The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 4

Volume 4 — BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATA: VOL IV

Reading edition

XIV

Chapters xxvi.-xxxvii., completing the document, are given in the present volume. The preceding chapters, with Bibliographical Data, are found in our Volume III.

XV-XVII

Documents XV. and XVI. are letters from Charles Lalemant to Sieur de Champlain and the provincial of the Récollets, respectively, dated at Quebec, July 28, 1625. They are taken from Sagard's Histoire du Canada (Paris, 1636), pp. 868, 869, 870; in the Tross reprint of Sagard (Paris, 1865), they are in vol. iii., pp. 789, 790.48

Document XVII. is a letter from Lalemant to his general, at Rome, dated New France, August 1, (presumably 1626). It was written in Latin, the original being preserved in the Archives of the Gesù at Rome. This is one of the letters copied for Carayon, by Father Martin, in 1858, and translated by the latter into French, for the Première Mission, where it appears on pp. 117-121,—see Bibliographical Data for Document XIII., in our Volume III. We follow the Martin apograph, in Latin (preserved at St. Mary's College, Montreal), and our translation into English is made therefrom.49

The above three letters by Lalemant were selected by O'Callaghan from Sagard and Carayon,—the third being, of course, Martin's French translation,—and published at Albany in 1870, with a brief "Avis" giving the sources of the documents. This publication, known in the Lenox Catalogue as "O'Callaghan Reprint No. 2," bears the following title-page:

Collation of O'Callaghan's Reprint. Title, 1 p.; reverse of title, with inscription: "Edition tirée à vingt cinq exemplaires. O'C.," 1 p.; "Avis" (by O'Callaghan), 1 p.; text, pp. 5-14.

For further references, see Brown, vol. ii., no. 316 and p. 166; Harrisse, nos. 426, 427, 429; Sabin, vol. x., no. 38679; O'Callaghan, nos. 1209, 1250; Winsor, p. 301; Lenox, p. 18.

XVIII

We follow the original publication (Paris, 1627), now in the Lenox Library, of Lalemant's letter to his brother, Jerome; it is described in the Lenox Catalogue, p. 4, under "H. 41."

There are extant, four different reprints of this document, as follows:

1. It appears to have first been reprinted in Mercure François, tome xiii., pp. 12-34; the portion of the journal wherein this is found, is devoted to the events of the year 1626, but the royal Privilege for the volume was "Donné au camp de la Rochelle le 28. de Septembre, l'an de grace 1628." The original publication appeared without statement of Privilege; it is, therefore, impossible to say when in 1627 permission to print was granted. In the Quebec edition of the Relations (1858), it is inadvertently stated (vol. i.) that this letter commences on p. 1 (instead of p. 12) of tome xiii. of Mercure, an error which Sabin, Harrisse, and others have repeated. As will be seen by a comparison of our text with that of issues which follow the Mercure, the differences between the original and this first reprint are slight.

2. The next reprint appears in Danjou's Archives Curieuses, 2nd series, tome iii. (Paris, 1838), pp. (405-426). This follows the text of the original, and not that of the Mercure. The following clause in the Lenox Catalogue, p. 19,—the final sentence of note under "7(b)" in list of O'Callaghan's Reprints,—is misleading: "The copy in the Astor Library of that work is printed from the original letter of 1627." The "copy in the Astor" is simply this reprint in Archives Curieuses, of which rare collection the Astor has a set.

3. The third reprint, but the first in separate form, was issued by O'Callaghan at Albany, 1870, and is the one designated in the Lenox Catalogue (p. 19) as "7(b)." The text of the Mercure reprint is followed, with a made-up title-page, as follows:

Collation of same. Title, 1 p.; reverse of title, with inscription: "Edition tirée a vingt-cinq exemplaires, O'C.," 1 p.; Tables des Matieres, 2 pp.; text, pp. 1-51; Table, pp. 53-59.

4. A second separate reprint was issued by O'Callaghan in 1871, and is that referred to in the Lenox Catalogue (p. 19) as "7(a)." This follows the original text, and not that of the Mercure; it is set in small type in imitation of the original (Paris, 1627), and comes into the same number of pages. Upon the otherwise blank page facing the last page of the text, is the inscription: "Calqué sur l'exemplaire dans la collection | de Mr. James Lenox, de New York." The title-page is apparently photo-lithographed from the original.

For further references to this document, which has had a curious bibliographical history, see Harrisse, no. 41; Sabin, vol. x., no. 38680 (original), and no. 38682 (reprint); Carayon, nos. 1254, 1255, and p. 1179; Ternaux, no. 496; Winsor, pp. 300, 301; Historical Magazine, vol. iii., p. 19; Brown, vol. ii., p. 166; Lenox, p. 4 (H. 41), 19; and the Barlow (no. 1272), Murphy (no. 1480), and O'Callaghan (nos. 1250, 1982) sale catalogues.

Title-page. We give a photographic facsimile of original.

Collation of Original. Title, 1 p.; text, pp. 1-16.

XIX

Charles Lalemant's letter of Nov. 22, 1629, to the superior of the Jesuit College at Paris, originally appeared without title or headlines, in Les voyages du Sieur de Champlain (Paris, 1632), 2nd part, pp. 275-279. O'Callaghan reprinted it in what is known in the Lenox list as "No. 3," of which,—as with others of the O'Callaghan series,—but twenty-five copies were published. He omitted the preliminary editorial note, on p. 275, made up a title-page of his own, and furnished the Avant-Propos. In the present issue, we reproduce the O'Callaghan title-page and Avant-Propos, but in all other respects strictly follow the original publication. See further references in Winsor, p. 301; Sabin, vol. x., no. 38681; Lenox, p. 18.

Title-page. We imitate O'Callaghan's Reprint.

Collation of O'Callaghan's Reprint. Title, 1 p.; reverse of title, with inscription: "Tirée à vingt cinq exemplaires, lesquels ne font | pas à vendre. O'C.," 1 p.; Avant-Propos (by O'Callaghan), 1 p.; blank, 1 p.; text, pp. 5-15; colophon, 1 p.: "Achevé d'Imprimer à Albany, N. Y., par | J. Munsell, çe 14 Juin, 1870."