interacting with and understanding indigenous societies prior to writing about them. Their works often spoke of the difficulties encountered by missionaries when converting natives, which led to these texts being dismissed by readers as pessimistic. This explains, in part with the burning of the Recollects convent in 1796, the small quantity of texts related to the missions which have survived to this day. Recollects were important in the documentation of indigenous life in New France. Chrestien Leclercq wrote Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, which concerns itself with the ways of life of those indigenous communities that he resided with as a result of his missions among the Mi’kmaq of Gaspésie. As a result of spending so much time among the Mi’kmaq people, Leclercq was able to learn their language. His fluency in their dialect allowed him to compose a dictionary of the Mi’kmaq language, meant to serve as an aid for future missionaries who would live among these First Nations people. Pacifique Duplessis was later sent to Trois-Rivères, where he evangelized Aboriginal communities, cared for the sick, and educated children. Because of the latter, he has been considered the first schoolmaster in New France. In 1620, the Recollects completed construction on the Notre-Dame-des-Agnes convent in Quebec, the first Canadian convent and Seminary. Father Nicolas Viel travelled to Huronia with Gabriel Sagard and other missionaries to assist Father Le Caron. As a result of this voyage, Sagard published one of his more notable works Le grand voyage du Pays des Hurons (1632) and later his Histoire du Canada (1636) in which he described the daily life, customs, and habits of the Hurons. To this day Leclercq's Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie and Sagard's Le grand voyage du Pays des Hurons is considered an important piece belonging to the large corpus of texts published on eastern Canada during its French regime. In other countries The Recollects were also present in other parts of the world. In 1521, the Province des Anges sent a few missionaries, R.P. Martin de Valence with nine priests and two fathers in the West Indies, and there, they converted in a very short time more than one thousand and two hundred Indians. Provinces In the late 17th century, the order had these provinces outside of Europe: four in New Spain, four in Peru, and two elsewhere in Latin America and two in Southeast Asia. Four provinces in New