (Le Clercq, i. 381) has a note of the contemporary discrediting of the Relations by rival orders.
The series was reprinted by the Canadian Government in 1858 in three octavo volumes, with bibliographical notes and synopses, containing—vol. i. 1611, 1626, 1632 to 1641; ii. 1642 to 1655; iii. 1656 to 1672. These reprinted volumes are not now easy to find, and have been lately priced at £7 10s. and 100 francs. Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1,177; Lenox, Jesuit Relations, p. 14.
There have been three supplemental and complemental issues of allied and later Relations; one was printed at the expense of Mr. Lenox, and the others had the editorial care of Dr. O’Callaghan and Dr. Shea, of which notice will be taken under their respective dates. See the lists of Shea’s “Cramoisy Series” (100 copies printed) in the Lenox Contributions, p. 15; Field, Indian Bibliography, nos. 129 and 1,397; and Menzies Catalogue, no. 1,811; and the O’Callaghan Catalogue for Dr. O’Callaghan’s series (25 copies printed). Dr. Shea’s acquaintance with the subject was first largely evinced by his History of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States, 1529-1854, published, at the instance of Jared Sparks, in New York in 1855 (Field, no. 1,392); and he published a list of early missionaries among the Iroquois in the Documentary History of New York, iv. 189.
The earliest summarizing of these Relations or of those before 1656, was by the Père du Creux (or Creuxius, b. 1596, d. 1666) in his Historiæ Canadensis, sev Novæ Franciæ, libri decem, Paris, 1664 (pp. xxvi, 810, 4, map and thirteen plates). There are copies in Harvard College, Carter-Brown, Lenox, and New York Historical Society libraries. Cf. Rich (1832), no. 333, £1 16s.; Brinley, no. 82, $80; Carayon, no. 1,322; Harrisse, no. 120; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 945, with fac-simile of title; Leclerc, Bibl. Amér. no. 706, 500 fr.; Ternaux, no. 823; Lenox, p. 10; O’Callaghan, no. 699; Huth, i. 367; Sunderland, vol. ii. no. 3,561; Charlevoix (Shea’s edition), i. 81, who says: “This extremely diffuse work was composed almost exclusively from the Jesuit Relations. Father du Creux did not reflect that details read with pleasure in a letter become unsupportable in a continuous history.” “It contains, however,” says Dr. Shea, “some curious statements, showing that he had other material.” The map, Tabula Novæ Franciæ anno 1660, extends so as to include Hudson’s Bay, Newfoundland, the Chesapeake, and Lake Superior; and it has a corner-map, “Pars regionis Huronum hodie desertæ.” The map has been reproduced in Martin’s translation of Bressani’s Relation of 1653, and is given in part on another page of the present volume.
The Relations were not much noticed by writers at the time, and few allusions to them appear in contemporaneous works. One of the few books which drew largely from them is Le Nouveau Monde ou l’Amérique Chrestienne.... Par Me Charles Chavlmer, Historiographe de France. Paris, 1659.
The story of the missions of New France necessarily makes part of the general works of Charlevoix and the other Catholic historians, particularly the Histoire du Canada of Brasseur de Bourbourg, Paris, 1859, who depends largely upon Bancroft for his facts. Mr. Parkman, not bound by the same ties, gives a view of the Jesuits’ character, in his Jesuits in North America, which has been questioned by their adherents. His book, however, is of the first importance; and Dr. George E. Ellis, in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1867, recounts, in a review of the book, the historian’s physical disability, which has from the beginning of his labor sadly impeded the progress of his work. Cf. also Dr. Ellis’s sustained estimate of Parkman, in his Red Man and White Man in North America, p. 259. The story of the Jesuits’ trials contained in the Lettres Edifiantes is translated in Bishop W. I. Kip’s Early Jesuit Missions in North America, 1846, and again, 1866. Cf. also Magazine of American History, iii. 767; M. J. Griffin in Canadian Monthly, i. 344; W. B. O. Peabody’s “Early Jesuit Missionaries in the Northwest,” in Democratic Review, May, 1844, reprinted in Beach’s Indian Miscellany; Judge Law on the same subject, in Wisconsin Historical Society’s Collections, iii. 89; and Thébaud on the natives and the missions, in The Month, June, 1877; Poole’s Index gives other references, p. 683. Dr. Shea, at the end of his Catholic Missions, p. 503, gives a list of his sources printed and in manuscript.
