LOUIS HENNEPIN.

New Zealand Tablet, Issue 389, 24 September 1880, Page 17

LOUIS HENNEPIN.

(From the St. Pavl Globe.) Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan (Recollect) missionary, was born at Ath, Belgium, about 1640, and died in Holland subsequent to 1690. After his entrance to the Franciscan order he travelled through Germany and Italy, and was then for a year settled in Hal in Belgium. Then his superiors sent him to Artois, whence he visited Calais and Dunkirk and at those places acquired a taste for the sea by intercourse with sailors. It was an age of adventurous explorers by sea, and sailors were to be met at almost every port who knew more of the world than was taught in the schools where Hennepin was educated, and whose narratives of the strange lands and people they had seen were stranger than the most romantic of the narratives of the fathers he had read. From Artois he went to Holland, and for 8 months had charge of a hospital at Maestricht. At the battle of Senet, between the Prince of Conde and William of Orange, in 1674, he was present as regimental Chaplin. The next year he was ordered to Canada, and embarked at La Rochelle with Bishop Laval and the Bieur de La Balle, with whom he became a favourite. For some time he preached at Quebec, and then in 1676 he was sent to take charge of the Indian mission at Fort Fontenac (commanded by La Salle), where the city of Kingston, Canada, now stands. While there hi visited the Indians of the Five Nations and the Dutch settlement at Albany. In 1678, having meantime returned to Quebec, he was attached to the expedition of La Balle, designed to find the mouth of the Mississippi and establish colonies : and on 7th August, 1679, embarked on Lake Erie with La Salle and his command, on board a vessel built for their lake voyage. They sailed over Lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan, and by canoes (and portages) followed the Bt. Joseph's, Kankakee and Illinois rivers, and built Fort Crevecceur near the present site of Peoria. From here, while La Salle returned to Fort Frontenac for supplies, Father Hennepin was charged with a voyage of discovery to the sources of the Mississippi, which had not then been explored above the mouth of the Wisconsin. Accompanied by Picard dv Gay and Michael Also, he set out in a canoe February 29, 1680, followed the Illinois to its mouth, and ascended the Mississippi, was taken captive by the Sioux, and while a captive with them, saw the falls of St. Anthony, and gave them their name in honour of his patron saint. Subsequently, after his return to Europe and publication of his narrative of La Salle's (first) expedition, and his own explorations, with a description of the upper Mississippi county, on account of disobedience, he was forced to leave the service of France, and is said to have entered the service of William 111. of England. About 1697 he abandoned the clerical dress, hut to the end of his life subscribed to his name " Recollect Missionary and Apostolic Notary." Hennepin was one of the many who are types of that age of discovery, a bold, light-hearted explorer, but an enthusiast, a quaint writer, fcut so far as his description of the upper Mississippi country and its Indians can be identified with our latter knowledge, a remarkably correct narrator. But a book, purporting to be a second edition of his narration, which was published in Utrecht after, or about the time he is said to have gone into the service of the English kingj contains a manifestly false interpellation — au account of a voyage down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, which Hennepin could not have made. Because of this Father Hennepin has been bitterly denounced by various historians. Bancroft, for an extreme instance, says that Hennepin "is now remembered, not merely as a light-hearted, ambitious, daring discoverer, but also as a boastful liar." The historical society of Minnesota, who have had occasion to verify Hennepin's original narration, and found it substantially correct, being also in possession of information that the researches of a competent American historian and antiquarian (John Gilmery Shea) have cleared away the Utrecht interpellation and other matters, so that the first white man in Minnesota may without doubt be regarded as a worthy example of the missionary priests of his time, has no hesitation in giving to Minnesota as a day of festival and congratulation, the two hundredth anniversary of Father Hennepin's most striking achievements, from which dates the beginning of the history of our beloved State. In celebrating the day (fixed for convenience in absence of knowledge as to the precise day on which the Recollect missionary in 1680 first saw and named the great falls of the Mississippi), our Historical Society celebrated the birthday of Minnesota and the new Northwest of to-day. In honouring Hennepin they honoured the class to which he belonged — those brave clergymen of two centuries ago who came with the first of white men into the heart of our continent and who were at once explorers, historians of discovery and heralds and martyrs of religion.