It was ten years later that those who were keeping the mission and the
trading-post on Point St. Ignace, where to-day candles burn before the
portrait of Pere Marquette, saw a vessel equipped with sails, as large as
the ships with which Jacques Cartier first crossed the Atlantic, come
ploughing its way through waters that had never before borne such burdens
without the beating of oars or paddles. Its commander is Sieur de la
Salle, now a noble and possessed of a seigniory two hundred miles west of
that on which we left him--two hundred miles nearer his goal. This
galleon, called the _Griffin_ because it carried on its prow the carving
of a griffin, "in honor of the armorial bearings of Count Frontenac," was
the precursor of those mighty fleets that now stir those waters with their
commerce.
These ten years of disaster and disappointment, but also of inflexible
purpose and indomitable persistence, must not be left to lie unremembered,
though the recital must be the briefest. In 1669, in company with some
Sulpitian priests and others, twenty-four in all, he sets forth from his
seigniory.
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