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Show Page 178 of them in 1849, required outfitting and, in some cases, financing. In Salt Lake, the authorities had raised several thousand dollars to assist the poorer converts in gathering - this resulted in the formation of the Perpetual Emigrating Company, of which Orson became chief agent at Liverpool, assigned to take "legal bonds" from every passenger. The fund was administered only on behalf of those who could not pay their passage to Utah, and Orson himself later left England with P.E.F. company. As head of the European church, Orson felt a strong desire to expand missionary labors outside of England - onto the continent, hitherto virtually untouched by the Mormon gospel. To Denmark went his fellow pioneer, the redoubtable Erastus Snow, and in July, Orson sent a Welsh convert, William Howells, across the Channel to the French port city of Le Havre - Howells, the first Mormon missionary to a Latin country, reported on July 30 the baptism of the first French convert, one Augustus Saint d'Anna, in the English Channel. And in Italy, Lorenzo Snow canvassed the deeply orthodox Piedmontese beginning in 1850. In England itself, hundreds joined every month. The demand for printed materials soared, as Orson oversaw the publication of ten thousand hymn books, a whole new edition of the Book of Mormon and the other revelations of Joseph Smith, and reams of his own writings - pamphlets selling for two or three pence each. As editor of the Star, Orson gave extensive answers to queries in its pages - a new pamphlet entitled New Jerusalem, or the Fulfillment of Modern Prophecy, grew out of his response to one investigator's doubts about the designation of Missouri as the center place of Zion. The inquirer notes that the Saints were driven out of Missouri despite Joseph Smith's prophecies that Independence was to be "an everlasting inheritance" for them. Orson dealt with the question by reading the prophecies referred to, laying particular Emphasis on a eiavTB^in Section 58 of the Doctrine and Covenants declaring |