[109] His account of Fort Chartres is quoted in the appendix of Mills’s Boundaries of Ontario, p. 198. His plan of Mobile Bay (p. 55), may be compared with one in Roberts’s Account of the First Discovery and Natural History of Florida (London, 1763), p. 95.
[110] [The Early History of Illinois, from its Discovery by the French, in 1673, until its Cession to Great Britain in 1763, including the Narrative of Marquette’s Discovery of the Mississippi. With a Biographical Memoir by Melville W. Fuller. Edited by Thomas Hoyne (Chicago, 1884). It has three folded maps.—Ed.]
[111] [Cf., for these and other titles, Vol. IV. pp. 198, 199. The routes of Marquette by Green Bay, and of La Salle by the St. Joseph River, had been the established method of communication of the French in Canada with Louisiana in the seventeenth century; but as they felt securer in the Ohio Valley, in 1716, they opened a route by the Miami and Wabash, and later from Presqu’ Isle on Lake Erie to French Creek, thence by the Alleghany and Ohio.—Ed.]
[112] Bossu, ii. 151.
[113] French (part iii. p. 12, note) says: “The two brothers met in deep mourning, and after mutual embraces the brave D’Iberville sought the tomb of his brother Sauvolle, where he knelt for hours in silent grief.” All this is purely imaginary; and in French’s second series (vol. ii. p. 111, note) he concludes that Sauvolle would appear from the text not to have been Iberville’s brother. This doubt whether Sauvolle was a brother of Iberville penetrates even such a work as Nos gloires nationales. The author not finding such a seigniory, says of François Le Moyne, “We do not know if he followed his brother to Louisiana, and is the same to whom the name Sieur de Sauvole was given,”—all this in face of the record in the previous paragraph of his burial in 1687 (Nos gloires, i. 53). To the account of the massacre at Natchez, in his translation of Dumont, French appends a note (vol. v. p. 76), in which he identifies a ship-carpenter, whose life was spared by the Indians, as “Perricault, who, after his escape, wrote a journal of all that passed in Louisiana from 1700 to 1729.” Penicaut, the spelling of whose name puzzled writers and printers, left the colony in 1721. There was no foundation whatever for the note.
[114] The reader might easily be misled by the title given to the translation of a portion of the second volume of Dumont into the belief that the whole work was before him. There is no mention in French of the preface, or of the appendix to Coxe’s Carolana. Both preface and appendix are full of interesting material.
[115] In this translation French (iii. 83) says: “But notwithstanding these reports, they now create him [Bienville] brigadier-general of the troops, and knight of the military order of St. Louis,” etc. Compare this with the faithful rendering of Martin (i. 229),—“The Regent ... so far from keeping the promise he had made of promoting him to the rank of brigadier-general, and sending him the broad ribbon of the order of St. Louis, would have proceeded against him with severity if he had not been informed that the Company’s agents in the colony had thwarted his views.”
[116] It has all the substantial portions of the copy given in Margry, but there are occasional abridgments and occasional additions. The story of the Margry relation is continuous and uninterrupted; but in the copy given by French items of colonial news are interspersed, and sometimes repeated with variations. It would seem as if the copyist had been unable properly to separate the manuscript from that of some other Relation of colonial affairs, and in the exercise of his discretion had made these mistakes. A comparison of the two accounts will readily disclose their differences. A single example will explain what is meant by repetitions which may have been occasioned by confusion of manuscripts. On p. 145 of vol. vi., or second series vol. i. of French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana occurs the following: On the 17th of March, 1719, “the ship of war ‘Le Comte de Toulouse’ arrived at Dauphin Island.” On p. 146 we find, “On the 19th of April the ships ‘Maréchal de Villars,’ ‘Count de Toulouse,’ and the ‘Phillip,’ under the command of M. de Sérigny, the brother of M. de Bienville, arrived at Dauphin Island.” These two paragraphs, with their contradictory statements about the “Comte de Toulouse,” do not occur in Margry. They are evidently interpolated from some outside source. Thomassy (1860) quotes Annales véritables des 22 premières années de la colonisation de la Louisiane par Pénicaut, as from the “MSS. Boismare, dans la Bibliothèque de l’État à Bâton-Rouge.”
The camp-fire yarn of Jalot, with its marvellous details about Saint-Denys’ romantic love-affair, the gorgeous establishment of the Mexican viceroy, and the foolhardy trip of Saint-Denys to see his wife, are omitted in French’s translation. They are worthless as history, but they reveal the simplicity of Penicaut, who yielded faith to his fellow-voyagers, in the belief that it was his good fortune to be chosen to tell the story to the world.
[117] [Historical Collections of Louisiana, ... compiled with Historical and Biographical Notes and an Introduction by B. F. French. Part I. Historical Documents from 1678 to 1691 (New York, 1846). This volume contains a discourse before the Historical Society of Louisiana by Henry A. Bullard, its president (originally issued at New Orleans, 1836; cf. Sabin, vol. iii. no. 9,116), and sundry papers relating to La Salle, Tonty, and Hennepin, specially referred to in Vol. IV. of the present History.