wilderness. The salvation of one soul was to him 'of more
value than the conquest of an empire.' Not far from his
native town of Brouage there was a community of the
Recollets, and, during one of his periodical sojourns in
France, he invited them to send missionaries to Canada.
The Recollets responded to his appeal, and it was arranged
that several of their number should sail with him to the
St Lawrence in the following spring. So, in May 1615,
three Recollet friars--Denis Jamay, Jean d'Olbeau, Joseph
Le Caron--and a lay brother named Pacificus du Plessis,
landed at Tadoussac. To these four men is due the honour
of founding the first permanent mission among the Indians
of New France. An earlier undertaking of the Jesuits in
Acadia (1611-13) had been broken up. The Canadian mission
is usually associated with the Jesuits, and rightly so,
for to them, as we shall see, belongs its most glorious
history; but it was the Recollets who pioneered the way.

When the friars reached Quebec they arranged a division
of labour in this manner: Jamay and Du Plessis were to
remain at Quebec; D'Olbeau was to return to Tadoussac
and essay the thorny task of converting the tribes round
that fishing and trading station; while to Le Caron was
assigned a more distant field, but one that promised a
rich harvest. Six or seven hundred miles from Quebec, in
the region of Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay, dwelt
the Hurons, a sedentary people living in villages and
practising a rude agriculture. In these respects they
differed from the Algonquin tribes of the St Lawrence,
who had no fixed abodes and depended on forest and stream