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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




[ 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. ]

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. [ 1 ] 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 defences 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. ]

[ 1 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. ]

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. [ 1 ] 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.

[ 1 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. ]

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. [ 1 ] 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.

[ 1 "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. ]

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 travelling
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 Hurons, 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 Hurons 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. [ 1 ] 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.

[ 1 "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. ]

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, [ 1 ] and conspired with their native fierceness
to form a character of unrelenting cruelty rarely equalled.

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