Guide to Documents Relating to French and British North America in ...

and their flock. Since there was no routine correspondence with the missionaries, these letters were
special. Often they contained requests for faculties or privileges and sometimes for help against hostile
superiors. In some cases no request was made. The letters were simply prompted by the urge to let
the centre of catholicism know what was being done and what results were being achieved in some
distant and unheard-ofland. Neufville's letter of 1668 dealing with Newfoundland fishermen has already
been discussed. Around 1765, a report on Louisiana written by the Jesuit Fran~ois-Philibert Watrin
found its way to the desks of Propaganda. Officials were informed that the lliinois, who sixty years
before numbered 10,000, were now reduced to 800 or 900, and that the cause of their decline rested
with "la frequentation des Fran~ois." Watrin explained:
TIs veu1ent jouir les douceurs dont Us voient I'usage parmi les Fran~ois; Us
s'amolissent, et ne peuvent plus resister A la vie dure qu'il faut mener malgre soi
quand on passe comme eux I'hyver au milieu des bois. 78 [See Appendix A for
translation.]
In 1785, the Capuchin Charles Maurice Whelan, recently arrived in New York, wrote to the nuncio in
France, Doria Pamphili, to report on his adventurous career. He had been chaplain in the French fleet
commanded by Fran~ois-Joseph-Paul, Count de Grasse, who was defeated at Les Saintes on 12 April
1782 in what was then considered "the hottest and most terrible, and also the most disastrous, of seafights
since the invention of gunpowder." A prisoner in Jamaica for thirteen months, he ministered to
3,563 Frenchmen, 800 Spanish and 35 Americans, before finding his way to the United Provinces of
America. Adding a cosmopolitan touch to his report, he ended his letter by suggesting that any priest
operating in New York had at least to speak Gaelic, English, French and Dutch, and that some Spanish
and Portuguese were also advisable. Whelan's letter was subsequently forwarded by the nuncio to
Propaganda. 79 Every example is a case-study in itself, and the list is virtually endless. Significantly,
each item eventually ended up in the hands of the same people in the offices of Propaganda.
All incoming correspondence was quickly and efficiently processed according to the ritual defined
above as Propaganda's "unchanging working style." The historian is somewhat frustrated when,
searching in the archives of Propaganda for universal views of European colonization of the New
World, general considerations on the conversion of native populations, and overall plans for reconverting
North American heretics to Catholicism, he finds next to nothing. But Propaganda officials
were administrators, not intellectuals. Like their colleagues in France and England, they were unlikely
to be political scientists or philosophers, since they were too busy with pending business to devote any
significant portion of their precious time to discuss the overall meaning of their task. (After all, their
faith was there to provide all the answers). They did not have much time to read, either. They most
appreciated letters whose requests were clearly singled out and whose general descriptions were kept
to a minimum. The nuncios, as we have seen, were masters in the art of letter-writing. Conversely,
individual missionaries were often verbose, and sometimes did not even have any special requests. In
this case, the letter was read but not processed, and it was likely to disappear into the archives. This
is what happened, for example, to the first general description of North America to reach Propaganda,
a report written in 1625 by the Recollet Gregorio Bolivar, which was never used. so
If Propaganda officials were not intellectuals, they certainly were good bureaucrats, if only
because they tended to their daily routine while letting their minds wander about. This allowed them
to absorb the winds of change that touched them through their correspondents around the world. Those
who wrote to Propaganda were mostly North Americans or were directly connected with North
American events. They were Bollvar, a friar with twenty years of experience in South America; Stock,
who was a friend of Lord Baltimore's and claimed to have converted the English nobleman; Pacifique
de Provins, who was said to have been killed by the "cannibals" of Guyana; Neufville, a diocesan
priest ministering to the Newfoundland fishermen; Fran~ois-Joseph Le Mercier, the Jesuit superior in
Martinica, formerly superior in New France;81Laval and Briand, bishops of Quebec; L'Isle-Dieu and
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