The establishment of a Jesuit mission was, however, decided upon. On the 12th of June, 1611, Fathers Peter Biard and Enemond Masse reached Port Royal. Some difficulties had been thrown in their way, and others met them in the petty settlement. They turned at once to study the Micmac language, so as to begin their mission labors among that nation of Algonquins. The aged Membertou, who had acquired some French, was their interpreter and first convert. Biard visited all the coast as far as the Kennebec, and tried to give some ideas of Christianity to the Abenakis on that river. Finding that little could be done at Port Royal, where the settlers hampered rather than aided their efforts, the Jesuits projected an independent mission settlement elsewhere. Their protector, Madame de Guercheville, obtained from the French king a grant of all the coast from the St. Lawrence to Florida. A vessel was sent out, the missionaries were taken on board, and a settlement was begun on Mount Desert Island. There a cross was planted, and Mass said at a rustic altar. But the Jesuits were not to carry out their mission projects. English vessels under Argall, from Virginia, attacked the ship and settlement of St. Savior; a Jesuit laybrother was killed; the rest of the settlers were sent to France or carried prisoners to Virginia. Thus ended the first Jesuit mission begun under French auspices.[677] Meanwhile Champlain had succeeded in establishing a settlement on the St. Lawrence, and had penetrated to Lake Champlain and the rapids of the Ottawa. On all sides were tribes “living like brute beasts, without law, without religion, without God.” His religious zeal was quickened; for Quebec itself was destitute of ministers of religion. The Recollects, a reformed branch of the Franciscan order, were invited to enter the field. They accepted the mission, and in May, 1615, four of the Gray Friars landed at Quebec. Father John Dolbeau at once began a mission among the Montagnais,—the tribe occupying that portion of the St. Lawrence valley,—and wintered with them in their wandering hunter life, enduring all its hardships, and learning their language and ideas. The friendly Wyandots, from the shores of a far distant lake, were the tribe assigned to Father Joseph le Caron, and to the palisaded towns of this more civilized race he boldly ventured, without waiting for Champlain. In the summer of 1615 he set up his altar in a new bark lodge in the Huron town of Caragouha, near Thunder Bay, and began to learn a new strange tongue, so as to teach the flock around him.