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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




The lesson, however, was too laborious, and of too little profit, to be
often repeated, and the missionary sought anxiously for more stable
instruction. To find such was not easy. The interpreters--Frenchmen,
who, in the interest of the fur company, had spent years among the
Indians--were averse to Jesuits, and refused their aid. There was one
resource, however, of which Le Jeune would fain avail himself. An Indian,
called Pierre by the French, had been carried to France by the Récollet
friars, instructed, converted, and baptized. He had lately returned to
Canada, where, to the scandal of the Jesuits, he had relapsed into his
old ways, retaining of his French education little besides a few new
vices. He still haunted the fort at Quebec, lured by the hope of an
occasional gift of wine or tobacco, but shunned the Jesuits, of whose
rigid way of life he stood in horror. As he spoke good French and good
Indian, he would have been invaluable to the embarrassed priests at the
mission. Le Jeune invoked the aid of the Saints. The effect of his
prayers soon appeared, he tells us, in a direct interposition of
Providence, which so disposed the heart of Pierre that he quarrelled with
the French commandant, who thereupon closed the fort against him.
He then repaired to his friends and relatives in the woods, but only to
encounter a rebuff from a young squaw to whom he made his addresses.
On this, he turned his steps towards the mission-house, and, being
unfitted by his French education for supporting himself by hunting,
begged food and shelter from the priests. Le Jeune gratefully accepted
him as a gift vouchsafed by Heaven to his prayers, persuaded a lackey at
the fort to give him a cast-off suit of clothes, promised him maintenance,
and installed him as his teacher.

Seated on wooden stools by the rough table in the refectory, the priest
and the Indian pursued their studies. "How thankful I am," writes Le
Jeune, "to those who gave me tobacco last year! At every difficulty I
give my master a piece of it, to make him more attentive."

[ Relation, 1633, 7. He continues: "Ie ne sçaurois assez rendre graces à
Nostre Seigneur de cet heureux rencontre. . . . Que Dieu soit beny pour
vn iamais, sa prouidence est adorable, et sa bonté n'a point de limites." ]

Meanwhile, winter closed in with a severity rare even in Canada. The
St. Lawrence and the St. Charles were hard frozen; rivers, forests,
and rocks were mantled alike in dazzling sheets of snow. The humble
mission-house of Notre-Dame des Anges was half buried in the drifts,
which, heaped up in front where a path had been dug through them, rose
two feet above the low eaves. The priests, sitting at night before the
blazing logs of their wide-throated chimney, heard the trees in the
neighboring forest cracking with frost, with a sound like the report of a
pistol. Le Jeune's ink froze, and his fingers were benumbed, as he
toiled at his declensions and conjugations, or translated the Pater
Noster into blundering Algonquin. The water in the cask beside the fire
froze nightly, and the ice was broken every morning with hatchets.
The blankets of the two priests were fringed with the icicles of their
congealed breath, and the frost lay in a thick coating on the lozenge-
shaped glass of their cells. [ Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 14, 15. ]

By day, Le Jeune and his companion practised with snow-shoes, with all
the mishaps which attend beginners,--the trippings, the falls, and
headlong dives into the soft drifts, amid the laughter of the Indians.
Their seclusion was by no means a solitude. Bands of Montagnais, with
their sledges and dogs, often passed the mission-house on their way to
hunt the moose. They once invited De Nouë to go with them; and he,
scarcely less eager than Le Jeune to learn their language, readily
consented. In two or three weeks he appeared, sick, famished, and half
dead with exhaustion. "Not ten priests in a hundred," writes Le Jeune to
his Superior, "could bear this winter life with the savages." But what
of that? It was not for them to falter. They were but instruments in
the hands of God, to be used, broken, and thrown aside, if such should be
His will.

[ "Voila, mon Reuerend Pere, vn eschantillon de ce qu'il faut souffrir
courant apres les Sauuages. . . . Il faut prendre sa vie, et tout ce
qu'on a, et le ietter à l'abandon, pour ainsi dire, se contentant d'vne
croix bien grosse et bien pesante pour toute richesse. Il est bien vray
que Dieu ne se laisse point vaincre, et que plus on quitte, plus on
trouue: plus on perd, plus on gaigne: mais Dieu se cache par fois,
et alors le Calice est bien amer."--Le Jeune, Relation 1633, 19. ]

An Indian made Le Jeune a present of two small children, greatly to the
delight of the missionary, who at once set himself to teaching them to
pray in Latin. As the season grew milder, the number of his scholars
increased; for, when parties of Indians encamped in the neighborhood,
he would take his stand at the door, and, like Xavier at Goa, ring a
bell. At this, a score of children would gather around him; and he,
leading them into the refectory, which served as his school-room, taught
them to repeat after him the Pater, Aye, and Credo, expounded the mystery
of the Trinity, showed them the sign of the cross, and made them repeat
an Indian prayer, the joint composition of Pierre and himself; then
followed the catechism, the lesson closing with singing the Pater Noster,
translated by the missionary into Algonquin rhymes; and when all was over,
he rewarded each of his pupils with a porringer of peas, to insure their
attendance at his next bell-ringing.

[ "I'ay commencé à appeller quelques enfans auec vne petite clochette.
La premiere fois i'en auois six, puis douze, puis quinze, puis vingt et
davantage; ie leur fais dire le Pater, Aue, et Credo, etc. . . . .
Nous finissons par le Pater Noster, que i'ay composé quasi en rimes en
leur langue, que ie leur fais chanter: et pour derniere conclusion,
ie leur fais donner chacun vne escuellée de pois, qu'ils mangent de bon
appetit," etc.--Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 23. ]

It was the end of May, when the priests one morning heard the sound of
cannon from the fort, and were gladdened by the tidings that Samuel de
Champlain had arrived to resume command at Quebec, bringing with him four
more Jesuits,--Brébeuf, Masse, Daniel, and Davost. [ See "Pioneers of
France." ] Brébeuf, from the first, turned his eyes towards the distant
land of the Hurons,--a field of labor full of peril, but rich in hope and
promise. Le Jeune's duties as Superior restrained him from wanderings so
remote. His apostleship must be limited, for a time, to the vagabond
hordes of Algonquins, who roamed the forests of the lower St. Lawrence,
and of whose language he had been so sedulous a student. His
difficulties had of late been increased by the absence of Pierre, who had
run off as Lent drew near, standing in dread of that season of fasting.
Masse brought tidings of him from Tadoussac, whither he had gone, and
where a party of English had given him liquor, destroying the last trace
of Le Jeune's late exhortations. "God forgive those," writes the Father,
"who introduced heresy into this country! If this savage, corrupted as
he is by these miserable heretics, had any wit, he would be a great
hindrance to the spread of the Faith. It is plain that he was given us,
not for the good of his soul, but only that we might extract from him the
principles of his language." [ Relation, 1633, 29. ]

Pierre had two brothers. One, well known as a hunter, was named
Mestigoit; the other was the most noted "medicine-man," or, as the
Jesuits called him, sorcerer, in the tribe of the Montagnais. Like the
rest of their people, they were accustomed to set out for their winter
hunt in the autumn, after the close of their eel-fishery. Le Jeune,
despite the experience of De Nouë, had long had a mind to accompany one
of these roving bands, partly in the hope, that, in some hour of distress,
he might touch their hearts, or, by a timely drop of baptismal water,
dismiss some dying child to paradise, but chiefly with the object of
mastering their language. Pierre had rejoined his brothers; and, as the
hunting season drew near, they all begged the missionary to make one of
their party,--not, as he thought, out of any love for him, but solely
with a view to the provisions with which they doubted not he would be
well supplied. Le Jeune, distrustful of the sorcerer, demurred, but at
length resolved to go.




CHAPTER IV.

1633, 1634.

LE JEUNE AND THE HUNTERS.


LE JEUNE JOINS THE INDIANS.--THE FIRST ENCAMPMENT.--THE APOSTATE.--
FOREST LIFE IN WINTER.--THE INDIAN HUT.--THE SORCERER.--
HIS PERSECUTION OF THE PRIEST.--EVIL COMPANY.--MAGIC.--
INCANTATIONS.--CHRISTMAS.--STARVATION.--HOPES OF CONVERSION.--
BACKSLIDING.--PERIL AND ESCAPE OF LE JEUNE.--HIS RETURN.


On a morning in the latter part of October, Le Jeune embarked with the
Indians, twenty in all, men, women, and children. No other Frenchman was
of the party. Champlain bade him an anxious farewell, and commended him
to the care of his red associates, who had taken charge of his store of
biscuit, flour, corn, prunes, and turnips, to which, in an evil hour,
his friends had persuaded him to add a small keg of wine. The canoes
glided along the wooded shore of the Island of Orleans, and the party
landed, towards evening, on the small island immediately below. Le Jeune
was delighted with the spot, and the wild beauties of the autumnal sunset.

His reflections, however, were soon interrupted. While the squaws were
setting up their bark lodges, and Mestigoit was shooting wild-fowl for
supper, Pierre returned to the canoes, tapped the keg of wine, and soon
fell into the mud, helplessly drunk. Revived by the immersion, he next
appeared at the camp, foaming at the mouth, threw down the lodges,
overset the kettle, and chased the shrieking squaws into the woods.
His brother Mestigoit rekindled the fire, and slung the kettle anew; when
Pierre, who meanwhile had been raving like a madman along the shore,
reeled in a fury to the spot to repeat his former exploit. Mestigoit
anticipated him, snatched the kettle from the fire, and threw the
scalding contents in his face. "He was never so well washed before in
his life," says Le Jeune; "he lost all the skin of his face and breast.
Would to God his heart had changed also!" [ 1 ] He roared in his frenzy
for a hatchet to kill the missionary, who therefore thought it prudent to
spend the night in the neighboring woods. Here he stretched himself on
the earth, while a charitable squaw covered him with a sheet of
birch-bark. "Though my bed," he writes, "had not been made up since the
creation of the world, it was not hard enough to prevent me from
sleeping."

[ "Iamais il ne fut si bien laué, il changea de peau en la face et en
tout l'estomach: pleust à Dieu que son ame eust changé aussi bien que son
corps!"--Relation, 1634, 59. ]

Such was his initiation into Indian winter life. Passing over numerous
adventures by water and land, we find the party, on the twelfth of
November, leaving their canoes on an island, and wading ashore at low
tide over the flats to the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. As two
other bands had joined them, their number was increased to forty-five
persons. Now, leaving the river behind, they entered those savage
highlands whence issue the springs of the St. John,--a wilderness of
rugged mountain-ranges, clad in dense, continuous forests, with no human
tenant but this troop of miserable rovers, and here and there some
kindred band, as miserable as they. Winter had set in, and already dead
Nature was sheeted in funereal white. Lakes and ponds were frozen,
rivulets sealed up, torrents encased with stalactites of ice; the black
rocks and the black trunks of the pine-trees were beplastered with snow,
and its heavy masses crushed the dull green boughs into the drifts
beneath. The forest was silent as the grave.

Through this desolation the long file of Indians made its way, all on
snow-shoes, each man, woman, and child bending under a heavy load,
or dragging a sledge, narrow, but of prodigious length. They carried
their whole wealth with them, on their backs or on their sledges,--
kettles, axes, hides of meat, if such they had, and huge rolls of
birch-bark for covering their wigwams. The Jesuit was loaded like the
rest. The dogs alone floundered through the drifts unburdened. There
was neither path nor level ground. Descending, climbing, stooping
beneath half-fallen trees, clambering over piles of prostrate trunks,
struggling through matted cedar-swamps, threading chill ravines, and
crossing streams no longer visible, they toiled on till the day began to
decline, then stopped to encamp. [ 1 ] Burdens were thrown down, and
sledges unladen. The squaws, with knives and hatchets, cut long poles of
birch and spruce saplings; while the men, with snow-shoes for shovels,
cleared a round or square space in the snow, which formed an upright wall
three or four feet high, inclosing the area of the wigwam. On one side,
a passage was cut for an entrance, and the poles were planted around the
top of the wall of snow, sloping and converging. On these poles were
spread the sheets of birch-bark; a bear-skin was hung in the passage-way
for a door; the bare ground within and the surrounding snow were covered
with spruce boughs; and the work was done.

[ 1 "S'il arriuoit quelque dégel, ô Dieu quelle peine! Il me sembloit
que ie marchois sur vn chemin de verre qui se cassoit à tous coups soubs
mes pieds: la neige congelée venant à s'amollir, tomboit et s'enfonçoit
par esquarres ou grandes pieces, et nous en auions bien souuent iusques
aux genoux, quelquefois iusqu'à la ceinture. Que s'il y auoit de la
peine à tomber, il y en auoit encor plus à se retirer: car nos raquettes
se chargeoient de neiges et se rendoient si pesantes, que quand vous
veniez à les retirer il vous sembloit qu'on vous tiroit les iambes pour
vous démembrer. I'en ay veu qui glissoient tellement soubs des souches
enseuelies soubs la neige, qu'ils ne pouuoient tirer ny iambes ny
raquettes sans secours: or figurez vous maintenant vne personne chargée
comme vn mulet, et iugez si la vie des Sauuages est douce."--Relation,
1634, 67. ]

This usually occupied about three hours, during which Le Jeune, spent
with travel, and weakened by precarious and unaccustomed fare, had the
choice of shivering in idleness, or taking part in a labor which fatigued,
without warming, his exhausted frame. The sorcerer's wife was in far
worse case. Though in the extremity of a mortal sickness, they left her
lying in the snow till the wigwam was made,--without a word, on her part,
of remonstrance or complaint. Le Jeune, to the great ire of her husband,
sometimes spent the interval in trying to convert her; but she proved
intractable, and soon died unbaptized.

Thus lodged, they remained so long as game could be found within a
circuit of ten or twelve miles, and then, subsistence failing, removed to
another spot. Early in the winter, they hunted the beaver and the Canada
porcupine; and, later, in the season of deep snows, chased the moose and
the caribou.

Put aside the bear-skin, and enter the hut. Here, in a space some
thirteen feet square, were packed nineteen savages, men, women, and
children, with their dogs, crouched, squatted, coiled like hedgehogs,
or lying on their backs, with knees drawn up perpendicularly to keep
their feet out of the fire. Le Jeune, always methodical, arranges the
grievances inseparable from these rough quarters under four chief
heads,--Cold, Heat, Smoke, and Dogs. The bark covering was full of
crevices, through which the icy blasts streamed in upon him from all
sides; and the hole above, at once window and chimney, was so large, that,
as he lay, he could watch the stars as well as in the open air. While
the fire in the midst, fed with fat pine-knots, scorched him on one side,
on the other he had much ado to keep himself from freezing. At times,
however, the crowded hut seemed heated to the temperature of an oven.
But these evils were light, when compared to the intolerable plague of
smoke. During a snow-storm, and often at other times, the wigwam was
filled with fumes so dense, stifling, and acrid, that all its inmates
were forced to lie flat on their faces, breathing through mouths in
contact with the cold earth. Their throats and nostrils felt as if on
fire; their scorched eyes streamed with tears; and when Le Jeune tried to
read, the letters of his breviary seemed printed in blood. The dogs were
not an unmixed evil, for, by sleeping on and around him, they kept him
warm at night; but, as an offset to this good service, they walked, ran,
and jumped over him as he lay, snatched the food from his birchen dish,
or, in a mad rush at some bone or discarded morsel, now and then overset
both dish and missionary.

Sometimes of an evening he would leave the filthy den, to read his
breviary in peace by the light of the moon. In the forest around sounded
the sharp crack of frost-riven trees; and from the horizon to the zenith
shot up the silent meteors of the northern lights, in whose fitful
flashings the awe-struck Indians beheld the dancing of the spirits of the
dead. The cold gnawed him to the bone; and, his devotions over, he
turned back shivering. The illumined hut, from many a chink and crevice,
shot forth into the gloom long streams of light athwart the twisted
boughs. He stooped and entered. All within glowed red and fiery around
the blazing pine-knots where, like brutes in their kennel, were gathered
the savage crew. He stepped to his place, over recumbent bodies and
leggined and moccasined limbs, and seated himself on the carpet of spruce
boughs. Here a tribulation awaited him, the crowning misery of his
winter-quarters,--worse, as he declares, than cold, heat, and dogs.

Of the three brothers who had invited him to join the party, one, we have
seen, was the hunter, Mestigoit; another, the sorcerer; and the third,
Pierre, whom, by reason of his falling away from the Faith, Le Jeune
always mentions as the Apostate. He was a weak-minded young Indian,
wholly under the influence of his brother, the sorcerer, who, if not more
vicious, was far more resolute and wily. From the antagonism of their
respective professions, the sorcerer hated the priest, who lost no
opportunity of denouncing his incantations, and who ridiculed his
perpetual singing and drumming as puerility and folly. The former,
being an indifferent hunter, and disabled by a disease which he had
contracted, depended for subsistence on his credit as a magician; and,
in undermining it, Le Jeune not only outraged his pride, but threatened
his daily bread. [ 1 ] He used every device to retort ridicule on his
rival. At the outset, he had proffered his aid to Le Jeune in his study
of the Algonquin; and, like the Indian practical jokers of Acadia in the
case of Father Biard, [ See "Pioneers of France," 268. ] palmed off upon
him the foulest words in the language as the equivalent of things
spiritual. Thus it happened, that, while the missionary sought to
explain to the assembled wigwam some point of Christian doctrine, he was
interrupted by peals of laughter from men, children, and squaws. And now,
as Le Jeune took his place in the circle, the sorcerer bent upon him his
malignant eyes, and began that course of rude bantering which filled to
overflowing the cup of the Jesuit's woes. All took their cue from him,
and made their afflicted guest the butt of their inane witticisms.
"Look at him! His face is like a dog's!"--"His head is like a pumpkin!"--
"He has a beard like a rabbit's!" The missionary bore in silence these
and countless similar attacks; indeed, so sorely was he harassed, that,
lest he should exasperate his tormentor, he sometimes passed whole days
without uttering a word. [ 2 ]

[ 1 "Ie ne laissois perdre aucune occasion de le conuaincre de niaiserie
et de puerilité, mettant au iour l'impertinence de ses superstitions: or
c'estoit luy arracher l'ame du corps par violence: car comme il ne
sçauroit plus chasser, il fait plus que iamais du Prophete et du Magicien
pour conseruer son credit, et pour auoir les bons morceaux; si bien
qu'esbranlant son authorité qui se va perdant tous les iours, ie le
touchois à la prunelle de l'œil."--Relation, 1634, 56. ]

[ 2 Relation, 1634, 207 (Cramoisy). "Ils me chargeoient incessament de
mille brocards & de mille injures; je me suis veu en tel estat, que pour
ne les aigrir, je passois les jours entiers sans ouvrir la bouche."
Here follows the abuse, in the original Indian, with French translations.
Le Jeune's account of his experiences is singularly graphic. The
following is his summary of his annoyances:--

"Or ce miserable homme" (the sorcerer), "& la fumée m'ont esté les deux
plus grands tourmens que i'aye enduré parmy ces Barbares: ny le froid,
ny le chaud, ny l'incommodité des chiens, ny coucher à l'air, ny dormir
sur un lict de terre, ny la posture qu'il faut tousiours tenir dans leurs
cabanes, se ramassans en peloton, ou se couchans, ou s'asseans sans siege
& sans mattelas, ny la faim, ny la soif, ny la pauureté & saleté de leur
boucan, ny la maladie, tout cela ne m'a semblé que ieu à comparaison de
la fumée & de la malice du Sorcier."--Relation, 1634, 201 (Cramoisy). ]

Le Jeune, a man of excellent observation, already knew his red associates
well enough to understand that their rudeness did not of necessity imply
ill-will. The rest of the party, in their turn fared no better. They
rallied and bantered each other incessantly, with as little forbearance,
and as little malice, as a troop of unbridled schoolboys. [ 1 ] No one
took offence. To have done so would have been to bring upon one's self
genuine contumely. This motley household was a model of harmony.
True, they showed no tenderness or consideration towards the sick and
disabled; but for the rest, each shared with all in weal or woe: the
famine of one was the famine of the whole, and the smallest portion of
food was distributed in fair and equal partition. Upbraidings and
complaints were unheard; they bore each other's foibles with wondrous
equanimity; and while persecuting Le Jeune with constant importunity for
tobacco, and for everything else he had, they never begged among
themselves.

[ 1 "Leur vie se passe à manger, à ire, et à railler les vns des autres,
et de tous les peuples qu'ils cognoissent; ils n'ont rien de serieux,
sinon par fois l'exterieur, faisans parmy nous les graues et les retenus,
mais entr'eux sont de vrais badins, de vrais enfans, qui ne demandent
qu'à rire."--Relation, 1634, 30. ]

When the fire burned well and food was abundant, their conversation,
such as it was, was incessant. They used no oaths, for their language
supplied none,--doubtless because their mythology had no beings
sufficiently distinct to swear by. Their expletives were foul words,
of which they had a superabundance, and which men, women, and children
alike used with a frequency and hardihood that amazed and scandalized the
priest. [ 1 ] Nor was he better pleased with their postures, in which
they consulted nothing but their ease. Thus, of an evening when the
wigwam was heated to suffocation, the sorcerer, in the closest possible
approach to nudity, lay on his back, with his right knee planted upright
and his left leg crossed on it, discoursing volubly to the company, who,
on their part, listened in postures scarcely less remote from decency.

[ 1 "Aussi leur disois-je par fois, que si les pourceaux et les chiens
sçauoient parler, ils tiendroient leur langage. . . . Les filles et les
ieunes femmes sont à l'exterieur tres honnestement couuertes, mais entre
elles leurs discours sont puants, comme des cloaques."--Relation, 1634,
32.--The social manners of remote tribes of the present time correspond
perfectly with Le Jeune's account of those of the Montagnais. ]

There was one point touching which Le Jeune and his Jesuit brethren had
as yet been unable to solve their doubts. Were the Indian sorcerers mere
impostors, or were they in actual league with the Devil? That the fiends
who possess this land of darkness make their power felt by action direct
and potential upon the persons of its wretched inhabitants there is,
argues Le Jeune, good reason to conclude; since it is a matter of grave
notoriety, that the fiends who infest Brazil are accustomed cruelly to
beat and otherwise torment the natives of that country, as many
travellers attest. "A Frenchman worthy of credit," pursues the Father,
"has told me that he has heard with his own ears the voice of the Demon
and the sound of the blows which he discharges upon these his miserable
slaves; and in reference to this a very remarkable fact has been reported
to me, namely, that, when a Catholic approaches, the Devil takes flight
and beats these wretches no longer, but that in presence of a Huguenot he
does not stop beating them."

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