Quite a number of Croats took part in the first Christian Missions, especially in South and North America and Asia. Ferdinand Konscak, or Fernardo Consag (born in Varazdin, 1703-1757), was a Jesuit and a Croatian missionary in North America. In 1752 he discovered that Baja California was not an island, as it had been believed until then, but a peninsula. There is a collection of rocky islets on the north of the Californian bay named in his honour as the Consag Rocks (Consag Rocas, or Roca de Consag, near San Felipe).

Denis Diderot and D’Alambert used some of his maps for the French Encyclopedia, see “Encyclopedie”, Supplement 5 Carte (Paris 1755-1780), where his name is cited as P. Consaque. Alexander Humbolt used his maps for his “Carte generale… de la Nouvelle Espagne”, Paris, 1804, and also Arrowsmith in his “Map of America”, London 1805.

Konscak spoke various dialects of local Indians, in particular a very difficult dialect of Cochinin Indians. He described a sort of boomerang that Indians used for hunting rabbits. His diaries were printed already during his lifetime (published by Villa-Senor y Sanchez, Ortega-Balthasar and Venegas-Buriel), and after his death translated into many languages. The 1761 copy of Konscak’s manuscript about California is held in The British Museum. His work Carta del P. Fernando Consag de la Compania de Jesus, Visistaro de las Misiones de Californias (43 pages) is kept in the British Museum in London, Library of Congress Harper in Washington, John Carter Library in Providence, Library of Pomona College in Pomona, Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino.

His life is described by outstanding american historian Peter Masten Dunne in his monograph Black Robes in Lower California, Los Angeles, 1952. Seven copies of his maps are published by Ernest J. Burrus in his work La obra cartografica, Madrid, 1967. In his 2000 monograph Zoric proved that Konscak was the author of important work Addiciones a las noticias contemidas en la Description compnediosa de lo descuviert y conocido de la California. Since Konscak discovered many springs of pouring water, it is not surprising that even today there exist shops and warehouses in California bearing his name: “Licores Konsag”, “Konsag Liquor Store and Mini Market”, “Konsaqua” (agua purificada) etc. For many more details see [Zoric] and [Gabric].

In the city of Ensenada in Mexico (on the Pacific coast of Baja California) there is a street called Boulevard Fernando Consag, named after Ferdinand Konscak. An international conference dedicated to Fernando Consag was organized in Ensenada in 2009.

In his Addiciones… Konscak described the following amusing event with an (illiterate) Indian who had to carry a written message and a loaf of bread from one missionary to another. The Indian ate the bread on his road, and gave only the message to the missionary, without knowing that the message said among others that he had to bring bread as well. Being asked about the bread, the Indian said that he knew nothing about it. When the missionary told him that he ate it, he retorted “Who told you that?”. The missionary answered “The paper that you brought told me that!” The next time the Indian was again asked to carry two loafs of bread and another written message. On his road he was passing by a huge rock, where he left the message, went with his loafs round the corner (so that the paper could not “see” him), and ate them. To his utmost amazement, the paper told the missionary not only that he ate the bread, but also how many loafs he ate. The Indian, having admitted that he indeed ate the bread, nevertheless claimed that it was impossible that the paper could see him eating the bread: “…I hid the paper so that it could not see me…The paper is the chatterer that speaks about things it did not see”. Taken from [Zoric, pp. 177-178].