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WINDING along the strand of Sillery Cove, close to the waters of the St. Lawrence four miles above Quebec, the traveller comes upon an old house which has had more than its share of association with great events. It is the Jesuit Mission, built in 1637, the oldest house in Canada, and bridging all but two years of the great gulf since the death of Champlain. Only a Spanish house at St. Augustine, Florida, of all buildings now on the continent, was standing when the Jesuits planted at Sillery their mission to train and civilize the Indians.

The story is like that of a modern Crusade. Noel Brulart de Sillery, a rich French nobleman who had been Ambassador to Spain and to Rome for Queen Marie de Medicis, renounced the world, became a priest and resolved to devote his wealth and effort to higher things. He sold his palace in Paris to Cardinal Richelieu and gave the money to the Jesuits to establish a mission in New France which he hoped would attract the Indians from their roving habits and make them Christians. A chapel, missionaries’ residence, fort, hospital and other buildings were erected on this sunny shore, and all were protected by a wooden palisade. Friendly Indians sought its shelter, and war parties came and went in the long struggle between the French and the Iroquois.

A new era was ushered in by the arrival of the Ursulines in 1639. Madame de la Peltrie, a rich young Norman widow, surrendered her money and gave her services to establish a school in New France, bringing the practical Marie de l’Incarnation as Mother Superior. Before they settled in Quebec they visited the Sillery mission and devotedly nursed and fondled the dirty Indian children. Father Enemond Massé, the first missionary to Canada, who had come to Acadia in 1611 and to Quebec in 1625, died here in 1646 and is honoured by a monument in front of the old Mission House.

Now had come the supreme struggle with the Iroquois. The nuns were forced to retire to Quebec from this exposed position, but the courageous Fathers lingered or gave their lives in the service of their militant order. Sir James LeMoine in “Picturesque Quebec” has expressed the feeling of reverence he experienced on first crossing the threshold of the Mission House, “where for years had resounded the orisons of the Jesuit Fathers, the men from whose ranks were largely recruited our heroic band of early martyrs, some of whose dust, unburied, but not unhonoured, has mingled for two centuries with its parent earth on the green banks of Lake Simcoe, on the borders of the Ohio, in the environs of Kingston, Montreal, Three Rivers and Quebec—a fruitful seed of Christianity scattered bountifully through the length and breadth of our land.”

The red allies of the French were friendly but helpless under the onslaughts of the Iroquois. Father Isaac Jogues was captured in the forest near Lake George and tortured to death after he had declared to his tormentors: “I am a man like yourselves, but I do not fear death or torture.” Jean Brébeuf,—

The Ajax of the Jesuit enterprise;

Huge, dominant and bold,

as Alan Sullivan has described him, rested here after his visit to the Neutrals on Lake Erie, before he set out for the Huron Missions where he and Lalement were tortured to a horrible but inspiring death. It was a long story of suffering and martyrdom before the pale-blue ranks of the Carignan-Salières regiment from France overawed the Iroquois and brought peace to the St. Lawrence.

Maisonneuve and his party, arriving late in 1641 to found Montreal, were coldly received at Quebec by Governor Montmagny, who foresaw a rival. They spent the winter with Puiseaux at St. Michel and visited the nuns in the rough stone house at Sillery, then, as now, reached by the Grande Allee from Quebec. Along this road the Governor travelled with the first horse brought to Canada, presented to him in 1647 by his people.

The Mission House is all that remains of that historic group of buildings at Sillery. Walls three feet thick explain its solid, lasting construction, and its steep roof and general design are typical of the French-Canadian country house. Neighbouring cottages with their garden plots of petunias and nasturtiums, the old crib-work from the days of the square timber trade in the cove, the railway embankment which screens the river from view, the distant Quebec Bridge, are modern surroundings, but the Province of Quebec proudly preserves the old Mission House as a priceless link with a glorious past.

Jesuit Mission House, Sillery