What were the letters, what the adventures described by the Jesuits, that aroused such zeal and inspired such heroism? It would require many volumes to record the adventures of the Jesuits in Canada, and a long list to include all their heroes martyred for the faith. Only a few of the most prominent episodes in the Jesuits' adventures can be given here.
When Pierre le Jeune reached Quebec after the victory of the Kirke brothers, he found only the charred remains of a mission on the old site of Cartier's winter quarters down on the St. Charles. Of houses, only the gray-stone cottage of Madame Hebert had been left standing. Here Le Jeune was welcomed and housed till the little mission could be rebuilt. At first it consisted of only mud-plastered log cabins, thatch-roofed, divided into four rooms, with garret and cellar. One room decorated with saints' images and pictures served as chapel; another, as kitchen; a third, as lodgings; the fourth, as refectory. In this humble abode six Jesuit priests and two lay brothers passed the winter after the war. The roof leaked like a sieve. The snow piled high almost as the top of the door. Le Jeune's first care was to obtain pupils. These consisted of an Indian boy and a negro lad left by the English. Meals of porridge given free attracted more Indian pupils; but Le Jeune's greatest difficulty was to learn the Indian language. Hearing that a renegade Indian named Pierre, who had served the French as interpreter, lodged with some Algonquins camped below Cape Diamond, Le Jeune tramped up the river bank, along what is now the Lower Road, where he found the Indians wigwamming, and by the bribe of free food obtained Pierre. Pierre was at best a tricky scoundrel, who considered it a joke to give Le Jeune the wrong word for some religious precept, gorged himself on the missionaries' food, stole their communion wine, and ran off at Lent to escape fasting.
When Champlain returned to receive Quebec back from the English, more priests joined the Jesuits' mission. Among them was the lion-hearted giant, Brébeuf.
If Champlain's bush lopers could join bands of wandering Indians for the extension of French dominion, surely the Jesuits could dare as perilous a life "for the greater glory of God,"—as their vows declared.
Le Jeune joined a band of wandering Montaignais, Pierre, the rascal, tapping the keg of sacramental wine the first night out, and turning the whole camp into a drunken bedlam, till his own brother sobered him with a kettle of hot water flung full in the face. That night the priest slept apart from the camp in the woods. By the time the hunters reached the forest borderland between Quebec and New Brunswick, their number had increased to forty-five. By Christmas time game is usually dormant, still living on the stores of the fall and not yet driven afield by spring hunger. In camp was no food. The hunters halted the march, and came in Christmas Eve of 1633 with not so much as a pound of flesh for nearly fifty people. From the first the Indian medicine man had heaped ridicule on the white priest, and Pierre had refused to interpret as much as a single prayer; but now the whole camp was starving. Pierre happened to tell the other Indians that Christmas was the day on which the white man's God had come to earth. In vain the medicine man had pounded his tom-tom and shouted at the Indian gods from the top of the wigwams and offered sacrifice of animals to be slain. No game had come as the result of the medicine man's invocation.
Le Jeune gathered the people about him and through Pierre, the interpreter, bade them try the white man's God. In the largest of the wigwams a little altar was fitted up. Then the Indians repeated this prayer after Le Jeune:
Jesus, Son of the Almighty … who died for us … who promised that if we ask anything in Thy name, Thou wilt do it—I pray Thee with all my heart, give food to these people … this people promises Thee faithfully they will trust Thee entirely and obey Thee with all their heart! My Lord, hear my prayer! I present Thee my life for this people, most willing to die that they may live and know Thee.
"Take that back," grunted the chief. "We love you! We don't want you to die."
"I only want to show that I am your friend," answered the priest.
Le Jeune then commanded them to go forth to the hunt, full of faith that God would give them food.
But alas for the poor father's hopes and the childlike Indian vow! True, they found abundance of food,—a beaver dam full of beaver, a moose, a porcupine taken by the Indian medicine man. Father Le Jeune, with radiant face, met the hunters returning laden with game.
"We must thank your God for this," said the Indian chief, throwing down his load.
"Bah," says Pierre, "you 'd have found it anyway."
"This is not the time to talk," sneered the medicine man. "Let the hungry people eat."
And by the time the Indians had gorged themselves with ample measure for their long fast, they were torpid with sleep. The sad priest was fain to wander out under the stars. There, in the snow-padded silences of the white-limned forest, far from the joyous peal of Christmas bells, he knelt alone and worshiped God.
For five months he wandered with the Montaignais, and now in April the hunters turned toward Quebec with their furs. At three in the morning Le Jeune knocked on the door of the mission house at Quebec, and was welcomed home by the priests. The pilgrimage had taught him what the Jesuits have always held—the way to power with a people is through the education of the children. "Give me a child for the first seven years of its life," said a famous educator, "and I care not what you do with him the rest of his years." Missions and schools must be established among the tribes of Hurons and Iroquois.
Consequently, when Champlain sent his soldiers in 1634 to build a fort at Three Rivers, they were accompanied by three Jesuits, chief of whom was Jean de Brébeuf, lion-hearted, bound for the land of the Hurons. The chapel bells of Quebec rang and rang again in honor of the new Jesuit mission—morning, noon, and night they chimed in airy music, calling men's thoughts to God, just as you may hear the chimes to-day; and the ramparts below Quebec thundered and reëchoed with salvos of cannon when the missionaries set out for Three Rivers.
At Three Rivers waited the Indians of the Up-Country. The Jesuits embarked with them for the land of the Hurons. The priests traveled barefoot to avoid injuring the frail bark of the canoes. Barely had farewell cheers faded on the river, when the canoes spread apart. With pieces of buckskin hoisted on fishing rods for sail, and a flipping of paddles as naked, bronzed arms set the pace, the voyage had begun. Heroism is easy with chapel bells ringing; it is another matter, barefoot and with sleeves rolled up.
It was the same trail that Champlain had followed up the Ottawa. Only Champlain was assured of good treatment, for he had promised to fight in the Indian wars; but the Jesuits were dependent on the caprice of their conductors. Any one, who, from experience in the wilds, has learned how the term "tenderfoot" came to be applied, will realize the hardships endured—and endured without self-pity—by these scholarly men of immured life. The rocks of the portage cut their naked feet. The Indians refused to carry their packs overland and flung bundles of clothing and food into the water. In fair weather the voyageurs slept on the sand under the overturned canoes; in rain a wigwam was raised, and into the close confines of this tent crowded men, women, and children, for the most part naked, and with less idea of decency than a domestic dog. Each night, as the boats were beached, the priests wandered off into the woods to hold their prayers in privacy. Soon the canoes were so far apart the different boats did not camp together, and the white men were scattered alone among the savages. Robberies increased till, when Brébeuf reached Georgian Bay, thirty days from leaving Three Rivers, he had little left but the bundles he had carried for himself.
Brébeuf had been to the Huron country before with Etienne Brulé, Champlain's pathfinder; but of the first mission no record exists. Brébeuf found that Brulé had been murdered near the modern Penetang; and the Indians had scarcely brought the priest's canoe ashore, when they bolted through the woods, leaving him to follow as best he could.
Take a map of modern Ontario. Draw a circle round Georgian Bay, running from Muskoka through Lake Simcoe and up into Manitoulin Island. Here, on the very stamping ground of the summer tourist, was the scene of the Jesuits' Huron mission.
When Brébeuf's tall frame emerged from the woods, the whole village of Ihonateria dashed out to welcome him, shouting, "He has come! He has come again! Behold, the Black Robe has come again!" Young braves willingly ran back through the forest for the baggage, which the voyageurs had thrown aside; and at one o'clock in the morning, as the messengers came through the moonlit forest, Brébeuf took up his abode in the house of the leading chief. Later came Fathers Davost and Daniel. By October the Indians had built the missionaries their wigwam, a bark-covered house of logs, thirty-six feet long, divided into three rooms, reception room, living quarters, church. In the entrance hall assembled the Indians, squatting on the floor, gazing in astonishment at the religious pictures on the wall, and, above all, at the clock.
"What does he say?" they would ask, listening solemnly to the ticking.
"He says 'Hang on the kettle,'" Brébeuf would answer as the clock struck twelve, and the whole conclave would be given a simple meal of corn porridge; but at four the clock sang a different song.
"It says 'Get up and go home,'" Brébeuf would explain, and the Indians would file out, knowing well that the Black Robes were to engage in prayer.
No holiday in the wildwoods was the Jesuit mission. Chapel bell called to service at four in the morning. Eight was the breakfast hour. The morning was passed teaching, preaching, visiting. At two o'clock was dinner, when a chapter of the Bible was read. After four the Indians were dismissed, and the missionaries met to compare notes and plan the next day's campaign.
By 1645, five mission houses had been established, with Ste. Marie on the Wye, east of Midland, as the central house. Near Lake Simcoe were two missions,—St. Jean Ba'tiste and St. Joseph; near Penetang, St. Louis, and St. Ignace. Westward of Ste. Marie on the Wye were half a dozen irregular missions among the Tobacco Indians. Each of the five regular missions boasted palisaded inclosures, a chapel of log slabs with bell and spire, though the latter might be only a high wooden cross. At Ste. Marie, the central station, were lodgings for sixty people, a hospital, kitchen garden, with cattle, pigs, and poultry. At various times soldiers had been sent up by the Quebec governors, till some thirty or forty were housed at Ste. Marie. In all were eighteen priests, four lay brothers, seven white servants, and twenty-three volunteers, unpaid helpers—donnés, they were called, young men ardently religious, learning woodlore and the Indian language among the Jesuits, as well as exploring whenever it was possible for them to accompany the Indians. Among the volunteers was one Chouart Groseillers, who, if he did not accompany Father Jogues on a preaching tour to the tribes of Lake Superior, had at least gone as far as the Sault and learned of the vast unexplored world beyond Lake Superior. Food, as always, played a large part in winning the soul of the redskin. On church fête days as many as three thousand people were fed and lodged at Ste. Marie. That the priests suffered many trials among the unreasonable savages need not be told. When it rained too heavily they were accused of ruining the crops by praying for too much rain; when there was drouth they were blamed for not arranging this matter with their God; and when the scourge of smallpox raged through the Huron villages, devastating the wigwams so that the timber wolves wandered unmolested among the dead, it was easy for the humpback sorcerer to ascribe the pestilence also to the influence of the Black Robes. Once their houses were set on fire. Again and again their lives were threatened. Often after tramping twenty miles through the sleet-soaked, snow-drifted spring forests, arriving at an Indian village foredone and exhausted, the Jesuit was met with no better welcome than a wigwam flap closed against his entrance, or a rabble of impish children hooting and jeering him as he sought shelter from house to house.
But an influence was at work on the borders of the St. Lawrence that yearly rendered the Hurons more tractable. From raiding the settlements of the St. Lawrence, the Iroquois were sweeping in a scourge more deadly than smallpox up the Ottawa to the very forests of Georgian Bay. The Hurons no longer dared to go down to Quebec in swarming canoes. Only a few picked warriors—perhaps two hundred and fifty—would venture so near the Iroquois fighting ground.
One winter night, as the priests sat round their hearth fire watching the mournful shadows cast by the blazing logs on the rude walls, Brébeuf, the soldier, lion-hearted, the fearless, told in a low, dreamy voice of a vision that had come,—the vision of a huge fiery cross rising slowly out of the forest and moving across the face of the sky towards the Huron country. It seemed to come from the land of the Iroquois. Was the priest's vision a dream, or his own intuition deeper than reason, assuming dire form, portending a universal fear? Who can tell? I can but repeat the story as it is told in their annals.
"How large was the cross?" asked the other priests. Brébeuf gazes long in the fire.
"Large enough to crucify us all," he answers.
And, as he had dreamed, fell the blow.
St. Joseph, of the Lake Simcoe region, was situated a day's travel from the main fortified mission of Ste. Marie. Round it were some two thousand Hurons to whom Father Daniel ministered. Father Daniel was just closing the morning services on July the 4th, 1648. His tawny people were on their knees repeating the responses of the service, when from the forest, humming with insect and bird life, arose a sound that was neither wind nor running water—confused, increasing, nearing! Then a shriek broke within the fort palisades,—"The enemy! the Iroquois!" and the courtyard was in an uproar indescribable. Painted redskins, naked but for the breech clout, were dashing across the cornfields to scale the palisades or force the hastily slammed gates. Father Daniel rushed from church to wigwams rallying the Huron warriors, while the women and children, the aged and the feeble, ran a terrified rabble to the shelter of the chapel. Before the Hurons could man the walls, Iroquois hatchets had hacked holes of entrance in the palisades. The fort was rushed by a bloodthirsty horde making the air hideous with fiendish screams.
"Fly! Save yourselves!" shouted the priest. "I stay here! We shall this day meet in Heaven!"
In the volley and counter volley of ball and arrow, Father Daniel reeled on his face, shot in the heart. In a trice his body was cut to pieces, and the Iroquois were bathing their hands in his warm lifeblood. A moment later the village was in roaring flames, and on the burning pile were flung the fragments of the priest's body. The victors set out on the homeward tramp with a line of more than six hundred prisoners, the majority, women and children, to be brained if their strength failed on the march, to be tortured in the Iroquois towns if they survived the abuse on the way.
Next westward from the Lake Simcoe missions were St. Ignace with four hundred people and St. Louis with seven hundred, near the modern Penetang and within short distance of the Jesuits' strong headquarters on the River Wye. At these two missions labored Brébeuf, the giant, and a fragile priest named Lalemant.
Encouraged by the total destruction of St. Joseph, the Iroquois that very fall took the warpath with more than one thousand braves. Ascending the Ottawa leisurely, they had passed the winter hunting and cutting off any stray wanderers found in the forest.
The Hurons knew the doom that was slowly approaching. Yet they remained passive, stunned, terrified by the blow at St. Joseph. It was spring of 1649 before the warriors reached Georgian Bay. March winds had cleared the trail of snowdrifts, but the forests were still leafless. St. Ignace mission lay between Lake Simcoe and St. Louis. Approaching it one windy March night, the Iroquois had cut holes through the palisades before dawn and burst inside the walls with the yells and gyrations of some hideous hell dance. Here a warrior simulated the howl of the wolf. There another approached in the crouching leaps of a panther, all the while uttering the yelps and screams of a beast of prey lashed to fury. The poor Hurons were easy victims. Nearly all their braves happened to be absent hunting, and the four hundred women and children, rushing from the long houses half dazed with sleep, fell without realizing their fate, or found themselves herded in the chapel like cattle at the shambles, Iroquois guards at every window and door.
Luckily three Hurons escaped over the palisades and rushed breathless through the forest to forewarn Brébeuf and Lalemant cooped up in St. Louis. The Iroquois came on behind like a wolf pack.
"Escape! Escape! Run to the woods, Black Robes! There is yet time," the Indian converts urged Brébeuf; but the lion-hearted stood steadfast, though Lalemant, new to scenes of carnage, turned white and trembled in spite of his resolution.
"Who would protect the women if the men fled like deer to the woods?" demanded Brébeuf, and the tigerish yells of the on-rushing horde answered the question.
Before day dawn had tipped the branches of the leafless trees with shafted sunlight, the enemy were hacking furiously at the palisades. Trapped and cornered, the most timid of animals will fight. With such fury, reckless from desperation, cherishing no hope, the Hurons now fought, but they were handicapped by lack of guns and balls. Thirty Iroquois had been slain, a hundred wounded, and the assailants drew off for breath. It was only the lull between two thunderclaps. A moment later they were on St. Louis' walls and had hacked through a dozen places. At these spots the fiercest fighting occurred, and those Iroquois who had not already bathed their faces in the gore of victims at St. Ignace were soon enough dyed in their own blood. Here, there, everywhere, were Brébeuf and Lalemant, fighting, administering last rites, exhorting the Hurons to perish valiantly. Then the rolling clouds of flame and smoke told the Hurons that their village was on fire. Some dashed back to die inside the burning wigwams. Others fought desperately to escape through the broken walls. A few, in the confusion and smoke, succeeded in reaching the woods, whence they ran to warn Ste. Marie on the Wye. Brébeuf and Lalemant had been knocked down, stripped, bound, and were now half driven, half dragged, with the other captives to be tortured at Ignace. Not a sign of fear did either priest betray.
One would fain pass over the next pages of the Jesuit records. It is inconceivable how human nature, even savage nature, so often stoops beneath the most repellent cruelties of the brute world. It is inconceivable unless one acknowledge an influence fiendish; but let us not judge the Indians too harshly. When the Iroquois warriors were torturing the Hurons and their missionaries, the populace of civilized European cities was outdoing the savages on victims whose sins were political.
While the Jesuits of Ste. Marie were praying all day and night before the lighted altar for heavenly intervention to rescue Brébeuf and Lalemant, the two captured priests stood bound to the torture stakes, the gapingstock of a thousand fiends. When the Iroquois singed Brébeuf from head to foot with burning birch bark, he threatened them in tones of thunder with everlasting damnation for persecuting the servants of God. The Iroquois shrieked with laughter. Such spirit in a man was to their liking. Then, to stop his voice, they cut away his lips and rammed a red-hot iron into his mouth. Not once did the giant priest flinch or writhe at the torture stake. Then they brought out Lalemant, that Brébeuf might suffer the agony of seeing a weaker spirit flinch. Poor Lalemant fell at his superior's feet, sobbing out a verse of Scripture. Then they wreathed Lalemant in oiled bark and set fire to it.
"We baptize you," they yelled, throwing hot water on the dying man. Then they railed out blasphemies, obscenities unspeakable, against the Jesuits' religion. Brébeuf had not winced, but his frame was relaxing. He sank to his knees, a dying man. With the yells of devils jealous of losing their prey, they ripped off his scalp while he was still alive, tore his heart from his breast, and drank the warm lifeblood of the priest. Brébeuf died at four in the afternoon. Strange to relate, Lalemant, of the weaker body, survived the tortures till daybreak, when, weary of the sport, the Indians desisted from their mad night orgies and put an end to his sufferings by braining him.
Over at Ste. Marie, Ragueneau and the other priests momentarily awaited the attack; but at Ste. Marie were forty French soldiers and ample supply of muskets. The Iroquois was bravest as the wolf is bravest—when attacking a lamb. Three hundred Hurons lay in ambush along the forest trail. These ran from the Iroquois like sheep; but when three hundred more sallied from the fort, led by the French, it was the Iroquois' turn to run, and they fled back behind the palisades of St. Louis. The Hurons followed, entered by the selfsame breaches the Iroquois had made, and drove the invaders out. More Iroquois rushed from Ignace to the rescue. A hundred Iroquois fell in the day's fight, and when they finally recaptured St. Louis, only twenty Hurons remained of the three hundred. The victory had been bought at too great cost. Tying their prisoners to stakes at St. Ignace, they heaped the courtyard with inflammable wood, set fire to all, and retreated, taking only enough prisoners to carry their plunder.
Ste. Marie for the time was safe. The invaders had gone; but the blow had crushed forever the prowess of the Huron nation. The remaining towns had thought for nothing but flight. Town after town was forsaken and burned in the summer of 1649, the corn harvest left standing in the fields, while the panic-stricken people put out in their canoes to take refuge on the islands of Georgian Bay. Ste. Marie on the Wye alone remained, and the reason for its existence was vanishing like winter snow before summer sun, for its people fled … fled … fled … daily fled to the pink granite islands of the lake. The Hurons begged the Jesuits to accompany them, and there was nothing else for Ragueneau to do. Ste. Marie was stripped, the stock slain for food. Then the buildings were set on fire. June 14, just as the sunset bathed water and sky in seas of gold, the priest led his homeless people down to the lake as Moses of old led the children of Israel. Oars and sweeps, Georgian Bay calm as glass, they rafted slowly out to the Christian Islands,—Faith, Hope, and Charity,—which tourists can still see from passing steamers, a long wooded line beyond the white water-fret of the wind-swept reefs. The island known on the map as Charity, or St. Joseph, was heavily wooded. Here the refugees found their haven, and the French soldiers cleared the ground for a stone fort of walled masonry,—the islands offering little else than stone and timber, though the fishing has not failed to this day.
By autumn the walled fort was complete, but some eight thousand refugees had gathered to the island. Such numbers could not subsist on Georgian Bay in summer. In winter their presence meant starvation, and before the spring of 1650 half had perished. Of the survivors, many had fed on the bodies of the dead. No help had come from Quebec for almost three years. The clothing of the priests had long since worn to shreds. Ragueneau and his helpers were now dressed in skins like the Indians, and reduced to a diet of nuts and smoked fish.
With warm weather came sickness. And also came bands of raiding Iroquois striking terror to the Tobacco Indians. Among them, too, perished Jesuit priests, martyrs to the faith. Did some of the Hurons venture from the Christian Islands across to the mainland to hunt, they were beset by scalping parties and came back to the fort with tales that crazed Ragueneau's Indians with terror. The Hurons decided to abandon Georgian Bay. Some scattered to Lake Superior, to Green Bay, to Detroit. Others found refuge on Manitoulin Island. A remnant of a few hundreds followed Ragueneau and the French down the Ottawa to take shelter at Quebec. Their descendants may be found to this day at the mission of Lorette.
To-day, as tourists drive through Quebec, marveling at the massive buildings and power and wealth of Catholic orders, do they pause to consider that the foundation stones of that power were dyed in the blood of these early martyrs? Or, as the pleasure seekers glide among the islands of Georgian Bay, do they ever ponder that this fair world of blue waters and pink granite islands once witnessed the most bloody tragedy of brute force, triumphant over the blasted hopes of religious zeal?
Radisson captured by Iroquois—Radisson escapes—At Onandaga—How the French were saved—Word of the western land—Westward bound—Dollard's Heroes—The fight at the Long Sault—To seek the north sea—Discovers Hudson Bay—Origin of the great fur company
Having destroyed the Hurons, who were under French protection, it is not surprising that the Iroquois now set themselves to destroy the French. From Montreal to Tadoussac the St. Lawrence swarmed with war canoes. No sooner had the river ice broken up and the birds begun winging north than the Iroquois flocked down the current of the Richelieu, across Lake St. Peter to Three Rivers, down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. And the snows of midwinter afforded no truce to the raids, for the Iroquois cached their canoes in the forest, and roamed the woods on snowshoes. Settlers fled terrified from their farms to the towns; farmers dared not work in their fields without a sentry standing guard; Montreal became a prison; Three Rivers lay blockaded; and at Quebec the war canoes passed defiantly below the cannon of Cape Diamond, paddles beating defiance against the gun'els, or prows flaunting the scalps of victims within cannon fire of Castle St. Louis. Rich and poor, priests and parishioners, governors and habitants, all alike trembled before the lurking treachery. Father Jogues had been captured on his way from the Huron mission; Père Poncet was likewise kidnapped at Quebec and carried to the tortures of the Mohawk towns; and a nephew of the Governor of Quebec was a few years later attacked while hunting near Lake Champlain.
The outraged people of New France realized that fear was only increasing the boldness of the Iroquois. A Mohawk-chief fell into their hands. By way of warning, they bound him to a stake and burned him to death. The Indian revenge fell swift and sure. In 1653 the Governor of Three Rivers and twelve leading citizens were murdered a short distance from the fort gates. One night in May of 1652 a tall, slim, swarthy lad about sixteen years of age was seen winding his way home to Three Rivers from a day's shooting in the marshes. He had set out at day dawn with some friends, but fear of the Iroquois had driven his comrades back. Now at nightfall, within sight of Three Rivers, when the sunset glittered from the chapel spire, he unslung his bag of game and sat down to reload his musket. Then he noticed that the pistols in his belt had been water-soaked from the day's wading, and he reloaded them too.
Any one who is used to life in the open knows how at sundown wild birds foregather for a last conclave. Ducks were winging in myriads and settling on the lake with noisy flacker. Unable to resist the temptation of one last shot, the boy was gliding noiselessly forward through the rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,—scalped, stripped, hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the woods, the Iroquois were upon him.
When he regained consciousness, he was pegged out on the sand amid a flotilla of beached canoes, where Iroquois warriors were having an evening meal. So began the captivity, the love of the wilds, the wide wanderings of one of the most intrepid explorers in New France,—Pierre Esprit Radisson.
His youth and the fact that he would make a good warrior were in his favor. When he was carried back to the Mohawk town and with other prisoners compelled to run the gauntlet between two lines of tormentors, Radisson ran so fast and dodged so dexterously that he was not once hit. The feat was greeted with shrieks of delight by the Iroquois; and the high-spirited boy was given in adoption to a captive Huron woman.
Things would have gone well had he not bungled an attempt to escape; but one night, while in camp with three Iroquois hunters, an Algonquin captive entered. While the Iroquois slept with guns stacked against the trees, the sleepless Algonquin captive rose noiselessly where he lay by the fire, seized the Mohawk warriors' guns, threw one tomahawk across to Radisson, and with the other brained two of the sleepers. The French boy aimed a blow at the third sleeper, and the two captives escaped. But they might have saved themselves the trouble. They were pursued and overtaken on Lake St. Peter, within sight of Three Rivers. This time Radisson had to endure all the diableries of Mohawk torture. For two days he was kept bound to the torture stake. The nails were torn from his fingers, the flesh burnt from the soles of his feet, a hundred other barbarous freaks of impish Indian children wreaked on the French boy. Arrows with flaming points were shot at his naked body. His mutilated finger ends were ground between stones, or thrust into the smoking bowl of a pipe full of coals, or bitten by fiendish youngsters being trained up the way a Mohawk warrior should go.
Radisson's youth, his courage, his very dare-devil rashness, together with presents of wampum belts from his Indian parents, saved his life for a second time, and a year of wild wanderings with Mohawk warriors finally brought him to Albany on the Hudson, where the Dutch would have ransomed him as they had ransomed the two Jesuits, Jogues and Poncet; but the boy disliked to break faith a second time with his loyal Indian friends. Still, the glimpse of white man's life caused a terrible upheaval of revulsion from the barbarities, the filth, the vice, of the Mohawk camp. He could endure Indian life no longer. One morning, in the fall of 1653, he stole out from the Mohawk lodges, while the mist of day dawn still shadowed the forest, and broke at a run down the trail of the Mohawk valley for Albany. All day he ran, pursued by the phantom fright of his own imagination, fancying everything that crunched beneath his moccasined tread some Mohawk warrior, seeing in the branches that reeled as he passed the arms of pursuers stretched out to stop him;—on … and on … and on, he ran, pausing neither to eat nor rest; here dashing into the bed of a stream and running along the pebbled bottom to throw pursuers off the trail; there breaking through a thicket of brushwood away from the trail, only to come back to it breathless farther on, when some alarm of the wind in the trees or deer on the move had proved false. Only muscles of iron strength, lithe as elastic, could have endured the strain. Nightfall at last came, hiding him from pursuers; but still he sped on at a run, following the trail by the light of the stars and the rush of the river. By sunrise of the second day he was staggering; for the rocks were slippery with frost and his moccasins worn to tatters. It was four in the afternoon before he reached the first outlying cabin of the Dutch settlers. For three days he lay hidden in Albany behind sacks of wheat in a thin-boarded attic, through the cracks of which he could see the Mohawks searching everywhere. The Jesuit Poncet gave him passage money to take ship to Europe by way of New York. New York was then a village of a few hundred houses, thatch-roofed, with stone fort, stone church, stone barracks. Central Park was a rocky wilderness. What is now Wall Street was the stamping ground of pigs and goats. January of 1654 Radisson reached Europe, no longer a boy, but a man inured to danger and hardships and daring, though not yet eighteen.
When Radisson came back to Three Rivers in May he found changes had taken place in New France. Among the men murdered with the Governor of Three Rivers by the Mohawks the preceding year had been his sister's husband, and the widow had married one Medard Chouart de Groseillers, who had served in the Huron country as a lay helper with the martyred Jesuits. Also a truce had been patched up between the Iroquois and the French. The Iroquois were warring against the Eries and wanted arms from the French. A still more treacherous motive underlay the Iroquois' peace. They wanted a French settlement in their country as a guarantee of non-intervention when they continued to raid the refugee Hurons. Such duplicity was unsuspected by New France. The Jesuits looked upon the peace as designed by Providence to enable them to establish missions among the Iroquois. Father Le Moyne went from village to village preaching the gospel and receiving belts of wampum as tokens of peace—one belt containing as many as seven thousand beads. When the Onondagas asked for a French colony, Lauzon, the French Governor, readily consented if the Jesuits would pay the cost, estimated at about $10,000; and in 1656 Major Dupuis had led fifty Frenchmen and four Jesuits up the St. Lawrence in long boats through the wilderness to a little hill on Lake Onondaga, where a palisaded fort was built, and the lilies of France, embroidered on a white silk flag by the Ursuline nuns, flung from the breeze above the Iroquois land. The colony was hardly established before three hundred Mohawks fell on the Hurons encamped under shelter of Quebec, butchered without mercy, and departed with shouts of laughter that echoed below the guns at Cape Diamond, scalps waving from the prow of each Iroquois canoe. Quebec was thunderstruck, numb with fright. The French dared not retaliate, or the Iroquois would fall on the colony at Onondaga. Perhaps people who keep their vision too constantly fixed on heaven lose sight of the practical duties of earth; but when eighty Onondagas came again in 1657, inviting a hundred Hurons to join the Iroquois Confederacy, the Jesuits again suspected no treachery in the invitation, but saw only a providential opportunity to spread one hundred Huron converts among the Iroquois pagans. Father Ragueneau, who had led the poor refugees down from the Christian Islands on Georgian Bay, now with another priest offered to accompany the Hurons to the Iroquois nation. An interpreter was needed. Young Radisson, now twenty-one years of age, offered to go as a lay helper, and the party of two hundred and twenty French, eighty Iroquois, one hundred Hurons, departed from the gates of Montreal, July 26.
Hardly were they beyond recall, before scouts brought word that twelve hundred Iroquois had gone on the warpath against Canada, and three Frenchmen of Montreal had been scalped. At last the Governor of Quebec bestirred himself: he caused twelve Iroquois to be seized and held as hostages for the safety of the French.
The Onondagas had set out from Montreal carrying the Frenchmen's baggage. Beyond the first portage they flung the packs on the ground, hurried the Hurons into canoes so that no two Hurons were in one boat, and paddled over the water with loud laughter, leaving the French in the lurch. Father Ragueneau and Radisson quickly read the ominous signs. Telling the other French to gather up the baggage, they armed themselves and paddled in swift pursuit. That night Ragueneau's party and the Onondagas camped together. Nothing was said or done to evince treachery. Friends and enemies, Onondagas and Hurons and white men, paddled and camped together for another week; but when, on August 3, four Huron warriors and two women forcibly seized a canoe and headed back for Montreal, the Onondagas would delay no longer. That afternoon as the Indians paddled inshore to camp on one of the Thousand Islands, some Onondaga braves rushed into the woods as if to hunt. As the canoes grated the pebbled shore a secret signal was given. The Huron men with their eyes bent on the beach, intent on landing, never knew that they had been struck. Onondaga hatchets, clubs, spears, were plied from the water side, and from the hunters ambushed on shore crashed musketry that mowed down those who would have fled to the woods.
By night time only a few Huron women and the French had survived the massacre. Such was the baptism of blood that inaugurated the French colony at Onondaga. Luckily the fort built on the crest of the hill above Lake Onondaga was large enough to house stock and provisions. Outside the palisades there daily gathered more Iroquois warriors, who no longer dissembled a hunger for Jesuits' preaching. Among the warriors were Radisson's old friends of the Mohawks, and his foster father confessed to him frankly that the Confederacy were only delaying the massacre of the French till they could somehow obtain the freedom of the twelve Iroquois hostages held at Quebec.
Daily more warriors gathered; nightly the war drum pounded; week after week the beleaguered and imprisoned French heard their stealthy enemy closing nearer and nearer on them, and the painted foliage of autumn frosts gave place to the leafless trees and the drifting snows of midwinter. The French were hemmed in completely as if on a desert isle, and no help could come from Quebec, where New France was literally under Iroquois siege.
The question was, what to do? Messengers had been secretly sent to Quebec, but the Mohawks had caught the scouts bringing back answers, and there was no safe escape from the colony through ambushed woods in midwinter. The Iroquois could afford to bide their time for victims who could not escape. All winter the whites secretly built boats in the lofts of the fort, but when the timbers were put together the boats had to be brought downstairs, and a Huron convert spread a terrifying report of a second deluge for which the white men were preparing a second Noah's Ark. Mohawk warriors at once scented an attempt to escape when the ice broke up in spring, and placed their braves in ambush along the portages. Also they sent a deputation to see if that story of the boats were true. Forewarned by Radisson, the whites built a floor over the boats, heaped canoes above the floor, and invited the Mohawk spies in. The Mohawks smiled grimly and were reassured. Canoes would be ripped into shingles if they ran the ice jam of spring. The Iroquois felt doubly certain of their victims; but Radisson, free to go among the warriors as one of themselves, learned that they were plotting to murder half the colony and hold the other half as hostages for the safety of the twelve Indians in the dungeon at Quebec. The whites could delay no longer. Something must be done, but what? Radisson, knowing the Indian customs, proposed a way out.
No normally built savage could refuse an invitation to a sumptuous feast. According to Indian custom, no feaster dare leave uneaten food on his plate. Waste to the Indian is crime. In the words of the Scotch proverb, "Better burst than waste." And all Indians have implicit faith in dreams. Radisson dreamed—so he told the Indians—that the white men were to give them a marvelous banquet. No sooner dreamed than done! The Iroquois probably thought it a chance to obtain possession inside the fort; but the whites had taken good care to set the banquet between inner and outer walls.
Such a repast no savage had ever enjoyed in the memory of the race. All the ambushed spies flocked in from the portages. The painted warriors washed off their grease, donned their best buckskin, and rallied to the banquet as to battle. All the stock but one solitary pig, a few chickens and dogs, had been slaughtered for the kettle. Such an odor of luscious meat steamed up from the fort for days as whetted the warriors' hunger to the appetite of ravenous wolves. Finally, one night, the trumpets blew a blare that almost burst eardrums. Fifes shrilled, and the rub-a-dub-dub of a dozen drums set the air in a tremor. A great fire had been kindled between the inner and outer walls that set shadows dancing in the forest. Then the gates were thrown open, and in trooped the feasters. All the French acting as waiters, the whites carried in the kettles—kettles of wild fowl, kettles of oxen, kettles of dogs, kettles of porridge and potatoes and corn and what not? That is it—what not? Were the kettles drugged? Who knows? The feasters ate till their eyes were rolling lugubriously; and still the kettles came round. The Indians ate till they were torpid as swollen corpses, and still came the white men with more kettles, while the mischievous French lad, Radisson, danced a mad jig, shouting, yelling, "Eat! eat! Beat the drum! Awake! awake! Cheer up! Eat! eat!"
By midnight every soul of the feast had tumbled over sound asleep, and at the rear gates were the French, stepping noiselessly, speaking in whispers, launching their boats loaded with provisions and ammunition. The soldiers were for going back and butchering every warrior, but the Jesuits forbade such treachery. Then Radisson, light-spirited as if the refugees had been setting out on a holiday, perpetrated yet a last trick on the warriors. To the bell rope of the main gate he fastened a pig, so when the Indians would pull the rope for admission, they would hear the tramp of a sentry inside. Then he stuffed effigies of men on guard round the windows of the fort.
It was a pitchy, sleety night, the river roaring with the loose ice of spring flood, the forests noisy with the boisterous March wind. Out on the maelstrom of ice and flood launched the fifty-three colonists, March 20, 1658. By April they were safe inside the walls of Quebec, and chance hunters brought word that what with sleep, and the measured tramp, tramp of the pig, and the baying of the dogs, and the clucking of the chickens inside the fort, the escape of the whites had not been discovered for a week. The Indians thought the whites had gone into retreat for especially long prayers. Then a warrior climbed the inner palisades, and rage knew no bounds. The fort was looted and burnt to the ground.