The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century Part 12

"Jamais y eut-il homme sur terre plus oblige que moi a la Sainte Famille de Jesus, de Marie et de Joseph! Marie en me guerissant de ma vilaine galle ou teigne, me delivra d'une infinite de peines et d'incommodites corporelles, que cette hideuse maladie qui me rongeoit m'avoit cause.

Joseph m'ayant obtenu la grace d'etre incorpore a un corps aussi saint qu'est celui des Jesuites, m'a preserve d'une infinite de miseres spirituelles, de tentations tres dangereuses et de peches tres enormes.

Jesus n'ayant pas permis que j'entra.s.se dans aucun autre ordre qu'en celui qu'il honore tout a la fois de son beau nom, de sa douce presence et de sa protection speciale. O Jesus! O Marie! O Joseph! qui meritoit moins que moi vos divines faveurs, et envers qui avez vous ete plus prodigue?"--Chaumonot, Vie, 37. ]

Before embarking, he set out with the Jesuit Poncet, who was also destined for Canada, on a pilgrimage from Rome to the shrine of Our Lady of Loretto. They journeyed on foot, begging alms by the way. Chaumonot was soon seized with a pain in the knee, so violent that it seemed impossible to proceed. At San Severino, where they lodged with the Barnabites, he bethought him of asking the intercession of a certain poor woman of that place, who had died some time before with the reputation of sanct.i.ty. Accordingly he addressed to her his prayer, promising to publish her fame on every possible occasion, if she would obtain his cure from G.o.d. [ "Je me recommandai a elle en lui promettant de la faire connoitre dans toutes les occasions que j'en aurois jamais, si elle vn'obtenoit de Dieu ma guerison."--Chaumonot, Vie, 46. ] The intercession was accepted; the offending limb became sound again, and the two pilgrims pursued their journey. They reached Loretto, and, kneeling before the Queen of Heaven, implored her favor and aid; while Chaumonot, overflowing with devotion to this celestial mistress of his heart, conceived the purpose of building in Canada a chapel to her honor, after the exact model of the Holy House of Loretto. They soon afterwards embarked together, and arrived among the Hurons early in the autumn of 1639.

Noel Chabanel came later to the mission; for he did not reach the Huron country until 1643. He detested the Indian life,--the smoke, the vermin, the filthy food, the impossibility of privacy. He could not study by the smoky lodge-fire, among the noisy crowd of men and squaws, with their dogs, and their restless, screeching children. He had a natural inapt.i.tude to learning the language, and labored at it for five years with scarcely a sign of progress. The Devil whispered a suggestion into his ear: Let him procure his release from these barren and revolting toils, and return to France, where congenial and useful employments awaited him. Chabanel refused to listen; and when the temptation still beset him, he bound himself by a solemn vow to remain in Canada to the day of his death. [ Abrege de la Vie du Pere Noel Chabanel, MS. This anonymous paper bears the signature of Ragueneau, in attestation of its truth. See also Ragueneau, Relation, 1650, 17, 18. Chabanel's vow is here given verbatim. ]

Isaac Jogues was of a character not unlike Garnier. Nature had given him no especial force of intellect or const.i.tutional energy, yet the man was indomitable and irrepressible, as his history will show. We have but few means of characterizing the remaining priests of the mission otherwise than as their traits appear on the field of their labors. Theirs was no faith of abstractions and generalities. For them, heaven was very near to earth, touching and mingling with it at many points. On high, G.o.d the Father sat enthroned: and, nearer to human sympathies, Divinity incarnate in the Son, with the benign form of his immaculate mother, and her spouse, St. Joseph, the chosen patron of New France. Interceding saints and departed friends bore to the throne of grace the pet.i.tions of those yet lingering in mortal bondage, and formed an ascending chain from earth to heaven.

These priests lived in an atmosphere of supernaturalism. Every day had its miracle. Divine power declared itself in action immediate and direct, controlling, guiding, or reversing the laws of Nature. The missionaries did not reject the ordinary cures for disease or wounds; but they relied far more on a prayer to the Virgin, a vow to St. Joseph, or the promise of a _neuvaine_, or nine days' devotion, to some other celestial personage; while the touch of a fragment of a tooth or bone of some departed saint was of sovereign efficacy to cure sickness, solace pain, or relieve a suffering squaw in the throes of childbirth. Once, Chaumonot, having a headache, remembered to have heard of a sick man who regained his health by commending his case to St. Ignatius, and at the same time putting a medal stamped with his image into his mouth. Accordingly he tried a similar experiment, putting into his mouth a medal bearing a representation of the Holy Family, which was the object of his especial devotion. The next morning found him cured. [ Chaumonot, Vie, 73. ]

The relation between this world and the next was sometimes of a nature curiously intimate. Thus, when Chaumonot heard of Garnier's death, he immediately addressed his departed colleague, and promised him the benefit of all the good works which he, Chaumonot, might perform during the next week, provided the defunct missionary would make him heir to his knowledge of the Huron tongue. [ 1 ] And he ascribed to the deceased Garnier's influence the mastery of that language which he afterwards acquired.

[ 1 "Je n'eus pas plutot appris sa glorieuse mort, que je lui promis tout ce que je ferois de bien pendant huit jours, a condition qu'il me feroit son heritier dans la connoissance parfaite qu'il avoit du Huron."--Chaumonot, Vie, 61. ]

The efforts of the missionaries for the conversion of the savages were powerfully seconded from the other world, and the refractory subject who was deaf to human persuasions softened before the superhuman agencies which the priest invoked to his aid.

[ As these may be supposed to be exploded ideas of the past, the writer may recall an incident of his youth, while spending a few days in the convent of the Pa.s.sionists, near the Coliseum at Rome. These worthy monks, after using a variety of arguments for his conversion, expressed the hope that a miraculous interposition would be vouchsafed to that end, and that the Virgin would manifest herself to him in a nocturnal vision.

To this end they gave him a small bra.s.s medal, stamped with her image, to be worn at his neck, while they were to repeat a certain number of Aves and Paters, in which he was urgently invited to join; as the result of which, it was hoped the Virgin would appear on the same night.

No vision, however, occurred. ]

It is scarcely necessary to add, that signs and voices from another world, visitations from h.e.l.l and visions from Heaven, were incidents of no rare occurrence in the lives of these ardent apostles. To Brebeuf, whose deep nature, like a furnace white hot, glowed with the still intensity of his enthusiasm, they were especially frequent. Demons in troops appeared before him, sometimes in the guise of men, sometimes as bears, wolves, or wildcats. He called on G.o.d, and the apparitions vanished. Death, like a skeleton, sometimes menaced him, and once, as he faced it with an unquailing eye, it fell powerless at his feet. A demon, in the form of a woman, a.s.sailed him with the temptation which beset St. Benedict among the rocks of Subiaco; but Brebeuf signed the cross, and the infernal siren melted into air. He saw the vision of a vast and gorgeous palace; and a miraculous voice a.s.sured him that such was to be the reward of those who dwelt in savage hovels for the cause of G.o.d. Angels appeared to him; and, more than once, St. Joseph and the Virgin were visibly present before his sight. Once, when he was among the Neutral Nation, in the winter of 1640, he beheld the ominous apparition of a great cross slowly approaching from the quarter where lay the country of the Iroquois. He told the vision to his comrades. "What was it like?

How large was it?" they eagerly demanded. "Large enough," replied the priest, "to crucify us all." [ 1 ] To explain such phenomena is the province of psychology, and not of history. Their occurrence is no matter of surprise, and it would be superfluous to doubt that they were recounted in good faith, and with a full belief in their reality.

[ 1 Quelques Remarques sur la Vie du Pere Jean de Brebeuf, MS. On the margin of this paper, opposite several of the statements repeated above, are the words, signed by Ragueneau, "Ex ipsius autographo," indicating that the statements were made in writing by Brebeuf himself.

Still other visions are recorded by Chaumonot as occurring to Brebeuf, when they were together in the Neutral country. See also the long notice of Brebeuf, written by his colleague, Ragueneau, in the Relation of 1649; and Tanner, Societas Jesu Militans, 533. ]

In these enthusiasts we shall find striking examples of one of the morbid forces of human nature; yet in candor let us do honor to what was genuine in them,--that principle of self-abnegation which is the life of true religion, and which is vital no less to the highest forms of heroism.

CHAPTER X.

1637-1640.

PERSECUTION.

OSSOSSANe.--THE NEW CHAPEL.--A TRIUMPH OF THE FAITH.-- THE NETHER POWERS.--SIGNS OF A TEMPEST.--SLANDERS.-- RAGE AGAINST THE JESUITS.--THEIR BOLDNESS AND PERSISTENCY.-- NOCTURNAL COUNCIL.--DANGER OF THE PRIESTS.--BReBEUF'S LETTER.-- NARROW ESCAPES.--WOES AND CONSOLATIONS.

The town of Ossossane, or Roch.e.l.le, stood, as we have seen, on the borders of Lake Huron, at the skirts of a gloomy wilderness of pine.

Thither, in May, 1637, repaired Father Pijart, to found, in this, one of the largest of the Huron towns, the new mission of the Immaculate Conception. [ The doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, recently sanctioned by the Pope, has long been a favorite tenet of the Jesuits. ] The Indians had promised Brebeuf to build a house for the black-robes, and Pijart found the work in progress. There were at this time about fifty dwellings in the town, each containing eight or ten families. The quadrangular fort already alluded to had now been completed by the Indians, under the instruction of the priests.

[ Lettres de Garnier, MSS. It was of upright pickets, ten feet high with flanking towers at two angles. ]

The new mission-house was about seventy feet in length. No sooner had the savage workmen secured the bark covering on its top and sides than the priests took possession, and began their preparations for a notable ceremony. At the farther end they made an altar, and hung such decorations as they had on the rough walls of bark throughout half the length of the structure. This formed their chapel. On the altar was a crucifix, with vessels and ornaments of s.h.i.+ning metal; while above hung several pictures,--among them a painting of Christ, and another of the Virgin, both of life-size. There was also a representation of the Last Judgment, wherein dragons and serpents might be seen feasting on the entrails of the wicked, while demons scourged them into the flames of h.e.l.l. The entrance was adorned with a quant.i.ty of tinsel, together with green boughs skilfully disposed.

[ "Nostre Chapelle estoit extraordinairement bien ornee, . . nous auions dresse vn portique entortille de feuillage, mesle d'oripeau, en vn mot nous auions estalle tout ce que vostre R. nous a enuoie de beau," etc., etc.--Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 175, 176.--In his Relation of the next year he recurs to the subject, and describes the pictures displayed on this memorable occasion.--Relation des Hurons, 1638, 33. ]

Never before were such splendors seen in the land of the Hurons. Crowds gathered from afar, and gazed in awe and admiration at the marvels of the sanctuary. A woman came from a distant town to behold it, and, tremulous between curiosity and fear, thrust her head into the mysterious recess, declaring that she would see it, though the look should cost her life.

[ Ibid., 1637, 176. ]

One is forced to wonder at, if not to admire, the energy with which these priests and their scarcely less zealous attendants [ 1 ] toiled to carry their pictures and ornaments through the most arduous of journeys, where the traveller was often famished from the sheer difficulty of transporting provisions.

[ 1 The Jesuits on these distant missions were usually attended by followers who had taken no vows, and could leave their service at will, but whose motives were religious, and not mercenary. Probably this was the character of their attendants in the present case. They were known as _donnes_, or "given men." It appears from a letter of the Jesuit Du Peron, that twelve hired laborers were soon after sent up to the mission. ]

A great event had called forth all this preparation. Of the many baptisms achieved by the Fathers in the course of their indefatigable ministry, the subjects had all been infants, or adults at the point of death; but at length a Huron, in full health and manhood, respected and influential in his tribe, had been won over to the Faith, and was now to be baptized with solemn ceremonial, in the chapel thus gorgeously adorned. It was a strange scene. Indians were there in throngs, and the house was closely packed: warriors, old and young, glistening in grease and sunflower-oil, with uncouth locks, a trifle less coa.r.s.e than a horse's mane, and faces perhaps smeared with paint in honor of the occasion; wenches in gay attire; hags m.u.f.fled in a filthy discarded deer-skin, their leathery visages corrugated with age and malice, and their hard, glittering eyes riveted on the spectacle before them.

The priests, no longer in their daily garb of black, but radiant in their surplices, the genuflections, the tinkling of the bell, the swinging of the censer, the sweet odors so unlike the fumes of the smoky lodge-fires, the mysterious elevation of the Host, (for a ma.s.s followed the baptism,) and the agitation of the neophyte, whose Indian imperturbability fairly deserted him,--all these combined to produce on the minds of the savage beholders an impression that seemed to promise a rich harvest for the Faith. To the Jesuits it was a day of triumph and of hope. The ice had been broken; the wedge had entered; light had dawned at last on the long night of heathendom. But there was one feature of the situation which in their rejoicing they overlooked.

The Devil had taken alarm. He had borne with reasonable composure the loss of individual souls s.n.a.t.c.hed from him by former baptisms; but here was a convert whose example and influence threatened to shake his Huron empire to its very foundation. In fury and fear, he rose to the conflict, and put forth all his malice and all his h.e.l.lish ingenuity. Such, at least, is the explanation given by the Jesuits of the scenes that followed. [ 1 ] Whether accepting it or not, let us examine the circ.u.mstances which gave rise to it.

[ 1 Several of the Jesuits allude to this supposed excitement among the tenants of the nether world. Thus, Le Mercier says, "Le Diable se sentoit presse de pres, il ne pouuoit supporter le Baptesme solennel de quelques Sauuages des plus signalez."--Relation des Hurons, 1638, 33.-- Several other baptisms of less note followed that above described.

Garnier, writing to his brother, repeatedly alludes to the alarm excited in h.e.l.l by the recent successes of the mission, and adds,--"Vous pouvez juger quelle consolation nous etoit-ce de voir le diable s'armer contre nous et se servir de ses esclaves pour nous attaquer et tacher de nous perdre en haine de J. C." ]

The mysterious strangers, garbed in black, who of late years had made their abode among them, from motives past finding out, marvellous in knowledge, careless of life, had awakened in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the Hurons mingled emotions of wonder, perplexity, fear, respect, and awe. From the first, they had held them answerable for the changes of the weather, commending them when the crops were abundant, and upbraiding them in times of scarcity. They thought them mighty magicians, masters of life and death; and they came to them for spells, sometimes to destroy their enemies, and sometimes to kill gra.s.shoppers. And now it was whispered abroad that it was they who had bewitched the nation, and caused the pest which threatened to exterminate it.

It was Isaac Jogues who first heard this ominous rumor, at the town of Onnentisati, and it proceeded from the dwarfish sorcerer already mentioned, who boasted himself a devil incarnate. The slander spread fast and far. Their friends looked at them askance; their enemies clamored for their lives. Some said that they concealed in their houses a corpse, which infected the country,--a perverted notion, derived from some half-instructed neophyte, concerning the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Others ascribed the evil to a serpent, others to a spotted frog, others to a demon which the priests were supposed to carry in the barrel of a gun. Others again gave out that they had p.r.i.c.ked an infant to death with awls in the forest, in order to kill the Huron children by magic. "Perhaps," observes Father Le Mercier, "the Devil was enraged because we had placed a great many of these little innocents in Heaven."

[ "Le diable enrageoit peutestre de ce que nous avions place dans le ciel quant.i.te de ces pet.i.ts innocens."--Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1638, 12 (Cramoisy). ]

The picture of the Last Judgment became an object of the utmost terror.

It was regarded as a charm. The dragons and serpents were supposed to be the demons of the pest, and the sinners whom they were so busily devouring to represent its victims. On the top of a spruce-tree, near their house at Ihonatiria, the priests had fastened a small streamer, to show the direction of the wind. This, too, was taken for a charm, throwing off disease and death to all quarters. The clock, once an object of harmless wonder, now excited the wildest alarm; and the Jesuits were forced to stop it, since, when it struck, it was supposed to sound the signal of death. At sunset, one would have seen knots of Indians, their faces dark with dejection and terror, listening to the measured sounds which issued from within the neighboring house of the mission, where, with bolted doors, the priests were singing litanies, mistaken for incantations by the awe-struck savages.

Had the objects of these charges been Indians, their term of life would have been very short. The blow of a hatchet, stealthily struck in the dusky entrance of a lodge, would have promptly avenged the victims of their sorcery, and delivered the country from peril. But the priests inspired a strange awe. Nocturnal councils were held; their death was decreed; and, as they walked their rounds, whispering groups of children gazed after them as men doomed to die. But who should be the executioner?

They were reviled and upbraided. The Indian boys threw sticks at them as they pa.s.sed, and then ran behind the houses. When they entered one of these pestiferous dens, this impish crew clambered on the roof, to pelt them with s...o...b..a.l.l.s through the smoke-holes. The old squaw who crouched by the fire scowled on them with mingled anger and fear, and cried out, "Begone! there are no sick ones here." The invalids wrapped their heads in their blankets; and when the priest accosted some dejected warrior, the savage looked gloomily on the ground, and answered not a word.

Yet nothing could divert the Jesuits from their ceaseless quest of dying subjects for baptism, and above all of dying children. They penetrated every house in turn. When, through the thin walls of bark, they heard the wail of a sick infant, no menace and no insult could repel them from the threshold. They pushed boldly in, asked to buy some trifle, spoke of late news of Iroquois forays,--of anything, in short, except the pestilence and the sick child; conversed for a while till suspicion was partially lulled to sleep, and then, pretending to observe the sufferer for the first time, approached it, felt its pulse, and asked of its health. Now, while apparently fanning the heated brow, the dexterous visitor touched it with a corner of his handkerchief, which he had previously dipped in water, murmured the baptismal words with motionless lips, and s.n.a.t.c.hed another soul from the fangs of the "Infernal Wolf."

[ 1 ] Thus, with the patience of saints, the courage of heroes, and an intent truly charitable, did the Fathers put forth a nimble-fingered adroitness that would have done credit to the profession of which the function is less to dispense the treasures of another world than to grasp those which pertain to this.

[ 1 _Ce loup infernal_ is a t.i.tle often bestowed in the Relations on the Devil. The above details are gathered from the narratives of Brebeuf, Le Mercier, and Lalemant, and letters, published and unpublished, of several other Jesuits.

In another case, an Indian girl was carrying on her back a sick child, two months old. Two Jesuits approached, and while one of them amused the girl with his rosary, "l'autre le baptise lestement; le pauure pet.i.t n'attendoit que ceste faueur du Ciel pour s'y enuoler." ]

The Huron chiefs were summoned to a great council, to discuss the state of the nation. The crisis demanded all their wisdom; for, while the continued ravages of disease threatened them with annihilation, the Iroquois scalping-parties infested the outskirts of their towns, and murdered them in their fields and forests. The a.s.sembly met in August, 1637; and the Jesuits, knowing their deep stake in its deliberations, failed not to be present, with a liberal gift of wampum, to show their sympathy in the public calamities. In private, they sought to gain the good-will of the deputies, one by one; but though they were successful in some cases, the result on the whole was far from hopeful.

In the intervals of the council, Brebeuf discoursed to the crowd of chiefs on the wonders of the visible heavens,--the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets. They were inclined to believe what he told them; for he had lately, to their great amazement, accurately predicted an eclipse. From the fires above he pa.s.sed to the fires beneath, till the listeners stood aghast at his hideous pictures of the flames of perdition,--the only species of Christian instruction which produced any perceptible effect on this unpromising auditory.

The council opened on the evening of the fourth of August, with all the usual ceremonies; and the night was spent in discussing questions of treaties and alliances, with a deliberation and good sense which the Jesuits could not help admiring. [ Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1638, 38. ] A few days after, the a.s.sembly took up the more exciting question of the epidemic and its causes. Deputies from three of the four Huron nations were present, each deputation sitting apart. The Jesuits were seated with the Nation of the Bear, in whose towns their missions were established. Like all important councils, the session was held at night.

It was a strange scene. The light of the fires flickered aloft into the smoky vault and among the soot-begrimed rafters of the great council- house, [ 1 ] and cast an uncertain gleam on the wild and dejected throng that filled the platforms and the floor. "I think I never saw anything more lugubrious," writes Le Mercier: "they looked at each other like so many corpses, or like men who already feel the terror of death. When they spoke, it was only with sighs, each reckoning up the sick and dead of his own family. All this was to excite each other to vomit poison against us."

[ 1 It must have been the house of a chief. The Hurons, unlike some other tribes, had no houses set apart for public occasions. ]

A grisly old chief, named Ont.i.tarac, withered with age and stone-blind, but renowned in past years for eloquence and counsel, opened the debate in a loud, though tremulous voice. First he saluted each of the three nations present, then each of the chiefs in turn,--congratulated them that all were there a.s.sembled to deliberate on a subject of the last importance to the public welfare, and exhorted them to give it a mature and calm consideration. Next rose the chief whose office it was to preside over the Feast of the Dead. He painted in dismal colors the woful condition of the country, and ended with charging it all upon the sorceries of the Jesuits. Another old chief followed him. "My brothers,"

he said, "you know well that I am a war-chief, and very rarely speak except in councils of war; but I am compelled to speak now, since nearly all the other chiefs are dead, and I must utter what is in my heart before I follow them to the grave. Only two of my family are left alive, and perhaps even these will not long escape the fury of the pest.

I have seen other diseases ravaging the country, but nothing that could compare with this. In two or three moons we saw their end: but now we have suffered for a year and more, and yet the evil does not abate.

And what is worst of all, we have not yet discovered its source."

Then, with words of studied moderation, alternating with bursts of angry invective, he proceeded to accuse the Jesuits of causing, by their sorceries, the unparalleled calamities that afflicted them; and in support of his charge he adduced a prodigious ma.s.s of evidence. When he had spent his eloquence, Brebeuf rose to reply, and in a few words exposed the absurdities of his statements; whereupon another accuser brought a new array of charges. A clamor soon arose from the whole a.s.sembly, and they called upon Brebeuf with one voice to give up a certain charmed cloth which was the cause of their miseries. In vain the missionary protested that he had no such cloth. The clamor increased.