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.
[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. [2] 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.
[2] During his captivity, he wrote, on a beaver-skin, a letter to the
Dutch in French, Latin, and English.
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. [3] 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, [4] sailed for
the Richelieu, in a brigantine and two or three open boats.
[3] Faillon, Colonie Française, II. 2; Vimont, Relation, 1642, 2, 44.
[4] Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre, Sept. 29, 1642.
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. [5] 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. [6]
[5] 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.
[6] The Relation of 1642 says three hundred. Jogues, who had been among
them to his cost, is the better authority.
It was the party of warriors that Jogues had met on an island in Lake
Champlain. But for the courage of Du Rocher, a corporal, who was on
guard, they would have carried all before them. They were rushing
through an opening in the palisade, when he, with a few soldiers, met
them with such vigor and resolution, that they were held in check long
enough for the rest to snatch their arms. Montmagny, who was on the
river in his brigantine, hastened on shore, and the soldiers, encouraged
by his arrival, fought with great determination.
The Iroquois, on their part, swarmed up to the palisade, thrust their
guns through the loop-holes, and fired on those within; nor was it till
several of them had been killed and others wounded that they learned to
keep a more prudent distance. A tall savage, wearing a crest of the hair
of some animal, dyed scarlet and bound with a fillet of wampum, leaped
forward to the attack, and was shot dead. Another shared his fate, with
seven buck-shot in his shield, and as many in his body. The French, with
shouts, redoubled their fire, and the Indians at length lost heart and
fell back. The wounded dropped guns, shields, and war-clubs, and the
whole band withdrew to the shelter of a fort which they had built in the
forest, three miles above. On the part of the French, one man was killed
and four wounded. They had narrowly escaped a disaster which might have
proved the ruin of the colony; and they now gained time so far to
strengthen their defences as to make them reasonably secure against any
attack of savages. [7] 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.
[7] 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." [8]
[8] Relation, 1644, 3.
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." [9]
[9] 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." [10]
[10] 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. [11] 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.
[11] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 46.
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. [12] 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.
[12] "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. [13]
[13] 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. [14] 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.
[14] Vimont, Relation, 1644, 41.
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." [15]
[15] 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 souffert pendant sa
captiuité."--Vimont, Relation, 1644, 43.
Then follows a modest narrative of what he 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." [16] 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. [17] 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.
[16] "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.
[17] "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. [18]
[18] 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, [19] and conspired with their native fierceness
to form a character of unrelenting cruelty rarely equalled.
[19] Thus, when Bressani, tortured by the tightness of the cords that
bound him, asked an Indian to loosen them, he would reply by mockery, if
others were present; but if no one saw him, he usually complied.
The perils which beset the missionaries did not spring from the fury of
the Iroquois alone, for Nature herself was armed with terror in this
stern wilderness of New France. On the thirtieth of January, 1646,
Father Anne de Nouë set out from Three Rivers to go to the fort built by
the French at the mouth of the River Richelieu, where he was to say mass
and hear confessions. De Nouë was sixty-three years old, and had come to
Canada in 1625. [20] As an indifferent memory disabled him from
mastering the Indian languages, he devoted himself to the spiritual
charge of the French, and of the Indians about the forts, within reach
of an interpreter. For the rest, he attended the sick, and, in times of
scarcity, fished in the river or dug roots in the woods for the
subsistence of his flock. In short, though sprung from a noble family of
Champagne, he shrank from no toil, however humble, to which his idea of
duty or his vow of obedience called him. [21]
[20] See "Pioneers of France," 393.
[21] He was peculiarly sensitive as regarded the cardinal Jesuit virtue
of obedience; and both Lalemant and Bressani say, that, at the age of
sixty and upwards, he was sometimes seen in tears, when he imagined that
he had not fulfilled to the utmost the commands of his Superior.
The old missionary had for companions two soldiers and a Huron Indian.
They were all on snow-shoes, and the soldiers dragged their baggage on
small sledges. Their highway was the St. Lawrence, transformed to solid
ice, and buried, like all the country, beneath two or three feet of
snow, which, far and near, glared dazzling white under the clear winter
sun. Before night they had walked eighteen miles, and the soldiers,
unused to snow-shoes, were greatly fatigued. They made their camp in the
forest, on the shore of the great expansion of the St. Lawrence called
the Lake of St. Peter,--dug away the snow, heaped it around the spot as
a barrier against the wind, made their fire on the frozen earth in the
midst, and lay down to sleep. At two o'clock in the morning De Nouë
awoke. The moon shone like daylight over the vast white desert of the
frozen lake, with its bordering fir-trees bowed to the ground with snow;
and the kindly thought struck the Father, that he might ease his
companions by going in advance to Fort Richelieu, and sending back men
to aid them in dragging their sledges. He knew the way well. He directed
them to follow the tracks of his snow-shoes in the morning; and, not
doubting to reach the fort before night, left behind his blanket and his
flint and steel. For provisions, he put a morsel of bread and five or
six prunes in his pocket, told his rosary, and set forth.
Before dawn the weather changed. The air thickened, clouds hid the moon,
and a snow-storm set in. The traveller was in utter darkness. He lost
the points of the compass, wandered far out on the lake, and when day
appeared could see nothing but the snow beneath his feet, and the
myriads of falling flakes that encompassed him like a curtain,
impervious to the sight. Still he toiled on, winding hither and thither,
and at times unwittingly circling back on his own footsteps. At night he
dug a hole in the snow under the shore of an island, and lay down,
without fire, food, or blanket.
Meanwhile the two soldiers and the Indian, unable to trace his
footprints, which the snow had hidden, pursued their way for the fort;
but the Indian was ignorant of the country, and the Frenchmen were
unskilled. They wandered from their course, and at evening encamped on
the shore of the island of St. Ignace, at no great distance from De
Nouë. Here the Indian, trusting to his instinct, left them and set forth
alone in search of their destination, which he soon succeeded in
finding. The palisades of the feeble little fort, and the rude buildings
within, were whitened with snow, and half buried in it. Here, amid the
desolation, a handful of men kept watch and ward against the Iroquois.
Seated by the blazing logs, the Indian asked for De Nouë, and, to his
astonishment, the soldiers of the garrison told him that he had not been
seen. The captain of the post was called; all was anxiety; but nothing
could be done that night.
At daybreak parties went out to search. The two soldiers were readily
found; but they looked in vain for the missionary. All day they were
ranging the ice, firing their guns and shouting; but to no avail, and
they returned disconsolate. There was a converted Indian, whom the
French called Charles, at the fort, one of four who were spending the
winter there. On the next morning, the second of February, he and one of
his companions, together with Baron, a French soldier, resumed the
search; and, guided by the slight depressions in the snow which had
fallen on the wanderer's footprints, the quick-eyed savages traced him
through all his windings, found his camp by the shore of the island, and
thence followed him beyond the fort. He had passed near without
discovering it,--perhaps weakness had dimmed his sight,--stopped to rest
at a point a league above, and thence made his way about three leagues
farther. Here they found him. He had dug a circular excavation in the
snow, and was kneeling in it on the earth. His head was bare, his eyes
open and turned upwards, and his hands clasped on his breast. His hat
and his snow-shoes lay at his side. The body was leaning slightly
forward, resting against the bank of snow before it, and frozen to the
hardness of marble.
Thus, in an act of kindness and charity, died the first martyr of the
Canadian mission. [22]
[22] Lalemant, Relation, 1646, 9; Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre, 10
Sept., 1646; Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 175.
One of the Indians who found the body of De Nouë was killed by the
Iroquois at Ossossané, in the Huron country, three years after. He
received the death-blow in a posture like that in which he had seen the
dead missionary. His body was found with the hands still clasped on the
breast.--Lettre de Chaumonot à Lalemant, 1 Juin, 1649.
The next death among the Jesuits was that of Masse, who died at Sillery,
on the twelfth of May of this year, 1646, at the age of seventy-two. He
had come with Biard to Acadia as early as 1611. (See "Pioneers of
France," 262.) Lalemant, in the Relation of 1646, gives an account of
him, and speaks of penances which he imposed on himself, some of which
are to the last degree disgusting.