A Jesuit And The Hurons

A Jesuit Missionary's Strange Adventures.

The labors and sacrifices of the French Jesuits in North America, during the seventeenth century, have never failed to awaken admiration and interest. Among these heroic men was a certain Father Adrian Grelon. He was appointed to the mission among the Hurons, a great and superior tribe living between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. In time the Hurons were almost exterminated by the Five Iroquois Nations of New York, who had obtained firearms from the Dutch. The surviving missionaries accompanied a band who went down to Quebec. Father Grelon was sent back to France. There he solicited the Chinese mission and set out for the far East. It is probable that he crossed Spain to take passage at some Spanish or Portuguese port, and on the way, to his astonishment, discovered in a Spanish convent an Iroquois, who had been sent to Spain, educated and ordained as a priest. On reaching China Father Grelon was stationed at different missions and labored with zeal. He wrote a book on China which is a curious addition to the Jesuit Relations of Canada, being by an old Canadian missioner. In time he penetrated Chinese Tartary, and there to his astonishment found in one of the camps a Huron woman whom he had known in America. She had been sold as a slave from tribe to tribe till she reached that place. Father Grelon reported the strange circumstance to his superiors and to the learned in Europe, and was the first man to afford any proof that America and Asia at the north, approached very closely, as was afterwards found by navigators to be the fact.

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