Gentlemen and Jesuits

• Gentlemen and Jesuits: Quests for Glory and Adventure in the Early Days of New France
  Elizabeth Jones. xiii + 293 pp. (University of Toronto Press)

The story Elizabeth Jones tells deserves to be more widely known than it has been hitherto, for the documentary record is full of dramatic incident and historical interest, but as an episode in French colonial history it is of course neglected because it was a false start to European settlement of a region which eventually became British. What we now call Nova Scotia was in the early years of the seventeenth century known as Acadia, or more familiarly as 'La Cadie' to the Frenchmen who tried to colonise parts of it in the years from 1604 to 1613, when Englishmen from Virginia finally destroyed those tiny toeholds on the vast continent of North America.