untutored simplicity. It does not appear that much attention was paid
to either of these injunctions, or if there was, the efforts proved as
abortive as those they made to discover the western passage. The moral
wilderness still remains around their settlements on the East Maine,
while those of the brethren on the opposite coast of Labrador bloom
and blossom as the rose.

The first thought of attempting to establish a missionary settlement
in that quarter among the Esquimaux, originated with a Moravian
brother, John Christian Erhardt, a Dutch pilot. He had in early life
made several voyages to Davis Straits; but in 1749, when sailing under
Captain Grierson in the Irene, the vessel touched at New Hernhut in
Greenland, where he saw the congregation that had been gathered from
among the heathen in that land; and in conversation with the brethren
they told him that they supposed the opposite coast of North America
was peopled by tribes having the same customs and speaking the same
language as the Greenlanders. This statement made a deep impression on
his mind, and during his stay at Hernhaag, 1750, while musing on the
state of that people sitting in the darkness of heathenism, and on how
the light of the gospel might be communicated to them, a description
of the journey undertaken by Henry Ellis, 1746-7, at the desire of the
Hudson's Bay Company, to try to discover a north-west passage,
accidentally fell into his hands. The account there given of these
barbarous regions convinced him that the people were sprung from the
same origin with the Greenlanders, and the methods suggested by Ellis
for their moral improvement enabled him to bring his own scheme to a
bearing.

In a letter, dated 20th May 1750, addressed to Bishop Johannes de
Watteville, he laid before him his plan for establishing a mission on