All posts by David Conner

I look back now on my early life as a faded pleasant dream, difficult to recall clearly. I remember my upbringing in England as a member of a wealthy family, born to certain privilege. I learned the pass times and manners of landed gentry and cared not for the troubles of a squalid populace. Hunting fox on horseback, teas on fine china in the parlor, and the latest fashions of London were my sincerest interests.

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This text was found in the early twentieth century during an estate sale in England. It appears to be an excerpt from “The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents”, dated 1653. Due to its late discovery, it does not appear in Goldthwaite’s nineteenth century reprinted edition of Relations. The first chapter of Relations, written by the Paris editor, recounts the capture by an English vessel of the ship which conveyed Father du Peron and the Canadian mail to France. The Father’s papers were seized and carelessly flung about by the soldiers; he rescued what he could, but some pages were lost, and the Relation for the year 1653 was not, in consequence, complete. Apparently the missing pages containing the excerpt were later gathered by the crew and given to the captain who filed it away until it eventually found its way to the estate sale.

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