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children. There were but three other trading stations, at Trois Rivières, the Rapids of St. Louis, and Tadoussac.

followed each other with edifying regular. ity, and the bell of the adjacent chapel, built by Champlain, rang morning, noon, and night. Godless soldiers caught the infection, and whipped themselves in penance for their sins. Debauched artisans outdid each other in the fury of their contrition. Quebec had become a mission."

But an important change was at hand. Richelieu, who had suppressed the office of admiral of France, and constituted himself "grand master and superintendent of navigation and commerce," turned his attention to the colonial expansion of For the next thirty years Canadian hisFrance. In 1627 a company was formed, tory is bound up with that of the Jesuits. called the Company of New France, con- On their side were zeal, wealth, ability, sisting of one hundred associates, among court influence. They were the main whom were Richelieu and Champlain. support of the military power, the princiOn this body, owing to the crown only pal agents of trade, the instruments of fealty and homage, was conferred the political expansion, and the pioneers of whole of New France, from Florida to exploration. To religious propagandism the Arctic circle, and from Newfoundland all other considerations were subordito the sources of the St. Lawrence, with nated. The early governors were half large monopolies of the fur trade and missionaries. Champlain was eager for other commerce. In return for these ad- the conversion of the Indians; Montvantages, the company bound itself "to magny was a Knight of Malta; Maisonconvey to New France, during the year neuve, the military leader of the settle1628, two or three hundred men of all ment of Montreal, consecrated his sword trades, and before the year 1643 to into the Church; "D'Aillebout lived with crease the number to four thousand per- his wife like monk and nun." The Jes sons, of both sexes, to lodge and support uits aimed at laying the foundations of them for three years; and, this time ex-temporal dominion in the hearts and conpired, to give them cleared lands for their sciences of the savages. If the Red Inmaintenance." None but Catholics might dians could be converted to the faith, an settle; to every settlement three priests empire, which might embrace the conwere to be attached; no Huguenot was to tinent, would be established, bound toland in New France. gether in allegiance to France by the strong band of religion. On the success of the Jesuits depended both commerce and policy. If heroic courage and unself

Before the company had entered on its new possessions, war broke out between France and England. The Huguenots, furious at their exclusion from the coun-ish zeal could command success, the try, instigated England to seize the French possessions in North America. In July, 1629, Champlain and the starving population of Quebec capitulated to Admiral Kirk, who planted the English flag on the Fort of St. Louis. By the convention of Suza New France was restored, but it was not till May, 1633, that Champlain, " commissioned anew by Richelieu, assumed command at Quebec on behalf of the company." Before his death, at Christmas, 1635, the new era had begun. The Recollets were driven from the field; the Jesuits were masters of the situation. The mission-house of Notre Dame des Anges already contained six Jesuit fathers. They preached, sang vespers, said mass, heard confessions, catechized, taught, tilled the land, cared for their cat tle, ruled the colony from the governor downwards, and yet found time to practise snowshoes and master the native languages. At Champlain's table, in the Fort of Quebec, "histories and lives of saints were read aloud, as in a monastic refectory. Prayers, masses, and confessions

Jesuits would have Christianized North America. Their missionary annals rival, in deeds of chivalrous daring, the tales of knight-errantry or the legends of the saints, with which Ignatius Loyola solaced his sickness. Fervent in their Master's cause, strong in religious enthusiasm, they labored in North America with all-embracing activity to advance the interests of their order, of the papacy, and of France. Directed, disciplined, impelled, restrained by one master hand, yielding obedience as complete and unresisting as that of a corpse, they impressed on the world the tremendous power of their organization. If Xavier alone has become the canonized saint of Christendom, many of.his brethren were heroes of no common stamp. In China, Japan, Thibet, Brazil, Califor nia, Abyssinia, and Caffreland, they performed miracles of self-denying devotion. Above all, in North America, men like Le Jeune, Jogues, Brébeuf, Garnier, Chaumonot, braved famine, solitude, insult, persecution, defied intolerabie and inex pressible torture, tasted day after day the

prolonged bitterness of death in its most appalling forms.

conversion. The central mission-house, near Lake Huron, served as residence, hospital, magazine, and refuge in case of need. The Huron towns, all named after saints, were divided into districts, to each of which two priests were assigned. The missionaries journeyed singly or in pairs from village to village, till every Huron settlement had heard the new doctrine. Their circuits were made in the depth of winter, for it was not till November or December that the Indians settled in their villages. The Jesuits paid for their lodg ings with needles, beads, awls, and other small articles. They taught the Hurons to fortify their towns, doctored the sick, instructed children, preached to the adults.

At first the labors of the Jesuits lay among the Algonquin children. Le Jeune took his stand, like Xavier in Goa, at the door of the mission-house, and rang his bell. The assembled children were shown the sign of the cross, taught to repeat portions of the church services, catechized, and dismissed with porringers of peas as inducements to return. But no permanent results could be obtained among the wandering Algonquin hordes. Le Jeune determined to establish missions among the numerous Huron tribes who lived in stationary settlements, on the shores of the western lakes. In 1634, Brébeuf, Daniel, and Davost left Trois Rivières | But converts were hard to make, and for Lake Huron. The hardships of the voyage, which lasted thirty days, were so severe that even the iron frame of Brébeuf almost succumbed. Mr. Parkman quotes, from a paper printed by the Jesuits of Paris, a series of minute instructions for the conduct on this river route of "les Pères de nostre Compagnie qui seront enuoiez aux Hurons." The directions are full of tact:

dians;

harder still to retain. Fear was the prin-
cipal agent of conversion, and pictures
were invaluable. Le Jeune writes home
for pictures of hell, in which "devils were
painted tormenting a soul with different
punishments, one applying fire, another
serpents, another tearing him with pincers,
and another holding him fast with a
chain." Garnier, asking a friend in
France to send him pictures, shows an
intimate knowledge of Indian peculiari-
ties. "Send me," he writes, "a picture
of Christ without a beard." A variety of
souls in perdition are requested.
"Par-
ticular directions are given with respect
to the demons, dragons, flames, and other
essentials of these works of art. Of souls
in bliss he thinks that one will be enough.
All the pictures must be in full face, not
in profile; and they must look directly at
the beholder, with open eyes. The colors
should be bright." Mr. Parkman notices
the Indian dislike of a beard, and quotes

Never make them [the Indians] wait for you in embarking. Take a flint and steel to light their pipes and kindle their fire at night; for these little services win their hearts. Try to eat their sagamite as they cook it, bad and dirty as it is. Fasten up your cassock, that you may not carry water or sand into the canoe. Wear no shoes or stockings in the canoe, but you may put them on in crossing the portages. Do not ask them too many questions. Bear their faults in silence, and appear always cheerful. Do not make yourself troublesome even to a single Indian. Buy fish for them from the tribes you will pass; and for this purpose take with you some awls, beads, knives, and the instance of a fatal quarrel which was fish-hooks. Be not ceremonious with the In- caused among the Sioux by Catlin repretake at once what they offer you; cere-senting one of them in profile. But if mony offends them. Be very careful, when in the Jesuits converted few of the savages, the canoe, that the brim of your hat does not they gained personal influence. Their annoy them. Perhaps it would be better to disinterestedness, intrepidity, and blamewear your nightcap. There is no such thing less lives gradually told upon the Indians. as impropriety among the Indians. Remem- Their patience and tact were never at fault. ber that it is Christ and his cross that you are "Pour conuertir les sauvages," says a seeking; and if you aim at anything else, you will get nothing but affliction for body and passage in the "Divers Sentiments," "il mind. (Jesuits in North America, pp. 54-55.) n'y faut pas tant de science que de bonté et vertu bien solide. Ils n'entendent pas bien nostre théologie, mais ils entendent parfaictement bien nostre humilité et nostre affabilité et se laissent gaigner." Their most determined enemies were the sorcerers, medicine-men, and diviners who swarmed in every village. To the Hurons the priests appeared as rival magicians. They looked upon the black-robed strac gers as "okies," or supernatural beings,

Partly from curiosity, partly from fear of offending the French at Quebec, partly from superstitious awe, the Jesuits were permitted to settle and build houses in the Huron towns. In France the utmost enthusiasm was aroused for the mission; Brébeuf's "Relation" produced a prodigious effect; as time wore on, more Jes. uits crossed the sea to aid the work of

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ence; St. Michael gave them his protec tion; Father Daniel appeared after his death with a radiant countenance, and they knew that, though they had lost a brother from their midst, they had gained an intercessor in heaven.

masters of life and death, controlling the
sun and the moon and the seasons. They
attributed to them the changes in the
weather, the scantiness or abundance of
their crops; they came to them for spells
to destroy their enemies, for charms to
kill grasshoppers. Brébeuf foretold an In the winter of 1640 Brébeuf saw a
eclipse, and his prophecy was fulfilled; great cross slowly approaching the mis-
the native sorcerers failed to obtain rain; sion of Ste. Marie from the country of the
nine masses to St. Joseph broke up the Iroquois. The ominous vision was fear-
obstinate drought. But the triumph was fully realized. Up to this time, though the
not an unmixed advantage. Pestilence lives of the missionaries were living mar-
and smallpox decimated the people; the tyrdoms, no priest had been put to death.
medicine-men, unable to check its ravages, But if the blood of martyrs is the seed of
whispered that the Jesuits themselves the Church, the harvest should have been
caused the pest. "Some said that they great in North America. Within the next
concealed in their houses a corpse which ten years De Nouë, Goupil, Jogues, La-
infected the country, a perverted notion | lande, Daniel, Buteux, Garnier, Lalemant,
derived from some half-instructed neo- Brébeuf, fell victims to their heroic enter-
phyte concerning the body of Christ in the prise. The five confederate nations of the
Eucharist." The lives of the fathers Iroquois tribe (Senecas, Cayugas, Onon-
hung upon a thread. Again and again dagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks) had never
nothing saved them but their unflinching forgotten the assistance which Champlain
courage. They could not leave their rendered to the Hurons.
War raged un.
houses without danger of being brained: interruptedly between them and the
Chaumonot was once actually struck down. French and their Indian allies. The Iro
So hopeless were they of escape, that quois hovered round the French settle-
they wrote a farewell letter to the father ments, cut off stragglers, lured parties
superior, and entrusted it to a faithful into ambuscades, harassed the colonists
convert. Even when the immediate dan-by day and night. In all Canada "no
ger had passed away, they were exposed man could hunt, fish, till the fields, or cut
to every sort of insult. It was many a tree in the forest without peril to his
years before their persecution as sorcerers scalp." There was no safety outside the
ceased. Surrounded by frightful dangers, palisades of Quebec, Three Rivers, Mont-
hedged in by the gloom of pathless for- real, and the Fort of Richelieu.
"I had as
ests, isolated from their fellow-country- lief," writes Father Vimont, "be beset by
men and often from each other, the per- goblins as by the Iroquois. The one are
petual tension of their nerves combined about as invisible as the other. Our peo-
with the ecstatic exaltation of their faith ple on the Richelieu and at Montreal are
to bring heaven and hell very near to their kept in a closer confinement than ever
lives. So powerfully realized was the were monks or nuns in our smallest con-
conflict in which they were engaged, in vents in France." Tracking the slightest
so dramatic a form was it presented to trails with unerring sagacity and untiring
their overwrought imaginations, that su- patience, skulking in ambush for days and
pernatural visions and visitations were of weeks, coming and going with the stealthi-
frequent occurrence. The Huron country ness and rapidity of wild animals, they
was the stronghold of Satan," comme un kept the whole colony in a perpetual fever
donjon des démons." The Jesuits and the of anxiety, destroyed the fur trade, and
hosts of heaven waged war against the for three years severed all communication
legions of hell for the possession of the with the Huron mission. In 1642 the
land. Death, like a skeleton, threatened priests were without clothes; they had no
them; troops of fiends in the form of men vessels for their altars, or sacrificial wine;
or of animals surrounded them; they they had exhausted their writing mate-
heard the roaring of demons, and saw rials. Father Jogues volunteered to ac-
spectres armed with javelins, and earth company the Huron fur-traders on a voy-
and hell raging against them. On the age to Quebec to procure supplies.
other hand the vision of a gorgeous palace the return voyage the Iroquois surprised
floated before them, and a miraculous the Huron canoes, and carried off Jogues
voice assured them it was the destined with two young donnés of the mission as
abode of those who dwelt in savage hovels prisoners. They beat him senseless with
for the love of God; the Virgin and St. their clubs, and, when he revived, tore
Joseph encouraged them with their pres- away his finger-nails with their teeth, and

On

gnawed his hands like famished dogs. | of the Hurons. They called the French After an eight days' march under a blaz- cowards, openly attacked their forts, and ing sun, his captors reached their first threatened to exterminate them, and carry camp. There he was made to run the the "white girls," meaning the nuns, to gauntlet; his hands were again mangled; their villages. On the other hand, the fire was applied to every part of his body; Hurons were dying out. They dared not and when at night he tried to rest, "the cultivate crops, hunt, or trade with Queyoung warriors came to lacerate his bec for fear of the Iroquois. Famine, wounds and pull out his hair and beard." | pestilence, and war thinned their numThe march was resumed for five days bers. Their spirit, though capable of longer, till the band reached the Mohawk spasmodic outbursts, was broken. Like town which was their goal. There for the a doomed people, they were sunk in de second time Jogues passed "through the|jection, paralyzed with fear, incapable of narrow road of Paradise," was unmerci- defending themselves. They flocked in fully beaten, and then tortured with such crowds to the priests; charity was made exquisite ingenuity that the greatest suf- an engine of conversion; thousands were fering was inflicted without endangering fed at Ste. Marie; converts were baptized life. At night he was "stretched on his by hundreds. In many of the towns the back, with his hands extended, and his Christians outnumbered the heathens; ankles and wrists bound fast to stakes they abandoned cannibalism, ceased to driven into the earthen floor. The chil- burn their prisoners, discontinued their dren now profited by the example of their diabolic games, feasts, and dances. Never parents, and amused themselves by plac- had the future of the mission seemed ing live coals on the naked bodies of their more hopeful. prisoners, who, bound fast and covered with wounds and bruises, which made every movement a torture, were some times unable to shake them off." For three consecutive days the torture continued; in two other Mohawk towns they subsequently endured a repetition of their sufferings. Yet throughout Jogues encouraged his fellow countrymen, converted some of the Huron prisoners, and baptized them with his mangled hands. The sequel of his story and his ultimate escape to France are well told by Mr. Parkman. Still Jogues had the heroism to return to Canada. Four years later negotiations were opened with the Iroquois. He was chosen as the French emissary, to act as political agent, and to found a mission, prophetically called the "mission of the martyrs." For a moment he recoiled; but the weakness was transient. He set out with a presentiment of his death. "Ibo et non redibo," he wrote in a farewell letter to a friend. His foreboding was realized. After once more undergoing torture, he was mercifully brained with a hatchet.

But at the moment when the prospect of the Jesuits seemed brightest, their labor of years was on the eve of destruction. The Iroquois abandoned their inroads of small scalping parties for an invasion in force. In the summer of 1648 the Huron town of St. Joseph was burned; the inhabitants massacred; the missionhouse destroyed; Daniel, its priest, shot dead, gasping with his latest breath the name of Jesus. Eight months later, in March, 1649, St. Louis and St. Ignace were taken and burnt; the two priests, Brébeuf and Lalemant, were captured alive. Brébeuf's fate is described below. Without leaders and without organization, starving, helpless with panic, the Hurons attempted no resistance. They abandoned their settlements, "Some roamed northward and eastward through the half-thawed wilderness; some hid themselves on rocks or islands of Lake Huron; some sought an asylum among the Tobacco Nation; a few joined the Neutrals on the north of Lake Erie. The Hurons, as a nation, ceased to exist." There was no longer any reason for the maintenance of the mission: Ste. Marie was abandoned. In June, 1650, the mis

In the heroism of his life and death he was, before three years had passed, equalled by more than one of his breth-erable remnant of the Huron nation was ren. To the advantages of compact or ganization which they possessed over other tribes, the Iroquois now added superiority in weapons. By the purchase of arquebuses from the Dutch traders of Albany, they had become masters of the French thunderbolts. Emboldened by success they aimed at the annihilation

conveyed to the shelter of the Fort of Que bec. With the ruin of their mission was dispelled the Jesuit dream of a Christian empire; many of the priests went back to France, "resolved," writes the father su perior (Lalemant), "to return to the com. bat at the first sound of the trumpet." Others, following their wandering flocks

B

to the north and west, founded new mis- | from his limbs, and devoured them before his
sions on Lake Huron, Lake Superior, and
Lake Michigan.

The last scene of this tragedy may be
appropriately closed with the fate of Bré-
beuf. He had spent the winter of 1625-6
among the Algonquins; for the next three
years he labored among the Hurons. His
mission was interrupted by the English
Occupation of Quebec; but he was the
first of the Jesuits to reach the country in
1634. When he arrived at the Huron
town of Ihonativa, "a crowd ran out to
meet him; Echom has come again!
Echom has come again!' they cried, rec. |
ognizing the stately figure, robed in black,
that advanced from the border of the for-
est." From 1634 to 1649 he was one of
the mainstays of the mission. On the
afternoon of March 16, 1649, the day on
which he and Lalemant, the nephew of
the superior, had been captured,

Brébeuf was led apart and bound to a stake.
He seemed more concerned for his captive
converts than for himself, and addressed them
in a loud voice, exhorting them to suffer pa-
tiently, and promising heaven as their reward.
The Iroquois, incensed, scorched him from
head to foot, to silence him; whereupon, in
the tone of a master, he threatened them with
everlasting flames for persecuting the worship-
pers of God.
As he continued to speak, with
voice and countenance unchanged, they cut
away his lower lip, and thrust a red-hot iron
down his throat. He still held his tall form
erect and defiant, with no sign or sound of
pain; and they tried other means to overcome
him. They led out Lalemant, that Brébeuf
might see him tortured. They had tied strips
of bark, smeared with pitch, about his naked
body. When he saw the condition of his
superior, he could not hide his agitation, and
called out to him with a broken voice, in the
words of St. Paul, "We are made a spectacle
to the world, to angels, and to men.' Then
he threw himself at Brébeuf's feet; upon which
the Iroquois seized him, made him fast to a
stake, and set fire to the bark that enveloped
him. As the flame rose, he threw his arms
upward, with a shriek of supplication to
Heaven. Next they hung round Brébeuf's
neck a collar made of hatchets heated red-hot;
but the indomitable priest stood like a rock.
A Huron in the crowd, who had been a con-
vert of the mission, but was now an Iroquois
by adoption, called out, with the malice of a
renegade, to pour hot water on their heads,
since they had poured so much cold water on
the heads of others. The kettle was accord.
ingly slung, and the water boiled and poured
slowly on the heads of the two missionaries.
"We baptise you," they cried, "that you may
be happy in heaven; for nobody can be saved
without a good baptism Brébeuf would not
flinch; and, in a rage, they cut strips of flesh

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eyes. After a succession of other revolting tortures, they scalped him; when, seeing him nearly dead, they laid open his breast, and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant an enemy, thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage. A chief then tore out his heart and devoured it. Thus died Jean de Brébeuf, the founder of the Huron mission, its truest hero and its greatest martyr. (Jesuits in North America, pp. 388-9.)

If the Red Indians could ever have been tamed, the Jesuits would have performed the task. The Huron mission had failed, but they did not despair. They had experienced the ferocious cruelty of the Iroquois, yet their order contained men courageous enough to attempt their conversion. As political agents the Jesuits saw the value of their alliance. Lying between Canada and the Dutch and English settlements, the Iroquois country was the highway of commerce with the West. The Jesuits hoped to ally the Indians against the heretics of New Amsterdam and New England, to monopolize the fur trade with the interior, to secure not only peace for Canada, but a barrier against her European rivals. Conversion to the Catholic faith was once more the means by which they hoped to cement the alliance. In 1653 a short lull occurred in the perpetual wars waged by the Iroquois against the French. They were anxious for peace and even for the establishment of a mission and a colony. Apparently the object of the Iroquois was thus to lure into their power the Christian Hurons; from the first they intended to massacre the colonists. With devoted zeal the Jesuits accepted the proposal. "The blood of the martyrs," said one of them, "is the seed of the Church, and if we die by the fires of the Iroquois, we shall have won eternal life by snatching souls from the fires of hell." Le Mercier, the superior, with three other Jesuits, two lay brethren, forty or fifty Frenchmen, and a large number of the Christian Hurons, set out up the St. Lawrence, across Lake Ontario, up the Oswego to Lake Onondaga. There, on a spot still known as the Jesuits' Well, they founded the mission of Ste. Marie, at once as a religious and political outwork. For nearly a year they preached, taught, and catechized. During the greater part of the time their deaths had been decreed; the day and hour were revealed by a dying convert. Hastily summoning the priests from the detached missions, the fifty-three colonists assembled in the fortified house at Ste.

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