Québec, Québec, Canada (Quebec City)
1650 - September 1: Father Gabriel Druillettes (1610-1681) departed Quebec for Boston to establish an alliance with New England against the Iroquois, but he was unsuccessful.

In 1650, Father Gabriel Druillettes, a French Jesuit missionary based in Quebec, set out on a diplomatic and missionary journey that took him all the way to Boston in an effort to forge an alliance with the New England colonies against the Iroquois Confederacy. He wasn’t simply traveling as a missionary among Indigenous nations but was also acting as an envoy of the French colonial government, charged with negotiating with the English in hopes of securing mutual protection and support against the powerful Iroquois, who were then threatening French interests and their Indigenous allies.

Druillettes and his Indigenous companion, Noël Negabamat, traveled down the Chaudière and Kennebec rivers, reaching Boston in December 1650, where he was received courteously by prominent figures in the English colonies, including the Puritan missionary John Eliot and colonial officials, despite laws in Massachusetts that restricted Jesuit priests. While the gesture of hospitality was genuine, his attempt to secure a formal treaty for military cooperation against the Iroquois ultimately failed, and the New England colonies declined to enter into the alliance France sought. Druillettes returned to mission work among Indigenous communities soon after, though his journey remains one of the most remarkable early attempts at Franco‑Anglo cooperation in North America.

www.many-roads.com/ 2010/ 04/ 20/ a-history-of-french-canada- 1650-to-1669/

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