A plan of Osaka from the first edition of ‘Histoire du Japon’ by Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix.

De Charlevoix (1682-1761) was a French Jesuit missionary and explorer. On his first journey he spent four years in Canada, and his knowledge of the area led the French government to commission him to search for a river routs to the Pacific Ocean in 1720. He explored the Great Lakes and part of the Mississippi, but was shipwrecked near the Bahamas and returned to France. De Charlevoix was an director of the academic journal ‘Journal de Trévoux’, and in that position initiated a series of histories of non-European countries. This history of the church in Japan was the first instalment.