Marquette was followed by a man whose name is even better known, but who was cast in a different mould. Réné Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was born at Rouen and had landed in Canada in the same year as Marquette. His object was to discover a route to the East, and the name that he gave to his seignory, La Chine, testifies to this desire. He began his work of discovery in 1669, and in the next two years he passed from Lakes Ontario and Erie right through the Illinois country, finally discovering the Ohio. In 1675 he took up his seignory on the Cataraqui River at Fort Frontenac. He was only thirty-two years of age, but he had already made himself famous. He was a man of strong character, and as such had many enemies amongst his fellow French Canadians; his want of sympathy turned men against him, and his want of tact wounded their feelings. To the Jesuits he was most unwelcome, for they recognised in him a rival discoverer; with the merchants and traders he was no less unpopular, a fact which was possibly intensified by his seignory being one of the best positions in New France for pecuniary gain. He was in every way an austere man, solitary and self-communing; and as his mind was filled with ambitions and even statesmanlike conceptions for New France, it is not surprising that the trading element and even his own followers failed to understand him. From 1675 to 1677 this man of extraordinary energy employed himself in commerce with the Indians by means of vessels of his own construction on Lake Ontario; but such work was too petty for La Salle. He therefore, in 1678, obtained from Louis XIV. permission "to labour at the discovery of the Western parts of New France through which to all appearance a way may be found to Mexico,"[251] in addition to which La Salle was strengthened in his possession of Fort Frontenac and was granted the privilege of constructing forts if necessary on his expeditions. On his enterprises he was accompanied by Henri de Tonty, an Italian officer and ever faithful to La Salle, and by Father Hennepin, a brave Flemish friar, whose overwhelming vanity tempted him in later years to try to rob his leader of the honour of first reaching the sea by the Mississippi River.