She smiled upon her little ones, and returned a serene and cheerful
greeting to the curious or pitying friends who accosted her. All day she
had carried the burden of domestic cares and duties, while her heart
ached within her bosom and cried out for solitude. Now, at night, alone
with her sleeping babes, the agony of fear and pain, so long repressed,
takes full possession of her sinking heart. Mingled with the roar of the
treacherous sea she hears the voices of husband and son, now calling
loudly for help, now borne away on the fitful wind. She sees their pale
faces, with unclosed eyes, floating below the cruel green water, their
strong limbs entangled in the twisted cordage. Now great, gleaming fish
swim around them. Oh! it is too fearful. From her knees she falls
forward upon her face and groans aloud. But on a sudden she hears a stir
without—a sound of repressed voices and many hurrying feet. Hope is not
dead within her yet; for she springs to the window with the wild thought
that it is her absent returned. No, ’tis but a group of fishermen on
their way to the pier; but Pinsard stops to tell her, with a strange
thrill in his rough voice, that there is a fishing-boat coming into
port!
Manon screams to her father to watch the little ones—she must go to the
pier—then flies out into the night. It is not raining, and she returns
to snatch her wakened and sobbing babe, and wrap him in his father’s
woollen blouse. She does not know when Mathilde joins her; she is
scarcely conscious of the warm, exultant clasp of her hand. Jean is
there, too, agitated but grave.
As they turn the angle of the village street, before them lies the open
bay. It is past midnight, but the pier is crowded. There, truly, coming
on with outspread canvas, white in the struggling rays of a watery moon,
is _the missing ship_! They know it well. Upon the broken, pebbly shore
the two women kneel to thank God; but they can only lift up their voices
and weep.
“They are not safe yet,” says Jean shortly. “The wind takes them
straight upon the pier. They will need all our help.”
The crowd make way instantly for the breathless women. The light-house
keeper stands ready with a coil of rope. The fishermen range themselves
in line, tighten their belts, and wait to draw the friendly hawser.
Great waves thunder against the long pier, sending showers of spray high
above the pale crucifix at the end against which the women lean. Now the
moon, emerging from a light cloud, sends a flood of pale radiance upon
the vessel’s deck. It is they! Jacques Payen is at the helm; young
Jacques stands upon the gunwale.
The light-house keeper throws his rope; the fishermen raise their
musical, long-drawn cry. Jacques catches the rope, but in silence; and
silently the crew make fast.
“It is their vow!” cries Manon, darting forward among the wondering men.
“They will not speak until they sing _Te Deum_ at Notre Dame for their
safe return.”
Reassured, the men pull in vigorously, but to no effect. Again, and yet
again, but the ship does not move. A moment since it came on swift as
the wind; now it seems anchored for ever not fifty yards away. They can
see plainly every object upon the deck, where the silent crew stand
gazing towards the pier. Even Manon and Mathilde have seized the rope,
and draw with the strength of terror. Breathless, unsteady, large drops
of sweat standing upon their faces, they pause irresolute. Stretching
her arms towards her husband, Manon holds out her babe.
A white mist rises out of the sea and hangs like a veil between them.
Sad, reproachful voices rise out of the waves, some near at hand, others
far out. An icy wind lifts the mist and carries it slowly away, clinging
for a moment like a shroud around the crucifix. The cable falls slack in
the strong hands that grasp it. The ship is gone—vanished without a
sound; but far away echoes a solemn chorus, “Have pity on me, have pity
on me, at least you, my friends, for the hand of the Lord hath touched
me.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROMANCE AND REALITY OF THE DEATH OF FATHER JAMES MARQUETTE, AND THE
RECENT DISCOVERY OF HIS REMAINS.
The bold and energetic exploration by the Canadian Louis Jolliet and the
French Jesuit James Marquette, in which, embarking in a frail canoe,
they penetrated to the Mississippi by the Wisconsin, and followed the
course of the great river to the Arkansas, gives them and their
important achievement a place in American history. It was an expedition
carried out by two skilled hydrographers familiar with the extent and
limit of American exploration, trained by education and long observation
to map and describe the countries through which they passed. Their great
object was to determine the extent of the river, its chief affluents,
and the nature of the tribes upon it, as well as to decide whether it
emptied into the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific.
In New Mexico, the advanced outpost of the Spanish colonies, some
definite knowledge of the interior structure of the continent prevailed;
but to the rest of the world the great watershed of the Rocky Mountains,
with the valley of the Mississippi and Missouri to the east and a series
of rivers on the west, was utterly unknown. Marquette and Jolliet lifted
the veil and gave the civilized world clear and definite ideas. The two
learned explorers floated alone down the mighty river, whose path had
not been traced for any distance since the shattered remnant of De
Soto’s army stole down its lower valley to the gulf.
Father Marquette was not a mere scholar or man of science. If he sought
new avenues for civilized man to thread the very heart of the continent,
it was with him a work of Christian love. It was to open the way for the
Gospel, that the cross might enlighten new and remote nations.
No missionary of that glorious band of Jesuits who in the seventeenth
century announced the faith from the Hudson Bay to the Lower
Mississippi, who hallowed by their labors and life-blood so many a wild
spot now occupied by the busy hives of men—none of them impresses us
more, in his whole life and career, with his piety, sanctity, and
absolute devotion to God, than Father Marquette. In life he seems to
have been looked up to with reverence by the wildest savage, by the rude
frontiersman, and by the polished officers of government. When he had
passed away his name and his fame remained in the great West, treasured
above that of his fellow-laborers, Ménard, Allouez, Nouvel, or
Druillettes. The tradition of his life and labors in a few generations,
while it lost none of its respect for his memory, gathered the moss of
incorrectness.
Father Charlevoix, travelling through the West in 1721, stopped on Lake
Michigan at the mouth of a stream which already bore the name of “River
of Father Marquette.” From Canadian voyagers and some missionary in the
West he learned the tradition which he thus embodies in his journal:
“Two years after the discovery (of the Mississippi), as he was going
from Chicagou, which is at the extremity of Lake Michigan, to
Michilimackinac, he entered the river in question on the 18th of May,
1675, its mouth being then at the extremity of the lowlands, which I
have noticed it leaves to the right as you enter. There he erected his
altar and said Mass. Then he withdrew a little distance to offer his
thanksgiving, and asked the two men who paddled his canoe to leave him
alone for half an hour. At the expiration of that time they returned for
him, and were greatly surprised to find him dead. They remembered,
nevertheless, that on entering the river he had inadvertently remarked
that he would end his journey there.
“As it was too far from the spot to Michilimackinac to convey his body
to that place, they buried him near the bank of the river, which since
that time has gradually withdrawn, as if through respect, to the bluff,
whose foot it now washes and where it has opened a new passage. The next
year one of the two men who had rendered the last tribute to the servant
of God returned to the spot where they had buried him, took up his
remains, and conveyed them to Michilimackinac. I could not learn, or
have forgotten, the name this river bore previously, but the Indians now
give it no name but ‘River of the Black-gown’; the French call it by the
name of Father Marquette, and never fail to invoke him when they are in
any peril on Lake Michigan. Many have declared that they believed
themselves indebted to his intercession for having escaped very great
dangers.”
Father Charlevoix’s fame as a historian gave this account the stamp of
authority and it was generally adopted. Bancroft drew from it the
poetical and touching account which he introduced into the first
editions of his _History of the United States_.
Yet this was but romance. The real, detailed account of the missionary’s
labors, the details which let us enter the sanctuary of his pious heart,
were all the time lying unused in Canada. They were in the college of
Quebec when Charlevoix was teaching in that institution as a young
scholastic; but if he then already projected his history of the colony,
no one of the old fathers seems to have opened to him the writings of
the early founders of the mission. It was the same when he returned to
make the tour through the country under the auspices of the government
and with a view to its development.
The papers lay unnoticed, and when Louis XV.’s neglect of his American
empire neutralized all the genius of Montcalm and the gallantry of his
French and Canadian soldiery, the mission of the Jesuit Fathers was
broken up. The precious archives were plundered; but some documents
reached pious hands, who laid them up with their own convent archives,
till the Society of Jesus returned to the land where it could boast of
so glorious a career.
Among these papers were accounts of the last labors and death of Father
Marquette and of the removal of his remains, prepared for publication by
Father Dablon; Marquette’s journal of his great expedition; the very map
he drew; and a letter left unfinished when the angel of death sheathed
his sword by the banks of the Michigan River.
Father Felix Martin, one of the earliest to revive the old Canadian
mission, received these treasures with joy, and has since gleaned far
and wide to add to our material for the wonderful mission labors of the
Jesuit pioneers. He has published many works, and aided in far more.
With a kindness not easy to repay he permitted the writer to use the
documents relating to Marquette in preparing a work on “The Discovery
and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley.”
From these authentic contemporary documents we learn the real story of
Father Marquette’s last labors. As he was returning from his voyage down
the Mississippi, he promised the Kaskaskia Indians, who then occupied
towns in the upper valley of the Illinois, that he would return to teach
them the faith which he announced. His health, broken by exposure and
mission labor on the St. Lawrence and the Upper Lakes, was very frail,
but he had no idea of rest. Devoted in an especial manner to the great
privilege of Mary—her Immaculate Conception—he named the great artery of
our continent The River of the Immaculate Conception, and in his heart
bestowed the same name on the mission which he hoped to found among the
Kaskaskias.
To enter upon that work, so dear to his piety, he needed permission from
his distant superior. When the permission came he took leave of the
Mackinac mission which he had founded, and pushed off his bark canoe
into Lake Michigan. The autumn was well advanced—for it was the 25th of
October, 1674—and the reddening forests swayed in the chill lake winds
as he glided along the western shore. Before he reached the southern
extremity winter was upon him with its cold and snows, and the disease
which had been checked, but not conquered, again claimed the frail
frame. It could not quench his courage, for he kept on in his open canoe
on the wintry lake till the 4th of December, when he reached Chicago.
There he had hoped to ascend the river and by a portage reach the
Illinois. It was too late. The ice had closed the stream, and a winter
march was beyond his strength. His two men, simple, faithful companions,
erected a log hut, home and chapel, the first dwelling and first church
of Chicago. Praying to Our Lady to enable him to reach his destination,
offering the Holy Sacrifice whenever his illness permitted, receiving
delegations from his flock, the Kaskaskias, the winter waned away in the
pious foundation of the white settlement at Chicago.
With the opening of spring Marquette set out, and his last letter notes
his progress till the 6th of April, 1675. Two days after he was among
the Kaskaskias, and, rearing his altar on the prairie which lies between
the present town of Utica and the Illinois river, he offered up the Mass
on Maundy Thursday, and began the instruction of the willing Indians who
gathered around him. A few days only were allotted to him, when, after
Easter, he was again stricken down. If he would die in the arms of his
brethren at Mackinac, he saw that he must depart at once; for he felt
that the days of his sojourning were rapidly closing. Escorted by the
Kaskaskias, who were deeply impressed by the zeal that could so battle
with death, the missionary reached Lake Michigan, on the eastern side.
Although that shore was as yet unknown, his faithful men launched his
canoe. “His strength, however, failed so much,” says Father Dablon,
whose words we shall now quote, “that his men despaired of being able to
convey him alive to their journey’s end; for, in fact, he became so weak
and so exhausted that he could no longer help himself, nor even stir,
and had to be handled and carried like a child. He nevertheless
maintained in this state an admirable resignation, joy, and gentleness,
consoling his beloved companions, and encouraging them to suffer
courageously all the hardships of this voyage, assuring them that our
Lord would not forsake them when he was gone. It was during this
navigation that he began to prepare more particularly for death, passing
his time in colloquies with our Lord, with his holy Mother, with his
angel guardian, or with all heaven. He was often heard pronouncing these
words: ‘I believe that my Redeemer liveth,’ or ‘Mary, Mother of grace,
Mother of God, remember me.’ Besides a spiritual reading made for him
every day, he toward the close asked them to read him his meditation on
the preparation for death, which he carried about him; he recited his
breviary every day; and although he was so low that both sight and
strength had greatly failed, he did not omit it till the last day of his
life, when his companions excited his scruples. A week before his death
he had the precaution to bless some holy-water to serve him during the
rest of his illness, in his agony, and at his burial, and he instructed
his companions how to use it.
“On the eve of his death, which was a Friday, he told them, all radiant
with joy, that it would take place on the morrow. During the whole day
he conversed with them about the manner of his burial, the way in which
he should be laid out, the place to be selected for his interment; how
they should arrange his hands, feet, and face, and how they should raise
a cross over his grave. He even went so far as to enjoin them, only
three hours before he expired, to take his chapel-bell, as soon as he
was dead, and ring it while they carried him to the grave. Of all this
he spoke so calmly and collectedly that you would have thought he spoke
of the death and burial of another, and not of his own.
“Thus did he speak to them as he sailed along the lake, till, perceiving
the mouth of a river, with an eminence on the bank which he thought
suited for his burial, he told them that it was the place of his last
repose. They wished, however, to pass on, as the weather permitted it
and the day was not far advanced; but God raised a contrary wind, which
obliged them to return and enter the river which the father had
designated.
“They then carried him ashore, kindled a little fire, and raised a
wretched bark cabin for his use, laying him in it with as little
discomfort as they could; but they were so depressed by sadness that, as
they afterwards said, they did not know what they were doing.
“The father being thus stretched on the shore like St. Francis Xavier,
as he had always so ardently desired, and left alone amid those
forests—for his companions were engaged in unloading—he had leisure to
repeat all the acts in which he had employed himself during the
preceding days.
“When his dear companions afterwards came up, all dejected, he consoled
them, and gave them hopes that God would take care of them after his
death in those new and unknown countries; he gave them his last
instructions, thanked them for all the charity they had shown him during
the voyage, begged their pardon for the trouble he had given them,
directed them also to ask pardon in his name of all our fathers and
brothers in the Ottawa country, and then disposed them to receive the
sacrament of penance, which he administered to them for the last time.
He also gave them a paper on which he had written all his faults since
his last confession, to be given to his superior, to oblige him to pray
to God more earnestly for him. In fine, he promised not to forget them
in heaven, and as he was very kind-hearted, and knew them to be worn out
with the toil of the preceding days, he bade them go and take a little
rest, assuring them that his hour was not yet so near, but that he would
wake them when it was time—as, in fact, he did two or three hours after,
calling them when about to enter into his agony.
“When they came near he embraced them again for the last time, while
they melted in tears at his feet. He then asked for the holy water and
his reliquary, and, taking off his crucifix, which he always wore
hanging from his neck, he placed it in the hands of one of his
companions, asking him to hold it constantly opposite him, raised before
his eyes. Feeling that he had but a little while to live, he made a last
effort, clasped his hands, and, with his eyes fixed sweetly on his
crucifix, he pronounced aloud his profession of faith, and thanked the
divine Majesty for the immense favor he bestowed upon him in allowing
him to die in the Society of Jesus, to die in it as a missionary of
Jesus Christ, and above all to die in it, as he had always asked, in a
wretched cabin, amid the forests, destitute of all human aid.
“On this he became silent, conversing inwardly with God; yet from time
to time words escaped him: ‘_Sistinuit anima mea in verbo ejus_,’ or
‘_Mater Dei, memento mei_,’ which were the last words he uttered before
entering into his agony, which was very calm and gentle.
“He had prayed his companions to remind him, when they saw him about to
expire, to pronounce frequently the names of Jesus and Mary, if he did
not do so himself; they did not neglect this; and when they thought him
about to pass away one cried aloud, ‘Jesus! Mary!’ which he several
times repeated distinctly, and then, as if at those sacred names
something had appeared to him, he suddenly raised his eyes above his
crucifix, fixing them apparently upon some object, which he seemed to
regard with pleasure; and thus, with a countenance all radiant with
smiles, he expired without a struggle, and so gently that it might be
called a quiet sleep.
“His two poor companions, after shedding many tears over his body, and
having laid it out as he had directed, carried it devoutly to the grave,
ringing the bell according to his injunction, and raised a large cross
near it to serve as a mark for all who passed....
“God did not permit so precious a deposit to remain unhonored and
forgotten amid the forests. The Indians, called Kiskakons, who have for
nearly ten years publicly professed Christianity, in which they were
first instructed by Father Marquette when stationed at La Pointe du St.
Esprit, at the extremity of Lake Superior, were hunting last winter not
far from Lake Illinois (Michigan), and, as they were returning early in
the spring, they resolved to pass by the tomb of their good father, whom
they tenderly loved; and God even gave them the thought of taking his
bones and conveying them to our church at the mission of St. Ignatius,
at Missilimakinac, where they reside.
“They accordingly repaired to the spot and deliberated together,
resolving to act with their father as they usually do with those whom
they respect. They accordingly opened the grave, unrolled the body, and,
though the flesh and intestines were all dried up, they found it entire,
without the skin being in any way injured. This did not prevent their
dissecting it according to custom. They washed the bones and dried them
in the sun; then, putting them neatly in a box of birch bark, they set
out to bear them to our house of St. Ignatius.
“The convoy consisted of nearly thirty canoes in excellent order,
including even a good number of Iroquois, who had joined our Algonquins
to honor the ceremony. As they approached our house, Father Nouvel, who
is superior, went to meet them with Father Pierson, accompanied by all
the French and Indians of the place, and, having caused the convoy to
stop, he made the ordinary interrogations to verify the fact that the
body which they bore was really Father Marquette’s. Then, before they
landed, he intoned the _De Profundis_ in sight of the thirty canoes
still on the water, and of all the people on the shore. After this the
body was carried to the church, observing all that the ritual prescribes
for such ceremonies. It remained exposed under his catafalque all that
day, which was Whitsun Monday, the 8th of June; and the next day, when
all the funeral honors had been paid it, it was deposited in a little
vault in the middle of the church, where he reposes as the
Guardian-Angel of our Ottawa missions. The Indians often come to pray on
his tomb.”
We are not writing his life, and will not enter upon the supernatural
favors ascribed to his intercession by French and Indians. His grave was
revered as a holy spot, and many a pilgrimage was made to it to invoke
his intercession.
The remains of the pious missionary lay in the chapel undoubtedly as
long as it subsisted. This, however, was not for many years. A new
French post was begun at Detroit in 1701 by La Motte Cadillac. The
Hurons and Ottawas at Michilimackinac immediately emigrated and planted
new villages near the rising town. Michilimackinac became deserted,
except by scattered bands of Indians or white bush-lopers, as savage as
the red men among whom they lived. The missionaries were in constant
peril and unable to produce any fruit. They could not follow their old
flocks to Detroit, as the commandant was strongly opposed to them and
had a Recollect father as chaplain of the post. There was no alternative
except to abandon Michilimackinac. The missionaries, not wishing the
church to be profaned or become a resort of the lawless, set fire to
their house and chapel in 1706 and returned to Quebec. The mission
ground became once more a wilderness.
In this disheartening departure what became of the remains of Father
Marquette? If the missionaries bore them to Quebec as a precious
deposit, some entry of their reinterment would appear on the Canadian
registers, which are extremely full and well preserved. Father Nouvel
and Father Pierson, who received and interred them at the mission, were
both dead, and their successors might not recall the facts. The silence
as to any removal, in Charlevoix and other writers, leads us to believe
that the bones remained interred beneath the ruined church. Charlevoix,
who notes, as we have seen, their removal to Mackinac, and is correct on
this point, was at Quebec College in 1706 when the missionaries came
down, and could scarcely have forgotten the ceremony of reinterring the
remains of Father Marquette, had it taken place at Quebec.
Taking this as a fact, that the bones of the venerable missionary,
buried in their bark box, were left there, the next question is: Where
did the church stand?