[671] From a copperplate by Van der Gucht in the London (1698) edition of Hennepin’s New Discovery. The Margry picture has unfortunately deceived not a few. It has been reproduced in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, and in Shea’s edition of Le Clercq’s Établissement de la Foi; and Mr. Baldwin speaks of the determination which its features showed the man to possess!
[672] The curious reader interested in M. Margry’s career among manuscripts may read R. H. Major’s Preface (pp. xxiv-li) to his Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, London, 1868. Mr. Major has clearly got no high idea of M. Margry’s acumen or honesty from the claim which this Frenchman has put forth, that the instigation of Columbus’s views came from France. Cf. Major’s Select Letters of Columbus, p. xlvii.
[673] Margry is not able to refer to the depository of this document, as it is not known to have been seen since Faillon used it. The copy of it made for Sparks is in Harvard College Library. See a translation of part in Magazine of American History, ii. 238.
[674] This method of supplying Canadian mothers is the subject of some inquiry in Parkman’s Old Régime, p. 220.
[675] Papers on Hennepin and Du Lhut are in the Minnesota Hist. Soc. Coll., vol. i. Du Lhut’s “Mémoire sur la Découverte du pays des Nadouecioux dans le Canada,” is in Harrisse, no. 177, and a translation is in Shea’s Hennepin.
[676] Shea (Le Clercq, ii. 123) notes a valuable series of articles on Hennepin by H. A. Rafferman, in the Deutsche Pionier, Aug.-Oct., 1880.
[677] [See chapter iv.—Ed.]
[678] This was not the only missionary labor in New France during the period already noticed. In 1619 some Recollect Fathers of the province of Aquitaine in France, at the instance of a fishing company which had establishments on the Acadian coast, came over to minister to the French and labor among the Indians. Their field of labor included Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Gaspé; but of the results of their attempts to instil an idea of Christianity into the minds of the Micmacs, we can give no details. One of their number, Father Sebastian, perished in the woods in 1623, while on his way from his post at Miscou to the chief mission station on St. John’s River. Three surviving Fathers joined the Recollects at Quebec in 1624 by order of their provincial in France, and took part in their ministry till Kirk arrived.
[679] [It was printed in 1833, in the Memoirs of the American Academy. His strong box, captured at the same time, was for a while (1845-1855) in the keeping of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Proceedings, ii. 322; iii. 40). Pickering, who edited the dictionary when printed, submitted to the same Society (Proceedings, i. 476) some original papers concerning Rale, preserved in the Massachusetts Archives, and these were used by Convers Francis in his Life of Ralle in Sparks’s American Biography. Cf. also 2 Mass. Hist. Coll. viii. 2511 and Proceedings, iii. 324. An account of his monument is in the Historical Magazine, March, 1858, p. 84, and June, 1871, p. 399.—Ed.]
[680] The Abenaki missions on the St. Lawrence and in Maine were continued, however; and a remnant of the tribe still adhere to the Catholic faith at Indian Old Town, on the Penobscot, as they did in the days of Rale and of Orono, their chief, who led them to fight beside the Continentals in the Revolution. They are now known as the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies, but are dwindling away.