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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




On Ash-Wednesday, the French at Three Rivers were at mass in the chapel,
when the Iroquois, quietly approaching, plundered two houses close to the
fort, containing all the property of the neighboring inhabitants, which
had been brought hither as to a place of security. They hid their booty,
and then went in quest of two large parties of Christian Algonquins
engaged in their winter hunt. Two Indians of the same nation, whom they
captured, basely set them on the trail; and they took up the chase like
hounds on the scent of game. Wrapped in furs or blanket-coats, some with
gun in hand, some with bows and quivers, and all with hatchets, war-clubs,
knives, or swords,--striding on snow-shoes, with bodies half bent,
through the gray forests and the frozen pine-swamps, among wet, black
trunks, along dark ravines and under savage hill-sides, their small,
fierce eyes darting quick glances that pierced the farthest recesses of
the naked woods,--the hunters of men followed the track of their human
prey. At length they descried the bark wigwams of the Algonquin camp.
The warriors were absent; none were here but women and children. The
Iroquois surrounded the huts, and captured all the shrieking inmates.
Then ten of them set out to find the traces of the absent hunters.
They soon met the renowned Piskaret returning alone. As they recognized
him and knew his mettle, they thought treachery better than an open
attack. They therefore approached him in the attitude of friends; while
he, ignorant of the rupture of the treaty, began to sing his peace-song.
Scarcely had they joined him, when one of them ran a sword through his
body; and, having scalped him, they returned in triumph to their
companions. [ 1 ] All the hunters were soon after waylaid, overpowered
by numbers, and killed or taken prisoners.

[ 1 Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 4. Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre à son
Fils. Québec, . . . 1647. Perrot's account, drawn from tradition,
is different, though not essentially so. ]

Another band of the Mohawks had meanwhile pursued the other party of
Algonquins, and overtaken them on the march, as, incumbered with their
sledges and baggage, they were moving from one hunting-camp to another.
Though taken by surprise, they made fight, and killed several of their
assailants; but in a few moments their resistance was overcome, and those
who survived the fray were helpless in the clutches of the enraged
victors. Then began a massacre of the old, the disabled, and the infants,
with the usual beating, gashing, and severing of fingers to the rest.
The next day, the two bands of Mohawks, each with its troop of captives
fast bound, met at an appointed spot on the Lake of St. Peter, and
greeted each other with yells of exultation, with which mingled a wail of
anguish, as the prisoners of either party recognized their companions in
misery. They all kneeled in the midst of their savage conquerors,
and one of the men, a noted convert, after a few words of exhortation,
repeated in a loud voice a prayer, to which the rest responded. Then
they sang an Algonquin hymn, while the Iroquois, who at first had stared
in wonder, broke into laughter and derision, and at length fell upon them
with renewed fury. One was burned alive on the spot. Another tried to
escape, and they burned the soles of his feet that he might not repeat
the attempt. Many others were maimed and mangled; and some of the women
who afterwards escaped affirmed, that, in ridicule of the converts,
they crucified a small child by nailing it with wooden spikes against a
thick sheet of bark.

The prisoners were led to the Mohawk towns; and it is needless to repeat
the monotonous and revolting tale of torture and death. The men, as
usual, were burned; but the lives of the women and children were spared,
in order to strengthen the conquerors by their adoption,--not, however,
until both, but especially the women, had been made to endure the
extremes of suffering and indignity. Several of them from time to time
escaped, and reached Canada with the story of their woes. Among these
was Marie, the wife of Jean Baptiste, one of the principal Algonquin
converts, captured and burned with the rest. Early in June, she appeared
in a canoe at Montreal, where Madame d'Ailleboust, to whom she was well
known, received her with great kindness, and led her to her room in the
fort. Here Marie was overcome with emotion. Madame d'Ailleboust spoke
Algonquin with ease; and her words of sympathy, joined to the
associations of a place where the unhappy fugitive, with her murdered
husband and child, had often found a friendly welcome, so wrought upon
her, that her voice was smothered with sobs.

She had once before been a prisoner of the Iroquois, at the town of
Onondaga. When she and her companions in misfortune had reached the
Mohawk towns, she was recognized by several Onondagas who chanced to be
there, and who, partly by threats and partly by promises, induced her to
return with them to the scene of her former captivity, where they assured
her of good treatment. With their aid, she escaped from the Mohawks,
and set out with them for Onondaga. On their way, they passed the great
town of the Oneidas; and her conductors, fearing that certain Mohawks who
were there would lay claim to her, found a hiding-place for her in the
forest, where they gave her food, and told her to wait their return.
She lay concealed all day, and at night approached the town, under cover
of darkness. A dull red glare of flames rose above the jagged tops of
the palisade that encompassed it; and, from the pandemonium within,
an uproar of screams, yells, and bursts of laughter told her that they
were burning one of her captive countrymen. She gazed and listened,
shivering with cold and aghast with horror. The thought possessed her
that she would soon share his fate, and she resolved to fly. The ground
was still covered with snow, and her footprints would infallibly have
betrayed her, if she had not, instead of turning towards home, followed
the beaten Indian path westward. She journeyed on, confused and
irresolute, and tortured between terror and hunger. At length she
approached Onondaga, a few miles from the present city of Syracuse,
and hid herself in a dense thicket of spruce or cedar, whence she crept
forth at night, to grope in the half-melted snow for a few ears of corn,
left from the last year's harvest. She saw many Indians from her
lurking-place, and once a tall savage, with an axe on his shoulder,
advanced directly towards the spot where she lay: but, in the extremity
of her fright, she murmured a prayer, on which he turned and changed his
course. The fate that awaited her, if she remained,--for a fugitive
could not hope for mercy,--and the scarcely less terrible dangers of the
pitiless wilderness between her and Canada, filled her with despair,
for she was half dead already with hunger and cold. She tied her girdle
to the bough of a tree, and hung herself from it by the neck. The cord
broke. She repeated the attempt with the same result, and then the
thought came to her that God meant to save her life. The snow by this
time had melted in the forests, and she began her journey for home,
with a few handfuls of corn as her only provision. She directed her
course by the sun, and for food dug roots, peeled the soft inner bark of
trees, and sometimes caught tortoises in the muddy brooks. She had the
good fortune to find a hatchet in a deserted camp, and with it made one
of those wooden implements which the Indians used for kindling fire by
friction. This saved her from her worst suffering; for she had no
covering but a thin tunic, which left her legs and arms bare, and exposed
her at night to tortures of cold. She built her fire in some deep nook
of the forest, warmed herself, cooked what food she had found, told her
rosary on her fingers, and slept till daylight, when she always threw
water on the embers, lest the rising smoke should attract attention.
Once she discovered a party of Iroquois hunters; but she lay concealed,
and they passed without seeing her. She followed their trail back,
and found their bark canoe, which they had hidden near the bank of a
river. It was too large for her use; but, as she was a practised
canoe-maker, she reduced it to a convenient size, embarked in it, and
descended the stream. At length she reached the St. Lawrence, and
paddled with the current towards Montreal. On islands and rocky shores
she found eggs of water-fowl in abundance; and she speared fish with a
sharpened pole, hardened at the point with fire. She even killed deer,
by driving them into the water, chasing them in her canoe, and striking
them on the head with her hatchet. When she landed at Montreal, her
canoe had still a good store of eggs and dried venison.

[ This story is taken from the Relation of 1647, and the letter of Marie
de l'Incarnation to her son, before cited. The woman must have descended
the great rapids of Lachine in her canoe: a feat demanding no ordinary
nerve and skill. ]

Her journey from Onondaga had occupied about two months, under hardships
which no woman but a squaw could have survived. Escapes not less
remarkable of several other women are chronicled in the records of this
year; and one of them, with a notable feat of arms which attended it,
calls for a brief notice.

Eight Algonquins, in one of those fits of desperate valor which sometimes
occur in Indians, entered at midnight a camp where thirty or forty
Iroquois warriors were buried in sleep, and with quick, sharp blows of
their tomahawks began to brain them as they lay. They killed ten of them
on the spot, and wounded many more. The rest, panic-stricken and
bewildered by the surprise and the thick darkness, fled into the forest,
leaving all they had in the hands of the victors, including a number of
Algonquin captives, of whom one had been unwittingly killed by his
countrymen in the confusion. Another captive, a woman, had escaped on a
previous night. They had stretched her on her back, with limbs extended,
and bound her wrists and ankles to four stakes firmly driven into the
earth,--their ordinary mode of securing prisoners. Then, as usual,
they all fell asleep. She presently became aware that the cord that
bound one of her wrists was somewhat loose, and, by long and painful
efforts, she freed her hand. To release the other hand and her feet was
then comparatively easy. She cautiously rose. Around her, breathing in
deep sleep, lay stretched the dark forms of the unconscious warriors,
scarcely visible in the gloom. She stepped over them to the entrance of
the hut; and here, as she was passing out, she descried a hatchet on the
ground. The temptation was too strong for her Indian nature. She seized
it, and struck again and again, with all her force, on the skull of the
Iroquois who lay at the entrance. The sound of the blows, and the
convulsive struggles of the victim, roused the sleepers. They sprang up,
groping in the dark, and demanding of each other what was the matter.
At length they lighted a roll of birch-bark, found their prisoner gone
and their comrade dead, and rushed out in a rage in search of the
fugitive. She, meanwhile, instead of running away, had hid herself in
the hollow of a tree, which she had observed the evening before. Her
pursuers ran through the dark woods, shouting and whooping to each other;
and when all had passed, she crept from her hiding-place, and fled in an
opposite direction. In the morning they found her tracks and followed
them. On the second day they had overtaken and surrounded her, when,
hearing their cries on all sides, she gave up all hope. But near at hand,
in the thickest depths of the forest, the beavers had dammed a brook and
formed a pond, full of gnawed stumps, dead fallen trees, rank weeds,
and tangled bushes. She plunged in, and, swimming and wading, found a
hiding-place, where her body was concealed by the water, and her head by
the masses of dead and living vegetation. Her pursuers were at fault,
and, after a long search, gave up the chase in despair. Shivering, naked,
and half-starved, she crawled out from her wild asylum, and resumed her
flight. By day, the briers and bushes tore her unprotected limbs; by
night, she shivered with cold, and the mosquitoes and small black gnats
of the forest persecuted her with torments which the modern sportsman
will appreciate. She subsisted on such roots, bark, reptiles, or other
small animals, as her Indian habits enabled her to gather on her way.
She crossed streams by swimming, or on rafts of driftwood, lashed
together with strips of linden-bark; and at length reached the
St. Lawrence, where, with the aid of her hatchet, she made a canoe.
Her home was on the Ottawa, and she was ignorant of the great river, or,
at least, of this part of it. She had scarcely even seen a Frenchman,
but had heard of the French as friends, and knew that their dwellings
were on the banks of the St. Lawrence. This was her only guide; and she
drifted on her way, doubtful whether the vast current would bear her to
the abodes of the living or to the land of souls. She passed the watery
wilderness of the Lake of St. Peter, and presently descried a Huron
canoe. Fearing that it was an enemy, she hid herself, and resumed her
voyage in the evening, when she soon came in sight of the wooden
buildings and palisades of Three Rivers. Several Hurons saw her at the
same moment, and made towards her; on which she leaped ashore and hid in
the bushes, whence, being entirely without clothing, she would not come
out till one of them threw her his coat. Having wrapped herself in it,
she went with them to the fort and the house of the Jesuits, in a
wretched state of emaciation, but in high spirits at the happy issue of
her voyage. [ Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 15, 16. ]

Such stories might be multiplied; but these will suffice. Nor is it
necessary to dwell further on the bloody record of inroads, butcheries,
and tortures. We have seen enough to show the nature of the scourge that
now fell without mercy on the Indians and the French of Canada. There
was no safety but in the imprisonment of palisades and ramparts. A deep
dejection sank on the white and red men alike; but the Jesuits would not
despair.

"Do not imagine," writes the Father Superior, "that the rage of the
Iroquois, and the loss of many Christians and many catechumens, can bring
to nought the mystery of the cross of Jesus Christ, and the efficacy of
his blood. We shall die; we shall be captured, burned, butchered: be it
so. Those who die in their beds do not always die the best death.
I see none of our company cast down. On the contrary, they ask leave to
go up to the Hurons, and some of them protest that the fires of the
Iroquois are one of their motives for the journey." [ Lalemant, Relation,
1647, 8. ]




CHAPTER XXII.

1645-1651.

PRIEST AND PURITAN.


MISCOU.--TADOUSSAC.--JOURNEYS OF DE QUEN.--DRUILLETES.--
HIS WINTER WITH THE MONTAGNAIS.--INFLUENCE OF THE MISSIONS.--
THE ABENAQUIS.--DRUILLETES ON THE KENNEBEC.--HIS EMBASSY TO BOSTON.--
GIBBONS.--DUDLEY.--BRADFORD.--ELIOT.--ENDICOTT.--
FRENCH AND PURITAN COLONIZATION.--FAILURE OF DRUILLETES'S EMBASSY.--
NEW REGULATIONS.--NEW-YEAR'S DAY AT QUEBEC.


Before passing to the closing scenes of this wilderness drama, we will
touch briefly on a few points aside from its main action, yet essential
to an understanding of the scope of the mission. Besides their
establishments at Quebec, Sillery, Three Rivers, and the neighborhood of
Lake Huron, the Jesuits had an outlying post at the island of Miscou,
on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near the entrance of the Bay of Chaleurs,
where they instructed the wandering savages of those shores, and
confessed the French fishermen. The island was unhealthy in the extreme.
Several of the priests sickened and died; and scarcely one convert repaid
their toils. There was a more successful mission at Tadoussac, or
Sadilege, as the neighboring Indians called it. In winter, this place
was a solitude; but in summer, when the Montagnais gathered from their
hunting-grounds to meet the French traders, Jesuits came yearly from
Quebec to instruct them in the Faith. Some times they followed them
northward, into wilds where, at this day, a white man rarely penetrates.
Thus, in 1646, De Quen ascended the Saguenay, and, by a series of rivers,
torrents, lakes, and rapids, reached a Montagnais horde called the Nation
of the Porcupine, where he found that the teachings at Tadoussac had
borne fruit, and that the converts had planted a cross on the borders of
the savage lake where they dwelt. There was a kindred band, the Nation
of the White Fish, among the rocks and forests north of Three Rivers.
They proved tractable beyond all others, threw away their "medicines"
or fetiches, burned their magic drums, renounced their medicine-songs,
and accepted instead rosaries, crucifixes, and versions of Catholic hymns.

In a former chapter, we followed Father Paul Le Jeune on his winter
roamings, with a band of Montagnais, among the forests on the northern
boundary of Maine. Now Father Gabriel Druilletes sets forth on a similar
excursion, but with one essential difference. Le Jeune's companions were
heathen, who persecuted him day and night with their gibes and sarcasms.
Those of Druilletes were all converts, who looked on him as a friend and
a father. There were prayers, confessions, masses, and invocations of
St. Joseph. They built their bark chapel at every camp, and no festival
of the Church passed unobserved. On Good Friday they laid their best
robe of beaver-skin on the snow, placed on it a crucifix, and knelt
around it in prayer. What was their prayer? It was a petition for the
forgiveness and the conversion of their enemies, the Iroquois. [ Vimont,
Relation, 1645, 16. ] Those who know the intensity and tenacity of an
Indian's hatred will see in this something more than a change from one
superstition to another. An idea had been presented to the mind of the
savage, to which he had previously been an utter stranger. This is the
most remarkable record of success in the whole body of the Jesuit
Relations; but it is very far from being the only evidence, that, in
teaching the dogmas and observances of the Roman Church, the missionaries
taught also the morals of Christianity. When we look for the results of
these missions, we soon become aware that the influence of the French and
the Jesuits extended far beyond the circle of converts. It eventually
modified and softened the manners of many unconverted tribes. In the
wars of the next century we do not often find those examples of diabolic
atrocity with which the earlier annals are crowded. The savage burned
his enemies alive, it is true, but he rarely ate them; neither did he
torment them with the same deliberation and persistency. He was a savage
still, but not so often a devil. The improvement was not great, but it
was distinct; and it seems to have taken place wherever Indian tribes
were in close relations with any respectable community of white men.
Thus Philip's war in New England, cruel as it was, was less ferocious,
judging from Canadian experience, than it would have been, if a
generation of civilized intercourse had not worn down the sharpest
asperities of barbarism. Yet it was to French priests and colonists,
mingled as they were soon to be among the tribes of the vast interior,
that the change is chiefly to be ascribed. In this softening of manners,
such as it was, and in the obedient Catholicity of a few hundred tamed
savages gathered at stationary missions in various parts of Canada,
we find, after a century had elapsed, all the results of the heroic toil
of the Jesuits. The missions had failed, because the Indians had ceased
to exist. Of the great tribes on whom rested the hopes of the early
Canadian Fathers, nearly all were virtually extinct. The missionaries
built laboriously and well, but they were doomed to build on a failing
foundation. The Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed
them, but because their own ferocity and intractable indolence made it
impossible that they should exist in its presence. Either the plastic
energies of a higher race or the servile pliancy of a lower one would,
each in its way, have preserved them: as it was, their extinction was a
foregone conclusion. As for the religion which the Jesuits taught them,
however Protestants may carp at it, it was the only form of Christianity
likely to take root in their crude and barbarous nature.

To return to Druilletes. The smoke of the wigwam blinded him; and it is
no matter of surprise to hear that he was cured by a miracle. He
returned from his winter roving to Quebec in high health, and soon set
forth on a new mission. On the River Kennebec, in the present State of
Maine, dwelt the Abenaquis, an Algonquin people, destined hereafter to
become a thorn in the sides of the New-England colonists. Some of them
had visited their friends, the Christian Indians of Sillery. Here they
became converted, went home, and preached the Faith to their countrymen,
and this to such purpose that the Abenaquis sent to Quebec to ask for a
missionary. Apart from the saving of souls, there were solid reasons for
acceding to their request. The Abenaquis were near the colonies of New
England,--indeed, the Plymouth colony, under its charter, claimed
jurisdiction over them; and in case of rupture, they would prove
serviceable friends or dangerous enemies to New France. [ Charlevoix,
I. 280, gives this as a motive of the mission. ] Their messengers were
favorably received; and Druilletes was ordered to proceed upon the new
mission.

He left Sillery, with a party of Indians, on the twenty-ninth of August,
1646, [ Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 51. ] and following, as it seems,
the route by which, a hundred and twenty-nine years later, the soldiers
of Arnold made their way to Quebec, he reached the waters of the Kennebec
and descended to the Abenaqui villages. Here he nursed the sick,
baptized the dying, and gave such instruction as, in his ignorance of the
language, he was able. Apparently he had been ordered to reconnoitre;
for he presently descended the river from Norridgewock to the first
English trading-post, where Augusta now stands. Thence he continued his
journey to the sea, and followed the coast in a canoe to the Penobscot,
visiting seven or eight English posts on the way, where, to his surprise,
he was very well received. At the Penobscot he found several Capuchin
friars, under their Superior, Father Ignace, who welcomed him with the
utmost cordiality. Returning, he again ascended the Kennebec to the
English post at Augusta. At a spot three miles above the Indians had
gathered in considerable numbers, and here they built him a chapel after
their fashion. He remained till midwinter, catechizing and baptizing,
and waging war so successfully against the Indian sorcerers, that
medicine-bags were thrown away, and charms and incantations were
supplanted by prayers. In January the whole troop set off on their grand
hunt, Druilletes following them, "with toil," says the chronicler,
"too great to buy the kingdoms of this world, but very small as a price
for the Kingdom of Heaven." [ Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 54. For an
account of this mission, see also Maurault, Histoire des Abenakis,
116-156. ] They encamped on Moosehead Lake, where new disputes with the
"medicine-men" ensued, and the Father again remained master of the field.
When, after a prosperous hunt, the party returned to the English
trading-house, John Winslow, the agent in charge again received the
missionary with a kindness which showed no trace of jealousy or religious
prejudice.

[ Winslow would scarcely have recognized his own name in the Jesuit
spelling,--"Le Sieur de Houinslaud." In his journal of 1650 Druilletes
is more successful in his orthography, and spells it Winslau. ]

Early in the summer Druilletes went to Quebec; and during the two
following years, the Abenaquis, for reasons which are not clear, were
left without a missionary. He spent another winter of extreme hardship
with the Algonquins on their winter rovings, and during summer instructed
the wandering savages of Tadoussac. It was not until the autumn of 1650
that he again descended the Kennebec. This time he went as an envoy
charged with the negotiation of a treaty. His journey is worthy of
notice, since, with the unimportant exception of Jogues's embassy to the
Mohawks, it is the first occasion on which the Canadian Jesuits appear in
a character distinctly political. Afterwards, when the fervor and
freshness of the missions had passed away, they frequently did the work
of political agents among the Indians: but the Jesuit of the earlier
period was, with rare exceptions, a missionary only; and though he was
expected to exert a powerful influence in gaining subjects and allies for
France, he was to do so by gathering them under the wings of the Church.

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