The Jesuits, on the other hand, were convinced that Hudson’s Bay (or the “Bay of the North”) was at no great distance from Lake Superior (which was true) and that it must communicate to the north-west with the Pacific Ocean or the sea that led to China.

In 1661, without the leave of the French Governor of Canada, who wanted them to take two servants of his own with them and to give him half the profits of the venture, Chouart and Radisson hurried away to the west, picked up large bodies of natives who were returning to the regions north of Lake Huron, with them fought their way through the ambushed Iroquois, and once more navigated the waters of Lake Superior.  Once again they started for the Mississippi basin and explored the country of Minnesota, coming thus into contact with native tribes which lived on the flesh of the bison.  In Minnesota they met a second time the Kri or Kinistino Indians of north-central Canada, and joined one of their camps in the spring of 1662, somewhere to the west of Lake Superior.  With Kri guides they started away to the north and north-east, no doubt by way of the Lake of the Woods, the English River, Lake St. Joseph, and the Albany River, thus reaching the salt sea at James Bay, the southernmost extension of Hudson Bay.  Or they may have proceeded by an even shorter route, though with longer portages for canoes, through Lake Nipigon to the Albany.

The summer of 1662 they passed on the islands and shores of James Bay hunting “buffalo"[6] with the Indians.  Then, in 1663, travelling back along the same route they had followed in the previous year, they regained Lake Superior, and so passed by the north of Lake Huron to the Ottawa River and the St. Lawrence.  But on their return to Three Rivers they were arrested by the French Governor, D’Avaugour, who condemned them to imprisonment and severe fines.  The courts of France gave them no redress, and in their furious anger Chouart and Radisson went over to the English, offered their services to England, and so brought about the creation of the Hudson Bay Company.

[Footnote 6:  More probably musk oxen.]

Radisson’s journey from England to Hudson Bay has been treated of in an earlier chapter:  it is preferable to follow out to its finish the great, western impulse of the French, which led them to neglect for a time the doings of the British on the east coast of North America and in the sub-Arctic regions of Hudson Bay.

From 1660 onwards the Jesuit missionaries again took up vigorously that work of Christianizing the Amerindians which had been so completely checked by the frightful ravages of the Iroquois between 1648 and 1654.

By 1669 the Jesuits had three permanent stations in western Canada.  The first was the mission station at Sault Ste. Marie, the second was the station of Ste. Esprit, on Lake Superior (not far from the modern town of Ashland), and the third was the station of St. Francois Xavier at the mouth of the Fox River, on Green Bay, Lake Michigan.