(1646)
Late in the autumn a party of the Indians set forth on their yearly
deer-hunt, and Jogues was ordered to go with them. Shivering and
half-famished, he followed them through the chill November forest, and
shared their wild bivouac in the depths of the wintry desolation. The
game they took was devoted to Areskoui, their god, and eaten in his
honor. Jogues would not taste the meat offered to a demon; and thus he
starved in the midst of plenty. At night, when the kettle was slung,
and the savage crew made merry around their fire, he crouched in a
corner of the hut, gnawed by hunger, and pierced to the bone with
cold. They thought his presence unpropitious to their hunting, and the
women especially hated him. His demeanor at once astonished and
incensed his masters. He brought them fire-wood, like a squaw; he did
their bidding without a murmur, and patiently bore their abuse; but
when they mocked at his God, and laughed at his devotions, their slave
assumed an air and tone of authority, and sternly rebuked them.
[Footnote 51: From Chapters XVI and XX of "The Jesuits in North
America." Copyright, 1867, 1895, by Francis Parkman. Published by
Little, Brown & Company. The site of Jogues's martyrdom is near
Auriesville in the Mohawk valley, where a memorial chapel in his honor
is now maintained, the Rev. John J. Wynne, S. J., having been active
in securing and maintaining it.]
He would sometimes escape from "this Babylon," as he calls the hut,
and wander in the forest, telling his beads and repeating passages of
Scripture. In a remote and lonely spot he cut the bark in the form of
the cross from the trunk of a great tree; and here he made his
prayers. This living martyr, half-clad in shaggy furs, kneeling on the
snow among the icicled rocks and beneath the gloomy pines, bowing in
adoration before the emblem of the faith in which was his only
consolation and his only hope, is alike a theme for the pen and a
subject for the pencil....
He remained two days, half-stifled, in this foul lurking-place,[52]
while the Indians, furious at his escape, ransacked the settlement in
vain to find him. They came off to the vessel, and so terrified the
officers that Jogues was sent on shore at night, and led to the fort.
Here he was hidden in the garret of a house occupied by a miserly old
man, to whose charge he was consigned. Food was sent to him; but, as
his host appropriated the larger part to himself, Jogues was nearly
starved. There was a compartment of his garret, separated from the
rest by a partition of boards. Here the old Dutchman, who, like many
others of the settlers, carried on a trade with the Mohawks, kept a
quantity of goods for that purpose; and hither he often brought his
customers. The boards of the partition had shrunk, leaving wide
crevices; and Jogues could plainly see the Indians, as they passed
between him and the light. They, on their part, might as easily have
seen him, if he had not, when he heard them entering the house, hidden
himself behind some barrels in the corner, where he would sometimes
remain crouched for hours, in a constrained and painful posture,
half-suffocated with heat, and afraid to move a limb. His wounded leg
began to show dangerous symptoms; but he was relieved by the care of a
Dutch, surgeon of the fort. The minister, Megapolensis, also visited
him, and did all in his power for the comfort of his Catholic brother,
with whom he seems to have been well pleased, and whom he calls "a
very learned scholar."
[Footnote 52: Near Albany, or Fort Orange, as it was then called.]
When Jogues had remained for six weeks in this hiding-place, his Dutch
friends succeeded in satisfying his Indian masters by the payment of a
large ransom. A vessel from Manhattan, now New York, soon after brought up
an order from the Director-General, Kieft, that he should be sent to him.
Accordingly, he was placed in a small vessel, which carried him down the
Hudson. The Dutch on board treated him with great kindness; and, to do him
honor, named after him one of the islands in the river. At Manhattan he
found a dilapidated fort, garrisoned by sixty soldiers, and containing a
stone church and the Director-General's house, together with storehouses
and barracks. Near it were ranges of small houses, occupied chiefly by
mechanics and laborers; while the dwellings of the remaining colonists,
numbering in all four or five hundred, were scattered here and there on the
island and the neighboring shores. The settlers were of different sects and
nations, but chiefly Dutch Calvinists. Kieft told his guest that eighteen
different languages were spoken at Manhattan. The colonists were in the
midst of a bloody Indian war, brought on by their own besotted cruelty; and
while Jogues was at the fort, some forty of the Dutchmen were killed on the
neighboring farms, and many barns and houses burned.
The Director-General, with a humanity that was far from usual with
him, exchanged Jogues's squalid and savage dress for a suit of Dutch
cloth, and gave him passage in a small vessel which was then about to
sail....
Jogues became a center of curiosity and reverence. He was summoned to
Paris. The Queen, Anne of Austria, wished to see him; and when the
persecuted slave of the Mohawks was conducted into her presence, she
kissed his mutilated hands, while the ladies of the court thronged
around to do him homage. We are told, and no doubt with truth, that
these honors were unwelcome to the modest and single-hearted
missionary, who thought only of returning to his work of converting
the Indians. A priest with any deformity of body is debarred from
saying mass. The teeth and knives of the Iroquois had inflicted an
injury worse than the tortures imagined, for they had robbed Jogues of
the privilege which was the chief consolation of his life; but the
Pope, by a special dispensation, restored it to him, and with the
opening spring he sailed again for Canada....
In the evening--it was the eighteenth of October--Jogues, smarting
with his wounds and bruises, was sitting in one of the lodges, when an
Indian entered, and asked him to a feast. To refuse would have been an
offense. He arose and followed the savage, who led him to the lodge of
the Bear chief. Jogues bent his head to enter, when another Indian,
standing concealed within, at the side of the doorway, struck at him
with a hatchet. An Iroquois, called by the French Le Berger, who seems
to have followed in order to defend him, bravely held out his arm to
ward off the blow; but the hatchet cut through it, and sank into the
missionary's brain. He fell at the feet of his murderer, who at once
finished the work by hacking off his head. Lalande was left in
suspense all night, and in the morning was killed in a similar manner.
The bodies of the two Frenchmen were then thrown into the Mohawk, and
their heads displayed on the points of the palisade which enclosed the
town.
Thus died Isaac Jogues, one of the purest examples of Roman Catholic
virtue which this western continent has seen.
V