Ninety-five years after the death of de Soto, the first real explorer of the Mississippi, Jacques Marquette, was born in 1637 in an old chateau in Laon, a city north of Paris. At this time, Louis Joliet, a young mapmaker educated in the Jesuit school at Quebec, also heard of the Mississippi and wondered if the fabled river might not provide the passage to China that both Columbus and Hendrik Hudson had been seeking.