ersion efforts of the French members of the Society of Jesus in New France were somewhat different than the countervailing conversion efforts of Puritan Protestants in New England and that historical analysis supports this contention.
Axtell (27-29) has demonstrated that the early French explorers, including Cartier and Roberval, did not go to Canada with any primary or even essential intention of converting the natives. However, the public statements made by FranceÆs King Francis I (among others directing colonial exploration and settlement) do tend to suggest that a primary purpose of French exploration was to instruct ôsavage men living without knowledge of God and without usage of religionö in GodÆs ôHoly law and Christian doctrine" (Axtell, 28). Axtell (29) believes that appending a religious and spiritual mission to what was essentially a drive for territorial control and the vast resources of the New World may have been little more than a form of propaganda and not indicative of a true missionary focus on the part of the French explorers.
This is a position affirmed by Nash (44) who maintains that the role adopted by the Jesuit priests was to establish missions, a task in which many ômartyred themselves in hostile Indian country, and worked for the greater glory of their God by converting Indians to Catholicism.ö Fur trading and missionary work often were conducted hand-in-hand, with the French Jesuits concentrating their main efforts among some 15,000 to 20,000 Hurons who were settled in the Great Lakes region.
The Jesuits in New France differed in their approach to proselytizing from the strategy used by Puritans in New England. Neal Salisbury (501) asserts that the Jesuits facilitated the development of trade relations with groups such as the Huron because those Native Americans who converted to Roman Catholicism were granted special trade privileges. For example, ôthey were separated from non-Ch...