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Two forces were battling for the mastery of Canada: on the one
side, Christ, the Virgin, and the Angels, with their agents, the
priests; on the other, the Devil, and his tools, the Iroquois. Such
at least was the view of the case held in full faith, not by the
Jesuit Fathers alone, but by most of the colonists. Never before had
the fiend put forth such rage, and in the Iroquois he found
instruments of a nature not uncongenial with his own.
At Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, and the little fort of Richelieu,
that is to say, in all Canada, no man could hunt, fish, till the
fields, or cut a tree in the forest, without peril to his scalp. The
Iroquois were everywhere, and nowhere. A yell, a volley of bullets,
a rush of screeching savages, and all was over. The soldiers
hastened to the spot to find silence, solitude, and a mangled
corpse.
"I had as lief," writes Father Vimont, "be beset by goblins as by
the Iroquois. The one are about as invisible as the other. Our
people on the Richelieu and at Montreal are kept in a closer
confinement than ever were monks or nuns in our smallest convents in
France."
The Confederates at this time were in a flush of unparalleled
audacity. They despised white men as base poltroons, and esteemed
themselves warriors and heroes, destined to conquer all mankind.1
The fire-arms with which the Dutch had rashly supplied them, joined
to their united councils, their courage, and ferocity, gave them an
advantage over the surrounding tribes which they fully understood.
Their passions rose with their sense of power. They boasted that
they would wipe the Hurons, the Algonquins, and the French from the
face of the earth, and carry the "white girls," meaning the nuns, to
their villages. This last event, indeed, seemed more than probable;
and the Hospital nuns left their exposed station at Sillery, and
withdrew to the ramparts and palisades of Quebec. The St. Lawrence
and the Ottawa were so infested, that communication with the Huron
country was cut off; and three times the annual packet of letters
sent thither to the missionaries fell into the hands of the
Iroquois.
It was towards the close of the year 1640 that the scourge of
Iroquois war had begun to fall heavily on the French. At that time,
a party of their warriors waylaid and captured Thomas Godefroy and
François Marguerie, the latter a young man of great energy and
daring, familiar with the woods, a master of the Algonquin language,
and a scholar of no mean acquirements. [During his captivity, he
wrote, on a beaver-skin, a letter to the Dutch in French, Latin, and
English.] To the great joy of the colonists, he and his companion
were brought back to Three Rivers by their captors, and given up, in
the vain hope that the French would respond with a gift of
fire-arms. Their demand for them being declined, they broke off the
parley in a rage, fortified themselves, fired on the French, and
withdrew under cover of night.
Open war now ensued, and for a time all was bewilderment and terror.
How to check the inroads of an enemy so stealthy and so keen for
blood was the problem that taxed the brain of Montmagny, the
Governor. He thought he had found a solution, when he conceived the
plan of building a fort at the mouth of the River Richelieu, by
which the Iroquois always made their descents to the St. Lawrence.
Happily for the perishing colony, the Cardinal de Richelieu, in
1642, sent out thirty or forty soldiers for its defence. [Faillon,
Colonie Française, II. 2; Vimont, Relation, 1642, 2, 44.] Ten times
the number would have been scarcely sufficient; but even this slight
succor was hailed with delight, and Montmagny was enabled to carry
into effect his plan of the fort, for which hitherto he had had
neither builders nor garrison. He took with him, besides the
new-comers, a body of soldiers and armed laborers from Quebec, and,
with a force of about a hundred men in all, [Marie de l'Incarnation,
Lettre, Sept. 29, 1642.] sailed for the Richelieu, in a brigantine
and two or three open boats.
On the thirteenth of August he reached his destination, and landed
where the town of Sorel now stands. It was but eleven days before
that Jogues and his companions had been captured, and Montmagny's
followers found ghastly tokens of the disaster. The heads of the
slain were stuck on poles by the side of the river; and several
trees, from which portions of the bark had been peeled, were daubed
with the rude picture-writing in which the victors recorded their
exploit.2 Among the rest, a
representation of Jogues himself was clearly distinguishable. The
heads were removed, the trees cut down, and a large cross planted on
the spot. An altar was raised, and all heard mass; then a volley of
musketry was fired; and then they fell to their work. They hewed an
opening into the forest, dug up the roots, cleared the ground, and
cut, shaped, and planted palisades. Thus a week passed, and their
defenses were nearly completed, when suddenly the war-whoop rang in
their ears, and two hundred Iroquois rushed upon them from the
borders of the clearing. [The Relation of 1642 says three hundred.
Jogues who had been among them to his cost, is the better
authority.]
It was the party of warriors that Jogues had met on an island in
Lake Champlain. But for the courage of Du Rocher, a corporal, who
was on guard, they would have carried all before them. They were
rushing through an opening in the palisade, when he, with a few
soldiers, met them with such vigor and resolution, that they were
held in check long enough for the rest to snatch their arms.
Montmagny, who was on the river in his brigantine, hastened on
shore, and the soldiers, encouraged by his arrival, fought with
great determination.
The Iroquois, on their part, swarmed up to the palisade, thrust
their guns through the loop-holes, and fired on those within; nor
was it till several of them had been killed and others wounded that
they learned to keep a more prudent distance. A tall savage, wearing
a crest of the hair of some animal, dyed scarlet and bound with a
fillet of wampum, leaped forward to the attack, and was shot dead.
Another shared his fate, with seven buck-shot in his shield, and as
many in his body. The French, with shouts, redoubled their fire, and
the Indians at length lost heart and fell back. The wounded dropped
guns, shields, and war-clubs, and the whole band withdrew to the
shelter of a fort which they had built in the forest, three miles
above. On the part of the French, one man was killed and four
wounded. They had narrowly escaped a disaster which might have
proved the ruin of the colony; and they now gained time so far to
strengthen their defences as to make them reasonably secure against
any attack of savages.3 The new fort,
however, did not effectually answer its purpose of stopping the
inroads of the Iroquois. They would land a mile or more above it,
carry their canoes through the forest across an intervening tongue
of land, and then launch them in the St. Lawrence, while the
garrison remained in total ignorance of their movements.
While the French were thus beset, their Indian allies fared still
worse. The effect of Iroquois hostilities on all the Algonquin
tribes of Canada, from the Saguenay to the Lake of the Nipissings,
had become frightfully apparent. Famine and pestilence had aided the
ravages of war, till these wretched bands seemed in the course of
rapid extermination. Their spirit was broken. They became humble and
docile in the hands of the missionaries, ceased their railings
against the new doctrine, and leaned on the French as their only
hope in this extremity of woe. Sometimes they would appear in troops
at Sillery or Three Rivers, scared out of their forests by the sight
of an Iroquois footprint; then some new terror would seize them, and
drive them back to seek a hiding-place in the deepest thickets of
the wilderness. Their best hunting-grounds were beset by the enemy.
They starved for weeks together, subsisting on the bark of trees or
the thongs of raw hide which formed the net-work of their
snow-shoes. The mortality among them was prodigious. "Where, eight
years ago," writes Father Vimont, "one would see a hundred wigwams,
one now sees scarcely five or six. A chief who once had eight
hundred warriors has now but thirty or forty; and in place of fleets
of three or four hundred canoes, we see less than a tenth of that
number." [Relation, 1644, 8.]
These Canadian tribes were undergoing that process of extermination,
absorption, or expatriation, which, as there is reason to believe,
had for many generations formed the gloomy and meaningless history
of the greater part of this continent. Three or four hundred Dutch
guns, in the hands of the conquerors, gave an unwonted quickness and
decision to the work, but in no way changed its essential character.
The horrible nature of this warfare can be known only through
examples; and of these one or two will suffice.
A band of Algonquins, late in the autumn of 1641, set forth from
Three Rivers on their winter hunt, and, fearful of the Iroquois,
made their way far northward, into the depths of the forests that
border the Ottawa. Here they thought themselves safe, built their
lodges, and began to hunt the moose and beaver. But a large party of
their enemies, with a persistent ferocity that is truly astonishing,
had penetrated even here, found the traces of the snow-shoes,
followed up their human prey, and hid at nightfall among the rocks
and thickets around the encampment. At midnight, their yells and the
blows of their war-clubs awakened their sleeping victims. In a few
minutes all were in their power. They bound the prisoners hand and
foot, rekindled the fire, slung the kettles, cut the bodies of the
slain to pieces, and boiled and devoured them before the eyes of the
wretched survivors. "In a word," says the narrator, "they ate men
with as much appetite and more pleasure than hunters eat a boar or a
stag." [Vimont, Relation, 1642, 46.]
Meanwhile they amused themselves with bantering their prisoners.
"Uncle," said one of them to an old Algonquin, "you are a dead man.
You are going to the land of souls. Tell them to take heart: they
will have good company soon, for we are going to send all the rest
of your nation to join them. This will be good news for them." [Vimont,
Relation, 1642, 45.]
This old man, who is described as no less malicious than his
captors, and even more crafty, soon after escaped, and brought
tidings of the disaster to the French. In the following spring, two
women of the party also escaped; and, after suffering almost
incredible hardships, reached Three Rivers, torn with briers, nearly
naked, and in a deplorable state of bodily and mental exhaustion.
One of them told her story to Father Buteux, who translated it into
French, and gave it to Vimont to be printed in the Relation of 1642.
Revolting as it is, it is necessary to recount it. Suffice it to
say, that it is sustained by the whole body of contemporary evidence
in regard to the practices of the Iroquois and some of the
neighboring tribes.
The conquerors feasted in the lodge till nearly daybreak, and then,
after a short rest, began their march homeward with their prisoners.
Among these were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had
each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt, their
captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits,
placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before
the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and
frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with
mockery and laughter. "They are not men, they are wolves!" sobbed
the wretched woman, as she told what had befallen her to the pitying
Jesuit. [Vimont, Relation, 1642, 46.] At the Fall of the Chaudière,
another of the women ended her woes by leaping into the cataract.
When they approached the first Iroquois town, they were met, at the
distance of several leagues, by a crowd of the inhabitants, and
among them a troop of women, bringing food to regale the triumphant
warriors. Here they halted, and passed the night in songs of
victory, mingled with the dismal chant of the prisoners, who were
forced to dance for their entertainment.
On the morrow, they entered the town, leading the captive
Algonquins, fast bound, and surrounded by a crowd of men, women, and
children, all singing at the top of their throats. The largest lodge
was ready to receive them; and as they entered, the victims read
their doom in the fires that blazed on the earthen floor, and in the
aspect of the attendant savages, whom the Jesuit Father calls
attendant demons, that waited their coming. The torture which ensued
was but preliminary, designed to cause all possible suffering
without touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and
cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off their fingers
with clam-shells, scorching them with firebrands, and other
indescribable torments.4 The women were
stripped naked, and forced to dance to the singing of the male
prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of the crowd. They then
gave them food, to strengthen them for further suffering.
On the following morning, they were placed on a large scaffold, in
sight of the whole population. It was a gala-day. Young and old were
gathered from far and near. Some mounted the scaffold, and scorched
them with torches and firebrands; while the children, standing
beneath the bark platform, applied fire to the feet of the prisoners
between the crevices. The Algonquin women were told to burn their
husbands and companions; and one of them obeyed, vainly thinking to
appease her tormentors. The stoicism of one of the warriors enraged
his captors beyond measure. "Scream! why don't you scream?" they
cried, thrusting their burning brands at his naked body. "Look at
me," he answered; "you cannot make me wince. If you were in my
place, you would screech like babies." At this they fell upon him
with redoubled fury, till their knives and firebrands left in him no
semblance of humanity. He was defiant to the last, and when death
came to his relief, they tore out his heart and devoured it; then
hacked him in pieces, and made their feast of triumph on his mangled
limbs.
| [The diabolical practices described above were not
peculiar to the Iroquois. The Neutrals and other kindred
tribes were no whit less cruel. It is a remark of Mr.
Gallatin, and I think a just one, that the Indians west
of the Mississippi are less ferocious than those east of
it. The burning of prisoners is rare among the prairie
tribes, but is not unknown. An Ogillallah chief, in
whose lodge I lived for several weeks in 1846, described
to me, with most expressive pantomime, how he had
captured and burned a warrior of the Snake Tribe, in a
valley of the Medicine Bow Mountains, near which we were
then encamped.] |
All the men and all the old women of the party were put to death
in a similar manner, though but few displayed the same amazing
fortitude. The younger women, of whom there were about thirty, after
passing their ordeal of torture, were permitted to live; and,
disfigured as they were, were distributed among the several
villages, as concubines or slaves to the Iroquois warriors. Of this
number were the narrator and her companion, who, being ordered to
accompany a war-party and carry their provisions, escaped at night
into the forest, and reached Three Rivers, as we have seen.
While the Indian allies of the French were wasting away beneath this
atrocious warfare, the French themselves, and especially the
traveling Jesuits, had their full share of the infliction. In truth,
the puny and sickly colony seemed in the gasps of dissolution. The
beginning of spring, particularly, was a season of terror and
suspense; for with the breaking up of the ice, sure as a destiny,
came the Iroquois. As soon as a canoe could float, they were on the
war-path; and with the cry of the returning wild-fowl mingled the
yell of these human tigers. They did not always wait for the
breaking ice, but set forth on foot, and, when they came to open
water, made canoes and embarked.
Well might Father Vimont call the Iroquois "the scourge of this
infant church." They burned, hacked, and devoured the neophytes;
exterminated whole villages at once; destroyed the nations whom the
Fathers hoped to convert; and ruined that sure ally of the missions,
the fur-trade. Not the most hideous nightmare of a fevered brain
could transcend in horror the real and waking perils with which they
beset the path of these intrepid priests.
In the spring of 1644, Joseph Bressani, an Italian Jesuit, born in
Rome, and now for two years past a missionary in Canada, was ordered
by his Superior to go up to the Hurons. It was so early in the
season that there seemed hope that he might pass in safety; and as
the Fathers in that wild mission had received no succor for three
years, Bressani was charged with letters to them, and such
necessaries for their use as he was able to carry. With him were six
young Huron, lately converted, and a French boy in his service. The
party were in three small canoes. Before setting out they all
confessed and prepared for death.
They left Three Rivers on the twenty-seventh of April, and found ice
still floating in the river, and patches of snow lying in the naked
forests. On the first day, one of the canoes overset, nearly
drowning Bressani, who could not swim. On the third day, a
snow-storm began, and greatly retarded their progress. The young
Indians foolishly fired their guns at the wild-fowl on the river,
and the sound reached the ears of a war-party of Iroquois, one of
ten that had already set forth for the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and
the Huron towns. [Vimont, Relation, 1644, 41.] Hence it befell,
that, as they crossed the mouth of a small stream entering the St.
Lawrence, twenty-seven Iroquois suddenly issued from behind a point,
and attacked them in canoes. One of the Huron was killed, and all
the rest of the party captured without resistance.
On the fifteenth of July following, Bressani wrote from the Iroquois
country to the General of the Jesuits at Rome--"I do not know if
your Paternity will recognize the handwriting of one whom you once
knew very well. The letter is soiled and ill-written; because the
writer has only one finger of his right hand left entire, and cannot
prevent the blood from his wounds, which are still open, from
staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water, and his
table is the earth." [This letter is printed anonymously in the
Second Part, Chap. II, of Bressani's Relation Abrégée. A comparison
with Vimont's account, in the Relation of 1644, makes its authorship
apparent. Vimont's narrative agrees in all essential points. His
informant was "vne personne digne de foy, qui a esté tesmoin
oculaire de tout ce qu'il a soufiert pendant sa captiuité."--Vimont,
Relation, 1644, 43.]
Then follows a modest narrative of what be endured at the hands of
his captors. First they thanked the Sun for their victory; then
plundered the canoes; then cut up, roasted, and devoured the slain
Huron before the eyes of the prisoners. On the next day they crossed
to the southern shore, and ascended the River Richelieu as far as
the rapids of Chambly, whence they pursued their march on foot among
the brambles, rocks, and swamps of the trackless forest. When they
reached Lake Champlain, they made new canoes and re-embarked, landed
at its southern extremity six days afterwards, and thence made for
the Upper Hudson. Here they found a fishing camp of four hundred
Iroquois, and now Bressani's torments began in earnest. They split
his hand with a knife, between the little finger and the ring
finger; then beat him with sticks, till he was covered with blood;
and afterwards placed him on one of their torture-scaffolds of bark,
as a spectacle to the crowd. Here they stripped him, and while he
shivered with cold from head to foot they forced him to sing. After
about two hours they gave him up to the children, who ordered him to
dance, at the same time thrusting sharpened sticks into his flesh,
and pulling out his hair and beard. "Sing!" cried one; "Hold your
tongue!" screamed another; and if he obeyed the first, the second
burned him. "We will burn you to death; we will eat you." "I will
eat one of your hands." "And I will eat one of your feet." ["Ils me
répétaient sans cesse: Nous te brûlerons; nous te mangerons;--je te
mangerai un pied;--et moi, une main," etc.--Bressani, in Relation
Abrégée, 137.] These scenes were renewed every night for a week.
Every evening a chief cried aloud through the camp, "Come, my
children, come and caress our prisoners!"--and the savage crew
thronged jubilant to a large hut, where the captives lay. They
stripped off the torn fragment of a cassock, which was the priest's
only garment; burned him with live coals and red-hot stones; forced
him to walk on hot cinders; burned off now a finger-nail and now the
joint of a finger,--rarely more than one at a time, however, for
they economized their pleasures, and reserved the rest for another
day. This torture was protracted till one or two o'clock, after
which they left him on the ground, fast bound to four stakes, and
covered only with a scanty fragment of deer-skin.5
The other prisoners had their share of torture; but the worst fell
upon the Jesuit, as the chief man of the party. The unhappy boy who
attended him, though only twelve or thirteen years old, was
tormented before his eyes with a pitiless ferocity.
At length they left this encampment, and, after a march of several
days,--during which Bressani, in wading a rocky stream, fell from
exhaustion and was nearly drowned,--they reached an Iroquois town.
It is needless to follow the revolting details of the new torments
that succeeded. They hung him by the feet with chains; placed food
for their dogs on his naked body, that they might lacerate him as
they ate; and at last had reduced his emaciated frame to such a
condition, that even they themselves stood in horror of him. "I
could not have believed," he writes to his Superior, "that a man was
so hard to kill." He found among them those who, from compassion, or
from a refinement of cruelty, fed him, for he could not feed
himself. They told him jestingly that they wished to fatten him
before putting him to death.
The council that was to decide his fate met on the nineteenth of
June, when, to the prisoner's amazement, and, as it seemed, to their
own surprise, they resolved to spare his life. He was given, with
due ceremony, to an old woman, to take the place of a deceased
relative; but, since he was as repulsive, in his mangled condition,
as, by the Indian standard, he was useless, she sent her son with
him to Fort Orange, to sell him to the Dutch. With the same humanity
which they had shown in the case of Jogues, they gave a generous
ransom for him, supplied him with clothing, kept him till his
strength was in some degree recruited, and then placed him on board
a vessel bound for Rochelle. Here he arrived on the fifteenth of
November; and in the following spring, maimed and disfigured, but
with health restored, embarked to dare again the knives and
firebrands of the Iroquois.
[Immediately on his return to Canada he was ordered
to set out again for the Hurons. More fortunate than on
his first attempt, he arrived safely, early in the
autumn of 1645.--Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1646,
73.
On Bressani, besides the authorities cited, see Du Creux,
Historia Canadensis, 399-403; Juchereau, Histoire de
l'Hôtel-Dieu, 53; and Martin, Biographie du P.
François-Joseph Bressani, prefixed to the Relation
Abrégée.
He made no converts while a prisoner, but he baptized a
Huron catechumen at the stake, to the great fury of the
surrounding Iroquois. He has left, besides his letters,
some interesting notes on his captivity, preserved in
the Relation Abrégée.] |
It should be noticed, in justice to the Iroquois, that, ferocious
and cruel as past all denial they were, they were not so bereft of
the instincts of humanity as at first sight might appear. An
inexorable severity towards enemies was a very essential element, in
their savage conception, of the character of the warrior. Pity was a
cowardly weakness, at which their pride revolted. This, joined to
their thirst for applause and their dread of ridicule, made them
smother every movement of compassion,6
and conspired with their native fierceness to form a character of
unrelenting cruelty rarely equaled.
The perils which beset the missionaries did not spring from the fury
of the Iroquois alone, for Nature herself was armed with terror in
this stern wilderness of New France. On the thirtieth of January,
1646, Father Anne de Nouë set out from Three Rivers to go to the
fort built by the French at the mouth of the River Richelieu, where
he was to say mass and hear confessions. De Nouë was sixty-three
years old, and had come to Canada in 1625. [See "Pioneers of
France," 393.] As an indifferent memory disabled him from mastering
the Indian languages, he devoted himself to the spiritual charge of
the French, and of the Indians about the forts, within reach of an
interpreter. For the rest, he attended the sick, and, in times of
scarcity, fished in the river or dug roots in the woods for the
subsistence of his flock. In short, though sprung from a noble
family of Champagne, he shrank from no toil, however humble, to
which his idea of duty or his vow of obedience called him. [He was
peculiarly sensitive as regarded the cardinal Jesuit virtue of
obedience; and both Lalemant and Bressani say, that, at the age of
sixty and upwards, he was sometimes seen in tears, when he imagined
that he had not fulfilled to the utmost the commands of his
Superior.]
The old missionary had for companions two soldiers and a Huron
Indian. They were all on snow-shoes, and the soldiers dragged their
baggage on small sledges. Their highway was the St. Lawrence,
transformed to solid ice, and buried, like all the country, beneath
two or three feet of snow, which, far and near, glared dazzling
white under the clear winter sun. Before night they had walked
eighteen miles, and the soldiers, unused to snow-shoes, were greatly
fatigued. They made their camp in the forest, on the shore of the
great expansion of the St. Lawrence called the Lake of St.
Peter,--dug away the snow, heaped it around the spot as a barrier
against the wind, made their fire on the frozen earth in the midst,
and lay down to sleep. At two o'clock in the morning De Nouë awoke.
The moon shone like daylight over the vast white desert of the
frozen lake, with its bordering fir-trees bowed to the ground with
snow; and the kindly thought struck the Father, that he might ease
his companions by going in advance to Fort Richelieu, and sending
back men to aid them in dragging their sledges. He knew the way
well. He directed them to follow the tracks of his snow-shoes in the
morning; and, not doubting to reach the fort before night, left
behind his blanket and his flint and steel. For provisions, he put a
morsel of bread and five or six prunes in his pocket, told his
rosary, and set forth.
Before dawn the weather changed. The air thickened, clouds hid the
moon, and a snow-storm set in. The traveler was in utter darkness.
He lost the points of the compass, wandered far out on the lake, and
when day appeared could see nothing but the snow beneath his feet,
and the myriads of falling flakes that encompassed him like a
curtain, impervious to the sight. Still he toiled on, winding hither
and thither, and at times unwittingly circling back on his own
footsteps. At night he dug a hole in the snow under the shore of an
island, and lay down, without fire, food, or blanket.
Meanwhile the two soldiers and the Indian, unable to trace his
footprints, which the snow had hidden, pursued their way for the
fort; but the Indian was ignorant of the country, and the Frenchmen
were unskilled. They wandered from their course, and at evening
encamped on the shore of the island of St. Ignace, at no great
distance from De Nouë. Here the Indian, trusting to his instinct,
left them and set forth alone in search of their destination, which
he soon succeeded in finding. The palisades of the feeble little
fort, and the rude buildings within, were whitened with snow, and
half buried in it. Here, amid the desolation, a handful of men kept
watch and ward against the Iroquois. Seated by the blazing logs, the
Indian asked for De Nouë, and, to his astonishment, the soldiers of
the garrison told him that he had not been seen. The captain of the
post was called; all was anxiety; but nothing could be done that
night.
At daybreak parties went out to search. The two soldiers were
readily found; but they looked in vain for the missionary. All day
they were ranging the ice, firing their guns and shouting; but to no
avail, and they returned disconsolate. There was a converted Indian,
whom the French called Charles, at the fort, one of four who were
spending the winter there. On the next morning, the second of
February, he and one of his companions, together with Baron, a
French soldier, resumed the search; and, guided by the slight
depressions in the snow which had fallen on the wanderer's
footprints, the quick-eyed savages traced him through all his
windings, found his camp by the shore of the island, and thence
followed him beyond the fort. He had passed near without discovering
it,--perhaps weakness had dimmed his sight,--stopped to rest at a
point a league above, and thence made his way about three leagues
farther. Here they found him. He had dug a circular excavation in
the snow, and was kneeling in it on the earth. His head was bare,
his eyes open and turned upwards, and his hands clasped on his
breast. His hat and his snow-shoes lay at his side. The body was
leaning slightly forward, resting against the bank of snow before
it, and frozen to the hardness of marble.
Thus, in an act of kindness and charity, died the first martyr of
the Canadian mission.
[Lalemant, Relation, 1646, 9; Marie de l'Incarnation,
Lettre, 10 Sept., 1646; Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 175.
One of the Indians who found the body of De Nouë was
killed by the Iroquois at Ossossané, in the Huron
country, three years after. He received the death-blow
in a posture like that in which he had seen the dead
missionary. His body was found with the hands still
clasped on the breast.--Lettre de Chaumonot à Lalemant,
1 Juin, 1649.
The next death among the Jesuits was that of Masse, who
died at Sillery, on the twelfth of May of this year,
1646, at the age of seventy-two. He had come with Biard
to Acadia as early as 1611. (See "Pioneers of France,"
262.) Lalemant, in the Relation of 1646, gives an
account of him, and speaks of penances which he imposed
on himself, some of which are to the last degree
disgusting.] |
1 Bressani, when a prisoner among them, writes to
this effect in a letter to his Superior.--See Relation Abrégée, 131.
The anonymous author of the Relation of 1660 says, that, in their
belief, if their nation were destroyed, a general confusion and
overthrow of mankind must needs be the consequence.--Relation, 1660,
6.
2 Vimont, Relation, 1642, 52.
This practice was common to many tribes, and is not yet extinct. The
writer has seen similar records, made by recent war-parties of Crows
or Blackfeet, in the remote West. In this case, the bark was removed
from the trunks of large cotton-wood trees, and the pictures traced
with charcoal and vermilion. There were marks for scalps, for
prisoners, and for the conquerors themselves.
3 Vimont, Relation, 1642, 50, 51.
Assaults by Indians on fortified places are rare. The Iroquois are
known, however, to have made them with success in several cases,
some of the most remarkable of which will appear hereafter. The
courage of Indians is uncertain and spasmodic. They are capable, at
times, of a furious temerity, approaching desperation; but this is
liable to sudden and extreme reaction. Their courage, too, is much
oftener displayed in covert than in open attacks.
4 "Cette pauure creature qui s'est sauuée, a les
deux pouces couppez, ou plus tost hachez. Quand ils me les eurent
couppez, disoit-elle, ils me les voulurent faire manger; mais ie les
mis sur mon giron, et leur dis qu'ils me tuassent s'ils vouloient,
que ie ne leur pouuois obeir."--Buteux in Relation, 1642, 47.
5 "Chaque nuit après m'avoir fait chanter, et
m'avoir tourmenté comme ie l'ai dit, ils passaient environ un quart
d'heure à me brûler un ongle ou un doigt. Il ne m'en reste
maintenant qu'un seul entier, et encore ils en ont arraché l'ongle
avec les dents. Un soir ils m'enlevaient un ongle, le lendemain la
première phalange, le jour suivant la seconde. En six fois, ils en
brûlèrent presque six. Aux mains seules, ils m'ont appliqué le feu
et le fer plus de 18 fois, et i'étais obligé de chanter pendant ce
supplice. Ils ne cessaient de me tourmenter qu'à une ou deux heures
de la nuit."--Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 122.
Bressani speaks in another passage of tortures of a nature yet more
excruciating. They were similar to those alluded to by the anonymous
author of the Relation of 1660: "Ie ferois rougir ce papier, et les
oreilles frémiroient, si ie rapportois les horribles traitemens que
les Agnieronnons" (the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois) "ont faits sur
quelques captifs." He adds, that past ages have never heard of
such.--Relation, 1660, 7, 8.
6 Thus, when Bressani, tortured by the tightness
of the cords that bound him, asked an Indian to loosen them, he
would reply by mockery, if others were present; but if no one saw
him, he usually complied.]
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of a particular period or place. These items are presented as part of the
historical record and should not be interpreted to mean that the WebMasters in
any way endorse the stereotypes implied.
The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, 1867
Jesuits
in North America
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