Part 1. The First Steps of Roman Catholicism on the Continent of North America (Cont.) (5)

The cruelty of the Iroquois was not only savage but refined. They tortured and tyrannized the captives so as not to deprive them of life and to prolong it for further torments. After the first fit of savagery, they gave the captives time to recover somewhat and then took them to neighboring villages, and in each place the sufferers had again to endure the same series of tortures. Meanwhile, war parties of the Iroquois brought new captive Hurons, among whom were even those converted to Christianity by the Jesuits. The missionary-martyr did not miss the chance to convert others to the truth even amid his own sufferings. Once he managed to persuade two Huron captives to accept Christianity, but there was no water for baptism. A corncob was thrown to them for food and it had several drops of dew on it. Father Isaac baptized them with these drops. Three of the captive Hurons were burned alive and the missionary and Frenchmen awaited the same fate. But a gathered council of Indians decided to spare them alive, although one of the Frenchmen soon paid with his life for teaching an Indian boy to make the sign of the cross, which seemed like sorcery to the boy’s father. Private attempts at murder constantly threatened Isaac, and he lived in hourly expectation of the tomahawk, a blow from which he would have considered deliverance from suffering. But death seemed to flee from him. With time, the Indians, seeing his gentleness, gave him considerable freedom. In late autumn, a party of Iroquois set out on their usual winter hunt and took the Jesuit with them. Hungry and almost unclothed, he dragged himself along after the Indians through impassable forests, carrying heavy burdens heaped upon him. At the camps Father Isaac gathered wood, lit fires, and cooked the game. But since the Indians had in advance dedicated all their game to the god of the hunt (Areskoui), Father Isaac did not dare even touch the demonic sacrifice and thus starved amid plenty, sustaining himself on bark and roots. He slept in a smoky shelter with dogs, but sometimes in the middle of the night he would go out into the forest to pray and recite passages of holy scripture that remained in his memory. In a secluded place he carved the form of a cross on bark and, kneeling amid snow and ancient pines, half-clad in dirty hide, he prayed with tears, and in this found his only comfort. The Indians soon began to tire of him and sent him back to the village, where he was given to an Indian family. There he was a constant witness to the savagery of the Iroquois. War parties continually brought captives, tyrannized them and burned them. Life became unbearable to him and he longed for death. His only comfort amid this nest of barbarism and inhumanity was that he secretly conversed with children, instructed them in the truths of Christianity, and baptized many, while awaiting death from a tomahawk or fire. But he was not destined to die there. A party of Iroquois, setting out with furs to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (present-day New York), took him with them, hoping to get a good ransom for him. The Dutch offered them ransom, but the Indians asked so much that the matter seemed hopeless; the sufferer had to return again to the land of his torturers. Then one Dutchman took pity on him and offered means to escape from the Indians. Father Isaac long hesitated to accept this means of salvation, but finally decided to flee. The Dutchman hid him in his house and concealed him until the Indians left the colony. Then the Jesuit boarded a ship and sailed to France, where he was greeted as an apparition, as he was thought to be dead. Word of him reached the royal court and Queen Anne of Austria, calling him to her, kissed his hands mutilated by the Iroquois. The self-sacrificing missionary, however, was not captivated by this fame and honor; he fell at the feet of the superior and asked permission to return again to missionary work. But here a difficulty arose. His hands had been so maimed that by canon law he could not celebrate the Eucharist. The matter was referred for the Pope’s consideration.[1] Having heard the account of the matter, the Pope exclaimed with enthusiasm: It is unworthy that a martyr of Christ not drink the blood of Christ, and the missionary set out for missionary work the following spring, never to return. Setting out as an envoy for peace negotiations with the Iroquois, who had shown inclination to make peace with the French, he perished from the treacherous tomahawk of his former torturers.[2]

The mission meanwhile remained in its former desperate and abandoned state. When word reached the superior of the mission in Quebec of the unfortunate outcome of Isaac Jogues’s embassy, he outfitted another expedition and sent the Jesuit Bressani to deliver letters and necessities to the missionaries. He was given six recently converted Hurons and a French boy for service. It was early spring, when the route was not yet so dangerous from Iroquois attacks; and the travelers hoped to pass through safely. Before setting out, however, they confessed and prepared for death. The spring journey on the river was difficult, and on the very first day of travel, one canoe capsized and Bressani nearly drowned. On the third day a snow storm arose and slowed their progress, and on the next day they encountered what they most feared—a war party of Iroquois, who like demons burst from the bushes and captured the entire party including 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 he said among other things: “I do not know whether your paternity will recognize the handwriting of one whom you formerly knew very well. This letter is stained and badly written; for the writer has only one finger left on his right hand, and he cannot keep from blotting the paper with blood flowing from wounds still open. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water, and his table is the earth.”[3] Then he describes all his torments. After the successful capture of captives, the Iroquois thanked the sun for their victory and plundered the captured canoes; then, taking the killed Huron, they 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 tortures and sufferings that savage Iroquois instinct could devise. His hands were cut to pieces, he was beaten with clubs until he was covered with blood, and then placed on an elevation like a scaffold for the crowd to mock. Here he was stripped naked, and while he trembled with cold, he was forced to sing. Having satiated their savage instincts themselves, the Iroquois, as was customary, gave the captives over to the children for torture, and these, imitating the adults, forced the Jesuit to dance and sing, urging him on with sharp sticks and plucking hair from his head and beard. “Sing,” cried one. “No, be silent,” objected another, and when the wretched Jesuit obeyed one, the other burned him with red-hot iron, and all continually cried to him: “we will burn you; we will eat you; I will eat your leg, and I will eat your arm.”[4] These scenes were repeated every evening for a week. Every evening the chief went through the camp and shouted: “Come, come, children, pet our captives,” and the little demons began their petting again, applying hot coals and heated stones to the bodies of the captives, biting off fingers and nails with their teeth, etc. The poor boy, only 13 or 14 years old, who accompanied the Jesuit, underwent the same tortures as the adults. But over the Jesuit himself the Iroquois exhausted all their savage inventiveness: 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 think,” writes the wretched sufferer, “how difficult it is to kill a man.”[5] Finally a council was held to decide the final fate of the Jesuit. He longed for death, but the council, to his surprise, decided to spare him alive and gave him to an old Indian woman in place of her relative killed in war. The old woman, however, found him useless for 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 begrudge ransom for the sufferer from the hands of his torturers; they clothed him and sent him to a French fort. Recovering somewhat there from the tortures, the maimed Jesuit again risked 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.[6]

During their missionary exploits, the Jesuits had to fear not only the savage bands of Iroquois, but also the severity of nature itself. During their journeys from one village to another, they faced the danger of becoming lost in the forest and dying from hunger, or even freezing to death in winter. The latter fate befell an elderly Jesuit Noue in 1646. Having once set out to a newly built French fort to say mass, he became lost in the forest. He had no warm clothing, and meanwhile a fierce snow storm arose. Exhausted, he fell on his knees and sought the only refuge in prayer. This prayer was his last. He was found later; he stood on stones, with open eyes and hands crossed on his chest, a frozen corpse.[7]

Such were the dangers and difficulties with which the Jesuits had to contend. But these individual cases were only the beginning of calamities, harbingers of the terrible fate of the entire mission among the Hurons and of this tribe of Indians itself.

IV

The epidemic produced terrible devastation in the villages of the Hurons. “Where eight years ago,” writes Father Vimont, there were a hundred shelters, now scarcely five or six are visible. The leader who once had eight hundred warriors now has only thirty or forty; and instead of fleets of three or four hundred canoes, we see less than a tenth of that number.[8] Such a calamity overwhelmingly affected the moral state of the Hurons. They became weak and cowardly, suffered constant failures both in hunting and in conflicts with enemy tribes. But the weaker they became, the bolder and more daring became their worst enemies the Iroquois. They began to make more frequent raids on neighboring Huron villages and more boldly attacked their parties on the St. Lawrence River, constantly capturing and leading away captives, sometimes by the hundreds.[9] An especially great advantage over the Hurons was given to them by firearms, which they obtained from the Dutch in exchange for furs and which they mastered with remarkable speed. They were, in Vimont’s words, the scourge of the infant church of the Hurons.[10] Winter was still relatively a safer time; but as soon as the ice melted on the rivers, the Iroquois appeared everywhere on their fast canoes and spread death and destruction. Soon they penetrated into the interior of the Huron country and the account of their deeds there is a tale of horror and terrible atrocities.