3. Suspicion Regarding the Black Robes. Calling Down the Thunderbirds, an Epidemic and the Terrors it Spread. Paradise and Hell. Jesuit Methods of Salvation for the Perishing. Danger to the Jesuits. A Sentence of Death and a Farewell Feast. Missionaries Amid Man-like Beasts. “The Narrow Gate of Paradise.” The Lives of Two Martyrs. Tortures and Deliverance. (Cont.) (2)

Meanwhile the mission remained in its usual deplorable and forsaken state. When the superior in Quebec heard the news of Isaac Jogues’ unfortunate fate in the embassy, he sent another expedition and dispatched Jesuit Bressani to deliver letters and necessary articles to the missionaries. He was given six recently converted Hurons and French boys for service. It was early spring, when the journey was less dangerous from Iroquois attacks; and the travelers hoped to pass safely. Before departure, however, they confessed and prepared themselves for death. The spring journey by river was difficult, and on the very first day of travel one canoe capsized and Bressani nearly drowned. On the third day a snowstorm arose and slowed their progress, and the next day they encountered what they feared most—a war party of Iroquois, who like demons burst from the brush and captured the entire party along with Bressani, killing one Huron. This was in late April, and in mid-July Bressani wrote a letter to the general of the Jesuits in Rome, in which, among other things, he wrote: “I do not know whether your Paternity will recognize the handwriting of one whom you once knew very well. This letter is soiled and poorly written; for the one writing it has but one finger left whole on his right hand, and he cannot help staining the paper with blood which flows from his still-open wounds. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water, and his desk is the earth[1]. Then he describes all his tortures. After the successful capture of the captives, the Iroquois thanked the sun for their victory and plundered the captured canoes; then, taking the slain Huron, cut him into pieces, roasted him, and ate him before the eyes of the captives. The next day they set out for home, and there the captives, especially Bressani, had to endure all the torments and agonies that the bestial instinct of the Iroquois could devise. His hands were slashed to pieces, he was beaten with clubs until he was covered with blood, and then displayed on a platform, like a scaffold, for the derision of the crowd. There he was stripped naked, and while he shivered from cold, he was forced to sing. Having satisfied their bestial instincts themselves, the Iroquois, as usual, turned the captives over to their children for torture, and these little demons, imitating the adults, made the Jesuit dance and sing, driving him with sharp sticks and pulling out the hair on his head and beard. “Sing,” cried one. “No, be silent,” objected another, and when the unhappy Jesuit obeyed one, the other burned him with hot iron, and all incessantly cried to him: “We will burn you; we will eat you; I will eat your leg, and I your arm”[2]. These scenes were repeated every evening for a week. Each evening the chief went about the camp and cried: “Come, come, children, soften our captives,” and the little demons began their torment anew, applying hot coals and heated stones to the bodies of the captives, biting off their fingernails with their teeth, and so on. The poor boy, who accompanied the Jesuit, only 13 or 14 years old, was subjected to the same tortures as the adults. Over the Jesuit himself the Iroquois exhausted all their bestial ingenuity: they hung him by his feet from a tree, placed food on his naked body for dogs to eat along with him, and finally brought him to such a state of exhaustion that they themselves were horrified. “I could not have thought,” writes the unhappy sufferer, “that it would be so difficult to kill a man”[3]. At last a council convened to decide the final fate of the Jesuit. He longed for death, but the council, to his surprise, decided to keep him alive and gave him to an old Huron woman to take the place of a relative killed in war. The old woman, however, found him useless in her household and with the first party going to New Amsterdam sent him for sale to the Dutch. To the credit of the latter, they did not grudge the ransom of the sufferer from the hands of his torturers, clothed him, and sent him to the French fort. Having recovered somewhat from his tortures at the fort, the mutilated Jesuit again ventured on the journey to the Hurons in the spring of the next year, 1645, and this time arrived safely in early autumn of that same year[4].

In their missionary labors, the Jesuits had to fear not only the brutal bands of Iroquois, but the harshness of nature itself. During their journeys from one village to another, they faced the danger of getting lost in the forest and perishing from hunger, or even freezing to death in winter. The latter fate fell to the elderly Jesuit Noël in 1646. Once, having set out to a fort recently built by the French to perform mass there, he became lost in the forest. He had no warm clothing, and meanwhile a severe snowstorm arose. Exhausted, he fell to his knees and sought refuge only in prayer. This prayer of his was his last. He was found later standing on his knees, with open eyes and arms folded on his breast, a frozen corpse”[5]. Such were the dangers and hardships with which the Jesuits had to contend. But these individual cases were only the beginning of calamities, the harbingers of the terrible fate of the entire mission among the Hurons and of this tribe of Native Americans themselves.