Marquette and Joliet's 1673 voyage is leaked to the world.

Découverte de quelques pays et nations de l´Amerique Septentrionale (1681)


After Joliet and Marquette returned from their 1673 Mississippi voyage, French officials refrained from publishing their findings. Several manuscripts telling their story circulated in Paris, however, based on a report by Fr. Claude Dablon of an interview with Joliet. Melchisédec Thévenot, an editor who specialized in printing voyages to exotic places, secured one of these unauthorized manuscripts and adapted Marquette's text for the little volume excerpted here. To make it appeal to audiences who were not fond of the Jesuits, he stripped out virtually all Marquette's religious remarks and turned it into a purely geographical account like the other's he had published.

Thevenot's book printed the news of the Marquette and Joliet voyage for the first time, and also published the first map to show the full course of the Mississippi (given elsewhere at Turning Points). We provide here images of the original French pages from 1681 for students who might like to stretch their language skills, as well as an English translation. To see the English text of any French page, open the drop down at the upper left ('document description') and click "Page & Text."

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Related Topics: Early Native Peoples
Explorers, Traders, and Settlers
Arrival of the First Europeans
Creator: Thévenot, Melchisédec, 1620-1692.
Pub Data: Paris, Chez Estienne Michallet..., 1681; pages 1-43. This translation was made by Turning Points staff, using Reuben Gold Thwaites' version of a different contemporary manuscript as the initial copy-text.
Citation: Thevenot, Melchisedec. "Découverte de quelques pays et nations de l´Amerique Septentrionale [par le P. Marquette]" in Recueil de Voyages de Mr Thevenot. ... (Paris: Estienne Michallet, 1681). Online facsimile at:  http://wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/search.asp?id=13; Visited on: 4/18/2024