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The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

F >> Francis Parkman >> The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century




Jogues passed a night of anguish and desolation, and in the morning,
reckless of life, set forth in search of Goupil's remains. "Where are
you going so fast?" demanded the old Indian, his master. "Do you not see
those fierce young braves, who are watching to kill you?" Jogues
persisted, and the old man asked another Indian to go with him as a
protector. The corpse had been flung into a neighboring ravine, at the
bottom of which ran a torrent; and here, with the Indian's help, Jogues
found it, stripped naked, and gnawed by dogs. He dragged it into the
water, and covered it with stones to save it from further mutilation,
resolving to return alone on the following day and secretly bury it.
But with the night there came a storm; and when, in the gray of the
morning, Jogues descended to the brink of the stream, he found it a
rolling, turbid flood, and the body was nowhere to be seen. Had the
Indians or the torrent borne it away? Jogues waded into the cold
current; it was the first of October; he sounded it with his feet and
with his stick; he searched the rocks, the thicket, the forest; but all
in vain. Then, crouched by the pitiless stream, he mingled his tears
with its waters, and, in a voice broken with groans, chanted the service
of the dead. [ Jogues in Tanner, Societas Militans, 519; Bressani,
216; Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 25, 26; Buteux, Narré, MS.; Jogues,
Notice sur René Goupil. ]

The Indians, it proved, and not the flood, had robbed him of the remains
of his friend. Early in the spring, when the snows were melting in the
woods, he was told by Mohawk children that the body was lying, where it
had been flung, in a lonely spot lower down the stream. He went to seek
it; found the scattered bones, stripped by the foxes and the birds; and,
tenderly gathering them up, hid them in a hollow tree, hoping that a day
might come when he could give them a Christian burial in consecrated
ground.

After the murder of Goupil, Jogues's life hung by a hair. He lived in
hourly expectation of the tomahawk, and would have welcomed it as a boon.
By signs and words, he was warned that his hour was near; but, as he
never shunned his fate, it fled from him, and each day, with renewed
astonishment, he found himself still among the living.

Late in the autumn, a party of the Indians set forth on their yearly
deer-hunt, and Jogues was ordered to go with them. Shivering and half
famished, he followed them through the chill November forest, and shared
their wild bivouac in the depths of the wintry desolation. The game they
took was devoted to Areskoui, their god, and eaten in his honor. Jogues
would not taste the meat offered to a demon; and thus he starved in the
midst of plenty. At night, when the kettle was slung, and the savage
crew made merry around their fire, he crouched in a corner of the hut,
gnawed by hunger, and pierced to the bone with cold. They thought his
presence unpropitious to their hunting, and the women especially hated
him. His demeanor at once astonished and incensed his masters. He
brought them fire-wood, like a squaw; he did their bidding without a
murmur, and patiently bore their abuse; but when they mocked at his God,
and laughed at his devotions, their slave assumed an air and tone of
authority, and sternly rebuked them. [ Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 41.]

He would sometimes escape from "this Babylon," as he calls the hut,
and wander in the forest, telling his beads and repeating passages of
Scripture. In a remote and lonely spot, he cut the bark in the form of a
cross from the trunk of a great tree; and here he made his prayers.
This living martyr, half clad in shaggy furs, kneeling on the snow among
the icicled rocks and beneath the gloomy pines, bowing in adoration
before the emblem of the faith in which was his only consolation and his
only hope, is alike a theme for the pen and a subject for the pencil.

The Indians at last grew tired of him, and sent him back to the village.
Here he remained till the middle of March, baptizing infants and trying
to convert adults. He told them of the sun, moon, planets, and stars.
They listened with interest; but when from astronomy he passed to
theology, he spent his breath in vain. In March, the old man with whom
he lived set forth for his spring fishing, taking with him his squaw,
and several children. Jogues also was of the party. They repaired to a
lake, perhaps Lake Saratoga, four days distant. Here they subsisted for
some time on frogs, the entrails of fish, and other garbage. Jogues
passed his days in the forest, repeating his prayers, and carving the
name of Jesus on trees, as a terror to the demons of the wilderness.
A messenger at length arrived from the town; and on the following day,
under the pretence that signs of an enemy had been seen, the party broke
up their camp, and returned home in hot haste. The messenger had brought
tidings that a war-party, which had gone out against the French, had been
defeated and destroyed, and that the whole population were clamoring to
appease their grief by torturing Jogues to death. This was the true
cause of the sudden and mysterious return; but when they reached the town,
other tidings had arrived. The missing warriors were safe, and on their
way home in triumph with a large number of prisoners. Again Jogues's
life was spared; but he was forced to witness the torture and butchery of
the converts and allies of the French. Existence became unendurable to
him, and he longed to die. War-parties were continually going out.
Should they be defeated and cut off, he would pay the forfeit at the
stake; and if they came back, as they usually did, with booty and
prisoners, he was doomed to see his countrymen and their Indian friends
mangled, burned, and devoured.

Jogues had shown no disposition to escape, and great liberty was
therefore allowed him. He went from town to town, giving absolution to
the Christian captives, and converting and baptizing the heathen.
On one occasion, he baptized a woman in the midst of the fire, under
pretence of lifting a cup of water to her parched lips. There was no
lack of objects for his zeal. A single war-party returned from the Huron
country with nearly a hundred prisoners, who were distributed among the
Iroquois towns, and the greater part burned. [ 1 ] Of the children of
the Mohawks and their neighbors, he had baptized, before August, about
seventy; insomuch that he began to regard his captivity as a Providential
interposition for the saving of souls.

[ 1 The Dutch clergyman, Megapolensis, at this time living at Fort
Orange, bears the strongest testimony to the ferocity with which his
friends, the Mohawks, treated their prisoners. He mentions the same
modes of torture which Jogues describes, and is very explicit as to
cannibalism. "The common people," he says, "eat the arms, buttocks,
and trunk; but the chiefs eat the head and the heart." (Short Sketch of
the Mohawk Indians. ) This feast was of a religious character. ]

At the end of July, he went with a party of Indians to a fishing-place on
the Hudson, about twenty miles below Fort Orange. While here, he learned
that another war-party had lately returned with prisoners, two of whom
had been burned to death at Osseruenon. On this, his conscience smote
him that he had not remained in the town to give the sufferers absolution
or baptism; and he begged leave of the old woman who had him in charge to
return at the first opportunity. A canoe soon after went up the river
with some of the Iroquois, and he was allowed to go in it. When they
reached Rensselaerswyck, the Indians landed to trade with the Dutch,
and took Jogues with them.

The centre of this rude little settlement was Fort Orange, a miserable
structure of logs, standing on a spot now within the limits of the city
of Albany. [ The site of the Phœnix Hotel.--Note by Mr. Shea to Jogues's
Novum Belgium. ] It contained several houses and other buildings; and
behind it was a small church, recently erected, and serving as the abode
of the pastor, Dominie Megapolensis, known in our day as the writer of an
interesting, though short, account of the Mohawks. Some twenty-five or
thirty houses, roughly built of boards and roofed with thatch, were
scattered at intervals on or near the borders of the Hudson, above and
below the fort. Their inhabitants, about a hundred in number, were for
the most part rude Dutch farmers, tenants of Van Rensselaer, the patroon,
or lord of the manor. They raised wheat, of which they made beer,
and oats, with which they fed their numerous horses. They traded, too,
with the Indians, who profited greatly by the competition among them,
receiving guns, knives, axes, kettles, cloth, and beads, at moderate
rates, in exchange for their furs. [ 1 ] The Dutch were on excellent
terms with their red neighbors, met them in the forest without the least
fear, and sometimes intermarried with them. They had known of Jogues's
captivity, and, to their great honor, had made efforts for his release,
offering for that purpose goods to a considerable value, but without
effect. [ 2 ]

[ 1 Jogues, Novum Belgium; Barnes, Settlement of Albany, 50-55;
O'Callaghan, New Netherland, Chap. VI.

On the relations of the Mohawks and Dutch, see Megapolensis, Short Sketch
of the Mohawk Indians, and portions of the letter of Jogues to his
Superior, dated Rensselaerswyck, Aug. 30, 1643. ]

[ 2 See a long letter of Arendt Van Curler (Corlaer) to Van Rensselaer,
June 16, 1643, in O'Callaghan's New Netherland, Appendix L. "We
persuaded them so far," writes Van Curler, "that they promised not to
kill them. . . . The French captives ran screaming after us, and
besought us to do all in our power to release them out of the hands of
the barbarians." ]

At Fort Orange Jogues heard startling news. The Indians of the village
where he lived were, he was told, enraged against him, and determined to
burn him. About the first of July, a war-party had set out for Canada,
and one of the warriors had offered to Jogues to be the bearer of a
letter from him to the French commander at Three Rivers, thinking
probably to gain some advantage under cover of a parley. Jogues knew
that the French would be on their guard; and he felt it his duty to lose
no opportunity of informing them as to the state of affairs among the
Iroquois. A Dutchman gave him a piece of paper; and he wrote a letter,
in a jargon of Latin, French, and Huron, warning his countrymen to be on
their guard, as war-parties were constantly going out, and they could
hope for no respite from attack until late in the autumn. [ See a French
rendering of the letter in Vimont, Relation, 1643, p. 75. ] When the
Iroquois reached the mouth of the River Richelieu, where a small fort had
been built by the French the preceding summer, the messenger asked for a
parley, and gave Jogues's letter to the commander of the post, who,
after reading it, turned his cannon on the savages. They fled in dismay,
leaving behind them their baggage and some of their guns; and, returning
home in a fury, charged Jogues with having caused their discomfiture.
Jogues had expected this result, and was prepared to meet it; but several
of the principal Dutch settlers, and among them Van Curler, who had made
the previous attempt to rescue him, urged that his death was certain,
if he returned to the Indian town, and advised him to make his escape.
In the Hudson, opposite the settlement, lay a small Dutch vessel nearly
ready to sail. Van Curler offered him a passage in her to Bordeaux or
Rochelle,--representing that the opportunity was too good to be lost,
and making light of the prisoner's objection, that a connivance in his
escape on the part of the Dutch would excite the resentment of the
Indians against them. Jogues thanked him warmly; but, to his amazement,
asked for a night to consider the matter, and take counsel of God in
prayer.

He spent the night in great agitation, tossed by doubt, and full of
anxiety lest his self-love should beguile him from his duty. [ Buteux,
Narré, MS. ] Was it not possible that the Indians might spare his life,
and that, by a timely drop of water, he might still rescue souls from
torturing devils, and eternal fires of perdition? On the other hand,
would he not, by remaining to meet a fate almost inevitable, incur the
guilt of suicide? And even should he escape torture and death, could he
hope that the Indians would again permit him to instruct and baptize
their prisoners? Of his French companions, one, Goupil, was dead; while
Couture had urged Jogues to flight, saying that he would then follow his
example, but that, so long as the Father remained a prisoner, he, Couture,
would share his fate. Before morning, Jogues had made his decision.
God, he thought, would be better pleased should he embrace the
opportunity given him. He went to find his Dutch friends, and, with a
profusion of thanks, accepted their offer. They told him that a boat
should be left for him on the shore, and that he must watch his time,
and escape in it to the vessel, where he would be safe.

He and his Indian masters were lodged together in a large building,
like a barn, belonging to a Dutch farmer. It was a hundred feet long,
and had no partition of any kind. At one end the farmer kept his cattle;
at the other he slept with his wife, a Mohawk squaw, and his children,
while his Indian guests lay on the floor in the middle. [ Buteux, Narré,
MS. ] As he is described as one of the principal persons of the colony,
it is clear that the civilization of Rensselaerswyck was not high.

In the evening, Jogues, in such a manner as not to excite the suspicion
of the Indians, went out to reconnoitre. There was a fence around the
house, and, as he was passing it, a large dog belonging to the farmer
flew at him, and bit him very severely in the leg. The Dutchman, hearing
the noise, came out with a light, led Jogues back into the building,
and bandaged his wound. He seemed to have some suspicion of the
prisoner's design; for, fearful perhaps that his escape might exasperate
the Indians, he made fast the door in such a manner that it could not
readily be opened. Jogues now lay down among the Indians, who, rolled in
their blankets, were stretched around him. He was fevered with
excitement; and the agitation of his mind, joined to the pain of his
wound, kept him awake all night. About dawn, while the Indians were
still asleep, a laborer in the employ of the farmer came in with a
lantern, and Jogues, who spoke no Dutch, gave him to understand by signs
that he needed his help and guidance. The man was disposed to aid him,
silently led the way out, quieted the dogs, and showed him the path to
the river. It was more than half a mile distant, and the way was rough
and broken. Jogues was greatly exhausted, and his wounded limb gave him
such pain that he walked with the utmost difficulty. When he reached the
shore, the day was breaking, and he found, to his dismay, that the ebb of
the tide had left the boat high and dry. He shouted to the vessel,
but no one heard him. His desperation gave him strength; and, by working
the boat to and fro, he pushed it at length, little by little, into the
water, entered it, and rowed to the vessel. The Dutch sailors received
him kindly, and hid him in the bottom of the hold, placing a large box
over the hatchway.

He remained two days, half stifled, in this foul lurking-place, while the
Indians, furious at his escape, ransacked the settlement in vain to find
him. They came off to the vessel, and so terrified the officers, that
Jogues was sent on shore at night, and led to the fort. Here he was
hidden in the garret of a house occupied by a miserly old man, to whose
charge he was consigned. Food was sent to him; but, as his host
appropriated the larger part to himself, Jogues was nearly starved.
There was a compartment of his garret, separated from the rest by a
partition of boards. Here the old Dutchman, who, like many others of the
settlers, carried on a trade with the Mohawks, kept a quantity of goods
for that purpose; and hither he often brought his customers. The boards
of the partition had shrunk, leaving wide crevices; and Jogues could
plainly see the Indians, as they passed between him and the light.
They, on their part, might as easily have seen him, if he had not,
when he heard them entering the house, hidden himself behind some barrels
in the corner, where he would sometimes remain crouched for hours,
in a constrained and painful posture, half suffocated with heat, and
afraid to move a limb. His wounded leg began to show dangerous symptoms;
but he was relieved by the care of a Dutch surgeon of the fort. The
minister, Megapolensis, also visited him, and did all in his power for
the comfort of his Catholic brother, with whom he seems to have been well
pleased, and whom he calls "a very learned scholar." [ Megapolensis,
A Short Sketch of the Mohawk Indians. ]

When Jogues had remained for six weeks in this hiding-place, his Dutch
friends succeeded in satisfying his Indian masters by the payment of a
large ransom. [ Lettre de Jogues à Lalemant, Rennes, Jan. 6, 1644.--See
Relation, 1643, p. 79.--Goods were given the Indians to the value of
three hundred livres. ] A vessel from Manhattan, now New York, soon
after brought up an order from the Director-General, Kieft, that he
should be sent to him. Accordingly he was placed in a small vessel,
which carried him down the Hudson. The Dutch on board treated him with
great kindness; and, to do him honor, named after him one of the islands
in the river. At Manhattan he found a dilapidated fort, garrisoned by
sixty soldiers, and containing a stone church and the Director-General's
house, together with storehouses and barracks. Near it were ranges of
small houses, occupied chiefly by mechanics and laborers; while the
dwellings of the remaining colonists, numbering in all four or five
hundred, were scattered here and there on the island and the neighboring
shores. The settlers were of different sects and nations, but chiefly
Dutch Calvinists. Kieft told his guest that eighteen different languages
were spoken at Manhattan. [ Jogues, Novum Belgium. ] The colonists were
in the midst of a bloody Indian war, brought on by their own besotted
cruelty; and while Jogues was at the fort, some forty of the Dutchmen
were killed on the neighboring farms, and many barns and houses burned.
[ This war was with Algonquin tribes of the neighborhood.--See
O'Callaghan, New Netherland, I., Chap. III. ]

The Director-General, with a humanity that was far from usual with him,
exchanged Jogues's squalid and savage dress for a suit of Dutch cloth,
and gave him passage in a small vessel which was then about to sail.
The voyage was rough and tedious; and the passenger slept on deck or on a
coil of ropes, suffering greatly from cold, and often drenched by the
waves that broke over the vessel's side. At length she reached Falmouth,
on the southern coast of England, when all the crew went ashore for a
carouse, leaving Jogues alone on board. A boat presently came alongside
with a gang of desperadoes, who boarded her, and rifled her of everything
valuable, threatened Jogues with a pistol, and robbed him of his hat and
coat. He obtained some assistance from the crew of a French ship in the
harbor, and, on the day before Christmas, took passage in a small coal
vessel for the neighboring coast of Brittany. In the following afternoon
he was set on shore a little to the north of Brest, and, seeing a
peasant's cottage not far off, he approached it, and asked the way to the
nearest church. The peasant and his wife, as the narrative gravely tells
us, mistook him, by reason of his modest deportment, for some poor,
but pious Irishman, and asked him to share their supper, after finishing
his devotions, an invitation which Jogues, half famished as he was,
gladly accepted. He reached the church in time for the evening mass,
and with an unutterable joy knelt before the altar, and renewed the
communion of which he had been deprived so long. When he returned to the
cottage, the attention of his hosts was at once attracted to his
mutilated and distorted hands. They asked with amazement how he could
have received such injuries; and when they heard the story of his
tortures, their surprise and veneration knew no bounds. Two young girls,
their daughters, begged him to accept all they had to give,--a handful of
sous; while the peasant made known the character of his new guest to his
neighbors. A trader from Rennes brought a horse to the door, and offered
the use of it to Jogues, to carry him to the Jesuit college in that town.
He gratefully accepted it; and, on the morning of the fifth of January,
1644, reached his destination.

He dismounted, and knocked at the door of the college. The porter opened
it, and saw a man wearing on his head an old woollen nightcap, and in an
attire little better than that of a beggar. Jogues asked to see the
Rector; but the porter answered, coldly, that the Rector was busied in
the Sacristy. Jogues begged him to say that a man was at the door with
news from Canada. The missions of Canada were at this time an object of
primal interest to the Jesuits, and above all to the Jesuits of France.
A letter from Jogues, written during his captivity, had already reached
France, as had also the Jesuit Relation of 1643, which contained a long
account of his capture; and he had no doubt been an engrossing theme of
conversation in every house of the French Jesuits. The Father Rector was
putting on his vestments to say mass; but when he heard that a poor man
from Canada had asked for him at the door, he postponed the service,
and went to meet him. Jogues, without discovering himself, gave him a
letter from the Dutch Director-General attesting his character. The
Rector, without reading it, began to question him as to the affairs of
Canada, and at length asked him if he knew Father Jogues.

"I knew him very well," was the reply.

"The Iroquois have taken him," pursued the Rector. "Is he dead? Have
they murdered him?"

"No," answered Jogues; "he is alive and at liberty, and I am he."
And he fell on his knees to ask his Superior's blessing.

That night was a night of jubilation and thanksgiving in the college of
Rennes. [ For Jogues's arrival in Brittany, see Lettre de Jogues à
Lalemant, Rennes, Jan. 6, 1644; Lettre de Jogues à ----, Rennes, Jan. 5,
1644, (in Relation, 1643,) and the long account in the Relation of 1647. ]

Jogues became a centre of curiosity and reverence. He was summoned to
Paris. The Queen, Anne of Austria, wished to see him; and when the
persecuted slave of the Mohawks was conducted into her presence, she
kissed his mutilated hands, while the ladies of the Court thronged around
to do him homage. We are told, and no doubt with truth, that these
honors were unwelcome to the modest and single-hearted missionary,
who thought only of returning to his work of converting the Indians.
A priest with any deformity of body is debarred from saying mass.
The teeth and knives of the Iroquois had inflicted an injury worse than
the torturers imagined, for they had robbed Jogues of the privilege which
was the chief consolation of his life; but the Pope, by a special
dispensation, restored it to him, and with the opening spring he sailed
again for Canada.




CHAPTER XVII.

1641-1646.

THE IROQUOIS.--BRESSANI.--DE NOUË.


WAR.--DISTRESS AND TERROR.--RICHELIEU.--BATTLE.--RUIN OF INDIAN TRIBES.--
MUTUAL DESTRUCTION.--IROQUOIS AND ALGONQUIN.--ATROCITIES.--
FRIGHTFUL POSITION OF THE FRENCH.--JOSEPH BRESSANI.--HIS CAPTURE.--
HIS TREATMENT.--HIS ESCAPE.--ANNE DE NOUË.--HIS NOCTURNAL JOURNEY.--
HIS DEATH.


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.

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