“The world is our house", Jérôme Nadal, one of the first companions of the founder of the Company of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), is said to have declared. The Jesuit missionaries were faithful to this principle and accompanied European colonial expansion. By the first half of the sixteenth century they were present in India, in the Congo, and in China. In March 1549 the first Jesuit mission to the New World arrived in Bahia. In 1665 the West Indies Trading Company allowed them to establish themselves in French Guiana "to work to convert the ignorant savages to the mysteries of faith". 17th and 18th centuries - history “I left the town of Cayenne to go to Loyola, which is the name of the place where our plantation is. (…) It is in this neighbourhood of Rémire that the biggest and finest sugar plantations are, and consequently the largest number of Negroes.” Father J. de la Mousse, Cayenne, 1687. In 1668 the Company of Jesus bought a plantation near the town of Rémire, a few miles from Cayenne. The early years of what was called the Loyola plantation were modest, as the fledgeling colony was subject to attacks by the English and Dutch. But the Jesuits had capital and faith on their side to motivate them, and the survival of the Missions in Indian country depended on their economic success. Within a few decades the Jesuits turned Loyola into the largest establishment on the "isle of Cayenne". By about 1740 the pl......