Part First INTRODUCTION. The springs of American civilization, unlike those of the elder world, lie revealed in the clear light of History. In appearance they are feeble; in reality, copious and full of force. Acting at the sources of life, instruments otherwise weak become mighty for good and evil, and men, lost elsewhere in the crowd, stand forth as agents of Destiny. In their toils, their sufferings, their conflicts, momentous questions were at stake, and issues vital to the future world,—the prevalence of races, the triumph of principles, health or disease, a blessing or a curse. On the obscure strife where men died by tens or by scores hung questions of as deep import for posterity as on those mighty contests of national adolescence where carnage is reckoned by thousands. The subject to which the proposed series will be devoted is that of "France in the New World,"—the attempt of Feudalism, Monarchy, and Rome to master a continent where, at this hour, half a million of bayonets are vindicating the ascendency of a regulated freedom;—Feudalism still strong in life, though enveloped and overborne by new-born Centralization; Monarchy in the flush of triumphant power; Rome, nerved by disaster, springing with renewed vitality from ashes and corruption, and ranging the earth to reconquer abroad what she had lost at home. These banded powers, pushing into the wilderness their indomitable soldiers and devoted priests, unveiled the secrets of the barbarous continent, pierced the forests, traced and mapped out the streams, planted their emblems, built their forts, and claimed all as their own. New France was all head. Under king, noble, and Jesuit, the lank, lean body would not thrive. Even commerce wore the sword, decked itself with badges of nobility, aspired to forest seigniories and hordes of savage retainers. Along the borders of the sea an adverse power was strengthening and widening, with slow but steadfast growth, full of blood and muscle,—a body without a head. Each had its strength, each its weakness, each its own modes of vigorous life: but the one was fruitful, the other barren; the one instinct with hope, the other darkening with shadows of despair. By name, local position, and character, one of these communities of freemen stands forth as the most conspicuous representative of this antagonism,—Liberty and Absolutism, New England and New France. The one was the offspring of a triumphant government; the other, of an oppressed and fugitive people: the one, an unflinching champion of the Roman Catholic reaction; the other, a vanguard of the Reform. Each followed its natural laws of growth, and each came to its natural result. Vitalized by the principles of its foundation, the Puritan commonwealth grew apace. New England was preeminently the land of material progress. Here the prize was within every man's reach: patient industry need never doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. Politically she was free; socially she suffered from that subtle and searching oppression which the dominant opinion of a free community may exercise over the members who compose it. As a whole, she grew upon the gaze of the world, a signal example of expansive energy; but she has not been fruitful in those salient and striking forms of character which often give a dramatic life to the annals of nations far less prosperous. We turn to New France, and all is reversed. Here was a bold attempt to crush under the exactions of a grasping hierarchy, to stifle under the curbs and trappings of a feudal monarchy, a people compassed by influences of the wildest freedom,—whose schools were the forest and the sea, whose trade was an armed barter with savages, and whose daily life a lesson of lawless independence. But this fierce spirit had its vent. The story of New France is from the first a story of war: of war—for so her founders believed—with the adversary of mankind himself; war with savage tribes and potent forest commonwealths; war with the encroaching powers of Heresy and of England. Her brave, unthinking people were stamped with the soldier's virtues and the soldier's faults; and in their leaders were displayed, on a grand and novel stage, the energies, aspirations, and passions which belong to hopes vast and vague, ill-restricted powers, and stations of command. The growth of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt. Long and valiantly her chiefs upheld their cause, leading to battle a vassal population, warlike as themselves. Borne down by numbers from without, wasted by corruption from within, New France fell at last; and out of her fall grew revolutions whose influence to this hour is felt through every nation of the civilized world. The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil. This memorable but half-forgotten chapter in the book of human life can be rightly read only by lights numerous and widely scattered. The earlier period of New France was prolific in a class of publications which are often of much historic value, but of which many are exceedingly rare. The writer, however, has at length gained access to them all. Of the unpublished records of the colonies, the archives of France are of course the grand deposit; but many documents of important bearing on the subject are to be found scattered in public and private libraries, chiefly in France and Canada. The task of collection has proved abundantly irksome and laborious. It has, however, been greatly lightened by the action of the governments of New York, Massachusetts, and Canada, in collecting from Europe copies of documents having more or less relation to their own history. It has been greatly lightened, too, by a most kind co-operation, for which the writer owes obligations too many for recognition at present, but of which he trusts to make fitting acknowledgment hereafter. Yet he cannot forbear to mention the name of Mr. John Gilmary Shea of New York, to whose labors this department of American history has been so deeply indebted, and that of the Hon. Henry Black of Quebec. Nor can he refrain from expressing his obligation to the skilful and friendly criticism of Mr. Charles Folsom. In this, and still more must it be the case in succeeding volumes, the amount of reading applied to their composition is far greater than the citations represent, much of it being of a collateral and illustrative nature. This was essential to a plan whose aim it was, while scrupulously and rigorously adhering to the truth of facts, to animate them with the life of the past, and, so far as might be, clothe the skeleton with flesh. If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation. Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes. With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer's aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true. To those who have aided him with information and documents, the extreme slowness in the progress of the work will naturally have caused surprise. This slowness was unavoidable. During the past eighteen years, the state of his health has exacted throughout an extreme caution in regard to mental application, reducing it at best within narrow and precarious limits, and often precluding it. Indeed, for two periods, each of several years, any attempt at bookish occupation would have been merely suicidal. A condition of sight arising from kindred sources has also retarded the work, since it has never permitted reading or writing continuously for much more than five minutes, and often has not permitted them at all. A previous work, "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," was written in similar circumstances. The writer means, if possible, to carry the present design to its completion. Such a completion, however, will by no means be essential as regards the individual volumes of the series, since each will form a separate and independent work. The present work, it will be seen, contains two distinct and completed narratives. Some progress has been made in others. Boston. January 1,1865. Part One HUGOENOTS IN FLORIDA PREFATORY NOTE TO THE HUGUENOTS IN FLORIDA. The story of New France opens with a tragedy. The political and religious enmities which were soon to bathe Europe in blood broke out with an intense and concentrated fury in the distant wilds of Florida. It was under equivocal auspices that Coligny and his partisans essayed to build up a Calvinist France in America, and the attempt was met by all the forces of national rivalry, personal interest, and religious hate. This striking passage of our early history is remarkable for the fullness and precision of the authorities that illustrate it. The incidents of the Huguenot occupation of Florida are recorded by eight eye-witnesses. Their evidence is marked by an unusual accord in respect to essential facts, as well as by a minuteness of statement which vividly pictures the events described. The following are the principal authorities consulted for the main body of the narrative. Ribauld, 'The Whole and True Discovery of Terra Florida,' This is Captain Jean Ribaut's account of his voyage to Florida in 1562. It was "prynted at London," "newly set forthe in Englishe," in 1563, and reprinted by Hakluyt in 1582 in his black-letter tract entitled 'Divers Voyages.' It is not known to exist in the original French. 'L'Histoire Notable de la Floride, mise en lumiere par M. Basanier' (Paris, 1586). The most valuable portion of this work consists of the letters of Rene de Laudonniere, the French commandant in Florida in 1564-65. They are interesting, and, with necessary allowance for the position and prejudices of the writer, trustworthy. Challeux, Discours de l'Histoire de la Floride (Dieppe, 1566). Challeux was a carpenter, who went to Florida in 1565. He was above sixty years of age, a zealous Huguenot, and a philosopher in his way. His story is affecting from its simplicity. Various editions of it appeared under various titles. Le Moyne, Brevis Narratio eorum qucs in Florida Americce Provincia Gallis acciderunt. Le Moyne was Laudonniere's artist. His narrative forms the Second Part of the Grands Voyages of De Bry (Frankfort, 1591). It is illustrated by numerous drawings made by the writer from memory, and accompanied with descriptive letter-press. Coppie d'une Lettre venant de la Floride (Paris, 1565). This is a letter from one of the adventurers under Laudonniere. It is reprinted in the Recueil de Pieces sur la Floride of Ternaux.-Compans. Ternaux also prints in the same volume a narrative called Histoire memorable du dernier Voyage faict par le Capitaine Jean Ribaut. It is of no original value, being compiled from Laudonniere and Challeux. Une Bequete au Roy, faite en forme de Complainte (1566). This is a petition for redress to Charles the Ninth from the relatives of the French massacred in Florida by the Spaniards. It recounts many incidents of that tragedy. La Reprinse de la Floride par le Cappitaine Gourgue. This is a manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale, printed in the Recueil of Ternaux-Compans. It contains a detailed account of the remarkable expedition of Dominique de Gourgues against the Spaniards in Florida in 1567-68. Charlevoix, in his Histoire de la Nouvelle France, speaks of another narrative of this expedition in manuscript, preserved in the Gourgues family. A copy of it, made in 1831 by the Vicomte de Gourgues, has been placed at the writer's disposal. Popeliniere, De Thou, Wytfleit, D'Aubigne De Laet, Brantome, Lescarbot, Champlain, and other writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have told or touched upon the story of the Huguenots in Florida; but they all draw their information from one or more of the sources named above. Lettres et Papiers d' Estat du Sieur de Forguevaulx (Bibliotheque Nationale). These include the correspondence of the French and Spanish courts concerning the massacre of the Huguenots. They are printed by Gaffarel in his Histoire de le Floride Francaise. The Spanish authorities are the following—Barcia (Cardenas y Cano), Ensayo Cronologico para la Historia General de la Florida (Madrid, 1723). This annalist had access to original documents of great interest. Some of them are used as material for his narrative, others are copied entire. Of these, the most remarkable is that of Solis de las Meras, Memorial de todas las Jornadas de la Conquista de la Florida. Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, Relacion de la Jornada de Pedro Menendez de Aviles en la Florida (Documentos Ineditos del Archivo de Indias, III. 441). A French translation of this journal will be found in the Recueil de Pieces sur let Floride of Ternaux-Compans. Mendoza was chaplain of the expedition commanded by Menendez de Aviles, and, like Solfs, he was an eye-witness of the events which he relates. Pedro Menendez de Aviles, Siete Cartas escritas al Rey, Anos de 1565 y 1566, MSS. These are the despatches of the Adelantado Menendez to Philip the Second. They were procured for the writer, together with other documents, from the archives of Seville, and their contents are now for the first time made public. They consist of seventy-two closely written foolscap pages, and are of the highest interest and value as regards the present subject, confirming and amplifying the statements of Solis and Mendoza, and giving new and curious information with respect to the designs of Spain upon the continent of North America. It is unnecessary to specify the authorities for the introductory and subordinate portions of the narrative. The writer is indebted to Mr. Buckingham Smith, for procuring copies of documents from the archives of Spain; to Mr. Bancroft, the historian of the United States, for the use of the Vicomte de Gourgues's copy of the journal describing the expedition of his ancestor against the Spaniards; and to Mr. Charles Russell Lowell, of the Boston Athenaeum, and Mr. John Langdon Sibley, Librarian of Harvard College, for obliging aid in consulting books and papers. CHAPTER I. 1512-1561. EARLY SPANISH ADVENTURE. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, Spain achieved her final triumph over the infidels of Granada, and made her name glorious through all generations by the discovery of America. The religious zeal and romantic daring which a long course of Moorish wars had called forth were now exalted to redoubled fervor. Every ship from the New World came freighted with marvels which put the fictions of chivalry to shame; and to the Spaniard of that day America was a region of wonder and mystery, of vague and magnificent promise. Thither adventurers hastened, thirsting for glory and for gold, and often mingling the enthusiasm of the crusader and the valor of the knight-errant with the bigotry of inquisitors and the rapacity of pirates. They roamed over land and sea; they climbed unknown mountains, surveyed unknown oceans, pierced the sultry intricacies of tropical forests; while from year to year and from day to day new wonders were unfolded, new islands and archipelagoes, new regions of gold and pearl, and barbaric empires of more than Oriental wealth. The extravagance of hope and the fever of adventure knew no bounds. Nor is it surprising that amid such waking marvels the imagination should run wild in romantic dreams; that between the possible and the impossible the line of distinction should be but faintly drawn, and that men should be found ready to stake life and honor in pursuit of the most insane fantasies. Such a man was the veteran cavalier Juan Ponce de Leon. Greedy of honors and of riches, he embarked at Porto Rico with three brigantines, bent on schemes of discovery. But that which gave the chief stimulus to his enterprise was a story, current among the Indians of Cuba and Hispaniola, that on the island of Bimini, said to be one of the Bahamas, there was a fountain of such virtue, that, bathing in its waters, old men resumed their youth. 1 It was said, moreover, that on a neighboring shore might be found a river gifted with the same beneficent property, and believed by some to be no other than the Jordan. 2 Ponce de Leon found the island of Bimini, but not the fountain. Farther westward, in the latitude of thirty degrees and eight minutes, he approached an unknown land, which he named Florida, and, steering southward, explored its coast as far as the extreme point of the peninsula, when, after some farther explorations, he retraced his course to Porto Rico. Ponce de Leon had not regained his youth, but his active spirit was unsubdued. Nine years later he attempted to plant a colony in Florida; the Indians attacked him fiercely; he was mortally wounded, and died soon afterwards in Cuba. 3 The voyages of Garay and Vasquez de Ayllon threw new light on the discoveries of Ponce, and the general outline of the coasts of Florida became known to the Spaniards. 4 Meanwhile, Cortes had conquered Mexico, and the fame of that iniquitous but magnificent exploit rang through all Spain. Many an impatient cavalier burned to achieve a kindred fortune. To the excited fancy of the Spaniards the unknown land of Florida seemed the seat of surpassing wealth, and Pamphilo de Narvaez essayed to possess himself of its fancied treasures. Landing on its shores, and proclaiming destruction to the Indians unless they acknowledged the sovereignty of the Pope and the Emperor, he advanced into the forests with three hundred men. Nothing could exceed their sufferings. Nowhere could they find the gold they came to seek. The village of Appalache, where they hoped to gain a rich booty, offered nothing but a few mean wigwams. The horses gave out, and the famished soldiers fed upon their flesh. The men sickened, and the Indians unceasingly harassed their march. At length, after two hundred and eighty leagues 5 of wandering, they found themselves on the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and desperately put to sea in such crazy boats as their skill and means could construct. Cold, disease, famine, thirst, and the fury of the waves, melted them away. Narvaez himself perished, and of his wretched followers no more than four escaped, reaching by land, after years of vicissitude, the Christian settlements of New Spain. 6 The interior of the vast country then comprehended under the name of Florida still remained unexplored. The Spanish voyager, as his caravel ploughed the adjacent seas, might give full scope to his imagination, and dream that beyond the long, low margin of forest which bounded his horizon lay hid a rich harvest for some future conqueror; perhaps a second Mexico with its royal palace and sacred pyramids, or another Cuzco with its temple of the Sun, encircled with a frieze of gold. Haunted by such visions, the ocean chivalry of Spain could not long stand idle. Hernando de Soto was the companion of Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. He had come to America a needy adventurer, with no other fortune than his sword and target. But his exploits had given him fame and fortune, and he appeared at court with the retinue of a nobleman. 7 Still, his active energies could not endure repose, and his avarice and ambition goaded him to fresh enterprises. He asked and obtained permission to conquer Florida. While this design was in agitation, Cabeca de Vaca, one of those who had survived the expedition of Narvaez, appeared in Spain, and for purposes of his own spread abroad the mischievous falsehood, that Florida was the richest country yet discovered. De Soto's plans were embraced with enthusiasm. Nobles and gentlemen contended for the privilege of joining his standard; and, setting sail with an ample armament, he landed at the bay of Espiritu Santo, now Tampa Bay, in Florida, with six hundred and twenty chosen men, a band as gallant and well appointed, as eager in purpose and audacious in hope, as ever trod the shores of the New World. The clangor of trumpets, the neighing of horses, the fluttering of pennons, the glittering of helmet and lance, startled the ancient forest with unwonted greeting. Amid this pomp of chivalry, religion was not forgotten. The sacred vessels and vestments with bread and wine for the Eucharist were carefully provided; and De Soto himself declared that the enterprise was undertaken for God alone, and seemed to be the object of His especial care. These devout marauders could not neglect the spiritual welfare of the Indians whom they had come to plunder; and besides fetters to bind, and bloodhounds to hunt them, they brought priests and monks for the saving of their souls. The adventurers began their march. Their story has been often told. For month after month and year after year, the procession of priests and cavaliers, crossbowmen, arquebusiers, and Indian captives laden with the baggage, still wandered on through wild and boundless wastes, lured hither and thither by the ignis fatuus of their hopes. They traversed great portions of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, everywhere inflicting and enduring misery, but never approaching their phantom El Dorado. At length, in the third year of their journeying, they reached the banks of the Mississippi, a hundred and thirty-two years before its second discovery by Marquette. One of their number describes the great river as almost half a league wide, deep, rapid, and constantly rolling down trees and drift-wood on its turbid current. The Spaniards crossed over at a point above the mouth of the Arkansas. They advanced westward, but found no treasures,—nothing indeed but hardships, and an Indian enemy, furious, writes one of their officers, "as mad dogs." They heard of a country towards the north where maize could not be cultivated because the vast herds of wild cattle devoured it. They penetrated so far that they entered the range of the roving prairie tribes; for, one day, as they pushed their way with difficulty across great plains covered with tall, rank grass, they met a band of savages who dwelt in lodges of skins sewed together, subsisting on game alone, and wandering perpetually from place to place. Finding neither gold nor the South Sea, for both of which they had hoped, they returned to the banks of the Mississippi. De Soto, says one of those who accompanied him, was a "stern man, and of few words." Even in the midst of reverses, his will had been law to his followers, and he had sustained himself through the depths of disappointment with the energy of a stubborn pride. But his hour was come. He fell into deep dejection, followed by an attack of fever, and soon after died miserably. To preserve his body from the Indians, his followers sank it at midnight in the river, and the sullen waters of the Mississippi buried his ambition and his hopes. The adventurers were now, with few exceptions, disgusted with the enterprise, and longed only to escape from the scene of their miseries. After a vain attempt to reach Mexico by land, they again turned back to the Mississippi, and labored, with all the resources which their desperate necessity could suggest, to construct vessels in which they might make their way to some Christian settlement. Their condition was most forlorn. Few of their horses remained alive; their baggage had been destroyed at the burning of the Indian town of Mavila, and many of the soldiers were without armor and without weapons. In place of the gallant array which, more than three years before, had left the harbor of Espiritu Santo, a company of sickly and starving men were laboring among the swampy forests of the Mississippi, some clad in skins, and some in mats woven from a kind of wild vine. Seven brigantines were finished and launched; and, trusting their lives on board these frail vessels, they descended the Mississippi, running the gantlet between hostile tribes, who fiercely attacked them. Reaching the Gulf, though not without the loss of eleven of their number, they made sail for the Spanish settlement on the river Panuco, where they arrived safely, and where the inhabitants met them with a cordial welcome. Three hundred and eleven men thus escaped with life, leaving behind them the bones of their comrades strewn broadcast through the wilderness. De Soto's fate proved an insufficient warning, for those were still found who begged a fresh commission for the conquest of Florida; but the Emperor would not hear them. A more pacific enterprise was undertaken by Cancello, a Dominican monk, who with several brother ecclesiastics undertook to convert the natives to the true faith, but was murdered in the attempt. Nine years later, a plan was formed for the colonization of Florida, and Guido de las Bazares sailed to explore the coasts, and find a spot suitable for the establishment. 8 After his return, a squadron, commanded by Angel de Villafane, and freighted with supplies and men, put to sea from San Juan d'Ulloa; but the elements were adverse, and the result was a total failure. Not a Spaniard had yet gained foothold in Florida. That name, as the Spaniards of that day understood it, comprehended the whole country extending from the Atlantic on the east to the longitude of New Mexico on the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico and the River of Palms indefinitely northward towards the polar sea. This vast territory was claimed by Spain in right of the discoveries of Columbus, the grant of the Pope, and the various expeditions mentioned above. England claimed it in right of the discoveries of Cabot; while France could advance no better title than might be derived from the voyage of Verazzano and vague traditions of earlier visits of Breton adventurers. With restless jealousy Spain watched the domain which she could not occupy, and on France especially she kept an eye of deep distrust. When, in 1541, Cartier and Roberval essayed to plant a colony in the part of ancient Spanish Florida now called Canada, she sent spies and fitted out caravels to watch that abortive enterprise. Her fears proved just. Canada, indeed, was long to remain a solitude; but, despite the Papal bounty gifting Spain with exclusive ownership of a hemisphere, France and Heresy at length took root in the sultry forests of modern Florida. CHAPTER II 1550-1558. VILLEGAGNON. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow. Her old feudal liberties were gone, absorbed in the despotism of Madrid. A tyranny of monks and inquisitors, with their swarms of spies and informers, their racks, their dungeons, and their fagots, crushed all freedom of thought or speech; and, while the Dominican held his reign of terror and force, the deeper Jesuit guided the mind from infancy into those narrow depths of bigotry from which it was never to escape. Commercial despotism was joined to political and religious despotism. The hands of the government were on every branch of industry. Perverse regulations, uncertain and ruinous taxes, monopolies, encouragements, prohibitions, restrictions, cramped the national energy. Mistress of the Indies, Spain swarmed with beggars. Yet, verging to decay, she had an ominous and appalling strength. Her condition was that of an athletic man penetrated with disease, which had not yet unstrung the thews and sinews formed in his days of vigor. Philip the Second could command the service of warriors and statesmen developed in the years that were past. The gathered energies of ruined feudalism were wielded by a single hand. The mysterious King, in his den in the Escorial, dreary and silent, and bent like a scribe over his papers, was the type and the champion of arbitrary power. More than the Pope himself, he was the head of Catholicity. In doctrine and in deed, the inexorable bigotry of Madrid was ever in advance of Rome. Not so with France. She was full of life,—a discordant and struggling vitality. Her monks and priests, unlike those of Spain, were rarely either fanatics or bigots; yet not the less did they ply the rack and the fagot, and howl for heretic blood. Their all was at stake: their vast power, their bloated wealth, were wrapped up in the ancient faith. Men were burned, and women buried alive. All was in vain. To the utmost bounds of France, the leaven of the Reform was working. The Huguenots, fugitives from torture and death, found an asylum at Geneva, their city of refuge, gathering around Calvin, their great high-priest. Thence intrepid colporteurs, their lives in their hands, bore the Bible and the psalm-book to city, hamlet, and castle, to feed the rising flame. The scattered churches, pressed by a common danger, began to organize. An ecclesiastical republic spread its ramifications through France, and grew underground to a vigorous life,—pacific at the outset, for the great body of its members were the quiet bourgeoisie, by habit, as by faith, averse to violence. Yet a potent fraction of the warlike noblesse were also of the new faith; and above them all, preeminent in character as in station, stood Gaspar de Coligny, Admiral of France. The old palace of the Louvre, reared by the "Roi Chevalier" on the site of those dreary feudal towers which of old had guarded the banks of the Seine, held within its sculptured masonry the worthless brood of Valois. Corruption and intrigue ran riot at the court. Factious nobles, bishops, and cardinals, with no God but pleasure and ambition, contended around the throne or the sick-bed of the futile King. Catherine de Medicis, with her stately form, her mean spirit, her bad heart, and her fathomless depths of duplicity, strove by every subtle art to hold the balance of power among them. The bold, pitiless, insatiable Guise, and his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine, the incarnation of falsehood, rested their ambition on the Catholic party. Their army was a legion of priests, and the black swarms of countless monasteries, who by the distribution of alms held in pay the rabble of cities and starving peasants on the lands of impoverished nobles. Montmorency, Conde, and Navarre leaned towards the Reform,—doubtful and inconstant chiefs, whose faith weighed light against their interests. Yet, amid vacillation, selfishness, weakness, treachery, one great man was like a tower of trust, and this was Gaspar de Coligny. Firm in his convictions, steeled by perils and endurance, calm, sagacious, resolute, grave even to severity, a valiant and redoubted soldier, Coligny looked abroad on the gathering storm and read its danger in advance. He saw a strange depravity of manners; bribery and violence overriding justice; discontented nobles, and peasants ground down with taxes. In the midst of this rottenness, the Calvinistic churches, patient and stern, were fast gathering to themselves the better life of the nation. Among and around them tossed the surges of clerical hate. Luxurious priests and libertine monks saw their disorders rebuked by the grave virtues of the Protestant zealots. Their broad lands, their rich endowments, their vessels of silver and of gold, their dominion over souls,—in itself a revenue,—were all imperiled by the growing heresy. Nor was the Reform less exacting, less intolerant, or, when its hour came, less aggressive than the ancient faith. The storm was thickening, and it must burst soon. When the Emperor Charles the Fifth beleaguered Algiers, his camps were deluged by a blinding tempest, and at its height the infidels made a furious sally. A hundred Knights of Malta, on foot, wearing over their armor surcoats of crimson blazoned with the white cross, bore the brunt of the assault. Conspicuous among them was Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon. A Moorish cavalier, rushing upon him, pierced his arm with a lance, and wheeled to repeat the blow; but the knight leaped on the infidel, stabbed him with his dagger, flung him from his horse, and mounted in his place. Again, a Moslem host landed in Malta and beset the Cite Notable. The garrison was weak, disheartened, and without a leader. Villegagnon with six followers, all friends of his own, passed under cover of night through the infidel leaguer, climbed the walls by ropes lowered from above, took command, repaired the shattered towers, aiding with his own hands in the work, and animated the garrison to a resistance so stubborn that the besiegers lost heart and betook themselves to their galleys. No less was he an able and accomplished mariner, prominent among that chivalry of the sea who held the perilous verge of Christendom against the Mussuhuan. He claimed other laurels than those of the sword. He was a scholar, a linguist, a controversialist, potent with the tongue and with the pen, commanding in presence, eloquent and persuasive in discourse. Yet this Crichton of France had proved himself an associate nowise desirable. His sleepless intellect was matched with a spirit as restless, vain, unstable, and ambitious, as it was enterprising and bold. Addicted to dissent, and enamoured of polemics, he entered those forbidden fields of inquiry and controversy to which the Reform invited him. Undaunted by his monastic vows, he battled for heresy with tongue and pen, and in the ear of Protestants professed himself a Protestant. As a Commander of his Order, he quarreled with the Grand Master, a domineering Spaniard; and, as Vice-Admiral of Brittany, he was deep in a feud with the Governor of Brest. Disgusted at home, his fancy crossed the seas. He aspired to build for France and himself an empire amid the tropical splendors of Brazil. Few could match him in the gift of persuasion; and the intrepid seamen whose skill and valor had run the gantlet of the English fleet, and borne Mary Stuart of Scotland in safety to her espousals with the Dauphin, might well be intrusted with a charge of moment so far inferior. Henry the Second was still on the throne. The lance of Montgomery had not yet rid France of that infliction. To win a share in the rich domain of the New World, of which Portuguese and Spanish arrogance claimed the monopoly, was the end held by Villegagnon before the eyes of the King. Of the Huguenots, he said not a word. For Coligny he had another language. He spoke of an asylum for persecuted religion, a Geneva in the wilderness, far from priests and monks and Francis of Guise. The Admiral gave him a ready ear; if, indeed, he himself had not first conceived the plan. Yet to the King, an active burner of Huguenots, Coligny too urged it as an enterprise, not for the Faith, but for France. In secret, Geneva was made privy to it, and Calvin himself embraced it with zeal. The enterprise, in fact, had a double character, political as well as religious. It was the reply of France, the most emphatic she had yet made, to the Papal bull which gave all the western hemisphere to Portugal and Spain; and, as if to point her answer, she sent, not Frenchmen only, but Protestant Frenchmen, to plant the fleur-de-lis on the shores of the New World. Two vessels were made ready, in the name of the King. The body of the emigration was Huguenot, mingled with young nobles, restless, idle, and poor, with reckless artisans, and piratical sailors from the Norman and Breton seaports. They put to sea from Havre on the twelfth of July, 1555, and early in November saw the shores of Brazil. Entering the harbor of Rio Janeiro, then called Ganabara, Villegagnon landed men and stores on an island, built huts, and threw up earthworks. In anticipation of future triumphs, the whole continent, by a strange perversion of language, was called Antarctic France, while the fort received the name of Coligny. Villegagnon signalized his new-born Protestantism by an intolerable solicitude for the manners and morals of his followers. The whip and the pillory requited the least offence. The wild and discordant crew, starved and flogged for a season into submission, conspired at length to rid themselves of him; but while they debated whether to poison him, blow him up, or murder him and his officers in their sleep, three Scotch soldiers, probably Calvinists, revealed the plot, and the vigorous hand of the commandant crushed it in the bud. But how was the colony to subsist? Their island was too small for culture, while the mainland was infested with hostile tribes, and threatened by the Portuguese, who regarded the French occupancy as a violation of their domain. Meanwhile, in France, Huguenot influence, aided by ardent letters sent home by Villegagnon in the returning ships, was urging on the work. Nor were the Catholic chiefs averse to an enterprise which, by colonizing heresy, might tend to relieve France of its presence. Another embarkation was prepared, in the name of Henry the Second, under Bois-Lecomte, a nephew of Villegagnon. Most of the emigrants were Huguenots. Geneva sent a large deputation, and among them several ministers, full of zeal for their land of promise and their new church in the wilderness. There were five young women, also, with a matron to watch over them. Soldiers, emigrants, and sailors, two hundred and ninety in all, were embarked in three vessels; and, to the sound of cannon, drums, fifes, and trumpets, they unfurled their sails at Honfleur. They were no sooner on the high seas than the piratical character of the Norman sailors, in no way exceptional at that day, began to declare itself. They hailed every vessel weaker than themselves, pretended to be short of provisions, and demanded leave to buy them; then, boarding the stranger, plundered her from stem to stern. After a passage of four months, on the ninth of March, 1557, they entered the port of Ganabara, and saw the fleur-de-lis floating above the walls of Fort Coligny. Amid salutes of cannon, the boats, crowded with sea-worn emigrants, moved towards the landing. It was an edifying scene when Villegagnon, in the picturesque attire which marked the warlike nobles of the period, came down to the shore to greet the sombre ministers of Calvin. With hands uplifted and eyes raised to heaven, he bade them welcome to the new asylum of the faithful; then launched into a long harangue full of zeal and unction. His discourse finished, he led the way to the dining-hall. If the redundancy of spiritual aliment had surpassed their expectations, the ministers were little prepared for the meagre provision which awaited their temporal cravings; for, with appetites whetted by the sea, they found themselves seated at a board whereof, as one of them complains the choicest dish was a dried fish, and the only beverage rain-water. They found their consolation in the inward graces of the commandant, whom they likened to the Apostle Paul. For a time all was ardor and hope. Men of birth and station, and the ministers themselves, labored with pick and shovel to finish the fort. Every day exhortations, sermons, prayers, followed in close succession, and Villegagnon was always present, kneeling on a velvet cushion brought after him by a page. Soon, however, he fell into sharp controversy with the ministers upon points of faith. Among the emigrants was a student of the Sorbonne, one Cointac, between whom and the ministers arose a fierce and unintermitted war of words. Is it lawful to mix water with the wine of the Eucharist? May the sacramental bread be made of meal of Indian corn? These and similar points of dispute filled the fort with wranglings, begetting cliques, factions, and feuds without number. Villegagnon took part with the student, and between them they devised a new doctrine, abhorrent alike to Geneva and to Rome. The advent of this nondescript heresy was the signal of redoubled strife. The dogmatic stiffness of the Geneva ministers chafed Villegagnon to fury. He felt himself, too, in a false position. On one side he depended on the Protestant, Coligny; on the other, he feared the Court. There were Catholics in the colony who might report him as an open heretic. On this point his doubts were set at rest; for a ship from France brought him a letter from the Cardinal of Lorraine, couched, it is said, in terms which restored him forthwith to the bosom of the Church. Villegagnon now affirmed that he had been deceived in Calvin, and pronounced him a "frightful heretic." He became despotic beyond measure, and would bear no opposition. The ministers, reduced nearly to starvation, found themselves under a tyranny worse than that from which they had fled. At length he drove them from the fort, and forced them to bivouac on the mainland, at the risk of being butchered by Indians, until a vessel loading with Brazil-wood in the harbor should be ready to carry them back to France. Having rid himself of the ministers, he caused three of the more zealous Calvinists to be seized, dragged to the edge of a rock, and thrown into the sea. A fourth, equally obnoxious, but who, being a tailor, could ill be spared, was permitted to live on condition of recantation. Then, mustering the colonists, he warned them to shun the heresies of Luther and Calvin; threatened that all who openly professed those detestable doctrines should share the fate of their three comrades; and, his harangue over, feasted the whole assembly, in token, says the narrator, of joy and triumph. Meanwhile, in their crazy vessel, the banished ministers drifted slowly on their way. Storms fell upon them, their provisions failed, their water-casks were empty, and, tossing in the wilderness of waves, or rocking on the long swells of subsiding gales, they sank almost to despair. In their famine they chewed the Brazil-wood with which the vessel was laden, devoured every scrap of leather, singed and ate the horn of lanterns, hunted rats through the hold, and sold them to each other at enormous prices. At length, stretched on the deck, sick, listless, attenuated, and scarcely able to move a limb, they descried across the waste of sea the faint, cloud-like line that marked the coast of Brittany. Their perils were not past; for, if we may believe one of them, Jean de Lery, they bore a sealed letter from Villegagnon to the magistrates of the first French port at which they might arrive. It denounced them as heretics, worthy to be burned. Happily, the magistrates leaned to the Reform, and the malice of the commandant failed of its victims. Villegagnon himself soon sailed for France, leaving the wretched colony to its fate. He presently entered the lists against Calvin, and engaged him in a hot controversial war, in which, according to some of his contemporaries, the knight often worsted the theologian at his own weapons. Before the year 1558 was closed, Ganabara fell a prey to the Portuguese. They set upon it in force, battered down the fort, and slew the feeble garrison, or drove them to a miserable refuge among the Indians. Spain and Portugal made good their claim to the vast domain, the mighty vegetation, and undeveloped riches of "Antarctic France." CHAPTER III. 1562, 1563. JEAN RIBAUT. In the year 1562 a cloud of black and deadly portent was thickening over France. Surely and swiftly she glided towards the abyss of the religious wars. None could pierce the future, perhaps none dared to contemplate it: the wild rage of fanaticism and hate, friend grappling with friend, brother with brother, father with son; altars profaned, hearth-stones made desolate, the robes of Justice herself bedrenched with murder. In the gloom without lay Spain, imminent and terrible. As on the hill by the field of Dreux, her veteran bands of pikemen, dark masses of organized ferocity, stood biding their time while the battle surged below, and then swept downward to the slaughter,—so did Spain watch and wait to trample and crush the hope of humanity. In these days of fear, a second Huguenot colony sailed for the New World. The calm, stern man who represented and led the Protestantism of France felt to his inmost heart the peril of the time. He would fain build up a city of refuge for the persecuted sect. Yet Gaspar de Coligny, too high in power and rank to be openly assailed, was forced to act with caution. He must act, too, in the name of the Crown, and in virtue of his office of Admiral of France. A nobleman and a soldier,—for the Admiral of France was no seaman,—he shared the ideas and habits of his class; nor is there reason to believe him to have been in advance of his time in a knowledge of the principles of successful colonization. His scheme promised a military colony, not a free commonwealth. The Huguenot party was already a political as well as a religious party. At its foundation lay the religious element, represented by Geneva, the martyrs, and the devoted fugitives who sang the psalms of Marot among rocks and caverns. Joined to these were numbers on whom the faith sat lightly, whose hope was in commotion and change. Of the latter, in great part, was the Huguenot noblesse, from Conde, who aspired to the crown, "Ce petit homme tant joli, Qui toujours chante, toujours rit," to the younger son of the impoverished seigneur whose patrimony was his sword. More than this, the restless, the factious, and the discontented, began to link their fortunes to a party whose triumph would involve confiscation of the wealth of the only rich class in France. An element of the great revolution was already mingling in the strife of religions. America was still a land of wonder. The ancient spell still hung unbroken over the wild, vast world of mystery beyond the sea,—a land of romance, adventure, and gold. Fifty-eight years later the Puritans landed on the sands of Massachusetts Bay. The illusion was gone,—the ignis fatuus of adventure, the dream of wealth. The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard won independence. In their own hearts, and not in the promptings of a great leader or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its birth and its achievement. They were of the boldest and most earnest of their sect. There were such among the French disciples of Calvin; but no Mayflower ever sailed from a port of France. Coligny's colonists were of a different stamp, and widely different was their fate. An excellent seaman and stanch Protestant, Jean Ribaut of Dieppe, commanded the expedition. Under him, besides sailors, were a band of veteran soldiers, and a few young nobles. Embarked in two of those antiquated craft whose high poops and tub-like porportions are preserved in the old engravings of De Bry, they sailed from Havre on the eighteenth of February, 1562. They crossed the Atlantic, and on the thirtieth of April, in the latitude of twenty-nine and a half degrees, saw the long, low line where the wilderness of waves met the wilderness of woods. It was the coast of Florida. They soon descried a jutting point, which they called French Cape, perhaps one of the headlands of Matanzas Inlet. They turned their prows northward, coasting the fringes of that waste of verdure which rolled in shadowy undulation far to the unknown West. On the next morning, the first of May, they found themselves off the mouth of a great river. Riding at anchor on a sunny sea, they lowered their boats, crossed the bar that obstructed the entrance, and floated on a basin of deep and sheltered water, "boyling and roaring," says Ribaut, "through the multitude of all kind of fish." Indians were running along the beach, and out upon the sand-bars, beckoning them to land. They pushed their boats ashore and disembarked,—sailors, soldiers, and eager young nobles. Corselet and morion, arquebuse and halberd, flashed in the sun that flickered through innumerable leaves, as, kneeling on the ground, they gave thanks to God, who had guided their voyage to an issue full of promise. The Indians, seated gravely under the neighboring trees, looked on in silent respect, thinking that they worshipped the sun. "They be all naked and of a goodly stature, mightie, and as well shapen and proportioned of body as any people in ye world; and the fore part of their body and armes be painted with pretie deuised workes, of Azure, red, and blacke, so well and so properly as the best Painter of Europe could not amende it." With their squaws and children, they presently drew near, and, strewing the earth with laurel boughs, sat down among the Frenchmen. Their visitors were much pleased with them, and Ribaut gave the chief, whom he calls the king, a robe of blue cloth, worked in yellow with the regal fleur-de-lis. But Ribaut and his followers, just escaped from the dull prison of their ships, were intent on admiring the wild scenes around them. Never had they known a fairer May-day. The quaint old narrative is exuberant with delight. The tranquil air, the warm sun, woods fresh with young verdure, meadows bright with flowers; the palm, the cypress, the pine, the magnolia; the grazing deer; herons, curlews, bitterns, woodcock, and unknown water-fowl that waded in the ripple of the beach; cedars bearded from crown to root with long, gray moss; huge oaks smothering in the folds of enormous grapevines;—such were the objects that greeted them in their roamings, till their new-discovered land seemed "the fairest, fruitfullest, and pleasantest of al the world." They found a tree covered with caterpillars, and hereupon the ancient black-letter says: "Also there be Silke wormes in meruielous number, a great deale fairer and better then be our silk wormes. To bee short, it is a thing vnspeakable to consider the thinges that bee seene there, and shalbe founde more and more in this incomperable lande." 9 Above all, it was plain to their excited fancy that the country was rich in gold and silver, turquoises and pearls. One of these last, "as great as an Acorne at ye least," hung from the neck of an Indian who stood near their boats as they re-embarked. They gathered, too, from the signs of their savage visitors, that the wonderful land of Cibola, with its seven cities and its untold riches, was distant but twenty days' journey by water. In truth, it was two thousand miles westward, and its wealth a fable. They named the river the River of May. It is now the St. John's. "And on the next morning," says Ribault, "we returned to land againe, accompanied with the Captaines, Gentlemen, and Souldiers, and others of our small troope, carrying with us a Pillour or columne of harde stone, our king's armes graved therein, to plant and set the same in the enterie of the Porte; and being come thither we espied on the south syde of the River a place very fitte for that purpose upon a little hill compassed with Cypres, Bayes, Paulmes, and other trees, with sweete smelling and pleasant shrubbes." Here they set the column, and then, again embarking, held their course northward, happy in that benign decree which locks from mortal eyes the secrets of the future. Next they anchored near Fernandina, and to a neighboring river, probably the St. Mary's, gave the name of the Seine. Here, as morning broke on the fresh, moist meadows hung with mists, and on broad reaches of inland waters which seemed like lakes, they were tempted to land again, and soon "espied an innumerable number of footesteps of great Hartes and Hindes of a wonderfull greatnesse, the steppes being all fresh and new, and it seemeth that the people doe nourish them like tame Cattell." By two or three weeks of exploration they seem to have gained a clear idea of this rich semi-aquatic region. Ribaut describes it as "a countrie full of hauens, riuers, and Ilands, of such fruitfulnes as cannot with tongue be expressed." Slowly moving northward, they named each river, or inlet supposed to be a river, after some stream of France,—the Loire, the Charente, the Garonne, the Gironde. At length, opening betwixt flat and sandy shores, they saw a commodious haven, and named it Port Royal. On the twenty-seventh of May they crossed the bar where the war-ships of Dupont crossed three hundred years later, passed Hilton Head, and held their course along the peaceful bosom of Broad River. 10 On the left they saw a stream which they named Libourne, probably Skull Creek; on the right, a wide river, probably the Beaufort. When they landed, all was solitude. The frightened Indians had fled, but they lured them back with knives, beads, and looking-glasses, and enticed two of them on board their ships. Here, by feeding, clothing, and caressing them, they tried to wean them from their fears, thinking to carry them to France, in obedience to a command of Catherine de Medicis; but the captive warriors moaned and lamented day and night, and at length made their escape. Ranging the woods, they found them full of game, wild turkeys and partridges, bears and lynxes. Two deer, of unusual size, leaped from the underbrush. Cross-bow and arquebuse were brought to the level; but the Huguenot captain, "moved with the singular fairness and bigness of them," forbade his men to shoot. Preliminary exploration, not immediate settlement, had been the object of the voyage; but all was still rose-color in the eyes of the voyagers, and many of their number would gladly linger in the New Canaan. Ribaut was more than willing to humor them. He mustered his company on deck, and made them a harangue. He appealed to their courage and their patriotism, told them how, from a mean origin, men rise by enterprise and daring to fame and fortune, and demanded who among them would stay behind and hold Port Royal for the King. The greater part came forward, and "with such a good will and joly corage," writes the commander, "as we had much to do to stay their importunitie." Thirty were chosen, and Albert de Pierria was named to command them. A fort was begun on a small stream called the Chenonceau, probably Archer's Creek, about six miles from the site of Beaufort. 11 They named it Charlesfort, in honor of the unhappy son of Catherine de Medicis, Charles the Ninth, the future hero of St. Bartholomew. Ammunition and stores were sent on shore, and on the eleventh of June, with his diminished company, Ribaut again embarked and spread his sails for France. From the beach at Hilton Head, Albert and his companions might watch the receding ships, growing less and less on the vast expanse of blue, dwindling to faint specks, then vanishing on the pale verge of the waters. They were alone in those fearful solitudes. From the north pole to Mexico there was no Christian denizen but they. The pressing question was how they were to subsist. Their thought was not of subsistence, but of gold. Of the thirty, the greater number were soldiers and sailors, with a few gentlemen; that is to say, men of the sword, born within the pale of nobility, who at home could neither labor nor trade without derogation from their rank. For a time they busied themselves with finishing their fort, and, this done, set forth in quest of adventures. The Indians had lost fear of them. Ribaut had enjoined upon them to use all kindness and gentleness in their dealing with the men of the woods; and they more than obeyed him. They were soon hand and glove with chiefs, warriors, and squaws; and as with Indians the adage that familiarity breeds contempt holds with peculiar force, they quickly divested themselves of the prestige which had attached at the outset to their supposed character of children of the Sun. Good-will, however, remained, and this the colonists abused to the utmost. Roaming by river, swamp, and forest, they visited in turn the villages of five petty chiefs, whom they called kings, feasting everywhere on hominy, beans, and game, and loaded with gifts. One of these chiefs, named Audusta, invited them to the grand religious festival of his tribe. When they arrived, they found the village alive with preparation, and troops of women busied in sweeping the great circular area where the ceremonies were to take place. But as the noisy and impertinent guests showed a disposition to undue merriment, the chief shut them all in his wigwam, lest their Gentile eyes should profane the mysteries. Here, immured in darkness, they listened to the howls, yelpings, and lugubrious songs that resounded from without. One of them, however, by some artifice, contrived to escape, hid behind a bush, and saw the whole solemnity,—the procession of the medicinemen and the bedaubed and befeathered warriors; the drumming, dancing, and stamping; the wild lamentation of the women as they gashed the arms of the young girls with sharp mussel-shells, and flung the blood into the air with dismal outcries. A scene of ravenous feasting followed, in which the French, released from durance, were summoned to share. After the carousal they returned to Charlesfort, where they were soon pinched with hunger. The Indians, never niggardly of food, brought them supplies as long as their own lasted; but the harvest was not yet ripe, and their means did not match their good-will. They told the French of two other kings, Ouade and Couexis, who dwelt towards the south, and were rich beyond belief in maize, beans, and squashes. The mendicant colonists embarked without delay, and, with an Indian guide, steered for the wigwams of these potentates, not by the open sea, but by a perplexing inland navigation, including, as it seems, Calibogue Sound and neighboring waters. Reaching the friendly villages, on or near the Savannah, they were feasted to repletion, and their boat was laden with vegetables and corn. They returned rejoicing; but their joy was short. Their store-house at Charlesfort, taking fire in the night, burned to the ground, and with it their newly acquired stock. Once more they set out for the realms of King Ouade, and once more returned laden with supplies. Nay, the generous savage assured them that, so long as his cornfields yielded their harvests, his friends should not want. How long this friendship would have lasted may well be doubted. With the perception that the dependants on their bounty were no demigods, but a crew of idle and helpless beggars, respect would soon have changed to contempt, and contempt to ill-will. But it was not to Indian war-clubs that the infant colony was to owe its ruin. It carried within itself its own destruction. The ill-assorted band of lands-men and sailors, surrounded by that influence of the wilderness which wakens the dormant savage in the breasts of men, soon fell into quarrels. Albert, a rude soldier, with a thousand leagues of ocean betwixt him and responsibility, grew harsh, domineering, and violent beyond endurance. None could question or oppose him without peril of death. He hanged with his own hands a drummer who had fallen under his displeasure, and banished a soldier, named La Chore, to a solitary island, three leagues from the fort, where he left him to starve. For a time his comrades chafed in smothered fury. The crisis came at length. A few of the fiercer spirits leagued together, assailed their tyrant, murdered him, delivered the famished soldier, and called to the command one Nicolas Barre, a man of merit. Barre took the command, and thenceforth there was peace. Peace, such as it was, with famine, homesickness, and disgust. The rough ramparts and rude buildings of Charlesfort, hatefully familiar to their weary eyes, the sweltering forest, the glassy river, the eternal silence of the lifeless wilds around them, oppressed the senses and the spirits. They dreamed of ease, of home, of pleasures across the sea, of the evening cup on the bench before the cabaret, and dances with kind wenches of Dieppe. But how to escape? A continent was their solitary prison, and the pitiless Atlantic shut them in. Not one of them knew how to build a ship; but Ribaut had left them a forge, with tools and iron, and strong desire supplied the place of skill. Trees were hewn down and the work begun. Had they put forth to maintain themselves at Port Royal the energy and resource which they exerted to escape from it, they might have laid the cornerstone of a solid colony. All, gentle and simple, labored with equal zeal. They calked the seams with the long moss which hung in profusion from the neighboring trees; the pines supplied them with pitch; the Indians made for them a kind of cordage; and for sails they sewed together their shirts and bedding. At length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Crusoe floated on the waters of the Chenonceau. They laid in what provision they could, gave all that remained of their goods to the Indians, embarked, descended the river, and put to sea. A fair wind filled their patchwork sails and bore them from the hated coast. Day after day they held their course, till at length the breeze died away and a breathless calm fell on the waters. Florida was far behind; France farther yet before. Floating idly on the glassy waste, the craft lay motionless. Their supplies gave out. Twelve kernels of maize a day were each man's portion; then the maize failed, and they ate their shoes and leather jerkins. The water-barrels were drained, and they tried to slake their thirst with brine. Several died, and the rest, giddy with exhaustion and crazed with thirst, were forced to ceaseless labor, bailing out the water that gushed through every seam. Head-winds set in, increasing to a gale, and the wretched brigantine, with sails close-reefed, tossed among the savage billows at the mercy of the storm. A heavy sea rolled down upon her, and burst the bulwarks on the windward side. The surges broke over her, and, clinging with desperate grip to spars and cordage, the drenched voyagers gave up all for lost. At length she righted. The gale subsided, the wind changed, and the crazy, water-logged vessel again bore slowly towards France. Gnawed with famine, they counted the leagues of barren ocean that still stretched before, and gazed on each other with haggard wolfish eyes, till a whisper passed from man to man that one, by his death, might ransom all the rest. The lot was cast, and it fell on La Chore, the same wretched man whom Albert had doomed to starvation on a lonely island. They killed him, and with ravenous avidity portioned out his flesh. The hideous repast sustained them till the land rose in sight, when, it is said, in a delirium of joy, they could no longer steer their vessel, but let her drift at the will of the tide. A small English bark bore down upon them, took them all on board, and, after landing the feeblest, carried the rest prisoners to Queen Elizabeth. 12 Thus closed another of those scenes of woe whose lurid clouds are thickly piled around the stormy dawn of American history. It was the opening act of a wild and tragic drama. CHAPTER IV. 1564. LAUDONNIERE. ON the twenty-fifth of June, 1564, a French squadron anchored a second time off the mouth of the River of May. There were three vessels, the smallest of sixty tons, the largest of one hundred and twenty, all crowded with men. Rene de Laudonniere held command. He was of a noble race of Poiton, attached to the house of Chatillon, of which Coligny was the head; pious, we are told, and an excellent marine officer. An engraving, purporting to be his likeness, shows us a slender figure, leaning against the mast, booted to the thigh, with slouched hat and plume, slashed doublet, and short cloak. His thin oval face, with curled moustache and close-trimmed beard, wears a somewhat pensive look, as if already shadowed by the destiny that awaited him. The intervening year since Ribaut's voyage had been a dark year for France. From the peaceful solitude of the River of May, that voyager returned to a land reeking with slaughter. But the carnival of bigotry and hate had found a pause. The Peace of Amboise had been signed. The fierce monk choked down his venom; the soldier sheathed his sword, the assassin his dagger; rival chiefs grasped hands, and masked their rancor under hollow smiles. The king and the queen-mother, helpless amid the storm of factions which threatened their destruction, smiled now on Conde, now on Guise,—gave ear to the Cardinal of Lorraine, or listened in secret to the emissaries of Theodore Beza. Coligny was again strong at Court. He used his opportunity, and solicited with success the means of renewing his enterprise of colonization. Men were mustered for the work. In name, at least, they were all Huguenots yet now, as before, the staple of the projected colony was unsound,—soldiers, paid out of the royal treasury, hired artisans and tradesmen, with a swarm of volunteers from the young Huguenot nobles, whose restless swords had rusted in their scabbards since the peace. The foundation-stone was forgotten. There were no tillers of the soil. Such, indeed, were rare among the Huegonots; for the dull peasants who guided the plough clung with blind tenacity to the ancient faith. Adventurous gentlemen, reckless soldiers, discontented tradesmen, all keen for novelty and heated with dreams of wealth,—these were they who would build for their country and their religion an empire beyond the sea. On Thursday, the twenty-second of June, Laudonniere saw the low coast-line of Florida, and entered the harbor of St. Augustine, which he named the River of Dolphins, "because that at mine arrival I saw there a great number of Dolphins which were playing in the mouth thereof." Then he bore northward, following the coast till, on the twenty-fifth, he reached the mouth of the St. John's or River of May. The vessels anchored, the boats were lowered, and he landed with his principal followers on the south shore, near the present village of Mayport. It was the very spot where he had landed with Ribaut two years before. They were scarcely on shore when they saw an Indian chief, "which having espied us cryed very far off, Antipola! Antipola! and being so joyful that he could not containe himselfe, he came to meet us accompanied with two of his sonnes, as faire and mightie persons as might be found in al the world. There was in their trayne a great number of men and women which stil made very much of us, and by signes made us understand how glad they were of our arrival. This good entertainment past, the Paracoussy [chief] prayed me to goe see the pillar which we had erected in the voyage of John Ribault." The Indians, regarding it with mysterious awe, had crowned it with evergreens, and placed baskets full of maize before it as an offering. The chief then took Laudonniere by the hand, telling him that he was named Satouriona, and pointed out the extent of his dominions, far up the river and along the adjacent coasts. One of his sons, a man "perfect in beautie, wisedome, and honest sobrietie," then gave the French commander a wedge of silver, and received some trifles in return, after which the voyagers went back to their ships. "I prayse God continually," says Laudonniere, "for the great love I have found in these savages." In the morning the French landed again, and found their new friends on the same spot, to the number of eighty or more, seated under a shelter of boughs, in festal attire of smoke-tanned deer-skins, painted in many colors. The party then rowed up the river, the Indians following them along the shore. As they advanced, coasting the borders of a great marsh that lay upon their left, the St. John's spread before them in vast sheets of glistening water, almost level with its flat, sedgy shores, the haunt of alligators, and the resort of innumerable birds. Beyond the marsh, some five miles from the mouth of the river, they saw a ridge of high ground abutting on the water, which, flowing beneath in a deep, strong current, had undermined it, and left a steep front of yellowish sand. This was the hill now called St. John's Bluff. Here they landed and entered the woods, where Laudonniere stopped to rest while his lieutenant, Ottigny, with a sergeant and a few soldiers, went to explore the country. They pushed their way through the thickets till they were stopped by a marsh choked with reeds, at the edge of which, under a great laurel-tree, they had seated themselves to rest, overcome with the summer heat, when five Indians suddenly appeared, peering timidly at them from among the bushes. Some of the men went towards them with signs of friendship, on which, taking heart, they drew near, and one of them, who was evidently a chief, made a long speech, inviting the strangers to their dwellings. The way was across the marsh, through which they carried the lieutenant and two or three of the soldiers on their backs, while the rest circled by a narrow path through the woods. When they reached the lodges, a crowd of Indians came out "to receive our men gallantly, and feast them after their manner." One of them brought a large earthen vessel full of spring water, which was served out to each in turn in a wooden cup. But what most astonished the French was a venerable chief, who assured them that he was the father of five successive generations, and that he had lived two hundred and fifty years. Opposite sat a still more ancient veteran, the father of the first, shrunken to a mere anatomy, and "seeming to be rather a dead carkeis than a living body." "Also," pursues the history, "his age was so great that the good man had lost his sight, and could not speak one onely word but with exceeding great paine." In spite of his dismal condition, the visitors were told that he might expect to live, in the course of nature, thirty or forty years more. As the two patriarchs sat face to face, half hidden with their streaming white hair, Ottigny and his credulous soldiers looked from one to the other, lost in speechless admiration. One of these veterans made a parting present to his guests of two young eagles, and Ottigny and his followers returned to report what they had seen. Laudonniere was waiting for them on the side of the hill; and now, he says, "I went right to the toppe thereof, where we found nothing else but Cedars, Palme, and Baytrees of so sovereigne odour that Baulme smelleth nothing like in comparison." From this high standpoint they surveyed their Canaan. The unruffled river lay before them, with its marshy islands overgrown with sedge and bulrushes; while on the farther side the flat, green meadows spread mile on mile, veined with countless creeks and belts of torpid water, and bounded leagues away by the verge of the dim pine forest. On the right, the sea glistened along the horizon; and on the left, the St. John's stretched westward between verdant shores, a highway to their fancied Eldorado. "Briefly," writes Laudonniere, "the place is so pleasant that those which are melancholicke would be inforced to change their humour." On their way back to the ships they stopped for another parley with the chief Satouriona, and Laudonniere eagerly asked where he had got the wedge of silver that he gave him in the morning. The chief told him by signs, that he had taken it in war from a people called Thimagoas, who lived higher up the River, and who were his mortal enemies; on which the French captain had the folly to promise that he would join in an expedition against them. Satouriona was delighted, and declared that, if he kept his word, he should have gold and silver to his heart's content. Man and nature alike seemed to mark the borders of the River of May as the site of the new colony; for here, around the Indian towns, the harvests of maize, beans, and pumpkins promised abundant food, while the river opened a ready way to the mines of gold and silver and the stores of barbaric wealth which glittered before the dreaming vision of the colonists. Yet, the better to satisfy himself and his men, Laudonniere weighed anchor, and sailed for a time along the neighboring coasts. Returning, confirmed in his first impression, he set out with a party of officers and soldiers to explore the borders of the chosen stream. The day was hot. The sun beat fiercely on the woollen caps and heavy doublets of the men, till at length they gained the shade of one of those deep forests of pine where the dead, hot air is thick with resinous odors, and the earth, carpeted with fallen leaves, gives no sound beneath the foot. Yet, in the stillness, deer leaped up on all sides as they moved along. Then they emerged into sunlight. A meadow was before them, a running brook, and a wall of encircling forests. The men called it the Vale of Laudonniere. The afternoon was spent, and the sun was near its setting, when they reached the bank of the river. They strewed the ground with boughs and leaves, and, stretched on that sylvan couch, slept the sleep of travel-worn and weary men. They were roused at daybreak by sound of trumpet, and after singing a psalm they set themselves to their task. It was the building of a fort, and the spot they chose was a furlong or more above St. John's Bluff, where close to the water was a wide, flat knoll, raised a few feet above the marsh and the river. 13 Boats came up the stream with laborers, tents, provisions, cannon, and tools. The engineers marked out the work in the form of a triangle; and, from the noble volunteer to the meanest artisan, all lent a hand to complete it. On the river side the defences were a palisade of timber. On the two other sides were a ditch, and a rampart of fascines, earth, and sods. At each angle was a bastion, in one of which was the magazine. Within was a spacious parade, around it were various buildings for lodging and storage, and a large house with covered galleries was built on the side towards the river for Laudonniere and his officers. 14In honor of Charles the Ninth the fort was named Fort Caroline. Meanwhile Satouriona, "lord of all that country," as the narratives style him, was seized with misgivings on learning these proceedings. The work was scarcely begun, and all was din and confusion around the incipient fort, when the startled Frenchmen saw the neighboring height of St. John's swarming with naked warriors. Laudonniere set his men in array, and for a season, pick and spade were dropped for arquebuse and pike. The savage chief descended to the camp. The artist Le Moyne, who saw him, drew his likeness from memory, a tall, athletic figure, tattooed in token of his rank, plumed, bedecked with strings of beads, and girdled with tinkling pieces of metal which hung from the belt which formed his only garment. He came in regal state, a crowd of warriors around him, and, in advance, a troop of young Indians armed with spears. Twenty musicians followed, blowing hideous discord through pipes of reeds, while he seated himself on the ground "like a monkey," as Le Moyne has it in the grave Latin of his Brevis Narratio. A council followed, in which broken words were aided by signs and pantomime; and a treaty of alliance was made, Laudonniere renewing his rash promise to aid the chief against his enemies. Satouriona, well pleased, ordered his Indians to help the French in their work. They obeyed with alacrity, and in two days the buildings of the fort were all thatched, after the native fashion, with leaves of the palmetto. These savages belonged to one of the confederacies into which the native tribes of Florida were divided, and with three of which the French came into contact. The first was that of Satouriona; and the second was that of the people called Thimagoas, who, under a chief named Outina, dwelt in forty villages high up the St. John's. The third was that of the chief, cacique, or paracoussy whom the French called King Potanou, and whose dominions lay among the pine barrens, cypress swamps, and fertile hummocks westward and northwestward of this remarkable river. These three confederacies hated each other, and were constantly at war. Their social state was more advanced than that of the wandering hunter tribes. They were an agricultural people, and around all their villages were fields of maize, beans, and pumpkins. The harvest was gathered into a public granary, and they lived on it during three fourths of the year, dispersing in winter to hunt among the forests. They were exceedingly well formed; the men, or the principal among them, were tattooed on the limbs and body, and in summer were nearly naked. Some wore their straight black hair flowing loose to the waist; others gathered it in a knot at the crown of the head. They danced and sang about the scalps of their enemies, like the tribes of the North; and like them they had their "medicine-men," who combined the functions of physicians, sorcerers, and priests. The most prominent feature of their religion was sun-worship. Their villages were clusters of large dome-shaped huts, framed with poles and thatched with palmetto leaves. In the midst was the dwelling of the chief, much larger than the rest, and sometimes raised on an artificial mound. They were enclosed with palisades, and, strange to say, some of them were approached by wide avenues, artificially graded, and several hundred yards in length. Traces of these may still be seen, as may also the mounds in which the Floridians, like the Hurons and various other tribes, collected at stated intervals the bones of their dead. Social distinctions were sharply defined among them. Their chiefs, whose office was hereditary, sometimes exercised a power almost absolute. Each village had its chief, subordinate to the grand chief of the confederacy. In the language of the French narratives, they were all kings or lords, vassals of the great monarch Satouriona, Outina, or Potanou. All these tribes are now extinct, and it is difficult to ascertain with precision their tribal affinities. There can be no doubt that they were the authors of the aboriginal remains at present found in various parts of Florida. Having nearly finished the fort, Laudonniere declares that he "would not lose the minute of an houre without employing of the same in some vertuous exercise;" and he therefore sent his lieutenant, Ottigny, to spy out the secrets of the interior, and to learn, above all, "what this Thimagoa might be, whereof the Paracoussy Satouriona had spoken to us so often." As Laudonniere stood pledged to attack the Thimagoas, the chief gave Ottigny two Indian guides, who, says the record, were so eager for the fray that they seemed as if bound to a wedding feast. The lazy waters of the St. John's, tinged to coffee color by the exudations of the swamps, curled before the prow of Ottigny's sail-boat as he advanced into the prolific wilderness which no European eye had ever yet beheld. By his own reckoning, he sailed thirty leagues up the river, which would have brought him to a point not far below Palatka. Here, more than two centuries later, the Bartrams, father and son, guided their skiff and kindled their nightly bivouac-fire; and here, too, roamed Audubon, with his sketch-book and his gun. It was a paradise for the hunter and the naturalist. Earth, air, and water teemed with life, in endless varieties of beauty and ugliness. A half-tropical forest shadowed the low shores, where the palmetto and the cabbage palm mingled with the oak, the maple, the cypress, the liquid-ambar, the laurel, the myrtle, and the broad glistening leaves of the evergreen magnolia. Here was the haunt of bears, wild-cats, lynxes, cougars, and the numberless deer of which they made their prey. In the sedges and the mud the alligator stretched his brutish length; turtles with outstretched necks basked on half-sunken logs; the rattlesnake sunned himself on the sandy bank, and the yet more dangerous moccason lurked under the water-lilies in inlets and sheltered coves. The air and the water were populous as the earth. The river swarmed with fish, from the fierce and restless gar, cased in his horny armor, to the lazy cat-fish in the muddy depths. There were the golden eagle and the white-headed eagle, the gray pelican and the white pelican, the blue heron and the white heron, the egret, the ibis, ducks of various sorts, the whooping crane, the black vulture, and the cormorant; and when at sunset the voyagers drew their boat upon the strand and built their camp-fire under the arches of the woods, the owls whooped around them all night long, and when morning came the sultry mists that wrapped the river were vocal with the clamor of wild turkeys. When Ottigny was about twenty leagues from Fort Caroline, his two Indian guides, who were always on the watch, descried three canoes, and in great excitement cried, "Thimagoa! Thimagoa!" As they drew near, one of them snatched up a halberd and the other a sword, and in their fury they seemed ready to jump into the water to get at the enemy. To their great disgust, Ottigny permitted the Thimagoas to run their canoes ashore and escape to the woods. Far from keeping Laudonniere's senseless promise to light them, he wished to make them friends; to which end he now landed with some of his men, placed a few trinkets in their canoes, and withdrew to a distance to watch the result. The fugitives presently returned, step by step, and allowed the French to approach them; on which Ottigny asked, by signs, if they had gold or silver. They replied that they had none, but that if he would give them one of his men they would show him where it was to be found. One of the soldiers boldly offered himself for the venture, and embarked with them. As, however, he failed to return according to agreement, Ottigny, on the next day, followed ten leagues farther up the stream, and at length had the good luck to see him approaching in a canoe. He brought little or no gold, but reported that he had heard of a certain chief, named Mayrra, marvellously rich, who lived three days' journey up the river; and with these welcome tidings Ottigny went back to Fort Caroline. A fortnight later, an officer named Vasseur went up the river to pursue the adventure. The fever for gold had seized upon the French. As the villages of the Thimagoas lay between them and the imagined treasures, they shrank from a quarrel, and Laudonniere repented already of his promised alliance with Satouriona. Vasseur was two days' sail from the fort when two Indians hailed him from the shore, inviting him to their dwellings. He accepted their guidance, and presently saw before him the cornfields and palisades of an Indian town. He and his followers were led through the wondering crowd to the lodge of Mollua, the chief, seated in the place of honor, and plentifully regaled with fish and bread. The repast over, Mollua made a speech. He told them that he was one of the forty vassal chiefs of the great Outina, lord of all the Thimagoas, whose warriors wore armor of gold and silver plate. He told them, too, of Potanou, his enemy, "a man cruell in warre;" and of the two kings of the distant Appalachian Mountains,—Onatheaqua and Houstaqua, "great lords and abounding in riches." While thus, with earnest pantomime and broken words, the chief discoursed with his guests, Vasseur, intent and eager, strove to follow his meaning; and no sooner did he hear of these Appalachian treasures than he promised to join Outina in war against the two potentates of the mountains. Mollua, well pleased, promised that each of Outina's vassal chiefs should requite their French allies with a heap of gold and silver two feet high. Thus, while Laudonniere stood pledged to Satouriona, Vasseur made alliance with his mortal enemy. On his return, he passed a night in the lodge of one of Satouriona's chiefs, who questioned him touching his dealings with the Thimagoas. Vasseur replied that he had set upon them and put them to utter rout. But as the chief, seeming as yet unsatisfied, continued his inquiries, the sergeant Francois de la Caille drew his sword, and, like Falstaff, reenacted his deeds of valor, pursuing and thrusting at the imaginary Thimagoas, as they fled before his fury. The chief, at length convinced, led the party to his lodge, and entertained them with a decoction of the herb called Cassina. Satouriona, elated by Laudonniere's delusive promises of aid, had summoned his so-called vassals to war. Ten chiefs and some five hundred warriors had mustered at his call, and the forest was alive with their bivouacs. When all was ready, Satouriona reminded the French commander of his pledge, and claimed its fulfilment, but got nothing but evasions in return, He stifled his rage, and prepared to go without his fickle ally. A fire was kindled near the bank of the river, and two large vessels of water were placed beside it. Here Satouriona took his stand, while his chiefs crouched on the grass around him, and the savage visages of his five hundred warriors filled the outer circle, their long hair garnished with feathers, or covered with the heads and skins of wolves, cougars, bears, or eagles. Satouriona, looking towards the country of his enemy, distorted his features into a wild expression of rage and hate; then muttered to himself; then howled an invocation to his god, the Sun; then besprinkled the assembly with water from one of the vessels, and, turning the other upon the fire, suddenly quenched it. "So," he cried, "may the blood of our enemies be poured out, and their lives extinguished!" and the concourse gave forth an explosion of responsive yells, till the shores resounded with the wolfish din. The rites over, they set out, and in a few days returned exulting, with thirteen prisoners and a number of scalps. These last were hung on a pole before the royal lodge; and when night came, it brought with it a pandemonium of dancing and whooping, drumming and feasting. A notable scheme entered the brain of Laudonniere. Resolved, cost what it might, to make a friend of Outina, he conceived it to be a stroke of policy to send back to him two of the prisoners. In the morning he sent a soldier to Satouriona to demand them. The astonished chief gave a fiat refusal, adding that he owed the French no favors, for they had shamefully broken faith with him. On this, Laudonniere, at the head of twenty soldiers, proceeded to the Indian town, placed a guard at the opening of the great lodge, entered with his arquebusiers, and seated himself without ceremony in the highest place. Here, to show his displeasure, he remained in silence for half an hour. At length he spoke, renewing his demand. For some moments Satouriona made no reply; then he coldly observed that the sight of so many armed men had frightened the prisoners away. Laudonniere grew peremptory, when the chief's son, Athore, went out, and presently returned with the two Indians, whom the French led back to Fort Caroline. Satouriona, says Laudonniere, "was wonderfully offended with his bravado, and bethought himselfe by all meanes how he might be revenged of us." He dissembled for the time, and presently sent three of his followers to the fort with a gift of pumpkins; though under this show of good-will the outrage rankled in his breast, and he never forgave it. The French had been unfortunate in their dealings with the Indians. They had alienated old friends in vain attempts to make new ones. Vasseur, with the Swiss ensign Arlac, a sergeant, and ten soldiers, went up the river early in September to carry back the two prisoners to Outina. Laudonniere declares that they sailed eighty leagues, which would have carried them far above Lake Monroe; but it is certain that his reckoning is grossly exaggerated. Their boat crawled up the hazy St. John's, no longer a broad lake like expanse, but a narrow and tortuous stream, winding between swampy forests, or through the vast savanna, a verdant sea of brushes and grass. At length they came to a village called Mayarqua, and thence, with the help of their oars, made their way to another cluster of wigwams, apparently on a branch of the main river. Here they found Outina himself, whom, prepossessed with ideas of feudality, they regarded as the suzerain of a host of subordinate lords and princes, ruling over the surrounding swamps and pine barrens. Outina gratefully received the two prisoners whom Laudonniere had sent to propitiate him, feasted the wonderful strangers, and invited them to join him on a raid against his rival, Potanou. Laudonniere had promised to join Satouriona against Outina, and Vasseur now promised to join Outina against Potanon, the hope of finding gold being in both cases the source of this impolitic compliance. Vasseur went back to Fort Caroline with five of the men, and left Arlac with the remaining five to fight the battles of Ontina. The warriors mustered to the number of some two hundred, and the combined force of white men and red took up their march. The wilderness through which they passed has not yet quite lost its characteristic features,—the bewildering monotony of the pine barrens, with their myriads of bare gray trunks and their canopy of perennial green, through which a scorching sun throws spots and streaks of yellow light, here on an undergrowth of dwarf palmetto, and there on dry sands half hidden by tufted wire-grass, and dotted with the little mounds that mark the burrows of the gopher; or those oases in the desert, the "hummocks," with their wild, redundant vegetation, their entanglement of trees, bushes, and vines, their scent of flowers and song of birds; or the broad sunshine of the savanna, where they waded to the neck in grass; or the deep swamp, where, out of the black and root-encumbered slough, rise the huge buttressed trunks of the Southern cypress, the gray Spanish moss drooping from every bough and twig, wrapping its victims like a drapery of tattered cobwebs, and slowly draining away their life, for even plants devour each other, and play their silent parts in the universal tragedy of nature. The allies held their way through forest, savanna, and swamp, with Outina's Indians in the front, till they neared the hostile villages, when the modest warriors fell to the rear, and yielded the post of honor to the Frenchmen. An open country lay before them, with rough fields of maize, beans, and pumpkins, and the palisades of an Indian town. Their approach was seen, and the warriors of Potanon swarmed out to meet them; but the sight of the bearded strangers, the flash and report of the fire-arms, and the fall of their foremost chief, shot through the brain by Arlac, filled them with consternation, and they fled within their defences. Pursuers and pursued entered pell-mell together. The place was pillaged and burned, its inmates captured or killed, and the victors returned triumphant. CHAPTER V. 1564, 1565. CONSPIRACY. In the little world of Fort Caroline, a miniature France, cliques and parties, conspiracy and sedition, were fast stirring into life. Hopes had been dashed, and wild expectations had come to naught. The adventurers had found, not conquest and gold, but a dull exile in a petty fort by a hot and sickly river, with hard labor, bad fare, prospective famine, and nothing to break the weary sameness but some passing canoe or floating alligator. Gathered in knots, they nursed each other's wrath, and inveighed against the commandant. Why are we put on half-rations, when he told us that provision should be made for a full year? Where are the reinforcements and supplies that he said should follow us from France? And why is he always closeted with Ottigny, Arlac, and this and that favorite, when we, men of blood as good as theirs, cannot gain his ear for a moment? The young nobles, of whom there were many, were volunteers, who had paid their own expenses in expectation of a golden harvest, and they chafed in impatience and disgust. The religious element in the colony—unlike the former Huguenot emigration to Brazil—was evidently subordinate. The adventurers thought more of their fortunes than of their faith; yet there were not a few earnest enough in the doctrine of Geneva to complain loudly and bitterly that no ministers had been sent with them. The burden of all grievances was thrown upon Laudonniere, whose greatest errors seem to have arisen from weakness and a lack of judgment,—fatal defects in his position. The growing discontent was brought to a partial head by one La Roquette, who gave out that, high up the river, he had discovered by magic a mine of gold and silver, which would give each of them a share of ten thousand crowns, besides fifteen hundred thousand for the King. But for Laudonniere, he said, their fortunes would all be made. He found an ally in a gentleman named Genre, one of Laudonniere's confidants, who, while still professing fast adherence to his interests, is charged by him with plotting against his life. "This Genre," he says, "secretly enfourmed the Souldiers that were already suborned by La Roquette, that I would deprive them of this great game, in that I did set them dayly on worke, not sending them on every side to discover the Countreys; therefore that it were a good deede to dispatch mee out of the way, and to choose another Captaine in my place." The soldiers listened too well. They made a flag of an old shirt, which they carried with them to the rampart when they went to their work, at the same time wearing their arms; and, pursues Laudonniere, "these gentle Souldiers did the same for none other ende but to have killed mee and my Lieutenant also, if by chance I had given them any hard speeches." About this time, overheating himself, he fell ill, and was confined to his quarters. On this, Genre made advances to the apothecary, urging him to put arsenic into his medicine; but the apothecary shrugged his shoulders. They next devised a scheme to blow him up by hiding a keg of gunpowder under his bed; but here, too, they failed. Hints of Genre's machinations reaching the ears of Laudonniere, the culprit fled to the woods, whence he wrote repentant letters, with full confession, to his commander. Two of the ships meanwhile returned to France, the third, the "Breton," remaining at anchor opposite the fort. The malcontents took the opportunity to send home charges against Laudonniere of peculation, favoritism, and tyranny. On the fourth of September, Captain Bourdet, apparently a private adventurer, had arrived from France with a small vessel. When he returned, about the tenth of November, Laudonniere persuaded him to carry home seven or eight of the malcontent soldiers. Bourdet left some of his sailors in their place. The exchange proved most disastrous. These pirates joined with others whom they had won over, stole Laudonniere's two pinnaces, and set forth on a plundering excursion to the West Indies. They took a small Spanish vessel off the coast of Cuba, but were soon compelled by famine to put into Havana and give themselves up. Here, to make their peace with the authorities, they told all they knew of the position and purposes of their countrymen at Fort Caroline, and thus was forged the thunderbolt soon to be hurled against the wretched little colony. On a Sunday morning, Francois de la Caille came to Laudonniere's quarters, and, in the name of the whole company, requested him to come to the parade ground. He complied, and issuing forth, his inseparable Ottigny at his side, he saw some thirty of his officers, soldiers, and gentlemen volunteers waiting before the building with fixed and sombre countenances. La Caille, advancing, begged leave to read, in behalf of the rest, a paper which he held in his hand. It opened with protestations of duty and obedience; next came complaints of hard work, starvation, and broken promises, and a request that the petitioners should be allowed to embark in the vessel lying in the river, and cruise along the Spanish Main, in order to procure provisions by purchase "or otherwise." In short, the flower of the company wished to turn buccaneers. Laudonniere refused, but assured them that, as soon as the defences of the fort should be completed, a search should be begun in earnest for the Appalachian gold mine, and that meanwhile two small vessels then building on the river should be sent along the coast to barter for provisions with the Indians. With this answer they were forced to content themselves; but the fermentation continued, and the plot thickened. Their spokesman, La Caille, however, seeing whither the affair tended, broke with them, and, except Ottigny, Yasseur, and the brave Swiss Arlac, was the only officer who held to his duty. A severe illness again seized Laudonniere, and confined him to his bed. Improving their advantage, the malcontents gained over nearly all the best soldiers in the fort. The ringleader was one Fourneaux, a man of good birth, but whom Le Moyne calls an avaricious hypocrite. He drew up a paper, to which sixty-six names were signed. La Caille boldly opposed the conspirators, and they resolved to kill him. His room-mate, Le Moyne, who had also refused to sign, received a hint of the design from a friend; upon which he warned La Caille, who escaped to the woods. It was late in the night. Fourneaux, with twenty men armed to the teeth, knocked fiercely at the commandant's door. Forcing an entrance, they wounded a gentleman who opposed them, and crowded around the sick man's bed. Fourneaux, armed with steel cap and cuirass, held his arquebuse to Laudonniere's throat, and demanded leave to go on a cruise among the Spanish islands. The latter kept his presence of mind, and remonstrated with some firmness; on which, with oaths and menaces, they dragged him from his bed, put him in fetters, carried him out to the gate of the fort, placed him in a boat, and rowed him to the ship anchored in the river. Two other gangs at the same time visited Ottigny and Arlac, whom they disarmed, and ordered to keep their rooms till the night following, on pain of death. Smaller parties were busied, meanwhile, in disarming all the loyal soldiers. The fort was completely in the hands of the conspirators. Fourneaux drew up a commission for his meditated West India cruise, which he required Laudonniere to sign. The sick commandant, imprisoned in the ship with one attendant, at first refused; but receiving a message from the mutineers, that, if he did not comply, they would come on board and cut his throat, he at length yielded. The buccaneers now bestirred themselves to finish the two small vessels on which the carpenters had been for some time at work. In a fortnight they were ready for sea, armed and provided with the King's cannon, munitions, and stores. Trenchant, an excellent pilot, was forced to join the party. Their favorite object was the plunder of a certain church on one of the Spanish islands, which they proposed to assail during the midnight mass of Christmas, whereby a triple end would be achieved: first, a rich booty; secondly, the punishment of idolatry; thirdly, vengeance on the arch-enemies of their party and their faith. They set sail on the eighth of December, taunting those who remained, calling them greenhorns, and threatening condign punishment if, on their triumphant return, they should be refused free entrance to the fort. They were no sooner gone than the unfortunate Laudonniere was gladdened in his solitude by the approach of his fast friends Ottigny and Arlac, who conveyed him to the fort and reinstated him. The entire command was reorganized, and new officers appointed. The colony was wofully depleted; but the bad blood had been drawn off, and thenceforth all internal danger was at an end. In finishing the fort, in building two new vessels to replace those of which they had been robbed, and in various intercourse with the tribes far and near, the weeks passed until the twenty-fifth of March, when an Indian came in with the tidings that a vessel was hovering off the coast. Laudonniere sent to reconnoitre. The stranger lay anchored at the mouth of the river. She was a Spanish brigantine, manned by the returning mutineers, starving, downcast, and anxious to make terms. Yet, as their posture seemed not wholly pacific, Landonniere sent down La Caille, with thirty soldiers concealed at the bottom of his little vessel. Seeing only two or three on deck, the pirates allowed her to come alongside; when, to their amazement, they were boarded and taken before they could snatch their arms. Discomfited, woebegone, and drunk, they were landed under a guard. Their story was soon told. Fortune had flattered them at the outset, and on the coast of Cuba they took a brigantine laden with wine and stores. Embarking in her, they next fell in with a caravel, which also they captured. Landing at a village in Jamaica, they plundered and caroused for a week, and had hardly re-embarked when they met a small vessel having on board the governor of the island. She made a desperate fight, but was taken at last, and with her a rich booty. They thought to put the governor to ransom but the astute official deceived them, and, on pretence of negotiating for the sum demanded,—together with "four or six parrots, and as many monkeys of the sort called sanguins, which are very beautiful," and for which his captors had also bargained,—contrived to send instructions to his wife. Hence it happened that at daybreak three armed vessels fell upon them, retook the prize, and captured or killed all the pirates but twenty-six, who, cutting the moorings of their brigantine, fled out to sea. Among these was the ringleader Fourneaux, and also the pilot Trenchant, who, eager to return to Fort Caroline, whence he had been forcibly taken, succeeded during the night in bringing the vessel to the coast of Florida. Great were the wrath and consternation of the pirates when they saw their dilemma; for, having no provisions, they must either starve or seek succor at the fort. They chose the latter course, and bore away for the St. John's. A few casks of Spanish wine yet remained, and nobles and soldiers, fraternizing in the common peril of a halter, joined in a last carouse. As the wine mounted to their heads, in the mirth of drink and desperation, they enacted their own trial. One personated the judge, another the commandant; witnesses were called, with arguments and speeches on either side. "Say what you like," said one of them, after hearing the counsel for the defence; "but if Laudonniere does not hang us all, I will never call him an honest man." They had some hope of getting provisions from the Indians at the month of the river, and then putting to sea again; but this was frustrated by La Caille's sudden attack. A court-martial was called near Fort Caroline, and all were found guilty. Fourneaux and three others were sentenced to be hanged. "Comrades," said one of the condemned, appealing to the soldiers, "will you stand by and see us butchered?" "These," retorted Laudonniere, "are no comrades of mutineers and rebels." At the request of his followers, however, he commuted the sentence to shooting. A file of men, a rattling volley, and the debt of justice was paid. The bodies were hanged on gibbets, at the river's mouth, and order reigned at Fort Caroline. CHAPTER VI. 1564, 1565. FAMINE. WAR. SUCCOR. While the mutiny was brewing, one La Roche Ferriere had been sent out as an agent or emissary among the more distant tribes. Sagacious, bold, and restless, he pushed his way from town to town, and pretended to have reached the mysterious mountains of Appalache. He sent to the fort mantles woven with feathers, quivers covered with choice furs, arrows tipped with gold, wedges of a green stone like beryl or emerald, and other trophies of his wanderings. A gentleman named Grotaut took up the quest, and penetrated to the dominions of Hostaqua, who, it was pretended, could muster three or four thousand warriors, and who promised, with the aid of a hundred arquebusiers, to conquer all the kings of the adjacent mountains, and subject them and their gold mines to the rule of the French. A humbler adventurer was Pierre Gambie, a robust and daring youth, who had been brought up in the household of Coligny, and was now a soldier under Laudonniere. The latter gave him leave to trade with the Indians,—a privilege which he used so well that he grew rich with his traffic, became prime favorite with the chief of the island of Edelano, married his daughter, and, in his absence, reigned in his stead. But, as his sway verged towards despotism, his subjects took offence, and split his head with a hatchet. During the winter, Indians from the neighborhood of Cape Canaveral brought to the fort two Spaniards, wrecked fifteen years before on the southwestern extremity of the peninsula. They were clothed like the Indians,—in other words, were not clothed at all,—and their uncut hair streamed loose down their backs. They brought strange tales of those among whom they had dwelt. They told of the King of Cabs, on whose domains they had been wrecked, a chief mighty in stature and in power. In one of his villages was a pit, six feet deep and as wide as a hogshead, filled with treasure gathered from Spanish wrecks on adjacent reefs and keys. The monarch was a priest too, and a magician, with power over the elements. Each year he withdrew from the public gaze to hold converse in secret with supernal or infernal powers; and each year he sacrificed to his gods one of the Spaniards whom the fortune of the sea had cast upon his shores. The name of the tribe is preserved in that of the river Caboosa. In close league with him was the mighty Oathcaqua, dwelling near Cape Canaveral, who gave his daughter, a maiden of wondrous beauty, in marriage to his great ally. But as the bride with her bridesmaids was journeying towards Calos, escorted by a chosen band, they were assailed by a wild and warlike race, inhabitants of an island called Sarrope, in the midst of a lake, who put the warriors to flight, bore the maidens captive to their watery fastness, espoused them all, and, we are assured, "loved them above all measure." 15 Outina, taught by Arlac the efficacy of the French fire-arms, begged for ten arquebusiers to aid him on a new raid among the villages of Potanou,—again alluring his greedy allies by the assurance, that, thus reinforced, he would conquer for them a free access to the phantom gold mines of Appalache. Ottigny set forth on this fool's errand with thrice the force demanded. Three hundred Thirnagoas and thirty Frenchmen took up their march through the pine barrens. Outina's conjurer was of the number, and had wellnigh ruined the enterprise. Kneeling on Ottigny's shield, that he might not touch the earth, with hideous grimaces, howlings, and contortions, he wrought himself into a prophetic frenzy, and proclaimed to the astounded warriors that to advance farther would be destruction. 16 Outina was for instant retreat, but Ottigny's sarcasms shamed him into a show of courage. Again they moved forward, and soon encountered Potanou with all his host. 17 The arquebuse did its work,—panic, slaughter, and a plentiful harvest of scalps. But no persuasion could induce Outina to follow up his victory. He went home to dance round his trophies, and the French returned disgusted to Fort Caroline. And now, in ample measure, the French began to reap the harvest of their folly. Conquest, gold, and military occupation had alone been their aims. Not a rod of ground had been stirred with the spade. Their stores were consumed, and the expected supplies had not come. The Indians, too, were hostile. Satouriona hated them as allies of his enemies; and his tribesmen, robbed and maltreated by the lawless soldiers, exulted in their miseries. Yet in these, their dark and subtle neighbors, was their only hope. May-day came, the third anniversary of the day when Ribaut and his companions, full of delighted anticipation, had first explored the flowery borders of the St. John's. The contrast was deplorable; for within the precinct of Fort Caroline a homesick, squalid band, dejected and worn, dragged their shrunken limbs about the sun-scorched area, or lay stretched in listless wretchedness under the shade of the barracks. Some were digging roots in the forest, or gathering a kind of sorrel upon the meadows. If they had had any skill in hunting and fishing, the river and the woods would have supplied their needs; but in this point, as in others, they were lamentably unfit for the work they had taken in hand. "Our miserie," says Laudonniere, "was so great that one was found that gathered up all the fish-bones that he could finde, which he dried and beate into powder to make bread thereof. The effects of this hideous famine appeared incontinently among us, for our bones eftsoones beganne to cleave so neere unto the skinne, that the most part of the souldiers had their skinnes pierced thorow with them in many partes of their bodies." Yet, giddy with weakness, they dragged themselves in turn to the top of St. John's Bluff, straining their eyes across the sea to descry the anxiously expected sail. Had Coligny left them to perish? Or had some new tempest of calamity, let loose upon France, drowned the memory of their exile? In vain the watchman on the hill surveyed the solitude of waters. A deep dejection fell upon them,—a dejection that would have sunk to despair could their eyes have pierced the future. The Indians had left the neighborhood, but from time to time brought in meagre supplies of fish, which they sold to the famished soldiers at exorbitant prices. Lest they should pay the penalty of their extortion, they would not enter the fort, but lay in their canoes in the river, beyond gunshot, waiting for their customers to come out to them. "Oftentimes," says Laudonniere, "our poor soldiers were constrained to give away the very shirts from their backs to get one fish. If at any time they shewed unto the savages the excessive price which they tooke, these villaines would answere them roughly and churlishly: If thou make so great account of thy marchandise, eat it, and we will eat our fish: then fell they out a laughing, and mocked us with open throat." The spring wore away, and no relief appeared. One thought now engrossed the colonists, that of return to France. Vasseur's ship, the "Breton," still remained in the river, and they had also the Spanish brigantine brought by the mutineers. But these vessels were insufficient, and they prepared to build a new one. The energy of reviving hope lent new life to their exhausted frames. Some gathered pitch in the pine forests; some made charcoal; some cut and sawed timber. The maize began to ripen, and this brought some relief; but the Indians, exasperated and greedy, sold it with reluctance, and murdered two half-famished Frenchmen who gathered a handful in the fields. The colonists applied to Outina, who owed them two victories. The result was a churlish message and a niggardly supply of corn, coupled with an invitation to aid him against an insurgent chief, one Astina, the plunder of whose villages would yield an ample supply. The offer was accepted. Ottigny and Vasseur set out, but were grossly deceived, led against a different enemy, and sent back empty-handed and half-starved. They returned to the fort, in the words of Laudonniere, "angry and pricked deepely to the quicke for being so mocked," and, joined by all their comrades, fiercely demanded to be led against Outina, to seize him, punish his insolence, and extort from his fears the supplies which could not be looked for from his gratitude. The commandant was forced to comply. Those who could bear the weight of their armor put it on, embarked, to the number of fifty, in two barges, and sailed up the river under Laudonniere himself. Having reached Outina's landing, they marched inland, entered his village, surrounded his mud-plastered palace, seized him amid the yells and howlings of his subjects, and led him prisoner to their boats. Here, anchored in mid-stream, they demanded a supply of corn and beans as the price of his ransom. The alarm spread. Excited warriors, bedaubed with red, came thronging from all his villages. The forest along the shore was full of them; and the wife of the chief, followed by all the women of the place, uttered moans and outcries from the strand. Yet no ransom was offered, since, reasoning from their own instincts, they never doubted that, after the price was paid, the captive would be put to death. Laudonniere waited two days, and then descended the river with his prisoner. In a rude chamber of Fort Caroline the sentinel stood his guard, pike in hand, while before him crouched the captive chief, mute, impassive, and brooding on his woes. His old enemy, Satouriona, keen as a hound on the scent of prey, tried, by great offers, to bribe Laudonniere to give Outina into his hands; but the French captain refused, treated his prisoner kindly, and assured him of immediate freedom on payment of the ransom. Meanwhile his captivity was bringing grievous affliction on his tribesmen; for, despairing of his return, they mustered for the election of a new chief. Party strife ran high. Some were for a boy, his son, and some for an ambitious kinsman. Outina chafed in his prison on learning these dissentions; and, eager to convince his over-hasty subjects that their chief still lived, he was so profuse of promises that he was again embarked and carried up the river. At no great distance from Lake George, a small affluent of the St. John's gave access by water to a point within six French leagues of Outina's principal town. The two barges, crowded with soldiers, and bearing also the captive Outina, rowed up this little stream. Indians awaited them at the landing, with gifts of bread, beans, and fish, and piteous prayers for their chief, upon whose liberation they promised an ample supply of corn. As they were deaf to all other terms, Laudonniere yielded, released his prisoner, and received in his place two hostages, who were fast bound in the boats. Ottigny and Arlac, with a strong detachment of arquebusiers, went to receive the promised supplies, for which, from the first, full payment in merchandise had been offered. On their arrival at the village, they filed into the great central lodge, within whose dusky precincts were gathered the magnates of the tribe. Council-chamber, forum, banquet-hall, and dancing-hall all in one, the spacious structure could hold half the population. Here the French made their abode. With armor buckled, and arquebuse matches lighted, they watched with anxious eyes the strange, dim scene, half revealed by the daylight that streamed down through the hole at the apex of the roof. Tall, dark forms stalked to and fro, with quivers at their backs, and bows and arrows in their hands, while groups, crouched in the shadow beyond, eyed the hated guests with inscrutable visages, and malignant, sidelong eyes. Corn came in slowly, but warriors mustered fast. The village without was full of them. The French officers grew anxious, and urged the chiefs to greater alacrity in collecting the promised ransom. The answer boded no good: "Our women are afraid when they see the matches of your guns burning. Put them out, and they will bring the corn faster." Outina was nowhere to be seen. At length they learned that he was in one of the small huts adjacent. Several of the officers went to him, complaining of the slow payment of his ransom. The kindness of his captors at Fort Caroline seemed to have won his heart. He replied, that such was the rage of his subjects that he could no longer control them; that the French were in danger; and that he had seen arrows stuck in the ground by the side of the path, in token that war was declared. The peril was thickening hourly, and Ottigny resolved to regain the boats while there was yet time. On the twenty-seventh of July, at nine in the morning, he set his men in order. Each shouldering a sack of corn, they marched through the rows of huts that surrounded the great lodge, and out betwixt the overlapping extremities of the palisade that encircled the town. Before them stretched a wide avenue, three or four hundred paces long, flanked by a natural growth of trees,—one of those curious monuments of native industry to which allusion has already been made. Here Ottigny halted and formed his line of march. Arlac, with eight matchlock men, was sent in advance, and flanking parties were thrown into the woods on either side. Ottigny told his soldiers that, if the Indians meant to attack them, they were probably in ambush at the other end of the avenue. He was right. As Arlac's party reached the spot, the whole pack gave tongue at once. The war-whoop rose, and a tempest of stone-headed arrows clattered against the breast-plates of the French, or, scorching like fire, tore through their unprotected limbs. They stood firm, and sent back their shot so steadily that several of the assailants were laid dead, and the rest, two or three hundred in number, gave way as Ottigny came up with his men. They moved on for a quarter of a mile through a country, as it seems, comparatively open, when again the war-cry pealed in front, and three hundred savages bounded to the assault. Their whoops were echoed from the rear. It was the party whom Arlac had just repulsed, and who, leaping and showering their arrows, were rushing on again with a ferocity restrained only by their lack of courage. There was no panic among the French. The men threw down their bags of corn, and took to their weapons. They blew their matches, and, under two excellent officers, stood well to their work. The Indians, on their part, showed good discipline after their fashion, and were perfectly under the control of their chiefs. With cries that imitated the yell of owls, the scream of cougars, and the howl of wolves, they ran up in successive bands, let fly their arrows, and instantly fell back, giving place to others. At the sight of the leveled arquebuse, they dropped flat on the ground. Whenever the French charged upon them, sword in hand, they fled through the woods like foxes; and whenever the march was resumed, the arrows were showering again upon the flanks and rear of the retiring band. As they fell, the soldiers picked them up and broke them. Thus, beset with swarming savages, the handful of Frenchmen pushed slowly onward, fighting as they went. The Indians gradually drew off, and the forest was silent again. Two of the French had been killed and twenty-two wounded, several so severely that they were supported to the boats with the utmost difficulty. Of the corn, two bags only had been brought off. Famine and desperation now reigned at Fort Caroline. The Indians had killed two of the carpenters; hence long delay in the finishing of the new ship. They would not wait, but resolved to put to sea in the "Breton" and the brigantine. The problem was to find food for the voyage; for now, in their extremity, they roasted and ate snakes, a delicacy in which the neighborhood abounded. On the third of August, Laudonniere, perturbed and oppressed, was walking on the hill, when, looking seaward, he saw a sight that sent a thrill through his exhausted frame. A great ship was standing towards the river's mouth. Then another came in sight, and another, and another. He despatched a messenger with the tidings to the fort below. The languid forms of his sick and despairing men rose and danced for joy, and voices shrill with weakness joined in wild laughter and acclamation, insomuch, he says, "that one would have thought them to bee out of their wittes." A doubt soon mingled with their joy. Who were the strangers? Were they the friends so long hoped for in vain? or were they Spaniards, their dreaded enemies? They were neither. The foremost ship was a stately one, of seven hundred tons, a great burden at that day. She was named the "Jesus;" and with her were three smaller vessels, the "Solomon," the "Tiger," and the "Swallow." Their commander was "a right worshipful and valiant knight,"—for so the record styles him,—a pious man and a prudent, to judge him by the orders he gave his crew when, ten months before, he sailed out of Plymouth: "Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keepe good companie." Nor were the crew unworthy the graces of their chief; for the devout chronicler of the voyage ascribes their deliverance from the perils of the sea to "the Almightie God, who never suffereth his Elect to perish." Who then were they, this chosen band, serenely conscious of a special Providential care? They were the pioneers of that detested traffic destined to inoculate with its infection nations yet unborn, the parent of discord and death, filling half a continent with the tramp of armies and the clash of fratricidal swords. Their chief was Sir John Hawkins, father of the English slave-trade. He had been to the coast of Guinea, where he bought and kidnapped a cargo of slaves. These he had sold to the jealous Spaniards of Hispaniola, forcing them, with sword, matchlock, and culverin, to grant him free trade, and then to sign testimonials that he had borne himself as became a peaceful merchant. Prospering greatly by this summary commerce, but distressed by the want of water, he had put into the River of May to obtain a supply. Among the rugged heroes of the British marine, Sir John stood in the front rank, and along with Drake, his relative, is extolled as "a man borne for the honour of the English name.... Neither did the West of England yeeld such an Indian Neptunian paire as were these two Ocean peeres, Hawkins and Drake." So writes the old chronicler, Purchas, and all England was of his thinking. A hardy and skilful seaman, a bold fighter, a loyal friend and a stern enemy, overbearing towards equals, but kind, in his bluff way, to those beneath him, rude in speech, somewhat crafty withal and avaricious, he buffeted his way to riches and fame, and died at last full of years and honor. As for the abject humanity stowed between the reeking decks of the ship "Jesus," they were merely in his eyes so many black cattle tethered for the market. 18 Hawkins came up the river in a pinnace, and landed at Fort Caroline, accompanied, says Laudonniere, "with gentlemen honorably apparelled, yet unarmed." Between the Huguenots and the English Puritans there was a double tie of sympathy. Both hated priests, and both hated Spaniards. Wakening from their apathetic misery, the starveling garrison hailed him as a deliverer. Yet Hawkins secretly rejoiced when he learned their purpose to abandon Florida; for although, not to tempt his cupidity, they hid from him the secret of their Appalachian gold mine, he coveted for his royal mistress the possession of this rich domain. He shook his head, however, when he saw the vessels in which they proposed to embark, and offered them all a free passage to France in his own ships. This, from obvious motives of honor and prudence, Laudonniere declined, upon which Hawkins offered to lend or sell to him one of his smaller vessels. Laudonniere hesitated, and hereupon arose a great clamor. A mob of soldiers and artisans beset his chamber, threatening loudly to desert him, and take passage with Hawkins, unless the offer were accepted. The commandant accordingly resolved to buy the vessel. The generous slaver, whose reputed avarice nowhere appears in the transaction, desired him to set his own price; and, in place of money, took the cannon of the fort, with other articles now useless to their late owners. He sent them, too, a gift of wine and biscuit, and supplied them with provisions for the voyage, receiving in payment Laudonniere's note; "for which," adds the latter, "untill this present I am indebted to him." With a friendly leave taking, he returned to his ships and stood out to sea, leaving golden opinions among the grateful inmates of Fort Caroline. Before the English top-sails had sunk beneath the horizon, the colonists bestirred themselves to depart. In a few days their preparations were made. They waited only for a fair wind. It was long in coming, and meanwhile their troubled fortunes assumed a new phase. On the twenty eighth of August, the two captains Vasseur and Verdier came in with tidings of an approaching squadron. Again the fort was wild with excitement. Friends or foes, French or Spaniards, succor or death,—betwixt these were their hopes and fears divided. On the following morning, they saw seven barges rowing up the river, bristling with weapons, and crowded with men in armor. The sentries on the bluff challenged, and received no answer. One of them fired at the advancing boats, and still there was no response. Laudonniere was almost defenceless. He had given his heavier cannon to Hawkins, and only two field-pieces were left. They were levelled at the foremost boats, and the word to fire was about to be given, when a voice from among the strangers called out that they were French, commanded by Jean Ribaut. At the eleventh hour, the long looked for succors were come. Ribaut had been commissioned to sail with seven ships for Florida. A disorderly concourse of disbanded soldiers, mixed with artisans and their families, and young nobles weary of a two years' peace, were mustered at the port of Dieppe, and embarked, to the number of three hundred men, bearing with them all things thought necessary to a prosperous colony. No longer in dread of the Spaniards, the colonists saluted the new-comers with the cannon by which a moment before they had hoped to blow them out of the water. Laudonniere issued from his stronghold to welcome them, and regaled them with what cheer he could. Ribaut was present, conspicuous by his long beard, an astonishment to the Indians; and here, too, were officers, old friends of Laudonniere. Why, then, had they approached in the attitude of enemies? The mystery was soon explained; for they expressed to the commandant their pleasure at finding that the charges made against him had proved false. He begged to know more; on which Ribaut, taking him aside, told him that the returning ships had brought home letters filled with accusations of arrogance, tyranny, cruelty, and a purpose of establishing an independent command,—accusations which he now saw to be unfounded, but which had been the occasion of his unusual and startling precaution. He gave him, too, a letter from Admiral Coligny. In brief but courteous terms, it required him to resign his command, and requested his return to France to clear his name from the imputations cast upon it. Ribaut warmly urged him to remain; but Laudonniere declined his friendly proposals. Worn in body and mind, mortified and wounded, he soon fell ill again. A peasant woman attended him, who was brought over, he says, to nurse the sick and take charge of the poultry, and of whom Le Moyne also speaks as a servant, but who had been made the occasion of additional charges against him, most offensive to the austere Admiral. Stores were landed, tents were pitched, women and children were sent on shore, feathered Indians mingled in the throng, and the borders of the River of May swarmed with busy life. "But, lo, how oftentimes misfortune doth search and pursue us, even then when we thinke to be at rest!" exclaims the unhappy Laudonniere. Amidst the light and cheer of renovated hope, a cloud of blackest omen was gathering in the east. At half-past eleven on the night of Tuesday, the fourth of September, the crew of Ribaut's flag-ship, anchored on the still sea outside the bar, saw a huge hulk, grim with the throats of cannon, drifting towards them through the gloom; and from its stern rolled on the sluggish air the portentous banner of Spain. CHAPTER VII. 1565. MENENDEZ. The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of Spain,—sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man. Day was breaking on the world. Light, hope, and freedom pierced with vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay and death. Kindled with new life, the nations gave birth to a progeny of heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine wall the waves of innovation beat in vain. 19 In every country of Europe the party of freedom and reform was the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was the Spanish party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help. Above all, it was so in France; and, while within her bounds there was for a time some semblance of peace, the national and religious rage burst forth on a wilder theatre. Thither it is for us to follow it, where, on the shores of Florida, the Spaniard and the Frenchman, the bigot and the Huguenot, met in the grapple of death. In a corridor of his palace, Philip the Second was met by a man who had long stood waiting his approach, and who with proud reverence placed a petition in the hand of the pale and sombre King. The petitioner was Pedro Menendez de Aviles, one of the ablest and most distinguished officers of the Spanish marine. He was born of an ancient Asturian family. His boyhood had been wayward, ungovernable, and fierce. He ran off at eight years of age, and when, after a search of six months, he was found and brought back, he ran off again. This time he was more successful, escaping on board a fleet bound against the Barbary corsairs, where his precocious appetite for blood and blows had reasonable contentment. A few years later, he found means to build a small vessel, in which he cruised against the corsairs and the French, and, though still hardly more than a boy, displayed a singular address and daring. The wonders of the New World now seized his imagination. He made a voyage thither, and the ships under his charge came back freighted with wealth. The war with France was then at its height. As captain-general of the fleet, he was sent with troops to Flanders; and to their prompt arrival was due, it is said, the victory of St. Quentin. Two years later, he commanded the luckless armada which bore back Philip to his native shore. On the way, the King narrowly escaped drowning in a storm off the port of Laredo. This mischance, or his own violence and insubordination, wrought to the prejudice of Menendez. He complained that his services were ill repaid. Philip lent him a favoring ear, and despatched him to the Indies as general of the fleet and army. Here he found means to amass vast riches; and, in 1561, on his return to Spain, charges were brought against him of a nature which his too friendly biographer does not explain. The Council of the Indies arrested him. He was imprisoned and sentenced to a heavy fine; but, gaining his release, hastened to court to throw himself on the royal clemency. His petition was most graciously received. Philip restored his command, but remitted only half his fine, a strong presumption of his guilt. Menendez kissed the royal hand; he had another petition in reserve. His son had been wrecked near the Bermudas, and he would fain go thither to find tidings of his fate. The pious King bade him trust in God, and promised that he should be despatched without delay to the Bermudas and to Florida, with a commission to make an exact survey of the neighboring seas for the profit of future voyagers; but Menendez was not content with such an errand. He knew, he said, nothing of greater moment to his Majesty than the conquest and settlement of Florida. The climate was healthful, the soil fertile; and, worldly advantages aside, it was peopled by a race sunk in the thickest shades of infidelity. "Such grief," he pursued, "seizes me, when I behold this multitude of wretched Indians, that I should choose the conquest and settling of Florida above all commands, offices, and dignities which your Majesty might bestow." Those who take this for hypocrisy do not know the Spaniard of the sixteenth century. The King was edified by his zeal. An enterprise of such spiritual and temporal promise was not to be slighted, and Menendez was empowered to conquer and convert Florida at his own cost. The conquest was to be effected within three years. Menendez was to take with him five hundred men, and supply them with five hundred slaves, besides horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs. Villages were to be built, with forts to defend them, and sixteen ecclesiastics, of whom four should be Jesuits, were to form the nucleus of a Floridan church. The King, on his part, granted Menendez free trade with Hispaniola, Porto Rico, Cuba, and Spain, the office of Adelantado of Florida for life, with the right of naming his successor, and large emoluments to be drawn from the expected conquest. The compact struck, Menendez hastened to his native Asturias to raise money among his relatives. Scarcely was he gone, when tidings reached Madrid that Florida was already occupied by a colony of French Protestants, and that a reinforcement, under Ribaut, was on the point of sailing thither. A French historian of high authority declares that these advices came from the Catholic party at the French court, in whom every instinct of patriotism was lost in their hatred of Coligny and the Huguenots. Of this there can be little doubt, though information also came about this time from the buccaneer Frenchmen captured in the West Indies. Foreigners had invaded the territory of Spain. The trespassers, too, were heretics, foes of God, and liegemen of the Devil. Their doom was fixed. But how would France endure an assault, in time of peace, on subjects who had gone forth on an enterprise sanctioned by the Crown, and undertaken in its name and under its commission? The throne of France, in which the corruption of the nation seemed gathered to a head, was trembling between the two parties of the Catholics and the Huguenots, whose chiefs aimed at royalty. Flattering both, caressing both, playing one against the other, and betraying both, Catherine de Medicis, by a thousand crafty arts and expedients of the moment, sought to retain the crown on the head of her weak and vicious son. Of late her crooked policy had led her towards the Catholic party, in other words the party of Spain; and she had already given ear to the savage Duke of Alva, urging her to the course which, seven years later, led to the carnage of St. Bartholomew. In short, the Spanish policy was in the ascendant, and no thought of the national interest or honor could restrain that basest of courts from abandoning by hundreds to the national enemy those whom it was itself meditating to immolate by thousands. It might protest for form's sake, or to quiet public clamor; but Philip of Spain well knew that it would end in patient submission. Menendez was summoned back in haste to the Spanish court. His force must be strengthened. Three hundred and ninety-four men were added at the royal charge, and a corresponding number of transport and supply ships. It was a holy war, a crusade, and as such was preached by priest and monk along the western coasts of Spain. All the Biscayan ports flamed with zeal, and adventurers crowded to enroll themselves; since to plunder heretics is good for the soul as well as the purse, and broil and massacre have double attraction when promoted into a means of salvation. It was a fervor, deep and hot, but not of celestial kindling; nor yet that buoyant and inspiring zeal which, when the Middle Age was in its youth and prime, glowed in the souls of Tancred, Godfrey, and St. Louis, and which, when its day was long since past, could still find its home in the great heart of Columbus. A darker spirit urged the new crusade,—born not of hope, but of fear, slavish in its nature, the creature and the tool of despotism; for the typical Spaniard of the sixteenth century was not in strictness a fanatic, he was bigotry incarnate. Heresy was a plague-spot, an ulcer to be eradicated with fire and the knife, and this foul abomination was infecting the shores which the Vicegerent of Christ had given to the King of Spain, and which the Most Catholic King had given to the Adelantado. Thus would countless heathen tribes be doomed to an eternity of flame, and the Prince of Darkness hold his ancient sway unbroken; and for the Adelantado himself, the vast outlays, the vast debts of his bold Floridan venture would be all in vain, and his fortunes be wrecked past redemption through these tools of Satan. As a Catholic, as a Spaniard, and as an adventurer, his course was clear. The work assigned him was prodigious. He was invested with power almost absolute, not merely over the peninsula which now retains the name of Florida, but over all North America, from Labrador to Mexico; for this was the Florida of the old Spanish geographers, and the Florida designated in the commission of Menendez. It was a continent which he was to conquer and occupy out of his own purse. The impoverished King contracted with his daring and ambitious subject to win and hold for him the territory of the future United States and British Provinces. His plan, as afterwards exposed at length in his letters to Philip the Second, was, first, to plant a garrison at Port Royal, and next to fortify strongly on Chesapeake Bay, called by him St. Mary's. He believed that adjoining this bay was an arm of the sea, running northward and eastward, and communicating with the Gulf of St. Lawrence, thus making New England, with adjacent districts, an island. His proposed fort on the Chesapeake, securing access by this imaginary passage, to the seas of Newfoundland, would enable the Spaniards to command the fisheries, on which both the French and the English had long encroached, to the great prejudice of Spanish rights. Doubtless, too, these inland waters gave access to the South Sea, and their occupation was necessary to prevent the French from penetrating thither; for that ambitious people, since the time of Cartier, had never abandoned their schemes of seizing this portion of the dominions of the King of Spain. Five hundred soldiers and one hundred sailors must, he urges, take possession, without delay, of Port Royal and the Chesapeake. 20 Preparation for his enterprise was pushed with furious energy. His whole force, when the several squadrons were united, amounted to two thousand six hundred and forty-six persons, in thirty-four vessels, one of which, the San Pelayo, bearing Menendez himself, was of nine hundred and ninety-six tons burden, and is described as one of the finest ships afloat. 21 There were twelve Franciscans and eight Jesuits, besides other ecclesiastics; and many knights of Galicia, Biscay, and the Asturias took part in the expedition. With a slight exception, the whole was at the Adelantado's charge. Within the first fourteen months, according to his admirer, Barcia, the adventure cost him a million ducats. 22 Before the close of the year, Sancho do Arciniega was commissioned to join Menendez with an additional force of fifteen hundred men. Red-hot with a determined purpose, the Adelantado would brook no delay. To him, says the chronicler, every day seemed a year. He was eager to anticipate Ribaut, of whose designs and whose force he seems to have been informed to the minutest particular, but whom he hoped to thwart and ruin by gaining Fort Caroline before him. With eleven ships, therefore, he sailed from Cadiz, on the twenty-ninth of June, 1565, leaving the smaller vessels of his fleet to follow with what speed they might. He touched first at the Canaries, and on the eighth of July left them, steering for Dominica. A minute account of the voyage has come down to us, written by Mendoza, chaplain of the expedition,—a somewhat dull and illiterate person, who busily jots down the incidents of each passing day, and is constantly betraying, with a certain awkward simplicity, how the cares of this world and of the next jostle each other in his thoughts. On Friday, the twentieth of July, a storm fell upon them with appalling fury. The pilots lost their wits, and the sailors gave themselves up to their terrors. Throughout the night, they beset Mendoza for confession and absolution, a boon not easily granted, for the seas swept the crowded decks with cataracts of foam, and the shriekings of the gale in the rigging overpowered the exhortations of the half-drowned priest. Cannon, cables, spars, water-casks, were thrown overboard, and the chests of the sailors would have followed, had not the latter, in spite of their fright, raised such a howl of remonstrance that the order was revoked. At length day dawned, Plunging, reeling, half under water, quivering with the shock of the seas, whose mountain ridges rolled down upon her before the gale, the ship lay in deadly peril from Friday till Monday noon. Then the storm abated; the sun broke out; and again she held her course. They reached Dominica on Sunday, the fifth of August. The chaplain tells us how he went on shore to refresh himself; how, while his Italian servant washed his linen at a brook, he strolled along the beach and picked up shells; and how he was scared, first, by a prodigious turtle, and next by a vision of the cannibal natives, which caused his prompt retreat to the boats. On the tenth, they anchored in the harbor of Porto Rico, where they found two ships of their squadron, from which they had parted in the storm. One of them was the "San Pelayo," with Menendez on board. Mendoza informs us, that in the evening the officers came on board the ship to which he was attached, when he, the chaplain, regaled them with sweetmeats, and that Menendez invited him not only to supper that night, but to dinner the next day, "for the which I thanked him, as reason was," says the gratified churchman. Here thirty men deserted, and three priests also ran off, of which Mendoza bitterly complains, as increasing his own work. The motives of the clerical truants may perhaps be inferred from a worldly temptation to which the chaplain himself was subjected. "I was offered the service of a chapel where I should have got a peso for every mass I said, the whole year round; but I did not accept it, for fear that what I hear said of the other three would be said of me. Besides, it is not a place where one can hope for any great advancement, and I wished to try whether, in refusing a benefice for the love of the Lord, He will not repay me with some other stroke of fortune before the end of the voyage; for it is my aim to serve God and His blessed Mother." The original design had been to rendezvous at Havana, but with the Adelantado the advantages of despatch outweighed every other consideration. He resolved to push directly for Florida. Five of his scattered ships had by this time rejoined company, comprising, exclusive of officers, a force of about five hundred soldiers, two hundred sailors, and one hundred colonists. Bearing northward, he advanced by an unknown and dangerous course along the coast of Hayti and through the intricate passes of the Bahamas. On the night of the twenty-sixth, the "San Pelayo" struck three times on the shoals; "but," says the chaplain, "inasmuch as our enterprise was undertaken for the sake of Christ and His blessed Mother, two heavy seas struck her abaft, and set her afloat again." At length the ships lay becalmed in the Bahama Channel, slumbering on the glassy sea, torpid with the heats of a West Indian August. Menendez called a council of the commanders. There was doubt and indecision. Perhaps Ribaut had already reached the French fort, and then to attack the united force would be an act of desperation. Far better to await their lagging comrades. But the Adelantado was of another mind; and, even had his enemy arrived, ho was resolved that he should have no time to fortify himself. "It is God's will," he said, "that our victory should be due, not to our numbers, but to His all-powerful aid. Therefore has He stricken us with tempests, and scattered our ships." And he gave his voice for instant advance. There was much dispute; even the chaplain remonstrated; but nothing could bend the iron will of Menendez. Nor was a sign of celestial approval wanting. At nine in the evening, a great meteor burst forth in mid-heaven, and, blazing like the sun, rolled westward towards the coast of Florida. The fainting spirits of the crusaders were revived. Diligent preparation was begun. Prayers and masses were said; and, that the temporal arm might not fail, the men were daily practised on deck in shooting at marks, in order, says the chronicle, that the recruits might learn not to be afraid of their guns. The dead calm continued. "We were all very tired," says the chaplain, "and I above all, with praying to God for a fair wind. To-day, at about two in the afternoon, He took pity on us, and sent us a breeze." Before night they saw land,—the faint line of forest, traced along the watery horizon, that marked the coast of Florida. But where, in all this vast monotony, was the lurking-place of the French? Menendez anchored, and sent a captain with twenty men ashore, who presently found a band of Indians, and gained from them the needed information. He stood northward, till, on the afternoon of Tuesday, the fourth of September, he descried four ships anchored near the mouth of a river. It was the river St. John's, and the ships were four of Ribaut's squadron. The prey was in sight. The Spaniards prepared for battle, and bore down upon the Lutherans; for, with them, all Protestants alike were branded with the name of the arch-heretic. Slowly, before the faint breeze, the ships glided on their way; but while, excited and impatient, the fierce crews watched the decreasing space, and when they were still three leagues from their prize, the air ceased to stir, the sails flapped against the mast, a black cloud with thunder rose above the coast, and the warm rain of the South descended on the breathless sea. It was dark before the wind stirred again and the ships resumed their course. At half-past eleven they reached the French. The "San Pelayo" slowly moved to windward of Ribaut's flag-ship, the "Trinity," and anchored very near her. The other ships took similar stations. While these preparations were making, a work of two hours, the men labored in silence, and the French, thronging their gangways, looked on in equal silence. "Never, since I came into the world," writes the chaplain, "did I know such a stillness." It was broken at length by a trumpet from the deck of the "San Pelayo." A French trumpet answered. Then Menendez, "with much courtesy," says his Spanish eulogist, inquired, "Gentlemen, whence does this fleet come?" "From France," was the reply. "What are you doing here?" pursued the Adelantado. "Bringing soldiers and supplies for a fort which the King of France has in this country, and for many others which he soon will have." "Are you Catholics or Lutherans?" Many voices cried out together, "Lutherans, of the new religion." Then, in their turn, they demanded who Menendez was, and whence he came. He answered: "I am Pedro Menendez, General of the fleet of the King of Spain, Don Philip the Second, who have come to this country to hang and behead all Lutherans whom I shall find by land or sea, according to instructions from my King, so precise that I have power to pardon none; and these commands I shall fulfil, as you will see. At daybreak I shall board your ships, and if I find there any Catholic, he shall be well treated; but every heretic shall die." The French with one voice raised a cry of wrath and defiance. "If you are a brave man, don't wait till day. Come on now, and see what you will get!" And they assailed the Adelantado with a shower of scoffs and insults. Menendez broke into a rage, and gave the order to board. The men slipped the cables, and the sullen black hulk of the "San Pelayo" drifted down upon the "Trinity." The French did not make good their defiance. Indeed, they were incapable of resistance, Ribaut with his soldiers being ashore at Fort Caroline. They cut their cables, left their anchors, made sail, and fled. The Spaniards fired, the French replied. The other Spanish ships had imitated the movement of the "San Pelayo;" "but," writes the chaplain, Mendoza, "these devils are such adroit sailors, and maneuvred so well, that we did not catch one of them." Pursuers and pursued ran out to sea, firing useless volleys at each other. In the morning Menendez gave over the chase, turned, and, with the "San Pelayo" alone, ran back for the St. John's. But here a welcome was prepared for him. He saw bands of armed men drawn up on the beach, and the smaller vessels of Ribaut's squadron, which had crossed the bar several days before, anchored behind it to oppose his landing. He would not venture an attack, but, steering southward, sailed along the coast till he came to an inlet which he named San Augustine, the same which Laudonniere had named the River of Dolphins. Here he found three of his ships already debarking their troops, guns, and stores. Two officers, Patiflo and Vicente, had taken possession of the dwelling of the Indian chief Seloy, a huge barn-like structure, strongly framed of entire trunks of trees, and thatched with palmetto leaves. Around it they were throwing up entrenchments of fascines and sand, and gangs of negroes were toiling at the work. Such was the birth of St. Augustine, the oldest town of the United States. On the eighth, Menendez took formal possession of his domain. Cannon were fired, trumpets sounded, and banners displayed, as he landed in state at the head of his officers and nobles. Mendoza, crucifix in hand, came to meet him, chanting Te Deum laudamus, while the Adelantado and all his company, kneeling, kissed the crucifix, and the assembled Indians gazed in silent wonder. Meanwhile the tenants of Fort Caroline were not idle. Two or three soldiers, strolling along the beach in the afternoon, had first seen the Spanish ships, and hastily summoned Ribaut. He came down to the mouth of the river, followed by an anxious and excited crowd; but, as they strained their eyes through the darkness, they could see nothing but the flashes of the distant guns. At length the returning light showed, far out at sea, the Adelantado in hot chase of their flying comrades. Pursuers and pursued were soon out of sight. The drums beat to arms. After many hours of suspense, the "San Pelayo" reappeared, hovering about the mouth of the river, then bearing away towards the south. More anxious hours ensued, when three other sail came in sight, and they recognized three of their own returning ships. Communication was opened, a boat's crew landed, and they learned from Cosette, one of the French captains, that, confiding in the speed of his ship, he had followed the Spaniards to St. Augustine, reconnoitred their position, and seen them land their negroes and intrench themselves. Laudonniere lay sick in bed in his chamber at Fort Caroline when Ribaut entered, and with him La Grange, Sainte Marie, Ottigny, Yonville, and other officers. At the bedside of the displaced commandant, they held their council of war. Three plans were proposed: first, to remain where they were and fortify themselves; next, to push overland for St. Augustine and attack the invaders in their intrenchments; and, finally, to embark and assail them by sea. The first plan would leave their ships a prey to the Spaniards; and so, too, in all likelihood, would the second, besides the uncertainties of an overland march through an unknown wilderness. By sea, the distance was short and the route explored. By a sudden blow they could capture or destroy the Spanish ships, and master the troops on shore before reinforcements could arrive, and before they had time to complete their defences. Such were the views of Ribaut, with which, not unnaturally, Laudonniere finds fault, and Le Moyne echoes the censures of his chief. And yet the plan seems as well conceived as it was bold, lacking nothing but success. The Spaniards, stricken with terror, owed their safety to the elements, or, as they say, to the special interposition of the Holy Virgin. Menendez was a leader fit to stand with Cortes and Pizarro; but he was matched with a man as cool, skilful, prompt, and daring as himself. The traces that have come down to us indicate in Ribaut one far above the common stamp,—"a distinguished man, of many high qualities," as even the fault-finding Le Moyne calls him; devout after the best spirit of the Reform; and with a human heart under his steel breastplate. La Grange and other officers took part with Landonniere, and opposed the plan of an attack by sea; but Ribaut's conviction was unshaken, and the order was given. All his own soldiers fit for duty embarked in haste, and with them went La Caille, Arlac, and, as it seems, Ottigny, with the best of Laudonniere's men. Even Le Moyne, though wounded in the fight with Outina's warriors, went on board to bear his part in the fray, and would have sailed with the rest had not Ottigny, seeing his disabled condition, ordered him back to the fort. On the tenth, the ships, crowded with troops, set sail. Ribaut was gone, and with him the bone and sinew of the colony. The miserable remnant watched his receding sails with dreary foreboding,—a fore-boding which seemed but too just, when, on the next day, a storm, more violent than the Indians had ever known, howled through the forest and lashed the ocean into fury. Most forlorn was the plight of these exiles, left, it might be, the prey of a band of ferocious bigots more terrible than the fiercest hordes of the wilderness; and when night closed on the stormy river and the gloomy waste of pines, what dreams of terror may not have haunted the helpless women who crouched under the hovels of Fort Caroline! The fort was in a ruinous state, with the palisade on the water side broken down, and three breaches in the rampart. In the driving rain, urged by the sick Laudonniere, the men, bedrenched and disheartened, labored as they could to strengthen their defences. Their muster-roll shows but a beggarly array. "Now," says Laudonniere, "let them which have bene bold to say that I had men ynough left me, so that I had meanes to defend my selfe, give care a little now vnto mee, and if they have eyes in their heads, let them see what men I had." Of Ribaut's followers left at the fort, only nine or ten had weapons, while only two or three knew how to use them. Four of them were boys, who kept Ribaut's dogs, and another was his cook. Besides these, he had left a brewer, an old crossbow-maker, two shoemakers, a player on the spinet, four valets, a carpenter of threescore,—Challeux, no doubt, who has left us the story of his woes,—with a crowd of women, children, and eighty-six camp-followers. To these were added the remnant of Laudonniere's men, of whom seventeen could bear arms, the rest being sick or disabled by wounds received in the fight with Outina. Laudonniere divided his force, such as it was, into two watches, over which he placed two officers, Saint Cler and La Vigne, gave them lanterns for going the rounds, and an hour-glass for setting the time; while he himself, giddy with weakness and fever, was every night at the guard-room. It was the night of the nineteenth of September, the season of tempests; floods of rain drenched the sentries on the rampart, and, as day dawned on the dripping barracks and deluged parade, the storm increased in violence. What enemy could venture out on such a night? La Vigne, who had the watch, took pity on the sentries and on himself, dismissed them, and went to his quarters. He little knew what human energies, urged by ambition, avarice, bigotry, and desperation, will dare and do. To return to the Spaniards at St. Augustine. On the morning of the eleventh, the crew of one of their smaller vessels, lying outside the bar, with Menendez himself on board, saw through the twilight of early dawn two of Ribaut's ships close upon them. Not a breath of air was stirring. There was no escape, and the Spaniards fell on their knees in supplication to Our Lady of Utrera, explaining to her that the heretics were upon them, and begging her to send them a little wind. "Forthwith," says Mendoza, "one would have said that Our Lady herself came down upon the vessel." A wind sprang up, and the Spaniards found refuge behind the bar. The returning day showed to their astonished eyes all the ships of Ribaut, their decks black with men, hovering off the entrance of the port; but Heaven had them in its charge, and again they experienced its protecting care. The breeze sent by Our Lady of Utrera rose to a gale, then to a furious tempest; and the grateful Adelantado saw through rack and mist the ships of his enemy tossed wildly among the raging waters as they struggled to gain an offing. With exultation in his heart, the skilful seaman read their danger, and saw them in his mind's eye dashed to utter wreck among the sand-bars and breakers of the lee shore. A bold thought seized him. He would march overland with five hundred men, and attack Fort Caroline while its defenders were absent. First he ordered a mass, and then he called a council. Doubtless it was in that great Indian lodge of Seloy, where he had made his headquarters; and here, in this dim and smoky abode, nobles, officers, and priests gathered at his summons. There were fears and doubts and murmurings, but Menendez was desperate; not with the mad desperation that strikes wildly and at random, but the still white heat that melts and burns and seethes with a steady, unquenchable fierceness. "Comrades," he said, "the time has come to show our courage and our zeal. This is God's war, and we must not flinch. It is a war with Lutherans, and we must wage it with blood and fire." But his hearers gave no response. They had not a million of ducats at stake, and were not ready for a cast so desperate. A clamor of remonstrance rose from the circle. Many voices, that of Mendoza among the rest, urged waiting till their main forces should arrive. The excitement spread to the men without, and the swarthy, black-bearded crowd broke into tumults mounting almost to mutiny, while an officer was heard to say that he would not go on such a hare-brained errand to be butchered like a beast. But nothing could move the Adelantado. His appeals or his threats did their work at last; the confusion was quelled, and preparation was made for the march. On the morning of the seventeenth, five hundred arquebusiers and pikemen were drawn up before the camp. To each was given six pounds of biscuit and a canteen filled with wine. Two Indians and a renegade Frenchman, called Francois Jean, were to guide them, and twenty Biscayan axemen moved to the front to clear the way. Through floods of driving rain, a hoarse voice shouted the word of command, and the sullen march began. With dismal misgiving, Mendoza watched the last files as they vanished in the tempestuous forest. Two days of suspense ensued, when a messenger came back with a letter from the Adelantado, announcing that he had nearly reached the French fort, and that on the morrow, September the twentieth, at sunrise, he hoped to assault it. "May the Divine Majesty deign to protect us, for He knows that we have need of it," writes the scared chaplain; "the Adelantado's great zeal and courage make us hope he will succeed, but, for the good of his Majesty's service, he ought to be a little less ardent in pursuing his schemes." Meanwhile the five hundred pushed their march, now toiling across the inundated savanrias, waist-deep in bulrushes and mud; now filing through the open forest to the moan and roar of the storm-racked pines: now hacking their way through palmetto thickets; and now turning from their path to shun some pool, quagmire, cypress swamp, or "hummock," matted with impenetrable bushes, brambles, and vines. As they bent before the tempest, the water trickling from the rusty head-piece crept clammy and cold betwixt the armor and the skin; and when they made their wretched bivouac, their bed was the spongy soil, and the exhaustless clouds their tent. The night of Wednesday, the nineteenth, found their vanguard in a deep forest of pines, less than a mile from Fort Caroline, and near the low hills which extended in its rear, and formed a continuation of St. John's Bluff. All around was one great morass. In pitchy darkness, knee-deep in weeds and water, half starved, worn with toil and lack of sleep, drenched to the skin, their provisions spoiled, their ammunition wet, and their spirit chilled out of them, they stood in shivering groups, cursing the enterprise and the author of it. Menendez heard Fernando Perez, an ensign, say aloud to his comrades: "This Asturian Corito, who knows no more of war on shore than an ass, has betrayed us all. By God, if my advice had been followed, he would have had his deserts, the day he set out on this cursed journey!" The Adelantado pretended not to hear. Two hours before dawn he called his officers about him. All night, he said, he had been praying to God and the Virgin. "Senores, what shall we resolve on? Our ammunition and provisions are gone. Our case is desperate." And he urged a bold rush on the fort. But men and officers alike were disheartened and disgusted. They listened coldly and sullenly; many were for returning at every risk; none were in the mood for fight. Menendez put forth all his eloquence, till at length the dashed spirits of his followers were so far revived that they consented to follow him. All fell on their knees in the marsh; then, rising, they formed their ranks and began to advance, guided by the renegade Frenchman, whose hands, to make sure of him, were tied behind his back. Groping and stumbling in the dark among trees, roots, and underbrush, buffeted by wind and rain, and lashed in the face by the recoiling boughs which they could not see, they soon lost their way, fell into confusion, and came to a stand, in a mood more savagely desponding than before. But soon a glimmer of returning day came to their aid, and showed them the dusky sky, and the dark columns of the surrounding pines. Menendez ordered the men forward on pain of death. They obeyed, and presently, emerging from the forest, could dimly discern the ridge of a low hill, behind which, the Frenchman told them, was the fort. Menendez, with a few officers and men, cautiously mounted to the top. Beneath lay Fort Caroline, three bow-shots distant; but the rain, the imperfect light, and a cluster of intervening houses prevented his seeing clearly, and he sent two officers to reconnoiter. As they descended, they met a solitary Frenchman. They knocked him down with a sheathed sword, wounded him, took him prisoner, kept him for a time, and then stabbed him as they returned towards the top of the hill. Here, clutching their weapons, all the gang stood in fierce expectancy. "Santiago!" cried Menendez. "At them! God is with us! Victory!" And, shouting their hoarse war-cries, the Spaniards rushed down the slope like starved wolves. Not a sentry was on the rampart. La Vigne, the officer of the guard, had just gone to his quarters; but a trumpeter, who chanced to remain, saw, through sheets of rain, the swarm of assailants sweeping down the hill. He blew the alarm, and at the summons a few half-naked soldiers ran wildly out of the barracks. It was too late. Through the breaches and over the ramparts the Spaniards came pouring in, with shouts of "Santiago! Santiago!" Sick men leaped from their beds. Women and children, blind with fright, darted shrieking from the houses. A fierce, gaunt visage, the thrust of a pike, or blow of a rusty halberd,—such was the greeting that met all alike. Laudonniere snatched his sword and target, and ran towards the principal breach, calling to his soldiers. A rush of Spaniards met him; his men were cut down around him; and he, with a soldier named Bartholomew, was forced back into the yard of his house. Here stood a tent, and, as the pursuers stumbled among the cords, he escaped behind Ottigny's house, sprang through the breach in the western rampart, and fled for the woods. Le Moyne had been one of the guard. Scarcely had he thrown himself into a hammock which was slung in his room, when a savage shout, and a wild uproar of shrieks, outcries, and the clash of weapons, brought him to his feet. He rushed by two Spaniards in the doorway, ran behind the guard-house, leaped through an embrasure into the ditch, and escaped to the forest. Challeux, the carpenter, was going betimes to his work, a chisel in his hand. He was old, but pike and partisan brandished at his back gave wings to his flight. In the ecstasy of his terror, he leaped upward, clutched the top of the palisade, and threw himself over with the agility of a boy. He ran up the hill, no one pursuing, and, as he neared the edge of the forest, turned and looked back. From the high ground where he stood, he could see the butchery, the fury of the conquerors, and the agonizing gestures of the victims. He turned again in horror, and plunged into the woods. As he tore his way through the briers and thickets, he met several fugitives escaped like himself. Others presently came up, haggard and wild, like men broken loose from the jaws of death. They gathered together and consulted. One of them, known as Master Robert, in great repute for his knowledge of the Bible, was for returning and surrendering to the Spaniards. "They are men," he said; "perhaps, when their fury is over, they will spare our lives; and, even if they kill us, it will only be a few moments' pain. Better so, than to starve here in the woods, or be torn to pieces by wild beasts." The greater part of the naked and despairing company assented, but Challeux was of a different mind. The old Huguenot quoted Scripture, and called the names of prophets and apostles to witness, that, in the direst extremity, God would not abandon those who rested their faith in Him. Six of the fugitives, however, still held to their desperate purpose. Issuing from the woods, they descended towards the fort, and, as with beating hearts their comrades watched the result, a troop of Spaniards rushed out, hewed them down with swords and halberds, and dragged their bodies to the brink of the river, where the victims of the massacre were already flung in heaps. Le Moyne, with a soldier named Grandehemin, whom he had met in his flight, toiled all day through the woods and marshes, in the hope of reaching the small vessels anchored behind the bar. Night found them in a morass. No vessel could be seen, and the soldier, in despair, broke into angry upbraidings against his companion,—saying that he would go back and give himself up. Le Moyne at first opposed him, then yielded. But when they drew near the fort, and heard the uproar of savage revelry that rose from within, the artist's heart failed him. He embraced his companion, and the soldier advanced alone. A party of Spaniards came out to meet him. He kneeled, and begged for his life. He was answered by a death-blow; and the horrified Le Moyne, from his hiding-place in the thicket, saw his limbs hacked apart, stuck on pikes, and borne off in triumph. Meanwhile, Menendez, mustering his followers, had offered thanks to God for their victory; and this pious butcher wept with emotion as he recounted the favors which Heaven had showered upon their enterprise. His admiring historian gives it in proof of his humanity, that, after the rage of the assault was spent, he ordered that women, infants, and boys under fifteen should thenceforth be spared. Of these, by his own account, there were about fifty. Writing in October to the King, he says that they cause him great anxiety, since he fears the anger of God should he now put them to death in cold blood, while, on the other hand, he is in dread lest the venom of their heresy should infect his men. A hundred and forty-two persons were slain in and around the fort, and their bodies lay heaped together on the bank of the river. Nearly opposite was anchored a small vessel, called the "Pearl," commanded by Jacques Ribaut, son of the Admiral. The ferocious soldiery, maddened with victory and drunk with blood, crowded to the water's edge, shouting insults to those on board, mangling the corpses, tearing out their eyes, and throwing them towards the vessel from the points of their daggers. Thus did the Most Catholic Philip champion the cause of Heaven in the New World. It was currently believed in France, and, though no eye-witness attests it, there is reason to think it true, that among those murdered at Fort Caroline there were some who died a death of peculiar ignominy. Menendez, it is affirmed, hanged his prisoners on trees, and placed over them the inscription, "I do this, not as to Frenchmen, but as to Lutherans." The Spaniards gained a great booty in armor, clothing, and provisions. "Nevertheless," says the devout Mendoza, after closing his inventory of the plunder, "the greatest profit of this victory is the triumph which our Lord has granted us, whereby His holy Gospel will be introduced into this country, a thing so needful for saving so many souls from perdition." Again he writes in his journal, "We owe to God and His Mother, more than to human strength, this victory over the adversaries of the holy Catholic religion." To whatever influence, celestial or other, the exploit may best be ascribed, the victors were not yet quite content with their success. Two small French vessels, besides that of Jacques Ribaut, still lay within range of the fort. When the storm had a little abated, the cannon were turned on them. One of them was sunk, but Ribaut, with the others, escaped down the river, at the mouth of which several light craft, including that bought from the English, had been anchored since the arrival of his father's squadron. While this was passing, the wretched fugitives were flying from the scene of massacre through a tempest, of whose persistent violence all the narratives speak with wonder. Exhausted, starved, half naked,—for most of them had escaped in their shirts,—they pushed their toilsome way amid the ceaseless wrath of the elements. A few sought refuge in Indian villages; but these, it is said, were afterwards killed by the Spaniards. The greater number attempted to reach the vessels at the mouth of the river. Among the latter was Le Moyne, who, notwithstanding his former failure, was toiling through the mazes of tangled forests, when he met a Belgian soldier, with the woman described as Laudonniere's maid-servant, who was wounded in the breast; and, urging their flight towards the vessels, they fell in with other fugitives, including Laudonniere himself. As they struggled through the salt marsh, the rank sedge cut their naked limbs, and the tide rose to their waists. Presently they descried others, toiling like themselves through the matted vegetation, and recognized Challeux and his companions, also in quest of the vessels. The old man still, as he tells us, held fast to his chisel, which had done good service in cutting poles to aid the party to cross the deep creeks that channelled the morass. The united band, twenty-six in all, were cheered at length by the sight of a moving sail. It was the vessel of Captain Mallard, who, informed of the massacre, was standing along shore in the hope of picking up some of the fugitives. He saw their signals, and sent boats to their rescue; but such was their exhaustion, that, had not the sailors, wading to their armpits among the rushes, borne them out on their shoulders, few could have escaped. Laudonniere was so feeble that nothing but the support of a soldier, who held him upright in his arms, had saved him from drowning in the marsh. On gaining the friendly decks, the fugitives counselled together. One and all, they sickened for the sight of France. After waiting a few days, and saving a few more stragglers from the marsh, they prepared to sail. Young Ribaut, though ignorant of his father's fate, assented with something more than willingness; indeed, his behavior throughout had been stamped with weakness and poltroonery. On the twenty-fifth of September they put to sea in two vessels; and, after a voyage the privations of which were fatal to many of them, they arrived, one party at Rochelle, the other at Swansea, in Wales. CHAPTER VIII 1565. MASSACRE OF THE HERETICS. In suspense and fear, hourly looking seaward for the dreaded fleet of Jean Ribaut, the chaplain Mendoza and his brother priests held watch and ward at St. Augustine in the Adelantado's absence. Besides the celestial guardians whom they ceased not to invoke, they had as protectors Bartholomew Menendez, the brother of the Adelantado, and about a hundred soldiers. Day and night they toiled to throw up earthworks and strengthen their position. A week elapsed, when they saw a man running towards them, shouting as he ran. Mendoza went to meet him. "Victory! victory!" gasped the breathless messenger. "The French fort is ours!" And he flung his arms about the chaplain's neck.' "To-day," writes the priest in his journal, "Monday, the twenty-fourth, came our good general himself, with fifty soldiers, very tired, Like all those who were with him. As soon as they told me he was coming, I ran to my lodging, took a new cassock, the best I had, put on my surplice, and went out to meet him with a crucifix in my hand; whereupon he, like a gentleman and a good Christian, kneeled down with all his followers, and gave the Lord a thousand thanks for the great favors he had received from Him." In solemn procession, with four priests in front chanting Te Deum, the victors entered St. Augustine in triumph. On the twenty-eighth, when the weary Adelantado was taking his siesta under the sylvan roof of Seloy, a troop of Indians came in with news that quickly roused him from his slumbers. They had seen a French vessel wrecked on the coast towards the south. Those who escaped from her were four or six leagues off, on the banks of a river or arm of the sea, which they could not cross. Menendez instantly sent forty or fifty men in boats to reconnoitre. Next, he called the chaplain,—for he would fain have him at his elbow to countenance the deeds he meditated,—and, with him twelve soldiers and two Indian guides, embarked in another boat. They rowed along the channel between Anastasia Island and the main shore; then they landed, struck across the island on foot, traversed plains and marshes, reached the sea towards night, and searched along shore till ten o'clock to find their comrades who had gone before. At length, with mutual joy, the two parties met, and bivouacked together on the sands. Not far distant they could see lights. These were the camp-fires of the shipwrecked French. To relate with precision the fortunes of these unhappy men is impossible; for henceforward the French narratives are no longer the narratives of eye-witnesses. It has been seen how, when on the point of assailing the Spaniards at St. Augustine, Jean Ribaut was thwarted by a gale, which they hailed as a divine interposition. The gale rose to a tempest of strange fury. Within a few days, all the French ships were cast on shore, between Matanzas Inlet and Cape Canaveral. According to a letter of Menendez, many of those on hoard were lost; but others affirm that all escaped but a captain, La Grange, an officer of high merit, who was washed from a floating mast. One of the ships was wrecked at a point farther northward than the rest, and it was her company whose campfires were seen by the Spaniards at their bivouac on the sands of Anastasia Island. They were endeavoring to reach Fort Caroline, of the fate of which they knew nothing, while Ribaut with the remainder was farther southward, struggling through the wilderness towards the same goal. What befell the latter will appear hereafter. Of the fate of the former party there is no French record. What we know of it is due to three Spanish eye-witnesses, Mendoza, Doctor Soils de las Meras, and Menendez himself. Soils was a priest, and brother-in-law to Menendez. Like Mendoza, he minutely describes what he saw, and, like him, was a red-hot zealot, lavishing applause on the darkest deeds of his chief. But the principal witness, though not the most minute or most trustworthy, is Menendez, in his long despatches sent from Florida to the King, and now first brought to light from the archives of Seville,—a cool record of unsurpassed atrocities, inscribed on the back with the royal indorsement, "Say to him that he has done well." When the Adelantado saw the French fires in the distance, he lay close in his bivouac, and sent two soldiers to reconnoitre. At two o'clock in the morning they came back, and reported that it was impossible to get at the enemy, since they were on the farther side of an arm of the sea (Matanzas Inlet). Menendez, however, gave orders to march, and before daybreak reached the hither bank, where he hid his men in a bushy hollow. Thence, as it grew light, they could discern the enemy, many of whom were searching along the sands and shallows for shell-fish, for they were famishing. A thought struck Menendez, an inspiration, says Mendoza, of the Holy Spirit. He put on the clothes of a sailor, entered a boat which had been brought to the spot, and rowed towards the shipwrecked men, the better to learn their condition. A Frenchman swam out to meet him. Menendez demanded what men they were. "Followers of Ribaut, Viceroy of the King of France," answered the swimmer. "Are you Catholics or Lutherans?" "All Lutherans." A brief dialogue ensued, during which the Adelantado declared his name and character, and the Frenchman gave an account of the designs of Ribaut, and of the disaster that had thwarted them. He then swam back to his companions, but soon returned, and asked safe conduct for his captain and four other gentlemen, who wished to hold conference with the Spanish general. Menendez gave his word for their safety, and, returning to the shore, sent his boat to bring them over. On their landing, he met them very courteously. His followers were kept at a distance, so disposed behind hills and among bushes as to give an exaggerated idea of their force,—a precaution the more needful, as they were only about sixty in number, while the French, says Solfs, were above two hundred. Menendez, however, declares that they did not exceed a hundred and forty. The French officer told him the story of their shipwreck, and begged him to lend them a boat to aid them in crossing the rivers which lay between them and a fort of their King, whither they were making their way. Then came again the ominous question, "Are you Catholics or Lutherans?" "We are Lutherans." "Gentlemen," pursued Menendez, "your fort is taken, and all in it are put to the sword." And, in proof of his declaration, he caused articles plundered from Fort Caroline to be shown to the unhappy petitioners. He then left them, and went to breakfast with his officers, first ordering food to be placed before them. Having breakfasted, he returned to them. "Are you convinced now," he asked, "that what I have told you is true?" The French captain assented, and implored him to lend them ships in which to return home. Menendez answered that he would do so willingly if they were Catholics, and if he had ships to spare, but he had none. The supplicants then expressed the hope that at least they and their followers would be allowed to remain with the Spaniards till ships could be sent to their relief, since there was peace between the two nations, whose kings were friends and brothers. "All Catholics," retorted the Spaniard, "I will befriend; but as you are of the New Sect, I hold you as enemies, and wage deadly war against you; and this I will do with all cruelty [crueldad] in this country, where I command as Viceroy and Captain-General for my King. I am here to plant the Holy Gospel, that the Indians may be enlightened and come to the knowledge of the Holy Catholic faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Roman Church teaches it. If you will give up your arms and banners, and place yourselves at my mercy, you may do so, and I will act towards you as God shall give me grace. Do as you will, for other than this you can have neither truce nor friendship with me." Such were the Adelantado's words, as reported by a bystanders his admiring brother-in-law and that they contain an implied assurance of mercy has been held, not only by Protestants, but by Catholics and Spaniards. The report of Menendez himself is more brief, and sufficiently equivocal:— "I answered, that they could give up their arms and place themselves under my mercy,—that I should do with them what our Lord should order; and from that I did not depart, nor would I, unless God our Lord should otherwise inspire." One of the Frenchmen recrossed to consult with his companions. In two hours he returned, and offered fifty thousand ducats to secure their lives; but Menendez, says his brother-in-law, would give no pledges. On the other hand, expressions in his own despatches point to the inference that a virtual pledge was given, at least to certain individuals. The starving French saw no resource but to yield themselves to his mercy. The boat was again sent across the river. It returned laden with banners, arquebuses, swords, targets, and helmets. The Adelantado ordered twenty soldiers to bring over the prisoners, ten at a time. He then took the French officers aside behind a ridge of sand, two gunshots from the bank. Here, with courtesy on his lips and murder at his heart, he said: "Gentlemen, I have but few men, and you are so many that, if you were free, it would be easy for you to take your satisfaction on us for the people we killed when we took your fort. Therefore it is necessary that you should go to my camp, four leagues from this place, with your hands tied." Accordingly, as each party landed, they were led out of sight behind the sand-hill, and their hands tied behind their backs with the match-cords of the arquebuses, though not before each had been supplied with food. The whole day passed before all were brought together, bound and helpless, under the eye of the inexorable Adelantado. But now Mendoza interposed. "I was a priest," he says, "and had the bowels of a man." He asked that if there were Christians—that is to say, Catholics—among the prisoners, they should be set apart. Twelve Breton sailors professed themselves to be such; and these, together with four carpenters and calkers, "of whom," writes Menendez, "I was in great need," were put on board the boat and sent to St. Augustine. The rest were ordered to march thither by land. The Adelantado walked in advance till he came to a lonely spot, not far distant, deep among the bush-covered hills. Here he stopped, and with his cane drew a line in the sand. The sun was set when the captive Huguenots, with their escort, reached the fatal goal thus marked out. And now let the curtain drop; for here, in the name of Heaven, the hounds of hell were turned loose, and the savage soldiery, like wolves in a sheepfold, rioted in slaughter. Of all that wretched company, not one was left alive. "I had their hands tied behind their backs," writes the chief criminal, "and themselves put to the knife. It appeared to me that, by thus chastising them, God our Lord and your Majesty were served; whereby in future this evil sect will leave us more free to plant the Gospel in these parts." Again Menendez returned triumphant to St. Augustine, and behind him marched his band of butchers, steeped in blood to the elbows, but still unsated. Great as had been his success, he still had cause for anxiety. There was ill news of his fleet. Some of the ships were lost, others scattered, or lagging tardily on their way. Of his whole force, less than a half had reached Florida, and of these a large part were still at Fort Caroline. Ribaut could not be far off; and, whatever might be the condition of his shipwrecked company, their numbers would make them formidable, unless taken at advantage. Urged by fear and fortified by fanaticism, Menendez had well begun his work of slaughter; but rest for him there was none,—a darker deed was behind. On the tenth of October, Indians came with the tidings that, at the spot where the first party of the shipwrecked French had been found, there was now another party still larger. This murder-loving race looked with great respect on Menendez for his wholesale butchery of the night before,—an exploit rarely equalled in their own annals of massacre. On his part, he doubted not that Ribaut was at hand. Marching with a hundred and fifty men, he crossed the bush-covered sands of Anastasia Island, followed the strand between the thickets and the sea, reached the inlet at midnight, and again, like a savage, ambushed himself on the bank. Day broke, and he could plainly see the French on the farther side. They had made a raft, which lay in the water ready for crossing. Menendez and his men showed themselves, when, forthwith, the French displayed their banners, sounded drums and trumpets, and set their sick and starving ranks in array of battle. But the Adelantado, regardless of this warlike show, ordered his men to seat themselves at breakfast, while he with three officers walked unconcernedly along the shore. His coolness had its effect. The French blew a trumpet of parley, and showed a white flag. The Spaniards replied. A Frenchman came out upon the raft, and, shouting across the water, asked that a Spanish envoy should be sent over. "You have a raft," was the reply; "come yourselves." An Indian canoe lay under the bank on the Spanish side. A French sailor swam to it, paddled back unmolested, and presently returned, bringing with him La Caille, Ribaut's sergeant-major. He told Menendez that the French were three hundred and fifty in all, and were on their way to Fort Caroline; and, like the officers of the former party, he begged for boats to aid them in crossing the river. "My brother," said Menendez, "go and tell your general, that, if he wishes to speak with me, he may come with four or six companions, and that I pledge my word he shall go back safe." La Caille returned; and Ribaut, with eight gentlemen, soon came over in the canoe. Menendez met them courteously, caused wine and preserved fruits to be placed before them,—he had come well provisioned on his errand of blood,—and next led Ribaut to the reeking Golgotha, where, in heaps upon the sand, lay the corpses of his slaughtered followers. Ribaut was prepared for the spectacle,—La Caille had already seen it,—but he would not believe that Fort Caroline was taken till a part of the plunder was shown him. Then, mastering his despair, he turned to the conqueror. "What has befallen us," he said, "may one day befall you." And, urging that the kings of France and Spain were brothers and close friends, he begged, in the name of that friendship, that the Spaniard would aid him in conveying his followers home. Menendez gave him the same equivocal answer that he had given the former party, and Ribaut returned to consult with his officers. After three hours of absence, he came back in the canoe, and told the Adelantado that some of his people were ready to surrender at discretion, but that many refused. "They can do as they please," was the reply. In behalf of those who surrendered, Ribaut offered a ransom of a hundred thousand ducats. "It would much grieve me," said Menendez, "not to accept it; for I have great need of it." Ribaut was much encouraged. Menendez could scarcely forego such a prize, and he thought, says the Spanish narrator, that the lives of his followers would now be safe. He asked to be allowed the night for deliberation, and at sunset recrossed the river. In the morning he reappeared among the Spaniards, and reported that two hundred of his men had retreated from the spot, but that the remaining hundred and fifty would surrender. At the same time he gave into the hands of Menendez the royal standard and other flags, with his sword, dagger, helmet, buckler, and the official seal given him by Coligny. Menendez directed an officer to enter the boat and bring over the French by tens. He next led Ribaut among the bushes behind the neighboring sand-hill, and ordered his hands to be bound fast. Then the scales fell from the prisoner's eyes. Face to face his fate rose up before him. He saw his followers and himself entrapped,—the dupes of words artfully framed to lure them to their ruin. The day wore on; and, as band after band of prisoners was brought over, they were led behind the sand-hill out of sight from the farther shore, and bound like their general. At length the transit was finished. With bloodshot eyes and weapons bared, the Spaniards closed around their victims. "Are you Catholics or Lutherans? and is there any one among you who will go to confession?" Ribaut answered, "I and all here are of the Reformed Faith." And he recited the Psalm, "Domine, memento mei." "We are of earth," he continued, "and to earth we must return; twenty years more or less can matter little;" and, turning to the Adelantado, he bade him do his will. The stony-hearted bigot gave the signal; and those who will may paint to themselves the horrors of the scene. A few, however, were spared. "I saved," writes Menendez, "the lives of two young gentlemen of about eighteen years of age, as well as of three others, the fifer, the drummer, and the trumpeter; and I caused Juan Ribao [Ribaut] with all the rest to be put to the knife, judging this to be necessary for the service of God our Lord and of your Majesty. And I consider it great good fortune that he [Juan Ribao] should be dead, for the King of France could effect more with him and five hundred ducats than with other men and five thousand; and he would do more in one year than another in ten, for he was the most experienced sailor and naval commander known, and of great skill in this navigation of the Indies and the coast of Florida. He was, besides, greatly liked in England, in which kingdom his reputation was such that he was appointed Captain-General of all the English fleet against the French Catholics in the war between England and France some years ago." Such is the sum of the Spanish accounts,—the self-damning testimony of the author and abettors of the crime; a picture of lurid and awful coloring; and yet there is reason to believe that the truth was darker still. Among those who were spared was one Christophe le Breton, who was carried to Spain, escaped to France, and told his story to Challeux. Among those struck down in the butchery was a sailor of Dieppe, stunned and left for dead under a heap of corpses. In the night he revived, contrived to draw his knife, cut the cords that bound his hands, and made his way to an Indian village. The Indians, not without reluctance, abandoned him to the Spaniards, who sold him as a slave; but, on his way in fetters to Portugal, the ship was taken by the Huguenots, the sailor set free, and his story published in the narrative of Le Moyne. When the massacre was known in France, the friends and relatives of the victims sent to the King, Charles the Ninth, a vehement petition for redress; and their memorial recounts many incidents of the tragedy. From these three sources is to be drawn the French version of the story. The following is its substance. Famished and desperate, the followers of Ribaut were toiling northward to seek refuge at Fort Caroline, when they found the Spaniards in their path. Some were filled with dismay; others, in their misery, almost hailed them as deliverers. La Caille, the sergeant-major, crossed the river. Menendez met him with a face of friendship, and protested that he would spare the lives of the shipwrecked men, sealing the promise with an oath, a kiss, and many signs of the cross. He even gave it in writing, under seal. Still, there were many among the French who would not place themselves in his power. The most credulous crossed the river in a boat. As each successive party landed, their hands were bound fast at their backs; and thus, except a few who were set apart, they were all driven towards the fort, like cattle to the shambles, with curses and scurrilous abuse. Then, at sound of drums and trumpets, the Spaniards fell upon them, striking them down with swords, pikes, and halberds. Ribaut vainly called on the Adelantado to remember his oath. By his order, a soldier plunged a dagger into the French commander's heart; and Ottigny, who stood near, met a similar fate. Ribaut's beard was cut off, and portions of it sent in a letter to Philip the Second. His head was hewn into four parts, one of which was displayed on the point of a lance at each corner of Fort St. Augustine. Great fires were kindled, and the bodies of the murdered burned to ashes. Such is the sum of the French accounts. The charge of breach of faith contained in them was believed by Catholics as well as Protestants; and it was as a defence against this charge that the narrative of the Adelantado's brother-in-law was published. That Ribaut, a man whose good sense and courage were both reputed high, should have submitted himself and his men to Menendez without positive assurance of safety, is scarcely credible; nor is it lack of charity to believe that a bigot so savage in heart and so perverted in conscience would act on the maxim, current among certain casuists of the day, that faith ought not to be kept with heretics. It was night when the Adelantado again entered St. Augustine. There were some who blamed his cruelty; but many applauded. "Even if the French had been Catholics,"—such was their language,—"he would have done right, for, with the little provision we have, they would all have starved; besides, there were so many of them that they would have cut our throats." And now Menendez again addressed himself to the despatch, already begun, in which he recounts to the King his labors and his triumphs, a deliberate and business-like document, mingling narratives of butchery with recommendations for promotions, commissary details, and petitions for supplies,—enlarging, too, on the vast schemes of encroachment which his successful generalship had brought to naught. The French, he says, had planned a military and naval depot at Los Martires, whence they would make a descent upon Havana, and another at the Bay of Ponce de Leon, whence they could threaten Vera Cruz. They had long been encroaching on Spanish rights at Newfoundland, from which a great arm of the sea—doubtless meaning the St. Lawrence—would give them access to the Moluccas and other parts of the East Indies. He adds, in a later despatch, that by this passage they may reach the mines of Zacatecas and St. Martin, as well as every part of the South Sea. And, as already mentioned, he urges immediate occupation of Chesapeake Bay, which, by its supposed water communication with the St. Lawrence, would enable Spain to vindicate her rights, control the fisheries of Newfoundland, and thwart her rival in vast designs of commercial and territorial aggrandizement. Thus did France and Spain dispute the possession of North America long before England became a party to the strife. 24 Some twenty days after Menendez returned to St. Augustine, the Indians, enamoured of carnage, and exulting to see their invaders mowed down, came to tell him that on the coast southward, near Cape Canaveral, a great number of Frenchmen were intrenching themselves. They were those of Ribaut's party who had refused to surrender. Having retreated to the spot where their ships had been cast ashore, they were trying to build a vessel from the fragments of the wrecks. In all haste Menendez despatched messengers to Fort Caroline, named by him San Mateo, ordering a reinforcement of a hundred and fifty men. In a few days they came. He added some of his own soldiers, and, with a united force of two hundred and fifty, set out, as he tells us, on the second of November. A part of his force went by sea, while the rest pushed southward along the shore with such merciless energy that several men dropped dead with wading night and day through the loose sands. When, from behind their frail defences, the French saw the Spanish pikes and partisans glittering into view, they fled in a panic, and took refuge among the hills. Menendez sent a trumpet to summon them, pledging his honor for their safety. The commander and several others told the messenger that they would sooner be eaten by the savages than trust themselves to Spaniards; and, escaping, they fled to the Indian towns. The rest surrendered; and Menendez kept his word. The comparative number of his own men made his prisoners no longer dangerous. They were led back to St. Augustine, where, as the Spanish writer affirms, they were well treated. Those of good birth sat at the Adelantado's table, eating the bread of a homicide crimsoned with the slaughter of their comrades. The priests essayed their pious efforts, and, under the gloomy menace of the Inquisition, some of the heretics renounced their errors. The fate of the captives may be gathered from the endorsement, in the handwriting of the King, on one of the despatches of Menendez. "Say to him," writes Philip the Second, "that, as to those he has killed, he has done well; and as to those he has saved, they shall be sent to the galleys." CHAPTER IX. 1565-1567. CHARLES IX. AND PHILLIP II. The state of international relations in the sixteenth century is hardly conceivable at this day. The Puritans of England and the Huguenots of France regarded Spain as their natural enemy, and on the high seas and in the British Channel they joined hands with godless freebooters to rifle her ships, kill her sailors, or throw them alive into the sea. Spain on her side seized English Protestant sailors who ventured into her ports, and burned them as heretics, or consigned them to a living death in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Yet in the latter half of the century these mutual outrages went on for years while the nations professed to be at peace. There was complaint, protest, and occasional menace, but no redress, and no declaration of war. Contemporary writers of good authority have said that, when the news of the massacres in Florida reached the court of France, Charles the Ninth and Catherine de Medicis submitted to the insult in silence; but documents lately brought to light show that a demand for redress was made, though not insisted on. A cry of horror and execration had risen from the Huguenots and many even of the Catholics had echoed it; yet the perpetrators of the crime, and not its victims, were the first to make complaint. Philip the Second resented the expeditions of Ribaut and Laudonniere as an invasion of the American domains of Spain, and ordered D'Alava, his ambassador at Paris, to denounce them to the French King. Charles, thus put on the defensive, replied, that the country in question belonged to France, having been discovered by Frenchmen a hundred years before, and named by them Terre des Bretons. This alludes to the tradition that the Bretons and Basques visited the northern coasts of America before the voyage of Columbus. In several maps of the sixteenth century the region of New England and the neighboring states and provinces is set down as Terre des Bretons, or Tierra de los Bretones, and this name was assumed by Charles to extend to the Gulf of Mexico, as the name of Florida was assumed by the Spaniards to extend to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and even beyond it. Philip spurned the claim, asserted the Spanish right to all Florida, and asked whether or not the followers of Ribaut and Laudonniere had gone thither by authority of their King. The Queen Mother, Catherine de Medicis, replied in her son's behalf, that certain Frenchmen had gone to a country called Terre aux Bretons, discovered by French subjects, and that in so doing they had been warned not to encroach on lands belonging to the King of Spain. And she added, with some spirit, that the Kings of France were not in the habit of permitting themselves to be threatened. Philip persisted in his attitude of injured innocence; and Forquevaulx, French ambassador at Madrid, reported that, as a reward for murdering French subjects, Menendez was to receive the title of Marquis of Florida. A demand soon followed from Philip, that Admiral Coligny should be punished for planting a French colony on Spanish ground, and thus causing the disasters that ensued. It was at this time that the first full account of the massacres reached the French court, and the Queen Mother, greatly moved, complained to the Spanish ambassador, saying that she could not persuade herself that his master would refuse reparation. The ambassador replied by again throwing the blame on Coligny and the Huguenots; and Catherine de Medicis returned that, Huguenots or not, the King of Spain had no right to take upon himself the punishment of French subjects. Forquevaulx was instructed to demand redress at Madrid; but Philip only answered that he was very sorry for what had happened, and again insisted that Coligny should be punished as the true cause of it. Forquevaulx, an old soldier, remonstrated with firmness, declared that no deeds so execrable had ever been committed within his memory, and demanded that Menendez and his followers should be chastised as they deserved. The King said that he was sorry that the sufferers chanced to be Frenchmen, but, as they were pirates also, they ought to be treated as such. The ambassador replied, that they were no pirates, since they bore the commission of the Admiral of France, who in naval affairs represented the King; and Philip closed the conversation by saying that he would speak on the subject with the Duke of Alva. This was equivalent to refusal, for the views of the Duke were well known; "and so, Madame," writes the ambassador to the Queen Mother, "there is no hope that any reparation will be made for the aforesaid massacre." On this, Charles wrote to Forquevaulx "It is my will that you renew your complaint, and insist urgently that, for the sake of the union and friendship between the two crowns, reparation be made for the wrong done me and the cruelties committed on my subjects, to which I cannot submit without too great loss of reputation." And, jointly with his mother, he ordered the ambassador to demand once more that Menendez and his men should be punished, adding, that he trusts that Philip will grant justice to the King of France, his brother-in-law and friend, rather than pardon a gang of brigands. "On this demand," concludes Charles, "the Sieur de Forquevaulx will not fail to insist, be the answer what it may, in order that the King of Spain shall understand that his Majesty of France has no less spirit than his predecessors to repel an insult." The ambassador fulfilled his commission, and Philip replied by referring him to the Duke of Alva. "I have no hope," reports Forquevaulx, "that the Duke will give any satisfaction as to the massacre, for it was he who advised it from the first." A year passed, and then he reported that Menendez had returned from Florida, that the King had given him a warm welcome, and that his fame as a naval commander was such that he was regarded as a sort of Neptune. In spite of their brave words, Charles and the Queen Mother tamely resigned themselves to the affront, for they would not quarrel with Spain. To have done so would have been to throw themselves into the arms of the Protestant party, adopt the principle of toleration, and save France from the disgrace and blight of her later years. France was not so fortunate. The enterprise of Florida was a national enterprise, undertaken at the national charge, with the royal commission, and under the royal standard; and it had been crushed in time of peace by a power professing the closest friendship. Yet Huguenot influence had prompted and Huguenot hands executed it. That influence had now ebbed low; Coligny's power had waned; Charles, after long vacillation, was leaning more and more towards the Guises and the Catholics, and fast subsiding into the deathly embrace of Spain, for whom, at last, on the bloody eve of St. Bartholomew, he was to become the assassin of his own best subjects. In vain the relatives of the slain petitioned him for redress; and had the honor of the nation rested in the keeping of its King, the blood of hundreds of murdered Frenchmen would have cried from the ground in vain. But it was not to be so. Injured humanity found an avenger, and outraged France a champion. Her chivalrous annals may be searched in vain for a deed of more romantic daring than the vengeance of Dominique de Gourgues. CHAPTER X. 1567-1583. DOMINIQUE DE GOURGUES. There was a gentleman of Mont-de-Marsan, Dominique de Gourgues, a soldier of ancient birth and high renown. It is not certain that he was a Huguenot. The Spanish annalist calls him a "terrible heretic;" but the French Jesuit, Charlevoix, anxious that the faithful should share the glory of his exploits, affirms that, like his ancestors before him, he was a good Catholic. If so, his faith sat lightly upon him; and, Catholic or heretic, he hated the Spaniards with a mortal hate. Fighting in the Italian wars,—for from boyhood he was wedded to the sword,—he had been taken prisoner by them near Siena, where he had signalized himself by a fiery and determined bravery. With brutal insult, they chained him to the oar as a galley slave. After he had long endured this ignominy the Turks captured the vessel and carried her to Constantinople. It was but a change of tyrants but, soon after, while she was on a cruise, Gourgues still at the oar, a galley of the knights of Malta hove in sight, bore down on her, recaptured her, and set the prisoner free. For several years after, his restless spirit found employment in voyages to Africa, Brazil, and regions yet more remote. His naval repute rose high, but his grudge against the Spaniards still rankled within him; and when, returned from his rovings, he learned the tidings from Florida, his hot Gascon blood boiled with fury. The honor of France had been foully stained, and there was none to wipe away the shame. The faction-ridden King was dumb. The nobles who surrounded him were in the Spanish interest. Then, since they proved recreant, he, Dominique de Gourgues, a simple gentleman, would take upon him to avenge the wrong, and restore the dimmed lustre of the French name. He sold his inheritance, borrowed money from his brother, who held a high post in Guienne, and equipped three small vessels, navigable by sail or oar. On board he placed a hundred arquebusiers and eighty sailors, prepared to fight on land, if need were. The noted Blaise de Montluc, then lieutenant for the King in Guienne, gave him a commission to make war on the negroes of Benin,—that is, to kidnap them as slaves, an adventure then held honorable. His true design was locked within his own breast. He mustered his followers,—not a few of whom were of rank equal to his own, feasted them, and, on the twenty-second of August, 1567, sailed from the mouth of the Charente. Off Cape Finisterre, so violent a storm buffeted his ships that his men clamored to return; but Gourgues's spirit prevailed. He bore away for Africa, and, landing at the Rio del Oro, refreshed and cheered them as he best might. Thence he sailed to Cape Blanco, where the jealous Portuguese, who had a fort in the neighborhoods set upon him three negro chiefs. Gourgues beat them off, and remained master of the harbor; whence, however, he soon voyaged onward to Cape Verd, and, steering westward, made for the West Indies. Here, advancing from island to island, he came to Hispaniola, where, between the fury of a hurricane at sea and the jealousy of the Spaniards on shore, he was in no small jeopardy,—"the Spaniards", exclaims the indignant journalist, "who think that this New World was made for nobody but them, and that no other living man has a right to move or breathe here!" Gourgues landed, however, obtained the water of which he was in need, and steered for Cape San Antonio, at the western end of Cuba. There he gathered his followers about him, and addressed them with his fiery Gascon eloquence. For the first time, he told them his true purpose, inveighed against Spanish cruelty, and painted, with angry rhetoric, the butcheries of Fort Caroline and St. Augustine. "What disgrace," he cried, "if such an insult should pass unpunished! What glory to us if we avenge it! To this I have devoted my fortune. I relied on you. I thought you jealous enough of your country's glory to sacrifice life itself in a cause like this. Was I deceived? I will show you the way; I will be always at your head; I will bear the brunt of the danger. Will you refuse to follow me?" At first his startled hearers listened in silence; but soon the passions of that adventurous age rose responsive to his words. The combustible French nature burst into flame. The enthusiasm of the soldiers rose to such a pitch that Gourgues had much ado to make them wait till the moon was full before tempting the perils of the Bahama Channel. His time came at length. The moon rode high above the lonely sea, and, silvered in its light, the ships of the avenger held their course. Meanwhile, it had fared ill with the Spaniards in Florida; the good-will of the Indians had vanished. The French had been obtrusive and vexatious guests; but their worst trespasses had been mercy and tenderness compared to the daily outrage of the new-comers. Friendship had changed to aversion, aversion to hatred, and hatred to open war. The forest paths were beset; stragglers were cut off; and woe to the Spaniard who should venture after nightfall beyond call of the outposts. Menendez, however, had strengthened himself in his new conquest. St. Augustine was well fortified; Fort Caroline, now Fort San Mateo, was repaired; and two redoubts, or small forts, were thrown up to guard the mouth of the River of May,—one of them near the present lighthouse at Mayport, and the other across the river on Fort George Island. Thence, on an afternoon in early spring, the Spaniards saw three sail steering northward. They suspected no enemy, and their batteries boomed a salute. Gourgues's ships replied, then stood out to sea, and were lost in the shades of evening. They kept their course all night, and, as day broke, anchored at the mouth of a river, the St. Mary's, or the Santilla, by their reckoning fifteen leagues north of the River of May. Here, as it grew light, Gourgues saw the borders of the sea thronged with savages, armed and plumed for war. They, too, had mistaken the strangers for Spaniards, and mustered to meet their tyrants at the landing. But in the French ships there was a trumpeter who had been long in Florida, and knew the Indians well. He went towards them in a boat, with many gestures of friendship; and no sooner was he recognized, than the naked crowd, with yelps of delight, danced for joy along the sands. Why had he ever left them? they asked; and why had he not returned before? The intercourse thus auspiciously begun was actively kept up. Gourgues told the principal chief,—who was no other than Satouriona, once the ally of the French,—that he had come to visit them, make friendship with them, and bring them presents. At this last announcement, so grateful to Indian ears the dancing was renewed with double zeal. The next morning was named for a grand council, and Satouriona sent runners to summon all Indians within call; while Gourgues, for safety, brought his vessels within the mouth of the river. Morning came, and the woods were thronged with warriors. Gourgues and his soldiers landed with martial pomp. In token of mutual confidence, the French laid aside their arquebuses, and the Indians their bows and arrows. Satouriona came to meet the strangers, and seated their commander at his side, on a wooden stool, draped and cushioned with the gray Spanish moss. Two old Indians cleared the spot of brambles, weeds, and grass; and, when their task was finished, the tribesmen took their places, ring within ring, standing, sitting, and crouching on the ground,—a dusky concourse, plumed in festal array, waiting with grave visages and intent eyes. Gourgues was about to speak, when the chief, who, says the narrator, had not learned French manners, anticipated him, and broke into a vehement harangue, denouncing the cruelty of the Spaniards. Since the French fort was taken, he said, the Indians had not had one happy day. The Spaniards drove them from their cabins, stole their corn, ravished their wives and daughters, and killed their children; and all this they had endured because they loved the French. There was a French boy who had escaped from the massacre at the fort; they had found him in the woods and though the Spaniards, who wished to kill him, demanded that they should give him up, they had kept him for his friends. "Look!" pursued the chief, "here he is! "—and he brought forward a youth of sixteen, named Pierre Debre, who became at once of the greatest service to the French, his knowledge of the Indian language making him an excellent interpreter. Delighted as he was at this outburst against the Spaniards, Gourgues did not see fit to display the full extent of his satisfaction. He thanked the Indians for their good-will, exhorted them to continue in it, and pronounced an ill-merited eulogy on the greatness and goodness of his King. As for the Spaniards, he said, their day of reckoning was at hand; and, if the Indians had been abused for their love of the French, the French would be their avengers. Here Satouriona forgot his dignity, and leaped up for joy. "What!" he cried, "will you fight the Spaniards?" "I came here," replied Gourgues, "only to reconnoitre the country and make friends with you, and then go back to bring more soldiers; but, when I hear what you are suffering from them, I wish to fall upon them this very day, and rescue you from their tyranny." All around the ring a clamor of applauding voices greeted his words. "But you will do your part," pursued the Frenchman; "you will not leave us all the honor." "We will go," replied Satouriona, "and die with you, if need be." "Then, if we fight, we ought to fight at once. How soon can you have your warriors ready to march?" The chief asked three days for preparation. Gourgues cautioned him to secrecy, lest the Spaniards should take alarm. "Never fear," was the answer; "we hate them more than you do." Then came a distribution of gifts,—knives, hatchets, mirrors, bells, and beads,—while the warrior rabble crowded to receive them, with eager faces and outstretched arms. The distribution over, Gourgues asked the chiefs if there was any other matter in which he could serve them. On this, pointing to his shirt, they expressed a peculiar admiration for that garment, and begged each to have one, to be worn at feasts and councils during life, and in their graves after death. Gourgues complied; and his grateful confederates were soon stalking about him, fluttering in the spoils of his wardrobe. To learn the strength and position of the Spaniards, Gourgues now sent out three scouts; and with them went Olotoraca, Satourioria's nephew, a young brave of great renown. The chief, eager to prove his good faith, gave as hostages his only surviving son and his favorite wife. They were sent on board the ships, while the Indians dispersed to their encampments, with leaping, stamping, dancing, and whoops of jubilation. The day appointed came, and with it the savage army, hideous in war-paint, and plumed for battle. The woods rang back their songs and yells, as with frantic gesticulation they brandished their war-clubs and vaunted their deeds of prowess. Then they drank the black drink, endowed with mystic virtues against hardship and danger; and Gourgues himself pretended to swallow the nauseous decoction. 25 These ceremonies consumed the day. It was evening before the allies filed off into their forests, and took the path for the Spanish forts. The French, on their part, were to repair by sea to the rendezvous. Gourgues mustered and addressed his men. It was needless: their ardor was at fever height. They broke in upon his words, and demanded to be led at once against the enemy. Francois Bourdelais, with twenty sailors, was left with the ships, and Gourgues affectionately bade him farewell. "If I am slain in this most just enterprise," he said, "I leave all in your charge, and pray you to carry back my soldiers to France." There were many embracings among the excited Frenchmen,—many sympathetic tears from those who were to stay behind,—many messages left with them for wives, children, friends, and mistresses; and then this valiant band pushed their boats from shore. It was a hare-brained venture, for, as young Debre had assured them, the Spaniards on the River of May were four hundred in number, secure behind their ramparts. Hour after hour the sailors pulled at the oar. They glided slowly by the sombre shores in the shimmering moonlight, to the sound of the surf and the moaning pine-trees. In the gray of the morning, they came to the mouth of a river, probably the Nassau; and here a northeast wind set in with a violence that almost wrecked their boats. Their Indian allies were waiting on the bank, but for a while the gale delayed their crossing. The bolder French would lose no time, rowed through the tossing waves, and, landing safely, left their boats, and pushed into the forest. Gourgues took the lead, in breastplate and back-piece. At his side marched the young chief Olotoraca, with a French pike in his hand; and the files of arquebuse-men and armed sailors followed close behind. They plunged through swamps, hewed their way through brambly thickets and the matted intricacies of the forests, and, at five in the afternoon, almost spent with fatigue and hunger, came to a river or inlet of the sea, not far from the first Spanish fort. Here they found three hundred Indians waiting for them. Tired as he was, Gourgues would not rest. He wished to attack at daybreak, and with ten arquebusiers and his Indian guide he set out to reconnoitre. Night closed upon him. It was a vain task to struggle on, in pitchy darkness, among trunks of trees, fallen logs, tangled vines, and swollen streams. Gourgues returned, anxious and gloomy. An Indian chief approached him, read through the darkness his perturbed look, and offered to lead him by a better path along the margin of the sea. Gourgues joyfully assented, and ordered all his men to march. The Indians, better skilled in wood-craft, chose the shorter course through the forest. The French forgot their weariness, and pressed on with speed. At dawn they and their allies met on the bank of a stream, probably Sister Creek, beyond which, and very near, was the fort. But the tide was in, and they tried in vain to cross. Greatly vexed,—for he had hoped to take the enemy asleep,—Gourgues withdrew his soldiers into the forest, where they were no sooner ensconced than a drenching rain fell, and they had much ado to keep their gun-matches burning. The light grew fast. Gourgues plainly saw the fort, the defences of which seemed slight and unfinished. He even saw the Spaniards at work within. A feverish interval elapsed, till at length the tide was out,—so far, at least, that the stream was fordable. A little higher up, a clump of trees lay between it and the fort. Behind this friendly screen the passage was begun. Each man tied his powder-flask to his steel cap, held his arquebuse above his head with one hand, and grasped his sword with the other. The channel was a bed of oysters. The sharp shells cut their feet as they waded through. But the farther bank was gained. They emerged from the water, drenched, lacerated, and bleeding, but with unabated mettle. Gourgues set them in array under cover of the trees. They stood with kindling eyes, and hearts throbbing, but not with fear. Gourgues pointed to the Spanish fort, seen by glimpses through the boughs. "Look I" he said, "there are the robbers who have stolen this land from our King; there are the murderers who have butchered our countrymen!" With voices eager, fierce, but half suppressed, they demanded to be led on. Gourgues gave the word. Cazenove, his lientenant, with thirty men, pushed for the fort gate; he himself, with the main body, for the glacis. It was near noon; the Spaniards had just finished their meal, and, says the narrative, "were still picking their teeth," when a startled cry rang in their ears:—"To arms! to arms! The French are coming! The French are coming!" It was the voice of a cannoneer who had that moment mounted the rampart and seen the assailants advancing in unbroken ranks, with heads lowered and weapons at the charge. He fired his cannon among them. He even had time to load and fire again, when the light-limbed Olotoraca bounded forward, ran up the glacis, leaped the unfinished ditch, and drove his pike through the Spaniard from breast to back. Gourgues was now on the glacis, when he heard Cazenove shouting from the gate that the Spaniards were escaping on that side. He turned and led his men thither at a run. In a moment, the fugitives, sixty in all, were enclosed between his party and that of his lieutenant. The Indians, too, came leaping to the spot. Not a Spaniard escaped. All were cut down but a few, reserved by Gourgues for a more inglorious end. Meanwhile the Spaniards in the other fort, on the opposite shore, cannonaded the victors without ceasing. The latter turned four captured guns against them. One of Gourgues's boats, a very large one, had been brought along-shore, and, entering it with eighty soldiers, he pushed for the farther bank. With loud yells, the Indians leaped into the river, which is here about three fourths of a mile wide. Each held his bow and arrows aloft in one hand, while he swam with the other. A panic seized the garrison as they saw the savage multitude. They broke out of the fort and fled into the forest. But the French had already landed; and, throwing themselves in the path of the fugitives, they greeted them with a storm of lead. The terrified wretches recoiled; but flight was vain. The Indian whoop rang behind them, and war-clubs and arrows finished the work. Gourgues's utmost efforts saved but fifteen, not out of mercy, but from a refinement of vengeance. The next day was Quasimodo Sunday, or the Sunday after Easter. Gourgues and his men remained quiet, making ladders for the assault on Fort San Mateo. Meanwhile the whole forest was in arms, and, far and near, the Indians were wild with excitement. They beset the Spanish fort till not a soldier could venture out. The garrison, aware of their danger, though ignorant of its extent, devised an expedient to gain information; and one of them, painted and feathered like an Indian, ventured within Gourgues's outposts. He himself chanced to be at hand, and by his side walked his constant attendant, Olotoraca. The keen-eyed young savage pierced the cheat at a glance. The spy was seized, and, being examined, declared that there were two hundred and sixty Spaniards in San Mateo, and that they believed the French to be two thousand, and were so frightened that they did not know what they were doing. Gourgues, well pleased, pushed on to attack them. On Monday evening he sent forward the Indians to ambush themselves on both sides of the fort. In the morning he followed with his Frenchmen; and, as the glittering ranks came into view, defiling between the forest and the river, the Spaniards opened on them with culverins from a projecting bastion. The French took cover in the woods with which the hills below and behind the fort were densely overgrown. Here, himself unseen, Gourgues could survey whole extent of the defences, and he presently descried a strong party of Spaniards issuing from their works, crossing the ditch, and advancing to reconnoitre. On this, he sent Cazenove, with a detachment, to station himself at a point well hidden by trees on the flank of the Spaniards, who, with strange infatuation, continued their advance. Gourgues and his followers pushed on through the thickets to meet them. As the Spaniards reached the edge of the open ground, a deadly fire blazed in their faces, and, before the smoke cleared, the French were among them, sword in hand. The survivors would have fled; but Cazenove's detachment fell upon their rear, and all were killed or taken. When their comrades in the fort beheld their fate, a panic seized them. Conscious of their own deeds, perpetrated on this very spot, they could hope no mercy, and their terror multiplied immeasurably the numbers of their enemy. They abandoned the fort in a body, and fled into the woods most remote from the French. But here a deadlier foe awaited them; for a host of Indians leaped up from ambush. Then rose those hideous war-cries which have curdled the boldest blood and blanched the manliest cheek. The forest warriors, with savage ecstasy, wreaked their long arrears of vengeance, while the French hastened to the spot, and lent their swords to the slaughter. A few prisoners were saved alive; the rest were slain; and thus did the Spaniards make bloody atonement for the butchery of Fort Caroline. But Gourgues's vengeance was not yet appeased. Hard by the fort, the trees were pointed out to him on which Menendez had hanged his captives, and placed over them the inscription, "Not as to Frenchmen, but as to Lutherans." Gourgues ordered the Spanish prisoners to be led thither. "Did you think," he sternly said, as the pallid wretches stood ranged before him, "that so vile a treachery, so detestable a cruelty, against a King so potent and a nation so generous, would go unpunished? I, one of the humblest gentlemen among my King's subjects, have charged myself with avenging it. Even if the Most Christian and the Most Catholic Kings had been enemies, at deadly war, such perfidy and extreme cruelty would still have been unpardonable. Now that they are friends and close allies, there is no name vile enough to brand your deeds, no punishment sharp enough to requite them. But though you cannot suffer as you deserve, you shall suffer all that an enemy can honorably inflict, that your example may teach others to observe the peace and alliance which you have so perfidiously violated." They were hanged where the French had hung before them; and over them was nailed the inscription, burned with a hot iron on a tablet of pine, "Not as to Spaniards, but as to Traitors, Robbers, and Murderers." Gourgues's mission was fulfilled. To occupy the country had never been his intention; nor was it possible, for the Spaniards were still in force at St. Augustine. His was a whirlwind visitation,—to ravage, ruin, and vanish. He harangued the Indians, and exhorted them to demolish the fort. They fell to the work with eagerness, and in less than a day not one stone was left on another. Gourgues returned to the forts at the mouth of the river, destroyed them also, and took up his march for his ships. It was a triumphal procession. The Indians thronged around the victors with gifts of fish and game; and an old woman declared that she was now ready to die, since she had seen the French once more. The ships were ready for sea. Gourgues bade his disconsolate allies farewell, and nothing would content them but a promise to return soon. Before embarking, he addressed his own men:—"My friends, let us give thanks to God for the success He has granted us. It is He who saved us from tempests; it is He who inclined the hearts of the Indians towards us; it is He who blinded the understanding of the Spaniards. They were four to one, in forts well armed and provisioned. Our right was our only strength; and yet we have conquered. Not to our own swords, but to God only, we owe our victory. Then let us thank Him, my friends; let us never forget His favors; and let us pray that He may continue them, saving us from dangers, and guiding us safely home. Let us pray, too, that He may so dispose the hearts of men that our perils and toils may find favor in the eyes of our King and of all France, since all we have done was done for the King's service and for the honor of our country." Thus Spaniards and Frenchmen alike laid their reeking swords on God's altar. Gourgues sailed on the third of May, and, gazing back along their foaming wake, the adventurers looked their last on the scene of their exploits. Their success had cost its price. A few of their number had fallen, and hardships still awaited the survivors. Gourgues, however, reached Rochelle on the day of Pentecost, and the Huguenot citizens greeted him with all honor. At court it fared worse with him. The King, still obsequious to Spain, looked on him coldly and askance. The Spanish minister demanded his head. It was hinted to him that he was not safe, and he withdrew to Ronen, where he found asylum among his friends. His fortune was gone; debts contracted for his expedition weighed heavily on him; and for years he lived in obscurity, almost in misery. At length his prospects brightened. Elizabeth of England learned his merits and his misfortunes, and invited him to enter her service. The King, who, says the Jesuit historian, had always at heart been delighted with his achievement, openly restored him to favor; while, some years later, Don Antonio tendered him command of his fleet, to defend his right to the crown of Portugal against Philip the Second. Gourgues, happy once more to cross swords with the Spaniards, gladly embraced this offer; but in 1583, on his way to join the Portuguese prince, he died at Tours of a sudden illness. The French mourned the loss of the man who had wiped a blot from the national scutcheon, and respected his memory as that of one of the best captains of his time. And, in truth, if a zealous patriotism, a fiery valor, and skilful leadership are worthy of honor, then is such a tribute due to Dominique de Gourgues, slave-catcher and half-pirate as he was, like other naval heroes of that wild age. Romantic as was his exploit, it lacked the fullness of poetic justice, since the chief offender escaped him. While Gourgues was sailing towards Florida, Menendez was in Spain, high in favor at court, where he told to approving ears how he had butchered the heretics. Borgia, the sainted General of the Jesuits, was his fast friend; and two years later, when he returned to America, the Pope, Paul the Fifth, regarding him as an instrument for the conversion of the Indians, wrote him a letter with his benediction. He re-established his power in Florida, rebuilt Fort San Mateo, and taught the Indians that death or flight was the only refuge from Spanish tyranny. They murdered his missionaries and spurned their doctrine. "The Devil is the best thing in the world," they cried; "we adore him; he makes men brave." Even the Jesuits despaired, and abandoned Florida in disgust. Menendez was summoned home, where fresh honors awaited him from the Crown, though, according to the somewhat doubtful assertion of the heretical Grotius, his deeds had left a stain upon his name among the people. He was given command of the armada of three hundred sail and twenty thousand men, which, in 1574, was gathered at Santander against England and Flanders. But now, at the height of his fortunes, his career was abruptly closed. He died suddenly, at the age of fifty-five. Grotius affirms that he killed himself; but, in his eagerness to point the moral of his story, he seems to have overstepped the bounds of historic truth. The Spanish bigot was rarely a suicide; for the rites of Christian burial and repose in consecrated ground were denied to the remains of the self-murderer. There is positive evidence, too, in a codicil to the will of Menendez, dated at Santander on the fifteenth of September, 1574, that he was on that day seriously ill, though, as the instrument declares, "of sound mind." There is reason, then, to believe that this pious cut-throat died a natural death, crowned with honors, and soothed by the consolations of his religion. It was he who crushed French Protestantism in America. To plant religious freedom on this western soil was not the mission of France. It was for her to rear in northern forests the banner of absolutism and of Rome; while among the rocks of Massachusetts England and Calvin fronted her in dogged opposition, long before the ice-crusted pines of Plymouth had listened to the rugged psalmody of the Puritan, the solitudes of Western New York and the stern wilderness of Lake Huron were trodden by the iron heel of the soldier and the sandalled foot of the Franciscan friar. France was the true pioneer of the Great West. They who bore the fleur-de-lis were always in the van, patient, daring, indomitable. And foremost on this bright roll of forest chivalry stands the half-forgotten name of Samuel de Champlain. Part 2 SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN. CHAPTER I. 1488-1543. EARLY FRENCH ADVENTURE IN NORTH AMERICA. When America was first made known to Europe, the part assumed by France on the borders of that new world was peculiar, and is little recognized. While the Spaniard roamed sea and land, burning for achievement, red-hot with bigotry and avarice, and while England, with soberer steps and a less dazzling result, followed in the path of discovery and gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry. A French writer, however, advances a more ambitious claim. In the year 1488, four years before the first voyage of Columbus, America, he maintains, was found by Frenchmen. Cousin, a navigator of Dieppe, being at sea off the African coast, was forced westward, it is said, by winds and currents to within sight of an unknown shore, where he presently descried the mouth of a great river. On board his ship was one Pinzon, whose conduct became so mutinous that, on his return to Dieppe, Cousin made complaint to the magistracy, who thereupon dismissed the offender from the maritime service of the town. Pinzon went to Spain, became known to Columbus, told him the discovery, and joined him on his voyage of 1492. To leave this cloudland of tradition, and approach the confines of recorded history. The Normans, offspring of an ancestry of conquerors,—the Bretons, that stubborn, hardy, unchanging race, who, among Druid monuments changeless as themselves, still cling with Celtic obstinacy to the thoughts and habits of the past,—the Basques, that primeval people, older than history,—all frequented from a very early date the cod-banks of Newfoundland. There is some reason to believe that this fishery existed before the voyage of Cabot, in 1497; there is strong evidence that it began as early as the year 1504; and it is well established that, in 1517, fifty Castilian, French, and Portuguese vessels were engaged in it at once; while in 1527, on the third of August, eleven sail of Norman, one of Breton, and two of Portuguese fishermen were to be found in the Bay of St. John. From this time forth, the Newfoundland fishery was never abandoned. French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese made resort to the Banks, always jealous, often quarrelling, but still drawing up treasure from those exhaustless mines, and bearing home bountiful provision against the season of Lent. On this dim verge of the known world there were other perils than those of the waves. The rocks and shores of those sequestered seas had, so thought the voyagers, other tenants than the seal, the walrus, and the screaming sea-fowl, the bears which stole away their fish before their eyes, and the wild natives dressed in seal-skins. Griffius—so ran the story—infested the mountains of Labrador. Two islands, north of Newfoundland, were given over to the fiends from whom they derived their name, the Isles of Demons. An old map pictures their occupants at length,—devils rampant, with wings, horns, and tail. The passing voyager heard the din of their infernal orgies, and woe to the sailor or the fisherman who ventured alone into the haunted woods. "True it is," writes the old cosmographer Thevet, "and I myself have heard it, not from one, but from a great number of the sailors and pilots with whom I have made many voyages, that, when they passed this way, they heard in the air, on the tops and about the masts, a great clamor of men's voices, confused and inarticulate, such as you may hear from the crowd at a fair or market-place whereupon they well knew that the Isle of Demons was not far off." And he adds, that he himself, when among the Indians, had seen them so tormented by these infernal persecutors, that they would fall into his arms for relief; on which, repeating a passage of the Gospel of St. John, he had driven the imps of darkness to a speedy exodus. They are comely to look upon, he further tells us; yet, by reason of their malice, that island is of late abandoned, and all who dwelt there have fled for refuge to the main. While French fishermen plied their trade along these gloomy coasts, the French government spent it's energies on a different field. The vitality of the kingdom was wasted in Italian wars. Milan and Naples offered a more tempting prize than the wilds of Baccalaos. Eager for glory and for plunder, a swarm of restless nobles followed their knight-errant King, the would-be paladin, who, misshapen in body and fantastic in mind, had yet the power to raise a storm which the lapse of generations could not quell. Under Charles the Eighth and his successor, war and intrigue ruled the day; and in the whirl of Italian politics there was no leisure to think of a new world. Yet private enterprise was not quite benumbed. In 1506, one Denis of Honfleur explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence; 2 two years later, Aubert of Dieppe followed on his track; and in 1518, the Baron de Lery made an abortive attempt at settlement on Sable Island, where the cattle left by him remained and multiplied. The crown passed at length to Francis of Angouleme. There were in his nature seeds of nobleness,—seeds destined to bear little fruit. Chivalry and honor were always on his lips; but Francis the First, a forsworn gentleman, a despotic king, vainglorious, selfish, sunk in debaucheries, was but the type of an era which retained the forms of the Middle Age without its soul, and added to a still prevailing barbarism the pestilential vices which hung fog-like around the dawn of civilization. Yet he esteemed arts and letters, and, still more, coveted the eclat which they could give. The light which was beginning to pierce the feudal darkness gathered its rays around his throne. Italy was rewarding the robbers who preyed on her with the treasures of her knowledge and her culture; and Italian genius, of whatever stamp, found ready patronage at the hands of Francis. Among artists, philosophers, and men of letters enrolled in his service stands the humbler name of a Florentine navigator, John Verrazzano. He was born of an ancient family, which could boast names eminent in Florentine history, and of which the last survivor died in 1819. He has been called a pirate, and he was such in the same sense in which Drake, Hawkins, and other valiant sea-rovers of his own and later times, merited the name; that is to say, he would plunder and kill a Spaniard on the high seas without waiting for a declaration of war. The wealth of the Indies was pouring into the coffers of Charles the Fifth, and the exploits of Cortes had given new lustre to his crown. Francis the First begrudged his hated rival the glories and profits of the New World. He would fain have his share of the prize; and Verrazzano, with four ships, was despatched to seek out a passage westward to the rich kingdom of Cathay. Some doubt has of late been cast on the reality of this voyage of Verrazzano, and evidence, mainly negative in kind, has been adduced to prove the story of it a fabrication; but the difficulties of incredulity appear greater than those of belief, and no ordinary degree of scepticism is required to reject the evidence that the narrative is essentially true. Towards the end of the year 1523, his four ships sailed from Dieppe; but a storm fell upon him, and, with two of the vessels, he ran back in distress to a port of Brittany. What became of the other two does not appear. Neither is it clear why, after a preliminary cruise against the Spaniards, he pursued his voyage with one vessel alone, a caravel called the "Dauphine." With her he made for Madeira, and, on the seventeenth of January, 1524, set sail from a barren islet in its neighborhood, and bore away for the unknown world. In forty-nine days they neared a low shore, not far from the site of Wilmington in North Carolina, "a newe land," exclaims the voyager, "never before seen of any man, either auncient or moderne." Verrazzano steered southward in search of a harbor, and, finding none, turned northward again. Presently he sent a boat ashore. The inhabitants, who had fled at first, soon came down to the strand in wonder and admiration, pointing out a landing-place, and making gestures of friendship. "These people," says Verrazzano, "goe altogether naked, except only certain skinnes of beastes like unto marterns [martens], which they fasten onto a narrowe girdle made of grasse. They are of colour russet, and not much unlike the Saracens, their hayre blacke, thicke, and not very long, which they tye togeather in a knot behinde, and weare it like a taile." He describes the shore as consisting of small low hillocks of fine sand, intersected by creeks and inlets, and beyond these a country "full of Palme [pine?] trees, Bay trees, and high Cypresse trees, and many other sortes of trees, vnknowne in Europe, which yeeld most sweete sanours, farre from the shore." Still advancing northward, Verrazzano sent a boat for a supply of water. The surf ran high, and the crew could not land; but an adventurous young sailor jumped overboard and swam shoreward with a gift of beads and trinkets for the Indians, who stood watching him. His heart failed as he drew near; he flung his gift among them, turned, and struck out for the boat. The surf dashed him back, flinging him with violence on the beach among the recipients of his bounty, who seized him by the arms and legs, and, while he called lustily for aid, answered him with outcries designed to allay his terrors. Next they kindled a great fire,—doubtless to roast and devour him before the eyes of his comrades, gazing in horror from their boat. On the contrary, they carefully warmed him, and were trying to dry his clothes, when, recovering from his bewilderment, he betrayed a strong desire to escape to his friends; whereupon, "with great love, clapping him fast about, with many embracings," they led him to the shore, and stood watching till he had reached the boat. It only remained to requite this kindness, and an opportunity soon occurred; for, coasting the shores of Virginia or Maryland, a party went on shore and found an old woman, a young girl, and several children, hiding with great terror in the grass. Having, by various blandishments, gained their confidence, they carried off one of the children as a curiosity, and, since the girl was comely, would fain have taken her also, but desisted by reason of her continual screaming. Verrazzano's next resting-place was the Bay of New York. Rowing up in his boat through the Narrows, under the steep heights of Staten Island, he saw the harbor within dotted with canoes of the feathered natives, coming from the shore to welcome him. But what most engaged the eyes of the white men were the fancied signs of mineral wealth in the neighboring hills. Following the shores of Long Island, they came to an island, which may have been Block Island, and thence to a harbor, which was probably that of Newport. Here they stayed fifteen days, most courteously received by the inhabitants. Among others appeared two chiefs, gorgeously arrayed in painted deer-skins,—kings, as Verrazzano calls them, with attendant gentlemen; while a party of squaws in a canoe, kept by their jealous lords at a safe distance from the caravel, figure in the narrative as the queen and her maids. The Indian wardrobe had been taxed to its utmost to do the strangers honor,—copper bracelets, lynx-skins, raccoon-skins, and faces bedaubed with gaudy colors. Again they spread their sails, and on the fifth of May bade farewell to the primitive hospitalities of Newport, steered along the rugged coasts of New England, and surveyed, ill pleased, the surf-beaten rocks, the pine-tree and the fir, the shadows and the gloom of mighty forests. Here man and nature alike were savage and repellent. Perhaps some plundering straggler from the fishing-banks, some manstealer like the Portuguese Cortereal, or some kidnapper of children and ravisher of squaws like themselves, had warned the denizens of the woods to beware of the worshippers of Christ. Their only intercourse was in the way of trade. From the brink of the rocks which overhung the sea the Indians would let down a cord to the boat below, demand fish-hooks, knives, and steel, in barter for their furs, and, their bargain made, salute the voyagers with unseemly gestures of derision and scorn. The French once ventured ashore; but a war-whoop and a shower of arrows sent them back to their boats. Verrazzano coasted the seaboard of Maine, and sailed northward as far as Newfoundland, whence, provisions failing, he steered for France. He had not found a passage to Cathay, but he had explored the American coast from the thirty-fourth degree to the fiftieth, and at various points had penetrated several leagues into the country. On the eighth of July, he wrote from Dieppe to the King the earliest description known to exist of the shores of the United States. Great was the joy that hailed his arrival, and great were the hopes of emolument and wealth from the new-found shores. The merchants of Lyons were in a flush of expectation. For himself, he was earnest to return, plant a colony, and bring the heathen tribes within the pale of the Church. But the time was inauspicious. The year of his voyage was to France a year of disasters,—defeat in Italy, the loss of Milan, the death of the heroic Bayard; and, while Verrazzano was writing his narrative at Dieppe, the traitor Bourbon was invading Provence. Preparation, too, was soon on foot for the expedition which, a few months later, ended in the captivity of Francis on the field of Pavia. Without a king, without an army, without money, convulsed within, and threatened from without, France after that humiliation was in no condition to renew her Transatlantic enterprise. Henceforth few traces remain of the fortunes of Verrazzano. Ramusio affirms, that, on another voyage, he was killed and eaten by savages, in sight of his followers; and a late writer hazards the conjecture that this voyage, if made at all, was made in the service of Henry the Eighth of England. But a Spanish writer affirms that, in 1527, he was hanged at Puerto del Pico as a pirate, and this assertion is fully confirmed by authentic documents recently brought to light. The fickle-minded King, always ardent at the outset of an enterprise and always flagging before its close, divided, moreover, between the smiles of his mistresses and the assaults of his enemies, might probably have dismissed the New World from his thoughts. But among the favorites of his youth was a high-spirited young noble, Philippe de BrionChabot, the partner of his joustings and tennis-playing, his gaming and gallantries. He still stood high in the royal favor, and, after the treacherous escape of Francis from captivity, held the office of Admiral of France. When the kingdom had rallied in some measure from its calamnities, he conceived the purpose of following up the path which Verrazzano had opened. The ancient town of St. Malo—thrust out like a buttress into the sea, strange and grim of aspect, breathing war front its walls and battlements of ragged stone, a stronghold of privateers, the home of a race whose intractable and defiant independence neither time nor change has subdued—has been for centuries a nursery of hardy mariners. Among the earliest and most eminent on its list stands the name of Jacques Cartier. His portrait hangs in the town-hall of St. Malo,—bold, keen features bespeaking a spirit not apt to quail before the wrath of man or of the elements. In him Chabot found a fit agent of his design, if, indeed, its suggestion is not due to the Breton navigator. Sailing from St. Malo on the twentieth of April, 1534, Cartier steered for Newfoundland, passed through the Straits of Belle Isle, entered the Gulf of Chaleurs, planted a cross at Gaspe, and, never doubting that he was on the high road to Cathay, advanced up the St. Lawrence till he saw the shores of Anticosti. But autumnal storms were gathering. The voyagers took counsel together, turned their prows eastward, and bore away for France, carrying thither, as a sample of the natural products of the New World, two young Indians, lured into their clutches by an act of villanous treachery. The voyage was a mere reconnoissance. The spirit of discovery was awakened. A passage to India could be found, and a new France built up beyond the Atlantic. Mingled with such views of interest and ambition was another motive scarcely less potent. The heresy of Luther was convulsing Germany, and the deeper heresy of Calvin infecting France. Devout Catholics, kindling with redoubled zeal, would fain requite the Church for her losses in the Old World by winning to her fold the infidels of the New. But, in pursuing an end at once so pious and so politic, Francis the First was setting at naught the supreme Pontiff himself, since, by the preposterous bull of Alexander the Sixth, all America had been given to the Spaniards. In October, 1534, Cartier received from Chabot another commission, and, in spite of secret but bitter opposition from jealous traders of St. Malo, he prepared for a second voyage. Three vessels, the largest not above a hundred and twenty tons, were placed at his disposal, and Claude de Pontbriand, Charles de la Pommeraye, and other gentlemen of birth, enrolled themselves for the adventure. On the sixteenth of May, 1535, officers and sailors assembled in the cathedral of St. Malo, where, after confession and mass, they received the parting blessing of the bishop. Three days later they set sail. The dingy walls of the rude old seaport, and the white rocks that line the neighboring shores of Brittany, faded from their sight, and soon they were tossing in a furious tempest. The scattered ships escaped the danger, and, reuniting at the Straits of Belle Isle, steered westward along the coast of Labrador, till they reached a small bay opposite the island of Anticosti. Cartier called it the Bay of St. Lawrence,—a name afterwards extended to the entire gulf, and to the great river above. To ascend this great river, and tempt the hazards of its intricate navigation with no better pilots than the two young Indians kidnapped the year before, was a venture of no light risk. But skill or fortune prevailed; and, on the first of September, the voyagers reached in safety the gorge of the gloomy Saguenay, with its towering cliffs and sullen depth of waters. Passing the Isle aux Coudres, and the lofty promontory of Cape Tourmente, they came to anchor in a quiet channel between the northern shore and the margin of a richly wooded island, where the trees were so thickly hung with grapes that Cartier named it the Island of Bacchus. Indians came swarming from the shores, paddled their canoes about the ships, and clambered to the decks to gaze in bewilderment at the novel scene, and listen to the story of their travelled countrymen, marvellous in their ears as a visit to another planet. Cartier received them kindly, listened to the long harangue of the great chief Donnacona, regaled him with bread and wine; and, when relieved at length of his guests, set forth in a boat to explore the river above. As he drew near the opening of the channel, the Hochelaga again spread before him the broad expanse of its waters. A mighty promontory, rugged and bare, thrust its scarped front into the surging current. Here, clothed in the majesty of solitude, breathing the stern poetry of the wilderness, rose the cliffs now rich with heroic memories, where the fiery Count Frontenac cast defiance at his foes, where Wolfe, Montcalm, and Montgomery fell. As yet, all was a nameless barbarism, and a cluster of wigwams held the site of the rock-built city of Quebec. Its name was Stadacone, and it owned the sway of the royal Donnacona. Cartier set out to visit this greasy potentate; ascended the river St. Charles, by him called the St. Croix, landed, crossed the meadows, climbed the rocks, threaded the forest, and emerged upon a squalid hamlet of bark cabins. When, having satisfied their curiosity, he and his party were rowing for the ships, a friendly interruption met them at the mouth of the St. Charles. An old chief harangued them from the bank, men, boys, and children screeched welcome from the meadow, and a troop of hilarious squaws danced knee-deep in the water. The gift of a few strings of beads completed their delight and redoubled their agility; and, from the distance of a mile, their shrill songs of jubilation still reached the ears of the receding Frenchmen. The hamlet of Stadacone, with its king, Donnacona, and its naked lords and princes, was not the metropolis of this forest state, since a town far greater—so the Indians averred—stood by the brink of the river, many days' journey above. It was called Hochelaga, and the great river itself, with a wide reach of adjacent country, had borrowed its name. Thither, with his two young Indians as guides, Cartier resolved to go; but misgivings seized the guides as the time drew near, while Donnacona and his tribesmen, jealous of the plan, set themselves to thwart it. The Breton captain turned a deaf ear to their dissuasions; on which, failing to touch his reason, they appealed to his fears. One morning, as the ships still lay at anchor, the French beheld three Indian devils descending in a canoe towards them, dressed in black and white dog-skins, with faces black as ink, and horns long as a man's arm. Thus arrayed, they drifted by, while the principal fiend, with fixed eyes, as of one piercing the secrets of futurity, uttered in a loud voice a long harangue. Then they paddled for the shore; and no sooner did they reach it than each fell flat like a dead man in the bottom of the canoe. Aid, however, was at hand; for Donnacona and his tribesmen, rushing pell-mell from the adjacent woods, raised the swooning masqueraders, and, with shrill clamors, bore them in their arms within the sheltering thickets. Here, for a full half-hour, the French could hear them haranguing in solemn conclave. Then the two young Indians whom Cartier had brought back from France came out of the bushes, enacting a pantomime of amazement and terror, clasping their hands, and calling on Christ and the Virgin; whereupon Cartier, shouting from the vessel, asked what was the matter. They replied, that the god Coudonagny had sent to warn the French against all attempts to ascend the great river, since, should they persist, snows, tempests, and drifting ice would requite their rashness with inevitable ruin. The French replied that Coudonagny was a fool; that he could not hurt those who believed in Christ; and that they might tell this to his three messengers. The assembled Indians, with little reverence for their deity, pretended great contentment at this assurance, and danced for joy along the beach. Cartier now made ready to depart. And, first, he caused the two larger vessels to be towed for safe harborage within the mouth of the St. Charles. With the smallest, a galleon of forty tons, and two open boats, carrying in all fifty sailors, besides Pontbriand, La Pommeraye, and other gentlemen, he set out for Hochelaga. Slowly gliding on their way by walls of verdure brightened in the autumnal sun, they saw forests festooned with grape-vines, and waters alive with wild-fowl; they heard the song of the blackbird, the thrush, and, as they fondly thought, the nightingale. The galleon grounded; they left her, and, advancing with the boats alone, on the second of October neared the goal of their hopes, the mysterious Hochelaga. Just below where now are seen the quays and storehouses of Montreal, a thousand Indians thronged the shore, wild with delight, dancing, singing, crowding about the strangers, and showering into the boats their gifts of fish and maize; and, as it grew dark, fires lighted up the night, while, far and near, the French could see the excited savages leaping and rejoicing by the blaze. At dawn of day, marshalled and accoutred, they marched for Hochelaga. An Indian path led them through the forest which covered the site of Montreal. The morning air was chill and sharp, the leaves were changing hue, and beneath the oaks the ground was thickly strewn with acorns. They soon met an Indian chief with a party of tribesmen, or, as the old narrative has it, "one of the principal lords of the said city," attended with a numerous retinue. Greeting them after the concise courtesy of the forest, he led them to a fire kindled by the side of the path for their comfort and refreshment, seated them on the ground, and made them a long harangue, receiving in requital of his eloquence two hatchets, two knives, and a crucifix, the last of which he was invited to kiss. This done, they resumed their march, and presently came upon open fields, covered far and near with the ripened maize, its leaves rustling, and its yellow grains gleaming between the parting husks. Before them, wrapped in forests painted by the early frosts, rose the ridgy back of the Mountain of Montreal, and below, encompassed with its corn-fields, lay the Indian town. Nothing was visible but its encircling palisades. They were of trunks of trees, set in a triple row. The outer and inner ranges inclined till they met and crossed near the summit, while the upright row between them, aided by transverse braces, gave to the whole an abundant strength. Within were galleries for the defenders, rude ladders to mount them, and magazines of stones to throw down on the heads of assailants. It was a mode of fortification practised by all the tribes speaking dialects of the Iroquois. The voyagers entered the narrow portal. Within, they saw some fifty of those large oblong dwellings so familiar in after years to the eyes of the Jesuit apostles in Iroquois and Huron forests. They were about fifty yards in length, and twelve or fifteen wide, framed of sapling poles closely covered with sheets of bark, and each containing several fires and several families. In the midst of the town was an open area, or public square, a stone's throw in width. Here Cartier and his followers stopped, while the surrounding houses of bark disgorged their inmates,—swarms of children, and young women and old, their infants in their arms. They crowded about the visitors, crying for delight, touching their beards, feeling their faces, and holding up the screeching infants to be touched in turn. The marvellous visitors, strange in hue, strange in attire, with moustached lip and bearded chin, with arquebuse, halberd, helmet, and cuirass, seemed rather demigods than men. Due time having been allowed for this exuberance of feminine rapture, the warriors interposed, banished the women and children to a distance, and squatted on the ground around the French, row within row of swarthy forms and eager faces, "as if," says Cartier, "we were going to act a play." Then appeared a troop of women, each bringing a mat, with which they carpeted the bare earth for the behoof of their guests. The latter being seated, the chief of the nation was borne before them on a deerskin by a number of his tribesmen, a bedridden old savage, paralyzed and helpless, squalid as the rest in his attire, and distinguished only by a red fillet, inwrought with the dyed quills of the Canada porcupine, encircling his lank black hair. They placed him on the ground at Cartier's feet and made signs of welcome for him, while he pointed feebly to his powerless limbs, and implored the healing touch from the hand of the French chief. Cartier complied, and received in acknowledgment the red fillet of his grateful patient. Then from surrounding dwellings appeared a woeful throng, the sick, the lame, the blind, the maimed, the decrepit, brought or led forth and placed on the earth before the perplexed commander, "as if," he says, "a god had come down to cure them." His skill in medicine being far behind the emergency, he pronounced over his petitioners a portion of the Gospel of St. John, made the sign of the cross, and uttered a prayer, not for their bodies only, but for their miserable souls. Next he read the passion of the Saviour, to which, though comprehending not a word, his audience listened with grave attention. Then came a distribution of presents. The squaws and children were recalled, and, with the warriors, placed in separate groups. Knives and hatchets were given to the men, and beads to the women, while pewter rings and images of the Agnus Dei were flung among the troop of children, whence ensued a vigorous scramble in the square of Hochelaga. Now the French trumpeters pressed their trumpets to their lips, and blew a blast that filled the air with warlike din and the hearts of the hearers with amazement and delight. Bidding their hosts farewells the visitors formed their ranks and defiled through the gate once more, despite the efforts of a crowd of women, who, with clamorous hospitality, beset them with gifts of fish, beans, corn, and other viands of uninviting aspect, which the Frenchmen courteously declined. A troop of Indians followed, and guided them to the top of the neighboring mountain. Cartier called it Mont Royal, Montreal; and hence the name of the busy city which now holds the site of the vanished Iloclielaga. Stadacone and Hochelaga, Quebec and Montreal, in the sixteenth century as in the nineteenth, were the centres of Canadian population. From the summit, that noble prospect met his eye which at this day is the delight of tourists, but strangely changed, since, first of white men, the Breton voyager gazed upon it. Tower and dome and spire, congregated roofs, white sail, and gliding steamer, animate its vast expanse with varied life. Cartier saw a different scene. East, west, and south, the mantling forest was over all, and the broad blue ribbon of the great river glistened amid a realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds of Mexico, stretched a leafy desert, and the vast hive of industry, the mighty battle-ground of later centuries, lay sunk in savage torpor, wrapped in illimitable woods. The French re-embarked, bade farewell to Hochelaga, retraced their lonely course down the St. Lawrence, and reached Stadacone in safety. On the bank of the St. Charles, their companions had built in their absence a fort of palisades, and the ships, hauled up the little stream, lay moored before it. Here the self-exiled company were soon besieged by the rigors of the Canadian winter. The rocks, the shores, the pine-trees, the solid floor of the frozen river, all alike were blanketed in snow beneath the keen cold rays of the dazzling sun. The drifts rose above the sides of their ships; masts, spars, and cordage were thick with glittering incrustations and sparkling rows of icicles; a frosty armor, four inches thick, encased the bulwarks. Yet, in the bitterest weather, the neighboring Indians, "hardy," says the journal, "as so many beasts," came daily to the fort, wading, half naked, waist-deep through the snow. At length, their friendship began to abate; their visits grew less frequent, and during December had wholly ceased, when a calamity fell upon the French. A malignant scurvy broke out among them. Man after man went down before the hideous disease, till twenty-five were dead, and only three or four were left in health. The sound were too few to attend the sick, and the wretched sufferers lay in helpless despair, dreaming of the sun and the vines of France. The ground, hard as flint, defied their feeble efforts, and, unable to bury their dead, they hid them in snow-drifts. Cartier appealed to the saints; but they turned a deaf ear. Then he nailed against a tree an image of the Virgin, and on a Sunday summoned forth his woe-begone followers, who, haggard, reeling, bloated with their maladies, moved in procession to the spot, and, kneeling in the snow, sang litanies and psalms of David. That day died Philippe Rougemont, of Amboise, aged twenty-two years. The Holy Virgin deigned no other response. There was fear that the Indians, learning their misery, might finish the work that scurvy had begun. None of them, therefore, were allowed to approach the fort; and when a party of savages lingered within hearing, Cartier forced his invalid garrison to beat with sticks and stones against the walls, that their dangerous neighbors, deluded by the clatter, might think them engaged in hard labor. These objects of their fear proved, however, the instruments of their salvation. Cartier, walking one day near the river, met an Indian, who not long before had been prostrate, like many of his fellows, with the scurvy, but who was now, to all appearance, in high health and spirits. What agency had wrought this marvellous recovery? According to the Indian, it was a certain evergreen, called by him ameda, a decoction of the leaves of which was sovereign against the disease. The experiment was tried. The sick men drank copiously of the healing draught,—so copiously indeed that in six days they drank a tree as large as a French oak. Thus vigorously assailed, the distemper relaxed its hold, and health and hope began to revisit the hapless company. When this winter of misery had worn away, and the ships were thawed from their icy fetters, Cartier prepared to return. He had made notable discoveries; but these were as nothing to the tales of wonder that had reached his ear,—of a land of gold and rubies, of a nation white like the French, of men who lived without food, and of others to whom Nature had granted but one leg. Should he stake his credit on these marvels? It were better that they who had recounted them to him should, with their own lips, recount them also to the King, and to this end he resolved that Donnacona and his chiefs should go with him to court. He lured them therefore to the fort, and led them into an ambuscade of sailors, who, seizing the astonished guests, hurried them on board the ships. Having accomplished this treachery, the voyagers proceeded to plant the emblem of Christianity. The cross was raised, the fleur-de-lis planted near it, and, spreading their sails, they steered for home. It was the sixteenth of July, 1536, when Cartier again cast anchor under the walls of St. Malo. A rigorous climate, a savage people, a fatal disease, and a soil barren of gold were the allurements of New France. Nor were the times auspicious for a renewal of the enterprise. Charles the Fifth, flushed with his African triumphs, challenged the Most Christian King to single combat. The war flamed forth with renewed fury, and ten years elapsed before a hollow truce varnished the hate of the royal rivals with a thin pretence of courtesy. Peace returned; but Francis the First was sinking to his ignominious grave, under the scourge of his favorite goddess, and Chabot, patron of the former voyages, was in disgrace. Meanwhile the ominous adventure of New France had found a champion in the person of Jean Francois de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval, a nobleman of Picardy. Though a man of high account in his own province, his past honors paled before the splendor of the titles said to have been now conferred on him, Lord of Norembega, Viceroy and Lieutenant-General in Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay, Newfoundland, Belle Isle, Carpunt, Labrador, the Great Bay, and Baccalaos. To this windy gift of ink and parchment was added a solid grant from the royal treasury, with which five vessels were procured and equipped; and to Cartier was given the post of Captain-General. "We have resolved," says Francis, "to send him again to the lands of Canada and Hochelaga, which form the extremity of Asia towards the west." His commission declares the objects of the enterprise to be discovery, settlement, and the conversion of the Indians, who are described as "men without knowledge of God or use of reason,"—a pious design, held doubtless in full sincerity by the royal profligate, now, in his decline, a fervent champion of the Faith and a strenuous tormentor of heretics. The machinery of conversion was of a character somewhat questionable, since Cartier and Roberval were empowered to ransack the prisons for thieves, robbers, and other malefactors, to complete their crews and strengthen the colony. "Whereas," says the King, "we have undertaken this voyage for the honor of God our Creator, desiring with all our heart to do that which shall be agreeable to Him, it is our will to perform a compassionate and meritorious work towards criminals and malefactors, to the end that they may acknowledge the Creator, return thanks to Him, and mend their lives. Therefore we have resolved to cause to be delivered to our aforesaid lieutenant (Roberval), such and so many of the aforesaid criminals and malefactors detained in our prisons as may seem to him useful and necessary to be carried to the aforesaid countries." Of the expected profits of the voyage the adventurers were to have one third and the King another, while the remainder was to be reserved towards defraying expenses. With respect to Donnacona and his tribesmen, basely kidnapped at Stadacone, their souls had been better cared for than their bodies; for, having been duly baptized, they all died within a year or two, to the great detriment, as it proved, of the expedition. Meanwhile, from beyond the Pyrenees, the Most Catholic King, with alarmed and jealous eye, watched the preparations of his Most Christian enemy. America, in his eyes, was one vast province of Spain, to be vigilantly guarded against the intruding foreigner. To what end were men mustered, and ships fitted out in the Breton seaports? Was it for colonization, and if so, where? Was it in Southern Florida, or on the frozen shores of Baccalaos, of which Breton cod-fishers claimed the discovery? Or would the French build forts on the Bahamas, whence they could waylay the gold ships in the Bahama Channel? Or was the expedition destined against the Spanish settlements of the islands or the Main? Reinforcements were despatched in haste, and a spy was sent to France, who, passing from port to port, Quimper, St. Malo, Brest, Morlaix, came back freighted with exaggerated tales of preparation. The Council of the Indies was called. "The French are bound for Baccalaos,"—such was the substance of their report; "your Majesty will do well to send two caravels to watch their movements, and a force to take possession of the said country. And since there is no other money to pay for it, the gold from Peru, now at Panama, might be used to that end." The Cardinal of Seville thought lightly of the danger, and prophesied that the French would reap nothing from their enterprise but disappointment and loss. The King of Portugal, sole acknowledged partner with Spain in the ownership of the New World, was invited by the Spanish ambassador to take part in an expedition against the encroaching French. "They can do no harm at Baccalaos," was the cold reply; "and so," adds the indignant ambassador, "this King would say if they should come and take him here at Lisbon; such is the softness they show here on the one hand, while, on the other, they wish to give law to the whole world." The five ships, occasions of this turmoil and alarm, had lain at St. Malo waiting for cannon and munitions from Normandy and Champagne. They waited in vain, and as the King's orders were stringent against delay, it was resolved that Cartier should sail at once, leaving Roberval to follow with additional ships when the expected supplies arrived. On the twenty-third of May, 1541, the Breton captain again spread his canvas for New France, and, passing in safety the tempestuous Atlantic, the fog-banks of Newfoundland, the island rocks clouded with screaming sea-fowl, and the forests breathing piny odors from the shore, cast anchor again beneath the cliffs of Quebec. Canoes came out from shore filled with feathered savages inquiring for their kidnapped chiefs. "Donnacona," replied Cartier, "is dead;" but he added the politic falsehood, that the others had married in France, and lived in state, like great lords. The Indians pretended to be satisfied; but it was soon apparent that they looked askance on the perfidious strangers. Cartier pursued his course, sailed three leagues and a half up the St. Lawrence, and anchored off the mouth of the River of Cap Rouge. It was late in August, and the leafy landscape sweltered in the sun. The Frenchmen landed, picked up quartz crystals on the shore and thought them diamonds, climbed the steep promontory, drank at the spring near the top, looked abroad on the wooded slopes beyond the little river, waded through the tall grass of the meadow, found a quarry of slate, and gathered scales of a yellow mineral which glistened like gold, then returned to their boats, crossed to the south shore of the St. Lawrence, and, languid with the heat, rested in the shade of forests laced with an entanglement of grape-vines. Now their task began, and while some cleared off the woods and sowed turnip-seed, others cut a zigzag road up the height, and others built two forts, one at the summit, and one on the shore below. The forts finished, the Vicomte de Beaupre took command, while Cartier went with two boats to explore the rapids above Hochelaga. When at length he returned, the autumn was far advanced; and with the gloom of a Canadian November came distrust, foreboding, and homesickness. Roberval had not appeared; the Indians kept jealously aloof; the motley colony was sullen as the dull, raw air around it. There was disgust and ire at Charlesbourg-Royal, for so the place was called. Meanwhile, unexpected delays had detained the impatient Roberval; nor was it until the sixteenth of April, 1542, that, with three ships and two hundred colonists, he set sail from Rochelle. When, on the eighth of June, he entered the harbor of St. John, he found seventeen fishing-vessels lying there at anchor. Soon after, he descried three other sail rounding the entrance of the haven, and, with anger and amazement, recognized the ships of Jacques Cartier. That voyager had broken up his colony and abandoned New France. What motives had prompted a desertion little consonant with the resolute spirit of the man it is impossible to say,—whether sickness within, or Indian enemies without, disgust with an enterprise whose unripened fruits had proved so hard and bitter, or discontent at finding himself reduced to a post of subordination in a country which he had discovered and where he had commanded. The Viceroy ordered him to return; but Cartier escaped with his vessels under cover of night, and made sail for France, carrying with him as trophies a few quartz diamonds from Cap Rouge, and grains of sham gold from the neighboring slate ledges. Thus closed the third Canadian voyage of this notable explorer. His discoveries had gained for him a patent of nobility, and he owned the seigniorial mansion of Limoilou, a rude structure of stone still standing. Here, and in the neighboring town of St. Malo, where also he had a house, he seems to have lived for many years. Roberval once more set sail, steering northward to the Straits of Belle Isle and the dreaded Isles of Demons. And here an incident befell which the all-believing Thevet records in manifest good faith, and which, stripped of the adornments of superstition and a love of the marvellous, has without doubt a nucleus of truth. I give the tale as I find it. The Viceroy's company was of a mixed complexion. There were nobles, officers, soldiers, sailors, adventurers, with women too, and children. Of the women, some were of birth and station, and among them a damsel called Marguerite, a niece of Roberval himself. In the ship was a young gentleman who had embarked for love of her. His love was too well requited; and the stern Viceroy, scandalized and enraged at a passion which scorned concealment and set shame at defiance, cast anchor by the haunted island, landed his indiscreet relative, gave her four arquebuses for defence, and, with an old Norman nurse named Bastienne, who had pandered to the lovers, left her to her fate. Her gallant threw himself into the surf, and by desperate effort gained the shore, with two more guns and a supply of ammunition. The ship weighed anchor, receded, vanished, and they were left alone. Yet not so, for the demon lords of the island beset them day and night, raging around their hut with a confused and hungry clamoring, striving to force the frail barrier. The lovers had repented of their sin, though not abandoned it, and Heaven was on their side. The saints vouchsafed their aid, and the offended Virgin, relenting, held before them her protecting shield. In the form of beasts or other shapes abominably and unutterably hideous, the brood of hell, howling in baffled fury, tore at the branches of the sylvan dwelling; but a celestial hand was ever interposed, and there was a viewless barrier which they might not pass. Marguerite became pregnant. Here was a double prize, two souls in one, mother and child. The fiends grew frantic, but all in vain. She stood undaunted amid these horrors; but her lover, dismayed and heartbroken, sickened and died. Her child soon followed; then the old Norman nurse found her unhallowed rest in that accursed soil, and Marguerite was left alone. Neither her reason nor her courage failed. When the demons assailed her, she shot at them with her gun, but they answered with hellish merriment, and thenceforth she placed her trust in Heaven alone. There were foes around her of the upper, no less than of the nether world. Of these, the bears were the most redoubtable; yet, being vulnerable to mortal weapons, she killed three of them, all, says the story, "as white as an egg." It was two years and five months from her landing on the island, when, far out at sea, the crew of a small fishing-craft saw a column of smoke curling upward from the haunted shore. Was it a device of the fiends to lure them to their ruin? They thought so, and kept aloof. But misgiving seized them. They warily drew near, and descried a female figure in wild attire waving signals from the strand. Thus at length was Marguerite rescued and restored to her native France, where, a few years later, the cosmographer Thevet met her at Natron in Perigord, and heard the tale of wonder from her own lips. Having left his offending niece to the devils and bears of the Isles of Demons, Roberval held his course up the St. Lawrence, and dropped anchor before the heights of Cap Rouge. His company landed; there were bivouacs along the strand, a hubbub of pick and spade, axe, saw, and hammer; and soon in the wilderness uprose a goodly structure, half barrack, half castle, with two towers, two spacious halls, a kitchen, chambers, storerooms, workshops, cellars, garrets, a well, an oven, and two watermills. Roberval named it France-Roy, and it stood on that bold acclivity where Cartier had before intrenched himself, the St. Lawrence in front, and on the right the River of Cap Rouge. Here all the colony housed under the same roof, like one of the experimental communities of recent days,—officers, soldiers, nobles, artisans, laborers, and convicts, with the women and children in whom lay the future hope of New France. Experience and forecast had both been wanting. There were storehouses, but no stores; mills, but no grist; an ample oven, and a dearth of bread. It was only when two of the ships had sailed for France that they took account of their provision and discovered its lamentable shortcoming. Winter and famine followed. They bought fish from the Indians, and dug roots and boiled them in whale-oil. Disease broke out, and, before spring, killed one third of the colony. The rest would have quarrelled, mutinied, and otherwise aggravated their inevitable woes, but disorder was dangerous under the iron rule of the inexorable Roberval. Michel Gaillon was detected in a petty theft, and hanged. Jean de Nantes, for a more venial offence, was kept in irons. The quarrels of men and the scolding of women were alike requited at the whipping-post, "by which means," quaintly says the narrative, "they lived in peace." Thevet, while calling himself the intimate friend of the Viceroy, gives a darker coloring to his story. He says that, forced to unceasing labor, and chafed by arbitrary rules, some of the soldiers fell under Roberval's displeasure, and six of them, formerly his favorites, were hanged in one day. Others were banished to an island, and there kept in fetters; while, for various light offences, several, both men and women, were shot. Even the Indians were moved to pity, and wept at the sight of their woes. And here, midway, our guide deserts us; the ancient narrative is broken, and the latter part is lost, leaving us to divine as we may the future of the ill-starred colony. That it did not long survive is certain. The King, in great need of Roberval, sent Cartier to bring him home, and this voyage seems to have taken place in the summer of 1543. It is said that, in after years, the Viceroy essayed to repossess himself of his Transatlantic domain, and lost his life in the attempt. Thevet, on the other hand, with ample means of learning the truth, affirms that Roberval was slain at night, near the Church of the Innocents, in the heart of Paris. With him closes the prelude of the French-American drama. Tempestuous years and a reign of blood and fire were in store for France. The religious wars begot the hapless colony of Florida, but for more than half a century they left New France a desert. Order rose at length out of the sanguinary chaos; the zeal of discovery and the spirit of commercial enterprise once more awoke, while, closely following, more potent than they, moved the black-robed forces of the Roman Catholic reaction. CHAPTER II. 1542-1604. LA ROCHE.—CHAMPLAIN.—DE MONTS. Years rolled on. France, long tossed among the surges of civil commotion, plunged at last into a gulf of fratricidal war. Blazing hamlets, sacked cities, fields steaming with slaughter, profaned altars, and ravished maidens, marked the track of the tornado. There was little room for schemes of foreign enterprise. Yet, far aloof from siege and battle, the fishermen of the western ports still plied their craft on the Banks of Newfoundland. Humanity, morality, decency, might be forgotten, but codfish must still be had for the use of the faithful in Lent and on fast days. Still the wandering Esquimaux saw the Norman and Breton sails hovering around some lonely headland, or anchored in fleets in the harbor of St. John; and still, through salt spray and driving mist, the fishermen dragged up the riches of the sea. In January and February, 1545, about two vessels a day sailed from French ports for Newfoundland. In 1565, Pedro Menendez complains that the French "rule despotically" in those parts. In 1578, there were a hundred and fifty French fishing-vessels there, besides two hundred of other nations, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Added to these were twenty or thirty Biscayan whalers. In 1607, there was an old French fisherman at Canseau who had voyaged to these seas for forty-two successive years. But if the wilderness of ocean had its treasures, so too had the wilderness of woods. It needed but a few knives, beads, and trinkets, and the Indians would throng to the shore burdened with the spoils of their winter hunting. Fishermen threw up their old vocation for the more lucrative trade in bear-skins and beaver-skins. They built rude huts along the shores of Anticosti, where, at that day, the bison, it is said, could be seen wallowing in the sands. They outraged the Indians; they quarrelled with each other; and this infancy of the Canadian fur-trade showed rich promise of the disorders which marked its riper growth. Others, meanwhile, were ranging the gulf in search of walrus tusks; and, the year after the battle of Ivry, St. Malo sent out a fleet of small craft in quest of this new prize. In all the western seaports, merchants and adventurers turned their eyes towards America; not, like the Spaniards, seeking treasures of silver and gold, but the more modest gains of codfish and train-oil, beaver-skins and marine ivory. St. Malo was conspicuous above them all. The rugged Bretons loved the perils of the sea, and saw with a jealous eye every attempt to shackle their activity on this its favorite field. When in 1588 Jacques Noel and Estienue Chaton—the former a nephew of Cartier and the latter pretending to be so—gained a monopoly of the American fur-trade for twelve year's, such a clamor arose within the walls of St. Malo that the obnoxious grant was promptly revoked. But soon a power was in the field against which all St. Malo might clamor in vain. A Catholic nobleman of Brittany, the Marquis de la Roche, bargained with the King to colonize New France. On his part, he was to receive a monopoly of the trade, and a profusion of worthless titles and empty privileges. He was declared Lieutenant-General of Canada, Hochelaga, Newfoundland, Labrador, and the countries adjacent, with sovereign power within his vast and ill-defined domain. He could levy troops, declare war and peace, make laws, punish or pardon at will, build cities, forts, and castles, and grant out lands in fiefs, seigniories, counties, viscounties, and baronies. Thus was effete and cumbrous feudalism to make a lodgment in the New World. It was a scheme of high-sounding promise, but in performance less than contemptible. La Roche ransacked the prisons, and, gathering thence a gang of thieves and desperadoes, embarked them in a small vessel, and set sail to plant Christianity and civilization in the West. Suns rose and set, and the wretched bark, deep freighted with brutality and vice, held on her course. She was so small that the convicts, leaning over her side, could wash their hands in the water. At length, on the gray horizon they descried a long, gray line of ridgy sand. It was Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia. A wreck lay stranded on the beach, and the surf broke ominously over the long, submerged arms of sand, stretched far out into the sea on the right hand and on the left. Here La Roche landed the convicts, forty in number, while, with his more trusty followers, he sailed to explore the neighboring coasts, and choose a site for the capital of his new dominion, to which, in due time, he proposed to remove the prisoners. But suddenly a tempest from the west assailed him. The frail vessel was forced to run before the gale, which, howling on her track, drove her off the coast, and chased her back towards France. Meanwhile the convicts watched in suspense for the returning sail. Days passed, weeks passed, and still they strained their eyes in vain across the waste of ocean. La Roche had left them to their fate. Rueful and desperate, they wandered among the sand-hills, through the stunted whortleberry bushes, the rank sand-grass, and the tangled cranberry vines which filled the hollows. Not a tree was to be seen; but they built huts of the fragments of the wreck. For food they caught fish in the surrounding sea, and hunted the cattle which ran wild about the island, sprung, perhaps, from those left here eighty years before by the Baron de Lery. They killed seals, trapped black foxes, and clothed themselves in their skins. Their native instincts clung to them in their exile. As if not content with inevitable miseries, they quarrelled and murdered one another. Season after season dragged on. Five years elapsed, and, of the forty, only twelve were left alive. Sand, sea, and sky,—there was little else around them; though, to break the dead monotony, the walrus would sometimes rear his half-human face and glistening sides on the reefs and sand-bars. At length, on the far verge of the watery desert, they descried a sail. She stood on towards the island; a boat's crew landed on the beach, and the exiles were once more among their countrymen. When La Roche returned to France, the fate of his followers sat heavy on his mind. But the day of his prosperity was gone. A host of enemies rose against him and his privileges, and it is said that the Due de Mercaeur seized him and threw him into prison. In time, however, he gained a hearing of the King; and the Norman pilot, Chefdhotel, was despatched to bring the outcasts home. He reached Sable Island in September, 1603, and brought back to France eleven survivors, whose names are still preserved. When they arrived, Henry the Fourth summoned them into his presence. They stood before him, says an old writer, like river-gods of yore; for from head to foot they were clothed in shaggy skins, and beards of prodigious length hung from their swarthy faces. They had accumulated, on their island, a quantity of valuable furs. Of these Chefdhotel had robbed them; but the pilot was forced to disgorge his prey, and, with the aid of a bounty from the King, they were enabled to embark on their own account in the Canadian trade. To their leader, fortune was less kind. Broken by disaster and imprisonment, La Roche died miserably. In the mean time, on the ruin of his enterprise, a new one had been begun. Pontgrave, a merchant of St. Malo, leagued himself with Chauvin, a captain of the navy, who had influence at court. A patent was granted to them, with the condition that they should colonize the country. But their only thought was to enrich themselves. At Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, under the shadow of savage and inaccessible rocks, feathered with pines, firs, and birch-trees, they built a cluster of wooden huts and store-houses. Here they left sixteen men to gather the expected harvest of furs. Before the winter was over, several of them were dead, and the rest scattered through the woods, living on the charity of the Indians. But a new era had dawned on France. Exhausted with thirty years of conflict, she had sunk at last to a repose, uneasy and disturbed, yet the harbinger of recovery. The rugged soldier whom, for the weal of France and of mankind, Providence had cast to the troubled surface of affairs, was throned in the Louvre, composing the strife of factions and the quarrels of his mistresses. The bear-hunting prince of the Pyrenees wore the crown of France; and to this day, as one gazes on the time-worn front of the Tuileries, above all other memories rises the small, strong finger, the brow wrinkled with cares of love and war, the bristling moustache, the grizzled beard, the bold, vigorous, and withal somewhat odd features of the mountaineer of Warn. To few has human liberty owed so deep a gratitude or so deep a grudge. He cared little for creeds or dogmas. Impressible, quick in sympathy, his grim lip lighted often with a smile, and his war-worn cheek was no stranger to a tear. He forgave his enemies and forgot his friends. Many loved him; none but fools trusted him. Mingled of mortal good and ill, frailty and force, of all the kings who for two centuries and more sat on the throne of France Henry the Fourth alone was a man. Art, industry, and commerce, so long crushed and overborne, were stirring into renewed life, and a crowd of adventurous men, nurtured in war and incapable of repose, must seek employment for their restless energies in fields of peaceful enterprise. Two small, quaint vessels, not larger than the fishing-craft of Gloucester and Marblehead,—one was of twelve, the other of fifteen tons,—held their way across the Atlantic, passed the tempestuous headlands of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence, and, with adventurous knight-errantry, glided deep into the heart of the Canadian wilderness. On board of one of them was the Breton merchant, Pontgrave, and with him a man of spirit widely different, a Catholic of good family,—Samuel de Champlain, born in 1567 at the small seaport of Bronage on the Bay of Biscay. His father was a captain in the royal navy, where he himself seems also to have served, though during the war he had fought for the King in Brittany, under the banners of D'Aumont, St. Luc, and Brissac. His purse was small, his merit great; and Henry the Fourth out of his own slender revenues had given him a pension to maintain him near his person. But rest was penance to him. The war in Brittany was over. The rebellious Duc de Mercaeur was reduced to obedience, and the royal army disbanded. Champlain, his occupation gone, conceived a design consonant with his adventurous nature. He would visit the West Indies, and bring back to the King a report of those regions of mystery whence Spanish jealousy excluded foreigners, and where every intruding Frenchman was threatened with death. Here much knowledge was to be won and much peril to be met. The joint attraction was resistless. The Spaniards, allies of the vanquished Leaguers, were about to evacuate Blavet, their last stronghold in Brittany. Thither Champlain repaired; and here he found an uncle, who had charge of the French fleet destined to take on board the Spanish garrison. Champlain embarked with them, and, reaching Cadiz, succeeded, with the aid of his relative, who had just accepted the post of Pilot-General of the Spanish marine, in gaining command of one of the ships about to sail for the West Indies under Don Francisco Colombo. At Dieppe there is a curious old manuscript, in clear, decisive, and somewhat formal handwriting of the sixteenth century, garnished with sixty-one colored pictures, in a style of art which a child of ten might emulate. Here one may see ports, harbors, islands, and rivers, adorned with portraitures of birds, beasts, and fishes thereto pertaining. Here are Indian feasts and dances; Indians flogged by priests for not going to mass; Indians burned alive for heresy, six in one fire; Indians working the silver mines. Here, too, are descriptions of natural objects, each with its illustrative sketch, some drawn from life and some from memory,—as, for example, a chameleon with two legs; others from hearsay, among which is the portrait of the griffin said to haunt certain districts of Mexico,—a monster with the wings of a bat, the head of an eagle, and the tail of an alligator. This is Champlain's journal, written and illustrated by his own hand, in that defiance of perspective and absolute independence of the canons of art which mark the earliest efforts of the pencil. A true hero, after the chivalrous mediaeval type, his character was dashed largely with the spirit of romance. Though earnest, sagacious, and penetrating, he leaned to the marvellous; and the faith which was the life of his hard career was somewhat prone to overstep the bounds of reason and invade the domain of fancy. Hence the erratic character of some of his exploits, and hence his simple faith in the Mexican griffin. His West-Indian adventure occupied him more than two years. He visited the principal ports of the islands, made plans and sketches of them all, after his fashion, and then, landing at Vera Cruz, journeyed inland to the city of Mexico. On his return he made his way to Panama. Here, more than two centuries and a half ago, his bold and active mind conceived the plan of a ship-canal across the isthmus, "by which," lie says, "the voyage to the South Sea would be shortened by more than fifteen hundred leagues." On reaching France he repaired to court, and it may have been at this time that a royal patent raised him to the rank of the untitled nobility. He soon wearied of the antechambers of the Louvre. It was here, however, that his destiny awaited him, and the work of his life was unfolded. Aymar de Chastes, Commander of the Order of St. John and Governor of Dieppe, a gray-haired veteran of the civil wars, wished to mark his closing days with some notable achievement for France and the Church. To no man was the King more deeply indebted. In his darkest hour, when the hosts of the League were gathering round him, when friends were falling off, and the Parisians, exulting in his certain ruin, were hiring the windows of the Rue St. Antoine to see him led to the Bastille, De Chastes, without condition or reserve, gave up to him the town and castle of Dieppe. Thus he was enabled to fight beneath its walls the battle of Arques, the first in the series of successes which secured his triumph; and he had been heard to say that to this friend in his adversity he owed his own salvation and that of France. De Chastes was one of those men who, amid the strife of factions and rage of rival fanaticisms, make reason and patriotism their watchwords, and stand on the firm ground of a strong and resolute moderation. He had resisted the madness of Leaguer and Huguenot alike; yet, though a foe of the League, the old soldier was a devout Catholic, and it seemed in his eyes a noble consummation of his life to plant the cross and the fleur-de-lis in the wilderness of New France. Chauvin had just died, after wasting the lives of a score or more of men in a second and a third attempt to establish the fur-trade at Tadoussac. De Chastes came to court to beg a patent of henry the Fourth; "and," says his friend Champlain, "though his head was crowned with gray hairs as with years, he resolved to proceed to New France in person, and dedicate the rest of his days to the service of God and his King." The patent, costing nothing, was readily granted; and De Chastes, to meet the expenses of the enterprise, and forestall the jealousies which his monopoly would awaken among the keen merchants of the western ports, formed a company with the more prominent of them. Pontgrave, who had some knowledge of the country, was chosen to make a preliminary exploration. This was the time when Champlain, fresh from the West Indies, appeared at court. De Chastes knew him well. Young, ardent, yet ripe in experience, a skilful seaman and a practised soldier, he above all others was a man for the enterprise. He had many conferences with the veteran, under whom he had served in the royal fleet off the coast of Brittany. De Chastes urged him to accept a post in his new company; and Champlain, nothing loath, consented, provided always that permission should be had from the King, "to whom," he says, "I was bound no less by birth than by the pension with which his Majesty honored me." To the King, therefore, De Chastes repaired. The needful consent was gained, and, armed with a letter to Pontgrave, Champlain set out for Honfleur. Here he found his destined companion, and embarking with him, as we have seen, they spread their sails for the west. Like specks on the broad bosom of the waters, the two pygmy vessels held their course up the lonely St. Lawrence. They passed abandoned Tadoussac, the channel of Orleans, and the gleaming cataract of Montmorenci; the tenantless rock of Quebec, the wide Lake of St. Peter and its crowded archipelago, till now the mountain reared before them its rounded shoulder above the forest-plain of Montreal. All was solitude. Hochelaga had vanished; and of the savage population that Cartier had found here, sixty-eight years before, no trace remained. In its place were a few wandering Algonquins, of different tongue and lineage. In a skiff, with a few Indians, Champlain essayed to pass the rapids of St. Louis. Oars, paddles, and poles alike proved vain against the foaming surges, and he was forced to return. On the deck of his vessel, the Indians drew rude plans of the river above, with its chain of rapids, its lakes and cataracts; and the baffled explorer turned his prow homeward, the objects of his mission accomplished, but his own adventurous curiosity unsated. When the voyagers reached Havre de Grace, a grievous blow awaited them. The Commander de Chastes was dead. His mantle fell upon Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, gentleman in ordinary of the King's chamber, and Governor of Polls. Undaunted by the fate of La Roche, this nobleman petitioned the king for leave to colonize La Cadie, or Acadie, a region defined as extending from the fortieth to the forty-Sixth degree of north latitude, or from Philadelphia to beyond Montreal. The King's minister, Sully, as he himself tells us, opposed the plan, on the ground that the colonization of this northern wilderness would never repay the outlay; but De Monts gained his point. He was made Lieutenant-General in Acadia, with viceregal powers; and withered Feudalism, with her antique forms and tinselled follies, was again to seek a new home among the rocks and pine-trees of Nova Scotia. The foundation of the enterprise was a monopoly of the fur-trade, and in its favor all past grants were unceremoniously annulled. St. Malo, Rouen, Dieppe, and Rochelle greeted the announcement with unavailing outcries. Patents granted and revoked, monopolies decreed and extinguished, had involved the unhappy traders in ceaseless embarrassment. De Monts, however, preserved De Chastes's old company, and enlarged it, thus making the chief malcontents sharers in his exclusive rights, and converting them from enemies into partners. A clause in his commission empowered him to impress idlers and vagabonds as material for his colony,—an ominous provision of which he largely availed himself. His company was strangely incongruous. The best and the meanest of France were crowded together in his two ships. Here were thieves and ruffians dragged on board by force; and here were many volunteers of condition and character, with Baron de Poutrincourt and the indefatigable Champlain. Here, too, were Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers; for, though De Monts was a Calvinist, the Church, as usual, displayed her banner in the van of the enterprise, and he was forced to promise that he would cause the Indians to be instructed in the dogmas of Rome. CHAPTER III. 1604, 1605. ACADIA OCCUPIED. De Monts, with one of his vessels, sailed from Havre de Grace on the seventh of April, 1604. Pontgrave, with stores for the colony, was to follow in a few days. Scarcely were they at sea, when ministers and priests fell first to discussion, then to quarrelling, then to blows. "I have seen our cure and the minister," says Champlain, "fall to with their fists on questions of faith. I cannot say which had the more pluck, or which hit the harder; but I know that the minister sometimes complained to the Sieur de Monts that he had been beaten. This was their way of settling points of controversy. I leave you to judge if it was a pleasant thing to see." Sagard, the Franciscan friar, relates with horror, that, after their destination was reached, a priest and a minister happening to die at the same time, the crew buried them both in one grave, to see if they would lie peaceably together. De Monts, who had been to the St. Lawrence with Chauvin, and learned to dread its rigorous winters, steered for a more southern, and, as he flattered himself, a milder region. The first land seen was Cap la Heve, on the southern coast of Nova Scotia. Four days later, they entered a small bay, where, to their surprise, they saw a vessel lying at anchor. here was a piece of good luck. The stranger was a fur-trader, pursuing her traffic in defiance, or more probably in ignorance, of De Monts's monopoly. The latter, as empowered by his patent, made prize of ship and cargo, consoling the commander, one Rossignol, by giving his name to the scene of his misfortune. It is now called Liverpool Harbor. In an adjacent harbor, called by them Port Mouton, because a sheep here leaped overboard, they waited nearly a month for Pontgrave's store-ship. At length, to their great relief, she appeared, laden with the spoils of four Basque fur-traders, captured at Cansean. The supplies delivered, Pontgrave sailed for Tadoussac to trade with the Indians, while De Monts, followed by his prize, proceeded on his voyage. He doubled Cape Sable, and entered St. Mary's Bay, where he lay two weeks, sending boats' crews to explore the adjacent coasts. A party one day went on shore to stroll through the forest, and among them was Nicolas Aubry, a priest from Paris, who, tiring of the scholastic haunts of the Rue de la Sorbonne and the Rue d'Enfer, had persisted, despite the remonstrance of his friends, in joining the expedition. Thirsty with a long walk, under the sun of June, through the tangled and rock-encumbered woods, he stopped to drink at a brook, laying his sword beside him on the grass. On rejoining his companions, he found that he had forgotten it; and turning back in search of it, more skilled in the devious windings of the Quartier Latin than in the intricacies of the Acadian forest, he soon lost his way. His comrades, alarmed, waited for a time, and then ranged the woods, shouting his name to the echoing solitudes. Trumpets were sounded, and cannon fired from the ships, but the priest did not appear. All now looked askance on a certain Huguenot, with whom Aubry had often quarrelled on questions of faith, and who was now accused of having killed him. In vain he denied the charge. Aubry was given up for dead, and the ship sailed from St. Mary's Bay; while the wretched priest roamed to and fro, famished and despairing, or, couched on the rocky soil, in the troubled sleep of exhaustion, dreamed, perhaps, as the wind swept moaning through the pines, that he heard once more the organ roll through the columned arches of Sainte Genevieve. The voyagers proceeded to explore the Bay of Fundy, which De Monts called La Baye Francoise. Their first notable discovery was that of Annapolis Harbor. A small inlet invited them. They entered, when suddenly the narrow strait dilated into a broad and tranquil basin, compassed by sunny hills, wrapped in woodland verdure, and alive with waterfalls. Poutrincourt was delighted with the scene. The fancy seized him of removing thither from France with his family and, to this end, he asked a grant of the place from De Monts, who by his patent had nearly half the continent in his gift. The grant was made, and Poutrincourt called his new domain Port Royal. Thence they sailed round the head of the Bay of Fundy, coasted its northern shore, visited and named the river St. John, and anchored at last in Passamaquoddy Bay. The untiring Champlain, exploring, surveying, sounding, had made charts of all the principal roads and harbors; and now, pursuing his research, he entered a river which he calls La Riviere des Etechemins, from the name of the tribe of whom the present Passamaquoddy Indians are descendants. Near its mouth he found an islet, fenced round with rocks and shoals, and called it St. Croix, a name now borne by the river itself. With singular infelicity this spot was chosen as the site of the new colony. It commanded the river, and was well fitted for defence: these were its only merits; yet cannon were landed on it, a battery was planted on a detached rock at one end, and a fort begun on a rising ground at the other. At St. Mary's Bay the voyagers thought they had found traces of iron and silver; and Champdore, the pilot, was now sent back to pursue the search. As he and his men lay at anchor, fishing, not far from land, one of them heard a strange sound, like a weak human voice; and, looking towards the shore, they saw a small black object in motion, apparently a hat waved on the end of a stick. Rowing in haste to the spot, they found the priest Aubry. For sixteen days he had wandered in the woods, sustaining life on berries and wild fruits; and when, haggard and emaciated, a shadow of his former self, Champdore carried him back to St. Croix, he was greeted as a man risen from the grave. In 1783 the river St. Croix, by treaty, was made the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. But which was the true St. Croix? In 1798, the point was settled. De Monts's island was found; and, painfully searching among the sand, the sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes, the commissioners could trace the foundations of buildings long crumbled into dust; for the wilderness had resumed its sway, and silence and solitude brooded once more over this ancient resting-place of civilization. But while the commissioner bends over a moss-grown stone, it is for us to trace back the dim vista of the centuries to the life, the zeal, the energy, of which this stone is the poor memorial. The rock-fenced islet was covered with cedars, and when the tide was out the shoals around were dark with the swash of sea-weed, where, in their leisure moments, the Frenchmen, we are told, amused themselves with detaching the limpets from the stones, as a savory addition to their fare. But there was little leisure at St. Croix. Soldiers, sailors, and artisans betook themselves to their task. Before the winter closed in, the northern end of the island was covered with buildings, surrounding a square, where a solitary tree had been left standing. On the right was a spacious house, well built, and surmounted by one of those enormous roofs characteristic of the time. This was the lodging of De Monts. Behind it, and near the water, was a long, covered gallery, for labor or amusement in foul weather. Champlain and the Sieur d'Orville, aided by the servants of the latter, built a house for themselves nearly opposite that of De Monts; and the remainder of the square was occupied by storehouses, a magazine, workshops, lodgings for gentlemen and artisans, and a barrack for the Swiss soldiers, the whole enclosed with a palisade. Adjacent there was an attempt at a garden, under the auspices of Champlain; but nothing would grow in the sandy soil. There was a cemetery, too, and a small rustic chapel on a projecting point of rock. Such was the "Habitation de l'Isle Saincte-Croix," as set forth by Champlain in quaint plans and drawings, in that musty little quarto of 1613, sold by Jean Berjon, at the sign of the Flying Horse, Rue St. Jean de Beauvais. Their labors over, Poutrincourt set sail for France, proposing to return and take possession of his domain of Port Royal. Seventy-nine men remained at St. Croix. Here was De Monts, feudal lord of half a continent in virtue of two potent syllables, "Henri," scrawled on parchment by the rugged hand of the Bearnais. Here were gentlemen of birth and breeding, Champlain, D'Orville, Beaumont, Sourin, La Motte, Boulay, and Fougeray; here also were the pugnacious cure and his fellow priests, with the Hugnenot ministers, objects of their unceasing ire. The rest were laborers, artisans, and soldiers, all in the pay of the company, and some of them forced into its service. Poutrincourt's receding sails vanished between the water and the sky. The exiles were left to their solitude. From the Spanish settlements northward to the pole, there was no domestic hearth, no lodgement of civilized men, save one weak band of Frenchmen, clinging, as it were for life, to the fringe of the vast and savage continent. The gray and sullen autumn sank upon the waste, and the bleak wind howled down the St. Croix, and swept the forest bare. Then the whirling snow powdered the vast sweep of desolate woodland, and shrouded in white the gloomy green of pine-clad mountains. Ice in sheets, or broken masses, swept by their island with the ebbing and flowing tide, often debarring all access to the main, and cutting off their supplies of wood and water. A belt of cedars, indeed, hedged the island; but De Monts had ordered them to be spared, that the north wind might spend something of its force with whistling through their shaggy boughs. Cider and wine froze in the casks, and were served out by the pound. As they crowded round their half-fed fires, shivering in the icy currents that pierced their rude tenements, many sank into a desperate apathy. Soon the scurvy broke out, and raged with a fearful malignity. Of the seventy-nine, thirty-five died before spring, and many more were brought to the verge of death. In vain they sought that marvellous tree which had relieved the followers of Cartier. Their little cemetery was peopled with nearly half their number, and the rest, bloated and disfigured with the relentless malady, thought more of escaping from their woes than of building up a Transatlantic empire. Yet among them there was one, at least, who, amid languor and defection, held to his purpose with indomitable tenacity; and where Champlain was present, there was no room for despair. Spring came at last, and, with the breaking up of the ice, the melting of the snow, and the clamors of the returning wild-fowl, the spirits and the health of the woe-begone company began to revive. But to misery succeeded anxiety and suspense. Where was the succor from France? Were they abandoned to their fate like the wretched exiles of La Roche? In a happy hour, they saw an approaching sail. Pontgrave, with forty men, cast anchor before their island on the sixteenth of June; and they hailed him as the condemned hails the messenger of his pardon. Weary of St. Croix, De Monts resolved to seek out a more auspicious site, on which to rear the capital of his wilderness dominion. During the preceding September, Champlain had ranged the westward coast in a pinnace, visited and named the island of Mount Desert, and entered the mouth of the river Penobscot, called by him the Pemetigoet, or Pentegoet, and previously known to fur-traders and fishermen as the Norembega, a name which it shared with all the adjacent region. 27 Now, embarking a second time, in a bark of fifteen tons, with De Monts, several gentlemen, twenty sailors, and an Indian with his squaw, he set forth on the eighteenth of June on a second voyage of discovery. They coasted the strangely indented shores of Maine, with its reefs and surf-washed islands, rocky headlands, and deep embosomed bays, passed Mount Desert and the Penobscot, explored the mouths of the Kennebec, crossed Casco Bay, and descried the distant peaks of the White Mountains. The ninth of July brought them to Saco Bay. They were now within the limits of a group of tribes who were called by the French the Armouchiquois, and who included those whom the English afterwards called the Massachusetts. They differed in habits as well as in language from the Etechemins and Miemacs of Acadia, for they were tillers of the soil, and around their wigwams were fields of maize, beans, pumpkins, squashes, tobacco, and the so-called Jerusalem artichoke. Near Pront's Neck, more than eighty of them ran down to the shore to meet the strangers, dancing and yelping to show their joy. They had a fort of palisades on a rising ground by the Saco, for they were at deadly war with their neighbors towards the east. On the twelfth, the French resumed their voyage, and, like some adventurous party of pleasure, held their course by the beaches of York and Wells, Portsmouth Harbor, the Isles of Shoals, Rye Beach, and Hampton Beach, till, on the fifteenth, they descried the dim outline of Cape Ann. Champlain called it Cap aux Isles, from the three adjacent islands, and in a subsequent voyage he gave the name of Beauport to the neighboring harbor of Gloucester. Thence steering southward and westward, they entered Massachusetts Bay, gave the name of Riviere du Guast to a river flowing into it, probably the Charles; passed the islands of Boston Harbor, which Champlain describes as covered with trees, and were met on the way by great numbers of canoes filled with astonished Indians. On Sunday, the seventeenth, they passed Point Allerton and Nantasket Beach, coasted the shores of Cohasset, Scituate, and Marshfield, and anchored for the night near Brant Point. On the morning of the eighteenth, a head wind forced them to take shelter in Port St. Louis, for so they called the harbor of Plymouth, where the Pilgrims made their memorable landing fifteen years later. Indian wigwams and garden patches lined the shore. A troop of the inhabitants came down to the beach and danced; while others, who had been fishing, approached in their canoes, came on board the vessel, and showed Champlain their fish-hooks, consisting of a barbed bone lashed at an acute angle to a slip of wood. From Plymouth the party circled round the bay, doubled Cape Cod, called by Champlain Cap Blanc, from its glistening white sands, and steered southward to Nausett Harbor, which, by reason of its shoals and sand-bars, they named Port Mallebarre. Here their prosperity deserted them. A party of sailors went behind the sand-banks to find fresh water at a spring, when an Indian snatched a kettle from one of them, and its owner, pursuing, fell, pierced with arrows by the robber's comrades. The French in the vessel opened fire. Champlain's arquebuse burst, and was near killing him, while the Indians, swift as deer, quickly gained the woods. Several of the tribe chanced to be on board the vessel, but flung themselves with such alacrity into the water that only one was caught. They bound him hand and foot, but soon after humanely set him at liberty. Champlain, who we are told "delighted marvellously in these enterprises," had busied himself throughout the voyage with taking observations, making charts, and studying the wonders of land and sea. The "horse-foot crab" seems to have awakened his special curiosity, and he describes it with amusing exactness. Of the human tenants of the New England coast he has also left the first precise and trustworthy account. They were clearly more numerous than when the Puritans landed at Plymouth, since in the interval a pestilence made great havoc among them. But Champlain's most conspicuous merit lies in the light that he threw into the dark places of American geography, and the order that he brought out of the chaos of American cartography; for it was a result of this and the rest of his voyages that precision and clearness began at last to supplant the vagueness, confusion, and contradiction of the earlier map-makers. At Nausett Harbor provisions began to fail, and steering for St. Croix the voyagers reached that ill-starred island on the third of August. De Monts had found no spot to his liking. He now bethought him of that inland harbor of Port Royal which he had granted to Poutrincourt, and thither he resolved to remove. Stores, utensils, even portions of the buildings, were placed on board the vessels, carried across the Bay of Fundy, and landed at the chosen spot. It was on the north side of the basin opposite Goat Island, and a little below the mouth of the river Annapolis, called by the French the Equille, and, afterwards, the Dauphin. The axe-men began their task; the dense forest was cleared away, and the buildings of the infant colony soon rose in its place. But while De Monts and his company were struggling against despair at St. Croix, the enemies of his monopoly were busy at Paris; and, by a ship from France, he was warned that prompt measures were needed to thwart their machinations. Therefore he set sail, leaving Pontgrave to command at Port Royal: while Champlain, Champdore, and others, undaunted by the past, volunteered for a second winter in the wilderness. CHAPTER IV. 1605-1607. LESCARBOT AND CHAMPLAIN. Evil reports of a churlish wilderness, a pitiless climate, disease, misery, and death, had heralded the arrival of De Monts. The outlay had been great, the returns small; and when he reached Paris, he found his friends cold, his enemies active and keen. Poutrincourt, however, was still full of zeal; and, though his private affairs urgently called for his presence in France, he resolved, at no small sacrifice, to go in person to Acadia. He had, moreover, a friend who proved an invaluable ally. This was Marc Lescarbot, "avocat en Parlement," who had been roughly handled by fortune, and was in the mood for such a venture, being desirous, as he tells us, "to fly from a corrupt world," in which he had just lost a lawsuit. Unlike De Monts, Poutrincourt, and others of his associates, he was not within the pale of the noblesse, belonging to the class of "gens de robe," which stood at the head of the bourgeoisie, and which, in its higher grades, formed within itself a virtual nobility. Lescarbot was no common man,—not that his abundant gift of verse-making was likely to avail much in the woods of New France, nor yet his classic lore, dashed with a little harmless pedantry, born not of the man, but of the times; but his zeal, his good sense, the vigor of his understanding, and the breadth of his views, were as conspicuous as his quick wit and his lively fancy. One of the best, as well as earliest, records of the early settlement of North America is due to his pen; and it has been said, with a certain degree of truth, that he was no less able to build up a colony than to write its history. He professed himself a Catholic, but his Catholicity sat lightly on him; and he might have passed for one of those amphibious religionists who in the civil wars were called "Les Politiques." De Monts and Poutrincourt bestirred themselves to find a priest, since the foes of the enterprise had been loud in lamentation that the spiritual welfare of the Indians had been slighted. But it was Holy Week. All the priests were, or professed to be, busy with exercises and confessions, and not one could be found to undertake the mission of Acadia. They were more successful in engaging mechanics and laborers for the voyage. These were paid a portion of their wages in advance, and were sent in a body to Rochelle, consigned to two merchants of that port, members of the company. De Monts and Poutrincourt went thither by post. Lescarbot soon followed, and no sooner reached Rochelle than he penned and printed his Adieu a la France, a poem which gained for him some credit. More serious matters awaited him, however, than this dalliance with the Muse. Rochelle was the centre and citadel of Calvinism,—a town of austere and grim aspect, divided, like Cisatlantic communities of later growth, betwixt trade and religion, and, in the interest of both, exacting a deportment of discreet and well-ordered sobriety. "One must walk a strait path here," says Lescarbot, "unless he would hear from the mayor or the ministers." But the mechanics sent from Paris, flush of money, and lodged together in the quarter of St. Nicolas, made day and night hideous with riot, and their employers found not a few of them in the hands of the police. Their ship, bearing the inauspicious name of the "Jonas," lay anchored in the stream, her cargo on board, when a sudden gale blew her adrift. She struck on a pier, then grounded on the flats, bilged, careened, and settled in the mud. Her captain, who was ashore, with Poutrincourt, Lescarbot, and others, hastened aboard, and the pumps were set in motion; while all Rochelle, we are told, came to gaze from the ramparts, with faces of condolence, but at heart well pleased with the disaster. The ship and her cargo were saved, but she must be emptied, repaired, and reladen. Thus a month was lost; at length, on the thirteenth of May, 1606, the disorderly crew were all brought on board, and the "Jonas" put to sea. Poutrincourt and Lescarbot had charge of the expedition, De Monts remaining in France. Lescarbot describes his emotions at finding himself on an element so deficient in solidity, with only a two-inch plank between him and death. Off the Azores, they spoke a supposed pirate. For the rest, they beguiled the voyage by harpooning porpoises, dancing on deck in calm weather, and fishing for cod on the Grand Bank. They were two months on their way; and when, fevered with eagerness to reach land, they listened hourly for the welcome cry, they were involved in impenetrable fogs. Suddenly the mists parted, the sun shone forth, and streamed fair and bright over the fresh hills and forests of the New World, in near view before them. But the black rocks lay between, lashed by the snow-white breakers. "Thus," writes Lescarbot, "doth a man sometimes seek the land as one doth his beloved, who sometimes repulseth her sweetheart very rudely. Finally, upon Saturday, the fifteenth of July, about two o'clock in the afternoon, the sky began to salute us as it were with cannon-shots, shedding tears, as being sorry to have kept us so long in pain;... but, whilst we followed on our course, there came from the land odors incomparable for sweetness, brought with a warm wind so abundantly that all the Orient parts could not produce greater abundance. We did stretch out our hands as it were to take them, so palpable were they, which I have admired a thousand times since." It was noon on the twenty-seventh when the "Jonas" passed the rocky gateway of Port Royal Basin, and Lescarbot gazed with delight and wonder on the calm expanse of sunny waters, with its amphitheatre of woody hills, wherein he saw the future asylum of distressed merit and impoverished industry. Slowly, before a favoring breeze, they held their course towards the head of the harbor, which narrowed as they advanced; but all was solitude,—no moving sail, no sign of human presence. At length, on their left, nestling in deep forests, they saw the wooden walls and roofs of the infant colony. Then appeared a birch canoe, cautiously coming towards them, guided by an old Indian. Then a Frenchman, arquebuse in hand, came down to the shore; and then, from the wooden bastion, sprang the smoke of a saluting shot. The ship replied; the trumpets lent their voices to the din, and the forests and the hills gave back unwonted echoes. The voyagers landed, and found the colony of Port Royal dwindled to two solitary Frenchmen. These soon told their story. The preceding winter had been one of much suffering, though by no means the counterpart of the woful experience of St. Croix. But when the spring had passed, the summer far advanced, and still no tidings of De Monts had come, Pontgrave grew deeply anxious. To maintain themselves without supplies and succor was impossible. He caused two small vessels to be built, and set out in search of some of the French vessels on the fishing stations. This was but twelve days before the arrival of the ship "Jonas." Two men had bravely offered themselves to stay behind and guard the buildings, guns, and munitions; and an old Indian chief, named Memberton, a fast friend of the French, and still a redoubted warrior, we are told, though reputed to number more than a hundred years, proved a stanch ally. When the ship approached, the two guardians were at dinner in their room at the fort. Memberton, always on the watch, saw the advancing sail, and, shouting from the gate, roused them from their repast. In doubt who the new-comers might be, one ran to the shore with his gun, while the other repaired to the platform where four cannon were mounted, in the valorous resolve to show fight should the strangers prove to be enemies. Happily this redundancy of mettle proved needless. He saw the white flag fluttering at the masthead, and joyfully fired his pieces as a salute. The voyagers landed, and eagerly surveyed their new home. Some wandered through the buildings; some visited the cluster of Indian wigwams hard by; some roamed in the forest and over the meadows that bordered the neighboring river. The deserted fort now swarmed with life; and, the better to celebrate their prosperous arrival, Poutrincourt placed a hogs-head of wine in the courtyard at the discretion of his followers, whose hilarity, in consequence, became exuberant. Nor was it diminished when Pontgrave's vessels were seen entering the harbor. A boat sent by Pountrincourt, more than a week before, to explore the coasts, had met them near Cape Sable, and they joyfully returned to Port Royal. Pontgrave, however, soon sailed for France in the "Jonas," hoping on his way to seize certain contraband fur-traders, reported to be at Canseau and Cape Breton. Poutrincourt and Champlain, bent on finding a better site for their settlement in a more southern latitude, set out on a voyage of discovery, in an ill-built vessel of eighteen tons, while Lescarbot remained in charge of Port Royal. They had little for their pains but danger, hardship, and mishap. The autumn gales cut short their exploration; and, after visiting Gloucester Harbor, doubling Monoinoy Point, and advancing as far as the neighborhood of Hyannis, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, they turned back, somewhat disgusted with their errand. Along the eastern verge of Cape Cod they found the shore thickly studded with the wigwams of a race who were less hunters than tillers of the soil. At Chatham Harbor—called by them Port Fortune—five of the company, who, contrary to orders, had remained on shore all night, were assailed, as they slept around their fire, by a shower of arrows from four hundred Indians. Two were killed outright, while the survivors fled for their boat, bristling like porcupines with the feathered missiles,—a scene oddly portrayed by the untutored pencil of Champlain. He and Poutrincourt, with eight men, hearing the war-whoops and the cries for aid, sprang up from sleep, snatched their weapons, pulled ashore in their shirts, and charged the yelling multitude, who fled before their spectral assailants, and vanished in the woods. "Thus," observes Lescarbot, "did thirty-five thousand Midianites fly before Gideon and his three hundred." The French buried their dead comrades; but, as they chanted their funeral hymn, the Indians, at a safe distance on a neighboring hill, were dancing in glee and triumph, and mocking them with unseemly gestures; and no sooner had the party re-embarked, than they dug up the dead bodies, burnt them, and arrayed themselves in their shirts. Little pleased with the country or its inhabitants, the voyagers turned their prow towards Port Royal, though not until, by a treacherous device, they had lured some of their late assailants within their reach, killed them, and cut off their heads as trophies. Near Mount Desert, on a stormy night, their rudder broke, and they had a hair-breadth escape from destruction. The chief object of their voyage, that of discovering a site for their colony under a more southern sky, had failed. Pontgrave's son had his hand blown off by the bursting of his gun; several of their number had been killed; others were sick or wounded; and thus, on the fourteenth of November, with somewhat downcast visages, they guided their helpless vessel with a pair of oars to the landing at Port Royal. "I will not," says Lescarbot, "compare their perils to those of Ulysses, nor yet of Aeneas, lest thereby I should sully our holy enterprise with things impure." He and his followers had been expecting them with great anxiety. His alert and buoyant spirit had conceived a plan for enlivening the courage of the company, a little dashed of late by misgivings and forebodings. Accordingly, as Poutrincourt, Champlain, and their weather-beaten crew approached the wooden gateway of Port Royal, Neptune issued forth, followed by his tritons, who greeted the voyagers in good French verse, written in all haste for the occasion by Lescarbot. And, as they entered, they beheld, blazoned over the arch, the arms of Prance, circled with laurels, and flanked by the scuteheons of De Monts and Poutrincourt. The ingenious author of these devices had busied himself, during the absence of his associates, in more serious labors for the welfare of the colony. He explored the low borders of the river Equille, or Annapolis. Here, in the solitude, he saw great meadows, where the moose, with their young, were grazing, and where at times the rank grass was beaten to a pulp by the trampling of their hoofs. He burned the grass, and sowed crops of wheat, rye, and barley in its stead. His appearance gave so little promise of personal vigor, that some of the party assured him that he would never see France again, and warned him to husband his strength; but he knew himself better, and set at naught these comforting monitions. He was the most diligent of workers. He made gardens near the fort, where, in his zeal, he plied the hoe with his own hands late into the moonlight evenings. The priests, of whom at the outset there had been no lack, had all succumbed to the scurvy at St. Croix; and Lescarbot, so far as a layman might, essayed to supply their place, reading on Sundays from the Scriptures, and adding expositions of his own after a fashion not remarkable for rigorous Catholicity. Of an evening, when not engrossed with his garden, he was reading or writing in his room, perhaps preparing the material of that History of New France in which, despite the versatility of his busy brain, his good sense and capacity are clearly made manifest. Now, however, when the whole company were reassembled, Lescarbot found associates more congenial than the rude soldiers, mechanics, and laborers who gathered at night around the blazing logs in their rude hall. Port Royal was a quadrangle of wooden buildings, enclosing a spacious court. At the southeast corner was the arched gateway, whence a path, a few paces in length, led to the water. It was flanked by a sort of bastion of palisades, while at the southwest corner was another bastion, on which four cannon were mounted. On the east side of the quadrangle was a range of magazines and storehouses; on the west were quarters for the men; on the north, a dining-hall and lodgings for the principal persons of the company; while on the south, or water side, were the kitchen, the forge, and the oven. Except the Garden-patches and the cemetery, the adjacent ground was thickly studded with the Stumps of the newly felled trees. Most bountiful provision had been made for the temporal wants of the colonists, and Lescarbot is profuse in praise of the liberality of Du Monte and two merchants of Rochelle, who had freighted the ship "Jonas." Of wine, in particular, the supply was so generous, that every man in Port Royal was served with three pints daily. The principal persons of the colony sat, fifteen in number, at Poutrincourt's table, which, by an ingenious device of Champlain, was always well furnished. He formed the fifteen into a new order, christened "L'Ordre de Bon-Temps." Each was Grand Master in turn, holding office for one day. It was his function to cater for the company; and, as it became a point of honor to fill the post with credit, the prospective Grand Master was usually busy, for several days before coming to his dignity, in hunting, fishing, or bartering provisions with the Indians. Thus did Poutrincourt's table groan beneath all the luxuries of the winter forest,—flesh of moose, caribou, and deer, beaver, otter, and hare, bears and wild-cats; with ducks, geese, grouse, and plover; sturgeon, too, and trout, and fish innumerable, speared through the ice of the Equille, or drawn from the depths of the neighboring bay. "And," says Lescarbot, in closing his bill of fare, "whatever our gourmands at home may think, we found as good cheer at Port Royal as they at their Rue aux Ours in Paris, and that, too, at a cheaper rate." For the preparation of this manifold provision, the Grand Master was also answerable; since, during his day of office, he was autocrat of the kitchen. Nor did this bounteous repast lack a solemn and befitting ceremonial. When the hour had struck, after the manner of our fathers they dined at noon, the Grand Master entered the hall, a napkin on his shoulder, his staff of office in his hand, and the collar of the Order—valued by Lescarbot at four crowns—about his neck. The brotherhood followed, each bearing a dish. The invited guests were Indian chiefs, of whom old Memberton was daily present, seated at table with the French, who took pleasure in this red-skin companionship. Those of humbler degree, warriors, squaws, and children, sat on the floor, or crouched together in the corners of the hall, eagerly waiting their portion of biscuit or of bread, a novel and much coveted luxury. Being always treated with kindness, they became fond of the French, who often followed them on their moose-hunts, and shared their winter bivouac. At the evening meal there was less of form and circumstance; and when the winter night closed in, when the flame crackled and the sparks streamed up the wide-throated chimney, and the founders of New France with their tawny allies were gathered around the blaze, then did the Grand Master resign the collar and the staff to the successor of his honors, and, with jovial courtesy, pledge him in a cup of wine. Thus these ingenious Frenchmen beguiled the winter of their exile. It was an unusually mild winter. Until January, they wore no warmer garment than their doublets. They made hunting and fishing parties, in which the Indians, whose lodges were always to be seen under the friendly shelter of the buildings, failed not to bear part. "I remember," says Lescarbot, "that on the fourteenth of January, of a Sunday afternoon, we amused ourselves with singing and music on the river Equille; and that in the same month we went to see the wheat-fields two leagues from the fort, and dined merrily in the sunshine." Good spirits and good cheer saved them in great measure from the scurvy; and though towards the end of winter severe cold set in, yet only four men died. The snow thawed at last, and as patches of the black and oozy soil began to appear, they saw the grain of their last autumn's sowing already piercing the mould. The forced inaction of the winter was over. The carpenters built a water-mill on the stream now called Allen's River; others enclosed fields and laid out gardens; others, again, with scoop-nets and baskets, caught the herrings and alewives as they ran up the innumerable rivulets. The leaders of the colony set a contagious example of activity. Poutrincourt forgot the prejudices of his noble birth, and went himself into the woods to gather turpentine from the pines, which he converted into tar by a process of his own invention; while Lescarbot, eager to test the qualities of the soil, was again, hoe in hand, at work all day in his garden. All seemed full of promise; but alas for the bright hope that kindled the manly heart of Champlain and the earnest spirit of the vivacions advocate! A sudden blight fell on them, and their rising prosperity withered to the ground. On a morning, late in spring, as the French were at breakfast, the ever watchful Membertou came in with news of an approaching sail. They hastened to the shore; but the vision of the centenarian sagamore put them all to shame. They could see nothing. At length their doubts were resolved. A small vessel stood on towards them, and anchored before the fort. She was commanded by one Chevalier, a young man from St. Malo, and was freighted with disastrous tidings. Dc Monts's monopoly was rescinded. The life of the enterprise was stopped, and the establishment at Port Royal could no longer be supported; for its expense was great, the body of the colony being laborers in the pay of the company. Nor was the annulling of the patent the full extent of the disaster; for, during the last summer, the Dutch had found their way to the St. Lawrence, and carried away a rich harvest of furs, while other interloping traders had plied a busy traffic along the coasts, and, in the excess of their avidity, dug up the bodies of buried Indians to rob them of their funeral robes. It was to the merchants and fishermen of the Norman, Breton, and Biscayan ports, exasperated at their exclusion from a lucrative trade, and at the confiscations which had sometimes followed their attempts to engage in it, that this sudden blow was due. Money had been used freely at court, and the monopoly, unjustly granted, had been more unjustly withdrawn. De Monts and his company, who had spent a hundred thousand livres, were allowed six thousand in requital, to be collected, if possible, from the fur-traders in the form of a tax. Chevalier, captain of the ill-omened bark, was entertained with a hospitality little deserved, since, having been intrusted with sundry hams, fruits, spices, sweetmeats, jellies, and other dainties, sent by the generous De Monts to his friends of New France, he with his crew had devoured them on the voyage, alleging that, in their belief, the inmates of Port Royal would all be dead before their arrival. Choice there was none, and Port Royal must be abandoned. Built on a false basis, sustained only by the fleeting favor of a government, the generous enterprise had come to naught. Yet Poutrincourt, who in virtue of his grant from De Monts owned the place, bravely resolved that, come what might, he would see the adventure to an end, even should it involve emigration with his family to the wilderness. Meanwhile, he began the dreary task of abandonment, sending boat-loads of men and stores to Canseau, where lay the ship "Jonas," eking out her diminished profits by fishing for cod. Membertou was full of grief at the departure of his friends. He had built a palisaded village not far from Port Royal, and here were mustered some four hundred of his warriors for a foray into the country of the Armouchiquois, dwellers along the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Western Maine. One of his tribesmen had been killed by a chief from the Saco, and he was bent on revenge. He proved himself a sturdy beggar, pursuing Pontrincourt with daily petitions,—now for a bushel of beans, now for a basket of bread, and now for a barrel of wine to regale his greasy crew. Memberton's long life had not been one of repose. In deeds of blood and treachery he had no rival in the Acadian forest; and, as his old age was beset with enemies, his alliance with the French had a foundation of policy no less than of affection. In right of his rank of Sagamore, he claimed perfect equality both with Poutrincourt and with the King, laying his shrivelled forefingers together in token of friendship between peers. Calumny did not spare him; and a rival chief intimated to the French, that, under cover of a war with the Armouchiquois, the crafty veteran meant to seize and plunder Port Royal. Precautions, therefore, were taken; but they were seemingly needless; for, their feasts and dances over, the warriors launched their birchen flotilla and set out. After an absence of six weeks they reappeared with howls of victory, and their exploits were commemorated in French verse by the muse of the indefatigable Lescarbot. With a heavy heart the advocate bade farewell to the dwellings, the cornfields, the gardens, and all the dawning prosperity of Port Royal, and sailed for Canseau in a small vessel on the thirtieth of July. Pontrincourt and Champlain remained behind, for the former was resolved to learn before his departure the results of his agricultural labors. Reaching a harbor on the southern coast of Nova Scotia, six leagues west of Cansean, Lescarbot found a fishing-vessel commanded and owned by an old Basque, named Savalet, who for forty-two successive years had carried to France his annual cargo of codfish. He was in great glee at the success of his present venture, reckoning his profits at ten thousand francs. The Indians, however, annoyed him beyond measure, boarding him from their canoes as his fishing-boats came alongside, and helping themselves at will to his halibut and cod. At Cansean—a harbor near the strait now bearing the name—the ship Jonas still lay, her hold well stored with fish; and here, on the twenty-seventh of August, Lescarbot was rejoined by Poutrincourt and Champlain, who had come from Port Royal in an open boat. For a few days, they amused themselves with gathering raspberries on the islands; then they spread their sails for France, and early in October, 1607, anchored in the harbor of St. Malo. First of Europeans, they had essayed to found an agricultural colony in the New World. The leaders of the enterprise had acted less as merchants than as citizens; and the fur-trading monopoly, odious in itself, had been used as the instrument of a large and generous design. There was a radical defect, however, in their scheme of settlement. Excepting a few of the leaders, those engaged in it had not chosen a home in the wilderness of New France, but were mere hirelings, without wives or families, and careless of the welfare of the colony. The life which should have pervaded all the members was confined to the heads alone. In one respect, however, the enterprise of De Monts was truer in principle than the Roman Catholic colonization of Canada, on the one hand, or the Puritan colonization of Massachusetts, on the other, for it did not attempt to enforce religions exclusion. Towards the fickle and bloodthirsty race who claimed the lordship of the forests, these colonists, excepting only in the treacherous slaughter at Port Fortune, bore themselves in a spirit of kindness contrasting brightly with the rapacious cruelty of the Spaniards and the harshness of the English settlers. When the last boat-load left Port Royal, the shore resounded with lamentation; and nothing could console the afflicted savages but reiterated promises of a speedy return. CHAPTER V. 1610, 1611. THE JESUITS AND THEIR PATRONESS. Poutrincourt, we have seen, owned Port Royal in virtue of a grant from De Monts. The ardent and adventurous baron was in evil case, involved in litigation and low in purse; but nothing could damp his zeal. Acadia must become a new France, and he, Poutrincourt, must be its father. He gained from the King a confirmation of his grant, and, to supply the lack of his own weakened resources, associated with himself one Robin, a man of family and wealth. This did not save him from a host of delays and vexations; and it was not until the spring of 1610 that he found himself in a condition to embark on his new and doubtful venture. Meanwhile an influence, of sinister omen as he thought, had begun to act upon his schemes. The Jesuits were strong at court. One of their number, the famous Father Coton, was confessor to Henry the Fourth, and, on matters of this world as of the next, was ever whispering at the facile ear of the renegade King. New France offered a fresh field of action to the indefatigable Society of Jesus, and Coton urged upon the royal convert, that, for the saving of souls, some of its members should be attached to the proposed enterprise. The King, profoundly indifferent in matters of religion, saw no evil in a proposal which at least promised to place the Atlantic betwixt him and some of those busy friends whom at heart he deeply mistrusted. Other influences, too, seconded the confessor. Devout ladies of the court, and the Queen herself, supplying the lack of virtue with an overflowing piety, burned, we are assured, with a holy zeal for snatching the tribes of the West from the bondage of Satan. Therefore it was insisted that the projected colony should combine the spiritual with the temporal character,—or, in other words, that Poutrincourt should take Jesuits with him. Pierre Biard, Professor of Theology at Lyons, was named for the mission, and repaired in haste to Bordeaux, the port of embarkation, where he found no vessel, and no sign of preparation; and here, in wrath and discomfiture, he remained for a whole year. That Poutrincourt was a good Catholic appears from a letter to the Pope, written for him in Latin by Lescarbot, asking a blessing on his enterprise, and assuring his Holiness that one of his grand objects was the saving of souls. But, like other good citizens, he belonged to the national party in the Church, those liberal Catholics, who, side by side with the Huguenots, had made head against the League, with its Spanish allies, and placed Henry the Fourth upon the throne. The Jesuits, an order Spanish in origin and policy, determined champions of ultramontane principles, the sword and shield of the Papacy in its broadest pretensions to spiritual and temporal sway, were to him, as to others of his party, objects of deep dislike and distrust. He feared them in his colony, evaded what he dared not refuse, left Biarci waiting in solitude at Bordeax, and sought to postpone the evil day by assuring Father Coton that, though Port Royal was at present in no state to receive the missionaries, preparation should be made to entertain them the next year after a befitting fashion. Poutrincourt owned the barony of St. Just in Champagne, inherited a few years before from his mother. Hence, early in February, 1610, he set out in a boat loaded to the gunwales with provisions, furniture, goods, and munitions for Port Royal, descended the rivers Aube and Seine, and reached Dieppe safely with his charge. Here his ship was awaiting him; and on the twenty-sixth of February he set sail, giving the slip to the indignant Jesuit at Bordeaux. The tedium of a long passage was unpleasantly broken by a mutiny among the crew. It was suppressed, however, and Poutrincourt entered at length the familiar basin of Port Royal. The buildings were still standing, whole and sound save a partial falling in of the roofs. Even furniture was found untouched in the deserted chambers. The centenarian Membertou was still alive, his leathern, wrinkled visage beaming with welcome. Pontrincourt set himself without delay to the task of Christianizing New France, in an access of zeal which his desire of proving that Jesuit aid was superfluous may be supposed largely to have reinforced. He had a priest with him, one La Fleche, whom he urged to the pious work. No time was lost. Membertou first was catechised, confessed his sins, and renounced the Devil, whom we are told he had faithfully served during a hundred and ten years. His squaws, his children, his grandchildren, and his entire clan were next won over. It was in June, the day of St. John the Baptist, when the naked proselytes, twenty-one in number, were gathered on the shore at Port Royal. Here was the priest in the vestments of his office; here were gentlemen in gay attire, soldiers, laborers, lackeys, all the infant colony. The converts kneeled; the sacred rite was finished, Te Deum was sung, and the roar of cannon proclaimed this triumph over the powers of darkness. Membertou was named Henri, after the King; his principal squaw, Marie, after the Queen. One of his sons received the name of the Pope, another that of the Dauphin; his daughter was called Marguerite, after the divorced Marguerite de Valois, and, in like manner, the rest of the squalid company exchanged their barbaric appellatives for the names of princes, nobles, and ladies of rank. The fame of this chef-d'aeuvre of Christian piety, as Lescarbot gravely calls it, spread far and wide through the forest, whose denizens,—partly out of a notion that the rite would bring good luck, partly to please the French, and partly to share in the good cheer with which the apostolic efforts of Father La Fleche had been sagaciously seconded—came flocking to enroll themselves under the banners of the Faith. Their zeal ran high. They would take no refusal. Membertou was for war on all who would not turn Christian. A living skeleton was seen crawling from hut to hut in search of the priest and his saving waters; while another neophyte, at the point of death, asked anxiously whether, in the realms of bliss to which he was bound, pies were to be had comparable to those with which the French regaled him. A formal register of baptisms was drawn up to be carried to France in the returning ship, of which Pontrincourt's son, Biencourt, a spirited youth of eighteen, was to take charge. He sailed in July, his father keeping him company as far as Port la Have, whence, bidding the young man farewell, he attempted to return in an open boat to Port Royal. A north wind blew him out to sea; and for six days he was out of sight of land, subsisting on rain-water wrung from the boat's sail, and on a few wild-fowl which he had shot on an island. Five weeks passed before he could rejoin his colonists, who, despairing of his safety, were about to choose a new chief. Meanwhile, young Biencourt, speeding on his way, heard dire news from a fisherman on the Grand Bank. The knife of Ravaillac had done its work. Henry the Fourth was dead. There is an ancient street in Paris, where a great thoroughfare contracts to a narrow pass, the Rue de la Ferronnerie. Tall buildings overshadow it, packed from pavement to tiles with human life, and from the dingy front of one of them the sculptured head of a man looks down on the throng that ceaselessly defiles beneath. On the fourteenth of May, 1610, a ponderous coach, studded with fleurs-de-lis and rich with gilding, rolled along this street. In it was a small man, well advanced in life, whose profile once seen could not be forgotten,—a hooked nose, a protruding chin, a brow full of wrinkles, grizzled hair, a short, grizzled beard, and stiff, gray moustaches, bristling like a cat's. One would have thought him some whiskered satyr, grim from the rack of tumultuous years; but his alert, upright port bespoke unshaken vigor, and his clear eye was full of buoyant life. Following on the footway strode a tall, strong, and somewhat corpulent man, with sinister, deep-set eyes and a red beard, his arm and shoulder covered with his cloak. In the throat of the thoroughfare, where the sculptured image of Henry the Fourth still guards the spot, a collision of two carts stopped the coach. Ravaillac quickened his pace. In an instant he was at the door. With his cloak dropped from his shoulders, and a long knife in his hand, he set his foot upon a guardstone, thrust his head and shoulders into the coach, and with frantic force stabbed thrice at the King's heart. A broken exclamation, a gasping convulsion,—and then the grim visage drooped on the bleeding breast. Henry breathed his last, and the hope of Europe died with him. The omens were sinister for Old France and for New. Marie de Medicis, "cette grosse banquiere," coarse scion of a bad stock, false wife and faithless queen, paramour of an intriguing foreigner, tool of the Jesuits and of Spain, was Regent in the minority of her imbecile son. The Huguenots drooped, the national party collapsed, the vigorous hand of Sully was felt no more, and the treasure gathered for a vast and beneficent enterprise became the instrument of despotism and the prey of corruption. Under such dark auspices, young Biencourt entered the thronged chambers of the Louvre. He gained audience of the Queen, and displayed his list of baptisms; while the ever present Jesuits failed not to seize him by the button, assuring him, not only that the late King had deeply at heart the establishment of their Society in Acadia, but that to this end he had made them a grant of two thousand livres a year. The Jesuits had found an ally and the intended mission a friend at court, whose story and whose character are too striking to pass unnoticed. This was a lady of honor to the Queen, Antoinette de Pons, Marquise de Guercheville, once renowned for grace and beauty, and not less conspicuous for qualities rare in the unbridled court of Henry's predecessor, where her youth had been passed. When the civil war was at its height, the royal heart, leaping with insatiable restlessness from battle to battle, from mistress to mistress, had found a brief repose in the affections of his Corisande, famed in tradition and romance; but Corisande was suddenly abandoned, and the young widow, Madame de Guercheville, became the load-star of his erratic fancy. It was an evil hour for the Bearnais. Henry sheathed in rusty steel, battling for his crown and his life, and Henry robed in royalty and throned triumphant in the Louvre, alike urged their suit in vain. Unused to defeat, the King's passion rose higher for the obstacle that barred it. On one occasion he was met with an answer not unworthy of record:— "Sire, my rank, perhaps, is not high enough to permit me to be your wife, but my heart is too high to permit me to be your mistress." She left the court and retired to her chateau of La Roche-Guyon, on the Seine, ten leagues below Paris, where, fond of magnificence, she is said to have lived in much expense and splendor. The indefatigable King, haunted by her memory, made a hunting-party in the neighboring forests; and, as evening drew near, separating himself from his courtiers, he sent a gentleman of his train to ask of Madame de Guercheville the shelter of her roof. The reply conveyed a dutiful acknowledgment of the honor, and an offer of the best entertainment within her power. It was night when Henry with his little band of horsemen, approached the chateau, where lights were burning in every window, after a fashion of the day on occasions of welcome to an honored guest. Pages stood in the gateway, each with a blazing torch; and here, too, were gentlemen of the neighborhood, gathered to greet their sovereign. Madame de Guercheville came forth, followed by the women of her household; and when the King, unprepared for so benign a welcome, giddy with love and hope, saw her radiant in pearls and more radiant yet in a beauty enhanced by the wavy torchlight and the surrounding shadows, he scarcely dared trust his senses:— "Que vois-je, madame; est-ce bien vous, et suis-je ce roi meprise?" He gave her his hand, and she led him within the chateau, where, at the door of the apartment destined for him, she left him, with a graceful reverence. The King, nowise disconcerted, did not doubt that she had gone to give orders for his entertainment, when an attendant came to tell him that she had descended to the courtyard and called for her coach. Thither he hastened in alarm: "What! am I driving you from your house?" "Sire," replied Madame de Guercheville, "where a king is, he should be the sole master; but, for my part, I like to preserve some little authority wherever I may be." With another deep reverence, she entered her coach and disappeared, seeking shelter under the roof of a friend, some two leagues off, and leaving the baffled King to such consolation as he might find in a magnificent repast, bereft of the presence of the hostess. Henry could admire the virtue which he could not vanquish; and, long after, on his marriage, he acknowledged his sense of her worth by begging her to accept an honorable post near the person of the Queen. "Madame," he said, presenting her to Marie de Medicis, "I give you a lady of honor who is a lady of honor indeed." Some twenty years had passed since the adventure of La Roche-Guyon. Madame de Guercheville had outlived the charms which had attracted her royal suitor, but the virtue which repelled him was reinforced by a devotion no less uncompromising. A rosary in her hand and a Jesuit at her side, she realized the utmost wishes of the subtle fathers who had moulded and who guided her. She readily took fire when they told her of the benighted souls of New France, and the wrongs of Father Biard kindled her utmost indignation. She declared herself the protectress of the American missions; and the only difficulty, as a Jesuit writer tells us, was to restrain her zeal within reasonable bounds. She had two illustrious coadjutors. The first was the jealous Queen, whose unbridled rage and vulgar clamor had made the Louvre a hell. The second was Henriette d'Entragues, Marquise de Vernenil, the crafty and capricious siren who had awakened these conjugal tempests. To this singular coalition were joined many other ladies of the court; for the pious flame, fanned by the Jesuits, spread through hall and boudoir, and fair votaries of the Loves and Graces found it a more grateful task to win heaven for the heathen than to merit it for themselves. Young Biencourt saw it vain to resist. Biard must go with him in the returning ship, and also another Jesuit, Enemond Masse. The two fathers repaired to Dieppe, wafted on the wind of court favor, which they never doubted would bear them to their journey s end. Not so, however. Poutrincourt and his associates, in the dearth of their own resources, had bargained with two Huguenot merchants of Dieppe, Du Jardin and Du Quesne, to equip and load the vessel, in consideration of their becoming partners in the expected profits. Their indignation was extreme when they saw the intended passengers. They declared that they would not aid in building up a colony for the profit of the King of Spain, nor risk their money in a venture where Jesuits were allowed to intermeddle; and they closed with a fiat refusal to receive them on board, unless, they added with patriotic sarcasm, the Queen would direct them to transport the whole order beyond sea. Biard and Masse insisted, on which the merchants demanded reimbursement for their outlay, as they would have no further concern in the business. Biard communicated with Father Coton, Father Coton with Madame de Guercheville. No more was needed. The zealous lady of honor, "indignant," says Biard, "to see the efforts of hell prevail," and resolved "that Satan should not remain master of the field," set on foot a subscription, and raised an ample fund within the precincts of the court. Biard, in the name of the "Province of France of the Order of Jesus," bought out the interest of the two merchants for thirty-eight hundred livres, thus constituting the Jesuits equal partners in business with their enemies. Nor was this all; for, out of the ample proceeds of the subscription, he lent to the needy associates a further sum of seven hundred and thirty-seven livres, and advanced twelve hundred and twenty-five more to complete the outfit of the ship. Well pleased, the triumphant priests now embarked, and friend and foe set sail together on the twenty-sixth of January, 1611. CHAPTER VI. 1611, 1612. JESUITS IN ACADIA. The voyage was one of inordinate length,—beset, too, with icebergs, larger and taller, according to the Jesuit voyagers, than the Church of Notre Dame; but on the day of Pentecost their ship, "The Grace of God," anchored before Port Royal. Then first were seen in the wilderness of New France the close black cap, the close black robe, of the Jesuit father, and the features seamed with study and thought and discipline. Then first did this mighty Proteus, this many-colored Society of Jesus, enter upon that rude field of toil and woe, where, in after years, the devoted zeal of its apostles was to lend dignity to their order and do honor to humanity. Few were the regions of the known world to which the potent brotherhood had not stretched the vast network of its influence. Jesuits had disputed in theology with the bonzes of Japan, and taught astronomy to the mandarins of China; had wrought prodigies of sudden conversion among the followers of Bralinra, preached the papal supremacy to Abyssinian schismatics, carried the cross among the savages of Caffraria, wrought reputed miracles in Brazil, and gathered the tribes of Paraguay beneath their paternal sway. And now, with the aid of the Virgin and her votary at court, they would build another empire among the tribes of New France. The omens were sinister and the outset was unpropitious. The Society was destined to reap few laurels from the brief apostleship of Biard and Masse. When the voyagers landed, they found at Port Royal a band of half-famished men, eagerly expecting their succor. The voyage of four months had, however, nearly exhausted their own very moderate stock of provisions, and the mutual congratulations of the old colonists and the new were damped by a vision of starvation. A friction, too, speedily declared itself between the spiritual and the temporal powers. Pontgrave's son, then trading on the coast, had exasperated the Indians by an outrage on one of their women, and, dreading the wrath of Poutrincourt, had fled to the woods. Biard saw fit to take his part, remonstrated for him with vehemence, gained his pardon, received his confession, and absolved him. The Jesuit says that he was treated with great consideration by Poutrincourt, and that he should be forever beholden to him. The latter, however, chafed at Biard's interference. "Father," he said, "I know my duty, and I beg you will leave me to do it. I, with my sword, have hopes of paradise, as well as you with your breviary. Show me my path to heaven. I will show you yours on earth." He soon set sail for France, leaving his son Biencourt in charge. This hardy young sailor, of ability and character beyond his years, had, on his visit to court, received the post of Vice-Admiral in the seas of New France, and in this capacity had a certain authority over the trading-vessels of St. Malo and Rochelle, several of which were upon the coast. To compel the recognition of this authority, and also to purchase provisions, he set out along with Biard in a boat filled with armed followers. His first collision was with young Pontgrave, who with a few men had built a trading-hut on the St. John, where he proposed to winter. Meeting with resistance, Biencourt took the whole party prisoners, in spite of the remonstrances of Biard. Next, proceeding along the coast, he levied tribute on four or five traders wintering at St. Croix, and, continuing his course to the Kennebec, found the Indians of that region greatly enraged at the conduct of certain English adventurers, who three or four years before had, as they said, set dogs upon them and otherwise maltreated them. These were the colonists under Popham and Gilbert, who in 1607 and 1608 made an abortive attempt to settle near the mouth of the river. Nothing now was left of them but their deserted fort. The neighboring Indians were Abenakis, one of the tribes included by the French under the general name of Armouchiquois. Their disposition was doubtful, and it needed all the coolness of young Biencourt to avoid a fatal collision. On one occasion a curious incident took place. The French met six canoes full of warriors descending the Kennebec, and, as neither party trusted the other, the two encamped on opposite banks of the river. In the evening the Indians began to sing and dance. Biard suspected these proceedings to be an invocation of the Devil, and "in order," he says, "to thwart this accursed tyrant, I made our people sing a few church hymns, such as the Salve, the Ave Mans Stella, and others. But being once in train, and getting to the end of their spiritual songs, they fell to singing such others as they knew, and when these gave out they took to mimicking the dancing and singing of the Armouchiquois on the other side of the water; and as Frenchmen are naturally good mimics, they did it so well that the Armouchiquols stopped to listen; at which our people stopped too; and then the Indians began again. You would have laughed to hear them, for they were like two choirs answering each other in concert, and you would hardly have known the real Armouchiquois from the sham ones." Before the capture of young Pontgrave, Biard made him a visit at his camp, six leagues up the St. John. Pontgrave's men were sailors from St. Malo, between whom and the other Frenchmen there was much ill blood, Biard had hardly entered the river when he saw the evening sky crimsoned with the dancing fires of a superb aurora borealis, and he and his attendants marvelled what evil thing the prodigy might portend. Their Indian companions said that it was a sign of war. In fact, the night after they had joined Pontgrave a furious quarrel broke out in the camp, with abundant shouting, gesticulating and swearing; and, says the father, "I do not doubt that an accursed band of furious and sanguinary spirits were hovering about us all night, expecting every moment to see a horrible massacre of the few Christians in those parts; but the goodness of God bridled their malice. No blood was shed, and on the next day the squall ended in a fine calm." He did not like the Indians, whom he describes as "lazy, gluttonous, irreligious, treacherous, cruel, and licentious." He makes an exception in favor of Memberton, whom he calls "the greatest, most renowned, and most redoubted savage that ever lived in the memory of man," and especially commends him for contenting himself with but one wife, hardly a superlative merit in a centenarian. Biard taught him to say the Lord's Prayer, though at the petition, "Give us this clay our daily bread," the chief remonstrated, saying, "If I ask for nothing but bread, I shall get no fish or moose meat." His protracted career was now drawing to a close, and, being brought to the settlement in a dying state, he was placed in Biard's bed and attended by the two Jesuits. He was as remarkable in person as in character, for he was bearded like a Frenchman. Though, alone among La Fleche's converts, the Faith seemed to have left some impression upon him, he insisted on being buried with his heathen forefathers, but was persuaded to forego a wish fatal to his salvation, and slept at last in consecrated ground. Another of the scanty fruits of the mission was a little girl on the point of death, whom Biard had asked her parents to give him for baptism. "Take her and keep her, if you like," was the reply, "for she is no better than a dead dog." "We accepted the offer," says Biard, "in order to show them the difference between Christianity and their impiety; and after giving her what care we could, together with some instruction, we baptized her. We named her after Madame the Marquise de Guercheville, in gratitude for the benefits we have received from that lady, who can now rejoice that her name is already in heaven; for, a few days after baptism, the chosen soul flew to that place of glory." Biard's greatest difficulty was with the Micmac language. Young Biencourt was his best interpreter, and on common occasions served him well; but the moment that religion was in question he was, as it were, stricken dumb,—the reason being that the language was totally without abstract terms. Biard resolutely set himself to the study of it,—a hard and thorny path, on which he made small progress, and often went astray. Seated, pencil in hand, before some Indian squatting on the floor, whom with the bribe of a mouldy biscuit he had lured into the hut, he plied him with questions which he often neither would nor could answer. What was the Indian word for Faith, Hope, Charity, Sacrament, Baptism, Eucharist, Trinity, Incarnation? The perplexed savage, willing to amuse himself, and impelled, as Biard thinks, by the Devil, gave him scurrilous and unseemly phrases as the equivalent of things holy, which, studiously incorporated into the father's Indian catechism, produced on his pupils an effect the reverse of that intended. Biard's colleague, Masse, was equally zealous, and still less fortunate. He tried a forest life among the Indians 'with signal ill success. Hard fare, smoke, filth, the scolding of squaws, and the cries of children reduced him to a forlorn condition of body and mind, wore him to a skeleton, and sent him back to Port Royal without a single convert. The dark months wore slowly on. A band of half-famished men gathered about the huge fires of their barn-like hall, moody, sullen, and quarrelsome. Discord was here in the black robe of the Jesuit and the brown capote of the rival trader. The position of the wretched little colony may well provoke reflection. Here lay the shaggy continent, from Florida to the Pole, outstretched in savage slumber along the sea, the stern domain of Nature,—or, to adopt the ready solution of the Jesuits, a realm of the powers of night, blasted beneath the sceptre of hell. On the banks of James River was a nest of woe-begone Englishmen, a handful of Dutch fur-traders at the mouth of the Hudson, and a few shivering Frenchmen among the snow-drifts of Acadia; while deep within the wild monotony of desolation, on the icy verge of the great northern river, the hand of Champlain upheld the fleur-de-lis on the rock of Quebec. These were the advance guard, the forlorn hope of civilization, messengers of promise to a desert continent. Yet, unconscious of their high function, not content with inevitable woes, they were rent by petty jealousies and miserable feuds; while each of these detached fragments of rival nationalities, scarcely able to maintain its own wretched existence on a few square miles, begrudged to the others the smallest share in a domain which all the nations of Europe could hardly have sufficed to fill. One evening, as the forlorn tenants of Port Royal sat together disconsolate, Biard was seized with a spirit of prophecy. He called upon Biencourt to serve out the little of wine that remained,—a proposal which met with high favor from the company present, though apparently with none from the youthful Vice-Admiral. The wine was ordered, however, and, as an unwonted cheer ran round the circle, the Jesuit announced that an inward voice told him how, within a month, they should see a ship from France. In truth, they saw one within a week. On the twentythird of January, 1612, arrived a small vessel laden with a moderate store of provisions and abundant seeds of future strife. This was the expected succor sent by Poutrincourt. A series of ruinous voyages had exhausted his resources but he had staked all on the success of the colony, had even brought his family to Acadia, and he would not leave them and his companions to perish. His credit was gone; his hopes were dashed; yet assistance was proffered, and, in his extremity, he was forced to accept it. It came from Madame de Guercheville and her Jesuit advisers. She offered to buy the interest of a thousand crowns in the enterprise. The ill-omened succor could not be refused; but this was not all. The zealous protectress of the missions obtained from De Monts, whose fortunes, like those of Poutrincouirt, had ebbed low, a transfer of all his claims to the lands of Acadia; while the young King, Louis the Thirteenth, was persuaded to give her, in addition, a new grant of all the territory of North America, from the St. Lawrence to Florida. Thus did Madame de Guercheville, or in other words, the Jesuits who used her name as a cover, become proprietors of the greater part of the future United States and British Provinces. The English colony of Virginia and the Dutch trading-houses of New York were included within the limits of this destined Northern Paraguay; while Port Royal, the seigniory of the unfortunate Poutrincourt, was encompassed, like a petty island, by the vast domain of the Society of Jesus. They could not deprive him of it, since his title had been confirmed by the late King, but they flattered themselves, to borrow their own language, that he would be "confined as in a prison." His grant, however, had been vaguely worded, and, while they held him restricted to an insignificant patch of ground, he claimed lordship over a wide and indefinite territory. Here was argument for endless strife. Other interests, too, were adverse. Poutrincourt, in his discouragement, had abandoned his plan of liberal colonization, and now thought of nothing but beaver-skins. He wished to make a trading-post; the Jesuits wished to make a mission. When the vessel anchored before Port Royal, Biencourt, with disgust and anger, saw another Jesuit landed at the pier. This was Gilbert du Thet, a lay brother, versed in affairs of this world, who had come out as representative and administrator of Madame de Guercheville. Poutrincourt, also, had his agent on board; and, without the loss of a day, the two began to quarrel. A truce ensued; then a smothered feud, pervading the whole colony, and ending in a notable explosion. The Jesuits, chafing under the sway of Biencourt, had withdrawn without ceremony, and betaken themselves to the vessel, intending to sail for France. Biencourt, exasperated at such a breach of discipline, and fearing their representations at court, ordered them to return, adding that, since the Queen had commended them to his especial care, he could not, in conscience, lose sight of them. The indignant fathers excommunicated him. On this, the sagamore Louis, son of the grisly convert Membertou, begged leave to kill them; but Biencourt would not countenance this summary mode of relieving his embarrassment. He again, in the King's name, ordered the clerical mutineers to return to the fort. Biard declared that he would not, threatened to excommunicate any who should lay hand on him, and called the Vice-Admiral a robber. His wrath, however, soon cooled; he yielded to necessity, and came quietly ashore, where, for the next three months, neither he nor his colleagues would say mass, or perform any office of religion. At length a change came over him; he made advances of peace, prayed that the past might be forgotten, said mass again, and closed with a petition that Brother du Thet might be allowed to go to France in a trading vessel then on the coast. His petition being granted, he wrote to Poutrincourt a letter overflowing with praises of his son; and, charged with this missive, Du Thet set sail. CHAPTER VII. 1613. LA SAUSSAYE.—ARGALL Pending these squabbles, the Jesuits at home were far from idle. Bent on ridding themselves of Poutrincourt, they seized, in satisfaction of debts due them, all the cargo of his returning vessel, and involved him in a network of litigation. If we accept his own statements in a letter to his friend Lescarbot, he was outrageously misused, and indeed defrauded, by his clerical copartners, who at length had him thrown into prison. Here, exasperated, weary, sick of Acadia, and anxious for the wretched exiles who looked to him for succor, the unfortunate man fell ill. Regaining his liberty, he again addressed himself with what strength remained to the forlorn task of sending relief to his son and his comrades. Scarcely had Brother Gilbert du Thet arrived in France, when Madame de Guercheville and her Jesuits, strong in court favor and in the charity of wealthy penitents, prepared to take possession of their empire beyond sea. Contributions were asked, and not in vain; for the sagacious fathers, mindful of every spring of influence, had deeply studied the mazes of feminine psychology, and then, as now, were favorite confessors of the fair. It was on the twelfth of March, 1613, that the "Mayflower" of the Jesuits sailed from Honfleur for the shores of New England. She was the "Jonas," formerly in the service of De Monts, a small craft bearing forty-eight sailors and colonists, including two Jesuits, Father Quentin and Brother Du Thet. She carried horses, too, and goats, and was abundantly stored with all things needful by the pious munificence of her patrons. A courtier named La Saussaye was chief of the colony, Captain Charles Fleury commanded the ship, and, as she winged her way across the Atlantic, benedictions hovered over her from lordly halls and perfumed chambers. On the sixteenth of May, La Saussaye touched at La Heve, where he heard mass, planted a cross, and displayed the scutcheon of Madame de Guercheville. Thence, passing on to Port Royal, he found Biard, Masse, their servant-boy, an apothecary, and one man beside. Biencourt and his followers were scattered about the woods and shores, digging the tuberous roots called ground-nuts, catching alewives in the brooks, and by similar expedients sustaining their miserable existence. Taking the two Jesuits on board, the voyagers steered for the Penobscot. A fog rose upon the sea. They sailed to and fro, groping their way in blindness, straining their eyes through the mist, and trembling each instant lest they should descry the black outline of some deadly reef and the ghostly death-dance of the breakers, But Heaven heard their prayers. At night they could see the stars. The sun rose resplendent on a laughing sea, and his morning beams streamed fair and full on the wild heights of the island of Mount Desert. They entered a bay that stretched inland between iron-bound shores, and gave it the name of St. Sauveur. It is now called Frenchman's Bay. They saw a coast-line of weather-beaten crags set thick with spruce and fir, the surf-washed cliffs of Great Head and Schooner Head, the rocky front of Newport Mountain, patched with ragged woods, the arid domes of Dry Mountain and Green Mountain, the round bristly backs of the Porcupine Islands, and the waving outline of the Gouldsborough Hills. La Saussaye cast anchor not far from Schooner Head, and here he lay till evening. The jet-black shade betwixt crags and sea, the pines along the cliff, pencilled against the fiery sunset, the dreamy slumber of distant mountains bathed in shadowy purples—such is the scene that in this our day greets the wandering artist, the roving collegian bivouacked on the shore, or the pilgrim from stifled cities renewing his laded strength in the mighty life of Nature. Perhaps they then greeted the adventurous Frenchmen. There was peace on the wilderness and peace on the sea; but none in this missionary bark, pioneer of Christianity and civilization. A rabble of angry sailors clamored on her deck, ready to mutiny over the terms of their engagement. Should the time of their stay be reckoned from their landing at La Heve, or from their anchoring at Mount Desert? Fleury, the naval commander, took their part. Sailor, courtier, and priest gave tongue together in vociferous debate. Poutrincourt was far away, a ruined man, and the intractable Vice-Admiral had ceased from troubling; yet not the less were the omens of the pious enterprise sinister and dark. The company, however, went ashore, raised a cross, and heard mass. At a distance in the woods they saw the signal smoke of Indians, whom Biard lost no time in visiting. Some of them were from a village on the shore, three leagues westward. They urged the French to go with them to their wigwams. The astute savages had learned already how to deal with a Jesuit. "Our great chief, Asticou, is there. He wishes for baptism. He is very sick. He will die unbaptized. He will burn in hell, and it will be all your fault." This was enough. Biard embarked in a canoe, and they paddied him to the spot, where he found the great chief, Asticou, in his wigwam, with a heavy cold in the head. Disappointed of his charitable purpose, the priest consoled himself with observing the beauties of the neighboring shore, which seemed to him better fitted than St. Sauveur for the intended settlement. It was a gentle slope, descending to the water, covered with tall grass, and backed by rocky hills. It looked southeast upon a harbor where a fleet might ride at anchor, sheltered from the gales by a cluster of islands. The ship was brought to the spot, and the colonists disembarked. First they planted a cross; then they began their labors, and with their labors their quarrels. La Saussaye, zealous for agriculture, wished to break ground and raise crops immediately; the rest opposed him, wishing first to be housed and fortified. Fleury demanded that the ship should be unladen, and La Saussaye would not consent. Debate ran high, when suddenly all was harmony, and the disputants were friends once more in the pacification of a common danger. Far out at sea, beyond the islands that sheltered their harbor, they saw an approaching sail; and as she drew near, straining their anxious eyes, they could descry the red flags that streamed from her masthead and her stern; then the black muzzles of her cannon,—they counted seven on a side; then the throng of men upon her decks. The wind was brisk and fair; all her sails were set; she came on, writes a spectator, more swiftly than an arrow. Six years before, in 1607, the ships of Captain Newport had conveyed to the banks of James River the first vital germ of English colonization on the continent. Noble and wealthy speculators with Hispaniola, Mexico, and Peru for their inspiration, had combined to gather the fancied golden harvest of Virginia, received a charter from the Crown, and taken possession of their El Dorado. From tavern, gaming-house, and brothel was drawn the staple the colony,—ruined gentlemen, prodigal sons, disreputable retainers, debauched tradesmen. Yet it would be foul slander to affirm that the founders of Virginia were all of this stamp; for among the riotous crew were men of worth, and, above them all, a hero disguised by the homeliest of names. Again and again, in direst woe and jeopardy, the infant settlement owed its life to the heart and hand of John Smith. Several years had elapsed since Newport's voyage; and the colony, depleted by famine, disease, and an Indian war, had been recruited by fresh emigration, when one Samuel Argall arrived at Jamestown, captain of an illicit trading-vessel. He was a man of ability and force,—one of those compounds of craft and daring in which the age was fruitful; for the rest, unscrupulous and grasping. In the spring of 1613 he achieved a characteristic exploit,—the abduction of Pocahontas, that most interesting of young squaws, or, to borrow the style of the day, of Indian princesses. Sailing up the Potomac he lured her on board his ship, and then carried off the benefactress of the colony a prisoner to Jamestown. Here a young man of family, Rolfe, became enamoured of her, married her with more than ordinary ceremony, and thus secured a firm alliance between her tribesmen and the English. Meanwhile Argall had set forth on another enterprise. With a ship of one hundred and thirty tons, carrying fourteen guns and sixty men, he sailed in May for islands off the coast of Maine to fish, as he says for cod. He had a more important errand; for Sir Thomas Dale, Governor of Virginia, had commissioned him to expel the French from any settlement they might have made within the limits of King James's patents. Thick fogs involved him; and when the weather cleared he found himself not far from the Bay of Penobscot. Canoes came out from shore; the Indians climbed the ship's side, and, as they gained the deck, greeted the astonished English with an odd pantomime of bows and flourishes, which, in the belief of the latter, could have been learned from none but Frenchmen. By signs, too, and by often repeating the word Norman,—by which they always designated the French,—they betrayed the presence of the latter. Argall questioned them as well as his total ignorance of their language would permit, and learned, by signs, the position and numbers of the colonists. Clearly they were no match for him. Assuring the Indians that the Normans were his friends, and that he longed to see them, he retained one of the visitors as a guide, dismissed the rest with presents, and shaped his course for Mount Desert. Now the wild heights rose in view; now the English could see the masts of a small ship anchored in the sound; and now, as they rounded the islands, four white tents were visible on the grassy slope between the water and the woods. They were a gift from the Queen to Madame de Guercheville and her missionaries. Argall's men prepared for fight, while their Indian guide, amazed, broke into a howl of lamentation. On shore all was confusion. Bailleul, the pilot, went to reconnoitre, and ended by hiding among the islands. La Saussaye lost presence of mind, and did nothing for defence. La Motte, his lieutenant, with Captain Fleury, an ensign, a sergeant, the Jesuit Du Thet, and a few of the bravest men, hastened on board the vessel, but had no time to cast loose her cables. Argall bore down on them, with a furious din of drums and trumpets, showed his broadside, and replied to their hail with a volley of cannon and musket shot. "Fire! Fire!" screamed Fleury. But there was no gunner to obey, till Du Thet seized and applied the match. "The cannon made as much noise as the enemy's," writes Biard; but, as the inexperienced artillerist forgot to aim the piece, no other result ensued. Another storm of musketry, and Brother Gilbert du Thet rolled helpless on the deck. The French ship was mute. The English plied her for a time with shot, then lowered a boat and boarded. Under the awnings which covered her, dead and wounded men lay strewn about her deck, and among them the brave lay brother, smothering in his blood. He had his wish; for, on leaving France, he had prayed with uplifted hands that he might not return, but perish in that holy enterprise. Like the Order of which he was a humble member, he was a compound of qualities in appearance contradictory. La Motte, sword in hand, showed fight to the last, and won the esteem of his captors. The English landed without meeting any show of resistance, and ranged at will among the tents, the piles of baggage and stores, and the buildings and defences newly begun. Argall asked for the commander, but La Saussaye had fled to the woods. The crafty Englishman seized his chests, caused the locks to be picked, searched till he found the royal letters and commissions, withdrew them, replaced everything else as he had found it, and again closed the lids. In the morning, La Saussaye, between the English and starvation, preferred the former, and issued from his hiding place. Argall received him with studious courtesy. That country, he said, belonged to his master, King James. Doubtless they had authority from their own sovereign for thus encroaching upon it; and, for his part, he was prepared to yield all respect to the commissions of the King of France, that the peace between the two nations might not be disturbed. Therefore he prayed that the commissions might be shown to him. La Saussaye opened his chests. The royal signature was nowhere to be found. At this, Argall's courtesy was changed to wrath. He denounced the Frenchmen as robbers and pirates who deserved the gallows, removed their property on board his ship, and spent the afternoon in dividing it among his followers, The disconsolate French remained on the scene of their woes, where the greedy sailors as they came ashore would snatch from them, now a cloak, now a hat, and now a doublet, till the unfortunate colonists were left half naked. In other respects the English treated their captives well,—except two of them, whom they flogged; and Argall, whom Biard, after recounting his knavery, calls "a gentleman of noble courage," having gained his point, returned to his former courtesy. But how to dispose of the prisoners? Fifteen of them, including La Saussaye and the Jesuit Masse, were turned adrift in an open boat, at the mercy of the wilderness and the sea. Nearly all were lands-men; but while their unpractised hands were struggling with the oars, they were joined among the islands by the fugitive pilot and his boat's crew. Worn and half starved, the united bands made their perilous way eastward, stopping from time to time to hear mass, make a procession, or catch codfish. Thus sustained in the spirit and in the flesh, cheered too by the Indians, who proved fast friends in need, they crossed the Bay of Fundy, doubled Cape Sable, and followed the southern coast of Nova Scotia, till they happily fell in with two French trading-vessels, which bore them in safety to St. Malo. CHAPTER VIII. 1613-1615. RUIN OF FRENCH ACADIA. "Praised be God, behold two thirds of our company safe in France, telling their strange adventures to their relatives and friends. And now you will wish to know what befell the rest of us." Thus writes Father Biard, who with his companions in misfortune, fourteen in all, prisoners on board Argall's ship and the prize, were borne captive to Virginia. Old Point Comfort was reached at length, the site of Fortress Monroe; Hampton Roads, renowned in our day for the sea-fight of the Titans; Sewell's Point; the Rip Raps; Newport News,—all household words in the ears of this generation. Now, far on their right, buried in the damp shade of immemorial verdure, lay, untrodden and voiceless, the fields where stretched the leaguering lines of Washington where the lilies of France floated beside the banners of the new-born republic, and where in later years embattled treason confronted the manhood of an outraged nation. And now before them they could descry the mast of small craft at anchor, a cluster of rude dwellings fresh from the axe, scattered tenements, and fields green with tobacco. Throughout the voyage the prisoners had been soothed with flattering tales of the benignity of the Governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Dale; of his love of the French, and his respect for the memory of Henry the Fourth, to whom, they were told, he was much beholden for countenance and favor. On their landing at Jamestown, this consoling picture was reversed. The Governor fumed and blustered, talked of halter and gallows, and declared that he would hang them all. In vain Argall remonstrated, urging that he had pledged his word for their lives. Dale, outraged by their invasion of British territory, was deaf to all appeals; till Argall, driven to extremity, displayed the stolen commissions, and proclaimed his stratagem, of which the French themselves had to that moment been ignorant. As they were accredited by their government, their lives at least were safe. Yet the wrath of Sir Thomas Dale still burned high. He summoned his council, and they resolved promptly to wipe off all stain of French intrusion from shores which King James claimed as his own. Their action was utterly unauthorized. The two kingdoms were at peace. James the First, by the patents of 1606, had granted all North America, from the thirty-fourth to the forty-fifth degree of latitude, to the two companies of London and Plymouth,—Virginia being assigned to the former, while to the latter were given Maine and Acadia, with adjacent regions. Over these, though as yet the claimants had not taken possession of them, the authorities of Virginia had no color of jurisdiction. England claimed all North America, in virtue of the discovery of Cabot; and Sir Thomas Dale became the self-constituted champion of British rights, not the less zealous that his championship promised a harvest of booty. Argall's ship, the captured ship of La Saussaye, and another smaller vessel, were at once equipped and despatched on their errand of havoc. Argall commanded; and Biard, with Quentin and several others of the prisoners, were embarked with him. They shaped their course first for Mount Desert. Here they landed, levelled La Saussaye's unfinished defences, cut down the French cross, and planted one of their own in its place. Next they sought out the island of St. Croix, seized a quantity of salt, and razed to the ground all that remained of the dilapidated buildings of De Monts. They crossed the Bay of Fundy to Port Royal, guided, says Biard, by an Indian chief,—an improbable assertion, since the natives of these coasts hated the English as much as they loved the French, and now well knew the designs of the former. The unfortunate settlement was tenantless. Biencourt, with some of his men, was on a visit to neighboring bands of Indians, while the rest were reaping in the fields on the river, two leagues above the fort. Succor from Poutrincourt had arrived during the summer. The magazines were by no means empty, and there were cattle, horses, and hogs in adjacent fields and enclosures. Exulting at their good fortune, Argall's men butchered or carried off the animals, ransacked the buildings, plundered them even to the locks and bolts of the doors, and then laid the whole in ashes; "and may it please the Lord," adds the pious Biard, "that the sins therein committed may likewise have been consumed in that burning." Having demolished Port Royal, the marauders went in boats up the river to the fields where the reapers were at work. These fled, and took refuge behind the ridge of a hill, whence they gazed helplessly on the destruction of their harvest. Biard approached them, and, according to the declaration of Poutrincourt made and attested before the Admiralty of Guienne, tried to persuade them to desert his son, Biencourt, and take service with Argall. The reply of one of the men gave little encouragement for further parley:— "Begone, or I will split your head with this hatchet." There is flat contradiction here between the narrative of the Jesuit and the accounts of Poutrincourt and contemporary English writers, who agree in affirming that Biard, "out of indigestible malice that he had conceived against Biencourt," encouraged the attack on the settlements of St. Croix and Port Royal, and guided the English thither. The priest himself admits that both French and English regarded him as a traitor, and that his life was in danger. While Argall's ship was at anchor, a Frenchman shouted to the English from a distance that they would do well to kill him. The master of the ship, a Puritan, in his abomination of priests, and above all of Jesuits, was at the same time urging his commander to set Biard ashore and leave him to the mercy of his countrymen. In this pass he was saved, to adopt his own account, by what he calls his simplicity; for he tells us, that, while—instigated, like the rest of his enemies, by the Devil—the robber and the robbed were joining hands to ruin him, he was on his knees before Argall, begging him to take pity on the French, and leave them a boat, together with provisions to sustain their miserable lives through the winter. This spectacle of charity, he further says, so moved the noble heart of the commander, that he closed his ears to all the promptings of foreign and domestic malice. The English had scarcely re-embarked, when Biencourt arrived with his followers, and beheld the scene of destruction. Hopelessly outnumbered, he tried to lure Argall and some of his officers into an ambuscade, but they would not be entrapped. Biencourt now asked for an interview. The word of honor was mutually given, and the two chiefs met in a meadow not far from the demolished dwellings. An anonymous English writer says that Biencourt offered to transfer his allegiance to King James, on condition of being permitted to remain at Port Royal and carry on the fur-trade under a guaranty of English protection, but that Argall would not listen to his overtures. The interview proved a stormy one. Biard says that the Frenchmen vomited against him every species of malignant abuse. "In the mean time," he adds, "you will considerately observe to what madness the evil spirit exciteth those who sell themselves to him." According to Pontrincourt, Argall admitted that the priest had urged him to attack Port Royal. Certain it is that Biencourt demanded his surrender, frankly declaring that he meant to hang him. "Whilest they were discoursing together," says the old English writer above mentioned, "one of the savages, rushing suddenly forth from the Woods, and licentiated to come neere, did after his manner, with such broken French as he had, earnestly mediate a peace, wondring why they that seemed to be of one Country should vse others with such hostilitie, and that with such a forme of habit and gesture as made them both to laugh." His work done, and, as he thought, the French settlements of Acadia effectually blotted out, Argall set sail for Virginia on the thirteenth of November. Scarcely was he at sea when a storm scattered the vessels. Of the smallest of the three nothing was ever heard. Argall, severely buffeted, reached his port in safety, having first, it is said, compelled the Dutch at Manhattan to acknowledge for a time the sovereignty of King James. The captured ship of La Saussaye, with Biard and his colleague Quentin on board, was forced to yield to the fury of the western gales and bear away for the Azores. To Biard the change of destination was not unwelcome. He stood in fear of the truculent Governor of Virginia, and his tempest-rocked slumbers were haunted with unpleasant visions of a rope's end. It seems that some of the French at Port Royal, disappointed in their hope of hanging him, had commended him to Sir Thomas Dale as a proper subject for the gallows drawing up a paper, signed by six of them, and containing allegations of a nature well fitted to kindle the wrath of that vehement official. The vessel was commanded by Turnel, Argall's lieutenant, apparently an officer of merit, a scholar and linguist. He had treated his prisoner with great kindness, because, says the latter, "he esteemed and loved him for his naive simplicity and ingenuous candor." But of late, thinking his kindness misplaced, he had changed it for an extreme coldness, preferring, in the words of Biard himself, "to think that the Jesuit had lied, rather than so many who accused him." Water ran low, provisions began to fail, and they eked out their meagre supply by butchering the horses taken at Port Royal. At length they came within sight of Fayal, when a new terror seized the minds of the two Jesuits. Might not the Englishmen fear that their prisoners would denounce them to the fervent Catholics of that island as pirates and sacrilegious kidnappers of priests? From such hazard the escape was obvious. What more simple than to drop the priests into the sea? In truth, the English had no little dread of the results of conference between the Jesuits and the Portuguese authorities of Fayal; but the conscience or humanity of Turnel revolted at the expedient which awakened such apprehension in the troubled mind of Biard. He contented himself with requiring that the two priests should remain hidden while the ship lay off the port: Biard does not say that he enforced the demand either by threats or by the imposition of oaths. He and his companion, however, rigidly complied with it, lying close in the hold or under the boats, while suspicious officials searched the ship, a proof, he triumphantly declares, of the audacious malice which has asserted it as a tenet of Rome that no faith need be kept with heretics. Once more at sea, Turnel shaped his course for home, having, with some difficulty, gained a supply of water and provisions at Fayal. All was now harmony between him and his prisoners. When he reached Pembroke, in Wales, the appearance of the vessel—a French craft in English hands—again drew upon him the suspicion of piracy. The Jesuits, dangerous witnesses among the Catholics of Fayal, could at the worst do little harm with the Vice-Admiral at Pembroke. To him, therefore, he led the prisoners, in the sable garb of their order, now much the worse for wear, and commended them as persons without reproach, "wherein," adds the modest father, "he spoke the truth." The result of their evidence was, we are told, that Turnel was henceforth treated, not as a pirate, but, according to his deserts, as an honorable gentleman. This interview led to a meeting with certain dignitaries of the Anglican Church, who, much interested in an encounter with Jesuits in their robes, were filled, says Biard, with wonder and admiration at what they were told of their conduct. He explains that these churchmen differ widely in form and doctrine from the English Calvinists, who, he says, are called Puritans; and he adds that they are superior in every respect to these, whom they detest as an execrable pest. Biard was sent to Dover and thence to Calais, returning, perhaps, to the tranquil honors of his chair of theology at Lyons. La Saussaye, La Motte, Fleury, and other prisoners were at various times sent from Virginia to England, and ultimately to France. Madame de Guercheville, her pious designs crushed in the bud, seems to have gained no further satisfaction than the restoration of the vessel. The French ambassador complained of the outrage, but answer was postponed; and, in the troubled state of France, the matter appears to have been dropped. Argall, whose violent and crafty character was offset by a gallant bearing and various traits of martial virtue, became Deputy-Governor of Virginia, and, under a military code, ruled the colony with a rod of iron. He enforced the observance of Sunday with an edifying rigor. Those who absented themselves from church were, for the first offence, imprisoned for the night, and reduced to slavery for a week; for the second offence, enslaved a month and for the third, a year. Nor was he less strenuous in his devotion to mammon. He enriched himself by extortion and wholesale peculation; and his audacious dexterity, aided by the countenance of the Earl of Warwick, who is said to have had a trading connection with him, thwarted all the efforts of the company to bring him to account. In 1623, he was knighted by the hand of King James. Early in the spring following the English attack, Pontrincourt came to Port Royal. He found the place in ashes, and his unfortunate son, with the men under his command, wandering houseless in the forests. They had passed a winter of extreme misery, sustaining their wretched existence with roots, the buds of trees, and lichens peeled from the rocks. Despairing of his enterprise, Poutrincourt returned to France. In the next year, 1615, during the civil disturbances which followed the marriage of the King, command was given him of the royal forces destined for the attack on Mery; and here, happier in his death than in his life, he fell, sword in hand. In spite of their reverses, the French kept hold on Acadia. Biencourt, partially at least, rebuilt Port Royal; while winter after winter the smoke of fur traders' huts curled into the still, sharp air of these frosty wilds, till at length, with happier auspices, plans of settlement were resumed. Rude hands strangled the "Northern Paraguay" in its birth. Its beginnings had been feeble, but behind were the forces of a mighty organization, at once devoted and ambitious, enthusiastic and calculating. Seven years later the "Mayflower" landed her emigrants at Plymouth. What would have been the issues had the zeal of the pious lady of honor preoccupied New England with a Jesuit colony? In an obscure stroke of lawless violence began the strife of France and England, Protestantism and Rome, which for a century and a half shook the struggling communities of North America, and closed at last in the memorable triumph on the Plains of Abraham. CHAPTER—IX. 1608, 1609. CHAMPLAIN AT QUEBEC. A LONELY ship sailed up the St. Lawrence. The white whales floundering in the Bay of Tadoussac, and the wild duck diving as the foaming prow drew near,—there was no life but these in all that watery solitude, twenty miles from shore to shore. The ship was from Honfleur, and was commanded by Samuel de Champlain. He was the AEneas of a destined people, and in her womb lay the embryo life of Canada. De Monts, after his exclusive privilege of trade was revoked and his Acadian enterprise ruined, had, as we have seen, abandoned it to Poutrincourt. Perhaps would it have been well for him had he abandoned with it all Transatlantic enterprises; but the passion for discovery and the noble ambition of founding colonies had taken possession of his mind. These, rather than a mere hope of gain, seem to have been his controlling motives; yet the profits of the fur-trade were vital to the new designs he was meditating, to meet the heavy outlay they demanded, and he solicited and obtained a fresh monopoly of the traffic for one year. Champlain was, at the time, in Paris; but his unquiet thoughts turned westward. He was enamoured of the New World, whose rugged charms had seized his fancy and his heart; and as explorers of Arctic seas have pined in their repose for polar ice and snow, so did his restless thoughts revert to the fog-wrapped coasts, the piny odors of forests, the noise of waters, the sharp and piercing sunlight, so dear to his remembrance. He longed to unveil the mystery of that boundless wilderness, and plant the Catholic faith and the power of France amid its ancient barbarism. Five years before, he had explored the St. Lawrence as far as the rapids above Montreal. On its banks, as he thought, was the true site for a settlement,—a fortified post, whence, as from a secure basis, the waters of the vast interior might be traced back towards their sources, and a western route discovered to China and Japan. For the fur-trade, too, the innumerable streams that descended to the great river might all be closed against foreign intrusion by a single fort at some commanding point, and made tributary to a rich and permanent commerce; while—and this was nearer to his heart, for he had often been heard to say that the saving of a soul was worth more than the conquest of an empire—countless savage tribes, in the bondage of Satan, might by the same avenues be reached and redeemed. De Monts embraced his views; and, fitting out two ships, gave command of one to the elder Pontgrave, of the other to Champlain. The former was to trade with the Indians and bring back the cargo of furs which, it was hoped, would meet the expense of the voyage. To Champlain fell the harder task of settlement and exploration. Pontgrave, laden with goods for the Indian trade of Tadoussac sailed from Honfleur on the fifth of April, 1608. Champlain, with men, arms, and stores for the colony, followed, eight days later. On the fifteenth of May he was on the Grand Bank; on the thirtieth he passed Gaspe, and on the third of June neared Tadoussac. No living thing was to be seen. He anchored, lowered a boat, and rowed into the port, round the rocky point at the southeast, then, from the fury of its winds and currents, called La Pointe de Tous les Diables. There was life enough within, and more than he cared to find. In the still anchorage under the cliffs lay Pontgrave's vessel, and at her side another ship, which proved to be a Basque furtrader. Poutgrave, arriving a few days before, had found himself anticipated by the Basques, who were busied in a brisk trade with bands of Indians cabined along the borders of the cove. He displayed the royal letters, and commanded a cessation of the prohibited traffic; but the Basques proved refractory, declared that they would trade in spite of the King, fired on Pontgrave with cannon and musketry, wounded him and two of his men, and killed a third. They then boarded his vessel, and carried away all his cannon, small arms, and ammunition, saying that they would restore them when they had finished their trade and were ready to return home. Champlain found his comrade on shore, in a disabled condition. The Basques, though still strong enough to make fight, were alarmed for the consequences of their conduct, and anxious to come to terms. A peace, therefore, was signed on board their vessel; all differences were referred to the judgment of the French courts, harmony was restored, and the choleric strangers betook themselves to catching whales. This port of Tadoussac was long the centre of the Canadian fur-trade. A desolation of barren mountains closes round it, betwixt whose ribs of rugged granite, bristling with savins, birches, and firs, the Saguenay rolls its gloomy waters from the northern wilderness. Centuries of civilization have not tamed the wildness of the place; and still, in grim repose, the mountains hold their guard around the waveless lake that glistens in their shadow, and doubles, in its sullen mirror, crag, precipice, and forest. Near the brink of the cove or harbor where the vessels lay, and a little below the mouth of a brook which formed one of the outlets of this small lake, stood the remains of the wooden barrack built by Chauvin eight years before. Above the brook were the lodges of an Indian camp,—stacks of poles covered with birch-bark. They belonged to an Algonquin horde, called Montagnais, denizens of surrounding wilds, and gatherers of their only harvest,—skins of the moose, caribou, and bear; fur of the beaver, marten, otter, fox, wild-cat, and lynx. Nor was this all, for there were intermediate traders betwixt the French and the shivering bands who roamed the weary stretch of stunted forest between the head-waters of the Saguenay and Hudson's Bay. Indefatigable canoe-men, in their birchen vessels, light as eggshells, they threaded the devious tracks of countless rippling streams, shady by-ways of the forest, where the wild duck scarcely finds depth to swim; then descended to their mart along those scenes of picturesque yet dreary grandeur which steam has made familiar to modern tourists. With slowly moving paddles they glided beneath the cliff whose shaggy brows frown across the zenith, and whose base the deep waves wash with a hoarse and hollow cadence; and they passed the sepulchral Bay of the Trinity, dark as the tide of Acheron,—a sanctuary of solitude and silence: depths which, as the fable runs, no sounding line can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge the wheeling eagle seems a speck. Peace being established with the Basques, and the wounded Pontgrave busied, as far as might be, in transferring to the hold of his ship the rich lading of the Indian canoes, Champlain spread his sails, and again held his course up the St. Lawrence. Far to the south, in sun and shadow, slumbered the woody mountains whence fell the countless springs of the St. John, behind tenantless shores, now white with glimmering villages,—La Chenaic, Granville, Kamouraska, St. Roche, St. Jean, Vincelot, Berthier. But on the north the jealous wilderness still asserts its sway, crowding to the river's verge its walls, domes, and towers of granite; and, to this hour, its solitude is scarcely broken. Above the point of the Island of Orleans, a constriction of the vast channel narrows it to less than a mile, with the green heights of Point Levi on one side, and on the other the cliffs of Quebec. Here, a small stream, the St. Charles, enters the St. Lawrence, and in the angle betwixt them rises the promontory on two sides a natural fortress. Between the cliffs and the river lay a strand covered with walnuts and other trees. From this strand, by a rough passage gullied downward from the place where Prescott Gate now guards the way, one might climb the height to the broken plateau above, now burdened with its ponderous load of churches, convents, dwellings, ramparts, and batteries. Thence, by a gradual ascent, the rock sloped upward to its highest summit, Cape Diamond, looking down on the St. Lawrence from a height of three hundred and fifty feet. Here the citadel now stands; then the fierce sun fell on the bald, baking rock, with its crisped mosses and parched lichens. Two centuries and a half have quickened the solitude with swarming life, covered the deep bosom of the river with barge and steamer and gliding sail, and reared cities and villages on the site of forests; but nothing can destroy the surpassing grandeur of the scene. On the strand between the water and the cliffs Champlain's axemen fell to their work. They were pioneers of an advancing host,—advancing, it is true, with feeble and uncertain progress,—priests, soldiers, peasants, feudal scutcheons, royal insignia: not the Middle Age, but engendered of it by the stronger life of modern centralization, sharply stamped with a parental likeness, heir to parental weakness and parental force. In a few weeks a pile of wooden buildings rose on the brink of the St. Lawrence, on or near the site of the marketplace of the Lower Town of Quebec. The pencil of Champlain, always regardless of proportion and perspective, has preserved its likeness. A strong wooden wall, surmounted by a gallery loop-holed for musketry, enclosed three buildings, containing quarters for himself and his men, together with a courtyard, from one side of which rose a tall dove-cot, like a belfry. A moat surrounded the whole, and two or three small cannon were planted on salient platforms towards the river. There was a large storehouse near at hand, and a part of the adjacent ground was laid out as a garden. In this garden Champlain was one morning directing his laborers, when Tetu, his pilot, approached him with an anxious countenance, and muttered a request to speak with him in private. Champlain assenting, they withdrew to the neighboring woods, when the pilot disburdened himself of his secret. One Antoine Natel, a locksmith, smitten by conscience or fear, had revealed to him a conspiracy to murder his commander and deliver Quebec into the hands of the Basques and Spaniards then at Tadoussac. Another locksmith, named Duval, was author of the plot, and, with the aid of three accomplices, had befooled or frightened nearly all the company into taking part in it. Each was assured that he should make his fortune, and all were mutually pledged to poniard the first betrayer of the secret. The critical point of their enterprise was the killing of Champlain. Some were for strangling him, some for raising a false alarm in the night and shooting him as he came out from his quarters. Having heard the pilot's story, Champlain, remaining in the woods, desired his informant to find Antoine Natel, and bring him to the spot. Natel soon appeared, trembling with excitement and fear, and a close examination left no doubt of the truth of his statement. A small vessel, built by Pontgrave at Tadoussac, had lately arrived, and orders were now given that it should anchor close at hand. On board was a young man in whom confidence could be placed. Champlain sent him two bottles of wine, with a direction to tell the four ringleaders that they had been given him by his Basque friends at Tadoussac, and to invite them to share the good cheer. They came aboard in the evening, and were seized and secured. "Voyla done mes galants bien estonnez," writes Champlain. It was ten o'clock, and most of the men on shore were asleep. They were wakened suddenly, and told of the discovery of the plot and the arrest of the ringleaders. Pardon was then promised them, and they were dismissed again to their beds, greatly relieved; for they had lived in trepidation, each fearing the other. Duval's body, swinging from a gibbet, gave wholesome warning to those he had seduced; and his head was displayed on a pike, from the highest roof of the buildings, food for birds and a lesson to sedition. His three accomplices were carried by Pontgrave to France, where they made their atonement in the galleys. It was on the eighteenth of September that Pontgrave set sail, leaving Champlain with twenty-eight men to hold Quebec through the winter. Three weeks later, and shores and hills glowed with gay prognostics of approaching desolation,—the yellow and scarlet of the maples, the deep purple of the ash, the garnet hue of young oaks, the crimson of the tupelo at the water's edge, and the golden plumage of birch saplings in the fissures of the cliff. It was a short-lived beauty. The forest dropped its festal robes. Shrivelled and faded, they rustled to the earth. The crystal air and laughing sun of October passed away, and November sank upon the shivering waste, chill and sombre as the tomb. A roving band of Montagnais had built their huts near the buildings, and were busying themselves with their autumn eel-fishery, on which they greatly relied to sustain their miserable lives through the winter. Their slimy harvest being gathered, and duly smoked and dried, they gave it for safe-keeping to Champlain, and set out to hunt beavers. It was deep in the winter before they came back, reclaimed their eels, built their birch cabins again, and disposed themselves for a life of ease, until famine or their enemies should put an end to their enjoyments. These were by no means without alloy. While, gorged with food, they lay dozing on piles of branches in their smoky huts, where, through the crevices of the thin birch bark, streamed in a cold capable at times of congealing mercury, their slumbers were beset with nightmare visions of Iroquois forays, scalpings, butcherings, and burnings. As dreams were their oracles, the camp was wild with fright. They sent out no scouts and placed no guard; but, with each repetition of these nocturnal terrors, they came flocking in a body to beg admission within the fort. The women and children were allowed to enter the yard and remain during the night, while anxious fathers and jealous husbands shivered in the darkness without. On one occasion, a group of wretched beings was seen on the farther bank of the St. Lawrence, like wild animals driven by famine to the borders of the settler's clearing. The river was full of drifting ice, and there was no crossing without risk of life. The Indians, in their desperation, made the attempt; and midway their canoes were ground to atoms among the tossing masses. Agile as wild-cats, they all leaped upon a huge raft of ice, the squaws carrying their children on their shoulders, a feat at which Champlain marveled when he saw their starved and emaciated condition. Here they began a wail of despair; when happily the pressure of other masses thrust the sheet of ice against the northern shore. They landed and soon made their appearance at the fort, worn to skeletons and horrible to look upon. The French gave them food, which they devoured with a frenzied avidity, and, unappeased, fell upon a dead dog left on the snow by Champlain for two months past as a bait for foxes. They broke this carrion into fragments, and thawed and devoured it, to the disgust of the spectators, who tried vainly to prevent them. This was but a severe access of the periodical famine which, during winter, was a normal condition of the Algonquin tribes of Acadia and the Lower St. Lawrence, who, unlike the cognate tribes of New England, never tilled the soil, or made any reasonable provision against the time of need. One would gladly know how the founders of Quebec spent the long hours of their first winter; but on this point the only man among them, perhaps, who could write, has not thought it necessary to enlarge. He himself beguiled his leisure with trapping foxes, or hanging a dead dog from a tree and watching the hungry martens in their efforts to reach it. Towards the close of winter, all found abundant employment in nursing themselves or their neighbors, for the inevitable scurvy broke out with virulence. At the middle of May, only eight men of the twenty-eight were alive, and of these half were suffering from disease. This wintry purgatory wore away; the icy stalactites that hung from the cliffs fell crashing to the earth; the clamor of the wild geese was heard; the bluebirds appeared in the naked woods; the water-willows were covered with their soft caterpillar-like blossoms; the twigs of the swamp maple were flushed with ruddy bloom; the ash hung out its black tufts; the shad-bush seemed a wreath of snow; the white stars of the bloodroot gleamed among dank, fallen leaves; and in the young grass of the wet meadows the marsh-marigolds shone like spots of gold. Great was the joy of Champlain when, on the fifth of June, he saw a sailboat rounding the Point of Orleans, betokening that the spring had brought with it the longed for succors. A son-in-law of Pontgrave, named Marais, was on board, and he reported that Pontgrave was then at Tadoussac, where he had lately arrived. Thither Champlain hastened, to take counsel with his comrade. His constitution or his courage had defied the scurvy. They met, and it was determined betwixt them, that, while Pontgrave remained in charge of Quebec, Champlain should enter at once on his long meditated explorations, by which, like La Salle seventy years later, he had good hope of finding a way to China. But there was a lion in the path. The Indian tribes, to whom peace was unknown, infested with their scalping parties the streams and pathways of the forest, and increased tenfold its inseparable risks. The after career of Champlain gives abundant proof that he was more than indifferent to all such chances; yet now an expedient for evading them offered itself, so consonant with his instincts that he was glad to accept it. During the last autumn, a young chief from the banks of the then unknown Ottawa had been at Quebec; and, amazed at what he saw, he had begged Champlain to join him in the spring against his enemies. These enemies were a formidable race of savages,—the Iroquois, or Five Confederate Nations, who dwelt in fortified villages within limits now embraced by the State of New York, and who were a terror to all the surrounding forests. They were deadly foes of their kindred the Hurons, who dwelt on the lake which bears their name, and were allies of Algonquin bands on the Ottawa. All alike were tillers of the soil, living at ease when compared with the famished Algonquins of the Lower St. Lawrence. By joining these Hurons and Algonquins against their Iroquois enemies, Champlain might make himself the indispensable ally and leader of the tribes of Canada, and at the same time fight his way to discovery in regions which otherwise were barred against him. From first to last it was the policy of France in America to mingle in Indian politics, hold the balance of power between adverse tribes, and envelop in the network of her power and diplomacy the remotest hordes of the wilderness. Of this policy the Father of New France may perhaps be held to have set a rash and premature example. Yet while he was apparently following the dictates of his own adventurous spirit, it became evident, a few years later, that under his thirst for discovery and spirit of knight-errantry lay a consistent and deliberate purpose. That it had already assumed a definite shape is not likely; but his after course makes it plain that, in embroiling himself and his colony with the most formidable savages on the continent, he was by no means acting so recklessly as at first sight would appear. CHAPTER X. 1609. LAKE CHAMPLAIN. It was past the middle of June, and the expected warriors from the upper country had not come,—a delay which seems to have given Champlain little concern, for, without waiting longer, he set out with no better allies than a band of Montagnais. But, as he moved up the St. Lawrence, he saw, thickly clustered in the bordering forest, the lodges of an Indian camp, and, landing, found his Huron and Algonquin allies. Few of them had ever seen a white man, and they surrounded the steel-clad strangers in speechless wonder. Champlain asked for their chief, and the staring throng moved with him towards a lodge where sat, not one chief, but two; for each band had its own. There were feasting, smoking, and speeches; and, the needful ceremony over, all descended together to Quebec; for the strangers were bent on seeing those wonders of architecture, the fame of which had pierced the recesses of their forests. On their arrival, they feasted their eyes and glutted their appetites; yelped consternation at the sharp explosions of the arquebuse and the roar of the cannon; pitched their camps, and bedecked themselves for their war-dance. In the still night, their fire glared against the black and jagged cliff, and the fierce red light fell on tawny limbs convulsed with frenzied gestures and ferocious stampings on contorted visages, hideous with paint; on brandished weapons, stone war-clubs, stone hatchets, and stone-pointed lances; while the drum kept up its hollow boom, and the air was split with mingled yells. The war-feast followed, and then all embarked together. Champlain was in a small shallop, carrying, besides himself, eleven men of Pontgrave's party, including his son-in-law Marais and the pilot La Routte. They were armed with the arquebuse,—a matchlock or firelock somewhat like the modern carbine, and from its shortness not ill suited for use in the forest. On the twenty-eighth of June they spread their sails and held their course against the current, while around them the river was alive with canoes, and hundreds of naked arms plied the paddle with a steady, measured sweep. They crossed the Lake of St. Peter, threaded the devious channels among its many islands, and reached at last the mouth of the Riviere des Iroquois, since called the Richelien, or the St. John. Here, probably on the site of the town of Sorel, the leisurely warriors encamped for two days, hunted, fished, and took their ease, regaling their allies with venison and wildfowl. They quarrelled, too; three fourths of their number seceded, took to their canoes in dudgeon, and paddled towards their homes, while the rest pursued their course up the broad and placid stream. Walls of verdure stretched on left and right. Now, aloft in the lonely air rose the cliffs of Belceil, and now, before them, framed in circling forests, the Basin of Chambly spread its tranquil mirror, glittering in the sun. The shallop outsailed the canoes. Champlain, leaving his allies behind, crossed the basin and tried to pursue his course; but, as he listened in the stillness, the unwelcome noise of rapids reached his ear, and, by glimpses through the dark foliage of the Islets of St. John he could see the gleam of snowy foam and the flash of hurrying waters. Leaving the boat by the shore in charge of four men, he went with Marais, La Routte, and five others, to explore the wild before him. They pushed their way through the damps and shadows of the wood, through thickets and tangled vines, over mossy rocks and mouldering logs. Still the hoarse surging of the rapids followed them; and when, parting the screen of foliage, they looked out upon the river, they saw it thick set with rocks where, plunging over ledges, gurgling under drift-logs, darting along clefts, and boiling in chasms, the angry waters filled the solitude with monotonous ravings. Champlain retraced his steps. He had learned the value of an Indian's word. His allies had promised him that his boat could pass unobstructed throughout the whole journey. "It afflicted me," he says, "and troubled me exceedingly to be obliged to return without having seen so great a lake, full of fair islands and bordered with the fine countries which they had described to me." When he reached the boat, he found the whole savage crew gathered at the spot. He mildly rebuked their bad faith, but added, that, though they had deceived him, he, as far as might be, would fulfil his pledge. To this end, he directed Marais, with the boat and the greater part of the men, to return to Quebec, while he, with two who offered to follow him, should proceed in the Indian canoes. The warriors lifted their canoes from the water, and bore them on their shoulders half a league through the forest to the smoother stream above. Here the chiefs made a muster of their forces, counting twenty-four canoes and sixty warriors. All embarked again, and advanced once more, by marsh, meadow, forest, and scattered islands,—then full of game, for it was an uninhabited land, the war-path and battleground of hostile tribes. The warriors observed a certain system in their advance. Some were in front as a vanguard; others formed the main body; while an equal number were in the forests on the flanks and rear, hunting for the subsistence of the whole; for, though they had a provision of parched maize pounded into meal, they kept it for use when, from the vicinity of the enemy, hunting should become impossible. Late in the day they landed and drew up their canoes, ranging them closely, side by side. Some stripped sheets of bark, to cover their camp sheds; others gathered wood, the forest being full of dead, dry trees; others felled the living trees, for a barricade. They seem to have had steel axes, obtained by barter from the French; for in less than two hours they had made a strong defensive work, in the form of a half-circle, open on the river side, where their canoes lay on the strand, and large enough to enclose all their huts and sheds. 28 Some of their number had gone forward as scouts, and, returning, reported no signs of an enemy. This was the extent of their precaution, for they placed no guard, but all, in full security, stretched themselves to sleep,—a vicious custom from which the lazy warrior of the forest rarely departs. They had not forgotten, however, to consult their oracle. The medicine-man pitched his magic lodge in the woods, formed of a small stack of poles, planted in a circle and brought together at the tops like stacked muskets. Over these he placed the filthy deer-skins which served him for a robe, and, creeping in at a narrow opening, hid himself from view. Crouched in a ball upon the earth, he invoked the spirits in mumbling inarticulate tones; while his naked auditory, squatted on the ground like apes, listened in wonder and awe. Suddenly, the lodge moved, rocking with violence to and fro,—by the power of the spirits, as the Indians thought, while Champlain could plainly see the tawny fist of the medicine-man shaking the poles. They begged him to keep a watchful eye on the peak of the lodge, whence fire and smoke would presently issue; but with the best efforts of his vision, he discovered none. Meanwhile the medicine-man was seized with such convulsions, that, when his divination was over, his naked body streamed with perspiration. In loud, clear tones, and in an unknown tongue, he invoked the spirit, who was understood to be present in the form of a stone, and whose feeble and squeaking accents were heard at intervals, like the wail of a young puppy. In this manner they consulted the spirit—as Champlain thinks, the Devil—at all their camps. His replies, for the most part, seem to have given them great content; yet they took other measures, of which the military advantages were less questionable. The principal chief gathered bundles of sticks, and, without wasting his breath, stuck them in the earth in a certain order, calling each by the name of some warrior, a few taller than the rest representing the subordinate chiefs. Thus was indicated the position which each was to hold in the expected battle. All gathered round and attentively studied the sticks, ranged like a child's wooden soldiers, or the pieces on a chessboard; then, with no further instruction, they formed their ranks, broke them, and reformed them again and again with excellent alacrity and skill. Again the canoes advanced, the river widening as they went. Great islands appeared, leagues in extent,—Isle a la Motte, Long Island, Grande Isle; channels where ships might float and broad reaches of water stretched between them, and Champlain entered the lake which preserves his name to posterity. Cumberland Head was passed, and from the opening of the great channel between Grande Isle and the main he could look forth on the wilderness sea. Edged with woods, the tranquil flood spread southward beyond the sight. Far on the left rose the forest ridges of the Green Mountains, and on the right the Adirondacks,—haunts in these later years of amateur sportsmen from counting-rooms or college halls. Then the Iroquois made them their hunting-ground; and beyond, in the valleys of the Mohawk, the Onondaga, and the Genesce, stretched the long line of their five cantons and palisaded towns. At night they encamped again. The scene is a familiar one to many a tourist; and perhaps, standing at sunset on the peaceful strand, Champlain saw what a roving student of this generation has seen on those same shores, at that same hour,—the glow of the vanished sun behind the western mountains, darkly piled in mist and shadow along the sky; near at hand, the dead pine, mighty in decay, stretching its ragged arms athwart the burning heaven, the crow perched on its top like an image carved in jet; and aloft, the nighthawk, circling in his flight, and, with a strange whirring sound, diving through the air each moment for the insects he makes his prey. The progress of the party was becoming dangerous. They changed their mode of advance and moved only in the night. All day they lay close in the depth of the forest, sleeping, lounging, smoking tobacco of their own raising, and beguiling the hours, no doubt, with the shallow banter and obscene jesting with which knots of Indians are wont to amuse their leisure. At twilight they embarked again, paddling their cautious way till the eastern sky began to redden. Their goal was the rocky promontory where Fort Ticonderoga was long afterward built. Thence, they would pass the outlet of Lake George, and launch their canoes again on that Como of the wilderness, whose waters, limpid as a fountain-head, stretched far southward between their flanking mountains. Landing at the future site of Fort William Henry, they would carry their canoes through the forest to the river Hudson, and, descending it, attack perhaps some outlying town of the Mohawks. In the next century this chain of lakes and rivers became the grand highway of savage and civilized war, linked to memories of momentous conflicts. The allies were spared so long a progress. On the morning of the twenty-ninth of July, after paddling all night, they hid as usual in the forest on the western shore, apparently between Crown Point and Ticonderoga. The warriors stretched themselves to their slumbers, and Champlain, after walking till nine or ten o'clock through the surrounding woods, returned to take his repose on a pile of spruce-boughs. Sleeping, he dreamed a dream, wherein he beheld the Iroquois drowning in the lake; and, trying to rescue them, he was told by his Algonquin friends that they were good for nothing, and had better be left to their fate. For some time past he had been beset every morning by his superstitious allies, eager to learn about his dreams; and, to this moment, his unbroken slumbers had failed to furnish the desired prognostics. The announcement of this auspicious vision filled the crowd with joy, and at nightfall they embarked, flushed with anticipated victories. It was ten o'clock in the evening, when, near a projecting point of land, which was probably Ticonderoga, they descried dark objects in motion on the lake before them. These were a flotilla of Iroquois canoes, heavier and slower than theirs, for they were made of oak bark. Each party saw the other, and the mingled war-cries pealed over the darkened water. The Iroquois, who were near the shore, having no stomach for an aquatic battle, landed, and, making night hideous with their clamors, began to barricade themselves. Champlain could see them in the woods, laboring like beavers, hacking down trees with iron axes taken from the Canadian tribes in war, and with stone hatchets of their own making. The allies remained on the lake, a bowshot from the hostile barricade, their canoes made fast together by poles lashed across. All night they danced with as much vigor as the frailty of their vessels would permit, their throats making amends for the enforced restraint of their limbs. It was agreed on both sides that the fight should be deferred till daybreak; but meanwhile a commerce of abuse, sarcasm, menace, and boasting gave unceasing exercise to the lungs and fancy of the combatants, "much," says Champlain, "like the besiegers and besieged in a beleaguered town." As day approached, he and his two followers put on the light armor of the time. Champlain wore the doublet and long hose then in vogue. Over the doublet he buckled on a breastplate, and probably a back-piece, while his thighs were protected by cuisses of steel, and his head by a plumed casque. Across his shoulder hung the strap of his bandoleer, or ammunition-box; at his side was his sword, and in his hand his arquebuse. Such was the equipment of this ancient Indian-fighter, whose exploits date eleven years before the landing of the Puritans at Plymouth, and sixty-six years before King Philip's War. Each of the three Frenchmen was in a separate canoe, and, as it grew light, they kept themselves hidden, either by lying at the bottom, or covering themselves with an Indian robe. The canoes approached the shore, and all landed without opposition at some distance from the Iroquois, whom they presently could see filing out of their barricade,-tall, strong men, some two hundred in number, the boldest and fiercest warriors of North America. They advanced through the forest with a steadiness which excited the admiration of Champlain. Among them could be seen three chiefs, made conspicuous by their tall plumes. Some bore shields of wood and hide, and some were covered with a kind of armor made of tough twigs interlaced with a vegetable fibre supposed by Champlain to be cotton. 29 The allies, growing anxious, called with loud cries for their champion, and opened their ranks that he might pass to the front. He did so, and, advancing before his red companions in arms, stood revealed to the gaze of the Iroquois, who, beholding the warlike apparition in their path, stared in mute amazement. "I looked at them," says Champlain, "and they looked at me. When I saw them getting ready to shoot their arrows at us, I levelled my arquebuse, which I had loaded with four balls, and aimed straight at one of the three chiefs. The shot brought down two, and wounded another. On this, our Indians set up such a yelling that one could not have heard a thunder-clap, and all the while the arrows flew thick on both sides. The Iroquois were greatly astonished and frightened to see two of their men killed so quickly, in spite of their arrow-proof armor. As I was reloading, one of my companions fired a shot from the woods, which so increased their astonishment that, seeing their chiefs dead, they abandoned the field and fled into the depth of the forest." The allies dashed after them. Some of the Iroquois were killed, and more were taken. Camp, canoes, provisions, all were abandoned, and many weapons flung down in the panic flight. The victory was complete. At night, the victors led out one of the prisoners, told him that he was to die by fire, and ordered him to sing his death-song if he dared. Then they began the torture, and presently scalped their victim alive, 30 when Champlain, sickening at the sight, begged leave to shoot him. They refused, and he turned away in anger and disgust; on which they called him back and told him to do as he pleased. He turned again, and a shot from his arquebuse put the wretch out of misery. The scene filled him with horror; but a few months later, on the Place de la Greve at Paris, he might have witnessed tortures equally revolting and equally vindictive, inflicted on the regicide Ravaillac by the sentence of grave and learned judges. The allies made a prompt retreat from the scene of their triumph. Three or four days brought them to the mouth of the Richelien. Here they separated; the Hurons and Algonquins made for the Ottawa, their homeward route, each with a share of prisoners for future torments. At parting, they invited Champlain to visit their towns and aid them again in their wars, an invitation which this paladin of the woods failed not to accept. The companions now remaining to him were the Montagnais. In their camp on the Richelien, one of them dreamed that a war party of Iroquois was close upon them; on which, in a torrent of rain, they left their huts, paddled in dismay to the islands above the Lake of St. Peter, and hid themselves all night in the rushes. In the morning they took heart, emerged from their hiding-places, descended to Quebec, and went thence to Tadoussac, whither Champlain accompanied them. Here the squaws, stark naked, swam out to the canoes to receive the heads of the dead Iroquois, and, hanging them from their necks, danced in triumph along the shore, One of the heads and a pair of arms were then bestowed on Champlain,—touching memorials of gratitude, which, however, he was by no means to keep for himself, but to present to the King. Thus did New France rush into collision with the redoubted warriors of the Five Nations. Here was the beginning, and in some measure doubtless the cause, of a long suite of murderous conflicts, bearing havoc and flame to generations yet unborn. Champlain had invaded the tiger's den; and now, in smothered fury, the patient savage would lie biding his day of blood. CHAPTER XI. 1610-1612. WAR.—TRADE.—DISCOVERY. Champlain and Pontgrave returned to France, while Pierre Chauvin of Dieppe held Quebec in their absence. The King was at Fontainebleau,—it was a few months before his assassination,—and here Champlain recounted his adventures, to the great satisfaction of the lively monarch. He gave him also, not the head of the dead Iroquois, but a belt wrought in embroidery of dyed quills of the Canada porcupine, together with two small birds of scarlet plumage, and the skull of a gar-fish. De Monts was at court, striving for a renewal of his monopoly. His efforts failed; on which, with great spirit but little discretion, he resolved to push his enterprise without it. Early in the spring of 1610, the ship was ready, and Champlain and Pontgrave were on board, when a violent illness seized the former, reducing him to the most miserable of all conflicts, the battle of the eager spirit against the treacherous and failing flesh. Having partially recovered, he put to sea, giddy and weak, in wretched plight for the hard career of toil and battle which the New World offered him. The voyage was prosperous, no other mishap occurring than that of an ardent youth of St. Malo, who drank the health of Pontgrave with such persistent enthusiasm that he fell overboard and was drowned. There were ships at Tadoussac, fast loading with furs; and boats, too, higher up the river, anticipating the trade, and draining De Monts's resources in advance. Champlain, who was left free to fight and explore wherever he should see fit, had provided, to use his own phrase, "two strings to his bow." On the one hand, the Montagnais had promised to guide him northward to Hudson's Bay; on the other, the Hurons were to show him the Great Lakes, with the mines of copper on their shores; and to each the same reward was promised,—to join them against the common foe, the Iroquois. The rendezvous was at the mouth of the river Richelien. Thither the Hurons were to descend in force, together with Algonquins of the Ottawa; and thither Champlain now repaired, while around his boat swarmed a multitude of Montagnais canoes, filled with warriors whose lank hair streamed loose in the wind. There is an island in the St. Lawrence near the mouth of the Richelien. On the nineteenth of June it was swarming with busy and clamorous savages, Champlain's Montagnais allies, cutting down the trees and clearing the ground for a dance and a feast; for they were hourly expecting the Algonquin warriors, and were eager to welcome them with befitting honors. But suddenly, far out on the river, they saw an advancing canoe. Now on this side, now on that, the flashing paddles urged it forward as if death were on its track; and as it drew near, the Indians on board cried out that the Algonquins were in the forest, a league distant, engaged with a hundred warriors of the Iroquois, who, outnumbered, were fighting savagely within a barricade of trees. The air was split with shrill outcries. The Montagnais snatched their weapons,—shields, bows, arrows, war-clubs, sword-blades made fast to poles,—and ran headlong to their canoes, impeding each other in their haste, screeching to Champlain to follow, and invoking with no less vehemence the aid of certain fur-traders, just arrived in four boats from below. These, as it was not their cue to fight, lent them a deaf ear; on which, in disgust and scorn, they paddled off, calling to the recusants that they were women, fit for nothing but to make war on beaver-skins. Champlain and four of his men were in the canoes. They shot across the intervening water, and, as their prows grated on the pebbles, each warrior flung down his paddle, snatched his weapons, and ran into the woods. The five Frenchmen followed, striving vainly to keep pace with the naked, light-limbed rabble, bounding like shadows through the forest. They quickly disappeared. Even their shrill cries grew faint, till Champlain and his men, discomforted and vexed, found themselves deserted in the midst of a swamp. The day was sultry, the forest air heavy, close, and filled with hosts of mosquitoes, "so thick," says the chief sufferer, "that we could scarcely draw breath, and it was wonderful how cruelly they persecuted us." Through black mud, spongy moss, water knee-deep, over fallen trees, among slimy logs and entangling roots, tripped by vines, lashed by recoiling boughs, panting under their steel head-pieces and heavy corselets, the Frenchmen struggled on, bewildered and indignant. At length they descried two Indians running in the distance, and shouted to them in desperation, that, if they wanted their aid, they must guide them to the enemy. At length they could hear the yells of the combatants; there was light in the forest before them, and they issued into a partial clearing made by the Iroquois axemen near the river. Champlain saw their barricade. Trees were piled into a circular breastwork, trunks, boughs, and matted foliage forming a strong defence, within which the Iroquois stood savagely at bay. Around them flocked the allies, half hidden in the edges of the forest, like hounds around a wild boar, eager, clamorous, yet afraid to rush in. They had attacked, and had met a bloody rebuff. All their hope was now in the French; and when they saw them, a yell arose from hundreds of throats that outdid the wilderness voices whence its tones were borrowed,—the whoop of the homed owl, the scream of the cougar, the howl of starved wolves on a winter night. A fierce response pealed from the desperate band within; and, amid a storm of arrows from both sides, the Frenchmen threw themselves into the fray, firing at random through the fence of trunks, boughs, and drooping leaves, with which the Iroquois had encircled themselves. Champlain felt a stone-headed arrow splitting his ear and tearing through the muscles of his neck, he drew it out, and, the moment after, did a similar office for one of his men. But the Iroquois had not recovered from their first terror at the arquebuse; and when the mysterious and terrible assailants, clad in steel and armed with thunder-bolts, ran up to the barricade, thrust their pieces through the openings, and shot death among the crowd within, they could not control their fright, but with every report threw themselves flat on the ground. Animated with unwonted valor, the allies, covered by their large shields, began to drag out the felled trees of the barricade, while others, under Champlain's direction, gathered at the edge of the forest, preparing to close the affair with a final rush. New actors soon appeared on the scene. These were a boat's crew of the fur-traders under a young man of St. Malo, one Des Prairies, who, when he heard the firing, could not resist the impulse to join the fight. On seeing them, Champlain checked the assault, in order, as he says, that the new-comers might have their share in the sport. The traders opened fire, with great zest and no less execution; while the Iroquois, now wild with terror, leaped and writhed to dodge the shot which tore through their frail armor of twigs. Champlain gave the signal; the crowd ran to the barricade, dragged down the boughs or clambered over them, and bore themselves, in his own words, "so well and manfully," that, though scratched and torn by the sharp points, they quickly forced an entrance. The French ceased their fire, and, followed by a smaller body of Indians, scaled the barricade on the farther side. Now, amid howlings, shouts, and screeches, the work was finished. Some of the Iroquois were cut down as they stood, hewing with their war-clubs, and foaming like slaughtered tigers; some climbed the barrier and were killed by the furious crowd without; some were drowned in the river; while fifteen, the only survivors, were made prisoners. "By the grace of God," writes Champlain, "behold the battle won!" Drunk with ferocious ecstasy, the conquerors scalped the dead and gathered fagots for the living; while some of the fur-traders, too late to bear part in the fight, robbed the carcasses of their blood-bedrenched robes of beaver-skin amid the derision of the surrounding Indians. That night, the torture fires blazed along the shore. Champlain saved one prisoner from their clutches, but nothing could save the rest. One body was quartered and eaten. 31 "As for the rest of the prisoners," says Champlain, "they were kept to be put to death by the women and girls, who in this respect are no less inhuman than the men, and, indeed, much more so; for by their subtlety they invent more cruel tortures, and take pleasure in it." On the next day, a large band of Hurons appeared at the rendezvous, greatly vexed that they had come too late. The shores were thickly studded with Indian huts, and the woods were full of them. Here were warriors of three designations, including many subordinate tribes, and representing three grades of savage society,—the Hurons, the Algonquins of the Ottawa, and the Montagnais; afterwards styled by a Franciscan friar, than whom few men better knew them, the nobles, the burghers, and the peasantry and paupers of the forest. Many of them, from the remote interior, had never before seen a white man; and, wrapped like statues in their robes, they stood gazing on the French with a fixed stare of wild and wondering eyes. Judged by the standard of Indian war, a heavy blow had been struck on the common enemy. Here were hundreds of assembled warriors; yet none thought of following up their success. Elated with unexpected fortune, they danced and sang; then loaded their canoes, hung their scalps on poles, broke up their camps, and set out triumphant for their homes. Champlain had fought their battles, and now might claim, on their part, guidance and escort to the distant interior. Why he did not do so is scarcely apparent. There were cares, it seems, connected with the very life of his puny colony, which demanded his return to France. Nor were his anxieties lessened by the arrival of a ship from his native town of Brouage, with tidings of the King's assassination. Here was a death-blow to all that had remained of De Monts's credit at court; while that unfortunate nobleman, like his old associate, Pontrincourt, was moving with swift strides toward financial ruin. With the revocation of his monopoly, fur-traders had swarmed to the St. Lawrence. Tadoussac was full of them, and for that year the trade was spoiled. Far from aiding to support a burdensome enterprise of colonization, it was in itself an occasion of heavy loss. Champlain bade farewell to his garden at Quebec, where maize, wheat, rye, and barley, with vegetables of all kinds, and a small vineyard of native grapes,—for he was a zealous horticulturist,—held forth a promise which he was not to see fulfilled. He left one Du Parc in command, with sixteen men, and, sailing on the eighth of August, arrived at Honfleur with no worse accident than that of running over a sleeping whale near the Grand Bank. With the opening spring he was afloat again. Perils awaited him worse than those of Iroquois tomahawks; for, approaching Newfoundland, the ship was entangled for days among drifting fields and bergs of ice. Escaping at length, she arrived at Tadoussac on the thirteenth of May, 1611. She had anticipated the spring. Forests and mountains, far and near, all were white with snow. A principal object with Champlain was to establish such relations with the great Indian communities of the interior as to secure to De Monts and his associates the advantage of trade with them; and to this end he now repaired to Montreal, a position in the gateway, as it were, of their yearly descents of trade or war. On arriving, he began to survey the ground for the site of a permanent post. A few days convinced him, that, under the present system, all his efforts would be vain. Wild reports of the wonders of New France had gone abroad, and a crowd of hungry adventurers had hastened to the land of promise, eager to grow rich, they scarcely knew how, and soon to return disgusted. A fleet of boats and small vessels followed in Champlain's wake. Within a few days, thirteen of them arrived at Montreal, and more soon appeared. He was to break the ground; others would reap the harvest. Travel, discovery, and battle, all must inure to the profit, not of the colony, but of a crew of greedy traders. Champlain, however, chose the site and cleared the ground for his intended post. It was immediately above a small stream, now running under arches of masonry, and entering the St. Lawrence at Point Callieres, within the modern city. He called it Place Royale; and here, on the margin of the river, he built a wall of bricks made on the spot, in order to measure the destructive effects of the "ice-shove" in the spring. Now, down the surges of St. Louis, where the mighty floods of the St. Lawrence, contracted to a narrow throat, roll in fury among their sunken rocks,—here, through foam and spray and the roar of the angry torrent, a fleet of birch canoes came dancing like dry leaves on the froth of some riotous brook. They bore a band of Hurons first at the rendezvous. As they drew near the landing, all the fur-traders' boats blazed out a clattering fusillade, which was designed to bid them welcome, but in fact terrified many of them to such a degree that they scarcely dared to come ashore. Nor were they reassured by the bearing of the disorderly crowd, who, in jealous competition for their beaver-skins, left them not a moment's peace, and outraged all their notions of decorum. More soon appeared, till hundreds of warriors were encamped along the shore, all restless, suspicious, and alarmed. Late one night they awakened Champlain. On going with them to their camp, he found chiefs and warriors in solemn conclave around the glimmering firelight. Though they were fearful of the rest, their trust in him was boundless. "Come to our country, buy our beaver, build a fort, teach us the true faith, do what you will, but do not bring this crowd with you." The idea had seized them that these lawless bands of rival traders, all well armed, meant to plunder and kill them. Champlain assured them of safety, and the whole night was consumed in friendly colloquy. Soon afterward, however, the camp broke up, and the uneasy warriors removed to the borders of the Lake of St. Louis, placing the rapids betwixt themselves and the objects of their alarm. Here Champlain visited them, and hence these intrepid canoe-men, kneeling in their birchen egg-shells, carried him homeward down the rapids, somewhat, as he admits, to the discomposure of his nerves. 32 The great gathering dispersed: the traders descended to Tadoussac, and Champlain to Quebec; while the Indians went, some to their homes, some to fight the Iroquois. A few months later, Champlain was in close conference with De Monts at Pons, a place near Rochelle, of which the latter was governor. The last two years had made it apparent, that, to keep the colony alive and maintain a basis for those discoveries on which his heart was bent, was impossible without a change of system. De Monts, engrossed with the cares of his government, placed all in the hands of his associate; and Champlain, fully empowered to act as he should judge expedient, set out for Paris. On the way, Fortune, at one stroke, wellnigh crushed him and New France together; for his horse fell on him, and he narrowly escaped with life. When he was partially recovered, he resumed his journey, pondering on means of rescue for the fading colony. A powerful protector must be had,—a great name to shield the enterprise from assaults and intrigues of jealous rival interests. On reaching Paris he addressed himself to a prince of the blood, Charles de Bourbon, Comte de Soissons; described New France, its resources, and its boundless extent; urged the need of unfolding a mystery pregnant perhaps with results of the deepest moment; laid before him maps and memoirs, and begged him to become the guardian of this new world. The royal consent being obtained, the Comte de Soissons became Lieutenant-General for the King in New France, with vice-regal powers. These, in turn, he conferred upon Champlain, making him his lieutenant, with full control over the trade in furs at and above Quebec, and with power to associate with himself such persons as he saw fit, to aid in the exploration and settlement of the country. Scarcely was the commission drawn when the Comte de Soissons, attacked with fever, died,—to the joy of the Breton and Norman traders, whose jubilation, however, found a speedy end. Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Conde, first prince of the blood, assumed the vacant protectorship. He was grandson of the gay and gallant Conde of the civil wars, was father of the great Conde, the youthful victor of Rocroy, and was husband of Charlotte de Moutmorency, whose blond beauties had fired the inflammable heart of Henry the Fourth. To the unspeakable wrath of that keen lover, the prudent Conde fled with his bride, first to Brussels, and then to Italy; nor did he return to France till the regicide's knife had put his jealous fears to rest. After his return, he began to intrigue against the court. He was a man of common abilities, greedy of money and power, and scarcely seeking even the decency of a pretext to cover his mean ambition. His chief honor—an honor somewhat equivocal—is, as Voltaire observes, to have been father of the great Conde. Busy with his intrigues, he cared little for colonies and discoveries; and his rank and power were his sole qualifications for his new post. In Champlain alone was the life of New France. By instinct and temperament he was more impelled to the adventurous toils of exploration than to the duller task of building colonies. The profits of trade had value in his eyes only as means to these ends, and settlements were important chiefly as a base of discovery. Two great objects eclipsed all others,—to find a route to the Indies, and to bring the heathen tribes into the embraces of the Church, since, while he cared little for their bodies, his solicitude for their souls knew no bounds. It was no part of his plan to establish an odious monopoly. He sought rather to enlist the rival traders in his cause; and he now, in concurrence with Du Monts, invited them to become sharers in the traffic, under certain regulations, and on condition of aiding in the establishment and support of the colony. The merchants of St. Malo and Rouen accepted the terms, and became members of the new company; but the intractable heretics of Rochelle, refractory in commerce as in religion, kept aloof, and preferred the chances of an illicit trade. The prospects of New France were far from flattering; for little could be hoped from this unwilling league of selfish traders, each jealous of the rest. They gave the Prince of Conde large gratuities to secure his countenance and support. The hungry viceroy took them, and with these emoluments his interest in the colony ended. CHAPTER XII. 1612, 1613. THE IMPOSTOR VIGNAU. The arrangements just indicated were a work of time. In the summer of 1612, Champlain was forced to forego his yearly voyage to New France; nor, even in the following spring, were his labors finished and the rival interests brought to harmony. Meanwhile, incidents occurred destined to have no small influence on his movements. Three years before, after his second fight with the Iroquois, a young man of his company had boldly volunteered to join the Indians on their homeward journey, and winter among them. Champlain gladly assented, and in the following summer the adventurer returned. Another young man, one Nicolas de Vignan, next offered himself; and he also, embarking in the Algonquin canoes, passed up the Ottawa, and was seen no more for a twelvemonth. In 1612 he reappeared in Paris, bringing a tale of wonders; for, says Champlain, "he was the most impudent liar that has been seen for many a day." He averred that at the sources of the Ottawa he had found a great lake; that he had crossed it, and discovered a river flowing northward; that he had descended this river, and reached the shores of the sea; that here he had seen the wreck of an English ship, whose crew, escaping to land, had been killed by the Indians; and that this sea was distant from Montreal only seventeen days by canoe. The clearness, consistency, and apparent simplicity of his story deceived Champlain, who had heard of a voyage of the English to the northern seas, coupled with rumors of wreck and disaster, and was thus confirmed in his belief of Vignau's honesty. The Marechal de Brissac, the President Jeannin, and other persons of eminence about the court, greatly interested by these dexterous fabrications, urged Champlain to follow up without delay a discovery which promised results so important; while he, with the Pacific, Japan, China, the Spice Islands, and India stretching in flattering vista before his fancy, entered with eagerness on the chase of this illusion. Early in the spring of 1613 the unwearied voyager crossed the Atlantic, and sailed up the St. Lawrence. On Monday, the twenty-seventh of May, he left the island of St. Helen, opposite Montreal, with four Frenchmen, one of whom was Nicolas de Vignau, and one Indian, in two small canoes. They passed the swift current at St. Ann's, crossed the Lake of Two Mountains, and advanced up the Ottawa till the rapids of Carillon and the Long Saut checked their course. So dense and tangled was the forest, that they were forced to remain in the bed of the river, trailing their canoes along the bank with cords, or pushing them by main force up the current. Champlain's foot slipped; he fell in the rapids, two boulders, against which he braced himself, saving him from being swept down, while the cord of the canoe, twisted round his hand, nearly severed it. At length they reached smoother water, and presently met fifteen canoes of friendly Indians. Champlain gave them the most awkward of his Frenchmen and took one of their number in return,—an exchange greatly to his profit. All day they plied their paddles, and when night came they made their camp-fire in the forest. He who now, when two centuries and a half are passed, would see the evening bivouac of Champlain, has but to encamp, with Indian guides, on the upper waters of this same Ottawa, or on the borders of some lonely river of New Brunswick or of Maine. Day dawned. The east glowed with tranquil fire, that pierced with eyes of flame the fir-trees whose jagged tops stood drawn in black against the burning heaven. Beneath, the glossy river slept in shadow, or spread far and wide in sheets of burnished bronze; and the white moon, paling in the face of day, hung like a disk of silver in the western sky. Now a fervid light touched the dead top of the hemlock, and creeping downward bathed the mossy beard of the patriarchal cedar, unstirred in the breathless air; now a fiercer spark beamed from the east; and now, half risen on the sight, a dome of crimson fire, the sun blazed with floods of radiance across the awakened wilderness. The canoes were launched again, and the voyagers held their course. Soon the still surface was flecked with spots of foam; islets of froth floated by, tokens of some great convulsion. Then, on their left, the falling curtain of the Rideau shone like silver betwixt its bordering woods, and in front, white as a snowdrift, the cataracts of the Chaudiere barred their way. They saw the unbridled river careering down its sheeted rocks, foaming in unfathomed chasms, wearying the solitude with the hoarse outcry of its agony and rage. On the brink of the rocky basin where the plunging torrent boiled like a caldron, and puffs of spray sprang out from its concussion like smoke from the throat of a cannon, Champlain's two Indians took their stand, and, with a loud invocation, threw tobacco into the foam,—an offering to the local spirit, the Manitou of the cataract. They shouldered their canoes over the rocks, and through the woods; then launched them again, and, with toil and struggle, made their amphibious way, pushing dragging, lifting, paddling, shoving with poles; till, when the evening sun poured its level rays across the quiet Lake of the Chaudiere, they landed, and made their camp on the verge of a woody island. Day by day brought a renewal of their toils. Hour by hour, they moved prosperously up the long windings of the solitary stream; then, in quick succession, rapid followed rapid, till the bed of the Ottawa seemed a slope of foam. Now, like a wall bristling at the top with woody islets, the Falls of the Chats faced them with the sheer plunge of their sixteen cataracts; now they glided beneath overhanging cliffs, where, seeing but unseen, the crouched wildcat eyed them from the thicket; now through the maze of water-girded rocks, which the white cedar and the spruce clasped with serpent-like roots, or among islands where old hemlocks darkened the water with deep green shadow. Here, too, the rock-maple reared its verdant masses, the beech its glistening leaves and clean, smooth stem, and behind, stiff and sombre, rose the balsam-fir. Here in the tortuous channels the muskrat swam and plunged, and the splashing wild duck dived beneath the alders or among the red and matted roots of thirsty water willows. Aloft, the white-pine towered above a sea of verdure; old fir-trees, hoary and grim, shaggy with pendent mosses, leaned above the stream, and beneath, dead and submerged, some fallen oak thrust from the current its bare, bleached limbs, like the skeleton of a drowned giant. In the weedy cove stood the moose, neck-deep in water to escape the flies, wading shoreward, with glistening sides, as the canoes drew near, shaking his broad antlers and writhing his hideous nostril, as with clumsy trot he vanished in the woods. In these ancient wilds, to whose ever verdant antiquity the pyramids are young and Nineveh a mushroom of yesterday; where the sage wanderer of the Odyssey, could he have urged his pilgrimage so far, would have surveyed the same grand and stern monotony, the same dark sweep of melancholy woods;—here, while New England was a solitude, and the settlers of Virginia scarcely dared venture inland beyond the sound of a cannon-shot, Champlain was planting on shores and islands the emblems of his faith. Of the pioneers of the North American forests, his name stands foremost on the list. It was he who struck the deepest and boldest strokes into the heart of their pristine barbarism. At Chantilly, at Fontainebleau, Paris, in the cabinets of princes and of royalty itself, mingling with the proud vanities of the court; then lost from sight in the depths of Canada, the companion of savages, sharer of their toils, privations, and battles, more hardy, patient, and bold than they;—such, for successive years, were the alternations of this man's life. To follow on his trail once more. His Indians said that the rapids of the river above were impassable. Nicolas de Vignan affirmed the contrary; but, from the first, Vignau had been found always in the wrong. His aim seems to have been to involve his leader in difficulties, and disgust him with a journey which must soon result in exposing the imposture which had occasioned it. Champlain took counsel of the Indians. The party left the river, and entered the forest. "We had a hard march," says Champlain. "I carried for my share of the luggage three arquebuses, three paddles, my overcoat, and a few bagatelles. My men carried a little more than I did, and suffered more from the mosquitoes than from their loads. After we had passed four small ponds and advanced two leagues and a half, we were so tired that we could go no farther, having eaten nothing but a little roasted fish for nearly twenty-four hours. So we stopped in a pleasant place enough by the edge of a pond, and lighted a fire to drive off the mosquitoes, which plagued us beyond all description; and at the same time we set our nets to catch a few fish." On the next day they fared still worse, for their way was through a pine forest where a tornado had passed, tearing up the trees and piling them one upon another in a vast "windfall," where boughs, roots, and trunks were mixed in confusion. Sometimes they climbed over and sometimes crawled through these formidable barricades, till, after an exhausting march, they reached the banks of Muskrat Lake, by the edge of which was an Indian settlement. This neighborhood was the seat of the principal Indian population of the river, and, as the canoes advanced, unwonted signs of human life could be seen on the borders of the lake. Here was a rough clearing. The trees had been burned; there was a rude and desolate gap in the sombre green of the pine forest. Dead trunks, blasted and black with fire, stood grimly upright amid the charred stumps and prostrate bodies of comrades half consumed. In the intervening spaces, the soil had been feebly scratched with hoes of wood or bone, and a crop of maize was growing, now some four inches high. The dwellings of these slovenly farmers, framed of poles covered with sheets of bark, were scattered here and there, singly or in groups, while their tenants were running to the shore in amazement. The chief, Nibachis, offered the calumet, then harangued the crowd: "These white men must have fallen from the clouds. How else could they have reached us through the woods and rapids which even we find it hard to pass? The French chief can do anything. All that we have heard of him must he true." And they hastened to regale the hungry visitors with a repast of fish. Champlain asked for guidance to the settlements above. It was readily granted. Escorted by his friendly hosts, he advanced beyond the foot of Muskrat Lake, and, landing, saw the unaccustomed sight of pathways through the forest. They led to the clearings and cabins of a chief named Tessonat, who, amazed at the apparition of the white strangers, exclaimed that he must be in a dream. Next, the voyagers crossed to the neighboring island, then deeply wooded with pine, elm, and oak. Here were more desolate clearings, more rude cornfields and bark-built cabins. Here, too, was a cemetery, which excited the wonder of Champlain, for the dead were better cared for than the living. Each grave was covered with a double row of pieces of wood, inclined like a roof till they crossed at the ridge, a long which was laid a thick tablet of wood, meant apparently either to bind the whole together or protect it from rain. At one end stood an upright tablet, or flattened post, rudely carved with an intended representation of the features of the deceased. If a chief, the head was adorned with a plume. If a warrior, there were figures near it of a shield, a lance, a war-club, and a bow and arrows; if a boy, of a small bow and one arrow; and if a woman or a girl, of a kettle, an earthen pot, a wooden spoon, and a paddle. The whole was decorated with red and yellow paint; and beneath slept the departed, wrapped in a robe of skins, his earthly treasures about him, ready for use in the land of souls. Tessouat was to give a tabagie, or solemn feast, in honor of Champlain, and the chiefs and elders of the island were invited. Runners were sent to summon the guests from neighboring hamlets; and, on the morrow, Tessonat's squaws swept his cabin for the festivity. Then Champlain and his Frenchmen were seated on skins in the place of honor, and the naked guests appeared in quick succession, each with his wooden dish and spoon, and each ejaculating his guttural salute as he stooped at the low door. The spacious cabin was full. The congregated wisdom and prowess of the nation sat expectant on the bare earth. Each long, bare arm thrust forth its dish in turn as the host served out the banquet, in which, as courtesy enjoined, he himself was to have no share. First, a mess of pounded maize, in which were boiled, without salt, morsels of fish and dark scraps of meat; then, fish and flesh broiled on the embers, with a kettle of cold water from the river. Champlain, in wise distrust of Ottawa cookery, confined himself to the simpler and less doubtful viands. A few minutes, and all alike had vanished. The kettles were empty. Then pipes were filled and touched with fire brought in by the squaws, while the young men who had stood thronged about the entrance now modestly withdrew, and the door was closed for counsel. First, the pipes were passed to Champlain. Then, for full half an hour, the assembly smoked in silence. At length, when the fitting time was come, he addressed them in a speech in which he declared, that, moved by affection for them, he visited their country to see its richness and its beauty, and to aid them in their wars; and he now begged them to furnish him with four canoes and eight men, to convey him to the country of the Nipissings, a tribe dwelling northward on the lake which bears their name. His audience looked grave, for they were but cold and jealous friends of the Nipissings. For a time they discoursed in murmuring tones among themselves, all smoking meanwhile with redoubled vigor. Then Tessouat, chief of these forest republicans, rose and spoke in behalf of all:—"We always knew you for our best friend among the Frenchmen. We love you like our own children. But why did you break your word with us last year when we all went down to meet you at Montreal, to give you presents and go with you to war? You were not there, but other Frenchmen were there who abused us. We will never go again. As for the four canoes, you shall have them if you insist upon it; but it grieves us to think of the hardships you must endure. The Nipissings have weak hearts. They are good for nothing in war, but they kill us with charms, and they poison us. Therefore we are on bad terms with them. They will kill you, too." Such was the pith of Tessouat's discourse, and at each clause the conclave responded in unison with an approving grunt. Champlain urged his petition; sought to relieve their tender scruples in his behalf; assured them that he was charm-proof, and that he feared no hardships. At length he gained his point. The canoes and the men were promised, and, seeing himself as he thought on the highway to his phantom Northern Sea, he left his entertainers to their pipes, and with a light heart issued from the close and smoky den to breathe the fresh air of the afternoon. He visited the Indian fields, with their young crops of pumpkins, beans, and French peas,—the last a novelty obtained from the traders. Here, Thomas, the interpreter, soon joined him with a countenance of ill news. In the absence of Champlain, the assembly had reconsidered their assent. The canoes were denied. With a troubled mind he hastened again to the hall of council, and addressed the naked senate in terms better suited to his exigencies than to their dignity: "I thought you were men; I thought you would hold fast to your word: but I find you children, without truth. You call yourselves my friends, yet you break faith with me. Still I would not incommode you; and if you cannot give me four canoes, two will Serve." The burden of the reply was, rapids, rocks, cataracts, and the wickedness of the Nipissings. "We will not give you the canoes, because we are afraid of losing you," they said. "This young man," rejoined Champlain, pointing to Vignau, who sat by his side, "has been to their country, and did not find the road or the people so bad as you have said." "Nicolas," demanded Tessouat, "did you say that you had been to the Nipissings?" The impostor sat mute for a time, and then replied, "Yes, I have been there." Hereupon an outcry broke from the assembly, and they turned their eyes on him askance, "as if," says Champlain, "they would have torn and eaten him." "You are a liar," returned the unceremonious host; "you know very well that you slept here among my children every night, and got up again every morning; and if you ever went to the Nipissings, it must have been when you were asleep. How can you be so impudent as to lie to your chief, and so wicked as to risk his life among so many dangers? He ought to kill you with tortures worse than those with which we kill our enemies." Champlain urged him to reply, but he sat motionless and dumb. Then he led him from the cabin, and conjured him to declare if in truth he had seen this sea of the north. Vignan, with oaths, affirmed that all he had said was true. Returning to the council, Champlain repeated the impostor's story—how he had seen the sea, the wreck of an English ship, the heads of eighty Englishmen, and an English boy, prisoner among the Indians. At this, an outcry rose louder than before, and the Indians turned in ire upon Vignan. "You are a liar." "Which way did you go?" "By what rivers?" "By what lakes?" "Who went with you?" Vignan had made a map of his travels, which Champlain now produced, desiring him to explain it to his questioners; but his assurance failed him, and he could not utter a word. Champlain was greatly agitated. His heart was in the enterprise, his reputation was in a measure at stake; and now, when he thought his triumph so near, he shrank from believing himself the sport of an impudent impostor. The council broke up,—the Indians displeased and moody, and he, on his part, full of anxieties and doubts. "I called Vignau to me in presence of his companions," he says. "I told him that the time for deceiving me was ended; that he must tell me whether or not he had really seen the things he had told of; that I had forgotten the past, but that, if he continued to mislead me, I would have him hanged without mercy." Vignau pondered for a moment; then fell on his knees, owned his treachery, and begged forgiveness. Champlain broke into a rage, and, unable, as he says, to endure the sight of him, ordered him from his presence, and sent the interpreter after him to make further examination. Vanity, the love of notoriety, and the hope of reward, seem to have been his inducements; for he had in fact spent a quiet winter in Tessonat's cabin, his nearest approach to the northern sea; and he had flattered himself that he might escape the necessity of guiding his commander to this pretended discovery. The Indians were somewhat exultant. "Why did you not listen to chiefs and warriors, instead of believing the lies of this fellow?" And they counselled Champlain to have him killed at once, adding, "Give him to us, and we promise you that he shall never lie again." No motive remaining for farther advance, the party set out on their return, attended by a fleet of forty canoes bound to Montreal for trade. They passed the perilous rapids of the Calumet, and were one night encamped on an island, when an Indian, slumbering in an uneasy posture, was visited with a nightmare. He leaped up with a yell, screamed, that somebody was killing him, and ran for refuge into the river. Instantly all his companions sprang to their feet, and, hearing in fancy the Iroquois war-whoop, took to the water, splashing, diving, and wading up to their necks, in the blindness of their fright. Champlain and his Frenchmen, roused at the noise, snatched their weapons and looked in vain for an enemy. The panic-stricken warriors, reassured at length, waded crestfallen ashore, and the whole ended in a laugh. At the Chaudiere, a contribution of tobacco was collected on a wooden platter, and, after a solemn harangue, was thrown to the guardian Manitou. On the seventeenth of June they approached Montreal, where the assembled traders greeted them with discharges of small arms and cannon. Here, among the rest, was Champlain's lieutenant, Du Parc, with his men, who had amused their leisure with hunting, and were revelling in a sylvan abundance, while their baffled chief, with worry of mind, fatigue of body, and a Lenten diet of half-cooked fish, was grievously fallen away in flesh and strength. He kept his word with DeVignau, left the scoundrel unpunished, bade farewell to the Indians, and, promising to rejoin then the next year, embarked in one of the trading-ships for France. CHAPTER XIII. 1615. DISCOVERY OF LAKE HURON. In New France, spiritual and temporal interests were inseparably blended, and, as will hereafter appear, the conversion of the Indians was used as a means of commercial and political growth. But, with the single-hearted founder of the colony, considerations of material advantage, though clearly recognized, were no less clearly subordinate. He would fain rescue from perdition a people living, as he says, "like brute beasts, without faith, without law, without religion, without God." While the want of funds and the indifference of his merchant associates, who as yet did not fully see that their trade would find in the missions its surest ally, were threatening to wreck his benevolent schemes, he found a kindred spirit in his friend Houd, secretary to the King, and comptroller-general of the salt-works of Bronage. Near this town was a convent of Recollet friars, some of whom were well known to Houel. To them he addressed himself; and several of the brotherhood, "inflamed," we are told, "with charity," were eager to undertake the mission. But the Recollets, mendicants by profession, were as weak in resources as Champlain himself. He repaired to Paris, then filled with bishops, cardinals, and nobles, assembled for the States-General. Responding to his appeal, they subscribed fifteen hundred livres for the purchase of vestments, candles, and ornaments for altars. The King gave letters patent in favor of the mission, and the Pope gave it his formal authorization. By this instrument the papacy in the person of Paul the Fifth virtually repudiated the action of the papacy in the person of Alexander the Sixth, who had proclaimed all America the exclusive property of Spain. The Recollets form a branch of the great Franciscan Order, founded early in the thirteenth century by Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint, hero, or madman, according to the point of view from which he is regarded, he belonged to an era of the Church when the tumult of invading heresies awakened in her defence a band of impassioned champions, widely different from the placid saints of an earlier age. He was very young when dreams and voices began to reveal to him his vocation, and kindle his high-wrought nature to sevenfold heat. Self-respect, natural affection, decency, became in his eyes but stumbling-blocks and snares. He robbed his father to build a church; and, like so many of the Roman Catholic saints, confounded filth with humility, exchanged clothes with beggars, and walked the streets of Assisi in rags amid the hootings of his townsmen. He vowed perpetual poverty and perpetual beggary, and, in token of his renunciation of the world, stripped himself naked before the Bishop of Assisi, and then begged of him in charity a peasant's mantle. Crowds gathered to his fervid and dramatic eloquence. His handful of disciples multiplied, till Europe became thickly dotted with their convents. At the end of the eighteenth century, the three Orders of Saint Francis numbered a hundred and fifteen thousand friars and twenty-eight thousand nuns. Four popes, forty-five cardinals, and forty-six canonized martyrs were enrolled on their record, besides about two thousand more who had shed their blood for the faith. Their missions embraced nearly all the known world; and, in 1621, there were in Spanish America alone five hundred Franciscan convents. In process of time the Franciscans had relaxed their ancient rigor; but much of their pristine spirit still subsisted in the Recollets, a reformed branch of the Order, sometimes known as Franciscans of the Strict Observance. Four of their number were named for the mission of New France,—Denis Jamay, Jean Dolbean, Joseph le Caron, and the lay brother Pacifique du Plessis. "They packed their church ornaments," says Champlain, "and we, our luggage." All alike confessed their sins, and, embarking at Honfleur, reached Quebec at the end of May, 1615. Great was the perplexity of the Indians as the apostolic mendicants landed beneath the rock. Their garb was a form of that common to the brotherhood of Saint Francis, consisting of a rude garment of coarse gray cloth, girt at the waist with the knotted cord of the Order, and furnished with a peaked hood, to be drawn over the head. Their naked feet were shod with wooden sandals, more than an inch thick. Their first care was to choose a site for their convent, near the fortified dwellings and storehouses built by Champlain. This done, they made an altar, and celebrated the first mass ever said in Canada. Dolbean was the officiating priest; all New France kneeled on the bare earth around him, and cannon from the ship and the ramparts hailed the mystic rite. Then, in imitation of the Apostles, they took counsel together, and assigned to each his province in the vast field of their mission,—to Le Caron the Hurons, and to Dolbean the Montagnais; while Jamay and Du Plessis were to remain for the present near Quebec. Dolbean, full of zeal, set out for his post, and in the next winter tried to follow the roving hordes of Tadoussac to their frozen hunting-grounds. He was not robust, and his eyes were weak. Lodged in a hut of birch bark, full of abominations, dogs, fleas, stench, and all uncleanness, he succumbed at length to the smoke, which had wellnigh blinded him, forcing him to remain for several days with his eyes closed. After debating within himself whether God required of him the sacrifice of his sight, he solved his doubts with a negative, and returned to Quebec, only to depart again with opening spring on a tour so extensive that it brought him in contact with outlying bands of the Esquimaux. Meanwhile Le Caron had long been absent on a more noteworthy mission. While his brethren were building their convent and garnishing their altar at Quebec, the ardent friar had hastened to the site of Montreal, then thronged with a savage concourse come down for the yearly trade. he mingled with them, studied their manners, tried to learn their languages, and, when Champlain and Pontgrave arrived, declared his purpose of wintering in their villages. Dissuasion availed nothing. "What," he demanded, "are privations to him whose life is devoted to perpetual poverty, and who has no ambition but to serve God?" The assembled Indians were more eager for temporal than for spiritual succor, and beset Champlain with clamors for aid against the Iroquois. He and Pontgrave were of one mind. The aid demanded must be given, and that from no motive of the hour, but in pursuance of a deliberate policy. It was evident that the innumerable tribes of New France, otherwise divided, were united in a common fear and hate of these formidable bands, who, in the strength of their fivefold league, spread havoc and desolation through all the surrounding wilds. It was the aim of Champlain, as of his successors, to persuade the threatened and endangered hordes to live at peace with each other, and to form against the common foe a virtual league, of which the French colony would be the heart and the head, and which would continually widen with the widening area of discovery. With French soldiers to fight their battles, French priests to baptize them, and French traders to supply their increasing wants, their dependence would be complete. They would become assured tributaries to the growth of New France. It was a triple alliance of soldier, priest, and trader. The soldier might be a roving knight, and the priest a martyr and a saint; but both alike were subserving the interests of that commerce which formed the only solid basis of the colony. The scheme of English colonization made no account of the Indian tribes. In the scheme of French colonization they were all in all. In one point the plan was fatally defective, since it involved the deadly enmity of a race whose character and whose power were as yet but ill understood,—the fiercest, boldest, most politic, and most ambitious savages to whom the American forest has ever given birth. The chiefs and warriors met in council,—Algonquins of the Ottawa, and Hurons from the borders of the great Fresh-Water Sea. Champlain promised to join them with all the men at his command, while they, on their part, were to muster without delay twenty-five hundred warriors for an inroad into the country of the Iroquois. He descended at once to Quebec for needful preparation; but when, after a short delay, he returned to Montreal, he found, to his chagrin, a solitude. The wild concourse had vanished; nothing remained but the skeleton poles of their huts, the smoke of their fires, and the refuse of their encampments. Impatient at his delay, they had set out for their villages, and with them had gone Father Joseph le Caron. Twelve Frenchmen, well armed, had attended him. Summer was at its height, and as his canoe stole along the bosom of the glassy river, and he gazed about him on the tawny multitude whose fragile craft covered the water like swarms of gliding insects, he thought, perhaps, of his whitewashed cell in the convent of Brouage, of his book, his table, his rosary, and all the narrow routine of that familiar life from which he had awakened to contrasts so startling. That his progress up the Ottawa was far from being an excursion of pleasure is attested by his letters, fragments of which have come down to us. "It would be hard to tell you," he writes to a friend, "how tired I was with paddling all day, with all my strength, among the Indians; wading the rivers a hundred times and more, through the mud and over the sharp rocks that cut my feet; carrying the canoe and luggage through the woods to avoid the rapids and frightful cataracts; and half starved all the while, for we had nothing to eat but a little sagantite, a sort of porridge of water and pounded maize, of which they gave us a very small allowance every morning and night. But I must needs tell you what abundant consolation I found under all my troubles; for when one sees so many infidels needing nothing but a drop of water to make them children of God, one feels an inexpressible ardor to labor for their conversion, and sacrifice to it one's repose and life." Another Recollet, Gabriel Sagard, followed the same route in similar company a few years later, and has left an account of his experience, of which Le Caron's was the counterpart. Sagard reckons from eighty to a hundred waterfalls and rapids in the course of the journey, and the task of avoiding them by pushing through the woods was the harder for him because he saw fit to go barefoot, "in imitation of our seraphic father, Saint Francis." "We often came upon rocks, mudholes, and fallen trees, which we had to scramble over, and sometimes we must force our way with head and hands through dense woods and thickets, without road or path. When the time came, my Indians looked for a good place to pass the night. Some went for dry wood; others for poles to make a shed; others kindled a fire, and hung the kettle to a stick stuck aslant in the ground; and others looked for two flat stones to bruise the Indian corn, of which they make sagamite." This sagamite was an extremely thin porridge; and, though scraps of fish were now and then boiled in it, the friar pined away daily on this weak and scanty fare, which was, moreover, made repulsive to him by the exceeding filthiness of the cookery. Nevertheless, he was forced to disguise his feelings. "One must always keep a smiling, modest, contented face, and now and then sing a hymn, both for his own consolation and to please and edify the savages, who take a singular pleasure in hearing us sing the praises of our God." Among all his trials, none afflicted him so much as the flies and mosquitoes. "If I had not kept my face wrapped in a cloth, I am almost sure they would have blinded me, so pestiferous and poisonous are the bites of these little demons. They make one look like a leper, hideous to the sight. I confess that this is the worst martyrdom I suffered in this country; hunger, thirst, weariness, and fever are nothing to it. These little beasts not only persecute you all day, but at night they get into your eyes and mouth, crawl under your clothes, or stick their long stings through them, and make such a noise that it distracts your attention, and prevents you from saying your prayers." He reckons three or four kinds of them, and adds, that in the Montagnais country there is still another kind, so small that they can hardly be seen, but which "bite like devils' imps." The sportsman who has bivouacked in the woods of Maine will at once recognize the minute tormentors there known as "no-see-'ems." While through tribulations like these Le Caron made his way towards the scene of his apostleship, Champlain was following on his track. With two canoes, ten Indians, Etienne Brule his interpreter, and another Frenchman, he pushed up the Ottawa till he reached the Algonquin villages which had formed the term of his former journeying. He passed the two lakes of the Allumettes; and now, for twenty miles, the river stretched before him, straight as the bee can fly, deep, narrow, and black, between its mountain shores. He passed the rapids of the Joachims and the Caribou, the Rocher Capitamne, and the Deux Rivieres, and reached at length the trihutary waters of the Mattawan. He turned to the left, ascended this little stream forty miles or more, and, crossing a portage track, well trodden, reached the margin of Lake Nipissing. The canoes were launched again, and glided by leafy shores and verdant islands till at length appeared signs of human life and clusters of bark lodges, half hidden in the vastness of the woods. It was the village of an Algonquin band, called the Nipissings,—a race so beset with spirits, infested by demons, and abounding in magicians, that the Jesuits afterwards stigmatized them as "the Sorcerers." In this questionable company Champlain spent two days, feasted on fish, deer, and bears. Then, descending to the outlet of the lake, he steered his canoes westward down the current of French River. Days passed, and no sign of man enlivened the rocky desolation. Hunger was pressing them hard, for the ten gluttonous Indians had devoured already nearly all their provision for the voyage, and they were forced to subsist on the blueberries and wild raspberries that grew abundantly in the meagre soil, when suddenly they encountered a troop of three hundred savages, whom, from their strange and startling mode of wearing their hair, Champlain named the Cheveux Releves. "Not one of our courtiers," he says, "takes so much pains in dressing his locks." Here, however, their care of the toilet ended; for, though tattooed on various parts of the body, painted, and armed with bows, arrows, and shields of bison-hide, they wore no clothing whatever. Savage as was their aspect, they were busied in the pacific task of gathering blueberries for their winter store. Their demeanor was friendly; and from them the voyager learned that the great lake of the Hurons was close at hand. Now, far along the western sky was traced the watery line of that inland ocean, and, first of white men except the Friar Le Caron, Champlain beheld the "Mer Douce," the Fresh-Water Sea of the Hurons. Before him, too far for sight, lay the spirit-haunted Manitonalins, and, southward, spread the vast bosom of the Georgian Bay. For more than a hundred miles, his course was along its eastern shores, among islets countless as the sea-sands,—an archipelago of rocks worn for ages by the wash of waves. He crossed Byng Inlet, Franklin Inlet, Parry Sound, and the wider bay of Matchedash, and seems to have landed at the inlet now called Thunder Bay, at the entrance of the Bay of Matchedash, and a little west of the Harbor of Penetanguishine. An Indian trail led inland, through woods and thickets, across broad meadows, over brooks, and along the skirts of green acclivities. To the eye of Champlain, accustomed to the desolation he had left behind, it seemed a land of beauty and abundance. He reached at last a broad opening in the forest, with fields of maize, pumpkins ripening in the sun, patches of sunflowers, from the seeds of which the Indians made hair-oil, and, in the midst, the Huron town of Otonacha. In all essential points, it resembled that which Cartier, eighty years before, had seen at Montreal,—the same triple palisade of crossed and intersecting trunks, and the same long lodges of bark, each containing several families. Here, within an area of thirty or forty miles, was the seat of one of the most remarkable savage communities on the continent. By the Indian standard, it was a mighty nation; yet the entire Huron population did not exceed that of a third or fourth class American city. To the south and southeast lay other tribes of kindred race and tongue, all stationary, all tillers of the soil, and all in a state of social advancement when compared with the roving bands of Eastern Canada: the Neutral Nation west of the Niagara, and the Eries and Andastes in Western New York and Pennsylvania; while from the Genesee eastward to the Hudson lay the banded tribes of the Iroquois, leading members of this potent family, deadly foes of their kindred, and at last their destroyers. In Champlain the Hurons saw the champion who was to lead them to victory. There was bountiful feasting in his honor in the great lodge at Otonacha; and other welcome, too, was tendered, of which the Hurons were ever liberal, but which, with all courtesy, was declined by the virtuous Champlain. Next, he went to Carmaron, a league distant, and then to Tonagnainchain and Tequenonquihayc; till at length he reached Carhagouha, with its triple palisade thirty-five feet high. Here he found Le Caron. The Indians, eager to do him honor, were building for him a bark lodge in the neighboring forest, fashioned like their own, but much smaller. In it the friar made an altar, garnished with those indispensable decorations which he had brought with him through all the vicissitudes of his painful journeying; and hither, night and day, came a curious multitude to listen to his annunciation of the new doctrine. It was a joyful hour when he saw Champlain approach his hermitage; and the two men embraced like brothers long sundered. The twelfth of August was a day evermore marked with white in the friar's calendar. Arrayed in priestly vestments, he stood before his simple altar; behind him his little band of Christians,—the twelve Frenchmen who had attended him, and the two who had followed Champlain. Here stood their devout and valiant chief, and, at his side, that pioneer of pioneers, Etienne Brule the interpreter. The Host was raised aloft; the worshippers kneeled. Then their rough voices joined in the hymn of praise, Te Deum laudamus; and then a volley of their guns proclaimed the triumph of the faith to the okies, the manitous, and all the brood of anomalous devils who had reigned with undisputed sway in these wild realms of darkness. The brave friar, a true soldier of the Church, had led her forlorn hope into the fastnesses of hell; and now, with contented heart, he might depart in peace, for he had said the first mass in the country of the Hurons. CHAPTER XIV. 1615, 1616. THE GREAT WAR PARTY. The lot of the favored guest of an Indian camp or village is idleness without repose, for he is never left alone, with the repletion of incessant and inevitable feasts. Tired of this inane routine, Champlain, with some of his Frenchmen, set forth on a tour of observation. Journeying at their ease by the Indian trails, they visited, in three days, five palisaded villages. The country delighted them, with its meadows, its deep woods, its pine and cedar thickets, full of hares and partridges, its wild grapes and plums, cherries, crab-apples, nuts, and raspberries. It was the seventeenth of August when they reached the Huron metropolis, Cahiague, in the modern township of Orillia, three leagues west of the river Severn, by which Lake Simcoe pours its waters into the bay of Matchedash. A shrill clamor of rejoicing, the fixed stare of wondering squaws, and the screaming flight of terrified children hailed the arrival of Champlain. By his estimate, the place contained two hundred lodges; but they must have been relatively small, since, had they been of the enormous capacity sometimes found in these structures, Cahiague alone would have held the whole Huron population. Here was the chief rendezvous, and the town swarmed with gathering warriors. There was cheering news; for an allied nation, called Carantonans, probably identical with the Andastes, had promised to join the Hurons in the enemy's country, with five hundred men. Feasts and the war-dance consumed the days, till at length the tardy bands had all arrived; and, shouldering their canoes and scanty baggage, the naked host set forth. At the outlet of Lake Simcoe they all stopped to fish,—their simple substitute for a commissariat. Hence, too, the intrepid Etienne Brule, at his own request, was sent with twelve Indians to hasten forward the five hundred allied warriors,—a dangerous venture, since his course must lie through the borders of the Iroquois. He set out on the eighth of September, and on the morning of the tenth, Champlain, shivering in his blanket, awoke to see the meadows sparkling with an early frost, soon to vanish under the bright autumnal sun. The Huron fleet pursued its course along Lake Simcoe, across the portage to Balsam or Sturgeon Lake, and down the chain of lakes which form the sources of the river Trent. As the long line of canoes moved on its way, no human life was seen, no sign of friend or foe; yet at times, to the fancy of Champlain, the borders of the stream seemed decked with groves and shrubbery by the hands of man, and the walnut trees, laced with grape-vines, seemed decorations of a pleasure-ground. They stopped and encamped for a deer-hunt. Five hundred Indians, in line, like the skirmishers of an army advancing to battle, drove the game to the end of a woody point; and the canoe-men killed them with spears and arrows as they took to the river. Champlain and his men keenly relished the sport, but paid a heavy price for their pleasure. A Frenchman, firing at a buck, brought down an Indian, and there was need of liberal gifts to console the sufferer and his friends. The canoes now issued from the mouth of the Trent. Like a flock of venturous wild-fowl, they put boldly out upon Lake Ontario, crossed it in safety, and landed within the borders of New York, on or near the point of land west of Hungry Bay. After hiding their light craft in the woods, the warriors took up their swift and wary march, filing in silence between the woods and the lake, for four leagues along the strand. Then they struck inland, threaded the forest, crossed the outlet of Lake Oneida, and after a march of four days, were deep within the limits of the Iroquois. On the ninth of October some of their scouts met a fishing-party of this people, and captured them,—eleven in number, men, women, and children. They were brought to the camp of the exultant Hurons. As a beginning of the jubilation, a chief cut off a finger of one of the women, but desisted from further torturing on the angry protest of Champlain, reserving that pleasure for a more convenient season. On the next day they reached an open space in the forest. The hostile town was close at hand, surrounded by rugged fields with a slovenly and savage cultivation. The young Hurons in advance saw the Iroquois at work among the pumpkins and maize, gathering their rustling harvest. Nothing could restrain the hare-brained and ungoverned crew. They screamed their war-cry and rushed in; but the Iroquois snatched their weapons, killed and wounded five or six of the assailants, and drove back the rest discomfited. Champlain and his Frenchmen were forced to interpose; and the report of their pieces from the border of the woods stopped the pursuing enemy, who withdrew to their defences, bearing with them their dead and wounded. It appears to have been a fortified town of the Onondagas, the central tribe of the Iroquois confederacy, standing, there is some reason to believe, within the limits of Madison County, a few miles south of Lake Oneida. Champlain describes its defensive works as much stronger than those of the Huron villages. They consisted of four concentric rows of palisades, formed of trunks of trees, thirty feet high, set aslant in the earth, and intersecting each other near the top, where they supported a kind of gallery, well defended by shot-proof timber, and furnished with wooden gutters for quenching fire. A pond or lake, which washed one side of the palisade, and was led by sluices within the town, gave an ample supply of water, while the galleries were well provided with magazines of stones. Champlain was greatly exasperated at the desultory and futile procedure of his Huron allies. Against his advice, they now withdrew to the distance of a cannon-shot from the fort, and encamped in the forest, out of sight of the enemy. "I was moved," he says, "to speak to them roughly and harshly enough, in order to incite them to do their duty; for I foresaw that if things went according to their fancy, nothing but harm could come of it, to their loss and ruin. He proceeded, therefore, to instruct them in the art of war." In the morning, aided doubtless by his ten or twelve Frenchmen, they set themselves with alacrity to their prescribed task. A wooden tower was made, high enough to overlook the palisade, and large enough to shelter four or five marksmen. Huge wooden shields, or movable parapets, like the mantelets of the Middle Ages, were also constructed. Four hours sufficed to finish the work, and then the assault began. Two hundred of the strongest warriors dragged the tower forward, and planted it within a pike's length of the palisade. Three arquebusiers mounted to the top, where, themselves well sheltered, they opened a raking fire along the galleries, now thronged with wild and naked defenders. But nothing could restrain the ungovernable Hurons. They abandoned their mantelets, and, deaf to every command, swarmed out like bees upon the open field, leaped, shouted, shrieked their war-cries, and shot off their arrows; while the Iroquois, yelling defiance from their ramparts, sent back a shower of stones and arrows in reply. A Huron, bolder than the rest, ran forward with firebrands to burn the palisade, and others followed with wood to feed the flame. But it was stupidly kindled on the leeward side, without the protecting shields designed to cover it; and torrents of water, poured down from the gutters above, quickly extinguished it. The confusion was redoubled. Champlain strove in vain to restore order. Each warrior was yelling at the top of his throat, and his voice was drowned in the outrageous din. Thinking, as he says, that his head would split with shouting, he gave over the attempt, and busied himself and his men with picking off the Iroquois along their ramparts. The attack lasted three hours, when the assailants fell back to their fortified camp, with seventeen warriors wounded. Champlain, too, had received an arrow in the knee, and another in the leg, which, for the time, disabled him. He was urgent, however, to renew the attack; while the Hurons, crestfallen and disheartened, refused to move from their camp unless the five hundred allies, for some time expected, should appear. They waited five days in vain, beguiling the interval with frequent skirmishes, in which they were always worsted; then began hastily to retreat, carrying their wounded in the centre, while the Iroquois, sallying from their stronghold, showered arrows on their flanks and rear. The wounded, Champlain among the rest, after being packed in baskets made on the spot, were carried each on the back of a strong warrior, "bundled in a heap," says Champlain, "doubled and strapped together after such a fashion that one could move no more than an infant in swaddling-clothes. The pain is extreme, as I can truly say from experience, having been carried several days in this way, since I could not stand, chiefly on account of the arrow-wound I had got in the knee. I never was in such torment in my life, for the pain of the wound was nothing to that of being bound and pinioned on the back of one of our savages. I lost patience, and as soon as I could bear my weight I got out of this prison, or rather out of hell." At length the dismal march was ended. They reached the spot where their canoes were hidden, found them untouched, embarked, and recrossed to the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The Hurons had promised Champlain an escort to Quebec; but as the chiefs had little power, in peace or war, beyond that of persuasion, each warrior found good reasons for refusing to lend his canoe. Champlain, too, had lost prestige. The "man with the iron breast" had proved not inseparably wedded to victory; and though the fault was their own, yet not the less was the lustre of their hero tarnished. There was no alternative. He must winter with the Hurons. The great war party broke into fragments, each band betaking itself to its hunting-ground. A chief named Durantal, or Darontal, offered Champlain the shelter of his lodge, and he was glad to accept it. Meanwhile, Etienne Brule had found cause to rue the hour when he undertook his hazardous mission to the Carantonan allies. Three years passed before Champlain saw him. It was in the summer of 1618, that, reaching the Saut St. Louis, he there found the interpreter, his hands and his swarthy face marked with traces of the ordeal he had passed. Brule then told him his story. He had gone, as already mentioned, with twelve Indians, to hasten the march of the allies, who were to join the Hurons before the hostile town. Crossing Lake Ontario, the party pushed onward with all speed, avoiding trails, threading the thickest forests and darkest swamps, for it was the land of the fierce and watchful Iroquois. They were well advanced on their way when they saw a small party of them crossing a meadow, set upon them, surprised them, killed four, and took two prisoners, whom they led to Carantonan,—a palisaded town with a population of eight hundred warriors, or about four thousand souls. The dwellings and defences were like those of the Hurons, and the town seems to have stood on or near the upper waters of the Susquehanna. They were welcomed with feasts, dances, and an uproar of rejoicing. The five hundred warriors prepared to depart; but, engrossed by the general festivity, they prepared so slowly, that, though the hostile town was but three days distant, they found on reaching it that the besiegers were gone. Brule now returned with them to Carantonan, and, with enterprise worthy of his commander, spent the winter in a tour of exploration. Descending a river, evidently the Susquehanna, he followed it to its junction with the sea, through territories of populous tribes, at war the one with the other. When, in the spring, he returned to Carantonan, five or six of the Indians offered to guide him towards his countrymen. Less fortunate than before, he encountered on the way a band of Iroquois, who, rushing upon the party, scattered them through the woods. Brule ran like the rest. The cries of pursuers and pursued died away in the distance. The forest was silent around him. He was lost in the shady labyrinth. For three or four days he wandered, helpless and famished, till at length he found an Indian foot-path, and, choosing between starvation and the Iroquois, desperately followed it to throw himself on their mercy. He soon saw three Indians in the distance, laden with fish newly caught, and called to them in the Huron tongue, which was radically similar to that of the Iroquois. They stood amazed, then turned to fly; but Brule, gaunt with famine, flung down his weapons in token of friendship. They now drew near, listened to the story of his distress, lighted their pipes, and smoked with him; then guided him to their village, and gave him food. A crowd gathered about him. "Whence do you come? Are you not one of the Frenchmen, the men of iron, who make war on us?" Brule answered that he was of a nation better than the French, and fast friends of the Iroquois. His incredulous captors tied him to a tree, tore out his beard by handfuls, and burned him with fire-brands, while their chief vainly interposed in his behalf. He was a good Catholic, and wore an Agnus Dei at his breast. One of his torturers asked what it was, and thrust out his hand to take it. "If you touch it," exclaimed Brule, "you and all your race will die." The Indian persisted. The day was hot, and one of those thunder-gusts which often succeed the fierce heats of an American midsummer was rising against the sky. Brule pointed to the inky clouds as tokens of the anger of his God. The storm broke, and, as the celestial artillery boomed over their darkening forests, the Iroquois were stricken with a superstitious terror. They all fled from the spot, leaving their victim still bound fast, until the chief who had endeavored to protect him returned, cut the cords, led him to his lodge, and dressed his wounds. Thenceforth there was neither dance nor feast to which Brule was not invited; and when he wished to return to his countrymen, a party of Iroquois guided him four days on his way. He reached the friendly Hurons in safety, and joined them on their yearly descent to meet the French traders at Montreal. Brule's adventures find in some points their counterpart in those of his commander on the winter hunting-grounds of his Huron allies. As we turn the ancient, worm-eaten page which preserves the simple record of his fortunes, a wild and dreary scene rises before the mind,—a chill November air, a murky sky, a cold lake, bare and shivering forests, the earth strewn with crisp brown leaves, and, by the water-side, the bark sheds and smoking camp-fires of a band of Indian hunters. Champlain was of the party. There was ample occupation for his gun, for the morning was vocal with the clamor of wild-fowl, and his evening meal was enlivened by the rueful music of the wolves. It was a lake north or northwest of the site of Kingston. On the borders of a neighboring river, twenty-five of the Indians had been busied ten days in preparing for their annual deer-hunt. They planted posts interlaced with boughs in two straight converging lines, each extending mere than half a mile through forests and swamps. At the angle where they met was made a strong enclosure like a pound. At dawn of day the hunters spread themselves through the woods, and advanced with shouts, clattering of sticks, and howlings like those of wolves, driving the deer before them into the enclosure, where others lay in wait to despatch them with arrows and spears. Champlain was in the woods with the rest, when he saw a bird whose novel appearance excited his attention; and, gun in hand, he went in pursuit. The bird, flitting from tree to tree, lured him deeper and deeper into the forest; then took wing and vanished. The disappointed sportsman tried to retrace his steps. But the day was clouded, and he had left his pocket-compass at the camp. The forest closed around him, trees mingled with trees in endless confusion. Bewildered and lost, he wandered all day, and at night slept fasting at the foot of a tree. Awaking, he wandered on till afternoon, when he reached a pond slumbering in the shadow of the woods. There were water-fowl along its brink, some of which he shot, and for the first time found food to allay his hunger. He kindled a fire, cooked his game, and, exhausted, blanketless, drenched by a cold rain, made his prayer to Heaven, and again lay down to sleep. Another day of blind and weary wandering succeeded, and another night of exhaustion. He had found paths in the wilderness, but they were not made by human feet. Once more roused from his shivering repose, he journeyed on till he heard the tinkling of a little brook, and bethought him of following its guidance, in the hope that it might lead him to the river where the hunters were now encamped. With toilsome steps he followed the infant stream, now lost beneath the decaying masses of fallen trunks or the impervious intricacies of matted "windfalls," now stealing through swampy thickets or gurgling in the shade of rocks, till it entered at length, not into the river, but into a small lake. Circling around the brink, he found the point where the brook ran out and resumed its course. Listening in the dead stillness of the woods, a dull, hoarse sound rose upon his ear. He went forward, listened again, and could plainly hear the plunge of waters. There was light in the forest before him, and, thrusting himself through the entanglement of bushes, he stood on the edge of a meadow. Wild animals were here of various kinds; some skulking in the bordering thickets, some browsing on the dry and matted grass. On his right rolled the river, wide and turbulent, and along its bank he saw the portage path by which the Indians passed the neighboring rapids. He gazed about him. The rocky hills seemed familiar to his eye. A clew was found at last; and, kindling his evening fire, with grateful heart he broke a long fast on the game he had killed. With the break of day he descended at his ease along the bank, and soon descried the smoke of the Indian fires curling in the heavy morning air against the gray borders of the forest. The joy was great on both sides. The Indians had searched for him without ceasing; and from that day forth his host, Durantal, would never let him go into the forest alone. They were thirty-eight days encamped on this nameless river, and killed in that time a hundred and twenty deer. Hard frosts were needful to give them passage over the land of lakes and marshes that lay between them and the Huron towns. Therefore they lay waiting till the fourth of December; when the frost came, bridged the lakes and streams, and made the oozy marsh as firm as granite. Snow followed, powdering the broad wastes with dreary white. Then they broke up their camp, packed their game on sledges or on their shoulders, tied on their snowshoes, and began their march. Champlain could scarcely endure his load, though some of the Indians carried a weight fivefold greater. At night, they heard the cleaving ice uttering its strange groans of torment, and on the morrow there came a thaw. For four days they waded through slush and water up to their knees; then came the shivering northwest wind, and all was hard again. In nineteen days they reached the town of Cahiague, and, lounging around their smoky lodge-fires, the hunters forgot the hardships of the past. For Champlain there was no rest. A double motive urged him,—discovery, and the strengthening of his colony by widening its circle of trade. First, he repaired to Carhagouha; and here he found the friar, in his hermitage, still praying, preaching, making catechisms, and struggling with the manifold difficulties of the Huron tongue. After spending several weeks together, they began their journeyings, and in three days reached the chief village of the Nation of Tobacco, a powerful tribe akin to the Hurons, and soon to be incorporated with them. The travellers visited seven of their towns, and then passed westward to those of the people whom Champlain calls the Cheveax Releves, and whom he commends for neatness and ingenuity no less than he condemns them for the nullity of their summer attire. As the strangers passed from town to town, their arrival was everywhere the signal of festivity. Champlain exchanged pledges of amity with his hosts, and urged them to come down with the Hurons to the yearly trade at Montreal. Spring was now advancing, and, anxious for his colony, he turned homeward, following that long circuit of Lake Huron and the Ottawa which Iroquois hostility made the only practicable route. Scarcely had he reached the Nipissings, and gained from them a pledge to guide him to that delusive northern sea which never ceased to possess his thoughts, when evil news called him back in haste to the Huron towns. A band of those Algonquins who dwelt on the great island in the Ottawa had spent the winter encamped near Cahiague, whose inhabitants made them a present of an Iroquois prisoner, with the friendly intention that they should enjoy the pleasure of torturing him. The Algonquins, on the contrary, fed, clothed, and adopted him. On this, the donors, in a rage, sent a warrior to kill the Iroquois. He stabbed him, accordingly, in the midst of the Algonquin chiefs, who in requital killed the murderer. Here was a casus belli involving most serious issues for the French, since the Algonquins, by their position on the Ottawa, could cut off the Hurons and all their allies from coming down to trade. Already a fight had taken place at Cahiague the principal Algonquin chief had been wounded, and his band forced to purchase safety by a heavy tribute of wampum 33 and a gift of two female prisoners. All eyes turned to Champlain as umpire of the quarrel. The great council-house was filled with Huron and Algonquin cltiefs, smoking with that immobility of feature beneath which their race often hide a more than tiger-like ferocity. The umpire addressed the assembly, enlarged on the folly of falling to blows between themselves when the common enemy stood ready to devour them both, extolled the advantages of the French trade and alliance, and, with zeal not wholly disinterested, urged them to shake hands like brothers. The friendly counsel was accepted, the pipe of peace was smoked, the storm dispelled, and the commerce of New France rescued from a serious peril. Once more Champlain turned homeward, and with him went his Huron host, Durantal. Le Caron had preceded him; and, on the eleventh of July, the fellow-travellers met again in the infant capital of Canada. The Indians had reported that Champlain was dead, and he was welcomed as one risen from the grave. The friars, who were all here, chanted lands in their chapel, with a solemn mass and thanksgiving. To the two travelers, fresh from the hardships of the wilderness, the hospitable board of Quebec, the kindly society of countrymen and friends, the adjacent gardens,—always to Champlain an object of especial interest,—seemed like the comforts and repose of home. The chief Durantal found entertainment worthy of his high estate. The fort, the ship, the armor, the plumes, the cannon, the marvellous architecture of the houses and barracks, the splendors of the chapel, and above all the good cheer outran the boldest excursion of his fancy; and he paddled back at last to his lodge in the woods, bewildered with astonishment and admiration. CHAPTER XV. 1616-1627. HOSTILE SECTS.—RIVAL INTERESTS. At Quebec the signs of growth were faint and few. By the water-side, under the cliff, the so-called "habitation," built in haste eight years before, was already tottering, and Champlain was forced to rebuild it. On the verge of the rock above, where now are seen the buttresses of the demolished castle of St. Louis, he began, in 1620, a fort, behind which were fields and a few buildings. A mile or more distant, by the bank of the St. Charles, where the General Hospital now stands, the Recollets, in the same year, built for themselves a small stone house, with ditches and outworks for defence; and here they began a farm, the stock consisting of several hogs, a pair of asses, a pair of geese, seven pairs of fowls, and four pairs of ducks. The only other agriculturist in the colony was Louis Hebert, who had come to Canada in 1617 with a wife and three children, and who made a house for himself on the rock, at a little distance from Champlain's fort. Besides Quebec, there were the three trading-stations of Montreal, Three Rivers, and Tadoussac, occupied during a part of the year. Of these, Tadoussac was still the most important. Landing here from France in 1617, the Recollet Paul Huet said mass for the first time in a chapel built of branches, while two sailors standing beside him waved green boughs to drive off the mosquitoes. Thither afterward came Brother Gervais Mohier, newly arrived in Canada; and meeting a crowd of Indians in festal attire, he was frightened at first, suspecting that they might be demons. Being invited by them to a feast, and told that he must not decline, he took his place among a party of two hundred, squatted about four large kettles full of fish, bear's meat, pease, and plums, mixed with figs, raisins, and biscuit procured at great cost from the traders, the whole boiled together and well stirred with a canoe-paddle. As the guest did no honor to the portion set before him, his entertainers tried to tempt his appetite with a large lump of bear's fat, a supreme luxury in their eyes. This only increased his embarrassment, and he took a hasty leave, uttering the ejaculation, "ho, ho, ho!" which, as he had been correctly informed, was the proper mode of acknowledgment to the master of the feast. A change had now begun in the life of Champlain. His forest rovings were over. To battle with savages and the elements was more congenial with his nature than to nurse a puny colony into growth and strength; yet to each task he gave himself with the same strong devotion. His difficulties were great. Quebec was half trading-factory, half mission. Its permanent inmates did not exceed fifty or sixty persons,—fur-traders, friars, and two or three wretched families, who had no inducement, and little wish, to labor. The fort is facetiously represented as having two old women for garrison, and a brace of hens for sentinels. All was discord and disorder. Champlain was the nominal commander; but the actual authority was with the merchants, who held, excepting the friars, nearly everybody in their pay. Each was jealous of the other, but all were united in a common jealousy of Champlain. The few families whom they brought over were forbidden to trade with the Indians, and compelled to sell the fruits of their labor to the agents of the company at a low, fixed price, receiving goods in return at an inordinate valuation. Some of the merchants were of Ronen, some of St. Malo; some were Catholics, some were Huguenots. Hence unceasing bickerings. All exercise of the Reformed religion, on land or water, was prohibited within the limits of New France; but the Huguenots set the prohibition at naught, roaring their heretical psalmody with such vigor from their ships in the river that the unhallowed strains polluted the ears of the Indians on shore. The merchants of Rochelle, who had refused to join the company, carried on a bold illicit traffic along the borders of the St. Lawrence, endangering the colony by selling fire-arms to the Indians, eluding pursuit, or, if hard pressed, showing fight; and this was a source of perpetual irritation to the incensed monopolists. The colony could not increase. The company of merchants, though pledged to promote its growth, did what they could to prevent it. They were fur-traders, and the interests of the fur-trade are always opposed to those of settlement and population. They feared, too, and with reason, that their monopoly might be suddenly revoked, like that of De Monts, and they thought only of making profit from it while it lasted. They had no permanent stake in the country; nor had the men in their employ, who formed nearly all the scanty population of Canada. Few, if any, of these had brought wives to the colony, and none of them thought of cultivating the soil. They formed a floating population, kept from starving by yearly supplies from France. Champlain, in his singularly trying position, displayed a mingled zeal and fortitude. He went every year to France, laboring for the interests of the colony. To throw open the trade to all competitors was a measure beyond the wisdom of the times; and he hoped only to bind and regulate the monopoly so as to make it subserve the generous purpose to which he had given himself. The imprisonment of Conde was a source of fresh embarrassment; but the young Duo de Montmorency assumed his place, purchasing from him the profitable lieuteuancy of New France for eleven thousand crowns, and continuing Champlain in command. Champlain had succeeded in binding the company of merchants with new and more stringent engagements; and, in the vain belief that these might not be wholly broken, he began to conceive fresh hopes for the colony. In this faith he embarked with his wife for Quebec in the spring of 1620; and, as the boat drew near the landing, the cannon welcomed her to the rock of her banishment. The buildings were falling to ruin; rain entered on all sides; the courtyard, says Champlain, was as squalid and dilapidated as a grange pillaged by soldiers. Madame de Champlain was still very young. If the Ursuline tradition is to be trusted, the Indians, amazed at her beauty and touched by her gentleness, would have worshipped her as a divinity. Her husband had married her at the age of twelve when, to his horror, he presently discovered that she was infected with the heresies of her father, a disguised Huguenot. He addressed himself at once to her conversion, and his pious efforts were something more than successful. During the four years which she passed in Canada, her zeal, it is true, was chiefly exercised in admonishing Indian squaws and catechising their children; but, on her return to France, nothing would content her but to become a nun. Champlain refused; but, as she was childless, he at length consented to a virtual though not formal separation. After his death she gained her wish, became an Ursuline nun, founded a convent of that order at Meaux, and died with a reputation almost saintly. At Quebec, matters grew from bad to worse. The few emigrants, with no inducement to labor, fell into a lazy apathy, lounging about the trading-houses, gaming, drinking when drink could be had, or roving into the woods on vagabond hunting excursions. The Indians could not be trusted. In the year 1617 they had murdered two men near the end of the Island of Orleans. Frightened at what they had done, and incited perhaps by other causes, the Montagnais and their kindred bands mustered at Three Rivers to the number of eight hundred, resolved to destroy the French. The secret was betrayed; and the childish multitude, naked and famishing, became suppliants to their intended victims for the means of life. The French, themselves at the point of starvation, could give little or nothing. An enemy far more formidable awaited them; and now were seen the fruits of Champlain's intermeddling in Indian wars. In the summer of 1622, the Iroquois descended upon the settlement. A strong party of their warriors hovered about Quebec, but, still fearful of the arquebuse, forbore to attack it, and assailed the Recollet convent on the St. Charles. The prudent friars had fortified themselves. While some prayed in the chapel, the rest, with their Indian converts, manned the walls. The Iroquois respected their palisades and demi-lunes, and withdrew, after burning two Huron prisoners. Yielding at length to reiterated complaints, the Viceroy Montmorency suppressed the company of St. Malo and Rouen, and conferred the trade of New France, burdened with similar conditions destined to be similarly broken, on two Huguenots, William and emery de Caen. The change was a signal for fresh disorders. The enraged monopolists refused to yield. The rival traders filled Quebec with their quarrels; and Champlain, seeing his authority set at naught, was forced to occupy his newly built fort with a band of armed followers. The evil rose to such a pitch that he joined with the Recollets and the better-disposed among the colonists in sending one of the friars to lay their grievances before the King. The dispute was compromised by a temporary union of the two companies, together with a variety of arrets and regulations, suited, it was thought, to restore tranquillity. A new change was at hand. Montmorency, tired of his viceroyalty, which gave him ceaseless annoyance, sold it to his nephew, Henri de Levis, Duc de Ventadour. It was no worldly motive which prompted this young nobleman to assume the burden of fostering the infancy of New France. He had retired from the court, and entered into holy orders. For trade and colonization he cared nothing; the conversion of infidels was his sole care. The Jesuits had the keeping of his conscience, and in his eyes they were the most fitting instruments for his purpose. The Recollets, it is true, had labored with an unflagging devotion. The six friars of their Order—for this was the number which the Calvinist Caen had bound himself to support—had established five distinct missions, extending from Acadia to the borders of Lake Huron; but the field was too vast for their powers. Ostensibly by a spontaneous movement of their own, but in reality, it is probable, under influences brought to bear on them from without, the Recollets applied for the assistance of the Jesuits, who, strong in resources as in energy, would not be compelled to rest on the reluctant support of Huguenots. Three of their brotherhood—Charles Lalemant, Enemond Masse, and Jean de Brebeuf—accordingly embarked; and, fourteen years after Biard and Masse had landed in Acadia, Canada beheld for the first time those whose names stand so prominent in her annals,—the mysterious followers of Loyola. Their reception was most inauspicious. Champlain was absent. Caen would not lodge them in the fort; the traders would not admit them to their houses. Nothing seemed left for them but to return as they came; when a boat, bearing several Recollets, approached the ship to proffer them the hospitalities of the convent on the St. Charles. They accepted the proffer, and became guests of the charitable friars, who nevertheless entertained a lurking jealousy of these formidable co-workers. The Jesuits soon unearthed and publicly burnt a libel against their Order belonging to some of the traders. Their strength was soon increased. The Fathers Noirot and De la Noue landed, with twenty laborers, and the Jesuits were no longer houseless. Brebeuf set forth for the arduous mission of the Hurons; but on arriving at Trois Rivieres he learned that one of his Franciscan predecessors, Nicolas Viel, had recently been drowned by Indians of that tribe, in the rapid behind Montreal, known to this day as the Saut au Recollet. Less ambitious for martyrdom than he afterwards approved himself, he postponed his voyage to a more auspicious season. In the following spring he renewed the attempt, in company with De la Noue and one of the friars. The Indians, however, refused to receive him into their canoes, alleging that his tall and portly frame would overset them; and it was only by dint of many presents that their pretended scruples could be conquered. Brebeuf embarked with his companions, and, after months of toil, reached the barbarous scene of his labors, his sufferings, and his death. Meanwhile the Viceroy had been deeply scandalized by the contumacious heresy of Emery de Caen, who not only assembled his Huguenot sailors at prayers, but forced Catholics to join them. He was ordered thenceforth to prohibit his crews from all praying and psalm-singing on the river St. Lawrence. The crews revolted, and a compromise was made. It was agreed that for the present they might pray, but not sing. "A bad bargain," says the pious Champlain, "but we made the best of it we could." Caen, enraged at the Viceroy's reproofs, lost no opportunity to vent his spleen against the Jesuits, whom he cordially hated. Eighteen years had passed since the founding of Quebec, and still the colony could scarcely be said to exist but in the founder's brain. Those who should have been its support were engrossed by trade or propagandism. Champlain might look back on fruitless toils, hopes deferred, a life spent seemingly in vain. The population of Quebec had risen to a hundred and five persons, men, women, and children. Of these, one or two families only had learned to support themselves from the products of the soil. All withered under the monopoly of the Caens. Champlain had long desired to rebuild the fort, which was weak and ruinous; but the merchants would not grant the men and means which, by their charter, they were bound to furnish. At length, however, his urgency in part prevailed, and the work began to advance. Meanwhile the Caens and their associates had greatly prospered, paying, it is said, an annual dividend of forty per cent. In a single year they brought from Canada twenty-two thousand beaver skins, though the usual number did not exceed twelve or fifteen thousand. While infant Canada was thus struggling into a half-stifled being, the foundation of a commonwealth destined to a marvellous vigor of development had been laid on the Rock of Plymouth. In their character, as in their destiny, the rivals were widely different; yet, at the outset, New England was unfaithful to the principle of freedom. New England Protestantism appealed to Liberty, then closed the door against her; for all Protestantism is an appeal from priestly authority to the right of private judgment, and the New England Puritan, after claiming this right for himself, denied it to all who differed with him. On a stock of freedom he grafted a scion of despotism; yet the vital juices of the root penetrated at last to the uttermost branches, and nourished them to an irrepressible strength and expansion. With New France it was otherwise. She was consistent to the last. Root, stem, and branch, she was the nursling of authority. Deadly absolutism blighted her early and her later growth. Friars and Jesuits, a Ventadour and a Richelieu, shaped her destinies. All that conflicted against advancing liberty—the centralized power of the crown and the tiara, the ultramontane in religion, the despotic in policy—found their fullest expression and most fatal exercise. Her records shine with glorious deeds, the self-devotion of heroes and of martyrs; and the result of all is disorder, imbecility, ruin. The great champion of absolutism, Richelieu, was now supreme in France. His thin frame, pale cheek, and cold, calm eye, concealed an inexorable will and a mind of vast capacity, armed with all the resources of boldness and of craft. Under his potent agency, the royal power, in the weak hands of Louis the Thirteenth, waxed and strengthened daily, triumphing over the factions of the court, the turbulence of the Huguenots, the ambitious independence of the nobles, and all the elements of anarchy which, since the death of Henry the Fourth, had risen into fresh life. With no friends and a thousand enemies, disliked and feared by the pitiful King whom he served, making his tool by turns of every party and of every principle, he advanced by countless crooked paths towards his object,—the greatness of France under a concentrated and undivided authority. In the midst of more urgent cares, he addressed himself to fostering the commercial and naval power. Montmorency then held the ancient charge of Admiral of France. Richelieu bought it, suppressed it, and, in its stead, constituted himself Grand Master and Superintendent of Navigation and Commerce. In this new capacity, the mismanaged affairs of New France were not long concealed from him; and he applied a prompt and powerful remedy. The privileges of the Caens were annulled. A company was formed, to consist of a hundred associates, and to be called the Company of New France. Richelieu himself was the head, and the Marechal Deffiat and other men of rank, besides many merchants and burghers of condition, were members. The whole of New France, from Florida to the Arctic Circle, and from Newfoundland to the sources of the—St. Lawrence and its tributary waters, was conferred on them forever, with the attributes of sovereign power. A perpetual monopoly of the fur-trade was granted them, with a monopoly of all other commerce within the limits of their government for fifteen years. The trade of the colony was declared free, for the same period, from all duties and imposts. Nobles, officers, and ecclesiastics, members of the Company, might engage in commercial pursuits without derogating from the privileges of their order; and, in evidence of his good-will, the King gave them two ships of war, armed and equipped. On their part, the Company were bound to convey to New France during the next year, 1628, two or three hundred men of all trades, and before the year 1643 to increase the number to four thousand persons, of both sexes; to lodge and support them for three years; and, this time expired, to give them cleared lands for their maintenance. Every settler must be a Frenchman and a Catholic; and for every new settlement at least three ecclesiastics must be provided. Thus was New France to be forever free from the taint of heresy. The stain of her infancy was to be wiped away. Against the foreigner and the Huguenot the door was closed and barred. England threw open her colonies to all who wished to enter,—to the suffering and oppressed, the bold, active, and enterprising. France shut out those who wished to come, and admitted only those who did not,—the favored class who clung to the old faith and had no motive or disposition to leave their homes. English colonization obeyed a natural law, and sailed with wind and tide; French colonization spent its whole struggling existence in futile efforts to make head against them. The English colonist developed inherited freedom on a virgin soil; the French colonist was pursued across the Atlantic by a paternal despotism better in intention and more withering in effect than that which he left behind. If, instead of excluding Huguenots, France had given them an asylum in the west, and left them there to work out their own destinies, Canada would never have been a British province, and the United States would have shared their vast domain with a vigorous population of self-governing Frenchmen. A trading company was now feudal proprietor of all domains in North America within the claim of France. Fealty and homage on its part, and on the part of the Crown the appointment of supreme judicial officers, and the confirmation of the titles of dukes, marquises, counts, and barons, were the only reservations. The King heaped favors on the new corporation. Twelve of the bourgeois members were ennobled; while artisans and even manufacturers were tempted, by extraordinary privileges, to emigrate to the New World. The associates, of whom Champlain was one, entered upon their functions with a capital of three hundred thousand livres. CHAPTER XVI. 1628, 1629. THE ENGLISH AT QUEBEC. The first care of the new Company was to succor Quebec, whose inmates were on the verge of starvation. Four armed vessels, with a fleet of transports commanded by Roquemont, one of the associates, sailed from Dieppe with colonists and supplies in April, 1628; but nearly at the same time another squadron, destined also for Quebec, was sailing from an English port. War had at length broken out in France. The Huguenot revolt had come to a head. Rochelle was in arms against the King; and Richelieu, with his royal ward, was beleaguering it with the whole strength of the kingdom. Charles the First of England, urged by the heated passions of Buckingham, had declared himself for the rebels, and sent a fleet to their aid. At home, Charles detested the followers of Calvin as dangerous to his own authority; abroad, he befriended them as dangerous to the authority of a rival. In France, Richelieu crushed Protestantism as a curb to the house of Bourbon; in Germany, he nursed and strengthened it as a curb to the house of Austria. The attempts of Sir William Alexander to colonize Acadia had of late turned attention in England towards the New World; and on the breaking out of the war an expedition was set on foot, under the auspices of that singular personage, to seize on the French possessions in North America. It was a private enterprise, undertaken by London merchants, prominent among whom was Gervase Kirke, an Englishman of Derbyshire, who had long lived at Dieppe, and had there married a Frenchwoman. Gervase Kirke and his associates fitted out three small armed ships, commanded respectively by his sons David, Lewis, and Thomas. Letters of marque were obtained from the King, and the adventurers were authorized to drive out the French from Acadia and Canada. Many Huguenot refugees were among the crews. Having been expelled from New France as settlers, the persecuted sect were returning as enemies. One Captain Michel, who had been in the service of the Caens, "a furious Calvinist," is said to have instigated the attempt, acting, it is affirmed, under the influence of one of his former employers. Meanwhile the famished tenants of Quebec were eagerly waiting the expected succor. Daily they gazed beyond Point Levi and along the channels of Orleans, in the vain hope of seeing the approaching sails. At length, on the ninth of July, two men, worn with struggling through forests and over torrents, crossed the St. Charles and mounted the rock. They were from Cape Tourmente, where Champlain had some time before established an outpost, and they brought news that, according to the report of Indians, six large vessels lay in the harbor of Tadoussac. The friar Le Caron was at Quebec, and, with a brother Recollet, he went in a canoe to gain further intelligence. As the missionary scouts were paddling along the borders of the Island of Orleans, they met two canoes advancing in hot haste, manned by Indians, who with shouts and gestures warned them to turn back. The friars, however, waited till the canoes came up, when they saw a man lying disabled at the bottom of one of them, his moustaches burned by the flash of the musket which had wounded him. He proved to be Foucher, who commanded at Cape Tourmente. On that morning,—such was the story of the fugitives,—twenty men had landed at that post from a small fishing-vessel. Being to all appearance French, they were hospitably received; but no sooner had they entered the houses than they began to pillage and burn all before them, killing the cattle, wounding the commandant, and making several prisoners. The character of the fleet at Tadoussac was now sufficiently clear. Quebec was incapable of defence. Only fifty pounds of gunpowder were left in the magazine; and the fort, owing to the neglect and ill-will of the Caens, was so wretchedly constructed, that, a few days before, two towers of the main building had fallen. Champlain, however, assigned to each man his post, and waited the result. On the next afternoon, a boat was seen issuing from behind the Point of Orleans and hovering hesitatingly about the mouth of the St. Charles. On being challenged, the men on board proved to be Basque fishermen, lately captured by the English, and now sent by Kirke unwilling messengers to Champlain. Climbing the steep pathway to the fort, they delivered their letter,—a summons, couched in terms of great courtesy, to surrender Quebec. There was no hope but in courage. A bold front must supply the lack of batteries and ramparts; and Champlain dismissed the Basques with a reply, in which, with equal courtesy, he expressed his determination to hold his position to the last. All now stood on the watch, hourly expecting the enemy; when, instead of the hostile squadron, a small boat crept into sight, and one Desdames, with ten Frenchmen, landed at the storehouses. He brought stirring news. The French commander, Roquemont, had despatched him to tell Champlain that the ships of the Hundred Associates were ascending the St. Lawrence, with reinforcements and supplies of all kinds. But on his way Desdames had seen an ominous sight,—the English squadron standing under full sail out of Tadoussac, and steering downwards as if to intercept the advancing succor. He had only escaped them by dragging his boat up the beach and hiding it; and scarcely were they out of sight when the booming of cannon told him that the fight was begun. Racked with suspense, the starving tenants of Quebec waited the result; but they waited in vain. No white sail moved athwart the green solitudes of Orleans. Neither friend nor foe appeared; and it was not till long afterward that Indians brought them the tidings that Roquemont's crowded transports had been overpowered, and all the supplies destined to relieve their miseries sunk in the St. Lawrence or seized by the victorious English. Kirke, however, deceived by the bold attitude of Champlain, had been too discreet to attack Quebec, and after his victory employed himself in cruising for French fishing-vessels along the borders of the Gulf. Meanwhile, the suffering at Quebec increased daily. Somewhat less than a hundred men, women, and children were cooped up in the fort, subsisting on a meagre pittance of pease and Indian corn. The garden of the Heberts, the only thrifty settlers, was ransacked for every root or seed that could afford nutriment. Months wore on, and in the spring the distress had risen to such a pitch that Champlain had wellnigh resolved to leave to the women, children, and sick the little food that remained, and with the able-bodied men invade the Iroquois, seize one of their villages, fortify himself in it, and sustain his followers on the buried stores of maize with which the strongholds of these provident savages were always furnished. Seven ounces of pounded pease were now the daily food of each; and, at the end of May, even this failed. Men, women, and children betook themselves to the woods, gathering acorns and grubbing up roots. Those of the plant called Solomon's seal were most in request. Some joined the Hurons or the Algonquins; some wandered towards the Abenakis of Maine; some descended in a boat to Gaspe, trusting to meet a French fishing-vessel. There was scarcely one who would not have hailed the English as deliverers. But the English had sailed home with their booty, and the season was so late that there was little prospect of their return. Forgotten alike by friends and foes, Quebec was on the verge of extinction. On the morning of the nineteenth of July, an Indian, renowned as a fisher of eels, who had built his hut on the St. Charles, hard by the new dwelling of the Jesuits, came, with his usual imperturbability of visage, to Champlain. He had just discovered three ships sailing up the south channel of Orleans. Champlain was alone. All his followers were absent, fishing or searching for roots. At about ten o'clock his servant appeared with four small bags of roots, and the tidings that he had seen the three ships a league off, behind Point Levi. As man after man hastened in, Champlain ordered the starved and ragged band, sixteen in all, to their posts, whence with hungry eyes, they watched the English vessels anchoring in the basin below, and a boat with a white flag moving towards the shore. A young officer landed with a summons to surrender. The terms of capitulation were at length settled. The French were to be conveyed to their own country, and each soldier was allowed to take with him his clothes, and, in addition, a coat of beaver-skin. On this some murmuring rose, several of those who had gone to the Hurons having lately returned with peltry of no small value. Their complaints were vain; and on the twentieth of July, amid the roar of cannon from the ships, Lewis Kirke, the Admiral's brother, landed at the head of his soldiers, and planted the cross of St. George where the followers of Wolfe again planted it a hundred and thirty years later. After inspecting the worthless fort, he repaired to the houses of the Recollets and Jesuits on the St. Charles. He treated the former with great courtesy, but displayed against the latter a violent aversion, expressing his regret that he could not have begun his operations by battering their house about their ears. The inhabitants had no cause to complain of him. He urged the widow and family of the settler Hebert, the patriarch, as he has been styled, of New France, to remain and enjoy the fruits of their industry under English allegiance; and, as beggary in France was the alternative, his offer was accepted. Champlain, bereft of his command, grew restless, and begged to be sent to Tadoussac, where the Admiral, David Kirke, lay with his main squadron, having sent his brothers Lewis and Thomas to seize Quebec. Accordingly, Champlain, with the Jesuits, embarking with Thomas Kirke, descended the river. Off Mal Bay a strange sail was seen. As she approached, she proved to be a French ship, in fact, she was on her way to Quebec with supplies, which, if earlier sent, would have saved the place. She had passed the Admiral's squadron in a fog; but here her good fortune ceased. Thomas Kirke bore down on her, and the cannonade began. The fight was hot and doubtful; but at length the French struck, and Kirke sailed into Tadoussac with his prize. Here lay his brother, the Admiral, with five armed ships. The Admiral's two voyages to Canada were private ventures; and though he had captured nineteen fishing-vessels, besides Roquemont's eighteen transports and other prizes, the result had not answered his hopes. His mood, therefore, was far from benign, especially as he feared, that, owing to the declaration of peace, he would be forced to disgorge a part of his booty; yet, excepting the Jesuits, he treated his captives with courtesy, and often amused himself with shooting larks on shore in company with Champlain. The Huguenots, however, of whom there were many in his ships, showed an exceeding bitterness against the Catholics. Chief among them was Michel, who had instigated and conducted the enterprise, the merchant admiral being but an indifferent seaman. Michel, whose skill was great, held a high command and the title of Rear-Admiral. He was a man of a sensitive temperament, easily piqued on the point of honor. His morbid and irritable nerves were wrought to the pitch of frenzy by the reproaches of treachery and perfidy with which the French prisoners assailed him, while, on the other hand, he was in a state of continual rage at the fancied neglect and contumely of his English associates. He raved against Kirke, who, as he declared, treated him with an insupportable arrogance. "I have left my country," he exclaimed, "for the service of foreigners; and they give me nothing but ingratitude and scorn." His fevered mind, acting on his diseased body, often excited him to transports of fury, in which he cursed indiscriminately the people of St. Malo, against whom he had a grudge, and the Jesuits, whom he detested. On one occasion, Kirke was conversing with some of the latter. "Gentlemen," he said, "your business in Canada was to enjoy what belonged to M. de Caen, whom you dispossessed." "Pardon me, sir," answered Brebeuf, "we came purely for the glory of God, and exposed ourselves to every kind of danger to convert the Indians." Here Michel broke in: "Ay, ay, convert the Indians! You mean, convert the beaver!" "That is false!" retorted Brebeuf. Michel raised his fist, exclaiming, "But for the respect I owe the General, I would strike you for giving me the lie." Brebeuf, a man of powerful frame and vehement passions, nevertheless regained his practised self-command, and replied: "You must excuse me. I did not mean to give you the lie. I should be very sorry to do so. The words I used are those we use in the schools when a doubtful question is advanced, and they mean no offence. Therefore I ask you to pardon me." Despite the apology, Michel's frenzied brain harped the presumed insult, and he raved about it without ceasing. "Bon Dieu!" said Champlain, "you swear well for a Reformer!" "I know it," returned Michel; "I should be content if I had but struck that Jesuit who gave me the lie before my General." At length, one of his transports of rage ended in a lethargy from which he never awoke. His funeral was conducted with a pomp suited to his rank; and, amid discharges of cannon whose dreary roar was echoed from the yawning gulf of the Saguenay, his body was borne to its rest under the rocks of Tadoussac. Good Catholics and good Frenchmen saw in his fate the immediate finger of Providence. "I do not doubt that his soul is in perdition," remarks Champlain, who, however, had endeavored to befriend the unfortunate man during the access of his frenzy. Having finished their carousings, which were profuse, and their trade with the Indians, which was not lucrative, the English steered down the St. Lawrence. Kirke feared greatly a meeting with Razilly, a naval officer of distinction, who was to have sailed from France with a strong force to succor Quebec; but, peace having been proclaimed, the expedition had been limited to two ships under Captain Daniel. Thus Kirke, wilfully ignoring the treaty of peace, was left to pursue his depredations unmolested. Daniel, however, though too weak to cope with him, achieved a signal exploit. On the island of Cape Breton, near the site of Louisburg, he found an English fort, built two months before, under the auspices, doubtless, of Sir William Alexander. Daniel, regarding it as a bold encroachment on French territory, stormed it at the head of his pike-men, entered sword in hand, and took it with all its defenders. Meanwhile, Kirke with his prisoners was crossing the Atlantic. His squadron at length reached Plymouth, whence Champlain set out for London. Here he had an interview with the French ambassador, who, at his instance, gained from the King a promise, that, in pursuance of the terms of the treaty concluded in the previous April, New France should be restored to the French Crown. It long remained a mystery why Charles consented to a stipulation which pledged him to resign so important a conquest. The mystery is explained by the recent discovery of a letter from the King to Sir Isaac Wake, his ambassador at Paris. The promised dowry of Queen Henrietta Maria, amounting to eight hundred thousand crowns, had been but half paid by the French government, and Charles, then at issue with his Parliament, and in desperate need of money, instructs his ambassador, that, when he receives the balance due, and not before, he is to give up to the French both Quebec and Port Royal, which had also been captured by Kirke. The letter was accompanied by "solemn instruments under our hand and seal" to make good the transfer on fulfillment of the condition. It was for a sum equal to about two hundred and forty thousand dollars that Charles entailed on Great Britain and her colonies a century of bloody wars. The Kirkes and their associates, who had made the conquest at their own cost, under the royal authority, were never reimbursed, though David Kirke received the honor of knighthood, which cost the King nothing. CHAPTER XVII. 1632-1635. DEATH OF CHAMPLAIN. On Monday, the fifth of July, 1632, Emery de Caen anchored before Quebec. He was commissioned by the French Crown to reclaim the place from the English; to hold for one year a monopoly of the fur-trade, as an indemnity for his losses in the war; and, when this time had expired, to give place to the Hundred Associates of New France. By the convention of Suza, New France was to be restored to the French Crown; yet it had been matter of debate whether a fulfillment of this engagement was worth the demanding. That wilderness of woods and savages had been ruinous to nearly all connected with it. The Caens, successful at first, had suffered heavily in the end. The Associates were on the verge of bankruptcy. These deserts were useless unless peopled; and to people them would depopulate France. Thus argued the inexperienced reasoners of the time, judging from the wretched precedents of Spanish and Portuguese colonization. The world had not as yet the example of an island kingdom, which, vitalized by a stable and regulated liberty, has peopled a continent and spread colonies over all the earth, gaining constantly new vigor with the matchless growth of its offspring. On the other hand, honor, it was urged, demanded that France should be reinstated in the land which she had discovered and explored. Should she, the centre of civilization, remain cooped up within her own narrow limits, while rivals and enemies were sharing the vast regions of the West? The commerce and fisheries of New France would in time become a school for French sailors. Mines even now might be discovered; arid the fur-trade, well conducted, could not but be a source of wealth. Disbanded soldiers and women from the streets might be shipped to Canada. Thus New France would be peopled and old France purified. A power more potent than reason reinforced such arguments. Richelieu seems to have regarded it as an act of personal encroachment that the subjects of a foreign crown should seize on the domain of a company of which he was the head; and it could not be supposed, that, with power to eject them, the arrogant minister would suffer them to remain in undisturbed possession. A spirit far purer and more generous was active in the same behalf. The character of Champlain belonged rather to the Middle Age than to the seventeenth century. Long toil and endurance had calmed the adventurous enthusiasm of his youth into a steadfast earnestness of purpose; and he gave himself with a loyal zeal and devotedness to the profoundly mistaken principles which he had espoused. In his mind, patriotism and religion were inseparably linked. France was the champion of Christianity, and her honor, her greatness, were involved in her fidelity to this high function. Should she abandon to perdition the darkened nations among whom she had cast the first faint rays of hope? Among the members of the Company were those who shared his zeal; and though its capital was exhausted, and many of the merchants were withdrawing in despair, these enthusiasts formed a subordinate association, raised a new fund, and embarked on the venture afresh. England, then, resigned her prize, and Caen was despatched to reclaim Quebec from the reluctant hands of Thomas Kirke. The latter, obedient to an order from the King of England, struck his flag, embarked his followers, and abandoned the scene of his conquest. Caen landed with the Jesuits, Paul le Jeune and Anne de la Noue. They climbed the steep stairway which led up the rock, and, as they reached the top, the dilapidated fort lay on their left, while farther on was the stone cottage of the Heberts, surrounded with its vegetable gardens,—the only thrifty spot amid a scene of neglect. But few Indians could be seen. True to their native instincts, they had, at first, left the defeated French and welcomed the conquerors. Their English partialities were, however, but short-lived. Their intrusion into houses and store-rooms, the stench of their tobacco, and their importunate begging, though before borne patiently, were rewarded by the newcomers with oaths and sometimes with blows. The Indians soon shunned Quebec, seldom approaching it except when drawn by necessity or a craving for brandy. This was now the case; and several Algonquin families, maddened with drink, were howling, screeching, and fighting within their bark lodges. The women were frenzied like the men, it was dangerous to approach the place unarmed. In the following spring, 1633, on the twenty-third of May, Champlain, commissioned anew by Richelieu, resumed command at Quebec in behalf of the Company. Father le Jeune, Superior of the mission, was wakened from his morning sleep by the boom of the saluting cannon. Before he could sally forth, the convent door was darkened by the stately form of his brother Jesuit, Brebeuf, newly arrived; and the Indians who stood by uttered ejaculations of astonishment at the raptures of their greeting. The father hastened to the fort, and arrived in time to see a file of musketeers and pikemen mounting the pathway of the cliff below, and the heretic Caen resigning the keys of the citadel into the Catholic hands of Champlain. Le Jeune's delight exudes in praises of one not always a theme of Jesuit eulogy, but on whom, in the hope of a continuance of his favors, no praise could now be ill bestowed. "I sometimes think that this great man [Richelieu], who by his admirable wisdom and matchless conduct of affairs is so renowned on earth, is preparing for himself a dazzling crown of glory in heaven by the care he evinces for the conversion of so many lost infidel souls in this savage land. I pray affectionately for him every day," etc. For Champlain, too, he has praises which, if more measured, are at least as sincere. Indeed, the Father Superior had the best reason to be pleased with the temporal head of the colony. In his youth, Champlain had fought on the side of that; more liberal and national form of Romanism of which the Jesuits were the most emphatic antagonists. Now, as Le Jeune tells us, with evident contentment, he chose him, the Jesuit, as director of his conscience. In truth, there were none but Jesuits to confess and absolve him; for the Recollets, prevented, to their deep chagrin, from returning to the missions they had founded, were seen no more in Canada, and the followers of Loyola were sole masters of the field. The manly heart of the commandant, earnest, zealous, and direct, was seldom chary of its confidence, or apt to stand too warily on its guard in presence of a profound art mingled with a no less profound sincerity. A stranger visiting the fort of Quebec would have been astonished at its air of conventual decorum. Black Jesuits and scarfed officers mingled at Champlain's table. There was little conversation, but, in its place, histories and the lives of saints were read aloud, as in a monastic refectory. Prayers, masses, and confessions followed one another with an edifying regularity, 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 was become a mission. Indians gathered thither as of old, not from the baneful lure of brandy, for the traffic in it was no longer tolerated, but from the less pernicious attractions of gifts, kind words, and politic blandishments. To the vital principle of propagandism both the commercial and the military character were subordinated; or, to speak more justly, trade, policy, and military power leaned on the missions as their main support, the grand instrument of their extension. The missions were to explore the interior; the missions were to win over the savage hordes at once to Heaven and to France. Peaceful, benign, beneficent, were the weapons of this conquest. France aimed to subdue, not by the sword, but by the cross; not to overwhelm and crush the nations she invaded, but to convert, civilize, and embrace them among her children. And who were the instruments and the promoters of this proselytism, at once so devout and so politic? Who can answer? Who can trace out the crossing and mingling currents of wisdom and folly, ignorance and knowledge, truth and falsehood, weakness and force, the noble and the base, can analyze a systematized contradiction, and follow through its secret wheels, springs, and levers a phenomenon of moral mechanism? Who can define the Jesuits? The story of their missions is marvellous as a tale of chivalry, or legends of the lives of saints. For many years, it was the history of New France and of the wild communities of her desert empire. Two years passed. The mission of the Hurons was established, and here the indomitable Breheuf, with a band worthy of him, toiled amid miseries and perils as fearful as ever shook the constancy of man; while Champlain at Quebec, in a life uneventful, yet harassing and laborious, was busied in the round of cares which his post involved. Christmas day, 1635, was a dark day in the annals of New France. In a chamber of the fort, breathless and cold, lay the hardy frame which war, the wilderness, and the sea had buffeted so long in vain. After two months and a half of illness, Champlain, stricken with paralysis, at the age of sixty-eight, was dead. His last cares were for his colony and the succor of its suffering families. Jesuits, officers, soldiers, traders, and the few settlers of Quebec followed his remains to the church; Le Jeune pronounced his eulogy, and the feeble community built a tomb to his honor. The colony could ill spare him. For twenty-seven years he had labored hard and ceaselessly for its welfare, sacrificing fortune, repose, and domestic peace to a cause embraced with enthusiasm and pursued with intrepid persistency. His character belonged partly to the past, partly to the present. The preux chevalier, the crusader, the romance-loving explorer, the curious, knowledge-seeking traveler, the practical navigator, all claimed their share in him. His views, though far beyond those of the mean spirits around him, belonged to his age and his creed. He was less statesman than soldier. He leaned to the most direct and boldest policy, and one of his last acts was to petition Richelieu for men and munitions for repressing that standing menace to the colony, the Iroquois. His dauntless courage was matched by an unwearied patience, proved by life-long vexations, and not wholly subdued even by the saintly follies of his wife. He is charged with credulity, from which few of his age were free, and which in all ages has been the foible of earnest and generous natures, too ardent to criticise, and too honorable to doubt the honor of others. Perhaps the heretic might have liked him more if the Jesuit had liked him less. The adventurous explorer of Lake Huron, the bold invader of the Iroquois, befits but indifferently the monastic sobrieties of the fort of Quebec, and his sombre environment of priests. Yet Champlain was no formalist, nor was his an empty zeal. A soldier from his youth, in an age of unbridled license, his life had answered to his maxims; and when a generation had passed after his visit to the Hurons, their elders remembered with astonishment the continence of the great French war-chief. His books mark the man,—all for his theme and his purpose, nothing for himself. Crude in style, full of the superficial errors of carelessness and haste, rarely diffuse, often brief to a fault, they bear on every page the palpable impress of truth. With the life of the faithful soldier closes the opening period of New France. Heroes of another stamp succeed; and it remains to tell the story of their devoted lives, their faults, follies, and virtues. Volume 2 PREFACE. Few passages of history are more striking than those which record the efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians. Full as they are of dramatic and philosophic interest, bearing strongly on the political destinies of America, and closely involved with the history of its native population, it is wonderful that they have been left so long in obscurity. While the infant colonies of England still clung feebly to the shores of the Atlantic, events deeply ominous to their future were in progress, unknown to them, in the very heart of the continent. It will be seen, in the sequel of this volume, that civil and religious liberty found strange allies in this Western World. The sources of information concerning the early Jesuits of New France are very copious. During a period of forty years, the Superior of the Mission vi sent, every summer, long and detailed reports, embodying or accompanied by the reports of his subordinates, to the Provincial of the Order at Paris, where they were annually published, in duodecimo volumes, forming the remarkable series known as the Jesuit Relations. Though the productions of men of scholastic training, they are simple and often crude in style, as might be expected of narratives hastily written in Indian lodges or rude mission-houses in the forest, amid annoyances and interruptions of all kinds. In respect to the value of their contents, they are exceedingly unequal. Modest records of marvellous adventures and sacrifices, and vivid pictures of forest-life, alternate with prolix and monotonous details of the conversion of individual savages, and the praiseworthy deportment of some exemplary neophyte. With regard to the condition and character of the primitive inhabitants of North America, it is impossible to exaggerate their value as an authority. I should add, that the closest examination has left me no doubt that these missionaries wrote in perfect good faith, and that the Relations hold a high place as authentic and trustworthy historical documents. They are very scarce, and no complete collection of them exists in America. The entire series was, however, republished, vii in 1858, by the Canadian government, in three large octavo volumes. [1] [1] Both editions—the old and the new—are cited in the following pages. Where the reference is to the old edition, it is indicated by the name of the publisher (Cramoisy), appended to the citation, in brackets. In extracts given in the notes, the antiquated orthography and accentuation are preserved. These form but a part of the surviving writings of the French-American Jesuits. Many additional reports, memoirs, journals, and letters, official and private, have come down to us; some of which have recently been printed, while others remain in manuscript. Nearly every prominent actor in the scenes to be described has left his own record of events in which he bore part, in the shape of reports to his Superiors or letters to his friends. I have studied and compared these authorities, as well as a great mass of collateral evidence, with more than usual care, striving to secure the greatest possible accuracy of statement, and to reproduce an image of the past with photographic clearness and truth. The introductory chapter of the volume is independent of the rest; but a knowledge of the facts set forth in it is essential to the full understanding of the narrative which follows. In the collection of material, I have received viii valuable aid from Mr. J. G. Shea, Rev. Felix Martin, S.J., the Abbés Laverdière and H. R. Casgrain, Dr. J. C. Taché, and the late Jacques Viger, Esq. I propose to devote the next volume of this series to the discovery and occupation by the French of the Valley of the Mississippi. Boston, 1st May, 1867 INTRODUCTION. NATIVE TRIBES. Divisions ? The Algonquins ? The Hurons ? Their Houses ? Fortifications ? Habits ? Arts ? Women ? Trade ? Festivities ? Medicine ? The Tobacco Nation ? The Neutrals ? The Eries ? The Andastes ? The Iroquois ? Indian Social and Political Organization ? Iroquois Institutions, Customs, and Character ? Indian Religion and Superstitions ? The Indian Mind America, when it became known to Europeans, was, as it had long been, a scene of wide-spread revolution. North and South, tribe was giving place to tribe, language to language; for the Indian, hopelessly unchanging in respect to individual and social development, was, as regarded tribal relations and local haunts, mutable as the wind. In Canada and the northern section of the United States, the elements of change were especially active. The Indian population which, in 1535, Cartier found at Montreal and Quebec, had disappeared at the opening of the next century, and another race had succeeded, in language and customs widely different; while, in the region now forming the State of New York, a power was rising to a ferocious vitality, which, but for the presence of Europeans, would probably have subjected, absorbed, or exterminated every other Indian xx community east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. The vast tract of wilderness from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and from the Carolinas to Hudson's Bay, was divided between two great families of tribes, distinguished by a radical difference of language. A part of Virginia and of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Southeastern New York, New England, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Lower Canada were occupied, so far as occupied at all, by tribes speaking various Algonquin languages and dialects. They extended, moreover, along the shores of the Upper Lakes, and into the dreary Northern wastes beyond. They held Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana, and detached bands ranged the lonely hunting-ground of Kentucky. [1] [1] The word Algonquin is here used in its broadest signification. It was originally applied to a group of tribes north of the River St. Lawrence. The difference of language between the original Algonquins and the Abenaquis of New England, the Ojibwas of the Great Lakes, or the Illinois of the West, corresponded to the difference between French and Italian, or Italian and Spanish. Each of these languages, again, had its dialects, like those of different provinces of France. Like a great island in the midst of the Algonquins lay the country of tribes speaking the generic tongue of the Iroquois. The true Iroquois, or Five Nations, extended through Central New York, from the Hudson to the Genesee. Southward lay the Andastes, on and near the Susquehanna; westward, the Eries, along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and the Neutral Nation, along its northern shore from Niagara towards the Detroit; while the towns of the Hurons lay near the lake to which they have left their name. [2] [2] To the above general statements there was, in the first half of the seventeenth century, but one exception worth notice. A detached branch of the Dahcotah stock, the Winnebago, was established south of Green Bay, on Lake Michigan, in the midst of Algonquins; and small Dahcotah bands had also planted themselves on the eastern side of the Mississippi, nearly in the same latitude. There was another branch of the Iroquois in the Carolinas, consisting of the Tuscaroras and kindred bands. In 1715 they were joined to the Five Nations. xxi Of the Algonquin populations, the densest, despite a recent epidemic which had swept them off by thousands, was in New England. Here were Mohicans, Pequots, Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Massachusetts, Penacooks, thorns in the side of the Puritan. On the whole, these savages were favorable specimens of the Algonquin stock, belonging to that section of it which tilled the soil, and was thus in some measure spared the extremes of misery and degradation to which the wandering hunter tribes were often reduced. They owed much, also, to the bounty of the sea, and hence they tended towards the coast; which, before the epidemic, Champlain and Smith had seen at many points studded with wigwams and waving with harvests of maize. Fear, too, drove them eastward; for the Iroquois pursued them with an inveterate enmity. Some paid yearly tribute to their tyrants, while others were still subject to their inroads, flying in terror at the sound of the Mohawk war-cry. Westward, the population thinned rapidly; northward, it soon disappeared. Northern New Hampshire, the whole of Vermont, and Western Massachusetts had no human tenants but the roving hunter or prowling warrior. We have said that this group of tribes was relatively very populous; yet it is more than doubtful whether all of them united, had union been possible, could have mustered eight thousand fighting men. To speak further of them is needless, for they were not within the scope of the Jesuit labors. The heresy of heresies had planted itself among them; and it was for the apostle Eliot, not the Jesuit, to essay their conversion. [3] [3] These Indians, the Armouchiquois of the old French writers, were in a state of chronic war with the tribes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Champlain, on his voyage of 1603, heard strange accounts of them. The following is literally rendered from the first narrative of that heroic, but credulous explorer. "They are savages of shape altogether monstrous: for their heads are small, their bodies short, and their arms thin as a skeleton, as are also their thighs; but their legs are stout and long, and all of one size, and, when they are seated on their heels, their knees rise more than half a foot above their heads, which seems a thing strange and against Nature. Nevertheless, they are active and bold, and they have the best country on all the coast towards Acadia."—Des Sauvages, f. 34. This story may match that of the great city of Norembega, on the Penobscot, with its population of dwarfs, as related by Jean Alphonse. xxii Landing at Boston, three years before a solitude, let the traveller push northward, pass the River Piscataqua and the Penacooks, and cross the River Saco. Here, a change of dialect would indicate a different tribe, or group of tribes. These were the Abenaquis, found chiefly along the course of the Kennebec and other rivers, on whose banks they raised their rude harvests, and whose streams they ascended to hunt the moose and bear in the forest desert of Northern Maine, or descended to fish in the neighboring sea. [4] [4] The Tarratines of New-England writers were the Abenaquis, or a portion of them. Crossing the Penobscot, one found a visible descent in the scale of humanity. Eastern Maine and the whole of New Brunswick were occupied by a race called Etchemins, to whom agriculture was unknown, though the sea, prolific of fish, lobsters, and seals, greatly lightened their miseries. The Souriquois, or Micmacs, of Nova Scotia, closely resembled them in habits and condition. From Nova Scotia to the St. Lawrence, there was no population worthy of the name. From the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, the southern border of the great river had no tenants but hunters. Northward, between the St. Lawrence and Hudson's Bay, roamed the scattered hordes of the Papinachois, Bersiamites, xxiii and others, included by the French under the general name of Montagnais. When, in spring, the French trading-ships arrived and anchored in the port of Tadoussac, they gathered from far and near, toiling painfully through the desolation of forests, mustering by hundreds at the point of traffic, and setting up their bark wigwams along the strand of that wild harbor. They were of the lowest Algonquin type. Their ordinary sustenance was derived from the chase; though often, goaded by deadly famine, they would subsist on roots, the bark and buds of trees, or the foulest offal; and in extremity, even cannibalism was not rare among them. Ascending the St. Lawrence, it was seldom that the sight of a human form gave relief to the loneliness, until, at Quebec, the roar of Champlain's cannon from the verge of the cliff announced that the savage prologue of the American drama was drawing to a close, and that the civilization of Europe was advancing on the scene. Ascending farther, all was solitude, except at Three Rivers, a noted place of trade, where a few Algonquins of the tribe called Atticamegues might possibly be seen. The fear of the Iroquois was everywhere; and as the voyager passed some wooded point, or thicket-covered island, the whistling of a stone-headed arrow proclaimed, perhaps, the presence of these fierce marauders. At Montreal there was no human life, save during a brief space in early summer, when the shore swarmed with savages, who had come to the yearly trade from the great communities of the interior. To-day there were dances, songs, and feastings; to-morrow all again was solitude, and the Ottawa was covered with the canoes of the returning warriors. Along this stream, a main route of traffic, the silence xxiv of the wilderness was broken only by the splash of the passing paddle. To the north of the river there was indeed a small Algonquin band, called La Petite Nation, together with one or two other feeble communities; but they dwelt far from the banks, through fear of the ubiquitous Iroquois. It was nearly three hundred miles, by the windings of the stream, before one reached that Algonquin tribe, La Nation de l'Isle, who occupied the great island of the Allumettes. Then, after many a day of lonely travel, the voyager found a savage welcome among the Nipissings, on the lake which bears their name; and then circling west and south for a hundred and fifty miles of solitude, he reached for the first time a people speaking a dialect of the Iroquois tongue. Here all was changed. Populous towns, rude fortifications, and an extensive, though barbarous tillage, indicated a people far in advance of the famished wanderers of the Saguenay, or their less abject kindred of New England. These were the Hurons, of whom the modern Wyandots are a remnant. Both in themselves and as a type of their generic stock they demand more than a passing notice. [5] [5] The usual confusion of Indian tribal names prevails in the case of the Hurons. The following are their synonymes:— Hurons (of French origin); Ochateguins (Champlain); Attigouantans (the name of one of their tribes, used by Champlain for the whole nation); Ouendat (their true name, according to Lalemant); Yendat, Wyandot, Guyandot (corruptions of the preceding); Ouaouakecinatouek (Potier), Quatogies (Colden). THE HURONS. More than two centuries have elapsed since the Hurons vanished from their ancient seats, and the settlers of this rude solitude stand perplexed and wondering over the relics of a lost people. In the damp shadow of what xxv seems a virgin forest, the axe and plough bring strange secrets to light: huge pits, close packed with skeletons and disjointed bones, mixed with weapons, copper kettles, beads, and trinkets. Not even the straggling Algonquins, who linger about the scene of Huron prosperity, can tell their origin. Yet, on ancient worm-eaten pages, between covers of begrimed parchment, the daily life of this ruined community, its firesides, its festivals, its funeral rites, are painted with a minute and vivid fidelity. The ancient country of the Hurons is now the northern and eastern portion of Simcoe County, Canada West, and is embraced within the peninsula formed by the Nottawassaga and Matchedash Bays of Lake Huron, the River Severn, and Lake Simcoe. Its area was small,—its population comparatively large. In the year 1639 the Jesuits made an enumeration of all its villages, dwellings, and families. The result showed thirty-two villages and hamlets, with seven hundred dwellings, about four thousand families, and twelve thousand adult persons, or a total population of at least twenty thousand. [6] [6] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1640, 38 (Cramoisy). His words are, "de feux enuiron deux mille, et enuiron douze mille personnes." There were two families to every fire. That by "personnes" adults only are meant cannot be doubted, as the Relations abound in incidental evidence of a total population far exceeding twelve thousand. A Huron family usually numbered from five to eight persons. The number of the Huron towns changed from year to year. Champlain and Le Caron, in 1615, reckoned them at seventeen or eighteen, with a population of about ten thousand, meaning, no doubt, adults. Brébeuf, in 1635, found twenty villages, and, as he thinks, thirty thousand souls. Both Le Mercier and De Quen, as well as Dollier de Casson and the anonymous author of the Relation of 1660, state the population at from thirty to thirty-five thousand. Since the time of Champlain's visit, various kindred tribes or fragments of tribes had been incorporated with the Hurons, thus more than balancing the ravages of a pestilence which had decimated them. The region whose boundaries we have given was an alternation of meadows and deep forests, interlaced with xxvi footpaths leading from town to town. Of these towns, some were fortified, but the greater number were open and defenceless. They were of a construction common to all tribes of Iroquois lineage, and peculiar to them. Nothing similar exists at the present day. [7] They covered a space of from one to ten acres, the dwellings clustering together with little or no pretension to order. In general, these singular structures were about thirty or thirty-five feet in length, breadth, and height; but many were much larger, and a few were of prodigious length. In some of the villages there were dwellings two hundred and forty feet long, though in breadth and height they did not much exceed the others. [8] In shape they were much like an arbor overarching a garden-walk. Their frame was of tall and strong saplings, planted in a double row to form the two sides of the house, bent till they met, and lashed together at the top. To these other poles were bound transversely, and the whole was covered with large sheets of the bark of the oak, elm, spruce, or white cedar, overlapping like the shingles of a roof, upon which, for their better security, split poles were made fast with cords of linden bark. At the crown of the arch, along the entire length of the house, an opening a foot wide was left for the admission of light and the escape of smoke. At each end was a close porch of similar xxvii construction; and here were stowed casks of bark, filled with smoked fish, Indian corn, and other stores not liable to injury from frost. Within, on both sides, were wide scaffolds, four feet from the floor, and extending the entire length of the house, like the seats of a colossal omnibus. [9] These were formed of thick sheets of bark, supported by posts and transverse poles, and covered with mats and skins. Here, in summer, was the sleeping-place of the inmates, and the space beneath served for storage of their firewood. The fires were on the ground, in a line down the middle of the house. Each sufficed for two families, who, in winter, slept closely packed around them. Above, just under the vaulted roof, were a great number of poles, like the perches of a hen-roost, and here were suspended weapons, clothing, skins, and ornaments. Here, too, in harvest time, the squaws hung the ears of unshelled corn, till the rude abode, through all its length, seemed decked with a golden tapestry. In general, however, its only lining was a thick coating of soot from the smoke of fires with neither draught, chimney, nor window. So pungent was the smoke, that it produced inflammation of the eyes, attended in old age with frequent blindness. Another annoyance was the fleas; and a third, the unbridled and unruly children. Privacy there was none. The house was one chamber, sometimes lodging more than twenty families. [10] [7] The permanent bark villages of the Dahcotah of the St. Peter's are the nearest modern approach to the Huron towns. The whole Huron country abounds with evidences of having been occupied by a numerous population. "On a close inspection of the forest," Dr. Taché writes to me, "the greatest part of it seems to have been cleared at former periods, and almost the only places bearing the character of the primitive forest are the low grounds." [8] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 31. Champlain says that he saw them, in 1615, more than thirty fathoms long; while Vanderdonck reports the length, from actual measurement, of an Iroquois house, at a hundred and eighty yards, or five hundred and forty feet! [9] Often, especially among the Iroquois, the internal arrangement was different. The scaffolds or platforms were raised only a foot from the earthen floor, and were only twelve or thirteen feet long, with intervening spaces, where the occupants stored their family provisions and other articles. Five or six feet above was another platform, often occupied by children. One pair of platforms sufficed for a family, and here during summer they slept pellmell, in the clothes they wore by day, and without pillows. [10] One of the best descriptions of the Huron and Iroquois houses is that of Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, 118. See also Champlain (1627), 78; Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 31; Vanderdonck, New Netherlands, in N. Y. Hist. Coll., Second Ser., I. 196; Lafitau, M?urs des Sauvages, II. 10. The account given by Cartier of the houses he saw at Montreal corresponds with the above. He describes them as about fifty yards long. In this case, there were partial partitions for the several families, and a sort of loft above. Many of the Iroquois and Huron houses were of similar construction, the partitions being at the sides only, leaving a wide passage down the middle of the house. Bartram, Observations on a Journey from Pennsylvania to Canada, gives a description and plan of the Iroquois Council-House in 1751, which was of this construction. Indeed, the Iroquois preserved this mode of building, in all essential points, down to a recent period. They usually framed the sides of their houses on rows of upright posts, arched with separate poles for the roof. The Hurons, no doubt, did the same in their larger structures. For a door, there was a sheet of bark hung on wooden hinges, or suspended by cords from above. On the site of Huron towns which were destroyed by fire, the size, shape, and arrangement of the houses can still, in some instances, be traced by remains in the form of charcoal, as well as by the charred bones and fragments of pottery found among the ashes. Dr. Taché, after a zealous and minute examination of the Huron country, extended through five years, writes to me as follows. "From the remains I have found, I can vouch for the scrupulous correctness of our ancient writers. With the aid of their indications and descriptions, I have been able to detect the sites of villages in the midst of the forest, and by time study, in situ, of arch?ological monuments, small as they are, to understand and confirm their many interesting details of the habits, and especially the funeral rites, of these extraordinary tribes." xxviii He who entered on a winter night beheld a strange spectacle: the vista of fires lighting the smoky concave; the bronzed groups encircling each,—cooking, eating, gambling, or amusing themselves with idle badinage; shrivelled squaws, hideous with threescore years of hardship; grisly old warriors, scarred with Iroquois war-clubs; young aspirants, whose honors were yet to be won; damsels gay with ochre and wampum; restless children pellmell with restless dogs. Now a tongue of resinous flame painted each wild feature in vivid light; now the fitful gleam expired, and the group vanished from sight, as their nation has vanished from history. The fortified towns of the Hurons were all on the side xxix exposed to Iroquois incursions. The fortifications of all this family of tribes were, like their dwellings, in essential points alike. A situation was chosen favorable to defence,—the bank of a lake, the crown of a difficult hill, or a high point of land in the fork of confluent rivers. A ditch, several feet deep, was dug around the village, and the earth thrown up on the inside. Trees were then felled by an alternate process of burning and hacking the burnt part with stone hatchets, and by similar means were cut into lengths to form palisades. These were planted on the embankment, in one, two, three, or four concentric rows,—those of each row inclining towards those of the other rows until they intersected. The whole was lined within, to the height of a man, with heavy sheets of bark; and at the top, where the palisades crossed, was a gallery of timber for the defenders, together with wooden gutters, by which streams of water could be poured down on fires kindled by the enemy. Magazines of stones, and rude ladders for mounting the rampart, completed the provision for defence. The forts of the Iroquois were stronger and more elaborate than those of the Hurons; and to this day large districts in New York are marked with frequent remains of their ditches and embankments. [11] [11] There is no mathematical regularity in these works. In their form, the builders were guided merely by the nature of the ground. Frequently a precipice or river sufficed for partial defence, and the line of embankment occurs only on one or two sides. In one instance, distinct traces of a double line of palisades are visible along the embankment. (See Squier, Aboriginal Monuments of New York, 38.) It is probable that the palisade was planted first, and the earth heaped around it. Indeed, this is stated by the Tuscarora Indian, Cusick, in his curious History of the Six Nations (Iroquois). Brébeuf says, that as early as 1636 the Jesuits taught the Hurons to build rectangular palisaded works, with bastions. The Iroquois adopted the same practice at an early period, omitting the ditch and embankment; and it is probable, that, even in their primitive defences, the palisades, where the ground was of a nature to yield easily to their rude implements, were planted simply in holes dug for the purpose. Such seems to have been the Iroquois fortress attacked by Champlain in 1615. The Muscogees, with other Southern tribes, and occasionally the Algonquins, had palisaded towns; but the palisades were usually but a single row, planted upright. The tribes of Virginia occasionally surrounded their dwellings with a triple palisade.—Beverly, History of Virginia, 149. Among these tribes there was no individual ownership of land, but each family had for the time exclusive right xxx to as much as it saw fit to cultivate. The clearing process—a most toilsome one—consisted in hacking off branches, piling them together with brushwood around the foot of the standing trunks, and setting fire to the whole. The squaws, working with their hoes of wood and bone among the charred stumps, sowed their corn, beans, pumpkins, tobacco, sunflowers, and Huron hemp. No manure was used; but, at intervals of from ten to thirty years, when the soil was exhausted, and firewood distant, the village was abandoned and a new one built. There was little game in the Huron country; and here, as among the Iroquois, the staple of food was Indian corn, cooked without salt in a variety of forms, each more odious than the last. Venison was a luxury found only at feasts; dog-flesh was in high esteem; and, in some of the towns captive bears were fattened for festive occasions. These tribes were far less improvident than the roving Algonquins, and stores of provision were laid up against a season of want. Their main stock of corn was buried in caches, or deep holes in the earth, either within or without the houses. In respect to the arts of life, all these stationary tribes were in advance of the wandering hunters of the North. The women made a species of earthen pot for cooking, but these were supplanted by the copper kettles of the French traders. They wove rush mats with no little xxxi skill. They spun twine from hemp, by the primitive process of rolling it on their thighs; and of this twine they made nets. They extracted oil from fish and from the seeds of the sunflower,—the latter, apparently, only for the purposes of the toilet. They pounded their maize in huge mortars of wood, hollowed by alternate burnings and scrapings. Their stone axes, spear and arrow heads, and bone fish-hooks, were fast giving place to the iron of the French; but they had not laid aside their shields of raw bison-hide, or of wood overlaid with plaited and twisted thongs of skin. They still used, too, their primitive breastplates and greaves of twigs interwoven with cordage. [12] The masterpiece of Huron handiwork, however, was the birch canoe, in the construction of which the Algonquins were no less skilful. The Iroquois, in the absence of the birch, were forced to use the bark of the elm, which was greatly inferior both in lightness and strength. Of pipes, than which nothing was more important in their eyes, the Hurons made a great variety, some of baked clay, others of various kinds of stone, carved by the men, during their long periods of monotonous leisure, often with great skill and ingenuity. But their most mysterious fabric was wampum. This was at once their currency, their ornament, their pen, ink, and parchment; and its use was by no means confined to tribes of the Iroquois stock. It consisted of elongated beads, white and purple, made from the inner part of certain shells. It is not easy to conceive how, with their rude implements, the Indians contrived to shape and perforate this intractable material. The art soon fell into disuse, however; for wampum better than their own xxxii was brought them by the traders, besides abundant imitations in glass and porcelain. Strung into necklaces, or wrought into collars, belts, and bracelets, it was the favorite decoration of the Indian girls at festivals and dances. It served also a graver purpose. No compact, no speech, or clause of a speech, to the representative of another nation, had any force, unless confirmed by the delivery of a string or belt of wampum. [13] The belts, on occasions of importance, were wrought into significant devices, suggestive of the substance of the compact or speech, and designed as aids to memory. To one or more old men of the nation was assigned the honorable, but very onerous, charge of keepers of the wampum,—in other words, of the national records; and it was for them to remember and interpret the meaning of the belts. The figures on wampum-belts were, for the most part, simply mnemonic. So also were those carved on wooden tablets, or painted on bark and skin, to preserve in memory the songs of war, hunting, or magic. [14] The Hurons had, however, in common with other tribes, a system of rude pictures and arbitrary signs, by which they could convey to each other, with tolerable precision, information touching the ordinary subjects of Indian interest. [12] Some of the northern tribes of California, at the present day, wear a sort of breastplate "composed of thin parallel battens of very tough wood, woven together with a small cord." [13] Beaver-skins and other valuable furs were sometimes, on such occasions, used as a substitute. [14] Engravings of many specimens of these figured songs are given in the voluminous reports on the condition of the Indians, published by Government, under the editorship of Mr. Schoolcraft. The specimens are chiefly Algonquin. Their dress was chiefly of skins, cured with smoke after the well-known Indian mode. That of the women, according to the Jesuits, was more modest than that "of our most pious ladies of France." The young girls on festal occasions must be excepted from this commendation, as they wore merely a kilt from the waist to the xxxiii knee, besides the wampum decorations of the breast and arms. Their long black hair, gathered behind the neck, was decorated with disks of native copper, or gay pendants made in France, and now occasionally unearthed in numbers from their graves. The men, in summer, were nearly naked,—those of a kindred tribe wholly so, with the sole exception of their moccasins. In winter they were clad in tunics and leggins of skin, and at all seasons, on occasions of ceremony, were wrapped from head to foot in robes of beaver or otter furs, sometimes of the greatest value. On the inner side, these robes were decorated with painted figures and devices, or embroidered with the dyed quills of the Canada hedgehog. In this art of embroidery, however, the Hurons were equalled or surpassed by some of the Algonquin tribes. They wore their hair after a variety of grotesque and startling fashions. With some, it was loose on one side, and tight braided on the other; with others, close shaved, leaving one or more long and cherished locks; while, with others again, it bristled in a ridge across the crown, like the back of a hyena. [15] When in full dress, they were painted with ochre, white clay, soot, and the red juice of certain berries. They practised tattooing, sometimes covering the whole body with indelible devices. [16] When of such extent, the process was very severe; and though no murmur escaped the sufferer, he sometimes died from its effects. [15] See Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 35.—"Quelles hures!" exclaimed some astonished Frenchman. Hence the name, Hurons. [16] Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 72.—Champlain has a picture of a warrior thus tattooed. Female life among the Hurons had no bright side. It was a youth of license, an age of drudgery. Despite an organization which, while it perhaps made them less sensible xxxiv of pain, certainly made them less susceptible of passion, than the higher races of men, the Hurons were notoriously dissolute, far exceeding in this respect the wandering and starving Algonquins. [17] Marriage existed among them, and polygamy was exceptional; but divorce took place at the will or caprice of either party. A practice also prevailed of temporary or experimental marriage, lasting a day, a week, or more. The seal of the compact was merely the acceptance of a gift of wampum made by the suitor to the object of his desire or his whim. These gifts were never returned on the dissolution of the connection; and as an attractive and enterprising damsel might, and often did, make twenty such marriages before her final establishment, she thus collected a wealth xxxv of wampum with which to adorn herself for the village dances. [18] This provisional matrimony was no bar to a license boundless and apparently universal, unattended with loss of reputation on either side. Every instinct of native delicacy quickly vanished under the influence of Huron domestic life; eight or ten families, and often more, crowded into one undivided house, where privacy was impossible, and where strangers were free to enter at all hours of the day or night. [17] Among the Iroquois there were more favorable features in the condition of women. The matrons had often a considerable influence on the decisions of the councils. Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, says that the nation was corrupt in his time, but that this was a degeneracy from their ancient manners. La Potherie and Charlevoix make a similar statement. Megapolensis, however, in 1644, says that they were then exceedingly debauched; and Greenhalgh, in 1677, gives ample evidence of a shameless license. One of their most earnest advocates of the present day admits that the passion of love among them had no other than an animal existence. (Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 322.) There is clear proof that the tribes of the South were equally corrupt. (See Lawson, Carolina, 34, and other early writers.) On the other hand, chastity in women was recognized as a virtue by many tribes. This was peculiarly the case among the Algonquins of Gaspé, where a lapse in this regard was counted a disgrace. (See Le Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, 417, where a contrast is drawn between the modesty of the girls of this region and the open prostitution practised among those of other tribes.) Among the Sioux, adultery on the part of a woman is punished by mutilation. The remarkable forbearance observed by Eastern and Northern tribes towards female captives was probably the result of a superstition. Notwithstanding the prevailing license, the Iroquois and other tribes had among themselves certain conventional rules which excited the admiration of the Jesuit celibates. Some of these had a superstitious origin; others were in accordance with the iron requirements of their savage etiquette. To make the Indian a hero of romance is mere nonsense. [18] "Il s'en trouue telle qui passe ainsi sa ieunesse, qui aura en plus de vingt maris, lesquels vingt maris ne sont pas seuls en la jouyssance de la beste, quelques mariez qu'ils soient: car la nuict venu?, les ieunes femmes courent d'une cabane en une autre, come font les ieunes hommes de leur costé, qui en prennent par ou bon leur semble, toutesfois sans violence aucune, et n'en re?oiuent aucune infamie, ny injure, la coustume du pays estant telle."—Champlain (1627), 90. Compare Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, 176. Both were personal observers. The ceremony, even of the most serious marriage, consisted merely in the bride's bringing a dish of boiled maize to the bridegroom, together with an armful of fuel. There was often a feast of the relatives, or of the whole village. Once a mother, and married with a reasonable permanency, the Huron woman from a wanton became a drudge. In March and April she gathered the year's supply of firewood. Then came sowing, tilling, and harvesting, smoking fish, dressing skins, making cordage and clothing, preparing food. On the march it was she who bore the burden; for, in the words of Champlain, "their women were their mules." The natural effect followed. In every Huron town were shrivelled hags, hideous and despised, who, in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men. To the men fell the task of building the houses, and making weapons, pipes, and canoes. For the rest, their home-life was a life of leisure and amusement. The summer and autumn were their seasons of serious employment,—of xxxvi war, hunting, fishing, and trade. There was an established system of traffic between the Hurons and the Algonquins of the Ottawa and Lake Nipissing: the Hurons exchanging wampum, fishing-nets, and corn for fish and furs. [19] From various relics found in their graves, it may be inferred that they also traded with tribes of the Upper Lakes, as well as with tribes far southward, towards the Gulf of Mexico. Each branch of traffic was the monopoly of the family or clan by whom it was opened. They might, if they could, punish interlopers, by stripping them of all they possessed, unless the latter had succeeded in reaching home with the fruits of their trade,—in which case the outraged monopolists had no further right of redress, and could not attempt it without a breaking of the public peace, and exposure to the authorized vengeance of the other party. [20] Their fisheries, too, were regulated by customs having the force of laws. These pursuits, with their hunting,—in which they were aided by a wolfish breed of dogs unable to bark,—consumed the autumn and early winter; but before the new year the greater part of the men were gathered in their villages. [19] Champlain (1627), 84. [20] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 156 (Cramoisy). Now followed their festal season; for it was the season of idleness for the men, and of leisure for the women. Feasts, gambling, smoking, and dancing filled the vacant hours. Like other Indians, the Hurons were desperate gamblers, staking their all,—ornaments, clothing, canoes, pipes, weapons, and wives. One of their principal games was played with plum-stones, or wooden lozenges, black on one side and white on the other. These were tossed up in a wooden bowl, by striking it sharply upon the ground, and the players betted on the black or white. xxxvii Sometimes a village challenged a neighboring village. The game was played in one of the houses. Strong poles were extended from side to side, and on these sat or perched the company, party facing party, while two players struck the bowl on the ground between. Bets ran high; and Brébeuf relates, that once, in midwinter, with the snow nearly three feet deep, the men of his village returned from a gambling visit, bereft of their leggins, and barefoot, yet in excellent humor. [21] Ludicrous as it may appear, these games were often medical prescriptions, and designed as a cure of the sick. [21] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 113.—This game is still a favorite among the Iroquois, some of whom hold to the belief that they will play it after death in the realms of bliss. In all their important games of chance, they employed charms, incantations, and all the resources of their magical art, to gain good luck. Their feasts and dances were of various character, social, medical, and mystical or religious. Some of their feasts were on a scale of extravagant profusion. A vain or ambitious host threw all his substance into one entertainment, inviting the whole village, and perhaps several neighboring villages also. In the winter of 1635 there was a feast at the village of Contarrea, where thirty kettles were on the fires, and twenty deer and four bears were served up. [22] The invitation was simple. The messenger addressed the desired guest with the concise summons, "Come and eat"; and to refuse was a grave offence. He took his dish and spoon, and repaired to the scene of festivity. Each, as he entered, greeted his host with the guttural ejaculation, Ho! and ranged himself with the rest, squatted on the earthen floor or on the platform along the sides of the house. The kettles were slung over the fires in the midst. First, there was a long prelude of lugubrious singing. Then the host, who xxxviii took no share in the feast, proclaimed in a loud voice the contents of each kettle in turn, and at each announcement the company responded in unison, Ho! The attendant squaws filled with their ladles the bowls of all the guests. There was talking, laughing, jesting, singing, and smoking; and at times the entertainment was protracted through the day. [22] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 111. When the feast had a medical or mystic character, it was indispensable that each guest should devour the whole of the portion given him, however enormous. Should he fail, the host would be outraged, the community shocked, and the spirits roused to vengeance. Disaster would befall the nation,—death, perhaps, the individual. In some cases, the imagined efficacy of the feast was proportioned to the rapidity with which the viands were despatched. Prizes of tobacco were offered to the most rapid feeder; and the spectacle then became truly porcine. [23] These festins à manger tout were much dreaded by many of the Hurons, who, however, were never known to decline them. [23] This superstition was not confined to the Hurons, but extended to many other tribes, including, probably, all the Algonquins, with some of which it holds in full force to this day. A feaster, unable to do his full part, might, if he could, hire another to aid him; otherwise, he must remain in his place till the work was done. Invitation to a dance was no less concise than to a feast. Sometimes a crier proclaimed the approaching festivity through the village. The house was crowded. Old men, old women, and children thronged the platforms, or clung to the poles which supported the sides and roof. Fires were raked out, and the earthen floor cleared. Two chiefs sang at the top of their voices, keeping time to their song with tortoise-shell rattles. [24] xxxix The men danced with great violence and gesticulation; the women, with a much more measured action. The former were nearly divested of clothing,—in mystical dances, sometimes wholly so; and, from a superstitious motive, this was now and then the case with the women. Both, however, were abundantly decorated with paint, oil, beads, wampum, trinkets, and feathers. [24] Sagard gives specimens of their songs. In both dances and feasts there was no little variety. These were sometimes combined. It is impossible, in brief space, to indicate more than their general features. In the famous "war-dance,"—which was frequently danced, as it still is, for amusement,—speeches, exhortations, jests, personal satire, and repartee were commonly introduced as a part of the performance, sometimes by way of patriotic stimulus, sometimes for amusement. The music in this case was the drum and the war-song. Some of the other dances were also interspersed with speeches and sharp witticisms, always taken in good part, though Lafitau says that he has seen the victim so pitilessly bantered that he was forced to hide his head in his blanket. Religious festivals, councils, the entertainment of an envoy, the inauguration of a chief, were all occasions of festivity, in which social pleasure was joined with matter of grave import, and which at times gathered nearly all the nation into one great and harmonious concourse. Warlike expeditions, too, were always preceded by feasting, at which the warriors vaunted the fame of their ancestors, and their own past and prospective exploits. A hideous scene of feasting followed the torture of a prisoner. Like the torture itself, it was, among the Hurons, partly an act of vengeance, and partly a religious rite. If the victim had shown courage, the heart was first roasted, cut into small pieces, and given to the young men and boys, who devoured it to increase their own courage. The body was then divided, thrown into the kettles, and eaten by the assembly, the head being the portion of the chief. Many of the Hurons joined in the feast with reluctance and horror, while others took pleasure in it. [25] This was the only form of cannibalism xl among them, since, unlike the wandering Algonquins, they were rarely under the desperation of extreme famine. [25] "Il y en a qui en mangent auec plaisir."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 121.—Le Mercier gives a description of one of these scenes, at which he was present. (Ibid., 1637, 118.) The same horrible practice prevailed to a greater extent among the Iroquois. One of the most remarkable instances of Indian cannibalism is that furnished by a Western tribe, the Miamis, among whom there was a clan, or family, whose hereditary duty and privilege it was to devour the bodies of prisoners burned to death. The act had somewhat of a religious character, was attended with ceremonial observances, and was restricted to the family in question.—See Hon. Lewis Cass, in the appendix to Colonel Whiting's poem, "Ontwa." A great knowledge of simples for the cure of disease is popularly ascribed to the Indian. Here, however, as elsewhere, his knowledge is in fact scanty. He rarely reasons from cause to effect, or from effect to cause. Disease, in his belief, is the result of sorcery, the agency of spirits or supernatural influences, undefined and indefinable. The Indian doctor was a conjurer, and his remedies were to the last degree preposterous, ridiculous, or revolting. The well-known Indian sweating-bath is the most prominent of the few means of cure based on agencies simply physical; and this, with all the other natural remedies, was applied, not by the professed doctor, but by the sufferer himself, or his friends. [26] [26] The Indians had many simple applications for wounds, said to have been very efficacious; but the purity of their blood, owing to the absence from their diet of condiments and stimulants, as well as to their active habits, aided the remedy. In general, they were remarkably exempt from disease or deformity, though often seriously injured by alternations of hunger and excess. The Hurons sometimes died from the effects of their festins à manger tout. The Indian doctor beat, shook, and pinched his patient, howled, whooped, rattled a tortoise-shell at his ear to expel the evil spirit, bit him till blood flowed, and then displayed in triumph a small piece of wood, bone, or iron, which he had hidden in his mouth, and which he affirmed xli was the source of the disease, now happily removed. [27] Sometimes he prescribed a dance, feast, or game; and the whole village bestirred themselves to fulfil the injunction to the letter. They gambled away their all; they gorged themselves like vultures; they danced or played ball naked among the snow-drifts from morning till night. At a medical feast, some strange or unusual act was commonly enjoined as vital to the patient's cure: as, for example, the departing guest, in place of the customary monosyllable of thanks, was required to greet his host with an ugly grimace. Sometimes, by prescription, half the village would throng into the house where the patient lay, led by old women disguised with the heads and skins of bears, and beating with sticks on sheets of dry bark. Here the assembly danced and whooped for hours together, with a din to which a civilized patient would promptly have succumbed. Sometimes the doctor wrought himself into a prophetic fury, raving through the length and breadth of the dwelling, snatching firebrands and flinging them about him, to the terror of the squaws, with whom, in their combustible tenements, fire was a constant bugbear. [27] The Hurons believed that the chief cause of disease and death was a monstrous serpent, that lived under the earth. By touching a tuft of hair, a feather, or a fragment of bone, with a portion of his flesh or fat, the sorcerer imparted power to it of entering the body of his victim, and gradually killing him. It was an important part of the doctor's function to extract these charms from the vitals of his patient.—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 75. Among the Hurons and kindred tribes, disease was frequently ascribed to some hidden wish ungratified. Hence the patient was overwhelmed with gifts, in the hope, that, in their multiplicity, the desideratum might be supplied. Kettles, skins, awls, pipes, wampum, fish-hooks, weapons, objects of every conceivable variety, were xlii piled before him by a host of charitable contributors; and if, as often happened, a dream, the Indian oracle, had revealed to the sick man the secret of his cure, his demands were never refused, however extravagant, idle, nauseous, or abominable. [28] Hence it is no matter of wonder that sudden illness and sudden cures were frequent among the Hurons. The patient reaped profit, and the doctor both profit and honor. [28] "Dans le pays de nos Hurons, il se faict aussi des assemblées de toutes les filles d'vn bourg auprés d'vne malade, tant à sa priere, suyuant la resuerie ou le songe qu'elle en aura eu?, que par l'ordonnance de Loki (the doctor), pour sa santé et guerison. Les filles ainsi assemblées, on leur demande à toutes, les vnes apres les autres, celuy qu'elles veulent des ieunes hommes du bourg pour dormir auec elles la nuict prochaine: elles en nomment chacune vn, qui sont aussi-tost aduertis par les Maistres de la ceremonie, lesquels viennent tous au soir en la presence de la malade dormir chacun auec celle qui l'a choysi, d'vn bout à l'autre de la Cabane, et passent ainsi toute la nuict, pendant que deux Capitaines aux deux bouts du logis chantent et sonnent de leur Tortu? du soir au lendemain matin, que la ceremonie cesse. Dieu vueille abolir vne si damnable et malheureuse ceremonie."—Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, 158.—This unique mode of cure, which was called Andacwandet, is also described by Lalemant, who saw it. (Relation des Hurons, 1639, 84.) It was one of the recognized remedies. For the medical practices of the Hurons, see also Champlain, Brébeuf, Lafitau, Charlevoix, and other early writers. Those of the Algonquins were in some points different. The doctor often consulted the spirits, to learn the cause and cure of the disease, by a method peculiar to that family of tribes. He shut himself in a small conical lodge, and the spirits here visited him, manifesting their presence by a violent shaking of the whole structure. This superstition will be described in another connection. THE HURON-IROQUOIS FAMILY. And now, before entering upon the very curious subject of Indian social and tribal organization, it may be well briefly to observe the position and prominent distinctive features of the various communities speaking dialects of the generic tongue of the Iroquois. In this remarkable xliii family of tribes occur the fullest developments of Indian character, and the most conspicuous examples of Indian intelligence. If the higher traits popularly ascribed to the race are not to be found here, they are to be found nowhere. A palpable proof of the superiority of this stock is afforded in the size of the Iroquois and Huron brains. In average internal capacity of the cranium, they surpass, with few and doubtful exceptions, all other aborigines of North and South America, not excepting the civilized races of Mexico and Peru. [29] [29] "On comparing five Iroquois heads, I find that they give an average internal capacity of eighty-eight cubic inches, which is within two inches of the Caucasian mean."—Morton, Crania Americana, 195.—It is remarkable that the internal capacity of the skulls of the barbarous American tribes is greater than that of either the Mexicans or the Peruvians. "The difference in volume is chiefly confined to the occipital and basal portions,"—in other words, to the region of the animal propensities; and hence, it is argued, the ferocious, brutal, and uncivilizable character of the wild tribes.—See J. S. Phillips, Admeasurements of Crania of the Principal Groups of Indians in the United States. In the woody valleys of the Blue Mountains, south of the Nottawassaga Bay of Lake Huron, and two days' journey west of the frontier Huron towns, lay the nine villages of the Tobacco Nation, or Tionnontates. [30] In manners, as in language, they closely resembled the Hurons. Of old they were their enemies, but were now at peace with them, and about the year 1640 became their close confederates. Indeed, in the ruin which befell that hapless people, the Tionnontates alone retained a tribal organization; and their descendants, with a trifling exception, are to this day the sole inheritors of the Huron or Wyandot name. Expatriated and wandering, they held for generations a paramount influence among the xliv Western tribes. [31] In their original seats among the Blue Mountains, they offered an example extremely rare among Indians, of a tribe raising a crop for the market; for they traded in tobacco largely with other tribes. Their Huron confederates, keen traders, would not suffer them to pass through their country to traffic with the French, preferring to secure for themselves the advantage of bartering with them in French goods at an enormous profit. [32] [30] Synonymes: Tionnontates, Etionontates, Tuinontatek, Dionondadies, Khionontaterrhonons, Petuneux or Nation du Petun (Tobacco). [31] "L'ame de tous les Conseils."—Charlevoix, Voyage, 199.—In 1763 they were Pontiac's best warriors. [32] On the Tionnontates, see Le Mercier, Relation, 1637, 163; Lalemant, Relation, 1641, 69; Ragueneau, Relation, 1648, 61. An excellent summary of their character and history, by Mr. Shea, will be found in Hist. Mag., V. 262. Journeying southward five days from the Tionnontate towns, the forest traveller reached the border villages of the Attiwandarons, or Neutral Nation. [33] As early as 1626, they were visited by the Franciscan friar, La Roche Dallion, who reports a numerous population in twenty-eight towns, besides many small hamlets. Their country, about forty leagues in extent, embraced wide and fertile districts on the north shore of Lake Erie, and their frontier extended eastward across the Niagara, where they had three or four outlying towns. [34] Their name of Neutrals was due to their neutrality in the war between the Hurons and the Iroquois proper. The hostile warriors, meeting in a Neutral cabin, were forced to keep the peace, though, once in the open air, the truce was at an end. Yet this people were abundantly ferocious, and, while xlv holding a pacific attitude betwixt their warring kindred, waged deadly strife with the Mascoutins, an Algonquin horde beyond Lake Michigan. Indeed, it was but recently that they had been at blows with seventeen Algonquin tribes. [35] They burned female prisoners, a practice unknown to the Hurons. [36] Their country was full of game, and they were bold and active hunters. In form and stature they surpassed even the Hurons, whom they resembled in their mode of life, and from whose language their own, though radically similar, was dialectically distinct. Their licentiousness was even more open and shameless; and they stood alone in the extravagance of some of their usages. They kept their dead in their houses till they became insupportable; then scraped the flesh from the bones, and displayed them in rows along the walls, there to remain till the periodical Feast of the Dead, or general burial. In summer, the men wore no clothing whatever, but were usually tattooed from head to foot with powdered charcoal. [33] Attiwandarons, Attiwendaronk, Atirhagenrenrets, Rhagenratka (Jesuit Relations), Attionidarons (Sagard). They, and not the Eries, were the Kahkwas of Seneca tradition. [34] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1641, 71.—The Niagara was then called the River of the Neutrals, or the Onguiaahra. Lalemant estimates the Neutral population, in 1640, at twelve thousand, in forty villages. [35] Lettre du Père La Roche Dallion, 8 Juillet, 1627, in Le Clerc, établissement de la Foy, I. 346. [36] Women were often burned by the Iroquois: witness the case of Catherine Mercier in 1651, and many cases of Indian women mentioned by the early writers. The sagacious Hurons refused them a passage through their country to the French; and the Neutrals apparently had not sense or reflection enough to take the easy and direct route of Lake Ontario, which was probably open to them, though closed against the Hurons by Iroquois enmity. Thus the former made excellent profit by exchanging French goods at high rates for the valuable furs of the Neutrals. [37] [37] The Hurons became very jealous, when La Roche Dallion visited the Neutrals, lest a direct trade should be opened between the latter and the French, against whom they at once put in circulation a variety of slanders: that they were a people who lived on snakes and venom; that they were furnished with tails; and that French women, though having but one breast, bore six children at a birth. The missionary nearly lost his life in consequence, the Neutrals conceiving the idea that he would infect their country with a pestilence.—La Roche Dallion, in Le Clerc, I. 346. xlvi Southward and eastward of Lake Erie dwelt a kindred people, the Eries, or Nation of the Cat. Little besides their existence is known of them. They seem to have occupied Southwestern New York, as far east as the Genesee, the frontier of the Senecas, and in habits and language to have resembled the Hurons. [38] They were noted warriors, fought with poisoned arrows, and were long a terror to the neighboring Iroquois. [39] [38] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 46. [39] Le Mercier, Relation, 1654, 10.—"Nous les appellons la Nation Chat, à cause qu'il y a dans leur pais vne quantité prodigieuse de Chats sauuages."—Ibid.—The Iroquois are said to have given the same name, Jegosasa, Cat Nation, to the Neutrals.—Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 41. Synonymes: Eriés, Erigas, Eriehronon, Riguehronon. The Jesuits never had a mission among them, though they seem to have been visited by Champlain's adventurous interpreter, étienne Brulé, in the summer of 1615.—They are probably the Carantoüans of Champlain. On the Lower Susquehanna dwelt the formidable tribe called by the French Andastes. Little is known of them, beyond their general resemblance to their kindred, in language, habits, and character. Fierce and resolute warriors, they long made head against the Iroquois of New York, and were vanquished at last more by disease than by the tomahawk. [40] [40] Gallatin erroneously places the Andastes on the Alleghany, Bancroft and others adopting the error. The research of Mr. Shea has shown their identity with the Susquehannocks of the English, and the Minquas of the Dutch.—See Hist. Mag., II. 294. Synonymes: Andastes, Andastracronnons, Andastaeronnons, Andastaguez, Antastoui (French), Susquehannocks (English), Mengwe, Minquas (Dutch), Conestogas, Conessetagoes (English). In Central New York, stretching east and west from the Hudson to the Genesee, lay that redoubted people xlvii who have lent their name to the tribal family of the Iroquois, and stamped it indelibly on the early pages of American history. Among all the barbarous nations of the continent, the Iroquois of New York stand paramount. Elements which among other tribes were crude, confused, and embryotic, were among them systematized and concreted into an established polity. The Iroquois was the Indian of Indians. A thorough savage, yet a finished and developed savage, he is perhaps an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without emerging from his primitive condition of the hunter. A geographical position, commanding on one hand the portal of the Great Lakes, and on the other the sources of the streams flowing both to the Atlantic and the Mississippi, gave the ambitious and aggressive confederates advantages which they perfectly understood, and by which they profited to the utmost. Patient and politic as they were ferocious, they were not only conquerors of their own race, but the powerful allies and the dreaded foes of the French and English colonies, flattered and caressed by both, yet too sagacious to give themselves without reserve to either. Their organization and their history evince their intrinsic superiority. Even their traditionary lore, amid its wild puerilities, shows at times the stamp of an energy and force in striking contrast with the flimsy creations of Algonquin fancy. That the Iroquois, left under their institutions to work out their destiny undisturbed, would ever have developed a civilization of their own, I do not believe. These institutions, however, are sufficiently characteristic and curious, and we shall soon have occasion to observe them. [41] [41] The name Iroquois is French. Charlevoix says: "Il a été formé du terme Hiro, ou Hero, qui signifie J'ai dit, et par lequel ces sauvages finissent tous leur discours, comme les Latins faisoient autrefois par leur Dixi; et de Koué, qui est un cri tant?t de tristesse, lorsqu'on le prononce en tra?nant, et tant?t de joye, quand on le prononce plus court."—Hist. de la N. F., I. 271.—Their true name is Hodenosaunee, or People of the Long House, because their confederacy of five distinct nations, ranged in a line along Central New York, was likened to one of the long bark houses already described, with five fires and five families. The name Agonnonsionni, or Aquanuscioni, ascribed to them by Lafitau and Charlevoix, who translated it "House-Makers," Faiseurs de Cabannes, may be a conversion of the true name with an erroneous rendering. The following are the true names of the five nations severally, with their French and English synonymes. For other synonymes, see "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," 8, note. English French Ganeagaono, Mohawk, Agnier. Onayotekaono, Oneida, Onneyut. Onundagaono, Onondaga, Onnontagué. Gweugwehono, Cayuga, Goyogouin. Nundawaono, Seneca, Tsonnontouans. The Iroquois termination in ono—or onon, as the French write it—simply means people. xlviii SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION. In Indian social organization, a problem at once suggests itself. In these communities, comparatively populous, how could spirits so fierce, and in many respects so ungoverned, live together in peace, without law and without enforced authority? Yet there were towns where savages lived together in thousands with a harmony which civilization might envy. This was in good measure due to peculiarities of Indian character and habits. This intractable race were, in certain external respects, the most pliant and complaisant of mankind. The early missionaries were charmed by the docile acquiescence with which their dogmas were received; but they soon discovered that their facile auditors neither believed nor understood that to which they had so promptly assented. They assented from a kind of courtesy, which, while it vexed the priests, tended greatly to keep the Indians in mutual xlix accord. That well-known self-control, which, originating in a form of pride, covered the savage nature of the man with a veil, opaque, though thin, contributed not a little to the same end. Though vain, arrogant, boastful, and vindictive, the Indian bore abuse and sarcasm with an astonishing patience. Though greedy and grasping, he was lavish without stint, and would give away his all to soothe the manes of a departed relative, gain influence and applause, or ingratiate himself with his neighbors. In his dread of public opinion, he rivalled some of his civilized successors. All Indians, and especially these populous and stationary tribes, had their code of courtesy, whose requirements were rigid and exact; nor might any infringe it without the ban of public censure. Indian nature, inflexible and unmalleable, was peculiarly under the control of custom. Established usage took the place of law,—was, in fact, a sort of common law, with no tribunal to expound or enforce it. In these wild democracies,—democracies in spirit, though not in form,—a respect for native superiority, and a willingness to yield to it, were always conspicuous. All were prompt to aid each other in distress, and a neighborly spirit was often exhibited among them. When a young woman was permanently married, the other women of the village supplied her with firewood for the year, each contributing an armful. When one or more families were without shelter, the men of the village joined in building them a house. In return, the recipients of the favor gave a feast, if they could; if not, their thanks were sufficient. [42] l Among the Iroquois and Hurons—and doubtless among the kindred tribes—there were marked distinctions of noble and base, prosperous and poor; yet, while there was food in the village, the meanest and the poorest need not suffer want. He had but to enter the nearest house, and seat himself by the fire, when, without a word on either side, food was placed before him by the women. [43] [42] The following testimony concerning Indian charity and hospitality is from Ragueneau: "As often as we have seen tribes broken up, towns destroyed, and their people driven to flight, we have seen them, to the number of seven or eight hundred persons, received with open arms by charitable hosts, who gladly gave them aid, and even distributed among them a part of the lands already planted, that they might have the means of living."—Relation, 1650, 28. [43] The Jesuit Brébeuf, than whom no one knew the Hurons better, is very emphatic in praise of their harmony and social spirit. Speaking of one of the four nations of which the Hurons were composed, he says: "Ils ont vne douceur et vne affabilité quasi incroyable pour des Sauuages; ils ne se picquent pas aisément.… Ils se maintiennent dans cette si parfaite intelligence par les frequentes visites, les secours qu'ils se donnent mutuellement dans leurs maladies, par les festins et les alliances.… Ils sont moins en leurs Cabanes que chez leurs amis.… S'ils ont vn bon morceau, ils en font festin à leurs amis, et ne le mangent quasi iamais en leur particulier," etc.—Relation des Hurons, 1636, 118. Contrary to the received opinion, these Indians, like others of their race, when living in communities, were of a very social disposition. Besides their incessant dances and feasts, great and small, they were continually visiting, spending most of their time in their neighbors' houses, chatting, joking, bantering one another with witticisms, sharp, broad, and in no sense delicate, yet always taken in good part. Every village had its adepts in these wordy tournaments, while the shrill laugh of young squaws, untaught to blush, echoed each hardy jest or rough sarcasm. In the organization of the savage communities of the continent, one feature, more or less conspicuous, continually appears. Each nation or tribe—to adopt the names by which these communities are usually known—is subdivided into several clans. These clans are not li locally separate, but are mingled throughout the nation. All the members of each clan are, or are assumed to be, intimately joined in consanguinity. Hence it is held an abomination for two persons of the same clan to intermarry; and hence, again, it follows that every family must contain members of at least two clans. Each clan has its name, as the clan of the Hawk, of the Wolf, or of the Tortoise; and each has for its emblem the figure of the beast, bird, reptile, plant, or other object, from which its name is derived. This emblem, called totem by the Algonquins, is often tattooed on the clansman's body, or rudely painted over the entrance of his lodge. The child belongs to the clan, not of the father, but of the mother. In other words, descent, not of the totem alone, but of all rank, titles, and possessions, is through the female. The son of a chief can never be a chief by hereditary title, though he may become so by force of personal influence or achievement. Neither can he inherit from his father so much as a tobacco-pipe. All possessions alike pass of right to the brothers of the chief, or to the sons of his sisters, since these are all sprung from a common mother. This rule of descent was noticed by Champlain among the Hurons in 1615. That excellent observer refers it to an origin which is doubtless its true one. The child may not be the son of his reputed father, but must be the son of his mother,—a consideration of more than ordinary force in an Indian community. [44] [44] "Les enfans ne succedent iamais aux biens et dignitez de leurs peres, doubtant comme i'ay dit de leur geniteur, mais bien font-ils leurs successeurs et heritiers, les enfans de leurs s?urs, et desquels ils sont asseurez d'estre yssus et sortis."—Champlain (1627), 91. Captain John Smith had observed the same, several years before, among the tribes of Virginia: "For the Crowne, their heyres inherite not, but the first heyres of the Sisters."—True Relation, 43 (ed. Deane). lii This system of clanship, with the rule of descent inseparable from it, was of very wide prevalence. Indeed, it is more than probable that close observation would have detected it in every tribe east of the Mississippi; while there is positive evidence of its existence in by far the greater number. It is found also among the Dahcotah and other tribes west of the Mississippi; and there is reason to believe it universally prevalent as far as the Rocky Mountains, and even beyond them. The fact that with most of these hordes there is little property worth transmission, and that the most influential becomes chief, with little regard to inheritance, has blinded casual observers to the existence of this curious system. It was found in full development among the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and other Southern tribes, including that remarkable people, the Natchez, who, judged by their religious and political institutions, seem a detached offshoot of the Toltec family. It is no less conspicuous among the roving Algonquins of the extreme North, where the number of totems is almost countless. Everywhere it formed the foundation of the polity of all the tribes, where a polity could be said to exist. The Franciscans and Jesuits, close students of the languages and superstitions of the Indians, were by no means so zealous to analyze their organization and government. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Hurons as a nation had ceased to exist, and their political portraiture, as handed down to us, is careless and unfinished. Yet some decisive features are plainly shown. The Huron nation was a confederacy of four distinct contiguous nations, afterwards increased to five by the addition of the Tionnontates;—it was divided into clans;—it was governed by chiefs, whose office was hereditary through the female;—the power of these chiefs, though liii great, was wholly of a persuasive or advisory character;—there were two principal chiefs, one for peace, the other for war;—there were chiefs assigned to special national functions, as the charge of the great Feast of the Dead, the direction of trading voyages to other nations, etc.;—there were numerous other chiefs, equal in rank, but very unequal in influence, since the measure of their influence depended on the measure of their personal ability;—each nation of the confederacy had a separate organization, but at certain periods grand councils of the united nations were held, at which were present, not chiefs only, but also a great concourse of the people; and at these and other councils the chiefs and principal men voted on proposed measures by means of small sticks or reeds, the opinion of the plurality ruling. [45] [45] These facts are gathered here and there from Champlain, Sagard, Bressani, and the Jesuit Relations prior to 1650. Of the Jesuits, Brébeuf is the most full and satisfactory. Lafitau and Charlevoix knew the Huron institutions only through others. The names of the four confederate Huron nations were the Ataronchronons, Attignenonghac, Attignaouentans, and Ahrendarrhonons. There was also a subordinate "nation" called Tohotaenrat, which had but one town. (See the map of the Huron Country.) They all bore the name of some animal or other object: thus the Attignaouentans were the Nation of the Bear. As the clans are usually named after animals, this makes confusion, and may easily lead to error. The Bear Nation was the principal member of the league. THE IROQUOIS. The Iroquois were a people far more conspicuous in history, and their institutions are not yet extinct. In early and recent times, they have been closely studied, and no little light has been cast upon a subject as difficult and obscure as it is curious. By comparing the liv statements of observers, old and new, the character of their singular organization becomes sufficiently clear. [46] [46] Among modern students of Iroquois institutions, a place far in advance of all others is due to Lewis H. Morgan, himself an Iroquois by adoption, and intimate with the race from boyhood. His work, The League of the Iroquois, is a production of most thorough and able research, conducted under peculiar advantages, and with the aid of an efficient co-laborer, Hasanoanda (Ely S. Parker), an educated and highly intelligent Iroquois of the Seneca nation. Though often differing widely from Mr. Morgan's conclusions, I cannot bear a too emphatic testimony to the value of his researches. The Notes on the Iroquois of Mr. H. R. Schoolcraft also contain some interesting facts; but here, as in all Mr. Schoolcraft's productions, the reader must scrupulously reserve his right of private judgment. None of the old writers are so satisfactory as Lafitau. His work, M?urs des Sauvages Ameriquains comparées aux M?urs des Premiers Temps, relates chiefly to the Iroquois and Hurons: the basis for his account of the former being his own observations and those of Father Julien Garnier, who was a missionary among them more than sixty years, from his novitiate to his death. Both reason and tradition point to the conclusion, that the Iroquois formed originally one undivided people. Sundered, like countless other tribes, by dissension, caprice, or the necessities of the hunter life, they separated into five distinct nations, cantoned from east to west along the centre of New York, in the following order: Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas. There was discord among them; wars followed, and they lived in mutual fear, each ensconced in its palisaded villages. At length, says tradition, a celestial being, incarnate on earth, counselled them to compose their strife and unite in a league of defence and aggression. Another personage, wholly mortal, yet wonderfully endowed, a renowned warrior and a mighty magician, stands, with his hair of writhing snakes, grotesquely conspicuous through the dim light of tradition at this birth of Iroquois nationality. This was Atotarho, a chief of the Onondagas; and from this honored source has sprung a lv long line of chieftains, heirs not to the blood alone, but to the name of their great predecessor. A few years since, there lived in Onondaga Hollow a handsome Indian boy on whom the dwindled remnant of the nation looked with pride as their destined Atotarho. With earthly and celestial aid the league was consummated, and through all the land the forests trembled at the name of the Iroquois. The Iroquois people was divided into eight clans. When the original stock was sundered into five parts, each of these clans was also sundered into five parts; and as, by the principle already indicated, the clans were intimately mingled in every village, hamlet, and cabin, each one of the five nations had its portion of each of the eight clans. [47] When the league was formed, these separate portions readily resumed their ancient tie of fraternity. Thus, of the Turtle clan, all the members became brothers again, nominal members of one family, whether Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, or Senecas; and so, too, of the remaining clans. All the Iroquois, irrespective of nationality, were therefore divided into eight families, each tracing its descent to a common mother, and each designated by its distinctive lvi emblem or totem. This connection of clan or family was exceedingly strong, and by it the five nations of the league were linked together as by an eightfold chain. [47] With a view to clearness, the above statement is made categorical. It requires, however, to be qualified. It is not quite certain, that, at the formation of the confederacy, there were eight clans, though there is positive proof of the existence of seven. Neither is it certain, that, at the separation, every clan was represented in every nation. Among the Mohawks and Oneidas there is no positive proof of the existence of more than three clans,—the Wolf, Bear, and Tortoise; though there is presumptive evidence of the existence of several others.—See Morgan, 81, note. The eight clans of the Iroquois were as follows: Wolf, Bear, Beaver, Tortoise, Deer, Snipe, Heron, Hawk. (Morgan, 79.) The clans of the Snipe and the Heron are the same designated in an early French document as La famille du Petit Pluvier and La famille du Grand Pluvier. (New York Colonial Documents, IX. 47.) The anonymous author of this document adds a ninth clan, that of the Potato, meaning the wild Indian potato, Glycine apios. This clan, if it existed, was very inconspicuous, and of little importance. Remarkable analogies exist between Iroquois clanship and that of other tribes. The eight clans of the Iroquois were separated into two divisions, four in each. Originally, marriage was interdicted between all the members of the same division, but in time the interdict was limited to the members of the individual clans. Another tribe, the Choctaws, remote from the Iroquois, and radically different in language, had also eight clans, similarly divided, with a similar interdict of marriage.—Gallatin, Synopsis, 109. The Creeks, according to the account given by their old chief, Sekopechi, to Mr. D. W. Eakins, were divided into nine clans, named in most cases from animals: clanship being transmitted, as usual, through the female. The clans were by no means equal in numbers, influence, or honor. So marked were the distinctions among them, that some of the early writers recognize only the three most conspicuous,—those of the Tortoise, the Bear, and the Wolf. To some of the clans, in each nation, belonged the right of giving a chief to the nation and to the league. Others had the right of giving three, or, in one case, four chiefs; while others could give none. As Indian clanship was but an extension of the family relation, these chiefs were, in a certain sense, hereditary; but the law of inheritance, though binding, was extremely elastic, and capable of stretching to the farthest limits of the clan. The chief was almost invariably succeeded by a near relative, always through the female, as a brother by the same mother, or a nephew by the sister's side. But if these were manifestly unfit, they were passed over, and a chief was chosen at a council of the clan from among remoter kindred. In these cases, the successor is said to have been nominated by the matron of the late chief's household. [48] Be this as it may, the choice was lvii never adverse to the popular inclination. The new chief was "raised up," or installed, by a formal council of the sachems of the league; and on entering upon his office, he dropped his own name, and assumed that which, since the formation of the league, had belonged to this especial chieftainship. [48] Lafitau, I. 471. The number of these principal chiefs, or, as they have been called by way of distinction, sachems, varied in the several nations from eight to fourteen. The sachems of the five nations, fifty in all, assembled in council, formed the government of the confederacy. All met as equals, but a peculiar dignity was ever attached to the Atotarho of the Onondagas. There was a class of subordinate chiefs, in no sense hereditary, but rising to office by address, ability, or valor. Yet the rank was clearly defined, and the new chief installed at a formal council. This class embodied, as might be supposed, the best talent of the nation, and the most prominent warriors and orators of the Iroquois have belonged to it. In its character and functions, however, it was purely civil. Like the sachems, these chiefs held their councils, and exercised an influence proportionate to their number and abilities. There was another council, between which and that of the subordinate chiefs the line of demarcation seems not to have been very definite. The Jesuit Lafitau calls it "the senate." Familiar with the Iroquois at the height of their prosperity, he describes it as the central and controlling power, so far, at least, as the separate nations were concerned. In its character it was essentially popular, but popular in the best sense, and one which can find its application only in a small community. Any man took part in it whose age and experience qualified him to do so. It was merely the gathered wisdom of the nation. lviii Lafitau compares it to the Roman Senate, in the early and rude age of the Republic, and affirms that it loses nothing by the comparison. He thus describes it: "It is a greasy assemblage, sitting sur leur derrière, crouched like apes, their knees as high as their ears, or lying, some on their bellies, some on their backs, each with a pipe in his mouth, discussing affairs of state with as much coolness and gravity as the Spanish Junta or the Grand Council of Venice." [49] [49] Lafitau, I. 478. The young warriors had also their councils; so, too, had the women; and the opinions and wishes of each were represented by means of deputies before the "senate," or council of the old men, as well as before the grand confederate council of the sachems. The government of this unique republic resided wholly in councils. By councils all questions were settled, all regulations established,—social, political, military, and religious. The war-path, the chase, the council-fire,—in these was the life of the Iroquois; and it is hard to say to which of the three he was most devoted. The great council of the fifty sachems formed, as we have seen, the government of the league. Whenever a subject arose before any of the nations, of importance enough to demand its assembling, the sachems of that nation might summon their colleagues by means of runners, bearing messages and belts of wampum. The usual place of meeting was the valley of Onondaga, the political as well as geographical centre of the confederacy. Thither, if the matter were one of deep and general interest, not the sachems alone, but the greater part of the population, gathered from east and west, swarming in the hospitable lodges of the town, or bivouacked by thousands in the surrounding fields and forests. lix While the sachems deliberated in the council-house, the chiefs and old men, the warriors, and often the women, were holding their respective councils apart; and their opinions, laid by their deputies before the council of sachems, were never without influence on its decisions. The utmost order and deliberation reigned in the council, with rigorous adherence to the Indian notions of parliamentary propriety. The conference opened with an address to the spirits, or the chief of all the spirits. There was no heat in debate. No speaker interrupted another. Each gave his opinion in turn, supporting it with what reason or rhetoric he could command,—but not until he had stated the subject of discussion in full, to prove that he understood it, repeating also the arguments, pro and con, of previous speakers. Thus their debates were excessively prolix; and the consumption of tobacco was immoderate. The result, however, was a thorough sifting of the matter in hand; while the practised astuteness of these savage politicians was a marvel to their civilized contemporaries. "It is by a most subtle policy," says Lafitau, "that they have taken the ascendant over the other nations, divided and overcome the most warlike, made themselves a terror to the most remote, and now hold a peaceful neutrality between the French and English, courted and feared by both." [50] [50] Lafitau, I. 480.—Many other French writers speak to the same effect. The following are the words of the soldier historian, La Potherie, after describing the organization of the league: "C'est donc là cette politique qui les unit si bien, à peu près comme tous les ressorts d'une horloge, qui par une liaison admirable de toutes les parties qui les composent, contribuent toutes unanimement au merveilleux effet qui en resulte."—Hist. de l'Amérique Septentrionale, III. 32.—He adds: "Les Fran?ois ont avoüé eux-mêmes qu'ils étoient nez pour la guerre, & quelques maux qu'ils nous ayent faits nous les avons toujours estimez."—Ibid., 2.—La Potherie's book was published in 1722. Unlike the Hurons, they required an entire unanimity lx in their decisions. The ease and frequency with which a requisition seemingly so difficult was fulfilled afford a striking illustration of Indian nature,—on one side, so stubborn, tenacious, and impracticable; on the other, so pliant and acquiescent. An explanation of this harmony is to be found also in an intense spirit of nationality: for never since the days of Sparta were individual life and national life more completely fused into one. The sachems of the league were likewise, as we have seen, sachems of their respective nations; yet they rarely spoke in the councils of the subordinate chiefs and old men, except to present subjects of discussion. [51] Their influence in these councils was, however, great, and even paramount; for they commonly succeeded in securing to their interest some of the most dexterous and influential of the conclave, through whom, while they themselves remained in the background, they managed the debates. [52] [51] Lafitau, I. 479. [52] The following from Lafitau is very characteristic: "Ce que je dis de leur zèle pour le bien public n'est cependant pas si universel, que plusieurs ne pensent à leur interêts particuliers, & que les Chefs (sachems) principalement ne fassent joüer plusieurs ressorts secrets pour venir à bout de leurs intrigues. Il y en a tel, dont l'adresse jou? si bien à coup s?r, qu'il fait déliberer le Conseil plusieurs jours de suite, sur une matière dont la détermination est arrêtée entre lui & les principales têtes avant d'avoir été mise sur le tapis. Cependant comme les Chefs s'entre-regardent, & qu'aucun ne veut paro?tre se donner une superiorité qui puisse piquer la jalousie, ils se ménagent dans les Conseils plus que les autres; & quoiqu'ils en soient l'ame, leur politique les oblige à y parler peu, & à écouter pl?t?t le sentiment d'autrui, qu'à y dire le leur; mais chacun a un homme à sa main, qui est comme une espèce de Br?lot, & qui étant sans consequence pour sa personne hazarde en pleine liberté tout ce qu'il juge à propos, selon qu'il l'a concerté avec le Chef même pour qui il agit."—M?urs des Sauvages, I. 481. There was a class of men among the Iroquois always put forward on public occasions to speak the mind of the nation or defend its interests. Nearly all of them were of the number of the subordinate chiefs. Nature and training lxi had fitted them for public speaking, and they were deeply versed in the history and traditions of the league. They were in fact professed orators, high in honor and influence among the people. To a huge stock of conventional metaphors, the use of which required nothing but practice, they often added an astute intellect, an astonishing memory, and an eloquence which deserved the name. In one particular, the training of these savage politicians was never surpassed. They had no art of writing to record events, or preserve the stipulations of treaties. Memory, therefore, was tasked to the utmost, and developed to an extraordinary degree. They had various devices for aiding it, such as bundles of sticks, and that system of signs, emblems, and rude pictures, which they shared with other tribes. Their famous wampum-belts were so many mnemonic signs, each standing for some act, speech, treaty, or clause of a treaty. These represented the public archives, and were divided among various custodians, each charged with the memory and interpretation of those assigned to him. The meaning of the belts was from time to time expounded in their councils. In conferences with them, nothing more astonished the French, Dutch, and English officials than the precision with which, before replying to their addresses, the Indian orators repeated them point by point. It was only in rare cases that crime among the Iroquois or Hurons was punished by public authority. Murder, the most heinous offence, except witchcraft, recognized among them, was rare. If the slayer and the slain were of the same household or clan, the affair was regarded as a family quarrel, to be settled by the immediate kin on both sides. This, under the pressure of lxii public opinion, was commonly effected without bloodshed, by presents given in atonement. But if the murderer and his victim were of different clans or different nations, still more, if the slain was a foreigner, the whole community became interested to prevent the discord or the war which might arise. All directed their efforts, not to bring the murderer to punishment, but to satisfy the injured parties by a vicarious atonement. [53] To this end, contributions were made and presents collected. Their number and value were determined by established usage. Among the Hurons, thirty presents of very considerable value were the price of a man's life. That of a woman's was fixed at forty, by reason of her weakness, and because on her depended the continuance and increase of the population. This was when the slain belonged to the nation. If of a foreign tribe, his death demanded a higher compensation, since it involved the danger of war. [54] These presents were offered in solemn council, with prescribed formalities. The relatives of the slain might refuse them, if they chose, and in this case the murderer was given them as a slave; but they might by no means kill him, since, in so doing, they would incur public censure, and be compelled in their turn to make atonement. Besides the principal gifts, there was a great number of less value, all symbolical, and each delivered with a set form of words: as, "By this we wash out the blood of the slain: By this we cleanse his wound: By this we clothe his corpse with a new shirt: By this we place food on his grave": and lxiii so, in endless prolixity, through particulars without number. [55] [53] Lalemant, while inveighing against a practice which made the public, and not the criminal, answerable for an offence, admits that heinous crimes were more rare than in France, where the guilty party himself was punished.—Lettre au P. Provincial, 15 May, 1645. [54] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 80. [55] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, gives a description of one of these ceremonies at length. Those of the Iroquois on such occasions were similar. Many other tribes had the same custom, but attended with much less form and ceremony. Compare Perrot, 73-76. The Hurons were notorious thieves; and perhaps the Iroquois were not much better, though the contrary has been asserted. Among both, the robbed was permitted not only to retake his property by force, if he could, but to strip the robber of all he had. This apparently acted as a restraint in favor only of the strong, leaving the weak a prey to the plunderer; but here the tie of family and clan intervened to aid him. Relatives and clansmen espoused the quarrel of him who could not right himself. [56] [56] The proceedings for detecting thieves were regular and methodical, after established customs. According to Bressani, no thief ever inculpated the innocent. Witches, with whom the Hurons and Iroquois were grievously infested, were objects of utter abomination to both, and any one might kill them at any time. If any person was guilty of treason, or by his character and conduct made himself dangerous or obnoxious to the public, the council of chiefs and old men held a secret session on his case, condemned him to death, and appointed some young man to kill him. The executioner, watching his opportunity, brained or stabbed him unawares, usually in the dark porch of one of the houses. Acting by authority, he could not be held answerable; and the relatives of the slain had no redress, even if they desired it. The council, however, commonly obviated all difficulty in advance, by charging the culprit with witchcraft, thus alienating his best friends. The military organization of the Iroquois was exceedingly lxiv imperfect and derived all its efficiency from their civil union and their personal prowess. There were two hereditary war-chiefs, both belonging to the Senecas; but, except on occasions of unusual importance, it does not appear that they took a very active part in the conduct of wars. The Iroquois lived in a state of chronic warfare with nearly all the surrounding tribes, except a few from whom they exacted tribute. Any man of sufficient personal credit might raise a war-party when he chose. He proclaimed his purpose through the village, sang his war-songs, struck his hatchet into the war-post, and danced the war-dance. Any who chose joined him; and the party usually took up their march at once, with a little parched-corn-meal and maple-sugar as their sole provision. On great occasions, there was concert of action,—the various parties meeting at a rendezvous, and pursuing the march together. The leaders of war-parties, like the orators, belonged, in nearly all cases, to the class of subordinate chiefs. The Iroquois had a discipline suited to the dark and tangled forests where they fought. Here they were a terrible foe: in an open country, against a trained European force, they were, despite their ferocious valor, far less formidable. In observing this singular organization, one is struck by the incongruity of its spirit and its form. A body of hereditary oligarchs was the head of the nation, yet the nation was essentially democratic. Not that the Iroquois were levellers. None were more prompt to acknowledge superiority and defer to it, whether established by usage and prescription, or the result of personal endowment. Yet each man, whether of high or low degree, had a voice in the conduct of affairs, and was never for a moment divorced from his wild spirit of independence. Where there was no property worthy the name, authority lxv had no fulcrum and no hold. The constant aim of sachems and chiefs was to exercise it without seeming to do so. They had no insignia of office. They were no richer than others; indeed, they were often poorer, spending their substance in largesses and bribes to strengthen their influence. They hunted and fished for subsistence; they were as foul, greasy, and unsavory as the rest; yet in them, withal, was often seen a native dignity of bearing, which ochre and bear's grease could not hide, and which comported well with their strong, symmetrical, and sometimes majestic proportions. To the institutions, traditions, rites, usages, and festivals of the league the Iroquois was inseparably wedded. He clung to them with Indian tenacity; and he clings to them still. His political fabric was one of ancient ideas and practices, crystallized into regular and enduring forms. In its component parts it has nothing peculiar to itself. All its elements are found in other tribes: most of them belong to the whole Indian race. Undoubtedly there was a distinct and definite effort of legislation; but Iroquois legislation invented nothing. Like all sound legislation, it built of materials already prepared. It organized the chaotic past, and gave concrete forms to Indian nature itself. The people have dwindled and decayed; but, banded by its ties of clan and kin, the league, in feeble miniature, still subsists, and the degenerate Iroquois looks back with a mournful pride to the glory of the past. Would the Iroquois, left undisturbed to work out their own destiny, ever have emerged from the savage state? Advanced as they were beyond most other American tribes, there is no indication whatever of a tendency to overpass the confines of a wild hunter and warrior life. They were inveterately attached to it, impracticable lxvi conservatists of barbarism, and in ferocity and cruelty they matched the worst of their race. Nor did the power of expansion apparently belonging to their system ever produce much result. Between the years 1712 and 1715, the Tuscaroras, a kindred people, were admitted into the league as a sixth nation; but they were never admitted on equal terms. Long after, in the period of their decline, several other tribes were announced as new members of the league; but these admissions never took effect. The Iroquois were always reluctant to receive other tribes, or parts of tribes, collectively, into the precincts of the "Long House." Yet they constantly practised a system of adoptions, from which, though cruel and savage, they drew great advantages. Their prisoners of war, when they had burned and butchered as many of them as would serve to sate their own ire and that of their women, were divided, man by man, woman by woman, and child by child, adopted into different families and clans, and thus incorporated into the nation. It was by this means, and this alone, that they could offset the losses of their incessant wars. Early in the eighteenth century, and even long before, a vast proportion of their population consisted of adopted prisoners. [57] [57] Relation, 1660, 7 (anonymous). The Iroquois were at the height of their prosperity about the year 1650. Morgan reckons their number at this time at 25,000 souls; but this is far too high an estimate. The author of the Relation of 1660 makes their whole number of warriors 2,200. Le Mercier, in the Relation of 1665, says 2,350. In the Journal of Greenhalgh, an Englishman who visited them in 1677, their warriors are set down at 2,150. Du Chesneau, in 1681, estimates them at 2,000; De la Barre, in 1684, at 2,600, they having been strengthened by adoptions. A memoir addressed to the Marquis de Seignelay, in 1687, again makes them 2,000. (See N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 162, 196, 321.) These estimates imply a total population of ten or twelve thousand. The anonymous writer of the Relation of 1660 may well remark: "It is marvellous that so few should make so great a havoc, and strike such terror into so many tribes." lxvii It remains to speak of the religious and superstitious ideas which so deeply influenced Indian life. RELIGION AND SUPERSTITIONS. The religious belief of the North-American Indians seems, on a first view, anomalous and contradictory. It certainly is so, if we adopt the popular impression. Romance, Poetry, and Rhetoric point, on the one hand, to the august conception of a one all-ruling Deity, a Great Spirit, omniscient and omnipresent; and we are called to admire the untutored intellect which could conceive a thought too vast for Socrates and Plato. On the other hand, we find a chaos of degrading, ridiculous, and incoherent superstitions. A closer examination will show that the contradiction is more apparent than real. We will begin with the lowest forms of Indian belief, and thence trace it upward to the highest conceptions to which the unassisted mind of the savage attained. To the Indian, the material world is sentient and intelligent. Birds, beasts, and reptiles have ears for human prayers, and are endowed with an influence on human destiny. A mysterious and inexplicable power resides in inanimate things. They, too, can listen to the voice of man, and influence his life for evil or for good. Lakes, rivers, and waterfalls are sometimes the dwelling-place of spirits; but more frequently they are themselves living beings, to be propitiated by prayers and offerings. The lake has a soul; and so has the river, and the cataract. Each can hear the words of men, and each can be pleased or offended. In the silence of a forest, the gloom of a deep ravine, resides a living mystery, indefinite, but redoubtable. Through all the works of lxviii Nature or of man, nothing exists, however seemingly trivial, that may not be endowed with a secret power for blessing or for bane. Men and animals are closely akin. Each species of animal has its great archetype, its progenitor or king, who is supposed to exist somewhere, prodigious in size, though in shape and nature like his subjects. A belief prevails, vague, but perfectly apparent, that men themselves owe their first parentage to beasts, birds, or reptiles, as bears, wolves, tortoises, or cranes; and the names of the totemic clans, borrowed in nearly every case from animals, are the reflection of this idea. [58] [58] This belief occasionally takes a perfectly definite shape. There was a tradition among Northern and Western tribes, that men were created from the carcasses of beasts, birds, and fishes, by Manabozho, a mythical personage, to be described hereafter. The Amikouas, or People of the Beaver, an Algonquin tribe of Lake Huron, claimed descent from the carcass of the great original beaver, or father of the beavers. They believed that the rapids and cataracts on the French River and the Upper Ottawa were caused by dams made by their amphibious ancestor. (See the tradition in Perrot, Mémoire sur les M?urs, Coustumes et Relligion des Sauvages de l'Amérique Septentrionale, p. 20.) Charlevoix tells the same story. Each Indian was supposed to inherit something of the nature of the animal whence he sprung. An Indian hunter was always anxious to propitiate the animals he sought to kill. He has often been known to address a wounded bear in a long harangue of apology. [59] The bones of the beaver were treated with especial tenderness, and carefully kept from the dogs, lest the spirit of the dead beaver, or his surviving brethren, should take offence. [60] This solicitude was not confined to animals, lxix but extended to inanimate things. A remarkable example occurred among the Hurons, a people comparatively advanced, who, to propitiate their fishing-nets, and persuade them to do their office with effect, married them every year to two young girls of the tribe, with a ceremony more formal than that observed in the case of mere human wedlock. [61] The fish, too, no less than the nets, must be propitiated; and to this end they were addressed every evening from the fishing-camp by one of the party chosen for that function, who exhorted them to take courage and be caught, assuring them that the utmost respect should be shown to their bones. The harangue, which took place after the evening meal, was made in solemn form; and while it lasted, the whole party, except the speaker, were required to lie on their backs, silent and motionless, around the fire. [62] [59] McKinney, Tour to the Lakes, 284, mentions the discomposure of a party of Indians when shown a stuffed moose. Thinking that its spirit would be offended at the indignity shown to its remains, they surrounded it, making apologetic speeches, and blowing tobacco-smoke at it as a propitiatory offering. [60] This superstition was very prevalent, and numerous examples of it occur in old and recent writers, from Father Le Jeune to Captain Carver. [61] There are frequent allusions to this ceremony in the early writers. The Algonquins of the Ottawa practised it, as well as the Hurons. Lalemant, in his chapter "Du Regne de Satan en ces Contrées" (Relation des Hurons, 1639), says that it took place yearly, in the middle of March. As it was indispensable that the brides should be virgins, mere children were chosen. The net was held between them; and its spirit, or oki, was harangued by one of the chiefs, who exhorted him to do his part in furnishing the tribe with food. Lalemant was told that the spirit of the net had once appeared in human form to the Algonquins, complaining that he had lost his wife, and warning them, that, unless they could find him another equally immaculate, they would catch no more fish. [62] Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons, 257. Other old writers make a similar statement. Besides ascribing life and intelligence to the material world, animate and inanimate, the Indian believes in supernatural existences, known among the Algonquins as Manitous, and among the Iroquois and Hurons as Okies or Otkons. These words comprehend all forms of supernatural being, from the highest to the lowest, with the exception, possibly, of certain diminutive fairies or hobgoblins, and certain giants and anomalous monsters, lxx which appear under various forms, grotesque and horrible, in the Indian fireside legends. [63] There are local manitous of streams, rocks, mountains, cataracts, and forests. The conception of these beings betrays, for the most part, a striking poverty of imagination. In nearly every case, when they reveal themselves to mortal sight, they bear the semblance of beasts, reptiles, or birds, in shapes unusual or distorted. [64] There are other manitous without local habitation, some good, some evil, countless in number and indefinite in attributes. They fill the world, and control the destinies of men,—that is to say, of Indians: for the primitive Indian holds that the white man lives under a spiritual rule distinct from that which governs his own fate. These beings, also, appear for the most part in the shape of animals. Sometimes, however, they assume human proportions; but more frequently they take the form of stones, which, being broken, are found full of living blood and flesh. [63] Many tribes have tales of diminutive beings, which, in the absence of a better word, may be called fairies. In the Travels of Lewis and Clarke, there is mention of a hill on the Missouri, supposed to be haunted by them. These Western fairies correspond to the Puck Wudj Ininee of Ojibwa tradition. As an example of the monsters alluded to, see the Saginaw story of the Weendigoes, in Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, II. 105. [64] The figure of a large bird is perhaps the most common,—as, for example, the good spirit of Rock Island: "He was white, with wings like a swan, but ten times larger."—Autobiography of Blackhawk, 70. Each primitive Indian has his guardian manitou, to whom he looks for counsel, guidance, and protection. These spiritual allies are gained by the following process. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, the Indian boy blackens his face, retires to some solitary place, and remains for days without food. Superstitious expectancy and the exhaustion of abstinence rarely fail of their results. His sleep is haunted by visions, and the form which first or most often appears is that of his guardian lxxi manitou,—a beast, a bird, a fish, a serpent, or some other object, animate or inanimate. An eagle or a bear is the vision of a destined warrior; a wolf, of a successful hunter; while a serpent foreshadows the future medicine-man, or, according to others, portends disaster. [65] The young Indian thenceforth wears about his person the object revealed in his dream, or some portion of it,—as a bone, a feather, a snake-skin, or a tuft of hair. This, in the modern language of the forest and prairie, is known as his "medicine." The Indian yields to it a sort of worship, propitiates it with offerings of tobacco, thanks it in prosperity, and upbraids it in disaster. [66] If his medicine fails to bring the desired success, he will sometimes discard it and adopt another. The superstition now becomes mere fetich-worship, since the Indian regards the mysterious object which he carries about him rather as an embodiment than as a representative of a supernatural power. [65] Compare Cass, in North-American Review, Second Series, XIII. 100. A turkey-buzzard, according to him, is the vision of a medicine-man. I once knew an old Dahcotah chief, who was greatly respected, but had never been to war, though belonging to a family of peculiarly warlike propensities. The reason was, that, in his initiatory fast, he had dreamed of an antelope,—the peace-spirit of his people. Women fast, as well as men,—always at the time of transition from childhood to maturity. In the Narrative of John Tanner, there is an account of an old woman who had fasted, in her youth, for ten days, and throughout her life placed the firmest faith in the visions which had appeared to her at that time. Among the Northern Algonquins, the practice, down to a recent day, was almost universal. [66] The author has seen a Dahcotah warrior open his medicine-bag, talk with an air of affectionate respect to the bone, feather, or horn within, and blow tobacco-smoke upon it as an offering. "Medicines" are acquired not only by fasting, but by casual dreams, and otherwise. They are sometimes even bought and sold. For a curious account of medicine-bags and fetich-worship among the Algonquins of Gaspé, see Le Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, Chap. XIII. Indian belief recognizes also another and very different lxxii class of beings. Besides the giants and monsters of legendary lore, other conceptions may be discerned, more or less distinct, and of a character partly mythical. Of these the most conspicuous is that remarkable personage of Algonquin tradition, called Manabozho, Messou, Michabou, Nanabush, or the Great Hare. As each species of animal has its archetype or king, so, among the Algonquins, Manabozho is king of all these animal kings. Tradition is diverse as to his origin. According to the most current belief, his father was the West-Wind, and his mother a great-granddaughter of the Moon. His character is worthy of such a parentage. Sometimes he is a wolf, a bird, or a gigantic hare, surrounded by a court of quadrupeds; sometimes he appears in human shape, majestic in stature and wondrous in endowment, a mighty magician, a destroyer of serpents and evil manitous; sometimes he is a vain and treacherous imp, full of childish whims and petty trickery, the butt and victim of men, beasts, and spirits. His powers of transformation are without limit; his curiosity and malice are insatiable; and of the numberless legends of which he is the hero, the greater part are as trivial as they are incoherent. [67] It does not appear that Manabozho was ever an object of worship; yet, despite his absurdity, tradition declares him to be chief among the manitous, in short, the "Great Spirit." [68] It was he who restored lxxiii the world, submerged by a deluge. He was hunting in company with a certain wolf, who was his brother, or, by other accounts, his grandson, when his quadruped relative fell through the ice of a frozen lake, and was at once devoured by certain serpents lurking in the depths of the waters. Manabozho, intent on revenge, transformed himself into the stump of a tree, and by this artifice surprised and slew the king of the serpents, as he basked with his followers in the noontide sun. The serpents, who were all manitous, caused, in their rage, the waters of the lake to deluge the earth. Manabozho climbed a tree, which, in answer to his entreaties, grew as the flood rose around it, and thus saved him from the vengeance of the evil spirits. Submerged to the neck, he looked abroad on the waste of waters, and at length descried the bird known as the loon, to whom he appealed for aid in the task of restoring the world. The loon dived in search of a little mud, as material for reconstruction, but could not reach the bottom. A musk-rat made the same attempt, but soon reappeared floating on his back, and apparently dead. Manabozho, however, on searching his paws, discovered in one of them a particle of the desired mud, and of this, together with the body of the loon, created the world anew. [69] [67] Mr. Schoolcraft has collected many of these tales. See his Algic Researches, Vol. I. Compare the stories of Messou, given by Le Jeune (Relations, 1633, 1634), and the account of Nanabush, by Edwin James, in his notes to Tanner's Narrative of Captivity and Adventures during a Thirty-Years' Residence among the Indians; also the account of the Great Hare, in the Mémoire of Nicolas Perrot, Chaps. I., II. [68] "Presque toutes les Nations Algonquines ont donné le nom de Grand Lièvre au Premier Esprit, quelques-uns l'appellent Michabou (Manabozho)."—Charlevoix, Journal Historique, 344. [69] This is a form of the story still current among the remoter Algonquins. Compare the story of Messou, in Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 16. It is substantially the same. There are various forms of this tradition, in some of which Manabozho appears, not as the restorer, but as the creator of the world, forming mankind from the carcasses of beasts, birds, and fishes. [70] Other stories represent lxxiv him as marrying a female musk-rat, by whom he became the progenitor of the human race. [71] [70] In the beginning of all things, Manabozho, in the form of the Great Hare, was on a raft, surrounded by animals who acknowledged him as their chief. No land could be seen. Anxious to create the world, the Great Hare persuaded the beaver to dive for mud; but the adventurous diver floated to the surface senseless. The otter next tried, and failed like his predecessor. The musk-rat now offered himself for the desperate task. He plunged, and, after remaining a day and night beneath the surface, reappeared, floating on his back beside the raft, apparently dead, and with all his paws fast closed. On opening them, the other animals found in one of them a grain of sand, and of this the Great Hare created the world.—Perrot, Mémoire, Chap. I. [71] Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 16.—The musk-rat is always a conspicuous figure in Algonquin cosmogony. It is said that Messou, or Manabozho, once gave to an Indian the gift of immortality, tied in a bundle, enjoining him never to open it. The Indian's wife, however, impelled by curiosity, one day cut the string, the precious gift flew out, and Indians have ever since been subject to death. Le Jeune, Relation, 1634, 13. Searching for some higher conception of supernatural existence, we find, among a portion of the primitive Algonquins, traces of a vague belief in a spirit dimly shadowed forth under the name of Atahocan, to whom it does not appear that any attributes were ascribed or any worship offered, and of whom the Indians professed to know nothing whatever; [72] but there is no evidence that this belief extended beyond certain tribes of the Lower St. Lawrence. Others saw a supreme manitou in the Sun. [73] The Algonquins believed also in a malignant manitou, in whom the early missionaries failed not to recognize the Devil, but who was far less dreaded than his wife. She wore a robe made of the hair of her victims, for she was the cause of death; and she it was lxxv whom, by yelling, drumming, and stamping, they sought to drive away from the sick. Sometimes, at night, she was seen by some terrified squaw in the forest, in shape like a flame of fire; and when the vision was announced to the circle crouched around the lodge-fire, they burned a fragment of meat to appease the female fiend. [72] Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 16; Relation, 1634, 13. [73] Biard, Relation, 1611, Chap. VIII.—This belief was very prevalent. The Ottawas, according to Ragueneau (Relation des Hurons, 1648, 77), were accustomed to invoke the "Maker of Heaven" at their feasts; but they recognized as distinct persons the Maker of the Earth, the Maker of Winter, the God of the Waters, and the Seven Spirits of the Wind. He says, at the same time, "The people of these countries have received from their ancestors no knowledge of a God"; and he adds, that there is no sentiment of religion in this invocation. The East, the West, the North, and the South were vaguely personified as spirits or manitous. Some of the winds, too, were personal existences. The West-Wind, as we have seen, was father of Manabozho. There was a Summer-Maker and a Winter-Maker; and the Indians tried to keep the latter at bay by throwing firebrands into the air. When we turn from the Algonquin family of tribes to that of the Iroquois, we find another cosmogony, and other conceptions of spiritual existence. While the earth was as yet a waste of waters, there was, according to Iroquois and Huron traditions, a heaven with lakes, streams, plains, and forests, inhabited by animals, by spirits, and, as some affirm, by human beings. Here a certain female spirit, named Ataentsic, was once chasing a bear, which, slipping through a hole, fell down to the earth. Ataentsic's dog followed, when she herself, struck with despair, jumped after them. Others declare that she was kicked out of heaven by the spirit, her husband, for an amour with a man; while others, again, hold the belief that she fell in the attempt to gather for her husband the medicinal leaves of a certain tree. Be this as it may, the animals swimming in the watery waste below saw her falling, and hastily met in council to determine what should be done. The case was referred to the beaver. The beaver commended it to the judgment of the tortoise, who thereupon called on the other animals to dive, bring up mud, and place it on his back. Thus lxxvi was formed a floating island, on which Ataentsic fell; and here, being pregnant, she was soon delivered of a daughter, who in turn bore two boys, whose paternity is unexplained. They were called Taouscaron and Jouskeha, and presently fell to blows, Jouskeha killing his brother with the horn of a stag. The back of the tortoise grew into a world full of verdure and life; and Jouskeha, with his grandmother, Ataentsic, ruled over its destinies. [74] [74] The above is the version of the story given by Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 86 (Cramoisy). No two Indians told it precisely alike, though nearly all the Hurons and Iroquois agreed as to its essential points. Compare Vanderdonck, Cusick, Sagard, and other writers. According to Vanderdonck, Ataentsic became mother of a deer, a bear, and a wolf, by whom she afterwards bore all the other animals, mankind included. Brébeuf found also among the Hurons a tradition inconsistent with that of Ataentsic, and bearing a trace of Algonquin origin. It declares, that, in the beginning, a man, a fox, and a skunk found themselves together on an island, and that the man made the world out of mud brought him by the skunk. The Delawares, an Algonquin tribe, seem to have borrowed somewhat of the Iroquois cosmogony, since they believed that the earth was formed on the back of a tortoise. According to some, Jouskeha became the father of the human race; but, in the third generation, a deluge destroyed his posterity, so that it was necessary to transform animals into men.—Charlevoix, III. 345. He is the Sun; she is the Moon. He is beneficent; but she is malignant, like the female demon of the Algonquins. They have a bark house, made like those of the Iroquois, at the end of the earth, and they often come to feasts and dances in the Indian villages. Jouskeha raises corn for himself, and makes plentiful harvests for mankind. Sometimes he is seen, thin as a skeleton, with a spike of shrivelled corn in his hand, or greedily gnawing a human limb; and then the Indians know that a grievous famine awaits them. He constantly interposes between mankind and the malice of his wicked grandmother, whom, at times, he soundly cudgels. It was he lxxvii who made lakes and streams: for once the earth was parched and barren, all the water being gathered under the armpit of a colossal frog; but Jouskeha pierced the armpit, and let out the water. No prayers were offered to him, his benevolent nature rendering them superfluous. [75] [75] Compare Brébeuf, as before cited, and Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, p. 228. The early writers call Jouskeha the creator of the world, and speak of him as corresponding to the vague Algonquin deity, Atahocan. Another deity appears in Iroquois mythology, with equal claims to be regarded as supreme. He is called Areskoui, or Agreskoui, and his most prominent attributes are those of a god of war. He was often invoked, and the flesh of animals and of captive enemies was burned in his honor. [76] Like Jouskeha, he was identified with the sun; and he is perhaps to be regarded as the same being, under different attributes. Among the Iroquois proper, or Five Nations, there was also a divinity called Tarenyowagon, or Teharonhiawagon, [77] whose place and character it is very difficult to determine. In some traditions he appears as the son of Jouskeha. He had a prodigious influence; for it was he who spoke to men in dreams. The Five Nations recognized still another superhuman personage,—plainly a deified chief or hero. This was Taounyawatha, or Hiawatha, said to be a divinely appointed messenger, who made his abode on earth for the political and social instruction of the chosen race, and whose lxxviii counterpart is to be found in the traditions of the Peruvians, Mexicans, and other primitive nations. [78] [76] Father Jogues saw a female prisoner burned to Areskoui, and two bears offered to him to atone for the sin of not burning more captives.—Lettre de Jogues, 5 Aug., 1643. [77] Le Mercier, Relation, 1670, 66; Dablon, Relation, 1671, 17. Compare Cusick, Megapolensis, and Vanderdonck. Some writers identify Tarenyowagon and Hiawatha. Vanderdonck assumes that Areskoui is the Devil, and Tarenyowagon is God. Thus Indian notions are often interpreted by the light of preconceived ideas. [78] For the tradition of Hiawatha, see Clark, History of Onondaga, I. 21. It will also be found in Schoolcraft's Notes on the Iroquois, and in his History, Condition, and Prospects of Indian Tribes. The Iroquois name for God is Hawenniio, sometimes written Owayneo; but this use of the word is wholly due to the missionaries. Hawenniio is an Iroquois verb, and means, he rules, he is master. There is no Iroquois word which, in its primitive meaning, can be interpreted, the Great Spirit, or God. On this subject, see études Philologiques sur quelques Langues Sauvages (Montreal, 1866), where will also be found a curious exposure of a few of Schoolcraft's ridiculous blunders in this connection. Close examination makes it evident that the primitive Indian's idea of a Supreme Being was a conception no higher than might have been expected. The moment he began to contemplate this object of his faith, and sought to clothe it with attributes, it became finite, and commonly ridiculous. The Creator of the World stood on the level of a barbarous and degraded humanity, while a natural tendency became apparent to look beyond him to other powers sharing his dominion. The Indian belief, if developed, would have developed into a system of polytheism. [79] [79] Some of the early writers could discover no trace of belief in a supreme spirit of any kind. Perrot, after a life spent among the Indians, ignores such an idea. Allouez emphatically denies that it existed among the tribes of Lake Superior. (Relation, 1667, 11.) He adds, however, that the Sacs and Foxes believed in a great génie, who lived not far from the French settlements.—Ibid., 21. In the primitive Indian's conception of a God the idea of moral good has no part. His deity does not dispense justice for this world or the next, but leaves mankind under the power of subordinate spirits, who fill and control the universe. Nor is the good and evil of these inferior beings a moral good and evil. The good spirit is the spirit that gives good luck, and ministers to the necessities and desires of mankind: the evil spirit is lxxix simply a malicious agent of disease, death, and mischance. In no Indian language could the early missionaries find a word to express the idea of God. Manitou and Oki meant anything endowed with supernatural powers, from a snake-skin, or a greasy Indian conjurer, up to Manabozho and Jouskeha. The priests were forced to use a circumlocution,—"The Great Chief of Men," or "He who lives in the Sky." [80] Yet it should seem that the idea of a supreme controlling spirit might naturally arise from the peculiar character of Indian belief. The idea that each race of animals has its archetype or chief would easily suggest the existence of a supreme chief of the spirits or of the human race,—a conception imperfectly shadowed forth in Manabozho. The Jesuit missionaries seized this advantage. "If each sort of animal has its king," they urged, "so, too, have men; and as man is above all the animals, so is the spirit that rules over men the master of all the other spirits." The Indian mind readily accepted the idea, and tribes in no sense Christian quickly rose to the belief in one controlling spirit. The Great Spirit became a distinct existence, a pervading power in the universe, and a dispenser of justice. Many tribes now pray to him, though still clinging obstinately to their ancient superstitions; and with some, as the heathen portion of the modern Iroquois, he is clothed with attributes of moral good. [81] [80] See "Divers Sentimens," appended to the Relation of 1635, § 27; and also many other passages of early missionaries. [81] In studying the writers of the last and of the present century, it is to be remembered that their observations were made upon savages who had been for generations in contact, immediate or otherwise, with the doctrines of Christianity. Many observers have interpreted the religious ideas of the Indians after preconceived ideas of their own; and it may safely be affirmed that an Indian will respond with a grunt of acquiescence to any question whatever touching his spiritual state. Loskiel and the simple-minded Heckewelder write from a missionary point of view; Adair, to support a theory of descent from the Jews; the worthy theologian, Jarvis, to maintain his dogma, that all religious ideas of the heathen world are perversions of revelation; and so, in a greater or less degree, of many others. By far the most close and accurate observers of Indian superstition were the French and Italian Jesuits of the first half of the seventeenth century. Their opportunities were unrivalled; and they used them in a spirit of faithful inquiry, accumulating facts, and leaving theory to their successors. Of recent American writers, no one has given so much attention to the subject as Mr. Schoolcraft; but, in view of his opportunities and his zeal, his results are most unsatisfactory. The work in six large quarto volumes, History, Condition, and Prospects of Indian Tribes, published by Government under his editorship, includes the substance of most of his previous writings. It is a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page of a striking unfitness either for historical or philosophical inquiry, and taxing to the utmost the patience of those who would extract what is valuable in it from its oceans of pedantic verbiage. lxxx The primitive Indian believed in the immortality of the soul, [82] but he did not always believe in a state of future reward and punishment. Nor, when such a belief existed, was the good to be rewarded a moral good, or the evil to be punished a moral evil. Skilful hunters, brave warriors, men of influence and consideration, went, after death, to the happy hunting-ground; while the slothful, the cowardly, and the weak were doomed to eat serpents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and darkness. In the general belief, however, there was but one land of shades for all alike. The spirits, in form and feature as they had been in life, wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the crouching posture of the sick, and, when night came, hunted lxxxi the shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees and rocks: for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead. [82] The exceptions are exceedingly rare. Father Gravier says that a Peoria Indian once told him that there was no future life. It would be difficult to find another instance of the kind. The belief respecting the land of souls varied greatly in different tribes and different individuals. Among the Hurons there were those who held that departed spirits pursued their journey through the sky, along the Milky Way, while the souls of dogs took another route, by certain constellations, known as the "Way of the Dogs." [83] [83] Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, 233. At intervals of ten or twelve years, the Hurons, the Neutrals, and other kindred tribes, were accustomed to collect the bones of their dead, and deposit them, with great ceremony, in a common place of burial. The whole nation was sometimes assembled at this solemnity; and hundreds of corpses, brought from their temporary resting-places, were inhumed in one capacious pit. From this hour the immortality of their souls began. They took wing, as some affirmed, in the shape of pigeons; while the greater number declared that they journeyed on foot, and in their own likeness, to the land of shades, bearing with them the ghosts of the wampum-belts, beaver-skins, bows, arrows, pipes, kettles, beads, and rings buried with them in the common grave. [84] But as the spirits of the old and of children are too feeble for the march, they are forced to stay behind, lingering near their earthly villages, where the living often hear the shutting of their invisible cabin-doors, and the weak lxxxii voices of the disembodied children driving birds from their corn-fields. [85] An endless variety of incoherent fancies is connected with the Indian idea of a future life. They commonly owe their origin to dreams, often to the dreams of those in extreme sickness, who, on awaking, supposed that they had visited the other world, and related to the wondering bystanders what they had seen. [84] The practice of burying treasures with the dead is not peculiar to the North American aborigines. Thus, the London Times of Oct. 28, 1865, describing the funeral rites of Lord Palmerston, says: "And as the words, 'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,' were pronounced, the chief mourner, as a last precious offering to the dead, threw into the grave several diamond and gold rings." [85] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 99 (Cramoisy). The Indian land of souls is not always a region of shadows and gloom. The Hurons sometimes represented the souls of their dead—those of their dogs included—as dancing joyously in the presence of Ataentsic and Jouskeha. According to some Algonquin traditions, heaven was a scene of endless festivity, the ghosts dancing to the sound of the rattle and the drum, and greeting with hospitable welcome the occasional visitor from the living world: for the spirit-land was not far off, and roving hunters sometimes passed its confines unawares. Most of the traditions agree, however, that the spirits, on their journey heavenward, were beset with difficulties and perils. There was a swift river which must be crossed on a log that shook beneath their feet, while a ferocious dog opposed their passage, and drove many into the abyss. This river was full of sturgeon and other fish, which the ghosts speared for their subsistence. Beyond was a narrow path between moving rocks, which each instant crashed together, grinding to atoms the less nimble of the pilgrims who essayed to pass. The Hurons believed that a personage named Oscotarach, or the Head-Piercer, dwelt in a bark house beside the path, and that it was his office to remove the brains from the heads of all who went by, as a necessary preparation for immortality. lxxxiii This singular idea is found also in some Algonquin traditions, according to which, however, the brain is afterwards restored to its owner. [86] [86] On Indian ideas of another life, compare Sagard, the Jesuit Relations, Perrot, Charlevoix, and Lafitau, with Tanner, James, Schoolcraft, and the Appendix to Morse's Indian Report. Le Clerc recounts a singular story, current in his time among the Algonquins of Gaspé and Northern New Brunswick. The favorite son of an old Indian died; whereupon the father, with a party of friends, set out for the land of souls to recover him. It was only necessary to wade through a shallow lake, several days' journey in extent. This they did, sleeping at night on platforms of poles which supported them above the water. At length they arrived, and were met by Papkootparout, the Indian Pluto, who rushed on them in a rage, with his war-club upraised; but, presently relenting, changed his mind, and challenged them to a game of ball. They proved the victors, and won the stakes, consisting of corn, tobacco, and certain fruits, which thus became known to mankind. The bereaved father now begged hard for his son's soul, and Papkootparout at last gave it to him, in the form and size of a nut, which, by pressing it hard between his hands, he forced into a small leather bag. The delighted parent carried it back to earth, with instructions to insert it in the body of his son, who would thereupon return to life. When the adventurers reached home, and reported the happy issue of their journey, there was a dance of rejoicing; and the father, wishing to take part in it, gave his son's soul to the keeping of a squaw who stood by. Being curious to see it, she opened the bag; on which it escaped at once, and took flight for the realms of Papkootparout, preferring them to the abodes of the living.—Le Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, 310-328. Dreams were to the Indian a universal oracle. They revealed to him his guardian spirit, taught him the cure of his diseases, warned him of the devices of sorcerers, guided him to the lurking-places of his enemy or the haunts of game, and unfolded the secrets of good and evil destiny. The dream was a mysterious and inexorable power, whose least behests must be obeyed to the letter,—a source, in every Indian town, of endless mischief and abomination. There were professed dreamers, and professed interpreters of dreams. One of the most noted festivals among the Hurons and Iroquois was the Dream Feast, a scene of frenzy, where the actors counterfeited lxxxiv madness, and the town was like a bedlam turned loose. Each pretended to have dreamed of something necessary to his welfare, and rushed from house to house, demanding of all he met to guess his secret requirement and satisfy it. Believing that the whole material world was instinct with powers to influence and control his fate, that good and evil spirits, and existences nameless and indefinable, filled all Nature, that a pervading sorcery was above, below, and around him, and that issues of life and death might be controlled by instruments the most unnoticeable and seemingly the most feeble, the Indian lived in perpetual fear. The turning of a leaf, the crawling of an insect, the cry of a bird, the creaking of a bough, might be to him the mystic signal of weal or woe. An Indian community swarmed with sorcerers, medicine-men, and diviners, whose functions were often united in the same person. The sorcerer, by charms, magic songs, magic feasts, and the beating of his drum, had power over the spirits and those occult influences inherent in animals and inanimate things. He could call to him the souls of his enemies. They appeared before him in the form of stones. He chopped and bruised them with his hatchet; blood and flesh issued forth; and the intended victim, however distant, languished and died. Like the sorcerer of the Middle Ages, he made images of those he wished to destroy, and, muttering incantations, punctured them with an awl, whereupon the persons represented sickened and pined away. The Indian doctor relied far more on magic than on natural remedies. Dreams, beating of the drum, songs, magic feasts and dances, and howling to frighten the female demon from his patient, were his ordinary methods of cure. lxxxv The prophet, or diviner, had various means of reading the secrets of futurity, such as the flight of birds, and the movements of water and fire. There was a peculiar practice of divination very general in the Algonquin family of tribes, among some of whom it still subsists. A small, conical lodge was made by planting poles in a circle, lashing the tops together at the height of about seven feet from the ground, and closely covering them with hides. The prophet crawled in, and closed the aperture after him. He then beat his drum and sang his magic songs to summon the spirits, whose weak, shrill voices were soon heard, mingled with his lugubrious chanting, while at intervals the juggler paused to interpret their communications to the attentive crowd seated on the ground without. During the whole scene, the lodge swayed to and fro with a violence which has astonished many a civilized beholder, and which some of the Jesuits explain by the ready solution of a genuine diabolic intervention. [87] [87] This practice was first observed by Champlain. (See "Pioneers of France in the New World." ) From his time to the present, numerous writers have remarked upon it. Le Jeune, in the Relation of 1637, treats it at some length. The lodge was sometimes of a cylindrical, instead of a conical form. The sorcerers, medicine-men, and diviners did not usually exercise the function of priests. Each man sacrificed for himself to the powers he wished to propitiate, whether his guardian spirit, the spirits of animals, or the other beings of his belief. The most common offering was tobacco, thrown into the fire or water; scraps of meat were sometimes burned to the manitous; and, on a few rare occasions of public solemnity, a white dog, the mystic animal of many tribes, was tied to the end of an upright pole, as a sacrifice to some superior spirit, or to lxxxvi the sun, with which the superior spirits were constantly confounded by the primitive Indian. In recent times, when Judaism and Christianity have modified his religious ideas, it has been, and still is, the practice to sacrifice dogs to the Great Spirit. On these public occasions, the sacrificial function is discharged by chiefs, or by warriors appointed for the purpose. [88] [88] Many of the Indian feasts were feasts of sacrifice,—sometimes to the guardian spirit of the host, sometimes to an animal of which he has dreamed, sometimes to a local or other spirit. The food was first offered in a loud voice to the being to be propitiated, after which the guests proceeded to devour it for him. This unique method of sacrifice was practised at war-feasts and similar solemnities. For an excellent account of Indian religious feasts, see Perrot, Chap. V. One of the most remarkable of Indian sacrifices was that practised by the Hurons in the case of a person drowned or frozen to death. The flesh of the deceased was cut off, and thrown into a fire made for the purpose, as an offering of propitiation to the spirits of the air or water. What remained of the body was then buried near the fire.—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 108. The tribes of Virginia, as described by Beverly and others, not only had priests who offered sacrifice, but idols and houses of worship. Among the Hurons and Iroquois, and indeed all the stationary tribes, there was an incredible number of mystic ceremonies, extravagant, puerile, and often disgusting, designed for the cure of the sick or for the general weal of the community. Most of their observances seem originally to have been dictated by dreams, and transmitted as a sacred heritage from generation to generation. They consisted in an endless variety of dances, masqueradings, and nondescript orgies; and a scrupulous adherence to all the traditional forms was held to be of the last moment, as the slightest failure in this respect might entail serious calamities. If children were seen in their play imitating any of these mysteries, they were grimly rebuked and punished. In many tribes secret magical societies existed, and still exist, into which lxxxvii members are initiated with peculiar ceremonies. These associations are greatly respected and feared. They have charms for love, war, and private revenge, and exert a great, and often a very mischievous influence. The societies of the Metai and the Wabeno, among the Northern Algonquins, are conspicuous examples; while other societies of similar character have, for a century, been known to exist among the Dahcotah. [89] [89] The Friendly Society of the Spirit, of which the initiatory ceremonies were seen and described by Carver (Travels, 271), preserves to this day its existence and its rites. A notice of the superstitious ideas of the Indians would be imperfect without a reference to the traditionary tales through which these ideas are handed down from father to son. Some of these tales can be traced back to the period of the earliest intercourse with Europeans. One at least of those recorded by the first missionaries, on the Lower St. Lawrence, is still current among the tribes of the Upper Lakes. Many of them are curious combinations of beliefs seriously entertained with strokes intended for humor and drollery, which never fail to awaken peals of laughter in the lodge-circle. Giants, dwarfs, cannibals, spirits, beasts, birds, and anomalous monsters, transformations, tricks, and sorcery, form the staple of the story. Some of the Iroquois tales embody conceptions which, however preposterous, are of a bold and striking character; but those of the Algonquins are, to an incredible degree, flimsy, silly, and meaningless; nor are those of the Dahcotah tribes much better. In respect to this wigwam lore, there is a curious superstition of very wide prevalence. The tales must not be told in summer; since at that season, when all Nature is full of life, the spirits are awake, and, hearing what is said of them, may take offence; whereas in winter they lxxxviii are fast sealed up in snow and ice, and no longer capable of listening. [90] [90] The prevalence of this fancy among the Algonquins in the remote parts of Canada is well established. The writer found it also among the extreme western bands of the Dahcotah. He tried, in the month of July, to persuade an old chief, a noted story-teller, to tell him some of the tales; but, though abundantly loquacious in respect to his own adventures, and even his dreams, the Indian obstinately refused, saying that winter was the time for the tales, and that it was bad to tell them in summer. Mr. Schoolcraft has published a collection of Algonquin tales, under the title of Algic Researches. Most of them were translated by his wife, an educated Ojibwa half-breed. This book is perhaps the best of Mr. Schoolcraft's works, though its value is much impaired by the want of a literal rendering, and the introduction of decorations which savor more of a popular monthly magazine than of an Indian wigwam. Mrs. Eastman's interesting Legends of the Sioux (Dahcotah) is not free from the same defect. Other tales are scattered throughout the works of Mr. Schoolcraft and various modern writers. Some are to be found in the works of Lafitau and the other Jesuits. But few of the Iroquois legends have been printed, though a considerable number have been written down. The singular History of the Five Nations, by the old Tuscarora Indian, Cusick, gives the substance of some of them. Others will be found in Clark's History of Onondaga. It is obvious that the Indian mind has never seriously occupied itself with any of the higher themes of thought. The beings of its belief are not impersonations of the forces of Nature, the courses of human destiny, or the movements of human intellect, will, and passion. In the midst of Nature, the Indian knew nothing of her laws. His perpetual reference of her phenomena to occult agencies forestalled inquiry and precluded inductive reasoning. If the wind blew with violence, it was because the water-lizard, which makes the wind, had crawled out of his pool; if the lightning was sharp and frequent, it was because the young of the thunder-bird were restless in their nest; if a blight fell upon the corn, it was because the Corn Spirit was angry; and if the beavers were shy and difficult to catch, it was because lxxxix they had taken offence at seeing the bones of one of their race thrown to a dog. Well, and even highly developed, in a few instances,—I allude especially to the Iroquois,—with respect to certain points of material concernment, the mind of the Indian in other respects was and is almost hopelessly stagnant. The very traits that raise him above the servile races are hostile to the kind and degree of civilization which those races so easily attain. His intractable spirit of independence, and the pride which forbids him to be an imitator, reinforce but too strongly that savage lethargy of mind from which it is so hard to rouse him. No race, perhaps, ever offered greater difficulties to those laboring for its improvement. To sum up the results of this examination, the primitive Indian was as savage in his religion as in his life. He was divided between fetich-worship and that next degree of religious development which consists in the worship of deities embodied in the human form. His conception of their attributes was such as might have been expected. His gods were no whit better than himself. Even when he borrows from Christianity the idea of a Supreme and Universal Spirit, his tendency is to reduce Him to a local habitation and a bodily shape; and this tendency disappears only in tribes that have been long in contact with civilized white men. The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage to One All-pervading and Omnipotent Spirit, is a dream of poets, rhetoricians, and sentimentalists. CHAPTER I. 1634. NOTRE-DAME DES ANGES. Quebec in 1634 ? Father Le Jeune ? The Mission-House ? Its Domestic Economy ? The Jesuits and their Designs Opposite Quebec lies the tongue of land called Point Levi. One who, in the summer of the year 1634, stood on its margin and looked northward, across the St. Lawrence, would have seen, at the distance of a mile or more, a range of lofty cliffs, rising on the left into the bold heights of Cape Diamond, and on the right sinking abruptly to the bed of the tributary river St. Charles. Beneath these cliffs, at the brink of the St. Lawrence, he would have descried a cluster of warehouses, sheds, and wooden tenements. Immediately above, along the verge of the precipice, he could have traced the outlines of a fortified work, with a flagstaff, and a few small cannon to command the river; while, at the only point where Nature had made the heights accessible, a zigzag path connected the warehouses and the fort. 2 Now, embarked in the canoe of some Montagnais Indian, let him cross the St. Lawrence, land at the pier, and, passing the cluster of buildings, climb the pathway up the cliff. Pausing for rest and breath, he might see, ascending and descending, the tenants of this outpost of the wilderness: a soldier of the fort, or an officer in slouched hat and plume; a factor of the fur company, owner and sovereign lord of all Canada; a party of Indians; a trader from the upper country, one of the precursors of that hardy race of coureurs de bois, destined to form a conspicuous and striking feature of the Canadian population: next, perhaps, would appear a figure widely different. The close, black cassock, the rosary hanging from the waist, and the wide, black hat, looped up at the sides, proclaimed the Jesuit,—Father Le Jeune, Superior of the Residence of Quebec. And now, that we may better know the aspect and condition of the infant colony and incipient mission, we will follow the priest on his way. Mounting the steep path, he reached the top of the cliff, some two hundred feet above the river and the warehouses. On the left lay the fort built by Champlain, covering a part of the ground now forming Durham Terrace and the Place d'Armes. Its ramparts were of logs and earth, and within was a turreted building of stone, used as a barrack, as officers' quarters, and for other purposes. [1] Near the fort stood a small chapel, newly built. The 3 surrounding country was cleared and partially cultivated; yet only one dwelling-house worthy the name appeared. It was a substantial cottage, where lived Madame Hébert, widow of the first settler of Canada, with her daughter, her son-in-law Couillard, and their children, good Catholics all, who, two years before, when Quebec was evacuated by the English, [2] wept for joy at beholding Le Jeune, and his brother Jesuit, De Nou?, crossing their threshold to offer beneath their roof the long-forbidden sacrifice of the Mass. There were inclosures with cattle near at hand; and the house, with its surroundings, betokened industry and thrift. [1] Compare the various notices in Champlain (1632) with that of Du Creux, Historia Canadensis, 204. [2] See "Pioneers of France in the New World." Hébert's cottage seems to have stood between Ste.-Famille and Couillard Streets, as appears by a contract of 1634, cited by M. Ferland. Thence Le Jeune walked on, across the site of the modern market-place, and still onward, near the line of the cliffs which sank abruptly on his right. Beneath lay the mouth of the St. Charles; and, beyond, the wilderness shore of Beauport swept in a wide curve eastward, to where, far in the distance, the Gulf of Montmorenci yawned on the great river. [3] The priest soon passed the clearings, and entered the woods which covered the site of the present suburb of St. John. Thence he descended to a lower plateau, where now lies the suburb of St. Roch, and, still advancing, reached a pleasant spot at the extremity of the Pointe-aux-Lièvres, a tract of meadow land nearly inclosed 4 by a sudden bend of the St. Charles. Here lay a canoe or skiff; and, paddling across the narrow stream, Le Jeune saw on the meadow, two hundred yards from the bank, a square inclosure formed of palisades, like a modern picket fort of the Indian frontier. [4] Within this inclosure were two buildings, one of which had been half burned by the English, and was not yet repaired. It served as storehouse, stable, workshop, and bakery. Opposite stood the principal building, a structure of planks, plastered with mud, and thatched with long grass from the meadows. It consisted of one story, a garret, and a cellar, and contained four principal rooms, of which one served as chapel, another as refectory, another as kitchen, and the fourth as a lodging for workmen. The furniture of all was plain in the extreme. Until the preceding year, the chapel had had no other ornament than a sheet on which were glued two coarse engravings; but the priests had now decorated their altar with an image of a dove representing the Holy Ghost, an image of Loyola, another of Xavier, and three images of the Virgin. Four cells opened from the refectory, the largest of which was eight feet square. In these lodged six priests, while two lay 5 brothers found shelter in the garret. The house had been hastily built, eight years before, and now leaked in all parts. Such was the Residence of Notre-Dame des Anges. Here was nourished the germ of a vast enterprise, and this was the cradle of the great mission of New France. [5] [3] The settlement of Beauport was begun this year, or the year following, by the Sieur Giffard, to whom a large tract had been granted here—Langevin, Notes sur les Archives de N. D. de Beauport, 5. [4] This must have been very near the point where the streamlet called the River Lairet enters the St. Charles. The place has a triple historic interest. The wintering-place of Cartier in 1535-6 (see "Pioneers of France") seems to have been here. Here, too, in 1759, Montcalm's bridge of boats crossed the St. Charles; and in a large intrenchment, which probably included the site of the Jesuit mission-house, the remnants of his shattered army rallied, after their defeat on the Plains of Abraham.—See the very curious Narrative of the Chevalier Johnstone, published by the Historical Society of Quebec. [5] The above particulars are gathered from the Relations of 1626 (Lalemant), and 1632, 1633, 1634, 1635 (Le Jeune), but chiefly from a long letter of the Father Superior to the Provincial of the Jesuits at Paris, containing a curiously minute report of the state of the mission. It was sent from Quebec by the returning ships in the summer of 1634, and will be found in Carayon, Première Mission des Jésuites au Canada, 122. The original is in the archives of the Order at Rome. Of the six Jesuits gathered in the refectory for the evening meal, one was conspicuous among the rest,—a tall, strong man, with features that seemed carved by Nature for a soldier, but which the mental habits of years had stamped with the visible impress of the priesthood. This was Jean de Brébeuf, descendant of a noble family of Normandy, and one of the ablest and most devoted zealots whose names stand on the missionary rolls of his Order. His companions were Masse, Daniel, Davost, De Nou?, and the Father Superior, Le Jeune. Masse was the same priest who had been the companion of Father Biard in the abortive mission of Acadia. [6] By reason of his useful qualities, Le Jeune nicknamed him "le Père Utile." At present, his special function was the care of the pigs and cows, which he kept in the inclosure around the buildings, lest they should ravage the neighboring fields of rye, barley, wheat, 6 and maize. [7] De Nou? had charge of the eight or ten workmen employed by the mission, who gave him at times no little trouble by their repinings and complaints. [8] They were forced to hear mass every morning and prayers every evening, besides an exhortation on Sunday. Some of them were for returning home, while two or three, of a different complexion, wished to be Jesuits themselves. The Fathers, in their intervals of leisure, worked with their men, spade in hand. For the rest, they were busied in preaching, singing vespers, saying mass and hearing confessions at the fort of Quebec, catechizing a few Indians, and striving to master the enormous difficulties of the Huron and Algonquin languages. [6] See "Pioneers of France in the New World." [7] "Le P. Masse, que je nomme quelquefois en riant le Père Utile, est bien cognu de V. R. Il a soin des choses domestiques et du bestail que nous avons, en quoy il a très-bien reussy."—Lettre du P. Paul le Jeune au R. P. Provincial, in Carayon, 122.—Le Jeune does not fail to send an inventory of the "bestail" to his Superior, namely: "Deux grosses truies qui nourissent chacune quatre petits cochons, deux vaches, deux petites genisses, et un petit taureau." [8] The methodical Le Jeune sets down the causes of their discontent under six different heads, each duly numbered. Thus:— "1o. C'est le naturel des artisans de se plaindre et de gronder." "2o. La diversité des gages les fait murmurer," etc. Well might Father Le Jeune write to his Superior, "The harvest is plentiful, and the laborers few." These men aimed at the conversion of a continent. From their hovel on the St. Charles, they surveyed a field of labor whose vastness might tire the wings of thought itself; a scene repellent and appalling, darkened with omens of peril and woe. They were an advance-guard of the great army of Loyola, strong in a discipline that controlled 7 not alone the body and the will, but the intellect, the heart, the soul, and the inmost consciousness. The lives of these early Canadian Jesuits attest the earnestness of their faith and the intensity of their zeal; but it was a zeal bridled, curbed, and ruled by a guiding hand. Their marvellous training in equal measure kindled enthusiasm and controlled it, roused into action a mighty power, and made it as subservient as those great material forces which modern science has learned to awaken and to govern. They were drilled to a factitious humility, prone to find utterance in expressions of self-depreciation and self-scorn, which one may often judge unwisely, when he condemns them as insincere. They were devoted believers, not only in the fundamental dogmas of Rome, but in those lesser matters of faith which heresy despises as idle and puerile superstitions. One great aim engrossed their lives. "For the greater glory of God"—ad majorem Dei gloriam—they would act or wait, dare, suffer, or die, yet all in unquestioning subjection to the authority of the Superiors, in whom they recognized the agents of Divine authority itself. CHAPTER II. LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. Conversion of Loyola ? Foundation of the Society of Jesus ? Preparation of the Novice ? Characteristics of the Order ? The Canadian Jesuits It was an evil day for new-born Protestantism, when a French artilleryman fired the shot that struck down Ignatius Loyola in the breach of Pampeluna. A proud noble, an aspiring soldier, a graceful courtier, an ardent and daring gallant was metamorphosed by that stroke into the zealot whose brain engendered and brought forth the mighty Society of Jesus. His story is a familiar one: how, in the solitude of his sick-room, a change came over him, upheaving, like an earthquake, all the forces of his nature; how, in the cave of Manresa, the mysteries of Heaven were revealed to him; how he passed from agonies to transports, from transports to the calm of a determined purpose. The soldier gave himself to a new warfare. In the forge of his great intellect, heated, but not disturbed by the intense fires of his zeal, was wrought the prodigious enginery whose power has been felt to the uttermost confines of the world. 9 Loyola's training had been in courts and camps: of books he knew little or nothing. He had lived in the unquestioning faith of one born and bred in the very focus of Romanism; and thus, at the age of about thirty, his conversion found him. It was a change of life and purpose, not of belief. He presumed not to inquire into the doctrines of the Church. It was for him to enforce those doctrines; and to this end he turned all the faculties of his potent intellect, and all his deep knowledge of mankind. He did not aim to build up barren communities of secluded monks, aspiring to heaven through prayer, penance, and meditation, but to subdue the world to the dominion of the dogmas which had subdued him; to organize and discipline a mighty host, controlled by one purpose and one mind, fired by a quenchless zeal or nerved by a fixed resolve, yet impelled, restrained, and directed by a single master hand. The Jesuit is no dreamer: he is emphatically a man of action; action is the end of his existence. It was an arduous problem which Loyola undertook to solve,—to rob a man of volition, yet to preserve in him, nay, to stimulate, those energies which would make him the most efficient instrument of a great design. To this end the Jesuit novitiate and the constitutions of the Order are directed. The enthusiasm of the novice is urged to its intensest pitch; then, in the name of religion, he is summoned to the utter abnegation of intellect and will in favor of the Superior, in whom he is 10 commanded to recognize the representative of God on earth. Thus the young zealot makes no slavish sacrifice of intellect and will; at least, so he is taught: for he sacrifices them, not to man, but to his Maker. No limit is set to his submission: if the Superior pronounces black to be white, he is bound in conscience to acquiesce. [1] [1] Those who wish to know the nature of the Jesuit virtue of obedience will find it set forth in the famous Letter on Obedience of Loyola. Loyola's book of Spiritual Exercises is well known. In these exercises lies the hard and narrow path which is the only entrance to the Society of Jesus. The book is, to all appearance, a dry and superstitious formulary; but, in the hands of a skilful director of consciences, it has proved of terrible efficacy. The novice, in solitude and darkness, day after day and night after night, ponders its images of perdition and despair. He is taught to hear, in imagination, the howlings of the damned, to see their convulsive agonies, to feel the flames that burn without consuming, to smell the corruption of the tomb and the fumes of the infernal pit. He must picture to himself an array of adverse armies, one commanded by Satan on the plains of Babylon, one encamped under Christ about the walls of Jerusalem; and the perturbed mind, humbled by long contemplation of its own vileness, is ordered to enroll itself under one or the other banner. Then, the choice made, it is led to a region of serenity and celestial peace, and soothed with images of divine benignity and grace. These meditations last, without intermission, about a month, 11 and, under an astute and experienced directorship, they have been found of such power, that the Manual of Spiritual Exercises boasts to have saved souls more in number than the letters it contains. To this succeed two years of discipline and preparation, directed, above all things else, to perfecting the virtues of humility and obedience. The novice is obliged to perform the lowest menial offices, and the most repulsive duties of the sick-room and the hospital; and he is sent forth, for weeks together, to beg his bread like a common mendicant. He is required to reveal to his confessor, not only his sins, but all those hidden tendencies, instincts, and impulses which form the distinctive traits of character. He is set to watch his comrades, and his comrades are set to watch him. Each must report what he observes of the acts and dispositions of the others; and this mutual espionage does not end with the novitiate, but extends to the close of life. The characteristics of every member of the Order are minutely analyzed, and methodically put on record. This horrible violence to the noblest qualities of manhood, joined to that equivocal system of morality which eminent casuists of the Order have inculcated, must, it may be thought, produce deplorable effects upon the characters of those under its influence. Whether this has been actually the case, the reader of history may determine. It is certain, however, that the Society of Jesus has numbered among its members men whose fervent 12 and exalted natures have been intensified, without being abased, by the pressure to which they have been subjected. It is not for nothing that the Society studies the character of its members so intently, and by methods so startling. It not only uses its knowledge to thrust into obscurity or cast out altogether those whom it discovers to be dull, feeble, or unwilling instruments of its purposes, but it assigns to every one the task to which his talents or his disposition may best adapt him: to one, the care of a royal conscience, whereby, unseen, his whispered word may guide the destiny of nations; to another, the instruction of children; to another, a career of letters or science; and to the fervent and the self-sacrificing, sometimes also to the restless and uncompliant, the distant missions to the heathen. The Jesuit was, and is, everywhere,—in the school-room, in the library, in the cabinets of princes and ministers, in the huts of savages, in the tropics, in the frozen North, in India, in China, in Japan, in Africa, in America; now as a Christian priest, now as a soldier, a mathematician, an astrologer, a Brahmin, a mandarin, under countless disguises, by a thousand arts, luring, persuading, or compelling souls into the fold of Rome. Of this vast mechanism for guiding and governing the minds of men, this mighty enginery for subduing the earth to the dominion of an idea, this harmony of contradictions, this moral Proteus, the faintest sketch must now suffice. A disquisition on the Society of Jesus would be without end. 13 No religious order has ever united in itself so much to be admired and so much to be detested. Unmixed praise has been poured on its Canadian members. It is not for me to eulogize them, but to portray them as they were. CHAPTER III. 1632, 1633. PAUL LE JEUNE. Le Jeune's Voyage ? His First Pupils ? His Studies ? His Indian Teacher ? Winter at the Mission-House ? Le Jeune's School ? Reinforcements In another narrative, we have seen how the Jesuits, supplanting the Récollet friars, their predecessors, had adopted as their own the rugged task of Christianizing New France. We have seen, too, how a descent of the English, or rather of Huguenots fighting under English colors, had overthrown for a time the miserable little colony, with the mission to which it was wedded; and how Quebec was at length restored to France, and the broken thread of the Jesuit enterprise resumed. [1] [1] "Pioneers of France." It was then that Le Jeune had embarked for the New World. He was in his convent at Dieppe when he received the order to depart; and he set forth in haste for Havre, filled, he assures us, with inexpressible joy at the prospect of a living or a dying martyrdom. At Rouen he was joined by De Nou?, with a lay brother named Gilbert; and 15 the three sailed together on the eighteenth of April, 1632. The sea treated them roughly; Le Jeune was wretchedly sea-sick; and the ship nearly foundered in a gale. At length they came in sight of "that miserable country," as the missionary calls the scene of his future labors. It was in the harbor of Tadoussac that he first encountered the objects of his apostolic cares; for, as he sat in the ship's cabin with the master, it was suddenly invaded by ten or twelve Indians, whom he compares to a party of maskers at the Carnival. Some had their cheeks painted black, their noses blue, and the rest of their faces red. Others were decorated with a broad band of black across the eyes; and others, again, with diverging rays of black, red, and blue on both cheeks. Their attire was no less uncouth. Some of them wore shaggy bear-skins, reminding the priest of the pictures of St. John the Baptist. After a vain attempt to save a number of Iroquois prisoners whom they were preparing to burn alive on shore, Le Jeune and his companions again set sail, and reached Quebec on the fifth of July. Having said mass, as already mentioned, under the roof of Madame Hébert and her delighted family, the Jesuits made their way to the two hovels built by their predecessors on the St. Charles, which had suffered woful dilapidation at the hands of the English. Here they made their abode, and applied themselves, with such skill as they could command, to repair the shattered tenements and cultivate the waste meadows around. 16 The beginning of Le Jeune's missionary labors was neither imposing nor promising. He describes himself seated with a small Indian boy on one side and a small negro on the other, the latter of whom had been left by the English as a gift to Madame Hébert. As neither of the three understood the language of the others, the pupils made little progress in spiritual knowledge. The missionaries, it was clear, must learn Algonquin at any cost; and, to this end, Le Jeune resolved to visit the Indian encampments. Hearing that a band of Montagnais were fishing for eels on the St. Lawrence, between Cape Diamond and the cove which now bears the name of Wolfe, he set forth for the spot on a morning in October. As, with toil and trepidation, he scrambled around the foot of the cape,—whose precipices, with a chaos of loose rocks, thrust themselves at that day into the deep tidewater,—he dragged down upon himself the trunk of a fallen tree, which, in its descent, well nigh swept him into the river. The peril past, he presently reached his destination. Here, among the lodges of bark, were stretched innumerable strings of hide, from which hung to dry an incredible multitude of eels. A boy invited him into the lodge of a withered squaw, his grandmother, who hastened to offer him four smoked eels on a piece of birch bark, while other squaws of the household instructed him how to roast them on a forked stick over the embers. All shared the feast together, his entertainers using as napkins their own hair or that of their dogs; while Le Jeune, intent on 17 increasing his knowledge of Algonquin, maintained an active discourse of broken words and pantomime. [2] [2] Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 2. The lesson, however, was too laborious, and of too little profit, to be often repeated, and the missionary sought anxiously for more stable instruction. To find such was not easy. The interpreters—Frenchmen, who, in the interest of the fur company, had spent years among the Indians—were averse to Jesuits, and refused their aid. There was one resource, however, of which Le Jeune would fain avail himself. An Indian, called Pierre by the French, had been carried to France by the Récollet friars, instructed, converted, and baptized. He had lately returned to Canada, where, to the scandal of the Jesuits, he had relapsed into his old ways, retaining of his French education little besides a few new vices. He still haunted the fort at Quebec, lured by the hope of an occasional gift of wine or tobacco, but shunned the Jesuits, of whose rigid way of life he stood in horror. As he spoke good French and good Indian, he would have been invaluable to the embarrassed priests at the mission. Le Jeune invoked the aid of the Saints. The effect of his prayers soon appeared, he tells us, in a direct interposition of Providence, which so disposed the heart of Pierre that he quarrelled with the French commandant, who thereupon closed the fort against him. He then repaired to his friends and relatives in the woods, but only to encounter a rebuff from a young squaw to whom 18 he made his addresses. On this, he turned his steps towards the mission-house, and, being unfitted by his French education for supporting himself by hunting, begged food and shelter from the priests. Le Jeune gratefully accepted him as a gift vouchsafed by Heaven to his prayers, persuaded a lackey at the fort to give him a cast-off suit of clothes, promised him maintenance, and installed him as his teacher. Seated on wooden stools by the rough table in the refectory, the priest and the Indian pursued their studies. "How thankful I am," writes Le Jeune, "to those who gave me tobacco last year! At every difficulty I give my master a piece of it, to make him more attentive." [3] [3] Relation, 1633, 7. He continues: "Ie ne s?aurois assez rendre graces à Nostre Seigneur de cet heureux rencontre.… Que Dieu soit beny pour vn iamais, sa prouidence est adorable, et sa bonté n'a point de limites" Meanwhile, winter closed in with a severity rare even in Canada. The St. Lawrence and the St. Charles were hard frozen; rivers, forests, and rocks were mantled alike in dazzling sheets of snow. The humble mission-house of Notre-Dame des Anges was half buried in the drifts, which, heaped up in front where a path had been dug through them, rose two feet above the low eaves. The priests, sitting at night before the blazing logs of their wide-throated chimney, heard the trees in the neighboring forest cracking with frost, with a sound like the report of a pistol. Le Jeune's ink froze, and his fingers were benumbed, as he toiled at his declensions and conjugations, 19 or translated the Pater Noster into blundering Algonquin. The water in the cask beside the fire froze nightly, and the ice was broken every morning with hatchets. The blankets of the two priests were fringed with the icicles of their congealed breath, and the frost lay in a thick coating on the lozenge-shaped glass of their cells. [4] [4] Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 14, 15. By day, Le Jeune and his companion practised with snow-shoes, with all the mishaps which attend beginners,—the trippings, the falls, and headlong dives into the soft drifts, amid the laughter of the Indians. Their seclusion was by no means a solitude. Bands of Montagnais, with their sledges and dogs, often passed the mission-house on their way to hunt the moose. They once invited De Nou? to go with them; and he, scarcely less eager than Le Jeune to learn their language, readily consented. In two or three weeks he appeared, sick, famished, and half dead with exhaustion. "Not ten priests in a hundred," writes Le Jeune to his Superior, "could bear this winter life with the savages." But what of that? It was not for them to falter. They were but instruments in the hands of God, to be used, broken, and thrown aside, if such should be His will. [5] [5] "Voila, mon Reuerend Pere, vn eschantillon de ce qu'il faut souffrir courant apres les Sauuages.… Il faut prendre sa vie, et tout ce qu'on a, et le ietter à l'abandon, pour ainsi dire, se contentant d'vne croix bien grosse et bien pesante pour toute richesse. Il est bien vray que Dieu ne se laisse point vaincre, et que plus on quitte, plus on trouue: plus on perd, plus on gaigne: mais Dieu se cache par fois, et alors le Calice est bien amer."—Le Jeune, Relation 1633, 19. An Indian made Le Jeune a present of two small 20 children, greatly to the delight of the missionary, who at once set himself to teaching them to pray in Latin. As the season grew milder, the number of his scholars increased; for, when parties of Indians encamped in the neighborhood, he would take his stand at the door, and, like Xavier at Goa, ring a bell. At this, a score of children would gather around him; and he, leading them into the refectory, which served as his school-room, taught them to repeat after him the Pater, Ave, and Credo, expounded the mystery of the Trinity, showed them the sign of the cross, and made them repeat an Indian prayer, the joint composition of Pierre and himself; then followed the catechism, the lesson closing with singing the Pater Noster, translated by the missionary into Algonquin rhymes; and when all was over, he rewarded each of his pupils with a porringer of peas, to insure their attendance at his next bell-ringing. [6] [6] "I'ay commencé à appeller quelques enfans auec vne petite clochette. La premiere fois i'en auois six, puis douze, puis quinze, puis vingt et davantage; ie leur fais dire le Pater, Aue, et Credo, etc. … Nous finissons par le Pater Noster, que i'ay composé quasi en rimes en leur langue, que ie leur fais chanter: et pour derniere conclusion, ie leur fais donner chacun vne escuellée de pois, qu'ils mangent de bon appetit," etc.—Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 23. It was the end of May, when the priests one morning heard the sound of cannon from the fort, and were gladdened by the tidings that Samuel de Champlain had arrived to resume command at Quebec, bringing with him four more Jesuits,—Brébeuf, Masse, Daniel, and Davost. [7] Brébeuf, 21 from the first, turned his eyes towards the distant land of the Hurons,—a field of labor full of peril, but rich in hope and promise. Le Jeune's duties as Superior restrained him from wanderings so remote. His apostleship must be limited, for a time, to the vagabond hordes of Algonquins, who roamed the forests of the lower St. Lawrence, and of whose language he had been so sedulous a student. His difficulties had of late been increased by the absence of Pierre, who had run off as Lent drew near, standing in dread of that season of fasting. Masse brought tidings of him from Tadoussac, whither he had gone, and where a party of English had given him liquor, destroying the last trace of Le Jeune's late exhortations. "God forgive those," writes the Father, "who introduced heresy into this country! If this savage, corrupted as he is by these miserable heretics, had any wit, he would be a great hindrance to the spread of the Faith. It is plain that he was given us, not for the good of his soul, but only that we might extract from him the principles of his language." [8] [7] See "Pioneers of France." [8] Relation, 1633, 29. Pierre had two brothers. One, well known as a hunter, was named Mestigoit; the other was the most noted "medicine-man," or, as the Jesuits called him, sorcerer, in the tribe of the Montagnais. Like the rest of their people, they were accustomed to set out for their winter hunt in the autumn, after the close of their eel-fishery. Le Jeune, despite the experience of De Nou?, had long had a mind to accompany one of these roving bands, partly in the 22 hope, that, in some hour of distress, he might touch their hearts, or, by a timely drop of baptismal water, dismiss some dying child to paradise, but chiefly with the object of mastering their language. Pierre had rejoined his brothers; and, as the hunting season drew near, they all begged the missionary to make one of their party,—not, as he thought, out of any love for him, but solely with a view to the provisions with which they doubted not he would be well supplied. Le Jeune, distrustful of the sorcerer, demurred, but at length resolved to go. CHAPTER IV. 1633, 1634. LE JEUNE AND THE HUNTERS. Le Jeune joins the Indians ? The First Encampment ? The Apostate ? Forest Life in Winter ? The Indian Hut ? The Sorcerer ? His Persecution of the Priest ? Evil Company ? Magic ? Incantations ? Christmas ? Starvation ? Hopes of Conversion ? Backsliding ? Peril and Escape of Le Jeune ? His Return On a morning in the latter part of October, Le Jeune embarked with the Indians, twenty in all, men, women, and children. No other Frenchman was of the party. Champlain bade him an anxious farewell, and commended him to the care of his red associates, who had taken charge of his store of biscuit, flour, corn, prunes, and turnips, to which, in an evil hour, his friends had persuaded him to add a small keg of wine. The canoes glided along the wooded shore of the Island of Orleans, and the party landed, towards evening, on the small island immediately below. Le Jeune was delighted with the spot, and the wild beauties of the autumnal sunset. His reflections, however, were soon interrupted. While the squaws were setting up their bark lodges, 24 and Mestigoit was shooting wild-fowl for supper, Pierre returned to the canoes, tapped the keg of wine, and soon fell into the mud, helplessly drunk. Revived by the immersion, he next appeared at the camp, foaming at the mouth, threw down the lodges, overset the kettle, and chased the shrieking squaws into the woods. His brother Mestigoit rekindled the fire, and slung the kettle anew; when Pierre, who meanwhile had been raving like a madman along the shore, reeled in a fury to the spot to repeat his former exploit. Mestigoit anticipated him, snatched the kettle from the fire, and threw the scalding contents in his face. "He was never so well washed before in his life," says Le Jeune; "he lost all the skin of his face and breast. Would to God his heart had changed also!" [1] He roared in his frenzy for a hatchet to kill the missionary, who therefore thought it prudent to spend the night in the neighboring woods. Here he stretched himself on the earth, while a charitable squaw covered him with a sheet of birch-bark. "Though my bed," he writes, "had not been made up since the creation of the world, it was not hard enough to prevent me from sleeping." [1] "Iamais il ne fut si bien laué, il changea de peau en la face et en tout l'estomach: pleust à Dieu que son ame eust changé aussi bien que son corps!"—Relation, 1634, 59. Such was his initiation into Indian winter life. Passing over numerous adventures by water and land, we find the party, on the twelfth of November, leaving their canoes on an island, and wading 25 ashore at low tide over the flats to the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. As two other bands had joined them, their number was increased to forty-five persons. Now, leaving the river behind, they entered those savage highlands whence issue the springs of the St. John,—a wilderness of rugged mountain-ranges, clad in dense, continuous forests, with no human tenant but this troop of miserable rovers, and here and there some kindred band, as miserable as they. Winter had set in, and already dead Nature was sheeted in funereal white. Lakes and ponds were frozen, rivulets sealed up, torrents encased with stalactites of ice; the black rocks and the black trunks of the pine-trees were beplastered with snow, and its heavy masses crushed the dull green boughs into the drifts beneath. The forest was silent as the grave. Through this desolation the long file of Indians made its way, all on snow-shoes, each man, woman, and child bending under a heavy load, or dragging a sledge, narrow, but of prodigious length. They carried their whole wealth with them, on their backs or on their sledges,—kettles, axes, bales of meat, if such they had, and huge rolls of birch-bark for covering their wigwams. The Jesuit was loaded like the rest. The dogs alone floundered through the drifts unburdened. There was neither path nor level ground. Descending, climbing, stooping beneath half-fallen trees, clambering over piles of prostrate trunks, struggling through matted cedar-swamps, threading chill ravines, 26 and crossing streams no longer visible, they toiled on till the day began to decline, then stopped to encamp. [2] Burdens were thrown down, and sledges unladen. The squaws, with knives and hatchets, cut long poles of birch and spruce saplings; while the men, with snow-shoes for shovels, cleared a round or square space in the snow, which formed an upright wall three or four feet high, inclosing the area of the wigwam. On one side, a passage was cut for an entrance, and the poles were planted around the top of the wall of snow, sloping and converging. On these poles were spread the sheets of birch-bark; a bear-skin was hung in the passage-way for a door; the bare ground within and the surrounding snow were covered with spruce boughs; and the work was done. [2] "S'il arriuoit quelque dégel, ? Dieu quelle peine! Il me sembloit que ie marchois sur vn chemin de verre qui se cassoit à tous coups soubs mes pieds: la neige congelée venant à s'amollir, tomboit et s'enfon?oit par esquarres ou grandes pieces, et nous en auions bien souuent iusques aux genoux, quelquefois iusqu'à la ceinture Que s'il y auoit de la peine à tomber, il y en auoit encor plus à se retirer: car nos raquettes se chargeoient de neiges et se rendoient si pesantes, que quand vous veniez à les retirer il vous sembloit qu'on vous tiroit les iambes pour vous démembrer. I'en ay veu qui glissoient tellement soubs des souches enseuelies soubs la neige, qu'ils ne pouuoient tirer ny iambes ny raquettes sans secours: or figurez vous maintenant vne personne chargée comme vn mulet, et iugez si la vie des Sauuages est douce."—Relation, 1634, 67. This usually occupied about three hours, during which Le Jeune, spent with travel, and weakened by precarious and unaccustomed fare, had the choice of shivering in idleness, or taking part in a labor which fatigued, without warming, his exhausted frame. The sorcerer's wife was in far 27 worse case. Though in the extremity of a mortal sickness, they left her lying in the snow till the wigwam was made,—without a word, on her part, of remonstrance or complaint. Le Jeune, to the great ire of her husband, sometimes spent the interval in trying to convert her; but she proved intractable, and soon died unbaptized. Thus lodged, they remained so long as game could be found within a circuit of ten or twelve miles, and then, subsistence failing, removed to another spot. Early in the winter, they hunted the beaver and the Canada porcupine; and, later, in the season of deep snows, chased the moose and the caribou. Put aside the bear-skin, and enter the hut. Here, in a space some thirteen feet square, were packed nineteen savages, men, women, and children, with their dogs, crouched, squatted, coiled like hedgehogs, or lying on their backs, with knees drawn up perpendicularly to keep their feet out of the fire. Le Jeune, always methodical, arranges the grievances inseparable from these rough quarters under four chief heads,—Cold, Heat, Smoke, and Dogs. The bark covering was full of crevices, through which the icy blasts streamed in upon him from all sides; and the hole above, at once window and chimney, was so large, that, as he lay, he could watch the stars as well as in the open air. While the fire in the midst, fed with fat pine-knots, scorched him on one side, on the other he had much ado to keep himself from freezing. At times, however, the crowded hut seemed heated 28 to the temperature of an oven. But these evils were light, when compared to the intolerable plague of smoke. During a snow-storm, and often at other times, the wigwam was filled with fumes so dense, stifling, and acrid, that all its inmates were forced to lie flat on their faces, breathing through mouths in contact with the cold earth. Their throats and nostrils felt as if on fire; their scorched eyes streamed with tears; and when Le Jeune tried to read, the letters of his breviary seemed printed in blood. The dogs were not an unmixed evil, for, by sleeping on and around him, they kept him warm at night; but, as an offset to this good service, they walked, ran, and jumped over him as he lay, snatched the food from his birchen dish, or, in a mad rush at some bone or discarded morsel, now and then overset both dish and missionary. Sometimes of an evening he would leave the filthy den, to read his breviary in peace by the light of the moon. In the forest around sounded the sharp crack of frost-riven trees; and from the horizon to the zenith shot up the silent meteors of the northern lights, in whose fitful flashings the awe-struck Indians beheld the dancing of the spirits of the dead. The cold gnawed him to the bone; and, his devotions over, he turned back shivering. The illumined hut, from many a chink and crevice, shot forth into the gloom long streams of light athwart the twisted boughs. He stooped and entered. All within glowed red and fiery around the blazing pine-knots, where, like brutes in their kennel, 29 were gathered the savage crew. He stepped to his place, over recumbent bodies and leggined and moccasined limbs, and seated himself on the carpet of spruce boughs. Here a tribulation awaited him, the crowning misery of his winter-quarters,—worse, as he declares, than cold, heat, and dogs. Of the three brothers who had invited him to join the party, one, we have seen, was the hunter, Mestigoit; another, the sorcerer; and the third, Pierre, whom, by reason of his falling away from the Faith, Le Jeune always mentions as the Apostate. He was a weak-minded young Indian, wholly under the influence of his brother, the sorcerer, who, if not more vicious, was far more resolute and wily. From the antagonism of their respective professions, the sorcerer hated the priest, who lost no opportunity of denouncing his incantations, and who ridiculed his perpetual singing and drumming as puerility and folly. The former, being an indifferent hunter, and disabled by a disease which he had contracted, depended for subsistence on his credit as a magician; and, in undermining it, Le Jeune not only outraged his pride, but threatened his daily bread. [3] He used every device to retort ridicule on his rival. At the outset, he had proffered 30 his aid to Le Jeune in his study of the Algonquin; and, like the Indian practical jokers of Acadia in the case of Father Biard, [4] palmed off upon him the foulest words in the language as the equivalent of things spiritual. Thus it happened, that, while the missionary sought to explain to the assembled wigwam some point of Christian doctrine, he was interrupted by peals of laughter from men, children, and squaws. And now, as Le Jeune took his place in the circle, the sorcerer bent upon him his malignant eyes, and began that course of rude bantering which filled to overflowing the cup of the Jesuit's woes. All took their cue from him, and made their afflicted guest the butt of their inane witticisms. "Look at him! His face is like a dog's!"—"His head is like a pumpkin!"—"He has a beard like a rabbit's!" The missionary bore in silence these and countless similar attacks; indeed, so sorely was he harassed, that, lest he should exasperate his tormentor, he sometimes passed whole days without uttering a word. [5] [3] "Ie ne laissois perdre aucune occasion de le conuaincre de niaiserie et de puerilité, mettant au iour l'impertinence de ses superstitions: or c'estoit luy arracher l'ame du corps par violence: car comme il ne s?auroit plus chasser, il fait plus que iamais du Prophete et du Magicien pour conseruer son credit, et pour auoir les bons morceaux; si bien qu'esbranlant son authorité qui se va perdant tous les iours, ie le touchois à la prunelle de l'?il."—Relation, 1634, 56. [4] See "Pioneers of France," 268. [5] Relation, 1634, 207 (Cramoisy). "Ils me chargeoient incessament de mille brocards & de mille injures; je me suis veu en tel estat, que pour ne les aigrir, je passois les jours entiers sans ouvrir la bouche." Here follows the abuse, in the original Indian, with French translations. Le Jeune's account of his experiences is singularly graphic. The following is his summary of his annoyances:— "Or ce miserable homme" (the sorcerer), "& la fumée m'ont esté les deux plus grands tourmens que i'aye enduré parmy ces Barbares: ny le froid, ny le chaud, ny l'incommodité des chiens, ny coucher à l'air, ny dormir sur un lict de terre, ny la posture qu'il faut tousiours tenir dans leurs cabanes, se ramassans en peloton, ou se couchans, ou s'asseans sans siege & sans mattelas, ny la faim, ny la soif, ny la pauureté & saleté de leur boucan, ny la maladie, tout cela ne m'a semblé que ieu à comparaison de la fumeé & de la malice du Sorcier."—Relation, 1634, 201 (Cramoisy). Le Jeune, a man of excellent observation, already knew his red associates well enough to understand that their rudeness did not of necessity 31 imply ill-will. The rest of the party, in their turn, fared no better. They rallied and bantered each other incessantly, with as little forbearance, and as little malice, as a troop of unbridled schoolboys. [6] No one took offence. To have done so would have been to bring upon one's self genuine contumely. This motley household was a model of harmony. True, they showed no tenderness or consideration towards the sick and disabled; but for the rest, each shared with all in weal or woe: the famine of one was the famine of the whole, and the smallest portion of food was distributed in fair and equal partition. Upbraidings and complaints were unheard; they bore each other's foibles with wondrous equanimity; and while persecuting Le Jeune with constant importunity for tobacco, and for everything else he had, they never begged among themselves. [6] "Leur vie se passe à manger, à rire, et à railler les vns des autres, et de tous les peuples qu'ils cognoissent; ils n'ont rien de serieux, sinon par fois l'exterieur, faisans parmy nous les graues et les retenus, mais entr'eux sont de vrais badins, de vrais enfans, qui ne demandent qu'à rire."—Relation, 1634, 30. When the fire burned well and food was abundant, their conversation, such as it was, was incessant. They used no oaths, for their language supplied none,—doubtless because their mythology had no beings sufficiently distinct to swear by. Their expletives were foul words, of which they 32 had a superabundance, and which men, women, and children alike used with a frequency and hardihood that amazed and scandalized the priest. [7] Nor was he better pleased with their postures, in which they consulted nothing but their ease. Thus, of an evening when the wigwam was heated to suffocation, the sorcerer, in the closest possible approach to nudity, lay on his back, with his right knee planted upright and his left leg crossed on it, discoursing volubly to the company, who, on their part, listened in postures scarcely less remote from decency. [7] "Aussi leur disois-je par fois, que si les pourceaux et les chiens s?auoient parler, ils tiendroient leur langage.… Les filles et les ieunes femmes sont à l'exterieur tres honnestement couuertes, mais entre elles leurs discours sont puants, comme des cloaques."—Relation, 1634, 32.—The social manners of remote tribes of the present time correspond perfectly with Le Jeune's account of those of the Montagnais. There was one point touching which Le Jeune and his Jesuit brethren had as yet been unable to solve their doubts. Were the Indian sorcerers mere impostors, or were they in actual league with the Devil? That the fiends who possess this land of darkness make their power felt by action direct and potential upon the persons of its wretched inhabitants there is, argues Le Jeune, good reason to conclude; since it is a matter of grave notoriety, that the fiends who infest Brazil are accustomed cruelly to beat and otherwise torment the natives of that country, as many travellers attest. "A Frenchman worthy of credit," pursues the Father, "has told me that he has heard with his own ears the voice of the Demon and the sound of the blows 33 which he discharges upon these his miserable slaves; and in reference to this a very remarkable fact has been reported to me, namely, that, when a Catholic approaches, the Devil takes flight and beats these wretches no longer, but that in presence of a Huguenot he does not stop beating them." [8] [8] "Surquoy on me rapporte vne chose tres remarquable, c'est que le Diable s'enfuit, et ne frappe point ou cesse de frapper ces miserables, quand vn Catholique entre en leur compagnie, et qu'il ne laiss point de les battre en la presence d'vn Huguenot: d'où vient qu'vn iour se voyans battus en la compagnie d'vn certain Fran?ois, ils luy dirent: Nous nous estonnons que le diable nous batte, toy estant auec nous, veu qu'il n'oseroit le faire quand tes compagnons sont presents. Luy se douta incontinent que cela pouuoit prouenir de sa religion (car il estoit Caluiniste); s'addressant donc à Dieu, il luy promit de se faire Catholique si le diable cessoit de battre ces pauures peuples en sa presence. Le v?u fait, iamais plus aucun Demon ne molesta Ameriquain en sa compagnie, d'où vient qu'il se fit Catholique, selon la promesse qu'il en auoit faicte. Mais retournons à nostre discours."—Relation, 1634, 22. Thus prone to believe in the immediate presence of the nether powers, Le Jeune watched the sorcerer with an eye prepared to discover in his conjurations the signs of a genuine diabolic agency. His observations, however, led him to a different result; and he could detect in his rival nothing but a vile compound of impostor and dupe. The sorcerer believed in the efficacy of his own magic, and was continually singing and beating his drum to cure the disease from which he was suffering. Towards the close of the winter, Le Jeune fell sick, and, in his pain and weakness, nearly succumbed under the nocturnal uproar of the sorcerer, who, hour after hour, sang and drummed without mercy,—sometimes yelling at the top of his throat, 34 then hissing like a serpent, then striking his drum on the ground as if in a frenzy, then leaping up, raving about the wigwam, and calling on the women and children to join him in singing. Now ensued a hideous din; for every throat was strained to the utmost, and all were beating with sticks or fists on the bark of the hut to increase the noise, with the charitable object of aiding the sorcerer to conjure down his malady, or drive away the evil spirit that caused it. He had an enemy, a rival sorcerer, whom he charged with having caused by charms the disease that afflicted him. He therefore announced that he should kill him. As the rival dwelt at Gaspé, a hundred leagues off, the present execution of the threat might appear difficult; but distance was no bar to the vengeance of the sorcerer. Ordering all the children and all but one of the women to leave the wigwam, he seated himself, with the woman who remained, on the ground in the centre, while the men of the party, together with those from other wigwams in the neighborhood, sat in a ring around. Mestigoit, the sorcerer's brother, then brought in the charm, consisting of a few small pieces of wood, some arrow-heads, a broken knife, and an iron hook, which he wrapped in a piece of hide. The woman next rose, and walked around the hut, behind the company. Mestigoit and the sorcerer now dug a large hole with two pointed stakes, the whole assembly singing, drumming, and howling meanwhile with a deafening uproar. The hole made, the charm, 35 wrapped in the hide, was thrown into it. Pierre, the Apostate, then brought a sword and a knife to the sorcerer, who, seizing them, leaped into the hole, and, with furious gesticulation, hacked and stabbed at the charm, yelling with the whole force of his lungs. At length he ceased, displayed the knife and sword stained with blood, proclaimed that he had mortally wounded his enemy, and demanded if none present had heard his death-cry. The assembly, more occupied in making noises than in listening for them, gave no reply, till at length two young men declared that they had heard a faint scream, as if from a great distance; whereat a shout of gratulation and triumph rose from all the company. [9] [9] "Le magicien tout glorieux dit que son homme est frappé, qu'il mourra bien tost, demande si on n'a point entendu ses cris: tout le monde dit que non, horsmis deux ieunes hommes ses parens, qui disent auoir ouy des plaintes fort sourdes, et comme de loing. O qu'ils le firent aise! Se tournant vers moy, il se mit à rire, disant: Voyez cette robe noire, qui nous vient dire qu'il ne faut tuer personne. Comme ie regardois attentiuement l'espée et le poignard, il me les fit presenter: Regarde, dit-il, qu'est cela? C'est du sang, repartis-ie. De qui? De quelque Orignac ou d'autre animal. Ils se mocquerent de moy, disants que c'estoit du sang de ce Sorcier de Gaspé. Comment, dis-je, il est à plus de cent lieu?s d'icy? Il est vray, font-ils, mais c'est le Manitou, c'est à dire le Diable, qui apporte son sang pardessous la terre."—Relation, 1634, 21. There was a young prophet, or diviner, in one of the neighboring huts, of whom the sorcerer took counsel as to the prospect of his restoration to health. The divining-lodge was formed, in this instance, of five or six upright posts planted in a circle and covered with a blanket. The prophet ensconced himself within; and after a long interval 36 of singing, the spirits declared their presence by their usual squeaking utterances from the recesses of the mystic tabernacle. Their responses were not unfavorable; and the sorcerer drew much consolation from the invocations of his brother impostor. [10] [10] See Introduction. Also, "Pioneers of France," 315. Besides his incessant endeavors to annoy Le Jeune, the sorcerer now and then tried to frighten him. On one occasion, when a period of starvation had been followed by a successful hunt, the whole party assembled for one of the gluttonous feasts usual with them at such times. While the guests sat expectant, and the squaws were about to ladle out the banquet, the sorcerer suddenly leaped up, exclaiming, that he had lost his senses, and that knives and hatchets must be kept out of his way, as he had a mind to kill somebody. Then, rolling his eyes towards Le Jeune, he began a series of frantic gestures and outcries,—then stopped abruptly and stared into vacancy, silent and motionless,—then resumed his former clamor, raged in and out of the hut, and, seizing some of its supporting poles, broke them, as if in an uncontrollable frenzy. The missionary, though alarmed, sat reading his breviary as before. When, however, on the next morning, the sorcerer began again to play the maniac, the thought occurred to him, that some stroke of fever might in truth have touched his brain. Accordingly, he approached him and felt his pulse, which he found, in his own words, "as cool as a fish." The pretended madman 37 looked at him with astonishment, and, giving over the attempt to frighten him, presently returned to his senses. [11] [11] The Indians, it is well known, ascribe mysterious and supernatural powers to the insane, and respect them accordingly. The Neutral Nation (see Introduction, (p. xliv)) was full of pretended madmen, who raved about the villages, throwing firebrands, and making other displays of frenzy. Le Jeune, robbed of his sleep by the ceaseless thumping of the sorcerer's drum and the monotonous cadence of his medicine-songs, improved the time in attempts to convert him. "I began," he says, "by evincing a great love for him, and by praises, which I threw to him as a bait whereby I might catch him in the net of truth." [12] But the Indian, though pleased with the Father's flatteries, was neither caught nor conciliated. [12] "Ie commen?ay par vn témoignage de grand amour en son endroit, et par des loüanges que ie luy iettay comme vne amorce pour le prendre dans les filets de la verité. Ie luy fis entendre que si vn esprit, capable des choses grandes comme le sien, cognoissoit Dieu, que tous les Sauuages induis par son exemple le voudroient aussi cognoistre."—Relation, 1634, 71. Nowhere was his magic in more requisition than in procuring a successful chase to the hunters,—a point of vital interest, since on it hung the lives of the whole party. They often, however, returned empty-handed; and, for one, two, or three successive days, no other food could be had than the bark of trees or scraps of leather. So long as tobacco lasted, they found solace in their pipes, which seldom left their lips. "Unhappy infidels," writes Le Jeune, "who spend their lives in smoke, and their eternity in flames!" As Christmas approached, their condition grew 38 desperate. Beavers and porcupines were scarce, and the snow was not deep enough for hunting the moose. Night and day the medicine-drums and medicine-songs resounded from the wigwams, mingled with the wail of starving children. The hunters grew weak and emaciated; and, as after a forlorn march the wanderers encamped once more in the lifeless forest, the priest remembered that it was the eve of Christmas. "The Lord gave us for our supper a porcupine, large as a sucking pig, and also a rabbit. It was not much, it is true, for eighteen or nineteen persons; but the Holy Virgin and St. Joseph, her glorious spouse, were not so well treated, on this very day, in the stable of Bethlehem." [13] [13] "Pour nostre souper, N. S. nous donna vn Porc-espic gros comme vn cochon de lait, et vn liéure; c'estoit peu pour dix-huit ou vingt personnes que nous estions, il est vray, mais la saincte Vierge et son glorieux Espoux sainct Ioseph ne furent pas si bien traictez à mesme iour dans l'estable de Bethleem."—Relation, 1634, 74. On Christmas Day, the despairing hunters, again unsuccessful, came to pray succor from Le Jeune. Even the Apostate had become tractable, and the famished sorcerer was ready to try the efficacy of an appeal to the deity of his rival. A bright hope possessed the missionary. He composed two prayers, which, with the aid of the repentant Pierre, he translated into Algonquin. Then he hung against the side of the hut a napkin which he had brought with him, and against the napkin a crucifix and a reliquary, and, this done, caused all the Indians to kneel before them, with hands raised and clasped. He now read one of the prayers, and 39 required the Indians to repeat the other after him, promising to renounce their superstitions, and obey Christ, whose image they saw before them, if he would give them food and save them from perishing. The pledge given, he dismissed the hunters with a benediction. At night they returned with game enough to relieve the immediate necessity. All was hilarity. The kettles were slung, and the feasters assembled. Le Jeune rose to speak, when Pierre, who, having killed nothing, was in ill humor, said, with a laugh, that the crucifix and the prayer had nothing to do with their good luck; while the sorcerer, his jealousy reviving as he saw his hunger about to be appeased, called out to the missionary, "Hold your tongue! You have no sense!" As usual, all took their cue from him. They fell to their repast with ravenous jubilation, and the disappointed priest sat dejected and silent. Repeatedly, before the spring, they were thus threatened with starvation. Nor was their case exceptional. It was the ordinary winter life of all those Northern tribes who did not till the soil, but lived by hunting and fishing alone. The desertion or the killing of the aged, sick, and disabled, occasional cannibalism, and frequent death from famine, were natural incidents of an existence which, during half the year, was but a desperate pursuit of the mere necessaries of life under the worst conditions of hardship, suffering, and debasement. At the beginning of April, after roaming for five months among forests and mountains, the party 40 made their last march, regained the bank of the St. Lawrence, and waded to the island where they had hidden their canoes. Le Jeune was exhausted and sick, and Mestigoit offered to carry him in his canoe to Quebec. This Indian was by far the best of the three brothers, and both Pierre and the sorcerer looked to him for support. He was strong, active, and daring, a skilful hunter, and a dexterous canoeman. Le Jeune gladly accepted his offer; embarked with him and Pierre on the dreary and tempestuous river; and, after a voyage full of hardship, during which the canoe narrowly escaped being ground to atoms among the floating ice, landed on the Island of Orleans, six miles from Quebec. The afternoon was stormy and dark, and the river was covered with ice, sweeping by with the tide. They were forced to encamp. At midnight, the moon had risen, the river was comparatively unencumbered, and they embarked once more. The wind increased, and the waves tossed furiously. Nothing saved them but the skill and courage of Mestigoit. At length they could see the rock of Quebec towering through the gloom, but piles of ice lined the shore, while floating masses were drifting down on the angry current. The Indian watched his moment, shot his canoe through them, gained the fixed ice, leaped out, and shouted to his companions to follow. Pierre scrambled up, but the ice was six feet out of the water, and Le Jeune's agility failed him. He saved himself by clutching the ankle of Mestigoit, by whose aid he gained a firm foothold at the top, and, for a moment, 41 the three voyagers, aghast at the narrowness of their escape, stood gazing at each other in silence. It was three o'clock in the morning when Le Jeune knocked at the door of his rude little convent on the St. Charles; and the Fathers, springing in joyful haste from their slumbers, embraced their long absent Superior with ejaculations of praise and benediction. CHAPTER V. 1633, 1634. THE HURON MISSION. Plans of Conversion ? Aims and Motives ? Indian Diplomacy ? Hurons at Quebec ? Councils ? The Jesuit Chapel ? Le Borgne ? The Jesuits Thwarted ? Their Perseverance ? The Journey to the Hurons ? Jean de Brébeuf ? The Mission Begun Le Jeune had learned the difficulties of the Algonquin mission. To imagine that he recoiled or faltered would be an injustice to his Order; but on two points he had gained convictions: first, that little progress could be made in converting these wandering hordes till they could be settled in fixed abodes; and, secondly, that their scanty numbers, their geographical position, and their slight influence in the politics of the wilderness offered no flattering promise that their conversion would be fruitful in further triumphs of the Faith. It was to another quarter that the Jesuits looked most earnestly. By the vast lakes of the West dwelt numerous stationary populations, and particularly the Hurons, on the lake which bears 43 their name. Here was a hopeful basis of indefinite conquests; for, the Hurons won over, the Faith would spread in wider and wider circles, embracing, one by one, the kindred tribes,—the Tobacco Nation, the Neutrals, the Eries, and the Andastes. Nay, in His own time, God might lead into His fold even the potent and ferocious Iroquois. The way was pathless and long, by rock and torrent and the gloom of savage forests. The goal was more dreary yet. Toil, hardship, famine, filth, sickness, solitude, insult,—all that is most revolting to men nurtured among arts and letters, all that is most terrific to monastic credulity: such were the promise and the reality of the Huron mission. In the eyes of the Jesuits, the Huron country was the innermost stronghold of Satan, his castle and his donjon-keep. [1] All the weapons of his malice were prepared against the bold invader who should assail him in this, the heart of his ancient domain. Far from shrinking, the priest's zeal rose to tenfold ardor. He signed the cross, invoked St. Ignatius, St. Francis Xavier, or St. Francis Borgia, kissed his reliquary, said nine masses to the Virgin, and stood prompt to battle with all the hosts of Hell. [1] "Une des principales forteresses & comme un donjon des Demons."—Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1639, 100 (Cramoisy). A life sequestered from social intercourse, and remote from every prize which ambition holds worth the pursuit, or a lonely death, under forms, perhaps, the most appalling,—these were the missionaries' alternatives. Their maligners may taunt 44 them, if they will, with credulity, superstition, or a blind enthusiasm; but slander itself cannot accuse them of hypocrisy or ambition. Doubtless, in their propagandism, they were acting in concurrence with a mundane policy; but, for the present at least, this policy was rational and humane. They were promoting the ends of commerce and national expansion. The foundations of French dominion were to be laid deep in the heart and conscience of the savage. His stubborn neck was to be subdued to the "yoke of the Faith." The power of the priest established, that of the temporal ruler was secure. These sanguinary hordes, weaned from intestine strife, were to unite in a common allegiance to God and the King. Mingled with French traders and French settlers, softened by French manners, guided by French priests, ruled by French officers, their now divided bands would become the constituents of a vast wilderness empire, which in time might span the continent. Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him. Policy and commerce, then, built their hopes on the priests. These commissioned interpreters of the Divine Will, accredited with letters patent from Heaven, and affiliated to God's anointed on earth, would have pushed to its most unqualified application the Scripture metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep. They would have tamed the wild man of the woods to a condition of obedience, unquestioning, 45 passive, and absolute,—repugnant to manhood, and adverse to the invigorating and expansive spirit of modern civilization. Yet, full of error and full of danger as was their system, they embraced its serene and smiling falsehoods with the sincerity of martyrs and the self-devotion of saints. We have spoken already of the Hurons, of their populous villages on the borders of the great "Fresh Sea," their trade, their rude agriculture, their social life, their wild and incongruous superstitions, and the sorcerers, diviners, and medicine-men who lived on their credulity. [2] Iroquois hostility left open but one avenue to their country, the long and circuitous route which, eighteen years before, had been explored by Champlain, [3]—up the river Ottawa, across Lake Nipissing, down French River, and along the shores of the great Georgian Bay of Lake Huron,—a route as difficult as it was tedious. Midway, on Allumette Island, in the Ottawa, dwelt the Algonquin tribe visited by Champlain in 1613, and who, amazed at the apparition of the white stranger, thought that he had fallen from the clouds. [4] Like other tribes of this region, they were keen traders, and would gladly have secured for themselves the benefits of an intermediate traffic between the Hurons and the French, receiving the furs of the former in barter at a low rate, and exchanging them with the latter at their full value. From their position, they 46 could at any time close the passage of the Ottawa; but, as this would have been a perilous exercise of their rights, [5] they were forced to act with discretion. An opportunity for the practice of their diplomacy had lately occurred. On or near the Ottawa, at some distance below them, dwelt a small Algonquin tribe, called La Petite Nation. One of this people had lately killed a Frenchman, and the murderer was now in the hands of Champlain, a prisoner at the fort of Quebec. The savage politicians of Allumette Island contrived, as will soon be seen, to turn this incident to profit. [2] See Introduction. [3] "Pioneers of France," 364. [4] Ibid., 348. [5] Nevertheless, the Hurons always passed this way as a matter of favor, and gave yearly presents to the Algonquins of the island, in acknowledgment of the privilege—Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 70.—By the unwritten laws of the Hurons and Algonquins, every tribe had the right, even in full peace, of prohibiting the passage of every other tribe across its territory. In ordinary cases, such prohibitions were quietly submitted to. "Ces Insulaires voudraient bien que les Hurons ne vinssent point aux Fran?ois & que les Fran?ois n'allassent point aux Hurons, afin d'emporter eux seuls tout le trafic," etc.—Relation, 1633, 205 (Cramoisy),—"desirans eux-mesmes aller recueiller les marchandises des peuples circonvoisins pour les apporter aux Fran?ois." This "Nation de l'Isle" has been erroneously located at Montreal. Its true position is indicated on the map of Du Creux, and on an ancient MS. map in the Dép?t des Cartes, of which a fac-simile is before me. See also "Pioneers of France," 347. In the July that preceded Le Jeune's wintering with the Montagnais, a Huron Indian, well known to the French, came to Quebec with the tidings, that the annual canoe-fleet of his countrymen was descending the St. Lawrence. On the twenty-eighth, the river was alive with them. A hundred and forty canoes, with six or seven hundred savages, landed at the warehouses beneath the fortified rock of Quebec, and set up their huts and camp-sheds 47 on the strand now covered by the lower town. The greater number brought furs and tobacco for the trade; others came as sight-seers; others to gamble, and others to steal, [6]—accomplishments in which the Hurons were proficient: their gambling skill being exercised chiefly against each other, and their thieving talents against those of other nations. [6] "Quelques vns d'entre eux ne viennent à la traite auec les Fran?ois que pour iou?r, d'autres pour voir, quelques vns pour dérober, et les plus sages et les plus riches pour trafiquer."—Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 34. The routine of these annual visits was nearly uniform. On the first day, the Indians built their huts; on the second, they held their council with the French officers at the fort; on the third and fourth, they bartered their furs and tobacco for kettles, hatchets, knives, cloth, beads, iron arrow-heads, coats, shirts, and other commodities; on the fifth, they were feasted by the French; and at daybreak of the next morning, they embarked and vanished like a flight of birds. [7] [7] "Comme une volée d'oiseaux."—Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 190 (Cramoisy).—The tobacco brought to the French by the Hurons may have been raised by the adjacent tribe of the Tionnontates, who cultivated it largely for sale. See Introduction. On the second day, then, the long file of chiefs and warriors mounted the pathway to the fort,—tall, well-moulded figures, robed in the skins of the beaver and the bear, each wild visage glowing with paint and glistening with the oil which the Hurons extracted from the seeds of the sunflower. The lank black hair of one streamed loose upon his shoulders; that of another was close shaven, except an upright ridge, which, bristling like the crest of a dragoon's helmet, crossed the crown from the 48 forehead to the neck; while that of a third hung, long and flowing from one side, but on the other was cut short. Sixty chiefs and principal men, with a crowd of younger warriors, formed their council-circle in the fort, those of each village grouped together, and all seated on the ground with a gravity of bearing sufficiently curious to those who had seen the same men in the domestic circle of their lodge-fires. Here, too, were the Jesuits, robed in black, anxious and intent; and here was Champlain, who, as he surveyed the throng, recognized among the elder warriors not a few of those who, eighteen years before, had been his companions in arms on his hapless foray against the Iroquois. [8] [8] See "Pioneers of France," 370. Their harangues of compliment being made and answered, and the inevitable presents given and received, Champlain introduced to the silent conclave the three missionaries, Brébeuf, Daniel, and Davost. To their lot had fallen the honors, dangers, and woes of the Huron mission. "These are our fathers," he said. "We love them more than we love ourselves. The whole French nation honors them. They do not go among you for your furs. They have left their friends and their country to show you the way to heaven. If you love the French, as you say you love them, then love and honor these our fathers." [9] [9] Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 274 (Cramoisy); Mercure Fran?ais, 1634, 845. Two chiefs rose to reply, and each lavished all his 49 rhetoric in praises of Champlain and of the French. Brébeuf rose next, and spoke in broken Huron,—the assembly jerking in unison, from the bottom of their throats, repeated ejaculations of applause. Then they surrounded him, and vied with each other for the honor of carrying him in their canoes. In short, the mission was accepted; and the chiefs of the different villages disputed among themselves the privilege of receiving and entertaining the three priests. On the last of July, the day of the feast of St. Ignatius, Champlain and several masters of trading vessels went to the house of the Jesuits in quest of indulgences; and here they were soon beset by a crowd of curious Indians, who had finished their traffic, and were making a tour of observation. Being excluded from the house, they looked in at the windows of the room which served as a chapel; and Champlain, amused at their exclamations of wonder, gave one of them a piece of citron. The Huron tasted it, and, enraptured, demanded what it was. Champlain replied, laughing, that it was the rind of a French pumpkin. The fame of this delectable production was instantly spread abroad; and, at every window, eager voices and outstretched hands petitioned for a share of the marvellous vegetable. They were at length allowed to enter the chapel, which had lately been decorated with a few hangings, images, and pieces of plate. These unwonted splendors filled them with admiration. They asked if the dove over the altar was the bird that makes the thunder; and, pointing to the images of 50 Loyola and Xavier, inquired if they were okies, or spirits: nor was their perplexity much diminished by Brébeuf's explanation of their true character. Three images of the Virgin next engaged their attention; and, in answer to their questions, they were told that they were the mother of Him who made the world. This greatly amused them, and they demanded if he had three mothers. "Oh!" exclaims the Father Superior, "had we but images of all the holy mysteries of our faith! They are a great assistance, for they speak their own lesson." [10] The mission was not doomed long to suffer from a dearth of these inestimable auxiliaries. [10] Relation, 1633, 38. The eve of departure came. The three priests packed their baggage, and Champlain paid their passage, or, in other words, made presents to the Indians who were to carry them in their canoes. They lodged that night in the storehouse of the fur company, around which the Hurons were encamped; and Le Jeune and De Nou? stayed with them to bid them farewell in the morning. At eleven at night, they were roused by a loud voice in the Indian camp, and saw Le Borgne, the one-eyed chief of Allumette Island, walking round among the huts, haranguing as he went. Brébeuf, listening, caught the import of his words. "We have begged the French captain to spare the life of the Algonquin of the Petite Nation whom he keeps in prison; but he will not listen to us. The prisoner will die. Then his people will revenge him. They will try to kill the three black-robes 51 whom you are about to carry to your country. If you do not defend them, the French will be angry, and charge you with their death. But if you do, then the Algonquins will make war on you, and the river will be closed. If the French captain will not let the prisoner go, then leave the three black-robes where they are; for, if you take them with you, they will bring you to trouble." Such was the substance of Le Borgne's harangue. The anxious priests hastened up to the fort, gained admittance, and roused Champlain from his slumbers. He sent his interpreter with a message to the Hurons, that he wished to speak to them before their departure; and, accordingly, in the morning an Indian crier proclaimed through their camp that none should embark till the next day. Champlain convoked the chiefs, and tried persuasion, promises, and threats; but Le Borgne had been busy among them with his intrigues, and now he declared in the council, that, unless the prisoner were released, the missionaries would be murdered on their way, and war would ensue. The politic savage had two objects in view. On the one hand, he wished to interrupt the direct intercourse between the French and the Hurons; and, on the other, he thought to gain credit and influence with the nation of the prisoner by effecting his release. His first point was won. Champlain would not give up the murderer, knowing those with whom he was dealing too well to take a course which would have proclaimed the killing of a Frenchman a venial offence. The Hurons thereupon refused to carry the 52 missionaries to their country; coupling the refusal with many regrets and many protestations of love, partly, no doubt, sincere,—for the Jesuits had contrived to gain no little favor in their eyes. The council broke up, the Hurons embarked, and the priests returned to their convent. Here, under the guidance of Brébeuf, they employed themselves, amid their other avocations, in studying the Huron tongue. A year passed, and again the Indian traders descended from their villages. In the meanwhile, grievous calamities had befallen the nation. They had suffered deplorable reverses at the hands of the Iroquois; while a pestilence, similar to that which a few years before had swept off the native populations of New England, had begun its ravages among them. They appeared at Three Rivers—this year the place of trade—in small numbers, and in a miserable state of dejection and alarm. Du Plessis Bochart, commander of the French fleet, called them to a council, harangued them, feasted them, and made them presents; but they refused to take the Jesuits. In private, however, some of them were gained over; then again refused; then, at the eleventh hour, a second time consented. On the eve of embarkation, they once more wavered. All was confusion, doubt, and uncertainty, when Brébeuf bethought him of a vow to St. Joseph. The vow was made. At once, he says, the Indians became tractable; the Fathers embarked, and, amid salvos of cannon from the ships, set forth for the wild scene of their apostleship. 53 They reckoned the distance at nine hundred miles; but distance was the least repellent feature of this most arduous journey. Barefoot, lest their shoes should injure the frail vessel, each crouched in his canoe, toiling with unpractised hands to propel it. Before him, week after week, he saw the same lank, unkempt hair, the same tawny shoulders, and long, naked arms ceaselessly plying the paddle. The canoes were soon separated; and, for more than a month, the Frenchmen rarely or never met. Brébeuf spoke a little Huron, and could converse with his escort; but Daniel and Davost were doomed to a silence unbroken save by the occasional unintelligible complaints and menaces of the Indians, of whom many were sick with the epidemic, and all were terrified, desponding, and sullen. Their only food was a pittance of Indian corn, crushed between two stones and mixed with water. The toil was extreme. Brébeuf counted thirty-five portages, where the canoes were lifted from the water, and carried on the shoulders of the voyagers around rapids or cataracts. More than fifty times, besides, they were forced to wade in the raging current, pushing up their empty barks, or dragging them with ropes. Brébeuf tried to do his part; but the boulders and sharp rocks wounded his naked feet, and compelled him to desist. He and his companions bore their share of the baggage across the portages, sometimes a distance of several miles. Four trips, at the least, were required to convey the whole. The way was through the dense forest, incumbered with rocks 54 and logs, tangled with roots and underbrush, damp with perpetual shade, and redolent of decayed leaves and mouldering wood. [11] The Indians themselves were often spent with fatigue. Brébeuf, a man of iron frame and a nature unconquerably resolute, doubted if his strength would sustain him to the journey's end. He complains that he had no moment to read his breviary, except by the moonlight or the fire, when stretched out to sleep on a bare rock by some savage cataract of the Ottawa, or in a damp nook of the adjacent forest. [11] "Adioustez à ces difficultez, qu'il faut coucher sur la terre nu?, ou sur quelque dure roche, faute de trouuer dix ou douze pieds de terre en quarré pour placer vne chetiue cabane; qu'il faut sentir incessamment la puanteur des Sauuages recreus, marcher dans les eaux, dans les fanges, dans l'obscurité et l'embarras des forest, où les piqueures d'vne multitude infinie de mousquilles et cousins vous importunent fort."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 25, 26. All the Jesuits, as well as several of their countrymen who accompanied them, suffered more or less at the hands of their ill-humored conductors. [12] Davost's Indian robbed him of a part of his baggage, threw a part into the river, including most of the books and writing-materials of the three priests, and then left him behind, among the Algonquins of 55 Allumette Island. He found means to continue the journey, and at length reached the Huron towns in a lamentable state of bodily prostration. Daniel, too, was deserted, but fortunately found another party who received him into their canoe. A young Frenchman, named Martin, was abandoned among the Nipissings; another, named Baron, on reaching the Huron country, was robbed by his conductors of all he had, except the weapons in his hands. Of these he made good use, compelling the robbers to restore a part of their plunder. [12] "En ce voyage, il nous a fallu tous commencer par ces experiences à porter la Croix que Nostre Seigneur nous presente pour son honneur, et pour le salut de ces pauures Barbares. Certes ie me suis trouué quelquesfois si las, que le corps n'en pouuoit plus. Mais d'ailleurs mon ame ressentoit de tres-grands contentemens, considerant que ie souffrois pour Dieu: nul ne le s?ait, s'il ne l'experimente. Tous n'en ont pas esté quittes à si bon marché."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 26. Three years afterwards, a paper was printed by the Jesuits of Paris, called Instruction pour les Pères de nostre Compagnie qui seront enuoiez aux Hurons, and containing directions for their conduct on this route by the Ottawa. It is highly characteristic, both of the missionaries and of the Indians. Some of the points are, in substance, as follows.—You should love the Indians like brothers, with whom you are to spend the rest of your life.—Never make them 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 the skirts of 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 make yourself troublesome, even to a single Indian.—Do not ask them too many questions.—Bear their faults in silence, and appear always cheerful.—Buy fish for them from the tribes you will pass; and for this purpose take with you some awls, beads, knives, and fish-hooks.—Be not ceremonious with the Indians; take at once what they offer you: ceremony offends them.—Be very careful, when in the canoe, that the brim of your hat does not annoy them. Perhaps it would be better to wear your night-cap. There is no such thing as impropriety among Indians.—Remember that it is Christ and his cross that you are seeking; and if you aim at anything else, you will get nothing but affliction for body and mind. Descending French River, and following the lonely shores of the great Georgian Bay, the canoe which carried Brébeuf at length neared its destination, thirty days after leaving Three Rivers. Before him, stretched in savage slumber, lay the forest shore of the Hurons. Did his spirit sink as he approached his dreary home, oppressed with a dark foreboding of what the future should bring 56 forth? There is some reason to think so. Yet it was but the shadow of a moment; for his masculine heart had lost the sense of fear, and his intrepid nature was fired with a zeal before which doubts and uncertainties fled like the mists of the morning. Not the grim enthusiasm of negation, tearing up the weeds of rooted falsehood, or with bold hand felling to the earth the baneful growth of overshadowing abuses: his was the ancient faith uncurtailed, redeemed from the decay of centuries, kindled with a new life, and stimulated to a preternatural growth and fruitfulness. Brébeuf and his Huron companions having landed, the Indians, throwing the missionary's baggage on the ground, left him to his own resources; and, without heeding his remonstrances, set forth for their respective villages, some twenty miles distant. Thus abandoned, the priest kneeled, not to implore succor in his perplexity, but to offer thanks to the Providence which had shielded him thus far. Then, rising, he pondered as to what course he should take. He knew the spot well. It was on the borders of the small inlet called Thunder Bay. In the neighboring Huron town of Toanché he had lived three years, preaching and baptizing; [13] but Toanché had now ceased to exist. Here, étienne Brulé, Champlain's adventurous interpreter, had recently been murdered by the inhabitants, who, in 57 excitement and alarm, dreading the consequences of their deed, had deserted the spot, and built, at the distance of a few miles, a new town, called Ihonatiria. [14] Brébeuf hid his baggage in the woods, including the vessels for the Mass, more precious than all the rest, and began his search for this new abode. He passed the burnt remains of Toanché, saw the charred poles that had formed the frame of his little chapel of bark, and found, as he thought, the spot where Brulé had fallen. [15] Evening was near, when, after following, bewildered and anxious, a gloomy forest path, he issued upon a wild clearing, and saw before him the bark roofs of Ihonatiria. [13] From 1626 to 1629. There is no record of the events of this first mission, which was ended with the English occupation of Quebec. Brébeuf had previously spent the winter of 1625-26 among the Algonquins, like Le Jeune in 1633-34.—Lettre du P. Charles Lalemant au T. R. P. Mutio Vitelleschi, 1 Aug., 1626, in Carayon. [14] Concerning Brulé, see "Pioneers of France," 377-380. [15] "Ie vis pareillement l'endroit où le pauure Estienne Brulé auoit esté barbarement et tra?treusement assommé; ce qui me fit penser que quelque iour on nous pourroit bien traitter de la sorte, et desirer au moins que ce fust en pourchassant la gloire de N. Seigneur."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 28, 29.—The missionary's prognostics were but too well founded. A crowd ran out to meet him. "Echom has come again! Echom has come again!" they cried, recognizing in the distance the stately figure, robed in black, that advanced from the border of the forest. They led him to the town, and the whole population swarmed about him. After a short rest, he set out with a number of young Indians in quest of his baggage, returning with it at one o'clock in the morning. There was a certain Awandoay in the village, noted as one of the richest and most hospitable of the Hurons,—a distinction not easily won where hospitality was 58 universal. His house was large, and amply stored with beans and corn; and though his prosperity had excited the jealousy of the villagers, he had recovered their good-will by his generosity. With him Brébeuf made his abode, anxiously waiting, week after week, the arrival of his companions. One by one, they appeared: Daniel, weary and worn; Davost, half dead with famine and fatigue; and their French attendants, each with his tale of hardship and indignity. At length, all were assembled under the roof of the hospitable Indian, and once more the Huron mission was begun. CHAPTER VI. 1634, 1635. BRéBEUF AND HIS ASSOCIATES. The Huron Mission-House ? Its Inmates ? Its Furniture ? Its Guests ? The Jesuit as a Teacher ? As an Engineer ? Baptisms ? Huron Village Life ? Festivities and Sorceries ? The Dream Feast ? The Priests accused of Magic ? The Drought and the Red Cross Where should the Fathers make their abode? Their first thought had been to establish themselves at a place called by the French Rochelle, the largest and most important town of the Huron confederacy; but Brébeuf now resolved to remain at Ihonatiria. Here he was well known; and here, too, he flattered himself, seeds of the Faith had been planted, which, with good nurture, would in time yield fruit. By the ancient Huron custom, when a man or a family wanted a house, the whole village joined in building one. In the present case, not Ihonatiria only, but the neighboring town of Wenrio also, took part in the work,—though not without the expectation of such gifts as the priests had to bestow. Before October, the task was finished. 60 The house was constructed after the Huron model. [1] It was thirty-six feet long and about twenty feet wide, framed with strong sapling poles planted in the earth to form the sides, with the ends bent into an arch for the roof,—the whole lashed firmly together, braced with cross-poles, and closely covered with overlapping sheets of bark. Without, the structure was strictly Indian; but within, the priests, with the aid of their tools, made innovations which were the astonishment of all the country. They divided their dwelling by transverse partitions into three apartments, each with its wooden door,—a wondrous novelty in the eyes of their visitors. The first served as a hall, an anteroom, and a place of storage for corn, beans, and dried fish. The second—the largest of the three—was at once kitchen, workshop, dining-room, drawing-room, school-room, and bed-chamber. The third was the chapel. Here they made their altar, and here were their images, pictures, and sacred vessels. Their fire was on the ground, in the middle of the second apartment, the smoke escaping by a hole in the roof. At the sides were placed two wide platforms, after the Huron fashion, four feet from the earthen floor. On these were chests in which they kept their clothing and vestments, and beneath them they slept, reclining on sheets of bark, and covered with skins and the garments they wore by day. Rude stools, a hand-mill, a large Indian mortar of wood for crushing corn, and a clock, completed the furniture of the room. [1] See Introduction. 61 There was no lack of visitors, for the house of the black-robes contained marvels [2] the fame of which was noised abroad to the uttermost confines of the Huron nation. Chief among them was the clock. The guests would sit in expectant silence by the hour, squatted on the ground, waiting to hear it strike. They thought it was alive, and asked what it ate. As the last stroke sounded, one of the Frenchmen would cry "Stop!"—and, to the admiration of the company, the obedient clock was silent. The mill was another wonder, and they were never tired of turning it. Besides these, there was a prism and a magnet; also a magnifying-glass, wherein a flea was transformed to a frightful monster, and a multiplying lens, which showed them the same object eleven times repeated. "All this," says Brébeuf, "serves to gain their affection, and make them more docile in respect to the admirable and incomprehensible mysteries of our Faith; for the opinion they have of our genius and capacity makes them believe whatever we tell them." [3] [2] "Ils ont pensé qu'elle entendoit, principalement quand, pour rire, quelqu'vn de nos Fran?ois s'escrioit au dernier coup de marteau, c'est assez sonné, et que tout aussi tost elle se taisoit. Ils l'appellent le Capitaine du iour. Quand elle sonne, ils disent qu'elle parle, et demandent, quand ils nous viennent veoir, combien de fois le Capitaine a desia parlé. Ils nous interrogent de son manger. Ils demeurent les heures entieres, et quelquesfois plusieurs, afin de la pouuoir ouyr parler."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 33. [3] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 33. "What does the Captain say?" was the frequent question; for by this title of honor they designated the clock. 62 "When he strikes twelve times, he says, 'Hang on the kettle'; and when he strikes four times, he says, 'Get up, and go home.'" Both interpretations were well remembered. At noon, visitors were never wanting, to share the Fathers' sagamite; but at the stroke of four, all rose and departed, leaving the missionaries for a time in peace. Now the door was barred, and, gathering around the fire, they discussed the prospects of the mission, compared their several experiences, and took counsel for the future. But the standing topic of their evening talk was the Huron language. Concerning this each had some new discovery to relate, some new suggestion to offer; and in the task of analyzing its construction and deducing its hidden laws, these intelligent and highly cultivated minds found a congenial employment. [4] [4] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1639, 17 (Cramoisy). But while zealously laboring to perfect their knowledge of the language, they spared no pains to turn their present acquirements to account. Was man, woman, or child sick or suffering, they were always at hand with assistance and relief,—adding, as they saw opportunity, explanations of Christian doctrine, pictures of Heaven and Hell, and exhortations to embrace the Faith. Their friendly offices did not cease here, but included matters widely different. The Hurons lived in constant fear of the Iroquois. At times the whole village population would fly to the woods for concealment, or take refuge in one of the neighboring 63 fortified towns, on the rumor of an approaching war-party. The Jesuits promised them the aid of the four Frenchmen armed with arquebuses, who had come with them from Three Rivers. They advised the Hurons to make their palisade forts, not, as hitherto, in a circular form, but rectangular, with small flanking towers at the corners for the arquebuse-men. The Indians at once saw the value of the advice, and soon after began to act on it in the case of their great town of Ossossané, or Rochelle. [5] [5] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 86. At every opportunity, the missionaries gathered together the children of the village at their house. On these occasions, Brébeuf, for greater solemnity, put on a surplice, and the close, angular cap worn by Jesuits in their convents. First he chanted the Pater Noster, translated by Father Daniel into Huron rhymes,—the children chanting in their turn. Next he taught them the sign of the cross; made them repeat the Ave, the Credo, and the Commandments; questioned them as to past instructions; gave them briefly a few new ones; and dismissed them with a present of two or three beads, raisins, or prunes. A great emulation was kindled among this small fry of heathendom. The priests, with amusement and delight, saw them gathered in groups about the village, vying with each other in making the sign of the cross, or in repeating the rhymes they had learned. At times, the elders of the people, the repositories of its ancient traditions, were induced to 64 assemble at the house of the Jesuits, who explained to them the principal points of their doctrine, and invited them to a discussion. The auditors proved pliant to a fault, responding, "Good," or "That is true," to every proposition; but, when urged to adopt the faith which so readily met their approval, they had always the same reply: "It is good for the French; but we are another people, with different customs." On one occasion, Brébeuf appeared before the chiefs and elders at a solemn national council, described Heaven and Hell with images suited to their comprehension, asked to which they preferred to go after death, and then, in accordance with the invariable Huron custom in affairs of importance, presented a large and valuable belt of wampum, as an invitation to take the path to Paradise. [6] [6] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 81. For the use of wampum belts, see Introduction. Notwithstanding all their exhortations, the Jesuits, for the present, baptized but few. Indeed, during the first year or more, they baptized no adults except those apparently at the point of death; for, with excellent reason, they feared backsliding and recantation. They found especial pleasure in the baptism of dying infants, rescuing them from the flames of perdition, and changing them, to borrow Le Jeune's phrase, "from little Indians into little angels." [7] [7] "Le seiziesme du mesme mois, deux petits Sauvages furent changez en deux petits Anges."—Relation, 1636, 89 (Cramoisy). "O mon cher frère, vous pourrois-je expliquer quelle consolation ce m'etoit quand je voyois un pauure baptisé mourir deux heures, une demi journée, une ou deux journées, après son baptesme, particulièrement quand c'etoit un petit enfant!"—Lettre du Père Garnier à son Frère, MS.—This form of benevolence is beyond heretic appreciation. "La joye qu'on a quand on a baptisé un Sauvage qui se meurt peu apres, & qui s'envole droit au Ciel, pour devenir un Ange, certainement c'est un joye qui surpasse tout ce qu'on se peut imaginer."—Le Jeune, Relation, 1635, 221 (Cramoisy). 65 The Fathers' slumbers were brief and broken. Winter was the season of Huron festivity; and, as they lay stretched on their hard couch, suffocating with smoke and tormented by an inevitable multitude of fleas, the thumping of the drum resounded all night long from a neighboring house, mingled with the sound of the tortoise-shell rattle, the stamping of moccasined feet, and the cadence of voices keeping time with the dancers. Again, some ambitious villager would give a feast, and invite all the warriors of the neighboring towns; or some grand wager of gambling, with its attendant drumming, singing, and outcries, filled the night with discord. But these were light annoyances, compared with the insane rites to cure the sick, prescribed by the "medicine-men," or ordained by the eccentric inspiration of dreams. In one case, a young sorcerer, by alternate gorging and fasting,—both in the interest of his profession,—joined with excessive exertion in singing to the spirits, contracted a disorder of the brain, which caused him, in mid-winter, to run naked about the village, howling like a wolf. The whole population bestirred itself to effect a cure. The patient had, or pretended to have, a dream, in which the conditions of his recovery 66 were revealed to him. These were equally ridiculous and difficult; but the elders met in council, and all the villagers lent their aid, till every requisition was fulfilled, and the incongruous mass of gifts which the madman's dream had demanded were all bestowed upon him. This cure failing, a "medicine-feast" was tried; then several dances in succession. As the patient remained as crazy as before, preparations were begun for a grand dance, more potent than all the rest. Brébeuf says, that, except the masquerades of the Carnival among Christians, he never saw a folly equal to it. "Some," he adds, "had sacks over their heads, with two holes for the eyes. Some were as naked as your hand, with horns or feathers on their heads, their bodies painted white, and their faces black as devils. Others were daubed with red, black, and white. In short, every one decked himself as extravagantly as he could, to dance in this ballet, and contribute something towards the health of the sick man." [8] This remedy also failing, a crowning effort of the medical art was essayed. Brébeuf does not describe it, for fear, as he says, of being tedious; but, for the time, the village was a pandemonium. [9] This, with other ceremonies, was supposed to be ordered by a certain image like a doll, which a sorcerer placed in his tobacco-pouch, whence it uttered its oracles, at the same time 67 moving as if alive. "Truly," writes Brébeuf, "here is nonsense enough: but I greatly fear there is something more dark and mysterious in it." [8] Relation des Hurons, 1636, 116. [9] "Suffit pour le present de dire en general, que iamais les Bacchantes forcenées du temps passé ne firent rien de plus furieux en leurs orgyes. C'est icy à s'entretuer, disent-ils, par des sorts qu'ils s'entreiettent, dont la composition est d'ongles d'Ours, de dents de Loup, d'ergots d'Aigles, de certaines pierres et de nerfs de Chien; c'est à rendre du sang par la bouche et par les narines, ou plustost d'vne poudre rouge qu'ils prennent subtilement, estans tombez sous le sort, et blessez; et dix mille autres sottises que ie laisse volontiers."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 117. But all these ceremonies were outdone by the grand festival of the Ononhara, or Dream Feast,—esteemed the most powerful remedy in cases of sickness, or when a village was infested with evil spirits. The time and manner of holding it were determined at a solemn council. This scene of madness began at night. Men, women, and children, all pretending to have lost their senses, rushed shrieking and howling from house to house, upsetting everything in their way, throwing firebrands, beating those they met or drenching them with water, and availing themselves of this time of license to take a safe revenge on any who had ever offended them. This scene of frenzy continued till daybreak. No corner of the village was secure from the maniac crew. In the morning there was a change. They ran from house to house, accosting the inmates by name, and demanding of each the satisfaction of some secret want, revealed to the pretended madman in a dream, but of the nature of which he gave no hint whatever. The person addressed thereupon threw to him at random any article at hand, as a hatchet, a kettle, or a pipe; and the applicant continued his rounds till the desired gift was hit upon, when he gave an 68 outcry of delight, echoed by gratulatory cries from all present. If, after all his efforts, he failed in obtaining the object of his dream, he fell into a deep dejection, convinced that some disaster was in store for him. [10] [10] Brébeuf's account of the Dream Feast is brief. The above particulars are drawn chiefly from Charlevoix, Journal Historique, 356, and Sagard, Voyage du Pays des Hurons, 280. See also Lafitau, and other early writers. This ceremony was not confined to the Hurons, but prevailed also among the Iroquois, and doubtless other kindred tribes. The Jesuit Dablon saw it in perfection at Onondaga. It usually took place in February, occupying about three days, and was often attended with great indecencies. The word ononhara means turning of the brain. The approach of summer brought with it a comparative peace. Many of the villagers dispersed,—some to their fishing, some to expeditions of trade, and some to distant lodges by their detached corn-fields. The priests availed themselves of the respite to engage in those exercises of private devotion which the rule of St. Ignatius enjoins. About midsummer, however, their quiet was suddenly broken. The crops were withering under a severe drought, a calamity which the sandy nature of the soil made doubly serious. The sorcerers put forth their utmost power, and, from the tops of the houses, yelled incessant invocations to the spirits. All was in vain; the pitiless sky was cloudless. There was thunder in the east and thunder in the west; but over Ihonatiria all was serene. A renowned "rain-maker," seeing his reputation tottering under his repeated failures, bethought him of accusing the Jesuits, and gave out that the red color of the cross which stood before their house scared the bird of thunder, 69 and caused him to fly another way. [11] On this a clamor arose. The popular ire turned against the priests, and the obnoxious cross was condemned to be hewn down. Aghast at the threatened sacrilege, they attempted to reason away the storm, assuring the crowd that the lightning was not a bird, but certain hot and fiery exhalations, which, being imprisoned, darted this way and that, trying to escape. As this philosophy failed to convince the hearers, the missionaries changed their line of defence. [11] The following is the account of the nature of thunder, given to Brébeuf on a former occasion by another sorcerer. "It is a man in the form of a turkey-cock. The sky is his palace, and he remains in it when the air is clear. When the clouds begin to grumble, he descends to the earth to gather up snakes, and other objects which the Indians call okies. The lightning flashes whenever he opens or closes his wings. If the storm is more violent than usual, it is because his young are with him, and aiding in the noise as well as they can."—Relation des Hurons, 1636, 114. The word oki is here used to denote any object endued with supernatural power. A belief similar to the above exists to this day among the Dacotahs. Some of the Hurons and Iroquois, however, held that the thunder was a giant in human form. According to one story, he vomited from time to time a number of snakes, which, falling to the earth, caused the appearance of lightning. "You say that the red color of the cross frightens the bird of thunder. Then paint the cross white, and see if the thunder will come." This was accordingly done; but the clouds still kept aloof. The Jesuits followed up their advantage. "Your spirits cannot help you, and your sorcerers have deceived you with lies. Now ask the aid of Him who made the world, and perhaps He will listen to your prayers." And they added, 70 that, if the Indians would renounce their sins and obey the true God, they would make a procession daily to implore his favor towards them. There was no want of promises. The processions were begun, as were also nine masses to St. Joseph; and, as heavy rains occurred soon after, the Indians conceived a high idea of the efficacy of the French "medicine." [12] [12] "Nous deuons aussi beaucoup au glorieux sainct Ioseph, espoux de Nostre Dame, et protecteur des Hurons, dont nous auons touché au doigt l'assistance plusieurs fois. Ce fut vne chose remarquable, que le iour de sa feste et durant l'Octaue, les commoditez nous venoient de toutes parts."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 41. The above extract is given as one out of many illustrations of the confidence with which the priests rested on the actual and direct aid of their celestial guardians. To St. Joseph, in particular, they find no words for their gratitude. In spite of the hostility of the sorcerers, and the transient commotion raised by the red cross, the Jesuits had gained the confidence and good-will of the Huron population. Their patience, their kindness, their intrepidity, their manifest disinterestedness, the blamelessness of their lives, and the tact which, in the utmost fervors of their zeal, never failed them, had won the hearts of these wayward savages; and chiefs of distant villages came to urge that they would make their abode with them. [13] As yet, the results of the mission had been faint and few; but the priests toiled on courageously, high in hope that an abundant harvest of souls would one day reward their labors. [13] Brébeuf preserves a speech made to him by one of these chiefs, as a specimen of Huron eloquence.—Relation des Hurons, 1636, 123. CHAPTER VII. 1636, 1637. THE FEAST OF THE DEAD. Huron Graves ? Preparation for the Ceremony ? Disinterment ? The Mourning ? The Funeral March ? The Great Sepulchre ? Funeral Games ? Encampment of the Mourners ? Gifts ? Harangues ? Frenzy of the Crowd ? The Closing Scene ? Another Rite ? The Captive Iroquois ? The Sacrifice. Mention has been made of those great depositories of human bones found at the present day in the ancient country of the Hurons. [1] They have been a theme of abundant speculation; [2] yet their origin is a subject, not of conjecture, but of historic certainty. The peculiar rites to which they owe their existence were first described at length by Brébeuf, who, in the summer of the year 1636, saw them at the town of Ossossané. [1] See Introduction. [2] Among those who have wondered and speculated over these remains is Mr. Schoolcraft. A slight acquaintance with the early writers would have solved his doubts. The Jesuits had long been familiar with the ordinary rites of sepulture among the Hurons: the corpse placed in a crouching posture in the midst of the circle of friends and relatives; the long, 72 measured wail of the mourners; the speeches in praise of the dead, and consolation to the living; the funeral feast; the gifts at the place of burial; the funeral games, where the young men of the village contended for prizes; and the long period of mourning to those next of kin. The body was usually laid on a scaffold, or, more rarely, in the earth. This, however, was not its final resting-place. At intervals of ten or twelve years, each of the four nations which composed the Huron Confederacy gathered together its dead, and conveyed them all to a common place of sepulture. Here was celebrated the great "Feast of the Dead,"—in the eyes of the Hurons, their most solemn and important ceremonial. In the spring of 1636, the chiefs and elders of the Nation of the Bear—the principal nation of the Confederacy, and that to which Ihonatiria belonged—assembled in a general council, to prepare for the great solemnity. There was an unwonted spirit of dissension. Some causes of jealousy had arisen, and three or four of the Bear villages announced their intention of holding their Feast of the Dead apart from the rest. As such a procedure was thought abhorrent to every sense of propriety and duty, the announcement excited an intense feeling; yet Brébeuf, who was present, describes the debate which ensued as perfectly calm, and wholly free from personal abuse or recrimination. The secession, however, took place, and each party withdrew to its villages to gather and prepare its dead. 73 The corpses were lowered from their scaffolds, and lifted from their graves. Their coverings were removed by certain functionaries appointed for the office, and the hideous relics arranged in a row, surrounded by the weeping, shrieking, howling concourse. The spectacle was frightful. Here were all the village dead of the last twelve years. The priests, connoisseurs in such matters, regarded it as a display of mortality so edifying, that they hastened to summon their French attendants to contemplate and profit by it. Each family reclaimed its own, and immediately addressed itself to removing what remained of flesh from the bones. These, after being tenderly caressed, with tears and lamentations, were wrapped in skins and adorned with pendent robes of fur. In the belief of the mourners, they were sentient and conscious. A soul was thought still to reside in them; [3] and to this notion, very general among Indians, is in no small degree due that extravagant attachment to the remains of their dead, which may be said to mark the race. [3] In the general belief, the soul took flight after the great ceremony was ended. Many thought that there were two souls, one remaining with the bones, while the other went to the land of spirits. These relics of mortality, together with the recent corpses,—which were allowed to remain entire, but which were also wrapped carefully in furs,—were now carried to one of the largest houses, and hung to the numerous cross-poles, which, like rafters, supported the roof. Here the concourse of mourners seated themselves at a funeral feast; 74 and, as the squaws of the household distributed the food, a chief harangued the assembly, lamenting the loss of the deceased, and extolling their virtues. This solemnity over, the mourners began their march for Ossossané, the scene of the final rite. The bodies remaining entire were borne on a kind of litter, while the bundles of bones were slung at the shoulders of the relatives, like fagots. Thus the procession slowly defiled along the forest pathways, with which the country of the Hurons was everywhere intersected; and as they passed beneath the dull shadow of the pines, they uttered at intervals, in unison, a dreary, wailing cry, designed to imitate the voices of disembodied souls winging their way to the land of spirits, and believed to have an effect peculiarly soothing to the conscious relics which each man bore. When, at night, they stopped to rest at some village on the way, the inhabitants came forth to welcome them with a grave and mournful hospitality. From every town of the Nation of the Bear,—except the rebellious few that had seceded,—processions like this were converging towards Ossossané. This chief town of the Hurons stood on the eastern margin of Nottawassaga Bay, encompassed with a gloomy wilderness of fir and pine. Thither, on the urgent invitation of the chiefs, the Jesuits repaired. The capacious bark houses were filled to overflowing, and the surrounding woods gleamed with camp-fires: for the processions of mourners were fast arriving, and the throng was swelled by invited guests of other tribes. Funeral 75 games were in progress, the young men and women practising archery and other exercises, for prizes offered by the mourners in the name of their dead relatives. [4] Some of the chiefs conducted Brébeuf and his companions to the place prepared for the ceremony. It was a cleared area in the forest, many acres in extent. In the midst was a pit, about ten feet deep and thirty feet wide. Around it was reared a high and strong scaffolding; and on this were planted numerous upright poles, with cross-poles extended between, for hanging the funeral gifts and the remains of the dead. [4] Funeral games were not confined to the Hurons and Iroquois: Perrot mentions having seen them among the Ottawas. An illustrated description of them will be found in Lafitau. Meanwhile there was a long delay. The Jesuits were lodged in a house where more than a hundred of these bundles of mortality were hanging from the rafters. Some were mere shapeless rolls; others were made up into clumsy effigies, adorned with feathers, beads, and belts of dyed porcupine-quills. Amidst this throng of the living and the dead, the priests spent a night which the imagination and the senses conspired to render almost insupportable. At length the officiating chiefs gave the word to prepare for the ceremony. The relics were taken down, opened for the last time, and the bones caressed and fondled by the women amid paroxysms of lamentation. [5] Then all the processions were 76 formed anew, and, each bearing its dead, moved towards the area prepared for the last solemn rites. As they reached the ground, they defiled in order, each to a spot assigned to it, on the outer limits of the clearing. Here the bearers of the dead laid their bundles on the ground, while those who carried the funeral gifts outspread and displayed them for the admiration of the beholders. Their number was immense, and their value relatively very great. Among them were many robes of beaver and other rich furs, collected and preserved for years, with a view to this festival. Fires were now lighted, kettles slung, and, around the entire circle of the clearing, the scene was like a fair or caravansary. This continued till three o'clock in the afternoon, when the gifts were repacked, and the bones shouldered afresh. Suddenly, at a signal from the chiefs, the crowd ran forward from every side towards the scaffold, like soldiers to the assault of a town, scaled it by rude ladders with which it was furnished, and hung their relics and their gifts to the forest of poles which surmounted it. Then the ladders were removed; and a number of chiefs, standing on the scaffold, harangued the crowd below, praising the dead, and extolling the gifts, which the relatives of the departed now bestowed, in their names, upon their surviving friends. [5] "I'admiray la tendresse d'vne femme enuers son pere et ses enfans; elle est fille d'vn Capitaine, qui est mort fort agé, et a esté autrefois fort considerable dans le Pa?s: elle luy peignoit sa cheuelure, elle manioit ses os les vns apres les autres, auec la mesme affection que si elle luy eust voulu rendre la vie; elle luy mit aupres de luy son Atsatone8ai, c'est à dire son pacquet de buchettes de Conseil, qui sont tous les liures et papiers du Pa?s. Pour ses petits enfans, elle leur mit des brasselets de Pourcelaine et de rassade aux bras, et baigna leurs os de ses larmes; on ne l'en pouuoit quasi separer, mais on pressoit, et il fallut incontinent partir."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 134. 77 During these harangues, other functionaries were lining the grave throughout with rich robes of beaver-skin. Three large copper kettles were next placed in the middle, [6] and then ensued a scene of hideous confusion. The bodies which had been left entire were brought to the edge of the grave, flung in, and arranged in order at the bottom by ten or twelve Indians stationed there for the purpose, amid the wildest excitement and the uproar of many hundred mingled voices. [7] When this part of the work was done, night was fast closing in. The concourse bivouacked around the clearing, and lighted their camp-fires under the brows of the forest which hedged in the scene of the dismal solemnity. Brébeuf and his companions withdrew to the village, where, an hour before dawn, they were roused by a clamor which might have wakened the dead. One of the bundles of bones, tied to a pole on the scaffold, had chanced to fall into the grave. This accident had precipitated the closing act, and perhaps increased its frenzy. Guided by the unearthly din, and the broad glare of flames fed with heaps of fat pine logs, the priests soon reached the spot, and saw what seemed, in their eyes, an image of Hell. All around blazed countless fires, and 78 the air resounded with discordant outcries. [8] The naked multitude, on, under, and around the scaffold, were flinging the remains of their dead, discharged from their envelopments of skins, pell-mell into the pit, where Brébeuf discerned men who, as the ghastly shower fell around them, arranged the bones in their places with long poles. All was soon over; earth, logs, and stones were cast upon the grave, and the clamor subsided into a funereal chant,—so dreary and lugubrious, that it seemed to the Jesuits the wail of despairing souls from the abyss of perdition. [9] [6] In some of these graves, recently discovered, five or six large copper kettles have been found, in a position corresponding with the account of Brébeuf. In one, there were no less than twenty-six kettles. [7] "Iamais rien ne m'a mieux figuré la confusion qui est parmy les damnez. Vous eussiez veu décharger de tous costez des corps à demy pourris, et de tous costez on entendoit vn horrible tintamarre de voix confuses de personnes qui parloient et ne s'entendoient pas."—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 135. [8] "Approchans, nous vismes tout à fait une image de l'Enfer: cette grande place estoit toute remplie de feux & de flammes, & l'air retentissoit de toutes parts des voix confuses de ces Barbares," etc.—Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 209 (Cramoisy). [9] "Se mirent à chanter, mais d'un ton si lamentable & si lugubre, qu'il nous representoit l'horrible tristesse & l'abysme du desespoir dans lequel sont plongées pour iamais ces ames malheureuses."—Ibid., 210. For other descriptions of these rites, see Charlevoix, Bressani, Du Creux, and especially Lafitau, in whose work they are illustrated with engravings. In one form or another, they were widely prevalent. Bartram found them among the Floridian tribes. Traces of a similar practice have been observed in recent times among the Dacotahs. Remains of places of sepulture, evidently of kindred origin, have been found in Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, and Ohio. Many have been discovered in several parts of New York, especially near the River Niagara. (See Squier, Aboriginal Monuments of New York.) This was the eastern extremity of the ancient territory of the Neuters. One of these deposits is said to have contained the bones of several thousand individuals. There is a large mound on Tonawanda Island, said by the modern Senecas to be a Neuter burial-place. (See Marshall, Historical Sketches of the Niagara Frontier, 8.) In Canada West, they are found throughout the region once occupied by the Neuters, and are frequent in the Huron district. Dr. Taché writes to me,—"I have inspected sixteen bone-pits," (in the Huron country,) "the situation of which is indicated on the little pencil map I send you. They contain from six hundred to twelve hundred skeletons each, of both sexes and all ages, all mixed together purposely. With one exception, these pits also contain pipes of stone or clay, small earthen pots, shells, and wampum wrought of these shells, copper ornaments, beads of glass, and other trinkets. Some pits contained articles of copper of aboriginal Mexican fabric." This remarkable fact, together with the frequent occurrence in these graves of large conch-shells, of which wampum was made, and which could have been procured only from the Gulf of Mexico, or some part of the southern coast of the United States, proves the extent of the relations of traffic by which certain articles were passed from tribe to tribe over a vast region. The transmission of pipes from the famous Red Pipe-Stone Quarry of the St. Peter's to tribes more than a thousand miles distant is an analogous modern instance, though much less remarkable. The Taché Museum, at the Laval University of Quebec, contains a large collection of remains from these graves. In one instance, the human bones are of a size that may be called gigantic. In nearly every case, the Huron graves contain articles of use or ornament of European workmanship. From this it may be inferred, that the nation itself, or its practice of inhumation, does not date back to a period long before the arrival of the French. The Northern Algonquins had also a solemn Feast of the Dead; but it was widely different from that of the Hurons.—See the very curious account of it by Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1642, 94, 95. Such was the origin of one of those strange sepulchres which are the wonder and perplexity of the modern settler in the abandoned forests of the Hurons. 79 The priests were soon to witness another and a more terrible rite, yet one in which they found a consolation, since it signalized the saving of a soul,—the snatching from perdition of one of that dreaded race, into whose very midst they hoped, with devoted daring, to bear hereafter the cross of salvation. A band of Huron warriors had surprised a small party of Iroquois, killed several, and captured the rest. One of the prisoners was led in triumph to a village where the priests then were. He had suffered greatly; his hands, especially, were frightfully lacerated. Now, however, he was received with every mark of kindness. "Take courage," said a chief, addressing him; "you are 80 among friends." The best food was prepared for him, and his captors vied with each other in offices of good-will. [10] He had been given, according to Indian custom, to a warrior who had lost a near relative in battle, and the captive was supposed to be adopted in place of the slain. His actual doom was, however, not for a moment in doubt. The Huron received him affectionately, and, having seated him in his lodge, addressed him in a tone of extreme kindness. "My nephew, when I heard that you were coming, I was very glad, thinking that you would remain with me to take the place of him I have lost. But now that I see your condition, and your hands crushed and torn so that you will never use them, I change my mind. Therefore take courage, and prepare to die tonight like a brave man." [10] This pretended kindness in the treatment of a prisoner destined to the torture was not exceptional. The Hurons sometimes even supplied their intended victim with a temporary wife. The prisoner coolly asked what should be the manner of his death. "By fire," was the reply. "It is well," returned the Iroquois. Meanwhile, the sister of the slain Huron, in whose place the prisoner was to have been adopted, brought him a dish of food, and, her eyes flowing with tears, placed it before him with an air of the utmost tenderness; while, at the same time, the warrior brought him a pipe, wiped the sweat from his brow, and fanned him with a fan of feathers. About noon he gave his farewell feast, after the 81 custom of those who knew themselves to be at the point of death. All were welcome to this strange banquet; and when the company were gathered, the host addressed them in a loud, firm voice: "My brothers, I am about to die. Do your worst to me. I do not fear torture or death." Some of those present seemed to have visitings of real compassion; and a woman asked the priests if it would be wrong to kill him, and thus save him from the fire. The Jesuits had from the first lost no opportunity of accosting him; while he, grateful for a genuine kindness amid the cruel hypocrisy that surrounded him, gave them an attentive ear, till at length, satisfied with his answers, they baptized him. His eternal bliss secure, all else was as nothing; and they awaited the issue with some degree of composure. A crowd had gathered from all the surrounding towns, and after nightfall the presiding chief harangued them, exhorting them to act their parts well in the approaching sacrifice, since they would be looked upon by the Sun and the God of War. [11] It is needless to dwell on the scene that ensued. It took place in the lodge of the great war-chief, Atsan. Eleven fires blazed on the ground, along the middle of this capacious dwelling. The platforms on each side were closely packed with spectators; and, betwixt these and the fires, the 82 younger warriors stood in lines, each bearing lighted pine-knots or rolls of birch-bark. The heat, the smoke, the glare of flames, the wild yells, contorted visages, and furious gestures of these human devils, as their victim, goaded by their torches, bounded through the fires again and again, from end to end of the house, transfixed the priests with horror. But when, as day dawned, the last spark of life had fled, they consoled themselves with the faith that the tortured wretch had found his rest at last in Paradise. [12] [11] Areskoui (see Introduction). He was often regarded as identical with the Sun. The semi-sacrificial character of the torture in this case is also shown by the injunction, "que pour ceste nuict on n'allast point folastrer dans les bois."—Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 114. [12] Le Mercier's long and minute account of the torture of this prisoner is too revolting to be dwelt upon. One of the most atrocious features of the scene was the alternation of raillery and ironical compliment which attended it throughout, as well as the pains taken to preserve life and consciousness in the victim as long as possible. Portions of his flesh were afterwards devoured. CHAPTER VIII. 1636, 1637. THE HURON AND THE JESUIT. Enthusiasm for the Mission ? Sickness of the Priests ? The Pest among the Hurons ? The Jesuit on his Rounds ? Efforts at Conversion ? Priests and Sorcerers ? The Man-Devil ? The Magician's Prescription ? Indian Doctors and Patients ? Covert Baptisms ? Self-Devotion of the Jesuits Meanwhile from Old France to New came succors and reinforcements to the missions of the forest. More Jesuits crossed the sea to urge on the work of conversion. These were no stern exiles, seeking on barbarous shores an asylum for a persecuted faith. Rank, wealth, power, and royalty itself, smiled on their enterprise, and bade them God-speed. Yet, withal, a fervor more intense, a self-abnegation more complete, a self-devotion more constant and enduring, will scarcely find its record on the page of human history. Holy Mother Church, linked in sordid wedlock to governments and thrones, numbered among her servants a host of the worldly and the proud, whose service of God was but the service of themselves,—and 84 many, too, who, in the sophistry of the human heart, thought themselves true soldiers of Heaven, while earthly pride, interest, and passion were the life-springs of their zeal. This mighty Church of Rome, in her imposing march along the high road of history, heralded as infallible and divine, astounds the gazing world with prodigies of contradiction: now the protector of the oppressed, now the right arm of tyrants; now breathing charity and love, now dark with the passions of Hell; now beaming with celestial truth, now masked in hypocrisy and lies; now a virgin, now a harlot; an imperial queen, and a tinselled actress. Clearly, she is of earth, not of heaven; and her transcendently dramatic life is a type of the good and ill, the baseness and nobleness, the foulness and purity, the love and hate, the pride, passion, truth, falsehood, fierceness, and tenderness, that battle in the restless heart of man. It was her nobler and purer part that gave life to the early missions of New France. That gloomy wilderness, those hordes of savages, had nothing to tempt the ambitious, the proud, the grasping, or the indolent. Obscure toil, solitude, privation, hardship, and death were to be the missionary's portion. He who set sail for the country of the Hurons left behind him the world and all its prizes. True, he acted under orders,—obedient, like a soldier, to the word of command: but the astute Society of Jesus knew its members, weighed each in the balance, gave each his fitting task; and when the word was passed to embark for New France, it was 85 but the response to a secret longing of the fervent heart. The letters of these priests, departing for the scene of their labors, breathe a spirit of enthusiastic exaltation, which, to a colder nature and a colder faith, may sometimes seem overstrained, but which is in no way disproportionate to the vastness of the effort and the sacrifice demanded of them. [1] [1] The following are passages from letters of missionaries at this time. See "Divers Sentimens," appended to the Relation of 1635. "On dit que les premiers qui fondent les Eglises d'ordinaire sont saincts: cette pensée m'attendrit si fort le c?ur, que quoy que ie me voye icy fort inutile dans ceste fortunée Nouuelle France, si faut-il que i'auoüe que ie ne me s?aurois defendre d'vne pensée qui me presse le c?ur: Cupio impendi, et superimpendi pro vobis, Pauure Nouuelle France, ie desire me sacrifier pour ton bien, et quand il me deuroit couster mille vies, moyennant que ie puisse aider à sauuer vne seule ame, ie seray trop heureux, et ma vie tres bien employée." "Ma consolation parmy les Hurons, c'est que tous les iours ie me confesse, et puis ie dis la Messe, comme si ie deuois prendre le Viatique et mourir ce iour là, et ie ne crois pas qu'on puisse mieux viure, ny auec plus de satisfaction et de courage, et mesme de merites, que viure en un lieu, où on pense pouuoir mourir tous les iours, et auoir la deuise de S. Paul, Quotidie morior, fratres, etc. mes freres, je fais estat de mourir tous les iours." "Qui ne void la Nouuelle France que par les yeux de chair et de nature, il n'y void que des bois et des croix; mais qui les considere auec les yeux de la grace et d'vne bonne vocation, il n'y void que Dieu, les vertus et les graces, et on y trouue tant et de si solides consolations, que si ie pouuois acheter la Nouuelle France, en donnant tout le Paradis Terrestre, certainement ie l'acheterois. Mon Dieu, qu'il fait bon estre au lieu où Dieu nous a mis de sa grace! veritablement i'ay trouué icy ce que i'auois esperé, vn c?ur selon le c?ur de Dieu, qui ne cherche que Dieu." All turned with longing eyes towards the mission of the Hurons; for here the largest harvest promised to repay their labor, and here hardships and dangers most abounded. Two Jesuits, Pijart and Le Mercier, had been sent thither in 1635; and in midsummer of the next year three more arrived,—Jogues, 86 Chatelain, and Garnier. When, after their long and lonely journey, they reached Ihonatiria one by one, they were received by their brethren with scanty fare indeed, but with a fervor of affectionate welcome which more than made amends; for among these priests, united in a community of faith and enthusiasm, there was far more than the genial comradeship of men joined in a common enterprise of self-devotion and peril. [2] On their way, they had met Daniel and Davost descending to Quebec, to establish there a seminary of Huron children,—a project long cherished by Brébeuf and his companions. [2] "Ie luy preparay de ce que nous auions, pour le receuoir, mais quel festin! vne poignée de petit poisson sec auec vn peu de farine; i'enuoyay chercher quelques nouueaux espics, que nous luy fismes rostir à la fa?on du pays; mais il est vray que dans son c?ur et à l'entendre, il ne fit iamais meilleure chere. La ioye qui se ressent à ces entreueu?s semble estre quelque image du contentement des bien-heureux à leur arriuée dans le Ciel, tant elle est pleine de suauité."—Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 106. Scarcely had the new-comers arrived, when they were attacked by a contagious fever, which turned their mission-house into a hospital. Jogues, Garnier, and Chatelain fell ill in turn; and two of their domestics also were soon prostrated, though the only one of the number who could hunt fortunately escaped. Those who remained in health attended the sick, and the sufferers vied with each other in efforts often beyond their strength to relieve their companions in misfortune. [3] The disease in no case proved fatal; but scarcely had health 87 begun to return to their household, when an unforeseen calamity demanded the exertion of all their energies. [3] Lettre de Brébeuf au T. R. P. Mutio Vitelleschi, 20 Mai, 1637, in Carayon, 157. Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 120, 123. The pestilence, which for two years past had from time to time visited the Huron towns, now returned with tenfold violence, and with it soon appeared a new and fearful scourge,—the small-pox. Terror was universal. The contagion increased as autumn advanced; and when winter came, far from ceasing, as the priests had hoped, its ravages were appalling. The season of Huron festivity was turned to a season of mourning; and such was the despondency and dismay, that suicide became frequent. The Jesuits, singly or in pairs, journeyed in the depth of winter from village to village, ministering to the sick, and seeking to commend their religious teachings by their efforts to relieve bodily distress. Happily, perhaps, for their patients, they had no medicine but a little senna. A few raisins were left, however; and one or two of these, with a spoonful of sweetened water, were always eagerly accepted by the sufferers, who thought them endowed with some mysterious and sovereign efficacy. No house was left unvisited. As the missionary, physician at once to body and soul, entered one of these smoky dens, he saw the inmates, their heads muffled in their robes of skins, seated around the fires in silent dejection. Everywhere was heard the wail of sick and dying children; and on or under the platforms at the sides of the house crouched squalid men and women, in all the stages of the distemper. The Father approached, made 88 inquiries, spoke words of kindness, administered his harmless remedies, or offered a bowl of broth made from game brought in by the Frenchman who hunted for the mission. [4] The body cared for, he next addressed himself to the soul. "This life is short, and very miserable. It matters little whether we live or die." The patient remained silent, or grumbled his dissent. The Jesuit, after enlarging for a time, in broken Huron, on the brevity and nothingness of mortal weal or woe, passed next to the joys of Heaven and the pains of Hell, which he set forth with his best rhetoric. His pictures of infernal fires and torturing devils were readily comprehended, if the listener had consciousness enough to comprehend anything; but with respect to the advantages of the French Paradise, he was slow of conviction. "I wish to go where my relations and ancestors have gone," was a common reply. "Heaven is a good place for Frenchmen," said another; "but I wish to be among Indians, for the French will give me nothing to eat when I get there." [5] Often the patient was stolidly silent; sometimes he was hopelessly perverse and contradictory. Again, Nature triumphed over Grace. "Which will you choose," demanded 89 the priest of a dying woman, "Heaven or Hell?" "Hell, if my children are there, as you say," returned the mother. "Do they hunt in Heaven, or make war, or go to feasts?" asked an anxious inquirer. "Oh, no!" replied the Father. "Then," returned the querist, "I will not go. It is not good to be lazy." But above all other obstacles was the dread of starvation in the regions of the blest. Nor, when the dying Indian had been induced at last to express a desire for Paradise, was it an easy matter to bring him to a due contrition for his sins; for he would deny with indignation that he had ever committed any. When at length, as sometimes happened, all these difficulties gave way, and the patient had been brought to what seemed to his instructor a fitting frame for baptism, the priest, with contentment at his heart, brought water in a cup or in the hollow of his hand, touched his forehead with the mystic drop, and snatched him from an eternity of woe. But the convert, even after his baptism, did not always manifest a satisfactory spiritual condition. "Why did you baptize that Iroquois?" asked one of the dying neophytes, speaking of the prisoner recently tortured; "he will get to Heaven before us, and, when he sees us coming, he will drive us out." [6] [4] Game was so scarce in the Huron country, that it was greatly prized as a luxury. Le Mercier speaks of an Indian, sixty years of age, who walked twelve miles to taste the wild-fowl killed by the French hunter. The ordinary food was corn, beans, pumpkins, and fish. [5] It was scarcely possible to convince the Indians, that there was but one God for themselves and the whites. The proposition was met by such arguments as this: "If we had been of one father, we should know how to make knives and coats as well as you."—Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 147. [6] Most of the above traits are drawn from Le Mercier's report of 1637. The rest are from Brébeuf. Thus did these worthy priests, too conscientious to let these unfortunates die in peace, follow them with benevolent persecutions to the hour of their death. 90 It was clear to the Fathers, that their ministrations were valued solely because their religion was supposed by many to be a "medicine," or charm, efficacious against famine, disease, and death. They themselves, indeed, firmly believed that saints and angels were always at hand with temporal succors for the faithful. At their intercession, St. Joseph had interposed to procure a happy delivery to a squaw in protracted pains of childbirth; [7] and they never doubted, that, in the hour of need, the celestial powers would confound the unbeliever with intervention direct and manifest. At the town of Wenrio, the people, after trying in vain all the feasts, dances, and preposterous ceremonies by which their medicine-men sought to stop the pest, resolved to essay the "medicine" of the French, and, to that end, called the priests to a council. "What must we do, that your God may take pity on us?" Brébeuf's answer was uncompromising:— [7] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 89. Another woman was delivered on touching a relic of St. Ignatius. Ibid., 90. "Believe in Him; keep His commandments; abjure your faith in dreams; take but one wife, and be true to her; give up your superstitious feasts; renounce your assemblies of debauchery; eat no human flesh; never give feasts to demons; and make a vow, that, if God will deliver you from this pest, you will build a chapel to offer Him thanksgiving and praise." [8] [8] Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 114, 116 (Cramoisy). The terms were too hard. They would fain bargain 91 to be let off with building the chapel alone; but Brébeuf would bate them nothing, and the council broke up in despair. At Ossossané, a few miles distant, the people, in a frenzy of terror, accepted the conditions, and promised to renounce their superstitions and reform their manners. It was a labor of Hercules, a cleansing of Augean stables; but the scared savages were ready to make any promise that might stay the pestilence. One of their principal sorcerers proclaimed in a loud voice through the streets of the town, that the God of the French was their master, and that thenceforth all must live according to His will. "What consolation," exclaims Le Mercier, "to see God glorified by the lips of an imp of Satan!" [9] [9] Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 127, 128 (Cramoisy). Their joy was short. The proclamation was on the twelfth of December. On the twenty-first, a noted sorcerer came to Ossossané. He was of a dwarfish, hump-backed figure,—most rare among this symmetrical people,—with a vicious face, and a dress consisting of a torn and shabby robe of beaver-skin. Scarcely had he arrived, when, with ten or twelve other savages, he ensconced himself in a kennel of bark made for the occasion. In the midst were placed several stones, heated red-hot. On these the sorcerer threw tobacco, producing a stifling fumigation; in the midst of which, for a full half-hour, he sang, at the top of his throat, those boastful, yet meaningless, rhapsodies of which Indian magical songs are composed. Then came 92 a grand "medicine-feast"; and the disappointed Jesuits saw plainly that the objects of their spiritual care, unwilling to throw away any chance of cure, were bent on invoking aid from God and the Devil at once. The hump-backed sorcerer became a thorn in the side of the Fathers, who more than half believed his own account of his origin. He was, he said, not a man, but an oki,—a spirit, or, as the priests rendered it, a demon,—and had dwelt with other okies under the earth, when the whim seized him to become a man. Therefore he ascended to the upper world, in company with a female spirit. They hid beside a path, and, when they saw a woman passing, they entered her womb. After a time they were born, but not until the male oki had quarrelled with and strangled his female companion, who came dead into the world. [10] The character of the sorcerer seems to have comported reasonably well with this story of his origin. He pretended to have an absolute control over the pestilence, and his prescriptions were scrupulously followed. [10] Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 72 (Cramoisy). This "petit sorcier" is often mentioned elsewhere. He had several conspicuous rivals, besides a host of humbler competitors. One of these magician-doctors, who was nearly blind, made for himself a kennel at the end of his house, where he fasted for seven days. [11] On the sixth day the spirits appeared, and, among other revelations, told 93 him that the disease could be frightened away by means of images of straw, like scarecrows, placed on the tops of the houses. Within forty-eight hours after this announcement, the roofs of Onnentisati and the neighboring villages were covered with an army of these effigies. The Indians tried to persuade the Jesuits to put them on the mission-house; but the priests replied, that the cross before their door was a better protector; and, for further security, they set another on their roof, declaring that they would rely on it to save them from infection. [12] The Indians, on their part, anxious that their scarecrows should do their office well, addressed them in loud harangues and burned offerings of tobacco to them. [13] [11] See Introduction. [12] "Qu'en vertu de ce signe nous ne redoutions point les demons, et esperions que Dieu preserueroit nostre petite maison de cette maladie contagieuse."—Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 150. [13] Ibid., 157. There was another sorcerer, whose medical practice was so extensive, that, unable to attend to all his patients, he sent substitutes to the surrounding towns, first imparting to them his own mysterious power. One of these deputies came to Ossossané while the priests were there. The principal house was thronged with expectant savages, anxiously waiting his arrival. A chief carried before him a kettle of mystic water, with which the envoy sprinkled the company, [14] at the same time fanning them 94 with the wing of a wild turkey. Then came a grand medicine-feast, followed by a medicine-dance of women. [14] The idea seems to have been taken from the holy water of the French. Le Mercier says that a Huron who had been to Quebec once asked him the use of the vase of water at the door of the chapel. The priest told him that it was "to frighten away the devils". On this, he begged earnestly to have some of it. Opinion was divided as to the nature of the pest; but the greater number were agreed that it was a malignant oki, who came from Lake Huron. [15] As it was of the last moment to conciliate or frighten him, no means to these ends were neglected. Feasts were held for him, at which, to do him honor, each guest gorged himself like a vulture. A mystic fraternity danced with firebrands in their mouths; while other dancers wore masks, and pretended to be hump-backed. Tobacco was burned to the Demon of the Pest, no less than to the scarecrows which were to frighten him. A chief climbed to the roof of a house, and shouted to the invisible monster, "If you want flesh, go to our enemies, go to the Iroquois!"—while, to add terror to persuasion, the crowd in the dwelling below yelled with all the force of their lungs, and beat furiously with sticks on the walls of bark. [15] Many believed that the country was bewitched by wicked sorcerers, one of whom, it was said, had been seen at night roaming around the villages, vomiting fire. (Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 134.) This superstition of sorcerers vomiting fire was common among the Iroquois of New York.—Others held that a sister of étienne Brulé caused the evil, in revenge for the death of her brother, murdered some years before. She was said to have been seen flying over the country, breathing forth pestilence. Besides these public efforts to stay the pestilence, the sufferers, each for himself, had their own methods of cure, dictated by dreams or prescribed by established usage. Thus two of the priests, entering 95 a house, saw a sick man crouched in a corner, while near him sat three friends. Before each of these was placed a huge portion of food,—enough, the witness declares, for four,—and though all were gorged to suffocation, with starting eyeballs and distended veins, they still held staunchly to their task, resolved at all costs to devour the whole, in order to cure the patient, who meanwhile ceased not, in feeble tones, to praise their exertions, and implore them to persevere. [16] [16] "En fin il leur fallut rendre gorge, ce qu'ils firent à diuerses reprises, ne laissants pas pour cela de continuer à vuider leur plat."—Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 142.—This beastly superstition exists in some tribes at the present day. A kindred superstition once fell under the writer's notice, in the case of a wounded Indian, who begged of every one he met to drink a large bowl of water, in order that he, the Indian, might be cured. Turning from these eccentricities of the "noble savage" [17] to the zealots who were toiling, according to their light, to snatch him from the clutch of Satan, we see the irrepressible Jesuits roaming from town to town in restless quest of subjects for baptism. In the case of adults, they thought some little preparation essential; but their efforts to this end, even with the aid of St. Joseph, whom they constantly invoked, [18] were not always successful; and, 96 cheaply as they offered salvation, they sometimes railed to find a purchaser. With infants, however, a simple drop of water sufficed for the transfer from a prospective Hell to an assured Paradise. The Indians, who at first had sought baptism as a cure, now began to regard it as a cause of death; and when the priest entered a lodge where a sick child lay in extremity, the scowling parents watched him with jealous distrust, lest unawares the deadly drop should be applied. The Jesuits were equal to the emergency. Father Le Mercier will best tell his own story. [17] In the midst of these absurdities we find recorded one of the best traits of the Indian character. At Ihonatiria, a house occupied by a family of orphan children was burned to the ground, leaving the inmates destitute. The villagers united to aid them. Each contributed something, and they were soon better provided for than before. [18] "C'est nostre refuge ordinaire en semblables necessitez, et d'ordinaire auec tels succez, que nous auons sujet d'en benir Dieu à iamais, qui nous fait cognoistre en cette barbarie le credit de ce S. Patriarche aupres de son infinie misericorde."—Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 153.—In the case of a woman at Onnentisati, "Dieu nous inspira de luy vou?r quelques Messes en l'honneur de S. Joseph." The effect was prompt. In half an hour the woman was ready for baptism. On the same page we have another subject secured to Heaven, "sans doute par les merites du glorieux Patriarche S. Joseph." "On the third of May, Father Pierre Pijart baptized at Anonatea a little child two months old, in manifest danger of death, without being seen by the parents, who would not give their consent. This is the device which he used. Our sugar does wonders for us. He pretended to make the child drink a little sugared water, and at the same time dipped a finger in it. As the father of the infant began to suspect something, and called out to him not to baptize it, he gave the spoon to a woman who was near, and said to her, 'Give it to him yourself.' She approached and found the child asleep; and at the same time Father Pijart, under pretence of seeing if he was really asleep, touched his face with his wet finger, and baptized him. At the end of forty-eight hours he went to Heaven. 97 "Some days before, the missionary had used the same device (industrie) for baptizing a little boy six or seven years old. His father, who was very sick, had several times refused to receive baptism; and when asked if he would not be glad to have his son baptized, he had answered, No. 'At least,' said Father Pijart, 'you will not object to my giving him a little sugar.' 'No; but you must not baptize him.' The missionary gave it to him once; then again; and at the third spoonful, before he had put the sugar into the water, he let a drop of it fall on the child, at the same time pronouncing the sacramental words. A little girl, who was looking at him, cried out, 'Father, he is baptizing him!' The child's father was much disturbed; but the missionary said to him, 'Did you not see that I was giving him sugar?' The child died soon after; but God showed His grace to the father, who is now in perfect health." [19] [19] Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 165. Various other cases of the kind are mentioned in the Relations. That equivocal morality, lashed by the withering satire of Pascal,—a morality built on the doctrine that all means are permissible for saving souls from perdition, and that sin itself is no sin when its object is the "greater glory of God,"—found far less scope in the rude wilderness of the Hurons than among the interests, ambitions, and passions of civilized life. Nor were these men, chosen from the purest of their Order, personally well fitted to illustrate the capabilities of this elastic system. Yet now and then, by the light of their own writings, 98 we may observe that the teachings of the school of Loyola had not been wholly without effect in the formation of their ethics. But when we see them, in the gloomy February of 1637, and the gloomier months that followed, toiling on foot from one infected town to another, wading through the sodden snow, under the bare and dripping forests, drenched with incessant rains, till they descried at length through the storm the clustered dwellings of some barbarous hamlet,—when we see them entering, one after another, these wretched abodes of misery and darkness, and all for one sole end, the baptism of the sick and dying, we may smile at the futility of the object, but we must needs admire the self-sacrificing zeal with which it was pursued. CHAPTER IX. 1637. CHARACTER OF THE CANADIAN JESUITS. Jean de Brébeuf ? Charles Garnier ? Joseph Marie Chaumonot ? No?l Chabanel ? Isaac Jogues ? Other Jesuits ? Nature of their Faith ? Supernaturalism ? Visions ? Miracles Before pursuing farther these obscure, but noteworthy, scenes in the drama of human history, it will be well to indicate, so far as there are means of doing so, the distinctive traits of some of the chief actors. Mention has often been made of Brébeuf,—that masculine apostle of the Faith,—the Ajax of the mission. Nature had given him all the passions of a vigorous manhood, and religion had crushed them, curbed them, or tamed them to do her work,—like a dammed-up torrent, sluiced and guided to grind and saw and weave for the good of man. Beside him, in strange contrast, stands his co-laborer, Charles Garnier. Both were of noble birth and gentle nurture; but here the parallel ends. Garnier's face was beardless, though he was above thirty years old. For this he was laughed at by his friends in Paris, but admired by 100 the Indians, who thought him handsome. [1] His constitution, bodily or mental, was by no means robust. From boyhood, he had shown a delicate and sensitive nature, a tender conscience, and a proneness to religious emotion. He had never gone with his schoolmates to inns and other places of amusement, but kept his pocket-money to give to beggars. One of his brothers relates of him, that, seeing an obscene book, he bought and destroyed it, lest other boys should be injured by it. He had always wished to be a Jesuit, and, after a novitiate which is described as most edifying, he became a professed member of the Order. The Church, indeed, absorbed the greater part, if not the whole, of this pious family,—one brother being a Carmelite, another a Capuchin, and a third a Jesuit, while there seems also to have been a fourth under vows. Of Charles Garnier there remain twenty-four letters, written at various times to his father and two of his brothers, chiefly during his missionary life among the Hurons. They breathe the deepest and most intense Roman Catholic piety, and a spirit enthusiastic, yet sad, as of one renouncing all the hopes and prizes of the world, and living for Heaven alone. The affections of his sensitive nature, severed from earthly objects, found relief in an ardent adoration of the Virgin Mary. With none of the bone and sinew of rugged manhood, he entered, not only without hesitation, but with 101 eagerness, on a life which would have tried the boldest; and, sustained by the spirit within him, he was more than equal to it. His fellow-missionaries thought him a saint; and had he lived a century or two earlier, he would perhaps have been canonized: yet, while all his life was a willing martyrdom, one can discern, amid his admirable virtues, some slight lingerings of mortal vanity. Thus, in three several letters, he speaks of his great success in baptizing, and plainly intimates that he had sent more souls to Heaven than the other Jesuits. [2] [1] "C'est pourquoi j'ai bien gagne à quitter la France, où vous me fesiez la guerre de n'avoir point de barbe; car c'est ce qui me fait estimer beau des Sauvages."—Lettres de Garnier, MSS. [2] The above sketch of Garnier is drawn from various sources. Observations du P. Henri de St. Joseph, Carme, sur son Frère le P. Charles Garnier, MS.—Abrégé de la Vie du R. Père Charles Garnier, MS. This unpublished sketch bears the signature of the Jesuit Ragueneau, with the date 1652. For the opportunity of consulting it I am indebted to Rev. Felix Martin, S. J.—Lettres du P. Charles Garnier, MSS. These embrace his correspondence from the Huron country, and are exceedingly characteristic and striking. There is another letter in Carayon, Première Mission.—Garnier's family was wealthy, as well as noble. Its members seem to have been strongly attached to each other, and the young priest's father was greatly distressed at his departure for Canada. Next appears a young man of about twenty-seven years, Joseph Marie Chaumonot. Unlike Brébeuf and Garnier, he was of humble origin,—his father being a vine-dresser, and his mother the daughter of a poor village schoolmaster. At an early age they sent him to Chatillon on the Seine, where he lived with his uncle, a priest, who taught him to speak Latin, and awakened his religious susceptibilities, which were naturally strong. This did not prevent him from yielding to the persuasions of one of his companions to run off to Beaune, a town of Burgundy, where the fugitives proposed to 102 study music under the Fathers of the Oratory. To provide funds for the journey, he stole a sum of about the value of a dollar from his uncle, the priest. This act, which seems to have been a mere peccadillo of boyish levity, determined his future career. Finding himself in total destitution at Beaune, he wrote to his mother for money, and received in reply an order from his father to come home. Stung with the thought of being posted as a thief in his native village, he resolved not to do so, but to set out forthwith on a pilgrimage to Rome; and accordingly, tattered and penniless, he took the road for the sacred city. Soon a conflict began within him between his misery and the pride which forbade him to beg. The pride was forced to succumb. He begged from door to door; slept under sheds by the wayside, or in haystacks; and now and then found lodging and a meal at a convent. Thus, sometimes alone, sometimes with vagabonds whom he met on the road, he made his way through Savoy and Lombardy in a pitiable condition of destitution, filth, and disease. At length he reached Ancona, when the thought occured to him of visiting the Holy House of Loretto, and imploring the succor of the Virgin Mary. Nor were his hopes disappointed. He had reached that renowned shrine, knelt, paid his devotions, and offered his prayer, when, as he issued from the door of the chapel, he was accosted by a young man, whom he conjectures to have been an angel descended to his relief, and who was probably some penitent or devotee bent on works of charity or 103 self-mortification. With a voice of the greatest kindness, he proffered his aid to the wretched boy, whose appearance was alike fitted to awaken pity and disgust. The conquering of a natural repugnance to filth, in the interest of charity and humility, is a conspicuous virtue in most of the Roman Catholic saints; and whatever merit may attach to it was acquired in an extraordinary degree by the young man in question. Apparently, he was a physician; for he not only restored the miserable wanderer to a condition of comparative decency, but cured him of a grievous malady, the result of neglect. Chaumonot went on his way, thankful to his benefactor, and overflowing with an enthusiasm of gratitude to Our Lady of Loretto. [3] [3] "Si la moindre dame m'avoit fait rendre ce service par le dernier de ses valets, n'aurois-je pas dus lui en rendre toutes les reconnoissances possibles? Et si après une telle charité elle s'étoit offerte à me servir toujours de mesme, comment aurois-je d? l'honorer, lui obéir, l'aimer toute ma vie! Pardon, Reine des Anges et des hommes! pardon de ce qu'après avoir re?u de vous tant de marques, par lesquelles vous m'avez convaincu que vous m'avez adopté pour votre fils, j'ai eu l'ingratitude pendant des années entières de me comporter encore plut?t en esclave de Satan qu'en enfant d'une Mère Vierge. O que vous êtes bonne et charitable! puisque quelques obstacles que mes péchés ayent pu mettre à vos graces, vous n'avez jamais cessé de m'attirer au bien; jusque là que vous m'avez fait admettre dans la Sainte Compagnie de Jésus, votre fils."—Chaumonot, Vie, 20. The above is from the very curious autobiography written by Chaumonot, at the command of his Superior, in 1688. The original manuscript is at the H?tel Dieu of Quebec. Mr. Shea has printed it. As he journeyed towards Rome, an old burgher, at whose door he had begged, employed him as a servant. He soon became known to a Jesuit, to whom he had confessed himself in Latin; and as his acquirements were considerable for his years, he was eventually employed as teacher of a low 104 class in one of the Jesuit schools. Nature had inclined him to a life of devotion. He would fain be a hermit, and, to that end, practised eating green ears of wheat; but, finding he could not swallow them, conceived that he had mistaken his vocation. Then a strong desire grew up within him to become a Récollet, a Capuchin, or, above all, a Jesuit; and at length the wish of his heart was answered. At the age of twenty-one, he was admitted to the Jesuit novitiate. [4] Soon after its close, a small duodecimo volume was placed in his hands. It was a Relation of the Canadian mission, and contained one of those narratives of Brébeuf which have been often cited in the preceding pages. Its effect was immediate. Burning to share those glorious toils, the young priest asked to be sent to Canada; and his request was granted. [4] His age, when he left his uncle, the priest, is not mentioned. But he must have been a mere child; for, at the end of his novitiate, he had forgotten his native language, and was forced to learn it a second time. "Jamais y eut-il homme sur terre plus obligé que moi à la Sainte Famille de Jésus, de Marie et de Joseph! Marie en me guérissant de ma vilaine galle ou teigne, me délivra d'une infinité de peines et d'incommodités corporelles, que cette hideuse maladie qui me rongeoit m'avoit causé. Joseph m'ayant obtenu la grace d'être incorporé à un corps aussi saint qu'est celui des Jésuites, m'a preservé d'une infinité de misères spirituelles, de tentations très dangereuses et de péchés très énormes. Jésus n'ayant pas permis que j'entrasse dans aucun autre ordre qu'en celui qu'il honore tout à la fois de son beau nom, de sa douce présence et de sa protection spéciale. O Jésus! O Marie! O Joseph! qui méritoit moins que moi vos divines faveurs, et envers qui avez vous été 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 105 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 sanctity. Accordingly he addressed to her his prayer, promising to publish her fame on every possible occasion, if she would obtain his cure from God. [5] 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. [5] "Je me recommandai à elle en lui promettant de la faire conno?tre dans toutes les occasions que j'en aurois jamais, si elle m'obtenoit de Dieu ma guérison."—Chaumonot, Vie, 46. No?l 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 inaptitude to learning the language, and 106 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. [6] [6] Abrégé de la Vie du Père No?l 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 constitutional 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, God 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 petitions 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 107 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. [7] [7] 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. [8] And he ascribed to the deceased Garnier's 108 influence the mastery of that language which he afterwards acquired. [8] "Je n'eus pas plut?t appris sa glorieuse mort, que je lui promis tout ce que je ferois de bien pendant huit jours, à condition qu'il me feroit son héritier 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. [9] [9] 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 Passionists, 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 brass 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 Hell and visions from Heaven, were incidents of no rare occurrence in the lives of these ardent apostles. To Brébeuf, 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 wild-cats. He called on God, 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, assailed him with the temptation which beset St. Benedict among the rocks of Subiaco; but Brébeuf signed the cross, and the infernal siren melted into air. He saw the vision 109 of a vast and gorgeous palace; and a miraculous voice assured him that such was to be the reward of those who dwelt in savage hovels for the cause of God. 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." [10] 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. [10] Quelques Remarques sur la Vie du Père Jean de Brébeuf, 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 Brébeuf himself. Still other visions are recorded by Chaumonot as occurring to Brébeuf, when they were together in the Neutral country. See also the long notice of Brébeuf, 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. Ossossané ? 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 ? Brébeuf's Letter ? Narrow Escapes ? Woes and Consolations The town of Ossossané, or Rochelle, 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. [1] The Indians had promised Brébeuf 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. [2] [1] The doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, recently sanctioned by the Pope, has long been a favorite tenet of the Jesuits. [2] Lettres de Garnier, MSS. It was of upright pickets, ten feet high, with flanking towers at two angles. 111 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 shining 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 Hell. The entrance was adorned with a quantity of tinsel, together with green boughs skilfully disposed. [3] [3] "Nostre Chapelle estoit extraordinairement bien ornée, … nous auions dressé vn portique entortillé de feüillage, meslé d'oripeau, en vn mot nous auions estallé tout ce que vostre R. nous a enuoié 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. [4] [4] Ibid., 1637, 176. 112 One is forced to wonder at, if not to admire, the energy with which these priests and their scarcely less zealous attendants [5] 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. [5] 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 donnés, 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 coarse than a horse's mane, and faces perhaps smeared with paint in honor of the occasion; wenches in gay attire; hags muffled 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 113 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 mass 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 snatched 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 hellish ingenuity. Such, at least, is the explanation given by the Jesuits of the scenes that followed. [6] Whether accepting it or not, let us examine the circumstances which gave rise to it. [6] Several of the Jesuits allude to this supposed excitement among the tenants of the nether world. Thus, Le Mercier says, "Le Diable se sentoit pressé de prés, 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 Hell by the recent successes of the mission, and adds,—"Vous pouvez juger quelle consolation nous étoit-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." 114 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 breasts 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 grasshoppers. 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 pricked an infant to death with awls in the forest, in order to kill the Huron children by magic. "Perhaps," 115 observes Father Le Mercier, "the Devil was enraged because we had placed a great many of these little innocents in Heaven." [7] [7] "Le diable enrageoit peutestre de ce que nous avions placé dans le ciel quantité de ces petits 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 116 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 passed, 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 snowballs 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 117 his handkerchief, which he had previously dipped in water, murmured the baptismal words with motionless lips, and snatched another soul from the fangs of the "Infernal Wolf." [8] 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. [8] Ce loup infernal is a title often bestowed in the Relations on the Devil. The above details are gathered from the narratives of Brébeuf, 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 petit 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 assembly 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, Brébeuf 118 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 passed 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. [9] A few days after, the assembly 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, [10] 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 119 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." [9] Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1638, 38. [10] 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 Ontitarac, 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 assembled 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 120 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 mass of evidence. When he had spent his eloquence, Brébeuf 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 assembly, and they called upon Brébeuf 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. "If you will not believe me," said Brébeuf, "go to our house; search everywhere; and if you are not sure which is the charm, take all our clothing and all our cloth, and throw them into the lake." "Sorcerers always talk in that way," was the reply. "Then what will you have me say?" demanded Brébeuf. "Tell us the cause of the pest." Brébeuf replied to the best of his power, mingling his explanations with instructions in Christian doctrine and exhortations to embrace the Faith. He was continually interrupted; and the old chief, Ontitarac, still called upon him to produce the charmed cloth. Thus the debate continued till after midnight, when several of the assembly, seeing no prospect of a termination, fell asleep, and others 121 went away. One old chief, as he passed out, said to Brébeuf, "If some young man should split your head, we should have nothing to say." The priest still continued to harangue the diminished conclave on the necessity of obeying God and the danger of offending Him, when the chief of Ossossané called out impatiently, "What sort of men are these? They are always saying the same thing, and repeating the same words a hundred times. They are never done with telling us about their Oki, and what he demands and what he forbids, and Paradise and Hell." [11] [11] The above account of the council is drawn from Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1638, Chap. II. See also Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 163. "Here was the end of this miserable council," writes Le Mercier; … "and if less evil came of it than was designed, we owe it, after God, to the Most Holy Virgin, to whom we had made a vow of nine masses in honor of her immaculate conception." The Fathers had escaped for the time; but they were still in deadly peril. They had taken pains to secure friends in private, and there were those who were attached to their interests; yet none dared openly take their part. The few converts they had lately made came to them in secret, and warned them that their death was determined upon. Their house was set on fire; in public, every face was averted from them; and a new council was called to pronounce the decree of death. They appeared before it with a front of such unflinching assurance, that their judges, Indian-like, postponed 122 the sentence. Yet it seemed impossible that they should much longer escape. Brébeuf, therefore, wrote a letter of farewell to his Superior, Le Jeune, at Quebec, and confided it to some converts whom he could trust, to be carried by them to its destination. "We are perhaps," he says, "about to give our blood and our lives in the cause of our Master, Jesus Christ. It seems that His goodness will accept this sacrifice, as regards me, in expiation of my great and numberless sins, and that He will thus crown the past services and ardent desires of all our Fathers here.… Blessed be His name forever, that He has chosen us, among so many better than we, to aid him to bear His cross in this land! In all things, His holy will be done!" He then acquaints Le Jeune that he has directed the sacred vessels, and all else belonging to the service of the altar, to be placed, in case of his death, in the hands of Pierre, the convert whose baptism has been described, and that especial care will be taken to preserve the dictionary and other writings on the Huron language. The letter closes with a request for masses and prayers. [12] [12] The following is the conclusion of the letter (Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1638, 43.) "En tout, sa sainte volonté soit faite; s'il veut que dés ceste heure nous mourions, ? la bonne heure pour nous! s'il veut nous reseruer à d'autres trauaux, qu'il soit beny; si vous entendez que Dieu ait couronné nos petits trauaux, ou plustost nos desirs, benissez-le: car c'est pour luy que nous desirons viure et mourir, et c'est luy qui nous en donne la grace. Au reste si quelques-vns suruiuent, i'ay donné ordre de tout ce qu'ils doiuent faire. I'ay esté d'aduis que nos Peres et nos domestiques se retirent chez ceux qu'ils croyront estre leurs meilleurs amis; i'ay donné charge qu'on porte chez Pierre nostre premier Chrestien tout ce qui est de la Sacristie, sur tout qu'on ait vn soin particulier de mettre en lieu d'asseurance le Dictionnaire et tout ce que nous auons de la langue. Pour moy, si Dieu me fait la grace d'aller au Ciel, ie prieray Dieu pour eux, pour les pauures Hurons, et n'oublieray pas Vostre Reuerence. "Apres tout, nous supplions V. R. et tous nos Peres de ne nous oublier en leurs saincts Sacrifices et prieres, afin qu'en la vie et apres la mort, il nous fasse misericorde; nous sommes tous en la vie et à l'Eternité, "De vostre Reuerence tres-humbles et tres-affectionnez seruiteurs en Nostre Seigneur, "Iean de Brebevf. Fran?ois Ioseph Le Mercier. Pierre Chastellain. Charles Garnier. Pavl Ragveneav. "En la Residence de la Conception, à Ossossané, ce 28 Octobre. "I'ay laissé en la Residence de sainct Ioseph les Peres Pierre Piiart, et Isaac Iogves, dans les mesmes sentimens." 123 The imperilled Jesuits now took a singular, but certainly a very wise step. They gave one of those farewell feasts—festins d'adieu—which Huron custom enjoined on those about to die, whether in the course of Nature or by public execution. Being interpreted, it was a declaration that the priests knew their danger, and did not shrink from it. It might have the effect of changing overawed friends into open advocates, and even of awakening a certain sympathy in the breasts of an assembly on whom a bold bearing could rarely fail of influence. The house was packed with feasters, and Brébeuf addressed them as usual on his unfailing themes of God, Paradise, and Hell. The throng listened in gloomy silence; and each, when he had emptied his bowl, rose and departed, leaving his entertainers in utter doubt as to his feelings and intentions. From this time forth, however, the clouds that overhung the Fathers became less 124 dark and threatening. Voices were heard in their defence, and looks were less constantly averted. They ascribed the change to the intercession of St. Joseph, to whom they had vowed a nine days' devotion. By whatever cause produced, the lapse of a week wrought a hopeful improvement in their prospects; and when they went out of doors in the morning, it was no longer with the expectation of having a hatchet struck into their brains as they crossed the threshold. [13] [13] "Tant y a que depuis le 6. de Nouembre que nous acheuasmes nos Messes votiues à son honneur, nous auons iouy d'vn repos incroyable, nons nous en emerueillons nous-mesmes de iour en iour, quand nous considerons en quel estat estoient nos affaires il n'y a que huict iours."—Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1638, 44. The persecution of the Jesuits as sorcerers continued, in an intermittent form, for years; and several of them escaped very narrowly. In a house at Ossossané, a young Indian rushed suddenly upon Fran?ois Du Peron, and lifted his tomahawk to brain him, when a squaw caught his hand. Paul Ragueneau wore a crucifix, from which hung the image of a skull. An Indian, thinking it a charm, snatched it from him. The priest tried to recover it, when the savage, his eyes glittering with murder, brandished his hatchet to strike. Ragueneau stood motionless, waiting the blow. His assailant forbore, and withdrew, muttering. Pierre Chaumonot was emerging from a house at the Huron town called by the Jesuits St. Michel, where he had just baptized a dying girl, when her brother, standing hidden in the doorway, struck him on the head with a stone. Chaumonot, severely 125 wounded, staggered without falling, when the Indian sprang upon him with his tomahawk. The bystanders arrested the blow. Fran?ois Le Mercier, in the midst of a crowd of Indians in a house at the town called St. Louis, was assailed by a noted chief, who rushed in, raving like a madman, and, in a torrent of words, charged upon him all the miseries of the nation. Then, snatching a brand from the fire, he shook it in the Jesuit's face, and told him that he should be burned alive. Le Mercier met him with looks as determined as his own, till, abashed at his undaunted front and bold denunciations, the Indian stood confounded. [14] [14] The above incidents are from Le Mercier, Lalemant, Bressani, the autobiography of Chaumonot, the unpublished writings of Garnier, and the ancient manuscript volume of memoirs of the early Canadian missionaries, at St. Mary's College, Montreal. The belief that their persecutions were owing to the fury of the Devil, driven to desperation by the home-thrusts he had received at their hands, was an unfailing consolation to the priests. "Truly," writes Le Mercier, "it is an unspeakable happiness for us, in the midst of this barbarism, to hear the roaring of the demons, and to see Earth and Hell raging against a handful of men who will not even defend themselves." [15] In all the copious records of this dark period, not a line gives occasion to suspect that one of this loyal band flinched or hesitated. The iron Brébeuf, the gentle Garnier, 126 the all-enduring Jogues, the enthusiastic Chaumonot, Lalemant, Le Mercier, Chatelain, Daniel, Pijart, Ragueneau, Du Peron, Poncet, Le Moyne,—one and all bore themselves with a tranquil boldness, which amazed the Indians and enforced their respect. [15] "C'est veritablement un bonheur indicible pour nous, au milieu de cette barbarie, d'entendre les rugissemens des demons, & de voir tout l'Enfer & quasi tous les hommes animez & remplis de fureur contre une petite poignée de gens qui ne voudroient pas se defendre."—Relation des Hurons, 1640, 31 (Cramoisy). Father Jerome Lalemant, in his journal of 1639, is disposed to draw an evil augury for the mission from the fact that as yet no priest had been put to death, inasmuch as it is a received maxim that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. [16] He consoles himself with the hope that the daily life of the missionaries may be accepted as a living martyrdom; since abuse and threats without end, the smoke, fleas, filth, and dogs of the Indian lodges,—which are, he says, little images of Hell,—cold, hunger, and ceaseless anxiety, and all these continued for years, are a portion to which many might prefer the stroke of a tomahawk. Reasonable as the Father's hope may be, its expression proved needless in the sequel; for the Huron church was not destined to suffer from a lack of martyrdom in any form. [16] "Nous auons quelque fois douté, s?auoir si on pouuoit esperer la conuersion de ce pa?s sans qu'il y eust effusion de sang: le principe re?eu ce semble dans l'Eglise de Dieu, que le sang des Martyrs est la semence des Chrestiens, me faisoit conclure pour lors, que cela n'estoit pas à esperer, voire mesme qu'il n'étoit pas à souhaiter, consideré la gloire qui reuient à Dieu de la constance des Martyrs, du sang desquels tout le reste de la terre ayant tantost esté abreuué, ce seroit vne espece de malediction, que ce quartier du monde ne participast point au bonheur d'auoir contribué à l'esclat de ceste gloire."—Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1639, 56, 57. CHAPTER XI. 1638-1640. PRIEST AND PAGAN. Du Peron's Journey ? Daily Life of the Jesuits ? Their Missionary Excursions ? Converts at Ossossané ? Machinery of Conversion ? Conditions of Baptism ? Backsliders ? The Converts and their Countrymen ? The Cannibals at St. Joseph We have already touched on the domestic life of the Jesuits. That we may the better know them, we will follow one of their number on his journey towards the scene of his labors, and observe what awaited him on his arrival. Father Fran?ois Du Peron came up the Ottawa in a Huron canoe in September, 1638, and was well treated by the Indian owner of the vessel. Lalemant and Le Moyne, who had set out from Three Rivers before him, did not fare so well. The former was assailed by an Algonquin of Allumette Island, who tried to strangle him in revenge for the death of a child, which a Frenchman in the employ of the Jesuits had lately bled, but had failed to restore to health by the operation. Le 128 Moyne was abandoned by his Huron conductors, and remained for a fortnight by the bank of the river, with a French attendant who supported him by hunting. Another Huron, belonging to the flotilla that carried Du Peron, then took him into his canoe; but, becoming tired of him, was about to leave him on a rock in the river, when his brother priest bribed the savage with a blanket to carry him to his journey's end. It was midnight, on the twenty-ninth of September, when Du Peron landed on the shore of Thunder Bay, after paddling without rest since one o'clock of the preceding morning. The night was rainy, and Ossossané was about fifteen miles distant. His Indian companions were impatient to reach their towns; the rain prevented the kindling of a fire; while the priest, who for a long time had not heard mass, was eager to renew his communion as soon as possible. Hence, tired and hungry as he was, he shouldered his sack, and took the path for Ossossané without breaking his fast. He toiled on, half-spent, amid the ceaseless pattering, trickling, and whispering of innumerable drops among innumerable leaves, till, as day dawned, he reached a clearing, and descried through the mists a cluster of Huron houses. Faint and bedrenched, he entered the principal one, and was greeted with the monosyllable "Shay!"—"Welcome!" A squaw spread a mat for him by the fire, roasted four ears of Indian corn before the coals, baked two squashes in the embers, ladled from her kettle a dish of sagamite, and offered them to her famished guest. 129 Missionaries seem to have been a novelty at this place; for, while the Father breakfasted, a crowd, chiefly of children, gathered about him, and stared at him in silence. One examined the texture of his cassock; another put on his hat; a third took the shoes from his feet, and tried them on her own. Du Peron requited his entertainers with a few trinkets, and begged, by signs, a guide to Ossossané. An Indian accordingly set out with him, and conducted him to the mission-house, which he reached at six o'clock in the evening. Here he found a warm welcome, and little other refreshment. In respect to the commodities of life, the Jesuits were but a step in advance of the Indians. Their house, though well ventilated by numberless crevices in its bark walls, always smelt of smoke, and, when the wind was in certain quarters, was filled with it to suffocation. At their meals, the Fathers sat on logs around the fire, over which their kettle was slung in the Indian fashion. Each had his wooden platter, which, from the difficulty of transportation, was valued, in the Huron country, at the price of a robe of beaver-skin, or a hundred francs. [1] Their food consisted of sagamite, or "mush," made of pounded Indian-corn, boiled with scraps of smoked fish. Chaumonot compares it to the paste used for papering the walls of houses. The repast was occasionally varied by a pumpkin or squash baked in the ashes, or, in the 130 season, by Indian corn roasted in the ear. They used no salt whatever. They could bring their cumbrous pictures, ornaments, and vestments through the savage journey of the Ottawa; but they could not bring the common necessaries of life. By day, they read and studied by the light that streamed in through the large smoke-holes in the roof,—at night, by the blaze of the fire. Their only candles were a few of wax, for the altar. They cultivated a patch of ground, but raised nothing on it except wheat for making the sacramental bread. Their food was supplied by the Indians, to whom they gave, in return, cloth, knives, awls, needles, and various trinkets. Their supply of wine for the Eucharist was so scanty, that they limited themselves to four or five drops for each mass. [2] [1] "Nos plats, quoyque de bois, nous co?tent plus cher que les v?tres; ils sont de la valeur d'une robe de castor, c'est à dire cent francs."—Lettre du P. Du Peron à son Frère, 27 Avril, 1639.—The Father's appraisement seems a little questionable. [2] The above particulars are drawn from a long letter of Fran?ois Du Peron to his brother, Joseph-Imbert Du Peron, dated at La Conception (Ossossané), April 27, 1639, and from a letter, equally long, of Chaumonot to Father Philippe Nappi, dated Du Pays des Hurons, May 26, 1640. Both are in Carayon. These private letters of the Jesuits, of which many are extant, in some cases written on birch-bark, are invaluable as illustrations of the subject. The Jesuits soon learned to make wine from wild grapes. Those in Maine and Acadia, at a later period, made good candles from the waxy fruit of the shrub known locally as the "bayberry." Their life was regulated with a conventual strictness. At four in the morning, a bell roused them from the sheets of bark on which they slept. Masses, private devotions, reading religious books, and breakfasting, filled the time until eight, when they opened their door and admitted the Indians. As many of these proved intolerable nuisances, they took what Lalemant calls the honnête liberty of turning out the most intrusive and impracticable,—an 131 act performed with all tact and courtesy, and rarely taken in dudgeon. Having thus winnowed their company, they catechized those that remained, as opportunity offered. In the intervals, the guests squatted by the fire and smoked their pipes. As among the Spartan virtues of the Hurons that of thieving was especially conspicuous, it was necessary that one or more of the Fathers should remain on guard at the house all day. The rest went forth on their missionary labors, baptizing and instructing, as we have seen. To each priest who could speak Huron [3] was assigned a certain number of houses,—in some instances, as many as forty; and as these often had five or six fires, with two families to each, his spiritual flock was as numerous as it was intractable. It was his care to see that none of the number died without baptism, and by every means in his power to commend the doctrines of his faith to the acceptance of those in health. [3] At the end of the year 1638, there were seven priests who spoke Huron, and three who had begun to learn it. At dinner, which was at two o'clock, grace was said in Huron,—for the benefit of the Indians present,—and a chapter of the Bible was read aloud during the meal. At four or five, according to the season, the Indians were dismissed, the door closed, and the evening spent in writing, reading, studying the language, devotion, and conversation on the affairs of the mission. The local missions here referred to embraced 132 Ossossané and the villages of the neighborhood; but the priests by no means confined themselves within these limits. They made distant excursions, two in company, until every house in every Huron town had heard the annunciation of the new doctrine. On these journeys, they carried blankets or large mantles at their backs, for sleeping in at night, besides a supply of needles, awls, beads, and other small articles, to pay for their lodging and entertainment: for the Hurons, hospitable without stint to each other, expected full compensation from the Jesuits. At Ossossané, the house of the Jesuits no longer served the double purpose of dwelling and chapel. In 1638, they had in their pay twelve artisans and laborers, sent up from Quebec, [4] who had built, before the close of the year, a chapel of wood. [5] Hither they removed their pictures and ornaments; and here, in winter, several fires were kept burning, for the comfort of the half-naked converts. [6] Of these they now had at Ossossané about sixty,—a large, though evidently not a very solid nucleus for the Huron church,—and they labored hard and anxiously to confirm and multiply them. Of a Sunday morning in winter, one could have seen them coming to mass, often from a considerable distance, "as naked," says Lalemant, "as your hand, except a skin over their backs like a mantle, and, in the coldest weather, a few skins around 133 their feet and legs." They knelt, mingled with the French mechanics, before the altar,—very awkwardly at first, for the posture was new to them,—and all received the sacrament together: a spectacle which, as the missionary chronicler declares, repaid a hundred times all the labor of their conversion. [7] [4] Du Peron in Carayon, 173. [5] "La chapelle est faite d'une charpente bien jolie, semblable presque, en fa?on et grandeur, à notre chapelle de St. Julien."—Ibid., 183. [6] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1639, 62. [7] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1639, 62. Some of the principal methods of conversion are curiously illustrated in a letter written by Garnier to a friend in France. "Send me," he says, "a picture of Christ without a beard." Several Virgins are also requested, together with a variety of souls in perdition—ames damnées—most of them to be mounted in a portable form. Particular directions are given with respect to the demons, dragons, flames, and other essentials of these works of art. Of souls in bliss—ames bienheureuses—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; and there must be no flowers or animals, as these distract the attention of the Indians. [8] [8] Garnier, Lettre 17me, MS. These directions show an excellent knowledge of Indian peculiarities. The Indian dislike of a beard is well known. Catlin, the painter, once caused a fatal quarrel among a party of Sioux, by representing one of them in profile, whereupon he was jibed by a rival as being but half a man. The first point with the priests was of course to bring the objects of their zeal to an acceptance of the fundamental doctrines of the Roman Church; but, as the mind of the savage was by no means 134 that beautiful blank which some have represented it, there was much to be erased as well as to be written. They must renounce a host of superstitions, to which they were attached with a strange tenacity, or which may rather be said to have been ingrained in their very natures. Certain points of Christian morality were also strongly urged by the missionaries, who insisted that the convert should take but one wife, and not cast her off without grave cause, and that he should renounce the gross license almost universal among the Hurons. Murder, cannibalism, and several other offences, were also forbidden. Yet, while laboring at the work of conversion with an energy never surpassed, and battling against the powers of darkness with the mettle of paladins, the Jesuits never had the folly to assume towards the Indians a dictatorial or overbearing tone. Gentleness, kindness, and patience were the rule of their intercourse. [9] They studied the nature of the savage, and conformed themselves to it with an admirable tact. Far from treating the Indian as an alien and barbarian, they would fain have adopted him as a countryman; and they 135 proposed to the Hurons that a number of young Frenchmen should settle among them, and marry their daughters in solemn form. The listeners were gratified at an overture so flattering. "But what is the use," they demanded, "of so much ceremony? If the Frenchmen want our women, they are welcome to come and take them whenever they please, as they always used to do." [10] [9] The following passage from the "Divers Sentimens," before cited, will illustrate this point. "Pour conuertir les Sauuages, il n'y faut pas tant de science que de bonté et vertu bien solide. Les quatre Elemens d'vn homme Apostolique en la Nouuelle France sont l'Affabilité, l'Humilité, la Patience et vne Charité genereuse. Le zele trop ardent brusle plus qu'il n'eschauffe, et gaste tout; il faut vne grande magnanimité et condescendance, pour attirer peu à peu ces Sauuages. Ils n'entendent pas bien nostre Theologie, mais ils entendent parfaictement bien nostre humilité et nostre affabilité, et se laissent gaigner." So too Brébeuf, in a letter to Vitelleschi, General of the Jesuits (see Carayon, 163): "Ce qu'il faut demander, avant tout, des ouvriers destinés à cette mission, c'est une douceur inaltérable et une patience à toute épreuve." [10] Le Mercier, Relation des Hurons, 1637, 160. The Fathers are well agreed that their difficulties did not arise from any natural defect of understanding on the part of the Indians, who, according to Chaumonot, were more intelligent than the French peasantry, and who, in some instances, showed in their way a marked capacity. It was the inert mass of pride, sensuality, indolence, and superstition that opposed the march of the Faith, and in which the Devil lay intrenched as behind impregnable breastworks. [11] [11] In this connection, the following specimen of Indian reasoning is worth noting. At the height of the pestilence, a Huron said to one of the priests, "I see plainly that your God is angry with us because we will not believe and obey him. Ihonatiria, where you first taught his word, is entirely ruined. Then you came here to Ossossané, and we would not listen; so Ossossané is ruined too. This year you have been all through our country, and found scarcely any who would do what God commands; therefore the pestilence is everywhere." After premises so hopeful, the Fathers looked for a satisfactory conclusion; but the Indian proceeded—"My opinion is, that we ought to shut you out from all the houses, and stop our ears when you speak of God, so that we cannot hear. Then we shall not be so guilty of rejecting the truth, and he will not punish us so cruelly."—Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1640, 80. It soon became evident that it was easier to make a convert than to keep him. Many of the Indians clung to the idea that baptism was a safeguard against pestilence and misfortune; and when 136 the fallacy of this notion was made apparent, their zeal cooled. Their only amusements consisted of feasts, dances, and games, many of which were, to a greater or less degree, of a superstitious character; and as the Fathers could rarely prove to their own satisfaction the absence of the diabolic element in any one of them, they proscribed the whole indiscriminately, to the extreme disgust of the neophyte. His countrymen, too, beset him with dismal prognostics: as, "You will kill no more game,"—"All your hair will come out before spring," and so forth. Various doubts also assailed him with regard to the substantial advantages of his new profession; and several converts were filled with anxiety in view of the probable want of tobacco in Heaven, saying that they could not do without it. [12] Nor was it pleasant to these incipient Christians, as they sat in class listening to the instructions of their teacher, to find themselves and him suddenly made the targets of a shower of sticks, snowballs, corn-cobs, and other rubbish, flung at them by a screeching rabble of vagabond boys. [13] [12] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1639, 80. [13] Ibid., 78. Yet, while most of the neophytes demanded an anxious and diligent cultivation, there were a few of excellent promise; and of one or two especially, the Fathers, in the fulness of their satisfaction, assure us again and again "that they were savage only in name." [14] [14] From June, 1639, to June, 1640, about a thousand persons were baptized. Of these, two hundred and sixty were infants, and many more were children. Very many died soon after baptism. Of the whole number, less than twenty were baptized in health,—a number much below that of the preceding year. The following is a curious case of precocious piety. It is that of a child at St. Joseph. "Elle n'a que deux ans, et fait joliment le signe de la croix, et prend elle-même de l'eau bénite; et une fois se mit à crier, sortant de la Chapelle, à cause que sa mère qui la portoit ne lui avoit donné le loisir d'en prendre. Il l'a fallu reporter en prendre."—Lettres de Garnier, MSS. 137 As the town of Ihonatiria, where the Jesuits had made their first abode, was ruined by the pestilence, the mission established there, and known by the name of St. Joseph, was removed, in the summer of 1638, to Teanaustayé, a large town at the foot of a range of hills near the southern borders of the Huron territory. The Hurons, this year, had had unwonted successes in their war with the Iroquois, and had taken, at various times, nearly a hundred prisoners. Many of these were brought to the seat of the new mission of St. Joseph, and put to death with frightful tortures, though not before several had been converted and baptized. The torture was followed, in spite of the remonstrances of the priests, by those cannibal feasts customary with the Hurons on such occasions. Once, when the Fathers had been strenuous in their denunciations, a hand of the victim, duly prepared, was flung in at their door, as an invitation to join in the festivity. As the owner of the severed member had been baptized, they dug a hole in their chapel, and buried it with solemn rites of sepulture. [15] [15] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1639, 70. CHAPTER XII. 1639, 1640. THE TOBACCO NATION—THE NEUTRALS. A Change of Plan ? Sainte Marie ? Mission of the Tobacco Nation ? Winter Journeying ? Reception of the Missionaries ? Superstitious Terrors ? Peril of Garnier and Jogues ? Mission of the Neutrals ? Huron Intrigues ? Miracles ? Fury of the Indians ? Intervention of Saint Michael ? Return to Sainte Marie ? Intrepidity of the Priests ? Their Mental Exaltation It had been the first purpose of the Jesuits to form permanent missions in each of the principal Huron towns; but, before the close of the year 1639, the difficulties and risks of this scheme had become fully apparent. They resolved, therefore, to establish one central station, to be a base of operations, and, as it were, a focus, whence the light of the Faith should radiate through all the wilderness around. It was to serve at once as residence, fort, magazine, hospital, and convent. Hence the priests would set forth on missionary expeditions far and near; and hither they might retire, as to an asylum, in times of sickness or extreme peril. Here the neophytes could be gathered 139 together, safe from perverting influences; and here in time a Christian settlement, Hurons mingled with Frenchmen, might spring up and thrive under the shadow of the cross. The site of the new station was admirably chosen. The little river Wye flows from the southward into the Matchedash Bay of Lake Huron, and, at about a mile from its mouth, passes through a small lake. The Jesuits made choice of the right bank of the Wye, where it issues from this lake,—gained permission to build from the Indians, though not without difficulty,—and began their labors with an abundant energy, and a very deficient supply of workmen and tools. The new establishment was called Sainte Marie. The house at Teanaustayé, and the house and chapel at Ossossané, were abandoned, and all was concentrated at this spot. On one hand, it had a short water communication with Lake Huron; and on the other, its central position gave the readiest access to every part of the Huron territory. During the summer before, the priests had made a survey of their field of action, visited all the Huron towns, and christened each of them with the name of a saint. This heavy draft on the calendar was followed by another, for the designation of the nine towns of the neighboring and kindred people of the Tobacco Nation. [1] The Huron towns were portioned into four districts, while those of the Tobacco Nation formed a fifth, and each district was assigned to the charge of two or more 140 priests. In November and December, they began their missionary excursions,—for the Indians were now gathered in their settlements,—and journeyed on foot through the denuded forests, in mud and snow, bearing on their backs the vessels and utensils necessary for the service of the altar. [1] See Introduction. The new and perilous mission of the Tobacco Nation fell to Garnier and Jogues. They were well chosen; and yet neither of them was robust by nature, in body or mind, though Jogues was noted for personal activity. The Tobacco Nation lay at the distance of a two days' journey from the Huron towns, among the mountains at the head of Nottawassaga Bay. The two missionaries tried to find a guide at Ossossané; but none would go with them, and they set forth on their wild and unknown pilgrimage alone. The forests were full of snow; and the soft, moist flakes were still falling thickly, obscuring the air, beplastering the gray trunks, weighing to the earth the boughs of spruce and pine, and hiding every footprint of the narrow path. The Fathers missed their way, and toiled on till night, shaking down at every step from the burdened branches a shower of fleecy white on their black cassocks. Night overtook them in a spruce swamp. Here they made a fire with great difficulty, cut the evergreen boughs, piled them for a bed, and lay down. The storm presently ceased; and, "praised be God," writes one of the travellers, "we passed a very good night." [2] [2] Jogues and Garnier in Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1640, 95. 141 In the morning they breakfasted on a morsel of corn bread, and, resuming their journey, fell in with a small party of Indians, whom they followed all day without food. At eight in the evening they reached the first Tobacco town, a miserable cluster of bark cabins, hidden among forests and half buried in snow-drifts, where the savage children, seeing the two black apparitions, screamed that Famine and the Pest were coming. Their evil fame had gone before them. They were unwelcome guests; nevertheless, shivering and famished as they were, in the cold and darkness, they boldly pushed their way into one of these dens of barbarism. It was precisely like a Huron house. Five or six fires blazed on the earthen floor, and around them were huddled twice that number of families, sitting, crouching, standing, or flat on the ground; old and young, women and men, children and dogs, mingled pell-mell. The scene would have been a strange one by daylight: it was doubly strange by the flicker and glare of the lodge-fires. Scowling brows, sidelong looks of distrust and fear, the screams of scared children, the scolding of squaws, the growling of wolfish dogs,—this was the greeting of the strangers. The chief man of the household treated them at first with the decencies of Indian hospitality; but when he saw them kneeling in the litter and ashes at their devotions, his suppressed fears found vent, and he began a loud harangue, addressed half to them and half to the Indians. "Now, what are these okies doing? They are making charms to kill us, and destroy all 142 that the pest has spared in this house. I heard that they were sorcerers; and now, when it is too late, I believe it." [3] It is wonderful that the priests escaped the tomahawk. Nowhere is the power of courage, faith, and an unflinching purpose more strikingly displayed than in the record of these missions. [3] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1640, 96. In other Tobacco towns their reception was much the same; but at the largest, called by them St. Peter and St. Paul, they fared worse. They reached it on a winter afternoon. Every door of its capacious bark houses was closed against them; and they heard the squaws within calling on the young men to go out and split their heads, while children screamed abuse at the black-robed sorcerers. As night approached, they left the town, when a band of young men followed them, hatchet in hand, to put them to death. Darkness, the forest, and the mountain favored them; and, eluding their pursuers, they escaped. Thus began the mission of the Tobacco Nation. In the following November, a yet more distant and perilous mission was begun. Brébeuf and Chaumonot set out for the Neutral Nation. This fierce people, as we have already seen, occupied that part of Canada which lies immediately north of Lake Erie, while a wing of their territory extended across the Niagara into Western New York. [4] In their athletic proportions, the ferocity 143 of their manners, and the extravagance of their superstitions, no American tribe has ever exceeded them. They carried to a preposterous excess the Indian notion, that insanity is endowed with a mysterious and superhuman power. Their country was full of pretended maniacs, who, to propitiate their guardian spirits, or okies, and acquire the mystic virtue which pertained to madness, raved stark naked through the villages, scattering the brands of the lodge-fires, and upsetting everything in their way. [4] Introduction.—The river Niagara was at this time, 1640, well known to the Jesuits, though none of them had visited it. Lalemant speaks of it as the "famous river of this nation" (the Neutrals). The following translation, from his Relation of 1641, shows that both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie had already taken their present names. "This river" (the Niagara) "is the same by which our great lake of the Hurons, or Fresh Sea, discharges itself, in the first place, into Lake Erie (le lac d'Erié), or the Lake of the Cat Nation. Then it enters the territories of the Neutral Nation, and takes the name of Onguiaahra (Niagara), until it discharges itself into Ontario, or the Lake of St. Louis; whence at last issues the river which passes before Quebec, and is called the St. Lawrence." He makes no allusion to the cataract, which is first mentioned as follows by Ragueneau, in the Relation of 1648. "Nearly south of this same Neutral Nation there is a great lake, about two hundred leagues in circuit, named Erie (Erié), which is formed by the discharge of the Fresh Sea, and which precipitates itself by a cataract of frightful height into a third lake, named Ontario, which we call Lake St. Louis."—Relation des Hurons, 1648, 46. The two priests left Sainte Marie on the second of November, found a Huron guide at St. Joseph, and, after a dreary march of five days through the forest, reached the first Neutral town. Advancing thence, they visited in turn eighteen others; and their progress was a storm of maledictions. Brébeuf especially was accounted the most pestilent of sorcerers. The Hurons, restrained by a superstitious awe, and unwilling to kill the priests, lest they should embroil themselves with the French at 144 Quebec, conceived that their object might be safely gained by stirring up the Neutrals to become their executioners. To that end, they sent two emissaries to the Neutral towns, who, calling the chiefs and young warriors to a council, denounced the Jesuits as destroyers of the human race, and made their auditors a gift of nine French hatchets on condition that they would put them to death. It was now that Brébeuf, fully conscious of the danger, half starved and half frozen, driven with revilings from every door, struck and spit upon by pretended maniacs, beheld in a vision that great cross, which, as we have seen, moved onward through the air, above the wintry forests that stretched towards the land of the Iroquois. [5] [5] See ante, (page 109). Chaumonot records yet another miracle. "One evening, when all the chief men of the town were deliberating in council whether to put us to death, Father Brébeuf, while making his examination of conscience, as we were together at prayers, saw the vision of a spectre, full of fury, menacing us both with three javelins which he held in his hands. Then he hurled one of them at us; but a more powerful hand caught it as it flew: and this took place a second and a third time, as he hurled his two remaining javelins.… Late at night our host came back from the council, where the two Huron emissaries had made their gift of hatchets to have us killed. He wakened us to say that three times we had been at the point of death; for the young men had offered three times 145 to strike the blow, and three times the old men had dissuaded them. This explained the meaning of Father Brébeuf's vision." [6] [6] Chaumonot, Vie, 55. They had escaped for the time; but the Indians agreed among themselves, that thenceforth no one should give them shelter. At night, pierced with cold and faint with hunger, they found every door closed against them. They stood and watched, saw an Indian issue from a house, and, by a quick movement, pushed through the half-open door into this abode of smoke and filth. The inmates, aghast at their boldness, stared in silence. Then a messenger ran out to carry the tidings, and an angry crowd collected. "Go out, and leave our country," said an old chief, "or we will put you into the kettle, and make a feast of you." "I have had enough of the dark-colored flesh of our enemies," said a young brave; "I wish to know the taste of white meat, and I will eat yours." A warrior rushed in like a madman, drew his bow, and aimed the arrow at Chaumonot. "I looked at him fixedly," writes the Jesuit, "and commended myself in full confidence to St. Michael. Without doubt, this great archangel saved us; for almost immediately the fury of the warrior was appeased, and the rest of our enemies soon began to listen to the explanation we gave them of our visit to their country." [7] [7] Ibid., 57. The mission was barren of any other fruit than 146 hardship and danger, and after a stay of four months the two priests resolved to return. On the way, they met a genuine act of kindness. A heavy snow-storm arresting their progress, a Neutral woman took them into her lodge, entertained them for two weeks with her best fare, persuaded her father and relatives to befriend them, and aided them to make a vocabulary of the dialect. Bidding their generous hostess farewell, they journeyed northward, through the melting snows of spring, and reached Sainte Marie in safety. [8] [8] Lalemant, in his Relation of 1641, gives the narrative of this mission at length. His account coincides perfectly with the briefer notice of Chaumonot in his Autobiography. Chaumonot describes the difficulties of the journey very graphically in a letter to his friend, Father Nappi, dated Aug. 3, 1640, preserved in Carayon. See also the next letter, Brébeuf au T. R. P. Mutio Vitelleschi, 20 Ao?t, 1641. The Récollet La Roche Dallion had visited the Neutrals fourteen years before, (see Introduction, note,) and, like his two successors, had been seriously endangered by Huron intrigues. The Jesuits had borne all that the human frame seems capable of bearing. They had escaped as by miracle from torture and death. Did their zeal flag or their courage fail? A fervor intense and unquenchable urged them on to more distant and more deadly ventures. The beings, so near to mortal sympathies, so human, yet so divine, in whom their faith impersonated and dramatized the great principles of Christian truth,—virgins, saints, and angels,—hovered over them, and held before their raptured sight crowns of glory and garlands of immortal bliss. They burned to do, to suffer, and to die; and now, from out a living martyrdom, they turned their heroic gaze towards an 147 horizon dark with perils yet more appalling, and saw in hope the day when they should bear the cross into the blood-stained dens of the Iroquois. [9] [9] This zeal was in no degree due to success; for in 1641, after seven years of toil, the mission counted only about fifty living converts,—a falling off from former years. But, in this exaltation and tension of the powers, was there no moment when the recoil of Nature claimed a temporary sway? When, an exile from his kind, alone, beneath the desolate rock and the gloomy pine-trees, the priest gazed forth on the pitiless wilderness and the hovels of its dark and ruthless tenants, his thoughts, it may be, flew longingly beyond those wastes of forest and sea that lay between him and the home of his boyhood: or rather, led by a deeper attraction, they revisited the ancient centre of his faith, and he seemed to stand once more in that gorgeous temple, where, shrined in lazuli and gold, rest the hallowed bones of Loyola. Column and arch and dome rise upon his vision, radiant in painted light, and trembling with celestial music. Again he kneels before the altar, from whose tablature beams upon him that loveliest of shapes in which the imagination of man has embodied the spirit of Christianity. The illusion overpowers him. A thrill shakes his frame, and he bows in reverential rapture. No longer a memory, no longer a dream, but a visioned presence, distinct and luminous in the forest shades, the Virgin stands before him. Prostrate on the rocky earth, he adores the benign angel of his 148 ecstatic faith, then turns with rekindled fervors to his stern apostleship. Now, by the shores of Thunder Bay, the Huron traders freight their birch vessels for their yearly voyage; and, embarked with them, let us, too, revisit the rock of Quebec. CHAPTER XIII. 1636-1646. QUEBEC AND ITS TENANTS. The New Governor ? Edifying Examples ? Le Jeune's Correspondents ? Rank and Devotion ? Nuns ? Priestly Authority ? Condition of Quebec ? The Hundred Associates ? Church Discipline ? Plays ? Fireworks ? Processions ? Catechizing ? Terrorism ? Pictures ? The Converts ? The Society of Jesus ? The Foresters I have traced, in another volume, the life and death of the noble founder of New France, Samuel de Champlain. It was on Christmas Day, 1635, that his heroic spirit bade farewell to the frame it had animated, and to the rugged cliff where he had toiled so long to lay the corner-stone of a Christian empire. Quebec was without a governor. Who should succeed Champlain? and would his successor be found equally zealous for the Faith, and friendly to the mission? These doubts, as he himself tells us, agitated the mind of the Father Superior, Le Jeune; but they were happily set at rest, when, on a morning in June, he saw a ship anchoring in the basin below, and, hastening with his brethren to the landing-place, was there met by Charles Huault 150 de Montmagny, a Knight of Malta, followed by a train of officers and gentlemen. As they all climbed the rock together, Montmagny saw a crucifix planted by the path. He instantly fell on his knees before it; and nobles, soldiers, sailors, and priests imitated his example. The Jesuits sang Te Deum at the church, and the cannon roared from the adjacent fort. Here the new governor was scarcely installed, when a Jesuit came in to ask if he would be godfather to an Indian about to be baptized. "Most gladly," replied the pious Montmagny. He repaired on the instant to the convert's hut, with a company of gayly apparelled gentlemen; and while the inmates stared in amazement at the scarlet and embroidery, he bestowed on the dying savage the name of Joseph, in honor of the spouse of the Virgin and the patron of New France. [1] Three days after, he was told that a dead proselyte was to be buried; on which, leaving the lines of the new fortification he was tracing, he took in hand a torch, De Lisle, his lieutenant, took another, Repentigny and St. Jean, gentlemen of his suite, with a band of soldiers followed, two priests bore the corpse, and thus all moved together in procession to the place of burial. The Jesuits were comforted. Champlain himself had not displayed a zeal so edifying. [2] [1] Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 5 (Cramoisy). "Monsieur le Gouverneur se transporte aux Cabanes de ces pauures barbares, suivy d'une leste Noblesse. Je vous laisse à penser quel estonnement à ces Peuples de voir tant d'écarlate, tant de personnes bien faites sous leurs toits d'écorce!" [2] Ibid., 83 (Cramoisy). 151 A considerable reinforcement came out with Montmagny, and among the rest several men of birth and substance, with their families and dependants. "It was a sight to thank God for," exclaims Father Le Jeune, "to behold these delicate young ladies and these tender infants issuing from their wooden prison, like day from the shades of night." The Father, it will be remembered, had for some years past seen nothing but squaws, with papooses swathed like mummies and strapped to a board. He was even more pleased with the contents of a huge packet of letters that was placed in his hands, bearing the signatures of nuns, priests, soldiers, courtiers, and princesses. A great interest in the mission had been kindled in France. Le Jeune's printed Relations had been read with avidity; and his Jesuit brethren, who, as teachers, preachers, and confessors, had spread themselves through the nation, had successfully fanned the rising flame. The Father Superior finds no words for his joy. "Heaven," he exclaims, "is the conductor of this enterprise. Nature's arms are not long enough to touch so many hearts." [3] He reads how in a single convent, thirteen nuns have devoted themselves by a vow to the work of converting the Indian women and children; how, in the church of Montmartre, a nun lies prostrate day and night before the altar, praying for the mission; [4] how 152 "the Carmelites are all on fire, the Ursulines full of zeal, the sisters of the Visitation have no words to speak their ardor"; [5] how some person unknown, but blessed of Heaven, means to found a school for Huron children; how the Duchesse d'Aiguillon has sent out six workmen to build a hospital for the Indians; how, in every house of the Jesuits, young priests turn eager eyes towards Canada; and how, on the voyage thither, the devils raised a tempest, endeavoring, in vain fury, to drown the invaders of their American domain. [6] [3] "C'est Dieu qui conduit cette entreprise. La Nature n'a pas les bras assez longs," etc.—Relation, 1636, 3. [4] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 76. [5] Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 6. Compare "Divers Sentimens," appended to the Relation of 1635. [6] "L'Enfer enrageant de nous veoir aller en la Nouuelle France pour conuertir les infidelles et diminuer sa puissance, par dépit il sousleuoit tous les Elemens contre nous, et vouloit abysmer la flotte."—Divers Sentimens. Great was Le Jeune's delight at the exalted rank of some of those who gave their patronage to the mission; and again and again his satisfaction flows from his pen in mysterious allusions to these eminent persons. [7] In his eyes, the vicious imbecile who sat on the throne of France was the anointed champion of the Faith, and the cruel and ambitious priest who ruled king and nation alike was the chosen instrument of Heaven. Church and State, linked in alliance close and potential, played faithfully into each other's hands; and that enthusiasm, in which the Jesuit saw the direct inspiration of God, was fostered by all the prestige 153 of royalty and all the patronage of power. And, as often happens where the interests of a hierarchy are identified with the interests of a ruling class, religion was become a fashion, as graceful and as comforting as the courtier's embroidered mantle or the court lady's robe of fur. [7] Among his correspondents was the young Duc d'Enghien, afterwards the Great Condé, at this time fifteen years old. "Dieu soit loüé! tout le ciel de nostre chere Patrie nous promet de fauorables influences, iusques à ce nouuel astre, qui commence à paroistre parmy ceux de la premiere grandeur."—Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 3, 4. Such, we may well believe, was the complexion of the enthusiasm which animated some of Le Jeune's noble and princely correspondents. But there were deeper fervors, glowing in the still depths of convent cells, and kindling the breasts of their inmates with quenchless longings. Yet we hear of no zeal for the mission among religious communities of men. The Jesuits regarded the field as their own, and desired no rivals. They looked forward to the day when Canada should be another Paraguay. [8] It was to the combustible hearts of female recluses that the torch was most busily applied; and here, accordingly, blazed forth a prodigious and amazing flame. "If all had their pious will," writes Le Jeune, "Quebec would soon be flooded with nuns." [9] [8] "Que si celuy qui a escrit cette lettre a leu la Relation de ce qui se passe au Paraguais, qu'il a veu ce qui se fera un jour en la Nouuelle France."—Le Jeune, Relation, 1637, 304 (Cramoisy). [9] Chaulmer, Le Nouveau Monde Chrestien, 41, is eloquent on this theme. Both Montmagny and De Lisle were half churchmen, for both were Knights of Malta. More and more the powers spiritual engrossed the colony. As nearly as might be, the sword itself was in priestly hands. The Jesuits were all in all. Authority, absolute and without appeal, was 154 vested in a council composed of the governor, Le Jeune, and the syndic, an official supposed to represent the interests of the inhabitants. [10] There was no tribunal of justice, and the governor pronounced summarily on all complaints. The church adjoined the fort; and before it was planted a stake bearing a placard with a prohibition against blasphemy, drunkenness, or neglect of mass and other religious rites. To the stake was also attached a chain and iron collar; and hard by was a wooden horse, whereon a culprit was now and then mounted by way of example and warning. [11] In a community so absolutely priest-governed, overt offences were, however, rare; and, except on the annual arrival of the ships from France, when the rock swarmed with godless sailors, Quebec was a model of decorum, and wore, as its chroniclers tell us, an aspect unspeakably edifying. [10] Le Clerc, établissement de la Foy, Chap. XV. [11] Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 153, 154 (Cramoisy). In the year 1640, various new establishments of religion and charity might have been seen at Quebec. There was the beginning of a college and a seminary for Huron children, an embryo Ursuline convent, an incipient hospital, and a new Algonquin mission at a place called Sillery, four miles distant. Champlain's fort had been enlarged and partly rebuilt in stone by Montmagny, who had also laid out streets on the site of the future city, though as yet the streets had no houses. Behind the fort, and very near it, stood the church and a house for the Jesuits. Both were of pine 155 wood; and this year, 1640, both were burned to the ground, to be afterwards rebuilt in stone. The Jesuits, however, continued to occupy their rude mission-house of Notre-Dame des Anges, on the St. Charles, where we first found them. The country around Quebec was still an unbroken wilderness, with the exception of a small clearing made by the Sieur Giffard on his seigniory of Beauport, another made by M. de Puiseaux between Quebec and Sillery, and possibly one or two feeble attempts in other quarters. [12] The total population did not much exceed two hundred, including women and children. Of this number, by far the greater part were agents of the fur company known as the Hundred Associates, and men in their employ. Some of these had brought over their families. The remaining inhabitants were priests, nuns, and a very few colonists. [12] For Giffard, Puiseaux, and other colonists, compare Langevin, Notes sur les Archives de Notre-Dame de Beauport, 5, 6, 7; Ferland, Notes sur les Archives de N. D. de Québec, 22, 24 (1863); Ibid., Cours d'Histoire du Canada, I. 266; Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 45; Faillon, Histoire de la Colonie Fran?aise, I. c. iv., v. The Company of the Hundred Associates was bound by its charter to send to Canada four thousand colonists before the year 1643. [13] It had neither the means nor the will to fulfil this engagement. Some of its members were willing to make personal sacrifices for promoting the missions, and building up a colony purely Catholic. Others thought only of the profits of trade; and the practical affairs of the company had passed entirely 156 into the hands of this portion of its members. They sought to evade obligations the fulfilment of which would have ruined them. Instead of sending out colonists, they granted lands with the condition that the grantees should furnish a certain number of settlers to clear and till them, and these were to be credited to the Company. [14] The grantees took the land, but rarely fulfilled the condition. Some of these grants were corrupt and iniquitous. Thus, a son of Lauson, president of the Company, received, in the name of a third person, a tract of land on the south side of the St. Lawrence of sixty leagues front. To this were added all the islands in that river, excepting those of Montreal and Orleans, together with the exclusive right of fishing in it through its whole extent. [15] Lauson sent out not a single colonist to these vast concessions. [13] See "Pioneers of France," 399. [14] This appears in many early grants of the Company. Thus, in a grant to Simon Le Ma?tre, Jan. 15, 1636, "que les hommes que le dit … fera passer en la N. F. tourneront à la décharge de la dite Compagnie," etc., etc.—See Pièces sur la Tenure Seigneuriale, published by the Canadian government, passim. [15] Archives du Séminaire de Villemarie, cited by Faillon, I. 350. Lauson's father owned Montreal. The son's grant extended from the River St. Francis to a point far above Montreal.—La Fontaine, Mémoire sur la Famille de Lauson. There was no real motive for emigration. No persecution expelled the colonist from his home; for none but good Catholics were tolerated in New France. The settler could not trade with the Indians, except on condition of selling again to the Company at a fixed price. He might hunt, but he could not fish; and he was forced to beg 157 or buy food for years before he could obtain it from that rude soil in sufficient quantity for the wants of his family. The Company imported provisions every year for those in its employ; and of these supplies a portion was needed for the relief of starving settlers. Giffard and his seven men on his seigniory of Beauport were for some time the only settlers—excepting, perhaps, the Hébert family—who could support themselves throughout the year. The rigor of the climate repelled the emigrant; nor were the attractions which Father Le Jeune held forth—"piety, freedom, and independence"—of a nature to entice him across the sea, when it is remembered that this freedom consisted in subjection to the arbitrary will of a priest and a soldier, and in the liability, should he forget to go to mass, of being made fast to a post with a collar and chain, like a dog. Aside from the fur trade of the Company, the whole life of the colony was in missions, convents, religious schools, and hospitals. Here on the rock of Quebec were the appendages, useful and otherwise, of an old-established civilization. While as yet there were no inhabitants, and no immediate hope of any, there were institutions for the care of children, the sick, and the decrepit. All these were supported by a charity in most cases precarious. The Jesuits relied chiefly on the Company, who, by the terms of their patent, were obliged to maintain religious worship. [16] Of the origin of the 158 convent, hospital, and seminary I shall soon have occasion to speak. [16] It is a principle of the Jesuits, that each of its establishments shall find a support of its own, and not be a burden on the general funds of the Society. The Relations are full of appeals to the charity of devout persons in behalf of the missions. "Of what use to the country at this period could have been two communities of cloistered nuns?" asks the modern historian of the Ursulines of Quebec. And he answers by citing the words of Pope Gregory the Great, who, when Rome was ravaged by famine, pestilence, and the barbarians, declared that his only hope was in the prayers of the three thousand nuns then assembled in the holy city.—Les Ursulines de Québec. Introd., XI. Quebec wore an aspect half military, half monastic. At sunrise and sunset, a squad of soldiers in the pay of the Company paraded in the fort; and, as in Champlain's time, the bells of the church rang morning, noon, and night. Confessions, masses, and penances were punctiliously observed; and, from the governor to the meanest laborer, the Jesuit watched and guided all. The social atmosphere of New England itself was not more suffocating. By day and by night, at home, at church, or at his daily work, the colonist lived under the eyes of busy and over-zealous priests. At times, the denizens of Quebec grew restless. In 1639, deputies were covertly sent to beg relief in France, and "to represent the hell in which the consciences of the colony were kept by the union of the temporal and spiritual authority in the same hands." [17] In 1642, partial and ineffective measures were taken, with the countenance of Richelieu, for introducing into New France an Order less greedy of seigniories and endowments than the Jesuits, 159 and less prone to political encroachment. [18] No favorable result followed; and the colony remained as before, in a pitiful state of cramping and dwarfing vassalage. [17] "Pour leur representer la gehenne où estoient les consciences de la Colonie, de se voir gouverné par les mesmes personnes pour le spirituel et pour le temporel."—Le Clerc, I. 478. [18] Declaration de Pierre Breant, par devant les Notaires du Roy, MS. The Order was that of the Capuchins, who, like the Récollets, are a branch of the Franciscans. Their introduction into Canada was prevented; but they established themselves in Maine. This is the view of a heretic. It was the aim of the founders of New France to build on a foundation purely and supremely Catholic. What this involved is plain; for no degree of personal virtue is a guaranty against the evils which attach to the temporal rule of ecclesiastics. Burning with love and devotion to Christ and his immaculate Mother, the fervent and conscientious priest regards with mixed pity and indignation those who fail in this supreme allegiance. Piety and charity alike demand that he should bring back the rash wanderer to the fold of his divine Master, and snatch him from the perdition into which his guilt must otherwise plunge him. And while he, the priest, himself yields reverence and obedience to the Superior, in whom he sees the representative of Deity, it behooves him, in his degree, to require obedience from those whom he imagines that God has confided to his guidance. His conscience, then, acts in perfect accord with the love of power innate in the human heart. These allied forces mingle with a perplexing subtlety; pride, disguised even from itself, walks in the likeness of love and duty; and a thousand times on the pages 160 of history we find Hell beguiling the virtues of Heaven to do its work. The instinct of domination is a weed that grows rank in the shadow of the temple, climbs over it, possesses it, covers its ruin, and feeds on its decay. The unchecked sway of priests has always been the most mischievous of tyrannies; and even were they all well-meaning and sincere, it would be so still. To the Jesuits, the atmosphere of Quebec was well-nigh celestial. "In the climate of New France," they write, "one learns perfectly to seek only God, to have no desire but God, no purpose but for God." And again: "To live in New France is in truth to live in the bosom of God." "If," adds Le Jeune, "any one of those who die in this country goes to perdition, I think he will be doubly guilty." [19] [19] "La Nouuelle France est vn vray climat où on apprend parfaictement bien à ne chercher que Dieu, ne desirer que Dieu seul, auoir l'intention purement à Dieu, etc.… Viure en la Nouuelle France, c'est à vray dire viure dans le sein de Dieu, et ne respirer que l'air de sa Diuine conduite."—Divers Sentimens. "Si quelqu'un de ceux qui meurent en ces contrées se damne, je croy qu'il sera doublement coupable."—Relation, 1640, 5 (Cramoisy). The very amusements of this pious community were acts of religion. Thus, on the fête-day of St. Joseph, the patron of New France, there was a show of fireworks to do him honor. In the forty volumes of the Jesuit Relations there is but one pictorial illustration; and this represents the pyrotechnic contrivance in question, together with a figure of the Governor in the act of touching it off. [20] 161 But, what is more curious, a Catholic writer of the present day, the Abbé Faillon, in an elaborate and learned work, dilates at length on the details of the display; and this, too, with a gravity which evinces his conviction that squibs, rockets, blue-lights, and serpents are important instruments for the saving of souls. [21] On May-Day of the same year, 1637, Montmagny planted before the church a May-pole surmounted by a triple crown, beneath which were three symbolical circles decorated with wreaths, and bearing severally the names, Iesus, Maria, Ioseph; the soldiers drew up before it, and saluted it with a volley of musketry. [22] [20] Relation, 1637, 8. The Relations, as originally published, comprised about forty volumes. [21] Histoire de la Colonie Fran?aise, I. 291, 292. [22] Relation, 1637, 82. On the anniversary of the Dauphin's birth there was a dramatic performance, in which an unbeliever, speaking Algonquin for the profit of the Indians present, was hunted into Hell by fiends. [23] Religious processions were frequent. In one of them, the Governor in a court dress and a baptized Indian in beaver-skins were joint supporters of the canopy which covered the Host. [24] In another, six Indians led the van, arrayed each in a velvet coat of scarlet and gold sent them by the King. Then came other Indian converts, two and two; then the foundress of the Ursuline convent, with Indian children in French gowns; then all the Indian girls and women, dressed after their own way; then the priests; then the Governor; and finally the whole French population, male and female, except the artillery-men at the fort, who saluted with their 162 cannon the cross and banner borne at the head of the procession. When all was over, the Governor and the Jesuits rewarded the Indians with a feast. [25] [23] Vimont, Relation, 1640, 6. [24] Le Jeune, Relation, 1638, 6. [25] Le Jeune, Relation, 1639, 3. Now let the stranger enter the church of Notre-Dame de la Recouvrance, after vespers. It is full, to the very porch: officers in slouched hats and plumes, musketeers, pikemen, mechanics, and laborers. Here is Montmagny himself; Repentigny and Poterie, gentlemen of good birth; damsels of nurture ill fitted to the Canadian woods; and, mingled with these, the motionless Indians, wrapped to the throat in embroidered moose-hides. Le Jeune, not in priestly vestments, but in the common black dress of his Order, is before the altar; and on either side is a row of small red-skinned children listening with exemplary decorum, while, with a cheerful, smiling face, he teaches them to kneel, clasp their hands, and sign the cross. All the principal members of this zealous community are present, at once amused and edified at the grave deportment, and the prompt, shrill replies of the infant catechumens; while their parents in the crowd grin delight at the gifts of beads and trinkets with which Le Jeune rewards his most proficient pupils. [26] [26] Le Jeune, Relation, 1637, 122 (Cramoisy). We have seen the methods of conversion practised among the Hurons. They were much the same at Quebec. The principal appeal was to fear. [27] "You do good to your friends," said Le Jeune to an Algonquin chief, "and you burn your 163 enemies. God does the same." And he painted Hell to the startled neophyte as a place where, when he was hungry, he would get nothing to eat but frogs and snakes, and, when thirsty, nothing to drink but flames. [28] Pictures were found invaluable. "These holy representations," pursues the Father Superior, "are half the instruction that can be given to the Indians. I wanted some pictures of Hell and souls in perdition, and a few were sent us on paper; but they are too confused. The devils and the men are so mixed up, that one can make out nothing without particular attention. If three, four, or five 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,—this would have a good effect, especially if everything were made distinct, and misery, rage, and desperation appeared plainly in his face." [29] [27] Ibid., 1636, 119, and 1637, 32 (Cramoisy). "La crainte est l'auan couriere de la foy dans ces esprits barbares." [28] Le Jeune, Relation, 1637, 80-82 (Cramoisy). "Avoir faim et ne manger que des serpens et des crapaux, avoir soif et ne boire que des flammes." [29] "Les heretiques sont grandement blasmables, de condamner et de briser les images qui ont de si bons effets. Ces sainctes figures sont la moitié de l'instruction qu'on peut donner aux Sauuages. I'auois desiré quelques portraits de l'enfer et de l'ame damnée; on nous en a enuoyé quelques vns en papier, mais cela est trop confus. Les diables sont tellement meslez auec les hommes, qu'on n'y peut rien recognoistre, qu'auec vne particuliere attention. Qui depeindroit trois ou quatre ou cinq demons, tourmentans vne ame de diuers supplices, l'vn luy appliquant des feux, l'autre des serpens, l'autre la tenaillant, l'autre la tenant liée auec des chaisnes, cela auroit vn bon effet, notamment si tout estoit bien distingué, et que la rage et la tristesse parussent bien en la face de cette ame desesperée"—Relation, 1637, 32 (Cramoisy). The preparation of the convert for baptism was often very slight. A dying Algonquin, who, though 164 meagre as a skeleton, had thrown himself, with a last effort of expiring ferocity, on an Iroquois prisoner, and torn off his ear with his teeth, was baptized almost immediately. [30] In the case of converts in health there was far more preparation; yet these often apostatized. The various objects of instruction may all be included in one comprehensive word, submission,—an abdication of will and judgment in favor of the spiritual director, who was the interpreter and vicegerent of God. The director's function consisted in the enforcement of dogmas by which he had himself been subdued, in which he believed profoundly, and to which he often clung with an absorbing enthusiasm. The Jesuits, an Order thoroughly and vehemently reactive, had revived in Europe the medi?val type of Christianity, with all its attendant superstitions. Of these the Canadian missions bear abundant marks. Yet, on the whole, the labors of the missionaries tended greatly to the benefit of the Indians. Reclaimed, as the Jesuits tried to reclaim them, from their wandering life, settled in habits of peaceful industry, and reduced to a passive and childlike obedience, 165 they would have gained more than enough to compensate them for the loss of their ferocious and miserable independence. At least, they would have escaped annihilation. The Society of Jesus aspired to the mastery of all New France; but the methods of its ambition were consistent with a Christian benevolence. Had this been otherwise, it would have employed other instruments. It would not have chosen a Jogues or a Garnier. The Society had men for every work, and it used them wisely. It utilized the apostolic virtues of its Canadian missionaries, fanned their enthusiasm, and decorated itself with their martyr crowns. With joy and gratulation, it saw them rival in another hemisphere the noble memory of its saint and hero, Francis Xavier. [31] [30] "Ce seroit vne estrange cruauté de voir descendre vne ame toute viuante dans les enfers, par le refus d'vn bien que Iesus Christ luy a acquis au prix de son sang."—Relation, 1637, 66 "Considerez d'autre coté la grande appréhension que nous avions sujet de redouter la guérison; pour autant que bien souvent étant guéris il ne leur reste du St. Baptême que le caractère."—Lettres de Garnier, MSS. It was not very easy to make an Indian comprehend the nature of baptism. An Iroquois at Montreal, hearing a missionary speaking of the water which cleansed the soul from sin, said that he was well acquainted with it, as the Dutch had once given him so much that they were forced to tie him, hand and foot, to prevent him from doing mischief.—Faillon, II. 43. [31] Enemies of the Jesuits, while denouncing them in unmeasured terms, speak in strong eulogy of many of the Canadian missionaries. See, for example, Steinmetz, History of the Jesuits, II. 415. I have spoken of the colonists as living in a state of temporal and spiritual vassalage. To this there was one exception,—a small class of men whose home was the forest, and their companions savages. They followed the Indians in their roamings, lived with them, grew familiar with their language, allied themselves with their women, and often became oracles in the camp and leaders on the war-path. Champlain's bold interpreter, étienne Brulé, whose adventures I have recounted elsewhere, [32] may be taken as a type of this class. Of the rest, the most conspicuous were Jean Nicollet, Jacques Hertel, Fran?ois Marguerie, and Nicolas 166 Marsolet. [33] Doubtless, when they returned from their rovings, they often had pressing need of penance and absolution; yet, for the most part, they were good Catholics, and some of them were zealous for the missions. Nicollet and others were at times settled as interpreters at Three Rivers and Quebec. Several of them were men of great intelligence and an invincible courage. From hatred of restraint, and love of a wild and adventurous independence, they encountered privations and dangers scarcely less than those to which the Jesuit exposed himself from motives widely different,—he from religious zeal, charity, and the hope of Paradise; they simply because they liked it. Some of the best families of Canada claim descent from this vigorous and hardy stock. [32] "Pioneers of France," 377. [33] See Ferland, Notes sur les Registres de N. D. de Québec, 30. Nicollet, especially, was a remarkable man. As early as 1639, he ascended the Green Bay of Lake Michigan, and crossed to the waters of the Mississippi. This was first shown by the researches of Mr. Shea. See his Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley, XX. CHAPTER XIV. 1636-1652. DEVOTEES AND NUNS. The Huron Seminary ? Madame de la Peltrie ? Her Pious Schemes ? Her Sham Marriage ? She visits the Ursulines of Tours ? Marie de Saint Bernard ? Marie de l'Incarnation ? Her Enthusiasm ? Her Mystical Marriage ? Her Dejection ? Her Mental Conflicts ? Her Vision ? Made Superior of the Ursulines ? The H?tel-Dieu ? The Voyage to Canada ? Sillery ? Labors and Sufferings of the Nuns ? Character of Marie de l'Incarnation ? Of Madame de la Peltrie Quebec, as we have seen, had a seminary, a hospital, and a convent, before it had a population. It will be well to observe the origin of these institutions. The Jesuits from the first had cherished the plan of a seminary for Huron boys at Quebec. The Governor and the Company favored the design; since not only would it be an efficient means of spreading the Faith and attaching the tribe to the French interest, but the children would be pledges for the good behavior of the parents, and hostages for the safety of missionaries and traders 168 in the Indian towns. [1] In the summer of 1636, Father Daniel, descending from the Huron country, worn, emaciated, his cassock patched and tattered, and his shirt in rags, brought with him a boy, to whom two others were soon added; and through the influence of the interpreter, Nicollet, the number was afterwards increased by several more. One of them ran away, two ate themselves to death, a fourth was carried home by his father, while three of those remaining stole a canoe, loaded it with all they could lay their hands upon, and escaped in triumph with their plunder. [2] [1] "M. de Montmagny cognoit bien l'importance de ce Seminaire pour la gloire de Nostre Seigneur, et pour le commerce de ces Messieurs"—Relation, 1637, 209 (Cramoisy). [2] Le Jeune, Relation, 1637, 55-59. Ibid., Relation, 1638, 23. The beginning was not hopeful; but the Jesuits persevered, and at length established their seminary on a firm basis. The Marquis de Gamache had given the Society six thousand crowns for founding a college at Quebec. In 1637, a year before the building of Harvard College, the Jesuits began a wooden structure in the rear of the fort; and here, within one inclosure, was the Huron seminary and the college for French boys. Meanwhile the female children of both races were without instructors; but a remedy was at hand. At Alen?on, in 1603, was born Marie Madeleine de Chauvigny, a scion of the haute noblesse of Normandy. Seventeen years later she was a young lady, abundantly wilful and superabundantly enthusiastic,—one who, in other circumstances, might perhaps have made a romantic elopement 169 and a mésalliance. [3] But her impressible and ardent nature was absorbed in other objects. Religion and its ministers possessed her wholly, and all her enthusiasm was spent on works of charity and devotion. Her father, passionately fond of her, resisted her inclination for the cloister, and sought to wean her back to the world; but she escaped from the chateau to a neighboring convent, where she resolved to remain. Her father followed, carried her home, and engaged her in a round of fêtes and hunting parties, in the midst of which she found herself surprised into a betrothal to M. de la Peltrie, a young gentleman of rank and character. The marriage proved a happy one, and Madame de la Peltrie, with an excellent grace, bore her part in the world she had wished to renounce. After a union of five years, her husband died, and she was left a widow and childless at the age of twenty-two. She returned to the religious ardors of her girlhood, again gave all her thoughts to devotion and charity, and again resolved to be a nun. She had heard of Canada; and when Le Jeune's first Relations appeared, she read them with avidity. "Alas!" wrote the Father, "is there no charitable and virtuous lady who will come to this country to gather up the blood of Christ, by teaching His word to the little Indian girls?" 170 His appeal found a prompt and vehement response from the breast of Madame de la Peltrie. Thenceforth she thought of nothing but Canada. In the midst of her zeal, a fever seized her. The physicians despaired; but, at the height of the disease, the patient made a vow to St. Joseph, that, should God restore her to health, she would build a house in honor of Him in Canada, and give her life and her wealth to the instruction of Indian girls. On the following morning, say her biographers, the fever had left her. [3] There is a portrait of her, taken at a later period, of which a photograph is before me. She has a semi-religious dress, hands clasped in prayer, large dark eyes, a smiling and mischievous mouth, and a face somewhat pretty and very coquettish. An engraving from the portrait is prefixed to the "Notice Biographique de Madame de la Peltrie" in Les Ursulines de Québec, I. 348. Meanwhile her relatives, or those of her husband, had confirmed her pious purposes by attempting to thwart them. They pronounced her a romantic visionary, incompetent to the charge of her property. Her father, too, whose fondness for her increased with his advancing age, entreated her to remain with him while he lived, and to defer the execution of her plans till he should be laid in his grave. From entreaties he passed to commands, and at length threatened to disinherit her, if she persisted. The virtue of obedience, for which she is extolled by her clerical biographers, however abundantly exhibited in respect to those who held charge of her conscience, was singularly wanting towards the parent who, in the way of Nature, had the best claim to its exercise; and Madame de la Peltrie was more than ever resolved to go to Canada. Her father, on his part, was urgent that she should marry again. On this she took counsel of a Jesuit, [4] who, 171 "having seriously reflected before God," suggested a device, which to the heretical mind is a little startling, but which commended itself to Madame de la Peltrie as fitted at once to soothe the troubled spirit of her father, and to save her from the sin involved in the abandonment of her pious designs. [4] "Partagée ainsi entre l'amour filial et la religion, en proie aux plus poignantes angoisses, elle s'adressa à un religieux de la Compagnie de Jésus, dont elle connaissait la prudence consommée, et le supplia de l'éclairer de ses lumières. Ce religieux, après y avoir sérieusement réfléchi devant Dieu, lui répondit qu'il croyait avoir trouvé un moyen de tout concilier."—Casgrain, Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation, 243. Among her acquaintance was M. de Bernières, a gentleman of high rank, great wealth, and zealous devotion. She wrote to him, explained the situation, and requested him to feign a marriage with her. His sense of honor recoiled: moreover, in the fulness of his zeal, he had made a vow of chastity, and an apparent breach of it would cause scandal. He consulted his spiritual director and a few intimate friends. All agreed that the glory of God was concerned, and that it behooved him to accept the somewhat singular overtures of the young widow, [5] and request her hand from her father. M. de Chauvigny, who greatly esteemed Bernières, was delighted; and his delight was raised to transport at the dutiful and modest acquiescence of his daughter. [6] A betrothal took place; all was 172 harmony, and for a time no more was said of disinheriting Madame de la Peltrie, or putting her in wardship. [5] "Enfin après avoir longtemps imploré les lumières du ciel, il remit toute l'affaire entre les mains de son directeur et de quelques amis intimes. Tous, d'un commun accord, lui déclarèrent que la gloire de Dieu y était interessée, et qu'il devait accepter."—Ibid., 244. [6] "The prudent young widow answered him with much respect and modesty, that, as she knew M. de Bernières to be a favorite with him, she also preferred him to all others." The above is from a letter of Marie de l'Incarnation, translated by Mother St. Thomas, of the Ursuline convent of Quebec, in her Life of Madame de la Peltrie, 41. Compare Les Ursulines de Québec, 10, and the "Notice Biographique" in the same volume. Bernières's scruples returned. Divided between honor and conscience, he postponed the marriage, until at length M. de Chauvigny conceived misgivings, and again began to speak of disinheriting his daughter, unless the engagement was fulfilled. [7] Bernières yielded, and went with Madame de la Peltrie to consult "the most eminent divines." [8] A sham marriage took place, and she and her accomplice appeared in public as man and wife. Her relatives, however, had already renewed their attempts to deprive her of the control of her property. A suit, of what nature does not appear, had been decided against her at Caen, and she had appealed to the Parliament of Normandy. Her lawyers were in despair; but, as her biographer justly observes, "the saints have resources which others have not." A vow to St. Joseph secured his intercession and gained her case. Another thought now filled her with agitation. Her plans were laid, and the time of action drew near. How could she endure the distress of her father, when he learned that she had deluded him with a false 173 marriage, and that she and all that was hers were bound for the wilderness of Canada? Happily for him, he fell ill, and died in ignorance of the deceit that had been practised upon him. [9] [7] "Our virtuous widow did not lose courage. As she had given her confidence to M. de Bernières, she informed him of all that passed, while she flattered her father each day, telling him that this nobleman was too honorable to fail in keeping his word."—St. Thomas, Life of Madame de la Peltrie, 42. [8] "He" (Bernières) "went to stay at the house of a mutual friend, where they had frequent opportunities of seeing each other, and consulting the most eminent divines on the means of effecting this pretended marriage."—Ibid., 43. [9] It will be of interest to observe the view taken of this pretended marriage by Madame de la Peltrie's Catholic biographers. Charlevoix tells the story without comment, but with apparent approval. Sainte-Foi, in his Premières Ursulines de France, says, that, as God had taken her under His guidance, we should not venture to criticize her. Casgrain, in his Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation, remarks:— "Une telle conduite peut encore aujourd'hui para?tre étrange à bien des personnes; mais outre que l'avenir fit bien voir que c'était une inspiration du ciel, nous pouvons répondre, avec un savant et pieux auteur, que nous ne devons point juger ceux que Dieu se charge lui-même de conduire."—p. 247. Mother St. Thomas highly approves the proceeding, and says:— "Thus ended the pretended engagement of this virtuous lady and gentleman, which caused, at the time, so much inquiry and excitement among the nobility in France, and which, after a lapse of two hundred years, cannot fail exciting feelings of admiration in the heart of every virtuous woman!" Surprising as it may appear, the book from which the above is taken was written a few years since, in so-called English, for the instruction of the pupils in the Ursuline Convent at Quebec. Whatever may be thought of the quality of Madame de la Peltrie's devotion, there can be no reasonable doubt of its sincerity or its ardor; and yet one can hardly fail to see in her the signs of that restless longing for éclat, which, with some women, is a ruling passion. When, in company with Bernières, she passed from Alen?on to Tours, and from Tours to Paris, an object of attention to nuns, priests, and prelates,—when the Queen herself summoned her to an interview,—it may be that the profound contentment of soul ascribed to her had its origin in sources not exclusively of the spirit. At Tours, she repaired to the Ursuline convent. The Superior and all the nuns met her 174 at the entrance of the cloister, and, separating into two rows as she appeared, sang the Veni Creator, while the bell of the monastery sounded its loudest peal. Then they led her in triumph to their church, sang Te Deum, and, while the honored guest knelt before the altar, all the sisterhood knelt around her in a semicircle. Their hearts beat high within them. That day they were to know who of their number were chosen for the new convent of Quebec, of which Madame de la Peltrie was to be the foundress; and when their devotions were over, they flung themselves at her feet, each begging with tears that the lot might fall on her. Aloof from this throng of enthusiastic suppliants stood a young nun, Marie de St. Bernard, too timid and too modest to ask the boon for which her fervent heart was longing. It was granted without asking. This delicate girl was chosen, and chosen wisely. [10] [10] Casgrain, Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation, 271-273. There is a long account of Marie de St. Bernard, by Ragueneau, in the Relation of 1652. Here it is said that she showed an unaccountable indifference as to whether she went to Canada or not, which, however, was followed by an ardent desire to go. There was another nun who stood apart, silent and motionless,—a stately figure, with features strongly marked and perhaps somewhat masculine; [11] but, if so, they belied her, for Marie de l'Incarnation was a woman to the core. For her there was no need of entreaties; for she knew that 175 the Jesuits had made her their choice, as Superior of the new convent. She was born, forty years before, at Tours, of a good bourgeois family. As she grew up towards maturity, her qualities soon declared themselves. She had uncommon talents and strong religious susceptibilities, joined to a vivid imagination,—an alliance not always desirable under a form of faith where both are excited by stimulants so many and so powerful. Like Madame de la Peltrie, she married, at the desire of her parents, in her eighteenth year. The marriage was not happy. Her biographers say that there was no fault on either side. Apparently, it was a severe case of "incompatibility." She sought her consolation in the churches; and, kneeling in dim chapels, held communings with Christ and the angels. At the end of two years her husband died, leaving her with an infant son. She gave him to the charge of her sister, abandoned herself to solitude and meditation, and became a mystic of the intense and passional school. Yet a strong maternal instinct battled painfully in her breast with a sense of religious vocation. Dreams, visions, interior voices, ecstasies, revulsions, periods of rapture and periods of deep dejection, made up the agitated tissue of her life. She fasted, wore hair-cloth, scourged herself, washed dishes among the servants, and did their most menial work. She heard, in a trance, a miraculous voice. It was that of Christ, promising to become her spouse. Months and years passed, full of troubled hopes and fears, when again the voice sounded in her 176 ear, with assurance that the promise was fulfilled, and that she was indeed his bride. Now ensued phenomena which are not infrequent among Roman Catholic female devotees, when unmarried, or married unhappily, and which have their source in the necessities of a woman's nature. To her excited thought, her divine spouse became a living presence; and her language to him, as recorded by herself, is that of the most intense passion. She went to prayer, agitated and tremulous, as if to a meeting with an earthly lover. "O my Love!" she exclaimed, "when shall I embrace you? Have you no pity on me in the torments that I suffer? Alas! alas! my Love, my Beauty, my Life! instead of healing my pain, you take pleasure in it. Come, let me embrace you, and die in your sacred arms!" And again she writes: "Then, as I was spent with fatigue, I was forced to say, 'My divine Love, since you wish me to live, I pray you let me rest a little, that I may the better serve you'; and I promised him that afterward I would suffer myself to consume in his chaste and divine embraces." [12] [11] There is an engraved portrait of her, taken some years later, of which a photograph is before me. When she was "in the world," her stately proportions are said to have attracted general attention. Her family name was Marie Guyard. She was born on the eighteenth of October, 1599. [12] "Allant à l'oraison, je tressaillois en moi-même, et disois: Allons dans la solitude, mon cher amour, afin que je vous embrasse à mon aise, et que, respirant mon ame en vous, elle ne soit plus que vous-même par union d'amour.… Puis, mon corps étant brisé de fatigues, j'étois contrainte de dire: Mon divin amour, je vous prie de me laisser prendre un peu de repos, afin que je puisse mieux vous servir, puisque vous voulez que je vive.… Je le priois de me laisser agir; lui promettant de me laisser après cela consumer dans ses chastes et divins embrassemens.… O amour! quand vous embrasserai-je? N'avez-vous point pitié de moi dans le tourment que je souffre? helas! helas! mon amour, ma beauté, ma vie! au lieu de me guérir, vous vous plaisez à mes maux. Venez donc que je vous embrasse, et que je meure entre vos bras sacréz!" The above passages, from various pages of her journal, will suffice, though they give but an inadequate idea of these strange extravagances. What is most astonishing is, that a man of sense like Charlevoix, in his Life of Marie de l'Incarnation, should extract them in full, as matter of edification and evidence of saintship. Her recent biographer, the Abbé Casgrain, refrains from quoting them, though he mentions them approvingly as evincing fervor. The Abbé Racine, in his Discours à l'Occasion du 192ème Anniversaire de l'heureuse Mort de la Vén. Mère de l'Incarnation, delivered at Quebec in 1864, speaks of them as transcendent proofs of the supreme favor of Heaven.—Some of the pupils of Marie de l'Incarnation also had mystical marriages with Christ; and the impassioned rhapsodies of one of them being overheard, she nearly lost her character, as it was thought that she was apostrophsizing an earthly lover. 177 Clearly, here is a case for the physiologist as well as the theologian; and the "holy widow," as her biographers call her, becomes an example, and a lamentable one, of the tendency of the erotic principle to ally itself with high religious excitement. But the wings of imagination will tire and droop, the brightest dream-land of contemplative fancy grow dim, and an abnormal tension of the faculties find its inevitable reaction at last. From a condition of highest exaltation, a mystical heaven of light and glory, the unhappy dreamer fell back to a dreary earth, or rather to an abyss of darkness and misery. Her biographers tell us that she became a prey to dejection, and thoughts of infidelity, despair, estrangement from God, aversion to mankind, pride, vanity, impurity, and a supreme disgust at the rites of religion. Exhaustion produced common-sense, and the dreams which had been her life now seemed a tissue of illusions. Her confessor became a weariness to her, and his words fell dead on her ear. Indeed, she conceived a repugnance to the holy man. Her old and 178 favorite confessor, her oracle, guide, and comforter, had lately been taken from her by promotion in the Church,—which may serve to explain her dejection; and the new one, jealous of his predecessor, told her that all his counsels had been visionary and dangerous to her soul. Having overwhelmed her with this announcement, he left her, apparently out of patience with her refractory and gloomy mood; and she remained for several months deprived of spiritual guidance. [13] Two years elapsed before her mind recovered its tone, when she soared once more in the seventh heaven of imaginative devotion. [13] Casgrain, 195-197. Marie de l'Incarnation, we have seen, was unrelenting in every practice of humiliation; dressed in mean attire, did the servants' work, nursed sick beggars, and, in her meditations, taxed her brain with metaphysical processes of self-annihilation. And yet, when one reads her "Spiritual Letters," the conviction of an enormous spiritual pride in the writer can hardly be repressed. She aspired to that inner circle of the faithful, that aristocracy of devotion, which, while the common herd of Christians are busied with the duties of life, eschews the visible and the present, and claims to live only for God. In her strong maternal affection she saw a lure to divert her from the path of perfect saintship. Love for her child long withheld her from becoming a nun; but at last, fortified by her confessor, she left him to his fate, took the vows, and immured herself with the Ursulines of Tours. The 179 boy, frenzied by his desertion, and urged on by indignant relatives, watched his opportunity, and made his way into the refectory of the convent, screaming to the horrified nuns to give him back his mother. As he grew older, her anxiety increased; and at length she heard in her seclusion that he had fallen into bad company, had left the relative who had sheltered him, and run off, no one knew whither. The wretched mother, torn with anguish, hastened for consolation to her confessor, who met her with stern upbraidings. Yet, even in this her intensest ordeal, her enthusiasm and her native fortitude enabled her to maintain a semblance of calmness, till she learned that the boy had been found and brought back. Strange as it may seem, this woman, whose habitual state was one of mystical abstraction, was gifted to a rare degree with the faculties most useful in the practical affairs of life. She had spent several years in the house of her brother-in-law. Here, on the one hand, her vigils, visions, and penances set utterly at nought the order of a well-governed family; while, on the other, she made amends to her impatient relative by able and efficient aid in the conduct of his public and private affairs. Her biographers say, and doubtless with truth, that her heart was far away from these mundane interests; yet her talent for business was not the less displayed. Her spiritual guides were aware of it, and saw clearly that gifts so useful to the world might be made equally useful to the Church. Hence it was that she was chosen Superior 180 of the convent which Madame de la Peltrie was about to endow at Quebec. [14] [14] The combination of religious enthusiasm, however extravagant and visionary, with a talent for business, is not very rare. Nearly all the founders of monastic Orders are examples of it. Yet it was from heaven itself that Marie de l'Incarnation received her first "vocation" to Canada. The miracle was in this wise. In a dream she beheld a lady unknown to her. She took her hand; and the two journeyed together westward, towards the sea. They soon met one of the Apostles, clothed all in white, who, with a wave of his hand, directed them on their way. They now entered on a scene of surpassing magnificence. Beneath their feet was a pavement of squares of white marble, spotted with vermilion, and intersected with lines of vivid scarlet; and all around stood monasteries of matchless architecture. But the two travellers, without stopping to admire, moved swiftly on till they beheld the Virgin seated with her Infant Son on a small temple of white marble, which served her as a throne. She seemed about fifteen years of age, and was of a "ravishing beauty." Her head was turned aside; she was gazing fixedly on a wild waste of mountains and valleys, half concealed in mist. Marie de l'Incarnation approached with outstretched arms, adoring. The vision bent towards her, and, smiling, kissed her three times; whereupon, in a rapture, the dreamer awoke. [15] [15] Marie de l'Incarnation recounts this dream at great length in her letters; and Casgrain copies the whole, verbatim, as a revelation from God. 181 She told the vision to Father Dinet, a Jesuit of Tours. He was at no loss for an interpretation. The land of mists and mountains was Canada, and thither the Virgin called her. Yet one mystery remained unsolved. Who was the unknown companion of her dream? Several years had passed, and signs from heaven and inward voices had raised to an intense fervor her zeal for her new vocation, when, for the first time, she saw Madame de la Peltrie on her visit to the convent at Tours, and recognized, on the instant, the lady of her nocturnal vision. No one can be surprised at this who has considered with the slightest attention the phenomena of religious enthusiasm. On the fourth of May, 1639, Madame de la Peltrie, Marie de l'Incarnation, Marie de St. Bernard, and another Ursuline, embarked at Dieppe for Canada. In the ship were also three young hospital nuns, sent out to found at Quebec a H?tel-Dieu, endowed by the famous niece of Richelieu, the Duchesse d'Aiguillon. [16] Here, too, were the Jesuits Chaumonot and Poncet, on the way to their mission, together with Father Vimont, who was to succeed Le Jeune in his post of Superior. To the nuns, pale from their cloistered seclusion, there was a strange and startling novelty in this new world of life and action,—the ship, the sailors, the shouts of command, the flapping of sails, the salt wind, and the boisterous sea. The voyage was long and tedious. Sometimes they lay in their berths, sea-sick and woe-begone; sometimes they 182 sang in choir on deck, or heard mass in the cabin. Once, on a misty morning, a wild cry of alarm startled crew and passengers alike. A huge iceberg was drifting close upon them. The peril was extreme. Madame de la Peltrie clung to Marie de l'Incarnation, who stood perfectly calm, and gathered her gown about her feet that she might drown with decency. It is scarcely necessary to say that they were saved by a vow to the Virgin and St. Joseph. Vimont offered it in behalf of all the company, and the ship glided into the open sea unharmed. [16] Juchereau, Histoire de l'H?tel-Dieu de Québec, 4. They arrived at Tadoussac on the fifteenth of July; and the nuns ascended to Quebec in a small craft deeply laden with salted codfish, on which, uncooked, they subsisted until the first of August, when they reached their destination. Cannon roared welcome from the fort and batteries; all labor ceased; the storehouses were closed; and the zealous Montmagny, with a train of priests and soldiers, met the new-comers at the landing. All the nuns fell prostrate, and kissed the sacred soil of Canada. [17] They heard mass at the church, dined at the fort, and presently set forth to visit the new settlement of Sillery, four miles above Quebec. [17] Juchereau, 14; Le Clerc, II. 33; Ragueneau, Vie de Catherine de St. Augustin, "Epistre dédicatoire;" Le Jeune, Relation, 1639, Chap. II.; Charlevoix, Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation, 264; "Acte de Reception," in Les Ursulines de Québec, I. 21. Noel Brulart de Sillery, a Knight of Malta, who had once filled the highest offices under the Queen Marie de Médicis, had now severed his connection 183 with his Order, renounced the world, and become a priest. He devoted his vast revenues—for a dispensation of the Pope had freed him from his vow of poverty—to the founding of religious establishments. [18] Among other endowments, he had placed an ample fund in the hands of the Jesuits for the formation of a settlement of Christian Indians at the spot which still bears his name. On the strand of Sillery, between the river and the woody heights behind, were clustered the small log-cabins of a number of Algonquin converts, together with a church, a mission-house, and an infirmary,—the whole surrounded by a palisade. It was to this place that the six nuns were now conducted by the Jesuits. The scene delighted and edified them; and, in the transports of their zeal, they seized and kissed every female Indian child on whom they could lay hands, "without minding," says Father Le Jeune, "whether they were dirty or not." "Love and charity," he adds, "triumphed over every human consideration." [19] [18] See Vie de l'Illustre Serviteur de Dieu Noel Brulart de Sillery; also études et Recherches Bioqraphiques sur le Chevalier Noel Brulart de Sillery; and several documents in Martin's translation of Bressani, Appendix IV. [19] "… sans prendre garde si ces petits enfans sauvages estoient sales ou non; … la loy d'amour et de charité l'emportoit par dessus toutes les considerations humaines."—Relation, 1639, 26 (Cramoisy). The nuns of the H?tel-Dieu soon after took up their abode at Sillery, whence they removed to a house built for them at Quebec by their foundress, the Duchesse d'Aiguillon. The Ursulines, in the absence of better quarters, were lodged at first in a small wooden tenement under the rock of 184 Quebec, at the brink of the river. Here they were soon beset with such a host of children, that the floor of their wretched tenement was covered with beds, and their toil had no respite. Then came the small-pox, carrying death and terror among the neighboring Indians. These thronged to Quebec in misery and desperation, begging succor from the French. The labors both of the Ursulines and of the hospital nuns were prodigious. In the infected air of their miserable hovels, where sick and dying savages covered the floor, and were packed one above another in berths,—amid all that is most distressing and most revolting, with little food and less sleep, these women passed the rough beginning of their new life. Several of them fell ill. But the excess of the evil at length brought relief; for so many of the Indians died in these pest-houses that the survivors shunned them in horror. But how did these women bear themselves amid toils so arduous? A pleasant record has come down to us of one of them,—that fair and delicate girl, Marie de St. Bernard, called, in the convent, Sister St. Joseph, who had been chosen at Tours as the companion of Marie de l'Incarnation. Another Ursuline, writing at a period when the severity of their labors was somewhat relaxed, says, "Her disposition is charming. In our times of recreation, she often makes us cry with laughing: it would be hard to be melancholy when she is near." [20] [20] Lettre de la Mère Ste Claire à une de ses S?urs Ursulines de Paris. Québec, 2 Sept., 1640.—See Les Ursulines de Québec, I. 38. 185 It was three years later before the Ursulines and their pupils took possession of a massive convent of stone, built for them on the site which they still occupy. Money had failed before the work was done, and the interior was as unfinished as a barn. [21] Beside the cloister stood a large ash-tree; and it stands there still. Beneath its shade, says the convent tradition, Marie de l'Incarnation and her nuns instructed the Indian children in the truths of salvation; but it might seem rash to affirm that their teachings were always either wise or useful, since Father Vimont tells us approvingly, that they reared their pupils in so chaste a horror of the other sex, that a little girl, whom a man had playfully taken by the hand, ran crying to a bowl of water to wash off the unhallowed influence. [22] [21] The interior was finished after a year or two, with cells as usual. There were four chimneys, with fireplaces burning a hundred and seventy-five cords of wood in a winter; and though the nuns were boxed up in beds which closed like chests, Marie de l'Incarnation complains bitterly of the cold. See her letter of Aug. 26, 1644. [22] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 112 (Cramoisy). Now and henceforward one figure stands nobly conspicuous in this devoted sisterhood. Marie de l'Incarnation, no longer lost in the vagaries of an insane mysticism, but engaged in the duties of Christian charity and the responsibilities of an arduous post, displays an ability, a fortitude, and an earnestness which command respect and admiration. Her mental intoxication had ceased, or recurred only at intervals; and false excitements no longer sustained her. She was racked with constant anxieties about her son, and was often in 186 a condition described by her biographers as a "deprivation of all spiritual consolations." Her position was a very difficult one. She herself speaks of her life as a succession of crosses and humiliations. Some of these were due to Madame de la Peltrie, who, in a freak of enthusiasm, abandoned her Ursulines for a time, as we shall presently see, leaving them in the utmost destitution. There were dissensions to be healed among them; and money, everything, in short, to be provided. Marie de l'Incarnation, in her saddest moments, neither failed in judgment nor slackened in effort. She carried on a vast correspondence, embracing every one in France who could aid her infant community with money or influence; she harmonized and regulated it with excellent skill; and, in the midst of relentless austerities, she was loved as a mother by her pupils and dependants. Catholic writers extol her as a saint. [23] Protestants may see in her a Christian heroine, admirable, with all her follies and her faults. [23] There is a letter extant from Sister Anne de Ste Claire, an Ursuline who came to Quebec in 1640, written soon after her arrival, and containing curious evidence that a reputation of saintship already attached to Marie de l'Incarnation. "When I spoke to her," writes Sister Anne, speaking of her first interview, "I perceived in the air a certain odor of sanctity, which gave me the sensation of an agreeable perfume." See the letter in a recent Catholic work, Les Ursulines de Québec, I. 38, where the passage is printed in Italics, as worthy the especial attention of the pious reader. The traditions of the Ursulines are full of the virtues of Madame de la Peltrie,—her humility, her charity, her penances, and her acts of mortification. No doubt, with some little allowance, these 187 traditions are true; but there is more of reason than of uncharitableness in the belief, that her zeal would have been less ardent and sustained, if it had had fewer spectators. She was now fairly committed to the conventual life, her enthusiasm was kept within prescribed bounds, and she was no longer mistress of her own movements. On the one hand, she was anxious to accumulate merits against the Day of Judgment; and, on the other, she had a keen appreciation of the applause which the sacrifice of her fortune and her acts of piety had gained for her. Mortal vanity takes many shapes. Sometimes it arrays itself in silk and jewels; sometimes it walks in sackcloth, and speaks the language of self-abasement. In the convent, as in the world, the fair devotee thirsted for admiration. The halo of saintship glittered in her eyes like a diamond crown, and she aspired to outshine her sisters in humility. She was as sincere as Simeon Stylites on his column; and, like him, found encouragement and comfort in the gazing and wondering eyes below. [24] [24] Madame de la Peltrie died in her convent in 1671. Marie de l'Incarnation died the following year. She had the consolation of knowing that her son had fulfilled her ardent wishes, and become a priest. CHAPTER XV. 1636-1642. VILLEMARIE DE MONTREAL. Dauversiére and the Voice from Heaven ? Abbé Olier ? Their Schemes ? The Society of Notre-Dame de Montreal ? Maisonneuve ? Devout Ladies ? Mademoiselle Mance ? Marguerite Bourgeoys ? The Montrealists at Quebec ? Jealousy ? Quarrels ? Romance and Devotion ? Embarkation ? Foundation of Montreal We come now to an enterprise as singular in its character as it proved important in its results. At La Flèche, in Anjou, dwelt one Jér?me le Royer de la Dauversière, receiver of taxes. His portrait shows us a round, bourgeois face, somewhat heavy perhaps, decorated with a slight moustache, and redeemed by bright and earnest eyes. On his head he wears a black skull-cap; and over his ample shoulders spreads a stiff white collar, of wide expanse and studious plainness. Though he belonged to the noblesse, his look is that of a grave burgher, of good renown and sage deportment. Dauversière was, however, an enthusiastic devotee, of mystical tendencies, who whipped himself with a scourge of small chains till his shoulders were one wound, wore a belt with more 189 than twelve hundred sharp points, and invented for himself other torments, which filled his confessor with admiration. [1] One day, while at his devotions, he heard an inward voice commanding him to become the founder of a new Order of hospital nuns; and he was further ordered to establish, on the island called Montreal, in Canada, a hospital, or H?tel-Dieu, to be conducted by these nuns. But Montreal was a wilderness, and the hospital would have no patients. Therefore, in order to supply them, the island must first be colonized. Dauversière was greatly perplexed. On the one hand, the voice of Heaven must be obeyed; on the other, he had a wife, six children, and a very moderate fortune. [2] [1] Fancamp in Faillon, Vie de Mlle Mance. Introduction. [2] Faillon, Vie de Mlle Mance, Introduction; Dollier de Casson, Hist. de Montreal, MS.; Les Véritables Motifs des Messieurs et Dames de Montreal, 25; Juchereau, 33. Again: there was at Paris a young priest, about twenty-eight years of age,—Jean Jacques Olier, afterwards widely known as founder of the Seminary of St. Sulpice. Judged by his engraved portrait, his countenance, though marked both with energy and intellect, was anything but prepossessing. Every lineament proclaims the priest. Yet the Abbé Olier has high titles to esteem. He signalized his piety, it is true, by the most disgusting exploits of self-mortification; but, at the same time, he was strenuous in his efforts to reform the people and the clergy. So zealous was he for good morals, that he drew upon himself the imputation of a leaning to the heresy of the Jansenists,—a 190 suspicion strengthened by his opposition to certain priests, who, to secure the faithful in their allegiance, justified them in lives of licentiousness. [3] Yet Olier's catholicity was past attaintment, and in his horror of Jansenists he yielded to the Jesuits alone. [3] Faillon, Vie de M. Olier, II. 188. He was praying in the ancient church of St. Germain des Prés, when, like Dauversière, he thought he heard a voice from Heaven, saying that he was destined to be a light to the Gentiles. It is recorded as a mystic coincidence attending this miracle, that the choir was at that very time chanting the words, Lumen ad revelationem Gentium; [4] and it seems to have occurred neither to Olier nor to his biographer, that, falling on the ear of the rapt worshipper, they might have unconsciously suggested the supposed revelation. But there was a further miracle. An inward voice told Olier that he was to form a society of priests, and establish them on the island called Montreal, in Canada, for the propagation of the True Faith; and writers old and recent assert, that, while both he and Dauversière were totally ignorant of Canadian geography, they suddenly found themselves in possession, they knew not how, of the most exact details concerning Montreal, its size, shape, situation, soil, climate, and productions. [4] Mémoires Autographes de M. Olier, cited by Faillon, in Histoire de la Colonie Fran?aise, I. 384. The annual volumes of the Jesuit Relations, issuing from the renowned press of Cramoisy, were 191 at this time spread broadcast throughout France; and, in the circles of haute devotion, Canada and its missions were everywhere the themes of enthusiastic discussion; while Champlain, in his published works, had long before pointed out Montreal as the proper site for a settlement. But we are entering a region of miracle, and it is superfluous to look far for explanations. The illusion, in these cases, is a part of the history. Dauversière pondered the revelation he had received; and the more he pondered, the more was he convinced that it came from God. He therefore set out for Paris, to find some means of accomplishing the task assigned him. Here, as he prayed before an image of the Virgin in the church of Notre-Dame, he fell into an ecstasy, and beheld a vision. "I should be false to the integrity of history," writes his biographer, "if I did not relate it here." And he adds, that the reality of this celestial favor is past doubting, inasmuch as Dauversière himself told it to his daughters. Christ, the Virgin, and St. Joseph appeared before him. He saw them distinctly. Then he heard Christ ask three times of his Virgin Mother, Where can I find a faithful servant? On which, the Virgin, taking him (Dauversière) by the hand, replied, See, Lord, here is that faithful servant!—and Christ, with a benignant smile, received him into his service, promising to bestow on him wisdom and strength to do his work. [5] From Paris he went to 192 the neighboring chateau of Meudon, which overlooks the valley of the Seine, not far from St. Cloud. Entering the gallery of the old castle, he saw a priest approaching him. It was Olier. Now we are told that neither of these men had ever seen or heard of the other; and yet, says the pious historian, "impelled by a kind of inspiration, they knew each other at once, even to the depths of their hearts; saluted each other by name, as we read of St. Paul, the Hermit, and St. Anthony, and of St. Dominic and St. Francis; and ran to embrace each other, like two friends who had met after a long separation." [6] [5] Faillon, Vie de Mlle Mance, Introduction, xxviii. The Abbé Ferland, in his Histoire du Canada, passes over the miracles in silence. [6] Ibid., La Colonie Fran?aise, I. 390. "Monsieur," exclaimed Olier, "I know your design, and I go to commend it to God at the holy altar." And he went at once to say mass in the chapel. Dauversière received the communion at his hands; and then they walked for three hours in the park, discussing their plans. They were of one mind, in respect both to objects and means; and when they parted, Olier gave Dauversière a hundred louis, saying, "This is to begin the work of God." They proposed to found at Montreal three religious communities,—three being the mystic number,—one of secular priests to direct the colonists and convert the Indians, one of nuns to nurse the sick, and one of nuns to teach the Faith to the children, white and red. To borrow their own phrases, they would plant the banner of Christ in an abode of desolation and a haunt of demons; and to this 193 end a band of priests and women were to invade the wilderness, and take post between the fangs of the Iroquois. But first they must make a colony, and to do so must raise money. Olier had pious and wealthy penitents; Dauversière had a friend, the Baron de Fancamp, devout as himself and far richer. Anxious for his soul, and satisfied that the enterprise was an inspiration of God, he was eager to bear part in it. Olier soon found three others; and the six together formed the germ of the Society of Notre-Dame de Montreal. Among them they raised the sum of seventy-five thousand livres, equivalent to about as many dollars at the present day. [7] [7] Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montreal, MS.; also Belmont, Histoire du Canada, 2. Juchereau doubles the sum. Faillon agrees with Dollier. On all that relates to the early annals of Montreal a flood of new light has been thrown by the Abbé Faillon. As a priest of St. Sulpice, he had ready access to the archives of the Seminaries of Montreal and Paris, and to numerous other ecclesiastical depositories, which would have been closed hopelessly against a layman and a heretic. It is impossible to commend too highly the zeal, diligence, exactness, and extent of his conscientious researches. His credulity is enormous, and he is completely in sympathy with the supernaturalists of whom he writes: in other words, he identifies himself with his theme, and is indeed a fragment of the seventeenth century, still extant in the nineteenth. He is minute to prolixity, and abounds in extracts and citations from the ancient manuscripts which his labors have unearthed. In short, the Abbé is a prodigy of patience and industry; and if he taxes the patience of his readers, he also rewards it abundantly. Such of his original authorities as have proved accessible are before me, including a considerable number of manuscripts. Among these, that of Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montreal, as cited above, is the most important. The copy in my possession was made from the original in the Mazarin Library. Now to look for a moment at their plan. Their eulogists say, and with perfect truth, that, from a worldly point of view, it was mere folly. The partners mutually bound themselves to seek no 194 return for the money expended. Their profit was to be reaped in the skies: and, indeed, there was none to be reaped on earth. The feeble settlement at Quebec was at this time in danger of utter ruin; for the Iroquois, enraged at the attacks made on them by Champlain, had begun a fearful course of retaliation, and the very existence of the colony trembled in the balance. But if Quebec was exposed to their ferocious inroads, Montreal was incomparably more so. A settlement here would be a perilous outpost,—a hand thrust into the jaws of the tiger. It would provoke attack, and lie almost in the path of the war-parties. The associates could gain nothing by the fur-trade; for they would not be allowed to share in it. On the other hand, danger apart, the place was an excellent one for a mission; for here met two great rivers: the St. Lawrence, with its countless tributaries, flowed in from the west, while the Ottawa descended from the north; and Montreal, embraced by their uniting waters, was the key to a vast inland navigation. Thither the Indians would naturally resort; and thence the missionaries could make their way into the heart of a boundless heathendom. None of the ordinary motives of colonization had part in this design. It owed its conception and its birth to religious zeal alone. The island of Montreal belonged to Lauson, former president of the great company of the Hundred Associates; and, as we have seen, his son had a monopoly of fishing in the St. Lawrence. Dauversière and Fancamp, after much diplomacy, 195 succeeded in persuading the elder Lauson to transfer his title to them; and, as there was a defect in it, they also obtained a grant of the island from the Hundred Associates, its original owners, who, however, reserved to themselves its western extremity as a site for a fort and storehouses. [8] At the same time, the younger Lauson granted them a right of fishery within two leagues of the shores of the island, for which they were to make a yearly acknowledgment of ten pounds of fish. A confirmation of these grants was obtained from the King. Dauversière and his companions were now seigneurs of Montreal. They were empowered to appoint a governor, and to establish courts, from which there was to be an appeal to the Supreme Court of Quebec, supposing such to exist. They were excluded from the fur-trade, and forbidden to build castles or forts other than such as were necessary for defence against the Indians. [8] Donation et Transport de la Concession de l'Isle de Montreal par M. Jean de Lauzon aux Sieurs Chevrier de Fouancant (Fancamp) et le Royer de la Doversière, MS. Concession d'une Partie de l'Isle de Montreal accordée par la Compagnie de la Nouvelle France aux Sieurs Chevrier et le Royer, MS. Lettres de Ratification, MS. Acte qui prouve que les Sieurs Chevrier de Fancamps et Royer de la Dauversière n'ont stipulé qu'au nom de la Compagnie de Montreal, MS. From copies of other documents before me, it appears that in 1659 the reserved portion of the island was also ceded to the Company of Montreal. See also Edits, Ordonnances Royaux, etc., I. 20-26 (Quebec, 1854). Their title assured, they matured their plan. First they would send out forty men to take possession of Montreal, intrench themselves, and raise crops. Then they would build a house for the 196 priests, and two convents for the nuns. Meanwhile, Olier was toiling at Vaugirard, on the outskirts of Paris, to inaugurate the seminary of priests, and Dauversière at La Flèche, to form the community of hospital nuns. How the school nuns were provided for we shall see hereafter. The colony, it will be observed, was for the convents, not the convents for the colony. The Associates needed a soldier-governor to take charge of their forty men; and, directed as they supposed by Providence, they found one wholly to their mind. This was Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, a devout and valiant gentleman, who in long service among the heretics of Holland had kept his faith intact, and had held himself resolutely aloof from the license that surrounded him. He loved his profession of arms, and wished to consecrate his sword to the Church. Past all comparison, he is the manliest figure that appears in this group of zealots. The piety of the design, the miracles that inspired it, the adventure and the peril, all combined to charm him; and he eagerly embraced the enterprise. His father opposed his purpose; but he met him with a text of St. Mark, "There is no man that hath left house or brethren or sisters or father for my sake, but he shall receive an hundred-fold." On this the elder Maisonneuve, deceived by his own worldliness, imagined that the plan covered some hidden speculation, from which enormous profits were expected, and therefore withdrew his opposition. [9] [9] Faillon, La Colonie Fran?aise, I. 409. 197 Their scheme was ripening fast, when both Olier and Dauversière were assailed by one of those revulsions of spirit, to which saints of the ecstatic school are naturally liable. Dauversière, in particular, was a prey to the extremity of dejection, uncertainty, and misgiving. What had he, a family man, to do with ventures beyond sea? Was it not his first duty to support his wife and children? Could he not fulfil all his obligations as a Christian by reclaiming the wicked and relieving the poor at La Flèche? Plainly, he had doubts that his vocation was genuine. If we could raise the curtain of his domestic life, perhaps we should find him beset by wife and daughters, tearful and wrathful, inveighing against his folly, and imploring him to provide a support for them before squandering his money to plant a convent of nuns in a wilderness. How long his fit of dejection lasted does not appear; but at length [10] he set himself again to his appointed work. Olier, too, emerging from the clouds and darkness, found faith once more, and again placed himself at the head of the great enterprise. [11] [10] Faillon, Vie de Mlle Mance, Introduction, xxxv. [11] Faillon (Vie de M. Olier) devotes twenty-one pages to the history of his fit of nervous depression. There was imperative need of more money; and Dauversière, under judicious guidance, was active in obtaining it. This miserable victim of illusions had a squat, uncourtly figure, and was no proficient in the graces either of manners or of speech: hence his success in commending his objects to persons 198 of rank and wealth is set down as one of the many miracles which attended the birth of Montreal. But zeal and earnestness are in themselves a power; and the ground had been well marked out and ploughed for him in advance. That attractive, though intricate, subject of study, the female mind, has always engaged the attention of priests, more especially in countries where, as in France, women exert a strong social and political influence. The art of kindling the flames of zeal, and the more difficult art of directing and controlling them, have been themes of reflection the most diligent and profound. Accordingly we find that a large proportion of the money raised for this enterprise was contributed by devout ladies. Many of them became members of the Association of Montreal, which was eventually increased to about forty-five persons, chosen for their devotion and their wealth. Olier and his associates had resolved, though not from any collapse of zeal, to postpone the establishment of the seminary and the college until after a settlement should be formed. The hospital, however, might, they thought, be begun at once; for blood and blows would be the assured portion of the first settlers. At least, a discreet woman ought to embark with the first colonists as their nurse and housekeeper. Scarcely was the need recognized when it was supplied. Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance was born of an honorable family of Nogent-le-Roi, and in 1640 was thirty-four years of age. These Canadian heroines began their religious experiences early. 199 Of Marie de l'Incarnation we read, that at the age of seven Christ appeared to her in a vision; [12] and the biographer of Mademoiselle Mance assures us, with admiring gravity, that, at the same tender age, she bound herself to God by a vow of perpetual chastity. [13] This singular infant in due time became a woman, of a delicate constitution, and manners graceful, yet dignified. Though an earnest devotee, she felt no vocation for the cloister; yet, while still "in the world," she led the life of a nun. The Jesuit Relations, and the example of Madame de la Peltrie, of whom she had heard, inoculated her with the Canadian enthusiasm, then so prevalent; and, under the pretence of visiting relatives, she made a journey to Paris, to take counsel of certain priests. Of one thing she was assured: the Divine will called her to Canada, but to what end she neither knew nor asked to know; for she abandoned herself as an atom to be borne to unknown destinies on the breath of God. At Paris, Father St. Jure, a Jesuit, assured her that her vocation to Canada was, past doubt, a call from Heaven; while Father Rapin, a Récollet, spread abroad the fame of her virtues, and introduced her to many ladies of rank, wealth, and zeal. Then, well supplied with money for any pious work to which she might be summoned, she journeyed to Rochelle, whence ships were to sail for New France. Thus far she had been kept in ignorance of the plan with regard to Montreal; 200 but now Father La Place, a Jesuit, revealed it to her. On the day after her arrival at Rochelle, as she entered the Church of the Jesuits, she met Dauversière coming out. "Then," says her biographer, "these two persons, who had never seen nor heard of each other, were enlightened supernaturally, whereby their most hidden thoughts were mutually made known, as had happened already with M. Olier and this same M. de la Dauversière." [14] A long conversation ensued between them; and the delights of this interview were never effaced from the mind of Mademoiselle Mance. "She used to speak of it like a seraph," writes one of her nuns, "and far better than many a learned doctor could have done." [15] [12] Casgrain, Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation, 78. [13] Faillon, Vie de Mlle Mance, I. 3. [14] Faillon, Vie de Mlle Mance, I. 18. Here again the Abbé Ferland, with his usual good sense, tacitly rejects the supernaturalism. [15] La S?ur Morin, Annales des Hospitalières de Villemarie, MS., cited by Faillon. She had found her destiny. The ocean, the wilderness, the solitude, the Iroquois,—nothing daunted her. She would go to Montreal with Maisonneuve and his forty men. Yet, when the vessel was about to sail, a new and sharp misgiving seized her. How could she, a woman, not yet bereft of youth or charms, live alone in the forest, among a troop of soldiers? Her scruples were relieved by two of the men, who, at the last moment, refused to embark without their wives,—and by a young woman, who, impelled by enthusiasm, escaped from her friends, and took passage, in spite of them, in one of the vessels. 201 All was ready; the ships set sail; but Olier, Dauversière, and Fancamp remained at home, as did also the other Associates, with the exception of Maisonneuve and Mademoiselle Mance. In the following February, an impressive scene took place in the Church of Notre Dame, at Paris. The Associates, at this time numbering about forty-five, [16] with Olier at their head, assembled before the altar of the Virgin, and, by a solemn ceremonial, consecrated Montreal to the Holy Family. Henceforth it was to be called Villemarie de Montreal, [17]—a sacred town, reared to the honor and under the patronage of Christ, St. Joseph, and the Virgin, to be typified by three persons on earth, founders respectively of the three destined communities,—Olier, Dauversière, and a maiden of Troyes, Marguerite Bourgeoys: the seminary to be consecrated to Christ, the H?tel-Dieu to St. Joseph, and the college to the Virgin. [16] Dollier de Casson, A.D. 1641-42, MS. Vimont says thirty five. [17] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 37. Compare Le Clerc, établissement de la Foy, II. 49. But we are anticipating a little; for it was several years as yet before Marguerite Bourgeoys took an active part in the work of Montreal. She was the daughter of a respectable tradesman, and was now twenty-two years of age. Her portrait has come down to us; and her face is a mirror of frankness, loyalty, and womanly tenderness. Her qualities were those of good sense, conscientiousness, and a warm heart. She had known no miracles, ecstasies, or trances; and though afterwards, 202 when her religious susceptibilities had reached a fuller development, a few such are recorded of her, yet even the Abbé Faillon, with the best intentions, can credit her with but a meagre allowance of these celestial favors. Though in the midst of visionaries, she distrusted the supernatural, and avowed her belief, that, in His government of the world, God does not often set aside its ordinary laws. Her religion was of the affections, and was manifested in an absorbing devotion to duty. She had felt no vocation to the cloister, but had taken the vow of chastity, and was attached, as an externe, to the Sisters of the Congregation of Troyes, who were fevered with eagerness to go to Canada. Marguerite, however, was content to wait until there was a prospect that she could do good by going; and it was not till the year 1653, that, renouncing an inheritance, and giving all she had to the poor, she embarked for the savage scene of her labors. To this day, in crowded school-rooms of Montreal and Quebec, fit monuments of her unobtrusive virtue, her successors instruct the children of the poor, and embalm the pleasant memory of Marguerite Bourgeoys. In the martial figure of Maisonneuve, and the fair form of this gentle nun, we find the true heroes of Montreal. [18] [18] For Marguerite Bourgeoys, see her life by Faillon. Maisonneuve, with his forty men and four women, reached Quebec too late to ascend to Montreal that season. They encountered distrust, jealousy, and opposition. The agents of the Company of the Hundred Associates looked on them askance; and 203 the Governor of Quebec, Montmagny, saw a rival governor in Maisonneuve. Every means was used to persuade the adventurers to abandon their project, and settle at Quebec. Montmagny called a council of the principal persons of his colony, who gave it as their opinion that the new-comers had better exchange Montreal for the Island of Orleans, where they would be in a position to give and receive succor; while, by persisting in their first design, they would expose themselves to destruction, and be of use to nobody. [19] Maisonneuve, who was present, expressed his surprise that they should assume to direct his affairs. "I have not come here," he said, "to deliberate, but to act. It is my duty and my honor to found a colony at Montreal; and I would go, if every tree were an Iroquois!" [20] [19] Juchereau, 32; Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, I. 423. [20] La Tour, Mémoire de Laval, Liv. VIII; Belmont, Histoire du Canada, 3. At Quebec there was little ability and no inclination to shelter the new colonists for the winter; and they would have fared ill, but for the generosity of M. Puiseaux, who lived not far distant, at a place called St. Michel. This devout and most hospitable person made room for them all in his rough, but capacious dwelling. Their neighbors were the hospital nuns, then living at the mission of Sillery, in a substantial, but comfortless house of stone; where, amidst destitution, sickness, and irrepressible disgust at the filth of the savages whom they had in charge, they were laboring day and night with devoted assiduity. Among the minor 204 ills which beset them were the eccentricities of one of their lay sisters, crazed with religious enthusiasm, who had the care of their poultry and domestic animals, of which she was accustomed to inquire, one by one, if they loved God; when, not receiving an immediate answer in the affirmative, she would instantly put them to death, telling them that their impiety deserved no better fate. [21] [21] Juchereau, 45. A great mortification to these excellent nuns was the impossibility of keeping their white dresses clean among their Indian patients, so that they were forced to dye them with butternut juice. They were the Hospitalières who had come over in 1639. At St. Michel, Maisonneuve employed his men in building boats to ascend to Montreal, and in various other labors for the behoof of the future colony. Thus the winter wore away; but, as celestial minds are not exempt from ire, Montmagny and Maisonneuve fell into a quarrel. The twenty-fifth of January was Maisonneuve's fête day; and, as he was greatly beloved by his followers, they resolved to celebrate the occasion. Accordingly, an hour and a half before daylight, they made a general discharge of their muskets and cannon. The sound reached Quebec, two or three miles distant, startling the Governor from his morning slumbers; and his indignation was redoubled when he heard it again at night: for Maisonneuve, pleased at the attachment of his men, had feasted them and warmed their hearts with a distribution of wine. Montmagny, jealous of his authority, resented these demonstrations as an infraction of it, affirming that they had no right to fire their 205 pieces without his consent; and, arresting the principal offender, one Jean Gory, he put him in irons. On being released, a few days after, his companions welcomed him with great rejoicing, and Maisonneuve gave them all a feast. He himself came in during the festivity, drank the health of the company, shook hands with the late prisoner, placed him at the head of the table, and addressed him as follows:— "Jean Gory, you have been put in irons for me: you had the pain, and I the affront. For that, I add ten crowns to your wages." Then, turning to the others: "My boys," he said, "though Jean Gory has been misused, you must not lose heart for that, but drink, all of you, to the health of the man in irons. When we are once at Montreal, we shall be our own masters, and can fire our cannon when we please." [22] [22] Documents Divers, MSS., now or lately in possession of G. B. Faribault, Esq.; Ferland, Notes sur les Registres de N. D. de Québec, 25; Faillon, La Colonie Fran?aise, I. 433. Montmagny was wroth when this was reported to him; and, on the ground that what had passed was "contrary to the service of the King and the authority of the Governor," he summoned Gory and six others before him, and put them separately under oath. Their evidence failed to establish a case against their commander; but thenceforth there was great coldness between the powers of Quebec and Montreal. Early in May, Maisonneuve and his followers embarked. They had gained an unexpected recruit 206 during the winter, in the person of Madame de la Peltrie. The piety, the novelty, and the romance of their enterprise, all had their charms for the fair enthusiast; and an irresistible impulse—imputed by a slandering historian to the levity of her sex [23]—urged her to share their fortunes. Her zeal was more admired by the Montrealists whom she joined than by the Ursulines whom she abandoned. She carried off all the furniture she had lent them, and left them in the utmost destitution. [24] Nor did she remain quiet after reaching Montreal, but was presently seized with a longing to visit the Hurons, and preach the Faith in person to those benighted heathen. It needed all the eloquence of a Jesuit, lately returned from that most arduous mission, to convince her that the attempt would be as useless as rash. [25] [23] La Tour, Mémoire de Laval, Liv. VIII. [24] Charlevoix, Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation, 279; Casgrain, Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation, 333. [25] St. Thomas, Life of Madame de la Peltrie, 98. It was the eighth of May when Maisonneuve and his followers embarked at St. Michel; and as the boats, deep-laden with men, arms, and stores, moved slowly on their way, the forest, with leaves just opening in the warmth of spring, lay on their right hand and on their left, in a flattering semblance of tranquillity and peace. But behind woody islets, in tangled thickets and damp ravines, and in the shade and stillness of the columned woods, lurked everywhere a danger and a terror. What shall we say of these adventurers of Montreal,—of 207 these who bestowed their wealth, and, far more, of these who sacrificed their peace and risked their lives, on an enterprise at once so romantic and so devout? Surrounded as they were with illusions, false lights, and false shadows,—breathing an atmosphere of miracle,—compassed about with angels and devils,—urged with stimulants most powerful, though unreal,—their minds drugged, as it were, to preternatural excitement,—it is very difficult to judge of them. High merit, without doubt, there was in some of their number; but one may beg to be spared the attempt to measure or define it. To estimate a virtue involved in conditions so anomalous demands, perhaps, a judgment more than human. The Roman Church, sunk in disease and corruption when the Reformation began, was roused by that fierce trumpet-blast to purge and brace herself anew. Unable to advance, she drew back to the fresher and comparatively purer life of the past; and the fervors of medi?val Christianity were renewed in the sixteenth century. In many of its aspects, this enterprise of Montreal belonged to the time of the first Crusades. The spirit of Godfrey de Bouillon lived again in Chomedey de Maisonneuve; and in Marguerite Bourgeoys was realized that fair ideal of Christian womanhood, a flower of Earth expanding in the rays of Heaven, which soothed with gentle influence the wildness of a barbarous age. On the seventeenth of May, 1642, Maisonneuve's little flotilla—a pinnace, a flat-bottomed craft moved 208 by sails, and two row-boats [26]—approached Montreal; and all on board raised in unison a hymn of praise. Montmagny was with them, to deliver the island, in behalf of the Company of the Hundred Associates, to Maisonneuve, representative of the Associates of Montreal. [27] And here, too, was Father Vimont, Superior of the missions; for the Jesuits had been prudently invited to accept the spiritual charge of the young colony. On the following day, they glided along the green and solitary shores now thronged with the life of a busy city, and landed on the spot which Champlain, thirty-one years before, had chosen as the fit site of a settlement. [28] It was a tongue or triangle of land, formed by the junction of a rivulet with the St. Lawrence, and known afterwards as Point Callière. The rivulet was bordered by a meadow, and beyond rose the forest with its vanguard of scattered trees. Early spring flowers were blooming in the young grass, and birds of varied plumage flitted among the boughs. [29] [26] Dollier de Casson, A.D. 1641-42, MS. [27] Le Clerc, II. 50, 51. [28] "Pioneers of France," 333. It was the Place Royale of Champlain. [29] Dollier de Casson, A.D. 1641-42, MS. Maisonneuve sprang ashore, and fell on his knees. His followers imitated his example; and all joined their voices in enthusiastic songs of thanksgiving. Tents, baggage, arms, and stores were landed. An altar was raised on a pleasant spot near at hand; and Mademoiselle Mance, with Madame de la Peltrie, aided by her servant, Charlotte Barré, decorated it with a taste which was the 209 admiration of the beholders. [30] Now all the company gathered before the shrine. Here stood Vimont, in the rich vestments of his office. Here were the two ladies, with their servant; Montmagny, no very willing spectator; and Maisonneuve, a warlike figure, erect and tall, his men clustering around him,—soldiers, sailors, artisans, and laborers,—all alike soldiers at need. They kneeled in reverent silence as the Host was raised aloft; and when the rite was over, the priest turned and addressed them:— [30] Morin, Annales, MS., cited by Faillon, La Colonie Fran?aise, I. 440; also Dollier de Casson, A.D. 1641-42, MS. "You are a grain of mustard-seed, that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the work of God. His smile is on you, and your children shall fill the Land." [31] [31] Dollier de Casson, MS., as above. Vimont, in the Relation of 1642, p. 37, briefly mentions the ceremony. The afternoon waned; the sun sank behind the western forest, and twilight came on. Fireflies were twinkling over the darkened meadow. They caught them, tied them with threads into shining festoons, and hung them before the altar, where the Host remained exposed. Then they pitched their tents, lighted their bivouac fires, stationed their guards, and lay down to rest. Such was the birth-night of Montreal. [32] [32] The Associates of Montreal published, in 1643, a thick pamphlet in quarto, entitled Les Véritables Motifs de Messieurs et Dames de la Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal, pour la Conversion des Sauvages de la Nouvelle France. It was written as an answer to aspersions cast upon them, apparently by persons attached to the great Company of New France known as the "Hundred Associates," and affords a curious exposition of the spirit of their enterprise. It is excessively rare; but copies of the essential portions are before me. The following is a characteristic extract:— 210 "Vous dites que l'entreprise de Montréal est d'une dépense infinie, plus convenable à un roi qu'à quelques particuliers, trop faibles pour la soutenir; & vous alléguez encore les périls de la navigation & les naufrages qui peuvent la ruiner. Vous avez mieux rencontré que vous ne pensiez, en disant que c'est une ?uvre de roi, puisque le Roi des rois s'en mêle, lui à qui obéissent la mer & les vents. Nous ne craignons donc pas les naufrages; il n'en suscitera que lorsque nous en aurons besoin, & qu'il sera plus expédient pour sa gloire, que nous cherchons uniquement. Comment avez-vous pu mettre dans votre esprit qu'appuyés de nos propres forces, nous eussions présumé de penser à un si glorieux dessein? Si Dieu n'est point dans l'affaire de Montréal, si c'est une invention humaine, ne vous en mettez point en peine, elle ne durera guère. Ce que vous prédisez arrivera, & quelque chose de pire encore; mais si Dieu l'a ainsi voulu, qui êtes-vous pour lui contredire? C'était la reflexion que le docteur Gamaliel faisait aux Juifs, en faveur des Ap?tres; pour vous, qui ne pouvez ni croire, ni faire, laissez les autres en liberté de faire ce qu'ils croient que Dieu demande d'eux. Vous assurez qu'il ne se fait plus de miracles; mais qui vous l'a dit? où cela est-il écrit? Jésus-Christ assure, au contraire, que ceux qui auront autant de Foi qu'un grain de senevé, feront, en son nom, des miracles plus grands que ceux qu'il a faits lui-même. Depuis quand êtes-vous les directeurs des operations divines, pour les réduire à certains temps & dans la conduite ordinaire? Tant de saints mouvements, d'inspirations & de vues intérieures, qu'il lui pla?t de donner à quelques ames dont il se sert pour l'avancement de cette ?uvre, sont des marques de son bon plaisir. Jusqu'-ici, il a pourvu au nécessaire; nous ne voulons point d'abondance, & nous espérons que sa Providence continuera." Is this true history, or a romance of Christian chivalry? It is both. CHAPTER XVI. 1641-1644. ISAAC JOGUES. The Iroquois War ? Jogues ? His Capture ? His Journey to the Mohawks ? Lake George ? The Mohawk Towns ? The Missionary Tortured ? Death of Goupil ? Misery of Jogues ? The Mohawk "Babylon" ? Fort Orange ? Escape of Jogues ? Manhattan ? The Voyage to France ? Jogues among his Brethren ? He returns to Canada The waters of the St. Lawrence rolled through a virgin wilderness, where, in the vastness of the lonely woodlands, civilized man found a precarious harborage at three points only,—at Quebec, at Montreal, and at Three Rivers. Here and in the scattered missions was the whole of New France,—a population of some three hundred souls in all. And now, over these miserable settlements, rose a war-cloud of frightful portent. It was thirty-two years since Champlain had first attacked the Iroquois. [1] They had nursed their wrath for more than a generation, and at length their hour was come. The Dutch traders at Fort Orange, now Albany, had supplied them 212 with fire-arms. The Mohawks, the most easterly of the Iroquois nations, had, among their seven or eight hundred warriors, no less than three hundred armed with the arquebuse, a weapon somewhat like the modern carbine. [2] They were masters of the thunderbolts which, in the hands of Champlain, had struck terror into their hearts. [1] See "Pioneers of France," 318. [2] Vimont, Relation, 1643, 62. The Mohawks were the Agniés, or Agneronons, of the old French writers. According to the Journal of New Netherland, a contemporary Dutch document, (see Colonial Documents of New York, I. 179,) the Dutch at Fort Orange had supplied the Mohawks with four hundred guns; the profits of the trade, which was free to the settlers, blinding them to the danger. We have surveyed in the introductory chapter the character and organization of this ferocious people; their confederacy of five nations, bound together by a peculiar tie of clanship; their chiefs, half hereditary, half elective; their government, an oligarchy in form and a democracy in spirit; their minds, thoroughly savage, yet marked here and there with traits of a vigorous development. The war which they had long waged with the Hurons was carried on by the Senecas and the other Western nations of their league; while the conduct of hostilities against the French and their Indian allies in Lower Canada was left to the Mohawks. In parties of from ten to a hundred or more, they would leave their towns on the River Mohawk, descend Lake Champlain and the River Richelieu, lie in ambush on the banks of the St. Lawrence, and attack the passing boats or canoes. Sometimes they hovered about the fortifications of Quebec and Three Rivers, killing stragglers, or luring 213 armed parties into ambuscades. They followed like hounds on the trail of travellers and hunters; broke in upon unguarded camps at midnight; and lay in wait, for days and weeks, to intercept the Huron traders on their yearly descent to Quebec. Had they joined to their ferocious courage the discipline and the military knowledge that belong to civilization, they could easily have blotted out New France from the map, and made the banks of the St. Lawrence once more a solitude; but, though the most formidable of savages, they were savages only. In the early morning of the second of August, 1642, [3] twelve Huron canoes were moving slowly along the northern shore of the expansion of the St. Lawrence known as the Lake of St. Peter. There were on board about forty persons, including four Frenchmen, one of them being the Jesuit, Isaac Jogues, whom we have already followed on his missionary journey to the towns of the Tobacco Nation. In the interval he had not been idle. During the last autumn, (1641,) he, with Father Charles Raymbault, had passed along the shore of Lake Huron northward, entered the strait through which Lake Superior discharges itself, pushed on as far as the Sault Sainte Marie, and preached the Faith to two thousand Ojibwas, and other Algonquins there assembled. [4] He was now on his return from a far more perilous errand. The Huron mission was in a state of destitution. There was need 214 of clothing for the priests, of vessels for the altars, of bread and wine for the eucharist, of writing materials,—in short, of everything; and, early in the summer of the present year, Jogues had descended to Three Rivers and Quebec with the Huron traders, to procure the necessary supplies. He had accomplished his task, and was on his way back to the mission. With him were a few Huron converts, and among them a noted Christian chief, Eustache Ahatsistari. Others of the party were in course of instruction for baptism; but the greater part were heathen, whose canoes were deeply laden with the proceeds of their bargains with the French fur-traders. [3] For the date, see Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1647, 18. [4] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1642, 97. Jogues sat in one of the leading canoes. He was born at Orleans in 1607, and was thirty-five years of age. His oval face and the delicate mould of his features indicated a modest, thoughtful, and refined nature. He was constitutionally timid, with a sensitive conscience and great religious susceptibilities. He was a finished scholar, and might have gained a literary reputation; but he had chosen another career, and one for which he seemed but ill fitted. Physically, however, he was well matched with his work; for, though his frame was slight, he was so active, that none of the Indians could surpass him in running. [5] [5] Buteux, Narré de la Prise du Père Jogues, MS.; Mémoire touchant le Père Jogues, MS. There is a portrait of him prefixed to Mr. Shea's admirable edition in quarto of Jogues's Novum Belgium. With him were two young men, René Goupil and Guillaume Couture, donnés of the mission,—that 215 is to say, laymen who, from a religious motive and without pay, had attached themselves to the service of the Jesuits. Goupil had formerly entered upon the Jesuit novitiate at Paris, but failing health had obliged him to leave it. As soon as he was able, he came to Canada, offered his services to the Superior of the mission, was employed for a time in the humblest offices, and afterwards became an attendant at the hospital. At length, to his delight, he received permission to go up to the Hurons, where the surgical skill which he had acquired was greatly needed; and he was now on his way thither. [6] His companion, Couture, was a man of intelligence and vigor, and of a character equally disinterested. [7] Both were, like Jogues, in the foremost canoes; while the fourth Frenchman was with the unconverted Hurons, in the rear. [6] Jogues, Notice sur René Goupil. [7] For an account of him, see Ferland, Notes sur les Registres de N. D. de Québec, 83 (1863). The twelve canoes had reached the western end of the Lake of St. Peter, where it is filled with innumerable islands. [8] The forest was close on their right, they kept near the shore to avoid the current, and the shallow water before them was covered with a dense growth of tall bulrushes. Suddenly the silence was frightfully broken. The war-whoop rose from among the rushes, mingled with the reports of guns and the whistling of bullets; and several Iroquois canoes, filled with warriors, pushed out from their concealment, and bore down upon 216 Jogues and his companions. The Hurons in the rear were seized with a shameful panic. They leaped ashore; left canoes, baggage, and weapons; and fled into the woods. The French and the Christian Hurons made fight for a time; but when they saw another fleet of canoes approaching from the opposite shores or islands, they lost heart, and those escaped who could. Goupil was seized amid triumphant yells, as were also several of the Huron converts. Jogues sprang into the bulrushes, and might have escaped; but when he saw Goupil and the neophytes in the clutches of the Iroquois, he had no heart to abandon them, but came out from his hiding-place, and gave himself up to the astonished victors. A few of them had remained to guard the prisoners; the rest were chasing the fugitives. Jogues mastered his agony, and began to baptize those of the captive converts who needed baptism. [8] Buteux, Narré de le Prise du Père Jogues, MS. This document leaves no doubt as to the locality. Couture had eluded pursuit; but when he thought of Jogues and of what perhaps awaited him, he resolved to share his fate, and, turning, retraced his steps. As he approached, five Iroquois ran forward to meet him; and one of them snapped his gun at his breast, but it missed fire. In his confusion and excitement, Couture fired his own piece, and laid the savage dead. The remaining four sprang upon him, stripped off all his clothing, tore away his finger-nails with their teeth, gnawed his fingers with the fury of famished dogs, and thrust a sword through one of his hands. Jogues broke from his guards, and, rushing to his friend, 217 threw his arms about his neck. The Iroquois dragged him away, beat him with their fists and war-clubs till he was senseless, and, when he revived, lacerated his fingers with their teeth, as they had done those of Couture. Then they turned upon Goupil, and treated him with the same ferocity. The Huron prisoners were left for the present unharmed. More of them were brought in every moment, till at length the number of captives amounted in all to twenty-two, while three Hurons had been killed in the fight and pursuit. The Iroquois, about seventy in number, now embarked with their prey; but not until they had knocked on the head an old Huron, whom Jogues, with his mangled hands, had just baptized, and who refused to leave the place. Then, under a burning sun, they crossed to the spot on which the town of Sorel now stands, at the mouth of the river Richelieu, where they encamped. [9] [9] The above, with much of what follows, rests on three documents. The first is a long letter, written in Latin, by Jogues, to the Father Provincial at Paris. It is dated at Rensselaerswyck (Albany), Aug. 5, 1643, and is preserved in the Societas Jesu Militans of Tanner, and in the Mortes Illustres et Gesta eorum de Societate Jesu, etc., of Alegambe. There is a French translation in Martin's Bressani, and an English translation, by Mr. Shea, in the New York Hist. Coll. of 1857. The second document is an old manuscript, entitled Narré de la Prise du Père Jogues. It was written by the Jesuit Buteux, from the lips of Jogues. Father Martin, S.J., in whose custody it was, kindly permitted me to have a copy made from it. Besides these, there is a long account in the Relation des Hurons of 1647, and a briefer one in that of 1644. All these narratives show the strongest internal evidence of truth, and are perfectly concurrent. They are also supported by statements of escaped Huron prisoners, and by several letters and memoirs of the Dutch at Rensselaerswyck. Their course was southward, up the River Richelieu and Lake Champlain; thence, by way of Lake 218 George, to the Mohawk towns. The pain and fever of their wounds, and the clouds of mosquitoes, which they could not drive off, left the prisoners no peace by day nor sleep by night. On the eighth day, they learned that a large Iroquois war-party, on their way to Canada, were near at hand; and they soon approached their camp, on a small island near the southern end of Lake Champlain. The warriors, two hundred in number, saluted their victorious countrymen with volleys from their guns; then, armed with clubs and thorny sticks, ranged themselves in two lines, between which the captives were compelled to pass up the side of a rocky hill. On the way, they were beaten with such fury, that Jogues, who was last in the line, fell powerless, drenched in blood and half dead. As the chief man among the French captives, he fared the worst. His hands were again mangled, and fire applied to his body; while the Huron chief, Eustache, was subjected to tortures even more atrocious. When, at night, the exhausted sufferers tried to rest, the young warriors came to lacerate their wounds and pull out their hair and beards. In the morning they resumed their journey. And now the lake narrowed to the semblance of a tranquil river. Before them was a woody mountain, close on their right a rocky promontory, and between these flowed a stream, the outlet of Lake George. On those rocks, more than a hundred years after, rose the ramparts of Ticonderoga. They landed, shouldered their canoes and baggage, took their way through the woods, passed the spot where 219 the fierce Highlanders and the dauntless regiments of England breasted in vain the storm of lead and fire, and soon reached the shore where Abercrombie landed and Lord Howe fell. First of white men, Jogues and his companions gazed on the romantic lake that bears the name, not of its gentle discoverer, but of the dull Hanoverian king. Like a fair Naiad of the wilderness, it slumbered between the guardian mountains that breathe from crag and forest the stern poetry of war. But all then was solitude; and the clang of trumpets, the roar of cannon, and the deadly crack of the rifle had never as yet awakened their angry echoes. [10] [10] Lake George, according to Jogues, was called by the Mohawks "Andiatarocte," or Place where the Lake closes. "Andiataraque" is found on a map of Sanson. Spofford, Gazetteer of New York, article "Lake George," says that it was called "Canideri-oit," or Tail of the Lake. Father Martin, in his notes on Bressani, prefixes to this name that of "Horicon," but gives no original authority. I have seen an old Latin map on which the name "Horiconi" is set down as belonging to a neighboring tribe. This seems to be only a misprint for "Horicoui," that is, "Irocoui," or "Iroquois." In an old English map, prefixed to the rare tract, A Treatise of New England, the "Lake of Hierocoyes" is laid down. The name "Horicon," as used by Cooper in his Last of the Mohicans, seems to have no sufficient historical foundation. In 1646, the lake, as we shall see, was named "Lac St. Sacrement." Again the canoes were launched, and the wild flotilla glided on its way,—now in the shadow of the heights, now on the broad expanse, now among the devious channels of the narrows, beset with woody islets, where the hot air was redolent of the pine, the spruce, and the cedar,—till they neared that tragic shore, where, in the following century, New-England rustics baffled the soldiers of Dieskau, where Montcalm planted his batteries, where the red cross waved so long amid the smoke, and 220 where at length the summer night was hideous with carnage, and an honored name was stained with a memory of blood. [11] [11] The allusion is, of course, to the siege of Fort William Henry in 1757, and the ensuing massacre by Montcalm's Indians. Charlevoix, with his usual carelessness, says that Jogues's captors took a circuitous route to avoid enemies. In truth, however, they were not in the slightest danger of meeting any; and they followed the route which, before the present century, was the great highway between Canada and New Holland, or New York. The Iroquois landed at or near the future site of Fort William Henry, left their canoes, and, with their prisoners, began their march for the nearest Mohawk town. Each bore his share of the plunder. Even Jogues, though his lacerated hands were in a frightful condition and his body covered with bruises, was forced to stagger on with the rest under a heavy load. He with his fellow-prisoners, and indeed the whole party, were half starved, subsisting chiefly on wild berries. They crossed the upper Hudson, and, in thirteen days after leaving the St. Lawrence, neared the wretched goal of their pilgrimage, a palisaded town, standing on a hill by the banks of the River Mohawk. The whoops of the victors announced their approach, and the savage hive sent forth its swarms. They thronged the side of the hill, the old and the young, each with a stick, or a slender iron rod, bought from the Dutchmen on the Hudson. They ranged themselves in a double line, reaching upward to the entrance of the town; and through this "narrow road of Paradise," as Jogues calls it, the captives were led in single file, Couture in front, after him a half-score of Hurons, then Goupil, then 221 the remaining Hurons, and at last Jogues. As they passed, they were saluted with yells, screeches, and a tempest of blows. One, heavier than the others, knocked Jogues's breath from his body, and stretched him on the ground; but it was death to lie there, and, regaining his feet, he staggered on with the rest. [12] When they reached the town, the blows ceased, and they were all placed on a scaffold, or high platform, in the middle of the place. The three Frenchmen had fared the worst, and were frightfully disfigured. Goupil, especially, was streaming with blood, and livid with bruises from head to foot. [12] This practice of forcing prisoners to "run the gauntlet" was by no means peculiar to the Iroquois, but was common to many tribes. They were allowed a few minutes to recover their breath, undisturbed, except by the hootings and gibes of the mob below. Then a chief called out, "Come, let us caress these Frenchmen!"—and the crowd, knife in hand, began to mount the scaffold. They ordered a Christian Algonquin woman, a prisoner among them, to cut off Jogues's left thumb, which she did; and a thumb of Goupil was also severed, a clam-shell being used as the instrument, in order to increase the pain. It is needless to specify further the tortures to which they were subjected, all designed to cause the greatest possible suffering without endangering life. At night, they were removed from the scaffold, and placed in one of the houses, each stretched on his back, with his limbs extended, and his ankles and wrists bound fast to stakes driven into the earthen 222 floor. The children now profited by the examples of their parents, and amused themselves by placing live coals and red-hot ashes on the naked bodies of the prisoners, who, bound fast, and covered with wounds and bruises which made every movement a torture, were sometimes unable to shake them off. In the morning, they were again placed on the scaffold, where, during this and the two following days, they remained exposed to the taunts of the crowd. Then they were led in triumph to the second Mohawk town, and afterwards to the third, [13] suffering at each a repetition of cruelties, the detail of which would be as monotonous as revolting. [13] The Mohawks had but three towns. The first, and the lowest on the river, was Osseruenon; the second, two miles above, was Andagaron; and the third, Teonontogen: or, as Megapolensis, in his Sketch of the Mohawks, writes the names, Asserué, Banagiro, and Thenondiogo. They all seem to have been fortified in the Iroquois manner, and their united population was thirty-five hundred, or somewhat more. At a later period, 1720, there were still three towns, named respectively Teahtontaioga, Ganowauga, and Ganeganaga. See the map in Morgan, League of the Iroquois. In a house in the town of Teonontogen, Jogues was hung by the wrists between two of the upright poles which supported the structure, in such a manner that his feet could not touch the ground; and thus he remained for some fifteen minutes, in extreme torture, until, as he was on the point of swooning, an Indian, with an impulse of pity, cut the cords and released him. While they were in this town, four fresh Huron prisoners, just taken, were brought in, and placed on the scaffold with the rest. Jogues, in the midst of his pain and exhaustion, took the opportunity to convert them. 223 An ear of green corn was thrown to him for food, and he discovered a few rain-drops clinging to the husks. With these he baptized two of the Hurons. The remaining two received baptism soon after from a brook which the prisoners crossed on the way to another town. Couture, though he had incensed the Indians by killing one of their warriors, had gained their admiration by his bravery; and, after torturing him most savagely, they adopted him into one of their families, in place of a dead relative. Thenceforth he was comparatively safe. Jogues and Goupil were less fortunate. Three of the Hurons had been burned to death, and they expected to share their fate. A council was held to pronounce their doom; but dissensions arose, and no result was reached. They were led back to the first village, where they remained, racked with suspense and half dead with exhaustion. Jogues, however, lost no opportunity to baptize dying infants, while Goupil taught children to make the sign of the cross. On one occasion, he made the sign on the forehead of a child, grandson of an Indian in whose lodge they lived. The superstition of the old savage was aroused. Some Dutchmen had told him that the sign of the cross came from the Devil, and would cause mischief. He thought that Goupil was bewitching the child; and, resolving to rid himself of so dangerous a guest, applied for aid to two young braves. Jogues and Goupil, clad in their squalid garb of tattered skins, were soon after walking together in the forest that adjoined the 224 town, consoling themselves with prayer, and mutually exhorting each other to suffer patiently for the sake of Christ and the Virgin, when, as they were returning, reciting their rosaries, they met the two young Indians, and read in their sullen visages an augury of ill. The Indians joined them, and accompanied them to the entrance of the town, where one of the two, suddenly drawing a hatchet from beneath his blanket, struck it into the head of Goupil, who fell, murmuring the name of Christ. Jogues dropped on his knees, and, bowing his head in prayer, awaited the blow, when the murderer ordered him to get up and go home. He obeyed but not until he had given absolution to his still breathing friend, and presently saw the lifeless body dragged through the town amid hootings and rejoicings. Jogues passed a night of anguish and desolation, and in the morning, reckless of life, set forth in search of Goupil's remains. "Where are you going so fast?" demanded the old Indian, his master. "Do you not see those fierce young braves, who are watching to kill you?" Jogues persisted, and the old man asked another Indian to go with him as a protector. The corpse had been flung into a neighboring ravine, at the bottom of which ran a torrent; and here, with the Indian's help, Jogues found it, stripped naked, and gnawed by dogs. He dragged it into the water, and covered it with stones to save it from further mutilation, resolving to return alone on the following day and secretly bury it. But with the night there came 225 a storm; and when, in the gray of the morning, Jogues descended to the brink of the stream, he found it a rolling, turbid flood, and the body was nowhere to be seen. Had the Indians or the torrent borne it away? Jogues waded into the cold current; it was the first of October; he sounded it with his feet and with his stick; he searched the rocks, the thicket, the forest; but all in vain. Then, crouched by the pitiless stream, he mingled his tears with its waters, and, in a voice broken with groans, chanted the service of the dead. [14] [14] Jogues in Tanner, Societas Militans, 519; Bressani, 216; Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 25, 26; Buteux, Narré, MS.; Jogues, Notice sur René Goupil. The Indians, it proved, and not the flood, had robbed him of the remains of his friend. Early in the spring, when the snows were melting in the woods, he was told by Mohawk children that the body was lying, where it had been flung, in a lonely spot lower down the stream. He went to seek it; found the scattered bones, stripped by the foxes and the birds; and, tenderly gathering them up, hid them in a hollow tree, hoping that a day might come when he could give them a Christian burial in consecrated ground. After the murder of Goupil, Jogues's life hung by a hair. He lived in hourly expectation of the tomahawk, and would have welcomed it as a boon. By signs and words, he was warned that his hour was near; but, as he never shunned his fate, it fled from him, and each day, with renewed astonishment, he found himself still among the living. 226 Late in the autumn, a party of the Indians set forth on their yearly deer-hunt, and Jogues was ordered to go with them. Shivering and half famished, he followed them through the chill November forest, and shared their wild bivouac in the depths of the wintry desolation. The game they took was devoted to Areskoui, their god, and eaten in his honor. Jogues would not taste the meat offered to a demon; and thus he starved in the midst of plenty. At night, when the kettle was slung, and the savage crew made merry around their fire, he crouched in a corner of the hut, gnawed by hunger, and pierced to the bone with cold. They thought his presence unpropitious to their hunting, and the women especially hated him. His demeanor at once astonished and incensed his masters. He brought them fire-wood, like a squaw; he did their bidding without a murmur, and patiently bore their abuse; but when they mocked at his God, and laughed at his devotions, their slave assumed an air and tone of authority, and sternly rebuked them. [15] [15] Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 41. He would sometimes escape from "this Babylon," as he calls the hut, and wander in the forest, telling his beads and repeating passages of Scripture. In a remote and lonely spot, he cut the bark in the form of a cross from the trunk of a great tree; and here he made his prayers. This living martyr, half clad in shaggy furs, kneeling on the snow among the icicled rocks and beneath the gloomy pines, bowing in adoration before 227 the emblem of the faith in which was his only consolation and his only hope, is alike a theme for the pen and a subject for the pencil. The Indians at last grew tired of him, and sent him back to the village. Here he remained till the middle of March, baptizing infants and trying to convert adults. He told them of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. They listened with interest; but when from astronomy he passed to theology, he spent his breath in vain. In March, the old man with whom he lived set forth for his spring fishing, taking with him his squaw, and several children. Jogues also was of the party. They repaired to a lake, perhaps Lake Saratoga, four days distant. Here they subsisted for some time on frogs, the entrails of fish, and other garbage. Jogues passed his days in the forest, repeating his prayers, and carving the name of Jesus on trees, as a terror to the demons of the wilderness. A messenger at length arrived from the town; and on the following day, under the pretence that signs of an enemy had been seen, the party broke up their camp, and returned home in hot haste. The messenger had brought tidings that a war-party, which had gone out against the French, had been defeated and destroyed, and that the whole population were clamoring to appease their grief by torturing Jogues to death. This was the true cause of the sudden and mysterious return; but when they reached the town, other tidings had arrived. The missing warriors were safe, and on their way home in triumph with a large number of prisoners. Again 228 Jogues's life was spared; but he was forced to witness the torture and butchery of the converts and allies of the French. Existence became unendurable to him, and he longed to die. War-parties were continually going out. Should they be defeated and cut off, he would pay the forfeit at the stake; and if they came back, as they usually did, with booty and prisoners, he was doomed to see his countrymen and their Indian friends mangled, burned, and devoured. Jogues had shown no disposition to escape, and great liberty was therefore allowed him. He went from town to town, giving absolution to the Christian captives, and converting and baptizing the heathen. On one occasion, he baptized a woman in the midst of the fire, under pretence of lifting a cup of water to her parched lips. There was no lack of objects for his zeal. A single war-party returned from the Huron country with nearly a hundred prisoners, who were distributed among the Iroquois towns, and the greater part burned. [16] Of the children of the Mohawks and their neighbors, he had baptized, before August, about seventy; insomuch that he began to regard his captivity as a Providential interposition for the saving of souls. [16] The Dutch clergyman, Megapolensis, at this time living at Fort Orange, bears the strongest testimony to the ferocity with which his friends, the Mohawks, treated their prisoners. He mentions the same modes of torture which Jogues describes, and is very explicit as to cannibalism. "The common people," he says, "eat the arms, buttocks, and trunk; but the chiefs eat the head and the heart." (Short Sketch of the Mohawk Indians.) This feast was of a religious character. At the end of July, he went with a party of 229 Indians to a fishing-place on the Hudson, about twenty miles below Fort Orange. While here, he learned that another war-party had lately returned with prisoners, two of whom had been burned to death at Osseruenon. On this, his conscience smote him that he had not remained in the town to give the sufferers absolution or baptism; and he begged leave of the old woman who had him in charge to return at the first opportunity. A canoe soon after went up the river with some of the Iroquois, and he was allowed to go in it. When they reached Rensselaerswyck, the Indians landed to trade with the Dutch, and took Jogues with them. The centre of this rude little settlement was Fort Orange, a miserable structure of logs, standing on a spot now within the limits of the city of Albany. [17] It contained several houses and other buildings; and behind it was a small church, recently erected, and serving as the abode of the pastor, Dominie Megapolensis, known in our day as the writer of an interesting, though short, account of the Mohawks. Some twenty-five or thirty houses, roughly built of boards and roofed with thatch, were scattered at intervals on or near the borders of the Hudson, above and below the fort. Their inhabitants, about a hundred in number, were for the most part rude Dutch farmers, tenants of Van Rensselaer, the patroon, or lord of the manor. They raised wheat, of which they 230 made beer, and oats, with which they fed their numerous horses. They traded, too, with the Indians, who profited greatly by the competition among them, receiving guns, knives, axes, kettles, cloth, and beads, at moderate rates, in exchange for their furs. [18] The Dutch were on excellent terms with their red neighbors, met them in the forest without the least fear, and sometimes intermarried with them. They had known of Jogues's captivity, and, to their great honor, had made efforts for his release, offering for that purpose goods to a considerable value, but without effect. [19] [17] The site of the Ph?nix Hotel.—Note by Mr. Shea to Jogues's Novum Belgium. [18] Jogues, Novum Belgium; Barnes, Settlement of Albany, 50-55; O'Callaghan, New Netherland, Chap. VI. On the relations of the Mohawks and Dutch, see Megapolensis, Short Sketch of the Mohawk Indians, and portions of the letter of Jogues to his Superior, dated Rensselaerswyck, Aug. 30, 1643. [19] See a long letter of Arendt Van Curler (Corlaer) to Van Rensselaer, June 16, 1643, in O'Callaghan's New Netherland, Appendix L. "We persuaded them so far," writes Van Curler, "that they promised not to kill them.… The French captives ran screaming after us, and besought us to do all in our power to release them out of the hands of the barbarians." At Fort Orange Jogues heard startling news. The Indians of the village where he lived were, he was told, enraged against him, and determined to burn him. About the first of July, a war-party had set out for Canada, and one of the warriors had offered to Jogues to be the bearer of a letter from him to the French commander at Three Rivers, thinking probably to gain some advantage under cover of a parley. Jogues knew that the French would be on their guard; and he felt it his duty to lose no opportunity of informing them as to the state of affairs among the Iroquois. 231 A Dutchman gave him a piece of paper; and he wrote a letter, in a jargon of Latin, French, and Huron, warning his countrymen to be on their guard, as war-parties were constantly going out, and they could hope for no respite from attack until late in the autumn. [20] When the Iroquois reached the mouth of the River Richelieu, where a small fort had been built by the French the preceding summer, the messenger asked for a parley, and gave Jogues's letter to the commander of the post, who, after reading it, turned his cannon on the savages. They fled in dismay, leaving behind them their baggage and some of their guns; and, returning home in a fury, charged Jogues with having caused their discomfiture. Jogues had expected this result, and was prepared to meet it; but several of the principal Dutch settlers, and among them Van Curler, who had made the previous attempt to rescue him, urged that his death was certain, if he returned to the Indian town, and advised him to make his escape. In the Hudson, opposite the settlement, lay a small Dutch vessel nearly ready to sail. Van Curler offered him a passage in her to Bordeaux or Rochelle,—representing that the opportunity was too good to be lost, and making light of the prisoner's objection, that a connivance in his escape on the part of the Dutch would excite the resentment of the Indians against them. Jogues thanked him warmly; but, to his amazement, asked for a night to consider the matter, and take counsel of God in prayer. [20] See a French rendering of the letter in Vimont, Relation, 1643, p. 75. 232 He spent the night in great agitation, tossed by doubt, and full of anxiety lest his self-love should beguile him from his duty. [21] Was it not possible that the Indians might spare his life, and that, by a timely drop of water, he might still rescue souls from torturing devils, and eternal fires of perdition? On the other hand, would he not, by remaining to meet a fate almost inevitable, incur the guilt of suicide? And even should he escape torture and death, could he hope that the Indians would again permit him to instruct and baptize their prisoners? Of his French companions, one, Goupil, was dead; while Couture had urged Jogues to flight, saying that he would then follow his example, but that, so long as the Father remained a prisoner, he, Couture, would share his fate. Before morning, Jogues had made his decision. God, he thought, would be better pleased should he embrace the opportunity given him. He went to find his Dutch friends, and, with a profusion of thanks, accepted their offer. They told him that a boat should be left for him on the shore, and that he must watch his time, and escape in it to the vessel, where he would be safe. [21] Buteux, Narré, MS. He and his Indian masters were lodged together in a large building, like a barn, belonging to a Dutch farmer. It was a hundred feet long, and had no partition of any kind. At one end the farmer kept his cattle; at the other he slept with his wife, a Mohawk squaw, and his children, while his Indian guests lay on the floor in the middle. [22] As he is 233 described as one of the principal persons of the colony, it is clear that the civilization of Rensselaerswyck was not high. [22] Buteux, Narré, MS. In the evening, Jogues, in such a manner as not to excite the suspicion of the Indians, went out to reconnoitre. There was a fence around the house, and, as he was passing it, a large dog belonging to the farmer flew at him, and bit him very severely in the leg. The Dutchman, hearing the noise, came out with a light, led Jogues back into the building, and bandaged his wound. He seemed to have some suspicion of the prisoner's design; for, fearful perhaps that his escape might exasperate the Indians, he made fast the door in such a manner that it could not readily be opened. Jogues now lay down among the Indians, who, rolled in their blankets, were stretched around him. He was fevered with excitement; and the agitation of his mind, joined to the pain of his wound, kept him awake all night. About dawn, while the Indians were still asleep, a laborer in the employ of the farmer came in with a lantern, and Jogues, who spoke no Dutch, gave him to understand by signs that he needed his help and guidance. The man was disposed to aid him, silently led the way out, quieted the dogs, and showed him the path to the river. It was more than half a mile distant, and the way was rough and broken. Jogues was greatly exhausted, and his wounded limb gave him such pain that he walked with the utmost difficulty. When he reached the shore, the day was breaking, and he found, to his dismay, that the ebb of the 234 tide had left the boat high and dry. He shouted to the vessel, but no one heard him. His desperation gave him strength; and, by working the boat to and fro, he pushed it at length, little by little, into the water, entered it, and rowed to the vessel. The Dutch sailors received him kindly, and hid him in the bottom of the hold, placing a large box over the hatchway. He remained two days, half stifled, in this foul lurking-place, while the Indians, furious at his escape, ransacked the settlement in vain to find him. They came off to the vessel, and so terrified the officers, that Jogues was sent on shore at night, and led to the fort. Here he was hidden in the garret of a house occupied by a miserly old man, to whose charge he was consigned. Food was sent to him; but, as his host appropriated the larger part to himself, Jogues was nearly starved. There was a compartment of his garret, separated from the rest by a partition of boards. Here the old Dutchman, who, like many others of the settlers, carried on a trade with the Mohawks, kept a quantity of goods for that purpose; and hither he often brought his customers. The boards of the partition had shrunk, leaving wide crevices; and Jogues could plainly see the Indians, as they passed between him and the light. They, on their part, might as easily have seen him, if he had not, when he heard them entering the house, hidden himself behind some barrels in the corner, where he would sometimes remain crouched for hours, in a constrained and painful posture, half suffocated 235 with heat, and afraid to move a limb. His wounded leg began to show dangerous symptoms; but he was relieved by the care of a Dutch surgeon of the fort. The minister, Megapolensis, also visited him, and did all in his power for the comfort of his Catholic brother, with whom he seems to have been well pleased, and whom he calls "a very learned scholar." [23] [23] Megapolensis, A Short Sketch of the Mohawk Indians. When Jogues had remained for six weeks in this hiding-place, his Dutch friends succeeded in satisfying his Indian masters by the payment of a large ransom. [24] A vessel from Manhattan, now New York, soon after brought up an order from the Director-General, Kieft, that he should be sent to him. Accordingly he was placed in a small vessel, which carried him down the Hudson. The Dutch on board treated him with great kindness; and, to do him honor, named after him one of the islands in the river. At Manhattan he found a dilapidated fort, garrisoned by sixty soldiers, and containing a stone church and the Director-General's house, together with storehouses and barracks. Near it were ranges of small houses, occupied chiefly by mechanics and laborers; while the dwellings of the remaining colonists, numbering in all four or five hundred, were scattered here and there on the island and the neighboring shores. The settlers were of different sects and nations, but chiefly Dutch Calvinists. Kieft told his guest that eighteen different languages 236 were spoken at Manhattan. [25] The colonists were in the midst of a bloody Indian war, brought on by their own besotted cruelty; and while Jogues was at the fort, some forty of the Dutchmen were killed on the neighboring farms, and many barns and houses burned. [26] [24] Lettre de Jogues à Lalemant, Rennes, Jan. 6, 1644.—See Relation, 1643, p. 79.—Goods were given the Indians to the value of three hundred livres. [25] Jogues, Novum Belgium. [26] This war was with Algonquin tribes of the neighborhood.—See O'Callaghan, New Netherland, I., Chap. III. The Director-General, with a humanity that was far from usual with him, exchanged Jogues's squalid and savage dress for a suit of Dutch cloth, and gave him passage in a small vessel which was then about to sail. The voyage was rough and tedious; and the passenger slept on deck or on a coil of ropes, suffering greatly from cold, and often drenched by the waves that broke over the vessel's side. At length she reached Falmouth, on the southern coast of England, when all the crew went ashore for a carouse, leaving Jogues alone on board. A boat presently came alongside with a gang of desperadoes, who boarded her, and rifled her of everything valuable, threatened Jogues with a pistol, and robbed him of his hat and coat. He obtained some assistance from the crew of a French ship in the harbor, and, on the day before Christmas, took passage in a small coal vessel for the neighboring coast of Brittany. In the following afternoon he was set on shore a little to the north of Brest, and, seeing a peasant's cottage not far off, he approached it, and asked the way to the nearest church. The peasant and his wife, as the narrative gravely tells us, mistook 237 him, by reason of his modest deportment, for some poor, but pious Irishman, and asked him to share their supper, after finishing his devotions, an invitation which Jogues, half famished as he was, gladly accepted. He reached the church in time for the evening mass, and with an unutterable joy knelt before the altar, and renewed the communion of which he had been deprived so long. When he returned to the cottage, the attention of his hosts was at once attracted to his mutilated and distorted hands. They asked with amazement how he could have received such injuries; and when they heard the story of his tortures, their surprise and veneration knew no bounds. Two young girls, their daughters, begged him to accept all they had to give,—a handful of sous; while the peasant made known the character of his new guest to his neighbors. A trader from Rennes brought a horse to the door, and offered the use of it to Jogues, to carry him to the Jesuit college in that town. He gratefully accepted it; and, on the morning of the fifth of January, 1644, reached his destination. He dismounted, and knocked at the door of the college. The porter opened it, and saw a man wearing on his head an old woollen nightcap, and in an attire little better than that of a beggar. Jogues asked to see the Rector; but the porter answered, coldly, that the Rector was busied in the Sacristy. Jogues begged him to say that a man was at the door with news from Canada. The missions of Canada were at this time an object of primal interest to the Jesuits, and above all to the 238 Jesuits of France. A letter from Jogues, written during his captivity, had already reached France, as had also the Jesuit Relation of 1643, which contained a long account of his capture; and he had no doubt been an engrossing theme of conversation in every house of the French Jesuits. The Father Rector was putting on his vestments to say mass; but when he heard that a poor man from Canada had asked for him at the door, he postponed the service, and went to meet him. Jogues, without discovering himself, gave him a letter from the Dutch Director-General attesting his character. The Rector, without reading it, began to question him as to the affairs of Canada, and at length asked him if he knew Father Jogues. "I knew him very well," was the reply. "The Iroquois have taken him," pursued the Rector. "Is he dead? Have they murdered him?" "No," answered Jogues; "he is alive and at liberty, and I am he." And he fell on his knees to ask his Superior's blessing. That night was a night of jubilation and thanksgiving in the college of Rennes. [27] [27] For Jogues's arrival in Brittany, see Lettre de Jogues à Lalemant, Rennes, Jan. 6, 1644; Lettre de Jogues à———, Rennes, Jan. 5, 1644, (in Relation, 1643,) and the long account in the Relation of 1647. Jogues became a centre of curiosity and reverence. He was summoned to Paris. The Queen, Anne of Austria, wished to see him; and when the persecuted slave of the Mohawks was conducted into her presence, she kissed his mutilated hands, while the ladies of the Court thronged around to 239 do him homage. We are told, and no doubt with truth, that these honors were unwelcome to the modest and single-hearted missionary, who thought only of returning to his work of converting the Indians. A priest with any deformity of body is debarred from saying mass. The teeth and knives of the Iroquois had inflicted an injury worse than the torturers imagined, for they had robbed Jogues of the privilege which was the chief consolation of his life; but the Pope, by a special dispensation, restored it to him, and with the opening spring he sailed again for Canada. CHAPTER XVII. 1641-1646. THE IROQUOIS—BRESSANI—DE NOU?. War ? Distress and Terror ? Richelieu ? Battle ? Ruin of Indian Tribes ? Mutual Destruction ? Iroquois and Algonquin ? Atrocities ? Frightful Position of the French ? Joseph Bressani ? His Capture ? His Treatment ? His Escape ? Anne de Nou? ? His Nocturnal Journey ? His Death Two forces were battling for the mastery of Canada: on the one side, Christ, the Virgin, and the Angels, with their agents, the priests; on the other, the Devil, and his tools, the Iroquois. Such at least was the view of the case held in full faith, not by the Jesuit Fathers alone, but by most of the colonists. Never before had the fiend put forth such rage, and in the Iroquois he found instruments of a nature not uncongenial with his own. At Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, and the little fort of Richelieu, that is to say, in all Canada, no man could hunt, fish, till the fields, or cut a tree in the forest, without peril to his scalp. The Iroquois were everywhere, and nowhere. A yell, 241 a volley of bullets, a rush of screeching savages, and all was over. The soldiers hastened to the spot to find silence, solitude, and a mangled corpse. "I had as lief," writes Father Vimont, "be beset by goblins as by the Iroquois. The one are about as invisible as the other. Our people on the Richelieu and at Montreal are kept in a closer confinement than ever were monks or nuns in our smallest convents in France." The Confederates at this time were in a flush of unparalleled audacity. They despised white men as base poltroons, and esteemed themselves warriors and heroes, destined to conquer all mankind. [1] The fire-arms with which the Dutch had rashly supplied them, joined to their united councils, their courage, and ferocity, gave them an advantage over the surrounding tribes which they fully understood. Their passions rose with their sense of power. They boasted that they would wipe the Hurons, the Algonquins, and the French from the face of the earth, and carry the "white girls," meaning the nuns, to their villages. This last event, indeed, seemed more than probable; and the Hospital nuns left their exposed station at Sillery, and withdrew to the ramparts and palisades of Quebec. The St. Lawrence and the Ottawa were so infested, that communication with the 242 Huron country was cut off; and three times the annual packet of letters sent thither to the missionaries fell into the hands of the Iroquois. [1] Bressani, when a prisoner among them, writes to this effect in a letter to his Superior.—See Relation Abrégée, 131. The anonymous author of the Relation of 1660 says, that, in their belief, if their nation were destroyed, a general confusion and overthrow of mankind must needs be the consequence.—Relation, 1660, 6. It was towards the close of the year 1640 that the scourge of Iroquois war had begun to fall heavily on the French. At that time, a party of their warriors waylaid and captured Thomas Godefroy and Fran?ois Marguerie, the latter a young man of great energy and daring, familiar with the woods, a master of the Algonquin language, and a scholar of no mean acquirements. [2] To the great joy of the colonists, he and his companion were brought back to Three Rivers by their captors, and given up, in the vain hope that the French would respond with a gift of fire-arms. Their demand for them being declined, they broke off the parley in a rage, fortified themselves, fired on the French, and withdrew under cover of night. [2] During his captivity, he wrote, on a beaver-skin, a letter to the Dutch in French, Latin, and English. Open war now ensued, and for a time all was bewilderment and terror. How to check the inroads of an enemy so stealthy and so keen for blood was the problem that taxed the brain of Montmagny, the Governor. He thought he had found a solution, when he conceived the plan of building a fort at the mouth of the River Richelieu, by which the Iroquois always made their descents to the St. Lawrence. Happily for the perishing colony, the Cardinal de Richelieu, in 1642, sent out thirty or forty soldiers for its defence. [3] Ten times the number 243 would have been scarcely sufficient; but even this slight succor was hailed with delight, and Montmagny was enabled to carry into effect his plan of the fort, for which hitherto he had had neither builders nor garrison. He took with him, besides the new-comers, a body of soldiers and armed laborers from Quebec, and, with a force of about a hundred men in all, [4] sailed for the Richelieu, in a brigantine and two or three open boats. [3] Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, II. 2; Vimont, Relation, 1642, 2, 44. [4] Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre, Sept. 29, 1642. On the thirteenth of August he reached his destination, and landed where the town of Sorel now stands. It was but eleven days before that Jogues and his companions had been captured, and Montmagny's followers found ghastly tokens of the disaster. The heads of the slain were stuck on poles by the side of the river; and several trees, from which portions of the bark had been peeled, were daubed with the rude picture-writing in which the victors recorded their exploit. [5] Among the rest, a representation of Jogues himself was clearly distinguishable. The heads were removed, the trees cut down, and a large cross planted on the spot. An altar was raised, and all heard mass; then a volley of musketry was fired; and then they fell to their work. They hewed an opening into the forest, dug up the roots, cleared the ground, and cut, shaped, and planted 244 palisades. Thus a week passed, and their defences were nearly completed, when suddenly the war-whoop rang in their ears, and two hundred Iroquois rushed upon them from the borders of the clearing. [6] [5] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 52. This practice was common to many tribes, and is not yet extinct. The writer has seen similar records, made by recent war-parties of Crows or Blackfeet, in the remote West. In this case, the bark was removed from the trunks of large cotton-wood trees, and the pictures traced with charcoal and vermilion. There were marks for scalps, for prisoners, and for the conquerors themselves. [6] The Relation of 1642 says three hundred. Jogues, who had been among them to his cost, is the better authority. It was the party of warriors that Jogues had met on an island in Lake Champlain. But for the courage of Du Rocher, a corporal, who was on guard, they would have carried all before them. They were rushing through an opening in the palisade, when he, with a few soldiers, met them with such vigor and resolution, that they were held in check long enough for the rest to snatch their arms. Montmagny, who was on the river in his brigantine, hastened on shore, and the soldiers, encouraged by his arrival, fought with great determination. The Iroquois, on their part, swarmed up to the palisade, thrust their guns through the loop-holes, and fired on those within; nor was it till several of them had been killed and others wounded that they learned to keep a more prudent distance. A tall savage, wearing a crest of the hair of some animal, dyed scarlet and bound with a fillet of wampum, leaped forward to the attack, and was shot dead. Another shared his fate, with seven buck-shot in his shield, and as many in his body. The French, with shouts, redoubled their fire, and the Indians at length lost heart and fell back. The wounded dropped guns, shields, and war-clubs, and the whole band withdrew to the shelter of a fort which they had built in the forest, three miles above. On the 245 part of the French, one man was killed and four wounded. They had narrowly escaped a disaster which might have proved the ruin of the colony; and they now gained time so far to strengthen their defences as to make them reasonably secure against any attack of savages. [7] The new fort, however, did not effectually answer its purpose of stopping the inroads of the Iroquois. They would land a mile or more above it, carry their canoes through the forest across an intervening tongue of land, and then launch them in the St. Lawrence, while the garrison remained in total ignorance of their movements. [7] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 50, 51. Assaults by Indians on fortified places are rare. The Iroquois are known, however, to have made them with success in several cases, some of the most remarkable of which will appear hereafter. The courage of Indians is uncertain and spasmodic. They are capable, at times, of a furious temerity, approaching desperation; but this is liable to sudden and extreme reaction. Their courage, too, is much oftener displayed in covert than in open attacks. While the French were thus beset, their Indian allies fared still worse. The effect of Iroquois hostilities on all the Algonquin tribes of Canada, from the Saguenay to the Lake of the Nipissings, had become frightfully apparent. Famine and pestilence had aided the ravages of war, till these wretched bands seemed in the course of rapid extermination. Their spirit was broken. They became humble and docile in the hands of the missionaries, ceased their railings against the new doctrine, and leaned on the French as their only hope in this extremity of woe. Sometimes they would appear in troops at Sillery or Three Rivers, 246 scared out of their forests by the sight of an Iroquois footprint; then some new terror would seize them, and drive them back to seek a hiding-place in the deepest thickets of the wilderness. Their best hunting-grounds were beset by the enemy. They starved for weeks together, subsisting on the bark of trees or the thongs of raw hide which formed the net-work of their snow-shoes. The mortality among them was prodigious. "Where, eight years ago," writes Father Vimont, "one would see a hundred wigwams, one now sees scarcely five or six. A chief who once had eight hundred warriors has now but thirty or forty; and in place of fleets of three or four hundred canoes, we see less than a tenth of that number." [8] [8] Relation, 1644, 3. These Canadian tribes were undergoing that process of extermination, absorption, or expatriation, which, as there is reason to believe, had for many generations formed the gloomy and meaningless history of the greater part of this continent. Three or four hundred Dutch guns, in the hands of the conquerors, gave an unwonted quickness and decision to the work, but in no way changed its essential character. The horrible nature of this warfare can be known only through examples; and of these one or two will suffice. A band of Algonquins, late in the autumn of 1641, set forth from Three Rivers on their winter hunt, and, fearful of the Iroquois, made their way far northward, into the depths of the forests that border the Ottawa. Here they thought themselves 247 safe, built their lodges, and began to hunt the moose and beaver. But a large party of their enemies, with a persistent ferocity that is truly astonishing, had penetrated even here, found the traces of the snow-shoes, followed up their human prey, and hid at nightfall among the rocks and thickets around the encampment. At midnight, their yells and the blows of their war-clubs awakened their sleeping victims. In a few minutes all were in their power. They bound the prisoners hand and foot, rekindled the fire, slung the kettles, cut the bodies of the slain to pieces, and boiled and devoured them before the eyes of the wretched survivors. "In a word," says the narrator, "they ate men with as much appetite and more pleasure than hunters eat a boar or a stag." [9] [9] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 46. Meanwhile they amused themselves with bantering their prisoners. "Uncle," said one of them to an old Algonquin, "you are a dead man. You are going to the land of souls. Tell them to take heart: they will have good company soon, for we are going to send all the rest of your nation to join them. This will be good news for them." [10] [10] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 45. This old man, who is described as no less malicious than his captors, and even more crafty, soon after escaped, and brought tidings of the disaster to the French. In the following spring, two women of the party also escaped; and, after suffering almost incredible hardships, reached Three Rivers, torn with briers, nearly naked, and in a deplorable state of bodily and mental exhaustion. One of them 248 told her story to Father Buteux, who translated it into French, and gave it to Vimont to be printed in the Relation of 1642. Revolting as it is, it is necessary to recount it. Suffice it to say, that it is sustained by the whole body of contemporary evidence in regard to the practices of the Iroquois and some of the neighboring tribes. The conquerors feasted in the lodge till nearly daybreak, and then, after a short rest, began their march homeward with their prisoners. Among these were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt, their captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter. "They are not men, they are wolves!" sobbed the wretched woman, as she told what had befallen her to the pitying Jesuit. [11] At the Fall of the Chaudière, another of the women ended her woes by leaping into the cataract. When they approached the first Iroquois town, they were met, at the distance of several leagues, by a crowd of the inhabitants, and among them a troop of women, bringing food to regale the triumphant warriors. Here they halted, and passed the night in songs of victory, mingled with the dismal chant of the prisoners, who were forced to dance for their entertainment. [11] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 46. On the morrow, they entered the town, leading 249 the captive Algonquins, fast bound, and surrounded by a crowd of men, women, and children, all singing at the top of their throats. The largest lodge was ready to receive them; and as they entered, the victims read their doom in the fires that blazed on the earthen floor, and in the aspect of the attendant savages, whom the Jesuit Father calls attendant demons, that waited their coming. The torture which ensued was but preliminary, designed to cause all possible suffering without touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off their fingers with clam-shells, scorching them with firebrands, and other indescribable torments. [12] The women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of the crowd. They then gave them food, to strengthen them for further suffering. [12] "Cette pauure creature qui s'est sauuée, a les deux pouces couppez, ou plus tost hachez. Quand ils me les eurent couppez, disoit-elle, ils me les voulurent faire manger; mais ie les mis sur mon giron, et leur dis qu'ils me tuassent s'ils vouloient, que ie ne leur pouuois obeir."—Buteux in Relation, 1642, 47. On the following morning, they were placed on a large scaffold, in sight of the whole population. It was a gala-day. Young and old were gathered from far and near. Some mounted the scaffold, and scorched them with torches and firebrands; while the children, standing beneath the bark platform, applied fire to the feet of the prisoners between the crevices. The Algonquin women were told to burn their husbands and companions; and one of them obeyed, vainly thinking to appease her 250 tormentors. The stoicism of one of the warriors enraged his captors beyond measure. "Scream! why don't you scream?" they cried, thrusting their burning brands at his naked body. "Look at me," he answered; "you cannot make me wince. If you were in my place, you would screech like babies." At this they fell upon him with redoubled fury, till their knives and firebrands left in him no semblance of humanity. He was defiant to the last, and when death came to his relief, they tore out his heart and devoured it; then hacked him in pieces, and made their feast of triumph on his mangled limbs. [13] [13] The diabolical practices described above were not peculiar to the Iroquois. The Neutrals and other kindred tribes were no whit less cruel. It is a remark of Mr. Gallatin, and I think a just one, that the Indians west of the Mississippi are less ferocious than those east of it. The burning of prisoners is rare among the prairie tribes, but is not unknown. An Ogillallah chief, in whose lodge I lived for several weeks in 1846, described to me, with most expressive pantomime, how he had captured and burned a warrior of the Snake Tribe, in a valley of the Medicine Bow Mountains, near which we were then encamped. All the men and all the old women of the party were put to death in a similar manner, though but few displayed the same amazing fortitude. The younger women, of whom there were about thirty, after passing their ordeal of torture, were permitted to live; and, disfigured as they were, were distributed among the several villages, as concubines or slaves to the Iroquois warriors. Of this number were the narrator and her companion, who, being ordered to accompany a war-party and carry their provisions, escaped at night into the forest, and reached Three Rivers, as we have seen. 251 While the Indian allies of the French were wasting away beneath this atrocious warfare, the French themselves, and especially the travelling Jesuits, had their full share of the infliction. In truth, the puny and sickly colony seemed in the gasps of dissolution. The beginning of spring, particularly, was a season of terror and suspense; for with the breaking up of the ice, sure as a destiny, came the Iroquois. As soon as a canoe could float, they were on the war-path; and with the cry of the returning wild-fowl mingled the yell of these human tigers. They did not always wait for the breaking ice, but set forth on foot, and, when they came to open water, made canoes and embarked. Well might Father Vimont call the Iroquois "the scourge of this infant church." They burned, hacked, and devoured the neophytes; exterminated whole villages at once; destroyed the nations whom the Fathers hoped to convert; and ruined that sure ally of the missions, the fur-trade. Not the most hideous nightmare of a fevered brain could transcend in horror the real and waking perils with which they beset the path of these intrepid priests. In the spring of 1644, Joseph Bressani, an Italian Jesuit, born in Rome, and now for two years past a missionary in Canada, was ordered by his Superior to go up to the Hurons. It was so early in the season that there seemed hope that he might pass in safety; and as the Fathers in that wild mission had received no succor for three years, Bressani was charged with letters to them, and such 252 necessaries for their use as he was able to carry. With him were six young Hurons, lately converted, and a French boy in his service. The party were in three small canoes. Before setting out, they all confessed and prepared for death. They left Three Rivers on the twenty-seventh of April, and found ice still floating in the river, and patches of snow lying in the naked forests. On the first day, one of the canoes overset, nearly drowning Bressani, who could not swim. On the third day, a snow-storm began, and greatly retarded their progress. The young Indians foolishly fired their guns at the wild-fowl on the river, and the sound reached the ears of a war-party of Iroquois, one of ten that had already set forth for the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the Huron towns. [14] Hence it befell, that, as they crossed the mouth of a small stream entering the St. Lawrence, twenty-seven Iroquois suddenly issued from behind a point, and attacked them in canoes. One of the Hurons was killed, and all the rest of the party captured without resistance. [14] Vimont, Relation, 1644, 41. On the fifteenth of July following, Bressani wrote from the Iroquois country to the General of the Jesuits at Rome:—"I do not know if your Paternity will recognize the handwriting of one whom you once knew very well. The letter is soiled and ill-written; because the writer has only one finger of his right hand left entire, and cannot prevent the blood from his wounds, which are still open, from staining the paper. His ink is 253 gunpowder mixed with water, and his table is the earth." [15] [15] This letter is printed anonymously in the Second Part, Chap. II, of Bressani's Relation Abrégée. A comparison with Vimont's account, in the Relation of 1644, makes its authorship apparent. Vimont's narrative agrees in all essential points. His informant was "vne personne digne de foy, qui a esté tesmoin oculaire de tout ce qu'il a souffert pendant sa captiuité."—Vimont, Relation, 1644, 43. Then follows a modest narrative of what he endured at the hands of his captors. First they thanked the Sun for their victory; then plundered the canoes; then cut up, roasted, and devoured the slain Huron before the eyes of the prisoners. On the next day they crossed to the southern shore, and ascended the River Richelieu as far as the rapids of Chambly, whence they pursued their march on foot among the brambles, rocks, and swamps of the trackless forest. When they reached Lake Champlain, they made new canoes and re-embarked, landed at its southern extremity six days afterwards, and thence made for the Upper Hudson. Here they found a fishing camp of four hundred Iroquois, and now Bressani's torments began in earnest. They split his hand with a knife, between the little finger and the ring finger; then beat him with sticks, till he was covered with blood; and afterwards placed him on one of their torture-scaffolds of bark, as a spectacle to the crowd. Here they stripped him, and while he shivered with cold from head to foot they forced him to sing. After about two hours they gave him up to the children, who ordered him to dance, at the same time thrusting sharpened sticks into his 254 flesh, and pulling out his hair and beard. "Sing!" cried one; "Hold your tongue!" screamed another; and if he obeyed the first, the second burned him. "We will burn you to death; we will eat you." "I will eat one of your hands." "And I will eat one of your feet." [16] These scenes were renewed every night for a week. Every evening a chief cried aloud through the camp, "Come, my children, come and caress our prisoners!"—and the savage crew thronged jubilant to a large hut, where the captives lay. They stripped off the torn fragment of a cassock, which was the priest's only garment; burned him with live coals and red-hot stones; forced him to walk on hot cinders; burned off now a finger-nail and now the joint of a finger,—rarely more than one at a time, however, for they economized their pleasures, and reserved the rest for another day. This torture was protracted till one or two o'clock, after which they left him on the ground, fast bound to four stakes, and covered only with a scanty fragment of deer-skin. [17] 255 The other prisoners had their share of torture; but the worst fell upon the Jesuit, as the chief man of the party. The unhappy boy who attended him, though only twelve or thirteen years old, was tormented before his eyes with a pitiless ferocity. [16] "Ils me répétaient sans cesse: Nous te br?lerons; nous te mangerons;—je te mangerai un pied;—et moi, une main," etc.—Bressani, in Relation Abrégée, 137. [17] "Chaque nuit après m'avoir fait chanter, et m'avoir tourmenté comme ie l'ai dit, ils passaient environ un quart d'heure à me br?ler un ongle ou un doigt. Il ne m'en reste maintenant qu'un seul entier, et encore ils en ont arraché l'ongle avec les dents. Un soir ils m'enlevaient un ongle, le lendemain la première phalange, le jour suivant la seconde. En six fois, ils en br?lèrent presque six. Aux mains seules, ils m'ont appliqué le feu et le fer plus de 18 fois, et i'étais obligé de chanter pendant ce supplice. Ils ne cessaient de me tourmenter qu'à une ou deux heures de la nuit."—Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 122. Bressani speaks in another passage of tortures of a nature yet more excruciating. They were similar to those alluded to by the anonymous author of the Relation of 1660: "Ie ferois rougir ce papier, et les oreilles frémiroient, si ie rapportois les horribles traitemens que les Agnieronnons" (the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois) "ont faits sur quelques captifs." He adds, that past ages have never heard of such.—Relation, 1660, 7, 8. At length they left this encampment, and, after a march of several days,—during which Bressani, in wading a rocky stream, fell from exhaustion and was nearly drowned,—they reached an Iroquois town. It is needless to follow the revolting details of the new torments that succeeded. They hung him by the feet with chains; placed food for their dogs on his naked body, that they might lacerate him as they ate; and at last had reduced his emaciated frame to such a condition, that even they themselves stood in horror of him. "I could not have believed," he writes to his Superior, "that a man was so hard to kill." He found among them those who, from compassion, or from a refinement of cruelty, fed him, for he could not feed himself. They told him jestingly that they wished to fatten him before putting him to death. The council that was to decide his fate met on the nineteenth of June, when, to the prisoner's amazement, and, as it seemed, to their own surprise, they resolved to spare his life. He was given, with due ceremony, to an old woman, to take the place of a deceased relative; but, since he was as repulsive, in his mangled condition, as, by the Indian 256 standard, he was useless, she sent her son with him to Fort Orange, to sell him to the Dutch. With the same humanity which they had shown in the case of Jogues, they gave a generous ransom for him, supplied him with clothing, kept him till his strength was in some degree recruited, and then placed him on board a vessel bound for Rochelle. Here he arrived on the fifteenth of November; and in the following spring, maimed and disfigured, but with health restored, embarked to dare again the knives and firebrands of the Iroquois. [18] [18] Immediately on his return to Canada he was ordered to set out again for the Hurons. More fortunate than on his first attempt, he arrived safely, early in the autumn of 1645.—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1646, 73. On Bressani, besides the authorities cited, see Du Creux, Historia Canadensis, 399-403; Juchereau, Histoire de l'H?tel-Dieu, 53; and Martin, Biographie du P. Fran?ois-Joseph Bressani, prefixed to the Relation Abrégée. He made no converts while a prisoner, but he baptized a Huron catechumen at the stake, to the great fury of the surrounding Iroquois. He has left, besides his letters, some interesting notes on his captivity, preserved in the Relation Abrégée. It should be noticed, in justice to the Iroquois, that, ferocious and cruel as past all denial they were, they were not so bereft of the instincts of humanity as at first sight might appear. An inexorable severity towards enemies was a very essential element, in their savage conception, of the character of the warrior. Pity was a cowardly weakness, at which their pride revolted. This, joined to their thirst for applause and their dread of ridicule, made them smother every movement of compassion, [19] and 257 conspired with their native fierceness to form a character of unrelenting cruelty rarely equalled. [19] Thus, when Bressani, tortured by the tightness of the cords that bound him, asked an Indian to loosen them, he would reply by mockery, if others were present; but if no one saw him, he usually complied. The perils which beset the missionaries did not spring from the fury of the Iroquois alone, for Nature herself was armed with terror in this stern wilderness of New France. On the thirtieth of January, 1646, Father Anne de Nou? set out from Three Rivers to go to the fort built by the French at the mouth of the River Richelieu, where he was to say mass and hear confessions. De Nou? was sixty-three years old, and had come to Canada in 1625. [20] As an indifferent memory disabled him from mastering the Indian languages, he devoted himself to the spiritual charge of the French, and of the Indians about the forts, within reach of an interpreter. For the rest, he attended the sick, and, in times of scarcity, fished in the river or dug roots in the woods for the subsistence of his flock. In short, though sprung from a noble family of Champagne, he shrank from no toil, however humble, to which his idea of duty or his vow of obedience called him. [21] [20] See "Pioneers of France," 393. [21] He was peculiarly sensitive as regarded the cardinal Jesuit virtue of obedience; and both Lalemant and Bressani say, that, at the age of sixty and upwards, he was sometimes seen in tears, when he imagined that he had not fulfilled to the utmost the commands of his Superior. The old missionary had for companions two soldiers and a Huron Indian. They were all on snow-shoes, and the soldiers dragged their baggage on small sledges. Their highway was the St. Lawrence, transformed to solid ice, and buried, like all the country, beneath two or three feet of snow, 258 which, far and near, glared dazzling white under the clear winter sun. Before night they had walked eighteen miles, and the soldiers, unused to snow-shoes, were greatly fatigued. They made their camp in the forest, on the shore of the great expansion of the St. Lawrence called the Lake of St. Peter,—dug away the snow, heaped it around the spot as a barrier against the wind, made their fire on the frozen earth in the midst, and lay down to sleep. At two o'clock in the morning De Nou? awoke. The moon shone like daylight over the vast white desert of the frozen lake, with its bordering fir-trees bowed to the ground with snow; and the kindly thought struck the Father, that he might ease his companions by going in advance to Fort Richelieu, and sending back men to aid them in dragging their sledges. He knew the way well. He directed them to follow the tracks of his snow-shoes in the morning; and, not doubting to reach the fort before night, left behind his blanket and his flint and steel. For provisions, he put a morsel of bread and five or six prunes in his pocket, told his rosary, and set forth. Before dawn the weather changed. The air thickened, clouds hid the moon, and a snow-storm set in. The traveller was in utter darkness. He lost the points of the compass, wandered far out on the lake, and when day appeared could see nothing but the snow beneath his feet, and the myriads of falling flakes that encompassed him like a curtain, impervious to the sight. Still he toiled on, winding hither and thither, and at times unwittingly circling 259 back on his own footsteps. At night he dug a hole in the snow under the shore of an island, and lay down, without fire, food, or blanket. Meanwhile the two soldiers and the Indian, unable to trace his footprints, which the snow had hidden, pursued their way for the fort; but the Indian was ignorant of the country, and the Frenchmen were unskilled. They wandered from their course, and at evening encamped on the shore of the island of St. Ignace, at no great distance from De Nou?. Here the Indian, trusting to his instinct, left them and set forth alone in search of their destination, which he soon succeeded in finding. The palisades of the feeble little fort, and the rude buildings within, were whitened with snow, and half buried in it. Here, amid the desolation, a handful of men kept watch and ward against the Iroquois. Seated by the blazing logs, the Indian asked for De Nou?, and, to his astonishment, the soldiers of the garrison told him that he had not been seen. The captain of the post was called; all was anxiety; but nothing could be done that night. At daybreak parties went out to search. The two soldiers were readily found; but they looked in vain for the missionary. All day they were ranging the ice, firing their guns and shouting; but to no avail, and they returned disconsolate. There was a converted Indian, whom the French called Charles, at the fort, one of four who were spending the winter there. On the next morning, the second of February, he and one of his companions, together 260 with Baron, a French soldier, resumed the search; and, guided by the slight depressions in the snow which had fallen on the wanderer's footprints, the quick-eyed savages traced him through all his windings, found his camp by the shore of the island, and thence followed him beyond the fort. He had passed near without discovering it,—perhaps weakness had dimmed his sight,—stopped to rest at a point a league above, and thence made his way about three leagues farther. Here they found him. He had dug a circular excavation in the snow, and was kneeling in it on the earth. His head was bare, his eyes open and turned upwards, and his hands clasped on his breast. His hat and his snow-shoes lay at his side. The body was leaning slightly forward, resting against the bank of snow before it, and frozen to the hardness of marble. Thus, in an act of kindness and charity, died the first martyr of the Canadian mission. [22] [22] Lalemant, Relation, 1646, 9; Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre, 10 Sept., 1646; Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 175. One of the Indians who found the body of De Nou? was killed by the Iroquois at Ossossané, in the Huron country, three years after. He received the death-blow in a posture like that in which he had seen the dead missionary. His body was found with the hands still clasped on the breast.—Lettre de Chaumonot à Lalemant, 1 Juin, 1649. The next death among the Jesuits was that of Masse, who died at Sillery, on the twelfth of May of this year, 1646, at the age of seventy-two. He had come with Biard to Acadia as early as 1611. (See "Pioneers of France," 262.) Lalemant, in the Relation of 1646, gives an account of him, and speaks of penances which he imposed on himself, some of which are to the last degree disgusting. CHAPTER XVIII. 1642-1644. VILLEMARIE. Infancy of Montreal ? The Flood ? Vow of Maisonneuve ? Pilgrimage ? D'Ailleboust ? The H?tel-Dieu ? Piety ? Propagandism ? War ? Hurons and Iroquois ? Dogs ? Sally of the French ? Battle ? Exploit of Maisonneuve Let us now ascend to the island of Montreal. Here, as we have seen, an association of devout and zealous persons had essayed to found a mission-colony under the protection of the Holy Virgin; and we left the adventurers, after their landing, bivouacked on the shore, on an evening in May. There was an altar in the open air, decorated with a taste that betokened no less of good nurture than of piety; and around it clustered the tents that sheltered the commandant, Maisonneuve, the two ladies, Madame de la Peltrie and Mademoiselle Mance, and the soldiers and laborers of the expedition. In the morning they all fell to their work, Maisonneuve hewing down the first tree,—and labored with such good-will, that their tents were soon 262 inclosed with a strong palisade, and their altar covered by a provisional chapel, built, in the Huron mode, of bark. Soon afterward, their canvas habitations were supplanted by solid structures of wood, and the feeble germ of a future city began to take root. The Iroquois had not yet found them out; nor did they discover them till they had had ample time to fortify themselves. Meanwhile, on a Sunday, they would stroll at their leisure over the adjacent meadow and in the shade of the bordering forest, where, as the old chronicler tells us, the grass was gay with wild-flowers, and the branches with the flutter and song of many strange birds. [1] [1] Dollier de Casson, MS. The day of the Assumption of the Virgin was celebrated with befitting solemnity. There was mass in their bark chapel; then a Te Deum; then public instruction of certain Indians who chanced to be at Montreal; then a procession of all the colonists after vespers, to the admiration of the redskinned beholders. Cannon, too, were fired, in honor of their celestial patroness. "Their thunder made all the island echo," writes Father Vimont; "and the demons, though used to thunderbolts, were scared at a noise which told them of the love we bear our great Mistress; and I have scarcely any doubt that the tutelary angels of the savages of New France have marked this day in the calendar of Paradise." [2] [2] Vimont, Relation, 1642, 38. Compare Le Clerc, Premier Etablissement de la Foy, II. 51. 263 The summer passed prosperously, but with the winter their faith was put to a rude test. In December, there was a rise of the St. Lawrence, threatening to sweep away in a night the results of all their labor. They fell to their prayers; and Maisonneuve planted a wooden cross in face of the advancing deluge, first making a vow, that, should the peril be averted, he, Maisonneuve, would bear another cross on his shoulders up the neighboring mountain, and place it on the summit. The vow seemed in vain. The flood still rose, filled the fort ditch, swept the foot of the palisade, and threatened to sap the magazine; but here it stopped, and presently began to recede, till at length it had withdrawn within its lawful channel, and Villemarie was safe. [3] [3] A little MS. map in M. Jacques Viger's copy of Le Petit Registre de la Cure de Montreal, lays down the position and shape of the fort at this time, and shows the spot where Maisonneuve planted the cross. Now it remained to fulfil the promise from which such happy results had proceeded. Maisonneuve set his men at work to clear a path through the forest to the top of the mountain. A large cross was made, and solemnly blessed by the priest; then, on the sixth of January, the Jesuit Du Peron led the way, followed in procession by Madame de la Peltrie, the artisans, and soldiers, to the destined spot. The commandant, who with all the ceremonies of the Church had been declared First Soldier of the Cross, walked behind the rest, bearing on his shoulder a cross so heavy that it needed his utmost strength to climb the steep and rugged 264 path. They planted it on the highest crest, and all knelt in adoration before it. Du Peron said mass; and Madame de la Peltrie, always romantic and always devout, received the sacrament on the mountain-top, a spectacle to the virgin world outstretched below. Sundry relics of saints had been set in the wood of the cross, which remained an object of pilgrimage to the pious colonists of Villemarie. [4] [4] Vimont, Relation, 1643, 52, 53. Peace and harmony reigned within the little fort; and so edifying was the demeanor of the colonists, so faithful were they to the confessional, and so constant at mass, that a chronicler of the day exclaims, in a burst of enthusiasm, that the deserts lately a resort of demons were now the abode of angels. [5] The two Jesuits who for the time were their pastors had them well in hand. They dwelt under the same roof with most of their flock, who lived in community, in one large house, and vied with each other in zeal for the honor of the Virgin and the conversion of the Indians. [5] Véritables Motifs, cited by Faillon, I. 453, 454. At the end of August, 1643, a vessel arrived at Villemarie with a reinforcement commanded by Louis d'Ailleboust de Coulonges, a pious gentleman of Champagne, and one of the Associates of Montreal. [6] Some years before, he had asked in wedlock the hand of Barbe de Boulogne; but the young lady had, when a child, in the ardor of her piety, taken a vow of perpetual chastity. By the advice 265 of her Jesuit confessor, she accepted his suit, on condition that she should preserve, to the hour of her death, the state to which Holy Church has always ascribed a peculiar merit. [7] D'Ailleboust married her; and when, soon after, he conceived the purpose of devoting his life to the work of the Faith in Canada, he invited his maiden spouse to go with him. She refused, and forbade him to mention the subject again. Her health was indifferent, and about this time she fell ill. As a last resort, she made a promise to God, that, if He would restore her, she would go to Canada with her husband; and forthwith her maladies ceased. Still her reluctance continued; she hesitated, and then refused again, when an inward light revealed to her that it was her duty to cast her lot in the wilderness. She accordingly embarked with d'Ailleboust, accompanied by her sister, Mademoiselle Philippine de Boulogne, who had caught the contagion of her zeal. The presence of these damsels would, to all appearance, be rather a burden than a profit to the colonists, beset as they then were by Indians, and often in peril of starvation; but the spectacle of their ardor, as disinterested as it was extravagant, would serve to exalt the religious enthusiasm in which alone was the life of Villemarie. [6] Chaulmer, 101; Juchereau, 91. [7] Juchereau, Histoire de l'H?tel-Dieu de Québec, 276. The confessor told D'Ailleboust, that, if he persuaded his wife to break her vow of continence, "God would chastise him terribly." The nun historian adds, that, undeterred by the menace, he tried and failed. Their vessel passed in safety the Iroquois who 266 watched the St. Lawrence, and its arrival filled the colonists with joy. D'Ailleboust was a skilful soldier, specially versed in the arts of fortification; and, under his direction, the frail palisades which formed their sole defence were replaced by solid ramparts and bastions of earth. He brought news that the "unknown benefactress," as a certain generous member of the Association of Montreal was called, in ignorance of her name, had given funds, to the amount, as afterwards appeared, of forty-two thousand livres, for the building of a hospital at Villemarie. [8] The source of the gift was kept secret, from a religious motive; but it soon became known that it proceeded from Madame de Bullion, a lady whose rank and wealth were exceeded only by her devotion. It is true that the hospital was not wanted, as no one was sick at Villemarie, and one or two chambers would have sufficed for every prospective necessity; but it will be remembered that the colony had been established in order that a hospital might be built, and Madame de Bullion would not hear to any other application of her money. [9] Instead, therefore, of tilling the land to supply their own pressing needs, all the laborers of the settlement were set at this pious, though superfluous, task. [10] There was no room in 267 the fort, which, moreover, was in danger of inundation; and the hospital was accordingly built on higher ground adjacent. To leave it unprotected would be to abandon its inmates to the Iroquois; it was therefore surrounded by a strong palisade, and, in time of danger, a part of the garrison was detailed to defend it. Here Mademoiselle Mance took up her abode, and waited the day when wounds or disease should bring patients to her empty wards. [8] Archives du Séminaire de Villemarie, cited by Faillon, I. 466. The amount of the gift was not declared until the next year. [9] Mademoiselle Mance wrote to her, to urge that the money should be devoted to the Huron mission; but she absolutely refused.—Dollier de Casson, MS. [10] Journal des Supérieurs des Jésuites, MS. The hospital was sixty feet long and twenty-four feet wide, with a kitchen, a chamber for Mademoiselle Mance, others for servants, and two large apartments for the patients. It was amply provided with furniture, linen, medicines, and all necessaries; and had also two oxen, three cows, and twenty sheep. A small oratory of stone was built adjoining it. The inclosure was four arpents in extent.—Archives du Séminaire de Villemarie, cited by Faillon. Dauversière, who had first conceived this plan of a hospital in the wilderness, was a senseless enthusiast, who rejected as a sin every protest of reason against the dreams which governed him; yet one rational and practical element entered into the motives of those who carried the plan into execution. The hospital was intended not only to nurse sick Frenchmen, but to nurse and convert sick Indians; in other words, it was an engine of the mission. From Maisonneuve to the humblest laborer, these zealous colonists were bent on the work of conversion. To that end, the ladies made pilgrimages to the cross on the mountain, sometimes for nine days in succession, to pray God to gather the heathen into His fold. The fatigue was great; nor was the danger less; and armed men always escorted them, as a precaution against the Iroquois. [11] The 268 male colonists were equally fervent; and sometimes as many as fifteen or sixteen persons would kneel at once before the cross, with the same charitable petition. [12] The ardor of their zeal may be inferred from the fact, that these pious expeditions consumed the greater part of the day, when time and labor were of a value past reckoning to the little colony. Besides their pilgrimages, they used other means, and very efficient ones, to attract and gain over the Indians. They housed, fed, and clothed them at every opportunity; and though they were subsisting chiefly on provisions brought at great cost from France, there was always a portion for the hungry savages who from time to time encamped near their fort. If they could persuade any of them to be nursed, they were consigned to the tender care of Mademoiselle Mance; and if a party went to war, their women and children were taken in charge till their return. As this attention to their bodies had for its object the profit of their souls, it was accompanied with incessant catechizing. This, with the other influences of the place, had its effect; and some notable conversions were made. Among them was that of the renowned chief, Tessouat, or Le Borgne, as the French called him,—a crafty and intractable savage, whom, to their own surprise, they succeeded in taming and winning to the Faith. [13] He was christened with the name of Paul, and 269 his squaw with that of Madeleine. Maisonneuve rewarded him with a gun, and celebrated the day by a feast to all the Indians present. [14] [11] Morin, Annales de l'H?tel-Dieu de St. Joseph, MS., cited by Faillon, I. 457. [12] Marguerite Bourgeoys, écrits Autographes, MS., extracts in Faillon, I. 458. [13] Vimont, Relation, 1643, 54, 55. Tessouat was chief of Allumette Island, in the Ottawa. His predecessor, of the same name, was Champlain's host in 1613.—See "Pioneers of France," Chap. XII. [14] It was the usual practice to give guns to converts, "pour attirer leur compatriotes à la Foy." They were never given to heathen Indians. "It seems," observes Vimont, "that our Lord wishes to make use of this method in order that Christianity may become acceptable in this country."—Relation, 1643, 71. The French hoped to form an agricultural settlement of Indians in the neighborhood of Villemarie; and they spared no exertion to this end, giving them tools, and aiding them to till the fields. They might have succeeded, but for that pest of the wilderness, the Iroquois, who hovered about them, harassed them with petty attacks, and again and again drove the Algonquins in terror from their camps. Some time had elapsed, as we have seen, before the Iroquois discovered Villemarie; but at length ten fugitive Algonquins, chased by a party of them, made for the friendly settlement as a safe asylum; and thus their astonished pursuers became aware of its existence. They reconnoitred the place, and went back to their towns with the news. [15] From that time forth the colonists had no peace; no more excursions for fishing and hunting; no more Sunday strolls in woods and meadows. The men went armed to their work, and returned at the sound of a bell, marching in a compact body, prepared for an attack. [15] Dollier de Casson, MS. Early in June, 1643, sixty Hurons came down in canoes for traffic, and, on reaching the place now called Lachine, at the head of the rapids of 270 St. Louis, and a few miles above Villemarie, they were amazed at finding a large Iroquois war-party in a fort hastily built of the trunks and boughs of trees. Surprise and fright seem to have infatuated them. They neither fought nor fled, but greeted their inveterate foes as if they were friends and allies, and, to gain their good graces, told them all they knew of the French settlement, urging them to attack it, and promising an easy victory. Accordingly, the Iroquois detached forty of their warriors, who surprised six Frenchmen at work hewing timber within a gunshot of the fort, killed three of them, took the remaining three prisoners, and returned in triumph. The captives were bound with the usual rigor; and the Hurons taunted and insulted them, to please their dangerous companions. Their baseness availed them little; for at night, after a feast of victory, when the Hurons were asleep or off their guard, their entertainers fell upon them, and killed or captured the greater part. The rest ran for Villemarie, where, as their treachery was as yet unknown, they were received with great kindness. [16] [16] I have followed Dollier de Casson. Vimont's account is different. He says that the Iroquois fell upon the Hurons at the outset, and took twenty-three prisoners, killing many others; after which they made the attack at Villemarie.—Relation, 1643, 62. Faillon thinks that Vimont was unwilling to publish the treachery of the Hurons, lest the interests of the Huron mission should suffer in consequence. Belmont, Histoire du Canada, 1643, confirms the account of the Huron treachery. The next morning the Iroquois decamped, carrying with them their prisoners, and the furs plundered 271 from the Huron canoes. They had taken also, and probably destroyed, all the letters from the missionaries in the Huron country, as well as a copy of their Relation of the preceding year. Of the three French prisoners, one escaped and reached Montreal; the remaining two were burned alive. At Villemarie it was usually dangerous to pass beyond the ditch of the fort or the palisades of the hospital. Sometimes a solitary warrior would lie hidden for days, without sleep and almost without food, behind a log in the forest, or in a dense thicket, watching like a lynx for some rash straggler. Sometimes parties of a hundred or more made ambuscades near by, and sent a few of their number to lure out the soldiers by a petty attack and a flight. The danger was much diminished, however, when the colonists received from France a number of dogs, which proved most efficient sentinels and scouts. Of the instinct of these animals the writers of the time speak with astonishment. Chief among them was a bitch named Pilot, who every morning made the rounds of the forests and fields about the fort, followed by a troop of her offspring. If one of them lagged behind, she hit him to remind him of his duty; and if any skulked and ran home, she punished them severely in the same manner on her return. When she discovered the Iroquois, which she was sure to do by the scent, if any were near, she barked furiously, and ran at once straight to the fort, followed by the rest. The Jesuit chronicler adds, with an amusing na?veté, 272 that, while this was her duty, "her natural inclination was for hunting squirrels." [17] [17] Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 74, 75. "Son attrait naturel estoit la chasse aux écurieux." Dollier de Casson also speaks admiringly of her and her instinct. Faillon sees in it a manifest proof of the protecting care of God over Villemarie. Maisonneuve was as brave a knight of the cross as ever fought in Palestine for the sepulchre of Christ; but he could temper his valor with discretion. He knew that he and his soldiers were but indifferent woodsmen; that their crafty foe had no equal in ambuscades and surprises; and that, while a defeat might ruin the French, it would only exasperate an enemy whose resources in men were incomparably greater. Therefore, when the dogs sounded the alarm, he kept his followers close, and stood patiently on the defensive. They chafed under this Fabian policy, and at length imputed it to cowardice. Their murmurings grew louder, till they reached the ear of Maisonneuve. The religion which animated him had not destroyed the soldierly pride which takes root so readily and so strongly in a manly nature; and an imputation of cowardice from his own soldiers stung him to the quick. He saw, too, that such an opinion of him must needs weaken his authority, and impair the discipline essential to the safety of the colony. On the morning of the thirtieth of March, Pilot was heard barking with unusual fury in the forest eastward from the fort; and in a few moments they saw her running over the clearing, where the snow was still deep, followed by her 273 brood, all giving tongue together. The excited Frenchmen flocked about their commander. "Monsieur, les ennemis sont dans le bois; ne les irons-nous jamais voir?" [18] [18] Dollier de Casson, MS. Maisonneuve, habitually composed and calm, answered sharply,— "Yes, you shall see the enemy. Get yourselves ready at once, and take care that you are as brave as you profess to be. I shall lead you myself." All was bustle in the fort. Guns were loaded, pouches filled, and snow-shoes tied on by those who had them and knew how to use them. There were not enough, however, and many were forced to go without them. When all was ready, Maisonneuve sallied forth at the head of thirty men, leaving d'Ailleboust, with the remainder, to hold the fort. They crossed the snowy clearing and entered the forest, where all was silent as the grave. They pushed on, wading through the deep snow, with the countless pitfalls hidden beneath it, when suddenly they were greeted with the screeches of eighty Iroquois, [19] who sprang up from their lurking-places, and showered bullets and arrows upon the advancing French. The emergency called, not for chivalry, but for woodcraft; and Maisonneuve ordered his men to take shelter, like their assailants, behind trees. They stood their ground resolutely 274 for a long time; but the Iroquois pressed them close, three of their number were killed, others were wounded, and their ammunition began to fail. Their only alternatives were destruction or retreat; and to retreat was not easy. The order was given. Though steady at first, the men soon became confused, and over-eager to escape the galling fire which the Iroquois sent after them. Maisonneuve directed them towards a sledge-track which had been used in dragging timber for building the hospital, and where the snow was firm beneath the foot. He himself remained to the last, encouraging his followers and aiding the wounded to escape. The French, as they struggled through the snow, faced about from time to time, and fired back to check the pursuit; but no sooner had they reached the sledge-track than they gave way to their terror, and ran in a body for the fort. Those within, seeing this confused rush of men from the distance, mistook them for the enemy; and an over-zealous soldier touched the match to a cannon which had been pointed to rake the sledge-track. Had not the piece missed fire, from dampness of the priming, he would have done more execution at one shot than the Iroquois in all the fight of that morning. [19] Vimont, Relation, 1644, 42. Dollier de Casson says two hundred, but it is usually safe in these cases to accept the smaller number, and Vimont founds his statement on the information of an escaped prisoner. Maisonneuve was left alone, retreating backwards down the track, and holding his pursuers in check, with a pistol in each hand. They might easily have shot him; but, recognizing him as the commander of the French, they were bent on taking him alive. Their chief coveted this honor for 275 himself, and his followers held aloof to give him the opportunity. He pressed close upon Maisonneuve, who snapped a pistol at him, which missed fire. The Iroquois, who had ducked to avoid the shot, rose erect, and sprang forward to seize him, when Maisonneuve, with his remaining pistol, shot him dead. Then ensued a curious spectacle, not infrequent in Indian battles. The Iroquois seemed to forget their enemy, in their anxiety to secure and carry off the body of their chief; and the French commander continued his retreat unmolested, till he was safe under the cannon of the fort. From that day, he was a hero in the eyes of his men. [20] [20] Dollier de Casson, MS. Vimont's mention of the affair is brief. He says that two Frenchmen were made prisoners, and burned. Belmont, Histoire du Canada, 1645, gives a succinct account of the fight, and indicates the scene of it. It seems to have been a little below the site of the Place d'Armes, on which stands the great Parish Church of Villemarie, commonly known to tourists as the "Cathedral." Faillon thinks that Maisonneuve's exploit was achieved on this very spot. Marguerite Bourgeoys also describes the affair in her unpublished writings. Quebec and Montreal are happy in their founders. Samuel de Champlain and Chomedey de Maisonneuve are among the names that shine with a fair and honest lustre on the infancy of nations. CHAPTER XIX. 1644, 1645. PEACE. Iroquois Prisoners ? Piskaret ? His Exploits ? More Prisoners ? Iroquois Embassy ? The Orator ? The Great Council ? Speeches of Kiotsaton ? Muster of Savages ? Peace Confirmed In the damp and freshness of a midsummer morning, when the sun had not yet risen, but when the river and the sky were red with the glory of approaching day, the inmates of the fort at Three Rivers were roused by a tumult of joyous and exultant voices. They thronged to the shore,—priests, soldiers, traders, and officers, mingled with warriors and shrill-voiced squaws from Huron and Algonquin camps in the neighboring forest. Close at hand they saw twelve or fifteen canoes slowly drifting down the current of the St. Lawrence, manned by eighty young Indians, all singing their songs of victory, and striking their paddles against the edges of their bark vessels in cadence with their voices. Among them three Iroquois prisoners stood upright, singing loud and defiantly, as men not fearing torture or death. 277 A few days before, these young warriors, in part Huron and in part Algonquin, had gone out on the war-path to the River Richelieu, where they had presently found themselves entangled among several bands of Iroquois. They withdrew in the night, after a battle in the dark with an Iroquois canoe, and, as they approached Fort Richelieu, had the good fortune to discover ten of their enemy ambuscaded in a clump of bushes and fallen trees, watching to waylay some of the soldiers on their morning visit to the fishing-nets in the river hard by. They captured three of them, and carried them back in triumph. The victors landed amid screams of exultation. Two of the prisoners were assigned to the Hurons, and the third to the Algonquins, who immediately took him to their lodges near the fort at Three Rivers, and began the usual "caress," by burning his feet with red-hot stones, and cutting off his fingers. Champfleur, the commandant, went out to them with urgent remonstrances, and at length prevailed on them to leave their victim without further injury, until Montmagny, the Governor, should arrive. He came with all dispatch,—not wholly from a motive of humanity, but partly in the hope that the three captives might be made instrumental in concluding a peace with their countrymen. A council was held in the fort at Three Rivers. Montmagny made valuable presents to the Algonquins and the Hurons, to induce them to place the prisoners in his hands. The Algonquins complied; and the unfortunate Iroquois, gashed, maimed, and 278 scorched, was given up to the French, who treated him with the greatest kindness. But neither the Governor's gifts nor his eloquence could persuade the Hurons to follow the example of their allies; and they departed for their own country with their two captives,—promising, however, not to burn them, but to use them for negotiations of peace. With this pledge, scarcely worth the breath that uttered it, Montmagny was forced to content himself. [1] [1] Vimont, Relation, 1644, 45-49. Thus it appeared that the fortune of war did not always smile even on the Iroquois. Indeed, if there is faith in Indian tradition, there had been a time, scarcely half a century past, when the Mohawks, perhaps the fiercest and haughtiest of the confederate nations, had been nearly destroyed by the Algonquins, whom they now held in contempt. [2] This people, whose inferiority arose chiefly from the want of that compact organization in which lay the strength of the Iroquois, had not lost their ancient warlike spirit; and they had one champion of whom even the audacious confederates stood in awe. His name was Piskaret; and he dwelt on that great island in the Ottawa of 279 which Le Borgne was chief. He had lately turned Christian, in the hope of French favor and countenance,—always useful to an ambitious Indian,—and perhaps, too, with an eye to the gun and powder-horn which formed the earthly reward of the convert. [3] Tradition tells marvellous stories of his exploits. Once, it is said, he entered an Iroquois town on a dark night. His first care was to seek out a hiding-place, and he soon found one in the midst of a large wood-pile. [4] Next he crept into a lodge, and, finding the inmates asleep, killed them with his war-club, took their scalps, and quietly withdrew to the retreat he had prepared. In the morning a howl of lamentation and fury rose from the astonished villagers. They ranged the fields and forests in vain pursuit of the mysterious enemy, who remained all day in the wood-pile, whence, at midnight, he came forth and repeated his former exploit. On the third night, every family placed its sentinels; and Piskaret, stealthily creeping from lodge to lodge, and reconnoitring each through crevices in the bark, saw watchers everywhere. At length he descried a sentinel who had fallen asleep near the entrance of a lodge, though his companion at the other end was still awake and vigilant. He pushed aside the sheet of bark that served as a door, struck the sleeper a deadly blow, yelled his war-cry, and fled 280 like the wind. All the village swarmed out in furious chase; but Piskaret was the swiftest runner of his time, and easily kept in advance of his pursuers. When daylight came, he showed himself from time to time to lure them on, then yelled defiance, and distanced them again. At night, all but six had given over the chase; and even these, exhausted as they were, had begun to despair. Piskaret, seeing a hollow tree, crept into it like a bear, and hid himself; while the Iroquois, losing his traces in the dark, lay down to sleep near by. At midnight he emerged from his retreat, stealthily approached his slumbering enemies, nimbly brained them all with his war-club, and then, burdened with a goodly bundle of scalps, journeyed homeward in triumph. [5] [2] Relation, 1660, 6 (anonymous). Both Perrot and La Potherie recount traditions of the ancient superiority of the Algonquins over the Iroquois, who formerly, it is said, dwelt near Montreal and Three Rivers, whence the Algonquins expelled them. They withdrew, first to the neighborhood of Lake Erie, then to that of Lake Ontario, their historic seat. There is much to support the conjecture that the Indians found by Cartier at Montreal in 1535 were Iroquois (See "Pioneers of France," 189.) That they belonged to the same family of tribes is certain. For the traditions alluded to, see Perrot, 9, 12, 79, and La Potherie, I. 288-295. [3] "Simon Pieskaret … n'estoit Chrestien qu'en apparence et par police."—Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 68.—He afterwards became a convert in earnest. [4] Both the Iroquois and the Hurons collected great quantities of wood in their villages in the autumn. [5] This story is told by La Potherie, I. 299, and, more briefly, by Perrot, 107. La Potherie, writing more than half a century after the time in question, represents the Iroquois as habitually in awe of the Algonquins. In this all the contemporary writers contradict him. This is but one of several stories that tradition has preserved of his exploits; and, with all reasonable allowances, it is certain that the crafty and valiant Algonquin was the model of an Indian warrior. That which follows rests on a far safer basis. Early in the spring of 1645, Piskaret, with six other converted Indians, some of them better Christians than he, set out on a war-party, and, after dragging their canoes over the frozen St. Lawrence, launched them on the open stream of the Richelieu. They ascended to Lake Champlain, 281 and hid themselves in the leafless forests of a large island, watching patiently for their human prey. One day they heard a distant shot. "Come, friends," said Piskaret, "let us get our dinner: perhaps it will be the last, for we must dine before we run." Having dined to their contentment, the philosophic warriors prepared for action. One of them went to reconnoitre, and soon reported that two canoes full of Iroquois were approaching the island. Piskaret and his followers crouched in the bushes at the point for which the canoes were making, and, as the foremost drew near, each chose his mark, and fired with such good effect, that, of seven warriors, all but one were killed. The survivor jumped overboard, and swam for the other canoe, where he was taken in. It now contained eight Iroquois, who, far from attempting to escape, paddled in haste for a distant part of the shore, in order to land, give battle, and avenge their slain comrades. But the Algonquins, running through the woods, reached the landing before them, and, as one of them rose to fire, they shot him. In his fall he overset the canoe. The water was shallow, and the submerged warriors, presently finding foothold, waded towards the shore, and made desperate fight. The Algonquins had the advantage of position, and used it so well, that they killed all but three of their enemies, and captured two of the survivors. Next they sought out the bodies, carefully scalped them, and set out in triumph on their return. To the credit of their Jesuit teachers, they treated their prisoners with 282 a forbearance hitherto without example. One of them, who was defiant and abusive, received a blow to silence him; but no further indignity was offered to either. [6] [6] According to Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre, 14 Sept., 1645, Piskaret was for torturing the captives; but a convert, named Bernard by the French, protested against it. As the successful warriors approached the little mission settlement of Sillery, immediately above Quebec, they raised their song of triumph, and beat time with their paddles on the edges of their canoes; while, from eleven poles raised aloft, eleven fresh scalps fluttered in the wind. The Father Jesuit and all his flock were gathered on the strand to welcome them. The Indians fired their guns, and screeched in jubilation; one Jean Baptiste, a Christian chief of Sillery, made a speech from the shore; Piskaret replied, standing upright in his canoe; and, to crown the occasion, a squad of soldiers, marching in haste from Quebec, fired a salute of musketry, to the boundless delight of the Indians. Much to the surprise of the two captives, there was no running of the gantlet, no gnawing off of finger-nails or cutting off of fingers; but the scalps were hung, like little flags, over the entrances of the lodges, and all Sillery betook itself to feasting and rejoicing. [7] One old woman, indeed, came to the Jesuit with a pathetic appeal: "Oh, my Father! let me caress these prisoners a little: they have killed, burned, and eaten my father, my husband, and my children." But the 283 missionary answered with a lecture on the duty of forgiveness. [8] [7] Vimont, Relation, 1645, 19-21. [8] Vimont, Relation, 1645, 21, 22. On the next day, Montmagny came to Sillery, and there was a grand council in the house of the Jesuits. Piskaret, in a solemn harangue, delivered his captives to the Governor, who replied with a speech of compliment and an ample gift. The two Iroquois were present, seated with a seeming imperturbability, but great anxiety of heart; and when at length they comprehended that their lives were safe, one of them, a man of great size and symmetry, rose and addressed Montmagny:— "Onontio, [9] I am saved from the fire; my body is delivered from death. Onontio, you have given me my life. I thank you for it. I will never forget it. All my country will be grateful to you. The earth will be bright; the river calm and smooth; there will be peace and friendship between us. The shadow is before my eyes no longer. The spirits of my ancestors slain by the Algonquins have disappeared. Onontio, you are good: we are bad. But our anger is gone; I have no heart but for peace and rejoicing." As he said this, he began to dance, holding his hands upraised, as if apostrophizing the sky. Suddenly he snatched a hatchet, brandished it for a moment like a madman, and then flung it into the fire, saying, as he did so, 284 "Thus I throw down my anger! thus I cast away the weapons of blood! Farewell, war! Now I am your friend forever!" [10] [9] Onontio, Great Mountain, a translation of Montmagny's name. It was the Iroquois name ever after for the Governor of Canada. In the same manner, Onas, Feather or Quill, became the official name of William Penn, and all succeeding Governors of Pennsylvania. We have seen that the Iroquois hereditary chiefs had official names, which are the same to-day that they were at the period of this narrative. [10] Vimont, Relation, 1645, 22, 23. He adds, that, "if these people are barbarous in deed, they have thoughts worthy of Greeks and Romans." The two prisoners were allowed to roam at will about the settlement, withheld from escaping by an Indian point of honor. Montmagny soon after sent them to Three Rivers, where the Iroquois taken during the last summer had remained all winter. Champfleur, the commandant, now received orders to clothe, equip, and send him home, with a message to his nation that Onontio made them a present of his life, and that he had still two prisoners in his hands, whom he would also give them, if they saw fit to embrace this opportunity of making peace with the French and their Indian allies. This was at the end of May. On the fifth of July following, the liberated Iroquois reappeared at Three Rivers, bringing with him two men of renown, ambassadors of the Mohawk nation. There was a fourth man of the party, and, as they approached, the Frenchmen on the shore recognized, to their great delight, Guillaume Couture, the young man captured three years before with Father Jogues, and long since given up as dead. In dress and appearance he was an Iroquois. He had gained a great influence over his captors, and this embassy of peace was due in good measure to his persuasions. [11] [11] Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre, 14 Sept., 1645. The chief of the Iroquois, Kiotsaton, a tall savage, 285 covered from head to foot with belts of wampum, stood erect in the prow of the sail-boat which had brought him and his companions from Richelieu, and in a loud voice announced himself as the accredited envoy of his nation. The boat fired a swivel, the fort replied with a cannon-shot, and the envoys landed in state. Kiotsaton and his colleague were conducted to the room of the commandant, where, seated on the floor, they were regaled sumptuously, and presented in due course with pipes of tobacco. They had never before seen anything so civilized, and were delighted with their entertainment. "We are glad to see you," said Champfleur to Kiotsaton; "you may be sure that you are safe here. It is as if you were among your own people, and in your own house." "Tell your chief that he lies," replied the honored guest, addressing the interpreter. Champfleur, though he probably knew that this was but an Indian mode of expressing dissent, showed some little surprise; when Kiotsaton, after tranquilly smoking for a moment, proceeded:— "Your chief says it is as if I were in my own country. This is not true; for there I am not so honored and caressed. He says it is as if I were in my own house; but in my own house I am some times very ill served, and here you feast me with all manner of good cheer." From this and many other replies, the French conceived that they had to do with a man of esprit. [12] [12] Vimont, Relation, 1645, 24. He undoubtedly belonged to that class of professed 286 orators who, though rarely or never claiming the honors of hereditary chieftainship, had great influence among the Iroquois, and were employed in all affairs of embassy and negotiation. They had memories trained to an astonishing tenacity, were perfect in all the conventional metaphors in which the language of Indian diplomacy and rhetoric mainly consisted, knew by heart the traditions of the nation, and were adepts in the parliamentary usages, which, among the Iroquois, were held little less than sacred. The ambassadors were feasted for a week, not only by the French, but also by the Hurons and Algonquins; and then the grand peace council took place. Montmagny had come up from Quebec, and with him the chief men of the colony. It was a bright midsummer day; and the sun beat hot upon the parched area of the fort, where awnings were spread to shelter the assembly. On one side sat Montmagny, with officers and others who attended him. Near him was Vimont, Superior of the Mission, and other Jesuits,—Jogues among the rest. Immediately before them sat the Iroquois, on sheets of spruce-bark spread on the ground like mats: for they had insisted on being near the French, as a sign of the extreme love they had of late conceived towards them. On the opposite side of the area were the Algonquins, in their several divisions of the Algonquins proper, the Montagnais, and the Atticamegues, [13] sitting, lying, 287 or squatting on the ground. On the right hand and on the left were Hurons mingled with Frenchmen. In the midst was a large open space like the arena of a prize-ring; and here were planted two poles with a line stretched from one to the other, on which, in due time, were to be hung the wampum belts that represented the words of the orator. For the present, these belts were in part hung about the persons of the two ambassadors, and in part stored in a bag carried by one of them. [13] The Atticamegues, or tribe of the White Fish, dwelt in the forests north of Three Rivers. They much resembled their Montagnais kindred. When all was ready, Kiotsaton arose, strode into the open space, and, raising his tall figure erect, stood looking for a moment at the sun. Then he gazed around on the assembly, took a wampum belt in his hand, and began:— "Onontio, give ear. I am the mouth of all my nation. When you listen to me, you listen to all the Iroquois. There is no evil in my heart. My song is a song of peace. We have many war-songs in our country; but we have thrown them all away, and now we sing of nothing but gladness and rejoicing." Hereupon he began to sing, his countrymen joining with him. He walked to and fro, gesticulated towards the sky, and seemed to apostrophize the sun; then, turning towards the Governor, resumed his harangue. First he thanked him for the life of the Iroquois prisoner released in the spring, but blamed him for sending him home without company or escort. Then he led forth the young Frenchman, Guillaume Couture, and tied a wampum belt to his arm. 288 "With this," he said, "I give you back this prisoner. I did not say to him, 'Nephew, take a canoe and go home to Quebec.' I should have been without sense, had I done so. I should have been troubled in my heart, lest some evil might befall him. The prisoner whom you sent back to us suffered every kind of danger and hardship on the way." Here he proceeded to represent the difficulties of the journey in pantomime, "so natural," says Father Vimont, "that no actor in France could equal it." He counterfeited the lonely traveller toiling up some rocky portage track, with a load of baggage on his head, now stopping as if half spent, and now tripping against a stone. Next he was in his canoe, vainly trying to urge it against the swift current, looking around in despair on the foaming rapids, then recovering courage, and paddling desperately for his life. "What did you mean," demanded the orator, resuming his harangue, "by sending a man alone among these dangers? I have not done so. 'Come, nephew,' I said to the prisoner there before you,"—pointing to Couture,—"'follow me: I will see you home at the risk of my life.'" And to confirm his words, he hung another belt on the line. The third belt was to declare that the nation of the speaker had sent presents to the other nations to recall their war-parties, in view of the approaching peace. The fourth was an assurance that the memory of the slain Iroquois no longer stirred the living to vengeance. "I passed near the place where Piskaret and the Algonquins slew our warriors 289 in the spring. I saw the scene of the fight where the two prisoners here were taken. I passed quickly; I would not look on the blood of my people. Their bodies lie there still; I turned away my eyes, that I might not be angry." Then, stooping, he struck the ground and seemed to listen. "I heard the voice of my ancestors, slain by the Algonquins, crying to me in a tone of affection, 'My grandson, my grandson, restrain your anger: think no more of us, for you cannot deliver us from death; think of the living; rescue them from the knife and the fire.' When I heard these voices, I went on my way, and journeyed hither to deliver those whom you still hold in captivity." The fifth, sixth, and seventh belts were to open the passage by water from the French to the Iroquois, to chase hostile canoes from the river, smooth away the rapids and cataracts, and calm the waves of the lake. The eighth cleared the path by land. "You would have said," writes Vimont, "that he was cutting down trees, hacking off branches, dragging away bushes, and filling up holes."—"Look!" exclaimed the orator, when he had ended this pantomime, "the road is open, smooth, and straight"; and he bent towards the earth, as if to see that no impediment remained. "There is no thorn, or stone, or log in the way. Now you may see the smoke of our villages from Quebec to the heart of our country." Another belt, of unusual size and beauty, was to bind the Iroquois, the French, and their Indian allies together as one man. As he presented it, 290 the orator led forth a Frenchman and an Algonquin from among his auditors, and, linking his arms with theirs, pressed them closely to his sides, in token of indissoluble union. The next belt invited the French to feast with the Iroquois. "Our country is full of fish, venison, moose, beaver, and game of every kind. Leave these filthy swine that run about among your houses, feeding on garbage, and come and eat good food with us. The road is open; there is no danger." There was another belt to scatter the clouds, that the sun might shine on the hearts of the Indians and the French, and reveal their sincerity and truth to all; then others still, to confirm the Hurons in thoughts of peace. By the fifteenth belt, Kiotsaton declared that the Iroquois had always wished to send home Jogues and Bressani to their friends, and had meant to do so; but that Jogues was stolen from them by the Dutch, and they had given Bressani to them because he desired it. "If he had but been patient," added the ambassador, "I would have brought him back myself. Now I know not what has befallen him. Perhaps he is drowned. Perhaps he is dead." Here Jogues said, with a smile, to the Jesuits near him, "They had the pile laid to burn me. They would have killed me a hundred times, if God had not saved my life." Two or three more belts were hung on the line, each with its appropriate speech; and then the speaker closed his harangue: "I go to spend what 291 remains of the summer in my own country, in games and dances and rejoicing for the blessing of peace." He had interspersed his discourse throughout with now a song and now a dance; and the council ended in a general dancing, in which Iroquois, Hurons, Algonquins, Montagnais, Atticamegues, and French, all took part, after their respective fashions. In spite of one or two palpable falsehoods that embellished his oratory, the Jesuits were delighted with him. "Every one admitted," says Vimont, "that he was eloquent and pathetic. In short, he showed himself an excellent actor, for one who has had no instructor but Nature. I gathered only a few fragments of his speech from the mouth of the interpreter, who gave us but broken portions of it, and did not translate consecutively." [14] [14] Vimont describes the council at length in the Relation of 1645. Marie de l'Incarnation also describes it in a letter to her son, of Sept. 14, 1645. She evidently gained her information from Vimont and the other Jesuits present. Two days after, another council was called, when the Governor gave his answer, accepting the proffered peace, and confirming his acceptance by gifts of considerable value. He demanded as a condition, that the Indian allies of the French should be left unmolested, until their principal chiefs, who were not then present, should make a formal treaty with the Iroquois in behalf of their several nations. Piskaret then made a present to wipe away the remembrance of the Iroquois he had slaughtered, and the assembly was dissolved. 292 In the evening, Vimont invited the ambassadors to the mission-house, and gave each of them a sack of tobacco and a pipe. In return, Kiotsaton made him a speech: "When I left my country, I gave up my life; I went to meet death, and I owe it to you that I am yet alive. I thank you that I still see the sun; I thank you for all your words and acts of kindness; I thank you for your gifts. You have covered me with them from head to foot. You left nothing free but my mouth; and now you have stopped that with a handsome pipe, and regaled it with the taste of the herb we love. I bid you farewell,—not for a long time, for you will hear from us soon. Even if we should be drowned on our way home, the winds and the waves will bear witness to our countrymen of your favors; and I am sure that some good spirit has gone before us to tell them of the good news that we are about to bring." [15] [15] Vimont, Relation, 1645, 28. On the next day, he and his companion set forth on their return. Kiotsaton, when he saw his party embarked, turned to the French and Indians who lined the shore, and said with a loud voice, "Farewell, brothers! I am one of your relations now." Then turning to the Governor,—"Onontio, your name will be great over all the earth. When I came hither, I never thought to carry back my head, I never thought to come out of your doors alive; and now I return loaded with honors, gifts, and kindness." "Brothers,"—to the Indians,—"obey Onontio and the French. Their hearts and 293 their thoughts are good. Be friends with them, and do as they do. You shall hear from us soon." The Indians whooped and fired their guns; there was a cannon-shot from the fort; and the sail-boat that bore the distinguished visitors moved on its way towards the Richelieu. But the work was not done. There must be more councils, speeches, wampum-belts, and gifts of all kinds,—more feasts, dances, songs, and uproar. The Indians gathered at Three Rivers were not sufficient in numbers or in influence to represent their several tribes; and more were on their way. The principal men of the Hurons were to come down this year, with Algonquins of many tribes, from the North and the Northwest; and Kiotsaton had promised that Iroquois ambassadors, duly empowered, should meet them at Three Rivers, and make a solemn peace with them all, under the eye of Onontio. But what hope was there that this swarm of fickle and wayward savages could be gathered together at one time and at one place,—or that, being there, they could be restrained from cutting each other's throats? Yet so it was; and in this happy event the Jesuits saw the interposition of God, wrought upon by the prayers of those pious souls in France who daily and nightly besieged Heaven with supplications for the welfare of the Canadian missions. [16] [16] Vimont, Relation, 1645, 29. First came a band of Montagnais; next followed Nipissings, Atticamegues, and Algonquins of the Ottawa, their canoes deep-laden with furs. Then, 294 on the tenth of September, appeared the great fleet of the Hurons, sixty canoes, bearing a host of warriors, among whom the French recognized the tattered black cassock of Father Jerome Lalemant. There were twenty French soldiers, too, returning from the Huron country, whither they had been sent the year before, to guard the Fathers and their flock. Three Rivers swarmed like an ant-hill with savages. The shore was lined with canoes; the forests and the fields were alive with busy camps. The trade was brisk; and in its attendant speeches, feasts, and dances, there was no respite. But where were the Iroquois? Montmagny and the Jesuits grew very anxious. In a few days more the concourse would begin to disperse, and the golden moment be lost. It was a great relief when a canoe appeared with tidings that the promised embassy was on its way; and yet more, when, on the seventeenth, four Iroquois approached the shore, and, in a loud voice, announced themselves as envoys of their nation. The tumult was prodigious. Montmagny's soldiers formed a double rank, and the savage rabble, with wild eyes and faces smeared with grease and paint, stared over the shoulders and between the gun-barrels of the musketeers, as the ambassadors of their deadliest foe stalked, with unmoved visages, towards the fort. Now council followed council, with an insufferable prolixity of speech-making. There were belts to wipe out the memory of the slain; belts to clear the sky, smooth the rivers, and calm the lakes; a 295 belt to take the hatchet from the hands of the Iroquois; another to take away their guns; another to take away their shields; another to wash the war-paint from their faces; and another to break the kettle in which they boiled their prisoners. [17] In short, there were belts past numbering, each with its meaning, sometimes literal, sometimes figurative, but all bearing upon the great work of peace. At length all was ended. The dances ceased, the songs and the whoops died away, and the great muster dispersed,—some to their smoky lodges on the distant shores of Lake Huron, and some to frozen hunting-grounds in northern forests. [17] Vimont, Relation, 1645, 34. There was peace in this dark and blood-stained wilderness. The lynx, the panther, and the wolf had made a covenant of love; but who should be their surety? A doubt and a fear mingled with the joy of the Jesuit Fathers; and to their thanksgivings to God they joined a prayer, that the hand which had given might still be stretched forth to preserve. CHAPTER XX. 1645, 1646. THE PEACE BROKEN. Uncertainties ? The Mission of Jogues ? He reaches the Mohawks ? His Reception ? His Return ? His Second Mission ? Warnings of Danger ? Rage of the Mohawks ? Murder of Jogues There is little doubt that the Iroquois negotiators acted, for the moment, in sincerity. Guillaume Couture, who returned with them and spent the winter in their towns, saw sufficient proof that they sincerely desired peace. And yet the treaty had a double defect. First, the wayward, capricious, and ungoverned nature of the Indian parties to it, on both sides, made a speedy rupture more than likely. Secondly, in spite of their own assertion to the contrary, the Iroquois envoys represented, not the confederacy of the five nations, but only one of these nations, the Mohawks: for each of the members of this singular league could, and often did, make peace and war independently of the rest. It was the Mohawks who had made war on the French and their Indian allies on the lower St. 297 Lawrence. They claimed, as against the other Iroquois, a certain right of domain to all this region; and though the warriors of the four upper nations had sometimes poached on the Mohawk preserve, by murdering both French and Indians at Montreal, they employed their energies for the most part in attacks on the Hurons, the Upper Algonquins, and other tribes of the interior. These attacks still continued, unaffected by the peace with the Mohawks. Imperfect, however, as the treaty was, it was invaluable, could it but be kept inviolate; and to this end Montmagny, the Jesuits, and all the colony, anxiously turned their thoughts. [1] [1] The Mohawks were at this time more numerous, as compared with the other four nations of the Iroquois, than they were a few years later. They seem to have suffered more reverses in war than any of the others. At this time they may be reckoned at six or seven hundred warriors. A war with the Mohegans, and another with the Andastes, besides their war with the Algonquins and the French of Canada soon after, told severely on their strength. The following are estimates of the numbers of the Iroquois warriors made in 1660 by the author of the Relation of that year, and by Wentworth Greenhalgh in 1677, from personal inspection:— 1660 1677 Mohawks 500 300 Oneidas 100 200 Onondagas 300 350 Cayugas 300 300 Senecas 1,000 1,000 2,200 2,150 It was to hold the Mohawks to their faith that Couture had bravely gone back to winter among them; but an agent of more acknowledged weight was needed, and Father Isaac Jogues was chosen. No white man, Couture excepted, knew their language and their character so well. His errand was half political, half religious; for not only was he 298 to be the bearer of gifts, wampum-belts, and messages from the Governor, but he was also to found a new mission, christened in advance with a prophetic name,—the Mission of the Martyrs. For two years past, Jogues had been at Montreal; and it was here that he received the order of his Superior to proceed to the Mohawk towns. At first, nature asserted itself, and he recoiled involuntarily at the thought of the horrors of which his scarred body and his mutilated hands were a living memento. [2] It was a transient weakness; and he prepared to depart with more than willingness, giving thanks to Heaven that he had been found worthy to suffer and to die for the saving of souls and the greater glory of God. [2] Lettre du P. Isaac Jogues au R. P. Jérosme L'Allemant. Montreal, 2 Mai, 1646. MS. He felt a presentiment that his death was near, and wrote to a friend, "I shall go, and shall not return." [3] An Algonquin convert gave him sage advice. "Say nothing about the Faith at first, for there is nothing so repulsive, in the beginning, as our doctrine, which seems to destroy everything that men hold dear; and as your long cassock preaches, as well as your lips, you had better put on a short coat." Jogues, therefore, exchanged the uniform of Loyola for a civilian's doublet and hose; "for," observes his Superior, "one should be all things to all men, that he may gain them all to Jesus Christ." [4] It would be well, if the application of the maxim had always been as harmless. [3] "Ibo et non redibo." Lettre du P. Jogues au R. P. No date. [4] Lalemant, Relation, 1646, 15. 299 Jogues left Three Rivers about the middle of May, with the Sieur Bourdon, engineer to the Governor, two Algonquins with gifts to confirm the peace, and four Mohawks as guides and escort. He passed the Richelieu and Lake Champlain, well-remembered scenes of former miseries, and reached the foot of Lake George on the eve of Corpus Christi. Hence he called the lake Lac St. Sacrement; and this name it preserved, until, a century after, an ambitious Irishman, in compliment to the sovereign from whom he sought advancement, gave it the name it bears. [5] [5] Mr. Shea very reasonably suggests, that a change from Lake George to Lake Jogues would be equally easy and appropriate. From Lake George they crossed on foot to the Hudson, where, being greatly fatigued by their heavy loads of gifts, they borrowed canoes at an Iroquois fishing station, and descended to Fort Orange. Here Jogues met the Dutch friends to whom he owed his life, and who now kindly welcomed and entertained him. After a few days he left them, and ascended the River Mohawk to the first Mohawk town. Crowds gathered from the neighboring towns to gaze on the man whom they had known as a scorned and abused slave, and who now appeared among them as the ambassador of a power which hitherto, indeed, they had despised, but which in their present mood they were willing to propitiate. There was a council in one of the lodges; and while his crowded auditory smoked their pipes, Jogues stood in the midst, and harangued them. 300 He offered in due form the gifts of the Governor, with the wampum belts and their messages of peace, while at every pause his words were echoed by a unanimous grunt of applause from the attentive concourse. Peace speeches were made in return; and all was harmony. When, however, the Algonquin deputies stood before the council, they and their gifts were coldly received. The old hate, maintained by traditions of mutual atrocity, burned fiercely under a thin semblance of peace; and though no outbreak took place, the prospect of the future was very ominous. The business of the embassy was scarcely finished, when the Mohawks counselled Jogues and his companions to go home with all despatch, saying, that, if they waited longer, they might meet on the way warriors of the four upper nations, who would inevitably kill the two Algonquin deputies, if not the French also. Jogues, therefore, set out on his return; but not until, despite the advice of the Indian convert, he had made the round of the houses, confessed and instructed a few Christian prisoners still remaining here, and baptized several dying Mohawks. Then he and his party crossed through the forest to the southern extremity of Lake George, made bark canoes, and descended to Fort Richelieu, where they arrived on the twenty seventh of June. [6] [6] Lalemant, Relation, 1646, 17. His political errand was accomplished. Now, should he return to the Mohawks, or should the Mission of the Martyrs be for a time abandoned? 301 Lalemant, who had succeeded Vimont as Superior of the missions, held a council at Quebec with three other Jesuits, of whom Jogues was one, and it was determined, that, unless some new contingency should arise, he should remain for the winter at Montreal. [7] This was in July. Soon after, the plan was changed, for reasons which do not appear, and Jogues received orders to repair to his dangerous post. He set out on the twenty-fourth of August, accompanied by a young Frenchman named Lalande, and three or four Hurons. [8] On the way they met Indians who warned them of a change of feeling in the Mohawk towns, and the Hurons, alarmed, refused to go farther. Jogues, naturally perhaps the most timid man of the party, had no thought of drawing back, and pursued his journey with his young companion, who, like other donnés of the missions; was scarcely behind the Jesuits themselves in devoted enthusiasm. [7] Journal des Supérieurs des Jésuites. MS. [8] Ibid. The reported change of feeling had indeed taken place; and the occasion of it was characteristic. On his previous visit to the Mohawks, Jogues, meaning to return, had left in their charge a small chest or box. From the first they were distrustful, suspecting that it contained some secret mischief. He therefore opened it, and showed them the contents, which were a few personal necessaries; and having thus, as he thought, reassured them, locked the box, and left it in their keeping. The Huron prisoners in the town attempted to make favor with 302 their Iroquois enemies by abusing their French friends,—declaring them to be sorcerers, who had bewitched, by their charms and mummeries, the whole Huron nation, and caused drought, famine, pestilence, and a host of insupportable miseries. Thereupon, the suspicions of the Mohawks against the box revived with double force, and they were convinced that famine, the pest, or some malignant spirit was shut up in it, waiting the moment to issue forth and destroy them. There was sickness in the town, and caterpillars were eating their corn: this was ascribed to the sorceries of the Jesuit. [9] Still they were divided in opinion. Some stood firm for the French; others were furious against them. Among the Mohawks, three clans or families were predominant, if indeed they did not compose the entire nation,—the clans of the Bear, the Tortoise, and the Wolf. [10] Though, by the nature of their constitution, it was scarcely possible that these clans should come to blows, so intimately were they bound together by ties of blood, yet they were often divided on points of interest or policy; and on this occasion the Bear raged against the French, and howled for war, while the Tortoise and the Wolf still clung to the treaty. Among savages, with no government except the intermittent one of councils, the party of action and violence must always prevail. The Bear chiefs sang their war-songs, and, followed by the young men of their own clan, and by such 303 others as they had infected with their frenzy, set forth, in two bands, on the war-path. [9] Lettre de Marie de l'Incarnation à son Fils. Québec, … 1647. [10] See Introduction. The warriors of one of these bands were making their way through the forests between the Mohawk and Lake George, when they met Jogues and Lalande. They seized them, stripped them, and led them in triumph to their town. Here a savage crowd surrounded them, beating them with sticks and with their fists. One of them cut thin strips of flesh from the back and arms of Jogues, saying, as he did so, "Let us see if this white flesh is the flesh of an oki."—"I am a man like yourselves," replied Jogues; "but I do not fear death or torture. I do not know why you would kill me. I come here to confirm the peace and show you the way to heaven, and you treat me like a dog." [11]—"You shall die to-morrow," cried the rabble. "Take courage, we shall not burn you. We shall strike you both with a hatchet, and place your heads on the palisade, that your brothers may see you when we take them prisoners." [12] The clans of the Wolf and the Tortoise still raised their voices in behalf of the captive Frenchmen; but the fury of the minority swept all before it. [11] Lettre du P. De Quen au R. P. Lallemant; no date. MS. [12] Lettre de J. Labatie à M. La Montagne, Fort d'Orange, 30 Oct., 1646. MS. In the evening,—it was the eighteenth of October,—Jogues, smarting with his wounds and bruises, was sitting in one of the lodges, when an Indian entered, and asked him to a feast. To refuse would have been an offence. He arose and followed 304 the savage, who led him to the lodge of the Bear chief. Jogues bent his head to enter, when another Indian, standing concealed within, at the side of the doorway, struck at him with a hatchet. An Iroquois, called by the French Le Berger, [13] who seems to have followed in order to defend him, bravely held out his arm to ward off the blow; but the hatchet cut through it, and sank into the missionary's brain. He fell at the feet of his murderer, who at once finished the work by hacking off his head. Lalande was left in suspense all night, and in the morning was killed in a similar manner. The bodies of the two Frenchmen were then thrown into the Mohawk, and their heads displayed on the points of the palisade which inclosed the town. [14] [13] It has been erroneously stated that this brave attempt to save Jogues was made by the orator Kiotsaton. Le Berger was one of those who had been made prisoners by Piskaret, and treated kindly by the French. In 1648, he voluntarily came to Three Rivers, and gave himself up to a party of Frenchmen. He was converted, baptized, and carried to France, where his behavior is reported to have been very edifying, but where he soon died. "Perhaps he had eaten his share of more than fifty men," is the reflection of Father Ragueneau, after recounting his exemplary conduct.—Relation, 1650, 43-48. [14] In respect to the death of Jogues, the best authority is the letter of Labatie, before cited. He was the French interpreter at Fort Orange, and, being near the scene of the murder, took pains to learn the facts. The letter was inclosed in another written to Montmagny by the Dutch Governor, Kieft, which is also before me, together with a MS. account, written from hearsay, by Father Buteux, and a letter of De Quen, cited above. Compare the Relations of 1647 and 1650. Thus died Isaac Jogues, one of the purest examples of Roman Catholic virtue which this Western continent has seen. The priests, his associates, praise his humility, and tell us that it reached the 305 point of self-contempt,—a crowning virtue in their eyes; that he regarded himself as nothing, and lived solely to do the will of God as uttered by the lips of his Superiors. They add, that, when left to the guidance of his own judgment, his self-distrust made him very slow of decision, but that, when acting under orders, he knew neither hesitation nor fear. With all his gentleness, he had a certain warmth or vivacity of temperament; and we have seen how, during his first captivity, while humbly submitting to every caprice of his tyrants and appearing to rejoice in abasement, a derisive word against his faith would change the lamb into the lion, and the lips that seemed so tame would speak in sharp, bold tones of menace and reproof. CHAPTER XXI. 1646, 1647. ANOTHER WAR. Mohawk Inroads ? The Hunters of Men ? The Captive Converts ? The Escape of Marie ? Her Story ? The Algonquin Prisoner's Revenge ? Her Flight ? Terror of the Colonists ? Jesuit Intrepidity The peace was broken, and the hounds of war turned loose. The contagion spread through all the Mohawk nation, the war-songs were sung, and the warriors took the path for Canada. The miserable colonists and their more miserable allies woke from their dream of peace to a reality of fear and horror. Again Montreal and Three Rivers were beset with murdering savages, skulking in thickets and prowling under cover of night, yet, when it came to blows, displaying a courage almost equal to the ferocity that inspired it. They plundered and burned Fort Richelieu, which its small garrison had abandoned, thus leaving the colony without even the semblance of protection. Before the spring opened, all the fighting men of the Mohawks took the war-path; but it is clear that many of them still had little heart for 307 their bloody and perfidious work; for, of these hardy and all-enduring warriors, two-thirds gave out on the way, and returned, complaining that the season was too severe. [1] Two hundred or more kept on, divided into several bands. [1] Lettre du P. Buteux au R. P. Lalemant. MS. On Ash-Wednesday, the French at Three Rivers were at mass in the chapel, when the Iroquois, quietly approaching, plundered two houses close to the fort, containing all the property of the neighboring inhabitants, which had been brought hither as to a place of security. They hid their booty, and then went in quest of two large parties of Christian Algonquins engaged in their winter hunt. Two Indians of the same nation, whom they captured, basely set them on the trail; and they took up the chase like hounds on the scent of game. Wrapped in furs or blanket-coats, some with gun in hand, some with bows and quivers, and all with hatchets, war-clubs, knives, or swords,—striding on snow-shoes, with bodies half bent, through the gray forests and the frozen pine-swamps, among wet, black trunks, along dark ravines and under savage hill-sides, their small, fierce eyes darting quick glances that pierced the farthest recesses of the naked woods,—the hunters of men followed the track of their human prey. At length they descried the bark wigwams of the Algonquin camp. The warriors were absent; none were here but women and children. The Iroquois surrounded the huts, and captured all the shrieking inmates. Then ten of them set out 308 to find the traces of the absent hunters. They soon met the renowned Piskaret returning alone. As they recognized him and knew his mettle, they thought treachery better than an open attack. They therefore approached him in the attitude of friends; while he, ignorant of the rupture of the treaty, began to sing his peace-song. Scarcely had they joined him, when one of them ran a sword through his body; and, having scalped him, they returned in triumph to their companions. [2] All the hunters were soon after waylaid, overpowered by numbers, and killed or taken prisoners. [2] Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 4. Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre à son Fils. Québec, … 1647. Perrot's account, drawn from tradition, is different, though not essentially so. Another band of the Mohawks had meanwhile pursued the other party of Algonquins, and overtaken them on the march, as, incumbered with their sledges and baggage, they were moving from one hunting-camp to another. Though taken by surprise, they made fight, and killed several of their assailants; but in a few moments their resistance was overcome, and those who survived the fray were helpless in the clutches of the enraged victors. Then began a massacre of the old, the disabled, and the infants, with the usual beating, gashing, and severing of fingers to the rest. The next day, the two bands of Mohawks, each with its troop of captives fast bound, met at an appointed spot on the Lake of St. Peter, and greeted each other with yells of exultation, with which mingled 309 a wail of anguish, as the prisoners of either party recognized their companions in misery. They all kneeled in the midst of their savage conquerors, and one of the men, a noted convert, after a few words of exhortation, repeated in a loud voice a prayer, to which the rest responded. Then they sang an Algonquin hymn, while the Iroquois, who at first had stared in wonder, broke into laughter and derision, and at length fell upon them with renewed fury. One was burned alive on the spot. Another tried to escape, and they burned the soles of his feet that he might not repeat the attempt. Many others were maimed and mangled; and some of the women who afterwards escaped affirmed, that, in ridicule of the converts, they crucified a small child by nailing it with wooden spikes against a thick sheet of bark. The prisoners were led to the Mohawk towns; and it is needless to repeat the monotonous and revolting tale of torture and death. The men, as usual, were burned; but the lives of the women and children were spared, in order to strengthen the conquerors by their adoption,—not, however, until both, but especially the women, had been made to endure the extremes of suffering and indignity. Several of them from time to time escaped, and reached Canada with the story of their woes. Among these was Marie, the wife of Jean Baptiste, one of the principal Algonquin converts, captured and burned with the rest. Early in June, she appeared in a canoe at Montreal, where Madame d'Ailleboust, to whom she was well 310 known, received her with great kindness, and led her to her room in the fort. Here Marie was overcome with emotion. Madame d'Ailleboust spoke Algonquin with ease; and her words of sympathy, joined to the associations of a place where the unhappy fugitive, with her murdered husband and child, had often found a friendly welcome, so wrought upon her, that her voice was smothered with sobs. She had once before been a prisoner of the Iroquois, at the town of Onondaga. When she and her companions in misfortune had reached the Mohawk towns, she was recognized by several Onondagas who chanced to be there, and who, partly by threats and partly by promises, induced her to return with them to the scene of her former captivity, where they assured her of good treatment. With their aid, she escaped from the Mohawks, and set out with them for Onondaga. On their way, they passed the great town of the Oneidas; and her conductors, fearing that certain Mohawks who were there would lay claim to her, found a hiding-place for her in the forest, where they gave her food, and told her to wait their return. She lay concealed all day, and at night approached the town, under cover of darkness. A dull red glare of flames rose above the jagged tops of the palisade that encompassed it; and, from the pandemonium within, an uproar of screams, yells, and bursts of laughter told her that they were burning one of her captive countrymen. She gazed and listened, shivering with cold and aghast with horror. The thought 311 possessed her that she would soon share his fate, and she resolved to fly. The ground was still covered with snow, and her footprints would infallibly have betrayed her, if she had not, instead of turning towards home, followed the beaten Indian path westward. She journeyed on, confused and irresolute, and tortured between terror and hunger. At length she approached Onondaga, a few miles from the present city of Syracuse, and hid herself in a dense thicket of spruce or cedar, whence she crept forth at night, to grope in the half-melted snow for a few ears of corn, left from the last year's harvest. She saw many Indians from her lurking-place, and once a tall savage, with an axe on his shoulder, advanced directly towards the spot where she lay: but, in the extremity of her fright, she murmured a prayer, on which he turned and changed his course. The fate that awaited her, if she remained,—for a fugitive could not hope for mercy,—and the scarcely less terrible dangers of the pitiless wilderness between her and Canada, filled her with despair, for she was half dead already with hunger and cold. She tied her girdle to the bough of a tree, and hung herself from it by the neck. The cord broke. She repeated the attempt with the same result, and then the thought came to her that God meant to save her life. The snow by this time had melted in the forests, and she began her journey for home, with a few handfuls of corn as her only provision. She directed her course by the sun, and for food dug roots, peeled the soft inner bark of trees, and sometimes 312 caught tortoises in the muddy brooks. She had the good fortune to find a hatchet in a deserted camp, and with it made one of those wooden implements which the Indians used for kindling fire by friction. This saved her from her worst suffering; for she had no covering but a thin tunic, which left her legs and arms bare, and exposed her at night to tortures of cold. She built her fire in some deep nook of the forest, warmed herself, cooked what food she had found, told her rosary on her fingers, and slept till daylight, when she always threw water on the embers, lest the rising smoke should attract attention. Once she discovered a party of Iroquois hunters; but she lay concealed, and they passed without seeing her. She followed their trail back, and found their bark canoe, which they had hidden near the bank of a river. It was too large for her use; but, as she was a practised canoe-maker, she reduced it to a convenient size, embarked in it, and descended the stream. At length she reached the St. Lawrence, and paddled with the current towards Montreal. On islands and rocky shores she found eggs of water-fowl in abundance; and she speared fish with a sharpened pole, hardened at the point with fire. She even killed deer, by driving them into the water, chasing them in her canoe, and striking them on the head with her hatchet. When she landed at Montreal, her canoe had still a good store of eggs and dried venison. [3] [3] This story is taken from the Relation of 1647, and the letter of Marie de l'Incarnation to her son, before cited. The woman must have 313 descended the great rapids of Lachine in her canoe: a feat demanding no ordinary nerve and skill. Her journey from Onondaga had occupied about two months, under hardships which no woman but a squaw could have survived. Escapes not less remarkable of several other women are chronicled in the records of this year; and one of them, with a notable feat of arms which attended it, calls for a brief notice. Eight Algonquins, in one of those fits of desperate valor which sometimes occur in Indians, entered at midnight a camp where thirty or forty Iroquois warriors were buried in sleep, and with quick, sharp blows of their tomahawks began to brain them as they lay. They killed ten of them on the spot, and wounded many more. The rest, panic-stricken and bewildered by the surprise and the thick darkness, fled into the forest, leaving all they had in the hands of the victors, including a number of Algonquin captives, of whom one had been unwittingly killed by his countrymen in the confusion. Another captive, a woman, had escaped on a previous night. They had stretched her on her back, with limbs extended, and bound her wrists and ankles to four stakes firmly driven into the earth,—their ordinary mode of securing prisoners. Then, as usual, they all fell asleep. She presently became aware that the cord that bound one of her wrists was somewhat loose, and, by long and painful efforts, she freed her hand. To release the other hand and her feet was then comparatively easy. She cautiously rose. Around her, 314 breathing in deep sleep, lay stretched the dark forms of the unconscious warriors, scarcely visible in the gloom. She stepped over them to the entrance of the hut; and here, as she was passing out, she descried a hatchet on the ground. The temptation was too strong for her Indian nature. She seized it, and struck again and again, with all her force, on the skull of the Iroquois who lay at the entrance. The sound of the blows, and the convulsive struggles of the victim, roused the sleepers. They sprang up, groping in the dark, and demanding of each other what was the matter. At length they lighted a roll of birch-bark, found their prisoner gone and their comrade dead, and rushed out in a rage in search of the fugitive. She, meanwhile, instead of running away, had hid herself in the hollow of a tree, which she had observed the evening before. Her pursuers ran through the dark woods, shouting and whooping to each other; and when all had passed, she crept from her hiding-place, and fled in an opposite direction. In the morning they found her tracks and followed them. On the second day they had overtaken and surrounded her, when, hearing their cries on all sides, she gave up all hope. But near at hand, in the thickest depths of the forest, the beavers had dammed a brook and formed a pond, full of gnawed stumps, dead fallen trees, rank weeds, and tangled bushes. She plunged in, and, swimming and wading, found a hiding-place, where her body was concealed by the water, and her head by the masses of dead and living vegetation. Her pursuers were at 315 fault, and, after a long search, gave up the chase in despair. Shivering, naked, and half-starved, she crawled out from her wild asylum, and resumed her flight. By day, the briers and bushes tore her unprotected limbs; by night, she shivered with cold, and the mosquitoes and small black gnats of the forest persecuted her with torments which the modern sportsman will appreciate. She subsisted on such roots, bark, reptiles, or other small animals, as her Indian habits enabled her to gather on her way. She crossed streams by swimming, or on rafts of driftwood, lashed together with strips of linden-bark; and at length reached the St. Lawrence, where, with the aid of her hatchet, she made a canoe. Her home was on the Ottawa, and she was ignorant of the great river, or, at least, of this part of it. She had scarcely even seen a Frenchman, but had heard of the French as friends, and knew that their dwellings were on the banks of the St. Lawrence. This was her only guide; and she drifted on her way, doubtful whether the vast current would bear her to the abodes of the living or to the land of souls. She passed the watery wilderness of the Lake of St. Peter, and presently descried a Huron canoe. Fearing that it was an enemy, she hid herself, and resumed her voyage in the evening, when she soon came in sight of the wooden buildings and palisades of Three Rivers. Several Hurons saw her at the same moment, and made towards her; on which she leaped ashore and hid in the bushes, whence, being entirely without clothing, she would 316 not come out till one of them threw her his coat. Having wrapped herself in it, she went with them to the fort and the house of the Jesuits, in a wretched state of emaciation, but in high spirits at the happy issue of her voyage. [4] [4] Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 15, 16. Such stories might be multiplied; but these will suffice. Nor is it necessary to dwell further on the bloody record of inroads, butcheries, and tortures. We have seen enough to show the nature of the scourge that now fell without mercy on the Indians and the French of Canada. There was no safety but in the imprisonment of palisades and ramparts. A deep dejection sank on the white and red men alike; but the Jesuits would not despair. "Do not imagine," writes the Father Superior, "that the rage of the Iroquois, and the loss of many Christians and many catechumens, can bring to nought the mystery of the cross of Jesus Christ, and the efficacy of his blood. We shall die; we shall be captured, burned, butchered: be it so. Those who die in their beds do not always die the best death. I see none of our company cast down. On the contrary, they ask leave to go up to the Hurons, and some of them protest that the fires of the Iroquois are one of their motives for the journey." [5] [5] Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 8. CHAPTER XXII. 1645-1651. PRIEST AND PURITAN. Miscou ? Tadoussac ? Journeys of De Quen ? Druilletes ? His Winter with the Montagnais ? Influence of the Missions ? The Abenaquis ? Druilletes on the Kennebec ? His Embassy to Boston ? Gibbons ? Dudley ? Bradford ? Eliot ? Endicott ? French and Puritan Colonization ? Failure of Druilletes's Embassy ? New Regulations ? New-Year's Day at Quebec. Before passing to the closing scenes of this wilderness drama, we will touch briefly on a few points aside from its main action, yet essential to an understanding of the scope of the mission. Besides their establishments at Quebec, Sillery, Three Rivers, and the neighborhood of Lake Huron, the Jesuits had an outlying post at the island of Miscou, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near the entrance of the Bay of Chaleurs, where they instructed the wandering savages of those shores, and confessed the French fishermen. The island was unhealthy in the extreme. Several of the priests sickened and died; and scarcely one convert repaid their toils. There was a more successful 318 mission at Tadoussac, or Sadilege, as the neighboring Indians called it. In winter, this place was a solitude; but in summer, when the Montagnais gathered from their hunting-grounds to meet the French traders, Jesuits came yearly from Quebec to instruct them in the Faith. Some times they followed them northward, into wilds where, at this day, a white man rarely penetrates. Thus, in 1646, De Quen ascended the Saguenay, and, by a series of rivers, torrents, lakes, and rapids, reached a Montagnais horde called the Nation of the Porcupine, where he found that the teachings at Tadoussac had borne fruit, and that the converts had planted a cross on the borders of the savage lake where they dwelt. There was a kindred band, the Nation of the White Fish, among the rocks and forests north of Three Rivers. They proved tractable beyond all others, threw away their "medicines" or fetiches, burned their magic drums, renounced their medicine-songs, and accepted instead rosaries, crucifixes, and versions of Catholic hymns. In a former chapter, we followed Father Paul Le Jeune on his winter roamings, with a band of Montagnais, among the forests on the northern boundary of Maine. Now Father Gabriel Druilletes sets forth on a similar excursion, but with one essential difference. Le Jeune's companions were heathen, who persecuted him day and night with their gibes and sarcasms. Those of Druilletes were all converts, who looked on him as a friend and a father. There were prayers, confessions, masses, 319 and invocations of St. Joseph. They built their bark chapel at every camp, and no festival of the Church passed unobserved. On Good Friday they laid their best robe of beaver-skin on the snow, placed on it a crucifix, and knelt around it in prayer. What was their prayer? It was a petition for the forgiveness and the conversion of their enemies, the Iroquois. [1] Those who know the intensity and tenacity of an Indian's hatred will see in this something more than a change from one superstition to another. An idea had been presented to the mind of the savage, to which he had previously been an utter stranger. This is the most remarkable record of success in the whole body of the Jesuit Relations; but it is very far from being the only evidence, that, in teaching the dogmas and observances of the Roman Church, the missionaries taught also the morals of Christianity. When we look for the results of these missions, we soon become aware that the influence of the French and the Jesuits extended far beyond the circle of converts. It eventually modified and softened the manners of many unconverted tribes. In the wars of the next century we do not often find those examples of diabolic atrocity with which the earlier annals are crowded. The savage burned his enemies alive, it is true, but he rarely ate them; neither did he torment them with the same deliberation and persistency. He was a savage still, but not so often a devil. The improvement was not great, but it was distinct; and it seems to have 320 taken place wherever Indian tribes were in close relations with any respectable community of white men. Thus Philip's war in New England, cruel as it was, was less ferocious, judging from Canadian experience, than it would have been, if a generation of civilized intercourse had not worn down the sharpest asperities of barbarism. Yet it was to French priests and colonists, mingled as they were soon to be among the tribes of the vast interior, that the change is chiefly to be ascribed. In this softening of manners, such as it was, and in the obedient Catholicity of a few hundred tamed savages gathered at stationary missions in various parts of Canada, we find, after a century had elapsed, all the results of the heroic toil of the Jesuits. The missions had failed, because the Indians had ceased to exist. Of the great tribes on whom rested the hopes of the early Canadian Fathers, nearly all were virtually extinct. The missionaries built laboriously and well, but they were doomed to build on a failing foundation. The Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them, but because their own ferocity and intractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence. Either the plastic energies of a higher race or the servile pliancy of a lower one would, each in its way, have preserved them: as it was, their extinction was a foregone conclusion. As for the religion which the Jesuits taught them, however Protestants may carp at it, it was the only form of Christianity likely to take root in their crude and barbarous nature. [1] Vimont, Relation, 1645, 16. 321 To return to Druilletes. The smoke of the wigwam blinded him; and it is no matter of surprise to hear that he was cured by a miracle. He returned from his winter roving to Quebec in high health, and soon set forth on a new mission. On the River Kennebec, in the present State of Maine, dwelt the Abenaquis, an Algonquin people, destined hereafter to become a thorn in the sides of the New-England colonists. Some of them had visited their friends, the Christian Indians of Sillery. Here they became converted, went home, and preached the Faith to their countrymen, and this to such purpose that the Abenaquis sent to Quebec to ask for a missionary. Apart from the saving of souls, there were solid reasons for acceding to their request. The Abenaquis were near the colonies of New England,—indeed, the Plymouth colony, under its charter, claimed jurisdiction over them; and in case of rupture, they would prove serviceable friends or dangerous enemies to New France. [2] Their messengers were favorably received; and Druilletes was ordered to proceed upon the new mission. [2] Charlevoix, I. 280, gives this as a motive of the mission. He left Sillery, with a party of Indians, on the twenty-ninth of August, 1646, [3] and following, as it seems, the route by which, a hundred and twenty-nine years later, the soldiers of Arnold made their way to Quebec, he reached the waters of the Kennebec and descended to the Abenaqui villages. Here he nursed the sick, baptized the dying, and 322 gave such instruction as, in his ignorance of the language, he was able. Apparently he had been ordered to reconnoitre; for he presently descended the river from Norridgewock to the first English trading-post, where Augusta now stands. Thence he continued his journey to the sea, and followed the coast in a canoe to the Penobscot, visiting seven or eight English posts on the way, where, to his surprise, he was very well received. At the Penobscot he found several Capuchin friars, under their Superior, Father Ignace, who welcomed him with the utmost cordiality. Returning, he again ascended the Kennebec to the English post at Augusta. At a spot three miles above the Indians had gathered in considerable numbers, and here they built him a chapel after their fashion. He remained till midwinter, catechizing and baptizing, and waging war so successfully against the Indian sorcerers, that medicine-bags were thrown away, and charms and incantations were supplanted by prayers. In January the whole troop set off on their grand hunt, Druilletes following them,—"with toil," says the chronicler, "too great to buy the kingdoms of this world, but very small as a price for the Kingdom of Heaven." [4] They encamped on Moosehead Lake, where new disputes with the "medicine-men" ensued, and the Father again remained master of the field. When, after a prosperous hunt, the party returned to the English trading-house, John Winslow, the agent in charge, 323 again received the missionary with a kindness which showed no trace of jealousy or religious prejudice. [5] [3] Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 51. [4] Lalemant, Relation, 1647, 54. For an account of this mission, see also Maurault, Histoire des Abenakis, 116-156. [5] Winslow would scarcely have recognized his own name in the Jesuit spelling,—"Le Sieur de Houinslaud." In his journal of 1650 Druilletes is more successful in his orthography, and spells it Winslau. Early in the summer Druilletes went to Quebec; and during the two following years, the Abenaquis, for reasons which are not clear, were left without a missionary. He spent another winter of extreme hardship with the Algonquins on their winter rovings, and during summer instructed the wandering savages of Tadoussac. It was not until the autumn of 1650 that he again descended the Kennebec. This time he went as an envoy charged with the negotiation of a treaty. His journey is worthy of notice, since, with the unimportant exception of Jogues's embassy to the Mohawks, it is the first occasion on which the Canadian Jesuits appear in a character distinctly political. Afterwards, when the fervor and freshness of the missions had passed away, they frequently did the work of political agents among the Indians: but the Jesuit of the earlier period was, with rare exceptions, a missionary only; and though he was expected to exert a powerful influence in gaining subjects and allies for France, he was to do so by gathering them under the wings of the Church. The Colony of Massachusetts had applied to the French officials at Quebec, with a view to a reciprocity of trade. The Iroquois had brought Canada to extremity, and the French Governor conceived the hope of gaining the powerful support of New 324 England by granting the desired privileges on condition of military aid. But, as the Puritans would scarcely see it for their interest to provoke a dangerous enemy, who had thus far never molested them, it was resolved to urge the proposed alliance as a point of duty. The Abenaquis had suffered from Mohawk inroads; and the French, assuming for the occasion that they were under the jurisdiction of the English colonies, argued that they were bound to protect them. Druilletes went in a double character,—as an envoy of the government at Quebec, and as an agent of his Abenaqui flock, who had been advised to petition for English assistance. The time seemed inauspicious for a Jesuit visit to Boston; for not only had it been announced as foremost among the objects in colonizing New England, "to raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist, which the Jesuits labor to rear up in all places of the world," [6] but, three years before, the Legislature of Massachusetts had enacted, that Jesuits entering the colony should be expelled, and, if they returned, hanged. [7] [6] Considerations for the Plantation in New England.—See Hutchinson, Collection, 27. Mr. Savage thinks that this paper was by Winthrop. See Savage's Winthrop. I. 360, note. [7] See the Act, in Hazard, 550. Nevertheless, on the first of September, Druilletes set forth from Quebec with a Christian chief of Sillery, crossed forests, mountains, and torrents, and reached Norridgewock, the highest Abenaqui settlement on the Kennebec. Thence he descended to the English trading-house at Augusta, where his 325 fast friend, the Puritan Winslow, gave him a warm welcome, entertained him hospitably, and promised to forward the object of his mission. He went with him, at great personal inconvenience, to Merrymeeting Bay, where Druilletes embarked in an English vessel for Boston. The passage was stormy, and the wind ahead. He was forced to land at Cape Ann, or, as he calls it, Kepane, whence, partly on foot, partly in boats along the shore, he made his way to Boston. The three-hilled city of the Puritans lay chill and dreary under a December sky, as the priest crossed in a boat from the neighboring peninsula of Charlestown. Winslow was agent for the merchant, Edward Gibbons, a personage of note, whose life presents curious phases,—a reveller of Merry Mount, a bold sailor, a member of the church, an adventurous trader, an associate of buccaneers, a magistrate of the commonwealth, and a major-general. [8] The Jesuit, with credentials from the Governor of Canada and letters from Winslow, met a reception widely different from that which the law enjoined against persons of his profession. [9] Gibbons welcomed him heartily, prayed him to accept no other lodging than his house while he remained in Boston, and gave him the key of a chamber, in order that he might pray after his own fashion, without fear of disturbance. An accurate Catholic writer 326 thinks it likely that he brought with him the means of celebrating the Mass. [10] If so, the house of the Puritan was, no doubt, desecrated by that Popish abomination; but be this as it may, Massachusetts, in the person of her magistrate, became the gracious host of one of those whom, next to the Devil and an Anglican bishop, she most abhorred. [8] An account of him will be found in Palfrey, Hist. of New England, II. 225, note. [9] In the Act, an exception, however, was made in favor of Jesuits coming as ambassadors or envoys from their government, who were declared not liable to the penalty of hanging. [10] J. G. Shea, in Boston Pilot. On the next day, Gibbons took his guest to Roxbury,—called Rogsbray by Druilletes,—to see the Governor, the harsh and narrow Dudley, grown gray in repellent virtue and grim honesty. Some half a century before, he had served in France, under Henry the Fourth; but he had forgotten his French, and called for an interpreter to explain the visitor's credentials. He received Druilletes with courtesy, and promised to call the magistrates together on the following Tuesday to hear his proposals. They met accordingly, and Druilletes was asked to dine with them. The old Governor sat at the head of the table, and after dinner invited the guest to open the business of his embassy. They listened to him, desired him to withdraw, and, after consulting among themselves, sent for him to join them again at supper, when they made him an answer, of which the record is lost, but which evidently was not definitive. As the Abenaqui Indians were within the jurisdiction of Plymouth, [11] Druilletes proceeded thither 327 in his character of their agent. Here, again, he was received with courtesy and kindness. Governor Bradford invited him to dine, and, as it was Friday, considerately gave him a dinner of fish. Druilletes conceived great hope that the colony could be wrought upon to give the desired assistance; for some of the chief inhabitants had an interest in the trade with the Abenaquis. [12] He came back by land to Boston, stopping again at Roxbury on the way. It was night when he arrived; and, after the usual custom, he took lodging with the minister. Here were several young Indians, pupils of his host: for he was no other than the celebrated Eliot, who, during the past summer, had established his mission at Natick, [13] and was now laboring, in the fulness of his zeal, in the work of civilization and conversion. There was great sympathy between the two missionaries; and Eliot prayed his guest to spend the winter with him. [11] For the documents on the title of Plymouth to lands on the Kennebec, see Drake's additions to Baylies's History of New Plymouth, 36, where they are illustrated by an ancient map. The patent was obtained as early as 1628, and a trading-house soon after established. [12] The Record of the Colony of Plymouth, June 5, 1651, contains, however, the entry, "The Court declare themselves not to be willing to aid them (the French) in their design, or to grant them liberty to go through their jurisdiction for the aforesaid purpose" (to attack the Mohawks). [13] See Palfrey, New England, II. 336. At Salem, which Druilletes also visited, in company with the minister of Marblehead, he had an interview with the stern, but manly, Endicott, who, he says, spoke French, and expressed both interest and good-will towards the objects of the expedition. As the envoy had no money left, Endicott paid his charges, and asked him to dine with the magistrates. [14] [14] On Druilletes's visit to New England, see his journal, entitled Narré 328 du Voyage faict pour la Mission des Abenaquois, et des Connoissances tiréz de la Nouvelle Angleterre et des Dispositions des Magistrats de cette Republique pour le Secours contre les Iroquois. See also Druilletes, Rapport sur le Résultat de ses Négotiations, in Ferland, Notes sur les Registres, 95. Druilletes was evidently struck with the thrift and vigor of these sturdy young colonies, and the strength of their population. He says that Boston, meaning Massachusetts, could alone furnish four thousand fighting men, and that the four united colonies could count forty thousand souls. [15] These numbers may be challenged; but, at all events, the contrast was striking with the attenuated and suffering bands of priests, nuns, and fur-traders on the St. Lawrence. About twenty-one thousand persons had come from Old to New England, with the resolve of making it their home; and though this immigration had virtually ceased, the natural increase had been great. The necessity, or the strong desire, of escaping from persecution had given the impulse to Puritan colonization; while, on the other hand, none but good Catholics, the favored class of France, were tolerated in Canada. These had no motive for exchanging the comforts of home and the smiles of Fortune for a starving wilderness and the scalping-knives of the Iroquois. The Huguenots would have emigrated in swarms; but they were rigidly forbidden. The zeal of propagandism and the fur-trade were, as we have seen, the vital forces of New France. Of her feeble population, the best part was bound to perpetual chastity; while the fur-traders and those in their 329 service rarely brought their wives to the wilderness. The fur-trader, moreover, is always the worst of colonists; since the increase of population, by diminishing the numbers of the fur-bearing animals, is adverse to his interest. But behind all this there was in the religious ideal of the rival colonies an influence which alone would have gone far to produce the contrast in material growth. [15] Druilletes, Reflexions touchant ce qu'on peut esperer de la Nouvelle Angleterre contre l'Irocquois (sic), appended to his journal. To the mind of the Puritan, heaven was God's throne; but no less was the earth His footstool: and each in its degree and its kind had its demands on man. He held it a duty to labor and to multiply; and, building on the Old Testament quite as much as on the New, thought that a reward on earth as well as in heaven awaited those who were faithful to the law. Doubtless, such a belief is widely open to abuse, and it would be folly to pretend that it escaped abuse in New England; but there was in it an element manly, healthful, and invigorating. On the other hand, those who shaped the character, and in great measure the destiny, of New France had always on their lips the nothingness and the vanity of life. For them, time was nothing but a preparation for eternity, and the highest virtue consisted in a renunciation of all the cares, toils, and interests of earth. That such a doctrine has often been joined to an intense worldliness, all history proclaims; but with this we have at present nothing to do. If all mankind acted on it in good faith, the world would sink into decrepitude. It is the monastic idea carried into the wide field of active life, and is like the error of those 330 who, in their zeal to cultivate their higher nature, suffer the neglected body to dwindle and pine, till body and mind alike lapse into feebleness and disease. Druilletes returned to the Abenaquis, and thence to Quebec, full of hope that the object of his mission was in a fair way of accomplishment. The Governor, d'Ailleboust, [16] who had succeeded Montmagny, called his council, and Druilletes was again dispatched to New England, together with one of the principal inhabitants of Quebec, Jean Paul Godefroy. [17] They repaired to New Haven, and appeared before the Commissioners of the Four Colonies, then in session there; but their errand proved bootless. The Commissioners refused either to declare war or to permit volunteers to be raised in New England against the Iroquois. The Puritan, like his descendant, would not fight without a reason. The bait of free-trade with Canada failed to tempt him; and the envoys retraced their steps, with a flat, though courteous refusal. [18] [16] The same who, with his wife, had joined the colonists of Montreal. See ante, (page 264). [17] He was one of the Governor's council.—Ferland, Notes sur les Registres, 67. [18] On Druilletes's second embassy, see Lettre écrite par le Conseil de Quebec aux Commissionaires de la Nouvelle Angleterre, in Charlevoix, I. 287; Extrait des Registres de l'Ancien Conseil de Quebec, Ibid., I. 288; Copy of a Letter from the Commissioners of the United Colonies to the Governor of Canada, in Hazard, II. 183; Answare to the Propositions presented by the honered French Agents, Ibid., II. 184; and Hutchinson, Collection of Papers, 166. Also, Records of the Commissioners of the United Colonies, Sept. 5, 1651; and Commission of Druilletes and Godefroy, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 6. Now let us stop for a moment at Quebec, and observe some notable changes that had taken place 331 in the affairs of the colony. The Company of the Hundred Associates, whose outlay had been great and their profit small, transferred to the inhabitants of the colony their monopoly of the fur-trade, and with it their debts. The inhabitants also assumed their obligations to furnish arms, munitions, soldiers, and works of defence, to pay the Governor and other officials, introduce emigrants, and contribute to support the missions. The Company was to receive, besides, an annual acknowledgement of a thousand pounds of beaver, and was to retain all seigniorial rights. The inhabitants were to form a corporation, of which any one of them might be a member; and no individual could trade on his own account, except on condition of selling at a fixed price to the magazine of this new company. [19] [19] Articles accordés entre les Directeurs et Associés de la Compagnie de la Nelle France et les Députés des Habitans du dit Pays, 6 Mars, 1645. MS. This change took place in 1645. It was followed, in 1647, by the establishment of a Council, composed of the Governor-General, the Superior of the Jesuits, and the Governor of Montreal, who were invested with absolute powers, legislative, judicial, and executive. The Governor-General had an appointment of twenty-five thousand livres, besides the privilege of bringing over seventy tons of freight, yearly, in the Company's ships. Out of this he was required to pay the soldiers, repair the forts, and supply arms and munitions. Ten thousand livres and thirty tons of freight, with similar conditions, were assigned to the Governor of Montreal. 332 Under these circumstances, one cannot wonder that the colony was but indifferently defended against the Iroquois, and that the King had to send soldiers to save it from destruction. In the next year, at the instance of Maisonneuve, another change was made. A specified sum was set apart for purposes of defence, and the salaries of the Governors were proportionably reduced. The Governor-General, Montmagny, though he seems to have done better than could reasonably have been expected, was removed; and, as Maisonneuve declined the office, d'Ailleboust, another Montrealist, was appointed to it. This movement, indeed, had been accomplished by the interest of the Montreal party; for already there was no slight jealousy between Quebec and her rival. The Council was reorganized, and now consisted of the Governor, the Superior of the Jesuits, and three of the principal inhabitants. [20] These last were to be chosen every three years by the Council itself, in conjunction with the Syndics of Quebec, Montreal, and Three Rivers. The Syndic was an officer elected by the inhabitants of the community to which he belonged, to manage its affairs. Hence a slight ingredient of liberty was introduced into the new organization. [20] The Governors of Montreal and Three Rivers, when present, had also seats in the Council. The colony, since the transfer of the fur-trade, had become a resident corporation of merchants, with the Governor and Council at its head. They were at once the directors of a trading company, 333 a legislative assembly, a court of justice, and an executive body: more even than this, for they regulated the private affairs of families and individuals. The appointment and payment of clerks and the examining of accounts mingled with high functions of government; and the new corporation of the inhabitants seems to have been managed with very little consultation of its members. How the Father Superior acquitted himself in his capacity of director of a fur-company is nowhere recorded. [21] [21] Those curious in regard to these new regulations will find an account of them, at greater length, in Ferland and Faillon. As for Montreal, though it had given a Governor to the colony, its prospects were far from hopeful. The ridiculous Dauversière, its chief founder, was sick and bankrupt; and the Associates of Montreal, once so full of zeal and so abounding in wealth, were reduced to nine persons. What it had left of vitality was in the enthusiastic Mademoiselle Mance, the earnest and disinterested soldier, Maisonneuve, and the priest, Olier, with his new Seminary of St. Sulpice. Let us visit Quebec in midwinter. We pass the warehouses and dwellings of the lower town, and as we climb the zigzag way now called Mountain Street, the frozen river, the roofs, the summits of the cliff, and all the broad landscape below and around us glare in the sharp sunlight with a dazzling whiteness. At the top, scarcely a private house is to be seen; but, instead, a fort, a church, a hospital, a cemetery, a house of the Jesuits, and 334 an Ursuline convent. Yet, regardless of the keen air, soldiers, Jesuits, servants, officials, women, all of the little community who are not cloistered, are abroad and astir. Despite the gloom of the times, an unwonted cheer enlivens this rocky perch of France and the Faith; for it is New-Year's Day, and there is an active interchange of greetings and presents. Thanks to the nimble pen of the Father Superior, we know what each gave and what each received. He thus writes in his private journal:— "The soldiers went with their guns to salute Monsieur the Governor; and so did also the inhabitants in a body. He was beforehand with us, and came here at seven o'clock to wish us a happy New-Year, each in turn, one after another. I went to see him after mass. Another time we must be beforehand with him. M. Giffard also came to see us. The Hospital nuns sent us letters of compliment very early in the morning; and the Ursulines sent us some beautiful presents, with candles, rosaries, a crucifix, etc., and, at dinner-time, two excellent pies. I sent them two images, in enamel, of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier. We gave to M. Giffard Father Bonnet's book on the life of Our Lord; to M. des Chatelets, a little volume on Eternity; to M. Bourdon, a telescope and compass; and to others, reliquaries, rosaries, medals, images, etc. I went to see M. Giffard, M. Couillard, and Mademoiselle de Repentigny. The Ursulines sent to beg that I would come and see them before the end of the day. I went, and paid my compliments also to Madame de la Peltrie, 335 who sent us some presents. I was near leaving this out, which would have been a sad oversight. We gave a crucifix to the woman who washes the church-linen, a bottle of eau-de-vie to Abraham, four handkerchiefs to his wife, some books of devotion to others, and two handkerchiefs to Robert Hache. He asked for two more, and we gave them to him." [22] [22] Journal des Supérieurs des Jésuites, MS. Only fragments of this curious record are extant. It was begun by Lalemant in 1645. For the privilege of having what remains of it copied I am indebted to M. Jacques Viger. The entry translated above is of Jan. 1, 1646. Of the persons named in it, Giffard was seigneur of Beauport, and a member of the Council; Des Chatelets was one of the earliest settlers, and connected by marriage with Giffard; Couillard was son-in-law of the first settler, Hébert; Mademoiselle de Repentigny was daughter of Le Gardeur de Repentigny, commander of the fleet; Madame de la Peltrie has been described already; Bourdon was chief engineer of the colony; Abraham was Abraham Martin, pilot for the King on the St. Lawrence, from whom the historic Plains of Abraham received their name. (See Ferland, Notes sur Registres, 16.) The rest were servants, or persons of humble station. CHAPTER XXIII. 1645-1648. A DOOMED NATION. Indian Infatuation ? Iroquois and Huron ? Huron Triumphs ? The Captive Iroquois ? His Ferocity and Fortitude ? Partisan Exploits ? Diplomacy ? The Andastes ? The Huron Embassy ? New Negotiations ? The Iroquois Ambassador ? His Suicide ? Iroquois Honor It was a strange and miserable spectacle to behold the savages of this continent at the time when the knell of their common ruin had already sounded. Civilization had gained a foothold on their borders. The long and gloomy reign of barbarism was drawing near its close, and their united efforts could scarcely have availed to sustain it. Yet, in this crisis of their destiny, these doomed tribes were tearing each other's throats in a wolfish fury, joined to an intelligence that served little purpose but mutual destruction. How the quarrel began between the Iroquois and their Huron kindred no man can tell, and it is not worth while to conjecture. At this time, the ruling passion of the savage Confederates was the annihilation of this rival people and of their Algonquin 337 allies,—if the understanding between the Hurons and these incoherent hordes can be called an alliance. United, they far outnumbered the Iroquois. Indeed, the Hurons alone were not much inferior in force; for, by the largest estimates, the strength of the five Iroquois nations must now have been considerably less than three thousand warriors. Their true superiority was a moral one. They were in one of those transports of pride, self-confidence, and rage for ascendency, which, in a savage people, marks an era of conquest. With all the defects of their organization, it was far better than that of their neighbors. There were bickerings, jealousies, plottings and counter-plottings, separate wars and separate treaties, among the five members of the league; yet nothing could sunder them. The bonds that united them were like cords of India-rubber: they would stretch, and the parts would be seemingly disjoined, only to return to their old union with the recoil. Such was the elastic strength of those relations of clanship which were the life of the league. [1] [1] See ante, Introduction. The first meeting of white men with the Hurons found them at blows with the Iroquois; and from that time forward, the war raged with increasing fury. Small scalping-parties infested the Huron forests, killing squaws in the cornfields, or entering villages at midnight to tomahawk their sleeping inhabitants. Often, too, invasions were made in force. Sometimes towns were set upon and burned, and sometimes there were deadly conflicts in the depths 338 of the forests and the passes of the hills. The invaders were not always successful. A bloody rebuff and a sharp retaliation now and then requited them. Thus, in 1638, a war-party of a hundred Iroquois met in the forest a band of three hundred Huron and Algonquin warriors. They might have retreated, and the greater number were for doing so; but Ononkwaya, an Oneida chief, refused. "Look!" he said, "the sky is clear; the Sun beholds us. If there were clouds to hide our shame from his sight, we might fly; but, as it is, we must fight while we can." They stood their ground for a time, but were soon overborne. Four or five escaped; but the rest were surrounded, and killed or taken. This year, Fortune smiled on the Hurons; and they took, in all, more than a hundred prisoners, who were distributed among their various towns, to be burned. These scenes, with them, occurred always in the night; and it was held to be of the last importance that the torture should be protracted from sunset till dawn. The too valiant Ononkwaya was among the victims. Even in death he took his revenge; for it was thought an augury of disaster to the victors, if no cry of pain could be extorted from the sufferer, and, on the present occasion, he displayed an unflinching courage, rare even among Indian warriors. His execution took place at the town of Teanaustayé, called St. Joseph by the Jesuits. The Fathers could not save his life, but, what was more to the purpose, they baptized him. On the scaffold where he was burned, he wrought himself into a fury which seemed to 339 render him insensible to pain. Thinking him nearly spent, his tormentors scalped him, when, to their amazement, he leaped up, snatched the brands that had been the instruments of his torture, drove the screeching crowd from the scaffold, and held them all at bay, while they pelted him from below with sticks, stones, and showers of live coals. At length he made a false step and fell to the ground, when they seized him and threw him into the fire. He instantly leaped out, covered with blood, cinders, and ashes, and rushed upon them, with a blazing brand in each hand. The crowd gave way before him, and he ran towards the town, as if to set it on fire. They threw a pole across his way, which tripped him and flung him headlong to the earth, on which they all fell upon him, cut off his hands and feet, and again threw him into the fire. He rolled himself out, and crawled forward on his elbows and knees, glaring upon them with such unutterable ferocity that they recoiled once more, till, seeing that he was helpless, they threw themselves upon him, and cut off his head. [2] [2] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1639, 68. It was this chief whose severed hand was thrown to the Jesuits. See ante, (page 137). When the Iroquois could not win by force, they were sometimes more successful with treachery. In the summer of 1645, two war-parties of the hostile nations met in the forest. The Hurons bore themselves so well that they had nearly gained the day, when the Iroquois called for a parley, displayed a great number of wampum-belts, and said that they 340 wished to treat for peace. The Hurons had the folly to consent. The chiefs on both sides sat down to a council, during which the Iroquois, seizing a favorable moment, fell upon their dupes and routed them completely, killing and capturing a considerable number. [3] [3] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1646, 55. The large frontier town of St. Joseph was well fortified with palisades, on which, at intervals, were wooden watch-towers. On an evening of this same summer of 1645, the Iroquois approached the place in force; and the young Huron warriors, mounting their palisades, sang their war-songs all night, with the utmost power of their lungs, in order that the enemy, knowing them to be on their guard, might be deterred from an attack. The night was dark, and the hideous dissonance resounded far and wide; yet, regardless of the din, two Iroquois crept close to the palisade, where they lay motionless till near dawn. By this time the last song had died away, and the tired singers had left their posts or fallen asleep. One of the Iroquois, with the silence and agility of a wild-cat, climbed to the top of a watch-tower, where he found two slumbering Hurons, brained one of them with his hatchet, and threw the other down to his comrade, who quickly despoiled him of his life and his scalp. Then, with the reeking trophies of their exploit, the adventurers rejoined their countrymen in the forest. The Hurons planned a counter-stroke; and three of them, after a journey of twenty days, reached 341 the great town of the Senecas. They entered it at midnight, and found, as usual, no guard; but the doors of the houses were made fast. They cut a hole in the bark side of one of them, crept in, stirred the fading embers to give them light, chose each his man, tomahawked him, scalped him, and escaped in the confusion. [4] [4] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1646, 55, 56. Despite such petty triumphs, the Hurons felt themselves on the verge of ruin. Pestilence and war had wasted them away, and left but a skeleton of their former strength. In their distress, they cast about them for succor, and, remembering an ancient friendship with a kindred nation, the Andastes, they sent an embassy to ask of them aid in war or intervention to obtain peace. This powerful people dwelt, as has been shown, on the River Susquehanna. [5] The way was long, even in a direct line; but the Iroquois lay between, and a wide circuit was necessary to avoid them. A Christian chief, whom the Jesuits had named Charles, together with four Christian and four heathen Hurons, bearing wampum-belts and gifts from the council, departed on this embassy on the thirteenth of April, 1647, and reached the great town of the Andastes 342 early in June. It contained, as the Jesuits were told, no less than thirteen hundred warriors. The council assembled, and the chief ambassador addressed them:— "We come from the Land of Souls, where all is gloom, dismay, and desolation. Our fields are covered with blood; our houses are filled only with the dead; and we ourselves have but life enough to beg our friends to take pity on a people who are drawing near their end." [6] Then he presented the wampum-belts and other gifts, saying that they were the voice of a dying country. [5] See Introduction. The Susquehannocks of Smith, clearly the same people, are placed, in his map, on the east side of the Susquehanna, some twenty miles from its mouth. He speaks of them as great enemies of the Massawomekes (Mohawks). No other savage people so boldly resisted the Iroquois; but the story in Hazard's Annals of Pennsylvania, that a hundred of them beat off sixteen hundred Senecas, is disproved by the fact, that the Senecas, in their best estate, never had so many warriors. The miserable remnant of the Andastes, called Conestogas, were massacred by the Paxton Boys, in 1763. See "Conspiracy of Pontiac," 414. Compare Historical Magazine, II. 294. [6] "Il leur dit qu'il venoit du pays des Ames, où la guerre et la terreur des ennemis auoit tout desolé, où les campagnes n'estoient couuertes que de sang, où les cabanes n'estoient remplies que de cadaures, et qu'il ne leur restoit à eux-mesmes de vie, sinon autant qu'ils en auoient eu besoin pour venir dire à leurs amis, qu'ils eussent pitié d'vn pays qui tiroit à sa fin."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 58. The Andastes, who had a mortal quarrel with the Mohawks, and who had before promised to aid the Hurons in case of need, returned a favorable answer, but were disposed to try the virtue of diplomacy rather than the tomahawk. After a series of councils, they determined to send ambassadors, not to their old enemies, the Mohawks, but to the Onondagas, Oneidas, and Cayugas, [7] who were geographically the central nations of the Iroquois league, while the Mohawks and the Senecas were respectively at its eastern and western extremities. By inducing the three central nations, 343 and, if possible, the Senecas also, to conclude a treaty with the Hurons, these last would be enabled to concentrate their force against the Mohawks, whom the Andastes would attack at the same time, unless they humbled themselves and made peace. This scheme, it will be seen, was based on the assumption, that the dreaded league of the Iroquois was far from being a unit in action or counsel. [7] Examination leaves no doubt that the Ouiouenronnons of Ragueneau (Relation des Hurons, 1648, 46, 59) were the Oiogouins or Goyogouins, that is to say, the Cayugas. They must not be confounded with the Ouenrohronnons, a small tribe hostile to the Iroquois, who took refuge among the Hurons in 1638. Charles, with some of his colleagues, now set out for home, to report the result of their mission; but the Senecas were lying in wait for them, and they were forced to make a wide sweep through the Alleghanies, Western Pennsylvania, and apparently Ohio, to avoid these vigilant foes. It was October before they reached the Huron towns, and meanwhile hopes of peace had arisen from another quarter. [8] [8] On this mission of the Hurons to the Andastes, see Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 58-60. Early in the spring, a band of Onondagas had made an inroad, but were roughly handled by the Hurons, who killed several of them, captured others, and put the rest to flight. The prisoners were burned, with the exception of one who committed suicide to escape the torture, and one other, the chief man of the party, whose name was Annenrais. Some of the Hurons were dissatisfied at the mercy shown him, and gave out that they would kill him; on which the chiefs, who never placed themselves in open opposition to the popular will, secretly fitted him out, made him presents, and aided him to escape at night, with an understanding that he 344 should use his influence at Onondaga in favor of peace. After crossing Lake Ontario, he met nearly all the Onondaga warriors on the march to avenge his supposed death; for he was a man of high account. They greeted him as one risen from the grave; and, on his part, he persuaded them to renounce their warlike purpose and return home. On their arrival, the chiefs and old men were called to council, and the matter was debated with the usual deliberation. About this time the ambassador of the Andastes appeared with his wampum-belts. Both this nation and the Onondagas had secret motives which were perfectly in accordance. The Andastes hated the Mohawks as enemies, and the Onondagas were jealous of them as confederates; for, since they had armed themselves with Dutch guns, their arrogance and boastings had given umbrage to their brethren of the league; and a peace with the Hurons would leave the latter free to turn their undivided strength against the Mohawks, and curb their insolence. The Oneidas and the Cayugas were of one mind with the Onondagas. Three nations of the league, to satisfy their spite against a fourth, would strike hands with the common enemy of all. It was resolved to send an embassy to the Hurons. Yet it may be, that, after all, the Onondagas had but half a mind for peace. At least, they were unfortunate in their choice of an ambassador. He was by birth a Huron, who, having been captured when a boy, adopted and naturalized, had become more an Iroquois than the Iroquois themselves; 345 and scarcely one of the fierce confederates had shed so much Huron blood. When he reached the town of St. Ignace, which he did about mid-summer, and delivered his messages and wampum-belts, there was a great division of opinion among the Hurons. The Bear Nation—the member of their confederacy which was farthest from the Iroquois, and least exposed to danger—was for rejecting overtures made by so offensive an agency; but those of the Hurons who had suffered most were eager for peace at any price, and, after solemn deliberation, it was resolved to send an embassy in return. At its head was placed a Christian chief named Jean Baptiste Atironta; and on the first of August he and four others departed for Onondaga, carrying a profusion of presents, and accompanied by the apostate envoy of the Iroquois. As the ambassadors had to hunt on the way for subsistence, besides making canoes to cross Lake Ontario, it was twenty days before they reached their destination. When they arrived, there was great jubilation, and, for a full month, nothing but councils. Having thus sifted the matter to the bottom, the Onondagas determined at last to send another embassy with Jean Baptiste on his return, and with them fifteen Huron prisoners, as an earnest of their good intentions, retaining, on their part, one of Baptiste's colleagues as a hostage. This time they chose for their envoy a chief of their own nation, named Scandawati, a man of renown, sixty years of age, joining with him two colleagues. The old Onondaga entered on his 346 mission with a troubled mind. His anxiety was not so much for his life as for his honor and dignity; for, while the Oneidas and the Cayugas were acting in concurrence with the Onondagas, the Senecas had refused any part in the embassy, and still breathed nothing but war. Would they, or still more the Mohawks, so far forget the consideration due to one whose name had been great in the councils of the League as to assault the Hurons while he was among them in the character of an ambassador of his nation, whereby his honor would be compromised and his life endangered? His mind brooded on this idea, and he told one of his colleagues, that, if such a slight were put upon him, he should die of mortification. "I am not a dead dog," he said, "to be despised and forgotten. I am worthy that all men should turn their eyes on me while I am among enemies, and do nothing that may involve me in danger." What with hunting, fishing, canoe-making, and bad weather, the progress of the august travellers was so slow, that they did not reach the Huron towns till the twenty-third of October. Scandawati presented seven large belts of wampum, each composed of three or four thousand beads, which the Jesuits call the pearls and diamonds of the country. He delivered, too, the fifteen captives, and promised a hundred more on the final conclusion of peace. The three Onondagas remained, as surety for the good faith of those who sent them, until the beginning of January, when the Hurons on their part sent six ambassadors to conclude the 347 treaty, one of the Onondagas accompanying them. Soon there came dire tidings. The prophetic heart of the old chief had not deceived him. The Senecas and Mohawks, disregarding negotiations in which they had no part, and resolved to bring them to an end, were invading the country in force. It might be thought that the Hurons would take their revenge on the Onondaga envoys, now hostages among them; but they did not do so, for the character of an ambassador was, for the most part, held in respect. One morning, however, Scandawati had disappeared. They were full of excitement; for they thought that he had escaped to the enemy. They ranged the woods in search of him, and at length found him in a thicket near the town. He lay dead, on a bed of spruce-boughs which he had made, his throat deeply gashed with a knife. He had died by his own hand, a victim of mortified pride. "See," writes Father Ragueneau, "how much our Indians stand on the point of honor!" [9] [9] This remarkable story is told by Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 56-58. He was present at the time, and knew all the circumstances. We have seen that one of his two colleagues had set out for Onondaga with a deputation of six Hurons. This party was met by a hundred Mohawks, who captured them all and killed the six Hurons, but spared the Onondaga, and compelled him to join them. Soon after, they made a sudden onset on about three hundred Hurons journeying through the forest from the town of St. Ignace; and, as many of them were women, they routed 348 the whole, and took forty prisoners. The Onondaga bore part in the fray, and captured a Christian Huron girl; but the next day he insisted on returning to the Huron town. "Kill me, if you will," he said to the Mohawks, "but I cannot follow you; for then I should be ashamed to appear among my countrymen, who sent me on a message of peace to the Hurons; and I must die with them, sooner than seem to act as their enemy." On this, the Mohawks not only permitted him to go, but gave him the Huron girl whom he had taken; and the Onondaga led her back in safety to her countrymen. [10] Here, then, is a ray of light out of Egyptian darkness. The principle of honor was not extinct in these wild hearts. [10] "Celuy qui l'auoit prise estoit Onnontaeronnon, qui estant icy en os tage à cause de la paix qui se traite auec les Onnontaeronnons, et s'estant trouué auec nos Hurons à cette chasse, y fut pris tout des premiers par les Sonnontoueronnons (Annieronnons?), qui l'ayans reconnu ne luy firent aucun mal, et mesme l'obligerent de les suiure et prendre part à leur victoire; et ainsi en ce rencontre cét Onnontaeronnon auoit fait sa prise, tellement neantmoins qu'il desira s'en retourner le lendemain, disant aux Sonnontoueronnons qu'ils le tuassent s'ils vouloient, mais qu'il ne pouuoit se resoudre à les suiure, et qu'il auroit honte de reparoistre en son pays, les affaires qui l'auoient amené aux Hurons pour la paix ne permettant pas qu'il fist autre chose que de mourir avec eux plus tost que de paroistre s'estre comporté en ennemy. Ainsi les Sonnontoueronnons luy permirent de s'en retourner et de ramener cette bonne Chrestienne, qui estoit sa captiue, laquelle nous a consolé par le recit des entretiens de ces pauures gens dans leur affliction."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 65. Apparently the word Sonnontoueronnons (Senecas), in the above, should read Annieronnons (Mohawks); for, on pp. 50, 57, the writer twice speaks of the party as Mohawks. We hear no more of the negotiations between the Onondagas and the Hurons. They and their results were swept away in the storm of events soon to be related. CHAPTER XXIV. 1645-1648. THE HURON CHURCH. Hopes of the Mission ? Christian and Heathen ? Body and Soul ? Position of Proselytes ? The Huron Girl's Visit to Heaven ? A Crisis ? Huron Justice ? Murder and Atonement ? Hopes and Fears How did it fare with the missions in these days of woe and terror? They had thriven beyond hope. The Hurons, in their time of trouble, had become tractable. They humbled themselves, and, in their desolation and despair, came for succor to the priests. There was a harvest of converts, not only exceeding in numbers that of all former years, but giving in many cases undeniable proofs of sincerity and fervor. In some towns the Christians outnumbered the heathen, and in nearly all they formed a strong party. The mission of La Conception, or Ossossané, was the most successful. Here there were now a church and one or more resident Jesuits,—as also at St. Joseph, St. Ignace, St. Michel, and St. Jean Baptiste: [1] for we have seen that the Huron towns were christened with names of saints. Each church had its bell, which was 350 sometimes hung in a neighboring tree. [2] Every morning it rang its summons to mass; and, issuing from their dwellings of bark, the converts gathered within the sacred precinct, where the bare, rude walls, fresh from the axe and saw, contrasted with the sheen of tinsel and gilding, and the hues of gay draperies and gaudy pictures. At evening they met again at prayers; and on Sunday, masses, confession, catechism, sermons, and repeating the rosary consumed the whole day. [3] [1] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1646, 56. [2] A fragment of one of these bells, found on the site of a Huron town, is preserved in the museum of Huron relics at the Laval University, Quebec. The bell was not large, but was of very elaborate workmanship. Before 1644 the Jesuits had used old copper kettles as a substitute.—Lettre de Lalemant, 31 March, 1644. [3] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1646, 56. These converts rarely took part in the burning of prisoners. On the contrary, they sometimes set their faces against the practice; and on one occasion, a certain étienne Totiri, while his heathen countrymen were tormenting a captive Iroquois at St. Ignace, boldly denounced them, and promised them an eternity of flames and demons, unless they desisted. Not content with this, he addressed an exhortation to the sufferer in one of the intervals of his torture. The dying wretch demanded baptism, which étienne took it upon himself to administer, amid the hootings of the crowd, who, as he ran with a cup of water from a neighboring house, pushed him to and fro to make him spill it, crying out, "Let him alone! Let the devils burn him after we have done!" [4] [4] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1646, 58. The Hurons often resisted the baptism of their prisoners, on the ground that Hell, and not Heaven, was the place to which they 351 would have them go.—See Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1642, 60, Ragueneau, Ibid., 1648, 53, and several other passages. In regard to these atrocious scenes, which formed the favorite Huron recreation of a summer night, the Jesuits, it must be confessed, did not quite come up to the requirements of modern sensibility. They were offended at them, it is true, and prevented them when they could; but they were wholly given to the saving of souls, and held the body in scorn, as the vile source of incalculable mischief, worthy the worst inflictions that could be put upon it. What were a few hours of suffering to an eternity of bliss or woe? If the victim were heathen, these brief pangs were but the faint prelude of an undying flame; and if a Christian, they were the fiery portal of Heaven. They might, indeed, be a blessing; since, accepted in atonement for sin, they would shorten the torments of Purgatory. Yet, while schooling themselves to despise the body, and all the pain or pleasure that pertained to it, the Fathers were emphatic on one point. It must not be eaten. In the matter of cannibalism, they were loud and vehement in invective. [5] [5] The following curious case of conversion at the stake, gravely related by Lalemant, is worth preserving. "An Iroquois was to be burned at a town some way off. What consolation to set forth, in the hottest summer weather, to deliver this poor victim from the hell prepared for him! The Father approaches him, and instructs him even in the midst of his torments. Forthwith the Faith finds a place in his heart. He recognizes and adores, as the author of his life, Him whose name he had never heard till the hour of his death. He receives the grace of baptism, and breathes nothing but heaven.… This newly made, but generous Christian, mounted on the scaffold which is the place of his torture, in the sight of a thousand spectators, who are 352 at once his enemies, his judges, and his executioners, raises his eyes and his voice heavenward, and cries aloud, 'Sun, who art witness of my torments, hear my words! I am about to die; but, after my death, I shall go to dwell in heaven.'"—Relation des Hurons, 1641, 67. The Sun, it will be remembered, was the god of the heathen Iroquois. The convert appealed to his old deity to rejoice with him in his happy future. Undeniably, the Faith was making progress; yet it is not to be supposed that its path was a smooth one. The old opposition and the old calumnies were still alive and active. "It is la prière that kills us. Your books and your strings of beads have bewitched the country. Before you came, we were happy and prosperous. You are magicians. Your charms kill our corn, and bring sickness and the Iroquois. Echon (Brébeuf) is a traitor among us, in league with our enemies." Such discourse was still rife, openly and secretly. The Huron who embraced the Faith renounced thenceforth, as we have seen, the feasts, dances, and games in which was his delight, since all these savored of diabolism. And if, being in health, he could not enjoy himself, so also, being sick, he could not be cured; for his physician was a sorcerer, whose medicines were charms and incantations. If the convert was a chief, his case was far worse; since, writes Father Lalemant, "to be a chief and a Christian is to combine water and fire; for the business of the chiefs is mainly to do the Devil's bidding, preside over ceremonies of hell, and excite the young Indians to dances, feasts, and shameless indecencies." [6] [6] Relation des Hurons, 1642, 89. The indecencies alluded to were chiefly naked dances, of a superstitious character, and the mystical cure called Andacwandet, before mentioned. 353 It is not surprising, then, that proselytes were difficult to make, or that, being made, they often relapsed. The Jesuits complain that they had no means of controlling their converts, and coercing backsliders to stand fast; and they add, that the Iroquois, by destroying the fur-trade, had broken the principal bond between the Hurons and the French, and greatly weakened the influence of the mission. [7] [7] Lettre du P. Hierosme Lalemant, appended to the Relation of 1645. Among the slanders devised by the heathen party against the teachers of the obnoxious doctrine was one which found wide credence, even among the converts, and produced a great effect. They gave out that a baptized Huron girl, who had lately died, and was buried in the cemetery at Sainte Marie, had returned to life, and given a deplorable account of the heaven of the French. No sooner had she entered,—such was the story,—than they seized her, chained her to a stake, and tormented her all day with inconceivable cruelty. They did the same to all the other converted Hurons; for this was the recreation of the French, and especially of the Jesuits, in their celestial abode. They baptized Indians with no other object than that they might have them to torment in heaven; to which end they were willing to meet hardships and dangers in this life, just as a war-party invades the enemy's country at great risk that it may bring home prisoners to burn. After her painful experience, an unknown friend secretly showed the girl a path down to the earth; and she hastened thither 354 to warn her countrymen against the wiles of the missionaries. [8] [8] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1646, 65. In the spring of 1648 the excitement of the heathen party reached a crisis. A young Frenchman, named Jacques Douart, in the service of the mission, going out at evening a short distance from the Jesuit house of Sainte Marie, was tomahawked by unknown Indians, [9] who proved to be two brothers, instigated by the heathen chiefs. A great commotion followed, and for a few days it seemed that the adverse parties would fall to blows, at a time when the common enemy threatened to destroy them both. But sager counsels prevailed. In view of the manifest strength of the Christians, the pagans lowered their tone; and it soon became apparent that it was the part of the Jesuits to insist boldly on satisfaction for the outrage. They made no demand that the murderers should be punished or surrendered, but, with their usual good sense in such matters, conformed to Indian usage, and required that the nation at large should make atonement for the crime by presents. [10] The number of these, their value, and the mode of delivering them were all fixed by ancient custom; and some of the converts, acting as counsel, advised the Fathers of every step it behooved them to take in a case of such importance. As this is the best illustration of Huron justice on record, it may be well to observe 355 the method of procedure,—recollecting that the public, and not the criminal, was to pay the forfeit of the crime. [9] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 77. Compare Lettre du P. Jean de Brébeuf au T. R. P. Vincent Carafa, Général de la Compagnie de Jésus, Sainte Marie, 2 Juin, 1648, in Carayon. [10] See Introduction. First of all, the Huron chiefs summoned the Jesuits to meet them at a grand council of the nation, when an old orator, chosen by the rest, rose and addressed Ragueneau, as chief of the French, in the following harangue. Ragueneau, who reports it, declares that he has added nothing to it, and the translation is as literal as possible. "My Brother," began the speaker, "behold all the tribes of our league assembled!"—and he named them one by one. "We are but a handful; you are the prop and stay of this nation. A thunderbolt has fallen from the sky, and rent a chasm in the earth. We shall fall into it, if you do not support us. Take pity on us. We are here, not so much to speak as to weep over our loss and yours. Our country is but a skeleton, without flesh, veins, sinews, or arteries; and its bones hang together by a thread. This thread is broken by the blow that has fallen on the head of your nephew, [11] for whom we weep. It was a demon of Hell who placed the hatchet in the murderer's hand. Was it you, Sun, whose beams shine on us, who led him to do this deed? Why did you not darken your light, that he might be stricken with horror at his crime? Were you his accomplice? No; for he walked in darkness, and did not see where 356 he struck. He thought, this wretched murderer, that he aimed at the head of a young Frenchman; but the blow fell upon his country, and gave it a death-wound. The earth opens to receive the blood of the innocent victim, and we shall be swallowed up in the chasm; for we are all guilty. The Iroquois rejoice at his death, and celebrate it as a triumph; for they see that our weapons are turned against each other, and know well that our nation is near its end. "Brother, take pity on this nation. You alone can restore it to life. It is for you to gather up all these scattered bones, and close this chasm that opens to ingulf us. Take pity on your country. I call it yours, for you are the master of it; and we came here like criminals to receive your sentence, if you will not show us mercy. Pity those who condemn themselves and come to ask forgiveness. It is you who have given strength to the nation by dwelling with it; and if you leave us, we shall be like a wisp of straw torn from the ground to be the sport of the wind. This country is an island drifting on the waves, for the first storm to overwhelm and sink. Make it fast again to its foundation, and posterity will never forget to praise you. When we first heard of this murder, we could do nothing but weep; and we are ready to receive your orders and comply with your demands. Speak, then, and ask what satisfaction you will, for our lives and our possessions are yours; and even if we rob our children to satisfy you, we will tell them that it is not of you that they have to complain, 357 but of him whose crime has made us all guilty. Our anger is against him; but for you we feel nothing but love. He destroyed our lives; and you will restore them, if you will but speak and tell us what you will have us do." [11] The usual Indian figure in such cases, and not meant to express an actual relationship;—"Uncle" for a superior, "Brother" for an equal, "Nephew" for an inferior. Ragueneau, who remarks that this harangue is a proof that eloquence is the gift of Nature rather than of Art, made a reply, which he has not recorded, and then gave the speaker a bundle of small sticks, indicating the number of presents which he required in satisfaction for the murder. These sticks were distributed among the various tribes in the council, in order that each might contribute its share towards the indemnity. The council dissolved, and the chiefs went home, each with his allotment of sticks, to collect in his village a corresponding number of presents. There was no constraint; those gave who chose to do so; but, as all were ambitious to show their public spirit, the contributions were ample. No one thought of molesting the murderers. Their punishment was their shame at the sacrifices which the public were making in their behalf. The presents being ready, a day was set for the ceremony of their delivery; and crowds gathered from all parts to witness it. The assembly was convened in the open air, in a field beside the mission-house of Sainte Marie; and, in the midst, the chiefs held solemn council. Towards evening, they deputed four of their number, two Christians and two heathen, to carry their address to the Father Superior. They came, loaded with presents; but 358 these were merely preliminary. One was to open the door, another for leave to enter; and as Sainte Marie was a large house, with several interior doors, at each one of which it behooved them to repeat this formality, their stock of gifts became seriously reduced before they reached the room where Father Ragueneau awaited them. On arriving, they made him a speech, every clause of which was confirmed by a present. The first was to wipe away his tears; the second, to restore his voice, which his grief was supposed to have impaired; the third, to calm the agitation of his mind; and the fourth, to allay the just anger of his heart. [12] These gifts consisted of wampum and the large shells of which it was made, together with other articles, worthless in any eyes but those of an Indian. Nine additional presents followed: four for the four posts of the sepulchre or scaffold of the murdered man; four for the cross-pieces which connected the posts; and one for a pillow to support his head. Then came eight more, corresponding to the eight largest bones of the victim's body, and also to the eight clans of the Hurons. [13] Ragueneau, as required by established custom, now made them a present in his turn. It consisted of three thousand beads of wampum, and was designed to soften the earth, in order that they might not be hurt, when falling upon it, overpowered by 359 his reproaches for the enormity of their crime. This closed the interview, and the deputation withdrew. [12] Ragueneau himself describes the scene. Relation des Hurons, 1648, 80. [13] Ragueneau says, "les huit nations"; but, as the Hurons consisted of only four, or at most five, nations, he probably means the clans. For the nature of these divisions, see Introduction. The grand ceremony took place on the next day. A kind of arena had been prepared, and here were hung the fifty presents in which the atonement essentially consisted,—the rest, amounting to as many more, being only accessory. [14] The Jesuits had the right of examining them all, rejecting any that did not satisfy them, and demanding others in place of them. The naked crowd sat silent and attentive, while the orator in the midst delivered the fifty presents in a series of harangues, which the tired listener has not thought it necessary to preserve. Then came the minor gifts, each with its signification explained in turn by the speaker. First, as a sepulchre had been provided the day before for the dead man, it was now necessary to clothe and equip him for his journey to the next world; and to this end three presents were made. They represented a hat, a coat, a shirt, breeches, stockings, shoes, a gun, powder, and bullets; but they were in fact something quite different, as wampum, beaver-skins, and the like. Next came several gifts to close up the wounds of the slain. Then followed three more. The first closed the chasm in the earth, which had burst through horror of the crime. The next trod the ground firm, that it might not open again; and here the whole assembly 360 rose and danced, as custom required. The last placed a large stone over the closed gulf, to make it doubly secure. [14] The number was unusually large,—partly because the affair was thought very important, and partly because the murdered man belonged to another nation. See Introduction. Now came another series of presents, seven in number,—to restore the voices of all the missionaries,—to invite the men in their service to forget the murder,—to appease the Governor when he should hear of it,—to light the fire at Sainte Marie,—to open the gate,—to launch the ferry-boat in which the Huron visitors crossed the river,—and to give back the paddle to the boy who had charge of the boat. The Fathers, it seems, had the right of exacting two more presents, to rebuild their house and church,—supposed to have been shaken to the earth by the late calamity; but they forbore to urge the claim. Last of all were three gifts to confirm all the rest, and to entreat the Jesuits to cherish an undying love for the Hurons. The priests on their part gave presents, as tokens of good-will; and with that the assembly dispersed. The mission had gained a triumph, and its influence was greatly strengthened. The future would have been full of hope, but for the portentous cloud of war that rose, black and wrathful, from where lay the dens of the Iroquois. CHAPTER XXV. 1648, 1649. SAINTE MARIE. The Centre of the Missions ? Fort ? Convent ? Hospital ? Caravansary ? Church ? The Inmates of Sainte Marie ? Domestic Economy ? Missions ? A Meeting of Jesuits ? The Dead Missionary The River Wye enters the Bay of Glocester, an inlet of the Bay of Matchedash, itself an inlet of the vast Georgian Bay of Lake Huron. Retrace the track of two centuries and more, and ascend this little stream in the summer of the year 1648. Your vessel is a birch canoe, and your conductor a Huron Indian. On the right hand and on the left, gloomy and silent, rise the primeval woods; but you have advanced scarcely half a league when the scene is changed, and cultivated fields, planted chiefly with maize, extend far along the bank, and back to the distant verge of the forest. Before you opens the small lake from which the stream issues; and on your left, a stone's throw from the shore, rises a range of palisades and bastioned walls, inclosing a number of buildings. Your 362 canoe enters a canal or ditch immediately above them, and you land at the Mission, or Residence, or Fort of Sainte Marie. Here was the centre and base of the Huron missions; and now, for once, one must wish that Jesuit pens had been more fluent. They have told us but little of Sainte Marie, and even this is to be gathered chiefly from incidental allusions. In the forest, which long since has resumed its reign over this memorable spot, the walls and ditches of the fortifications may still be plainly traced; and the deductions from these remains are in perfect accord with what we can gather from the Relations and letters of the priests. [1] The fortified work which inclosed the buildings was in the form of a parallelogram, about a hundred and seventy-five feet long, and from eighty to ninety wide. It lay parallel with the river, and somewhat more than a hundred feet distant from it. On two sides it was a continuous wall of masonry, [2] flanked with square bastions, adapted to musketry, and probably used as magazines, storehouses, or lodgings. The sides towards the river and the lake had no other defences than a ditch and palisade, flanked, like the others, by bastions, over each of which was displayed a large cross. [3] The buildings within 363 were, no doubt, of wood; and they included a church, a kitchen, a refectory, places of retreat for religious instruction and meditation, [4] and lodgings for at least sixty persons. Near the church, but outside the fortification, was a cemetery. Beyond the ditch or canal which opened on the river was a large area, still traceable, in the form of an irregular triangle, surrounded by a ditch, and apparently by palisades. It seems to have been meant for the protection of the Indian visitors who came in throngs to Sainte Marie, and who were lodged in a large house of bark, after the Huron manner. [5] Here, perhaps, was also the hospital, which was placed without the walls, in order that Indian women, as well as men, might be admitted into it. [6] [1] Before me is an elaborate plan of the remains, taken on the spot. [2] It seems probable that the walls, of which the remains may still be traced, were foundations supporting a wooden superstructure. Ragueneau, in a letter to the General of the Jesuits, dated March 13, 1650, alludes to the defences of Saint Marie as "une simple palissade." [3] "Quatre grandes Croix qui sont aux quatre coins de nostre enclos."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 81. [4] It seems that these places, besides those for the priests, were of two kinds,—"vne retraite pour les pelerins (Indians), enfin vn lieu plus separé, où les infideles, qui n'y sont admis que de iour au passage, y puissent tousiours receuoir quelque bon mot pour leur salut."—Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1644, 74. [5] At least it was so in 1642. "Nous leur auons dressé vn Hospice ou Cabane d'écorce."—Ibid., 1642, 57. [6] "Cet hospital est tellement separé de nostre demeure, que non seulement les hommes et enfans, mais les femmes y peuuent estre admises."—Ibid., 1644, 74. No doubt the buildings of Sainte Marie were of the roughest,—rude walls of boards, windows without glass, vast chimneys of unhewn stone. All its riches were centred in the church, which, as Lalemant tells us, was regarded by the Indians as one of the wonders of the world, but which, he adds, would have made but a beggarly show in France. Yet one wonders, at first thought, how so much labor could have been accomplished here. 364 Of late years, however, the number of men at the command of the mission had been considerable. Soldiers had been sent up from time to time, to escort the Fathers on their way, and defend them on their arrival. Thus, in 1644, Montmagny ordered twenty men of a reinforcement just arrived from France to escort Brébeuf, Garreau, and Chabanel to the Hurons, and remain there during the winter. [7] These soldiers lodged with the Jesuits, and lived at their table. [8] It was not, however, on detachments of troops that they mainly relied for labor or defence. Any inhabitant of Canada who chose to undertake so hard and dangerous a service was allowed to do so, receiving only his maintenance from the mission, without pay. In return, he was allowed to trade with the Indians, and sell the furs thus obtained at the magazine of the Company, at a fixed price. [9] Many availed themselves of this permission; and all whose services were accepted by the Jesuits seem to have been men to whom they had communicated no small portion of their own zeal, and who were enthusiastically attached to their Order and their cause. There is abundant evidence that a large proportion of them acted from motives wholly disinterested. They were, in fact, donnés of the mission, [10]—given, heart and hand, to 365 its service. There is probability in the conjecture, that the profits of their trade with the Indians were reaped, not for their own behoof, but for that of the mission. [11] It is difficult otherwise to explain the confidence with which the Father Superior, in a letter to the General of the Jesuits at Rome, speaks of its resources. He says, "Though our number is greatly increased, and though we still hope for more men, and especially for more priests of our Society, it is not necessary to increase the pecuniary aid given us." [12] [7] Vimont, Relation, 1644, 49. He adds, that some of these soldiers, though they had once been "assez mauvais gar?ons," had shown great zeal and devotion in behalf of the mission. [8] Journal des Supérieurs des Jésuites, MS. In 1648, a small cannon was sent to Sainte Marie in the Huron canoes.—Ibid. [9] Registres des Arrêts du Conseil, extract in Faillon, II. 94. [10] See ante, (Page 214). Garnier calls them "séculiers d'habit, mais religieux de c?ur."—Lettres, MSS. [11] The Jesuits, even at this early period, were often and loudly charged with sharing in the fur-trade. It is certain that this charge was not wholly without foundation. Le Jeune, in the Relation of 1657, speaking of the wampum, guns, powder, lead, hatchets, kettles, and other articles which the missionaries were obliged to give to the Indians, at councils and elsewhere, says that these must be bought from the traders with beaver-skins, which are the money of the country; and he adds, "Que si vn Iesuite en re?oit ou en recueille quelques-vns pour ayder aux frais immenses qu'il faut faire dans ces Missions si éloignées, et pour gagner ces peuples à Iesus-Christ et les porter à la paix, il seroit à souhaiter que ceux-là mesme qui deuroient faire ces despenses pour la conseruation du pays, ne fussent pas du moins les premiers à condamner le zele de ces Peres, et à les rendre par leurs discours plus noirs que leurs robes."—Relation, 1657, 16. In the same year, Chaumonot, addressing a council of the Iroquois during a period of truce, said, "Keep your beaver-skins, if you choose, for the Dutch. Even such of them as may fall into our possession will be employed for your service."—Ibid., 17. In 1636, La Jeune thought it necessary to write a long letter of defence against the charge; and in 1643, a declaration, appended to the Relation of that year, and certifying that the Jesuits took no part in the fur-trade, was drawn up and signed by twelve members of the company of New France. Its only meaning is, that the Jesuits were neither partners nor rivals of the Company's monopoly. They certainly bought supplies from its magazines with furs which they obtained from the Indians. Their object evidently was to make the mission partially self-supporting. To impute mercenary motives to Garnier, Jogues, and their co-laborers, is manifestly idle; but, even in the highest flights of his enthusiasm, the Jesuit never forgot his worldly wisdom. [12] Lettre du P. Paul Ragueneau au T. R. P. Vincent Carafa, Général de la Compagnie de Jésus à Rome, Sainte Marie aux Hurons, 1 Mars, 1649 (Carayon). 366 Much of this prosperity was no doubt due to the excellent management of their resources, and a very successful agriculture. While the Indians around them were starving, they raised maize in such quantities, that, in the spring of 1649, the Father Superior thought that their stock of provisions might suffice for three years. "Hunting and fishing," he says, "are better than heretofore"; and he adds, that they had fowls, swine, and even cattle. [13] How they could have brought these last to Sainte Marie it is difficult to conceive. The feat, under the circumstances, is truly astonishing. Everything indicates a fixed resolve on the part of the Fathers to build up a solid and permanent establishment. [13] Lettre du P. Paul Ragueneau au T. R. P. Vincent Carafa, Général de la Compagnie de Jésus à Rome, Sainte Marie aux Hurons, 1 Mars, 1649 (Carayon). It is by no means to be inferred that the household fared sumptuously. Their ordinary food was maize, pounded and boiled, and seasoned, in the absence of salt, which was regarded as a luxury, with morsels of smoked fish. [14] [14] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 48. In March, 1649, there were in the Huron country and its neighborhood eighteen Jesuit priests, four lay brothers, twenty-three men serving without pay, seven hired men, four boys, and eight soldiers. [15] Of this number, fifteen priests were engaged in the various missions, while all the rest were retained permanently at Sainte Marie. All was method, 367 discipline, and subordination. Some of the men were assigned to household work, and some to the hospital; while the rest labored at the fortifications, tilled the fields, and stood ready, in case of need, to fight the Iroquois. The Father Superior, with two other priests as assistants, controlled and guided all. The remaining Jesuits, undisturbed by temporal cares, were devoted exclusively to the charge of their respective missions. Two or three times in the year, they all, or nearly all, assembled at Sainte Marie, to take counsel together and determine their future action. Hither, also, they came at intervals for a period of meditation and prayer, to nerve themselves and gain new inspiration for their stern task. [15] See the report of the Father Superior to the General, above cited. The number was greatly increased within the year. In April, 1648, Ragueneau reports but forty-two French in all, including priests. Before the end of the summer a large reinforcement came up in the Huron canoes. Besides being the citadel and the magazine of the mission, Sainte Marie was the scene of a bountiful hospitality. On every alternate Saturday, as well as on feast-days, the converts came in crowds from the farthest villages. They were entertained during Saturday, Sunday, and a part of Monday; and the rites of the Church were celebrated before them with all possible solemnity and pomp. They were welcomed also at other times, and entertained, usually with three meals to each. In these latter years the prevailing famine drove them to Sainte Marie in swarms. In the course of 1647 three thousand were lodged and fed here; and in the following year the number was doubled. [16] Heathen Indians were also received and supplied with food, 368 but were not permitted to remain at night. There was provision for the soul as well as the body; and, Christian or heathen, few left Sainte Marie without a word of instruction or exhortation. Charity was an instrument of conversion. [16] Compare Ragueneau in Relation des Hurons, 1648, 48, and in his report to the General in 1649. Such, so far as we can reconstruct it from the scattered hints remaining, was this singular establishment, at once military, monastic, and patriarchal. The missions of which it was the basis were now eleven in number. To those among the Hurons already mentioned another had lately been added,—that of Sainte Madeleine; and two others, called St. Jean and St. Matthias, had been established in the neighboring Tobacco Nation. [17] The three remaining missions were all among tribes speaking the Algonquin languages. Every winter, bands of these savages, driven by famine and fear of the Iroquois, sought harborage in the Huron country, and the mission of Sainte Elisabeth was established for their benefit. The next Algonquin mission was that of Saint Esprit, embracing the Nipissings and other tribes east and north-east of Lake Huron; and, lastly, the mission of St. Pierre included the tribes at the outlet of Lake Superior, and throughout a vast extent of surrounding wilderness. [18] [17] The mission of the Neutral Nation had been abandoned for the time, from the want of missionaries. The Jesuits had resolved on concentration, and on the thorough conversion of the Hurons, as a preliminary to more extended efforts. [18] Besides these tribes, the Jesuits had become more or less acquainted with many others, also Algonquin, on the west and south of Lake Huron; as well as with the Puans, or Winnebagoes, a Dacotah tribe between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. The Mission of Sault Sainte Marie, at the outlet of Lake Superior, was established at a later period. Modern writers have confounded it with Sainte Marie of the Hurons. By the Relation of 1649 it appears that another mission had lately been begun at the Grand Manitoulin Island, which the Jesuits also christened Isle Sainte Marie. 369 These missions were more laborious, though not more perilous, than those among the Hurons. The Algonquin hordes were never long at rest; and, summer and winter, the priest must follow them by lake, forest, and stream: in summer plying the paddle all day, or toiling through pathless thickets, bending under the weight of a birch canoe or a load of baggage,—at night, his bed the rugged earth, or some bare rock, lashed by the restless waves of Lake Huron; while famine, the snow-storms, the cold, the treacherous ice of the Great Lakes, smoke, filth, and, not rarely, threats and persecution, were the lot of his winter wanderings. It seemed an earthly paradise, when, at long intervals, he found a respite from his toils among his brother Jesuits under the roof of Sainte Marie. Hither, while the Fathers are gathered from their scattered stations at one of their periodical meetings,—a little before the season of Lent, 1649, [19]—let us, too, repair, and join them. We enter at the eastern gate of the fortification, midway in the wall between its northern and southern bastions, and pass to the hall, where, at a rude table, spread with ruder fare, all the household are assembled,—laborers, domestics, soldiers, and priests. [19] The date of this meeting is a supposition merely. It is adopted with reference to events which preceded and followed. 370 It was a scene that might recall a remote half feudal, half patriarchal age, when, under the smoky rafters of his antique hall, some warlike thane sat, with kinsmen and dependants ranged down the long board, each in his degree. Here, doubtless, Ragueneau, the Father Superior, held the place of honor; and, for chieftains scarred with Danish battle-axes, was seen a band of thoughtful men, clad in a threadbare garb of black, their brows swarthy from exposure, yet marked with the lines of intellect and a fixed enthusiasm of purpose. Here was Bressani, scarred with firebrand and knife; Chabanel, once a professor of rhetoric in France, now a missionary, bound by a self-imposed vow to a life from which his nature recoiled; the fanatical Chaumonot, whose character savored of his peasant birth,—for the grossest fungus of superstition that ever grew under the shadow of Rome was not too much for his omnivorous credulity, and miracles and mysteries were his daily food; yet, such as his faith was, he was ready to die for it. Garnier, beardless like a woman, was of a far finer nature. His religion was of the affections and the sentiments; and his imagination, warmed with the ardor of his faith, shaped the ideal forms of his worship into visible realities. Brébeuf sat conspicuous among his brethren, portly and tall, his short moustache and beard grizzled with time,—for he was fifty-six years old. If he seemed impassive, it was because one overmastering principle had merged and absorbed all the impulses of his nature and all the faculties of his 371 mind. The enthusiasm which with many is fitful and spasmodic was with him the current of his life,—solemn and deep as the tide of destiny. The Divine Trinity, the Virgin, the Saints, Heaven and Hell, Angels and Fiends,—to him, these alone were real, and all things else were nought. Gabriel Lalemant, nephew of Jerome Lalemant, Superior at Quebec, was Brébeuf's colleague at the mission of St. Ignace. His slender frame and delicate features gave him an appearance of youth, though he had reached middle life; and, as in the case of Garnier, the fervor of his mind sustained him through exertions of which he seemed physically incapable. Of the rest of that company little has come down to us but the bare record of their missionary toils; and we may ask in vain what youthful enthusiasm, what broken hope or faded dream, turned the current of their lives, and sent them from the heart of civilization to this savage outpost of the world. No element was wanting in them for the achievement of such a success as that to which they aspired,—neither a transcendent zeal, nor a matchless discipline, nor a practical sagacity very seldom surpassed in the pursuits where men strive for wealth and place; and if they were destined to disappointment, it was the result of external causes, against which no power of theirs could have insured them. There was a gap in their number. The place of Antoine Daniel was empty, and never more to be filled by him,—never at least in the flesh: 372 for Chaumonot averred, that not long since, when the Fathers were met in council, he had seen their dead companion seated in their midst, as of old, with a countenance radiant and majestic. [20] They believed his story,—no doubt he believed it himself; and they consoled one another with the thought, that, in losing their colleague on earth, they had gained him as a powerful intercessor in heaven. Daniel's station had been at St. Joseph; but the mission and the missionary had alike ceased to exist. [20] "Ce bon Pere s'apparut aprés sa mort à vn des nostres par deux diuerses fois. En l'vne il se fit voir en estat de gloire, portant le visage d'vn homme d'enuiron trente ans, quoy qu'il soit mort en l'age de quarante-huict.… Vne autre fois il fut veu assister à vne assemblée que nous tenions," etc.—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1649, 5. "Le P. Chaumonot vit au milieu de l'assemblée le P. Daniel qui aidait les Pères de ses conseils, et les remplissait d'une force surnaturelle; son visage était plein de majesté et d'éclat."—Ibid., Lettre au Général de la Compagnie de Jésus (Carayon, 243). "Le P. Chaumonot nous a quelque fois raconté, à la gloire de cet illustre confesseur de J. C. (Daniel) qu'il s'étoit fait voir à lui dans la gloire, à l'age d'environ 30 ans, quoiqu'il en eut près de 50, et avec les autres circonstances qui se trouuent là (in the Historia Canadensis of Du Creux). Il ajoutait seulement qu'à la vue de ce bien-heureux tant de choses lui vinrent à l'esprit pour les lui demander, qu'il ne savoit pas où commencer son entretien avec ce cher défunt. Enfin, lui dit-il: 'Apprenez moi, mon Père, ce que ie dois faire pour être bien agréable à Dieu.'—'Jamais,' répondit le martyr, 'ne perdez le souvenir de vos péchés.'"—Suite de la Vie de Chaumonot, 11. CHAPTER XXVI. 1648. ANTOINE DANIEL. Huron Traders ? Battle at Three Rivers ? St. Joseph ? Onset of the Iroquois ? Death of Daniel ? The Town Destroyed In the summer of 1647 the Hurons dared not go down to the French settlements, but in the following year they took heart, and resolved at all risks to make the attempt; for the kettles, hatchets, and knives of the traders had become necessaries of life. Two hundred and fifty of their best warriors therefore embarked, under five valiant chiefs. They made the voyage in safety, approached Three Rivers on the seventeenth of July, and, running their canoes ashore among the bulrushes, began to grease their hair, paint their faces, and otherwise adorn themselves, that they might appear after a befitting fashion at the fort. While they were thus engaged, the alarm was sounded. Some of their warriors had discovered a large body of Iroquois, who for several days had been lurking in the forest, unknown to the French garrison, watching their opportunity to strike a blow. The Hurons 374 snatched their arms, and, half-greased and painted, ran to meet them. The Iroquois received them with a volley. They fell flat to avoid the shot, then leaped up with a furious yell, and sent back a shower of arrows and bullets. The Iroquois, who were outnumbered, gave way and fled, excepting a few who for a time made fight with their knives. The Hurons pursued. Many prisoners were taken, and many dead left on the field. [1] The rout of the enemy was complete; and when their trade was ended, the Hurons returned home in triumph, decorated with the laurels and the scalps of victory. As it proved, it would have been well, had they remained there to defend their families and firesides. [1] Lalemant, Relation, 1648, 11. The Jesuit Bressani had come down with the Hurons, and was with them in the fight. The oft-mentioned town of Teanaustayé, or St. Joseph, lay on the south-eastern frontier of the Huron country, near the foot of a range of forest-covered hills, and about fifteen miles from Sainte Marie. It had been the chief town of the nation, and its population, by the Indian standard, was still large; for it had four hundred families, and at least two thousand inhabitants. It was well fortified with palisades, after the Huron manner, and was esteemed the chief bulwark of the country. Here countless Iroquois had been burned and devoured. Its people had been truculent and intractable heathen, but many of them had surrendered to the Faith, and for four years past Father Daniel had preached among them with excellent results. 375 On the morning of the fourth of July, when the forest around basked lazily in the early sun, you might have mounted the rising ground on which the town stood, and passed unchallenged through the opening in the palisade. Within, you would have seen the crowded dwellings of bark, shaped like the arched coverings of huge baggage-wagons, and decorated with the totems or armorial devices of their owners daubed on the outside with paint. Here some squalid wolfish dog lay sleeping in the sun, a group of Huron girls chatted together in the shade, old squaws pounded corn in large wooden mortars, idle youths gambled with cherry-stones on a wooden platter, and naked infants crawled in the dust. Scarcely a warrior was to be seen. Some were absent in quest of game or of Iroquois scalps, and some had gone with the trading-party to the French settlements. You followed the foul passage-ways among the houses, and at length came to the church. It was full to the door. Daniel had just finished the mass, and his flock still knelt at their devotions. It was but the day before that he had returned to them, warmed with new fervor, from his meditations in retreat at Sainte Marie. Suddenly an uproar of voices, shrill with terror, burst upon the languid silence of the town. "The Iroquois! the Iroquois!" A crowd of hostile warriors had issued from the forest, and were rushing across the clearing, towards the opening in the palisade. Daniel ran out of the church, and hurried to the point of danger. Some snatched weapons; some rushed to and fro in the madness 376 of a blind panic. The priest rallied the defenders; promised Heaven to those who died for their homes and their faith; then hastened from house to house, calling on unbelievers to repent and receive baptism, to snatch them from the Hell that yawned to ingulf them. They crowded around him, imploring to be saved; and, immersing his handkerchief in a bowl of water, he shook it over them, and baptized them by aspersion. They pursued him, as he ran again to the church, where he found a throng of women, children, and old men, gathered as in a sanctuary. Some cried for baptism, some held out their children to receive it, some begged for absolution, and some wailed in terror and despair. "Brothers," he exclaimed again and again, as he shook the baptismal drops from his handkerchief,—"brothers, to-day we shall be in Heaven." The fierce yell of the war-whoop now rose close at hand. The palisade was forced, and the enemy was in the town. The air quivered with the infernal din. "Fly!" screamed the priest, driving his flock before him. "I will stay here. We shall meet again in Heaven." Many of them escaped through an opening in the palisade opposite to that by which the Iroquois had entered; but Daniel would not follow, for there still might be souls to rescue from perdition. The hour had come for which he had long prepared himself. In a moment he saw the Iroquois, and came forth from the church to meet them. When they saw him in turn, radiant in the vestments of his office, confronting them with a look kindled with the inspiration 377 of martyrdom, they stopped and stared in amazement; then recovering themselves, bent their bows, and showered him with a volley of arrows, that tore through his robes and his flesh. A gunshot followed; the ball pierced his heart, and he fell dead, gasping the name of Jesus. They rushed upon him with yells of triumph, stripped him naked, gashed and hacked his lifeless body, and, scooping his blood in their hands, bathed their faces in it to make them brave. The town was in a blaze; when the flames reached the church, they flung the priest into it, and both were consumed together. [2] [2] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1649, 3-5; Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 247; Du Creux, Historia Canadensis, 524; Tanner, Societas Jesu Militans, 531; Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre aux Ursulines de Tours, Quebec, 1649. Daniel was born at Dieppe, and was forty-eight years old at the time of his death. He had been a Jesuit from the age of twenty. Teanaustayé was a heap of ashes, and the victors took up their march with a train of nearly seven hundred prisoners, many of whom they killed on the way. Many more had been slain in the town and the neighboring forest, where the pursuers hunted them down, and where women, crouching for refuge among thickets, were betrayed by the cries and wailing of their infants. The triumph of the Iroquois did not end here; for a neighboring fortified town, included within the circle of Daniel's mission, shared the fate of Teanaustayé. Never had the Huron nation received such a blow. CHAPTER XXVII. 1649. RUIN OF THE HURONS. St. Louis on Fire ? Invasion ? St. Ignace captured ? Brébeuf and Lalemant ? Battle at St. Louis ? Sainte Marie threatened ? Renewed Fighting ? Desperate Conflict ? A Night of Suspense ? Panic among the Victors ? Burning of St. Ignace ? Retreat of the Iroquois More than eight months had passed since the catastrophe of St. Joseph. The winter was over, and that dreariest of seasons had come, the churlish forerunner of spring. Around Sainte Marie the forests were gray and bare, and, in the cornfields, the oozy, half-thawed soil, studded with the sodden stalks of the last autumn's harvest, showed itself in patches through the melting snow. At nine o'clock on the morning of the sixteenth of March, the priests saw a heavy smoke rising over the naked forest towards the south-east, about three miles distant. They looked at each other in dismay. "The Iroquois! They are burning St. Louis!" Flames mingled with the smoke; and, as they stood gazing, two Christian Hurons came, 379 breathless and aghast, from the burning town. Their worst fear was realized. The Iroquois were there; but where were the priests of the mission, Brébeuf and Lalemant? Late in the autumn, a thousand Iroquois, chiefly Senecas and Mohawks, had taken the war-path for the Hurons. They had been all winter in the forests, hunting for subsistence, and moving at their leisure towards their prey. The destruction of the two towns of the mission of St. Joseph had left a wide gap, and in the middle of March they entered the heart of the Huron country, undiscovered. Common vigilance and common sense would have averted the calamities that followed; but the Hurons were like a doomed people, stupefied, sunk in dejection, fearing everything, yet taking no measures for defence. They could easily have met the invaders with double their force, but the besotted warriors lay idle in their towns, or hunted at leisure in distant forests; nor could the Jesuits, by counsel or exhortation, rouse them to face the danger. Before daylight of the sixteenth, the invaders approached St. Ignace, which, with St. Louis and three other towns, formed the mission of the same name. They reconnoitred the place in the darkness. It was defended on three sides by a deep ravine, and further strengthened by palisades fifteen or sixteen feet high, planted under the direction of the Jesuits. On the fourth side it was protected by palisades alone; and these were left, as usual, unguarded. This was not from a sense of security; 380 for the greater part of the population had abandoned the town, thinking it too much exposed to the enemy, and there remained only about four hundred, chiefly women, children, and old men, whose infatuated defenders were absent hunting, or on futile scalping-parties against the Iroquois. It was just before dawn, when a yell, as of a legion of devils, startled the wretched inhabitants from their sleep; and the Iroquois, bursting in upon them, cut them down with knives and hatchets, killing many, and reserving the rest for a worse fate. They had entered by the weakest side; on the other sides there was no exit, and only three Hurons escaped. The whole was the work of a few minutes. The Iroquois left a guard to hold the town, and secure the retreat of the main body in case of a reverse; then, smearing their faces with blood, after their ghastly custom, they rushed, in the dim light of the early dawn, towards St. Louis, about a league distant. The three fugitives had fled, half naked, through the forest, for the same point, which they reached about sunrise, yelling the alarm. The number of inhabitants here was less, at this time, than seven hundred; and, of these, all who had strength to escape, excepting about eighty warriors, made in wild terror for a place of safety. Many of the old, sick, and decrepit were left perforce in the lodges. The warriors, ignorant of the strength of the assailants, sang their war-songs, and resolved to hold the place to the last. It had not the natural strength of St. Ignace; but, like it, was surrounded by palisades. 381 Here were the two Jesuits, Brébeuf and Lalemant. Brébeuf's converts entreated him to escape with them; but the Norman zealot, bold scion of a warlike stock, had no thought of flight. His post was in the teeth of danger, to cheer on those who fought, and open Heaven to those who fell. His colleague, slight of frame and frail of constitution, trembled despite himself; but deep enthusiasm mastered the weakness of Nature, and he, too, refused to fly. Scarcely had the sun risen, and scarcely were the fugitives gone, when, like a troop of tigers, the Iroquois rushed to the assault. Yell echoed yell, and shot answered shot. The Hurons, brought to bay, fought with the utmost desperation, and with arrows, stones, and the few guns they had, killed thirty of their assailants, and wounded many more. Twice the Iroquois recoiled, and twice renewed the attack with unabated ferocity. They swarmed at the foot of the palisades, and hacked at them with their hatchets, till they had cut them through at several different points. For a time there was a deadly fight at these breaches. Here were the two priests, promising Heaven to those who died for their faith,—one giving baptism, and the other absolution. At length the Iroquois broke in, and captured all the surviving defenders, the Jesuits among the rest. They set the town on fire; and the helpless wretches who had remained, unable to fly, were consumed in their burning dwellings. Next they fell upon Brébeuf and Lalemant, stripped them, bound them fast, and led them with the other 382 prisoners back to St. Ignace, where all turned out to wreak their fury on the two priests, beating them savagely with sticks and clubs as they drove them into the town. At present, there was no time for further torture, for there was work in hand. The victors divided themselves into several bands, to burn the neighboring villages and hunt their flying inhabitants. In the flush of their triumph, they meditated a bolder enterprise; and, in the afternoon, their chiefs sent small parties to reconnoitre Sainte Marie, with a view to attacking it on the next day. Meanwhile the fugitives of St. Louis, joined by other bands as terrified and as helpless as they, were struggling through the soft snow which clogged the forests towards Lake Huron, where the treacherous ice of spring was still unmelted. One fear expelled another. They ventured upon it, and pushed forward all that day and all the following night, shivering and famished, to find refuge in the towns of the Tobacco Nation. Here, when they arrived, they spread a universal panic. Ragueneau, Bressani, and their companions waited in suspense at Sainte Marie. On the one hand, they trembled for Brébeuf and Lalemant; on the other, they looked hourly for an attack: and when at evening they saw the Iroquois scouts prowling along the edge of the bordering forest, their fears were confirmed. They had with them about forty Frenchmen, well armed; but their palisades and wooden buildings were not fire-proof, and they had learned from fugitives the number and ferocity of 383 the invaders. They stood guard all night, praying to the Saints, and above all to their great patron, Saint Joseph, whose festival was close at hand. In the morning they were somewhat relieved by the arrival of about three hundred Huron warriors, chiefly converts from La Conception and Sainte Madeleine, tolerably well armed, and full of fight. They were expecting others to join them; and meanwhile, dividing into several bands, they took post by the passes of the neighboring forest, hoping to waylay parties of the enemy. Their expectation was fulfilled; for, at this time, two hundred of the Iroquois were making their way from St. Ignace, in advance of the main body, to begin the attack on Sainte Marie. They fell in with a band of the Hurons, set upon them, killed many, drove the rest to headlong flight, and, as they plunged in terror through the snow, chased them within sight of Sainte Marie. The other Hurons, hearing the yells and firing, ran to the rescue, and attacked so fiercely, that the Iroquois in turn were routed, and ran for shelter to St. Louis, followed closely by the victors. The houses of the town had been burned, but the palisade around them was still standing, though breached and broken. The Iroquois rushed in; but the Hurons were at their heels. Many of the fugitives were captured, the rest killed or put to utter rout, and the triumphant Hurons remained masters of the place. The Iroquois who escaped fled to St. Ignace. Here, or on the way thither, they found the main 384 body of the invaders; and when they heard of the disaster, the whole swarm, beside themselves with rage, turned towards St. Louis to take their revenge. Now ensued one of the most furious Indian battles on record. The Hurons within the palisade did not much exceed a hundred and fifty; for many had been killed or disabled, and many, perhaps, had straggled away. Most of their enemies had guns, while they had but few. Their weapons were bows and arrows, war-clubs, hatchets, and knives; and of these they made good use, sallying repeatedly, fighting like devils, and driving back their assailants again and again. There are times when the Indian warrior forgets his cautious maxims, and throws himself into battle with a mad and reckless ferocity. The desperation of one party, and the fierce courage of both, kept up the fight after the day had closed; and the scout from Sainte Marie, as he bent listening under the gloom of the pines, heard, far into the night, the howl of battle rising from the darkened forest. The principal chief of the Iroquois was severely wounded, and nearly a hundred of their warriors were killed on the spot. When, at length, their numbers and persistent fury prevailed, their only prize was some twenty Huron warriors, spent with fatigue and faint with loss of blood. The rest lay dead around the shattered palisades which they had so valiantly defended. Fatuity, not cowardice, was the ruin of the Huron nation. The lamps burned all night at Sainte Marie, and its defenders stood watching till daylight, musket 385 in hand. The Jesuits prayed without ceasing, and Saint Joseph was besieged with invocations. "Those of us who were priests," writes Ragueneau, "each made a vow to say a mass in his honor every month, for the space of a year; and all the rest bound themselves by vows to divers penances." The expected onslaught did not take place. Not an Iroquois appeared. Their victory had been bought too dear, and they had no stomach for more fighting. All the next day, the eighteenth, a stillness, like the dead lull of a tempest, followed the turmoil of yesterday,—as if, says the Father Superior, "the country were waiting, palsied with fright, for some new disaster." On the following day,—the journalist fails not to mention that it was the festival of Saint Joseph,—Indians came in with tidings that a panic had seized the Iroquois camp, that the chiefs could not control it, and that the whole body of invaders was retreating in disorder, possessed with a vague terror that the Hurons were upon them in force. They had found time, however, for an act of atrocious cruelty. They planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace, and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side. Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that rose from the blazing dwellings. [1] [1] The site of St. Ignace still bears evidence of the catastrophe, in the ashes and charcoal that indicate the position of the houses, and the fragments of broken pottery and half-consumed bone, together with trinkets of stone, metal, or glass, which have survived the lapse of two centuries and more. The place has been minutely examined by Dr. Taché. 386 They loaded the rest of their prisoners with their baggage and plunder, and drove them through the forest southward, braining with their hatchets any who gave out on the march. An old woman, who had escaped out of the midst of the flames of St. Ignace, made her way to St. Michel, a large town not far from the desolate site of St. Joseph. Here she found about seven hundred Huron warriors, hastily mustered. She set them on the track of the retreating Iroquois, and they took up the chase,—but evidently with no great eagerness to overtake their dangerous enemy, well armed as he was with Dutch guns, while they had little beside their bows and arrows. They found, as they advanced, the dead bodies of prisoners tomahawked on the march, and others bound fast to trees and half burned by the fagots piled hastily around them. The Iroquois pushed forward with such headlong speed, that the pursuers could not, or would not, overtake them; and, after two days, they gave over the attempt. CHAPTER XXVIII. 1649. THE MARTYRS. The Ruins of St. Ignace ? The Relics found ? Brébeuf at the Stake ? His Unconquerable Fortitude ? Lalemant ? Renegade Hurons ? Iroquois Atrocities ? Death of Brébeuf ? His Character ? Death of Lalemant On the morning of the twentieth, the Jesuits at Sainte Marie received full confirmation of the reported retreat of the invaders; and one of them, with seven armed Frenchmen, set out for the scene of havoc. They passed St. Louis, where the bloody ground was strown thick with corpses, and, two or three miles farther on, reached St. Ignace. Here they saw a spectacle of horror; for among the ashes of the burnt town were scattered in profusion the half-consumed bodies of those who had perished in the flames. Apart from the rest, they saw a sight that banished all else from their thoughts; for they found what they had come to seek,—the scorched and mangled relics of Brébeuf and Lalemant. [1] [1] "Ils y trouuerent vn spectacle d'horreur, les restes de la cruauté mesme, ou plus tost les restes de l'amour de Dieu, qui seul triomphe dans la mort des Martyrs."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1649, 13. 388 They had learned their fate already from Huron prisoners, many of whom had made their escape in the panic and confusion of the Iroquois retreat. They described what they had seen, and the condition in which the bodies were found confirmed their story. On the afternoon of the sixteenth,—the day when the two priests were 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 patiently, 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 worshippers 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 another 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 Saint 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, 389 he threw his arms upward, with a shriek of supplication to Heaven. Next they hung around 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 convert 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 those of others. The kettle was accordingly slung, and the water boiled and poured slowly on the heads of the two missionaries. "We baptize 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 from his limbs, and devoured them before his eyes. Other renegade Hurons called out to him, "You told us, that, the more one suffers on earth, the happier he is in Heaven. We wish to make you happy; we torment you because we love you; and you ought to thank us for it." 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. He came of a noble race,—the same, it is said, from which sprang the English Earls of Arundel; but never had the mailed barons of his line 390 confronted a fate so appalling, with so prodigious a constancy. To the last he refused to flinch, and "his death was the astonishment of his murderers." [2] In him an enthusiastic devotion was grafted on an heroic nature. His bodily endowments were as remarkable as the temper of his mind. His manly proportions, his strength, and his endurance, which incessant fasts and penances could not undermine, had always won for him the respect of the Indians, no less than a courage unconscious of fear, and yet redeemed from rashness by a cool and vigorous judgment; for, extravagant as were the chimeras which fed the fires of his zeal, they were consistent with the soberest good sense on matters of practical bearing. [2] Charlevoix, I. 294. Alegambe uses a similar expression. Lalemant, physically weak from childhood, and slender almost to emaciation, was constitutionally unequal to a display of fortitude like that of his colleague. When Brébeuf died, he was led back to the house whence he had been taken, and tortured there all night, until, in the morning, one of the Iroquois, growing tired of the protracted entertainment, killed him with a hatchet. [3] It was said, that, at times, he seemed beside himself; then, rallying, with hands uplifted, he offered his 391 sufferings to Heaven as a sacrifice. His robust companion had lived less than four hours under the torture, while he survived it for nearly seventeen. Perhaps the Titanic effort of will with which Brébeuf repressed all show of suffering conspired with the Iroquois knives and firebrands to exhaust his vitality; perhaps his tormentors, enraged at his fortitude, forgot their subtlety, and struck too near the life. [3] "We saw no part of his body," says Ragueneau, "from head to foot, which was not burned, even to his eyes, in the sockets of which these wretches had placed live coals."—Relation des Hurons, 1649, 15. Lalemant was a Parisian, and his family belonged to the class of gens de robe, or hereditary practitioners of the law. He was thirty-nine years of age. His physical weakness is spoken of by several of those who knew him. Marie de l'Incarnation says, "C'était l'homme le plus faible et le plus délicat qu'on e?t pu voir." Both Bressani and Ragueneau are equally emphatic on this point. The bodies of the two missionaries were carried to Sainte Marie, and buried in the cemetery there; but the skull of Brébeuf was preserved as a relic. His family sent from France a silver bust of their martyred kinsman, in the base of which was a recess to contain the skull; and, to this day, the bust and the relic within are preserved with pious care by the nuns of the H?tel-Dieu at Quebec. [4] [4] Photographs of the bust are before me. Various relics of the two missionaries were preserved; and some of them may still be seen in Canadian monastic establishments. The following extract from a letter of Marie de l'Incarnation to her son, written from Quebec in October of this year, 1649, is curious. "Madame our foundress (Madame de la Peltrie) sends you relics of our holy martyrs; but she does it secretly, since the reverend Fathers would not give us any, for fear that we should send them to France: but, as she is not bound by vows, and as the very persons who went for the bodies have given relics of them to her in secret, I begged her to send you some of them, which she has done very gladly, from the respect she has for you." She adds, in the same letter, "Our Lord having revealed to him (Brébeuf) the time of his martyrdom three days before it happened, he went, full of joy, to find the other Fathers; who, seeing him in extraordinary spirits, caused him, by an inspiration of God, to be bled; after which time surgeon dried his blood, through a presentiment of what was to take place, lest he should be treated like Father Daniel, who, eight months before, had been so reduced to ashes that no remains of his body could be found." Brébeuf had once been ordered by the Father Superior to write down the visions, revelations, and inward experiences with which he was 392 favored,—"at least," says Ragueneau, "those which he could easily remember, for their multitude was too great for the whole to be recalled."—"I find nothing," he adds, "more frequent in this memoir than the expression of his desire to die for Jesus Christ: 'Sentio me vehementer impelli ad moriendum pro Christo.'… In fine, wishing to make himself a holocaust and a victim consecrated to death, and holily to anticipate the happiness of martyrdom which awaited him, he bound himself by a vow to Christ, which he conceived in these terms"; and Ragueneau gives the vow in the original Latin. It binds him never to refuse "the grace of martyrdom, if, at any day, Thou shouldst, in Thy infinite pity, offer it to me, Thy unworthy servant;" … "and when I shall have received the stroke of death, I bind myself to accept it at Thy hand, with all the contentment and joy of my heart." Some of his innumerable visions have been already mentioned. (See ante, (page 108).) Tanner, Societas Militans, gives various others,—as, for example, that he once beheld a mountain covered thick with saints, but above all with virgins, while the Queen of Virgins sat at the top in a blaze of glory. In 1637, when the whole country was enraged against the Jesuits, and above all against Brébeuf, as sorcerers who had caused the pest, Ragueneau tells us that "a troop of demons appeared before him divers times,—sometimes like men in a fury, sometimes like frightful monsters, bears, lions, or wild horses, trying to rush upon him. These spectres excited in him neither horror nor fear. He said to them, 'Do to me whatever God permits you; for without His will not one hair will fall from my head.' And at these words all the demons vanished in a moment."—Relation des Hurons, 1649, 20. Compare the long notice in Alegambe, Mortes Illustres, 644. In Ragueneau's notice of Brébeuf, as in all other notices of deceased missionaries in the Relations, the saintly qualities alone are brought forward, as obedience, humility, etc.; but wherever Brébeuf himself appears in the course of those voluminous records, he always brings with him an impression of power. We are told that, punning on his own name, he used to say that he was an ox, fit only to bear burdens. This sort of humility may pass for what it is worth; but it must be remembered, that there is a kind of acting in which the actor firmly believes in the part he is playing. As for the obedience, it was as genuine as that of a well-disciplined soldier, and incomparably more profound. In the case of the Canadian Jesuits, posterity owes to this, their favorite virtue, the record of numerous visions, inward voices, and the like miracles, which the object of these favors set down on paper, at the command of his Superior; while, otherwise, humility would have concealed them forever. The truth is, that, with some of these missionaries, one may throw off trash and nonsense by the cart-load, and find under it all a solid nucleus of saint and hero. CHAPTER XXIX. 1649, 1650. THE SANCTUARY. Dispersion of the Hurons ? Sainte Marie abandoned ? Isle St. Joseph ? Removal of the Mission ? The New Fort ? Misery of the Hurons ? Famine ? Epidemic ? Employments of the Jesuits All was over with the Hurons. The death-knell of their nation had struck. Without a leader, without organization, without union, crazed with fright and paralyzed with misery, they yielded to their doom without a blow. Their only thought was flight. Within two weeks after the disasters of St. Ignace and St. Louis, fifteen Huron towns were abandoned, and the greater number burned, lest they should give shelter to the Iroquois. The last year's harvest had been scanty; the fugitives had no food, and they left behind them the fields in which was their only hope of obtaining it. In bands, large or small, some roamed northward and eastward, through the half-thawed wilderness; some hid themselves on the rocks or islands of Lake Huron; some sought an asylum among the Tobacco 394 Nation; a few joined the Neutrals on the north of Lake Erie. The Hurons, as a nation, ceased to exist. [1] [1] Chaumonot, who was at Ossossané at the time of the Iroquois invasion, gives a vivid picture of the panic and lamentation which followed the news of the destruction of the Huron warriors at St. Louis, and of the flight of the inhabitants to the country of the Tobacco Nation.—Vie, 62. Hitherto Sainte Marie had been covered by large fortified towns which lay between it and the Iroquois; but these were all destroyed, some by the enemy and some by their own people, and the Jesuits were left alone to bear the brunt of the next attack. There was, moreover, no reason for their remaining. Sainte Marie had been built as a basis for the missions; but its occupation was gone: the flock had fled from the shepherds, and its existence had no longer an object. If the priests stayed to be butchered, they would perish, not as martyrs, but as fools. The necessity was as clear as it was bitter. All their toil must come to nought. Sainte Marie must be abandoned. They confess the pang which the resolution cost them; but, pursues the Father Superior, "since the birth of Christianity, the Faith has nowhere been planted except in the midst of sufferings and crosses. Thus this desolation consoles us; and in the midst of persecution, in the extremity of the evils which assail us and the greater evils which threaten us, we are all filled with joy: for our hearts tell us that God has never had a more tender love for us than now." [2] [2] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1649, 26. 395 Several of the priests set out to follow and console the scattered bands of fugitive Hurons. One embarked in a canoe, and coasted the dreary shores of Lake Huron northward, among the wild labyrinth of rocks and islets, whither his scared flock had fled for refuge; another betook himself to the forest with a band of half-famished proselytes, and shared their miserable rovings through the thickets and among the mountains. Those who remained took counsel together at Sainte Marie. Whither should they go, and where should be the new seat of the mission? They made choice of the Grand Manitoulin Island, called by them Isle Sainte Marie, and by the Hurons Ekaentoton. It lay near the northern shores of Lake Huron, and by its position would give a ready access to numberless Algonquin tribes along the borders of all these inland seas. Moreover, it would bring the priests and their flock nearer to the French settlements, by the route of the Ottawa, whenever the Iroquois should cease to infest that river. The fishing, too, was good; and some of the priests, who knew the island well, made a favorable report of the soil. Thither, therefore, they had resolved to transplant the mission, when twelve Huron chiefs arrived, and asked for an interview with the Father Superior and his fellow Jesuits. The conference lasted three hours. The deputies declared that many of the scattered Hurons had determined to reunite, and form a settlement on a neighboring island of the lake, called by the Jesuits Isle St. Joseph; that they needed the aid of the Fathers; that without 396 them they were helpless, but with them they could hold their ground and repel the attacks of the Iroquois. They urged their plea in language which Ragueneau describes as pathetic and eloquent; and, to confirm their words, they gave him ten large collars of wampum, saying that these were the voices of their wives and children. They gained their point. The Jesuits abandoned their former plan, and promised to join the Hurons on Isle St. Joseph. They had built a boat, or small vessel, and in this they embarked such of their stores as it would hold. The greater part were placed on a large raft made for the purpose, like one of the rafts of timber which every summer float down the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa. Here was their stock of corn,—in part the produce of their own fields, and in part bought from the Hurons in former years of plenty,—pictures, vestments, sacred vessels and images, weapons, ammunition, tools, goods for barter with the Indians, cattle, swine, and poultry. [3] Sainte Marie was stripped of everything that could be moved. Then, lest it should harbor the Iroquois, they set it on fire, and saw consumed in an hour the results of nine or ten years of toil. It was near sunset, on the fourteenth of June. [4] The 397 houseless band descended to the mouth of the Wye, went on board their raft, pushed it from the shore, and, with sweeps and oars, urged it on its way all night. The lake was calm and the weather fair; but it crept so slowly over the water that several days elapsed before they reached their destination, about twenty miles distant. [3] Some of these were killed for food after reaching the island. In March following, they had ten fowls, a pair of swine, two bulls and two cows, kept for breeding.—Lettre de Ragueneau au Général de la Compagnie de Jésus, St. Joseph, 13 Mars, 1650. [4] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 3. In the Relation of the preceding year he gives the fifteenth of May as the date,—evidently an error. "Nous sortismes de ces terres de Promission qui estoient nostre Paradis, et où la mort nous eust esté mille fois plus douce que ne sera la vie en quelque lieu que nous puissions estre. Mais il faut suiure Dieu, et il faut aimer ses conduites, quelque opposées qu'elles paroissent à nos desirs, à nos plus saintes esperances et aux plus tendres amours de nostre c?ur."—Lettre de Ragueneau au P. Provincial à Paris, in Relation des Hurons, 1650, 1. "Mais il fallut, à tous tant que nous estions, quitter cette ancienne demeure de saincte Marie; ces edifices, qui quoy que pauures, paroissoient des chefs-d'?uure de l'art aux yeux de nos pauures Sauuages; ces terres cultiuées, qui nous promettoient vne riche moisson. Il nous fallut abandonner ce lieu, que ie puis appeller nostre seconde Patrie et nos delices innocentes, puis qu'il auoit esté le berceau de ce Christianisme, qu'il estoit le temple de Dieu et la maison des seruiteurs de Iesus-Christ; et crainte que nos ennemis trop impies, ne profanassent ce lieu de saincteté et n'en prissent leur auantage, nous y mismes le feu nous mesmes, et nous vismes brusler à nos yeux, en moins d'vne heure, nos trauaux de neuf et de dix ans."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 2, 3. Near the entrance of Matchedash Bay lie the three islands now known as Faith, Hope, and Charity. Of these, Charity or Christian Island, called Ahoendoé by the Hurons and St. Joseph by the Jesuits, is by far the largest. It is six or eight miles wide; and when the Hurons sought refuge here, it was densely covered with the primeval forest. The priests landed with their men, some forty soldiers, laborers, and others, and found about three hundred Huron families bivouacked in the woods. Here were wigwams and sheds of bark, and smoky kettles slung over fires, each 398 on its tripod of poles, while around lay groups of famished wretches, with dark, haggard visages and uncombed hair, in every posture of despondency and woe. They had not been wholly idle; for they had made some rough clearings, and planted a little corn. The arrival of the Jesuits gave them new hope; and, weakened as they were with famine, they set themselves to the task of hewing and burning down the forest, making bark houses, and planting palisades. The priests, on their part, chose a favorable spot, and began to clear the ground and mark out the lines of a fort. Their men—the greater part serving without pay—labored with admirable spirit, and before winter had built a square, bastioned fort of solid masonry, with a deep ditch, and walls about twelve feet high. Within were a small chapel, houses for lodging, and a well, which, with the ruins of the walls, may still be seen on the south-eastern shore of the island, a hundred feet from the water. [5] Detached redoubts were also built near at hand, where French musketeers could aid in defending the adjacent Huron village. [6] Though the island was called St. Joseph, the fort, like that on the Wye, received the name of Sainte Marie. Jesuit 399 devotion scattered these names broadcast over all the field of their labors. [5] The measurement between the angles of the two southern bastions is 123 feet, and that of the curtain wall connecting these bastions is 78 feet. Some curious relics have been found in the fort,—among others, a steel mill for making wafers for the Host. It was found in 1848, in a remarkable state of preservation, and is now in an English museum, having been bought on the spot by an amateur. As at Sainte Marie on the Wye, the remains are in perfect conformity with the narratives and letters of the priests. [6] Compare Martin, Introduction to Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 38. The island, thanks to the vigilance of the French, escaped attack throughout the summer; but Iroquois scalping-parties ranged the neighboring shores, killing stragglers and keeping the Hurons in perpetual alarm. As winter drew near, great numbers, who, trembling and by stealth, had gathered a miserable subsistence among the northern forests and islands, rejoined their countrymen at St. Joseph, until six or eight thousand expatriated wretches were gathered here under the protection of the French fort. They were housed in a hundred or more bark dwellings, each containing eight or ten families. [7] Here were widows without children, and children without parents; for famine and the Iroquois had proved more deadly enemies than the pestilence which a few years before had wasted their towns. [8] Of this 400 multitude but few had strength enough to labor, scarcely any had made provision for the winter, and numbers were already perishing from want, dragging themselves from house to house, like living skeletons. The priests had spared no effort to meet the demands upon their charity. They sent men during the autumn to buy smoked fish from the Northern Algonquins, and employed Indians to gather acorns in the woods. Of this miserable food they succeeded in collecting five or six hundred bushels. To diminish its bitterness, the Indians boiled it with ashes, or the priests served it out to them pounded, and mixed with corn. [9] [7] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 3, 4. He reckons eight persons to a family. [8] "Ie voudrois pouuoir representer à toutes les personnes affectionnées à nos Hurons, l'état pitoyable auquel ils sont reduits; … comment seroit-il possible que ces imitateurs de Iésus Christ ne fussent émeus à pitié à la veu? des centaines et centaines de veuues dont non seulement les enfans, mais quasi les parens ont esté outrageusement ou tuez, ou emmenez captifs, et puis inhumainement bruslez, cuits, déchirez et deuorez des ennemis."—Lettre de Chaumonot à Lalemant, Supérieur à Quebec, Isle de St. Joseph, 1 Juin, 1649. "Vne mère s'est veu?, n'ayant que ses deux mamelles, mais sans suc et sans laict, qui toutefois estoit l'vnique chose qu'elle eust peu presenter à trois ou quatre enfans qui pleuroient y estans attachez. Elle les voyoit mourir entre ses bras, les vns apres les autres, et n'auoit pas mesme les forces de les pousser dans le tombeau. Elle mouroit sous cette charge, et en mourant elle disoit: Ouy, Mon Dieu, vous estes le maistre de nos vies; nous mourrons puisque vous le voulez; voila qui est bien que nous mourrions Chrestiens. I'estois damnée, et mes enfans auec moy, si nous ne fussions morts miserables; ils ont receu le sainct Baptesme, et ie croy fermement que mourans tous de compagnie, nous ressusciterons tous ensemble."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 5. [9] Eight hundred sacks of this mixture were given to the Hurons during the winter.—Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 283. As winter advanced, the Huron houses became a frightful spectacle. Their inmates were dying by scores daily. The priests and their men buried the bodies, and the Indians dug them from the earth or the snow and fed on them, sometimes in secret and sometimes openly; although, notwithstanding their superstitious feasts on the bodies of their enemies, their repugnance and horror were extreme at the thought of devouring those of relatives and friends. [10] An epidemic presently appeared, to aid 401 the work of famine. Before spring, about half of their number were dead. [10] "Ce fut alors que nous fusmes contraints de voir des squeletes mourantes, qui soustenoient vne vie miserable, mangeant iusqu'aux ordures et les rebuts de la nature. Le gland estoit à la pluspart, ce que seroient en France les mets les plus exquis. Les charognes mesme deterrées, les restes des Renards et des Chiens ne faisoient point horreur, et se mangeoient, quoy qu'en cachete: car quoy que les Hurons, auant que la foy leur eust donné plus de lumiere qu'ils n'en auoient dans l'infidelité, ne creussent pas commettre aucun peché de manger leurs ennemis, aussi peu qu'il y en a de les tuer, toutefois ie puis dire auec verité, qu'ils n'ont pas moins d'horreur de manger de leurs compatriotes, qu'on peut auoir en France de manger de la chair humaine. Mais la necessité n'a plus de loy, et des dents fameliques ne discernent plus ce qu'elles mangent. Les mères se sont repeu?s de leurs enfans, des freres de leurs freres, et des enfans ne reconnoissoient plus en vn cadaure mort, celuy lequel lors qu'il viuoit, ils appelloient leur Pere."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 4. Compare Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 283. Meanwhile, though the cold was intense and the snow several feet deep, yet not an hour was free from the danger of the Iroquois; and, from sunset to daybreak, under the cold moon or in the driving snow-storm, the French sentries walked their rounds along the ramparts. The priests rose before dawn, and spent the time till sunrise in their private devotions. Then the bell of their chapel rang, and the Indians came in crowds at the call; for misery had softened their hearts, and nearly all on the island were now Christian. There was a mass, followed by a prayer and a few words of exhortation; then the hearers dispersed to make room for others. Thus the little chapel was filled ten or twelve times, until all had had their turn. Meanwhile other priests were hearing confessions and giving advice and encouragement in private, according to the needs of each applicant. This lasted till nine o'clock, when all the Indians returned to their village, and the priests presently followed, to give what assistance they could. Their cassocks were worn out, and they 402 were dressed chiefly in skins. [11] They visited the Indian houses, and gave to those whose necessities were most urgent small scraps of hide, severally stamped with a particular mark, and entitling the recipients, on presenting them at the fort, to a few acorns, a small quantity of boiled maize, or a fragment of smoked fish, according to the stamp on the leather ticket of each. Two hours before sunset the bell of the chapel again rang, and the religious exercises of the morning were repeated. [12] [11] Lettre de Ragueneau au Général de la Compagnie de Jésus, Isle St. Joseph, 13 Mars, 1650. [12] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 6, 7. Thus this miserable winter wore away, till the opening spring brought new fears and new necessities. [13] [13] Concerning the retreat of the Hurons to Isle St. Joseph, the principal authorities are the Relations of 1649 and 1650, which are ample in detail, and written with an excellent simplicity and modesty; the Relation Abrégée of Bressani; the reports of the Father Superior to the General of the Jesuits at Rome; the manuscript of 1652, entitled Mémoires touchant la Mort et les Vertus des Pères, etc.; the unpublished letters of Garnier; and a letter of Chaumonot, written on the spot, and preserved in the Relations. CHAPTER XXX. 1649. GARNIER—CHABANEL. The Tobacco Missions ? St. Jean attacked ? Death of Garnier ? The Journey of Chabanel ? His Death ? Garreau and Grelon. Late in the preceding autumn the Iroquois had taken the war-path in force. At the end of November, two escaped prisoners came to Isle St. Joseph with the news that a band of three hundred warriors was hovering in the Huron forests, doubtful whether to invade the island or to attack the towns of the Tobacco Nation in the valleys of the Blue Mountains. The Father Superior, Ragueneau, sent a runner thither in all haste, to warn the inhabitants of their danger. There were at this time two missions in the Tobacco Nation, St. Jean and St. Matthias, [1]—the latter under the charge of the Jesuits Garreau and Grelon, and the former under that of Garnier and Chabanel. St. Jean, the principal seat of the 404 mission of the same name, was a town of five or six hundred families. Its population was, moreover, greatly augmented by the bands of fugitive Hurons who had taken refuge there. When the warriors were warned by Ragueneau's messenger of a probable attack from the Iroquois, they were far from being daunted, but, confiding in their numbers, awaited the enemy in one of those fits of valor which characterize the unstable courage of the savage. At St. Jean all was paint, feathers, and uproar,—singing, dancing, howling, and stamping. Quivers were filled, knives whetted, and tomahawks sharpened; but when, after two days of eager expectancy, the enemy did not appear, the warriors lost patience. Thinking, and probably with reason, that the Iroquois were afraid of them, they resolved to sally forth, and take the offensive. With yelps and whoops they defiled into the forest, where the branches were gray and bare, and the ground thickly covered with snow. They pushed on rapidly till the following day, but could not discover their wary enemy, who had made a wide circuit, and was approaching the town from another quarter. By ill luck, the Iroquois captured a Tobacco Indian and his squaw, straggling in the forest not far from St. Jean; and the two prisoners, to propitiate them, told them the defenceless condition of the place, where none remained but women, children, and old men. The delighted Iroquois no longer hesitated, but silently and swiftly pushed on towards the town. [1] The Indian name of St. Jean was Etarita; and that of St. Matthias, Ekarenniondi. It was two o'clock in the afternoon of the seventh 405 of December. [2] Chabanel had left the place a day or two before, in obedience to a message from Ragueneau, and Garnier was here alone. He was making his rounds among the houses, visiting the sick and instructing his converts, when the horrible din of the war-whoop rose from the borders of the clearing, and, on the instant, the town was mad with terror. Children and girls rushed to and fro, blind with fright; women snatched their infants, and fled they knew not whither. Garnier ran to his chapel, where a few of his converts had sought asylum. He gave them his benediction, exhorted them to hold fast to the Faith, and bade them fly while there was yet time. For himself, he hastened back to the houses, running from one to another, and giving absolution or baptism to all whom he found. An Iroquois met him, shot him with three balls through the body and thigh, tore off his cassock, and rushed on in pursuit of the fugitives. Garnier lay for a moment on the ground, as if stunned; then, recovering his senses, he was seen to rise into a kneeling posture. At a little distance from him lay a Huron, mortally wounded, but still showing signs of life. With the Heaven that awaited him glowing before his fading vision, the priest dragged himself towards the dying Indian, to give him absolution; but his strength failed, and he fell again to the earth. He rose once more, and again crept forward, when a party of Iroquois rushed upon him, split his head with two blows of a hatchet, stripped him, and left his body 406 on the ground. [3] At this time the whole town was on fire. The invaders, fearing that the absent warriors might return and take their revenge, hastened to finish their work, scattered firebrands everywhere, and threw children alive into the burning houses. They killed many of the fugitives, captured many more, and then made a hasty retreat through the forest with their prisoners, butchering such of them as lagged on the way. St. Jean lay a waste of smoking ruins thickly strewn with blackened corpses of the slain. [2] Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 264. [3] The above particulars of Garnier's death rest on the evidence of a Christian Huron woman, named Marthe, who saw him shot down, and also saw his attempt to reach the dying Indian. She was herself struck down immediately after with a war-club, but remained alive, and escaped in the confusion. She died three months later, at Isle St. Joseph, from the effects of the injuries she had received, after reaffirming the truth of her story to Ragueneau, who was with her, and who questioned her on the subject. (Mémoires touchant la Mort et les Vertus des Pères Garnier, etc., MS.). Ragueneau also speaks of her in Relation des Hurons, 1650, 9.—The priests Grelon and Garreau found the body stripped naked, with three gunshot wounds in the abdomen and thigh, and two deep hatchet wounds in the head. Towards evening, parties of fugitives reached St. Matthias, with tidings of the catastrophe. The town was wild with alarm, and all stood on the watch, in expectation of an attack; but when, in the morning, scouts came in and reported the retreat of the Iroquois, Garreau and Grelon set out with a party of converts to visit the scene of havoc. For a long time they looked in vain for the body of Garnier; but at length they found him lying where he had fallen,—so scorched and disfigured, that he was recognized with difficulty. The two priests wrapped his body in a part of their own 407 clothing; the Indian converts dug a grave on the spot where his church had stood; and here they buried him. Thus, at the age of forty-four, died Charles Garnier, the favorite child of wealthy and noble parents, nursed in Parisian luxury and ease, then living and dying, a more than willing exile, amid the hardships and horrors of the Huron wilderness. His life and his death are his best eulogy. Brébeuf was the lion of the Huron mission, and Garnier was the lamb; but the lamb was as fearless as the lion. [4] [4] Garnier's devotion to the mission was absolute. He took little or no interest in the news from France, which, at intervals of from one to three years, found its way to the Huron towns. His companion Bressani says, that he would walk thirty or forty miles in the hottest summer day, to baptize some dying Indian, when the country was infested by the enemy. On similar errands, he would sometimes pass the night alone in the forest in the depth of winter. He was anxious to fall into the hands of the Iroquois, that he might preach the Faith to them even out of the midst of the fire. In one of his unpublished letters he writes, "Praised be our Lord, who punishes me for my sins by depriving me of this crown" (the crown of martyrdom). After the death of Brébeuf and Lalemant, he writes to his brother:— "Hélas! Mon cher frère, si ma conscience ne me convainquait et ne me confondait de mon infidélité au service de notre bon maitre, je pourrais espérer quelque faveur approchante de celles qu'il a faites aux bienheureux martyrs avec qui j'avais le bien de converser souvent, étant dans les mêmes occasions et dangers qu'ils étaient, mais sa justice me fait craindre que je ne demeure toujours indigne d'une telle couronne." He contented himself with the most wretched fare during the last years of famine, living in good measure on roots and acorns; "although," says Ragueneau, "he had been the cherished son of a rich and noble house, on whom all the affection of his father had centred, and who had been nourished on food very different from that of swine."—Relation des Hurons, 1650, 12. For his character, see Ragueneau, Bressani, Tanner, and Alegambe, who devotes many pages to the description of his religious traits; but the complexion of his mind is best reflected in his private letters. When, on the following morning, the warriors of St. Jean returned from their rash and bootless 408 sally, and saw the ashes of their desolated homes and the ghastly relics of their murdered families, they seated themselves amid the ruin, silent and motionless as statues of bronze, with heads bowed down and eyes fixed on the ground. Thus they remained through half the day. Tears and wailing were for women; this was the mourning of warriors. Garnier's colleague, Chabanel, had been recalled from St. Jean by an order from the Father Superior, who thought it needless to expose the life of more than one priest in a position of so much danger. He stopped on his way at St. Matthias, and on the morning of the seventh of December, the day of the attack, left that town with seven or eight Christian Hurons. The journey was rough and difficult. They proceeded through the forest about eighteen miles, and then encamped in the snow. The Indians fell asleep; but Chabanel, from an apprehension of danger, or some other cause, remained awake. About midnight he heard a strange sound in the distance,—a confusion of fierce voices, mingled with songs and outcries. It was the Iroquois on their retreat with their prisoners, some of whom were defiantly singing their war-songs, after the Indian custom. Chabanel waked his companions, who instantly took flight. He tried to follow, but could not keep pace with the light-footed savages, who returned to St. Matthias, and told what had occurred. They said, however, that Chabanel had left them and taken an opposite direction, in order to reach Isle St. Joseph. 409 His brother priests were for some time ignorant of what had befallen him. At length a Huron Indian, who had been converted, but afterward apostatized, gave out that he had met him in the forest, and aided him with his canoe to cross a river which lay in his path. Some supposed that he had lost his way, and died of cold and hunger; but others were of a different opinion. Their suspicion was confirmed some time afterwards by the renegade Huron, who confessed that he had killed Chabanel and thrown his body into the river, after robbing him of his clothes, his hat, the blanket or mantle which was strapped to his shoulders, and the bag in which he carried his books and papers. He declared that his motive was hatred of the Faith, which had caused the ruin of the Hurons. [5] The priest had prepared himself for a worse fate. Before leaving Sainte Marie on the Wye, to go to his post in the Tobacco Nation, he had written to his brother to regard him as a victim destined to the fires of the Iroquois. [6] He added, that, though he was naturally timid, he was now wholly indifferent to danger; and he expressed the belief that only a superhuman power could have wrought such a change in him. [7] [5] Mémoires touchant la Mort et les Vertus des Pères, etc., MS. [6] Abrégé de la Vie du P. No?l Chabanel. MS. [7] "Ie suis fort apprehensif de mon naturel; toutefois, maintenant que ie vay au plus grand danger et qu'il me semble que la mort n'est pas esloignée, ie ne sens plus de crainte. Cette disposition ne vient pas de moy."—Relation des Hurons, 1650, 18. The following is the vow made by Chabanel, at a time when his disgust at the Indian mode of life beset him with temptations to ask to be recalled from the mission. It is translated from the Latin original:— "My Lord Jesus Christ, who, in the admirable disposition of thy paternal providence, hast willed that I, although most unworthy, should be a co-laborer with the holy Apostles in this vineyard of the Hurons,—I, No?l Chabanel, impelled by the desire of fulfilling thy holy will in advancing the conversion of the savages of this land to thy faith, do vow, in the presence of the most holy sacrament of thy precious body and blood, which is God's tabernacle among men, to remain perpetually attached to this mission of the Hurons, understanding all things according to the interpretation and disposal of the Superiors of the Society of Jesus. Therefore I entreat thee to receive me as the perpetual servant of this mission, and to render me worthy of so sublime a ministry. Amen. This twentieth day of June, 1647." 410 Garreau and Grelon, in their mission of St. Matthias, were exposed to other dangers than those of the Iroquois. A report was spread, not only that they were magicians, but that they had a secret understanding with the enemy. A nocturnal council was called, and their death was decreed. In the morning, a furious crowd gathered before a lodge which they were about to enter, screeching and yelling after the manner of Indians when they compel a prisoner to run the gantlet. The two priests, giving no sign of fear, passed through the crowd and entered the lodge unharmed. Hatchets were brandished over them, but no one would be the first to strike. Their converts were amazed at their escape, and they themselves ascribed it to the interposition of a protecting Providence. The Huron missionaries were doubly in danger,—not more from the Iroquois than from the blind rage of those who should have been their friends. [8] [8] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 20. One of these two missionaries, Garreau, was afterwards killed by the Iroquois, who shot him through the spine, in 1656, near Montreal.—De Quen, Relation, 1656, 41. CHAPTER XXXI. 1650-1652. THE HURON MISSION ABANDONED. Famine and the Tomahawk ? A New Asylum ? Voyage of the Refugees to Quebec ? Meeting with Bressani ? Desperate Courage of the Iroquois ? Inroads and Battles ? Death of Buteux As spring approached, the starving multitude on Isle St. Joseph grew reckless with hunger. Along the main shore, in spots where the sun lay warm, the spring fisheries had already begun, and the melting snow was uncovering the acorns in the woods. There was danger everywhere, for bands of Iroquois were again on the track of their prey. [1] The miserable Hurons, gnawed with inexorable famine, stood in the dilemma of a deadly peril and an assured death. They chose the former; and, early in March, began to leave their island and 412 cross to the main-land, to gather what sustenance they could. The ice was still thick, but the advancing season had softened it; and, as a body of them were crossing, it broke under their feet. Some were drowned; while others dragged themselves out, drenched and pierced with cold, to die miserably on the frozen lake, before they could reach a shelter. Other parties, more fortunate, gained the shore safely, and began their fishing, divided into companies of from eight or ten to a hundred persons. But the Iroquois were in wait for them. A large band of warriors had already made their way, through ice and snow, from their towns in Central New York. They surprised the Huron fishermen, surrounded them, and cut them in pieces without resistance,—tracking out the various parties of their victims, and hunting down fugitives with such persistency and skill, that, of all who had gone over to the main, the Jesuits knew of but one who escaped. [2] [1] "Mais le Printemps estant venu, les Iroquois nous furent encore plus cruels; et ce sont eux qui vrayement ont ruiné toutes nos esperances, et qui ont fait vn lieu d'horreur, vne terre de sang et de carnage, vn theatre de cruauté et vn sepulchre de carcasses décharnées par les langueurs d'vne longue famine, d'vn pa?s de benediction, d'vne terre de Sainteté et d'vn lieu qui n'auoit plus rien de barbare, depuis que le sang respandu pour son amour auoit rendu tout son peuple Chrestien."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 23. [2] "Le iour de l'Annonciation, vingt-cinquiesme de Mars, vne armée d'Iroquois ayans marché prez de deux cents lieu?s de pa?s, à trauers les glaces et les neges, trauersans les montagnes et les forests pleines d'horreur, surprirent au commencement de la nuit le camp de nos Chrestiens, et en firent vne cruelle boucherie. Il sembloit que le Ciel conduisit toutes leurs demarches et qu'ils eurent vn Ange pour guide: car ils diuiserent leurs troupes auec tant de bon-heur, qu'ils trouuerent en moins de deux iours, toutes les bandes de nos Chrestiens qui estoient dispersées ?a et là, esloignées les vnes des autres de six, sept et huit lieu?s, cent personnes en vn lieu, en vn autre cinquante; et mesme il y auoit quelques familles solitaires, qui s'estoient escartées en des lieux moins connus et hors de tout chemin. Chose estrange! de tout ce monde dissipé, vn seul homme s'eschappa, qui vint nous en apporter les nouuelles."—Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 23, 24. "My pen," writes Ragueneau, "has no ink black 413 enough to describe the fury of the Iroquois." Still the goadings of famine were relentless and irresistible. "It is said," adds the Father Superior, "that hunger will drive wolves from the forest. So, too, our starving Hurons were driven out of a town which had become an abode of horror. It was the end of Lent. Alas, if these poor Christians could have had but acorns and water to keep their fast upon! On Easter Day we caused them to make a general confession. On the following morning they went away, leaving us all their little possessions; and most of them declared publicly that they made us their heirs, knowing well that they were near their end. And, in fact, only a few days passed before we heard of the disaster which we had foreseen. These poor people fell into ambuscades of our Iroquois enemies. Some were killed on the spot; some were dragged into captivity; women and children were burned. A few made their escape, and spread dismay and panic everywhere. A week after, another band was overtaken by the same fate. Go where they would, they met with slaughter on all sides. Famine pursued them, or they encountered an enemy more cruel than cruelty itself; and, to crown their misery, they heard that two great armies of Iroquois were on the way to exterminate them.… Despair was universal." [3] [3] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 24. The Jesuits at St. Joseph knew not what course to take. The doom of their flock seemed inevitable. When dismay and despondency were at 414 their height, two of the principal Huron chiefs came to the fort, and asked an interview with Ragueneau and his companions. They told them that the Indians had held a council the night before, and resolved to abandon the island. Some would disperse in the most remote and inaccessible forests; others would take refuge in a distant spot, apparently the Grand Manitoulin Island; others would try to reach the Andastes; and others would seek safety in adoption and incorporation with the Iroquois themselves. "Take courage, brother," continued one of the chiefs, addressing Ragueneau. "You can save us, if you will but resolve on a bold step. Choose a place where you can gather us together, and prevent this dispersion of our people. Turn your eyes towards Quebec, and transport thither what is left of this ruined country. Do not wait till war and famine have destroyed us to the last man. We are in your hands. Death has taken from you more than ten thousand of us. If you wait longer, not one will remain alive; and then you will be sorry that you did not save those whom you might have snatched from danger, and who showed you the means of doing so. If you do as we wish, we will form a church under the protection of the fort at Quebec. Our faith will not be extinguished. The examples of the French and the Algonquins will encourage us in our duty, and their charity will relieve some of our misery. At least, we shall sometimes find a morsel of bread for our children, who so long have had 415 nothing but bitter roots and acorns to keep them alive." [4] [4] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 25. It appears from the MS. Journal des Supérieurs des Jésuites, that a plan of bringing the remnant of the Hurons to Quebec was discussed and approved by Lalemant and his associates, in a council held by them at that place in April. The Jesuits were deeply moved. They consulted together again and again, and prayed in turn during forty hours without ceasing, that their minds might be enlightened. At length they resolved to grant the petition of the two chiefs, and save the poor remnant of the Hurons, by leading them to an asylum where there was at least a hope of safety. Their resolution once taken, they pushed their preparations with all speed, lest the Iroquois might learn their purpose, and lie in wait to cut them off. Canoes were made ready, and on the tenth of June they began the voyage, with all their French followers and about three hundred Hurons. The Huron mission was abandoned. "It was not without tears," writes the Father Superior, "that we left the country of our hopes and our hearts, where our brethren had gloriously shed their blood." [5] The fleet of canoes held its melancholy way along the shores where two years before had been the seat of one of the chief savage communities of the continent, and where now all was a waste of death and desolation. Then they steered northward, along the eastern coast of the Georgian Bay, with its countless rocky islets; and everywhere they saw the traces of the Iroquois. When they reached Lake Nipissing, they found it deserted,—nothing 416 remaining of the Algonquins who dwelt on its shore, except the ashes of their burnt wigwams. A little farther on, there was a fort built of trees, where the Iroquois who made this desolation had spent the winter; and a league or two below, there was another similar fort. The River Ottawa was a solitude. The Algonquins of Allumette Island and the shores adjacent had all been killed or driven away, never again to return. "When I came up this great river, only thirteen years ago," writes Ragueneau, "I found it bordered with Algonquin tribes, who knew no God, and, in their infidelity, thought themselves gods on earth; for they had all that they desired, abundance of fish and game, and a prosperous trade with allied nations: besides, they were the terror of their enemies. But since they have embraced the Faith and adored the cross of Christ, He has given them a heavy share in this cross, and made them a prey to misery, torture, and a cruel death. In a word, they are a people swept from the face of the earth. Our only consolation is, that, as they died Christians, they have a part in the inheritance of the true children of God, who scourgeth every one whom He receiveth." [6] [5] Compare Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 288. [6] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1650, 27. These Algonquins of the Ottawa, though broken and dispersed, were not destroyed, as Ragueneau supposes. As the voyagers descended the river, they had a serious alarm. Their scouts came in, and reported that they had found fresh footprints of men in the forest. These proved, however, to be the tracks, 417 not of enemies, but of friends. In the preceding autumn Bressani had gone down to the French settlements with about twenty Hurons, and was now returning with them, and twice their number of armed Frenchmen, for the defence of the mission. His scouts had also been alarmed by discovering the footprints of Ragueneau's Indians; and for some time the two parties stood on their guard, each taking the other for an enemy. When at length they discovered their mistake, they met with embraces and rejoicing. Bressani and his Frenchmen had come too late. All was over with the Hurons and the Huron mission; and, as it was useless to go farther, they joined Ragueneau's party, and retraced their course for the settlements. A day or two before, they had had a sharp taste of the mettle of the enemy. Ten Iroquois warriors had spent the winter in a little fort of felled trees on the borders of the Ottawa, hunting for subsistence, and waiting to waylay some passing canoe of Hurons, Algonquins, or Frenchmen. Bressani's party outnumbered them six to one; but they resolved that it should not pass without a token of their presence. Late on a dark night, the French and Hurons lay encamped in the forest, sleeping about their fires. They had set guards: but these, it seems, were drowsy or negligent; for the ten Iroquois, watching their time, approached with the stealth of lynxes, and glided like shadows into the midst of the camp, where, by the dull glow of the smouldering fires, they could distinguish the recumbent figures of their victims. Suddenly they 418 screeched the war-whoop, and struck like lightning with their hatchets among the sleepers. Seven were killed before the rest could spring to their weapons. Bressani leaped up, and received on the instant three arrow-wounds in the head. The Iroquois were surrounded, and a desperate fight ensued in the dark. Six of them were killed on the spot, and two made prisoners; while the remaining two, breaking through the crowd, bounded out of the camp and escaped in the forest. The united parties soon after reached Montreal; but the Hurons refused to remain in a spot so exposed to the Iroquois. Accordingly, they all descended the St. Lawrence, and at length, on the twenty-eighth of July, reached Quebec. Here the Ursulines, the hospital nuns, and the inhabitants taxed their resources to the utmost to provide food and shelter for the exiled Hurons. Their good will exceeded their power; for food was scarce at Quebec, and the Jesuits themselves had to bear the chief burden of keeping the sufferers alive. [7] [7] Compare Juchereau, Histoire de l'H?tel-Dieu, 79, 80. But, if famine was an evil, the Iroquois were a far greater one; for, while the western nations of their confederacy were engrossed with the destruction of the Hurons, the Mohawks kept up incessant attacks on the Algonquins and the French. A party of Christian Indians, chiefly from Sillery, planned a stroke of retaliation, and set out for the Mohawk country, marching cautiously and sending forward scouts to scour the forest. One of these, a Huron, suddenly fell in with a large Iroquois war-party, 419 and, seeing that he could not escape, formed on the instant a villanous plan to save himself. He ran towards the enemy, crying out, that he had long been looking for them and was delighted to see them; that his nation, the Hurons, had come to an end; and that henceforth his country was the country of the Iroquois, where so many of his kinsmen and friends had been adopted. He had come, he declared, with no other thought than that of joining them, and turning Iroquois, as they had done. The Iroquois demanded if he had come alone. He answered, "No," and said, that, in order to accomplish his purpose, he had joined an Algonquin war-party who were in the woods not far off. The Iroquois, in great delight, demanded to be shown where they were. This Judas, as the Jesuits call him, at once complied; and the Algonquins were surprised by a sudden onset, and routed with severe loss. The treacherous Huron was well treated by the Iroquois, who adopted him into their nation. Not long after, he came to Canada, and, with a view, as it was thought, to some further treachery, rejoined the French. A sharp cross-questioning put him to confusion, and he presently confessed his guilt. He was sentenced to death; and the sentence was executed by one of his own countrymen, who split his head with a hatchet. [8] [8] Ragueneau, Relation, 1650, 30. In the course of the summer, the French at Three Rivers became aware that a band of Iroquois was prowling in the neighborhood, and sixty men went out to meet them. Far from retreating, the 420 Iroquois, who were about twenty-five in number, got out of their canoes, and took post, waist-deep in mud and water, among the tall rushes at the margin of the river. Here they fought stubbornly, and kept all the Frenchmen at bay. At length, finding themselves hard pressed, they entered their canoes again, and paddled off. The French rowed after them, and soon became separated in the chase; whereupon the Iroquois turned, and made desperate fight with the foremost, retreating again as soon as the others came up. This they repeated several times, and then made their escape, after killing a number of the best French soldiers. Their leader in this affair was a famous half-breed, known as the Flemish Bastard, who is styled by Ragueneau "an abomination of sin, and a monster produced between a heretic Dutch father and a pagan mother." In the forests far north of Three Rivers dwelt the tribe called the Atticamegues, or Nation of the White Fish. From their remote position, and the difficult nature of the intervening country, they thought themselves safe; but a band of Iroquois, marching on snow-shoes a distance of twenty days' journey northward from the St. Lawrence, fell upon one of their camps in the winter, and made a general butchery of the inmates. The tribe, however, still held its ground for a time, and, being all good Catholics, gave their missionary, Father Buteux, an urgent invitation to visit them in their own country. Buteux, who had long been stationed at Three Rivers, was in ill health, and for years had rarely been free from some form of bodily suffering. 421 Nevertheless, he acceded to their request, and, before the opening of spring, made a remarkable journey on snow-shoes into the depths of this frozen wilderness. [9] In the year following, he repeated the undertaking. With him were a large party of Atticamegues, and several Frenchmen. Game was exceedingly scarce, and they were forced by hunger to separate, a Huron convert and a Frenchman named Fontarabie remaining with the missionary. The snows had melted, and all the streams were swollen. The three travellers, in a small birch canoe, pushed their way up a turbulent river, where falls and rapids were so numerous, that many times daily they were forced to carry their bark vessel and their baggage through forests and thickets and over rocks and precipices. On the tenth of May, they made two such portages, and, soon after, reaching a third fall, again lifted their canoe from the water. They toiled through the naked forest, among the wet, black trees, over tangled roots, green, spongy mosses, mouldering leaves, and rotten, prostrate trunks, while the cataract foamed amidst the rocks hard by. The Indian led the way with the canoe on his head, while Buteux and the other Frenchman followed with the baggage. Suddenly they were set upon by a troop of Iroquois, who had crouched behind thickets, rocks, and fallen trees, to waylay them. The Huron was captured before he had time to fly. Buteux and the Frenchman tried to escape, but were instantly 422 shot down, the Jesuit receiving two balls in the breast. The Iroquois rushed upon them, mangled their bodies with tomahawks and swords, stripped them, and then flung them into the torrent. [10] [9] Iournal du Pere Iacques Buteux du Voyage qu'il a fait pour la Mission des Attikamegues. See Relation, 1651, 15. [10] Ragueneau, Relation, 1652, 2, 3. CHAPTER XXXII. 1650-1866. THE LAST OF THE HURONS. Fate of the Vanquished ? The Refugees of St. Jean Baptiste and St. Michel ? The Tobacco Nation and its Wanderings ? The Modern Wyandots ? The Biter Bit ? The Hurons at Quebec ? Notre-Dame de Lorette. Iroquois bullets and tomahawks had killed the Hurons by hundreds, but famine and disease had killed incomparably more. The miseries of the starving crowd on Isle St. Joseph had been shared in an equal degree by smaller bands, who had wintered in remote and secret retreats of the wilderness. Of those who survived that season of death, many were so weakened that they could not endure the hardships of a wandering life, which was new to them. The Hurons lived by agriculture: their fields and crops were destroyed, and they were so hunted from place to place that they could rarely till the soil. Game was very scarce; and, without agriculture, the country could support only a scanty and scattered population like that which maintained a struggling existence in the wilderness of the lower St. Lawrence. The mortality among the exiles was prodigious. 424 It is a matter of some interest to trace the fortunes of the shattered fragments of a nation once prosperous, and, in its own eyes and those of its neighbors, powerful and great. None were left alive within their ancient domain. Some had sought refuge among the Neutrals and the Eries, and shared the disasters which soon overwhelmed those tribes; others succeeded in reaching the Andastes; while the inhabitants of two towns, St. Michel and St. Jean Baptiste, had recourse to an expedient which seems equally strange and desperate, but which was in accordance with Indian practices. They contrived to open a communication with the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois, and promised to change their nationality and turn Senecas as the price of their lives. The victors accepted the proposal; and the inhabitants of these two towns, joined by a few other Hurons, migrated in a body to the Seneca country. They were not distributed among different villages, but were allowed to form a town by themselves, where they were afterwards joined by some prisoners of the Neutral Nation. They identified themselves with the Iroquois in all but religion,—holding so fast to their faith, that, eighteen years after, a Jesuit missionary found that many of them were still good Catholics. [1] [1] Compare Relation, 1651, 4; 1660, 14, 28; and 1670, 69. The Huron town among the Senecas was called Gandougaraé. Father Fremin was here in 1668, and gives an account of his visit in the Relation of 1670. The division of the Hurons called the Tobacco Nation, favored by their isolated position among 425 mountains, had held their ground longer than the rest; but at length they, too, were compelled to fly, together with such other Hurons as had taken refuge with them. They made their way northward, and settled on the Island of Michilimackinac, where they were joined by the Ottawas, who, with other Algonquins, had been driven by fear of the Iroquois from the western shores of Lake Huron and the banks of the River Ottawa. At Michilimackinac the Hurons and their allies were again attacked by the Iroquois, and, after remaining several years, they made another remove, and took possession of the islands at the mouth of the Green Bay of Lake Michigan. Even here their old enemy did not leave them in peace; whereupon they fortified themselves on the main-land, and afterwards migrated southward and westward. This brought them in contact with the Illinois, an Algonquin people, at that time very numerous, but who, like many other tribes at this epoch, were doomed to a rapid diminution from wars with other savage nations. Continuing their migration westward, the Hurons and Ottawas reached the Mississippi, where they fell in with the Sioux. They soon quarrelled with those fierce children of the prairie, who drove them from their country. They retreated to the south-western extremity of Lake Superior, and settled on Point Saint Esprit, or Shagwamigon Point, near the Islands of the Twelve Apostles. As the Sioux continued to harass them, they left this place about the year 1671, and returned to Michilimackinac, where they settled, 426 not on the island, but on the neighboring Point St. Ignace, at the northern extremity of the great peninsula of Michigan. The greater part of them afterwards removed thence to Detroit and Sandusky, where they lived under the name of Wyandots until within the present century, maintaining a marked influence over the surrounding Algonquins. They bore an active part, on the side of the French, in the war which ended in the reduction of Canada; and they were the most formidable enemies of the English in the Indian war under Pontiac. [2] The government of the United States at length removed them to reserves on the western frontier, where a remnant of them may still be found. Thus it appears that the Wyandots, whose name is so conspicuous in the history of our border wars, are descendants of the ancient Hurons, and chiefly of that portion of them called the Tobacco Nation. [3] [2] See "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac." [3] The migrations of this band of the Hurons may be traced by detached passages and incidental remarks in the Relations of 1654, 1660, 1667, 1670, 1671, and 1672. Nicolas Perrot, in his chapter, Deffaitte et Füitte des Hurons chassés de leur Pays, and in the chapter following, gives a long and rather confused account of their movements and adventures. See also La Poterie, Histoire de l'Amérique Septentrionale, II. 51-56. According to the Relation of 1670, the Hurons, when living at Shagwamigon Point, numbered about fifteen hundred souls. When Ragueneau and his party left Isle St. Joseph for Quebec, the greater number of the Hurons chose to remain. They took possession of the stone fort which the French had abandoned, and where, with reasonable vigilance, they could maintain themselves against attack. In the succeeding 427 autumn a small Iroquois war-party had the audacity to cross over to the island, and build a fort of felled trees in the woods. The Hurons attacked them; but the invaders made so fierce a defence, that they kept their assailants at bay, and at length retreated with little or no loss. Soon after, a much larger band of Onondaga Iroquois, approaching undiscovered, built a fort on the main-land, opposite the island, but concealed from sight in the forest. Here they waited to waylay any party of Hurons who might venture ashore. A Huron war chief, named étienne Annaotaha, whose life is described as a succession of conflicts and adventures, and who is said to have been always in luck, landed with a few companions, and fell into an ambuscade of the Iroquois. He prepared to defend himself, when they called out to him, that they came not as enemies, but as friends, and that they brought wampum-belts and presents to persuade the Hurons to forget the past, go back with them to their country, become their adopted countrymen, and live with them as one nation. étienne suspected treachery, but concealed his distrust, and advanced towards the Iroquois with an air of the utmost confidence. They received him with open arms, and pressed him to accept their invitation; but he replied, that there were older and wiser men among the Hurons, whose counsels all the people followed, and that they ought to lay the proposal before them. He proceeded to advise them to keep him as a hostage, and send over his companions, with some of their chiefs, to open the negotiation. 428 His apparent frankness completely deceived them; and they insisted that he himself should go to the Huron village, while his companions remained as hostages. He set out accordingly with three of the principal Iroquois. When he reached the village, he gave the whoop of one who brings good tidings, and proclaimed with a loud voice that the hearts of their enemies had changed, that the Iroquois would become their countrymen and brothers, and that they should exchange their miseries for a life of peace and plenty in a fertile and prosperous land. The whole Huron population, full of joyful excitement, crowded about him and the three envoys, who were conducted to the principal lodge, and feasted on the best that the village could supply. étienne seized the opportunity to take aside four or five of the principal chiefs, and secretly tell them his suspicions that the Iroquois were plotting to compass their destruction under cover of overtures of peace; and he proposed that they should meet treachery with treachery. He then explained his plan, which was highly approved by his auditors, who begged him to charge himself with the execution of it. étienne now caused criers to proclaim through the village that every one should get ready to emigrate in a few days to the country of their new friends. The squaws began their preparations at once, and all was bustle and alacrity; for the Hurons themselves were no less deceived than were the Iroquois envoys. During one or two succeeding days, many messages 429 and visits passed between the Hurons and the Iroquois, whose confidence was such, that thirty-seven of their best warriors at length came over in a body to the Huron village. étienne's time had come. He and the chiefs who were in the secret gave the word to the Huron warriors, who, at a signal, raised the war-whoop, rushed upon their visitors, and cut them to pieces. One of them, who lingered for a time, owned before he died that étienne's suspicions were just, and that they had designed nothing less than the massacre or capture of all the Hurons. Three of the Iroquois, immediately before the slaughter began, had received from étienne a warning of their danger in time to make their escape. The year before, he had been captured, with Brébeuf and Lalemant, at the town of St. Louis, and had owed his life to these three warriors, to whom he now paid back the debt of gratitude. They carried tidings of what had befallen to their countrymen on the main-land, who, aghast at the catastrophe, fled homeward in a panic. [4] [4] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1651, 5, 6. Le Mercier, in the Relation of 1654, preserves the speech of a Huron chief, in which he speaks of this affair, and adds some particulars not mentioned by Ragueneau. He gives thirty-four as the number killed. Here was a sweet morsel of vengeance. The miseries of the Hurons were lighted up with a brief gleam of joy; but it behooved them to make a timely retreat from their island before the Iroquois came to exact a bloody retribution. Towards spring, while the lake was still frozen, many 430 of them escaped on the ice, while another party afterwards followed in canoes. A few, who had neither strength to walk nor canoes to transport them, perforce remained behind, and were soon massacred by the Iroquois. The fugitives directed their course to the Grand Manitoulin Island, where they remained for a short time, and then, to the number of about four hundred, descended the Ottawa, and rejoined their countrymen who had gone to Quebec the year before. These united parties, joined from time to time by a few other fugitives, formed a settlement on land belonging to the Jesuits, near the south-western extremity of the Isle of Orleans, immediately below Quebec. Here the Jesuits built a fort, like that on Isle St. Joseph, with a chapel, and a small house for the missionaries, while the bark dwellings of the Hurons were clustered around the protecting ramparts. [5] Tools and seeds were given them, and they were encouraged to cultivate the soil. Gradually they rallied from their dejection, and the mission settlement was beginning to wear an appearance of thrift, when, in 1656, the Iroquois made a descent upon them, and carried off a large number of captives, under the very cannon of Quebec; the French not daring to fire upon the invaders, lest they should take revenge 431 upon the Jesuits who were at that time in their country. This calamity was, four years after, followed by another, when the best of the Huron warriors, including their leader, the crafty and valiant étienne Annaotaha, were slain, fighting side by side with the French, in the desperate conflict of the Long Sault. [6] [5] The site of the fort was the estate now known as "La Terre du Fort," near the landing of the steam ferry. In 1856, Mr. N. H. Bowen, a resident near the spot, in making some excavations, found a solid stone wall five feet thick, which, there can be little doubt, was that of the work in question. This wall was originally crowned with palisades. See Bowen, Historical Sketch of the Isle of Orleans, 25. [6] Relation, 1660 (anonymous), 14. The attenuated colony, replenished by some straggling bands of the same nation, and still numbering several hundred persons, was removed to Quebec after the inroad in 1656, and lodged in a square inclosure of palisades close to the fort. [7] Here they remained about ten years, when, the danger of the times having diminished, they were again removed to a place called Notre-Dame de Foy, now St. Foi, three or four miles west of Quebec. Six years after, when the soil was impoverished and the wood in the neighborhood exhausted, they again changed their abode, and, under the auspices of the Jesuits, who owned the land, settled at Old Lorette, nine miles from Quebec. [7] In a plan of Quebec of 1660, the "Fort des Hurons" is laid down on a spot adjoining the north side of the present Place d'Armes. Chaumonot was at this time their missionary. It may be remembered that he had professed special devotion to Our Lady of Loretto, who, in his boyhood, had cured him, as he believed, of a distressing malady. [8] He had always cherished the idea of building a chapel in honor of her in Canada, 432 after the model of the Holy House of Loretto,—which, as all the world knows, is the house wherein Saint Joseph dwelt with his virgin spouse, and which angels bore through the air from the Holy Land to Italy, where it remains an object of pilgrimage to this day. Chaumonot opened his plan to his brother Jesuits, who were delighted with it, and the chapel was begun at once, not without the intervention of miracle to aid in raising the necessary funds. It was built of brick, like its original, of which it was an exact facsimile; and it stood in the centre of a quadrangle, the four sides of which were formed by the bark dwellings of the Hurons, ranged with perfect order in straight lines. Hither came many pilgrims from Quebec and more distant settlements, and here Our Lady granted to her suppliants, says Chaumonot, many miraculous favors, insomuch that "it would require an entire book to describe them all." [9] [8] See ante, (p. 102). [9] "Les graces qu'on y obtient par l'entremise de la Mère de Dieu vont jusqu'au miracle. Comme il faudroit composer un livre entier pour décrire toutes ces faveurs extraordinaires, je n'en rapporterai que deux, ayant été témoin oculaire de l'une et propre sujet de l'autre."—Vie, 95. The removal from Notre-Dame de Foy took place at the end of 1673, and the chapel was finished in the following year. Compare Vie de Chaumonot with Dablon, Relation, 1672-73, p. 21; and Ibid., Relation 1673-79, p. 259. But the Hurons were not destined to remain permanently even here; for, before the end of the century, they removed to a place four miles distant, now called New Lorette, or Indian Lorette. It was a wild spot, covered with the primitive forest, and seamed by a deep and tortuous ravine, where 433 the St. Charles foams, white as a snow-drift, over the black ledges, and where the sunlight struggles through matted boughs of the pine and fir, to bask for brief moments on the mossy rocks or flash on the hurrying waters. On a plateau beside the torrent, another chapel was built to Our Lady, and another Huron town sprang up; and here, to this day, the tourist finds the remnant of a lost people, harmless weavers of baskets and sewers of moccasins, the Huron blood fast bleaching out of them, as, with every generation, they mingle and fade away in the French population around. [10] [10] An interesting account of a visit to Indian Lorette in 1721 will be found in the Journal Historique of Charlevoix. Kalm, in his Travels in North America, describes its condition in 1749. See also Le Beau, Aventures, I. 103; who, however, can hardly be regarded as an authority. CHAPTER XXXIII. 1650-1670. THE DESTROYERS. Iroquois Ambition ? Its Victims ? The Fate of the Neutrals ? The Fate of the Eries ? The War with the Andastes ? Supremacy of the Iroquois It was well for the European colonies, above all for those of England, that the wisdom of the Iroquois was but the wisdom of savages. Their sagacity is past denying; it showed itself in many ways; but it was not equal to a comprehension of their own situation and that of their race. Could they have read their destiny, and curbed their mad ambition, they might have leagued with themselves four great communities of kindred lineage, to resist the encroachments of civilization, and oppose a barrier of fire to the spread of the young colonies of the East. But their organization and their intelligence were merely the instruments of a blind frenzy, which impelled them to destroy those whom they might have made their allies in a common cause. Of the four kindred communities, two at least, 435 the Hurons and the Neutrals, were probably superior in numbers to the Iroquois. Either one of these, with union and leadership, could have held its ground against them, and the two united could easily have crippled them beyond the power of doing mischief. But these so-called nations were mere aggregations of villages and families, with nothing that deserved to be called a government. They were very liable to panics, because the part attacked by an enemy could never rely with confidence on prompt succor from the rest; and when once broken, they could not be rallied, because they had no centre around which to gather. The Iroquois, on the other hand, had an organization with which the ideas and habits of several generations were interwoven, and they had also sagacious leaders for peace and war. They discussed all questions of policy with the coolest deliberation, and knew how to turn to profit even imperfections in their plan of government which seemed to promise only weakness and discord. Thus, any nation, or any large town, of their confederacy, could make a separate war or a separate peace with a foreign nation, or any part of it. Some member of the league, as, for example, the Cayugas, would make a covenant of friendship with the enemy, and, while the infatuated victims were thus lulled into a delusive security, the war-parties of the other nations, often joined by the Cayuga warriors, would overwhelm them by a sudden onset. But it was not by their craft, nor by their organization,—which for military purposes was wretchedly feeble,—that 436 this handful of savages gained a bloody supremacy. They carried all before them, because they were animated throughout, as one man, by the same audacious pride and insatiable rage for conquest. Like other Indians, they waged war on a plan altogether democratic,—that is, each man fought or not, as he saw fit; and they owed their unity and vigor of action to the homicidal frenzy that urged them all alike. The Neutral Nation had taken no part, on either side, in the war of extermination against the Hurons; and their towns were sanctuaries where either of the contending parties might take asylum. On the other hand, they made fierce war on their western neighbors, and, a few years before, destroyed, with atrocious cruelties, a large fortified town of the Nation of Fire. [1] Their turn was now come, and their victims found fit avengers; for no sooner 437 were the Hurons broken up and dispersed, than the Iroquois, without waiting to take breath, turned their fury on the Neutrals. At the end of the autumn of 1650, they assaulted and took one of their chief towns, said to have contained at the time more than sixteen hundred men, besides women and children; and early in the following spring, they took another town. The slaughter was prodigious, and the victors drove back troops of captives for butchery or adoption. It was the death-blow of the Neutrals. They abandoned their corn-fields and villages in the wildest terror, and dispersed themselves abroad in forests, which could not yield sustenance to such a multitude. They perished by thousands, and from that time forth the nation ceased to exist. [2] [1] "Last summer," writes Lalemant in 1643, "two thousand warriors of the Neutral Nation attacked a town of the Nation of Fire, well fortified with a palisade, and defended by nine hundred warriors. They took it after a siege of ten days; killed many on the spot; and made eight hundred prisoners, men, women, and children. After burning seventy of the best warriors, they put out the eyes of the old men, and cut away their lips, and then left them to drag out a miserable existence. Behold the scourge that is depopulating all this country!"—Relation des Hurons, 1644, 98. The Assistaeronnons, Atsistaehonnons, Mascoutins, or Nation of Fire (more correctly, perhaps, Nation of the Prairie), were a very numerous Algonquin people of the West, speaking the same language as the Sacs and Foxes. In the map of Sanson, they are placed in the southern part of Michigan; and according to the Relation of 1658, they had thirty towns. They were a stationary, and in some measure an agricultural people. They fled before their enemies to the neighborhood of Fox River in Wisconsin, where they long remained. Frequent mention of them will be found in the later Relations, and in contemporary documents. They are now extinct as a tribe. [2] Ragueneau, Relation, 1651, 4. In the unpublished journal kept by the Superior of the Jesuits at Quebec, it is said, under date of April, 1651, that news had just come from Montreal, that, in the preceding autumn, fifteen hundred Iroquois had taken a Neutral town; that the Neutrals had afterwards attacked them, and killed two hundred of their warriors; and that twelve hundred Iroquois had again invaded the Neutral country to take their revenge. Lafitau, M?urs des Sauvages, II. 176, gives, on the authority of Father Julien Garnier, a singular and improbable account of the origin of the war. An old chief, named Kenjockety, who claimed descent from an adopted prisoner of the Neutral Nation, was recently living among the Senecas of Western New York. During two or three succeeding years, the Iroquois contented themselves with harassing the French and Algonquins; but in 1653 they made treaties of peace, each of the five nations for itself, and the colonists and their red allies had an interval of rest. In the following May, an Onondaga orator, on a peace visit to Montreal, said, in a speech 438 to the Governor, "Our young men will no more fight the French; but they are too warlike to stay at home, and this summer we shall invade the country of the Eries. The earth trembles and quakes in that quarter; but here all remains calm." [3] Early in the autumn, Father Le Moyne, who had taken advantage of the peace to go on a mission to the Onondagas, returned with the tidings that the Iroquois were all on fire with this new enterprise, and were about to march against the Eries with eighteen hundred warriors. [4] [3] Le Mercier, Relation, 1654, 9. [4] Ibid., 10. Le Moyne, in his interesting journal of his mission, repeatedly alludes to their preparations. The occasion of this new war is said to have been as follows. The Eries, who it will be remembered dwelt on the south of the lake named after them, had made a treaty of peace with the Senecas, and in the preceding year had sent a deputation of thirty of their principal men to confirm it. While they were in the great Seneca town, it happened that one of that nation was killed in a casual quarrel with an Erie; whereupon his countrymen rose in a fury, and murdered the thirty deputies. Then ensued a brisk war of reprisals, in which not only the Senecas, but the other Iroquois nations, took part. The Eries captured a famous Onondaga chief, and were about to burn him, when he succeeded in convincing them of the wisdom of a course of conciliation; and they resolved to give him to the sister of one of the murdered deputies, to take the place of her lost brother. The sister, by Indian law, had 439 it in her choice to receive him with a fraternal embrace or to burn him; but, though she was absent at the time, no one doubted that she would choose the gentler alternative. Accordingly, he was clothed in gay attire, and all the town fell to feasting in honor of his adoption. In the midst of the festivity, the sister returned. To the amazement of the Erie chiefs, she rejected with indignation their proffer of a new brother, declared that she would be revenged for her loss, and insisted that the prisoner should forthwith be burned. The chiefs remonstrated in vain, representing the danger in which such a procedure would involve the nation: the female fury was inexorable; and the unfortunate prisoner, stripped of his festal robes, was bound to the stake, and put to death. [5] He warned his tormentors with his last breath, that they were burning not only him, but the whole Erie nation; since his countrymen would take a fiery vengeance for his fate. His words proved true; for no sooner was his story spread abroad among the Iroquois, than the confederacy resounded with war-songs from end to end, and the warriors took the field under their two great war-chiefs. Notwithstanding Le Moyne's report, their number, according to the Iroquois account, did not exceed twelve hundred. [6] [5] De Quen, Relation, 1656, 30. [6] This was their statement to Chaumonot and Dablon, at Onondaga, in November of this year. They added, that the number of the Eries was between three and four thousand, (Journal des PP. Chaumonot et Dablon, in Relation, 1656, 18.) In the narrative of De Quen (Ibid., 30, 31), based, of course, on Iroquois reports, the Iroquois force is also set down at twelve hundred, but that of the Eries is reduced to between two and three thousand warriors. Even this may safely be taken as an exaggeration. Though the Eries had no fire-arms, they used poisoned arrows with great effect, discharging them, it is said, with surprising rapidity. They embarked in canoes on the lake. At their approach the Eries fell back, withdrawing into the 440 forests towards the west, till they were gathered into one body, when, fortifying themselves with palisades and felled trees, they awaited the approach of the invaders. By the lowest estimate, the Eries numbered two thousand warriors, besides women and children. But this is the report of the Iroquois, who were naturally disposed to exaggerate the force of their enemies. They approached the Erie fort, and two of their chiefs, dressed like Frenchmen, advanced and called on those within to surrender. One of them had lately been baptized by Le Moyne; and he shouted to the Eries, that, if they did not yield in time, they were all dead men, for the Master of Life was on the side of the Iroquois. The Eries answered with yells of derision. "Who is this master of your lives?" they cried; "our hatchets and our right arms are the masters of ours." The Iroquois rushed to the assault, but were met with a shower of poisoned arrows, which killed and wounded many of them, and drove the rest back. They waited awhile, and then attacked again with unabated mettle. This time, they carried their bark canoes over their heads like huge shields, to protect them from the storm of arrows; then planting them upright, and mounting them by the cross-bars like ladders, scaled the barricade with 441 such impetuous fury that the Eries were thrown into a panic. Those escaped who could; but the butchery was frightful, and from that day the Eries as a nation were no more. The victors paid dear for their conquest. Their losses were so heavy that they were forced to remain for two months in the Erie country, to bury their dead and nurse their wounded. [7] [7] De Quen, Relation, 1656, 31. The Iroquois, it seems, afterwards made other expeditions, to finish their work. At least, they told Chaumonot and Dablon, in the autumn of this year, that they meant to do so in the following spring. It seems, that, before attacking the great fort of the Eries, the Iroquois had made a promise to worship the new God of the French, if He would give them the victory. This promise, and the success which followed, proved of great advantage to the mission. Various traditions are extant among the modern remnant of the Iroquois concerning the war with the Eries. They agree in little beyond the fact of the existence and destruction of that people. Indeed, Indian traditions are very rarely of any value as historical evidence. One of these stories, told me some years ago by a very intelligent Iroquois of the Cayuga Nation, is a striking illustration of Iroquois ferocity. It represents, that, the night after the great battle, the forest was lighted up with more than a thousand fires, at each of which an Erie was burning alive. It differs from the historical accounts in making the Eries the aggressors. One enemy of their own race remained,—the Andastes. This nation appears to have been inferior in numbers to either the Hurons, the Neutrals, or the Eries; but they cost their assailants more trouble than all these united. The Mohawks seem at first to have borne the brunt of the Andaste war; and, between the years 1650 and 1660, they were so roughly handled by these stubborn adversaries, that they were reduced from the height of audacious insolence to the depths of dejection. [8] The remaining 442 four nations of the Iroquois league now took up the quarrel, and fared scarcely better than the Mohawks. In the spring of 1662, eight hundred of their warriors set out for the Andaste country, to strike a decisive blow; but when they reached the great town of their enemies, they saw that they had received both aid and counsel from the neighboring Swedish colonists. The town was fortified by a double palisade, flanked by two bastions, on which, it is said, several small pieces of cannon were mounted. Clearly, it was not to be carried by assault, as the invaders had promised themselves. Their only hope was in treachery; and, accordingly, twenty-five of their warriors gained entrance, on pretence of settling the terms of a peace. Here, again, ensued a grievous disappointment; for the Andastes seized them all, built high scaffolds visible from without, and tortured them to death in sight of their countrymen, who thereupon decamped in miserable discomfiture. [9] [8] Relation, 1660, 6 (anonymous). The Mohawks also suffered great reverses about this time at the hands of their Algonquin neighbors, the Mohicans. [9] Lalemant, Relation, 1663, 10. The Senecas, by far the most numerous of the five Iroquois nations, now found themselves attacked in turn,—and this, too, at a time when they were full of despondency at the ravages of the small-pox. The French reaped a profit from their misfortunes; for the disheartened savages made them overtures of peace, and begged that they would settle in their country, teach them to fortify their towns, supply them with arms and ammunition, and bring "black-robes" to show them the road to Heaven. [10] [10] Lalemant, Relation, 1664, 33. 443 The Andaste war became a war of inroads and skirmishes, under which the weaker party gradually wasted away, though it sometimes won laurels at the expense of its adversary. Thus, in 1672, a party of twenty Senecas and forty Cayugas went against the Andastes. They were at a considerable distance the one from the other, the Cayugas being in advance, when the Senecas were set upon by about sixty young Andastes, of the class known as "Burnt-Knives," or "Soft-Metals," because as yet they had taken no scalps. Indeed, they are described as mere boys, fifteen or sixteen years old. They killed one of the Senecas, captured another, and put the rest to flight; after which, flushed with their victory, they attacked the Cayugas with the utmost fury, and routed them completely, killing eight of them, and wounding twice that number, who, as is reported by the Jesuit then in the Cayuga towns, came home half dead with gashes of knives and hatchets. [11] "May God preserve the Andastes," exclaims the Father, "and prosper their arms, that the Iroquois may be humbled, and we and our missions left in peace!" "None but they," he elsewhere adds, "can curb the pride of the Iroquois." The only strength of the Andastes, however, was in their courage: for at this time they were reduced to three hundred fighting men; and about the year 1675 they were finally overborne by the Senecas. [12] Yet they were not wholly destroyed; for a remnant 444 of this valiant people continued to subsist, under the name of Conestogas, for nearly a century, until, in 1763, they were butchered, as already mentioned, by the white ruffians known as the "Paxton Boys." [13] [11] Dablon, Relation, 1672, 24. [12] état Présent des Missions, in Relations Inédites, II. 44. Relation, 1676, 2. This is one of the Relations printed by Mr. Lenox. [13] "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," Chap. XXIV. Compare Shea, in Historical Magazine, II. 297. The bloody triumphs of the Iroquois were complete. They had "made a solitude, and called it peace." All the surrounding nations of their own lineage were conquered and broken up, while neighboring Algonquin tribes were suffered to exist only on condition of paying a yearly tribute of wampum. The confederacy remained a wedge thrust between the growing colonies of France and England. But what was the state of the conquerors? Their triumphs had cost them dear. As early as the year 1660, a writer, evidently well-informed, reports that their entire force had been reduced to twenty-two hundred warriors, while of these not more than twelve hundred were of the true Iroquois stock. The rest was a medley of adopted prisoners,—Hurons, Neutrals, Eries, and Indians of various Algonquin tribes. [14] Still their aggressive 445 spirit was unsubdued. These incorrigible warriors pushed their murderous raids to Hudson's Bay, Lake Superior, the Mississippi, and the Tennessee; they were the tyrants of all the intervening wilderness; and they remained, for more than half a century, a terror and a scourge to the afflicted colonists of New France. [14] Relation, 1660, 6, 7 (anonymous). Le Jeune says, "Their victories have so depopulated their towns, that there are more foreigners in them than natives. At Onondaga there are Indians of seven different nations permanently established; and, among the Senecas, of no less than eleven." (Relation, 1657, 34.) These were either adopted prisoners, or Indians who had voluntarily joined the Iroquois to save themselves from their hostility. They took no part in councils, but were expected to join war-parties, though they were usually excused from fighting against their former countrymen. The condition of female prisoners was little better than that of slaves, and those to whom they were assigned often killed them on the slightest pique. CHAPTER XXXIV. THE END. Failure of the Jesuits ? What their Success would have involved ? Future of the Mission With the fall of the Hurons, fell the best hope of the Canadian mission. They, and the stable and populous communities around them, had been the rude material from which the Jesuit would have formed his Christian empire in the wilderness; but, one by one, these kindred peoples were uprooted and swept away, while the neighboring Algonquins, to whom they had been a bulwark, were involved with them in a common ruin. The land of promise was turned to a solitude and a desolation. There was still work in hand, it is true,—vast regions to explore, and countless heathens to snatch from perdition; but these, for the most part, were remote and scattered hordes, from whose conversion it was vain to look for the same solid and decisive results. 447 In a measure, the occupation of the Jesuits was gone. Some of them went home, "well resolved," writes the Father Superior, "to return to the combat at the first sound of the trumpet;" [1] while of those who remained, about twenty in number, several soon fell victims to famine, hardship, and the Iroquois. A few years more, and Canada ceased to be a mission; political and commercial interests gradually became ascendant, and the story of Jesuit propagandism was interwoven with her civil and military annals. [1] Lettre de Lalemant au R. P. Provincial (Relation, 1650, 48). Here, then, closes this wild and bloody act of the great drama of New France; and now let the curtain fall, while we ponder its meaning. The cause of the failure of the Jesuits is obvious. The guns and tomahawks of the Iroquois were the ruin of their hopes. Could they have curbed or converted those ferocious bands, it is little less than certain that their dream would have become a reality. Savages tamed—not civilized, for that was scarcely possible—would have been distributed in communities through the valleys of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, ruled by priests in the interest of Catholicity and of France. Their habits of agriculture would have been developed, and their instincts of mutual slaughter repressed. The swift decline of the Indian population would have been arrested; and it would have been made, through the fur-trade, a source of prosperity to New France. Unmolested by Indian enemies, and fed by a rich commerce, she would have put forth a vigorous growth. True to her far-reaching and adventurous genius, she would have occupied the West with 448 traders, settlers, and garrisons, and cut up the virgin wilderness into fiefs, while as yet the colonies of England were but a weak and broken line along the shore of the Atlantic; and when at last the great conflict came, England and Liberty would have been confronted, not by a depleted antagonist, still feeble from the exhaustion of a starved and persecuted infancy, but by an athletic champion of the principles of Richelieu and of Loyola. Liberty may thank the Iroquois, that, by their insensate fury, the plans of her adversary were brought to nought, and a peril and a woe averted from her future. They ruined the trade which was the life-blood of New France; they stopped the current of her arteries, and made all her early years a misery and a terror. Not that they changed her destinies. The contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism was never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete. Populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile to freedom of thought, would have remained a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the way of that majestic experiment of which America is the field. The Jesuits saw their hopes struck down; and their faith, though not shaken, was sorely tried. The Providence of God seemed in their eyes dark and inexplicable; but, from the stand-point of Liberty, that Providence is clear as the sun at noon. Meanwhile let those who have prevailed yield due 449 honor to the defeated. Their virtues shine amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent. But now new scenes succeed, and other actors enter on the stage, a hardy and valiant band, moulded to endure and dare,—the Discoverers of the Great West. Vol 3 PREFACE OF THE ELEVENTH EDITION. When the earlier editions of this book were published, I was aware of the existence of a collection of documents relating to La Salle, and containing important material to which I had not succeeded in gaining access. This collection was in possession of M. Pierre Margry, director of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies at Paris, and was the result of more than thirty years of research. With rare assiduity and zeal, M. Margry had explored not only the vast depository with which he has been officially connected from youth, and of which he is now the chief, but also the other public archives of France, and many private collections in Paris and the provinces. The object of his search was to throw light on the career and achievements of French explorers, and, above all, of La Salle. A collection of extraordinary richness grew gradually upon his hands. In the course of [Pg viii]my own inquiries, I owed much to his friendly aid; but his collections, as a whole, remained inaccessible, since he naturally wished to be the first to make known the results of his labors. An attempt to induce Congress to furnish him with the means of printing documents so interesting to American history was made in 1870 and 1871, by Henry Harrisse, Esq., aided by the American minister at Paris; but it unfortunately failed. In the summer and autumn of 1872, I had numerous interviews with M. Margry, and at his desire undertook to try to induce some American bookseller to publish the collection. On returning to the United States, I accordingly made an arrangement with Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., of Boston, by which they agreed to print the papers if a certain number of subscriptions should first be obtained. The condition proved very difficult; and it became clear that the best hope of success lay in another appeal to Congress. This was made in the following winter, in conjunction with Hon. E. B. Washburne; Colonel Charles Whittlesey, of Cleveland; O. H. Marshall, Esq., of Buffalo; and other gentlemen interested in early American history. The attempt succeeded. Congress made an appropriation [Pg ix] for the purchase of five hundred copies of the work, to be printed at Paris, under direction of M. Margry; and the three volumes devoted to La Salle are at length before the public. Of the papers contained in them which I had not before examined, the most interesting are the letters of La Salle, found in the original by M. Margry, among the immense accumulations of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies and the Bibliothèque Nationale. The narrative of La Salle's companion, Joutel, far more copious than the abstract printed in 1713, under the title of "Journal Historique," also deserves special mention. These, with other fresh material in these three volumes, while they add new facts and throw new light on the character of La Salle, confirm nearly every statement made in the first edition of the Discovery of the Great West. The only exception of consequence relates to the causes of La Salle's failure to find the mouth of the Mississippi in 1684, and to the conduct, on that occasion, of the naval commander, Beaujeu. This edition is revised throughout, and in part rewritten with large additions. A map of the country traversed by the explorers is also added. The name of La Salle is placed on the titlepage, [Pg x] as seems to be demanded by his increased prominence in the narrative of which he is the central figure. Boston, 10 December, 1878. Note.—The title of M. Margry's printed collection is Découvertes et établissements des Fran?ais dans l'Ouest et dans le Sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale (1614-1754), Mémoires et Documents originaux." I., II., III. Besides the three volumes relating to La Salle, there will be two others, relating to other explorers. In accordance with the agreement with Congress, an independent edition will appear in France, with an introduction setting forth the circumstances of the publication. PREFACE OF THE FIRST EDITION. The discovery of the "Great West," or the valleys of the Mississippi and the Lakes, is a portion of our history hitherto very obscure. Those magnificent regions were revealed to the world through a series of daring enterprises, of which the motives and even the incidents have been but partially and superficially known. The chief actor in them wrote much, but printed nothing; and the published writings of his associates stand wofully in need of interpretation from the unpublished documents which exist, but which have not heretofore been used as material for history. This volume attempts to supply the defect. Of the large amount of wholly new material employed in it, by far the greater part is drawn from the various public archives of France, and the rest from private sources. The discovery of many of these documents is due to the indefatigable research of M. Pierre Margry, assistant [Pg xii] director of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies at Paris, whose labors as an investigator of the maritime and colonial history of France can be appreciated only by those who have seen their results. In the department of American colonial history, these results have been invaluable; for, besides several private collections made by him, he rendered important service in the collection of the French portion of the Brodhead documents, selected and arranged the two great series of colonial papers ordered by the Canadian government, and prepared with vast labor analytical indexes of these and of supplementary documents in the French archives, as well as a copious index of the mass of papers relating to Louisiana. It is to be hoped that the valuable publications on the maritime history of France which have appeared from his pen are an earnest of more extended contributions in future. The late President Sparks, some time after the publication of his Life of La Salle, caused a collection to be made of documents relating to that explorer, with the intention of incorporating them in a future edition. This intention was never carried into effect, and the documents were never used. With the liberality which always distinguished him, he placed them at my [Pg xiii] disposal, and this privilege has been kindly continued by Mrs. Sparks. Abbé Faillon, the learned author of "La Colonie Fran?aise en Canada," has sent me copies of various documents found by him, including family papers of La Salle. Among others who in various ways have aided my inquiries are Dr. John Paul, of Ottawa, Ill.; Count Adolphe de Circourt, and M. Jules Marcou, of Paris; M. A. Gérin Lajoie, Assistant Librarian of the Canadian Parliament; M. J. M. Le Moine, of Quebec; General Dix, Minister of the United States at the Court of France; O. H. Marshall, of Buffalo; J. G. Shea, of New York; Buckingham Smith, of St. Augustine; and Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, of Boston. The smaller map contained in the book is a portion of the manuscript map of Franquelin, of which an account will be found in the Appendix. The next volume of the series will be devoted to the efforts of Monarchy and Feudalism under Louis XIV. to establish a permanent power on this continent, and to the stormy career of Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac. Boston, 16 September, 1869. INTRODUCTION The Spaniards discovered the Mississippi. De Soto was buried beneath its waters; and it was down its muddy current that his followers fled from the Eldorado of their dreams, transformed to a wilderness of misery and death. The discovery was never used, and was well-nigh forgotten. On early Spanish maps, the Mississippi is often indistinguishable from other affluents of the Gulf. A century passed after De Soto's journeyings in the South, before a French explorer reached a northern tributary of the great river. This was Jean Nicollet, interpreter at Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence. He had been some twenty years in Canada, had lived among the savage Algonquins of Allumette Island, and spent eight or nine years among the Nipissings, on the lake which bears their name. Here he became an Indian in all [Pg 4] his habits, but remained, nevertheless, a zealous Catholic, and returned to civilization at last because he could not live without the sacraments. Strange stories were current among the Nipissings of a people without hair or beard, who came from the West to trade with a tribe beyond the Great Lakes. Who could doubt that these strangers were Chinese or Japanese? Such tales may well have excited Nicollet's curiosity; and when, in 1635, or possibly in 1638, he was sent as an ambassador to the tribe in question, he would not have been surprised if on arriving he had found a party of mandarins among them. Perhaps it was with a view to such a contingency that he provided himself, as a dress of ceremony, with a robe of Chinese damask embroidered with birds and flowers. The tribe to which he was sent was that of the Winnebagoes, living near the head of the Green Bay of Lake Michigan. They had come to blows with the Hurons, allies of the French; and Nicollet was charged to negotiate a peace. When he approached the Winnebago town, he sent one of his Indian attendants to announce his coming, put on his robe of damask, and advanced to meet the expectant crowd with a pistol in each hand. The squaws and children fled, screaming that it was a manito, or spirit, armed with thunder and lightning; but the chiefs and warriors regaled him with so bountiful a hospitality that a hundred and twenty beavers were devoured at a single feast. From the Winnebagoes, he passed westward, ascended Fox [Pg 5] River, crossed to the Wisconsin, and descended it so far that, as he reported on his return, in three days more he would have reached the sea. The truth seems to be that he mistook the meaning of his Indian guides, and that the "great water" to which he was so near was not the sea, but the Mississippi. It has been affirmed that one Colonel Wood, of Virginia, reached a branch of the Mississippi as early as the year 1654, and that about 1670 a certain Captain Bolton penetrated to the river itself. Neither statement is sustained by sufficient evidence. It is further affirmed that, in 1678, a party from New England crossed the Mississippi, reached New Mexico, and, returning, reported their discoveries to the authorities of Boston,—a story without proof or probability. Meanwhile, French Jesuits and fur-traders pushed deeper and deeper into the wilderness of the northern lakes. In 1641, Jogues and Raymbault preached the Faith to a concourse of Indians at the outlet of Lake Superior. Then came the havoc and desolation of the Iroquois war, and for years farther exploration was arrested. In 1658-59 Pierre Esprit Radisson, a Frenchman of St. Malo, and his brother-in-law, Médard Chouart des Groseilliers, penetrated the regions beyond Lake Superior, and roamed westward till, as Radisson declares, they reached what was called the Forked River, "because it has two branches, the one towards the west, the other towards the south, which, we believe, runs towards Mexico,"—which seems to point to the [Pg 6] Mississippi and its great confluent the Missouri. Two years later, the aged Jesuit Ménard attempted to plant a mission on the southern shore of Lake Superior, but perished in the forest by famine or the tomahawk. Allouez succeeded him, explored a part of Lake Superior, and heard, in his turn, of the Sioux and their great river the "Messipi." More and more, the thoughts of the Jesuits—and not of the Jesuits alone—dwelt on this mysterious stream. Through what regions did it flow; and whither would it lead them,—to the South Sea or the "Sea of Virginia;" to Mexico, Japan, or China? The problem was soon to be solved, and the mystery revealed. CHAPTER I 1643-1669. CAVELIER DE LA SALLE. The Youth of La Salle: his Connection with the Jesuits; he goes to Canada; his Character; his Schemes; his Seigniory at La Chine; his Expedition in Search of a Western Passage to India. Among the burghers of Rouen was the old and rich family of the Caveliers. Though citizens and not nobles, some of their connections held high diplomatic posts and honorable employments at Court. They were destined to find a better claim to distinction. In 1643 was born at Rouen Robert Cavelier, better known by the designation of La Salle.[1] His father Jean and his uncle Henri were wealthy merchants, [Pg 8] living more like nobles than like burghers; and the boy received an education answering to the marked traits of intellect and character which he soon began to display. He showed an inclination for the exact sciences, and especially for the mathematics, in which he made great proficiency. At an early age, it is said, he became connected with the Jesuits; and, though doubt has been expressed of the statement, it is probably true.[2] LA SALLE AND THE JESUITS. La Salle was always an earnest Catholic; and yet, judging by the qualities which his after-life evinced, he was not very liable to religious enthusiasm. It is nevertheless clear that the Society of Jesus may have had a powerful attraction for his youthful imagination. This great organization, so complicated yet so harmonious, a mighty machine moved from the centre by a single hand, was an image of regulated power, full of fascination for a mind like his. But if it was likely that he would be drawn into it, it was no less likely that he would soon wish to escape. To find [Pg 9] himself not at the centre of power, but at the circumference; not the mover, but the moved; the passive instrument of another's will, taught to walk in prescribed paths, to renounce his individuality and become a component atom of a vast whole,—would have been intolerable to him. Nature had shaped him for other uses than to teach a class of boys on the benches of a Jesuit school. Nor, on his part, was he likely to please his directors; for, self-controlled and self-contained as he was, he was far too intractable a subject to serve their turn. A youth whose calm exterior hid an inexhaustible fund of pride; whose inflexible purposes, nursed in secret, the confessional and the "manifestation of conscience" could hardly drag to the light; whose strong personality would not yield to the shaping hand; and who, by a necessity of his nature, could obey no initiative but his own,—was not after the model that Loyola had commended to his followers. La Salle left the Jesuits, parting with them, it is said, on good terms, and with a reputation of excellent acquirements and unimpeachable morals. This last is very credible. The cravings of a deep ambition, the hunger of an insatiable intellect, the intense longing for action and achievement, subdued in him all other passions; and in his faults the love of pleasure had no part. He had an elder brother in Canada, the Abbé Jean Cavelier, a priest of St. Sulpice. Apparently, it was this that shaped his destinies. His connection with the Jesuits had deprived him, [Pg 10] under the French law, of the inheritance of his father, who had died not long before. An allowance was made to him of three or (as is elsewhere stated) four hundred livres a year, the capital of which was paid over to him; and with this pittance he sailed for Canada, to seek his fortune, in the spring of 1666.[3] LA SALLE AT MONTREAL. Next, we find him at Montreal. In another volume, we have seen how an association of enthusiastic devotees had made a settlement at this place.[4] Having in some measure accomplished its work, it was now dissolved; and the corporation of priests, styled the Seminary of St. Sulpice, which had taken a prominent part in the enterprise, and, indeed, had been created with a view to it, was now the proprietor and the feudal lord of Montreal. It was destined to retain its seignorial rights until the abolition of the feudal tenures of Canada in our own day, and it still holds vast possessions in the city and island. These worthy ecclesiastics, models of a discreet and sober conservatism, were holding a post with which a band of veteran soldiers or warlike frontiersmen would have been better matched. Montreal was perhaps the most dangerous place in Canada. In time [Pg 11] of war, which might have been called the normal condition of the colony, it was exposed by its position to incessant inroads of the Iroquois, or Five Nations, of New York; and no man could venture into the forests or the fields without bearing his life in his hand. The savage confederates had just received a sharp chastisement at the hands of Courcelle, the governor; and the result was a treaty of peace which might at any moment be broken, but which was an inexpressible relief while it lasted. The priests of St. Sulpice were granting out their lands, on very easy terms, to settlers. They wished to extend a thin line of settlements along the front of their island, to form a sort of outpost, from which an alarm could be given on any descent of the Iroquois. La Salle was the man for such a purpose. Had the priests understood him,—which they evidently did not, for some of them suspected him of levity, the last foible with which he could be charged,—had they understood him, they would have seen in him a young man in whom the fire of youth glowed not the less ardently for the veil of reserve that covered it; who would shrink from no danger, but would not court it in bravado; and who would cling with an invincible tenacity of gripe to any purpose which he might espouse. There is good reason to think that he had come to Canada with purposes already conceived, and that he was ready to avail himself of any stepping-stone which might help to realize them. Queylus, Superior of the Seminary, made him a [Pg 12] generous offer; and he accepted it. This was the gratuitous grant of a large tract of land at the place now called La Chine, above the great rapids of the same name, and eight or nine miles from Montreal. On one hand, the place was greatly exposed to attack; and, on the other, it was favorably situated for the fur-trade. La Salle and his successors became its feudal proprietors, on the sole condition of delivering to the Seminary, on every change of ownership, a medal of fine silver, weighing one mark.[5] He entered on the improvement of his new domain with what means he could command, and began to grant out his land to such settlers as would join him. Approaching the shore where the city of Montreal now stands, one would have seen a row of small compact dwellings, extending along a narrow street, parallel to the river, and then, as now, called St. Paul Street. On a hill at the right stood the windmill of the seigniors, built of stone, and pierced with loopholes to serve, in time of need, as a place of defence. On the left, in an angle formed by the junction of a rivulet with the St. Lawrence, was a square bastioned fort of stone. Here lived the military governor, appointed by the Seminary, and commanding a few soldiers of the regiment of Carignan. In front, on the line of the street, were the enclosure and buildings of the Seminary, and, [Pg 13] nearly adjoining them, those of the H?tel-Dieu, or Hospital, both provided for defence in case of an Indian attack. In the hospital enclosure was a small church, opening on the street, and, in the absence of any other, serving for the whole settlement.[6] Landing, passing the fort, and walking southward along the shore, one would soon have left the rough clearings, and entered the primeval forest. Here, mile after mile, he would have journeyed on in solitude, when the hoarse roar of the rapids, foaming in fury on his left, would have reached his listening ear; and at length, after a walk of some three hours, he would have found the rude beginnings of a settlement. It was where the St. Lawrence widens into the broad expanse called the Lake of St. Louis. Here, La Salle had traced out the circuit of a palisaded village, and assigned to each settler half an arpent, or about the third of an acre, within the enclosure, for which he was to render to the young seignior a yearly acknowledgment of three capons, besides six deniers—that is, half a sou—in money. To each was assigned, moreover, sixty arpents of land beyond the limits of the village, with the perpetual rent of half a sou for each arpent. He also set apart a common, two hundred arpents in extent, for the use of the settlers, on condition of the payment [Pg 14] by each of five sous a year. He reserved four hundred and twenty arpents for his own personal domain, and on this he began to clear the ground and erect buildings. Similar to this were the beginnings of all the Canadian seigniories formed at this troubled period.[7] LA CHINE. That La Salle came to Canada with objects distinctly in view, is probable from the fact that he at once began to study the Indian languages,—and with such success that he is said, within two or three years, to have mastered the Iroquois and seven or eight other languages and dialects.[8] From the shore of his seigniory, he could gaze westward over the broad breast of the Lake of St. Louis, bounded by the dim forests of Chateauguay and Beauharnois; but his thoughts flew far beyond, across the wild and lonely world that stretched towards the sunset. Like Champlain, and all the early explorers, he dreamed of a passage to the South Sea, and a new road for commerce to the riches of China and Japan. Indians often came to his secluded settlement; and, on one occasion, he was visited by a band of the Seneca Iroquois, not long before the scourge of the colony, but now, in virtue of the treaty, wearing the semblance [Pg 15] of friendship. The visitors spent the winter with him, and told him of a river called the Ohio, rising in their country, and flowing into the sea, but at such a distance that its mouth could only be reached after a journey of eight or nine months. Evidently, the Ohio and the Mississippi are here merged into one.[9] In accordance with geographical views then prevalent, he conceived that this great river must needs flow into the "Vermilion Sea;" that is, the Gulf of California. If so, it would give him what he sought, a western passage to China; while, in any case, the populous Indian tribes said to inhabit its banks might be made a source of great commercial profit. SCHEMES OF DISCOVERY. La Salle's imagination took fire. His resolution was soon formed; and he descended the St. Lawrence to Quebec, to gain the countenance of the governor for his intended exploration. Few men were more skilled than he in the art of clear and plausible statement. Both the governor Courcelle and the intendant Talon were readily won over to his plan; for which, however, they seem to have given him no more substantial aid than that of the governor's letters patent authorizing the enterprise.[10] The cost was to be his own; and he had no money, having spent it all on his seigniory. He therefore proposed that the Seminary, [Pg 16] which had given it to him, should buy it back again, with such improvements as he had made. Queylus, the Superior, being favorably disposed towards him, consented, and bought of him the greater part; while La Salle sold the remainder, including the clearings, to one Jean Milot, an iron-monger, for twenty-eight hundred livres.[11] With this he bought four canoes, with the necessary supplies, and hired fourteen men. Meanwhile, the Seminary itself was preparing a similar enterprise. The Jesuits at this time not only held an ascendency over the other ecclesiastics in Canada, but exercised an inordinate influence on the civil government. The Seminary priests of Montreal were jealous of these powerful rivals, and eager to emulate their zeal in the saving of souls and the conquering of new domains for the Faith. Under this impulse, they had, three years before, established a mission at Quinté, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in charge of two of their number, one of whom was the Abbé Fénelon, elder brother of the celebrated Archbishop of Cambray. Another of them, Dollier de Casson, had spent the winter in a hunting-camp of the Nipissings, where an Indian prisoner, captured in the Northwest, told him of populous tribes of that quarter living in heathenish darkness. On this, the Seminary priests resolved to essay their conversion; and an expedition, to be directed by Dollier, was fitted out to this end. [Pg 17] DEPARTURE. He was not ill suited to the purpose. He had been a soldier in his youth, and had fought valiantly as an officer of cavalry under Turenne. He was a man of great courage; of a tall, commanding person; and of uncommon bodily strength, which he had notably proved in the campaign of Courcelle against the Iroquois, three years before.[12] On going to Quebec to procure the necessary outfit, he was urged by Courcelle to modify his plans so far as to act in concert with La Salle in exploring the mystery of the great unknown river of the West. Dollier and his brother priests consented. One of them, Galinée, was joined with him as a colleague, because he was skilled in surveying, and could make a map of their route. Three canoes were procured, and seven hired men completed the party. It was determined that La Salle's expedition and that of the Seminary should be combined in one,—an arrangement ill suited to the character of the young explorer, who was unfit for any enterprise of which he was not the undisputed chief. Midsummer was near, and there was no time to lose. Yet the moment was most unpropitious, for a Seneca chief had lately been murdered by three scoundrel soldiers of the fort of Montreal; and, while they were undergoing their trial, it became known [Pg 18] that three other Frenchmen had treacherously put to death several Iroquois of the Oneida tribe, in order to get possession of their furs. The whole colony trembled in expectation of a new outbreak of the war. Happily, the event proved otherwise. The authors of the last murder escaped; but the three soldiers were shot at Montreal, in presence of a considerable number of the Iroquois, who declared themselves satisfied with the atonement; and on this same day, the sixth of July, the adventurers began their voyage. FOOTNOTES: [1] The following is the acte de naissance, discovered by Margry in the registres de l'état civil, Paroisse St. Herbland, Rouen: "Le vingt-deuxième jour de novembre, 1643, a été baptisé Robert Cavelier, fils de honorable homme Jean Cavelier et de Catherine Geest; ses parrain et marraine honorables personnes Nicolas Geest et Marguerite Morice." La Salle's name in full was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. La Salle was the name of an estate near Rouen, belonging to the Caveliers. The wealthy French burghers often distinguished the various members of their families by designations borrowed from landed estates. Thus, Fran?ois Marie Arouet, son of an ex-notary, received the name of Voltaire, which he made famous. [2] Margry, after investigations at Rouen, is satisfied of its truth (Journal Général de l'Instruction Publique, xxxi. 571.) Family papers of the Caveliers, examined by the Abbé Faillon, and copies of some of which he has sent to me, lead to the same conclusion. We shall find several allusions hereafter to La Salle's having in his youth taught in a school, which, in his position, could only have been in connection with some religious community. The doubts alluded to have proceeded from the failure of Father Felix Martin, S. J., to find the name of La Salle on the list of novices. If he had looked for the name of Robert Cavelier, he would probably have found it. The companion of La Salle, Hennepin, is very explicit with regard to this connection with the Jesuits, a point on which he had no motive for falsehood. [3] It does not appear what vows La Salle had taken. By a recent ordinance (1666), persons entering religious orders could not take the final vows before the age of twenty-five. By the family papers above mentioned, it appears, however, that he had brought himself under the operation of the law, which debarred those who, having entered religious orders, afterwards withdrew, from claiming the inheritance of relatives who had died after their entrance. [4] The Jesuits in North America, chap. xv. [5] Transport de la Seigneurie de St. Sulpice, cited by Faillon. La Salle called his new domain as above. Two or three years later, it received the name of La Chine, for a reason which will appear. [6] A detailed plan of Montreal at this time is preserved in the Archives de l'Empire, and has been reproduced by Faillon. There is another, a few years later, and still more minute, of which a fac-simile will be found in the Library of the Canadian Parliament. [7] The above particulars have been unearthed by the indefatigable Abbé Faillon. Some of La Salle's grants are still preserved in the ancient records of Montreal. [8] Papiers de Famille. He is said to have made several journeys into the forests, towards the North, in the years 1667 and 1668, and to have satisfied himself that little could be hoped from explorations in that direction. [9] According to Dollier de Casson, who had good opportunities of knowing, the Iroquois always called the Mississippi the Ohio, while the Algonquins gave it its present name. [10] Patoulet à Colbert, 11 Nov., 1669. [11] Cession de la Seigneurie; Contrat de Vente (Margry, i. 103, 104). [12] He was the author of the very curious and valuable Histoire de Montréal, preserved in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, of which a copy is in my possession. The Historical Society of Montreal has recently resolved to print it. CHAPTER II. 1669-1671. LA SALLE AND THE SULPITIANS. The French in Western New York.—Louis Joliet.—The Sulpitians on Lake Erie; at Detroit; at Saut Ste. Marie.—The Mystery of La Salle: he discovers the Ohio; he descends the Illinois; did he reach the Mississippi? La Chine was the starting-point; and the combined parties, in all twenty-four men with seven canoes, embarked on the Lake of St. Louis. With them were two other canoes, bearing the party of Senecas who had wintered at La Salle's settlement, and who were now to act as guides. Father Galinée recounts the journey. He was no woodsman: the river, the forests, the rapids, were all new to him, and he dilates on them with the minuteness of a novice. Above all, he admired the Indian birch canoes. "If God," he says, "grants me the grace of returning to France, I shall try to carry one with me." Then he describes the bivouac: "Your lodging is as extraordinary as your vessels; for, after paddling or carrying the canoes all day, you find mother earth ready to receive your wearied body. If the weather is fair, you make a fire and lie down [Pg 20] to sleep without further trouble; but if it rains, you must peel bark from the trees, and make a shed by laying it on a frame of sticks. As for your food, it is enough to make you burn all the cookery books that ever were written; for in the woods of Canada one finds means to live well without bread, wine, salt, pepper, or spice. The ordinary food is Indian corn, or Turkey wheat as they call it in France, which is crushed between two stones and boiled, seasoning it with meat or fish, when you can get them. This sort of life seemed so strange to us that we all felt the effects of it; and before we were a hundred leagues from Montreal, not one of us was free from some malady or other. At last, after all our misery, on the second of August, we discovered Lake Ontario, like a great sea with no land beyond it." THE SENECA VILLAGES. Thirty-five days after leaving La Chine, they reached Irondequoit Bay, on the south side of the lake. Here they were met by a number of Seneca Indians, who professed friendship and invited them to their villages, fifteen or twenty miles distant. As this was on their way to the upper waters of the Ohio, and as they hoped to find guides at the villages to conduct them, they accepted the invitation. Dollier, with most of the men, remained to guard the canoes; while La Salle, with Galinée and eight other Frenchmen, accompanied by a troop of Indians, set out on the morning of the twelfth, and reached the principal village before evening. It stood on a [Pg 21] hill, in the midst of a clearing nearly two leagues in compass.[13] A rude stockade surrounded it; and as the visitors drew near they saw a band of old men seated on the grass, waiting to receive them. One of these veterans, so feeble with age that he could hardly stand, made them an harangue, in which he declared that the Senecas were their brothers, and invited them to enter the village. They did so, surrounded by a crowd of savages, and presently found themselves in the midst of a disorderly cluster of large but filthy abodes of bark, about a hundred and fifty in number, the most capacious of which was assigned to their use. Here they made their quarters, and were soon overwhelmed by Seneca hospitality. Children brought them pumpkins and berries from the woods; and boy messengers came to summon them to endless feasts, where they were regaled with the flesh of dogs and with boiled maize seasoned with oil pressed from nuts and the seed of sunflowers. La Salle had flattered himself that he knew enough Iroquois to hold communication with the Senecas; but he failed completely in the attempt. The priests had a Dutch interpreter, who spoke Iroquois fluently, but knew so little French, and was withal so obstinate, that he proved useless; so that it was necessary to employ a man in the service of the Jesuit Fremin, whose mission was at this village. What the party needed was a guide to conduct them to the Ohio; and [Pg 22] soon after their arrival a party of warriors appeared, with a young prisoner belonging to one of the tribes of that region. Galinée wanted to beg or buy him from his captors; but the Senecas had other intentions. "I saw," writes the priest, "the most miserable spectacle I ever beheld in my life." It was the prisoner tied to a stake and tortured for six hours with diabolical ingenuity, while the crowd danced and yelled with delight, and the chiefs and elders sat in a row smoking their pipes and watching the contortions of the victim with an air of serene enjoyment. The body was at last cut up and eaten, and in the evening the whole population occupied themselves in scaring away the angry ghost by beating with sticks against the bark sides of the lodges. La Salle and his companions began to fear for their own safety. Some of their hosts wished to kill them in revenge for the chief murdered near Montreal; and as these and others were at times in a frenzy of drunkenness, the position of the French became critical. They suspected that means had been used to prejudice the Senecas against them. Not only could they get no guides, but they were told that if they went to the Ohio the tribes of those parts would infallibly kill them. Their Dutch interpreter became disheartened and unmanageable, and, after staying a month at the village, the hope of getting farther on their way seemed less than ever. Their plan, it was clear, must be changed; and an Indian from Otinawatawa, a kind of Iroquois colony at the head [Pg 23] of Lake Ontario, offered to guide them to his village and show them a better way to the Ohio. They left the Senecas, coasted the south shore of the lake, passed the mouth of the Niagara, where they heard the distant roar of the cataract, and on the twenty-fourth of September reached Otinawatawa, which was a few miles north of the present town of Hamilton. The inhabitants proved friendly, and La Salle received the welcome present of a Shawanoe prisoner, who told them that the Ohio could be reached in six weeks, and that he would guide them to it. Delighted at this good fortune, they were about to set out; when they heard, to their astonishment, of the arrival of two other Frenchmen at a neighboring village. LOUIS JOLIET. One of the strangers was destined to hold a conspicuous place in the history of western discovery. This was Louis Joliet, a young man of about the age of La Salle. Like him, he had studied for the priesthood; but the world and the wilderness had conquered his early inclinations, and changed him to an active and adventurous fur-trader. Talon had sent him to discover and explore the copper-mines of Lake Superior. He had failed in the attempt, and was now returning. His Indian guide, afraid of passing the Niagara portage lest he should meet enemies, had led him from Lake Erie, by way of Grand River, towards the head of Lake Ontario; and thus it was that he met La Salle and the Sulpitians. [Pg 24] This meeting caused a change of plan. Joliet showed the priests a map which he had made of such parts of the Upper Lakes as he had visited, and gave them a copy of it; telling them, at the same time, of the Pottawattamies and other tribes of that region in grievous need of spiritual succor. The result was a determination on their part to follow the route which he suggested, notwithstanding the remonstrances of La Salle, who in vain reminded them that the Jesuits had preoccupied the field, and would regard them as intruders. They resolved that the Pottawattamies should no longer sit in darkness; while, as for the Mississippi, it could be reached, as they conceived, with less risk by this northern route than by that of the south. La Salle was of a different mind. His goal was the Ohio, and not the northern lakes. A few days before, while hunting, he had been attacked by a fever, sarcastically ascribed by Galinée to his having seen three large rattle-snakes crawling up a rock. He now told his two colleagues that he was in no condition to go forward, and should be forced to part with them. The staple of La Salle's character, as his life will attest, was an invincible determination of purpose, which set at naught all risks and all sufferings. He had cast himself with all his resources into this enterprise; and, while his faculties remained, he was not a man to recoil from it. On the other hand, the masculine fibre of which he was made did not always withhold him from the practice of the arts of address, [Pg 25] and the use of what Dollier de Casson styles belles paroles. He respected the priesthood, with the exception, it seems, of the Jesuits; and he was under obligations to the Sulpitians of Montreal. Hence there can be no doubt that he used his illness as a pretext for escaping from their company without ungraciousness, and following his own path in his own way. SEPARATION. On the last day of September, the priests made an altar, supported by the paddles of the canoes laid on forked sticks. Dollier said mass; La Salle and his followers received the sacrament, as did also those of his late colleagues; and thus they parted, the Sulpitians and their party descending the Grand River towards Lake Erie, while La Salle, as they supposed, began his return to Montreal. What course he actually took we shall soon inquire; and meanwhile, for a few moments, we will follow the priests. When they reached Lake Erie, they saw it tossing like an angry ocean. They had no mind to tempt the dangerous and unknown navigation, and encamped for the winter in the forest near the peninsula called the Long Point. Here they gathered a good store of chestnuts, hickory-nuts, plums, and grapes, and built themselves a log cabin, with a recess at the end for an altar. They passed the winter unmolested, shooting game in abundance, and saying mass three times a week. Early in spring, they planted a large cross, attached to it the arms of France, and took formal possession of the country in [Pg 26] the name of Louis XIV. This done, they resumed their voyage, and, after many troubles, landed one evening in a state of exhaustion on or near Point Pelée, towards the western extremity of Lake Erie. A storm rose as they lay asleep, and swept off a great part of their baggage, which, in their fatigue, they had left at the edge of the water. Their altar-service was lost with the rest,—a misfortune which they ascribed to the jealousy and malice of the Devil. Debarred henceforth from saying mass, they resolved to return to Montreal and leave the Pottawattamies uninstructed. They presently entered the strait by which Lake Huron joins Lake Erie, and landing near where Detroit now stands, found a large stone, somewhat suggestive of the human figure, which the Indians had bedaubed with paint, and which they worshipped as a manito. In view of their late misfortune, this device of the arch-enemy excited their utmost resentment. "After the loss of our altar-service," writes Galinée, "and the hunger we had suffered, there was not a man of us who was not filled with hatred against this false deity. I devoted one of my axes to breaking him in pieces; and then, having fastened our canoes side by side, we carried the largest piece to the middle of the river, and threw it, with all the rest, into the water, that he might never be heard of again. God rewarded us immediately for this good action, for we killed a deer and a bear that same day." AT STE. MARIE DU SAUT. This is the first recorded passage of white men [Pg 27] through the Strait of Detroit; though Joliet had, no doubt, passed this way on his return from the Upper Lakes.[14] The two missionaries took this course, with the intention of proceeding to the Saut Ste. Marie, and there joining the Ottawas, and other tribes of that region, in their yearly descent to Montreal. They issued upon Lake Huron; followed its eastern shores till they reached the Georgian Bay, near the head of which the Jesuits had established their great mission of the Hurons, destroyed, twenty years before, by the Iroquois;[15] and, ignoring or slighting the labors of the rival missionaries, held their way northward along the rocky archipelago that edged those lonely coasts. They passed the Manitoulins, and, ascending the strait by which Lake Superior discharges its waters, arrived on the twenty-fifth of May at Ste. Marie du Saut. Here they found the two Jesuits, Dablon and Marquette, in a square fort of cedar pickets, built by their men within the past year, and enclosing a chapel and a house. Near by, they had cleared a large tract of land, and sown it with wheat, Indian corn, peas, and other crops. The new-comers were graciously received, and invited to vespers in the chapel; but they very soon found La Salle's prediction made good, and saw that the Jesuit fathers wanted no help from St. Sulpice. Galinée, [Pg 28] on his part, takes occasion to remark, that, though the Jesuits had baptized a few Indians at the Saut, not one of them was a good enough Christian to receive the Eucharist; and he intimates that the case, by their own showing, was still worse at their mission of St. Esprit. The two Sulpitians did not care to prolong their stay; and, three days after their arrival, they left the Saut,—not, as they expected, with the Indians, but with a French guide, furnished by the Jesuits. Ascending French River to Lake Nipissing, they crossed to the waters of the Ottawa, and descended to Montreal, which they reached on the eighteenth of June. They had made no discoveries and no converts; but Galinée, after his arrival, made the earliest map of the Upper Lakes known to exist.[16] LA SALLE'S DISCOVERIES. We return now to La Salle, only to find ourselves involved in mist and obscurity. What did he do after he left the two priests? Unfortunately, a definite answer is not possible; and the next two years of his life remain in some measure an enigma. That he was busied in active exploration, and that he made important discoveries, is certain; but the extent and character of these discoveries remain wrapped in doubt. He is known to have kept journals and made maps; and these were in existence, and in possession of his niece, Madeleine Cavelier, then in advanced [Pg 29] age, as late as the year 1756; beyond which time the most diligent inquiry has failed to trace them. Abbé Faillon affirms that some of La Salle's men, refusing to follow him, returned to La Chine, and that the place then received its name, in derision of the young adventurer's dream of a westward passage to China.[17] As for himself, the only distinct record of his movements is that contained in a paper, entitled "Histoire de Monsieur de la Salle." It is an account of his explorations, and of the state of parties in Canada previous to the year 1678,—taken from the lips of La Salle himself, by a person whose name does not appear, but who declares that he had ten or twelve conversations with him at Paris, whither he had come with a petition to the Court. The writer himself had never been in America, and was ignorant of its geography; hence blunders on his part might reasonably be expected. His statements, however, are in some measure intelligible; and the following is the substance of them. After leaving the priests, La Salle went to Onondaga, where we are left to infer that he succeeded better in getting a guide than he had before done among the Senecas. Thence he made his way to a point six or seven leagues distant from Lake Erie, where he reached a branch of the Ohio, and, descending it, followed the river as far as the rapids at Louisville,—or, as has been maintained, beyond [Pg 30] its confluence with the Mississippi. His men now refused to go farther, and abandoned him, escaping to the English and the Dutch; whereupon he retraced his steps alone.[18] This must have been in the winter of 1669-70, or in the following spring; unless there is an error of date in the statement of Nicolas Perrot, the famous voyageur, who says that he met him in the summer of 1670, hunting on the Ottawa with a party of Iroquois.[19] THE RIVER ILLINOIS. But how was La Salle employed in the following year? The same memoir has its solution to the [Pg 31] problem. By this it appears that the indefatigable explorer embarked on Lake Erie, ascended the Detroit to Lake Huron, coasted the unknown shores of Michigan, passed the Straits of Michilimackinac, and, leaving Green Bay behind him, entered what is described as an incomparably larger bay, but which was evidently the southern portion of Lake Michigan. Thence he crossed to a river flowing westward,—evidently the Illinois,—and followed it until it was joined by another river flowing from the northwest to the southeast. By this, the Mississippi only can be meant; and he is reported to have said that he descended it to the thirty-sixth degree of latitude; where he stopped, assured that it discharged itself not into the Gulf of California, but into the Gulf of Mexico, and resolved to follow it thither at a future day, when better provided with men and supplies.[20] THE MISSISSIPPI. The first of these statements,—that relating to the [Pg 32] Ohio,—confused, vague, and in great part incorrect, as it certainly is, is nevertheless well sustained as regards one essential point. La Salle himself, in a memorial addressed to Count Frontenac in 1677, affirms that he discovered the Ohio, and descended it as far as to a fall which obstructed it.[21] Again, his rival, Louis Joliet, whose testimony on this point cannot be suspected, made two maps of the region of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. The Ohio is laid down on both of them, with an inscription to the effect that it had been explored by La Salle.[22] That [Pg 33] he discovered the Ohio may then be regarded as established. That he descended it to the Mississippi, he himself does not pretend; nor is there reason to believe that he did so. With regard to his alleged voyage down the Illinois, the case is different. Here, he is reported to have made a statement which admits but one interpretation,—that of the discovery by him of the Mississippi prior to its discovery by Joliet and Marquette. This statement is attributed to a man not prone to vaunt his own exploits, who never proclaimed them in print, and whose testimony, even in his own case, must therefore have weight. But it comes to us through the medium of a person strongly biassed in favor of La Salle, and against Marquette and the Jesuits. LA SALLE'S DISCOVERIES. Seven years had passed since the alleged discovery, and La Salle had not before laid claim to it; although it was matter of notoriety that during five years it had been claimed by Joliet, and that his claim was generally admitted. The correspondence of the governor and the intendant is silent as to La Salle's having penetrated to the Mississippi, though the attempt was made under the auspices of the latter, as his own letters declare; while both had the discovery of the great river earnestly at heart. The governor, Frontenac, La Salle's ardent supporter and [Pg 34] ally, believed in 1672, as his letters show, that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of California; and, two years later, he announces to the minister Colbert its discovery by Joliet.[23] After La Salle's death, his brother, his nephew, and his niece addressed a memorial to the king, petitioning for certain grants in consideration of the discoveries of their relative, which they specify at some length; but they do not pretend that he reached the Mississippi before his expeditions of 1679 to 1682.[24] This silence is the more significant, as it is this very niece who had possession of the papers in which La Salle recounts the journeys of which the issues are in question.[25] [Pg 35] Had they led him to the Mississippi, it is reasonably certain that she would have made it known in her memorial. La Salle discovered the Ohio, and in all probability the Illinois also; but that he discovered the Mississippi has not been proved, nor, in the light of the evidence we have, is it likely. FOOTNOTES: [13] This village seems to have been that attacked by Denonville in 1687. It stood on Boughton Hill, near the present town of Victor. [14] The Jesuits and fur-traders, on their way to the Upper Lakes, had followed the route of the Ottawa, or, more recently, that of Toronto and the Georgian Bay. Iroquois hostility had long closed the Niagara portage and Lake Erie against them. [15] The Jesuits in North America. [16] See Appendix. The above narrative is from Récit de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable dans le Voyage de MM. Dollier et Galinée. (Bibliothèque Nationale.) [17] Dollier de Casson alludes to this as "cette transmigration célèbre qui se fit de la Chine dans ces quartiers." [18] The following is the passage relating to this journey in the remarkable paper above mentioned. After recounting La Salle's visit with the Sulpitians to the Seneca village, and stating that the intrigues of the Jesuit missionary prevented them from obtaining a guide, it speaks of the separation of the travellers and the journey of Galinée and his party to the Saut Ste. Marie, where "les Jésuites les congédièrent." It then proceeds as follows: "Cependant M{r.} de la Salle continua son chemin par une rivière qui va de l'est à l'ouest; et passe à Onontaqué [Onondaga], puis à six ou sept lieues au-dessous du Lac Erié; et estant parvenu jusqu'au 280me ou 83me degré de longitude, et jusqu'au 41me degré de latitude, trouva un sault qui tombe vers l'ouest dans un pays bas, marescageux, tout couvert de vielles souches, dont il y en a quelques-unes qui sont encore sur pied. Il fut donc contraint de prendre terre, et suivant une hauteur qui le pouvoit mener loin, il trouva quelques sauvages qui luy dirent que fort loin de là le mesme fleuve qui se perdoit dans cette terre basse et vaste se réunnissoit en un lit. Il continua donc son chemin, mais comme la fatigue estoit grande, 23 ou 24 hommes qu'il avoit menez jusques là le quittèrent tous en une nuit, regagnèrent le fleuve, et se sauvèrent, les uns à la Nouvelle Hollande et les autres à la Nouvelle Angleterre. Il se vit donc seul à 400 lieues de chez luy, où il ne laisse pas de revenir, remontant la rivière et vivant de chasse, d'herbes, et de ce que luy donnèrent les sauvages qu'il rencontra en son chemin." [19] Perrot, Mémoires, 119, 120. [20] The memoir—after stating, as above, that he entered Lake Huron, doubled the peninsula of Michigan, and passed La Baye des Puants (Green Bay)—says: "Il reconnut une baye incomparablement plus large; au fond de laquelle vers l'ouest il trouva un très-beau havre et au fond de ce havre un fleuve qui va de l'est à l'ouest. Il suivit ce fleuve, et estant parvenu jusqu'environ le 280me degré de longitude et le 39me de latitude, il trouva un autre fleuve qui se joignant au premier coulait du nordouest au sudest, et il suivit ce fleuve jusqu'au 36me degré de latitude." The "très-beau havre" may have been the entrance of the river Chicago, whence, by an easy portage, he might have reached the Des Plaines branch of the Illinois. We shall see that he took this course in his famous exploration of 1682. The intendant Talon announces, in his despatches of this year that he had sent La Salle southward and westward to explore. [21] The following are his words (he speaks of himself in the third person): "L'année 1667, et les suivantes, il fit divers voyages avec beaucoup de dépenses, dans lesquels il découvrit le premier beaucoup de pays au sud des grands lacs, et entre autres la grande rivière d'Ohio; il la suivit jusqu'à un endroit où elle tombe de fort haut dans de vastes marais, à la hauteur de 37 degrés, après avoir été grossie par une autre rivière fort large qui vient du nord; et toutes ces eaux se dêchargent selon toutes les apparences dans le Golfe du Mexique." This "autre rivière," which, it seems, was above the fall, may have been the Miami or the Scioto. There is but one fall on the river, that of Louisville, which is not so high as to deserve to be described as "fort haut," being only a strong rapid. The latitude, as will be seen, is different in the two accounts, and incorrect in both. [22] One of these maps is entitled Carte de la découverte du Sieur Joliet, 1674. Over the lines representing the Ohio are the words, "Route du sieur de la Salle pour aller dans le Mexique." The other map of Joliet bears, also written over the Ohio, the words, "Rivière par où descendit le sieur de la Salle au sortir du lac Erié pour aller dans le Mexique." I have also another manuscript map, made before the voyage of Joliet and Marquette, and apparently in the year 1673, on which the Ohio is represented as far as to a point a little below Louisville, and over it is written, "Rivière Ohio, ainsy appellée par les Iroquois à cause de sa beauté, par où le sieur de la Salle est descendu." The Mississippi is not represented on this map; but—and this is very significant, as indicating the extent of La Salle's exploration of the following year—a small part of the upper Illinois is laid down. [23] Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 14 Nov., 1674. He here speaks of "la grande rivière qu'il [Joliet] a trouvée, qui va du nord au sud, et qui est aussi large que celle du Saint-Laurent vis-à-vis de Québec." Four years later, Frontenac speaks slightingly of Joliet, but neither denies his discovery of the Mississippi, nor claims it for La Salle, in whose interest he writes. [24] Papiers de Famille; Mémoire présenté au Roi. The following is an extract: "Il parvient ... jusqu'à la rivière des Illinois. Il y construisit un fort situé à 350 lieues au-delà du fort de Frontenac, et suivant ensuite le cours de cette rivière, il trouva qu'elle se jettoit dans un grand fleuve appellé par ceux du pays Mississippi, c'est à dire grande eau, environ cent lieues au-dessous du fort qu'il venoit de construire." This fort was Fort Crèvec?ur, built in 1680, near the site of Peoria. The memoir goes on to relate the descent of La Salle to the Gulf, which concluded this expedition of 1679-82. [25] The following is an extract, given by Margry, from a letter of the aged Madeleine Cavelier, dated 21 Février, 1756, and addressed to her nephew, M. Le Baillif, who had applied for the papers in behalf of the minister, Silhouette: "J'ay cherché une occasion s?re pour vous anvoyé les papiers de M. de la Salle. Il y a des cartes que j'ay jointe à ces papiers, qui doivent prouver que, en 1675, M. de Lasalle avet déja fet deux voyages en ces decouverte, puisqu'il y avet une carte, que je vous envoye, par laquelle il est fait mention de l'androit auquel M. de Lasalle aborda près le fleuve de Mississipi; un autre androit qu'il nomme le fleuve Colbert; en un autre il prans possession de ce pais au nom du roy et fait planter une crois." The words of the aged and illiterate writer are obscure, but her expression "aborda près" seems to indicate that La Salle had not reached the Mississippi prior to 1675, but only approached it. Finally, a memorial presented to Seignelay, along with the official narrative of 1679-81, by a friend of La Salle, whose object was to place the discoverer and his achievements in the most favorable light, contains the following: "Il [La Salle] a esté le premier à former le dessein de ces descouvertes, qu'il communiqua, il y a plus de quinze ans, à M. de Courcelles, gouverneur, et à M. Talon, intendant du Canada, qui l'approuvèrent. Il a fait ensuite plusieurs voyages de ce costé-là, et un entr'autres en 1669 avec MM. Dolier et Galinée, prestres du Séminaire de St. Sulpice. Il est vray que le sieur Jolliet, pour le prévenir, fit un voyage in 1673, à la rivière Colbert; mais ce fut uniquement pour y faire commerce." See Margry, ii. 285. This passage is a virtual admission that Joliet reached the Mississippi (Colbert) before La Salle. Margry, in a series of papers in the Journal Général de l'Instruction Publique for 1862, first took the position that La Salle reached the Mississippi in 1670 and 1671, and has brought forward in defence of it all the documents which his unwearied research enabled him to discover. Father Tailhan, S.J., has replied at length, in the copious notes to his edition of Nicolas Perrot, but without having seen the principal document cited by Margry, and of which extracts have been given in the notes to this chapter. CHAPTER III. 1670-1672. THE JESUITS ON THE LAKES. The Old Missions and the New.—A Change of Spirit.—Lake Superior and the Copper-mines.—Ste. Marie.—La Pointe.—Michilimackinac.— Jesuits on Lake Michigan.—Allouez and Dablon.—The Jesuit Fur-trade. What were the Jesuits doing? Since the ruin of their great mission of the Hurons, a perceptible change had taken place in them. They had put forth exertions almost superhuman, set at naught famine, disease, and death, lived with the self-abnegation of saints and died with the devotion of martyrs; and the result of all had been a disastrous failure. From no short-coming on their part, but from the force of events beyond the sphere of their influence, a very demon of havoc had crushed their incipient churches, slaughtered their converts, uprooted the populous communities on which their hopes had rested, and scattered them in bands of wretched fugitives far and wide through the wilderness.[26] They had devoted themselves in the fulness of faith to the building up [Pg 37] of a Christian and Jesuit empire on the conversion of the great stationary tribes of the lakes; and of these none remained but the Iroquois, the destroyers of the rest,—among whom, indeed, was a field which might stimulate their zeal by an abundant promise of sufferings and martyrdoms, but which, from its geographical position, was too much exposed to Dutch and English influence to promise great and decisive results. Their best hopes were now in the North and the West; and thither, in great part, they had turned their energies. REPORTS OF THE JESUITS. We find them on Lake Huron, Lake Superior, and Lake Michigan, laboring vigorously as of old, but in a spirit not quite the same. Now, as before, two objects inspired their zeal,—the "greater glory of God," and the influence and credit of the Order of Jesus. If the one motive had somewhat lost in power, the other had gained. The epoch of the saints and martyrs was passing away; and henceforth we find the Canadian Jesuit less and less an apostle, more and more an explorer, a man of science, and a politician. The yearly reports of the missions are still, for the edification of the pious reader, filled with intolerably tedious stories of baptisms, conversions, and the exemplary deportment of neophytes,—for these have become a part of the formula; but they are relieved abundantly by more mundane topics. One finds observations on the winds, currents, and tides of the Great Lakes; speculations on a subterranean outlet of Lake Superior; accounts of [Pg 38] its copper-mines, and how we, the Jesuit fathers, are laboring to explore them for the profit of the colony; surmises touching the North Sea, the South Sea, the Sea of China, which we hope ere long to discover; and reports of that great mysterious river of which the Indians tell us,—flowing southward, perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the Vermilion Sea,—and the secrets whereof, with the help of the Virgin, we will soon reveal to the world. The Jesuit was as often a fanatic for his Order as for his faith; and oftener yet the two fanaticisms mingled in him inextricably. Ardently as he burned for the saving of souls, he would have none saved on the Upper Lakes except by his brethren and himself. He claimed a monopoly of conversion, with its attendant monopoly of toil, hardship, and martyrdom. Often disinterested for himself, he was inordinately ambitious for the great corporate power in which he had merged his own personality; and here lies one cause, among many, of the seeming contradictions which abound in the annals of the Order. Prefixed to the Relation of 1671 is that monument of Jesuit hardihood and enterprise, the map of Lake Superior,—a work of which, however, the exactness has been exaggerated, as compared with other Canadian maps of the day. While making surveys, the priests were diligently looking for copper. Father Dablon reports that they had found it in greatest abundance on Isle Minong, now Isle Royale. "A day's journey from the head of the lake, on the [Pg 39] south side, there is," he says, "a rock of copper weighing from six hundred to eight hundred pounds, lying on the shore where any who pass may see it;" and he further speaks of great copper boulders in the bed of the river Ontonagan.[27] STE. MARIE DU SAUT. There were two principal missions on the Upper Lakes, which were, in a certain sense, the parents of the rest. One of these was Ste. Marie du Saut,—the same visited by Dollier and Galinée,—at the outlet of Lake Superior. This was a noted fishing-place; for the rapids were full of white-fish, and Indians came thither in crowds. The permanent residents were an Ojibwa band, whom the French called Sauteurs, and whose bark lodges were clustered [Pg 40] at the foot of the rapids, near the fort of the Jesuits. Besides these, a host of Algonquins, of various tribes, resorted thither in the spring and summer,—living in abundance on the fishery, and dispersing in winter to wander and starve in scattered hunting-parties far and wide through the forests. The other chief mission was that of St. Esprit, at La Pointe, near the western extremity of Lake Superior. Here were the Hurons, fugitives twenty years before from the slaughter of their countrymen; and the Ottawas, who, like them, had sought an asylum from the rage of the Iroquois. Many other tribes—Illinois, Pottawattamies, Foxes, Menomonies, Sioux, Assiniboins, Knisteneaux, and a multitude besides—came hither yearly to trade with the French. Here was a young Jesuit, Jacques Marquette, lately arrived from the Saut Ste. Marie. His savage flock disheartened him by its backslidings; and the best that he could report of the Hurons, after all the toil and all the blood lavished in their conversion, was, that they "still retain a little Christianity;" while the Ottawas are "far removed from the kingdom of God, and addicted beyond all other tribes to foulness, incantations, and sacrifices to evil spirits."[28] MARQUETTE AND ANDRé. Marquette heard from the Illinois—yearly visitors at La Pointe—of the great river which they had crossed on their way,[29] and which, as he conjectured, flowed [Pg 41] into the Gulf of California. He heard marvels of it also from the Sioux, who lived on its banks; and a strong desire possessed him to explore the mystery of its course. A sudden calamity dashed his hopes. The Sioux—the Iroquois of the West, as the Jesuits call them—had hitherto kept the peace with the expatriated tribes of La Pointe; but now, from some cause not worth inquiry, they broke into open war, and so terrified the Hurons and Ottawas that they abandoned their settlements and fled. Marquette followed his panic-stricken flock, who, passing the Saut Ste. Marie, and descending to Lake Huron, stopped at length,—the Hurons at Michilimackinac, and the Ottawas at the Great Manitoulin Island. Two missions were now necessary to minister to the divided bands. That of Michilimackinac was assigned to Marquette, and that of the Manitoulin Island to Louis André. The former took post at Point St. Ignace, on the north shore of the Straits of Michilimackinac, while the latter began the mission of St. Simon at the new abode of the Ottawas. When winter came, scattering his flock to their hunting-grounds, André made a missionary tour among the Nipissings and other neighboring tribes. The shores of Lake Huron had long been an utter [Pg 42] solitude, swept of their denizens by the terror of the all-conquering Iroquois; but now that these tigers had felt the power of the French, and learned for a time to leave their Indian allies in peace, the fugitive hordes were returning to their ancient abodes. André's experience among them was of the roughest. The staple of his diet was acorns and tripe de roche,—a species of lichen, which, being boiled, resolved itself into a black glue, nauseous, but not void of nourishment. At times, he was reduced to moss, the bark of trees, or moccasins and old moose-skins cut into strips and boiled. His hosts treated him very ill, and the worst of their fare was always his portion. When spring came to his relief, he returned to his post of St. Simon, with impaired digestion and unabated zeal. THE GREEN BAY MISSION. Besides the Saut Ste. Marie and Michilimackinac, both noted fishing-places, there was another spot, no less famous for game and fish, and therefore a favorite resort of Indians. This was the head of the Green Bay of Lake Michigan.[30] Here and in adjacent districts several distinct tribes had made their abode. The Menomonies were on the river which bears their name; the Pottawattamies and Winnebagoes were [Pg 43] near the borders of the bay; the Sacs, on Fox River; the Mascoutins, Miamis, and Kickapoos, on the same river, above Lake Winnebago; and the Outagamies, or Foxes, on a tributary of it flowing from the north. Green Bay was manifestly suited for a mission; and, as early as the autumn of 1669, Father Claude Allouez was sent thither to found one. After nearly perishing by the way, he set out to explore the destined field of his labors, and went as far as the town of the Mascoutins. Early in the autumn of 1670, having been joined by Dablon, Superior of the missions on the Upper Lakes, he made another journey, but not until the two fathers had held a council with the congregated tribes at St. Fran?ois Xavier; for so they named their mission of Green Bay. Here, as they harangued their naked audience, their gravity was put to the proof; for a band of warriors, anxious to do them honor, walked incessantly up and down, aping the movements of the soldiers on guard before the governor's tent at Montreal. "We could hardly keep from laughing," writes Dablon, "though, we were discoursing on very important subjects; namely, the mysteries of our religion, and the things necessary to escaping from eternal fire."[31] The fathers were delighted with the country, which Dablon calls an earthly paradise; but he adds that the way to it is as hard as the path to heaven. He alludes especially to the rapids of Fox River, which gave the two travellers great trouble. Having [Pg 44] safely passed them, they saw an Indian idol on the bank, similar to that which Dollier and Galinée found at Detroit,—being merely a rock, bearing some resemblance to a man, and hideously painted. With the help of their attendants, they threw it into the river. Dablon expatiates on the buffalo, which he describes apparently on the report of others, as his description is not very accurate. Crossing Winnebago Lake, the two priests followed the river leading to the town of the Mascoutins and Miamis, which they reached on the fifteenth of September.[32] These two tribes lived together within the compass of the same enclosure of palisades,—to the number, it is said, of more than three thousand souls. The missionaries, who had brought a highly colored picture of the Last Judgment, called the Indians to council and displayed it before them; while Allouez, who spoke Algonquin, harangued them on hell, demons, and eternal flames. They listened with open ears, beset him night and day with questions, and invited him and his companion to unceasing feasts. They were welcomed in every lodge, and followed everywhere with eyes of curiosity, wonder, and awe. Dablon overflows with praises of the Miami chief, who was honored by his subjects like a king, and [Pg 45] whose demeanor towards his guests had no savor of the savage. Their hosts told them of the great river Mississippi, rising far in the north and flowing southward,—they knew not whither,—and of many tribes that dwelt along its banks. When at length they took their departure, they left behind them a reputation as medicine-men of transcendent power. THE CROSS AMONG THE FOXES. In the winter following, Allouez visited the Foxes, whom he found in extreme ill-humor. They were incensed against the French by the ill-usage which some of their tribe had lately met when on a trading visit to Montreal; and they received the Faith with shouts of derision. The priest was horror-stricken at what he saw. Their lodges, each containing from five to ten families, seemed in his eyes like seraglios; for some of the chiefs had eight wives. He armed himself with patience, and at length gained a hearing. Nay, he succeeded so well, that when he showed them his crucifix they would throw tobacco on it as an offering; and, on another visit which he made them soon after, he taught the whole village to make the sign of the cross. A war-party was going out against their enemies, and he bethought him of telling them the story of the Cross and the Emperor Constantine. This so wrought upon them that they all daubed the figure of a cross on their shields of bull-hide, set out for the war, and came back victorious, extolling the sacred symbol as a great war-medicine. [Pg 46] "Thus it is," writes Dablon, who chronicles the incident, "that our holy faith is established among these people; and we have good hope that we shall soon carry it to the famous river called the Mississippi, and perhaps even to the South Sea."[33] Most things human have their phases of the ludicrous; and the heroism of these untiring priests is no exception to the rule. TRADING WITH INDIANS. The various missionary stations were much alike. They consisted of a chapel (commonly of logs) and one or more houses, with perhaps a store-house and a workshop; the whole fenced with palisades, and forming, in fact, a stockade fort, surrounded with clearings and cultivated fields. It is evident that the priests had need of other hands than their own and those of the few lay brothers attached to the mission. They required men inured to labor, accustomed to the forest life, able to guide canoes and handle tools and weapons. In the earlier epoch of the missions, when enthusiasm was at its height, they were served in great measure by volunteers, who joined them through devotion or penitence, and who were known as donnés or "given men." Of late, the number of these had much diminished; and they now relied chiefly on hired men, or engagés. These were employed in building, hunting, fishing, clearing, and tilling the ground, guiding canoes, and (if faith is to be placed in reports current throughout the colony) in trading with the Indians for the profit [Pg 47] of the missions. This charge of trading—which, if the results were applied exclusively to the support of the missions, does not of necessity involve much censure—is vehemently reiterated in many quarters, including the official despatches of the governor of Canada; while, so far as I can discover, the Jesuits never distinctly denied it, and on several occasions they partially admitted its truth.[34] FOOTNOTES: [26] See "The Jesuits in North America." [27] He complains that the Indians were very averse to giving information on the subject, so that the Jesuits had not as yet discovered the metal in situ, though they hoped soon to do so. The Indians told him that the copper had first been found by four hunters, who had landed on a certain island, near the north shore of the lake. Wishing to boil their food in a vessel of bark, they gathered stones on the shore, heated them red hot, and threw them in, but presently discovered them to be pure copper. Their repast over, they hastened to re-embark, being afraid of the lynxes and the hares, which, on this island, were as large as dogs, and which would have devoured their provisions, and perhaps their canoe. They took with them some of the wonderful stones; but scarcely had they left the island, when a deep voice, like thunder, sounded in their ears, "Who are these thieves who steal the toys of my children?" It was the God of the Waters, or some other powerful manito. The four adventurers retreated in great terror; but three of them soon died, and the fourth survived only long enough to reach his village, and tell the story. The island has no foundation, but floats with the movement of the wind; and no Indian dares land on its shores, dreading the wrath of the manito. Dablon, Relation, 1670, 84. [28] Lettre du Père Jacques Marquette au R. P. Supérieur des Missions; in Relation, 1670, 87. [29] The Illinois lived at this time beyond the Mississippi, thirty days' journey from La Pointe; whither they had been driven by the Iroquois, from their former abode near Lake Michigan. Dablon (Relation, 1671, 24, 25) says that they lived seven days' journey beyond the Mississippi, in eight villages. A few years later, most of them returned to the east side, and made their abode on the river Illinois. [30] The Baye des Puants of the early writers; or, more correctly, La Baye des Eaux Puantes. The Winnebago Indians, living near it, were called Les Puans, apparently for no other reason than because some portion of the bay was said to have an odor like the sea. Lake Michigan, the "Lac des Illinois" of the French, was, according to a letter of Father Allouez, called "Machihiganing" by the Indians. Dablon writes the name "Mitchiganon." [31] Relation, 1671, 43. [32] This town was on the Neenah or Fox River, above Lake Winnebago. The Mascoutins, Fire Nation, or Nation of the Prairie, are extinct or merged in other tribes. See "The Jesuits in North America." The Miamis soon removed to the banks of the river St. Joseph, near Lake Michigan. [33] Relation, 1672, 42. [34] This charge was made from the first establishment of the missions. For remarks on it, see "The Jesuits in North America" and "The Old Régime in Canada." CHAPTER IV. 1667-1672. FRANCE TAKES POSSESSION OF THE WEST. Talon.—Saint-Lusson.—Perrot.—The Ceremony at Saut Ste. Marie.—The Speech of Allouez.—Count Frontenac. Jean Talon, intendant of Canada, was full of projects for the good of the colony. On the one hand, he set himself to the development of its industries, and, on the other, to the extension of its domain. He meant to occupy the interior of the continent, control the rivers, which were its only highways, and hold it for France against every other nation. On the east, England was to be hemmed within a narrow strip of seaboard; while, on the south, Talon aimed at securing a port on the Gulf of Mexico, to keep the Spaniards in check, and dispute with them the possession of the vast regions which they claimed as their own. But the interior of the continent was still an unknown world. It behooved him to explore it; and to that end he availed himself of Jesuits, officers, fur-traders, and enterprising schemers like La Salle. His efforts at discovery seem to have been conducted with a singular economy [Pg 49] of the King's purse. La Salle paid all the expenses of his first expedition made under Talon's auspices; and apparently of the second also, though the intendant announces it in his despatches as an expedition sent out by himself.[35] When, in 1670, he ordered Daumont de Saint-Lusson to search for copper mines on Lake Superior, and at the same time to take formal possession of the whole interior for the King, it was arranged that he should pay the costs of the journey by trading with the Indians.[36] SAINT-LUSSON AND PERROT. Saint-Lusson set out with a small party of men, and Nicolas Perrot as his interpreter. Among Canadian voyageurs, few names are so conspicuous as that of Perrot; not because there were not others who matched him in achievement, but because he could write, and left behind him a tolerable account of what he had seen.[37] He was at this time twenty-six years old, and had formerly been an engagé of the Jesuits. He was a man of enterprise, courage, and [Pg 50] address,—the last being especially shown in his dealings with Indians, over whom he had great influence. He spoke Algonquin fluently, and was favorably known to many tribes of that family. Saint-Lusson wintered at the Manitoulin Islands; while Perrot, having first sent messages to the tribes of the north, inviting them to meet the deputy of the governor at the Saut Ste. Marie in the following spring, proceeded to Green Bay, to urge the same invitation upon the tribes of that quarter. They knew him well, and greeted him with clamors of welcome. The Miamis, it is said, received him with a sham battle, which was designed to do him honor, but by which nerves more susceptible would have been severely shaken.[38] They entertained him also with a grand game of la crosse, the Indian ball-play. Perrot gives a marvellous account of the authority and state of the Miami chief, who, he says, was attended day and night by a guard of warriors,—an assertion which would be incredible, were it not sustained by the account of the same chief given by the Jesuit Dablon. Of the tribes of the Bay, the greater part promised to send delegates to the Saut; but the Pottawattamies dissuaded the Miami potentate from attempting so long a journey, lest the fatigue incident to it might injure his health; and he [Pg 51] therefore deputed them to represent him and his tribesmen at the great meeting. Their principal chiefs, with those of the Sacs, Winnebagoes, and Menomonies, embarked, and paddled for the place of rendezvous, where they and Perrot arrived on the fifth of May.[39] Saint-Lusson was here with his men, fifteen in number, among whom was Louis Joliet;[40] and Indians were fast thronging in from their wintering grounds, attracted, as usual, by the fishery of the rapids or moved by the messages sent by Perrot,—Crees, Monsonis, Amikoués, Nipissings, and many more. When fourteen tribes, or their representatives, had arrived, Saint-Lusson prepared to execute the commission with which he was charged. CEREMONY AT THE SAUT. At the foot of the rapids was the village of the Sauteurs, above the village was a hill, and hard by stood the fort of the Jesuits. On the morning of the fourteenth of June, Saint-Lusson led his followers to the top of the hill, all fully equipped and under arms. Here, too, in the vestments of their priestly office, were four Jesuits,—Claude Dablon, Superior of the Missions of the lakes, Gabriel Druilletes, Claude Allouez, and Louis André.[41] All around the great throng of Indians stood, or crouched, or reclined at length, with eyes and ears intent. A [Pg 52] large cross of wood had been made ready. Dablon, in solemn form, pronounced his blessing on it; and then it was reared and planted in the ground, while the Frenchmen, uncovered, sang the Vexilla Regis. Then a post of cedar was planted beside it, with a metal plate attached, engraven with the royal arms; while Saint-Lusson's followers sang the Exaudiat, and one of the Jesuits uttered a prayer for the King. Saint-Lusson now advanced, and, holding his sword in one hand, and raising with the other a sod of earth, proclaimed in a loud voice,— "In the name of the Most High, Mighty, and Redoubted Monarch, Louis, Fourteenth of that name, Most Christian King of France and of Navarre, I take possession of this place, Sainte Marie du Saut, as also of Lakes Huron and Superior, the Island of Manitoulin, and all countries, rivers, lakes, and streams contiguous and adjacent thereunto,—both those which have been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in all their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas of the North and of the West, and on the other by the South Sea: declaring to the nations thereof that from this time forth they are vassals of his Majesty, bound to obey his laws and follow his customs; promising them on his part all succor and protection against the incursions and invasions of their enemies: declaring to all other potentates, princes, sovereigns, states, and republics,—to them and to their subjects,—that they cannot and are not to seize or settle upon any [Pg 53] parts of the aforesaid countries, save only under the good pleasure of His Most Christian Majesty, and of him who will govern in his behalf; and this on pain of incurring his resentment and the efforts of his arms. Vive le Roi."[42] The Frenchmen fired their guns and shouted "Vive le Roi," and the yelps of the astonished Indians mingled with the din. What now remains of the sovereignty thus pompously proclaimed? Now and then the accents of France on the lips of some straggling boatman or vagabond half-breed,—this, and nothing more. ALLOUEZ'S HARANGUE. When the uproar was over, Father Allouez addressed the Indians in a solemn harangue; and these were his words: "It is a good work, my brothers, an important work, a great work, that brings us together in council to-day. Look up at the cross which rises so high above your heads. It was there that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, after making himself a man for the love of men, was nailed and died, to satisfy his Eternal Father for our sins. He is the master of our lives; the ruler of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. It is he of whom I am continually speaking to you, and whose name and word I have borne through all your country. But look at this post to which are fixed the arms of the great chief of France, whom we call King. He lives across the sea. He is the chief of the greatest chiefs, and has no equal on earth. All the chiefs whom you have ever seen are but children [Pg 54] beside him. He is like a great tree, and they are but the little herbs that one walks over and tramples under foot. You know Onontio,[43] that famous chief at Quebec; you know and you have seen that he is the terror of the Iroquois, and that his very name makes them tremble, since he has laid their country waste and burned their towns with fire. Across the sea there are ten thousand Onontios like him, who are but the warriors of our great King, of whom I have told you. When he says, 'I am going to war,' everybody obeys his orders; and each of these ten thousand chiefs raises a troop of a hundred warriors, some on sea and some on land. Some embark in great ships, such as you have seen at Quebec. Your canoes carry only four or five men, or, at the most, ten or twelve; but our ships carry four or five hundred, and sometimes a thousand. Others go to war by land, and in such numbers that if they stood in a double file they would reach from here to Mississaquenk, which is more than twenty leagues off. When our King attacks his enemies, he is more terrible than the thunder: the earth trembles; the air and the sea are all on fire with the blaze of his cannon: he is seen in the midst of his warriors, covered over with the blood of his enemies, whom he kills in such numbers that he does not reckon them by the scalps, but by the streams of blood which he causes to flow. He takes so many prisoners that he holds them in no account, but lets them go where they will, to show [Pg 55] that he is not afraid of them. But now nobody dares make war on him. All the nations beyond the sea have submitted to him and begged humbly for peace. Men come from every quarter of the earth to listen to him and admire him. All that is done in the world is decided by him alone. "But what shall I say of his riches? You think yourselves rich when you have ten or twelve sacks of corn, a few hatchets, beads, kettles, and other things of that sort. He has cities of his own, more than there are of men in all this country for five hundred leagues around. In each city there are store-houses where there are hatchets enough to cut down all your forests, kettles enough to cook all your moose, and beads enough to fill all your lodges. His house is longer than from here to the top of the Saut,—that is to say, more than half a league,—and higher than your tallest trees; and it holds more families than the largest of your towns."[44] The father added more in a similar strain; but the peroration of his harangue is not on record. Whatever impression this curious effort of Jesuit rhetoric may have produced upon the hearers, it did not prevent them from stripping the royal arms from the post to which they were nailed, as soon as Saint-Lusson and his men had left the Saut; probably, not because they understood the import of the symbol, but because they feared it as a charm. Saint-Lusson [Pg 56] proceeded to Lake Superior, where, however, he accomplished nothing, except, perhaps, a traffic with the Indians on his own account; and he soon after returned to Quebec. Talon was resolved to find the Mississippi, the most interesting object of search, and seemingly the most attainable, in the wild and vague domain which he had just claimed for the King. The Indians had described it; the Jesuits were eager to discover it; and La Salle, if he had not reached it, had explored two several avenues by which it might be approached. Talon looked about him for a fit agent of the enterprise, and made choice of Louis Joliet, who had returned from Lake Superior.[45] But the intendant was not to see the fulfilment of his design. His busy and useful career in Canada was drawing to an end. A misunderstanding had arisen between him and the governor, Courcelle. Both were faithful servants of the King; but the relations between the two chiefs of the colony were of a nature necessarily so critical, that a conflict of authority was scarcely to be avoided. Each thought his functions encroached upon, and both asked for recall. Another governor succeeded; one who was to stamp his mark, broad, bold, and ineffaceable, on the most memorable page of French-American History,—Louis de Buade, Count of Palluau and Frontenac. FOOTNOTES: [35] At least, La Salle was in great need of money, about the time of his second journey. On the sixth of August, 1671, he had received on credit, "dans son grand besoin et nécessité," from Branssac, fiscal attorney of the Seminary, merchandise to the amount of four hundred and fifty livres; and on the eighteenth of December of the following year he gave his promise to pay the same sum, in money or furs, in the August following. Faillon found the papers in the ancient records of Montreal. [36] In his despatch of 2d Nov., 1671, Talon writes to the King that "Saint-Lusson's expedition will cost nothing, as he has received beaver enough from the Indians to pay him." [37] M?urs, Coustumes, et Relligion des Sauvages de l'Amérique Septentrionale. This work of Perrot, hitherto unpublished, appeared in 1864, under the editorship of Father Tailhan, S.J. A great part of it is incorporated in La Potherie. [38] See La Potherie, ii. 125. Perrot himself does not mention it. Charlevoix erroneously places this interview at Chicago. Perrot's narrative shows that he did not go farther than the tribes of Green Bay; and the Miamis were then, as we have seen, on the upper part of Fox River. [39] Perrot, Mémoires, 127. [40] Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession, etc., 14 Juin, 1671. The names are attached to this instrument. [41] Marquette is said to have been present; but the official act just cited, proves the contrary. He was still at St. Esprit. [42] Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession. [43] The Indian name of the governor of Canada. [44] A close translation of Dablon's report of the speech. See Relation, 1671, 27. [45] Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672. In the Brodhead Collection, by a copyist's error, the name of the Chevalier de Grandfontaine is substituted for that of Talon. CHAPTER V. 1672-1675. THE DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. Joliet sent to find the Mississippi. Marquette.—Departure.—Green Bay.—The Wisconsin.—The Mississippi.—Indians.—Manitous.—The Arkansas.—The Illinois.—Joliet's Misfortune.—Marquette at Chicago: his Illness; his Death. If Talon had remained in the colony, Frontenac would infallibly have quarrelled with him; but he was too clear-sighted not to approve his plans for the discovery and occupation of the interior. Before sailing for France, Talon recommended Joliet as a suitable agent for the discovery of the Mississippi, and the governor accepted his counsel.[46] Louis Joliet was the son of a wagon-maker in the service of the Company of the Hundred Associates,[47] then owners of Canada. He was born at Quebec in 1645, and was educated by the Jesuits. When still very young, he resolved to be a priest. He received the tonsure and the minor orders at the age of seventeen. [Pg 58] Four years after, he is mentioned with especial honor for the part he bore in the disputes in philosophy, at which the dignitaries of the colony were present, and in which the intendant himself took part.[48] Not long after, he renounced his clerical vocation, and turned fur-trader. Talon sent him, with one Péré, to explore the copper-mines of Lake Superior; and it was on his return from this expedition that he met La Salle and the Sulpitians near the head of Lake Ontario.[49] In what we know of Joliet, there is nothing that reveals any salient or distinctive trait of character, any especial breadth of view or boldness of design. He appears to have been simply a merchant, intelligent, well educated, courageous, hardy, and enterprising. Though he had renounced the priesthood, he retained his partiality for the Jesuits; and it is more than probable that their influence had aided not a little to determine Talon's choice. One of their [Pg 59] number, Jacques Marquette, was chosen to accompany him. MARQUETTE. He passed up the lakes to Michilimackinac, and found his destined companion at Point St. Ignace, on the north side of the strait, where, in his palisaded mission-house and chapel, he had labored for two years past to instruct the Huron refugees from St. Esprit, and a band of Ottawas who had joined them. Marquette was born in 1637, of an old and honorable family at Laon, in the north of France, and was now thirty-five years of age. When about seventeen, he had joined the Jesuits, evidently from motives purely religious; and in 1666 he was sent to the missions of Canada. At first, he was destined to the station of Tadoussac; and to prepare himself for it, he studied the Montagnais language under Gabriel Druilletes. But his destination was changed, and he was sent to the Upper Lakes in 1668, where he had since remained. His talents as a linguist must have been great; for within a few years he learned to speak with ease six Indian languages. The traits of his character are unmistakable. He was of the brotherhood of the early Canadian missionaries, and the true counterpart of Garnier or Jogues. He was a devout votary of the Virgin Mary, who, imaged to his mind in shapes of the most transcendent loveliness with which the pencil of human genius has ever informed the canvas, was to him the object of an adoration not unmingled with a sentiment of chivalrous devotion. The longings of a sensitive heart, [Pg 60] divorced from earth, sought solace in the skies. A subtile element of romance was blended with the fervor of his worship, and hung like an illumined cloud over the harsh and hard realities of his daily lot. Kindled by the smile of his celestial mistress, his gentle and noble nature knew no fear. For her he burned to dare and to suffer, discover new lands and conquer new realms to her sway. He begins the journal of his voyage thus: "The day of the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin; whom I had continually invoked since I came to this country of the Ottawas to obtain from God the favor of being enabled to visit the nations on the river Mississippi,—this very day was precisely that on which M. Joliet arrived with orders from Count Frontenac, our governor, and from M. Talon, our intendant, to go with me on this discovery. I was all the more delighted at this good news, because I saw my plans about to be accomplished, and found myself in the happy necessity of exposing my life for the salvation of all these tribes,—and especially of the Illinois, who, when I was at Point St. Esprit, had begged me very earnestly to bring the word of God among them." DEPARTURE. The outfit of the travellers was very simple. They provided themselves with two birch canoes, and a supply of smoked meat and Indian corn; embarked with five men, and began their voyage on the seventeenth of May. They had obtained all possible information from the Indians, and had made, by means [Pg 61] of it, a species of map of their intended route. "Above all," writes Marquette, "I placed our voyage under the protection of the Holy Virgin Immaculate, promising that if she granted us the favor of discovering the great river, I would give it the name of the Conception."[50] Their course was westward; and, plying their paddles, they passed the Straits of Michilimackinac, and coasted the northern shores of Lake Michigan, landing at evening to build their camp-fire at the edge of the forest, and draw up their canoes on the strand. They soon reached the river Menomonie, and ascended it to the village of the Menomonies, or Wild-rice Indians.[51] When they told them the object of their voyage, they were filled with astonishment, and used their best ingenuity to dissuade them. The banks of the Mississippi, they said, were inhabited by ferocious tribes, who put every stranger to death, tomahawking all new-comers without cause or provocation. They added that there was a demon in a certain part of the river, whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt; that its waters were full of frightful monsters, who would devour them and their canoe; and, finally, that the [Pg 62] heat was so great that they would perish inevitably. Marquette set their counsel at naught, gave them a few words of instruction in the mysteries of the Faith, taught them a prayer, and bade them farewell. The travellers next reached the mission at the head of Green Bay; entered Fox River; with difficulty and labor dragged their canoes up the long and tumultuous rapids; crossed Lake Winnebago; and followed the quiet windings of the river beyond, where they glided through an endless growth of wild rice, and scared the innumerable birds that fed upon it. On either hand rolled the prairie, dotted with groves and trees, browsing elk and deer.[52] On the seventh of June, they reached the Mascoutins and Miamis, who, since the visit of Dablon and Allouez, had been joined by the Kickapoos. Marquette, who had an eye for natural beauty, was delighted with the situation of the town, which he describes as standing on the crown of a hill; while, all around, the prairie stretched beyond the sight, interspersed with groves and belts of tall forest. But he was still more delighted when he saw a cross planted in the midst of the place. The Indians had decorated it with a number of dressed deer-skins, red girdles, and bows and arrows, which they had hung upon it as an offering to the Great Manitou of the French; a sight by which Marquette says he was "extremely consoled." [Pg 63] THE WISCONSIN RIVER. The travellers had no sooner reached the town than they called the chiefs and elders to a council. Joliet told them that the governor of Canada had sent him to discover new countries, and that God had sent his companion to teach the true faith to the inhabitants; and he prayed for guides to show them the way to the waters of the Wisconsin. The council readily consented; and on the tenth of June the Frenchmen embarked again, with two Indians to conduct them. All the town came down to the shore to see their departure. Here were the Miamis, with long locks of hair dangling over each ear, after a fashion which Marquette thought very becoming; and here, too, the Mascoutins and the Kickapoos, whom he describes as mere boors in comparison with their Miami townsmen. All stared alike at the seven adventurers, marvelling that men could be found to risk an enterprise so hazardous. The river twisted among lakes and marshes choked with wild rice; and, but for their guides, they could scarcely have followed the perplexed and narrow channel. It brought them at last to the portage, where, after carrying their canoes a mile and a half over the prairie and through the marsh, they launched them on the Wisconsin, bade farewell to the waters that flowed to the St. Lawrence, and committed themselves to the current that was to bear them they knew not whither,—perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the South Sea or the Gulf of California. They glided calmly down the tranquil stream, by [Pg 64] islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grape-vines; by forests, groves, and prairies, the parks and pleasure-grounds of a prodigal Nature; by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars; under the shadowing trees, between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow of some woody bluff. At night, the bivouac,—the canoes inverted on the bank, the flickering fire, the meal of bison-flesh or venison, the evening pipes, and slumber beneath the stars; and when in the morning they embarked again, the mist hung on the river like a bridal veil, then melted before the sun, till the glassy water and the languid woods basked breathless in the sultry glare.[53] THE MISSISSIPPI. On the seventeenth of June they saw on their right the broad meadows, bounded in the distance by rugged hills, where now stand the town and fort of Prairie du Chien. Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests. They had found what they sought, and "with a joy," writes Marquette, "which I cannot express," they steered forth their canoes on the eddies of the Mississippi. Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man. A large fish, apparently one of the huge cat-fish of the Mississippi, blundered against Marquette's canoe, with a force which seems to have startled him; and once, as they drew in their net, they caught [Pg 65] a "spade-fish," whose eccentric appearance greatly astonished them. At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls, as they stared at the intruders through the tangled mane which nearly blinded them. THE ILLINOIS INDIANS. They advanced with extreme caution, landed at night, and made a fire to cook their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till morning. They had journeyed more than a fortnight without meeting a human being, when, on the twenty-fifth, they discovered footprints of men in the mud of the western bank, and a well-trodden path that led to the adjacent prairie. Joliet and Marquette resolved to follow it; and leaving the canoes in charge of their men, they set out on their hazardous adventure. The day was fair, and they walked two leagues in silence, following the path through the forest and across the sunny prairie, till they discovered an Indian village on the banks of a river, and two others on a hill half a league distant.[54] Now, with beating hearts, they invoked the aid of Heaven, and, again advancing, came so near, without being seen, that they could [Pg 66] hear the voices of the Indians among the wigwams. Then they stood forth in full view, and shouted to attract attention. There was great commotion in the village. The inmates swarmed out of their huts, and four of their chief men presently came forward to meet the strangers, advancing very deliberately, and holding up toward the sun two calumets, or peace-pipes, decorated with feathers. They stopped abruptly before the two Frenchmen, and stood gazing at them without speaking a word. Marquette was much relieved on seeing that they wore French cloth, whence he judged that they must be friends and allies. He broke the silence, and asked them who they were; whereupon they answered that they were Illinois, and offered the pipe; which having been duly smoked, they all went together to the village. Here the chief received the travellers after a singular fashion, meant to do them honor. He stood stark naked at the door of a large wigwam, holding up both hands as if to shield his eyes. "Frenchmen, how bright the sun shines when you come to visit us! All our village awaits you; and you shall enter our wigwams in peace." So saying, he led them into his own, which was crowded to suffocation with savages, staring at their guests in silence. Having smoked with the chiefs and old men, they were invited to visit the great chief of all the Illinois, at one of the villages they had seen in the distance; and thither they proceeded, followed by a throng of warriors, squaws, and children. On [Pg 67] arriving, they were forced to smoke again, and listen to a speech of welcome from the great chief, who delivered it standing between two old men, naked like himself. His lodge was crowded with the dignitaries of the tribe, whom Marquette addressed in Algonquin, announcing himself as a messenger sent by the God who had made them, and whom it behooves them to recognize and obey. He added a few words touching the power and glory of Count Frontenac, and concluded by asking information concerning the Mississippi, and the tribes along its banks, whom he was on his way to visit. The chief replied with a speech of compliment; assuring his guests that their presence added flavor to his tobacco, made the river more calm, the sky more serene, and the earth more beautiful. In conclusion, he gave them a young slave and a calumet, begging them at the same time to abandon their purpose of descending the Mississippi. A feast of four courses now followed. First, a wooden bowl full of a porridge of Indian meal boiled with grease was set before the guests; and the master of ceremonies fed them in turn, like infants, with a large spoon. Then appeared a platter of fish; and the same functionary, carefully removing the bones with his fingers, and blowing on the morsels to cool them, placed them in the mouths of the two Frenchmen. A large dog, killed and cooked for the occasion, was next placed before them; but, failing to tempt their fastidious appetites, was supplanted by a [Pg 68] dish of fat buffalo-meat, which concluded the entertainment. The crowd having dispersed, buffalo-robes were spread on the ground, and Marquette and Joliet spent the night on the scene of the late festivity. In the morning, the chief, with some six hundred of his tribesmen, escorted them to their canoes, and bade them, after their stolid fashion, a friendly farewell. A REAL DANGER. Again they were on their way, slowly drifting down the great river. They passed the mouth of the Illinois, and glided beneath that line of rocks on the eastern side, cut into fantastic forms by the elements, and marked as "The Ruined Castles" on some of the early French maps. Presently they beheld a sight which reminded them that the Devil was still lord paramount of this wilderness. On the flat face of a high rock were painted, in red, black, and green, a pair of monsters, each "as large as a calf, with horns like a deer, red eyes, a beard like a tiger, and a frightful expression of countenance. The face is something like that of a man, the body covered with scales; and the tail so long that it passes entirely round the body, over the head and between the legs, ending like that of a fish." Such is the account which the worthy Jesuit gives of these manitous, or Indian gods.[55] He confesses that at first they frightened [Pg 69] him; and his imagination and that of his credulous companions was so wrought upon by these unhallowed efforts of Indian art, that they continued for a long time to talk of them as they plied their paddles. They were thus engaged, when they were suddenly aroused by a real danger. A torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and surging, and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees. They had reached the mouth of the Missouri, where that savage river, descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentler sister. Their light canoes whirled on the miry vortex like dry leaves on an angry brook. "I never," writes Marquette, "saw anything more terrific;" but they escaped with their fright, and held their way down the turbulent and swollen current of the now united rivers.[56] They passed the lonely forest that covered [Pg 70] the site of the destined city of St. Louis, and, a few days later, saw on their left the mouth of the stream to which the Iroquois had given the well-merited name of Ohio, or the "Beautiful River."[57] Soon they began to see the marshy shores buried in a dense growth of the cane, with its tall straight stems and feathery light-green foliage. The sun glowed through the hazy air with a languid stifling heat, and by day and night mosquitoes in myriads left them no peace. They floated slowly down the current, crouched in the shade of the sails which they had spread as awnings, when suddenly they saw Indians on the east bank. The surprise was mutual, and each party was as much frightened as the other. Marquette hastened to display the calumet which the Illinois had given him by way of passport; and the Indians, recognizing the pacific symbol, replied with an invitation to land. Evidently, they were in communication with Europeans, for they were armed with guns, knives, and hatchets, wore garments of cloth, and carried their gunpowder in small bottles of thick glass. They feasted the Frenchmen with buffalo-meat, bear's oil, and white plums; and gave them a variety of doubtful information, [Pg 71] including the agreeable but delusive assurance that they would reach the mouth of the river in ten days. It was, in fact, more than a thousand miles distant. THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI. They resumed their course, and again floated down the interminable monotony of river, marsh, and forest. Day after day passed on in solitude, and they had paddled some three hundred miles since their meeting with the Indians, when, as they neared the mouth of the Arkansas, they saw a cluster of wigwams on the west bank. Their inmates were all astir, yelling the war-whoop, snatching their weapons, and running to the shore to meet the strangers, who, on their part, called for succor to the Virgin. In truth, they had need of her aid; for several large wooden canoes, filled with savages, were putting out from the shore, above and below them, to cut off their retreat, while a swarm of headlong young warriors waded into the water to attack them. The current proved too strong; and, failing to reach the canoes of the Frenchmen, one of them threw his war-club, which flew over the heads of the startled travellers. Meanwhile, Marquette had not ceased to hold up his calumet, to which the excited crowd gave no heed, but strung their bows and notched their arrows for immediate action; when at length the elders of the village arrived, saw the peace-pipe, restrained the ardor of the youth, and urged the Frenchmen to come ashore. Marquette and his companions complied, trembling, and found a better reception than [Pg 72] they had reason to expect. One of the Indians spoke a little Illinois, and served as interpreter; a friendly conference was followed by a feast of sagamite and fish; and the travellers, not without sore misgivings, spent the night in the lodges of their entertainers.[58] THE ARKANSAS. Early in the morning, they embarked again, and proceeded to a village of the Arkansas tribe, about eight leagues below. Notice of their coming was sent before them by their late hosts; and as they drew near they were met by a canoe, in the prow of which stood a naked personage, holding a calumet, singing, and making gestures of friendship. On reaching the village, which was on the east side,[59] opposite the mouth of the river Arkansas, they were conducted to a sort of scaffold, before the lodge of the war-chief. The space beneath had been prepared for their reception, the ground being neatly covered with rush mats. On these they were seated; the warriors sat around them in a semi-circle; then the elders of the tribe; and then the promiscuous crowd of villagers, standing, and staring over the heads of the more dignified members of the assembly. All the men were naked; but, to compensate for the lack of clothing, they wore strings of beads in their noses and ears. The women were clothed in shabby skins, and wore their hair clumped in a mass behind each [Pg 73] ear. By good luck, there was a young Indian in the village, who had an excellent knowledge of Illinois; and through him Marquette endeavored to explain the mysteries of Christianity, and to gain information concerning the river below. To this end he gave his auditors the presents indispensable on such occasions, but received very little in return. They told him that the Mississippi was infested by hostile Indians, armed with guns procured from white men; and that they, the Arkansas, stood in such fear of them that they dared not hunt the buffalo, but were forced to live on Indian corn, of which they raised three crops a year. During the speeches on either side, food was brought in without ceasing,—sometimes a platter of sagamite or mush; sometimes of corn boiled whole; sometimes a roasted dog. The villagers had large earthen pots and platters, made by themselves with tolerable skill, as well as hatchets, knives, and beads, gained by traffic with the Illinois and other tribes in contact with the French or Spaniards. All day there was feasting without respite, after the merciless practice of Indian hospitality; but at night some of their entertainers proposed to kill and plunder them,—a scheme which was defeated by the vigilance of the chief, who visited their quarters, and danced the calumet dance to reassure his guests. The travellers now held counsel as to what course they should take. They had gone far enough, as they thought, to establish one important point,—that [Pg 74] the Mississippi discharged its waters, not into the Atlantic or sea of Virginia, nor into the Gulf of California or Vermilion Sea, but into the Gulf of Mexico. They thought themselves nearer to its mouth than they actually were, the distance being still about seven hundred miles; and they feared that if they went farther they might be killed by Indians or captured by Spaniards, whereby the results of their discovery would be lost. Therefore they resolved to return to Canada, and report what they had seen. They left the Arkansas village, and began their homeward voyage on the seventeenth of July. It was no easy task to urge their way upward, in the heat of midsummer, against the current of the dark and gloomy stream, toiling all day under the parching sun, and sleeping at night in the exhalations of the unwholesome shore, or in the narrow confines of their birchen vessels, anchored on the river. Marquette was attacked with dysentery. Languid and well-nigh spent, he invoked his celestial mistress, as day after day, and week after week, they won their slow way northward. At length, they reached the Illinois, and, entering its mouth, followed its course, charmed, as they went, with its placid waters, its shady forests, and its rich plains, grazed by the bison and the deer. They stopped at a spot soon to be made famous in the annals of western discovery. This was a village of the Illinois, then called "Kaskaskia;" a name afterwards transferred to [Pg 75] another locality.[60] A chief, with a band of young warriors, offered to guide them to the Lake of the Illinois; that is to say, Lake Michigan. Thither they repaired; and, coasting its shores, reached Green Bay at the end of September, after an absence of about four months, during which they had paddled their canoes somewhat more than two thousand five hundred miles.[61] RETURN TO CANADA. Marquette remained to recruit his exhausted strength; but Joliet descended to Quebec, to bear the report of his discovery to Count Frontenac. Fortune had wonderfully favored him on his long and perilous journey; but now she abandoned him on the very threshold of home. At the foot of the rapids of La Chine, and immediately above Montreal, [Pg 76] his canoe was overset, two of his men and an Indian boy were drowned, all his papers were lost, and he himself narrowly escaped.[62] In a letter to Frontenac, he speaks of the accident as follows: "I had escaped every peril from the Indians; I had passed forty-two rapids; and was on the point of disembarking, full of joy at the success of so long and difficult an enterprise, when my canoe capsized, after all the danger seemed over. I lost two men and my box of papers, within sight of the first French settlements, which I had left almost two years before. Nothing remains to me but my life, and the ardent desire to employ it on any service which you may please to direct."[63] [Pg 77] MARQUETTE'S MISSION. Marquette spent the winter and the following summer at the mission of Green Bay, still suffering from his malady. In the autumn, however, it abated; and he was permitted by his Superior to attempt the execution of a plan to which he was devotedly attached,—the founding, at the principal town of the Illinois, of a mission to be called the "Immaculate Conception," a name which he had already given to the river Mississippi. He set out on this errand on the twenty-fifth of October, accompanied by two men, named Pierre and Jacques, one of whom had been with him on his great journey of discovery. A band of Pottawattamies and another band of Illinois also joined him. The united parties—ten canoes in all—followed the east shore of Green Bay as far as the inlet then called "Sturgeon Cove," from the head of which they crossed by a difficult portage through the forest to the shore of Lake Michigan. November had come. The bright hues of the autumn foliage were changed to rusty brown. The shore was desolate, and the lake was stormy. They were more [Pg 78] than a month in coasting its western border, when at length they reached the river Chicago, entered it, and ascended about two leagues. Marquette's disease had lately returned, and hemorrhage now ensued. He told his two companions that this journey would be his last. In the condition in which he was, it was impossible to go farther. The two men built a log hut by the river, and here they prepared to spend the winter; while Marquette, feeble as he was, began the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius, and confessed his two companions twice a week. Meadow, marsh, and forest were sheeted with snow, but game was abundant. Pierre and Jacques killed buffalo and deer, and shot wild turkeys close to their hut. There was an encampment of Illinois within two days' journey; and other Indians, passing by this well-known thoroughfare, occasionally visited them, treating the exiles kindly, and sometimes bringing them game and Indian corn. Eighteen leagues distant was the camp of two adventurous French traders,—one of them, a noted coureur de bois, nicknamed La Taupine;[64] and the other, a self-styled surgeon. They also visited Marquette, and befriended him to the best of their power. THE MISSION AT KASKASKIA. Urged by a burning desire to lay, before he died, the foundation of his new mission of the Immaculate Conception, Marquette begged his two followers to [Pg 79] join him in a novena, or nine days' devotion to the Virgin. In consequence of this, as he believed, his disease relented; he began to regain strength, and in March was able to resume the journey. On the thirtieth of the month, they left their hut, which had been inundated by a sudden rise of the river, and carried their canoe through mud and water over the portage which led to the Des Plaines. Marquette knew the way, for he had passed by this route on his return from the Mississippi. Amid the rains of opening spring, they floated down the swollen current of the Des Plaines, by naked woods and spongy, saturated prairies, till they reached its junction with the main stream of the Illinois, which they descended to their destination, the Indian town which Marquette calls "Kaskaskia." Here, as we are told, he was received "like an angel from Heaven." He passed from wigwam to wigwam, telling the listening crowds of God and the Virgin, Paradise and Hell, angels and demons; and, when he thought their minds prepared, he summoned them all to a grand council. It took place near the town, on the great meadow which lies between the river and the modern village of Utica. Here five hundred chiefs and old men were seated in a ring; behind stood fifteen hundred youths and warriors, and behind these again all the women and children of the village. Marquette, standing in the midst, displayed four large pictures of the Virgin; harangued the assembly on the mysteries of the Faith, and exhorted them to adopt it. [Pg 80] The temper of his auditory met his utmost wishes. They begged him to stay among them and continue his instructions; but his life was fast ebbing away, and it behooved him to depart. BURIAL OF MARQUETTE. A few days after Easter he left the village, escorted by a crowd of Indians, who followed him as far as Lake Michigan. Here he embarked with his two companions. Their destination was Michilimackinac, and their course lay along the eastern borders of the lake. As, in the freshness of advancing spring, Pierre and Jacques urged their canoe along that lonely and savage shore, the priest lay with dimmed sight and prostrated strength, communing with the Virgin and the angels. On the nineteenth of May, he felt that his hour was near; and, as they passed the mouth of a small river, he requested his companions to land. They complied, built a shed of bark on a rising ground near the bank, and carried thither the dying Jesuit. With perfect cheerfulness and composure, he gave directions for his burial, asked their forgiveness for the trouble he had caused them, administered to them the sacrament of penitence, and thanked God that he was permitted to die in the wilderness, a missionary of the Faith and a member of the Jesuit brotherhood. At night, seeing that they were fatigued, he told them to take rest, saying that he would call them when he felt his time approaching. Two or three hours after, they heard a feeble voice, and, hastening to his side, found him at the point of death. He expired calmly, murmuring [Pg 81] the names of Jesus and Mary, with his eyes fixed on the crucifix which one of his followers held before him. They dug a grave beside the hut, and here they buried him according to the directions which he had given them; then, re-embarking, they made their way to Michilimackinac, to bear the tidings to the priests at the mission of St. Ignace.[65] In the winter of 1676, a party of Kiskakon Ottawas were hunting on Lake Michigan; and when, in the following spring, they prepared to return home, they bethought them, in accordance with an Indian custom, of taking with them the bones of Marquette, who had been their instructor at the mission of St. Esprit. They repaired to the spot, found the grave, opened it, washed and dried the bones and placed them carefully in a box of birch-bark. Then, in a procession of thirty canoes, they bore it, singing their funeral songs, to St. Ignace of Michilimackinac. As they approached, priests, Indians, and traders all thronged to the shore. The relics of Marquette were received with solemn ceremony, and buried beneath the floor of the little chapel of the mission.[66] [Pg 82] FOOTNOTES: [46] Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672; Ibid., 14 Nov., 1674. [47] See "The Jesuits in North America." [48] "Le 2 Juillet (1666) les premières disputes de philosophie se font dans la congrégation avec succès. Toutes les puissances s'y trouvent; M. l'Intendant entr'autres y a argumenté très-bien. M. Jolliet et Pierre Francheville y ont très-bien répondu de toute la logique."—Journal des Jésuites. [49] Nothing was known of Joliet till Shea investigated his history. Ferland, in his Notes sur les Registres de Notre-Dame de Québec; Faillon, in his Colonie Fran?aise en Canada; and Margry, in a series of papers in the Journal Général de l'Instruction Publique,—have thrown much new light on his life. From journals of a voyage made by him at a later period to the coast of Labrador, given in substance by Margry, he seems to have been a man of close and intelligent observation. His mathematical acquirements appear to have been very considerable. [50] The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, sanctioned in our own time by the Pope, was always a favorite tenet of the Jesuits; and Marquette was especially devoted to it. [51] The Malhoumines, Malouminek, Oumalouminek, or Nation des Folles-Avoines, of early French writers. The folle-avoine, wild oats or "wild rice" (Zizania aquatica), was their ordinary food, as also of other tribes of this region. [52] Dablon, on his journey with Allouez in 1670, was delighted with the aspect of the country and the abundance of game along this river. Carver, a century later, speaks to the same effect, saying that the birds rose up in clouds from the wild-rice marshes. [53] The above traits of the scenery of the Wisconsin are taken from personal observation of the river during midsummer. [54] The Indian villages, under the names of Peouaria (Peoria) and Moingouena, are represented in Marquette's map upon a river corresponding in position with the Des Moines; though the distance from the Wisconsin, as given by him, would indicate a river farther north. [55] The rock where these figures were painted is immediately above the city of Alton. The tradition of their existence remains, though they are entirely effaced by time. In 1867, when I passed the place, a part of the rock had been quarried away, and, instead of Marquette's monsters, it bore a huge advertisement of "Plantation Bitters." Some years ago, certain persons, with more zeal than knowledge, proposed to restore the figures, after conceptions of their own; but the idea was abandoned. Marquette made a drawing of the two monsters, but it is lost. I have, however, a fac-simile of a map made a few years later, by order of the Intendant Duchesneau, which is decorated with the portrait of one of them, answering to Marquette's description, and probably copied from his drawing. St. Cosme, who saw them in 1699, says that they were even then almost effaced. Douay and Joutel also speak of them,—the former, bitterly hostile to his Jesuit contemporaries, charging Marquette with exaggeration in his account of them. Joutel could see nothing terrifying in their appearance; but he says that his Indians made sacrifices to them as they passed. [56] The Missouri is called "Pekitanou?" by Marquette. It also bears, on early French maps, the names of "Rivière des Osages," and "Rivière des Emissourites," or "Oumessourits." On Marquette's map, a tribe of this name is placed near its banks, just above the Osages. Judging by the course of the Mississippi that it discharged into the Gulf of Mexico, he conceived the hope of one day reaching the South Sea by way of the Missouri. [57] Called, on Marquette's map, "Ouabouskiaou." On some of the earliest maps, it is called "Ouabache" (Wabash). [58] This village, called "Mitchigamea," is represented on several contemporary maps. [59] A few years later, the Arkansas were all on the west side. [60] Marquette says that it consisted at this time of seventy-four lodges. These, like the Huron and Iroquois lodges, contained each several fires and several families. This village was about seven miles below the site of the present town of Ottawa. [61] The journal of Marquette, first published in an imperfect form by Thevenot, in 1681, has been reprinted by Mr. Lenox, under the direction of Mr. Shea, from the manuscript preserved in the archives of the Canadian Jesuits. It will also be found in Shea's Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley, and the Relations Inédites of Martin. The true map of Marquette accompanies all these publications. The map published by Thevenot and reproduced by Bancroft is not Marquette's. The original of this, of which I have a fac-simile, bears the title Carte de la Nouvelle Découverte que les Pères Jésuites ont faite en l'année 1672, et continuée par le Père Jacques Marquette, etc. The return route of the expedition is incorrectly laid down on it. A manuscript map of the Jesuit Raffeix, preserved in the Bibliothèque Impériale, is more accurate in this particular. I have also another contemporary manuscript map, indicating the various Jesuit stations in the West at this time, and representing the Mississippi, as discovered by Marquette. For these and other maps, see Appendix. [62] Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, Québec, 14 Nov., 1674. [63] This letter is appended to Joliet's smaller map of his discoveries. See Appendix. Compare Détails sur le Voyage de Louis Joliet and Relation de la Descouverte de plusieurs Pays situez au midi de la Nouvelle France, faite en 1673 (Margry, i. 259). These are oral accounts given by Joliet after the loss of his papers. Also, Lettre de Joliet, Oct. 10, 1674 (Harrisse). On the seventh of October, 1675, Joliet married Claire Bissot, daughter of a wealthy Canadian merchant, engaged in trade with the northern Indians. This drew Joliet's attention to Hudson's Bay; and he made a journey thither in 1679, by way of the Saguenay. He found three English forts on the bay, occupied by about sixty men, who had also an armed vessel of twelve guns and several small trading-craft. The English held out great inducements to Joliet to join them; but he declined, and returned to Quebec, where he reported that unless these formidable rivals were dispossessed, the trade of Canada would be ruined. In consequence of this report, some of the principal merchants of the colony formed a company to compete with the English in the trade of Hudson's Bay. In the year of this journey, Joliet received a grant of the islands of Mignan; and in the following year, 1652, he received another grant, of the great island of Anticosti in the lower St. Lawrence. In 1681 he was established here, with his wife and six servants. He was engaged in fisheries; and, being a skilful navigator and surveyor, he made about this time a chart of the St. Lawrence. In 1690, Sir William Phips, on his way with an English fleet to attack Quebec, made a descent on Joliet's establishment, burnt his buildings, and took prisoners his wife and his mother-in-law. In 1694 Joliet explored the coasts of Labrador, under the auspices of a company formed for the whale and seal fishery. On his return, Frontenac made him royal pilot for the St. Lawrence; and at about the same time he received the appointment of hydrographer at Quebec. He died, apparently poor, in 1699 or 1700, and was buried on one of the islands of Mignan. The discovery of the above facts is due in great part to the researches of Margry. [64] Pierre Moreau, alias La Taupine, was afterwards bitterly complained of by the Intendant Duchesneau, for acting as the governor's agent in illicit trade with the Indians. [65] The contemporary Relation tells us that a miracle took place at the burial of Marquette. One of the two Frenchmen, overcome with grief and colic, bethought him of applying a little earth from the grave to the seat of pain. This at once restored him to health and cheerfulness. [66] For Marquette's death, see the contemporary Relation, published by Shea, Lenox, and Martin, with the accompanying Lettre et Journal. The river where he died is a small stream in the west of Michigan, some distance south of the promontory called the "Sleeping Bear." It long bore his name, which is now borne by a larger neighboring stream, Charlevoix's account of Marquette's death is derived from tradition, and is not supported by the contemporary narrative. In 1877, human bones, with fragments of birch-bark, were found buried on the supposed site of the Jesuit chapel at Point St. Ignace. In 1847, the missionary of the Algonquins at the Lake of Two Mountains, above Montreal, wrote down a tradition of the death of Marquette, from the lips of an old Indian woman, born in 1777, at Michilimackinac. Her ancestress had been baptized by the subject of the story. The tradition has a resemblance to that related as fact by Charlevoix. The old squaw said that the Jesuit was returning, very ill, to Michilimackinac, when a storm forced him and his two men to land near a little river. Here he told them that he should die, and directed them to ring a bell over his grave and plant a cross. They all remained four days at the spot; and, though without food, the men felt no hunger. On the night of the fourth day he died, and the men buried him as he had directed. On waking in the morning, they saw a sack of Indian corn, a quantity of bacon, and some biscuit, miraculously sent to them, in accordance with the promise of Marquette, who had told them that they should have food enough for their journey to Michilimackinac. At the same instant, the stream began to rise, and in a few moments encircled the grave of the Jesuit, which formed, thenceforth, an islet in the waters. The tradition adds, that an Indian battle afterwards took place on the banks of this stream, between Christians and infidels; and that the former gained the victory, in consequence of invoking the name of Marquette. This story bears the attestation of the priest of the Two Mountains that it is a literal translation of the tradition, as recounted by the old woman. It has been asserted that the Illinois country was visited by two priests, some time before the visit of Marquette. This assertion was first made by M. Noiseux, late Grand Vicar of Quebec, who gives no authority for it. Not the slightest indication of any such visit appears in any contemporary document or map, thus far discovered. The contemporary writers, down to the time of Marquette and La Salle, all speak of the Illinois as an unknown country. The entire groundlessness of Noiseux's assertion is shown by Shea, in a paper in the "Weekly Herald," of New York, April 21, 1855. CHAPTER VI. 1673-1678. LA SALLE AND FRONTENAC. Objects of La Salle.—Frontenac favors him.—Projects of Frontenac.—Cataraqui.—Frontenac on Lake Ontario.—Fort Frontenac.—La Salle and Fénelon.—Success of La Salle: his Enemies. We turn from the humble Marquette, thanking God with his last breath that he died for his Order and his Faith; and by our side stands the masculine form of Cavelier de la Salle. Prodigious was the contrast between the two discoverers: the one, with clasped hands and upturned eyes, seems a figure evoked from some dim legend of medi?val saintship; the other, with feet firm planted on the hard earth, breathes the self-relying energies of modern practical enterprise. Nevertheless, La Salle's enemies called him a visionary. His projects perplexed and startled them. At first, they ridiculed him; and then, as step by step he advanced towards his purpose, they denounced and maligned him. What was this purpose? It was not of sudden growth, but developed as years went on. La Salle at La Chine dreamed of a western passage to China, and nursed vague [Pg 84] schemes of western discovery. Then, when his earlier journeyings revealed to him the valley of the Ohio and the fertile plains of Illinois, his imagination took wing over the boundless prairies and forests drained by the great river of the West. His ambition had found its field. He would leave barren and frozen Canada behind, and lead France and civilization into the valley of the Mississippi. Neither the English nor the Jesuits should conquer that rich domain: the one must rest content with the country east of the Alleghanies, and the other with the forests, savages, and beaver-skins of the northern lakes. It was for him to call into light the latent riches of the great West. But the way to his land of promise was rough and long: it lay through Canada, filled with hostile traders and hostile priests, and barred by ice for half the year. The difficulty was soon solved. La Salle became convinced that the Mississippi flowed, not into the Pacific or the Gulf of California, but into the Gulf of Mexico. By a fortified post at its mouth, he could guard it against both English and Spaniards, and secure for the trade of the interior an access and an outlet under his own control, and open at every season. Of this trade, the hides of the buffalo would at first form the staple, and along with furs would reward the enterprise till other resources should be developed. Such were the vast projects that unfolded themselves in the mind of La Salle. Canada must needs be, at the outset, his base of action, and without the [Pg 85] support of its authorities he could do nothing. This support he found. From the moment when Count Frontenac assumed the government of the colony, he seems to have looked with favor on the young discoverer. There were points of likeness between the two men. Both were ardent, bold, and enterprising. The irascible and fiery pride of the noble found its match in the reserved and seemingly cold pride of the ambitious burgher. Each could comprehend the other; and they had, moreover, strong prejudices and dislikes in common. An understanding, not to say an alliance, soon grew up between them. PROJECTS OF FRONTENAC. Frontenac had come to Canada a ruined man. He was ostentatious, lavish, and in no way disposed to let slip an opportunity of mending his fortune. He presently thought that he had found a plan by which he could serve both the colony and himself. His predecessor, Courcelle, had urged upon the King the expediency of building a fort on Lake Ontario, in order to hold the Iroquois in check and intercept the trade which the tribes of the Upper Lakes had begun to carry on with the Dutch and English of New York. Thus a stream of wealth would be turned into Canada, which would otherwise enrich her enemies. Here, to all appearance, was a great public good, and from the military point of view it was so in fact; but it was clear that the trade thus secured might be made to profit, not the colony at large, but those alone who had control of the fort, which would then become the instrument of a monopoly. This [Pg 86] the governor understood; and, without doubt, he meant that the projected establishment should pay him tribute. How far he and La Salle were acting in concurrence at this time, it is not easy to say; but Frontenac often took counsel of the explorer, who, on his part, saw in the design a possible first step towards the accomplishment of his own far-reaching schemes. EXPEDITION OF FRONTENAC Such of the Canadian merchants as were not in the governor's confidence looked on his plan with extreme distrust. Frontenac, therefore, thought it expedient "to make use," as he expresses it, "of address." He gave out merely that he intended to make a tour through the upper parts of the colony with an armed force, in order to inspire the Indians with respect, and secure a solid peace. He had neither troops, money, munitions, nor means of transportation; yet there was no time to lose, for, should he delay the execution of his plan, it might be countermanded by the King. His only resource, therefore, was in a prompt and hardy exertion of the royal authority; and he issued an order requiring the inhabitants of Quebec, Montreal, Three Rivers, and other settlements to furnish him, at their own cost, as soon as the spring sowing should be over, with a certain number of armed men, besides the requisite canoes. At the same time, he invited the officers settled in the country to join the expedition,—an invitation which, anxious as they were to gain his good graces, few of them cared to decline. Regardless of murmurs and discontent, he pushed his preparation [Pg 87] vigorously, and on the third of June left Quebec with his guard, his staff, a part of the garrison of the Castle of St. Louis, and a number of volunteers. He had already sent to La Salle, who was then at Montreal, directing him to repair to Onondaga, the political centre of the Iroquois, and invite their sachems to meet the governor in council at the Bay of Quinté on the north of Lake Ontario. La Salle had set out on his mission, but first sent Frontenac a map, which convinced him that the best site for his proposed fort was the mouth of the Cataraqui, where Kingston now stands. Another messenger was accordingly despatched, to change the rendezvous to this point. Meanwhile, the governor proceeded at his leisure towards Montreal, stopping by the way to visit the officers settled along the bank, who, eager to pay their homage to the newly risen sun, received him with a hospitality which under the roof of a log hut was sometimes graced by the polished courtesies of the salon and the boudoir. Reaching Montreal, which he had never before seen, he gazed, we may suppose, with some interest at the long row of humble dwellings which lined the bank, the massive buildings of the Seminary, and the spire of the church predominant over all. It was a rude scene, but the greeting that awaited him savored nothing of the rough simplicity of the wilderness. Perrot, the local governor, was on the shore with his soldiers and the inhabitants, drawn up under arms and firing [Pg 88] a salute to welcome the representative of the King. Frontenac was compelled to listen to a long harangue from the judge of the place, followed by another from the syndic. Then there was a solemn procession to the church, where he was forced to undergo a third effort of oratory from one of the priests. Te Deum followed, in thanks for his arrival; and then he took refuge in the fort. Here he remained thirteen days, busied with his preparations, organizing the militia, soothing their mutual jealousies, and settling knotty questions of rank and precedence. During this time, every means, as he declares, was used to prevent him from proceeding; and among other devices a rumor was set on foot that a Dutch fleet, having just captured Boston, was on its way to attack Quebec.[67] FRONTENAC'S JOURNEY Having sent men, canoes, and baggage, by land, to La Salle's old settlement of La Chine, Frontenac himself followed on the twenty-eighth of June. Including Indians from the missions, he now had with him about four hundred men and a hundred and twenty canoes, besides two large flat-boats, which he caused to be painted in red and blue, with strange devices, intended to dazzle the Iroquois by a display of unwonted splendor. Now their hard task began. Shouldering canoes through the forest, dragging the flat-boats along the shore, working like beavers,—sometimes [Pg 89] in water to the knees, sometimes to the armpits, their feet cut by the sharp stones, and they themselves well-nigh swept down by the furious current,—they fought their way upward against the chain of mighty rapids that break the navigation of the St. Lawrence. The Indians were of the greatest service. Frontenac, like La Salle, showed from the first a special faculty of managing them; for his keen, incisive spirit was exactly to their liking, and they worked for him as they would have worked for no man else. As they approached the Long Saut, rain fell in torrents; and the governor, without his cloak, and drenched to the skin, directed in person the amphibious toil of his followers. Once, it is said, he lay awake all night, in his anxiety lest the biscuit should be wet, which would have ruined the expedition. No such mischance took place, and at length the last rapid was passed, and smooth water awaited them to their journey's end. Soon they reached the Thousand Islands, and their light flotilla glided in long file among those watery labyrinths, by rocky islets, where some lonely pine towered like a mast against the sky; by sun-scorched crags, where the brown lichens crisped in the parching glare; by deep dells, shady and cool, rich in rank ferns, and spongy, dark-green mosses; by still coves, where the water-lilies lay like snow-flakes on their broad, flat leaves,—till at length they neared their goal, and the glistening bosom of Lake Ontario opened on their sight. [Pg 90] Frontenac, to impose respect on the Iroquois, now set his canoes in order of battle. Four divisions formed the first line, then came the two flat-boats; he himself, with his guards, his staff, and the gentlemen volunteers, followed, with the canoes of Three Rivers on his right, and those of the Indians on his left, while two remaining divisions formed a rear line. Thus, with measured paddles, they advanced over the still lake, till they saw a canoe approaching to meet them. It bore several Iroquois chiefs, who told them that the dignitaries of their nation awaited them at Cataraqui, and offered to guide them to the spot. They entered the wide mouth of the river, and passed along the shore, now covered by the quiet little city of Kingston, till they reached the point at present occupied by the barracks, at the western end of Cataraqui bridge. Here they stranded their canoes and disembarked. Baggage was landed, fires lighted, tents pitched, and guards set. Close at hand, under the lee of the forest, were the camping sheds of the Iroquois, who had come to the rendezvous in considerable numbers. FRONTENAC AT CATARAQUI At daybreak of the next morning, the thirteenth of July, the drums beat, and the whole party were drawn up under arms. A double line of men extended from the front of Frontenac's tent to the Indian camp; and, through the lane thus formed, the savage deputies, sixty in number, advanced to the place of council. They could not hide their admiration at the martial array of the French, many of whom were old [Pg 91] soldiers of the regiment of Carignan; and when they reached the tent they ejaculated their astonishment at the uniforms of the governor's guard who surrounded it. Here the ground had been carpeted with the sails of the flat-boats, on which the deputies squatted themselves in a ring and smoked their pipes for a time with their usual air of deliberate gravity; while Frontenac, who sat surrounded by his officers, had full leisure to contemplate the formidable adversaries whose mettle was hereafter to put his own to so severe a test. A chief named Garakontié, a noted friend of the French, at length opened the council, in behalf of all the five Iroquois nations, with expressions of great respect and deference towards "Onontio;" that is to say, the governor of Canada. Whereupon Frontenac, whose native arrogance where Indians were concerned always took a form which imposed respect without exciting anger, replied in the following strain:— "Children! Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. I am glad to see you here, where I have had a fire lighted for you to smoke by, and for me to talk to you. You have done well, my children, to obey the command of your Father. Take courage: you will hear his word, which is full of peace and tenderness. For do not think that I have come for war. My mind is full of peace, and she walks by my side. Courage, then, children, and take rest." With that, he gave them six fathoms of tobacco, [Pg 92] reiterated his assurances of friendship, promised that he would be a kind father so long as they should be obedient children, regretted that he was forced to speak through an interpreter, and ended with a gift of guns to the men, and prunes and raisins to their wives and children. Here closed this preliminary meeting, the great council being postponed to another day. During the meeting, Raudin, Frontenac's engineer, was tracing out the lines of a fort, after a predetermined plan; and the whole party, under the direction of their officers, now set themselves to construct it. Some cut down trees, some dug the trenches, some hewed the palisades; and with such order and alacrity was the work urged on, that the Indians were lost in astonishment. Meanwhile, Frontenac spared no pains to make friends of the chiefs, some of whom he had constantly at his table. He fondled the Iroquois children, and gave them bread and sweetmeats, and in the evening feasted the squaws to make them dance. The Indians were delighted with these attentions, and conceived a high opinion of the new Onontio. FRONTENAC AND THE INDIANS. On the seventeenth, when the construction of the fort was well advanced, Frontenac called the chiefs to a grand council, which was held with all possible state and ceremony. His dealing with the Indians on this and other occasions was truly admirable. Unacquainted as he was with them, he seems to have had an instinctive perception of the treatment they required. His predecessors had never ventured to [Pg 93] address the Iroquois as "Children," but had always styled them "Brothers;" and yet the assumption of paternal authority on the part of Frontenac was not only taken in good part, but was received with apparent gratitude. The martial nature of the man, his clear, decisive speech, and his frank and downright manner, backed as they were by a display of force which in their eyes was formidable, struck them with admiration, and gave tenfold effect to his words of kindness. They thanked him for that which from another they would not have endured. Frontenac began by again expressing his satisfaction that they had obeyed the commands of their Father, and come to Cataraqui to hear what he had to say. Then he exhorted them to embrace Christianity; and on this theme he dwelt at length, in words excellently adapted to produce the desired effect,—words which it would be most superfluous to tax as insincere, though doubtless they lost nothing in emphasis because in this instance conscience and policy aimed alike. Then, changing his tone, he pointed to his officers, his guard, the long files of the militia, and the two flat-boats, mounted with cannon, which lay in the river near by. "If," he said, "your Father can come so far, with so great a force, through such dangerous rapids, merely to make you a visit of pleasure and friendship, what would he do, if you should awaken his anger, and make it necessary for him to punish his disobedient children? He is the arbiter of peace and war. [Pg 94] Beware how you offend him!" And he warned them not to molest the Indian allies of the French, telling them, sharply, that he would chastise them for the least infraction of the peace. From threats he passed to blandishments, and urged them to confide in his paternal kindness, saying that, in proof of his affection, he was building a store-house at Cataraqui, where they could be supplied with all the goods they needed, without the necessity of a long and dangerous journey. He warned them against listening to bad men, who might seek to delude them by misrepresentations and falsehoods; and he urged them to give heed to none but "men of character, like the Sieur de la Salle." He expressed a hope that they would suffer their children to learn French from the missionaries, in order that they and his nephews—meaning the French colonists—might become one people; and he concluded by requesting them to give him a number of their children to be educated in the French manner, at Quebec. TREATY WITH THE INDIANS. This speech, every clause of which was reinforced by abundant presents, was extremely well received; though one speaker reminded him that he had forgotten one important point, inasmuch as he had not told them at what prices they could obtain goods at Cataraqui. Frontenac evaded a precise answer, but promised them that the goods should be as cheap as possible, in view of the great difficulty of transportation. As to the request concerning their children, they said that they could not accede to it till they [Pg 95] had talked the matter over in their villages; but it is a striking proof of the influence which Frontenac had gained over them, that, in the following year, they actually sent several of their children to Quebec to be educated,—the girls among the Ursulines, and the boys in the household of the governor. Three days after the council, the Iroquois set out on their return; and as the palisades of the fort were now finished, and the barracks nearly so, Frontenac began to send his party homeward by detachments. He himself was detained for a time by the arrival of another band of Iroquois, from the villages on the north side of Lake Ontario. He repeated to them the speech he had made to the others; and, this final meeting over, he embarked with his guard, leaving a sufficient number to hold the fort, which was to be provisioned for a year by means of a convoy then on its way up the river. Passing the rapids safely, he reached Montreal on the first of August. His enterprise had been a complete success. He had gained every point, and, in spite of the dangerous navigation, had not lost a single canoe. Thanks to the enforced and gratuitous assistance of the inhabitants, the whole had cost the King only about ten thousand francs, which Frontenac had advanced on his own credit. Though in a commercial point of view the new establishment was of very questionable benefit to the colony at large, the governor had, nevertheless, conferred an inestimable blessing on all Canada by the assurance he had gained of a long [Pg 96] respite from the fearful scourge of Iroquois hostility. "Assuredly," he writes, "I may boast of having impressed them at once with respect, fear, and good-will."[68] He adds that the fort at Cataraqui, with the aid of a vessel now building, will command Lake Ontario, keep the peace with the Iroquois, and cut off the trade with the English; and he proceeds to say that by another fort at the mouth of the Niagara, and another vessel on Lake Erie, we, the French, can command all the Upper Lakes. This plan was an essential link in the schemes of La Salle; and we shall soon find him employed in executing it. A curious incident occurred soon after the building of the fort on Lake Ontario. Frontenac, on his way back, quarrelled with Perrot, the governor of Montreal, whom, in view of his speculations in the fur-trade, he seems to have regarded as a rival in business; but who, by his folly and arrogance, would have justified any reasonable measure of severity. Frontenac, however, was not reasonable. He arrested Perrot, threw him into prison, and set up a man of his own as governor in his place; and as the judge of Montreal was not in his interest, he removed him, and substituted another on whom he could rely. Thus for a time he had Montreal well in hand. The priests of the Seminary, seigniors of the island, regarded these arbitrary proceedings with extreme uneasiness. They claimed the right of nominating their own governor; and Perrot, though he held a [Pg 97] commission from the King, owed his place to their appointment. True, he had set them at nought, and proved a veritable King Stork; yet nevertheless they regarded his removal as an infringement of their rights. During the quarrel with Perrot, La Salle chanced to be at Montreal, lodged in the house of Jacques Le Ber, who, though one of the principal merchants and most influential inhabitants of the settlement, was accustomed to sell goods across his counter in person to white men and Indians, his wife taking his place when he was absent. Such were the primitive manners of the secluded little colony. Le Ber, at this time, was in the interest of Frontenac and La Salle; though he afterwards became one of their most determined opponents. Amid the excitement and discussion occasioned by Perrot's arrest, La Salle declared himself an adherent of the governor, and warned all persons against speaking ill of him in his hearing. ABBé FéNELON. The Abbé Fénelon, already mentioned as half-brother to the famous Archbishop, had attempted to mediate between Frontenac and Perrot, and to this end had made a journey to Quebec on the ice, in midwinter. Being of an ardent temperament, and more courageous than prudent, he had spoken somewhat indiscreetly, and had been very roughly treated by the stormy and imperious Count. He returned to Montreal greatly excited, and not without cause. It fell to his lot to preach the Easter sermon. The [Pg 98] service was held in the little church of the H?tel-Dieu, which was crowded to the porch, all the chief persons of the settlement being present. The curé of the parish, whose name also was Perrot, said High Mass, assisted by La Salle's brother, Cavelier, and two other priests. Then Fénelon mounted the pulpit. Certain passages of his sermon were obviously levelled against Frontenac. Speaking of the duties of those clothed with temporal authority, he said that the magistrate, inspired with the spirit of Christ, was as ready to pardon offences against himself as to punish those against his prince; that he was full of respect for the ministers of the altar, and never maltreated them when they attempted to reconcile enemies and restore peace; that he never made favorites of those who flattered him, nor under specious pretexts oppressed other persons in authority who opposed his enterprises; that he used his power to serve his king, and not to his own advantage; that he remained content with his salary, without disturbing the commerce of the country, or abusing those who refused him a share in their profits; and that he never troubled the people by inordinate and unjust levies of men and material, using the name of his prince as a cover to his own designs.[69] [Pg 99] LA SALLE AND FéNELON. La Salle sat near the door; but as the preacher proceeded he suddenly rose to his feet in such a manner as to attract the notice of the congregation. As they turned their heads, he signed to the principal persons among them, and by his angry looks and gesticulation called their attention to the words of Fénelon. Then meeting the eye of the curé, who sat beside the altar, he made the same signs to him, to which the curé replied by a deprecating shrug of the shoulders. Fénelon changed color, but continued his sermon.[70] This indecent proceeding of La Salle, and the zeal with which throughout the quarrel he took the part of the governor, did not go unrewarded. Henceforth, Frontenac was more than ever his friend; and this plainly appeared in the disposition made, through his influence, of the new fort on Lake Ontario. Attempts had been made to induce the king to have it demolished; but it was resolved at last that, being built, it should be allowed to stand; and, after long delay, a final arrangement was made for its maintenance, in the manner following: In the autumn of 1674, La Salle went to France, with letters of strong recommendation from Frontenac.[71] He was well [Pg 100] received at Court; and he made two petitions to the King,—the one for a patent of nobility, in consideration of his services as an explorer; and the other for a grant in seigniory of Fort Frontenac, for so he called the new post, in honor of his patron. On his part, he offered to pay back the ten thousand francs which the fort had cost the King; to maintain it at his own charge, with a garrison equal to that of Montreal, besides fifteen or twenty laborers; to form a French colony around it; to build a church, whenever the number of inhabitants should reach one hundred; and, meanwhile, to support one or more Récollet friars; and, finally, to form a settlement of domesticated Indians in the neighborhood. His offers were accepted. He was raised to the rank of the untitled nobles; received a grant of the fort and lands adjacent, to the extent of four leagues in front and half a league in depth, besides the neighboring islands; and was invested with the government of the fort and settlement, subject to the orders of the governor-general.[72] [Pg 101] La Salle returned to Canada, proprietor of a seigniory which, all things considered, was one of the most valuable in the colony. His friends and his family, rejoicing in his good fortune and not unwilling to share it, made him large advances of money, enabling him to pay the stipulated sum to the King, to rebuild the fort in stone, maintain soldiers and laborers, and procure in part, at least, the necessary outfit. Had La Salle been a mere merchant, he was in a fair way to make a fortune, for he was in a position to control the better part of the Canadian fur-trade. But he was not a mere merchant; and no commercial profit could content his ambition. Those may believe, who will, that Frontenac did not expect a share in the profits of the new post. That he did expect it, there is positive evidence; for a deposition is extant, taken at the instance of his enemy the Intendant Duchesneau, in which three witnesses attest that the governor, La Salle, his lieutenant La Forest, and one Boisseau, had formed a partnership to carry on the trade of Fort Frontenac. ENEMIES OF LA SALLE. No sooner was La Salle installed in his new post than the merchants of Canada joined hands to oppose him. Le Ber, once his friend, became his bitter enemy; for he himself had hoped to share the monopoly of Fort Frontenac, of which he and one Bazire had at first been placed provisionally in control, [Pg 102] and from which he now saw himself ejected. La Chesnaye, Le Moyne, and others of more or less influence took part in the league, which, in fact, embraced all the traders in the colony except the few joined with Frontenac and La Salle. Duchesneau, intendant of the colony, aided the malcontents. As time went on, their bitterness grew more bitter; and when at last it was seen that, not satisfied with the monopoly of Fort Frontenac, La Salle aimed at the control of the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and the usufruct of half a continent, the ire of his opponents redoubled, and Canada became for him a nest of hornets, buzzing in wrath and watching the moment to sting. But there was another element of opposition, less noisy, but not less formidable; and this arose from the Jesuits. Frontenac hated them; and they, under befitting forms of duty and courtesy, paid him back in the same coin. Having no love for the governor, they would naturally have little for his partisan and protégé; but their opposition had another and a deeper root, for the plans of the daring young schemer jarred with their own. PURPOSES OF THE JESUITS. We have seen the Canadian Jesuits in the early apostolic days of their mission, when the flame of their zeal, fed by an ardent hope, burned bright and high. This hope was doomed to disappointment. Their avowed purpose of building another Paraguay on the borders of the Great Lakes[73] was never accomplished, [Pg 103] and their missions and their converts were swept away in an avalanche of ruin. Still, they would not despair. From the lakes they turned their eyes to the Valley of the Mississippi, in the hope to see it one day the seat of their new empire of the Faith. But what did this new Paraguay mean? It meant a little nation of converted and domesticated savages, docile as children, under the paternal and absolute rule of Jesuit fathers, and trained by them in industrial pursuits, the results of which were to inure, not to the profit of the producers, but to the building of churches, the founding of colleges, the establishment of warehouses and magazines, and the construction of works of defence,—all controlled by Jesuits, and forming a part of the vast possessions of the Order. Such was the old Paraguay;[74] and such, we may suppose, would have been the new, had the plans of those who designed it been realized. I have said that since the middle of the century the religious exaltation of the early missions had sensibly declined. In the nature of things, that grand enthusiasm was too intense and fervent to be long sustained. But the vital force of Jesuitism had suffered no diminution. That marvellous esprit de corps, that extinction of self and absorption of the individual in the Order which has marked the Jesuits from their first existence as a body, was no whit changed or lessened,—a principle, which, though [Pg 104] different, was no less strong than the self-devoted patriotism of Sparta or the early Roman Republic. The Jesuits were no longer supreme in Canada; or, in other words, Canada was no longer simply a mission. It had become a colony. Temporal interests and the civil power were constantly gaining ground; and the disciples of Loyola felt that relatively, if not absolutely, they were losing it. They struggled vigorously to maintain the ascendency of their Order, or, as they would have expressed it, the ascendency of religion; but in the older and more settled parts of the colony it was clear that the day of their undivided rule was past. Therefore, they looked with redoubled solicitude to their missions in the West. They had been among its first explorers; and they hoped that here the Catholic Faith, as represented by Jesuits, might reign with undisputed sway. In Paraguay, it was their constant aim to exclude white men from their missions. It was the same in North America. They dreaded fur-traders, partly because they interfered with their teachings and perverted their converts, and partly for other reasons. But La Salle was a fur-trader, and far worse than a fur-trader: he aimed at occupation, fortification, and settlement. The scope and vigor of his enterprises, and the powerful influence that aided them, made him a stumbling-block in their path. He was their most dangerous rival for the control of the West, and from first to last they set themselves against him. [Pg 105] SPIRIT OF LA SALLE. What manner of man was he who could conceive designs so vast and defy enmities so many and so powerful? And in what spirit did he embrace these designs? We will look hereafter for an answer. FOOTNOTES: [67] Lettre de Frontenac à Colbert, 13 Nov., 1673. This rumor, it appears, originated with the Jesuit Dablon. Journal du Voyage du Comte de Frontenac au lac Ontario. The Jesuits were greatly opposed to the establishment of forts and trading-posts in the upper country, for reasons that will appear hereafter. [68] Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1673. [69] Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, iii. 497, and manuscript authorities there cited. I have examined the principal of these. Faillon himself is a priest of St. Sulpice. Compare H. Verreau, Les Deux Abbés de Fénelon, chap. vii. [70] Information faicte par nous, Charles le Tardieu, Sieur de Tilly, et Nicolas Dupont, etc., etc., contre le Sr. Abbé de Fénelon. Tilly and Dupont were sent by Frontenac to inquire into the affair. Among the deponents is La Salle himself. [71] In his despatch to the minister Colbert, of the fourteenth of November, 1674, Frontenac speaks of La Salle as follows: "I cannot help, Monseigneur, recommending to you the Sieur de la Salle, who is about to go to France, and who is a man of intelligence and ability, more capable than anybody else I know here to accomplish every kind of enterprise and discovery which may be intrusted to him, as he has the most perfect knowledge of the state of the country, as you will see, if you are disposed to give him a few moments of audience." [72] Mémoire pour l'entretien du Fort Frontenac, par le Sr. de la Salle, 1674. Petition du Sr. de la Salle au Roi. Lettres patentes de concession, du Fort de Frontenac et terres adjacentes au profit du Sr. de la Salle; données à Compiègne le 13 Mai, 1675. Arrêt qui accepte les offres faites par Robert Cavelier Sr. de la Salle; à Compiègne le 13 Mai, 1675. Lettres de noblesse pour le Sr. Cavelier de la Salle; données à Compiègne le 13 Mai, 1675. Papiers de Famille. Mémoire au Roi. [73] This purpose is several times indicated in the Relations. For an instance, see "The Jesuits in North America," 245. [74] Compare Charlevoix, Histoire de Paraguay, with Robertson, Letters on Paraguay. CHAPTER VII. 1678. PARTY STRIFE. La Salle and his Reporter.—Jesuit Ascendency.—The Missions and the Fur-trade.—Female Inquisitors.—Plots against La Salle: his Brother the Priest.—Intrigues Of the Jesuits.—La Salle poisoned: he exculpates the Jesuits.—Renewed Intrigues. LA SALLE'S MEMOIR. One of the most curious monuments of La Salle's time is a long memoir, written by a person who made his acquaintance at Paris in the summer of 1678, when, as we shall soon see, he had returned to France in prosecution of his plans. The writer knew the Sulpitian Galinée,[75] who, as he says, had a very high opinion of La Salle; and he was also in close relations with the discoverer's patron, the Prince de Conti.[76] He says that he had ten or twelve interviews with La Salle; and, becoming interested in him and in that which he communicated, he wrote down the substance of his conversation. The paper is divided into two [Pg 107] parts: the first, called "Mémoire sur Mr. de la Salle," is devoted to the state of affairs in Canada, and chiefly to the Jesuits; the second, entitled "Histoire de Mr. de la Salle," is an account of the discoverer's life, or as much of it as the writer had learned from him.[77] Both parts bear throughout the internal evidence of being what they profess to be; but they embody the statements of a man of intense partisan feeling, transmitted through the mind of another person in sympathy with him, and evidently sharing his prepossessions. In one respect, however, the paper is of unquestionable historical value; for it gives us a vivid and not an exaggerated picture of the bitter strife of parties which then raged in Canada, and which was destined to tax to the utmost the vast energy and fortitude of La Salle. At times, the memoir is fully sustained by contemporary evidence; but often, again, it rests on its own unsupported authority. I give an abstract of its statements as I find them. The following is the writer's account of La Salle: "All those among my friends who have seen him find him a man of great intelligence and sense. He rarely speaks of any subject except when questioned about it, and his words are very few and very precise. He distinguishes perfectly between that which he knows with certainly and that which he knows with some mingling of doubt. When he does not know, he does [Pg 108] not hesitate to avow it; and though I have heard him say the same thing more than five or six times, when persons were present who had not heard it before, he always said it in the same manner. In short, I never heard anybody speak whose words carried with them more marks of truth."[78] JESUIT ASCENDENCY. After mentioning that he is thirty-three or thirty-four years old, and that he has been twelve years in America, the memoir declares that he made the following statements: that the Jesuits are masters at Quebec; that the bishop is their creature, and does nothing but in concert with them;[79] that he is not well inclined towards the Récollets,[80] who have little [Pg 109] credit, but who are protected by Frontenac; that in Canada the Jesuits think everybody an enemy to religion who is an enemy to them; that, though they refused absolution to all who sold brandy to the Indians, they sold it themselves, and that he, La Salle, had himself detected them in it;[81] that the bishop laughs at the orders of the King when they do not agree with the wishes of the Jesuits; that the Jesuits dismissed one of their servants named Robert, because he told of their trade in brandy; that Albanel,[82] in particular, carried on a great fur-trade, and that the Jesuits have built their college in part from the profits of this kind of traffic; that they [Pg 110] admitted that they carried on a trade, but denied that they gained so much by it as was commonly supposed.[83] FEMALE INQUISITORS. The memoir proceeds to affirm that they trade largely with the Sioux at Ste. Marie, and with other tribes at Michilimackinac, and that they are masters of the trade of that region, where the forts are in their possession.[84] An Indian said, in full council, at Quebec, that he had prayed and been a Christian as long as the Jesuits would stay and teach him, but since no more beaver were left in his country, the missionaries were gone also. The Jesuits, pursues the memoir, will have no priests but themselves in their missions, and call them all Jansenists, not excepting the priests of St. Sulpice. The bishop is next accused of harshness and intolerance, as well as of growing rich by tithes, and even by trade, in which it is affirmed he has a covert interest.[85] It is added that there exists in Quebec, under the auspices of the Jesuits, an association [Pg 111] called the Sainte Famille, of which Madame Bourdon[86] is superior. They meet in the cathedral every Thursday, with closed doors, where they relate to each other—as they are bound by a vow to do—all they have learned, whether good or evil, concerning other people, during the week. It is a sort of female inquisition, for the benefit of the Jesuits, the secrets of whose friends, it is said, are kept, while no such discretion is observed with regard to persons not of their party.[87] [Pg 112] Here follow a series of statements which it is needless to repeat, as they do not concern La Salle. They relate to abuse of the confessional, hostility to other priests, hostility to civil authorities, and over-hasty baptisms, in regard to which La Salle is reported to have made a comparison, unfavorable to the Jesuits, between them and the Récollets and Sulpitians. PLOTS AGAINST LA SALLE. We now come to the second part of the memoir, entitled "History of Monsieur de la Salle." After stating that he left France at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, with the purpose of attempting some new discovery, it makes the statements repeated in a former chapter, concerning his discovery of the Ohio, the Illinois, and possibly the Mississippi. It then mentions the building of Fort Frontenac, and says that one object of it was to prevent the Jesuits from becoming undisputed masters of the fur-trade.[88] Three years ago, it pursues, La Salle came to France, and obtained a grant of the fort; and it proceeds to give examples of the means used by the party opposed to him to injure his good name and bring him within reach of the law. Once, when he was at Quebec, the farmer of the King's revenue, one of the richest [Pg 113] men in the place, was extremely urgent in his proffers of hospitality, and at length, though he knew La Salle but slightly, persuaded him to lodge in his house. He had been here but a few days when his host's wife began to enact the part of the wife of Potiphar, and this with so much vivacity that on one occasion La Salle was forced to take an abrupt leave, in order to avoid an infringement of the laws of hospitality. As he opened the door, he found the husband on the watch, and saw that it was a plot to entrap him.[89] Another attack, of a different character, though in the same direction, was soon after made. The remittances which La Salle received from the various members and connections of his family were sent through the hands of his brother, Abbé Cavelier, from whom his enemies were, therefore, very eager to alienate him. To this end, a report was made to reach the priest's ears that La Salle had seduced a young woman, with whom he was living in an open and scandalous manner at Fort Frontenac. The effect of this device exceeded the wishes of its contrivers; for the priest, aghast at what he had heard, set out for the fort, to administer his fraternal rebuke, but on arriving, in place of the expected abomination, found his brother, assisted by two Récollet friars, ruling with edifying propriety over a most exemplary household. [Pg 114] Thus far the memoir. From passages in some of La Salle's letters, it may be gathered that Abbé Cavelier gave him at times no little annoyance. In his double character of priest and elder brother, he seems to have constituted himself the counsellor, monitor, and guide of a man who, though many years his junior, was in all respects incomparably superior to him, as the sequel will show. This must have been almost insufferable to a nature like that of La Salle, who, nevertheless, was forced to arm himself with patience, since his brother held the purse-strings. On one occasion his forbearance was put to a severe proof, when, wishing to marry a damsel of good connections in the colony, Abbé Cavelier saw fit for some reason to interfere, and prevented the alliance.[90] INTRIGUES OF THE JESUITS. To resume the memoir. It declares that the Jesuits procured an ordinance from the Supreme Council prohibiting traders from going into the Indian country, in order that they, the Jesuits, being already established there in their missions, might carry on trade without competition. But La Salle induced a good number of the Iroquois to settle around his fort; thus bringing the trade to his own door, without breaking the ordinance. These Iroquois, he is further reported to have said, were very fond of him, and aided him in rebuilding the fort with cut stone. The Jesuits told the Iroquois on the south side of the lake, where they were established [Pg 115] as missionaries, that La Salle was strengthening his defences with the view of making war on them. They and the intendant, who was their creature, endeavored to embroil the Iroquois with the French in order to ruin La Salle; writing to him at the same time that he was the bulwark of the country, and that he ought to be always on his guard. They also tried to persuade Frontenac that it was necessary to raise men and prepare for war. La Salle suspected them; and seeing that the Iroquois, in consequence of their intrigues, were in an excited state, he induced the governor to come to Fort Frontenac to pacify them. He accordingly did so; and a council was held, which ended in a complete restoration of confidence on the part of the Iroquois.[91] At this council they accused the two Jesuits, Bruyas and Pierron,[92] of spreading reports that the French were preparing to attack them. La Salle thought that the [Pg 116] object of the intrigue was to make the Iroquois jealous of him, and engage Frontenac in expenses which would offend the King. After La Salle and the governor had lost credit by the rupture, the Jesuits would come forward as pacificators, in the full assurance that they could restore quiet, and appear in the attitude of saviors of the colony. La Salle, pursues his reporter, went on to say that about this time a quantity of hemlock and verdigris was given him in a salad; and that the guilty person was a man in his employ named Nicolas Perrot, otherwise called Jolyc?ur, who confessed the crime.[93] The memoir adds that La Salle, who recovered from the effects of the poison, wholly exculpates the Jesuits. This attempt, which was not, as we shall see, the only one of the kind made against La Salle, is alluded to by him in a letter to a friend at Paris, [Pg 117] written in Canada when he was on the point of departure on his great expedition to descend the Mississippi. The following is an extract from it: LA SALLE EXCULPATES THE JESUITS. "I hope to give myself the honor of sending you a more particular account of this enterprise when it shall have had the success which I hope for it; but I have need of a strong protection for its support. It traverses the commercial operations of certain persons, who will find it hard to endure it. They intended to make a new Paraguay in these parts, and the route which I close against them gave them facilities for an advantageous correspondence with Mexico. This check will infallibly be a mortification to them; and you know how they deal with whatever opposes them. Nevertheless, I am bound to render them the justice to say that the poison which was given me was not at all of their instigation. The person who was conscious of the guilt, believing that I was their enemy because he saw that our sentiments were opposed, thought to exculpate himself by accusing them, and I confess that at the time I was not sorry to have this indication of their ill-will; but having afterwards carefully examined the affair, I clearly discovered the falsity of the accusation which this rascal had made against them. I nevertheless pardoned him, in order not to give notoriety to the affair; as the mere suspicion might sully their reputation, to which I should scrupulously avoid doing the slightest injury unless I thought it necessary to the good of the public, and unless the fact were fully proved. Therefore, [Pg 118] Monsieur, if anybody shared the suspicion which I felt, oblige me by undeceiving him."[94] This letter, so honorable to La Salle, explains the statement made in the memoir, that, notwithstanding his grounds of complaint against the Jesuits, he continued to live on terms of courtesy with them, entertained them at his fort, and occasionally corresponded with them. The writer asserts, however, that they intrigued with his men to induce them to desert,—employing for this purpose a young man named Deslauriers, whom they sent to him with letters of recommendation. La Salle took him into his service; but he soon after escaped, with several other men, and took refuge in the Jesuit missions.[95] The object of the intrigue is said to have been the reduction of La Salle's garrison to a number less than that which he was bound to maintain, thus exposing him to a forfeiture of his title of possession. RENEWED INTRIGUES. He is also stated to have declared that Louis Joliet was an impostor,[96] and a donné of the Jesuits,—that [Pg 119] is, a man who worked for them without pay; and, further, that when he, La Salle, came to court to ask for privileges enabling him to pursue his discoveries, the Jesuits represented in advance to the minister Colbert that his head was turned, and that he was fit for nothing but a mad-house. It was only by the aid of influential friends that he was at length enabled to gain an audience. Here ends this remarkable memoir, which, criticise it as we may, does not exaggerate the jealousies and enmities that beset the path of the discoverer. FOOTNOTES: [75] Ante, p. 17. [76] Louis-Armand de Bourbon, second Prince de Conti. The author of the memoir seems to have been Abbé Renaudot, a learned churchman. [77] Extracts from this have already been given in connection with La Salle's supposed discovery of the Mississippi. Ante, p. 29. [78] "Tous ceux de mes amis qui l'ont vu luy trouve beaucoup d'esprit et un très-grand sens; il ne parle guère que des choses sur lesquelles on l'interroge; il les dit en très-peu de mots et très-bien circonstanciées; il distingue parfaitement ce qu'il scait avec certitude, de ce qu'il scait avec quelque mélange de doute. Il avoue sans aucune fa?on ne pas savoir ce qu'il ne scait pas, et quoyque je luy aye ouy dire plus de cinq ou six fois les mesme choses à l'occasion de quelques personnes qui ne les avaient point encore entendues, je les luy ay toujours ouy dire de la mesme manière. En un mot je n'ay jamais ouy parler personne dont les paroles portassent plus de marques de vérité." [79]] "Il y a une autre chose qui me déplait, qui est l'entière dépendence dans laquelle les Prêtres du Séminaire de Québec et le Grand Vicaire de l'Evêque sont pour les Pères Jésuites, car il ne fait pas la moindre chose sans leur ordre; ce qui fait qu'indirectement ils sont les ma?tres de ce qui regarde le spirituel, qui, comme vous savez, est une grande machine pour remuer tout le reste."—Lettre de Frontenac à Colbert, 2 Nov., 1672. [80] "Ces réligieux [les Récollets] sont fort protégés partout par le comte de Frontenac, gouverneur du pays, et à cause de cela assez maltraités par l'évesque, parceque la doctrine de l'évesque et des Jésuites est que les affaires de la Réligion chrestienne n'iront point bien dans ce pays-là que quand le gouverneur sera créature des Jésuites, ou que l'évesque sera gouverneur."—Mémoire sur Mr. de la Salle. [81] "Ils [les Jésuites] refusent l'absolution à ceux qui ne veulent pas promettre de n'en plus vendre [de l'eau-de-vie], et s'ils meurent en cet état, ils les privent de la sépulture ecclésiastique; au contraire ils se permettent à eux-mêmes sans aucune difficulté ce mesme trafic quoique toute sorte de trafic soit interdite à tous les ecclésiastiques par les ordonnances du Roy, et par une bulle expresse du Pape. La Bulle et les ordonnances sont notoires, et quoyqu'ils cachent le trafic qu'ils font d'eau-de-vie, M. de la Salle prétend qu'il ne l'est pas moins; qu'outre la notoriété il en a des preuves certaines, et qu'il les a surpris dans ce trafic, et qu'ils luy ont tendu des pièges pour l'y surprendre.... Ils ont chassé leur valet Robert à cause qu'il révéla qu'ils en traitaient jour et nuit."—Ibid. The writer says that he makes this last statement, not on the authority of La Salle, but on that of a memoir made at the time when the intendant, Talon, with whom he elsewhere says that he was well acquainted, returned to France. A great number of particulars are added respecting the Jesuit trade in furs. [82] Albanel was prominent among the Jesuit explorers at this time. He is best known by his journey up the Saguenay to Hudson's Bay in 1672. [83] "Pour vous parler franchement, ils [les Jésuites] songent autant à la conversion du Castor qu'à celle des ames."—Lettre de Frontenac à Colbert, 2 Nov., 1672. In his despatch of the next year, he says that the Jesuits ought to content themselves with instructing the Indians in their old missions, instead of neglecting them to make new ones in countries where there are "more beaver-skins to gain than souls to save." [84] These forts were built by them, and were necessary to the security of their missions. [85] Fran?ois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, first bishop of Quebec, was a prelate of austere character. His memory is cherished in Canada by adherents of the Jesuits and all ultramontane Catholics. [86] This Madame Bourdon was the widow of Bourdon, the engineer (see "The Jesuits in North America," 297). If we may credit the letters of Marie de l'Incarnation, she had married him from a religious motive, in order to charge herself with the care of his motherless children; stipulating in advance that he should live with her, not as a husband, but as a brother. As may be imagined, she was regarded as a most devout and saint-like person. [87] "Il y a dans Québec une congrégation de femmes et de filles qu'ils [les Jésuites] appellent la sainte famille, dans laquelle on fait v?u sur les Saints Evangiles de dire tout ce qu'on sait de bien et de mal des personnes qu'on connoist. La Supérieure de cette compagnie s'appelle Madame Bourdon; une Mde. d'Ailleboust est, je crois, l'assistante et une Mde. Charron, la Trésorière. La Compagnie s'assemble tous les Jeudis dans la Cathédrale, à porte fermée, et là elles se disent les unes aux autres tout ce qu'elles ont appris. C'est une espèce d'Inquisition contre toutes les personnes qui ne sont pas unies avec les Jésuites. Ces personnes sont accusées de tenir secret ce qu'elles apprennent de mal des personnes de leur party et de n'avoir pas la mesme discretion pour les autres."—Mémoire sur M^r. de la Salle. The Madame d'Ailleboust mentioned above was a devotee like Madame Bourdon, and, in one respect, her history was similar. See "The Jesuits in North America," 360. The association of the Sainte Famille was founded by the Jesuit Chaumonot at Montreal in 1663. Laval, Bishop of Quebec, afterwards encouraged its establishment at that place; and, as Chaumonot himself writes, caused it to be attached to the cathedral. Vie de Chaumonot, 83. For its establishment at Montreal, see Faillon, Vie de Mlle. Mance, i. 233. "Ils [les Jésuites] ont tous une si grande envie de savoir tout ce qui se fait dans les familles qu'ils ont des Inspecteurs à gages dans la Ville, qui leur rapportent tout ce qui se fait dans les maisons," etc., etc.—Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1673. [88] Mention has been made (p. 88, note) of the report set on foot by the Jesuit Dablon, to prevent the building of the fort. [89] This story is told at considerable length, and the advances of the lady particularly described. [90] Letter of La Salle, in possession of M. Margry. [91] Louis XIV. alludes to this visit, in a letter to Frontenac, dated 28 April, 1677. "I cannot but approve," he writes, "of what you have done, in your voyage to Fort Frontenac, to reconcile the minds of the Five Iroquois Nations, and to clear yourself from the suspicions they had entertained, and from the motives that might induce them to make war." Frontenac's despatches of this year, as well as of the preceding and following years, are missing from the archives. In a memoir written in November, 1680, La Salle alludes to "le désir que l'on avoit que Monseigneur le Comte de Frontenac fit la guerre aux Iroquois." See Thomassy, Géologie Pratique de la Louisiane, 203. [92] Bruyas was about this time stationed among the Onondagas. Pierron was among the Senecas. He had lately removed to them from the Mohawk country. Relation des Jésuites, 1673-79, 140 (Shea). Bruyas was also for a long time among the Mohawks. [93] This puts the character of Perrot in a new light; for it is not likely that any other can be meant than the famous voyageur. I have found no mention elsewhere of the synonyme of Jolyc?ur. Poisoning was the current crime of the day, and persons of the highest rank had repeatedly been charged with it. The following is the passage:— "Quoiqu'il en soit, Mr. de la Salle se sentit quelque temps après empoisonné d'une salade dans laquelle on avoit meslé du cigu?, qui est poison en ce pays là, et du verd de gris. Il en fut malade à l'extrémité, vomissant presque continuellement 40 ou 50 jours après, et il ne réchappa que par la force extrême de sa constitution. Celuy qui luy donna le poison fut un nommé Nicolas Perrot, autrement Jolyc?ur, l'un de ses domestiques.... Il pouvait faire mourir cet homme, qui a confessé son crime, mais il s'est contenté de l'enfermer les fers aux pieds."—Histoire de Mr. de la Salle. [94] The following words are underlined in the original: "Je suis pourtant obligé de leur rendre une justice, que le poison qu'on m'avoit donné n'éstoit point de leur instigation."—Lettre de La Salle au Prince de Conti, 31 Oct., 1678. [95] In a letter to the King, Frontenac mentions that several men who had been induced to desert from La Salle had gone to Albany, where the English had received them well. Lettre de Frontenac au Roy, 6 Nov., 1679. The Jesuits had a mission in the neighboring tribe of the Mohawks and elsewhere in New York. [96] This agrees with expressions used by La Salle in a memoir addressed by him to Frontenac in November, 1680. In this, he intimates his belief that Joliet went but little below the mouth of the Illinois, thus doing flagrant injustice to that brave explorer. CHAPTER VIII. 1677, 1678. THE GRAND ENTERPRISE. La Salle at Fort Frontenac.—La Salle at Court: his Memorial.—Approval of the King.—Money and Means.—Henri de Tonty.—Return to Canada. "If," writes a friend of La Salle," he had preferred gain to glory, he had only to stay at his fort, where he was making more than twenty-five thousand livres a year."[97] He loved solitude and he loved power; and at Fort Frontenac he had both, so far as each consisted with the other. The nearest settlement was a week's journey distant, and he was master of all around him. He had spared no pains to fulfil the conditions on which his wilderness seigniory had been granted, and within two years he had demolished the original wooden fort, replacing it by another much larger, enclosed on the land side by ramparts and bastions of stone, and on the water side by palisades. It contained a range of barracks of squared timber, a guard-house, a lodging for officers, a forge, a well, [Pg 121] a mill, and a bakery. Nine small cannon were mounted on the walls. Two officers and a surgeon, with ten or twelve soldiers, made up the garrison; and three or four times that number of masons, laborers, and canoe-men were at one time maintained at the place. LA SALLE AT FORT FRONTENAC. Along the shore south of the fort was a small village of French families, to whom La Salle had granted farms, and, farther on, a village of Iroquois, whom he had persuaded to settle here. Near these villages were the house and chapel of two Récollet friars, Luc Buisset and Louis Hennepin. More than a hundred French acres of land had been cleared of wood, and planted in part with crops; while cattle, fowls, and swine had been brought up from Montreal. Four vessels, of from twenty-five to forty tons, had been built for the lake and the river; but canoes served best for ordinary uses, and La Salle's followers became so skilled in managing them that they were reputed the best canoe-men in America. Feudal lord of the forests around him, commander of a garrison raised and paid by himself, founder of the mission, and patron of the church, he reigned the autocrat of his lonely little empire.[98] [Pg 122] LA SALLE'S MEMORIAL. It was not solely or chiefly for commercial gain that La Salle had established Fort Frontenac. He regarded it as a first step towards greater things; and now, at length, his plans were ripe and his time was come. In the autumn of 1677 he left the fort in charge of his lieutenant, descended the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and sailed for France. He had the patronage of Frontenac and the help of strong friends in Paris. It is said, as we have seen already, that his enemies denounced him, in advance, as a madman; but a memorial of his, which his friends laid before the minister Colbert, found a favorable hearing. In it he set forth his plans, or a portion of them. He first recounted briefly the discoveries he had made, and then described the country he had seen south and west of the great lakes. "It is nearly all so beautiful and so fertile; so free from forests, and so full of meadows, brooks, and rivers; so abounding in fish, game, and venison, that one can find there in plenty, and with little trouble, all that is needful for the support of flourishing colonies. The soil will produce everything that is raised in France. Flocks and herds can be left out at pasture all winter; and there are even native wild cattle, which, instead of hair, have a fine wool that may answer for making cloth and hats. Their hides are better than those of France, as appears [Pg 123] by the sample which the Sieur de la Salle has brought with him. Hemp and cotton grow here naturally, and may be manufactured with good results; so there can be no doubt that colonies planted here would become very prosperous. They would be increased by a great number of western Indians, who are in the main of a tractable and social disposition; and as they have the use neither of our weapons nor of our goods, and are not in intercourse with other Europeans, they will readily adapt themselves to us and imitate our way of life as soon as they taste the advantages of our friendship and of the commodities we bring them, insomuch that these countries will infallibly furnish, within a few years, a great many new subjects to the Church and the King. "It was the knowledge of these things, joined to the poverty of Canada, its dense forests, its barren soil, its harsh climate, and the snow that covers the ground for half the year, that led the Sieur de la Salle to undertake the planting of colonies in these beautiful countries of the West." Then he recounts the difficulties of the attempt,—the vast distances, the rapids and cataracts that obstruct the way; the cost of men, provisions, and munitions; the danger from the Iroquois, and the rivalry of the English, who covet the western country, and would gladly seize it for themselves. "But this last reason," says the memorial, "only animates the Sieur de la Salle the more, and impels [Pg 124] him to anticipate them by the promptness of his action." He declares that it was for this that he had asked for the grant of Fort Frontenac; and he describes what he had done at that post, in order to make it a secure basis for his enterprise. He says that he has now overcome the chief difficulties in his way, and that he is ready to plant a new colony at the outlet of Lake Erie, of which the English, if not prevented, might easily take possession. Towards the accomplishment of his plans, he asks the confirmation of his title to Fort Frontenac, and the permission to establish at his own cost two other posts, with seigniorial rights over all lands which he may discover and colonize within twenty years, and the government of all the country in question. On his part, he proposes to renounce all share in the trade carried on between the tribes of the Upper Lakes and the people of Canada. La Salle seems to have had an interview with the minister, in which the proposals of his memorial were somewhat modified. He soon received in reply the following patent from the King:— THE KING'S APPROVAL. "Louis, by the grace of God King of France and Navarre, to our dear and well-beloved Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, greeting. We have received with favor the very humble petition made us in your name, to permit you to labor at the discovery of the western parts of New France; and we have the more willingly entertained this proposal, [Pg 125] since we have nothing more at heart than the exploration of this country, through which, to all appearance, a way may be found to Mexico.... For this and other causes thereunto moving us, we permit you by these presents, signed with our hand, to labor at the discovery of the western parts of our aforesaid country of New France; and, for the execution of this enterprise, to build forts at such places as you may think necessary, and enjoy possession thereof under the same clauses and conditions as of Fort Frontenac, conformably to our letters patent of May thirteenth, 1675, which, so far as needful, we confirm by these presents. And it is our will that they be executed according to their form and tenor: on condition, nevertheless, that you finish this enterprise within five years, failing which, these presents shall be void, and of no effect; that you carry on no trade with the savages called Ottawas, or with other tribes who bring their peltries to Montreal; and that you do the whole at your own cost and that of your associates, to whom we have granted the sole right of trade in buffalo-hides. And we direct the Sieur Count Frontenac, our governor and lieutenant-general, and also Duchesneau, intendant of justice, police, and finance, and the officers of the supreme council of the aforesaid country, to see to the execution of these presents; for such is our pleasure. "Given at St. Germain en Laye, this 12th day of May, 1678, and of our reign the 35th year." This patent grants both more and less than the [Pg 126] memorial had asked. It authorizes La Salle to build and own, not two forts only, but as many as he may see fit, provided that he do so within five years; and it gives him, besides, the monopoly of buffalo-hides, for which at first he had not petitioned. Nothing is said of colonies. To discover the country, secure it by forts, and find, if possible, a way to Mexico, are the only object set forth; for Louis XIV. always discountenanced settlement in the West, partly as tending to deplete Canada, and partly as removing his subjects too far from his paternal control. It was but the year before that he refused to Louis Joliet the permission to plant a trading station in the Valley of the Mississippi.[99] La Salle, however, still held to his plan of a commercial and industrial colony, and in connection with it to another purpose, of which his memorial had made no mention. This was the building of a vessel on some branch of the Mississippi, in order to sail down that river to its mouth, and open a route to commerce through the Gulf of Mexico. It is evident that this design was already formed; for he had no sooner received his patent, than he engaged ship-carpenters, and procured iron, cordage, and anchors, not for one vessel, but for two. MONEY AND MEANS. What he now most needed was money; and having none of his own, he set himself to raising it from others. A notary named Simonnet lent him four thousand livres; an advocate named Raoul, twenty-four [Pg 127] thousand; and one Dumont, six thousand. His cousin Fran?ois Plet, a merchant of Rue St. Martin, lent him about eleven thousand, at the interest of forty per cent; and when he returned to Canada, Frontenac found means to procure him another loan of about fourteen thousand, secured by the mortgage of Fort Frontenac. But his chief helpers were his family, who became sharers in his undertaking. "His brothers and relations," says a memorial afterwards addressed by them to the King, "spared nothing to enable him to respond worthily to the royal goodness;" and the document adds, that, before his allotted five years were ended, his discoveries had cost them more than five hundred thousand livres (francs).[100] La Salle himself believed, and made others believe, that there was more profit than risk in his schemes. Lodged rather obscurely in Rue de la Truanderie, and of a nature reserved and shy, he nevertheless found countenance and support from personages no less exalted than Colbert, Seignelay, and the Prince de Conti. Others, too, in stations less conspicuous, warmly espoused his cause, and none more so than the learned Abbé Renaudot, who helped him with tongue and pen, and seems to have been instrumental in introducing to him a man who afterwards proved invaluable. This was Henri de Tonty, an Italian [Pg 128] officer, a protégé of the Prince de Conti, who sent him to La Salle as a person suited to his purposes, Tonty had but one hand, the other having been blown off by a grenade in the Sicilian wars.[101] His father, who had been governor of Gaeta, but who had come to France in consequence of political disturbances in Naples, had earned no small reputation as a financier, and had invented the form of life insurance still called the Tontine. La Salle learned to know his new lieutenant on the voyage across the Atlantic; and, soon after reaching Canada, he wrote of him to his patron in the following terms: "His honorable character and his amiable disposition were well known to you; but perhaps you would not have thought him capable of doing things for which a strong constitution, an acquaintance with the country, and the use of both hands seemed absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, his energy and address make him equal to anything; and now, at a season when everybody is in fear of the ice, he is setting out to begin a new fort, two hundred leagues from this place, and to which I have taken the liberty to give the name of Fort Conti. It is situated near that great cataract, more than a hundred and twenty toises in height, by which the lakes of higher elevation precipitate themselves into Lake Frontenac [Ontario]. From there one goes by water, five hundred leagues, to the place where Fort Dauphin is to be begun; from which it only remains to descend the great [Pg 129] river of the Bay of St. Esprit, to reach the Gulf of Mexico."[102] RETURN TO CANADA. Besides Tonty, La Salle found in France another ally, La Motte de Lussière, to whom he offered a share in the enterprise, and who joined him at Rochelle, the place of embarkation. Here vexatious delays occurred. Bellinzani, director of trade, who had formerly taken lessons in rascality in the service of Cardinal Mazarin, abused his official position to throw obstacles in the way of La Salle, in order to extort money from him; and he extorted, in fact, a considerable sum, which his victim afterwards reclaimed. It was not till the fourteenth of July that La Salle, with Tonty, La Motte, and thirty men, set sail for Canada, and two months more elapsed before he reached Quebec. Here, to increase his resources and strengthen his position, he seems to have made a league with several Canadian merchants, [Pg 130] some of whom had before been his enemies, and were to be so again. Here, too, he found Father Louis Hennepin, who had come down from Fort Frontenac to meet him.[103] FOOTNOTES: [97] Mémoire pour Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay sur les Descouvertes du Sieur de la Salle, 1682. [98] état de la dépense faite par Mr. de la Salle, Gouverneur du Fort Frontenac. Récit de Nicolas de la Salle. Revue faite au Fort de Frontenac, 1677; Mémoire sur le Projet du Sieur de la Salle (Margry, i. 329). Plan of Fort Frontenac, published by Faillon, from the original sent to France by Denonville in 1685. Relation des Découvertes du Sieur de la Salle. When Frontenac was at the fort in September, 1677, he found only four habitants. It appears, by the Relation des Découvertes du Sieur de la Salle, that, three or four years later, there were thirteen or fourteen families. La Salle spent 34,426 francs on the fort. Mémoire au Roy, Papiers de Famille. [99] Colbert à Duchesneau, 28 Avril, 1677. [100] Mémoire au Roy, présenté sous la Régence; Obligation du Sieur de la Salle envers le Sieur Plet; Autres Emprunts de Cavelier de la Salle (Margry, i. 423-432). [101] Tonty, Mémoire, in Margry, Relations et Mémoires inédits, 5. [102] Lettre de La Salle, 31 Oct., 1678. Fort Conti was to have been built on the site of the present Fort Niagara. The name of Lac de Conti was given by La Salle to Lake Erie. The fort mentioned as Fort Dauphin was built, as we shall see, on the Illinois, though under another name. La Salle, deceived by Spanish maps, thought that the Mississippi discharged itself into the Bay of St. Esprit (Mobile Bay). Henri de Tonty signed his name in the Gallicized, and not in the original Italian form Tonti. He wore a hand of iron or some other metal, which was usually covered with a glove. La Potherie says that he once or twice used it to good purpose when the Indians became disorderly, in breaking the heads of the most contumacious or knocking out their teeth. Not knowing at the time the secret of the unusual efficacy of his blows, they regarded him as a "medicine" of the first order. La Potherie erroneously ascribes the loss of his hand to a sabre-cut received in a sortie at Messina. [103] La Motte de Lussière à ——, sans date; Mémoíre de la Salle sur les Extorsions commises par Bellinzani; Société formée par La Salle; Relation de Henri de Tonty, 1684 (Margry, i. 338, 573; ii. 2, 25). CHAPTER IX. 1678-1679. LA SALLE AT NIAGARA. Father Louis Hennepin: his Past Life; his Character.—Embarkation.—Niagara Falls.—Indian Jealousy.—La Motte and the Senecas.—A Disaster.—La Salle and his Followers. Hennepin was all eagerness to join in the adventure; and, to his great satisfaction, La Salle gave him a letter from his Provincial, Father Le Fèvre, containing the coveted permission. Whereupon, to prepare himself, he went into retreat at the Récollet convent of Quebec, where he remained for a time in such prayer and meditation as his nature, the reverse of spiritual, would permit. Frontenac, always partial to his Order, then invited him to dine at the chateau; and having visited the bishop and asked his blessing, he went down to the Lower Town and embarked. His vessel was a small birch canoe, paddled by two men. With sandalled feet, a coarse gray capote, and peaked hood, the cord of St. Francis about his waist, and a rosary and crucifix hanging at his side, the father set forth on his memorable journey. He [Pg 132] carried with him the furniture of a portable altar, which in time of need he could strap on his back like a knapsack. He slowly made his way up the St. Lawrence, stopping here and there, where a clearing and a few log houses marked the feeble beginning of a parish and a seigniory. The settlers, though good Catholics, were too few and too poor to support a priest, and hailed the arrival of the friar with delight. He said mass, exhorted a little, as was his custom, and on one occasion baptized a child. At length he reached Montreal, where the enemies of the enterprise enticed away his two canoe-men. He succeeded in finding two others, with whom he continued his voyage, passed the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, and reached Fort Frontenac at eleven o'clock at night of the second of November, where his brethren of the mission, Ribourde and Buisset, received him with open arms.[104] La Motte, with most of the men, appeared on the eighth; but La Salle and Tonty did not arrive till more than a month later. Meanwhile, in pursuance of his orders, fifteen men set out in canoes for Lake Michigan and the Illinois, to trade with the Indians and collect provisions, while La Motte embarked in a small vessel for Niagara, accompanied by Hennepin.[105] Hennepin Mass Copyright, 1897, by Little, Brown & Co Goupil & Co., Paris Father Hennepin Celebrating Mass. Drawn by Howard Pyle. [Pg 133] HENNEPIN This bold, hardy, and adventurous friar, the historian of the expedition, and a conspicuous actor in it, has unwittingly painted his own portrait with tolerable distinctness. "I always," he says, "felt a strong inclination to fly from the world and live according to the rules of a pure and severe virtue; and it was with this view that I entered the Order of St. Francis."[106] He then speaks of his zeal for the saving of souls, but admits that a passion for travel and a burning desire to visit strange lands had no small part in his inclination for the missions.[107] Being in a convent in Artois, his Superior sent him to Calais, at the season of the herring-fishery, to beg alms, after the practice of the Franciscans. Here and at Dunkirk he made friends of the sailors, and was never tired of their stories. So insatiable, indeed, was his appetite for them, that "often," he says, "I hid myself behind tavern doors while the sailors were telling of their voyages. The tobacco smoke made me very sick at the stomach; but, notwithstanding, I listened attentively to all they said about their adventures at sea and their travels in distant countries. I could have passed whole days and nights in this way without eating."[108] He presently set out on a roving mission through [Pg 134] Holland; and he recounts various mishaps which befell him, "in consequence of my zeal in laboring for the saving of souls," "I was at the bloody fight of Seneff," he pursues, "where so many perished by fire and sword, and where I had abundance of work in comforting and consoling the poor wounded soldiers. After undergoing great fatigues, and running extreme danger in the sieges of towns, in the trenches, and in battles, where I exposed myself freely for the salvation of others while the soldiers were breathing nothing but blood and carnage, I found myself at last in a way of satisfying my old inclination for travel."[109] He got leave from his superiors to go to Canada, the most adventurous of all the missions, and accordingly sailed in 1675, in the ship which carried La Salle, who had just obtained the grant of Fort Frontenac. In the course of the voyage, he took it upon him to reprove a party of girls who were amusing themselves and a circle of officers and other passengers by dancing on deck. La Salle, who was among the spectators, was annoyed at Hennepin's interference, and told him that he was behaving like a pedagogue. The friar retorted, by alluding— unconsciously, as he says—to the circumstance that La Salle was once a pedagogue himself, having, according to Hennepin, been for ten or twelve years teacher of a class in a Jesuit school. La Salle, he adds, turned pale with rage, and never forgave him [Pg 135] to his dying day, but always maligned and persecuted him.[110] On arriving in Canada, he was sent up to Fort Frontenac, as a missionary. That wild and remote post was greatly to his liking. He planted a gigantic cross, superintended the building of a chapel for himself and his colleague Buisset, and instructed the Iroquois colonists of the place. He visited, too, the neighboring Indian settlements, —paddling his canoe in summer, when the lake was open, and journeying in winter on snow-shoes, with a blanket slung at his back. His most noteworthy journey was one which he made in the winter,—apparently of 1677,—with a soldier of the fort. They crossed the eastern extremity of Lake Ontario on snow-shoes, and pushed southward through the forests, towards Onondaga,—stopping at evening to dig away the snow, which was several feet deep, and collect wood for their fire, which they were forced to replenish repeatedly during the night, to keep themselves from freezing. At length, they reached the great Onondaga town, where the Indians were much amazed at their hardihood. Thence they proceeded eastward to the Oneidas, and afterwards to the Mohawks, who regaled them with small frogs, pounded up with a porridge of Indian corn. Here Hennepin found the Jesuit Bruyas, who permitted him to copy a dictionary [Pg 136] of the Mohawk language[111] which he had compiled; and here he presently met three Dutchmen, who urged him to visit the neighboring settlement of Orange, or Albany,—an invitation which he seems to have declined.[112] They were pleased with him, he says, because he spoke Dutch. Bidding them farewell, he tied on his snow-shoes again, and returned with his companion to Fort Frontenac. Thus he inured himself to the hardships of the woods, and prepared for the execution of the grand plan of discovery which he calls his own,—"an enterprise," to borrow his own words, "capable of terrifying anybody but me."[113] When the later editions of his book appeared, doubts had been expressed of his veracity. "I here protest to you, before God," he writes, addressing the reader, "that my narrative is faithful and sincere, and that you may believe everything related in it."[114] And yet, as we shall see, this reverend father was the most impudent of liars; and the narrative of which he speaks is a rare monument of brazen mendacity. Hennepin, however, had seen and dared much; for [Pg 137] among his many failings fear had no part, and where his vanity or his spite was not involved, he often told the truth. His books have their value, with all their enormous fabrications.[115] La Motte and Hennepin, with sixteen men, went on board the little vessel of ten tons, which lay at Fort Frontenac. The friar's two brethren, Buisset and Ribourde, threw their arms about his neck as they bade him farewell; while his Indian proselytes, learning whither he was bound, stood with their hands pressed upon their mouths, in amazement at the perils which awaited their ghostly instructor. La Salle, with the rest of the party, was to follow as soon as he could finish his preparations. It was a boisterous and gusty day, the eighteenth of November. The sails were spread; the shore receded,—the stone walls of the fort, the huge cross that the friar had reared, the wigwams, the settlers' cabins, the group of staring Indians on the strand. The lake was rough; and the men, crowded in so small a craft, grew nervous and uneasy. They hugged the northern shore, to escape the fury of the wind, which blew savagely from the northeast; while the long gray sweep of naked forests on their right betokened that winter was fast closing in. On the twenty-sixth, they reached the neighborhood of the Indian town of [Pg 138] Taiaiagon,[116] not far from Toronto, and ran their vessel, for safety, into the mouth of a river,—probably the Humber,—where the ice closed about her, and they were forced to cut her out with axes. On the fifth of December, they attempted to cross to the mouth of the Niagara; but darkness overtook them, and they spent a comfortless night, tossing on the troubled lake, five or six miles from shore. In the morning, they entered the mouth of the Niagara, and landed on the point at its eastern side, where now stand the historic ramparts of Fort Niagara. Here they found a small village of Senecas, attracted hither by the fisheries, who gazed with curious eyes at the vessel, and listened in wonder as the voyagers sang Te Deum in gratitude for their safe arrival. NIAGARA FALLS. Hennepin, with several others, now ascended the river in a canoe to the foot of the mountain ridge of Lewiston, which, stretching on the right hand and on the left, forms the acclivity of a vast plateau, rent with the mighty chasm, along which, from this point to the cataract, seven miles above, rush, with the fury of an Alpine torrent, the gathered waters of four inland oceans. To urge the canoe farther was impossible. He landed, with his companions, on the west bank, near the foot of that part of the ridge now called Queenstown Heights, climbed the steep ascent, and pushed through the wintry forest on a [Pg 139] tour of exploration. On his left sank the cliffs, the furious river raging below; till at length, in primeval solitudes unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of man, the imperial cataract burst upon his sight.[117] The explorers passed three miles beyond it, and encamped for the night on the banks of Chippewa Creek, scraping away the snow, which was a foot deep, in order to kindle a fire. In the morning they retraced their steps, startling a number of deer and wild turkeys on their way, and rejoined their companions at the mouth of the river. [Pg 140] LA MOTTE AND THE SENECAS. La Motte now began the building of a fortified house, some two leagues above the mouth of the Niagara.[118] Hot water was used to soften the frozen ground; but frost was not the only obstacle. The Senecas of the neighboring village betrayed a sullen jealousy at a design which, indeed, boded them no good. Niagara was the key to the four great lakes above; and whoever held possession of it could, in no small measure, control the fur-trade of the interior. Occupied by the French, it would in time of peace intercept the trade which the Iroquois carried on between the western Indians and the Dutch and English at Albany, and in time of war threaten them with serious danger. La Motte saw the necessity of conciliating these formidable neighbors, and, if possible, cajoling them to give their consent to the plan. La Salle, indeed, had instructed him to that effect. He resolved on a journey to the great village of the Senecas, and called on Hennepin, who was busied in building a bark chapel for himself, to accompany him. They accordingly set out with several men well armed and equipped, and bearing at their backs presents of very considerable value. The village was beyond the Genesee, southeast of the site of Rochester.[119] After a march of five days, they reached it on the last day of December. They were conducted [Pg 141] to the lodge of the great chief, where they were beset by a staring crowd of women and children. Two Jesuits, Raffeix and Julien Garnier, were in the village; and their presence boded no good for the embassy. La Motte, who seems to have had little love for priests of any kind, was greatly annoyed at seeing them; and when the chiefs assembled to hear what he had to say, he insisted that the two fathers should leave the council-house. At this, Hennepin, out of respect for his cloth, thought it befitting that he should retire also. The chiefs, forty-two in number, squatted on the ground, arrayed in ceremonial robes of beaver, wolf, or black-squirrel skin. "The senators of Venice," writes Hennepin, "do not look more grave or speak more deliberately than the counsellors of the Iroquois." La Motte's interpreter harangued the attentive conclave, placed gift after gift at their feet,—coats, scarlet cloth, hatchets, knives, and beads,—and used all his eloquence to persuade them that the building of a fort on the banks of the Niagara, and a vessel on Lake Erie, were measures vital to their interest. They gladly took the gifts, but answered the interpreter's speech with evasive generalities; and having been entertained with the burning of an Indian prisoner, the discomfited embassy returned, half-famished, to Niagara. Meanwhile, La Salle and Tonty were on their way from Fort Frontenac, with men and supplies, to join La Motte and his advance party. They were [Pg 142] in a small vessel, with a pilot either unskilful or treacherous. On Christmas eve, he was near wrecking them off the Bay of Quinté. On the next day they crossed to the mouth of the Genesee; and La Salle, after some delay, proceeded to the neighboring town of the Senecas, where he appears to have arrived just after the departure of La Motte and Hennepin. He, too, called them to a council, and tried to soothe the extreme jealousy with which they regarded his proceedings. "I told them my plan," he says, "and gave the best pretexts I could, and I succeeded in my attempt."[120] More fortunate than La Motte, he persuaded them to consent to his carrying arms and ammunition by the Niagara portage, building a vessel above the cataract, and establishing a fortified warehouse at the mouth of the river. JEALOUSIES. This success was followed by a calamity. La Salle had gone up the Niagara to find a suitable place for a ship-yard, when he learned that the pilot in charge of the vessel he had left had disobeyed his orders, and ended by wrecking it on the coast. Little was saved except the anchors and cables destined for the new vessel to be built above the cataract. This loss threw him into extreme perplexity, and, as Hennepin says, "would have made anybody but him give up the enterprise."[121] The whole party were now gathered [Pg 143] at the palisaded house which La Motte had built, a little below the mountain ridge of Lewiston. They were a motley crew of French, Flemings, and Italians, all mutually jealous. La Salle's enemies had tampered with some of the men; and none of them seemed to have had much heart for the enterprise. The fidelity even of La Motte was doubtful. "He served me very ill," says La Salle; "and Messieurs de Tonty and de la Forest knew that he did his best to debauch all my men."[122] His health soon failed under the hardships of these winter journeyings, and he returned to Fort Frontenac, half-blinded by an inflammation of the eyes.[123] La Salle, seldom happy in the choice of subordinates, had, perhaps, in all his company but one man whom he could fully trust; and this was Tonty. He and Hennepin were on indifferent terms. Men thrown together in a rugged enterprise like this quickly learn to know each other; and the vain and assuming friar was not likely to commend himself to La Salle's brave and loyal lieutenant. Hennepin says that it was La Salle's policy to govern through the dissensions of his followers; and, from whatever cause, it is certain that those beneath him were rarely in perfect harmony. FOOTNOTES: [104] Hennepin, Description de la Louisiane (1683), 19; Ibid., Voyage Curieux (1704), 66. Ribourde had lately arrived. [105] Lettre de La Motte de la Lussière, sans date; Relation de Henri de Tonty écrite de Québec, le 14 Novembre, 1684 (Margry, i. 573). This paper, apparently addressed to Abbé Renaudot, is entirely distinct from Tonty's memoir of 1693, addressed to the minister Ponchartrain. [106] Hennepin, Nouvelle Découverte (1697), 8. [107] Ibid., Avant Propos, 5. [108] Ibid., Voyage Curieux (1704), 12. [109] Hennepin, Voyage Curieux (1704), 18. [110] Ibid. Avis au Lecteur. He elsewhere represents himself as on excellent terms with La Salle; with whom, he says, he used to read histories of travels at Fort Frontenac, after which they discussed together their plans of discovery. [111] This was the Racines Agnières of Bruyas. It was published by Mr. Shea in 1862. Hennepin seems to have studied it carefully; for on several occasions he makes use of words evidently borrowed from it, putting them into the mouths of Indians speaking a dialect different from that of the Agniers, or Mohawks. [112] Compare Brodhead in Hist. Mag., x. 268. [113] "Une enterprise capable d'épouvanter tout autre que moi."—Hennepin, Voyage Curieux, Avant Propos (1704). [114] "Je vous proteste ici devant Dieu, que ma Relation est fidèle et sincère," etc.—Ibid., Avis au Lecteur. [115] The nature of these fabrications will be shown hereafter. They occur, not in the early editions of Hennepin's narrative, which are comparatively truthful, but in the edition of 1697 and those which followed. La Salle was dead at the time of their publication. [116] This place is laid down on a manuscript map sent to France by the Intendant Duchesneau, and now preserved in the Archives de la Marine, and also on several other contemporary maps. [117] Hennepin's account of the falls and river of Niagara—especially his second account, on his return from the West—is very minute, and on the whole very accurate. He indulges in gross exaggeration as to the height of the cataract, which, in the edition of 1683, he states at five hundred feet, and raises to six hundred in that of 1697. He also says that there was room for four carriages to pass abreast under the American Fall without being wet. This is, of course, an exaggeration at the best; but it is extremely probable that a great change has taken place since his time. He speaks of a small lateral fall at the west side of the Horse Shoe Fall which does not now exist. Table Rock, now destroyed, is distinctly figured in his picture. He says that he descended the cliffs on the west side to the foot of the cataract, but that no human being can get down on the east side. The name of Niagara, written Onguiaahra by Lalemant in 1641, and Ongiara by Sanson, on his map of 1657, is used by Hennepin in its present form. His description of the falls is the earliest known to exist. They are clearly indicated on the map of Champlain, 1632. For early references to them, see "The Jesuits in North America," 235, note. A brief but curious notice of them is given by Gendron, Quelques Particularitez du Pays des Hurons, 1659. The indefatigable Dr. O'Callaghan has discovered thirty-nine distinct forms of the name Niagara. Index to Colonial Documents of New York, 465. It is of Iroquois origin, and in the Mohawk dialect is pronounced Nyàgarah. [118] Tonty, Relation, 1684 (Margry, i. 573). [119] Near the town of Victor. It is laid down on the map of Galinée, and other unpublished maps. Compare Marshall, Historical Sketches of the Niagara Frontier, 14. [120] Lettre de La Salle à un de ses associés (Margry, ii. 32). [121] Description de la Louisiane (1683), 41. It is characteristic of Hennepin that, in the editions of his book published after La Salle's death, he substitutes, for "anybody but him," "anybody but those who had formed so generous a design,"—meaning to include himself, though he lost nothing by the disaster, and had not formed the design. On these incidents, compare the two narratives of Tonty, of 1684 and 1693. The book bearing Tonty's name is a compilation full of errors. He disowned its authorship. [122] Lettre de La Salle, 22 Ao?t, 1682 (Margry, ii. 212). [123] Lettre de La Motte, sans date. CHAPTER X. 1679. THE LAUNCH OF THE "GRIFFIN." The Niagara Portage.—A Vessel on the Stocks.—Suffering and Discontent.—La Salle's Winter Journey.—The Vessel launched.—Fresh Disasters. THE NIAGARA PORTAGE. A more important work than that of the warehouse at the mouth of the river was now to be begun. This was the building of a vessel above the cataract. The small craft which had brought La Motte and Hennepin with their advance party had been hauled to the foot of the rapids at Lewiston, and drawn ashore with a capstan, to save her from the drifting ice. Her lading was taken out, and must now be carried beyond the cataract to the calm water above. The distance to the destined point was at least twelve miles, and the steep heights above Lewiston must first be climbed. This heavy task was accomplished on the twenty-second of January. The level of the plateau was reached, and the file of burdened men, some thirty in number, toiled slowly on its way over the snowy plains and through the gloomy forests of spruce and naked oak-trees; while Hennepin plodded through the drifts with his portable altar [Pg 145] lashed fast to his back. They came at last to the mouth of a stream which entered the Niagara two leagues above the cataract, and which was undoubtedly that now called Cayuga Creek.[124] [Pg 146] Trees were felled, the place cleared, and the master-carpenter set his ship-builders at work. Meanwhile, two Mohegan hunters, attached to the party, made bark wigwams to lodge the men. Hennepin had his chapel, apparently of the same material, where he placed his altar, and on Sundays and saints' days said mass, preached, and exhorted; while some of the men, who knew the Gregorian chant, lent their aid at the service. When the carpenters were ready to lay the keel of the vessel, La Salle asked the friar to drive the first bolt; "but the modesty of my religious profession," he says, "compelled me to decline this honor." Fortunately, it was the hunting-season of the Iroquois, and most of the Seneca warriors were in the forests south of Lake Erie; yet enough remained to cause serious uneasiness. They loitered sullenly about the place, expressing their displeasure at the proceedings of the French. One of them, pretending [Pg 147] to be drunk, attacked the blacksmith and tried to kill him; but the Frenchman, brandishing a red-hot bar of iron, held him at bay till Hennepin ran to the rescue, when, as he declares, the severity of his rebuke caused the savage to desist.[125] The work of the ship-builders advanced rapidly; and when the Indian visitors beheld the vast ribs of the wooden monster, their jealousy was redoubled. A squaw told the French that they meant to burn the vessel on the stocks. All now stood anxiously on the watch. Cold, hunger, and discontent found imperfect antidotes in Tonty's energy and Hennepin's sermons. SUFFERING AND DISCONTENT. La Salle was absent, and his lieutenant commanded in his place. Hennepin says that Tonty was jealous because he, the friar, kept a journal, and that he was forced to use all manner of just precautions to prevent the Italian from seizing it. The men, being half-starved, in consequence of the loss of their provisions on Lake Ontario, were restless and moody; and their discontent was fomented by one of their number, who had very probably been tampered with by La Salle's enemies.[126] The Senecas refused to [Pg 148] supply them with corn, and the frequent exhortations of the Récollet father proved an insufficient substitute. In this extremity, the two Mohegans did excellent service,—bringing deer and other game, which relieved the most pressing wants of the party, and went far to restore their cheerfulness. La Salle, meanwhile, had gone down to the mouth of the river, with a sergeant and a number of men; and here, on the high point of land where Fort Niagara now stands, he marked out the foundations of two blockhouses.[127] Then, leaving his men to build them, he set out on foot for Fort Frontenac, where the condition of his affairs demanded his presence, and where he hoped to procure supplies to replace those lost in the wreck of his vessel. It was February, and the distance was some two hundred and fifty miles, through the snow-encumbered forests of the Iroquois and over the ice of Lake Ontario. Two men attended him, and a dog dragged his baggage on a sledge. For food, they had only a bag of parched corn, which failed them two days before they reached the fort; and they made the rest of the journey fasting. THE SHIP FINISHED. During his absence, Tonty finished the vessel, which was of about forty-five tons' burden.[128] As [Pg 149] spring opened, she was ready for launching. The friar pronounced his blessing on her; the assembled company sang Te Deum; cannon were fired; and French and Indians, warmed alike by a generous gift of brandy, shouted and yelped in chorus as she glided into the Niagara. Her builders towed her out and anchored her in the stream, safe at last from incendiary hands; and then, swinging their hammocks under her deck, slept in peace, beyond reach of the tomahawk. The Indians gazed on her with amazement. Five small cannon looked out from her portholes; and on her prow was carved a portentous monster, the Griffin, whose name she bore, in honor of the armorial bearings of Frontenac. La Salle had often been heard to say that he would make the griffin fly above the crows, or, in other words, make Frontenac triumph over the Jesuits. They now took her up the river, and made her fast below the swift current at Black Rock. Here they finished her equipment, and waited for La Salle's return; but the absent commander did not appear. The spring and more than half of the summer had passed before they saw him again. At length, early in August, he arrived at the mouth of the Niagara, bringing three more friars; for, though no friend of the Jesuits, he was zealous for the Faith, and was rarely without a missionary in his journeyings. Like Hennepin, the three friars were all Flemings. One [Pg 150] of them, Melithon Watteau, was to remain at Niagara; the others, Zenobe Membré and Gabriel Ribourde, were to preach the Faith among the tribes of the West. Ribourde was a hale and cheerful old man of sixty-four. He went four times up and down the Lewiston heights, while the men were climbing the steep pathway with their loads. It required four of them, well stimulated with brandy, to carry up the principal anchor destined for the "Griffin." La Salle brought a tale of disaster. His enemies, bent on ruining the enterprise, had given out that he was embarked on a harebrained venture, from which he would never return. His creditors, excited by rumors set afloat to that end, had seized on all his property in the settled parts of Canada, though his seigniory of Fort Frontenac alone would have more than sufficed to pay all his debts. There was no remedy. To defer the enterprise would have been to give his adversaries the triumph that they sought; and he hardened himself against the blow with his usual stoicism.[129] FOOTNOTES: [124] It has been a matter of debate on which side of the Niagara the first vessel on the Upper Lakes was built. A close study of Hennepin, and a careful examination of the localities, have convinced me that the spot was that indicated above. Hennepin repeatedly alludes to a large detached rock, rising out of the water at the foot of the rapids above Lewiston, on the west side of the river. This rock may still be seen immediately under the western end of the Lewiston suspension-bridge. Persons living in the neighborhood remember that a ferry-boat used to pass between it and the cliffs of the western shore; but it has since been undermined by the current and has inclined in that direction, so that a considerable part of it is submerged, while the gravel and earth thrown down from the cliff during the building of the bridge has filled the intervening channel. Opposite to this rock, and on the east side of the river, says Hennepin, are three mountains, about two leagues below the cataract. (Nouveau Voyage (1704), 462, 466.) To these "three mountains," as well as to the rock, he frequently alludes. They are also spoken of by La Hontan, who clearly indicates their position. They consist in the three successive grades of the acclivity: first, that which rises from the level of the water, forming the steep and lofty river-bank; next, an intermediate ascent, crowned by a sort of terrace, where the tired men could find a second resting-place and lay down their burdens, whence a third effort carried them with difficulty to the level top of the plateau. That this was the actual "portage," or carrying place of the travellers, is shown by Hennepin (1704), 114, who describes the carrying of anchors and other heavy articles up these heights in August, 1679. La Hontan also passed the Falls by way of the "three mountains" eight years later. La Hontan (1703), 106. It is clear, then, that the portage was on the east side, whence it would be safe to conclude that the vessel was built on the same side. Hennepin says that she was built at the mouth of a stream (rivière) entering the Niagara two leagues above the Falls. Excepting one or two small brooks, there is no stream on the west side but Chippewa Creek, which Hennepin had visited and correctly placed at about a league from the cataract. His distances on the Niagara are usually correct. On the east side there is a stream which perfectly answers the conditions. This is Cayuga Creek, two leagues above the Falls. Immediately in front of it is an island about a mile long, separated from the shore by a narrow and deep arm of the Niagara, into which Cayuga Creek discharges itself. The place is so obviously suited to building and launching a vessel, that, in the early part of this century, the government of the United States chose it for the construction of a schooner to carry supplies to the garrisons of the Upper Lakes. The neighboring village now bears the name of La Salle. In examining this and other localities on the Niagara, I have been greatly aided by my friend O. H. Marshall, Esq., of Buffalo, who is unrivalled in his knowledge of the history and traditions of the Niagara frontier. [125] Hennepin (1704), 97. On a paper drawn up at the instance of the Intendant Duchesneau, the names of the greater number of La Salle's men are preserved. These agree with those given by Hennepin: thus, the master-carpenter, whom he calls Ma?tre Moyse, appears as Mo?se Hillaret; and the blacksmith, whom he calls La Forge, is mentioned as—(illegible) dit la Forge. [126] "This bad man," says Hennepin, "would infallibly have debauched our workmen, if I had not reassured them by the exhortations which I made them on fête-days and Sundays, after divine service." (1704), 98. [127] Lettre de La Salle, 22 Ao?t, 1682 (Margry, ii. 197); Relation de Tonty, 1684 (Ibid., i. 577). He called this new post Fort Conti. It was burned some months after, by the carelessness of the sergeant in command, and was the first of a succession of forts on this historic spot. [128] Hennepin (1683), 46. In the edition of 1697, he says that it was of sixty tons. I prefer to follow the earlier and more trustworthy narrative. [129] La Salle's embarrassment at this time was so great that he purposed to send Tonty up the lakes in the "Griffin," while he went back to the colony to look after his affairs; but suspecting that the pilot, who had already wrecked one of his vessels, was in the pay of his enemies, he resolved at last to take charge of the expedition himself, to prevent a second disaster. (Lettre de La Salle, 22 Ao?t, 1682; Margry, ii. 214.) Among the creditors who bore hard upon him were Migeon, Charon, Giton, and Peloquin, of Montreal, in whose name his furs at Fort Frontenac had been seized. The intendant also placed under seal all his furs at Quebec, among which is set down the not very precious item of two hundred and eighty-four skins of enfants du diable, or skunks. CHAPTER XI. 1679. LA SALLE ON THE UPPER LAKES. The Voyage of the "Griffin."—Detroit.—A Storm.—St. Ignace of Michilimackinac.—Rivals and Enemies.—Lake Michigan.—Hardships.—A Threatened Fight.—Fort Miami.—Tonty's Misfortunes.—Forebodings. The "Griffin" had lain moored by the shore, so near that Hennepin could preach on Sundays from the deck to the men encamped along the bank. She was now forced up against the current with tow-ropes and sails, till she reached the calm entrance of Lake Erie. On the seventh of August, La Salle and his followers embarked, sang Te Deum, and fired their cannon. A fresh breeze sprang up; and with swelling canvas the "Griffin" ploughed the virgin waves of Lake Erie, where sail was never seen before. For three days they held their course over these unknown waters, and on the fourth turned northward into the Strait of Detroit. Here, on the right hand and on the left, lay verdant prairies, dotted with groves and bordered with lofty forests. They saw walnut, chestnut, and wild plum trees, and oaks festooned with grape-vines; herds of deer, [Pg 152] and flocks of swans and wild turkeys. The bulwarks of the "Griffin" were plentifully hung with game which the men killed on shore, and among the rest with a number of bears, much commended by Hennepin for their want of ferocity and the excellence of their flesh. "Those," he says, "who will one day have the happiness to possess this fertile and pleasant strait, will be very much obliged to those who have shown them the way." They crossed Lake St. Clair,[130] and still sailed northward against the current, till now, sparkling in the sun, Lake Huron spread before them like a sea. ST. IGNACE. For a time they bore on prosperously. Then the wind died to a calm, then freshened to a gale, then rose to a furious tempest; and the vessel tossed wildly among the short, steep, perilous waves of the raging lake. Even La Salle called on his followers to commend themselves to Heaven. All fell to their prayers but the godless pilot, who was loud in complaint against his commander for having brought him, after the honor he had won on the ocean, to drown at last ignominiously in fresh water. The rest clamored to the saints. St. Anthony of Padua was promised a chapel to be built in his honor, if he would but save them from their jeopardy; while in the same breath La Salle and the friars declared him patron of their great enterprise.[131] The saint heard their prayers. [Pg 153]The obedient winds were tamed; and the "Griffin" plunged on her way through foaming surges that still grew calmer as she advanced. Now the sun shone forth on woody islands, Bois Blanc and Mackinaw and the distant Manitoulins,—on the forest wastes of Michigan and the vast blue bosom of the angry lake; and now her port was won, and she found her rest behind the point of St. Ignace of Michilimackinac, floating in that tranquil cove where crystal waters cover but cannot hide the pebbly depths beneath. Before her rose the house and chapel of the Jesuits, enclosed with palisades; on the right, the Huron village, with its bark cabins and its fence of tall pickets; on the left, the square compact houses of the French traders; and, not far off, the clustered wigwams of an Ottawa village.[132] Here was a centre of the Jesuit missions, and a centre of the Indian trade; and here, under the shadow of the cross, was much sharp practice in the service of Mammon. Keen traders, with or without a license, and lawless coureurs de bois, whom a few years of forest life had weaned from civilization, made St. Ignace their resort; and here there were many of them when the "Griffin" came. They and their employers hated and feared La Salle, who, sustained as he was by the governor, might set at nought the prohibition of the King, debarring him from traffic with these tribes. Yet, while plotting [Pg 154] against him, they took pains to allay his distrust by a show of welcome. The "Griffin" fired her cannon, and the Indians yelped in wonder and amazement. The adventurers landed in state, and marched under arms to the bark chapel of the Ottawa village, where they heard mass. La Salle knelt before the altar, in a mantle of scarlet bordered with gold. Soldiers, sailors, and artisans knelt around him,—black Jesuits, gray Récollets, swarthy voyageurs, and painted savages; a devout but motley concourse. As they left the chapel, the Ottawa chiefs came to bid them welcome, and the Hurons saluted them with a volley of musketry. They saw the "Griffin" at her anchorage, surrounded by more than a hundred bark canoes, like a Triton among minnows. Yet it was with more wonder than good-will that the Indians of the mission gazed on the "floating fort," for so they called the vessel. A deep jealousy of La Salle's designs had been infused into them. His own followers, too, had been tampered with. In the autumn before, it may be remembered, he had sent fifteen men up the lakes to trade for him, with orders to go thence to the Illinois and make preparation against his coming. Early in the summer, Tonty had been despatched in a canoe from Niagara to look after them.[133] It was high time. Most of the men had been seduced from their duty, and had disobeyed [Pg 155] their orders, squandered the goods intrusted to them, or used them in trading on their own account. La Salle found four of them at Michilimackinac. These he arrested, and sent Tonty to the Falls of Ste. Marie, where two others were captured, with their plunder. The rest were in the woods, and it was useless to pursue them. RIVALS AND ENEMIES. Anxious and troubled as to the condition of his affairs in Canada. La Salle had meant, after seeing his party safe at Michilimackinac, to leave Tonty to conduct it to the Illinois, while he himself returned to the colony. But Tonty was still at Ste. Marie, and he had none to trust but himself. Therefore, he resolved at all risks to remain with his men; "for," he says, "I judged my presence absolutely necessary to retain such of them as were left me, and prevent them from being enticed away during the winter." Moreover, he thought that he had detected an intrigue of his enemies to hound on the Iroquois against the Illinois, in order to defeat his plan by involving him in the war. Early in September he set sail again, and passing westward into Lake Michigan,[134] cast anchor near one of the islands at the entrance of Green Bay. Here, for once, he found a friend in the person of a Pottawattamie chief, who had been so wrought upon [Pg 156] by the politic kindness of Frontenac that he declared himself ready to die for the children of Onontio.[135] Here, too, he found several of his advance party, who had remained faithful and collected a large store of furs. It would have been better had they proved false, like the rest. La Salle, who asked counsel of no man, resolved, in spite of his followers, to send back the "Griffin" laden with these furs, and others collected on the way, to satisfy his creditors.[136] It was a rash resolution, for it involved trusting her to the pilot, who had already proved either incompetent or treacherous. She fired a parting shot, and on the eighteenth of September set sail for Niagara, with orders to return to the head of Lake Michigan as soon as she had discharged her cargo. La Salle, with the fourteen men who remained, in four canoes deeply laden with a forge, tools, merchandise, and arms, put out from the island and resumed his voyage. POTTAWATTAMIES. The parting was not auspicious. The lake, glassy and calm in the afternoon, was convulsed at night with a sudden storm, when the canoes were midway between the island and the main shore. It was with difficulty that they could keep together, the men [Pg 157] shouting to each other through the darkness. Hennepin, who was in the smallest canoe with a heavy load, and a carpenter for a companion who was awkward at the paddle, found himself in jeopardy which demanded all his nerve. The voyagers thought themselves happy when they gained at last the shelter of a little sandy cove, where they dragged up their canoes, and made their cheerless bivouac in the drenched and dripping forest. Here they spent five days, living on pumpkins and Indian corn, the gift of their Pottawattamie friends, and on a Canada porcupine brought in by La Salle's Mohegan hunter. The gale raged meanwhile with relentless fury. They trembled when they thought of the "Griffin." When at length the tempest lulled, they re-embarked, and steered southward along the shore of Wisconsin; but again the storm fell upon them, and drove them for safety to a bare, rocky islet. Here they made a fire of drift-wood, crouched around it, drew their blankets over their heads, and in this miserable plight, pelted with sleet and rain, remained for two days. At length they were afloat again; but their prosperity was brief. On the twenty-eighth, a fierce squall drove them to a point of rocks covered with bushes, where they consumed the little that remained of their provisions. On the first of October they paddled about thirty miles, without food, when they came to a village of Pottawattamies, who ran down to the shore to help them to land; but La Salle, fearing [Pg 158] that some of his men would steal the merchandise and desert to the Indians, insisted on going three leagues farther, to the great indignation of his followers. The lake, swept by an easterly gale, was rolling its waves against the beach, like the ocean in a storm. In the attempt to land, La Salle's canoe was nearly swamped. He and his three canoe-men leaped into the water, and in spite of the surf, which nearly drowned them, dragged their vessel ashore with all its load. He then went to the rescue of Hennepin, who with his awkward companion was in woful need of succor. Father Gabriel, with his sixty-four years, was no match for the surf and the violent undertow. Hennepin, finding himself safe, waded to his relief, and carried him ashore on his sturdy shoulders; while the old friar, though drenched to the skin, laughed gayly under his cowl as his brother missionary staggered with him up the beach.[137] When all were safe ashore, La Salle, who distrusted the Indians they had passed, took post on a hill, and ordered his followers to prepare their guns for action. Nevertheless, as they were starving, an effort must be risked to gain a supply of food; and he sent three men back to the village to purchase it. Well armed, but faint with toil and famine, they made their way through the stormy forest bearing a pipe of peace, but on arriving saw that the scared inhabitants had fled. They found, however, a stock of corn, of [Pg 159] which they took a portion, leaving goods in exchange, and then set out on their return. Meanwhile, about twenty of the warriors, armed with bows and arrows, approached the camp of the French to reconnoitre. La Salle went to meet them with some of his men, opened a parley with them, and kept them seated at the foot of the hill till his three messengers returned, when on seeing the peace-pipe the warriors set up a cry of joy. In the morning they brought more corn to the camp, with a supply of fresh venison, not a little cheering to the exhausted Frenchmen, who, in dread of treachery, had stood under arms all night. HARDSHIPS. This was no journey of pleasure. The lake was ruffled with almost ceaseless storms; clouds big with rain above, a turmoil of gray and gloomy waves beneath. Every night the canoes must be shouldered through the breakers and dragged up the steep banks, which, as they neared the site of Milwaukee, became almost insurmountable. The men paddled all day, with no other food than a handful of Indian corn. They were spent with toil, sick with the haws and wild berries which they ravenously devoured, and dejected at the prospect before them. Father Gabriel's good spirits began to fail. He fainted several times from famine and fatigue, but was revived by a certain "confection of Hyacinth" administered by Hennepin, who had a small box of this precious specific. At length they descried at a distance, on the stormy shore, two or three eagles among a busy [Pg 160] congregation of crows or turkey buzzards. They paddled in all haste to the spot. The feasters took flight; and the starved travellers found the mangled body of a deer, lately killed by the wolves. This good luck proved the inauguration of plenty. As they approached the head of the lake, game grew abundant; and, with the aid of the Mohegan, there was no lack of bear's meat and venison. They found wild grapes, too, in the woods, and gathered them by cutting down the trees to which the vines clung. ENCOUNTER WITH INDIANS. While thus employed, they were startled by a sight often so fearful in the waste and the wilderness,—the print of a human foot. It was clear that Indians were not far off. A strict watch was kept, not, as it proved, without cause; for that night, while the sentry thought of little but screening himself and his gun from the floods of rain, a party of Outagamies crept under the bank, where they lurked for some time before he discovered them. Being challenged, they came forward, professing great friendship, and pretending to have mistaken the French for Iroquois. In the morning, however, there was an outcry from La Salle's servant, who declared that the visitors had stolen his coat from under the inverted canoe where he had placed it; while some of the carpenters also complained of being robbed. La Salle well knew that if the theft were left unpunished, worse would come of it. First, he posted his men at the woody point of a peninsula, whose sandy neck was interposed between them and [Pg 161] the main forest. Then he went forth, pistol in hand, met a young Outagami, seized him, and led him prisoner to his camp. This done, he again set out, and soon found an Outagami chief,—for the wigwams were not far distant,—to whom he told what he had done, adding that unless the stolen goods were restored, the prisoner should be killed. The Indians were in perplexity, for they had cut the coat to pieces and divided it. In this dilemma they resolved, being strong in numbers, to rescue their comrade by force. Accordingly, they came down to the edge of the forest, or posted themselves behind fallen trees on the banks, while La Salle's men in their stronghold braced their nerves for the fight. Here three Flemish friars with their rosaries, and eleven Frenchmen with their guns, confronted a hundred and twenty screeching Outagamies. Hennepin, who had seen service, and who had always an exhortation at his tongue's end, busied himself to inspire the rest with a courage equal to his own. Neither party, however, had an appetite for the fray. A parley ensued: full compensation was made for the stolen goods, and the aggrieved Frenchmen were farther propitiated with a gift of beaver-skins. Their late enemies, now become friends, spent the next day in dances, feasts, and speeches. They entreated La Salle not to advance farther, since the Illinois, through whose country he must pass, would be sure to kill him; for, added these friendly counsellors, they hated the French because they had been [Pg 162] instigating the Iroquois to invade their country, Here was another subject of anxiety. La Salle was confirmed in his belief that his busy and unscrupulous enemies were intriguing for his destruction. He pushed on, however, circling around the southern shore of Lake Michigan, till he reached the mouth of the St. Joseph, called by him the Miamis. Here Tonty was to have rejoined him with twenty men, making his way from Michilimackinac along the eastern shore of the lake; but the rendezvous was a solitude,—Tonty was nowhere to be seen. It was the first of November; winter was at hand, and the streams would soon be frozen. The men clamored to go forward, urging that they should starve if they could not reach the villages of the Illinois before the tribe scattered for the winter hunt. La Salle was inexorable. If they should all desert, he said, he, with his Mohegan hunter and the three friars, would still remain and wait for Tonty. The men grumbled, but obeyed; and, to divert their thoughts, he set them at building a fort of timber on a rising ground at the mouth of the river. They had spent twenty days at this task, and their work was well advanced, when at length Tonty appeared. He brought with him only half of his men. Provisions had failed; and the rest of his party had been left thirty leagues behind, to sustain themselves by hunting. La Salle told him to return and hasten them forward. He set out with two men. A violent north wind arose. He tried to run [Pg 163] his canoe ashore through the breakers. The two men could not manage their vessel, and he with his one hand could not help them. She swamped, rolling over in the surf. Guns, baggage, and provisions were lost; and the three voyagers returned to the Miamis, subsisting on acorns by the way. Happily, the men left behind, excepting two deserters, succeeded, a few days after, in rejoining the party.[138] FOREBODINGS. Thus was one heavy load lifted from the heart of La Salle. But where was the "Griffin"? Time enough, and more than enough, had passed for her voyage to Niagara and back again. He scanned the dreary horizon with an anxious eye. No returning sail gladdened the watery solitude, and a dark foreboding gathered on his heart. Yet further delay was impossible. He sent back two men to Michilimackinac to meet her, if she still existed, and pilot her to his new fort of the Miamis, and then prepared to ascend the river, whose weedy edges were already glassed with thin flakes of ice.[139] FOOTNOTES: [130] They named it Sainte Claire, of which the present name is a perversion. [131] Hennepin (1683), 58. [132] There is a rude plan of the establishment in La Hontan, though in several editions its value is destroyed by the reversal of the plate. [133] Relation de Tonty, 1684; Ibid., 1693. He was overtaken at the Detroit by the "Griffin." [134] Then usually known as Lac des Illinois, because it gave access to the country of the tribes so called. Three years before, Allouez gave it the name of Lac St. Joseph, by which it is often designated by the early writers. Membré, Douay, and others, call it Lac Dauphin. [135] "The Great Mountain," the Iroquois name for the governor of Canada. It was borrowed by other tribes also. [136] In the license of discovery granted to La Salle, he is expressly prohibited from trading with the Ottawas and others who brought furs to Montreal. This traffic on the lakes was, therefore, illicit. His enemy, the Intendant Duchesneau, afterwards used this against him. Lettre de Duchesneau au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1680. [137] Hennepin (1683), 79. [138] Hennepin (1683), 112; Relation de Tonty, 1693. [139] The official account of this journey is given at length in the Relation des Découvertes et des Voyages du Sieur de la Salle, 1679-1681. This valuable document, compiled from letters and diaries of La Salle, early in the year 1682, was known to Hennepin, who evidently had a copy of it before him when he wrote his book, in which he incorporated many passages from it. CHAPTER XII. 1679, 1680. LA SALLE ON THE ILLINOIS. The St. Joseph.—Adventure of La Salle.—The Prairies.—Famine.—The Great Town of the Illinois.—Indians.—Intrigues.—Difficulties.—Policy of la Salle.—Desertion.—Another Attempt to poison La Salle. LA SALLE'S ADVENTURE. On the third of December the party re-embarked, thirty-three in all, in eight canoes,[140] and ascended the chill current of the St. Joseph, bordered with dreary meadows and bare gray forests. When they approached the site of the present village of South Bend, they looked anxiously along the shore on their right to find the portage or path leading to the headquarters of the Illinois. The Mohegan was absent, hunting; and, unaided by his practised eye, they passed the path without seeing it. La Salle landed to search the woods. Hours passed, and he did not return. Hennepin and Tonty grew uneasy, disembarked, bivouacked, ordered guns to be fired, and sent out men to scour the country. Night came, but not their lost leader. Muffled in their blankets and [Pg 165] powdered by the thick-falling snow-flakes, they sat ruefully speculating as to what had befallen him; nor was it till four o'clock of the next afternoon that they saw him approaching along the margin of the river. His face and hands were besmirched with charcoal; and he was further decorated with two opossums which hung from his belt, and which he had killed with a stick as they were swinging head downwards from the bough of a tree, after the fashion of that singular beast. He had missed his way in the forest, and had been forced to make a wide circuit around the edge of a swamp; while the snow, of which the air was full, added to his perplexities. Thus he pushed on through the rest of the day and the greater part of the night, till, about two o'clock in the morning, he reached the river again, and fired his gun as a signal to his party. Hearing no answering shot, he pursued his way along the bank, when he presently saw the gleam of a fire among the dense thickets close at hand. Not doubting that he had found the bivouac of his party, he hastened to the spot. To his surprise, no human being was to be seen. Under a tree beside the fire was a heap of dry grass impressed with the form of a man who must have fled but a moment before, for his couch was still warm. It was no doubt an Indian, ambushed on the bank, watching to kill some passing enemy. La Salle called out in several Indian languages; but there was dead silence all around. He then, with admirable coolness, took possession of the quarters he had found, shouting to [Pg 166] their invisible proprietor that he was about to sleep in his bed; piled a barricade of bushes around the spot, rekindled the dying fire, warmed his benumbed hands, stretched himself on the dried grass, and slept undisturbed till morning. The Mohegan had rejoined the party before La Salle's return, and with his aid the portage was soon found. Here the party encamped. La Salle, who was excessively fatigued, occupied, together with Hennepin, a wigwam covered in the Indian manner with mats of reeds. The cold forced them to kindle a fire, which before daybreak set the mats in a blaze; and the two sleepers narrowly escaped being burned along with their hut. THE KANKAKEE. In the morning, the party shouldered their canoes and baggage and began their march for the sources of the river Illinois, some five miles distant. Around them stretched a desolate plain, half-covered with snow and strewn with the skulls and bones of buffalo; while, on its farthest verge, they could see the lodges of the Miami Indians, who had made this place their abode. As they filed on their way, a man named Duplessis, bearing a grudge against La Salle, who walked just before him, raised his gun to shoot him through the back, but was prevented by one of his comrades. They soon reached a spot where the oozy, saturated soil quaked beneath their tread. All around were clumps of alder-bushes, tufts of rank grass, and pools of glistening water. In the midst a dark and lazy current, which a tall man might [Pg 167] bestride, crept twisting like a snake among the weeds and rushes. Here were the sources of the Kankakee, one of the heads of the Illinois.[141] They set their canoes on this thread of water, embarked their baggage and themselves, and pushed down the sluggish streamlet, looking, at a little distance, like men who sailed on land. Fed by an unceasing tribute of the spongy soil, it quickly widened to a river; and they floated on their way through a voiceless, lifeless solitude of dreary oak barrens, or boundless marshes overgrown with reeds. At night, they built their fire on ground made firm by frost, and bivouacked among the rushes. A few days brought them to a more favored region. On the right hand and on the [Pg 168] left stretched the boundless prairie, dotted with leafless groves and bordered by gray wintry forests, scorched by the fires kindled in the dried grass by Indian hunters, and strewn with the carcasses and the bleached skulls of innumerable buffalo. The plains were scored with their pathways, and the muddy edges of the river were full of their hoof-prints. Yet not one was to be seen. At night, the horizon glowed with distant fires; and by day the savage hunters could be descried at times roaming on the verge of the prairie. The men, discontented and half-starved, would have deserted to them had they dared. La Salle's Mohegan could kill no game except two lean deer, with a few wild geese and swans. At length, in their straits, they made a happy discovery. It was a buffalo bull, fast mired in a slough. They killed him, lashed a cable about him, and then twelve men dragged out the shaggy monster, whose ponderous carcass demanded their utmost efforts. The scene changed again as they descended. On either hand ran ranges of woody hills, following the course of the river; and when they mounted to their tops, they saw beyond them a rolling sea of dull green prairie, a boundless pasture of the buffalo and the deer, in our own day strangely transformed,—yellow in harvest-time with ripened wheat, and dotted with the roofs of a hardy and valiant yeomanry.[142] [Pg 169] THE ILLINOIS TOWN. They passed the site of the future town of Ottawa, and saw on their right the high plateau of Buffalo Rock, long a favorite dwelling-place of Indians. A league below, the river glided among islands bordered with stately woods. Close on their left towered a lofty cliff,[143] crested with trees that overhung the rippling current; while before them spread the valley of the Illinois, in broad low meadows, bordered on the right by the graceful hills at whose foot now lies the village of Utica. A population far more numerous then tenanted the valley. Along the right bank of the river were clustered the lodges of a great Indian town. Hennepin counted four hundred and sixty of them.[144] In shape, they were somewhat like the [Pg 170] arched top of a baggage-wagon. They were built of a framework of poles, covered with mats of rushes closely interwoven; and each contained three or four fires, of which the greater part served for two families. HUNGER RELIEVED. Here, then, was the town; but where were the inhabitants? All was silent as the desert. The lodges were empty, the fires dead, and the ashes cold. La Salle had expected this; for he knew that in the autumn the Illinois always left their towns for their winter hunting, and that the time of their return had not yet come. Yet he was not the less [Pg 171] embarrassed, for he would fain have bought a supply of food to relieve his famished followers. Some of them, searching the deserted town, presently found the caches, or covered pits, in which the Indians hid their stock of corn. This was precious beyond measure in their eyes, and to touch it would be a deep offence. La Salle shrank from provoking their anger, which might prove the ruin of his plans; but his necessity overcame his prudence, and he took thirty minots of corn, hoping to appease the owners by presents. Thus provided, the party embarked again, and resumed their downward voyage. On New Year's Day, 1680, they landed and heard mass. Then Hennepin wished a happy new year to La Salle first, and afterwards to all the men, making them a speech, which, as he tells us, was "most touching."[145] He and his two brethren next embraced the whole company in turn, "in a manner," writes the father, "most tender and affectionate," exhorting them, at the same time, to patience, faith, and constancy. Four days after these solemnities, they reached the long expansion of the river then called Pimitoui, and now known as Peoria Lake, and leisurely made their way downward to the site of the city of Peoria.[146] Here, as evening drew near, they [Pg 172] saw a faint spire of smoke curling above the gray forest, betokening that Indians were at hand. La Salle, as we have seen, had been warned that these tribes had been taught to regard him as their enemy; and when, in the morning, he resumed his course, he was prepared alike for peace or war. The shores now approached each other; and the Illinois was once more a river, bordered on either hand with overhanging woods.[147] At nine o'clock, doubling a point, he saw about eighty Illinois wigwams, on both sides of the river. He instantly ordered the eight canoes to be ranged in line, abreast, across the stream,—Tonty on the right, and he himself on the left. The men laid down their paddles and seized their weapons; while, in this warlike guise, the current bore them swiftly into the midst of the surprised and astounded savages. The camps were in a panic. Warriors whooped and howled; squaws and children screeched in chorus. Some snatched their bows and war-clubs; some ran in terror; and, in the midst of the hubbub, La Salle leaped ashore, followed by his men. None knew better how to deal with Indians; and he made no sign of friendship, knowing that it might be construed as a token of fear. His little knot of Frenchmen stood, gun in hand, passive, yet prepared for battle. [Pg 173] The Indians, on their part, rallying a little from their fright, made all haste to proffer peace. Two of their chiefs came forward, holding out the calumet; while another began a loud harangue, to check the young warriors who were aiming their arrows from the farther bank. La Salle, responding to these friendly overtures, displayed another calumet; while Hennepin caught several scared children and soothed them with winning blandishments.[148] The uproar was quelled; and the strangers were presently seated in the midst of the camp, beset by a throng of wild and swarthy figures. ILLINOIS HOSPITALITY. Food was placed before them; and, as the Illinois code of courtesy enjoined, their entertainers conveyed the morsels with their own hands to the lips of these unenviable victims of their hospitality, while others rubbed their feet with bear's grease. La Salle, on his part, made them a gift of tobacco and hatchets; and when he had escaped from their caresses, rose and harangued them. He told them that he had been forced to take corn from their granaries, lest his men should die of hunger; but he prayed them not to be offended, promising full restitution or ample payment. He had come, he said, to protect them against their enemies, and teach them to pray to the true God. As for the Iroquois, they were subjects of the Great King, and therefore brethren of the French; yet, nevertheless, should they begin a war and invade the country of the Illinois, he would [Pg 174] stand by them, give them guns, and fight in their defence, if they would permit him to build a fort among them for the security of his men. It was also, he added, his purpose to build a great wooden canoe, in which to descend the Mississippi to the sea, and then return, bringing them the goods of which they stood in need; but if they would not consent to his plans and sell provisions to his men, he would pass on to the Osages, who would then reap all the benefits of intercourse with the French, while they were left destitute, at the mercy of the Iroquois.[149] This threat had its effect, for it touched their deep-rooted jealousy of the Osages. They were lavish of promises, and feasts and dances consumed the day. Yet La Salle soon learned that the intrigues of his enemies were still pursuing him. That evening, unknown to him, a stranger appeared in the Illinois camp. He was a Mascoutin chief, named Monso, attended by five or six Miamis, and bringing a gift of knives, hatchets, and kettles to the Illinois.[150] The chiefs assembled in a secret nocturnal session, where, smoking their pipes, they listened with open ears to the harangue of the envoys. Monso told them that he had come in behalf of certain Frenchmen, whom he named, to warn his hearers against the designs of La Salle, whom he denounced [Pg 175] as a partisan and spy of the Iroquois, affirming that he was now on his way to stir up the tribes beyond the Mississippi to join in a war against the Illinois, who, thus assailed from the east and from the west, would be utterly destroyed. There was no hope for them, he added, but in checking the farther progress of La Salle, or, at least, retarding it, thus causing his men to desert him. Having thrown his fire-brand, Monso and his party left the camp in haste, dreading to be confronted with the object of their aspersions.[151] FRESH INTRIGUES. In the morning, La Salle saw a change in the behavior of his hosts. They looked on him askance, cold, sullen, and suspicious. There was one Omawha, a chief, whose favor he had won the day before by the politic gift of two hatchets and three knives, and who now came to him in secret to tell him what had taken place at the nocturnal council. La Salle at once saw in it a device of his enemies; and this belief was confirmed, when, in the afternoon, Nicanopé, brother of the head chief, sent to invite the Frenchmen to a feast. They repaired to his lodge; but before dinner was served,—that is to say, while the guests, white and red, were seated on [Pg 176] mats, each with his hunting-knife in his hand, and the wooden bowl before him which was to receive his share of the bear's or buffalo's meat, or the corn boiled in fat, with which he was to be regaled,—while such was the posture of the company, their host arose and began a long speech. He told the Frenchmen that he had invited them to his lodge less to refresh their bodies with good cheer than to cure their minds of the dangerous purpose which possessed them, of descending the Mississippi. Its shores, he said, were beset by savage tribes, against whose numbers and ferocity their valor would avail nothing; its waters were infested by serpents, alligators, and unnatural monsters; while the river itself, after raging among rocks and whirlpools, plunged headlong at last into a fathomless gulf, which would swallow them and their vessel forever. LA SALLE AND THE INDIANS. La Salle's men were for the most part raw hands, knowing nothing of the wilderness, and easily alarmed at its dangers; but there were two among them, old coureurs de bois, who unfortunately knew too much; for they understood the Indian orator, and explained his speech to the rest. As La Salle looked around on the circle of his followers, he read an augury of fresh trouble in their disturbed and rueful visages. He waited patiently, however, till the speaker had ended, and then answered him, through his interpreter, with great composure. First, he thanked him for the friendly warning which his affection had impelled him to utter; but, he continued, [Pg 177] the greater the danger, the greater the honor; and even if the danger were real, Frenchmen would never flinch from it. But were not the Illinois jealous? Had they not been deluded by lies? "We were not asleep, my brother, when Monso came to tell you, under cover of night, that we were spies of the Iroquois. The presents he gave you, that you might believe his falsehoods, are at this moment buried in the earth under this lodge. If he told the truth, why did he skulk away in the dark? Why did he not show himself by day? Do you not see that when we first came among you, and your camp was all in confusion, we could have killed you without needing help from the Iroquois? And now, while I am speaking, could we not put your old men to death, while your young warriors are all gone away to hunt? If we meant to make war on you, we should need no help from the Iroquois, who have so often felt the force of our arms. Look at what we have brought you. It is not weapons to destroy you, but merchandise and tools for your good. If you still harbor evil thoughts of us, be frank as we are, and speak them boldly. Go after this impostor Monso, and bring him back, that we may answer him face to face; for he never saw either us or the Iroquois, and what can he know of the plots that he pretends to reveal?"[152] Nicanopé had nothing to [Pg 178] reply, and, grunting assent in the depths of his throat, made a sign that the feast should proceed. The French were lodged in huts, near the Indian camp; and, fearing treachery, La Salle placed a guard at night. On the morning after the feast, he came out into the frosty air and looked about him for the sentinels. Not one of them was to be seen. Vexed and alarmed, he entered hut after hut and roused his drowsy followers. Six of the number, including two of the best carpenters, were nowhere to be found. Discontented and mutinous from the first, and now terrified by the fictions of Nicanopé, they had deserted, preferring the hardships of the midwinter forest to the mysterious terrors of the Mississippi. La Salle mustered the rest before him, and inveighed sternly against the cowardice and baseness of those who had thus abandoned him, regardless of his many favors. If any here, he added, are afraid, let them but wait till the spring, and they shall have free leave to return to Canada, safely and without dishonor.[153] LA SALLE AGAIN POISONED. This desertion cut him to the heart. It showed him that he was leaning on a broken reed; and he felt that, on an enterprise full of doubt and peril, there were scarcely four men in his party whom he could trust. Nor was desertion the worst he had to fear; for here, as at Fort Frontenac, an attempt was made to kill him. Tonty tells us that poison was [Pg 179] placed in the pot in which their food was cooked, and that La Salle was saved by an antidote which some of his friends had given him before he left France. This, it will be remembered, was an epoch of poisoners. It was in the following month that the notorious La Voisin was burned alive, at Paris, for practices to which many of the highest nobility were charged with being privy, not excepting some in whose veins ran the blood of the gorgeous spendthrift who ruled the destinies of France.[154] In these early French enterprises in the West, it was to the last degree difficult to hold men to their duty. Once fairly in the wilderness, completely freed from the sharp restraints of authority in which they had passed their lives, a spirit of lawlessness broke out among them with a violence proportioned to the pressure which had hitherto controlled it. Discipline had no resources and no guarantee; while those outlaws of the forest, the coureurs de bois, were always before their eyes, a standing example of unbridled license. La Salle, eminently skilful in his dealings with Indians, was rarely so happy with his own countrymen; and yet the desertions from which he was continually suffering were due far more to the inevitable difficulty of his position than to any want of conduct on his part. FOOTNOTES: [140] Lettre de Duchesneau à ——, 10 Nov., 1680. [141] The Kankakee was called at this time the Theakiki, or Haukiki (Marest); a name which, as Charlevoix says, was afterwards corrupted by the French to Kiakiki whence, probably, its present form. In La Salle's time, the name "Theakiki" was given to the river Illinois through all its course. It was also called the Rivière Seignelay, the Rivière des Macopins, and the Rivière Divine, or Rivière de la Divine. The latter name, when Charlevoix visited the country in 1721, was confined to the northern branch. He gives an interesting and somewhat graphic account of the portage and the sources of the Kankakee, in his letter dated De la Source du Theakiki, ce dix-sept Septembre, 1721. Why the Illinois should ever have been called the "Divine," it is not easy to see. The Memoirs of St. Simon suggest an explanation. Madame de Frontenac and her friend Mademoiselle d'Outrelaise, he tells us, lived together in apartments at the Arsenal, where they held their salon and exercised a great power in society. They were called at court les Divines. (St. Simon, v. 335: Cheruel.) In compliment to Frontenac, the river may have been named after his wife or her friend. The suggestion is due to M. Margry. I have seen a map by Raudin, Frontenac's engineer, on which the river is called "Rivière de la Divine ou l'Outrelaise." [142] The change is very recent. Within the memory of men not yet old, wolves and deer, besides wild swans, wild turkeys, cranes, and pelicans, abounded in this region. In 1840, a friend of mine shot a deer from the window of a farmhouse, near the present town of La Salle. Running wolves on horseback was his favorite amusement in this part of the country. The buffalo long ago disappeared; but the early settlers found frequent remains of them. Mr. James Clark, of Utica, Ill., told me that he once found a large quantity of their bones and skulls in one place, as if a herd had perished in the snowdrifts. [143] "Starved Rock." It will hold, hereafter, a conspicuous place in the narrative. [144] La Louisiane, 137. Allouez (Relation, 1673-79) found three hundred and fifty-one lodges. This was in 1677. The population of this town, which embraced five or six distinct tribes of the Illinois, was continually changing. In 1675, Marquette addressed here an auditory composed of five hundred chiefs and old men, and fifteen hundred young men, besides women and children. He estimates the number of fires at five or six hundred. (Voyages du Père Marquette, 98: Lenox.) Membré, who was here in 1680, says that it then contained seven or eight thousand souls. (Membré in Le Clerc, Premier établissement de la Foy, ii. 173.) On the remarkable manuscript map of Franquelin, 1684, it is set down at twelve hundred warriors, or about six thousand souls. This was after the destructive inroad of the Iroquois. Some years later, Rasle reported upwards of twenty-four hundred families. (Lettre à son Frère, in Lettres édifiantes.) At times, nearly the whole Illinois population was gathered here. At other times, the several tribes that composed it separated, some dwelling apart from the rest; so that at one period the Illinois formed eleven villages, while at others they were gathered into two, of which this was much the larger. The meadows around it were extensively cultivated, yielding large crops, chiefly of Indian corn. The lodges were built along the river-bank for a distance of a mile, and sometimes far more. In their shape, though not in their material, they resembled those of the Hurons. There were no palisades or embankments. This neighborhood abounds in Indian relics. The village graveyard appears to have been on a rising ground, near the river immediately in front of the town of Utica. This is the only part of the river bottom, from this point to the Mississippi, not liable to inundation in the spring floods. It now forms part of a farm occupied by a tenant of Mr. James Clark. Both Mr. Clark and his tenant informed me that every year great quantities of human bones and teeth were turned up here by the plough. Many implements of stone are also found, together with beads and other ornaments of Indian and European fabric. [145] "Les paroles les plus touchantes."—Hennepin (1683), 139. The later editions add the modest qualification, "que je pus." [146] Peoria was the name of one of the tribes of the Illinois. Hennepin's dates here do not exactly agree with those of La Salle (Lettre du 29 Sept., 1680), who says that they were at the Illinois village on the first of January, and at Peoria Lake on the fifth. [147] At least, it is so now at this place. Perhaps, in La Salle's time, it was not wholly so; for there is evidence, in various parts of the West, that the forest has made considerable encroachments on the open country. [148] Hennepin (1683), 142. [149] Hennepin (1683), 144-149. The later editions omit a part of the above. [150] "Un sauvage, nommé Monso, qui veut dire Chevreuil."—La Salle. Probably Monso is a misprint for Mouso, as mousoa is Illinois for chevreuil, or deer. [151] Hennepin (1683), 151, (1704), 205; Le Clerc, ii. 157; Mémoire du Voyage de M. de la Salle. This is a paper appended to Frontenac's Letter to the Minister, 9 Nov., 1680. Hennepin prints a translation of it in the English edition of his later work. It charges the Jesuit Allouez with being at the bottom of the intrigue. Compare Lettre de La Salle, 29 Sept., 1680 (Margry, ii. 41), and Mémoire de La Salle, in Thomassy, Géologie Pratique de la Louisiane, 203. The account of the affair of Monso, in the spurious work bearing Tonty's name, is mere romance. [152] The above is a paraphrase, with some condensation, from Hennepin, whose account is substantially identical with that of La Salle. [153] Hennepin (1683), 162. Déclaration faite par Moyse Hillaret, charpentier de barque, cy devant au service du Sr. de la Salle. [154] The equally noted Brinvilliers was burned four years before. An account of both will be found in the Letters of Madame de Sévigné. The memoirs of the time abound in evidence of the frightful prevalence of these practices, and the commotion which they excited in all ranks of society. CHAPTER XIII. 1680. FORT CRèVEC?UR. Building of the Fort.—Loss of the "Griffin."—A Bold Resolution.—Another Vessel.—Hennepin sent to the Mississippi.—Departure of La Salle. BUILDING OF THE FORT. La Salle now resolved to leave the Indian camp, and fortify himself for the winter in a strong position, where his men would be less exposed to dangerous influence, and where he could hold his ground against an outbreak of the Illinois or an Iroquois invasion. At the middle of January, a thaw broke up the ice which had closed the river; and he set out in a canoe, with Hennepin, to visit the site he had chosen for his projected fort. It was half a league below the camp, on a low hill or knoll, two hundred yards from the southern bank. On either side was a deep ravine, and in front a marshy tract, overflowed at high water. Thither, then, the party was removed. They dug a ditch behind the hill, connecting the two ravines, and thus completely isolating it. The hill was nearly square in form. An embankment of earth was thrown up on every side: its declivities [Pg 181] were sloped steeply down to the bottom of the ravines and the ditch, and further guarded by chevaux-de-frise; while a palisade, twenty-five feet high, was planted around the whole. The lodgings of the men, built of musket-proof timber, were at two of the angles; the house of the friars at the third; the forge and magazine at the fourth; and the tents of La Salle and Tonty in the area within. Hennepin laments the failure of wine, which prevented him from saying mass; but every morning and evening he summoned the men to his cabin to listen to prayers and preaching, and on Sundays and fête-days they chanted vespers. Father Zenobe usually spent the day in the Indian camp, striving, with very indifferent success, to win them to the Faith, and to overcome the disgust with which their manners and habits inspired him. Such was the first civilized occupation of the region which now forms the State of Illinois. La Salle christened his new fort Fort Crèvec?ur. The name tells of disaster and suffering, but does no justice to the iron-hearted constancy of the sufferer. Up to this time he had clung to the hope that his vessel, the "Griffin," might still be safe. Her safety was vital to his enterprise. She had on board articles of the last necessity to him, including the rigging and anchors of another vessel which he was to build at Fort Crèvec?ur, in order to descend the Mississippi and sail thence to the West Indies. But now his last hope had well-nigh vanished. Past all reasonable [Pg 182] doubt, the "Griffin" was lost; and in her loss he and all his plans seemed ruined alike. Nothing, indeed, was ever heard of her. Indians, fur-traders, and even Jesuits, have been charged with contriving her destruction. Some say that the Ottawas boarded and burned her, after murdering those on board; others accuse the Pottawattamies; others affirm that her own crew scuttled and sunk her; others, again, that she foundered in a storm.[155] As for La Salle, the belief grew in him to a settled conviction that she had been treacherously sunk by the pilot and the sailors to whom he had intrusted her; and he thought he had found evidence that the authors of the crime, laden with the merchandise they had taken from her, had reached the Mississippi and ascended it, hoping to join Du Lhut, a famous chief of coureurs de bois, and enrich themselves by traffic with the northern tribes.[156] [Pg 183] LA SALLE'S ANXIETIES. But whether her lading was swallowed in the depths of the lake, or lost in the clutches of traitors, the evil was alike past remedy. She was gone, it mattered little how. The main-stay of the enterprise was broken; yet its inflexible chief lost neither heart nor hope. One path, beset with hardships and terrors, still lay open to him. He might return on foot to Fort Frontenac, and bring thence the needful succors. La Salle felt deeply the dangers of such a step. His men were uneasy, discontented, and terrified by the stories with which the jealous Illinois still constantly filled their ears, of the whirlpools and the monsters of the Mississippi. He dreaded lest, in his absence, they should follow the example of their comrades, and desert. In the midst of his anxieties, a lucky accident gave him the means of disabusing them. He was hunting, one day, near the fort, when he met a young Illinois on his way home, half-starved, from a distant war excursion. He had been absent so long that he knew nothing of what had passed between his countrymen and the French. La Salle gave him a turkey he had shot, invited him to the fort, fed him, and made him presents. Having thus warmed his heart, he questioned him, with apparent carelessness, as to the countries he had visited, and especially as to the Mississippi,—on which the young warrior, seeing no reason to disguise the truth, gave him all the information he required. La Salle now made him the present of a hatchet, to [Pg 184] engage him to say nothing of what had passed, and, leaving him in excellent humor, repaired, with some of his followers, to the Illinois camp. Here he found the chiefs seated at a feast of bear's meat, and he took his place among them on a mat of rushes. After a pause, he charged them with having deceived him in regard to the Mississippi; adding that he knew the river perfectly, having been instructed concerning it by the Master of Life. He then described it to them with so much accuracy that his astonished hearers, conceiving that he owed his knowledge to "medicine," or sorcery, clapped their hands to their mouths in sign of wonder, and confessed that all they had said was but an artifice, inspired by their earnest desire that he should remain among them.[157] On this, La Salle's men took heart again; and their courage rose still more when, soon after, a band of Chickasa, Arkansas, and Osage warriors, from the Mississippi, came to the camp on a friendly visit, and assured the French not only that the river was navigable to the sea, but that the tribes along its banks would give them a warm welcome. ANOTHER VESSEL. La Salle had now good reason to hope that his followers would neither mutiny nor desert in his absence. One chief purpose of his intended journey was to procure the anchors, cables, and rigging of [Pg 185] the vessel which he meant to build at Fort Crèvec?ur, and he resolved to see her on the stocks before he set out. This was no easy matter, for the pit-sawyers had deserted. "Seeing," he writes, "that I should lose a year if I waited to get others from Montreal, I said one day, before my people, that I was so vexed to find that the absence of two sawyers would defeat my plans and make all my trouble useless, that I was resolved to try to saw the planks myself, if I could find a single man who would help me with a will." Hereupon, two men stepped forward and promised to do their best. They were tolerably successful, and, the rest being roused to emulation, the work went on with such vigor that within six weeks the hull of the vessel was half finished. She was of forty tons' burden, and was built with high bulwarks, to protect those on board from Indian arrows. La Salle now bethought him that, in his absence, he might get from Hennepin service of more value than his sermons; and he requested him to descend the Illinois, and explore it to its mouth. The friar, though hardy and daring, would fain have excused himself, alleging a troublesome bodily infirmity; but his venerable colleague Ribourde, himself too old for the journey, urged him to go, telling him that if he died by the way, his apostolic labors would redound to the glory of God. Membré had been living for some time in the Indian camp, and was thoroughly out of humor with the objects of his missionary [Pg 186] efforts, of whose obduracy and filth he bitterly complained. Hennepin proposed to take his place, while he should assume the Mississippi adventure; but this Membré declined, preferring to remain where he was. Hennepin now reluctantly accepted the proposed task. "Anybody but me," he says, with his usual modesty, "would have been very much frightened at the dangers of such a journey; and, in fact, if I had not placed all my trust in God, I should not have been the dupe of the Sieur de la Salle, who exposed my life rashly."[158] On the last day of February, Hennepin's canoe lay at the water's edge; and the party gathered on the bank to bid him farewell. He had two companions,—Michel Accau, and a man known as the Picard du Gay,[159] though his real name was Antoine Auguel. The canoe was well laden with gifts for the Indians,—tobacco, knives, beads, awls, and other goods, to a very considerable value, supplied at La Salle's cost; "and, in fact," observes Hennepin, "he is liberal enough towards his friends."[160] [Pg 187] DEPARTURE OF HENNEPIN. The friar bade farewell to La Salle, and embraced all the rest in turn. Father Ribourde gave him his benediction. "Be of good courage and let your heart be comforted," said the excellent old missionary, as he spread his hands in benediction over the shaven crown of the reverend traveller. Du Gay and Accau plied their paddles; the canoe receded, and vanished at length behind the forest. We will follow Hennepin hereafter on his adventures, imaginary and real. Meanwhile, we will trace the footsteps of his chief, urging his way, in the storms of winter, through those vast and gloomy wilds,—those realms of famine, treachery, and death,—that lay betwixt him and his far-distant goal of Fort Frontenac. On the first of March,[161] before the frost was yet out of the ground, when the forest was still leafless, and the oozy prairies still patched with snow, a band of discontented men were again gathered on the shore for another leave-taking. Hard by, the unfinished ship lay on the stocks, white and fresh from the saw and axe, ceaselessly reminding them of the hardship and peril that was in store. Here you would have seen the calm, impenetrable face of La Salle, and with him the Mohegan hunter, who seems to have felt towards him that admiring attachment which he could always inspire in his Indian retainers. Besides the Mohegan, four Frenchmen were to accompany him,—Hunaut, La Violette, Collin, and Dautray.[[162] [Pg 188] His parting with Tonty was an anxious one, for each well knew the risks that environed both. Embarking with his followers in two canoes, he made his way upward amid the drifting ice; while the faithful Italian, with two or three honest men and twelve or thirteen knaves, remained to hold Fort Crèvec?ur in his absence. FOOTNOTES: [155] Charlevoix, i. 459; La Potherie, ii. 140; La Hontan, Memoir on the Fur-Trade of Canada. I am indebted for a copy of this paper to Winthrop Sargent, Esq., who purchased the original at the sale of the library of the poet Southey. Like Hennepin, La Hontan went over to the English; and this memoir is written in their interest. [156] Lettre de La Salle à La Barre, Chicagou, 4 Juin, 1683. This is a long letter, addressed to the successor of Frontenac in the government of Canada. La Salle says that a young Indian belonging to him told him that three years before he saw a white man, answering the description of the pilot, a prisoner among a tribe beyond the Mississippi. He had been captured with four others on that river, while making his way with canoes, laden with goods, towards the Sioux. His companions had been killed. Other circumstances, which La Salle details at great length, convinced him that the white prisoner was no other than the pilot of the "Griffin." The evidence, however, is not conclusive. [157] Relation des Découvertes et des Voyages du Sr. de la Salle, Seigneur et Gouverneur du Fort de Frontenac, au delà des grands Lacs de la Nouvelle France, faits par ordre de Monseigneur Colbert, 1679, 80 et 81. Hennepin gives a story which is not essentially different, except that he makes himself a conspicuous actor in it. [158] All the above is from Hennepin; and it seems to be marked by his characteristic egotism. It appears, from La Salle's letters, that Accau was the real chief of the party; that their orders were to explore not only the Illinois, but also a part of the Mississippi; and that Hennepin volunteered to go with the others. Accau was chosen because he spoke several Indian languages. [159] An eminent writer has mistaken "Picard" for a personal name. Du Gay was called "Le Picard," because he came from the province of Picardy. [160] (1683), 188. This commendation is suppressed in the later editions. [161] Tonty erroneously places their departure on the twenty-second. [162] Déclaration faite par Moyse Hillaret, charpentier de barque. CHAPTER XIV. 1680. HARDIHOOD OF LA SALLE. The Winter Journey.—The Deserted Town.—Starved Rock.—Lake Michigan.—The Wilderness.—War Parties.—La Salle's Men give out.—Ill Tidings.—Mutiny.—Chastisement of the Mutineers. La Salle well knew what was before him, and nothing but necessity spurred him to this desperate journey. He says that he could trust nobody else to go in his stead, and that unless the articles lost in the "Griffin" were replaced without delay, the expedition would be retarded a full year, and he and his associates consumed by its expenses. "Therefore," he writes to one of them, "though the thaws of approaching spring greatly increased the difficulty of the way, interrupted as it was everywhere by marshes and rivers, to say nothing of the length of the journey, which is about five hundred leagues in a direct line, and the danger of meeting Indians of four or five different nations through whose country we were to pass, as well as an Iroquois army which we knew was coming that way; though we must suffer all the [Pg 190] time from hunger; sleep on the open ground, and often without food; watch by night and march by day, loaded with baggage, such as blanket, clothing, kettle, hatchet, gun, powder, lead, and skins to make moccasins; sometimes pushing through thickets, sometimes climbing rocks covered with ice and snow, sometimes wading whole days through marshes where the water was waist-deep or even more, at a season when the snow was not entirely melted,—though I knew all this, it did not prevent me from resolving to go on foot to Fort Frontenac, to learn for myself what had become of my vessel, and bring back the things we needed."[163] The winter had been a severe one; and when, an hour after leaving the fort, he and his companions reached the still water of Peoria Lake, they found it sheeted with ice from shore to shore. They carried their canoes up the bank, made two rude sledges, placed the light vessels upon them, and dragged them to the upper end of the lake, where they encamped. In the morning they found the river still covered with ice, too weak to bear them and too strong to permit them to break a way for the canoes. They spent the whole day in carrying them through the woods, toiling knee-deep in saturated snow. Rain fell in floods, and they took shelter at night in a deserted Indian hut. In the morning, the third of March, they dragged [Pg 191] their canoes half a league farther; then launched them, and, breaking the ice with clubs and hatchets, forced their way slowly up the stream. Again their progress was barred, and again they took to the woods, toiling onward till a tempest of moist, half-liquid snow forced them to bivouac for the night. A sharp frost followed, and in the morning the white waste around them was glazed with a dazzling crust. Now, for the first time, they could use their snow-shoes. Bending to their work, dragging their canoes, which glided smoothly over the polished surface, they journeyed on hour after hour and league after league, till they reached at length the great town of the Illinois, still void of its inhabitants.[164] THE DESERTED TOWN. It was a desolate and lonely scene,—the river gliding dark and cold between its banks of rushes; the empty lodges, covered with crusted snow; the vast white meadows; the distant cliffs, bearded with shining icicles; and the hills wrapped in forests, which glittered from afar with the icy incrustations that cased each frozen twig. Yet there was life in the savage landscape. The men saw buffalo wading in the snow, and they killed one of them. More than this: they discovered the tracks of moccasins. They cut rushes by the edge of the river, piled them on the bank, and set them on fire, that the smoke might attract the eyes of savages roaming near. [Pg 192] On the following day, while the hunters were smoking the meat of the buffalo, La Salle went out to reconnoitre, and presently met three Indians, one of whom proved to be Chassagoac, the principal chief of the Illinois.[165] La Salle brought them to his bivouac, feasted them, gave them a red blanket, a kettle, and some knives and hatchets, made friends with them, promised to restrain the Iroquois from attacking them, told them that he was on his way to the settlements to bring arms and ammunition to defend them against their enemies, and, as the result of these advances, gained from the chief a promise that he would send provisions to Tonty's party at Fort Crèvec?ur. After several days spent at the deserted town, La Salle prepared to resume his journey. Before his departure, his attention was attracted to the remarkable cliff of yellow sandstone, now called Starved Rock, a mile or more above the village,—a natural fortress, which a score of resolute white men might make good against a host of savages; and he soon afterwards sent Tonty an order to examine it, and make it his stronghold in case of need.[166] On the fifteenth the party set out again, carried [Pg 193] their canoes along the bank of the river as far as the rapids above Ottawa, then launched them and pushed their way upward, battling with the floating ice, which, loosened by a warm rain, drove down the swollen current in sheets. On the eighteenth they reached a point some miles below the site of Joliet, and here found the river once more completely closed. Despairing of farther progress by water, they hid their canoes on an island, and struck across the country for Lake Michigan. LA SALLE'S JOURNEY. It was the worst of all seasons for such a journey. The nights were cold, but the sun was warm at noon, and the half-thawed prairie was one vast tract of mud, water, and discolored, half-liquid snow. On the twenty-second they crossed marshes and inundated meadows, wading to the knee, till at noon they were stopped by a river, perhaps the Calumet. They made a raft of hard-wood timber, for there was no other, and shoved themselves across. On the next day they could see Lake Michigan dimly glimmering beyond the waste of woods; and, after crossing three swollen streams, they reached it at evening. On the twenty-fourth they followed its shore, till, at nightfall, they arrived at the fort which they had built in the autumn at the mouth of the St. Joseph. Here La Salle found Chapelle and Leblanc, the two men whom he had sent from hence to Michilimackinac, in search of the "Griffin."[167] They reported that they had made the circuit of the lake, and had neither [Pg 194] seen her nor heard tidings of her. Assured of her fate, he ordered them to rejoin Tonty at Fort Crèvec?ur; while he pushed onward with his party through the unknown wild of Southern Michigan. "The rain," says La Salle, "which lasted all day, and the raft we were obliged to make to cross the river, stopped us till noon of the twenty-fifth, when we continued our march through the woods, which was so interlaced with thorns and brambles that in two days and a half our clothes were all torn, and our faces so covered with blood that we hardly knew each other. On the twenty-eighth we found the woods more open, and began to fare better, meeting a good deal of game, which after this rarely failed us; so that we no longer carried provisions with us, but made a meal of roast meat wherever we happened to kill a deer, bear, or turkey. These are the choicest feasts on a journey like this; and till now we had generally gone without them, so that we had often walked all day without breakfast. INDIAN ALARMS. "The Indians do not hunt in this region, which is debatable ground between five or six nations who are at war, and, being afraid of each other, do not venture into these parts except to surprise each other, and always with the greatest precaution and all possible secrecy. The reports of our guns and the carcasses of the animals we killed soon led some of them to find our trail. In fact, on the evening of the twenty-eighth, having made our fire by the edge of a prairie, we were surrounded by them; but as the [Pg 195] man on guard waked us, and we posted ourselves behind trees with our guns, these savages, who are called Wapoos, took us for Iroquois, and thinking that there must be a great many of us because we did not travel secretly, as they do when in small bands, they ran off without shooting their arrows, and gave the alarm to their comrades, so that we were two days without meeting anybody." La Salle guessed the cause of their fright; and, in order to confirm their delusion, he drew with charcoal, on the trunks of trees from which he had stripped the bark, the usual marks of an Iroquois war-party, with signs for prisoners and for scalps, after the custom of those dreaded warriors. This ingenious artifice, as will soon appear, was near proving the destruction of the whole party. He also set fire to the dry grass of the prairies over which he and his men had just passed, thus destroying the traces of their passage. "We practised this device every night, and it answered very well so long as we were passing over an open country; but on the thirtieth we got into great marshes, flooded by the thaws, and were obliged to cross them in mud or water up to the waist; so that our tracks betrayed us to a band of Mascoutins who were out after Iroquois. They followed us through these marshes during the three days we were crossing them; but we made no fire at night, contenting ourselves with taking off our wet clothes and wrapping ourselves in our blankets on some dry knoll, where we slept till morning. At [Pg 196] last, on the night of the second of April, there came a hard frost, and our clothes, which were drenched when we took them off, froze stiff as sticks, so that we could not put them on in the morning without making a fire to thaw them. The fire betrayed us to the Indians, who were encamped across the marsh; and they ran towards us with loud cries, till they were stopped halfway by a stream so deep that they could not get over, the ice which had formed in the night not being strong enough to bear them. We went to meet them, within gun-shot; and whether our fire-arms frightened them, or whether they thought us more numerous than we were, or whether they really meant us no harm, they called out, in the Illinois language, that they had taken us for Iroquois, but now saw that we were friends and brothers; whereupon, they went off as they came, and we kept on our way till the fourth, when two of my men fell ill and could not walk." In this emergency, La Salle went in search of some watercourse by which they might reach Lake Erie, and soon came upon a small river, which was probably the Huron. Here, while the sick men rested, their companions made a canoe. There were no birch-trees; and they were forced to use elm-bark, which at that early season would not slip freely from the wood until they loosened it with hot water. Their canoe being made, they embarked in it, and for a time floated prosperously down the stream, when at length the way was barred by a matted [Pg 197] barricade of trees fallen across the water. The sick men could now walk again, and, pushing eastward through the forest, the party soon reached the banks of the Detroit. THE JOURNEY'S END. La Salle directed two of the men to make a canoe, and go to Michilimackinac, the nearest harborage. With the remaining two, he crossed the Detroit on a raft, and, striking a direct line across the country, reached Lake Erie not far from Point Pelée. Snow, sleet, and rain pelted them with little intermission: and when, after a walk of about thirty miles, they gained the lake, the Mohegan and one of the Frenchmen were attacked with fever and spitting of blood. Only one man now remained in health. With his aid, La Salle made another canoe, and, embarking the invalids, pushed for Niagara. It was Easter Monday when they landed at a cabin of logs above the cataract, probably on the spot where the "Griffin" was built. Here several of La Salle's men had been left the year before, and here they still remained. They told him woful news. Not only had he lost the "Griffin," and her lading of ten thousand crowns in value, but a ship from France, freighted with his goods, valued at more than twenty-two thousand livres, had been totally wrecked at the mouth of the St. Lawrence; and of twenty hired men on their way from Europe to join him, some had been detained by his enemy, the Intendant Duchesneau, while all but four of the remainder, being told that he was dead, had found means to return home. [Pg 198] His three followers were all unfit for travel: he alone retained his strength and spirit. Taking with him three fresh men at Niagara, he resumed his journey, and on the sixth of May descried, looming through floods of rain, the familiar shores of his seigniory and the bastioned walls of Fort Frontenac. During sixty-five days he had toiled almost incessantly, travelling, by the course he took, about a thousand miles through a country beset with every form of peril and obstruction,—"the most arduous journey," says the chronicler, "ever made by Frenchmen in America." Such was Cavelier de la Salle. In him, an unconquerable mind held at its service a frame of iron, and tasked it to the utmost of its endurance. The pioneer of western pioneers was no rude son of toil, but a man of thought, trained amid arts and letters.[168] He had reached his goal; but for him there was neither rest nor peace. Man and Nature seemed in arms against him. His agents had plundered him; his creditors had seized his property; and several of his canoes, richly laden, had been lost in the rapids of the St. Lawrence.[169] He hastened to Montreal, where [Pg 199] his sudden advent caused great astonishment; and where, despite his crippled resources and damaged credit, he succeeded, within a week, in gaining the supplies which he required and the needful succors for the forlorn band on the Illinois. He had returned to Fort Frontenac, and was on the point of embarking for their relief, when a blow fell upon him more disheartening than any that had preceded. THE MUTINEERS. On the twenty-second of July, two voyageurs, Messier and Laurent, came to him with a letter from Tonty, who wrote that soon after La Salle's departure nearly all the men had deserted, after destroying Fort Crèvec?ur, plundering the magazine, and throwing into the river all the arms, goods, and stores which they could not carry off. The messengers who brought this letter were speedily followed by two of the habitants of Fort Frontenac, who had been trading on the lakes, and who, with a fidelity which the unhappy La Salle rarely knew how to inspire, had travelled day and night to bring him their tidings. They reported that they had met the deserters, and that, having been reinforced by recruits gained at Michilimackinac and Niagara, they now numbered twenty men.[170] They had destroyed the fort on the [Pg 200] St. Joseph, seized a quantity of furs belonging to La Salle at Michilimackinac, and plundered the magazine at Niagara. Here they had separated, eight of them coasting the south side of Lake Ontario to find harborage at Albany, a common refuge at that time of this class of scoundrels; while the remaining twelve, in three canoes, made for Fort Frontenac along the north shore, intending to kill La Salle as the surest means of escaping punishment. CHASTISEMENT. He lost no time in lamentation. Of the few men at his command he chose nine of the trustiest, embarked with them in canoes, and went to meet the marauders. After passing the Bay of Quinté, he took his station with five of his party at a point of land suited to his purpose, and detached the remaining four to keep watch. In the morning, two canoes were discovered approaching without suspicion, one of them far in advance of the other. As the foremost drew near, La Salle's canoe darted out from under the leafy shore,—two of the men handling the paddles, while he, with the remaining two, levelled their guns at the deserters, and called on them to surrender. Astonished and dismayed, they yielded at once; while two more, who were in the second canoe, hastened to follow their example. La Salle now returned to the fort with his prisoners, placed [Pg 201] them in custody, and again set forth. He met the third canoe upon the lake at about six o'clock in the evening. His men vainly plied their paddles in pursuit. The mutineers reached the shore, took post among rocks and trees, levelled their guns, and showed fight. Four of La Salle's men made a circuit to gain their rear and dislodge them, on which they stole back to their canoe and tried to escape in the darkness. They were pursued, and summoned to yield; but they replied by aiming their guns at their pursuers, who instantly gave them a volley, killed two of them, and captured the remaining three. Like their companions, they were placed in custody at the fort, to await the arrival of Count Frontenac.[171] FOOTNOTES: [163] Lettre de La Salle à un de ses associés (Thouret?), 29 Sept., 1680 (Margry, ii. 50). [164] Membré says that he was in the town at the time; but this could hardly have been the case. He was, in all probability, among the Illinois, in their camp near Fort Crèvec?ur. [165] The same whom Hennepin calls Chassagouasse. He was brother of the chief, Nicanopé, who, in his absence, had feasted the French on the day after the nocturnal council with Monso. Chassagoac was afterwards baptized by Membré or Ribourde, but soon relapsed into the superstitions of his people, and died, as the former tells us, "doubly a child of perdition." See Le Clerc, ii. 181. [166] Tonty, Mémoire. The order was sent by two Frenchmen, whom La Salle met on Lake Michigan. [167] Déclaration de Moyse Hillaret; Relation des Découvertes. [168] A Rocky Mountain trapper, being complimented on the hardihood of himself and his companions, once said to the writer, "That's so; but a gentleman of the right sort will stand hardship better than anybody else." The history of Arctic and African travel and the military records of all time are a standing evidence that a trained and developed mind is not the enemy, but the active and powerful ally, of constitutional hardihood. The culture that enervates instead of strengthening is always a false or a partial one. [169] Zenobe Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 202. [170] When La Salle was at Niagara, in April, he had ordered Dautray, the best of the men who had accompanied him from the Illinois, to return thither as soon as he was able. Four men from Niagara were to go with him and he was to rejoin Tonty with such supplies as that post could furnish. Dautray set out accordingly, but was met on the lakes by the deserters, who told him that Tonty was dead, and seduced his men. (Relation des Découvertes.) Dautray himself seems to have remained true; at least, he was in La Salle's service immediately after, and was one of his most trusted followers. He was of good birth, being the son of Jean Bourdon, a conspicuous personage in the early period of the colony; and his name appears on official records as Jean Bourdon, Sieur d'Autray. [171] La Salle's long letter, written apparently to his associate Thouret, and dated 29 Sept., 1680, is the chief authority for the above. The greater part of this letter is incorporated, almost verbatim, in the official narrative called Relation des Découvertes. Hennepin, Membré, and Tonty also speak of the journey from Fort Crèvec?ur. The death of the two mutineers was used by La Salle's enemies as the basis of a charge of murder. CHAPTER XV. 1680. INDIAN CONQUERORS. The Enterprise renewed.—Attempt to rescue Tonty.—Buffalo.—A Frightful Discovery.—Iroquois Fury.—The Ruined Town.—A Night of Horror.—Traces of the Invaders.—No News of Tonty. ANOTHER EFFORT. And now La Salle's work must be begun afresh. He had staked all, and all had seemingly been lost. In stern, relentless effort he had touched the limits of human endurance; and the harvest of his toil was disappointment, disaster, and impending ruin. The shattered fabric of his enterprise was prostrate in the dust. His friends desponded; his foes were blatant and exultant. Did he bend before the storm? No human eye could pierce the depths of his reserved and haughty nature; but the surface was calm, and no sign betrayed a shaken resolve or an altered purpose. Where weaker men would have abandoned all in despairing apathy, he turned anew to his work with the same vigor and the same apparent confidence as if borne on the full tide of success. His best hope was in Tonty. Could that brave and true-hearted officer and the three or four faithful [Pg 203] men who had remained with him make good their foothold on the Illinois, and save from destruction the vessel on the stocks and the forge and tools so laboriously carried thither, then a basis was left on which the ruined enterprise might be built up once more. There was no time to lose. Tonty must be succored soon, or succor would come too late. La Salle had already provided the necessary material, and a few days sufficed to complete his preparations. On the tenth of August he embarked again for the Illinois. With him went his lieutenant La Forest, who held of him in fief an island, then called Belle Isle, opposite Fort Frontenac.[172] A surgeon, ship-carpenters, joiners, masons, soldiers, voyageurs and laborers completed his company, twenty-five men in all, with everything needful for the outfit of the vessel. His route, though difficult, was not so long as that which he had followed the year before. He ascended the river Humber; crossed to Lake Simcoe, and thence descended the Severn to the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron; followed its eastern shore, coasted the Manitoulin Islands, and at length reached Michilimackinac. Here, as usual, all was hostile; and he had great difficulty in inducing the Indians, who had been excited against him, to sell him provisions. Anxious to reach his destination, he pushed forward with twelve men, leaving La Forest to bring on the [Pg 204] rest. On the fourth of November[173] he reached the ruined fort at the mouth of the St. Joseph, and left five of his party, with the heavy stores, to wait till La Forest should come up, while he himself hastened forward with six Frenchmen and an Indian. A deep anxiety possessed him. The rumor, current for months past, that the Iroquois, bent on destroying the Illinois, were on the point of invading their country had constantly gained strength. Here was a new disaster, which, if realized, might involve him and his enterprise in irretrievable wreck. He ascended the St. Joseph, crossed the portage to the Kankakee, and followed its course downward till it joined the northern branch of the Illinois. He had heard nothing of Tonty on the way, and neither here nor elsewhere could he discover the smallest sign of the passage of white men. His friend, therefore, if alive, was probably still at his post; and he pursued his course with a mind lightened, in some small measure, of its load of anxiety. BUFFALO. When last he had passed here, all was solitude; but now the scene was changed. The boundless waste was thronged with life. He beheld that wondrous spectacle, still to be seen at times on the plains of the remotest West, and the memory of which can quicken the pulse and stir the blood after [Pg 205] the lapse of years: far and near, the prairie was alive with buffalo; now like black specks dotting the distant swells; now trampling by in ponderous columns, or filing in long lines, morning, noon, and night, to drink at the river,—wading, plunging, and snorting in the water; climbing the muddy shores, and staring with wild eyes at the passing canoes. It was an opportunity not to be lost. The party landed, and encamped for a hunt. Sometimes they hid under the shelving bank, and shot them as they came to drink; sometimes, flat on their faces, they dragged themselves through the long dead grass, till the savage bulls, guardians of the herd, ceased their grazing, raised their huge heads, and glared through tangled hair at the dangerous intruders. The hunt was successful. In three days the hunters killed twelve buffalo, besides deer, geese, and swans. They cut the meat into thin flakes, and dried it in the sun or in the smoke of their fires. The men were in high spirits,—delighting in the sport, and rejoicing in the prospect of relieving Tonty and his hungry followers with a plentiful supply. They embarked again, and soon approached the great town of the Illinois. The buffalo were far behind; and once more the canoes glided on their way through a voiceless solitude. No hunters were seen; no saluting whoop greeted their ears. They passed the cliff afterwards called the Rock of St. Louis, where La Salle had ordered Tonty to build his stronghold; but as he scanned its lofty top he [Pg 206] saw no palisades, no cabins, no sign of human hand, and still its primeval crest of forests overhung the gliding river. Now the meadow opened before them where the great town had stood. They gazed, astonished and confounded: all was desolation. The town had vanished, and the meadow was black with fire. They plied their paddles, hastened to the spot, landed; and as they looked around their cheeks grew white, and the blood was frozen in their veins. A NIGHT OF HORROR. Before them lay a plain once swarming with wild human life and covered with Indian dwellings, now a waste of devastation and death, strewn with heaps of ashes, and bristling with the charred poles and stakes which had formed the framework of the lodges. At the points of most of them were stuck human skulls, half picked by birds of prey.[174] Near at hand was the burial-ground of the village. The travellers sickened with horror as they entered its revolting precincts. Wolves in multitudes fled at their approach; while clouds of crows or buzzards, rising from the hideous repast, wheeled above their heads, or settled on the naked branches of the neighboring forest. Every grave had been rifled, and the bodies flung down from the scaffolds where, after the Illinois custom, many of them had been placed. The field was strewn with broken bones and torn and [Pg 207] mangled corpses. A hyena warfare had been waged against the dead. La Salle knew the handiwork of the Iroquois. The threatened blow had fallen, and the wolfish hordes of the five cantons had fleshed their rabid fangs in a new victim.[175] Not far distant, the conquerors had made a rude fort of trunks, boughs, and roots of trees laid together to form a circular enclosure; and this, too, was garnished with skulls, stuck on the broken branches and protruding sticks. The caches, or subterranean store-houses of the villagers, had been broken open and the contents scattered. The cornfields were laid waste, and much of the corn thrown into heaps and half burned. As La Salle surveyed this scene of havoc, one thought engrossed him: where were Tonty and his men? He searched the Iroquois fort: there were abundant traces of its savage occupants, and, among them, a few fragments of French clothing. [Pg 208] He examined the skulls; but the hair, portions of which clung to nearly all of them, was in every case that of an Indian. Evening came on before he had finished the search. The sun set, and the wilderness sank to its savage rest. Night and silence brooded over the waste, where, far as the raven could wing his flight, stretched the dark domain of solitude and horror. Yet there was no silence at the spot where La Salle and his companions made their bivouac. The howling of the wolves filled the air with fierce and dreary dissonance. More dangerous foes were not far off, for before nightfall they had seen fresh Indian tracks; "but, as it was very cold," says La Salle, "this did not prevent us from making a fire and lying down by it, each of us keeping watch in turn. I spent the night in a distress which you can imagine better than I can write it; and I did not sleep a moment with trying to make up my mind as to what I ought to do. My ignorance as to the position of those I was looking after, and my uncertainty as to what would become of the men who were to follow me with La Forest if they arrived at the ruined village and did not find me there, made me apprehend every sort of trouble and disaster. At last, I decided to keep on my way down the river, leaving some of my men behind in charge of the goods, which it was not only useless but dangerous to carry with me, because we should be forced to abandon them when the winter fairly set in, which would be very soon." [Pg 209] FEARS FOR TONTY. This resolution was due to a discovery he had made the evening before, which offered, as he thought, a possible clew to the fate of Tonty and the men with him. He thus describes it: "Near the garden of the Indians, which was on the meadows, a league from the village and not far from the river, I found six pointed stakes set in the ground and painted red. On each of them was the figure of a man with bandaged eyes, drawn in black. As the savages often set stakes of this sort where they have killed people, I thought, by their number and position, that when the Iroquois came, the Illinois, finding our men alone in the hut near their garden, had either killed them or made them prisoners. And I was confirmed in this, because, seeing no signs of a battle, I supposed that on hearing of the approach of the Iroquois, the old men and other non-combatants had fled, and that the young warriors had remained behind to cover their flight, and afterwards followed, taking the French with them; while the Iroquois, finding nobody to kill, had vented their fury on the corpses in the graveyard." Uncertain as was the basis of this conjecture, and feeble as was the hope it afforded, it determined him to push forward, in order to learn more. When daylight returned, he told his purpose to his followers, and directed three of them to await his return near the ruined village. They were to hide themselves on an island, conceal their fire at night, make no smoke by day, fire no guns, and keep a close [Pg 210] watch. Should the rest of the party arrive, they, too, were to wait with similar precautions. The baggage was placed in a hollow of the rocks, at a place difficult of access; and, these arrangements made, La Salle set out on his perilous journey with the four remaining men, Dautray, Hunaut, You, and the Indian. Each was armed with two guns, a pistol, and a sword; and a number of hatchets and other goods were placed in the canoe, as presents for Indians whom they might meet. Several leagues below the village they found, on their right hand close to the river, a sort of island, made inaccessible by the marshes and water which surrounded it. Here the flying Illinois had sought refuge with their women and children, and the place was full of their deserted huts. On the left bank, exactly opposite, was an abandoned camp of the Iroquois. On the level meadow stood a hundred and thirteen huts, and on the forest trees which covered the hills behind were carved the totems, or insignia, of the chiefs, together with marks to show the number of followers which each had led to the war. La Salle counted five hundred and eighty-two warriors. He found marks, too, for the Illinois killed or captured, but none to indicate that any of the Frenchmen had shared their fate. SEARCH FOR TONTY. As they descended the river, they passed, on the same day, six abandoned camps of the Illinois; and opposite to each was a camp of the invaders. The former, it was clear, had retreated in a body; while [Pg 211] the Iroquois had followed their march, day by day, along the other bank. La Salle and his men pushed rapidly onward, passed Peoria Lake, and soon reached Fort Crèvec?ur, which they found, as they expected, demolished by the deserters. The vessel on the stocks was still left entire, though the Iroquois had found means to draw out the iron nails and spikes. On one of the planks were written the words: "Nous sommes tous sauvages: ce 15, 1680,"—the work, no doubt, of the knaves who had pillaged and destroyed the fort. La Salle and his companions hastened on, and during the following day passed four opposing camps of the savage armies. The silence of death now reigned along the deserted river, whose lonely borders, wrapped deep in forests, seemed lifeless as the grave. As they drew near the mouth of the stream they saw a meadow on their right, and on its farthest verge several human figures, erect, yet motionless. They landed, and cautiously examined the place. The long grass was trampled down, and all around were strewn the relics of the hideous orgies which formed the ordinary sequel of an Iroquois victory. The figures they had seen were the half-consumed bodies of women, still bound to the stakes where they had been tortured. Other sights there were, too revolting for record.[176] All the remains were those [Pg 212] of women and children. The men, it seemed, had fled, and left them to their fate. Here, again, La Salle sought long and anxiously, without finding the smallest sign that could indicate the presence of Frenchmen. Once more descending the river, they soon reached its mouth. Before them, a broad eddying current rolled swiftly on its way; and La Salle beheld the Mississippi,—the object of his day-dreams, the destined avenue of his ambition and his hopes. It was no time for reflections. The moment was too engrossing, too heavily charged with anxieties and cares. From a rock on the shore, he saw a tree stretched forward above the stream; and stripping off its bark to make it more conspicuous, he hung upon it a board on which he had drawn the figures of himself and his men, seated in their canoe, and bearing a pipe of peace. To this he tied a letter for Tonty, informing him that he had returned up the river to the ruined village. His four men had behaved admirably throughout, and they now offered to continue the journey if he saw fit, and follow him to the sea; but he thought it useless to go farther, and was unwilling to abandon the three men whom he had ordered to await his return. Accordingly, they retraced their course, and, paddling at times both day and night, urged their canoe so swiftly that they reached the village in the incredibly short space of four days.[177] [Pg 213] THE COMET. The sky was clear, and as night came on the travellers saw a prodigious comet blazing above this scene of desolation. On that night, it was chilling with a superstitious awe the hamlets of New England and the gilded chambers of Versailles; but it is characteristic of La Salle, that, beset as he was with perils and surrounded with ghastly images of death, he coolly notes down the phenomenon, not as a portentous messenger of war and woe, but rather as an object of scientific curiosity.[178] He found his three men safely ensconced upon their island, where they were anxiously looking for his return. After collecting a store of half-burnt corn from the ravaged granaries of the Illinois, the whole party began to ascend the river, and on the sixth of January reached the junction of the Kankakee with the northern branch. On their way downward they had descended the former stream; they now chose the latter, and soon discovered, by the margin [Pg 214] of the water, a rude cabin of bark. La Salle landed and examined the spot, when an object met his eye which cheered him with a bright gleam of hope. It was but a piece of wood; but the wood had been cut with a saw. Tonty and his party, then, had passed this way, escaping from the carnage behind them. Unhappily, they had left no token of their passage at the fork of the two streams; and thus La Salle, on his voyage downward, had believed them to be still on the river below. With rekindled hope, the travellers pursued their journey, leaving their canoes, and making their way overland towards the fort on the St. Joseph. "Snow fell in extraordinary quantities all day," writes La Salle, "and it kept on falling for nineteen days in succession, with cold so severe that I never knew so hard a winter, even in Canada. We were obliged to cross forty leagues of open country, where we could hardly find wood to warm ourselves at evening, and could get no bark whatever to make a hut, so that we had to spend the night exposed to the furious winds which blow over these plains. I never suffered so much from cold, or had more trouble in getting forward; for the snow was so light, resting suspended as it were among the tall grass, that we could not use snow-shoes. Sometimes it was waist deep; and as I walked before my men, as usual, to encourage them by breaking the path, I often had much ado, though I am rather tall, to lift my legs above the [Pg 215] drifts, through which I pushed by the weight of my body." FORT MIAMI. At length they reached their goal, and found shelter and safety within the walls of Fort Miami. Here was the party left in charge of La Forest; but, to his surprise and grief, La Salle heard no tidings of Tonty. He found some amends for the disappointment in the fidelity and zeal of La Forest's men, who had restored the fort, cleared ground for planting, and even sawed the planks and timber for a new vessel on the lake. And now, while La Salle rests at Fort Miami, let us trace the adventures which befell Tonty and his followers, after their chief's departure from Fort Crèvec?ur. FOOTNOTES: [172] Robert Cavelier, Sr. de la Salle, à Fran?ois Daupin, Sr. de la Forest, 10 Juin, 1679. [173] This date is from the Relation. Membré says the twenty-eighth; but he is wrong, by his own showing, as he says that the party reached the Illinois village on the first of December, which would be an impossibility. [174] "Il ne restoit que quelques bouts de perches brulées qui montroient quelle avoit été l'étendue du village, et sur la plupart desquelles il y avoit des têtes de morts plantées et mangées des corbeaux."—Relation des Découvertes du Sr. de la Salle. [175] "Beaucoup de carcasses à demi rongées par les loups, les sépulchres démolis, les os tirés de leurs fosses et épars par la campagne; ... enfin les loups et les corbeaux augmentoient encore par leurs hurlemens et par leurs cris l'horreur de ce spectacle."—Relation des Découvertes du Sr. de la Salle. The above may seem exaggerated; but it accords perfectly with what is well established concerning the ferocious character of the Iroquois and the nature of their warfare. Many other tribes have frequently made war upon the dead. I have myself known an instance in which five corpses of Sioux Indians placed in trees, after the practice of the Western bands of that people, were thrown down and kicked into fragments by a war party of the Crows, who then held the muzzles of their guns against the skulls, and blew them to pieces. This happened near the head of the Platte, in the summer of 1846. Yet the Crows are much less ferocious than were the Iroquois in La Salle's time. [176] "On ne s?auroit exprimer la rage de ces furieux ni les tourmens qu'ils avoient fait souffrir aux misérables Tamaroa [a tribe of the Illinois]. Il y en avoit encore dans des chaudières qu'ils avoient laissées pleines sur les feux, qui depuis s'étoient éteints," etc., etc.—Relation des Découvertes. [177] The distance is about two hundred and fifty miles. The letters of La Salle, as well as the official narrative compiled from them, say that they left the village on the second of December, and returned to it on the eleventh, having left the mouth of the river on the seventh. [178] This was the "Great Comet of 1680." Dr. B. A. Gould writes me: "It appeared in December, 1680, and was visible until the latter part of February, 1681, being especially brilliant in January." It was said to be the largest ever seen. By observations upon it, Newton demonstrated the regular revolutions of comets around the sun. "No comet," it is said, "has threatened the earth with a nearer approach than that of 1680." (Winthrop on Comets, Lecture II. p. 44.) Increase Mather, in his Discourse concerning Comets, printed at Boston in 1683, says of this one: "Its appearance was very terrible; the Blaze ascended above 60 Degrees almost to its Zenith." Mather thought it fraught with terrific portent to the nations of the earth. CHAPTER XVI. 1680. TONTY AND THE IROQUOIS. The Deserters.—The Iroquois War.—The Great Town of the Illinois.—The Alarm.—Onset of the Iroquois.—Peril of Tonty.—A Treacherous Truce.—Intrepidity of Tonty.—Murder of Ribourde.—War upon the Dead. When La Salle set out on his rugged journey to Fort Frontenac, he left, as we have seen, fifteen men at Fort Crèvec?ur,—smiths, ship-carpenters, house-wrights, and soldiers, besides his servant L'Espérance and the two friars Membré and Ribourde. Most of the men were ripe for mutiny. They had no interest in the enterprise, and no love for its chief. They were disgusted with the present, and terrified at the future. La Salle, too, was for the most part a stern commander, impenetrable and cold; and when he tried to soothe, conciliate, and encourage, his success rarely answered to the excellence of his rhetoric. He could always, however, inspire respect, if not love; but now the restraint of his presence was removed. He had not been long absent, when a fire-brand was thrown into the midst of the discontented and restless crew. It may be remembered that La Salle had met two of his men, La Chapelle and Leblanc, at his fort on the St. Joseph, and ordered them to rejoin Tonty. Unfortunately, they obeyed. On arriving, they told their comrades that the "Griffin" was lost, that Fort Frontenac was seized by the creditors of La Salle, that he was ruined past recovery, and that they, the men, would never receive their pay. Their wages were in arrears for more than two years; and, indeed, it would have been folly to pay them before their return to the settlements, as to do so would have been a temptation to desert. Now, however, the effect on their minds was still worse, believing, as many of them did, that they would never be paid at all. THE DESERTERS. La Chapelle and his companion had brought a letter from La Salle to Tonty, directing him to examine and fortify the cliff so often mentioned, which overhung the river above the great Illinois village. Tonty, accordingly, set out on his errand with some of the men. In his absence, the malcontents destroyed the fort, stole powder, lead, furs, and provisions, and deserted, after writing on the side of the unfinished vessel the words seen by La Salle, "Nous sommes tous sauvages."[179] The brave [Pg 218] young Sieur de Boisrondet and the servant L'Espérance hastened to carry the news to Tonty, who at once despatched four of those with him, by two different routes, to inform La Salle of the disaster.[180] Besides the two just named, there now remained with him only one hired man and the Récollet friars. With this feeble band, he was left among a horde of treacherous savages, who had been taught to regard him as a secret enemy. Resolved, apparently, to disarm their jealousy by a show of confidence, he took up his abode in the midst of them, making his quarters in the great village, whither, as spring opened, its inhabitants returned, to the number, according to Membré, of seven or eight thousand. Hither he conveyed the forge and such tools as he could recover, and here he hoped to maintain himself till La Salle should reappear. The spring and the summer were past, and he looked anxiously for his coming, unconscious that a storm was gathering in [Pg 219] the east, soon to burst with devastation over the fertile wilderness of the Illinois. THE IROQUOIS WAR. I have recounted the ferocious triumphs of the Iroquois in another volume.[181] Throughout a wide semi-circle around their cantons, they had made the forest a solitude; destroyed the Hurons, exterminated the Neutrals and the Eries, reduced the formidable Andastes to helpless insignificance, swept the borders of the St. Lawrence with fire, spread terror and desolation among the Algonquins of Canada; and now, tired of peace, they were seeking, to borrow their own savage metaphor, new nations to devour. Yet it was not alone their homicidal fury that now impelled them to another war. Strange as it may seem, this war was in no small measure one of commercial advantage. They had long traded with the Dutch and English of New York, who gave them, in exchange for their furs, the guns, ammunition, knives, hatchets, kettles, beads, and brandy which had become indispensable to them. Game was scarce in their country. They must seek their beaver and other skins in the vacant territories of the tribes they had destroyed; but this did not content them. The French of Canada were seeking to secure a monopoly of the furs of the north and west; and, of late, the enterprises of La Salle on the tributaries of the Mississippi had especially roused the jealousy of the Iroquois, fomented, moreover, by Dutch and English traders.[182] These crafty savages would fain [Pg 220] reduce all these regions to subjection, and draw thence an exhaustless supply of furs, to be bartered for English goods with the traders of Albany. They turned their eyes first towards the Illinois, the most important, as well as one of the most accessible, of the western Algonquin tribes; and among La Salle's enemies were some in whom jealousy of a hated rival could so far override all the best interests of the colony that they did not scruple to urge on the Iroquois to an invasion which they hoped would prove his ruin. The chiefs convened, war was decreed, the war-dance was danced, the war-song sung, and five hundred warriors began their march. In their path lay the town of the Miamis, neighbors and kindred of the Illinois. It was always their policy to divide and conquer; and these forest Machiavels had intrigued so well among the Miamis, working craftily on their jealousy, that they induced them to join in the invasion, though there is every reason to believe that they had marked these infatuated allies as their next victims.[183] THE ILLINOIS TOWN. Go to the banks of the Illinois where it flows by the village of Utica, and stand on the meadow that borders it on the north. In front glides the river, a musket-shot in width; and from the farther bank rises, with gradual slope, a range of wooded hills [Pg 221] that hide from sight the vast prairie behind them. A mile or more on your left these gentle acclivities end abruptly in the lofty front of the great cliff, called by the French the Rock of St. Louis, looking boldly out from the forests that environ it; and, three miles distant on your right, you discern a gap in the steep bluffs that here bound the valley, marking the mouth of the river Vermilion, called Aramoni by the French.[184] Now stand in fancy on this same spot in the early autumn of the year 1680. You are in the midst of the great town of the Illinois,—hundreds of mat-covered lodges, and thousands of congregated savages. Enter one of their dwellings: they will not think you an intruder. Some friendly squaw will lay a mat for you by the fire; you may seat yourself upon it, smoke your pipe, and study the lodge and its inmates by the light that streams through the holes at the top. Three or four fires smoke and smoulder on the ground down the middle [Pg 222] of the long arched structure; and, as to each fire there are two families, the place is somewhat crowded when all are present. But now there is breathing room, for many are in the fields. A squaw sits weaving a mat of rushes; a warrior, naked except his moccasins, and tattooed with fantastic devices, binds a stone arrow-head to its shaft, with the fresh sinews of a buffalo. Some lie asleep, some sit staring in vacancy, some are eating, some are squatted in lazy chat around a fire. The smoke brings water to your eyes; the fleas annoy you; small unkempt children, naked as young puppies, crawl about your knees and will not be repelled. You have seen enough; you rise and go out again into the sunlight. It is, if not a peaceful, at least a languid scene. A few voices break the stillness, mingled with the joyous chirping of crickets from the grass. Young men lie flat on their faces, basking in the sun; a group of their elders are smoking around a buffalo-skin on which they have just been playing a game of chance with cherry-stones. A lover and his mistress, perhaps, sit together under a shed of bark, without uttering a word. Not far off is the graveyard, where lie the dead of the village, some buried in the earth, some wrapped in skins and laid aloft on scaffolds, above the reach of wolves. In the cornfields around, you see squaws at their labor, and children driving off intruding birds; and your eye ranges over the meadows beyond, spangled with the yellow blossoms of the resin-weed and the Rudbeckia, [Pg 223] or over the bordering hills still green with the foliage of summer.[185] This, or something like it, one may safely affirm, was the aspect of the Illinois village at noon of the tenth of September.[186] In a hut apart from the rest, you would probably have found the Frenchmen. Among them was a man, not strong in person, and disabled, moreover, by the loss of a hand, yet in this den of barbarism betraying the language and bearing of one formed in the most polished civilization of Europe. This was Henri de Tonty. The others were young Boisrondet, the servant L'Espérance, and a Parisian youth named étienne Renault. The [Pg 224] friars, Membré and Ribourde, were not in the village, but at a hut a league distant, whither they had gone to make a "retreat" for prayer and meditation. Their missionary labors had not been fruitful; they had made no converts, and were in despair at the intractable character of the objects of their zeal. As for the other Frenchmen, time, doubtless, hung heavy on their hands; for nothing can surpass the vacant monotony of an Indian town when there is neither hunting, nor war, nor feasts, nor dances, nor gambling, to beguile the lagging hours. THE ALARM. Suddenly the village was wakened from its lethargy as by the crash of a thunderbolt. A Shawanoe, lately here on a visit, had left his Illinois friends to return home. He now reappeared, crossing the river in hot haste, with the announcement that he had met, on his way, an army of Iroquois approaching to attack them. All was panic and confusion. The lodges disgorged their frightened inmates; women and children screamed, startled warriors snatched their weapons. There were less than five hundred of them, for the greater part of the young men had gone to war. A crowd of excited savages thronged about Tonty and his Frenchmen, already objects of their suspicion, charging them, with furious gesticulation, with having stirred up their enemies to invade them. Tonty defended himself in broken Illinois, but the naked mob were but half convinced. They seized the forge and tools and flung them into the river, with all the goods that had [Pg 225] been saved from the deserters; then, distrusting their power to defend themselves, they manned the wooden canoes which lay in multitudes by the bank, embarked their women and children, and paddled down the stream to that island of dry land in the midst of marshes which La Salle afterwards found filled with their deserted huts. Sixty warriors remained here to guard them, and the rest returned to the village. All night long fires blazed along the shore. The excited warriors greased their bodies, painted their faces, befeathered their heads, sang their war-songs, danced, stamped, yelled, and brandished their hatchets, to work up their courage to face the crisis. The morning came, and with it came the Iroquois. Young warriors had gone out as scouts, and now they returned. They had seen the enemy in the line of forest that bordered the river Aramoni, or Vermilion, and had stealthily reconnoitred them. They were very numerous,[187] and armed for the most part with guns, pistols, and swords. Some had bucklers of wood or raw-hide, and some wore those corselets of tough twigs interwoven with cordage which their fathers had used when fire-arms were unknown. The scouts added more, for they declared that they had seen a Jesuit among the Iroquois; nay, [Pg 226] that La Salle himself was there, whence it must follow that Tonty and his men were enemies and traitors. The supposed Jesuit was but an Iroquois chief arrayed in a black hat, doublet, and stockings; while another, equipped after a somewhat similar fashion, passed in the distance for La Salle. But the Illinois were furious. Tonty's life hung by a hair. A crowd of savages surrounded him, mad with rage and terror. He had come lately from Europe, and knew little of Indians, but, as the friar Membré says of him, "he was full of intelligence and courage," and when they heard him declare that he and his Frenchmen would go with them to fight the Iroquois, their threats grew less clamorous and their eyes glittered with a less deadly lustre. TONTY'S MEDIATION. Whooping and screeching, they ran to their canoes, crossed the river, climbed the woody hill, and swarmed down upon the plain beyond. About a hundred of them had guns; the rest were armed with bows and arrows. They were now face to face with the enemy, who had emerged from the woods of the Vermilion, and were advancing on the open prairie. With unwonted spirit, for their repute as warriors was by no means high, the Illinois began, after their fashion, to charge; that is, they leaped, yelled, and shot off bullets and arrows, advancing as they did so; while the Iroquois replied with gymnastics no less agile and howlings no less terrific, mingled with the rapid clatter of their guns. Tonty saw that it would go hard with his allies. It was of the last [Pg 227] moment to stop the fight, if possible. The Iroquois were, or professed to be, at peace with the French; and, taking counsel of his courage, he resolved on an attempt to mediate, which may well be called a desperate one. He laid aside his gun, took in his hand a wampum belt as a flag of truce, and walked forward to meet the savage multitude, attended by Boisrondet, another Frenchman, and a young Illinois who had the hardihood to accompany him. The guns of the Iroquois still flashed thick and fast. Some of them were aimed at him, on which he sent back the two Frenchmen and the Illinois, and advanced alone, holding out the wampum belt.[188] A moment more, and he was among the infuriated warriors. It was a frightful spectacle,—the contorted forms, bounding, crouching, twisting, to deal or dodge the shot; the small keen eyes that shone like an angry snake's; the parted lips pealing their [Pg 228] fiendish yells; the painted features writhing with fear and fury, and every passion of an Indian fight,—man, wolf, and devil, all in one.[189] With his swarthy complexion and his half-savage dress, they thought he was an Indian, and thronged about him, glaring murder. A young warrior stabbed at his heart with a knife, but the point glanced aside against a rib, inflicting only a deep gash. A chief called out that, as his ears were not pierced, he must be a Frenchman. On this, some of them tried to stop the bleeding, and led him to the rear, where an angry parley ensued, while the yells and firing still resounded in the front. Tonty, breathless, and bleeding at the mouth with the force of the blow he had received, found words to declare that the Illinois were under the protection of the King and the governor of Canada, and to demand that they should be left in peace.[190] PERIL OF TONTY. A young Iroquois snatched Tonty's hat, placed it on the end of his gun, and displayed it to the Illinois, who, thereupon thinking he was killed, [Pg 229] renewed the fight; and the firing in front clattered more angrily than before. A warrior ran in, crying out that the Iroquois were giving ground, and that there were Frenchmen among the Illinois, who fired at them. On this, the clamor around Tonty was redoubled. Some wished to kill him at once; others resisted. "I was never," he writes, "in such perplexity; for at that moment there was an Iroquois behind me, with a knife in his hand, lifting my hair as if he were going to scalp me. I thought it was all over with me, and that my best hope was that they would knock me in the head instead of burning me, as I believed they would do." In fact, a Seneca chief demanded that he should be burned; while an Onondaga chief, a friend of La Salle, was for setting him free. The dispute grew fierce and hot. Tonty told them that the Illinois were twelve hundred strong, and that sixty Frenchmen were at the village, ready to back them. This invention, though not fully believed, had no little effect. The friendly Onondaga carried his point; and the Iroquois, having failed to surprise their enemies, as they had hoped, now saw an opportunity to delude them by a truce. They sent back Tonty with a belt of peace: he held it aloft in sight of the Illinois; chiefs and old warriors ran to stop the fight; the yells and the firing ceased; and Tonty, like one waked from a hideous nightmare, dizzy, almost fainting with loss of blood, staggered across the intervening prairie, to rejoin his friends. He was met by the two friars, Ribourde [Pg 230] and Membré, who in their secluded hut, a league from the village, had but lately heard of what was passing, and who now, with benedictions and thanksgiving, ran to embrace him as a man escaped from the jaws of death. The Illinois now withdrew, re-embarking in their canoes, and crossing again to their lodges; but scarcely had they reached them, when their enemies appeared at the edge of the forest on the opposite bank. Many found means to cross, and, under the pretext of seeking for provisions, began to hover in bands about the skirts of the town, constantly increasing in numbers. Had the Illinois dared to remain, a massacre would doubtless have ensued; but they knew their foe too well, set fire to their lodges, embarked in haste, and paddled down the stream to rejoin their women and children at the sanctuary among the morasses. The whole body of the Iroquois now crossed the river, took possession of the abandoned town, building for themselves a rude redoubt or fort of the trunks of trees and of the posts and poles forming the framework of the lodges which escaped the fire. Here they ensconced themselves, and finished the work of havoc at their leisure. Tonty and his companions still occupied their hut; but the Iroquois, becoming suspicious of them, forced them to remove to the fort, crowded as it was with the savage crew. On the second day, there was an alarm. The Illinois appeared in numbers on the low hills, half a mile behind the town; and the Iroquois, [Pg 231] who had felt their courage, and who had been told by Tonty that they were twice as numerous as themselves, showed symptoms of no little uneasiness. They proposed that he should act as mediator, to which he gladly assented, and crossed the meadow towards the Illinois, accompanied by Membré, and by an Iroquois who was sent as a hostage. The Illinois hailed the overtures with delight, gave the ambassadors some refreshment, which they sorely needed, and sent back with them a young man of their nation as a hostage on their part. This indiscreet youth nearly proved the ruin of the negotiation; for he was no sooner among the Iroquois than he showed such an eagerness to close the treaty, made such promises, professed such gratitude, and betrayed so rashly the numerical weakness of the Illinois, that he revived all the insolence of the invaders. They turned furiously upon Tonty, and charged him with having robbed them of the glory and the spoils of victory. "Where are all your Illinois warriors, and where are the sixty Frenchmen that you said were among them?" It needed all Tonty's tact and coolness to extricate himself from this new danger. IROQUOIS TREACHERY. The treaty was at length concluded; but scarcely was it made, when the Iroquois prepared to break it, and set about constructing canoes of elm-bark, in which to attack the Illinois women and children in their island sanctuary. Tonty warned his allies that the pretended peace was but a snare for their destruction. The Iroquois, on their part, grew hourly more [Pg 232] jealous of him, and would certainly have killed him, had it not been their policy to keep the peace with Frontenac and the French. Several days after, they summoned him and Membré to a council. Six packs of beaver-skins were brought in; and the savage orator presented them to Tonty in turn, explaining their meaning as he did so. The first two were to declare that the children of Count Frontenac—that is, the Illinois—should not be eaten; the next was a plaster to heal Tonty's wound; the next was oil wherewith to anoint him and Membré, that they might not be fatigued in travelling; the next proclaimed that the sun was bright; and the sixth and last required them to decamp and go home.[191] Tonty thanked them for their gifts, but demanded when they themselves meant to go and leave the Illinois in peace. At this, the conclave grew angry; and, despite their late pledge, some of them said that before they went they would eat Illinois flesh. Tonty instantly kicked away the packs of beaver-skins, the Indian symbol of the scornful rejection of a proposal, telling them that since they meant to eat the governor's children he would have none of their presents. The chiefs, [Pg 233] in a rage, rose and drove him from the lodge. The French withdrew to their hut, where they stood all night on the watch, expecting an attack, and resolved to sell their lives dearly. At daybreak, the chiefs ordered them to begone. MURDER OF RIBOURDE. Tonty, with admirable fidelity and courage, had done all in the power of man to protect the allies of Canada against their ferocious assailants; and he thought it unwise to persist further in a course which could lead to no good, and which would probably end in the destruction of the whole party. He embarked in a leaky canoe with Membré, Ribourde, Boisrondet, and the remaining two men, and began to ascend the river. After paddling about five leagues, they landed to dry their baggage and repair their crazy vessel; when Father Ribourde, breviary in hand, strolled across the sunny meadows for an hour of meditation among the neighboring groves. Evening approached, and he did not return. Tonty, with one of the men, went to look for him, and, following his tracks, presently discovered those of a band of Indians, who had apparently seized or murdered him. Still, they did not despair. They fired their guns to guide him, should he still be alive; built a huge fire by the bank, and then, crossing the river, lay watching it from the other side. At midnight, they saw the figure of a man hovering around the blaze; then many more appeared, but Ribourde was not among them. In truth, a band of Kickapoos, enemies of the Iroquois, about whose camp they had [Pg 234] been prowling in quest of scalps, had met and wantonly murdered the inoffensive old man. They carried his scalp to their village, and danced round it in triumph, pretending to have taken it from an enemy. Thus, in his sixty-fifth year, the only heir of a wealthy Burgundian house perished under the war-clubs of the savages for whose salvation he had renounced station, ease, and affluence.[192] ATTACK OF THE IROQUOIS. Meanwhile, a hideous scene was enacted at the ruined village of the Illinois. Their savage foes, balked of a living prey, wreaked their fury on the dead. They dug up the graves; they threw down the scaffolds. Some of the bodies they burned; some they threw to the dogs; some, it is affirmed, they ate.[193] Placing the skulls on stakes as trophies, they turned to pursue the Illinois, who, when the French withdrew, had abandoned their asylum and retreated down the river. The Iroquois, still, it seems, in awe of them, followed them along the opposite bank, each night encamping face to face [Pg 235] with them; and thus the adverse bands moved slowly southward, till they were near the mouth of the river. Hitherto, the compact array of the Illinois had held their enemies in check; but now, suffering from hunger, and lulled into security by the assurances of the Iroquois that their object was not to destroy them, but only to drive them from the country, they rashly separated into their several tribes. Some descended the Mississippi; some, more prudent, crossed to the western side. One of their principal tribes, the Tamaroas, more credulous than the rest, had the fatuity to remain near the mouth of the Illinois, where they were speedily assailed by all the force of the Iroquois. The men fled, and very few of them were killed; but the women and children were captured to the number, it is said, of seven hundred.[194] Then followed that scene of torture of which, some two weeks later, La Salle saw the revolting traces.[195] Sated, at length, with horrors, the conquerors withdrew, leading with them a host of captives, and exulting in their triumphs over women, children, and the dead. After the death of Father Ribourde, Tonty and his companions remained searching for him till noon [Pg 236] of the next day, and then in despair of again seeing him, resumed their journey. They ascended the river, leaving no token of their passage at the junction of its northern and southern branches. For food, they gathered acorns and dug roots in the meadows. Their canoe proved utterly worthless; and, feeble as they were, they set out on foot for Lake Michigan. Boisrondet wandered off, and was lost. He had dropped the flint of his gun, and he had no bullets; but he cut a pewter porringer into slugs, with which he shot wild turkeys by discharging his piece with a fire-brand, and after several days he had the good fortune to rejoin the party. Their object was to reach the Pottawattamies of Green Bay. Had they aimed at Michilimackinac, they would have found an asylum with La Forest at the fort on the St. Joseph; but unhappily they passed westward of that post, and, by way of Chicago, followed the borders of Lake Michigan northward. The cold was intense; and it was no easy task to grub up wild onions from the frozen ground to save themselves from starving. Tonty fell ill of a fever and a swelling of the limbs, which disabled him from travelling, and hence ensued a long delay. At length they neared Green Bay, where they would have starved, had they not gleaned a few ears of corn and frozen squashes in the fields of an empty Indian town. FRIENDS IN NEED. This enabled them to reach the bay, and having patched an old canoe which they had the good luck to find, they embarked in it; whereupon, says Tonty, [Pg 237] "there rose a northwest wind, which lasted five days, with driving snow. We consumed all our food; and not knowing what to do next, we resolved to go back to the deserted town, and die by a warm fire in one of the wigwams. On our way, we saw a smoke; but our joy was short, for when we reached the fire we found nobody there. We spent the night by it; and before morning the bay froze. We tried to break a way for our canoe through the ice, but could not; and therefore we determined to stay there another night, and make moccasins in order to reach the town. We made some out of Father Gabriel's cloak. I was angry with étienne Renault for not finishing his; but he excused himself on account of illness, because he had a great oppression of the stomach, caused by eating a piece of an Indian shield of raw-hide, which he could not digest. His delay proved our salvation; for the next day, December fourth, as I was urging him to finish the moccasins, and he was still excusing himself on the score of his malady, a party of Kiskakon Ottawas, who were on their way to the Pottawattamies, saw the smoke of our fire, and came to us. We gave them such a welcome as was never seen before. They took us into their canoes, and carried us to an Indian village, only two leagues off. There we found five Frenchmen, who received us kindly, and all the Indians seemed to take pleasure in sending us food; so that, after thirty-four days of starvation, we found our famine turned to abundance." [Pg 238] This hospitable village belonged to the Pottawattamies, and was under the sway of the chief who had befriended La Salle the year before, and who was wont to say that he knew but three great captains in the world,—Frontenac, La Salle, and himself.[196] [Pg 239] THE ILLINOIS TOWN. The Site of the Great Illinois Town.—This has not till now been determined, though there have been various conjectures concerning it. From a study of the contemporary documents and maps, I became satisfied, first, that the branch of the river Illinois, called the "Big Vermilion," was the Aramoni of the French explorers; and, secondly, that the cliff called "Starved Rock" was that known to the French as Le Rocher, or the Rock of St. Louis. If I was right in this conclusion, then the position of the Great Village was established; for there is abundant proof that it was on the north side of the river, above the Aramoni, and below Le Rocher. I accordingly went to the village of Utica, which, as I judged by the map, was very near the point in question, and mounted to the top of one of the hills immediately behind it, whence I could see the valley of the Illinois for miles, bounded on the farther side by a range of hills, in some parts rocky and precipitous, and in others covered with forests. Far on the right was a gap in these hills, through which the Big Vermilion flowed to join the Illinois; and somewhat towards the left, at the distance of a mile and a half, was a huge cliff, rising perpendicularly from the opposite margin of the river. This I assumed to be Le Rocher of the French, though from where I stood I was unable to discern the distinctive features which I was prepared to find in it. In every other respect, the scene before me was precisely what I had expected to see. There was a meadow on the hither side of the river, on which stood a farmhouse; and this, as it seemed to me, by its relations with surrounding objects, might be supposed to stand in the midst of the space once occupied by the Illinois town. On the way down from the hill I met Mr. James Clark, the principal inhabitant of Utica, and one of the earliest settlers of this region. I accosted him, told him my objects, and requested [Pg 240] a half hour's conversation with him, at his leisure. He seemed interested in the inquiry, and said he would visit me early in the evening at the inn, where, accordingly, he soon appeared. The conversation took place in the porch, where a number of farmers and others were gathered. I asked Mr. Clark if any Indian remains were found in the neighborhood. "Yes," he replied, "plenty of them." I then inquired if there was any one spot where they were more numerous than elsewhere. "Yes," he answered again, pointing towards the farmhouse on the meadow; "on my farm down yonder by the river, my tenant ploughs up teeth and bones by the peck every spring, besides arrow-heads, beads, stone hatchets, and other things of that sort." I replied that this was precisely what I had expected, as I had been led to believe that the principal town of the Illinois Indians once covered that very spot. "If," I added, "I am right in this belief, the great rock beyond the river is the one which the first explorers occupied as a fort; and I can describe it to you from their accounts of it, though I have never seen it, except from the top of the hill where the trees on and around it prevented me from seeing any part but the front." The men present now gathered around to listen. "The rock," I continued, "is nearly a hundred and fifty feet high, and rises directly from the water. The front and two sides are perpendicular and inaccessible; but there is one place where it is possible for a man to climb up, though with difficulty. The top is large enough and level enough for houses and fortifications." Here several of the men exclaimed: "That's just it." "You've hit it exactly." I then asked if there was any other rock on that side of the river which could answer to the description. They all agreed that there was no such rock on either side, along the whole length of the river. I then said: "If the Indian town was in the place where I suppose it to have been, I can tell you the nature of the country which lies behind the hills on the farther side of the river, though I know nothing about it except what I have learned from writings nearly two centuries old. From the top of the hills, you look out upon a great prairie reaching as far as you can see, except that it is crossed by a belt of woods, following the course of a stream [Pg 241] which enters the main river a few miles below." (See ante, p. 221, note.) "You are exactly right again," replied Mr. Clark; "we call that belt of timber the 'Vermilion Woods,' and the stream is the Big Vermilion." "Then," I said, "the Big Vermilion is the river which the French called the Aramoni; 'Starved Rock' is the same on which they built a fort called St. Louis, in the year 1682; and your farm is on the site of the great town of the Illinois." I spent the next day in examining these localities, and was fully confirmed in my conclusions. Mr. Clark's tenant showed me the spot where the human bones were ploughed up. It was no doubt the graveyard violated by the Iroquois. The Illinois returned to the village after their defeat, and long continued to occupy it. The scattered bones were probably collected and restored to their place of burial. FOOTNOTES: [179] For the particulars of this desertion, Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 171, Relation des Découvertes; Tonty, Mémoire, 1684, 1693; Déclaration faite par devant le Sr. Duchesneau, Intendant en Canada, par Moyse Hillaret, charpentier de barque cy-devant au service du Sr. de la Salle, Aoust, 1680. Moyse Hillaret, the "Ma?tre Moyse" of Hennepin, was a ring-leader of the deserters, and seems to have been one of those captured by La Salle near Fort Frontenac. Twelve days after, Hillaret was examined by La Salle's enemy, the intendant; and this paper is the formal statement made by him. It gives the names of most of the men, and furnishes incidental confirmation of many statements of Hennepin, Tonty, Membré, and the Relation des Découvertes. Hillaret, Leblanc, and Le Meilleur, the blacksmith nicknamed La Forge, went off together, and the rest seem to have followed afterwards. Hillaret does not admit that any goods were wantonly destroyed. There is before me a schedule of the debts of La Salle, made after his death. It includes a claim of this man for wages to the amount of 2,500 livres. [180] Two of the messengers, Laurent and Messier, arrived safely. The others seem to have deserted. [181] The Jesuits in North America. [182] Duchesneau, in Paris Docs., ix. 163. [183] There had long been a rankling jealousy between the Miamis and the Illinois. According to Membré, La Salle's enemies had intrigued successfully among the former, as well as among the Iroquois, to induce them to take arms against the Illinois. [184] The above is from notes made on the spot. The following is La Salle's description of the locality in the Relation des Découvertes, written in 1681: "La rive gauche de la rivière, du coté du sud, est occupée par un long rocher, fort étroit et escarpé presque partout, à la réserve d'un endroit de plus d'une lieue de longueur, situé vis-à-vis du village, ou le terrain, tout couvert de beaux chênes, s'étend par une pente douce jusqu'au bord de la rivière. Au delà de cette hauteur est une vaste plaine, qui s'étend bien loin du coté du sud, et qui est traversée par la rivière Aramoni, dont les bords sont couverts d'une lisière de bois peu large." The Aramoni is laid down on the great manuscript map of Franquelin, 1684, and on the map of Coronelli, 1688. It is, without doubt, the Big Vermilion. Aramoni is the Illinois word for "red," or "vermilion." Starved Rock, or the Rock of St. Louis, is the highest and steepest escarpment of the long rocher above mentioned. [185] The Illinois were an aggregation of distinct though kindred tribes,—the Kaskaskias, the Peorias, the Kahokias, the Tamaroas, the Moingona, and others. Their general character and habits were those of other Indian tribes; but they were reputed somewhat cowardly and slothful. In their manners, they were more licentious than many of their neighbors, and addicted to practices which are sometimes supposed to be the result of a perverted civilization. Young men enacting the part of women were frequently to be seen among them. These were held in great contempt. Some of the early travellers, both among the Illinois and among other tribes, where the same practice prevailed, mistook them for hermaphrodites. According to Charlevoix (Journal Historique, 303), this abuse was due in part to a superstition. The Miamis and Piankishaws were in close affinities of language and habits with the Illinois. All these tribes belonged to the great Algonquin family. The first impressions which the French received of them, as recorded in the Relation of 1671, were singularly favorable; but a closer acquaintance did not confirm them. The Illinois traded with the lake tribes, to whom they carried slaves taken in war, receiving in exchange guns, hatchets, and other French goods. Marquette in Relation, 1670, 91. [186] This is Membré's date. The narratives differ as to the day, though all agree as to the month. [187] The Relation des Découvertes says, five hundred Iroquois and one hundred Shawanoes. Membré says that the allies were Miamis. He is no doubt right, as the Miamis had promised their aid, and the Shawanoes were at peace with the Illinois. Tonty is silent on the point. [188] Membré says that he went with Tonty: "J'étois aussi à c?té du Sieur de Tonty." This is an invention of the friar's vanity. "Les deux pères Récollets étoient alors dans une cabane à une lieue du village, où ils s'étoient retirés pour faire une espèce de retraite, et ils ne furent avertis de l'arrivée des Iroquois que dans le temps du combat."—Relation des Découvertes. "Je rencontrai en chemin les pères Gabriel et Zenobe Membré, qui cherchoient de mes nouvelles."—Tonty, Mémoire, 1693. This was on his return from the Iroquois. The Relation confirms the statement, as far as concerns Membré: "II rencontra le Père Zenobe [Membré], qui venoit pour le secourir, aiant été averti du combat et de sa blessure." The perverted Dernières Découvertes, published without authority, under Tonty's name, says that he was attended by a slave, whom the Illinois sent with him as interpreter. In his narrative of 1684, Tonty speaks of a Sokokis (Saco) Indian who was with the Iroquois and who spoke French enough to serve as interpreter. [189] Being once in an encampment of Sioux when a quarrel broke out, and the adverse factions raised the war-whoop and began to fire at each other, I had a good, though for the moment a rather dangerous, opportunity of seeing the demeanor of Indians at the beginning of a fight. The fray was quelled before much mischief was done, by the vigorous intervention of the elder warriors, who ran between the combatants. [190] "Je leur fis connoistre que les Islinois étoient sous la protection du roy de France et du gouverneur du pays, que j'estois surpris qu'ils voulussent rompre avec les Fran?ois et qu'ils voulussent attendre [sic] à une paix."—Tonty, Mémoire, 1693. [191] An Indian speech, it will be remembered, is without validity if not confirmed by presents, each of which has its special interpretation. The meaning of the fifth pack of beaver, informing Tonty that the sun was bright,—"que le soleil étoit beau," that is, that the weather was favorable for travelling,—is curiously misconceived by the editor of the Dernières Découvertes, who improves upon his original by substituting the words "par le cinquième paquet ils nous exhortoient à adorer le Soleil." [192] Tonty, Mémoire; Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 191. Hennepin, who hated Tonty, unjustly charges him with having abandoned the search too soon, admitting, however, that it would have been useless to continue it. This part of his narrative is a perversion of Membré's account. [193] "Cependant les Iroquois, aussit?t après le départ du Sr. de Tonty, exercèrent leur rage sur les corps morts des Ilinois, qu'ils déterrèrent ou abbattèrent de dessus les échafauds où les Ilinois les laissent longtemps exposés avant que de les mettre en terre. Ils en br?lèrent la plus grande partie, ils en mangèrent même quelques uns, et jettèrent le reste aux chiens. Ils plantèrent les têtes de ces cadavres à demi décharnés sur des pieux," etc.—Relation des Découvertes. [194] Relation des Découvertes; Frontenac to the King, N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 147. A memoir of Duchesneau makes the number twelve hundred. [195] "Ils [les Illinois] trouvèrent dans leur campement des carcasses de leurs enfans que ces anthropophages avoient mangez, ne voulant même d'autre nourriture que la chair de ces infortunez."—La Potherie, ii. 145, 146. Compare note, ante, p. 211. [196] Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 199. The other authorities for the foregoing chapter are the letters of La Salle, the Relation des Découvertes, in which portions of them are embodied, and the two narratives of Tonty, of 1684 and 1693. They all agree in essential points. In his letters of this period, La Salle dwells at great length on the devices by which, as he believed, his enemies tried to ruin him and his enterprise. He is particularly severe against the Jesuit Allouez, whom he charges with intriguing "pour commencer la guerre entre les Iroquois et les Illinois par le moyen des Miamis qu'on engageoit dans cette négociation afin ou de me faire massacrer avec mes gens par quelqu'une de ces nations ou de me brouiller avec les Iroquois."—Lettre (à Thouret?), 22 Ao?t, 1682. He gives in detail the circumstances on which this suspicion rests, but which are not convincing. He says, further, that the Jesuits gave out that Tonty was dead in order to discourage the men going to his relief, and that Allouez encouraged the deserters, "leur servoit de conseil, bénit mesme leurs balles, et les asseura plusieurs fois que M. de Tonty auroit la teste cassée." He also affirms that great pains were taken to spread the report that he was himself dead. A Kiskakon Indian, he says, was sent to Tonty with a story to this effect; while a Huron named Scortas was sent to him (La Salle) with false news of the death of Tonty. The latter confirms this statement, and adds that the Illinois had been told "que M. de la Salle estoit venu en leur pays pour les donner à manger aux Iroquois." CHAPTER XVII. 1680. THE ADVENTURES OF HENNEPIN. Hennepin an Impostor: his Pretended Discovery; his Actual Discovery; Captured by the Sioux.—The Upper Mississippi. It was on the last day of the winter that preceded the invasion of the Iroquois that Father Hennepin, with his two companions, Accau and Du Gay, had set out from Fort Crèvec?ur to explore the Illinois to its mouth. It appears from his own later statements, as well as from those of Tonty, that more than this was expected of him, and that La Salle had instructed him to explore, not alone the Illinois, but also the Upper Mississippi. That he actually did so, there is no reasonable doubt; and could he have contented himself with telling the truth, his name would have stood high as a bold and vigorous discoverer. But his vicious attempts to malign his commander and plunder him of his laurels have wrapped his genuine merit in a cloud. Hennepin's first book was published soon after his return from his travels, and while La Salle was still alive. In it he relates the accomplishment of the [Pg 243] instructions given him, without the smallest intimation that he did more.[197] Fourteen years after, when La Salle was dead, he published another edition of his travels,[198] in which he advanced a new and surprising pretension. Reasons connected with his personal safety, he declares, before compelled him to remain silent; but a time at length had come when the truth must be revealed. And he proceeds to affirm, that, before ascending the Mississippi, he, with his two men, explored its whole course from the Illinois to the sea,—thus anticipating the discovery which forms the crowning laurel of La Salle. HENNEPIN'S RESOLUTION. "I am resolved," he says, "to make known here to the whole world the mystery of this discovery, which I have hitherto concealed, that I might not offend the Sieur de la Salle, who wished to keep all the glory and all the knowledge of it to himself. It is for this that he sacrificed many persons whose lives he exposed, to prevent them from making known what they had seen, and thereby crossing his secret plans.... I was certain that if I went down the Mississippi, he would not fail to traduce me to my superiors for not taking the northern route, which I was to have followed in accordance with his desire and the plan we had made together. But I saw myself on the point of dying of hunger, and knew not what to do; because the two men who were with [Pg 244] me threatened openly to leave me in the night, and carry off the canoe and everything in it, if I prevented them from going down the river to the nations below. Finding myself in this dilemma, I thought that I ought not to hesitate, and that I ought to prefer my own safety to the violent passion which possessed the Sieur de la Salle of enjoying alone the glory of this discovery. The two men, seeing that I had made up my mind to follow them, promised me entire fidelity; so, after we had shaken hands together as a mutual pledge, we set out on our voyage."[199] He then proceeds to recount at length the particulars of his alleged exploration. The story was distrusted from the first.[200] Why had he not told it before? An excess of modesty, a lack of self-assertion, or a too sensitive reluctance to wound the susceptibilities of others, had never been found among his foibles. Yet some, perhaps, might have believed him, had he not in the first edition of his book gratuitously and distinctly declared that he did not make the voyage in question. "We had some designs," he says, "of going down the river Colbert [Mississippi] as far as its mouth; but the tribes that took us prisoners gave us no time to navigate this river both up and down."[201]] [Pg 245] HENNEPIN AN IMPOSTOR. In declaring to the world the achievement which he had so long concealed and so explicitly denied, the worthy missionary found himself in serious embarrassment. In his first book, he had stated that on the twelfth of March he left the mouth of the Illinois on his way northward, and that on the eleventh of April he was captured by the Sioux near the mouth of the Wisconsin, five hundred miles above. This would give him only a month to make his alleged canoe-voyage from the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and again upward to the place of his capture,—a distance of three thousand two hundred and sixty miles. With his means of transportation, three months would have been insufficient.[202] He saw the difficulty; but, on the other hand, he saw that he could not greatly change either date without confusing the parts of his narrative which preceded and which followed. In this perplexity he chose a middle course, which only involved him in additional contradictions. Having, as he affirms, gone down to the Gulf and returned to the mouth of the Illinois, he set out thence to explore the river above; and he assigns the twenty-fourth of April as the date of this departure. This gives him forty-three days for [Pg 246] his voyage to the mouth of the river and back. Looking further, we find that having left the Illinois on the twenty-fourth he paddled his canoe two hundred leagues northward, and was then captured by the Sioux on the twelfth of the same month. In short, he ensnares himself in a hopeless confusion of dates.[203] Here, one would think, is sufficient reason for rejecting his story; and yet the general truth of the descriptions, and a certain verisimilitude which marks it, might easily deceive a careless reader and perplex a critical one. These, however, are easily explained. Six years before Hennepin published his pretended discovery, his brother friar, Father Chrétien Le Clerc, published an account of the Récollet missions among the Indians, under the title of "établissement de la Foi." This book, offensive to the Jesuits, is said to have been suppressed by order of government; but a few copies fortunately survive.[204] One of these is now before me. It contains the journal of Father Zenobe Membré, on his descent of the Mississippi in [Pg 247] 1681, in company with La Salle. The slightest comparison of his narrative with that of Hennepin is sufficient to show that the latter framed his own story out of incidents and descriptions furnished by his brother missionary, often using his very words, and sometimes copying entire pages, with no other alterations than such as were necessary to make himself, instead of La Salle and his companions, the hero of the exploit. The records of literary piracy may be searched in vain for an act of depredation more recklessly impudent.[205] Such being the case, what faith can we put in the rest of Hennepin's story? Fortunately, there are tests by which the earlier parts of his book can be [Pg 248] tried; and, on the whole, they square exceedingly well with contemporary records of undoubted authenticity. Bating his exaggerations respecting the Falls of Niagara, his local descriptions, and even his estimates of distance, are generally accurate. He constantly, it is true, magnifies his own acts, and thrusts himself forward as one of the chiefs of an enterprise to the costs of which he had contributed nothing, and to which he was merely an appendage; and yet, till he reaches the Mississippi, there can be no doubt that in the main he tells the truth. As for his ascent of that river to the country of the Sioux, the general statement is fully confirmed by La Salle, Tonty, and other contemporary writers.[206] For the details of the journey we must rest on Hennepin alone, whose account of the country and of the peculiar traits of its Indian occupants afford, as far as they go, good evidence of truth. Indeed, this part of his narrative could only have been written by one well versed in the savage life of this northwestern region.[207] Trusting, [Pg 249] then, to his own guidance in the absence of better, let us follow in the wake of his adventurous canoe. HIS VOYAGE NORTHWARD. It was laden deeply with goods belonging to La Salle, and meant by him as presents to Indians on the way, though the travellers, it appears, proposed to use them in trading on their own account. The friar was still wrapped in his gray capote and hood, shod with sandals, and decorated with the cord of St. Francis. As for his two companions, Accau[208] and [Pg 250] Du Gay, it is tolerably clear that the former was the real leader of the party, though Hennepin, after his custom, thrusts himself into the foremost place. Both were somewhat above the station of ordinary hired hands; and Du Gay had an uncle who was an ecclesiastic of good credit at Amiens, his native place. In the forests that overhung the river the buds were feebly swelling with advancing spring. There was game enough. They killed buffalo, deer, beavers, wild turkeys, and now and then a bear swimming in the river. With these, and the fish which they caught in abundance, they fared sumptuously, though it was the season of Lent. They were exemplary, however, at their devotions. Hennepin said prayers at morning and night, and the angelus at noon, adding a petition to Saint Anthony of Padua that he would save them from the peril that beset their way. In truth, there was a lion in the path. The ferocious character of the Sioux, or Dacotah, who occupied the region of the Upper Mississippi, was already known to the French; and Hennepin, with excellent reason, prayed that it might be his fortune to meet them, not by night, but by day. CAPTURED BY THE SIOUX. On the eleventh or twelfth of April, they stopped in the afternoon to repair their canoe; and Hennepin busied himself in daubing it with pitch, while the others cooked a turkey. Suddenly, a fleet of Sioux canoes swept into sight, bearing a war-party of a hundred and twenty naked savages, who on seeing [Pg 251] the travellers raised a hideous clamor; and, some leaping ashore and others into the water, they surrounded the astonished Frenchmen in an instant.[209] Hennepin held out the peace-pipe; but one of them snatched it from him. Next, he hastened to proffer a gift of Martinique tobacco, which was better received. Some of the old warriors repeated the name Miamiha, giving him to understand that they were a war-party, on the way to attack the Miamis; on which, Hennepin, with the help of signs and of marks which he drew on the sand with a stick, explained that the Miamis had gone across the Mississippi, beyond their reach. Hereupon, he says that three or four old men placed their hands on his head, and began a dismal wailing; while he with his handkerchief wiped away their tears, in order to evince sympathy with their affliction, from whatever cause arising. Notwithstanding this demonstration of tenderness, they refused to smoke with him in his peace-pipe, and forced him and his companions to embark and paddle across the river; while they all followed behind, uttering yells and howlings which froze the missionary's blood. On reaching the farther side, they made their camp-fires, and allowed their prisoners to do the same. Accau and Du Gay slung their kettle; while [Pg 252] Hennepin, to propitiate the Sioux, carried to them two turkeys, of which there were several in the canoe. The warriors had seated themselves in a ring, to debate on the fate of the Frenchmen; and two chiefs presently explained to the friar, by significant signs, that it had been resolved that his head should be split with a war-club. This produced the effect which was no doubt intended. Hennepin ran to the canoe, and quickly returned with one of the men, both loaded with presents, which he threw into the midst of the assembly; and then, bowing his head, offered them at the same time a hatchet with which to kill him, if they wished to do so. His gifts and his submission seemed to appease them. They gave him and his companions a dish of beaver's flesh; but, to his great concern, they returned his peace-pipe,—an act which he interpreted as a sign of danger. That night the Frenchmen slept little, expecting to be murdered before morning. There was, in fact, a great division of opinion among the Sioux. Some were for killing them and taking their goods; while others, eager above all things that French traders should come among them with the knives, hatchets, and guns of which they had heard the value, contended that it would be impolitic to discourage the trade by putting to death its pioneers. Scarcely had morning dawned on the anxious captives, when a young chief, naked, and painted from head to foot, appeared before them and asked for the pipe, which the friar gladly gave him. He filled it, [Pg 253] smoked it, made the warriors do the same, and, having given this hopeful pledge of amity, told the Frenchmen that, since the Miamis were out of reach, the war-party would return home, and that they must accompany them. To this Hennepin gladly agreed, having, as he declares, his great work of exploration so much at heart that he rejoiced in the prospect of achieving it even in their company. SUSPECTED OF SORCERY. He soon, however, had a foretaste of the affliction in store for him; for when he opened his breviary and began to mutter his morning devotion, his new companions gathered about him with faces that betrayed their superstitious terror, and gave him to understand that his book was a bad spirit with which he must hold no more converse. They thought, indeed, that he was muttering a charm for their destruction. Accau and Du Gay, conscious of the danger, begged the friar to dispense with his devotions, lest he and they alike should be tomahawked; but Hennepin says that his sense of duty rose superior to his fears, and that he was resolved to repeat his office at all hazards, though not until he had asked pardon of his two friends for thus imperilling their lives. Fortunately, he presently discovered a device by which his devotion and his prudence were completely reconciled. He ceased the muttering which had alarmed the Indians, and, with the breviary open on his knees, sang the service in loud and cheerful tones. As this had no savor of sorcery, and as they now imagined that the book was teaching its owner [Pg 254] to sing for their amusement, they conceived a favorable opinion of both alike. These Sioux, it may be observed, were the ancestors of those who committed the horrible but not unprovoked massacres of 1862, in the valley of the St. Peter. Hennepin complains bitterly of their treatment of him, which, however, seems to have been tolerably good. Afraid that he would lag behind, as his canoe was heavy and slow,[210] they placed several warriors in it to aid him and his men in paddling. They kept on their way from morning till night, building huts for their bivouac when it rained, and sleeping on the open ground when the weather was fair,—which, says Hennepin, "gave us a good opportunity to contemplate the moon and stars." The three Frenchmen took the precaution of sleeping at the side of the young chief who had been the first to smoke the peace-pipe, and who seemed inclined to befriend them; but there was another chief, one Aquipaguetin, a crafty old savage, who having lost a son in war with the Miamis, was angry that the party had abandoned their expedition, and thus deprived him of his revenge. He therefore kept up a dismal lament through half the night; while other old men, crouching over Hennepin as he lay trying to sleep, stroked him with their hands, and uttered wailings so lugubrious that he was forced to [Pg 255] the belief that he had been doomed to death, and that they were charitably bemoaning his fate.[211] THE CAPTIVE FRIAR. One night, the captives were, for some reason, unable to bivouac near their protector, and were forced to make their fire at the end of the camp. Here they were soon beset by a crowd of Indians, who told them that Aquipaguetin had at length resolved to tomahawk them. The malcontents were gathered in a knot at a little distance, and Hennepin hastened to appease them by another gift of knives and tobacco. This was but one of the devices of the old chief to deprive them of their goods without robbing them outright. He had with him the bones of a deceased relative, which he was carrying home wrapped in skins prepared with smoke after the Indian fashion, and gayly decorated with bands of dyed porcupine quills. He would summon his warriors, and placing these relics in the midst of the assembly, call on all present to smoke in their honor; after which, Hennepin was required to offer a more substantial tribute in the shape of cloth, beads, hatchets, tobacco, and the like, to be laid upon the bundle of bones. The gifts thus acquired were then, in the name of the deceased, distributed among the persons present. [Pg 256] On one occasion, Aquipaguetin killed a bear, and invited the chiefs and warriors to feast upon it. They accordingly assembled on a prairie, west of the river, where, after the banquet, they danced a "medicine-dance." They were all painted from head to foot, with their hair oiled, garnished with red and white feathers, and powdered with the down of birds. In this guise they set their arms akimbo, and fell to stamping with such fury that the hard prairie was dented with the prints of their moccasins; while the chief's son, crying at the top of his throat, gave to each in turn the pipe of war. Meanwhile, the chief himself, singing in a loud and rueful voice, placed his hands on the heads of the three Frenchmen, and from time to time interrupted his music to utter a vehement harangue. Hennepin could not understand the words, but his heart sank as the conviction grew strong within him that these ceremonies tended to his destruction. It seems, however, that, after all the chief's efforts, his party was in the minority, the greater part being adverse to either killing or robbing the three strangers. Every morning, at daybreak, an old warrior shouted the signal of departure; and the recumbent savages leaped up, manned their birchen fleet, and plied their paddles against the current, often without waiting to break their fast. Sometimes they stopped for a buffalo-hunt on the neighboring prairies; and there was no lack of provisions. They passed Lake Pepin, which Hennepin called the Lake of Tears, by reason [Pg 257] of the howlings and lamentations here uttered over him by Aquipaguetin, and nineteen days after his capture landed near the site of St. Paul. The father's sorrows now began in earnest. The Indians broke his canoe to pieces, having first hidden their own among the alder-bushes. As they belonged to different bands and different villages, their mutual jealousy now overcame all their prudence; and each proceeded to claim his share of the captives and the booty. Happily, they made an amicable distribution, or it would have fared ill with the three Frenchmen; and each taking his share, not forgetting the priestly vestments of Hennepin, the splendor of which they could not sufficiently admire, they set out across the country for their villages, which lay towards the north in the neighborhood of Lake Buade, now called Mille Lac. A HARD JOURNEY. Being, says Hennepin, exceedingly tall and active, they walked at a prodigious speed, insomuch that no European could long keep pace with them. Though the month of May had begun, there were frosts at night; and the marshes and ponds were glazed with ice, which cut the missionary's legs as he waded through. They swam the larger streams, and Hennepin nearly perished with cold as he emerged from the icy current. His two companions, who were smaller than he, and who could not swim, were carried over on the backs of the Indians. They showed, however, no little endurance; and he declares that he should have dropped by the way, but for their [Pg 258] support. Seeing him disposed to lag, the Indians, to spur him on, set fire to the dry grass behind him, and then, taking him by the hands, ran forward with him to escape the flames. To add to his misery, he was nearly famished, as they gave him only a small piece of smoked meat once a day, though it does not appear that they themselves fared better. On the fifth day, being by this time in extremity, he saw a crowd of squaws and children approaching over the prairie, and presently descried the bark lodges of an Indian town. The goal was reached. He was among the homes of the Sioux. FOOTNOTES: [197] Description de la Louisiane, nouvellement découverte, Paris, 1683. [198] Nouvelle Découverte d'un très grand Pays situé dans l'Amérique, Utrecht, 1697. [199] Nouvelle Découverte, 248, 250, 251. [200] See the preface of the Spanish translation by Don Sebastian Fernandez de Medrano, 1699, and also the letter of Gravier, dated 1701, in Shea's Early Voyages on the Mississippi. Barcia, Charlevoix, Kalm, and other early writers put a low value on Hennepin's veracity. [201] Description de la Louisiane, 218. [202] La Salle, in the following year, with a far better equipment, was more than three months and a half in making the journey. A Mississippi trading-boat of the last generation, with sails and oars, ascending against the current, was thought to do remarkably well if it could make twenty miles a day. Hennepin, if we believe his own statements, must have ascended at an average rate of sixty miles, though his canoe was large and heavily laden. [203] Hennepin here falls into gratuitous inconsistencies. In the edition of 1697, in order to gain a little time, he says that he left the Illinois on his voyage southward on the eighth of March, 1680; and yet in the preceding chapter he repeats the statement of the first edition, that he was detained at the Illinois by floating ice till the twelfth. Again, he says in the first edition that he was captured by the Sioux on the eleventh of April; and in the edition of 1697 he changes this date to the twelfth, without gaining any advantage by doing so. [204] Le Clerc's book had been made the text of an attack on the Jesuits. See Reflexions sur un Livre intitulé Premier établissement de la Foi. This piece is printed in the Morale Pratique des Jésuites. [205] Hennepin may have copied from the unpublished journal of Membré, which the latter had placed in the hands of his Superior; or he may have compiled from Le Clerc's book, relying on the suppression of the edition to prevent detection. He certainly saw and used it; for he elsewhere borrows the exact words of the editor. He is so careless that he steals from Membré passages which he might easily have written for himself; as, for example, a description of the opossum and another of the cougar,—animals with which he was acquainted. Compare the following pages of the Nouvelle Découverte with the corresponding pages of Le Clerc: Hennepin, 252, Le Clerc, ii. 217; H. 253, Le C. ii. 218; H. 257, Le C. ii. 221; H. 259, Le C. ii. 224; H. 262, Le C. ii. 226; H. 265, Le C. ii. 229; H. 267, Le C. ii. 233; H. 270, Le C. ii. 235; H. 280, Le C. ii. 240; H. 295, Le C. ii. 249; H. 296, Le C. ii. 250; H. 297, Le C. ii. 253; H. 299, Le C. ii. 254; H. 301, Le C. ii. 257. Some of these parallel passages will be found in Sparks's Life of La Salle, where this remarkable fraud was first fully exposed. In Shea's Discovery of the Mississippi, there is an excellent critical examination of Hennepin's works. His plagiarisms from Le Clerc are not confined to the passages cited above; for in his later editions he stole largely from other parts of the suppressed établissement de la Foi. [206] It is certain that persons having the best means of information believed at the time in Hennepin's story of his journeys on the Upper Mississippi. The compiler of the Relation des Découvertes, who was in close relations with La Salle and those who acted with him, does not intimate a doubt of the truth of the report which Hennepin on his return gave to the Provincial Commissary of his Order, and which is in substance the same which he published two years later. The Relation, it is to be observed, was written only a few months after the return of Hennepin, and embodies the pith of his narrative of the Upper Mississippi, no part of which had then been published. [207] In this connection, it is well to examine the various Sioux words which Hennepin uses incidentally, and which he must have acquired by personal intercourse with the tribe, as no Frenchman then understood the language. These words, as far as my information reaches, are in every instance correct. Thus, he says that the Sioux called his breviary a "bad spirit,"—Ouackanché. Wakanshe, or Wakanshecha, would express the same meaning in modern English spelling. He says elsewhere that they called the guns of his companions Manzaouackanché, which he translates, "iron possessed with a bad spirit." The western Sioux to this day call a gun Manzawakan, "metal possessed with a spirit." Chonga (shonka), "a dog," Ouasi (wahsee), "a pine-tree," Chinnen (shinnan), "a robe," or "garment," and other words, are given correctly, with their interpretations. The word Louis, affirmed by Hennepin to mean "the sun," seems at first sight a wilful inaccuracy, as this is not the word used in general by the Sioux. The Yankton band of this people, however, call the sun oouee, which, it is evident, represents the French pronunciation of Louis, omitting the initial letter. This Hennepin would be apt enough to supply, thereby conferring a compliment alike on himself, Louis Hennepin, and on the King, Louis XIV., who, to the indignation of his brother monarchs, had chosen the sun as his emblem. Various trivial incidents touched upon by Hennepin, while recounting his life among the Sioux, seem to me to afford a strong presumption of an actual experience. I speak on this point with the more confidence, as the Indians in whose lodges I was once domesticated for several weeks belonged to a western band of the same people. [208] Called Ako by Hennepin. In contemporary documents, it is written Accau, Acau, D'Accau, Dacau, Dacan, and D'Accault. [209] The edition of 1683 says that there were thirty-three canoes; that of 1697 raises the number to fifty. The number of Indians is the same in both. The later narrative is more in detail than the former. [210] And yet it had, by his account, made a distance of thirteen hundred and eighty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi upward in twenty-four days! [211] This weeping and wailing over Hennepin once seemed to me an anomaly in his account of Sioux manners, as I am not aware that such practices are to be found among them at present. They are mentioned, however, by other early writers. Le Sueur, who was among them in 1699-1700, was wept over no less than Hennepin. See the abstract of his journal in La Harpe. CHAPTER XVIII. 1680, 1681. HENNEPIN AMONG THE SIOUX. Signs of Danger.—Adoption.—Hennepin and his Indian Relatives.—The Hunting Party.—The Sioux Camp.—Falls of St. Anthony.—A Vagabond Friar: his Adventures on the Mississippi.—Greysolon du Lhut.—Return to Civilization. As Hennepin entered the village, he beheld a sight which caused him to invoke Saint Anthony of Padua. In front of the lodges were certain stakes, to which were attached bundles of straw, intended, as he supposed, for burning him and his friends alive. His concern was redoubled when he saw the condition of the Picard Du Gay, whose hair and face had been painted with divers colors, and whose head was decorated with a tuft of white feathers. In this guise he was entering the village, followed by a crowd of Sioux, who compelled him to sing and keep time to his own music by rattling a dried gourd containing a number of pebbles. The omens, indeed, were exceedingly [Pg 260] threatening; for treatment like this was usually followed by the speedy immolation of the captive. Hennepin ascribes it to the effect of his invocations, that, being led into one of the lodges, among a throng of staring squaws and children, he and his companions were seated on the ground, and presented with large dishes of birch-bark, containing a mess of wild rice boiled with dried whortleberries,—a repast which he declares to have been the best that had fallen to his lot since the day of his captivity.[212] THE SIOUX. This soothed his fears; but, as he allayed his famished appetite, he listened with anxious interest to the vehement jargon of the chiefs and warriors, who were disputing among themselves to whom the three captives should respectively belong; for it seems that, as far as related to them, the question of distribution had not yet been definitely settled. The debate ended in the assigning of Hennepin to his old enemy Aquipaguetin, who, however, far from persisting in his evil designs, adopted him on the spot as his son. The three companions must now part company. Du Gay, not yet quite reassured of his safety, hastened to confess himself to Hennepin; but Accau proved refractory, and refused the offices of religion, which did not prevent the friar from embracing them both, as he says, with an extreme tenderness. Tired as he was, he was forced to set out with his self-styled father to his village, which was fortunately [Pg 262] not far off. An unpleasant walk of a few miles through woods and marshes brought them to the borders of a sheet of water, apparently Lake Buade, where five of Aquipaguetin's wives received the party in three canoes, and ferried them to an island on which the village stood. At the entrance of the chief's lodge, Hennepin was met by a decrepit old Indian, withered with age, who offered him the peace-pipe, and placed him on a bear-skin which was spread by the fire. Here, to relieve his fatigue,—for he was well-nigh spent,—a small boy anointed his limbs with the fat of a wild-cat, supposed to be sovereign in these cases by reason of the great agility of that animal. His new father gave him a bark-platter of fish, covered him with a buffalo-robe, and showed him six or seven of his wives, who were thenceforth, he was told, to regard him as a son. The chief's household was numerous; and his allies and relatives formed a considerable clan, of which the missionary found himself an involuntary member. He was scandalized when he saw one of his adopted brothers carrying on his back the bones of a deceased friend, wrapped in the chasuble of brocade which they had taken with other vestments from his box. HENNEPIN AS A MISSIONARY. Seeing their new relative so enfeebled that he could scarcely stand, the Indians made for him one of their sweating baths,[213] where they immersed him [Pg 263] in steam three times a week,—a process from which he thinks he derived great benefit. His strength gradually returned, in spite of his meagre fare; for there was a dearth of food, and the squaws were less attentive to his wants than to those of their children. They respected him, however, as a person endowed with occult powers, and stood in no little awe of a pocket compass which he had with him, as well as of a small metal pot with feet moulded after the face of a lion. This last seemed in their eyes a "medicine" of the most formidable nature, and they would not touch it without first wrapping it in a beaver-skin. For the rest, Hennepin made himself useful in various ways. He shaved the heads of the children, as was the custom of the tribe; bled certain asthmatic persons, and dosed others with orvietan, the famous panacea of his time, of which he had brought with him a good supply. With respect to his missionary functions, he seems to have given himself little trouble, unless his attempt to make a Sioux vocabulary is to be regarded as preparatory to a future apostleship. "I could gain nothing over them," he says, "in the way of their salvation, by reason of their natural stupidity." Nevertheless, on one occasion, he baptized a sick child, naming it Antoinette in honor of Saint Anthony of Padua. It seemed to revive after the rite, but soon relapsed and presently [Pg 264] died, "which," he writes, "gave me great joy and satisfaction." In this he was like the Jesuits, who could find nothing but consolation in the death of a newly baptized infant, since it was thus assured of a paradise which, had it lived, it would probably have forfeited by sharing in the superstitions of its parents. With respect to Hennepin and his Indian father, there seems to have been little love on either side; but Ouasicoudé, the principal chief of the Sioux of this region, was the fast friend of the three white men. He was angry that they had been robbed, which he had been unable to prevent, as the Sioux had no laws, and their chiefs little power; but he spoke his mind freely, and told Aquipaguetin and the rest, in full council, that they were like a dog who steals a piece of meat from a dish and runs away with it. When Hennepin complained of hunger, the Indians had always promised him that early in the summer he should go with them on a buffalo hunt, and have food in abundance. The time at length came, and the inhabitants of all the neighboring villages prepared for departure. To each band was assigned its special hunting-ground, and he was expected to accompany his Indian father. To this he demurred; for he feared lest Aquipaguetin, angry at the words of the great chief, might take this opportunity to revenge the insult put upon him. He therefore gave out that he expected a party of "Spirits"—that is to say, Frenchmen—to meet him [Pg 265] at the mouth of the Wisconsin, bringing a supply of goods for the Indians; and he declares that La Salle had in fact promised to send traders to that place. Be this as it may, the Indians believed him; and, true or false, the assertion, as will be seen, answered the purpose for which it was made. CAMP OF SAVAGES. The Indians set out in a body to the number of two hundred and fifty warriors, with their women and children. The three Frenchmen, who though in different villages had occasionally met during the two months of their captivity, were all of the party. They descended Rum River, which forms the outlet of Mille Lac, and which is called the St. Francis by Hennepin. None of the Indians had offered to give him passage; and, fearing lest he should be abandoned, he stood on the bank, hailing the passing canoes and begging to be taken in. Accau and Du Gay presently appeared, paddling a small canoe which the Indians had given them; but they would not listen to the missionary's call, and Accau, who had no love for him, cried out that he had paddled him long enough already. Two Indians, however, took pity on him, and brought him to the place of encampment, where Du Gay tried to excuse himself for his conduct; but Accau was sullen, and kept aloof. After reaching the Mississippi, the whole party encamped together opposite to the mouth of Rum River, pitching their tents of skin, or building their bark-huts, on the slope of a hill by the side of the water. It was a wild scene, this camp of savages [Pg 266] among whom as yet no traders had come and no handiwork of civilization had found its way,—the tall warriors, some nearly naked, some wrapped in buffalo-robes, and some in shirts of dressed deer-skin fringed with hair and embroidered with dyed porcupine quills, war-clubs of stone in their hands, and quivers at their backs filled with stone-headed arrows; the squaws, cutting smoke-dried meat with knives of flint, and boiling it in rude earthen pots of their own making, driving away, meanwhile, with shrill cries, the troops of lean dogs, which disputed the meal with a crew of hungry children. The whole camp, indeed, was threatened with starvation. The three white men could get no food but unripe berries,—from the effects of which Hennepin thinks they might all have died, but for timely doses of his orvietan. FALLS OF ST. ANTHONY. Being tired of the Indians, he became anxious to set out for the Wisconsin to find the party of Frenchmen, real or imaginary, who were to meet him at that place. That he was permitted to do so was due to the influence of the great chief Ouasicoudé, who always befriended him, and who had soundly berated his two companions for refusing him a seat in their canoe. Du Gay wished to go with him; but Accau, who liked the Indian life as much as he disliked Hennepin, preferred to remain with the hunters. A small birch-canoe was given to the two adventurers, together with an earthen pot; and they had also between them a gun, a knife, and a robe of beaver-skin. [Pg 267] Thus equipped, they began their journey, and soon approached the Falls of St. Anthony, so named by Hennepin in honor of the inevitable Saint Anthony of Padua.[214] As they were carrying their canoe by the cataract, they saw five or six Indians, who had gone before, and one of whom had climbed into an oak-tree beside the principal fall, whence in a loud and lamentable voice he was haranguing the spirit of the waters, as a sacrifice to whom he had just hung a robe of beaver-skin among the branches.[215] Their attention was soon engrossed by another object. Looking over the edge of the cliff which overhung the river below the falls, Hennepin saw a snake, [Pg 268] which, as he avers, was six feet long,[216] writhing upward towards the holes of the swallows in the face of the precipice, in order to devour their young. He pointed him out to Du Gay, and they pelted him with stones till he fell into the river, but not before his contortions and the darting of his forked tongue had so affected the Picard's imagination that he was haunted that night with a terrific incubus. ADVENTURES. They paddled sixty leagues down the river in the heats of July, and killed no large game but a single deer, the meat of which soon spoiled. Their main resource was the turtles, whose shyness and watchfulness caused them frequent disappointments and many involuntary fasts. They once captured one of more than common size; and, as they were endeavoring to cut off his head, he was near avenging himself by snapping off Hennepin's finger. There was a herd of buffalo in sight on the neighboring prairie; and Du Gay went with his gun in pursuit of them, leaving the turtle in Hennepin's custody. Scarcely was he gone when the friar, raising his eyes, saw that their canoe, which they had left at the edge of the water, had floated out into the current. Hastily turning the turtle on his back, he covered him with his habit of St. Francis, on which, for greater security, he laid a number of stones, and then, being a good swimmer, struck out in pursuit of the canoe, [Pg 269] which he at length overtook. Finding that it would overset if he tried to climb into it, he pushed it before him to the shore, and then paddled towards the place, at some distance above, where he had left the turtle. He had no sooner reached it than he heard a strange sound, and beheld a long file of buffalo—bulls, cows, and calves—entering the water not far off, to cross to the western bank. Having no gun, as became his apostolic vocation, he shouted to Du Gay, who presently appeared, running in all haste, and they both paddled in pursuit of the game. Du Gay aimed at a young cow, and shot her in the head. She fell in shallow water near an island, where some of the herd had landed; and being unable to drag her out, they waded into the water and butchered her where she lay. It was forty-eight hours since they had tasted food. Hennepin made a fire, while Du Gay cut up the meat. They feasted so bountifully that they both fell ill, and were forced to remain two days on the island, taking doses of orvietan, before they were able to resume their journey. Apparently they were not sufficiently versed in woodcraft to smoke the meat of the cow; and the hot sun soon robbed them of it. They had a few fishhooks, but were not always successful in the use of them. On one occasion, being nearly famished, they set their line, and lay watching it, uttering prayers in turn. Suddenly, there was a great turmoil in the water. Du Gay ran to the line, and, with the help [Pg 270] of Hennepin, drew in two large cat-fish.[217] The eagles, or fish-hawks, now and then dropped a newly caught fish, of which they gladly took possession; and once they found a purveyor in an otter which they saw by the bank, devouring some object of an appearance so wonderful that Du Gay cried out that he had a devil between his paws. They scared him from his prey, which proved to be a spade-fish, or, as Hennepin correctly describes it, a species of sturgeon, with a bony projection from his snout in the shape of a paddle. They broke their fast upon him, undeterred by this eccentric appendage. THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI. If Hennepin had had an eye for scenery, he would have found in these his vagabond rovings wherewith to console himself in some measure for his frequent fasts. The young Mississippi, fresh from its northern springs, unstained as yet by unhallowed union with the riotous Missouri, flowed calmly on its way amid strange and unique beauties,—a wilderness, clothed with velvet grass; forest-shadowed valleys; lofty heights, whose smooth slopes seemed levelled with the scythe; domes and pinnacles, ramparts and ruined towers, the work of no human hand. The canoe of the voyagers, borne on the tranquil current, glided in the shade of gray crags festooned with honeysuckles; by trees mantled with wild grape-vines; [Pg 271] dells bright with the flowers of the white euphorbia, the blue gentian, and the purple balm; and matted forests, where the red squirrels leaped and chattered. They passed the great cliff whence the Indian maiden threw herself in her despair;[218] and Lake Pepin lay before them, slumbering in the July sun,—the far-reaching sheets of sparkling water, the woody slopes, the tower-like crags, the grassy heights basking in sunlight or shadowed by the passing cloud; all the fair outline of its graceful scenery, the finished and polished master-work of Nature. And when at evening they made their bivouac fire and drew up their canoe, while dim, sultry clouds veiled the west, and the flashes of the silent heat-lightning gleamed on the leaden water, they could listen, as they smoked their pipes, to the mournful cry of the whippoorwills and the quavering scream of the owls. Other thoughts than the study of the picturesque occupied the mind of Hennepin when one day he saw his Indian father, Aquipaguetin, whom he had supposed five hundred miles distant, descending the river with ten warriors in canoes. He was eager to be the first to meet the traders, who, as Hennepin had given out, were to come with their goods to the mouth of the Wisconsin. The two travellers trembled [Pg 272] for the consequences of this encounter; but the chief, after a short colloquy, passed on his way. In three days he returned in ill-humor, having found no traders at the appointed spot. The Picard was absent at the time, looking for game; and Hennepin was sitting under the shade of his blanket, which he had stretched on forked sticks to protect him from the sun, when he saw his adopted father approaching with a threatening look, and a war-club in his hand. He attempted no violence, however, but suffered his wrath to exhale in a severe scolding, after which he resumed his course up the river with his warriors. If Hennepin, as he avers, really expected a party of traders at the Wisconsin, the course he now took is sufficiently explicable. If he did not expect them, his obvious course was to rejoin Tonty on the Illinois, for which he seems to have had no inclination; or to return to Canada by way of the Wisconsin,—an attempt which involved the risk of starvation, as the two travellers had but ten charges of powder left. Assuming, then, his hope of the traders to have been real, he and Du Gay resolved, in the mean time, to join a large body of Sioux hunters, who, as Aquipaguetin had told them, were on a stream which he calls Bull River, now the Chippeway, entering the Mississippi near Lake Pepin. By so doing, they would gain a supply of food, and save themselves from the danger of encountering parties of roving warriors. [Pg 273] HE REJOINS THE INDIANS. They found this band, among whom was their companion Accau, and followed them on a grand hunt along the borders of the Mississippi. Du Gay was separated for a time from Hennepin, who was placed in a canoe with a withered squaw more than eighty years old. In spite of her age, she handled her paddle with great address, and used it vigorously, as occasion required, to repress the gambols of three children, who, to Hennepin's annoyance, occupied the middle of the canoe. The hunt was successful. The Sioux warriors, active as deer, chased the buffalo on foot with their stone-headed arrows, on the plains behind the heights that bordered the river; while the old men stood sentinels at the top, watching for the approach of enemies. One day an alarm was given. The warriors rushed towards the supposed point of danger, but found nothing more formidable than two squaws of their own nation, who brought strange news. A war-party of Sioux, they said, had gone towards Lake Superior, and had met by the way five "Spirits;" that is to say, five Europeans. Hennepin was full of curiosity to learn who the strangers might be; and they, on their part, were said to have shown great anxiety to know the nationality of the three white men who, as they were told, were on the river. The hunt was over; and the hunters, with Hennepin and his companion, were on their way northward to their towns, when they met the five "Spirits" at some distance below the Falls of St. Anthony. They proved to [Pg 274] be Daniel Greysolon du Lhut, with four well-armed Frenchmen. DE LHUT'S EXPLORATIONS. This bold and enterprising man, stigmatized by the Intendant Duchesneau as a leader of coureurs de bois, was a cousin of Tonty, born at Lyons. He belonged to that caste of the lesser nobles whose name was legion, and whose admirable military qualities shone forth so conspicuously in the wars of Louis XIV. Though his enterprises were independent of those of La Salle, they were at this time carried on in connection with Count Frontenac and certain merchants in his interest, of whom Du Lhut's uncle, Patron, was one; while Louvigny, his brother-in-law, was in alliance with the governor, and was an officer of his guard. Here, then, was a kind of family league, countenanced by Frontenac, and acting conjointly with him, in order, if the angry letters of the intendant are to be believed, to reap a clandestine profit under the shadow of the governor's authority, and in violation of the royal ordinances. The rudest part of the work fell to the share of Du Lhut, who with a persistent hardihood, not surpassed perhaps even by La Salle, was continually in the forest, in the Indian towns, or in remote wilderness outposts planted by himself, exploring, trading, fighting, ruling lawless savages and whites scarcely less ungovernable, and on one or more occasions varying his life by crossing the ocean to gain interviews with the colonial minister Seignelay, amid the splendid vanities of Versailles. Strange to say, this man of hardy enterprise was a [Pg 275] martyr to the gout, which for more than a quarter of a century grievously tormented him; though for a time he thought himself cured by the intercession of the Iroquois saint, Catharine Tegahkouita, to whom he had made a vow to that end. He was, without doubt, an habitual breaker of the royal ordinances regulating the fur-trade; yet his services were great to the colony and to the crown, and his name deserves a place of honor among the pioneers of American civilization.[219] [Pg 276] When Hennepin met him, he had been about two years in the wilderness. In September, 1678, he left Quebec for the purpose of exploring the region of the Upper Mississippi, and establishing relations of friendship with the Sioux and their kindred the Assiniboins. In the summer of 1679 he visited three large towns of the eastern division of the Sioux, including those visited by Hennepin in the following year, and planted the King's arms in all of them. Early in the autumn he was at the head of Lake Superior, holding a council with the Assiniboins and the lake tribes, and inducing them to live at peace with the Sioux. In all this, he acted in a public [Pg 277] capacity, under the authority of the governor; but it is not to be supposed that he forgot his own interests or those of his associates. The intendant angrily complains that he aided and abetted the coureurs de bois in their lawless courses, and sent down in their canoes great quantities of beaver-skins consigned to the merchants in league with him, under cover of whose names the governor reaped his share of the profits. In June, 1680, while Hennepin was in the Sioux villages, Du Lhut set out from the head of Lake Superior, with two canoes, four Frenchmen, and an Indian, to continue his explorations.[220] He ascended a river, apparently the Burnt Wood, and reached from thence a branch of the Mississippi, which seems to have been the St. Croix. It was now that, to his surprise, he learned that there were three Europeans on the main river below; and fearing that they might be Englishmen or Spaniards encroaching on the territories of the King, he eagerly pressed forward to solve his doubts. When he saw Hennepin, his mind was set at rest; and the travellers met with mutual cordiality. They followed the Indians to their villages of Mille Lac, where Hennepin had now no reason to complain of their treatment of him. The Sioux gave him and Du Lhut a grand feast of honor, at which were seated a hundred and twenty naked guests; and the great chief Ouasicoudé, with his [Pg 278] own hands, placed before Hennepin a bark dish containing a mess of smoked meat and wild rice. Autumn had come, and the travellers bethought them of going home. The Sioux, consoled by their promises to return with goods for trade, did not oppose their departure; and they set out together, eight white men in all. As they passed St. Anthony's Falls, two of the men stole two buffalo-robes which were hung on trees as offerings to the spirit of the cataract. When Du Lhut heard of it he was very angry, telling the men that they had endangered the lives of the whole party. Hennepin admitted that in the view of human prudence he was right, but urged that the act was good and praiseworthy, inasmuch as the offerings were made to a false god; while the men, on their part, proved mutinous, declaring that they wanted the robes and meant to keep them. The travellers continued their journey in great ill-humor, but were presently soothed by the excellent hunting which they found on the way. As they approached the Wisconsin, they stopped to dry the meat of the buffalo they had killed, when to their amazement they saw a war-party of Sioux approaching in a fleet of canoes. Hennepin represents himself as showing on this occasion an extraordinary courage, going to meet the Indians with a peace-pipe, and instructing Du Lhut, who knew more of these matters than he, how he ought to behave. The Sioux proved not unfriendly, and said nothing of the theft of the buffalo-robes. They soon went on their [Pg 279] way to attack the Illinois and Missouris, leaving the Frenchmen to ascend the Wisconsin unmolested. THE RETURN. After various adventures, they reached the station of the Jesuits at Green Bay; but its existence is wholly ignored by Hennepin, whose zeal for his own Order will not permit him to allude to this establishment of the rival missionaries.[221] He is equally reticent with regard to the Jesuit mission at Michilimackinac, where the party soon after arrived, and where they spent the winter. The only intimation which he gives of its existence consists in the mention of the Jesuit Pierson, who was a Fleming like himself, and who often skated with him on the frozen lake, or kept him company in fishing through a hole in the ice.[222] When the spring opened, Hennepin descended Lake Huron, followed the Detroit to Lake Erie, and proceeded thence to Niagara. Here he spent some time in making a fresh examination of the cataract, and then resumed his voyage on Lake Ontario. He stopped, however, at the great town of the Senecas, near the Genesee, where, with his usual spirit of meddling, he took upon him the functions of the civil and military [Pg 280] authorities, convoked the chiefs to a council, and urged them to set at liberty certain Ottawa prisoners whom they had captured in violation of treaties. Having settled this affair to his satisfaction, he went to Fort Frontenac, where his brother missionary, Buisset, received him with a welcome rendered the warmer by a story which had reached him that the Indians had hanged Hennepin with his own cord of St. Francis. From Fort Frontenac he went to Montreal; and leaving his two men on a neighboring island, that they might escape the payment of duties on a quantity of furs which they had with them, he paddled alone towards the town. Count Frontenac chanced to be here, and, looking from the window of a house near the river, he saw approaching in a canoe a Récollet father, whose appearance indicated the extremity of hard service; for his face was worn and sunburnt, and his tattered habit of St. Francis was abundantly patched with scraps of buffalo-skin. When at length he recognized the long-lost Hennepin, he received him, as the father writes, "with all the tenderness which a missionary could expect from a person of his rank and quality." He kept him for twelve days in his own house, and listened with interest to such of his adventures as the friar saw fit to divulge. LA SALLE'S LETTERS. And here we bid farewell to Father Hennepin. "Providence," he writes, "preserved my life that I might make known my great discoveries to the world." He soon after went to Europe, where the [Pg 281] story of his travels found a host of readers, but where he died at last in a deserved obscurity.[223] FOOTNOTES: [212] The Sioux, or Dacotah, as they call themselves, were a numerous people, separated into three great divisions, which were again subdivided into bands. Those among whom Hennepin was a prisoner belonged to the division known as the Issanti, Issanyati, or, as he writes it, Issati, of which the principal band was the Meddewakantonwan. The other great divisions, the Yanktons and the Tintonwans, or Tetons, lived west of the Mississippi, extending beyond the Missouri, and ranging as far as the Rocky Mountains. The Issanti cultivated the soil; but the extreme western bands subsisted on the buffalo alone. The former had two kinds of dwelling,—the teepee, or skin-lodge, and the bark-lodge. The teepee, which was used by all the Sioux, consists of a covering of dressed buffalo-hide, stretched on a conical stack of poles. The bark-lodge was peculiar to the Eastern Sioux; and examples of it might be seen, until within a few years, among the bands on the St. Peter's. In its general character, it was like the Huron and Iroquois houses, but was inferior in construction. It had a ridge roof, framed of poles, extending from the posts which formed the sides; and the whole was covered with elm-bark. The lodges in the villages to which Hennepin was conducted were probably of this kind. The name Sioux is an abbreviation of Nadouessioux, an Ojibwa word, meaning "enemies." The Ojibwas used it to designate this people, and occasionally also the Iroquois, being at deadly war with both. Rev. Stephen B. Riggs, for many years a missionary among the Issanti Sioux, says that this division consists of four distinct bands. They ceded all their lands east of the Mississippi to the United States in 1837, and lived on the St. Peter's till driven thence in consequence of the massacres of 1862, 1863. The Yankton Sioux consist of two bands, which are again subdivided. The Assiniboins, or Hohays, are an offshoot from the Yanktons, with whom they are now at war. The Tintonwan, or Teton Sioux, forming the most western division and the largest, comprise seven bands, and are among the bravest and fiercest tenants of the prairie. The earliest French writers estimate the total number of the Sioux at forty thousand; but this is little better than conjecture. Mr. Riggs, in 1852, placed it at about twenty-five thousand. [213] These baths consist of a small hut, covered closely with buffalo-skins, into which the patient and his friends enter, carefully closing every aperture. A pile of heated stones is placed in the middle, and water is poured upon them, raising a dense vapor. They are still (1868) in use among the Sioux and some other tribes. [214] Hennepin's notice of the falls of St. Anthony, though brief, is sufficiently accurate. He says, in his first edition, that they are forty or fifty feet high, but adds ten feet more in the edition of 1697. In 1821, according to Schoolcraft, the perpendicular fall measured forty feet. Great changes, however, have taken place here, and are still in progress. The rock is a very soft, friable sandstone, overlaid by a stratum of limestone; and it is crumbling with such rapidity under the action of the water that the cataract will soon be little more than a rapid. Other changes equally disastrous, in an artistic point of view, are going on even more quickly. Beside the falls stands a city, which, by an ingenious combination of the Greek and Sioux languages, has received the name of Minneapolis, or City of the Waters, and which in 1867 contained ten thousand inhabitants, two national banks, and an opera-house; while its rival city of St. Anthony, immediately opposite, boasted a gigantic water-cure and a State university. In short, the great natural beauty of the place is utterly spoiled. [215] Oanktayhee, the principal deity of the Sioux, was supposed to live under these falls, though he manifested himself in the form of a buffalo. It was he who created the earth, like the Algonquin Manabozho, from mud brought to him in the paws of a musk-rat. Carver, in 1766, saw an Indian throw everything he had about him into the cataract as an offering to this deity. [216] In the edition of 1683. In that of 1697 he had grown to seven or eight feet. The bank-swallows still make their nests in these cliffs, boring easily into the soft sandstone. [217] Hennepin speaks of their size with astonishment, and says that the two together would weigh twenty-five pounds. Cat-fish have been taken in the Mississippi, weighing more than a hundred and fifty pounds. [218] The "Lover's Leap," or "Maiden's Rock" from which a Sioux girl, Winona, or the "Eldest Born," is said to have thrown herself, in the despair of disappointed affection. The story, which seems founded in truth, will be found, not without embellishments, in Mrs. Eastman's Legends of the Sioux. [219] The facts concerning Du Lhut have been gleaned from a variety of contemporary documents, chiefly the letters of his enemy Duchesneau, who always puts him in the worst light, especially in his despatch to Seignelay of 10 Nov., 1679, where he charges both him and the governor with carrying on an illicit trade with the English of New York. Du Lhut himself, in a memoir dated 1685 (see Harrisse, Bibliographie, 176), strongly denies these charges. Du Lhut built a trading fort on Lake Superior, called Cananistigoyan (La Hontan), or Kamalastigouia (Perrot). It was on the north side, at the mouth of a river entering Thunder Bay, where Fort William now stands. In 1684 he caused two Indians, who had murdered several Frenchmen on Lake Superior, to be shot. He displayed in this affair great courage and coolness, undaunted by the crowd of excited savages who surrounded him and his little band of Frenchmen. The long letter, in which he recounts the capture and execution of the murderers, is before me. Duchesneau makes his conduct on this occasion the ground of a charge of rashness. In 1686 Denonville, then governor of the colony, ordered him to fortify the Detroit; that is, the strait between Lakes Erie and Huron. He went thither with fifty men and built a palisade fort, which he occupied for some time. In 1687 he, together with Tonty and Durantaye, joined Denonville against the Senecas, with a body of Indians from the Upper Lakes. In 1689, during the panic that followed the Iroquois invasion of Montreal, Du Lhut, with twenty-eight Canadians, attacked twenty-two Iroquois in canoes, received their fire without returning it, bore down upon them, killed eighteen of them, and captured three, only one escaping. In 1695 he was in command at Fort Frontenac. In 1697 he succeeded to the command of a company of infantry, but was suffering wretchedly from the gout at Fort Frontenac. In 1710 Vaudreuil, in a despatch to the minister Ponchartrain, announced his death as occurring in the previous winter, and added the brief comment, "c'était un très-honnête homme." Other contemporaries speak to the same effect. "Mr. Dulhut, Gentilhomme Lionnois, qui a beaucoup de mérite et de capacité."—La Hontan, i. 103 (1703). "Le Sieur du Lut, homme d'esprit et d'expérience."—Le Clerc, ii. 137. Charlevoix calls him "one of the bravest officers the King has ever had in this colony." His name is variously spelled Du Luc, Du Lud, Du Lude, Du Lut, Du Luth, Du Lhut. For an account of the Iroquois virgin, Tegahkouita, whose intercession is said to have cured him of the gout, see Charlevoix, i. 572. On a contemporary manuscript map by the Jesuit Raffeix, representing the routes of Marquette, La Salle, and Du Lhut, are the following words, referring to the last-named discoverer, and interesting in connection with Hennepin's statements: "Mr. du Lude le premier a esté chez les Sioux en 1678, et a esté proche la source du Mississippi, et ensuite vint retirer le P. Louis [Hennepin] qui avoit esté fait prisonnier chez les Sioux." Du Lhut here appears as the deliverer of Hennepin. One of his men was named Pepin; hence, no doubt, the name of Lake Pepin. [220] Memoir on the French Dominion in Canada, N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 781. [221] On the other hand, he sets down on his map of 1683 a mission of the Récollets at a point north of the farthest sources of the Mississippi, to which no white man had ever penetrated. [222] He says that Pierson had come among the Indians to learn their language; that he "retained the frankness and rectitude of our country" and "a disposition always on the side of candor and sincerity. In a word, he seemed to me to be all that a Christian ought to be" (1697), 433. [223] Since the two preceding chapters were written, the letters of La Salle have been brought to light by the researches of M. Margry. They confirm, in nearly all points, the conclusions given above; though, as before observed (note, 186), they show misstatements on the part of Hennepin concerning his position at the outset of the expedition. La Salle writes: "J'ay fait remonter le fleuve Colbert, nommé par les Iroquois Gastacha, par les Outaouais Mississipy par un canot conduit par deux de mes gens, l'un nommé Michel Accault et l'autre Picard, auxquels le R. P. Hennepin se joignit pour ne perdre pas l'occasion de prescher l'évangile aux peuples qui habitent dessus et qui n'en avoient jamais oui parler." In the same letter he recounts their voyage on the Upper Mississippi, and their capture by the Sioux in accordance with the story of Hennepin himself. Hennepin's assertion, that La Salle had promised to send a number of men to meet him at the mouth of the Wisconsin, turns out to be true. "Estans tous revenus en chasse avec les Nadouessioux [Sioux] vers Ouisconsing [Wisconsin], le R. P. Louis Hempin [Hennepin] et Picard prirent résolution de venir jusqu'à l'emboucheure de la rivière où j'avois promis d'envoyer de mes nouvelles, comme j'avois fait par six hommes que les Jésuistes desbauchèrent en leur disant que le R. P. Louis et ses compagnons de voyage avoient esté tuez." It is clear that La Salle understood Hennepin; for, after speaking of his journey, he adds: "J'ai cru qu'il estoit à propos de vous faire le narré des aventures de ce canot parce que je ne doute pas qu'on en parle; et si vous souhaitez en conférer avec le P. Louis Hempin, Récollect, qui est repassé en France, il faut un peu le connoistre, car il ne manquera pas d'exagérer toutes choses, c'est son caractère, et à moy mesme il m'a escrit comme s'il eust esté tout près d'estre bruslé, quoiqu'il n'en ait pas esté seulement en danger; mais il croit qu'il luy est honorable de le faire de la sorte, et il parle plus conformément à ce qu'il veut qu'à ce qu'il scait."—Lettre de la Salle, 22 Ao?t, 1682 (1681?), Margry, ii. 259. On his return to France, Hennepin got hold of the manuscript, Relation des Découvertes, compiled for the government from La Salle's letters, and, as already observed, made very free use of it in the first edition of his book, printed in 1683. In 1699 he wished to return to Canada; but, in a letter of that year, Louis XIV. orders the governor [Pg 282] to seize him, should he appear, and send him prisoner to Rochefort. This seems to have been in consequence of his renouncing the service of the French crown, and dedicating his edition of 1697 to William III. of England. More than twenty editions of Hennepin's travels appeared, in French, English, Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish. Most of them include the mendacious narrative of the pretended descent of the Mississippi. For a list of them, see Hist. Mag., i. 346; ii. 24. CHAPTER XIX. 1681. LA SALLE BEGINS ANEW. His Constancy; his Plans; his Savage Allies; he becomes Snow-blind.—Negotiations.—Grand Council.—La Salle's Oratory.—Meeting with Tonty.—Preparation.—Departure. In tracing the adventures of Tonty and the rovings of Hennepin, we have lost sight of La Salle, the pivot of the enterprise. Returning from the desolation and horror in the valley of the Illinois, he had spent the winter at Fort Miami, on the St. Joseph, by the borders of Lake Michigan. Here he might have brooded on the redoubled ruin that had befallen him,—the desponding friends, the exulting foes; the wasted energies, the crushing load of debt, the stormy past, the black and lowering future. But his mind was of a different temper. He had no thought but to grapple with adversity, and out of the fragments of his ruin to build up the fabric of success. He would not recoil; but he modified his plans to meet the new contingency. His white enemies had found, or rather perhaps had made, a savage ally in the Iroquois. Their incursions must be stopped, or [Pg 284] his enterprise would come to nought; and he thought he saw the means by which this new danger could be converted into a source of strength. The tribes of the West, threatened by the common enemy, might be taught to forget their mutual animosities and join in a defensive league, with La Salle at its head. They might be colonized around his fort in the valley of the Illinois, where in the shadow of the French flag, and with the aid of French allies, they could hold the Iroquois in check, and acquire in some measure the arts of a settled life. The Franciscan friars could teach them the Faith; and La Salle and his associates could supply them with goods, in exchange for the vast harvest of furs which their hunters could gather in these boundless wilds. Meanwhile, he would seek out the mouth of the Mississippi; and the furs gathered at his colony in the Illinois would then find a ready passage to the markets of the world. Thus might this ancient slaughter-field of warring savages be redeemed to civilization and Christianity; and a stable settlement, half-feudal, half-commercial, grow up in the heart of the western wilderness. This plan was but a part of the original scheme of his enterprise, adapted to new and unexpected circumstances; and he now set himself to its execution with his usual vigor, joined to an address which, when dealing with Indians, never failed him. INDIAN FRIENDS. There were allies close at hand. Near Fort Miami were the huts of twenty-five or thirty savages, exiles [Pg 285] from their homes, and strangers in this western world. Several of the English colonies, from Virginia to Maine, had of late years been harassed by Indian wars; and the Puritans of New England, above all, had been scourged by the deadly outbreak of King Philip's war. Those engaged in it had paid a bitter price for their brief triumphs. A band of refugees, chiefly Abenakis and Mohegans, driven from their native seats, had roamed into these distant wilds, and were wintering in the friendly neighborhood of the French. La Salle soon won them over to his interests. One of their number was the Mohegan hunter, who for two years had faithfully followed his fortunes, and who had been four years in the West. He is described as a prudent and discreet young man, in whom La Salle had great confidence, and who could make himself understood in several western languages, belonging, like his own, to the great Algonquin tongue. This devoted henchman proved an efficient mediator with his countrymen. The New-England Indians, with one voice, promised to follow La Salle, asking no recompense but to call him their chief, and yield to him the love and admiration which he rarely failed to command from this hero-worshipping race. New allies soon appeared. A Shawanoe chief from the valley of the Ohio, whose following embraced a hundred and fifty warriors, came to ask the protection of the French against the all-destroying Iroquois. "The Shawanoes are too distant," was La Salle's [Pg 286] reply; "but let them come to me at the Illinois, and they shall be safe." The chief promised to join him in the autumn, at Fort Miami, with all his band. But, more important than all, the consent and co-operation of the Illinois must be gained; and the Miamis, their neighbors and of late their enemies, must be taught the folly of their league with the Iroquois, and the necessity of joining in the new confederation. Of late, they had been made to see the perfidy of their dangerous allies. A band of the Iroquois, returning from the slaughter of the Tamaroa Illinois, had met and murdered a band of Miamis on the Ohio, and had not only refused satisfaction, but had intrenched themselves in three rude forts of trees and brushwood in the heart of the Miami country. The moment was favorable for negotiating; but, first, La Salle wished to open a communication with the Illinois, some of whom had begun to return to the country they had abandoned. With this view, and also, it seems, to procure provisions, he set out on the first of March, with his lieutenant La Forest, and fifteen men. The country was sheeted in snow, and the party journeyed on snow-shoes; but when they reached the open prairies, the white expanse glared in the sun with so dazzling a brightness that La Salle and several of the men became snow-blind. They stopped and encamped under the edge of a forest; and here La Salle remained in darkness for three days, suffering extreme pain. Meanwhile, he sent forward La [Pg 287] Forest and most of the men, keeping with him his old attendant Hunaut. Going out in quest of pine-leaves,—a decoction of which was supposed to be useful in cases of snow-blindness,—this man discovered the fresh tracks of Indians, followed them, and found a camp of Outagamies, or Foxes, from the neighborhood of Green Bay. From them he heard welcome news. They told him that Tonty was safe among the Pottawattamies, and that Hennepin had passed through their country on his return from among the Sioux.[224] ILLINOIS ALLIES. A thaw took place; the snow melted rapidly; the rivers were opened; the blind men began to recover; and launching the canoes which they had dragged after them, the party pursued their way by water. They soon met a band of Illinois. La Salle gave them presents, condoled with them on their losses, and urged them to make peace and alliance with the Miamis. Thus, he said, they could set the Iroquois at defiance; for he himself, with his Frenchmen and his Indian friends, would make his abode among them, supply them with goods, and aid them to defend themselves. They listened, well pleased, promised to carry his message to their countrymen, and furnished him with a large supply of corn.[225] Meanwhile he had rejoined La Forest, whom he now [Pg 288] sent to Michilimackinac to await Tonty, and tell him to remain there till he, La Salle, should arrive. Having thus accomplished the objects of his journey, he returned to Fort Miami, whence he soon after ascended the St. Joseph to the village of the Miami Indians, on the portage, at the head of the Kankakee. Here he found unwelcome guests. These were three Iroquois warriors, who had been for some time in the place, and who, as he was told, had demeaned themselves with the insolence of conquerors, and spoken of the French with the utmost contempt. He hastened to confront them, rebuked and menaced them, and told them that now, when he was present, they dared not repeat the calumnies which they had uttered in his absence. They stood abashed and confounded, and during the following night secretly left the town and fled. The effect was prodigious on the minds of the Miamis, when they saw that La Salle, backed by ten Frenchmen, could command from their arrogant visitors a respect which they, with their hundreds of warriors, had wholly failed to inspire. Here, at the outset, was an augury full of promise for the approaching negotiations. There were other strangers in the town,—a band of eastern Indians, more numerous than those who had wintered at the fort. The greater number were from Rhode Island, including, probably, some of King Philip's warriors; others were from New York, and others again from Virginia. La Salle called [Pg 289] them to a council, promised them a new home in the West under the protection of the Great King, with rich lands, an abundance of game, and French traders to supply them with the goods which they had once received from the English. Let them but help him to make peace between the Miamis and the Illinois, and he would insure for them a future of prosperity and safety. They listened with open ears, and promised their aid in the work of peace. GRAND COUNCIL. On the next morning, the Miamis were called to a grand council. It was held in the lodge of their chief, from which the mats were removed, that the crowd without might hear what was said. La Salle rose and harangued the concourse. Few men were so skilled in the arts of forest rhetoric and diplomacy. After the Indian mode, he was, to follow his chroniclers, "the greatest orator in North America."[226] He began with a gift of tobacco, to clear the brains of his auditory; next, for he had brought a canoe-load of presents to support his eloquence, he gave them cloth to cover their dead, coats to dress them, hatchets to build a grand scaffold in their honor, and beads, bells, and trinkets of all sorts, to decorate their relatives at a grand funeral feast. All this was mere metaphor. The living, while appropriating the gifts to their own use, were pleased at the compliment offered to their dead; and their delight redoubled as the orator proceeded. One of their [Pg 290] great chiefs had lately been killed; and La Salle, after a eulogy of the departed, declared that he would now raise him to life again; that is, that he would assume his name and give support to his squaws and children. This flattering announcement drew forth an outburst of applause; and when, to confirm his words, his attendants placed before them a huge pile of coats, shirts, and hunting-knives, the whole assembly exploded in yelps of admiration. Now came the climax of the harangue, introduced by a further present of six guns:— "He who is my master, and the master of all this country, is a mighty chief, feared by the whole world; but he loves peace, and the words of his lips are for good alone. He is called the King of France, and he is the mightiest among the chiefs beyond the great water. His goodness reaches even to your dead, and his subjects come among you to raise them up to life. But it is his will to preserve the life he has given; it is his will that you should obey his laws, and make no war without the leave of Onontio, who commands in his name at Quebec, and who loves all the nations alike, because such is the will of the Great King. You ought, then, to live at peace with your neighbors, and above all with the Illinois. You have had causes of quarrel with them; but their defeat has avenged you. Though they are still strong, they wish to make peace with you. Be content with the glory of having obliged them to ask for it. You have an interest in preserving them; since, [Pg 291] if the Iroquois destroy them, they will next destroy you. Let us all obey the Great King, and live together in peace, under his protection. Be of my mind, and use these guns that I have given you, not to make war, but only to hunt and to defend yourselves."[227] THE CHIEFS REPLY. So saying, he gave two belts of wampum to confirm his words; and the assembly dissolved. On the following day, the chiefs again convoked it, and made their reply in form. It was all that La Salle could have wished. "The Illinois is our brother, because he is the son of our Father, the Great King." "We make you the master of our beaver and our lands, of our minds and our bodies." "We cannot wonder that our brothers from the East wish to live with you. We should have wished so too, if we had known what a blessing it is to be the children of the Great King." The rest of this auspicious day was passed in feasts and dances, in which La Salle and his Frenchmen all bore part. His new scheme was hopefully begun. It remained to achieve the enterprise, twice defeated, of the discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi,—that vital condition of his triumph, without which all other success was meaningless and vain. To this end he must return to Canada, appease his creditors, and collect his scattered resources. Towards the end of May he set out in canoes from [Pg 292] Fort Miami, and reached Michilimackinac after a prosperous voyage. Here, to his great joy, he found Tonty and Zenobe Membré, who had lately arrived from Green Bay. The meeting was one at which even his stoic nature must have melted. Each had for the other a tale of disaster; but when La Salle recounted the long succession of his reverses, it was with the tranquil tone and cheerful look of one who relates the incidents of an ordinary journey. Membré looked on him with admiration. "Any one else," he says, "would have thrown up his hand and abandoned the enterprise; but, far from this, with a firmness and constancy that never had its equal, I saw him more resolved than ever to continue his work and push forward his discovery."[228] Without loss of time they embarked together for Fort Frontenac, paddled their canoes a thousand miles, and safely reached their destination. Here, in this third beginning of his enterprise, La Salle found himself beset with embarrassments. Not only was he burdened with the fruitless costs of his two former efforts, but the heavy debts which he had incurred in building and maintaining Fort Frontenac had not been wholly paid. The fort and the seigniory were already deeply mortgaged; yet through the influence of Count Frontenac, the assistance of his [Pg 293] secretary Barrois, a consummate man of business, and the support of a wealthy relative, he found means to appease his creditors and even to gain fresh advances. To this end, however, he was forced to part with a portion of his monopolies. Having first made his will at Montreal, in favor of a cousin who had befriended him,[229] he mustered his men, and once more set forth, resolved to trust no more to agents, but to lead on his followers, in a united body, under his own personal command.[230] THE TORONTO PORTAGE. At the beginning of autumn he was at Toronto, where the long and difficult portage to Lake Simcoe detained him a fortnight. He spent a part of it in writing an account of what had lately occurred to a correspondent in France, and he closes his letter thus: "This is all I can tell you this year. I have a hundred things to write, but you could not believe how hard it is to do it among Indians. The canoes and their lading must be got over the portage, and I must speak to them continually and bear all their importunity, or else they will do nothing I want. I hope to write more at leisure next year, and tell you [Pg 294] the end of this business, which I hope will turn out well: for I have M. de Tonty, who is full of zeal; thirty Frenchmen, all good men, without reckoning such as I cannot trust; and more than a hundred Indians, some of them Shawanoes, and others from New England, all of whom know how to use guns." It was October before he reached Lake Huron. Day after day and week after week the heavy-laden canoes crept on along the lonely wilderness shores, by the monotonous ranks of bristling moss-bearded firs; lake and forest, forest and lake; a dreary scene haunted with yet more dreary memories,—disasters, sorrows, and deferred hopes; time, strength, and wealth spent in vain; a ruinous past and a doubtful future; slander, obloquy, and hate. With unmoved heart, the patient voyager held his course, and drew up his canoes at last on the beach at Fort Miami. FOOTNOTES: [224] Relation des Découvertes. Compare Lettre de La Salle (Margry, ii. 144). [225] This seems to have been taken from the secret repositories, or caches, of the ruined town of the Illinois. [226] "En ce genre, il étoit le plus grand orateur de l'Amérique Septentrionale."—Relation des Découvertes. [227] Translated from the Relation, where these councils are reported at great length. [228] Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 208. Tonty, in his memoir of 1693, speaks of the joy of La Salle at the meeting. The Relation, usually very accurate, says, erroneously, that Tonty had gone to Fort Frontenac. La Forest had gone thither, not long before La Salle's arrival. [229] Copie du Testament du deffunt Sr. de la Salle, 11 Ao?t, 1681. The relative was Fran?ois Plet, to whom he was deeply in debt. [230] "On apprendra à la fin de cette année, 1682, le succès de la découverte qu'il étoit résolu d'achever, au plus tard le printemps dernier ou de périr en y travaillant. Tant de traverses et de malheurs toujours arrivés en son absence l'ont fait résoudre à ne se fier plus à personne et à conduire lui-même tout son monde, tout son équipage, et toute son entreprise, de laquelle il espéroit une heureuse conclusion." The above is a part of the closing paragraph of the Relation des Découvertes, so often cited. CHAPTER XX. 1681-1682. SUCCESS OF LA SALLE. His Followers.—The Chicago Portage.—Descent of the Mississippi.—The Lost Hunter.—The Arkansas.—The Taensas.—The Natchez.—Hostility.—The Mouth of the Mississippi.—Louis XIV. proclaimed Sovereign of the Great West. The season was far advanced. On the bare limbs of the forest hung a few withered remnants of its gay autumnal livery; and the smoke crept upward through the sullen November air from the squalid wigwams of La Salle's Abenaki and Mohegan allies. These, his new friends, were savages whose midnight yells had startled the border hamlets of New England; who had danced around Puritan scalps, and whom Puritan imaginations painted as incarnate fiends. La Salle chose eighteen of them, whom he added to the twenty-three Frenchmen who remained with him, some of the rest having deserted and others lagged behind. The Indians insisted on taking their squaws with them. These were ten in number, besides three children; and thus the expedition included fifty-four persons, of whom some were useless, and others a burden. [Pg 296] On the 21st of December, Tonty and Membré set out from Fort Miami with some of the party in six canoes, and crossed to the little river Chicago.[231] La Salle, with the rest of the men, joined them a few days later. It was the dead of winter, and the streams were frozen. They made sledges, placed on them the canoes, the baggage, and a disabled Frenchman; crossed from the Chicago to the northern branch of the Illinois, and filed in a long procession down its frozen course. They reached the site of the great Illinois village, found it tenantless, and continued their journey, still dragging their canoes, till at length they reached open water below Lake Peoria. PRUDHOMME. La Salle had abandoned for a time his original plan of building a vessel for the navigation of the Mississippi. Bitter experience had taught him the difficulty of the attempt, and he resolved to trust to [Pg 297] his canoes alone. They embarked again, floating prosperously down between the leafless forests that flanked the tranquil river; till, on the sixth of February, they issued upon the majestic bosom of the Mississippi. Here, for the time, their progress was stopped; for the river was full of floating ice. La Salle's Indians, too, had lagged behind; but within a week all had arrived, the navigation was once more free, and they resumed their course. Towards evening they saw on their right the mouth of a great river; and the clear current was invaded by the headlong torrent of the Missouri, opaque with mud. They built their camp-fires in the neighboring forest; and at daylight, embarking anew on the dark and mighty stream, drifted swiftly down towards unknown destinies. They passed a deserted town of the Tamaroas; saw, three days after, the mouth of the Ohio;[232] and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on the twenty-fourth of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs.[233] They encamped, and the hunters went out for game. All returned, excepting Pierre Prudhomme; and as the others had seen fresh tracks of Indians, La Salle feared that he was killed. While some of his followers built a small stockade fort on a high bluff[234] by the river, others [Pg 298] ranged the woods in pursuit of the missing hunter. After six days of ceaseless and fruitless search, they met two Chickasaw Indians in the forest; and through them La Salle sent presents and peace-messages to that warlike people, whose villages were a few days' journey distant. Several days later Prudhomme was found, and brought into the camp, half-dead. He had lost his way while hunting; and to console him for his woes La Salle christened the newly built fort with his name, and left him, with a few others, in charge of it. Again they embarked; and with every stage of their adventurous progress the mystery of this vast New World was more and more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of Nature. For several days more they followed the writhings of the great river on its tortuous course through wastes of swamp and cane-brake, till on the thirteenth of March[235] they found themselves wrapped in a thick fog. Neither shore was visible; but they heard on the right the booming of an Indian drum and the shrill outcries of the war-dance. La Salle at once crossed to the opposite side, where, in less than an hour, his men threw up a rude fort of felled trees. [Pg 299] Meanwhile the fog cleared; and from the farther bank the astonished Indians saw the strange visitors at their work. Some of the French advanced to the edge of the water, and beckoned them to come over. Several of them approached, in a wooden canoe, to within the distance of a gun-shot. La Salle displayed the calumet, and sent a Frenchman to meet them. He was well received; and the friendly mood of the Indians being now apparent, the whole party crossed the river. THE ARKANSAS. On landing, they found themselves at a town of the Kappa band of the Arkansas, a people dwelling near the mouth of the river which bears their name. "The whole village," writes Membré to his superior, "came down to the shore to meet us, except the women, who had run off. I cannot tell you the civility and kindness we received from these barbarians, who brought us poles to make huts, supplied us with firewood during the three days we were among them, and took turns in feasting us. But, my Reverend Father, this gives no idea of the good qualities of these savages, who are gay, civil, and free-hearted. The young men, though the most alert and spirited we had seen, are nevertheless so modest that not one of them would take the liberty to enter our hut, but all stood quietly at the door. They are so well formed that we were in admiration at their beauty. We did not lose the value of a pin while we were among them." Various were the dances and ceremonies with which [Pg 300] they entertained the strangers, who, on their part, responded with a solemnity which their hosts would have liked less if they had understood it better. La Salle and Tonty, at the head of their followers, marched to the open area in the midst of the village. Here, to the admiration of the gazing crowd of warriors, women, and children, a cross was raised bearing the arms of France. Membré, in canonicals, sang a hymn; the men shouted Vive le Roi; and La Salle, in the King's name, took formal possession of the country.[236] The friar, not, he flatters himself, without success, labored to expound by signs the mysteries of the Faith; while La Salle, by methods equally satisfactory, drew from the chief an acknowledgement of fealty to Louis XIV.[237] THE TAENSAS. After touching at several other towns of this people, the voyagers resumed their course, guided by two of the Arkansas; passed the sites, since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf; and, about three hundred miles below the Arkansas, stopped by the edge of a swamp on the western side of the [Pg 301] river.[238] Here, as their two guides told them, was the path to the great town of the Taensas. Tonty and Membré were sent to visit it. They and their men shouldered their birch canoe through the swamp, and launched it on a lake which had once formed a portion of the channel of the river. In two hours, they reached the town; and Tonty gazed at it with astonishment. He had seen nothing like it in America,—large square dwellings, built of sun-baked mud mixed with straw, arched over with a dome-shaped roof of canes, and placed in regular order around an open area. Two of them were larger and better than the rest. One was the lodge of the chief; the other was the temple, or house of the Sun. They entered the former, and found a single room, forty feet square, where, in the dim light,—for there was no opening but the door,—the chief sat awaiting them on a sort of bedstead, three of his wives at his side; while sixty old men, wrapped in white cloaks woven of mulberry-bark, formed his divan. When he spoke, his wives howled to do him honor; and the assembled councillors listened with the reverence due to a potentate for whom, at his death, a hundred victims were to be sacrificed. He received the visitors graciously, and joyfully [Pg 302] accepted the gifts which Tonty laid before him.[239] This interview over, the Frenchmen repaired to the temple, wherein were kept the bones of the departed chiefs. In construction, it was much like the royal dwelling. Over it were rude wooden figures, representing three eagles turned towards the east. A strong mud wall surrounded it, planted with stakes, on which were stuck the skulls of enemies sacrificed to the Sun; while before the door was a block of wood, on which lay a large shell surrounded with the braided hair of the victims. The interior was rude as a barn, dimly lighted from the doorway, and full of smoke. There was a structure in the middle which Membré thinks was a kind of altar; and before it burned a perpetual fire, fed with three logs laid end to end, and watched by two old men devoted to this sacred office. There was a mysterious recess, too, which the strangers were forbidden to explore, but which, as Tonty was told, contained the riches of the nation, consisting of pearls from the Gulf, and trinkets obtained, probably through other tribes, from the Spaniards and other Europeans. The chief condescended to visit La Salle at his camp,—a favor which he would by no means have granted, had the visitors been Indians. A master of ceremonies and six attendants preceded him, to clear [Pg 303] the path and prepare the place of meeting. When all was ready, he was seen advancing, clothed in a white robe and preceded by two men bearing white fans, while a third displayed a disk of burnished copper,—doubtless to represent the Sun, his ancestor, or, as others will have it, his elder brother. His aspect was marvellously grave, and he and La Salle met with gestures of ceremonious courtesy. The interview was very friendly; and the chief returned well pleased with the gifts which his entertainer bestowed on him, and which, indeed, had been the principal motive of his visit. THE NATCHEZ. On the next morning, as they descended the river, they saw a wooden canoe full of Indians; and Tonty gave chase. He had nearly overtaken it, when more than a hundred men appeared suddenly on the shore, with bows bent to defend their countrymen. La Salle called out to Tonty to withdraw. He obeyed; and the whole party encamped on the opposite bank. Tonty offered to cross the river with a peace-pipe, and set out accordingly with a small party of men. When he landed, the Indians made signs of friendship by joining their hands,—a proceeding by which Tonty, having but one hand, was somewhat embarrassed; but he directed his men to respond in his stead. La Salle and Membré now joined him, and went with the Indians to their village, three leagues distant. Here they spent the night. "The Sieur de la Salle," writes Membré, "whose very air, engaging manners, tact, and address attract love and [Pg 304] respect alike, produced such an effect on the hearts of these people that they did not know how to treat us well enough."[240] The Indians of this village were the Natchez; and their chief was brother of the great chief, or Sun, of the whole nation. His town was several leagues distant, near the site of the city of Natchez; and thither the French repaired to visit him. They saw what they had already seen among the Taensas,—a religious and political despotism, a privileged caste descended from the sun, a temple, and a sacred fire.[241] [Pg 305] La Salle planted a large cross, with the arms of France attached, in the midst of the town; while the inhabitants looked on with a satisfaction which they would hardly have displayed had they understood the meaning of the act. HOSTILITY. The French next visited the Coroas, at their village two leagues below; and here they found a reception no less auspicious. On the thirty-first of March, as they approached Red River, they passed in the fog a town of the Oumas, and three days later discovered a party of fishermen, in wooden canoes, among the canes along the margin of the water. They fled at sight of the Frenchmen. La Salle sent men to reconnoitre, who, as they struggled through the marsh, were greeted with a shower of arrows; while from the neighboring village of the Quinipissas,[242] invisible behind the cane-brake, they heard the sound of an Indian drum and the whoops of the mustering warriors. La Salle, anxious to keep the peace with all the tribes along the river, recalled his men, and pursued his voyage. A few leagues below they saw a cluster of Indian lodges on the left bank, apparently void of inhabitants. They landed, and found three of them filled with corpses. It was a village of the Tangibao, sacked by their enemies only a few days before.[243] [Pg 306] And now they neared their journey's end. On the sixth of April the river divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that of the west, and Dautray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle passage. As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew fresh with the salt breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the great Gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life. La Salle, in a canoe, coasted the marshy borders of the sea; and then the reunited parties assembled on a spot of dry ground, a short distance above the mouth of the river. Here a column was made ready, bearing the arms of France, and inscribed with the words, "Louis Le Grand, Roy De France Et De Navarre, Règne; Le Neuvième Avril, 1682." The Frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the New England Indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence, they chanted the Te Deum, the Exaudiat, and the Domine salvum fac Regem. Then, amid volleys of musketry and shouts of Vive le Roi, La Salle planted the column in its place, and, standing near it, proclaimed in a loud voice,— POSSESSION TAKEN. "In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible, and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the grace of God King of France and of Navarre, Fourteenth of that name, I, this ninth day of April, one thousand six hundred and eighty-two, in virtue of the commission [Pg 307] of his Majesty, which I hold in my hand, and which may be seen by all whom it may concern, have taken, and do now take, in the name of his Majesty and of his successors to the crown, possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers, within the extent of the said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio, ... as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of the Nadouessioux ... as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of Mexico, and also to the mouth of the River of Palms, upon the assurance we have had from the natives of these countries that we are the first Europeans who have descended or ascended the said river Colbert; hereby protesting against all who may hereafter undertake to invade any or all of these aforesaid countries, peoples, or lands, to the prejudice of the rights of his Majesty, acquired by the consent of the nations dwelling herein. Of which, and of all else that is needful, I hereby take to witness those who hear me, and demand an act of the notary here present."[244] [Pg 308] Shouts of Vive le Roi and volleys of musketry responded to his words. Then a cross was planted beside the column, and a leaden plate buried near it, bearing the arms of France, with a Latin inscription, Ludovicus Magnus regnat. The weather-beaten voyagers joined their voices in the grand hymn of the Vexilla Regis:— "The banners of Heaven's King advance, The mystery of the Cross shines forth;" and renewed shouts of Vive le Roi closed the ceremony. On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains,—a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts, and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the sceptre of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile. FOOTNOTES: [231] La Salle, Relation de la Découverte, 1682, in Thomassy, Géologie Pratique de la Louisiane 9; Lettre du Père Zenobe Membré, 3 Juin, 1682; Ibid., 14 Ao?t, 1682; Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 214; Tonty, 1684, 1693; Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession de la Louisiane, Feuilles détachées d'une Lettre de La Salle (Margry, ii. 164); Récit de Nicolas de la Salle (Ibid., i. 547). The narrative ascribed to Membré and published by Le Clerc is based on the document preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine, entitled Relation de la Découverte de l'Embouchure de la Rivière Mississippi faite par le Sieur de la Salle, l'année passée, 1682. The writer of the narrative has used it very freely, copying the greater part verbatim, with occasional additions of a kind which seem to indicate that he had taken part in the expedition. The Relation de la Découverte, though written in the third person, is the official report of the discovery made by La Salle, or perhaps for him by Membré. [232] Called by Membré the Ouabache (Wabash). [233] La Salle, Relation de la Découverte de l'Embouchure, etc.; Thomassy, 10. Membré gives the same date; but the Procès Verbal makes it the twenty-sixth. [234] Gravier, in his letter of 16 Feb., 1701, says that he encamped near a "great bluff of stone, called Fort Prudhomme, because M. de La Salle, going on his discovery, intrenched himself here with his party, fearing that Prudhomme, who had lost himself in the woods, had been killed by the Indians, and that he himself would be attacked." [235] La Salle, Relation; Thomassy, 11. [236] Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession du Pays des Arkansas, 14 Mars, 1682. [237]The nation of the Akanseas, Alkansas, or Arkansas, dwelt on the west bank of the Mississippi, near the mouth of the Arkansas. They were divided into four tribes, living for the most part in separate villages. Those first visited by La Salle were the Kappas, or Quapaws, a remnant of whom still subsists. The others were the Topingas, or Tongengas; the Torimans; and the Osotouoy, or Sauthouis. According to Charlevoix, who saw them in 1721, they were regarded as the tallest and best-formed Indians in America, and were known as les Beaux Hommes. Gravier says that they once lived on the Ohio. [238] In Tensas County, Louisiana. Tonty's estimates of distance are here much too low. They seem to be founded on observations of latitude, without reckoning the windings of the river. It may interest sportsmen to know that the party killed several large alligators, on their way. Membré is much astonished that such monsters should be born of eggs like chickens. [239] Tonty, 1684, 1693. In the spurious narrative, published in Tonty's name, the account is embellished and exaggerated. Compare Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 227. La Salle's statements in the Relation of 1682 (Thomassy, 12) sustain those of Tonty. [240] Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 232. [241] The Natchez and the Taensas, whose habits and customs were similar, did not, in their social organization, differ radically from other Indians. The same principle of clanship, or totemship, so widely spread, existed in full force among them, combined with their religious ideas, and developed into forms of which no other example, equally distinct, is to be found. (For Indian clanship, see "The Jesuits in North America," Introduction.) Among the Natchez and Taensas, the principal clan formed a ruling caste; and its chiefs had the attributes of demi-gods. As descent was through the female, the chief's son never succeeded him, but the son of one of his sisters; and as she, by the usual totemic law, was forced to marry in another clan,—that is, to marry a common mortal,—her husband, though the destined father of a demi-god, was treated by her as little better than a slave. She might kill him, if he proved unfaithful; but he was forced to submit to her infidelities in silence. The customs of the Natchez have been described by Du Pratz, Le Petit, Penecaut, and others. Charlevoix visited their temple in 1721, and found it in a somewhat shabby condition. At this time, the Taensas were extinct. In 1729 the Natchez, enraged by the arbitrary conduct of a French commandant, massacred the neighboring settlers, and were in consequence expelled from their country and nearly destroyed. A few still survive, incorporated with the Creeks; but they have lost their peculiar customs. [242] In St. Charles County, on the left bank, not far above New Orleans. [243] Hennepin uses this incident, as well as most of those which have preceded it, in making up the story of his pretended voyage to the Gulf. [244] In the passages omitted above, for the sake of brevity, the Ohio is mentioned as being called also the Olighin- (Alleghany) Sipou, and Chukagoua; and La Salle declares that he takes possession of the country with the consent of the nations dwelling in it, of whom he names the Chaouanons (Shawanoes), Kious, or Nadouessious (Sioux), Chikachas (Chickasaws), Motantees (?), Illinois, Mitchigamias, Arkansas, Natchez, and Koroas. This alleged consent is, of course, mere farce. If there could be any doubt as to the meaning of the words of La Salle, as recorded in the Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession de la Louisiane, it would be set at rest by Le Clerc, who says: "Le Sieur de la Salle prit au nom de sa Majesté possession de ce fleuve, de toutes les rivières qui y entrent, et de tous les pays qu'elles arrosent." These words are borrowed from the report of La Salle (see Thomassy, 14). A copy of the original Procès Verbal is before me. It bears the name of Jacques de la Metairie, Notary of Fort Frontenac, who was one of the party. CHAPTER XXI. 1682, 1683. ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS. Louisiana.—Illness of La Salle: his Colony on the Illinois.—Fort St. Louis.—Recall of Frontenac.—Le Febvre de la Barre.—Critical Position of la Salle.—Hostility Of the New Governor.—Triumph of the Adverse Faction.—La Salle sails for France. Louisiana was the name bestowed by La Salle on the new domain of the French crown. The rule of the Bourbons in the West is a memory of the past, but the name of the Great King still survives in a narrow corner of their lost empire. The Louisiana of to-day is but a single State of the American republic. The Louisiana of La Salle stretched from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains; from the Rio Grande and the Gulf to the farthest springs of the Missouri.[245] [Pg 310] La Salle had written his name in history; but his hard-earned success was but the prelude of a harder task. Herculean labors lay before him, if he would realize the schemes with which his brain was pregnant. Bent on accomplishing them, he retraced his course, and urged his canoes upward against the muddy current. The party were famished. They had little to subsist on but the flesh of alligators. When they reached the Quinipissas, who had proved hostile on their way down, they resolved to risk an interview with them, in the hope of obtaining food. The treacherous savages dissembled, brought them corn, and on the following night made an attack upon them, but met with a bloody repulse. The party next revisited the Coroas, and found an unfavorable change in their disposition towards them. They feasted them, indeed, but during the repast surrounded them with an overwhelming force of warriors. The French, however, kept so well on their guard, that their entertainers dared not make an attack, and suffered them to depart unmolested.[246] ILLNESS OF LA SALLE. And now, in a career of unwonted success and anticipated triumph, La Salle was arrested by a foe against which the boldest heart avails nothing. As he ascended the Mississippi, he was seized by a dangerous illness. Unable to proceed, he sent forward [Pg 311] Tonty to Michilimackinac, whence, after despatching news of their discovery to Canada, he was to return to the Illinois. La Salle himself lay helpless at Fort Prudhomme, the palisade work which his men had built at the Chickasaw Bluffs on their way down. Father Zenobe Membré attended him; and at the end of July he was once more in a condition to advance by slow movements towards Fort Miami, which he reached in about a month. In September he rejoined Tonty at Michilimackinac, and in the following month wrote to a friend in France: "Though my discovery is made, and I have descended the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, I cannot send you this year either an account of my journey or a map. On the way back I was attacked by a deadly disease, which kept me in danger of my life for forty days, and left me so weak that I could think of nothing for four months after. I have hardly strength enough now to write my letters, and the season is so far advanced that I cannot detain a single day this canoe which I send expressly to carry them. If I had not feared being forced to winter on the way, I should have tried to get to Quebec to meet the new governor, if it is true that we are to have one; but in my present condition this would be an act of suicide, on account of the bad nourishment I should have all winter in case the snow and ice stopped me on the way. Besides, my presence is absolutely necessary in the place to which I am [Pg 312] going. I pray you, my dear sir, to give me once more all the help you can. I have great enemies, who have succeeded in all they have undertaken. I do not pretend to resist them, but only to justify myself, so that I can pursue by sea the plans I have begun here by land." This was what he had proposed to himself from the first; that is, to abandon the difficult access through Canada, beset with enemies, and open a way to his western domain through the Gulf and the Mississippi. This was the aim of all his toilsome explorations. Could he have accomplished his first intention of building a vessel on the Illinois and descending in her to the Gulf, he would have been able to defray in good measure the costs of the enterprise by means of the furs and buffalo-hides collected on the way and carried in her to France. With a fleet of canoes, this was impossible; and there was nothing to offset the enormous outlay which he and his associates had made. He meant, as we have seen, to found on the banks of the Illinois a colony of French and Indians to answer the double purpose of a bulwark against the Iroquois and a place of storage for the furs of all the western tribes; and he hoped in the following year to secure an outlet for this colony and for all the trade of the valley of the Mississippi, by occupying the mouth of that river with a fort and another colony. This, too, was an essential part of his original design. But for his illness, he would have gone to France [Pg 313] to provide for its execution. Meanwhile, he ordered Tonty to collect as many men as possible, and begin the projected colony on the banks of the Illinois. A report soon after reached him that those pests of the wilderness the Iroquois were about to renew their attacks on the western tribes. This would be fatal to his plans; and, following Tonty to the Illinois, he rejoined him near the site of the great town. "STARVED ROCK." The cliff called "Starved Rock," now pointed out to travellers as the chief natural curiosity of the region, rises, steep on three sides as a castle wall, to the height of a hundred and twenty-five feet above the river. In front, it overhangs the water that washes its base; its western brow looks down on the tops of the forest trees below; and on the east lies a wide gorge or ravine, choked with the mingled foliage of oaks, walnuts, and elms; while in its rocky depths a little brook creeps down to mingle with the river. From the trunk of the stunted cedar that leans forward from the brink, you may drop a plummet into the river below, where the cat-fish and the turtles may plainly be seen gliding over the wrinkled sands of the clear and shallow current. The cliff is accessible only from behind, where a man may climb up, not without difficulty, by a steep and narrow passage. The top is about an acre in extent. Here, in the month of December, La Salle and Tonty began to intrench themselves. They cut away the forest that crowned the rock, built store-houses and dwellings of its remains, [Pg 314]dragged timber up the rugged pathway, and encircled the summit with a palisade.[247] La Salle's Colony LA SALLE'S COLONY. Thus the winter passed, and meanwhile the work [Pg 315] of negotiation went prosperously on. The minds of the Indians had been already prepared. In La Salle they saw their champion against the Iroquois, the standing terror of all this region. They gathered round his stronghold like the timorous peasantry of the middle ages around the rock-built castle of their feudal lord. From the wooden ramparts of St. Louis,—for so he named his fort,—high and inaccessible as an eagle's nest, a strange scene lay before his eye. The broad, flat valley of the Illinois was spread beneath him like a map, bounded in the distance by its low wall of woody hills. The river wound at his feet in devious channels among islands bordered with lofty trees; then, far on the left, flowed calmly westward through the vast meadows, till its glimmering blue ribbon was lost in hazy distance. There had been a time, and that not remote, when these fair meadows were a waste of death and desolation, scathed with fire, and strewn with the ghastly relics of an Iroquois victory. Now all was changed. La Salle looked down from his rock on a concourse of wild human life. Lodges of bark and rushes, or cabins of logs, were clustered on the open plain or along the edges of the bordering forests. Squaws labored, warriors lounged in the sun, naked children whooped and gambolled on the grass. Beyond the river, a mile and a half on the left, the banks were studded once more with the lodges of the Illinois, who, to the number of six thousand, had returned, since their defeat, to this their favorite dwelling-place. [Pg 316] Scattered along the valley, among the adjacent hills, or over the neighboring prairie, were the cantonments of a half-score of other tribes and fragments of tribes, gathered under the protecting ?gis of the French,—Shawanoes from the Ohio, Abenakis from Maine, Miamis from the sources of the Kankakee, with others whose barbarous names are hardly worth the record.[248] Nor were these La Salle's only dependants. [Pg 317] By the terms of his patent, he held seigniorial rights over this wild domain; and he now began to grant it out in parcels to his followers. These, however, were as yet but a score,—a lawless band, trained in forest license, and marrying, as their detractors affirm, a new squaw every day in the week. This was after their lord's departure, for his presence imposed a check on these eccentricities. La Salle, in a memoir addressed to the Minister of the Marine, reports the total number of the Indians around Fort St. Louis at about four thousand warriors, or twenty thousand souls. His diplomacy had [Pg 318] been crowned with a marvellous success,—for which his thanks were due, first to the Iroquois, and the universal terror they inspired; next, to his own address and unwearied energy. His colony had sprung up, as it were, in a night; but might not a night suffice to disperse it? The conditions of maintaining it were twofold: first, he must give efficient aid to his savage colonists against the Iroquois; secondly, he must supply them with French goods in exchange for their furs. The men, arms, and ammunition for their defence, and the goods for trading with them, must be brought from Canada, until a better and surer avenue of supply could be provided through the entrep?t which he meant to establish at the mouth of the Mississippi. Canada was full of his enemies; but as long as Count Frontenac was in power, he was sure of support. Count Frontenac was in power no longer. He had been recalled to France through the intrigues of the party adverse to La Salle; and Le Febvre de la Barre reigned in his stead. LA SALLE AND LA BARRE. La Barre was an old naval officer of rank, advanced to a post for which he proved himself notably unfit. If he was without the arbitrary passions which had been the chief occasion of the recall of his predecessor, he was no less without his energies and his talents. He showed a weakness and an avarice for which his age may have been in some measure answerable. He was no whit less unscrupulous than his predecessor in his secret violation of the royal ordinances [Pg 319] regulating the fur-trade, which it was his duty to enforce. Like Frontenac, he took advantage of his position to carry on an illicit traffic with the Indians; but it was with different associates. The late governor's friends were the new governor's enemies; and La Salle, armed with his monopolies, was the object of his especial jealousy.[249] Meanwhile, La Salle, buried in the western wilderness, remained for the time ignorant of La Barre's disposition towards him, and made an effort to secure his good-will and countenance. He wrote to him from his rock of St. Louis, early in the spring of 1683, expressing the hope that he should have from him the same support as from Count Frontenac; "although," he says, "my enemies will try to influence you against me." His attachment to Frontenac, he pursues, has been the cause of all the late governor's enemies turning against him. He then recounts his voyage down the Mississippi; says that, with twenty-two Frenchmen, he caused all the tribes along the river to ask for peace; and speaks of his right under the royal patent to build forts anywhere along his route, and grant out lands around them, as at Fort Frontenac. [Pg 320] "My losses in my enterprises," he continues, "have exceeded forty thousand crowns. I am now going four hundred leagues south-southwest of this place, to induce the Chickasaws to follow the Shawanoes and other tribes, and settle, like them, at St. Louis. It remained only to settle French colonists here, and this I have already done. I hope you will not detain them as coureurs de bois, when they come down to Montreal to make necessary purchases. I am aware that I have no right to trade with the tribes who descend to Montreal, and I shall not permit such trade to my men; nor have I ever issued licenses to that effect, as my enemies say that I have done."[250] Again, on the fourth of June following, he writes to La Barre, from the Chicago portage, complaining that some of his colonists, going to Montreal for necessary supplies, have been detained by his enemies, and begging that they may be allowed to return, that his enterprise may not be ruined. "The Iroquois," he pursues, "are again invading the country. Last year, the Miamis were so alarmed by them that they abandoned their town and fled; but at my return they came back, and have been induced to settle with the Illinois at my fort of St. Louis. The Iroquois have lately murdered some families of their nation, and they are all in terror again. I am afraid they will take flight, and so prevent the Missouris and [Pg 321] neighboring tribes from coming to settle at St. Louis, as they are about to do. "Some of the Hurons and French tell the Miamis that I am keeping them here for the Iroquois to destroy. I pray that you will let me hear from you, that I may give these people some assurances of protection before they are destroyed in my sight. Do not suffer my men who have come down to the settlements to be longer prevented from returning. There is great need here of reinforcements. The Iroquois, as I have said, have lately entered the country; and a great terror prevails. I have postponed going to Michilimackinac, because, if the Iroquois strike any blow in my absence, the Miamis will think that I am in league with them; whereas, if I and the French stay among them, they will regard us as protectors. But, Monsieur, it is in vain that we risk our lives here, and that I exhaust my means in order to fulfil the intentions of his Majesty, if all my measures are crossed in the settlements below, and if those who go down to bring munitions, without which we cannot defend ourselves, are detained under pretexts trumped up for the occasion. If I am prevented from bringing up men and supplies, as I am allowed to do by the permit of Count Frontenac, then my patent from the King is useless. It would be very hard for us, after having done what was required, even before the time prescribed, and after suffering severe losses, to have our efforts frustrated by obstacles got up designedly. [Pg 322] "I trust that, as it lies with you alone to prevent or to permit the return of the men whom I have sent down, you will not so act as to thwart my plans. A part of the goods which I have sent by them belong not to me, but to the Sieur de Tonty, and are a part of his pay. Others are to buy munitions indispensable for our defence. Do not let my creditors seize them. It is for their advantage that my fort, full as it is of goods, should be held against the enemy. I have only twenty men, with scarcely a hundred pounds of powder; and I cannot long hold the country without more. The Illinois are very capricious and uncertain.... If I had men enough to send out to reconnoitre the enemy, I would have done so before this; but I have not enough. I trust you will put it in my power to obtain more, that this important colony may be saved."[251] While La Salle was thus writing to La Barre, La Barre was writing to Seignelay, the Marine and Colonial Minister, decrying his correspondent's discoveries, and pretending to doubt their reality. "The Iroquois," he adds, "have sworn his [La Salle's] death. The imprudence of this man is about to involve the colony in war."[252] And again he [Pg 323] writes, in the following spring, to say that La Salle was with a score of vagabonds at Green Bay, where he set himself up as a king, pillaged his countrymen, and put them to ransom, exposed the tribes of the West to the incursions of the Iroquois, and all under pretence of a patent from his Majesty, the provisions of which he grossly abused; but, as his privileges would expire on the twelfth of May ensuing, he would then be forced to come to Quebec, where his creditors, to whom he owed more than thirty thousand crowns, were anxiously awaiting him.[253] Finally, when La Barre received the two letters from La Salle, of which the substance is given above, he sent copies of them to the Minister Seignelay, with the following comment: "By the copies of the Sieur de la Salle's letters, you will perceive that his head is turned, and that he has been bold enough to give you intelligence of a false discovery, and that, instead of returning to the colony to learn what the King wishes him to do, he does not come near me, but keeps in the backwoods, five hundred leagues off, with the idea of attracting the inhabitants to him, and building up an imaginary kingdom for himself, by debauching all the bankrupts and idlers of this country. If you will look at the two letters I had from him, you can judge the character of this personage better than I can. Affairs with the [Pg 324] Iroquois are in such a state that I cannot allow him to muster all their enemies together and put himself at their head. All the men who brought me news from him have abandoned him, and say not a word about returning, but sell the furs they have brought as if they were their own; so that he cannot hold his ground much longer."[254] Such calumnies had their effect. The enemies of La Salle had already gained the ear of the King; and he had written in August, from Fontainebleau, to his new governor of Canada: "I am convinced, like you, that the discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless, and that such enterprises ought to be prevented in future, as they tend only to debauch the inhabitants by the hope of gain, and to diminish the revenue from beaver-skins."[255] In order to understand the posture of affairs at this time, it must be remembered that Dutch and English traders of New York were urging on the Iroquois to attack the western tribes, with the object of gaining, through their conquest, the control of the fur-trade of the interior, and diverting it from Montreal to Albany. The scheme was full of danger to Canada, which the loss of the trade would have ruined. La Barre and his associates were greatly alarmed at it. Its complete success would have been fatal to their hopes of profit; but they nevertheless wished it such a measure of success as would ruin their rival, La Salle. Hence, no little satisfaction mingled with [Pg 325] their anxiety when they heard that the Iroquois were again threatening to invade the Miamis and the Illinois; and thus La Barre, whose duty it was strenuously to oppose the intrigue of the English, and use every effort to quiet the ferocious bands whom they were hounding against the Indian allies of the French, was, in fact, but half-hearted in the work. He cut off La Salle from all supplies; detained the men whom he sent for succor; and, at a conference with the Iroquois, told them that they were welcome to plunder and kill him.[256] A NEW ALARM. The old governor, and the unscrupulous ring with which he was associated, now took a step to which he was doubtless emboldened by the tone of the King's letter, in condemnation of La Salle's enterprise. He resolved to seize Fort Frontenac, the property of La Salle, under the pretext that the latter had not fulfilled the conditions of the grant, and had not maintained a sufficient garrison.[257] Two of [Pg 326] his associates, La Chesnaye and Le Ber, armed with an order from him, went up and took possession, despite the remonstrances of La Salle's creditors and mortgagees; lived on La Salle's stores, sold for their own profit, and (it is said) that of La Barre, the provisions sent by the King, and turned in the cattle to pasture on the growing crops. La Forest, La Salle's lieutenant, was told that he might retain the command of the fort if he would join the associates; but he refused, and sailed in the autumn for France.[258] Meanwhile La Salle remained at the Illinois in extreme embarrassment, cut off from supplies, robbed of his men who had gone to seek them, and disabled from fulfilling the pledges he had given to the surrounding Indians. Such was his position, when reports came to Fort St. Louis that the Iroquois were at hand. The Indian hamlets were wild with terror, beseeching him for succor which he had no power to give. Happily, the report proved false. No Iroquois appeared; the threatened attack was postponed, and the summer passed away in peace. But La Salle's position, with the governor his declared enemy, was intolerable and untenable; and there was no resource but in the protection of the court. Early in the autumn, he left Tonty in command of the rock, bade farewell to his savage retainers, and descended to Quebec, intending to sail for France. On his way, he met the Chevalier de Baugis, an [Pg 327] officer of the King's dragoons, commissioned by La Barre to take possession of Fort St. Louis, and bearing letters from the governor ordering La Salle to come to Quebec,—a superfluous command, as he was then on his way thither. He smothered his wrath, and wrote to Tonty to receive De Baugis well. The chevalier and his party proceeded to the Illinois, and took possession of the fort,—De Baugis commanding for the governor, while Tonty remained as representative of La Salle. The two officers could not live in harmony; but, with the return of spring, each found himself in sore need of aid from the other. Towards the end of March the Iroquois attacked their citadel, and besieged it for six days, but at length withdrew discomfited, carrying with them a number of Indian prisoners, most of whom escaped from their clutches.[259] Meanwhile, La Salle had sailed for France. FOOTNOTES: [245] The boundaries are laid down on the great map of Franquelin, made in 1684, and preserved in the Dép?t des Cartes of the Marine. The line runs along the south shore of Lake Erie, and thence follows the heads of the streams flowing into Lake Michigan. It then turns northwest, and is lost in the vast unknown of the now British Territories. On the south, it is drawn by the heads of the streams flowing into the Gulf, as far west as Mobile, after which it follows the shore of the Gulf to a little south of the Rio Grande; then runs west, northwest, and finally north, along the range of the Rocky Mountains. [246] Tonty, 1684, 1693. [247]"Starved Rock" perfectly answers, in every respect, to the indications of the contemporary maps and documents concerning "Le Rocher," the site of La Salle's fort of St. Louis. It is laid down on several contemporary maps, besides the great map of La Salle's discoveries, made in 1684. They all place it on the south side of the river; whereas Buffalo Rock, three miles above, which has been supposed to be the site of the fort, is on the north. The latter is crowned by a plateau of great extent, is but sixty feet high, is accessible at many points, and would require a large force to defend it; whereas La Salle chose "Le Rocher," because a few men could hold it against a multitude. Charlevoix, in 1721, describes both rocks, and says that the top of Buffalo Rock had been occupied by the Miami village, so that it was known as Le Fort des Miamis. This is confirmed by Joutel, who found the Miamis here in 1687. Charlevoix then speaks of "Le Rocher," calling it by that name; says that it is about a league below, on the left or south side, forming a sheer cliff, very high, and looking like a fortress on the border of the river. He saw remains of palisades at the top, which, he thinks, were made by the Illinois (Journal Historique, Let. xxvii.), though his countrymen had occupied it only three years before. "The French reside on the rock (Le Rocher), which is very lofty and impregnable." (Memoir on Western Indians, 1718, in N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 890.) St. Cosme, passing this way in 1699, mentions it as "Le Vieux Fort," and says that it is "a rock about a hundred feet high at the edge of the river, where M. de la Salle built a fort, since abandoned." (Journal de St. Cosme.) Joutel, who was here in 1687, says, "Fort St. Louis is on a steep rock, about two hundred feet high, with the river running at its base." He adds that its only defences were palisades. The true height, as stated above, is about a hundred and twenty-five feet. A traditional interest also attaches to this rock. It is said that, in the Indian wars that followed the assassination of Pontiac, a few years after the cession of Canada, a party of Illinois, assailed by the Pottawattamies, here took refuge, defying attack. At length they were all destroyed by starvation, and hence the name of "Starved Rock." For other proofs concerning this locality, see ante, 239. [248] This singular extemporized colony of La Salle, on the banks of the Illinois, is laid down in detail on the great map of La Salle's discoveries, by Jean Baptiste Franquelin, finished in 1684. There can be no doubt that this part of the work is composed from authentic data. La Salle himself, besides others of his party, came down from the Illinois in the autumn of 1683, and undoubtedly supplied the young engineer with materials. The various Indian villages, or cantonments, are all indicated, with the number of warriors belonging to each, the aggregate corresponding very nearly with that of La Salle's report to the minister. The Illinois, properly so called, are set down at 1,200 warriors; the Miamis, at 1,300; the Shawanoes, at 200; the Ouiatnoens (Weas), at 500; the Peanqhichia (Piankishaw) band, at 150; the Pepikokia, at 160; the Kilatica, at 300; and the Ouabona, at 70,—in all, 3,880 warriors. A few others, probably Abenakis, lived in the fort. The Fort St. Louis is placed, on the map, at the exact site of Starved Rock, and the Illinois village at the place where, as already mentioned (see 239), Indian remains in great quantities are yearly ploughed up. The Shawanoe camp, or village, is placed on the south side of the river, behind the fort. The country is here hilly, broken, and now, as in La Salle's time, covered with wood, which, however, soon ends in the open prairie. A short time since, the remains of a low, irregular earthwork of considerable extent were discovered at the intersection of two ravines, about twenty-four hundred feet behind, or south of, Starved Rock. The earthwork follows the line of the ravines on two sides. On the east, there is an opening, or gateway, leading to the adjacent prairie. The work is very irregular in form, and shows no trace of the civilized engineer. In the stump of an oak-tree upon it, Dr. Paul counted a hundred and sixty rings of annual growth. The village of the Shawanoes (Chaouenons), on Franquelin's map, corresponds with the position of this earthwork. I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. John Paul and Col. D. F. Hitt, the proprietor of Starved Rock, for a plan of these curious remains and a survey of the neighboring district. I must also express my obligations to Mr. W. E. Bowman, photographer at Ottawa, for views of Starved Rock and other features of the neighboring scenery. An interesting relic of the early explorers of this region was found a few years ago at Ottawa, six miles above Starved Rock, in the shape of a small iron gun, buried several feet deep in the drift of the river. It consists of a welded tube of iron, about an inch and a half in calibre, strengthened by a series of thick iron rings, cooled on, after the most ancient as well as the most recent method of making cannon. It is about fourteen inches long, the part near the muzzle having been burst off. The construction is very rude. Small field-pieces, on a similar principle, were used in the fourteenth century. Several of them may be seen at the Musée d'Artillerie at Paris. In the time of Louis XIV., the art of casting cannon was carried to a high degree of perfection. The gun in question may have been made by a French blacksmith on the spot. A far less probable supposition is, that it is a relic of some unrecorded visit of the Spaniards; but the pattern of the piece would have been antiquated, even in the time of De Soto. [249] The royal instructions to La Barre, on his assuming the government, dated at Versailles, 10 May, 1682, require him to give no further permission to make journeys of discovery towards the Sioux and the Mississippi, as his Majesty thinks his subjects better employed in cultivating the land. The letter adds, however, that La Salle is to be allowed to continue his discoveries, if they appear to be useful. The same instructions are repeated in a letter of the Minister of the Marine to the new intendant of Canada, De Meules. [250] Lettre de La Salle à La Barre, Fort St. Louis, 2 Avril, 1683. The above is condensed from passages in the original. [251] Lettre de La Salle à La Barre, Portage de Chicagou, 4 Juin, 1683. The substance of the letter is given above, in a condensed form. A passage is omitted, in which La Salle expresses his belief that his vessel, the "Griffin," had been destroyed, not by Indians, but by the pilot, who, as he thinks, had been induced to sink her, and then, with some of the crew, attempted to join Du Lhut with their plunder, but were captured by Indians on the Mississippi. [252] Lettre de La Barre au Ministre, 14 Nov., 1682. [253] Lettre de La Barre au Ministre, 30 Avril, 1683. La Salle had spent the winter, not at Green Bay, as this slanderous letter declares, but in the Illinois country. [254] Lettre de La Barre au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1683. [255] Lettre du Roy à La Barre, 5 Ao?t, 1683. [256] Mémoire pour rendre compte à Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay de l'état où le Sieur de Lasalle a laissé le Fort Frontenac pendant le temps de sa découverte. On La Barre's conduct, see "Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.," chap. v. [257] La Salle, when at Mackinaw, on his way to Quebec, in 1682, had been recalled to the Illinois, as we have seen, by a threatened Iroquois invasion. There is before me a copy of a letter which he then wrote to Count Frontenac, begging him to send up more soldiers to the fort, at his (La Salle's) expense. Frontenac, being about to sail for France, gave this letter to his newly arrived successor, La Barre, who, far from complying with the request, withdrew La Salle's soldiers already at the fort, and then made its defenceless state a pretext for seizing it. This statement is made in the memoir addressed to Seignelay, before cited. [258] These are the statements of the memorial addressed in La Salle's behalf to the minister, Seignelay. [259] Tonty, 1684, 1693; Lettre de La Barre au Ministre, 5 Juin, 1684; Ibid., 9 Juillet, 1684. CHAPTER XXII. 1680-1683. LA SALLE PAINTED BY HIMSELF. Difficulty of knowing him: his Detractors; his Letters; vexations of his Position; his Unfitness for Trade; risks of Correspondence; his Reported Marriage; alleged Ostentation; motives of Action; charges of Harshness; intrigues against him; unpopular Manners; a Strange Confession; his Strength and his Weakness; contrasts of his Character. We have seen La Salle in his acts. While he crosses the sea, let us look at him in himself. Few men knew him, even of those who saw him most. Reserved and self-contained as he was, with little vivacity or gayety or love of pleasure, he was a sealed book to those about him. His daring energy and endurance were patent to all; but the motive forces that urged him, and the influences that wrought beneath the surface of his character, were hidden where few eyes could pierce. His enemies were free to make their own interpretations, and they did not fail to use the opportunity. The interests arrayed against him were incessantly at work. His men were persuaded to desert and rob him; the Iroquois were told that he was arming [Pg 329] the western tribes against them; the western tribes were told that he was betraying them to the Iroquois; his proceedings were denounced to the court; and continual efforts were made to alienate his associates. They, on their part, sore as they were from disappointment and loss, were in a mood to listen to the aspersions cast upon him; and they pestered him with letters, asking questions, demanding explanations, and dunning him for money. It is through his answers that we are best able to judge him; and at times, by those touches of nature which make the whole world kin, they teach us to know him and to feel for him. CHARGES AGAINST LA SALLE. The main charges against him were that he was a crack-brained schemer, that he was harsh to his men, that he traded where he had no right to trade, and that his discoveries were nothing but a pretence for making money. No accusations appear that touch his integrity or his honor. It was hard to convince those who were always losing by him. A remittance of good dividends would have been his best answer, and would have made any other answer needless; but, instead of bills of exchange, he had nothing to give but excuses and explanations. In the autumn of 1680, he wrote to an associate who had demanded the long-deferred profits: "I have had many misfortunes in the last two years. In the autumn of '78, I lost a vessel by the fault of the pilot; in the next summer, the deserters I told you about robbed me of eight or ten [Pg 330] thousand livres' worth of goods. In the autumn of '79, I lost a vessel worth more than ten thousand crowns; in the next spring, five or six rascals stole the value of five or six thousand livres in goods and beaver-skins, at the Illinois, when I was absent. Two other men of mine, carrying furs worth four or five thousand livres, were killed or drowned in the St. Lawrence, and the furs were lost. Another robbed me of three thousand livres in beaver-skins stored at Michilimackinac. This last spring, I lost about seventeen hundred livres' worth of goods by the upsetting of a canoe. Last winter, the fort and buildings at Niagara were burned by the fault of the commander; and in the spring the deserters, who passed that way, seized a part of the property that remained, and escaped to New York. All this does not discourage me in the least, and will only defer for a year or two the returns of profit which you ask for this year. These losses are no more my fault than the loss of the ship 'St. Joseph' was yours. I cannot be everywhere, and cannot help making use of the people of the country." He begs his correspondent to send out an agent of his own. "He need not be very savant, but he must be faithful, patient of labor, and fond neither of gambling, women, nor good cheer; for he will find none of these with me. Trusting in what he will write you, you may close your ears to what priests and Jesuits tell you. VEXATIONS OF HIS POSITION. "After having put matters in good trim for trade I [Pg 331] mean to withdraw, though I think it will be very profitable; for I am disgusted to find that I must always be making excuses, which is a part I cannot play successfully. I am utterly tired of this business; for I see that it is not enough to put property and life in constant peril, but that it requires more pains to answer envy and detraction than to overcome the difficulties inseparable from my undertaking." And he makes a variety of proposals, by which he hopes to get rid of a part of his responsibility to his correspondent. He begs him again to send out a confidential agent, saying that for his part he does not want to have any account to render, except that which he owes to the court, of his discoveries. He adds, strangely enough for a man burdened with such liabilities, "I have neither the habit nor the inclination to keep books, nor have I anybody with me who knows how." He says to another correspondent, "I think, like you, that partnerships in business are dangerous, on account of the little practice I have in these matters." It is not surprising that he wanted to leave his associates to manage business for themselves: "You know that this trade is good; and with a trusty agent to conduct it for you, you run no risk. As for me, I will keep the charge of the forts, the command of posts and of men, the management of Indians and Frenchmen, and the establishment of the colony, which will remain my property, leaving your agent and mine to [Pg 332] look after our interests, and drawing my half without having any hand in what belongs to you." La Salle was a very indifferent trader; and his heart was not in the commercial part of his enterprise. He aimed at achievement, and thirsted after greatness. His ambition was to found another France in the West; and if he meant to govern it also,—as without doubt he did,—it is not a matter of wonder or of blame. His misfortune was, that, in the pursuit of a great design, he was drawn into complications of business with which he was ill fitted to grapple. He had not the instinct of the successful merchant. He dared too much, and often dared unwisely; attempted more than he could grasp, and forgot, in his sanguine anticipations, to reckon with enormous and incalculable risks. Except in the narrative parts, his letters are rambling and unconnected,—which is natural enough, written, as they were, at odd moments, by camp-fires and among Indians. The style is crude; and being well aware of this, he disliked writing, especially as the risk was extreme that his letters would miss their destination. "There is too little good faith in this country, and too many people on the watch, for me to trust anybody with what I wish to send you. Even sealed letters are not too safe. Not only are they liable to be lost or stopped by the way, but even such as escape the curiosity of spies lie at Montreal, waiting a long time to be forwarded." HIS LETTERS INTERCEPTED. Again, he writes: "I cannot pardon myself for the [Pg 333] stoppage of my letters, though I made every effort to make them reach you. I wrote to you in '79 (in August), and sent my letters to M. de la Forest, who gave them in good faith to my brother. I don't know what he has done with them. I wrote you another, by the vessel that was lost last year. I sent two canoes, by two different routes; but the wind and the rain were so furious that they wintered on the way, and I found my letters at the fort on my return. I now send you one of them, which I wrote last year to M. Thouret, in which you will find a full account of what passed, from the time when we left the outlet of Lake Erie down to the sixteenth of August, 1680. What preceded was told at full length in the letters my brother has seen fit to intercept." This brother was the Sulpitian priest, Jean Cavelier, who had been persuaded that La Salle's enterprise would be ruinous, and therefore set himself sometimes to stop it altogether, and sometimes to manage it in his own way. "His conduct towards me," says La Salle, "has always been so strange, through the small love he bears me, that it was clear gain for me when he went away; since while he stayed he did nothing but cross all my plans, which I was forced to change every moment to suit his caprice." There was one point on which the interference of his brother and of his correspondents was peculiarly annoying. They thought it for their interest that he [Pg 334] should remain a single man; whereas, it seems that his devotion to his purpose was not so engrossing as to exclude more tender subjects. He writes:— "I am told that you have been uneasy about my pretended marriage. I had not thought about it at that time; and I shall not make any engagement of the sort till I have given you reason to be satisfied with me. It is a little extraordinary that I must render account of a matter which is free to all the world. "In fine, Monsieur, it is only as an earnest of something more substantial that I write to you so much at length. I do not doubt that you will hereafter change the ideas about me which some persons wish to give you, and that you will be relieved of the anxiety which all that has happened reasonably causes you. I have written this letter at more than twenty different times; and I am more than a hundred and fifty leagues from where I began it. I have still two hundred more to get over, before reaching the Illinois. I am taking with me twenty-five men to the relief of the six or seven who remain with the Sieur de Tonty." This was the journey which ended in that scene of horror at the ruined town of the Illinois. CHARGED WITH OSTENTATION. To the same correspondent, pressing him for dividends, he says: "You repeat continually that you will not be satisfied unless I make you large returns of profit. Though I have reason to thank you for what you have done for this enterprise, it seems to [Pg 335] me that I have done still more, since I have put everything at stake; and it would be hard to reproach me either with foolish outlays or with the ostentation which is falsely imputed to me. Let my accusers explain what they mean. Since I have been in this country, I have had neither servants nor clothes nor fare which did not savor more of meanness than of ostentation; and the moment I see that there is anything with which either you or the court find fault, I assure you that I will give it up,—for the life I am leading has no other attraction for me than that of honor; and the more danger and difficulty there is in undertakings of this sort, the more worthy of honor I think they are." His career attests the sincerity of these words. They are a momentary betrayal of the deep enthusiasm of character which may be read in his life, but to which he rarely allowed the faintest expression. "Above all," he continues, "if you want me to keep on, do not compel me to reply to all the questions and fancies of priests and Jesuits. They have more leisure than I; and I am not subtle enough to anticipate all their empty stories. I could easily give you the information you ask; but I have a right to expect that you will not believe all you hear, nor require me to prove to you that I am not a madman. That is the first point to which you should have attended, before having business with me; and in our long acquaintance, either you must have found me out, or else I must have had long intervals of sanity." [Pg 336] To another correspondent he defends himself against the charge of harshness to his men: "The facility I am said to want is out of place with this sort of people, who are libertines for the most part; and to indulge them means to tolerate blasphemy, drunkenness, lewdness, and a license incompatible with any kind of order. It will not be found that I have in any case whatever treated any man harshly, except for blasphemies and other such crimes openly committed. These I cannot tolerate: first, because such compliance would give grounds for another accusation, much more just; secondly, because, if I allowed such disorders to become habitual, it would be hard to keep the men in subordination and obedience, as regards executing the work I am commissioned to do; thirdly, because the debaucheries, too common with this rabble, are the source of endless delays and frequent thieving; and, finally, because I am a Christian, and do not want to bear the burden of their crimes. INTRIGUES AGAINST HIM. "What is said about my servants has not even a show of truth; for I use no servants here, and all my men are on the same footing. I grant that as those who have lived with me are steadier and give me no reason to complain of their behavior, I treat them as gently as I should treat the others if they resembled them, and as those who were formerly my servants are the only ones I can trust, I speak more openly to them than to the rest, who are generally spies of my enemies. The twenty-two men who deserted and [Pg 337] robbed me are not to be believed on their word, deserters and thieves as they are. They are ready enough to find some pretext for their crime; and it needs as unjust a judge as the intendant to prompt such rascals to enter complaints against a person to whom he had given a warrant to arrest them. But, to show the falsity of these charges, Martin Chartier, who was one of those who excited the rest to do as they did, was never with me at all; and the rest had made their plot before seeing me." And he proceeds to relate, in great detail, a variety of circumstances to prove that his men had been instigated first to desert, and then to slander him; adding, "Those who remain with me are the first I had, and they have not left me for six years." "I have a hundred other proofs of the bad counsel given to these deserters, and will produce them when wanted; but as they themselves are the only witnesses of the severity they complain of, while the witnesses of their crimes are unimpeachable, why am I refused the justice I demand, and why is their secret escape connived at? "I do not know what you mean by having popular manners. There is nothing special in my food, clothing, or lodging, which are all the same for me as for my men. How can it be that I do not talk with them? I have no other company. M. de Tonty has often found fault with me because I stopped too often to talk with them. You do not know the men one must employ here, when you [Pg 338] exhort me to make merry with them. They are incapable of that; for they are never pleased, unless one gives free rein to their drunkenness and other vices. If that is what you call having popular manners, neither honor nor inclination would let me stoop to gain their favor in a way so disreputable: and, besides, the consequences would be dangerous, and they would have the same contempt for me that they have for all who treat them in this fashion. "You write me that even my friends say that I am not a man of popular manners. I do not know what friends they are. I know of none in this country. To all appearance they are enemies, more subtle and secret than the rest. I make no exceptions; for I know that those who seem to give me support do not do it out of love for me, but because they are in some sort bound in honor, and that in their hearts they think I have dealt ill with them. M. Plet will tell you what he has heard about it himself, and the reasons they have to give.[260] I have seen it for a long time; and these secret stabs they give me show it very plainly. After that, it is not surprising that I open my mind to nobody, and distrust everybody. I have reasons that I cannot write. "For the rest, Monsieur, pray be well assured that the information you are so good as to give me is [Pg 339] received with a gratitude equal to the genuine friendship from which it proceeds; and, however unjust are the charges made against me, I should be much more unjust myself if I did not feel that I have as much reason to thank you for telling me of them as I have to complain of others for inventing them. HIS MANNERS. "As for what you say about my look and manner, I myself confess that you are not far from right. But naturam expellas; and if I am wanting in expansiveness and show of feeling towards those with whom I associate, it is only through a timidity which is natural to me, and which has made me leave various employments, where without it I could have succeeded. But as I judged myself ill-fitted for them on account of this defect, I have chosen a life more suited to my solitary disposition; which, nevertheless, does not make me harsh to my people, though, joined to a life among savages, it makes me, perhaps, less polished and complaisant than the atmosphere of Paris requires. I well believe that there is self-love in this; and that, knowing how little I am accustomed to a more polite life, the fear of making mistakes makes me more reserved than I like to be. So I rarely expose myself to conversation with those in whose company I am afraid of making blunders, and can hardly help making them. Abbé Renaudot knows with what repugnance I had the honor to appear before Monseigneur de Conti; and sometimes it took me a week to make up my mind to go to the audience,—that is, when I had time to think about [Pg 340] myself, and was not driven by pressing business. It is much the same with letters, which I never write except when pushed to it, and for the same reason. It is a defect of which I shall never rid myself as long as I live, often as it spites me against myself, and often as I quarrel with myself about it." HIS STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. Here is a strange confession for a man like La Salle. Without doubt, the timidity of which he accuses himself had some of its roots in pride; but not the less was his pride vexed and humbled by it. It is surprising that, being what he was, he could have brought himself to such an avowal under any circumstances or any pressure of distress. Shyness; a morbid fear of committing himself; and incapacity to express, and much more to simulate, feeling,—a trait sometimes seen in those with whom feeling is most deep,—are strange ingredients in the character of a man who had grappled so dauntlessly with life on its harshest and rudest side. They were deplorable defects for one in his position. He lacked that sympathetic power, the inestimable gift of the true leader of men, in which lies the difference between a willing and a constrained obedience. This solitary being, hiding his shyness under a cold reserve, could rouse no enthusiasm in his followers. He lived in the purpose which he had made a part of himself, nursed his plans in secret, and seldom asked or accepted advice. He trusted himself, and learned more and more to trust no others. One may fairly infer that distrust was natural to him; but the [Pg 341] inference may possibly be wrong. Bitter experience had schooled him to it; for he lived among snares, pitfalls, and intriguing enemies. He began to doubt even the associates who, under representations he had made them in perfect good faith, had staked their money on his enterprise, and lost it, or were likely to lose it. They pursued him with advice and complaint, and half believed that he was what his maligners called him,—a visionary or a madman. It galled him that they had suffered for their trust in him, and that they had repented their trust. His lonely and shadowed nature needed the mellowing sunshine of success, and his whole life was a fight with adversity. All that appears to the eye is his intrepid conflict with obstacles without; but this, perhaps, was no more arduous than the invisible and silent strife of a nature at war with itself,—the pride, aspiration, and bold energy that lay at the base of his character battling against the superficial weakness that mortified and angered him. In such a man, the effect of such an infirmity is to concentrate and intensify the force within. In one form or another, discordant natures are common enough; but very rarely is the antagonism so irreconcilable as it was in him. And the greater the antagonism, the greater the pain. There are those in whom the sort of timidity from which he suffered is matched with no quality that strongly revolts against it. These gentle natures may at least have peace, but for him there was no peace. [Pg 342] Cavelier de La Salle stands in history like a statue cast in iron; but his own unwilling pen betrays the man, and reveals in the stern, sad figure an object of human interest and pity.[261] FOOTNOTES: [260] His cousin, Fran?ois Plet, was in Canada in 1680, where, with La Salle's approval, he carried on the trade of Fort Frontenac, in order to indemnify himself for money advanced. La Salle always speaks of him with esteem and gratitude. [261] The following is the character of La Salle, as drawn by his friend, Abbé Bernou, in a memorial to the minister Seignelay: "Il est irréprochable dans ses m?urs, réglé dans sa conduite, et qui veut de l'ordre parmy ses gens. Il est savant, judicieux, politique, vigilant, infatigable, sobre, et intrépide. Il entend suffisament l'architecture civile, militaire, et navale ainsy que l'agriculture; il parle ou entend quatre ou cinq langues des Sauvages, et a beaucoup de facilité pour apprendre les autres. Il s?ait toutes leurs manières et obtient d'eux tout ce qu'il veut par son adresse, par son éloquence, et parce qu'il est beaucoup estimé d'eux. Dans ses voyages il ne fait pas meilleure chère que le moindre de ses gens et se donne plus de peine que pas un pour les encourager, et il y a lieu de croire qu'avec la protection de Monseigneur il fondera des colonies plus considérables que toutes celles que les Fran?ois ont établies jusqu'à présent."—Mémoire pour Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay, 1682 (Margry, ii. 277). The extracts given in the foregoing chapter are from La Salle's long letters of 29 Sept., 1680, and 22 Aug., 1682 (1681?). Both are printed in the second volume of the Margry collection, and the originals of both are in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The latter seems to have been written to La Salle's friend, Abbé Bernou; and the former, to a certain M. Thouret. CHAPTER XXIII. 1684. A NEW ENTERPRISE. La Salle at Court: his Proposals.—Occupation of Louisiana.—Invasion of Mexico.—Royal Favor.—Preparation.—A Divided Command.—Beaujeu and La Salle.—Mental Condition of La Salle: his Farewell to his Mother. When La Salle reached Paris, he went to his old lodgings in Rue de la Truanderie, and, it is likely enough, thought for an instant of the adventures and vicissitudes he had passed since he occupied them before. Another ordeal awaited him. He must confront, not painted savages with tomahawk and knife, but—what he shrank from more—the courtly throngs that still live and move in the pages of Sévigné and Saint-Simon. The news of his discovery and the rumor of his schemes were the talk of a moment among the courtiers, and then were forgotten. It was not so with their master. La Salle's friends and patrons did not fail him. A student and a recluse in his youth, and a backwoodsman in his manhood, he had what was to him the formidable honor of an interview with royalty itself, and stood with such philosophy [Pg 344] as he could command before the gilded arm-chair, where, majestic and awful, the power of France sat embodied. The King listened to all he said; but the results of the interview were kept so secret that it was rumored in the ante-chambers that his proposals had been rejected.[262] On the contrary, they had met with more than favor. The moment was opportune for La Salle. The King had long been irritated against the Spaniards, because they not only excluded his subjects from their American ports, but forbade them to enter the Gulf of Mexico. Certain Frenchmen who had sailed on this forbidden sea had been seized and imprisoned; and more recently a small vessel of the royal navy had been captured for the same offence. This had drawn from the King a declaration that every sea should be free to all his subjects; and Count d'Estrées was sent with a squadron to the Gulf, to exact satisfaction of the Spaniards, or fight them if they refused it.[263] This was in time of peace. War had since arisen between the two crowns, and brought with it the opportunity of settling the question forever. In order to do so, the minister Seignelay, like his father Colbert, proposed to establish a French port on the Gulf, as a permanent menace to the Spaniards and a basis of future [Pg 345] conquest. It was in view of this plan that La Salle's past enterprises had been favored; and the proposals he now made were in perfect accord with it. LA SALLE'S PROPOSALS. These proposals were set forth in two memorials. The first of them states that the late Monseigneur Colbert deemed it important for the service of his Majesty to discover a port in the Gulf of Mexico; that to this end the memorialist, La Salle, made five journeys of upwards of five thousand leagues, in great part on foot; and traversed more than six hundred leagues of unknown country, among savages and cannibals, at the cost of a hundred and fifty thousand francs. He now proposes to return by way of the Gulf of Mexico and the mouth of the Mississippi to the countries he has discovered, whence great benefits may be expected: first, the cause of God may be advanced by the preaching of the gospel to many Indian tribes; and, secondly, great conquests may be effected for the glory of the King, by the seizure of provinces rich in silver mines, and defended only by a few indolent and effeminate Spaniards. The Sieur de la Salle, pursues the memorial, binds himself to be ready for the accomplishment of this enterprise within one year after his arrival on the spot; and he asks for this purpose only one vessel and two hundred men, with their arms, munitions, pay, and maintenance. When Monseigneur shall direct him, he will give the details of what he proposes. The memorial then describes the boundless extent, the fertility and [Pg 346] resources of the country watered by the river Colbert, or Mississippi; the necessity of guarding it against foreigners, who will be eager to seize it now that La Salle's discovery has made it known; and the ease with which it may be defended by one or two forts at a proper distance above its mouth, which would form the key to an interior region eight hundred leagues in extent. "Should foreigners anticipate us," he adds, "they will complete the ruin of New France, which they already hem in by their establishments of Virginia, Pennsylvania, New England, and Hudson's Bay."[264] The second memorial is more explicit. The place, it says, which the Sieur de la Salle proposes to fortify, is on the river Colbert, or Mississippi, sixty leagues above its mouth, where the soil is very fertile, the climate very mild, and whence we, the French, may control the continent,—since, the river being narrow, we could defend ourselves by means of fire-ships against a hostile fleet, while the position is excellent both for attacking an enemy or retreating in case of need. The neighboring Indians detest the Spaniards, but love the French, having been won over by the kindness of the Sieur de la Salle. We could form of them an army of more than fifteen thousand savages, who, supported by the French and Abenakis, followers of the Sieur de la Salle, could easily subdue the province of New Biscay (the most northern province of Mexico), where there are but [Pg 347] four hundred Spaniards, more fit to work the mines than to fight. On the north of New Biscay lie vast forests, extending to the river Seignelay[265] (Red River), which is but forty or fifty leagues from the Spanish province. This river affords the means of attacking it to great advantage. In view of these facts, pursues the memorial, the Sieur de la Salle offers, if the war with Spain continues, to undertake this conquest with two hundred men from France. He will take on his way fifty buccaneers at St. Domingo, and direct the four thousand Indian warriors at Fort St. Louis of the Illinois to descend the river and join him. He will separate his force into three divisions, and attack at the same time the centre and the two extremities of the province. To accomplish this great design, he asks only for a vessel of thirty guns, a few cannon for the forts, and power to raise in France two hundred such men as he shall think fit, to be armed, paid, and maintained six months at the King's charge. And the Sieur de la Salle binds himself, if the execution of this plan is prevented for more than three years, by peace with Spain, to refund to his Majesty all the costs of the enterprise, on pain of forfeiting the government of the ports he will have established.[266] [Pg 348] LA SALLES'S PLANS. Such, in brief, was the substance of this singular proposition. And, first, it is to be observed that it is based on a geographical blunder, the nature of which is explained by the map of La Salle's discoveries made in this very year. Here the river Seignelay, or Red River, is represented as running parallel to the northern border of Mexico, and at no great distance from it,—the region now called Texas being almost entirely suppressed. According to the map, New Biscay might be reached from this river in a few days; and, after crossing the intervening forests, the coveted mines of Ste. Barbe, or Santa Barbara, would be within striking distance.[267] That La Salle believed in the possibility of invading the Spanish province of New Biscay from Red River there can be no doubt; neither can it reasonably be doubted that he hoped at some future day to make the attempt; and yet it is incredible that a man in his sober senses could have proposed this scheme with the intention of attempting to execute it at the time and in the manner which he indicates.[268] This memorial bears [Pg 349] some indications of being drawn up in order to produce a certain effect on the minds of the King and his minister. La Salle's immediate necessity was to obtain from them the means for establishing a fort and a colony within the mouth of the Mississippi. This was essential to his own plans; nor did he in the least exaggerate the value of such an establishment to the French nation, and the importance of anticipating other powers in the possession of it. But he thought that he needed a more glittering lure to attract the eyes of Louis and Seignelay; and thus, it may be, he held before them, in a definite and tangible form, the project of Spanish conquest which had haunted his imagination from youth,—trusting that the speedy conclusion of peace, which actually took place, would absolve him from the immediate execution of the scheme, and give him time, with the means placed at his disposal, to mature his plans and prepare for eventual action. Such a procedure may be charged with indirectness; but there is a different explanation, which we shall suggest hereafter, and which implies no such reproach.[269] [Pg 350] Even with this madcap enterprise lopped off, La Salle's scheme of Mississippi trade and colonization, perfectly sound in itself, was too vast for an individual,—above all, for one crippled and crushed with debt. While he grasped one link of the great chain, another, no less essential, escaped from his hand; while he built up a colony on the Mississippi, it was reasonably certain that evil would befall his distant colony of the Illinois. LA BARRE REBUKED. The glittering project which he now unfolded found favor in the eyes of the King and his minister; for both were in the flush of an unparalleled success, and looked in the future, as in the past, for nothing but triumphs. They granted more than the petitioner asked, as indeed they well might, if they expected the accomplishment of all that he proposed [Pg 351] to attempt. La Forest, La Salle's lieutenant, ejected from Fort Frontenac by La Barre, was now at Paris; and he was despatched to Canada, empowered to reoccupy, in La Salle's name, both Fort Frontenac and Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. The King himself wrote to La Barre in a strain that must have sent a cold thrill through the veins of that official. "I hear," he says, "that you have taken possession of Fort Frontenac, the property of the Sieur de la Salle, driven away his men, suffered his land to run to waste, and even told the Iroquois that they might seize him as an enemy of the colony." He adds, that, if this is true, La Barre must make reparation for the wrong, and place all La Salle's property, as well as his men, in the hands of the Sieur de la Forest, "as I am satisfied that Fort Frontenac was not abandoned, as you wrote to me that it had been."[270] Four days later, he wrote to the intendant of Canada, De Meules, to the effect that the bearer, La Forest, is to suffer no impediment, and that La Barre is to surrender to him without reserve all that belongs to La Salle.[271] Armed with this letter, La Forest sailed for Canada.[272] [Pg 352] A chief object of his mission, as it was represented to Seignelay, was, not only to save the colony at the Illinois from being broken up by La Barre, but also to collect La Salle's scattered followers, muster the savage warriors around the rock of St. Louis, and lead the whole down the Mississippi, to co-operate in the attack on New Biscay. If La Salle meant that La Forest should seriously attempt to execute such a scheme, then the charges of his enemies that his brain was turned were better founded than he would have us think.[273] PREPARATION. He had asked for two vessels,[274] and four were given to him. Agents were sent to Rochelle and Rochefort to gather recruits. A hundred soldiers were enrolled, besides mechanics and laborers; and thirty volunteers, [Pg 353] including gentlemen and burghers of condition, joined the expedition. And, as the plan was one no less of colonization than of war, several families embarked for the new land of promise, as well as a number of girls, lured by the prospect of almost certain matrimony. Nor were missionaries wanting. Among them was La Salle's brother, Cavelier, and two other priests of St. Sulpice. Three Récollets were added,—Zenobe Membré, who was then in France, Anastase Douay, and Maxime Le Clerc. The principal vessel was the "Joly," belonging to the royal navy, and carrying thirty-six guns. Another armed vessel of six guns was added, together with a store-ship and a ketch. La Salle had asked for sole command of the expedition, with a subaltern officer, and one or two pilots to sail the vessels as he should direct. Instead of complying, Seignelay gave the command of the vessels to Beaujeu, a captain of the royal navy,—whose authority was restricted to their management at sea, while La Salle was to prescribe the route they were to take, and have entire control of the troops and colonists on land.[275] This arrangement displeased both parties. Beaujeu, an old and experienced officer, was galled that a civilian should be set over him,—and he, too, a burgher lately ennobled; nor was La Salle the man to soothe his ruffled spirit. Detesting a divided command, cold, reserved, and [Pg 354] impenetrable, he would have tried the patience of a less excitable colleague. Beaujeu, on his part, though set to a task which he disliked, seems to have meant to do his duty, and to have been willing at the outset to make the relations between himself and his unwelcome associate as agreeable as possible. Unluckily, La Salle discovered that the wife of Beaujeu was devoted to the Jesuits. We have seen the extreme distrust with which he regarded these guides of his youth, and he seems now to have fancied that Beaujeu was their secret ally. Possibly, he suspected that information of his movements would be given to the Spaniards; more probably, he had undefined fears of adverse machinations. Granting that such existed, it was not his interest to stimulate them by needlessly exasperating the naval commander. His deportment, however, was not conciliating; and Beaujeu, prepared to dislike him, presently lost temper. While the vessels still lay at Rochelle; while all was bustle and preparation; while stores, arms, and munitions were embarking; while boys and vagabonds were enlisting as soldiers for the expedition,—Beaujeu was venting his disgust in long letters to the minister. BEAUJEU AND LA SALLE. "You have ordered me, Monseigneur, to give all possible aid to this undertaking, and I shall do so to the best of my power; but permit me to take great credit to myself, for I find it very hard to submit to the orders of the Sieur de la Salle, whom I believe to be a man of merit, but who has no experience of [Pg 355] war except with savages, and who has no rank, while I have been captain of a ship thirteen years, and have served thirty by sea and land. Besides, Monseigneur, he has told me that in case of his death you have directed that the Sieur de Tonty shall succeed him. This, indeed, is very hard; for, though I am not acquainted with that country, I should be very dull, if, being on the spot, I did not know at the end of a month as much of it as they do. I beg, Monseigneur, that I may at least share the command with them; and that, as regards war, nothing may be done without my knowledge and concurrence,—for, as to their commerce, I neither intend nor desire to know anything about it." Seignelay answered by a rebuff, and told him to make no trouble about the command. This increased his irritation, and he wrote: "In my last letter, Monseigneur, I represented to you the hardship of compelling me to obey M. de la Salle, who has no rank, and never commanded anybody but school-boys; and I begged you at least to divide the command between us. I now, Monseigneur, take the liberty to say that I will obey without repugnance, if you order me to do so, having reflected that there can be no competition between the said Sieur de la Salle and me. "Thus far, he has not told me his plan; and he changes his mind every moment. He is a man so suspicious, and so afraid that one will penetrate his secrets, that I dare not ask him anything. He says [Pg 356] that M. de Parassy, commissary's clerk, with whom he has often quarrelled, is paid by his enemies to defeat his undertaking; and many other things with which I will not trouble you.... "He pretends that I am only to command the sailors, and have no authority over the volunteer officers and the hundred soldiers who are to take passage in the 'Joly;' and that they are not to recognize or obey me in any way during the voyage.... "He has covered the decks with boxes and chests of such prodigious size that neither the cannon nor the capstan can be worked." La Salle drew up a long list of articles, defining the respective rights and functions of himself and Beaujeu, to whom he presented it for signature. Beaujeu demurred at certain military honors demanded by La Salle, saying that if a marshal of France should come on board his ship, he would have none left to offer him. The point was referred to the naval intendant; and the articles of the treaty having been slightly modified, Beaujeu set his name to it. "By this," he says, "you can judge better of the character of M. de la Salle than by all I can say. He is a man who wants smoke [form and ceremony]. I will give him his fill of it, and, perhaps, more than he likes. "I am bound to an unknown country, to seek what is about as hard to find as the philosopher's stone. It vexes me, Monseigneur, that you should [Pg 357] have been involved in a business the success of which is very uncertain. M. de la Salle begins to doubt it himself." While Beaujeu wrote thus to the minister, he was also writing to Cabart de Villermont, one of his friends at Paris, with whom La Salle was also on friendly terms. These letters are lively and entertaining, and by no means suggestive of any secret conspiracy. He might, it is true, have been more reserved in his communications; but he betrays no confidence, for none was placed in him. It is the familiar correspondence of an irritable but not ill-natured veteran, who is placed in an annoying position, and thinks he is making the best of it. La Salle thought that the minister had been too free in communicating the secrets of the expedition to the naval intendant at Rochefort, and through him to Beaujeu. It is hard to see how Beaujeu was to blame for this; but La Salle nevertheless fell into a dispute with him. "He could hardly keep his temper, and used expressions which obliged me to tell him that I cared very little about his affairs, and that the King himself would not speak as he did. He retracted, made excuses, and we parted good friends.... "I do not like his suspiciousness. I think him a good, honest Norman; but Normans are out of fashion. It is one thing to-day, another to-morrow. It seems to me that he is not so sure about his undertaking as he was at Paris. This morning he [Pg 358] came to see me, and told me he had changed his mind, and meant to give a new turn to the business, and go to another coast. He gave very poor reasons, to which I assented, to avoid a quarrel. I thought, by what he said, that he wanted to find a scapegoat to bear the blame, in case his plan does not succeed as he hopes. For the rest, I think him a brave man and a true; and I am persuaded that if this business fails, it will be because he does not know enough, and will not trust us of the profession. As for me, I shall do my best to help him, as I have told you before; and I am delighted to have him keep his secret, so that I shall not have to answer for the result. Pray do not show my letters, for fear of committing me with him. He is too suspicious already; and never was Norman so Norman as he, which is a great hinderance to business." Beaujeu came from the same province and calls himself jocularly un bon gros Normand. His good-nature, however, rapidly gave way as time went on. "Yesterday," he writes, "this Monsieur told me that he meant to go to the Gulf of Mexico. A little while ago, as I said before, he talked about going to Canada. I see nothing certain in it. It is not that I do not believe that all he says is true; but not being of the profession, and not liking to betray his ignorance, he is puzzled what to do. "I shall go straight forward, without regarding a thousand whims and bagatelles. His continual suspicion would drive anybody mad except a Norman [Pg 359] like me; but I shall humor him, as I have always done, even to sailing my ship on dry land, if he likes." AN OPEN QUARREL. A few days later, there was an open quarrel. "M. de la Salle came to me, and said, rather haughtily and in a tone of command, that I must put provisions for three months more on board my vessel. I told him it was impossible, as she had more lading already than anybody ever dared to put in her before. He would not hear reason, but got angry and abused me in good French, and found fault with me because the vessel would not hold his three months' provisions. He said I ought to have told him of it before. 'And how would you have me tell you,' said I, 'when you never tell me what you mean to do?' We had still another quarrel. He asked me where his officers should take their meals. I told him that they might take them where he pleased; for I gave myself no trouble in the matter, having no orders. He answered that they should not mess on bacon, while the rest ate fowls and mutton. I said that if he would send fowls and mutton on board, his people should eat them; but, as for bacon, I had often ate it myself. At this, he went off and complained to M. Dugué that I refused to embark his provisions, and told him that he must live on bacon. I excused him as not knowing how to behave himself, having spent his life among school-boy brats and savages. Nevertheless, I offered to him, his brother, and two of his friends, seats at my table and [Pg 360] the same fare as myself. He answered my civility by an impertinence, saying that he distrusted people who offered so much and seemed so obliging. I could not help telling him that I saw he was brought up in the provinces." This was touching La Salle on a sensitive point. Beaujeu continues: "In fact, you knew him better than I; for I always took him for a gentleman (honnête homme). I see now that he is anything but that. Pray set Abbé Renaudot and M. Morel right about this man, and tell them he is not what they take him for. Adieu. It has struck twelve: the postman is just going." Bad as was the state of things, it soon grew worse. Renaudot wrote to La Salle that Beaujeu was writing to Villermont everything that happened, and that Villermont showed the letters to all his acquaintance. Villermont was a relative of the Jesuit Beschefer; and this was sufficient to suggest some secret machination to the mind of La Salle. Villermont's fault, however, seems to have been simple indiscretion, for which Beaujeu took him sharply to task. "I asked you to burn my letters; and I cannot help saying that I am angry with you, not because you make known my secrets, but because you show letters scrawled in haste, and sent off without being even read over. M. de la Salle not having told me his secret, though M. de Seignelay ordered him to tell me, I am not obliged to keep it, and have as good a right as anybody to make my [Pg 361] conjectures on what I read about it in the Gazette de Hollande. Let Abbé Renaudot glorify M. de la Salle as much as he likes, and make him a Cortez, a Pizarro, or an Almagro,—that is nothing to me; but do not let him speak of me as an obstacle in his hero's way. Let him understand that I know how to execute the orders of the court as well as he.... LA SALLE'S INDISCRETION. "You ask how I get on with M. de la Salle. Don't you know that this man is impenetrable, and that there is no knowing what he thinks of one? He told a person of note whom I will not name that he had suspicions about our correspondence, as well as about Madame de Beaujeu's devotion to the Jesuits. His distrust is incredible. If he sees one of his people speak to the rest, he suspects something, and is gruff with them. He told me himself that he wanted to get rid of M. de Tonty, who is in America." La Salle's claim to exclusive command of the soldiers on board the "Joly" was a source of endless trouble. Beaujeu declared that he would not set sail till officers, soldiers, and volunteers had all sworn to obey him when at sea; at which La Salle had the indiscretion to say, "If I am not master of my soldiers, how can I make him [Beaujeu] do his duty in case he does not want to do it?" Beaujeu says that this affair made a great noise among the officers at Rochefort, and adds: "There are very few people who do not think that his brain is touched. I have spoken to some who have known [Pg 362] him twenty years. They all say that he was always rather visionary." It is difficult not to suspect that the current belief at Rochefort had some foundation; and that the deadly strain of extreme hardship, prolonged anxiety, and alternation of disaster and success, joined to the fever which nearly killed him, had unsettled his judgment and given a morbid development to his natural defects. His universal suspicion, which included even the stanch and faithful Henri de Tonty; his needless provocation of persons whose good-will was necessary to him; his doubts whether he should sail for the Gulf or for Canada, when to sail to Canada would have been to renounce, or expose to almost certain defeat, an enterprise long cherished and definitely planned,—all point to one conclusion. It may be thought that his doubts were feigned, in order to hide his destination to the last moment; but if so, he attempted to blind not only his ill wishers, but his mother, whom he also left in uncertainty as to his route. AN OVERWROUGHT BRAIN. Unless we assume that his scheme of invading Mexico was thrown out as a bait to the King, it is hard to reconcile it with the supposition of mental soundness. To base so critical an attempt on a geographical conjecture, which rested on the slightest possible information, and was in fact a total error; to postpone the perfectly sound plan of securing the mouth of the Mississippi, to a wild project of leading fifteen thousand savages for an unknown distance [Pg 363] through an unknown country to attack an unknown enemy,—was something more than Quixotic daring. The King and the minister saw nothing impracticable in it, for they did not know the country or its inhabitants. They saw no insuperable difficulty in mustering and keeping together fifteen thousand of the most wayward and unstable savages on earth, split into a score and more of tribes, some hostile to each other and some to the French; nor in the problem of feeding such a mob, on a march of hundreds of miles; nor in the plan of drawing four thousand of them from the Illinois, nearly two thousand miles distant, though some of these intended allies had no canoes or other means of transportation, and though, travelling in such numbers, they would infallibly starve on the way to the rendezvous. It is difficult not to see in all this the chimera of an overwrought brain, no longer able to distinguish between the possible and the impossible. Preparation dragged slowly on; the season was growing late; the King grew impatient, and found fault with the naval intendant. Meanwhile, the various members of the expedition had all gathered at Rochelle. Joutel, a fellow-townsman of La Salle, returning to his native Rouen, after sixteen years in the army, found all astir with the new project. His father had been gardener to Henri Cavelier, La Salle's uncle; and being of an adventurous spirit he volunteered for the enterprise, of which he was to become the historian. With La Salle's brother the [Pg 364] priest, and two of his nephews, one of whom was a boy of fourteen, Joutel set out for Rochelle, where all were to embark together for their promised land.[276] A PARTING LETTER La Salle wrote a parting letter to his mother at Rouen:— Rochelle, 18 July, 1684. Madame my Most Honored Mother,— At last, after having waited a long time for a favourable wind, and having had a great many difficulties to overcome, we are setting sail with four vessels, and nearly four hundred men on board. Everybody is well, including little Colin and my nephew. We all have good hope of a happy success. We are not going by way of Canada, but by the Gulf of Mexico. I passionately wish, and so do we all, that the success of this voyage may contribute to your repose and comfort. Assuredly, I shall spare no effort that it may; and I beg you, on your part, to preserve yourself for the love of us. You need not be troubled by the news from Canada, which are nothing but the continuation of the artifices of my enemies. I hope to be as successful against them as I have been thus far, and to embrace you a year hence with all the pleasure that the most grateful of children can feel with so good a mother as you have always been. Pray let this hope, which shall not disappoint you, support you through whatever trials may happen, and be sure that you will always find me with a heart full of the feelings which are due to you. [Pg 365] Madame my Most Honored Mother, from your most humble and most obedient servant and son, De la Salle. My brother, my nephews, and all the others greet you, and take their leave of you. This memorable last farewell has lain for two hundred years among the family papers of the Caveliers.[277] FOOTNOTES: [262] Lettres de l'Abbé Tronson, 8 Avril, 10 Avril, 1684 (Margry, ii. 354). [263] Lettres du Roy et du Ministre sur la Navigation du Golfe du Mexique, 1669-1682 (Margry, iii. 3-14). [264] Mémoire du Sr. de la Salle, pour rendre compte à Monseigneur de Seignelay de la découverte qu'il a faite par l'ordre de sa Majesté. [265] This name, also given to the Illinois, is used to designate Red River on the map of Franquelin, where the forests above mentioned are represented. [266] ] Mémoire du Sr. de la Salle sur l'Entreprise qu'il a proposé à Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay sur une des provinces de Mexique. [267] Both the memorial and the map represent the banks of Red River as inhabited by Indians, called Terliquiquimechi, and known to the Spaniards as Indios bravos, or Indios de guerra. The Spaniards, it is added, were in great fear of them, as they made frequent inroads into Mexico. La Salle's Mexican geography was in all respects confused and erroneous; nor was Seignelay better informed. Indeed, Spanish jealousy placed correct information beyond their reach. [268] While the plan, as proposed in the memorial, was clearly impracticable, the subsequent experience of the French in Texas tended to prove that the tribes of that region could be used with advantage in attacking the Spaniards of Mexico, and that an inroad on a comparatively small scale might have been successfully made with their help. In 1689, Tonty actually made the attempt, as we shall see, but failed, from the desertion of his men. In 1697, the Sieur de Louvigny wrote to the Minister of the Marine, asking to complete La Salle's discoveries, and invade Mexico from Texas. (Lettre de M. de Louvigny, 14 Oct., 1697.) In an unpublished memoir of the year 1700, the seizure of the Mexican mines is given as one of the motives of the colonization of Louisiana. [269] Another scheme, with similar aims, but much more practicable, was at this very time before the court. Count Pe?alossa, a Spanish Creole, born in Peru, had been governor of New Mexico, where he fell into a dispute with the Inquisition, which involved him in the loss of property, and for a time of liberty. Failing to obtain redress in Spain, he renounced his allegiance in disgust, and sought refuge in France, where, in 1682, he first proposed to the King the establishment of a colony of French buccaneers at the mouth of Rio Bravo, on the Gulf of Mexico. In January, 1684, after the war had broken out, he proposed to attack the Spanish town of Panuco, with twelve hundred buccaneers from St. Domingo; then march into the interior, seize the mines, conquer Durango, and occupy New Mexico. It was proposed to combine his plan with that of La Salle; but the latter, who had an interview with him, expressed distrust, and showed characteristic reluctance to accept a colleague. It is extremely probable, however, that his knowledge of Pe?alossa's original proposal had some influence in stimulating him to lay before the court proposals of his own, equally attractive. Peace was concluded before the plans of the Spanish adventurer could be carried into effect. [270] Lettre du Roy à La Barre, Versailles, 10 Avril, 1684. [271] Lettre du Roy à De Meules, Versailles, 14 Avril, 1684. Seignelay wrote to De Meules to the same effect. [272] On La Forest's mission,—Mémoire pour representer à Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay la nécessité d'envoyer le Sr. de la Forest en diligence à la Nouvelle France; Lettre du Roy à La Barre, 14 Avril, 1684; Ibid., 31 Oct., 1684. There is before me a promissory note of La Salle to La Forest, of 5,200 livres, dated at Rochelle, 17 July, 1684. This seems to be pay due to La Forest, who had served as La Salle's officer for nine years. A memorandum is attached, signed by La Salle, to the effect that it is his wish that La Forest reimburse himself, "par préférence," out of any property of his (La Salle's) in France or Canada. [273] The attitude of La Salle, in this matter, is incomprehensible. In July, La Forest was at Rochefort, complaining because La Salle had ordered him to stay in garrison at Fort Frontenac. Beaujeu à Villermont, 10 July, 1684. This means an abandonment of the scheme of leading the warriors at the rock of St. Louis down the Mississippi; but, in the next month, La Salle writes to Seignelay that he is afraid La Barre will use the Iroquois war as a pretext to prevent La Forest from making his journey (to the Illinois), and that in this case he will himself try to go up the Mississippi, and meet the Illinois warriors; so that, in five or six months from the date of the letter, the minister will hear of his departure to attack the Spaniards. (La Salle à Seignelay, Ao?t, 1684.) Either this is sheer folly, or else it is meant to delude the minister. [274] Mémoire de ce qui aura esté accordé au Sieur de la Salle. [275] Lettre au Roy à La Salle, 12 Avril, 1684; Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction au Sieur de Beaujeu, 14 Avril, 1684. [276] Joutel, Journal Historique, 12. [277] The letters of Beaujeu to Seignelay and to Cabart de Villermont, with most of the other papers on which this chapter rests, will be found in Margry, ii. 354-471. This indefatigable investigator has also brought to light a number of letters from a brother officer of Beaujeu, Machaut-Rougemont, written at Rochefort, just after the departure of the expedition from Rochelle, and giving some idea of the views there entertained concerning it. He says: "L'on ne peut pas faire plus d'extravagances que le Sieur de la Salle n'en a fait sur toutes ses prétentions de commandement. Je plains beaucoup le pauvre Beaujeu d'avoir affaire à une humeur si saturnienne.... Je le croy beaucoup visionnaire ... Beaujeu a une sotte commission." CHAPTER XXIV. 1684, 1685. THE VOYAGE. Disputes with Beaujeu.—St. Domingo.—La Salle Attacked with Fever: his Desperate Condition.—The Gulf Of Mexico.—A Vain Search and a Fatal Error. The four ships sailed from Rochelle on the twenty-fourth of July. Four days after, the "Joly" broke her bowsprit, by design as La Salle fancied. They all put back to Rochefort, where the mischief was quickly repaired; and they put to sea again. La Salle, and the chief persons of the expedition, with a crowd of soldiers, artisans, and women, the destined mothers of Louisiana, were all on board the "Joly." Beaujeu wished to touch at Madeira, to replenish his water-casks. La Salle refused, lest by doing so the secret of the enterprise might reach the Spaniards. One Paget, a Huguenot, took up the word in support of Beaujeu. La Salle told him that the affair was none of his; and as Paget persisted with increased warmth and freedom, he demanded of Beaujeu if it was with his consent that a man of no rank spoke to him in that manner. Beaujeu sustained [Pg 367] the Huguenot. "That is enough," returned La Salle, and withdrew into his cabin.[278] This was not the first misunderstanding; nor was it the last. There was incessant chafing between the two commanders; and the sailors of the "Joly" were soon of one mind with their captain. When the ship crossed the tropic, they made ready a tub on deck to baptize the passengers, after the villanous practice of the time; but La Salle refused to permit it, at which they were highly exasperated, having promised themselves a bountiful ransom, in money or liquor, from their victims. "Assuredly," says Joutel, "they would gladly have killed us all." ST. DOMINGO. When, after a wretched voyage of two months the ships reached St. Domingo, a fresh dispute occurred. It had been resolved at a council of officers to stop at Port de Paix; but Beaujeu, on pretext of a fair wind, ran by that place in the night, and cast anchor at Petit Goave, on the other side of the island. La Salle was extremely vexed; for he expected to meet at Port de Paix the Marquis de Saint-Laurent, lieutenant-general of the islands, Bégon the intendant, and De Cussy, governor of La Tortue, who had orders to supply him with provisions and give him all possible aid. The "Joly" was alone: the other vessels had lagged behind. She had more than fifty sick men on [Pg 368] board, and La Salle was of the number. He sent a messenger to Saint-Laurent, Bégon, and Cussy, begging them to come to him; ordered Joutel to get the sick ashore, suffocating as they were in the hot and crowded ship; and caused the soldiers to be landed on a small island in the harbor. Scarcely had the voyagers sung Te Deum for their safe arrival, when two of the lagging vessels appeared, bringing tidings that the third, the ketch "St. Fran?ois," had been taken by Spanish buccaneers. She was laden with provisions, tools, and other necessaries for the colony; and the loss was irreparable. Beaujeu was answerable for it; for had he anchored at Port de Paix, it would not have occurred. The lieutenant-general, with Bégon and Cussy, who presently arrived, plainly spoke their minds to him.[279] ILLNESS OF LA SALLE. La Salle's illness increased. "I was walking with him one day," writes Joutel, "when he was seized of a sudden with such a weakness that he could not stand, and was obliged to lie down on the ground. When he was a little better, I led him to a chamber of a house that the brothers Duhaut had hired. Here we put him to bed, and in the morning he was attacked by a violent fever."[280] "It was so violent that," says another of his shipmates, "his imagination pictured to him things equally terrible and amazing."[281] He lay delirious in the wretched garret, [Pg 369] attended by his brother, and one or two others who stood faithful to him. A goldsmith of the neighborhood, moved at his deplorable condition, offered the use of his house; and Abbé Cavelier had him removed thither. But there was a tavern hard by, and the patient was tormented with daily and nightly riot. At the height of the fever, a party of Beaujeu's sailors spent a night in singing and dancing before the house; and, says Cavelier, "The more we begged them to be quiet, the more noise they made." La Salle lost reason and well-nigh life; but at length his mind resumed its balance, and the violence of the disease abated. A friendly Capucin friar offered him the shelter of his roof; and two of his men supported him thither on foot, giddy with exhaustion and hot with fever. Here he found repose, and was slowly recovering, when some of his attendants rashly told him the loss of the ketch "St. Fran?ois;" and the consequence was a critical return of the disease.[282] There was no one to fill his place. Beaujeu would not; Cavelier could not. Joutel, the gardener's son, was apparently the most trusty man of the company; but the expedition was virtually without a head. The men roamed on shore, and plunged into every excess of debauchery, contracting diseases which eventually killed them. COMPLAINTS OF BEAUJEU. Beaujeu, in the extremity of ill-humor, resumed [Pg 370] his correspondence with Seignelay. "But for the illness of the Sieur de la Salle," he writes, "I could not venture to report to you the progress of our voyage, as I am charged only with the navigation, and he with the secrets; but as his malady has deprived him of the use of his faculties, both of body and mind, I have thought myself obliged to acquaint you with what is passing, and of the condition in which we are." He then declares that the ships freighted by La Salle were so slow that the "Joly" had continually been forced to wait for them, thus doubling the length of the voyage; that he had not had water enough for the passengers, as La Salle had not told him that there were to be any such till the day they came on board; that great numbers were sick, and that he had told La Salle there would be trouble if he filled all the space between decks with his goods, and forced the soldiers and sailors to sleep on deck; that he had told him he would get no provisions at St. Domingo, but that he insisted on stopping; that it had always been so,—that whatever he proposed La Salle would refuse, alleging orders from the King; "and now," pursues the ruffled commander, "everybody is ill; and he himself has a violent fever, as dangerous, the surgeon tells me, to the mind as to the body." The rest of the letter is in the same strain. He says that a day or two after La Salle's illness began, his brother Cavelier came to ask him to take charge [Pg 371] of his affairs; but that he did not wish to meddle with them, especially as nobody knows anything about them, and as La Salle has sold some of the ammunition and provisions; that Cavelier tells him that he thinks his brother keeps no accounts, wishing to hide his affairs from everybody; that he learns from buccaneers that the entrance of the Mississippi is very shallow and difficult, and that this is the worst season for navigating the Gulf; that the Spaniards have in these seas six vessels of from thirty to sixty guns each, besides row-galleys; but that he is not afraid, and will perish, or bring back an account of the Mississippi. "Nevertheless," he adds, "if the Sieur de la Salle dies, I shall pursue a course different from that which he has marked out; for I do not approve his plans." "If," he continues, "you permit me to speak my mind, M. de la Salle ought to have been satisfied with discovering his river, without undertaking to conduct three vessels with troops two thousand leagues through so many different climates, and across seas entirely unknown to him. I grant that he is a man of knowledge, that he has reading, and even some tincture of navigation; but there is so much difference between theory and practice, that a man who has only the former will always be at fault. There is also a great difference between conducting canoes on lakes and along a river, and navigating ships with troops on distant oceans."[283] [Pg 372] While Beaujeu was complaining of La Salle, his followers were deserting him. It was necessary to send them on board ship, and keep them there; for there were French buccaneers at Petit Goave, who painted the promised land in such dismal colors that many of the adventurers completely lost heart. Some, too, were dying. "The air of this place is bad," says Joutel; "so are the fruits; and there are plenty of women worse than either."[284] It was near the end of November before La Salle could resume the voyage. He was told that Beaujeu had said that he would not wait longer for the store-ship "Aimable," and that she might follow as she could.[285] Moreover, La Salle was on ill terms with Aigron, her captain, who had declared that he would have nothing more to do with him.[286] Fearing, therefore, that some mishap might befall her, he resolved to embark in her himself, with his brother Cavelier, Membré, Douay, and others, the trustiest of his followers. On the twenty-fifth they set sail; the "Joly" and the little frigate "Belle" following. They coasted the shore of Cuba, and landed at the Isle of Pines, where La Salle shot an alligator, which the soldiers ate; and the hunter brought in a wild pig, half of which he sent to Beaujeu. Then they advanced to Cape St. Antoine, where bad weather and contrary winds long detained them. A load of [Pg 373] cares oppressed the mind of La Salle, pale and haggard with recent illness, wrapped within his own thoughts, and seeking sympathy from none. A VAIN SEARCH. At length they entered the Gulf of Mexico, that forbidden sea whence by a Spanish decree, dating from the reign of Philip II., all foreigners were excluded on pain of extermination.[287] Not a man on board knew the secrets of its perilous navigation. Cautiously feeling their way, they held a north-westerly course, till on the twenty-eighth of December a sailor at the mast-head of the "Aimable" saw land. La Salle and all the pilots had been led to form an exaggerated idea of the force of the easterly currents; and they therefore supposed themselves near the Bay of Appalache, when, in fact, they were much farther westward. On New Year's Day they anchored three leagues from the shore. La Salle, with the engineer Minet, went to explore it, and found nothing but a vast marshy plain, studded with clumps of rushes. Two days after there was a thick fog, and when at length it cleared, the "Joly" was nowhere to be seen. La Salle in the "Aimable," followed closely by the little frigate "Belle," stood westward along the coast. When at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, he had taken its latitude, but unhappily could not determine its longitude; and now every eye on board was strained to detect in the monotonous lines [Pg 374] of the low shore some tokens of the great river. In fact, they had already passed it. On the sixth of January, a wide opening was descried between two low points of land; and the adjacent sea was discolored with mud. "La Salle," writes his brother Cavelier, "has always thought that this was the Mississippi." To all appearance, it was the entrance of Galveston Bay.[288] But why did he not examine it? Joutel says that his attempts to do so were frustrated by the objections of the pilot of the "Aimable," to which, with a facility very unusual with him, he suffered himself to yield. Cavelier declares, on the other hand, that he would not enter the opening because he was afraid of missing the "Joly." But he might have entered with one of his two vessels, while the other watched outside for the absent ship. From whatever cause, he lay here five or six days, waiting in vain for Beaujeu;[289] till, at last, thinking that he must have passed westward, he resolved to follow. The "Aimable" and the "Belle" again spread their sails, and coasted the shores of Texas. Joutel, with a boat's crew, tried to land; but the sand-bars and breakers repelled him. A party of Indians swam out through the surf, and were taken on board; but La Salle could learn nothing from them, as their language was unknown to him. [Pg 375] Again Joutel tried to land, and again the breakers repelled him. He approached as near as he dared, and saw vast plains and a dim expanse of forest, buffalo running with their heavy gallop along the shore, and deer grazing on the marshy meadows. THE SHORES OF TEXAS. Soon after, he succeeded in landing at a point somewhere between Matagorda Island and Corpus Christi Bay. The aspect of the country was not cheering, with its barren plains, its reedy marshes, its interminable oyster-beds, and broad flats of mud bare at low tide. Joutel and his men sought in vain for fresh water, and after shooting some geese and ducks returned to the "Aimable." Nothing had been seen of Beaujeu and the "Joly;" the coast was trending southward; and La Salle, convinced that he must have passed the missing ship, turned to retrace his course. He had sailed but a few miles when the wind failed, a fog covered the sea, and he was forced to anchor opposite one of the openings into the lagoons north of Mustang Island. At length, on the nineteenth, there came a faint breeze; the mists rolled away before it, and to his great joy he saw the "Joly" approaching. "His joy," says Joutel, "was short." Beaujeu's lieutenant, Aire, came on board to charge him with having caused the separation, and La Salle retorted by throwing the blame on Beaujeu. Then came a debate as to their position. The priest Esmanville was present, and reports that La Salle seemed greatly perplexed. He had more cause for perplexity than [Pg 376] he knew; for in his ignorance of the longitude of the Mississippi, he had sailed more than four hundred miles beyond it. Of this he had not the faintest suspicion. In full sight from his ship lay a reach of those vast lagoons which, separated from the sea by narrow strips of land, line this coast with little interruption from Galveston Bay to the Rio Grande. The idea took possession of him that the Mississippi discharged itself into these lagoons, and thence made its way to the sea through the various openings he had seen along the coast, chief among which was that he had discovered on the sixth, about fifty leagues from the place where he now was.[290] PERPLEXITY OF LA SALLE. Yet he was full of doubt as to what he should do. Four days after rejoining Beaujeu, he wrote him the [Pg 377] strange request to land the troops, that he "might fulfil his commission;" that is, that he might set out against the Spaniards.[291] More than a week passed, a gale had set in, and nothing was done. Then La Salle wrote again, intimating some doubt as to whether he was really at one of the mouths of the Mississippi, and saying that, being sure that he had passed the principal mouth, he was determined to go back to look for it.[292] Meanwhile, Beaujeu was in a state of great irritation. The weather was stormy, and the coast was dangerous. Supplies were scanty; and La Salle's soldiers, still crowded in the "Joly," were consuming the provisions of the ship. Beaujeu gave vent to his annoyance, and La Salle retorted in the same strain. According to Joutel, he urged the naval commander to sail back in search of the river; and Beaujeu refused, unless La Salle should give the soldiers provisions. La Salle, he adds, offered to supply them with rations for fifteen days; and Beaujeu declared this insufficient. There is reason, however, to believe that the request was neither made by the one nor refused by the other so positively as here appears. FOOTNOTES: [278] Lettre (sans nom d'auteur) écrite de St. Domingue, 14 Nov., 1684 (Margry, ii. 492); Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Jean Cavelier sur le Voyage de 1684. Compare Joutel. [279] Mémoire de MM. de Saint-Laurens et Bégon (Margry, ii. 499); Joutel, Journal Historique, 28. [280] Relation de Henri Joutel (Margry, iii. 98). [281] Lettre (sans nom d'auteur), 14 Nov., 1684 (Margry, ii. 496). [282] The above particulars are from the memoir of La Salle's brother, Abbé Cavelier, already cited. [283] Lettre de Beaujeu au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1684. [284] Relation de Henri Joutel (Margry, iii. 105). [285] Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Jean Cavelier. [286] Lettre de Beaujeu au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1684. [287] Letter of Don Luis de Onis to the Secretary of State (American State Papers, xii, 27-31). [288] "La hauteur nous a fait remarquer ... que ce que nous avions vu le sixième janvier estoit en effet la principale entrée de la rivière que nous cherchions."—Lettre de La Salle au Ministre, 4 Mars, 1687. [289] Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Cavelier. [290] "Depuis que nous avions quitté cette rivière qu'il croyoit infailliblement estre le fleuve Colbert [Mississippi] nous avions fait environ 45 lieues ou 50 au plus." (Cavelier, Mémoire.) This, taken in connection with the statement of La Salle that this "principale entrée de la rivière que nous cherchions" was twenty-five or thirty leagues northeast from the entrance of the Bay of St. Louis (Matagorda Bay), shows that it can have been no other than the entrance of Galveston Bay, mistaken by him for the chief outlet of the Mississippi. It is evident that he imagined Galveston Bay to form a part of the chain of lagoons from which it is in fact separated. He speaks of these lagoons as "une espèce de baye fort longue et fort large, dans laquelle le fleuve Colbert se décharge." He adds that on his descent to the mouth of the river in 1682 he had been deceived in supposing that this expanse of salt water, where no shore was in sight, was the open sea. Lettre de La Salle au Ministre, 4 Mars, 1685. Galveston Bay and the mouth of the Mississippi differ little in latitude, though separated by about five and a half degrees of longitude. [291] Lettre de La Salle à Beaujeu, 23 Jan., 1685 (Margry, ii. 526). [292] This letter is dated, "De l'emboucheure d'une rivière que je crois estre une des descharges du Mississipy" (Margry, ii. 528). CHAPTER XXV. 1685. LA SALLE IN TEXAS. A Party of Exploration—Wreck of the "Aimable."—Landing of the Colonists.—A Forlorn Position.—Indian Neighbors.—Friendly Advances of Beaujeu: his Departure.—A Fatal Discovery. Impatience to rid himself of his colleague and to command alone no doubt had its influence on the judgment of La Salle. He presently declared that he would land the soldiers, and send them along shore till they came to the principal outlet of the river. On this, the engineer Minet took up the word,—expressed his doubts as to whether the Mississippi discharged itself into the lagoons at all; represented that even if it did, the soldiers would be exposed to great risks; and gave as his opinion that all should reimbark and continue the search in company. The advice was good, but La Salle resented it as coming from one in whom he recognized no right to give it. "He treated me," complains the engineer, "as if I were the meanest of mankind."[293] [Pg 379] He persisted in his purpose, and sent Joutel and Moranget with a party of soldiers to explore the coast. They made their way northeastward along the shore of Matagorda Island, till they were stopped on the third day by what Joutel calls a river, but which was in fact the entrance of Matagorda Bay. Here they encamped, and tried to make a raft of drift-wood. "The difficulty was," says Joutel, "our great number of men, and the few of them who were fit for anything except eating. As I said before, they had all been caught by force or surprise, so that our company was like Noah's ark, which contained animals of all sorts." Before their raft was finished, they descried to their great joy the ships which had followed them along the coast.[294] LANDING OF LA SALLE. La Salle landed, and announced that here was the western mouth of the Mississippi, and the place to which the King had sent him. He said further that he would land all his men, and bring the "Aimable" and the "Belle" to the safe harborage within. Beaujeu remonstrated, alleging the shallowness of the water and the force of the currents; but his remonstrance was vain.[295] The Bay of St. Louis, now Matagorda Bay, forms a broad and sheltered harbor, accessible from the sea by a narrow passage, obstructed by sand-bars and by the small island now called Pelican Island. Boats [Pg 380] were sent to sound and buoy out the channel, and this was successfully accomplished on the sixteenth of February. The "Aimable" was ordered to enter; and, on the twentieth, she weighed anchor. La Salle was on shore watching her. A party of men, at a little distance, were cutting down a tree to make a canoe. Suddenly some of them ran towards him with terrified faces, crying out that they had been set upon by a troop of Indians, who had seized their companions and carried them off. La Salle ordered those about him to take their arms, and at once set out in pursuit. He overtook the Indians, and opened a parley with them; but when he wished to reclaim his men, he discovered that they had been led away during the conference to the Indian camp, a league and a half distant. Among them was one of his lieutenants, the young Marquis de la Sablonnière. He was deeply vexed, for the moment was critical; but the men must be recovered, and he led his followers in haste towards the camp. Yet he could not refrain from turning a moment to watch the "Aimable," as she neared the shoals; and he remarked with deep anxiety to Joutel, who was with him, that if she held that course she would soon be aground. WRECK OF THE "AIMABLE". They hurried on till they saw the Indian huts. About fifty of them, oven-shaped, and covered with mats and hides, were clustered on a rising ground, with their inmates gathered among and around them. As the French entered the camp, there was the report [Pg 381] of a cannon from the seaward. The startled savages dropped flat with terror. A different fear seized La Salle, for he knew that the shot was a signal of disaster. Looking back, he saw the "Aimable" furling her sails, and his heart sank with the conviction that she had struck upon the reef. Smothering his distress,—she was laden with all the stores of the colony,—he pressed forward among the filthy wigwams, whose astonished inmates swarmed about the band of armed strangers, staring between curiosity and fear. La Salle knew those with whom he was dealing, and, without ceremony, entered the chief's lodge with his followers. The crowd closed around them, naked men and half-naked women, described by Joutel as of singular ugliness. They gave buffalo meat and dried porpoise to the unexpected guests, but La Salle, racked with anxiety, hastened to close the interview; and having without difficulty recovered the kidnapped men, he returned to the beach, leaving with the Indians, as usual, an impression of good-will and respect. When he reached the shore, he saw his worst fears realized. The "Aimable" lay careened over on the reef, hopelessly aground. Little remained but to endure the calamity with firmness, and to save, as far as might be, the vessel's cargo. This was no easy task. The boat which hung at her stern had been stove in,—it is said, by design. Beaujeu sent a boat from the "Joly," and one or more Indian pirogues were procured. La Salle urged on his men [Pg 382] with stern and patient energy, and a quantity of gunpowder and flour was safely landed. But now the wind blew fresh from the sea; the waves began to rise; a storm came on; the vessel, rocking to and fro on the sand-bar, opened along her side, and the ravenous waves were strewn with her treasures. When the confusion was at its height, a troop of Indians came down to the shore, greedy for plunder. The drum was beat; the men were called to arms; La Salle set his trustiest followers to guard the gunpowder, in fear, not of the Indians alone, but of his own countrymen. On that lamentable night, the sentinels walked their rounds through the dreary bivouac among the casks, bales, and boxes which the sea had yielded up; and here, too, their fate-hunted chief held his drearier vigil, encompassed with treachery, darkness, and the storm. Not only La Salle, but Joutel and others of his party, believed that the wreck of the "Aimable" was intentional. Aigron, who commanded her, had disobeyed orders and disregarded signals. Though he had been directed to tow the vessel through the channel, he went in under sail; and though little else was saved from the wreck, his personal property, including even some preserved fruits, was all landed safely. He had long been on ill terms with La Salle.[296] [Pg 383] All La Salle's company were now encamped on the sands at the left side of the inlet where the "Aimable" was wrecked.[297] "They were all," says the engineer Minet, "sick with nausea and dysentery. Five or six died every day, in consequence of brackish water and bad food. There was no grass, but plenty of rushes and plenty of oysters. There was nothing to make ovens, so that they had to eat flour saved from the wreck, boiled into messes of porridge with this brackish water. Along the shore were quantities of uprooted trees and rotten logs, thrown up by the sea and the lagoon." Of these, and fragments of the wreck, they made a sort of rampart to protect their camp; and here, among tents and hovels, bales, boxes, casks, spars, dismounted cannon, and pens for fowls and swine, were gathered the dejected men and homesick women who were to seize New Biscay, and hold for France a region large as half Europe. The Spaniards, whom they were to conquer, were they [Pg 384] knew not where. They knew not where they were themselves; and for the fifteen thousand Indian allies who were to have joined them, they found two hundred squalid savages, more like enemies than friends. In fact, it was soon made plain that these their neighbors wished them no good. A few days after the wreck, the prairie was seen on fire. As the smoke and flame rolled towards them before the wind, La Salle caused all the grass about the camp to be cut and carried away, and especially around the spot where the powder was placed. The danger was averted; but it soon became known that the Indians had stolen a number of blankets and other articles, and carried them to their wigwams. Unwilling to leave his camp, La Salle sent his nephew Moranget and several other volunteers, with a party of men, to reclaim them. They went up the bay in a boat, landed at the Indian camp, and, with more mettle than discretion, marched into it, sword in hand. The Indians ran off, and the rash adventurers seized upon several canoes as an equivalent for the stolen goods. Not knowing how to manage them, they made slow progress on their way back, and were overtaken by night before reaching the French camp. They landed, made a fire, placed a sentinel, and lay down on the dry grass to sleep. The sentinel followed their example, when suddenly they were awakened by the war-whoop and a shower of arrows. Two volunteers, Oris and Desloges, were killed on the spot; a third, named Gayen, was severely [Pg 385] wounded; and young Moranget received an arrow through the arm. He leaped up and fired his gun at the vociferous but invisible foe. Others of the party did the same, and the Indians fled. BEAUJEU AND LA SALLE. It was about this time that Beaujeu prepared to return to France. He had accomplished his mission, and landed his passengers at what La Salle assured him to be one of the mouths of the Mississippi. His ship was in danger on this exposed and perilous coast, and he was anxious to find shelter. For some time past, his relations with La Salle had been amicable, and it was agreed between them that Beaujeu should stop at Galveston Bay, the supposed chief mouth of the Mississippi; or, failing to find harborage here, that he should proceed to Mobile Bay, and wait there till April, to hear from his colleague. Two days before the wreck of the "Aimable," he wrote to La Salle: "I wish with all my heart that you would have more confidence in me. For my part, I will always make the first advances; and I will follow your counsel whenever I can do so without risking my ship. I will come back to this place, if you want to know the results of the voyage I am going to make. If you wish, I will go to Martinique for provisions and reinforcements. In fine, there is nothing I am not ready to do: you have only to speak." La Salle had begged him to send ashore a number of cannon and a quantity of iron, stowed in the "Joly," for the use of the colony; and Beaujeu replies: "I wish very much that I could give you [Pg 386] your iron, but it is impossible except in a harbor; for it is on my ballast, and under your cannon, my spare anchors, and all my stowage. It would take three days to get it out, which cannot be done in this place, where the sea runs like mountains when the slightest wind blows outside. I would rather come back to give it to you, in case you do not send the 'Belle' to Baye du St. Esprit [Mobile Bay] to get it.... I beg you once more to consider the offer I make you to go to Martinique to get provisions for your people. I will ask the intendant for them in your name; and if they are refused, I will take them on my own account."[298] To this La Salle immediately replied: "I received with singular pleasure the letter you took the trouble to write me; for I found in it extraordinary proofs of kindness in the interest you take in the success of an affair which I have the more at heart, as it involves the glory of the King and the honor of Monseigneur de Seignelay. I have done my part towards a perfect understanding between us, and have never been wanting in confidence; but even if I could be so, the offers you make are so obliging that they would inspire complete trust." He nevertheless declines them,—assuring Beaujeu at the same time that he has reached the place he sought, and is in a fair way of success if he can but have the cannon, cannonballs, and iron stowed on board the "Joly."[299] [Pg 387] Directly after he writes again, "I cannot help conjuring you once more to try to give us the iron." Beaujeu replies: "To show you how ardently I wish to contribute to the success of your undertaking, I have ordered your iron to be got out, in spite of my officers and sailors, who tell me that I endanger my ship by moving everything in the depth of the hold on a coast like this, where the seas are like mountains. I hesitated to disturb my stowage, not so much to save trouble as because no ballast is to be got hereabout; and I have therefore had six cannon, from my lower deck battery, let down into the hold to take the place of the iron." And he again urges La Salle to accept his offer to bring provisions to the colonists from Martinique. DEPARTURE OF BEAUJEU. On the next day, the "Aimable" was wrecked. Beaujeu remained a fortnight longer on the coast, and then told La Salle that being out of wood, water, and other necessaries, he must go to Mobile Bay to get them. Nevertheless, he lingered a week more, repeated his offer to bring supplies from Martinique, which La Salle again refused, and at last set sail on the twelfth of March, after a leave-taking which was courteous on both sides.[300] La Salle and his colonists were left alone. Several of them had lost heart, and embarked for home with Beaujeu. Among these was Minet the engineer, who had fallen out with La Salle, and who when he [Pg 388] reached France was imprisoned for deserting him. Even his brother, the priest Jean Cavelier, had a mind to abandon the enterprise, but was persuaded at last to remain, along with his nephew the hot-headed Moranget, and the younger Cavelier, a mere school-boy. The two Récollet friars, Zenobe Membré and Anastase Douay, the trusty Joutel, a man of sense and observation, and the Marquis de la Sablonnière, a debauched noble whose patrimony was his sword, were now the chief persons of the forlorn company. The rest were soldiers, raw and undisciplined, and artisans, most of whom knew nothing of their vocation. Add to these the miserable families and the infatuated young women who had come to tempt fortune in the swamps and cane-brakes of the Mississippi. La Salle set out to explore the neighborhood. Joutel remained in command of the so-called fort. He was beset with wily enemies, and often at night the Indians would crawl in the grass around his feeble stockade, howling like wolves; but a few shots would put them to flight. A strict guard was kept; and a wooden horse was set in the enclosure, to punish the sentinel who should sleep at his post. They stood in daily fear of a more formidable foe, and once they saw a sail, which they doubted not was Spanish; but she happily passed without discovering them. They hunted on the prairies, and speared fish in the neighboring pools. On Easter Day, the Sieur le Gros, one of the chief men of the [Pg 389] company, went out after the service to shoot snipes; but as he walked barefoot through the marsh, a snake bit him, and he soon after died. Two men deserted, to starve on the prairie, or to become savages among savages. Others tried to escape, but were caught; and one of them was hung. A knot of desperadoes conspired to kill Joutel; but one of them betrayed the secret, and the plot was crushed. La Salle returned from his exploration, but his return brought no cheer. He had been forced to renounce the illusion to which he had clung so long, and was convinced at last that he was not at the mouth of the Mississippi. The wreck of the "Aimable" itself was not pregnant with consequences so disastrous. CONDUCT OF BEAUJEU. Note.—The conduct of Beaujeu, hitherto judged chiefly by the printed narrative of Joutel, is set in a new and more favorable light by his correspondence with La Salle. Whatever may have been their mutual irritation, it is clear that the naval commander was anxious to discharge his duty in a manner to satisfy Seignelay, and that he may be wholly acquitted of any sinister design. When he left La Salle on the twelfth of March, he meant to sail in search of the Bay of Mobile (Baye du St. Esprit),—partly because he hoped to find it a safe harbor, where he could get La Salle's cannon out of the hold and find ballast to take their place; and partly to get a supply of wood and water, of which he was in extreme need. He told La Salle that he would wait there till the middle of April, in order that he (La Salle) might send the "Belle" to receive the cannon; but on this point there was no definite agreement between them. Beaujeu was ignorant of the position of the bay, which he thought much nearer than it actually was. After trying two days to reach it, the strong head-winds and the discontent of his crew induced him to bear away for Cuba; and after an encounter with pirates and various adventures, he reached France about the first of July. He was coldly received by Seignelay, who wrote to the [Pg 390] intendant at Rochelle: "His Majesty has seen what you wrote about the idea of the Sieur de Beaujeu, that the Sieur de la Salle is not at the mouth of the Mississippi. He seems to found this belief on such weak conjectures that no great attention need be given to his account, especially as this man has been prejudiced from the first against La Salle's enterprise." (Lettre de Seignelay à Arnoul, 22 Juillet, 1685. Margry, ii. 604.) The minister at the same time warns Beaujeu to say nothing in disparagement of the enterprise, under pain of the King's displeasure. The narrative of the engineer, Minet, sufficiently explains a curious map, made by him, as he says, not on the spot, but on the voyage homeward, and still preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine. This map includes two distinct sketches of the mouth of the Mississippi. The first, which corresponds to that made by Franquelin in 1684, is entitled "Embouchure de la Rivière comme M. de la Salle la marque dans sa Carte." The second bears the words, "Costes et Lacs par la Hauteur de sa Rivière, comme nous les avons trouvés." These "Costes et Lacs" are a rude representation of the lagoons of Matagorda Bay and its neighborhood, into which the Mississippi is made to discharge, in accordance with the belief of La Salle. A portion of the coast-line is drawn from actual, though superficial observation. The rest is merely conjectural. FOOTNOTES: [293] Relation de Minet; Lettre de Minet à Seignelay, 6 July, 1685 (Margry, ii. 591, 602). [294] Joutel, Journal Historique, 68; Relation (Margry, iii. 143-146) Compare Journal d'Esmanville (Margry, ii. 510). [295] Relation de Minet (Margry, ii. 591). [296] Procès Verbal du Sieur de la Salle sur le Naufrage de la Fl?te l'Aimable; Lettre de La Salle à Seignelay, 4 Mars, 1685; Lettre de Beaujeu à Seignelay, sans date. Beaujeu did his best to save the cargo. The loss included nearly all the provisions, 60 barrels of wine, 4 cannon, 1,620 balls, 400 grenades, 4,000 pounds of iron, 5,000 pounds of lead, most of the tools, a forge, a mill, cordage, boxes of arms, nearly all the medicines, and most of the baggage of the soldiers and colonists. Aigron returned to France in the "Joly," and was thrown into prison, "comme il paroist clairement que cet accident est arrivé par sa faute."—Seignelay au Sieur Arnoul, 22 Juillet, 1685 (Margry, ii. 604). [297] A map, entitled Entrée du Lac où on a laisse le Sr. de la Salle, made by the engineer Minet, and preserved in the Archives de la Marine, represents the entrance of Matagorda Bay, the camp of La Salle on the left, Indian camps on the borders of the bay, the "Belle" at anchor within, the "Aimable" stranded at the entrance, and the "Joly" anchored in the open sea. [298] Lettre de Beaujeu à La Salle, 18 Fév., 1685 (Margry, ii. 542). [299] Lettre de La Salle à Beaujeu, 18 Fév., 1685 (Margry, ii. 546). [300] The whole of this correspondence between Beaujeu and La Salle will be found in Margry, ii. CHAPTER XXVI. 1685-1687. ST. LOUIS OF TEXAS. The Fort.—Misery and Dejection.—Energy of La Salle: his Journey of Exploration.—Adventures and Accidents.—The Buffalo.—Duhaut.—Indian Massacre.—Return Of La Salle.—A New Calamity.—A Desperate Resolution.—Departure for Canada.—Wreck of the "Belle."—Marriage.—Sedition.—Adventures Of la Salle's Party.—The Cenis.—The Camanches.—The Only Hope.—The Last Farewell. Of what avail to plant a colony by the mouth of a petty Texan river? The Mississippi was the life of the enterprise, the condition of its growth and of its existence. Without it, all was futile and meaningless,—a folly and a ruin. Cost what it might, the Mississippi must be found. But the demands of the hour were imperative. The hapless colony, cast ashore like a wreck on the sands of Matagorda Bay, must gather up its shattered resources and recruit its exhausted strength, before it essayed anew its pilgrimage to the "fatal river." La Salle during his explorations had found a spot which he thought well fitted for a temporary establishment. It was on the river which he named the [Pg 392] La Vache,[301] now the Lavaca, which enters the head of Matagorda Bay; and thither he ordered all the women and children, and most of the men, to remove; while the rest, thirty in number, remained with Joutel at the fort near the mouth of the bay. Here they spent their time in hunting, fishing, and squaring the logs of drift-wood which the sea washed up in abundance, and which La Salle proposed to use in building his new station on the Lavaca. Thus the time passed till midsummer, when Joutel received orders to abandon his post, and rejoin the main body of the colonists. To this end, the little frigate "Belle" was sent down the bay. She was a gift from the King to La Salle, who had brought her safely over the bar, and regarded her as a main-stay of his hopes. She now took on board the stores and some of the men, while Joutel with the rest followed along shore to the post on the Lavaca. Here he found a state of things that was far from cheering. Crops had been sown, but the drought and the cattle had nearly destroyed them. The colonists were lodged under tents and hovels; and the only solid structure was a small square enclosure of pickets, in which the gunpowder and the brandy were stored. The site was good, a rising ground by the river; but there was no wood within the distance of a league, and no horses or oxen to drag it. Their work must be done by men. Some felled and squared the timber; and others dragged it by main force over the [Pg 393] matted grass of the prairie, under the scorching Texan sun. The gun-carriages served to make the task somewhat easier; yet the strongest men soon gave out under it. Joutel went down to the first fort, made a raft and brought up the timber collected there, which proved a most seasonable and useful supply. Palisades and buildings began to rise. The men labored without spirit, yet strenuously; for they labored under the eye of La Salle. The carpenters brought from Rochelle proved worthless; and he himself made the plans of the work, marked out the tenons and mortises, and directed the whole.[302] MISERY AND DEJECTION. Death, meanwhile, made withering havoc among his followers; and under the sheds and hovels that shielded them from the sun lay a score of wretches slowly wasting away with the diseases contracted at St. Domingo. Of the soldiers enlisted for the expedition by La Salle's agents, many are affirmed to have spent their lives in begging at the church doors of Rochefort, and were consequently incapable of discipline. It was impossible to prevent either them or the sailors from devouring persimmons and other wild fruits to a destructive excess. Nearly all fell ill; and before the summer had passed, the graveyard had more than thirty tenants.[303] The bearing of La Salle did not aid to raise the drooping spirits of his [Pg 394] followers. The results of the enterprise had been far different from his hopes; and, after a season of flattering promise, he had entered again on those dark and obstructed paths which seemed his destined way of life. The present was beset with trouble; the future, thick with storms. The consciousness quickened his energies; but it made him stern, harsh, and often unjust to those beneath him. Joutel was returning to camp one afternoon with the master-carpenter, when they saw game; and the carpenter went after it. He was never seen again. Perhaps he was lost on the prairie, perhaps killed by Indians. He knew little of his trade, but they nevertheless had need of him. Le Gros, a man of character and intelligence, suffered more and more from the bite of the snake received in the marsh on Easter Day. The injured limb was amputated, and he died. La Salle's brother, the priest, lay ill; and several others among the chief persons of the colony were in the same condition. Meanwhile, the work was urged on. A large building was finished, constructed of timber, roofed with boards and raw hides, and divided into apartments for lodging and other uses. La Salle gave the new establishment his favorite name of Fort St. Louis, and the neighboring bay was also christened after the royal saint.[304] The scene was not without [Pg 395] its charms. Towards the southeast stretched the bay with its bordering meadows; and on the northeast the Lavaca ran along the base of green declivities. Around, far and near, rolled a sea of prairie, with distant forests, dim in the summer haze. At times, it was dotted with the browsing buffalo, not yet scared from their wonted pastures; and the grassy swells were spangled with the flowers for which Texas is renowned, and which now form the gay ornaments of our gardens. LA SALLE'S EXPLORATIONS. And now, the needful work accomplished, and the colony in some measure housed and fortified, its indefatigable chief prepared to renew his quest of the "fatal river," as Joutel repeatedly calls it. Before his departure he made some preliminary explorations, in the course of which, according to the report of his brother the priest, he found evidence that the Spaniards had long before had a transient establishment at a spot about fifteen leagues from Fort St. Louis.[305] [Pg 396] LIFE AT THE FORT. It was the last day of October when La Salle set out on his great journey of exploration. His brother Cavelier, who had now recovered, accompanied him with fifty men; and five cannon-shot from the fort saluted them as they departed. They were lightly equipped; but some of them wore corselets made of staves, to ward off arrows. Descending the Lavaca, they pursued their course eastward on foot along the margin of the bay, while Joutel remained in command of the fort. It was two leagues above the mouth of the river; and in it were thirty-four persons, including three Récollet friars, a number of women and girls from Paris, and two young orphan daughters of one Talon, a Canadian, who had lately died. Their live-stock consisted of some hogs and a litter of eight pigs, which, as Joutel does not forget to inform us, passed their time in wallowing in the ditch of the palisade; a cock and hen, with a young family; and a pair of goats, which, in a temporary dearth of fresh meat, were sacrificed to the needs of the invalid Abbé Cavelier. Joutel suffered no man to lie idle. The blacksmith, having no anvil, was supplied with a cannon as a substitute. Lodgings were built for the women and girls, and separate lodgings for the men. A small chapel was afterwards added, and the whole was fenced with a [Pg 397] palisade. At the four corners of the house were mounted eight pieces of cannon, which, in the absence of balls, were loaded with bags of bullets.[306] Between the palisades and the stream lay a narrow strip of marsh, the haunt of countless birds; and at a little distance it deepened into pools full of fish. All the surrounding prairies swarmed with game,—buffalo, deer, hares, turkeys, ducks, geese, swans, plover, snipe, and grouse. The river supplied the colonists with turtles, and the bay with oysters. Of these last, they often found more than they wanted; for when in their excursions they shoved their log canoes into the water, wading shoeless through the deep, tenacious mud, the sharp shells would cut their feet like knives; "and what was worse," says Joutel, "the salt water came into the gashes, and made them smart atrociously." He sometimes amused himself with shooting alligators. "I never spared them when I met them near the house. One day I killed an extremely large one, which was nearly four feet and a half in girth, and about twenty feet long." He describes with accuracy that curious native of the southwestern plains, the "horned frog," which, deceived by its uninviting appearance, he erroneously supposed to be venomous. "We had some of our animals bitten by snakes; among the others, a bitch that had belonged to the [Pg 398] deceased Sieur le Gros. She was bitten in the jaw when she was with me, as I was fishing by the shore of the bay. I gave her a little theriac [an antidote then in vogue], which cured her, as it did one of our sows, which came home one day with her head so swelled that she could hardly hold it up. Thinking it must be some snake that had bitten her, I gave her a dose of the theriac mixed with meal and water." The patient began to mend at once. "I killed a good many rattle-snakes by means of the aforesaid bitch, for when she saw one she would bark around him, sometimes for a half hour together, till I took my gun and shot him. I often found them in the bushes, making a noise with their tails. When I had killed them, our hogs ate them." He devotes many pages to the plants and animals of the neighborhood, most of which may easily be recognized from his description. THE BUFFALO. With the buffalo, which he calls "our daily bread," his experiences were many and strange. Being, like the rest of the party, a novice in the art of shooting them, he met with many disappointments. Once, having mounted to the roof of the large house in the fort, he saw a dark moving object on a swell of the prairie three miles off; and rightly thinking that it was a herd of buffalo, he set out with six or seven men to try to kill some of them. After a while, he discovered two bulls lying in a hollow; and signing to the rest of his party to keep quiet, he made his approach, gun in hand. The bulls presently jumped [Pg 399] up, and stared through their manes at the intruder. Joutel fired. It was a close shot; but the bulls merely shook their shaggy heads, wheeled about, and galloped heavily away. The same luck attended him the next day. "We saw plenty of buffalo. I approached several bands of them, and fired again and again, but could not make one of them fall." He had not yet learned that a buffalo rarely falls at once, unless hit in the spine. He continues: "I was not discouraged; and after approaching several more bands,—which was hard work, because I had to crawl on the ground, so as not to be seen,—I found myself in a herd of five or six thousand, but, to my great vexation, I could not bring one of them down. They all ran off to the right and left. It was near night, and I had killed nothing. Though I was very tired, I tried again, approached another band, and fired a number of shots; but not a buffalo would fall. The skin was off my knees with crawling. At last, as I was going back to rejoin our men, I saw a buffalo lying on the ground. I went towards it, and saw that it was dead. I examined it, and found that the bullet had gone in near the shoulder. Then I found others dead like the first. I beckoned the men to come on, and we set to work to cut up the meat,—a task which was new to us all." It would be impossible to write a more true and characteristic sketch of the experience of a novice in shooting buffalo on foot. A few days after, he went out again, with Father Anastase Douay; approached a [Pg 400] bull, fired, and broke his shoulder. The bull hobbled off on three legs. Douay ran in his cassock to head him back, while Joutel reloaded his gun; upon which the enraged beast butted at the missionary, and knocked him down. He very narrowly escaped with his life. "There was another missionary," pursues Joutel, "named Father Maxime Le Clerc, who was very well fitted for such an undertaking as ours, because he was equal to anything, even to butchering a buffalo; and as I said before that every one of us must lend a hand, because we were too few for anybody to be waited upon, I made the women, girls, and children do their part, as well as him; for as they all wanted to eat, it was fair that they all should work." He had a scaffolding built near the fort, and set them to smoking buffalo meat, against a day of scarcity.[307] RETURN OF DUHAUT. Thus the time passed till the middle of January; when late one evening, as all were gathered in the principal building, conversing perhaps, or smoking, or playing at cards, or dozing by the fire in homesick dreams of France, a man on guard came in to report that he had heard a voice from the river. They all went down to the bank, and descried a man in a canoe, who called out, "Dominic!" This was the name of the younger of the two brothers Duhaut, who was one of Joutel's followers. As the canoe [Pg 401] approached, they recognized the elder, who had gone with La Salle on his journey of discovery, and who was perhaps the greatest villain of the company. Joutel was much perplexed. La Salle had ordered him to admit nobody into the fort without a pass and a watchword. Duhaut, when questioned, said that he had none, but told at the same time so plausible a story that Joutel no longer hesitated to receive him. As La Salle and his men were pursuing their march along the prairie, Duhaut, who was in the rear, had stopped to mend his moccasins, and when he tried to overtake the party, had lost his way, mistaking a buffalo-path for the trail of his companions. At night he fired his gun as a signal, but there was no answering shot. Seeing no hope of rejoining them, he turned back for the fort, found one of the canoes which La Salle had hidden at the shore, paddled by night and lay close by day, shot turkeys, deer, and buffalo for food, and, having no knife, cut the meat with a sharp flint, till after a month of excessive hardship he reached his destination. As the inmates of Fort St. Louis gathered about the weather-beaten wanderer, he told them dreary tidings. The pilot of the "Belle," such was his story, had gone with five men to sound along the shore, by order of La Salle, who was then encamped in the neighborhood with his party of explorers. The boat's crew, being overtaken by the night, had rashly bivouacked on the beach without setting a guard; and as they slept, a band of Indians had rushed in [Pg 402] upon them, and butchered them all. La Salle, alarmed by their long absence, had searched along the shore, and at length found their bodies scattered about the sands and half-devoured by wolves.[308] Well would it have been, if Duhaut had shared their fate. Weeks and months dragged on, when, at the end of March, Joutel, chancing to mount on the roof of one of the buildings, saw seven or eight men approaching over the prairie. He went out to meet them with an equal number, well armed; and as he drew near recognized, with mixed joy and anxiety, La Salle and some of those who had gone with him. His brother Cavelier was at his side, with his cassock so tattered that, says Joutel, "there was hardly a piece left large enough to wrap a farthing's worth of salt. He had an old cap on his head, having lost his hat by the way. The rest were in no better plight, for their shirts were all in rags. Some of them carried loads of meat, because M. de la Salle was afraid that we might not have killed any buffalo. We met with great joy and many embraces. After our greetings were over, M. de la Salle, seeing Duhaut, asked me in an angry tone how it was that [Pg 403] I had received this man who had abandoned him. I told him how it had happened, and repeated Duhaut's story. Duhaut defended himself, and M. de la Salle's anger was soon over. We went into the house, and refreshed ourselves with some bread and brandy, as there was no wine left."[309] LA SALLE'S ADVENTURES. La Salle and his companions told their story. They had wandered on through various savage tribes, with whom they had more than one encounter, scattering them like chaff by the terror of their fire-arms. At length they found a more friendly band, and learned much touching the Spaniards, who, they were told, were universally hated by the tribes of that country. It would be easy, said their informants, to gather a host of warriors and lead them over the Rio Grande; but La Salle was in no condition for attempting conquests, and the tribes in whose alliance he had trusted had, a few days before, been at blows with him. The invasion of New Biscay must be postponed to a more propitious day. Still advancing, he came to a large river, which he at first mistook for the Mississippi; and building a fort of palisades, he left here several of his men.[310] The fate of these unfortunates does not appear. He [Pg 404] now retraced his steps towards Fort St. Louis, and, as he approached it, detached some of his men to look for his vessel, the "Belle," for whose safety, since the loss of her pilot, he had become very anxious. On the next day these men appeared at the fort, with downcast looks. They had not found the "Belle" at the place where she had been ordered to remain, nor were any tidings to be heard of her. From that hour, the conviction that she was lost possessed the mind of La Salle. Surrounded as he was, and had always been, with traitors, the belief now possessed him that her crew had abandoned the colony, and made sail for the West Indies or for France. The loss was incalculable. He had relied on this vessel to transport the colonists to the Mississippi, as soon as its exact position could be ascertained; and thinking her a safer place of deposit than the fort, he had put on board of her all his papers and personal baggage, besides a great quantity of stores, ammunition, and tools.[311] In truth, she was of the last necessity to the unhappy exiles, and their only resource for escape from a position which was fast becoming desperate. La Salle, as his brother tells us, now fell dangerously ill,—the fatigues of his journey, joined to the effects upon his mind of this last disaster, having overcome his strength, though not his fortitude. "In truth," writes the priest, "after the loss of the [Pg 405] vessel which deprived us of our only means of returning to France, we had no resource but in the firm guidance of my brother, whose death each of us would have regarded as his own."[312] DEPARTURE FOR CANADA. La Salle no sooner recovered than he embraced a resolution which could be the offspring only of a desperate necessity. He determined to make his way by the Mississippi and the Illinois to Canada, whence he might bring succor to the colonists, and send a report of their condition to France. The attempt was beset with uncertainties and dangers. The Mississippi was first to be found, then followed through all the perilous monotony of its interminable windings to a goal which was to be but the starting-point of a new and not less arduous journey. Cavelier his brother, Moranget his nephew, the friar Anastase Douay, and others to the number of twenty, were chosen to accompany him. Every corner of the magazine was ransacked for an outfit. Joutel generously gave up the better part of his wardrobe to La Salle and his two relatives. Duhaut, who had saved his baggage from the wreck of the "Aimable," was required to contribute to the necessities of the party; and the scantily-furnished chests of those who had died were used to supply the wants of the living. Each man labored with needle and awl to patch his failing garments, or supply their place with buffalo or deer skins. On the twenty-second of April, after [Pg 406] mass and prayers in the chapel, they issued from the gate, each bearing his pack and his weapons, some with kettles slung at their backs, some with axes, some with gifts for Indians. In this guise, they held their way in silence across the prairie; while anxious eyes followed them from the palisades of St. Louis, whose inmates, not excepting Joutel himself, seem to have been ignorant of the extent and difficulty of the undertaking.[313] WRECK OF THE "BELLE." "On May Day," he writes, "at about two in the afternoon, as I was walking near the house, I heard a voice from the river below, crying out several times, Qui vive? Knowing that the Sieur Barbier had gone that way with two canoes to hunt buffalo, I thought that it might be one of these canoes coming back with meat, and did not think much of the matter till I heard the same voice again. I answered, Versailles, which was the password I had given the Sieur Barbier, in case he should come back in the night. But, as I was going towards the bank, I heard other voices which I had not heard for a long time. I recognized among the rest that of M. Chefdeville, which made me fear that some disaster had happened. I ran down to the bank, and my first greeting was to ask what had become of the 'Belle.' [Pg 407] They answered that she was wrecked on the other side of the bay, and that all on board were drowned except the six who were in the canoe; namely, the Sieur Chefdeville, the Marquis de la Sablonnière, the man named Teissier, a soldier, a girl, and a little boy."[314] From the young priest Chefdeville, Joutel learned the particulars of the disaster. Water had failed on board the "Belle"; a boat's crew of five men had gone in quest of it; the wind rose, their boat was swamped, and they were all drowned. Those who remained had now no means of going ashore; but if they had no water, they had wine and brandy in abundance, and Teissier, the master of the vessel, was drunk every day. After a while they left their moorings, and tried to reach the fort; but they were few, weak, and unskilful. A violent north wind drove them on a sand-bar. Some of them were drowned in trying to reach land on a raft. Others were more successful; and, after a long delay, they found a stranded canoe, in which they made their way to St. Louis, bringing with them some of La Salle's papers and baggage saved from the wreck. These multiplied disasters bore hard on the spirits of the colonists; and Joutel, like a good commander as he was, spared no pains to cheer them. "We did what we could to amuse ourselves and drive away care. I encouraged our people to dance and sing in the evenings; for when M. de la Salle was among [Pg 408] us, pleasure was often banished. Now, there is no use in being melancholy on such occasions. It is true that M. de la Salle had no great cause for merry-making, after all his losses and disappointments; but his troubles made others suffer also. Though he had ordered me to allow to each person only a certain quantity of meat at every meal, I observed this rule only when meat was rare. The air here is very keen, and one has a great appetite. One must eat and act, if he wants good health and spirits. I speak from experience; for once, when I had ague chills, and was obliged to keep the house with nothing to do, I was dreary and down-hearted. On the contrary, if I was busy with hunting or anything else, I was not so dull by half. So I tried to keep the people as busy as possible. I set them to making a small cellar to keep meat fresh in hot weather; but when M. de la Salle came back, he said it was too small. As he always wanted to do everything on a grand scale, he prepared to make a large one, and marked out the plan." This plan of the large cellar, like more important undertakings of its unhappy projector, proved too extensive for execution, the colonists being engrossed by the daily care of keeping themselves alive. MATRIMONY. A gleam of hilarity shot for an instant out of the clouds. The young Canadian, Barbier, usually conducted the hunting-parties; and some of the women and girls often went out with them, to aid in cutting up the meat. Barbier became enamoured of one of [Pg 409] the girls; and as his devotion to her was the subject of comment, he asked Joutel for leave to marry her. The commandant, after due counsel with the priests and friars, vouchsafed his consent, and the rite was duly solemnized; whereupon, fired by the example, the Marquis de la Sablonnière begged leave to marry another of the girls. Joutel, the gardener's son, concerned that a marquis should so abase himself, and anxious at the same time for the morals of the fort, which La Salle had especially commended to his care, not only flatly refused, but, in the plenitude of his authority, forbade the lovers all further intercourse. Father Zenobe Membré, superior of the mission, gave unwilling occasion for further merriment. These worthy friars were singularly unhappy in their dealings with the buffalo, one of which, it may be remembered, had already knocked down Father Anastase. Undeterred by his example, Father Zenobe one day went out with the hunters, carrying a gun like the rest. Joutel shot a buffalo, which was making off, badly wounded, when a second shot stopped it, and it presently lay down. The father superior thought it was dead; and, without heeding the warning shout of Joutel, he approached, and pushed it with the butt of his gun. The bull sprang up with an effort of expiring fury, and, in the words of Joutel, "trampled on the father, took the skin off his face in several places, and broke his gun, so that he could hardly manage to get away, and remained [Pg 410] in an almost helpless state for more than three months. Bad as the accident was, he was laughed at nevertheless for his rashness." The mishaps of the friars did not end here. Father Maxime Le Clerc was set upon by a boar belonging to the colony. "I do not know," says Joutel, "what spite the beast had against him, whether for a beating or some other offence; but, however this may be, I saw the father running and crying for help, and the boar running after him. I went to the rescue, but could not come up in time. The father stooped as he ran, to gather up his cassock from about his legs; and the boar, which ran faster than he, struck him in the arm with his tusks, so that some of the nerves were torn. Thus, all three of our good Récollet fathers were near being the victims of animals."[315] In spite of his efforts to encourage them, the followers of Joutel were fast losing heart. Father Maxime Le Clerc kept a journal, in which he set down various charges against La Salle. Joutel got possession of the paper, and burned it on the urgent entreaty of the friars, who dreaded what might ensue, should the absent commander become aware of the aspersions cast upon him. The elder Duhaut fomented the rising discontent of the colonists, played the demagogue, told them that La Salle would never return, and tried to make himself their leader. Joutel detected the mischief, and, with a lenity which he afterwards deeply regretted, contented [Pg 411] himself with a rebuke to the offender, and words of reproof and encouragement to the dejected band. ADVENTURES OF THE TRAVELLERS. He had caused the grass to be cut near the fort, so as to form a sort of playground; and here, one evening, he and some of the party were trying to amuse themselves, when they heard shouts from beyond the river, and Joutel recognized the voice of La Salle. Hastening to meet him in a wooden canoe, he brought him and his party to the fort. Twenty men had gone out with him, and eight had returned. Of the rest, four had deserted, one had been lost, one had been devoured by an alligator; and the others, giving out on the march, had probably perished in attempting to regain the fort. The travellers told of a rich country, a wild and beautiful landscape,—woods, rivers, groves, and prairies; but all availed nothing, and the acquisition of five horses was but an indifferent return for the loss of twelve men. After leaving the fort, they had journeyed towards the northeast, over plains green as an emerald with the young verdure of April, till at length they saw, far as the eye could reach, the boundless prairie alive with herds of buffalo. The animals were in one of their tame or stupid moods; and they killed nine or ten of them without the least difficulty, drying the best parts of the meat. They crossed the Colorado on a raft, and reached the banks of another river, where one of the party, named Hiens, a German of [Pg 412] Würtemberg, and an old buccaneer, was mired and nearly suffocated in a mud-hole. Unfortunately, as will soon appear, he managed to crawl out; and, to console him, the river was christened with his name. The party made a bridge of felled trees, on which they crossed in safety. La Salle now changed their course, and journeyed eastward, when the travellers soon found themselves in the midst of a numerous Indian population, where they were feasted and caressed without measure. At another village they were less fortunate. The inhabitants were friendly by day and hostile by night. They came to attack the French in their camp, but withdrew, daunted by the menacing voice of La Salle, who had heard them approaching through the cane-brake. La Salle's favorite Shawanoe hunter, Nika, who had followed him from Canada to France, and from France to Texas, was bitten by a rattlesnake; and, though he recovered, the accident detained the party for several days. At length they resumed their journey, but were stopped by a river, called by Douay, "La Rivière des Malheurs." La Salle and Cavelier, with a few others, tried to cross on a raft, which, as it reached the channel, was caught by a current of marvellous swiftness. Douay and Moranget, watching the transit from the edge of the cane-brake, beheld their commander swept down the stream, and vanishing, as it were, in an instant. All that day they remained with their companions on the bank, lamenting in despair for the loss of their guardian [Pg 413] angel, for so Douay calls La Salle.[316] It was fast growing dark, when, to their unspeakable relief, they saw him advancing with his party along the opposite bank, having succeeded, after great exertion, in guiding the raft to land. How to rejoin him was now the question. Douay and his companions, who had tasted no food that day, broke their fast on two young eagles which they knocked out of their nest, and then spent the night in rueful consultation as to the means of crossing the river. In the morning they waded into the marsh, the friar with his breviary in his hood to keep it dry, and hacked among the canes till they had gathered enough to make another raft; on which, profiting by La Salle's experience, they safely crossed, and rejoined him. Next, they became entangled in a cane-brake, where La Salle, as usual with him in such cases, took the lead, a hatchet in each hand, and hewed out a path for his followers. They soon reached the villages of the Cenis Indians, on and near the river Trinity,—a tribe then powerful, but long since extinct. Nothing could surpass the friendliness of their welcome. The chiefs came to meet them, bearing the calumet, and followed by warriors in shirts of embroidered deer-skin. Then the whole village swarmed out like bees, gathering around the [Pg 414] visitors with offerings of food and all that was precious in their eyes. La Salle was lodged with the great chief; but he compelled his men to encamp at a distance, lest the ardor of their gallantry might give occasion of offence. The lodges of the Cenis, forty or fifty feet high, and covered with a thatch of meadow-grass, looked like huge bee-hives. Each held several families, whose fire was in the middle, and their beds around the circumference. The spoil of the Spaniards was to be seen on all sides,—silver lamps and spoons, swords, old muskets, money, clothing, and a bull of the Pope dispensing the Spanish colonists of New Mexico from fasting during summer.[317] These treasures, as well as their numerous horses, were obtained by the Cenis from their neighbors and allies the Camanches, that fierce prairie banditti who then, as now, scourged the Mexican border with their bloody forays. A party of these wild horsemen was in the village. Douay was edified at seeing them make the sign of the cross in imitation of the neophytes of one of the Spanish missions. They enacted, too, the ceremony of the mass; and one of them, in his rude way, drew a sketch of a picture he had seen in some church which he had pillaged, wherein the friar plainly recognized the Virgin weeping at the foot of the cross. They invited the French to join them on a raid into New Mexico; and they spoke with contempt, as their tribesmen will speak to this day, of the Spanish [Pg 415] creoles, saying that it would be easy to conquer a nation of cowards who make people walk before them with fans to cool them in hot weather.[318] Soon after leaving the Cenis villages, both La Salle and his nephew Moranget were attacked by fever. This caused a delay of more than two months, during which the party seem to have remained encamped on the Neches, or possibly the Sabine. When at length the invalids had recovered sufficient strength to travel, the stock of ammunition was nearly spent, some of the men had deserted, and the condition of the travellers was such that there seemed no alternative but to return to Fort St. Louis. This they accordingly did, greatly aided in their march by the horses bought from the Cenis, and suffering no very serious accident by the way,—excepting the loss of La Salle's servant, Dumesnil, who was seized by an alligator while attempting to cross the Colorado. DEJECTION. The temporary excitement caused among the colonists by their return soon gave place to a dejection bordering on despair. "This pleasant land," writes Cavelier, "seemed to us an abode of weariness and a perpetual prison." Flattering themselves with the delusion, common to exiles of every kind, that they were objects of solicitude at home, they watched daily, with straining eyes, for an approaching sail. Ships, indeed, had ranged the coast to seek them, but with no friendly intent. Their thoughts dwelt, [Pg 416] with unspeakable yearning, on the France they had left behind, which, to their longing fancy, was pictured as an unattainable Eden. Well might they despond; for of a hundred and eighty colonists, besides the crew of the "Belle," less than forty-five remained. The weary precincts of Fort St. Louis, with its fence of rigid palisades, its area of trampled earth, its buildings of weather-stained timber, and its well-peopled graveyard without, were hateful to their sight. La Salle had a heavy task to save them from despair. His composure, his unfailing equanimity, his words of encouragement and cheer, were the breath of life to this forlorn company; for though he could not impart to minds of less adamantine temper the audacity of hope with which he still clung to the final accomplishment of his purposes, the contagion of his hardihood touched, nevertheless, the drooping spirits of his followers.[319] TWELFTH NIGHT. The journey to Canada was clearly their only hope; and, after a brief rest, La Salle prepared to renew the attempt. He proposed that Joutel should this time be of the party; and should proceed from Quebec to France, with his brother Cavelier, to solicit succors for the colony, while he himself [Pg 417] returned to Texas. A new obstacle was presently interposed. La Salle, whose constitution seems to have suffered from his long course of hardships, was attacked in November with hernia. Joutel offered to conduct the party in his stead; but La Salle replied that his own presence was indispensable at the Illinois. He had the good fortune to recover, within four or five weeks, sufficiently to undertake the journey; and all in the fort busied themselves in preparing an outfit. In such straits were they for clothing, that the sails of the "Belle" were cut up to make coats for the adventurers. Christmas came, and was solemnly observed. There was a midnight mass in the chapel, where Membré, Cavelier, Douay, and their priestly brethren stood before the altar, in vestments strangely contrasting with the rude temple and the ruder garb of the worshippers. And as Membré elevated the consecrated wafer, and the lamps burned dim through the clouds of incense, the kneeling group drew from the daily miracle such consolation as true Catholics alone can know. When Twelfth Night came, all gathered in the hall, and cried, after the jovial old custom, "The King drinks," with hearts, perhaps, as cheerless as their cups, which were filled with cold water. THE LAST FAREWELL. On the morrow, the band of adventurers mustered for the fatal journey.[320] The five horses, bought by [Pg 418] La Salle of the Indians, stood in the area of the fort, packed for the march; and here was gathered the wretched remnant of the colony,—those who were to go, and those who were to stay behind. These latter were about twenty in all,—Barbier, who was to command in the place of Joutel; Sablonnière, who, despite his title of marquis, was held in great contempt;[321] the friars, Membré and Le Clerc,[322] and the priest Chefdeville, besides a surgeon, soldiers, laborers, seven women and girls, and several children, doomed, in this deadly exile, to wait the issues of the journey, and the possible arrival of a tardy succor. La Salle had made them a last address, delivered, we are told, with that winning air which, though alien from his usual bearing, seems to have been at times a natural expression of this unhappy man.[323] It was a bitter parting, one of sighs, tears, and embracings,—the farewell of those on whose souls had sunk a heavy boding that they would never [Pg 419] meet again.[324] Equipped and weaponed for the journey, the adventurers filed from the gate, crossed the river, and held their slow march over the prairies beyond, till intervening woods and hills shut Fort St. Louis forever from their sight. FOOTNOTES: [301] Called by Joutel, Rivière aux B?ufs. [302] Joutel, Journal Historique, 108; Relation (Margry, iii. 174); Procès Verbal fait au poste de St. Louis, le 18 Avril, 1686. [303] Joutel, Journal Historique, 109. Le Clerc, who was not present, says a hundred. [304] The Bay of St. Louis, St. Bernard's Bay, or Matagorda Bay,—for it has borne all these names,—was also called Espiritu Santo Bay by the Spaniards, in common with several other bays in the Gulf of Mexico. An adjoining bay still retains the name. [305] Cavelier, in his report to the minister, says: "We reached a large village, enclosed with a kind of wall made of clay and sand, and fortified with little towers at intervals, where we found the arms of Spain engraved on a plate of copper, with the date of 1588, attached to a stake. The inhabitants gave us a kind welcome, and showed us some hammers and an anvil, two small pieces of iron cannon, a small brass culverin, some pike-heads, some old sword-blades, and some books of Spanish comedy; and thence they guided us to a little hamlet of fishermen, about two leagues distant, where they showed us a second stake, also with the arms of Spain, and a few old chimneys. All this convinced us that the Spaniards had formerly been here." (Cavelier, Relation du Voyage que mon frère entreprit pour découvrir l'embouchure du fleuve de Missisipy.) The above is translated from the original draft of Cavelier, which is in my possession. It was addressed to the colonial minister, after the death of La Salle. The statement concerning the Spaniards needs confirmation. [306] Compare Joutel with the Spanish account in Carta en que se da noticia de un viaje hecho á la Bahia de Espíritu Santo y de la poblacion que tenian ahi los Franceses; Coleccion de Varios Documentos, 25. [307] For the above incidents of life at Fort St. Louis, see Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 185-218, passim). The printed condensation of the narrative omits most of these particulars. [308] Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 206). Compare Le Clerc, ii. 296. Cavelier, always disposed to exaggerate, says that ten men were killed. La Salle had previously had encounters with the Indians, and punished them severely for the trouble they had given his men. Le Clerc says of the principal fight: "Several Indians were wounded, a few were killed, and others made prisoners,—one of whom, a girl of three or four years, was baptized, and died a few days after, as the first-fruit of this mission, and a sure conquest sent to heaven." [309] Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 219). [310] Cavelier says that he actually reached the Mississippi; but, on the one hand, the abbé did not know whether the river in question was the Mississippi or not; and, on the other, he is somewhat inclined to mendacity. Le Clerc says that La Salle thought he had found the river. According to the Procès Verbal of 18 April, 1686, "il y arriva le 13 Février." Joutel says that La Salle told him "qu'il n'avoit point trouvé sa rivière." [311] Procès Verbal fait au poste de St. Louis, le 18 Avril, 1686. [312] Cavelier, Relation du Voyage pour découvrir l'Embouchure du Fleuve de Missisipy. [313] Joutel, Journal Historique, 140; Anastase Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 303; Cavelier, Relation. The date is from Douay. It does not appear, from his narrative, that they meant to go farther than the Illinois. Cavelier says that after resting here they were to go to Canada. Joutel supposed that they would go only to the Illinois. La Salle seems to have been even more reticent than usual. [314] Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 226). [315] Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 244, 246. [316] "Ce f?t une desolation extrême pour nous tous qui desesperions de revoir jamais nostre Ange tutélaire, le Sieur de la Salle.... Tout le jour se passa en pleurs et en larmes."—Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 315. [317] Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 321; Cavelier, Relation. [318] Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 324, 325. [319] "L'égalité d'humeur du Chef rassuroit tout le monde; et il trouvoit des resources à tout par son esprit qui relevoit les espérances les plus abatues."—Joutel, Journal Historique, 152. "Il seroit difficile de trouver dans l'Histoire un courage plus intrepide et plus invincible que celuy du Sieur de la Salle dans les évenemens contraires; il ne f?t jamais abatu, et il espéroit toujours avec le secours du Ciel de venir à bout de son entreprise malgré tous les obstacles qui se présentoient."—Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 327. [320] I follow Douay's date, who makes the day of departure the seventh of January, or the day after Twelfth Night. Joutel thinks it was the twelfth of January, but professes uncertainty as to all his dates at this time, as he lost his notes. [321] He had to be kept on short allowance, because he was in the habit of bargaining away everything given to him. He had squandered the little that belonged to him at St. Domingo, in amusements "indignes de sa naissance," and in consequence was suffering from diseases which disabled him from walking. (Procès Verbal, 18 Avril, 1686.) [322] Maxime le Clerc was a relative of the author of L'établissement de la Foi. [323] "Il fit une Harangue pleine d'éloquence et de cet air engageant qui luy estoit si naturel: toute la petite Colonie y estoit presente et en f?t touchée jusques aux larmes, persuadée de la nécessité de son voyage et de la droiture de ses intentions."—Douay in Le Clerc, ii, 330. [324] "Nous nous separames les uns des autres, d'une manière si tendre et si triste qu'il sembloit que nous avions tous le secret pressentiment que nous ne nous reverrions jamais."—Joutel, Journal Historique, 158. CHAPTER XXVII. 1687. ASSASSINATION OF LA SALLE. His Followers.—Prairie Travelling—A Hunters' Quarrel—The Murder of Moranget.—The Conspiracy.—Death of La Salle: his Character. LA SALLE'S FOLLOWERS. The travellers were crossing a marshy prairie towards a distant belt of woods that followed the course of a little river. They led with them their five horses, laden with their scanty baggage, and, with what was of no less importance, their stock of presents for Indians. Some wore the remains of the clothing they had worn from France, eked out with deer-skins, dressed in the Indian manner; and some had coats of old sail-cloth. Here was La Salle, in whom one would have known, at a glance, the chief of the party; and the priest, Cavelier, who seems to have shared not one of the high traits of his younger brother. Here, too, were their nephews, Moranget and the boy Cavelier, now about seventeen years old; the trusty soldier Joutel; and the friar Anastase Douay. Duhaut followed, a man of respectable birth and education; and Liotot, the surgeon of the party. [Pg 421] At home, they might perhaps have lived and died with a fair repute; but the wilderness is a rude touchstone, which often reveals traits that would have lain buried and unsuspected in civilized life. The German Hiens, the ex-buccaneer, was also of the number. He had probably sailed with an English crew; for he was sometimes known as Gemme Anglais, or "English Jem."[325] The Sieur de Marie; Teissier, a pilot; L'Archevêque, a servant of Duhaut; and others, to the number in all of seventeen,—made up the party; to which is to be added Nika, La Salle's Shawanoe hunter, who, as well as another Indian, had twice crossed the ocean with him, and still followed his fortunes with an admiring though undemonstrative fidelity. They passed the prairie, and neared the forest. Here they saw buffalo; and the hunters approached, and killed several of them. Then they traversed the woods; found and forded the shallow and rushy stream, and pushed through the forest beyond, till they again reached the open prairie. Heavy clouds gathered over them, and it rained all night; but they sheltered themselves under the fresh hides of the buffalo they had killed. PRAIRIE TRAVELLING. It is impossible, as it would be needless, to follow the detail of their daily march.[326] It was such an one, [Pg 422] though with unwonted hardship, as is familiar to the memory of many a prairie traveller of our own time. They suffered greatly from the want of shoes, and found for a while no better substitute than a casing of raw buffalo-hide, which they were forced to keep always wet, as, when dry, it hardened about the foot like iron. At length they bought dressed deer-skin from the Indians, of which they made tolerable moccasins. The rivers, streams, and gullies filled with water were without number; and to cross them they made a boat of bull-hide, like the "bull boat" still used on the Upper Missouri. This did good service, as, with the help of their horses, they could carry it with them. Two or three men could cross in it at once, and the horses swam after them like dogs. Sometimes they traversed the sunny prairie; sometimes dived into the dark recesses of the forest, where the buffalo, descending daily from their pastures in long files to drink at the river, often made a broad and easy path for the travellers. When foul weather arrested them, they built huts of bark and long meadow-grass; and safely sheltered lounged away the day, while their horses, picketed near by, stood steaming in the rain. At night, they usually set a rude stockade about their camp; and here, by [Pg 423] the grassy border of a brook, or at the edge of a grove where a spring bubbled up through the sands, they lay asleep around the embers of their fire, while the man on guard listened to the deep breathing of the slumbering horses, and the howling of the wolves that saluted the rising moon as it flooded the waste of prairie with pale mystic radiance. They met Indians almost daily,—sometimes a band of hunters, mounted or on foot, chasing buffalo on the plains; sometimes a party of fishermen; sometimes a winter camp, on the slope of a hill or under the sheltering border of a forest. They held intercourse with them in the distance by signs; often they disarmed their distrust, and attracted them into their camp; and often they visited them in their lodges, where, seated on buffalo-robes, they smoked with their entertainers, passing the pipe from hand to hand, after the custom still in use among the prairie tribes. Cavelier says that they once saw a band of a hundred and fifty mounted Indians attacking a herd of buffalo with lances pointed with sharpened bone. The old priest was delighted with the sport, which he pronounces "the most diverting thing in the world." On another occasion, when the party were encamped near the village of a tribe which Cavelier calls Sassory, he saw them catch an alligator about twelve feet long, which they proceeded to torture as if he were a human enemy,—first putting out his eyes, and then leading him to the neighboring prairie, where, having confined him by a [Pg 424] number of stakes, they spent the entire day in tormenting him.[327] Holding a northerly course, the travellers crossed the Brazos, and reached the waters of the Trinity. The weather was unfavorable, and on one occasion they encamped in the rain during four or five days together. It was not an harmonious company. La Salle's cold and haughty reserve had returned, at least for those of his followers to whom he was not partial. Duhaut and the surgeon Liotot, both of whom were men of some property, had a large pecuniary stake in the enterprise, and were disappointed and incensed at its ruinous result. They had a quarrel with young Moranget, whose hot and hasty temper was as little fitted to conciliate as was the harsh reserve of his uncle. Already at Fort St. Louis, Duhaut had intrigued among the men; and the mild admonition of Joutel had not, it seems, sufficed to divert him from his sinister purposes. Liotot, it is said, had secretly sworn vengeance against La Salle, whom he charged with having caused the death of his brother, or, as some will have it, his nephew. On one of the former journeys this young man's strength had failed; and, La Salle having ordered him to return to the fort, he had been killed by Indians on the way. MURDER OF MORANGET. The party moved again as the weather improved, and on the fifteenth of March encamped within a few miles of a spot which La Salle had passed on his [Pg 425] preceding journey, and where he had left a quantity of Indian corn and beans in cache; that is to say, hidden in the ground or in a hollow tree. As provisions were falling short, he sent a party from the camp to find it. These men were Duhaut, Liotot,[328] Hiens the buccaneer, Teissier, L'Archevêque, Nika the hunter, and La Salle's servant Saget. They opened the cache, and found the contents spoiled; but as they returned from their bootless errand they saw buffalo, and Nika shot two of them. They now encamped on the spot, and sent the servant to inform La Salle, in order that he might send horses to bring in the meat. Accordingly, on the next day, he directed Moranget and De Marle, with the necessary horses, to go with Saget to the hunters' camp. When they arrived, they found that Duhaut and his companions had already cut up the meat, and laid it upon scaffolds for smoking, though it was not yet so dry as, it seems, this process required. Duhaut and the others had also put by, for themselves, the marrow-bones and certain portions of the meat, to which, by woodland custom, they had a perfect right. Moranget, whose rashness and violence had once before caused a fatal catastrophe, fell into a most unreasonable fit of rage, berated and menaced Duhaut and his party, and ended by seizing upon the whole of the meat, including the reserved portions. This added fuel to the fire of Duhaut's old grudge against Moranget and his uncle. There is reason to think [Pg 426] that he had harbored deadly designs, the execution of which was only hastened by the present outbreak. The surgeon also bore hatred against Moranget, whom he had nursed with constant attention when wounded by an Indian arrow, and who had since repaid him with abuse. These two now took counsel apart with Hiens, Teissier, and L'Archevêque; and it was resolved to kill Moranget that night. Nika, La Salle's devoted follower, and Saget, his faithful servant, must die with him. All of the five were of one mind except the pilot Teissier, who neither aided nor opposed the plot. Night came: the woods grew dark; the evening meal was finished, and the evening pipes were smoked. The order of the guard was arranged; and, doubtless by design, the first hour of the night was assigned to Moranget, the second to Saget, and the third to Nika. Gun in hand, each stood watch in turn over the silent but not sleeping forms around him, till, his time expiring, he called the man who was to relieve him, wrapped himself in his blanket, and was soon buried in a slumber that was to be his last. Now the assassins rose. Duhaut and Hiens stood with their guns cocked, ready to shoot down any one of the destined victims who should resist or fly. The surgeon, with an axe, stole towards the three sleepers, and struck a rapid blow at each in turn. Saget and Nika died with little movement; but Moranget started spasmodically into a sitting posture, gasping and unable to speak; and the murderers [Pg 427] compelled De Marle, who was not in their plot, to compromise himself by despatching him. The floodgates of murder were open, and the torrent must have its way. Vengeance and safety alike demanded the death of La Salle. Hiens, or "English Jem," alone seems to have hesitated; for he was one of those to whom that stern commander had always been partial. Meanwhile, the intended victim was still at his camp, about six miles distant. It is easy to picture, with sufficient accuracy, the features of the scene,—the sheds of bark and branches, beneath which, among blankets and buffalo-robes, camp-utensils, pack-saddles, rude harness, guns, powder-horns, and bullet-pouches, the men lounged away the hour, sleeping or smoking, or talking among themselves; the blackened kettles that hung from tripods of poles over the fires; the Indians strolling about the place or lying, like dogs in the sun, with eyes half-shut, yet all observant; and, in the neighboring meadow, the horses grazing under the eye of a watchman. SUSPENSE. It was the eighteenth of March. Moranget and his companions had been expected to return the night before; but the whole day passed, and they did not appear. La Salle became very anxious. He resolved to go and look for them; but not well knowing the way, he told the Indians who were about the camp that he would give them a hatchet if they would guide him. One of them accepted the offer; and La Salle prepared to set out in the morning, at [Pg 428] the same time directing Joutel to be ready to go with him. Joutel says: "That evening, while we were talking about what could have happened to the absent men, he seemed to have a presentiment of what was to take place. He asked me if I had heard of any machinations against them, or if I had noticed any bad design on the part of Duhaut and the rest. I answered that I had heard nothing, except that they sometimes complained of being found fault with so often; and that this was all I knew; besides which, as they were persuaded that I was in his interest, they would not have told me of any bad design they might have. We were very uneasy all the rest of the evening." THE FATAL SHOT. In the morning, La Salle set out with his Indian guide. He had changed his mind with regard to Joutel, whom he now directed to remain in charge of the camp and to keep a careful watch. He told the friar Anastase Douay to come with him instead of Joutel, whose gun, which was the best in the party, he borrowed for the occasion, as well as his pistol. The three proceeded on their way,—La Salle, the friar, and the Indian. "All the way," writes the friar, "he spoke to me of nothing but matters of piety, grace, and predestination; enlarging on the debt he owed to God, who had saved him from so many perils during more than twenty years of travel in America. Suddenly, I saw him overwhelmed with a profound sadness, for which he himself could not account. He was so much moved [Pg 429] that I scarcely knew him." He soon recovered his usual calmness; and they walked on till they approached the camp of Duhaut, which was on the farther side of a small river. Looking about him with the eye of a woodsman, La Salle saw two eagles circling in the air nearly over him, as if attracted by carcasses of beasts or men. He fired his gun and his pistol, as a summons to any of his followers who might be within hearing. The shots reached the ears of the conspirators. Rightly conjecturing by whom they were fired, several of them, led by Duhaut, crossed the river at a little distance above, where trees or other intervening objects hid them from sight. Duhaut and the surgeon crouched like Indians in the long, dry, reed-like grass of the last summer's growth, while L'Archevêque stood in sight near the bank. La Salle, continuing to advance, soon saw him, and, calling to him, demanded where was Moranget. The man, without lifting his hat, or any show of respect, replied in an agitated and broken voice, but with a tone of studied insolence, that Moranget was strolling about somewhere. La Salle rebuked and menaced him. He rejoined with increased insolence, drawing back, as he spoke, towards the ambuscade, while the incensed commander advanced to chastise him. At that moment a shot was fired from the grass, instantly followed by another; and, pierced through the brain, La Salle dropped dead. The friar at his side stood terror-stricken, unable [Pg 430] to advance or to fly; when Duhaut, rising from the ambuscade, called out to him to take courage, for he had nothing to fear. The murderers now came forward, and with wild looks gathered about their victim. "There thou liest, great Bashaw! There thou liest!"[329] exclaimed the surgeon Liotot, in base exultation over the unconscious corpse. With mockery and insult, they stripped it naked, dragged it into the bushes, and left it there, a prey to the buzzards and the wolves. Thus in the vigor of his manhood, at the age of forty-three, died Robert Cavelier de la Salle, "one of the greatest men," writes Tonty, "of this age;" without question one of the most remarkable explorers whose names live in history. His faithful officer Joutel thus sketches his portrait: "His firmness, his courage, his great knowledge of the arts and sciences, which made him equal to every undertaking, and his untiring energy, which enabled him to surmount every obstacle, would have won at last a glorious success for his grand enterprise, had not all his fine qualities been counterbalanced by a haughtiness of manner which often made him insupportable, and by a harshness towards those under his command which drew upon him an implacable hatred, and was at last the cause of his death."[330] HIS CHARACTER. The enthusiasm of the disinterested and chivalrous [Pg 431] Champlain was not the enthusiasm of La Salle; nor had he any part in the self-devoted zeal of the early Jesuit explorers. He belonged not to the age of the knight-errant and the saint, but to the modern world of practical study and practical action. He was the hero not of a principle nor of a faith, but simply of a fixed idea and a determined purpose. As often happens with concentred and energetic natures, his purpose was to him a passion and an inspiration; and he clung to it with a certain fanaticism of devotion. It was the offspring of an ambition vast and comprehensive, yet acting in the interest both of France and of civilization. Serious in all things, incapable of the lighter pleasures, incapable of repose, finding no joy but in the pursuit of great designs, too shy for society and too reserved for popularity, often unsympathetic and always seeming so, smothering emotions which he could not utter, schooled to universal distrust, stern to his followers and pitiless to himself, bearing the brunt of every hardship and every danger, demanding of others an equal constancy joined to an implicit deference, heeding no counsel but his own, attempting the impossible and grasping at what was too vast to hold,—he contained in his own complex and painful nature the chief springs of his triumphs, his failures, and his death. It is easy to reckon up his defects, but it is not easy to hide from sight the Roman virtues that redeemed them. Beset by a throng of enemies, he [Pg 432] stands, like the King of Israel, head and shoulders above them all. He was a tower of adamant, against whose impregnable front hardship and danger, the rage of man and of the elements, the southern sun, the northern blast, fatigue, famine, disease, delay, disappointment, and deferred hope emptied their quivers in vain. That very pride which, Coriolanus-like, declared itself most sternly in the thickest press of foes, has in it something to challenge admiration. Never, under the impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader, beat a heart of more intrepid mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude, one must follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings,—those thousands of weary miles of forest, marsh, and river, where, again and again, in the bitterness of baffled striving, the untiring pilgrim pushed onward towards the goal which he was never to attain. America owes him an enduring memory; for in this masculine figure she sees the pioneer who guided her to the possession of her richest heritage.[331] FOOTNOTES: [325] Tonty also speaks of him as "un flibustier anglois." In another document, he is called "James." [326] Of the three narratives of this journey, those of Joutel, Cavelier, and Anastase Douay, the first is by far the best. That of Cavelier seems the work of a man of confused brain and indifferent memory. Some of his statements are irreconcilable with those of Joutel and Douay; and known facts of his history justify the suspicion of a wilful inaccuracy. Joutel's account is of a very different character, and seems to be the work of an honest and intelligent man. Douay's account if brief; but it agrees with that of Joutel, in most essential points. [327] Cavelier, Relation. [328] Called Lanquetot by Tonty. [329] "Te voilà, grand Bacha, te voilà!"—Joutel, Journal Historique, 203. [330] Ibid. [331] On the assassination of La Salle, the evidence is fourfold: 1. The narrative of Douay, who was with him at the time. 2. That of Joutel, who learned the facts, immediately after they took place, from Douay and others, and who parted from La Salle an hour or more before his death. 3. A document preserved in the Archives de la Marine, entitled Relation de la Mort du Sr. de la Salle, suivant le rapport d'un nommé Couture à qui M. Cavelier l'apprit en passant au pays des Akansa, avec toutes les circonstances que le dit Couture a apprises d'un Fran?ois que M. Cavelier avoit laissé aux dits pays des Akansa, crainte qu'il ne gardat pas le secret. 4. The authentic [Pg 433]memoir of Tonty, of which a copy from the original is before me, and which has recently been printed by Margry. The narrative of Cavelier unfortunately fails us several weeks before the death of his brother, the remainder being lost. On a study of these various documents, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that neither Cavelier nor Douay always wrote honestly. Joutel, on the contrary, gives the impression of sense, intelligence, and candor throughout. Charlevoix, who knew him long after, says that he was "un fort honnête homme, et le seul de la troupe de M. de la Salle, sur qui ce célèbre voyageur p?t compter." Tonty derived his information from the survivors of La Salle's party. Couture, whose statements are embodied in the Relation de la Mort de M. de la Salle, was one of Tonty's men, who, as will be seen hereafter, were left by him at the mouth of the Arkansas, and to whom Cavelier told the story of his brother's death. Couture also repeats the statements of one of La Salle's followers, undoubtedly a Parisian boy, named Barthelemy, who was violently prejudiced against his chief, whom he slanders to the utmost of his skill, saying that he was so enraged at his failures that he did not approach the sacraments for two years; that he nearly starved his brother Cavelier, allowing him only a handful of meal a day; that he killed with his own hand "quantité de personnes," who did not work to his liking; and that he killed the sick in their beds, without mercy, under the pretence that they were counterfeiting sickness in order to escape work. These assertions certainly have no other foundation than the undeniable rigor of La Salle's command. Douay says that he confessed and made his devotions on the morning of his death, while Cavelier always speaks of him as the hope and the staff of the colony. Douay declares that La Salle lived an hour after the fatal shot; that he gave him absolution, buried his body, and planted a cross on his grave. At the time, he told Joutel a different story; and the latter, with the best means of learning the facts, explicitly denies the friar's printed statement. Couture, on the authority of Cavelier himself, also says that neither he nor Douay was permitted to take any step for burying the body. Tonty says that Cavelier begged leave to do so, but was refused. Douay, unwilling to place upon record facts from which the inference might easily be drawn that he had been terrified from discharging his duty, no doubt invented the story of the burial, as well as that of the edifying behavior of Moranget, after he had been struck in the head with an axe. The locality of La Salle's assassination is sufficiently clear, from a comparison of the several narratives; and it is also indicated on a contemporary manuscript map, made on the return of the survivors of the party to France. The scene of the catastrophe is here placed on a southern branch of the Trinity. La Salle's debts, at the time of his death, according to a schedule presented in 1701 to Champigny, intendant of Canada, amounted to 106,831 livres, without reckoning interest. This cannot be meant to include all, as items are given which raise the amount much higher. In 1678 and 1679 alone, he contracted debts to the amount of 97,184 livres, of which 46,000 were furnished by Branssac, fiscal attorney of the Seminary of Montreal. This was to be paid in beaver-skins. Frontenac, at the same time, became his surety for 13,623 livres. In 1684, he borrowed 34,825 livres from the Sieur Pen, at Paris. These sums do not include the losses incurred by his family, which, in the memorial presented by them to the King, are set down at 500,000 livres for the expeditions between 1678 and 1683, and 300,000 livres for the fatal Texan expedition of 1684 These last figures are certainly exaggerated. CHAPTER XXVIII. 1687, 1688. THE INNOCENT AND THE GUILTY. Triumph of the Murderers.—Danger of Joutel.—Joutel among the Cenis.—White Savages.—Insolence of Duhaut and his Accomplices.—Murder of Duhaut and Liotot.—Hiens, the Buccaneer.—Joutel and his Party: their Escape; they reach the Arkansas.—Bravery and Devotion of Tonty.—The Fugitives reach the Illinois.—Unworthy Conduct of Cavelier.—He and his Companions return to France. Father Anastase Douay returned to the camp, and, aghast with grief and terror, rushed into the hut of Cavelier. "My poor brother is dead!" cried the priest, instantly divining the catastrophe from the horror-stricken face of the messenger. Close behind came the murderers, Duhaut at their head. Cavelier, his young nephew, and Douay himself, all fell on their knees, expecting instant death. The priest begged piteously for half an hour to prepare for his end; but terror and submission sufficed, and no more blood was shed. The camp yielded without resistance; and Duhaut was lord of all. In truth, there were none to oppose him; for, except the assassins themselves, the party was now reduced to six [Pg 436] persons,—Joutel, Douay, the elder Cavelier, his young nephew, and two other boys, the orphan Talon and a lad called Barthelemy. DOUBT AND ANXIETY. Joutel, for the moment, was absent; and L'Archevêque, who had a kindness for him, went quietly to seek him. He found him on a hillock, making a fire of dried grass in order that the smoke might guide La Salle on his return, and watching the horses grazing in the meadow below. "I was very much surprised," writes Joutel, "when I saw him approaching. When he came up to me he seemed all in confusion, or, rather, out of his wits. He began with saying that there was very bad news. I asked what it was. He answered that the Sieur de la Salle was dead, and also his nephew the Sieur de Moranget, his Indian hunter, and his servant. I was petrified, and did not know what to say; for I saw that they had been murdered. The man added that, at first, the murderers had sworn to kill me too. I easily believed it, for I had always been in the interest of M. de la Salle, and had commanded in his place; and it is hard to please everybody, or prevent some from being dissatisfied. I was greatly perplexed as to what I ought to do, and whether I had not better escape to the woods, whithersoever God should guide me; but, by bad or good luck, I had no gun and only one pistol, without balls or powder except what was in my powder-horn. To whatever side I turned, my life was in great peril. It is true that L'Archevêque assured me that they [Pg 437] had changed their minds, and had agreed to murder nobody else, unless they met with resistance. So, being in no condition, as I just said, to go far, having neither arms nor powder, I abandoned myself to Providence, and went back to the camp, where I found that these wretched murderers had seized everything belonging to M. de la Salle, and even my personal effects. They had also taken possession of all the arms. The first words that Duhaut said to me were, that each should command in turn; to which I made no answer. I saw M. Cavelier praying in a corner, and Father Anastase in another. He did not dare to speak to me, nor did I dare to go towards him till I had seen the designs of the assassins. They were in furious excitement, but, nevertheless, very uneasy and embarrassed. I was some time without speaking, and, as it were, without moving, for fear of giving umbrage to our enemies. "They had cooked some meat, and when it was supper-time they distributed it as they saw fit, saying that formerly their share had been served out to them, but that it was they who would serve it out in future. They, no doubt, wanted me to say something that would give them a chance to make a noise; but I managed always to keep my mouth closed. When night came and it was time to stand guard, they were in perplexity, as they could not do it alone; therefore they said to M. Cavelier, Father Anastase, me, and the others who were not in the plot with them, that all we had to do was to stand [Pg 438] guard as usual; that there was no use in thinking about what had happened,—that what was done was done; that they had been driven to it by despair, and that they were sorry for it, and meant no more harm to anybody. M. Cavelier took up the word, and told them that when they killed M. de la Salle they killed themselves, for there was nobody but him who could get us out of this country. At last, after a good deal of talk on both sides, they gave us our arms. So we stood guard; during which, M. Cavelier told me how they had come to the camp, entered his hut like so many madmen, and seized everything in it." Joutel, Douay, and the two Caveliers spent a sleepless night, consulting as to what they should do. They mutually pledged themselves to stand by each other to the last, and to escape as soon as they could from the company of the assassins. In the morning, Duhaut and his accomplices, after much discussion, resolved to go to the Cenis villages; and, accordingly, the whole party broke up their camp, packed their horses, and began their march. They went five leagues, and encamped at the edge of a grove. On the following day they advanced again till noon, when heavy rains began, and they were forced to stop by the banks of a river. "We passed the night and the next day there," says Joutel; "and during that time my mind was possessed with dark thoughts. It was hard to prevent ourselves from being in constant fear among such men, and we could not look at [Pg 439] them without horror. When I thought of the cruel deeds they had committed, and the danger we were in from them, I longed to revenge the evil they had done us. This would have been easy while they were asleep; but M. Cavelier dissuaded us, saying that we ought to leave vengeance to God, and that he himself had more to revenge than we, having lost his brother and his nephew." JOURNEY TO THE CENIS. The comic alternated with the tragic. On the twenty-third, they reached the bank of a river too deep to ford. Those who knew how to swim crossed without difficulty, but Joutel, Cavelier, and Douay were not of the number. Accordingly, they launched a log of light, dry wood, embraced it with one arm, and struck out for the other bank with their legs and the arm that was left free. But the friar became frightened. "He only clung fast to the aforesaid log," says Joutel, "and did nothing to help us forward. While I was trying to swim, my body being stretched at full length, I hit him in the belly with my feet; on which he thought it was all over with him, and, I can answer for it, he invoked Saint Francis with might and main. I could not help laughing, though I was myself in danger of drowning." Some Indians who had joined the party swam to the rescue, and pushed the log across. The path to the Cenis villages was exceedingly faint, and but for the Indians they would have lost the way. They crossed the main stream of the Trinity in a boat of raw hides, and then, being short [Pg 440] of provisions, held a council to determine what they should do. It was resolved that Joutel, with Hiens, Liotot, and Teissier, should go in advance to the villages and buy a supply of corn. Thus, Joutel found himself doomed to the company of three villains, who, he strongly suspected, were contriving an opportunity to kill him; but, as he had no choice, he dissembled his doubts, and set out with his sinister companions, Duhaut having first supplied him with goods for the intended barter. JOUTEL AND THE CENIS. They rode over hills and plains till night, encamped, supped on a wild turkey, and continued their journey till the afternoon of the next day, when they saw three men approaching on horseback, one of whom, to Joutel's alarm, was dressed like a Spaniard. He proved, however, to be a Cenis Indian, like the others. The three turned their horses' heads, and accompanied the Frenchmen on their way. At length they neared the Indian town, which, with its large thatched lodges, looked like a cluster of gigantic haystacks. Their approach had been made known, and they were received in solemn state. Twelve of the elders came to meet them in their dress of ceremony, each with his face daubed red or black, and his head adorned with painted plumes. From their shoulders hung deer-skins wrought with gay colors. Some carried war-clubs; some, bows and arrows; some, the blades of Spanish rapiers, attached to wooden handles decorated with hawk's bells and bunches of feathers. They stopped [Pg 441] before the honored guests, and, raising their hands aloft, uttered howls so extraordinary that Joutel could hardly preserve the gravity which the occasion demanded. Having next embraced the Frenchmen, the elders conducted them into the village, attended by a crowd of warriors and young men; ushered them into their town-hall, a large lodge, devoted to councils, feasts, dances, and other public assemblies; seated them on mats, and squatted in a ring around them. Here they were regaled with sagamite or Indian porridge, corn-cake, beans, bread made of the meal of parched corn, and another kind of bread made of the kernels of nuts and the seed of sunflowers. Then the pipe was lighted, and all smoked together. The four Frenchmen proposed to open a traffic for provisions, and their entertainers grunted assent. Joutel found a Frenchman in the village. He was a young man from Provence, who had deserted from La Salle on his last journey, and was now, to all appearance, a savage like his adopted countrymen, being naked like them, and affecting to have forgotten his native language. He was very friendly, however, and invited the visitors to a neighboring village, where he lived, and where, as he told them, they would find a better supply of corn. They accordingly set out with him, escorted by a crowd of Indians. They saw lodges and clusters of lodges scattered along their path at intervals, each with its field of corn, beans, and pumpkins, rudely cultivated [Pg 442] with a wooden hoe. Reaching their destination, which was four or five leagues distant, they were greeted with the same honors as at the first village, and, the ceremonial of welcome over, were lodged in the abode of the savage Frenchman. It is not to be supposed, however, that he and his squaws, of whom he had a considerable number, dwelt here alone; for these lodges of the Cenis often contained eight or ten families. They were made by firmly planting in a circle tall, straight young trees, such as grew in the swamps. The tops were then bent inward and lashed together; great numbers of cross-pieces were bound on; and the frame thus constructed was thickly covered with thatch, a hole being left at the top for the escape of the smoke. The inmates were ranged around the circumference of the structure, each family in a kind of stall, open in front, but separated from those adjoining it by partitions of mats. Here they placed their beds of cane, their painted robes of buffalo and deer-skin, their cooking utensils of pottery, and other household goods; and here, too, the head of the family hung his bow, quiver, lance, and shield. There was nothing in common but the fire, which burned in the middle of the lodge, and was never suffered to go out. These dwellings were of great size, and Joutel declares that he has seen some of them sixty feet in diameter.[332] [Pg 443] It was in one of the largest that the four travellers were now lodged. A place was assigned them where to bestow their baggage; and they took possession of their quarters amid the silent stares of the whole community. They asked their renegade countryman, the Proven?al, if they were safe. He replied that they were; but this did not wholly reassure them, and they spent a somewhat wakeful night. In the morning, they opened their budgets, and began a brisk trade in knives, awls, beads, and other trinkets, which they exchanged for corn and beans. Before evening, they had acquired a considerable stock; and Joutel's three companions declared their intention of returning with it to the camp, leaving him to continue the trade. They went, accordingly, in the morning; and Joutel was left alone. On the one hand, he was glad to be rid of them; on the other, he found his position among the Cenis very irksome, and, as he thought, insecure. Besides the Proven?al, who had gone with Liotot and his companions, there were two other French deserters among this tribe, and Joutel was very desirous to see them, hoping that they could tell him the way to the Mississippi; [Pg 444] for he was resolved to escape, at the first opportunity, from the company of Duhaut and his accomplices. He therefore made the present of a knife to a young Indian, whom he sent to find the two Frenchmen and invite them to come to the village. Meanwhile he continued his barter, but under many difficulties; for he could only explain himself by signs, and his customers, though friendly by day, pilfered his goods by night. This, joined to the fears and troubles which burdened his mind, almost deprived him of sleep, and, as he confesses, greatly depressed his spirits. Indeed, he had little cause for cheerfulness as to the past, present, or future. An old Indian, one of the patriarchs of the tribe, observing his dejection and anxious to relieve it, one evening brought him a young wife, saying that he made him a present of her. She seated herself at his side; "but," says Joutel, "as my head was full of other cares and anxieties, I said nothing to the poor girl. She waited for a little time; and then, finding that I did not speak a word, she went away."[333] WHITE SAVAGES. Late one night, he lay between sleeping and waking on the buffalo-robe that covered his bed of canes. All around the great lodge, its inmates were buried in sleep; and the fire treasured scalp-locks, the spear and war-club, and shield of whitened bull-hide—that hung by each warrior's resting-place. Such was the weird [Pg 445] scene that lingered on the dreamy eyes of Joutel, as he closed them at last in a troubled sleep. The sound of a footstep soon wakened him; and, turning, he saw at his side the figure of a naked savage, armed with a bow and arrows. Joutel spoke, but received no answer. Not knowing what to think, he reached out his hand for his pistols; on which the intruder withdrew, and seated himself by the fire. Thither Joutel followed; and as the light fell on his features, he looked at him closely. His face was tattooed, after the Cenis fashion, in lines drawn from the top of the forehead and converging to the chin; and his body was decorated with similar embellishments. Suddenly, this supposed Indian rose and threw his arms around Joutel's neck, making himself known, at the same time, as one of the Frenchmen who had deserted from La Salle and taken refuge among the Cenis. He was a Breton sailor named Ruter. His companion, named Grollet, also a sailor, had been afraid to come to the village lest he should meet La Salle. Ruter expressed surprise and regret when he heard of the death of his late commander. He had deserted him but a few months before. That brief interval had sufficed to transform him into a savage; and both he and his companion found their present reckless and ungoverned way of life greatly to their liking. He could tell nothing of the Mississippi; and on the next day he went home, carrying with him a present of beads for his wives, of which last he had made a large collection. [Pg 446] In a few days he reappeared, bringing Grollet with him. Each wore a bunch of turkey-feathers dangling from his head, and each had wrapped his naked body in a blanket. Three men soon after arrived from Duhaut's camp, commissioned to receive the corn which Joutel had purchased. They told him that Duhaut and Liotot, the tyrants of the party, had resolved to return to Fort St. Louis, and build a vessel to escape to the West Indies,—"a visionary scheme," writes Joutel, "for our carpenters were all dead; and even if they had been alive, they were so ignorant that they would not have known how to go about the work; besides, we had no tools for it. Nevertheless, I was obliged to obey, and set out for the camp with the provisions." On arriving, he found a wretched state of affairs. Douay and the two Caveliers, who had been treated by Duhaut with great harshness and contempt, had been told to make their mess apart; and Joutel now joined them. This separation restored them their freedom of speech, of which they had hitherto been deprived; but it subjected them to incessant hunger, as they were allowed only food enough to keep them from famishing. Douay says that quarrels were rife among the assassins themselves,—the malcontents being headed by Hiens, who was enraged that Duhaut and Liotot should have engrossed all the plunder. Joutel was helpless, for he had none to back him but two priests and a boy. SCHEMES OF ESCAPE. He and his companions talked of nothing around [Pg 447] their solitary camp-fire but the means of escaping from the villanous company into which they were thrown. They saw no resource but to find the Mississippi, and thus make their way to Canada,—a prodigious undertaking in their forlorn condition; nor was there any probability that the assassins would permit them to go. These, on their part, were beset with difficulties. They could not return to civilization without manifest peril of a halter; and their only safety was to turn buccaneers or savages. Duhaut, however, still held to his plan of going back to Fort St. Louis; and Joutel and his companions, who with good reason stood in daily fear of him, devised among themselves a simple artifice to escape from his company. The elder Cavelier was to tell him that they were too fatigued for the journey, and wished to stay among the Cenis; and to beg him to allow them a portion of the goods, for which Cavelier was to give his note of hand. The old priest, whom a sacrifice of truth even on less important occasions cost no great effort, accordingly opened the negotiation, and to his own astonishment and that of his companions, gained the assent of Duhaut. Their joy, however, was short; for Ruter, the French savage, to whom Joutel had betrayed his intention, when inquiring the way to the Mississippi, told it to Duhaut, who on this changed front and made the ominous declaration that he and his men would also go to Canada. Joutel and his companions were now filled with alarm; for there was no likelihood that [Pg 448] the assassins would permit them, the witnesses of their crime, to reach the settlements alive. In the midst of their trouble, the sky was cleared as by the crash of a thunderbolt. THE CRISIS. Hiens and several others had gone, some time before, to the Cenis villages to purchase horses; and here they had been detained by the charms of the Indian women. During their stay, Hiens heard of Duhaut's new plan of going to Canada by the Mississippi; and he declared to those with him that he would not consent. On a morning early in May he appeared at Duhaut's camp, with Ruter and Grollet, the French savages, and about twenty Indians. Duhaut and Liotot, it is said, were passing the time by practising with bows and arrows in front of their hut. One of them called to Hiens, "Good-morning;" but the buccaneer returned a sullen answer. He then accosted Duhaut, telling him that he had no mind to go up the Mississippi with him, and demanding a share of the goods. Duhaut replied that the goods were his own, since La Salle had owed him money. "So you will not give them to me?" returned Hiens. "No," was the answer. "You are a wretch!" exclaimed Hiens; "you killed my master."[334] And drawing a pistol from his belt he [Pg 449] fired at Duhaut, who staggered three or four paces and fell dead. Almost at the same instant Ruter fired his gun at Liotot, shot three balls into his body, and stretched him on the ground mortally wounded. Douay and the two Caveliers stood in extreme terror, thinking that their turn was to come next. Joutel, no less alarmed, snatched his gun to defend himself; but Hiens called to him to fear nothing, declaring that what he had done was only to avenge the death of La Salle,—to which, nevertheless, he had been privy, though not an active sharer in the crime. Liotot lived long enough to make his confession, after which Ruter killed him by exploding a pistol loaded with a blank charge of powder against his head. Duhaut's myrmidon, L'Archevêque, was absent, hunting, and Hiens was for killing him on his return; but the two priests and Joutel succeeded in dissuading him. The Indian spectators beheld these murders with undisguised amazement, and almost with horror. What manner of men were these who had pierced the secret places of the wilderness to riot in mutual slaughter? Their fiercest warriors might learn a lesson in ferocity from these heralds of civilization. Joutel and his companions, who could not dispense with the aid of the Cenis, were obliged to explain away, as they best might, the atrocity of what they had witnessed.[335] Hiens, and others of the French, had before [Pg 450] promised to join the Cenis on an expedition against a neighboring tribe with whom they were at war; and the whole party having removed to the Indian village, the warriors and their allies prepared to depart. Six Frenchmen went with Hiens; and the rest, including Joutel, Douay, and the Caveliers, remained behind, in the lodge where Joutel had been domesticated, and where none were now left but women, children, and old men. Here they remained a week or more, watched closely by the Cenis, who would not let them leave the village; when news at length arrived of a great victory, and the warriors soon after returned with forty-eight scalps. It was the French guns that won the battle, but not the less did they glory in their prowess; and several days were spent in ceremonies and feasts of triumph.[336] When all this hubbub of rejoicing had subsided, Joutel and his companions broke to Hiens their plan of attempting to reach home by way of the Mississippi. As they had expected, he opposed it vehemently, declaring that for his own part he would not run such a risk of losing his head; but at length he consented to their departure, on condition that the elder Cavelier should give him a certificate of his entire innocence of the murder of La Salle, which the priest did not hesitate to do. For the rest, Hiens treated his departing fellow-travellers with the generosity of a successful free-booter; for he gave them a good [Pg 451] share of the plunder he had won by his late crime, supplying them with hatchets, knives, beads, and other articles of trade, besides several horses. Meanwhile, adds Joutel, "we had the mortification and chagrin of seeing this scoundrel walking about the camp in a scarlet coat laced with gold which had belonged to the late Monsieur de la Salle, and which he had seized upon, as also upon all the rest of his property." A well-aimed shot would have avenged the wrong, but Joutel was clearly a mild and moderate person; and the elder Cavelier had constantly opposed all plans of violence. Therefore they stifled their emotions, and armed themselves with patience. JOUTEL AND HIS PARTY. Joutel's party consisted, besides himself, of the Caveliers (uncle and nephew), Anastase Douay, De Marle, Teissier, and a young Parisian named Barthelemy. Teissier, an accomplice in the murders of Moranget and La Salle, had obtained a pardon, in form, from the elder Cavelier. They had six horses and three Cenis guides. Hiens embraced them at parting, as did the ruffians who remained with him. Their course was northeast, toward the mouth of the Arkansas,—a distant goal, the way to which was beset with so many dangers that their chance of reaching it seemed small. It was early in June, and the forests and prairies were green with the verdure of opening summer. They soon reached the Assonis, a tribe near the Sabine, who received them well, and gave them guides to the nations dwelling towards Red River. [Pg 452] On the twenty-third, they approached a village, the inhabitants of which, regarding them as curiosities of the first order, came out in a body to see them; and, eager to do them honor, they required them to mount on their backs, and thus make their entrance in procession. Joutel, being large and heavy, weighed down his bearer, insomuch that two of his countrymen were forced to sustain him, one on each side. On arriving, an old chief washed their faces with warm water from an earthen pan, and then invited them to mount on a scaffold of canes, where they sat in the hot sun listening to four successive speeches of welcome, of which they understood not a word.[337] At the village of another tribe, farther on their way, they met with a welcome still more oppressive. Cavelier, the unworthy successor of his brother, being represented as the chief of the party, became the principal victim of their attentions. They danced the calumet before him; while an Indian, taking him, with an air of great respect, by the shoulders as he sat, shook him in cadence with the thumping of the drum. They then placed two girls close beside him, as his wives; while, at the same time, an old chief tied a painted feather in his hair. These proceedings so scandalized him that, pretending [Pg 453] to be ill, he broke off the ceremony; but they continued to sing all night, with so much zeal that several of them were reduced to a state of complete exhaustion. ARRIVAL AT THE ARKANSAS. At length, after a journey of about two months, during which they lost one of their number,—De Marle, accidentally drowned while bathing,—the travellers approached the river Arkansas, at a point not far above its junction with the Mississippi. Led by their Indian guides, they traversed a rich district of plains and woods, and stood at length on the borders of the stream. Nestled beneath the forests of the farther shore, they saw the lodges of a large Indian town; and here, as they gazed across the broad current, they presently descried an object which nerved their spent limbs, and thrilled their homesick hearts with joy. It was a tall, wooden cross; and near it was a small house, built evidently by Christian hands. With one accord they fell on their knees, and raised their hands to Heaven in thanksgiving. Two men, in European dress, issued from the door of the house and fired their guns to salute the excited travellers, who on their part replied with a volley. Canoes put out from the farther shore and ferried them to the town, where they were welcomed by Couture and De Launay, two followers of Henri de Tonty.[338] That brave, loyal, and generous man, always vigilant and always active, beloved and feared alike by [Pg 454] white men and by red,[339] had been ejected, as we have seen, by the agent of the governor, La Barre, from the command of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. An order from the King had reinstated him; and he no sooner heard the news of La Salle's landing on the shores of the Gulf, and of the disastrous beginnings of his colony,[340] than he prepared, on his own responsibility and at his own cost, to go to his assistance. He collected twenty-five Frenchmen and eleven Indians, and set out from his fortified rock on the thirteenth of February, 1686;[341] descended the Mississippi, and reached its mouth in Holy Week. All was solitude, a voiceless desolation of river, marsh, and sea. He despatched canoes to the east and to the west, searching the coast for some thirty leagues on either side. Finding no trace of his friend, who at that moment was ranging the prairies of Texas in no less fruitless search of his "fatal river," Tonty wrote for him a letter, which he left [Pg 455] in the charge of an Indian chief, who preserved it with reverential care, and gave it, fourteen years after, to Iberville, the founder of Louisiana.[342] Deeply disappointed at his failure, Tonty retraced his course, and ascended the Mississippi to the villages of the Arkansas, where some of his men volunteered to remain. He left six of them; and of this number were Couture and De Launay.[343] A HOSPITABLE RECEPTION. Cavelier and his companions, followed by a crowd of Indians, some carrying their baggage, some struggling for a view of the white strangers, entered the log cabin of their two hosts. Rude as it was, they found in it an earnest of peace and safety, and a foretaste of home. Couture and De Launay were moved even to tears by the story of their disasters, and of the catastrophe that crowned them. La Salle's death was carefully concealed from the Indians, many of whom had seen him on his descent of the Mississippi, and who regarded him with prodigious respect. They lavished all their hospitality on his followers; feasted them on corn-bread, dried buffalo meat, and watermelons, and danced the calumet before them, the most august of all their ceremonies. On this occasion, Cavelier's patience [Pg 456] failed him again; and pretending, as before, to be ill, he called on his nephew to take his place. There were solemn dances, too, in which the warriors—some bedaubed with white clay, some with red, and some with both; some wearing feathers, and some the horns of buffalo; some naked, and some in painted shirts of deer-skin, fringed with scalp-locks, insomuch, says Joutel, that they looked like a troop of devils—leaped, stamped, and howled from sunset till dawn. All this was partly to do the travellers honor, and partly to extort presents. They made objections, however, when asked to furnish guides; and it was only by dint of great offers that four were at length procured. THE MISSISSIPPI. With these, the travellers resumed their journey in a wooden canoe, about the first of August,[344] descended the Arkansas, and soon reached the dark and inexorable river, so long the object of their search, rolling, like a destiny, through its realms of solitude and shade. They launched their canoe on its turbid bosom, plied their oars against the current, and slowly won their way upward, following the writhings of this watery monster through cane-brake, swamp, and fen. It was a hard and toilsome journey, [Pg 457] under the sweltering sun of August,—now on the water, now knee-deep in mud, dragging their canoe through the unwholesome jungle. On the nineteenth, they passed the mouth of the Ohio; and their Indian guides made it an offering of buffalo meat. On the first of September, they passed the Missouri, and soon after saw Marquette's pictured rock, and the line of craggy heights on the east shore, marked on old French maps as "the Ruined Castles." Then, with a sense of relief, they turned from the great river into the peaceful current of the Illinois. They were eleven days in ascending it, in their large and heavy wooden canoe; when at length, on the afternoon of the fourteenth of September, they saw, towering above the forest and the river, the cliff crowned with the palisades of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. As they drew near, a troop of Indians, headed by a Frenchman, descended from the rock, and fired their guns to salute them. They landed, and followed the forest path that led towards the fort, when they were met by Boisrondet, Tonty's comrade in the Iroquois war, and two other Frenchmen, who no sooner saw them than they called out, demanding where was La Salle. Cavelier, fearing lest he and his party would lose the advantage they might derive from his character of representative of his brother, was determined to conceal his death; and Joutel, as he himself confesses, took part in the deceit. Substituting equivocation for falsehood, they replied that La Salle had been with them nearly [Pg 458] as far as the Cenis villages, and that, when they parted, he was in good health. This, so far as they were concerned, was, literally speaking, true; but Douay and Teissier, the one a witness and the other a sharer in his death, could not have said so much without a square falsehood, and therefore evaded the inquiry. Threading the forest path, and circling to the rear of the rock, they climbed the rugged height, and reached the top. Here they saw an area, encircled by the palisades that fenced the brink of the cliff, and by several dwellings, a store-house, and a chapel. There were Indian lodges too; for some of the red allies of the French made their abode with them.[345] Tonty was absent, fighting the Iroquois; but his lieutenant, Bellefontaine, received the travellers, and his little garrison of bush-rangers greeted them with a salute of musketry, mingled with the whooping of the Indians. A Te Deum followed at the chapel; "and, with all our hearts," says Joutel, "we gave thanks to God, who had preserved and guided us." At length, the tired travellers were among countrymen and friends. Bellefontaine found a room for the two priests; while Joutel, Teissier, and young Cavelier were lodged in the store-house. THE JESUIT ALLOUEZ. The Jesuit Allouez was lying ill at the fort; and [Pg 459] Joutel, Cavelier, and Douay went to visit him. He showed great anxiety when told that La Salle was alive, and on his way to the Illinois; asked many questions, and could not hide his agitation. When, some time after, he had partially recovered, he left St. Louis, as if to shun a meeting with the object of his alarm.[346] Once before, in 1679, Allouez had fled [Pg 460] from the Illinois on hearing of the approach of La Salle. The season was late, and they were eager to hasten forward that they might reach Quebec in time to return to France in the autumn ships. There was not a day to lose. They bade farewell to Bellefontaine, from whom, as from all others, they had concealed the death of La Salle, and made their way across the country to Chicago. Here they were detained a week by a storm; and when at length they embarked in a canoe furnished by Bellefontaine, the tempest soon forced them to put back. On this, they abandoned their design, and returned to Fort St. Louis, to the astonishment of its inmates. CONDUCT OF CAVELIER. It was October when they arrived; and, meanwhile, Tonty had returned from the Iroquois war, where he had borne a conspicuous part in the famous attack on the Senecas by the Marquis de Denonville.[347] He listened with deep interest to the mournful story of his guests. Cavelier knew him well. He knew, so far as he was capable of knowing, his generous and disinterested character, his long and faithful [Pg 461] attachment to La Salle, and the invaluable services he had rendered him. Tonty had every claim on his confidence and affection. Yet he did not hesitate to practise on him the same deceit which he had practised on Bellefontaine. He told him that he had left his brother in good health on the Gulf of Mexico, and drew upon him, in La Salle's name, for an amount stated by Joutel at about four thousand livres, in furs, besides a canoe and a quantity of other goods, all of which were delivered to him by the unsuspecting victim.[348] This was at the end of the winter, when the old priest and his companions had been living for months on Tonty's hospitality. They set out for Canada on [Pg 462] the twenty-first of March, reached Chicago on the twenty-ninth, and thence proceeded to Michilimackinac. Here Cavelier sold some of Tonty's furs to a merchant, who gave him in payment a draft on Montreal, thus putting him in funds for his voyage home. The party continued their journey in canoes by way of French River and the Ottawa, and safely reached Montreal on the seventeenth of July. Here they procured the clothing of which they were wofully in need, and then descended the river to Quebec, where they took lodging,—some with the Récollet friars, and some with the priests of the Seminary,—in order to escape the questions of the curious. At the end of August they embarked for France, and early in October arrived safely at Rochelle. None of the party were men of especial energy or force of character; and yet, under the spur of a dire necessity, they had achieved one of the most adventurous journeys on record. THE COLONISTS ABANDONED. Now, at length, they disburdened themselves of their gloomy secret; but the sole result seems to have been an order from the King for the arrest of the murderers, should they appear in Canada.[349] [Pg 463] Joutel was disappointed. It had been his hope throughout that the King would send a ship to the relief of the wretched band at Fort St. Louis of Texas. But Louis XIV. hardened his heart, and left them to their fate. CHAPTER XXIX. 1688-1689. FATE OF THE TEXAN COLONY. Tonty attempts to rescue the Colonists: his Difficulties and Hardships.—Spanish Hostility.—Expedition of Alonzo de Leon: he reaches Fort St. Louis.—A Scene of Havoc.—Destruction of the French.—The End. COURAGE OF TONTY. Henri De Tonty, on his rock of St. Louis, was visited in September by Couture and two Indians from the Arkansas. Then, for the first time, he heard with grief and indignation of the death of La Salle, and the deceit practised by Cavelier. The chief whom he had served so well was beyond his help; but might not the unhappy colonists left on the shores of Texas still be rescued from destruction? Couture had confirmed what Cavelier and his party had already told him, that the tribes south of the Arkansas were eager to join the French in an invasion of northern Mexico; and he soon after received from the governor, Denonville, a letter informing him that war had again been declared against Spain. As bold and enterprising as La Salle himself, Tonty resolved on an effort to learn the condition of the [Pg 465] few Frenchmen left on the borders of the Gulf, relieve their necessities, and, should it prove practicable, make them the nucleus of a war-party to cross the Rio Grande, and add a new province to the domain of France. It was the revival, on a small scale, of La Salle's scheme of Mexican invasion; and there is no doubt that, with a score of French musketeers, he could have gathered a formidable party of savage allies from the tribes of Red River, the Sabine, and the Trinity. This daring adventure and the rescue of his suffering countrymen divided his thoughts, and he prepared at once to execute the double purpose.[350] TONTY MISREPRESENTED. He left Fort St. Louis of the Illinois early in December, in a pirogue, or wooden canoe, with five Frenchmen, a Shawanoe warrior, and two Indian slaves; and, after a long and painful journey, he reached the villages of the Caddoes on Red River on the twenty-eighth of March. Here he was told that Hiens and his companions were at a village eighty leagues distant; and thither he was preparing to go in search of them, when all his men, excepting the Shawanoe and one Frenchman, declared themselves disgusted with the journey, and refused to follow him. Persuasion was useless, and there was no means of enforcing obedience. He found himself abandoned; but he still pushed on, with the two who remained faithful. A few days after, they lost nearly all their ammunition in crossing a river. [Pg 466] Undeterred by this accident, Tonty made his way to the village where Hiens and those who had remained with him were said to be; but no trace of them appeared, and the demeanor of the Indians, when he inquired for them, convinced him that they had been put to death. He charged them with having killed the Frenchmen, whereupon the women of the village raised a wail of lamentation; "and I saw," he says, "that what I had said to them was true." They refused to give him guides; and this, with the loss of his ammunition, compelled him to forego his purpose of making his way to the colonists on the Bay of St. Louis. With bitter disappointment, he and his two companions retraced their course, and at length approached Red River. Here they found the whole country flooded. Sometimes they waded to the knees, sometimes to the neck, sometimes pushed their slow way on rafts. Night and day it rained without ceasing. They slept on logs placed side by side to raise them above the mud and water, and fought their way with hatchets through the inundated cane-brakes. They found no game but a bear, which had taken refuge on an island in the flood; and they were forced to eat their dogs. "I never in my life," writes Tonty, "suffered so much." In judging these intrepid exertions, it is to be remembered that he was not, at least in appearance, of a robust constitution, and that he had but one hand. They reached the Mississippi on the eleventh of July, and the Arkansas villages on the [Pg 467] thirty-first. Here Tonty was detained by an attack of fever. He resumed his journey when it began to abate, and reached his fort of the Illinois in September.[351] [Pg 468] A SCENE OF HAVOC. While the King of France abandoned the exiles of Texas to their fate, a power dark, ruthless, and terrible was hovering around the feeble colony on the Bay of St. Louis, searching with pitiless eye to discover and tear out that dying germ of civilization from the bosom of the wilderness in whose savage immensity it lay hidden. Spain claimed the Gulf of Mexico and all its coasts as her own of unanswerable right, and the viceroys of Mexico were strenuous to enforce her claim. The capture of one of La Salle's four vessels at St. Domingo had made known his designs, and in the course of the three succeeding years no less than four expeditions were sent out from Vera Cruz to find and destroy him. They scoured the whole extent of the coast, and found the wrecks of the "Aimable" and the "Belle;" but the colony of St. Louis,[352] inland and secluded, escaped their search. For a time, the jealousy of the Spaniards was lulled to sleep. They rested in the assurance that the intruders had perished, when fresh advices from the frontier province of New Leon [Pg 469] caused the Viceroy, Galve, to order a strong force, under Alonzo de Leon, to march from Coahuila, and cross the Rio Grande. Guided by a French prisoner, probably one of the deserters from La Salle, they pushed their way across wild and arid plains, rivers, prairies, and forests, till at length they approached the Bay of St. Louis, and descried, far off, the harboring-place of the French.[353] As they drew near, no banner was displayed, no sentry challenged; and the silence of death reigned over the shattered palisades and neglected dwellings. The Spaniards spurred their reluctant horses through the gateway, and a scene of desolation met their sight. No living thing was stirring. Doors were torn from their hinges; broken boxes, staved barrels, and rusty kettles, mingled with a great number of stocks of arquebuses and muskets, were scattered about in confusion. Here, too, trampled in mud and soaked with rain, they saw more than two hundred books, many of which still retained the traces of costly bindings. On the adjacent prairie lay three dead bodies, one of which, from fragments of dress still clinging to the wasted remains, they saw to be that of a woman. It was in vain to question the imperturbable [Pg 470] savages, who, wrapped to the throat in their buffalo-robes, stood gazing on the scene with looks of wooden immobility. Two strangers, however, at length arrived.[354] Their faces were smeared with paint, and they were wrapped in buffalo-robes like the rest; yet these seeming Indians were L'Archevêque, the tool of La Salle's murderer Duhaut, and Grollet, the companion of the white savage Ruter. The Spanish commander, learning that these two men were in the district of the tribe called Texas,[355] had sent to invite them to his camp under a pledge of good treatment; and they had resolved to trust Spanish clemency rather than endure longer a life that had become intolerable. From them the Spaniards learned nearly all that is known of the fate of Barbier, Zenobe Membré, and their companions. Three months before, a large band of Indians had approached the fort, the inmates of which had suffered severely from the ravages of the small-pox. From fear of treachery, they refused to admit their visitors, but received them at a cabin without the palisades. Here the French began a trade with them; when suddenly a band of warriors, yelling [Pg 471] the war-whoop, rushed from an ambuscade under the bank of the river, and butchered the greater number. The children of one Talon, together with an Italian and a young man from Paris named Breman, were saved by the Indian women, who carried them off on their backs. L'Archevêque and Grollet, who with others of their stamp were domesticated in the Indian villages, came to the scene of slaughter, and, as they affirmed, buried fourteen dead bodies.[356] [Pg 472] THE SURVIVORS. L'Archevêque and Grollet were sent to Spain, where, in spite of the pledge given them, they were thrown into prison, with the intention of sending them back to labor in the mines. The Indians, some time after De Leon's expedition, gave up their captives to the Spaniards. The Italian was imprisoned at Vera Cruz. Breman's fate is unknown. Pierre and Jean Baptiste Talon, who were now old enough to bear arms, were enrolled in the Spanish navy, and, being captured in 1696 by a French ship of war, regained their liberty; while their younger brothers and their sister were carried to Spain by the Viceroy.[357] With respect to the ruffian companions of Hiens, the conviction of Tonty that they had been put to death by the Indians may have been well founded; but the buccaneer himself is said to have been killed in a quarrel with his accomplice Ruter, the white savage; and thus in ignominy and darkness died the last embers of the doomed colony of La Salle. FRUIT OF EXPLORATIONS. Here ends the wild and mournful story of the explorers of the Mississippi. Of all their toil and [Pg 473] sacrifice, no fruit remained but a great geographical discovery, and a grand type of incarnate energy and will. Where La Salle had ploughed, others were to sow the seed; and on the path which the undespairing Norman had hewn out, the Canadian D'Iberville was to win for France a vast though a transient dominion. APPENDIX. I. EARLY UNPUBLISHED MAPS OF THE MISSISSIPPI AND THE GREAT LAKES. Most of the maps described below are to be found in the Dép?t des Cartes de la Marine et des Colonies, at Paris. Taken together, they exhibit the progress of western discovery, and illustrate the records of the explorers. 1. The map of Galinée, 1670, has a double title,—Carte du Canada et des Terres découvertes vers le lac Derié, and Carte du Lac Ontario et des habitations qui l'environnent ensemble le pays que Messrs. Dolier et Galinée, missionnaires du seminaire de St. Sulpice, ont parcouru. It professes to represent only the country actually visited by the two missionaries. Beginning with Montreal, it gives the course of the Upper St. Lawrence and the shores of Lake Ontario, the river Niagara, the north shore of Lake Erie, the Strait of Detroit, and the eastern and northern shores of Lake Huron. Galinée did not know the existence of the peninsula of Michigan, and merges Lakes Huron and Michigan into one, under the name of "Michigané, ou Mer Douce des Hurons." He was also entirely ignorant of the south shore of Lake Erie. He represents the outlet of Lake Superior as far as the Saut Ste. [Pg 476] Marie, and lays down the river Ottawa in great detail, having descended it on his return. The Falls of the Genesee are indicated, as also the Falls of Niagara, with the inscription, "Sault qui tombe au rapport des sauvages de plus de 200 pieds de haut." Had the Jesuits been disposed to aid him, they could have given him much additional information, and corrected his most serious errors; as, for example, the omission of the peninsula of Michigan. The first attempt to map out the Great Lakes was that of Champlain, in 1632. This of Galinée may be called the second. 2. The map of Lake Superior, published in the Jesuit Relation of 1670, 1671, was made at about the same time with Galinée's map. Lake Superior is here styled "Lac Tracy, ou Supérieur." Though not so exact as it has been represented, this map indicates that the Jesuits had explored every part of this fresh-water ocean, and that they had a thorough knowledge of the straits connecting the three Upper Lakes, and of the adjacent bays, inlets, and shores. The peninsula of Michigan, ignored by Galinée, is represented in its proper place. 3. Three years or more after Galinée made the map mentioned above, another, indicating a greatly increased knowledge of the country, was made by some person whose name does not appear. This map, which is somewhat more than four feet long and about two feet and a half wide, has no title. All the Great Lakes, through their entire extent, are laid down on it with considerable accuracy. Lake Ontario is called "Lac Ontario, ou de Frontenac." Fort Frontenac is indicated, as well as the Iroquois colonies of the north shore. Niagara is "Chute haute de 120 toises par où le Lac Erié tombe dans le Lac Frontenac." Lake Erie is "Lac Teiocha-rontiong, dit communément Lac Erié." Lake St. Clair is "Tsiketo, ou Lac de la Chaudière." Lake Huron is "Lac Huron, ou Mer Douce des Hurons." [Pg 477] Lake Superior is "Lac Supérieur." Lake Michigan is "Lac Mitchiganong, ou des Illinois." On Lake Michigan, immediately opposite the site of Chicago, are written the words, of which the following is the literal translation: "The largest vessels can come to this place from the outlet of Lake Erie, where it discharges into Lake Frontenac [Ontario]; and from this marsh into which they can enter there is only a distance of a thousand paces to the River La Divine [Des Plaines], which can lead them to the River Colbert [Mississippi], and thence to the Gulf of Mexico." This map was evidently made after that voyage of La Salle in which he discovered the Illinois, or at least the Des Plaines branch of it. The Ohio is laid down with the inscription, "River Ohio, so called by the Iroquois on account of its beauty, which the Sieur de la Salle descended." (Ante, 32, note.) 4. We now come to the map of Marquette, which is a rude sketch of a portion of Lakes Superior and Michigan, and of the route pursued by him and Joliet up the Fox River of Green Bay, down the Wisconsin, and thence down the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas. The river Illinois is also laid down, as it was by this course that he returned to Lake Michigan after his memorable voyage. He gives no name to the Wisconsin. The Mississippi is called "Rivière de la Conception;" the Missouri, the Pekitanoui; and the Ohio, the Ouabouskiaou, though La Salle, its discoverer, had previously given it its present name, borrowed from the Iroquois. The Illinois is nameless, like the Wisconsin. At the mouth of a river, perhaps the Des Moines, Marquette places the three villages of the Peoria Indians visited by him. These, with the Kaskaskias, Maroas, and others, on the map, were merely sub-tribes of the aggregation of savages known as the Illinois. On or near the Missouri he places the Ouchage (Osages), the Oumessourit [Pg 478] (Missouris), the Kansa (Kanzas), the Paniassa (Pawnees), the Maha (Omahas), and the Pahoutet (Pah-Utahs?). The names of many other tribes, "esloignées dans les terres," are also given along the course of the Arkansas, a river which is nameless on the map. Most of these tribes are now indistinguishable. This map has recently been engraved and published. 5. Not long after Marquette's return from the Mississippi, another map was made by the Jesuits, with the following title: Carte de la nouvelle decouverte que les peres Iesuites ont fait en l'année 1672, et continuée par le P. Iacques Marquette de la mesme Compagnie accompagné de quelques fran?ois en l'année 1673, qu'on pourra nommer en fran?ois la Manitoumie. This title is very elaborately decorated with figures drawn with a pen, and representing Jesuits instructing Indians. The map is the same published by Thevenot, not without considerable variations, in 1681. It represents the Mississippi from a little above the Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, the part below the Arkansas being drawn from conjecture. The river is named "Mitchisipi, ou grande Rivière." The Wisconsin, the Illinois, the Ohio, the Des Moines(?), the Missouri, and the Arkansas are all represented, but in a very rude manner. Marquette's route, in going and returning, is marked by lines; but the return route is incorrect. The whole map is so crude and careless, and based on information so inexact, that it is of little interest. 6. The Jesuits made also another map, without title, of the four Upper Lakes and the Mississippi to a little below the Arkansas. The Mississippi is called "Riuiere Colbert." The map is remarkable as including the earliest representation of the Upper Mississippi, based, perhaps, on the reports of Indians. The Falls of St. Anthony are indicated by the word "Saut." It is possible that the map [Pg 479] may be of later date than at first appears, and that it may have been drawn in the interval between the return of Hennepin from the Upper Mississippi and that of La Salle from his discovery of the mouth of the river. The various temporary and permanent stations of the Jesuits are marked by crosses. 7. Of far greater interest is the small map of Louis Joliet made and presented to Count Frontenac after the discoverer's return from the Mississippi. It is entitled Carte de la decouverte du Sr. Jolliet ou l'on voit La Communication du fleuve St. Laurens avec les lacs frontenac, Erié, Lac des Hurons et Ilinois. Then succeeds the following, written in the same antiquated French, as if it were a part of the title: "Lake Frontenac [Ontario] is separated by a fall of half a league from Lake Erié, from which one enters that of the Hurons, and by the same navigation, into that of the Illinois [Michigan], from the head of which one crosses to the Divine River [Rivière Divine; i. e., the Des Plaines branch of the river Illinois], by a portage of a thousand paces. This river falls into the river Colbert [Mississippi], which discharges itself into the Gulf of Mexico." A part of this map is based on the Jesuit map of Lake Superior, the legends being here for the most part identical, though the shape of the lake is better given by Joliet. The Mississippi, or "Riuiere Colbert," is made to flow from three lakes in latitude 47°; and it ends in latitude 37°, a little below the mouth of the Ohio, the rest being apparently cut off to make room for Joliet's letter to Frontenac (ante, 76), which is written on the lower part of the map. The valley of the Mississippi is called on the map "Colbertie, ou Amerique Occidentale." The Missouri is represented without name, and against it is a legend, of which the following is the literal translation: "By one of these great rivers which come from the west and discharge themselves into the river Colbert, [Pg 480] one will find a way to enter the Vermilion Sea (Gulf of California). I have seen a village which was not more than twenty days' journey by land from a nation which has commerce with those of California. If I had come two days sooner, I should have spoken with those who had come from thence, and had brought four hatchets as a present." The Ohio has no name, but a legend over it states that La Salle had descended it. (See ante, 32, note). 8. Joliet, at about the same time, made another map, larger than that just mentioned, but not essentially different. The letter to Frontenac is written upon both. There is a third map, of which the following is the title: Carte generalle de la France septentrionale contenant la descouuerte du pays des Illinois, faite par le Sr. Jolliet. This map, which is inscribed with a dedication by the Intendant Duchesneau to the minister Colbert, was made some time after the voyage of Joliet and Marquette. It is an elaborate piece of work, but very inaccurate. It represents the continent from Hudson's Strait to Mexico and California, with the whole of the Atlantic and a part of the Pacific coast. An open sea is made to extend from Hudson's Strait westward to the Pacific. The St. Lawrence and all the Great Lakes are laid down with tolerable correctness, as also is the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi, called "Messasipi," flows into the Gulf, from which it extends northward nearly to the "Mer du Nord." Along its course, above the Wisconsin, which is called "Miskous," is a long list of Indian tribes, most of which cannot now be recognized, though several are clearly sub-tribes of the Sioux. The Ohio is called "Ouaboustikou." The whole map is decorated with numerous figures of animals, natives of the country, or supposed to be so. Among them are camels, ostriches, and a giraffe, which are placed on the plains west [Pg 481] of the Mississippi. But the most curious figure is that which represents one of the monsters seen by Joliet and Marquette, painted on a rock by the Indians. It corresponds with Marquette's description (ante, 68). This map, which is an early effort of the engineer Franquelin, does more credit to his skill as a designer than to his geographical knowledge, which appears in some respects behind his time. 9. Carte de l'Amérique Septentrionale depuis l'embouchure de la Rivière St. Laurens jusques au Sein Mexique. On this curious little map, the Mississippi is called "Riuiere Buade" (the family name of Frontenac); and the neighboring country is "La Frontenacie." The Illinois is "Riuiere de la Diuine ou Loutrelaise," and the Arkansas is "Riuiere Bazire." The Mississippi is made to head in three lakes, and to discharge itself into "B. du S. Esprit" (Mobile Bay). Some of the legends and the orthography of various Indian names are clearly borrowed from Marquette. This map appears to be the work of Raudin, Frontenac's engineer. I owe a tracing of it to the kindness of Henry Harrisse, Esq. 10. Carte des Parties les plus occidentales du Canada, par le Père Pierre Raffeix, S. J. This rude map shows the course of Du Lhut from the head of Lake Superior to the Mississippi, and partly confirms the story of Hennepin, who, Raffeix says in a note, was rescued by Du Lhut. The course of Joliet and Marquette is given, with the legend "Voyage et première descouverte du Mississipy faite par le P. Marquette et Mr. Joliet en 1672." The route of La Salle in 1679, 1680, is also laid down. 11. In the Dép?t des Cartes de la Marine is another map of the Upper Mississippi, which seems to have been made by or for Du Lhut. Lac Buade, the "Issatis," the "Tintons," the "Houelbatons," the "Poualacs," and other tribes [Pg 482] of this region appear upon it. This is the map numbered 208 in the Cartographie of Harrisse. 12. Another map deserving mention is a large and fine one, entitled Carte de l'Amérique Septentrionale et partie de la Meridionale ... avec les nouvelles découvertes de la Rivière Missisipi, ou Colbert. It appears to have been made in 1682 or 1683, before the descent of La Salle to the mouth of the Mississippi was known to the maker, who seems to have been Franquelin. The lower Mississippi is omitted, but its upper portions are elaborately laid down; and the name La Louisiane appears in large gold letters along its west side. The Falls of St. Anthony are shown, and above them is written "Armes du Roy gravées sur cet arbre l'an 1679." This refers to the acte de prise de possession of Du Lhut in July of that year, and this part of the map seems made from data supplied by him. 13. We now come to the great map of Franquelin, the most remarkable of all the early maps of the interior of North America, though hitherto completely ignored by both American and Canadian writers. It is entitled Carte de la Louisiane ou des Voyages du Sr. de la Salle et des pays qu'il a découverts depuis la Nouvelle France jusqu'au Golfe Mexique les années 1679, 80, 81, et 82, par Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, l'an 1684. Paris. Franquelin was a young engineer, who held the post of hydrographer to the King, at Quebec, in which Joliet succeeded him. Several of his maps are preserved, including one made in 1681, in which he lays down the course of the Mississippi,—the lower part from conjecture,—making it discharge itself into Mobile Bay. It appears from a letter of the governor, La Barre, that Franquelin was at Quebec in 1683, engaged on a map which was probably that of which the title is given above, though had La Barre known that it was to be called a map of the journeys of [Pg 483] his victim La Salle, he would have been more sparing of his praises. "He" (Franquelin), writes the governor, "is as skilful as any in France, but extremely poor and in need of a little aid from his Majesty as an Engineer; he is at work on a very correct map of the country, which I shall send you next year in his name; meanwhile, I shall support him with some little assistance."—Colonial Documents of New York, IX. 205. The map is very elaborately executed, and is six feet long and four and a half wide. It exhibits the political divisions of the continent, as the French then understood them; that is to say, all the regions drained by streams flowing into the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi are claimed as belonging to France, and this vast domain is separated into two grand divisions, La Nouvelle France and La Louisiane. The boundary line of the former, New France, is drawn from the Penobscot to the southern extremity of Lake Champlain, and thence to the Mohawk, which it crosses a little above Schenectady, in order to make French subjects of the Mohawk Indians. Thence it passes by the sources of the Susquehanna and the Alleghany, along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across Southern Michigan, and by the head of Lake Michigan, whence it sweeps northwestward to the sources of the Mississippi. Louisiana includes the entire valley of the Mississippi and the Ohio, besides the whole of Texas. The Spanish province of Florida comprises the peninsula and the country east of the Bay of Mobile, drained by streams flowing into the Gulf; while Carolina, Virginia, and the other English provinces, form a narrow strip between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic. The Mississippi is called "Missisipi, ou Rivière Colbert;" the Missouri, "Grande Rivière des Emissourittes, ou Missourits;" the Illinois, "Rivière des Ilinois, ou Macopins;" the Ohio, which La Salle had before called by its [Pg 484] present name, "Fleuve St. Louis, ou Chucagoa, ou Casquinampogamou;" one of its principal branches is "Ohio, ou Olighin" (Alleghany); the Arkansas, "Rivière des Acansea;" the Red River, "Rivière Seignelay," a name which had once been given to the Illinois. Many smaller streams are designated by names which have been entirely forgotten. The nomenclature differs materially from that of Coronelli's map, published four years later. Here the whole of the French territory is laid down as "Canada, ou La Nouvelle France," of which "La Louisiane" forms an integral part. The map of Homannus, like that of Franquelin, makes two distinct provinces, of which one is styled "Canada" and the other "La Louisiane," the latter including Michigan and the greater part of New York. Franquelin gives the shape of Hudson's Bay, and of all the Great Lakes, with remarkable accuracy. He makes the Mississippi bend much too far to the West. The peculiar sinuosities of its course are indicated; and some of its bends—as, for example, that at New Orleans—are easily recognized. Its mouths are represented with great minuteness; and it may be inferred from the map that, since La Salle's time, they have advanced considerably into the sea. Perhaps the most interesting feature in Franquelin's map is his sketch of La Salle's evanescent colony on the Illinois, engraved for this volume. He reproduced the map in 1688, for presentation to the King, with the title Carte de l'Amérique Septentrionale, depuis le 25 jusq'au 65 degré de latitude et environ 140 et 235 degrés de longitude, etc. In this map, Franquelin corrects various errors in that which preceded. One of these corrections consists in the removal of a branch of the river Illinois which he had marked on his first map,—as will be seen by referring to the portion of it in this book,—but which does not in fact exist. On this [Pg 485] second map, La Salle's colony appears in much diminished proportions, his Indian settlements having in good measure dispersed. Two later maps of New France and Louisiana, both bearing Franquelin's name, are preserved in the Dép?t des Cartes de la Marine, as well as a number of smaller maps and sketches, also by him. They all have more or less of the features of the great map of 1684, which surpasses them all in interest and completeness. The remarkable manuscript map of the Upper Mississippi by Le Sueur belongs to a period later than the close of this narrative. These various maps, joined to contemporary documents, show that the Valley of the Mississippi received, at an early date, the several names of Manitoumie, Frontenacie, Colbertie, and La Louisiane. This last name, which it long retained, is due to La Salle. The first use of it which I have observed is in a conveyance of the Island of Belleisle made by him to his lieutenant, La Forest, in 1679. II. THE ELDORADO OF MATHIEU S?GEAN. Father Hennepin had among his contemporaries two rivals in the fabrication of new discoveries. The first was the noted La Hontan, whose book, like his own, had a wide circulation and proved a great success. La Hontan had seen much, and portions of his story have a substantial value; but his account of his pretended voyage up the "Long River" is a sheer fabrication. His "Long River" [Pg 486] corresponds in position with the St. Peter, but it corresponds in nothing else; and the populous nations whom he found on it—the Eokoros, the Esanapes, and the Gnacsitares, no less than their neighbors the Mozeemlek and the Tahuglauk—are as real as the nations visited by Captain Gulliver. But La Hontan did not, like Hennepin, add slander and plagiarism to mendacity, or seek to appropriate to himself the credit of genuine discoveries made by others. Mathieu Sagean is a personage less known than Hennepin or La Hontan; for though he surpassed them both in fertility of invention, he was illiterate, and never made a book. In 1701, being then a soldier in a company of marines at Brest, he revealed a secret which he declared that he had locked within his breast for twenty years, having been unwilling to impart it to the Dutch and English, in whose service he had been during the whole period. His story was written down from his dictation, and sent to the minister Ponchartrain. It is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in 1863 it was printed by Mr. Shea. He was born, he declares, at La Chine in Canada, and engaged in the service of La Salle about twenty years before the revelation of his secret; that is, in 1681. Hence, he would have been, at the utmost, only fourteen years old, as La Chine did not exist before 1667. He was with La Salle at the building of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, and was left here as one of a hundred men under command of Tonty. Tonty, it is to be observed, had but a small fraction of this number; and Sagean describes the fort in a manner which shows that he never saw it. Being desirous of making some new discovery, he obtained leave from Tonty, and set out with eleven other Frenchmen and two Mohegan Indians. They ascended the Mississippi a hundred and fifty leagues, carried their canoes by a cataract, went forty leagues farther, and stopped a month to hunt. [Pg 487] While thus employed, they found another river, fourteen leagues distant, flowing south-southwest. They carried their canoes thither, meeting on the way many lions, leopards, and tigers, which did them no harm; then they embarked, paddled a hundred and fifty leagues farther, and found themselves in the midst of the great nation of the Acanibas, dwelling in many fortified towns, and governed by King Hagaren, who claimed descent from Montezuma. The King, like his subjects, was clothed with the skins of men. Nevertheless, he and they were civilized and polished in their manners. They worshipped certain frightful idols of gold in the royal palace. One of them represented the ancestor of their monarch armed with lance, bow, and quiver, and in the act of mounting his horse; while in his mouth he held a jewel as large as a goose's egg, which shone like fire, and which, in the opinion of Sagean, was a carbuncle. Another of these images was that of a woman mounted on a golden unicorn, with a horn more than a fathom long. After passing, pursues the story, between these idols, which stand on platforms of gold, each thirty feet square, one enters a magnificent vestibule, conducting to the apartment of the King. At the four corners of this vestibule are stationed bands of music, which, to the taste of Sagean, was of very poor quality. The palace is of vast extent, and the private apartment of the King is twenty-eight or thirty feet square; the walls, to the height of eighteen feet, being of bricks of solid gold, and the pavement of the same. Here the King dwells alone, served only by his wives, of whom he takes a new one every day. The Frenchmen alone had the privilege of entering, and were graciously received. These people carry on a great trade in gold with a nation, believed by Sagean to be the Japanese, as the journey to them lasts six months. He saw the departure of one of the [Pg 488] caravans, which consisted of more than three thousand oxen, laden with gold, and an equal number of horsemen, armed with lances, bows, and daggers. They receive iron and steel in exchange for their gold. The King has an army of a hundred thousand men, of whom three fourths are cavalry. They have golden trumpets, with which they make very indifferent music; and also golden drums, which, as well as the drummer, are carried on the backs of oxen. The troops are practised once a week in shooting at a target with arrows; and the King rewards the victor with one of his wives, or with some honorable employment. These people are of a dark complexion and hideous to look upon, because their faces are made long and narrow by pressing their heads between two boards in infancy. The women, however, are as fair as in Europe; though, in common with the men, their ears are enormously large. All persons of distinction among the Acanibas wear their fingernails very long. They are polygamists, and each man takes as many wives as he wants. They are of a joyous disposition, moderate drinkers, but great smokers. They entertained Sagean and his followers during five months with the fat of the land; and any woman who refused a Frenchman was ordered to be killed. Six girls were put to death with daggers for this breach of hospitality. The King, being anxious to retain his visitors in his service, offered Sagean one of his daughters, aged fourteen years, in marriage; and when he saw him resolved to depart, promised to keep her for him till he should return. The climate is delightful, and summer reigns throughout the year. The plains are full of birds and animals of all kinds, among which are many parrots and monkeys, besides the wild cattle, with humps like camels, which these people use as beasts of burden. King Hagaren would not let the Frenchmen go till they [Pg 489] had sworn by the sky, which is the customary oath of the Acanibas, that they would return in thirty-six moons, and bring him a supply of beads and other trinkets from Canada. As gold was to be had for the asking, each of the eleven Frenchmen took away with him sixty small bars, weighing about four pounds each. The King ordered two hundred horsemen to escort them, and carry the gold to their canoes; which they did, and then bade them farewell with terrific howlings, meant, doubtless, to do them honor. After many adventures, wherein nearly all his companions came to a bloody end, Sagean, and the few others who survived, had the ill luck to be captured by English pirates, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. He spent many years among them in the East and West Indies, but would not reveal the secret of his Eldorado to these heretical foreigners. Such was the story, which so far imposed on the credulity of the minister Ponchartrain as to persuade him that the matter was worth serious examination. Accordingly, Sagean was sent to Louisiana, then in its earliest infancy as a French colony. Here he met various persons who had known him in Canada, who denied that he had ever been on the Mississippi, and contradicted his account of his parentage. Nevertheless, he held fast to his story, and declared that the gold mines of the Acanibas could be reached without difficulty by the river Missouri. But Sauvolle and Bienville, chiefs of the colony, were obstinate in their unbelief; and Sagean and his King Hagaren lapsed alike into oblivion. Part IV PREFACE. “The physiognomy of a government,” says De Tocqueville, “can best be judged in its colonies, for there its characteristic traits usually appear larger and more distinct. When I wish to judge of the spirit and the faults of the administration of Louis XIV., I must go to Canada. Its deformity is there seen as through a microscope.” The monarchical administration of France, at the height of its power and at the moment of its supreme triumph, stretched an arm across the Atlantic and grasped the North American continent. This volume attempts to show by what methods it strove to make good its hold, why it achieved a certain kind of success, and why it failed at last. The political system which has fallen, and the antagonistic system which has prevailed, seem, at first sight, to offer nothing but contrasts; yet out of the tomb of Canadian absolutism come voices not without suggestion even to us. Extremes meet, and Autocracy and Democracy often touch hands, at least in their vices. The means of knowing the Canada of the past are ample. The pen was always busy in this outpost of the old monarchy. The king and the minister demanded to know every thing; and officials of high and low degree, soldiers and civilians, friends and foes, poured letters, despatches, and memorials, on both sides of every question, into the lap of government. These masses of paper have in the main survived the perils of revolutions and the incendiary torch of the Commune. Add to them the voluminous records of the Superior Council of Quebec, and numerous other documents preserved in the civil and ecclesiastical depositories of Canada. The governments of New York and of Canada have caused a large part of the papers in the French archives, relating to their early history, to be copied and brought to America, and valuable contributions of material from the same quarter have been made by the State of Massachusetts and by private Canadian investigators. Nevertheless, a great deal has still remained in France, uncopied and unexplored. In the course of several visits to that country, I have availed myself of these supplementary papers, as well as of those which had before been copied, sparing neither time nor pains to explore every part of the field. With the help of a system of classified notes, I have collated the evidence of the various writers, and set down without reserve all the results of the examination, whether favorable or unfavorable. Some of them are of a character which I regret, since they cannot be agreeable to persons for whom I have a very cordial regard. The conclusions drawn from the facts may be matter of opinion, but it will be remembered that the facts themselves can be overthrown only by overthrowing the evidence on which they rest, or bringing forward counter evidence of equal or greater strength; and neither task will be found an easy one. * I have received most valuable aid in my inquiries from the great knowledge and experience of M. Pierre Margry, Chief of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies at Paris. I beg also warmly to acknowledge the kind offices of Abbé Henri Raymond Casgrain and Grand Vicar Cazeau, of Quebec, together with those of James LeMoine, Esq., M. Eugène Taché, Hon. P. J. O. Chauveau, and other eminent Canadians, and Henry Harrisse, Esq. The few extracts from original documents, which are printed in the appendix, may serve as samples of the material out of which the work has been constructed. In some instances their testimony * Those who wish to see the subject from a point of view opposite to mine cannot do better than consult the work of the Jesuit Charlevoix, with the excellent annotation of Mr. Shea. (History and General Description of New France, by the Rev. P. F. X. de Charlevoix, S.J., translated with notes by John Gilmary Shea. 6 vols. New York: 1866-1872.) might be multiplied twenty-fold. When the place of deposit of the documents cited in the margin is not otherwise indicated, they will, in nearly all cases, be found in the Archives of the Marine and Colonies. In the present book we examine the political and social machine; in the next volume of the series we shall see this machine in action. Boston, July 1, 1874. CHAPTER I. 1653-1658. THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. The Iroquois War.—Father Poncet.—His Adventures.—Jesuit Boldness.—Le Moyne’s Mission.—Chaumonot and Dablon.—Iroquois Ferocity.—The Mohawk Kidnappers.—Critical Position.—The Colony of Onondaga.—Speech op Chaumonot.—Omens of Destruction.—Device of the Jesuits.—The Medicine Feast.—The Escape. In the summer of 1653, all Canada turned to fasting and penance, processions, vows, and supplications. The saints and the Virgin were beset with unceasing prayer. The wretched little colony was like some puny garrison, starving and sick, compassed with inveterate foes, supplies cut off, and succor hopeless. At Montreal, the advance guard of the settlements, a sort of Castle Dangerous, held by about fifty Frenchmen, and said by a pious writer of the day to exist only by a continuous miracle, some two hundred Iroquois fell upon twenty-six Frenchmen. The Christians were outmatched, eight to one; but, says the chronicle, the Queen of Heaven was on their side, and the Son of Mary refuses nothing to his holy mother. * Through her intercession, the Iroquois shot so wildly that at their first fire every bullet missed its mark, and they met with a bloody defeat. The palisaded settlement of Three Rivers, though in a position less exposed than that of Montreal, was in no less jeopardy. A noted war-chief of the Mohawk Iroquois had been captured here the year before, and put to death; and his tribe swarmed out, like a nest of angry hornets, to revenge him. Not content with defeating and killing the commandant, Du Plessis Bochart, they encamped during winter in the neighboring forest, watching for an opportunity to surprise the place. Hunger drove them off, but they returned in spring, infesting every field and pathway; till, at length, some six hundred of their warriors landed in secret and lay hidden in the depths of the woods, silently biding their time. Having failed, however, in an artifice designed to lure the French out of their defences, they showed themselves on all sides, plundering, burning, and destroying, up to the palisades of the fort. ** Of the three settlements which, with their feeble dependencies, then comprised the whole of Canada, Quebec was least exposed to Indian attacks, being partially covered by Montreal and Three Rivers. Nevertheless, there was no safety this year, even * Le Mercier, Relation, 1653, 3. ** So bent were they on taking the place, that they brought their families, in order to make a permanent settlement.— Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre du 6 Sept., 1653. under the cannon of Fort St. Louis. At Cap Rouge, a few miles above, the Jesuit Poncet saw a poor woman who had a patch of corn beside her cabin, but could find nobody to harvest it. The father went to seek aid, met one Mathurin. Franchetot, whom he persuaded to undertake the charitable task, and was returning with him, when they both fell into an ambuscade of Iroquois, who seized them and dragged them off. Thirty-two men embarked in canoes at Quebec to follow the retreating savages and rescue the prisoners. Pushing rapidly up the St. Lawrence, they approached Three Rivers, found it beset by the Mohawks, and bravely threw themselves into it, to the great joy of its defenders and discouragement of the assailants. Meanwhile, the intercession of the Virgin wrought new marvels at Montreal, and a bright ray of hope beamed forth from the darkness and the storm to cheer the hearts of her votaries. It was on the 26th of June that sixty of the Onondaga Iroquois appeared in sight of the fort, shouting from a distance that they came on an errand of peace, and asking safe-conduct for some of their number. Guns, scalping-knives, tomahawks, were all laid aside; and, with a confidence truly astonishing, a deputation of chiefs, naked and defenceless, came into the midst of those whom they had betrayed so often. The French had a mind to seize them, and pay them in kind for past treachery; but they refrained, seeing in this wondrous change of heart the manifest hand of Heaven. Nevertheless, it can be explained without a miracle. The Iroquois, or, at least, the western nations of their league, had just become involved in war with their neighbors the Eries, * and “one war at a time” was the sage maxim of their policy. All was smiles and blandishment in the fort at Montreal; presents were exchanged, and the deputies departed, bearing home golden reports of the French. An Oneida deputation soon followed; but the enraged Mohawks still infested Montreal and beleaguered Three Rivers, till one of their principal chiefs and four of their best warriors were captured by a party of Christian Hurons. Then, seeing themselves abandoned by the other nations of the league and left to wage the war alone, they, too, made overtures of peace. A grand council was held at Quebec. Speeches were made, and wampum-belts exchanged. The Iroquois left some of their chief men as pledges of sincerity, and two young soldiers offered themselves as reciprocal pledges on the part of the French. The war was over; at least Canada had found a moment to take breath for the next struggle. The fur trade was restored again, with promise of plenty; for the beaver, profiting by the quarrels of their human foes, had of late greatly multiplied. It was a change from death to life; for Canada lived on the beaver, and, robbed of this, * See Jesuits in North America, 438. The Iroquois, it will be remembered, consisted of five “nations,” or tribes,—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. For an account of them, see the work just cited, Introduction. her only sustenance, had been dying slowly since the strife began. * “Yesterday,” writes Father Le Mercier, “all was dejection and gloom; to-day, all is smiles and gayety. On Wednesday, massacre, burning, and pillage; on Thursday, gifts and visits, as among friends. If the Iroquois have their hidden designs, so, too, has God. “On the day of the Visitation of the Holy Virgin, the chief, Aontarisati, ** so regretted by the Iroquois, was taken prisoner by our Indians, instructed by our fathers, and baptized; and, on the same day, being put to death, he ascended to heaven. I doubt not that he thanked the Virgin for his misfortune and the blessing that followed, and that he prayed to God for his countrymen. “The people of Montreal made a solemn vow to celebrate publicly the fête of this mother of all blessings; whereupon the Iroquois came to ask for peace. “It was on the day of the Assumption of this Queen of angels and of men that the Hurons took at Montreal that other famous Iroquois chief, whose capture caused the Mohawks to seek our alliance. “On the day when the Church honors the Nativity of the Holy Virgin, the Iroquois granted Father * According to Le Mercier, beaver to the value of from 200,000 to 300,000 livres was yearly brought down to the colony before the destruction of the Hurons (1649-50). Three years later, not one beaver skin was brought to Montreal during a twelvemonth, and Three Rivers and Quebec had barely enough to pay for keeping the fortifications in repair. ** The chief whose death had so enraged the Mohawks. Poncet his life; and he, or rather the Holy Virgin and the holy angels, labored so well in the work of peace, that on St. Michael’s Day it was resolved in a council of the elders that the father should be conducted to Quebec, and a lasting treaty made with the French.” * Happy as was this consummation, Father Poncet’s path to it had been a thorny one. He has left us his own rueful story, written in obedience to the command of his superior. He and his companion in misery had been hurried through the forests, from Cap Rouge on the St. Lawrence to the Indian towns on the Mohawk. He tells us how he slept among dank weeds, dropping with the cold dew; how frightful colics assailed him as he waded waist-deep through a mountain stream; how one of his feet was blistered and one of his legs benumbed; how an Indian snatched away his reliquary and lost the precious contents. “I had,” he says, “a picture of Saint Ignatius with our Lord bearing the cross, and another of Our Lady of Pity surrounded by the five wounds of her Son. They were my joy and my consolation; but I hid them in a bush, lest the Indians should laugh at them.” He kept, however, a little image of the crown of thorns, in which he found great comfort, as well as in communion with his patron saints, Saint Raphael, Saint Martha, and Saint Joseph. On one occasion he asked these celestial friends for something to soothe his thirst, and for a bowl of broth to revive his strength. Scarcely had he framed the petition when an Indian gave * Relation, 1653, 18. him some wild plums; and in the evening, as he lay fainting on the ground, another brought him the coveted broth. Weary and forlorn, he reached at last the lower Mohawk town, where, after being stripped, and, with his companion, forced to run the gauntlet, he was placed on a scaffold of bark, surrounded by a crowd of grinning and mocking savages. As it began to rain, they took him into one of their lodges, and amused themselves by making him dance, sing, and perform various fantastic tricks for their amusement. He seems to have done his best to please them; “but,” adds the chronicler, “I will say in passing, that as he did not succeed to their liking in these buffooneries (singeries), they would have put him to death, if a young Huron prisoner had not offered himself to sing, dance, and make wry faces in place of the father, who had never learned the trade.” Having sufficiently amused themselves, they left him for a time in peace; when an old one-eyed Indian approached, took his hands, examined them, selected the left forefinger, and calling a child four or five years old, gave him a knife, and told him to cut it off, which the imp proceeded to do, his victim meanwhile singing the Vexilla Regis. After this preliminary, they would have burned him, like Franchetot, his unfortunate companion, had not a squaw happily adopted him in place, as he says, of a deceased brother. He was installed at once in the lodge of his new relatives, where, bereft of every rag of Christian clothing, and attired in leggins, moccasins, and a greasy shirt, the astonished father saw himself transformed into an Iroquois. But his deliverance was at hand. A special agreement providing for it had formed a part of the treaty concluded at Quebec; and he now learned that he was to be restored to his countrymen. After a march of almost intolerable hardship, he saw himself once more among Christians; Heaven, as he modestly thinks, having found him unworthy of martyrdom. “At last,” he writes, “we reached Montreal on the 21st of October, the nine weeks of my captivity being accomplished, in honor of Saint Michael and all the holy angels. On the 6th of November the Iroquois who conducted me made their presents to confirm the peace; and thus, on a Sunday evening, eighty-and-one days after my capture,—that is to say, nine times nine days,—this great business of the peace was happily concluded, the holy angels showing by this number nine, which is specially dedicated to them, the part they bore in this holy work.” * This incessant supernaturalism is the key to the early history of New France. Peace was made; but would peace endure? There was little chance of it, and this for several reasons. First, the native fickleness of the Iroquois, who, astute and politic to a surprising degree, were in certain respects, like all savages, mere grown-up children. Next, their total want of control over their fierce and capricious young warriors, any one of whom could break the peace with * Poncet in Relation, 1653,17. On Poncet’s captivity see also Moral Pratique des Jésuites, vol. xxxiv. (4to) chap. xii. impunity whenever he saw fit; and, above all, the strong probability that the Iroquois had made peace in order, under cover of it, to butcher or kidnap the unhappy remnant of the Hurons who were living, under French protection, on the island of Orleans, immediately below Quebec. I have already told the story of the destruction of this people and of the Jesuit missions established among them. * The conquerors were eager to complete their bloody triumph by seizing upon the refugees of Orleans, killing the elders, and strengthening their own tribes by the adoption of the women, children, and youths. The Mohawks and the Onondagas were competitors for the prize. Each coveted the Huron colony, and each was jealous lest his rival should pounce upon it first. When the Mohawks brought home Poncet, they covertly gave wampum-belts to the Huron chiefs, and invited them to remove to their villages. It was the wolf’s invitation to the lamb. The Hurons, aghast with terror, went secretly to the Jesuits, and told them that demons had whispered in their ears an invitation to destruction. So helpless were both the Hurons and their French supporters, that they saw no recourse but dissimulation. The Hurons promised to go, and only sought excuses to gain time. The Onondagas had a deeper plan. Their towns were already full of Huron captives, former converts of the Jesuits, cherishing their memory and constantly repeating their praises. Hence their * Jesuits in North America. tyrants conceived the idea that by planting at Onondaga a colony of Frenchmen under the direction of these beloved fathers, the Hurons of Orleans, disarmed of suspicion, might readily be led to join them. Other motives, as we shall see, tended to the same end, and the Onondaga deputies begged, or rather demanded, that a colony of Frenchmen should be sent among them. Here was a dilemma. Was not this, like the Mohawk invitation to the Hurons, an invitation to butchery? On the other hand, to refuse would probably kindle the war afresh. The Jesuits had long nursed a project bold to temerity. Their great Huron mission was ruined; but might not another be built up among the authors of this ruin, and the Iroquois themselves, tamed by the power of the Faith, be annexed to the kingdoms of Heaven and of France? Thus would peace be restored to Canada, a barrier of fire opposed to the Dutch and English heretics, and the power of the Jesuits vastly increased. Yet the time was hardly ripe for such an attempt. Before thrusting a head into the tiger’s jaws, it would be well to try the effect of thrusting in a hand. They resolved to compromise with the danger, and before risking a colony at Onondaga to send thither an envoy who could soothe the Indians, confirm them in pacific designs, and pave the way for more decisive steps. The choice fell on Father Simon Le Moyne. The errand was mainly a political one; and this sagacious and able priest, versed in Indian languages and customs, was well suited to do it. “On the second day of the month of July, the festival of the Visitation of the Most Holy Virgin, ever favorable to our enterprises, Father Simon Le Moyne set out from Quebec for the country of the Onondaga Iroquois.” In these words does Father Le Mercier chronicle the departure of his brother Jesuit. Scarcely was he gone when a band of Mohawks, under a redoubtable half-breed known as the Flemish Bastard, arrived at Quebec; and, when they heard that the envoy was to go to the Onondagas without visiting their tribe, they took the imagined slight in high dudgeon, displaying such jealousy and ire that a letter was sent after Le Moyne, directing him to proceed to the Mohawk towns before his return. But he was already beyond reach, and the angry Mohawks were left to digest their wrath. At Montreal, Le Moyne took a canoe, a young Frenchman, and two or three Indians, and began the tumultuous journey of the Upper St. Lawrence. Nature, or habit, had taught him to love the wilderness life. He and his companions had struggled all day against the surges of La Chine, and were bivouacked at evening by the Lake of St. Louis, when a cloud of mosquitoes fell upon them, followed by a shower of warm rain. The father, stretched under a tree, seems clearly to have enjoyed himself. “It is a pleasure,” he writes, “the sweetest and most innocent imaginable, to have no other shelter than trees planted by Nature since the creation of the world.” Sometimes, during their journey, this primitive tent proved insufficient, and they would build a bark hut or find a partial shelter under their inverted canoe. Now they glided smoothly over the sunny bosom of the calm and smiling river, and now strained every nerve to fight their slow way against the rapids, dragging their canoe upward in the shallow water by the shore, as one leads an unwilling horse by the bridle, or shouldering it and bearing it through the forest to the smoother current above. Game abounded; and they saw great herds of elk quietly defiling between the water and the woods, with little heed of men, who in that perilous region found employment enough in hunting one another. At the entrance of Lake Ontario they met a party of Iroquois fishermen, who proved friendly, and guided them on their way. Ascending the Onondaga, they neared their destination; and now all misgivings as to their reception at the Iroquois capital were dispelled. The inhabitants came to meet them, bringing roasting ears of the young maize and bread made of its pulp, than which they knew no luxury more exquisite. Their faces beamed welcome. Le Moyne was astonished. “I never," he says, “saw the like among Indians before.” They were flattered by his visit, and, for the moment, were glad to see him. They hoped for great advantages from the residence of Frenchmen among them; and, having the Erie war on their hands, they wished for peace with Canada. “One would call me brother,” writes Le Moyne; “another, uncle; another, cousin. I never had so many relations.” He was overjoyed to find that many of the Huron converts, who had long been captives at Onondaga, had not forgotten the teachings of their Jesuit instructors. Such influence as they had with their conquerors was sure to be exerted in behalf of the French. Deputies of the Senecas, Cayugas, and Oneidas at length arrived, and, on the 10th of August, the criers passed through the town, summoning all to hear the words of Onontio. The naked dignitaries, sitting, squatting, or lying at full length, thronged the smoky hall of council The father knelt and prayed in a loud voice, invoking the aid of Heaven, cursing the demons who are spirits of discord, and calling on the tutelar angels of the country to open the ears of his listeners. Then he opened his packet of presents and began his speech. “I was full two hours," he says, “in making it, speaking in the tone of a chief, and walking to and fro, after their fashion, like an actor on a theatre.” Not only did he imitate the prolonged accents of the Iroquois orators, but he adopted and improved their figures of speech, and addressed them in turn by their respective tribes, bands, and families, calling their men of note by name, as if he had been born among them. They were delighted; and their ejaculations of approval—hoh-hoh-hoh—came thick and fast at every pause of his harangue. Especially were they pleased with the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh presents, whereby the reverend speaker gave to the four upper nations of the league four hatchets to strike their new enemies, the Eries; while by another present he metaphorically daubed their faces with the war-paint. However it may have suited the character of a Christian priest to hound on these savage hordes to a war of extermination which they had themselves provoked, it is certain that, as a politician, Le Moyne did wisely; since in the war with the Eries lay the best hope of peace for the French. The reply of the Indian orator was friendly to overflowing. He prayed his French brethren to choose a spot on the lake of Onondaga, where they might dwell in the country of the Iroquois, as they dwelt already in their hearts. Le Moyne promised, and made two presents to confirm the pledge. Then, his mission fulfilled, he set out on his return, attended by a troop of Indians. As he approached the lake, his escort showed him a large spring of water, possessed, as they told him, by a bad spirit. Le Moyne tasted it, then boiled a little of it, and produced a quantity of excellent salt. He had discovered the famous salt-springs of Onondaga. Fishing and hunting, the party pursued their way till, at noon of the 7th of September, Le Moyne reached Montreal. * When he reached Quebec, his tidings cheered for a while the anxious hearts of its tenants; but an unwonted incident soon told them how hollow was the ground beneath their feet. Le Moyne, accompanied by two Onondagas and several Hurons and Algonquins, was returning to Montreal, when he and his companions were set upon by a war-party * Journal du Père Le Moine, Relation, 1654, chaps, vi. vii. of Mohawks. The Hurons and Algonquins were killed. One of the Onondagas shared their fate, and the other, with Le Moyne himself, was seized and bound fast. The captive Onondaga, however, was so loud in his threats and denunciations, that the Mohawks released both him and the Jesuit. * Here was a foreshadowing of civil war, Mohawk against Onondaga, Iroquois against Iroquois. The quarrel was patched up, but fresh provocations were imminent. The Mohawks took no part in the Erie war, and hence their hands were free to fight the French and the tribes allied with them. Reckless of their promises, they began a series of butcheries, fell upon the French at Isle aux Oies, killed a lay brother of the Jesuits at Sillery, and attacked Montreal. Here, being roughly handled, they came for a time to their senses, and offered terms, promising to spare the French, but declaring that they would still wage war against the Hurons and Algonquins. These were allies whom the French were pledged to protect; but so helpless was the colony, that the insolent and humiliating proffer was accepted, and another peace ensued, as hollow as the last. The indefatigable Le Moyne was sent to the Mohawk towns to confirm it, “so far,” says the chronicle, “as it is possible to confirm a peace made by infidels backed by heretics.” ** The Mohawks received him with great rejoicing; yet his * Compare Relation, 1654, 33, and Lettre de Marie de l’Incarnation, 18 Octobre, 1654. ** Copie de Deux Lettres envoyées de la Nouvelle France au Père Procureur des Missions de la Compagnie de Jésus. life was not safe for a moment. A warrior, feigning madness, raved through the town with uplifted hatchet, howling for his blood; but the saints watched over him and balked the machinations of hell. He came off alive and returned to Montreal, spent with famine and fatigue. Meanwhile a deputation of eighteen Onondaga chiefs arrived at Quebec. There was a grand council. The Onondagas demanded a colony of Frenchmen to dwell among them. Lauson, the governor, dared neither to consent nor to refuse. A middle course was chosen, and two Jesuits, Chaumonot and Dablon, were sent, like Le Moyne, partly to gain time, partly to reconnoitre, and partly to confirm the Onondagas in such good intentions as they might entertain. Chaumonot was a veteran of the Huron mission, who, miraculously as he himself supposed, had acquired a great fluency in the Huron tongue, which is closely allied to that of the Iroquois. Dablon, a new-comer, spoke, as yet, no Indian. Their voyage up the St. Lawrence was enlivened by an extraordinary bear-hunt, and by the antics of one of their Indian attendants, who, having dreamed that he had swallowed a frog, roused the whole camp by the gymnastics with which he tried to rid himself of the intruder. On approaching Onondaga, they were met by a chief who sang a song of welcome, a part of which he seasoned with touches of humor, apostrophizing the fish in the river Onondaga, naming each sort, great or small, and calling on them in turn to come into the nets of the Frenchmen and sacrifice life cheerfully for their behoof. Hereupon there was much laughter among the Indian auditors. An unwonted cleanliness reigned in the town; the streets had been cleared of refuse, and the arched roofs of the long houses of bark were covered with red-skinned children staring at the entry of the “black robes.” Crowds followed behind, and all was jubilation. The dignitaries of the tribe met them on the way, and greeted them with a speech of welcome. A feast of bear’s meat awaited them; but, unhappily, it was Friday, and the fathers were forced to abstain. “On Monday, the 15th of November, at nine in the morning, after having secretly sent to Paradise a dying infant by the waters of baptism, all the elders and the people having assembled, we opened the council by public prayer.” Thus writes Father Dablon. His colleague, Chaumonot, a Frenchman bred in Italy, now rose, with a long belt of wampum in his hand, and proceeded to make so effective a display of his rhetorical gifts that the Indians were lost in admiration, and their orators put to the blush by his improvements on their own metaphors. “If he had spoken all day,” said the de lighted auditors, “we should not have had enough of it.” “The Dutch,” added others, “have neither brains nor tongues; they never tell us about Paradise and Hell; on the contrary, they lead us into bad ways.” On the next day the chiefs returned their answer. The council opened with a song or chant, which was divided into six parts, and which, according to Dablon, was exceedingly well sung. The burden of the fifth part was as follows:— “Farewell war; farewell tomahawk; we have been fools till now; henceforth we will be brothers; yes, we will be brothers.” Then came four presents, the third of which enraptured the fathers. It was a belt of seven thousand beads of wampum. “But this,” says Dablon, “was as nothing to the words that accompanied it.” “It is the gift of the faith,” said the orator; “it is to tell you that we are believers; it is to beg you not to tire of instructing us; have patience, seeing that we are so dull in learning prayer; push it into our heads and our hearts.” Then he led Chaumonot into the midst of the assembly, clasped him in his arms, tied the belt about his waist, and protested, with a suspicious redundancy of words, that as he clasped the father, so would he clasp the faith. What had wrought this sudden change of heart? The eagerness of the Onondagas that the French should settle among them, had, no doubt, a large share in it. For the rest, the two Jesuits saw abundant signs of the fierce, uncertain nature of those with whom they were dealing. Erie prisoners were brought in and tortured before their eyes, one of them being a young stoic of about ten years, who endured his fate without a single outcry. Huron women and children, taken in war and adopted by their captors, were killed on the slightest provocation, and sometimes from mere caprice. For several days the whole town was in an uproar with the crazy follies of the “dream feast,” * and one of the Fathers nearly lost his life in this Indian Bedlam. One point was clear; the French must make a settlement at Onondaga, and that speedily, or, despite their professions of brotherhood, the Onondagas would make war. Their attitude became menacing; from urgency they passed to threats; and the two priests felt that the critical posture of affairs must at once be reported at Quebec. But here a difficulty arose. It was the beaver-hunting season; and, eager as were the Indians for a French colony, not one of them would offer to conduct the Jesuits to Quebec in order to fetch one. It was not until nine masses had been said to Saint John the Baptist, that a number of Indians consented to forego their hunting, and escort Father Dablon home. ** Chaumonot remained at Onondaga, to watch his dangerous hosts and soothe their rising jealousies. It was the 2d of March when Dablon began his journey. His constitution must have been of iron, or he would have succumbed to the appalling hardships of the way. It was neither winter nor spring. The lakes and streams were not yet open, but the half-thawed ice gave way beneath the foot. One of the Indians fell through and was drowned. Swamp and forest were clogged with sodden snow, * See Jesuits in North America, 67. ** De Quen, Relation, 1656, 35. Chaumonot, in his Autobiography, ascribes the miracle to the intercession of the deceased Brébeuf. and ceaseless rains drenched them as they toiled on, knee-deep in slush. Happily, the St. Lawrence was open. They found an old wooden canoe by the shore, embarked, and reached Montreal after a journey of four weeks. Dablon descended to Quebec. There was long and anxious counsel in the chambers of Fort St. Louis. The Jesuits had information that, if the demands of the Onondagas were rejected, they would join the Mohawks to destroy Canada. But why were they so eager for a colony of Frenchmen? Did they want them as hostages, that they might attack the Hurons and Algonquins without risk of French interference; or would they massacre them, and then, like tigers mad with the taste of blood, turn upon the helpless settlements of the St. Lawrence? An abyss yawned on either hand. Lauson, the governor, was in an agony of indecision, but at length declared for the lesser and remoter peril, and gave his voice for the colony. The Jesuits were of the same mind, though it was they, and not he, who must bear the brunt of danger. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” said one of them, “and, if we die by the fires of the Iroquois, we shall have won eternal life by snatching souls from the fires of Hell.” Preparation was begun at once. The expense fell on the Jesuits, and the outfit is said to have cost them seven thousand livres,—a heavy sum for Canada at that day. A pious gentleman, Zachary Du Puys, major of the fort of Quebec, joined the expedition with ten soldiers; and between thirty and forty other Frenchmen also enrolled themselves, impelled by devotion or destitution. Four Jesuits, Le Mercier, the superior, with Dablon, Menard, and Frémin, besides two lay brothers of the order, formed, as it were, the pivot of the enterprise. The governor made them the grant of a hundred square leagues of land in the heart of the Iroquois country,—a preposterous act, which, had the Iroquois known it, would have rekindled the war; but Lauson had a mania for land-grants, and was himself the proprietor of vast domains which he could have occupied only at the cost of his scalp. Embarked in two large boats and followed by twelve canoes filled with Hurons, Onondagas, and a few Senecas lately arrived, they set out on the 17th of May “to attack the demons,” as Le Mercier writes, “in their very stronghold.” With shouts, tears, and benedictions, priests, soldiers, and inhabitants waved farewell from the strand. They passed the bare steeps of Cape Diamond and the mission-house nestled beneath the heights of Sillery, and vanished from the anxious eyes that watched the last gleam of their receding oars. * Meanwhile three hundred Mohawk warriors had taken the war-path, bent on killing or kidnapping the Hurons of Orleans. When they heard of the departure of the colonists for Onondaga, their rage was unbounded; for not only were they full of jealousy towards their Onondaga confederates, but they had hitherto derived great profit from the * Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettres, 1656. Le Mercier, Relation, 1657 chap. iv. Chaulmer, Nouveau Monde, II. 265, 322, 319. control which their local position gave them over the traffic between this tribe and the Dutch of the Hudson, upon whom the Onondagas, in common with all the upper Iroquois, had been dependent for their guns, hatchets, scalping-knives, beads, blankets, and brandy. These supplies would now be furnished by the French, and the Mohawk speculators saw their occupation gone. Nevertheless, they had just made peace with the French, and, for the moment, were not quite in the mood to break it. To wreak their spite, they took a middle course, crouched in ambush among the bushes at Point St. Croix, ten or twelve leagues above Quebec, allowed the boats bearing the French to pass unmolested, and fired a volley at the canoes in the rear, filled with Onondagas, Senecas, and Hurons. Then they fell upon them with a yell, and, after wounding a lay brother of the Jesuits who was among them, flogged and bound such of the Indians as they could seize. The astonished Onondagas protested and threatened; whereupon the Mohawks feigned great surprise, declared that they had mistaken them for Hurons, called them brothers, and suffered the whole party to escape without further injury. * The three hundred maurauders now paddled their large canoes of elm-bark stealthily down the current, passed Quebec undiscovered in the dark night of the 19th of May, landed in early morning on the island of Orleans, and ambushed * Compare Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre 14 Aout, 1656, Le Jeune. Relation, 1657, 9. themselves to surprise the Hurons as they came to labor in their cornfields. They were tolerably successful, killed six, and captured more than eighty, the rest taking refuge in their fort, where the Mohawks dared not attack them. At noon, the French on the rock of Quebec saw forty canoes approaching from the island of Orleans, and defiling, with insolent parade, in front of the town, all crowded with the Mohawks and their prisoners, among whom were a great number of Huron girls. Their captors, as they passed, forced them to sing and dance. The Hurons were the allies, or rather the wards of the French, who were in every way pledged to protect them. Yet the cannon of Fort St. Louis were silent, and the crowd stood gaping in bewilderment and fright. Had an attack been made, nothing but a complete success and the capture of many prisoners to serve as hostages could have prevented the enraged Mohawks from taking their revenge on the Onondaga colonists. The emergency demanded a prompt and clear-sighted soldier. The governor, Lauson, was a gray-haired civilian, who, however enterprising as a speculator in wild lands, was in no way matched to the desperate crisis of the hour. Some of the Mohawks landed above and below the town, and plundered the houses from which the scared inhabitants had fled. Not a soldier stirred and not a gun was fired. The French, bullied by a horde of naked savages, became an object of contempt to their own allies. The Mohawks carried their prisoners home, burned six of them, and adopted or rather enslaved the rest. * Meanwhile the Onondaga colonists pursued their perilous way. At Montreal they exchanged their heavy boats for canoes, and resumed their journey with a flotilla of twenty of these sylvan vessels. A few days after, the Indians of the party had the satisfaction of pillaging a small band of Mohawk hunters, in vicarious reprisal for their own wrongs. On the 26th of June, as they neared Lake Ontario, they heard a loud and lamentable voice from the edge of the forest; whereupon, having beaten their drum to show that they were Frenchmen, they beheld a spectral figure, lean and covered with scars, which proved to be a pious Huron, one Joachim Ondakout, captured by the Mohawks in their descent on the island of Orleans, five or six weeks before. They had carried him to their village and begun to torture him; after which they tied him fast and lay down to sleep, thinking to resume their pleasure on the morrow. His cuts and burns being only on the surface, he had the good fortune to free himself from his bonds, and, naked as he was, to escape to the woods. He held his course northwestward, through regions even now a wilderness, gathered wild strawberries to sustain life, and, in fifteen days, reached the St. Lawrence, nearly dead with exhaustion. The Frenchmen gave him food and a canoe, and the living skeleton paddled with a light heart for Quebec. The colonists themselves soon began to suffer * See Perrot M?urs des Sauvages, 106. from hunger. Their fishing failed on Lake Ontario and they were forced to content themselves with cranberries of the last year, gathered in the meadows. Of their Indians, all but five deserted them. The Father Superior fell ill, and when they reached the mouth of the Oswego many of the starving Frenchmen had completely lost heart. Weary and faint, they dragged their canoes up the rapids, when suddenly they were cheered by the sight of a stranger canoe swiftly descending the current. The Onondagas, aware of their approach, had sent it to meet them, laden with Indian corn and fresh salmon. Two more canoes followed, freighted like the first; and now all was abundance till they reached their journey’s end, the Lake of Onondaga. It lay before them in the July sun, a glittering mirror, framed in forest verdure. They knew that ?haumonot with a crowd of Indians was awaiting them at a spot on the margin of the water, which he and Dablon had chosen as the site of their settlement. Landing on the strand, they fired, to give notice of their approach, five small cannon which they had brought in their canoes. Waves, woods, and hills resounded with the thunder of their miniature artillery. Then reembarking, they advanced in order, four canoes abreast, towards the destined spot. In front floated their banner of white silk, embroidered in large letters with the name of Jesus. Here were Du Puys and his soldiers, with the picturesque uniforms and quaint weapons of their time; Le Mercier and his Jesuits in robes of black; hunters and bush-rangers; Indians painted and feathered for a festal day. As they neared the place where a spring bubbling from the hillside is still known as the “Jesuits’ Well,” they saw the edge of the forest dark with the muster of savages whose yells of welcome answered the salvo of their guns. Happily for them, a flood of summer rain saved them from the harangues of the Onondaga orators, and forced white men and red alike to seek such shelter as they could find. Their hosts, with hospitable intent, would fain have sung and danced all night; but the Frenchmen pleaded fatigue, and the courteous savages, squatting around their tents, chanted in monotonous tones to lull them to sleep. In the morning they woke refreshed, sang Te Deum, reared an altar, and, with a solemn mass, took possession of the country in the name of Jesus. * Three things, which they saw or heard of in their new home, excited their astonishment. The first was the vast flight of wild pigeons which in spring darkened the air around the Lake of Onondaga; the second was the salt springs of Salina; the third was the rattlesnakes, which Le Mercier describes with excellent precision, adding that, as he learns from the Indians, their tails are good for toothache and their flesh for fever. These reptiles, for reasons best known to themselves, haunted the neighborhood of the salt-springs, but did not intrude their presence into the abode of the French. On the 17th of July, Le Mercier and Chamnonot, * Le Mercier, Relation, 1657, 14. escorted by a file of soldiers, set out for Onondaga, scarcely five leagues distant. They followed the Indian trail, under the leafy arches of the woods, by hill and hollow, still swamp and gurgling brook, till through the opening foliage they saw the Iroquois capital, compassed with cornfields and girt with its rugged palisade. As the Jesuits, like black spectres, issued from the shadows of the forest, followed by the plumed soldiers with shouldered arquebuses, the red-skinned population swarmed out like bees, and they defiled to the town through gazing and admiring throngs. All conspired to welcome them. Feast followed feast throughout the afternoon, till, what with harangues and songs, bear’s meat, beaver-tails, and venison, beans, corn, and grease, they were wellnigh killed with kindness. “If, after this, they murder us,” writes Le Mercier, “it will be from fickleness, not premeditated treachery.” But the Jesuits, it seems, had not sounded the depths of Iroquois dissimulation. * There was one exception to the real or pretended joy. Some Mohawks were in the town, and their orator was insolent and sarcastic; but the ready tongue of Chaumonot turned the laugh against him and put him to shame. Here burned the council fire of the Iroquois, and at this very time the deputies of the five tribes were assembling. The session opened on the 24th. * The Jesuits were afterwards told by Hurons, captive among the Mohawks and the Onondagas, that, from the first, it was intended to massacre the French as soon as their presence had attracted the remnant of the Hurons of Orleans into the power of the Onondagas. Lettre du P Ragueneau au R. P. Provincial, 31 Ao?t, 1658. In the great council house, on the earthen floor and the broad platforms beneath the smoke-begrimed concave of the bark roof, stood, sat, or squatted, the wisdom and valor of the confederacy; Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas; sachems, counsellors, orators, warriors fresh from Erie victories; tall, stalwart figures, limbed like Grecian statues. The pressing business of the council over, it was Chaumonot’s turn to speak. But, first, all the Frenchmen, kneeling in a row, with clasped hands sang the Veni Creator, amid the silent admiration of the auditors. Then Chaumonot rose, with an immense wampum-belt in his hand. “It is not trade that brings us here. Do you think that your beaver skins can pay us for all our toils and dangers? Keep them, if you like; or, if any fall into our hands, we shall use them only for your service. We seek not the things that perish. It is for the Faith that we have left our homes to live in your hovels of bark, and eat food which the beasts of our country would scarcely touch. We are the messengers whom God has sent to tell you that his Son became a man for the love of you; that this man, the Son of God, is the prince and master of men; that he has prepared in heaven eternal joys for those who obey him, and kindled the fires of hell for those who will not receive his word. If you reject it, whoever you are,—Onondaga, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, or Oneida,—know that Jesus Christ, who inspires my heart and my voice, will plunge you one day into hell. Avert this ruin; be not the authors of your own destruction; accept the truth; listen to the voice of the Omnipotent.” Such, in brief, was the pith of the father’s exhortation. As he spoke Indian like a native, and as his voice and gestures answered to his words, we may believe what Le Mercier tells us, that his hearers listened with mingled wonder, admiration, and terror. The work was well begun. The Jesuits struck while the iron was hot, built a small chapel for the mass, installed themselves in the town, and preached and catechised from morning till night. The Frenchmen at the lake were not idle. The chosen site of their settlement was the crown of a hill commanding a broad view of waters and forests. The axemen fell to their work, and a ghastly wound soon gaped in the green bosom of the woodland. Here, among the stumps and prostrate trees of the unsightly clearing, the blacksmith built his forge, saw and hammer plied their trade; palisades were shaped and beams squared, in spite of heat, mosquitoes, and fever. At one time twenty men were ill, and lay gasping under a wretched shed of bark; but they all recovered, and the work went on till at length a capacious house, large enough to hold the whole colony, rose above the ruin of the forest. A palisade was set around it, and the Mission of Saint Mary of Gannentaa * was begun. France and the Faith were intrenched on the Lake of Onondaga. How long would they remain * Gannentaa or Ganuntaah is still the Iroquois name for Lake Onondaga. According to Morgan, it means “Material for Council Fire.” there? The future alone could tell. The mission, it must not be forgotten, had a double scope, half ecclesiastical, half political. The Jesuits had essayed a fearful task,—to convert the Iroquois to God and to the king, thwart the Dutch heretics of the Hudson, save souls from hell, avert ruin from Canada, and thus raise their order to a place of honor and influence both hard earned and well earned. The mission at Lake Onondaga was but a base of operations. Long before they were lodged and fortified here, Chaumonot and Ménard set out for the Cayugas, whence the former proceeded to the Senecas, the most numerous, and powerful of the five confederate nations; and in the following spring another mission was begun among the Oneidas. Their reception was not unfriendly; but such was the reticence and dissimulation of these inscrutable savages, that it was impossible to foretell results. The women proved, as might be expected, far more impressible than the men; and in them the fathers placed great hope; since in this, the most savage people of the continent, women held a degree of political influence never perhaps equalled in any civilized nation. * * Women, among the Iroquois, had a council of their own, which, according to Lafitau, who knew this people well, had the initiative in discussion, subjects presented by them being settled in the council of chiefs and elders. In this latter council the women had an orator, often of their own sex, to represent them. The matrons had a leading voice in determining the succession of chiefs. There were also female chiefs, one of whom, with her attendants, came to Quebec with an embassy in 1655 (Marie de l’Incarnation). In the torture of prisoners, great deference was paid to the judgment of the women, who, says Champlain, were thought more skilful and subtle than the men. The learned Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, dwells at length on the resemblance of the Iroquois to the ancient Lycians, among whom, according to Grecian writers, women were in the ascendant. “Gynecocracy, or the rule of women,” continues Lafitau, “which was the foundation of the Lycian government, was probably common in early times to nearly all the barbarous people of Greece” M?urs des Sauvages, I. 460. But while infants were baptized and squaws converted, the crosses of the mission were many and great. The devil bestirred himself with more than his ordinary activity; “for,” as one of the fathers writes, “when in sundry nations of the earth men are rising up in strife against us (the Jesuits), then how much more the demons, on whom we continually wage war!” It was these infernal sprites, as the priests believed, who engendered suspicions and calumnies in the dark and superstitious minds of the Iroquois, and prompted them in dreams to destroy the apostles of the faith. Whether the foe was of earth or hell, the Jesuits were like those who tread the lava-crust that palpitates with the throes of the coming eruption, while the molten death beneath their feet glares white-hot through a thousand crevices. Yet, with a sublime enthusiasm and a glorious constancy, they toiled and they hoped, though the skies around were black with portent. In the year in which the colony at Onondaga was begun, the Mohawks murdered the Jesuit Garreau, on his way up the Ottawa. In the following spring, a hundred Mohawk warriors came to Quebec, to carry more of the Hurons into slavery, though the remnant of that unhappy people, since the catastrophe of the last year, had sought safety in a palisaded camp within the limits of the French town, and immediately under the ramparts of Fort St. Louis. Here, one might think, they would have been safe; but Charny, son and successor of Lauson, seems to have been even more imbecile than his father, and listened meekly to the threats of the insolent strangers who told him that unless he abandoned the Hurons to their mercy, both they and the French should feel the weight of Mohawk tomahawks. They demanded further, that the French should give them boats to carry their prisoners; but, as there were none at hand, this last humiliation was spared. The Mohawks were forced to make canoes, in which they carried off as many as possible of their victims. When the Onondagas learned this last exploit of their rivals, their jealousy knew no bounds, and a troop of them descended to Quebec to claim their share in the human plunder. Deserted by the French, the despairing Hurons abandoned themselves to their fate, and about fifty of those whom the Mohawks had left obeyed the behest of their tyrants and embarked for Onondaga. They reached Montreal in July, and thence proceeded towards their destination in company with the Onondaga warriors. The Jesuit Ragueneau, bound also for Onondaga, joined them. Five leagues above Montreal, the warriors left him behind; but he found an old canoe on the bank, in which, after abandoning most of his baggage, he contrived to follow with two or three Frenchmen who were with him. There was a rumor that a hundred Mohawk warriors were lying in wait among the Thousand Islands, to plunder the Onondagas of their Huron prisoners. It proved a false report. A speedier catastrophe awaited these unfortunates. Towards evening on the 3d of August, after the party had landed to encamp, an Onondaga chief made advances to a Christian Huron girl, as he had already done at every encampment since leaving Montreal. Being repulsed for the fourth time, he split her head with his tomahawk. It was the beginning of a massacre. The Onondagas rose upon their prisoners, killed seven men, all Christians, before the eyes of the horrified Jesuit, and plundered the rest of all they had. When Ragueneau protested, they told him with insolent mockery that they were acting by direction of the governor and the superior of the Jesuits, The priest himself was secretly warned that he was to be killed during the night; and he was surprised in the morning to find himself alive. * On reaching Onondaga, some of the Christian captives were burned, including several women and their infant children. ** The confederacy was a hornet’s nest, buzzing with preparation, and fast pouring out its wrathful swarms. The indomitable Le Moyne had gone again to the Mohawks, whence he wrote that two hundred of them had taken the war-path against the Algonquins of Canada; and, a little later, that all were gone but women, children, and old men. A great * Lettre de Ragueneau au R. P. Provincial, 9 Ao?t, 1657 (Rel., 1657). ** Ibid., 21 Ao?t, 1658 (Rel., 1658). war-party of twelve hundred Iroquois from all the five cantons was to advance into Canada in the direction of the Ottawa. The settlements on the St. Lawrence were infested with prowling warriors, who killed the Indian allies of the French, and plundered the French themselves, whom they treated with an insufferable insolence; for they felt themselves masters of the situation, and knew that the Onondaga colony was in their power. Near Montreal they killed three Frenchmen. “They approach like foxes,” writes a Jesuit, “attack like lions, and disappear like birds.” Charny, fortunately, had resigned the government in despair, in order to turn priest, and the brave soldier Aillebout had taken his place. He caused twelve of the Iroquois to be seized and held as hostages. This seemed to increase their fury. An embassy came to Quebec and demanded the release of the hostages, but were met with a sharp reproof and a flat refusal. At the mission on Lake Onondaga the crisis was drawing near. The unbridled young warriors, whose capricious lawlessness often set at naught the monitions of their crafty elders, killed wantonly at various times thirteen Christian Hurons, captives at Onondaga. Ominous reports reached the ears of the colonists. They heard of a secret council at which their death was decreed. Again, they heard that they were to be surprised and captured, that the Iroquois in force were then to descend upon Canada, lay waste the outlying settlements, and torture them, the colonists, in sight of their countrymen, by which they hoped to extort what terms they pleased. At length, a dying Onondaga, recently converted and baptized, confirmed the rumors, and revealed the whole plot. It was to take effect before the spring opened; but the hostages in the hands of Aillebout embarrassed the conspirators and caused delay. Messengers were sent in haste to call in the priests from the detached missions, and all the colonists, fifty-three in number, were soon gathered at their fortified house on the lake. Their situation was frightful. Fate hung over them by a hair, and escape seemed hopeless. Of Du Puys’s ten soldiers, nine wished to desert, but the attempt would have been fatal. A throng of Onondaga warriors were day and night on the watch, bivouacked around the house. Some of them had built their huts of bark before the gate, and here, with calm, impassive faces, they lounged and smoked their pipes; or, wrapped in their blankets, strolled about the yards and outhouses, attentive to all that passed. Their behavior was very friendly. The Jesuits, themselves adepts in dissimulation, were amazed at the depth of their duplicity; for the conviction had been forced upon them that some of the chiefs had nursed their treachery from the first. In this extremity Du Puys and the Jesuits showed an admirable coolness, and among them devised a plan of escape, critical and full of doubt, but not devoid of hope. First, they must provide means of transportation; next, they must contrive to use them undis covered. They had eight canoes, all of which combined would not hold half their company. Over the mission-house was a large loft or garret, and here the carpenters were secretly set at work to construct two large and light flat-boats, each capable of carrying fifteen men. The task was soon finished. The most difficult part of their plan remained. There was a beastly superstition prevalent among the Hurons, the Iroquois, and other tribes. It consisted of a “medicine” or mystic feast, in which it was essential that the guests should devour every thing set before them, however inordinate in quantity, unless absolved from duty by the person in whose behalf the solemnity was ordained; he, on his part, taking no share in the banquet. So grave was the obligation, and so strenuously did the guests fulfil it, that even their ostrich digestion was sometimes ruined past redemption by the excess of this benevolent gluttony. These festins à manger tout had been frequently denounced as diabolical by the Jesuits, during their mission among the Hurons; but now, with a pliancy of conscience as excusable in this case as in any other, they resolved to set aside their scruples, although, judged from their point of view, they were exceedingly well founded. Among the French was a young man who had been adopted by an Iroquois chief, and who spoke the language fluently. He now told his Indian father that it had been revealed to him in a dream that he would soon die unless the spirits were appeased by one of these magic feasts. Dreams were the oracles of the Iroquois, and woe to those who slighted them. A day was named for the sacred festivity. The fathers killed their hogs to meet, the occasion, and, that nothing might be wanting, they ransacked their stores for all that might give piquancy to the entertainment. It took place in the evening of the 20th of March, apparently in a large enclosure outside the palisade surrounding the mission-house. Here, while blazing fires or glaring pine-knots shed their glow on the wild assemblage, Frenchmen and Iroquois joined in the dance, or vied with each other in games of agility and skill. The politic fathers offered prizes to the winners, and the Indians entered with zest into the sport, the better, perhaps, to hide their treachery and hoodwink their intended victims; for they little suspected that a subtlety, deeper this time than their own, was at work to countermine them. Here, too, were the French musicians; and drum, trumpet, and cymbal lent their clangor to the din of shouts and laughter. Thus the evening wore on, till at length the serious labors of the feast began. The kettles were brought in, and their steaming contents ladled into the wooden bowls which each provident guest had brought with him. Seated gravely in a ring, they fell to their work. It was a point of high conscience not to flinch from duty on these solemn occasions; and though they might burn the young man to-morrow, they would gorge themselves like vultures in his behoof to-day. Meantime, while the musicians strained their lungs and their arms to drown all other sounds, a band of anxious Frenchmen, in the darkness of the cloudy night, with cautious tread and bated breath, carried the boats from the rear of the mission-house down to the border of the lake. It was near eleven o’clock. The miserable guests were choking with repletion. They prayed the young Frenchman to dispense them from further surfeit. “Will you suffer me to die?” he asked, in piteous tones. They bent to their task again, but Nature soon reached her utmost limit; and they sat helpless as a conventicle of gorged turkey-buzzards, without the power possessed by those unseemly birds to rid themselves of the burden. “That will do,” said the young man; “you have eaten enough; my life is saved. Now you can sleep till we come in the morning to waken you for prayers.” * And one of his companions played soft airs on a violin to lull them to repose. Soon all were asleep, or in a lethargy akin to sleep. The few remaining Frenchmen now silently withdrew and cautiously descended to the shore, where their comrades, already embarked, lay on their oars anxiously awaiting them. Snow was falling fast as they pushed out upon the murky waters. The ice of the winter had broken up, but recent frosts had glazed the surface with a thin crust. The two boats led the way, and the canoes followed in their wake, while men in the bows of the foremost boat broke the ice with clubs as they advanced. They reached * Lettre de Marie de l'Incarnation a son fils, 4 Octobre, 1658. the outlet and rowed swiftly down the dark current of the Oswego. When day broke, Lake Onondaga was far behind, and around them was the leafless, lifeless forest. When the Indians woke in the morning, dull and stupefied from their nightmare slumbers, they were astonished at the silence that reigned in the mission-house. They looked through the palisade. Nothing was stirring but a bevy of hens clucking and scratching in the snow, and one or two dogs imprisoned in the house and barking to be set free The Indians waited for some time, then climbed the palisade, burst in the doors, and found the house empty. Their amazement was unbounded. How, without canoes, could the French have escaped by water? and how else could they escape? The snow which had fallen during the night completely hid their footsteps. A superstitious awe seized the Iroquois. They thought that the “black-robes” and their flock had flown off through the air. Meanwhile the fugitives pushed their flight with the energy of terror, passed in safety the rapids of the Oswego, crossed Lake Ontario, and descended the St. Lawrence with the loss of three men drowned in the rapids. On the 3d of April they reached Montreal, and on the 23d arrived at Quebec. They had saved their lives; but the mission of Onondaga was a miserable failure. * * On the Onondaga mission, the authorities are Marie de l'incarnation, Lettres Historiques, and Relations des Jésuites, 1657 and 1658, where the story is told at length, accompanied with several interesting letters and journals. Chaumonok in his Autobiographie, speaks only of the Seneca mission, and refers to the Relations for the rest. Dollier de Casson, in his Histoire du Montréal, mentions the arrival of the fugitives at that place, the sight of which, he adds complacently, cured them of their fright. The Journal des Supérieurs des Jésuites chronicles with its usual brevity the ruin of the mission and the return of the party to Quebec. The Jesuits, in their account, say nothing of the superstitious character of the feast. It is Marie de l’Incarnation who lets out the secret. The Jesuit Charlevoix, much to his credit, repeats the story without reserve. The Sulpitian ’Allet, in a memoir printed in the Morale Pratique des Jésuites, says that the French placed effigies of soldiers, made of straw, in the fort, to deceive the Indians. He adds that the Jesuits found very little sympathy at Quebec. CHAPTER II. 1642-1661. THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. Dauversière.—Mance and Bourgeoys.—Miracle.—A Pious Defaulter.— Jesuit and Sulpitian.—Montreal in 1659.—The Hospital Nuns.—The Nuns and the Iroquois.—More Miracles.—The Murdered Priests.—Brigeac and Closse.—Soldiers of the Holy Family. On the 2d of July, 1659, the ship “St. André” lay in the harbor of Rochelle, crowded with passengers for Canada. She had served two years as a hospital for marines, and was infected with a contagious fever. Including the crew, some two hundred persons were on board, more than half of whom were bound for Montreal. Most of these were sturdy laborers, artisans, peasants, and soldiers, together with a troop of young women, their present or future partners; a portion of the company set down on the old record as “sixty virtuous men and thirty-two pious girls.” There were two priests also, Vignal and Le Ma?tre, both destined to a speedy death at the hands of the Iroquois. But the most conspicuous among these passengers for Montreal were two groups of women in the habit of nuns, under the direction of Marguerite Bourgeoys and Jeanne Mance. Marguerite Bourgeoys, whose kind, womanly face bespoke her fitness for the task, was foundress of the school for female children at Montreal; her companion, a tall, austere figure, worn with suffering and care, was directress of the hospital. Both had returned to France for aid, and were now on their way back, each with three recruits, three being the mystic number, as a type of the Holy Family, to whose worship they were especially devoted. Amid the bustle of departure, the shouts of sailors, the rattling of cordage, the flapping of sails, the tears and the embracings, an elderly man, with heavy plebeian features, sallow with disease, and in a sober, half-clerical dress, approached Mademoiselle Mance and her three nuns, and, turning his eyes to heaven, spread his hands over them in benediction. It was Le Boyer de la Dauversière, founder of the sisterhood of St. Joseph, to which the three nuns belonged. “Now, O Lord,” he exclaimed, with the look of one whose mission on earth is fulfilled, “permit thou thy servant to depart in peace!” Sister Maillet, who had charge of the meagre treasury of the community, thought that something more than a blessing was due from him; and asked where she should apply for payment of the interest of the twenty thousand livres which Mademoiselle Mance had placed in his hands for investment. Dauversière changed countenance, and replied, with a troubled voice: “My daughter, God will provide for you. Place your trust in Him.” * He was bankrupt, and had used the money of the sisterhood to pay a debt of his own, leaving the nuns penniless. I have related in another place ** how an association of devotees, inspired, as they supposed, from heaven, had undertaken to found a religious colony at Montreal in honor of the Holy Family. The essentials of the proposed establishment were to be a seminary of priests dedicated to the Virgin, a hospital to Saint Joseph, and a school to the Infant Jesus; while a settlement was to be formed around them simply for their defence and maintenance. This pious purpose had in part been accomplished. It was seventeen years since Mademoiselle Mance had begun her labors in honor of Saint Joseph. Marguerite Bourgeoys had entered upon hers more recently; yet even then the attempt was premature, for she found no white children to teach. In time, however, this want was supplied, and she opened her school in a stable, which answered to the stable of Bethlehem, lodging with her pupils in the loft, and instructing them in Roman Catholic Christianity, with such rudiments of mundane knowledge as she and her advisers thought fit to impart. Mademoiselle Mance found no lack of hospital work, for blood and blows were rife at Montreal, where the woods were full of Iroquois, and not a moment was without its peril. Though years * Faillon, Vie de M’lle Mance, I. 172. This volume is illustrated with a portrait of Dauversière. ** The Jesuits in North America. began to tell upon her, she toiled patiently at her dreary task, till, in the winter of 1657, she fell on the ice of the St. Lawrence, broke her right arm, and dislocated the wrist. Bouchard, the surgeon of Montreal, set the broken bones, but did not discover the dislocation. The arm in consequence became totally useless, and her health wasted away under incessant and violent pain. Maisonneuve, the civil and military chief of the settlement, advised her to go to France for assistance in the work to which she was no longer equal; and Marguerite Bourgeoys, whose pupils, white and red, had greatly multiplied, resolved to go with her for a similar object. They set out in September, 1658, landed at Rochelle, and went thence to Paris. Here they repaired to the seminary of St. Sulpice; for the priests of this community were joined with them in the work at Montreal, of which they were afterwards to become the feudal proprietors. Now ensued a wonderful event, if we may trust the evidence of sundry devout persons. Olier, the founder of St. Sulpice, had lately died, and the two pilgrims would fain pay their homage to his heart, which the priests of his community kept as a precious relic, enclosed in a leaden box. The box was brought, when the thought inspired Mademoiselle Mance to try its miraculous efficacy and invoke the intercession of the departed founder. She did so, touching her disabled arm gently with the leaden casket. Instantly a grateful warmth pervaded the shrivelled limb, and from that hour its use was restored. It is true that the Jesuits ventured to doubt the Sulpitian miracle, and even to ridicule it; but the Sulpitians will show to this day the attestation of Mademoiselle Mance herself, written with the fingers once paralyzed and powerless. * Nevertheless, the cure was not so thorough as to permit her again to take charge of her patients. Her next care was to visit Madame de Bullion, a devout lady of great wealth, who was usually designated at Montreal as “the unknown benefactress,” because, though her charities were the mainstay of the feeble colony, and though the source from which they proceeded was well known, she affected, in the interest of humility, the greatest secrecy, and required those who profited by her gifts to pretend ignorance whence they came. Overflowing with zeal for the pious enterprise, she received her visitor with enthusiasm, lent an open ear to her recital, responded graciously to her appeal for aid, and paid over to her the sum, munificent at that day, of twenty-two thousand francs. Thus far successful, Mademoiselle Mance repaired to the town of La Flèche to visit Le Royer de la Dauversière. 0141 Jér?me Le Royer de la Dauversière From an engraving by L. Massard. It was this wretched fanatic who, through visions and revelations, had first conceived the plan of a hospital in honor of Saint Joseph at Montreal. ** He had found in Mademoiselle Mance a zealous and efficient pioneer; but the execution of his scheme required a community of hospital nuns, and * For an account of this miracle, written in perfect good faith and supported by various attestations, see Faillon, Vie de M’lle Mance, chap. iv. ** See The Jesuits in North America. therefore he had labored for the last eighteen years to form one at La Flèche, meaning to despatch its members in due time to Canada. The time at length was come. Three of the nuns were chosen, Sisters Brésoles, Mace, and Maillet, and sent under the escort of certain pious gentlemen to Rochelle, Their exit from La Flèche was not without its difficulties. Dauversière was in ill odor, not only from the multiplicity of his debts, but because, in his character of agent of the association of Montreal, he had at various times sent thither those whom his biographer describes as "the most virtuous girls to be found at La Flèche,” intoxicating them with religious excitement, and shipping them for the New World against the will of their parents. It was noised through the town that he had kidnapped and sold them; and now the report spread abroad that he was about to crown his iniquity by luring away three young nuns. A mob gathered at the convent gate, and the escort were forced to draw their swords to open a way for the terrified sisters. Of the twenty-two thousand francs which she had received, Mademoiselle Mance kept two thousand for immediate needs, and confided the rest to the hands of Dauversière, who, hard pressed by his creditors, used it to pay one of his debts; and then, to his horror, found himself unable to replace it. Racked by the gout and tormented by remorse, he betook himself to his bed in a state of body and mind truly pitiable. One of the miracles, so frequent in the early annals of Montreal, was vouchsafed in answer to his prayer, and he was enabled to journey to Rochelle and bid farewell to his nuns. It was but a brief respite; he returned home to become the prey of a host of maladies, and to die at last a lingering and painful death. While Mademoiselle Mance was gaining recruits in La Flèche, Marguerite Bourgeoys was no less successful in her native town of Troyes, and she rejoined her companions at Rochelle, accompanied by Sisters Chatel, Crolo, and Raisin, her destined assistants in the school at Montreal. Meanwhile, the Sulpitians and others interested in the pious enterprise, had spared no effort to gather men to strengthen the colony, and young women to serve as their wives; and all were now mustered at Rochelle, waiting for embarkation. Their waiting was a long one. Laval, bishop at Quebec, was allied to the Jesuits, and looked on the colonists of Montreal with more than coldness. Sulpitian writers say that his agents used every effort to discourage them, and that certain persons at Rochelle told the master of the ship in which the emigrants were to sail that they were not to be trusted to pay their passage-money. Hereupon ensued a delay of more than two months before means could be found to quiet the scruples of the prudent commander. At length the anchor was weighed, and the dreary voyage begun. The woe-begone company, crowded in the filthy and infected ship, were tossed for two months more on the relentless sea, buffeted by repeated storms, and wasted by a contagious fever, which attacked nearly all of them and reduced Mademoiselle Mance to extremity. Eight or ten died and were dropped overboard, after a prayer from the two priests. At length land hove in sight; the piny odors of the forest regaled their languid senses as they sailed up the broad estuary of the St. Lawrence and anchored under the rock of Quebec. High aloft, on the brink of the cliff, they saw the fleur-de-lis waving above the fort of St. Louis, and, beyond, the cross on the tower of the cathedral traced against the sky; the houses of the merchants on the strand below, and boats and canoes drawn up along the bank. The bishop and the Jesuits greeted them as co-workers in a holy cause, with an unction not wholly sincere. Though a unit against heresy, the pious founders of New France were far from unity among themselves. To the thinking of the Jesuits, Montreal was a government within a government, a wheel within a wheel. This rival Sulpitian settlement was, in their eyes, an element of disorganization adverse to the disciplined harmony of the Canadian Church, which they would fain have seen, with its focus at Quebec, radiating light unrefracted to the uttermost parts of the colony. That is to say, they wished to control it unchecked, through their ally, the bishop. The emigrants, then, were received with a studious courtesy, which veiled but thinly a stiff and persistent opposition. The bishop and the Jesuits were especially anxious to prevent the La Flèche nuns from establishing themselves at Montreal, where they would form a separate community, under Sulpitian influence; and, in place of the newly arrived sisters, they wished to substitute nuns from the H?tel Dieu of Quebec, who would be under their own control. That which most strikes the non-Catholic reader throughout this affair is the constant reticence and dissimulation practised, not only between Jesuits and Montrealists, but among the Montrealists themselves. Their self-devotion, great as it was, was fairly matched by their disingenuousness. * All difficulties being overcome, the Montrealists embarked in boats and ascended the St. Lawrence, leaving Quebec infected with the contagion they had brought. The journey now made in a single night cost them fifteen days of hardship and danger. At length they reached their new home. The little settlement lay before them, still gasping betwixt life and death, in a puny, precarious infancy. Some forty small, compact houses were ranged parallel to the river, chiefly along the fine of what is now St. Paul’s Street. On the left there was a fort, and on a rising ground at the right a massive windmill of stone, enclosed with a wall or palisade pierced for musketry, and answering the purpose of a redoubt or block-house. ** Fields, studded with charred and blackened stumps, * See, for example, chapter iv. of Faillon’s Life of Mademoiselle Mance. The evidence is unanswerable, the writer being the partisan and admirer of most of those whose pieuse tromperie, to use the expression of Dollier de Casson, he describes in apparent unconsciousness that any body will see reason to cavil at it. ** Lettre du Vicomte d’Argenson, Gouverneur du Canada, 4 Ao?t, 1659, MS between which crops were growing, stretched away to the edges of the bordering forest; and the green, shaggy back of the mountain towered over all. There were at this time a hundred and sixty men at Montreal, about fifty of whom had families, or at least wives. They greeted the new-comers with a welcome which, this time, was as sincere as it was warm, and bestirred themselves with alacrity to provide them with shelter for the winter. As for the three nuns from La Flèche, a chamber was hastily made for them over two low rooms which had served as Mademoiselle Mance’s hospital. This chamber was twenty-five feet square, with four cells for the nuns, and a closet for stores and clothing, which for the present was empty, as they had landed in such destitution that they were forced to sell all their scanty equipment to gain the bare necessaries of existence. Little could be hoped from the colonists, who were scarcely less destitute than they. Such was their poverty,—thanks to Dauversiere’s breach of trust,—that when their clothes were worn out, they were unable to replace them, and were forced to patch them with such material as came to hand. Maisonneuve, the governor, and the pious Madame d’Aillebout, being once on a visit to the hospital, amused themselves with trying to guess of what stuff the habits of the nuns had originally been made, and were unable to agree on the point in question. * * Annales des Hospitalières de Villemarie, par la S?ur Morin, a contemporary record, from which Faillon gives long extracts. Their chamber, which they occupied for many years, being hastily built of ill-seasoned planks, let in the piercing cold of the Canadian winter through countless cracks and chinks; and the driving snow sifted through in such quantities that they were sometimes obliged, the morning after a storm, to remove it with shovels. Their food would freeze on the table before them, and their coarse brown bread had to be thawed on the hearth before they could cut it. These women had been nurtured in ease, if not in luxury. One of them, Judith de Brésoles, had in her youth, by advice of her confessor, run away from parents who were devoted to her, and immured herself in a convent, leaving them in agonies of doubt as to her fate. She now acted as superior of the little community. One of her nuns records of her that she had a fervent devotion for the Infant Jesus; and that, along with many more spiritual graces, he inspired her with so transcendent a skill in cookery, that “with a small piece of lean pork and a few herbs she could make soup of a marvellous relish.” * Sister Macé was charged with the care of the pigs and hens, to whose wants she attended in person, though she, too, had been delicately bred. In course of time, the sisterhood was increased by additions from without; though more than twenty girls who entered the hospital as novices recoiled from the hardship, and took husbands in the colony. Among * “C’était par son recours à l’Enfant Jésus qu’elle trouvait tous ces secrets et d’autres semblables,” writes in our own day the excellent annalist, Faillon. a few who took the vows, Sister Jumeau should not pass unnoticed. Such was her humility, that, though of a good family and unable to divest herself of the marks of good breeding, she pretended to be the daughter of a poor peasant, and persisted in repeating the pious falsehood till the merchant Le Ber told her flatly that he did not believe her. The sisters had great need of a man to do the heavy work of the house and garden, but found no means of hiring one, when an incident, in which they saw a special providence, excellently supplied the want. There was a poor colonist named Jouaneaux to whom a piece of land had been given at some distance from the settlement. Had he built a cabin upon it, his scalp would soon have paid the forfeit; but, being bold and hardy, he devised a plan by which he might hope to sleep in safety without abandoning the farm which was his only possession. Among the stumps of his clearing there was one hollow with age. Under this he dug a sort of cave, the entrance of which was a small hole carefully hidden by brushwood. The hollow stump was easily converted into a chimney; and by creeping into his burrow at night, or when he saw signs of danger, he escaped for some time the notice of the Iroquois. But, though he could dispense with a house, he needed a barn for his hay and corn; and while he was building one, he fell from the ridge of the roof and was seriously hurt. He was carried to the H?tel Dieu, where the nuns showed him every attention, until, after a long confinement, he at last recovered. Being of a grateful nature and enthusiastically devout, he was so touched by the kindness of his benefactors, and so moved by the spectacle of their piety, that he conceived the wish of devoting his life to their service. To this end a contract was drawn up, by which he pledged himself to work for them as long as strength remained; and they, on their part, agreed to maintain him in sickness or old age. This stout-hearted retainer proved invaluable; though, had a guard of soldiers been added, it would have been no more than the case demanded. Montreal was not palisaded, and at first the hospital was as much exposed as the rest. The Iroquois would skulk at night among the houses, like wolves in a camp of sleeping travellers on the prairies; though the human foe was, of the two, incomparably the bolder, fiercer, and more bloodthirsty. More than once one of these prowling savages was known to have crouched all night in a rank growth of wild mustard in the garden of the nuns, vainly hoping that one of them would come out within reach of his tomahawk. During summer, a month rarely passed without a fight, sometimes within sight of their windows. A burst of yells from the ambushed marksmen, followed by a clatter of musketry, would announce the opening of the fray, and promise the nuns an addition to their list of patients. On these occasions they bore themselves according to their several natures. Sister Morin, who had joined their number three years after their arrival, relates that Sister Brésoles and she used to run to the belfry and ring the tocsin to call the inhabitants together. “From our high station,” she writes, “we could sometimes see the combat, which terrified us extremely, so that we came down again as soon as we could, trembling with fright, and thinking that our last hour was come. When the tocsin sounded, my Sister Maillet would become faint with excess of fear; and my Sister Macé, as long as the alarm continued, would remain speechless, in a state pitiable to see. They would both get into a corner of the rood-loft, before the Holy Sacrament, so as to be prepared for death; or else go into their cells. As soon as I heard that the Iroquois were gone, I went to tell them, which comforted them and seemed to restore them to life. My Sister Brésoles was stronger and more courageous; her terror, which she could not help, did not prevent her from attending the sick and receiving the dead and wounded who were brought in.” The priests of St. Sulpice, who had assumed the entire spiritual charge of the settlement, and who were soon to assume its entire temporal charge also, had for some years no other lodging than a room at the hospital, adjoining those of the patients. They caused the building to be fortified with palisades, and the houses of some of the chief inhabitants were placed near it, for mutual defence. They also built two fortified houses, called Ste. Marie and St. Gabriel, at the two extremities of the settlement, and lodged in them a considerable number of armed men, whom they employed in clearing and cultivating the surrounding lands, the property of their community. All other outlying houses were also pierced with loopholes, and fortified as well as the slender means of their owners would permit. The laborers always carried their guns to the field, and often had need to use them. A few incidents will show the state of Montreal and the character of its tenants. In the autumn of 1657 there was a truce with the Iroquois, under cover of which three or four of them came to the settlement. Nicolas Godé and Jean Saint-Père were on the roof of their house, laying thatch; when one of the visitors aimed his arquebuse at Saint-Père, and brought him to the ground like a wild turkey from a tree. Now ensued a prodigy; for the assassins, having cut off his head and carried it home to their village, were amazed to hear it speak to them in good Iroquois, scold them for their perfidy, and threaten them with the vengeance of Heaven; and they continued to hear its voice of admonition even after scalping it and throwing away the skull. * This story, circulated at Montreal on the alleged authority of the Indians themselves, found believers among the most intelligent men of the colony. Another miracle, which occurred several years later, deserves to be recorded. Le Ma?tre, one of the two priests who had sailed from France with Mademoiselle Mance and her nuns, being one day at the fortified house of St. Gabriel, went out with the laborers, in order to watch while they were at their work. In view of a possible enemy, he had girded himself with an earthly sword; but seeing no sign of danger, he presently took out his breviary, and, while reciting his office with eyes bent on the page, walked into an ambuscade of Iroquois, who rose before him with a yell. He shouted to the laborers, and, drawing his sword, faced the whole savage crew, in order, probably, to give the men time to snatch their guns. Afraid to approach, the Iroquois fired and killed him; then rushed upon the working party, who escaped into the house, after losing several of their number. The victors cut off the head of the heroic priest, and tied it in a white handkerchief which they took from a pocket of his cassock. It is said that on reaching their villages they were astonished to find the handkerchief without the slightest stain of blood, but stamped indelibly with the features of its late owner, so plainly marked that none who had known him could fail to recognize them. * This not very original miracle, though it found eager credence at Montreal, was received coolly, like other Montreal miracles, at Quebec; and Sulpitian writers complain that the bishop, in a long letter which he wrote to the Pope, made no mention of it whatever. Le Ma?tre, on the voyage to Canada, had been accompanied by another priest, Guillaume de Vignal, who met a fate more deplorable than that of his companion, though unattended by any * This story is told by Sister Morin, Marguerite Bourgeoys, and Dollier de Casson, on the authority of one Lavigne, then a prisoner among the Iroquois, who declared that he had seen the handkerchief the hands of the returning warriors. recorded miracle. Le Ma?tre had been killed in August. In the October following, Vignal went with thirteen men, in a flat-boat and several canoes, to Isle à la Pierre, nearly opposite Montreal, to get stone for the seminary which the priests had recently begun to build. With him was a pious and valiant gentleman named Claude de Brigeac, who, though but thirty years of age, had come as a soldier to Montreal, in the hope of dying in defence of the true church, and thus reaping the reward of a martyr. Vignal and three or four men had scarcely landed when they were set upon by a large band of Iroquois who lay among the bushes waiting to receive them. The rest of the party, who were still in their boats, with a cowardice rare at Montreal, thought only of saving themselves. Claude de Brigeac alone leaped ashore and ran to aid his comrades. Vignal was soon mortally wounded. Brigeac shot the chief dead with his arquebuse, and then, pistol in hand, held the whole troop for an instant at bay; but his arm was shattered by a gun-shot, and he was seized, along with Vignal, René Cuillérier, and Jacques Dufresne. Crossing to the main shore, immediately opposite Montreal, the Iroquois made, after their custom, a small fort of logs and branches, in which they ensconced themselves, and then began to dress the wounds of their prisoners. Seeing that Vignal was unable to make the journey to their villages, they killed him, divided his flesh, and roasted it for food. Brigeac and his fellows in misfortune spent a woful night in this den of wolves; and in the morning their captors, having breakfasted on the remains of Vignal, took up their homeward march, dragging the Frenchmen with them. On reaching Oneida, Brigeac was tortured to death with the customary atrocities. Cuillérier, who was present, declared that they could wring from him no cry of pain, but that throughout he ceased not to pray for their conversion. The witness himself expected the same fate, but an old squaw happily adopted him, and thus saved his life. He eventually escaped to Albany, and returned to Canada by the circuitous but comparatively safe route of New York and Boston. In the following winter, Montreal suffered an irreparable loss in the death of the brave Major Closse, a man whose intrepid coolness was never known to fail in the direst emergency. Going to the aid of a party of laborers attacked by the Iroquois, he was met by a crowd of savages, eager to kill or capture him. His servant ran off. He snapped a pistol at the foremost assailant, but it missed fire. His remaining pistol served him no better, and he was instantly shot down “He died,” writes Dollier de Casson, “like a brave soldier of Christ and the king.” Some of his friends once remonstrating with him on the temerity with which he exposed his life, he replied, “Messieurs, I came here only to die in the service of God; and if I thought I could not die here, I would leave this country to fight the Turks, that I might not be deprived of such a glory.” * The fortified house of Ste. Marie, belonging to the priests of St. Sulpice, was the scene of several hot and bloody fights. Here, too, occurred the following nocturnal adventure. A man named Lavigne, who had lately returned from captivity among the Iroquois, chancing to rise at night and look out of the window, saw by the bright moon-fight a number of naked warriors stealthily gliding round a corner and crouching near the door, in order to kill the first Frenchman who should go out in the morning. He silently woke his comrades; and, having the rest of the night for consultation, they arranged their plan so well, that some of them, sallying from the rear of the house, came cautiously round upon the Iroquois, placed them between two fires, and captured them all. The summer of 1661 was marked by a series of calamities scarcely paralleled even in the annals of this disastrous epoch. Early in February, thirteen colonists were surprised and captured; next came a fight between a large band of laborers and two hundred and sixty Iroquois; in the following month, ten more Frenchmen were killed or taken; and thenceforth, till winter closed, the settlement had scarcely a breathing space. “These hobgoblins,” writes the author of the Relation of this year, “sometimes appeared at the edge of the woods, assailing us with abuse; sometimes they glided stealthily into the midst of the fields, to surprise the men at work; sometimes they approached the houses, harassing us without ceasing, and, like importunate harpies or birds of prey, swooping down on us whenever they could take us unawares.” Speaking of the disasters of this year, the soldier-priest, Dollier de Casson, writes: “God, who afflicts the body only for the good of the soul, made a marvellous use of these calamities and terrors to hold the people firm in their duty towards Heaven. Vice was then almost unknown here, and in the midst of war religion flourished on all sides in a manner very different from what we now see in time of peace.” The war was, in fact, a war of religion. The small redoubts of logs, scattered about the skirts of the settlement to serve as points of defence in case of attack, bore the names of saints, to whose care they were commended. There was one placed under a higher protection and called the Redoubt of the Infant Jesus. Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the pious and valiant governor of Montreal, to whom its successful defence is largely due, resolved, in view of the increasing fury and persistency of the Iroquois attacks, to form among the inhabitants a military fraternity, to be called “Soldiers of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph;” and to this end he issued a proclamation, of which the following is the characteristic beginning:— “We, Paul de Chomedey, governor of the island of Montreal and lands thereon dependent, on information given us from divers quarters that the Iroquois have formed the design of seizing upon this settlement by surprise or force, have thought it our duty, seeing that this island is the property of the Holy Virgin, * to invite and exhort those zealous for her service to unite together by squads, each of seven persons; and after choosing a corporal by a plurality of voices, to report themselves to us for enrolment in our garrison, and, in this capacity, to obey our orders, to the end that the country may be saved.” Twenty squads, numbering in all one hundred and forty men, whose names, appended to the proclamation, may still be seen on the ancient records of Montreal, answered the appeal and enrolled themselves in the holy cause. The whole settlement was in a state of religious exaltation. As the Iroquois were regarded as actual myrmidons of Satan in his malign warfare against Mary and her divine Son, those who died in fighting them were held to merit the reward of martyrs, assured of a seat in paradise. And now it remains to record one of the most heroic feats of arms ever achieved on this continent. That it may be rated as it merits, it will be well to glance for a moment at the condition of Canada, under the portentous cloud of war which constantly overshadowed it. ** * This is no figure of speech. The Associates of Montreal, after receiving a grant of the island from Jean de Lauson, placed it under the protection of the Virgin, and formally declared her to be the proprietor of it from that day forth for ever. ** In all that relates to Montreal, I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Abbé Faillon, the indefatigable, patient, conscientious chronicler of its early history; an ardent and prejudiced Sulpitian, a priest who three centuries ago would have passed for credulous, and, withal, a kind-hearted and estimable man. His numerous books on his favorite theme, with the vast and heterogeneous mass of facts which they embody, are invaluable, provided their partisan character be well kept in mind. His recent death leaves his principal work unfinished. His Histoire de la Colonie Fran?aise en Canada—it might more fitly be called Histoire du Montréal—is unhappily little more than half complete. CHAPTER III. 1660, 1661. THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. Suffering and Terror.—Francois Hertel.—The Captive Wolf—The threatened Invasion.—Daulac des Ormeaux.—The Adventurers at the Long Saut.—The Attack.—A Desperate Defence.—A Final Assault.—The Fort taken. Canada had writhed for twenty years, with little respite, under the scourge of Iroquois war. During a great part of this dark period the entire French population was less than three thousand. What, then, saved them from destruction? In the first place, the settlements were grouped around three fortified posts, Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal, which in time of danger gave asylum to the fugitive inhabitants. Again, their assailants were continually distracted by other wars, and never, except at a few spasmodic intervals, were fully in earnest to destroy the French colony. Canada was indispensable to them. The four upper nations of the league soon became dependent on her for supplies; and all the nations alike appear, at a very early period, to have conceived the policy on which they afterwards distinctly acted, of balancing the rival settlements of the Hudson and the St. Lawrence, the one against the other. They would torture, but not kill. It was but rarely that, in fits of fury, they struck their hatchets at the brain; and thus the bleeding and gasping colony fingered on in torment. The seneschal of New France, son of the governor Lauson, was surprised and killed on the island of Orleans, along with seven companions. About the same time, the same fate befell the son of Godefroy, one of the chief inhabitants of Quebec. Outside the fortifications there was no safety for a moment. A universal terror seized the people. A comet appeared above Quebec, and they saw in it a herald of destruction. Their excited imaginations turned natural phenomena into portents and prodigies. A blazing canoe sailed across the sky; confused cries and lamentations were heard in the air; and a voice of thunder sounded from mid-heaven. * The Jesuits despaired for their scattered and persecuted flocks. “Everywhere,” writes their superior, “we see infants to be saved for heaven, sick and dying to be baptized, adults to be instructed, but everywhere we see the Iroquois. They haunt us like persecuting goblins. They kill our new-made Christians in our arms. If they meet us on the river, they kill us. If they find us in the huts of our Indians, they burn us and them together.” ** And he appeals urgently for troops to destroy them, as a holy work inspired by God, and needful for his service. Canada was still a mission, and the influence of * Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre, Sept., 1661. ** Relation, 1660 (anonymous), 3. the church was paramount and pervading. At Quebec, as at Montreal, the war with the Iroquois was regarded as a war with the hosts of Satan. Of the settlers’ cabins scattered along the shores above and below Quebec, many were provided with small iron cannon, made probably by blacksmiths in the colony; but they had also other protectors. In each was an image of the Virgin or some patron saint, and every morning the pious settler knelt before the shrine to beg the protection of a celestial hand in his perilous labors of the forest or the farm. When, in the summer of 1658, the young Vicomte d’Argenson came to assume the thankless task of governing the colony, the Iroquois war was at its height. On the day after his arrival, he was washing his hands before seating himself at dinner in the hall of the Chateau St. Louis, when cries of alarm were heard, and he was told that the Iroquois were close at hand. In fact, they were so near that their war-whoops and the screams of their victims could plainly be heard. Argenson left his guests, and, with such a following as he could muster at the moment, hastened to the rescue; but the assailants were too nimble for him. The forests, which grew at that time around Quebec, favored them both in attack and in retreat. After a year or two of experience, he wrote urgently to the court for troops. He adds that, what with the demands of the harvest, and the unmilitary character of many of the settlers, the colony could not furnish more than a hundred men for offensive operations. A vigorous aggressive war, he insists, is absolutely necessary, and this not only to save the colony, but to save the only true faith; “for,” to borrow his own words, “it is this colony alone which has the honor to be in the communion of the Holy Church. Everywhere else reigns the doctrine of England or Holland, to which I can give no other name, because there are as many creeds as there are subjects who embrace them. They do not care in the least whether the Iroquois and the other savages of this country have or have not a knowledge of the true God, or else they are so malicious as to inject the venom of their errors into souls incapable of distinguishing the truth of the gospel from the falsehoods of heresy; and hence it is plain that religion has its sole support in the French colony, and that, if this colony is in danger, religion is equally in danger.” * Among the most interesting memorials of the time are two letters, written by Fran?ois Hertel, a youth of eighteen, captured at Three Rivers, and carried to the Mohawk towns in the summer of 1661. He belonged to one of the best families of Canada, and was the favorite child of his mother, to whom the second of the two letters is addressed. The first is to the Jesuit Le Moyne, who had gone to Onondaga, in July of that year, to effect the release of French prisoners in accordance with the terms of a truce. ** Both letters were written on birch bark:— * Papiers d’Argenson; Mémoire sur le sujet de la guerre des Iroquois, 1659 (1660?). MS. ** Journal des Jésuites, 300. My Reverend Father:—The very day when you left Three Rivers I was captured, at about three in the afternoon, by four Iroquois of the Mohawk tribe. I would not have been taken alive, if, to my sorrow, I had not feared that I was not in a fit state to die. If you came here, my Father, I could have the happiness of confessing to you; and I do not think they would do you any harm; and I think that I could return home with you. I pray you to pity my poor mother, who is in great trouble. You know, my Father, how fond she is of me. I have heard from a Frenchman, who was taken at Three Rivers on the 1st of August, that she is well, and comforts herself with the hope that I shall see you. There are three of us Frenchmen alive here. I commend myself to your good prayers, and particularly to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. I pray you, my Father, to say a mass for me. I pray you give my dutiful love to my poor mother, and console her, if it pleases you. My Father, I beg your blessing on the hand that writes to you, which has one of the fingers burned in the bowl of an Indian pipe, to satisfy the Majesty of God which I have offended. The thumb of the other hand is cut off; but do not tell my mother of it. My Father, I pray you to honor me with a word from your hand in reply, and tell me if you shall come here before winter. Your most humble and most obedient servant, Fran?ois Hertel. The following is the letter to his mother, sent probably, with the other, to the charge of Le Moyne:— My most dear and honored Mother:—I know very well that my capture must have distressed you very much I ask you to forgive my disobedience. It is my sins that have placed me where I am. I owe my life to your prayers, and those of M. de Saint-Quentin, and of my sisters. I hope to see you again before winter. I pray you to tell the good brethren of Notre Dame to pray to God and the Holy Virgin for me, my dear mother, and for you and all my sisters. Your poor Fanchon This, no doubt, was the name by which she had called him familiarly when a child. And who was this “Fanchon,” this devout and tender son of a fond mother? New England can answer to her cost. When, twenty-nine years later, a band of French and Indians issued from the forest and fell upon the fort and settlement of Salmon Falls, it was Fran?ois Hertel who led the attack; and when the retiring victors were hard pressed by an overwhelming force, it was he who, sword in hand, held the pursuers in check at the bridge of Wooster River, and covered the retreat of his men. He was ennobled for his services, and died at the age of eighty, the founder of one of the most distinguished families of Canada. * To the New England of old he was the abhorred chief of Popish malignants and murdering savages. The New England of to-day will be more just to the brave defender of his country and his faith. In May, 1660, a party of French Algonquins captured a Wolf, or Mohegan, Indian, naturalized among the Iroquois, brought him to Quebec, and burned him there with their usual atrocity of torture. A modern Catholic writer says that the Jesuits could not save him; but this is not so. Their influence over the consciences of the colonists * His letters of nobility, dated 1716, will be found in Daniel's Histoire des Grandes Familles Fran?aises du Canada, 404. was at that time unbounded, and their direct political power was very great. A protest on their part, and that of the newly arrived bishop, who was in their interest, could not have failed of effect. The truth was, they did not care to prevent the torture of prisoners of war, not solely out of that spirit of compliance with the savage humor of Indian allies which stains so often the pages of French American history, but also, and perhaps chiefly, from motives purely religious. Torture, in their eyes, seems to have been a blessing in disguise. They thought it good for the soul, and in case of obduracy the surest way of salvation. “We have very rarely indeed,” writes one of them, “seen the burning of an Iroquois without feeling sure that he was on the path to Paradise; and we never knew one of them to be surely on the path to Paradise without seeing him pass through this fiery punishment.” * So they let the Wolf burn; but first, having instructed him after their fashion, they baptized him, and his savage soul flew to heaven out of the fire. "Is it not,” pursues the same writer, “a marvel to see a wolf changed at one stroke into a lamb, and enter into the fold of Christ, which he came to ravage?” Before he died he requited their spiritual cares with a startling secret. He told them that eight hundred Iroquois warriors were encamped below Montreal; that four hundred more, who had wintered on the Ottawa, were on the point of joining them; and that the united force would swoop upon * Relation, 1660, 31. Quebec, kill the governor, lay waste the town, and then attack Three Rivers and Montreal. * This time, at least, the Iroquois were in deadly earnest. Quebec was wild with terror. The Ursulines and the nuns of the H?tel Dieu took refuge in the strong and extensive building which the Jesuits had just finished, opposite the Parish Church. Its walls and palisades made it easy of defence; and in its yards and court were lodged the terrified Hurons, as well as the fugitive inhabitants of the neighboring settlements. Others found asylum in the fort, and others in the convent of the Ursulines, which, in place of nuns, was occupied by twenty-four soldiers, who fortified it with redoubts, and barricaded the doors and windows. Similar measures of defence were taken at the H?tel Dieu, and the streets of the Lower Town were strongly barricaded. Everybody was in arms, and the Qui vive of the sentries and patrols resounded all night. ** 2063 The Ursuline Convent Several days passed, and no Iroquois appeared. The refugees took heart, and began to return to their deserted farms and dwellings. Among the rest was a family consisting of an old woman, her daughter, her son-in-law, and four small children, living near St. Anne, some twenty miles below Quebec. On reaching home the old woman and the man went to their work in the fields, while the mother and children remained in the house. * Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre, 26 Juin, 1660. ** On this alarm at Quebec compare Marie de l’Incarnation, 25 Juin, 1660; Relation, 1660, 5; Juchereau, Histoire de l'H?tel-Dieu de Québec, 126 and Journal des Jésuites 282. Here they were pounced upon and captured by eight renegade Hurons, Iroquois by adoption, who placed them in their large canoe, and paddled up the river with their prize. It was Saturday, a day dedicated to the Virgin; and the captive mother prayed to her for aid, “feeling,” writes a Jesuit, “a full conviction that, in passing before Quebec on a Saturday, she would be delivered by the power of this Queen of Heaven.” In fact, as the marauders and their captives glided in the darkness of night by Point Levi, under the shadow of the shore, they were greeted with a volley of musketry from the bushes, and a band of French and Algonquins dashed into the water to seize them. Five of the eight were taken, and the rest shot or drowned. The governor had heard of the descent at St. Anne, and despatched a party to lie in ambush for the authors of it. The Jesuits, it is needless to say, saw a miracle in the result. The Virgin had answered the prayer of her votary. “Though it is true,” observes the father who records the marvel, “that, in the volley, she received a mortal wound.” The same shot struck the infant in her arms. The prisoners were taken to Quebec, where four of them were tortured with even more ferocity than had been shown in the case of the unfortunate Wolf. * Being questioned, they confirmed his story, * The torturers were Christian Algonquins, converts of the Jesuits. Chaumonot, who was present to give spiritual aid to the sufferers, describes the scene with horrible minuteness. “I could not,” he says, “deliver them from their torments.” Perhaps not: but it is certain that the Jesuits as a body, with or without the bishop, could have prevented the atrocity, had they seen fit. They sometimes taught their converts to pray for their enemies. It would have been well had they taught them not to torture them. I can recall but one instance in which they did so. The prayers for enemies were always for a spiritual, not a temporal good. The fathers held the body in slight account and cared little what happened to it. and expressed great surprise that the Iroquois had not come, adding that they must have stopped to attack Montreal or Three Rivers. Again all was terror, and again days passed and no enemy appeared. Had the dying converts, so charitably despatched to heaven through fire, sought an unhallowed consolation in scaring the abettors of their torture with a lie? Not at all. Bating a slight exaggeration, they had told the truth. Where, then, were the Iroquois? As one small point of steel disarms the lightning of its terrors, so did the heroism of a few intrepid youths divert this storm of war and save Canada from a possible ruin. In the preceding April, before the designs of the Iroquois were known, a young officer named Daulac, commandant of the garrison of Montreal, asked leave of Maisonneuve, the governor, to lead a party of volunteers against the enemy. His plan was bold to desperation. It was known that Iroquois warriors in great numbers had wintered among the forests of the Ottawa. Daulac proposed to waylay them on their descent of the river, and fight them without regard to disparity of force. The settlers of Montreal had hitherto acted solely on the defensive, for their numbers had been too small for aggressive war. Of late their strength had been somewhat increased, and Maisonneuve, judging that a display of enterprise and boldness might act as a check on the audacity of the enemy, at length gave his consent. Adam Daulac, or Dollard, Sieur des Ormeaux, was a young man of good family, who had come to the colony three years before, at the age of twenty-two. He had held some military command in France, though in what rank does not appear. It was said that he had been involved in some affair which made him anxious to wipe out the memory of the past by a noteworthy exploit; and he had been busy for some time among the young men of Montreal, inviting them to join him in the enterprise he meditated. Sixteen of them caught his spirit, struck hands with him, and pledged their word. They bound themselves by oath to accept no quarter; and, having gained Maisonneuve’s consent, they made their wills, confessed, and received the sacraments. As they knelt for the last time before the altar in the chapel of the H?tel Dieu, that sturdy little population of pious Indian-fighters gazed on them with enthusiasm, not unmixed with an envy which had in it nothing ignoble. Some of the chief men of Montreal, with the brave Charles Le Moyne at their head, begged them to wait till the spring sowing was over, that they might join them; but Daulac refused. He was jealous of the glory and the danger, and he wished to command, which he could not have done had Le Moyne been present. The spirit of the enterprise was purely mediaeval. The enthusiasm of honor, the enthusiasm of adventure, and the enthusiasm of faith, were its motive forces. Danlac was a knight of the early crusades among the forests and savages of the New World. Yet the incidents of this exotic heroism are definite and clear as a tale of yesterday. The names, ages, and occupations of the seventeen young men may still be read on the ancient register of the parish of Montreal; and the notarial acts of that year, preserved in the records of the city, contain minute accounts of such property as each of them possessed. The three eldest were of twenty-eight, thirty, and thirty-one years respectively. The age of the rest varied from twenty-one to twenty-seven. They were of various callings,—soldiers, armorers, locksmiths, lime-burners, or settlers without trades. The greater number had come to the colony as part of the reinforcement brought by Maisonneuve in 1653. After a solemn farewell they embarked in several canoes well supplied with arms and ammunition. They were very indifferent canoe-men; and it is said that they lost a week in vain attempts to pass the swift current of St. Anne, at the head of the island of Montreal. At length they were more successful, and entering the mouth of the Ottawa, crossed the Lake of Two Mountains, and slowly advanced against the current. Meanwhile, forty warriors of that remnant of the Hurons who, in spite of Iroquois persecutions, still lingered at Quebec, had set out on a war-party, led by the brave and wily Etienne Annahotaha, their most noted chief. They stopped by the way at Three Rivers, where they found a band of Christian Algonquins under a chief named Mituvemeg An'nahotaha challenged him to a trial of courage, and it was agreed that they should meet at Montreal, where they were likely to find a speedy opportunity of putting their mettle to the test. Thither, accordingly, they repaired, the Algonquin with three followers, and the Huron with thirty-nine. It was not long before they learned the departure of Daulac and his companions. “For,” observes the honest Dollier de Casson, “the principal fault of our Frenchmen is to talk too much.” The wish seized them to share the adventure, and to that end the Huron chief asked the governor for a letter to Daulac, to serve as credentials. Maisonneuve hesitated. His faith in Huron valor was not great, and he feared the proposed alliance. Nevertheless, he at length yielded so far as to give Annahotaha a letter in which Daulac was told to accept or reject the proffered reinforcement as he should see fit. The Hurons and Algonquins now embarked and paddled in pursuit of the seventeen Frenchmen. They meanwhile had passed with difficulty the swift current at Carillon, and about the first of May reached the foot of the more formidable rapid called the Long Saut, where a tumult of waters, foaming among ledges and boulders, barred the onward way. It was needless to go farther. The Iroquois were sure to pass the Saut, and could be fought here as well as elsewhere. Just below the rapid, where the forests sloped gently to the shore, among the bushes and stumps of the rough clearing made in constructing it, stood a palisade fort, the work of an Algonquin war-party in the past autumn. It was a mere enclosure of trunks of small trees planted in a circle, and was already ruinous. Such as it was, the Frenchmen took possession of it. Their first care, one would think, should have been to repair and strengthen it; but this they seem not to have done: possibly, in the exaltation of their minds, they scorned such precaution. They made their fires, and slung their kettles on the neighboring shore; and here they were soon joined by the Hurons and Algonquins. Daulac, it seems, made no objection to their company, and they all bivouacked together. Morning and noon and night they prayed in three different tongues; and when at sunset the long reach of forests on the farther shore basked peacefully in the level rays, the rapids joined their hoarse music to the notes of their evening hymn. In a day or two their scouts came in with tidings that two Iroquois canoes were coming down the Saut. Daulac had time to set his men in ambush among the bushes at a point where he thought the strangers likely to land. He judged aright. The canoes, bearing five Iroquois, approached, and were met by a volley fired with such precipitation that one or more of them escaped the shot, fled into the forest, and told their mischance to their main body, two hundred in number, on the river above. A fleet of canoes suddenly appeared, bounding down the rapids, filled with warriors eager for revenge. The allies had barely time to escape to their fort, leaving their kettles still slung over the fires. The Iroquois made a hasty and desultory attack, and were quickly repulsed. They next opened a parley, hoping, no doubt, to gain some advantage by surprise. Failing in this, they set themselves, after their custom on such occasions, to building a rude fort of their own in the neighboring forest. This gave the French a breathing-time, and they used it for strengthening their defences. Being provided with tools, they planted a row of stakes within their palisade, to form a double fence, and filled the intervening space with earth and stones to the height of a man, leaving some twenty loopholes, at each of which three marksmen were stationed. Their work was still unfinished when the Iroquois were upon them again. They had broken to pieces the birch canoes of the French and their allies, and, kindling the bark, rushed up to pile it blazing against the palisade; but so brisk and steady a fire met them that they recoiled and at last gave way. They came on again, and again were driven back, leaving many of their number on the ground, among them the principal chief of the Senecas. Some of the French dashed out, and, covered by the fire of their comrades, hacked off his head, and stuck it on the palisade, while the Iroquois howled in a frenzy of helpless rage. They tried another attack, and were beaten off a third time. This dashed their spirits, and they sent a canoe to call to their aid five hundred of their warriors who were mustered near the mouth of the Richelieu. These were the allies whom, but for this untoward check, they were on their way to join for a com bined attack on Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal. It was maddening to see their grand project thwarted by a few French and Indians ensconced in a paltry redoubt, scarcely better than a cattle-pen; but they were forced to digest the affront as best they might. Meanwhile, crouched behind trees and logs, they beset the fort, harassing its defenders day and night with a spattering fire and a constant menace of attack. Thus five days passed. Hunger, thirst, and want of sleep wrought fatally on the strength of the French and their allies, who, pent up together in their narrow prison, fought and prayed by turns. Deprived as they were of water, they could not swallow the crushed Indian corn, or “hominy,” which was their only food. Some of them, under cover of a brisk fire, ran down to the river and filled such small vessels as they had; but this pittance only tantalized their thirst. They dug a hole in the fort, and were rewarded at last by a little muddy water oozing through the clay. Among the assailants were a number of Hurons, adopted by the Iroquois and fighting on their side. These renegades now shouted to their countrymen in the fort, telling them that a fresh army was close at hand; that they would soon be attacked by seven or eight hundred warriors; and that their only hope was in joining the Iroquois, who would receive them as friends. Annahotaha’s followers, half dead with thirst and famine, listened to their seducers, took the bait, and, one, two, or three at a time, climbed the palisade and ran over to the enemy, amid the hootings and execrations of those whom they deserted. Their chief stood firm; and when he saw his nephew, La Mouche, join the other fugitives, he fired his pistol at him in a rage. The four Algonquins, who had no mercy to hope for, stood fast, with the courage of despair. On the fifth day an uproar of unearthly yells from seven hundred savage throats, mingled with a clattering salute of musketry, told the Frenchmen that the expected reinforcement had come; and soon, in the forest and on the clearing, a crowd of warriors mustered for the attack. Knowing from the Huron deserters the weakness of their enemy, they had no doubt of an easy victory. They advanced cautiously, as was usual with the Iroquois before their blood was up, screeching, leaping from side to side, and firing as they came on; but the French were at their posts, and every loophole darted its tongue of fire. Besides muskets, they had heavy musketoons of large calibre, which, scattering scraps of lead and iron among the throng of savages, often maimed several of them at one discharge. The Iroquois, astonished at the persistent vigor of the defence, fell back discomfited. The fire of the French, who were themselves completely under cover, had told upon them with deadly effect. Three days more wore away in a series of futile attacks, made with little concert or vigor; and during all this time Daulac and his men, reeling with exhaustion, fought and prayed as before, sure of a martyr’s reward. The uncertain, vacillating temper common to all Indians now began to declare itself. Some of the Iroquois were for going home. Others revolted at the thought, and declared that it would be an eternal disgrace to lose so many men at the hands of so paltry an enemy, and yet fail to take revenge. It was resolved to make a general assault, and volunteers were called for to lead the attack. After the custom on such occasions, bundles of small sticks were thrown upon the ground, and those picked them up who dared, thus accepting the gage of battle, and enrolling themselves in the forlorn hope. No precaution was neglected. Large and heavy shields four or five feet high were made by lashing together three split logs with the aid of cross-bars. Covering themselves with these mantelets, the chosen band advanced, followed by the motley throng of warriors. In spite of a brisk fire, they reached the palisade, and, crouching below the range of shot, hewed furiously with their hatchets to cut their way through. The rest followed close, and swarmed like angry hornets around the little fort, hacking and tearing to get in. Daulac had crammed a large musketoon with powder, and plugged up the muzzle. Lighting the fuse inserted in it, he tried to throw it over the barrier, to burst like a grenade among the crowd of savages without; but it struck the ragged top of one of the palisades, fell back among the Frenchmen and exploded, killing and wounding several of them, and nearly blinding others. In the confusion that followed, the Iroquois got possession of the loopholes, and, thrusting in their guns, fired on those within. In a moment more they had torn a breach in the palisade; but, nerved with the energy of desperation, Daulac and his followers sprang to defend it. Another breach was made, and then another. Daulac was struck dead, but the survivors kept up the fight. With a sword or a hatchet in one hand and a knife in the other, they threw themselves against the throng of enemies, striking and stabbing with the fury of madmen; till the Iroquois, despairing of taking them alive, fired volley after volley and shot them down. All was over, and a burst of triumphant yells proclaimed the dear-bought victory. Searching the pile of corpses, the victors found four Frenchmen still breathing. Three had scarcely a spark of life, and, as no time was to be lost, they burned them on the spot. The fourth, less fortunate, seemed likely to survive, and they reserved him for future torments. As for the Huron deserters, their cowardice profited them little. The Iroquois, regardless of their promises, fell upon them, burned some at once, and carried the rest to their villages for a similar fate. Five of the number had the good fortune to escape, and it was from them, aided by admissions made long afterwards by the Iroquois themselves, that the French of Canada derived all their knowledge of this glorious disaster. * * When the fugitive Hurons reached Montreal, they were unwilling to confess their desertion of the French, and declared that they and some others of their people, to the number of fourteen, had stood by them to the last. This was the story told by one of them to the Jesuit Chaumonot, and by him communicated in a letter to his friends at Quebec The substance of this letter is given by Marie de l’Incarnation, in her letter to her son of June 25, 1660. The Jesuit Relation of this year gives another long account of the affair, also derived from the Huron deserters, who this time only pretended that ten of their number remained with the French. They afterwards admitted that all had deserted but Annaliotaha, as appears from the account drawn up by Dollier de Casson, in his Histoire du Montréal. Another contemporary, Belmont, who heard the story from an Iroquois, makes the same statement. All these writers, though two of them were not friendly to Montreal, agree that Daulac and his followers saved Canada from a disastrous invasion. The governor, Argenson, in a letter written on the fourth of July following, and in his Mémoire sur le sujet de la guerre des Iroquois, expresses the same conviction. Before me is an extract, copied from the Petit Registre de la Cure de Montréal, giving the names and ages of Daulac’s men. The Abbé Faillon took extraordinary pains to collect all the evidence touching this affair. See his Histoire de la Colonie Fran?aise, II. chap. xv. Charlevoix, very little to his credit, passes it over in silence, not being partial to Montreal. To the colony it proved a salvation. The Iroquois had had fighting enough. If seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such, fighting behind walls of stone? For that year they thought no more of capturing Quebec and Montreal, but went home dejected and amazed, to howl over their losses, and nurse their dashed courage for a day of vengeance. CHAPTER IV. 1657-1668. THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. Domestic Strife.—Jesuit and Sulpitian.—Abbé Queylus.—Francois de Laval.—The Zealots of Caen.—Gallican and Ultramontane.—The Rival Claimants.—Storm at Quebec—Laval Triumphant. Canada, gasping under the Iroquois tomahawk, might, one would suppose, have thought her cup of tribulation full, and, sated with inevitable woe, have sought consolation from the wrath without in a holy calm within. Not so, however; for while the heathen raged at the door, discord rioted at the hearthstone. Her domestic quarrels were wonderful in number, diversity, and bitterness. There was the standing quarrel of Montreal and Quebec, the quarrels of priests with each other, of priests with the governor, and of the governor with the intendant, besides ceaseless wranglings of rival traders and rival peculators. Some of these disputes were local and of no special significance; while others are very interesting, because, on a remote and obscure theatre, they represent, sometimes in striking forms, the contending passions and principles of a most important epoch of history. To begin with one which even to this day has left a root of bitterness behind it. The association of pious enthusiasts who had founded Montreal * was reduced in 1657 to a remnant of five or six persons, whose ebbing zeal and overtaxed purses were no longer equal to the devout but arduous enterprise. They begged the priests of the Seminary of St. Sulpice to take it off their hands. The priests consented; and, though the conveyance of the island of Montreal to these its new proprietors did not take effect till some years later, four of the Sulpitian fathers, Queylus, Souart, Galinée, and Allet, came out to the colony and took it in charge. Thus far Canada had had no bishop, and the Sulpitians now aspired to give it one from their own brotherhood. Many years before, when the Recollets had a foothold in the colony, they too, or at least some of them, had cherished the hope of giving Canada a bishop of their own. ** As for the Jesuits, who for nearly thirty years had of themselves constituted the Canadian church, they had been content thus far to dispense with a bishop; for, having no rivals in the field, they had felt no need of episcopal support. The Sulpitians put forward Queylus as their candidate for the new bishopric. The assembly of French clergy approved, and Cardinal Mazarin * See Jesuits in North America, chap. xv. ** Mémoire qui faiet pour l’affaire des P.P. Recollects de la province de St Denys ditte de Paris touchant le droigt qu’ils ont depuis l’an 1615, d’aller en Quanada soubs l’authorité de Sa Maiesté, etc. 1637. himself seemed to sanction, the nomination. The Jesuits saw that their time of action was come. It was they who had borne the heat and burden of the day, the toils, privations, and martyrdoms, while as yet the Sulpitians had done nothing and endured nothing. If any body of ecclesiastics was to have the nomination of a bishop, it clearly belonged to them, the Jesuits. Their might, too, matched their right. They were strong at court; Mazarin withdrew his assent, and the Jesuits were invited to name a bishop to their liking. Meanwhile the Sulpitians, despairing of the bishopric, had sought their solace elsewhere. Ships bound for Canada had usually sailed from ports within the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Rouen, and the departing missionaries had received their ecclesiastical powers from him, till he had learned to regard Canada as an outlying section of his diocese. Not unwilling to assert his claims, he now made Queylus his vicar-general for all Canada, thus clothing him with episcopal powers, and placing him over the heads of the Jesuits. Queylus, in effect, though not in name, a bishop, left his companion Souart in the spiritual charge of Montreal, came down to Quebec, announced his new dignity, and assumed the curacy of the parish. The Jesuits received him at first with their usual urbanity, an exercise of self-control rendered more easy by their knowledge that one more potent than Queylus would soon arrive to supplant him. * * A detailed account of the experiences of Queylus at Quebec, immediately after his arrival, as related by himself, will be found in a memoir by the Sulpitian Allet, in Morale Pratique des Jésuites, XXXIV. chap, xii. In chapter ten of the same volume the writer says that he visited Queylus at Mont St. Valérien, after his return from Canada. “II me prit à part; nous nous promenames assez longtemps dans le jardin et il m’ouvrit son c?ur sur la conduite des Je'suites dans le Canada et partout ailleurs Messieurs de St. Sulpice savent bien ce qu’il m’en a pu dire, et je suis assuré qu’ils ne diront pas que je l’ai du prendre pour des mensonges." The vicar of the Archbishop of Rouen was a man of many virtues, devoted to good works, as he understood them; rich, for the Sulpitians were under no vow of poverty; generous in almsgiving, busy, indefatigable, overflowing with zeal, vivacious in temperament and excitable in temper, impatient of opposition, and, as it seems, incapable, like his destined rival, of seeing any way of doing good but his own. Though the Jesuits were outwardly courteous, their partisans would not listen to the new curé’s sermons, or listened only to find fault, and germs of discord grew vigorously in the parish of Quebec. Prudence was not among the virtues of Queylus. He launched two sermons against the Jesuits, in which he likened himself to Christ and them to the Pharisees. “Who,” he supposed them to say, “is this Jesus, so beloved of the people, who comes to cast discredit on us, who for thirty or forty years have governed church and state here, with none to dispute us?” * He denounced such of his hearers as came to pick flaws in his discourse, and told them it would be better for their souls if they lay in bed at home, sick of a “good quartan fever.” His ire was greatly kindled by a letter of the Jesuit Pijart, which fell into his hands through a female adherent, the pious * Journal des Jésuites, Oct., 1657. Madame d’Aillebout, and in which that father declared that he, Queylus, was waging war on him and his brethren more savagely than the Iroquois. * “He was as crazy at sight of a Jesuit,” writes an adverse biographer, “as a mad dog at sight of water.” ** He cooled, however, on being shown certain papers which proved that his position was neither so strong nor so secure as he had supposed; and the governor, Argenson, at length persuaded him to retire to Montreal. *** The queen mother, Anne of Austria, always inclined to the Jesuits, had invited Father Le Jeune, who was then in France, to make choice of a bishop for Canada. It was not an easy task. No Jesuit was eligible, for the sage policy of Loyola had excluded members of the order from the bishopric. The signs of the times portended trouble for the Canadian church, and there was need of a bishop who would assert her claims and fight her battles. Such a man could not be made an instrument of the Jesuits; therefore there was double need that he should be one with them in sympathy and purpose. They made a sagacious choice. Le Jeune presented to the queen mother the name of Fran?ois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, Abbé de Montigny. 2165 Fran?ois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, Abbé de Montigny. Laval, for by this name he was thenceforth known, belonged to one of the proudest families of Europe, and, churchman as he was, there is * Journal des Jésuites, Oct., 1657. ** Viger, Notice Historique sur l’Abbé de Queylus. *** Papiers d’Argenson. much in his career to remind us that in his veins ran the blood of the stern Constable of France, Anne de Montmorency. Nevertheless, his thoughts from childhood had turned towards the church, or, as his biographers will have it, all his aspirations were heavenward. He received the tonsure at the age of nine. The Jesuit Bagot confirmed and moulded his youthful predilections; and, at a later period, he was one of a band of young zealots, formed under the auspices of Bernières de Louvigni, royal treasurer at Caen, who, though a layman, was reputed almost a saint. It was Bernières who had borne the chief part in the pious fraud of the pretended marriage through which Madame de la Peltrie escaped from her father’s roof to become foundress of the Ursulines of Quebec. * He had since renounced the world, and dwelt at Caen, in a house attached to an Ursuline convent, and known as the Hermitage. Here he lived like a monk, in the midst of a community of young priests and devotees, who looked to him as their spiritual director, and whom he trained in the maxims and practices of the most extravagant, or, as his admirers say, the most sublime ultramontane piety. ** The conflict between the Jesuits and the Jansenists was then at its height. The Jansenist doctrines of election and salvation by grace, which sapped the power of the priesthood and impugned the authority of the Pope himself in his capacity of holder of the keys of heaven, were to the Jesuits * See Jesuits in North America, chap. xiv. ** La Tour, Vie de Laval, gives his maxims at length. an abomination; while the rigid morals of the Jansenists stood in stern contrast to the pliancy of Jesuit casuistry. Bernières and his disciples were zealous, not to say fanatical, partisans of the Jesuits. There is a long account of the “Hermitage" and its inmates from the pen of the famous Jansenist, Nicole; an opponent, it is true, but one whose qualities of mind and character give weight to his testimony. * “In this famous Hermitage,” says Nicole, “the late Sieur de Bernières brought up a number of young men, to whom he taught a sort of sublime and transcendental devotion called passive prayer, because in it the mind does not act at all, but merely receives the divine operation; and this devotion is the source of all those visions and revelations in which the Hermitage is so prolific.” In short, he and his disciples were mystics of the most exalted type. Nicole pursues: “After having thus subtilized their minds, and almost sublimed them into vapor, he rendered them capable of detecting Jansenists under any disguise, insomuch that some of his followers said that they knew them by the scent, as dogs know their game; but the aforesaid Sieur de Bernières denied that they had so subtile a sense of smell, and said that the mark by which he detected Jansenists was their disapproval of his teachings or their opposition to the Jesuits.” The zealous band at the Hermitage was aided in * Mémoire pour faire connoistre l'esprit et la conduite de la Compagnie établie en la ville de Caen, appéllée l'Hermitage (Bibliothèque Nationnale Imprimés Partie Réservée). Written in 1660. its efforts to extirpate error by a sort of external association in the city of Caen, consisting of merchants, priests, officers, petty nobles, and others, all inspired and guided by Bernières. They met every week at the Hermitage, or at the houses of each other. Similar associations existed in other cities of France, besides a fraternity in the Rue St. Dominique at Paris, which was formed by the Jesuit Bagot, and seems to have been the parent, in a certain sense, of the others. They all acted together when any important object was in view. Bernières and his disciples felt that God had chosen them not only to watch over doctrine and discipline in convents and in families, but also to supply the prevalent deficiency of zeal in bishops and other dignitaries of the church. They kept, too, a constant eye on the humbler clergy, and whenever a new preacher appeared in Caen, two of their number were deputed to hear his sermon and report upon it. If he chanced to let fall a word concerning the grace of God, they denounced him for Jansenistic heresy. Such commotion was once raised in Caen by charges of sedition and Jansenism, brought by the Hermitage against priests and laymen hitherto without attaint, that the Bishop of Bayeux thought it necessary to interpose; but even he was forced to pause, daunted by the insinuations of Bernières that he was in secret sympathy with the obnoxious doctrines. Thus the Hermitage and its affiliated societies constituted themselves a sort of inquisition in the interest of the Jesuits; “for what,” asks Nicole “might not be expected from persons of weak minds and atrabilious dispositions, dried up by constant fasts, vigils, and other austerities, besides meditations of three or four hours a day, and told continually that the church is in imminent danger of ruin through the machinations of the Jansenists, who are represented to them as persons who wish to break up the foundations of the Christian faith and subvert the mystery of the Incarnation; who believe neither in transubstantiation, the invocation of saints, nor indulgences; who wish to abolish the sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrament of Penitence, oppose the worship of the Holy Virgin, deny freewill and substitute predestination in its place, and, in fine, conspire to overthrow the authority of the Supreme Pontiff.” Among other anecdotes, Nicole tells the following: One of the young zealots of the Hermitage took it into his head that all Caen was full of Jansenists, and that the curés of the place were in league with them. He inoculated four others with this notion, and they resolved to warn the people of their danger. They accordingly made the tour of the streets, without hats or collars, and with coats unbuttoned, though it was a cold winter day, stopping every moment to proclaim in a loud voice that all the curés, excepting two, whom they named, were abettors of the Jansenists. A mob was soon following at their heels, and there was great excitement. The magistrates chanced to be in session, and, hearing of the disturbance, they sent constables to arrest the authors of it. Being brought to the bar of justice and questioned by the judge, they answered that they were doing the work of God, and were ready to die in the cause; that Caen was full of Jansenists, and that the curés had declared in their favor, inasmuch as they denied any knowledge of their existence. Four of the five were locked up for a few days, tried, and sentenced to a fine of a hundred livres, with a promise of further punishment should they again disturb the peace. * The fifth, being pronounced out of his wits by the physicians, was sent home to his mother, at a village near Argentan, where two or three of his fellow zealots presently joined him. Among them, they persuaded his mother, who had hitherto been, devoted to household cares, to exchange them for a life of mystical devotion. “These three or four persons,” says Nicole, “attracted others as imbecile as themselves.” Among these recruits were a number of women, and several priests. After various acts of fanaticism, “two or three days before last Pentecost,” proceeds the narrator, “they all set out, men and women, for Argentan. The priests had drawn the skirts of their cassocks over their heads, and tied them about their necks with twisted straw. Some of the women had their heads bare, and their hair streaming loose over their shoulders. They picked up filth on the road, and rubbed their faces with it, and the most zealous ate it, saying that it was necessary to mortify the taste. Some * Nicole is not the only authority for this story. It is also told by a very different writer. See Notice Historique de l'Abbaye de Ste. Claire d’Arqentan, 124, held stones in their hands, which they knocked together to draw the attention of the passers-by. They had a leader, whom they were bound to obey; and when this leader saw any mud-hole particularly deep and dirty, he commanded some of the party to roll themselves in it, which they did forthwith. * “After this fashion, they entered the town of Argentan, and marched, two by two, through all the streets, crying with a loud voice that the Faith was perishing, and that whoever wished to save it must quit the country and go with them to Canada, whither they were soon to repair. It is said that they still hold this purpose, and that their leaders declare it revealed to them that they will find a vessel ready at the first port to which Providence directs them. The reason why they choose Canada for an asylum is, that Monsieur de Montigny (Laval), Bishop of Petr?a, who lived at the Hermitage a long time, where he was instructed in mystical theology by Monsieur de Bernières, exercises episcopal functions there; and that the Jesuits, who are their oracles, reign in that country.” This adventure, like the other, ended in a collision with the police. “The priests,” adds Nicole, “were arrested, and are now waiting trial, and the rest were treated as mad, and sent back with shame and confusion to the places whence they had come.” * These proceedings were probably intended to produce the result which was the constant object of the mystics of the Hermitage; namely, the “annihilation of self,” with a view to a perfect union with God. To become despised of men was an important, if not an essential, step in this mystical suicide. Though these pranks took place after Laval had left the Hermitage, they serve to characterize the school in which he was formed; or, more justly speaking, to show its most extravagant side. That others did not share the views of the celebrated Jansenist, may be gathered from the following passage of the funeral oration pronounced over the body of Laval half a century later:— “The humble abbé was next transported into the terrestrial paradise of Monsieur de Bernières. It is thus that I call, as it is fitting to call it, that famous Hermitage of Caen, where the seraphic author of the ‘Christian Interior’ (Bernières) transformed into angels all those who had the happiness to be the companions of his solitude and of his spiritual exercises. It was there that, during four years, the fervent abbé drank the living and abounding waters of grace which have since flowed so benignly over this land of Canada. In this celestial abode his ordinary occupations were prayer, mortification, instruction of the poor, and spiritual readings or conferences; his recreations were to labor in the hospitals, wait upon the sick and poor, make their beds, dress their wounds, and aid them in their most repulsive needs.” * In truth, Laval’s zeal was boundless, and the exploits of self-humiliation recorded of him were unspeakably revolting. ** Bernières himself regarded * Eloge funèbre de Messire Fran?ois Xavier de Laval- Montmorency, par Messire de la Colombière, Vicaire Général. ** See La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. I. Some of them were closely akin to that of the fanatics mentioned above, who ate “immondices d’animaux” to mortify the taste. him as a light by which to guide his own steps in ways of holiness. He made journeys on foot about the country, disguised, penniless, begging from door to door, and courting scorn and opprobrium, “in order,” says his biographer, “that he might suffer for the love of God.” Yet, though living at this time in a state of habitual religious exaltation, he was by nature no mere dreamer; and in whatever heights his spirit might wander, his feet were always planted on the solid earth. His flaming zeal had for its servants a hard, practical nature, perfectly fitted for the battle of life, a narrow intellect, a stiff and persistent will, and, as his enemies thought, the love of domination native to his blood. Two great parties divided the Catholics of France,—the Gallican or national party, and the ultramontane or papal party. The first, resting on the Scriptural injunction to give tribute to C?sar, held that to the king, the Lord’s anointed, belonged the temporal, and to the church the spiritual power. It held also that the laws and customs of the church of France could not be broken at the bidding of the Pope. * The ultramontane party, on the other hand, maintained that the Pope, Christ’s vicegerent on earth, was supreme over earthly rulers, and should of right hold jurisdiction over the clergy of all Christendom, with powers of appointment and removal. Hence they claimed for him the right of nominating bishops in * See the famous Quatre Articles of 1682, in which the liberties of the Gallican Church are asserted. France. This had anciently been exercised by assemblies of the French clergy, but in the reign of Francis I. the king and the Pope had combined to wrest it from them by the Concordat of Bologna. Under this compact, which was still in force, the Pope appointed French bishops on the nomination of the king, a plan which displeased the Gallicans, and did not satisfy the ultramontanes. The Jesuits, then as now, were the most forcible exponents of ultramontane principles. The church to rule the world; the Pope to rule the church; the Jesuits to rule the Pope: such was and is the simple programme of the Order of Jesus, and to it they have held fast, except on a few rare occasions of misunderstanding with the Vicegerent of Christ. * In the question of papal supremacy, as in most things else, Laval was of one mind with them. Those versed in such histories will not be surprised to learn that, when he received the royal nomination, humility would not permit him to accept it; nor that, being urged, he at length bowed in resignation, still protesting his unworthiness. Nevertheless, the royal nomination did not take effect. The ultramontanes outflanked both the king and the Gallicans, and by adroit strategy made the new prelate completely a creature of the papacy. Instead of appointing him Bishop of Quebec, in accordance with the royal initiative, the Pope made him his vicar apostolic for Canada, * For example, not long after this time, the Jesuits, having a dispute with Innocent XI., threw themselves into the party of opposition. thus evading the king’s nomination, and affirming that Canada, a country of infidel savages, was excluded from the concordat, and under his (the Pope’s) jurisdiction pure and simple. The Gallicans were enraged. The Archbishop of Rouen vainly opposed, and the parliaments of Rouen and of Paris vainly protested. The papal party prevailed. The king, or rather Mazarin, gave his consent, subject to certain conditions, the chief of which was an oath of allegiance; and Laval, grand vicar apostolic, decorated with the title of Bishop of Petr?a, sailed for his wilderness diocese in the spring of 1659. * He was but thirty-six years of age, but even when a boy he could scarcely have seemed young. Queylus, for a time, seemed to accept the situation, and tacitly admit the claim of Laval as his ecclesiastical superior; but, stimulated by a letter from the Archbishop of Rouen, he soon threw himself into an attitude of opposition, ** in which the popularity which his generosity to the poor had won for him gave him an advantage very annoying to his adversary. The quarrel, it will be seen, was three-sided,—Gallican against ultramontane, Sulpitian against Jesuit, Montreal against Quebec. To Montreal the recalcitrant abbé, after a brief visit to Quebec, had again retired; but even here, girt with his Sulpitian brethren and compassed with * Compare La Tour, Vie de Laval, with the long statement in Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, II. 315-335. Faillon gives various documents in full, including the royal letter of nomination and those in which the King gives a reluctant consent to the appointment of the vicar apostolic. ** Journal des Jésuites, Sept., 1657. partisans, the arm of the vicar apostolic was long enough to reach him. By temperament and conviction Laval hated a divided authority, and the very shadow of a schism was an abomination in his sight. The young king, who, though abundantly jealous of his royal power, was forced to conciliate the papal party, had sent instructions to Argenson, the governor, to support Laval, and prevent divisions in the Canadian church. * These instructions served as the pretext of a procedure sufficiently summary. A squad of soldiers, commanded, it is said, by the governor himself, went up to Montreal, brought the indignant Queylus to Quebec, and shipped him thence for France. ** By these means, writes Father Lalemant, order reigned for a season in the church. It was but for a season. Queylus was not a man to bide his defeat in tranquillity, nor were his brother Sulpitians disposed to silent acquiescence. Laval, on his part, was not a man of half measures. He had an agent in France, and partisans strong at court. Fearing, to borrow the words of a Catholic writer, that the return of Queylus to Canada would prove “injurious to the glory of God,” he bestirred himself to prevent it. The young king, then at Aix, on his famous journey to the frontiers of Spain to marry the Infanta, was induced to write to Queylus, ordering him to remain in France. *** Queylus, however, repaired to Rome; but even * Lettre du Roi à d’Argenson, 14 Mai, 1659. ** Belmont, Histoire du Canada, a.d. 1659. Memoir by Abbé d’Allet, in Morale Pratique des Jésuites, XXXIV. 725. *** Lettre du Roi a Queylus, 27 Feb., 1660. against this movement provision had been made: accusations of Jansenism had gone before him, and he met a cold welcome. Nevertheless, as he had powerful friends near the Pope, he succeeded in removing these adverse impressions, and even in obtaining certain bulls relating to the establishment, of the parish of Montreal, and favorable to the Sulpitians. Provided with these, he set at nought the king’s letter, embarked under an assumed name, and sailed to Quebec, where he made his appearance on the 3d of August, 1661, * to the extreme wrath of Laval. A ferment ensued. Laval’s partisans charged the Sulpitians with Jansenism and opposition to the will of the Pope. A preacher more zealous than the rest denounced them as priests of Antichrist; and as to the bulls in their favor, it was affirmed that Queylus had obtained them by fraud from the Holy Father. Laval at once issued a mandate forbidding him to proceed to Montreal till ships should arrive with instructions from the King. ** At the same time he demanded of the governor that he should interpose the civil power to prevent Queylus from leaving Quebec. *** As Argenson, who wished to act as peacemaker between the belligerent fathers, did not at once take the sharp measures required of him, Laval renewed his demand on the next day, calling on him, in the name of God and the king, to compel Queylus to yield the obedience * Journal des Jésuites, Ao?t, 1661. ** Lettre de Laval à Queylus, 4 Ao?t, 1661. ***Lettre de Laval a d’Argenson, Ibid. due to him, the vicar apostolic. * At the same time he sent another to the offending abbé, threatening to suspend him from priestly functions if he persisted in his rebellion. ** The incorrigible Queylus, who seems to have lived for some months in a simmer of continual indignation, set at nought the vicar apostolic as he had set at nought the king, took a boat that very night, and set out for Montreal under cover of darkness. Great was the ire of Laval when he heard the news in the morning. He despatched a letter after him, declaring him suspended ipso facto, if he did not instantly return and make his submission. *** This letter, like the rest, failed of the desired effect; but the governor, who had received a second mandate from the king to support Laval and prevent a schism, **** now reluctantly interposed the secular arm, and Queylus was again compelled to return to France. (v) His expulsion was a Sulpitian defeat. Laval, always zealous for unity and centralization, had some time before taken steps to repress what he regarded as a tendency to independence at Montreal. In the preceding year he had written to the Pope: “There are some secular priests (Sulpitians) at Montreal, whom the Abbé de Queylus brought out with him in 1657, and I have named for the * Lettre de Laval a d’Argenson, 5 Ao?t, 1661. ** Lettre de Laval a Queylus, Ibid. **** Ibid, 6 Ao?t, 1661. **** Lettre du Roi à d’Argenson, 13 Mai, 1660. (v) For the governor’s attitude in this affair, consult the Papiers d'Argentan, containing his despatches. functions of curé the one among them whom I thought the least disobedient.” The bulls which Queylus had obtained from Rome related to this very curacy, and greatly disturbed the mind of the vicar apostolic. He accordingly wrote again to the Pope: “I pray your Holiness to let me know your will concerning the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Rouen. M. l’Abbé de Queylus, who has come out this year as vicar of this archbishop, has tried to deceive us by surreptitious letters, and has obeyed neither our prayers nor our repeated commands to desist. But he has received orders from the king to return immediately to France, to render an account of his disobedience, and he has been compelled by the governor to conform to the will of his Majesty. What I now fear is that, on his return to France, by using every kind of means, employing new artifices, and falsely representing our affairs, he may obtain from the court of Rome powers which may disturb the peace of our church; for the priests whom he brought with him from France, and who five at Montreal, are animated with the same spirit of disobedience and division; and I fear, with good reason, that all belonging to the seminary of St. Sulpice, who may come hereafter to join them, will be of the same disposition. If what is said is true, that by means of fraudulent letters the right of patronage of the pretended parish of Montreal has been granted to the superior of this seminary, and the right of appointment to the Archbishop of Rouen, then is altar reared against altar in our church of Canada; for the clergy of Montreal will always stand in opposition to me, the vicar apostolic, and to my successors.” * These dismal forebodings were never realized The Holy See annulled the obnoxious bulls; the Archbishop of Rouen renounced his claims, and Queylus found his position untenable. Seven years later, when Laval was on a visit to France, a reconciliation was brought about between them. The former vicar of the Archbishop of Rouen made his submission to the vicar of the Pope, and returned to Canada as a missionary. Laval’s triumph was complete, to the joy of the Jesuits, silent, if not idle, spectators of the tedious and complex quarrel. * Lettre de Laval au Pape, 22 Oct., 1661. Printed by Faillon, from the original in the archives of the Propaganda. CHAPTER V. 1659, 1660. LAVAL AND ARGENSON. Fran?ois de Laval.—His Position and Character.—Arrival of Argenson.—The Quarrel. We are touching delicate ground. To many excellent Catholics of our own day Laval is an object of veneration. The Catholic university of Quebec glories in bearing his name, and certain modern ecclesiastical writers rarely mention him in terms less reverent than “the virtuous prelate,” or “the holy prelate.” Nor are some of his contemporaries less emphatic in eulogy. Mother Juchereau de Saint-Denis, Superior of the H?tel Dieu, wrote immediately after his death: “He began in his tenderest years the study of perfection, and we have reason to think that he reached it, since every virtue which Saint Paul demands in a bishop was seen and admired in him;” and on his first arrival in Canada, Mother Marie de l’Incarnation, Superior of the Ursulines, wrote to her son that the choice of such a prelate was not of man, but of God. “will not,” she adds, “say that he is a saint, but I may say with truth that he lives like a saint and an apostle.” And she describes his austerity of life; how he had but two servants, a gardener—whom he lent on occasion to his needy neighbors—and a valet; how he lived in a small hired house, saying that he would not have one of his own if he could build it for only five sous; and how, in his table, furniture, and bed, he showed the spirit of poverty, even, as she thinks, to excess. His servant, a lay brother named Houssart, testified, after his death, that he slept on a hard bed, and would not suffer it to be changed even when it became full of fleas; and, what is more to the purpose, that he gave fifteen hundred or two thousand francs to the poor every year. * Houssart also gives the following specimen of his austerities: “I have seen him keep cooked meat five, six, seven, or eight days in the heat of summer, and when it was all mouldy and wormy he washed it in warm water and ate it, and told me that it was very good.” The old servant was so impressed by these and other proofs of his master’s sanctity, that “I determined,” he says, “to keep every thing I could that had belonged to his holy person, and after his death to soak bits of linen in his blood when his body was opened, and take a few bones and cartilages from his breast, cut off his hair, and keep his clothes, and such things, to serve as most precious relics.” These pious cares were not in vain, for the relics proved greatly in demand. * Lettre du Frère Houssart, ancien serviteur de Mg'r de Laval a M. Tremblay, 1 Sept., 1708. This letter is printed, though with one or two important omissions, in the Abeille, Vol. I. (Quebec, 1848.) Several portraits of Laval are extant. A drooping nose of portentous size; a well-formed forehead; a brow strongly arched; a bright, clear eye; scanty hair, half hidden by a black skullcap; thin lips, compressed and rigid, betraying a spirit not easy to move or convince; features of that indescribable cast which marks the priestly type: such is Laval, as he looks grimly down on us from the dingy canvas of two centuries ago. 0057 La Tour and the Governor Drawn by B. West Clinedinst He is one of those concerning whom Protestants and Catholics, at least ultramontane Catholics, will never agree in judgment. The task of eulogizing him may safely be left to those of his own way of thinking. It is for us to regard him from the standpoint of secular history. And, first, let us credit him with sincerity. He believed firmly that the princes and rulers of this world ought to be subject to guidance and control at the hands of the Pope, the vicar of Christ on earth. But he himself was the Pope’s vicar, and, so far as the bounds of Canada extended, the Holy Father had clothed him with his own authority. The glory of God demanded that this authority should suffer no abatement, and he, Laval, would be guilty before Heaven if he did not uphold the supremacy of the church over the powers both of earth and of hell. Of the faults which he owed to nature, the principal seems to have been an arbitrary and domineering temper. He was one of those who by nature lean always to the side of authority; and in the English Revolution he would inevitably have stood for the Stuarts; or, in the American Revolution, for the Crown. But being above all things a Catholic and a priest, he was drawn by a constitutional necessity to the ultramontane party, or the party of centralization. He fought lustily, in his way, against the natural man; and humility was the virtue to the culture of which he gave his chief attention, but soil and climate were not favorable. His life was one long assertion of the authority of the church, and this authority was lodged in himself. In his stubborn fight for ecclesiastical ascendancy, he was aided by the impulses of a nature that loved to rule, and could not endure to yield. His principles and his instinct of domination were acting in perfect unison, and his conscience was the handmaid of his fault. Austerities and mortifications, playing at beggar, sleeping in beds full of fleas, or performing prodigies of gratuitous dirtiness in hospitals, however fatal to self-respect, could avail little against influences working so powerfully and so insidiously to stimulate the most subtle of human vices. The history of the Roman church is full of Lavals. The Jesuits, adepts in human nature, had made a sagacious choice when they put forward this conscientious, zealous, dogged, and pugnacious priest to fight their battles. Nor were they ill pleased that, for the present, he was not Bishop of Canada, but only vicar apostolic; for, such being the case, they could have him recalled if, on trial, they did not like him, while an unacceptable bishop would be an evil past remedy. Canada was entering; a state of transition. Hitherto ecclesiastical influence had been all in all. The Jesuits, by far the most educated and able body of men in the colony, had controlled it, not alone in things spiritual, but virtually in things temporal also; and the governor may be said to have been little else than a chief of police, under the direction of the missionaries. The early governors were themselves deeply imbued with the missionary spirit. Champlain was earnest above all things for converting the Indians; Montmagny was half-monk, for he was a Knight of Malta; Aillebout was so insanely pious, that he lived with his wife like monk and nun. A change was at hand. From a mission and a trading station, Canada was soon to become, in the true sense, a colony; and civil government had begun to assert itself on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The epoch of the martyrs and apostles was passing away, and the man of the sword and the man of the gown—the soldier and the legist—were threatening to supplant the paternal sway of priests; or, as Laval might have said, the hosts of this world were beleaguering the sanctuary, and he was called of Heaven to defend it. His true antagonist, though three thousand miles away, was the great minister Colbert, as purely a statesman as the vicar apostolic was purely a priest. Laval, no doubt, could see behind the statesman’s back another adversary, the devil. Argenson was governor when the crozier and the sword began to clash, which is merely another way of saying that he was governor when Laval arrived. He seems to have been a man of education, moderation, and sense, and lie was also an earnest Catholic; but if Laval had his duties to God, so had Argenson his duties to the king, of whose authority he was the representative and guardian. If the first collisions seem trivial, they were no less the symptoms of a grave antagonism. Argenson could have purchased peace only by becoming an agent of the church. The vicar apostolic, or, as he was usually styled, the bishop, being, it may be remembered, titular Bishop of Petr?a in Arabia, presently fell into a quarrel with the governor touching the relative position of their seats in church,—a point which, by the way, was a subject of contention for many years, and under several successive governors. This time the case was referred to the ex-governor, Aillebout, and a temporary settlement took place. * A few weeks after, on the fête of Saint Francis Xavier, when the Jesuits were accustomed to ask the dignitaries of the colony to dine in their refectory after mass, a fresh difficulty arose,—Should the governor or the bishop have the higher seat at table? The question defied solution; so the fathers invited neither of them. ** Again, on Christmas, at the midnight mass, the deacon offered incense to the bishop, and then, in obedience to an order from him, sent a subordinate to offer it to the governor, instead of offering it himself. Laval further insisted that the priests of the choir should receive incense before the governor * Lalemant, in Journal des Jesuites, Sept., 1659. ** Ibid., Dec., 1659. received it. Argenson resisted, and a bitter quarrel ensued. * The late governor, Aillebout, had been churchwarden ex officio; ** and in this pious community the office was esteemed as an addition to his honors. Argenson had thus far held the same position; but Laval declared that he should hold it no longer. Argenson, to whom the bishop had not spoken on the subject, came soon after to a meeting of the wardens, and, being challenged, denied Laval’s right to dismiss him. A dispute ensued, in which the bishop, according to his Jesuit friends, used language not very respectful to the representative of royalty. *** On occasion of the “solemn catechism,” the bishop insisted that the children should salute him before saluting the governor. Argenson hearing of this, declined to come. A compromise was contrived. It was agreed that when the rival dignitaries entered, the children should be busied in some manual exercise which should prevent their saluting either. Nevertheless, two boys, “enticed and set on by their parents,” saluted the governor first, to the great indignation of Laval. They were whipped on the next day for breach of orders. **** Next there was a sharp quarrel about a sentence pronounced by Laval against a heretic, to which the governor, good Catholic as he was, took * Lalemant, in Journal des Jésuites, Dec., 1659; Lettre d’Argenson MM. de la Compagnie de St. Sulpice. ** Livre des Délibérations de la Fabrique de Québec. *** Journal des Jésuites, Nov., 1660 **** Ibid., Feb., 1661. exception. * Palm Sunday came, and there could be no procession and no distribution of branches, because the governor and the bishop could not agree on points of precedence. ** On the day of the Fête Dieu, however, there was a grand procession, which stopped from time to time at temporary altars, or reposoirs, placed at intervals along its course. One of these was in the fort, where the soldiers were drawn, up, waiting the arrival of the procession. Laval demanded that they should take off their hats. Argenson assented, and the soldiers stood uncovered. Laval now insisted that they should kneel. The governor replied that it was their duty as soldiers to stand; whereupon the bishop refused to stop at the altar, and ordered the procession to move on. *** The above incidents are set down in the private journal of the superior of the Jesuits, which was not meant for the public eye. The bishop, it will be seen, was, by the showing of his friends, in most cases the aggressor. The disputes in question, though of a nature to provoke a smile on irreverent lips, were by no means so puerile as they appear. It is difficult in a modern democratic society to conceive the substantial importance of the signs and symbols of dignity and authority, at a time and among a people where they were adjusted with the most scrupulous precision, and accepted by all classes as exponents of relative degrees in the social and political scale. Whether * Journal des Jésuites, Feb., 1661. ** Ibid., Avril, 1661. *** Ibid., Juin, 1661. the bishop or the governor should sit in the higher seat at table thus became a political question, for it defined to the popular understanding the position of church and state in their relations to government Hence it is not surprising to find a memorial, drawn up apparently by Argenson, and addressed to the council of state, asking for instructions when and how a governor—lieutenant-general for the king—ought to receive incense, holy water, and consecrated bread; whether the said bread should be offered him with sound of drum and fife; what should be the position of his seat at church; and what place he should hold in various religious ceremonies; whether in feasts, assemblies, ceremonies, and councils of a purely civil character, he or the bishop was to hold the first place; and, finally, if the bishop could excommunicate the inhabitants or others for acts of a civil and political character, when the said acts were pronounced lawful by the governor. The reply to the memorial denies to the bishop the power of excommunication in civil matters, assigns to him the second place in meetings and ceremonies of a civil character, and is very reticent as to the rest. * Argenson had a brother, a counsellor of state, and a fast friend of the Jesuits. Laval was in correspondence with him, and, apparently sure of sympathy, wrote to him touching his relations with the governor. “Your brother,” he begins, * Advis et Résolutions demandés sur la Nouvelle France. “received me on my arrival with extraordinary kindness;” but he proceeds to say that, perceiving with sorrow that he entertained a groundless distrust of those good servants of God, the Jesuit fathers, he, the bishop, thought it his duty to give him in private a candid warning which ought to have done good, but which, to his surprise, the governor had taken amiss, and had conceived, in consequence, a prejudice against his monitor. * Argenson, on his part, writes to the same brother, at about the same time. “The Bishop of Petr?a is so stiff in opinion, and so often transported by his zeal beyond the rights of his position, that he makes no difficulty in encroaching on the functions of others; and this with so much heat that he will listen to nobody. A few days ago he carried off a servant girl of one of the inhabitants here, and placed her by his own authority in the Ursuline convent, on the sole pretext that he wanted to have her instructed, thus depriving her master of her services, though he had been at great expense in bringing her from France. This inhabitant is M. Denis, who, not knowing who had carried her off, came to me with a petition to get her out of the convent. I kept the petition three days without answering it, to prevent the affair from being noised abroad. The Reverend Father Lalemant, with whom I communicated on the subject, and who greatly blamed the Bishop of Petr?a, did all in his power to have the girl given up quietly, but * Lettre de Laval à M. d’Argenson, frère du Gouverneur, 20 Oct, 1659. without the least success, so that I was forced to answer the petition, and permit M. Denis to take his servant wherever he should find her; and, if I had not used means to bring about an accommodation, and if M. Denis, on the refusal which was made him to give her up, had brought the matter into court, I should have been compelled to take measures which would have caused great scandal, and all from the self-will of the Bishop of Petr?a, who says that a bishop can do what he likes, and threatens nothing but excommunication.” * In another letter he speaks in the same strain of this redundancy of zeal on the part of the bishop, which often, he says, takes the shape of obstinacy and encroachment on the rights of others. “It is greatly to be wished,” he observes, “that the Bishop of Petr?a would give his confidence to the Reverend Father Lalemant instead of Father Ragueneau;” ** and he praises Lalemant as a person of excellent sense. “It would be well,” he adds, “if the rest of their community were of the same mind; for in that case they would not mix themselves up with various matters in the way they do, and would leave the government to those to whom God has given it in charge.”*** One of Laval’s modern admirers, the worthy Abbé Ferland, after confessing that his zeal may now and then have savored of excess, adds in his defence, that a vigorous hand was needed to * “—Qui dict quun Evesque peult ce qu’il veult et ne menace que dexcommunication.” Lettre d’Argenson a son Frère, 1659. ** Lettre d’Argenson à son Frère, 21 Oct., 1659. *** Ibid., 7 July, 1660. compel the infant colony to enter “the good path;” meaning, of course, the straitest path of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. We may hereafter see more of this stringent system of colonial education, its success, and the results that followed. CHAPTER VI. 1658-1663. LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. Reception of Argenson.—His Difficulties.—His Recall.—Dubois d’Avaugour.—The Brandt Quarrel.—Distress of Laval.—Portents.—The Earthquake. When Argenson arrived to assume the government, a curious greeting had awaited him. The Jesuits asked him to dine; vespers followed the repast; and then they conducted him into a hall, where the boys of their school—disguised, one as the Genius of New France, one as the Genius of the Forest, and others as Indians of various friendly tribes—made him speeches by turn, in prose and verse. First, Pierre du Quet, who played the Genius of New France, presented his Indian retinue to the governor, in a complimentary harangue. Then four other boys, personating French colonists, made him four flattering addresses, in French verse. Charles Denis, dressed as a Huron, followed, bewailing the ruin of his people, and appealing to Argenson for aid. Jean Fran?ois Bourdon, in the character of an Algonquin, next advanced on the platform, boasted his courage, and declared that he was ashamed to cry like the Huron. The Genius of the Forest now appeared, with a retinue of wild Indians from the interior, who, being unable to speak French, addressed the governor in their native tongues, which the Genius proceeded to interpret. Two other boys, in the character of prisoners just escaped from the Iroquois, then came forward, imploring aid in piteous accents; and, in conclusion, the whole troop of Indians, from far and near, laid their bows and arrows at the feet of Argenson, and hailed him as their chief. * Besides these mock Indians, a crowd of genuine savages had gathered at Quebec to greet the new “Ononthio.” On the next day—at his own cost, as he writes to a friend—he gave them a feast, consisting of “seven large kettles full of Indian corn, peas, prunes, sturgeons, eels, and fat, which they devoured, having first sung me a song, after their fashion.” ** These festivities over, he entered on the serious business of his government, and soon learned that his path was a thorny one. He could find, he says, but a hundred men to resist the twenty-four hundred warriors of the Iroquois; *** and he begs the proprietary company which he represented to send him a hundred more, who could serve as soldiers or laborers, according to the occasion. * La Reception de Monseigneur le Vicomte d’Argenson par toutes les nations du pais de Canada a son entrée au gouvernement de la Nouvelle France; a Quebecq au College de la Compagnie de Jésus, le 28 de Juillet de l’année 1658. The speeches, in French and Indian, are here given verbatim, with the names of all the boys who took part in the ceremony. ** Papiers d’Argenson. Kebec, 5 Sept., 1658. *** Mémoire sur le subject (sic) de la Guerre des Iroquois, 1659. The company turned a deal ear to his appeals. They had lost money in Canada, and were grievously out of humor with it. In their view, the first duty of a governor was to collect their debts, which, for more reasons than one, was no easy task. While they did nothing to aid the colony in its distress, they beset Argenson with demands for the thousand pounds of beaver-skins, which the inhabitants had agreed to send them every year, in return for the privilege of the fur trade, a privilege which the Iroquois war made for the present worthless. The perplexed governor vents his feelings in sarcasm. “They (the company) take no pains to learn the truth; and, when they hear of settlers carried off and burned by the Iroquois, they will think it a punishment for not settling old debts, and paying over the beaver-skins.” * “I wish,” he adds, “they would send somebody to look after their affairs here. I would gladly give him the same lodging and entertainment as my own.” Another matter gave him great annoyance. This was the virtual independence of Montreal; and here, if nowhere else, he and the bishop were of the same mind. On one occasion he made a visit to the place in question, where he expected to be received as governor-general; but the local governor, Maisonneuve, declined, or at least postponed, to take his orders and give him the keys of the fort. Argenson accordingly speaks of Montreal as “a place which makes so much noise, but which is * Papiers d’Argenson, 21 Oct., 1659. of such small account.” * He adds that, besides wanting to be independent, the Montrealists want to monopolize the fur trade, which would cause civil war; and that the king ought to interpose to correct their obstinacy. In another letter he complains of Aillebout, who had preceded him in the government, though himself a Montrealist. Argenson says that, on going out to fight the Iroquois, he left Aillebout at Quebec, to act as his lieutenant; that, instead of doing so, he had assumed to govern in his own right; that he had taken possession of his absent superior’s furniture, drawn his pay, and in other respects behaved as if he never expected to see him again. “When I returned,” continues the governor, “I made him director in the council, without pay, as there was none to give him. It was this, I think, that made him remove to Montreal, for which I do not care, provided the glory of our Master suffer no prejudice thereby.” ** These extracts may, perhaps, give an unjust impression of Argenson, who, from the general tenor of his letters, appears to have been a temperate and reasonable person. His patience and his nervous system seem, however, to have been taxed to the utmost. His pay could not support him. “The costs of living here are horrible,” he writes. “I have only two thousand crowns a year for all my expenses, and I have already been forced to * Papiers d’Argenson, 4 Ao?t, 1659. ** Ibid. Double de la lettre escripte par le Vaisseau du Gaigneur, parti la 6 Septembre (1658). run into debt to the company to an equal amount.” * Part of his scanty income was derived from a fishery of eels, on which sundry persons had encroached, to his great detriment. ** “I see no reason,” he adds, “for staying here any longer. When I came to this country, I hoped to enjoy a little repose, but I am doubly deprived of it; on one hand by enemies without, and incessant petty disputes within; and, on the other, by the difficulty I find in subsisting. The profits of the fur trade have been so reduced that all the inhabitants are in the greatest poverty. They are all insolvent, and cannot pay the merchants their advances.” His disgust at length reached a crisis. “I am resolved to stay here no longer, but to go home next year. My horror of dissension, and the manifest certainty of becoming involved in disputes with certain persons with whom I am unwilling to quarrel, oblige me to anticipate these troubles, and seek some way of living in peace. These excessive fatigues are far too much for my strength. I am writing to Monsieur the President, and to the gentlemen of the Company of New France, to choose some other man for this government.” *** And again, “if you take any interest in this country, see that the person chosen to command here has, besides the true piety necessary to a Christian in every condition of life, great firmness of character and strong bodily health. I assure you that without these * Ibid. Lettre a M de Morangi, 5 Sept., 1658. ** Délibérations de la Compagnie de la Nouvelle France. *** Papiers d'Arqenson. Lettre à son Frère, 1659. qualities he cannot succeed. Besides, it is absolutely necessary that he should be a man of property and of some rank, so that he will not be despised for humble birth, or suspected of coming here to make his fortune; for in that case he can do no good whatever.” * His constant friction with the head of the church distressed the pious governor, and made his recall doubly a relief. According to a contemporary writer, Laval was the means of delivering him from the burden of government, having written to the President Lamoignon to urge his removal. ** Be this as it may, it is certain that the bishop was not sorry to be rid of him. The Baron Dubois d’Avaugour arrived to take his place. He was an old soldier of forty years service, *** blunt, imperative, and sometimes obstinate to perverseness; but full of energy, and of a probity which even his enemies confessed. “He served a long time in Germany while you were there,” writes the minister Colbert to the Marquis de Tracy, “and you must have known his talents, as well as his bizarre and somewhat impracticable temper.” On landing, he would have no reception, being, as Father Lalemant observes, “an enemy of all ceremony.” He went, however, to see the Jesuits, and “took a morsel of food in our refectory.” **** Laval was prepared to receive * Ibid. Lettre (à son Frère?), 4 Nov., 1660. The originals of Argenson’s letters were destroyed in the burning of the library of the Louvre by the Commune. ** Lachenaye, Mémoire sur le Canada. *** Avaugour, Mémoire, 4 Ao?t, 1663. **** Lalemant, Journal des Jésuites, Sept., 1661. him with all solemnity at the church; but the governor would not go. He soon set out on a tour of observation as far as Montreal, whence he returned delighted with the country, and immediately wrote to Colbert in high praise of it, observing that the St. Lawrence was the most beautiful river he had ever seen. * 0229 Dubois d'Avaugour From an engraving by P. Aubry, in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It was clear from the first that, while he had a prepossession against the bishop, he wished to be on good terms with the Jesuits. He began by placing some of them on the council; but they and Laval were too closely united; and if Avaugour thought to separate them, he signally failed. A few months only had elapsed when we find it noted in Father Lalemant’s private journal that the governor had dissolved the council and appointed a new one, and that other “changes and troubles” had befallen The inevitable quarrel had broken out; it was a complex one, but the chief occasion of dispute was fortunate for the ecclesiastics, since it placed them, to a certain degree, morally in the right. The question at issue was not new. It had agitated the colony for years, and had been the spring of some of Argenson’s many troubles. Nor did it cease with Avaugour, for we shall trace its course hereafter, tumultuous as a tornado. It was simply the temperance question; not as regards the colonists, though here, too, there was great room for reform, but as regards the Indians. Their inordinate passion for brandy had long been the source of excessive disorders. They drank * Lettre d’Avaugour au Ministre, 1661. expressly to get drunk, and when drunk they were like wild beasts. Crime and violence of all sorts ensued; the priests saw their teachings despised and their flocks ruined. On the other hand, the sale of brandy was a chief source of profit, direct or indirect, to all those interested in the fur trade, including the principal persons of the colony. In Argenson’s time, Laval launched an excommunication against those engaged in the abhorred traffic; for nothing less than total prohibition would content the clerical party, and besides the spiritual penalty, they demanded the punishment of death against the contumacious offender. Death, in fact, was decreed. Such was the posture of affairs when Avaugour arrived; and, willing as he was to conciliate the Jesuits, he permitted the decree to take effect, although, it seems, with great repugnance. A few weeks after his arrival, two men were shot and one whipped, for selling brandy to Indians. * An extreme though partially suppressed excitement shook the entire settlement, for most of the colonists were, in one degree or another, implicated in the offence thus punished. An explosion soon followed; and the occasion of it was the humanity or good-nature of the Jesuit Lalemant. A woman had been condemned to imprisonment for the same cause, and Lalemant, moved by compassion, came to the governor to intercede for her. Avaugour could no longer contain himself, and answered the reverend petitioner with characteristic * Journal des Jésuites, Oct., 1661. bluntness. “You and your brethren were the first to cry out against the trade, and now you want to save the traders from punishment. I will no longer be the sport of your contradictions. Since it is not a crime for this woman, it shall not be a crime for anybody.” * And in this posture he stood fast, with an inflexible stubbornness. Henceforth there was full license to liquor dealers. A violent reaction ensued against the past restriction, and brandy flowed freely among French and Indians alike. The ungodly drank to spite the priests and revenge themselves for the “constraint of consciences,” of which they loudly complained. The utmost confusion followed, and the principles on which the pious colony was built seemed upheaved from the foundation. Laval was distracted with grief and anger. He outpoured himself from the pulpit in threats of divine wrath, and launched fresh excommunications against the offenders; but such was the popular fury, that he was forced to yield and revoke them. ** Disorder grew from bad to worse. “Men gave no heed to bishop, preacher, or confessor,” writes Father Charlevoix. “The French have despised the remonstrances of our prelate, because they are supported by the civil power,’ says the superior of the Ursulines. “He is almost dead with grief, and pines away before our eyes.” Laval could bear it no longer, but sailed for * La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. V. ** Journal des Jésuites, Feb., 1662. The sentence of excommunication is printed in the Appendix to the Esquisse de la Vie de Laval. It bears date February 24. It was on this very day that he was forced to revoke it. France, to lay his complaints before the court, and urge the removal of Avaugour. He had, besides, two other important objects, as will appear hereafter. His absence brought no improvement. Summer and autumn passed, and the commotion did not abate. Winter was drawing to a close, when, at length, outraged Heaven interposed an awful warning to the guilty colony. Scarcely had the bishop left his flock when the skies grew portentous with signs of the chastisement to come. “We beheld,” gravely writes Father Lalemant, “blazing serpents which flew through the air, borne on wings of fire. We beheld above Quebec a great globe of flame, which lighted up the night, and threw out sparks on all sides. This same meteor appeared above Montreal, where it seemed to issue from the bosom of the moon, with a noise as loud as cannon or thunder, and after sailing three leagues through the air it disappeared behind the mountain whereof this island bears the name.” * Still greater marvels followed. First, a Christian Algonquin squaw, described as “innocent, simple, and sincere,” being seated erect in bed, wide awake, by the side of her husband, in the night between the fourth and fifth of February, distinctly heard a voice saying, “Strange things will happen to-day; the earth will quake!” In great alarm she whispered the prodigy to her husband, who told her that she lied. This silenced her for a time; but when, the next morning, she went into the forest * Lalemant. Relation, 1663, 2. with her hatchet to cut a faggot of wood, the same dread voice resounded through the solitude, and sent her back in terror to her hut. * These things were as nothing compared with the marvel that befell a nun of the hospital, Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin, who died five years later, in the odor of sanctity. On the night of the fourth of February, 1663, she beheld in the spirit four furious demons at the four corners of Quebec, shaking it with a violence which plainly showed their purpose of reducing it to ruins; “and this they would have done,” says the story, “if a personage of admirable beauty and ravishing majesty [Christ], whom she saw in the midst of them, and who, from time to time, gave rein to their fury, had not restrained them when they were on the point of accomplishing their wicked design.” She also heard the conversation of these demons, to the effect that people were now well frightened, and many would be converted; but this would not last long, and they, the demons, would have them in time, “Let us keep on shaking,” they cried, encouraging each other, “and do our best to upset every thing.” ** Now, to pass from visions to facts: “At half-past five o’clock on the morning of the fifth,” writes Father Lalemant, “a great roaring sound was heard at the same time through the whole extent * Lalemant, Relation, 1663, 6. ** Ragueneau, Vie de Catherine de St. Augustin, Liv. IV. chap. i. The same story is told by Juchereau, Lalemant, and Marie de l'Incarnation, to whom Charlevoix erroneously ascribes the vision, as does also the Abbe La Tour. of Canada. This sound, which produced an effect as if the houses were on fire, brought everybody out of doors; but instead of seeing smoke and flame, they were amazed to behold the walls shaking, and all the stones moving as if they would drop from their places. The houses seemed to bend first to one side and then to the other. Bells sounded of themselves; beams, joists, and planks cracked; the ground heaved, making the pickets of the palisades dance in a way that would have seemed incredible had we not seen it in divers places. “Everybody was in the streets; animals ran wildly about; children cried; men and women, seized with fright, knew not where to take refuge, expecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of the houses, or swallowed up in some abyss opening under their feet. Some, on their knees in the snow, cried for mercy, and others passed the night in prayer; for the earthquake continued without ceasing, with a motion much like that of a ship at sea, insomuch that sundry persons felt the same qualms of stomach which they would feel on the water. In the forests the commotion was far greater. The trees struck one against the other as if there were a battle between them; and you would have said that not only their branches, but even their trunks started out of their places and leaped on each other with such noise and confusion that the Indians said that the whole forest was drunk.” Mary of the Incarnation gives a similar account, as does also Frances Juchereau de Saint-Ignace; and these contemporary records are sustained to some extent by the evidence of geology. * A remarkable effect was produced on the St. Lawrence, which was so charged with mud and clay that for many weeks the water was unfit to drink. Considerable hills and large tracts of forest slid from their places, some into the river, and some into adjacent valleys. A number of men in a boat near Tadoussac stared aghast at a large hill covered with trees, which sank into the water before their eyes; streams were turned from their courses; water-falls were levelled; springs were dried up in some places, while in others new springs appeared. Nevertheless, the accounts that have come down to us seem a little exaggerated, and sometimes ludicrously so; as when, for example, Mother Mary of the Incarnation tells us of a man who ran all night to escape from a fissure in the earth which opened behind him and chased him as he fled. It is perhaps needless to say that “spectres and phantoms of fire, bearing torches in their hands,” took part in the convulsion. “The fiery figure of a man vomiting flames” also appeared in the air, with many other apparitions too numerous to mention. It is recorded that three young men were on their way through the forest to sell brandy to the Indians, when one of them, a little in advance of the rest, was met by a hideous spectre which nearly * Professor Sterry Hunt, whose intimate knowledge of Canadian geology is well known, tells me that the shores of the St. Lawrence are to a great extent formed of beds of gravel and clay resting on inclined strata of rock, so that earth-slides would be the necessary result of any convulsion like that of 1663. He adds that the evidence that such slides have taken place on a great scale is very distinct at various points along the river, especially at Les Eboulemcns. Professor Sterry Hunt, whose intimate knowledge of Canadian geology is well known, tells me that the shores of the St. Lawrence are to a great extent formed of beds of gravel and clay resting on inclined strata of rock, so that earth-slides would be the necessary result of any convulsion like that of 1663. He adds that the evidence that such slides have taken place on a great scale is very distinct at various points along the river, especially at Les Eboulemcns on the north shore. killed him with fright. He had scarcely strength enough to rejoin his companions, who, seeing his terror, began to laugh at him. One of them, however, presently came to his senses, and said: “This is no laughing matter; we are going to sell liquor to the Indians against the prohibitions of the church, and perhaps God means to punish our disobedience.” On this they all turned back. That night they had scarcely lain down to sleep when the earthquake roused them, and they ran out of their hut just in time to escape being swallowed up along with it. * With every allowance, it is clear that the convulsion must have been a severe one, and it is remarkable that in all Canada not a life was lost. The writers of the day see in this a proof that God meant to reclaim the guilty and not destroy them. At Quebec there was for the time an intense revival of religion. The end of the world was thought to be at hand, and everybody made ready for the last judgment. Repentant throngs beset confessionals and altars; enemies were reconciled; fasts, prayers, and penances filled the whole season of Lent. Yet, as we shall see, the devil could still find wherewith to console himself. It was midsummer before the shocks wholly ceased and the earth resumed her wonted calm. An extreme drought was followed by floods of rain, and then Nature began her sure work of * Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre du 20 Aout, 1663. It appears from Morton, Josselyn, and other writers, that the earthquake extended to New England and New Netherlands, producing similar effects on the imagination of the people. reparation. It was about this time that the thorn which had plagued the church was at length plucked out. Avaugour was summoned home. He took his recall with magnanimity, and on his way wrote at Gaspé a memorial to Colbert, in which he commends New France to the attention of the king. “The St. Lawrence,” he says, “is the entrance to what may be made the greatest state in the world;” and, in his purely military way, he recounts the means of realizing this grand possibility. Three thousand soldiers should be sent to the colony, to be discharged and turned into settlers after three years of service. During these three years they may make Quebec an impregnable fortress, subdue the Iroquois, build a strong fort on the river where the Dutch have a miserable wooden redoubt, called Fort Orange [Albany], and finally open a way by that river to the sea. Thus the heretics will be driven out, and the king will be master of America, at a total cost of about four hundred thousand francs yearly for ten years. He closes his memorial by a short allusion to the charges against him, and to his forty years of faithful service; and concludes, speaking of the authors of his recall, Laval and the Jesuits: “By reason of the respect I owe their cloth, I will rest content, monseigneur, with assuring you that I have not only served the king with fidelity, but also, by the grace of God, with very good success, considering the means at my disposal.” * He had, in truth, borne himself as a brave and experienced * Avaugour, Mémoire, Gaspé 4 Ao?t 1663. soldier; and he soon after died a soldier’s death, while defending the fortress of Zrin, in Croatia, against the Turks. * * Lettre de Colbert au Marquis de Tracy, 1664. Mémoire du Boy, pout servir d’instruction au Sieur Talon CHAPTER VII. 1661-1664. LAVAL AND DUMESNIL Péronne Dumesnil.—The Old Council.—Alleged Murder.—The New Council.—Bourdon And Villeray.—Strong Measures.—Escape Of Duhesnil.—Views Of Colbert. Though the proposals of Avaugour’s memorial were not adopted, it seems to have produced a strong impression at court. For this impression the minds of the king and his minister had already been prepared. Two years before, the inhabitants of Canada had sent one of their number, Pierre Boucher, to represent their many grievances and ask for aid. * Boucher had had an audience of the young king, who listened with interest to his statements; and when in the following year he returned to Quebec, he was accompanied by an officer named Dumont, who had under his command a hundred soldiers for the colony, and was commissioned to report its condition and resources. The movement * To promote the objects of his mission, Boucher wrote a little book, Histoire Véritable et Naturelle des M?urs et Productions du Pays de la Nouvelle France. He dedicates it to Colbert. ** A long journal of Dumont is printed anonymously in the Relation of 1663. seemed to betoken that the government was wakening at last from its long inaction. Meanwhile the Company of New France, feudal lord of Canada, had also shown signs of returning life. Its whole history had been one of mishap, followed by discouragement and apathy; and it is difficult to say whether its ownership of Canada had been more hurtful to itself or to the colony. At the eleventh hour it sent out an agent invested with powers of controller-general, intendant, and supreme judge, to inquire into the state of its affairs. This agent, Péronne Dumesnil, arrived early in the autumn of 1660, and set himself with great vigor to his work. He was an advocate of the Parliament of Paris, an active, aggressive, and tenacious person, of a temper well fitted to rip up an old abuse or probe a delinquency to the bottom. His proceedings quickly raised a storm at Quebec. It may be remembered that, many years before, the company had ceded its monopoly of the fur trade to the inhabitants of the colony, in consideration of that annual payment in beaver-skins which had been so tardily and so rarely made. The direction of the trade had at that time been placed in the hands of a council composed of the governor, the superior of the Jesuits, and several other members. Various changes had since taken place, and the trade was now controlled by another council, established without the consent of the company, * and composed of the principal persons in the colony. The members of this council, with certain * Registres du Conseil du Roy; Réponse a la requeste présentée au Roy. prominent merchants in league with them, engrossed all the trade, so that the inhabitants at large profited nothing by the right which the company had ceded; * and as the councillors controlled not only the trade but all the financial affairs of Canada, while the remoteness of their scene of operations made it difficult to supervise them, they were able, with little risk, to pursue their own profit, to the detriment both of the company and the colony. They and their allies formed a petty trading oligarchy, as pernicious to the prosperity of Canada as the Iroquois war itself. The company, always anxious for its beaver-skins, made several attempts to control the proceedings of the councillors and call them to account, but with little success, till the vigorous Dumesnil undertook the task, when, to their wrath and consternation, they and their friends found themselves attacked by wholesale accusations of fraud and embezzlement. That these charges were exaggerated there can be little doubt; that they were unfounded is incredible, in view of the effect they produced. The councillors refused to acknowledge Dumesnil’s powers as controller, intendant, and judge, and declared his proceedings null. He retorted by charging them with usurpation. The excitement increased, and Dumesnil’s life was threatened. He had two sons in the colony. One of them, Péronne de Mazé, was secretary to Avaugour, then on his way up the St. Lawrence to assume the * Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat, 7 Mars, 1657. Also Papiers d’Argenson, and Extrait des Registres du Conseil d’Etat, 15 Mars, 1656. government. The other, Péronne des Touches, was with his father at Quebec. Towards the end of August this young man was attacked in the street in broad daylight, and received a kick which proved fatal. He was carried to his father’s house, where he died on the twenty-ninth. Dumesnil charges four persons, all of whom were among those into whose affairs he had been prying, with having taken part in the outrage; but it is very uncertain who was the immediate cause of Des Touches’s death. Dumesnil, himself the supreme judicial officer of the colony, made complaint to the judge in ordinary of the company; but he says that justice was refused, the complaint suppressed by authority, his allegations torn in pieces, and the whole affair hushed. * At the time of the murder, Dumesnil was confined to his house by illness. An attempt was made to rouse the mob against him, by reports that he had come to the colony for the purpose of laying taxes; but he sent for some of the excited inhabitants, and succeeded in convincing them that he was their champion rather than their enemy. Some Indians in the neighborhood were also instigated to kill him, and he was forced to conciliate them by presents. * Dumesnil, Mémoire. Under date August 31 the Journal des Jésuite makes this brief and guarded mention of the affair: “Le fils de Mons. du Mesnil... fut enterré le mesme jour, tué d’un coup de pié par N.” Who is meant by N. it is difficult to say. The register of the parish church records the burial as follows:— L’an 1661. Le 30 Aoust a esté enterré au Cemetiere de Quebec Michel peronne dit Sr. des Touches fils de Mr. du Mesnil décédé le Jour precedent a sa Maison. He soon renewed his attacks, and in his quality of intendant called on the councillors and their allies to render their accounts, and settle the long arrears of debt due to the company. They set his demands at naught. The war continued month after month. It is more than likely that when in the spring of 1662 Avaugour dissolved and reconstructed the council, his action had reference to these disputes; and it is clear that when in the following August Laval sailed for France, one of his objects was to restore the tranquillity which Dumesnil’s proceedings had disturbed. There was great need; for, what with these proceedings and the quarrel about brandy, Quebec was a little hell of discord, the earthquake not having as yet frightened it into propriety. The bishop’s success at court was triumphant. Not only did he procure the removal of Avaugour, but he was invited to choose a new governor to replace him. * This was not all; for he succeeded in effecting a complete change in the government of the colony. The Company of New France was called upon to resign its claims; ** and, by a royal edict of April, 1663, all power, legislative, judicial, and executive, was vested in a council composed of the governor whom Laval had chosen, of Laval himself, and of five councillors, an attorney-general, and a secretary, to be chosen by Laval and the governor jointly. *** Bearing with them blank * La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. V. ** See the deliberations and acts to this end in Edits et Ordonnances concernant le Canada, 1. 30-32. *** Edit de Création du Conseil Supérieur de Quebec. commissions to be filled with the names of the new functionaries, Laval and his governor sailed for Quebec, where they landed on the fifteenth of September. With them came one Gaudais-Dupont, a royal commissioner instructed to inquire into the state of the colony. No sooner had they arrived than Laval and Mézy, the new governor, proceeded to construct the new council. Mézy knew nobody in the colony, and was, at this time, completely under Laval’s influence. The nominations, therefore, were virtually made by the bishop alone, in whose hands, and not in those of the governor, the blank commissions had been placed. * Thus for the moment he had complete control of the government; that is to say, the church was mistress of the civil power. Laval formed his council as follows: Jean Bourdon for attorney-general; Rouer de Villeray, Juchereau de la Berté, Ruette d’Auteuil, Le Gardeur de Tilly, and Matthieu Damours for councillors; and Peuvret de Mesnu for secretary. The royal commissioner, Gaudais, also took a prominent place at the board. ** This functionary was on the point of marrying his niece to a son of Robert Giffard, * Commission actroyée au Sieur Gaudais. Mémoire pour servir d’instruction au Sieur Gaudais. A sequel to these instructions, marked secret, shows that, notwithstanding Laval’s extraordinary success in attaining his objects, he and the Jesuits were somewhat distrusted. Gaudais is directed to make, with great discretion and caution, careful inquiry into the bishop’s conduct, and with equal secrecy to ascertain why the Jesuits had asked for Avaugour’s recall. ** As substitute for the intendant, an officer who had been appointed but who had not arrived. who had a strong interest in suppressing Dumesnil’s accusations. * Dumesnil had laid his statements before the commissioner, who quickly rejected them, and took part with the accused. Of those appointed to the new council, their enemy Dumesnil says that they were "incapable persons,” and their associate Gaudais, in defending them against worse charges, declares that they were “unlettered, of little experience, and nearly all unable to deal with affairs of importance.” This was, perhaps, unavoidable; for, except among the ecclesiastics, education was then scarcely known in Canada. But if Laval may be excused for putting incompetent men in office, nothing can excuse him for making men charged with gross public offences the prosecutors and judges in their own cause; and his course in doing so gives color to the assertion of Dumesnil, that he made up the council expressly to shield the accused and smother the accusation. ** The two persons under the heaviest charges received the two most important appointments: Bourdon, attorney-general, and Villeray, keeper of * Dumesnil here makes one of the few mistakes I have been able to detect in his long memorials. He says that the name of the niece of Gaudais was Marie Nau. It was, in fact, Michelle-Therese Nau, who married Joseph, son of Robert Giffard, on the 22d of October, 1663. Dumesnil had forgotten the bride’s first name. The elder Giffard was surety for Repentigny, whom Dumesnil charged with liabilities to the company, amounting to 644,700 livres. Giffard was also father-in-law of Juchereau de la Ferte, one of the accused. ** Dumesnil goes further than this, for he plainly intimates that the removing from power of the company, to whom the accused were responsible, and the placing in power of a council formed of the accused themselves, was a device contrived from the first by Laval and the Jesuits, to get their friends out of trouble. the seals. La Ferté was also one of the accused. * Of Villeray, the governor Argenson had written in 1059: “Some of his qualities are good enough, but confidence cannot be placed in him, on account of his instability.” ** In the same year, he had been ordered to France, “to purge himself of sundry crimes wherewith he stands charged.” *** He was not yet free of suspicion, having returned to Canada under an order to make up and render his accounts, which he had not yet done. Dumesnil says that he first came to the colony in 1651, as valet of the governor Lauson, who had taken him from the jail at Rochelle, where he was imprisoned for a debt of seventy-one francs, “as appears by the record of the jail of date July eleventh in that year.” From this modest beginning he became in time the richest man in Canada. **** He was strong in orthodoxy, and an ardent supporter of the bishop and the Jesuits. He is alternately praised and blamed, according to the partisan leanings of the writer. * Bourdon is charged with not having accounted for an immense quantity of beaver-skins which had passed through his hands during twelve years or more, and which are valued at more than 300,000 livres. Other charges are made against him in connection with large sums borrowed in Lauson’s time on account of the colony. In a memorial addressed to the king in council, Dumesnil says that, in 1662, Bourdon, according to his own accounts, had in his hands 37,516 livres belonging to the company, which he still retained. Villeray’s liabilities arose out of the unsettled accounts of his father-in-law, Charles Sevestre, and are set down at more than 600,000 livres. La Ferté’s are of a smaller amount. Others of the council were indirectly involved in the charges. ** Lettre d’Argenson, 20 Nov., 1659. *** Edit du Roy, 13 Mai, 1659. **** Lettre de Colbert a Frontenac, 17 Mai, 1674. Bourdon, though of humble origin, was, perhaps, the most intelligent man in the council. He was chiefly known as an engineer, but he had also been a baker, a painter, a syndic of the inhabitants, chief gunner at the fort, and collector of customs for the company. Whether guilty of embezzlement or not, he was a zealous devotee, and would probably have died for his creed. Like Villeray, he was one of Laval’s stanchest supporters, while the rest of the council were also sound in doctrine and sure in allegiance. In virtue of their new dignity, the accused now claimed exemption from accountability; but this was not all. The abandonment of Canada by the company, in leaving Dumesnil without support, and depriving him of official character, had made his charges far less dangerous. Nevertheless, it was thought best to suppress them altogether, and the first act of the new government was to this end. On the twentieth of September, the second day after the establishment of the council, Bourdon, in his character of attorney-general, rose and demanded that the papers of Jean Péronne Dumesnil should be seized and sequestered. The council consented, and, to Complete the scandal, Villeray was commissioned to make the seizure in the presence of Bourdon. To color the proceeding, it was alleged that Dumesnil had obtained certain papers unlawfully from the greffe or record office. “As he was thought,” says Gaudais, “to be a violent man." Bourdon and Villeray took with them ten soldiers, well armed, together with a locksmith and the secretary of the council. Thus prepared for every contingency, they set out on their errand, and appeared suddenly at Dumesnil's house between seven and eight o’clock in the evening. “The aforesaid Sieur Dumesnil,” further says Gaudais, “did not refute the opinion entertained of his violence; for he made a great noise, shouted robbers! and tried to rouse the neighborhood, outrageously abusing the aforesaid Sieur de Villeray and the attorney-general, in great contempt of the authority of the council, which he even refused to recognize.” They tried to silence him by threats, but without effect; upon which they seized him and held him fast in a chair; “me,” writes the wrathful Dumesnil, “who had lately been their judge.” The soldiers stood over him and stopped his mouth while the others broke open and ransacked his cabinet, drawers, and chest, from which they took all his papers, refusing to give him an inventory, or to permit any witness to enter the house. Some of these papers were private; among the rest were, he says, the charges and specifications, nearly finished, for the trial of Bourdon and Villeray, together with the proofs of their “peculations, extortions, and malversations.” The papers were enclosed under seal, and deposited in a neighboring house, whence they were afterwards removed to the council-chamber, and Dumesnil never saw them again. It may well be believed that this, the inaugural act of the new council, was not allowed to appear on its records. * On the twenty-first, Villeray made a formal report of the seizure to his colleagues; upon which, “by reason of the insults, violences, and irreverences therein set forth against the aforesaid Sieur de Villeray, commissioner, as also against the authority of the council,” it was ordered that the offending Dumesnil should be put under arrest; but Gaudais, as he declares, prevented the order from being carried into effect. Dumesnil, who says that during the scene at his house he had expected to be murdered like his son, now, though unsupported and alone, returned to the attack, demanded his papers, and was so loud in threats of complaint to the king that the council were seriously alarmed. They again decreed his arrest and imprisonment; but resolved to keep the decree secret till the morning of the day when the last of the returning ships was to sail for France. In this ship Dumesnil had taken his passage, and they proposed to arrest him unexpectedly on the point of embarkation, that he might have no time to prepare and despatch a memorial to the court. Thus a full year must elapse before his complaints could reach the minister, and seven or eight months more before a reply could be returned to Canada. During this long delay the affair would have time to cool. Dumesnil received a secret warning of * The above is drawn from the two memorials of Gaudais and of Dimesnil. They do not contradict each other as, to the essential facts. this plan, and accordingly went on board another vessel, which was to sail immediately. The council caused the six cannon of the battery in the Lower Town to be pointed at her, and threatened to sink her if she left the harbor; but she disregarded them, and proceeded on her way. On reaching France, Dumesnil contrived to draw the attention of the minister Colbert to his accusations, and to the treatment they had brought upon him. On this Colbert demanded of Gaudais, who had also returned in one of the autumn ships, why he had not reported these matters to him. Gaudais made a lame attempt to explain his silence, gave his statement of the seizure of the papers, answered in vague terms some of Dumesnil’s charges against the Canadian financiers, and said that he had nothing to do with the rest. In the following spring Colbert wrote as follows to his relative Terron, intendant of marine:— “I do not know what report M. Gaudais has made to you, but family interests and the connections which he has at Quebec should cause him to be a little distrusted. On his arrival in that country, having constituted himself chief of the council, he despoiled an agent of the Company of Canada of all his papers, in a manner very violent and extraordinary, and this proceeding leaves no doubt whatever that these papers contained matters the knowledge of which it was wished absolutely to suppress. I think it will be very proper that you should be informed of the statements made by this agent, in order that, through him, an exact knowledge may be acquired of every thing that has taken place in the management of affairs.” * Whether Terron pursued the inquiry does not appear. Meanwhile new quarrels had arisen at Quebec, and the questions of the past were obscured in the dust of fresh commotions. Nothing is more noticeable in the whole history of Canada, after it came under the direct control of the Crown, than the helpless manner in which this absolute government was forced to overlook and ignore the disobedience and rascality of its functionaries in this distant transatlantic dependency. As regards Dumesnil’s charges, the truth seems to be, that the financial managers of the colony, being ignorant and unpractised, had kept imperfect and confused accounts, which they themselves could not always unravel; and that some, if not all of them, had made illicit profits under cover of this confusion. That their stealings approached the enormous sum at which Dinesnil places them is not to be believed. But, even on the grossly improbable assumption of their entire innocence, there can be no apology for the means, subversive of all justice, by which Laval enabled his partisans and supporters to extricate themselves from embarrassment.—— * Lettre de Colbert a Terron, Rochelle, 8 Fev., 1664. “Il a spolié un agent de la Compagnie de Canada de tous ses papiers d’une manière fort violente et extraordinaire, et ce procédé ne laisse point à douter que dans ces papiers il n’y e?t des choses dont on a voulu absolument supprimer la connaissance.” Colbert seems to have received an exaggerated impression of the part borne by Gaudais in the seizure of the papers. NOTE.—Dumesnil’s principal memorial, preserved in the archives of the Marine and Colonies, is entitled Mémoire concernant les Affaires du Canada, qui montre et fait voir que sous prétexte de la Gloire de Dieu, d’Instruction des Sauvages, de servir le Roy et de faire la nouvelle Colonie, il a été pris et diverti trois millions de livres ou environ. It forms in the copy before me thirty-eight pages of manuscript, and bears no address; but seems meant for Colbert, or the council of state. There is a second memorial, which is little else than an abridgment of the first. A third, bearing the address Au Roy et a nos Seigneurs du Conseil (d’Etat), and signed Peronne Dumesnil, is a petition for the payment of 10,132 livres due to him by the company for his services in Canada, “ou il a perdu son fils assassiné par les comptables du dit pays, qui n’ont voulu rendre compte au dit suppliant, Intendant, et ont pillé sa maison, ses meubles et papiers le 20 du mois de Septembre dernier, dont il y a acte.” Gaudais, in compliance with the demands of Colbert, gives his statement in a long memorial, Le Sieur Gaudais Dupont à Monseigneur de Colbert, 1664. Dumesnil, in his principal memorial, gives a list of the alleged defaulters, with the special charges against each, and the amounts for which he reckons them liable. The accusations cover a period of ten or twelve years, and sometimes more. Some of them are curiously suggestive of more recent “rings.” Thus Jean Gloria makes a charge of thirty-one hundred livres (francs) for fireworks to celebrate the king’s marriage, when the actual cost is said to have been about forty livres. Others are alleged to have embezzled the funds of the company, under cover of pretended payments to imaginary creditors; and Argenson himself is said to have eked out his miserable salary by drawing on the company for the pay of soldiers who did not exist. The records of the Council preserve a guarded silence about this affair. I find, however, under date 20 Sept., 1663, “Pouvoir a M. de Villeray de faire recherche dans la maison d’un nommé du Mesnil des papiers appartenants au Conseil concernant Sa Majesté;” and under date 18 March, 1664, “Ordre pour l’ouverture du coffre contenant les papiers de Dumesnil,” and also an “Ordre pour mettre l’Inventaire des biens du Sr. Dumesnil entre les mains du Sr. Fillion.” CHAPTER VIII. 1657-1665. LAVAL AND MéZY. The Bishop’s Choice.—A Military Zealot.—Hopeful Beginnings.—Signs of Storm.—The Quarrel.—Distress of Mézy.—He Refuses to Yield.—His Defeat and Death. We have seen that Laval, when at court, had been invited to choose a governor to his liking. He soon made his selection. There was a pious officer, Saffray de Mézy, major of the town and citadel of Caen, whom he had well known during his long stay with Bernières at the Hermitage. Mézy was the principal member of the company of devotees formed at Caen under the influence of Bernières and his disciples. In his youth he had been headstrong and dissolute. Worse still, he had been, it is said, a Huguenot; but both in life and doctrine his conversion had been complete, and the fervid mysticism of Bernières acting on his vehement nature had transformed him into a red-hot zealot. Towards the hermits and their chief he showed a docility in strange contrast with his past history, and followed their inspirations with an ardor which sometimes overleaped its mark. Thus a Jacobin monk, a doctor of divinity, once came to preach at the church of St. Paul at Caen; on which, according to their custom, the brotherhood of the Hermitage sent two persons to make report concerning his orthodoxy. Mézy and another military zealot, “who,” says the narrator, “hardly know how to read, and assuredly do not know their catechism,” were deputed to hear his first sermon; wherein this Jacobin, having spoken of the necessity of the grace of Jesus Christ in order to the doing of good deeds, these two wiseacres thought that he was preaching Jansenism; and thereupon, after the sermon, the Sieur de Mézy went to the proctor of the ecclesiastical court and denounced him. * His zeal, though but moderately tempered with knowledge, sometimes proved more useful than on this occasion. The Jacobin convent at Caen was divided against itself. Some of the monks had embraced the doctrines taught by Bernières, while the rest held dogmas which he declared to be contrary to those of the Jesuits, and therefore heterodox. A prior was to be elected, and, with the help of Bernières, his partisans gained the victory, choosing one Father Louis, through whom the Hermitage gained a complete control in the convent. But the adverse party presently resisted, and complained to the provincial of their order, who came to Caen to close the dispute by deposing Father Louis. Hearing of his approach, Bernières asked * Nicole, Mémoire pour faire connoistre l’espnt et la conduite de la Compagnie appellée l'Hermitage. aid from his military disciple, and De Mézy sent him a squad of soldiers, who guarded the convent doors and barred out the provincial. * Among the merits of Mézy, his humility and charity were especially admired; and the people of Caen had more than once seen the town major staggering across the street with a beggar mounted on his back, whom he was bearing dry-shod through the mud in the exercise of those virtues. ** In this he imitated his master Bernières, of whom similar acts are recorded. *** However dramatic in manifestation, his devotion was not only sincere but intense. Laval imagined that he knew him well. Above all others, Mézy was the man of his choice; and so eagerly did he plead for him, that the king himself paid certain debts which the pious major had contracted, and thus left him free to sail for Canada. His deportment on the voyage was edifying, and the first days of his accession were passed in harmony. He permitted Laval to form the new council, and supplied the soldiers for the seizure of Dumesnil’s papers. A question arose concerning Montreal, a subject on which the governors and the bishop rarely differed in opinion. The present instance was no exception to the rule. Mézy removed Maisonneuve, the local governor, and immediately replaced him; the effect being, that whereas * ibid. ** Juchereau, Histoire de l'H?tel-Dieu, 149. *** See the laudatory notice of Bernières de Louvigny in the Nouvelle Biographie Universelle. he had before derived his authority from the seigniors of the island, he now derived it from the governor-general. It was a movement in the interest, of centralized power, and as such was cordially approved by Laval The first indication to the bishop and the Jesuits that the new governor was not likely to prove in their hands as clay in the hands of the potter, is said to have been given on occasion of an interview with an embassy of Iroquois chiefs, to whom Mézy, aware of their duplicity, spoke with a decision and haughtiness that awed the savages and astonished the ecclesiastics. He seems to have been one of those natures that run with an engrossing vehemence along any channel into which they may have been turned. At the Hermitage he was all devotee; but climate and conditions had changed, and he or his symptoms changed with them. He found himself raised suddenly to a post of command, or one which was meant to be such. The town major of Caen was set to rule over a region far larger than France. The royal authority was trusted to his keeping, and his honor and duty forbade him to break the trust. But when he found that those who had procured for him his new dignities had done so that he might be an instrument of their will, his ancient pride started again into life, and his headstrong temper broke out like a long-smothered fire. Laval stood aghast at the transformation. His lamb had turned wolf. What especially stirred the governor’s dudgeon was the conduct of Bourdon, Villeray, and Auteuil, those faithful allies whom Laval had placed on the council, and who, as Mézy soon found, were wholly in the bishop’s interest. On the 13th of February he sent his friend Angoville, major of the fort, to Laval, with a written declaration to the effect that he had ordered them to absent themselves from the council, because, having been appointed “on the persuasion of the aforesaid Bishop of Petr?a, who knew them to be wholly his creatures, they wish to make themselves masters in the aforesaid council, and have acted in divers ways against the interests of the king and the public for the promotion of personal and private ends, and have formed and fomented cabals, contrary to their duty and their oath of fidelity to his aforesaid Majesty.” * He further declares that advantage had been taken of the facility of his disposition and his ignorance of the country to surprise him into assenting to their nomination; and he asks the bishop to acquiesce in their expulsion, and join him in calling an assembly of the people to choose others in their place. Laval refused; on which Mézy caused his declaration to be placarded about Quebec and proclaimed by sound of drum. The proposal of a public election, contrary as it was to the spirit of the government, opposed to the edict establishing the council, and utterly odious to the young autocrat who ruled over France, gave * Ordre de M. de Mézy de faire sommation a l’Evêque de Petrée, 13 Fev., 1664. Notification du dit Ordre, mène date. (Registre du Conseil Supérieur.) Laval a great advantage. “I reply,” he wrote, “to the request which Monsieur the Governor makes me to consent to the interdiction of the persons named in his declaration, and proceed to the choice of other councillors or officers by an assembly of the people, that neither my conscience nor my honor, nor the respect and obedience which I owe to the will and commands of the king, nor my fidelity and affection to his service, will by any means permit me to do so.” * Mézy was dealing with an adversary armed with redoubtable weapons. It was intimated to him that the sacraments would be refused, and the churches closed against him. This threw him into an agony of doubt and perturbation; for the emotional religion which had become a part of his nature, though overborne by gusts of passionate irritation, was still full of life within him. Tossing between the old feeling and the new, he took a course which reveals the trouble and confusion of his mind. He threw himself for counsel and comfort on the Jesuits, though he knew them to be one with Laval against him, and though, under cover of denouncing sin in general, they had lashed him sharply in their sermons. There is something pathetic in the appeal he makes them. For the glory of God and the service of the king, he had come, he says, on Laval’s solicitation, to seek salvation in Canada; and being under obligation to the bishop, who had recommended him to the king, he felt bound to show proofs of his gratitude on every occasion. * Réponse de l'Evêque de Petrée, 16 Fev., 1664. Yet neither gratitude to a benefactor nor the respect due to his character and person should be permitted to interfere with duty to the king, “since neither conscience nor honor permit us to neglect the requirements of our office and betray the interests of his Majesty, after receiving orders from his lips, and making oath of fidelity between his hands.” He proceeds to say that, having discovered practices of which he felt obliged to prevent the continuance, he had made a declaration expelling the offenders from office; that the bishop and all the ecclesiastics had taken this declaration as an offence; that, regardless of the king’s service, they had denounced him as a calumniator, an unjust judge, without gratitude, and perverted in conscience; and that one of the chief among them had come to warn him that the sacraments would be refused and the churches closed against him. “This,” writes the unhappy governor, “has agitated our soul with scruples; and we have none from whom to seek light save those who are our declared opponents, pronouncing judgment on us without knowledge of cause. Yet as our salvation and the duty we owe the king are the things most important to us on earth, and as we hold them to be inseparable the one from the other: and as nothing is so certain as death, and nothing so uncertain as the hour thereof; and as there is no time to inform his Majesty of what is passing and to receive his commands; and as our soul, though conscious of innocence, is always in fear,—we feel obliged, despite their opposition, to have recourse to the reverend father casuists of the House of Jesus, to tell us in conscience what we can do for the fulfilment of our duty at once to God and to the king.” * The Jesuits gave him little comfort. Lalemant, their superior, replied by advising him to follow the directions of his confessor, a Jesuit, so far as the question concerned spiritual matters, adding that in temporal matters he had no advice to give. ** The distinction was illusory. The quarrel turned wholly on temporal matters, but it was a quarrel with a bishop. To separate in such a case the spiritual obligation from the temporal was beyond the skill of Mézy, nor would the confessor have helped him. Perplexed and troubled as he was, he would not reinstate Bourdon and the two councillors. The people began to clamor at the interruption of justice, for which they blamed Laval, whom a recent imposition of tithes had made unpopular. Mézy thereupon issued a proclamation, in which, after mentioning his opponents as the most subtle and artful persons in Canada, he declares that, in consequence of petitions sent him from Quebec and the neighboring settlements, he had called the people to the council chamber, and by their advice had appointed the Sieur de Chartier as attorney-general in place of Bourdon.*** Bourdon replied by a violent appeal from the * Mézy aux PP. Jésuites, Fait au Chateau de Quebec ce dernier jour de Février, 1664. ** Lettre du P. H. Lalemant a Mr. le Gouverneur. *** Declaration du Sieur de Mézy, 10 Mars, 1664. governor to the remaining members of the council, * on which Mézy declared him excluded from all public functions whatever, till the king’s pleasure should be known. ** Thus church and state still frowned on each other, and new disputes soon arose to widen the breach between them. On the first establishment of the council, an order had been passed for the election of a mayor and two aldermen (échevins) for Quebec, which it was proposed to erect into a city, though it had only seventy houses and less than a thousand inhabitants. Repentigny was chosen mayor, and Madry and Charron aldermen; but the choice was not agreeable to the bishop, and the three functionaries declined to act, influence having probably been brought to bear on them to that end. The council now resolved that a mayor was needless, and the people were permitted to choose a syndic in his stead. These municipal elections were always so controlled by the authorities that the element of liberty which they seemed to represent was little but a mockery. On the present occasion, after an unaccountable delay of ten months, twenty-two persons cast their votes in presence of the council, and the choice fell on Charron. The real question was whether the new syndic should belong to the governor or to the bishop. Charron leaned to the governor’s party. The ecclesiastics insisted that the people were dissatisfied, and a new election was ordered, but the voters did not come. The governor now * Bourdon au Conseil, 13 Mars, 1664. ** Ordre du Gouverneur, 13 Mars, 1664. sent messages to such of the inhabitants as he knew to be in his interest, who gathered in the council chamber, voted under his eye, and again chose a syndic agreeable to him. Laval’s party protested in vain. * The councillors held office for a year, and the year had now expired. The governor and the bishop, it will be remembered, had a joint power of appointment; but agreement between them was impossible. Laval was for replacing his partisans, Bourdon, Villeray, Auteuil, and La Ferté. Mézy refused; and on the eighteenth of September he reconstructed the council by his sole authority, retaining of the old councillors only Amours and Tilly, and replacing the rest by Denis, La Tesserie, and Péronne de Maze, the surviving son of Dumesnil. Again Laval protested; but Mézy proclaimed his choice by sound of drum, and caused placards to be posted, full, according to Father Lalemant, of abuse against the bishop. On this he was excluded from confession and absolution. He complained loudly; “but our reply was,” says the father, “that God knew every thing.” ** This unanswerable but somewhat irrelevant response failed to satisfy him, and it was possibly on this occasion that an incident occurred which is recounted by the bishop’s eulogist, La Tour. He says that Mézy, with some unknown design, appeared before the church at the head of a band of soldiers, while Laval was saying mass. The service over, the bishop presented himself at the door, on which, to * Registre du Conseil Supérieur. ** Journal des Jésuites, Oct., 1664. the governor's confusion, all the soldiers respectfully saluted him. * The story may have some foundation, but it is not supported by contemporary evidence. On the Sunday after Mézy’s coup d’etat, the pulpits resounded with denunciations. The people listened, doubtless, with becoming respect; but their sympathies were with the governor; and he, on his part, had made appeals to them at more than one crisis of the quarrel. He now fell into another indiscretion. He banished Bourdon and Villeray, and ordered them home to France. They carried with them the instruments of their revenge, the accusations of Laval and the Jesuits against the author of their woes. Of these accusations one alone would have sufficed. Mézy had appealed to the people. It is true that he did so from no love of popular liberty, but simply do make head against an opponent; yet the act alone was enough, and he received a peremptory recall. Again Laval had triumphed. He had made one governor and unmade two, if not three. The modest Levite, as one of his biographers calls him in his earlier days, had become the foremost power in Canada. Laval had a threefold strength at court; his high birth, his reputed sanctity, and the support of the Jesuits. This was not all, for the permanency of his position in the colony gave him another advantage. The governors were named for three * La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VII. It is charitable to ascribe this writer’s many errors to carelessness. years, and could be recalled at any time; but the vicar apostolic owed his appointment to the Pope, and the Pope alone could revoke it. Thus he was beyond reach of the royal authority, and the court was in a certain sense obliged to conciliate him. As for Mézy, a man of no rank or influence, he could expect no mercy. Yet, though irritable and violent, he seems to have tried conscientiously to reconcile conflicting duties, or what he regarded as such. The governors and intendants, his successors, received, during many years, secret instructions from the court to watch Laval, and cautiously prevent him from assuming powers which did not belong to him. It is likely that similar instructions had been given to Mézy, * and that the attempt to fulfil them had aided to embroil him with one who was probably the last man on earth with whom he would willingly have quarrelled. An inquiry was ordered into his conduct; but a voice more potent than the voice of the king had called him to another tribunal. A disease, the result perhaps of mental agitation, seized upon him and soon brought him to extremity. As he lay gasping between life and death, fear and horror took possession of his soul. Hell yawned before his fevered vision, peopled with phantoms which long and lonely meditations, after the discipline of Loyola, made real and palpable to his thought. He smelt the fumes of infernal brimstone, and * The royal commissioner, Gaudais, who came to Canada with Mézy, had, as before mentioned, orders to inquire with great secrecy into th? conduct of Laval. The intendant, Talon, who followed immediately after, had similar instructions. heard the bowlings of the damned. He saw the frown of the angry Judge, and the fiery swords of avenging angels, hurling wretches like himself, writhing in anguish and despair, into the gulf of unutterable woe. He listened to the ghostly counsellors who besieged his bed, bowed his head in penitence, made his peace with the church, asked pardon of Laval, confessed to him, and received absolution at his hands; and his late adversaries, now benign and bland, soothed him with promises of pardon, and hopes of eternal bliss. Before he died, he wrote to the Marquis de Tracy, newly appointed viceroy, a letter which indicates that even in his penitence he could not feel himself wholly in the wrong. * He also left a will in which the pathetic and the quaint are curiously mingled. After praying his patron, Saint Augustine, with Saint John, Saint Peter, and all the other saints, to intercede for the pardon of his sins, he directs that his body shall be buried in the cemetery of the poor at the hospital, as being unworthy of more honored sepulture. He then makes various legacies of piety and charity. Other bequests follow, one of which is to his friend Major Angoville, to whom he leaves two hundred francs, his coat of English cloth, his camlet mantle, a pair of new shoes, eight shirts with sleeve buttons, his sword and belt, and a new blanket for the major’s servant. Felix Aubert is to have fifty francs, with a gray jacket, a small coat of gray serge, “which,” says the testator, “has been worn for a while,” and a * Lettre de Mézy au Marquis de Tracy, 26 Avril 1665. pair of long white stockings. And in a codicil he farther leaves to Angoville his best black coat, in order that he may wear mourning for him. * His earthly troubles closed on the night of the sixth of May. He went to his rest among the paupers; and the priests, serenely triumphant, sang requiems over his grave. NOTE:—Mézy sent home charges against the bishop and the Jesuits which seem to have existed in Charlevoix’s time, but for which, as well as for those made by Laval, I have sought in vain. The substance of these mutual accusations is given thus by the minister Colbert, in a memorial addressed to the Marquis de Tracy, in 1665: “Les Jésuites l’accusent d’avarice et de violences; et lui qu’ils voulaient entreprendre sur l’autorité qui lui a été commise par le Roy, en sorte que n’ayant que de leurs créatures dans le Conseil Souverain, toutes les résolutions s’y prenaient selon leurs sentiments.” The papers cited are drawn partly from the Registres du Conseil Supérieur, still preserved at Quebec, and partly from the Archives of the Marine and Colonies. Laval’s admirer, the abbé La Tour, in his eagerness to justify the bishop, says that the quarrel arose from a dispute about precedence between Mézy and the intendant, and from the ill-humor of the governor because the intendant shared the profits of his office. The truth is, that there was no intendant in Canada during the term of Mezy’s government. One Robert had been appointed to the office, but he never came to the colony. The commissioner Gaudais, during the two or three months of his stay at Quebec, took the intendant’s place at the council-board; but harmony between Laval and Mézy was unbroken till after his departure. Other writers say that the dispute arose from the old question about brandy. Towards the end of the quarrel there was some disorder from this source, but even then the brandy question was subordinate to other subjects of strife. * Testament du Sieur de Mézy. This will, as well as the letter, is engrossed in the registers of the council. CHAPTER IX. 1662-1680. LAVAL AND THE SEMINARY. LaVal’s Visit to Court.—The Seminary.—Zeal oF the Bishop.—His Eulogists.—Church and State.—Attitude of Laval. That memorable journey of Laval to court, which caused the dissolution of the Company of New France, the establishment of the Supreme Council, the recall of Avaugour, and the appointment of Mézy, had yet other objects and other results. Laval, vicar apostolic and titular bishop of Petr?a, wished to become in title, as in fact, bishop of Quebec. Thus he would gain an increase of dignity and authority, necessary, as he thought, in his conflicts with the civil power; “for,” he wrote to the cardinals of the Propaganda, “I have learned from long experience how little security my character of vicar apostolic gives me against those charged with political affairs: I mean the officers of the Crown, perpetual rivals and contemners of the authority of the church.” * * For a long extract from this letter, copied from the original in the archives of the Propaganda at Rome, see Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, III. 432 This reason was for the Pope and the cardinals. It may well be believed that he held a different language to the king. To him he urged that the bishopric was needed to enforce order, suppress sin, and crush heresy. Both Louis XIV. and the queen mother favored his wishes; * but difficulties arose and interminable disputes ensued on the question, whether the proposed bishopric should depend immediately on the Pope or on the Archbishop of Rouen. It was a revival of the old quarrel of Gallican and ultramontane. Laval, weary of hope deferred, at length declared that he would leave the colony if he could not be its bishop in title; and in 1674, after eleven years of delay, the king yielded to the Pope’s demands, and the vicar apostolic became first bishop of Quebec. If Laval had to wait for his mitre, he found no delay and no difficulty in attaining another object no less dear to him. He wished to provide priests for Canada, drawn from the Canadian population, fed with sound and wholesome doctrine, reared under his eye, and moulded by his hand. To this end he proposed to establish a seminary at Quebec. The plan found favor with the pious king, and a decree signed by his hand sanctioned and confirmed it. The new seminary was to be a corporation of priests under a superior chosen by the bishop; and, besides its functions of instruction, it was vested with distinct and extraordinary powers. Laval, * Anne d'Autriche a Laval, 23 Avril, 1662; Louis XIV. au Pape, 28 Jan., 1664; Louis XIV. au Duc de Créquy, Ambassadeur à Rome, 28 June, 1664. an organizer and a disciplinarian by nature and training, would fain subject the priests of his diocese to a control as complete as that of monks in a convent. In France, the curé or parish priest was, with rare exceptions, a fixture in his parish, whence he could be removed only for grave reasons, and through prescribed forms of procedure. Hence he was to a certain degree independent of the bishop. Laval, on the contrary, demanded that the Canadian curé should be removable at his will, and thus placed in the position of a missionary, to come and go at the order of his superior. In fact, the Canadian parishes were for a long time so widely scattered, so feeble in population, and so miserably poor, that, besides the disciplinary advantages of this plan, its adoption was at first almost a matter of necessity. It added greatly to the power of the church; and, as the colony increased, the king and the minister conceived an increasing distrust of it. Instructions for the “fixation” of the curés were repeatedly sent to the colony, and the bishop, while professing to obey, repeatedly evaded them. Various fluctuations and changes took place; but Laval had built on strong foundations, and at this day the system of removable curés prevails in most of the Canadian parishes. * Thus he formed his clergy into a family with * On the establishment of the seminary. Mandement de l’Evêque de Petrée, pour l’Etablissement du Séminaire de Québec; Approbation du Roy (Edits et Ordonnances, I. 33, 35); La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VI.; Esquisse de la Vie de Laval, Appendix. Various papers bearing on the subject are printed in the Canadian Abeille, from originals in the archives of the seminary. himself at its head. His seminary, the mother who had reared them, was further charged to maintain them, nurse them in sickness, and support them in old age. Under her maternal roof the tired priest found repose among his brethren; and thither every year he repaired from the charge of his flock in the wilderness, to freshen his devotion and animate his zeal by a season of meditation and prayer. The difficult task remained to provide the necessary funds. Laval imposed a tithe of one-thirteenth on all products of the soil, or, as afterwards settled, on grains alone. This tithe was paid to the seminary, and by the seminary to the priests. The people, unused to such a burden, clamored and resisted; and Mézy, in his disputes with the bishop, had taken advantage of their discontent. It became necessary to reduce the tithe to a twenty-sixth, which, as there was little or no money among the inhabitants, was paid in kind. Nevertheless, the scattered and impoverished settlers grudged even this contribution to the support of a priest whom many of them rarely saw; and the collection of it became a matter of the greatest difficulty and uncertainty. How the king came to the rescue, we shall hereafter see. Besides the great seminary where young men were trained for the priesthood, there was the lesser seminary where boys were educated in the hope that they would one day take orders. This school began in 1668, with eight French and six Indian pupils, in the old house of Madame Couillard; but so far as the Indians were concerned it was a failure. Sooner or later they all ran wild in the woods, carrying with them as fruits of their studies a sufficiency of prayers, offices, and chants learned by rote, along with a feeble smattering of Latin and rhetoric, which they soon dropped by the way. There was also a sort of farm-school attached to the seminary, for the training of a humbler class of pupils. It was established at the parish of St. Joachim, below Quebec, where the children of artisans and peasants were taught farming and various mechanical arts, and thoroughly grounded in the doctrine and discipline of the church. * The Great and Lesser Seminary still subsist, and form one of the most important Roman Catholic institutions on this continent. To them has recently been added the Laval University, resting on the same foundation, and supported by the same funds. Whence were these funds derived? Laval, in order to imitate the poverty of the apostles, had divested himself of his property before he came to Canada; otherwise there is little doubt that in the fulness of his zeal he would have devoted it to his favorite object. But if he had no property he had influence, and his family had both influence and wealth. He acquired vast grants of land in the best parts of Canada. Some of these he sold or exchanged; others he retained till the year *Annales du Petit Séminaire de Quebec, see Abeille, Vol. I.; Notice Historique sur le Petit Séminaire de Quebec, Ibid., Vol. II.; Notice Historique sur la Paroisse de St. Joachim, Ibid., Vol. I. The Abeille is a journal published by the seminary. 1680, when he gave them, with nearly all else that he then possessed, to his seminary at Quebec. The lands with which he thus endowed it included the seigniories of the Petite Nation, the island of Jesus, and Beaupré. The last is of great extent, and at the present day of immense value. Beginning a few miles below Quebec, it borders the St. Lawrence for a distance of sixteen leagues, and is six leagues in depth, measured from the river. From these sources the seminary still draws an abundant revenue, though its seigniorial rights were commuted on the recent extinction of the feudal tenure in Canada. Well did Laval deserve that his name should live in that of the university which a century and a half after his death owed its existence to his bounty. This father of the Canadian church, who has left so deep an impress on one of the communities which form the vast population of North America, belonged to a type of character to which an even justice is rarely done. With the exception of the Canadian Garneau, a liberal Catholic, those who have treated of him, have seen him through a medium intensely Romanist, coloring, hiding, and exaggerating by turns both his actions and the traits of his character. Tried by the Romanist standard, his merits were great; though the extraordinary influence which he exercised in the affairs of the colony were, as already observed, by no means due to his spiritual graces alone. To a saint sprung from the haute noblesse, Earth and Heaven were alike propitious. When the vicar general Colombière pronounced his funeral eulogy in the sounding periods of Bossuet, he did not fail to exhibit him on the ancestral pedestal where his virtues would shine with redoubled lustre. “The exploits of the heroes of the House of Montmorency,” exclaims the reverend orator, “form one of the fairest chapters in the annals of Old France; the heroic acts of charity, humility, and faith, achieved by a Montmorency, form one of the fairest in the annals of New France. The combats, victories, and conquests of the Montmorency in Europe would fill whole volumes; and so, too, would the triumphs won by a Montmorency, in America, over sin, passion, and the devil.” Then he crowns the high-born prelate with a halo of fourfold saintship. “It was with good reason that Providence permitted him to be called Francis: for the virtues of all the saints of that name were combined in him; the zeal of Saint Francis Xavier, the charity of Saint Francis of Sales, the poverty of Saint Francis of Assissi, the self-mortification of Saint Francis Borgia; but poverty was the mistress of his heart, and he loved her with incontrollable transports.” The stories which Colombière proceeds to tell of Laval’s asceticism are confirmed by other evidence, and are, no doubt, true. Nor is there any reasonable doubt that, had the bishop stood in the place of Brebeuf or Charles Lalemant, he would have suffered torture and death like them. But it was his lot to strive, not against infidel savages, but against countrymen and Catholics, who had no disposition to burn him, and would rather have done him reverence than wrong. To comprehend his actions and motives, it is necessary to know his ideas in regard to the relations of church and state. They were those of the extreme ultramontanes, which a recent Jesuit preacher has expressed with tolerable distinctness. In a sermon uttered in the Church of Notre Dame, at Montreal, on the first of November, 1872, he thus announced them. “The supremacy and infallibility of the Pope; the independence and liberty of the church; the subordination and submission of the state to the church; in case of conflict between them, the church to decide, the state to submit: for whoever follows and defends these principles, life and a blessing; for whoever rejects and combats them, death and a curse.” * These were the principles which Laval and the Jesuits strove to make good. Christ was to rule in Canada through his deputy the bishop, and God’s law was to triumph over the laws of man. As in the halcyon days of Champlain and Montmagny, the governor was to be the right hand of the church, to wield the earthly sword at her bidding, and the council was to be the agent of her high behests. France was drifting toward the triumph of the parti dévot, the sinister reign of petticoat and cassock, the era of Maintenon and Tellier, and the * This sermon was preached by Father Braun, S. J., on occasion of the “Golden Wedding,” or fiftieth anniversary, of Bishop Bourget of Montreal. A large body of the Canadian clergy were present, some of whom thought his expressions too emphatic. A translation by another Jesuit is published in the “Montreal Weekly Herald” of Nov. 2, 1872; and the above extract is copied verbatim. fatal atrocities of the dragonnades. Yet the advancing tide of priestly domination did not flow smoothly. The unparalleled prestige which surrounded the throne of the young king, joined to his quarrels with the Pope and divisions in the church itself, disturbed, though they could not check its progress. In Canada it was otherwise. The colony had been ruled by priests from the beginning, and it only remained to continue in her future the law of her past. She was the fold of Christ; the wolf of civil government was among the flock, and Laval and the Jesuits, watchful shepherds, were doing their best to chain and muzzle him. According to Argenson, Laval had said, “A bishop can do what he likes;” and his action answered reasonably well to his words. He thought himself above human law. In vindicating the assumed rights of the church, he invaded the rights of others, and used means from which a healthy conscience would have shrunk. All his thoughts and sympathies had run from childhood in ecclesiastical channels, and he cared for nothing outside the church. Prayer, meditation, and asceticism had leavened and moulded him. During four years he had been steeped in the mysticism of the Hermitage, which had for its aim the annihilation of self, and through self-annihilation the absorption into God. * He had passed from a life of visions to a life of action. Earnest to fanaticism, he saw but one great object, the glory of God on earth. He was penetrated by the poisonous casuistry of the Jesuits, * See the maxims of Bernieres published by La Tour. based on the assumption that all means are permitted when the end is the service of God; and as Laval, in his own opinion, was always doing the service of God, while his opponents were always doing that of the devil, he enjoyed, in the use of means, a latitude of which we have seen him avail himself. II. THE COLONY AND THE KING. CHAPTER X. Fontainebleau.—Louis XIV.—Colbert.—The Company of the West.—Evil Omens.—Action op the King.—Tracy, Coürcelle, And Talon.—The Regiment Of Carignan-Sallères.—Tracy at Quebec.—Miracles.—A Holy War. Leave Canada behind; cross the sea, and stand, on an evening in June, by the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. Beyond the broad gardens, above the long ranges of moonlit trees, rise the walls and pinnacles of the vast chateau; a shrine of history, the gorgeous monument of lines of vanished kings, haunted with memories of Capet, Valois, and Bourbon. There was little thought of the past at Fontainebleau in June, 1661. The present was too dazzling and too intoxicating; the future, too radiant with hope and promise. It was the morning of a new reign; the sun of Louis XIV. was rising in splendor, and the rank and beauty of France were gathered to pay it homage. A youthful court, a youthful king; a pomp and magnificence such as Europe had never seen; a delirium of ambition, pleasure, and love,—wrought in many a young heart an enchantment destined to be cruelly broken. Even old courtiers felt the fascination of the scene, and tell us of the music at evening by the borders of the lake; of the gay groups that strolled under the shadowing trees, floated in gilded barges on the still water, or moved slowly in open carriages around its borders. Here was Anne of Austria, the king’s mother, and Marie Thérèse, his tender and jealous queen; his brother, the Duke of Orleans, with his bride of sixteen, Henriette of England; and his favorite, that vicious butterfly of the court, the Count de Guiche. Here, too, were the humbled chiefs of the civil war, Beaufort and Condé, obsequious before their triumphant master. Louis XIV., the centre of all eyes, in the flush of health and vigor, and the pride of new-fledged royalty, stood, as he still stands on the canvas of Philippe de Champagne, attired in a splendor which would have been effeminate but for the stately port of the youth who wore it. * Fortune had been strangely bountiful to him. The nations of Europe, exhausted by wars and dissensions, looked upon him with respect and fear. Among weak and weary neighbors, he alone was strong. The death of Mazarin had released him from tutelage; feudalism in the person of Condé * On the visit of the court at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1661, see Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, Mémoires de Madame de La Fayette, Mémoires de l’Abbé de Choisy, and Walckenaer, Mémoires sur Madame de Sevigné. was abject before him; he had reduced his parliaments to submission; and, in the arrest of the ambitious prodigal Fouquet, he was preparing a crashing blow to the financial corruption which had devoured France. Nature had formed him to act the part of king. Even his critics and enemies praise the grace and majesty of his presence, and he impressed his courtiers with an admiration which seems to have been to an astonishing degree genuine. He carried airs of royalty even into his pleasures; and, while his example corrupted all France, he proceeded to the apartments of Montespan or Fontanges with the majestic gravity of Olympian Jove. He was a devout observer of the forms of religion; and, as the buoyancy of youth passed away, his zeal was stimulated by a profound fear of the devil. Mazarin had reared him in ignorance; but his faculties were excellent in their way, and, in a private station, would have made him an efficient man of business. The vivacity of his passions, and his inordinate love of pleasure, were joined to a persistent will and a rare power of labor. The vigorous mediocrity of his understanding delighted in grappling with details. His astonished courtiers saw him take on himself the burden of administration, and work at it without relenting for more than half a century. Great as was his energy, his pride was far greater. As king by divine right, he felt himself raised immeasurably above the highest of his subjects; but, while vindicating with unparalleled haughtiness his claims to supreme authority, he was, at the outset, filled with a sense of the duties of his high place, and fired by an ambition to make his reign beneficent to France as well as glorious to himself. Above all rulers of modern times, he was the embodiment of the monarchical idea. The famous words ascribed to him, “I am the state,” were probably never uttered; but they perfectly express his spirit. “It is God’s will,” he wrote in 1666, “that whoever is born a subject should not reason, but obey;” * and those around him were of his mind. “The state is in the king,” said Bossuet, the great mouthpiece of monarchy; “the will of the people is merged in his will. Oh kings, put forth your power boldly, for it is divine and salutary to human kind.” ** For a few brief years, his reign was indeed salutary to France. His judgment of men, when not obscured by his pride and his passion for flattery, was good; and he had at his service the generals and statesmen formed in the freer and bolder epoch that had ended with his accession. Among them was Jean Baptiste Colbert, formerly the intendant of Mazarin’s household, a man whose energies matched his talents, and who had preserved his rectitude in the midst of corruption. It was a hard task that Colbert imposed on his proud and violent nature to serve the imperious king, morbidly jealous of his authority, and resolved to * ?uvres de Louis XIV., II. 283. ** Bossuet, Politique tirée de l’Ecriture sainte, 70. (1843). accept no initiative but his own. He must counsel while seeming to receive counsel, and lead while seeming to follow. The new minister bent himself to the task, and the nation reaped the profit. A vast system of reform was set in action amid the outcries of nobles, financiers, churchmen, and all who profited by abuses. The methods of this reform were trenchant and sometimes violent, and its principles were not always in accord with those of modern economic science; but the good that resulted was incalculable. The burdens of the laboring classes were lightened, the public revenues increased, and the wholesale plunder of the public money arrested with a strong hand. Laws were reformed and codified; feudal tyranny, which still subsisted in many quarters, was repressed; agriculture and productive industry of all kinds were encouraged, roads and canals opened; trade stimulated, a commercial marine created, and a powerful navy formed as if by magic. * It is in his commercial, industrial, and colonial policy that the profound defects of the great minister’s system are most apparent. It was a system of authority, monopoly, and exclusion, in which the government, and not the individual, acted always the foremost part. Upright, incorruptible, ardent for the public good, inflexible, arrogant, and domineering, he sought to drive France into paths of prosperity, and create colonies by the * On Colbert, see Clement, Histoire de Colbert. Clément, Lettres et Mémoires de Colbert; Chéruel, Administration monarchique en France, II chap, vi Henri Martin, Histoire de France, XIII., etc. energy of an imperial will. He feared, and with reason, that the want of enterprise and capital among the merchants would prevent the broad and immediate results at which he aimed; and, to secure these results, he established a series of great trading corporations, in which the principles of privilege and exclusion were pushed to their utmost limits. Prominent among them was the Company of the West. The king signed the edict creating it on the 24th of May, 1664. Any person in the kingdom or out of it might become a partner by subscribing, within a certain time, not less than three thousand francs. France was a mere patch on the map, compared to the vast domains of the new association. Western Africa from Cape Verd to the Cape of Good Hope, South America between the Amazon and the Orinoco, Cayenne, the Antilles, and all New France, from Hudson’s Bay to Virginia and Florida were bestowed on it for ever, to be held of the Crown on the simple condition of faith and homage. As, according to the edict, the glory of God was the chief object in view, the company was required to supply its possessions with a sufficient number of priests, and diligently to exclude all teachers of false doctrine. It was empowered to build forts and war-ships, cast cannon, wage war, make peace, establish courts, appoint judges, and otherwise to act as sovereign within its own domains. A monopoly of trade was granted it for forty years. * Sugar from the Antilles, and furs from Canada, were the chief source of expected profit; and Africa was to supply the slaves to raise the sugar. Scarcely was the grand machine set in motion, when its directors betrayed a narrowness and blindness of policy which boded the enterprise no good. Canada was a chief sufferer. Once more, bound hand and foot, she was handed over to a selfish league of merchants; monopoly in trade, monopoly in religion, monopoly in government. Nobody but the company had a right to bring her the necessaries of life; and nobody but the company had a right to exercise the traffic which alone could give her the means of paying for these necessaries. Moreover, the supplies which it brought were insufficient, and the prices which it demanded were exorbitant. It was throttling its wretched victim. The Canadian merchants remonstrated. ** It was clear that, if the colony was to live, the system must be changed; and a change was accordingly ordered. The company gave up its monopoly of the fur trade, but reserved the right to levy a duty of one-fourth of the beaver-skins, and one-tenth of the moose-skins: and it also reserved the entire trade of Tadoussac; that is to say, the trade of all the tribes between the lower St. Lawrence and Hudson’s Bay. It retained besides the exclusive right of transporting furs in its own ships, thus controlling the commerce of Canada, and discouraging, or rather extinguishing, the enterprise of Canadian merchants. On its part, it was required to pay governors, judges, and all the colonial officials out of the duties which it levied. **** Yet the king had the prosperity of Canada at heart; and he proceeded to show his interest in her after a manner hardly consistent with his late action in handing her over to a mercenary guardian. In fact, he acted as if she had still remained under his paternal care. He had just conferred the right of naming a governor and intendant upon the new company; but he now assumed it himself, the company, with a just sense of its own unfitness, readily consenting to this suspension of one of its most important privileges. Daniel de Rémy, Sieur de Courcelle, was appointed governor, and Jean Baptiste Talon intendant. (v) The nature of this duplicate government will appear hereafter. But, before appointing rulers for Canada, the king had appointed a representative of the Crown for all his American domains. The Maréchal d’Estrades had for some time held the title of viceroy for America; and, as he could not fulfil the duties of that office, being at the time ambassador in Holland, the Marquis de Tracy was sent in his place, with the title of lieutenant-general.—— * Arrêt du Conseil du Roy qui accorde a la Compagnie le quart des castors, le dixième des orignaux et la traite de Tadoussac: Instruction a Monseigneur de Tracy et a Messieurs le Gouverneur et L'Intendant. This company prospered as little as the rest of Colbert’s trading companies. Within ten years it lost 3,523,000 livres, besides blighting the colonies placed under its control. Recherches sur les Finances, cited by Clement, Histoire de Colbert. ** Commission de Lieutenant Général en Canada, etc., pour M. de Courcelle, 23 Mais, 1665; Commission d’intendant de la Justice, Police, et Finances en Canada, etc., pour M. Talon, 23 Mars, 1665. *** Commission de Lieutenant Général de l’Amérique Méridionale et Septentrionale pour M. Prou Conseil du Roy qui accorde a la Compagnie le quart des castors, le dixième des orignaux et la traite de Tadoussac: Instruction a Monseigneur de Tracy et a Messieurs le Gouverneur et L'Intendant. This company prospered as little as the rest of Colbert’s trading companies. Within ten years it lost 3,523,000 livres, besides blighting the colonies placed under its control. Recherches sur les Finances, cited by Clement, Histoire de Colbert. **** Commission de Lieutenant Général en Canada, etc., pour M. de Courcelle, 23 Mais, 1665; Commission d’intendant de la Justice, Police, et Finances en Canada, etc., pour M. Talon, 23 Mars, 1665. (v) Commission de Lieutenant Général de l’Amérique Méridionale et Septentrionale pour M. Prouville de Tracy, 19 Nov., 1663. Canada at this time was an object of very considerable attention at court, and especially in what was known as the parti dévot. The Relations of the Jesuits, appealing equally to the spirit of religion and the spirit of romantic adventure, had, for more than a quarter of a century, been the favorite reading of the devout, and the visit of Laval at court had greatly stimulated the interest they had kindled. The letters of Argenson, and especially of Avaugour, had shown the vast political possibilities of the young colony, and opened a vista of future glories alike for church and for king. So, when Tracy set sail he found no lack of followers. A throng of young nobles embarked with him, eager to explore the marvels and mysteries of the western world. The king gave him two hundred soldiers of the regiment of Carignan-Salières, and promised that a thousand more should follow. After spending more than a year in the West Indies, where, as Mother Mary of the Incarnation expresses it, “he performed marvels and reduced everybody to obedience,” he at length sailed up the St. Lawrence, and, on the thirtieth of June, 1665, anchored in the basin of Quebec. The broad, white standard, blazoned with the arms of France, proclaimed the representative of royalty; and Point Levi and Cape Diamond and the distant Cape Tourmente roared back the sound of the saluting cannon. All Quebec was on the ramparts or at the landing-place, and all eyes were strained at the two vessels as they slowly emptied their crowded decks into the boats alongside. The boats at length drew near, and the lieutenant-general and his suite landed on the quay with a pomp such as Quebec had never seen before. Tracy was a veteran of sixty-two, portly and tall, “one of the largest men I ever saw,” writes Mother Mary; but he was sallow with disease, for fever had seized him, and it had fared ill with him on the long voyage. The Chevalier de Chaumont walked at his side, and young nobles surrounded him, gorgeous in lace and ribbons and majestic in leonine wigs. Twenty-four guards in the king’s livery led the way, followed by four pages and six valets; * and thus, while the Frenchmen shouted and the Indians stared, the august procession threaded the streets of the Lower Town, and climbed the steep pathway that scaled the cliffs above. Breathing hard, they reached the top, passed on the left the dilapidated walls of the fort and the shed of mingled wood and masonry which then bore the name of the Castle of St. Louis; passed on the right the old house of Couillard and the site of Laval’s new seminary, and soon reached the square betwixt the Jesuit college and the cathedral. The bells were ringing in a phrensy of welcome. Laval in pontificals, surrounded by priests and Jesuits, stood waiting to receive the deputy of the king; and, as he greeted Tracy and offered him the holy water, he looked with anxious curiosity to see what manner of man he was. The signs were auspicious. The deportment of the lieutenant-general * Juchereau says that this was his constant attendance when he went abroad. left nothing to desire. A prie-dieu had been placed for him. He declined it. They offered him a cushion, but he would not have it; and, fevered as he was, he knelt on the bare pavement with a devotion that edified every beholder. Te Deum was sung, and a day of rejoicing followed. There was good cause. Canada, it was plain, was not to be wholly abandoned to a trading company. Louis XIV. was resolved that a new France should be added to the old. Soldiers, settlers, horses, sheep, cattle, young women for wives, were all sent out in abundance by his paternal benignity. Before the season was over, about two thousand persons had landed at Quebec at the royal charge. “At length,” writes Mother Juchereau, “our joy was completed by the arrival of two vessels with Monsieur de Courcelle, our governor; Monsieur Talon, our intendant, and the last companies of the regiment of Carignan.” More state and splendor more young nobles, more guards and valets: for Courcelle, too, says the same chronicler, “had a superb train; and Monsieur Talon, who naturally loves glory, forgot nothing which could do honor to the king.” Thus a sunbeam from the court fell for a moment on the rock of Quebec. Yet all was not sunshine; for the voyage had been a tedious one, and disease had broken out in the ships. That which bore Talon had been a hundred and seventeen days at sea, * and others were hardly more fortunate. The hospital was crowded with the sick; so, too, were the church and the neighboring houses; * Talon au ministre, 4 Oct., 1665. and the nuns were so spent with their labors that seven of them were brought to the point of death. The priests were busied in converting the Huguenots, a number of whom were detected among the soldiers and emigrants. One of them proved refractory, declaring with oaths that he would never renounce his faith. Falling dangerously ill, he was carried to the hospital, where Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin bethought her of a plan of conversion. She ground to powder a small piece of a bone of Father Brebeuf, the Jesuit martyr, and secretly mixed the sacred dust with the patient’s gruel; whereupon, says Mother Juchereau, “this intractable man forthwith became gentle as an angel, begged to be instructed, embraced the faith, and abjured his errors publicly with an admirable fervor.” * Two or three years before, the church of Quebec had received as a gift from the Pope, the bodies or bones of two saints; Saint Flavian and Saint Félicité. They were enclosed in four large coffers or reliquaries, and a grand procession was now ordered in their honor. Tracy, Courcelle, Talon, and the agent of the company, bore the canopy of the Host. Then came the four coffers on four decorated litters, carried by the principal ecclesiastics. Laval followed in pontificals. Forty-seven priests, and a long file of officers, nobles, soldiers, and inhabitants, followed the precious relics amid the sound of music and the roar of cannon. ** * Le Mercier tells the same story in the Relation of 1665. ** Compare Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre, 16 Oct., 1660, with La Tour Vie de Laval, chap. x. “It is a ravishing thing,” says Mother Mary, “to see how marvellously exact is Monsieur de Tracy, at all these holy ceremonies, where he is always the first to come, for he would not lose a single moment of them. He has been seen in church for six hours together, without once going out.” But while the lieutenant-general thus edified the colony, he betrayed no lack of qualities equally needful in his position. In Canada, as in the West Indies, he showed both vigor and conduct. First of all, he had been ordered to subdue or destroy the Iroquois, and the regiment of Carignan-Salières was the weapon placed in his hands for this end, Four companies of this corps had arrived early in the season, four more came with Tracy, more yet with Salières, their colonel, and now the number was complete. As with slouched hat and plume, bandoleer, and shouldered firelock, these bronzed veterans of the Turkish wars marched at the tap of drum through the narrow street, or mounted the rugged way that led up to the fort, the inhabitants gazed with a sense of profound relief. Tame Indians from the neighboring missions, wild Indians from the woods, stared in silent wonder at their new defenders. Their numbers, their discipline, their uniform, and their martial bearing, filled the savage beholders with admiration. Carignan-Salières was the first regiment of regular troops ever sent to America by the French government. It was raised in Savoy by the Prince of Carignan in 1644, but was soon employed in the service of France; where, in 1652, it took a conspicuous part, on the side of the king, in the battle with Condé and the Fronde at the Porte St. Antoine. After the peace of the Pyrenees, the Prince of Carignan, unable to support the regiment, gave it to the king, and it was, for the first time, incorporated into the French armies. In 1664, it distinguished itself, as part of the allied force of France, in the Austrian war against the Turks. In the next year it was ordered to America, along with the fragment of a regiment formed of Germans, the whole being placed under the command of Colonel de Salières. Hence its double name. * Fifteen heretics were discovered in its ranks, and quickly converted. ** Then the new crusade was preached; the crusade against the Iroquois, enemies of God and tools of the devil. The soldiers and the people were filled with a zeal half warlike and half religious. “They are made to understand,” writes Mother Mary, “that this is a holy war, all for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. The fathers are doing wonders in inspiring them with true sentiments of piety and * For a long notice of the regiment of Carignan-Salières (Lorraine), see Susane, Ancienne Infanterie Fran?aise V 236. The portion of it which returned to France from Canada formed a nucleus for the reconstruction of the regiment, which, under the name of the regiment of Lorraine, did not cease to exist as a separate organization till 1794. When it came to Canada it consisted, says Susane, of about a thousand men, besides about two hundred of the other regiment incorporated with it. Compare Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’instruction au Sieur Talon, which corresponds very nearly with Susane’s statement. ** Besides these, there was Berthier, a captain, “Voilà” writes Talon to the king, “le 16me converti; ainsi votre Majesté moissonne déjà à pleines mains de la gloire pour Dieu, et pour elle bien de la renommée dans toute l’étendue de la Chrétienté” Lettre au 7 Oct., 1665. devotion. Fully five hundred soldiers have taken the scapulary of the Holy Virgin. It is we (the Ursulines), who make them; it is a real pleasure to do such work;” and she proceeds to relate a “beau miracle” by which God made known his satisfaction at the fervor of his military servants. The secular motives for the war were in themselves strong enough; for the growth of the colony absolutely demanded the cessation of Iroquois raids, and the French had begun to learn the lesson that, in the case of hostile Indians, no good can come of attempts to conciliate, unless respect is first imposed by a sufficient castigation. It is true that the writers of the time paint Iroquois hostilities in their worst colors. In the innumerable letters which Mother Mary of the Incarnation sent home every autumn, by the returning ships, she spared no means to gain the sympathy and aid of the devout; and, with similar motives, the Jesuits in their printed Relations, took care to extenuate nothing of the miseries which the pious colony endured. Avaugour, too, in urging the sending out of a strong force to fortify and hold the country, had advised that, in order to furnish a pretext and disarm the jealousy of the English and Dutch, exaggerated accounts should be given of danger from the side of the savage confederates. Yet, with every allowance, these dangers and sufferings were sufficiently great. The three upper nations of the Iroquois were comparatively pacific; but the two lower nations, the Mohawks and Oneidas, were persistently hostile; making inroads into the colony by way of Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, murdering and scalping, and then vanishing like ghosts. Tracy’s first step was to send a strong detachment to the Richelieu to build a picket fort below the rapids of Chambly, which take their name from that of the officer in command. An officer named Sorel soon afterwards built a second fort on the site of the abandoned palisade work built by Montmagny, at the mouth of the river, where the town of Sorel now stands; and Salières, colonel of the regiment, added a third fort, two or three leagues above Chambly. * These forts could not wholly bar the passage against the nimble and wily warriors who might pass them in the night, shouldering their canoes through the woods. A blow, direct and hard, was needed, and Tracy prepared to strike it. Late in the season an embassy from the three upper nations—the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—arrived at Quebec, led by Garacontié, a famous chief whom the Jesuits had won over, and who proved ever after a staunch friend of the French. They brought back the brave Charles Le Moyne of Montreal, whom they had captured some three months before, and now restored as a peace-offering, taking credit to themselves that “not even one of his nails had been torn out, nor any part of his body burnt.” ** Garacontié made a * See the map in the Relation of 1665. The accompanying text of the Relation is incorrect. ** Explanation of the eleven Presents of the Iroquois Ambassadors. N. Y Colonial Docs.. IX. 37 peace speech, which, as rendered by the Jesuits, was an admirable specimen of Iroquois eloquence; but, while joining hands with him and his companions, the French still urged on their preparations to chastise the contumacious Mohawks. CHAPTER XI. 1666, 1667. THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. Courcelle’s March.—His Failure and Return.—Courcelle and the Jesuits.—Mohawk Treachery.—Tracy’s Expedition.—Burning of the Mohawk Towns.—French and English.—Dollier de Casson at St. Anne.—Peace.—The Jesuits and the Iroquois. The governor, Courcelle, says Father Le Meircier, “breathed nothing but war,” and was bent on immediate action. He was for the present subordinate to Tracy, who, however, forebore to cool his ardor, and allowed him to proceed. The result was an enterprise bold to rashness. Courcelle, with about five hundred men, prepared to march in the depth of a Canadian winter to the Mohawk towns, a distance estimated at three hundred leagues. Those who knew the country, vainly urged the risks and difficulties of the attempt. The adventurous governor held fast to his purpose, and only waited till the St. Lawrence should be well frozen. Early in January, it was a solid floor; and on the ninth the march began. Officers and men stopped at Sillery, and knelt in the little mission chapel before the shrine of Saint Michael, to ask the protection and aid of the warlike archangel; then they resumed their course, and, with their snow-shoes tied at their backs, walked with difficulty and toil over the bare and slippery ice. A keen wind swept the river, and the fierce cold gnawed them to the bone. Ears, noses, fingers, hands, and knees were frozen; some fell in torpor, and were dragged on by their comrades to the shivering bivouac. When, after a march of ninety miles, they reached Three Rivers, a considerable number were disabled, and had to be left behind; but others joined them from the garrison, and they set out again. Ascending the Richelieu, and passing the new forts at Sorel and Chambly, they reached at the end of the month the third fort, called Ste. Thérèse. On the thirtieth they left it, and continued their march up the frozen stream. About two hundred of them were Canadians, and of these seventy were old Indian-fighters from Montreal, versed in woodcraft, seasoned to the climate, and trained among dangers and alarms. Courcelle quickly learned their value, and his “Blue Coats,” as he called them, were always placed in the van. * Here, wrapped in their coarse blue capotes, with blankets and provisions strapped at their backs, they strode along on snow-shoes, which recent storms had made indispensable. The regulars followed as they could. They were not yet the tough and experienced woodsmen that they and their descendants afterwards became; and their snow * Doll du Montréal, a.d. 1665, 1666. shoes embarrassed them, burdened as they were with the heavy loads which all carried alike, from Courcelle to the lowest private. Lake Champlain lay glaring in the winter sun, a sheet of spotless snow; and the wavy ridges of the Adirondack? bordered the dazzling landscape with the cold gray of their denuded forests. The long procession of weary men crept slowly on under the lee of the shore; and when night came they bivouacked by squads among the trees, dug away the snow with their snow-shoes, piled it in a bank around them, built their fire in the middle, and crouched about it on beds of spruce or hemlock; * while, as they lay close packed for mutual warmth, the winter sky arched them like a vault of burnished steel, sparkling with the cold diamond lustre of its myriads of stars. This arctic serenity of the elements was varied at times by heavy snow-storms; and, before they reached their journey’s end, the earth and the ice were buried to the unusual depth of four feet. From Lake Champlain they passed to Lake George, ** and the frigid glories of its snow-wrapped mountains; thence crossed to the Hudson, and groped their way through the woods in search of the Mohawk towns. They soon went astray; for thirty Algonquins, whom they had taken as guides, had found * One of the men, telling the story of their sufferings to Daniel Gookin, of Massachusetts, indicated this as their mode of encamping. See Mass. Hist. Coll., first series, I. 161. ** Carte des grands lacs, Ontario et autres... et des pays traversez par MM. de Tracy et Courcelle our aller attaquer les agniés (Mohawks), 1666. the means of a grand debauch at Fort Ste. Thérèse, drunk themselves into helplessness, and lingered behind. Thus Courcelle and his men mistook the path, and, marching by way of Saratoga Lake and Long Lake, * found themselves, on Saturday the twentieth of February, close to the little Dutch hamlet of Corlaer or Schenectady. Here the chief man in authority told them that most of the Mohawks and Oneidas had gone to war with another tribe. They, however, caught a few stragglers, and had a smart skirmish with a party of warriors, losing an officer and several men. Half frozen and half starved, they encamped in the neighboring woods, where, on Sunday, three envoys appeared from Albany, to demand why they had invaded the territories of his Royal Highness the Duke of York. It was now that they learned for the first time that the New Netherlands had passed into English hands, a change which boded no good to Canada. The envoys seemed to take their explanations in good part, made them a present of wine and provisions, and allowed them to buy further supplies from the Dutch of Schenectady. They even invited them to enter the village, but Courcelle declined, partly because the place could not hold them all, and partly because he feared that his men, once seated in a chimney-corner, could never be induced to leave it. Their position was cheerless enough; for the vast beds of snow around them were soaking slowly under a sullen rain, and there was danger * Carte... des pays traversez par MM. de Tracy et Courcelle, etc. that the lakes might thaw and cut off their retreat. “Ye Mohaukes,” says the old English report of the affair, “were all gone to their Castles with resolution to fight it out against the french, who, being refresht and supplyed with the aforesaid provisions, made a shew of marching towards the Mohaukes Castles, but with faces about, and great sylence and dilligence, return’d towards Cannada.” “Surely,” observes the narrator, “so bould and hardy an attempt hath not hapned in any age.” * The end hardly answered to the beginning. The retreat, which began on Sunday night, was rather precipitate. The Mohawks hovered about their rear, and took a few prisoners; but famine and cold proved more deadly foes, and sixty men perished before they reached the shelter of Fort Ste. Thérèse. On the eighth of March, Courcelle came to the neighboring fort of St. Louis or Chambly. Here he found the Jesuit Albanel acting as chaplain; and, being in great ill humor, he charged him with causing the failure of the expedition by detaining the Algonquin guides. This singular notion took such possession of him, that, when a few days after he met the Jesuit Frémin at Three Rivers, he embraced him ironically, saying, at the same time, “My father, I am the unluckiest gentleman in the world; and you, and the rest of you, are the cause of it.” ** The pious Tracy, and the prudent * A Relation of the Governr. of Cannada, his March with 600 Volunteire into if Territoryes of His Roy all Highnesse the Duke of Yorke in America. See Doc. Hist. N. Y. I. 71. ** Journal des Jésuites, Mars, 1666. . Talon, tried to disarm his suspicions, and with such success that he gave up an intention he had entertained of discarding his Jesuit confessor, and forgot or forgave the imagined wrong. Unfortunate as this expedition was, it produced a strong effect on the Iroquois by convincing them that their forest homes were no safe asylum from French attacks. In May, the Senecas sent an embassy of peace; and the other nations, including the Mohawks, soon followed. Tracy, on his part, sent the Jesuit Bêchefer to learn on the spot the real temper of the savages, and ascertain whether peace could safely be made with them. The Jesuit was scarcely gone when news came that a party of officers hunting near the outlet of Lake Champlain had been set upon by the Mohawks, and that seven of them had been captured or killed. Among the captured was Leroles, a cousin of Tracy, and among the killed was a young gentleman named Chasy, his nephew. On this the Jesuit envoy was recalled; twenty-four Iroquois deputies were seized and imprisoned; and Sorel, captain in the regiment of Carignan, was sent with three hundred men to chastise the perfidious Mohawks. If, as it seems, he was expected to attack their fortified towns or “castles,” as the English call them, his force was too small. This time, however, there was no fighting. At two days from his journey’s end, Sorel met the famous chief called the Flemish Bastard, bringing back Leroles and his fellow-captives, and charged, as he alleged, to offer full satisfaction for the murder of Chasy. Sorel believed him, retraced his course, and with the Bastard in his train returned to Quebec. Quebec was full of Iroquois deputies, all bent on peace or pretending to be so. On the last day of August, there was a grand council in the garden of the Jesuits. Some days later, Tracy invited the Flemish Bastard and a Mohawk chief named Agariata to his table, when allusion was made to the murder of Chasy. On this the Mohawk, stretching out his arm, exclaimed in a braggart tone, “This is the hand that split the head of that young man.” The indignation of the company may be imagined. Tracy told his insolent guest that he should never kill anybody else; and he was led out and hanged in presence of the Bastard. * There was no more talk of peace. Tracy prepared to march in person against the Mohawks with all the force of Canada. On the day of the Exaltation of the Cross, “for whose glory,” says the chronicler, “this expedition is undertaken,” Tracy and Courcelle left Quebec with thirteen hundred men. They crossed Lake Champlain, and launched their boats again on the waters of St. Sacrament, now Lake George. It was the first of the warlike pageants that have made that fair scene historic. October had begun, and the romantic wilds breathed the buoyant life of the most inspiring of American seasons, when * This story rests chiefly on the authority of Nicolas Perrot, M?urs des Saurages, 113. La Potherie also tells it, with the addition of the chief’s name. Colden follows him. The Journal des Jésuites mentions that the chief who led the murderers of Chasy arrived at Quebec on the sixth of September. Marie de l’Incarnation mentions the hanging of an Iroquois at Quebec, late in the autumn, for violating the peace. the blue-jay screams from the woods; the wild duck splashes along the lake; and the echoes of distant mountains prolong the quavering cry of the loon; when weather-stained rocks are plumed with the fiery crimson of the sumac, the claret hues of young oaks, the amber and scarlet of the maple, and the sober purple of the ash; or when gleams of sunlight, shot aslant through the rents of cool autumnal clouds, chase fitfully along the glowing sides of painted mountains. Amid this gorgeous euthanasia of the dying season, the three hundred boats and canoes trailed in long procession up the lake, threaded the labyrinth of the Narrows, that sylvan fairy-land of tufted islets and quiet waters, and landed at length where Fort William Henry was afterwards built. * About a hundred miles of forests, swamps, rivers, and mountains, still lay between them and the Mohawk towns. There seems to have been an Indian path; for this was the ordinary route of the Mohawk and Oneida war-parties: but the path was narrow, broken, full of gullies and pitfalls, crossed by streams, and in one place interrupted by a lake which they passed on rafts. A hundred and ten “Blue Coats,” of Montreal, led the way, under Charles Le Moyne. Repentigny commanded the levies from Quebec. In all there were six hundred Canadians; six hundred regulars; and a hundred Indians from the missions, who ranged the woods in front, flank, and rear, like hounds on the scent. Red or white, Canadians or regulars, all were full * Carte... des pays traversez par MM. de Tracy et Courcelle, etc. of zeal. “It seems to them," writes Mother Mary, “that they are going to lay siege to Paradise, and win it and enter in, because they are fighting for religion and the faith.” * Their ardor was rudely tried. Officers as well as men carried loads at their backs, whence ensued a large blister on the shoulders of the Chevalier de Chaumont, in no way used to such burdens. Tracy, old, heavy, and infirm, was inopportunely seized with the gout. A Swiss soldier tried to carry him on his shoulders across a rapid stream; but midway his strength failed, and he was barely able to deposit his ponderous load on a rock. A Huron came to his aid, and bore Tracy safely to the farther bank. Courcelle was attacked with cramps, and had to be carried for a time like his commander. Provisions gave out, and men and officers grew faint with hunger. The Montreal soldiers had for chaplain a sturdy priest, Doilier de Casson, as large as Tracy and far stronger; for the incredible story is told of him that, when in good condition, he could hold two men seated on his extended hands. ** Now, however, he was equal to no such exploit, being not only deprived of food, but also of sleep, by the necessity of listening at night to the confessions of his pious flock; and his shoes, too, had failed him, nothing remaining but the upper leather, which gave him little comfort among the sharp stones. He bore up manfully, being by nature brave and * Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre du 16 Oct., 1666. ** Grandet, Notice manuscrite sur Dollier de Casson, extract given by J. Vigor in appendix to Histoire du Montréal (Montreal, 1868). light-hearted; and, when a servant of the Jesuits fell into the water, he threw off his cassock and leaped after him. His strength gave out, and the man was drowned; but a grateful Jesuit led him aside and requited his efforts with a morsel of bread. * A wood of chestnut-trees full of nuts at length stayed the hunger of the famished troops. It was Saint Theresa’s day when they approached the lower Mohawk town. A storm of wind and rain set in; but, anxious to surprise the enemy, they pushed on all night amid the moan and roar of the forest; over slippery logs, tangled roots, and oozy mosses; under dripping boughs and through saturated bushes. This time there was no want of good guides; and when in the morning they issued from the forest, they saw, amid its cornfields, the palisades of the Indian stronghold. They had two small pieces of cannon brought from the lake by relays of men, but they did not stop to use them. Their twenty drums beat the charge, and they advanced to seize the place by coup-de-main. Lucidly for them, a panic had seized the Indians. Not that they were taken by surprise, for they had discovered the approaching French, and, two days before, had sent away their women and children in preparation for a desperate fight; but the din of the drums, which they took for so many devils in the French service; and the armed men advancing from the rocks and thickets in files that seemed interminable,—so wrought on the scared imagination of the warriors that they fled in terror to their next * Dollier de Casson, Histoire du Montréal, a.d 1665, 1666. town, a short distance above. Tracy lost no time, but hastened in pursuit. A few Mohawks were seen on the hills, yelling and firing too far for effect. Repentigny, at the risk of his scalp, climbed a neighboring height, and looked down on the little army, which seemed so numerous as it passed beneath, “that,” writes the superior of the Ursulines, “he told me that he thought the good angels must have joined with it; whereat he stood amazed.” The second town or fort was taken as easily as the first; so, too, were the third and the fourth. The Indians yelled, and fled without killing a man; and still the troops pursued, following the broad trail which led from town to town along the valley of the Mohawk. It was late in the afternoon when the fourth town was entered, * and Tracy thought that his work was done; but an Algonquin squaw who had followed her husband to the war, and who had once been a prisoner among the Mohawks, told him that there was still another above. The sun was near its setting, and the men were tired with their pitiless marching; but again the order was given to advance. The eager squaw showed the way, holding a pistol in one hand and leading Courcelle-with the other; and they soon came in sight of Andaraqué, the largest and strongest of the Mohawk forts. The drums beat with fury, and the troops prepared to attack, but there were none to oppose them. The scouts sent forward, reported * Marie de l'Incarnation says that there were four towns in all I follow the Acte de prise de possession, made on the spot. Five are here mentioned. that the warriors had fled. The last of the savage strongholds was in the hands of the French. “God has done for us,” says Mother Mary, “what he did in ancient days for his chosen people, striking terror into our enemies, insomuch that we were victors without a blow. Certain it is that there is miracle in all this; for, if the Iroquois had stood fast, they would have given us a great deal of trouble and caused our army great loss, seeing how they were fortified and armed, and how haughty and bold they are.” The French were astonished as they looked about them. These Iroquois forts were very different from those that Jogues had seen here twenty years before, or from that which in earlier times set Champlain and his Hurons at defiance. The Mohawks had had counsel and aid from their Dutch friends, and adapted their savage defences to the rules of European art. Andaraqué was a quadrangle formed of a triple palisade, twenty feet high, and flanked by four bastions. Large vessels of bark filled with water were placed on the platform of the palisade for defence against fire. The dwellings which these fortifications enclosed were in many cases built of wood, though the form and arrangement of the primitive bark lodge of the Iroquois seems to have been preserved. Some of the wooden houses were a hundred and twenty feet long, with fires for eight or nine families. Here and in subterranean caches was stored a prodigious quantity of Indian-corn and other provisions; and all the dwellings were supplied with carpenters’ tools, domestic utensils, and many other appliances of comfort. The only living things in Andaraqué, when the French entered, were two old women, a small boy, and a decrepit old man, who, being frightened by the noise of the drums, had hidden himself under a canoe. From them the victors learned that the Mohawks, retreating from the other towns, had gathered here, resolved to fight to the last; but at sight of the troops their courage failed, and the chief was first to run, crying out, “Let us save ourselves, brothers; the whole world is coming against us.” A cross was planted, and at its side the royal arms. The troops were drawn up in battle array, when Jean Baptiste du Bois, an officer deputed by Tracy, advancing sword in hand to the front, proclaimed in a loud voice that he took possession in the name of the king of all the country of the Mohawks; and the troops shouted three times, Vive le Roi. * That night a mighty bonfire illumined the Mohawk forests; and the scared savages from their hiding-places among the rocks saw their palisades, their dwellings, their stores of food, and all their possessions, turned to cinders and ashes. The two old squaws captured in the town, threw themselves in despair into the flames of their blazing homes. When morning came, there was nothing left of Andaraqué but smouldering embers, rolling their pale smoke against the painted background of the * Acte de priss de possession, 17 Oct., 1666. October woods. Te Deum was sung and mass said; and then the victors began their backward march, burning, as they went, all the remaining forts, with all their hoarded stores of corn, except such as they needed for themselves. If they had failed to destroy their enemies in battle, they hoped that winter and famine would do the work of shot and steel. While there was distress among the Mohawks, there was trouble among their English neighbors, who claimed as their own the country which Tracy had invaded. The English authorities were the more disquieted, because they feared that the lately conquered Dutch might join hands with the French against them. When Nicolls, governor of New York, heard of Tracy’s advance, he wrote to the governors of the New England colonies, begging them to join him against the French invaders, and urging that, if Tracy’s force were destroyed or captured, the conquest of Canada would be an easy task. There was war at the time between the two crowns; and the British court had already entertained this project of conquest, and sent orders to its colonies to that effect. But the New England governors, ill prepared for war, and fearing that their Indian neighbors, who were enemies of the Mohawks, might take part with the French, hesitated to act, and the affair ended in a correspondence, civil if not sincere, between Nicolls and Tracy. * The treaty of Breda, in the following year, secured peace for a time between the rival colonies. * See the correspondence in N. Y. Col. Docs. III. 118-156. Compare Hutchinson Collection, 407, and Mass. Hist. Coll. XVIII. 102. The return of Tracy was less fortunate than his advance. The rivers, swollen by autumn rains, were difficult to pass; and in crossing Lake Champlain two canoes were overset in a storm, and eight men were drowned. From St. Anne, a new fort built early in the summer on Isle La Motte, near the northern end of the lake, he sent news of his success to Quebec, where there was great rejoicing and a solemn thanksgiving. Signs and prodigies had not been wanting to attest the interest of the upper and nether powers in the crusade against the myrmidons of hell. At one of the forts on the Richelieu, “the soldiers,” says Mother Mary, “were near dying of fright. They saw a great fiery cavern in the sky, and from this cavern came plaintive voices mixed with frightful howlings. Perhaps it was the demons, enraged because we had depopulated a country where they had been masters so long, and had said mass and sung the praises of God in a place where there had never before been any thing but foulness and abomination.” Tracy had at first meant to abandon Fort St. Anne; but he changed his mind after returning to Quebec. Meanwhile the season had grown so late that there was no time to send proper supplies to the garrison. Winter closed, and the place was not only ill provisioned, but was left without a priest. Tracy wrote to the superior of the Sulpitians at Montreal to send one without delay; but the request was more easily made than fulfilled, for he forgot to order an escort, and the way was long and dangerous. The stout-hearted Dollier de Casson was told, however, to hold himself ready to go at the first opportunity. His recent campaigning had left him in no condition for braving fresh hardships, for he was nearly disabled by a swelling on one of his knees. By way of cure he resolved to try a severe bleeding, and the Sangrado of Montreal did his work so thoroughly that his patient fainted under his hands. As he returned to consciousness, he became aware that two soldiers had entered the room. They told him that they were going in the morning to Chambly, which was on the way to St. Anne; and they invited him to go with them. “Wait till the day after to-morrow,” replied the priest, “and I will try.” The delay was obtained; and, on the day fixed, the party set out by the forest path to Chambly, a distance of about four leagues. When they reached it, Dollier de Casson was nearly spent, but he concealed his plight from the commanding officer, and begged an escort to St. Anne, some twenty leagues farther. As the officer would not give him one, he threatened to go alone, on which ten men and an ensign were at last ordered to conduct him. Thus attended, he resumed his journey after a day’s rest. One of the soldiers fell through the ice, and none of his comrades dared help him. Dollier de Casson, making the sign of the cross, went to his aid, and, more successful than on the former occasion, caught him and pulled him out. The snow was deep; and the priest, having arrived in the preceding summer, had never before worn snow-shoes, while a sack of clothing, and his portable chapel which he carried at his back, joined to the pain of his knee and the effects of his late bleeding, made the march a purgatory. He was sorely needed at Fort St. Anne. There was pestilence in the garrison. Two men had just died without absolution, while more were at the point of death, and praying for a priest. Thus it happened that when the sentinel descried far off, on the ice of Lake Champlain, a squad of soldiers approaching, and among them a black cassock, every officer and man not sick, or on duty, came out with one accord to meet the new-comer. They overwhelmed him with welcome and with thanks. One took his sack, another his portable chapel, and they led him in triumph to the fort. First he made a short prayer, then went his rounds among the sick, and then came to refresh himself with the officers. Here was La Motte de la Lucière, the commandant; La Durantaye, a name destined to be famous in Canadian annals; and a number of young subalterns. The scene was no strange one to Dollier de Casson, for he had been an officer of cavalry in his time, and fought under Turenne; * a good soldier, without doubt, at the mess table or in the field, and none the worse a priest that he had once followed the wars. He was of a lively humor, given to jests and mirth; as pleasant a father as ever said Benedicite. The soldier and * Grandet, Notice manuscrite sur Dollier de Casson, extracts from copy in possession of the late Jacques Viger. the gentleman still lived under the cassock of the priest. He was greatly respected and beloved; and his influence as a peace-maker, which he often had occasion to exercise, is said to have been remarkable. When the time demanded it, he could use arguments more cogent than those of moral suasion. Once, in a camp of Algonquins, when, as he was kneeling in prayer, an insolent savage came to interrupt him, the father, without rising, knocked the intruder flat by a blow of his fist, and the other Indians, far from being displeased, were filled with admiration at the exploit. * His cheery temper now stood him in good stead; for there was dreary work before him, and he was not the man to flinch from it. The garrison of St. Anne had nothing to live on but salt pork and half-spoiled flour. Their hogshead of vinegar had sprung a leak, and the contents had all oozed out. They had rejoiced in the supposed possession of a reasonable stock of brandy; but they soon discovered that the sailors, on the voyage from France, had emptied the casks and filled them again with salt-water. The scurvy broke out with fury. In a short time, forty out of the sixty men became victims of the loathsome malady. Day or night, Doilier de Casson and Forestier, the equally devoted young surgeon, had no rest. The surgeon’s strength failed, and the priest was himself slightly attacked with the disease. Eleven men * Grandet, Notice manuscrite sur Dollier de Casson, cited by Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, III. 395, 396 died; and others languished for want of help, for their comrades shrank from entering the infected dens where they lay. In their extremity some of them devised an ingenious expedient. Though they had nothing to bequeath, they made wills in which they left imaginary sums of money to those who had befriended them, and thenceforth they found no lack of nursing. In the intervals of his labors, Dollier de Casson would run to and fro for warmth and exercise on a certain track of beaten snow, between two of the bastions, reciting his breviary as he went, so that those who saw him might have thought him out of his wits. One day La Motte called out to him as he was thus engaged, “Eh, Monsieur le curé, if the Iroquois should come, you must defend that bastion. My men are all deserting me, and going over to you and the doctor.” To which the father replied, “Get me some litters with wheels, and I will bring them out to man my bastion. They are brave enough now; no fear of their running away.” With banter like this, they sought to beguile their miseries; and thus the winter wore on at Fort St. Anne. * Early in spring they saw a troop of Iroquois approaching, and prepared as well as they could to make fight; but the strangers proved to be * The above curious incidents are told by Dollier de Casson, in his Histoire du Montréal, preserved in manuscript in the Mazarin Library at Paris. He gives no hint that the person in question was himself, but speaks of him as un ecclésiastique. His identity is, however, made certain by internal evidence, by a passage in the Notice of Grandet, and by other contemporary allusions. ambassadors of peace. The destruction of the Mohawk towns had produced a deep effect, not on that nation alone, but also on the other four members of the league. They were disposed to confirm the promises of peace which they had already made; and Tracy had spurred their good intentions by sending them a message that, unless they quickly presented themselves at Quebec, he would hang all the chiefs whom he had kept prisoners after discovering their treachery in the preceding summer. The threat had its effect: deputies of the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas presently arrived in a temper of befitting humility. The Mohawks were at first afraid to come: but in April they sent the Flemish Bastard with overtures of peace; and in July, a large deputation of their chiefs appeared at Quebec. They and the rest left some of their families as hostages, and promised that, if any of their people should kill a Frenchman, they would give them up to be hanged. * They begged, too, for blacksmiths, surgeons, and Jesuits to live among them. The presence of the Jesuits in their towns was in many ways an advantage to them; while to the colony it was of the greatest importance. Not only was conversion to the church justly regarded as the best means of attaching the Indians to the French, and alienating them from the English; but the Jesuits living in the midst of them could influence even those whom they could not convert, soothe rising jealousies, * Lettre du Père Jean Pierron, de la Compagnie de Jésus, escripte de la Motte (Fort Ste. Anne) sur le lac Champlain, le 12me d’aoust. 1667 counteract English intrigues, and keep the rulers of the colony informed of all that was passing in the Iroquois towns. Thus, half Christian missionaries, half political agents, the Jesuits prepared to resume the hazardous mission of the Iroquois. Frémin and Pierron were ordered to the Mohawks, Bruyas to the Oneidas, and three others were named for the remaining three nations of the league. The troops had made the peace; the Jesuits were the rivets to hold it fast; and peace endured without absolute rupture for nearly twenty years. Of all the French expeditions against the Iroquois, that of Tracy was the most productive of good. CHAPTER XII. 1665-1672. PATERNAL GOVERNMENT. Talon.—Restriction and Monopoly.—Views of Colbert.—Political Galvanism.—A Father of the People. Tracy’s work was done, and he left Canada with the glittering noblesse in his train. Courcelle and Talon remained to rule alone; and now the great experiment was begun. Paternal royalty would try its hand at building up a colony, and Talon was its chosen agent. His appearance did him no justice. The regular contour of his oval face, about which fell to his shoulders a cataract of curls, natural or supposititious; the smooth lines of his well-formed features, brows delicately arched, and a mouth more suggestive of feminine sensibility than of masculine force,—would certainly have misled the disciple of Lavater. * Yet there was no want of manhood in him. He was most happily chosen for the task placed in his hands, and from first to last approved himself a vigorous executive officer. He was a true disciple of Colbert, formed in his school and animated by his spirit. * His portrait is at the H?tel Dieu of Quebec. An engraving from it will be found in the third volume of Shea’s Charlevoix. Being on the spot, he was better able than his master to judge the working of the new order of things. With regard to the company, he writes that it will profit by impoverishing the colony; that its monopolies dishearten the people and paralyze enterprise; that it is thwarting the intentions of the king, who wishes trade to be encouraged; and that, if its exclusive privileges are maintained, Canada in ten years will be less populous than now. * But Colbert clung to his plan, though he wrote in reply that to satisfy the colonists he had persuaded the company to forego the monopolies for a year. ** As this proved insufficient, the company was at length forced to give up permanently its right of exclusive trade, still exacting its share of beaver and moose skins. This was its chief source of profit; it begrudged every sou deducted from it for charges of government, and the king was constantly obliged to do at his own cost that which the company should have done. In one point it showed a ceaseless activity; and this was the levying of duties, in which it was never known to fail. Trade, even after its exercise was permitted, was continually vexed by the hand of authority. One of Tracy’s first measures had been to issue a decree reducing the price of wheat one half. The council took up the work of regulation, and fixed the price of all imported goods in three several tariffs,—one for Quebec, one for Three Rivers, and * Talon a Colbert, 4 Oct., 1665. ** Colbert a Talon, 5 Avril, 1666. one for Montreal. * It may well be believed that there was in Canada little capital and little enterprise. Industrially and commercially, the colony was almost dead. Talon set himself to galvanize it; and, if one man could have supplied the intelligence and energy of a whole community, the results would have been triumphant. He had received elaborate instructions, and they indicate an ardent wish for the prosperity of Canada. Colbert had written to him that the true means to strengthen the colony was to “cause justice to reign, establish a good police, protect the inhabitants, discipline them against enemies, and procure for them peace, repose, and plenty.” ** “And as,” the minister further says, “the king regards his Canadian subjects, from the highest to the lowest, almost as his own children, and wishes them to enjoy equally with the people of France the mildness and happiness of his reign, the Sieur Talon will study to solace them in all things and encourage them to trade and industry. And, seeing that nothing can better promote this end than entering into the details of their households and of all their little affairs, it will not be amiss that he visit all their settlements one after the other in order to learn their true condition, provide as much as possible for their wants, and, performing the duty of a good head of a family, put them in the way of making some profit.” The intendant was also told to encourage fathers to inspire their children with * Tariff of Prices, in N. Y. Colonial Docs. IX. 36 ** Colbert a Talon, 6 Avril, 1666. piety, together with “profound love and respect for the royal person of his Majesty.” * Talon entered on his work with admirable zeal. Sometimes he used authority, sometimes persuasion, sometimes promises of reward. Sometimes, again, he tried the force of example. Thus he built a ship to show the people how to do it, and rouse them to imitation. ** Three or four years later, the experiment was repeated. This time it was at the cost of the king, who applied the sum of forty thousand livres *** to the double purpose of promoting the art of ship-building, and saving the colonists from vagrant habits by giving them employment. Talon wrote that three hundred and fifty men had been supplied that summer with work at the charge of government. **** He despatched two engineers to search for coal, lead, iron, copper, and other minerals. Important discoveries of iron were made; but three generations were destined to pass before the mines were successfully worked. (v) The copper of Lake Superior raised the intendants hopes for a time, but he was soon forced to the conclusion that it was too remote to be of practical value. He labored vigorously to develop arts and manufactures; made a barrel of tar, and sent it to the king as a specimen; caused some of the colonists to make cloth * Instruction au Sieur Talon, 27 Mars, 1665. ** Talon a Colbert, Oct., 1667; Colbert a Talon, 20 Fev., 1668. *** Dépêche de Colbert, 11 Fev., 1671. **** Talon a Colbert, 2 Nov., 1671. (v) Charlevoix speaks of these mines as having been forgotten for seventy years, and rediscovered in his time. After passing. through various hands, they were finally worked on the king’s account. of the wool of the sheep which the king had sent out; encouraged others to establish a tannery, and also a factory of hats and of shoes. The Sieur Follin was induced by the grant of a monopoly to begin the making of soap and potash. * The people were ordered to grow hemp, ** and urged to gather the nettles of the country as material for cordage; and the Ursulines were supplied with flax and wool, in order that they might teach girls to weave and spin. Talon was especially anxious to establish trade between Canada and the West Indies; and, to make a beginning, he freighted the vessel he had built with salted cod, salmon, eels, pease, fish-oil, staves, and planks, and sent her thither to exchange her cargo for sugar, which she was in turn to exchange in France for goods suited for the Canadian market. *** Another favorite object with him was the fishery of seals and white porpoises for the sake of their oil; and some of the chief merchants were urged to undertake it, as well as the establishment of stationary cod-fisheries along the Lower St. Lawrence. But, with every encouragement, many years passed before this valuable industry was placed on a firm basis. Talon saw with concern the huge consumption of wine and brandy among the settlers, costing them, as he wrote to Colbert, a hundred thousand livres a year; and, to keep this money in the * Registre du Conseil Souverain. ** Marie de l’Incarnation, Choix des Lettres de 871. *** Le Mercier, Rel. 1667, 3; Dépêches de Talon colony, he declared his intention of building a brewery. The minister approved the plan, not only on economic grounds, but because “the vice of drunkenness would thereafter cause no more scandal by reason of the cold nature of beer, the vapors whereof rarely deprive men of the use of judgment.” * The brewery was accordingly built, to the great satisfaction of the poorer colonists. Nor did the active intendant fail to acquit himself of the duty of domiciliary visits, enjoined upon him by the royal instructions; a point on which he was of one mind with his superiors, for he writes that “those charged in this country with his Majesty’s affairs are under a strict obligation to enter into the detail of families.” ** Accordingly we learn from Mother Juchereau, that "he studied with the affection of a father how to succor the poor and cause the colony to grow; entered into the minutest particulars; visited the houses of the inhabitants, and caused them to visit him; learned what crops each one was raising; taught those who had wheat to sell it at a profit, helped those who had none, and encouraged everybody.” And Dollier de Casson represents him as visiting in turn every house at Montreal, and giving aid from the king to such as needed it. *** Horses, cattle, sheep, and other domestic animals, were sent out at the royal charge in considerable numbers, and * Colbert à Talon, 20 Fev., 1668. ** Mémoire de 1667. *** Histoire du Montréal, a.d. 1666, 1667. distributed gratuitously, with an order that none of the young should be killed till the country was sufficiently stocked. Large quantities of goods were also sent from the same high quarter. Some of these were distributed as gifts, and the rest bartered for corn to supply the troops. As the intendant perceived that the farmers lost much time in coming from their distant clearings to buy necessaries at Quebec, he caused his agents to furnish them with the king’s goods at their own houses, to the great annoyance of the merchants of Quebec, who complained that their accustomed trade was thus forestalled. * These were not the only cares which occupied the mind of Talon. He tried to open a road across the country to Acadia, an almost impossible task, in which he and his successors completely failed. Under his auspices, Albanel penetrated to Hudson’s Bay, and Saint Lusson took possession in the king’s name of the country of the Upper Lakes. It was Talon, in short, who prepared the way for the remarkable series of explorations described in another work. ** Again and again he urged upon Colbert and the king a measure from which, had it taken effect, momentous consequences must have sprung. This was the purchase or seizure of New York, involving the isolation of New England, the subjection of the Iroquois, and the undisputed control of half the continent. * Talon a Colbert, 10 Nov., 1670. ** Discovery of the Great West Great as were his opportunities of abusing his trust, it does not appear that he took advantage of them. He held lands and houses in Canada, * owned the brewery which he had established, and embarked in various enterprises of productive industry; but, so far as I can discover, he is nowhere accused of making illicit gains, and there is reason to believe that he acquitted himself of his charge with entire fidelity. ** His health failed in 1668, and for this and other causes he asked for his recall. Colbert granted it with strong expressions of regret; and when, two years later, he resumed the intendancy, the colony seems to have welcomed his return. * In 1682, the Intendant Meules, in a despatch to the minister, makes a statement of Talon’s property in Quebec. The chief items are the brewery and a house of some value on the descent of Mountain Street. He owned, also, the valuable seigniory, afterwards barony, Des Islets, in the immediate neighborhood. ** Some imputations against him, not of much weight, are, however, made in a memorial of Aubert de la Chesnaye, a merchant of Quebec CHAPTER XIII 1661-1673. MARRIAGE AND POPULATION. Shipment of Emigrants.—Soldier Settlers.—Importation of Wives.—Wedlock.—Summary Methods.—The Mothers of Canada.—Bounties on Marriage.—Celibacy Punished.—Bounties on Children.—Results. The peopling of Canada was due in the main to the king. Before the accession of Louis XIV. the entire population, priests, nuns, traders, and settlers, did not exceed twenty-five hundred; * but scarcely had he reached his majority when the shipment of men to the colony was systematically begun. Even in Argenson’s time, loads of emigrants sent out by the Crown were landed every year at Quebec. The Sulpitians of Montreal also brought over colonists to people their seigniorial estate; the same was true on a small scale of one or two other proprietors, and once at least the company sent a considerable number: yet the government was the chief agent of emigration. Colbert did the work, and the king paid for it. In 1661, Laval wrote to the cardinals of the Propaganda, that during the past two years the * Le Clerc, Etablissement de la Foy, II 4 king had spent two hundred thousand livres on the colony; that, since 1659, he had sent out three hundred men a year; and that he had promised to send an equal number every summer during ten years. * These men were sent by squads in merchant-ships, each one of which was required to carry a certain number. In many instances, emigrants were bound on their arrival to enter into the service of colonists already established. In this case the employer paid them wages, and after a term of three years they became settlers themselves. ** The destined emigrants were collected by agents in the provinces, conducted to Dieppe or Rochelle, and thence embarked. At first men were sent from Rochelle itself, and its neighborhood; but Laval remonstrated, declaring that he wanted none from that ancient stronghold of heresy. *** The people of Rochelle, indeed, found no favor in Canada. Another writer describes them as “persons of little conscience, and almost no religion,” adding that the Normans, Percherons, Picards, and peasants of the neighborhood of Paris, are docile, industrious, and far more pious. “It is important,” he concludes, “in beginning a new colony, to sow good seed.” **** It was, accordingly, from the north-western provinces that most of the emigrants * Lettre de Laval envoyée à Rome. 21 Oct., 1661 (extract in Faillon from Archives of the Propaganda). ** Marie de l’Incarnation, 18 Ao?t, 1664. These engagés were some times also brought over by private persons. *** Colbert a Laval, 18 Mars, 1664. **** Mémoire de 1664 (anonymous) were drawn. * They seem in the main to have been a decent peasantry, though writers who, from their position, should have been well informed, have denounced them in unmeasured terms. ** Some of them could read and write, and some brought with them a little money. Talon was constantly begging for more men, till Louis XIV. at length took alarm. Colbert replied to the over-zealous intendant, that the king did not think it expedient to depopulate France, in order to people Canada; that he wanted men for his armies; and that the colony must rely chiefly on increase from within. Still the shipments did not cease; and, even while tempering the ardor of his agent, the king gave another * See a paper by Garneau in Le National of Quebec, 28 October, 1856, embodying the results of research among the papers of the early notaries of Quebec. The chief emigration was from Paris, Normandy, Poitou, Pays d’Aunis, Brittany, and Picardy. Nearly all those from Paris were sent by the king from houses of charity. ** “Une foule d'aventuriers, ramasses au hazard en France, presque tous de la lie du peuple, la plupart obérés de dettes ou chargés de crimes.” etc. La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. IV. “Le vice a obligé la plupart de chercher ce pays comme un asile pour se mettre à couvert de leurs crimes,” Meules, Dépêché de 1682. Meules was intendant in that year. Marie de l’Incarnation, after speaking of the emigrants as of a very mixed character, says that it would have been far better to send a few who were good Christians, rather than so many who give so much trouble. Lettre du—Oct., 1669. Le Clerc, on the other hand, is emphatic in praise, calling the early colonists, “très honnêtes gens, avant de la probité, de la droiture, et de la religion.... L’on a examiné et choisi les habitants, et renvoyé en France les personnes vicieuses.” If, he adds, any such were left “ils effacaient glorieusement par leur pénitence les taches de leur première condition.” Charlevoix is almost as strong in praise as La Tour in censure. Both of them wrote in the next century. We shall have means hereafter of judging between these conflicting statements. proof how much he had the growth of Canada at heart. * The regiment of Carignan-Salières had been ordered home, with the exception of four companies kept in garrison, ** and a considerable number discharged in order to become settlers. Of those who returned, six companies were, a year or two later, sent back, discharged in their turn, and converted into colonists. Neither men nor officers were positively constrained to remain in Canada; but the officers were told that if they wished to please his Majesty this was the way to do so; and both they and the men were stimulated by promises and rewards. Fifteen hundred livres were given to La Motte, because he had married in the country and meant to remain there. Six thousand livres were assigned to other officers, because they had followed, or were about to follow, La Motte’s example; and twelve thousand were set apart to be distributed to the soldiers under similar conditions. *** Each soldier who consented to remain and settle was promised a grant of land and a hundred livres in money; or, if he preferred it, fifty livres with provisions for a year. This military colonization had a strong and lasting influence on the character of the Canadian people. * The king had sent out more emigrants than he had promised, to judge from the census reports during the years 1666, 1667, and 1668. The total population for those years is 3418, 4312, and 5870, respectively. A small part of this growth may be set down to emigration not under government auspices, and a large part to natural increase, which was enormous at this time, from causes which will soon appear. ** Colbert a Talon, 20 Fev., 1668. *** Ibid. But if the colony was to grow from within, the new settlers must have wives. For some years past, the Sulpitians had sent out young women for the supply of Montreal; and the king, on a larger scale, continued the benevolent work. Girls for the colony were taken from the hospitals of Paris and of Lyons, which were not so much hospitals for the sick as houses of refuge for the poor. Mother Mary writes in 1665 that a hundred had come that summer, and were nearly all provided with husbands, and that two hundred more were to come next year. The case was urgent, for the demand was great. Complaints, however, were soon heard that women from cities made indifferent partners; and peasant girls, healthy, strong, and accustomed to field work, were demanded in their place. Peasant girls were therefore sent, but this was not all. Officers as well as men wanted wives; and Talon asked for a consignment of young ladies. His request was promptly answered. In 1667, he writes: “They send us eighty-four girls from Dieppe and twenty-five from Rochelle; among them are fifteen or twenty of pretty good birth; several of them are really demoiselles, and tolerably well brought up.” They complained of neglect and hardship during the voyage. “I shall do what I can to soothe their discontent,” adds the intendant; “for if they write to their correspondents at home how ill they have been treated it would be an obstacle to your plan of sending us next year a number of select young ladies.” * * “Des demoiselles bien choisies.” Talon a Colbert, 27 Oct. 1667. Three years later we find him asking for three or four more in behalf of certain bachelor officers. The response surpassed his utmost wishes; and he wrote again: “It is not expedient to send more demoiselles. I have had this year fifteen of them, instead of the four I asked for.” * As regards peasant girls, the supply rarely equalled the demand. Count Frontenac, Courcelle’s successor, complained of the scarcity: “If a hundred and fifty girls and as many servants,” he says, “had been sent out this year, they would all have found husbands and masters within a month.” ** The character of these candidates for matrimony has not escaped the pen of slander. The caustic La Hontan, writing fifteen or twenty years after, draws the following sketch of the mothers of Canada: “After the regiment of Carignan was disbanded, ships were sent out freighted with girls of indifferent virtue, under the direction of a few pious old duennas, who divided them into three classes. These vestals were, so to speak, piled one on the other in three different halls, where the bridegrooms chose their brides as a butcher chooses his sheep out of the midst of the * Talon 'a Colbert, 2 Nov., 1671. ** Frontenac a Colbert, 2 Nov., 1672. This year only eleven girls had been sent. The scarcity was due to the indiscretion of Talon, who had written to the minister that, as many of the old settlers had daughters just becoming marriageable, it would be well, in order that they might find husbands, to send no more girls from France at present. The next year, 1673, the king writes that, though he is involved in a great war, which needs all his resources, he has nevertheless sent sixty more girls. flock. There was wherewith to content the most fantastical in these three harems; for here were to be seen the tall and the short, the blond and the brown, the plump and the lean; everybody, in short, found a shoe to fit him. At the end of a fortnight not one was left. I am told that the plumpest were taken first, because it was thought that, being less active, they were more likely to keep at home, and that they could resist the winter cold better. Those who wanted a wife applied to the directresses, to whom they were obliged to make known their possessions and means of livelihood before taking from one of the three classes the girl whom they found most to their liking. The marriage was concluded forthwith, with the help of a priest and a notary, and the next day the governor-general caused the couple to be presented with an ox, a cow, a pair of swine, a pair of fowls, two barrels of salted meat, and eleven crowns in money.” * As regards the character of the girls, there can be no doubt that this amusing sketch is, in the main, maliciously untrue. Since the colony began, it had been the practice to send back to France women of the class alluded to by La Hontan, as soon as they became notorious. ** Those who were * La Hontan, Nouveaux Voyages, I. 11 (1709). In some of the other editions, the same account is given in different words, equally lively and scandalous. ** This is the statement of Boucher, a good authority. A case of the sort in 1658 is mentioned in the correspondence of Argenson. Boucher says further, that an assurance of good character was required from the relations or friends of the girl who wished to embark. This refers to a period anterior to 1663, when Boucher wrote his book. Colbert evidently cared for no qualification except the capacity of maternity. not taken from institutions of charity usually belonged to the families of peasants overburdened with children, and glad to find the chance of establishing them. * How some of them were obtained appears from a letter of Colbert to Harlay, Archbishop of Rouen. “As, in the parishes about Rouen,” he writes, “fifty or sixty girls might be found who would be very glad to go to Canada to be married, I beg you to employ your credit and authority with the curés of thirty or forty of these parishes, to try to find in each of them one or two girls disposed to go voluntarily for the sake of a settlement in life.” ** Mistakes nevertheless occurred. “Along with the honest people,” complains Mother Mary, “comes a great deal of canaille of both sexes, who cause a great deal of scandal.” *** After some of the young women had been married at Quebec, it was found that they had husbands at home. The priests * Témoignage de la Mère du Plessis de Sainte-Helène (extract in Faillon). ** Colbert a l’Archevêque de Rouen, 27 Fev., 1670. That they were not always destitute may be gathered from a passage in one of Talon’s letters. “Entre les filles qu’on fait passer ici il y en a qui ont de légitimes et considérables prétentions aux successions de leurs parents, même entre celles qui sont tirées de l’H?pital Général.” The General Hospital of Paris had recently been established (1656) as a house of refuge for the “Bohemians,” or vagrants of Paris. The royal edict creating it says that “les pauvres mendiants et invalides des deux sexes y seraient enfermés pour estre employés aux manufactures et aultres travaux selon leur pouvoir.” They were gathered by force in the streets by a body of special police, called “Archers de l’H?pital.” They resisted at first, and serious riots ensued. In 1662, the General Hospital of Paris contained 6262 paupers. See Clement, Histoire de Colbert, 113. Mother de Sainte-Helène says that the girls sent from this asylum had been there from childhood in charge of nuns. *** “Beaucoup de canaille de l’un et l’autre sexe qui causent beaucoup de scandale.” Lettre du—Oct., 1669. became cautious in tying the matrimonial knot, and Colbert thereupon ordered that each girl should provide herself with a certificate from the cure or magistrate of her parish to the effect that she was free to marry. Nor was the practical intendant unmindful of other precautions to smooth the path to the desired goal. “The girls destined for this country,” he writes, “besides being strong and healthy, ought to be entirely free from any natural blemish or any thing personally repulsive.” * Thus qualified canonically and physically, the annual consignment of young women was shipped to Quebec, in charge of a matron employed and paid by the king. Her task was not an easy one, for the troop under her care was apt to consist of what Mother Mary in a moment of unwonted levity calls “mixed goods.” ** On one occasion the office was undertaken by the pious widow of Jean Bourdon. Her flock of a hundred and fifty girls, says Mother Mary, “gave her no little trouble on the voyage; for they are of all sorts, and some of them are very rude and hard to manage.” Madame Bourdon was not daunted. She not only saw her charge distributed and married, but she continued to receive and care for the subsequent ship-loads as they arrived summer after summer. She was * Talon a Colbert, 10 Nov., 1670. ** “Une marchandise mêlée.” Lettre du—1668. In that year, 1668, the king spent 40,000 livres in the shipment of men and girls. In 1669, a hundred and fifty girls were sent; in 1670, a hundred and sixty-five; and Talon asks for a hundred and fifty or two hundred more to supply the soldiers who had got ready their houses and clearings, and were now prepared to marry. The total number of girls sent from 1665 to 1673, inclusive, was about a thousand. indeed chief among the pious duennas of whom La Hontan irreverently speaks. Marguerite Bourgeoys did the same good offices for the young women sent to Montreal. Here the “king’s girls," as they were called, were all lodged together in a house to which the suitors repaired to make their selection. “I was obliged to live there myself,” writes the excellent nun, “because families were to be formed;” * that is to say, because it was she who superintended these extemporized unions. Meanwhile she taught the girls their catechism, and, more fortunate than Madame Bourdon, inspired them with a confidence and affection which they retained long after. 0135 Marguerite Bourgeoys From an engraving by L Massard. At Quebec, where the matrimonial market was on a larger scale, a more ample bazaar was needed. That the girls were assorted into three classes, each penned up for selection in a separate hall, is a statement probable enough in itself, but resting on no better authority than that of La Hontan. Be this as it may, they were submitted together to the inspection of the suitor; and the awkward young peasant or the rugged soldier of Carignan was required to choose a bride without delay from among the anxious candidates. They, on their part, were permitted to reject any applicant who displeased them, and the first question, we are told, which most of them asked was whether the suitor had a house and a farm. Great as was the call for wives, it was thought prudent to stimulate it. The new settler was at once * Extract in Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, III. 214. enticed and driven into wedlock. Bounties were offered on early marriages. Twenty livres were given to each youth who married before the age of twenty, and to each girl who married before the age of sixteen. * This, which was called the “king’s gift,” was exclusive of the dowry given by him to every girl brought over by his orders. The dowry varied greatly in form and value; but, according to Mother Mary, it was sometimes a house with provisions for eight months. More often it was fifty livres in household supplies, besides a barrel or two of salted meat. The royal solicitude extended also to the children of colonists already established. “I pray you,” writes Colbert to Talon, “to commend it to the consideration of the whole people, that their prosperity, their subsistence, and all that is dear to them, depend on a general resolution, never to be departed from, to marry youths at eighteen or nineteen years and girls at fourteen or fifteen; since abundance can never come to them except through the abundance of men.” ** This counsel was followed by appropriate action. Any father of a family who, without showing good cause, neglected to marry his children when they had reached the ages of twenty and sixteen was fined; *** and each father thus delinquent was required to present himself every six months to the local authorities to declare what * Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat du Roy (see Edits et Ordonnances, I. 67). ** Colbert a Talon, 20 Fev., 1668. *** Arrêts du Conseil d’Etat, 1669 (cited by Faillon); Arrêt du Conseil d Etat, 1670 (see Edits et Ordonnances, I. 67); Ordonnance du Roy, 5 Avril, 1669. See Clément, Instructions, etc., de Colbert, III. 2me Partie, 657. reason, if any, he had for such delay. * Orders were issued, a little before the arrival of the yearly ships from France, that all single men should marry within a fortnight after the landing of the prospective brides. No mercy was shown to the obdurate bachelor. Talon issued an order forbidding unmarried men to hunt, fish, trade with the Indians, or go into the woods under any pretence whatsoever. ** In short, they were made as miserable as possible. Colbert goes further. He writes to the intendant, “those who may seem to have absolutely renounced marriage should be made to bear additional burdens, and be excluded from all honors: it would be well even to add some marks of infamy.” *** The success of these measures was complete. “No sooner,” says Mother Mary, “have the vessels arrived than the young men go to get wives; and, by reason of the great number they are married by thirties at a time.” Throughout the length and breadth of Canada, Hymen, * Registre du Conseil Souverain. ** Talon au Ministre, 10 Oct., 1670. Colbert highly approves this order. Faillon found a case of its enforcement among the ancient records of Montreal. In December, 1670, Fran?ois Le Noir, an inhabitant of La Chine, was summoned before the judge, because, though a single man, he had traded with Indians at his own house. He confessed the fact, but protested that he would marry within three weeks after the arrival of the vessels from France, or, failing to do so, that he would give a hundred and fifty livres to the church of Montreal, and an equal sum to the hospital. On this condition he was allowed to trade, but was still forbidden to go into the woods. The next year he kept his word, and married Marie Magdeleine Charbonnier, late of Paris. The prohibition to go into the woods was probably intended to prevent the bachelor from finding a temporary Indian substitute for a French wife. *** “Il serait à propos de leur augmenter les charges, de les priver de tous honneurs, même d’y ajouter quelque marque d’infamie.” Lettre du 20 Fev., 1668. if not Cupid, was whipped into a frenzy of activity. Dollier de Casson tells us of a widow who was married afresh before her late husband was buried. * Nor was the fatherly care of the king confined to the humbler classes of his colonists. He wished to form a Canadian noblesse, to which end early marriages were thought needful among officers and others of the better sort. The progress of such marriages was carefully watched and reported by the intendant. We have seen the reward bestowed upon La Motte for taking to himself a wife, and the money set apart for the brother officers who imitated him. In his despatch of October, 1667, the intendant announces that two captains are already married to two damsels of the country; that a lieutenant has espoused a daughter of the governor of Three Rivers; and that “four ensigns are in treaty with their mistresses, and are already half engaged.” ** The paternal care of government, one would think, could scarcely go further. It did, however, go further. Bounties were offered on children. The king, in council, passed a decree “that in future all inhabitants of the said country of Canada who shall have living children to the number of ten, born in lawful wedlock, not * Histoire du Montréal, A.B. 1671, 1672. ** “Quatre enseignes sont en pourparler avec leurs ma?tresses et sent déjà à demi engagés.” Dépêche du 27 Oct., 1667. The lieutenant was René Gaultier de Varennes, who on the 26th September, 1667, married Marie Boucher, daughter of the governor of Three Rivers, aged twelve years. One of the children of this marriage was Varennes de la Vérendrye, discoverer of the Rocky Mountains. being priests, monks, or nuns, shall each be paid out of the moneys sent by his Majesty to the said country a pension of three hundred livres a year, and those who shall have twelve children, a pension of four hundred livres; and that, to this effect, they shall be required to declare the number of their children every year in the months of June or July to the intendant of justice, police, and finance, established in the said country, who, having verified the same, shall order the payment of said pensions, one-half in cash, and the other half at the end of each year.” * This was applicable to all. Colbert had before offered a reward, intended specially for the better class, of twelve hundred livres to those who had fifteen children, and eight hundred to those who had ten. These wise encouragements, as the worthy Faillon calls them, were crowned with the desired result. A despatch of Talon in 1670 informs the minister that most of the young women sent out last summer are pregnant already, and in 1671 he announces that from six hundred to seven hundred children have been born in the colony during the year; a prodigious number in view of the small population. The climate was supposed to be particularly favorable to the health of women, which * Edits et Ordonnances, I. 67. It was thought at this time that the Indians, mingled with the French, might become a valuable part of the population. The reproductive qualities of Indian women, therefore, became an object of Talon’s attention, and he reports that they impair their fertility by nursing their children longer than is necessary; “but,” he adds, “this obstacle to the speedy building up of the colony can be overcome by a police regulation.” Mémoire sur l’Etat Présent du Canada, 1667, is somewhat surprising in view of recent American experience. “The first reflection I have to make,” says Dollier de Casson, “is on the advantage that women have in this place (Montreal) over men, for though the cold is very wholesome to both sexes, it is incomparably more so to the female, who is almost immortal here.” Her fecundity matched her longevity, and was the admiration of Talon and his successors, accustomed as they were to the scanty families of France. Why with this great natural increase joined to an immigration which, though greatly diminishing, did not entirely cease, was there not a corresponding increase in the population of the colony? Why, more than half a century after the king took Canada in charge, did the census show a total of less than twenty-five thousand souls? The reasons will appear hereafter. It is a peculiarity of Canadian immigration, at this its most flourishing epoch, that it was mainly an immigration of single men and single women. The cases in which entire families came over were comparatively few. * The new settler was found * The principal emigration of families seems to have been in 1669 when, at the urgency of Talon, then in France, a considerable number were sent out. In the earlier period the emigration of families was, relatively, much greater. Thus, in 1634, the physician Giffard brought over seven to people his seigniory of Beauport. Before 1663, when the king took the colony in hand, the emigrants were for the most part apprenticed laborers. The zeal with which the king entered into the work of stocking his colony is shown by numberless passages in his letters, and those of his minister. “The end and the rule of all your conduct,” says Colbert to the intendant Bouteroue, “should be the increase of the colony; and on this point you should never be satisfied, but labor without ceasing to find every imaginable expedient for preserving the inhabitants, attracting new ones, and multiplying them by marriage.” Instruction pour M. Bouteroue, 1668. by the king; sent over by the king; and supplied by the king with a wife, a farm, and sometimes with a house. Well did Louis XIV. earn the title of Father of New France. But the royal zeal was spasmodic. The king was diverted to other cares, and soon after the outbreak of the Dutch war in 1672 the regular despatch of emigrants to Canada wellnigh ceased; though the practice of disbanding soldiers in the colony, giving them lands, and turning them into settlers, was continued in some degree, even to the last. CHAPTER XIV. 1665-1672. THE NEW HOME. Military Frontier.—The Canadian Settler.—Seignior and Vassal.—Example of Talon.—Plan of Settlement.—Aspect of Canada.—Quebec.—The River Settlements.—Montreal.—The Pioneers. We have seen the settler landed and married; let us follow him to his new home. At the end of Talon’s administration, the head of the colony, that is to say the island of Montreal and the borders of the Richelieu, was the seat of a peculiar colonization, the chief object of which was to protect the rest of Canada against Iroquois incursions. The lands along the Richelieu, from its mouth to a point above Chambly, were divided in large seigniorial grants among several officers of the regiment of Carignan, who in their turn granted out the land to the soldiers, reserving a sufficient portion as their own. The officer thus became a kind of feudal chief, and the whole settlement a permanent military cantonment admirably suited to the object in view. The disbanded soldier was practically a soldier still, but he was also a farmer and a landholder. Talon had recommended this plan as being in accordance with the example of the Romans. “The practice of that politic and martial people,” he wrote, “may, in my opinion, be wisely adopted in a country a thousand leagues distant from its monarch. And as the peace and harmony of peoples depend above all things on their fidelity to their sovereign, our first kings, better statesmen than is commonly supposed, introduced into newly conquered countries men of war, of approved trust, in order at once to hold the inhabitants to their duty within, and repel the enemy from without.” * The troops were accordingly discharged, and settled not alone on the Richelieu, but also along the St. Lawrence, between Lake St. Peter and Montreal, as well as at some other points. The Sulpitians, feudal owners of Montreal, adopted a similar policy, and surrounded their island with a border of fiefs large and small, granted partly to officers and partly to humbler settlers, bold, hardy, and practised in bush-fighting. Thus a line of sentinels was posted around their entire shore, ready to give the alarm whenever an enemy appeared. About Quebec the settlements, covered as they were by those above, were for the most part of a more pacific character. To return to the Richelieu. The towns and villages which have since grown upon its banks and along the adjacent shores of the St. Lawrence owe their names to these officers of Carignan, ancient lords of the soil: Sorel, Chambly, Saint Ours, * Projets de Réglemens, 1667 (see Edits et Ordonnances, II. 29). Contrec?ur, Yarennes, Verchères. Yet let it not be supposed that villages sprang up at once. The military seignior, valiant and poor as Walter the Penniless, was in no condition to work such magic. His personal possessions usually consisted of little but his sword and the money which the king had paid him for marrying a wife. A domain varying from half a league to six leagues in front on the river, and from half a league to two leagues in depth, had been freely given him. When he had distributed a part of it in allotments to the soldiers, a variety of tasks awaited him: to clear and cultivate his land; to build his seigniorial mansion, often a log hut; to build a fort; to build a chapel; and to build a mill. To do all this at once was impossible. Chambly, the chief proprietor on the Richelieu, was better able than the others to meet the exigency. He built himself a good house, where, with cattle and sheep furnished by the king, he lived in reasonable comfort. * The king’s fort, close at hand, spared him and his tenants the necessity of building one for themselves, and furnished, no doubt, a mill, a chapel, and a chaplain. His brother officers, Sorel excepted, were less fortunate. They and their tenants were forced to provide defence as well as shelter. Their houses were all built together, and surrounded by a palisade, so as to form a little fortified village. The ever-active benevolence of the king had aided them in the task, for the soldiers were still maintained by him * Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672. Marie de l’Incarnation speaks of these officers on the Richelieu as très honnêtes gens. while clearing the lands and building the houses destined to be their own; nor was it till this work was done that the provident government despatched them to Quebec with orders to bring back wives. The settler, thus lodged and wedded, was required on his part to aid in clearing lands for those who should come after him. * It was chiefly in the more exposed parts of the colony, that the houses were gathered together in palisaded villages, thus forcing the settler to walk or paddle some distance to his farm. He naturally preferred to build when he could on the front of his farm itself, near the river, which supplied the place of a road. As the grants of land were very narrow, his house was not far from that of his next neighbor, and thus a line of dwellings was ranged along the shore, forming what in local language was called a c?te, a use of the word peculiar to Canada, where it still prevails. The impoverished seignior rarely built a chapel. Most of the early Canadian churches were built with funds furnished by the seminaries of Quebec or of Montreal, aided by contributions of material and labor from the parishioners. ** Meanwhile mass was said in some house of the neighborhood by * “Sa Majesté semble prétendre faire la dépense entière pour former le commencement des habitations par l’abattis du bois, la culture et semence de deux arpens de terre, l’avance de quelques farines aux familles venantes,” etc., etc. Projets de Réglemens, 1667. This applied to civil and military settlers alike. The established settler was allowed four years to clear two arpents of land for a new-comer. The soldiers were maintained by the king during a year, while preparing their farms and houses. Talon asks that two years more be given them. Talon au Roy. 10 Nov., 1670 ** La Tour, Vie de Laval, chap. x. a missionary priest, paddling his canoe from village to village, or from c?te to c?te. The mill was an object of the last importance. It was built of stone and pierced with loopholes, to serve as a blockhouse in case of attack. The great mill at Montreal was one of the chief defences of the place. It was at once the duty and the right of the seignior to supply his tenants, or rather vassals, with this essential requisite, and they on their part were required to grind their grain at his mill, leaving the fourteenth part in payment. But for many years there was not a seigniory in Canada, where this fraction would pay the wages of a miller and, except the ecclesiastical corporations, there were few seigniors who could pay the cost of building. The first settlers were usually forced to grind for themselves after the tedious fashion of the Indians. Talon, in his capacity of counsellor, friend, and father to all Canada, arranged the new settlements near Quebec in the manner which he judged best, and which he meant to serve as an example to the rest of the colony. It was his aim to concentrate population around this point, so that, should an enemy appear, the sound of a cannon-shot from the Chateau St. Louis might summon a numerous body of defenders to this the common point of rendezvous. * He bought a tract of land near Quebec, laid it out, and settled it as a model seigniory, hoping, as he says, to kindle a spirit of emulation among the new-made seigniors to whom he * Projets de Réglemens, 1667. had granted lands from the king. He also laid out at the royal cost three villages in the immediate neighborhood, planning them with great care, and peopling them partly with families newly arrived, partly with soldiers, and partly with old settlers, in order that the new-comers might take lessons from the experience of these veterans. That each village might be complete in itself, he furnished it as well as he could with the needful carpenter, mason, blacksmith, and shoemaker. These inland villages, called respectively Bourg Royal, Bourg la Reine, and Bourg Talon, did not prove very thrifty. * Wherever the settlers were allowed to choose for themselves, they ranged their dwellings along the watercourses. With the exception of Talon’s villages, one could have seen nearly every house in Canada, by paddling a canoe up the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu. The settlements formed long thin lines on the edges of the rivers; a convenient arrangement, but one very unfavorable to defence, to ecclesiastical control, and to strong government. The king soon discovered this; and repeated orders were sent to concentrate the inhabitants and form Canada into villages, instead of c?tes. To do so would have involved a general revocation of grants and abandonment of houses and clearings, a measure too arbitrary and too wasteful, even for Louis XIV., and one extremely difficult to enforce. Canada persisted in attenuating herself, and the royal will was foiled. * In 1672, the king, as a mark of honor, attached these villages to Talon’s seigniory. Documents on Seigniorial Tenure. As you ascended the St. Lawrence, the first harboring place of civilization was Tadoussao, at the mouth of the Saguenay, where the company had its trading station, where its agents ruled supreme, and where, in early summer, all was alive with canoes and wigwams, and troops of Montagnais savages, bringing their furs to market. Leave Tadoussac behind, and, embarked in a sailboat or a canoe, follow the northern coast. Far on the left, twenty miles away, the southern shore lies pale and dim, and mountain ranges wave their faint outline along the sky. You pass the beetling rocks of Mai Bay, a solitude but for the bark hut of some wandering Indian beneath the cliff; the Eboulements with their wild romantic gorge, and foaming waterfalls; and the Bay of St. Paul with its broad valley and its woody mountains, rich with hidden stores of iron. Vast piles of savage verdure border the mighty stream, till at length the mountain of Cape Tourmente upheaves its huge bulk from the bosom of the water, shadowed by lowering clouds, and dark with forests. Just beyond, begin the settlements of Laval’s vast seigniory of Beaupré, which had not been forgotten in the distribution of emigrants, and which, in 1667, contained more inhabitants than Quebec itself. * The ribbon of rich meadow land that borders that beautiful shore, was yellow with wheat * The census of 1667 gives to Quebec only 448 souls; C?te de Beaupré, 656; Beauport, 123; Island of Orleans, 529; other settlements included under the government of Quebec, 1,011; C?te de Lauzon (south shore), 113; Trois Rivières and its dependencies, 666; Montreal, 766. Both Beaupré and Isle d’Orleans belonged at this time to the bishop. in harvest time, and on the woody slopes behind, the frequent clearings and the solid little dwellings of logs continued for a long distance to relieve the sameness of the forest. After passing the cataract af Montmorenci, there was another settlement, much smaller, at Beauport, the seigniory of the ex-physician Giffard, one of the earliest proprietors in Canada. The neighboring shores of the island of Orleans were also edged with houses and clearings. The promontory of Quebec now towered full in sight, crowned with church, fort, chateau, convents, and seminary. There was little else on the rock. Priests, nuns, government officials, and soldiers, were the denizens of the Upper Town; while commerce and the trades were cabined along the strand beneath. * From the gallery of the chateau, you might toss a pebble far down on their shingled roofs. In the midst of them was the magazine of the company, with its two round towers and two projecting wings. It was here that all the beaver-skins of the colony were collected, assorted, and shipped for France. The so-called chateau St. Louis was an indifferent wooden structure planted on a site truly superb; above the Lower Town, above the river, above the ships, gazing abroad on a majestic panorama of waters, forests, and mountains. ** Behind it was the area of the fort, of which it formed one side. The * According to Juchereau, there were seventy houses at Quebec about the time of Tracy’s arrival. ** In 1660, an exact inventory was taken of the contents of the fort and chateau; a beggarly account of rubbish. The chateau was then a long low building roofed with shingles. governor lived in the chateau, and soldiers were on guard night and day in the fort. At some little distance was the convent of the Ursulines, ugly but substantial, * where Mother Mary of the Incarnation ruled her pupils and her nuns; and a little further on, towards the right, was the H?tel Dieu. Between them were the massive buildings of the Jesuits, then as now facing the principal square. At one side was their church, newly finished; and opposite, across the square, stood and still stands the great church of Notre Dame. Behind the church was Laval’s seminary, with the extensive enclosures belonging to it. The sénéchaussée or court-house, the tavern of one Jacques Boisdon on the square near the church, and a few houses along the line of what is now St. Louis Street, comprised nearly all the civil part of the Upper Town. The ecclesiastical buildings were of stone, and the church of Notre Dame and the Jesuit College were marvels of size and solidity in view of the poverty and weakness of the colony. ** Proceeding upward along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, one found a cluster of houses at Cap Rouge, and, further on, the frequent rude beginnings of a seigniory. The settlements thickened on * There is an engraving of it in Abbé Casgrain’s interesting Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation. It was burned in 1686. ** The first stone of Notre Dame de Quebec was laid in September, 1647, and the first mass was said in it on the 24th of December, 1650. The side walls still remain as part of the present structure. The Jesuit college was also begun in 1647. The walls and roof were finished in 1649. The church connected with it, since destroyed, was begun in 1666. Journal des Jésuites. approaching Three Rivers, a fur-trading hamlet enclosed with a square palisade. Above this place, a line of incipient seigniories bordered the river, most of them granted to officers: Laubia, a captain; Labadie, a sergeant; Moras, an ensign; Berthier, a captain; Raudin, an ensign; La Valterie, a lieutenant. * Under their auspices, settlers, military and civilian, were ranging themselves along the shore, and ugly gaps in the forest thickly set with stumps bore witness to their toils. These settlements rapidly extended, till in a few years a chain of houses and clearings reached with little interruption from Quebec to Montreal. Such was the fruit of Tracy’s chastisement of the Mohawks, and the influx of immigrants that followed. As you approached Montreal, the fortified mill built by the Sulpitians at Point aux Trembles towered above the woods; and soon after the newly built chapel of the Infant Jesus. More settlements followed, till at length the great fortified mill of Montreal rose in sight; then the long row of compact wooden houses, the H?tel Dieu, and the rough masonry of the seminary of St. Sulpice. Beyond the town, the clearings continued at intervals till you reached Lake St. Louis, where young Cavelier de la Salle had laid out his seigniory of La Chine, and abandoned it to begin his hard career of western exploration. Above the island of Montreal, * Documents on the Seigniorial Tenure; Abstracts of Titles. Most of these grants, like those on the Richelieu, were made by Talon in 1672; but the land had, in many cases, been occupied and cleared in anticipation of the title. the wilderness was broken only by a solitary trading station on the neighboring Isle Perot. Now cross Lake St. Louis, shoot the rapids of La Chine, and follow the southern shore downward. Here the seigniories of Longueuil, Boucherville, Yarennes, Verchères, and Contrecoeur were already begun. From the fort of Sorel one could visit the military seigniories along the Richelieu or descend towards Quebec, passing on the way those of Lussaudière, Becancour, Lobinière, and others still in a shapeless infancy. Even far below Quebec, at St. Anne de la Pocatière, River Ouelle, and other points, cabins and clearings greeted the eye of the passing canoeman. For a year or two, the settler’s initiation was a rough one; but when he had a few acres under tillage he could support himself and his family on the produce, aided by hunting, if he knew how to use a gun, and by the bountiful profusion of eels which the St. Lawrence never failed to yield in their season, and which, smoked or salted, supplied his larder for months. In winter he hewed timber, sawed planks, or split shingles for the market of Quebec, obtaining in return such necessaries as he required. With thrift and hard work he was sure of comfort at last; but the former habits of the military settlers and of many of the others were not favorable to a routine of dogged industry. The sameness and solitude of their new life often became insufferable; nor, married as they had been, was the domestic hearth likely to supply much consolation. Yet, thrifty or not, they multiplied apace. “A poor man,” says Mother Mary, “will have eight children and more, who run about in winter with bare heads and bare feet, and a little jacket on their backs, live on nothing but bread and eels, and on that grow fat and stout.” With such treatment the weaker sort died; but the strong survived, and out of this rugged nursing sprang the hardy Canadian race of bush-rangers and bush-fighters. CHAPTER XV 1663-1763. CANADIAN FEUDALISM. Transplantation Of Feudalism.—Precautions.—Faith And Hope —Age.—The Seignior.—The Censitaire.—Royal Intervention.—The Gentilhomme.—Canadian Noblesse. Canadian society was beginning to form itself, and at its base was the feudal tenure. European feudalism was the indigenous and natural growth of political and social conditions which preceded it. Canadian feudalism was an offshoot of the feudalism of France, modified by the lapse of centuries, and further modified by the royal will. In France, as in the rest of Europe, the system had lost its vitality. The warrior-nobles who placed Hugh Capet on the throne, and began the feudal monarchy, formed an aristocratic republic, and the king was one of their number, whom they chose to be their chief. But, through the struggles and vicissitudes of many succeeding reigns, royalty had waxed and oligarchy had waned. The fact had changed and the theory had changed with it. The king, once powerless among a host of turbulent nobles, was now a king indeed. Once a chief, because his equals had made him so, he was now the anointed of the Lord. This triumph of royalty had culminated in Louis XIV. The stormy energies and bold individualism of the old feudal nobles had ceased to exist. They who had held his predecessors in awe had become his obsequious servants. He no longer feared his nobles; he prized them as gorgeous decorations of his court, and satellites of his royal person. It was Richelieu who first planted feudalism in Canada. * The king would preserve it there, because with its teeth drawn he was fond of it, and because, as the feudal tenure prevailed in Old France, it was natural that it should prevail also in the New. But he continued as Richelieu had begun, and moulded it to the form that pleased him. Nothing was left which could threaten his absolute and undivided authority over the colony. In France, a multitude of privileges and prescriptions still clung, despite its fall, about the ancient ruling class. Few of these were allowed to cross the Atlantic, while the old, lingering abuses, which had made the system odious, were at the same time lopped away. Thus retrenched, Canadian feudalism was made to serve a double end; to produce a faint and harmless reflection of French aristocracy, and simply and practically to supply agencies for distributing land among the settlers. The nature of the precautions which it was held to require appear in the plan of administration which Talon and Tracy laid before the minister. * By the charter of the Company of the Hundred Associates, 1627. They urge that, in view of the distance from France, special care ought to be taken to prevent changes and revolutions, aristocratic or otherwise, in the colony, whereby in time sovereign jurisdictions might grow up, as formerly occurred in various parts of France. * And, in respect to grants already made, an inquiry was ordered, to ascertain “if seigniors in distributing lands to their vassals have exacted any conditions injurious to the rights of the Crown and the subjection due solely to the king.” In the same view the seignior was denied any voice whatever in the direction of government; and it is scarcely necessary to say that the essential feature of feudalism in the day of its vitality, the requirement of military service by the lord from the vassal, was utterly unknown in Canada. The royal governor called out the militia whenever he saw fit, and set over it what officers he pleased. The seignior was usually the immediate vassal of the Crown, from which he had received his land gratuitously. In a few cases, he made grants to other seigniors inferior in the feudal scale, and they, his vassals, granted in turn to their vassals, the habitants or cultivators of the soil. ** Sometimes * Projet de Réglement fait par MM. de Tracy et Talon pour la justice et la distribution des terres du Canada, Jan. 24, 1667. ** Most of the seigniories of Canada were simple fiefs; but there were some exceptions. In 1671, the king, as a mark of honor to Talon, erected his seigniory Des Islets into a barony; and it was soon afterwards made an earldom, comté. In 1676, the seigniory of St. Laurent, on the island of Orleans, once the property of Laval, and then belonging to Fran?ois Berthelot, councillor of the king, was erected into an earldom. In 1681, the seigniory of Portneuf, belonging to Réné Robineau, chevalier, was made a barony. In 1700, three seigniories on the south side of the St. Lawrence were united into the barony of Lcngueuil. See Papers on the Feudal Tenure in Canada, Abstract of Titles. the habitant held directly of the Crown, in which case there was no step between the highest and lowest degrees of the feudal scale. The seignior held by the tenure of faith and homage, the habitant by the inferior tenure en censive. Faith and homage were rendered to the Crown or other feudal superior whenever the seigniory changed hands, or, in the case of seigniories held by corporations, after long stated intervals. The following is an example, drawn from the early days of the colony, of the performance of this ceremony by the owner of a fief to the seignior who had granted it to him. It is that of Jean Guion, vassal of Giffard, seignior of Beauport. The act recounts how, in presence of a notary, Guion presented himself at the principal door of the manor-house of Beauport; how, having knocked, one Boullé, farmer of Giffard, opened the door, and in reply to Guion’s question if the seignior was at home, replied that he was not, but that he, Boullé, was empowered to receive acknowledgments of faith and homage from the vassals in his name. “After the which reply,” proceeds the act, the said Guion, being at the principal door, placed himself on his knees on the ground, with head bare, and without sword or spurs, and said three times these words: “Monsieur de Beauport, Monsieur de Beauport, Monsieur de Beauport, I bring you the faith and homage which I am bound to bring you on account of my fief Du Buisson, which I hold as a man of faith of your seigniory of Beauport, declaring that I offer to pay my seigniorial and feudal dues in their season, and demanding of you to accept me in faith and homage as aforesaid.” * 2019 Jean Guion before Monsieur de Beauport The following instance is the more common one of a seignior holding directly of the Crown. It is widely separated from the first in point of time, having occurred a year after the army of Wolfe entered Quebec. Philippe No?l had lately died, and Jean No?l, his son, inherited his seigniory of Tilly and Bonsecours. To make the title good, faith and homage must be renewed. Jean No?l was under the bitter necessity of rendering this duty to General Murray, governor for the king of Great Britain. The form is the same as in the case of Guion, more than a century before. No?l repairs to the Government House at Quebec, and knocks at the door. A servant opens it. No?l asks if the governor is there. The servant replies that he is. Murray, informed of the visitor’s object, comes to the door, and No?l then and there, “without sword or spurs, with bare head, and one knee on the ground,” repeats the acknowledgment of faith and homage for his seigniory. He was compelled, however, to add a detested innovation, the oath of fidelity to his Britannic Majesty, coupled with a pledge to keep his vassals in obedience to the new sovereign. ** The seignior was a proprietor holding that relation to the feudal superior which, in its pristine * Ferland, Notes sur les Registres de Notre Dame de Québec, 65. This was a fief en roture, as distinguished from a fief noble, to which judicial powers and other privileges were attached. ** See the act in Observations de Sir L. H. Lafontaine, Bart., sur la Tenure Seignetiriale, 217, note. character, has been truly described as servile in form, proud and bold in spirit. But in Canada this bold spirit was very far from being strengthened by the changes which the policy of the Crown had introduced into the system. The reservation of mines and minerals, oaks for the royal navy, roadways, and a site, if needed, for royal forts and magazines, had in it nothing extraordinary. The great difference between the position of the Canadian seignior and that of the vassal proprietor of the Middle Ages lay in the extent and nature of the control which the Crown and its officers held over him. A decree of the king, an edict of the council, or an ordinance of the intendant, might at any moment change old conditions, impose new ones, interfere between the lord of the manor and his grantees, and modify or annul his bargains, past or present. He was never sure whether or not the government would let him alone; and against its most arbitrary intervention he had no remedy. One condition was imposed on him which may be said to form the distinctive feature of Canadian feudalism; that of clearing his land within a limited time on pain of forfeiting it. The object was the excellent one of preventing the lands of the colony from lying waste. As the seignior was often the penniless owner of a domain three or four leagues wide and proportionably deep, he could not clear it all himself, and was therefore under the necessity of placing the greater part in the hands of those who could. But he was forbidden to sell any part of it which he had not cleared. He must grant it without price, on condition of a small perpetual rent; and this brings us to the cultivator of the soil, the censitaire, the broad base of the feudal pyramid. * The tenure en censive by which the censitaire held of the seignior consisted in the obligation to make annual payments in money, produce, or both. In Canada these payments, known as cens et rente, were strangely diverse in amount and kind; but, in all the early period of the colony, they were almost ludicrously small. A common charge at Montreal was half a sou and half a pint of wheat for each arpent. The rate usually fluctuated in the early times between half a sou and two sous, so that a farm of a hundred and sixty arpents would pay from four to sixteen francs, of which a part would be in money and the rest in live capons, wheat, eggs, or all three together, in pursuance of contracts as amusing in their precision as they are bewildering in their variety. Live capons, * The greater part of the grants made by the old Company of New France were resumed by the Crown for neglect to occupy and improve the land, which was granted out anew under the administration of Talon. The most remarkable of these forfeited grants is that of the vast domain of La Citière, large enough for a kingdom. Lauson, afterwards governor, had obtained it from the company, but had failed to improve it. Two or three sub-grants which he had made from it were held valid; the rest was reunited to the royal domain. On repeated occasions at later dates, negligent seigniors were threatened with the loss of half or the whole of their land, and various cases are recorded in which the threat took effect. In 1741, an ordinance of the governor and intendant reunited to the royal domain seventeen seigniories at one stroke; but the former owners were told that if within a year they cleared and settled a reasonable part of the forfeited estates, the titles should be restored to them. Edits et Ordonnances, II. 555. In the case of the habitant or censitaire forfeitures for neglect to improve the land and live on it are very numerous. estimated at twenty sous each, though sometimes not worth ten, form a conspicuous feature in these agreements, so that on pay-day the seignior’s barnyard presented an animated scene. Later in the history of the colony grants were at somewhat higher rates. Payment was commonly made on St. Martin’s day, when there was a general muster of tenants at the seigniorial mansion, with a prodigious consumption of tobacco and a corresponding retail of neighborhood gossip, joined to the outcries of the captive fowls bundled together for delivery, with legs tied, but throats at full liberty. A more considerable but a very uncertain source of income to the seignior were the lods et ventes, or mutation fines. The land of the censitaire passed freely to his heirs; but if he sold it, a twelfth part of the purchase-money must be paid to the seignior. The seignior, on his part, was equally liable to pay a mutation fine to his feudal superior if he sold his seigniory; and for him the amount was larger, being a quint, or a fifth of the price received, of which, however, the greater part was deducted for immediate payment. This heavy charge, constituting, as it did, a tax on all improvements, was a principal cause of the abolition of the feudal tenure in 1854. The obligation of clearing his land and living on it was laid on seignior and censitaire alike; but the latter was under a variety of other obligations to the former, partly imposed by custom and partly established by agreement when the grant was made. To grind his grain at the seignior’s mill, bake his bread in the seignior’s oven, work for him one or more days in the year, and give him one fish in every eleven, for the privilege of fishing in the river before his farm; these were the most annoying of the conditions to which the censitaire was liable. Few of them were enforced with much regularity. That of baking in the seignior’s oven was rarely carried into effect, though occasionally used for purposes of extortion. It is here that the royal government appears in its true character, so far as concerns its relations with Canada, that of a well-meaning despotism. It continually intervened between censitaire and seignior, on the principle that “as his Majesty gives the land for nothing, he can make what conditions he pleases, and change them when he pleases.” * These interventions were usually favorable to the censitaire. On one occasion an intendant reported to the minister, that in his opinion all rents ought to be reduced to one sou and one live capon for every arpent of front, equal in most cases to forty superficial arpents. ** Every thing, he remarks, ought to be brought down to the level of the first grants “made in days of innocence,” a happy period which he does not attempt to define. The minister replies that the diversity of the rent is, in fact, vexatious, and that, for his part, he is disposed to abolish it altogether. *** Neither he nor the intendant gives the slightest hint of any compensation * This doctrine is laid down in a letter of the Marquis de Beauharnois, governor, to the minister, 1734. ** Lettre de Raudot, père, au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1707. *** Lettre de Ponchartrain à Raudot, père, 13 Juin, 1708. to the seignior. Though these radical measures were not executed, many changes were decreed from time to time in the relations between seignior and censitaire, sometimes as a simple act of sovereign power, and sometimes on the ground that the grants had been made with conditions not recognized by the Coutume de Paris. This was the code of law assigned to Canada; but most of the contracts between seignior and censitaire had been agreed upon in good faith by men who knew as much of the Coutume de Paris as of the Capitularies of Charlemagne, and their conditions had remained in force unchallenged for generations. These interventions of government sometimes contradicted each other, and often proved a dead letter. They are more or less active through the whole period of the French rule. The seignior had judicial powers, which, however, were carefully curbed and controlled. His jurisdiction, when exercised at all, extended in most cases only to trivial causes. He very rarely had a prison, and seems never to have abused it. The dignity of a seigniorial gallows with high justice or jurisdiction over heinous offences was granted only in three or four instances. * Four arpents in front by forty in depth were the ordinary dimensions of a grant en censive. These ribbons of land, nearly a mile and a half long, with one end on the river and the other on * Baronies and comtés were empowered to set up gallows and pillories, to which the arms of the owner were affixed. See, for example, the edict creating the Barony des Islets. the uplands behind, usually combined the advantages of meadows for cultivation, and forests for timber and firewood. So long as the censitaire brought in on St. Martin’s day his yearly capons and his yearly handful of copper, his title against the seignior was perfect. There are farms in Canada which have passed from father to son for two hundred years. The condition of the cultivator was incomparably better than that of the French peasant, crushed by taxes, and oppressed by feudal burdens far heavier than those of Canada. In fact, the Canadian settler scorned the name of peasant, and then, as now, was always called the habitant. The government held him in wardship, watched over him, interfered with him, but did not oppress him or allow others to oppress him. Canada was not governed to the profit of a class, and if the king wished to create a Canadian noblesse he took care that it should not bear hard on the country. * Under a genuine feudalism, the ownership of land conferred nobility; but all this was changed. The king and not the soil was now the parent of honor. France swarmed with landless nobles, while roturier land-holders grew daily more numerous. In Canada half the seigniories were in roturier or plebeian hands, and in course of time some of them * On the seigniorial tenure, I have examined the whole of the mass of papers printed at the time when the question of its abolition was under discussion. A great deal of legal research and learning was then devoted to the subject. The argument of Mr. Dunkin in behalf of the seigniors, and the observations of Judge Lafontaine, are especially instructive, as is also the collected correspondence of the governors and intendants with the central government on matters relating to the seigniorial system. came into possession of persons on very humble degrees of the social scale. A seigniory could be bought and sold, and a trader or a thrifty habitant might, and often did become the buyer. * If the Canadian noble was always a seignior, it is far from being true that the Canadian seignior was always a noble. In France, it will be remembered, nobility did not in itself imply a title. Besides its titled leaders, it had its rank and file, numerous enough to form a considerable army. Under the later Bourbons, the penniless young nobles were, in fact, enrolled into regiments, turbulent, difficult to control, obeying officers of high rank, but scorning all others, and conspicuous by a fiery and impetuous valor which on more than one occasion turned the tide of victory. The gentilhomme, or untitled noble, had a distinctive character of his own, gallant, punctilious, vain; skilled in social and sometimes in literary and artistic accomplishments, but usually ignorant of most things except the handling of his rapier. Yet there were striking exceptions; and to say of him, as has been said, that “he knew nothing but how to get himself killed,” is hardly just to a body which has produced some of the best writers and thinkers of France. Sometimes the origin of his nobility was lost in * In 1712, the engineer Catalogne made a very long and elaborate report on the condition of Canada, with a full account of all the seigniorial estates. Of ninety-one seigniories, fiefs, and baronies, described by him, ten belonged to merchants, twelve to husbandmen, and two to masters of small river craft. The rest belonged to religious corporations, members of the council, judges, officials of the Crown, widows, and discharged officers or their sons. the mists of time; sometimes he owed it to a patent from the king. In either case, the line of demarcation between him and the classes below him was perfectly distinct; and in this lies an essential difference between the French noblesse and the English gentry, a class not separated from others by a definite barrier. The French noblesse, unlike the English gentry, constituted a caste. The gentilhomme had no vocation for emigrating. He liked the army and he liked the court. If he could not be of it, it was something to live in its shadow. The life of a backwoods settler had no charm for him. He was not used to labor; and he could not trade, at least in retail, without becoming liable to forfeit his nobility. When Talon came to Canada, there were but four noble families in the colony. * Young nobles in abundance came out with Tracy; but they went home with him. Where, then, should be found the material of a Canadian noblesse? First, in the regiment of Carignan, of which most of the officers were gentilshommes; secondly, in the issue of patents of nobility to a few of the more prominent colonists. Tracy asked for four such patents; Talon asked for five more; ** and such requests were repeated at intervals by succeeding governors and intendants, in behalf of those who had gained their favor by merit or otherwise. Money smoothed the path. * Talon, Mémoire sur l'Etat présent du Canada, 1667. The families of Repentigny, Tilly, Poterie, and Aillebout appear to be meant. ** Tracy’s request was in behalf of Bourdon, Boucher, Auteuil, and Juchereau. Talon’s was in behalf of Godefroy, Le Moyne, Denis, Amiot, and Couillard to advancement, so far had noblesse already fallen from its old estate. Thus Jacques Le Ber, the merchant, who had long kept a shop at Montreal, got himself made a gentleman for six thousand livres. * All Canada soon became infatuated with noblesse; and country and town, merchant and seignior, vied with each other for the quality of gentilhomme. If they could not get it, they often pretended to have it, and aped its ways with the zeal of Monsieur Jourdain himself. “Everybody here,” writes the intendant Meules, “calls himself Esquire, and ends with thinking himself a gentleman.” Successive intendants repeat this complaint. The case was worst with roturiers who had acquired seigniories. Thus Noel Langlois was a good carpenter till he became owner of a seigniory, on which he grew lazy and affected to play the gentleman. The real gentilshommes, as well as the spurious, had their full share of official stricture. The governor Denonville speaks of them thus: “Several of them have come out this year with their wives, who are very much cast down; but they play the fine lady, nevertheless. I had much rather see good peasants; it would be a pleasure to me to give aid to such, knowing, as I should, that within two years their families would have the means of living at ease; for it is certain that a peasant who can and will work is well off in this country, while our nobles with nothing to do can never be any thing but beggars. Still they ought not to be * Faillon, Vie de Mademoiselle Le Ber, 325. driven off or abandoned. The question is how to maintain them.” * The intendant Duchesneau writes to the same effect: “Many of our gentilshommes, officers, and other owners of seigniories, lead what in France is called the life of a country gentleman, and spend most of their time in hunting and fishing. As their requirements in food and clothing are greater than those of the simple habitants, and as they do not devote themselves to improving their land, they mix themselves up in trade, run in debt on all hands, incite their young habitants to range the woods, and send their own children there to trade for furs in the Indian villages and in the depths of the forest, in spite of the prohibition of his Majesty. Yet, with all this, they are in miserable poverty.” ** Their condition, indeed, was often deplorable. “It is pitiful,” says the intendant Champigny, “to see their children, of which they have great numbers, passing all summer with nothing on them but a shirt, and their wives and daughters working in the fields.” *** In another letter he asks aid from the king for Repentigny with his thirteen children, and for Tilly with his fifteen. “We must give them some corn at once,” he says, “or they will starve.” **** These were two of the original four noble families of Canada. The family of Aillebout, another of the four, is described as equally destitute. “Pride and sloth,” says the same intendant, * Lettre de Denonville au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1686. ** Lettre de Duchesneau au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1679. *** Lettre de Champigny au Ministre, 26 Ao?t, 1687. **** Ibid., 6 Nov., 1687. “are the great faults of the people of Canada, and especially of the nobles and those who pretend to be such. I pray you grant no more letters of nobility, unless you want to multiply beggars.” * The governor Denonville is still more emphatic: “Above all things, monseigneur, permit me to say that the nobles of this new country are every thing that is most beggarly, and that to increase their number is to increase the number of do-nothings. A new country requires hard workers, who will handle the axe and mattock. The sons of our councillors are no more industrious than the nobles; and their only resource is to take to the woods, trade a little with the Indians, and, for the most part, fall into the disorders of which I have had the honor to inform you. I shall use all possible means to induce them to engage in regular commerce; but as our nobles and councillors are all very poor and weighed down with debt, they could not get credit for a single crown piece.” ** “Two days ago,” he writes in another letter, “Monsieur de Saint-Ours, a gentleman of Dauphiny, came to me to ask leave to go back to France in search of bread. He says that he will put his ten children into the charge of any who will give them a living, and that he himself will go into the army again. His wife and he are in despair; and yet they do what they can. I have seen two of his girls reaping grain and holding the plough. Other families are * Mémoire instructif sur le Canada, joint a la lettre de M. de Champigny du 10 May, 1691. ** Lettre de Denonville au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1685. in the same condition. They come to me with tears in their eyes. All our married officers are beggars; and I entreat you to send them aid. There is need that the king should provide support for their children, or else they will be tempted to go over to the English.” * Again he writes that the sons of the councillor D’Amours have been arrested as coureurs de bois, or outlaws in the bush; and that if the minister does not do something to help them, there is danger that all the sons of the noblesse, real or pretended, will turn bandits, since they have no other means of living. The king, dispenser of charity for all Canada, came promptly to the rescue. He granted an alms of a hundred crowns to each family, coupled with a warning to the recipients of his bounty that “their misery proceeds from their ambition to live as persons of quality and without labor.” ** At the same time, the minister announced that no more letters of nobility would be granted in Canada; adding, “to relieve the country of some of the children of those who are really noble, I send you (the governor) six commissions of Gardes de la Marine, and recommend you to take care not to give them to any who are not actually gentilshommes." The Garde de la Marine answered to the midshipman of the English or American service. As the six commissions could bring little relief to the crowd of needy youths, it was further ordained * Lettre de Denonville au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1686. (Condensed in the translation.) ** Abstract of Denonville’s Letters, and of the Minister’s Answers, in N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. 317, 318. that sons of nobles or persons living as such should be enrolled into companies at eight sous a day for those who should best conduct themselves, and six sous a day for the others. Nobles in Canada were also permitted to trade, even at retail, without derogating from their rank. * They had already assumed this right, without waiting for the royal license; but thus far it had profited them little. The gentilhomme was not a good shopkeeper, nor, as a rule, was the shop-keeper’s vocation very lucrative in Canada. The domestic trade of the colony was small; and all trade was exposed to such vicissitudes from the intervention of intendants, ministers, and councils, that at one time it was almost banished. At best, it was carried on under conditions auspicious to a favored few and withering to the rest. Even when most willing to work, the position of the gentilhomme was a painful one. Unless he could gain a post under the Crown, which was rarely the case, he was as complete a political cipher as the meanest habitant. His rents were practically nothing, and he had no capital to improve his seigniorial estate. By a peasant’s work he could gain a peasant’s living, and this was all. The prospect was not inspiring. His long initiation of misery was the natural result of his position and surroundings; and it is no matter of wonder that he threw himself into the only field of action which in time of peace was open to him. It was trade, but trade seasoned by adventure and * Lettre de Meules au Ministre, 1685. ennobled by danger; defiant of edict and ordinance, outlawed, conducted in arms among forests and savages,—in short, it was the Western fur trade. The tyro was likely to fail in it at first, but time and experience formed him to the work. On the Great Lakes, in the wastes of the Northwest, on the Mississippi and the plains beyond, we find the roving gentilhomme, chief of a gang of bushrangers, often his own habitants; sometimes proscribed by the government, sometimes leagued in contraband traffic with its highest officials, a hardy vidette of civilization, tracing unknown streams, piercing unknown forests, trading, fighting, negotiating, and building forts. Again we find him on the shores of Acadia or Maine, surrounded by Indian retainers, a menace and a terror to the neighboring English colonist. Saint-Castin, Du Lhut, La Durantaye, La Salle, La Motte-Cadillac, Iberville, Bienville, La Vérendrye, are names that stand conspicuous on the page of half-savage romance that refreshes the hard and practical annals of American colonization. But a more substantial debt is due to their memory. It was they, and such as they, who discovered the Ohio, explored the Mississippi to its mouth, discovered the Rocky Mountains, and founded Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Even in his earliest day, the gentilhomme was not always in the evil plight where we have found him. There were a few exceptions to the general misery, and the chief among them is that of the Le Moynes of Montreal. Charles Le Moyne, son of an innkeeper of Dieppe and founder of a family the most truly eminent in Canada, was a man of sterling qualities who had been long enough in the colony to learn how to live there. * Others learned the same lesson at a later day, adapted themselves to soil and situation, took root, grew, and became more Canadian than French. As population increased, their seigniories began to yield appreciable returns, and their reserved domains became worth cultivating. A future dawned upon them; they saw in hope their names, their seigniorial estates, their manor-houses, their tenantry, passing to their children and their children’s children. The beggared noble of the early time became a sturdy country gentleman; poor, but not wretched; ignorant of books, except possibly a few scraps of rusty Latin picked up in a Jesuit school; hardy as the hardiest woodsman, yet never forgetting his quality of gentilhomme; scrupulously wearing its badge, the sword, and copying as well as he could the fashions of the court, which glowed on his vision across the sea in all the effulgence of Versailles, and beamed with reflected ray from the chateau of Quebec. He was at home among his tenants, at home among the Indians, and never more at home than when, a gun in his hand and a crucifix on his breast, he took the war-path with a * Berthelot, proprietor of the comté of St. Laurent, and Robineau, of the barony of Portneuf, may also be mentioned as exceptionally prosperous. Of the younger Charles Le Moyne, afterwards Baron de Longueuil, Frontenac the governor says, “son fort et sa maison nous donnent une idée des chateaux de France fortifiez.” His fort was of Stone and flanked with four towers. It was nearly opposite Montreal, on the south shore. crew of painted savages and Frenchmen almost as wild, and pounced like a lynx from the forest on some lonely farm or outlying hamlet of New England. How New England hated him, let her records tell. The reddest blood streaks on her old annals mark the track of the Canadian gentil-homme. CHAPTER XVI. 1663-1763. THE RULERS OF CANADA. Nature Of The Government.—The Governor.—The Council, Courts and Judges.—The Intendant.—His Grievances.—Strong Government.—Sedition and Blasphemy.—Royal Bounty.—Defects and Abuses. The government of Canada was formed in its chief features after the government of a French province. Throughout France the past and the present stood side by side. The kingdom had a double administration; or rather, the shadow of the old administration and the substance of the new. The government of provinces had long been held by the high nobles, often kindred to the Crown; and hence, in former times, great perils had arisen, amounting during the civil wars to the danger of dismemberment. The high nobles were still governors of provinces; but here, as elsewhere, they had ceased to be dangerous. Titles, honors, and ceremonial they had in abundance; but they were deprived of real power. Close beside them was the royal intendant, an obscure figure, lost amid the vainglories of the feudal sunset, but in the name of the king holding the reins of government; a check and a spy on his gorgeous colleague. He was the king’s agent: of modest birth, springing from the legal class; owing his present to the king, and dependent on him for his future; learned in the law and trained to administration. It was by such instruments that the powerful centralization of the monarchy enforced itself throughout the kingdom, and, penetrating beneath the crust of old prescriptions, supplanted without seeming to supplant them. The courtier noble looked down in the pride of rank on the busy man in black at his side; but this man in black, with the troop of officials at his beck, controlled finance, the royal courts, public works, and all the administrative business of the province. The governor-general and the intendant of Canada answered to those of a French province. The governor, excepting in the earliest period of the colony, was a military noble; in most cases bearing a title and sometimes of high rank. The intendant, as in France, was usually drawn from the gens de robe, or legal class. * The mutual relations of the two officers were modified by the circumstances about them. The governor was superior in rank to the intendant; he commanded the troops, conducted relations with foreign colonies and Indian tribes, and took precedence on all occasions of ceremony. Unlike a provincial * The governor was styled in his commission, Gouverneur et Lieutenant-Général en Canada, Acadie, Isle de Terreneuve, et autres pays de la France Septentrionale; and the intendant, Intendant de la Justice, Police, et Finances in Canada, Acadie, Terreneuve, et autres pays de la France Septentrionale governor in France, he had great and substantial power, The king and the minister, his sole masters, were a thousand leagues distant, and he controlled the whole military force. If he abused his position, there was no remedy but in appeal to the court, which alone could hold him in check. There were local governors at Montreal and Three Rivers; but their power was carefully curbed, and they were forbidden to fine or imprison any person without authority from Quebec. * The intendant was virtually a spy on the governor-general, of whose proceedings and of every thing else that took place he was required to make report. Every year he wrote to the minister of state, one, two, three, or four letters, often forty or fifty pages long, filled with the secrets of the colony, political and personal, great and small, set forth with a minuteness often interesting, often instructive, and often excessively tedious. ** The governor, too, wrote letters of pitiless length; and each of the colleagues was jealous of the letters of the other. In truth, their relations to each other were so critical, and perfect harmony so rare, that they might almost be described as natural enemies. The court, it is certain, did not desire their perfect accord; nor, on the other hand, did it wish them to quarrel: it aimed to keep them on such terms * The Sulpitian seigniors of Montreal claimed the right of appointing their own local governor. This was denied by the court, and the excellent Sulpitian governor, Maisonneuve, was removed by De Tracy, to die in patient obscurity at Paris. Some concessions were afterwards made in favor of the Sulpitian claims. ** I have carefully read about two thousand pages of these letters. that, without deranging the machinery of administration, each should be a check on the other. * The governor, the intendant, and the supreme council or court, were absolute masters of Canada under the pleasure of the king. Legislative, judicial, and executive power, all centred in them. We have seen already the very unpromising beginnings of the supreme council. It had consisted at first of the governor, the bishop, and five councillors chosen by them. The intendant was soon added to form the ruling triumvirate; but the appointment of the councillors, the occasion of so many quarrels, was afterwards exercised by the king himself. ** Even the name of the council underwent a change in the interest of his autocracy, and he commanded that it should no longer be called the Supreme, but only the Superior Council. The same change had just been imposed on all the high tribunals of France. *** Under the shadow of the fleur-de-lis, the king alone was to be supreme. In 1675, the number of councillors was increased to seven, and in 1703 it was again increased to twelve; but the character of the council or court * The governor and intendant made frequent appeals to the court to settle questions arising between them. Several of these appeals are preserved. The king wrote replies on the margin of the paper, but they were usually too curt and general to satisfy either party. ** Déclaration du Roi du 16me Juin, 1703. Appointments were made by the king many years earlier. As they were always made on the recommendation of the governor and intendant, the practical effect of the change was merely to exclude the bishop from a share in them. The West India Company made the nominations during the ten years of its ascendancy. *** Cheruel, Administration Monarchique en France, II. 100. remained the same. It issued decrees for the civil, commercial, and financial government of the colony, and gave judgment in civil and criminal causes according to the royal ordinances and the Coutume de Paris. It exercised also the function of registration borrowed from the parliament of Paris. That body, it will be remembered, had no analogy whatever with the English parliament. Its ordinary functions were not legislative, but judicial; and it was composed of judges hereditary under certain conditions. Nevertheless, it had long acted as a check on the royal power through its right of registration. No royal edict had the force of law till entered upon its books, and this custom had so deep a root in the monarchical constitution of France, that even Louis XIV., in the flush of his power, did not attempt to abolish it. He did better; he ordered his decrees to be registered, and the humbled parliament submissively obeyed. In like manner all edicts, ordinances, or declarations relating to Canada were entered on the registers of the superior council at Quebec. The order of registration was commonly affixed to the edict or other mandate, and nobody dreamed of disobeying it. * The council or court had its attorney-general, who heard complaints and brought them before the tribunal if he thought necessary; its secretary, who kept its registers, and its huissiers or attendant officers. It sat once a week; and, though * Many general edicts relating to the whole kingdom are also registered on the books of the council, but the practice in this respect was by no means uniform. it was the highest court of appeal, it exercised at first original jurisdiction in very trivial cases. * It was empowered to establish subordinate courts or judges throughout the colony. Besides these there was a judge appointed by the king for each of the three districts into which Canada was divided, those of Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal. To each of the three royal judges were joined a clerk and an attorney-general under the supervision and control of the attorney-general of the superior court, to which tribunal appeal lay from all the subordinate jurisdictions. The jurisdiction of the seigniors within their own limits has already been mentioned. They were entitled by the terms of their grants to the exercise of “high, middle, and low justice;” but most of them were practically restricted to the last of the three, that is, to petty disputes between the habitans, involving not more than sixty sous, or offences for which the fine did not exceed ten sous. ** Thus limited, their judgments were often useful in saving time, trouble, and money to the disputants. The corporate seigniors of Montreal long continued to hold a feudal court in form, with attorney-general, clerk, and huissier; but very few other seigniors were in a condition to imitate them. Added to all these tribunals was the bishop’s court at Quebec to try causes held to be within the province of the church. * See the Registres du Conseil Supérieur, preserved at Quebec. Between 1663 and 1673 are a multitude of judgments on matters great and small; from murder, rape, and infanticide, down to petty nuisances, misbehavior of servants, and disputes about the price of a sow. ** Doutre et Lareau, Histoire du Droit Canadien, 135. The office of judge in Canada was no sinecure. The people were of a litigious disposition, partly from their Norman blood, partly perhaps from the idleness of the long and tedious winter, which gave full leisure for gossip and quarrel, and partly from the very imperfect manner in which titles had been drawn and the boundaries of grants marked out, whence ensued disputes without end between neighbor and neighbor. “I will not say,” writes the satirical La Hontan, "that Justice is more chaste and disinterested here than in France; but, at least, if she is sold, she is sold cheaper. We do not pass through the clutches of advocates, the talons of attorneys, and the claws of clerks. These vermin do not infest Canada yet. Everybody pleads his own cause. Our Themis is prompt, and she does not bristle with fees, costs, and charges. The judges have only four hundred francs a year, a great temptation to look for law in the bottom of the suitor’s purse. Four hundred francs! Not enough to buy a cap and gown, so these gentry never wear them.” * Thus far La Hontan. Now let us hear the king; himself. “The greatest disorder which has hitherto existed in Canada,” writes Louis XIV. to the intendant Meules, “has come from the small degree of liberty which the officers of justice have had in the discharge of their duties, by reason of the violence to which they have been subjected, and the part they have been obliged to take in the * La Hontan, I. 21 (ed. 1705). In some editions, the above is expressed in different language. continual quarrels between the governor and the intendant; insomuch that justice having been administered by cabal and animosity, the inhabitants have hitherto been far from the tranquillity and repose which cannot be found in a place where everybody is compelled to take side with one party or another.” * Nevertheless, on ordinary local questions between the habitants, justice seems to have been administered on the whole fairly; and judges of all grades often interposed in their personal capacity to bring parties to an agreement without a trial. From head to foot, the government kept its attitude of paternity. Beyond and above all the regular tribunals, beyond and above the council itself, was the independent jurisdiction lodged in the person of the king’s man, the intendant. His commission empowered him, if he saw fit, to call any cause whatever before himself for judgment; and he judged exclusively the cases which concerned the king, and those involving the relations of seignior and vassal. ** He appointed subordinate judges, from whom there was appeal to him; but from his decisions, as well as from those of the superior council, there was no appeal but to the king in his council of state. On any Monday morning one would have found the superior council in session in the antechamber * Instruction du Roy pour le Sieur de Meules, 1682. ** See the commissions of various intendants, in Edits et Ordonnances of the governor’s apartment, at the Chateau St. Louis. The members sat at a round table. At the head was the governor, with the bishop on his right, and the intendant on his left. The councillors sat in the order of their appointment, and the attorney-general also had his place at the board. As La Hontan says, they were not in judicial robes, but in their ordinary dress, and all but the bishop wore swords.1 The want of the cap and gown greatly disturbed the intendant Meules, and he begs the minister to consider how important it is that the councillors, in order to inspire respect, should appear in public in long black robes, which on occasions of ceremony they should exchange for robes of red. He thinks that the principal persons of the colony would thus be induced to train up their children to so enviable a dignity; “and,” he concludes, “as none of the councillors can afford to buy red robes, I hope that the king will vouchsafe to send out nine such. As for the black robes, they can furnish those themselves.” ** The king did not respond, and the nine robes never arrived. The official dignity of the council was sometimes exposed to trials against which even red gowns might have proved an insufficient protection. The same intendant urges that the tribunal ought to be provided immediately with a house of its own. "It is not decent,” he says, “that it should sit in the governor’s antechamber any longer. His guards and valets make such a noise, that we * Compare La Poterie, I. 260, and La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VII. ** Meules au Ministre, 28 Sept. 1685. cannot hear each other speak. I have continually to tell them to keep quiet, which causes them to make a thousand jokes at the councillors as they pass in and out.” * As the governor and the council were often on ill terms, the official head of the colony could not always be trusted to keep his attendants on their good behavior. The minister listened to the complaint of Meules, and adopted his suggestion that the government should buy the old brewery of Talon, a large structure of mingled timber and masonry on the banks of the St. Charles. It was at an easy distance from the chateau; passing the H?tel Dieu and descending the rock, one reached it by a walk of a few minutes. It was accordingly repaired, partly rebuilt, and fitted up to serve the double purpose of a lodging for the intendant and a court-house. Henceforth the transformed brewery was known as the Palace of the Intendant, or the Palace of Justice; and here the council and inferior courts long continued to hold their sessions. Some of these inferior courts appear to have needed a lodging quite as much as the council. The watchful Meules informs the minister that the royal judge for the district of Quebec was accustomed in winter, with a view to saving fuel, to hear causes and pronounce judgment by his own fireside, in the midst of his children, whose gambols disturbed the even distribution of justice. ** The superior council was not a very harmonious * Meules au Ministre, 12 Nov., 1681. ** Ibid. body. As its three chiefs, the man of the sword, the man of the church, and the man of the law, were often at variance, the councillors attached themselves to one party or the other, and hot disputes sometimes ensued. The intendant, though but third in rank, presided at the sessions, took votes, pronounced judgment, signed papers, and called special meetings. This matter of the presidency was for some time a source of contention between him and the governor, till the question was set at rest by a decree of the king. The intendants in their reports to the minister do not paint the council in flattering colors. One of them complains that the councillors, being busy with their farms, neglect their official duties. Another says that they are all more or less in trade. A third calls them uneducated persons of slight account, allied to the chief families and chief merchants in Canada, in whose interest they make laws; and he adds that, as a year and a half or even two years usually elapse before the answer to a complaint is received from France, they take advantage of this long interval to the injury of the king’s service. * These and other similar charges betray the continual friction between the several branches of the government. The councillors were rarely changed, and they usually held office for life. In a few cases the king granted to the son of a councillor yet living the right of succeeding his father when the charge * Meules au Ministre 12 Nov, 1684. should become vacant. * It was a post of honor and not of profit, at least of direct profit. The salaries were very small, and coupled with a prohibition to receive fees. Judging solely by the terms of his commission, the intendant was the ruling power in the colony. He controlled all expenditure of public money, and not only presided at the council but was clothed in his own person with independent legislative as well as judicial power. He was authorized to issue ordinances having the force of law whenever he thought necessary, and, in the words of his commission, “to order every thing as he shall see just and proper.” ** He was directed to be present at councils of war, though war was the special province of his colleague, and to protect soldiers and all others from official extortion and abuse; that is, to protect them from the governor. Yet there were practical difficulties in the way of his apparent power. The king, his master, was far away; but official jealousy was busy around him, and his patience was sometimes put to the proof. Thus the royal judge of Quebec had fallen into irregularities. “I can do nothing with him,” writes the intendant; “he keeps on good terms with the governor and council and sets me at naught.” The governor had, as he thought, treated him amiss. “You have told me,” he writes to the * A son of Amours was named in his father’s lifetime to succeed him, as was also a son of the attorney-general Auteuil. There are several other cases. A son of Tilly, to whom the right of succeeding his father had been granted, asks leave to sell it to the merchant La Chesnaye. ** Commissions of Bouteroue, Duchesneau, Meules, etc. minister, “to bear every thing from him and report to you;” and he proceeds to recount his grievances Again, "the attorney-general is bold to insolence, and needs to be repressed. The king’s interposition is necessary.” He modestly adds that the intendant is the only man in Canada whom his Majesty can trust, and that he ought to have more power. * These were far from being his only troubles. The enormous powers with which his commission clothed him were sometimes retrenched by contradictory instructions from the king; ** for this government, not of laws but of arbitrary will, is marked by frequent inconsistencies. When he quarrelled with the governor, and the governor chanced to have strong friends at court, his position became truly pitiable. He was berated as an imperious master berates an offending servant. “Your last letter is full of nothing but complaints.” “You have exceeded your authority.” “Study to know yourself and to understand clearly the difference there is between a governor and an intendant.” “Since you fail to comprehend the difference between you and the officer who represents the king’s person, you are in danger of being often condemned, or rather of being recalled, for his Majesty cannot endure so many petty complaints, founded on nothing but a certain quasi equality between the governor and you, which you assume, but which * Meules au Ministre, 12 Nov., 1684. ** Thus, Meules is flatly forbidden to compel litigants to bring causes before him (Instruction pour le Sieur de Meules, 1682), and this prohibition is nearly of the same date with the commission in which the power to do so is expressly given him. does not exist.” “Meddle with nothing beyond your functions.” “Take good care to tell me nothing but the truth.” “You ask too many favors for your adherents.” “You must not spend more than you have authority to spend, or it will be taken out of your pay.” In short, there are several letters from the minister Colbert to his colonial man-of-all-work, which, from beginning to end, are one continued scold. * The luckless intendant was liable to be held to account for the action of natural laws. “If the population does not increase in proportion to the pains I take,” writes the king to Duchesneau, “you are to lay the blame on yourself for not having executed my principal order (to promote marriages) and for having failed in the principal object for which I sent you to Canada.” ** A great number of ordinances of intendants are preserved. They were usually read to the people at the doors of churches after mass, or sometimes by the curé from his pulpit. They relate to a great variety of subjects,—regulation of inns and markets, poaching, preservation of game, sale of brandy, rent of pews, stray hogs, mad dogs, tithes, matrimonial quarrels, fast driving, wards and guardians, weights and measures, nuisances, value of coinage, trespass on lands, building churches, observance of Sunday, preservation of timber, seignior and vassal, settlement of boundaries, and many * The above examples are all taken from the letters of Colbert to the intendant Duchesneau. It is an extreme case, but other intendants are occasionally treated with scarcely more ceremony. ** Le Roi à Duchesneau, 11 Juin, 1680. other matters. If a curé with some of his parishioners reported that his church or his house needed repair or rebuilding, the intendant issued an ordinance requiring all the inhabitants of the parish, “both those who have consented and those who have not consented,” to contribute materials and labor, on pain of fine or other penalty. * The militia captain of the cote was to direct the work and see that each parishioner did his due part, which was determined by the extent of his farm; so, too, if the grand voyer, an officer charged with the superintendence of highways, reported that a new road was wanted or that an old one needed mending, an ordinance of the intendant set the whole neighborhood at work upon it, directed, as in the other case, by the captain of militia. If children were left fatherless, the intendant ordered the curé of the parish to assemble their relations or friends for the choice of a guardian. If a censitaire did not clear his land and live on it, the intendant took it from him and gave it back to the seignior. ** Chimney-sweeping having been neglected at Quebec, the intendant commands all householders promptly to do their duty in this respect, and at the same time fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney. Another order forbids quarrelling in church. Another assigns pews in due order of precedence to the seignior, the captain of militia, and the wardens. The intendant Raudot, who seems * See, among many examples, the ordinance of 24th December, 1716. Edits et Ordonnances, II. 443. ** Compare the numerous ordinances printed in the second and third volumes of Edits et Ordonnances. to have been inspired even more than the others with the spirit of paternal intervention, issued a mandate to the effect that, whereas the people of Montreal raise too many horses, which prevents them from raising cattle and sheep, “being therein ignorant of their true interest.... Now, therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the c?tes of this government shall hereafter own no more than two horses or mares and one foal; the same to take effect after the sowing-season of the ensuing year, 1710, giving them time to rid themselves of their horses in excess of said number, after which they will be required to kill any of such excess that may remain in their possession.” * Many other ordinances, if not equally preposterous, are equally stringent; such, for example, as that of the intendant Bigot, in which, with a view of promoting agriculture, and protecting the morals of the farmers by saving them from the temptations of cities, he proclaims to them: “We prohibit and forbid you to remove to this town (Quebec) under any pretext whatever, without our permission in writing, on pain of being expelled and sent back to your farms, your furniture and goods confiscated, and a fine of fifty livres laid on you for the benefit of the hospitals. And, furthermore, we forbid all inhabitants of the city to let houses or rooms to persons coming from the country, on pain of a fine of a hundred livres, also applicable to the hospitals.” ** At about the same time a royal edict, designed to prevent the undue subdivision of farms, forbade the country * Edits et Ordonnances, II. 273. ** Ibid., II. 399. people, except such as were authorized to live in villages, to build a house or barn on any piece of land less than one and a half arpents wide and thirty arpents long; * while a subsequent ordinance of the intendant commands the immediate demolition of certain houses built in contravention of the edict. ** The spirit of absolutism is everywhere apparent. “It is of very great consequence,” writes the intendant Meules, “that the people should not be left at liberty to speak their minds.” *** Hence public meetings were jealously restricted. Even those held by parishioners under the eye of the curé to estimate the cost of a new church seem to have required a special license from the intendant. During a number of years a meeting of the principal inhabitants of Quebec was called in spring and autumn by the council to discuss the price and quality of bread, the supply of firewood, and other similar matters. The council commissioned two of its members to preside at these meetings, and on hearing their report took what action it thought best. Thus, after the meeting held in February, 1686, it issued a decree, in which, after a long and formal preamble, it solemnly ordained, “that besides white-bread and light brown-bread, all bakers shall hereafter make dark brown-bread whenever the same shall be required.” **** Such assemblies, so controlled, could scarcely, one would think, wound * Edits et Ordonnances, I. 585. ** Ibid., II. 400. *** “Il ne laisse pas d’être de très grande conséquence de ne pas laisser la liberté au peuple de dire son sentiment.” —Meules au Ministre, 1685. **** Edits et Ordonnances, II. 112. the tenderest susceptibilities of authority; yet there was evident distrust of them, and after a few years this modest shred of self-government is seen no more. The syndic, too, that functionary whom the people of the towns were at first allowed to choose, under the eye of the authorities, was conjured out of existence by a word from the king. Seignior, censitaire, and citizen were prostrate alike in flat subjection to the royal will. They were not free even to go home to France. No inhabitant of Canada, man or woman, could do so without leave; and several intendants express their belief that without this precaution there would soon be a falling off in the population. In 1671 the council issued a curious decree. One Paul Dupuy had been heard to say that there is nothing like righting one’s self, and that when the English cut off the head of Charles I. they did a good thing, with other discourse to the like effect The council declared him guilty of speaking ill of royalty in the person of the king of England, and uttering words tending to sedition. He was condemned to be dragged from prison by the public executioner, and led in his shirt, with a rope about his neck, and a torch in his hand, to the gate of the Chateau St. Louis, there to beg pardon of the king; thence to the pillory of the Lower Town to be branded with a fleur-de-lis on the cheek, and set in the stocks for half an hour; then to be led back to prison, and put in irons “till the information against him shall be completed.” * * Jugements et Délibérations du Conseil Supérieur. If irreverence to royalty was thus rigorously chastised, irreverence to God was threatened with still sharper penalties. Louis XIV., ever haunted with the fear of the devil, sought protection against him by his famous edict against swearing, duly registered on the books of the council at Quebec. “It is our will and pleasure,” says this pious mandate, “that all persons convicted of profane swearing or blaspheming the name of God, the most Holy Virgin, his mother, or the saints, be condemned for the first offence to a pecuniary fine according to their possessions and the greatness and enormity of the oath and blasphemy; and if those thus punished repeat the said oaths, then for the second, third, and fourth time they shall be condemned to a double, triple, and quadruple fine; and for the fifth time, they shall be set in the pillory on Sunday or other festival days, there to remain from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon, exposed to all sorts of opprobrium and abuse, and be condemned besides to a heavy fine; and for the sixth time, they shall be led to the pillory, and there have the upper lip cut with a hot iron; and for the seventh time, they shall be led to the pillory and have the lower lip cut; and if, by reason of obstinacy and inveterate bad habit, they continue after all these punishments to utter the said oaths and blasphemies, it is our will and command that they have the tongue completely cut out, so that thereafter they cannot utter them again.” * All those who should hear anybody * Edit du Roy contre les Jureurs et Blasphémateurs, du 30me Juillet, 1666 See Edits et Ordonnances, I. 62. swear were further required to report the fact to the nearest judge within twenty-four hours, on pain of fine. This is far from being the only instance in which the temporal power lends aid to the spiritual. Among other cases, the following is worth mentioning: Louis Gaboury, an inhabitant of the island of Orleans, charged with eating meat in Lent without asking leave of the priest, was condemned by the local judge to be tied three hours to a stake in public, and then led to the door of the chapel, there on his knees, with head bare and hands clasped, to ask pardon of God and the king. The culprit appealed to the council, which revoked the sentence and imposed only a fine. * The due subordination of households had its share of attention. Servants who deserted their masters were to be set in the pillory for the first offence, and whipped and branded for the second; while any person harboring them was to pay a fine of twenty francs. ** On the other hand, nobody was allowed to employ a servant without a license. *** In case of heinous charges, torture of the accused was permitted under the French law; and it was sometimes practised in Canada. Condemned murderers and felons were occasionally tortured before being strangled; and the dead body, enclosed in a kind of iron cage, was left hanging for months at the top of Cape Diamond, a terror to children and a warning to evil-doers. Yet, on the whole, * Doutre et Lareau, Histoire du Droit Canadien, 163. ** Réglement de Police, 1676. *** Edits et Ordonnances, II. 53. Canadian justice, tried by the standard of the time, was neither vindictive nor cruel. In reading the voluminous correspondence of governors and intendants, the minister and the king, nothing is more apparent than the interest with which, in the early part of his reign, Louis XIV. regarded his colony. One of the faults of his rule is the excess of his benevolence; for not only did he give money to support parish priests, build churches, and aid the seminary, the Ursulines, the missions, and the hospitals; but he established a fund destined, among other objects, to relieve indigent persons, subsidized nearly every branch of trade and industry, and in other instances did for the colonists what they would far better have learned to do for themselves. Meanwhile the officers of government were far from suffering from an excess of royal beneficence. La Hontan says that the local governor of Three Rivers would die of hunger if, besides his pay, he did not gain something by trade with the Indians; and that Perrot, local governor of Montreal, with one thousand crowns of salary, traded to such purpose that in a few years he made fifty thousand crowns. This trade, it may be observed, was in violation of the royal edicts. The pay of the governor-general varied from time to time. When La Poterie wrote it was twelve thousand francs a year, besides three thousand which he received in his capacity of local governor of Quebec. * This would hardly * In 1674, the governor-general received 20,718 francs, out of which he was to pay 8,718 to his guard of twenty men and officers. Ordonnance du Roy, 1675. Yet in 1677, in the Etat de la Dépense que le Roy veut et ordonne estre faite, etc., the total pay of the governor-general is set down at 3,000 francs, and so also in 1681, 1682, and 1687. The local governor of Montreal was to have 1,800 francs, and the governor of Three Rivers 1,200. It is clear, however, that this Etat de dépense is not complete, as there is no provision for the intendant. The first councillor received 500 francs, and the rest 300 francs each, equal in Canadian money to 400. An ordinance of 1676 gives the intendant 12,000 francs. It is tolerably clear that the provision of 3,000 francs for the governor-general was meant only to apply to his capacity of local governor of Quebec. tempt a Frenchman of rank to expatriate himself; and yet some, at least, of the governors came out to the colony for the express purpose of mending their fortunes; indeed, the higher nobility could scarcely, in time of peace, have other motives for going there. The court and the army were their element, and to be elsewhere was banishment. We shall see hereafter by what means they sought compensation for their exile in Canadian forests. Loud complaints sometimes found their way to Versailles. A memorial addressed to the regent duke of Orleans, immediately after the king’s death, declares that the ministers of state, who have been the real managers of the colony, have made their creatures and relations governors and intendants, and set them free from all responsibility. High colonial officers, pursues the writer, come home rich, while the colony languishes almost to perishing. * As for lesser offices, they were multiplied to satisfy needy retainers, till lean and starving Canada was covered with official leeches, sucking, in famished desperation, at her bloodless veins. The whole system of administration centred in * Mémoire addressé au Régent 1716 the king, who, to borrow the formula of his edicts, “in the fulness of our power and our certain knowledge,” was supposed to direct the whole machine, from its highest functions to its pettiest intervention in private affairs. That this theory, like all extreme theories of government, was an illusion, is no fault of Louis XIV. Hard-working monarch as he was, he spared no pains to guide his distant colony in the paths of prosperity. The prolix letters of governors and intendants were carefully studied; and many of the replies, signed by the royal hand, enter into details of surprising minuteness. That the king himself wrote these letters is incredible; but in the early part of his reign he certainly directed and controlled them. At a later time, when more absorbing interests engrossed him, he could no longer study in person the long-winded despatches of his Canadian officers. They were usually addressed to the minister of state, who caused abstracts to be made from them, for the king’s use, and perhaps for his own. * The minister or the minister’s secretary could suppress or color as he or those who influenced him saw fit. In the latter half of his too long reign, when cares, calamities, and humiliations were thickening around the king, another influence was added to make the theoretical supremacy of his royal will more than ever a mockery. That prince of annalists, Saint-Simon, has painted Louis XIV. ruling his realm from the bedchamber of Madame de * Many of these abstracts are still preserved in the Archives of the Marine and Colonies. Maintenons seated with his minister at a small table beside the fire, the king in an arm-chair, the minister on a stool with his bag of papers on a second stool near him. In another arm-chair, at another table, on the other side of the fire, sat the sedate favorite, busy to all appearance with a book or a piece of tapestry, but listening to every thing that passed. “She rarely spoke,” says Saint-Simon, “except when the king asked her opinion, which he often did; and then she answered with great deliberation and gravity. She never or very rarely showed a partiality for any measure, still less for any person; but she had an understanding with the minister, who never dared do otherwise than she wished. Whenever any favor or appointment was in question, the business was settled between them beforehand. She would send to the minister that she wanted to speak to him, and he did not dare bring the matter on the carpet till he had received her orders.” Saint-Simon next recounts the subtle methods by which Maintenon and the minister, her tool, beguiled the king to do their will, while never doubting that he was doing his own. “He thought,” concludes the annalist, “that it was he alone who disposed of all appointments; while in reality he disposed of very few indeed, except on the rare occasions when he had taken a fancy to somebody, or when somebody whom he wanted to favor had spoken to him in behalf of somebody else.” * * Mémoires du Duc de Saint-Simon, XIII. 38, 39 (Cheruel, 1857). Saint-Simon, notwithstanding the independence of his character, held a high position at court; and his acute and careful observation, joined to his familiar acquaintance with ministers and other functionaries, both in and out of office, gives a rare value to his matchless portraitures. Add to all this the rarity of communication with the distant colony. The ships from France arrived at Quebec in July, August, or September, and returned in November. The machine of Canadian government, wound up once a year, was expected to run unaided at least a twelvemonth. Indeed, it was often left to itself for two years, such was sometimes the tardiness of the overburdened government in answering the despatches of its colonial agents. It is no matter of surprise that a writer well versed in its affairs calls Canada the “country of abuses.” * * Etat présent du Canada, 1768. CHAPTER XVII. 1663-1763. TRADE AND INDUSTRY. Trade in Fetters.—The Hüguenot Merchants.—Royal Patronage.—The Fisheries.—Cries for Help.—Agriculture.—Manufactures.—Arts of Ornament.—Finance.—Card Money.—Repudiation.—Imposts.—The Beaver Trade.—The Fair at Montreal.—Contraband Trade.—A Fatal System.—Trouble and Change.—The Coureurs de Bois.—The Forest.—Letter of Carheil. We have seen the head of the colony, its guiding intellect and will: it remains to observe its organs of nutrition. Whatever they might have been under a different treatment, they were perverted and enfeebled by the regimen to which they were subjected. The spirit of restriction and monopoly had ruled from the beginning. The old governor Lauson, seignior for a while of a great part of the colony, held that Montreal had no right to trade directly with France, but must draw all her supplies from Quebec; * and this preposterous claim was revived in the time of Mézy. The successive companies to whose hands the colony was consigned had a baneful effect on individual enterprise. In 1674, * Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, II. 244. the charter of the West India Company was revoked, and trade was declared open to all subjects of the king; yet commerce was still condemned to wear the ball and chain. New restrictions were imposed, meant for good, but resulting in evil. Merchants not resident in the colony were forbidden all trade, direct or indirect, with the Indians. * They were also forbidden to sell any goods at retail except in August, September, and October; ** to trade anywhere in Canada above Quebec; and to sell clothing or domestic articles ready made. This last restriction was designed to develop colonial industry. No person, resident or not, could trade with the English colonies, or go thither without a special passport, and rigid examination by the military authorities. *** Foreign trade of any kind was stiffly prohibited. In 1719, after a new company had engrossed the beaver trade, its agents were empowered to enter all houses in Canada, whether ecclesiastical or secular, and search them for foreign goods, which when found were publicly burned. **** In the next year, the royal council ordered that vessels engaged in foreign trade should be captured by force of arms, like pirates, and confiscated along with their cargoes; (v) while anybody having an article of foreign manufacture in his possession was subjected to a heavy fine. (v*) Attempts were made to fix the exact amount of profit which merchants from France should be * Réglement de Police, 1676, Art. xl. ** Edits et Ord., II. 100. *** Ibid., I. 489. **** Ibid.. I. 402. (v) Ibid., I. 425. (v*) Ibid., I. 505. allowed to make in the colony. One of the first acts of the superior council was to order them to bring their invoices immediately before that body, which thereupon affixed prices to each article. The merchant who sold and the purchaser who bought above this tariff were alike condemned to heavy penalties; and so, too, was the merchant who chose to keep his goods rather than sell them at the price ordained. * Resident merchants, on the other hand, were favored to the utmost. They could sell at what price they saw fit; and, according to La Hontan, they made great profit by the sale of laces, ribbons, watches, jewels, and similar superfluities to the poor but extravagant colonists. A considerable number of the non-resident merchants were Huguenots, for most of the importations were from the old Huguenot city of Rochelle. No favor was shown them; they were held under rigid restraint, and forbidden to exercise their religion, or to remain in the colony during winter without special license. ** This sometimes bore very hard upon them. The governor Denonville, an ardent Catholic, states the case of one Bernon, who had done great service to the colony, and whom La Hontan mentions as the principal French merchant in the Canadian trade. “It is a pity,” says Denonville, “that he cannot be converted. As he is a Huguenot, the bishop wants me to order him home this autumn, which I have done, though he * Edits et Ord., II. 17, 19. ** Réglement de Police, 1676. Art. xxxvii. carries on a large business, and a great deal of money remains due to him here.” * For a long time the ships from France went home empty, except a favored few which carried furs, or occasionally a load of dried pease or of timber. Payment was made in money when there was any in Canada, or in bills of exchange. The colony, drawing every thing from France, and returning little besides beaver skins, remained under a load of debt. French merchants were discouraged, and shipments from France languished. As for the trade with the West Indies, which Talon had tried by precept and example to build up, the intendant reports in 1680 that it had nearly ceased; though six years later it grew again to the modest proportions of three vessels loaded with wheat. ** The besetting evil of trade and industry in Canada was the habit they contracted, and were encouraged to contract, of depending on the direct aid of government. Not a new enterprise was set on foot without a petition to the king to lend a helping hand. Sometimes the petition was sent through the governor, sometimes through the intendant; and it was rarely refused. Denonville writes that the merchants of Quebec, by a combined effort, had sent a vessel of sixty tons to France with colonial produce; and he asks that the royal commissaries at Rochefort be instructed to buy the whole cargo, in order to encourage so * Denonville au Ministre, 1685. ** Ibid., 1686. The year before, about 18,000 minots of grain were sent hither. In 1736, the shipments reached 80,000 minots. deserving an enterprise. One Hazeur set up a saw-mill, at Mai Bay. Finding a large stock of planks and timber on his hands, he begs the king to send two vessels to carry them to France; and the king accordingly did so. A similar request was made in behalf of another saw-mill at St. Paul’s Bay. Denonville announces that one Riverin wishes to embark in the whale and cod fishery, and that though strong in zeal he is weak in resources. The minister replies, that he is to be encouraged, and that his Majesty will favorably consider his enterprise. * Various gifts were soon after made him. He now took to himself a partner, the Sieur Chalons; whereupon the governor writes to ask the minister’s protection for them. “The Basques,” he says, “formerly carried on this fishery, but some monopoly or other put a stop to it.” The remedy he proposes is homoeopathic. He asks another monopoly for the two partners. Louis Joliet, the discoverer of the Mississippi, made a fishing station on the island of Anticosti; and he begs help from the king, on the ground that his fishery will furnish a good and useful employment to young men. The Sieur Vitry wished to begin a fishery of white porpoises, and he begs the king * The interest felt by the king in these matters is shown in a letter signed by his hand in which he enters with considerable detail into the plans of Riverin. Le Roy à Denonville et Champigny, 1 Mai, 1689. He afterwards ordered boats, harpooners, and cordage to be sent him, for which he was to pay at his convenience. Four years later, he complains that, though Riverin had been often helped, his fisheries were of slight account. “Let him take care,” pursues the king, “that he does not use his enterprises as a pretext to obtain favors.”. Mémoire du Roy a Frontenac et Champigny, 1693 to give him two thousand pounds of cod-line and two thousand pounds of one and two inch rope. His request was granted, on which he asked for five hundred livres. The money was given him, and the next year he asked to have the gift renewed. * The king was very anxious to develop the fisheries of the colony. “His Majesty,” writes the minister, “wishes you to induce the inhabitants to unite with the merchants for this object, and to incite them by all sorts of means to overcome their natural laziness, since there is no other way of saving them from the misery in which they now are.” ** “I wish,” says the zealous Denonville, “that fisheries could be well established to give employment to our young men, and prevent them from running wild in the woods;” and he adds mournfully, “they (the fisheries) are enriching Boston at our expense.” “They are our true mines,” urges the intendant Meules; “but the English of Boston have got possession of those of Acadia, which belong to us; and we ought to prevent it.” It was not prevented; and the Canadian * All the above examples are drawn from the correspondence of the governor and intendant with the minister, between 1680 and 1699, together with a memorial of Hazeur and another of Riverin, addressed to the minister. Vitry’s porpoise-fishing appears to have ended in failure. In 1707 the intendant Raudot granted the porpoise fishery of the seigniory of Riviere Ouelle to six of the habitans. This fishery is carried on here successfully at the present day. A very interesting account of it was published in the Opinion Publique, 1873, by my friend Abbé Casgrain, whose family residence is the seigniorial mansion of Riviere Ouelle. ** Mémoire pour Denonville et Champigny, 8 Mars, 1688. fisheries, like other branches of Canadian industry, remained in a state of almost hopeless languor. * The government applied various stimulants. One of these, proposed by the intendant Duchesneau, is characteristic. He advises the formation of a company which should have the exclusive right of exporting fish; but which on its part should be required to take, at a fixed price, all that the inhabitants should bring them. This notable plan did not find favor with the king. ** It was practised, however, in the case of beaver skins, and also in that of wood-ashes. The farmers of the revenue were required to take this last commodity at a fixed price, on their own risk, and in any quantity offered. They remonstrated, saying that it was unsalable; adding that, if the inhabitants would but take the trouble to turn it into potash, it might be possible to find a market for it. The king released them entirely, coupling his order to that effect with a eulogy of free trade. *** In all departments of industry, the appeals for help are endless. Governors and intendants are so many sturdy beggars for the languishing colony. * The Canadian fisheries must not be confounded with the French fisheries of Newfoundland, which were prosperous, but were carried on wholly from French ports. In a memorial addressed by the partners Chalons and Riverin to the minister Seignelay, they say: “Baston (Boston) et toute sa colonie nous donne un exemple qui fait honte à nostre nation, puisqu’elle s’augmente tous les jours par cette pesche (de la morue) qu’elle fait la plus grande partie sur nos costes pendant que les Fran?ois ne s’occupent à rien.” Meules urges that the king should undertake the fishing business himself since his subjects cannot or will not. ** Ministre a Duchesneau, 15 Mai, 1678 *** Le Roy a Duchesneau, 11 Juin, 1680. “Send us money to build storehouses, to which the habitants can bring their produce and receive goods from the government in exchange.” “Send us a teacher to make sailors of our young men: it is a pity the colony should remain in such a state for want of instruction for youth.” * “We want a surgeon: there is none in Canada who can set a bone.” ** “Send us some tilers, brick-makers, and potters.” *** “Send us iron-workers to work our mines.” **** “It is to be wished that his Majesty would send us all sorts of artisans, especially potters and glass-workers.” (v) “Our Canadians need aid and instruction in their fisheries; they need pilots.” (v*) In 1688, the intendant reported that Canada was entirely without either pilots or sailors; and, as late as 1712, the engineer Catalogne informed the government that, though the St. Lawrence was dangerous, a pilot was rarely to be had. “There ought to be trade with the West Indies and other places,” urges another writer. “Everybody says it is best, but nobody will undertake it. Our merchants are too poor, or else are engrossed by the fur trade.” (v**) The languor of commerce made agriculture languish. “It is of no use now,” writes Meules, * Mémoire a Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignday, présenté par les Sieurs Chalons et Riverin, 1686. ** Champigny au Ministre, 1688. *** Ibid. **** Denonville au Ministre, 1686. (v) Mémoire de Catalogue, 1712. (v*) Denonville au Ministre, 1686. (v**) Mémoire de Chalons et Riverin présenté au Marquis de Seignelay. in 1682, “to raise any crops except what each family wants for itself.” In vain the government sent out seeds for distribution. In vain intendants lectured the farmers, and lavished well-meant advice. Tillage remained careless and slovenly. “If,” says the all-observing Catalogne, “the soil were not better cultivated in Europe than here, three-fourths of the people would starve.” He complains that the festivals of the church are so numerous that not ninety working days are left during the whole working season. The people, he says, ought to be compelled to build granaries to store their crops, instead of selling them in autumn for almost nothing, and every habitant should be required to keep two or three sheep. The intendant Champigny calls for seed of hemp and flax, and promises to visit the farms, and show the people the lands best suited for their culture. He thinks that favors should be granted to those who raise hemp and flax as well as to those who marry. Denonville is of opinion that each habitant should be compelled to raise a little hemp every year, and that the king should then buy it of him at a high price. * It will be well, he says, to make use of severity, while, at the same time, holding out a hope of gain; and he begs that weavers be sent out to teach the women and girls, who spend the winter in idleness, how to weave and spin. Weaving and spinning, however, as well as the culture of hemp and flax, were neglected till 1705, when the loss of a ship laden with goods for the colony * Denonville au Ministre, 13 Nov.. 1685 gave the spur to home industry; and Madame de Repentigny set the example of making a kind of coarse blanket of nettle and linden bark. * The jealousy of colonial manufactures shown by England appears but rarely in the relations of France with Canada. According to its light, the French government usually did its best to stimulate Canadian industry, with what results we have just seen. There was afterwards some improvement. In 1714, the intendant Bégon reported that coarse fabrics of wool and linen were made; that the sisters of the congregation wore cloth for their own habits as good as the same stuffs in France; that black cloth was made for priests, and blue cloth for the pupils of the colleges. The inhabitants, he says, have been taught these arts by necessity. They were naturally adroit at handiwork of all kinds; and during the last half century of the French rule, when the population had settled into comparative stability, many of the mechanic arts were practised with success, notwithstanding the assertion of the Abbé La Tour that every thing but bread and meat had still to be brought from France. This change may be said to date from the peace of Utrecht, or a few years before it. At that time, one Duplessis had a new vessel on the stocks. Catalogne, who states the fact, calls it the beginning of ship-building in Canada, evidently ignorant that Talon had made a fruitless beginning more than forty years before. Of the arts of ornament not much could have * Beauharnois et Raudot au Ministre, 1705. been expected; but, strangely enough, they were in somewhat better condition than the useful arts. The nuns of the H?tel-Dieu made artificial flowers for altars and shrines, under the direction of Mother-Juchereau; * and the boys of the seminary were taught to make carvings in wood for the decoration of churches. ** Pierre, son of the merchant Le Ber, had a turn for painting, and made religious pictures, described as very indifferent. *** His sister Jeanne, an enthusiastic devotee, made embroideries for vestments and altars, and her work was much admired. The colonial finances were not prosperous. In the absence of coin, beaver-skins long served as currency. In 1669, the council declared wheat a legal tender, at four francs the minot or three French bushels; **** and, five years later, all creditors were ordered to receive moose-skins in payment at the market rate. (v) Coin would not remain in the colony. If the company or the king sent any thither, it went back in the returning ships. The government devised a remedy. A coinage was ordered for Canada one-fourth less in value than that of France. Thus the Canadian livre or franc was worth, in reality, fifteen sous instead of twenty. (v*) This shallow expedient produced only a nominal rise of prices, and coin fled the colony as before. * Juchereau, Hist, de l'H?tel-Dieu, 244. ** Abeille, II., 13. *** Faillon, Vie de Mlle. Le Ber, 331. **** Edits et Ord., II. 47. (v) Ibid., II. 55. (v*) This device was of very early date. See Boucher, Hist. Véritable chap, xiv Trade was carried on for a time by means of negotiable notes, payable in furs, goods, or farm produce. In 1685, the intendant Meules issued a card currency. He had no money to pay the soldiers, “and not knowing,” he informs the minister, “to what saint to make my vows, the idea occurred to me of putting in circulation notes made of cards, each cut into four pieces; and I have issued an ordinance commanding the inhabitants to receive them in payment.” * The cards were common playing cards, and each piece was stamped with a fleur-de-lis and a crown, and signed by the governor, the intendant, and the clerk of the treasury at Quebec. ** The example of Meules found ready imitation. Governors and intendants made card money whenever they saw fit; and, being worthless everywhere but in Canada, it showed no disposition to escape the colony. It was declared convertible not into coin, but into bills of exchange; and this conversion could only take place at brief specified periods. “The currency used in Canada,” says a writer in the last years of the French rule, “has no value as a representative of money. It is the sign of a sign.” *** It was card representing paper, and this paper was very often dishonored. In 1714, the amount of card rubbish had risen to two million livres. Confidence was lost, and trade was half dead. The minister Ponchartrain came to the rescue, and promised to * Meules au Ministre, 24 Sept., 1685. ** Mémoire addressé au Régent, 1715. *** Considérations sur l’Etat du Canada, 1758. redeem it at half its nominal value. The holders preferred to lose half rather than the whole, and accepted the terms. A few of the cards were redeemed at the rate named; then the government broke faith, and payment ceased. “This afflicting news,” says a writer of the time, “was brought out by the vessel which sailed from France last July.” In 1717, the government made another proposal, and the cards were converted into bills of exchange. At the same time a new issue was made, which it was declared should be the last. * This issue was promptly redeemed, but twelve years later another followed it. In the interval, a certain quantity of coin circulated in the colony; but it underwent fluctuations through the intervention of government; and, within eight years, at least four edicts were issued affecting its value. ** Then came more promises to pay, till, in the last bitter years of its existence, the colony floundered in drifts of worthless paper. One characteristic grievance was added to the countless woes of Canadian commerce. The government was so jealous of popular meetings of all kinds, that for a long time it forbade merchants to meet together for discussing their affairs; and, it was not till 1717 that the establishment of a bourse or exchange was permitted at Quebec and Montreal. *** In respect of taxation, Canada, as compared with * Edits et Ord., I. 370. ** Ibid., 400, 432, 436, 484. *** Doutre et Lareau, Hist, du Droit Canadien, 254. France, had no reason to complain. If the king permitted governors and intendants to make card money, he permitted nobody to impose taxes but himself. The Canadians paid no direct civil tax, except in a few instances where temporary and local assessments were ordered for special objects. It was the fur trade on which the chief burden fell. One-fourth of the beaver-skins, and one-tenth of the moose-hides, belonged to the king; and wine, brandy, and tobacco contributed a duty of ten per cent. During a long course of years, these were the only imposts. The king, also, retained the exclusive right of the fur trade at Tadoussac. A vast tract of wilderness extending from St. Paul’s Bay to a point eighty leagues down the St. Lawrence, and stretching indefinitely northward towards Hudson’s Bay, formed a sort of royal preserve, whence every settler was rigidly excluded. The farmers of the revenue had their trading-houses at Tadoussac, whither the northern tribes, until war, pestilence, and brandy consumed them, brought every summer a large quantity of furs. When, in 1674, the West India Company, to whom these imposts had been granted, was extinguished, the king resumed possession of them. The various duties, along with the trade of Tadoussac, were now farmed out to one Oudiette and his associates, who paid the Crown three hundred and fifty thousand livres for their privilege. * * The annual return to the king from the ferme du Canada was, for some years, 119,000 francs (livres). Out of this were paid from 35,000 to 40,000 francs a year for “ordinary charges.” The governor, intendant, and all troops except the small garrisons of Quebec, Montreal, and Three Rivers, were paid from other sources. There was a time when the balance must have been in the king’s favor; but profit soon changed to loss, owing partly to wars, partly to the confusion into which the beaver trade soon fell. “His Majesty,” writes the minister to the governor in 1698, “may soon grow tired of a colony which, far from yielding him any profit, costs him immense sums every year.” We come now to a trade far more important than all the rest together, one which absorbed the enterprise of the colony, drained the life-sap from other branches of commerce, and, even more than a vicious system of government, kept them in a state of chronic debility,—the hardy, adventurous, lawless, fascinating fur trade. In the eighteenth century, Canada exported a moderate quantity of timber, wheat, the herb called ginseng, and a few other commodities; but from first to last she lived chiefly on beaver-skins. The government tried without ceasing to control and regulate this traffic; but it never succeeded. It aimed, above all things, to bring the trade home to the colonists, to prevent them from going to the Indians, and induce the Indians to come to them. To this end a great annual fair was established by order of the king at Montreal. Thither every summer a host of savages came down from the lakes in their bark canoes. A place was assigned them at a little distance from the town. They landed, drew up their canoes in a line on the bank, took out their packs of beaver-skins, set up their wigwams, slung their kettles, and encamped for the night. On the next day, there was a grand council on the common, between St. Paul Street and the river. Speeches of compliment were made amid a solemn smoking of pipes. The governor-general was usually present, seated in an arm-chair, while the visitors formed a ring about him, ranged in the order of their tribes. On the next day the trade began in the same place. Merchants of high and low degree brought up their goods from Quebec, and every inhabitant of Montreal, of any substance, sought a share in the profit. Their booths were set along the palisades, of the town, and each had an interpreter, to whom he usually promised a certain portion of his gains. The scene abounded in those contrasts—not always edifying, but always picturesque—which mark the whole course of French Canadian history. Here was a throng of Indians armed with bows and arrows, war-clubs, or the cheap guns of the trade; some of them completely naked except for the feathers on their heads and the paint on their faces; French bush-rangers tricked out with savage finery; merchants and habitants in their coarse and plain attire, and the grave priests of St. Sulpice robed in black. Order and sobriety were their watchwords, but the wild gathering was beyond their control. The prohibition to sell brandy could rarely be enforced; and the fair ended at times in a pandemonium of drunken frenzy. The rapacity of trade, and the license of savages and coureurs de bois, had completely transformed the pious settlement. A similar fair was established at Three Rivers, for the Algonquin tribes north of that place. These yearly markets did not fully answer the desired object. There was a constant tendency among the inhabitants of Canada to form settlements above Montreal, in order to intercept the Indians on their way down, drench them with brandy, and get their furs from them at low rates in advance of the fair. Such settlements were forbidden, but not prevented. The audacious “squatter” defied edict and ordinance and the fury of drunken savages, and boldly planted himself in the path of the descending trade.-Nor is this a matter of surprise; for he was usually the secret agent of some high colonial officer, an intendant, the local governor, or the governor-general, who often used his power to enforce the law against others, and to violate it himself. This was not all; for the more youthful and vigorous part of the male population soon began to escape into the woods, and trade with the Indians far beyond the limits of the remotest settlements. Here, too, many of them were in league with the authorities, who denounced the abuse while secretly favoring the portion of it in which they themselves were interested. The home government, unable to prevent the evil, tried to regulate it. Licenses were issued for the forest trade. * Their number was limited to twenty-five, and the privileges which they conferred varied at different periods. In La Hontan’s time, each license authorized the departure of two canoes loaded with goods. One canoe only was afterwards allowed, bearing three men with about four hundred pounds of freight. The licenses were sometimes sold for the profit of government, but many were given to widows of * Ordres du Roy au sujet de la Traite du Canada, 1681. officers and other needy persons, to the hospitals, or to favorites and retainers of the governor. Those who could not themselves use them sold them to merchants or voyageurs, at a price varying from a thousand to eighteen hundred francs. They were valid for a year and a half; and each canoeman had a share in the profits, which, if no accident happened, were very large. The license system was several times suppressed and renewed again; but, like the fair at Montreal, it failed completely to answer its purpose, and restrain the young men of Canada from a general exodus into the wilderness. * The most characteristic features of the Canadian fur trade still remain to be seen. Oudiette and his associates were not only charged with collecting the revenue, but were also vested with an exclusive right of transporting all the beaver-skins of the colony to France. On their part they were compelled to receive all beaver-skins brought to their magazines; and, after deducting the fourth belonging to the king, to pay for the rest at a fixed price. This price was graduated to the different qualities of the fur; but the average cost to the collectors was a little more than three francs a pound. The inhabitants could barter their furs with merchants; but the merchants must bring them all to the magazines of Oudiette, who paid in receipts convertible into bills of exchange. He soon found himself burdened with such a mass * Before me is one of these licenses, signed by the governor Denonville. A condition of carrying no brandy is appended to it. of beaver-skins, that the market was completely glutted. The French hatters refused to take them all; and for the part which they consented to take, they paid chiefly in hats, which Oudiette was not allowed to sell in France, but only in the French West Indies, where few people wanted them. An unlucky fashion of small hats diminished the consumption of fur and increased his embarrassments, as did also a practice common among the hatters of mixing rabbit fur with the beaver. In his extremity he bethought him of setting up a hat factory for himself under the name of a certain licensed hatter, thinking thereby to alarm his customers into buying his stock. * The other hatters rose in wrath and petitioned the minister. The new factory was suppressed, and Oudiette soon became bankrupt. Another company of farmers of the revenue took his place with similar results. The action of the law of supply and demand was completely arrested by the peremptory edict which, with a view to the prosperity of the colony and the profit of the king, required the company to take every beaver-skin offered. All Canada, thinking itself sure of its price, rushed into the beaver trade, and the accumulation of unsalable furs became more and more suffocating. The farmers of the revenue could not meet their engagements. Their bills of exchange were unpaid, and Canada was filled with distress and consternation. In 1700, a change of system was ordered. The monopoly of exporting beaver * Mémoire touchant le Commerce du Canada, 1687. was placed in the hands of a company formed of the chief inhabitants of Canada. Some of them hesitated to take the risk; but the government was not to be trifled with, and the minister, Ponchartrain, wrote in terms so peremptory, and so menacing to the recusants, that, in the words of a writer of the time, he “shut everybody’s mouth.” About a hundred and fifty merchants accordingly subscribed to the stock of the new company, and immediately petitioned the king for a ship and a loan of seven hundred thousand francs. They were required to take off the hands of the farmers of the revenue an accumulation of more than six hundred thousand pounds of beaver, for which, however, they were to pay but half its usual price. The market of France absolutely refused it, and the directors of the new company saw no better course than to burn three-fourths of the troublesome and perishable commodity; nor was this the first resort to this strange expedient. One cannot repress a feeling of indignation at the fate of the interesting and unfortunate animals uselessly sacrificed to a false economic system. In order to rid themselves of what remained, the directors begged the king to issue a decree, requiring all hatters to put at least three ounces of genuine beaver-fur into each hat. All was in vain. The affairs of the company fell into a confusion which was aggravated by the bad faith of some of its chief members. In 1707, it was succeeded by another company, to whose magazines every habitant or merchant was ordered to bring every beaver-skin in his possession within forty-eight hours; and the company, like its predecessors, was required to receive it, and pay for it in written promises. Again the market was overwhelmed with a surfeit of beaver. Again the bills of exchange were unpaid, and all was confusion and distress. Among the memorials and petitions to which this state of things gave birth, there is one conspicuous by the presence of good sense and the absence of self-interest. The writer proposes that there should be no more monopoly, but that everybody should be free to buy beaver-skins and send them to France, subject only to a moderate duty of entry. The proposal was not accepted. In 1721, the monopoly of exporting beaver-skins was given to the new West India Company; but this time it was provided that the government should direct from time to time, according to the capacities of the market, the quantity of furs which the company should be forced to receive. * Out of the beaver trade rose a huge evil, baneful to the growth and the morals of Canada. All that was most active and vigorous in the colony took to the woods, and escaped from the control of intendants, councils, and priests, to the savage freedom * On the fur trade the documents consulted are very numerous. The following are the most important: Mémoire sur ce qui concerne le Commerce du Castor et ses dépendances, 1715; Mémoire concernant le Commerce le Traite entre les Fran?ois et les Sauvages, 1691; Mémoire sur le Canada addressé au Régent, 1715; Mémoire sur les Affaires de Canada dans leur Estat présent, 1696; Mémoire des Négotiants de la Rochelle qui font Commerce en Canada sur la Proposition de ne plus recevoir les Castors et d'engager les Habitants a la Culture des Terres et Pesche de la Molue, 1696; Mémoire du Sr. Riverin sur la Traite et la Ferme du Castor, 1696; Mémoire touchant le Commerce du Canada, 1687, etc. of the wilderness. Not only were the possible profits great; but, in the pursuit of them, there was a fascinating element of adventure and danger. The bush-rangers or coureurs de bois were to the king an object of horror. They defeated his plans for the increase of the population, and shocked his native instinct of discipline and order. Edict after edict was directed against them; and more than once the colony presented the extraordinary spectacle of the greater part of its young men turned into forest outlaws. But severity was dangerous. The offenders might be driven over to the English, or converted into a lawless banditti, renegades of civilization and the faith. Therefore, clemency alternated with rigor, and declarations of amnesty with edicts of proscription. Neither threats nor blandishments were of much avail. We hear of seigniories abandoned; farms turning again into forests; wives and children left in destitution. The exodus of the coureurs de bois would take, at times, the character of an organized movement. The famous Du Lhut is said to have made a general combination of the young men of Canada to follow him into the woods. Their plan was to be absent four years, in order that the edicts against them might have time to relent. The intendant Duchesneau reported that eight hundred men out of a population of less than ten thousand souls had vanished from sight in the immensity of a boundless wilderness. Whereupon the king ordered that any person going into the woods without a license should be whipped and branded for the first offence, and sent lor life to the galleys for the second. * The order was more easily given than enforced. “I must not conceal from you, monseigneur,” again writes Duchesneau, “that the disobedience of the coureurs de bois has reached such a point that everybody boldly contravenes the king’s interdictions; that there is no longer any concealment; and that parties are collected with astonishing insolence to go and trade in the Indian country. I have done all in my power to prevent this evil, which may cause the ruin of the colony. I have enacted ordinances against the coureurs de bois; against the merchants who furnish them with goods; against the gentlemen and others who harbor them, and even against those who have any knowledge of them, and will not inform the local judges. All has been in vain; inasmuch as some of the most considerable families are interested with them, and the governor lets them go on and even shares their profits.” ** “You are aware, monseigneur,” writes Denonville, some years later, “that the coureurs de bois are a great evil, but you are not aware how great this evil is. It deprives the country of its effective men; makes them indocile, debauched, and incapable of discipline, and turns them into pretended nobles, wearing the sword and decked out with lace, both they and their relations, who all affect to be gentlemen and ladies. As for cultivating the soil, they will not hear of it. * Le Roy a Frontenac, 30 Avril, 1681. On another occasion, it was ordered that any person thus offending should suffer death. ** N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. 131. This, along with the scattered condition of the settlements, causes their children to be as unruly as Indians, being brought up in the same manner. Not that there are not some very good people here, but they are in a minority.” * In another despatch he enlarges on their vagabond and lawless ways, their indifference to marriage, and the mischief caused by their example; describes how, on their return from the woods, they swagger like lords, spend all their gains in dress and drunken revelry, and despise the peasants, whose daughters they will not deign to marry, though they are peasants themselves. It was a curious scene when a party of coureurs de bois returned from their rovings. Montreal was their harboring place, and they conducted themselves much like the crew of a man-of-war paid off after a long voyage. As long as their beaver-skins lasted, they set no bounds to their riot. Every house in the place, we are told, was turned into a drinking shop. The new-comers were bedizened with a strange mixture of French and Indian finery; while some of them, with instincts more thoroughly savage, stalked about the streets as naked as a Pottawattamie or a Sioux. The clamor of tongues was prodigious, and gambling and drinking filled the day and the night. When at last they were sober again, they sought absolution for their sins; nor could the priests venture to bear too hard on their unruly penitents, * Denonville, Mémoire sur l’Estat des Affaires de le Nouvelle France. lest they should break wholly with the church and dispense thenceforth with her sacraments. Under such leaders as Du Lhut, the coureurs de bois built forts of palisades at various points throughout the West and Northwest. They had a post of this sort at Detroit some time before its permanent settlement, as well as others on Lake Superior and in the valley of the Mississippi. They occupied them as long as it suited their purposes, and then abandoned them to the next comer. Michillimackinac was, however, their chief resort; and thence they would set out, two or three together, to roam for hundreds of miles through the endless meshwork of interlocking lakes and rivers which seams the northern wilderness. No wonder that a year or two of bush-ranging spoiled them for civilization. Though not a very valuable member of society, and though a thorn in the side of princes and rulers, the coureur de bois had his uses, at least from an artistic point of view; and his strange figure, sometimes brutally savage, but oftener marked with the lines of a dare-devil courage, and a reckless, thoughtless gayety, will always be joined to the memories of that grand world of woods which the nineteenth century is fast civilizing out of existence. At least, he is picturesque, and with his red-skin companion serves to animate forest scenery. Perhaps he could sometimes feel, without knowing that he felt them, the charms of the savage nature that had adopted him. Rude as he was, her voice may not always have been meaningless for one who knew her haunts so well; deep recesses where, veiled in foliage, some wild shy rivulet steals with timid music through breathless caves of verdure; gulfs where feathered crags rise like castle walls, where the noonday sun pierces with keen rays athwart the torrent, and the mossed arms of fallen pines cast wavering shadows on the illumined foam; pools of liquid crystal turned emerald in the reflected green of impending woods; rocks on whose rugged front the gleam of sunlit waters dances in quivering light; ancient trees hurled headlong by the storm to dam the raging stream with their forlorn and savage ruin; or the stern depths of immemorial forests, dim and silent as a cavern, columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channelled rind; some strong in youth, some grisly with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing fallen trunks as bent in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow, like mouldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on and through them, springs the young growth that battens on their decay,—the forest devouring its own dead. Or, to turn from its funereal shade to the light and life of the open woodland, the sheen of sparkling lakes, and mountains basking in the glory of the summer noon, flecked by the shadows of passing clouds that sail on snowy wings across the transparent azure. Yet it would be false coloring to paint the half-savage coureur de bois as a romantic lover of nature. He liked the woods because they emancipated him from restraint. He liked the lounging ease of the camp-fire, and the license of Indian villages. His life has a dark and ugly side, which is nowhere drawn more strongly than in a letter written by the Jesuit Carheil to the intendant Champigny. It was at a time when some of the outlying forest posts, originally either missions or transient stations of coureurs de bois, had received regular garrisons. Carheil writes from Michillimackinac, and describes the state of things around him like one whom long familiarity with them had stripped of every illusion. But here, for the present, we pause; for the father touches on other matters than the coureurs de bois, and we reserve him and his letter for the next chapter. CHAPTER XVIII. 1663-1702. THE MISSIONS. THE BRANDY QUESTION. The Jesuits and the Iroquois.—Mission Villages.—Michillimackinac. —Father Carheil.—Temperance.—Brandy and the Indians.—Strong Measures.—Disputes.—License and Prohibition.—Views of the King.—Trade and the Jesuits. For a year or two after De Tracy had chastised the Mohawks, and humbled the other Iroquois nations, all was rose color on the side of that dreaded confederacy. The Jesuits, defiant as usual of hardship and death, had begun their ruined missions anew. Bruyas took the Mission of the Martyrs among the Mohawks; Milet, that of Saint Francis Xavier, among the Oneidas; Lamberville, that of Saint John the Baptist among the Onondagas; Carheil, that of Saint Joseph among the Cayugas; and Raffeix and Julien Gamier shared between them the three missions of the Senecas. The Iroquois, after their punishment, were in a frame of mind so hopeful, that the fathers imagined for a moment that they were all on the point of accepting the faith. This was a consummation earnestly to be wished, not only from a religious, but also from a political point of view. The complete conversion of the Iroquois meant their estrangement from the heretic English and Dutch, and their firm alliance with the French. It meant safety for Canada, and it ensured for her the fur trade of the interior freed from English rivalry. Hence the importance of these missions, and hence their double character. While the Jesuit toiled to convert his savage hosts, he watched them at the same time with the eye of a shrewd political agent; reported at Quebec the result of his observations, and by every means in his power sought to alienate them from England, and attach them to France. Their simple conversion, by placing them wholly under his influence, would have outweighed in political value all other agencies combined; but the flattering hopes of the earlier years soon vanished. Some petty successes against other tribes so elated the Iroquois, that they ceased to care for French alliance or French priests. Then a few petty reverses would dash their spirits, and dispose them again to listen to Jesuit counsels. Every success of a war-party was a loss to the faith, and every reverse was a gain. Meanwhile a more repulsive or a more critical existence than that of a Jesuit father in an Iroquois town is scarcely conceivable. The torture of prisoners turned into a horrible festivity for the whole tribe; foul and crazy orgies in which, as the priest thought, the powers of darkness took a special delight; drunken riots, the work of Dutch brandy, when he was forced to seek refuge from death in his chapel, a sanctuary which superstitious fear withheld the Indians from violating; these, and a thousand disgusts and miseries, filled the record of his days, and he bore them all in patience. Not only were the early Canadian Jesuits men of an intense religious zeal, but they were also men who lived not for themselves but for their order. Their faults were many and great, but the grandeur of their self-devotion towers conspicuous over all. At Caughnawaga, near Montreal, may still be seen the remnants of a mission of converted Iroquois, whom the Jesuits induced to leave the temptations of their native towns and settle here, under the wing of the church. They served as a bulwark against the English, and sometimes did good service in time of war. At Sillery, near Quebec, a band of Abenaquis, escaping from the neighborhood of the English towards the close of Philip’s War, formed another mission of similar character. The Sulpitians had a third at the foot of the mountain of Montreal, where two massive stone towers of the fortified Indian town are standing to this day. All these converted savages, as well as those of Lorette and other missions far and near, were used as allies in war, and launched in scalping parties against the border settlements of New England. Not only the Sulpitians, but also the seminary priests of Quebec, the Recollets, and even the Capuchins, had missions more or less important, and more or less permanent; but the Jesuits stood always in the van of religious and political propagandism; and all the forest tribes felt their influence, from Acadia and Maine to the plains beyond the Mississippi. Next in importance to their Iroquois missions were those among the Algonquins of the northern lakes. Here was the grand domain of the beaver trade; and the chief woes of the missionary sprang not from the Indians, but from his own countrymen. Beaver-skins had produced an effect akin to that of gold in our own day, and the deepest recesses of the wilderness were invaded by eager seekers after gain. The focus of the evil was at Father Marquette’s old mission of Michillimackinac. First, year after year came a riotous invasion of coureurs de bois, and then a garrison followed to crown the mischief. Discipline was very weak at these advanced posts, and, to eke out their pay, the soldiers were allowed to trade; brandy, whether permitted or interdicted, being the chief article of barter. Father Etienne Carheil was driven almost to despair; and he wrote to the intendant, his fast friend and former pupil, the long letter already mentioned. “Our missions,” he says, “are reduced to such extremity that we can no longer maintain them against the infinity of disorder, brutality, violence, injustice, impiety, impurity, insolence, scorn, and insult, which the deplorable and infamous traffic in brandy has spread universally among the Indians of these parts.... In the despair in which we are plunged, nothing remains for us but to abandon them to the brandy sellers as a domain of drunkenness and debauchery.” He complains bitterly of the officers in command of the fort, who, he says, far from repressing disorders, encourage them by their example, and are even worse than their subordinates, “insomuch that all our Indian villages are so many taverns for drunkenness and Sodoms for iniquity, which we shall be forced to leave to the just wrath and vengeance of God.” He insists that the garrisons are entirely useless, as they have only four occupations: first, to keep open liquor shops for crowds of drunken Indians; secondly, to roam from place to place, carrying goods and brandy under the orders of the commandant, who shares their profits; thirdly, to gamble day and night; fourthly, to “turn the fort into a place which I am ashamed to call by its right name;” and he describes, with a curious amplitude of detail, the swarms of Indian girls who are hired to make it their resort. “Such, monseigneur, are the only employments of the soldiers maintained here so many years. If this can be called doing the king service, I admit that such service is done for him here now, and has always been done for him here; but I never saw any other done in my life.” He further declares that the commandants oppose and malign the missionaries, while of the presents which the king sends up the country for distribution to the Indians, they, the Indians, get nothing but a little tobacco, and the officer keeps the rest for himself. * * Of the officers in command at Michillimackinac while Carheil was there, he partially excepts La Durantaye from his strictures, but bears very hard on La Motte-Cadillac, who hated the Jesuits and was hated by them in turn. La Motte, on his part, writes that “the missionaries wish to be masters wherever they are, and cannot tolerate anybody above themselves.” N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. 587. For much more emphatic expressions of his views concerning them, see two letters from him, translated in Sheldon’s Early History of Michigan. From the misconduct of officers and soldiers, he passes to that of the coureurs de bois and licensed traders; and here he is equally severe. He dilates on the evils which result from permitting the colonists to go to the Indians instead of requiring the Indians to come to the settlements. “It serves only to rob the country of all its young men, weaken families, deprive wives of their husbands, sisters of their brothers, and parents of their children; expose the voyagers to a hundred dangers of body and soul; involve them in a multitude of expenses, some necessary, some useless, and some criminal; accustom them to do no work, and at last disgust them with it for ever; make them live in constant idleness, unlit them completely for any trade, and render them useless to themselves, their families, and the public. But it is less as regards the body than as regards the soul, that this traffic of the French among the savages is infinitely hurtful. It carries them far away from churches, separates them from priests and nuns, and severs them from all instruction, all exercise of religion, and all spiritual aid. It sends them into places wild and almost inaccessible, through a thousand perils by land and water, to carry on by base, abject, and shameful means a trade which would much better be carried on at Montreal.” But in the complete transfer of the trade to Montreal, he sees insuperable difficulties, and he proceeds to suggest, as the last and best resort, that garrisons and officers should be withdrawn, and licenses abolished; that discreet and virtuous persons should be chosen to take charge of all the trade of the upper country; that these persons should be in perfect sympathy and correspondence with the Jesuits; and that the trade should be carried on at the missions of the Jesuits and in their presence. * This letter brings us again face to face with the brandy question, of which we have seen something already in the quarrel between Avaugour and the bishop. In the summer of 1648, there was held at the mission of Sillery a temperance meeting; the first in all probability on this continent. The drum beat after mass, and the Indians gathered at the summons. Then an Algonquin chief, a zealous convert of the Jesuits, proclaimed to the crowd a late edict of the governor imposing penalties for drunkenness, and, in his own name and that of the other chiefs, exhorted them to abstinence, declaring that all drunkards should be handed over to the French for punishment. Father Jerome Lalemant looked on delighted. “It was,” he says, “the finest public act of jurisdiction exercised among the Indians since I have been in this country. From the beginning of the world they have all thought themselves as great lords, the one as the other, and never before submitted to their chiefs any further than they chose to do so.” * * Lettre du Pere Etienne Carheil de la Compagnie de Jésus à l'Intendant Champigny, Michillimackinac, 30 Ao?t, 1702 (Archives Nationales) Lalemant, Rel, 1648, p. 43. There was great need of reform; for a demon of drunkenness seemed to possess these unhappy tribes. Nevertheless, with all their rage for brandy, they sometimes showed in regard to it a self-control quite admirable in its way. When at a fair, a council, or a friendly visit, their entertainers regaled them with rations of the coveted liquor, so prudently measured out that they could not be the worse for it, they would unite their several portions in a common stock, which they would then divide among a few of their number, thus enabling them to attain that complete intoxication which, in their view, was the true end of all drinking. The objects of this singular benevolence were expected to requite it in kind on some future occasion. A drunken Indian with weapons within reach, was very dangerous, and all prudent persons kept out of his way. This greatly pleased him; for, seeing everybody run before him, he fancied himself a great chief, and howled and swung his tomahawk with redoubled fury. If, as often happened, he maimed or murdered some wretch not nimble enough to escape, his countrymen absolved him from all guilt, and blamed only the brandy. Hence, if an Indian wished to take a safe revenge on some personal enemy, he would pretend to be drunk; and, not only murders but other crimes were often committed by false claimants to the bacchanalian privilege. In the eyes of the missionaries, brandy was a fiend with all crimes and miseries in his train; and, in fact, nothing earthly could better deserve the epithet infernal than an Indian town in the height of a drunken debauch. The orgies never ceased till the bottom of the barrel was reached. Then came repentance, despair, wailing, and bitter invective against the white men, the cause of all the woe. In the name of the public good, of humanity, and above all of religion, the bishop and the Jesuits denounced the fatal traffic. Their case was a strong one; but so was the case of their opponents. There was real and imminent danger that the thirsty savages, if refused brandy by the French, would seek it from the Dutch and English of New York. It was the most potent lure and the most killing bait. Wherever it was found, thither the Indians and their beaver-skins were sure to go, and the interests of the fur trade, vital to the colony, were bound up with it. Nor was this all, for the merchants and the civil powers insisted that religion and the saving of souls were bound up with it no less; since, to repel the Indians from the Catholic French, and attract them to the heretic English, was to turn them from ways of grace to ways of perdition. * The argument, no doubt, was dashed largely with hypocrisy in those who used it; but it was one which the priests were greatly perplexed to answer. In former days, when Canada was not yet transformed from a mission to a colony, the Jesuits entered with a high hand on the work of reform. * “Ce commerce est absolument nécessaire pour attirer les sauvages dans les colonies fran?oises, et par ce moyen leur donner les premières teintures de la foy.” Mémoire de Colbert, joint à sa lettre à Duchesneau du 24 Mai, 1678. It fared hard with the culprit caught in the act of selling brandy to Indians. They led him, after the sermon, to the door of the church; where, kneeling on the pavement, partially stript and bearing in his hand the penitential torch, he underwent a vigorous flagellation, laid on by Father Le Mercier himself, after the fashion formerly practised in the case of refractory school-boys. * Bishop Laval not only discharged against the offenders volleys of wholesale excommunication, but he made of the offence a “reserved case;” that is, a case in which the power of granting absolution was reserved to himself alone. This produced great commotion, and a violent conflict between religious scruples and a passion for gain. The bishop and the Jesuits stood inflexible; while their opponents added bitterness to the quarrel by charging them with permitting certain favored persons to sell brandy, unpunished, and even covertly selling it themselves. ** * Mémoire de Dumesnil, 1671. ** Lettre de Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye, 24 Oct., 1693. After speaking of the excessive rigor of the bishop, he adds: “L’on dit, et il est vrai, que dans ces temps si facheux, sous prétexte de pauvreté dans les familles, certaines gens avoient permission d’en traiter, je crois toujours avec la réserve de ne pas enivrer.” Dumesnil, Mémoire de 1671, says that Laval excommunicated all brandy- sellers, “à l’exception, néanmoins, de quelques particuliers qu’il voulait favoriser.” He says further that the bishop and the Jesuit Ragueneau had a clerk whom they employed at 500 francs a year to trade with the Indians, paying them in liquors for their furs; and that for a time the ecclesiastics had this trade to themselves, their severities having deterred most others from venturing into it. La Salle, Mémoire de 1678, declares that, “Ils (les Jésuites) refusent l’absolution a ceux qui ne veulent pas promettre de n’en plus vendre, et s’ils meurent en cet état, ils les privent de la sépulture ecclésiastique: au contraire, ils so permettent à eux mesmes sans aucune difficulté ce mesme trafic, quoyque toute sorte de trafic soit interdite à tous les ecclésiastiques par les ordonnances du Roy et par une bulle expresse du Pape.” I give these assertions as I find them, and for what they are worth. Appeal was made to the king, who, with his Jesuit confessor, guardian of his conscience on one side, and Colbert, guardian of his worldly interests on the other, stood in some perplexity. The case was referred to the fathers of the Sorbonne, and they, after solemn discussion, pronounced the selling of brandy to Indians a mortal sin. * It was next referred to an assembly of the chief merchants and inhabitants of Canada, held under the eye of the governor, intendant, and council, in the Chateau St. Louis. Each was directed to state his views in writing. The great majority were for unrestricted trade in brandy; a few were for a limited and guarded trade; and two or three declared for prohibition. ** Decrees of prohibition were passed from time to time, but they were unavailing. They were revoked, renewed, and revoked again. They were, in fact, worse than useless; for their chief effect was to turn traders and coureurs de bois into troops of audacious contrabandists. Attempts were made to limit the brandy trade to the settlements, and exclude it from the forest country, where its regulation was impossible; but these attempts, like the others, were of little avail. It is worthy of notice that, when brandy was forbidden everywhere else, it was permitted in the trade of Tadoussac, carried on for the profit of government. *** * Délibération de la Sorbonne sur la Traite des Boissons, 8 Mars, 1676. ** Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée tenue au Chateau de St. Louis de Québec, le 26 Oct., 1676, et jours suivants. *** Lettre de Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye, 24 Oct., 1693. In the course of the quarrel a severe law passed by the General Court of Massachusetts against the sale of liquors to Indians was several times urged as an example to be imitated. A copy of it was sent to the minister, and is still preserved in the Archives of the Marine and Colonies. In spite of the Sorbonne, in spite of Père La Chaise, and of the Archbishop of Paris, whom he also consulted, the king was never at heart a prohibitionist. * His Canadian revenue was drawn from the fur trade; and the singular argument of the partisans of brandy, that its attractions were needed to keep the Indians from contact with heresy, served admirably to salve his conscience. Bigot as he was, he distrusted the Bishop of Quebec, the great champion of the anti-liquor movement. His own letters, as well as those of his minister, prove that he saw or thought that he saw motives for the crusade very different from those inscribed on its banners. He wrote to Saint-Vallier, Laval’s successor in the bishopric, that the brandy trade was very useful to the kingdom of France; that it should be regulated, but not prevented; that the consciences of his subjects must not be disturbed by denunciations of it as a sin; and that “it is well that you (the bishop) should take care that the zeal of the ecclesiastics is not excited by personal interests and passions.” ** Perhaps he alludes to the spirit of encroachment and domination which he and his minister in secret instructions to their officers often impute to the bishop and the clergy, or perhaps he may have in mind other accusations which had reached him * See, among other evidence, Mémoire sur la Traite des Boissons, 1678. ** Le Roy à Saint-Vallier, 7 Avril, 1691 from time to time during many years, and of which the following from the pen of the most noted of Canadian governors will serve as an example. Count Frontenac declares that the Jesuits greatly exaggerate the disorders caused by brandy, and that they easily convince persons “who do not know the interested motives which have led them to harp continually on this string for more than forty years.... They have long wished to have the fur trade entirely to themselves, and to keep out of sight the trade which they have always carried on in the woods, and which they are carrying on there now.” * Trade of the Jesuits.—As I have observed in a former volume, the charge against the Jesuits of trading in beaver-skins dates from the beginning of the colony. In the private journal of Father Jerome Lalemant, their superior, occurs the following curious passage, under date of November, 1645: “Pour la traite des castors. Le 15 de Nov. le bruit estant qu’on s’en alloit icy publier la defense qui auoit esté publiée aux Trois Riuieres que pas vu n’eut à traiter avec les sauvages, le P. Vimont demanda à Mons. des Chastelets commis general si nous serions de pire condition soubs eux que soubs Messieurs de la Compagnie. La conclusion fut que non et que cela iroit pour nous à U ordinaire, mais que nous le fissions doucement.” Journal des Jésuites. Two years after, on the request of Lalemant, the governor Montmagny, and his destined successor Aillebout, gave the Jesuits a certificate to the effect that “les pères de la compagnie de Jésus sont innocents de la calomnie qui leur a été imputée, et ce qu’ils en ont fiait a été pour le bien de la communauté et pour un bon sujet.” This leaves it to be inferred that they actually traded, though with good intentions. In 1664, in reply to similar “calumnies,” the Jesuits made by proxy a declaration before the council, stating, “que les dits Révérends Pères Jésuites n’ont fait jamais aucune profession de vendre et n’ont jamais rien vendu, mais seulement que les marchandises qu’ils donnent aux particuliers ne sont que pour avoir leurs * Frontenac au Ministre, 29 Oct., 1676. nécessités.” This is an admission in a thin disguise. The word nécessités is of very elastic interpretation. In a memoir of Talon, 1667, he mentions, “la traite de pelleteries qu’on assure qu’ils (les Jésuites) font aux Outaouacks et au Cap de la Madeleine; ce que je ne sais pas de science certaine.” That which Talon did not know with certainty is made reasonably clear for us by a line in the private journal of Father Le Mercier, who writes under date of 17 August, 1665, “Le Père Frémin remonte supérieur au Cap de la Magdeleine, ou le temporel est en bon estat. Comme il est delivre de tout soin d'aucune traite, il doit s’appliquer à l’instruction tant des Montagnets que des Algonquins.” Father Charles Albanel was charged, under Frémin, with the affairs of the mission, including doubtless the temporal interests, to the prosperity of which Father Le Merciei alludes, and the cares of trade from which Father Frémin was delivered. Cavelier de la Salle declared in 1678, “Le père Arbanelle (Albanel) jésuite a traité au Cap (de la Madeleine) pour 700 pistoles de peaux d’orignaux et de castors; luy mesme me l’a dit en 1667. Il vend le pain, le vin, le bled, le lard, et il tient magazin au Cap aussi bien que le frère Joseph à Québec. Ce frère gagne 500 pour 100 sur tous les peuples. Ils (les Jésuites) ont bati leur collège en partie de leur traite et en partie de l’emprunt.” La Salle further says that Frémin, being reported to have made enormous profits, “ce père répondit au gouverneur (qui lui en avait fait des plaintes) par un billet que luy a conservé, que c’estoit une calomnie que ce grand gain prétendu; puisque tout ce qui se passoit par ses mains ne pouvoit produire par an que quatre mille de revenant bon, tous frais faits, sans comprendre les gages des domestiques.” La Salle gives also many other particulars, especially relating to Michillimackinac, where, as he says, the Jesuits had a large stock of beaver-skins. According to Peronne Dumesnil, Mémoire de 1671, the Jesuits had at that time more than 20,000 francs a year, partly from trade and partly from charitable contributions of their friends in France. The king repeatedly forbade the Jesuits and other ecclesiastics in Canada to carry on trade. On one occasion he threatened strong measures should they continue to disobey him. Le Roi à Frontenac, 28 Avril, 1677. In the same year the minister wrote to the intendant Duchesneau: “Vous ne sauriez apporter trop de precautions pour abolir entièrement la coustume que les Ecclesiastiques séculiers et réguliers avaient pris de traitter ou de faire traitter leurs valets,” 18 Avril, 1677. The Jesuits entered also into other branches of trade and industry with a vigor and address which the inhabitants of Canada might have emulated with advantage. They were successful fishers of eels. In 1646, their eel-pots at Sillery are said to have yielded no less than forty thousand eels, some of which they sold at the modest price of thirty sous a hundred. Ferland, Notes sur les Registres de N. D. de Québec, 82. The members of the order were exempted from payment of duties, and in 1674 they were specially empowered to construct mills, including sugar-mills, and beep slaves, apprentices, and hired servants. Droit Canadien, 180. CHAPTER XIX 1663-1763. PRIESTS AND PEOPLE. Church and State.—The Bishop and the King.—The King and the Cures.—The New Bishop.—The Canadian Cure.—Ecclesiastical Rule.—Saint-Vallier and Denonville.—Clerical Rigor.—Jesuit and Sulpitian.—Courcelle and Chatelain.—The Recollets.—Heresy and Witchcraft.—Canadian Nuns.—Jeanne Le Ber.—Education.—The Seminary.—Saint Joachim.—Miracles op Saint Anne.—Canadian Schools. When Laval and the Jesuits procured the recall of Mézy, they achieved a seeming triumph; yet it was but a defeat in disguise. While ordering home the obnoxious governor, the king and Colbert made a practical assertion of their power too strong to be resisted. A vice-regal officer, a governor, an intendant, and a regiment of soldiers, were silent but convincing proofs that the mission days of Canada were over, and the dream of a theocracy dispelled for ever. The ecclesiastics read the signs of the times, and for a while seemed to accept the situation. The king on his part, in vindicating the civil power, had shown a studious regard to the sensibilities of the bishop and his allies. The lieutenant-general Tracy, a zealous devotee, and the intendant Talon, who at least professed to be one, were not men to offend the clerical party needlessly. In the choice of Courcelle, the governor, a little less caution had been shown. His chief business was to fight the Iroquois, for which he was well fitted, but he presently showed signs of a willingness to fight the Jesuits also. The colonists liked him for his lively and impulsive speech; but the priests were of a different mind, and so, too, was his colleague Talon, a prudent person who studied the amenities of life and knew how to pursue his ends with temper and moderation. On the subject of the clergy he and the governor substantially agreed, but the ebullitions of the one and the smooth discretion of the other were mutually repugnant to both. Talon complained of his colleague’s impetuosity; and Colbert directed him to use his best efforts to keep Courcelle within bounds and prevent him from publicly finding fault with the bishop and the Jesuits.* Next we find the minister writing to Courcelle himself to soothe his ruffled temper, and enjoining him to act discreetly, “because,” said Colbert, “as the colony grows the king’s authority will grow with it, and the authority of the priests will be brought back in time within lawful bounds.” ** Meanwhile, Talon had been ordered to observe carefully the conduct of the bishop and the Jesuits, “who,” says the minister, “have hitherto nominated governors for the king, and used every * Colbert a Talon, 20 Fev., 1668. ** Colbert a Courcelle, 19 Mai, 1669 means to procure the recall of those chosen without their participation; * filled offices with their adherents, and tolerated no secular priests except those of one mind with them.” ** Talon, therefore, under the veil of a reverent courtesy, sharply watched them. They paid courtesy with courtesy, and the intendant wrote home to his master that he saw nothing amiss in them. He quickly changed his mind. “I should have had less trouble and more praise,” he writes in the next year, “if I had been willing to leave the power of the church |where I found it.” *** “It is easy,” he says again, “to incur the ill-will of the Jesuits if one does not accept all their opinions and abandon one’s self to their direction even in temporal matters; for their encroachments extend to affairs of police, which concern only the civil magistrate;” and he recommends that one or two of them be sent home as disturbers of the peace. **** They, on their part, changed attitude towards both him and the governor. One of them, Father Bardy, less discreet than the rest, is said to have preached a sermon against them at Quebec, in which he likened them to a pair of toadstools springing up in a night, adding that a good remedy would soon be found, and that Courcelle would have to run home like other governors before him. (v) Tracy escaped clerical attacks. He was * Instruction au Sieur Talon. ** Mémoire pour M. de Tracy. *** Talon au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1666. **** Talon, Mémoire de 1667. (v) La Salle, Mémoire de 1678 This sermon was preached on the 12th of March, 1667. extremely careful not to provoke them; and one of his first acts was to restore to the council the bishop’s adherents, whom Mézy had expelled. * And if, on the one hand, he was too pious to quarrel with the bishop, so, on the other, the bishop was too prudent to invite collision with a man of his rank and influence. After all, the dispute between the civil and ecclesiastical powers was not fundamental. Each had need of the other. Both rested on authority, and they differed only as to the boundary lines of their respective shares in it. Yet the dispute of boundaries was a serious one, and it remained a source of bitterness for many years. The king, though rigidly Catholic, was not yet sunk in the slough of bigotry into which Maintenon and the Jesuits succeeded at last in plunging him. He had conceived a distrust of Laval, and his jealousy of his royal authority disposed him to listen to the anti-clerical counsels of his minister. How needful they both thought it to prune the exuberant growth of clerical power, and how cautiously they set themselves to do so, their letters attest again and again. “The bishop,” writes Colbert, “assumes a domination far beyond that of other bishops throughout the Christian world, and particularly in the kingdom of France.” ** “It is the will of his Majesty that you confine him and the Jesuits within just bounds, and let none of them * A curious account of his relations with Laval is given in a letter of La Motte-Cadillac, 28 September, 1694. ** Colbert a Duchesneau, 1 Mai, 1677. overstep these bounds in any manner whatsoever. Consider this as a matter of the greatest importance, and one to which you cannot give too much attention.” * “But,” the prudent minister elsewhere writes, “it is of the greatest consequence that the bishop and the Jesuits do not perceive that the intendant blames their conduct.” ** It was to the same intendant that Colbert wrote, “it is necessary to diminish as much as possible the excessive number of priests, monks, and nuns, in Canada.” Yet in the very next year, and on the advice of Talon, he himself sent four more to the colony. His motive was plain. He meant that they should serve as a counterpoise to the Jesuits. *** They were mendicant friars, belonging to the branch of the Franciscans known as the Recollets; and they were supposed to be free from the ambition for the aggrandizement of their order which was imputed, and with reason, to the Jesuits. Whether the Recollets were free from it or not, no danger was to be feared from them; for Laval and the Jesuits were sure to oppose them, and they would need the support of the government too much to set themselves in opposition to it. “The more Recollets we have,” says Talon, “the better will the too firmly rooted authority of the others be balanced.” **** While Louis XIV. tried to confine the priests to * Colbert a Duchesneau, 28 Avril, 1677. ** Instruction pour M. Bouteroue, 1668. *** Mémoire succinct des principaux points des intentions du Roy sur le pays de Canada, 18 Mai, 1669. **** Talon au Ministre, 10 Oct., 1670. their ecclesiastical functions, he was at the same time, whether from religion, policy, or both combined, very liberal to the Canadian church, of which, indeed, he was the main-stay. In the yearly estimate of “ordinary charges” of the colony, the church holds the most prominent place; and the appropriations for religious purposes often exceed all the rest together. Thus, in 1667, out of a total of 36,360 francs, 28,000 are assigned to church uses. * The amount fluctuated, but was always relatively large. The Canadian curés were paid in great part by the king, who for many years gave eight thousand francs annually towards their support. Such was the poverty of the country that, though in 1685 there were only twenty-five curés, ** each costing about five hundred francs a year, the tithes utterly failed to meet the expense. As late as 1700, the intendant declared that Canada without the king’s help could not maintain more than eight or nine curés. Louis XIV. winced under these steady demands, and reminded the bishop that more than four thousand curés in France lived on less than two hundred francs a year. *** “You say,” he wrote to the intendant, “that it is impossible for a Canadian curé to live on five hundred francs. Then you * Of this, 6,000 francs were given to the Jesuits, 6,000 to the Ursulines, 9,000 to the cathedral, 4,000 to the seminary, and 3,000 to the H?tel-Dieu. Etat de dépense, etc., 1677. The rest went to pay civil officers and garrisons. In 1682, the amount for church uses was only 12,000 francs. In 1687 it was 13,500. In 1689, it rose to 34,000, including Acadia. ** Increased soon after to thirty-six by Saint-Vallier, Laval’s successor. *** Mémoire a Duchesneau, 15 Mai, 1678; Le Roy a Duchesneau, 11 Juin, 1680. must do the impossible to accomplish my intentions, which are always that the curés should live on the tithes alone.” * Yet the head of the church still begged for money, and the king still paid it. “We are in the midst of a costly war,” wrote the minister to the bishop, “yet in consequence of your urgency the gifts to ecclesiastics will be continued as before.” ** And they did continue. More than half a century later, the king was still making them, and during the last years of the colony he gave twenty thousand francs annually to support Canadian curés. *** The maintenance of curés was but a part of his bounty. He endowed the bishopric with the revenues of two French abbeys, to which he afterwards added a third. The vast tracts of land which Laval had acquired were freed from feudal burdens, and emigrants were sent to them by the government in such numbers that, in 1667, the bishop’s seigniory of Beaupré and Orleans contained more than a fourth of the entire population of Canada. **** He had emerged from his condition of apostolic poverty to find himself the richest land-owner in the colony. If by favors like these the king expected to lead the ecclesiastics into compliance with his * Le Roy a Duchesneau, 30 Avril, 1681. ** Le Ministre a l’Evêque, 8 Mai, 1694. *** Bougainville, Mémoire, 1757. **** Entire population, 4,312; Beaupré and Orleans, 1,185. Recensement de 1667. Laval, it will be remembered, afterwards gave his lands to the seminary of Quebec. He previously exchanged the island of Orleans with the Sieur Berthelot for the island of Jesus. Berthelot gave him a large sum of money in addition. wishes, he was doomed to disappointment. The system of movable curés, by which the bishop like a military chief could compel each member of his clerical army to come and go at his bidding, was from the first repugnant to Louis XIV. On the other hand, the bishop clung to it with his usual tenacity. Colbert denounced it as contrary to the laws of the kingdom. * “His Majesty has reason to believe,” he writes, “that the chief source of the difficulty which the bishop makes on this point is his wish to preserve a greater authority over the curés.” ** The inflexible prelate, whose heart was bound up in the system he had established, opposed evasion and delay to each expression of the royal will; and even a royal edict failed to produce the desired effect. In the height of the dispute, Laval went to court, and, on the ground of failing health, asked for a successor in the bishopric. The king readily granted his prayer. The successor was appointed; but when Laval prepared to embark again for Canada, he was given to understand that he was to remain in France. In vain he promised to make no trouble; *** and it was not till after an absence of four years that he was permitted to return, no longer as its chief, to his beloved Canadian church. **** * Le Ministre a Duchesneau, 15 Mai, 1678. ** Instruction a M. de Meules, 1682. *** Laval au Père la Chaise, 1687. This forms part of a curious correspondence printed in the Foyer Canadien for 1866, from originals in the Archevêché of Quebec. **** From a mémoire of 18 Feb., 1685 (Archives de Versailles) it is plain that the court, in giving a successor to Laval, thought that it had ended the vexed question of movable curés. Meanwhile Saint-Vallier, the new bishop, had raised a new tempest. He attacked that organization of the seminary of Quebec by which Laval had endeavored to unite the secular priests of Canada into an attached and obedient family, with the bishop as its head and the seminary as its home, a plan of which the system of movable curés was an essential part. The Canadian priests, devoted to Laval, met the innovations of Saint-Vallier with an opposition which seemed only to confirm his purpose. Laval, old and worn with toil and asceticism, was driven almost to despair. The seminary of Quebec was the cherished work of his life, and, to his thinking, the citadel of the Canadian church; and now he beheld it battered and breached before his eyes. His successor, in fact, was trying to place the church of Canada on the footing of the church of France. The conflict lasted for years, with the rancor that marks the quarrels of non-combatants of both sexes. “He” (Saint-Vallier), says one of his opponents, “has made himself contemptible to almost everybody, and particularly odious to the priests born in Canada; for there is between them and him a mutual antipathy difficult to overcome.” * He is described by the same writer as a person “without reflection and judgment, extreme in all things, secret and artful, passionate when opposed, and a flatterer when he wishes to gain his point.” This amiable critic adds that Saint-Vallier believes a * The above is from an anonymous paper, written apparently in 1695 and entitled Mémoire pour le Canada. bishop to be inspired, in virtue of his office, with a wisdom that needs no human aid, and that whatever thought comes to him in prayer is a divine inspiration to be carried into effect at all costs and in spite of all opposition. The new bishop, notwithstanding the tempest he had raised, did not fully accomplish that establishment of the curés in their respective parishes which the king and the minister so much desired. The Canadian curé was more a missionary than a parish priest; and nature as well as Bishop Laval threw difficulties in the way of settling him quietly over his charge. On the Lower St. Lawrence, where it widens to an estuary, six leagues across, a ship from France, the last of the season, holds her way for Quebec, laden with stores and clothing, household utensils, goods for Indian trade, the newest court fashions, wine, brandy, tobacco, and the king’s orders from Versailles. Swelling her patched and dingy sails, she glides through the wildness and the solitude where there is nothing but her to remind you of the great troubled world behind and the little troubled world before. On the far verge of the ocean-like river, clouds and mountains mingle in dim confusion; fresh gusts from the north dash waves against the ledges, sweep through the quivering spires of stiff and stunted fir-trees, and ruffle the feathers of the crow, perched on the dead bough after his feast of mussels among the sea-weed. You are not so solitary as you think. A small birch canoe rounds the point of rocks, and it bears two men; one in an old black cassock, and the other in a buckskin coat; both working hard at the paddle to keep their slender craft off the shingle and the breakers. The man in the cassock is Father Morel, aged forty-eight, the oldest country curé in Canada, most of his brethren being in the vigor of youth as they had need to be. His parochial charge embraces. a string of incipient parishes extending along the south shore from Riviere du Loup to Rivière du Sud, a distance reckoned at twenty-seven leagues, and his parishioners number in all three hundred and twenty-eight souls. He has administered spiritual consolation to the one inhabitant of Kamouraska; visited the eight families of La Bouteillerie and the five families of La Combe; and now he is on his way to the seigniory of St. Denis with its two houses and eleven souls. * The father lands where a shattered eel-pot high and dry on the pebbles betrays the neighborhood of man. His servant shoulders his portable chapel, and follows him through the belt of firs, and the taller woods beyond, till the sunlight of a desolate clearing shines upon them. Charred trunks and limbs encumber the ground; dead trees, branchless, barkless, pierced by the woodpeckers, in part black with fire, in part bleached by sun and frost, tower ghastly and weird above the labyrinth of forest ruins, through which the priest and his * These particulars are from the Plan général de l’estat présent des missions du Canada, fait en l’année, 1683. It is a list and description of the parishes with the names and ages of the cures, and other details. See Abeille, I. This paper was drawn up by order of Laval. follower wind their way, the cat-bird mewing, and the blue-jay screaming as they pass. Now the golden-rod and the aster, harbingers of autumn, fringe with purple and yellow the edge of the older clearing, where wheat and maize, the settler’s meagre harvest, are growing among the stumps. Wild-looking women, with sunburnt faces and neglected hair, run from their work to meet the curé; a man or two follow with soberer steps and less exuberant zeal; while half-savage children, the coureurs de bois of the future, bareheaded, barefooted, and half-clad, come to wonder and stare. To set up his altar in a room of the rugged log cabin, say mass, hear confessions, impose penance, grant absolution, repeat the office of the dead over a grave made weeks before, baptize, perhaps, the last infant; marry, possibly, some pair who may or may not have waited for his coming; catechize as well as time and circumstance would allow the shy but turbulent brood of some former wedlock: such was the work of the parish priest in the remoter districts. It was seldom that his charge was quite so scattered, and so far extended as that of Father Morel; but there were fifteen or twenty others whose labors were like in kind, and in some cases no less arduous. All summer they paddled their canoes from settlement to settlement; and in winter they toiled on snow-shoes over the drifts; while the servant carried the portable chapel on his back, or dragged it on a sledge. Once, at least, in the year, the curé paid his visit to Quebec, where, under the maternal roof of the seminary he made his retreat of meditation and prayer, and then returned to his work. He rarely had a house of his own, but boarded in that of the seignior or one of the habitants. Many parishes or aggregations of parishes had no other church than a room fitted up for the purpose in the house of some pious settler. In the larger settlements, there were churches and chapels of wood, thatched with straw, often ruinous, poor to the last degree, without ornaments, and sometimes without the sacred vessels necessary for the service. * In 1683, there were but seven stone churches in all the colony. The population was so thin and scattered that many of the settlers heard mass only three or four times a year, and some of them not so often. The sick frequently died without absolution, and infants without baptism. The splendid self-devotion of the early Jesuit missions has its record; so, too, have the unseemly bickerings of bishops and governors: but the patient toils of the missionary curé rest in the obscurity where the best of human virtues are buried from age to age. What we find set down concerning him is, that Louis XIV. was unable to see why he should not live on two hundred francs a year as well as a village curé by the banks of the Garonne. The king did not know that his cassock and all his clothing cost him twice as much and lasted half as long; that he must have a canoe and a man to paddle it; and that when on his * Saint-Vallier, Estat présent de l’Eglise et de la Colonie Fran?aise, 22ed. 18nt-Vallier, Estat présent de l’Eglise et de la Colonie Fran?aise, 22 (ed. 1856). annual visit the seminary paid him five or six hundred francs, partly in clothes, partly in stores, and partly in money, the end of the year found him as poor as before except only in his conscience. The Canadian priests held the manners of the colony under a rule as rigid as that of the Puritan churches of New England, but with the difference that in Canada a large part of the population was restive under their control, while some of the civil authorities, often with the governor at their head, supported the opposition. This was due, partly to an excess of clerical severity, and partly to the continued friction between the secular and ecclesiastical powers. It sometimes happened, however, that a new governor arrived, so pious that the clerical party felt that they could rely on him. Of these rare instances the principal is that of Denonville, who, with a wife as pious as himself, and a young daughter, landed at Quebec, in 1685. On this, Bishop Saint-Vallier, anxious to turn his good dispositions to the best account, addressed to him a series of suggestions or rather directions for the guidance of his conduct, with a view to the spiritual profit of those over whom he was appointed to rule. The document was put on file, and the following are some of the points in it. It is divided into five different heads: “Touching feasts,” “touching balls and dances,” “touching comedies and other declamations,” “touching dress,” “touching irreverence in church.” The governor and madame his wife are desired to accept no invitations to suppers, that is to say late dinners, as tending to nocturnal hours and dangerous pastimes; and they are further enjoined to express dissatisfaction, and refuse to come again, should any entertainment offered them be too sumptuous. “Although,” continues the bishop under the second head of his address, “balls and dances are not sinful in their nature, nevertheless they are so dangerous by reason of the circumstances that attend them, and the evil results that almost inevitably follow, that, in the opinion of Saint Francis of Sales, it should be said of them as physicians say of mushrooms, that at best they are good for nothing;” and, after enlarging on their perils, he declares it to be of great importance to the glory of God and the sanctification of the colony, that the governor and his wife neither give such entertainments nor countenance them by their presence. “Nevertheless,” adds the mentor, “since the youth and vivacity of mademoiselle their daughter requires some diversion, it is permitted to relent somewhat, and indulge her in a little moderate and proper dancing, provided that it be solely with persons of her own sex, and in the presence of madame her mother; but by no means in the presence of men or youths, since it is this mingling of sexes which causes the disorders that spring from balls and dances.” Private theatricals in any form are next interdicted to the young lady. The bishop then passes to the subject of her dress, and exposes the abuses against which she is to be guarded. “The luxury of dress,” he says, “appears in the rich and dazzling fabrics wherein the women and girls of Canada attire themselves, and which are far beyond their condition and their means; in the excess of ornaments which they put on; in the extraordinary head-dresses which they affect, their heads being uncovered and full of strange trinkets; and in the immodest curls so expressly forbidden in the epistles of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, as well as by all the fathers and doctors of the church, and which God has often severely punished, as may be seen by the example of the unhappy Pretextata, a lady of high quality, who, as we learn from Saint Jerome, who knew her, had her hands withered, and died suddenly five months after, and was precipitated into hell, as God had threatened her by an angel; because, by order of her husband, she had curled the hair of her niece, and attired her after a worldly fashion.” * Whether the Marquis and Marchioness Denonville profited by so apt and terrible a warning, or whether their patience and good-nature survived the episcopal onslaught, does not appear on record. The subject of feminine apparel received great attention, both from Saint-Vallier and his * “Témoin entr’autres l’exemple de la malheureuse Prétextate, dame de grande condition, laquelle au rapport de S. Jér?me, dont elle étoit connue, eut les mains desséchées et cinq mois après mourut subitement et fut précipitée en enfer, ainsi que Dieu l’en avoit menacée par un Ange pour avoir par le commandement de son mari frisé et habillé mondainement sa nièce.” Divers points a représenter a Mr. le Gouverneur et à Madame la Gouvernante, signé Jean, évesque de Québec. (Registre de l’Evêché de Québec.) The bishop on another occasion holds up the sad fate of Pretextata as a warning to Canadian mothers; but in the present case he slightly changes the incidents to make the story more applicable to the governor and his wife. predecessor, each of whom issued a number of pastoral mandates concerning it. Their severest denunciations were aimed at low-necked dresses, which they regarded as favorite devices of the enemy for the snaring of souls; and they also used strong language against certain knots of ribbons called fontanges, with which the belles of Quebec adorned them heads. Laval launches strenuous invectives against “the luxury and vanity of women and girls, who, forgetting the promises of their baptism, decorate themselves with the pomp of Satan, whom they have so solemnly renounced; and, in their wish to please the eyes of men, make themselves the instruments and the captives of the fiend.” * In the journal of the superior of the Jesuits we find, under date of February 4, 1667, a record of the first ball in Canada, along with the pious wish, “God grant that nothing further come of it.” Nevertheless more balls were not long in following; and, worse yet, sundry comedies were enacted under no less distinguished patronage than that of Frontenac, the governor. Laval denounced them vigorously, the Jesuit Dablon attacked them in a violent sermon; and such excitement followed that the affair was brought before the royal council, which declined to interfere. ** This flurry, * Mandement contre le luxe et la vanité des femmes et des filles, 1682. (Registres de l'Evêché de Québec.) A still more vigorous denunciation is contained in Ordonnance contre les vices de luxe et d’impureté, 1690. This was followed in the next year by a stringent list of rules called Réglement pour la conduite des fidèles de ce diocèse. ** Arrêts du 24 et 28 juin par lesquels cette affaire (des comédies) est renvoyésn& Sa Majesté, 1681. (?) (Registre du Conseil Souverain.) however, was nothing to the storm raised ten or twelve years later by other dramatic aggressions, an account of which will appear in the sequel of this volume. The morals of families were watched with unrelenting vigilance. Frontenac writes in a mood unusually temperate, “they (the priests) are full of virtue and piety, and if their zeal were less vehement and more moderate they would perhaps succeed better in their efforts for the conversion of souls; but they often use means so extraordinary, and in France so unusual, that they repel most people instead of persuading them. I sometimes tell them my views frankly and as gently as I can, as I know the murmurs that their conduct excites, and often receive complaints of the constraint under which they place consciences. This is above all the case with the ecclesiastics at Montreal, where there is a curé from Franche Comté who wants to establish a sort of inquisition worse than that of Spain, and all out of an excess of zeal.” * It was this curé, no doubt, of whom La Hontan complains. That unsanctified young officer was quartered at Montreal, in the house of one of the inhabitants. “During a part of the winter I was hunting with the Algonquins; the rest of it I spent here very disagreeably. One can neither go on a pleasure party, nor play a game of cards, nor visit the ladies, without the curé knowing it and preaching about it publicly from his pulpit. The priests excommunicate * Frontenac au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1691. masqueraders, and even go in search of them to pull off their masks and overwhelm them with abuse. They watch more closely over the women and girls than their husbands and fathers. They prohibit and burn all books but books of devotion. I cannot think of this tyranny without cursing the indiscreet zeal of the curé of this town. He came to the house where I lived, and, finding some books on my table, presently pounced on the romance of Petronius, which I valued more than my life because it was not mutilated. He tore out almost all the leaves, so that if my host had not restrained me when I came in and saw the miserable wreck, I should have run after this rampant shepherd and torn out every hair of his beard.” * La Motte-Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, seems to have had equal difficulty in keeping his temper. “Neither men of honor nor men of parts are endured in Canada; nobody can live here but simpletons and slaves of the ecclesiastical domination. The count (Frontenac) would not have so many troublesome affairs on his hands if he had not abolished a Jericho in the shape of a house built by messieurs of the seminary of Montreal, to shut up, as they said, girls who caused scandal; if he had allowed them to take officers and soldiers to go into houses at midnight and carry off women from their husbands and whip them till the blood flowed because they had been at a ball or worn a mask; if he had said nothing against the curés * La Hontan, I. 60 (ed. 1709). Other editions contain the same story to different words. who went the rounds with the soldiers and compelled women and girls to shut themselves up in their houses at nine o’clock of summer evenings; if he had forbidden the wearing of lace, and made no objection to the refusal of the communion to women of quality because they wore a fontange; if he had not opposed excommunications flung about without sense or reason; if, I say, the count had been of this way of thinking he would have stood as a nonpareil, and have been put very soon on the list of saints, for saint-making is cheap in this country.” * While the Sulpitians were thus rigorous at Montreal, the bishop and his Jesuit allies were scarcely less so at Quebec. There was little goodwill between them and the Sulpitians, and some of the sharpest charges against the followers of Loyola are brought by their brother priests at Montreal. The Sulpitian Allet writes: “The Jesuits hold such domination over the people of this country that they go into the houses and see every thing that passes there. They then tell what they have learned to each other at their meetings, and on this information they govern their policy. The Jesuit, Father Ragueneau, used to go every day down to the Lower Town, where the merchants live, to find out all that was going on in their families; and he often made people get up from table to confess to him.” Allet goes on to say that Father Chatelain also went continually to the Lower Town with the same object, and that some * La Motte-Cadillac à-, 28 Sept., 1694. of the inhabitants complained of him to Courcelle, the governor. One day Courcelle saw the Jesuit, who was old and somewhat infirm, slowly walking by the Chateau, cane in hand, on his usual errand, on which he sent a sergeant after him to request that he would not go so often to the Lower Town, as the people were annoyed by the frequency of his visits. The father replied in wrath, “Go and tell Monsieur de Courcelle that I have been there ever since he was governor, and that I shall go there after he has ceased to be governor;” and he kept on his way as before. Courcelle reported his answer to the superior, Le Mercier, and demanded to have him sent home as a punishment; but the superior effected a compromise. On the following Thursday, after mass in the cathedral, he invited Courcelle into the sacristy, where Father Chatelain was awaiting them; and here, at Le Mercier’s order, the old priest begged pardon of the offended governor on his knees. * The Jesuits derived great power from the confessional; and, if their accusers are to be believed, they employed unusual means to make it effective. Cavelier de la Salle says: “They will confess nobody till he tells his name, and no servant till he tells the name of his master. When a crime is confessed, they insist on knowing the name of the accomplice, as well as all the circumstances, with * Mémoire d’Allet. The author was at one time secretary to Abbé Quélus. The paper is printed in the Morale pratique des Jésuites. The above is one of many curious statements which it contains. the greatest particularity. Father Chatelain especially never fails to do this. They enter as it were by force into the secrets of families, and thus make themselves formidable; for what cannot be done by a clever man devoted to his work, who knows all the secrets of every family; above all when he permits himself to tell them when it is for his interest to do so?” * The association of women and girls known as the Congregation of the Holy Family, which was formed under Jesuit auspices, and which met every Thursday with closed doors in the cathedral, is said to have been very useful to the fathers in their social investigations. ** The members are affirmed to have been under a vow to tell each other every good or evil deed they knew of every person of their acquaintance; so that this pious gossip became a copious source of information to those in a position to draw upon it. In Talon’s time the Congregation of the Holy Family caused such commotion in Quebec that he asked the council to appoint a commission to inquire into its proceedings. He was touching dangerous ground. The affair was presently hushed, and the application cancelled on the register of the council. *** The Jesuits had long exercised solely the function of confessors in the colony, and a number of * La Salle, Mémoire, 1678. ** See Discovery of the Great West, 105. *** Représentation faite au conseil au sujet de certaines assemblées de femmes ou filles sous le nom de la Sainte Famille, 1667. (Registre du Conseil Souverain.) The paper is cancelled by lines drawn over it; and the following minute, duly attested, is appended to it: “Rayé du consentement de M. Talon” curious anecdotes are on record showing the reluctance with which they admitted the secular priests, and above all the Recollets, to share in it. The Recollets, of whom a considerable number had arrived from time to time, were on excellent terms with the civil powers, and were popular with the colonists; but with the bishop and the Jesuits they were not in favor, and one or two sharp collisions took place. The bishop was naturally annoyed when, while he was trying to persuade the king that a curé needed at least six hundred francs a year, these mendicant friars came forward with an offer to serve the parishes for nothing; nor was he, it is likely, better pleased when, having asked the hospital nuns eight hundred francs annually for two masses a day in their chapel, the Recollets underbid him, and offered to say the masses for three hundred. * They, on their part, complain bitterly of the bishop, who, they say, would gladly have ordered them out of the colony, but being unable to do this, tried to shut them up in their convent, and prevent them from officiating as priests among the people. “We have as little liberty,” says the Recollet writer, “as if we were in a country of heretics.” He adds that the inhabitants ask earnestly for the ministrations of the friars, but that the bishop replies with invectives and calumnies against the order, and that * “Mon dit sieur l’evesque leur fait payer (aux hospitalières) 800L. par an pour deux messes qu’il leur fait dire par ses Séminaristes que lei Récollets leurs voisins leur offrent pour 300L.” La Barre au Ministre, 1682. when the Recollets absolve a penitent he often annuls the absolution. * In one respect this Canadian church militant achieved a complete success. Heresy was scoured out of the colony. When Maintenon and her ghostly prompters overcame the better nature of the king, and wrought on his bigotry and his vanity to launch him into the dragonnades; when violence and lust bore the crucifix into thousands of Huguenot homes, and the land reeked with nameless infamies; when churches rang with Te Deums, and the heart of France withered in anguish; when, in short, this hideous triumph of the faith was won, the royal tool of priestly ferocity sent orders that heresy should be treated in Canada as it had been treated in France. ** The orders were needless. The pious Denonville replies, “Praised be God, there is not a heretic here.” He adds that a few abjured last year, and that he should be very glad if the king would make them a present. The Jesuits, he further says, go every day on board the ships in the harbor to look after the new converts from France. *** Now and then at a later day a real or suspected Jansenist found his way to Canada, and sometimes an esprit fort, like * Mémoire instructif contenant la conduite des PP. Récollets de Paris en leurs missions de Canada, 1684. This paper, of which only a fragment is preserved, was written in connection with a dispute of the Recolléts with the bishop who opposed their attempt to establish a church in Quebec. ** Mémoire du Roy a Denonville, 31 Mai, 1686. The king here orders the imprisonment of heretics who refuse to abjure, or the quartering of soldiers on them. What this meant the history of the dragonnades will show. *** Denonville au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1686. La Hontan, came over with the troops; but on the whole a community more free from positive heterodoxy perhaps never existed on earth. This exemption cost no bloodshed. What it did cost we may better judge hereafter. If Canada escaped the dragonnades, so also she escaped another infliction from which a neighboring colony suffered deplorably. Her peace was never much troubled by witches. They were held to exist, it is true; but they wrought no panic. Mother Mary of the Incarnation reports on one occasion the discovery of a magician in the person of a converted Huguenot miller who, being refused in marriage by a girl of Quebec, bewitched her, and filled the house where she lived with demons, which the bishop tried in vain to exorcise. The miller was thrown into prison, and the girl sent to the H?tel-Dieu, where not a demon dared enter. The infernal crew took their revenge by creating a severe influenza among the citizens. * If there are no Canadian names on the calendar of saints, it is not because in by-ways and obscure places Canada had not virtues worthy of canonization. Not alone her male martyrs and female devotees, whose merits have found a chronicle and a recognition; not the fantastic devotion of Madame d’Aillebout, who, lest she should not suffer enough, took to herself a vicious and refractory servant girl, as an exercise of patience; and not certainly the mediaeval pietism of Jeanne Le Ber, the * Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre de—Sept., 1661. venerated recluse of Montreal. There are others quite as worthy of honor, whose names have died from memory. It is difficult to conceive a self-abnegation more complete than that of the hospital nuns of Quebec and Montreal. In the almost total absence of trained and skilled physicians, the burden of the sick and wounded fell upon them. Of the two communities, that of Montreal was the more wretchedly destitute, while that of Quebec was exposed, perhaps, to greater dangers. Nearly every ship from France brought some form of infection, and all infection found its way to the H?tel-Dieu of Quebec. The nuns died, but they never complained. Removed from the arena of ecclesiastical strife, too busy for the morbidness of the cloister, too much absorbed in practical benevolence to become the prey of illusions, they and their sister community were models of that benign and tender charity of which the Roman Catholic Church is so rich in examples. Nor should the Ursulines and the nuns of the Congregation be forgotten among those who, in another field of labor, have toiled patiently according to their light. Mademoiselle Jeanne Le Ber belonged to none of these sisterhoods. She was the favorite daughter of the chief merchant of Montreal, the same who, with the help of his money, got himself ennobled. She seems to have been a girl of a fine and sensitive nature; ardent, affectionate, and extremely susceptible to religious impressions. Religion at last gained absolute sway over her. Nothing could appease her longings or content the demands of her excited conscience but an entire consecration of herself to heaven. Constituted as she was, the resolution must have cost her an agony of mental conflict. Her story is a strange, and, as many will think, a very sad one. She renounced her suitors, and wished to renounce her inheritance; but her spiritual directors, too far-sighted to permit such a sacrifice, persuaded her to hold fast to her claims, and content herself with what they called “poverty of heart.” Her mother died, and her father, left with a family of young children, greatly needed her help; but she refused to leave her chamber where she had immured herself. Here she remained ten years, seeing nobody but her confessor and the girl who brought her food. Once only she emerged, and this was when her brother lay dead in the adjacent room, killed in a fight with the English. She suddenly appeared before her astonished sisters, stood for a moment in silent prayer by the body, and then vanished without uttering a word. “Such,” says her modern biographer, “was the sublimity of her virtue and the grandeur of her soul.” Not content with this domestic seclusion, she caused a cell to be made behind the altar in the newly built church of the Congregation, and here we will permit ourselves to cast a stolen glance at her through the narrow opening through which food was passed in to her. Her bed, a pile of straw which she never moved, lest it should become too soft, was so placed that her head could touch the partition, that alone separated it from the Host on the altar. Here she lay wrapped in a garment of coarse gray serge, worn, tattered, and unwashed. An old blanket, a stool, a spinning-wheel, a belt and shirt of haircloth, a scourge, and a pair of shoes made by herself of the husks of Indian-corn, appear to have formed the sum of her furniture and her wardrobe. Her employments were spinning and working embroidery for churches. She remained in this voluntary prison about twenty years; and the nun who brought her food testifies that she never omitted a mortification or a prayer, though commonly in a state of profound depression, and what her biographer calls “complete spiritual aridity.” When her mother died, she had refused to see, her; and, long after, no prayer of her dying father could draw her from her cell. “In the person of this modest virgin,” writes her reverend eulogist, “we see, with astonishment, the love of God triumphant over earthly affection for parents, and a complete victory of faith over reason and of grace over nature.” In 1711, Canada was threatened with an attack by the English; and she gave the nuns of the Congregation an image of the Virgin on which she had written a prayer to protect their granary from the invaders. Other persons, anxious for a similar protection,, sent her images to write upon; but she declined the request. One of the disappointed applicants then stole the inscribed image from the granary of the Congregation, intending to place it on his own when the danger drew near. The English, however, did not come, their fleet having suffered a ruinous shipwreck ascribed to the prayers of Jeanne Le Ber. “It was,” writes the Sulpitian Belmont, “the greatest miracle that ever happened since the days of Moses.” Nor was this the only miracle of which she was the occasion. She herself declared that once when she had broken her spinning-wheel, an angel came and mended it for her. Angels also assisted in her embroidery, “no doubt,” says Mother Juchereau, “taking great pleasure in the society of this angelic creature.” In the church where she had secluded herself, an image of the Virgin continued after her death to heal the lame and cure the sick. * Though she rarely permitted herself to speak, yet some oracular utterance of the sainted recluse would now and then escape to the outer world. One of these was to the effect that teaching poor girls to read, unless they wanted to be nuns, was robbing them of their time. Nor was she far wrong, for in Canada there was very little to read except formulas of devotion and lives of saints. The dangerous innovation of a printing-press had not invaded the colony, ** and the first Canadian newspaper dates from the British conquest. All education was controlled by priests or nuns. The ablest teachers in Canada were the Jesuits. Their college of Quebec was three years older than * Faillon, L’Héroine chrétienne du Canada, ou Vie de Mlle. Le Ber. This is a most elaborate and eulogistic life of the recluse. A shorter account of her will be found in Juchereau, H?tel-Dieu. She died in 1714, at the age of fifty-two. ** A printing-press was afterwards brought to Canada, but was soon sent back again. Harvard. We hear at an early date of public disputations by the pupils, after the pattern of those tournaments of barren logic which preceded the reign of inductive reason in Europe, and of which the archetype is to be found in the scholastic duels of the Sorbonne. The boys were sometimes permitted to act certain approved dramatic pieces of a religious character, like the Sage Visionnaire. On one occasion they were allowed to play the Cid of Corneille, which, though remarkable as a literary work, contained nothing threatening to orthodoxy. They were taught a little Latin, a little rhetoric, and a little logic; but against all that might rouse the faculties to independent action, the Canadian schools prudently closed their doors. There was then no rival population, of a different origin and a different faith, to compel competition in the race of intelligence and knowledge. The church stood sole mistress of the field. Under the old régime the real object of education in Canada was a religious and, in far less degree, a political one. The true purpose of the schools was: first, to make priests; and, secondly, to make obedient servants of the church and the king. All the rest was extraneous and of slight account. In regard to this matter, the king and the bishop were of one mind. “As I have been informed,” Louis XIV writes to Laval, “of your continued care to hold the people in their duty towards God and towards me by the good education you give or cause to be given to the young, I write this letter to express my satisfaction with conduct so salutary, and to exhort you to persevere in it.” * The bishop did not fail to persevere. The school for boys attached to his seminary became the most important educational institution in Canada. It was regulated by thirty-four rules, “in honor of the thirty-four years which Jesus lived on earth.” The qualities commended to the boys as those which they should labor diligently to acquire were, “humility, obedience, purity, meekness, modesty, simplicity, chastity, charity, and an ardent love of Jesus and his Holy Mother.” ** Here is a goodly roll of Christian virtues. What is chiefly noticeable in it is, that truth is allowed no place. That manly but unaccommodating virtue was not, it seems, thought important in forming the mind of youth. Humility and obedience lead the list, for in unquestioning submission to the spiritual director lay the guaranty of all other merits. We have seen already that, besides this seminary for boys, Laval established another for educating the humbler colonists. It was a sort of farm-school, though besides farming various mechanical trades were also taught in it. It was well adapted to the wants of a great majority of Canadians, whose tendencies were any thing but bookish; but here, as elsewhere, the real object was religious. It enabled the church to extend her influence over classes which the ordinary schools could not reach. Besides manual training, the pupils were taught to * Le Roy a Laval, 9 Avril, 1667 (extract in Faillon). ** Ancien règlement du Petit Séminaire de Québec, see Abeille VIII., no. 32. read and write; and for a time a certain number of them received some instruction in Latin. When, in 1686, Saint-Vallier visited the school, he found in all thirty-one boys under the charge of two priests; but the number was afterwards greatly reduced, and the place served, as it still serves, chiefly as a retreat during vacations for the priests and pupils of the seminary of Quebec. A spot better suited for such a purpose cannot be conceived. From the vast meadows of the parish of St. Joachim, that here border the St. Lawrence, there rises like an island a low flat hill, hedged round with forests like the tonsured head of a monk. It was here that Laval planted his school. Across the meadows, a mile or more distant, towers the mountain promontory of Cape Tourmente. You may climb its woody steeps, and from the top, waist-deep in blueberry-bushes, survey, from Kamouraska to Quebec, the grand Canadian world outstretched below; or mount the neighboring heights of St. Anne, where, athwart the gaunt arms of ancient pines, the river lies shimmering in summer haze, the cottages of the habitants are strung like beads of a rosary along the meadows of Beaupré, the shores of Orleans bask in warm light, and far on the horizon the rock of Quebec rests like a faint gray cloud; or traverse the forest till the roar of the torrent guides you to the rocky solitude where it holds its savage revels. High on the cliffs above, young birch-trees stand smiling in the morning sun; while in the abyss beneath the snowy waters plunge from depth to depth, and, half way down, the slender hare-bell hangs from its mossy nook, quivering in the steady thunder of the cataract. Game on the river; trout in lakes, brooks, and pools; wild fruits and flowers on meadows and mountains,—a thousand resources of honest and wholesome recreation here wait the student emancipated from books, but not parted for a moment from the pious influence that hangs about the old walls embosomed in the woods of St. Joachim. Around on plains and hills stand the dwellings of a peaceful peasantry, as different from the restless population of the neighboring states as the denizens of some Norman or Breton village. 2205 Saint Anne of the Petit Cap Above all, do not fail to make your pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Anne. You may see her chapel four or five miles away, nestled under the heights of the Petit Cap. Here, when Aillebout was governor, he began with his own hands the pious work, and a habitant of Beaupré, Louis Guimont, sorely afflicted with rheumatism, came grinning with pain to lay three stones in the foundation, in honor probably of Saint Anne, Saint Joachim, and their daughter, the Virgin. Instantly he was cured. It was but the beginning of a long course of miracles continued more than two centuries, and continuing still. Their fame spread far and wide. The devotion to Saint Anne became a distinguishing feature of Canadian Catholicity, till at the present day at least thirteen parishes bear her name. But of all her shrines none can match the fame of St. Anne du Petit Cap. Crowds flocked thither on the week of her festival, and marvellous cures were wrought unceasingly, as the sticks and crutches hanging on the walls and columns still attest. Sometimes the whole shore was covered with the wigwams of Indian converts who had paddled their birch canoes from the farthest wilds of Canada. The more fervent among them would crawl on their knees from the shore to the altar. And, in our own day, every summer a far greater concourse of pilgrims, not in paint and feathers, but in cloth and millinery, and not in canoes, but in steamboats, bring their offerings and their vows to the “Bonne Sainte Anne.” * To return to Laval’s industrial school. Judging from repeated complaints of governors and intendants of the dearth of skilled workmen, the priests in charge of it were more successful in making good Catholics than in making good masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and weavers; and the number of pupils, even if well trained, was at no time sufficient to meet the wants of the colony; ** for, though the Canadians showed an aptitude for * For an interesting account of the shrine at the Petit Cap, see Casgrain, Le Pélérinage de la Bonne Sainte Anne, a little manual of devotion printed at Quebec. I chanced to visit the old chapel in 1871, during a meeting of the parish to consider the question of reconstructing it, as it was in a ruinous state. Passing that way again two years after, I found the old chapel still standing, and a new one, much larger, half finished ** Most of them were moreover retained, after leaving the school, by the seminary, as servants, farmers, or vassals. La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VI mechanical trades, they preferred above all things the savage liberty of the backwoods. The education of girls was in the hands of the Ursulines and the nuns of the Congregation, of whom the former, besides careful instruction in religious duties, taught their pupils “all that a girl ought to know.” * This meant exceedingly little besides the manual arts suited to their sex; and, in the case of the nuns of the Congregation, who taught girls of the poorer class, it meant still less. It was on nuns as well as on priests that the charge fell, not only of spiritual and mental, but also of industrial, training. Thus we find the king giving to a sisterhood of Montreal a thousand francs to buy wool, and a thousand more for teaching girls to knit. ** The king also maintained a teacher of navigation and surveying at Quebec on the modest salary of four hundred francs. During the eighteenth century, some improvement is perceptible in the mental status of the population. As it became more numerous and more stable, it also became less ignorant; and the Canadian habitant, towards the end of the French rule, was probably better taught, so far as concerned religion, than the mass of French peasants. Yet secular instruction was still extremely meagre, even in the noblesse. “In spite of this defective education,” says the famous navigator, Bougainville, who knew the colony well in its last years, “the * A lire, à écrire, les prières, les m?urs chrétiennes, et tout ce qu'une fille doit savoir. Marie de l'Incarnation, Lettre du 9 Ao?t, 1668. ** Denonville au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1686. Canadians are naturally intelligent. They do not know how to write, but they speak with ease and with an accent as good as the Parisian.” * He means, of course, the better class. “Even the children of officers and gentlemen,” says another writer, “scarcely know how to read and write; they are ignorant of the first elements of geography and history.” ** And evidence like this might be extended. When France was heaving with the throes that prepared the Revolution; when new hopes, new dreams, new thoughts,—good and evil, false and true,—tossed the troubled waters of French society, Canada caught something of its social corruption, but not the faintest impulsion of its roused mental life. The torrent surged on its way; while, in the deep nook beside it, the sticks and dry leaves floated their usual round, and the unruffled pool slept in the placidity of intellectual torpor. *** * Bougainville, Mémoire de 1757 (see Margry, Relations inédites). ** Mémoire de 1736; Detail de toute la Colonie (published by Hist. Soc. of Quebec). *** Several Frenchmen of a certain intellectual eminence made their abode in Canada from time to time. The chief among them are the Jesuit Lafitau, author of M?urs des Sauvages Américains; the Jesuit Charlevoix, traveller and historian; the physician Sarrazin; and the Marquis de la Galisonnière, the most enlightened of the French governors of Canada. Sarrazin, a naturalist as well as a physician, has left his name to the botanical genus Sarracenia, of which the curious American species, S. purpurea, the “pitcher-plant,” was described by him. His position in the colony was singular and characteristic. He got little or no pay from his patients; and, though at one time the only genuine physician in Canada (Callieres et Beauharnois au Ministre, 3 Nov., 1702), he was dependent on the king for support. In 1699, we find him thanking his Majesty for 300 francs a year, and asking at the same time for more, as he has nothing else to live on. ( Callères et Champigny au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1699.) Two years later the governor writes that, as he serves almost everybody without fees, he ought to have another 300 francs. (Ibid., 5 Oct., 1701.) The additional 300 francs was given him; but, finding it insufficient, he wanted to leave the colony. “He is too useful,” writes the governor again: “we cannot let him go.” His yearly pittance of 600 francs, French money, was at one time re-enforced by his salary as member of the Superior Council. He died at Quebec in 1734. CHAPTER XX. 1640-1763. MORALS AND MANNERS. Social Influence of the Troops.—A Petty Tyrant.—Brawls.—Violence and Outlawry.—State of the Population.—Views of Denonville.—Brandy.—Beggary.—The Past and the Present.—Inns.—State of Quebec.—Fires.—The Country Parishes.—Slavery.—Views of La Hontan.—Of Hocquart.—Of Bougainville.—Of Kalm.—Of Charlevoix. The mission period of Canada, or the period anterior to the year 1663, when the king took the colony in charge, has a character of its own. The whole population did not exceed that of a large French village. Its extreme poverty, the constant danger that surrounded it, and, above all, the contagious zeal of the missionaries, saved it from many vices, and inspired it with an extraordinary religious fervor. Without doubt an ideal picture has been drawn of this early epoch. Trade as well as propagandism was the business of the colony, and the colonists were far from being all in a state of grace; yet it is certain that zeal was higher, devotion more constant, and popular morals more pure, than at any later period of the French rule. The intervention of the king wrought a change. The annual shipments of emigrants made by him were, in the most favorable view, of a very mixed character, and the portion which Mother Mary calls canaille was but too conspicuous. Along with them came a regiment of soldiers fresh from the license of camps and the excitements of Turkish wars, accustomed to obey their officers and to obey nothing else, and more ready to wear the scapulary of the Virgin in campaigns against the Mohawks than to square their lives by the rules of Christian ethics. “Our good king,” writes Sister Morin, of Montreal, “has sent troops to defend us from the Iroquois, and the soldiers and officers have ruined the Lord’s vineyard, and planted wickedness and sin and crime in our soil of Canada.” * Few, indeed, among the officers followed the example of one of their number, Paul Dupuy, who, in his settlement of Isle aux Oies, below Quebec, lived, it is said, like a saint, and on Sundays and fête days exhorted his servants and habitans with such unction that their eyes filled with tears. ** Nor, let us hope, were there many imitators of Major La Fredière, who, with a company of the regiment, was sent to garrison Montreal, where he ruled with absolute sway over settlers and soldiers alike. His countenance naturally repulsive was made more so by the loss of an eye; yet he was irrepressible in gallantry, and women and girls fled in terror from the military Polyphemus. The men, too, feared and hated him, not without reason. One morning a settler named Demers was hoeing his field, when * Annales de l'H?tel-Dieu St Joseph, cited by Faillon. ** Juchereau, H?tel-Dieu de Québec, 511 he saw a sportsman gun in hand striding through his half-grown wheat. “Steady there, steady," he shouted in a tone of remonstrance; but the sportsman gave no heed. “Why do you spoil a poor man’s wheat?” cried the outraged cultivator. “If I knew who you were, I would go and complain of you.” “Whom would you complain to?” demanded the sportsman, who then proceeded to walk back into the middle of the wheat, and called out to Demers, “You are a rascal, and I’ll thrash you.” “Look at home for rascals,” retorted Demers, “and keep your thrashing for your dogs.” The sportsman came towards him in a rage to execute his threat. Demers picked up his gun, which, after the custom of the time, he had brought to the field with him, and, advancing to meet his adversary, recognized La Fredière, the commandant. On this he ran off. La Fredière sent soldiers to arrest him, threw him into prison, put him in irons, and the next day mounted him on the wooden horse, with a weight of sixty pounds tied to each foot. He repeated the torture a day or two after, and then let his victim go, saying, “If I could have caught you when I was in your wheat, I would have beaten you well.” The commandant next turned his quarters into a dram-shop for Indians, to whom he sold brandy in large quantities, but so diluted that his customers, finding themselves partially defrauded of their right of intoxication, complained grievously. About this time the intendant Talon made one of his domiciliary visits to Montreal, and when, in his character of father of the people, he inquired if they had any complaints to make, every tongue was loud in accusation against La Fredière. Talon caused full depositions to be made out from the statements of Demers and other witnesses. Copies were deposited in the hands of the notary, and it is from these that the above story is drawn. The tyrant was removed, and ordered home to France. * Many other officers embarked in the profitable trade of selling brandy to Indians, and several garrison posts became centres of disorder. Others, of the regiment became notorious brawlers. A lieutenant of the garrison of Montreal named Carion, and an ensign named Morel, had for some reason conceived a violent grudge against another ensign named Lormeau. On Pentecost day, just after vespers, Lormeau was walking by the river with his wife. They had passed the common and the seminary wall, and were in front of the house of the younger Charles Le Moyne, when they saw Carion coming towards them. He stopped before Lormeau, looked him full in the face, and exclaimed, “Coward.” “Coward yourself,” returned Lormeau; “take yourself off.” Carion drew his sword, and Lormeau followed his example. They exchanged a few passes; then closed, and fell to the ground grappled together. Lormeau’s wig fell off; and Carion, getting the uppermost, hammered his bare head with the hilt of his sword. Lormeau’s * Information contre La Fredière. See Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, III. 886. The dialogue, as here given from the depositions, is translated as closely as possible.See Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, III. wife, in a frenzy of terror, screamed murder. One of the neighbors, Monsieur Belêtre, was at table with Charles Le Moyne and a Rochelle merchant named Baston. He ran out with his two guests, and they tried to separate the combatants, who still lay on the ground foaming like a pair of enraged bull-dogs. All their efforts were useless. “Very well,” said Le Moyne in disgust, “if you won’t let go, then kill each other if you like.” A former military servant of Carion now ran up, and began to brandish his sword in behalf of his late master. Carion’s comrade, Morel, also arrived, and, regardless of the angry protest of Le Moyne, stabbed repeatedly at Lormeau as he lay. Lormeau had received two or three wounds in the hand and arm with which he parried the thrusts, and was besides severely mauled by the sword-hilt of Carion, when two Sulpitian priests, drawn by the noise, appeared on the scene. One was Fremont, the curé; the other was Dollier de Casson. That herculean father, whose past soldier life had made him at home in a fray, and who cared nothing for drawn swords, set himself at once to restore peace, upon which, whether from the strength of his arm, or the mere effect of his presence, the two champions released their gripe on each other’s throats, rose, sheathed their weapons, and left the field. * Montreal, a frontier town at the head of the * Requête de Lormeau a M. d'Aillebout. Dépositions de MM. de Longueu?l (Le Moyne), de Baston, de Belêtre, et autres. Cited by Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, III. 393. 2219 He made a jump at the guns, took them under his arm like so many feathers colony, was the natural resort of desperadoes, offering, as we have seen, a singular contrast between the rigor of its clerical seigniors and the riotous license of the lawless crew which infested it. Dollier de Casson tells the story of an outlaw who broke prison ten or twelve times, and whom no walls, locks, or fetters could hold. “A few months ago,” he says, “he was caught again, and put into the keeping of six or seven men, each with a good gun. They stacked their arms to play a game of cards, which their prisoner saw fit to interrupt to play a game of his own. He made a jump at the guns, took them under his arm like so many feathers, aimed at these fellows with one of them, swearing that he would kill the first who came near him, and so, falling back step by step, at last bade them good-by, and carried off all their guns. Since then he has not been caught, and is roaming the woods. Very likely he will become chief of our banditti, and make great trouble in the country when it pleases him to come back from the Dutch settlements, whither they say he is gone along with another rascal, and a French woman so depraved that she is said to have given or sold two of her children to the Indians.” * When the governor, La Barre, visited Montreal, he found there some two hundred reprobates gambling, drinking, and stealing. If hard pressed by justice, they had only to cross the river and place themselves beyond the seigniorial jurisdiction. The military settlements of the Richelieu * Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, 1671, 72 were in a condition somewhat similar, and La Barre complains of a prevailing spirit of disobedience and lawlessness. * The most orderly and thrifty part of Canada appears to have been at this time the cote of Beaupré, belonging to the seminary of Quebec. Here the settlers had religious instruction from their curés, and industrial instruction also if they wanted it. Domestic spinning and weaving were practised at Beaupré sooner than in any other part of the colony. When it is remembered that a population which in La Barre’s time did not exceed ten thousand, and which forty years later did not much exceed twice that number, was scattered along both sides of a great river for three hundred miles or more; that a large part of this population was in isolated groups of two, three, five, ten, or twenty houses at the edge of a savage wilderness; that between them there was little communication except by canoes; that the settlers were disbanded soldiers, or others whose fives had been equally adverse to habits of reflection or self-control; that they rarely saw a priest, and that a government omnipotent in name had not arms long enough to reach them,—we may listen without surprise to the lamentations of order-loving officials over the unruly condition of a great part of the colony. One accuses the seigniors, who, he says, being often of low extraction, cannot keep their vassals in order. ** Another dwells sorrowfully on the “terrible dispersion” of * La Barre au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1683. ** Catalogne, Mémoire addressé au Ministre, 1712 the settlements where the inhabitants "live in a savage independence.” But it is better that each should speak for himself, and among the rest let us hear the pious Denonville. “This, monseigneur, seems to me the place for rendering you an account of the disorders which prevail not only in the woods, but also in the settlements. They arise from the idleness of young persons, and the great liberty which fathers, mothers, and guardians have for a long time given them, or allowed them to assume, of going into the forest under pretence of hunting or trading. This has come to such a pass, that, from the moment a boy can carry a gun, the father cannot restrain him and dares not offend him. You can judge the mischief that follows. These disorders are always greatest in the families of those who are gentilshommes, or who through laziness or vanity pass themselves off as such. Having no resource but hunting, they must spend their lives in the woods, where they have no curés to trouble them, and no fathers or guardians to constrain them. I think, monseigneur, that martial law would suit their case better than any judicial sentence. “Monsieur de la Barre suppressed a certain order of knighthood which had sprung up here, but he did not abolish the usages belonging to it. It was thought a fine thing and a good joke to go about naked and tricked out like Indians, not only on carnival days, but on all other days of feasting and debauchery. These practices tend to encourage the disposition of our young men to live like sav ages, frequent their company, and be for ever unruly and lawless like them. I; cannot tell you, monseigneur, how attractive this Indian life is to all our youth. It consists in doing nothing, caring for nothing, following every inclination, and getting out of the way of all correction.” He goes on to say that the mission villages governed by the Jesuits and Sulpitians are models of good order, and that drunkards are never seen there except when they come from the neighboring French settlements; but that the other Indians who roam at large about the colony, do prodigious mischief, because the children of the seigniors not only copy their way of life, but also run off with their women into the woods. * “Nothing,” he continues, “can be finer or better conceived than the regulations framed for the government of this country; but nothing, I assure you, is so ill observed as regards both the fur trade and the general discipline of the colony. One great evil is the infinite number of drinking-shops, which makes it almost impossible to remedy the disorders resulting from them. All the rascals and idlers of the country are attracted into this business of tavern-keeping. They never dream of tilling the soil; but, on the contrary, they deter the other inhabitants from it, and end with ruining * Raudot, who was intendant early in the eighteenth century, is a little less gloomy in his coloring, but says that Canadian children were without discipline or education, had no respect for parents or cure's, and owned no superiors. This, he thinks, is owing to “la folle tendresse des parents qui les empêche de les corriger et de leur former le caractère qu’ils ont dur et féroce.” them. I know seigniories where there are but twenty houses, and moire than half of them dram shops. At Three Rivers there are twenty-five houses, and liquor may be had at eighteen or twenty of them. Villemarie (Montreal) and Quebec are on the same footing.” The governor next dwells on the necessity of finding occupation for children and youths, a matter which he regards as of the last importance. "It is sad to see the ignorance of the population at a distance from the abodes of the curés, who are put to the greatest trouble to remedy the evil by travelling from place to place through the parishes in their charge.” * La Barre, Champigny, and Duchesneau write in a similar strain. Bishop Saint-Vallier, in an epistolary journal which he printed of a tour through the colony made on his first arrival, gives a favorable account of the disposition of the people, especially as regards religion. He afterwards changed his views. An abstract made from his letters for the use of the king states that he "represents, like M. Denonville, that the Canadian youth are for the most part wholly demoralized.” ** "The bishop was very sorry,” says a correspondent of the minister at Quebec, "to have so much exaggerated in the letter he printed at Paris the morality of the people here.” *** He preached a sermon on the sins of the inhabitants and issued a pastoral mandate, in which he says, "Before we * Denonville au Ministre, 13 Nov. 1685. ** N. Y. Colonial Documents, IX. 278. *** Ibid., IX. 388. knew our flock we thought that the English and the Iroquois were the only wolves we had to fear; but God having opened our eyes to the disorders of this diocese, and made us feel more than ever the weight of our charge, we are forced to confess that our most dangerous foes are drunkenness, luxury, impurity, and slander.” * Drunkenness was at this time the most destructive vice in the colony. One writer declares that most of the Canadians drink so much brandy in the morning, that they are unfit for work all day. ** Another says that a canoe-man when he is tired will lift a keg of brandy to his lips and drink the raw liquor from the bung-hole, after which, having spoiled his appetite, he goes to bed supperless; and that, what with drink and hardship, he is an old man at forty. Nevertheless the race did not deteriorate. The prevalence of early marriages, and the birth of numerous offspring before the vigor of the father had been wasted, ensured the strength and hardihood which characterized the Canadians. As Denonville describes them so they long remained. “The Canadians are tall, well-made, and well set on their legs (bienplantés sur leurs jambes), robust, vigorous, and accustomed in time of need to live on little. They have intelligence and vivacity, but are wayward, light-minded, and inclined to debauchery.” As the population increased, as the rage for * Ordonnance contre les vices de l’ivrognerie, luxe, et impureté, 31 Oct., 1690. ** N Y. Colonial Documents. IX. 398. bush-ranging began to abate, and, above all, as the curés multiplied, a change took place for the better. More churches were built, the charge of each priest was reduced within reasonable bounds, and a greater proportion of the inhabitants remained on their farms. They were better watched, controlled, and taught, by the church. The ecclesiastical power, wherever it had a hold, was exercised, as we have seen, with an undue rigor, yet it was the chief guardian of good morals; and the colony grew more orderly and more temperate as the church gathered more and more of its wild and wandering flock fairly within its fold. In this, however, its success was but relative. It is true that in 1715 a well-informed writer says that the people were “perfectly instructed in religion;” * but at that time the statement was only partially true. During the seventeenth century, and some time after its close, Canada swarmed with beggars, a singular feature in a new country where a good farm could be had for the asking. In countries intensely Roman Catholic begging is not regarded as an unmixed evil, being supposed to promote two cardinal virtues,—charity in the giver and humility in the receiver. The Canadian officials nevertheless tried to restrain it. Vagabonds of both sexes were ordered to leave Quebec, and nobody was allowed to beg without a certificate of poverty from the curé or the local judge. ** These orders were not * Mémoire addressé au Regent. ** Réglement de Police, 1676. always observed. Bishop Saint-Vallier writes that he is overwhelmed by beggars, * and the intendant echoes his complaint. Almshouses were established at Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec; ** and when Saint-Vallier founded the General Hospital, its chief purpose was to serve, not as a hospital in the ordinary sense of the word, but as a house of refuge, after the plan of the General Hospital of Paris. *** Appeal, as usual, was made to the king. Denonville asks his aid for two destitute families, and says that many others need it. Louis XIV. did not fail to respond, and from time to time he sent considerable sums for the relief of the Canadian poor. **** Denonville says, “The principal reason of the poverty of this country is the idleness and bad conduct of most of the people. The greater part of the women, including all the demoiselles, are very lazy.” (v) Meules proposes as a remedy that the king should establish a general workshop in the colony, and pay the workmen himself during the first five or six years. (v*) “The persons here,” he says, “who have wished to make a figure are nearly all so overwhelmed with debt that they may be * N. Y. Colonial Documents, IX. 279. ** Edits et Ordonnances, II. 119. *** On the General Hospital of Quebec, see Juchereau, 355. In 1692, the minister writes to Frontenac and Champigny that they should consider well whether this house of refuge will not “augmenter la fainéantise parmi les habitans,” by giving them a sure support in poverty. **** As late as 1701, six thousand livres were granted Callieres au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1701. (v) Denonville et Champigny au Ministre, 6 Nov,, 1687. (v*) Meules au Ministre, 12 Nov., 1682. considered as in the last necessity.” * He adds that many of the people go half-naked even in winter. “The merchants of this country,” says the intendant Duchesneau, “are all plunged in poverty, except five or six at the most; it is the same with the artisans, except a small number, because the vanity of the women and the debauchery of the men consume all their gains. As for such of the laboring class as apply themselves steadily to cultivating the soil, they not only live very well, but are incomparably better off than the better sort of peasants in France.” ** All the writers lament the extravagant habits of the people; and even La Hontan joins hands with the priests in wishing that the supply of ribbons, laces, brocades, jewelry, and the like, might be cut off: by act of law. Mother Juchereau tells us that, when the English invasion was impending, the belles of Canada were scared for a while into modesty in order to gain the favor of heaven; but, as may be imagined, the effect was short, and Father La Tour declares that in his time all the fashions except rouge came over regularly in the annual ships. The manners of the mission period, on the other hand, were extremely simple. The old governor, Lauzon, lived on pease and bacon like a laborer, and kept no man-servant. He was regarded, it is true, as a miser, and held in slight account. *** Magdeleine Boucher, sister of the governor of Three Rivers, * Meules, Mémoire touchant le Canada et l’Acadie, 1684. ** Duchesneau au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1679. *** Mémoire d’Aubert de la Chesnaye, 1676 brought her husband two hundred francs in money, four sheets, two table-cloths, six napkins of linen and hemp, a mattress, a blanket, two dishes, six spoons and six tin plates, a pot and a kettle, a table and two benches, a kneading-trough, a chest with lock and key, a cow, and a pair of hogs. * But the Bouchers were a family of distinction, and the bride’s dowry answered to her station. By another marriage contract, at about the same time, the parents of the bride, being of humble degree, bind themselves to present the bridegroom with a barrel of bacon, deliverable on the arrival of the ships from France. ** Some curious traits of this early day appear in the license of Jean Boisdon as innkeeper. He is required to establish himself on the great square of Quebec, close to the church, so that the parishioners may conveniently warm and refresh themselves between the services; but he is forbidden to entertain anybody during high mass, sermon, catechism, or vespers. *** Matters soon changed; Jean Boisdon lost his monopoly, and inns sprang up on all hands. They did not want for patrons, and we find some of their proprietors mentioned as among the few thriving men in Canada. Talon tried to regulate them, and, among other rules, ordained that no innkeeper should furnish food or drink to any hired laborer whatever, or to any * Contrat de marriage, cited by Ferland, Notes, 73. ** Contrat de marriage, cited by Benjamin Suite in Revue Canadienne, IX. 111. *** Acte officielle, 1648, cited by Ferland. Cours d’Histoire du Canada, I. 865. person residing in the place where his inn was situated. An innkeeper of Montreal was fined for allowing the syndic of the town to dine under his roof. * One gets glimpses of the pristine state of Quebec through the early police regulations. Each inhabitant was required to make a gutter along the middle of the street before his house, and also to remove refuse and throw it into the river. All dogs, without exception, were ordered home at nine o’clock. On Tuesdays and Fridays there was a market in the public square, whither the neighboring habitants, male and female, brought their produce for sale, as they still continue to do. Smoking in the street was forbidden, as a precaution against fire; householders were required to provide themselves with ladders, and when the fire alarm was rung all able-bodied persons were obliged to run to the scene of danger with buckets or kettles full of water. ** This did not prevent the Lower Town from burning to the ground in 1682. It was soon rebuilt, but a repetition of the catastrophe seemed very likely. “This place,” says Denonville, “is in a fearful state as regards fire; for the houses are crowded together out of all reason, and so surrounded with piles of cord-wood that it is pitiful to see.” *** Add to this the stores of hay for the cows kept by many of the inhabitants for the benefit of their swarming progeny. * Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, III. 405. ** Réglement de Police, 1672. Ibid., 1676. *** Denonville au Ministre, 20 Ao?t, 1686 The houses were at this time low, compact buildings, with gables of masonry, as required by law; but many had wooden fronts, and all had roofs covered with cedar shingles. The anxious governor begs that, as the town has not a sou of revenue, his Majesty will be pleased to make it the gift of two hundred crowns’ worth of leather fire-buckets. * Six or seven years after, certain citizens were authorized by the council to import from France, at their own cost, “a pump after the Dutch fashion, for throwing water on houses in case of fire.” ** How a fire was managed at Quebec appears from a letter of the engineer, Yasseur, describing the burning of Laval’s seminary in 1701. Vasseur was then at Quebec, directing the new fortifications. On a Monday in November, all the pupils of the seminary and most of the priests went, according to their weekly custom, to recreate themselves at a house and garden at St. Michel, a short distance from town. The few priests who remained went after dinner to say vespers at the church. Only one, Father Petit, was left in the seminary, and he presently repaired to the great hall to rekindle the fire in the stove and warm the place against the return of his brethren. His success surpassed his wishes. A firebrand snapped out in his absence and set the pine floor in a blaze. Father Boucher, curé of Point Levi, chanced to come in, and was half choked by the smoke. He cried fire! the servants * Denonville au Ministre, 20 Ao?t, 1685. ** Réglement de 1691, extract in Ferland. ran for water; but the flames soon mastered them; they screamed the alarm, and the bells began to ring. Vasseur was dining with the intendant at his palace by the St. Charles, when he heard a frightened voice crying out, “Monsieur, you are wanted; you are wanted.” He sprang from table, saw the smoke rolling in volumes from the top of the rock, ran up the steep ascent, reached the seminary, and found an excited crowd making a prodigious outcry. He shouted for carpenters. Four men came to him, and he set them at work with such tools as they had to tear away planks and beams, and prevent the fire from spreading to the adjacent parts of the building; but, when he went to find others to help them, they ran off. He set new men in their place, and these too ran off the moment his back was turned. A cry was raised that the building was to be blown up, on which the crowd scattered for their lives. Vasseur now gave up the seminary for lost, and thought only of cutting off the fire from the rear of the church, which was not far distant. In this he succeeded, by tearing down an intervening wing or gallery. The walls of the burning building were of massive stone, and by seven o’clock the fire had spent itself. We hear nothing of the Dutch pump, nor does it appear that the soldiers of the garrison made any effort to keep order. Under cover of the confusion, property was stolen from the seminary to the amount of about two thousand livres, which is remarkable, considering the religious character of the building, and the supposed piety of the people. “There were more than three hundred persons at the fire," says Yasseur; “but thirty picked men would have been worth more than the whole of them.” * August, September, and October were the busy months at Quebec. Then the ships from France discharged their lading, the shops and warehouses of the Lower Town were filled with goods, and the habitants came to town to make their purchases. When the frosts began, the vessels sailed away, the harbor was deserted, the streets were silent again, and like ants or squirrels the people set at work to lay in their winter stores. Fathers of families packed their cellars with beets, carrots, potatoes, and cabbages; and, at the end of autumn, with meat, fowls, game, fish, and eels, all frozen to stony hardness. Most of the shops closed, and the long season of leisure and amusement began. New Year’s day brought visits and mutual gifts. Thence till Lent dinner parties were frequent, sometimes familiar and sometimes ceremonious. The governor’s little court at the chateau was a standing example to all the aspiring spirits of Quebec, and forms and orders of precedence were in some houses punctiliously observed. There were dinners to the military and civic dignitaries and their wives, and others, quite distinct, to prominent citizens. The wives and daughters of the burghers of Quebec are said to have been superior in manners to women of the corresponding * Vasseur au Ministre, 2-4 Nov., 1701. Like Denonville before him, he urges the need of fire-buckets. class in France. “They have wit,” says La Potherie, “delicacy, good voices, and a great fondness for dancing. They are discreet, and not much given to flirting; but when they undertake to catch a lover it is not easy for him to escape the bands of Hymen.” * So much for the town. In the country parishes, there was the same autumnal stowing away of frozen vegetables, meat, fish, and eels, and unfortunately the same surfeit of leisure through five months of the year. During the seventeenth century, many of the people were so poor that women were forced to keep at home from sheer want of winter clothing. Nothing, however, could prevent their running from house to house to exchange gossip with the neighbors, who all knew each other, and, having nothing else to do, discussed each other’s affairs with an industry which often bred bitter quarrels. At a later period, a more general introduction of family weaving and spinning served at once to furnish clothing and to promote domestic peace. The most important persons in a parish were the curé, the seignior, and the militia captain. The seignior had his bench of honor in the church. Immediately behind it was the bench of the militia captain, whose duty it was to drill the able-bodied men of the neighborhood, direct road-making and other public works, and serve as deputy to the intendant, whose ordinances he was required to enforce. Next in honor came the local judge any there was, and the church-wardens. * La Potherie. I. 279. The existence of slavery in Canada dates from the end of the seventeenth century. In 1688, the attorney-general made a visit to Paris, and urged upon the king the expediency of importing negroes from the West Indies as a remedy for the scarcity and dearness of labor. The king consented, but advised caution, on the ground that the rigor of the climate would make the venture a critical one. * A number of slaves were brought into the colony; but the system never flourished, the climate and other circumstances being hostile to it. Many of the colonists, especially at Detroit and other outlying posts, owned slaves of a remote Indian tribe, the Pawnees. The fact is remarkable, since it would be difficult to find another of the wild tribes of the continent capable of subjection to domestic servitude. The Pawnee slaves were captives taken in war and sold at low prices to the Canadians. Their market value was much impaired by their propensity to run off. It is curious to observe the views of the Canadians taken at different times by different writers. La Hontan says, “They are vigorous, enterprising, and indefatigable, and need nothing but education. They are presumptuous and full of self-conceit, regard themselves as above all the nations of the earth, and, unfortunately, have not the veneration for their parents that they ought to have. The women are generally pretty; few of them are * Instruction au Sr. de Frontenac, 1689. On Canadian slavery, see a long paper, l'Esclavage en Canada, published by the Historical Society of Montreal. brunettes; many of them are discreet, and a good number are lazy. They are fond to the last degree of dress and show, and each tries to outdo the rest in the art of catching a husband.” * Fifty years later, the intendant Hocquart writes, “The Canadians are fond of distinctions and attentions, plume themselves on their courage, and are extremely sensitive to slights or the smallest corrections. They are self-interested, vindictive, prone to drunkenness, use a great deal of brandy, and pass for not being at all truthful. This portrait is true of many of them, particularly the country people: those of the towns are less vicious. They are all attached to religion, and criminals are rare. They are volatile, and think too well of themselves, which prevents their succeeding as they might in farming and trade. They have not the rude and rustic air of our French peasants. If they are put on their honor and governed with justice, they are tractable enough; but their natural disposition is indocile.” * The navigator Bougainville, in the last years of the French rule, describes the Canadian habitant as essentially superior to the French peasant, and adds, “He is loud, boastful, mendacious, obliging, civil, and honest; indefatigable in hunting, travelling, and bush-ranging, but lazy in tilling the soil.” *** The Swedish botanist, Kalm, an excellent observer, was in Canada a few years before Bougainville, * La Hontan, II. 81 (ed. 1709). ** Mémoire de 1736. *** Mémoire de 1757, printed in Margry, Relations Inédites. and sketches from life the following traits of Canadian manners. The language is chat of the old English translation. “The men here (at Montreal) are extremely civil, and take their hats off to every person indifferently whom they meet in the streets. The women in general are handsome; they are well bred and virtuous, with an innocent and becoming freedom. They dress out very fine on Sundays, and though on the other days they do not take much pains with the other parts of their dress, yet they are very fond of adorning their heads, the hair of which is always curled and powdered and ornamented with glittering bodkins and aigrettes. They are not averse to taking part in all the business of housekeeping, and I have with pleasure seen the daughters of the better sort of people, and of the governor (of Montreal) himself, not too finely dressed, and going into kitchens and cellars to look that every thing be done as it ought. What I have mentioned above of their dressing their heads too assiduously is the case with all the ladies throughout Canada. Their hair is always curled even when they are at home in a dirty jacket, and short coarse petticoat that does not reach to the middle of their legs. On those days when they pay or receive visits they dress so gayly that one is almost induced to think their parents possess the greatest honors in the state. They are no less attentive to have the newest fashions, and they laugh at each other when they are not dressed to each other’s fancy. One of the first questions they propose to a stranger is, whether he is married; the next, how he likes the ladies of the country, and whether he thinks them handsomer than those of his own country; and the third, whether he will take one home with him. The behavior of the ladies seemed to me somewhat too free at Quebec, and of a more becoming modesty at Montreal. Those of Quebec are not very industrious. The young ladies, especially those of a higher rank, get up at seven and dress till nine, drinking their coffee at the same time. When they are dressed, they place themselves near a window that opens into the street, take up some needlework and sew a stitch now and then, but turn their eyes into the street most of the time. When a young fellow comes in, whether they are acquainted with him or not, they immediately lay aside their work, sit down by him, and begin to chat, laugh, joke, and invent double-entendres, and this is reckoned being very witty. In this manner they frequently pass the whole day, leaving their mothers to do the business of the house. They are likewise cheerful and content, and nobody can say that they want either wit or charms. Their fault is that they think too well of themselves. However, the daughters of people of all ranks without exception go to market and carry home what they have bought. The girls at Montreal are very much displeased that those at Quebec get husbands sooner than they. The reason of this is that many young gentlemen who come over from France with the ships are captivated by the ladies at Quebec and marry them; but, as these gentlemen seldom go up to Montreal, the girls there are not often so happy as those of the former place." * Long before Kalm’s visit, the Jesuit Charlevoix, a traveller and a man of the world, wrote thus of Quebec in a letter to the Duchesse de Lesdiguières: “There is a select little society here which wants nothing to make it agreeable. In the salons of the wives of the governor and of the intendant, one finds circles as brilliant as in other countries.” These circles were formed partly of the principal inhabitants, but chiefly of military officers and government officials, with their families. Charlevoix continues, “Everybody does his part to make the time pass pleasantly, with games and parties of pleasure; drives and canoe excursions in summer, sleighing and skating in winter. There is a great deal of hunting and shooting, for many Canadian gentlemen are almost destitute of any other means of living at their ease. The news of the day amounts to very little indeed, as the country furnishes scarcely any, while that from Europe comes all at once. Science and the fine arts have their turn, and conversation does not fail. The Canadians breathe from their birth an air of liberty, which makes them very pleasant in the intercourse of life, and our language is nowhere more purely spoken. One finds here no rich persons whatever, and this is a great pity; for the Canadians like to get the credit of their money, and scarcely anybody * Kalm, Travels into North America, translated into English by John Reinold Forster (London, 1771), 56, 282, etc. amuses himself with hoarding it. They say it is very different with our neighbors the English, and one who knew the two colonies only by the way of living, acting, and speaking of the colonists would not hesitate to judge ours the more flourishing. In New England and the other British colonies, there reigns an opulence by which the people seem not to know how to profit; while in New France poverty is hidden under an air of ease which appears entirely natural. The English colonist keeps as much and spends as little as possible: the French colonist enjoys what he has got, and often makes a display of what he has not got. The one labors for his heirs: the other leaves them to get on as they can, like himself. I could push the comparison farther; but I must close here: the king’s ship is about to sail, and the merchant vessels are getting ready to follow. In three days perhaps, not one will be left in the harbor.” * And now we, too, will leave Canada. Winter draws near, and the first patch of snow lies gleaming on the distant mountain of Cape Tourmente. The sun has set in chill autumnal beauty, and the sharp spires of fir-trees on the heights of Sillery stand stiff and black against the pure cold amber of the fading west. The ship sails in the morning; and, before the old towers of Rochelle rise in sight, there will be time to smoke many a pipe, and ponder what we have seen on the banks of the St Lawrence. * Charlevoix. Journal Historique 80 (ed. 1744). CHAPTER XXI 1663-1763. CANADIAN ABSOLUTISM. Formation op Canadian Character.—The Rival Colonies.—England and France.—New England.—Characteristics op Race.—Military Qualities.—The Church.—The English Conquest. Not institutions alone, but geographical position, climate, and many other conditions unite to form the educational influences that, acting through successive generations, shape the character of nations and communities. It is easy to see the nature of the education, past and present, which wrought on the Canadians and made them what they were. An ignorant population, sprung from a brave and active race, but trained to subjection and dependence through centuries of feudal and monarchical despotism, was planted in the wilderness by the hand of authority, and told to grow and flourish. Artificial stimulants were applied, but freedom was withheld. Perpetual intervention of government, regulations, restrictions, encouragements sometimes more mischievous than restrictions, a constant uncertainty what the authorities would do next, the fate of each man resting less with himself than with another, volition enfeebled, self-reliance paralyzed,—the condition, in short, of a child held always under the rule of a father, in the main well-meaning and kind, sometimes generous, sometimes neglectful, often capricious, and rarely very wise,—such were the influences under which Canada grew up. If she had prospered, it would have been sheer miracle. A man, to be a man, must feel that he holds his fate, in some good measure, in his own hands. But this was not all. Against absolute authority there was a counter influence, rudely and wildly antagonistic. Canada was at the very portal of the great interior wilderness. The St. Lawrence and the Lakes were the highway to that domain of savage freedom; and thither the disfranchised, half-starved seignior, and the discouraged habitant who could find no market for his produce, naturally enough betook themselves. Their lesson of savagery was well learned, and for many a year a boundless license and a stiff-handed authority battled for the control of Canada. Nor, to the last, were church and state fairly masters of the field. The French rule was drawing towards its close when the intendant complained that though twenty-eight companies of regular troops were quartered in the colony, there were not soldiers enough to keep the people in order. * One cannot but remember that in a neighboring colony, far more populous, perfect order prevailed, with no other * Mémoire de 1736 (printed by the Historical Society of Quebec). guardians than a few constables chosen by the people themselves. Whence arose this difference, and other differences equally striking, between the rival colonies? It is easy to ascribe them to a difference of political and religious institutions; but the explanation does not cover the ground. The institutions of New England were utterly inapplicable to the population of New France, and the attempt to apply them would have wrought nothing but mischief. There are no political panaceas, except in the imagination of political quacks. To each degree and each variety of public development there are corresponding institutions, best answering the public needs; and what is meat to one is poison to another. Freedom is for those who are fit for it. The rest will lose it, or turn it to corruption. Church and state were right in exercising authority over a people which had not learned the first rudiments of self-government. Their fault was not that they exercised authority, but that they exercised too much of it, and, instead of weaning the child to go alone, kept him in perpetual leading-strings, making him, if possible, more and more dependent, and less and less fit for freedom. In the building up of colonies, England succeeded and France failed. The cause lies chiefly in the vast advantage drawn by England from the historical training of her people in habits of reflection, forecast, industry, and self-reliance,—a training which enabled them to adopt and maintain an invigorating system of self-rule, totally inapplicable to their rivals. The New England colonists were far less fugitives from oppression than voluntary exiles seeking the realization of an idea. They were neither peasants nor soldiers, but a substantial Puritan yeomanry, led by Puritan gentlemen and divines in thorough sympathy with them. They were neither sent out by the king, governed by him, nor helped by him. They grew up in utter neglect, and continued neglect was the only boon they asked. Till their increasing strength roused the jealousy of the Crown, they were virtually independent; a republic, but by no means a democracy. They chose their governor and all their rulers from among themselves, made their own government and paid for it, supported their own clergy, defended themselves, and educated themselves. Under the hard and repellent surface of New England society lay the true foundations of a stable freedom,—conscience, reflection, faith, patience, and public spirit. The cement of common interests, hopes, and duties compacted the whole people like a rock of conglomerate; while the people of New France remained in a state of political segregation, like a basket of pebbles held together by the enclosure that surrounds them. It may be that the difference of historical antecedents would alone explain the difference of character between the rival colonies; but there are deeper causes, the influence of which went far to determine the antecedents themselves. The Germanic race, and especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it, is peculiarly masculine, and, therefore, peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its action habitually to the guidance of reason, and has the judicial faculty of seeing both sides of a question. The French Celt is cast in a different mould. He sees the end distinctly, and reasons about it with an admirable clearness; but his own impulses and passions continually turn him away from it. Opposition excites him; he is impatient of delay, is impelled always to extremes, and does not readily sacrifice a present inclination to an ultimate good. He delights in abstractions and generalizations, cuts loose from unpleasing facts, and roams through an ocean of desires and theories. While New England prospered and Canada did not prosper, the French system had at least one great advantage. It favored military efficiency. The Canadian population sprang in great part from soldiers, and was to the last systematically reinforced by disbanded soldiers. Its chief occupation was a continual training for forest war; it had little or nothing to lose, and little to do but fight and range the woods. This was not all. The Canadian government was essentially military. At its head was a soldier nobleman, often an old and able commander, and those beneath him caught his spirit and emulated his example. In spite of its political nothingness, in spite of poverty and hardship, and in spite even of trade, the upper stratum of Canadian society was animated by the pride and fire of that gallant noblesse which held war as its only worthy calling, and prized honor more than life. As for the habitant, the forest, lake, and river were his true school; and here, at least, he was an apt scholar. A skilful woodsman, a bold and adroit canoe-man, a willing fighter in time of need, often serving without pay, and receiving from government only his provisions and his canoe, he was more than ready at any time for any hardy enterprise; and in the forest warfare of skirmish and surprise there were few to match him. An absolute government used him at will, and experienced leaders guided his rugged valor to the best account. The New England man was precisely the same material with that of which Cromwell formed his invincible “Ironsides;” but he had very little forest experience. His geographical position cut him off completely from the great wilderness of the interior. The sea was his field of action. Without the aid of government, and in spite of its restrictions, he built up a prosperous commerce, and enriched himself by distant fisheries, neglected by the rivals before whose doors they lay. He knew every ocean from Greenland to Cape Horn, and the whales of the north and of the south had no more dangerous foe. But he was too busy to fight without good cause, and when he turned his hand to soldiering it was only to meet some pressing need of the hour. The New England troops in the early wars were bands of raw fishermen and farmers, led by civilians decorated with military titles, and subject to the slow and uncertain action of legislative bodies. The officers had not learned to command, nor the men to obey. The remarkable exploit of the capture of Louisburg, the strongest fortress in America, was the result of mere audacity and hardihood, backed by the rarest good luck. One great fact stands out conspicuous in Canadian history,—the Church of Rome. More even than the royal power she shaped the character and the destinies of the colony. She was its nurse and almost its mother; and, wayward and headstrong as it was, it never broke the ties of faith that held it to her. It was these ties which, in the absence of political franchises, formed under the old regime the only vital coherence in the population. The royal government was transient; the church was permanent. The English conquest shattered the whole apparatus of civil administration at a blow, but it left her untouched. Governors, intendants, councils, and commandants, all were gone; the principal seigniors fled the colony; and a people who had never learned to control themselves or help themselves were suddenly left to their own devices. Confusion, if not anarchy, would have followed but for the parish priests, who in a character of double paternity, half spiritual and half temporal, became more than ever the guardians of order throughout Canada. This English conquest was the grand crisis of Canadian history. It was the beginning of a new life. With England came Protestantism, and the Canadian church grew purer and better in the presence of an adverse faith. Material growth, an increased mental activity, an education real though fenced and guarded, a warm and genuine patriotism, all date from the peace of 1763. England imposed by the sword on reluctant Canada the boon of rational and ordered liberty. Through centuries of striving she had advanced from stage to stage of progress, deliberate and calm, never breaking with her past, but making each fresh gain the base of a new success, enlarging popular liberties while bating nothing of that height and force of individual development which is the brain and heart of civilization; and now, through a hard-earned victory, she taught the conquered colony to share the blessings she had won. A happier calamity never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by the British arms. Part 5 PREFACE. The events recounted in this book group themselves in the main about a single figure, that of Count Frontenac, the most remarkable man who ever represented the crown of France in the New World. From strangely unpromising beginnings, he grew with every emergency, and rose equal to every crisis. His whole career was one of conflict, sometimes petty and personal, sometimes of momentous consequence, involving the question of national ascendancy on this continent. Now that this question is put at rest for ever, it is hard to conceive the anxiety which it wakened in our forefathers. But for one rooted error of French policy, the future of the English-speaking races in America would have been more than endangered. Under the rule of Frontenac occurred the first serious collision of the rival powers, and the opening of the grand scheme of military occupation by which France strove to envelop and hold in check the industrial populations of the viii English colonies. It was he who made that scheme possible. In "The Old Régime in Canada," I tried to show from what inherent causes this wilderness empire of the Great Monarch fell at last before a foe, superior indeed in numbers, but lacking all the forces that belong to a system of civil and military centralization. The present volume will show how valiantly, and for a time how successfully, New France battled against a fate which her own organic fault made inevitable. Her history is a great and significant drama, enacted among untamed forests, with a distant gleam of courtly splendors and the regal pomp of Versailles. The authorities on which the book rests are drawn chiefly from the manuscript collections of the French government in the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and, above all, the vast repositories of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies. Others are from Canadian and American sources. I have, besides, availed myself of the collection of French, English, and Dutch documents published by the State of New York, under the excellent editorship of Dr. O'Callaghan, and of the manuscript collections made in France by the governments of Canada and of Massachusetts. A considerable number of books, contemporary or nearly so with ix the events described, also help to throw light upon them; and these have all been examined. The citations in the margins represent but a small part of the authorities consulted. This mass of material has been studied with extreme care, and peculiar pains have been taken to secure accuracy of statement. In the preface of "The Old Régime," I wrote: "Some of the results here reached are of a character which I regret, since they cannot be agreeable to persons for whom I have a very cordial regard. The conclusions drawn from the facts may be matter of opinion: but it will be remembered that the facts themselves can be overthrown only by overthrowing the evidence on which they rest, or bringing forward counter-evidence of equal or greater strength; and neither task will be found an easy one." The invitation implied in these words has not been accepted. "The Old Régime" was met by vehement protest in some quarters; but, so far as I know, none of the statements of fact contained in it have been attacked by evidence, or even challenged. The lines just quoted are equally applicable to this volume. Should there be occasion, a collection of documentary proofs will be published more than sufficient to make good the positions taken. Meanwhile, it will, I think, be clear to an impartial reader that the x story is told, not in the interest of any race or nationality, but simply in that of historical truth. When, at the age of eighteen, I formed the purpose of writing on French-American history, I meant at first to limit myself to the great contest which brought that history to a close. It was by an afterthought that the plan was extended to cover the whole field, so that the part of the work, or series of works, first conceived, would, following the sequence of events, be the last executed. As soon as the original scheme was formed, I began to prepare for executing it by examining localities, journeying in forests, visiting Indian tribes, and collecting materials. I have continued to collect them ever since, so that the accumulation is now rather formidable; and, if it is to be used at all, it had better be used at once. Therefore, passing over for the present an intervening period of less decisive importance, I propose to take, as the next subject of this series, "Montcalm and the Fall of New France." Boston, 1 Jan., 1877. CHAPTER I. 1620-1672. Count and Countess Frontenac. Mademoiselle de Montpensier and Madame de Frontenac ? Orleans ? The Maréchale de Camp ? Count Frontenac ? Conjugal Disputes ? Early Life of Frontenac ? His Courtship and Marriage ? Estrangement ? Scenes at St. Fargeau ? The Lady of Honor dismissed ? Frontenac as a Soldier ? He is made Governor of New France ? Les Divines. At Versailles there is the portrait of a lady, beautiful and young. She is painted as Minerva, a plumed helmet on her head, and a shield on her arm. In a corner of the canvas is written Anne de La Grange-Trianon, Comtesse de Frontenac. This blooming goddess was the wife of the future governor of Canada. Madame de Frontenac, at the age of about twenty, was a favorite companion of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the grand-daughter of Henry IV. and daughter of the weak and dastardly Gaston, Duke of Orleans. Nothing in French annals has found more readers than the story of the exploit of this spirited princess at Orleans during the civil 2 war of the Fronde. Her cousin Condé, chief of the revolt, had found favor in her eyes; and she had espoused his cause against her cousin, the king. The royal army threatened Orleans. The duke, her father, dared not leave Paris; but he consented that his daughter should go in his place to hold the city for Condé and the Fronde. The princess entered her carriage and set out on her errand, attended by a small escort. With her were three young married ladies, the Marquise de Bréauté, the Comtesse de Fiesque, and the Comtesse de Frontenac. In two days they reached Orleans. The civic authorities were afraid to declare against the king, and hesitated to open the gates to the daughter of their duke, who, standing in the moat with her three companions, tried persuasion and threats in vain. The prospect was not encouraging, when a crowd of boatmen came up from the river and offered the princess their services. "I accepted them gladly," she writes, "and said a thousand fine things, such as one must say to that sort of people to make them do what one wishes." She gave them money as well as fair words, and begged them to burst open one of the gates. They fell at once to the work; while the guards and officials looked down from the walls, neither aiding nor resisting them. "To animate the boatmen by my presence," she continues, "I mounted a hillock near by. I did not look to see which way I went, but clambered up like a cat, clutching brambles and thorns, and jumping over hedges without hurting myself. 3 Madame de Bréauté, who is the most cowardly creature in the world, began to cry out against me and everybody who followed me; in fact, I do not know if she did not swear in her excitement, which amused me very much." At length, a hole was knocked in the gate; and a gentleman of her train, who had directed the attack, beckoned her to come on. "As it was very muddy, a man took me and carried me forward, and thrust me in at this hole, where my head was no sooner through than the drums beat to salute me. I gave my hand to the captain of the guard. The shouts redoubled. Two men took me and put me in a wooden chair. I do not know whether I was seated in it or on their arms, for I was beside myself with joy. Everybody was kissing my hands, and I almost died with laughing to see myself in such an odd position." There was no resisting the enthusiasm of the people and the soldiers. Orleans was won for the Fronde. [1] [1] Memoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, I. 358-363 (ed. 1859). The young Countesses of Frontenac and Fiesque had constantly followed her, and climbed after her through the hole in the gate. Her father wrote to compliment them on their prowess, and addressed his letter à Mesdames les Comtesses, Maréchales de Camp dans l'armée de ma fille contre le Mazarin. Officers and soldiers took part in the pleasantry; and, as Madame de Frontenac passed on horseback before the troops, they saluted her with the honors paid to a brigadier. When the king, or Cardinal Mazarin who controlled 4 him, had triumphed over the revolting princes, Mademoiselle de Montpensier paid the penalty of her exploit by a temporary banishment from the court. She roamed from place to place, with a little court of her own, of which Madame de Frontenac was a conspicuous member. During the war, Count Frontenac had been dangerously ill of a fever in Paris; and his wife had been absent for a time, attending him. She soon rejoined the princess, who was at her chateau of St. Fargeau, three days' journey from Paris, when an incident occurred which placed the married life of her fair companion in an unexpected light. "The Duchesse de Sully came to see me, and brought with her M. d'Herbault and M. de Frontenac. Frontenac had stopped here once before, but it was only for a week, when he still had the fever, and took great care of himself like a man who had been at the door of death. This time he was in high health. His arrival had not been expected, and his wife was so much surprised that everybody observed it, especially as the surprise seemed to be not at all a pleasant one. Instead of going to talk with her husband, she went off and hid herself, crying and screaming because he had said that he would like to have her company that evening. I was very much astonished, especially as I had never before perceived her aversion to him. The elder Comtesse de Fiesque remonstrated with her; but she only cried the more. Madame de Fiesque then brought books to show her her duty as a wife; but it did no good, and at last she got into such a state 5 that we sent for the curé with holy water to exorcise her." [2] [2] Memoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, II. 265. The curé's holy water, or his exhortations, were at last successful. Count Frontenac came of an ancient and noble race, said to have been of Basque origin. His father held a high post in the household of Louis XIII., who became the child's god-father, and gave him his own name. At the age of fifteen, the young Louis showed an incontrollable passion for the life of a soldier. He was sent to the seat of war in Holland, to serve under the Prince of Orange. At the age of nineteen, he was a volunteer at the siege of Hesdin; in the next year, he was at Arras, where he distinguished himself during a sortie of the garrison; in the next, he took part in the siege of Aire; and, in the next, in those of Callioure and Perpignan. At the age of twenty-three, he was made colonel of the regiment of Normandy, which he commanded in repeated battles and sieges of the Italian campaign. He was several times wounded, and in 1646 he had an arm broken at the siege of Orbitello. In the same year, when twenty-six years old, he was raised to the rank of maréchal de camp, equivalent to that of brigadier-general. A year or two later, we find him at Paris, at the house of his father, on the Quai des Célestins. [3] [3] Pinard, Chronologie Historique-militaire, VI.; Table de la Gazette de France; Jal, Dictionnaire Critique, Biographique, et d'Histoire, art. "Frontenac;" Goyer, Oraison Funèbre du Comte de Frontenac. In the same neighborhood lived La Grange-Trianon, Sieur de Neuville, a widower of fifty, 6 with one child, a daughter of sixteen, whom he had placed in the charge of his relative, Madame de Bouthillier. Frontenac fell in love with her. Madame de Bouthillier opposed the match, and told La Grange that he might do better for his daughter than to marry her to a man who, say what he might, had but twenty thousand francs a year. La Grange was weak and vacillating: sometimes he listened to his prudent kinswoman, and sometimes to the eager suitor; treated him as a son-in-law, carried love messages from him to his daughter, and ended by refusing him her hand, and ordering her to renounce him on pain of being immured in a convent. Neither Frontenac nor his mistress was of a pliant temper. In the neighborhood was the little church of St. Pierre aux B?ufs, which had the privilege of uniting couples without the consent of their parents; and here, on a Wednesday in October, 1648, the lovers were married in presence of a number of Frontenac's relatives. La Grange was furious at the discovery; but his anger soon cooled, and complete reconciliation followed. [4] [4] Historiettes de Tallemant des Réaux, IX. 214 (ed. Monmerqué); Jal, Dictionnaire Critique, etc. The happiness of the newly wedded pair was short. Love soon changed to aversion, at least on the part of the bride. She was not of a tender nature; her temper was imperious, and she had a restless craving for excitement. Frontenac, on his part, was the most wayward and headstrong of men. She bore him a son; but maternal cares 7 were not to her liking. The infant, Fran?ois Louis, was placed in the keeping of a nurse at the village of Clion; and his young mother left her husband, to follow the fortunes of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who for a time pronounced her charming, praised her wit and beauty, and made her one of her ladies of honor. Very curious and amusing are some of the incidents recounted by the princess, in which Madame de Frontenac bore part; but what is more to our purpose are the sketches traced here and there by the same sharp pen, in which one may discern the traits of the destined saviour of New France. Thus, in the following, we see him at St. Fargeau in the same attitude in which we shall often see him at Quebec. The princess and the duke her father had a dispute touching her property. Frontenac had lately been at Blois, where the duke had possessed him with his own views of the questions at issue. Accordingly, on arriving at St. Fargeau, he seemed disposed to assume the character of mediator. "He wanted," says the princess, "to discuss my affairs with me: I listened to his preaching, and he also spoke about these matters to Préfontaine (her man of business). I returned to the house after our promenade, and we went to dance in the great hall. While we were dancing, I saw Préfontaine walking at the farther end with Frontenac, who was talking and gesticulating. This continued for a long time. Madame de Sully noticed it also, and seemed disturbed by it, as I was myself. I said, 'Have we not danced enough?' 8 Madame de Sully assented, and we went out. I called Préfontaine, and asked him, 'What was Frontenac saying to you?' He answered: 'He was scolding me. I never saw such an impertinent man in my life.' I went to my room, and Madame de Sully and Madame de Fiesque followed. Madame de Sully said to Préfontaine: 'I was very much disturbed to see you talking with so much warmth to Monsieur de Frontenac; for he came here in such ill-humor that I was afraid he would quarrel with you. Yesterday, when we were in the carriage, he was ready to eat us.' The Comtesse de Fiesque said, 'This morning he came to see my mother-in-law, and scolded at her.' Préfontaine answered: 'He wanted to throttle me. I never saw a man so crazy and absurd.' We all four began to pity poor Madame de Frontenac for having such a husband, and to think her right in not wanting to go with him." [5] [5] Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, II. 267. Frontenac owned the estate of Isle Savary, on the Indre, not far from Blois; and here, soon after the above scene, the princess made him a visit. "It is a pretty enough place," she says, "for a man like him. The house is well furnished, and he gave me excellent entertainment. He showed me all the plans he had for improving it, and making gardens, fountains, and ponds. It would need the riches of a superintendent of finance to execute his schemes, and how anybody else should venture to think of them I cannot comprehend." "While Frontenac was at St. Fargeau," she 9 continues, "he kept open table, and many of my people went to dine with him; for he affected to hold court, and acted as if everybody owed duty to him. The conversation was always about my affair with his Royal Highness (her father), whose conduct towards me was always praised, while mine was blamed. Frontenac spoke ill of Préfontaine, and, in fine, said every thing he could to displease me and stir up my own people against me. He praised every thing that belonged to himself, and never came to sup or dine with me without speaking of some rago?t or some new sweetmeat which had been served up on his table, ascribing it all to the excellence of the officers of his kitchen. The very meat that he ate, according to him, had a different taste on his board than on any other. As for his silver plate, it was always of good workmanship; and his dress was always of patterns invented by himself. When he had new clothes, he paraded them like a child. One day he brought me some to look at, and left them on my dressing-table. We were then at Chambord. His Royal Highness came into the room, and must have thought it odd to see breeches and doublets in such a place. Préfontaine and I laughed about it a great deal. Frontenac took everybody who came to St. Fargeau to see his stables; and all who wished to gain his good graces were obliged to admire his horses, which were very indifferent. In short, this is his way in every thing." [6] [6] Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, II. 279; III. 10. Though not himself of the highest rank, his 10 position at court was, from the courtier point of view, an enviable one. The princess, after her banishment had ended, more than once mentions incidentally that she had met him in the cabinet of the queen. Her dislike of him became intense, and her fondness for his wife changed at last to aversion. She charges the countess with ingratitude. She discovered, or thought that she discovered, that in her dispute with her father, and in certain dissensions in her own household, Madame de Frontenac had acted secretly in opposition to her interests and wishes. The imprudent lady of honor received permission to leave her service. It was a woful scene. "She saw me get into my carriage," writes the princess, "and her distress was greater than ever. Her tears flowed abundantly: as for me, my fortitude was perfect, and I looked on with composure while she cried. If any thing could disturb my tranquility, it was the recollection of the time when she laughed while I was crying." Mademoiselle de Montpensier had been deeply offended, and apparently with reason. The countess and her husband received an order never again to appear in her presence; but soon after, when the princess was with the king and queen at a comedy in the garden of the Louvre, Frontenac, who had previously arrived, immediately changed his position, and with his usual audacity took a post so conspicuous that she could not help seeing him. "I confess," she says, "I was so angry that I could find no pleasure in the play; but I said nothing to the king and queen, fearing that 11 they would not take such a view of the matter as I wished." [7] [7] Memoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, III. 270. With the close of her relations with "La Grande Mademoiselle," Madame de Frontenac is lost to sight for a while. In 1669, a Venetian embassy came to France to beg for aid against the Turks, who for more than two years had attacked Candia in overwhelming force. The ambassadors offered to place their own troops under French command, and they asked Turenne to name a general officer equal to the task. Frontenac had the signal honor of being chosen by the first soldier of Europe for this most arduous and difficult position. He went accordingly. The result increased his reputation for ability and courage; but Candia was doomed, and its chief fortress fell into the hands of the infidels, after a protracted struggle, which is said to have cost them a hundred and eighty thousand men. [8] [8] Oraison funèbre du Comte de Frontenac, par le Père Olivier Goyer. A powerful French contingent, under another command, co-operated with the Venetians under Frontenac. Three years later, Frontenac received the appointment of Governor and Lieutenant-General for the king in all New France. "He was," says Saint-Simon, "a man of excellent parts, living much in society, and completely ruined. He found it hard to bear the imperious temper of his wife; and he was given the government of Canada to deliver him from her, and afford him some means of living." [9] Certain scandalous songs of the day 12 assign a different motive for his appointment. Louis XIV. was enamoured of Madame de Montespan. She had once smiled upon Frontenac; and it is said that the jealous king gladly embraced the opportunity of removing from his presence, and from hers, a lover who had forestalled him. [10] [9] Memoires du Duc de Saint-Simon, II. 270; V. 336. [10] Note of M. Brunet, in Correspondance de la Duchesse d'Orléans, I. 200 (ed. 1869). The following lines, among others, were passed about secretly among the courtiers:— "Je suis ravi que le roi, notre sire, Aime la Montespan; Moi, Frontenac, je me crève de rire, Sachant ce qui lui pend; Et je dirai, sans être des plus bestes, Tu n'as que mon reste, Roi, Tu n'as que mon reste." Mademoiselle de Montpensier had mentioned in her memoirs, some years before, that Frontenac, in taking out his handkerchief, dropped from his pocket a love-letter to Mademoiselle de Mortemart, afterwards Madame de Montespan, which was picked up by one of the attendants of the princess. The king, on the other hand, was at one time attracted by the charms of Madame de Frontenac, against whom, however, no aspersion is cast. The Comte de Grignan, son-in-law of Madame de Sévigné, was an unsuccessful competitor with Frontenac for the government of Canada. Frontenac's wife had no thought of following him across the sea. A more congenial life awaited her at home. She had long had a friend of humbler station than herself, Mademoiselle d'Outrelaise, daughter of an obscure gentleman of Poitou, an amiable and accomplished person, who became through life her constant companion. The extensive building called the Arsenal, formerly the residence of Sully, the minister of Henry IV., contained suites of apartments which were granted to persons who had influence enough to obtain 13 them. The Duc de Lude, grand master of artillery, had them at his disposal, and gave one of them to Madame de Frontenac. Here she made her abode with her friend; and here at last she died, at the age of seventy-five. The annalist Saint-Simon, who knew the court and all belonging to it better than any other man of his time, says of her: "She had been beautiful and gay, and was always in the best society, where she was greatly in request. Like her husband, she had little property and abundant wit. She and Mademoiselle d'Outrelaise, whom she took to live with her, gave the tone to the best company of Paris and the court, though they never went thither. They were called Les Divines. In fact, they demanded incense like goddesses; and it was lavished upon them all their lives." Mademoiselle d'Outrelaise died long before the countess, who retained in old age the rare social gifts which to the last made her apartments a resort of the highest society of that brilliant epoch. It was in her power to be very useful to her absent husband, who often needed her support, and who seems to have often received it. She was childless. Her son, Fran?ois Louis, was killed, some say in battle, and others in a duel, at an early age. Her husband died nine years before her; and the old countess left what little she had to her friend Beringhen, the king's master of the horse. CHAPTER II. 1672-1675. Frontenac at Quebec. Arrival ? Bright Prospects ? The Three Estates of New France ? Speech of the Governor ? His Innovations ? Royal Displeasure ? Signs of Storm ? Frontenac and the Priests ? His Attempts to civilize the Indians ? Opposition ? Complaints and Heart-burnings. Frontenac was fifty-two years old when he landed at Quebec. If time had done little to cure his many faults, it had done nothing to weaken the springs of his unconquerable vitality. In his ripe middle age, he was as keen, fiery, and perversely headstrong as when he quarrelled with Préfontaine in the hall at St. Fargeau. Had nature disposed him to melancholy, there was much in his position to awaken it. A man of courts and camps, born and bred in the focus of a most gorgeous civilization, he was banished to the ends of the earth, among savage hordes and half-reclaimed forests, to exchange the splendors of St. Germain and the dawning glories of Versailles for a stern gray rock, haunted by sombre priests, rugged merchants and traders, blanketed Indians, and wild bush-rangers. But Frontenac was a man of action. He wasted no time in vain regrets, and 15 set himself to his work with the elastic vigor of youth. His first impressions had been very favorable. When, as he sailed up the St. Lawrence, the basin of Quebec opened before him, his imagination kindled with the grandeur of the scene. "I never," he wrote, "saw any thing more superb than the position of this town. It could not be better situated as the future capital of a great empire." [1] [1] Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672. That Quebec was to become the capital of a great empire there seemed in truth good reason to believe. The young king and his minister Colbert had labored in earnest to build up a new France in the west. For years past, ship-loads of emigrants had landed every summer on the strand beneath the rock. All was life and action, and the air was full of promise. The royal agent Talon had written to his master: "This part of the French monarchy is destined to a grand future. All that I see around me points to it; and the colonies of foreign nations, so long settled on the seaboard, are trembling with fright in view of what his Majesty has accomplished here within the last seven years. The measures we have taken to confine them within narrow limits, and the prior claim we have established against them by formal acts of possession, do not permit them to extend themselves except at peril of having war declared against them as usurpers; and this, in fact, is what they seem greatly to fear." [2] [2] Talon au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1671. 16 Frontenac shared the spirit of the hour. His first step was to survey his government. He talked with traders, colonists, and officials; visited seigniories, farms, fishing-stations, and all the infant industries that Talon had galvanized into life; examined the new ship on the stocks, admired the structure of the new brewery, went to Three Rivers to see the iron mines, and then, having acquired a tolerably exact idea of his charge, returned to Quebec. He was well pleased with what he saw, but not with the ways and means of Canadian travel; for he thought it strangely unbecoming that a lieutenant-general of the king should be forced to crouch on a sheet of bark, at the bottom of a birch canoe, scarcely daring to move his head to the right or left lest he should disturb the balance of the fragile vessel. At Quebec he convoked the council, made them a speech, and administered the oath of allegiance. [3] This did not satisfy him. He resolved that all Quebec should take the oath together. It was little but a pretext. Like many of his station, Frontenac was not in full sympathy with the centralizing movement of the time, which tended to level ancient rights, privileges, and prescriptions under the ponderous roller of the monarchical administration. He looked back with regret to the day when the three orders of the state, clergy, nobles, and commons, had a place and a power in the direction of national affairs. The three orders still subsisted, in form, if not in substance, in some of 17 the provinces of France; and Frontenac conceived the idea of reproducing them in Canada. Not only did he cherish the tradition of faded liberties, but he loved pomp and circumstance, above all, when he was himself the central figure in it; and the thought of a royal governor of Languedoc or Brittany, presiding over the estates of his province, appears to have fired him with emulation. [3] Registre du Conseil Souverain. He had no difficulty in forming his order of the clergy. The Jesuits and the seminary priests supplied material even more abundant than he wished. For the order of the nobles, he found three or four gentilshommes at Quebec, and these he reinforced with a number of officers. The third estate consisted of the merchants and citizens; and he formed the members of the council and the magistrates into another distinct body, though, properly speaking, they belonged to the third estate, of which by nature and prescription they were the head. The Jesuits, glad no doubt to lay him under some slight obligation, lent him their church for the ceremony that he meditated, and aided in decorating it for the occasion. Here, on the twenty-third of October, 1672, the three estates of Canada were convoked, with as much pomp and splendor as circumstances would permit. Then Frontenac, with the ease of a man of the world and the loftiness of a grand seigneur, delivered himself of the harangue he had prepared. He wrote exceedingly well; he is said also to have excelled as an orator; certainly he was never averse to the tones of his own eloquence. His 18 speech was addressed to a double audience: the throng that filled the church, and the king and the minister three thousand miles away. He told his hearers that he had called the assembly, not because he doubted their loyalty, but in order to afford them the delight of making public protestation of devotion to a prince, the terror of whose irresistible arms was matched only by the charms of his person and the benignity of his rule. "The Holy Scriptures," he said, "command us to obey our sovereign, and teach us that no pretext or reason can dispense us from this obedience." And, in a glowing eulogy on Louis XIV., he went on to show that obedience to him was not only a duty, but an inestimable privilege. He dwelt with admiration on the recent victories in Holland, and held forth the hope that a speedy and glorious peace would leave his Majesty free to turn his thoughts to the colony which already owed so much to his fostering care. "The true means," pursued Frontenac, "of gaining his favor and his support, is for us to unite with one heart in laboring for the progress of Canada." Then he addressed, in turn, the clergy, the nobles, the magistrates, and the citizens. He exhorted the priests to continue with zeal their labors for the conversion of the Indians, and to make them subjects not only of Christ, but also of the king; in short, to tame and civilize them, a portion of their duties in which he plainly gave them to understand that they had not hitherto acquitted themselves to his satisfaction. Next, he appealed to the nobles, commended 19 their gallantry, and called upon them to be as assiduous in the culture and improvement of the colony as they were valiant in its defence. The magistrates, the merchants, and the colonists in general were each addressed in an appropriate exhortation. "I can assure you, messieurs," he concluded, "that if you faithfully discharge your several duties, each in his station, his Majesty will extend to us all the help and all the favor that we can desire. It is needless, then, to urge you to act as I have counselled, since it is for your own interest to do so. As for me, it only remains to protest before you that I shall esteem myself happy in consecrating all my efforts, and, if need be, my life itself, to extending the empire of Jesus Christ throughout all this land, and the supremacy of our king over all the nations that dwell in it." He administered the oath, and the assembly dissolved. He now applied himself to another work: that of giving a municipal government to Quebec, after the model of some of the cities of France. In place of the syndic, an official supposed to represent the interests of the citizens, he ordered the public election of three aldermen, of whom the senior should act as mayor. One of the number was to go out of office every year, his place being filled by a new election; and the governor, as representing the king, reserved the right of confirmation or rejection. He then, in concert with the chief inhabitants, proceeded to frame a body of regulations for the government of a town destined, as he again and again declares, to become the capital 20 of a mighty empire; and he farther ordained that the people should hold a meeting every six months to discuss questions involving the welfare of the colony. The boldness of these measures will scarcely be appreciated at the present day. The intendant Talon declined, on pretence of a slight illness, to be present at the meeting of the estates. He knew too well the temper of the king, whose constant policy it was to destroy or paralyze every institution or custom that stood in the way of his autocracy. The despatches in which Frontenac announced to his masters what he had done received in due time their answer. The minister Colbert wrote: "Your assembling of the inhabitants to take the oath of fidelity, and your division of them into three estates, may have had a good effect for the moment; but it is well for you to observe that you are always to follow, in the government of Canada, the forms in use here; and since our kings have long regarded it as good for their service not to convoke the states-general of the kingdom, in order, perhaps, to abolish insensibly this ancient usage, you, on your part, should very rarely, or, to speak more correctly, never, give a corporate form to the inhabitants of Canada. You should even, as the colony strengthens, suppress gradually the office of the syndic, who presents petitions in the name of the inhabitants; for it is well that each should speak for himself, and no one for all." [4] [4] Frontenac au Roi, 2 Nov., 1672; Ibid., 13 Nov., 1673; Harangue du Comte de Frontenac en l'Assemblée à Quebec; Prestations de Serment, 23 Oct., 1672; Réglement de Police fait par Monsieur le Comte de Frontenac; Colbert à Frontenac, 13 Juin, 1673. 21 Here, in brief, is the whole spirit of the French colonial rule in Canada; a government, as I have elsewhere shown, of excellent intentions, but of arbitrary methods. Frontenac, filled with the traditions of the past, and sincerely desirous of the good of the colony, rashly set himself against the prevailing current. His municipal government, and his meetings of citizens, were, like his three estates, abolished by a word from the court, which, bold and obstinate as he was, he dared not disobey. Had they been allowed to subsist, there can be little doubt that great good would have resulted to Canada. Frontenac has been called a mere soldier. He was an excellent soldier, and more besides. He was a man of vigorous and cultivated mind, penetrating observation, and ample travel and experience. His zeal for the colony, however, was often counteracted by the violence of his prejudices, and by two other influences. First, he was a ruined man, who meant to mend his fortunes; and his wish that Canada should prosper was joined with a determination to reap a goodly part of her prosperity for himself. Again, he could not endure a rival; opposition maddened him, and, when crossed or thwarted, he forgot every thing but his passion. Signs of storm quickly showed themselves between him and the intendant Talon; but the danger was averted by the departure of that official for France. A cloud then rose in the direction of the clergy. "Another thing displeases me," writes Frontenac, 22 "and this is the complete dependence of the grand vicar and the seminary priests on the Jesuits, for they never do the least thing without their order: so that they (the Jesuits) are masters in spiritual matters, which, as you know, is a powerful lever for moving every thing else." [5] And he complains that they have spies in town and country, that they abuse the confessional, intermeddle in families, set husbands against wives, and parents against children, and all, as they say, for the greater glory of God. "I call to mind every day, Monseigneur, what you did me the honor to say to me when I took leave of you, and every day I am satisfied more and more of the great importance to the king's service of opposing the slightest of the attempts which are daily made against his authority." He goes on to denounce a certain sermon, preached by a Jesuit, to the great scandal of loyal subjects, wherein the father declared that the king had exceeded his powers in licensing the trade in brandy when the bishop had decided it to be a sin, together with other remarks of a seditious nature. "I was tempted several times," pursues Frontenac, "to leave the church with my guards and interrupt the sermon; but I contented myself with telling the grand vicar and the superior of the Jesuits, after it was over, that I was very much surprised at what I had heard, and demanded justice at their hands. They greatly blamed the preacher, and disavowed him, attributing his language, after their custom, to an excess of zeal, and 23 making many apologies, with which I pretended to be satisfied; though I told them, nevertheless, that their excuses would not pass current with me another time, and, if the thing happened again, I would put the preacher in a place where he would learn how to speak. Since then they have been a little more careful, though not enough to prevent one from always seeing their intention to persuade the people that, even in secular matters, their authority ought to be respected above any other. As there are many persons here who have no more brains than they need, and who are attached to them by ties of interest or otherwise, it is necessary to have an eye to these matters in this country more than anywhere else." [6] [5] Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672. [6] Frontenac au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1673. The churchmen, on their part, were not idle. The bishop, who was then in France, contrived by some means to acquaint himself with the contents of the private despatches sent by Colbert in reply to the letters of Frontenac. He wrote to another ecclesiastic to communicate what he had learned, at the same time enjoining great caution; "since, while it is well to acquire all necessary information, and to act upon it, it is of the greatest importance to keep secret our possession of such knowledge." [7] [7] Laval à———, 1674. The letter is a complete summary of the contents of Colbert's recent despatch to Frontenac. Then follows the injunction to secrecy, "estant de très-grande conséquence que l'on ne sache pas que l'on aye rien appris de tout cela, sur quoi néanmoins il est bon que l'on agisse et que l'on me donne tous les advis qui seront nécessaires." The king and the minister, in their instructions to Frontenac, had dwelt with great emphasis on 24 the expediency of civilizing the Indians, teaching them the French language, and amalgamating them with the colonists. Frontenac, ignorant as yet of Indian nature and unacquainted with the difficulties of the case, entered into these views with great heartiness. He exercised from the first an extraordinary influence over all the Indians with whom he came in contact; and he persuaded the most savage and refractory of them, the Iroquois, to place eight of their children in his hands. Four of these were girls and four were boys. He took two of the boys into his own household, of which they must have proved most objectionable inmates; and he supported the other two, who were younger, out of his own slender resources, placed them in respectable French families, and required them to go daily to school. The girls were given to the charge of the Ursulines. Frontenac continually urged the Jesuits to co-operate with him in this work of civilization, but the results of his urgency disappointed and exasperated him. He complains that in the village of the Hurons, near Quebec, and under the control of the Jesuits, the French language was scarcely known. In fact, the fathers contented themselves with teaching their converts the doctrines and rites of the Roman Church, while retaining the food, dress, and habits of their original barbarism. In defence of the missionaries, it should be said that, when brought in contact with the French, the Indians usually caught the vices of civilization without its virtues; but Frontenac made no allowances. 25 "The Jesuits," he writes, "will not civilize the Indians, because they wish to keep them in perpetual wardship. They think more of beaver skins than of souls, and their missions are pure mockeries." At the same time he assures the minister that, when he is obliged to correct them, he does so with the utmost gentleness. In spite of this somewhat doubtful urbanity, it seems clear that a storm was brewing; and it was fortunate for the peace of the Canadian Church that the attention of the truculent governor was drawn to other quarters. CHAPTER III. 1673-1675. Frontenac and Perrot. La Salle ? Fort Frontenac ? Perrot ? His Speculations ? His Tyranny ? The Bush-rangers ? Perrot revolts ? Becomes alarmed ? Dilemma of Frontenac ? Mediation of Fénelon ? Perrot in Prison ? Excitement of the Sulpitians ? Indignation of Fénelon ? Passion of Frontenac ? Perrot on Trial ? Strange Scenes ? Appeal to the King ? Answers of Louis XIV. and Colbert ? Fénelon rebuked. Not long before Frontenac's arrival, Courcelle, his predecessor, went to Lake Ontario with an armed force, in order to impose respect on the Iroquois, who had of late become insolent. As a means of keeping them in check, and at the same time controlling the fur trade of the upper country, he had recommended, like Talon before him, the building of a fort near the outlet of the lake. Frontenac at once saw the advantages of such a measure, and his desire to execute it was stimulated by the reflection that the proposed fort might be made not only a safeguard to the colony, but also a source of profit to himself. At Quebec, there was a grave, thoughtful, self-contained young man, who soon found his way into Frontenac's confidence. There was between them the sympathetic attraction of two bold and 27 energetic spirits; and though Cavelier de la Salle had neither the irritable vanity of the count, nor his Gallic vivacity of passion, he had in full measure the same unconquerable pride and hardy resolution. There were but two or three men in Canada who knew the western wilderness so well. He was full of schemes of ambition and of gain; and, from this moment, he and Frontenac seem to have formed an alliance, which ended only with the governor's recall. In telling the story of La Salle, I have described the execution of the new plan: the muster of the Canadians, at the call of Frontenac; the consternation of those of the merchants whom he and La Salle had not taken into their counsels, and who saw in the movement the preparation for a gigantic fur trading monopoly; the intrigues set on foot to bar the enterprise; the advance up the St. Lawrence; the assembly of Iroquois at the destined spot; the ascendency exercised over them by the governor; the building of Fort Frontenac on the ground where Kingston now stands, and its final transfer into the hands of La Salle, on condition, there can be no doubt, of sharing the expected profits with his patron. [1] [1] Discovery of the Great West, chap. vi. On the way to the lake, Frontenac stopped for some time at Montreal, where he had full opportunity to become acquainted with a state of things to which his attention had already been directed. This state of things was as follows:— When the intendant, Talon, came for the second 28 time to Canada, in 1669, an officer named Perrot, who had married his niece, came with him. Perrot, anxious to turn to account the influence of his wife's relative, looked about him for some post of honor and profit, and quickly discovered that the government of Montreal was vacant. The priests of St. Sulpice, feudal owners of the place, had the right of appointing their own governor. Talon advised them to choose Perrot, who thereupon received the desired commission, which, however, was revocable at the will of those who had granted it. The new governor, therefore, begged another commission from the king, and after a little delay he obtained it. Thus he became, in some measure, independent of the priests, who, if they wished to rid themselves of him, must first gain the royal consent. Perrot, as he had doubtless foreseen, found himself in an excellent position for making money. The tribes of the upper lakes, and all the neighboring regions, brought down their furs every summer to the annual fair at Montreal. Perrot took his measures accordingly. On the island which still bears his name, lying above Montreal and directly in the route of the descending savages, he built a storehouse, and placed it in charge of a retired lieutenant named Brucy, who stopped the Indians on their way, and carried on an active trade with them, to the great profit of himself and his associate, and the great loss of the merchants in the settlements below. This was not all. Perrot connived at the desertion of his own 29 soldiers, who escaped to the woods, became coureurs de bois, or bush-rangers, traded with the Indians in their villages, and shared their gains with their commander. Many others, too, of these forest rovers, outlawed by royal edicts, found in the governor of Montreal a protector, under similar conditions. The journey from Quebec to Montreal often consumed a fortnight. Perrot thought himself virtually independent; and relying on his commission from the king, the protection of Talon, and his connection with other persons of influence, he felt safe in his position, and began to play the petty tyrant. The judge of Montreal, and several of the chief inhabitants, came to offer a humble remonstrance against disorders committed by some of the ruffians in his interest. Perrot received them with a storm of vituperation, and presently sent the judge to prison. This proceeding was followed by a series of others, closely akin to it, so that the priests of St. Sulpice, who received their full share of official abuse, began to repent bitterly of the governor they had chosen. Frontenac had received stringent orders from the king to arrest all the bush-rangers, or coureurs de bois; but, since he had scarcely a soldier at his disposal, except his own body-guard, the order was difficult to execute. As, however, most of these outlaws were in the service of his rival, Perrot, his zeal to capture them rose high against every obstacle. He had, moreover, a plan of his own in regard to them, and had already petitioned the 30 minister for a galley, to the benches of which the captive bush-rangers were to be chained as rowers, thus supplying the representative of the king with a means of transportation befitting his dignity, and at the same time giving wholesome warning against the infraction of royal edicts. [2] Accordingly, he sent orders to the judge, at Montreal, to seize every coureur de bois on whom he could lay hands. [2] Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672. The judge, hearing that two of the most notorious were lodged in the house of a lieutenant named Carion, sent a constable to arrest them; whereupon Carion threatened and maltreated the officer of justice, and helped the men to escape. Perrot took the part of his lieutenant, and told the judge that he would put him in prison, in spite of Frontenac, if he ever dared to attempt such an arrest again. [3] [3] Mémoire des Motifs qui ont obligé M. le Comte de Frontenac de faire arrêter le Sieur Perrot. When Frontenac heard what had happened, his ire was doubly kindled. On the one hand, Perrot had violated the authority lodged by the king in the person of his representative; and, on the other, the mutinous official was a rival in trade, who had made great and illicit profits, while his superior had, thus far, made none. As a governor and as a man, Frontenac was deeply moved; yet, helpless as he was, he could do no more than send three of his guardsmen, under a lieutenant named Bizard, with orders to arrest Carion and bring him to Quebec. The commission was delicate. The arrest was 31 to be made in the dominions of Perrot, who had the means to prevent it, and the audacity to use them. Bizard acted accordingly. He went to Carion's house, and took him prisoner; then proceeded to the house of the merchant Le Ber, where he left a letter, in which Frontenac, as was the usage on such occasions, gave notice to the local governor of the arrest he had ordered. It was the object of Bizard to escape with his prisoner before Perrot could receive the letter; but, meanwhile, the wife of Carion ran to him with the news, and the governor suddenly arrived, in a frenzy of rage, followed by a sergeant and three or four soldiers. The sergeant held the point of his halberd against the breast of Bizard, while Perrot, choking with passion, demanded, "How dare you arrest an officer in my government without my leave?" The lieutenant replied that he acted under orders of the governor-general, and gave Frontenac's letter to Perrot, who immediately threw it into his face, exclaiming: "Take it back to your master, and tell him to teach you your business better another time. Meanwhile you are my prisoner." Bizard protested in vain. He was led to jail, whither he was followed a few days after by Le Ber, who had mortally offended Perrot by signing an attestation of the scene he had witnessed. As he was the chief merchant of the place, his arrest produced a great sensation, while his wife presently took to her bed with a nervous fever. As Perrot's anger cooled, he became somewhat 32 alarmed. He had resisted the royal authority, and insulted its representative. The consequences might be serious; yet he could not bring himself to retrace his steps. He merely released Bizard, and sullenly permitted him to depart, with a letter to the governor-general, more impertinent than apologetic. [4] [4] Mémoire des Motifs, etc. Frontenac, as his enemies declare, was accustomed, when enraged, to foam at the mouth. Perhaps he did so when he learned the behavior of Perrot. If he had had at command a few companies of soldiers, there can be little doubt that he would have gone at once to Montreal, seized the offender, and brought him back in irons; but his body-guard of twenty men was not equal to such an enterprise. Nor would a muster of the militia have served his purpose; for the settlers about Quebec were chiefly peaceful peasants, while the denizens of Montreal were disbanded soldiers, fur traders, and forest adventurers, the best fighters in Canada. They were nearly all in the interest of Perrot, who, if attacked, had the temper as well as the ability to make a passionate resistance. Thus civil war would have ensued, and the anger of the king would have fallen on both parties. On the other hand, if Perrot were left unpunished, the coureurs de bois, of whom he was the patron, would set no bounds to their audacity, and Frontenac, who had been ordered to suppress them, would be condemned as negligent or incapable. Among the priests of St. Sulpice at Montreal 33 was the Abbé Salignac de Fénelon, half-brother of the celebrated author of Télémaque. He was a zealous missionary, enthusiastic and impulsive, still young, and more ardent than discreet. One of his uncles had been the companion of Frontenac during the Candian war, and hence the count's relations with the missionary had been very friendly. Frontenac now wrote to Perrot, directing him to come to Quebec and give account of his conduct; and he coupled this letter with another to Fénelon, urging him to represent to the offending governor the danger of his position, and advise him to seek an interview with his superior, by which the difficulty might be amicably adjusted. Perrot, dreading the displeasure of the king, soothed by the moderate tone of Frontenac's letter, and moved by the assurances of the enthusiastic abbé, who was delighted to play the part of peace-maker, at length resolved to follow his counsel. It was mid-winter. Perrot and Fénelon set out together, walked on snow-shoes a hundred and eighty miles down the frozen St. Lawrence, and made their appearance before the offended count. Frontenac, there can be little doubt, had never intended that Perrot, once in his power, should return to Montreal as its governor; but that, beyond this, he meant harm to him, there is not the least proof. Perrot, however, was as choleric and stubborn as the count himself; and his natural disposition had not been improved by several years of petty autocracy at Montreal. Their interview was brief, but stormy. When it ended, Perrot was a 34 prisoner in the chateau, with guards placed over him by day and night. Frontenac made choice of one La Nouguère, a retired officer, whom he knew that he could trust, and sent him to Montreal to command in place of its captive governor. With him he sent also a judge of his own selection. La Nouguère set himself to his work with vigor. Perrot's agent or partner, Brucy, was seized, tried, and imprisoned; and an active hunt was begun for his coureurs de bois. Among others, the two who had been the occasion of the dispute were captured and sent to Quebec, where one of them was solemnly hanged before the window of Perrot's prison; with the view, no doubt, of producing a chastening effect on the mind of the prisoner. The execution was fully authorized, a royal edict having ordained that bush-ranging was an offence punishable with death. [5] As the result of these proceedings, Frontenac reported to the minister that only five coureurs de bois remained at large; all the rest having returned to the settlements and made their submission, so that farther hanging was needless. [5] édits et Ordonnances, I. 73. Thus the central power was vindicated, and Montreal brought down from her attitude of partial independence. Other results also followed, if we may believe the enemies of Frontenac, who declare that, by means of the new commandant and other persons in his interest, the governor-general possessed himself of a great part of the trade from which he had ejected Perrot, and that 35 the coureurs de bois, whom he hanged when breaking laws for his rival, found complete impunity when breaking laws for him. Meanwhile, there was a deep though subdued excitement among the priests of St. Sulpice. The right of naming their own governor, which they claimed as seigniors of Montreal, had been violated by the action of Frontenac in placing La Nouguère in command without consulting them. Perrot was a bad governor; but it was they who had chosen him, and the recollection of his misdeeds did not reconcile them to a successor arbitrarily imposed upon them. Both they and the colonists, their vassals, were intensely jealous of Quebec; and, in their indignation against Frontenac, they more than half forgave Perrot. None among them all was so angry as the Abbé Fénelon. He believed that he had been used to lure Perrot into a trap; and his past attachment to the governor-general was turned into wrath. High words had passed between them; and, when Fénelon returned to Montreal, he vented his feelings in a sermon plainly levelled at Frontenac. [6] So sharp and bitter was it, that his brethren of St. Sulpice hastened to disclaim it; and Dollier de Casson, their Superior, strongly reproved the preacher, who protested in return that his words were not meant to apply to Frontenac in particular, but only to bad rulers in general. His offences, however, did not cease with the sermon; for he espoused the cause of 36 Perrot with more than zeal, and went about among the colonists to collect attestations in his favor. When these things were reported to Frontenac, his ire was kindled, and he summoned Fénelon before the council at Quebec to answer the charge of instigating sedition. [6] Information faite par nous, Charles le Tardieu, Sieur de Tilly. Tilly was a commissioner sent by the council to inquire into the affair. Fénelon had a relative and friend in the person of the Abbé d'Urfé, his copartner in the work of the missions. D'Urfé, anxious to conjure down the rising storm, went to Quebec to seek an interview with Frontenac; but, according to his own account, he was very ill received, and threatened with a prison. On another occasion, the count showed him a letter in which D'Urfé was charged with having used abusive language concerning him. Warm words ensued, till Frontenac, grasping his cane, led the abbé to the door and dismissed him, berating him from the top of the stairs in tones so angry that the sentinel below spread the report that he had turned his visitor out of doors. [7] [7] Mémoire de M. d'Urfé à Colbert, extracts in Faillon. Two offenders were now arraigned before the council of Quebec: the first was Perrot, charged with disobeying the royal edicts and resisting the royal authority; the other was the Abbé Fénelon. The councillors were at this time united in the interest of Frontenac, who had the power of appointing and removing them. Perrot, in no way softened by a long captivity, challenged the governor-general, who presided at the council board, as a party to the suit and his personal enemy, and 37 took exception to several of the members as being connections of La Nouguère. Frontenac withdrew, and other councillors or judges were appointed provisionally; but these were challenged in turn by the prisoner, on one pretext or another. The exceptions were overruled, and the trial proceeded, though not without signs of doubt and hesitation on the part of some of the councillors. [8] [8] All the proceedings in the affair of Perrot will be found in full in the Registre des Jugements et Déliberations du Conseil Supérieur. They extend from the end of January to the beginning of November, 1674. Meanwhile, other sessions were held for the trial of Fénelon; and a curious scene ensued. Five councillors and the deputy attorney-general were seated at the board, with Frontenac as presiding judge, his hat on his head and his sword at his side, after the established custom. Fénelon, being led in, approached a vacant chair, and was about to seat himself with the rest, when Frontenac interposed, telling him that it was his duty to remain standing while answering the questions of the council. Fénelon at once placed himself in the chair, and replied that priests had the right to speak seated and with heads covered. "Yes," returned Frontenac, "when they are summoned as witnesses, but not when they are cited to answer charges of crime." "My crimes exist nowhere but in your head," replied the abbé. And, putting on his hat, he drew it down over his brows, rose, gathered his cassock about him, and walked in a defiant manner 38 to and fro. Frontenac told him that his conduct was wanting in respect to the council, and to the governor as its head. Fénelon several times took off his hat, and pushed it on again more angrily than ever, saying at the same time that Frontenac was wanting in respect to his character of priest, in citing him before a civil tribunal. As he persisted in his refusal to take the required attitude, he was at length told that he might leave the room. After being kept for a time in the anteroom in charge of a constable, he was again brought before the council, when he still refused obedience, and was ordered into a sort of honorable imprisonment. [9] [9] Conteste entre le Gouverneur et l'Abbé de Fénelon; Jugements et Déliberations du Conseil Supérieur, 21 Ao?t, 1674. This behavior of the effervescent abbé, which Frontenac justly enough characterizes as unworthy of his birth and his sacred office, was, nevertheless, founded on a claim sustained by many precedents. As an ecclesiastic, Fénelon insisted that the bishop alone, and not the council, had the right to judge him. Like Perrot, too, he challenged his judges as parties to the suit, or otherwise interested against him. On the question of jurisdiction, he had all the priests on his side. Bishop Laval was in France; and Bernières, his grand vicar, was far from filling the place of the strenuous and determined prelate. Yet the ecclesiastical storm rose so high that the councillors, discouraged and daunted, were no longer amenable to the will of Frontenac; and it was resolved at last to refer the whole matter to 39 the king. Perrot was taken from the prison, which he had occupied from January to November, and shipped for France, along with Fénelon. An immense mass of papers was sent with them for the instruction of the king; and Frontenac wrote a long despatch, in which he sets forth the offences of Perrot and Fénelon, the pretensions of the ecclesiastics, the calumnies he had incurred in his efforts to serve his Majesty, and the insults heaped upon him, "which no man but me would have endured so patiently." Indeed, while the suits were pending before the council, he had displayed a calmness and moderation which surprised his opponents. "Knowing as I do," he pursues, "the cabals and intrigues that are rife here, I must expect that every thing will be said against me that the most artful slander can devise. A governor in this country would greatly deserve pity, if he were left without support; and, even should he make mistakes, it would surely be very pardonable, seeing that there is no snare that is not spread for him, and that, after avoiding a hundred of them, he will hardly escape being caught at last." [10] [10] Frontenac au Ministre, 14 Nov., 1674. In a preceding letter, sent by way of Boston, and dated 16 February, he says that he could not suffer Perrot to go unpunished without injury to the regal authority, which he is resolved to defend to the last drop of his blood. In his charges of cabal and intrigue, Frontenac had chiefly in view the clergy, whom he profoundly distrusted, excepting always the Récollet friars, whom he befriended because the bishop and the Jesuits opposed them. The priests on their part declare that he persecuted them, compelled 40 them to take passports like laymen when travelling about the colony, and even intercepted their letters. These accusations and many others were carried to the king and the minister by the Abbé d'Urfé, who sailed in the same ship with Fénelon. The moment was singularly auspicious to him. His cousin, the Marquise d'Allègre, was on the point of marrying Seignelay, the son of the minister Colbert, who, therefore, was naturally inclined to listen with favor to him and to Fénelon, his relative. Again, Talon, uncle of Perrot's wife, held a post at court, which brought him into close personal relations with the king. Nor were these the only influences adverse to Frontenac and propitious to his enemies. Yet his enemies were disappointed. The letters written to him both by Colbert and by the king are admirable for calmness and dignity. The following is from that of the king:— "Though I do not credit all that has been told me concerning various little annoyances which you cause to the ecclesiastics, I nevertheless think it necessary to inform you of it, in order that, if true, you may correct yourself in this particular, giving to all the clergy entire liberty to go and come throughout all Canada without compelling them to take out passports, and at the same time leaving them perfect freedom as regards their letters. I have seen and carefully examined all that you have sent touching M. Perrot; and, after having also seen all the papers given by him in his defence, I have condemned his action in 41 imprisoning an officer of your guard. To punish him, I have had him placed for a short time in the Bastile, that he may learn to be more circumspect in the discharge of his duty, and that his example may serve as a warning to others. But after having thus vindicated my authority, which has been violated in your person, I will say, in order that you may fully understand my views, that you should not without absolute necessity cause your commands to be executed within the limits of a local government, like that of Montreal, without first informing its governor, and also that the ten months of imprisonment which you have made him undergo seems to me sufficient for his fault. I therefore sent him to the Bastile merely as a public reparation for having violated my authority. After keeping him there a few days, I shall send him back to his government, ordering him first to see you and make apology to you for all that has passed; after which I desire that you retain no resentment against him, and that you treat him in accordance with the powers that I have given him." [11] [11] Le Roi à Frontenac, 22 Avril, 1675. Colbert writes in terms equally measured, and adds: "After having spoken in the name of his Majesty, pray let me add a word in my own. By the marriage which the king has been pleased to make between the heiress of the house of Allègre and my son, the Abbé d'Urfé has become very closely connected with me, since he is cousin german of my daughter-in-law; and this induces me 42 to request you to show him especial consideration, though, in the exercise of his profession, he will rarely have occasion to see you." As D'Urfé had lately addressed a memorial to Colbert, in which the conduct of Frontenac is painted in the darkest colors, the almost imperceptible rebuke couched in the above lines does no little credit to the tact and moderation of the stern minister. Colbert next begs Frontenac to treat with kindness the priests of Montreal, observing that Bretonvilliers, their Superior at Paris, is his particular friend. "As to M. Perrot," he continues, "since ten months of imprisonment at Quebec and three weeks in the Bastile may suffice to atone for his fault, and since also he is related or connected with persons for whom I have a great regard, I pray you to accept kindly the apologies which he will make you, and, as it is not at all likely that he will fall again into any offence approaching that which he has committed, you will give me especial pleasure in granting him the honor of your favor and friendship." [12] [12] Colbert à Frontenac, 13 Mai, 1675. Fénelon, though the recent marriage had allied him also to Colbert, fared worse than either of the other parties to the dispute. He was indeed sustained in his claim to be judged by an ecclesiastical tribunal; but his Superior, Bretonvilliers, forbade him to return to Canada, and the king approved the prohibition. Bretonvilliers wrote to the Sulpitian priests of Montreal: "I exhort you to profit 43 by the example of M. de Fénelon. By having busied himself too much in worldly matters, and meddled with what did not concern him, he has ruined his own prospects and injured the friends whom he wished to serve. In matters of this sort, it is well always to stand neutral." [13] [13] Lettre de Bretonvilliers, 7 Mai, 1675; extract in Faillon. Fénelon, though wanting in prudence and dignity, had been an ardent and devoted missionary. In relation to these disputes, I have received much aid from the research of Abbé Faillon, and from the valuable paper of Abbé Verreau, Les deux Abbés de Fénelon, printed in the Canadian Journal de l'Instruction Publique, Vol. VIII. CHAPTER IV. 1675-1682. Frontenac and Duchesneau. Frontenac receives a Colleague ? He opposes the Clergy ? Disputes in the Council ? Royal Intervention ? Frontenac rebuked ? Fresh Outbreaks ? Charges and Countercharges ? The Dispute grows hot ? Duchesneau condemned and Frontenac warned ? The Quarrel continues ? The King loses Patience ? More Accusations ? Factions and Feuds ? A Side Quarrel ? The King threatens ? Frontenac denounces the Priests ? The Governor and the Intendant recalled ? Qualities of Frontenac. While writing to Frontenac in terms of studied mildness, the king and Colbert took measures to curb his power. In the absence of the bishop, the appointment and removal of councillors had rested wholly with the governor; and hence the council had been docile under his will. It was now ordained that the councillors should be appointed by the king himself. [1] This was not the only change. Since the departure of the intendant Talon, his office had been vacant; and Frontenac was left to rule alone. This seems to have been an experiment on the part of his masters at Versailles, who, knowing the peculiarities of his temper, were perhaps willing to try the effect of leaving him without a colleague. The experiment had not 45 succeeded. An intendant was now, therefore, sent to Quebec, not only to manage the details of administration, but also to watch the governor, keep him, if possible, within prescribed bounds, and report his proceedings to the minister. The change was far from welcome to Frontenac, whose delight it was to hold all the reins of power in his own hands; nor was he better pleased with the return of Bishop Laval, which presently took place. Three preceding governors had quarrelled with that uncompromising prelate; and there was little hope that Frontenac and he would keep the peace. All the signs of the sky foreboded storm. [1] édits et Ordonnances, I. 84. The storm soon came. The occasion of it was that old vexed question of the sale of brandy, which has been fully treated in another volume, [2] and on which it is needless to dwell here. Another dispute quickly followed; and here, too, the governor's chief adversaries were the bishop and the ecclesiastics. Duchesneau, the new intendant, took part with them. The bishop and his clergy were, on their side, very glad of a secular ally; for their power had greatly fallen since the days of Mézy, and the rank and imperious character of Frontenac appear to have held them in some awe. They avoided as far as they could a direct collision with him, and waged vicarious war in the person of their friend the intendant. Duchesneau was not of a conciliating spirit, and he felt strong in the support of the clergy; while Frontenac, when his temper was roused, would fight with haughty and 46 impracticable obstinacy for any position which he had once assumed, however trivial or however mistaken. There was incessant friction between the two colleagues in the exercise of their respective functions, and occasions of difference were rarely wanting. [2] The Old Régime in Canada. The question now at issue was that of honors and precedence at church and in religious ceremonies, matters of substantial importance under the Bourbon rule. Colbert interposed, ordered Duchesneau to treat Frontenac with becoming deference, and warned him not to make himself the partisan of the bishop; [3] while, at the same time, he exhorted Frontenac to live in harmony with the intendant. [4] The dispute continued till the king lost patience. [3] Colbert à Duchesneau, 1 Mai, 1677. [4] Ibid., 18 Mai, 1677. "Through all my kingdom," he wrote to the governor, "I do not hear of so many difficulties on this matter (of ecclesiastical honors) as I see in the church of Quebec." [5] And he directs him to conform to the practice established in the city of Amiens, and to exact no more; "since you ought to be satisfied with being the representative of my person in the country where I have placed you in command." [5] Le Roy à Frontenac, 25 Avril, 1679. At the same time, Colbert corrects the intendant. "A memorial," he wrote, "has been placed in my hands, touching various ecclesiastical honors, wherein there continually appears a great pretension 47 on your part, and on that of the bishop of Quebec in your favor, to establish an equality between the governor and you. I think I have already said enough to lead you to know yourself, and to understand the difference between a governor and an intendant; so that it is no longer necessary for me to enter into particulars, which could only serve to show you that you are completely in the wrong." [6] [6] Colbert à Duchesneau, 8 Mai, 1679 Scarcely was this quarrel suppressed, when another sprang up. Since the arrival of the intendant and the return of the bishop, the council had ceased to be in the interest of Frontenac. Several of its members were very obnoxious to him; and chief among these was Villeray, a former councillor whom the king had lately reinstated. Frontenac admitted him to his seat with reluctance. "I obey your orders," he wrote mournfully to Colbert; "but Villeray is the principal and most dangerous instrument of the bishop and the Jesuits." [7] He says, farther, that many people think him to be a Jesuit in disguise, and that he is an intriguing busybody, who makes trouble everywhere. He also denounces the attorney-general, Auteuil, as an ally of the Jesuits. Another of the reconstructed council, Tilly, meets his cordial approval; but he soon found reason to change his mind concerning him. [7] Frontenac au Ministre, 14 Nov., 1674 The king had recently ordered that the intendant, though holding only the third rank in the 48 council, should act as its president. [8] The commission of Duchesneau, however, empowered him to preside only in the absence of the governor; [9] while Frontenac is styled "chief and president of the council" in several of the despatches addressed to him. Here was an inconsistency. Both parties claimed the right of presiding, and both could rest their claim on a clear expression of the royal will. [8] Declaration du Roy, 23 Sept., 1675. [9] "Présider au Conseil Souverain en l'absence du dit Sieur de Frontenac."—Commission de Duchesneau, 5 Juin, 1675. Frontenac rarely began a new quarrel till the autumn vessels had sailed for France; because a full year must then elapse before his adversaries could send their complaints to the king, and six months more before the king could send back his answer. The governor had been heard to say, on one of these occasions, that he should now be master for eighteen months, subject only to answering with his head for what he might do. It was when the last vessel was gone in the autumn of 1678 that he demanded to be styled chief and president on the records of the council; and he showed a letter from the king in which he was so entitled. [10] In spite of this, Duchesneau resisted, and appealed to precedent to sustain his position. A long series of stormy sessions followed. The councillors in the clerical interest supported the intendant. Frontenac, chafed and angry, refused all compromise. Business was stopped for weeks. 49 Duchesneau lost temper, and became abusive. Auteuil tried to interpose in behalf of the intendant. Frontenac struck the table with his fist, and told him fiercely that he would teach him his duty. Every day embittered the strife. The governor made the declaration usual with him on such occasions, that he would not permit the royal authority to suffer in his person. At length he banished from Quebec his three most strenuous opponents, Villeray, Tilly, and Auteuil, and commanded them to remain in their country houses till they received his farther orders. All attempts at compromise proved fruitless; and Auteuil, in behalf of the exiles, appealed piteously to the king. [10] This letter, still preserved in the Archives de la Marine, is dated 12 Mai, 1678. Several other letters of Louis XIV. give Frontenac the same designation. The answer came in the following summer: "Monsieur le Comte de Frontenac," wrote Louis XIV., "I am surprised to learn all the new troubles and dissensions that have occurred in my country of New France, more especially since I have clearly and strongly given you to understand that your sole care should be to maintain harmony and peace among all my subjects dwelling therein; but what surprises me still more is that in nearly all the disputes which you have caused you have advanced claims which have very little foundation. My edicts, declarations, and ordinances had so plainly made known to you my will, that I have great cause of astonishment that you, whose duty it is to see them faithfully executed, have yourself set up pretensions entirely opposed to them. You have wished to be styled chief and president on the records of the Supreme Council, which is contrary 50 to my edict concerning that council; and I am the more surprised at this demand, since I am very sure that you are the only man in my kingdom who, being honored with the title of governor and lieutenant-general, would care to be styled chief and president of such a council as that of Quebec." He then declares that neither Frontenac nor the intendant is to have the title of president, but that the intendant is to perform the functions of presiding officer, as determined by the edict. He continues:— "Moreover, your abuse of the authority which I have confided to you in exiling two councillors and the attorney-general for so trivial a cause cannot meet my approval; and, were it not for the distinct assurances given me by your friends that you will act with more moderation in future, and never again fall into offences of this nature, I should have resolved on recalling you." [11] [11] Le Roy à Frontenac, 29 Avril, 1680. A decree of the council of state soon after determined the question of presidency in accord with this letter. édits et Ordonnances, I. 238. Colbert wrote to him with equal severity: "I have communicated to the king the contents of all the despatches which you have written to me during the past year; and as the matters of which they treat are sufficiently ample, including dissensions almost universal among those whose duty it is to preserve harmony in the country under your command, his Majesty has been pleased to examine all the papers sent by all the parties interested, 51 and more particularly those appended to your letters. He has thereupon ordered me distinctly to make known to you his intentions." The minister then proceeds to reprove him sharply in the name of the king, and concludes: "It is difficult for me to add any thing to what I have just said. Consider well that, if it is any advantage or any satisfaction to you that his Majesty should be satisfied with your services, it is necessary that you change entirely the conduct which you have hitherto pursued." [12] [12] Colbert à Frontenac, 4 Dec., 1679. This letter seems to have been sent by a special messenger by way of New England. It was too late in the season to send directly to Canada. On the quarrel about the presidency, Duchesneau au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1679; Auteuil au Ministre, 10 Aug., 1679; Contestations entre le Sieur Comte de Frontenac et M. Duchesneau, Chevalier. This last paper consists of voluminous extracts from the records of the council. This, one would think, might have sufficed to bring the governor to reason, but the violence of his resentments and antipathies overcame the very slender share of prudence with which nature had endowed him. One morning, as he sat at the head of the council board, the bishop on his right hand, and the intendant on his left, a woman made her appearance with a sealed packet of papers. She was the wife of the councillor Amours, whose chair was vacant at the table. Important business was in hand, the registration of a royal edict of amnesty to the coureurs de bois. The intendant, who well knew what the packet contained, demanded that it should be opened. Frontenac insisted that the business before the council should 52 proceed. The intendant renewed his demand, the council sustained him, and the packet was opened accordingly. It contained a petition from Amours, stating that Frontenac had put him in prison, because, having obtained in due form a passport to send a canoe to his fishing station of Matane, he had afterwards sent a sail-boat thither without applying for another passport. Frontenac had sent for him, and demanded by what right he did so. Amours replied that he believed that he had acted in accordance with the intentions of the king; whereupon, to borrow the words of the petition, "Monsieur the governor fell into a rage, and said to your petitioner, 'I will teach you the intentions of the king, and you shall stay in prison till you learn them;' and your petitioner was shut up in a chamber of the chateau, wherein he still remains." He proceeds to pray that a trial may be granted him according to law. [13] [13] Registre du Conseil Supérieur, 16 Ao?st, 1681. Discussions now ensued which lasted for days, and now and then became tempestuous. The governor, who had declared that the council had nothing to do with the matter, and that he could not waste time in talking about it, was not always present at the meetings, and it sometimes became necessary to depute one or more of the members to visit him. Auteuil, the attorney-general, having been employed on this unenviable errand, begged the council to dispense him from such duty in future, "by reason," as he says, "of the abuse, ill treatment, and threats which he received from 53 Monsieur the governor, when he last had the honor of being deputed to confer with him, the particulars whereof he begs to be excused from reporting, lest the anger of Monsieur the governor should be kindled against him still more." [14] Frontenac, hearing of this charge, angrily denied it, saying that the attorney-general had slandered and insulted him, and that it was his custom to do so. Auteuil rejoined that the governor had accused him of habitual lying, and told him that he would have his hand cut off. All these charges and countercharges may still be found entered in due form on the old records of the council at Quebec. [14] Registre du Conseil Supérieur, 4 Nov., 1681. It was as usual upon the intendant that the wrath of Frontenac fell most fiercely. He accuses him of creating cabals and intrigues, and causing not only the council, but all the country, to forget the respect due to the representative of his Majesty. Once, when Frontenac was present at the session, a dispute arose about an entry on the record. A draft of it had been made in terms agreeable to the governor, who insisted that the intendant should sign it. Duchesneau replied that he and the clerk would go into the adjoining room, where they could examine it in peace, and put it into a proper form. Frontenac rejoined that he would then have no security that what he had said in the council would be accurately reported. Duchesneau persisted, and was going out with the draft in his hand, when Frontenac planted himself before the door, and 54 told him that he should not leave the council chamber till he had signed the paper. "Then I will get out of the window, or else stay here all day," returned Duchesneau. A lively debate ensued, and the governor at length yielded the point. [15] [15] Registre de Conseil Supérieur, 1681. The imprisonment of Amours was short, but strife did not cease. The disputes in the council were accompanied throughout with other quarrels which were complicated with them, and which were worse than all the rest, since they involved more important matters and covered a wider field. They related to the fur trade, on which hung the very life of the colony. Merchants, traders, and even habitants, were ranged in two contending factions. Of one of these Frontenac was the chief. With him were La Salle and his lieutenant, La Forêt; Du Lhut, the famous leader of coureurs de bois; Boisseau, agent of the farmers of the revenue; Barrois, the governor's secretary; Bizard, lieutenant of his guard; and various others of greater or less influence. On the other side were the members of the council, with Aubert de la Chesnaye, Le Moyne and all his sons, Louis Joliet, Jacques Le Ber, Sorel, Boucher, Varennes, and many more, all supported by the intendant Duchesneau, and also by his fast allies, the ecclesiastics. The faction under the lead of the governor had every advantage, for it was sustained by all the power of his office. Duchesneau was beside himself with rage. He wrote to the court letters full of bitterness, accused Frontenac of illicit trade, 55 denounced his followers, and sent huge bundles of procès-verbaux and attestations to prove his charges. But if Duchesneau wrote letters, so too did Frontenac; and if the intendant sent proofs, so too did the governor. Upon the unfortunate king and the still more unfortunate minister fell the difficult task of composing the quarrels of their servants, three thousand miles away. They treated Duchesneau without ceremony. Colbert wrote to him: "I have examined all the letters, papers, and memorials that you sent me by the return of the vessels last November, and, though it appears by the letters of M. de Frontenac that his conduct leaves something to be desired, there is assuredly far more to blame in yours than in his. As to what you say concerning his violence, his trade with the Indians, and in general all that you allege against him, the king has written to him his intentions; but since, in the midst of all your complaints, you say many things which are without foundation, or which are no concern of yours, it is difficult to believe that you act in the spirit which the service of the king demands; that is to say, without interest and without passion. If a change does not appear in your conduct before next year, his Majesty will not keep you in your office." [16] [16] Colbert à Duchesneau, 15 Mai, 1678. At the same time, the king wrote to Frontenac, alluding to the complaints of Duchesneau, and exhorting the governor to live on good terms with 56 him. The general tone of the letter is moderate, but the following significant warning occurs in it: "Although no gentleman in the position in which I have placed you ought to take part in any trade, directly or indirectly, either by himself or any of his servants, I nevertheless now prohibit you absolutely from doing so. Not only abstain from trade, but act in such a manner that nobody can even suspect you of it; and this will be easy, since the truth will readily come to light." [17] [17] Le Roy à Frontenac, 12 Mai, 1678. Exhortation and warning were vain alike. The first ships which returned that year from Canada brought a series of despatches from the intendant, renewing all his charges more bitterly than before. The minister, out of patience, replied by berating him without mercy. "You may rest assured," he concludes, "that, did it not appear by your later despatches that the letters you have received have begun to make you understand that you have forgotten yourself, it would not have been possible to prevent the king from recalling you." [18] [18] Colbert à Duchesneau, 25 Avril, 1679. Duchesneau, in return, protests all manner of deference to the governor, but still insists that he sets the royal edicts at naught; protects a host of coureurs de bois who are in league with him; corresponds with Du Lhut, their chief; shares his illegal profits, and causes all the disorders which afflict the colony. "As for me, Monseigneur, I have done every thing within the scope of my office to prevent these evils; but all the pains I have taken 57 have only served to increase the aversion of Monsieur the governor against me, and to bring my ordinances into contempt. This, Monseigneur, is a true account of the disobedience of the coureurs de bois, of which I twice had the honor to speak to Monsieur the governor; and I could not help telling him, with all possible deference, that it was shameful to the colony and to us that the king, our master, of whom the whole world stands in awe, who has just given law to all Europe, and whom all his subjects adore, should have the pain of knowing that, in a country which has received so many marks of his paternal tenderness, his orders are violated and scorned; and a governor and an intendant stand by, with folded arms, content with saying that the evil is past remedy. For having made these representations to him, I drew on myself words so full of contempt and insult that I was forced to leave his room to appease his anger. The next morning I went to him again, and did all I could to have my ordinances executed; but, as Monsieur the governor is interested with many of the coureurs de bois, it is useless to attempt to do any thing. He has gradually made himself master of the trade of Montreal; and, as soon as the Indians arrive, he sets guards in their camp, which would be very well, if these soldiers did their duty and protected the savages from being annoyed and plundered by the French, instead of being employed to discover how many furs they have brought, with a view to future operations. Monsieur the governor then compels 58 the Indians to pay his guards for protecting them; and he has never allowed them to trade with the inhabitants till they had first given him a certain number of packs of beaver skins, which he calls his presents. His guards trade with them openly at the fair, with their bandoleers on their shoulders." He says, farther, that Frontenac sends up goods to Montreal, and employs persons to trade in his behalf; and that, what with the beaver skins exacted by him and his guards under the name of presents, and those which he and his favorites obtain in trade, only the smaller part of what the Indians bring to market ever reaches the people of the colony. [19] [19] Duchesneau au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1679. This despatch, and the proofs accompanying it, drew from the king a sharp reproof to Frontenac. "What has passed in regard to the coureurs de bois is entirely contrary to my orders; and I cannot receive in excuse for it your allegation that it is the intendant who countenances them by the trade he carries on, for I perceive clearly that the fault is your own. As I see that you often turn the orders that I give you against the very object for which they are given, beware not to do so on this occasion. I shall hold you answerable for bringing the disorder of the coureurs de bois to an end throughout Canada; and this you will easily succeed in doing, if you make a proper use of my authority. Take care not to persuade yourself that what I write to you comes from the ill 59 offices of the intendant. It results from what I fully know from every thing which reaches me from Canada, proving but too well what you are doing there. The bishop, the ecclesiastics, the Jesuit fathers, the Supreme Council, and, in a word, everybody, complain of you; but I am willing to believe that you will change your conduct, and act with the moderation necessary for the good of the colony." [20] [20] Le Roy à Frontenac, 29 Avril, 1680. Colbert wrote in a similar strain; and Frontenac saw that his position was becoming critical. He showed, it is true, no sign of that change of conduct which the king had demanded; but he appealed to his allies at court to use fresh efforts to sustain him. Among the rest, he had a strong friend in the Maréchal de Bellefonds, to whom he wrote, in the character of an abused and much-suffering man: "You exhort me to have patience, and I agree with you that those placed in a position of command cannot have too much. For this reason, I have given examples of it here such as perhaps no governor ever gave before; and I have found no great difficulty in doing so, because I felt myself to be the master. Had I been in a private station, I could not have endured such outrageous insults without dishonor. I have always passed over in silence those directed against me personally; and have never given way to anger, except when attacks were made on the authority of which I have the honor to be the guardian. You could not believe all the annoyances 60 which the intendant tries to put upon me every day, and which, as you advise me, I scorn or disregard. It would require a virtue like yours to turn them to all the good use of which they are capable; yet, great as the virtue is which has enabled you to possess your soul in tranquillity amid all the troubles of the court, I doubt if you could preserve such complete equanimity among the miserable tumults of Canada." [21] [21] Frontenac au Maréchal de Bellefonds, 14 Nov., 1680. Having given the principal charges of Duchesneau against Frontenac, it is time to give those of Frontenac against Duchesneau. The governor says that all the coureurs de bois would be brought to submission but for the intendant and his allies, who protect them, and carry on trade by their means; that the seigniorial house of Duchesneau's partner, La Chesnaye, is the constant resort of these outlaws; and that he and his associates have large storehouses at Montreal, Isle St. Paul, and Rivière du Loup, whence they send goods into the Indian country, in contempt of the king's orders. [22] Frontenac also complains of numberless provocations from the intendant. "It is no fault of mine that I am not on good terms with M. Duchesneau; for I have done every thing I could to that end, being too submissive to your Majesty's commands not to suppress my sharpest indignation the moment your will is known to me. But, Sire, it is not so with him; and his desire to excite new disputes, in the hope of making me appear their 61 principal author, has been so great that the last ships were hardly gone, when, forgetting what your Majesty had enjoined upon us both, he began these dissensions afresh, in spite of all my precautions. If I depart from my usual reserve in regard to him, and make bold to ask justice at the hands of your Majesty for the wrongs and insults I have undergone, it is because nothing but your authority can keep them within bounds. I have never suffered more in my life than when I have been made to appear as a man of violence and a disturber of the officers of justice: for I have always confined myself to what your Majesty has prescribed; that is, to exhorting them to do their duty when I saw that they failed in it. This has drawn upon me, both from them and from M. Duchesneau, such cutting affronts that your Majesty would hardly credit them." [23] [22] Mémoire et Preuves du Désordre des Coureurs de Bois. [23] Frontenac au Roy, 2 Nov., 1681. In 1681, Seignelay, the son of Colbert, entered upon the charge of the colonies; and both Frontenac and Duchesneau hastened to congratulate him, protest their devotion, and overwhelm him with mutual accusations. The intendant declares that, out of pure zeal for the king's service, he shall tell him every thing. "Disorder," he says, "reigns everywhere; universal confusion prevails throughout every department of business; the pleasure of the king, the orders of the Supreme Council, and my ordinances remain unexecuted; justice is openly violated, and trade is destroyed; violence, upheld by authority, decides every thing; 62 and nothing consoles the people, who groan without daring to complain, but the hope, Monseigneur, that you will have the goodness to condescend to be moved by their misfortunes. No position could be more distressing than mine, since, if I conceal the truth from you, I fail in the obedience I owe the king, and in the fidelity that I vowed so long since to Monseigneur, your father, and which I swear anew at your hands; and if I obey, as I must, his Majesty's orders and yours, I cannot avoid giving offence, since I cannot render you an account of these disorders without informing you that M. de Frontenac's conduct is the sole cause of them." [24] [24] Duchesneau au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1681. Frontenac had written to Seignelay a few days before: "I have no doubt whatever that M. Duchesneau will, as usual, overwhelm me with fabrications and falsehoods, to cover his own ill conduct. I send proofs to justify myself, so strong and convincing that I do not see that they can leave any doubt; but, since I fear that their great number might fatigue you, I have thought it better to send them to my wife, with a full and exact journal of all that has passed here day by day, in order that she may extract and lay before you the principal portions. "I send you in person merely the proofs of the conduct of M. Duchesneau, in barricading his house and arming all his servants, and in coming three weeks ago to insult me in my room. You will see thereby to what a pitch of temerity and 63 lawlessness he has transported himself, in order to compel me to use violence against him, with the hope of justifying what he has asserted about my pretended outbreaks of anger." [25] [25] Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1681. The mutual charges of the two functionaries were much the same; and, so far at least as concerns trade, there can be little doubt that they were well founded on both sides. The strife of the rival factions grew more and more bitter: canes and sticks played an active part in it, and now and then we hear of drawn swords. One is reminded at times of the intestine feuds of some medi?val city, as, for example, in the following incident, which will explain the charge of Frontenac against the intendant of barricading his house and arming his servants:— On the afternoon of the twentieth of March, a son of Duchesneau, sixteen years old, followed by a servant named Vautier, was strolling along the picket fence which bordered the descent from the Upper to the Lower Town of Quebec. The boy was amusing himself by singing a song, when Frontenac's partisan, Boisseau, with one of the guardsmen, approached, and, as young Duchesneau declares, called him foul names, and said that he would give him and his father a thrashing. The boy replied that he would have nothing to say to a fellow like him, and would beat him if he did not keep quiet; while the servant, Vautier, retorted Boisseau's abuse, and taunted him with low birth and disreputable employments. Boisseau made report to 64 Frontenac, and Frontenac complained to Duchesneau, who sent his son, with Vautier, to give the governor his version of the affair. The bishop, an ally of the intendant, thus relates what followed. On arriving with a party of friends at the chateau, young Duchesneau was shown into a room in which were the governor and his two secretaries, Barrois and Chasseur. He had no sooner entered than Frontenac seized him by the arm, shook him, struck him, called him abusive names, and tore the sleeve of his jacket. The secretaries interposed, and, failing to quiet the governor, opened the door and let the boy escape. Vautier, meanwhile, had remained in the guard-room, where Boisseau struck at him with his cane; and one of the guardsmen went for a halberd to run him through the body. After this warm reception, young Duchesneau and his servant took refuge in the house of his father. Frontenac demanded their surrender. The intendant, fearing that he would take them by force, for which he is said to have made preparation, barricaded himself and armed his household. The bishop tried to mediate, and after protracted negotiations young Duchesneau was given up, whereupon Frontenac locked him in a chamber of the chateau, and kept him there a month. [26] [26] Mémoire de l'Evesque de Quebec, Mars, 1681 (printed in Revue Canadienne, 1873). The bishop is silent about the barricades of which Frontenac and his friends complain in several letters. The story of Frontenac's violence to the boy is flatly denied by his friends, who charge Duchesneau 65 and his partisans with circulating libels against him, and who say, like Frontenac himself, that the intendant used every means to exasperate him, in order to make material for accusations. [27] [27] See, among other instances, the Défense de M. de Frontenac par un de ses Amis, published by Abbé Verreau in the Revue Canadienne, 1873. The disputes of the rival factions spread through all Canada. The most heinous offence in the eyes of the court with which each charged the other was the carrying of furs to the English settlements; thus defrauding the revenue, and, as the king believed, preparing the ruin of the colony. The intendant farther declared that the governor's party spread among the Indians the report of a pestilence at Montreal, in order to deter them from their yearly visit to the fair, and thus by means of coureurs de bois obtain all their beaver skins at a low price. The report, according to Duchesneau, had no other foundation than the fate of eighteen or twenty Indians, who had lately drunk themselves to death at La Chine. [28] [28] Plumitif du Conseil Souverain, 1681. Montreal, in the mean time, was the scene of a sort of by-play, in which the chief actor was the local governor, Perrot. He and Frontenac appear to have found it for their common interest to come to a mutual understanding; and this was perhaps easier on the part of the count, since his quarrel with Duchesneau gave sufficient employment to his natural pugnacity. Perrot was now left to make a reasonable profit from the illicit trade which had once kindled the wrath of his superior; 66 and, the danger of Frontenac's anger being removed, he completely forgot the lessons of his imprisonment. The intendant ordered Migeon, bailiff of Montreal, to arrest some of Perrot's coureurs de bois. Perrot at once arrested the bailiff, and sent a sergeant and two soldiers to occupy his house, with orders to annoy the family as much as possible. One of them, accordingly, walked to and fro all night in the bed-chamber of Migeon's wife. On another occasion, the bailiff invited two friends to supper: Le Moyne d'Iberville and one Bouthier, agent of a commercial house at Rochelle. The conversation turned on the trade carried on by Perrot. It was overheard and reported to him, upon which he suddenly appeared at the window, struck Bouthier over the head with his cane, then drew his sword, and chased him while he fled for his life. The seminary was near at hand, and the fugitive clambered over the wall. Dollier de Casson dressed him in the hat and cassock of a priest, and in this disguise he escaped. [29] Perrot's avidity sometimes carried him to singular extremities. "He has been seen," says one of his accusers, "filling barrels of brandy with his own hands, and mixing it with water to sell to the Indians. He bartered with one of them his hat, sword, coat, ribbons, shoes, and stockings, and boasted that he had made thirty pistoles by the bargain, while the Indian walked about town equipped as governor." [30] [29] Conduite du Sieur Perrot, Gouverneur de Montréal en la Nouvelle France, 1681; Plainte du Sieur Bouthier, 10 Oct., 1680; Procès-verbal des huissiers de Montréal. [30] Conduite du Sieur Perrot. La Barre, Frontenac's successor, declares 67 that the charges against Perrot were false, including the attestations of Migeon and his friends; that Dollier de Casson had been imposed upon, and that various persons had been induced to sign unfounded statements without reading them. La Barre au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1683. Every ship from Canada brought to the king fresh complaints of Duchesneau against Frontenac, and of Frontenac against Duchesneau; and the king replied with rebukes, exhortations, and threats to both. At first he had shown a disposition to extenuate and excuse the faults of Frontenac, but every year his letters grew sharper. In 1681 he wrote: "Again I urge you to banish from your mind the difficulties which you have yourself devised against the execution of my orders; to act with mildness and moderation towards all the colonists, and divest yourself entirely of the personal animosities which have thus far been almost your sole motive of action. In conclusion, I exhort you once more to profit well by the directions which this letter contains; since, unless you succeed better herein than formerly, I cannot help recalling you from the command which I have intrusted to you." [31] [31] Le Roy à Frontenac, 30 Avril, 1681. The dispute still went on. The autumn ships from Quebec brought back the usual complaints, and the long-suffering king at length made good his threat. Both Frontenac and Duchesneau received their recall, and they both deserved it. [32] [32] La Barre says that Duchesneau was far more to blame than Frontenac. La Barre au Ministre, 1683. This testimony has weight, since Frontenac's friends were La Barre's enemies. The last official act of the governor, recorded in the register of the council of Quebec, is the formal 68 declaration that his rank in that body is superior to that of the intendant. [33] [33] Registre du Conseil-Supérieur, 16 Fév., 1682. The key to nearly all these disputes lies in the relations between Frontenac and the Church. The fundamental quarrel was generally covered by superficial issues, and it was rarely that the governor fell out with anybody who was not in league with the bishop and the Jesuits. "Nearly all the disorders in New France," he writes, "spring from the ambition of the ecclesiastics, who want to join to their spiritual authority an absolute power over things temporal, and who persecute all who do not submit entirely to them." He says that the intendant and the councillors are completely under their control, and dare not decide any question against them; that they have spies everywhere, even in his house; that the bishop told him that he could excommunicate even a governor, if he chose; that the missionaries in Indian villages say that they are equals of Onontio, and tell their converts that all will go wrong till the priests have the government of Canada; that directly or indirectly they meddle in all civil affairs; that they trade even with the English of New York; that, what with Jesuits, Sulpitians, the bishop, and the seminary of Quebec, they hold two-thirds of the good lands of Canada; that, in view of the poverty of the country, their revenues are enormous; that, in short, their object is mastery, and that they use all means to compass it. [34] The recall of the governor was a triumph 69 to the ecclesiastics, offset but slightly by the recall of their instrument, the intendant, who had done his work, and whom they needed no longer. [34] Frontenac, Mémoire adressé à Colbert, 1677. This remarkable paper will be found in the Découvertes et établissements des Fran?ais dans l'Amérique Septentrionale; Mémoires et Documents Originaux, edited by M. Margry. The paper is very long, and contains references to attestations and other proofs which accompanied it, especially in regard to the trade of the Jesuits. Thus far, we have seen Frontenac on his worst side. We shall see him again under an aspect very different. Nor must it be supposed that the years which had passed since his government began, tempestuous as they appear on the record, were wholly given over to quarrelling. They had their periods of uneventful calm, when the wheels of administration ran as smoothly as could be expected in view of the condition of the colony. In one respect at least, Frontenac had shown a remarkable fitness for his office. Few white men have ever equalled or approached him in the art of dealing with Indians. There seems to have been a sympathetic relation between him and them. He conformed to their ways, borrowed their rhetoric, flattered them on occasion with great address, and yet constantly maintained towards them an attitude of paternal superiority. When they were concerned, his native haughtiness always took a form which commanded respect without exciting anger. He would not address them as brothers, but only as children; and even the Iroquois, arrogant as they were, accepted the new relation. In their eyes Frontenac was by far the greatest of all the "Onontios," or governors of Canada. They admired 70 the prompt and fiery soldier who played with their children, and gave beads and trinkets to their wives; who read their secret thoughts and never feared them, but smiled on them when their hearts were true, or frowned and threatened them when they did amiss. The other tribes, allies of the French, were of the same mind; and their respect for their Great Father seems not to have been permanently impaired by his occasional practice of bullying them for purposes of extortion. Frontenac appears to have had a liking not only for Indians, but also for that roving and lawless class of the Canadian population, the coureurs de bois, provided always that they were not in the service of his rivals. Indeed, as regards the Canadians generally, he refrained from the strictures with which succeeding governors and intendants freely interlarded their despatches. It was not his instinct to clash with the humbler classes, and he generally reserved his anger for those who could retort it. He had the air of distinction natural to a man familiar all his life with the society of courts, and he was as gracious and winning on some occasions as he was unbearable on others. When in good humor, his ready wit and a certain sympathetic vivacity made him very agreeable. At times he was all sunshine, and his outrageous temper slumbered peacefully till some new offence wakened it again; nor is there much doubt that many of his worst outbreaks were the work of his enemies, who knew his foible, and studied to exasperate him. 71 He was full of contradictions; and, intolerant and implacable as he often was, there were intervals, even in his bitterest quarrels, in which he displayed a surprising moderation and patience. By fits he could be magnanimous. A woman once brought him a petition in burlesque verse. Frontenac wrote a jocose answer. The woman, to ridicule him, contrived to have both petition and answer slipped among the papers of a suit pending before the council. Frontenac had her fined a few francs, and then caused the money to be given to her children. [35] [35] Note by Abbé Verreau, in Journal de l'Instruction Publique (Canada), VIII. 127. When he sailed for France, it was a day of rejoicing to more than half the merchants of Canada, and, excepting the Récollets, to all the priests; but he left behind him an impression, very general among the people, that, if danger threatened the colony, Count Frontenac was the man for the hour. CHAPTER V. 1682-1684. LeFebvre de la Barre. His Arrival at Quebec ? The Great Fire ? A Coming Storm ? Iroquois Policy ? The Danger imminent ? Indian Allies of France ? Frontenac and the Iroquois ? Boasts of La Barre ? His Past Life ? His Speculations ? He takes Alarm ? His Dealings with the Iroquois ? His Illegal Trade ? His Colleague denounces him ? Fruits of his Schemes ? His Anger and his Fears. When the new governor, La Barre, and the new intendant, Meules, arrived at Quebec, a dismal greeting waited them. All the Lower Town was in ashes, except the house of the merchant Aubert de la Chesnaye, standing alone amid the wreck. On a Tuesday, the fourth of August, at ten o'clock in the evening, the nuns of the H?tel-Dieu were roused from their early slumbers by shouts, outcries, and the ringing of bells; "and," writes one of them, "what was our terror to find it as light as noonday, the flames burned so fiercely and rose so high." Half an hour before, Chartier de Lotbinière, judge of the king's court, heard the first alarm, ran down the descent now called Mountain Street, and found every thing in confusion in the town below. The house of Etienne Planchon was in a blaze; the fire was spreading to those of his 73 neighbors, and had just leaped the narrow street to the storehouse of the Jesuits. The season was excessively dry; there were no means of throwing water except kettles and buckets, and the crowd was bewildered with excitement and fright. Men were ordered to tear off roofs and pull down houses; but the flames drove them from their work, and at four o'clock in the morning fifty-five buildings were burnt to the ground. They were all of wood, but many of them were storehouses filled with goods; and the property consumed was more in value than all that remained in Canada. [1] [1] Chartier de Lotbinière, Procès-verbal sur l'Incendie de la Basse Ville; Meules au Ministre, 6 Oct., 1682; Juchereau, Histoire de l'H?tel-Dieu de Québec, 256. Under these gloomy auspices, Le Febvre de la Barre began his reign. He was an old officer who had achieved notable exploits against the English in the West Indies, but who was now to be put to a test far more severe. He made his lodging in the chateau; while his colleague, Meules, could hardly find a shelter. The buildings of the Upper Town were filled with those whom the fire had made roofless, and the intendant was obliged to content himself with a house in the neighboring woods. Here he was ill at ease, for he dreaded an Indian war and the scalping-knives of the Iroquois. [2] [2] Meules au Ministre, 6 Oct., 1682. So far as his own safety was concerned, his alarm was needless; but not so as regarded the colony with whose affairs he was charged. For those who had eyes to see it, a terror and a woe lowered in the future of Canada. In an evil 74 hour for her, the Iroquois had conquered their southern neighbors, the Andastes, who had long held their ground against them, and at one time threatened them with ruin. The hands of the confederates were now free; their arrogance was redoubled by victory, and, having long before destroyed all the adjacent tribes on the north and west, [3] they looked for fresh victims in the wilderness beyond. Their most easterly tribe, the Mohawks, had not forgotten the chastisement they had received from Tracy and Courcelle. They had learned to fear the French, and were cautious in offending them; but it was not so with the remoter Iroquois. Of these, the Senecas at the western end of the "Long House," as they called their fivefold league, were by far the most powerful, for they could muster as many warriors as all the four remaining tribes together; and they now sought to draw the confederacy into a series of wars, which, though not directed against the French, threatened soon to involve them. Their first movement westward was against the tribes of the Illinois. I have already described their bloody inroad in the summer of 1680. [4] They made the valley of the Illinois a desert, and returned with several hundred prisoners, of whom they burned those that were useless, and incorporated the young and strong into their own tribe. [3] Jesuits in North America. [4] Discovery of the Great West. This movement of the western Iroquois had a double incentive, their love of fighting and their 75 love of gain. It was a war of conquest and of trade. All the five tribes of the league had become dependent on the English and Dutch of Albany for guns, powder, lead, brandy, and many other things that they had learned to regard as necessities. Beaver skins alone could buy them, but to the Iroquois the supply of beaver skins was limited. The regions of the west and north-west, the upper Mississippi with its tributaries, and, above all, the forests of the upper lakes, were occupied by tribes in the interest of the French, whose missionaries and explorers had been the first to visit them, and whose traders controlled their immense annual product of furs. La Salle, by his newly built fort of St. Louis, engrossed the trade of the Illinois and Miami tribes; while the Hurons and Ottawas, gathered about the old mission of Michillimackinac, acted as factors for the Sioux, the Winnebagoes, and many other remote hordes. Every summer they brought down their accumulated beaver skins to the fair at Montreal; while French bush-rangers roving through the wilderness, with or without licenses, collected many more. [5] [5] Duchesneau, Memoir on Western Indians in N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. 160. It was the purpose of the Iroquois to master all this traffic, conquer the tribes who had possession of it, and divert the entire supply of furs to themselves, and through themselves to the English and Dutch. That English and Dutch traders urged them on is affirmed by the French, and is very likely. The accomplishment of the scheme would 76 have ruined Canada. Moreover, the Illinois, the Hurons, the Ottawas, and all the other tribes threatened by the Iroquois, were the allies and "children" of the French, who in honor as in interest were bound to protect them. Hence, when the Seneca invasion of the Illinois became known, there was deep anxiety in the colony, except only among those in whom hatred of the monopolist La Salle had overborne every consideration of the public good. La Salle's new establishment of St. Louis was in the path of the invaders; and, if he could be crushed, there was wherewith to console his enemies for all else that might ensue. Bad as was the posture of affairs, it was made far worse by an incident that took place soon after the invasion of the Illinois. A Seneca chief engaged in it, who had left the main body of his countrymen, was captured by a party of Winnebagoes to serve as a hostage for some of their tribe whom the Senecas had lately seized. They carried him to Michillimackinac, where there chanced to be a number of Illinois, married to Indian women of that neighborhood. A quarrel ensued between them and the Seneca, whom they stabbed to death in a lodge of the Kiskakons, one of the tribes of the Ottawas. Here was a casus belli likely to precipitate a war fatal to all the tribes about Michillimackinac, and equally fatal to the trade of Canada. Frontenac set himself to conjure the rising storm, and sent a messenger to the Iroquois to invite them to a conference. 77 He found them unusually arrogant. Instead of coming to him, they demanded that he should come to them, and many of the French wished him to comply; but Frontenac refused, on the ground that such a concession would add to their insolence, and he declined to go farther than Montreal, or at the utmost Fort Frontenac, the usual place of meeting with them. Early in August he was at Montreal, expecting the arrival of the Ottawas and Hurons on their yearly descent from the lakes. They soon appeared, and he called them to a solemn council. Terror had seized them all. "Father, take pity on us," said the Ottawa orator, "for we are like dead men." A Huron chief, named the Rat, declared that the world was turned upside down, and implored the protection of Onontio, "who is master of the whole earth." These tribes were far from harmony among themselves. Each was jealous of the other, and the Ottawas charged the Hurons with trying to make favor with the common enemy at their expense. Frontenac told them that they were all his children alike, and advised them to live together as brothers, and make treaties of alliance with all the tribes of the lakes. At the same time, he urged them to make full atonement for the death of the Seneca murdered in their country, and carefully to refrain from any new offence. Soon after there was another arrival. La Forêt, the officer in command at Fort Frontenac, appeared, bringing with him a famous Iroquois chief called Decanisora or Tegannisorens, attended by a number 78 of warriors. They came to invite Frontenac to meet the deputies of the five tribes at Oswego, within their own limits. Frontenac's reply was characteristic. "It is for the father to tell the children where to hold council, not for the children to tell the father. Fort Frontenac is the proper place, and you should thank me for going so far every summer to meet you." The Iroquois had expressed pacific intentions towards the Hurons and Ottawas. For this Frontenac commended him, but added: "The Illinois also are children of Onontio, and hence brethren of the Iroquois. Therefore they, too, should be left in peace; for Onontio wishes that all his family should live together in union." He confirmed his words with a huge belt of wampum. Then, addressing the flattered deputy as a great chief, he desired him to use his influence in behalf of peace, and gave him a jacket and a silk cravat, both trimmed with gold, a hat, a scarlet ribbon, and a gun, with beads for his wife, and red cloth for his daughter. The Iroquois went home delighted. [6] [6] For the papers on this affair, see N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. Perhaps on this occasion Frontenac was too confident of his influence over the savage confederates. Such at least was the opinion of Lamberville, Jesuit missionary at Onondaga, the Iroquois capital. From what he daily saw around him, he thought the peril so imminent that concession on the part of the French was absolutely necessary, since not only the Illinois, but some of the tribes of the lakes, were in danger of speedy and complete destruction. 79 "Tegannisorens loves the French," he wrote to Frontenac, "but neither he nor any other of the upper Iroquois fear them in the least. They annihilate our allies, whom by adoption of prisoners they convert into Iroquois; and they do not hesitate to avow that after enriching themselves by our plunder, and strengthening themselves by those who might have aided us, they will pounce all at once upon Canada, and overwhelm it in a single campaign." He adds that within the past two years they have reinforced themselves by more than nine hundred warriors, adopted into their tribes. [7] [7] P. Jean de Lamberville à Frontenac, 20 Sept., 1682. Such was the crisis when Frontenac left Canada at the moment when he was needed most, and Le Febvre de la Barre came to supplant him. The new governor introduces himself with a burst of rhodomontade. "The Iroquois," he writes to the king, "have twenty-six hundred warriors. I will attack them with twelve hundred men. They know me before seeing me, for they have been told by the English how roughly I handled them in the West Indies." This bold note closes rather tamely; for the governor adds, "I think that if the Iroquois believe that your Majesty would have the goodness to give me some help, they will make peace, and let our allies alone, which would save the trouble and expense of an arduous war." [8] He then begs hard for troops, and in fact there was great need of them, for there were none in Canada; 80 and even Frontenac had been compelled in the last year of his government to leave unpunished various acts of violence and plunder committed by the Iroquois. La Barre painted the situation in its blackest colors, declared that war was imminent, and wrote to the minister, "We shall lose half our trade and all our reputation, if we do not oppose these haughty conquerors." [9] [8] La Barre au Roy, (4 Oct.?) 1682. [9] La Barre à Seignelay, 1682. A vein of gasconade appears in most of his letters, not however accompanied with any conclusive evidence of a real wish to fight. His best fighting days were past, for he was sixty years old; nor had he always been a man of the sword. His early life was spent in the law; he had held a judicial post, and had been intendant of several French provinces. Even the military and naval employments, in which he afterwards acquitted himself with credit, were due to the part he took in forming a joint-stock company for colonizing Cayenne. [10] In fact, he was but half a soldier; and it was perhaps for this reason that he insisted on being called, not Monsieur le Gouverneur, but Monsieur le Général. He was equal to Frontenac neither in vigor nor in rank, but he far surpassed him in avidity. Soon after his arrival, he wrote to the minister that he should not follow the example of 81 his predecessors in making money out of his government by trade; and in consideration of these good intentions he asked for an addition to his pay. [11] He then immediately made alliances with certain merchants of Quebec for carrying on an extensive illicit trade, backed by all the power of his office. Now ensued a strange and miserable complication. Questions of war mingled with questions of personal gain. There was a commercial revolution in the colony. The merchants whom Frontenac excluded from his ring now had their turn. It was they who, jointly with the intendant and the ecclesiastics, had procured the removal of the old governor; and it was they who gained the ear of the new one. Aubert de la Chesnaye, Jacques Le Ber, and the rest of their faction, now basked in official favor; and La Salle, La Forêt, and the other friends of Frontenac, were cast out. There was one exception. Greysolon Du Lhut, leader of coureurs de bois, was too important to be thus set aside. He was now as usual in the wilderness of the north, the roving chief of a half savage crew, trading, exploring, fighting, and laboring with persistent hardihood to foil the rival English traders of Hudson's Bay. Inducements to gain his adhesion were probably held out to him by La Barre and his allies: be this as it may, it is certain that he acted in harmony with the faction of the new governor. With La Forêt it was widely different. He commanded Fort Frontenac, which belonged to La Salle, when La Barre's associates, 82 La Chesnaye and Le Ber, armed with an order from the governor, came up from Montreal, and seized upon the place with all that it contained. The pretext for this outrage was the false one that La Salle had not fulfilled the conditions under which the fort had been granted to him. La Forêt was told that he might retain his command, if he would join the faction of La Barre; but he refused, stood true to his chief, and soon after sailed for France. [10] He was made governor of Cayenne, and went thither with Tracy in 1664. Two years later, he gained several victories over the English, and recaptured Cayenne, which they had taken in his absence. He wrote a book concerning this colony, called Description de la France équinoctiale. Another volume, called Journal du Voyage du Sieur de la Barre en la Terre Ferme et Isle de Cayenne, was printed at Paris in 1671. [11] La Barre à Seignelay, 1682. La Barre summoned the most able and experienced persons in the colony to discuss the state of affairs. Their conclusion was that the Iroquois would attack and destroy the Illinois, and, this accomplished, turn upon the tribes of the lakes, conquer or destroy them also, and ruin the trade of Canada. [12] Dark as was the prospect, La Barre and his fellow-speculators flattered themselves that the war could be averted for a year at least. The Iroquois owed their triumphs as much to their sagacity and craft as to their extraordinary boldness and ferocity. It had always been their policy to attack their enemies in detail, and while destroying one to cajole the rest. There seemed little doubt that they would leave the tribes of the lakes in peace till they had finished the ruin of the Illinois; so that if these, the allies of the colony, were abandoned to their fate, there would be time for a profitable trade in the direction of Michillimackinac. [12] Conference on the State of Affairs with the Iroquois, Oct., 1682, in N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. 194. 83 But hopes seemed vain and prognostics illusory, when, early in spring, a report came that the Seneca Iroquois were preparing to attack, in force, not only the Illinois, but the Hurons and Ottawas of the lakes. La Barre and his confederates were in dismay. They already had large quantities of goods at Michillimackinac, the point immediately threatened; and an officer was hastily despatched, with men and munitions, to strengthen the defences of the place. [13] A small vessel was sent to France with letters begging for troops. "I will perish at their head," wrote La Barre to the king, "or destroy your enemies;" [14] and he assures the minister that the Senecas must be attacked or the country abandoned. [15] The intendant, Meules, shared something of his alarm, and informed the king that "the Iroquois are the only people on earth who do not know the grandeur of your Majesty." [16] [13] La Barre au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1683. [14] La Barre au Roy, 30 Mai, 1683. [15] La Barre au Ministre, 30 Mai, 1683. [16] Meules au Roy, 2 Juin, 1683. While thus appealing to the king, La Barre sent Charles le Moyne as envoy to Onondaga. Through his influence, a deputation of forty-three Iroquois chiefs was sent to meet the governor at Montreal. Here a grand council was held in the newly built church. Presents were given the deputies to the value of more than two thousand crowns. Soothing speeches were made them; and they were urged not to attack the tribes of the lakes, nor to plunder French traders, without permission. [17] 84 They assented; and La Barre then asked, timidly, why they made war on the Illinois. "Because they deserve to die," haughtily returned the Iroquois orator. La Barre dared not answer. They complained that La Salle had given guns, powder, and lead to the Illinois; or, in other words, that he had helped the allies of the colony to defend themselves. La Barre, who hated La Salle and his monopolies, assured them that he should be punished. [17] It is affirmed, on good authority, that he said more than this, and told them they were welcome to plunder and kill him. [18] The rapacious old man was playing with a two-edged sword. [17] Soon after La Barre's arrival, La Chesnaye is said to have induced him to urge the Iroquois to plunder all traders who were not provided with passports from the governor. The Iroquois complied so promptly, that they stopped and pillaged, at Niagara, two canoes belonging to La Chesnaye himself, which had gone up the lakes in Frontenac's time, and therefore were without passports. Recueil de ce qui s'est passé en Canada au Sujet de la Guerre, etc., depuis l'année 1682. (Published by the Historical Society of Quebec.) This was not the only case in which the weapons of La Barre and his partisans recoiled against themselves. [18] Belmont, Histoire du Canada (a contemporary chronicle). [19] See Discovery of the Great West. La Barre denies the assertion, and says that he merely told the Iroquois that La Salle should be sent home. Thus the Illinois, with the few Frenchmen who had tried to defend them, were left to perish; and, in return, a brief and doubtful respite was gained for the tribes of the lakes. La Barre and his confederates took heart again. Merchandise, in abundance, was sent to Michillimackinac, and thence to the remoter tribes of the north and west. The governor and his partner, La Chesnaye, sent up a fleet of thirty canoes; [20] and, a 85 little later, they are reported to have sent more than a hundred. This forest trade robbed the colonists, by forestalling the annual market of Montreal; while a considerable part of the furs acquired by it were secretly sent to the English and Dutch of New York. Thus the heavy duties of the custom-house at Quebec were evaded; and silver coin was received in payment, instead of questionable bills of exchange. [21] Frontenac had not been faithful to his trust; but, compared to his successor, he was a model of official virtue. [20] Mémoire adressé a MM. les Intéressés en la Société de la Ferme et Commerce du Canada, 1683. [21] These statements are made in a memorial of the agents of the custom-house, in letters of Meules, and in several other quarters. La Barre is accused of sending furs to Albany under pretext of official communication with the governor of New York. La Barre busied himself with ostentatious preparation for war; built vessels at Fort Frontenac, and sent up fleets of canoes, laden or partly laden with munitions. But his accusers say that the king's canoes were used to transport the governor's goods, and that the men sent to garrison Fort Frontenac were destined, not to fight the Iroquois, but to sell them brandy. "Last year," writes the intendant, "Monsieur de la Barre had a vessel built, for which he made his Majesty pay heavily;" and he proceeds to say that it was built for trade, and was used for no other purpose. "If," he continues, "the two (king's) vessels now at Fort Frontenac had not been used for trading, they would have saved us half the expense we have been forced to incur in transporting munitions and supplies. The pretended necessity of having vessels at this fort, and the consequent employing 86 of carpenters, and sending up of iron, cordage, sails, and many other things, at his Majesty's charge, was simply in the view of carrying on trade." He says, farther, that in May last, the vessels, canoes, and men being nearly all absent on this errand, the fort was left in so defenceless a state that a party of Senecas, returning from their winter hunt, took from it a quantity of goods, and drank as much brandy as they wanted. "In short," he concludes, "it is plain that Monsieur de la Barre uses this fort only as a depot for the trade of Lake Ontario." [22] [22] Meules à Seignelay, 8 July, 1684. This accords perfectly with statements made in several memorials of La Salle and his friends. In the spring of 1683, La Barre had taken a step as rash as it was lawless and unjust. He sent the Chevalier de Baugis, lieutenant of his guard, with a considerable number of canoes and men, to seize La Salle's fort of St. Louis on the river Illinois; a measure which, while gratifying the passions and the greed of himself and his allies, would greatly increase he danger of rupture with the Iroquois. Late in the season, he despatched seven canoes and fourteen men, with goods to the value of fifteen or sixteen thousand livres, to trade with the tribes of the Mississippi. As he had sown, so he reaped. The seven canoes passed through the country of the Illinois. A large war party of Senecas and Cayugas invaded it in February. La Barre had told their chiefs that they were welcome to plunder the canoes of La Salle. The Iroquois were not discriminating. They fell upon 87 the governor's canoes, seized all the goods, and captured the men. [23] Then they attacked Baugis at Fort St. Louis. The place, perched on a rock, was strong, and they were beaten off; but the act was one of open war. [23] There appears no doubt that La Barre brought this upon himself. His successor, Denonville, writes that the Iroquois declared that, in plundering the canoes, they thought they were executing the orders they had received to plunder La Salle's people. Denonville, Mémoire adressé ou Ministre sur les Affaires de la Nouvelle France, 10 Ao?t, 1688. The Iroquois told Dongan, in 1684, "that they had not don any thing to the French but what Monsr. delaBarr Ordered them, which was that if they mett with any French hunting without his passe to take what they had from them." Dongan to Denonville, 9 Sept., 1687. When La Barre heard the news, he was furious. [24] He trembled for the vast amount of goods which he and his fellow-speculators had sent to Michillimackinac and the lakes. There was but one resource: to call out the militia, muster the Indian allies, advance to Lake Ontario, and dictate peace to the Senecas, at the head of an imposing force; or, failing in this, to attack and crush them. A small vessel lying at Quebec was despatched to France, with urgent appeals for immediate aid, though there was little hope that it could arrive in time. She bore a long letter, half piteous, half bombastic, from La Barre to the king. He declared that extreme necessity and the despair of the people had forced him into war, and protested that he should always think it a privilege to lay down life for his Majesty. "I cannot refuse to your country of Canada, and your faithful subjects, to throw myself, with unequal forces, against 88 the foe, while at the same time begging your aid for a poor, unhappy people on the point of falling victims to a nation of barbarians." He says that the total number of men in Canada capable of bearing arms is about two thousand; that he received last year a hundred and fifty raw recruits; and that he wants, in addition, seven or eight hundred good soldiers. "Recall me," he concludes, "if you will not help me, for I cannot bear to see the country perish in my hands." At the same time, he declares his intention to attack the Senecas, with or without help, about the middle of August. [25] Here we leave him, for a while, scared, excited, and blustering. [24] "Ce qui mit M. de la Barre en fureur." Belmont, Histoire du Canada. [25] La Barre au Roy, 5 Juin, 1684. CHAPTER VI. 1684. La Barre and the Iroquois. Dongan ? New York and its Indian Neighbors ? The Rival Governors ? Dongan and the Iroquois ? Mission to Onondaga ? An Iroquois Politician ? Warnings of Lamberville ? Iroquois Boldness ? La Barre takes the Field ? His Motives ? The March ? Pestilence ? Council at La Famine ? The Iroquois defiant ? Humiliation of La Barre ? The Indian Allies ? Their Rage and Disappointment ? Recall of La Barre. The Dutch colony of New Netherland had now become the English colony of New York. Its proprietor, the Duke of York, afterwards James II. of England, had appointed Colonel Thomas Dongan its governor. He was a Catholic Irish gentleman of high rank, nephew of the famous Earl of Tyrconnel, and presumptive heir to the earldom of Limerick. He had served in France, was familiar with its language, and partial to its king and its nobility; but he nevertheless gave himself with vigor to the duties of his new trust. The Dutch and English colonists aimed at a share in the western fur trade, hitherto a monopoly of Canada; and it is said that Dutch traders had already ventured among the tribes of the Great Lakes, boldly poaching on the French preserves. 90 Dongan did his utmost to promote their interests, so far at least as was consistent with his instructions from the Duke of York, enjoining him to give the French governor no just cause of offence. [1] [1] Sir John Werden to Dongan, 4 Dec., 1684; N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 353. Werden was the duke's secretary. Dongan has been charged with instigating the Iroquois to attack the French. The Jesuit Lamberville, writing from Onondaga, says, on the contrary, that he hears that the "governor of New England (New York), when the Mohawk chiefs asked him to continue the sale of powder to them, replied that it should be continued so long as they would not make war on Christians." Lamberville à La Barre, 10 Fév., 1684. The French ambassador at London complained that Dongan excited the Iroquois to war, and Dongan denied the charge. N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 506, 509. For several years past, the Iroquois had made forays against the borders of Maryland and Virginia, plundering and killing the settlers; and a declared rupture between those colonies and the savage confederates had more than once been imminent. The English believed that these hostilities were instigated by the Jesuits in the Iroquois villages. There is no proof whatever of the accusation; but it is certain that it was the interest of Canada to provoke a war which might, sooner or later, involve New York. In consequence of a renewal of such attacks, Lord Howard of Effingham, governor of Virginia, came to Albany in the summer of 1684, to hold a council with the Iroquois. The Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas were the offending tribes. They all promised friendship for the future. A hole was dug in the court-yard of the council house, each of the three threw a hatchet into it, and Lord Howard and the representative of 91 Maryland added two others; then the hole was filled, the song of peace was sung, and the high contracting parties stood pledged to mutual accord. [2] The Mohawks were also at the council, and the Senecas soon after arrived; so that all the confederacy was present by its deputies. Not long before, La Barre, then in the heat of his martial preparations, had sent a messenger to Dongan with a letter, informing him that, as the Senecas and Cayugas had plundered French canoes and assaulted a French fort, he was compelled to attack them, and begging that the Dutch and English colonists should be forbidden to supply them with arms. [3] This letter produced two results, neither of them agreeable to the writer: first, the Iroquois were fully warned of the designs of the French; and, secondly, Dongan gained the opportunity he wanted of asserting the claim of his king to sovereignty over the confederacy, and possession of the whole country south of the Great Lakes. He added that, if the Iroquois had done wrong, he would require them, as British subjects, to make reparation; and he urged La Barre, for the sake of peace between the two colonies, to refrain from his intended invasion of British territory. [4] [2] Report of Conferences at Albany, in Colden, History of the Five Nations, 50 (ed. 1727, Shea's reprint). [3] La Barre à Dongan, 15 Juin, 1684. [4] Dongan à La Barre, 24 Juin, 1684. Dongan next laid before the assembled sachems the complaints made against them in the letter of La Barre. They replied by accusing the French of carrying arms to their enemies, the Illinois 92 and the Miamis. "Onontio," said their orator, "calls us his children, and then helps our enemies to knock us in the head." They were somewhat disturbed at the prospect of La Barre's threatened attack; and Dongan seized the occasion to draw from them an acknowledgment of subjection to the Duke of York, promising in return that they should be protected from the French. They did not hesitate. "We put ourselves," said the Iroquois speaker, "under the great sachem Charles, who lives over the Great Lake, and under the protection of the great Duke of York, brother of your great sachem." But he added a moment after, "Let your friend (King Charles) who lives over the Great Lake know that we are a free people, though united to the English." [5] They consented that the arms of the Duke of York should be planted in their villages, being told that this would prevent the French from destroying them. Dongan now insisted that they should make no treaty with Onontio without his consent; and he promised that, if their country should be invaded, he would send four hundred horsemen and as many foot soldiers to their aid. [5] Speech of the Onondagas and Cayugas, in Colden, Five Nations, 63 (1727). As for the acknowledgment of subjection to the king and the Duke of York, the Iroquois neither understood its full meaning nor meant to abide by it. What they did clearly understand was that, while they recognized Onontio, the governor of Canada, as their father, they recognized Corlaer, 93 the governor of New York, only as their brother. [6] Dongan, it seems, could not, or dared not, change this mark of equality. He did his best, however, to make good his claims, and sent Arnold Viele, a Dutch interpreter, as his envoy to Onondaga. Viele set out for the Iroquois capital, and thither we will follow him. [6] Except the small tribe of the Oneidas, who addressed Corlaer as Father. Corlaer was the official Iroquois name of the governor of New York; Onas (the Feather, or Pen), that of the governor of Pennsylvania; and Assarigoa (the Big Knife, or Sword), that of the governor of Virginia. Corlaer, or Cuyler, was the name of a Dutchman whom the Iroquois held in great respect. He mounted his horse, and in the heats of August rode westward along the valley of the Mohawk. On a hill a bow-shot from the river, he saw the first Mohawk town, Kaghnawaga, encircled by a strong palisade. Next he stopped for a time at Gandagaro, on a meadow near the bank; and next, at Canajora, on a plain two miles away. Tionondogué, the last and strongest of these fortified villages, stood like the first on a hill that overlooked the river, and all the rich meadows around were covered with Indian corn. The largest of the four contained but thirty houses, and all together could furnish scarcely more than three hundred warriors. [7] [7] Journal of Wentworth Greenhalgh, 1677, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 250. When the last Mohawk town was passed, a ride of four or five days still lay before the envoy. He held his way along the old Indian trail, now traced through the grass of sunny meadows, and now tunnelled through the dense green of shady forests, till it led him to the town of the Oneidas, containing 94 about a hundred bark houses, with twice as many fighting men, the entire force of the tribe. Here, as in the four Mohawk villages, he planted the scutcheon of the Duke of York, and, still advancing, came at length to a vast open space where the rugged fields, patched with growing corn, sloped upwards into a broad, low hill, crowned with the clustered lodges of Onondaga. There were from one to two hundred of these large bark dwellings, most of them holding several families. The capital of the confederacy was not fortified at this time, and its only defence was the valor of some four hundred warriors. [8] [8] Journal of Greenhalgh. The site of Onondaga, like that of all the Iroquois towns, was changed from time to time, as the soil of the neighborhood became impoverished, and the supply of wood exhausted. Greenhalgh, in 1677, estimated the warriors at three hundred and fifty; but the number had increased of late by the adoption of prisoners. In this focus of trained and organized savagery, where ferocity was cultivated as a virtue, and every emotion of pity stifled as unworthy of a man; where ancient rites, customs, and traditions were held with the tenacity of a people who joined the extreme of wildness with the extreme of conservatism,—here burned the council fire of the five confederate tribes; and here, in time of need, were gathered their bravest and their wisest to debate high questions of policy and war. The object of Viele was to confirm the Iroquois in their very questionable attitude of subjection to the British crown, and persuade them to make no treaty or agreement with the French, except through the intervention of Dongan, or at least 95 with his consent. The envoy found two Frenchmen in the town, whose presence boded ill to his errand. The first was the veteran colonist of Montreal, Charles le Moyne, sent by La Barre to invite the Onondagas to a conference. They had known him, in peace or war, for a quarter of a century; and they greatly respected him. The other was the Jesuit Jean de Lamberville, who had long lived among them, and knew them better than they knew themselves. Here, too, was another personage who cannot pass unnoticed. He was a famous Onondaga orator named Otréouati, and called also Big Mouth, whether by reason of the dimensions of that feature or the greatness of the wisdom that issued from it. His contemporary, Baron La Hontan, thinking perhaps that his French name of La Grande Gueule was wanting in dignity, Latinized it into Grangula; and the Scotchman, Colden, afterwards improved it into Garangula, under which high-sounding appellation Big Mouth has descended to posterity. He was an astute old savage, well trained in the arts of Iroquois rhetoric, and gifted with the power of strong and caustic sarcasm, which has marked more than one of the chief orators of the confederacy. He shared with most of his countrymen the conviction that the earth had nothing so great as the league of the Iroquois; but, if he could be proud and patriotic, so too he could be selfish and mean. He valued gifts, attentions, and a good meal, and would pay for them abundantly in promises, which he kept or not, as his own interests 96 or those of his people might require. He could use bold and loud words in public, and then secretly make his peace with those he had denounced. He was so given to rough jokes that the intendant, Meules, calls him a buffoon; but his buffoonery seems to have been often a cover to his craft. He had taken a prominent part in the council of the preceding summer at Montreal; and, doubtless, as he stood in full dress before the governor and the officers, his head plumed, his face painted, his figure draped in a colored blanket, and his feet decked with embroidered moccasins, he was a picturesque and striking object. He was less so as he squatted almost naked by his lodge fire, with a piece of board laid across his lap, chopping rank tobacco with a scalping-knife to fill his pipe, and entertaining the grinning circle with grotesque stories and obscene jests. Though not one of the hereditary chiefs, his influence was great. "He has the strongest head and the loudest voice among the Iroquois," wrote Lamberville to La Barre. "He calls himself your best friend…. He is a venal creature, whom you do well to keep in pay. I assured him I would send him the jerkin you promised." [9] Well as the Jesuit knew the Iroquois, he was deceived if he thought that Big Mouth was securely won. [9] Letters of Lamberville in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. For specimens of Big Mouth's skill in drawing, see ibid., IX. 386. Lamberville's constant effort was to prevent a rupture. He wrote with every opportunity to the governor, painting the calamities that war would 97 bring, and warning him that it was vain to hope that the league could be divided, and its three eastern tribes kept neutral, while the Senecas were attacked. He assured him, on the contrary, that they would all unite to fall upon Canada, ravaging, burning, and butchering along the whole range of defenceless settlements. "You cannot believe, Monsieur, with what joy the Senecas learned that you might possibly resolve on war. When they heard of the preparations at Fort Frontenac, they said that the French had a great mind to be stripped, roasted, and eaten; and that they will see if their flesh, which they suppose to have a salt taste, by reason of the salt which we use with our food, be as good as that of their other enemies." [10] Lamberville also informs the governor that the Senecas have made ready for any emergency, buried their last year's corn, prepared a hiding place in the depth of the forest for their old men, women, and children, and stripped their towns of every thing that they value; and that their fifteen hundred warriors will not shut themselves up in forts, but fight under cover, among trees and in the tall grass, with little risk to themselves and extreme danger to the invader. "There is no profit," he says, "in fighting with this sort of banditti, whom you cannot catch, but who will catch many of your people. The Onondagas wish to bring about an agreement. Must the father and the children, they ask, cut each other's throats?" [10] Lamberville to La Barre, 11 July, 1684, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 253. 98 The Onondagas, moved by the influence of the Jesuit and the gifts of La Barre, did in fact wish to act as mediators between their Seneca confederates and the French; and to this end they invited the Seneca elders to a council. The meeting took place before the arrival of Viele, and lasted two days. The Senecas were at first refractory, and hot for war, but at length consented that the Onondagas might make peace for them, if they could; a conclusion which was largely due to the eloquence of Big Mouth. The first act of Viele was a blunder. He told the Onondagas that the English governor was master of their country; and that, as they were subjects of the king of England, they must hold no council with the French without permission. The pride of Big Mouth was touched. "You say," he exclaimed to the envoy, "that we are subjects of the king of England and the Duke of York; but we say that we are brothers. We must take care of ourselves. The coat of arms which you have fastened to that post cannot defend us against Onontio. We tell you that we shall bind a covenant chain to our arm and to his. We shall take the Senecas by one hand and Onontio by the other, and their hatchet and his sword shall be thrown into deep water." [11] [11] Colden, Five Nations, 80 (1727). Thus well and manfully did Big Mouth assert the independence of his tribe, and proclaim it the arbiter of peace. He told the warriors, moreover, to close their ears to the words of the Dutchman, 99 who spoke as if he were drunk; [12] and it was resolved at last that he, Big Mouth, with an embassy of chiefs and elders, should go with Le Moyne to meet the French governor. [12] Lamberville to La Barre, 28 Aug., 1684, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 257. While these things were passing at Onondaga, La Barre had finished his preparations, and was now in full campaign. Before setting out, he had written to the minister that he was about to advance on the enemy, with seven hundred Canadians, a hundred and thirty regulars, and two hundred mission Indians; that more Indians were to join him on the way; that Du Lhut and La Durantaye were to meet him at Niagara with a body of coureurs de bois and Indians from the interior; and that, "when we are all united, we will perish or destroy the enemy." [13] On the same day, he wrote to the king: "My purpose is to exterminate the Senecas; for otherwise your Majesty need take no farther account of this country, since there is no hope of peace with them, except when they are driven to it by force. I pray you do not abandon me; and be assured that I shall do my duty at the head of your faithful colonists." [14] [13] La Barre au Ministre, 9 July, 1684. [14] La Barre au Roy, même date. A few days after writing these curiously incoherent epistles, La Barre received a letter from his colleague, Meules, who had no belief that he meant to fight, and was determined to compel him to do so, if possible. "There is a report," wrote the intendant, "that you mean to make peace. It is doing great harm. Our Indian allies will despise 100 us. I trust the story is untrue, and that you will listen to no overtures. The expense has been enormous. The whole population is roused." [15] Not satisfied with this, Meules sent the general a second letter, meant, like the first, as a tonic and a stimulant. "If we come to terms with the Iroquois, without first making them feel the strength of our arms, we may expect that, in future, they will do every thing they can to humiliate us, because we drew the sword against them, and showed them our teeth. I do not think that any course is now left for us but to carry the war to their very doors, and do our utmost to reduce them to such a point that they shall never again be heard of as a nation, but only as our subjects and slaves. If, after having gone so far, we do not fight them, we shall lose all our trade, and bring this country to the brink of ruin. The Iroquois, and especially the Senecas, pass for great cowards. The Reverend Father Jesuit, who is at Prairie de la Madeleine, told me as much yesterday; and, though he has never been among them, he assured me that he has heard everybody say so. But, even if they were brave, we ought to be very glad of it; since then we could hope that they would wait our attack, and give us a chance to beat them. If we do not destroy them, they will destroy us. I think you see but too well that your honor and the safety of the country are involved in the results of this war." [16] [15] Meules à La Barre, 15 July, 1684. [16] Meules à La Barre, 14 Ao?t, 1684. This and the preceding letter stand, by a copyist's error, in the name of La Barre. They are certainly written by Meules. 101 While Meules thus wrote to the governor, he wrote also to the minister, Seignelay, and expressed his views with great distinctness. "I feel bound in conscience to tell you that nothing was ever heard of so extraordinary as what we see done in this country every day. One would think that there was a divided empire here between the king and the governor; and, if things should go on long in this way, the governor would have a far greater share than his Majesty. The persons whom Monsieur la Barre has sent this year to trade at Fort Frontenac have already shared with him from ten to twelve thousand crowns." He then recounts numerous abuses and malversations on the part of the governor. "In a word, Monseigneur, this war has been decided upon in the cabinet of Monsieur the general, along with six of the chief merchants of the country. If it had not served their plans, he would have found means to settle every thing; but the merchants made him understand that they were in danger of being plundered, and that, having an immense amount of merchandise in the woods in nearly two hundred canoes fitted out last year, it was better to make use of the people of the country to carry on war against the Senecas. This being done, he hopes to make extraordinary profits without any risk, because one of two things will happen: either we shall gain some considerable advantage over the savages, as there is reason to hope, if Monsieur the general will but attack them in their villages; or else we shall make a peace which will keep every thing 102 safe for a time. These are assuredly the sole motives of this war, which has for principle and end nothing but mere interest. He says himself that there is good fishing in troubled waters. [17] [17] The famous voyageur, Nicolas Perrot, agrees with the intendant. "Ils (La Barre et ses associés) s'imaginèrent que sitost que le Fran?ois viendroit à paroistre, l'Irroquois luy demanderoit miséricorde, quil seroit facile d'establir des magasins, construire des barques dans le lac Ontario, et que c'estoit un moyen de trouver des richesses." Mémoire sur les M?urs, Coustumes, et Relligion des Sauvages, chap. xxi. The Sulpitian, Abbé Belmont, says that the avarice of the merchants was the cause of the war; that they and La Barre wished to prevent the Iroquois from interrupting trade; and that La Barre aimed at an indemnity for the sixteen hundred livres in merchandise which the Senecas had taken from his canoes early in the year. Belmont adds that he wanted to bring them to terms without fighting. "With all our preparations for war, and all the expense in which Monsieur the general is involving his Majesty, I will take the liberty to tell you, Monseigneur, though I am no prophet, that I discover no disposition on the part of Monsieur the general to make war against the aforesaid savages. In my belief, he will content himself with going in a canoe as far as Fort Frontenac, and then send for the Senecas to treat of peace with them, and deceive the people, the intendant, and, if I may be allowed with all possible respect to say so, his Majesty himself. "P. S.—I will finish this letter, Monseigneur, by telling you that he set out yesterday, July 10th, with a detachment of two hundred men. All Quebec was filled with grief to see him embark on an expedition of war tête-à-tête with the man named La Chesnaye. Everybody says that the war is a sham, that these two will arrange every 103 thing between them, and, in a word, do whatever will help their trade. The whole country is in despair to see how matters are managed." [18] [18] Meules au Ministre, 8-11 Juillet, 1684. After a long stay at Montreal, La Barre embarked his little army at La Chine, crossed Lake St. Louis, and began the ascent of the upper St. Lawrence. In one of the three companies of regulars which formed a part of the force was a young subaltern, the Baron la Hontan, who has left a lively account of the expedition. Some of the men were in flat boats, and some were in birch canoes. Of the latter was La Hontan, whose craft was paddled by three Canadians. Several times they shouldered it through the forest to escape the turmoil of the rapids. The flat boats could not be so handled, and were dragged or pushed up in the shallow water close to the bank, by gangs of militia men, toiling and struggling among the rocks and foam. The regulars, unskilled in such matters, were spared these fatigues, though tormented night and day by swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, objects of La Hontan's bitterest invective. At length the last rapid was passed, and they moved serenely on their way, threaded the mazes of the Thousand Islands, entered what is now the harbor of Kingston, and landed under the palisades of Fort Frontenac. Here the whole force was soon assembled, the regulars in their tents, the Canadian militia and the Indians in huts and under sheds of bark. Of these red allies there were several hundred: Abenakis 104 and Algonquins from Sillery, Hurons from Lorette, and converted Iroquois from the Jesuit mission of Saut St. Louis, near Montreal. The camp of the French was on a low, damp plain near the fort; and here a malarious fever presently attacked them, killing many and disabling many more. La Hontan says that La Barre himself was brought by it to the brink of the grave. If he had ever entertained any other purpose than that of inducing the Senecas to agree to a temporary peace, he now completely abandoned it. He dared not even insist that the offending tribe should meet him in council, but hastened to ask the mediation of the Onondagas, which the letters of Lamberville had assured him that they were disposed to offer. He sent Le Moyne to persuade them to meet him on their own side of the lake, and, with such of his men as were able to move, crossed to the mouth of Salmon River, then called La Famine. The name proved prophetic. Provisions fell short from bad management in transportation, and the men grew hungry and discontented. September had begun; the place was unwholesome, and the malarious fever of Fort Frontenac infected the new encampment. The soldiers sickened rapidly. La Barre, racked with suspense, waited impatiently the return of Le Moyne. We have seen already the result of his mission, and how he and Lamberville, in spite of the envoy of the English governor, gained from the Onondaga chiefs the promise to meet Onontio in council. Le Moyne appeared at La Famine on the third of the month, bringing 105 with him Big Mouth and thirteen other deputies. La Barre gave them a feast of bread, wine, and salmon trout, and on the morning of the fourth the council began. Before the deputies arrived, the governor had sent the sick men homeward in order to conceal his helpless condition; and he now told the Iroquois that he had left his army at Fort Frontenac, and had come to meet them attended only by an escort. The Onondaga politician was not to be so deceived. He, or one of his party, spoke a little French; and during the night, roaming noiselessly among the tents, he contrived to learn the true state of the case from the soldiers. The council was held on an open spot near the French encampment. La Barre was seated in an arm-chair. The Jesuit Bruyas stood by him as interpreter, and the officers were ranged on his right and left. The Indians sat on the ground in a row opposite the governor; and two lines of soldiers, forming two sides of a square, closed the intervening space. Among the officers was La Hontan, a spectator of the whole proceeding. He may be called a man in advance of his time; for he had the caustic, sceptical, and mocking spirit which a century later marked the approach of the great revolution, but which was not a characteristic of the reign of Louis XIV. He usually told the truth when he had no motive to do otherwise, and yet was capable at times of prodigious mendacity. [19] 106 There is no reason to believe that he indulged in it on the present occasion, and his account of what he now saw and heard may probably be taken as substantially correct. According to him, La Barre opened the council as follows:— "The king my master, being informed that the Five Nations of the Iroquois have long acted in a manner adverse to peace, has ordered me to come with an escort to this place, and to send Akouessan (Le Moyne) to Onondaga to invite the principal chiefs to meet me. It is the wish of this great king that you and I should smoke the calumet of peace together, provided that you promise, in the name of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, to give entire satisfaction and indemnity to his subjects, and do nothing in future which may occasion rupture." [19] La Hontan attempted to impose on his readers a marvellous story of pretended discoveries beyond the Mississippi; and his ill repute in the matter of veracity is due chiefly to this fabrication. On the other hand, his account of what he saw in the colony is commonly in accord with the best contemporary evidence. Then he recounted the offences of the Iroquois. First, they had maltreated and robbed French traders in the country of the Illinois; "wherefore," said the governor, "I am ordered to demand reparation, and in case of refusal to declare war against you." Next, "the warriors of the Five Nations have introduced the English into the lakes which belong to the king my master, and among the tribes who are his children, in order to destroy the trade of his subjects, and seduce these people from the obedience they owe him. I am willing to forget this; but, should it happen again, I am expressly ordered to declare war against you." 107 Thirdly, "the warriors of the Five Nations have made sundry barbarous inroads into the country of the Illinois and Miamis, seizing, binding, and leading into captivity an infinite number of these savages in time of peace. They are the children of my king, and are not to remain your slaves. They must at once be set free and sent home. If you refuse to do this, I am expressly ordered to declare war against you." La Barre concluded by assuring Big Mouth, as representing the Five Nations of the Iroquois, that the French would leave them in peace if they made atonement for the past, and promised good conduct for the future; but that, if they did not heed his words, their villages should be burned, and they themselves destroyed. He added, though he knew the contrary, that the governor of New York would join him in war against them. During the delivery of this martial harangue, Big Mouth sat silent and attentive, his eyes fixed on the bowl of his pipe. When the interpreter had ceased, he rose, walked gravely two or three times around the lines of the assembly, then stopped before the governor, looked steadily at him, stretched his tawny arm, opened his capacious jaws, and uttered himself as follows:— "Onontio, I honor you, and all the warriors who are with me honor you. Your interpreter has ended his speech, and now I begin mine. Listen to my words. "Onontio, when you left Quebec, you must have thought that the heat of the sun had burned the 108 forests that make our country inaccessible to the French, or that the lake had overflowed them so that we could not escape from our villages. You must have thought so, Onontio; and curiosity to see such a fire or such a flood must have brought you to this place. Now your eyes are opened; for I and my warriors have come to tell you that the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks are all alive. I thank you in their name for bringing back the calumet of peace which they gave to your predecessors; and I give you joy that you have not dug up the hatchet which has been so often red with the blood of your countrymen. "Listen, Onontio. I am not asleep. My eyes are open; and by the sun that gives me light I see a great captain at the head of a band of soldiers, who talks like a man in a dream. He says that he has come to smoke the pipe of peace with the Onondagas; but I see that he came to knock them in the head, if so many of his Frenchmen were not too weak to fight. I see Onontio raving in a camp of sick men, whose lives the Great Spirit has saved by smiting them with disease. Our women had snatched war-clubs, and our children and old men seized bows and arrows to attack your camp, if our warriors had not restrained them, when your messenger, Akouessan, appeared in our village." He next justified the pillage of French traders on the ground, very doubtful in this case, that they were carrying arms to the Illinois, enemies of the confederacy; and he flatly refused to make reparation, telling La Barre that even the old men 109 of his tribe had no fear of the French. He also avowed boldly that the Iroquois had conducted English traders to the lakes. "We are born free," he exclaimed, "we depend neither on Onontio nor on Corlaer. We have the right to go whithersoever we please, to take with us whomever we please, and buy and sell of whomever we please. If your allies are your slaves or your children, treat them like slaves or children, and forbid them to deal with anybody but your Frenchmen. "We have knocked the Illinois in the head, because they cut down the tree of peace and hunted the beaver on our lands. We have done less than the English and the French, who have seized upon the lands of many tribes, driven them away, and built towns, villages, and forts in their country. "Listen, Onontio. My voice is the voice of the Five Tribes of the Iroquois. When they buried the hatchet at Cataraqui (Fort Frontenac) in presence of your predecessor, they planted the tree of peace in the middle of the fort, that it might be a post of traders and not of soldiers. Take care that all the soldiers you have brought with you, shut up in so small a fort, do not choke this tree of peace. I assure you in the name of the Five Tribes that our warriors will dance the dance of the calumet under its branches; and that they will sit quiet on their mats and never dig up the hatchet, till their brothers, Onontio and Corlaer, separately or together, make ready to attack the country that the Great Spirit has given to our ancestors." The session presently closed; and La Barre 110 withdrew to his tent, where, according to La Hontan, he vented his feelings in invective, till reminded that good manners were not to be expected from an Iroquois. Big Mouth, on his part, entertained some of the French at a feast which he opened in person by a dance. There was another session in the afternoon, and the terms of peace were settled in the evening. The tree of peace was planted anew; La Barre promised not to attack the Senecas; and Big Mouth, in spite of his former declaration, consented that they should make amends for the pillage of the traders. On the other hand, he declared that the Iroquois would fight the Illinois to the death; and La Barre dared not utter a word in behalf of his allies. The Onondaga next demanded that the council fire should be removed from Fort Frontenac to La Famine, in the Iroquois country. This point was yielded without resistance; and La Barre promised to decamp and set out for home on the following morning. [20] [20] The articles of peace will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 236. Compare Memoir of M. de la Barre regarding the War against the Senecas, ibid., 239. These two documents do not agree as to date, one placing the council on the 4th and the other on the 5th. Such was the futile and miserable end of the grand expedition. Even the promise to pay for the plundered goods was contemptuously broken. [21] The honor rested with the Iroquois. They had spurned the French, repelled the claims of the English, and by act and word asserted their independence of both. [21] This appears from the letters of Denonville, La Barre's successor. La Barre embarked and hastened home in advance 111 of his men. His camp was again full of the sick. Their comrades placed them, shivering with ague fits, on board the flat-boats and canoes; and the whole force, scattered and disordered, floated down the current to Montreal. Nothing had been gained but a thin and flimsy truce, with new troubles and dangers plainly visible behind it. The better to understand their nature, let us look for a moment at an episode of the campaign. When La Barre sent messengers with gifts and wampum belts to summon the Indians of the Upper Lakes to join in the war, his appeal found a cold response. La Durantaye and Du Lhut, French commanders in that region, vainly urged the surrounding tribes to lift the hatchet. None but the Hurons would consent, when, fortunately, Nicolas Perrot arrived at Michillimackinac on an errand of trade. This famous coureur de bois—a very different person from Perrot, governor of Montreal—was well skilled in dealing with Indians. Through his influence, their scruples were overcome; and some five hundred warriors, Hurons, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Pottawatamies, and Foxes, were persuaded to embark for the rendezvous at Niagara, along with a hundred or more Frenchmen. The fleet of canoes, numerous as a flock of blackbirds in autumn, began the long and weary voyage. The two commanders had a heavy task. Discipline was impossible. The French were scarcely less wild than the savages. Many of them were painted and feathered like their red companions, whose ways they imitated with perfect success. The Indians, on their part, 112 were but half-hearted for the work in hand, for they had already discovered that the English would pay twice as much for a beaver skin as the French; and they asked nothing better than the appearance of English traders on the lakes, and a safe peace with the Iroquois, which should open to them the market of New York. But they were like children with the passions of men, inconsequent, fickle, and wayward. They stopped to hunt on the shore of Michigan, where a Frenchman accidentally shot himself with his own gun. Here was an evil omen. But for the efforts of Perrot, half the party would have given up the enterprise, and paddled home. In the Strait of Detroit there was another hunt, and another accident. In firing at a deer, an Indian wounded his own brother. On this the tribesmen of the wounded man proposed to kill the French, as being the occasion of the mischance. Once more the skill of Perrot prevailed; but when they reached the Long Point of Lake Erie, the Foxes, about a hundred in number, were on the point of deserting in a body. As persuasion failed, Perrot tried the effect of taunts. "You are cowards," he said to the naked crew, as they crowded about him with their wild eyes and long lank hair. "You do not know what war is: you never killed a man and you never ate one, except those that were given you tied hand and foot." They broke out against him in a storm of abuse. "You shall see whether we are men. We are going to fight the Iroquois; and, unless you do your part, we will knock you in the head." "You will 113 never have to give yourselves the trouble," retorted Perrot, "for at the first war-whoop you will all run off." He gained his point. Their pride was roused, and for the moment they were full of fight. [22] [22] La Potherie, II. 159 (ed. 1722). Perrot himself, in his M?urs des Sauvages, briefly mentions the incident. Immediately after, there was trouble with the Ottawas, who became turbulent and threatening, and refused to proceed. With much ado, they were persuaded to go as far as Niagara, being lured by the rash assurance of La Durantaye that three vessels were there, loaded with a present of guns for them. They carried their canoes by the cataract, launched them again, paddled to the mouth of the river, and looked for the vessels in vain. At length a solitary sail appeared on the lake. She brought no guns, but instead a letter from La Barre, telling them that peace was made, and that they might all go home. Some of them had paddled already a thousand miles, in the hope of seeing the Senecas humbled. They turned back in disgust, filled with wrath and scorn against the governor and all the French. Canada had incurred the contempt, not only of enemies, but of allies. There was danger that these tribes would repudiate the French alliance, welcome the English traders, make peace at any price with the Iroquois, and carry their beaver skins to Albany instead of Montreal. The treaty made at La Famine was greeted with contumely through all the colony. The governor found, however, a comforter in the Jesuit Lamberville, 114 who stood fast in the position which he had held from the beginning. He wrote to La Barre: "You deserve the title of saviour of the country for making peace at so critical a time. In the condition in which your army was, you could not have advanced into the Seneca country without utter defeat. The Senecas had double palisades, which could not have been forced without great loss. Their plan was to keep three hundred men inside, and to perpetually harass you with twelve hundred others. All the Iroquois were to collect together, and fire only at the legs of your people, so as to master them, and burn them at their leisure, and then, after having thinned their numbers by a hundred ambuscades in the woods and grass, to pursue you in your retreat even to Montreal, and spread desolation around it." [23] [23] Lamberville to La Barre, 9 Oct., 1684, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 260. La Barre was greatly pleased with this letter, and made use of it to justify himself to the king. His colleague, Meules, on the other hand, declared that Lamberville, anxious to make favor with the governor, had written only what La Barre wished to hear. The intendant also informs the minister that La Barre's excuses are a mere pretence; that everybody is astonished and disgusted with him; that the sickness of the troops was his own fault, because he kept them encamped on wet ground for an unconscionable length of time; that Big Mouth shamefully befooled and bullied him; that, after the council at La Famine, he lost his wits, and went off in a fright; that, 115 since the return of the troops, the officers have openly expressed their contempt for him; and that the people would have risen against him, if he, Meules, had not taken measures to quiet them. [24] These, with many other charges, flew across the sea from the pen of the intendant. [24] Meules au Ministre, 10 Oct., 1684. The next ship from France brought the following letter from the king:— Monsieur de la Barre,—Having been informed that your years do not permit you to support the fatigues inseparable from your office of governor and lieutenant-general in Canada, I send you this letter to acquaint you that I have selected Monsieur de Denonville to serve in your place; and my intention is that, on his arrival, after resigning to him the command, with all instructions concerning it, you embark for your return to France. Louis. La Barre sailed for home; and the Marquis de Denonville, a pious colonel of dragoons, assumed the vacant office. CHAPTER VII. 1685-1687. Denonville and Dongan. Troubles of the New Governor ? His Character ? English Rivalry ? Intrigues of Dongan ? English Claims ? A Diplomatic Duel ? Overt Acts ? Anger of Denonville ? James II. checks Dongan ? Denonville emboldened ? Strife in the North ? Hudson's Bay ? Attempted Pacification ? Artifice of Denonville ? He prepares for War. Denonville embarked at Rochelle in June, with his wife and a part of his family. Saint-Vallier, the destined bishop, was in the same vessel; and the squadron carried five hundred soldiers, of whom a hundred and fifty died of fever and scurvy on the way. Saint-Vallier speaks in glowing terms of the new governor. "He spent nearly all his time in prayer and the reading of good books. The Psalms of David were always in his hands. In all the voyage, I never saw him do any thing wrong; and there was nothing in his words or acts which did not show a solid virtue and a consummate prudence, as well in the duties of the Christian life as in the wisdom of this world." [1] [1] Saint-Vallier, état Présent de l'église, 4 (Quebec, 1856). When they landed, the nuns of the H?tel-Dieu 117 were overwhelmed with the sick. "Not only our halls, but our church, our granary, our hen-yard, and every corner of the hospital where we could make room, were filled with them." [2] [2] Juchereau, H?tel-Dieu, 283. Much was expected of Denonville. He was to repair the mischief wrought by his predecessor, and restore the colony to peace, strength, and security. The king had stigmatized La Barre's treaty with the Iroquois as disgraceful, and expressed indignation at his abandonment of the Illinois allies. All this was now to be changed; but it was easier to give the order at Versailles than to execute it in Canada. Denonville's difficulties were great; and his means of overcoming them were small. What he most needed was more troops and more money. The Senecas, insolent and defiant, were still attacking the Illinois; the tribes of the north-west were angry, contemptuous, and disaffected; the English of New York were urging claims to the whole country south of the Great Lakes, and to a controlling share in all the western fur trade; while the English of Hudson's Bay were competing for the traffic of the northern tribes, and the English of New England were seizing upon the fisheries of Acadia, and now and then making piratical descents upon its coast. The great question lay between New York and Canada. Which of these two should gain mastery in the west? Denonville, like Frontenac, was a man of the army and the court. As a soldier, he had the experience of thirty years of service; and he was in 118 high repute, not only for piety, but for probity and honor. He was devoted to the Jesuits, an ardent servant of the king, a lover of authority, filled with the instinct of subordination and order, and, in short, a type of the ideas, religious, political, and social, then dominant in France. He was greatly distressed at the disturbed condition of the colony; while the state of the settlements, scattered in broken lines for two or three hundred miles along the St. Lawrence, seemed to him an invitation to destruction. "If we have a war," he wrote, "nothing can save the country but a miracle of God." Nothing was more likely than war. Intrigues were on foot between the Senecas and the tribes of the lakes, which threatened to render the appeal to arms a necessity to the French. Some of the Hurons of Michillimackinac were bent on allying themselves with the English. "They like the manners of the French," wrote Denonville; "but they like the cheap goods of the English better." The Senecas, in collusion with several Huron chiefs, had captured a considerable number of that tribe and of the Ottawas. The scheme was that these prisoners should be released, on condition that the lake tribes should join the Senecas and repudiate their alliance with the French. [3] The governor of New York favored this intrigue to the utmost. [3] Denonville au Ministre, 12 Juin, 1686. Denonville was quick to see that the peril of the colony rose, not from the Iroquois alone, but from the English of New York, who prompted them. 119 Dongan understood the situation. He saw that the French aimed at mastering the whole interior of the continent. They had established themselves in the valley of the Illinois, had built a fort on the lower Mississippi, and were striving to entrench themselves at its mouth. They occupied the Great Lakes; and it was already evident that, as soon as their resources should permit, they would seize the avenues of communication throughout the west. In short, the grand scheme of French colonization had begun to declare itself. Dongan entered the lists against them. If his policy should prevail, New France would dwindle to a feeble province on the St. Lawrence: if the French policy should prevail, the English colonies would remain a narrow strip along the sea. Dongan's cause was that of all these colonies; but they all stood aloof, and left him to wage the strife alone. Canada was matched against New York, or rather against the governor of New York. The population of the English colony was larger than that of its rival; but, except the fur traders, few of the settlers cared much for the questions at issue. [4] Dongan's chief difficulty, however, rose from the relations of the French and English kings. Louis XIV. gave Denonville an unhesitating support. James II., on the other hand, was for a time cautious to timidity. The two monarchs were closely united. Both hated constitutional liberty, and both held the same principles of supremacy in church and state; but 120 Louis was triumphant and powerful, while James, in conflict with his subjects, was in constant need of his great ally, and dared not offend him. [4] New York had about 18,000 inhabitants (Brodhead, Hist. N. Y., II. 458). Canada, by the census of 1685, had 12,263. The royal instructions to Denonville enjoined him to humble the Iroquois, sustain the allies of the colony, oppose the schemes of Dongan, and treat him as an enemy, if he encroached on French territory. At the same time, the French ambassador at the English court was directed to demand from James II. precise orders to the governor of New York for a complete change of conduct in regard to Canada and the Iroquois. [5] But Dongan, like the French governors, was not easily controlled. In the absence of money and troops, he intrigued busily with his Indian neighbors. "The artifices of the English," wrote Denonville, "have reached such a point that it would be better if they attacked us openly and burned our settlements, instead of instigating the Iroquois against us for our destruction. I know beyond a particle of doubt that M. Dongan caused all the five Iroquois nations to be assembled last spring at Orange (Albany), in order to excite them against us, by telling them publicly that I meant to declare war against them." He says, further, that Dongan supplies them with arms and ammunition, incites them to attack the colony, and urges them to deliver Lamberville, the priest at Onondaga, into his hands. "He has sent people, at the same time, to our Montreal Indians to entice them over to 121 him, promising them missionaries to instruct them, and assuring them that he would prevent the introduction of brandy into their villages. All these intrigues have given me not a little trouble throughout the summer. M. Dongan has written to me, and I have answered him as a man may do who wishes to dissimulate and does not feel strong enough to get angry." [6] [5] Seignelay to Barillon, French Ambassador at London, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 269. [6] Denonville à Seigneloy, 8 Nov., 1686. Denonville, accordingly, while biding his time, made use of counter intrigues, and, by means of the useful Lamberville, freely distributed secret or "underground" presents among the Iroquois chiefs; while the Jesuit Engelran was busy at Michillimackinac in adroit and vigorous efforts to prevent the alienation of the Hurons, Ottawas, and other lake tribes. The task was difficult; and, filled with anxiety, the father came down to Montreal to see the governor, "and communicate to me," writes Denonville, "the deplorable state of affairs with our allies, whom we can no longer trust, owing to the discredit into which we have fallen among them, and from which we cannot recover, except by gaining some considerable advantage over the Iroquois; who, as I have had the honor to inform you, have labored incessantly since last autumn to rob us of all our allies, by using every means to make treaties with them independently of us. You may be assured, Monseigneur, that the English are the chief cause of the arrogance and insolence of the Iroquois, adroitly using them to extend the limits of their dominion, 122 and uniting with them as one nation, insomuch that the English claims include no less than the Lakes Ontario and Erie, the region of Saginaw (Michigan), the country of the Hurons, and all the country in the direction of the Mississippi." [7] [7] Denonville à Seignelay, 12 Juin, 1686. The most pressing danger was the defection of the lake tribes. "In spite of the king's edicts," pursues Denonville, "the coureurs de bois have carried a hundred barrels of brandy to Michillimackinac in a single year; and their libertinism and debauchery have gone to such an extremity that it is a wonder the Indians have not massacred them all to save themselves from their violence and recover their wives and daughters from them. This, Monseigneur, joined to our failure in the last war, has drawn upon us such contempt among all the tribes that there is but one way to regain our credit, which is to humble the Iroquois by our unaided strength, without asking the help of our Indian allies." [8] And he begs hard for a strong reinforcement of troops. [8] Ibid. Without doubt, Denonville was right in thinking that the chastising of the Iroquois, or at least the Senecas, the head and front of mischief, was a matter of the last necessity. A crushing blow dealt against them would restore French prestige, paralyze English intrigue, save the Illinois from destruction, and confirm the wavering allies of Canada. Meanwhile, matters grew from bad to worse. In the north and in the west, there was 123 scarcely a tribe in the French interest which was not either attacked by the Senecas or cajoled by them into alliances hostile to the colony. "We may set down Canada as lost," again writes Denonville, "if we do not make war next year; and yet, in our present disordered state, war is the most dangerous thing in the world. Nothing can save us but the sending out of troops and the building of forts and blockhouses. Yet I dare not begin to build them; for, if I do, it will bring down all the Iroquois upon us before we are in a condition to fight them." Nevertheless, he made what preparations he could, begging all the while for more soldiers, and carrying on at the same time a correspondence with his rival, Dongan. At first, it was courteous on both sides; but it soon grew pungent, and at last acrid. Denonville wrote to announce his arrival, and Dongan replied in French: "Sir, I have had the honor of receiving your letter, and greatly rejoice at having so good a neighbor, whose reputation is so widely spread that it has anticipated your arrival. I have a very high respect for the king of France, of whose bread I have eaten so much that I feel under an obligation to prevent whatever can give the least umbrage to our masters. M. de la Barre is a very worthy gentleman, but he has not written to me in a civil and befitting style." [9] [9] Dongan to Denonville, 13 Oct., 1685, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX, 292. Denonville replied with many compliments: "I know not what reason you may have had to be 124 dissatisfied with M. de la Barre; but I know very well that I should reproach myself all my life if I could fail to render to you all the civility and attention due to a person of so great rank and merit. In regard to the affair in which M. de la Barre interfered, as you write me, I presume you refer to his quarrel with the Senecas. As to that, Monsieur, I believe you understand the character of that nation well enough to perceive that it is not easy to live in friendship with a people who have neither religion, nor honor, nor subordination. The king, my master, entertains affection and friendship for this country solely through zeal for the establishment of religion here, and the support and protection of the missionaries whose ardor in preaching the faith leads them to expose themselves to the brutalities and persecutions of the most ferocious of tribes. You know better than I what fatigues and torments they have suffered for the sake of Jesus Christ. I know your heart is penetrated with the glory of that name which makes Hell tremble, and at the mention of which all the powers of Heaven fall prostrate. Shall we be so unhappy as to refuse them our master's protection? You are a man of rank and abounding in merit. You love our holy religion. Can we not then come to an understanding to sustain our missionaries by keeping those fierce tribes in respect and fear?" [10] [10] Denonville to Dongan, 5 Juin, 1686, N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 456. This specious appeal for maintaining French Jesuits on English territory, or what was claimed 125 as such, was lost on Dongan, Catholic as he was. He regarded them as dangerous political enemies, and did his best to expel them, and put English priests in their place. Another of his plans was to build a fort at Niagara, to exclude the French from Lake Erie. Denonville entertained the same purpose, in order to exclude the English; and he watched eagerly the moment to execute it. A rumor of the scheme was brought to Dongan by one of the French coureurs de bois, who often deserted to Albany, where they were welcomed and encouraged. The English governor was exceedingly wroth. He had written before in French out of complaisance. He now dispensed with ceremony, and wrote in his own peculiar English: "I am informed that you intend to build a fort at Ohniagero (Niagara) on this side of the lake, within my Master's territoryes without question. I cannot beleev that a person that has your reputation in the world would follow the steps of Monsr. Labarr, and be ill advized by some interested persons in your Governt. to make disturbance between our Masters subjects in those parts of the world for a little pelttree (peltry). I hear one of the Fathers (the Jesuit Jean de Lamberville) is gone to you, and th'other that stayed (Jacques de Lamberville) I have sent for him here lest the Indians should insult over him, tho' it's a thousand pittys that those that have made such progress in the service of God should be disturbed, and that by the fault of those that laid the foundation of Christianity amongst these barbarous people; 126 setting apart the station I am in, I am as much Monsr. Des Novilles (Denonville's) humble servant as any friend he has, and will ommit no opportunity of manifesting the same. Sir, your humble servant, Thomas Dongan." [11] [11] Dongan to Denonville, 22 May, 1686, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 455. Denonville in reply denied that he meant to build a fort at Niagara, and warned Dongan not to believe the stories told him by French deserters. "In order," he wrote, "that we may live on a good understanding, it would be well that a gentleman of your character should not give protection to all the rogues, vagabonds, and thieves who desert us and seek refuge with you, and who, to gain your favor, think they cannot do better than tell nonsensical stories about us, which they will continue to do so long as you listen to them." [12] [12] Denonville à Dongan, 20 Juin, 1686. The rest of the letter was in terms of civility, to which Dongan returned: "Beleive me it is much joy to have soe good a neighbour of soe excellent qualifications and temper, and of a humour altogether differing from Monsieur de la Barre, your predecessor, who was so furious and hasty and very much addicted to great words, as if I had bin to have bin frighted by them. For my part, I shall take all immaginable care that the Fathers who preach the Holy Gospell to those Indians over whom I have power bee not in the least ill treated, and upon that very accompt have sent for one of each nation to come to me, and then those beastly crimes you reproove shall be checked severely, 127 and all my endevours used to surpress their filthy drunkennesse, disorders, debauches, warring, and quarrels, and whatsoever doth obstruct the growth and enlargement of the Christian faith amongst those people." He then, in reply to an application of Denonville, promised to give up "runawayes." [13] [13] Dongan to Denonville, 26 July, 1686, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 460. Promise was not followed by performance; and he still favored to the utmost the truant Frenchmen who made Albany their resort, and often brought with them most valuable information. This drew an angry letter from Denonville. "You were so good, Monsieur, as to tell me that you would give up all the deserters who have fled to you to escape chastisement for their knavery. As most of them are bankrupts and thieves, I hope that they will give you reason to repent having harbored them, and that your merchants who employ them will be punished for trusting such rascals." [14] To the great wrath of the French governor, Dongan persisted in warning the Iroquois that he meant to attack them. "You proposed, Monsieur," writes Denonville, "to submit every thing to the decision of our masters. Nevertheless, your emissary to the Onondagas told all the Five Nations in your name to pillage and make war on us." Next, he berates his rival for furnishing the Indians with rum. "Think you that religion will make any progress, while your traders supply the savages in abundance with the liquor which, as you ought to know, converts them into demons and their lodges into counterparts of Hell?" [14] Denonville à Dongan, 1 Oct., 1686. 128 "Certainly," retorts Dongan, "our Rum doth as little hurt as your Brandy, and, in the opinion of Christians, is much more wholesome." [15] [15] Dongan to Denonville, 1 Dec., 1686, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 462. Each tried incessantly to out-general the other. Denonville, steadfast in his plan of controlling the passes of the western country, had projected forts, not only at Niagara, but also at Toronto, on Lake Erie, and on the Strait of Detroit. He thought that a time had come when he could, without rashness, secure this last important passage; and he sent an order to Du Lhut, who was then at Michillimackinac, to occupy it with fifty coureurs de bois. [16] That enterprising chief accordingly repaired to Detroit, and built a stockade at the outlet of Lake Huron on the western side of the strait. It was not a moment too soon. The year before, Dongan had sent a party of armed traders in eleven canoes, commanded by Johannes Rooseboom, a Dutchman of Albany, to carry English goods to the upper lakes. They traded successfully, winning golden opinions from the Indians, who begged them to come every year; and, though Denonville sent an officer to stop them at Niagara, they returned in triumph, after an absence of three months. [17] A larger expedition was organized in the autumn of 1686. Rooseboom again set out for the lakes with twenty or more canoes. He was to winter among the Senecas, and wait the arrival of Major McGregory, a Scotch officer, who was to leave Albany 129 in the spring with fifty men, take command of the united parties, and advance to Lake Huron, accompanied by a band of Iroquois, to form a general treaty of trade and alliance with the tribes claimed by France as her subjects. [18] [16] Denonville à Du Lhut, 6 Juin, 1686. [17] Brodhead, Hist. of New York, II. 429; Denonville au Ministre, 8 Mai, 1686. [18] Brodhead, Hist. of New York, II. 443; Commission of McGregory, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 318. Denonville was beside himself at the news. He had already urged upon Louis XIV. the policy of buying the colony of New York, which he thought might easily be done, and which, as he said, "would make us masters of the Iroquois without a war." This time he wrote in a less pacific mood: "I have a mind to go straight to Albany, storm their fort, and burn every thing." [19] And he begged for soldiers more earnestly than ever. "Things grow worse and worse. The English stir up the Iroquois against us, and send parties to Michillimackinac to rob us of our trade. It would be better to declare war against them than to perish by their intrigues." [20] [19] Denonville au Ministre, 16 Nov., 1686. [20] Ibid., 15 Oct., 1686. He complained bitterly to Dongan, and Dongan replied: "I beleeve it is as lawfull for the English as the French to trade amongst the remotest Indians. I desire you to send me word who it was that pretended to have my orders for the Indians to plunder and fight you. That is as false as 'tis true that God is in heaven. I have desired you to send for the deserters. I know not who they are but had rather such Rascalls and Bankrouts, 130 as you call them, were amongst their own countrymen." [21] Dongan to Denonville, 1 Dec., 1686; Ibid., 20 June, 1687, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 462, 465. He had, nevertheless, turned them to good account; for, as the English knew nothing of western geography, they employed these French bush-rangers to guide their trading parties. Denonville sent orders to Du Lhut to shoot as many of them as he could catch. Dongan presently received despatches from the English court, which showed him the necessity of caution; and, when next he wrote to his rival, it was with a chastened pen: "I hope your Excellency will be so kinde as not desire or seeke any correspondence with our Indians of this side of the Great lake (Ontario): if they doe amisse to any of your Governmt. and you make it known to me, you shall have all justice done." He complained mildly that the Jesuits were luring their Iroquois converts to Canada; "and you must pardon me if I tell you that is not the right way to keepe fair correspondence. I am daily expecting Religious men from England, which I intend to put amongst those five nations. I desire you would order Monsr. de Lamberville that soe long as he stayes amongst those people he would meddle only with the affairs belonging to his function. Sir, I send you some Oranges, hearing that they are a rarity in your partes." [22] [22] Dongan to Denonville, 20 Juin, 1687, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 465. "Monsieur," replies Denonville, "I thank you 131 for your oranges. It is a great pity that they were all rotten." The French governor, unlike his rival, felt strong in the support of his king, who had responded amply to his appeals for aid; and the temper of his letters answered to his improved position. "I was led, Monsieur, to believe, by your civil language in the letter you took the trouble to write me on my arrival, that we should live in the greatest harmony in the world; but the result has plainly shown that your intentions did not at all answer to your fine words." And he upbraids him without measure for his various misdeeds: "Take my word for it. Let us devote ourselves to the accomplishment of our masters' will; let us seek, as they do, to serve and promote religion; let us live together in harmony, as they desire. I repeat and protest, Monsieur, that it rests with you alone; but do not imagine that I am a man to suffer others to play tricks on me. I willingly believe that you have not ordered the Iroquois to plunder our Frenchmen; but, whilst I have the honor to write to you, you know that Salvaye, Gédeon Petit, and many other rogues and bankrupts like them, are with you, and boast of sharing your table. I should not be surprised that you tolerate them in your country; but I am astonished that you should promise me not to tolerate them, that you so promise me again, and that you perform nothing of what you promise. Trust me, Monsieur, make no promise that you are not willing to keep." [23] [23] Denonville à Dongan, 21 Aug., 1687; Ibid., no date (1687). 132 Denonville, vexed and perturbed by his long strife with Dongan and the Iroquois, presently found a moment of comfort in tidings that reached him from the north. Here, as in the west, there was violent rivalry between the subjects of the two crowns. With the help of two French renegades, named Radisson and Groseilliers, the English Company of Hudson's Bay, then in its infancy, had established a post near the mouth of Nelson River, on the western shore of that dreary inland sea. The company had also three other posts, called Fort Albany, Fort Hayes, and Fort Rupert, at the southern end of the bay. A rival French company had been formed in Canada, under the name of the Company of the North; and it resolved on an effort to expel its English competitors. Though it was a time of profound peace between the two kings, Denonville warmly espoused the plan; and, in the early spring of 1686, he sent the Chevalier de Troyes from Montreal, with eighty or more Canadians, to execute it. [24] With Troyes went Iberville, Sainte-Hélène, and Maricourt, three of the sons of Charles Le Moyne; and the Jesuit Silvy joined the party as chaplain. [24] The Compagnie du Nord had a grant of the trade of Hudson's Bay from Louis XIV. The bay was discovered by the English, under Hudson; but the French had carried on some trade there before the establishment of Fort Nelson. Denonville's commission to Troyes merely directs him to build forts, and "se saisir des voleurs coureurs de bois et autres que nous savons avoir pris et arrêté plusieurs de nos Fran?ois commer?ants avec les sauvages." They ascended the Ottawa, and thence, from stream to stream and lake to lake, toiled painfully towards their goal. At length, they neared Fort 133 Hayes. It was a stockade with four bastions, mounted with cannon. There was a strong blockhouse within, in which the sixteen occupants of the place were lodged, unsuspicious of danger. Troyes approached at night. Iberville and Sainte-Hélène with a few followers climbed the palisade on one side, while the rest of the party burst the main gate with a sort of battering ram, and rushed in, yelling the war-whoop. In a moment, the door of the blockhouse was dashed open, and its astonished inmates captured in their shirts. The victors now embarked for Fort Rupert, distant forty leagues along the shore. In construction, it resembled Fort Hayes. The fifteen traders who held the place were all asleep at night in their blockhouse, when the Canadians burst the gate of the stockade and swarmed into the area. One of them mounted by a ladder to the roof of the building, and dropped lighted hand-grenades down the chimney, which, exploding among the occupants, told them unmistakably that something was wrong. At the same time, the assailants fired briskly on them through the loopholes, and, placing a petard under the walls, threatened to blow them into the air. Five, including a woman, were killed or wounded; and the rest cried for quarter. Meanwhile, Iberville with another party attacked a vessel anchored near the fort, and, climbing silently over her side, found the man on the watch asleep in his blanket. He sprang up and made fight, but they killed him, then stamped on the deck to rouse those below, sabred two of them as they came up 134 the hatchway, and captured the rest. Among them was Bridger, governor for the company of all its stations on the bay. They next turned their attention to Fort Albany, thirty leagues from Fort Hayes, in a direction opposite to that of Fort Rupert. Here there were about thirty men, under Henry Sargent, an agent of the company. Surprise was this time impossible; for news of their proceedings had gone before them, and Sargent, though no soldier, stood on his defence. The Canadians arrived, some in canoes, some in the captured vessel, bringing ten captured pieces of cannon, which they planted in battery on a neighboring hill, well covered by intrenchments from the English shot. Here they presently opened fire; and, in an hour, the stockade with the houses that it enclosed was completely riddled. The English took shelter in a cellar, nor was it till the fire slackened that they ventured out to show a white flag and ask for a parley. Troyes and Sargent had an interview. The Englishman regaled his conqueror with a bottle of Spanish wine; and, after drinking the health of King Louis and King James, they settled the terms of capitulation. The prisoners were sent home in an English vessel which soon after arrived; and Maricourt remained to command at the bay, while Troyes returned to report his success to Denonville. [25] [25] On the capture of the forts at Hudson's Bay, see La Potherie, I. 147-163; the letter of Father Silvy, chaplain of the expedition, in Saint-Vallier, état Présent, 43; and Oldmixon, British Empire in America, I. 561-564 (ed. 1741). An account of the preceding events will be found in La Potherie and Oldmixon; in Jerémie, Relation de la Baie de Hudson; and in 135 N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 796-802. Various embellishments have been added to the original narratives by recent writers, such as an imaginary hand-to-hand fight of Iberville and several Englishmen in the blockhouse of Fort Hayes. This buccaneer exploit exasperated the English public, and it became doubly apparent that the state of affairs in America could not be allowed to continue. A conference had been arranged between the two powers, even before the news came from Hudson's Bay; and Count d'Avaux appeared at London as special envoy of Louis XIV. to settle the questions at issue. A treaty of neutrality was signed at Whitehall, and commissioners were appointed on both sides. [26] Pending the discussion, each party was to refrain from acts of hostility or encroachment; and, said the declaration of the commissioners, "to the end the said agreement may have the better effect, we do likewise agree that the said serene kings shall immediately send necessary orders in that behalf to their respective governors in America." [27] Dongan accordingly was directed to keep a friendly correspondence with his rival, and take good care to give him no cause of complaint. [28] [26] Traité de Neutralité pour l'Amérique, conclu à Londres le 16 Nov., 1686, in Mémoires des Commissaires, II. 86. [27] Instrument for preventing Acts of Hostility in America in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 505. [28] Order to Gov. Dongan, 22 Jan., 1687, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 504. It was this missive which had dashed the ardor of the English governor, and softened his epistolary style. More than four months after, Louis XIV. sent corresponding instructions to Denonville; [29] but, 136 meantime, he had sent him troops, money, and munitions in abundance, and ordered him to attack the Iroquois towns. Whether such a step was consistent with the recent treaty of neutrality may well be doubted; for, though James II. had not yet formally claimed the Iroquois as British subjects, his representative had done so for years with his tacit approval, and out of this claim had risen the principal differences which it was the object of the treaty to settle. [29] Louis XIV. à Denonville, 17 Juin, 1687. At the end of March, the king had written that "he did not think it expedient to make any attack on the English." Eight hundred regulars were already in the colony, and eight hundred more were sent in the spring, with a hundred and sixty-eight thousand livres in money and supplies. [30] Denonville was prepared to strike. He had pushed his preparations actively, yet with extreme secrecy; for he meant to fall on the Senecas unawares, and shatter at a blow the mainspring of English intrigue. Harmony reigned among the chiefs of the colony, military, civil, and religious. The intendant Meules had been recalled on the complaints of the governor, who had quarrelled with him; and a new intendant, Champigny, had been sent in his place. He was as pious as Denonville himself, and, like him, was in perfect accord with the bishop and the Jesuits. All wrought together to promote the new crusade. [30] Abstract of Letters, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 314. This answers exactly to the statement of the Mémoire adressé au Régent, which places the number of troops in Canada at this time at thirty-two companies of fifty men each. It was not yet time to preach it, or at least Denonville thought so. He dissembled his purpose to the last moment, even with his best friends. Of all the Jesuits among the Iroquois, the two 137 brothers Lamberville had alone held their post. Denonville, in order to deceive the enemy, had directed these priests to urge the Iroquois chiefs to meet him in council at Fort Frontenac, whither, as he pretended, he was about to go with an escort of troops, for the purpose of conferring with them. The two brothers received no hint whatever of his real intention, and tried in good faith to accomplish his wishes; but the Iroquois were distrustful, and hesitated to comply. On this, the elder Lamberville sent the younger with letters to Denonville to explain the position of affairs, saying at the same time that he himself would not leave Onondaga except to accompany the chiefs to the proposed council. "The poor father," wrote the governor, "knows nothing of our designs. I am sorry to see him exposed to danger; but, should I recall him, his withdrawal would certainly betray our plans to the Iroquois." This unpardonable reticence placed the Jesuit in extreme peril; for the moment the Iroquois discovered the intended treachery they would probably burn him as its instrument. No man in Canada had done so much as the elder Lamberville to counteract the influence of England and serve the interests of France, and in return the governor exposed him recklessly to the most terrible of deaths. [31] [31] Denonville au Ministre, 9 Nov., 1686; Ibid., 8 Juin, 1687. Denonville at last seems to have been seized with some compunction, and writes: "Tout cela me fait craindre que le pauvre père n'ayt de la peine à se retirer d'entre les mains de ces barbares ce qui m'inquiète fort." Dongan, though regarding the Jesuit as an insidious enemy, had treated him much better, and protected him on several occasions, for which he received the emphatic thanks of Dablon, superior of the missions. Dablon to Dongan (1685?), in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 454. 138 In spite of all his pains, it was whispered abroad that there was to be war; and the rumor was brought to the ears of Dongan by some of the Canadian deserters. He lost no time in warning the Iroquois, and their deputies came to beg his help. Danger humbled them for the moment; and they not only recognized King James as their sovereign, but consented at last to call his representative Father Corlaer instead of Brother. Their father, however, dared not promise them soldiers; though, in spite of the recent treaty, he caused gunpowder and lead to be given them, and urged them to recall the powerful war-parties which they had lately sent against the Illinois. [32] [32] Colden, 97 (1727), Denonville au Ministre, 8 Juin, 1687. Denonville at length broke silence, and ordered the militia to muster. They grumbled and hesitated, for they remembered the failures of La Barre. The governor issued a proclamation, and the bishop a pastoral mandate. There were sermons, prayers, and exhortations in all the churches. A revulsion of popular feeling followed; and the people, says Denonville, "made ready for the march with extraordinary animation." The church showered blessings on them as they went, and daily masses were ordained for the downfall of the foes of Heaven and of France. [33] [33] Saint-Vallier, état Présent. Even to the moment of marching, Denonville pretended that he meant only to hold a peace council at Fort Frontenac. "J'ai toujours publié que je n'allois qu'à l'assemblée générale projetée à Cataracouy (Fort Frontenac), J'ai toujours tenu ce discours jusqu'au temps de la marche." Denonville au Ministre, 8 Juin, 1687. CHAPTER VIII. 1687. Denonville and the Senecas. Treachery of Denonville ? Iroquois Generosity ? The Invading Army ? The Western Allies ? Plunder of English Traders ? Arrival of the Allies ? Scene at the French Camp ? March of Denonville ? Ambuscade ? Battle ? Victory ? The Seneca Babylon ? Imperfect Success. A host of flat-boats filled with soldiers, and a host of Indian canoes, struggled against the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and slowly made their way to Fort Frontenac. Among the troops was La Hontan. When on his arrival he entered the gate of the fort, he saw a strange sight. A row of posts was planted across the area within, and to each post an Iroquois was tied by the neck, hands, and feet, "in such a way," says the indignant witness, "that he could neither sleep nor drive off the mosquitoes." A number of Indians attached to the expedition, all of whom were Christian converts from the mission villages, were amusing themselves by burning the fingers of these unfortunates in the bowls of their pipes, while the sufferers sang their death songs. La Hontan recognized one of them who, during his campaign with La Barre, had often feasted him in his wigwam; 140 and the sight so exasperated the young officer that he could scarcely refrain from thrashing the tormentors with his walking stick. [1] [1] La Hontan, I. 93-95 (1709). Though the prisoners were Iroquois, they were not those against whom the expedition was directed; nor had they, so far as appears, ever given the French any cause of complaint. They belonged to two neutral villages, called Kenté and Ganneious, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, forming a sort of colony, where the Sulpitians of Montreal had established a mission. [2] They hunted and fished for the garrison of the fort, and had been on excellent terms with it. Denonville, however, feared that they would report his movements to their relations across the lake; but this was not his chief motive for seizing them. Like La Barre before him, he had received orders from the court that, as the Iroquois were robust and strong, he should capture as many of them as possible, and send them to France as galley slaves. [3] The order, without doubt, referred to prisoners taken in war; but Denonville, aware that the hostile Iroquois were not easily caught, resolved to entrap their unsuspecting relatives. [2] Ganneious or Ganéyout was on an arm of the lake a little west of the present town of Fredericksburg. Kenté or Quinte was on Quinte Bay. [3] Le Roy à La Barre, 21 Juillet, 1684; Le Roy à Denonville et Champigny, 30 Mars, 1687. The intendant Champigny accordingly proceeded to the fort in advance of the troops, and invited the neighboring Iroquois to a feast. They 141 came to the number of thirty men and about ninety women and children, whereupon they were surrounded and captured by the intendant's escort and the two hundred men of the garrison. The inhabitants of the village of Ganneious were not present; and one Perré, with a strong party of Canadians and Christian Indians, went to secure them. He acquitted himself of his errand with great address, and returned with eighteen warriors and about sixty women and children. Champigny's exertions did not end here. Learning that a party of Iroquois were peaceably fishing on an island in the St. Lawrence, he offered them also the hospitalities of Fort Frontenac; but they were too wary to be entrapped. Four or five Iroquois were however caught by the troops on their way up the river. They were in two or more parties, and they all had with them their women and children, which was never the case with Iroquois on the war-path. Hence the assertion of Denonville, that they came with hostile designs, is very improbable. As for the last six months he had constantly urged them, by the lips of Lamberville, to visit him and smoke the pipe of peace, it is not unreasonable to suppose that these Indian families were on their way to the colony in consequence of his invitations. Among them were the son and brother of Big Mouth, who of late had been an advocate of peace; and, in order not to alienate him, these two were eventually set free. The other warriors were tied like the rest to stakes at the fort. The whole number of prisoners thus secured 142 was fifty-one, sustained by such food as their wives were able to get for them. Of more than a hundred and fifty women and children captured with them, many died at the fort, partly from excitement and distress, and partly from a pestilential disease. The survivors were all baptized, and then distributed among the mission villages in the colony. The men were sent to Quebec, where some of them were given up to their Christian relatives in the missions who had claimed them, and whom it was not expedient to offend; and the rest, after being baptized, were sent to France, to share with convicts and Huguenots the horrible slavery of the royal galleys. [4] [4] The authorities for the above are Denonville, Champigny, Abbé Belmont, Bishop Saint-Vallier, and the author of Recueil de ce qui s'est passé en Canada au Sujet de la Guerre, etc., depuis l'année 1682. Belmont, who accompanied the expedition, speaks of the affair with indignation, which was shared by many French officers. The bishop, on the other hand, mentions the success of the stratagem as a reward accorded by Heaven to the piety of Denonville. état Présent de l'église, 91, 92 (reprint, 1856). Denonville's account, which is sufficiently explicit, is contained in the long journal of the expedition which he sent to the court, and in several letters to the minister. Both Belmont and the author of the Recueil speak of the prisoners as having been "pris par l'appat d'un festin." Mr. Shea, usually so exact, has been led into some error by confounding the different acts of this affair. By Denonville's official journal, it appears that, on the 19th June, Perré, by his order, captured several Indians on the St. Lawrence; that, on the 25th June, the governor, then at Rapide Plat on his way up the river, received a letter from Champigny, informing him that he had seized all the Iroquois near Fort Frontenac; and that, on the 3d July, Perré, whom Denonville had sent several days before to attack Ganneious, arrived with his prisoners. Before reaching Fort Frontenac, Denonville, to his great relief, was joined by Lamberville, delivered from the peril to which the governor had exposed him. He owed his life to an act of magnanimity 143 on the part of the Iroquois, which does them signal honor. One of the prisoners at Fort Frontenac had contrived to escape, and, leaping sixteen feet to the ground from the window of a blockhouse, crossed the lake, and gave the alarm to his countrymen. Apparently, it was from him that the Onondagas learned that the invitations of Onontio were a snare; that he had entrapped their relatives, and was about to fall on their Seneca brethren with all the force of Canada. The Jesuit, whom they trusted and esteemed, but who had been used as an instrument to beguile them, was summoned before a council of the chiefs. They were in a fury at the news; and Lamberville, as much astonished by it as they, expected instant death, when one of them is said to have addressed him to the following effect: "We know you too well to believe that you meant to betray us. We think that you have been deceived as well as we; and we are not unjust enough to punish you for the crime of others. But you are not safe here. When once our young men have sung the war-song, they will listen to nothing but their fury; and we shall not be able to save you." They gave him guides, and sent him by secret paths to meet the advancing army. [5] [5] I have ventured to give this story on the sole authority of Charlevoix, for the contemporary writers are silent concerning it. Mr. Shea thinks that it involves a contradiction of date; but this is entirely due to confounding the capture of prisoners by Perré at Ganneious on July 3d with the capture by Champigny at Fort Frontenac about June 20th. Lamberville reached Denonville's camp, one day's journey from the fort, on the evening of the 29th. (Journal of Denonville.) This would 144 give four and a half days for news of the treachery to reach Onondaga, and four and a half days for the Jesuit to rejoin his countrymen. Charlevoix, with his usual carelessness, says that the Jesuit Milet had also been used to lure the Iroquois into the snare, and that he was soon after captured by the Oneidas, and delivered by an Indian matron. Milet's captivity did not take place till 1689-90. Again the fields about Fort Frontenac were covered with tents, camp-sheds, and wigwams. Regulars, militia, and Indians, there were about two thousand men; and, besides these, eight hundred regulars just arrived from France had been left at Montreal to protect the settlers. [6] Fortune thus far had smiled on the enterprise, and she now gave Denonville a fresh proof of her favor. On the very day of his arrival, a canoe came from Niagara with news that a large body of allies from the west had reached that place three days before, and were waiting his commands. It was more than he had dared to hope. In the preceding autumn, he had ordered Tonty, commanding at the Illinois, and La Durantaye, commanding at Michillimackinac, to muster as many coureurs de bois and Indians as possible, and join him early in July at Niagara. The distances were vast, and the difficulties incalculable. In the eyes of the pious governor, their timely arrival was a manifest sign of the favor of Heaven. At Fort St. Louis, of the Illinois, Tonty had mustered sixteen Frenchmen and about two hundred Indians, whom he led across the country to Detroit; and here he found Du Lhut, La Forêt, and La Durantaye, with a large body of French 145 and Indians from the upper lakes. [7] It had been the work of the whole winter to induce these savages to move. Presents, persuasion, and promises had not been spared; and while La Durantaye, aided by the Jesuit Engelran, labored to gain over the tribes of Michillimackinac, the indefatigable Nicolas Perrot was at work among those of the Mississippi and Lake Michigan. They were of a race unsteady as aspens and fierce as wild-cats, full of mutual jealousies, without rulers, and without laws; for each was a law to himself. It was difficult to persuade them, and, when persuaded, scarcely possible to keep them so. Perrot, however, induced some of them to follow him to Michillimackinac, where many hundreds of Algonquin savages were presently gathered: a perilous crew, who changed their minds every day, and whose dancing, singing, and yelping might turn at any moment into war-whoops against each other or against their hosts, the French. The Hurons showed more stability; and La Durantaye was reasonably sure that some of them would follow him to the war, though it was clear that others were bent on allying themselves with the Senecas and the English. As for the Pottawatamies, Sacs, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and other Algonquin hordes, no man could foresee what they would do. [8] [6] Denonville. Champigny says 832 regulars, 930 militia, and 300 Indians. This was when the army left Montreal. More Indians afterwards joined it. Belmont says 1,800 French and Canadians and about 300 Indians. [7] Tonty, Mémoire in Margry, Relations Inédites. [8] The name of Ottawas, here used specifically, was often employed by the French as a generic term for the Algonquin tribes of the Great Lakes. Suddenly a canoe arrived with news that a party of English traders was approaching. It will be 146 remembered that two bands of Dutch and English, under Rooseboom and McGregory, had prepared to set out together for Michillimackinac, armed with commissions from Dongan. They had rashly changed their plan, and parted company. Rooseboom took the lead, and McGregory followed some time after. Their hope was that, on reaching Michillimackinac, the Indians of the place, attracted by their cheap goods and their abundant supplies of rum, would declare for them and drive off the French; and this would probably have happened, but for the prompt action of La Durantaye. The canoes of Rooseboom, bearing twenty-nine whites and five Mohawks and Mohicans, were not far distant, when, amid a prodigious hubbub, the French commander embarked to meet him with a hundred and twenty coureurs de bois. [9] Behind them followed a swarm of Indian canoes, whose occupants scarcely knew which side to take, but for the most part inclined to the English. Rooseboom and his men, however, naturally thought that they came to support the French; and, when La Durantaye bore down upon them with threats of instant death if they made the least resistance, they surrendered at once. The captors carried them in triumph to Michillimackinac, and gave their goods to the delighted Indians. [9] Attestation of N. Harmentse and others of Rooseboom's party. N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 436. La Potherie says, three hundred. "It is certain," wrote Denonville; "that, if the English had not been stopped and pillaged, the Hurons and Ottawas would have revolted and cut 147 the throats of all our Frenchmen." [10] As it was, La Durantaye's exploit produced a revulsion of feeling, and many of the Indians consented to follow him. He lost no time in leading them down the lake to join Du Lhut at Detroit; and, when Tonty arrived, they all paddled for Niagara. On the way, they met McGregory with a party about equal to that of Rooseboom. He had with him a considerable number of Ottawa and Huron prisoners whom the Iroquois had captured, and whom he meant to return to their countrymen as a means of concluding the long projected triple alliance between the English, the Iroquois, and the tribes of the lakes. This bold scheme was now completely crushed. All the English were captured and carried to Niagara, whence they and their luckless precursors were sent prisoners to Quebec. [10] Denonville au Ministre, 25 Ao?t, 1687. La Durantaye and his companions, with a hundred and eighty coureurs de bois and four hundred Indians, waited impatiently at Niagara for orders from the governor. A canoe despatched in haste from Fort Frontenac soon appeared; and they were directed to repair at once to the rendezvous at Irondequoit Bay, on the borders of the Seneca country. [11] [11] The above is drawn from papers in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 436, IX. 324, 336, 346, 405; Saint-Vallier, état Présent, 92; Denonville, Journal; Belmont, Histoire du Canada; La Potherie, II. chap. xvi; La Hontan. I. 96. Colden's account is confused and incorrect. Denonville was already on his way thither. On the fourth of July, he had embarked at Fort Frontenac with four hundred bateaux and canoes, 148 crossed the foot of Lake Ontario, and moved westward along the southern shore. The weather was rough, and six days passed before he descried the low headlands of Irondequoit Bay. Far off on the glimmering water, he saw a multitude of canoes advancing to meet him. It was the flotilla of La Durantaye. Good management and good luck had so disposed it that the allied bands, concentring from points more than a thousand miles distant, reached the rendezvous on the same day. This was not all. The Ottawas of Michillimackinac, who refused to follow La Durantaye, had changed their minds the next morning, embarked in a body, paddled up the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, crossed to Toronto, and joined the allies at Niagara. White and red, Denonville now had nearly three thousand men under his command. [12] [12] Recueil de ce qui s'est passé en Canada depuis 1682; Captain Duplessis's Plan for the Defence of Canada, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 447. All were gathered on the low point of land that separates Irondequoit Bay from Lake Ontario. "Never," says an eye-witness, "had Canada seen such a sight; and never, perhaps, will she see such a sight again. Here was the camp of the regulars from France, with the general's head-quarters; the camp of the four battalions of Canadian militia, commanded by the noblesse of the country; the camp of the Christian Indians; and, farther on, a swarm of savages of every nation. Their features were different, and so were their manners, their weapons, their decorations, and their dances. They sang and whooped and harangued in every accent 149 and tongue. Most of them wore nothing but horns on their heads, and the tails of beasts behind their backs. Their faces were painted red or green, with black or white spots; their ears and noses were hung with ornaments of iron; and their naked bodies were daubed with figures of various sorts of animals." [13] [13] The first part of the extract is from Belmont; the second, from Saint-Vallier. These were the allies from the upper lakes. The enemy, meanwhile, had taken alarm. Just after the army arrived, three Seneca scouts called from the edge of the woods, and demanded what they meant to do. "To fight you, you blockheads," answered a Mohawk Christian attached to the French. A volley of bullets was fired at the scouts; but they escaped, and carried the news to their villages. [14] Many of the best warriors were absent. Those that remained, four hundred or four hundred and fifty by their own accounts, and eight hundred by that of the French, mustered in haste; and, though many of them were mere boys, they sent off the women and children, hid their most valued possessions, burned their chief town, and prepared to meet the invaders. [14] Information received from several Indians, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 444. On the twelfth, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Denonville began his march, leaving four hundred men in a hastily built fort to guard the bateaux and canoes. Troops, officers, and Indians, all carried their provisions at their backs. Some of the Christian Mohawks guided them; but guides were scarcely needed, for a broad Indian trail led 150 from the bay to the great Seneca town, twenty-two miles southward. They marched three leagues through the open forests of oak, and encamped for the night. In the morning, the heat was intense. The men gasped in the dead and sultry air of the woods, or grew faint in the pitiless sun, as they waded waist-deep through the rank grass of the narrow intervales. They passed safely through two dangerous defiles, and, about two in the afternoon, began to enter a third. Dense forests covered the hills on either hand. La Durantaye with Tonty and his cousin Du Lhut led the advance, nor could all Canada have supplied three men better for the work. Each led his band of coureurs de bois, white Indians, without discipline, and scarcely capable of it, but brave and accustomed to the woods. On their left were the Iroquois converts from the missions of Saut St. Louis and the Mountain of Montreal, fighting under the influence of their ghostly prompters against their own countrymen. On the right were the pagan Indians from the west. The woods were full of these painted spectres, grotesquely horrible in horns and tail; and among them flitted the black robe of Father Engelran, the Jesuit of Michillimackinac. Nicolas Perrot and two other bush-ranging Frenchmen were assigned to command them, but in fact they obeyed no man. These formed the vanguard, eight or nine hundred in all, under an excellent officer, Callières, governor of Montreal. Behind came the main body under Denonville, each of the four battalions of regulars 151 alternating with a battalion of Canadians. Some of the regulars wore light armor, while the Canadians were in plain attire of coarse cloth or buckskin. Denonville, oppressed by the heat, marched in his shirt. "It is a rough life," wrote the marquis, "to tramp afoot through the woods, carrying one's own provisions in a haversack, devoured by mosquitoes, and faring no better than a mere soldier." [15] With him was the Chevalier de Vaudreuil, who had just arrived from France in command of the eight hundred men left to guard the colony, and who, eager to take part in the campaign, had pushed forward alone to join the army. Here, too, were the Canadian seigniors at the head of their vassals, Berthier, La Valterie, Granville, Longueuil, and many more. A guard of rangers and Indians brought up the rear. [15] Denonville au Ministre, 8 Juin, 1687. Scouts thrown out in front ran back with the report that they had reached the Seneca clearings, and had seen no more dangerous enemy than three or four women in the cornfields. This was a device of the Senecas to cheat the French into the belief that the inhabitants were still in the town. It had the desired effect. The vanguard pushed rapidly forward, hoping to surprise the place, and ignorant that, behind the ridge of thick forests on their right, among a tangled growth of beech-trees in the gorge of a brook, three hundred ambushed warriors lay biding their time. Hurrying forward through the forest, they left the main body behind, and soon reached the end 152 of the defile. The woods were still dense on their left and front; but on their right lay a great marsh, covered with alder thickets and rank grass. Suddenly the air was filled with yells, and a rapid though distant fire was opened from the thickets and the forest. Scores of painted savages, stark naked, some armed with swords and some with hatchets, leaped screeching from their ambuscade, and rushed against the van. Almost at the same moment a burst of whoops and firing sounded in the defile behind. It was the ambushed three hundred supporting the onset of their countrymen in front; but they had made a fatal mistake. Deceived by the numbers of the vanguard, they supposed it to be the whole army, never suspecting that Denonville was close behind with sixteen hundred men. It was a surprise on both sides. So dense was the forest that the advancing battalions could see neither the enemy nor each other. Appalled by the din of whoops and firing, redoubled by the echoes of the narrow valley, the whole army was seized with something like a panic. Some of the officers, it is said, threw themselves on the ground in their fright. There were a few moments of intense bewilderment. The various corps became broken and confused, and moved hither and thither without knowing why. Denonville behaved with great courage. He ran, sword in hand, to where the uproar was greatest, ordered the drums to beat the charge, turned back the militia of Berthier who were trying to escape, and commanded them and all others whom he met to fire 153 on whatever looked like an enemy. He was bravely seconded by Callières, La Valterie, and several other officers. The Christian Iroquois fought well from the first, leaping from tree to tree, and exchanging shots and defiance with their heathen countrymen; till the Senecas, seeing themselves confronted by numbers that seemed endless, abandoned the field, after heavy loss, carrying with them many of their dead and all of their wounded. [16] [16] For authorities, see note at the end of the chapter. The account of Charlevoix is contradicted at several points by the contemporary writers. Denonville made no attempt to pursue. He had learned the dangers of this blind warfare of the woods; and he feared that the Senecas would waylay him again in the labyrinth of bushes that lay between him and the town. "Our troops," he says, "were all so overcome by the extreme heat and the long march that we were forced to remain where we were till morning. We had the pain of witnessing the usual cruelties of the Indians, who cut the dead bodies into quarters, like butchers' meat, to put into their kettles, and opened most of them while still warm to drink the blood. Our rascally Ottawas particularly distinguished themselves by these barbarities, as well as by cowardice; for they made off in the fight. We had five or six men killed on the spot, and about twenty wounded, among whom was Father Engelran, who was badly hurt by a gun-shot. Some prisoners who escaped from the Senecas tell us that they lost forty men killed outright, twenty-five of whom we saw butchered. 154 One of the escaped prisoners saw the rest buried, and he saw also more than sixty very dangerously wounded." [17] [17] Denonville au Ministre, 25 Ao?t, 1687. In his journal, written afterwards, he says that the Senecas left twenty-seven dead on the field, and carried off twenty more, besides upwards of sixty mortally wounded. In the morning, the troops advanced in order of battle through a marsh covered with alders and tall grass, whence they had no sooner emerged than, says Abbé Belmont, "we began to see the famous Babylon of the Senecas, where so many crimes have been committed, so much blood spilled, and so many men burned. It was a village or town of bark, on the top of a hill. They had burned it a week before. We found nothing in it but the graveyard and the graves, full of snakes and other creatures; a great mask, with teeth and eyes of brass, and a bearskin drawn over it, with which they performed their conjurations." [18] The fire had also spared a number of huge receptacles of bark, still filled with the last season's corn; while the fields around were covered with the growing crop, ripening in the July sun. There were hogs, too, in great number; for the Iroquois did not share the antipathy with which Indians are apt to regard that unsavory animal, and from which certain philosophers have argued their descent from the Jews. [18] Belmont. A few words are added from Saint-Vallier. The soldiers killed the hogs, burned the old corn, and hacked down the new with their swords. Next they advanced to an abandoned Seneca fort on a hill half a league distant, and burned it, with 155 all that it contained. Ten days were passed in the work of havoc. Three neighboring villages were levelled, and all their fields laid waste. The amount of corn destroyed was prodigious. Denonville reckons it at the absurdly exaggerated amount of twelve hundred thousand bushels. The Senecas, laden with such of their possessions as they could carry off, had fled to their confederates in the east; and Denonville did not venture to pursue them. His men, feasting without stint on green corn and fresh pork, were sickening rapidly, and his Indian allies were deserting him. "It is a miserable business," he wrote, "to command savages, who, as soon as they have knocked an enemy in the head, ask for nothing but to go home and carry with them the scalp, which they take off like a skull-cap. You cannot believe what trouble I had to keep them till the corn was cut." On the twenty-fourth, he withdrew, with all his army, to the fortified post at Irondequoit Bay, whence he proceeded to Niagara, in order to accomplish his favorite purpose of building a fort there. The troops were set at work, and a stockade was planted on the point of land at the eastern angle between the River Niagara and Lake Ontario, the site of the ruined fort built by La Salle nine years before. [19] Here he left a hundred men, under the Chevalier de Troyes, and, embarking with the rest of the army, descended to Montreal. [19] Procès-verbal de la Prise de Possession de Niagara, 31 Juillet, 1687. There are curious errors of date in this document regarding the proceedings of La Salle. The campaign was but half a success. Joined 156 to the capture of the English traders on the lakes, it had, indeed, prevented the defection of the western Indians, and in some slight measure restored their respect for the French, of whom, nevertheless, one of them was heard to say that they were good for nothing but to make war on hogs and corn. As for the Senecas, they were more enraged than hurt. They could rebuild their bark villages in a few weeks; and, though they had lost their harvest, their confederates would not let them starve. [20] A converted Iroquois had told the governor before his departure that, if he overset a wasps' nest, he must crush the wasps, or they would sting him. Denonville left the wasps alive. [20] The statement of some later writers, that many of the Senecas died during the following winter in consequence of the loss of their corn, is extremely doubtful. Captain Duplessis, in his Plan for the Defence of Canada, 1690, declares that not one of them perished of hunger. Denonville's campaign against the Senecas.—The chief authorities on this matter are the journal of Denonville, of which there is a translation in the Colonial Documents of New York, IX.; the letters of Denonville to the Minister; the état Présent de l'église de la Colonie Fran?aise, by Bishop Saint-Vallier; the Recueil de ce qui s'est passé en Canada au Sujet de la Guerre, tant des Anglais que des Iroquois, depuis l'année 1682; and the excellent account by Abbé Belmont in his chronicle called Histoire du Canada. To these may be added La Hontan, Tonty, Nicolas Perrot, La Potherie, and the Senecas examined before the authorities of Albany, whose statements are printed in the Colonial Documents, III. These are the original sources. Charlevoix drew his account from a portion of them. It is inexact, and needs the correction of his learned annotator, Mr. Shea. Colden, Smith, and other English writers follow La Hontan. The researches of Mr. O. H. Marshall, of Buffalo, have left no reasonable doubt as to the scene of the battle, and the site of the neighboring town. The Seneca ambuscade was on the marsh and 157 the hills immediately north and west of the present village of Victor; and their chief town, called Gannagaro by Denonville, was on the top of Boughton's Hill, about a mile and a quarter distant. Immense quantities of Indian remains were formerly found here, and many are found to this day. Charred corn has been turned up in abundance by the plough, showing that the place was destroyed by fire. The remains of the fort burned by the French are still plainly visible on a hill a mile and a quarter from the ancient town. A plan of it will be found in Squier's Aboriginal Monuments of New York. The site of the three other Seneca towns destroyed by Denonville, and called Totiakton, Gannondata, and Gannongarae, can also be identified. See Marshall, in Collections N. Y. Hist. Soc., 2d Series, II. Indian traditions of historical events are usually almost worthless; but the old Seneca chief Dyunehogawah, or "John Blacksmith," who was living a few years ago at the Tonawanda reservation, recounted to Mr. Marshall with remarkable accuracy the story of the battle as handed down from his ancestors who lived at Gannagaro, close to the scene of action. Gannagaro was the Canagorah of Wentworth Greenalgh's Journal. The old Seneca, on being shown a map of the locality, placed his finger on the spot where the fight took place, and which was long known to the Senecas by the name of Dyagodiyu, or "The Place of a Battle." It answers in the most perfect manner to the French contemporary descriptions. CHAPTER IX. 1687-1689. The Iroquois Invasion. Altercations ? Attitude of Dongan ? Martial Preparation ? Perplexity of Denonville ? Angry Correspondence ? Recall of Dongan ? Sir Edmund Andros ? Humiliation of Denonville ? Distress of Canada ? Appeals for Help ? Iroquois Diplomacy ? A Huron Macchiavel ? The Catastrophe ? Ferocity of the Victors ? War with England ? Recall of Denonville. When Dongan heard that the French had invaded the Senecas, seized English traders on the lakes, and built a fort at Niagara, his wrath was kindled anew. He sent to the Iroquois, and summoned them to meet him at Albany; told the assembled chiefs that the late calamity had fallen upon them because they had held councils with the French without asking his leave; forbade them to do so again, and informed them that, as subjects of King James, they must make no treaty, except by the consent of his representative, the governor of New York. He declared that the Ottawas and other remote tribes were also British subjects; that the Iroquois should unite with them, to expel the French from the west; and that all alike should bring down their beaver skins to the English at Albany. Moreover, he enjoined them to 159 receive no more French Jesuits into their towns, and to call home their countrymen whom these fathers had converted and enticed to Canada. "Obey my commands," added the governor, "for that is the only way to eat well and sleep well, without fear or disturbance." The Iroquois, who wanted his help, seemed to assent to all he said. "We will fight the French," exclaimed their orator, "as long as we have a man left." [1] [1] Dongan's Propositions to the Five Nations; Answer of the Five Nations, N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 438, 441. At the same time, Dongan wrote to Denonville demanding the immediate surrender of the Dutch and English captured on the lakes. Denonville angrily replied that he would keep the prisoners, since Dongan had broken the treaty of neutrality by "giving aid and comfort to the savages." The English governor, in return, upbraided his correspondent for invading British territory. "I will endevour to protect his Majesty's subjects here from your unjust invasions, till I hear from the King, my Master, who is the greatest and most glorious Monarch that ever set on a Throne, and would do as much to propagate the Christian faith as any prince that lives. He did not send me here to suffer you to give laws to his subjects. I hope, notwithstanding all your trained souldiers and greate Officers come from Europe, that our masters at home will suffer us to do ourselves justice on you for the injuries and spoyle you have committed on us; and I assure you, Sir, if my Master gives leave, I will be as soon at Quebeck as 160 you shall be att Albany. What you alleage concerning my assisting the Sinnakees (Senecas) with arms and ammunition to warr against you was never given by mee untill the sixt of August last, when understanding of your unjust proceedings in invading the King my Master's territorys in a hostill manner, I then gave them powder, lead, and armes, and united the five nations together to defend that part of our King's dominions from your jnjurious invasion. And as for offering them men, in that you doe me wrong, our men being all buisy then at their harvest, and I leave itt to your judgment whether there was any occasion when only foure hundred of them engaged with your whole army. I advise you to send home all the Christian and Indian prisoners the King of England's subjects you unjustly do deteine. This is what I have thought fitt to answer to your reflecting and provoking letter." [2] [2] Dongan to Denonville, 9 Sept., 1687, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 472. As for the French claims to the Iroquois country and the upper lakes, he turned them to ridicule. They were founded, in part, on the missions established there by the Jesuits. "The King of China," observes Dongan, "never goes anywhere without two Jessuits with him. I wonder you make not the like pretence to that Kingdome." He speaks with equal irony of the claim based on discovery: "Pardon me if I say itt is a mistake, except you will affirme that a few loose fellowes rambling amongst Indians to keep themselves from starving gives the French a right to the Countrey." And of the claim 161 based on geographical divisions: "Your reason is that some rivers or rivoletts of this country run out into the great river of Canada. O just God! what new, farr-fetched, and unheard-of pretence is this for a title to a country. The French King may have as good a pretence to all those Countrys that drink clarett and Brandy." [3] In spite of his sarcasms, it is clear that the claim of prior discovery and occupation was on the side of the French. [3] Dongan's Fourth Paper to the French Agents, N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 528. The dispute now assumed a new phase. James II. at length consented to own the Iroquois as his subjects, ordering Dongan to protect them, and repel the French by force of arms, should they attack them again. [4] At the same time, conferences were opened at London between the French ambassador and the English commissioners appointed to settle the questions at issue. Both disputants claimed the Iroquois as subjects, and the contest wore an aspect more serious than before. [4] Warrant, authorizing Governor Dongan to protect the Five Nations, 10 Nov., 1687, N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 503. The royal declaration was a great relief to Dongan. Thus far he had acted at his own risk; now he was sustained by the orders of his king. He instantly assumed a warlike attitude; and, in the next spring, wrote to the Earl of Sunderland that he had been at Albany all winter, with four hundred infantry, fifty horsemen, and eight hundred Indians. This was not without cause, for a report had come from Canada that the French 162 were about to march on Albany to destroy it. "And now, my Lord," continues Dongan, "we must build forts in ye countrey upon ye great Lakes, as ye French doe, otherwise we lose ye Countrey, ye Bever trade, and our Indians." [5] Denonville, meanwhile, had begun to yield, and promised to send back McGregory and the men captured with him. [6] Dongan, not satisfied, insisted on payment for all the captured merchandise, and on the immediate demolition of Fort Niagara. He added another demand, which must have been singularly galling to his rival. It was to the effect that the Iroquois prisoners seized at Fort Frontenac, and sent to the galleys in France, should be surrendered as British subjects to the English ambassador at Paris or the secretary of state in London. [7] [5] Dongan to Sunderland, Feb., 1688, N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 510. [6] Denonville à Dongan, 2 Oct., 1687. McGregory soon arrived, and Dongan sent him back to Canada as an emissary with a civil message to Denonville. Dongan to Denonville, 10 Nov., 1687. [7] Dongan to Denonville, 31 Oct., 1687; Dongan's First Demand of the French Agents, N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 515, 520. Denonville was sorely perplexed. He was hard pressed, and eager for peace with the Iroquois at any price; but Dongan was using every means to prevent their treating of peace with the French governor until he had complied with all the English demands. In this extremity, Denonville sent Father Vaillant to Albany, in the hope of bringing his intractable rival to conditions less humiliating. The Jesuit played his part with ability, and proved more than a match for his adversary in dialectics; but Dongan held fast to all his demands. Vaillant 163 tried to temporize, and asked for a truce, with a view to a final settlement by reference to the two kings. [8] Dongan referred the question to a meeting of Iroquois chiefs, who declared in reply that they would make neither peace nor truce till Fort Niagara was demolished and all the prisoners restored. Dongan, well pleased, commended their spirit, and assured them that King James, "who is the greatest man the sunn shines uppon, and never told a ly in his life, has given you his Royall word to protect you." [9] Vaillant returned from his bootless errand; and a stormy correspondence followed between the two governors. Dongan renewed his demands, then protested his wish for peace, extolled King James for his pious zeal, and declared that he was sending over missionaries of his own to convert the Iroquois. [10] What Denonville wanted was not their conversion by Englishmen, but their conversion by Frenchmen, and the presence in their towns of those most useful political agents, the Jesuits. [11] He replied angrily, charging Dongan with preventing the conversion of the Iroquois by driving off the French missionaries, and accusing him, farther, of instigating the tribes of New York to attack 164 Canada.[12] Suddenly there was a change in the temper of his letters. He wrote to his rival in terms of studied civility; declared that he wished he could meet him, and consult with him on the best means of advancing the cause of true religion; begged that he would not refuse him his friendship; and thanked him in warm terms for befriending some French prisoners whom he had saved from the Iroquois, and treated with great kindness. [13] [8] The papers of this discussion will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. [9] Dongan's Reply to the Five Nations, Ibid., III. 535. [10] Dongan to Denonville, 17 Feb., 1688, Ibid., III. 519. [11] "II y a une nécessité indispensable pour les intérais de la Religion et de la Colonie de restablir les missionaires Jésuites dans tous les villages Iroquois: si vous ne trouvés moyen de faire retourner ces Pères dans leurs anciennes missions, vous devés en attendre beaucoup de malheur pour cette Colonie; car je dois vous dire que jusqu'icy c'est leur habilité qui a soutenu les affaires du pays par leur s?avoir-faire à gouverner les esprits de ces barbares, qui ne sont Sauvages que de nom." Denonville, Mémoire adressé au Ministre, 9 Nov., 1688. [12] Denonville à Dongan, 24 Avril, 1688; Ibid., 12 Mai, 1688. Whether the charge is true is questionable. Dongan had just written that, if the Iroquois did harm to the French, he was ordered to offer satisfaction, and had already done so. [13] Denonville à Dongan, 18 Juin, 1688; Ibid., 5 Juillet, 1688; Ibid., 20 Aug., 1688. "Je n'ai donc qu'à vous asseurer que toute la Colonie a une très-parfaite reconnoissance des bons offices que ces pauvres malheureux ont re?u de vous et de vos peuples." This change was due to despatches from Versailles, in which Denonville was informed that the matters in dispute would soon be amicably settled by the commissioners; that he was to keep on good terms with the English commanders, and, what pleased him still more, that the king of England was about to recall Dongan. [14] In fact, James II. had resolved on remodelling his American colonies. New York, New Jersey, and New England had been formed into one government under Sir Edmund Andros; and Dongan was summoned home, where a regiment was given him, with the rank of major-general of artillery. Denonville says that, in his efforts to extend English trade to the Great 165 Lakes and the Mississippi, his late rival had been influenced by motives of personal gain. Be this as it may, he was a bold and vigorous defender of the claims of the British crown. [14] Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction au Sr. Marquis de Denonville, 8 Mars, 1688; Le Roy à Denonville, même date; Seignelay à Denonville, même date. Louis XIV. had demanded Dongan's recall. How far this had influenced the action of James II. it is difficult to say. Sir Edmund Andros now reigned over New York; and, by the terms of his commission, his rule stretched westward to the Pacific. The usual official courtesies passed between him and Denonville; but Andros renewed all the demands of his predecessor, claimed the Iroquois as subjects, and forbade the French to attack them. [15] The new governor was worse than the old. Denonville wrote to the minister: "I send you copies of his letters, by which you will see that the spirit of Dongan has entered into the heart of his successor, who may be less passionate and less interested, but who is, to say the least, quite as much opposed to us, and perhaps more dangerous by his suppleness and smoothness than the other was by his violence. What he has just done among the Iroquois, whom he pretends to be under his government, and whom he prevents from coming to meet me, is a certain proof that neither he nor the other English governors, nor their people, will refrain from doing this colony all the harm they can." [16] [15] Andros to Denonville, 21 Aug., 1688; Ibid., 29 Sept., 1688. [16] Mémoire de l'Estat Présent des Affaires de ce Pays depuis le 10me Aoust, 1688, jusq'au dernier Octobre de la mesme année. He declares that the English are always "itching for the western trade," that their favorite plan is to establish a post on the Ohio, and that they have made the attempt three times already. While these things were passing, the state of Canada was deplorable, and the position of its 166 governor as mortifying as it was painful. He thought with good reason that the maintenance of the new fort at Niagara was of great importance to the colony, and he had repeatedly refused the demands of Dongan and the Iroquois for its demolition. But a power greater than sachems and governors presently intervened. The provisions left at Niagara, though abundant, were atrociously bad. Scurvy and other malignant diseases soon broke out among the soldiers. The Senecas prowled about the place, and no man dared venture out for hunting, fishing, or firewood. [17] The fort was first a prison, then a hospital, then a charnel-house, till before spring the garrison of a hundred men was reduced to ten or twelve. In this condition, they were found towards the end of April by a large war-party of friendly Miamis, who entered the place and held it till a French detachment at length arrived for its relief. [18] The garrison of Fort Frontenac had suffered from the same causes, though not to the same degree. Denonville feared that he should be forced to abandon them both. The way was so long and so dangerous, and the governor had grown of late so cautious, that he dreaded the risk of maintaining such remote communications. On second thought, he resolved to keep Frontenac and sacrifice Niagara. He promised Dongan that he would demolish it, and he kept his word. [19] [17] Denonville, Mémoire du 10 Aoust, 1688. [18] Recueil de ce qui s'est passé en Canada depuis l'année 1682. The writer was an officer of the detachment, and describes what he saw. Compare La Potherie, II. 210; and La Hontan, I. 131 (1709). [19] Denonville à Dongan, 20 Aoust, 1688; Procès-verbal of the Condition of 167 Fort Niagara, 1688; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 386. The palisades were torn down by Denonville's order on the 15th of September. The rude dwellings and storehouses which they enclosed, together with a large wooden cross, were left standing. The commandant De Troyes had died, and Captain Desbergères had been sent to succeed him. He was forced to another and a deeper humiliation. At the imperious demand of Dongan and the Iroquois, he begged the king to send back the prisoners entrapped at Fort Frontenac, and he wrote to the minister: "Be pleased, Monseigneur, to remember that I had the honor to tell you that, in order to attain the peace necessary to the country, I was obliged to promise that I would beg you to send back to us the prisoners I sent you last year. I know you gave orders that they should be well treated, but I am informed that, though they were well enough treated at first, your orders were not afterwards executed with the same fidelity. If ill treatment has caused them all to die,—for they are people who easily fall into dejection, and who die of it,—and if none of them come back, I do not know at all whether we can persuade these barbarians not to attack us again." [20] [20] Denonville, Mémoire de 10 Aoust, 1688. What had brought the marquis to this pass? Famine, destitution, disease, and the Iroquois were making Canada their prey. The fur trade had been stopped for two years; and the people, bereft of their only means of subsistence, could contribute nothing to their own defence. Above Three Rivers, the whole population was imprisoned in stockade forts hastily built in every seigniory. [21] 168 Here they were safe, provided that they never ventured out; but their fields were left untilled, and the governor was already compelled to feed many of them at the expense of the king. The Iroquois roamed among the deserted settlements or prowled like lynxes about the forts, waylaying convoys and killing or capturing stragglers. Their war-parties were usually small; but their movements were so mysterious and their attacks so sudden, that they spread a universal panic through the upper half of the colony. They were the wasps which Denonville had failed to kill. [21] In the Dépot des Cartes de la Marine, there is a contemporary manuscript map, on which all these forts are laid down. "We should succumb," wrote the distressed governor, "if our cause were not the cause of God. Your Majesty's zeal for religion, and the great things you have done for the destruction of heresy, encourage me to hope that you will be the bulwark of the Faith in the new world as you are in the old. I cannot give you a truer idea of the war we have to wage with the Iroquois than by comparing them to a great number of wolves or other ferocious beasts, issuing out of a vast forest to ravage the neighboring settlements. The people gather to hunt them down; but nobody can find their lair, for they are always in motion. An abler man than I would be greatly at a loss to manage the affairs of this country. It is for the interest of the colony to have peace at any cost whatever. For the glory of the king and the good of religion, we should be glad to have it an advantageous one; and so it would have been, but for the 169 malice of the English and the protection they have given our enemies." [22] [22] Denonville au Roy, 1688; Ibid., Mémoire du 10 Aoust, 1688; Ibid., Mémoire du 9 Nov., 1688. And yet he had, one would think, a reasonable force at his disposal. His thirty-two companies of regulars were reduced by this time to about fourteen hundred men, but he had also three or four hundred Indian converts, besides the militia of the colony, of whom he had stationed a large body under Vaudreuil at the head of the Island of Montreal. All told, they were several times more numerous than the agile warriors who held the colony in terror. He asked for eight hundred more regulars. The king sent him three hundred. Affairs grew worse, and he grew desperate. Rightly judging that the best means of defence was to take the offensive, he conceived the plan of a double attack on the Iroquois, one army to assail the Onondagas and Cayugas, another the Mohawks and Oneidas. [23] Since to reach the Mohawks as he proposed, by the way of Lake Champlain, he must pass through territory indisputably British, the attempt would be a flagrant violation of the treaty of neutrality. Nevertheless, he implored the king to send him four thousand soldiers to accomplish it. [24] His fast friend, the bishop, warmly seconded his appeal. "The glory of God is involved," 170 wrote the head of the church, "for the Iroquois are the only tribe who oppose the progress of the gospel. The glory of the king is involved, for they are the only tribe who refuse to recognize his grandeur and his might. They hold the French in the deepest contempt; and, unless they are completely humbled within two years, his Majesty will have no colony left in Canada." [25] And the prelate proceeds to tell the minister how, in his opinion, the war ought to be conducted. The appeal was vain. "His Majesty agrees with you," wrote Seignelay, "that three or four thousand men would be the best means of making peace, but he cannot spare them now. If the enemy breaks out again, raise the inhabitants, and fight as well as you can till his Majesty is prepared to send you troops." [26] [23] Plan for the Termination of the Iroquois War, N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 375. [24] Denonville, Mémoire du 8 Ao?t, 1688. [25] Saint-Vallier, Mémoire sur les Affaires du Canada pour Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay. [26] Mémoire du Ministre adressé à Denonville, 1 Mai, 1689. A hope had dawned on the governor. He had been more active of late in negotiating than in fighting, and his diplomacy had prospered more than his arms. It may be remembered that some of the Iroquois entrapped at Fort Frontenac had been given to their Christian relatives in the mission villages. Here they had since remained. Denonville thought that he might use them as messengers to their heathen countrymen, and he sent one or more of them to Onondaga with gifts and overtures of peace. That shrewd old politician, Big Mouth, was still strong in influence at the Iroquois capital, and his name was great to the farthest bounds of the confederacy. He knew by personal experience the advantages of a neutral 171 position between the rival European powers, from both of whom he received gifts and attentions; and he saw that what was good for him was good for the confederacy, since, if it gave itself to neither party, both would court its alliance. In his opinion, it had now leaned long enough towards the English; and a change of attitude had become expedient. Therefore, as Denonville promised the return of the prisoners, and was plainly ready to make other concessions, Big Mouth, setting at naught the prohibitions of Andros, consented to a conference with the French. He set out at his leisure for Montreal, with six Onondaga, Cayuga, and Oneida chiefs; and, as no diplomatist ever understood better the advantage of negotiating at the head of an imposing force, a body of Iroquois warriors, to the number, it is said, of twelve hundred, set out before him, and silently took path to Canada. The ambassadors paddled across the lake and presented themselves before the commandant of Fort Frontenac, who received them with distinction, and ordered Lieutenant Perelle to escort them to Montreal. Scarcely had the officer conducted his august charge five leagues on their way, when, to his amazement, he found himself in the midst of six hundred Iroquois warriors, who amused themselves for a time with his terror, and then accompanied him as far as Lake St. Francis, where he found another body of savages nearly equal in number. Here the warriors halted, and the ambassadors 172 with their escort gravely pursued their way to meet Denonville at Montreal. [27] [27] Relation des évenements de la Guerre, 30 Oct., 1688. Big Mouth spoke haughtily, like a man who knew his power. He told the governor that he and his people were subjects neither of the French nor of the English; that they wished to be friends of both; that they held their country of the Great Spirit; and that they had never been conquered in war. He declared that the Iroquois knew the weakness of the French, and could easily exterminate them; that they had formed a plan of burning all the houses and barns of Canada, killing the cattle, setting fire to the ripe grain, and then, when the people were starving, attacking the forts; but that he, Big Mouth, had prevented its execution. He concluded by saying that he was allowed but four days to bring back the governor's reply; and that, if he were kept waiting longer, he would not answer for what might happen. [28] Though it appeared by some expressions in his speech that he was ready to make peace only with the French, leaving the Iroquois free to attack the Indian allies of the colony, and though, while the ambassadors were at Montreal, their warriors on the river above actually killed several of the Indian converts, Denonville felt himself compelled to pretend ignorance of the outrage. [29] A declaration of neutrality was drawn up, and Big Mouth 173 affixed to it the figures of sundry birds and beasts as the signatures of himself and his fellow-chiefs. [30] He promised, too, that within a certain time deputies from the whole confederacy should come to Montreal and conclude a general peace. [28] Declaration of the Iroquois in presence of M. de Denonville, N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 384; Relation des événements de la Guerre, 30 Oct., 1688; Belmont, Histoire du Canada. [29] Callières à Seignelay, Jan., 1689. [30] See the signatures in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 385, 386. The time arrived, and they did not appear. It became known, however, that a number of chiefs were coming from Onondaga to explain the delay, and to promise that the deputies should soon follow. The chiefs in fact were on their way. They reached La Famine, the scene of La Barre's meeting with Big Mouth; but here an unexpected incident arrested them, and completely changed the aspect of affairs. Among the Hurons of Michillimackinac there was a chief of high renown named Kondiaronk, or the Rat. He was in the prime of life, a redoubted warrior, and a sage counsellor. The French seem to have admired him greatly. "He is a gallant man," says La Hontan, "if ever there was one;" while Charlevoix declares that he was the ablest Indian the French ever knew in America, and that he had nothing of the savage but the name and the dress. In spite of the father's eulogy, the moral condition of the Rat savored strongly of the wigwam. He had given Denonville great trouble by his constant intrigues with the Iroquois, with whom he had once made a plot for the massacre of his neighbors, the Ottawas, under cover of a pretended treaty. [31] The French had spared no pains to gain 174 him; and he had at length been induced to declare for them, under a pledge from the governor that the war should never cease till the Iroquois were destroyed. During the summer, he raised a party of forty warriors, and came down the lakes in quest of Iroquois scalps. [32] On the way, he stopped at Fort Frontenac to hear the news, when, to his amazement, the commandant told him that deputies from Onondaga were coming in a few days to conclude peace, and that he had better go home at once. [31] Nicolas Perrot, 143. [32] Denonville à Seignelay, 9 Nov., 1688. La Hontan saw the party set out, and says that there were about a hundred of them. "It is well," replied the Rat. He knew that for the Hurons it was not well. He and his tribe stood fully committed to the war, and for them peace between the French and the Iroquois would be a signal of destruction, since Denonville could not or would not protect his allies. The Rat paddled off with his warriors. He had secretly learned the route of the expected deputies; and he shaped his course, not, as he had pretended, for Michillimackinac, but for La Famine, where he knew that they would land. Having reached his destination, he watched and waited four or five days, till canoes at length appeared, approaching from the direction of Onondaga. On this, the Rat and his friends hid themselves in the bushes. The new comers were the messengers sent as precursors of the embassy. At their head was a famous personage named Decanisora, or Tegannisorens, with whom were three other chiefs, and, it seems, a number of warriors. They had scarcely 175 landed when the ambushed Hurons gave them a volley of bullets, killed one of the chiefs, wounded all the rest, and then, rushing upon them, seized the whole party except a warrior who escaped with a broken arm. Having secured his prisoners, the Rat told them that he had acted on the suggestion of Denonville, who had informed him that an Iroquois war-party was to pass that way. The astonished captives protested that they were envoys of peace. The Rat put on a look of amazement, then of horror and fury, and presently burst into invectives against Denonville for having made him the instrument of such atrocious perfidy. "Go, my brothers," he exclaimed, "go home to your people. Though there is war between us, I give you your liberty. Onontio has made me do so black a deed that I shall never be happy again till your five tribes take a just vengeance upon him." After giving them guns, powder, and ball, he sent them on their way, well pleased with him and filled with rage against the governor. In accordance with Indian usage, he, however, kept one of them to be adopted, as he declared, in place of one of his followers whom he had lost in the skirmish; then, recrossing the lake, he went alone to Fort Frontenac, and, as he left the gate to rejoin his party, he said coolly, "I have killed the peace: we shall see how the governor will get out of this 176 business." [33] Then, without loss of time, he repaired to Michillimackinac, and gave his Iroquois prisoner to the officer in command. No news of the intended peace had yet reached that distant outpost; and, though the unfortunate Iroquois told the story of his mission and his capture, the Rat declared that it was a crazy invention inspired by the fear of death, and the prisoner was immediately shot by a file of soldiers. The Rat now sent for an old Iroquois who had long been a prisoner at the Huron village, telling him with a mournful air that he was free to return to his people, and recount the cruelty of the French, who, had put their countryman to death. The liberated Iroquois faithfully acquitted himself of his mission. [34] [33] "Il dit, J'ai tué la paix." Belmont, Histoire du Canada. "Le Rat passa ensuite seul à Catarakouy (Fort Frontenac) sans vouloir dire le tour qu'il avoit fait, dit seulement estant hors de la porte, en s'en allant, Nous verrons comme le gouverneur se tirera d'affaire." Denonville. [34] La Hontan, I. 189. (1709) Most of the details of the story are drawn from the writer, whose statement I have compared with that of Denonville, in his letter dated Nov. 9, 1688; of Callières, Jan., 1689; of the Abstract of Letters from Canada, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 393; and of the writer of Relation des événements de la Guerre, 30 Oct., 1688. Belmont notices the affair with his usual conciseness. La Hontan's account is sustained by the others in most, though not all of its essential points. He calls the Huron chief Adario, ou le Rat. He is elsewhere mentioned as Kondiaronk, Kondiaront, Soüo?as, and Soüa?ti. La Hontan says that the scene of the treachery was one of the rapids of the St. Lawrence, but more authentic accounts place it at La Famine. One incident seemed for a moment likely to rob the intriguer of the fruits of his ingenuity. The Iroquois who had escaped in the skirmish contrived to reach Fort Frontenac some time after the last visit of the Rat. He told what had happened; and, after being treated with the utmost attention, he was sent to Onondaga, charged with explanations and regrets. The Iroquois dignitaries seemed satisfied, and Denonville wrote to the minister that 177 there was still good hope of peace. He little knew his enemy. They could dissemble and wait; but they neither believed the governor nor forgave him. His supposed treachery at La Famine, and his real treachery at Fort Frontenac, filled them with a patient but unextinguishable rage. They sent him word that they were ready to renew the negotiation; then they sent again, to say that Andros forbade them. Without doubt they used his prohibition as a pretext. Months passed, and Denonville remained in suspense. He did not trust his Indian allies, nor did they trust him. Like the Rat and his Hurons, they dreaded the conclusion of peace, and wished the war to continue, that the French might bear the brunt of it, and stand between them and the wrath of the Iroquois. [35] [35] Denonville au Ministre, 9 Nov., 1688. In the direction of the Iroquois, there was a long and ominous silence. It was broken at last by the crash of a thunderbolt. On the night between the fourth and fifth of August, a violent hail-storm burst over Lake St. Louis, an expansion of the St. Lawrence a little above Montreal. Concealed by the tempest and the darkness, fifteen hundred warriors landed at La Chine, and silently posted themselves about the houses of the sleeping settlers, then screeched the war-whoop, and began the most frightful massacre in Canadian history. The houses were burned, and men, women, and children indiscriminately butchered. In the neighborhood were three stockade forts, called Rémy, Roland, and La Présentation; and they all had 178 garrisons. There was also an encampment of two hundred regulars about three miles distant, under an officer named Subercase, then absent at Montreal on a visit to Denonville, who had lately arrived with his wife and family. At four o'clock in the morning, the troops in this encampment heard a cannon-shot from one of the forts. They were at once ordered under arms. Soon after, they saw a man running towards them, just escaped from the butchery. He told his story, and passed on with the news to Montreal, six miles distant. Then several fugitives appeared, chased by a band of Iroquois, who gave over the pursuit at sight of the soldiers, but pillaged several houses before their eyes. The day was well advanced before Subercase arrived. He ordered the troops to march. About a hundred armed inhabitants had joined them, and they moved together towards La Chine. Here they found the houses still burning, and the bodies of their inmates strewn among them or hanging from the stakes where they had been tortured. They learned from a French surgeon, escaped from the enemy, that the Iroquois were all encamped a mile and a half farther on, behind a tract of forest. Subercase, whose force had been strengthened by troops from the forts, resolved to attack them; and, had he been allowed to do so, he would probably have punished them severely, for most of them were helplessly drunk with brandy taken from the houses of the traders. Sword in hand, at the head of his men, the daring officer entered the forest; but, at that moment, a voice from the rear 179 commanded a halt. It was that of the Chevalier de Vaudreuil, just come from Montreal, with positive orders from Denonville to run no risks and stand solely on the defensive. Subercase was furious. High words passed between him and Vaudreuil, but he was forced to obey. The troops were led back to Fort Roland, where about five hundred regulars and militia were now collected under command of Vaudreuil. On the next day, eighty men from Fort Rémy attempted to join them; but the Iroquois had slept off the effect of their orgies, and were again on the alert. The unfortunate detachment was set upon by a host of savages, and cut to pieces in full sight of Fort Roland. All were killed or captured, except Le Moyne de Longueuil, and a few others, who escaped within the gate of Fort Rémy. [36] [36] Recueil de ce qui s'est passé en Canada depuis l'année 1682; Observations on the State of Affairs in Canada, 1689, N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 431; Belmont, Histoire du Canada; Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Nov., 1689. This detachment was commanded by Lieutenant de la Rabeyre, and consisted of fifty French and thirty Indian converts. Montreal was wild with terror. It had been fortified with palisades since the war began; but, though there were troops in the town under the governor himself, the people were in mortal dread. No attack was made either on the town or on any of the forts, and such of the inhabitants as could reach them were safe; while the Iroquois held undisputed possession of the open country, burned all the houses and barns over an extent of nine miles, and roamed in small parties, pillaging and scalping, over more than twenty miles. There is 180 no mention of their having encountered opposition; nor do they seem to have met with any loss but that of some warriors killed in the attack on the detachment from Fort Rémy, and that of three drunken stragglers who were caught and thrown into a cellar in Fort La Présentation. When they came to their senses, they defied their captors, and fought with such ferocity that it was necessary to shoot them. Charlevoix says that the invaders remained in the neighborhood of Montreal till the middle of October, or more than two months; but this seems incredible, since troops and militia enough to drive them all into the St. Lawrence might easily have been collected in less than a week. It is certain, however, that their stay was strangely long. Troops and inhabitants seem to have been paralyzed with fear. At length, most of them took to their canoes, and recrossed Lake St. Louis in a body, giving ninety yells to show that they had ninety prisoners in their clutches. This was not all; for the whole number carried off was more than a hundred and twenty, besides about two hundred who had the good fortune to be killed on the spot. As the Iroquois passed the forts, they shouted, "Onontio, you deceived us, and now we have deceived you." Towards evening, they encamped on the farther side of the lake, and began to torture and devour their prisoners. On that miserable night, stupefied and speechless groups stood gazing from the strand of La Chine at the lights that gleamed along the distant shore of Chateaugay, where their 181 friends, wives, parents, or children agonized in the fires of the Iroquois, and scenes were enacted of indescribable and nameless horror. The greater part of the prisoners were, however, reserved to be distributed among the towns of the confederacy, and there tortured for the diversion of the inhabitants. While some of the invaders went home to celebrate their triumph, others roamed in small parties through all the upper parts of the colony, spreading universal terror. [37] [37] The best account of the descent of the Iroquois at La Chine is that of the Recueil de ce qui s'est passé en Canada, 1682-1712. The writer was an author under Subercase, and was on the spot. Belmont, superior of the mission at Montreal, also gives a trustworthy account in his Histoire du Canada. Compare La Honton, I. 193 (1709) and La Potherie, II. 229. Farther particulars are given in the letters of Callières, 8 Nov.; Champigny, 16 Nov.; and Frontenac, 15 Nov. Frontenac, after visiting the scene of the catastrophe a few weeks after it occurred, writes: "Ils (les Iroquois) avoient bruslé plus de trois lieues de pays, saccagé toutes les maisons jusqu'aux portes de la ville, enlevé plus de six vingt personnes, tant hommes, femmes, qu'enfants, après avoir massacré plus de deux cents dont ils avoient cassé la teste aux uns, bruslé, rosty, et mangé les autres, ouverte le ventre des femmes grosses pour en arracher les enfants, et fait des cruautez inou?es et sans exemple." The details are given by Belmont, and by the author of Histoire de l'Eau de Vie en Canada, are no less revolting. The last-mentioned writer thinks that the massacre was a judgment of God upon the sale of brandy at La Chine. Some Canadian writers have charged the English with instigating the massacre. I find nothing in contemporary documents to support the accusation. Denonville wrote to the minister, after the Rat's treachery came to light, that Andros had forbidden the Iroquois to attack the colony. Immediately after the attack at La Chine, the Iroquois sachems, in a conference with the agents of New England, declared that "we did not make war on the French at the persuasion of our brethren at Albany; for we did not so much as acquaint them of our intention till fourteen days after our army had begun their march." Report of Conference in Colden, 103. Canada lay bewildered and benumbed under the shock of this calamity; but the cup of her misery was not full. There was revolution in 182 England. James II., the friend and ally of France, had been driven from his kingdom, and William of Orange had seized his vacant throne. Soon there came news of war between the two crowns. The Iroquois alone had brought the colony to the brink of ruin; and now they would be supported by the neighboring British colonies, rich, strong, and populous, compared to impoverished and depleted Canada. A letter of recall for Denonville was already on its way. [38] His successor arrived in October, and the marquis sailed for France. He was a good soldier in a regular war, and a subordinate command; and he had some of the qualities of a good governor, while lacking others quite as essential. He had more activity than vigor, more personal bravery than firmness, and more clearness of perception than executive power. He filled his despatches with excellent recommendations, but was not the man to carry them into effect. He was sensitive, fastidious, critical, and conventional, and plumed himself on his honor, which was not always able to bear a strain; though as regards illegal trade, the besetting sin of Canadian governors, his hands were undoubtedly clean. [39] It is said that he had an 183 instinctive antipathy for Indians, such as some persons have for certain animals; and the coureurs de bois, and other lawless classes of the Canadian population, appeared to please him no better. Their license and insubordination distressed him, and he constantly complained of them to the king. For the Church and its hierarchy his devotion was unbounded; and his government was a season of unwonted sunshine for the ecclesiastics, like the balmy days of the Indian summer amid the gusts of November. They exhausted themselves in eulogies of his piety; and, in proof of its depth and solidity, Mother Juchereau tells us that he did not regard station and rank as very useful aids to salvation. While other governors complained of too many priests, Denonville begged for more. All was harmony between him and Bishop Saint-Vallier; and the prelate was constantly his friend, even to the point of justifying his worst act, the treacherous seizure of the Iroquois neutrals. [40] When he left Canada, the only mourner besides the churchmen was his colleague, the intendant Champigny; for the two chiefs of the colony, joined in a common union with the Jesuits, lived together in unexampled concord. On his arrival at court, the good offices of his clerical allies gained for him the highly honorable post of governor of the royal children, the young Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou, and Berri. [38] Le Roy à Denonville, 31 Mai, 1689. [39] "I shall only add one article, on which possibly you will find it strange that I have said nothing; namely, whether the governor carries on any trade. I shall answer, no; but my Lady the Governess (Madame la Gouvernante), who is disposed not to neglect any opportunity for making a profit, had a room, not to say a shop, full of goods, till the close of last winter, in the chateau of Quebec, and found means afterwards to make a lottery to get rid of the rubbish that remained, which produced her more than her good merchandise." Relation of the State of Affairs in Canada, 1688, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 388. This paper was written at Quebec. [40] Saint-Vallier, état Présent, 91, 92 (Quebec, 1856). CHAPTER X. 1689, 1690. Return of Frontenac. Versailles ? Frontenac and the King ? Frontenac sails for Quebec ? Projected Conquest of New York ? Designs of the King ? Failure ? Energy of Frontenac ? Fort Frontenac ? Panic ? Negotiations ? The Iroquois in Council ? Chevalier d'Aux ? Taunts of the Indian Allies ? Boldness of Frontenac ? An Iroquois Defeat ? Cruel Policy ? The Stroke parried. The sun of Louis XIV. had reached its zenith. From a morning of unexampled brilliancy it had mounted to the glare of a cloudless noon; but the hour of its decline was near. The mortal enemy of France was on the throne of England, turning against her from that new point of vantage all the energies of his unconquerable genius. An invalid built the Bourbon monarchy, and another invalid battered and defaced the imposing structure: two potent and daring spirits in two frail bodies, Richelieu and William of Orange. Versailles gave no sign of waning glories. On three evenings of the week, it was the pleasure of the king that the whole court should assemble in the vast suite of apartments now known as the Halls of Abundance, of Venus, of Diana, of Mars, 185 of Mercury, and of Apollo. The magnificence of their decorations, pictures of the great Italian masters, sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, tapestries, vases and statues of silver and gold; the vista of light and splendor that opened through the wide portals; the courtly throngs, feasting, dancing, gaming, promenading, conversing, formed a scene which no palace of Europe could rival or approach. Here were all the great historic names of France, princes, warriors, statesmen, and all that was highest in rank and place; the flower, in short, of that brilliant society, so dazzling, captivating, and illusory. In former years, the king was usually present, affable and gracious, mingling with his courtiers and sharing their amusements; but he had grown graver of late, and was more often in his cabinet, laboring with his ministers on the task of administration, which his extravagance and ambition made every day more burdensome. [1] [1] Saint-Simon speaks of these assemblies. The halls in question were finished in 1682; and a minute account of them, and of the particular use to which each was destined, was printed in the Mercure Fran?ais of that year. See also Soulié, Notice du Musée impérial de Versailles, where copious extracts from the Mercure are given. The grands appartements are now entirely changed in appearance, and turned into an historic picture gallery. There was one corner of the world where his emblem, the sun, would not shine on him. He had done his best for Canada, and had got nothing for his pains but news of mishaps and troubles. He was growing tired of the colony which he had nursed with paternal fondness, and he was more than half angry with it because it did not prosper. Denonville's letters had grown worse and worse; and, 186 though he had not heard as yet of the last great calamity, he was sated with ill tidings already. Count Frontenac stood before him. Since his recall, he had lived at court, needy and no longer in favor; but he had influential friends, and an intriguing wife, always ready to serve him. The king knew his merits as well as his faults; and, in the desperate state of his Canadian affairs, he had been led to the resolution of restoring him to the command from which, for excellent reasons, he had removed him seven years before. He now told him that, in his belief, the charges brought against him were without foundation. [2] "I send you back to Canada," he is reported to have said, "where I am sure that you will serve me as well as you did before; and I ask nothing more of you." [3] The post was not a tempting one to a man in his seventieth year. Alone and unsupported,—for the king, with Europe rising against him, would give him no more troops,—he was to restore the prostrate colony to hope and courage, and fight two enemies with a force that had proved no match for one of them alone. The audacious count trusted himself, and undertook the task; received the royal instructions, and took his last leave of the master whom even he after a fashion honored and admired. [2] Journal de Dangeau, II. 390. Frontenac, since his recall, had not been wholly without marks of royal favor. In 1685, the king gave him a "gratification" of 3,500 francs. Ibid., I. 205. [3] Goyer, Oraison Funèbre du Comte de Frontenac. He repaired to Rochelle, where two ships of the royal navy were waiting his arrival, embarked in 187 one of them, and sailed for the New World. An heroic remedy had been prepared for the sickness of Canada, and Frontenac was to be the surgeon. The cure, however, was not of his contriving. Denonville had sent Callières, his second in command, to represent the state of the colony to the court, and beg for help. Callières saw that there was little hope of more troops or any considerable supply of money; and he laid before the king a plan, which had at least the recommendations of boldness and cheapness. This was to conquer New York with the forces already in Canada, aided only by two ships of war. The blow, he argued, should be struck at once, and the English taken by surprise. A thousand regulars and six hundred Canadian militia should pass Lake Champlain and Lake George in canoes and bateaux, cross to the Hudson and capture Albany, where they would seize all the river craft and descend the Hudson to the town of New York, which, as Callières stated, had then about two hundred houses and four hundred fighting men. The two ships were to cruise at the mouth of the harbor, and wait the arrival of the troops, which was to be made known to them by concerted signals, whereupon they were to enter and aid in the attack. The whole expedition, he thought, might be accomplished in a month; so that by the end of October the king would be master of all the country. The advantages were manifold. The Iroquois, deprived of English arms and ammunition, would be at the mercy of the French; the question of English rivalry in the 188 west would be settled for ever; the king would acquire a means of access to his colony incomparably better than the St. Lawrence, and one that remained open all the year; and, finally, New England would be isolated, and prepared for a possible conquest in the future. The king accepted the plan with modifications, which complicated and did not improve it. Extreme precautions were taken to insure secrecy; but the vast distances, the difficult navigation, and the accidents of weather appear to have been forgotten in this amended scheme of operation. There was, moreover, a long delay in fitting the two ships for sea. The wind was ahead, and they were fifty-two days in reaching Chedabucto, at the eastern end of Nova Scotia. Thence Frontenac and Callières had orders to proceed in a merchant ship to Quebec, which might require a month more; and, on arriving, they were to prepare for the expedition, while at the same time Frontenac was to send back a letter to the naval commander at Chedabucto, revealing the plan to him, and ordering him to sail to New York to co-operate in it. It was the twelfth of September when Chedabucto was reached, and the enterprise was ruined by the delay. Frontenac's first step in his new government was a failure, though one for which he was in no way answerable. [4] [4] Projet du Chevalier de Callières de former une Expédition pour aller attaquer Orange, Manatte, etc.; Résumé du Ministre sur la Proposition de M. de Callières; Autre Mémoire de M. de Callières sur son Projet d'attaquer la Nouvelle York; Mémoire des Armes, Munitions, et Ustensiles nécessaires pour l'Entreprise proposée par M. de Callières; Observations du Ministre sur 189 le Projet et le Mémoire ci-dessus; Observations du Ministre sur le Projet d'Attaque de la Nouvelle York; Autre Mémoire de M. de Callières au Sujet de l'Entreprise proposée; Autre Mémoire de M. de Callières sur le même Sujet. It will be well to observe what were the intentions of the king towards the colony which he proposed to conquer. They were as follows: If any Catholics were found in New York, they might be left undisturbed, provided that they took an oath of allegiance to the king. Officers, and other persons who had the means of paying ransoms, were to be thrown into prison. All lands in the colony, except those of Catholics swearing allegiance, were to be taken from their owners, and granted under a feudal tenure to the French officers and soldiers. All property, public or private, was to be seized, a portion of it given to the grantees of the land, and the rest sold on account of the king. Mechanics and other workmen might, at the discretion of the commanding officer, be kept as prisoners to work at fortifications and do other labor. The rest of the English and Dutch inhabitants, men, women, and children, were to be carried out of the colony and dispersed in New England, Pennsylvania, or other places, in such a manner that they could not combine in any attempt to recover their property and their country. And, that the conquest might be perfectly secure, the nearest settlements of New England were to be destroyed, and those more remote laid under contribution. [5] [5] Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction à Monsieur le Comte de Frontenac sur l'Entreprise de la Nouvelle York, 7 Juin, 1689. "Si parmy les habitans de la Nouvelle York il se trouve des Catholiques de la fidelité desquels il croye se pouvoir asseurer, il pourra les laisser dans leurs habitations après leur avoir fait prester serment de fidelité à sa Majesté…. Il 190 pourra aussi garder, s'il le juge à propos, des artisans et autres gens de service nécessaires pour la culture des terres ou pour travailler aux fortifications en qualité de prisonniers…. II faut retenir en prison les officiers et les principaux habitans desquels on pourra retirer des ran?ons. A l'esgard de tous les autres estrangers (ceux qui ne sont pas Fran?ais) hommes, femmes, et enfans, sa Majesté trouve à propos qu'ils soient mis hors de la Colonie et envoyez à la Nouvelle Angleterre, à la Pennsylvanie, ou en d'autres endroits qu'il jugera à propos, par mer ou par terre, ensemble ou séparément, le tout suivant qu'il trouvera plus seur pour les dissiper et empescher qu'en se réunissant ils ne puissent donner occasion à des entreprises de la part des ennemis contre cette Colonie. Il envoyera en France les Fran?ais fugitifs qu'il y pourra trouver, et particulièrement ceux de la Religion Prétendue-Réformée (Huguenots)." A translation of the entire document will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 422. In the next century, some of the people of Acadia were torn from their homes by order of a British commander. The act was harsh and violent, and the innocent were involved with the guilty; but many of the sufferers had provoked their fate, and deserved it. Louis XIV. commanded that eighteen thousand unoffending persons should be stripped of all that they possessed, and cast out to the mercy of the wilderness. The atrocity of the plan is matched by its folly. The king gave explicit orders, but he gave neither ships nor men enough to accomplish them; and the Dutch farmers, goaded to desperation, would have cut his sixteen hundred soldiers to pieces. It was the scheme of a man blinded by a long course of success. Though perverted by flattery and hardened by unbridled power, he was not cruel by nature; and here, as in the burning of the Palatinate and the persecution of the Huguenots, he would have stood aghast, if his dull imagination could have pictured to him the miseries he was preparing to inflict. [6] [6] On the details of the projected attack of New York, Le Roy à Denonville, 191 7 Juin, 1689; Le Ministre à Denonville, même date; Le Ministre à Frontenac, même date; Ordre du Roy à Vaudreuil, même date; Le Roy au Sieur de la Caffinière, même date; Champigny au Ministre, 16 Nov., 1689. With little hope left that the grand enterprise against New York could succeed, Frontenac made sail for Quebec, and, stopping by the way at Isle Percée, learned from Récollet missionaries the irruption of the Iroquois at Montreal. He hastened on; but the wind was still against him, and the autumn woods were turning brown before he reached his destination. It was evening when he landed, amid fireworks, illuminations, and the firing of cannon. All Quebec came to meet him by torchlight; the members of the council offered their respects, and the Jesuits made him an harangue of welcome. [7] It was but a welcome of words. They and the councillors had done their best to have him recalled, and hoped that they were rid of him for ever; but now he was among them again, rasped by the memory of real or fancied wrongs. The count, however, had no time for quarrelling. The king had told him to bury old animosities and forget the past, and for the present he was too busy to break the royal injunction. [8] He caused boats to be made ready, and in spite of incessant rains pushed up the river to Montreal. Here he found Denonville and his frightened wife. Every thing was in confusion. The Iroquois were gone, leaving dejection and terror behind them. Frontenac reviewed the troops. There were seven or eight hundred of them in the town, the rest being in garrison at the 192 various forts. Then he repaired to what was once La Chine, and surveyed the miserable waste of ashes and desolation that spread for miles around. [7] La Hontan, I. 199. [8] Instruction pour le Sieur Comte de Frontenac, 7 Juin, 1689. To his extreme disgust, he learned that Denonville had sent a Canadian officer by secret paths to Fort Frontenac, with orders to Valrenne, the commandant, to blow it up, and return with his garrison to Montreal. Frontenac had built the fort, had given it his own name, and had cherished it with a paternal fondness, reinforced by strong hopes of making money out of it. For its sake he had become the butt of scandal and opprobrium; but not the less had he always stood its strenuous and passionate champion. An Iroquois envoy had lately with great insolence demanded its destruction of Denonville; and this alone, in the eyes of Frontenac, was ample reason for maintaining it at any cost. [9] He still had hope that it might be saved, and with all the energy of youth he proceeded to collect canoes, men, provisions, and arms; battled against dejection, insubordination, and fear, and in a few days despatched a convoy of three hundred men to relieve the place, and stop the execution of Denonville's orders. His orders had been but too promptly obeyed. The convoy was scarcely gone an hour, when, to Frontenac's unutterable wrath, Valrenne appeared with his garrison. He reported that he had set fire to every thing in the fort that would burn, sunk the three vessels belonging to it, thrown the cannon into the lake, mined the walls and bastions, and left matches burning 193 in the powder magazine; and, further, that when he and his men were five leagues on their way to Montreal a dull and distant explosion told them that the mines had sprung. It proved afterwards that the destruction was not complete; and the Iroquois took possession of the abandoned fort, with a large quantity of stores and munitions left by the garrison in their too hasty retreat. [10] [9] Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Nov., 1689. [10] Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Nov., 1689; Recueil de ce qui s'est passé en Canada depuis l'année 1682. There was one ray of light through the clouds. The unwonted news of a victory came to Montreal. It was small, but decisive, and might be an earnest of greater things to come. Before Frontenac's arrival, Denonville had sent a reconnoitring party up the Ottawa. They had gone no farther than the Lake of Two Mountains, when they met twenty-two Iroquois in two large canoes, who immediately bore down upon them, yelling furiously. The French party consisted of twenty-eight coureurs de bois under Du Lhut and Mantet, excellent partisan chiefs, who man?uvred so well that the rising sun blazed full in the eyes of the advancing enemy, and spoiled their aim. The French received their fire, which wounded one man; then, closing with them while their guns were empty, gave them a volley, which killed and wounded eighteen of their number. One swam ashore. The remaining three were captured, and given to the Indian allies to be burned. [11] [11] Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Nov., 1689; Champigny au Ministre, 16 Nov., 1689. Compare Belmont, whose account is a little different; also N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 435. 194 This gleam of sunshine passed, and all grew black again. On a snowy November day, a troop of Iroquois fell on the settlement of La Chesnaye, burned the houses, and vanished with a troop of prisoners, leaving twenty mangled corpses on the snow. [12] "The terror," wrote the bishop, "is indescribable." The appearance of a few savages would put a whole neighborhood to flight. [13] So desperate, wrote Frontenac, were the needs of the colony, and so great the contempt with which the Iroquois regarded it, that it almost needed a miracle either to carry on war or make peace. What he most earnestly wished was to keep the Iroquois quiet, and so leave his hands free to deal with the English. This was not easy, to such a pitch of audacity had late events raised them. Neither his temper nor his convictions would allow him to beg peace of them, like his predecessor; but he had inordinate trust in the influence of his name, and he now took a course which he hoped might answer his purpose without increasing their insolence. The perfidious folly of Denonville in seizing their countrymen at Fort Frontenac had been a prime cause of their hostility; and, at the request of the late governor, the surviving captives, thirteen in all, had been taken from the galleys, gorgeously clad in French attire, and sent back to Canada in the ship which carried Frontenac. Among them was a famous Cayuga war-chief called 195 Ourehaoué, whose loss had infuriated the Iroquois. [14] Frontenac gained his good-will on the voyage; and, when they reached Quebec, he lodged him in the chateau, and treated him with such kindness that the chief became his devoted admirer and friend. As his influence was great among his people, Frontenac hoped that he might use him with success to bring about an accommodation. He placed three of the captives at the disposal of the Cayuga, who forthwith sent them to Onondaga with a message which the governor had dictated, and which was to the following effect: "The great Onontio, whom you all know, has come back again. He does not blame you for what you have done; for he looks upon you as foolish children, and blames only the English, who are the cause of your folly, and have made you forget your obedience to a father who has always loved and never deceived you. He will permit me, Ourehaoué, to return to you as soon as you will come to ask for me, not as you have spoken of late, but like children speaking to a father." [15] Frontenac hoped that they would send an embassy to reclaim their chief, and thus give him an opportunity to use his personal influence over them. With the three released captives, he sent an Iroquois convert named Cut Nose with a wampum belt to announce his return. [12] Belmont, Histoire du Canada; Frontenac à———, 17 Nov., 1689; Champigny au Ministre, 16 Nov., 1689. This letter is not the one just cited. Champigny wrote twice on the same day. [13] N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 435. [14] Ourehaoué was not one of the neutrals entrapped at Fort Frontenac, but was seized about the same time by the troops on their way up the St. Lawrence. [15] Frontenac au Ministre, 30 Avril, 1690. When the deputation arrived at Onondaga and made known their errand, the Iroquois 196 magnates, with their usual deliberation, deferred answering till a general council of the confederacy should have time to assemble; and, meanwhile, they sent messengers to ask the mayor of Albany, and others of their Dutch and English friends, to come to the meeting. They did not comply, merely sending the government interpreter, with a few Mohawk Indians, to represent their interests. On the other hand, the Jesuit Milet, who had been captured a few months before, adopted, and made an Oneida chief, used every effort to second the designs of Frontenac. The authorities of Albany tried in vain to induce the Iroquois to place him in their hands. They understood their interests too well, and held fast to the Jesuit. [16] [16] Milet was taken in 1689, not, as has been supposed, in 1690. Lettre du Père Milet, 1691, printed by Shea. The grand council took place at Onondaga on the twenty-second of January. Eighty chiefs and sachems, seated gravely on mats around the council fire, smoked their pipes in silence for a while; till at length an Onondaga orator rose, and announced that Frontenac, the old Onontio, had returned with Ourehaoué and twelve more of their captive friends, that he meant to rekindle the council fire at Fort Frontenac, and that he invited them to meet him there. [17] [17] Frontenac declares that he sent no such message, and intimates that Cut Nose had been tampered with by persons over-anxious to conciliate the Iroquois, and who had even gone so far as to send them messages on their own account. These persons were Lamberville, Fran?ois Hertel, and one of the Le Moynes. Frontenac was very angry at this interference, to which he ascribes the most mischievous consequences. 197 Cut Nose, or Nez Coupé, is called Adarahta by Colden, and Gagniegaton, or Red Bird, by some French writers. "Ho, ho, ho," returned the eighty senators, from the bottom of their throats. It was the unfailing Iroquois response to a speech. Then Cut Nose, the governor's messenger, addressed the council: "I advise you to meet Onontio as he desires. Do so, if you wish to live." He presented a wampum belt to confirm his words, and the conclave again returned the same guttural ejaculation. "Ourehaoué sends you this," continued Cut Nose, presenting another belt of wampum: "by it he advises you to listen to Onontio, if you wish to live." When the messenger from Canada had ceased, the messenger from Albany, a Mohawk Indian, rose and repeated word for word a speech confided to him by the mayor of that town, urging the Iroquois to close their ears against the invitations of Onontio. Next rose one Cannehoot, a sachem of the Senecas, charged with matters of grave import; for they involved no less than the revival of that scheme, so perilous to the French, of the union of the tribes of the Great Lakes in a triple alliance with the Iroquois and the English. These lake tribes, disgusted with the French, who, under Denonville, had left them to the mercy of the Iroquois, had been impelled, both by their fears and their interests, to make new advances to the confederacy, and had first addressed themselves to the Senecas, whom they had most cause to dread. They had given up some of the Iroquois prisoners 198 in their hands, and promised soon to give up the rest. A treaty had been made; and it was this event which the Seneca sachem now announced to the council. Having told the story to his assembled colleagues, he exhibited and explained the wampum belts and other tokens brought by the envoys from the lakes, who represented nine distinct tribes or bands from the region of Michillimackinac. By these tokens, the nine tribes declared that they came to learn wisdom of the Iroquois and the English; to wash off the war-paint, throw down the tomahawk, smoke the pipe of peace, and unite with them as one body. "Onontio is drunk," such was the interpretation of the fourth wampum belt; "but we, the tribes of Michillimackinac, wash our hands of all his actions. Neither we nor you must defile ourselves by listening to him." When the Seneca sachem had ended, and when the ejaculations that echoed his words had ceased, the belts were hung up before all the assembly, then taken down again, and distributed among the sachems of the five Iroquois tribes, excepting one, which was given to the messengers from Albany. Thus was concluded the triple alliance, which to Canada meant no less than ruin. "Brethren," said an Onondaga sachem, "we must hold fast to our brother Quider (Peter Schuyler, mayor of Albany) and look on Onontio as our enemy, for he is a cheat." Then they invited the interpreter from Albany to address the council, which he did, advising them 199 not to listen to the envoys from Canada. When he had ended, they spent some time in consultation among themselves, and at length agreed on the following message, addressed to Corlaer, or New York, and to Kinshon, the Fish, by which they meant New England, the authorities of which had sent them the image of a fish as a token of alliance: [18]— "Brethren, our council fire burns at Albany. We will not go to meet Onontio at Fort Frontenac. We will hold fast to the old chain of peace with Corlaer, and we will fight with Onontio. Brethren, we are glad to hear from you that you are preparing to make war on Canada, but tell us no lies. "Brother Kinshon, we hear that you mean to send soldiers against the Indians to the eastward; but we advise you, now that we are all united against the French, to fall upon them at once. Strike at the root: when the trunk is cut down, all the branches fall with it. "Courage, Corlaer! courage, Kinshon! Go to Quebec in the spring; take it, and you will have your feet on the necks of the French and all their friends." [18] The wooden image of a codfish still hangs in the State House at Boston, the emblem of a colony which lived chiefly by the fisheries. Then they consulted together again, and agreed on the following answer to Ourehaoué and Frontenac:— "Ourehaoué, the whole council is glad to hear that you have come back. 200 "Onontio, you have told us that you have come back again, and brought with you thirteen of our people who were carried prisoners to France. We are glad of it. You wish to speak with us at Cataraqui (Fort Frontenac). Don't you know that your council fire there is put out? It is quenched in blood. You must first send home the prisoners. When our brother Ourehaoué is returned to us, then we will talk with you of peace. You must send him and the others home this very winter. We now let you know that we have made peace with the tribes of Michillimackinac. You are not to think, because we return you an answer, that we have laid down the tomahawk. Our warriors will continue the war till you send our countrymen back to us." [19] [19] The account of this council is given, with condensation and the omission of parts not essential, from Colden (105-112, ed. 1747). It will serve as an example of the Iroquois method of conducting political business, the habitual regularity and decorum of which has drawn from several contemporary French writers the remark that in such matters the five tribes were savages only in name. The reply to Frontenac is also given by Monseignat (N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 465), and, after him, by La Potherie. Compare Le Clercq, établissement de la Foy, II. 403. Ourehaoué is the Tawerahet of Colden. The messengers from Canada returned with this reply. Unsatisfactory as it was, such a quantity of wampum was sent with it as showed plainly the importance attached by the Iroquois to the matters in question. Encouraged by a recent success against the English, and still possessed with an overweening confidence in his own influence over the confederates, Frontenac resolved that Ourehaoué should send them another message. The chief, whose devotion to the count never wavered, accordingly 201 despatched four envoys, with a load of wampum belts, expressing his astonishment that his countrymen had not seen fit to send a deputation of chiefs to receive him from the hands of Onontio, and calling upon them to do so without delay, lest he should think that they had forgotten him. Along with the messengers, Frontenac ventured to send the Chevalier d'Aux, a half-pay officer, with orders to observe the disposition of the Iroquois, and impress them in private talk with a sense of the count's power, of his good-will to them, and of the wisdom of coming to terms with him, lest, like an angry father, he should be forced at last to use the rod. The chevalier's reception was a warm one. They burned two of his attendants, forced him to run the gauntlet, and, after a vigorous thrashing, sent him prisoner to Albany. The last failure was worse than the first. The count's name was great among the Iroquois, but he had trusted its power too far. [20] [20] Message of Ourehaoué, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 735; Instructions to Chevalier d'Eau, Ibid., 733; Chevalier d'Aux au Ministre, 15 Mai, 1693. The chevalier's name is also written d'O, He himself wrote it as in the text. The worst of news had come from Michillimackinac. La Durantaye, the commander of the post, and Carheil, the Jesuit, had sent a messenger to Montreal in the depth of winter to say that the tribes around them were on the point of revolt. Carheil wrote that they threatened openly to throw themselves into the arms of the Iroquois and the English; that they declared that the protection of Onontio was an illusion and a snare; that they 202 once mistook the French for warriors, but saw now that they were no match for the Iroquois, whom they had tamely allowed to butcher them at Montreal, without even daring to defend themselves; that when the French invaded the Senecas they did nothing but cut down corn and break canoes, and since that time they had done nothing but beg peace for themselves, forgetful of their allies, whom they expected to bear the brunt of the war, and then left to their fate; that they had surrendered through cowardice the prisoners they had caught by treachery, and this, too, at a time when the Iroquois were burning French captives in all their towns; and, finally, that, as the French would not or could not make peace for them, they would make peace for themselves. "These," pursued Carheil, "are the reasons they give us to prove the necessity of their late embassy to the Senecas; and by this one can see that our Indians are a great deal more clear-sighted than they are thought to be, and that it is hard to conceal from their penetration any thing that can help or harm their interests. What is certain is that, if the Iroquois are not stopped, they will not fail to come and make themselves masters here." [21] Carheil à Frontenac, 1690. Frontenac did not receive this letter till September, and acted on the information previously sent him. Charlevoix's version of the letter does not conform with the original. Charlevoix thinks that Frontenac was not displeased at this bitter arraignment of his predecessor's administration. At the same time, his position was very embarrassing. He had no men 203 to spare; but such was the necessity of saving Michillimackinac, and breaking off the treaty with the Senecas, that when spring opened he sent Captain Louvigny with a hundred and forty-three Canadians and six Indians to reinforce the post and replace its commander, La Durantaye. Two other officers with an additional force were ordered to accompany him through the most dangerous part of the journey. With them went Nicolas Perrot, bearing a message from the count to his rebellious children of Michillimackinac. The following was the pith of this characteristic document:— "I am astonished to learn that you have forgotten the protection that I always gave you. Do you think that I am no longer alive; or that I have a mind to stand idle, like those who have been here in my place? Or do you think that, if eight or ten hairs have been torn from my children's heads when I was absent, I cannot put ten handfuls of hair in the place of every one that was pulled out? You know that before I protected you the ravenous Iroquois dog was biting everybody. I tamed him and tied him up; but, when he no longer saw me, he behaved worse than ever. If he persists, he shall feel my power. The English have tried to win him by flatteries, but I will kill all who encourage him. The English have deceived and devoured their children, but I am a good father who loves you. I loved the Iroquois once, because they obeyed me. When I knew that they had been treacherously captured and carried 204 to France, I set them free; and, when I restore them to their country, it will not be through fear, but through pity, for I hate treachery. I am strong enough to kill the English, destroy the Iroquois, and whip you, if you fail in your duty to me. The Iroquois have killed and captured you in time of peace. Do to them as they have done to you, do to the English as they would like to do to you, but hold fast to your true father, who will never abandon you. Will you let the English brandy that has killed you in your wigwams lure you into the kettles of the Iroquois? Is not mine better, which has never killed you, but always made you strong?" [22] [22] Parole (de M. de Frontenac) qui doit être dite à l'Outaouais pour le dissuader de l'Alliance qu'il vent faire avec l'Iroquois et l'Anglois. The message is long. Only the principal points are given above. Charged with this haughty missive, Perrot set out for Michillimackinac along with Louvigny and his men. On their way up the Ottawa, they met a large band of Iroquois hunters, whom they routed with heavy loss. Nothing could have been more auspicious for Perrot's errand. When towards midsummer they reached their destination, they ranged their canoes in a triumphal procession, placed in the foremost an Iroquois captured in the fight, forced him to dance and sing, hung out the fleur-de-lis, shouted Vive le Roi, whooped, yelled, and fired their guns. As they neared the village of the Ottawas, all the naked population ran down to the shore, leaping, yelping, and firing, in return. Louvigny and his men passed on, and landed at the 205 neighboring village of the French settlers, who, drawn up in battle array on the shore, added more yells and firing to the general uproar; though, amid this joyous fusillade of harmless gunpowder, they all kept their bullets ready for instant use, for they distrusted the savage multitude. The story of the late victory, however, confirmed as it was by an imposing display of scalps, produced an effect which averted the danger of an immediate outbreak. The fate of the Iroquois prisoner now became the point at issue. The French hoped that the Indians in their excitement could be induced to put him to death, and thus break their late treaty with his countrymen. Besides the Ottawas, there was at Michillimackinac a village of Hurons under their crafty chief, the Rat. They had pretended to stand fast for the French, who nevertheless believed them to be at the bottom of all the mischief. They now begged for the prisoner, promising to burn him. On the faith of this pledge, he was given to them; but they broke their word, and kept him alive, in order to curry favor with the Iroquois. The Ottawas, intensely jealous of the preference shown to the Hurons, declared in their anger that the prisoner ought to be killed and eaten. This was precisely what the interests of the French demanded; but the Hurons still persisted in protecting him. Their Jesuit missionary now interposed, and told them that, unless they "put the Iroquois into the kettle," the French would take him from them. After much discussion, this argument prevailed. They planted a stake, 206 tied him to it, and began to torture him; but, as he did not show the usual fortitude of his countrymen, they declared him unworthy to die the death of a warrior, and accordingly shot him. [23] [23] "Le Père Missionnaire des Hurons, prévoyant que cette affaire auroit peut-être une suite qui pourrait être préjudiciable aux soins qu'il prenoit de leur instruction, demanda qu'il lui fut permis d'aller à leur village pour les obliger de trouver quelque moyen qui fut capable d'appaiser le ressentiment des Fran?ois. Il leur dit que ceux-ci vouloient absolument que l'on mit l'Iroquois à la chaudière, et que si on ne le faisoit, on devoit venir le leur enlever." La Potherie, II. 237 (1722). By the "result prejudicial to his cares for their instruction" he seems to mean their possible transfer from French to English influences. The expression mettre à la chaudière, though derived from cannibal practices, is often used figuratively for torturing and killing. The missionary in question was either Carheil or another Jesuit, who must have acted with his sanction. Here was a point gained for the French, but the danger was not passed. The Ottawas could disavow the killing of the Iroquois; and, in fact, though there was a great division of opinion among them, they were preparing at this very time to send a secret embassy to the Seneca country to ratify the fatal treaty. The French commanders called a council of all the tribes. It met at the house of the Jesuits. Presents in abundance were distributed. The message of Frontenac was reinforced by persuasion and threats; and the assembly was told that the five tribes of the Iroquois were like five nests of muskrats in a marsh, which the French would drain dry, and then burn with all its inhabitants. Perrot took the disaffected chiefs aside, and with his usual bold adroitness diverted them for the moment from their purpose. The projected embassy was stopped, but any day might revive it. There was no safety for the French, 207 and the ground of Michillimackinac was hollow under their feet. Every thing depended on the success of their arms. A few victories would confirm their wavering allies; but the breath of another defeat would blow the fickle crew over to the enemy like a drift of dry leaves. CHAPTER XI. 1690. The Three War-parties. Measures of Frontenac ? Expedition against Schenectady ? The March ? The Dutch Village ? The Surprise ? The Massacre ? Prisoners spared ? Retreat ? The English and their Iroquois Friends ? The Abenaki War ? Revolution at Boston ? Capture of Pemaquid ? Capture of Salmon Falls ? Capture of Fort Loyal ? Frontenac and his Prisoner ? The Canadians encouraged. While striving to reclaim his allies, Frontenac had not forgotten his enemies. It was of the last necessity to revive the dashed spirits of the Canadians and the troops; and action, prompt and bold, was the only means of doing so. He resolved, therefore, to take the offensive, not against the Iroquois, who seemed invulnerable as ghosts, but against the English; and by striking a few sharp and rapid blows to teach both friends and foes that Onontio was still alive. The effect of his return had already begun to appear, and the energy and fire of the undaunted veteran had shot new life into the dejected population. He formed three war-parties of picked men, one at Montreal, one at Three Rivers, and one at Quebec; the first to strike at Albany, the second at the 209 border settlements of New Hampshire, and the third at those of Maine. That of Montreal was ready first. It consisted of two hundred and ten men, of whom ninety-six were Indian converts, chiefly from the two mission villages of Saut St. Louis and the Mountain of Montreal. They were Christian Iroquois whom the priests had persuaded to leave their homes and settle in Canada, to the great indignation of their heathen countrymen, and the great annoyance of the English colonists, to whom they were a constant menace. When Denonville attacked the Senecas, they had joined him; but of late they had shown reluctance to fight their heathen kinsmen, with whom the French even suspected them of collusion. Against the English, however, they willingly took up the hatchet. The French of the party were for the most part coureurs de bois. As the sea is the sailor's element, so the forest was theirs. Their merits were hardihood and skill in woodcraft; their chief faults were insubordination and lawlessness. They had shared the general demoralization that followed the inroad of the Iroquois, and under Denonville had proved mutinous and unmanageable. In the best times, it was a hard task to command them, and one that needed, not bravery alone, but tact, address, and experience. Under a chief of such a stamp, they were admirable bushfighters, and such were those now chosen to lead them. D'Aillebout de Mantet and Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène, the brave son of Charles Le Moyne, had the chief command, supported by the brothers 210 Le Moyne d'Iberville and Le Moyne de Bienville, with Repentigny de Montesson, Le Ber du Chesne, and others of the sturdy Canadian noblesse, nerved by adventure and trained in Indian warfare. [1] [1] Relation de Monseignat, 1689-90. There is a translation of this valuable paper in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 462. The party, according to three of their number, consisted at first of 160 French and 140 Christian Indians, but was reduced by sickness and desertion to 250 in all. Examination of three French prisoners taken by ye. Maquas (Mohawks), and brought to Skinnectady, who were examined by Peter Schuyler, Mayor of Albany, Domine Godevridus Dellius, and some of ye. Gentlen. that went from Albany a purpose. It was the depth of winter when they began their march, striding on snow-shoes over the vast white field of the frozen St. Lawrence, each with the hood of his blanket coat drawn over his head, a gun in his mittened hand, a knife, a hatchet, a tobacco pouch, and a bullet pouch at his belt, a pack on his shoulders, and his inseparable pipe hung at his neck in a leather case. They dragged their blankets and provisions over the snow on Indian sledges. Crossing the forest to Chambly, they advanced four or five days up the frozen Richelieu and the frozen Lake Champlain, and then stopped to hold a council. Frontenac had left the precise point of attack at the discretion of the leaders, and thus far the men had been ignorant of their destination. The Indians demanded to know it. Mantet and Sainte-Hélène replied that they were going to Albany. The Indians demurred. "How long is it," asked one of them, "since the French grew so bold?" The commanders answered that, to regain the honor of which their late misfortunes had robbed them, the French would take Albany or die in the attempt. The 211 Indians listened sullenly; the decision was postponed, and the party moved forward again. When after eight days they reached the Hudson, and found the place where two paths diverged, the one for Albany and the other for Schenectady, they all without farther words took the latter. Indeed, to attempt Albany would have been an act of desperation. The march was horrible. There was a partial thaw, and they waded knee-deep through the half melted snow, and the mingled ice, mud, and water of the gloomy swamps. So painful and so slow was their progress, that it was nine days more before they reached a point two leagues from Schenectady. The weather had changed again, and a cold, gusty snow-storm pelted them. It was one of those days when the trees stand white as spectres in the sheltered hollows of the forest, and bare and gray on the wind-swept ridges. The men were half dead with cold, fatigue, and hunger. It was four in the afternoon of the eighth of February. The scouts found an Indian hut, and in it were four Iroquois squaws, whom they captured. There was a fire in the wigwam; and the shivering Canadians crowded about it, stamping their chilled feet and warming their benumbed hands over the blaze. The Christian chief of the Saut St. Louis, known as Le Grand Agnié, or the Great Mohawk, by the French, and by the Dutch called Kryn, harangued his followers, and exhorted them to wash out their wrongs in blood. Then they all advanced again, and about dark reached the river Mohawk, a little above the village. A 212 Canadian named Gignières, who had gone with nine Indians to reconnoitre, now returned to say that he had been within sight of Schenectady, and had seen nobody. Their purpose had been to postpone the attack till two o'clock in the morning; but the situation was intolerable, and the limit of human endurance was reached. They could not make fires, and they must move on or perish. Guided by the frightened squaws, they crossed the Mohawk on the ice, toiling through the drifts amid the whirling snow that swept down the valley of the darkened stream, till about eleven o'clock they descried through the storm the snow-beplastered palisades of the devoted village. Such was their plight that some of them afterwards declared that they would all have surrendered if an enemy had appeared to summon them. [2] [2] Colden, 114 (ed. 1747). Schenectady was the farthest outpost of the colony of New York. Westward lay the Mohawk forests; and Orange, or Albany, was fifteen miles or more towards the south-east. The village was oblong in form, and enclosed by a palisade which had two gates, one towards Albany and the other towards the Mohawks. There was a blockhouse near the eastern gate, occupied by eight or nine Connecticut militia men under Lieutenant Talmage. There were also about thirty friendly Mohawks in the place, on a visit. The inhabitants, who were all Dutch, were in a state of discord and confusion. The revolution in England had produced a revolution in New York. The demagogue Jacob Leisler had got possession 213 of Fort William, and was endeavoring to master the whole colony. Albany was in the hands of the anti-Leisler or conservative party, represented by a convention of which Peter Schuyler was the chief. The Dutch of Schenectady for the most part favored Leisler, whose emissaries had been busily at work among them; but their chief magistrate, John Sander Glen, a man of courage and worth, stood fast for the Albany convention, and in consequence the villagers had threatened to kill him. Talmage and his Connecticut militia were under orders from Albany; and therefore, like Glen, they were under the popular ban. In vain the magistrate and the officer entreated the people to stand on their guard. They turned the advice to ridicule, laughed at the idea of danger, left both their gates wide open, and placed there, it is said, two snow images as mock sentinels. A French account declares that the village contained eighty houses, which is certainly an exaggeration. There had been some festivity during the evening, but it was now over; and the primitive villagers, fathers, mothers, children, and infants, lay buried in unconscious sleep. They were simple peasants and rude woodsmen, but with human affections and capable of human woe. The French and Indians stood before the open gate, with its blind and dumb warder, the mock sentinel of snow. Iberville went with a detachment to find the Albany gate, and bar it against the escape of fugitives; but he missed it in the gloom, and hastened back. The assailants were 214 now formed into two bands, Sainte-Hélène leading the one and Mantet the other. They passed through the gate together in dead silence: one turned to the right and the other to the left, and they filed around the village between the palisades and the houses till the two leaders met at the farther end. Thus the place was completely surrounded. The signal was then given: they all screeched the war-whoop together, burst in the doors with hatchets, and fell to their work. Roused by the infernal din, the villagers leaped from their beds. For some it was but a momentary nightmare of fright and horror, ended by the blow of the tomahawk. Others were less fortunate. Neither women nor children were spared. "No pen can write, and no tongue express," wrote Schuyler, "the cruelties that were committed." [3] There was little resistance, except at the blockhouse, where Talmage and his men made a stubborn fight; but the doors were at length forced open, the defenders killed or taken, and the building set on fire. Adam Vrooman, one of the villagers, saw his wife shot and his child brained against the door-post; but he fought so desperately that the assailants promised him his life. Orders had been given to spare Peter Tassemaker, the domine or minister, from whom it was thought that valuable information might be obtained; but 215 he was hacked to pieces, and his house burned. Some, more agile or more fortunate than the rest, escaped at the eastern gate, and fled through the storm to seek shelter at Albany or at houses along the way. Sixty persons were killed outright, of whom thirty-eight were men and boys, ten were women, and twelve were children. [4] The number captured appears to have been between eighty and ninety. The thirty Mohawks in the town were treated with studied kindness by the victors, who declared that they had no quarrel with them, but only with the Dutch and English. [3] "The women bigg with Childe rip'd up, and the Children alive throwne into the flames, and their heads dashed to pieces against the Doors and windows." Schuyler to the Council of Connecticut, 15 Feb., 1690. Similar statements are made by Leisler. See Doc. Hist. N. Y., I. 307, 310. [4] List of ye. People kild and destroyed by ye. French of Canida and there Indians at Skinnechtady, in Doc. Hist. N. Y., I. 304. The massacre and pillage continued two hours; then the prisoners were secured, sentinels posted, and the men told to rest and refresh themselves. In the morning, a small party crossed the river to the house of Glen, which stood on a rising ground half a mile distant. It was loopholed and palisaded; and Glen had mustered his servants and tenants, closed his gates, and prepared to defend himself. The French told him to fear nothing, for they had orders not to hurt a chicken of his; whereupon, after requiring them to lay down their arms, he allowed them to enter. They urged him to go with them to the village, and he complied; they on their part leaving one of their number as a hostage in the hands of his followers. Iberville appeared at the gate with the Great Mohawk, and, drawing his commission from the breast of his coat, told 216 Glen that he was specially charged to pay a debt which the French owed him. On several occasions, he had saved the lives of French prisoners in the hands of the Mohawks; and he, with his family, and, above all, his wife, had shown them the greatest kindness. He was now led before the crowd of wretched prisoners, and told that not only were his own life and property safe, but that all his kindred should be spared. Glen stretched his privilege to the utmost, till the French Indians, disgusted at his multiplied demands for clemency, observed that everybody seemed to be his relation. Some of the houses had already been burned. Fire was now set to the rest, excepting one, in which a French officer lay wounded, another belonging to Glen, and three or four more which he begged the victors to spare. At noon Schenectady was in ashes. Then the French and Indians withdrew, laden with booty. Thirty or forty captured horses dragged their sledges; and a troop of twenty-seven men and boys were driven prisoners into the forest. About sixty old men, women, and children were left behind, without farther injury, in order, it is said, to conciliate the Mohawks in the place, who had joined with Glen in begging that they might be spared. Of the victors, only two had been killed. [5] [5] Many of the authorities on the burning of Schenectady will be found in the Documentary History of New York, I. 297-312. One of the most important is a portion of the long letter of M. de Monseignat, comptroller-general of the marine in Canada, to a lady of rank, said to be Madame de Maintenon. Others are contemporary documents preserved 217 at Albany, including, among others, the lists of killed and captured, letters of Leisler to the governor of Maryland, the governor of Massachusetts, the governor of Barbadoes, and the Bishop of Salisbury; of Robert Livingston to Sir Edmund Andros and to Captain Nicholson; and of Mr. Van Cortlandt to Sir Edmund Andros. One of the best contemporary authorities is a letter of Schuyler and his colleagues to the governor and council of Massachusetts, 15 February, 1690, preserved in the Massachusetts archives, and printed in the third volume of Mr. Whitmore's Andros Tracts. La Potherie, Charlevoix, Colden, Smith, and many others, give accounts at second-hand. Johannes Sander, or Alexander, Glen, was the son of a Scotchman of good family. He was usually known as Captain Sander. The French wrote the name Cendre, which became transformed into Condre, and then into Coudre. In the old family Bible of the Glens, still preserved at the place named by them Scotia, near Schenectady, is an entry in Dutch recording the "murders" committed by the French, and the exemption accorded to Alexander Glen on account of services rendered by him and his family to French prisoners. See Proceedings of N. Y. Hist. Soc., 1846, 118. The French called Schenectady Corlaer or Corlar, from Van Curler, its founder. Its treatment at their hands was ill deserved, as its inhabitants, and notably Van Curler himself, had from the earliest times been the protectors of French captives among the Mohawks. Leisler says that only one-sixth of the inhabitants escaped unhurt. At the outset of the attack, Simon Schermerhorn threw himself on a horse, and galloped through the eastern gate. The French shot at and wounded him; but he escaped, reached Albany at daybreak, and gave the alarm. The soldiers and inhabitants were called to arms, cannon were fired to rouse the country, and a party of horsemen, followed by some friendly Mohawks, set out for Schenectady. The Mohawks had promised to carry the news to their three towns on the river above; but, when they reached the ruined village, they were so frightened at the scene of havoc that they would not go farther. Two days passed before the alarm reached the Mohawk towns. Then troops of warriors came down on 218 snow-shoes, equipped with tomahawk and gun, to chase the retiring French. Fifty young men from Albany joined them; and they followed the trail of the enemy, who, with the help of their horses, made such speed over the ice of Lake Champlain that it seemed impossible to overtake them. They thought the pursuit abandoned; and, having killed and eaten most of their horses, and being spent with fatigue, they moved more slowly as they neared home, when a band of Mohawks, who had followed stanchly on their track, fell upon a party of stragglers, and killed or captured fifteen or more, almost within sight of Montreal. Three of these prisoners, examined by Schuyler, declared that Frontenac was preparing for a grand attack on Albany in the spring. In the political confusion of the time, the place was not in fighting condition; and Schuyler appealed for help to the authorities of Massachusetts. "Dear neighbours and friends, we must acquaint you that nevir poor People in the world was in a worse Condition than we are at Present, no Governour nor Command, no money to forward any expedition, and scarce Men enough to maintain the Citty. We have here plainly laid the case before you, and doubt not but you will so much take it to heart, and make all Readinesse in the Spring to invade Canida by water." [6] The Mohawks were of the same mind. Their elders came down to Albany to condole with their Dutch and English 219 friends on the late disaster. "We are come," said their orator, "with tears in our eyes, to lament the murders committed at Schenectady by the perfidious French. Onontio comes to our country to speak of peace, but war is at his heart. He has broken into our house at both ends, once among the Senecas and once here; but we hope to be revenged. Brethren, our covenant with you is a silver chain that cannot rust or break. We are of the race of the bear; and the bear does not yield, so long as there is a drop of blood in his body. Let us all be bears. We will go together with an army to ruin the country of the French. Therefore, send in all haste to New England. Let them be ready with ships and great guns to attack by water, while we attack by land." [7] Schuyler did not trust his red allies, who, however, seem on this occasion to have meant what they said. He lost no time in sending commissioners to urge the several governments of New England to a combined attack on the French. [6] Schuyler, Wessell, and Van Rensselaer to the Governor and Council of Massachusetts, 15 Feb., 1690, in Andros Tracts, III. 114. [7] Propositions made by the Sachems of ye. Maquase (Mohawk) Castles to ye. Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonality of ye. Citty of Albany, ye. 25 day of february, 1690, in Doc. Hist. N. Y., II. 164-169. New England needed no prompting to take up arms; for she presently learned to her cost that, though feeble and prostrate, Canada could sting. The war-party which attacked Schenectady was, as we have seen, but one of three which Frontenac had sent against the English borders. The second, aimed at New Hampshire, left Three Rivers on the twenty-eighth of January, commanded by Fran?ois 220 Hertel. It consisted of twenty-four Frenchmen, twenty Abenakis of the Sokoki band, and five Algonquins. After three months of excessive hardship in the vast and rugged wilderness that intervened, they approached the little settlement of Salmon Falls on the stream which separates New Hampshire from Maine; and here for a moment we leave them, to observe the state of this unhappy frontier. It was twelve years and more since the great Indian outbreak, called King Philip's War, had carried havoc through all the borders of New England. After months of stubborn fighting, the fire was quenched in Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut; but in New Hampshire and Maine it continued to burn fiercely till the treaty of Casco, in 1678. The principal Indians of this region were the tribes known collectively as the Abenakis. The French had established relations with them through the missionaries; and now, seizing the opportunity, they persuaded many of these distressed and exasperated savages to leave the neighborhood of the English, migrate to Canada, and settle first at Sillery near Quebec and then at the falls of the Chaudière. Here the two Jesuits, Jacques and Vincent Bigot, prime agents in their removal, took them in charge; and the missions of St. Francis became villages of Abenaki Christians, like the village of Iroquois Christians at Saut St. Louis. In both cases, the emigrants were sheltered under the wing of Canada; and they and their tomahawks were always at her service. The two Bigots spared 221 no pains to induce more of the Abenakis to join these mission colonies. They were in good measure successful, though the great body of the tribe still clung to their ancient homes on the Saco, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot. [8] [8] The Abenaki migration to Canada began as early as the autumn of 1675 (Relation, 1676-77). On the mission of St. Francis on the Chaudière, see Bigot, Relation, 1684; Ibid., 1685. It was afterwards removed to the river St. Francis. There were ten years of critical and dubious peace along the English border, and then the war broke out again. The occasion of this new uprising is not very clear, and it is hardly worth while to look for it. Between the harsh and reckless borderer on the one side, and the fierce savage on the other, a single spark might at any moment set the frontier in a blaze. The English, however, believed firmly that their French rivals had a hand in the new outbreak; and, in fact, the Abenakis told some of their English captives that Saint-Castin, a French adventurer on the Penobscot, gave every Indian who would go to the war a pound of gunpowder, two pounds of lead, and a supply of tobacco. [9] The trading house of Saint-Castin, which stood on ground claimed by England, had lately been plundered by Sir Edmund Andros, and some of the English had foretold that an Indian war would be the consequence; but none of them seem at this time to have suspected that the governor of Canada and his Jesuit friends had any part in their woes. Yet there is proof that this was the case; 222 for Denonville himself wrote to the minister at Versailles that the successes of the Abenakis on this occasion were due to the "good understanding which he had with them," by means of the two brothers Bigot and other Jesuits. [10] [9] Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., I. 326. Compare N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. 282, 476. [10] "En partant de Canada, j'ay laissé une très grande disposition à attirer au Christianisme la plus grande partie des sauvages Abenakis qui abitent les bois du voisinage de Baston. Pour cela il faut les attirer à la mission nouvellement établie près Québec sous le nom de S. Fran?ois de Sale. Je l'ai vue en peu de temps au nombre de six cents ames venues du voisinage de Baston. Je l'ay laissée en estat d'augmenter beaucoup si elle est protegée; j'y ai fait quelque dépense qui n'est pas inutile. La bonne intelligence que j'ai eue avec ces sauvages par les soins des Jésuites, et surtout des deux pères Bigot frères a fait le succès de toutes les attaques qu'ils ont faites sur les Anglois cet esté, aux quels ils ont enlevé 16 forts, outre celuy de Pemcuit (Pemaquid) ou il y avoit 20 pièces de canon, et leur ont tué plus de 200 hommes." Denonville au Ministre, Jan., 1690. It is to be observed that this Indian outbreak began in the summer of 1688, when there was peace between France and England. News of the declaration of war did not reach Canada till July, 1689. (Belmont.) Dover and other places were attacked in June of the same year. The intendant Champigny says that most of the Indians who attacked the English were from the mission villages near Quebec. Champigny au Ministre, 16 Nov., 1689. He says also that he supplied them with gunpowder for the war. The "forts" taken by the Indians on the Kennebec at this time were nothing but houses protected by palisades. They were taken by treachery and surprise. Lettre du Père Thury, 1689. Thury says that 142 men, women, and children were killed. Whatever were the influences that kindled and maintained the war, it spread dismay and havoc through the English settlements. Andros at first made light of it, and complained of the authorities of Boston, because in his absence they had sent troops to protect the settlers; but he soon changed his mind, and in the winter went himself to the scene of action with seven hundred men. Not an Indian did he find. They had all withdrawn into 223 the depths of the frozen forest. Andros did what he could, and left more than five hundred men in garrison on the Kennebec and the Saco, at Casco Bay, Pemaquid, and various other exposed points. He then returned to Boston, where surprising events awaited him. Early in April, news came that the Prince of Orange had landed in England. There was great excitement. The people of the town rose against Andros, whom they detested as the agent of the despotic policy of James II. They captured his two forts with their garrisons of regulars, seized his frigate in the harbor, placed him and his chief adherents in custody, elected a council of safety, and set at its head their former governor, Bradstreet, an old man of eighty-seven. The change was disastrous to the eastern frontier. Of the garrisons left for its protection the winter before, some were partially withdrawn by the new council; while others, at the first news of the revolution, mutinied, seized their officers, and returned home. [11] These garrisons were withdrawn or reduced, 224 partly perhaps because the hated governor had established them, partly through distrust of his officers, some of whom were taken from the regulars, and partly because the men were wanted at Boston. The order of withdrawal cannot be too strongly condemned. It was a part of the bungling inefficiency which marked the military management of the New England governments from the close of Philip's war to the peace of Utrecht. [11] Andros, Account of Forces in Maine, in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., I. 85. Compare Andros Tracts, I. 177; Ibid., II. 181, 193, 207, 213, 217; Ibid., III. 232; Report of Andros in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 722. The order for the reduction of the garrisons and the return of the suspected officers was passed at the first session of the council of safety, 20 April. The agents of Massachusetts at London endeavored to justify it. See Andros Tracts, III. 34. The only regular troops in New England were two companies brought by Andros. Most of them were kept at Boston, though a few men and officers were sent to the eastern garrison. These regulars were regarded with great jealousy, and denounced as "a crew that began to teach New England to Drab, Drink, Blaspheme, Curse, and Damm." Ibid., II. 59. In their hatred of Andros, many of the people of New England held the groundless and foolish belief that he was in secret collusion with the French and Indians. Their most dangerous domestic enemies were some of their own traders, who covertly sold arms and ammunition to the Indians. When spring opened, the Indians turned with redoubled fury against the defenceless frontier, seized the abandoned stockades, and butchered the helpless settlers. Now occurred the memorable catastrophe at Cocheco, or Dover. Two squaws came at evening and begged lodging in the palisaded house of Major Waldron. At night, when all was still, they opened the gates and let in their savage countrymen. Waldron was eighty years old. He leaped from his bed, seized his sword, and drove back the assailants through two rooms; but, as he turned to snatch his pistols, they stunned him by the blow of a hatchet, bound him in an arm-chair, and placed him on a table, where after torturing him they killed him with his own sword. The crowning event of the war was the capture of Pemaquid, a stockade work, mounted with seven or eight cannon. Andros had placed in it a garrison of a hundred and fifty-six men, under an officer devoted to him. Most of them had been withdrawn by the council of safety; and the entire force of the defenders consisted of Lieutenant James Weems and thirty soldiers, nearly half of whom 225 appear to have been absent at the time of the attack. [12] The Indian assailants were about a hundred in number, all Christian converts from mission villages. By a sudden rush, they got possession of a number of houses behind the fort, occupied only by women and children, the men being at their work. [13] Some ensconced themselves in the cellars, and others behind a rock on the seashore, whence they kept up a close and galling fire. On the next day, Weems surrendered, under a promise of life, and, as the English say, of liberty to himself and all his followers. The fourteen men who had survived the fire, along with a number of women and children, issued from the gate, upon which some were butchered on the spot, and the rest, excepting Weems and a few others, were made prisoners. In other respects, the behavior of the victors is said to have been creditable. They tortured nobody, and their chiefs broke the rum barrels in the fort, to prevent disorder. Father Thury, a priest of the seminary of Quebec, was present at the attack; and the assailants were a part of his Abenaki flock. Religion was one of the impelling forces of the war. In the eyes of the Indian converts, it 226 was a crusade against the enemies of God. They made their vows to the Virgin before the fight; and the squaws, in their distant villages on the Penobscot, told unceasing beads, and offered unceasing prayers for victory. [14] [12] Andros in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., I. 85. The original commanding officer, Brockholes, was reputed a "papist." Hence his removal. Andros Tracts, III. 35. Andros says that but eighteen men were left in the fort. A list of them in the archives of Massachusetts, certified by Weems himself, shows that there were thirty. Doubt is thrown on this certificate by the fact that the object of it was to obtain a grant of money in return for advances of pay made by Weems to his soldiers. Weems was a regular officer. A number of letters from him, showing his condition before the attack, will be found in Johnston, History of Bristol, Bremen, and Pemaquid. [13] Captivity of John Gyles. Gyles was one of the inhabitants. [14] Thury, Relation du Combat des Canibas. Compare Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., I. 352, and Mather, Magnalia, II. 590 (ed. 1853). The murder of prisoners after the capitulation has been denied. Thury incidentally confirms the statement, when, after saying that he exhorted the Indians to refrain from drunkenness and cruelty, he adds that, in consequence, they did not take a single scalp, and "tuèrent sur le champ ceux qu'ils voulurent tuer." English accounts place the number of Indians at from two to three hundred. Besides the persons taken in the fort, a considerable number were previously killed, or captured in the houses and fields. Those who were spared were carried to the Indian towns on the Penobscot, the seat of Thury's mission. La Motte-Cadillac, in his Mémoire sur l'Acadie, 1692, says that 80 persons in all were killed; an evident exaggeration. He adds that Weems and six men were spared at the request of the chief, Madockawando. The taking of Pemaquid is remarkable as one of the very rare instances in which Indians have captured a fortified place otherwise than by treachery or surprise. The exploit was undoubtedly due to French prompting. We shall see hereafter with what energy and success Thury incited his flock to war. The war now ran like wildfire through the settlements of Maine and New Hampshire. Sixteen fortified houses, with or without defenders, are said to have fallen into the hands of the enemy; and the extensive district then called the county of Cornwall was turned to desolation. Massachusetts and Plymouth sent hasty levies of raw men, ill-armed and ill-officered, to the scene of action. At Casco Bay, they met a large body of Indians, whom they routed after a desultory fight of six hours; and then, as the approaching winter seemed to promise a respite from attack, most of them were withdrawn and disbanded. 227 It was a false and fatal security. Through snow and ice and storm, Hertel and his band were moving on their prey. On the night of the twenty-seventh of March, they lay hidden in the forest that bordered the farms and clearings of Salmon Falls. Their scouts reconnoitred the place, and found a fortified house with two stockade forts, built as a refuge for the settlers in case of alarm. Towards daybreak, Hertel, dividing his followers into three parties, made a sudden and simultaneous attack. The settlers, unconscious of danger, were in their beds. No watch was kept even in the so-called forts; and, when the French and Indians burst in, there was no time for their few tenants to gather for defence. The surprise was complete; and, after a short struggle, the assailants were successful at every point. They next turned upon the scattered farms of the neighborhood, burned houses, barns, and cattle, and laid the entire settlement in ashes. About thirty persons of both sexes and all ages were tomahawked or shot; and fifty-four, chiefly women and children, were made prisoners. Two Indian scouts now brought word that a party of English was advancing to the scene of havoc from Piscataqua, or Portsmouth, not many miles distant. Hertel called his men together, and began his retreat. The pursuers, a hundred and forty in number, overtook him about sunset at Wooster River, where the swollen stream was crossed by a narrow bridge. Hertel and his followers made a stand on the farther bank, killed and wounded a number of the English 228 as they attempted to cross, kept up a brisk fire on the rest, held them in check till night, and then continued their retreat. The prisoners, or some of them, were given to the Indians, who tortured one or more of the men, and killed and tormented children and infants with a cruelty not always equalled by their heathen countrymen. [15] [15] The archives of Massachusetts contain various papers on the disaster at Salmon Falls. Among them is the report of the authorities of Portsmouth to the governor and council at Boston, giving many particulars, and asking aid. They estimate the killed and captured at upwards of eighty, of whom about one fourth were men. They say that about twenty houses were burnt, and mention but one fort. The other, mentioned in the French accounts, was, probably a palisaded house. Speaking of the combat at the bridge, they say, "We fought as long as we could distinguish friend from foe. We lost two killed and six or seven wounded, one mortally." The French accounts say fourteen. This letter is accompanied by the examination of a French prisoner, taken the same day. Compare Mather, Magnalia, II. 595; Belknap, Hist. New Hampshire, I. 207; Journal of Rev. John Pike (Proceedings of Mass. Hist. Soc. 1875); and the French accounts of Monseignat and La Potherie. Charlevoix adds various embellishments, not to be found in the original sources. Later writers copy and improve upon him, until Hertel is pictured as charging the pursuers sword in hand, while the English fly in disorder before him. Hertel continued his retreat to one of the Abenaki villages on the Kennebec. Here he learned that a band of French and Indians had lately passed southward on their way to attack the English fort at Casco Bay, on the site of Portland. Leaving at the village his eldest son, who had been badly wounded at Wooster River, he set out to join them with thirty-six of his followers. The band in question was Frontenac's third war-party. It consisted of fifty French and sixty Abenakis from the mission of St. Francis; and it had left Quebec in January, under a Canadian officer named 229 Portneuf and his lieutenant, Courtemanche. They advanced at their leisure, often stopping to hunt, till in May they were joined on the Kennebec by a large body of Indian warriors. On the twenty-fifth, Portneuf encamped in the forest near the English forts, with a force which, including Hertel's party, the Indians of the Kennebec, and another band led by Saint-Castin from the Penobscot, amounted to between four and five hundred men. [16] [16] Declaration of Sylvanus Davis; Mather, Magnalia, II. 603. Fort Loyal was a palisade work with eight cannon, standing on rising ground by the shore of the bay, at what is now the foot of India Street in the city of Portland. Not far distant were four blockhouses and a village which they were designed to protect. These with the fort were occupied by about a hundred men, chiefly settlers of the neighborhood, under Captain Sylvanus Davis, a prominent trader. Around lay rough and broken fields stretching to the skirts of the forest half a mile distant. Some of Portneuf's scouts met a straggling Scotchman, and could not resist the temptation of killing him. Their scalp-yells alarmed the garrison, and thus the advantage of surprise was lost. Davis resolved to keep his men within their defences, and to stand on his guard; but there was little or no discipline in the yeoman garrison, and thirty young volunteers under Lieutenant Thaddeus Clark sallied out to find the enemy. They were too successful; for, as they approached the top of a hill near the woods, they observed a number of cattle staring with a scared look at some 230 object on the farther side of a fence; and, rightly judging that those they sought were hidden there, they raised a cheer, and ran to the spot. They were met by a fire so close and deadly that half their number were shot down. A crowd of Indians leaped the fence and rushed upon the survivors, who ran for the fort; but only four, all of whom were wounded, succeeded in reaching it. [17] [17] Relation de Monseignat; La Potherie, III. 79. The men in the blockhouses withdrew under cover of night to Fort Loyal, where the whole force of the English was now gathered along with their frightened families. Portneuf determined to besiege the place in form; and, after burning the village, and collecting tools from the abandoned blockhouses, he opened his trenches in a deep gully within fifty yards of the fort, where his men were completely protected. They worked so well that in three days they had wormed their way close to the palisade; and, covered as they were in their burrows, they lost scarcely a man, while their enemies suffered severely. They now summoned the fort to surrender. Davis asked for a delay of six days, which was refused; and in the morning the fight began again. For a time the fire was sharp and heavy. The English wasted much powder in vain efforts to dislodge the besiegers from their trenches; till at length, seeing a machine loaded with a tar-barrel and other combustibles shoved against their palisades, they asked for a parley. Up to this time, Davis had supposed that his assailants were all Indians, the French being probably 231 dressed and painted like their red allies. "We demanded," he says, "if there were any French among them, and if they would give us quarter. They answered that they were Frenchmen, and that they would give us good quarter. Upon this, we sent out to them again to know from whence they came, and if they would give us good quarter for our men, women, and children, both wounded and sound, and (to demand) that we should have liberty to march to the next English town, and have a guard for our defence and safety; then we would surrender; and also that the governour of the French should hold up his hand and swear by the great and ever living God that the several articles should be performed: all which he did solemnly swear." The survivors of the garrison now filed through the gate, and laid down their arms. They with their women and children were thereupon abandoned to the Indians, who murdered many of them, and carried off the rest. When Davis protested against this breach of faith, he was told that he and his countrymen were rebels against their lawful king, James II. After spiking the cannon, burning the fort, and destroying all the neighboring settlements, the triumphant allies departed for their respective homes, leaving the slain unburied where they had fallen. [18] [18] Their remains were buried by Captain Church, three years later. On the capture of Fort Loyal, compare Monseignat and La Potherie with Mather, Magnalia, II. 603, and the Declaration of Sylvanus Davis, in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., I. 101. Davis makes curious mistakes in regard to French names, his rustic ear not being accustomed to the accents of the Gallic tongue. He calls Courtemanche, Monsieur Corte de March, and 232 Portneuf, Monsieur Burniffe or Burneffe. To these contemporary authorities may be added the account given by Le Clercq, établissement de la Foy, II. 393, and a letter from Governor Bradstreet of Massachusetts to Jacob Leisler in Doc. Hist. N. Y., II. 259. The French writers of course say nothing of any violation of faith on the part of the victors, but they admit that the Indians kept most of the prisoners. Scarcely was the fort taken, when four English vessels appeared in the harbor, too late to save it. Willis, in his History of Portland (ed. 1865), gives a map of Fort Loyal and the neighboring country. In the Massachusetts archives is a letter from Davis, written a few days before the attack, complaining that his fort is in wretched condition. Davis with three or four others, more fortunate than their companions, was kept by the French, and carried to Canada. "They were kind to me," he says, "on my travels through the country. I arrived at Quebeck the 14th of June, where I was civilly treated by the gentry, and soon carried to the fort before the governour, the Earl of Frontenack." Frontenac told him that the governor and people of New York were the cause of the war, since they had stirred up the Iroquois against Canada, and prompted them to torture French prisoners. [19] Davis replied that New York and New England were distinct and separate governments, each of which must answer for its own deeds; and that New England would gladly have remained at peace with the French, if they had not set on the Indians to attack her peaceful settlers. Frontenac admitted that the people of New England were not to be regarded in the same light with those who had stirred up the Indians against Canada; but he added that they were all rebels to their king, and that if they had been good subjects there would have been no war. "I do believe," 233 observes the captive Puritan, "that there was a popish design against the Protestant interest in New England as in other parts of the world." He told Frontenac of the pledge given by his conqueror, and the violation of it. "We were promised good quarter," he reports himself to have said, "and a guard to conduct us to our English; but now we are made captives and slaves in the hands of the heathen. I thought I had to do with Christians that would have been careful of their engagements, and not to violate and break their oaths. Whereupon the governour shaked his head, and, as I was told, was very angry with Burniffe (Portneuf)." [19] I am unable to discover the foundation of this last charge. Frontenac was pleased with his prisoner, whom he calls a bonhomme. He told him in broken English to take courage, and promised him good treatment; to which Davis replied that his chief concern was not for himself, but for the captives in the hands of the Indians. Some of these were afterwards ransomed by the French, and treated with much kindness, as was also Davis himself, to whom the count gave lodging in the chateau. The triumphant success of his three war-parties produced on the Canadian people all the effect that Frontenac had expected. This effect was very apparent, even before the last two victories had become known. "You cannot believe, Monseigneur," wrote the governor, speaking of the capture of Schenectady, "the joy that this slight success has caused, and how much it contributes to raise the people from their dejection and terror." 234 One untoward accident damped the general joy for a moment. A party of Iroquois Christians from the Saut St. Louis had made a raid against the English borders, and were returning with prisoners. One evening, as they were praying at their camp near Lake Champlain, they were discovered by a band of Algonquins and Abenakis who were out on a similar errand, and who, mistaking them for enemies, set upon them and killed several of their number, among whom was Kryn, the great Mohawk, chief of the mission of the Saut. This mishap was near causing a rupture between the best Indian allies of the colony; but the difference was at length happily adjusted, and the relatives of the slain propitiated by gifts. [20] [20] The attacking party consisted of some of the Abenakis and Algonquins who had been with Hertel, and who had left the main body after the destruction of Salmon Falls. Several of them were killed in the skirmish, and among the rest their chief, Hopehood, or Wohawa, "that memorable tygre," as Cotton Mather calls him. CHAPTER XII. 1690. Massachusetts attacks Quebec. English Schemes ? Capture of Port Royal ? Acadia reduced ? Conduct of Phips ? His History and Character ? Boston in Arms ? A Puritan Crusade ? The March from Albany ? Frontenac and the Council ? Frontenac at Montreal ? His War Dance ? An Abortive Expedition ? An English Raid ? Frontenac at Quebec ? Defences of the Town ? The Enemy arrives. When Frontenac sent his war-parties against New York and New England, it was in the hope not only of reanimating the Canadians, but also of teaching the Iroquois that they could not safely rely on English aid, and of inciting the Abenakis to renew their attacks on the border settlements. He imagined, too, that the British colonies could be chastised into prudence and taught a policy of conciliation towards their Canadian neighbors; but he mistook the character of these bold and vigorous though not martial communities. The plan of a combined attack on Canada seems to have been first proposed by the Iroquois; and New York and the several governments of New England, smarting under French and Indian attacks, hastened to embrace it. Early in May, a congress of their delegates was held in the city of New York. It 236 was agreed that the colony of that name should furnish four hundred men, and Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut three hundred and fifty-five jointly; while the Iroquois afterwards added their worthless pledge to join the expedition with nearly all their warriors. The colonial militia were to rendezvous at Albany, and thence advance upon Montreal by way of Lake Champlain. Mutual jealousies made it difficult to agree upon a commander; but Winthrop of Connecticut was at length placed at the head of the feeble and discordant band. While Montreal was thus assailed by land, Massachusetts and the other New England colonies were invited to attack Quebec by sea; a task formidable in difficulty and in cost, and one that imposed on them an inordinate share in the burden of the war. Massachusetts hesitated. She had no money, and she was already engaged in a less remote and less critical enterprise. During the winter, her commerce had suffered from French cruisers, which found convenient harborage at Port Royal, whence also the hostile Indians were believed to draw supplies. Seven vessels, with two hundred and eighty-eight sailors, were impressed, and from four to five hundred militia-men were drafted for the service. [1] That rugged son of New England, Sir William Phips, was appointed to the command. He sailed from Nantasket at the end of April, reached Port Royal 237 on the eleventh of May, landed his militia, and summoned Meneval, the governor, to surrender. The fort, though garrisoned by about seventy soldiers, was scarcely in condition to repel an assault; and Meneval yielded without resistance, first stipulating, according to French accounts, that private property should be respected, the church left untouched, and the troops sent to Quebec or to France. [2] It was found, however, that during the parley a quantity of goods, belonging partly to the king and partly to merchants of the place, had been carried off and hidden in the woods. [3] Phips thought this a sufficient pretext for plundering the merchants, imprisoning the troops, and desecrating the church. "We cut down the cross," writes one of his followers, "rifled their church, pulled down their high altar, and broke their images." [4] The houses of the two priests were also pillaged. The people were promised security to life, liberty, and property, on condition of swearing allegiance to King William and Queen Mary; "which," says the journalist, "they did with great acclamation," and thereupon they were left unmolested. [5] The lawful portion 238 of the booty included twenty-one pieces of cannon, with a considerable sum of money belonging to the king. The smaller articles, many of which were taken from the merchants and from such of the settlers as refused the oath, were packed in hogsheads and sent on board the ships. Phips took no measures to secure his conquest, though he commissioned a president and six councillors, chosen from the inhabitants, to govern the settlement till farther orders from the crown or from the authorities of Massachusetts. The president was directed to constrain nobody in the matter of religion; and he was assured of protection and support so long as he remained "faithful to our government," that is, the government of Massachusetts. [6] The little Puritan commonwealth already gave itself airs of sovereignty. [1] Summary of Muster Roll, appended to A Journal of the Expedition from Boston against Port Royal, among the papers of George Chalmers in the Library of Harvard College. [2] Relation de la Prise du Port Royal par les Anglois de Baston, pièce anonyme, 27 Mai, 1690. [3] Journal of the Expedition from Boston against Port Royal. [4] Ibid. [5] Relation de Monseignat. Nevertheless, a considerable number seem to have refused the oath, and to have been pillaged. The Relation de la Prise du Port Royal par les Anglois de Baston, written on the spot immediately after the event, says that, except that nobody was killed, the place was treated as if taken by assault. Meneval also says that the inhabitants were pillaged. Meneval au Ministre, 29 Mai, 1690; also Rapport de Champigny, Oct., 1690. Meneval describes the New England men as excessively irritated at the late slaughter of settlers at Salmon Falls and elsewhere. [6] Journal of the Expedition, etc. Phips now sent Captain Alden, who had already taken possession of Saint-Castin's post at Penobscot, to seize upon La Hêve, Chedabucto, and other stations on the southern coast. Then, after providing for the reduction of the settlements at the head of the Bay of Fundy, he sailed, with the rest of the fleet, for Boston, where he arrived triumphant on the thirtieth of May, bringing with him, as prisoners, the French governor, fifty-nine soldiers, and the two priests, Petit and Trouvé. Massachusetts had made an easy conquest of all Acadia; a conquest, however, which she had neither 239 the men nor the money to secure by sufficient garrisons. The conduct of the New England commander in this affair does him no credit. It is true that no blood was spilt, and no revenge taken for the repeated butcheries of unoffending and defenceless settlers. It is true, also, that the French appear to have acted in bad faith. But Phips, on the other hand, displayed a scandalous rapacity. Charlevoix says that he robbed Meneval of all his money; but Meneval himself affirms that he gave it to the English commander for safe keeping, and that Phips and his wife would return neither the money nor various other articles belonging to the captive governor, whereof the following are specified: "Six silver spoons, six silver forks, one silver cup in the shape of a gondola, a pair of pistols, three new wigs, a gray vest, four pair of silk garters, two dozen of shirts, six vests of dimity, four nightcaps with lace edgings, all my table service of fine tin, all my kitchen linen," and many other items which give an amusing insight into Meneval's housekeeping. [7] [7] An Account of the Silver and Effects which Mr. Phips keeps back from Mr. Meneval, in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., I. 115. Monseignat and La Potherie describe briefly this expedition against Port Royal. In the archives of Massachusetts are various papers concerning it, among which are Governor Bradstreet's instructions to Phips, and a complete invoice of the plunder. Extracts will be found in Professor Bowen's Life of Phips, in Sparks's American Biography, VII. There is also an order of council, "Whereas the French soldiers lately brought to this place from Port Royal did surrender on capitulation," they shall be set at liberty. Meneval, Lettre au Ministre, 29 Mai, 1690, says that there was a capitulation, and that Phips broke it. Perrot, former governor of Acadia, accuses both Meneval and the priest Petit of being 240 in collusion with the English. Perrot à de Chevry, 2 Juin, 1690. The same charge is made as regards Petit in Mémoire sur l'Acadie, 1691. Charlevoix's account of this affair is inaccurate. He ascribes to Phips acts which took place weeks after his return, such as the capture of Chedabucto. Meneval, with the two priests, was confined in a house at Boston, under guard. He says that he petitioned the governor and council for redress; "but, as they have little authority and stand in fear of Phips, who is supported by the rabble, to which he himself once belonged, and of which he is now the chief, they would do nothing for me." [8] This statement of Meneval is not quite correct: for an order of the council is on record, requiring Phips to restore his chest and clothes; and, as the order received no attention, Governor Bradstreet wrote to the refractory commander a note, enjoining him to obey it at once. [9] Phips thereupon gave up some of the money and the worst part of the clothing, still keeping the rest. [10] After long delay, the council released Meneval: upon which, Phips and the populace whom he controlled demanded that he should be again imprisoned; but the "honest people" of the town took his part, his persecutor was forced to desist, and he set sail covertly for France. [11] This, at least, is his own account of the affair. [8] Mémoire présenté à M. de Ponchartrain par M. de Meneval, 6 Avril, 1691. [9] This note, dated 7 Jan., 1691, is cited by Bowen in his Life of Phips, Sparks's American Biography, VII. [10] Mémoire de Meneval. [11] Ibid. As Phips was to play a conspicuous part in the events that immediately followed, some notice of 241 him will not be amiss. He is said to have been one of twenty-six children, all of the same mother, and was born in 1650 at a rude border settlement, since called Woolwich, on the Kennebec. His parents were ignorant and poor; and till eighteen years of age he was employed in keeping sheep. Such a life ill suited his active and ambitious nature. To better his condition, he learned the trade of ship-carpenter, and, in the exercise of it, came to Boston, where he married a widow with some property, beyond him in years, and much above him in station. About this time, he learned to read and write, though not too well, for his signature is like that of a peasant. Still aspiring to greater things, he promised his wife that he would one day command a king's ship and own a "fair brick house in the Green Lane of North Boston," a quarter then occupied by citizens of the better class. He kept his word at both points. Fortune was inauspicious to him for several years; till at length, under the pressure of reverses, he conceived the idea of conquering fame and wealth at one stroke, by fishing up the treasure said to be stored in a Spanish galleon wrecked fifty years before somewhere in the West Indian seas. Full of this project, he went to England, where, through influences which do not plainly appear, he gained a hearing from persons in high places, and induced the admiralty to adopt his scheme. A frigate was given him, and he sailed for the West Indies; whence, after a long search, he returned unsuccessful, though not without adventures which proved his mettle. It 242 was the epoch of the buccaneers; and his crew, tired of a vain and toilsome search, came to the quarterdeck, armed with cutlasses, and demanded of their captain that he should turn pirate with them. Phips, a tall and powerful man, instantly fell upon them with his fists, knocked down the ringleaders, and awed them all into submission. Not long after, there was a more formidable mutiny; but, with great courage and address, he quelled it for a time, and held his crew to their duty till he had brought the ship into Jamaica, and exchanged them for better men. Though the leaky condition of the frigate compelled him to abandon the search, it was not till he had gained information which he thought would lead to success; and, on his return, he inspired such confidence that the Duke of Albemarle, with other noblemen and gentlemen, gave him a fresh outfit, and despatched him again on his Quixotic errand. This time he succeeded, found the wreck, and took from it gold, silver, and jewels to the value of three hundred thousand pounds sterling. The crew now leagued together to seize the ship and divide the prize; and Phips, pushed to extremity, was compelled to promise that every man of them should have a share in the treasure, even if he paid it himself. On reaching England, he kept his pledge so well that, after redeeming it, only sixteen thousand pounds was left as his portion, which, however, was an ample fortune in the New England of that day. He gained, too, what he valued almost as much, the honor of knighthood. 243 Tempting offers were made him of employment in the royal service; but he had an ardent love for his own country, and thither he presently returned. Phips was a rude sailor, bluff, prompt, and choleric. He never gave proof of intellectual capacity; and such of his success in life as he did not owe to good luck was due probably to an energetic and adventurous spirit, aided by a blunt frankness of address that pleased the great, and commended him to their favor. Two years after the expedition to Port Royal, the king, under the new charter, made him governor of Massachusetts, a post for which, though totally unfit, he had been recommended by the elder Mather, who, like his son Cotton, expected to make use of him. He carried his old habits into his new office, cudgelled Brinton, the collector of the port, and belabored Captain Short of the royal navy with his cane. Far from trying to hide the obscurity of his origin, he leaned to the opposite foible, and was apt to boast of it, delighting to exhibit himself as a self-made man. New England writers describe him as honest in private dealings; but, in accordance with his coarse nature, he seems to have thought that any thing is fair in war. On the other hand, he was warmly patriotic, and was almost as ready to serve New England as to serve himself. [12] [12] An excellent account of Phips will be found in Professor Bowen's biographical notice, already cited. His Life by Cotton Mather is excessively eulogistic. When he returned from Port Royal, he found 244 Boston alive with martial preparation. A bold enterprise was afoot. Massachusetts of her own motion had resolved to attempt the conquest of Quebec. She and her sister colonies had not yet recovered from the exhaustion of Philip's war, and still less from the disorders that attended the expulsion of the royal governor and his adherents. The public treasury was empty, and the recent expeditions against the eastern Indians had been supported by private subscription. Worse yet, New England had no competent military commander. The Puritan gentlemen of the original emigration, some of whom were as well fitted for military as for civil leadership, had passed from the stage; and, by a tendency which circumstances made inevitable, they had left none behind them equally qualified. The great Indian conflict of fifteen years before had, it is true, formed good partisan chiefs, and proved that the New England yeoman, defending his family and his hearth, was not to be surpassed in stubborn fighting; but, since Andros and his soldiers had been driven out, there was scarcely a single man in the colony of the slightest training or experience in regular war. Up to this moment, New England had never asked help of the mother country. When thousands of savages burst on her defenceless settlements, she had conquered safety and peace with her own blood and her own slender resources; but now, as the proposed capture of Quebec would inure to the profit of the British crown, Bradstreet and his council thought it not unfitting to ask for a supply 245 of arms and ammunition, of which they were in great need. [13] The request was refused, and no aid of any kind came from the English government, whose resources were engrossed by the Irish war. [13] Bradstreet and Council to the Earl of Shrewsbury, 29 Mar., 1690; Danforth to Sir H. Ashurst, 1 April, 1690. While waiting for the reply, the colonial authorities urged on their preparations, in the hope that the plunder of Quebec would pay the expenses of its conquest. Humility was not among the New England virtues, and it was thought a sin to doubt that God would give his chosen people the victory over papists and idolaters; yet no pains were spared to ensure the divine favor. A proclamation was issued, calling the people to repentance; a day of fasting was ordained; and, as Mather expresses it, "the wheel of prayer was kept in continual motion." [14] The chief difficulty was to provide funds. An attempt was made to collect a part of the money by private subscription; [15] but, as this plan failed, the provisional government, already in debt, strained its credit yet farther, and borrowed the needful sums. Thirty-two trading and fishing vessels, great and small, were impressed for the service. The largest was a ship called the "Six Friends," engaged in the dangerous West India trade, and carrying forty-four guns. A call was made for volunteers, and many enrolled themselves; but, as more were wanted, a press was ordered to complete the number. So rigorously was it applied 246 that, what with voluntary and enforced enlistment, one town, that of Gloucester, was deprived of two-thirds of its fencible men. [16] There was not a moment of doubt as to the choice of a commander, for Phips was imagined to be the very man for the work. One John Walley, a respectable citizen of Barnstable, was made second in command with the modest rank of major; and a sufficient number of ship-masters, merchants, master mechanics, and substantial farmers, were commissioned as subordinate officers. About the middle of July, the committee charged with the preparations reported that all was ready. Still there was a long delay. The vessel sent early in spring to ask aid from England had not returned. Phips waited for her as long as he dared, and the best of the season was over when he resolved to put to sea. The rustic warriors, duly formed into companies, were sent on board; and the fleet sailed from Nantasket on the ninth of August. Including sailors, it carried twenty-two hundred men, with provisions for four months, but insufficient ammunition and no pilot for the St. Lawrence. [17] [14] Mass. Colonial Records, 12 Mar., 1690; Mather, Life of Phips. [15] Proposals for an Expedition against Canada, in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., X. 119. [16] Rev. John Emerson to Wait Winthrop, 26 July, 1690. Emerson was the minister of Gloucester. He begs for the release of the impressed men. [17] Mather, Life of Phips, gives an account of the outfit. Compare the Humble Address of Divers of the Gentry, Merchants and others inhabiting in Boston, to the King's Most Excellent Majesty. Two officers of the expedition, Walley and Savage, have left accounts of it, as Phips would probably have done, had his literary acquirements been equal to the task. While Massachusetts was making ready to conquer Quebec by sea, the militia of the land expedition against Montreal had mustered at Albany. 247 Their strength was even less than was at first proposed; for, after the disaster at Casco, Massachusetts and Plymouth had recalled their contingents to defend their frontiers. The rest, decimated by dysentery and small-pox, began their march to Lake Champlain, with bands of Mohawk, Oneida, and Mohegan allies. The western Iroquois were to join them at the lake, and the combined force was then to attack the head of the colony, while Phips struck at its heart. Frontenac was at Quebec during most of the winter and the early spring. When he had despatched the three war-parties, whose hardy but murderous exploits were to bring this double storm upon him, he had an interval of leisure, of which he made a characteristic use. The English and the Iroquois were not his only enemies. He had opponents within as well as without, and he counted as among them most of the members of the supreme council. Here was the bishop, representing that clerical power which had clashed so often with the civil rule; here was that ally of the Jesuits, the intendant Champigny, who, when Frontenac arrived, had written mournfully to Versailles that he would do his best to live at peace with him; here were Villeray and Auteuil, whom the governor had once banished, Damours, whom he had imprisoned, and others scarcely more agreeable to him. They and their clerical friends had conspired for his recall seven or eight years before; they had clung to Denonville, that faithful son of the Church, in spite of all his failures; and they had 248 seen with troubled minds the return of King Stork in the person of the haughty and irascible count. He on his part felt his power. The country was in deadly need of him, and looked to him for salvation; while the king had shown him such marks of favor, that, for the moment at least, his enemies must hold their peace. Now, therefore, was the time to teach them that he was their master. Whether trivial or important the occasion mattered little. What he wanted was a conflict and a victory, or submission without a conflict. The supreme council had held its usual weekly meetings since Frontenac's arrival; but as yet he had not taken his place at the board, though his presence was needed. Auteuil, the attorney-general, was thereupon deputed to invite him. He visited the count at his apartment in the chateau, but could get from him no answer, except that the council was able to manage its own business, and that he would come when the king's service should require it. The councillors divined that he was waiting for some assurance that they would receive him with befitting ceremony; and, after debating the question, they voted to send four of their number to repeat the invitation, and beg the governor to say what form of reception would be agreeable to him. Frontenac answered that it was for them to propose the form, and that, when they did so, he would take the subject into consideration. The deputies returned, and there was another debate. A ceremony was devised, which it was thought must needs be acceptable to the count; and the 249 first councillor, Villeray, repaired to the chateau to submit it to him. After making him an harangue of compliment, and protesting the anxiety of himself and his colleagues to receive him with all possible honor, he explained the plan, and assured Frontenac that, if not wholly satisfactory, it should be changed to suit his pleasure. "To which," says the record, "Monsieur the governor only answered that the council could consult the bishop and other persons acquainted with such matters." The bishop was consulted, but pleaded ignorance. Another debate followed; and the first councillor was again despatched to the chateau, with proposals still more deferential than the last, and full power to yield, in addition, whatever the governor might desire. Frontenac replied that, though they had made proposals for his reception when he should present himself at the council for the first time, they had not informed him what ceremony they meant to observe when he should come to the subsequent sessions. This point also having been thoroughly debated, Villeray went again to the count, and with great deference laid before him the following plan: That, whenever it should be his pleasure to make his first visit to the council, four of its number should repair to the chateau, and accompany him, with every mark of honor, to the palace of the intendant, where the sessions were held; and that, on his subsequent visits, two councillors should meet him at the head of the stairs, and conduct him to his seat. The envoy farther protested that, if this failed to meet his approval, the council would conform itself to 250 all his wishes on the subject. Frontenac now demanded to see the register in which the proceedings on the question at issue were recorded. Villeray was directed to carry it to him. The records had been cautiously made; and, after studying them carefully, he could find nothing at which to cavil. He received the next deputation with great affability, told them that he was glad to find that the council had not forgotten the consideration due to his office and his person, and assured them, with urbane irony, that, had they offered to accord him marks of distinction greater than they felt were due, he would not have permitted them thus to compromise their dignity, having too much regard for the honor of a body of which he himself was the head. Then, after thanking them collectively and severally, he graciously dismissed them, saying that he would come to the council after Easter, or in about two months. [18] During four successive Mondays, he had forced the chief dignitaries of the colony to march in deputations up and down the rugged road from the intendant's palace to the 251 chamber of the chateau where he sat in solitary state. A disinterested spectator might see the humor of the situation; but the council felt only its vexations. Frontenac had gained his point: the enemy had surrendered unconditionally. [18] "M. le Gouverneur luy a répondu qu'il avoit reconnu avec plaisir que la Compagnie (le Conseil) conservoit la considération qu'elle avoit pour son caractère et pour sa personne, et qu'elle pouvoit bien s'assurer qu'encore qu'elle luy eust fait des propositions au delà de ce qu'elle auroit cru devoir faire pour sa reception au Conseil, il ne les auroit pas acceptées, l'honneur de la Compagnie luy estant d'autant plus considérable, qu'en estant le chef, il n'auroit rien voulu souffrir qui peust estre contraire à sa dignité." Registre du Conseil Souverain, séance du 13 Mars, 1690. The affair had occupied the preceding sessions of 20 and 27 February and 6 March. The submission of the councillors did not prevent them from complaining to the minister. Champigny au Ministre, 10 Mai, 1691; Mémoire instructif sur le Canada, 1691. Having settled this important matter to his satisfaction, he again addressed himself to saving the country. During the winter, he had employed gangs of men in cutting timber in the forests, hewing it into palisades, and dragging it to Quebec. Nature had fortified the Upper Town on two sides by cliffs almost inaccessible, but it was open to attack in the rear; and Frontenac, with a happy prevision of approaching danger, gave his first thoughts to strengthening this, its only weak side. The work began as soon as the frost was out of the ground, and before midsummer it was well advanced. At the same time, he took every precaution for the safety of the settlements in the upper parts of the colony, stationed detachments of regulars at the stockade forts, which Denonville had built in all the parishes above Three Rivers, and kept strong scouting parties in continual movement in all the quarters most exposed to attack. Troops were detailed to guard the settlers at their work in the fields, and officers and men were enjoined to use the utmost vigilance. Nevertheless, the Iroquois war-parties broke in at various points, burning and butchering, and spreading such terror that in some districts the fields were left untilled and the prospects of the harvest ruined. Towards the end of July, Frontenac left Major 252 Prévost to finish the fortifications, and, with the intendant Champigny, went up to Montreal, the chief point of danger. Here he arrived on the thirty-first; and, a few days after, the officer commanding the fort at La Chine sent him a messenger in hot haste with the startling news that Lake St. Louis was "all covered with canoes." [19] Nobody doubted that the Iroquois were upon them again. Cannon were fired to call in the troops from the detached posts; when alarm was suddenly turned to joy by the arrival of other messengers to announce that the new comers were not enemies, but friends. They were the Indians of the upper lakes descending from Michillimackinac to trade at Montreal. Nothing so auspicious had happened since Frontenac's return. The messages he had sent them in the spring by Louvigny and Perrot, reinforced by the news of the victory on the Ottawa and the capture of Schenectady, had had the desired effect; and the Iroquois prisoner whom their missionary had persuaded them to torture had not been sacrificed in vain. Despairing of an English market for their beaver skins, they had come as of old to seek one from the French. [19] "Que le lac estoit tout convert de canots." Frontenac au Ministre, 9 et 12 Nov., 1690. On the next day, they all came down the rapids, and landed near the town. There were fully five hundred of them, Hurons, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Pottawatamies, Crees, and Nipissings, with a hundred and ten canoes laden with beaver skins to the value of nearly a hundred thousand crowns. Nor was 253 this all; for, a few days after, La Durantaye, late commander at Michillimackinac, arrived with fifty-five more canoes, manned by French traders, and filled with valuable furs. The stream of wealth dammed back so long was flowing upon the colony at the moment when it was most needed. Never had Canada known a more prosperous trade than now in the midst of her danger and tribulation. It was a triumph for Frontenac. If his policy had failed with the Iroquois, it had found a crowning success among the tribes of the lakes. Having painted, greased, and befeathered themselves, the Indians mustered for the grand council which always preceded the opening of the market. The Ottawa orator spoke of nothing but trade, and, with a regretful memory of the cheapness of English goods, begged that the French would sell them at the same rate. The Huron touched upon politics and war, declaring that he and his people had come to visit their old father and listen to his voice, being well assured that he would never abandon them, as others had done, nor fool away his time, like Denonville, in shameful negotiations for peace; and he exhorted Frontenac to fight, not the English only, but the Iroquois also, till they were brought to reason. "If this is not done," he said, "my father and I shall both perish; but, come what may, we will perish together." [20] "I answered," writes Frontenac, "that I would fight the Iroquois till they came to beg for peace, 254 and that I would grant them no peace that did not include all my children, both white and red, for I was the father of both alike." [20] La Potherie, III. 94; Monseignat, Relation; Frontenac au Ministre, 9 et 12 Nov., 1690. Now ensued a curious scene. Frontenac took a hatchet, brandished it in the air and sang the war-song. The principal Frenchmen present followed his example. The Christian Iroquois of the two neighboring missions rose and joined them, and so also did the Hurons and the Algonquins of Lake Nipissing, stamping and screeching like a troop of madmen; while the governor led the dance, whooping like the rest. His predecessor would have perished rather than play such a part in such company; but the punctilious old courtier was himself half Indian at heart, as much at home in a wigwam as in the halls of princes. Another man would have lost respect in Indian eyes by such a performance. In Frontenac, it roused his audience to enthusiasm. They snatched the proffered hatchet and promised war to the death. [21] [21] "Je leur mis moy-mesme la hache à la main en chantant la chanson de guerre pour m'accommoder à leurs fa?ons de faire." Frontenac au Ministre, 9 et 12 Nov., 1690. "Monsieur de Frontenac commen?a la Chanson de guerre, la Hache à la main, les principaux Chefs des Fran?ois se joignant a luy avec de pareilles armes, la chanterent ensemble. Les Iroquois du Saut et de la Montagne, les Hurons et les Nipisiriniens donnerent encore le branle: l'on eut dit, Monsieur, que ces Acteurs étoient des possedez par les gestes et les contorsions qu'ils faisoient. Les Sassakouez, où les cris et les hurlemens que Mr. de Frontenac étoit obligé de faire pour se conformer à leur manière, augmentoit encore la fureur bachique." La Potherie, III. 97. Then came a solemn war-feast. Two oxen and six large dogs had been chopped to pieces for the occasion, and boiled with a quantity of prunes. Two 255 barrels of wine with abundant tobacco were also served out to the guests, who devoured the meal in a species of frenzy. [22] All seemed eager for war except the Ottawas, who had not forgotten their late dalliance with the Iroquois. A Christian Mohawk of the Saut St. Louis called them to another council, and demanded that they should explain clearly their position. Thus pushed to the wall, they no longer hesitated, but promised like the rest to do all that their father should ask. [22] La Potherie, III. 96, 98. Their sincerity was soon put to the test. An Iroquois convert called La Plaque, a notorious reprobate though a good warrior, had gone out as a scout in the direction of Albany. On the day when the market opened and trade was in full activity, the buyers and sellers were suddenly startled by the sound of the death-yell. They snatched their weapons, and for a moment all was confusion; when La Plaque, who had probably meant to amuse himself at their expense, made his appearance, and explained that the yells proceeded from him. The news that he brought was, however, sufficiently alarming. He declared that he had been at Lake St. Sacrement, or Lake George, and had seen there a great number of men making canoes as if about to advance on Montreal. Frontenac, thereupon, sent the Chevalier de Clermont to scout as far as Lake Champlain. Clermont soon sent back one of his followers to announce that he had discovered a party of the enemy, and that they were already on their way down the Richelieu. Frontenac ordered 256 cannon to be fired to call in the troops, crossed the St. Lawrence followed by all the Indians, and encamped with twelve hundred men at La Prairie to meet the expected attack. He waited in vain. All was quiet, and the Ottawa scouts reported that they could find no enemy. Three days passed. The Indians grew impatient, and wished to go home. Neither English nor Iroquois had shown themselves; and Frontenac, satisfied that their strength had been exaggerated, left a small force at La Prairie, recrossed the river, and distributed the troops again among the neighboring parishes to protect the harvesters. He now gave ample presents to his departing allies, whose chiefs he had entertained at his own table, and to whom, says Charlevoix, he bade farewell "with those engaging manners which he knew so well how to assume when he wanted to gain anybody to his interest." Scarcely were they gone, when the distant cannon of La Prairie boomed a sudden alarm. The men whom La Plaque had seen near Lake George were a part of the combined force of Connecticut and New York, destined to attack Montreal. They had made their way along Wood Creek to the point where it widens into Lake Champlain, and here they had stopped. Disputes between the men of the two colonies, intestine quarrels in the New York militia, who were divided between the two factions engendered by the late revolution, the want of provisions, the want of canoes, and the ravages of small-pox, had ruined an enterprise which had been mismanaged from the first. There 257 was no birch bark to make more canoes, and owing to the lateness of the season the bark of the elms would not peel. Such of the Iroquois as had joined them were cold and sullen; and news came that the three western tribes of the confederacy, terrified by the small-pox, had refused to move. It was impossible to advance; and Winthrop, the commander, gave orders to return to Albany, leaving Phips to conquer Canada alone. [23] But first, that the campaign might not seem wholly futile, he permitted Captain John Schuyler to make a raid into Canada with a band of volunteers. Schuyler left the camp at Wood Creek with twenty-nine whites and a hundred and twenty Indians, passed Lake Champlain, descended the Richelieu to Chambly, and fell suddenly on the settlement of La Prairie, whence Frontenac had just withdrawn with his forces. Soldiers and inhabitants were reaping in the wheat-fields. Schuyler and his followers killed or captured twenty-five, including several 258 women. He wished to attack the neighboring fort, but his Indians refused; and after burning houses, barns, and hay-ricks, and killing a great number of cattle, he seated himself with his party at dinner in the adjacent woods, while cannon answered cannon from Chambly, La Prairie, and Montreal, and the whole country was astir. "We thanked the Governor of Canada," writes Schuyler, "for his salute of heavy artillery during our meal." [24] [23] On this expedition see the Journal of Major General Winthrop, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. 193; Publick Occurrences, 1690, in Historical Magazine, I. 228; and various documents in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 727, 752, and in Doc. Hist. N. Y., II. 266, 288. Compare La Potherie, III. 126, and N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 513. These last are French statements. A Sokoki Indian brought to Canada a greatly exaggerated account of the English forces, and said that disease had been spread among them by boxes of infected clothing, which they themselves had provided in order to poison the Canadians. Bishop Laval, Lettre du 20 Nov., 1690, says that there was a quarrel between the English and their Iroquois allies, who, having plundered a magazine of spoiled provisions, fell ill, and thought that they were poisoned. Colden and other English writers seem to have been strangely ignorant of this expedition. The Jesuit Michel Germain declares that the force of the English alone amounted to four thousand men (Relation de la Défaite des Anglois, 1690). About one tenth of this number seem actually to have taken the field. [24] Journal of Captain John Schuyler, in Doc. Hist. N. Y., II. 285. Compare La Potherie, III. 101, and Relation de Monseignat. The English had little to boast in this affair, the paltry termination of an enterprise from which great things had been expected. Nor was it for their honor to adopt the savage and cowardly mode of warfare in which their enemies had led the way. The blow that had been struck was less an injury to the French than an insult; but, as such, it galled Frontenac excessively, and he made no mention of it in his despatches to the court. A few more Iroquois attacks and a few more murders kept Montreal in alarm till the tenth of October, when matters of deeper import engaged the governor's thoughts. A messenger arrived in haste at three o'clock in the afternoon, and gave him a letter from Prévost, town major of Quebec. It was to the effect that an Abenaki Indian had just come over land from Acadia, with news that some of his tribe had captured an English woman near Portsmouth, who told them that a great fleet had sailed from Boston to attack Quebec. Frontenac, not easily alarmed, doubted the report. Nevertheless, he embarked 259 at once with the intendant in a small vessel, which proved to be leaky, and was near foundering with all on board. He then took a canoe, and towards evening set out again for Quebec, ordering some two hundred men to follow him. On the next day, he met another canoe, bearing a fresh message from Prévost, who announced that the English fleet had been seen in the river, and that it was already above Tadoussac. Frontenac now sent back Captain de Ramsay with orders to Callières, governor of Montreal, to descend immediately to Quebec with all the force at his disposal, and to muster the inhabitants on the way. Then he pushed on with the utmost speed. The autumnal storms had begun, and the rain pelted him without ceasing; but on the morning of the fourteenth he neared the town. The rocks of Cape Diamond towered before him; the St. Lawrence lay beneath them, lonely and still; and the Basin of Quebec outspread its broad bosom, a solitude without a sail. Frontenac had arrived in time. He landed at the Lower Town, and the troops and the armed inhabitants came crowding to meet him. He was delighted at their ardor. [25] Shouts, cheers, and the waving of hats greeted the old man as he climbed the steep ascent of Mountain Street. Fear and doubt seemed banished by his presence. Even those who hated him rejoiced at his coming, and hailed him as a deliverer. He went at once to inspect the fortifications. Since the alarm a week before, Prévost had accomplished wonders, and 260 not only completed the works begun in the spring, but added others to secure a place which was a natural fortress in itself. On two sides, the Upper Town scarcely needed defence. The cliffs along the St. Lawrence and those along the tributary river St. Charles had three accessible points, guarded at the present day by the Prescott Gate, the Hope Gate, and the Palace Gate. Prévost had secured them by barricades of heavy beams and casks filled with earth. A continuous line of palisades ran along the strand of the St. Charles, from the great cliff called the Saut au Matelot to the palace of the intendant. At this latter point began the line of works constructed by Frontenac to protect the rear of the town. They consisted of palisades, strengthened by a ditch and an embankment, and flanked at frequent intervals by square towers of stone. Passing behind the garden of the Ursulines, they extended to a windmill on a hillock called Mt. Carmel, and thence to the brink of the cliffs in front. Here there was a battery of eight guns near the present Public Garden; two more, each of three guns, were planted at the top of the Saut au Matelot; another at the barricade of the Palace Gate; and another near the windmill of Mt. Carmel; while a number of light pieces were held in reserve for such use as occasion might require. The Lower Town had no defensive works; but two batteries, each of three guns, eighteen and twenty-four pounders, were placed here at the edge of the river. [26] [25] Frontenac au Ministre, 9 et 12 Nov., 1690. [26] Relation de Monseignat; Plan de Québec, par Villeneuve, 1690; Relation du Mercure Galant, 1691. The summit of Cape Diamond, which 261 commanded the town, was not fortified till three years later, nor were any guns placed here during the English attack. Two days passed in completing these defences under the eye of the governor. Men were flocking in from the parishes far and near; and on the evening of the fifteenth about twenty-seven hundred, regulars and militia, were gathered within the fortifications, besides the armed peasantry of Beauport and Beaupré, who were ordered to watch the river below the town, and resist the English, should they attempt to land. [27] At length, before dawn on the morning of the sixteenth, the sentinels on the Saut au Matelot could descry the slowly moving lights of distant vessels. At daybreak the fleet was in sight. Sail after sail passed the Point of Orleans and glided into the Basin of Quebec. The excited spectators on the rock counted thirty-four of them. Four were large ships, several others were of considerable size, and the rest were brigs, schooners, and fishing craft, all thronged with men. [27] Diary of Sylvanus Davis, prisoner in Quebec, in Mass. Hist. Coll. 3, I. 101. There is a difference of ten days in the French and English dates, the New Style having been adopted by the former and not by the latter. CHAPTER XIII. 1690. Defence of Quebec. Phips on the St. Lawrence ? Phips at Quebec ? A Flag of Truce ? Scene at the Chateau ? The Summons and the Answer ? Plan of Attack ? Landing of the English ? The Cannonade ? The Ships repulsed ? The Land Attack ? Retreat of Phips ? Condition of Quebec ? Rejoicings of the French ? Distress at Boston. The delay at Boston, waiting aid from England that never came, was not propitious to Phips; nor were the wind and the waves. The voyage to the St. Lawrence was a long one; and when he began, without a pilot, to grope his way up the unknown river, the weather seemed in league with his enemies. He appears, moreover, to have wasted time. What was most vital to his success was rapidity of movement; yet, whether by his fault or his misfortune, he remained three weeks within three days' sail of Quebec. [1] While anchored off Tadoussac, with the wind ahead, he passed the idle hours in holding councils of war and framing rules for the government of his men; and, when at length the wind veered to the east, it is doubtful if he made the best use of his opportunity. [2] [1] Journal of Major Walley, in Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., I. 470. [2] "Ils ne profitèrent pas du vent favorable pour nous surprendre comme ils auroient pu faire." Juchereau, 320. 263 He presently captured a small vessel, commanded by Granville, an officer whom Prévost had sent to watch his movements. He had already captured, near Tadoussac, another vessel, having on board Madame Lalande and Madame Joliet, the wife and the mother-in-law of the discoverer of the Mississippi. [3] When questioned as to the condition of Quebec, they told him that it was imperfectly fortified, that its cannon were dismounted, and that it had not two hundred men to defend it. Phips was greatly elated, thinking that, like Port Royal, the capital of Canada would fall without a blow. The statement of the two prisoners was true, for the most part, when it was made; but the energy of Prévost soon wrought a change. [3] "Les Demoiselles Lalande et Joliet." The title of madame was at this time restricted to married women of rank. The wives of the bourgeois, and even of the lesser nobles, were called demoiselles. Phips imagined that the Canadians would offer little resistance to the Puritan invasion; for some of the Acadians had felt the influence of their New England neighbors, and shown an inclination to them. It was far otherwise in Canada, where the English heretics were regarded with abhorrence. Whenever the invaders tried to land at the settlements along the shore, they were met by a rebuff. At the river Ouelle, Francheville, the curé put on a cap and capote, took a musket, led his parishioners to the river, and hid with them in the bushes. As the English boats approached their ambuscade, they gave the foremost a volley, which killed nearly every man on board; upon which the rest sheared off. It was the same when 264 the fleet neared Quebec. Bands of militia, vigilant, agile, and well commanded, followed it along the shore, and repelled with showers of bullets every attempt of the enemy to touch Canadian soil. When, after his protracted voyage, Phips sailed into the Basin of Quebec, one of the grandest scenes on the western continent opened upon his sight: the wide expanse of waters, the lofty promontory beyond, and the opposing heights of Levi; the cataract of Montmorenci, the distant range of the Laurentian Mountains, the warlike rock with its diadem of walls and towers, the roofs of the Lower Town clustering on the strand beneath, the Chateau St. Louis perched at the brink of the cliff, and over it the white banner, spangled with fleurs-de-lis, flaunting defiance in the clear autumnal air. Perhaps, as he gazed, a suspicion seized him that the task he had undertaken was less easy than he had thought; but he had conquered once by a simple summons to surrender, and he resolved to try its virtue again. The fleet anchored a little below Quebec; and towards ten o'clock the French saw a boat put out from the admiral's ship, bearing a flag of truce. Four canoes went from the Lower Town, and met it midway. It brought a subaltern officer, who announced himself as the bearer of a letter from Sir William Phips to the French commander. He was taken into one of the canoes and paddled to the quay, after being completely blindfolded by a bandage which covered half his face. Prévost received him as he landed, and ordered two sergeants 265 to take him by the arms and lead him to the governor. His progress was neither rapid nor direct. They drew him hither and thither, delighting to make him clamber in the dark over every possible obstruction; while a noisy crowd hustled him, and laughing women called him Colin Maillard, the name of the chief player in blindman's buff. [4] Amid a prodigious hubbub, intended to bewilder him and impress him with a sense of immense warlike preparation, they dragged him over the three barricades of Mountain Street, and brought him at last into a large room of the chateau. Here they took the bandage from his eyes. He stood for a moment with an air of astonishment and some confusion. The governor stood before him, haughty and stern, surrounded by French and Canadian officers, Maricourt, Sainte-Hélène, Longueuil, Villebon, Valrenne, Bienville, and many more, bedecked with gold lace and silver lace, perukes and powder, plumes and ribbons, and all the martial foppery in which they took delight, and regarding the envoy with keen, defiant eyes. [5] After a moment, he recovered his breath and his composure, saluted Frontenac, and, expressing a wish that the duty assigned him had been of a more agreeable nature, handed him the letter of Phips. Frontenac gave it to an interpreter, who read it aloud in French that all might hear. It ran thus:— [4] Juchereau, 323. [5] "Tous ces Officiers s'étoient habillés le plus proprement qu'ils p?rent, les galons d'or et d'argent, les rubans, les plumets, la poudre, et la frisure, rien ne manquoit," etc. Ibid. 266 "Sir William Phips, Knight, General and Commander-in-chief in and over their Majesties' Forces of New England, by Sea and Land, to Count Frontenac, Lieutenant-General and Governour for the French King at Canada; or, in his absence, to his Deputy, or him or them in chief command at Quebeck: "The war between the crowns of England and France doth not only sufficiently warrant, but the destruction made by the French and Indians, under your command and encouragement, upon the persons and estates of their Majesties' subjects of New England, without provocation on their part, hath put them under the necessity of this expedition for their own security and satisfaction. And although the cruelties and barbarities used against them by the French and Indians might, upon the present opportunity, prompt unto a severe revenge, yet, being desirous to avoid all inhumane and unchristian-like actions, and to prevent shedding of blood as much as may be, "I, the aforesaid William Phips, Knight, do hereby, in the name and in the behalf of their most excellent Majesties, William and Mary, King and Queen of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, and by order of their said Majesties' government of the Massachuset-colony in New England, demand a present surrender of your forts and castles, undemolished, and the King's and other stores, unimbezzled, with a seasonable delivery of all captives; together with a surrender of all your persons and estates to my dispose: upon the doing whereof, you may expect mercy from me, as a Christian, according to what shall be found for their Majesties' service and the subjects' security. Which, if you refuse forthwith to do, I am come provided, and am resolved, by the help of God, in whom I trust, by force of arms to revenge all wrongs and injuries offered, and bring you under subjection to the Crown of England, and, when too late, make you wish you had accepted of the favour tendered. "Your answer positive in an hour, returned by your own trumpet, with the return of mine, is required upon the peril that will ensue." [6] [6] See the Letter in Mather, Magnalia, I. 186. The French kept a copy of it, which, with an accurate translation, in parallel columns, was sent to Versailles, and is still preserved in the Archives de la Marine. The text answers perfectly to that given by Mather. 267 When the reading was finished, the Englishman pulled his watch from his pocket, and handed it to the governor. Frontenac could not, or pretended that he could not, see the hour. The messenger thereupon told him that it was ten o'clock, and that he must have his answer before eleven. A general cry of indignation arose; and Valrenne called out that Phips was nothing but a pirate, and that his man ought to be hanged. Frontenac contained himself for a moment, and then said to the envoy:— "I will not keep you waiting so long. Tell your general that I do not recognize King William; and that the Prince of Orange, who so styles himself, is a usurper, who has violated the most sacred laws of blood in attempting to dethrone his father-in-law. I know no king of England but King James. Your general ought not to be surprised at the hostilities which he says that the French have carried on in the colony of Massachusetts; for, as the king my master has taken the king of England under his protection, and is about to replace him on his throne by force of arms, he might have expected that his Majesty would order me to make war on a people who have rebelled against their lawful prince." Then, turning with a smile to the officers about him: "Even if your general offered me conditions a little more gracious, and if I had a mind to accept them, does he suppose that these brave gentlemen would give their consent, and advise me to trust a man who broke his agreement with the governor of Port Royal, or a rebel 268 who has failed in his duty to his king, and forgotten all the favors he had received from him, to follow a prince who pretends to be the liberator of England and the defender of the faith, and yet destroys the laws and privileges of the kingdom and overthrows its religion? The divine justice which your general invokes in his letter will not fail to punish such acts severely." The messenger seemed astonished and startled; but he presently asked if the governor would give him his answer in writing. "No," returned Frontenac, "I will answer your general only by the mouths of my cannon, that he may learn that a man like me is not to be summoned after this fashion. Let him do his best, and I will do mine;" and he dismissed the Englishman abruptly. He was again blindfolded, led over the barricades, and sent back to the fleet by the boat that brought him. [7] [7] Lettre de Sir William Phips à M. de Frontenac, avec sa Réponse verbale; Relation de ce qui s'est passé à la Descente des Anglois à Québec au mois d'Octobre, 1690. Compare Monseignat, Relation. The English accounts, though more brief, confirm those of the French. Phips had often given proof of personal courage, but for the past three weeks his conduct seems that of a man conscious that he is charged with a work too large for his capacity. He had spent a good part of his time in holding councils of war; and now, when he heard the answer of Frontenac, he called another to consider what should be done. A plan of attack was at length arranged. The militia were to be landed on the shore of Beauport, which was just below Quebec, though separated 269 from it by the St. Charles. They were then to cross this river by a ford practicable at low water, climb the heights of St. Geneviève, and gain the rear of the town. The small vessels of the fleet were to aid the movement by ascending the St. Charles as far as the ford, holding the enemy in check by their fire, and carrying provisions, ammunition, and intrenching tools, for the use of the land troops. When these had crossed and were ready to attack Quebec in the rear, Phips was to cannonade it in front, and land two hundred men under cover of his guns to effect a diversion by storming the barricades. Some of the French prisoners, from whom their captors appear to have received a great deal of correct information, told the admiral that there was a place a mile or two above the town where the heights might be scaled and the rear of the fortifications reached from a direction opposite to that proposed. This was precisely the movement by which Wolfe afterwards gained his memorable victory; but Phips chose to abide by the original plan. [8] [8] Journal of Major Walley; Savage, Account of the Late Action of the New Englanders (Lond. 1691). While the plan was debated, the opportunity for accomplishing it ebbed away. It was still early when the messenger returned from Quebec; but, before Phips was ready to act, the day was on the wane and the tide was against him. He lay quietly at his moorings when, in the evening, a great shouting, mingled with the roll of drums and the sound of fifes, was heard from the Upper Town. The 270 English officers asked their prisoner, Granville, what it meant. "Ma foi, Messieurs," he replied, "you have lost the game. It is the governor of Montreal with the people from the country above. There is nothing for you now but to pack and go home." In fact, Callières had arrived with seven or eight hundred men, many of them regulars. With these were bands of coureurs de bois and other young Canadians, all full of fight, singing and whooping with martial glee as they passed the western gate and trooped down St. Louis Street. [9] [9] Juchereau, 325, 326. The next day was gusty and blustering; and still Phips lay quiet, waiting on the winds and the waves. A small vessel, with sixty men on board, under Captain Ephraim Savage, ran in towards the shore of Beauport to examine the landing, and stuck fast in the mud. The Canadians plied her with bullets, and brought a cannon to bear on her. They might have waded out and boarded her, but Savage and his men kept up so hot a fire that they forbore the attempt; and, when the tide rose, she floated again. There was another night of tranquillity; but at about eleven on Wednesday morning the French heard the English fifes and drums in full action, while repeated shouts of "God save King William!" rose from all the vessels. This lasted an hour or more; after which a great number of boats, loaded with men, put out from the fleet and rowed rapidly towards the shore of Beauport. The tide was low, and the boats grounded before reaching the landing-place. 271 The French on the rock could see the troops through telescopes, looking in the distance like a swarm of black ants, as they waded through mud and water, and formed in companies along the strand. They were some thirteen hundred in number, and were commanded by Major Walley. [10] Frontenac had sent three hundred sharpshooters, under Sainte-Hélène, to meet them and hold them in check. A battalion of troops followed; but, long before they could reach the spot, Sainte-Hélène's men, with a few militia from the neighboring parishes, and a band of Huron warriors from Lorette, threw themselves into the thickets along the front of the English, and opened a distant but galling fire upon the compact bodies of the enemy. Walley ordered a charge. The New England men rushed, in a disorderly manner, but with great impetuosity, up the rising ground; received two volleys, which failed to check them; and drove back the assailants in some confusion. They turned, however, and fought in Indian fashion with courage and address, leaping and dodging among trees, rocks, and bushes, firing as they retreated, and inflicting more harm than they received. Towards evening they disappeared; and Walley, whose men had been much scattered in the desultory fight, drew them together as well as he could, and advanced towards the St. Charles, in order to meet the vessels which were to aid him in passing the ford. 272 Here he posted sentinels, and encamped for the night. He had lost four killed and about sixty wounded, and imagined that he had killed twenty or thirty of the enemy. In fact, however, their loss was much less, though among the killed was a valuable officer, the Chevalier de Clermont, and among the wounded the veteran captain of Beauport, Juchereau de Saint-Denis, more than sixty-four years of age. In the evening, a deserter came to the English camp, and brought the unwelcome intelligence that there were three thousand armed men in Quebec. [11] [10] "Between 12 and 1,300 men." Walley, Journal. "About 1,200 men." Savage, Account of the Late Action. Savage was second in command of the militia. Mather says, 1,400. Most of the French accounts say, 1,500. Some say, 2,000; and La Hontan raises the number to 3,000. [11] On this affair, Walley, Journal; Savage, Account of the Late Action (in a letter to his brother); Monseignat, Relation; Relation de la Descente des Anglois; Relation de 1682-1712; La Hontan, I. 213. "M. le comte de Frontenac se trouva avec 3,000 hommes." Belmont, Histoire du Canada, A.D. 1690. The prisoner Captain Sylvanus Davis, in his diary, says, as already mentioned, that on the day before Phips's arrival so many regulars and militia arrived that, with those who came with Frontenac, there were about 2,700. This was before the arrival of Callières, who, according to Davis, brought but 300. Thus the three accounts of the deserter, Belmont, and Davis, tally exactly as to the sum total. An enemy of Frontenac writes, "Ce n'est pas sa présence qui fit prendre la fuite aux Anglois, mais le grand nombre de Fran?ois auxquels ils virent bien que celuy de leurs guerriers n'étoit pas capable de faire tête." Remarques sur l'Oraison Funèbre de feu M. de Frontenac. Meanwhile, Phips, whose fault hitherto had not been an excess of promptitude, grew impatient, and made a premature movement inconsistent with the preconcerted plan. He left his moorings, anchored his largest ships before the town, and prepared to cannonade it; but the fiery veteran, who watched him from the Chateau St. Louis, anticipated him, and gave him the first shot. Phips replied furiously, opening fire with every gun that he could bring to bear; while the rock paid him back in kind, 273 and belched flame and smoke from all its batteries. So fierce and rapid was the firing, that La Hontan compares it to volleys of musketry; and old officers, who had seen many sieges, declared that they had never known the like. [12] The din was prodigious, reverberated from the surrounding heights, and rolled back from the distant mountains in one continuous roar. On the part of the English, however, surprisingly little was accomplished beside noise and smoke. The practice of their gunners was so bad that many of their shot struck harmlessly against the face of the cliff. Their guns, too, were very light, and appear to have been charged with a view to the most rigid economy of gunpowder; for the balls failed to pierce the stone walls of the buildings, and did so little damage that, as the French boasted, twenty crowns would have repaired it all. [13] Night came at length, and the turmoil ceased. [12] La Hontan, I. 216; Juchereau, 326. [13] Père Germain, Relation de la Défaite des Anglois. Phips lay quiet till daybreak, when Frontenac sent a shot to waken him, and the cannonade began again. Sainte-Hélène had returned from Beauport; and he, with his brother Maricourt, took charge of the two batteries of the Lower Town, aiming the guns in person, and throwing balls of eighteen and twenty-four pounds with excellent precision against the four largest ships of the fleet. One of their shots cut the flagstaff of the admiral, and the cross of St. George fell into the river. It drifted with the tide towards the north shore; whereupon several 274 Canadians paddled out in a birch canoe, secured it, and brought it back in triumph. On the spire of the cathedral in the Upper Town had been hung a picture of the Holy Family, as an invocation of divine aid. The Puritan gunners wasted their ammunition in vain attempts to knock it down. That it escaped their malice was ascribed to miracle, but the miracle would have been greater if they had hit it. At length, one of the ships, which had suffered most, hauled off and abandoned the fight. That of the admiral had fared little better, and now her condition grew desperate. With her rigging torn, her mainmast half cut through, her mizzen-mast splintered, her cabin pierced, and her hull riddled with shot, another volley seemed likely to sink her, when Phips ordered her to be cut loose from her moorings, and she drifted out of fire, leaving cable and anchor behind. The remaining ships soon gave over the conflict, and withdrew to stations where they could neither do harm nor suffer it. [14] [14] Besides authorities before cited, Le Clercq, établissement de la Foy, II. 434; La Potherie, III. 118; Rapport de Champigny, Oct., 1690; Laval, Lettre à———, 20 Nov., 1690. Phips had thrown away nearly all his ammunition in this futile and disastrous attack, which should have been deferred till the moment when Walley, with his land force, had gained the rear of the town. Walley lay in his camp, his men wet, shivering with cold, famished, and sickening with the small-pox. Food, and all other supplies, were to have been brought him by the small vessels, which 275 should have entered the mouth of the St. Charles and aided him to cross it. But he waited for them in vain. Every vessel that carried a gun had busied itself in cannonading, and the rest did not move. There appears to have been insubordination among the masters of these small craft, some of whom, being owners or part-owners of the vessels they commanded, were probably unwilling to run them into danger. Walley was no soldier; but he saw that to attempt the passage of the river without aid, under the batteries of the town and in the face of forces twice as numerous as his own, was not an easy task. Frontenac, on his part, says that he wished him to do so, knowing that the attempt would ruin him. [15] The New England men were eager to push on; but the night of Thursday, the day of Phips's repulse, was so cold that ice formed more than an inch in thickness, and the half-starved militia suffered intensely. Six field-pieces, with their ammunition, had been sent ashore; but they were nearly useless, as there were no means of moving them. Half a barrel of musket powder, and one biscuit for each man, were also landed; and with this meagre aid Walley was left to capture Quebec. He might, had he dared, have made a dash across the ford on the morning of Thursday, and assaulted the town in the rear while Phips was cannonading it in front; but his courage was not equal to so desperate a venture. The firing ceased, and the possible opportunity was lost. The citizen soldier despaired of success; and, on the morning of Friday, he went 276 on board the admiral's ship to explain his situation. While he was gone, his men put themselves in motion, and advanced along the borders of the St. Charles towards the ford. Frontenac, with three battalions of regular troops, went to receive them at the crossing; while Sainte-Hélène, with his brother Longueuil, passed the ford with a body of Canadians, and opened fire on them from the neighboring thickets. Their advance parties were driven in, and there was a hot skirmish, the chief loss falling on the New England men, who were fully exposed. On the side of the French, Sainte-Hélène was mortally wounded, and his brother was hurt by a spent ball. Towards evening, the Canadians withdrew, and the English encamped for the night. Their commander presently rejoined them. The admiral had given him leave to withdraw them to the fleet, and boats were accordingly sent to bring them off; but, as these did not arrive till about daybreak, it was necessary to defer the embarkation till the next night. [15] Frontenac au Ministre, 12 et 19 Nov., 1690. At dawn, Quebec was all astir with the beating of drums and the ringing of bells. The New England drums replied; and Walley drew up his men under arms, expecting an attack, for the town was so near that the hubbub of voices from within could plainly be heard. The noise gradually died away; and, except a few shots from the ramparts, the invaders were left undisturbed. Walley sent two or three companies to beat up the neighboring thickets, where he suspected that the enemy was lurking. On the way, they had the good luck to 277 find and kill a number of cattle, which they cooked and ate on the spot; whereupon, being greatly refreshed and invigorated, they dashed forward in complete disorder, and were soon met by the fire of the ambushed Canadians. Several more companies were sent to their support, and the skirmishing became lively. Three detachments from Quebec had crossed the river; and the militia of Beauport and Beaupré had hastened to join them. They fought like Indians, hiding behind trees or throwing themselves flat among the bushes, and laying repeated ambuscades as they slowly fell back. At length, they all made a stand on a hill behind the buildings and fences of a farm; and here they held their ground till night, while the New England men taunted them as cowards who would never fight except under cover. [16] [16] Relation de la Descente des Anglois. Walley, who with his main body had stood in arms all day, now called in the skirmishers, and fell back to the landing-place, where, as soon as it grew dark, the boats arrived from the fleet. The sick men, of whom there were many, were sent on board, and then, amid floods of rain, the whole force embarked in noisy confusion, leaving behind them in the mud five of their cannon. Hasty as was their parting, their conduct on the whole had been creditable; and La Hontan, who was in Quebec at the time, says of them, "They fought vigorously, though as ill-disciplined as men gathered together at random could be; for they did not lack courage, and, if they failed, it was by reason 278 of their entire ignorance of discipline, and because they were exhausted by the fatigues of the voyage." Of Phips he speaks with contempt, and says that he could not have served the French better if they had bribed him to stand all the while with his arms folded. Some allowance should, nevertheless, be made him for the unmanageable character of the force under his command, the constitution of which was fatal to military subordination. On Sunday, the morning after the re-embarkation, Phips called a council of officers, and it was resolved that the men should rest for a day or two, that there should be a meeting for prayer, and that, if ammunition enough could be found, another landing should be attempted; but the rough weather prevented the prayer-meeting, and the plan of a new attack was fortunately abandoned. Quebec remained in agitation and alarm till Tuesday, when Phips weighed anchor and disappeared, with all his fleet, behind the Island of Orleans. He did not go far, as indeed he could not, but stopped four leagues below to mend rigging, fortify wounded masts, and stop shot-holes. Subercase had gone with a detachment to watch the retiring enemy; and Phips was repeatedly seen among his men, on a scaffold at the side of his ship, exercising his old trade of carpenter. This delay was turned to good use by an exchange of prisoners. Chief among those in the hands of the French was Captain Davis, late commander at Casco Bay; and there were also two young daughters 279 of Lieutenant Clark, who had been killed at the same place. Frontenac himself had humanely ransomed these children from the Indians; and Madame de Champigny, wife of the intendant, had, with equal kindness, bought from them a little girl named Sarah Gerrish, and placed her in charge of the nuns at the H?tel-Dieu, who had become greatly attached to her, while she, on her part, left them with reluctance. The French had the better in these exchanges, receiving able-bodied men, and returning, with the exception of Davis, only women and children. The heretics were gone, and Quebec breathed freely again. Her escape had been a narrow one; not that three thousand men, in part regular troops, defending one of the strongest positions on the continent, and commanded by Frontenac, could not defy the attacks of two thousand raw fishermen and farmers, led by an ignorant civilian, but the numbers which were a source of strength were at the same time a source of weakness. [17] Nearly all the adult males of Canada were gathered at Quebec, and there was imminent danger of starvation. Cattle from the neighboring parishes had been hastily driven into the town; but there was little other provision, and before Phips retreated the pinch of famine had begun. Had he come a week earlier or stayed a week later, the French themselves 280 believed that Quebec would have fallen, in the one case for want of men, and in the other for want of food. [17] The small-pox had left probably less than 2,000 effective men in the fleet when it arrived before Quebec. The number of regular troops in Canada by the roll of 1689 was 1,418. Nothing had since occurred to greatly diminish the number. Callières left about fifty in Montreal, and perhaps also a few in the neighboring forts. The rest were in Quebec. The Lower Town had been abandoned by its inhabitants, who bestowed their families and their furniture within the solid walls of the seminary. The cellars of the Ursuline convent were filled with women and children, and many more took refuge at the H?tel-Dieu. The beans and cabbages in the garden of the nuns were all stolen by the soldiers; and their wood-pile was turned into bivouac fires. "We were more dead than alive when we heard the cannon," writes Mother Juchereau; but the Jesuit Fremin came to console them, and their prayers and their labors never ceased. On the day when the firing was heaviest, twenty-six balls fell into their yard and garden, and were sent to the gunners at the batteries, who returned them to their English owners. At the convent of the Ursulines, the corner of a nun's apron was carried off by a cannon-shot as she passed through her chamber. The sisterhood began a novena, or nine days' devotion, to St. Joseph, St. Ann, the angels, and the souls in purgatory; and one of their number remained day and night in prayer before the images of the Holy Family. The bishop came to encourage them; and his prayers and his chants were so fervent that they thought their last hour was come. [18] [18] Récit d'une Réligieuse Ursuline, in Les Ursulines de Québec, I. 470. The superior of the Jesuits, with some of the elder members of the Order, remained at their college 281 during the attack, ready, should the heretics prevail, to repair to their chapel, and die before the altar. Rumor exaggerated the numbers of the enemy, and a general alarm pervaded the town. It was still greater at Lorette, nine miles distant. The warriors of that mission were in the first skirmish at Beauport; and two of them, running off in a fright, reported at the village that the enemy were carrying every thing before them. On this, the villagers fled to the woods, followed by Father Germain, their missionary, to whom this hasty exodus suggested the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. [19] The Jesuits were thought to have special reason to fear the Puritan soldiery, who, it was reported, meant to kill them all, after cutting off their ears to make necklaces. [20] [19] "Il nous ressouvint alors de la fuite de Nostre Seigneur en égypte." Père Germain, Relation. [20] Ibid. When news first came of the approach of Phips, the bishop was absent on a pastoral tour. Hastening back, he entered Quebec at night, by torchlight, to the great joy of its inmates, who felt that his presence brought a benediction. He issued a pastoral address, exhorting his flock to frequent and full confession and constant attendance at mass, as the means of insuring the success of their arms. [21] Laval, the former bishop, aided his efforts. "We appealed," he writes, "to God, his Holy Mother, to all the Angels, and to all the Saints." [22] Nor was 282 the appeal in vain: for each day seemed to bring some new token of celestial favor; and it is not surprising that the head-winds which delayed the approach of the enemy, the cold and the storms which hastened his departure, and, above all, his singularly innocent cannonade, which killed but two or three persons, should have been accepted as proof of divine intervention. It was to the Holy Virgin that Quebec had been most lavish of its vows, and to her the victory was ascribed. [21] Lettre pastorale pour disposer les Peuples de ce Diocèse à se bien déffendre contre les Anglois (Reg. de l'évêché de Québec). [22] Laval à———, Nov. 20, 1690. One great anxiety still troubled the minds of the victors. Three ships, bringing large sums of money and the yearly supplies for the colony, were on their way to Quebec; and nothing was more likely than that the retiring fleet would meet and capture them. Messengers had been sent down the river, who passed the English in the dark, found the ships at St. Paul's Bay, and warned them of the danger. They turned back, and hid themselves within the mouth of the Saguenay; but not soon enough to prevent Phips from discovering their retreat. He tried to follow them; but thick fogs arose, with a persistent tempest of snow, which completely baffled him, and, after waiting five days, he gave over the attempt. When he was gone, the three ships emerged from their hiding-place, and sailed again for Quebec, where they were greeted with a universal jubilee. Their deliverance was ascribed to Saint Ann, the mother of the Virgin, and also to St. Francis Xavier, whose name one of them bore. Quebec was divided between thanksgiving and 283 rejoicing. The captured flag of Phips's ship was borne to the cathedral in triumph; the bishop sang Te Deum; and, amid the firing of cannon, the image of the Virgin was carried to each church and chapel in the place by a procession, in which priests, people, and troops all took part. The day closed with a grand bonfire in honor of Frontenac. One of the three ships carried back the news of the victory, which was hailed with joy at Versailles; and a medal was struck to commemorate it. The ship carried also a despatch from Frontenac. "Now that the king has triumphed by land and sea," wrote the old soldier, "will he think that a few squadrons of his navy would be ill employed in punishing the insolence of these genuine old parliamentarians of Boston, and crushing them in their den and the English of New York as well? By mastering these two towns, we shall secure the whole sea-coast, besides the fisheries of the Grand Bank, which is no slight matter: and this would be the true, and perhaps the only, way of bringing the wars of Canada to an end; for, when the English are conquered, we can easily reduce the Iroquois to complete submission." [23] [23] Frontenac au Ministre, 9 et 12 Nov., 1690. Phips returned crestfallen to Boston late in November; and one by one the rest of the fleet came straggling after him, battered and weather-beaten. Some did not appear till February, and three or four never came at all. The autumn and early winter were unusually stormy. Captain Rainsford, with sixty men, was wrecked on the 284 Island of Anticosti, where more than half their number died of cold and misery. [24] In the other vessels, some were drowned, some frost-bitten, and above two hundred killed by small-pox and fever. [24] Mather, Magnalia, I. 192. At Boston, all was dismay and gloom. The Puritan bowed before "this awful frown of God," and searched his conscience for the sin that had brought upon him so stern a chastisement. [25] Massachusetts, already impoverished, found herself in extremity. The war, instead of paying for itself, had burdened her with an additional debt of fifty thousand pounds. [26] The sailors and soldiers were clamorous for their pay; and, to satisfy them, the colony was forced for the first time in its history to issue a paper currency. It was made receivable at a premium for all public debts, and was also fortified by a provision for its early redemption by taxation; a provision which was carried into effect in spite of poverty and distress. [27] [25] The Governor and Council to the Agents of Massachusetts, in Andros Tracts, III. 53. [26] Address of the Gentry, Merchants, and others, Ibid., II. 236. [27] The following is a literal copy of a specimen of this paper money, which varied in value from two shillings to ten pounds:— No. (2161) 10s This Indented Bill of Ten Shillings, due from the Massachusetts Colony to the Possessor, shall be in value equal to Money, and shall be accordingly accepted by the Treasurer and Receivers subordinate to him in all Publick Payments, and for any Stock at any time in the Treasury Boston in New England, December the 10th. 1690. By Order of the General Court. Seal of Masachu- setts. Peter Townsend Adam Winthrop Tim. Thornton } Comtee When this paper came into the hands of the treasurer, it was burned. Nevertheless, owing to the temporary character of the provisional government, it fell for a time to the value of from fourteen to sixteen shillings in the pound. In the Bibliothèque Nationale is the original draft of a remarkable map, by the engineer Villeneuve, of which a fac-simile is before me. It represents in detail the town and fortifications of Quebec, the surrounding country, and the positions of the English fleet and land forces, and is entitled PLAN DE QUéBEC, et de ses Environs, EN LA NOUVELLE FRANCE, ASSIéGé PAR LES ANGLOIS, le 16 d'Octobre 1690 jusqu'au 22 dud. mois qu'ils s'en allerent, apprès avoir esté bien battus PAR Mr. LE COMTE DE FRONTENAC, gouverneur general du Pays. 285 Massachusetts had made her usual mistake. She had confidently believed that ignorance and inexperience could match the skill of a tried veteran, and that the rude courage of her fishermen and farmers could triumph without discipline or leadership. The conditions of her material prosperity were adverse to efficiency in war. A trading republic, without trained officers, may win victories; but it wins them either by accident or by an extravagant outlay in money and life. CHAPTER XIV. 1690-1694. The Scourge of Canada. Iroquois Inroads ? Death of Bienville ? English Attack ? A Desperate Fight ? Miseries of the Colony ? Alarms ? A Winter Expedition ? La Chesnaye burned ? The Heroine of Verchères ? Mission Indians ? The Mohawk Expedition ? Retreat and Pursuit ? Relief arrives ? Frontenac Triumphant. One of Phips's officers, charged with the exchange of prisoners at Quebec, said as he took his leave, "We shall make you another visit in the spring;" and a French officer returned, with martial courtesy, "We shall have the honor of meeting you before that time." Neither side made good its threat, for both were too weak and too poor. No more war-parties were sent that winter to ravage the English border; for neither blankets, clothing, ammunition, nor food could be spared. The fields had lain untilled over half Canada; and, though four ships had arrived with supplies, twice as many had been captured or driven back by English cruisers in the Gulf. The troops could not be kept together; and they were quartered for subsistence upon the settlers, themselves half famished. Spring came at length, and brought with it the 287 swallows, the bluebirds, and the Iroquois. They rarely came in winter, when the trees and bushes had no leaves to hide them, and their movements were betrayed by the track of their snow-shoes; but they were always to be expected at the time of sowing and of harvest, when they could do most mischief. During April, about eight hundred of them, gathering from their winter hunting-grounds, encamped at the mouth of the Ottawa, whence they detached parties to ravage the settlements. A large band fell upon Point aux Trembles, below Montreal, burned some thirty houses, and killed such of the inmates as could not escape. Another band attacked the Mission of the Mountain, just behind the town, and captured thirty-five of the Indian converts in broad daylight. Others prowled among the deserted farms on both shores of the St. Lawrence; while the inhabitants remained pent in their stockade forts, with misery in the present and starvation in the future. Troops and militia were not wanting. The difficulty was to find provisions enough to enable them to keep the field. By begging from house to house, getting here a biscuit and there a morsel of bacon, enough was collected to supply a considerable party for a number of days; and a hundred and twenty soldiers and Canadians went out under Vaudreuil to hunt the hunters of men. Long impunity had made the Iroquois so careless that they were easily found. A band of about forty had made their quarters at a house near the fort at Repentigny, and here the French scouts discovered them early 288 in the night. Vaudreuil and his men were in canoes. They lay quiet till one o'clock, then landed, and noiselessly approached the spot. Some of the Iroquois were in the house, the rest lay asleep on the ground before it. The French crept towards them, and by one close volley killed them all. Their comrades within sprang up in dismay. Three rushed out, and were shot: the others stood on their defence, fired from windows and loopholes, and killed six or seven of the French, who presently succeeded in setting fire to the house, which was thatched with straw. Young Fran?ois de Bienville, one of the sons of Charles Le Moyne, rushed up to a window, shouted his name like an Indian warrior, fired on the savages within, and was instantly shot dead. The flames rose till surrounding objects were bright as day. The Iroquois, driven to desperation, burst out like tigers, and tried to break through their assailants. Only one succeeded. Of his companions, some were shot, five were knocked down and captured, and the rest driven back into the house, where they perished in the fire. Three of the prisoners were given to the inhabitants of Repentigny, Point aux Trembles, and Boucherville, who, in their fury, burned them alive. [1] [1] Relation de Bénac, 1691; Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus considérable en Canada, 1690, 1691; La Potherie, III. 134; Relation de 1682-1712; Champigny au Ministre, 12 May, 1691. The name of Bienville was taken, after his death, by one of his brothers, the founder of New Orleans. For weeks, the upper parts of the colony were infested by wolfish bands howling around the forts, which they rarely ventured to attack. At length, help came. A squadron from France, strong enough 289 to beat off the New England privateers which blockaded the St. Lawrence, arrived at Quebec with men and supplies; and a strong force was despatched to break up the Iroquois camp at the Ottawa. The enemy vanished at its approach; and the suffering farmers had a brief respite, which enabled them to sow their crops, when suddenly a fresh alarm was sounded from Sorel to Montreal, and again the settlers ran to their forts for refuge. Since the futile effort of the year before, the English of New York, still distracted by the political disorders that followed the usurpation of Leisler, had fought only by deputy, and contented themselves with hounding on the Iroquois against the common enemy. These savage allies at length lost patience, and charged their white neighbors with laziness and fear. "You say to us, 'Keep the French in perpetual alarm.' Why don't you say, 'We will keep the French in perpetual alarm'?" [2] It was clear that something must be done, or New York would be left to fight her battles alone. A war-party was therefore formed at Albany, and the Indians were invited to join it. Major Peter Schuyler took command; and his force consisted of two hundred and sixty-six men, of whom a hundred and twenty were English and Dutch, and the rest Mohawks and Wolves, or Mohegans. [3] He advanced to a point on the Richelieu ten miles above Fort Chambly, and, leaving his canoes under a strong guard, marched towards La Prairie de la Madeleine, opposite Montreal. [2] Colden, 125, 140. [3] Official Journal of Schuyler, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 800. 290 Scouts had brought warning of his approach; and Callières, the local governor, crossed the St. Lawrence, and encamped at La Prairie with seven or eight hundred men. [4] Here he remained for a week, attacked by fever and helpless in bed. The fort stood a few rods from the river. Two battalions of regulars lay on a field at the right; and the Canadians and Indians were bivouacked on the left, between the fort and a small stream, near which was a windmill. On the evening of the tenth of August, a drizzling rain began to fall; and the Canadians thought more of seeking shelter than of keeping watch. They were, moreover, well supplied with brandy, and used it freely. [5] At an hour before dawn, the sentry at the mill descried objects like the shadows of men silently advancing along the borders of the stream. They were Schuyler's vanguard. The soldier cried, "Qui vive?" There was no answer. He fired his musket, and ran into the mill. Schuyler's men rushed in a body upon the Canadian camp, drove its occupants into the fort, and killed some of the Indian allies, who lay under their canoes on the adjacent strand. [4] Relation de Bénac; Relation de 1682-1712. [5] "La débauche fut extrême en toute manière." Belmont. The regulars on the other side of the fort, roused by the noise, sprang to arms and hastened to the spot. They were met by a volley, which laid some fifty of them on the ground, and drove back the rest in disorder. They rallied and attacked again; on which, Schuyler, greatly outnumbered, withdrew his men to a neighboring ravine, where he once 291 more repulsed his assailants, and, as he declares, drove them into the fort with great loss. By this time it was daylight. The English, having struck their blow, slowly fell back, hacking down the corn in the fields, as it was still too green for burning, and pausing at the edge of the woods, where their Indians were heard for some time uttering frightful howls, and shouting to the French that they were not men, but dogs. Why the invaders were left to retreat unmolested, before a force more than double their own, does not appear. The helpless condition of Callières and the death of Saint-Cirque, his second in command, scarcely suffice to explain it. Schuyler retreated towards his canoes, moving, at his leisure, along the forest path that led to Chambly. Tried by the standard of partisan war, his raid had been a success. He had inflicted great harm and suffered little; but the affair was not yet ended. A day or two before, Valrenne, an officer of birth and ability, had been sent to Chambly, with about a hundred and sixty troops and Canadians, a body of Huron and Iroquois converts, and a band of Algonquins from the Ottawa. His orders were to let the English pass, and then place himself in their rear to cut them off from their canoes. His scouts had discovered their advance; and, on the morning of the attack, he set his force in motion, and advanced six or seven miles towards La Prairie, on the path by which Schuyler was retreating. The country was buried in forests. At about nine o'clock, the scouts of the hostile 292 parties met each other, and their war-whoops gave the alarm. Valrenne instantly took possession of a ridge of ground that crossed the way of the approaching English. Two large trees had fallen along the crest of the acclivity; and behind these the French crouched, in a triple row, well hidden by bushes and thick standing trunks. The English, underrating the strength of their enemy, and ignorant of his exact position, charged impetuously, and were sent reeling back by a close and deadly volley. They repeated the attack with still greater fury, and dislodged the French from their ambuscade. Then ensued a fight, which Frontenac declares to have been the most hot and stubborn ever known in Canada. The object of Schuyler was to break through the French and reach his canoes: the object of Valrenne was to drive him back upon the superior force at La Prairie. The cautious tactics of the bush were forgotten. Three times the combatants became mingled together, firing breast to breast, and scorching each other's shirts by the flash of their guns. The Algonquins did themselves no credit; and at first some of the Canadians gave way, but they were rallied by Le Ber Duchesne, their commander, and afterwards showed great bravery. On the side of the English, many of the Mohegan allies ran off; but the whites and the Mohawks fought with equal desperation. In the midst of the tumult, Valrenne was perfectly cool, directing his men with admirable vigor and address, and barring Schuyler's retreat for more than an hour. At length, the French were driven 293 from the path. "We broke through the middle of their body," says Schuyler, "until we got into their rear, trampling upon their dead; then faced about upon them, and fought them until we made them give way; then drove them, by strength of arm, four hundred paces before us; and, to say the truth, we were all glad to see them retreat." [6] He and his followers continued their march unmolested, carrying their wounded men, and leaving about forty dead behind them, along with one of their flags, and all their knapsacks, which they had thrown off when the fray began. They reached the banks of the Richelieu, found their canoes safe, and, after waiting several hours for stragglers, embarked for Albany. [6] Major Peter Schuyler's Journal of his Expedition to Canada, in N. Y. Col. Docs., III. 800. "Les ennemis enfoncèrent notre embuscade." Belmont. Nothing saved them from destruction but the failure of the French at La Prairie to follow their retreat, and thus enclose them between two fires. They did so, it is true, at the eleventh hour, but not till the fight was over and the English were gone. The Christian Mohawks of the Saut also appeared in the afternoon, and set out to pursue the enemy, but seem to have taken care not to overtake them; for the English Mohawks were their relatives, and they had no wish for their scalps. Frontenac was angry at their conduct; and, as he rarely lost an opportunity to find fault with the Jesuits, he laid the blame on the fathers in charge of the mission, whom he sharply upbraided for the shortcomings of their flock. [7] [7] As this fight under Valrenne has been represented as a French 294 victory against overwhelming odds, it may be well to observe the evidence as to the numbers engaged. The French party consisted, according to Bénac, of 160 regulars and Canadians, besides Indians. La Potherie places it at 180 men, and Frontenac at 200 men. These two estimates do not include Indians; for the author of the Relation of 1682-1712, who was an officer on the spot at the time, puts the number at 300 soldiers, Canadians, and savages. Schuyler's official return shows that his party consisted of 120 whites, 80 Mohawks, and 66 River Indians (Mohegans): 266 in all. The French writer Bénac places the whole at 280, and the intendant Champigny at 300. The other French estimates of the English force are greatly exaggerated. Schuyler's strength was reduced by 27 men left to guard the canoes, and by a number killed or disabled at La Prairie. The force under Valrenne was additional to the 700 or 800 men at La Prairie (Relation, 1682-1712). Schuyler reported his loss in killed at 21 whites, 16 Mohawks, and 6 Mohegans, besides many wounded. The French statements of it are enormously in excess of this, and are irreconcilable with each other. He was at Three Rivers at a ball when news of the disaster at La Prairie damped the spirits of the company, which, however, were soon revived by tidings of the fight under Valrenne and the retreat of the English, who were reported to have left two hundred dead on the field. Frontenac wrote an account of the affair to the minister, with high praise of Valrenne and his band, followed by an appeal for help. "What with fighting and hardship, our troops and militia are wasting away." "The enemy is upon us by sea and land." "Send us a thousand men next spring, if you want the colony to be saved." "We are perishing by inches; the people are in the depths of poverty; the war has doubled prices so that nobody can live." "Many families are without bread. The inhabitants desert the country, and crowd into the towns." [8] 295 A new enemy appeared in the following summer, almost as destructive as the Iroquois. This was an army of caterpillars, which set at naught the maledictions of the clergy, and made great havoc among the crops. It is recorded that along with the caterpillars came an unprecedented multitude of squirrels, which, being industriously trapped or shot, proved a great help to many families. [8] Lettres de Frontenac et de Champigny, 1691, 1692. Alarm followed alarm. It was reported that Phips was bent on revenge for his late discomfiture, that great armaments were afoot, and that a mighty host of "Bostonnais" was preparing another descent. Again and again Frontenac begged that one bold blow should be struck to end these perils and make King Louis master of the continent, by despatching a fleet to seize New York. If this were done, he said, it would be easy to take Boston and the "rebels and old republican leaven of Cromwell" who harbored there; then burn the place, and utterly destroy it. [9] Villebon, governor of Acadia, was of the same mind. "No town," he told the minister, "could be burned more easily. Most of the houses are covered with shingles, and the streets are very narrow." [10] But the king could not spare a squadron equal to the attempt; and Frontenac was told that he must wait. The troops sent him did not supply his losses. [11] Money came every summer in sums which now seem small, but were far from being so in the eyes of the king, 296 who joined to each remittance a lecture on economy and a warning against extravagance. [12] [9] Frontenac in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 496, 506. [10] Villebon in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 507. [11] The returns show 1,313 regulars in 1691, and 1,120 in 1692. [12] Lettres du Roy et du Ministre, 1690-1694. In 1691, the amount allowed for extraordinaires de guerre was 99,000 livres (francs). In 1692, it was 193,000 livres, a part of which was for fortifications. In the following year, no less than 750,000 livres were drawn for Canada, "ce qui ne se pourroit pas supporter, si cela continuoit de la mesme force," writes the minister. (Le Ministre à Frontenac, 13 Mars, 1694.) This last sum probably included the pay of the troops. The intendant received his share of blame on these occasions, and he usually defended himself vigorously. He tells his master that "war-parties are necessary, but very expensive. We rarely pay money; but we must give presents to our Indians, and fit out the Canadians with provisions, arms, ammunition, moccasons, snow-shoes, sledges, canoes, capotes, breeches, stockings, and blankets. This costs a great deal, but without it we should have to abandon Canada." The king complained that, while the great sums he was spending in the colony turned to the profit of the inhabitants, they contributed nothing to their own defence. The complaint was scarcely just; for, if they gave no money, they gave their blood with sufficient readiness. Excepting a few merchants, they had nothing else to give; and, in the years when the fur trade was cut off, they lived chiefly on the pay they received for supplying the troops and other public services. Far from being able to support the war, they looked to the war to support them. [13] [13] "Sa Majesté fait depuis plusieurs années des sacrifices immenses en Canada. L'avantage en demeure presque tout entier au profit des habitans et des marchands qui y resident. Ces dépenses se font pour leur seureté et pour leur conservation. Il est juste que ceux qui sont en estat secourent le public." Mémoire du Roy, 1693. "Les habitans de la colonie 297 ne contribuent en rien à tout ce que Sa Majesté fait pour leur conservation, pendant que ses sujets du Royaume donnent tout ce qu'ils ont pour son service." Le Ministre à Frontenac, 13 Mars, 1694. The work of fortifying the vital points of the colony, Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal, received constant stimulus from the alarms of attack, and, above all, from a groundless report that ten thousand "Bostonnais" had sailed for Quebec. The sessions of the council were suspended, and the councillors seized pick and spade. The old defences of the place were reconstructed on a new plan, made by the great engineer Vauban. The settlers were mustered together from a distance of twenty leagues, and compelled to labor, with little or no pay, till a line of solid earthworks enclosed Quebec from Cape Diamond to the St. Charles. Three Rivers and Montreal were also strengthened. The cost exceeded the estimates, and drew upon Frontenac and Champigny fresh admonitions from Versailles. [14] [14] Lettres du Roy et du Ministre, 1693, 1694. Cape Diamond was now for the first time included within the line of circumvallation at Quebec. A strong stone redoubt, with sixteen cannon, was built upon its summit. In 1854, in demolishing a part of the old wall between the fort of Quebec and the adjacent "Governor's Garden," a plate of copper was found with a Latin inscription, of which the following is a translation:— "In the year of Grace, 1693, under the reign of the Most August, Most Invincible, and Most Christian King, Louis the Great, Fourteenth of that name, the Most Excellent and Most Illustrious Lord, Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, twice Viceroy of all New France, after having three years before repulsed, routed, and completely conquered the rebellious inhabitants of New England, who besieged this town of Quebec, and who threatened to renew their attack this year, constructed, at the charge of the king, this citadel, with the fortifications therewith connected, for the defence of the country and the safety of the people, and for confounding yet again a people perfidious towards God and towards its lawful king. And he has laid this first stone." 298 The bounties on scalps and prisoners were another occasion of royal complaint. Twenty crowns had been offered for each male white prisoner, ten crowns for each female, and ten crowns for each scalp, whether Indian or English. [15] The bounty on prisoners produced an excellent result, since instead of killing them the Indian allies learned to bring them to Quebec. If children, they were placed in the convents; and, if adults, they were distributed to labor among the settlers. Thus, though the royal letters show that the measure was one of policy, it acted in the interest of humanity. It was not so with the bounty on scalps. The Abenaki, Huron, and Iroquois converts brought in many of them; but grave doubts arose whether they all came from the heads of enemies. [16] The scalp of a Frenchman was not distinguishable from the scalp of an Englishman, and could be had with less trouble. Partly for this reason, and partly out of economy, the king gave it as his belief that a bounty of one crown was enough; though the governor and the intendant united in declaring that the scalps of the whole Iroquois confederacy would be a good bargain for his Majesty at ten crowns apiece. [17] [15] Champigny au Ministre, 21 Sept., 1692. [16] Relation de 1682-1712. [17] Mémoire du Roy aux Sieurs Frontenac et Champigny, 1693; Frontenac et Champigny au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1693. The bounty on prisoners was reduced in the same proportion, showing that economy was the chief object of the change. The river Ottawa was the main artery of Canada, and to stop it was to stop the flow of her life blood. The Iroquois knew this; and their constant effort 299 was to close it so completely that the annual supply of beaver skins would be prevented from passing, and the colony be compelled to live on credit. It was their habit to spend the latter part of the winter in hunting among the forests between the Ottawa and the upper St. Lawrence, and then, when the ice broke up, to move in large bands to the banks of the former stream, and lie in ambush at the Chaudière, the Long Saut, or other favorable points, to waylay the passing canoes. On the other hand, it was the constant effort of Frontenac to drive them off and keep the river open; an almost impossible task. Many conflicts, great and small, took place with various results; but, in spite of every effort, the Iroquois blockade was maintained more than two years. The story of one of the expeditions made by the French in this quarter will show the hardship of the service, and the moral and physical vigor which it demanded. Early in February, three hundred men under Dorvilliers were sent by Frontenac to surprise the Iroquois in their hunting-grounds. When they were a few days out, their leader scalded his foot by the upsetting of a kettle at their encampment near Lake St. Francis; and the command fell on a youth named Beaucour, an officer of regulars, accomplished as an engineer, and known for his polished wit. The march through the snow-clogged forest was so terrible that the men lost heart. Hands and feet were frozen; some of the Indians refused to proceed, and many of the Canadians lagged behind. Shots were heard, showing that 300 the enemy were not far off; but cold, hunger, and fatigue had overcome the courage of the pursuers, and the young commander saw his followers on the point of deserting him. He called them together, and harangued them in terms so animating that they caught his spirit, and again pushed on. For four hours more they followed the tracks of the Iroquois snow-shoes, till they found the savages in their bivouac, set upon them, and killed or captured nearly all. There was a French slave among them, scarcely distinguishable from his owners. It was an officer named La Plante, taken at La Chine three years before. "He would have been killed like his masters," says La Hontan, "if he had not cried out with all his might, 'Miséricorde, sauvez-moi, je suis Fran?ais'" [18] Beaucour brought his prisoners to Quebec, where Frontenac ordered that two of them should be burned. One stabbed himself in prison; the other was tortured by the Christian Hurons on Cape Diamond, defying them to the last. Nor was this the only instance of such fearful reprisal. In the same year, a number of Iroquois captured by Vaudreuil were burned at Montreal at the demand of the Canadians and the mission Indians, who insisted that their cruelties should be paid back in kind. It is said that the purpose was answered, and the Iroquois deterred for a while from torturing their captives. [19] [18] La Potherie, III. 156; Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus considérable en Canada, 1691, 1692; La Hontan, I. 233. [19] Relation, 1682-1712. The brunt of the war fell on the upper half of 301 the colony. The country about Montreal, and for nearly a hundred miles below it, was easily accessible to the Iroquois by the routes of Lake Champlain and the upper St. Lawrence; while below Three Rivers the settlements were tolerably safe from their incursions, and were exposed to attack solely from the English of New England, who could molest them only by sailing up from the Gulf in force. Hence the settlers remained on their farms, and followed their usual occupations, except when Frontenac drafted them for war-parties. Above Three Rivers, their condition was wholly different. A traveller passing through this part of Canada would have found the houses empty. Here and there he would have seen all the inhabitants of a parish laboring in a field together, watched by sentinels, and generally guarded by a squad of regulars. When one field was tilled, they passed to the next; and this communal process was repeated when the harvest was ripe. At night, they took refuge in the fort; that is to say, in a cluster of log cabins, surrounded by a palisade. Sometimes, when long exemption from attack had emboldened them, they ventured back to their farm-houses, an experiment always critical and sometimes fatal. Thus the people of La Chesnaye, forgetting a sharp lesson they had received a year or two before, returned to their homes in fancied security. One evening a bachelor of the parish made a visit to a neighboring widow, bringing with him his gun and a small dog. As he was taking his leave, his hostess, whose husband had 302 been killed the year before, told him that she was afraid to be left alone, and begged him to remain with her, an invitation which he accepted. Towards morning, the barking of his dog roused him; when, going out, he saw the night lighted up by the blaze of burning houses, and heard the usual firing and screeching of an Iroquois attack. He went back to his frightened companion, who also had a gun. Placing himself at a corner of the house, he told her to stand behind him. A number of Iroquois soon appeared, on which he fired at them, and, taking her gun, repeated the shot, giving her his own to load. The warriors returned his fire from a safe distance, and in the morning withdrew altogether, on which the pair emerged from their shelter, and succeeded in reaching the fort. The other inhabitants were all killed or captured. [20] [20] Relation, 1682-1712. Many incidents of this troubled time are preserved, but none of them are so well worth the record as the defence of the fort at Verchères by the young daughter of the seignior. Many years later, the Marquis de Beauharnais, governor of Canada, caused the story to be written down from the recital of the heroine herself. Verchères was on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, about twenty miles below Montreal. A strong blockhouse stood outside the fort, and was connected with it by a covered way. On the morning of the twenty-second of October, the inhabitants were at work in the fields, and nobody was left in the place but two soldiers, two boys, an old man of eighty, 303 and a number of women and children. The seignior, formerly an officer of the regiment of Carignan, was on duty at Quebec; his wife was at Montreal; and their daughter Madeleine, fourteen years of age, was at the landing-place not far from the gate of the fort, with a hired man named Laviolette. Suddenly she heard firing from the direction where the settlers were at work, and an instant after Laviolette cried out, "Run, Mademoiselle, run! here come the Iroquois!" She turned and saw forty or fifty of them at the distance of a pistol-shot. "I ran for the fort, commending myself to the Holy Virgin. The Iroquois who chased after me, seeing that they could not catch me alive before I reached the gate, stopped and fired at me. The bullets whistled about my ears, and made the time seem very long. As soon as I was near enough to be heard, I cried out, To arms! to arms! hoping that somebody would come out and help me; but it was of no use. The two soldiers in the fort were so scared that they had hidden in the blockhouse. At the gate, I found two women crying for their husbands, who had just been killed. I made them go in, and then shut the gate. I next thought what I could do to save myself and the few people with me. I went to inspect the fort, and found that several palisades had fallen down, and left openings by which the enemy could easily get in. I ordered them to be set up again, and helped to carry them myself. When the breaches were stopped, I went to the blockhouse where the ammunition is kept, and 304 here I found the two soldiers, one hiding in a corner, and the other with a lighted match in his hand. 'What are you going to do with that match?' I asked. He answered, 'Light the powder, and blow us all up.' 'You are a miserable coward,' said I, 'go out of this place.' I spoke so resolutely that he obeyed. I then threw off my bonnet; and, after putting on a hat and taking a gun, I said to my two brothers: 'Let us fight to the death. We are fighting for our country and our religion. Remember that our father has taught you that gentlemen are born to shed their blood for the service of God and the king.'" The boys, who were twelve and ten years old, aided by the soldiers, whom her words had inspired with some little courage, began to fire from the loopholes upon the Iroquois, who, ignorant of the weakness of the garrison, showed their usual reluctance to attack a fortified place, and occupied themselves with chasing and butchering the people in the neighboring fields. Madeleine ordered a cannon to be fired, partly to deter the enemy from an assault, and partly to warn some of the soldiers, who were hunting at a distance. The women and children in the fort cried and screamed without ceasing. She ordered them to stop, lest their terror should encourage the Indians. A canoe was presently seen approaching the landing-place. It was a settler named Fontaine, trying to reach the fort with his family. The Iroquois were still near; and Madeleine feared that the new comers would be killed, if something were not done to aid them. 305 She appealed to the soldiers, but their courage was not equal to the attempt; on which, as she declares, after leaving Laviolette to keep watch at the gate, she herself went alone to the landing-place. "I thought that the savages would suppose it to be a ruse to draw them towards the fort, in order to make a sortie upon them. They did suppose so, and thus I was able to save the Fontaine family. When they were all landed, I made them march before me in full sight of the enemy. We put so bold a face on it, that they thought they had more to fear than we. Strengthened by this reinforcement, I ordered that the enemy should be fired on whenever they showed themselves. After sunset, a violent north-east wind began to blow, accompanied with snow and hail, which told us that we should have a terrible night. The Iroquois were all this time lurking about us; and I judged by their movements that, instead of being deterred by the storm, they would climb into the fort under cover of the darkness. I assembled all my troops, that is to say, six persons, and spoke to them thus: 'God has saved us to-day from the hands of our enemies, but we must take care not to fall into their snares to-night. As for me, I want you to see that I am not afraid. I will take charge of the fort with an old man of eighty and another who never fired a gun; and you, Pierre Fontaine, with La Bonté and Gachet (our two soldiers), will go to the blockhouse with the women and children, because that is the strongest place; and, if I am taken, don't surrender, even if I am cut to pieces and 306 burned before your eyes. The enemy cannot hurt you in the blockhouse, if you make the least show of fight.' I placed my young brothers on two of the bastions, the old man on the third, and I took the fourth; and all night, in spite of wind, snow, and hail, the cries of 'All's well' were kept up from the blockhouse to the fort, and from the fort to the blockhouse. One would have thought that the place was full of soldiers. The Iroquois thought so, and were completely deceived, as they confessed afterwards to Monsieur de Callières, whom they told that they had held a council to make a plan for capturing the fort in the night but had done nothing because such a constant watch was kept. "About one in the morning, the sentinel on the bastion by the gate called out, 'Mademoiselle, I hear something.' I went to him to find what it was; and by the help of the snow, which covered the ground, I could see through the darkness a number of cattle, the miserable remnant that the Iroquois had left us. The others wanted to open the gate and let them in, but I answered: 'God forbid. You don't know all the tricks of the savages. They are no doubt following the cattle, covered with skins of beasts, so as to get into the fort, if we are simple enough to open the gate for them.' Nevertheless, after taking every precaution, I thought that we might open it without risk. I made my two brothers stand ready with their guns cocked in case of surprise, and so we let in the cattle. "At last, the daylight came again; and, as the 307 darkness disappeared, our anxieties seemed to disappear with it. Everybody took courage except Mademoiselle Marguérite, wife of the Sieur Fontaine, who being extremely timid, as all Parisian women are, asked her husband to carry her to another fort … He said, 'I will never abandon this fort while Mademoiselle Madelon (Madeleine) is here.' I answered him that I would never abandon it; that I would rather die than give it up to the enemy; and that it was of the greatest importance that they should never get possession of any French fort, because, if they got one, they would think they could get others, and would grow more bold and presumptuous than ever. I may say with truth that I did not eat or sleep for twice twenty-four hours. I did not go once into my father's house, but kept always on the bastion, or went to the blockhouse to see how the people there were behaving. I always kept a cheerful and smiling face, and encouraged my little company with the hope of speedy succor. "We were a week in constant alarm, with the enemy always about us. At last Monsieur de la Monnerie, a lieutenant sent by Monsieur de Callières, arrived in the night with forty men. As he did not know whether the fort was taken or not, he approached as silently as possible. One of our sentinels, hearing a slight sound, cried, 'Qui vive?' I was at the time dozing, with my head on a table and my gun lying across my arms. The sentinel told me that he heard a voice from the river. I went up at once to the bastion to see whether it was Indians or Frenchmen. I asked, 'Who are 308 you?' One of them answered, 'We are Frenchmen: it is La Monnerie, who comes to bring you help.' I caused the gate to be opened, placed a sentinel there, and went down to the river to meet them. As soon as I saw Monsieur de la Monnerie, I saluted him, and said, 'Monsieur, I surrender my arms to you.' He answered gallantly, 'Mademoiselle, they are in good hands.' 'Better than you think,' I returned. He inspected the fort, and found every thing in order, and a sentinel on each bastion. 'It is time to relieve them, Monsieur' said I: 'we have not been off our bastions for a week.'" [21] [21] Récit de Mlle. Magdelaine de Verchères, agée de 14 ans (Collection de l'Abbé Ferland). It appears from Tanguay, Dictionnaire Généalogique, that Marie-Madeleine Jarret de Verchères was born in April, 1678, which corresponds to the age given in the Récit. She married Thomas Tarleu de la Naudière in 1706, and M. de la Perrade, or Prade, in 1722. Her brother Louis was born in 1680, and was therefore, as stated in the Récit, twelve years old in 1692. The birthday of the other, Alexander, is not given. His baptism was registered in 1682. One of the brothers was killed at the attack of Haverhill, in 1708. Madame de Ponchartrain, wife of the minister, procured a pension for life to Madeleine de Verchères. Two versions of her narrative are before me. There are slight variations between them, but in all essential points they are the same. The following note is appended to one of them: "Ce récit fut fait par ordre de Mr. de Beauharnois, gouverneur du Canada." A band of converts from the Saut St. Louis arrived soon after, followed the trail of their heathen countrymen, overtook them on Lake Champlain, and recovered twenty or more French prisoners. Madeleine de Verchères was not the only heroine of her family. Her father's fort was the Castle Dangerous of Canada; and it was but two years before that her mother, left with three or four 309 armed men, and beset by the Iroquois, threw herself with her followers into the blockhouse, and held the assailants two days at bay, till the Marquis de Crisasi came with troops to her relief. [22] [22] La Potherie, I. 326. From the moment when the Canadians found a chief whom they could trust, and the firm old hand of Frontenac grasped the reins of their destiny, a spirit of hardihood and energy grew up in all this rugged population; and they faced their stern fortunes with a stubborn daring and endurance that merit respect and admiration. Now, as in all their former wars, a great part of their suffering was due to the Mohawks. The Jesuits had spared no pains to convert them, thus changing them from enemies to friends; and their efforts had so far succeeded that the mission colony of Saut St. Louis contained a numerous population of Mohawk Christians. [23] The place was well fortified; and troops were usually stationed here, partly to defend the converts and partly to ensure their fidelity. They had sometimes done excellent service for the French; but many of them still remembered their old homes on the Mohawk, and their old ties of fellowship and kindred. Their heathen countrymen were jealous of their secession, and spared no pains to reclaim them. Sometimes they tried intrigue, and sometimes force. On one occasion, joined by the Oneidas and Onondagas, they appeared before the palisades of St. Louis, to the 310 number of more than four hundred warriors; but, finding the bastions manned and the gates shut, they withdrew discomfited. It was of great importance to the French to sunder them from their heathen relatives so completely that reconciliation would be impossible, and it was largely to this end that a grand expedition was prepared against the Mohawk towns. [23] This mission was also called Caghnawaga. The village still exists, at the head of the rapid of St. Louis, or La Chine. All the mission Indians in the colony were invited to join it, the Iroquois of the Saut and Mountain, Abenakis from the Chaudière, Hurons from Lorette, and Algonquins from Three Rivers. A hundred picked soldiers were added, and a large band of Canadians. All told, they mustered six hundred and twenty-five men, under three tried leaders, Mantet, Courtemanche, and La Noue. They left Chambly at the end of January, and pushed southward on snow-shoes. Their way was over the ice of Lake Champlain, for more than a century the great thoroughfare of war-parties. They bivouacked in the forest by squads of twelve or more; dug away the snow in a circle, covered the bared earth with a bed of spruce boughs, made a fire in the middle, and smoked their pipes around it. Here crouched the Christian savage, muffled in his blanket, his unwashed face still smirched with soot and vermilion, relics of the war-paint he had worn a week before when he danced the war-dance in the square of the mission village; and here sat the Canadians, hooded like Capuchin monks, but irrepressible in loquacity, as the blaze of the camp-fire glowed on their hardy visages and 311 fell in fainter radiance on the rocks and pines behind them. Sixteen days brought them to the two lower Mohawk towns. A young Dutchman who had been captured three years before at Schenectady, and whom the Indians of the Saut had imprudently brought with them, ran off in the night, and carried the alarm to the English. The invaders had no time to lose. The two towns were a quarter of a league apart. They surrounded them both on the night of the sixteenth of February, waited in silence till the voices within were hushed, and then captured them without resistance, as most of the inmates were absent. After burning one of them, and leaving the prisoners well guarded in the other, they marched eight leagues to the third town, reached it at evening, and hid in the neighboring woods. Through all the early night, they heard the whoops and songs of the warriors within, who were dancing the war-dance for an intended expedition. About midnight, all was still. The Mohawks had posted no sentinels; and one of the French Indians, scaling the palisade, opened the gate to his comrades. There was a short but bloody fight. Twenty or thirty Mohawks were killed, and nearly three hundred captured, chiefly women and children. The French commanders now required their allies, the mission Indians, to make good a promise which, at the instance of Frontenac, had been exacted from them by the governor of Montreal. It was that they should kill all their male captives, a proceeding which 312 would have averted every danger of future reconciliation between the Christian and heathen Mohawks. The converts of the Saut and the Mountain had readily given the pledge, but apparently with no intention to keep it; at least, they now refused to do so. Remonstrance was useless; and, after burning the town, the French and their allies began their retreat, encumbered by a long train of prisoners. They marched two days, when they were hailed from a distance by Mohawk scouts, who told them that the English were on their track, but that peace had been declared in Europe, and that the pursuers did not mean to fight, but to parley. Hereupon the mission Indians insisted on waiting for them, and no exertion of the French commanders could persuade them to move. Trees were hewn down, and a fort made after the Iroquois fashion, by encircling the camp with a high and dense abatis of trunks and branches. Here they lay two days more, the French disgusted and uneasy, and their savage allies obstinate and impracticable. Meanwhile, Major Peter Schuyler was following their trail, with a body of armed settlers hastily mustered. A troop of Oneidas joined him; and the united parties, between five and six hundred in all, at length appeared before the fortified camp of the French. It was at once evident that there was to be no parley. The forest rang with war-whoops; and the English Indians, unmanageable as those of the French, set at work to entrench themselves with felled trees. The French and their 313 allies sallied to dislodge them. The attack was fierce, and the resistance equally so. Both sides lost ground by turns. A priest of the mission of the Mountain, named Gay, was in the thick of the fight; and, when he saw his neophytes run, he threw himself before them, crying, "What are you afraid of? We are fighting with infidels, who have nothing human but the shape. Have you forgotten that the Holy Virgin is our leader and our protector, and that you are subjects of the King of France, whose name makes all Europe tremble?" [24] Three times the French renewed the attack in vain; then gave over the attempt, and lay quiet behind their barricade of trees. So also did their opponents. The morning was dark and stormy, and the driving snow that filled the air made the position doubly dreary. The English were starving. Their slender stock of provisions had been consumed or shared with the Indians, who, on their part, did not want food, having resources unknown to their white friends. A group of them squatted about a fire invited Schuyler to share their broth; but his appetite was spoiled when he saw a human hand ladled out of the kettle. His hosts were breakfasting on a dead Frenchman. [24] Journal de Jacques Le Ber, extract in Faillon, Vie de Mlle. Le Ber, Appendix. All night the hostile bands, ensconced behind their sylvan ramparts, watched each other in silence. In the morning, an Indian deserter told the English commander that the French were packing their baggage. Schuyler sent to reconnoitre, and found 314 them gone. They had retreated unseen through the snow-storm. He ordered his men to follow; but, as most of them had fasted for two days, they refused to do so till an expected convoy of provisions should arrive. They waited till the next morning, when the convoy appeared: five biscuits were served out to each man, and the pursuit began. By great efforts, they nearly overtook the fugitives, who now sent them word that, if they made an attack, all the prisoners should be put to death. On this, Schuyler's Indians refused to continue the chase. The French, by this time, had reached the Hudson, where to their dismay they found the ice breaking up and drifting down the stream. Happily for them, a large sheet of it had become wedged at a turn of the river, and formed a temporary bridge, by which they crossed, and then pushed on to Lake George. Here the soft and melting ice would not bear them; and they were forced to make their way along the shore, over rocks and mountains, through sodden snow and matted thickets. The provisions, of which they had made a dép?t on Lake Champlain, were all spoiled. They boiled moccasons for food, and scraped away the snow to find hickory and beech nuts. Several died of famine, and many more, unable to move, lay helpless by the lake; while a few of the strongest toiled on to Montreal to tell Callières of their plight. Men and food were sent them; and from time to time, as they were able, they journeyed on again, straggling towards their homes, singly or in small parties, feeble, emaciated, 315 and in many instances with health irreparably broken. [25] [25] On this expedition, Narrative of Military Operations in Canada, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 550; Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable en Canada, 1692, 1693; Callières au Ministre, 7 Sept., 1693; La Potherie, III. 169; Relation de 1682-1712; Faillon, Vie de Mlle. Le Ber, 313; Belmont, Hist. du Canada; Beyard and Lodowick, Journal of the Late Actions of the French at Canada; Report of Major Peter Schuyler, in N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. 16; Colden, 142. The minister wrote to Callières, finding great fault with the conduct of the mission Indians. Ponchartrain à Callières, 8 Mai, 1694. "The expedition," says Frontenac, "was a glorious success." However glorious, it was dearly bought; and a few more such victories would be ruin. The governor presently achieved a success more solid and less costly. The wavering mood of the north-western tribes, always oscillating between the French and the English, had caused him incessant anxiety; and he had lost no time in using the defeat of Phips to confirm them in alliance with Canada. Courtemanche was sent up the Ottawa to carry news of the French triumph, and stimulate the savages of Michillimackinac to lift the hatchet. It was a desperate venture; for the river was beset, as usual, by the Iroquois. With ten followers, the daring partisan ran the gauntlet of a thousand dangers, and safely reached his destination; where his gifts and his harangues, joined with the tidings of victory, kindled great excitement among the Ottawas and Hurons. The indispensable but most difficult task remained: that of opening the Ottawa for the descent of the great accumulation of beaver skins, which had been gathering at Michillimackinac for three years, and for the want of which Canada was bankrupt. More than two hundred 316 Frenchmen were known to be at that remote post, or roaming in the wilderness around it; and Frontenac resolved on an attempt to muster them together, and employ their united force to protect the Indians and the traders in bringing down this mass of furs to Montreal. A messenger, strongly escorted, was sent with orders to this effect, and succeeded in reaching Michillimackinac, though there was a battle on the way, in which the officer commanding the escort was killed. Frontenac anxiously waited the issue, when after a long delay the tidings reached him of complete success. He hastened to Montreal, and found it swarming with Indians and coureurs de bois. Two hundred canoes had arrived, filled with the coveted beaver skins. "It is impossible," says the chronicle, "to conceive the joy of the people, when they beheld these riches. Canada had awaited them for years. The merchants and the farmers were dying of hunger. Credit was gone, and everybody was afraid that the enemy would waylay and seize this last resource of the country. Therefore it was, that none could find words strong enough to praise and bless him by whose care all this wealth had arrived. Father of the People, Preserver of the Country, seemed terms too weak to express their gratitude." [26] [26] Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable en Canada, 1692, 1693. Compare La Potherie, III. 185. While three years of arrested sustenance came down together from the lakes, a fleet sailed up the St. Lawrence, freighted with soldiers and supplies. The horizon of Canada was brightening. CHAPTER XV. 1691-1695. An Interlude. Appeal of Frontenac ? His Opponents ? His Services ? Rivalry and Strife ? Bishop Saint-Vallier ? Society at the Chateau ? Private Theatricals ? Alarm of the Clergy ? Tartuffe ? A Singular Bargain ? Mareuil and the Bishop ? Mareuil on Trial ? Zeal of Saint-Vallier ? Scandals at Montreal ? Appeal to the King ? The Strife composed ? Libel against Frontenac. While the Canadians hailed Frontenac as a father, he found also some recognition of his services from his masters at the court. The king wrote him a letter with his own hand, to express satisfaction at the defence of Quebec, and sent him a gift of two thousand crowns. He greatly needed the money, but prized the letter still more, and wrote to his relative, the minister Ponchartrain: "The gift you procured for me, this year, has helped me very much towards paying the great expenses which the crisis of our affairs and the excessive cost of living here have caused me; but, though I receive this mark of his Majesty's goodness with the utmost respect and gratitude, I confess that I feel far more deeply the satisfaction that he has been pleased to express with my services. The raising of the siege of Quebec did not 318 deserve all the attention that I hear he has given it in the midst of so many important events, and therefore I must needs ascribe it to your kindness in commending it to his notice. This leads me to hope that whenever some office, or permanent employment, or some mark of dignity or distinction, may offer itself, you will put me on the list as well as others who have the honor to be as closely connected with you as I am; for it would be very hard to find myself forgotten because I am in a remote country, where it is more difficult and dangerous to serve the king than elsewhere. I have consumed all my property. Nothing is left but what the king gives me; and I have reached an age where, though neither strength nor goodwill fail me as yet, and though the latter will last as long as I live, I see myself on the eve of losing the former: so that a post a little more secure and tranquil than the government of Canada will soon suit my time of life; and, if I can be assured of your support, I shall not despair of getting such a one. Please then to permit my wife and my friends to refresh your memory now and then on this point." [1] Again, in the following year: "I have been encouraged to believe that the gift of two thousand crowns, which his Majesty made me last year, would be continued; but apparently you have not been able to obtain it, for I think that you know the difficulty I have in living here on my salary. I hope that, when you find a better opportunity, you will try to procure me this favor. My 319 only trust is in your support; and I am persuaded that, having the honor to be so closely connected with you, you would reproach yourself, if you saw me sink into decrepitude, without resources and without honors." [2] And still again he appeals to the minister for "some permanent and honorable place attended with the marks of distinction, which are more grateful than all the rest to a heart shaped after the right pattern." [3] In return for these sturdy applications, he got nothing for the present but a continuance of the king's gift of two thousand crowns. [1] Frontenac au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1691. [2] Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692. [3] Ibid., 25 Oct., 1693. Not every voice in the colony sounded the governor's praise. Now, as always, he had enemies in state and Church. It is true that the quarrels and the bursts of passion that marked his first term of government now rarely occurred, but this was not so much due to a change in Frontenac himself as to a change in the conditions around him. The war made him indispensable. He had gained what he wanted, the consciousness of mastery; and under its soothing influence he was less irritable and exacting. He lived with the bishop on terms of mutual courtesy, while his relations with his colleague, the intendant, were commonly smooth enough on the surface; for Champigny, warned by the court not to offend him, treated him with studied deference, and was usually treated in return with urbane condescension. During all this time, the intendant was complaining of him to the 320 minister. "He is spending a great deal of money; but he is master, and does what he pleases. I can only keep the peace by yielding every thing." [4] "He wants to reduce me to a nobody." And, among other similar charges, he says that the governor receives pay for garrisons that do not exist, and keeps it for himself. "Do not tell that I said so," adds the prudent Champigny, "for it would make great trouble, if he knew it." [5] Frontenac, perfectly aware of these covert attacks, desires the minister not to heed "the falsehoods and impostures uttered against me by persons who meddle with what does not concern them." [6] He alludes to Champigny's allies, the Jesuits, who, as he thought, had also maligned him. "Since I have been here, I have spared no pains to gain the goodwill of Monsieur the intendant, and may God grant that the counsels which he is too ready to receive from certain persons who have never been friends of peace and harmony do not some time make division between us. But I close my eyes to all that, and shall still persevere." [7] In another letter to Ponchartrain, he says: "I write you this in private, because I have been informed by my wife that charges have been made to you against my conduct since my return to this country. I promise you, Monseigneur, that, whatever my accusers do, they will not make me change conduct towards them, and that I shall still treat them with consideration. I 321 merely ask your leave most humbly to represent that, having maintained this colony in full prosperity during the ten years when I formerly held the government of it, I nevertheless fell a sacrifice to the artifice and fury of those whose encroachments, and whose excessive and unauthorized power, my duty and my passionate affection for the service of the king obliged me in conscience to repress. My recall, which made them masters in the conduct of the government, was followed by all the disasters which overwhelmed this unhappy colony. The millions that the king spent here, the troops that he sent out, and the Canadians that he took into pay, all went for nothing. Most of the soldiers, and no small number of brave Canadians, perished in enterprises ill devised and ruinous to the country, which I found on my arrival ravaged with unheard-of cruelty by the Iroquois, without resistance, and in sight of the troops and of the forts. The inhabitants were discouraged, and unnerved by want of confidence in their chiefs; while the friendly Indians, seeing our weakness, were ready to join our enemies. I was fortunate enough and diligent enough to change this deplorable state of things, and drive away the English, whom my predecessors did not have on their hands, and this too with only half as many troops as they had. I am far from wishing to blame their conduct. I leave you to judge it. But I cannot have the tranquillity and freedom of mind which I need for the work I have to do here, without feeling entire confidence that the cabal which is again 322 forming against me cannot produce impressions which may prevent you from doing me justice. For the rest, if it is thought fit that I should leave the priests to do as they like, I shall be delivered from an infinity of troubles and cares, in which I can have no other interest than the good of the colony, the trade of the kingdom, and the peace of the king's subjects, and of which I alone bear the burden, as well as the jealousy of sundry persons, and the iniquity of the ecclesiastics, who begin to call impious those who are obliged to oppose their passions and their interests." [8] [4] Champigny au Ministre, 12 Oct., 1691. [5] Ibid., 4 Nov., 1693. [6] Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692. [7] Ibid., 20 Oct., 1691. [8] "L'iniquité des ecclésiastiques qui commencent à traiter d'impies ceux qui sont obligés de resister à leurs passions et à leurs interêts." Frontenac au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1691. As Champigny always sided with the Jesuits, his relations with Frontenac grew daily more critical. Open rupture at length seemed imminent, and the king interposed to keep the peace. "There has been discord between you under a show of harmony," he wrote to the disputants. [9] Frontenac was exhorted to forbearance and calmness; while the intendant was told that he allowed himself to be made an instrument of others, and that his charges against the governor proved nothing but his own ill-temper. [10] The minister wrote in vain. The bickerings that he reproved were but premonitions of a greater strife. [9] Mémoire du Roy pour Frontenac et Champigny, 1694. [10] Le Ministre à Frontenac, 8 May, 1694; Le Ministre à Champigny, même date. Bishop Saint-Vallier was a rigid, austere, and contentious prelate, who loved power as much as 323 Frontenac himself, and thought that, as the deputy of Christ, it was his duty to exercise it to the utmost. The governor watched him with a jealous eye, well aware that, though the pretensions of the Church to supremacy over the civil power had suffered a check, Saint-Vallier would revive them the moment he thought he could do so with success. I have shown elsewhere the severity of the ecclesiastical rule at Quebec, where the zealous pastors watched their flock with unrelenting vigilance, and associations of pious women helped them in the work. [11] This naturally produced revolt, and tended to divide the town into two parties, the worldly and the devout. The love of pleasure was not extinguished, and various influences helped to keep it alive. Perhaps none of these was so potent as the presence in winter of a considerable number of officers from France, whose piety was often less conspicuous than their love of enjoyment. At the Chateau St. Louis a circle of young men, more or less brilliant and accomplished, surrounded the governor, and formed a centre of social attraction. Frontenac was not without religion, and he held it becoming a man of his station not to fail in its observances; but he would not have a Jesuit confessor, and placed his conscience in the keeping of the Récollet friars, who were not politically aggressive, and who had been sent to Canada expressly as a foil to the rival order. They found no favor in the eyes of the bishop and his adherents, and the governor found none for the support he lent them. [11] Old Régime, chap. xix. 324 The winter that followed the arrival of the furs from the upper lakes was a season of gayety without precedent since the war began. All was harmony at Quebec till the carnival approached, when Frontenac, whose youthful instincts survived his seventy-four years, introduced a startling novelty which proved the signal of discord. One of his military circle, the sharp-witted La Motte-Cadillac, thus relates this untoward event in a letter to a friend: "The winter passed very pleasantly, especially to the officers, who lived together like comrades; and, to contribute to their honest enjoyment, the count caused two plays to be acted, 'Nicomede' and 'Mithridate.'" It was an amateur performance, in which the officers took part along with some of the ladies of Quebec. The success was prodigious, and so was the storm that followed. Half a century before, the Jesuits had grieved over the first ball in Canada. Private theatricals were still more baneful. "The clergy," continues La Motte, "beat their alarm drums, armed cap-a-pie, and snatched their bows and arrows. The Sieur Glandelet was first to begin, and preached two sermons, in which he tried to prove that nobody could go to a play without mortal sin. The bishop issued a mandate, and had it read from the pulpits, in which he speaks of certain impious, impure, and noxious comedies, insinuating that those which had been acted were such. The credulous and infatuated people, seduced by the sermons and the mandate, began already to regard the count as a corrupter of morals and a destroyer of religion. 325 The numerous party of the pretended devotees mustered in the streets and public places, and presently made their way into the houses, to confirm the weak-minded in their illusion, and tried to make the stronger share it; but, as they failed in this almost completely, they resolved at last to conquer or die, and persuaded the bishop to use a strange device, which was to publish a mandate in the church, whereby the Sieur de Mareuil, a half-pay lieutenant, was interdicted the use of the sacraments." [12] [12] La Motte-Cadillac à———, 28 Sept., 1694. This story needs explanation. Not only had the amateur actors at the chateau played two pieces inoffensive enough in themselves, but a report had been spread that they meant next to perform the famous "Tartuffe" of Molière, a satire which, while purporting to be levelled against falsehood, lust, greed, and ambition, covered with a mask of religion, was rightly thought by a portion of the clergy to be levelled against themselves. The friends of Frontenac say that the report was a hoax. Be this as it may, the bishop believed it. "This worthy prelate," continues the irreverent La Motte, "was afraid of 'Tartuffe,' and had got it into his head that the count meant to have it played, though he had never thought of such a thing. Monsieur de Saint-Vallier sweated blood and water to stop a torrent which existed only in his imagination." It was now that he launched his two mandates, both on the same day; one denouncing comedies in general and "Tartuffe" in particular, and the other smiting 326 Mareuil, who, he says, "uses language capable of making Heaven blush," and whom he elsewhere stigmatizes as "worse than a Protestant." [13] It was Mareuil who, as reported, was to play the part of Tartuffe; and on him, therefore, the brunt of episcopal indignation fell. He was not a wholly exemplary person. "I mean," says La Motte, "to show you the truth in all its nakedness. The fact is that, about two years ago, when the Sieur de Mareuil first came to Canada, and was carousing with his friends, he sang some indecent song or other. The count was told of it, and gave him a severe reprimand. This is the charge against him. After a two years' silence, the pastoral zeal has wakened, because a play is to be acted which the clergy mean to stop at any cost." [13] Mandement au Sujet des Comédies, 16 Jan., 1694; Mandement au Sujet de certaines Personnes qui tenoient des Discours impies, même date; Registre du Conseil Souverain. The bishop found another way of stopping it. He met Frontenac, with the intendant, near the Jesuit chapel, accosted him on the subject which filled his thoughts, and offered him a hundred pistoles if he would prevent the playing of "Tartuffe." Frontenac laughed, and closed the bargain. Saint-Vallier wrote his note on the spot; and the governor took it, apparently well pleased to have made the bishop disburse. "I thought," writes the intendant, "that Monsieur de Frontenac would have given him back the paper." He did no such thing, but drew the money on the next day and gave it to the hospitals. [14] [14] This incident is mentioned by La Motte-Cadillac; by the intendant, 327 who reports it to the minister; by the minister Ponchartrain, who asks Frontenac for an explanation; by Frontenac, who passes it off as a jest; and by several other contemporary writers. Mareuil, deprived of the sacraments, and held up to reprobation, went to see the bishop, who refused to receive him; and it is said that he was taken by the shoulders and put out of doors. He now resolved to bring his case before the council; but the bishop was informed of his purpose, and anticipated it. La Motte says "he went before the council on the first of February, and denounced the Sieur de Mareuil, whom he declared guilty of impiety towards God, the Virgin, and the Saints, and made a fine speech in the absence of the count, interrupted by the effusions of a heart which seemed filled with a profound and infinite charity, but which, as he said, was pushed to extremity by the rebellion of an indocile child, who had neglected all his warnings. This was, nevertheless, assumed; I will not say entirely false." The bishop did, in fact, make a vehement speech against Mareuil before the council on the day in question; Mareuil stoutly defending himself, and entering his appeal against the episcopal mandate. [15] The battle was now fairly joined. Frontenac stood alone for the accused. The intendant tacitly favored his opponents. Auteuil, the attorney-general, and Villeray, the first councillor, owed the governor an old grudge; and they and their colleagues sided with the bishop, with the outside support of all the clergy, except the Récollets, who, as usual, ranged themselves with their patron. At first, 328 Frontenac showed great moderation, but grew vehement, and then violent, as the dispute proceeded; as did also the attorney-general, who seems to have done his best to exasperate him. Frontenac affirmed that, in depriving Mareuil and others of the sacraments, with no proof of guilt and no previous warning, and on allegations which, even if true, could not justify the act, the bishop exceeded his powers, and trenched on those of the king. The point was delicate. The attorney-general avoided the issue, tried to raise others, and revived the old quarrel about Frontenac's place in the council, which had been settled fourteen years before. Other questions were brought up, and angrily debated. The governor demanded that the debates, along with the papers which introduced them, should be entered on the record, that the king might be informed of every thing; but the demand was refused. The discords of the council chamber spread into the town. Quebec was divided against itself. Mareuil insulted the bishop; and some of his scapegrace sympathizers broke the prelate's windows at night, and smashed his chamber-door. [16] Mareuil was at last ordered to prison, and the whole affair was referred to the king. [17] [15] Registre du Conseil Souverain, 1 et 8 Fév., 1694. [16] Champigny au Ministre, 27 Oct., 1694. [17] Registre du Conseil Souverain; Requeste du Sieur de Mareuil, Nov., 1694. These proceedings consumed the spring, the summer, and a part of the autumn. Meanwhile, an access of zeal appeared to seize the bishop; and he launched interdictions to the right and left. 329 Even Champigny was startled when he refused the sacraments to all but four or five of the military officers for alleged tampering with the pay of their soldiers, a matter wholly within the province of the temporal authorities. [18] During a recess of the council, he set out on a pastoral tour, and, arriving at Three Rivers, excommunicated an officer named Desjordis for a reputed intrigue with the wife of another officer. He next repaired to Sorel, and, being there on a Sunday, was told that two officers had neglected to go to mass. He wrote to Frontenac, complaining of the offence. Frontenac sent for the culprits, and rebuked them; but retracted his words when they proved by several witnesses that they had been duly present at the rite. [19] The bishop then went up to Montreal, and discord went with him. [18] Champigny au Ministre, 24 Oct., 1694. Trouble on this matter had begun some time before. Mémoire du Roy pour Frontenac et Champigny, 1694; Le Ministre à l'évêque, 8 Mai, 1694. [19] La Motte-Cadillac à———, 28 Sept., 1694; Champigny au Ministre, 27 Oct., 1694. Except Frontenac alone, Callières, the local governor, was the man in all Canada to whom the country owed most; but, like his chief, he was a friend of the Récollets, and this did not commend him to the bishop. The friars were about to receive two novices into their order, and they invited the bishop to officiate at the ceremony. Callières was also present, kneeling at a prie-dieu, or prayer-desk, near the middle of the church. Saint-Vallier, having just said mass, was seating himself in his arm-chair, close to the altar, when he saw Callières 330 at the prie-dieu, with the position of which he had already found fault as being too honorable for a subordinate governor. He now rose, approached the object of his disapproval, and said, "Monsieur, you are taking a place which belongs only to Monsieur de Frontenac." Callières replied that the place was that which properly belonged to him. The bishop rejoined that, if he did not leave it, he himself would leave the church. "You can do as you please," said Callières; and the prelate withdrew abruptly through the sacristy, refusing any farther part in the ceremony. [20] When the services were over, he ordered the friars to remove the obnoxious prie-dieu. They obeyed; but an officer of Callières replaced it, and, unwilling to offend him, they allowed it to remain. On this, the bishop laid their church under an interdict; that is, he closed it against the celebration of all the rites of religion. [21] He then issued a pastoral mandate, in which he charged Father Joseph Denys, their superior, with offences which he "dared not name for fear of making the paper blush." [22] His tongue was less bashful than his pen; and he gave out publicly that the father superior had acted as go-between in an intrigue of his sister with the 331 Chevalier de Callières. [23] It is said that the accusation was groundless, and the character of the woman wholly irreproachable. The Récollets submitted for two months to the bishop's interdict, then refused to obey longer, and opened their church again. [20] Procès-verbal du Père Hyacinthe Perrault, Commissaire Provincial des Récollets (Archives Nationales); Mémoire touchant le Démeslé entre M. l'évesque de Québec et le Chevalier de Callières (Ibid.). [21] Mandement ordonnant de fermer l'église des Récollets, 13 Mai, 1694. [22] "Le Supérieur du dit Couvent estant lié avec le Gouverneur de la dite ville par des interests que tout le monde scait et qu'on n'oseroit exprimer de peur de faire rougir le papier." Extrait du Mandement de l'évesque de Québec (Archives Nationales). He had before charged Mareuil with language "capable de faire rougir le ciel." [23] "Mr. l'évesque accuse publiquement le Rev. Père Joseph, supérieur des Récollets de Montréal, d'être l'entremetteur d'une galanterie entre sa s?ur et le Gouverneur. Cependant Mr. l'évesque sait certainement que le Père Joseph est l'un des meilleurs et des plus saints religieux de son ordre. Ce qu'il allègue du prétendu commerce entre le Gouverneur et la Dame de la Naudière (s?ur du Père Joseph) est entièrement faux, et il l'a publié avec scandale, sans preuve et contre toute apparence, la ditte Dame ayant toujours eu une conduite irréprochable." Mémoire touchant le Démeslé, etc. Champigny also says that the bishop has brought this charge, and that Callières declares that he has told a falsehood. Champigny au Ministre, 27 Oct., 1694. Quebec, Three Rivers, Sorel, and Montreal had all been ruffled by the breeze of these dissensions, and the farthest outposts of the wilderness were not too remote to feel it. La Motte-Cadillac had been sent to replace Louvigny in the command of Michillimackinac, where he had scarcely arrived, when trouble fell upon him. "Poor Monsieur de la Motte-Cadillac," says Frontenac, "would have sent you a journal to show you the persecutions he has suffered at the post where I placed him, and where he does wonders, having great influence over the Indians, who both love and fear him, but he has had no time to copy it. Means have been found to excite against him three or four officers of the posts dependent on his, who have put upon him such strange and unheard of affronts, that I was obliged to send them to prison when they came down to the colony. A certain Father Carheil, the Jesuit who wrote me such insolent letters a few 332 years ago, has played an amazing part in this affair. I shall write about it to Father La Chaise, that he may set it right. Some remedy must be found; for, if it continues, none of the officers who were sent to Michillimackinac, the Miamis, the Illinois, and other places, can stay there on account of the persecutions to which they are subjected, and the refusal of absolution as soon as they fail to do what is wanted of them. Joined to all this is a shameful traffic in influence and money. Monsieur de Tonty could have written to you about it, if he had not been obliged to go off to the Assinneboins, to rid himself of all these torments." [24] In fact, there was a chronic dispute at the forest outposts between the officers and the Jesuits, concerning which matter much might be said on both sides. [24] Frontenac à M. de Lagny, 2 Nov., 1695 The bishop sailed for France. "He has gone," writes Callières, "after quarrelling with everybody." The various points in dispute were set before the king. An avalanche of memorials, letters, and procès-verbaux, descended upon the unfortunate monarch; some concerning Mareuil and the quarrels in the council, others on the excommunication of Desjordis, and others on the troubles at Montreal. They were all referred to the king's privy council. [25] An adjustment was effected: order, if not harmony, was restored; and the usual distribution of advice, exhortation, reproof, and menace, was made to the parties in the strife. Frontenac was commended for defending the royal prerogative, 333 censured for violence, and admonished to avoid future quarrels. [26] Champigny was reproved for not supporting the governor, and told that "his Majesty sees with great pain that, while he is making extraordinary efforts to sustain Canada at a time so critical, all his cares and all his outlays are made useless by your misunderstanding with Monsieur de Frontenac." [27] The attorney-general was sharply reprimanded, told that he must mend his ways or lose his place, and ordered to make an apology to the governor. [28] Villeray was not honored by a letter, but the intendant was directed to tell him that his behavior had greatly displeased the king. Callières was mildly advised not to take part in the disputes of the bishop and the Récollets. [29] Thus was conjured down one of the most bitter as well as the most needless, trivial, and untimely, of the quarrels that enliven the annals of New France. [25] Arrest qui ordonne que les Procédures faites entre le Sieur évesque de Québec et les Sieurs Mareuil, Desjordis, etc., seront évoquez au Conseil Privé de Sa Majesté, 3 Juillet, 1695. [26] Le Ministre à Frontenac, 4 Juin, 1695; Ibid., 8 Juin, 1695. [27] Le Ministre à Champigny, 4 Juin, 1695; Ibid., 8 Juin, 1695. [28] Le Ministre à d'Auteuil, 8 Juin, 1695. [29] Le Ministre à Callières, 8 Juin, 1695. A generation later, when its incidents had faded from memory, a passionate and reckless partisan, Abbé La Tour, published, and probably invented, a story which later writers have copied, till it now forms an accepted episode of Canadian history. According to him, Frontenac, in order to ridicule the clergy, formed an amateur company of comedians expressly to play "Tartuffe;" and, after rehearsing at the chateau during three or four months, they acted the piece before a large audience. "He was not satisfied with having it played at the chateau, but wanted the actors and actresses and the dancers, 334 male and female, to go in full costume, with violins, to play it in all the religious communities, except the Récollets. He took them first to the house of the Jesuits, where the crowd entered with him; then to the Hospital, to the hall of the paupers, whither the nuns were ordered to repair; then he went to the Ursuline Convent, assembled the sisterhood, and had the piece played before them. To crown the insult, he wanted next to go to the seminary, and repeat the spectacle there; but, warning having been given, he was met on the way, and begged to refrain. He dared not persist, and withdrew in very ill-humor." [30] [30] La Tour, Vie de Laval, liv. xii. Not one of numerous contemporary papers, both official and private, and written in great part by enemies of Frontenac, contains the slightest allusion to any such story, and many of them are wholly inconsistent with it. It may safely be set down as a fabrication to blacken the memory of the governor, and exhibit the bishop and his adherents as victims of persecution. [31] [31] Had an outrage, like that with which Frontenac is here charged, actually taken place, the registers of the council, the letters of the intendant and the attorney-general, and the records of the bishopric of Quebec would not have failed to show it. They show nothing beyond a report that "Tartuffe" was to be played, and a payment of money by the bishop in order to prevent it. We are left to infer that it was prevented accordingly. I have the best authority—that of the superior of the convent (1871), herself a diligent investigator into the history of her community—for stating that neither record nor tradition of the occurrence exists among the Ursulines of Quebec; and I have been unable to learn that any such exists among the nuns of the Hospital (H?tel-Dieu). The contemporary Récit d'une Religieuse Ursuline speaks of Frontenac with gratitude, as a friend and benefactor, as does also Mother Juchereau, superior of the H?tel-Dieu. CHAPTER XVI. 1690-1694. The War in Acadia. State of that Colony ? The Abenakis ? Acadia and New England ? Pirates ? Baron de Saint-Castin ? Pentegoet ? The English Frontier ? The French and the Abenakis ? Plan of the War ? Capture of York ? Villebon ? Grand War-party ? Attack of Wells ? Pemaquid rebuilt ? John Nelson ? A Broken Treaty ? Villieu and Thury ? Another War-party ? Massacre at Oyster River. Amid domestic strife, the war with England and the Iroquois still went on. The contest for territorial mastery was fourfold: first, for the control of the west; secondly, for that of Hudson's Bay; thirdly, for that of Newfoundland; and, lastly, for that of Acadia. All these vast and widely sundered regions were included in the government of Frontenac. Each division of the war was distinct from the rest, and each had a character of its own. As the contest for the west was wholly with New York and her Iroquois allies, so the contest for Acadia was wholly with the "Bostonnais," or people of New England. Acadia, as the French at this time understood the name, included Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the greater part of Maine. Sometimes they 336 placed its western boundary at the little River St. George, and sometimes at the Kennebec. Since the wars of D'Aulnay and La Tour, this wilderness had been a scene of unceasing strife; for the English drew their eastern boundary at the St. Croix, and the claims of the rival nationalities overlapped each other. In the time of Cromwell, Sedgwick, a New England officer, had seized the whole country. The peace of Breda restored it to France: the Chevalier de Grandfontaine was ordered to reoccupy it, and the king sent out a few soldiers, a few settlers, and a few women as their wives. [1] Grandfontaine held the nominal command for a time, followed by a succession of military chiefs, Chambly, Marson, and La Vallière. Then Perrot, whose malpractices had cost him the government of Montreal, was made governor of Acadia; and, as he did not mend his ways, he was replaced by Meneval. [2] [1] In 1671, 30 gar?ons and 30 filles were sent by the king to Acadia, at the cost of 6,000 livres. état. de Dépenses, 1671. [2] Grandfontaine, 1670; Chambly, 1673; Marson, 1678; La Vallière, the same year, Marson having died; Perrot, 1684; Meneval, 1687. The last three were commissioned as local governors, in subordination to the governor-general. The others were merely military commandants. One might have sailed for days along these lonely coasts, and seen no human form. At Canseau, or Chedabucto, at the eastern end of Nova Scotia, there was a fishing station and a fort; Chibuctou, now Halifax, was a solitude; at La Hêve there were a few fishermen; and thence, as you doubled the rocks of Cape Sable, the ancient haunt of La Tour, you would have seen four French settlers, and an unlimited number of seals and seafowl. 337 Ranging the shore by St. Mary's Bay, and entering the Strait of Annapolis Basin, you would have found the fort of Port Royal, the chief place of all Acadia. It stood at the head of the basin, where De Monts had planted his settlement nearly a century before. Around the fort and along the neighboring river were about ninety-five small houses; and at the head of the Bay of Fundy were two other settlements, Beaubassin and Les Mines, comparatively stable and populous. At the mouth of the St. John were the abandoned ruins of La Tour's old fort; and on a spot less exposed, at some distance up the river, stood the small wooden fort of Jemsec, with a few intervening clearings. Still sailing westward, passing Mount Desert, another scene of ancient settlement, and entering Penobscot Bay, you would have found the Baron de Saint-Castin with his Indian harem at Pentegoet, where the town of Castine now stands. All Acadia was comprised in these various stations, more or less permanent, together with one or two small posts on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the huts of an errant population of fishermen and fur traders. In the time of Denonville, the colonists numbered less than a thousand souls. The king, busied with nursing Canada, had neglected its less important dependency. [3] [3] The census taken by order of Meules in 1686 gives a total of 885 persons, of whom 592 were at Port Royal, and 127 at Beaubassin. By the census of 1693, the number had reached 1,009. Rude as it was, Acadia had charms, and it has them still: in its wilderness of woods and its 338 wilderness of waves; the rocky ramparts that guard its coasts; its deep, still bays and foaming headlands; the towering cliffs of the Grand Menan; the innumerable islands that cluster about Penobscot Bay; and the romantic highlands of Mount Desert, down whose gorges the sea-fog rolls like an invading host, while the spires of fir-trees pierce the surging vapors like lances in the smoke of battle. Leaving Pentegoet, and sailing westward all day along a solitude of woods, one might reach the English outpost of Pemaquid, and thence, still sailing on, might anchor at evening off Casco Bay, and see in the glowing west the distant peaks of the White Mountains, spectral and dim amid the weird and fiery sunset. Inland Acadia was all forest, and vast tracts of it are a primeval forest still. Here roamed the Abenakis with their kindred tribes, a race wild as their haunts. In habits they were all much alike. Their villages were on the waters of the Androscoggin, the Saco, the Kennebec, the Penobscot, the St. Croix, and the St. John; here in spring they planted their corn, beans, and pumpkins, and then, leaving them to grow, went down to the sea in their birch canoes. They returned towards the end of summer, gathered their harvest, and went again to the sea, where they lived in abundance on ducks, geese, and other water-fowl. During winter, most of the women, children, and old men remained in the villages; while the hunters ranged the forest in chase of moose, deer, caribou, beavers, and bears. Their summer stay at the seashore was perhaps 339 the most pleasant, and certainly the most picturesque, part of their lives. Bivouacked by some of the innumerable coves and inlets that indent these coasts, they passed their days in that alternation of indolence and action which is a second nature to the Indian. Here in wet weather, while the torpid water was dimpled with rain-drops, and the upturned canoes lay idle on the pebbles, the listless warrior smoked his pipe under his roof of bark, or launched his slender craft at the dawn of the July day, when shores and islands were painted in shadow against the rosy east, and forests, dusky and cool, lay waiting for the sunrise. The women gathered raspberries or whortleberries in the open places of the woods, or clams and oysters in the sands and shallows, adding their shells as a contribution to the shell-heaps that have accumulated for ages along these shores. The men fished, speared porpoises, or shot seals. A priest was often in the camp watching over his flock, and saying mass every day in a chapel of bark. There was no lack of altar candles, made by mixing tallow with the wax of the bayberry, which abounded among the rocky hills, and was gathered in profusion by the squaws and children. The Abenaki missions were a complete success. Not only those of the tribe who had been induced to migrate to the mission villages of Canada, but also those who remained in their native woods, were, or were soon to become, converts to Romanism, and therefore allies of France. Though less ferocious than the Iroquois, they were brave, after 340 the Indian manner, and they rarely or never practised cannibalism. Some of the French were as lawless as their Indian friends. Nothing is more strange than the incongruous mixture of the forms of feudalism with the independence of the Acadian woods. Vast grants of land were made to various persons, some of whom are charged with using them for no other purpose than roaming over their domains with Indian women. The only settled agricultural population was at Port Royal, Beaubassin, and the Basin of Minas. The rest were fishermen, fur traders, or rovers of the forest. Repeated orders came from the court to open a communication with Quebec, and even to establish a line of military posts through the intervening wilderness, but the distance and the natural difficulties of the country proved insurmountable obstacles. If communication with Quebec was difficult, that with Boston was easy; and thus Acadia became largely dependent on its New England neighbors, who, says an Acadian officer, "are mostly fugitives from England, guilty of the death of their late king, and accused of conspiracy against their present sovereign; others of them are pirates, and they are all united in a sort of independent republic." [4] Their relations with the Acadians were of a mixed sort. They continually encroached on Acadian fishing grounds, and we hear at one time of a hundred of their vessels thus engaged. This was not all. The interlopers often landed and traded with the Indians 341 along the coast. Meneval, the governor, complained bitterly of their arrogance. Sometimes, it is said, they pretended to be foreign pirates, and plundered vessels and settlements, while the aggrieved parties could get no redress at Boston. They also carried on a regular trade at Port Royal and Les Mines or Grand Pré, where many of the inhabitants regarded them with a degree of favor which gave great umbrage to the military authorities, who, nevertheless, are themselves accused of seeking their own profit by dealings with the heretics; and even French priests, including Petit, the curé of Port Royal, are charged with carrying on this illicit trade in their own behalf, and in that of the seminary of Quebec. The settlers caught from the "Bostonnais" what their governor stigmatizes as English and parliamentary ideas, the chief effect of which was to make them restive under his rule. The Church, moreover, was less successful in excluding heresy from Acadia than from Canada. A number of Huguenots established themselves at Port Royal, and formed sympathetic relations with the Boston Puritans. The bishop at Quebec was much alarmed. "This is dangerous," he writes. "I pray your Majesty to put an end to these disorders." [5] [4] Mémoire du Sieur Bergier, 1685. [5] L'évêque au Roy, 10 Nov., 1683. For the preceding pages, the authorities are chiefly the correspondence of Grandfontaine, Marson, La Vallière, Meneval, Bergier, Goutins, Perrot, Talon, Frontenac, and other officials. A large collection of Acadian documents, from the archives of Paris, is in my possession. I have also examined the Acadian collections made for the government of Canada and for that of Massachusetts. A sort of chronic warfare of aggression and reprisal, 342 closely akin to piracy, was carried on at intervals in Acadian waters by French private armed vessels on one hand, and New England private armed vessels on the other. Genuine pirates also frequently appeared. They were of various nationality, though usually buccaneers from the West Indies. They preyed on New England trading and fishing craft, and sometimes attacked French settlements. One of their most notorious exploits was the capture of two French vessels and a French fort at Chedabucto by a pirate, manned in part, it is said, from Massachusetts. [6] A similar proceeding of earlier date was the act of Dutchmen from St. Domingo. They made a descent on the French fort of Pentegoet, on Penobscot Bay. Chambly, then commanding for the king in Acadia, was in the place. They assaulted his works, wounded him, took him prisoner, and carried him to Boston, where they held him at ransom. His young ensign escaped into the woods, and carried the news to Canada; but many months elapsed before Chambly was released. [7] [6] Meneval, Mémoire, 1688; Denonville, Mémoire, 18 Oct., 1688; Procès-verbal du Pillage de Chedabucto; Relation de la Boullaye, 1688. [7] Frontenac au Ministre, 14 Nov., 1674; Frontenac à Leverett, gouverneur de Baston, 24 Sept., 1674; Frontenac to the Governor and Council of Massachusetts, 25 May, 1675 (see 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., I. 64); Colbert à Frontenac, 15 May, 1675. Frontenac supposed the assailants to be buccaneers. They had, however, a commission from William of Orange. Hutchinson says that the Dutch again took Pentegoet in 1676, but were driven off by ships from Boston, as the English claimed the place for themselves. This young ensign was Jean Vincent de l'Abadie, Baron de Saint-Castin, a native of Béarn, on the slopes of the Pyrenees, the same rough, strong soil 343 that gave to France her Henri IV. When fifteen years of age, he came to Canada with the regiment of Carignan-Salières, ensign in the company of Chambly; and, when the regiment was disbanded, he followed his natural bent, and betook himself to the Acadian woods. At this time there was a square bastioned fort at Pentegoet, mounted with twelve small cannon; but after the Dutch attack it fell into decay. [8] Saint-Castin, meanwhile, roamed the woods with the Indians, lived like them, formed connections more or less permanent with their women, became himself a chief, and gained such ascendency over his red associates that, according to La Hontan, they looked upon him as their tutelary god. He was bold, hardy, adroit, tenacious; and, in spite of his erratic habits, had such capacity for business, that, if we may believe the same somewhat doubtful authority, he made a fortune of three or four hundred thousand crowns. His gains came chiefly through his neighbors of New England, whom he hated, but to whom he sold his beaver skins at an ample profit. His trading house was at Pentegoet, now called Castine, in or near the old fort; a perilous spot, which he occupied or abandoned by turns, according to the needs of the time. Being a devout Catholic he wished to add a resident priest to his establishment 344 for the conversion of his Indian friends; but, observes Father Petit of Port Royal, who knew him well, "he himself has need of spiritual aid to sustain him in the paths of virtue." [9] He usually made two visits a year to Port Royal, where he gave liberal gifts to the church of which he was the chief patron, attended mass with exemplary devotion, and then, shriven of his sins, returned to his squaws at Pentegoet. Perrot, the governor, maligned him; the motive, as Saint-Castin says, being jealousy of his success in trade, for Perrot himself traded largely with the English and the Indians. This, indeed, seems to have been his chief occupation; and, as Saint-Castin was his principal rival, they were never on good terms. Saint-Castin complained to Denonville. "Monsieur Petit," he writes, "will tell you every thing. I will only say that he (Perrot) kept me under arrest from the twenty-first of April to the ninth of June, on pretence of a little weakness I had for some women, and even told me that he had your orders to do it: but that is not what troubles him; and as I do not believe there is another man under heaven who will do meaner things through love of gain, even to selling brandy by the pint and half-pint before strangers in his own house, because he does not trust a single one of his servants,—I see plainly what is the matter with him. He wants to be the only merchant in Acadia." [10] [8] On its condition in 1670, Estat du Fort et Place de Pentegoet fait en l'année 1670, lorsque les Anglois l'ont rendu. In 1671, fourteen soldiers and eight laborers were settled near the fort. Talon au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1671. In the next year, Talon recommends an envoi de filles for the benefit of Pentegoet. Mémoire sur le Canada, 1672. As late as 1698, we find Acadian officials advising the reconstruction of the fort. [9] Petit in Saint-Vallier, Estat de l'église, 39 (1856). [10] Saint-Castin à Denonville, 2 Juiliet, 1687. Perrot was recalled this very year; and his successor, 345 Meneval, received instructions in regard to Saint-Castin, which show that the king or his minister had a clear idea both of the baron's merits and of his failings. The new governor was ordered to require him to abandon "his vagabond life among the Indians," cease all trade with the English, and establish a permanent settlement. Meneval was farther directed to assure him that, if he conformed to the royal will, and led a life "more becoming a gentleman," he might expect to receive proofs of his Majesty's approval. [11] [11] Instruction du Roy au Sieur de Meneval, 5 Avril, 1687. In the next year, Meneval reported that he had represented to Saint-Castin the necessity of reform, and that in consequence he had abandoned his trade with the English, given up his squaws, married, and promised to try to make a solid settlement. [12] True he had reformed before, and might need to reform again; but his faults were not of the baser sort: he held his honor high, and was free-handed as he was bold. His wife was what the early chroniclers would call an Indian princess; for she was the daughter of Madockawando, chief of the Penobscots. [12] Mémoire du Sieur de Meneval sur l'Acadie, 10 Sept., 1688. So critical was the position of his post at Pentegoet that a strong fort and a sufficient garrison could alone hope to maintain it against the pirates and the "Bostonnais." Its vicissitudes had been many. Standing on ground claimed by the English, within territory which had been granted to 346 the Duke of York, and which, on his accession to the throne, became a part of the royal domain, it was never safe from attack. In 1686, it was plundered by an agent of Dongan. In 1687, it was plundered again; and in the next year Andros, then royal governor, anchored before it in his frigate, the "Rose," landed with his attendants, and stripped the building of all it contained, except a small altar with pictures and ornaments, which they found in the principal room. Saint-Castin escaped to the woods; and Andros sent him word by an Indian that his property would be carried to Pemaquid, and that he could have it again by becoming a British subject. He refused the offer. [13] [13] Mémoire présenté au Roy d'Angleterre, 1687; Saint-Castin à Denonville, 7 Juillet, 1687; Hutchinson Collection, 562, 563; Andros Tracts, I. 118. The rival English post of Pemaquid was destroyed, as we have seen, by the Abenakis in 1689; and, in the following year, they and their French allies had made such havoc among the border settlements that nothing was left east of the Piscataqua except the villages of Wells, York, and Kittery. But a change had taken place in the temper of the savages, mainly due to the easy conquest of Port Royal by Phips, and to an expedition of the noted partisan Church by which they had suffered considerable losses. Fear of the English on one hand, and the attraction of their trade on the other, disposed many of them to peace. Six chiefs signed a truce with the commissioners of Massachusetts, and promised to meet them in council to bury the hatchet for ever. 347 The French were filled with alarm. Peace between the Abenakis and the "Bostonnais" would be disastrous both to Acadia and to Canada, because these tribes held the passes through the northern wilderness, and, so long as they were in the interest of France, covered the settlements on the St. Lawrence from attack. Moreover, the government relied on them to fight its battles. Therefore, no pains were spared to break off their incipient treaty with the English, and spur them again to war. Villebon, a Canadian of good birth, one of the brothers of Portneuf, was sent by the king to govern Acadia. Presents for the Abenakis were given him in abundance; and he was ordered to assure them of support, so long as they fought for France. [14] He and his officers were told to join their war-parties; while the Canadians, who followed him to Acadia, were required to leave all other employments and wage incessant war against the English borders. "You yourself," says the minister, "will herein set them so good an example, that they will be animated by no other desire than that of making profit out of the enemy: there is nothing which I more strongly urge upon you than to put forth all your ability and prudence to prevent the Abenakis from occupying themselves in any thing but war, and by good management of the supplies which you have received for their use to enable them to live by it more to their advantage than by hunting." [15] [14] Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction au Sieur de Villebon, 1691. [15] "Comme vostre principal objet doit estre de faire la guerre sans relache aux Anglois, il faut que vostre plus particulière application soit 348 de detourner de tout autre employ les Fran?ois qui sont avec vous, en leur donnant de vostre part un si bon exemple en cela qu'ils ne soient animez que du désir de chercher à faire du proffit sur les ennemis. Je n'ay aussy rien à vous recommander plus fortement que de mettre en usage tout ce que vous pouvez avoir de capacité et de prudence afin que les Canibas (Abenakis) ne s'employent qu'à la guerre, et que par l'économie de ce que vous avez à leur fournir ils y puissent trouver leur subsistance et plus d'avantage qu'à la chasse." Le Ministre à Villebon, Avril, 1692. Two years before, the king had ordered that the Abenakis should be made to attack the English settlements. Armed with these instructions, Villebon repaired to his post, where he was joined by a body of Canadians under Portneuf. His first step was to reoccupy Port Royal; and, as there was nobody there to oppose him, he easily succeeded. The settlers renounced allegiance to Massachusetts and King William, and swore fidelity to their natural sovereign. [16] The capital of Acadia dropped back quietly into the lap of France; but, as the "Bostonnais" might recapture it at any time, Villebon crossed to the St. John, and built a fort high up the stream at Naxouat, opposite the present city of Fredericton. Here no "Bostonnais" could reach him, and he could muster war-parties at his leisure. [16] Procès-verbal de la Prise de Possession du Port Royal, 27 Sept., 1691. One thing was indispensable. A blow must be struck that would encourage and excite the Abenakis. Some of them had had no part in the truce, and were still so keen for English blood that a deputation of their chiefs told Frontenac at Quebec that they would fight, even if they must head their arrows with the bones of beasts. [17] They were under no such necessity. Guns, powder, and lead were given them in abundance; and Thury, the priest 349 on the Penobscot, urged them to strike the English. A hundred and fifty of his converts took the war-path, and were joined by a band from the Kennebec. It was January; and they made their way on snow-shoes along the frozen streams, and through the deathly solitudes of the winter forest, till, after marching a month, they neared their destination, the frontier settlement of York. In the afternoon of the fourth of February, they encamped at the foot of a high hill, evidently Mount Agamenticus, from the top of which the English village lay in sight. It was a collection of scattered houses along the banks of the river Agamenticus and the shore of the adjacent sea. Five or more of them were built for defence, though owned and occupied by families like the other houses. Near the sea stood the unprotected house of the chief man of the place, Dummer, the minister. York appears to have contained from three to four hundred persons of all ages, for the most part rude and ignorant borderers. [17] Paroles des Sauvages de la Mission de Pentegoet. The warriors lay shivering all night in the forest, not daring to make fires. In the morning, a heavy fall of snow began. They moved forward, and soon heard the sound of an axe. It was an English boy chopping wood. They caught him, extorted such information as they needed, then tomahawked him, and moved on, till, hidden by the forest and the thick snow, they reached the outskirts of the village. Here they divided into two parties, and each took its station. A gun was fired as a signal, upon which they all yelled the war-whoop, and dashed 350 upon their prey. One party mastered the nearest fortified house, which had scarcely a defender but women. The rest burst into the unprotected houses, killing or capturing the astonished inmates. The minister was at his door, in the act of mounting his horse to visit some distant parishioners, when a bullet struck him dead. He was a graduate of Harvard College, a man advanced in life, of some learning, and greatly respected. The French accounts say that about a hundred persons, including women and children, were killed, and about eighty captured. Those who could, ran for the fortified houses of Preble, Harmon, Alcock, and Norton, which were soon filled with the refugees. The Indians did not attack them, but kept well out of gun-shot, and busied themselves in pillaging, killing horses and cattle, and burning the unprotected houses. They then divided themselves into small bands, and destroyed all the outlying farms for four or five miles around. The wish of King Louis was fulfilled. A good profit had been made out of the enemy. The victors withdrew into the forest with their plunder and their prisoners, among whom were several old women and a number of children from three to seven years old. These, with a forbearance which does them credit, they permitted to return uninjured to the nearest fortified house, in requital, it is said, for the lives of a number of Indian children spared by the English in a recent attack on the Androscoggin. The wife of the minister was allowed to go with them; but her son remained a 351 prisoner, and the agonized mother went back to the Indian camp to beg for his release. They again permitted her to return; but, when she came a second time, they told her that, as she wanted to be a prisoner, she should have her wish. She was carried with the rest to their village, where she soon died of exhaustion and distress. One of the warriors arrayed himself in the gown of the slain minister, and preached a mock sermon to the captive parishioners. [18] [18] The best French account of the capture of York is that of Champigny in a letter to the minister, 5 Oct., 1692. His information came from an Abenaki chief, who was present. The journal of Villebon contains an exaggerated account of the affair, also derived from Indians. Compare the English accounts in Mather, Williamson, and Niles. These writers make the number of slain and captives much less than that given by the French. In the contemporary journal of Rev. John Pike, it is placed at 48 killed and 73 taken. Two fortified houses of this period are still (1875) standing at York. They are substantial buildings of squared timber, with the upper story projecting over the lower, so as to allow a vertical fire on the heads of assailants. In one of them some of the loopholes for musketry are still left open. They may or may not have been originally enclosed by palisades. Leaving York in ashes, the victors began their march homeward; while a body of men from Portsmouth followed on their trail, but soon lost it, and failed to overtake them. There was a season of feasting and scalp-dancing at the Abenaki towns; and then, as spring opened, a hundred of the warriors set out to visit Villebon, tell him of their triumph, and receive the promised gifts from their great father the king. Villebon and his brothers, Portneuf, Neuvillette, and Des?les, with their Canadian followers, had spent the winter chiefly on the St. John, finishing their fort at Naxouat, and preparing for future operations. The Abenaki visitors 352 arrived towards the end of April, and were received with all possible distinction. There were speeches, gifts, and feasting; for they had done much, and were expected to do more. Portneuf sang a war-song in their language; then he opened a barrel of wine: the guests emptied it in less than fifteen minutes, sang, whooped, danced, and promised to repair to the rendezvous at Saint-Castin's station of Pentegoet. [19] A grand war-party was afoot; and a new and withering blow was to be struck against the English border. The guests set out for Pentegoet, followed by Portneuf, Des?les, La Brognerie, several other officers, and twenty Canadians. A few days after, a large band of Micmacs arrived; then came the Malicite warriors from their village of Medoctec; and at last Father Baudoin appeared, leading another band of Micmacs from his mission of Beaubassin. Speeches, feasts, and gifts were made to them all; and they all followed the rest to the appointed rendezvous. [19] Villebon, Journal de ce qui s'est passé à l'Acadie, 1691, 1692. At the beginning of June, the site of the town of Castine was covered with wigwams and the beach lined with canoes. Malecites and Micmacs, Abenakis from the Penobscot and Abenakis from the Kennebec, were here, some four hundred warriors in all. [20] Here, too, were Portneuf and his Canadians, the Baron de Saint-Castin and his Indian father-in-law, Madockawando, with Moxus, Egeremet, and other noted chiefs, the terror of the English borders. They crossed Penobscot Bay, and marched upon the frontier village of Wells. [20] Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692. 353 Wells, like York, was a small settlement of scattered houses along the sea-shore. The year before, Moxus had vainly attacked it with two hundred warriors. All the neighboring country had been laid waste by a murderous war of detail, the lonely farm-houses pillaged and burned, and the survivors driven back for refuge to the older settlements. [21] Wells had been crowded with these refugees; but famine and misery had driven most of them beyond the Piscataqua, and the place was now occupied by a remnant of its own destitute inhabitants, who, warned by the fate of York, had taken refuge in five fortified houses. The largest of these, belonging to Joseph Storer, was surrounded by a palisade, and occupied by fifteen armed men, under Captain Convers, an officer of militia. On the ninth of June, two sloops and a sail-boat ran up the neighboring creek, bringing supplies and fourteen more men. The succor came in the nick of time. The sloops had scarcely anchored, when a number of cattle were seen running frightened and wounded from the woods. It was plain that an enemy was lurking there. All the families of the place now gathered within the palisades of Storer's house, thus increasing his force to about thirty men; and a close watch was kept throughout the night. [21] The ravages committed by the Abenakis in the preceding year among the scattered farms of Maine and New Hampshire are said by Frontenac to have been "impossible to describe." Another French writer says that they burned more than 200 houses. In the morning, no room was left for doubt. One John Diamond, on his way from the house to 354 the sloops, was seized by Indians and dragged off by the hair. Then the whole body of savages appeared swarming over the fields, so confident of success that they neglected their usual tactics of surprise. A French officer, who, as an old English account says, was "habited like a gentleman," made them an harangue: they answered with a burst of yells, and then attacked the house, firing, screeching, and calling on Convers and his men to surrender. Others gave their attention to the two sloops, which lay together in the narrow creek, stranded by the ebbing tide. They fired at them for a while from behind a pile of planks on the shore, and threw many fire-arrows without success, the men on board fighting with such cool and dexterous obstinacy that they held them all at bay, and lost but one of their own number. Next, the Canadians made a huge shield of planks, which they fastened vertically to the back of a cart. La Brognerie with twenty-six men, French and Indians, got behind it, and shoved the cart towards the stranded sloops. It was within fifty feet of them, when a wheel sunk in the mud, and the machine stuck fast. La Brognerie tried to lift the wheel, and was shot dead. The tide began to rise. A Canadian tried to escape, and was also shot. The rest then broke away together, some of them, as they ran, dropping under the bullets of the sailors. The whole force now gathered for a final attack on the garrison house. Their appearance was so frightful, and their clamor so appalling, that one 355 of the English muttered something about surrender. Convers returned, "If you say that again, you are a dead man." Had the allies made a bold assault, he and his followers must have been overpowered; but this mode of attack was contrary to Indian maxims. They merely leaped, yelled, fired, and called on the English to yield. They were answered with derision. The women in the house took part in the defence, passed ammunition to the men, and sometimes fired themselves on the enemy. The Indians at length became discouraged, and offered Convers favorable terms. He answered, "I want nothing but men to fight with." An Abenaki who spoke English cried out: "If you are so bold, why do you stay in a garrison house like a squaw? Come out and fight like a man!" Convers retorted, "Do you think I am fool enough to come out with thirty men to fight five hundred?" Another Indian shouted, "Damn you, we'll cut you small as tobacco before morning." Convers returned a contemptuous defiance. After a while, they ceased firing, and dispersed about the neighborhood, butchering cattle and burning the church and a few empty houses. As the tide began to ebb, they sent a fire-raft in full blaze down the creek to destroy the sloops; but it stranded, and the attempt failed. They now wreaked their fury on the prisoner Diamond, whom they tortured to death, after which they all disappeared. A few resolute men had foiled one of the most formidable bands that ever took the war-path in Acadia. [22] [22] Villebon, Journal de ce qui s'est passé à l'Acadie, 1691, 1692; Mather, 356 Magnalia, II. 613; Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., II. 67; Williamson, History of Maine, I. 631; Bourne, History of Wells, 213; Niles, Indian and French Wars, 229. Williamson, like Sylvanus Davis, calls Portneuf Burneffe or Burniffe. He, and other English writers, call La Brognerie Labocree. The French could not recover his body, on which, according to Niles and others, was found a pouch "stuffed full of relics, pardons, and indulgences." The prisoner Diamond told the captors that there were thirty men in the sloops. They believed him, and were cautious accordingly. There were, in fact, but fourteen. Most of the fighting was on the tenth. On the evening of that day, Convers received a reinforcement of six men. They were a scouting party, whom he had sent a few days before in the direction of Salmon River. Returning, they were attacked, when near the garrison house, by a party of Portneuf's Indians. The sergeant in command instantly shouted, "Captain Convers, send your men round the hill, and we shall catch these dogs." Thinking that Convers had made a sortie, the Indians ran off, and the scouts joined the garrison without loss. The warriors dispersed to their respective haunts; and, when a band of them reached the St. John, Villebon coolly declares that he gave them a prisoner to burn. They put him to death with all their ingenuity of torture. The act, on the part of the governor, was more atrocious, as it had no motive of reprisal, and as the burning of prisoners was not the common practice of these tribes. [23] [23] "Le 18me (Ao?t) un sauvage anglois fut pris au bas de la rivière de St. Jean. Je le donnai à nos sauvages pour estre brulé, ce qu'ils firent le lendemain. On ne peut rien adjouter aux tourmens qu'ils luy firent souffrir." Villebon, Journal, 1691, 1692. The warlike ardor of the Abenakis cooled after the failure at Wells, and events that soon followed nearly extinguished it. Phips had just received his preposterous appointment to the government of Massachusetts. To the disgust of its inhabitants, the stubborn colony was no longer a republic. The new governor, unfit as he was for his office, understood the needs of the eastern frontier, where he had spent his youth; and he brought a royal order 357 to rebuild the ruined fort at Pemaquid. The king gave the order, but neither men, money, nor munitions to execute it; and Massachusetts bore all the burden. Phips went to Pemaquid, laid out the work, and left a hundred men to finish it. A strong fort of stone was built, the abandoned cannon of Casco mounted on its walls, and sixty men placed in garrison. The keen military eye of Frontenac saw the danger involved in the re-establishment of Pemaquid. Lying far in advance of the other English stations, it barred the passage of war-parties along the coast, and was a standing menace to the Abenakis. It was resolved to capture it. Two ships of war, lately arrived at Quebec, the "Poli" and the "Envieux," were ordered to sail for Acadia with above four hundred men, take on board two or three hundred Indians at Pentegoet, reduce Pemaquid, and attack Wells, Portsmouth, and the Isles of Shoals; after which, they were to scour the Acadian seas of "Bostonnais" fishermen. At this time, a gentleman of Boston, John Nelson, captured by Villebon the year before, was a prisoner at Quebec. Nelson was nephew and heir of Sir Thomas Temple, in whose right he claimed the proprietorship of Acadia, under an old grant of Oliver Cromwell. He was familiar both with that country and with Canada, which he had visited several times before the war. As he was a man of birth and breeding, and a declared enemy of Phips, and as he had befriended French prisoners, and shown especial kindness to Meneval, the 358 captive governor of Acadia, he was treated with distinction by Frontenac, who, though he knew him to be a determined enemy of the French, lodged him at the chateau, and entertained him at his own table. [24] Madockawando, the father-in-law of Saint-Castin, made a visit to Frontenac; and Nelson, who spoke both French and Indian, contrived to gain from him and from other sources a partial knowledge of the intended expedition. He was not in favor at Boston; for, though one of the foremost in the overthrow of Andros, his creed and his character savored more of the Cavalier than of the Puritan. This did not prevent him from risking his life for the colony. He wrote a letter to the authorities of Massachusetts, and then bribed two soldiers to desert and carry it to them. The deserters were hotly pursued, but reached their destination, and delivered their letter. The two ships sailed from Quebec; but when, after a long delay at Mount Desert, they took on board the Indian allies and sailed onward to Pemaquid, they found an armed ship from Boston anchored in the harbor. Why they did not attack it, is a mystery. The defences of Pemaquid were still unfinished, the French force was far superior to the English, and Iberville, who commanded it, was a leader of unquestionable enterprise and daring. Nevertheless, the French did nothing, and soon after bore away for France. Frontenac was indignant, and severely blamed Iberville, whose sister was on 359 board his ship, and was possibly the occasion of his inaction. [25] [24] Champigny au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1693. [25] Frontenac au Ministre, 25 Oct., 1693. Thus far successful, the authorities of Boston undertook an enterprise little to their credit. They employed the two deserters, joined with two Acadian prisoners, to kidnap Saint-Castin, whom, next to the priest Thury, they regarded as their most insidious enemy. The Acadians revealed the plot, and the two soldiers were shot at Mount Desert. Nelson was sent to France, imprisoned two years in a dungeon of the Chateau of Angoulême, and then placed in the Bastile. Ten years passed before he was allowed to return to his family at Boston. [26] [26] Lagny, Mémoire sur l'Acadie, 1692; Mémoire sur l'Enlèvement de Saint-Castin; Frontenac au Ministre, 25 Oct., 1693; Relation de ce qui s'est passè de plus remarquable, 1690, 1691 (capture of Nelson); Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692; Champigny au Ministre, 15 Oct., 1692. Champigny here speaks of Nelson as the most audacious of the English, and the most determined on the destruction of the French. Nelson's letter to the authorities of Boston is printed in Hutchinson, I. 338. It does not warn them of an attempt against Pemaquid, of the rebuilding of which he seems not to have heard, but only of a design against the seaboard towns. Compare N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 555. In the same collection is a Memorial on the Northern Colonies, by Nelson, a paper showing much good sense and penetration. After an imprisonment of four and a half years, he was allowed to go to England on parole; a friend in France giving security of 15,000 livres for his return, in case of his failure to procure from the king an order for the fulfilment of the terms of the capitulation of Port Royal. (Le Ministre à Bégon, 13 Jan., 1694.) He did not succeed, and the king forbade him to return. It is characteristic of him that he preferred to disobey the royal order, and thus incur the high displeasure of his sovereign, rather than break his parole and involve his friend in loss. La Hontan calls him a "fort galant homme." There is a portrait of him at Boston, where his descendants are represented by the prominent families of Derby and Borland. The French failure at Pemaquid completed the discontent of the Abenakis; and despondency and 360 terror seized them when, in the spring of 1693, Convers, the defender of Wells, ranged the frontier with a strong party of militia, and built another stone fort at the falls of the Saco. In July, they opened a conference at Pemaquid; and, in August, thirteen of their chiefs, representing, or pretending to represent, all the tribes from the Merrimac to the St. Croix, came again to the same place to conclude a final treaty of peace with the commissioners of Massachusetts. They renounced the French alliance, buried the hatchet, declared themselves British subjects, promised to give up all prisoners, and left five of their chief men as hostages. [27] The frontier breathed again. Security and hope returned to secluded dwellings buried in a treacherous forest, where life had been a nightmare of horror and fear; and the settler could go to his work without dreading to find at evening his cabin burned and his wife and children murdered. He was fatally deceived, for the danger was not past. [27] For the treaty in full, Mather, Magnalia, II. 625. It is true that some of the Abenakis were sincere in their pledges of peace. A party among them, headed by Madockawando, were dissatisfied with the French, anxious to recover their captive countrymen, and eager to reopen trade with the English. But there was an opposing party, led by the chief Taxous, who still breathed war; while between the two was an unstable mob of warriors, guided by the impulse of the hour. [28] The French 361 spared no efforts to break off the peace. The two missionaries, Bigot on the Kennebec and Thury on the Penobscot, labored with unwearied energy to urge the savages to war. The governor, Villebon, flattered them, feasted them, adopted Taxous as his brother, and, to honor the occasion, gave him his own best coat. Twenty-five hundred pounds of gunpowder, six thousand pounds of lead, and a multitude of other presents, were given this year to the Indians of Acadia. [29] Two of their chiefs had been sent to Versailles. They now returned, in gay attire, their necks hung with medals, and their minds filled with admiration, wonder, and bewilderment. [28] The state of feeling among the Abenakis is shown in a letter of Thury to Frontenac, 11 Sept., 1694, and in the journal of Villebon for 1693. [29] Estat de Munitions, etc., pour les Sauvages de l'Acadie, 1693. The special duty of commanding Indians had fallen to the lot of an officer named Villieu, who had been ordered by the court to raise a war-party and attack the English. He had lately been sent to replace Portneuf, who had been charged with debauchery and peculation. Villebon, angry at his brother's removal, was on ill terms with his successor; and, though he declares that he did his best to aid in raising the war-party, Villieu says, on the contrary, that he was worse than indifferent. The new lieutenant spent the winter at Naxouat, and on the first of May went up in a canoe to the Malicite village of Medoctec, assembled the chiefs, and invited them to war. They accepted the invitation with alacrity. Villieu next made his way through the wilderness to the Indian towns of the Penobscot. On the ninth, he reached the mouth of the Mattawamkeag, 362 where he found the chief Taxous, paddled with him down the Penobscot, and, at midnight on the tenth, landed at a large Indian village, at or near the place now called Passadumkeag. Here he found a powerful ally in the Jesuit Vincent Bigot, who had come from the Kennebec, with three Abenakis, to urge their brethren of the Penobscot to break off the peace. The chief envoy denounced the treaty of Pemaquid as a snare; and Villieu exhorted the assembled warriors to follow him to the English border, where honor and profit awaited them. But first he invited them to go back with him to Naxouat to receive their presents of arms, ammunition, and every thing else that they needed. They set out with alacrity. Villieu went with them, and they all arrived within a week. They were feasted and gifted to their hearts' content; and then the indefatigable officer led them back by the same long and weary routes which he had passed and repassed before, rocky and shallow streams, chains of wilderness lakes, threads of water writhing through swamps where the canoes could scarcely glide among the water-weeds and alders. Villieu was the only white man. The governor, as he says, would give him but two soldiers, and these had run off. Early in June, the whole flotilla paddled down the Penobscot to Pentegeot. Here the Indians divided their presents, which they found somewhat less ample than they had imagined. In the midst of their discontent, Madockawando came from Pemaquid with news that 363 the governor of Massachusetts was about to deliver up the Indian prisoners in his hands, as stipulated by the treaty. This completely changed the temper of the warriors. Madockawando declared loudly for peace, and Villieu saw all his hopes wrecked. He tried to persuade his disaffected allies that the English only meant to lure them to destruction, and the missionary Thury supported him with his utmost eloquence. The Indians would not be convinced; and their trust in English good faith was confirmed, when they heard that a minister had just come to Pemaquid to teach their children to read and write. The news grew worse and worse. Villieu was secretly informed that Phips had been off the coast in a frigate, invited Madockawando and other chiefs on board, and feasted them in his cabin, after which they had all thrown their hatchets into the sea, in token of everlasting peace. Villieu now despaired of his enterprise, and prepared to return to the St. John; when Thury, wise as the serpent, set himself to work on the jealousy of Taxous, took him aside, and persuaded him that his rival, Madockawando, had put a slight upon him in presuming to make peace without his consent. "The effect was marvellous," says Villieu. Taxous, exasperated, declared that he would have nothing to do with Madockawando's treaty. The fickle multitude caught the contagion, and asked for nothing but English scalps; but, before setting out, they must needs go back to Passadumkeag to finish their preparations. Villieu again went with them, and on the way his 364 enterprise and he nearly perished together. His canoe overset in a rapid at some distance above the site of Bangor: he was swept down the current, his head was dashed against a rock, and his body bruised from head to foot. For five days he lay helpless with fever. He had no sooner recovered than he gave the Indians a war-feast, at which they all sang the war-song, except Madockawando and some thirty of his clansmen, whom the others made the butt of their taunts and ridicule. The chief began to waver. The officer and the missionary beset him with presents and persuasion, till at last he promised to join the rest. It was the end of June when Villieu and Thury, with one Frenchman and a hundred and five Indians, began their long canoe voyage to the English border. The savages were directed to give no quarter, and told that the prisoners already in their hands would insure the safety of their hostages in the hands of the English. [30] More warriors were to join them from Bigot's mission on the Kennebec. On the ninth of July, they neared Pemaquid; but it was no part of their plan to attack a garrisoned post. The main body passed on at a safe distance; while Villieu approached the fort, dressed and painted like an Indian, and accompanied by two or three genuine savages, carrying a packet of furs, as if on a peaceful errand of trade. Such visits from Indians had been common since the treaty; and, while his companions bartered their beaver 365 skins with the unsuspecting soldiers, he strolled about the neighborhood and made a plan of the works. The party was soon after joined by Bigot's Indians, and the united force now amounted to two hundred and thirty. They held a council to determine where they should make their attack, but opinions differed. Some were for the places west of Boston, and others for those nearer at hand. Necessity decided them. Their provisions were gone, and Villieu says that he himself was dying of hunger. They therefore resolved to strike at the nearest settlement, that of Oyster River, now Durham, about twelve miles from Portsmouth. They cautiously moved forward, and sent scouts in advance, who reported that the inhabitants kept no watch. In fact, a messenger from Phips had assured them that the war was over, and that they could follow their usual vocations without fear. [30] Villebon, Mémoire, Juillet, 1694; Instruction du Sr. de Villebon au Sr. de Villieu. Villieu and his band waited till night, and then made their approach. There was a small village; a church; a mill; twelve fortified houses, occupied in most cases only by families; and many unprotected farm-houses, extending several miles along the stream. The Indians separated into bands, and, stationing themselves for a simultaneous attack at numerous points, lay patiently waiting till towards day. The moon was still bright when the first shot gave the signal, and the slaughter began. The two palisaded houses of Adams and Drew, without garrisons, were taken immediately, and the families butchered. Those of Edgerly, Beard, and Medar were abandoned, and most of the inmates 366 escaped. The remaining seven were successfully defended, though several of them were occupied only by the families which owned them. One of these, belonging to Thomas Bickford, stood by the river near the lower end of the settlement. Roused by the firing, he placed his wife and children in a boat, sent them down the stream, and then went back alone to defend his dwelling. When the Indians appeared, he fired on them, sometimes from one loophole and sometimes from another, shouting the word of command to an imaginary garrison, and showing himself with a different hat, cap, or coat, at different parts of the building. The Indians were afraid to approach, and he saved both family and home. One Jones, the owner of another of these fortified houses, was wakened by the barking of his dogs, and went out, thinking that his hog-pen was visited by wolves. The flash of a gun in the twilight of the morning showed the true nature of the attack. The shot missed him narrowly; and, entering the house again, he stood on his defence, when the Indians, after firing for some time from behind a neighboring rock, withdrew and left him in peace. Woodman's garrison house, though occupied by a number of men, was attacked more seriously, the Indians keeping up a long and brisk fire from behind a ridge where they lay sheltered; but they hit nobody, and at length disappeared. [31] [31] Woodman's garrison house is still standing, having been carefully preserved by his descendants. Among the unprotected houses, the carnage was 367 horrible. A hundred and four persons, chiefly women and children half naked from their beds, were tomahawked, shot, or killed by slower and more painful methods. Some escaped to the fortified houses, and others hid in the woods. Twenty-seven were kept alive as prisoners. Twenty or more houses were burned; but, what is remarkable, the church was spared. Father Thury entered it during the massacre, and wrote with chalk on the pulpit some sentences, of which the purport is not preserved, as they were no doubt in French or Latin. Thury said mass, and then the victors retreated in a body to the place where they had hidden their canoes. Here Taxous, dissatisfied with the scalps that he and his band had taken, resolved to have more; and with fifty of his own warriors, joined by others from the Kennebec, set out on a new enterprise. "They mean," writes Villieu in his diary, "to divide into bands of four or five, and knock people in the head by surprise, which cannot fail to produce a good effect." [32] They did in fact fall a few days after on the settlements near Groton, and killed some forty persons. [32] "Casser des testes à la surprise après s'estre divisés en plusieurs bandes de quatre au cinq, ce qui ne peut manquer de faire un bon effect." Villieu, Relation. Having heard from one of the prisoners a rumor of ships on the way from England to attack Quebec, Villieu thought it necessary to inform Frontenac at once. Attended by a few Indians, he travelled four days and nights, till he found Bigot at an 368 Abenaki fort on the Kennebec. His Indians were completely exhausted. He took others in their place, pushed forward again, reached Quebec on the twenty-second of August, found that Frontenac had gone to Montreal, followed him thither, told his story, and presented him with thirteen English scalps. [33] He had displayed in the achievement of his detestable exploit an energy, perseverance, and hardihood rarely equalled; but all would have been vain but for the help of his clerical colleague Father Pierre Thury. [34] [33] "Dans cette assemblée M. de Villieu avec 4 sauvages qu'il avoit amenés de l'Accadie présenta à Monsieur le Comte de Frontenac 13 chevelures angloises." Callières au Ministre, 19 Oct., 1694. [34] The principal authority for the above is the very curious Relation du Voyage fait par le Sieur de Villieu … pour faire la Guerre aux Anglois au printemps de l'an 1694. It is the narrative of Villieu himself, written in the form of a journal, with great detail. He also gives a brief summary in a letter to the minister, 7 Sept. The best English account is that of Belknap, in his History of New Hampshire. Cotton Mather tells the story in his usual unsatisfactory and ridiculous manner. Pike, in his journal, says that ninety-four persons in all were killed or taken. Mather says, "ninety four or a hundred." The Provincial Record of New Hampshire estimates it at eighty. Charlevoix claims two hundred and thirty, and Villieu himself but a hundred and thirty-one. Champigny, Frontenac, and Callières, in their reports to the court, adopt Villieu's statements. Frontenac says that the success was due to the assurances of safety which Phips had given the settlers. In the Massachusetts archives is a letter to Phips, written just after the attack. The devastation extended six or seven miles. There are also a number of depositions from persons present, giving a horrible picture of the cruelties practised. The Indian tribes of Acadia.—The name Abenaki is generic, and of very loose application. As employed by the best French writers at the end of the seventeenth century, it may be taken to include the tribes from the Kennebec eastward to the St. John. These again may be sub-divided as follows. First, the Canibas (Kenibas), or tribes of the Kennebec and adjacent waters. These with kindred neighboring tribes on the Saco, the Androscoggin, 369 and the Sheepscot, have been held by some writers to be the Abenakis proper, though some of them, such as the Sokokis or Pequawkets of the Saco, spoke a dialect distinct from the rest. Secondly, the tribes of the Penobscot, called Tarratines by early New England writers, who sometimes, however, give this name a more extended application. Thirdly, the Malicites (Marechites) of the St. Croix and the St. John. These, with the Penobscots or Tarratines, are the Etchemins of early French waiters. All these tribes speak dialects of Algonquin, so nearly related that they understand each other with little difficulty. That eminent Indian philologist, Mr. J. Hammond Trumbull, writes to me: "The Malicite, the Penobscot, and the Kennebec, or Caniba, are dialects of the same language, which may as well be called Abenaki. The first named differs more considerably from the other two than do these from each other. In fact the Caniba and the Penobscot are merely provincial dialects, with no greater difference than is found in two English counties." The case is widely different with the Micmacs, the Souriquois of the French, who occupy portions of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and who speak a language which, though of Algonquin origin, differs as much from the Abenaki dialects as Italian differs from French, and was once described to me by a Malicite (Passamaquoddy) Indian as an unintelligible jargon. CHAPTER XVII. 1690-1697. New France and New England. The Frontier of New England ? Border Warfare ? Motives of the French ? Needless Barbarity ? Who were answerable? ? Father Thury ? The Abenakis waver ? Treachery at Pemaquid ? Capture of Pemaquid ? Projected Attack on Boston ? Disappointment ? Miseries of the Frontier ? A Captive Amazon. "This stroke," says Villebon, speaking of the success at Oyster River, "is of great advantage, because it breaks off all the talk of peace between our Indians and the English. The English are in despair, for not even infants in the cradle were spared." [1] [1] "Ce coup est très-avantageux, parcequ'il rompte tous les pour-parlers de paix entre nos sauvages et les Anglois. Les Anglois sont au désespoir de ce qu'ils ont tué jusqu'aux enfants au berceau." Villebon au Ministre, 19 Sept., 1694. I have given the story in detail, as showing the origin and character of the destructive raids, of which New England annalists show only the results. The borders of New England were peculiarly vulnerable. In Canada, the settlers built their houses in lines, within supporting distance of each other, along the margin of a river which supplied easy transportation for troops; and, in time of danger, they all took refuge in forts under command 371 of the local seigniors, or of officers with detachments of soldiers. The exposed part of the French colony extended along the St. Lawrence about ninety miles. The exposed frontier of New England was between two and three hundred miles long, and consisted of farms and hamlets, loosely scattered through an almost impervious forest. Mutual support was difficult or impossible. A body of Indians and Canadians, approaching secretly and swiftly, dividing into small bands, and falling at once upon the isolated houses of an extensive district, could commit prodigious havoc in a short time, and with little danger. Even in so-called villages, the houses were far apart, because, except on the sea-shore, the people lived by farming. Such as were able to do so fenced their dwellings with palisades, or built them of solid timber, with loopholes, a projecting upper story like a blockhouse, and sometimes a flanker at one or more of the corners. In the more considerable settlements, the largest of these fortified houses was occupied, in time of danger, by armed men, and served as a place of refuge for the neighbors. The palisaded house defended by Convers at Wells was of this sort, and so also was the Woodman house at Oyster River. These were "garrison houses," properly so called, though the name was often given to fortified dwellings occupied only by the family. The French and Indian war-parties commonly avoided the true garrison houses, and very rarely captured them, except unawares; for their tactics were essentially Iroquois, and consisted, 372 for the most part, in pouncing upon peaceful settlers by surprise, and generally in the night. Combatants and non-combatants were slaughtered together. By parading the number of slain, without mentioning that most of them were women and children, and by counting as forts mere private houses surrounded with palisades, Charlevoix and later writers have given the air of gallant exploits to acts which deserve a very different name. To attack military posts, like Casco and Pemaquid, was a legitimate act of war; but systematically to butcher helpless farmers and their families can hardly pass as such, except from the Iroquois point of view. The chief alleged motive for this ruthless warfare was to prevent the people of New England from invading Canada, by giving them employment at home; though, in fact, they had never thought of invading Canada till after these attacks began. But for the intrigues of Denonville, the Bigots, Thury, and Saint-Castin, before war was declared, and the destruction of Salmon Falls after it, Phips's expedition would never have taken place. By successful raids against the borders of New England, Frontenac roused the Canadians from their dejection, and prevented his red allies from deserting him; but, in so doing, he brought upon himself an enemy who, as Charlevoix himself says, asked only to be let alone. If there was a political necessity for butchering women and children on the frontier of New England, it was a necessity created by the French themselves. There was no such necessity. Massachusetts was 373 the only one of the New England colonies which took an aggressive part in the contest. Connecticut did little or nothing. Rhode Island was non-combatant through Quaker influence; and New Hampshire was too weak for offensive war. Massachusetts was in no condition to fight, nor was she impelled to do so by the home government. Canada was organized for war, and must fight at the bidding of the king, who made the war and paid for it. Massachusetts was organized for peace; and, if she chose an aggressive part, it was at her own risk and her own cost. She had had fighting enough already against infuriated savages far more numerous than the Iroquois, and poverty and political revolution made peace a necessity to her. If there was danger of another attack on Quebec, it was not from New England, but from Old; and no amount of frontier butchery could avert it. Nor, except their inveterate habit of poaching on Acadian fisheries, had the people of New England provoked these barbarous attacks. They never even attempted to retaliate them, though the settlements of Acadia offered a safe and easy revenge. Once, it is true, they pillaged Beaubassin; but they killed nobody, though countless butcheries in settlements yet more defenceless were fresh in their memory. [2] [2] The people of Beaubassin had taken an oath of allegiance to England in 1690, and pleaded it as a reason for exemption from plunder; but it appears by French authorities that they had violated it (Observations sur les Depêches touchant l'Acadie, 1695), and their priest Baudoin had led a band of Micmacs to the attack of Wells (Villebon, Journal). When the "Bostonnais" captured Port Royal, they are described by the French as excessively irritated by the recent slaughter at Salmon Falls, yet the only revenge they took was plundering some of the inhabitants. 374 With New York, a colony separate in government and widely sundered in local position, the case was different. Its rulers had instigated the Iroquois to attack Canada, possibly before the declaration of war, and certainly after it; and they had no right to complain of reprisal. Yet the frontier of New York was less frequently assailed, because it was less exposed; while that of New England was drenched in blood, because it was open to attack, because the Abenakis were convenient instruments for attacking it, because the adhesion of these tribes was necessary to the maintenance of French power in Acadia, and because this adhesion could best be secured by inciting them to constant hostility against the English. They were not only needed as the barrier of Canada against New England, but the French commanders hoped, by means of their tomahawks, to drive the English beyond the Piscataqua, and secure the whole of Maine to the French crown. Who were answerable for these offences against Christianity and civilization? First, the king; and, next, the governors and military officers who were charged with executing his orders, and who often executed them with needless barbarity. But a far different responsibility rests on the missionary priests, who hounded their converts on the track of innocent blood. The Acadian priests are not all open to this charge. Some of them are even accused of being too favorable to the English; while others gave themselves to their proper work, and neither abused their influence, nor perverted 375 their teaching to political ends. The most prominent among the apostles of carnage, at this time, are the Jesuit Bigot on the Kennebec, and the seminary priest Thury on the Penobscot. There is little doubt that the latter instigated attacks on the English frontier before the war, and there is conclusive evidence that he had a hand in repeated forays after it began. Whether acting from fanaticism, policy, or an odious compound of both, he was found so useful, that the minister Ponchartrain twice wrote him letters of commendation, praising him in the same breath for his care of the souls of the Indians and his zeal in exciting them to war. "There is no better man," says an Acadian official, "to prompt the savages to any enterprise." [3] The king was begged to reward him with money; and Ponchartrain wrote to the bishop of Quebec to increase his pay out of the allowance furnished by the government to the Acadian clergy, because he, Thury, had persuaded the Abenakis to begin the war anew. [4] [3] Tibièrge, Mémoire sur l'Acadie, 1695. [4] "Les témoignages qu'on a rendu à Sa Majesté de l'affection et du zêle du Sr. de Thury, missionaire chez les Canibas (Abenakis), pour son service, et particulièrement dans l'engagement où il a mis les Sauvages de recommencer la guerre contre les Anglois, m'oblige de vous prier de luy faire une plus forte part sur les 1,500 livres de gratification que Sa Majesté accorde pour les ecclésiastiques de l'Acadie." Le Ministre à l'évesque de Québec, 16 Avril, 1695. "Je suis bien aise de me servir de cette occasion pour vous dire que j'ay esté informé, non seulement de vostre zêle et de vostre application pour vostre mission, et du progrès qu'elle fait pour l'avancement de la religion avec les sauvages, mais encore de vos soins pour les maintenir dans le service de Sa Majesté et pour les encourager aux expeditions de guerre." Le Ministre à Thury, 23 Avril, 1697. The other letter to Thury, written two years before, is of the same tenor. 376 The French missionaries are said to have made use of singular methods to excite their flocks against the heretics. The Abenaki chief Bomaseen, when a prisoner at Boston in 1696, declared that they told the Indians that Jesus Christ was a Frenchman, and his mother, the Virgin, a French lady; that the English had murdered him, and that the best way to gain his favor was to revenge his death. [5] [5] Mather, Magnalia, II. 629. Compare Dummer, Memorial, 1709, in Mass. Hist. Coll., 3 Ser., I., and the same writer's Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the Late Expedition to Canada, 1712. Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the geologist, when engaged in the survey of Maine in 1836, mentions, as an example of the simplicity of the Acadians of Madawaska, that one of them asked him "if Bethlehem, where Christ was born, was not a town in France." First Report on the Geology of Maine, 72. Here, perhaps, is a tradition from early missionary teaching. Whether or not these articles of faith formed a part of the teachings of Thury and his fellow-apostles, there is no doubt that it was a recognized part of their functions to keep their converts in hostility to the English, and that their credit with the civil powers depended on their success in doing so. The same holds true of the priests of the mission villages in Canada. They avoided all that might impair the warlike spirit of the neophyte, and they were well aware that in savages the warlike spirit is mainly dependent on native ferocity. They taught temperance, conjugal fidelity, devotion to the rites of their religion, and submission to the priest; but they left the savage a savage still. In spite of the remonstrances of the civil authorities, the mission Indian was separated as far as possible from intercourse with the French, and discouraged 377 from learning the French tongue. He wore a crucifix, hung wampum on the shrine of the Virgin, told his beads, prayed three times a day, knelt for hours before the Host, invoked the saints, and confessed to the priest; but, with rare exceptions, he murdered, scalped, and tortured like his heathen countrymen. [6] [6] The famous Ouréhaoué, who had been for years under the influence of the priests, and who, as Charlevoix says, died "un vrai Chrétien," being told on his death-bed how Christ was crucified by the Jews, exclaimed with fervor: "Ah! why was not I there? I would have revenged him: I would have had their scalps." La Potherie, IV. 91. Charlevoix, after his fashion on such occasions, suppresses the revenge and the scalping, and instead makes the dying Christian say, "I would have prevented them from so treating my God." The savage custom of forcing prisoners to run the gauntlet, and sometimes beating them to death as they did so, was continued at two, if not all, of the mission villages down to the end of the French domination. General Stark of the Revolution, when a young man, was subjected to this kind of torture at St. Francis, but saved himself by snatching a club from one of the savages, and knocking the rest to the right and left as he ran. The practice was common, and must have had the consent of the priests of the mission. At the Sulpitian mission of the Mountain of Montreal, unlike the rest, the converts were taught to speak French and practise mechanical arts. The absence of such teaching in other missions was the subject of frequent complaint, not only from Frontenac, but from other officers. La Motte-Cadillac writes bitterly on the subject, and contrasts the conduct of the French priests with that of the English ministers, who have taught many Indians to read and write, and reward them for teaching others in turn, which they do, he says, with great success. Mémoire contenant une Description détaillée de l'Acadie, etc., 1693. In fact, Eliot and his co-workers took great pains in this respect. There were at this time thirty Indian churches in New England, according to the Diary of President Stiles, cited by Holmes. The picture has another side, which must not pass unnoticed. Early in the war, the French of Canada began the merciful practice of buying English prisoners, and especially children, from their Indian allies. After the first fury of attack, many 378 lives were spared for the sake of this ransom. Sometimes, but not always, the redeemed captives were made to work for their benefactors. They were uniformly treated well, and often with such kindness that they would not be exchanged, and became Canadians by adoption. Villebon was still full of anxiety as to the adhesion of the Abenakis. Thury saw the danger still more clearly, and told Frontenac that their late attack at Oyster River was due more to levity than to any other cause; that they were greatly alarmed, wavering, half stupefied, afraid of the English, and distrustful of the French, whom they accused of using them as tools. [7] It was clear that something must be done; and nothing could answer the purpose so well as the capture of Pemaquid, that English stronghold which held them in constant menace, and at the same time tempted them by offers of goods at a low rate. To the capture of Pemaquid, therefore, the French government turned its thoughts. [7] Thury à Frontenac, 11 Sept., 1694. One Pascho Chubb, of Andover, commanded the post, with a garrison of ninety-five militia-men. Stoughton, governor of Massachusetts, had written to the Abenakis, upbraiding them for breaking the peace, and ordering them to bring in their prisoners without delay. The Indians of Bigot's mission, that is to say, Bigot in their name, retorted by a letter to the last degree haughty and abusive. Those of Thury's mission, however, were so anxious to recover their friends held in prison 379 at Boston that they came to Pemaquid, and opened a conference with Chubb. The French say that they meant only to deceive him. [8] This does not justify the Massachusetts officer, who, by an act of odious treachery, killed several of them, and captured the chief, Egeremet. Nor was this the only occasion on which the English had acted in bad faith. It was but playing into the hands of the French, who saw with delight that the folly of their enemies had aided their own intrigues. [9] [8] Villebon, Journal, 1694-1696. [9] N. Y. Col Docs., IX. 613, 616, 642, 643; La Potherie, III. 258; Calières au Ministre, 25 Oct., 1695; Rev. John Pike to Governor and Council, 7 Jan., 1694 (1695), in Johnston, Hist. of Bristol and Bremen; Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., II. 81, 90. Early in 1696, two ships of war, the "Envieux" and the "Profond," one commanded by Iberville and the other by Bonaventure, sailed from Rochefort to Quebec, where they took on board eighty troops and Canadians; then proceeded to Cape Breton, embarked thirty Micmac Indians, and steered for the St. John. Here they met two British frigates and a provincial tender belonging to Massachusetts. A fight ensued. The forces were very unequal. The "Newport," of twenty-four guns, was dismasted and taken; but her companion frigate along with the tender escaped in the fog. The French then anchored at the mouth of the St. John, where Villebon and the priest Simon were waiting for them, with fifty more Micmacs. Simon and the Indians went on board; and they all sailed for Pentegoet, where Villieu, with twenty-five soldiers, and Thury and Saint-Castin, with some 380 three hundred Abenakis, were ready to join them. After the usual feasting, these new allies paddled for Pemaquid; the ships followed; and on the next day, the fourteenth of August, they all reached their destination. The fort of Pemaquid stood at the west side of the promontory of the same name, on a rocky point at the mouth of Pemaquid River. It was a quadrangle, with ramparts of rough stone, built at great pains and cost, but exposed to artillery, and incapable of resisting heavy shot. The government of Massachusetts, with its usual military fatuity, had placed it in the keeping of an unfit commander, and permitted some of the yeoman garrison to bring their wives and children to this dangerous and important post. Saint-Castin and his Indians landed at New Harbor, half a league from the fort. Troops and cannon were sent ashore; and, at five o'clock in the afternoon, Chubb was summoned to surrender. He replied that he would fight, "even if the sea were covered with French ships and the land with Indians." The firing then began; and the Indian marksmen, favored by the nature of the ground, ensconced themselves near the fort, well covered from its cannon. During the night, mortars and heavy ships' guns were landed, and by great exertion were got into position, the two priests working lustily with the rest. They opened fire at three o'clock on the next day. Saint-Castin had just before sent Chubb a letter, telling him that, if the garrison were obstinate, they would get no quarter, 381 and would be butchered by the Indians. Close upon this message followed four or five bomb-shells. Chubb succumbed immediately, sounded a parley, and gave up the fort, on condition that he and his men should be protected from the Indians, sent to Boston, and exchanged for French and Abenaki prisoners. They all marched out without arms; and Iberville, true to his pledge, sent them to an island in the bay, beyond the reach of his red allies. Villieu took possession of the fort, where an Indian prisoner was found in irons, half dead from long confinement. This so enraged his countrymen that a massacre would infallibly have taken place but for the precaution of Iberville. The cannon of Pemaquid were carried on board the ships, and the small arms and ammunition given to the Indians. Two days were spent in destroying the works, and then the victors withdrew in triumph. Disgraceful as was the prompt surrender of the fort, it may be doubted if, even with the best defence, it could have held out many days; for it had no casemates, and its occupants were defenceless against the explosion of shells. Chubb was arrested for cowardice on his return, and remained some months in prison. After his release, he returned to his family at Andover, twenty miles from Boston; and here, in the year following, he and his wife were killed by Indians, who seem to have pursued him to this apparently safe asylum to take revenge for his treachery toward their countrymen. [10] [10] Baudoin, Journal d'un Voyage fait avec M. d'Iberville. Baudoin 382 was an Acadian priest, who accompanied the expedition, which he describes in detail. Relation de ce qui s'est passé, etc., 1695, 1696; Des Goutins au Ministre, 23 Sept., 1696; Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., II. 89; Mather, Magnalia, II. 633. A letter from Chubb, asking to be released from prison, is preserved in the archives of Massachusetts. I have examined the site of the fort, the remains of which are still distinct. The people of Massachusetts, compelled by a royal order to build and maintain Pemaquid, had no love for it, and underrated its importance. Having been accustomed to spend their money as they themselves saw fit, they revolted at compulsion, though exercised for their good. Pemaquid was nevertheless of the utmost value for the preservation of their hold on Maine, and its conquest was a crowning triumph to the French. The conquerors now projected a greater exploit. The Marquis de Nesmond, with a powerful squadron of fifteen ships, including some of the best in the royal navy, sailed for Newfoundland, with orders to defeat an English squadron supposed to be there, and then to proceed to the mouth of the Penobscot, where he was to be joined by the Abenaki warriors and fifteen hundred troops from Canada. The whole united force was then to fall upon Boston. The French had an exact knowledge of the place. Meneval, when a prisoner there, lodged in the house of John Nelson, had carefully examined it; and so also had the Chevalier d'Aux; while La Motte-Cadillac had reconnoitred the town and harbor before the war began. An accurate map of them was made for the use of the expedition, and the plan of operations was arranged with great care. Twelve hundred troops and Canadians 383 were to land with artillery at Dorchester, and march at once to force the barricade across the neck of the peninsula on which the town stood. At the same time, Saint-Castin was to land at Noddle's Island, with a troop of Canadians and all the Indians; pass over in canoes to Charlestown; and, after mastering it, cross to the north point of Boston, which would thus be attacked at both ends. During these movements, two hundred soldiers were to seize the battery on Castle Island, and then land in front of the town near Long Wharf, under the guns of the fleet. Boston had about seven thousand inhabitants, but, owing to the seafaring habits of the people, many of its best men were generally absent; and, in the belief of the French, its available force did not much exceed eight hundred. "There are no soldiers in the place," say the directions for attack, "at least there were none last September, except the garrison from Pemaquid, who do not deserve the name." An easy victory was expected. After Boston was taken, the land forces, French and Indian, were to march on Salem, and thence northward to Portsmouth, conquering as they went; while the ships followed along the coast to lend aid, when necessary. All captured places were to be completely destroyed after removing all valuable property. A portion of this plunder was to be abandoned to the officers and men, in order to encourage them, and the rest stowed in the ships for transportation to France. [11] [11] Mémoire sur l'Entreprise de Boston, pour M. le Marquis de Nesmond, Versailles, 21 Avril, 1697; Instruction à M. le Marquis de Nesmond, même 384 date; Le Roy à Frontenac, même date; Le Roy à Frontenac et Champigny 27 Avril, 1697; Le Ministre à Nesmond, 28 Avril, 1697; Ibid., 15 Juin, 1697; Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Oct., 1697; Carte de Baston, par le Sr. Franquelin, 1697. This is the map made for the use of the expedition. A fac-simile of it is before me. The conquest of New York had originally formed part of the plan. Lagny au Ministre, 20 Jan., 1695. Even as it was, too much was attempted, and the scheme was fatally complicated by the operations at Newfoundland. Four years before, a projected attack on Quebec by a British fleet, under Admiral Wheeler, had come to nought from analogous causes. The French spared no pains to gain accurate information as to the strength of the English settlements. Among other reports on this subject there is a curious Mémoire sur les établissements anglois au delà de Pemaquid, jusqu'a Baston. It was made just after the capture of Pemaquid, with a view to farther operations. Saco is described as a small fort a league above the mouth of the river Saco, with four cannon, but fit only to resist Indians. At Wells, it says, all the settlers have sought refuge in four petits forts, of which the largest holds perhaps 20 men, besides women and children. At York, all the people have gathered into one fort, where there are about 40 men. At Portsmouth there is a fort, of slight account, and about a hundred houses. This neighborhood, no doubt including Kittery, can furnish at most about 300 men. At the Isles of Shoals there are some 280 fishermen, who are absent, except on Sundays. In the same manner, estimates are made for every village and district as far as Boston. Notice of the proposed expedition had reached Frontenac in the spring; and he began at once to collect men, canoes, and supplies for the long and arduous march to the rendezvous. He saw clearly the uncertainties of the attempt; but, in spite of his seventy-seven years, he resolved to command the land force in person. He was ready in June, and waited only to hear from Nesmond. The summer passed; and it was not till September that a ship reached Quebec with a letter from the marquis, telling him that head winds had detained the fleet till only fifty days' provision remained, and it was too late for action. The enterprise had completely failed, and even at Newfoundland nothing was accomplished. 385 It proved a positive advantage to New England, since a host of Indians, who would otherwise have been turned loose upon the borders, were gathered by Saint-Castin at the Penobscot to wait for the fleet, and kept there idle all summer. It is needless to dwell farther on the war in Acadia. There were petty combats by land and sea; Villieu was captured and carried to Boston; a band of New England rustics made a futile attempt to dislodge Villebon from his fort at Naxouat; while, throughout the contest, rivalry and jealousy rankled among the French officials, who continually maligned each other in tell-tale letters to the court. Their hope that the Abenakis would force back the English boundary to the Piscataqua was never fulfilled. At Kittery, at Wells, and even among the ashes of York, the stubborn settlers held their ground, while war-parties prowled along the whole frontier, from the Kennebec to the Connecticut. A single incident will show the nature of the situation, and the qualities which it sometimes called forth. Early in the spring that followed the capture of Pemaquid, a band of Indians fell, after daybreak, on a number of farm-houses near the village of Haverhill. One of them belonged to a settler named Dustan, whose wife Hannah had borne a child a week before, and lay in the house, nursed by Mary Neff, one of her neighbors. Dustan had gone to his work in a neighboring field, taking with him his seven children, of whom the youngest was two years old. Hearing the noise of the attack, 386 he told them to run to the nearest fortified house, a mile or more distant, and, snatching up his gun, threw himself on one of his horses and galloped towards his own house to save his wife. It was too late: the Indians were already there. He now thought only of saving his children; and, keeping behind them as they ran, he fired on the pursuing savages, and held them at bay till he and his flock reached a place of safety. Meanwhile, the house was set on fire, and his wife and the nurse carried off. Her husband, no doubt, had given her up as lost, when, weeks after, she reappeared, accompanied by Mary Neff and a boy, and bringing ten Indian scalps. Her story was to the following effect. The Indians had killed the new-born child by dashing it against a tree, after which the mother and the nurse were dragged into the forest, where they found a number of friends and neighbors, their fellows in misery. Some of these were presently tomahawked, and the rest divided among their captors. Hannah Dustan and the nurse fell to the share of a family consisting of two warriors, three squaws, and seven children, who separated from the rest, and, hunting as they went, moved northward towards an Abenaki village, two hundred and fifty miles distant, probably that of the mission on the Chaudière. Every morning, noon, and evening, they told their beads, and repeated their prayers. An English boy, captured at Worcester, was also of the party. After a while, the Indians began to amuse themselves by telling the 387 women that, when they reached the village, they would be stripped, made to run the gauntlet, and severely beaten, according to custom. Hannah Dustan now resolved on a desperate effort to escape, and Mary Neff and the boy agreed to join in it. They were in the depths of the forest, half way on their journey, and the Indians, who had no distrust of them, were all asleep about their camp fire, when, late in the night, the two women and the boy took each a hatchet, and crouched silently by the bare heads of the unconscious savages. Then they all struck at once, with blows so rapid and true that ten of the twelve were killed before they were well awake. One old squaw sprang up wounded, and ran screeching into the forest, followed by a small boy whom they had purposely left unharmed. Hannah Dustan and her companions watched by the corpses till daylight; then the Amazon scalped them all, and the three made their way back to the settlements, with the trophies of their exploit. [12] [12] This story is told by Mather, who had it from the women themselves, and by Niles, Hutchinson, and others. An entry in the contemporary journal of Rev. John Pike fully confirms it. The facts were notorious at the time. Hannah Dustan and her companions received a bounty of £50 for their ten scalps; and the governor of Maryland, hearing of what they had done, sent them a present. CHAPTER XVIII. 1693-1697. French and English Rivalry. Le Moyne d'Iberville ? His Exploits in Newfoundland ? In Hudson's Bay ? The Great Prize ? The Competitors ? Fatal Policy of the King ? The Iroquois Question ? Negotiation ? Firmness of Frontenac ? English Intervention ? War renewed ? State of the West ? Indian Diplomacy ? Cruel Measures ? A Perilous Crisis ? Audacity of Frontenac. No Canadian, under the French rule, stands in a more conspicuous or more deserved eminence than Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville. In the seventeenth century, most of those who acted a prominent part in the colony were born in Old France; but Iberville was a true son of the soil. He and his brothers, Longueuil, Serigny, Assigny, Maricourt, Sainte-Hélène, the two Chateauguays, and the two Bienvilles, were, one and all, children worthy of their father, Charles Le Moyne of Montreal, and favorable types of that Canadian noblesse, to whose adventurous hardihood half the continent bears witness. Iberville was trained in the French navy, and was already among its most able commanders. The capture of Pemaquid was, for him, but the beginning of greater things; and, though the exploits that followed were outside the main theatre 389 of action, they were too remarkable to be passed in silence. The French had but one post of any consequence on the Island of Newfoundland, the fort and village at Placentia Bay; while the English fishermen had formed a line of settlements two or three hundred miles along the eastern coast. Iberville had represented to the court the necessity of checking their growth, and to that end a plan was settled, in connection with the expedition against Pemaquid. The ships of the king were to transport the men; while Iberville and others associated with him were to pay them, and divide the plunder as their compensation. The chronicles of the time show various similar bargains between the great king and his subjects. Pemaquid was no sooner destroyed, than Iberville sailed for Newfoundland, with the eighty men he had taken at Quebec; and, on arriving, he was joined by as many more, sent him from the same place. He found Brouillan, governor of Placentia, with a squadron formed largely of privateers from St. Malo, engaged in a vain attempt to seize St. John, the chief post of the English. Brouillan was a man of harsh, jealous, and impracticable temper; and it was with the utmost difficulty that he and Iberville could act in concert. They came at last to an agreement, made a combined attack on St. John, took it, and burned it to the ground. Then followed a new dispute about the division of the spoils. At length it was settled. Brouillan went back to Placentia, and Iberville and his men were left to pursue their conquests alone. 390 There were no British soldiers on the island. The settlers were rude fishermen without commanders, and, according to the French accounts, without religion or morals. In fact, they are described as "worse than Indians." Iberville now had with him a hundred and twenty-five soldiers and Canadians, besides a few Abenakis from Acadia. 1 It was mid-winter when he began his march. For two months he led his hardy band through frost and snow, from hamlet to hamlet, along those forlorn and desolate coasts, attacking each in turn and carrying havoc everywhere. Nothing could exceed the hardships of the way, or the vigor with which they were met and conquered. The chaplain Baudoin gives an example of them in his diary. "January 18th. The roads are so bad that we can find only twelve men strong enough to beat the path. Our snow-shoes break on the crust, and against the rocks and fallen trees hidden under the snow, which catch and trip us; but, for all that, we cannot help laughing to see now one, and now another, fall headlong. The Sieur de Martigny fell into a river, and left his gun and his sword there to save his life." [1] The reinforcement sent him from Quebec consisted of fifty soldiers, thirty Canadians, and three officers. Frontenac au Ministre, 28 Oct., 1696. A panic seized the settlers, many of whom were without arms as well as without leaders. They imagined the Canadians to be savages, who scalped and butchered like the Iroquois. Their resistance was feeble and incoherent, and Iberville carried all before him. Every hamlet was pillaged and burned; 391 and, according to the incredible report of the French writers, two hundred persons were killed and seven hundred captured, though it is admitted that most of the prisoners escaped. When spring opened, all the English settlements were destroyed, except the post of Bonavista and the Island of Carbonnière, a natural fortress in the sea. Iberville returned to Placentia, to prepare for completing his conquest, when his plans were broken by the arrival of his brother Serigny, with orders to proceed at once against the English at Hudson's Bay. [2] [2] On the Newfoundland expedition, the best authority is the long diary of the chaplain Baudoin, Journal du Voyage que j'ai fait avec M. d'Iberville; also, Mémoire sur l'Entreprise de Terreneuve, 1696. Compare La Potherie, I. 24-52. A deposition of one Phillips, one Roberts, and several others, preserved in the Public Record Office of London, and quoted by Brown in his History of Cape Breton, makes the French force much greater than the statements of the French writers. The deposition also says that at the attack of St. John's "the French took one William Brew, an inhabitant, a prisoner, and cut all round his scalp, and then, by strength of hands, stript his skin from the forehead to the crown, and so sent him into the fortifications, assuring the inhabitants that they would serve them all in like manner if they did not surrender." St. John's was soon after reoccupied by the English. Baudoin was one of those Acadian priests who are praised for services "en empeschant les sauvages de faire la paix avec les Anglois, ayant mesme esté en guerre avec eux." Champigny au Ministre, 24 Oct., 1694. It was the nineteenth of May, when Serigny appeared with five ships of war, the "Pelican," the "Palmier," the "Wesp," the "Profond," and the "Violent." The important trading-post of Fort Nelson, called Fort Bourbon by the French, was the destined object of attack. Iberville and Serigny had captured it three years before, but the English had retaken it during the past summer, and, as it commanded the fur-trade of a vast interior 392 region, a strong effort was now to be made for its recovery. Iberville took command of the "Pelican," and his brother of the "Palmier." They sailed from Placentia early in July, followed by two other ships of the squadron, and a vessel carrying stores. Before the end of the month they entered the bay, where they were soon caught among masses of floating ice. The store-ship was crushed and lost, and the rest were in extreme danger. The "Pelican" at last extricated herself, and sailed into the open sea; but her three consorts were nowhere to be seen. Iberville steered for Fort Nelson, which was several hundred miles distant, on the western shore of this dismal inland sea. He had nearly reached it, when three sail hove in sight; and he did not doubt that they were his missing ships. They proved, however, to be English armed merchantmen: the "Hampshire" of fifty-two guns, and the "Daring" and the "Hudson's Bay" of thirty-six and thirty-two. The "Pelican" carried but forty-four, and she was alone. A desperate battle followed, and from half past nine to one o'clock the cannonade was incessant. Iberville kept the advantage of the wind, and, coming at length to close quarters with the "Hampshire," gave her repeated broadsides between wind and water, with such effect that she sank with all on board. He next closed with the "Hudson's Bay," which soon struck her flag; while the "Daring" made sail, and escaped. The "Pelican" was badly damaged in hull, masts, and rigging; and the increasing fury of a gale from 393 the east made her position more critical every hour. She anchored, to escape being driven ashore; but the cables parted, and she was stranded about two leagues from the fort. Here, racked by the waves and the tide, she split amidships; but most of the crew reached land with their weapons and ammunition. The northern winter had already begun, and the snow lay a foot deep in the forest. Some of them died from cold and exhaustion, and the rest built huts and kindled fires to warm and dry themselves. Food was so scarce that their only hope of escape from famishing seemed to lie in a desperate effort to carry the fort by storm, but now fortune interposed. The three ships they had left behind in the ice arrived with all the needed succors. Men, cannon, and mortars were sent ashore, and the attack began. Fort Nelson was a palisade work, garrisoned by traders and other civilians in the employ of the English fur company, and commanded by one of its agents, named Bailey. Though it had a considerable number of small cannon, it was incapable of defence against any thing but musketry; and the French bombs soon made it untenable. After being three times summoned, Bailey lowered his flag, though not till he had obtained honorable terms; and he and his men marched out with arms and baggage, drums beating and colors flying. Iberville had triumphed over the storms, the icebergs, and the English. The north had seen his prowess, and another fame awaited him in the regions of the sun; for he became the father of 394 Louisiana, and his brother Bienville founded New Orleans. [3] [3] On the capture of Fort Nelson, Iberville au Ministre, 8 Nov., 1697; Jérémie, Relation de la Baye de Hudson; La Potherie, I. 85-109. All these writers were present at the attack. These northern conflicts were but episodes. In Hudson's Bay, Newfoundland, and Acadia, the issues of the war were unimportant, compared with the momentous question whether France or England should be mistress of the west; that is to say, of the whole interior of the continent. There was a strange contrast in the attitude of the rival colonies towards this supreme prize: the one was inert, and seemingly indifferent; the other, intensely active. The reason is obvious enough. The English colonies were separate, jealous of the crown and of each other, and incapable as yet of acting in concert. Living by agriculture and trade, they could prosper within limited areas, and had no present need of spreading beyond the Alleghanies. Each of them was an aggregate of persons, busied with their own affairs, and giving little heed to matters which did not immediately concern them. Their rulers, whether chosen by themselves or appointed in England, could not compel them to become the instruments of enterprises in which the sacrifice was present, and the advantage remote. The neglect in which the English court left them, though wholesome in most respects, made them unfit for aggressive action; for they had neither troops, commanders, political union, military organization, nor military habits. In 395 communities so busy, and governments so popular, much could not be done, in war, till the people were roused to the necessity of doing it; and that awakening was still far distant. Even New York, the only exposed colony, except Massachusetts and New Hampshire, regarded the war merely as a nuisance to be held at arm's length. [4] [4] See note at the end of the chapter. In Canada, all was different. Living by the fur trade, she needed free range and indefinite space. Her geographical position determined the nature of her pursuits; and her pursuits developed the roving and adventurous character of her people, who, living under a military rule, could be directed at will to such ends as their rulers saw fit. The grand French scheme of territorial extension was not born at court, but sprang from Canadian soil, and was developed by the chiefs of the colony, who, being on the ground, saw the possibilities and requirements of the situation, and generally had a personal interest in realizing them. The rival colonies had two different laws of growth. The one increased by slow extension, rooting firmly as it spread; the other shot offshoots, with few or no roots, far out into the wilderness. It was the nature of French colonization to seize upon detached strategic points, and hold them by the bayonet, forming no agricultural basis, but attracting the Indians by trade, and holding them by conversion. A musket, a rosary, and a pack of beaver skins may serve to represent it, and in fact it consisted of little else. 396 Whence came the numerical weakness of New France, and the real though latent strength of her rivals? Because, it is answered, the French were not an emigrating people; but, at the end of the seventeenth century, this was only half true. The French people were divided into two parts, one eager to emigrate, and the other reluctant. The one consisted of the persecuted Huguenots, the other of the favored Catholics. The government chose to construct its colonies, not of those who wished to go, but of those who wished to stay at home. From the hour when the edict of Nantes was revoked, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen would have hailed as a boon the permission to transport themselves, their families, and their property to the New World. The permission was fiercely refused, and the persecuted sect was denied even a refuge in the wilderness. Had it been granted them, the valleys of the west would have swarmed with a laborious and virtuous population, trained in adversity, and possessing the essential qualities of self-government. Another France would have grown beyond the Alleghanies, strong with the same kind of strength that made the future greatness of the British colonies. British America was an asylum for the oppressed and the suffering of all creeds and nations, and population poured into her by the force of a natural tendency. France, like England, might have been great in two hemispheres, if she had placed herself in accord with this tendency, instead of opposing it; but despotism was consistent with itself, and a mighty opportunity was for ever lost. 397 As soon could the Ethiopian change his skin as the priest-ridden king change his fatal policy of exclusion. Canada must be bound to the papacy, even if it blasted her. The contest for the west must be waged by the means which Bourbon policy ordained, and which, it must be admitted, had some great advantages of their own, when controlled by a man like Frontenac. The result hung, for the present, on the relations of the French with the Iroquois and the tribes of the lakes, the Illinois, and the valley of the Ohio, but, above all, on their relations with the Iroquois; for, could they be conquered or won over, it would be easy to deal with the rest. Frontenac was meditating a grand effort to inflict such castigation as would bring them to reason, when one of their chiefs, named Tareha, came to Quebec with overtures of peace. The Iroquois had lost many of their best warriors. The arrival of troops from France had discouraged them; the war had interrupted their hunting; and, having no furs to barter with the English, they were in want of arms, ammunition, and all the necessaries of life. Moreover, Father Milet, nominally a prisoner among them, but really an adopted chief, had used all his influence to bring about a peace; and the mission of Tareha was the result. Frontenac received him kindly. "My Iroquois children have been drunk; but I will give them an opportunity to repent. Let each of your five nations send me two deputies, and I will listen to what they have to say." They would not come, but sent him instead 398 an invitation to meet them and their friends, the English, in a general council at Albany; a proposal which he rejected with contempt. Then they sent another deputation, partly to him and partly to their Christian countrymen of the Saut and the Mountain, inviting all alike to come and treat with them at Onondaga. Frontenac, adopting the Indian fashion, kicked away their wampum belts, rebuked them for tampering with the mission Indians, and told them that they were rebels, bribed by the English; adding that, if a suitable deputation should be sent to Quebec to treat squarely of peace, he still would listen, but that, if they came back with any more such proposals as they had just made, they should be roasted alive. A few weeks later, the deputation appeared. It consisted of two chiefs of each nation, headed by the renowned orator Decanisora, or, as the French wrote the name, Tegannisorens. The council was held in the hall of the supreme council at Quebec. The dignitaries of the colony were present, with priests, Jesuits, Récollets, officers, and the Christian chiefs of the Saut and the Mountain. The appearance of the ambassadors bespoke their destitute plight; for they were all dressed in shabby deerskins and old blankets, except Decanisora, who was attired in a scarlet coat laced with gold, given him by the governor of New York. Colden, who knew him in his old age, describes him as a tall, well-formed man, with a face not unlike the busts of Cicero. "He spoke," says the French reporter, "with as perfect a grace as is vouchsafed to an 399 uncivilized people;" buried the hatchet, covered the blood that had been spilled, opened the roads, and cleared the clouds from the sun. In other words, he offered peace; but he demanded at the same time that it should include the English. Frontenac replied, in substance: "My children are right to come submissive and repentant. I am ready to forgive the past, and hang up the hatchet; but the peace must include all my other children, far and near. Shut your ears to English poison. The war with the English has nothing to do with you, and only the great kings across the sea have power to stop it. You must give up all your prisoners, both French and Indian, without one exception. I will then return mine, and make peace with you, but not before." He then entertained them at his own table, gave them a feast described as "magnificent," and bestowed gifts so liberally, that the tattered ambassadors went home in embroidered coats, laced shirts, and plumed hats. They were pledged to return with the prisoners before the end of the season, and they left two hostages as security. [5] [5] On these negotiations, and their antecedents, Callières, Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable en Canada depuis Sept., 1692, jusqu'au Départ des Vaisseaux en 1693; La Motte-Cadillac, Mémoire des Negociations avec les Iroquois, 1694; Callières au Ministre, 19 Oct., 1694; La Potherie, III. 200-220; Colden, Five Nations, chap. x.; N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. 85. Meanwhile, the authorities of New York tried to prevent the threatened peace. First, Major Peter Schuyler convoked the chiefs at Albany, and told them that, if they went to ask peace in Canada, they would be slaves for ever. The Iroquois declared that they loved the English, but they repelled 400 every attempt to control their action. Then Fletcher, the governor, called a general council at the same place, and told them that they should not hold councils with the French, or that, if they did so, they should hold them at Albany in presence of the English. Again they asserted their rights as an independent people. "Corlaer," said their speaker, "has held councils with our enemies, and why should not we hold councils with his?" Yet they were strong in assurances of friendship, and declared themselves "one head, one heart, one blood, and one soul, with the English." Their speaker continued: "Our only reason for sending deputies to the French is that we are brought so low, and none of our neighbors help us, but leave us to bear all the burden of the war. Our brothers of New England, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, all of their own accord took hold of the covenant chain, and called themselves our allies; but they have done nothing to help us, and we cannot fight the French alone, because they are always receiving soldiers from beyond the Great Lake. Speak from your heart, brother: will you and your neighbors join with us, and make strong war against the French? If you will, we will break off all treaties, and fight them as hotly as ever; but, if you will not help us, we must make peace." Nothing could be more just than these reproaches; and, if the English governor had answered by a vigorous attack on the French forts south of the St. Lawrence, the Iroquois warriors would have raised the hatchet again with one accord. But 401 Fletcher was busy with other matters; and he had besides no force at his disposal but four companies, the only British regulars on the continent, defective in numbers, ill-appointed, and mutinous. Therefore he answered not with acts, but with words. The negotiation with the French went on, and Fletcher called another council. It left him in a worse position than before. The Iroquois again asked for help: he could not promise it, but was forced to yield the point, and tell them that he consented to their making peace with Onontio. [6] Fletcher is, however, charged with gross misconduct in regard to the four companies, which he is said to have kept at about half their complement, in order to keep the balance of their pay for himself. It is certain that they wanted peace, but equally certain that they did not want it to be lasting, and sought nothing more than a breathing time to regain their strength. Even now some of them were for continuing the war; and at the great council at Onondaga, where the matter was debated, the Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks spurned the French proposals, and refused to give up their prisoners. The Cayugas and some of the Senecas were of another mind, and agreed to a partial compliance with Frontenac's demands. The rest seem to have stood passive in the hope of gaining time. They were disappointed. In vain the Seneca and Cayuga deputies buried the hatchet at Montreal, and promised that the other nations would soon do likewise. Frontenac was not to be deceived. He would accept nothing but the frank fulfilment of his conditions, refused the proffered 402 peace, and told his Indian allies to wage war to the knife. There was a dog-feast and a war-dance, and the strife began anew. In all these conferences, the Iroquois had stood by their English allies, with a fidelity not too well merited. But, though they were loyal towards the English, they had acted with duplicity towards the French, and, while treating of peace with them, had attacked some of their Indian allies, and intrigued with others. They pursued with more persistency than ever the policy they had adopted in the time of La Barre, that is, to persuade or frighten the tribes of the west to abandon the French, join hands with them and the English, and send their furs to Albany instead of Montreal; for the sagacious confederates knew well that, if the trade were turned into this new channel, their local position would enable them to control it. The scheme was good; but with whatever consistency their chiefs and elders might pursue it, the wayward ferocity of their young warriors crossed it incessantly, and murders alternated with intrigues. On the other hand, the western tribes, who since the war had been but ill supplied with French goods and French brandy, knew that they could have English goods and English rum in great abundance, and at far less cost; and thus, in spite of hate and fear, the intrigue went on. Michillimackinac was the focus of it, but it pervaded all the west. The position of Frontenac was one of great difficulty, and the more so that the intestine quarrels of his allies excessively complicated the 403 mazes of forest diplomacy. This heterogeneous multitude, scattered in tribes and groups of tribes over two thousand miles of wilderness, was like a vast menagerie of wild animals; and the lynx bristled at the wolf, and the panther grinned fury at the bear, in spite of all his efforts to form them into a happy family under his paternal rule. La Motte-Cadillac commanded at Michillimackinac, Courtemanche was stationed at Fort Miamis, and Tonty and La Forêt at the fortified rock of St. Louis on the Illinois; while Nicolas Perrot roamed among the tribes of the Mississippi, striving at the risk of his life to keep them at peace with each other, and in alliance with the French. Yet a plot presently came to light, by which the Foxes, Mascontins, and Kickapoos were to join hands, renounce the French, and cast their fortunes with the Iroquois and the English. There was still more anxiety for the tribes of Michillimackinac, because the results of their defection would be more immediate. This important post had at the time an Indian population of six or seven thousand souls, a Jesuit mission, a fort with two hundred soldiers, and a village of about sixty houses, occupied by traders and coureurs de bois. The Indians of the place were in relations more or less close with all the tribes of the lakes. The Huron village was divided between two rival chiefs: the Baron, who was deep in Iroquois and English intrigue; and the Rat, who, though once the worst enemy of the French, now stood their friend. The Ottawas and other Algonquins of the adjacent villages were 404 savages of a lower grade, tossed continually between hatred of the Iroquois, distrust of the French, and love of English goods and English rum. [7] [7] "Si les Outaouacs (Ottawas) et Hurons concluent la paix avec l'Iroquois sans nostre participation, et donnent chez eux l'entrée à l'Anglois pour le commerce, la Colonie est entièrement ruinée, puisque c'est le seul (moyen) par lequel ce pays-cy puisse subsister, et l'on peut asseurer que si les sauvages goustent une fois du commerce de l'Anglois, ils rompront pour toujours avec les Fran?ois, parcequ'ils ne peuvent donner les marchandises qu'à un prix beaucoup plus hault." Frontenac au Ministre, 25 Oct., 1696. La Motte-Cadillac found that the Hurons of the Baron's band were receiving messengers and peace belts from New York and her red allies, that the English had promised to build a trading house on Lake Erie, and that the Iroquois had invited the lake tribes to a grand convention at Detroit. These belts and messages were sent, in the Indian expression, "underground," that is, secretly; and the envoys who brought them came in the disguise of prisoners taken by the Hurons. On one occasion, seven Iroquois were brought in; and some of the French, suspecting them to be agents of the negotiation, stabbed two of them as they landed. There was a great tumult. The Hurons took arms to defend the remaining five; but at length suffered themselves to be appeased, and even gave one of the Iroquois, a chief, into the hands of the French, who, says La Potherie, determined to "make an example of him." They invited the Ottawas to "drink the broth of an Iroquois." The wretch was made fast to a stake, and a Frenchman began the torture by burning him with a red-hot gun-barrel. The mob of savages was soon wrought 405 up to the required pitch of ferocity; and, after atrociously tormenting him, they cut him to pieces, and ate him. [8] It was clear that the more Iroquois the allies of France could be persuaded to burn, the less would be the danger that they would make peace with the confederacy. On another occasion, four were tortured at once; and La Motte-Cadillac writes, "If any more prisoners are brought me, I promise you that their fate will be no sweeter." [9] [8] La Potherie, II. 298. [9] La Motte-Cadillac à———, 3 Aug., 1695. A translation of this letter will be found in Sheldon, Early History of Michigan. The same cruel measures were practised when the Ottawas came to trade at Montreal. Frontenac once invited a band of them to "roast an Iroquois," newly caught by the soldiers; but as they had hamstrung him, to prevent his escape, he bled to death before the torture began. [10] In the next spring, the revolting tragedy of Michillimackinac was repeated at Montreal, where four more Iroquois were burned by the soldiers, inhabitants, and Indian allies. "It was the mission of Canada," says a Canadian writer, "to propagate Christianity and civilization." [11] [10] Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable entre les Fran?ois et les Iroquois durant la présente année, 1695. There is a translation in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. Compare La Potherie, who misplaces the incident as to date. [11] This last execution was an act of reprisal: "J'abandonnay les 4 prisonniers aux soldats, habitants, et sauvages, qui les bruslerent par représailles de deux du Sault que cette nation avoit traitté de la mesme manière." Callières au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1696. Every effort was vain. La Motte-Cadillac wrote that matters grew worse and worse, and that the 406 Ottawas had been made to believe that the French neither would nor could protect them, but meant to leave them to their fate. They thought that they had no hope except in peace with the Iroquois, and had actually gone to meet them at an appointed rendezvous. One course alone was now left to Frontenac, and this was to strike the Iroquois with a blow heavy enough to humble them, and teach the wavering hordes of the west that he was, in truth, their father and their defender. Nobody knew so well as he the difficulties of the attempt; and, deceived perhaps by his own energy, he feared that, in his absence on a distant expedition, the governor of New York would attack Montreal. Therefore, he had begged for more troops. About three hundred were sent him, and with these he was forced to content himself. He had waited, also, for another reason. In his belief, the re-establishment of Fort Frontenac, abandoned in a panic by Denonville, was necessary to the success of a campaign against the Iroquois. A party in the colony vehemently opposed the measure, on the ground that the fort would be used by the friends of Frontenac for purposes of trade. It was, nevertheless, very important, if not essential, for holding the Iroquois in check. They themselves felt it to be so; and, when they heard that the French intended to occupy it again, they appealed to the governor of New York, who told them that, if the plan were carried into effect, he would march to their aid with all the power of 407 his government. He did not, and perhaps could not, keep his word. [12] [12] Colden, 178. Fletcher could get no men from his own or neighboring governments. See note, at the end of the chapter. In the question of Fort Frontenac, as in every thing else, the opposition to the governor, always busy and vehement, found its chief representative in the intendant, who told the minister that the policy of Frontenac was all wrong; that the public good was not its object; that he disobeyed or evaded the orders of the king; and that he had suffered the Iroquois to delude him by false overtures of peace. The representations of the intendant and his faction had such effect, that Ponchartrain wrote to the governor that the plan of re-establishing Fort Frontenac "must absolutely be abandoned." Frontenac, bent on accomplishing his purpose, and doubly so because his enemies opposed it, had anticipated the orders of the minister, and sent seven hundred men to Lake Ontario to repair the fort. The day after they left Montreal, the letter of Ponchartrain arrived. The intendant demanded their recall. Frontenac refused. The fort was repaired, garrisoned, and victualled for a year. A successful campaign was now doubly necessary to the governor, for by this alone could he hope to avert the consequences of his audacity. He waited no longer, but mustered troops, militia, and Indians, and marched to attack the Iroquois. [13] [13] The above is drawn from the correspondence of Frontenac, Champigny, La Motte-Cadillac, and Callières, on one hand, and the king and the minister on the other. The letters are too numerous to specify. Also, from the official Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable en Canada, 1694, 1695, and Ibid., 1695, 1696; Mémoire soumis au Ministre de ce qui résulte 408 des Avis re?us du Canada en 1695; Champigny, Mémoire concernant le Fort de Cataracouy; La Potherie, II. 284-302, IV. 1-80; Colden, chaps. x., xi. Military Inefficiency of the British Colonies—"His Majesty has subjects enough in those parts of America to drive out the French from Canada; but they are so crumbled into little governments, and so disunited, that they have hitherto afforded little assistance to each other, and now seem in a much worse disposition to do it for the future." This is the complaint of the Lords of Trade. Governor Fletcher writes bitterly: "Here every little government sets up for despotic power, and allows no appeal to the Crown, but, by a little juggling, defeats all commands and injunctions from the King." Fletcher's complaint was not unprovoked. The Queen had named him commander-in-chief, during the war, of the militia of several of the colonies, and empowered him to call on them for contingents of men, not above 350 from Massachusetts, 250 from Virginia, 160 from Maryland, 120 from Connecticut, 48 from Rhode Island, and 80 from Pennsylvania. This measure excited the jealousy of the colonies, and several of them remonstrated on constitutional grounds; but the attorney-general, to whom the question was referred, reported that the crown had power, under certain limitations, to appoint a commander-in-chief. Fletcher, therefore, in his character as such, called for a portion of the men; but scarcely one could he get. He was met by excuses and evasions, which, especially in the case of Connecticut, were of a most vexatious character. At last, that colony, tired by his importunities, condescended to furnish him with twenty-five men. With the others, he was less fortunate, though Virginia and Maryland compounded with a sum of money. Each colony claimed the control of its own militia, and was anxious to avoid the establishment of any precedent which might deprive it of the right. Even in the military management of each separate colony, there was scarcely less difficulty. A requisition for troops from a royal governor was always regarded with jealousy, and the provincial assemblies were slow to grant money for their support. In 1692, when Fletcher came to New York, the assembly gave him 300 men, for a year; in 1693, they gave him an equal number; in 1694, they allowed him but 170, he being accused, apparently with truth, of not having made good use of the former levies. He afterwards asked that the force at his disposal should be increased to 500 men, to guard the frontier; and the request was not granted. In 1697 he was recalled; and the Earl of Bellomont was commissioned 409 governor of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, and captain-general, during the war, of all the forces of those colonies, as well as of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. The close of the war quickly ended this military authority; but there is no reason to believe that, had it continued, the earl's requisitions for men, in his character of captain-general, would have had more success than those of Fletcher. The whole affair is a striking illustration of the original isolation of communities, which afterwards became welded into a nation. It involved a military paralysis almost complete. Sixty years later, under the sense of a great danger, the British colonies were ready enough to receive a commander-in-chief, and answer his requisitions. A great number of documents bearing upon the above subject will be found in the New York Colonial Documents, IV. CHAPTER XIX. 1696-1698. Frontenac attacks the Onondagas. March of Frontenac ? Flight of the Enemy ? An Iroquois Stoic ? Relief for the Onondagas ? Boasts of Frontenac ? His Complaints ? His Enemies ? Parties in Canada ? Views of Frontenac and the King ? Frontenac prevails ? Peace of Ryswick ? Frontenac and Bellomont ? Schuyler at Quebec ? Festivities ? A Last Defiance. On the fourth of July, Frontenac left Montreal, at the head of about twenty-two hundred men. On the nineteenth he reached Fort Frontenac, and on the twenty-sixth he crossed to the southern shore of Lake Ontario. A swarm of Indian canoes led the way; next followed two battalions of regulars, in bateaux, commanded by Callières; then more bateaux, laden with cannon, mortars, and rockets; then Frontenac himself, surrounded by the canoes of his staff and his guard; then eight hundred Canadians, under Ramesay; while more regulars and more Indians, all commanded by Vaudreuil, brought up the rear. In two days they reached the mouth of the Oswego; strong scouting-parties were sent out to scour the forests in front; while the expedition slowly and painfully worked its way up the stream. Most of the troops and Canadians 411 marched through the matted woods along the banks; while the bateaux and canoes were pushed, rowed, paddled, or dragged forward against the current. On the evening of the thirtieth, they reached the falls, where the river plunged over ledges of rock which completely stopped the way. The work of "carrying" was begun at once. The Indians and Canadians carried the canoes to the navigable water above, and gangs of men dragged the bateaux up the portage-path on rollers. Night soon came, and the work was continued till ten o'clock by torchlight. Frontenac would have passed on foot like the rest, but the Indians would not have it so. They lifted him in his canoe upon their shoulders, and bore him in triumph, singing and yelling, through the forest and along the margin of the rapids, the blaze of the torches lighting the strange procession, where plumes of officers and uniforms of the governor's guard mingled with the feathers and scalp-locks of naked savages. When the falls were passed, the troops pushed on as before along the narrow stream, and through the tangled labyrinths on either side; till, on the first of August, they reached Lake Onondaga, and, with sails set, the whole flotilla glided before the wind, and landed the motley army on a rising ground half a league from the salt springs of Salina. The next day was spent in building a fort to protect the canoes, bateaux, and stores; and, as evening closed, a ruddy glow above the southern forest told them that the town of Onondaga was on fire. 412 The Marquis de Crisasy was left, with a detachment, to hold the fort; and, at sunrise on the fourth, the army moved forward in order of battle. It was formed in two lines, regulars on the right and left, and Canadians in the centre. Callières commanded the first line, and Vaudreuil the second. Frontenac was between them, surrounded by his staff officers and his guard, and followed by the artillery, which relays of Canadians dragged and lifted forward with inconceivable labor. The governor, enfeebled by age, was carried in an arm-chair; while Callières, disabled by gout, was mounted on a horse, brought for the purpose in one of the bateaux. To Subercase fell the hard task of directing the march among the dense columns of the primeval forest, by hill and hollow, over rocks and fallen trees, through swamps, brooks, and gullies, among thickets, brambles, and vines. It was but eight or nine miles to Onondaga; but they were all day in reaching it, and evening was near when they emerged from the shadows of the forest into the broad light of the Indian clearing. The maize-fields stretched before them for miles, and in the midst lay the charred and smoking ruins of the Iroquois capital. Not an enemy was to be seen, but they found the dead bodies of two murdered French prisoners. Scouts were sent out, guards were set, and the disappointed troops encamped on the maize-fields. Onondaga, formerly an open town, had been fortified by the English, who had enclosed it with a double range of strong palisades, forming a rectangle, 413 flanked by bastions at the four corners, and surrounded by an outer fence of tall poles. The place was not defensible against cannon and mortars; and the four hundred warriors belonging to it had been but slightly reinforced from the other tribes of the confederacy, each of which feared that the French attack might be directed against itself. On the approach of an enemy of five times their number, they had burned their town, and retreated southward into distant forests. The troops were busied for two days in hacking down the maize, digging up the caches, or hidden stores of food, and destroying their contents. The neighboring tribe of the Oneidas sent a messenger to beg peace. Frontenac replied that he would grant it, on condition that they all should migrate to Canada, and settle there; and Vaudreuil, with seven hundred men, was sent to enforce the demand. Meanwhile, a few Onondaga stragglers had been found; and among them, hidden in a hollow tree, a withered warrior, eighty years old, and nearly blind. Frontenac would have spared him; but the Indian allies, Christians from the mission villages, were so eager to burn him that it was thought inexpedient to refuse them. They tied him to the stake, and tried to shake his constancy by every torture that fire could inflict; but not a cry nor a murmur escaped him. He defied them to do their worst, till, enraged at his taunts, one of them gave him a mortal stab. "I thank you," said the old Stoic, with his last breath; "but you ought to have finished as you began, and killed me by fire. Learn from me, 414 you dogs of Frenchmen, how to endure pain; and you, dogs of dogs, their Indian allies, think what you will do when you are burned like me." [1] [1] Relation de ce qui s'est passé, etc., 1695, 1696; La Potherie, III. 279. Callières and the author of the Relation of 1682-1712 also speak of the extraordinary fortitude of the victim. The Jesuits say that it was not the Christian Indians who insisted on burning him, but the French themselves, "qui voulurent absolument qu'il f?t brulé à petit feu, ce qu'ils executèrent eux-mêmes. Un Jesuite le confessa et l'assista à la mort, l'encourageant à souffrir courageusement et chrétiennement les tourmens." Relation de 1696 (Shea), 10. This writer adds that, when Frontenac heard of it, he ordered him to be spared; but it was too late. Charlevoix misquotes the old Stoic's last words, which were, according to the official Relation of 1695-6: "Je te remercie mais tu aurais bien d? achever de me faire mourir par le feu. Apprenez, chiens de Fran?ois, à souffrir, et vous sauvages leurs allies, qui êtes les chiens des chiens, souvenez vous de ce que vous devez faire quand vous serez en pareil état que moi." Vaudreuil and his detachment returned within three days, after destroying Oneida, with all the growing corn, and seizing a number of chiefs as hostages for the fulfilment of the demands of Frontenac. There was some thought of marching on Cayuga, but the governor judged it to be inexpedient; and, as it would be useless to chase the fugitive Onondagas, nothing remained but to return home. [2] [2] On the expedition against the Onondagas, Callières au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1696; Frontenac au Ministre, 25 Oct., 1696; Frontenac et Champigny au Ministre (lettre commune) 26 Oct., 1696; Relation de ce qui s'est passé, etc., 1695, 1696; Relation, 1682-1712; Relation des Jesuites, 1696 (Shea); Doc. Hist. N. Y., I. 323-355; La Potherie, III. 270-282; N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. 242. Charlevoix charges Frontenac on this occasion with failing to pursue his advantage, lest others, and especially Callières, should get more honor than he. The accusation seems absolutely groundless. His many enemies were silent about it at the time; for the king warmly commends his conduct on the expedition, and Callières himself, writing immediately after, gives him nothing but praise. While Frontenac was on his march, Governor 415 Fletcher had heard of his approach, and called the council at New York to consider what should be done. They resolved that "it will be very grievous to take the people from their labour; and there is likewise no money to answer the charge thereof." Money was, however, advanced by Colonel Cortlandt and others; and the governor wrote to Connecticut and New Jersey for their contingents of men; but they thought the matter no concern of theirs, and did not respond. Fletcher went to Albany with the few men he could gather at the moment, and heard on his arrival that the French were gone. Then he convoked the chiefs, condoled with them, and made them presents. Corn was sent to the Onondagas and Oneidas to support them through the winter, and prevent the famine which the French hoped would prove their destruction. What Frontenac feared had come to pass. The enemy had saved themselves by flight; and his expedition, like that of Denonville, was but half successful. He took care, however, to announce it to the king as a triumph. "Sire, the benedictions which Heaven has ever showered upon your Majesty's arms have extended even to this New World; whereof we have had visible proof in the expedition I have just made against the Onondagas, the principal nation of the Iroquois. I had long projected this enterprise, but the difficulties and risks which attended it made me regard it as imprudent; and I should never have resolved to undertake it, if I had not last year established 416 an entrep?t (Fort Frontenac), which made my communications more easy, and if I had not known, beyond all doubt, that this was absolutely the only means to prevent our allies from making peace with the Iroquois, and introducing the English into their country, by which the colony would infallibly be ruined. Nevertheless, by unexpected good fortune, the Onondagas, who pass for masters of the other Iroquois, and the terror of all the Indians of this country, fell into a sort of bewilderment, which could only have come from on High; and were so terrified to see me march against them in person, and cover their lakes and rivers with nearly four hundred sail, that, without availing themselves of passes where a hundred men might easily hold four thousand in check, they did not dare to lay a single ambuscade, but, after waiting till I was five leagues from their fort, they set it on fire with all their dwellings, and fled, with their families, twenty leagues into the depths of the forest. It could have been wished, to make the affair more brilliant, that they had tried to hold their fort against us, for we were prepared to force it and kill a great many of them; but their ruin is not the less sure, because the famine, to which they are reduced, will destroy more than we could have killed by sword and gun. "All the officers and men have done their duty admirably; and especially M. de Callières, who has been a great help to me. I know not if your Majesty will think that I have tried to do mine, and will hold me worthy of some mark of honor that 417 may enable me to pass the short remainder of my life in some little distinction; but, whether this be so or not, I most humbly pray your Majesty to believe that I will sacrifice the rest of my days to your Majesty's service with the same ardor I have always felt." [3] [3] Frontenac au Roy, 25 Oct., 1696. The king highly commended him, and sent him the cross of the Military Order of St. Louis. Callières, who had deserved it less, had received it several years before; but he had not found or provoked so many defamers. Frontenac complained to the minister that his services had been slightly and tardily requited. This was true, and it was due largely to the complaints excited by his own perversity and violence. These complaints still continued; but the fault was not all on one side, and Frontenac himself had often just reason to retort them. He wrote to Ponchartrain: "If you will not be so good as to look closely into the true state of things here, I shall always be exposed to detraction, and forced to make new apologies, which is very hard for a person so full of zeal and uprightness as I am. My secretary, who is going to France, will tell you all the ugly intrigues used to defeat my plans for the service of the king, and the growth of the colony. I have long tried to combat these artifices, but I confess that I no longer feel strength to resist them, and must succumb at last, if you will not have the goodness to give me strong support." [4] [4] Frontenac au Ministre, 25 Oct., 1696. 418 He still continued to provoke the detraction which he deprecated, till he drew, at last, a sharp remonstrance from the minister. "The dispute you have had with M. de Champigny is without cause, and I confess I cannot comprehend how you could have acted as you have done. If you do things of this sort, you must expect disagreeable consequences, which all the desire I have to oblige you cannot prevent. It is deplorable, both for you and for me, that, instead of using my good-will to gain favors from his Majesty, you compel me to make excuses for a violence which answers no purpose, and in which you indulge wantonly, nobody can tell why." [5] [5] Le Ministre à Frontenac, 21 Mai, 1698. Most of these quarrels, however trivial in themselves, had a solid foundation, and were closely connected with the great question of the control of the west. As to the measures to be taken, two parties divided the colony; one consisting of the governor and his friends, and the other of the intendant, the Jesuits, and such of the merchants as were not in favor with Frontenac. His policy was to protect the Indian allies at all risks, to repel by force, if necessary, every attempt of the English to encroach on the territory in dispute, and to occupy it by forts which should be at once posts of war and commerce and places of rendezvous for traders and voyageurs. Champigny and his party denounced this system; urged that the forest posts should be abandoned, that both garrisons and traders should be recalled, that the French should 419 not go to the Indians, but that the Indians should come to the French, that the fur trade of the interior should be carried on at Montreal, and that no Frenchman should be allowed to leave the settled limits of the colony, except the Jesuits and persons in their service, who, as Champigny insisted, would be able to keep the Indians in the French interest without the help of soldiers. Strong personal interests were active on both sides, and gave bitterness to the strife. Frontenac, who always stood by his friends, had placed Tonty, La Forêt, La Motte-Cadillac, and others of their number, in charge of the forest posts, where they made good profit by trade. Moreover, the licenses for trading expeditions into the interior were now, as before, used largely for the benefit of his favorites. The Jesuits also declared, and with some truth, that the forest posts were centres of debauchery, and that the licenses for the western trade were the ruin of innumerable young men. All these reasons were laid before the king. In vain Frontenac represented that to abandon the forest posts would be to resign to the English the trade of the interior country, and at last the country itself. The royal ear was open to his opponents, and the royal instincts reinforced their arguments. The king, enamoured of subordination and order, wished to govern Canada as he governed a province of France; and this could be done only by keeping the population within prescribed bounds. Therefore, he commanded that licenses for the forest trade should cease, that the 420 forest posts should be abandoned and destroyed, that all Frenchmen should be ordered back to the settlements, and that none should return under pain of the galleys. An exception was made in favor of the Jesuits, who were allowed to continue their western missions, subject to restrictions designed to prevent them from becoming a cover to illicit fur trade. Frontenac was also directed to make peace with the Iroquois, even, if necessary, without including the western allies of France; that is, he was authorized by Louis XIV. to pursue the course which had discredited and imperilled the colony under the rule of Denonville. [6] [6] Mémoire du Roy pour Frontenac et Champigny, 26 Mai, 1696; Ibid., 27 Avril, 1697; Registres du Conseil Supérieur, Edit du 21 Mai, 1696. "Ce qui vous avez mandé de l'accommodement des Sauvages alliés avec les Irocois n'a pas permis à Sa Majesté d'entrer dans la discution de la manière de faire l'abandonnement des postes des Fran?ois dans la profondeur des terres, particulièrement à Missilimackinac … En tout cas vous ne devez pas manquer de donner ordre pour ruiner les forts et tous les édifices qui pourront y avoir esté faits." Le Ministre à Frontenac, 26 Mai, 1696. Besides the above, many other letters and despatches on both sides have been examined in relation to these questions. The intentions of the king did not take effect. The policy of Frontenac was the true one, whatever motives may have entered into his advocacy of it. In view of the geographical, social, political, and commercial conditions of Canada, the policy of his opponents was impracticable, and nothing less than a perpetual cordon of troops could have prevented the Canadians from escaping to the backwoods. In spite of all the evils that attended the forest posts, it would have been a blunder to abandon them. This quickly became apparent. 421 Champigny himself saw the necessity of compromise. The instructions of the king were scarcely given before they were partially withdrawn, and they soon became a dead letter. Even Fort Frontenac was retained after repeated directions to abandon it. The policy of the governor prevailed; the colony returned to its normal methods of growth, and so continued to the end. Now came the question of peace with the Iroquois, to whose mercy Frontenac was authorized to leave his western allies. He was the last man to accept such permission. Since the burning of Onondaga, the Iroquois negotiations with the western tribes had been broken off, and several fights had occurred, in which the confederates had suffered loss and been roused to vengeance. This was what Frontenac wanted, but at the same time it promised him fresh trouble; for, while he was determined to prevent the Iroquois from making peace with the allies without his authority, he was equally determined to compel them to do so with it. There must be peace, though not till he could control its conditions. The Onondaga campaign, unsatisfactory as it was, had had its effect. Several Iroquois chiefs came to Quebec with overtures of peace. They brought no prisoners, but promised to bring them in the spring; and one of them remained as a hostage that the promise should be kept. It was nevertheless broken under English influence; and, instead of a solemn embassy, the council of Onondaga sent a messenger with a wampum belt to tell 422 Frontenac that they were all so engrossed in bewailing the recent death of Black Kettle, a famous war chief, that they had no strength to travel; and they begged that Onontio would return the hostage, and send to them for the French prisoners. The messenger farther declared that, though they would make peace with Onontio, they would not make it with his allies. Frontenac threw back the peace-belt into his face. "Tell the chiefs that, if they must needs stay at home to cry about a trifle, I will give them something to cry for. Let them bring me every prisoner, French and Indian, and make a treaty that shall include all my children, or they shall feel my tomahawk again." Then, turning to a number of Ottawas who were present: "You see that I can make peace for myself when I please. If I continue the war, it is only for your sake. I will never make a treaty without including you, and recovering your prisoners like my own." Thus the matter stood, when a great event took place. Early in February, a party of Dutch and Indians came to Montreal with news that peace had been signed in Europe; and, at the end of May, Major Peter Schuyler, accompanied by Dellius, the minister of Albany, arrived with copies of the treaty in French and Latin. The scratch of a pen at Ryswick had ended the conflict in America, so far at least as concerned the civilized combatants. It was not till July that Frontenac received the official announcement from Versailles, coupled with an address from the king to the people of Canada. 423Our Faithful and Beloved,—The moment has arrived ordained by Heaven to reconcile the nations. The ratification of the treaty concluded some time ago by our ambassadors with those of the Emperor and the Empire, after having made peace with Spain, England, and Holland, has everywhere restored the tranquillity so much desired. Strasbourg, one of the chief ramparts of the empire of heresy, united for ever to the Church and to our Crown; the Rhine established as the barrier between France and Germany; and, what touches us even more, the worship of the True Faith authorized by a solemn engagement with sovereigns of another religion, are the advantages secured by this last treaty. The Author of so many blessings manifests Himself so clearly that we cannot but recognize His goodness; and the visible impress of His all-powerful hand is as it were the seal He has affixed to justify our intent to cause all our realm to serve and obey Him, and to make our people happy. We have begun by the fulfilment of our duty in offering Him the thanks which are His due; and we have ordered the archbishops and bishops of our kingdom to cause Te Deum to be sung in the cathedrals of their dioceses. It is our will and our command that you be present at that which will be sung in the cathedral of our city of Quebec, on the day appointed by the Count of Frontenac, our governor and lieutenant-general in New France. Herein fail not, for such is our pleasure. Louis.[7] [7] Lettre du Roy pour faire chanter le Te Deum, 12 Mars, 1698. There was peace between the two crowns; but a serious question still remained between Frontenac and the new governor of New York, the Earl of Bellomont. When Schuyler and Dellius came to Quebec, they brought with them all the French prisoners in the hands of the English of New York, together with a promise from Bellomont that he would order the Iroquois, subjects of the British crown, to deliver to him all those in their possession, and that he would then send them to Canada under 424 a safe escort. The two envoys demanded of Frontenac, at the same time, that he should deliver to them all the Iroquois in his hands. To give up Iroquois prisoners to Bellomont, or to receive through him French prisoners whom the Iroquois had captured, would have been an acknowledgment of British sovereignty over the five confederate tribes. Frontenac replied that the earl need give himself no trouble in the matter, as the Iroquois were rebellious subjects of King Louis; that they had already repented and begged peace; and that, if they did not soon come to conclude it, he should use force to compel them. Bellomont wrote, in return, that he had sent arms to the Iroquois, with orders to defend themselves if attacked by the French, and to give no quarter to them or their allies; and he added that, if necessary, he would send soldiers to their aid. A few days after, he received fresh news of Frontenac's warlike intentions, and wrote in wrath as follows:— Sir,—Two of our Indians, of the Nation called Onondages, came yesterday to advise me that you had sent two renegades of their Nation to them, to tell them and the other tribes, except the Mohawks, that, in case they did not come to Canada within forty days to solicit peace from you, they may expect your marching into their country at the head of an army to constrain them thereunto by force. I, on my side, do this very day send my lieutenant-governor with the king's troops to join the Indians, and to oppose any hostilities you will attempt; and, if needs be, I will arm every man in the Provinces under my government to repel you, and to make reprisals for the damage which you will commit on our Indians. This, in a few words, is the part I will 425 take, and the resolution I have adopted, whereof I have thought it proper by these presents to give you notice. I am, Sir, yours, &c., Earl of Bellemont. New York, 22d August, 1698. To arm every man in his government would have been difficult. He did, however, what he could, and ordered Captain Nanfan, the lieutenant-governor, to repair to Albany; whence, on the first news that the French were approaching, he was to march to the relief of the Iroquois with the four shattered companies of regulars and as many of the militia of Albany and Ulster as he could muster. Then the earl sent Wessels, mayor of Albany, to persuade the Iroquois to deliver their prisoners to him, and make no treaty with Frontenac. On the same day, he despatched Captain John Schuyler to carry his letters to the French governor. When Schuyler reached Quebec, and delivered the letters, Frontenac read them with marks of great displeasure. "My Lord Bellomont threatens me," he said. "Does he think that I am afraid of him? He claims the Iroquois, but they are none of his. They call me father, and they call him brother; and shall not a father chastise his children when he sees fit?" A conversation followed, in which Frontenac asked the envoy what was the strength of Bellomont's government. Schuyler parried the question by a grotesque exaggeration, and answered that the earl could bring about a hundred thousand men into the field. Frontenac pretended to believe him, and returned with careless gravity that he had always heard so. 426 The following Sunday was the day appointed for the Te Deum ordered by the king; and all the dignitaries of the colony, with a crowd of lesser note, filled the cathedral. There was a dinner of ceremony at the chateau, to which Schuyler was invited; and he found the table of the governor thronged with officers. Frontenac called on his guests to drink the health of King William. Schuyler replied by a toast in honor of King Louis; and the governor next gave the health of the Earl of Bellomont. The peace was then solemnly proclaimed, amid the firing of cannon from the batteries and ships; and the day closed with a bonfire and a general illumination. On the next evening, Frontenac gave Schuyler a letter in answer to the threats of the earl. He had written with trembling hand, but unshaken will and unbending pride:— "I am determined to pursue my course without flinching; and I request you not to try to thwart me by efforts which will prove useless. All the protection and aid you tell me that you have given, and will continue to give, the Iroquois, against the terms of the treaty, will not cause me much alarm, nor make me change my plans, but rather, on the contrary, engage me to pursue them still more." [8] [8] On the questions between Bellomont and Frontenac, Relation de ce qui s'est passé, etc., 1697, 1698; Champigny au Ministre, 12 Juillet, 1698; Frontenac au Ministre, 18 Oct., 1698; Frontenac et Champigny au Ministre (lettre commune), 15 Oct., 1698; Calliéres au Ministre, même date, etc. The correspondence of Frontenac and Bellomont, the report of Peter Schuyler and Dellius, the journal of John Schuyler, and other papers on the same subjects, will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. John Schuyler was grandfather of General Schuyler of the American Revolution. Peter Schuyler and his colleague Dellius brought to Canada all the French prisoners in the hands of the English of New York, and asked for English 427 prisoners in return; but nearly all of these preferred to remain, a remarkable proof of the kindness with which the Canadians treated their civilized captives. As the old soldier traced these lines, the shadow of death was upon him. Toils and years, passions and cares, had wasted his strength at last, and his fiery soul could bear him up no longer. A few weeks later he was lying calmly on his death-bed. CHAPTER XX. 1698. Death of Frontenac. His Last Hours ? His Will ? His Funeral ? His Eulogist and his Critic ? His Disputes with the Clergy ? His Character. In November, when the last ship had gone, and Canada was sealed from the world for half a year, a mortal illness fell upon the governor. On the twenty-second, he had strength enough to dictate his will, seated in an easy-chair in his chamber at the chateau. His colleague and adversary, Champigny, often came to visit him, and did all in his power to soothe his last moments. The reconciliation between them was complete. One of his Récollet friends, Father Olivier Goyer, administered extreme unction; and, on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, he died, in perfect composure and full possession of his faculties. He was in his seventy-eighth year. He was greatly beloved by the humbler classes, who, days before his death, beset the chateau, praising and lamenting him. Many of higher station shared the popular grief. "He was the love and delight of New France," says one of 429 them: "churchmen honored him for his piety, nobles esteemed him for his valor, merchants respected him for his equity, and the people loved him for his kindness." [1] "He was the father of the poor," says another, "the protector of the oppressed, and a perfect model of virtue and piety." [2] An Ursuline nun regrets him as the friend and patron of her sisterhood, and so also does the superior of the H?tel-Dieu. [3] His most conspicuous though not his bitterest opponent, the intendant Champigny, thus announced his death to the court: "I venture to send this letter by way of New England to tell you that Monsieur le Comte de Frontenac died on the twenty-eighth of last month, with the sentiments of a true Christian. After all the disputes we have had together, you will hardly believe, Monseigneur, how truly and deeply I am touched by his death. He treated me during his illness in a manner so obliging, that I should be utterly void of gratitude if I did not feel thankful to him." [4] [1] La Potherie, I. 244, 246. [2] Hennepin, 41 (1704). Le Clerc speaks to the same effect. [3] Histoire des Ursulines de Québec, I. 508; Juchereau, 378. [4] Champigny au Ministre, 22 Dec., 1698. As a mark of kind feeling, Frontenac had bequeathed to the intendant a valuable crucifix, and to Madame de Champigny a reliquary which he had long been accustomed to wear. For the rest, he gave fifteen hundred livres to the Récollets, to be expended in masses for his soul, and that of his wife after her death. To her he bequeathed all the remainder of 430 his small property, and he also directed that his heart should be sent her in a case of lead or silver. [5] His enemies reported that she refused to accept it, saying that she had never had it when he was living, and did not want it when he was dead. [5] Testament du Comte de Frontenac. I am indebted to Abbé Bois of Maskinongé for a copy of this will. Frontenac expresses a wish that the heart should be placed in the family tomb at the Church of St. Nicolas des Champs. On the Friday after his death, he was buried as he had directed, not in the cathedral, but in the church of the Récollets, a preference deeply offensive to many of the clergy. The bishop officiated; and then the Récollet, Father Goyer, who had attended his death-bed, and seems to have been his confessor, mounted the pulpit, and delivered his funeral oration. "This funeral pageantry," exclaimed the orator, "this temple draped in mourning, these dim lights, this sad and solemn music, this great assembly bowed in sorrow, and all this pomp and circumstance of death, may well penetrate your hearts. I will not seek to dry your tears, for I cannot contain my own. After all, this is a time to weep, and never did people weep for a better governor." A copy of this eulogy fell into the hands of an enemy of Frontenac, who wrote a running commentary upon it. The copy thus annotated is still preserved at Quebec. A few passages from the orator and his critic will show the violent conflict of opinion concerning the governor, and illustrate in some sort, though with more force than fairness, the contradictions of his character:— 431The Orator. "This wise man, to whom the Senate of Venice listened with respectful attention, because he spoke before them with all the force of that eloquence which you, Messieurs, have so often admired,—" [6] [6] Alluding to an incident that occurred when Frontenac commanded a Venetian force for the defence of Candia against the Turks. The Critic. "It was not his eloquence that they admired, but his extravagant pretensions, his bursts of rage, and his unworthy treatment of those who did not agree with him." The Orator. "This disinterested man, more busied with duty than with gain,—" The Critic. "The less said about that the better." The Orator. "Who made the fortune of others, but did not increase his own,—" The Critic. "Not for want of trying, and that very often in spite of his conscience and the king's orders." The Orator. "Devoted to the service of his king, whose majesty he represented, and whose person he loved,—" The Critic. "Not at all. How often has he opposed his orders, even with force and violence, to the great scandal of everybody!" The Orator. "Great in the midst of difficulties, by that consummate prudence, that solid judgment, that presence of mind, that breadth and elevation of thought, which he retained to the last moment of his life,—" The Critic. "He had in fact a great capacity for political man?uvres and tricks; but as for the solid judgment ascribed to 432 him, his conduct gives it the lie, or else, if he had it, the vehemence of his passions often unsettled it. It is much to be feared that his presence of mind was the effect of an obstinate and hardened self-confidence by which he put himself above everybody and every thing, since he never used it to repair, so far as in him lay, the public and private wrongs he caused. What ought he not to have done here, in this temple, to ask pardon for the obstinate and furious heat with which he so long persecuted the Church; upheld and even instigated rebellion against her; protected libertines, scandal-mongers, and creatures of evil life against the ministers of Heaven; molested, persecuted, vexed persons most eminent in virtue, nay, even the priests and magistrates, who defended the cause of God; sustained in all sorts of ways the wrongful and scandalous traffic in brandy with the Indians; permitted, approved, and supported the license and abuse of taverns; authorized and even introduced, in spite of the remonstrances of the servants of God, criminal and dangerous diversions; tried to decry the bishop and the clergy, the missionaries, and other persons of virtue, and to injure them, both here and in France, by libels and calumnies; caused, in fine, either by himself or through others, a multitude of disorders, under which this infant church has groaned for many years! What, I say, ought he not to have done before dying to atone for these scandals, and give proof of sincere penitence and compunction? God gave him full time to recognize his errors, and yet to the last he showed a great indifference in all these matters. When, in presence of the Holy Sacrament, he was asked according to the ritual, 'Do you not beg pardon for all the ill examples you may have given?' he answered, 'Yes,' but did not confess that he had ever given any. In a word, he behaved during the few days before his death like one who had led an irreproachable life, and had nothing to fear. And this is the presence of mind that he retained to his last moment!" The Orator. "Great in dangers by his courage, he always came off with honor, and never was reproached with rashness,—" The Critic. "True; he was not rash, as was seen when the Bostonnais besieged Quebec." 433The Orator. "Great in religion by his piety, he practised its good works in spirit and in truth,—" The Critic. "Say rather that he practised its forms with parade and ostentation: witness the inordinate ambition with which he always claimed honors in the Church, to which he had no right; outrageously affronted intendants, who opposed his pretensions; required priests to address him when preaching, and in their intercourse with him demanded from them humiliations which he did not exact from the meanest military officer. This was his way of making himself great in religion and piety, or, more truly, in vanity and hypocrisy. How can a man be called great in religion, when he openly holds opinions entirely opposed to the True Faith, such as, that all men are predestined, that Hell will not last for ever, and the like?" The Orator. "His very look inspired esteem and confidence,—" The Critic. "Then one must have taken him at exactly the right moment, and not when he was foaming at the mouth with rage." The Orator. "A mingled air of nobility and gentleness; a countenance that bespoke the probity that appeared in all his acts, and a sincerity that could not dissimulate,—" The Critic. "The eulogist did not know the old fox." The Orator. "An inviolable fidelity to friends,—" The Critic. "What friends? Was it persons of the other sex? Of these he was always fond, and too much for the honor of some of them." The Orator. "Disinterested for himself, ardent for others, he used his credit at court only to recommend their services, excuse their faults, and obtain favors for them,—" 434The Critic. "True; but it was for his creatures and for nobody else." The Orator. "I pass in silence that reading of spiritual books which he practised as an indispensable duty more than forty years; that holy avidity with which he listened to the word of God,—" The Critic. "Only if the preacher addressed the sermon to him, and called him Monseigneur. As for his reading, it was often Jansenist books, of which he had a great many, and which he greatly praised and lent freely to others." The Orator. "He prepared for the sacraments by meditation and retreat,—" The Critic. "And generally came out of his retreat more excited than ever against the Church." The Orator. "Let us not recall his ancient and noble descent, his family connected with all that is greatest in the army, the magistracy, and the government; Knights, Marshals of France, Governors of Provinces, Judges, Councillors, and Ministers of State: let us not, I say, recall all these without remembering that their examples roused this generous heart to noble emulation; and, as an expiring flame grows brighter as it dies, so did all the virtues of his race unite at last in him to end with glory a long line of great men, that shall be no more except in history." The Critic. "Well laid on, and too well for his hearers to believe him. Far from agreeing that all these virtues were collected in the person of his pretended hero, they would find it very hard to admit that he had even one of them." [7] [7] Oraison Funèbre du très-haut et très-puissant Seigneur Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac et de Palluau, etc., avec des remarques critiques, 1698. 435 That indefatigable investigator of Canadian history, the late M. Jacques Viger, to whom I am indebted for a copy of this eulogy, suggested that the anonymous critic may have been Abbé la Tour, author of the Vie de Laval. If so, his statements need the support of more trustworthy evidence. The above extracts are not consecutive, but are taken from various parts of the manuscript. It is clear enough from what quiver these arrows came. From the first, Frontenac had set himself in opposition to the most influential of the Canadian clergy. When he came to the colony, their power in the government was still enormous, and even the most devout of his predecessors had been forced into conflict with them to defend the civil authority; but, when Frontenac entered the strife, he brought into it an irritability, a jealous and exacting vanity, a love of rule, and a passion for having his own way, even in trifles, which made him the most exasperating of adversaries. Hence it was that many of the clerical party felt towards him a bitterness that was far from ending with his life. The sentiment of a religion often survives its convictions. However heterodox in doctrine, he was still wedded to the observances of the Church, and practised them, under the ministration of the Récollets, with an assiduity that made full amends to his conscience for the vivacity with which he opposed the rest of the clergy. To the Récollets their patron was the most devout of men; to his ultramontane adversaries, he was an impious persecutor. His own acts and words best paint his character, and it is needless to enlarge upon it. What perhaps 436 may be least forgiven him is the barbarity of the warfare that he waged, and the cruelties that he permitted. He had seen too many towns sacked to be much subject to the scruples of modern humanitarianism; yet he was no whit more ruthless than his times and his surroundings, and some of his contemporaries find fault with him for not allowing more Indian captives to be tortured. Many surpassed him in cruelty, none equalled him in capacity and vigor. When civilized enemies were once within his power, he treated them, according to their degree, with a chivalrous courtesy, or a generous kindness. If he was a hot and pertinacious foe, he was also a fast friend; and he excited love and hatred in about equal measure. His attitude towards public enemies was always proud and peremptory, yet his courage was guided by so clear a sagacity that he never was forced to recede from the position he had taken. Towards Indians, he was an admirable compound of sternness and conciliation. Of the immensity of his services to the colony there can be no doubt. He found it, under Denonville, in humiliation and terror; and he left it in honor, and almost in triumph. In spite of Father Goyer, greatness must be denied him; but a more remarkable figure, in its bold and salient individuality and sharply marked light and shadow, is nowhere seen in American history. [8] [8] There is no need to exaggerate the services of Frontenac. Nothing could be more fallacious than the assertion, often repeated, that in 437 his time Canada withstood the united force of all the British colonies. Most of these colonies took no part whatever in the war. Only two of them took an aggressive part, New York and Massachusetts. New York attacked Canada twice, with the two inconsiderable war-parties of John Schuyler in 1690 and of Peter Schuyler in the next year. The feeble expedition under Winthrop did not get beyond Lake George. Massachusetts, or rather her seaboard towns, attacked Canada once. Quebec, it is true, was kept in alarm during several years by rumors of another attack from the same quarter; but no such danger existed, as Massachusetts was exhausted by her first effort. The real scourge of Canada was the Iroquois, supplied with arms and ammunition from Albany. CHAPTER XXI. 1699-1701. Conclusion. The New Governor ? Attitude of the Iroquois ? Negotiations ? Embassy to Onondaga ? Peace ? The Iroquois and the Allies ? Difficulties ? Death of the Great Huron ? Funeral Rites ? The Grand Council ? The Work of Frontenac finished ? Results. It did not need the presence of Frontenac to cause snappings and sparks in the highly electrical atmosphere of New France. Callières took his place as governor ad interim, and in due time received a formal appointment to the office. Apart from the wretched state of his health, undermined by gout and dropsy, he was in most respects well fitted for it; but his deportment at once gave umbrage to the excitable Champigny, who declared that he had never seen such hauteur since he came to the colony. Another official was still more offended. "Monsieur de Frontenac," he says, "was no sooner dead than trouble began. Monsieur de Callières, puffed up by his new authority, claims honors due only to a marshal of France. It would be a different matter if he, like his predecessor, were regarded as the father of the country, and the love and delight of the Indian allies. At 439 the review at Montreal, he sat in his carriage, and received the incense offered him with as much composure and coolness as if he had been some divinity of this New World." In spite of these complaints, the court sustained Callières, and authorized him to enjoy the honors that he had assumed. [1] [1] Champigny au Ministre, 26 Mai, 1699; La Potherie au Ministre, 2 Juin, 1699; Vaudreuil et La Potherie au Ministre, même date. His first and chief task was to finish the work that Frontenac had shaped out, and bring the Iroquois to such submission as the interests of the colony and its allies demanded. The fierce confederates admired the late governor, and, if they themselves are to be believed, could not help lamenting him; but they were emboldened by his death, and the difficulty of dealing with them was increased by it. Had they been sure of effectual support from the English, there can be little doubt that they would have refused to treat with the French, of whom their distrust was extreme. The treachery of Denonville at Fort Frontenac still rankled in their hearts, and the English had made them believe that some of their best men had lately been poisoned by agents from Montreal. The French assured them, on the other hand, that the English meant to poison them, refuse to sell them powder and lead, and then, when they were helpless, fall upon and destroy them. At Montreal, they were told that the English called them their negroes; and, at Albany, that if they made peace with Onontio, they would sink into "perpetual infamy 440 and slavery." Still, in spite of their perplexity, they persisted in asserting their independence of each of the rival powers, and played the one against the other, in order to strengthen their position with both. When Bellomont required them to surrender their French prisoners to him, they answered: "We are the masters; our prisoners are our own. We will keep them or give them to the French, if we choose." At the same time, they told Callières that they would bring them to the English at Albany, and invited him to send thither his agents to receive them. They were much disconcerted, however, when letters were read to them which showed that, pending the action of commissioners to settle the dispute, the two kings had ordered their respective governors to refrain from all acts of hostility, and join forces, if necessary, to compel the Iroquois to keep quiet. [2] This, with their enormous losses, and their desire to recover their people held captive in Canada, led them at last to serious thoughts of peace. Resolving at the same time to try the temper of the new Onontio, and yield no more than was absolutely necessary, they sent him but six ambassadors, and no prisoners. The ambassadors marched in single file to the place of council; while their chief, who led the way, sang a dismal song of lamentation for the French slain in the war, calling on them to thrust their heads above ground, behold the good work 441 of peace, and banish every thought of vengeance. Callières proved, as they had hoped, less inexorable than Frontenac. He accepted their promises, and consented to send for the prisoners in their hands, on condition that within thirty-six days a full deputation of their principal men should come to Montreal. The Jesuit Bruyas, the Canadian Maricourt, and a French officer named Joncaire went back with them to receive the prisoners. [2] Le Roy à Frontenac, 25 Mars, 1699. Frontenac's death was not known at Versailles till April. Le Roy d' Angleterre à Bellomont, 2 Avril, 1699; La Potherie, IV. 128; Callières à Bellomont, 7 Ao?t, 1699. The history of Joncaire was a noteworthy one. The Senecas had captured him some time before, tortured his companions to death, and doomed him to the same fate. As a preliminary torment, an old chief tried to burn a finger of the captive in the bowl of his pipe, on which Joncaire knocked him down. If he had begged for mercy, their hearts would have been flint; but the warrior crowd were so pleased with this proof of courage that they adopted him as one of their tribe, and gave him an Iroquois wife. He lived among them for many years, and gained a commanding influence, which proved very useful to the French. When he, with Bruyas and Maricourt, approached Onondaga, which had long before risen from its ashes, they were greeted with a fusillade of joy, and regaled with the sweet stalks of young maize, followed by the more substantial refreshment of venison and corn beaten together into a pulp and boiled. The chiefs and elders seemed well inclined to peace; and, though an envoy came from Albany to prevent it, he behaved with such arrogance that, far from dissuading his auditors, he confirmed 442 them in their resolve to meet Onontio at Montreal. They seemed willing enough to give up their French prisoners, but an unexpected difficulty arose from the prisoners themselves. They had been adopted into Iroquois families; and, having become attached to the Indian life, they would not leave it. Some of them hid in the woods to escape their deliverers, who, with their best efforts, could collect but thirteen, all women, children, and boys. With these, they returned to Montreal, accompanied by a peace embassy of nineteen Iroquois. Peace, then, was made. "I bury the hatchet," said Callières, "in a deep hole, and over the hole I place a great rock, and over the rock I turn a river, that the hatchet may never be dug up again." The famous Huron, Kondiaronk, or the Rat, was present, as were also a few Ottawas, Abenakis, and converts of the Saut and the Mountain. Sharp words passed between them and the ambassadors; but at last they all laid down their hatchets at the feet of Onontio, and signed the treaty together. It was but a truce, and a doubtful one. More was needed to confirm it, and the following August was named for a solemn act of ratification. [3] [3] On these negotiations, La Potherie, IV. lettre xi.; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 708, 711, 715; Colden, 200; Callières au Ministre, 16 Oct., 1700; Champigny au Ministre, 22 Juillet, 1700; La Potherie au Ministre, 11 Aout, 1700; Ibid., 16 Oct., 1700; Callières et Champigny au Ministre, 18 Oct., 1700. See also N. Y. Col. Docs., IV., for a great number of English documents bearing on the subject. Father Engelran was sent to Michillimackinac, while Courtemanche spent the winter and spring in toilsome journeyings among the tribes of the 443 west. Such was his influence over them that he persuaded them all to give up their Iroquois prisoners, and send deputies to the grand council. Engelran had had scarcely less success among the northern tribes; and early in July a great fleet of canoes, conducted by Courtemanche, and filled with chiefs, warriors, and Iroquois prisoners, paddled down the lakes for Montreal. Meanwhile Bruyas, Maricourt, and Joncaire had returned on the same errand to the Iroquois towns; but, so far as concerned prisoners, their success was no greater than before. Whether French or Indian, the chiefs were slow to give them up, saying that they had all been adopted into families who would not part with them unless consoled for the loss by gifts. This was true; but it was equally true of the other tribes, whose chiefs had made the necessary gifts, and recovered the captive Iroquois. Joncaire and his colleagues succeeded, however, in leading a large deputation of chiefs and elders to Montreal. Courtemanche with his canoe fleet from the lakes was not far behind; and when their approach was announced, the chronicler, La Potherie, full of curiosity, went to meet them at the mission village of the Saut. First appeared the Iroquois, two hundred in all, firing their guns as their canoes drew near, while the mission Indians, ranged along the shore, returned the salute. The ambassadors were conducted to a capacious lodge, where for a quarter of an hour they sat smoking with immovable composure. Then a chief of the mission made a speech, and then followed a feast of boiled dogs. 444 In the morning they descended the rapids to Montreal, and in due time the distant roar of the saluting cannon told of their arrival. They had scarcely left the village, when the river was covered with the canoes of the western and northern allies. There was another fusillade of welcome as the heterogeneous company landed, and marched to the great council-house. The calumet was produced, and twelve of the assembled chiefs sang a song, each rattling at the same time a dried gourd half full of peas. Six large kettles were next brought in, containing several dogs and a bear suitably chopped to pieces, which being ladled out to the guests were despatched in an instant, and a solemn dance and a supper of boiled corn closed the festivity. The strangers embarked again on the next day, and the cannon of Montreal greeted them as they landed before the town. A great quantity of evergreen boughs had been gathered for their use, and of these they made their wigwams outside the palisades. Before the opening of the grand council, a multitude of questions must be settled, jealousies soothed, and complaints answered. Callières had no peace. He was busied for a week in giving audience to the deputies. There was one question which agitated them all, and threatened to rekindle the war. Kondiaronk, the Rat, the foremost man among all the allied tribes, gave utterance to the general feeling: "My father, you told us last autumn to bring you all the Iroquois prisoners in our hands. We have obeyed, and 445 brought them. Now let us see if the Iroquois have also obeyed, and brought you our people whom they captured during the war. If they have done so, they are sincere; if not, they are false. But I know that they have not brought them. I told you last year that it was better that they should bring their prisoners first. You see now how it is, and how they have deceived us." The complaint was just, and the situation became critical. The Iroquois deputies were invited to explain themselves. They stalked into the council-room with their usual haughty composure, and readily promised to surrender the prisoners in future, but offered no hostages for their good faith. The Rat, who had counselled his own and other tribes to bring their Iroquois captives to Montreal, was excessively mortified at finding himself duped. He came to a later meeting, when this and other matters were to be discussed; but he was so weakened by fever that he could not stand. An armchair was brought him; and, seated in it, he harangued the assembly for two hours, amid a deep silence, broken only by ejaculations of approval from his Indian hearers. When the meeting ended, he was completely exhausted; and, being carried in his chair to the hospital, he died about midnight. He was a great loss to the French; for, though he had caused the massacre of La Chine, his services of late years had been invaluable. In spite of his unlucky name, he was one of the ablest North American Indians on record, as appears by his remarkable influence over many tribes, and by 446 the respect, not to say admiration, of his French contemporaries. The French charged themselves with the funeral rites, carried the dead chief to his wigwam, stretched him on a robe of beaver skin, and left him there lying in state, swathed in a scarlet blanket, with a kettle, a gun, and a sword at his side, for his use in the world of spirits. This was a concession to the superstition of his countrymen; for the Rat was a convert, and went regularly to mass. [4] Even the Iroquois, his deadliest foes, paid tribute to his memory. Sixty of them came in solemn procession, and ranged themselves around the bier; while one of their principal chiefs pronounced an harangue, in which he declared that the sun had covered his face that day in grief for the loss of the great Huron. [5] He was buried on the next morning. Saint-Ours, senior captain, led the funeral train with an escort of troops, followed by sixteen Huron warriors in robes of beaver skin, marching four and four, with faces painted black and guns reversed. Then came the clergy, and then six war-chiefs carrying the coffin. It was decorated with flowers, and on it lay a plumed hat, a sword, and a gorget. Behind it were the brother 447 and sons of the dead chief, and files of Huron and Ottawa warriors; while Madame de Champigny, attended by Vaudreuil and all the military officers, closed the procession. After the service, the soldiers fired three volleys over the grave; and a tablet was placed upon it, carved with the words,— Cy git le Rat, Chef des Hurons. [4] La Potherie, IV. 229. Charlevoix suppresses the kettle and gun, and says that the dead chief wore a sword and a uniform, like a French officer. In fact, he wore Indian leggins and a capote under his scarlet blanket. [5] Charlevoix says that these were Christian Iroquois of the missions. Potherie, his only authority, proves them to have been heathen, as their chief mourner was a noted Seneca, and their spokesman, Avenano, was the accredited orator of the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, in whose name he made the funeral harangue. All this ceremony pleased the allied tribes, and helped to calm their irritation. Every obstacle being at length removed or smoothed over, the fourth of August was named for the grand council. A vast, oblong space was marked out on a plain near the town, and enclosed with a fence of branches. At one end was a canopy of boughs and leaves, under which were seats for the spectators. Troops were drawn up in line along the sides; the seats under the canopy were filled by ladies, officials, and the chief inhabitants of Montreal; Callières sat in front, surrounded by interpreters; and the Indians were seated on the grass around the open space. There were more than thirteen hundred of them, gathered from a distance of full two thousand miles, Hurons and Ottawas from Michillimackinac, Ojibwas from Lake Superior, Crees from the remote north, Pottawatamies from Lake Michigan, Mascontins, Sacs, Foxes, Winnebagoes, and Menominies from Wisconsin, Miamis from the St. Joseph, Illinois from the river Illinois, Abenakis from Acadia, and many allied hordes of less account; each savage painted with diverse hues and patterns, and each in his dress of ceremony, 448 leathern shirts fringed with scalp-locks, colored blankets or robes of bison hide and beaver skin, bristling crests of hair or long lank tresses, eagle feathers or horns of beasts. Pre-eminent among them all sat their valiant and terrible foes, the warriors of the confederacy. "Strange," exclaims La Potherie, "that four or five thousand should make a whole new world tremble. New England is but too happy to gain their good graces; New France is often wasted by their wars, and our allies dread them over an extent of more than fifteen hundred leagues." It was more a marvel than he knew, for he greatly overrates their number. Callières opened the council with a speech, in which he told the assembly that, since but few tribes were represented at the treaty of the year before, he had sent for them all to ratify it; that he now threw their hatchets and his own into a pit so deep that nobody could find them; that henceforth they must live like brethren; and, if by chance one should strike another, the injured brother must not revenge the blow, but come for redress to him, Onontio, their common father. Nicolas Perrot and the Jesuits who acted as interpreters repeated the speech in five different languages; and, to confirm it, thirty-one wampum belts were given to the thirty-one tribes present. Then each tribe answered in turn. First came Hassaki, chief of an Ottawa band known as Cut Tails. He approached with a majestic air, his long robe of beaver skin trailing on the grass behind him. Four Iroquois captives followed, with eyes bent on the 449 ground; and, when he stopped before the governor, they seated themselves at his feet. "You asked us for our prisoners," he said, "and here they are. I set them free because you wish it, and I regard them as my brothers." Then turning to the Iroquois deputies: "Know that if I pleased I might have eaten them; but I have not done as you would have done. Remember this when we meet, and let us be friends." The Iroquois ejaculated their approval. Next came a Huron chief, followed by eight Iroquois prisoners, who, as he declared, had been bought at great cost, in kettles, guns, and blankets, from the families who had adopted them. "We thought that the Iroquois would have done by us as we have done by them; and we were astonished to see that they had not brought us our prisoners. Listen to me, my father, and you, Iroquois, listen. I am not sorry to make peace, since my father wishes it, and I will live in peace with him and with you." Thus, in turn, came the spokesmen of all the tribes, delivering their prisoners and making their speeches. The Miami orator said: "I am very angry with the Iroquois, who burned my son some years ago; but to-day I forget all that. My father's will is mine. I will not be like the Iroquois, who have disobeyed his voice." The orator of the Mississagas came forward, crowned with the head and horns of a young bison bull, and, presenting his prisoners, said: "I place them in your hands. Do with them as you like. I am only too proud that you count me among your allies." 450 The chief of the Foxes now rose from his seat at the farther end of the enclosure, and walked sedately across the whole open space towards the stand of spectators. His face was painted red, and he wore an old French wig, with its abundant curls in a state of complete entanglement. When he reached the chair of the governor, he bowed, and lifted the wig like a hat, to show that he was perfect in French politeness. There was a burst of laughter from the spectators; but Callières, with ceremonious gravity, begged him to put it on again, which he did, and proceeded with his speech, the pith of which was briefly as follows: "The darkness is gone, the sun shines bright again, and now the Iroquois is my brother." Then came a young Algonquin war-chief, dressed like a Canadian, but adorned with a drooping red feather and a tall ridge of hair like the crest of a cock. It was he who slew Black Kettle, that redoubted Iroquois whose loss filled the confederacy with mourning, and who exclaimed as he fell, "Must I, who have made the whole earth tremble, now die by the hand of a child!" The young chief spoke concisely and to the purpose: "I am not a man of counsel: it is for me to listen to your words. Peace has come, and now let us forget the past." When he and all the rest had ended, the orator of the Iroquois strode to the front, and in brief words gave in their adhesion to the treaty. "Onontio, we are pleased with all you have done, and we have listened to all you have said. We assure you 451 by these four belts of wampum that we will stand fast in our obedience. As for the prisoners whom we have not brought you, we place them at your disposal, and you will send and fetch them." The calumet was lighted. Callières, Champigny, and Vaudreuil drew the first smoke, then the Iroquois deputies, and then all the tribes in turn. The treaty was duly signed, the representative of each tribe affixing his mark, in the shape of some bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, plant, or nondescript object. "Thus," says La Potherie, "the labors of the late Count Frontenac were brought to a happy consummation." The work of Frontenac was indeed finished, though not as he would have finished it. Callières had told the Iroquois that till they surrendered their Indian prisoners he would keep in his own hands the Iroquois prisoners surrendered by the allied tribes. To this the spokesman of the confederacy coolly replied: "Such a proposal was never made since the world began. Keep them, if you like. We will go home, and think no more about them; but, if you gave them to us without making trouble, and gave us our son Joncaire at the same time, we should have no reason to distrust your sincerity, and should all be glad to send you back the prisoners we took from your allies." Callières yielded, persuaded the allies to agree to the conditions, gave up the prisoners, and took an empty promise in return. It was a triumph for the Iroquois, who meant to keep their Indian captives, and did in fact keep nearly all of them. [6] [6] The council at Montreal is described at great length by La Potherie, 452 a spectator. There is a short official report of the various speeches, of which a translation will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 722. Callières himself gives interesting details. (Callières au Ministre, 4 Oct., 1701.) A great number of papers on Indian affairs at this time will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. Joncaire went for the prisoners whom the Iroquois had promised to give up, and could get but six of them. Callières au Ministre, 31 Oct., 1701. The rest were made Iroquois by adoption. According to an English official estimate made at the end of the war, the Iroquois numbered 2,550 warriors in 1689, and only 1,230 in 1698. N. Y. Col. Docs., IV. 420. In 1701, a French writer estimates them at only 1,200 warriors. In other words, their strength was reduced at least one half. They afterwards partially recovered it by the adoption of prisoners, and still more by the adoption of an entire kindred tribe, the Tuscaroras. In 1720, the English reckon them at 2,000 warriors. N. Y. Col Docs., V. 557. The chief objects of the late governor were gained. The power of the Iroquois was so far broken that they were never again very formidable to the French. Canada had confirmed her Indian alliances, and rebutted the English claim to sovereignty over the five tribes, with all the consequences that hung upon it. By the treaty of Ryswick, the great questions at issue in America were left to the arbitrament of future wars; and meanwhile, as time went on, the policy of Frontenac developed and ripened. Detroit was occupied by the French, the passes of the west were guarded by forts, another New France grew up at the mouth of the Mississippi, and lines of military communication joined the Gulf of Mexico with the Gulf of St. Lawrence; while the colonies of England lay passive between the Alleghanies and the sea till roused by the trumpet that sounded with wavering notes on many a bloody field to peal at last in triumph from the Heights of Abraham. APPENDIX. The Family of Frontenac. Count Frontenac's grandfather was Antoine de Buade, Seigneur de Frontenac, Baron de Palluau, Conseiller d'état, Chevalier des Ordres du Roy, son premier ma?tre d'h?tel, et gouverneur de St. Germain-en-Laye. By Jeanne Secontat, his wife, he had, among other children, Henri de Buade, Chevalier, Baron de Palluau et mestre de camp (colonel) du régiment de Navarre, who, by his wife Anne Phélippeaux, daughter of Raymond Phélippeaux, Secretary of State, had, among other children, LOUIS DE BUADE, Comte de Palluau et Frontenac, Seigneur de l'Isle-Savary, mestre de camp du régiment de Normandie, maréchal de camp dans les armées du Roy, et gouverneur et lieutenant général en Canada, Acadie, Isle de Terreneuve, et autres pays de la France septentrionale. Louis de Buade had by his wife, Anne de La Grange-Trianon, one son, Fran?ois Louis, killed in Germany, while in the service of the king, and leaving no issue. The foregoing is drawn from a comparison of the following authorities, all of which will be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, where the examination was made: Mémoires de Marolles, abbé de Villeloin, II. 201; L'Hermite-Souliers, Histoire Généalogique de la Noblesse de Touraine; Du Chesne, Recherches Historiques de l'Ordre du Saint-Esprit; Morin, Statuts de l'Ordre du Saint-Esprit; Marolles de Villeloin, Histoire des Anciens Comtes d'Anjou; Père Anselme, Grands Officiers de la Couronne; Pinard, Chronologie Historique-militaire; Table de la Gazette de France. In this matter of the Frontenac genealogy, 454 I am much indebted to the kind offices of my friend, James Gordon Clarke, Esq. When, in 1600, Henry IV. was betrothed to Marie de Medicis, Frontenac, grandfather of the governor of Canada, described as "ung des plus antiens serviteurs du roy," was sent to Florence by the king to carry his portrait to his affianced bride. Mémoires de Philippe Hurault, 448 (Petitot). The appointment of Frontenac to the post, esteemed as highly honorable, of ma?tre d'h?tel in the royal household, immediately followed. There is a very curious book, the journal of Jean Héroard, a physician charged with the care of the infant Dauphin, afterwards Louis XIII., born in 1601. It records every act of the future monarch: his screaming and kicking in the arms of his nurses, his refusals to be washed and dressed, his resistance when his hair was combed; how he scratched his governess, and called her names; how he quarrelled with the children of his father's mistresses, and at the age of four declined to accept them as brothers and sisters; how his mother slighted him; and how his father sometimes caressed, sometimes teased, and sometimes corrected him with his own hand. The details of the royal nursery are, we may add, astounding for their grossness; and the language and the manners amid which the infant monarch grew up were worthy of the days of Rabelais. Frontenac and his children appear frequently, and not unfavorably, on the pages of this singular diary. Thus, when the Dauphin was three years old, the king, being in bed, took him and a young Frontenac of about the same age, set them before him, and amused himself by making them rally each other in their infantile language. The infant Frontenac had a trick of stuttering, which the Dauphin caught from him, and retained for a long time. Again, at the age of five, the Dauphin, armed with a little gun, played at soldier with two of the Frontenac children in the hall at St. Germain. They assaulted a town, the rampart being represented by a balustrade before the fireplace. "The Dauphin," writes the journalist, "said that he would be a musketeer, and yet he spoke sharply to the others 455 who would not do as he wished. The king said to him, 'My boy, you are a musketeer, but you speak like a general.'" Long after, when the Dauphin was in his fourteenth year, the following entry occurs in the physician's diary:— St. Germain, Sunday, 22d (July, 1614). "He (the Dauphin) goes to the chapel of the terrace, then mounts his horse and goes to find M. de Souvré and M. de Frontenac, whom he surprises as they were at breakfast at the small house near the quarries. At half past one, he mounts again, in hunting boots; goes to the park with M. de Frontenac as a guide, chases a stag, and catches him. It was his first stag-hunt." Of Henri de Buade, father of the governor of Canada, but little is recorded. When in Paris, he lived, like his son after him, on the Quai des Célestins, in the parish of St. Paul. His son, Count Frontenac, was born in 1620, seven years after his father's marriage. Apparently his birth took place elsewhere than in Paris, for it is not recorded with those of Henri de Buade's other children, on the register of St. Paul (Jal, Dictionnaire Critique, Biographique, et d'Histoire). The story told by Tallemant des Réaux concerning his marriage (see page 6) seems to be mainly true. Colonel Jal says: "On con?oit que j'ai pu être tenté de conna?tre ce qu'il y a de vrai dans les récits de Saint-Simon et de Tallemant des Réaux; voici ce qu'après bien des recherches, j'ai pu apprendre. Mlle. La Grange fit, en effet, un mariage à demi secret. Ce ne fut point à sa paroisse que fut bénie son union avec M. de Frontenac, mais dans une des petites églises de la Cité qui avaient le privilège de recevoir les amants qui s'unissaient malgré leurs parents, et ceux qui regularisaient leur position et s'épousaient un peu avant—quelquefois après—la naissance d'un enfant. Ce fut à St. Pierre-aux-B?ufs que, le mercredy, 28 Octobre, 1648, 'Messire Louis de Buade, Chevalier, comte de Frontenac, conseiller du Roy en ses conseils, mareschal des camps et armées de S. M., et maistre de camp du régiment du Normandie,' épousa 'demoiselle Anne de La Grange, fille de Messire Charles de La Grange, conseiller du Roy et maistre des comptes' de la paroisse de St. Paul comme M. de Frontenac, 'en vertu de la dispense … obtenue 456 de M. l'official de Paris par laquelle il est permis au Sr. de Buade et demoiselle de La Grange de célébrer leur marriage suyvant et conformément à la permission qu'ils en ont obtenue du Sr. Coquerel, vicaire de St. Paul, devant le premier curé ou vicaire sur ce requis, en gardant les solennités en ce cas requises et accoutumées.'" Jal then gives the signatures to the act of marriage, which, except that of the bride, are all of the Frontenac family. Part VII PREFACE. This book, forming Part VI. of the series called France and England in North America, fills the gap between Part V., "Count Frontenac," and Part VII., "Montcalm and Wolfe;" so that the series now forms a continuous history of the efforts of France to occupy and control this continent. In the present volumes the nature of the subject does not permit an unbroken thread of narrative, and the unity of the book lies in its being throughout, in one form or another, an illustration of the singularly contrasted characters and methods of the rival claimants to North America. Like the rest of the series, this work is founded on original documents. The statements of secondary writers have been accepted only when found to conform to the evidence of contemporaries, whose writings have been sifted and collated with the greatest care. As extremists[Pg vi] on each side have charged me with favoring the other, I hope I have been unfair to neither. The manuscript material collected for the preparation of the series now complete forms about seventy volumes, most of them folios. These have been given by me from time to time to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in whose library they now are, open to the examination of those interested in the subjects of which they treat. The collection was begun forty-five years ago, and its formation has been exceedingly slow, having been retarded by difficulties which seemed insurmountable, and for years were so in fact. Hence the completion of the series has required twice the time that would have sufficed under less unfavorable conditions. Boston, March 26, 1892. CHAPTER I. 1700-1713. EVE OF WAR. The Spanish Succession.—Influence of Louis XIV. on History.—French Schemes of Conquest in America.—New York.—Unfitness of the Colonies for War.—The Five Nations.—Doubt and Vacillation.—The Western Indians.—Trade and Politics. [Pg 3]The war which in the British colonies was called Queen Anne's War, and in England the War of the Spanish Succession, was the second of a series of four conflicts which ended in giving to Great Britain a maritime and colonial preponderance over France and Spain. So far as concerns the colonies and the sea, these several wars may be regarded as a single protracted one, broken by intervals of truce. The three earlier of them, it is true, were European contests, begun and waged on European disputes. Their American part was incidental and apparently subordinate, yet it involved questions of prime importance in the history of the world. [Pg 4]The War of the Spanish Succession sprang from the ambition of Louis XIV. We are apt to regard the story of that gorgeous monarch as a tale that is told; but his influence shapes the life of nations to this day. At the beginning of his reign two roads lay before him, and it was a momentous question for posterity, as for his own age, which one of them he would choose,—whether he would follow the wholesome policy of his great minister Colbert, or obey his own vanity and arrogance, and plunge France into exhausting wars; whether he would hold to the principle of tolerance embodied in the Edict of Nantes, or do the work of fanaticism and priestly ambition. The one course meant prosperity, progress, and the rise of a middle class; the other meant bankruptcy and the Dragonades,—and this was the King's choice. Crushing taxation, misery, and ruin followed, till France burst out at last in a frenzy, drunk with the wild dreams of Rousseau. Then came the Terror and the Napoleonic wars, and reaction on reaction, revolution on revolution, down to our own day. Louis placed his grandson on the throne of Spain, and insulted England by acknowledging as her rightful King the son of James II., whom she had deposed. Then England declared war. Canada and the northern British colonies had had but a short breathing time since the Peace of Ryswick; both were tired of slaughtering each other, and both needed rest. Yet before the declaration of war, the Canadian officers of the Crown prepared, with their usual energy, to meet[Pg 5] the expected crisis. One of them wrote: "If war be declared, it is certain that the King can very easily conquer and ruin New England." The French of Canada often use the name "New England" as applying to the British colonies in general. They are twice as populous as Canada, he goes on to say; but the people are great cowards, totally undisciplined, and ignorant of war, while the Canadians are brave, hardy, and well trained. We have, besides, twenty-eight companies of regulars, and could raise six thousand warriors from our Indian allies. Four thousand men could easily lay waste all the northern English colonies, to which end we must have five ships of war, with one thousand troops on board, who must land at Penobscot, where they must be joined by two thousand regulars, militia, and Indians, sent from Canada by way of the Chaudière and the Kennebec. Then the whole force must go to Portsmouth, take it by assault, leave a garrison there, and march to Boston, laying waste all the towns and villages by the way; after destroying Boston, the army must march for New York, while the fleet follows along the coast. "Nothing could be easier," says the writer, "for the road is good, and there is plenty of horses and carriages. The troops would ruin everything as they advanced, and New York would quickly be destroyed and burned."[1] Another plan, scarcely less absurd, was proposed[Pg 6] about the same time by the celebrated Le Moyne d'Iberville. The essential point, he says, is to get possession of Boston; but there are difficulties and risks in the way. Nothing, he adds, referring to the other plan, seems difficult to persons without experience; but unless we are prepared to raise a great and costly armament, our only hope is in surprise. We should make it in winter, when the seafaring population, which is the chief strength of the place, is absent on long voyages. A thousand Canadians, four hundred regulars, and as many Indians should leave Quebec in November, ascend the Chaudière, then descend the Kennebec, approach Boston under cover of the forest, and carry it by a night attack. Apparently he did not know that but for its lean neck—then but a few yards wide—Boston was an island, and that all around for many leagues the forest that was to have covered his approach had already been devoured by numerous busy settlements. He offers to lead the expedition, and declares that if he is honored with the command, he will warrant that the New England capital will be forced to submit to King Louis, after which New York can be seized in its turn.[2] In contrast to those incisive proposals, another French officer breathed nothing but peace. Brouillan,[Pg 7] governor of Acadia, wrote to the governor of Massachusetts to suggest that, with the consent of their masters, they should make a treaty of neutrality. The English governor being dead, the letter came before the council, who received it coldly. Canada, and not Acadia, was the enemy they had to fear. Moreover, Boston merchants made good profit by supplying the Acadians with necessaries which they could get in no other way; and in time of war these profits, though lawless, were greater than in time of peace. But what chiefly influenced the council against the overtures of Brouillan was a passage in his letter reminding them that, by the Treaty of Ryswick, the New England people had no right to fish within sight of the Acadian coast. This they flatly denied, saying that the New England people had fished there time out of mind, and that if Brouillan should molest them, they would treat it as an act of war.[3] While the New England colonies, and especially Massachusetts and New Hampshire, had most cause to deprecate a war, the prospect of one was also extremely unwelcome to the people of New York. The conflict lately closed had borne hard upon them[Pg 8] through the attacks of the enemy, and still more through the derangement of their industries. They were distracted, too, with the factions rising out of the recent revolution under Jacob Leisler. New York had been the bulwark of the colonies farther south, who, feeling themselves safe, had given their protector little help, and that little grudgingly, seeming to regard the war as no concern of theirs. Three thousand and fifty-one pounds, provincial currency, was the joint contribution of Virginia, Maryland, East Jersey, and Connecticut to the aid of New York during five years of the late war.[4] Massachusetts could give nothing, even if she would, her hands being full with the defence of her own borders. Colonel Quary wrote to the Board of Trade that New York could not bear alone the cost of defending herself; that the other colonies were "stuffed with commonwealth notions," and were "of a sour temper in opposition to government," so that Parliament ought to take them in hand and compel each to do its part in the common cause.[5] To this Lord Cornbury adds that Rhode Island and Connecticut are even more stubborn than the rest, hate all true subjects of the Queen, and will not give a farthing to the war so long as they can help it.[6] Each province lived in selfish isolation, recking little of its neighbor's woes. [Pg 9]New York, left to fight her own battles, was in a wretched condition for defence. It is true that, unlike the other colonies, the King had sent her a few soldiers, counting at this time about one hundred and eighty, all told;[7] but they had been left so long without pay that they were in a state of scandalous destitution. They would have been left without rations had not three private gentlemen—Schuyler, Livingston, and Cortlandt—advanced money for their supplies, which seems never to have been repaid.[8] They are reported to have been "without shirts, breeches, shoes, or stockings," and "in such a shameful condition that the women when passing them are obliged to cover their eyes." "The Indians ask," says the governor, "'Do you think us such fools as to believe that a king who cannot clothe his soldiers can protect us from the French, with their fourteen hundred men all well equipped?'"[9] The forts were no better than their garrisons. The governor complains that those of Albany and Schenectady "are so weak and ridiculous that they look more like pounds for cattle than forts." At Albany the rotten stockades were falling from their own weight. If New York had cause to complain of those whom she sheltered, she herself gave cause of complaint to those who sheltered her. The Five Nations of the Iroquois had always been her allies against the[Pg 10] French, had guarded her borders and fought her battles. What they wanted in return were gifts, attentions, just dealings, and active aid in war; but they got them in scant measure. Their treatment by the province was short-sighted, if not ungrateful. New York was a mixture of races and religions not yet fused into a harmonious body politic, divided in interests and torn with intestine disputes. Its Assembly was made up in large part of men unfitted to pursue a consistent scheme of policy, or spend the little money at their disposal on any objects but those of present and visible interest. The royal governors, even when personally competent, were hampered by want of means and by factious opposition. The Five Nations were robbed by land-speculators, cheated by traders, and feebly supported in their constant wars with the French. Spasmodically, as it were, on occasions of crisis, they were summoned to Albany, soothed with such presents as could be got from unwilling legislators, or now and then from the Crown, and exhorted to fight vigorously in the common cause. The case would have been far worse but for a few patriotic men, with Peter Schuyler at their head, who understood the character of these Indians, and labored strenuously to keep them in what was called their allegiance. The proud and fierce confederates had suffered greatly in the late war. Their numbers had been reduced about one half, and they now counted little more than twelve hundred warriors. They had[Pg 11] learned a bitter and humiliating lesson, and their arrogance had changed to distrust and alarm. Though hating the French, they had learned to respect their military activity and prowess, and to look askance on the Dutch and English, who rarely struck a blow in their defence, and suffered their hereditary enemy to waste their fields and burn their towns. The English called the Five Nations British subjects, on which the French taunted them with being British slaves, and told them that the King of England had ordered the governor of New York to poison them. This invention had great effect. The Iroquois capital, Onondaga, was filled with wild rumors. The credulous savages were tossed among doubts, suspicions, and fears. Some were in terror of poison, and some of witchcraft. They believed that the rival European nations had leagued to destroy them and divide their lands, and that they were bewitched by sorcerers, both French and English.[10] After the Peace of Ryswick, and even before it, the French governor kept agents among them. Some of these were soldiers, like Joncaire, Maricourt, or Longueuil, and some were Jesuits, like Bruyas, Lamberville, or Vaillant. The Jesuits showed their usual ability and skill in their difficult and perilous task. The Indians derived various advantages from their presence, which they regarded also as a flattering attention; while the English, jealous of their influence, made feeble attempts to counteract it by[Pg 12] sending Protestant clergymen to Onondaga. "But," writes Lord Bellomont, "it is next to impossible to prevail with the ministers to live among the Indians. They [the Indians] are so nasty as never to wash their hands, or the utensils they dress their victuals with."[11] Even had their zeal been proof to these afflictions, the ministers would have been no match for their astute opponents. In vain Bellomont assured the Indians that the Jesuits were "the greatest lyars and impostors in the world."[12] In vain he offered a hundred dollars for every one of them whom they should deliver into his hands. They would promise to expel them; but their minds were divided, and they stood in fear of one another. While one party distrusted and disliked the priests, another was begging the governor of Canada to send more. Others took a practical view of the question. "If the English sell goods cheaper than the French, we will have ministers; if the French sell them cheaper than the English, we will have priests." Others, again, wanted neither Jesuits nor ministers, "because both of you [English and French] have made us drunk with the noise of your praying."[13] The aims of the propagandists on both sides were secular. The French wished to keep the Five Nations neutral in the event of another war; the[Pg 13] English wished to spur them to active hostility; but while the former pursued their purpose with energy and skill, the efforts of the latter were intermittent and generally feeble. "The Nations," writes Schuyler, "are full of factions." There was a French party and an English party in every town, especially in Onondaga, the centre of intrigue. French influence was strongest at the western end of the confederacy, among the Senecas, where the French officer Joncaire, an Iroquois by adoption, had won many to France; and it was weakest at the eastern end, among the Mohawks, who were nearest to the English settlements. Here the Jesuits had labored long and strenuously in the work of conversion, and from time to time they had led their numerous proselytes to remove to Canada, where they settled at St. Louis, or Caughnawaga, on the right bank of the St. Lawrence, a little above Montreal, where their descendants still remain. It is said that at the beginning of the eighteenth century two-thirds of the Mohawks had thus been persuaded to cast their lot with the French, and from enemies to become friends and allies. Some of the Oneidas and a few of the other Iroquois nations joined them and strengthened the new mission settlement; and the Caughnawagas afterwards played an important part between the rival European colonies. The "Far Indians," or "Upper Nations," as the French called them, consisted of the tribes of the[Pg 14] Great Lakes and adjacent regions, Ottawas, Pottawattamies, Sacs, Foxes, Sioux, and many more. It was from these that Canada drew the furs by which she lived. Most of them were nominal friends and allies of the French, who in the interest of trade strove to keep these wild-cats from tearing one another's throats, and who were in constant alarm lest they should again come to blows with their old enemies, the Five Nations, in which case they would call on Canada for help, thus imperilling those pacific relations with the Iroquois confederacy which the French were laboring constantly to secure. In regard to the "Far Indians," the French, the English, and the Five Iroquois Nations all had distinct and opposing interests. The French wished to engross their furs, either by inducing the Indians to bring them down to Montreal, or by sending traders into their country to buy them. The English, with a similar object, wished to divert the "Far Indians" from Montreal and draw them to Albany; but this did not suit the purpose of the Five Nations, who, being sharp politicians and keen traders, as well as bold and enterprising warriors, wished to act as middle-men between the beaver-hunting tribes and the Albany merchants, well knowing that good profit might thus accrue. In this state of affairs the converted Iroquois settled at Caughnawaga played a peculiar part. In the province of New York, goods for the Indian trade were of excellent quality and comparatively abundant and cheap; while among the[Pg 15] French, especially in time of war, they were often scarce and dear. The Caughnawagas accordingly, whom neither the English nor the French dared offend, used their position to carry on a contraband trade between New York and Canada. By way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson they brought to Albany furs from the country of the "Far Indians," and exchanged them for guns, blankets, cloths, knives, beads, and the like. These they carried to Canada and sold to the French traders, who in this way, and often in this alone, supplied themselves with the goods necessary for bartering furs from the "Far Indians." This lawless trade of the Caughnawagas went on even in time of war; and opposed as it was to every principle of Canadian policy, it was generally connived at by the French authorities as the only means of obtaining the goods necessary for keeping their Indian allies in good humor. It was injurious to English interests; but the fur-traders of Albany and also the commissioners charged with Indian affairs, being Dutchmen converted by force into British subjects, were, with a few eminent exceptions, cool in their devotion to the British Crown; while the merchants of the port of New York, from whom the fur-traders drew their supplies, thought more of their own profits than of the public good. The trade with Canada through the Caughnawagas not only gave aid and comfort to the enemy, but continually admitted spies into the[Pg 16] colony, from whom the governor of Canada gained information touching English movements and designs. The Dutch traders of Albany and the importing merchants who supplied them with Indian goods had a strong interest in preventing active hostilities with Canada, which would have spoiled their trade. So, too, and for similar reasons, had influential persons in Canada. The French authorities, moreover, thought it impolitic to harass the frontiers of New York by war parties, since the Five Nations might come to the aid of their Dutch and English allies, and so break the peaceful relations which the French were anxious to maintain with them. Thus it happened that, during the first six or seven years of the eighteenth century, there was a virtual truce between Canada and New York, and the whole burden of the war fell upon New England, or rather upon Massachusetts, with its outlying district of Maine and its small and weak neighbor, New Hampshire.[14] FOOTNOTES: [1] Premier Projet pour L'Expédition contre la Nouvelle Angleterre, 1701. Second Projet, etc. Compare N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 725. [2] Mémoire du Sieur d'Iberville sur Boston et ses Dépendances, 1700 (1701?). Baron de Saint-Castin also drew up a plan for attacking Boston in 1702 with lists of necessary munitions and other supplies. [3] Brouillan à Bellomont, 10 Ao?t, 1701. Conseil de Baston à Brouillan, 22 Ao?t, 1701. Brouillan acted under royal orders, having been told, in case of war being declared, to propose a treaty with New England, unless he should find that he can "se garantir des insultes des Anglais" and do considerable harm to their trade, in which case he is to make no treaty. Mémoire du Roy au Sieur de Brouillan, 23 Mars, 1700. [4] Schuyler, Colonial New York, i. 431, 432. [5] Colonel Quary to the Lords of Trade, 16 June, 1703. [6] Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, 9 September, 1703. [7] Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, 28 February, 1700. [8] Ibid. [9] Schuyler, Colonial New York, i. 488. [10] N. Y. Col. Docs., iv. 658. [11] Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, 17 October, 1700. [12] Conference of Bellomont with the Indians, 26 August, 1700. [13] Journal of Bleeker and Schuyler on their visit to Onondaga, August, September, 1701. [14] The foregoing chapter rests on numerous documents in the Public Record Office, Archives de la Marine, Archives Nationales, N. Y. Colonial Documents, vols. iv. v. ix., and the Second and Third Series of the Correspondance Officielle at Ottawa. CHAPTER II. 1694-1704. DETROIT. Michilimackinac.—La Mothe-Cadillac: his Disputes with the Jesuits.—Opposing Views.—Plans of Cadillac: his Memorial to the Court; his Opponents.—Detroit founded. The New Company.—Detroit changes Hands.—Strange Act of the Five Nations. [Pg 17]In the few years of doubtful peace that preceded Queen Anne's War, an enterprise was begun, which, nowise in accord with the wishes and expectations of those engaged in it, was destined to produce as its last result an American city. Antoine de La Mothe-Cadillac commanded at Michilimackinac, whither Frontenac had sent him in 1694. This old mission of the Jesuits, where they had gathered the remnants of the lake tribes dispersed by the Iroquois at the middle of the seventeenth century, now savored little of its apostolic beginnings. It was the centre of the western fur-trade and the favorite haunt of the coureurs de bois. Brandy and squaws abounded, and according to the Jesuit Carheil, the spot where Marquette had labored was now a witness of scenes the most unedifying.[15] [Pg 18]At Michilimackinac was seen a curious survival of Huron-Iroquois customs. The villages of the Hurons and Ottawas, which were side by side, separated only by a fence, were surrounded by a common enclosure of triple palisades, which, with the addition of loopholes for musketry, were precisely like those seen by Cartier at Hochelaga, and by Champlain in the Onondaga country. The dwellings which these defences enclosed were also after the old Huron-Iroquois pattern,—those long arched structures covered with bark which Brébeuf found by the shores of Matchedash Bay, and Jogues on the banks of the Mohawk. Besides the Indians, there was a French colony at the place, chiefly of fur-traders, lodged in log-cabins, roofed with cedar bark, and forming a street along the shore close to the palisaded villages of the Hurons and Ottawas. The fort, known as Fort Buade, stood at the head of the little bay.[16] The Hurons and Ottawas were thorough savages, though the Hurons retained the forms of Roman Catholic Christianity. This tribe, writes Cadillac, "are reduced to a very small number; and it is well for us that they are, for they are ill-disposed and mischievous, with a turn for intrigue and a capacity for large undertakings. Luckily, their power is not great; but as they cannot play the lion, they play the fox, and do their best to make trouble between us and our allies." [Pg 19]La Mothe-Cadillac[17] was a captain in the colony troops, and an admirer of the late governor, Frontenac, to whose policy he adhered, and whose prejudices he shared. He was amply gifted with the kind of intelligence that consists in quick observation, sharpened by an inveterate spirit of sarcasm, was energetic, enterprising, well instructed, and a bold and sometimes a visionary schemer, with a restless spirit, a nimble and biting wit, a Gascon impetuosity of temperament, and as much devotion as an officer of the King was forced to profess, coupled with small love of priests and an aversion to Jesuits.[18] Carheil and Marest, missionaries of that order at Michilimackinac, were objects of his especial antipathy, which they fully returned. The two priests were impatient of a military commandant to whose authority they were in some small measure subjected; and[Pg 20] they imputed to him the disorders which he did not, and perhaps could not, prevent. They were opposed also to the traffic in brandy, which was favored by Cadillac on the usual ground that it attracted the Indians, and so prevented the English from getting control of the fur-trade,—an argument which he reinforced by sanitary considerations based on the supposed unwholesomeness of the fish and smoked meat which formed the chief diet of Michilimackinac. "A little brandy after the meal," he says, with the solemnity of the learned Purgon, "seems necessary to cook the bilious meats and the crudities they leave in the stomach."[19] Cadillac calls Carheil, superior of the mission, the most passionate and domineering man he ever knew, and further declares that the Jesuit tried to provoke him to acts of violence, in order to make matter of accusation against him. If this was Carheil's aim, he was near succeeding. Once, in a dispute with the commandant on the brandy-trade, he upbraided him sharply for permitting it; to which Cadillac replied that he only obeyed the orders of the court. The Jesuit rejoined that he ought to obey God, and not man,—"on which," says the commandant, "I told him that his talk smelt of sedition a hundred yards off, and begged that he would amend it. He told me that I gave myself airs that did not belong to me, holding his fist before my nose at the same time. I confess I almost forgot that he was a priest, and[Pg 21] felt for a moment like knocking his jaw out of joint; but, thank God, I contented myself with taking him by the arm, pushing him out, and ordering him not to come back."[20] Such being the relations of the commandant and the Father Superior, it is not surprising to find the one complaining that he cannot get absolved from his sins, and the other painting the morals and manners of Michilimackinac in the blackest colors. I have spoken elsewhere of the two opposing policies that divided Canada,—the policies of concentration and of expansion, on the one hand leaving the west to the keeping of the Jesuits, and confining the population to the borders of the St. Lawrence; on the other, the occupation of the interior of the continent by posts of war and trade.[21] Through the force of events the latter view had prevailed; yet while the military chiefs of Canada could not but favor it, the Jesuits were unwilling to accept it, and various interests in the colony still opposed it openly or secretly. Frontenac had been its strongest champion, and Cadillac followed in his steps. It seemed[Pg 22] to him that the time had come for securing the west for France. The strait—détroit—which connects Lake Huron with Lake Erie was the most important of all the western passes. It was the key of the three upper lakes, with the vast countries watered by their tributaries, and it gave Canada her readiest access to the valley of the Mississippi. If the French held it, the English would be shut out from the northwest; if, as seemed likely, the English should seize it, the Canadian fur-trade would be ruined.[22] The possession of it by the French would be a constant curb and menace to the Five Nations, as well as a barrier between those still formidable tribes and the western Indians, allies of Canada; and when the intended French establishment at the mouth of the Mississippi should be made, Detroit would be an indispensable link of communication between Canada and Louisiana. Denonville had recognized the importance of the position, and it was by his orders that Greysolon Du Lhut, in 1686, had occupied it for a time, and built a picket fort near the site of Fort Gratiot.[23] It would be idle to imagine that the motives of Cadillac were wholly patriotic. Fur-trading interests were deeply involved in his plans, and bitter opposition was certain. The fur-trade, in its nature, was a constant breeder of discord. The people of Montreal[Pg 23] would have the tribes come down every summer from the west and northwest and hold a fair under the palisades of their town. It is said that more than four hundred French families lived wholly or in part by this home trade, and therefore regarded with deep jealousy the establishment of interior posts, which would forestall it. Again, every new western post would draw away trade from those already established, and every trading license granted to a company or an individual would rouse the animosity of those who had been licensed before. The prosperity of Detroit would be the ruin of Michilimackinac, and those whose interests centred at the latter post angrily opposed the scheme of Cadillac. He laid his plans before Count de Maurepas by a characteristic memorial, apparently written in 1699. In this he proposed to gather all the tribes of the lakes at Detroit, civilize them and teach them French, "insomuch that from pagans they would become children of the Church, and therefore good subjects of the King." They will form, he continues, a considerable settlement, "strong enough to bring the English and the Iroquois to reason, or, with help from Montreal, to destroy both of them." Detroit, he adds, should be the seat of trade, which should not be permitted in the countries beyond it. By this regulation the intolerable glut of beaver-skins, which spoils the market, may be prevented. This proposed restriction of the beaver-trade to Detroit was enough in itself to raise a tempest against the whole scheme.[Pg 24] "Cadillac well knows that he has enemies," pursues the memorial, "but he keeps on his way without turning or stopping for the noise of the puppies who bark after him."[24] Among the essential features of his plan was a well-garrisoned fort, and a church, served not by Jesuits alone, but also by Récollet friars and priests of the Missions étrangères. The idea of this ecclesiastical partnership was odious to the Jesuits, who felt that the west was their proper field, and that only they had a right there. Another part of Cadillac's proposal pleased them no better. This was his plan of civilizing the Indians and teaching them to speak French; for it was the reproach of the Jesuit missions that they left the savage a savage still, and asked little of him but the practice of certain rites and the passive acceptance of dogmas to him incomprehensible. "It is essential," says the memorial, "that in this matter of teaching the Indians our language the missionaries should act in good faith, and that his Majesty should have the goodness to impose his strictest orders upon them; for which there are several good reasons. The first and most stringent is that when members of religious orders or other ecclesiastics undertake anything, they never let it go. The second is that by not teaching French to[Pg 25] the Indians they make themselves necessary [as interpreters] to the King and the governor. The third is that if all Indians spoke French, all kinds of ecclesiastics would be able to instruct them. This might cause them [the Jesuits] to lose some of the presents they get; for though these Reverend Fathers come here only for the glory of God, yet the one thing does not prevent the other,"—meaning that God and Mammon may be served at once. "Nobody can deny that the priests own three quarters of Canada. From St. Paul's Bay to Quebec, there is nothing but the seigniory of Beauport that belongs to a private person. All the rest, which is the best part, belongs to the Jesuits or other ecclesiastics. The Upper Town of Quebec is composed of six or seven superb palaces belonging to Hospital Nuns, Ursulines, Jesuits, Récollets, Seminary priests, and the bishop. There may be some forty private houses, and even these pay rent to the ecclesiastics, which shows that the one thing does not prevent the other." From this it will be seen that, in the words of one of his enemies, Cadillac "was not quite in the odor of sanctity." "One may as well knock one's head against a wall," concludes the memorial, "as hope to convert the Indians in any other way [than that of civilizing them]; for thus far all the fruits of the missions consist in the baptism of infants who die before reaching the age of reason."[25] This was not literally true, though the results of the Jesuit missions in the west had been meagre and transient to a surprising degree. [Pg 26]Cadillac's plan of a settlement at Detroit was not at first received with favor by Callières, the governor; while the intendant Champigny, a fast friend of the Jesuits, strongly opposed it. By their order the chief inhabitants of Quebec met at the Chateau St. Louis,—Callières, Champigny, and Cadillac himself being present. There was a heated debate on the beaver-trade, after which the intendant commanded silence, explained the projects of Cadillac, and proceeded to oppose them. His first point was that the natives should not be taught French, because the Indian girls brought up at the Ursuline Convent led looser lives than the young squaws who had received no instruction, while it was much the same with the boys brought up at the Seminary. "M. de Champigny," returned the sarcastic Cadillac, "does great honor to the Ursulines and the Seminary. It is true that some Indian women who have learned our language have lived viciously; but that is because their teachers were too stiff with them, and tried to make them nuns."[26] Champigny's position, as stated by his adversary, was that "all intimacy of the Indians with the French is dangerous and corrupting to their morals," and that their only safety lies in keeping them at a distance from the settlements. This was the view of[Pg 27] the Jesuits, and there is much to be said in its favor; but it remains not the less true that conversion must go hand in hand with civilization, or it is a failure and a fraud. Cadillac was not satisfied with the results of the meeting at the Chateau St. Louis, and he wrote to the minister: "You can never hope that this business will succeed if it is discussed here on the spot. Canada is a country of cabals and intrigues, and it is impossible to reconcile so many different interests."[27] He sailed for France, apparently in the autumn of 1699, to urge his scheme at court. Here he had an interview with the colonial minister, Ponchartrain, to whom he represented the military and political expediency of his proposed establishment;[28] and in a letter which seems to be addressed to La Touche, chief clerk in the Department of Marine and Colonies, he promised that the execution of his plan would insure the safety of Canada and the ruin of the British colonies.[29] He asked for fifty soldiers and fifty Canadians to begin the work, to be followed in the next year by twenty or thirty families and by two hundred picked men of various trades, sent out at the King's charge, along with priests of several communities, and nuns to attend the sick and teach the Indian girls. "I cannot tell you," continues Cadillac,[Pg 28] "the efforts my enemies have made to deprive me of the honor of executing my project; but so soon as M. de Ponchartrain decides in its favor, the whole country will applaud it." Ponchartrain accepted the plan, and Cadillac returned to Canada commissioned to execute it. Early in June, 1701, he left La Chine with a hundred men in twenty-five canoes loaded with provisions, goods, munitions, and tools. He was accompanied by Alphonse de Tonty, brother of Henri de Tonty, the companion of La Salle, and by two half-pay lieutenants, Dugué and Chacornacle, together with a Jesuit and a Récollet.[30] Following the difficult route of the Ottawa and Lake Huron, they reached their destination on the twenty-fourth of July, and built a picket fort sixty yards square, which by order of the governor they named Fort Ponchartrain.[31] It stood near the west bank of the strait, about forty paces from the water.[32] Thus was planted the germ of the city of Detroit. Cadillac sent back Chacornacle with the report of what he had done, and a description of the country written in a strain of swelling and gushing rhetoric in singular contrast with his usual sarcastic utterances. "None but enemies of the truth," his letter concludes, "are enemies of this establishment, so[Pg 29] necessary to the glory of the King, the progress of religion, and the destruction of the throne of Baal."[33] What he had, perhaps, still more at heart was making money out of it by the fur-trade. By command of the King a radical change had lately been made in this chief commerce of Canada, and the entire control of it had been placed in the hands of a company in which all Canadians might take shares. But as the risks were great and the conditions ill-defined, the number of subscribers was not much above one hundred and fifty; and the rest of the colony found themselves shut out from the trade,—to the ruin of some, and the injury of all.[34] All trade in furs was restricted to Detroit and Fort Frontenac, both of which were granted to the company, subject to be resumed by the King at his pleasure.[35] The company was to repay the eighty thousand francs which the expedition to Detroit had cost; and to this were added various other burdens. The King, however, was to maintain the garrison. All the affairs of the company were placed in the hands of seven directors, who began immediately to complain that their burdens were too heavy, and to beg for more privileges; while an outcry against the privileges already granted rose from those who had not taken shares in the enterprise. Both in the company[Pg 30] and out of it there was nothing but discontent. None were worse pleased than the two Jesuits Carheil and Marest, who saw their flocks at Michilimackinac, both Hurons and Ottawas, lured away to a new home at Detroit. Cadillac took a peculiar satisfaction in depriving Carheil of his converts, and in 1703 we find him writing to the minister Ponchartrain, that only twenty-five Hurons are left at Michilimackinac; and "I hope," he adds, "that in the autumn I shall pluck this last feather from his wing; and I am convinced that this obstinate priest will die in his parish without one parishioner to bury him."[36] If the Indians came to Detroit, the French would not come. Cadillac had asked for five or six families as the modest beginning of a settlement; but not one had appeared. The Indians, too, were angry because the company asked too much for its goods; while the company complained that a forbidden trade, fatal to its interests, went on through all the region of the upper lakes. It was easy to ordain a monopoly, but impossible to enforce it. The prospects of the new establishment were deplorable; and Cadillac lost no time in presenting his views of the situation to the court. "Detroit is good, or it is bad," he writes to[Pg 31] Ponchartrain. "If it is good, it ought to be sustained, without allowing the people of Canada to deliberate any more about it. If it is bad, the court ought to make up its mind concerning it as soon as may be. I have said what I think. I have explained the situation. You have felt the need of Detroit, and its utility for the glory of God, the progress of religion, and the good of the colony. Nothing is left me to do but to imitate the governor of the Holy City,—take water, and wash my hands of it." His aim now appears. He says that if Detroit were made a separate government, and he were put at the head of it, its prospects would improve. "You may well believe that the company cares for nothing but to make a profit out of it. It only wants to have a storehouse and clerks; no officers, no troops, no inhabitants. Take this business in hand, Monseigneur, and I promise that in two years your Detroit shall be established of itself." He then informs the minister that as the company complain of losing money, he has told them that if they will make over their rights to him, he will pay them back all their past outlays. "I promise you," he informs Ponchartrain, "that if they accept my proposal and you approve it, I will make our Detroit flourish. Judge if it is agreeable to me to have to answer for my actions to five or six merchants [the directors of the company], who not long ago were blacking their masters' boots." He is scarcely more reserved as to the Jesuits. "I do what I can to make them my[Pg 32] friends, but, impiety apart, one had better sin against God than against them; for in that case one gets one's pardon, whereas in the other the offence is never forgiven in this world, and perhaps never would be in the other, if their credit were as great there as it is here."[37] The letters of Cadillac to the court are unique. No governor of New France, not even the audacious Frontenac, ever wrote to a minister of Louis XIV. with such off-hand freedom of language as this singular personage,—a mere captain in the colony troops; and to a more stable and balanced character it would have been impossible. Cadillac's proposal was accepted. The company was required to abandon Detroit to him on his paying them the expenses they had incurred. Their monopoly was transferred to him; but as far as concerned beaver-skins, his trade was limited to twenty thousand francs a year. The governor was ordered to give him as many soldiers as he might want, permit as many persons to settle at Detroit as might choose to do so, and provide missionaries.[38] The minister exhorted him to quarrel no more with the Jesuits, or anybody else, to banish blasphemy and[Pg 33] bad morals from the post, and not to offend the Five Nations. The promised era of prosperity did not come. Detroit lingered on in a weak and troubled infancy, disturbed, as we shall see, by startling incidents. Its occupation by the French produced a noteworthy result. The Five Nations, filled with jealousy and alarm, appealed to the King of England for protection, and, the better to insure it, conveyed the whole country from Lake Ontario northward to Lake Superior, and westward as far as Chicago, "unto our souveraigne Lord King William the Third" and his heirs and successors forever. This territory is described in the deed as being about eight hundred miles long and four hundred wide, and was claimed by the Five Nations as theirs by right of conquest.[39] It of course included Detroit itself. The conveyance was drawn by the English authorities at Albany in a form to suit their purposes, and included terms of subjection and sovereignty which the signers could understand but imperfectly, if at all. The Five Nations gave away their land to no purpose. The French remained in undisturbed possession of Detroit. The English made no attempt to enforce their title, but they put the deed on file, and used it long after as the base of their claim to the region of the Lakes. FOOTNOTES: [15] See "Old Régime in Canada," 383. [16] Relation de La Mothe-Cadillac, in Margry, v. 75. [17] He wrote his name as above. It is often written La Motte, which has the advantage of conveying the pronunciation unequivocally to an unaccustomed English ear. La Mothe-Cadillac came of a good family of Languedoc. His father, Jean de La Mothe, seigneur de Cadillac et de Launay, or Laumet, was a counsellor in the Parliament of Toulouse. The date of young Cadillac's birth is uncertain. The register of his marriage places it in 1661, and that of his death in 1657. Another record, cited by Farmer in his History of Detroit, makes it 1658. In 1703 he himself declared that he was forty-seven years old. After serving as lieutenant in the regiment of Clairembault, he went to Canada about the year 1683. He became skilled in managing Indians, made himself well acquainted with the coasts of New England, and strongly urged an attack by sea on New York and Boston, as the only sure means of securing French ascendency. He was always in opposition to the clerical party. [18] See La Mothe-Cadillac à ——, 3 Ao?t, 1695. [19] La Mothe-Cadillac à ——, 3 Ao?t, 1695. [20] "Il me dit que je me donnois des airs qui ne m'appartenoient pas, en me portant le poing au nez. Je vous avoue, Monsieur, que je pensai oublier qu'il étoit prêtre, et que je vis le moment où j'allois luy démonter la machoire; mais, Dieu merci, je me contentai de le prendre par le bras et de le pousser dehors, avec ordre de n'y plus rentrer." Margry, v. (author's edition), Introduction, civ. This introduction, with other editorial matter, is omitted in the edition of M. Margry's valuable collection, printed under a vote of the American Congress. [21] See "Count Frontenac," 440. [22] Robert Livingston urged the occupation of Detroit as early as 1700. N. Y. Col. Docs., iv. 650. [23] Denonville à Du Lhut, 6 Juin, 1686. Count Frontenac, 133. [24] "Sans se destourner et sans s'arrester au bruit des jappereaux qui crient après luy."—Mémoire de La Mothe-Cadillac adressé au Comte de Maurepas. [25] Mémoire adressé au Comte de Maurepas, in Margry, v. 138. [26] La Mothe-Cadillac, Rapport au Ministre, 1700, in Margry, v. 157. [27] Rapport au Ministre, 1700. [28] Cadillac's report of this interview is given in Sheldon, Early History of Michigan, 85-91. [29] La Mothe-Cadillac à un premier commis, 18 Octobre, 1700, in Margry, v. 166. [30] Callières au Ministre, 4 Octobre, 1701. Autre lettre du même, sans date, in Margry, v. 187, 190. [31] Callières et Champigny au Ministre, sans date. [32] Relation du Destroit (by the Jesuit who accompanied the expedition). [33] Description de la Rivière du Détroit, jointe à la lettre de MM. de Callières et de Champigny, 8 Octobre, 1701. [34] Callières au Ministre, 9 Novembre, 1700. [35] Traité fait avec la Compagnie de la Colonie de Canada, 31 Octobre, 1701. [36] Lamothe-Cadillac à Ponchartrain, 31 Aoust, 1703 (Margry, v. 301). On Cadillac's relations with the Jesuits, see Conseils tenus par Lamothe-Cadillac avec les Sauvages (Margry, v. 253-300); also a curious collection of Jesuit letters sent by Cadillac to the minister, with copious annotations of his own. He excepts from his strictures Father Engelran, who, he says, incurred the ill-will of the other Jesuits by favoring the establishment of Detroit, and he also has a word of commendation for Father Germain. [37] La Mothe-Cadillac à Ponchartrain, 31 Ao?t, 1703. "Toute impiété à part, il vaudroit mieux pescher contre Dieu que contre eux, parce que d'un costé on en re?oit son pardon, et de l'autre, l'offense, mesme prétendue, n'est jamais remise dans ce monde, et ne le seroit peut-estre jamais dans l'autre, si leur crédit y estoit aussi grand qu'il est dans ce pays." [38] Ponchartrain à La Mothe-Cadillac, 14 Juin, 1704. [39] Deed from the Five Nations to the King of their Beaver Hunting Ground, in N. Y. Col. Docs., iv. 908. It is signed by the totems of sachems of all the Nations. CHAPTER III. 1703-1713. QUEEN ANNE'S WAR. The Forest of Maine.—A Treacherous Peace.—A Frontier Village.—Wells and its People.—Attack upon it.—Border Ravages.—Beaubassin's War-party.—The "Woful Decade."—A Wedding Feast.—A Captive Bridegroom. [Pg 34]For untold ages Maine had been one unbroken forest, and it was so still. Only along the rocky seaboard or on the lower waters of one or two great rivers a few rough settlements had gnawed slight indentations into this wilderness of woods; and a little farther inland some dismal clearing around a blockhouse or stockade let in the sunlight to a soil that had lain in shadow time out of mind. This waste of savage vegetation survives, in some part, to this day, with the same prodigality of vital force, the same struggle for existence and mutual havoc that mark all organized beings, from men to mushrooms. Young seedlings in millions spring every summer from the black mould, rich with the decay of those that had preceded them, crowding, choking, and[Pg 35] killing one another, perishing by their very abundance,—all but a scattered few, stronger than the rest, or more fortunate in position, which survive by blighting those about them. They in turn, as they grow, interlock their boughs, and repeat in a season or two the same process of mutual suffocation. The forest is full of lean saplings dead or dying with vainly stretching towards the light. Not one infant tree in a thousand lives to maturity; yet these survivors form an innumerable host, pressed together in struggling confusion, squeezed out of symmetry and robbed of normal development, as men are said to be in the level sameness of democratic society. Seen from above, their mingled tops spread in a sea of verdure basking in light; seen from below, all is shadow, through which spots of timid sunshine steal down among legions of lank, mossy trunks, toadstools and rank ferns, protruding roots, matted bushes, and rotting carcasses of fallen trees. A generation ago one might find here and there the rugged trunk of some great pine lifting its verdant spire above the undistinguished myriads of the forest. The woods of Maine had their aristocracy; but the axe of the woodman has laid them low, and these lords of the wilderness are seen no more. The life and light of this grim solitude were in its countless streams and lakes, from little brooks stealing clear and cold under the alders, full of the small fry of trout, to the mighty arteries of the Penobscot and the Kennebec; from the great reservoir of[Pg 36] Moosehead to a thousand nameless ponds shining in the hollow places of the forest. It had and still has its beast of prey,—wolves, savage, cowardly, and mean; bears, gentle and mild compared to their grisly relatives of the Far West, vegetarians when they can do no better, and not without something grotesque and quaint in manners and behavior; sometimes, though rarely, the strong and sullen wolverine; frequently the lynx; and now and then the fierce and agile cougar. The human denizens of this wilderness were no less fierce, and far more dangerous. These were the various tribes and sub-tribes of the Abenakis, whose villages were on the Saco, the Kennebec, the Penobscot, and the other great watercourses. Most of them had been converted by the Jesuits, and, as we have seen already, some had been persuaded to remove to Canada, like the converted Iroquois of Caughnawaga.[40] The rest remained in their native haunts, where, under the direction of their missionaries, they could be used to keep the English settlements in check. We know how busily they plied their tomahawks in William and Mary's War, and what havoc they made among the scattered settlements of the border.[41] Another war with France was declared on the fourth of May, 1702, on which the Abenakis again assumed a threatening attitude. In June of the next year Dudley, governor of Massachusetts, called the chiefs of the various bands to a council at Casco. Here[Pg 37] presently appeared the Norridgewocks from the Kennebec, the Penobscots and Androscoggins from the rivers that bear their names, the Penacooks from the Merrimac, and the Pequawkets from the Saco, all well armed, and daubed with ceremonial paint. The principal among them, gathered under a large tent, were addressed by Dudley in a conciliatory speech. Their orator replied that they wanted nothing but peace, and that their thoughts were as far from war as the sun was from the earth,—words which they duly confirmed by a belt of wampum.[42] Presents were distributed among them and received with apparent satisfaction, while two of their principal chiefs, known as Captain Samuel and Captain Bomazeen, declared that several French missionaries had lately come among them to excite them against the English, but that they were "firm as mountains," and would remain so "as long as the sun and moon endured." They ended the meeting with dancing, singing, and whoops of joy, followed by a volley of musketry, answered by another from the English. It was discovered, however, that the Indians had[Pg 38] loaded their guns with ball, intending, as the English believed, to murder Dudley and his attendants if they could have done so without danger to their chiefs, whom the governor had prudently kept about him. It was afterwards found, if we may believe a highly respectable member of the party, that two hundred French and Indians were on their way, "resolved to seize the governor, council, and gentlemen, and then to sacrifice the inhabitants at pleasure;" but when they arrived, the English officials had been gone three days.[43] The French governor, Vaudreuil, says that about this time some of the Abenakis were killed or maltreated by Englishmen. It may have been so: desperadoes, drunk or sober, were not rare along the frontier; but Vaudreuil gives no particulars, and the only English outrage that appears on record at the time was the act of a gang of vagabonds who plundered the house of the younger Saint-Castin, where the town of Castine now stands. He was Abenaki by his mother; but he was absent when the attack took place, and the marauders seem to have shed no blood. Nevertheless, within six weeks after[Pg 39] the Treaty of Casco, every unprotected farmhouse in Maine was in a blaze. The settlements of Maine, confined to the southwestern corner of what is now the State of Maine, extended along the coast in a feeble and broken line from Kittery to Casco. Ten years of murderous warfare had almost ruined them. East of the village of Wells little was left except one or two forts and the so-called "garrisons," which were private houses pierced with loopholes and having an upper story projecting over the lower, so that the defenders could fire down on assailants battering the door or piling fagots against the walls. A few were fenced with palisades, as was the case with the house of Joseph Storer at the east end of Wells, where an overwhelming force of French and Indians had been gallantly repulsed in the summer of 1692.[44] These fortified houses were, however, very rarely attacked, except by surprise and treachery. In case of alarm such of the inhabitants as found time took refuge in them with their families, and left their dwellings to the flames; for the first thought of the settler was to put his women and children beyond reach of the scalping-knife. There were several of these asylums in different parts of Wells; and without them the place must have been abandoned. In the little settlement of York, farther westward, there were five of them, which had saved a part of the inhabitants when the rest were surprised and massacred. [Pg 40]Wells was a long, straggling settlement, consisting at the beginning of William and Mary's War of about eighty houses and log-cabins,[45] strung at intervals along the north side of the rough track, known as the King's Road, which ran parallel to the sea. Behind the houses were rude, half-cleared pastures, and behind these again, the primeval forest. The cultivated land was on the south side of the road; in front of the houses, and beyond it, spread great salt-marshes, bordering the sea and haunted by innumerable game-birds. The settlements of Maine were a dependency of Massachusetts,—a position that did not please their inhabitants, but which they accepted because they needed the help of their Puritan neighbors, from whom they differed widely both in their qualities and in their faults. The Indian wars that checked their growth had kept them in a condition more than half barbarous. They were a hard-working and hard-drinking race; for though tea and coffee were scarcely known, the land flowed with New England rum, which was ranked among the necessaries of life. The better sort could read and write in a bungling way; but many were wholly illiterate, and it was not till long after Queen Anne's War that the remoter settlements established schools, taught by poor students from Harvard or less competent instructors, and held at first in private houses or under sheds. The church at Wells had been burned by the Indians; and[Pg 41] though the settlers were beggared by the war, they voted in town-meeting to build another. The new temple, begun in 1699, was a plain wooden structure thirty feet square. For want of money the windows long remained unglazed, the walls without plaster, and the floor without seats; yet services were duly held here under direction of the minister, Samuel Emery, to whom they paid £45 a year, half in provincial currency, and half in farm-produce and fire-wood. In spite of these efforts to maintain public worship, they were far from being a religious community; nor were they a peaceful one. Gossip and scandal ran riot; social jealousies abounded; and under what seemed entire democratic equality, the lazy, drunken, and shiftless envied the industrious and thrifty. Wells was infested, moreover, by several "frightfully turbulent women," as the chronicle styles them, from whose rabid tongues the minister himself did not always escape; and once, in its earlier days, the town had been indicted for not providing a ducking-stool to correct these breeders of discord. Judicial officers were sometimes informally chosen by popular vote, and sometimes appointed by the governor of Massachusetts from among the inhabitants. As they knew no law, they gave judgment according to their own ideas of justice, and their sentences were oftener wanting in wisdom than in severity. Until after 1700 the county courts met by beat of drum at some of the primitive inns or taverns with which the frontier abounded. [Pg 42]At Wells and other outlying and endangered hamlets life was still exceedingly rude. The log-cabins of the least thrifty were no better furnished than Indian wigwams. The house of Edmond Littlefield, reputed the richest man in Wells, consisted of two bedrooms and a kitchen, which last served a great variety of uses, and was supplied with a table, a pewter pot, a frying-pan, and a skillet; but no chairs, cups, saucers, knives, forks, or spoons. In each of the two bedrooms there was a bed, a blanket, and a chest. Another village notable—Ensign John Barrett—was better provided, being the possessor of two beds, two chests and a box, four pewter dishes, four earthen pots, two iron pots, seven trays, two buckets, some pieces of wooden-ware, a skillet, and a frying-pan. In the inventory of the patriarchal Francis Littlefield, who died in 1712, we find the exceptional items of one looking-glass, two old chairs, and two old books. Such of the family as had no bed slept on hay or straw, and no provision for the toilet is recorded.[46] On the tenth of August, 1703, these rugged borderers were about their usual callings, unconscious of danger,—the women at their household work, the men in the fields or on the more distant salt-marshes. The wife of Thomas Wells had reached the time of her confinement, and her husband had gone for a[Pg 43] nurse. Some miles east of Wells's cabin lived Stephen Harding,—hunter, blacksmith, and tavern-keeper, a sturdy, good-natured man, who loved the woods, and whose frequent hunting trips sometimes led him nearly to the White Mountains. Distant gunshots were heard from the westward, and his quick eye presently discovered Indians approaching, on which he told his frightened wife to go with their infant to a certain oak-tree beyond the creek while he waited to learn whether the strangers were friends or foes. That morning several parties of Indians had stolen out of the dismal woods behind the houses and farms of Wells, and approached different dwellings of the far-extended settlement at about the same time. They entered the cabin of Thomas Wells, where his wife lay in the pains of childbirth, and murdered her and her two small children. At the same time they killed Joseph Sayer, a neighbor of Wells, with all his family. Meanwhile Stephen Harding, having sent his wife and child to a safe distance, returned to his blacksmith's shop, and, seeing nobody, gave a defiant whoop; on which four Indians sprang at him from the bushes. He escaped through a back-door of the shop, eluded his pursuers, and found his wife and child in a cornfield, where the woman had fainted with fright. They spent the night in the woods, and on the next day, after a circuit of nine miles, reached the palisaded house of Joseph Storer. [Pg 44]They found the inmates in distress and agitation. Storer's daughter Mary, a girl of eighteen, was missing. The Indians had caught her, and afterwards carried her prisoner to Canada. Samuel Hill and his family were captured, and the younger children butchered. But it is useless to record the names and fate of the sufferers. Thirty-nine in all, chiefly women and children, were killed or carried off, and then the Indians disappeared as quickly and silently as they had come, leaving many of the houses in flames. This raid upon Wells was only part of a combined attack on all the settlements from that place to Casco. Those eastward of Wells had been, as we have seen, abandoned in the last war, excepting the forts and fortified houses; but the inhabitants, reassured, no doubt, by the Treaty of Casco, had begun to return. On this same day, the tenth of August, they were startled from their security. A band of Indians mixed with Frenchmen fell upon the settlements about the stone fort near the Falls of the Saco, killed eleven persons, captured twenty-four, and vainly attacked the fort itself. Others surprised the settlers at a place called Spurwink, and killed or captured twenty-two. Others, again, destroyed the huts of the fishermen at Cape Porpoise, and attacked the fortified house at Winter Harbor, the inmates of which, after a brave resistance, were forced to capitulate. The settlers at Scarborough were also in a fortified house, where they made a long and obstinate[Pg 45] defence till help at last arrived. Nine families were settled at Purpooduck Point, near the present city of Portland. They had no place of refuge, and the men being, no doubt, fishermen, were all absent, when the Indians burst into the hamlet, butchered twenty-five women and children, and carried off eight. The fort at Casco, or Falmouth, was held by Major March, with thirty-six men. He had no thought of danger, when three well-known chiefs from Norridgewock appeared with a white flag, and asked for an interview. As they seemed to be alone and unarmed, he went to meet them, followed by two or three soldiers and accompanied by two old men named Phippeny and Kent, inhabitants of the place. They had hardly reached the spot when the three chiefs drew hatchets from under a kind of mantle which they wore and sprang upon them, while other Indians, ambushed near by, leaped up and joined in the attack. The two old men were killed at once; but March, who was noted for strength and agility, wrenched a hatchet from one of his assailants, and kept them all at bay till Sergeant Hook came to his aid with a file of men and drove them off. They soon reappeared, burned the deserted cabins in the neighborhood, and beset the garrison in numbers that continually increased, till in a few days the entire force that had been busied in ravaging the scattered settlements was gathered around the place. It consisted of about five hundred Indians of several[Pg 46] tribes, and a few Frenchmen under an officer named Beaubassin. Being elated with past successes, they laid siege to the fort, sheltering themselves under a steep bank by the water-side and burrowing their way towards the rampart. March could not dislodge them, and they continued their approaches till the third day, when Captain Southack, with the Massachusetts armed vessel known as the "Province Galley," sailed into the harbor, recaptured three small vessels that the Indians had taken along the coast, and destroyed a great number of their canoes, on which they gave up their enterprise and disappeared.[47] Such was the beginning of Queen Anne's War. These attacks were due less to the Abenakis than to the French who set them on. "Monsieur de Vaudreuil," writes the Jesuit historian Charlevoix, "formed a party of these savages, to whom he joined some Frenchmen under the direction of the Sieur de Beaubassin, when they effected some ravages of no great consequence; they killed, however, about three hundred men." This last statement is doubly incorrect. The whole number of persons killed and carried off during the August attacks did not much[Pg 47] exceed one hundred and sixty;[48] and these were of both sexes and all ages, from octogenarians to newborn infants. The able-bodied men among them were few, as most of the attacks were made upon unprotected houses in the absence of the head of the family; and the only fortified place captured was the garrison-house at Winter Harbor, which surrendered on terms of capitulation. The instruments of this ignoble warfare and the revolting atrocities that accompanied it were all, or nearly all, converted Indians of the missions. Charlevoix has no word of disapproval for it, and seems to regard its partial success as a gratifying one so far as it went. One of the objects was, no doubt, to check the progress of the English settlements; but, pursues Charlevoix, "the essential point was to commit the Abenakis in such a manner that they could not draw back."[49] This object was constantly kept in view. The French claimed at this time that the territory of Acadia reached as far westward as the Kennebec, which therefore formed, in their view, the boundary between the rival nations, and they trusted in the Abenakis to defend this assumed line of demarcation. But the Abenakis sorely needed English guns, knives, hatchets, and kettles, and nothing but the utmost vigilance could prevent them from coming to terms with those who could supply their necessities. Hence[Pg 48] the policy of the French authorities on the frontier of New England was the opposite of their policy on the frontier of New York. They left the latter undisturbed, lest by attacking the Dutch and English settlers they should stir up the Five Nations to attack Canada; while, on the other hand, they constantly spurred the Abenakis against New England, in order to avert the dreaded event of their making peace with her. The attack on Wells, Casco, and the intervening settlements was followed by murders and depredations that lasted through the autumn and extended along two hundred miles of frontier. Thirty Indians attacked the village of Hampton, killed the Widow Mussey, a famous Quakeress, and then fled to escape pursuit. At Black Point nineteen men going to their work in the meadows were ambushed by two hundred Indians, and all but one were shot or captured. The fort was next attacked. It was garrisoned by eight men under Lieutenant Wyatt, who stood their ground for some time, and then escaped by means of a sloop in the harbor. At York the wife and children of Arthur Brandon were killed, and the Widow Parsons and her daughter carried off. At Berwick the Indians attacked the fortified house of Andrew Neal, but were repulsed with the loss of nine killed and many wounded, for which they revenged themselves by burning alive Joseph Ring, a prisoner whom they had taken. Early in February a small party of them hovered about the fortified house of[Pg 49] Joseph Bradley at Haverhill, till, seeing the gate open and nobody on the watch, they rushed in. The woman of the house was boiling soap, and in her desperation she snatched up the kettle and threw the contents over them with such effect that one of them, it is said, was scalded to death. The man who should have been on the watch was killed, and several persons were captured, including the woman. It was the second time that she had been a prisoner in Indian hands. Half starved and bearing a heavy load, she followed her captors in their hasty retreat towards Canada. After a time she was safely delivered of an infant in the midst of the winter forest; but the child pined for want of sustenance, and the Indians hastened its death by throwing hot coals into its mouth when it cried. The astonishing vitality of the woman carried her to the end of the frightful journey. A Frenchman bought her from the Indians, and she was finally ransomed by her husband. By far the most dangerous and harassing attacks were those of small parties skulking under the edge of the forest, or lying hidden for days together, watching their opportunity to murder unawares, and vanishing when they had done so. Against such an enemy there was no defence. The Massachusetts government sent a troop of horse to Portsmouth, and another to Wells. These had the advantage of rapid movement in case of alarm along the roads and forest-paths from settlement to settlement; but once in the woods, their horses were worse than useless, and they[Pg 50] could only fight on foot. Fighting, however, was rarely possible; for on reaching the scene of action they found nothing but mangled corpses and burning houses. The best defence was to take the offensive. In September Governor Dudley sent three hundred and sixty men to the upper Saco, the haunt of the Pequawket tribe; but the place was deserted. Major, now Colonel, March soon after repeated the attempt, killing six Indians, and capturing as many more. The General Court offered £40 for every Indian scalp, and one Captain Tyng, in consequence, surprised an Indian village in midwinter and brought back five of these disgusting trophies. In the spring of 1704 word came from Albany that a band of French Indians had built a fort and planted corn at Coos meadows, high up the river Connecticut. On this, one Caleb Lyman with five friendly Indians, probably Mohegans, set out from Northampton, and after a long march through the forest, surprised, under cover of a thunderstorm, a wigwam containing nine warriors,—bound, no doubt, against the frontier. They killed seven of them; and this was all that was done at present in the way of reprisal or prevention.[50] The murders and burnings along the borders were destined to continue with little variety and little interruption during ten years. It was a repetition of what the pedantic Cotton Mather calls Decennium luctuosum, or the "woful decade" of William and[Pg 51] Mary's War. The wonder is that the outlying settlements were not abandoned. These ghastly, insidious, and ever-present dangers demanded a more obstinate courage than the hottest battle in the open field. One curious frontier incident may be mentioned here, though it did not happen till towards the end of the war. In spite of poverty, danger, and tribulation, marrying and giving in marriage did not cease among the sturdy borderers; and on a day in September there was a notable wedding feast at the palisaded house of John Wheelwright, one of the chief men of Wells. Elisha Plaisted was to espouse Wheelwright's daughter Hannah, and many guests were assembled, some from Portsmouth, and even beyond it. Probably most of them came in sailboats; for the way by land was full of peril, especially on the road from York, which ran through dense woods, where Indians often waylaid the traveller. The bridegroom's father was present with the rest. It was a concourse of men in homespun, and women and girls in such improvised finery as their poor resources could supply; possibly, in default of better, some wore nightgowns, more or less disguised, over their daily dress, as happened on similar occasions half a century later among the frontiersmen of West Virginia.[51] After an evening of rough merriment and gymnastic dancing, the guests lay down to sleep under the roof of their host or in adjacent barns and sheds. When morning came, and they were[Pg 52] preparing to depart, it was found that two horses were missing; and not doubting that they had strayed away, three young men—Sergeant Tucker, Joshua Downing, and Isaac Cole—went to find them. In a few minutes several gunshots were heard. The three young men did not return. Downing and Cole were killed, and Tucker was wounded and made prisoner. Believing that, as usual, the attack came from some small scalping-party, Elisha Plaisted and eight or ten more threw themselves on the horses that stood saddled before the house, and galloped across the fields in the direction of the firing; while others ran to cut off the enemy's retreat. A volley was presently heard, and several of the party were seen running back towards the house. Elisha Plaisted and his companions had fallen into an ambuscade of two hundred Indians. One or more of them were shot, and the unfortunate bridegroom was captured. The distress of his young wife, who was but eighteen, may be imagined. Two companies of armed men in the pay of Massachusetts were then in Wells, and some of them had come to the wedding. Seventy marksmen went to meet the Indians, who ensconced themselves in the edge of the forest, whence they could not be dislodged. There was some desultory firing, and one of the combatants was killed on each side, after which the whites gave up the attack, and Lieutenant Banks went forward with a flag of truce, in the hope[Pg 53] of ransoming the prisoners. He was met by six chiefs, among whom were two noted Indians of his acquaintance, Bomazeen and Captain Nathaniel. They well knew that the living Plaisted was worth more than his scalp; and though they would not come to terms at once, they promised to meet the English at Richmond's Island in a few days and give up both him and Tucker on payment of a sufficient ransom. The flag of truce was respected, and Banks came back safe, bringing a hasty note to the elder Plaisted from his captive son. This note now lies before me, and it runs thus, in the dutiful formality of the olden time:— Sir,—I am in the hands of a great many Indians, with which there is six captains. They say that what they will have for me is 50 pounds, and thirty pounds for Tucker, my fellow prisoner, in good goods, as broadcloth, some provisions, some tobacco pipes, Pomisstone [pumice-stone], stockings, and a little of all things. If you will, come to Richmond's Island in 5 days at farthest, for here is 200 Indians, and they belong to Canada. If you do not come in 5 days, you will not see me, for Captain Nathaniel the Indian will not stay no longer, for the Canada Indians is not willing for to sell me. Pray, Sir, don't fail, for they have given me one day, for the days were but 4 at first. Give my kind love to my dear wife. This from your dutiful son till death, Elisha Plaisted. The alarm being spread and a sufficient number of men mustered, they set out to attack the enemy[Pg 54] and recover the prisoners by force; but not an Indian could be found. Bomazeen and Captain Nathaniel were true to the rendezvous; in due time Elisha Plaisted was ransomed and restored to his bride.[52] FOOTNOTES: [40] Count Frontenac, 231. [41] Ibid., chaps, xi. xvi. xvii. [42] Penhallow, History of the Wars of New England with the Eastern Indians, 16 (ed. 1859). Penhallow was present at the council. In Judge Sewall's clumsy abstract of the proceedings (Diary of Sewall, ii. 85) the Indians are represented as professing neutrality. The governor and intendant of Canada write that the Abenakis had begun a treaty of neutrality with the English, but that as "les Jésuites observoient les sauvages, le traité ne fut pas conclu." They add that Rale, Jesuit missionary at Norridgewock, informs them that his Indians were ready to lift the hatchet against the English. Vaudreuil et Beauharnois au Ministre, 1703. [43] Penhallow, 17, 18 (ed. 1859). There was a previous meeting of conciliation between the English and the Abenakis in 1702. The Jesuit Bigot says that the Indians assured him that they had scornfully repelled the overtures of the English, and told them that they would always stand fast by the French. (Relation des Abenakis, 1702.) This is not likely. The Indians probably lied both to the Jesuit and to the English, telling to each what they knew would be most acceptable. [44] See "Count Frontenac," 371. [45] Bourne, History of Wells and Kennebunk. [46] The above particulars are drawn from the History of Wells and Kennebunk, by the late Edward E. Bourne, of Wells,—a work of admirable thoroughness, fidelity, and candor. [47] On these attacks on the frontier of Maine, Penhallow, who well knew the country and the people, is the best authority. Niles, in his Indian and French Wars, copies him without acknowledgment, but not without blunders. As regards the attack on Wells, what particulars we have are mainly due to the research of the indefatigable Bourne. Compare Belknap, i. 330; Folsom, History of Saco and Biddeford, 198; Coll. Maine Hist. Soc., iii. 140, 348; Williamson, History of Maine, ii. 42. Beaubassin is called "Bobasser" in most of the English accounts. [48] The careful and well-informed Belknap puts it at only 130. History of New Hampshire, i. 331. [49] Charlevoix, ii. 289, 290 (quarto edition). [50] Penhallow, Wars of New England with the Eastern Indians. [51] Doddridge, Notes on Western Virginia and Pennsylvania. [52] On this affair, see the note of Elisha Plaisted in Massachusetts Archives; Richard Waldron to Governor Dudley, Portsmouth, 19 September, 1712; Bourne, Wells and Kennebunk, 278. CHAPTER IV. 1704-1740. DEERFIELD. Hertel de Rouville.—A Frontier Village.—Rev. John Williams.—The Surprise.—Defence of the Stebbins House.—Attempted Rescue.—The Meadow Fight.—The Captives.—The Northward March.—Mrs. Williams killed.—The Minister's Journey.—Kindness of Canadians.—A Stubborn Heretic.—Eunice Williams.—Converted Captives.—John Sheldon's Mission.—Exchange of Prisoners.—An English Squaw.—The Gill Family [Pg 55]About midwinter the governor of Canada sent another large war-party against the New England border. The object of attack was an unoffending hamlet, that from its position could never be a menace to the French, and the destruction of which could profit them nothing. The aim of the enterprise was not military, but political. "I have sent no war-party towards Albany," writes Vaudreuil, "because we must do nothing that might cause a rupture between us and the Iroquois; but we must keep things astir in the direction of Boston, or else the Abenakis will declare for the English." In short, the object was fully to commit these savages to hostility[Pg 56] against New England, and convince them at the same time that the French would back their quarrel.[53] The party consisted, according to French accounts, of fifty Canadians and two hundred Abenakis and Caughnawagas,—the latter of whom, while trading constantly with Albany, were rarely averse to a raid against Massachusetts or New Hampshire.[54] The command was given to the younger Hertel de Rouville, who was accompanied by four of his brothers. They began their march in the depth of winter, journeyed nearly three hundred miles on snow-shoes through the forest, and approached their destination on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of February, 1704. It was the village of Deerfield, which then formed the extreme northwestern frontier of Massachusetts,—its feeble neighbor, the infant settlement of Northfield, a little higher up the Connecticut, having been abandoned during the last war. Rouville halted his followers at a place now called Petty's Plain, two miles from the village; and here, under the shelter of a pine forest, they all lay hidden, shivering with cold,—for they dared not make fires,—and hungry as wolves, for their provisions were spent. Though their numbers, by the lowest account, were nearly[Pg 57] equal to the whole population of Deerfield,—men, women, and children,—they had no thought of an open attack, but trusted to darkness and surprise for an easy victory. Deerfield stood on a plateau above the river meadows, and the houses—forty-one in all—were chiefly along the road towards the villages of Hadley and Hatfield, a few miles distant. In the middle of the place, on a rising ground called Meeting-house Hill, was a small square wooden meeting-house. This, with about fifteen private houses, besides barns and sheds, was enclosed by a fence of palisades eight feet high, flanked by "mounts," or blockhouses, at two or more of the corners. The four sides of this palisaded enclosure, which was called the fort, measured in all no less than two hundred and two rods, and within it lived some of the principal inhabitants of the village, of which it formed the centre or citadel. Chief among its inmates was John Williams, the minister, a man of character and education, who, after graduating at Harvard, had come to Deerfield when it was still suffering under the ruinous effects of King Philip's War, and entered on his ministry with a salary of sixty pounds in depreciated New England currency, payable, not in money, but in wheat, Indian-corn, and pork.[55] His parishioners built him a house, he married, and had now eight children, one of whom was absent with friends at[Pg 58] Hadley.[56] His next neighbor was Benoni Stebbins, sergeant in the county militia, who lived a few rods from the meeting-house. About fifty yards distant, and near the northwest angle of the enclosure, stood the house of Ensign John Sheldon, a framed building, one of the largest in the village, and, like that of Stebbins, made bullet-proof by a layer of bricks between the outer and inner sheathing, while its small windows and its projecting upper story also helped to make it defensible. The space enclosed by the palisade, though much too large for effective defence, served in time of alarm as an asylum for the inhabitants outside, whose houses were scattered,—some on the north towards the hidden enemy, and some on the south towards Hadley and Hatfield. Among those on the south side was that of the militia captain, Jonathan Wells, which had a palisade of its own, and, like the so-called fort, served as an asylum for the neighbors. These private fortified houses were sometimes built by the owners alone, though more often they were the joint work of the owners and of the inhabitants, to whose safety they contributed. The palisade fence that enclosed the central part of the village was made under a vote of the town, each inhabitant being required to do his share; and as they were greatly impoverished by the last war, the General Court of the province remitted for a time a part of[Pg 59] their taxes in consideration of a work which aided the general defence.[57] Down to the Peace of Ryswick the neighborhood had been constantly infested by scalping-parties, and once the village had been attacked by a considerable force of French and Indians, who were beaten off. Of late there had been warnings of fresh disturbance. Lord Cornbury, governor of New York, wrote that he had heard through spies that Deerfield was again to be attacked, and a message to the same effect came from Peter Schuyler, who had received intimations of the danger from Mohawks lately on a visit to their Caughnawaga relatives. During the autumn the alarm was so great that the people took refuge within the palisades, and the houses of the enclosure were crowded with them; but the panic had now subsided, and many, though not all, had returned to their homes. They were reassured by the presence of twenty volunteers from the villages below, whom, on application from the minister, Williams, the General Court had sent as a garrison to Deerfield, where they were lodged in the houses of the villagers. On the night when Hertel de Rouville and his band lay hidden among the pines there were in all the settlement a little less than three hundred souls, of whom two hundred and sixty-eight were inhabitants, twenty were yeomen soldiers of the garrison, two were visitors[Pg 60] from Hatfield, and three were negro slaves. They were of all ages,—from the Widow Allison, in her eighty-fifth year, to the infant son of Deacon French, aged four weeks.[58] Heavy snows had lately fallen and buried the clearings, the meadow, and the frozen river to the depth of full three feet. On the northwestern side the drifts were piled nearly to the top of the palisade fence, so that it was no longer an obstruction to an active enemy. As the afternoon waned, the sights and sounds of the little border hamlet were, no doubt, like those of any other rustic New England village at the end of a winter day,—an ox-sledge creaking on the frosty snow as it brought in the last load of firewood, boys in homespun snowballing one another in the village street, farmers feeding their horses and cattle in the barns, a matron drawing a pail of water with the help of one of those long well-sweeps still used in some remote districts, or a girl bringing a pail of milk from the cow-shed. In the houses, where one room served as kitchen, dining-room, and parlor, the housewife cooked the evening meal, children sat at their bowls of mush and milk, and the men of the family, their day's work over, gathered about the fire, while perhaps some village coquette sat in[Pg 61] the corner with fingers busy at the spinning-wheel, and ears intent on the stammered wooings of her rustic lover. Deerfield kept early hours, and it is likely that by nine o'clock all were in their beds. There was a patrol inside the palisade, but there was little discipline among these extemporized soldiers; the watchers grew careless as the frosty night went on; and it is said that towards morning they, like the villagers, betook themselves to their beds. Rouville and his men, savage with hunger, lay shivering under the pines till about two hours before dawn; then, leaving their packs and their snow-shoes behind, they moved cautiously towards their prey. There was a crust on the snow strong enough to bear their weight, though not to prevent a rustling noise as it crunched under the feet of so many men. It is said that from time to time Rouville commanded a halt, in order that the sentinels, if such there were, might mistake the distant sound for rising and falling gusts of wind. In any case, no alarm was given till they had mounted the palisade and dropped silently into the unconscious village. Then with one accord they screeched the war-whoop, and assailed the doors of the houses with axes and hatchets. The hideous din startled the minister, Williams, from his sleep. Half-wakened, he sprang out of bed, and saw dimly a crowd of savages bursting through the shattered door. He shouted to two soldiers who were lodged in the house; and then, with more valor than discretion, snatched a pistol that hung at the[Pg 62] head of the bed, cocked it, and snapped it at the breast of the foremost Indian, who proved to be a Caughnawaga chief. It missed fire, or Williams would, no doubt, have been killed on the spot. Amid the screams of his terrified children, three of the party seized him and bound him fast; for they came well provided with cords, since prisoners had a market value. Nevertheless, in the first fury of their attack they dragged to the door and murdered two of the children and a negro woman called Parthena, who was probably their nurse. In an upper room lodged a young man named Stoddard, who had time to snatch a cloak, throw himself out of the window, climb the palisade, and escape in the darkness. Half-naked as he was, he made his way over the snow to Hatfield, binding his bare feet with strips torn from the cloak. They kept Williams shivering in his shirt for an hour while a frightful uproar of yells, shrieks, and gunshots sounded from without. At length they permitted him, his wife, and five remaining children to dress themselves. Meanwhile the Indians and their allies burst into most of the houses, killed such of the men as resisted, butchered some of the women and children, and seized and bound the rest. Some of the villagers escaped in the confusion, like Stoddard, and either fled half dead with cold towards Hatfield, or sought refuge in the fortified house of Jonathan Wells. The house of Stebbins, the minister's next neighbor,[Pg 63] had not been attacked so soon as the rest, and the inmates had a little time for preparation. They consisted of Stebbins himself, with his wife and five children, David Hoyt, Joseph Catlin, Benjamin Church, a namesake of the old Indian fighter of Philip's War, and three other men,—probably refugees who had brought their wives and families within the palisaded enclosure for safety. Thus the house contained seven men, four or five women, and a considerable number of children. Though the walls were bullet-proof, it was not built for defence. The men, however, were well supplied with guns, powder, and lead, and they seem to have found some means of barricading the windows. When the enemy tried to break in, they drove them back with loss. On this, the French and Indians gathered in great numbers before the house, showered bullets upon it, and tried to set it on fire. They were again repulsed, with the loss of several killed and wounded; among the former a Caughnawaga chief, and among the latter a French officer. Still the firing continued. If the assailants had made a resolute assault, the defenders must have been overpowered; but to risk lives in open attack was contrary to every maxim of forest warfare. The women in the house behaved with great courage, and moulded bullets, which the men shot at the enemy. Stebbins was killed outright, and Church was wounded, as was also the wife of David Hoyt. At length most of the French and Indians, disgusted with the obstinacy of the[Pg 64] defence, turned their attention to other quarters; though some kept up their fire under cover of the meeting-house and another building within easy range of gunshot. This building was the house of Ensign John Sheldon, already mentioned. The Indians had had some difficulty in mastering it; for the door being of thick oak plank, studded with nails of wrought iron and well barred, they could not break it open. After a time, however, they hacked a hole in it, through which they fired and killed Mrs. Sheldon as she sat on the edge of a bed in a lower room. Her husband, a man of great resolution, seems to have been absent. Their son John, with Hannah his wife, jumped from an upper chamber window. The young woman sprained her ankle in the fall, and lay helpless, but begged her husband to run to Hatfield for aid, which he did, while she remained a prisoner. The Indians soon got in at a back door, seized Mercy Sheldon, a little girl of two years, and dashed out her brains on the door-stone. Her two brothers and her sister Mary, a girl of sixteen, were captured. The house was used for a short time as a depot for prisoners, and here also was brought the French officer wounded in the attack on the Stebbins house. A family tradition relates that as he lay in great torment he begged for water, and that it was brought him by one of the prisoners, Mrs. John Catlin, whose husband, son, and infant grandson had been killed, and who, nevertheless, did all in her power to relieve the[Pg 65] sufferings of the wounded man. Probably it was in recognition of this charity that when the other prisoners were led away, Mrs. Catlin was left behind. She died of grief a few weeks later. The sun was scarcely an hour high when the miserable drove of captives was conducted across the river to the foot of a mountain or high hill. Williams and his family were soon compelled to follow, and his house was set on fire. As they led him off he saw that other houses within the palisade were burning, and that all were in the power of the enemy except that of his neighbor Stebbins, where the gallant defenders still kept their assailants at bay. Having collected all their prisoners, the main body of the French and Indians began to withdraw towards the pine forest, where they had left their packs and snow-shoes, and to prepare for a retreat before the country should be roused, first murdering in cold blood Marah Carter, a little girl of five years, whom they probably thought unequal to the march. Several parties, however, still lingered in the village, firing on the Stebbins house, killing cattle, hogs, and sheep, and gathering such plunder as the place afforded. Early in the attack, and while it was yet dark, the light of burning houses, reflected from the fields of snow, had been seen at Hatfield, Hadley, and Northampton. The alarm was sounded through the slumbering hamlets, and parties of men mounted on farm-horses, with saddles or without, hastened to the rescue, not doubting that the fires were kindled by[Pg 66] Indians. When the sun was about two hours high, between thirty and forty of them were gathered at the fortified house of Jonathan Wells, at the southern end of the village. The houses of this neighborhood were still standing, and seem not to have been attacked,—the stubborn defence of the Stebbins house having apparently prevented the enemy from pushing much beyond the palisaded enclosure. The house of Wells was full of refugee families. A few Deerfield men here joined the horsemen from the lower towns, as also did four or five of the yeoman soldiers who had escaped the fate of most of their comrades. The horsemen left their horses within Wells's fence; he himself took the lead, and the whole party rushed in together at the southern gate of the palisaded enclosure, drove out the plunderers, and retook a part of their plunder. The assailants of the Stebbins house, after firing at it for three hours, were put to flight, and those of its male occupants who were still alive joined their countrymen, while the women and children ran back for harborage to the house of Wells. Wells and his men, now upwards of fifty, drove the flying enemy more than a mile across the river meadows, and ran in headlong pursuit over the crusted snow, killing a considerable number. In the eagerness of the chase many threw off their overcoats, and even their jackets. Wells saw the danger, and vainly called on them to stop. Their blood was up, and most of them were young and inexperienced. [Pg 67]Meanwhile the firing at the village had been heard by Rouville's main body, who had already begun their retreat northward. They turned back to support their comrades, and hid themselves under the bank of the river till the pursuers drew near, when they gave them a close volley and rushed upon them with the war-whoop. Some of the English were shot down, and the rest driven back. There was no panic. "We retreated," says Wells, "facing about and firing." When they reached the palisade they made a final stand, covering by their fire such of their comrades as had fallen within range of musket-shot, and thus saving them from the scalping-knife. The French did not try to dislodge them. Nine of them had been killed, several were wounded, and one was captured.[59] The number of English carried off prisoners was one hundred and eleven, and the number killed was according to one list forty-seven, and according to[Pg 68] another fifty-three, the latter including some who were smothered in the cellars of their burning houses. The names, and in most cases the ages, of both captives and slain are preserved. Those who escaped with life and freedom were, by the best account, one hundred and thirty-seven. An official tabular statement, drawn up on the spot, sets the number of houses burned at seventeen. The house of the town clerk, Thomas French, escaped, as before mentioned, and the town records, with other papers in his charge, were saved. The meeting-house also was left standing. The house of Sheldon was hastily set on fire by the French and Indians when their rear was driven out of the village by Wells and his men; but the fire was extinguished, and "the Old Indian House," as it was called, stood till the year 1849. Its door, deeply scarred with hatchets, and with a hole cut near the middle, is still preserved in the Memorial Hall at Deerfield.[60] Vaudreuil wrote to the minister, Ponchartrain, that the French lost two or three killed, and twenty or twenty-one wounded, Rouville himself being among the latter. This cannot include the Indians, since there is proof that the enemy left behind a considerable number of their dead. Wherever resistance[Pg 69] was possible, it had been of the most prompt and determined character.[61] Long before noon the French and Indians were on their northward march with their train of captives. More armed men came up from the settlements below, and by midnight about eighty were gathered at the ruined village. Couriers had been sent to rouse the country, and before evening of the next day (the first of March) the force at Deerfield was increased to two hundred and fifty; but a thaw and a warm rain had set in, and as few of the men had snow-shoes, pursuit was out of the question. Even could the agile savages and their allies have been overtaken, the probable consequence would have been the murdering of the captives to prevent their escape. In spite of the foul blow dealt upon it, Deerfield was not abandoned. Such of its men as were left were taken as soldiers into the pay of the province, while the women and children were sent to the villages below. A small garrison was also stationed at the spot, under command of Captain Jonathan Wells, and thus the village held its ground till the storm of war should pass over.[62] [Pg 70]We have seen that the minister, Williams, with his wife and family, were led from their burning[Pg 71] house across the river to the foot of the mountain, where the crowd of terrified and disconsolate captives—friends, neighbors, and relatives—were already gathered. Here they presently saw the fight in the meadow, and were told that if their countrymen attempted a rescue, they should all be put to death. "After this," writes Williams, "we went up the mountain, and saw the smoke of the fires in town, and beheld the awful desolation of Deerfield; and before we marched any farther they killed a sucking child of the English." The French and Indians marched that afternoon only four or five miles,—to Greenfield meadows,—where they stopped to encamp, dug away the snow, laid spruce-boughs on the ground for beds, and bound fast such of the prisoners as seemed able to escape. The Indians then held a carousal on some liquor they had found in the village, and in their drunken rage murdered a negro man belonging to Williams. In spite of their precautions, Joseph Alexander, one of the prisoners, escaped during the night, at which they were greatly incensed; and Rouville ordered Williams to tell his companions in misfortune that if any more of them ran off, the rest should be burned alive.[63] The prisoners were the property of those who had[Pg 72] taken them. Williams had two masters, one of the three who had seized him having been shot in the attack on the house of Stebbins. His principal owner was a surly fellow who would not let him speak to the other prisoners; but as he was presently chosen to guard the rear, the minister was left in the hands of his other master, who allowed him to walk beside his wife and help her on the way. Having borne a child a few weeks before, she was in no condition for such a march, and felt that her hour was near. Williams speaks of her in the strongest terms of affection. She made no complaint, and accepted her fate with resignation. "We discoursed," he says, "of the happiness of those who had God for a father and friend, as also that it was our reasonable duty quietly to submit to his will." Her thoughts were for her remaining children, whom she commended to her husband's care. Their intercourse was short. The Indian who had gone to the rear of the train soon returned, separated them, ordered Williams to the front, "and so made me take a last farewell of my dear wife, the desire of my eyes and companion in many mercies and afflictions." They came soon after to Green River, a stream then about knee-deep, and so swift that the water had not frozen. After wading it with difficulty, they climbed a snow-covered hill beyond. The minister, with strength almost spent, was permitted to rest a few moments at the top; and as the other prisoners passed by in turn, he questioned each for news of his wife. He was not[Pg 73] left long in suspense. She had fallen from weakness in fording the stream, but gained her feet again, and, drenched in the icy current, struggled to the farther bank, when the savage who owned her, finding that she could not climb the hill, killed her with one stroke of his hatchet. Her body was left on the snow till a few of her townsmen, who had followed the trail, found it a day or two after, carried it back to Deerfield, and buried it in the churchyard. The Return from Deerfield. Drawn by Howard Pyle. The Return from Deerfield. Drawn by Howard Pyle. On the next day the Indians killed an infant and a little girl of eleven years; on the day following, Friday, they tomahawked a woman, and on Saturday four others. This apparent cruelty was in fact a kind of mercy. The victims could not keep up with the party, and the death-blow saved them from a lonely and lingering death from cold and starvation. Some of the children, when spent with the march, were carried on the backs of their owners,—partly, perhaps, through kindness, and partly because every child had its price. On the fourth day of the march they came to the mouth of West River, which enters the Connecticut a little above the present town of Brattleboro'. Some of the Indians were discontented with the distribution of the captives, alleging that others had got more than their share; on which the whole troop were mustered together, and some changes of ownership were agreed upon. At this place dog-trains and sledges had been left, and these served to carry their wounded, as well as some of the captive children.[Pg 74] Williams was stripped of the better part of his clothes, and others given him instead, so full of vermin that they were a torment to him through all the journey. The march now continued with pitiless speed up the frozen Connecticut, where the recent thaw had covered the ice with slush and water ankle-deep. On Sunday they made a halt, and the minister was permitted to preach a sermon from the text, "Hear, all people, and behold my sorrow: my virgins and my young men are gone into captivity." Then amid the ice, the snow, the forest, and the savages, his forlorn flock joined their voices in a psalm.[64] On Monday guns were heard from the rear, and the Indians and their allies, in great alarm, bound their prisoners fast, and prepared for battle. It proved, however, that the guns had been fired at wild geese by some of their own number; on which they recovered their spirits, fired a volley for joy, and boasted that the English could not overtake them.[65] More women fainted by the way and died under the hatchet,—some with pious resignation, some with despairing apathy, some with a desperate joy. Two hundred miles of wilderness still lay between them and the Canadian settlements. It was a waste without a house or even a wigwam, except here and there the bark shed of some savage hunter. At the[Pg 75] mouth of White River, the party divided into small bands,—no doubt in order to subsist by hunting, for provisions were fast failing. The Williams family were separated. Stephen was carried up the Connecticut; Samuel and Eunice, with two younger children, were carried off in various directions; while the wretched father, along with two small children of one of his parishioners, was compelled to follow his Indian masters up the valley of White River. One of the children—a little girl—was killed on the next morning by her Caughnawaga owner, who was unable to carry her.[66] On the next Sunday the minister was left in camp with one Indian and the surviving child,—a boy of nine,—while the rest of the party were hunting. "My spirit," he says, "was almost overwhelmed within me." But he found comfort in the text, "Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive." Nor was his hope deceived. His youngest surviving child,—a boy of four,—though harshly treated by his owners, was carried on their shoulders or dragged on a sledge to the end of the journey. His youngest daughter—seven years old—was treated with great kindness throughout. Samuel and Eunice suffered much from hunger, but were dragged on sledges when too faint to walk. Stephen nearly starved to death; but after eight months in the forest, he safely reached Chambly with his Indian masters. [Pg 76]Of the whole band of captives, only about half ever again saw friends and home. Seventeen broke down on the way and were killed; while David Hoyt and Jacob Hix died of starvation at Coos Meadows, on the upper Connecticut. During the entire march, no woman seems to have been subjected to violence; and this holds true, with rare exceptions, in all the Indian wars of New England. This remarkable forbearance towards female prisoners, so different from the practice of many western tribes, was probably due to a form of superstition, aided perhaps by the influence of the missionaries.[67] It is to be observed, however, that the heathen savages of King Philip's War, who had never seen a Jesuit, were no less forbearing in this respect. The hunters of Williams's party killed five moose, the flesh of which, smoked and dried, was carried on their backs and that of the prisoner whom they had provided with snow-shoes. Thus burdened, the minister toiled on, following his masters along the frozen current of White River till, crossing the snowy backs of the Green Mountains, they struck the headwaters of the stream then called French River, now the Winooski, or Onion. Being in great fear of a thaw, they pushed on with double speed. Williams was not used to snow-shoes, and they gave him those painful cramps of the legs and ankles called in Canada mal à la raquette. One morning at dawn he was[Pg 77] waked by his chief master and ordered to get up, say his prayers, and eat his breakfast, for they must make a long march that day. The minister was in despair. "After prayer," he says, "I arose from my knees; but my feet were so tender, swollen, bruised, and full of pain that I could scarce stand upon them without holding on the wigwam. And when the Indians said, 'You must run to-day,' I answered I could not run. My master, pointing to his hatchet, said to me, 'Then I must dash out your brains and take your scalp.'" The Indian proved better than his word, and Williams was suffered to struggle on as he could. "God wonderfully supported me," he writes, "and my strength was restored and renewed to admiration." He thinks that he walked that day forty miles on the snow. Following the Winooski to its mouth, the party reached Lake Champlain a little north of the present city of Burlington. Here the swollen feet of the prisoner were tortured by the rough ice, till snow began to fall and cover it with a soft carpet. Bending under his load, and powdered by the falling flakes, he toiled on till, at noon of a Saturday, lean, tired, and ragged, he and his masters reached the French outpost of Chambly, twelve or fifteen miles from Montreal. Here the unhappy wayfarer was treated with great kindness both by the officers of the fort and by the inhabitants, one of the chief among whom lodged him in his house and welcomed him to his table. After a short stay at Chambly, Williams and his[Pg 78] masters set out in a canoe for Sorel. On the way a Frenchwoman came down to the bank of the river and invited the party to her house, telling the minister that she herself had once been a prisoner among the Indians, and knew how to feel for him. She seated him at a table, spread a table-cloth, and placed food before him, while the Indians, to their great indignation, were supplied with a meal in the chimney-corner. Similar kindness was shown by the inhabitants along the way till the party reached their destination, the Abenaki village of St. Francis, to which his masters belonged. Here there was a fort, in which lived two Jesuits, directors of the mission, and here Williams found several English children, captured the summer before during the raid on the settlements of Maine, and already transformed into little Indians both in dress and behavior. At the gate of the fort one of the Jesuits met him, and asked him to go into the church and give thanks to God for sparing his life, to which he replied that he would give thanks in some other place. The priest then commanded him to go, which he refused to do. When on the next day the bell rang for mass, one of his Indian masters seized him and dragged him into the church, where he got behind the door, and watched the service from his retreat with extreme disapprobation. One of the Jesuits telling him that he would go to hell for not accepting the apostolic traditions, and trusting only in the Bible, he replied that he was glad to know that Christ was to be his[Pg 79] judge, and not they. His chief master, who was a zealot in his way, and as much bound to the rites and forms of the Church as he had been before his conversion to his "medicines," or practices of heathen superstition, one day ordered him to make the sign of the cross, and on his refusal, tried to force him. But as the minister was tough and muscular, the Indian could not guide his hand. Then, pulling out a crucifix that hung at his neck, he told Williams in broken English to kiss it; and being again refused, he brandished his hatchet over him and threatened to knock out his brains. This failing of the desired effect, he threw down the hatchet and said he would first bite out the minister's finger-nails,—a form of torture then in vogue among the northern Indians, both converts and heathen. Williams offered him a hand and invited him to begin; on which he gave the thumb-nail a gripe with his teeth, and then let it go, saying, "No good minister, bad as the devil." The failure seems to have discouraged him, for he made no further attempt to convert the intractable heretic. The direct and simple narrative of Williams is plainly the work of an honest and courageous man. He was the most important capture of the year; and the governor, hearing that he was at St. Francis, despatched a canoe to request the Jesuits of the mission to send him to Montreal. Thither, therefore, his masters carried him, expecting, no doubt, a good price for their prisoner. Vaudreuil, in fact, bought him, exchanged his tattered clothes for good ones,[Pg 80] lodged him in his house, and, in the words of Williams, "was in all respects relating to my outward man courteous and charitable to admiration." He sent for two of the minister's children who were in the town, bought his eldest daughter from the Indians, and promised to do what he could to get the others out of their hands. His youngest son was bought by a lady of the place, and his eldest by a merchant. His youngest daughter, Eunice, then seven or eight years old, was at the mission of St. Louis, or Caughnawaga. Vaudreuil sent a priest to conduct Williams thither and try to ransom the child. But the Jesuits of the mission flatly refused to let him speak to or see her. Williams says that Vaudreuil was very angry at hearing of this; and a few days after, he went himself to Caughnawaga with the minister. This time the Jesuits, whose authority within their mission seemed almost to override that of the governor himself, yielded so far as to permit the father to see his child, on condition that he spoke to no other English prisoner. He talked with her for an hour, exhorting her never to forget her catechism, which she had learned by rote. Vaudreuil and his wife afterwards did all in their power to procure her ransom; but the Indians, or the missionaries in their name, would not let her go. "She is there still," writes Williams two years later, "and has forgotten to speak English." What grieved him still more, Eunice had forgotten her catechism. While he was at Montreal, his movements were[Pg 81] continually watched, lest he should speak to other prisoners and prevent their conversion. He thinks these precautions were due to the priests, whose constant endeavor it was to turn the captives, or at least the younger and more manageable among them, into Catholics and Canadians. The governor's kindness towards him never failed, though he told him that he should not be set free till the English gave up one Captain Baptiste, a noted sea-rover whom they had captured some time before. He was soon after sent down the river to Quebec along with the superior of the Jesuits. Here he lodged seven weeks with a member of the council, who treated him kindly, but told him that if he did not avoid intercourse with the other English prisoners he would be sent farther away. He saw much of the Jesuits, who courteously asked him to dine; though he says that one of them afterwards made some Latin verses about him, in which he was likened to a captive wolf. Another Jesuit told him that when the mission Indians set out on their raid against Deerfield, he charged them to baptize all children before killing them,—such, he said, was his desire for the salvation even of his enemies. To murdering the children after they were baptized, he appears to have made no objection. Williams says that in their dread lest he should prevent the conversion of the other prisoners, the missionaries promised him a pension from the King and free intercourse with his children and neighbors if he would embrace the[Pg 82] Catholic faith and remain in Canada; to which he answered that he would do so without reward if he thought their religion was true, but as he believed the contrary, "the offer of the whole world would tempt him no more than a blackberry." To prevent him more effectually from perverting the minds of his captive countrymen, and fortifying them in their heresy, he was sent to Chateau Richer, a little below Quebec, and lodged with the parish priest, who was very kind to him. "I am persuaded," he writes, "that he abhorred their sending down the heathen to commit outrages against the English, saying it is more like committing murders than carrying on war." He was sorely tried by the incessant efforts to convert the prisoners. "Sometimes they would tell me my children, sometimes my neighbors, were turned to be of their religion. Some made it their work to allure poor souls by flatteries and great promises; some threatened, some offered abuse to such as refused to go to church and be present at mass; and some they industriously contrived to get married among them. I understood they would tell the English that I was turned, that they might gain them to change their religion. These their endeavors to seduce to popery were very exercising to me." After a time he was permitted to return to Quebec, where he met an English Franciscan, who, he says, had been sent from France to aid in converting the prisoners. Lest the minister should counteract the[Pg 83] efforts of the friar, the priests had him sent back to Chateau Richer; "but," he observes, "God showed his dislike of such a persecuting spirit; for the very next day the Seminary, a very famous building, was most of it burnt down, by a joiner letting a coal of fire drop among the shavings."[68] The heaviest of all his tribulations now fell upon him. His son Samuel, about sixteen years old, had been kept at Montreal under the tutelage of Father Meriel, a priest of St. Sulpice. The boy afterwards declared that he was promised great rewards if he would make the sign of the cross, and severe punishment if he would not. Proving obstinate, he was whipped till at last he made the sign; after which he was told to go to mass, and on his refusal, four stout boys of the school were ordered to drag him in. Williams presently received a letter in Samuel's handwriting, though dictated, as the father believed, by his priestly tutors. In this was recounted, with many edifying particulars, the deathbed conversion of two New England women; and to the minister's unspeakable grief and horror, the messenger who brought the letter told him that the boy himself had turned Catholic. "I have heard the news," he wrote to his recreant son, "with the most distressing, afflicting, sorrowful spirit. Oh, I pity you, I mourn over you day and night. Oh, I pity your weakness that,[Pg 84] through the craftiness of man, you are turned from the simplicity of the gospel." Though his correspondence was strictly watched, he managed to convey to the boy a long exposition, from his own pen, of the infallible truth of Calvinistic orthodoxy, and the damnable errors of Rome. This, or something else, had its effect. Samuel returned to the creed of his fathers; and being at last exchanged, went home to Deerfield, where he was chosen town-clerk in 1713, and where he soon after died.[69] Williams gives many particulars of the efforts of the priests to convert the prisoners, and his account, like the rest of his story, bears the marks of truth. There was a treble motive for conversion: it recruited the Church, weakened the enemy, and strengthened Canada, since few of the converts would peril their souls by returning to their heretic relatives. The means of conversion varied. They were gentle when gentleness seemed likely to answer the purpose. Little girls and young women were placed in convents, where it is safe to assume that they were treated with the most tender kindness by the sisterhood, who fully believed that to gain them to the faith was to snatch them from perdition. But when they or their brothers proved obdurate, different means were used. Threats of hell were varied by threats of a whipping, which, according to Williams, were often put into execution. Parents were rigorously severed from their families; though one Lalande,[Pg 85] who had been sent to watch the elder prisoners, reported that they would persist in trying to see their children, till some of them were killed in the attempt. "Here," writes Williams, "might be a history in itself of the trials and sufferings of many of our children, who, after separation from grown persons, have been made to do as they would have them. I mourned when I thought with myself that I had one child with the Maquas [Caughnawagas], a second turned papist, and a little child of six years of age in danger to be instructed in popery, and knew full well that all endeavors would be used to prevent my seeing or speaking with them." He also says that he and others were told that if they would turn Catholic their children should be restored to them; and among other devices, some of his parishioners were assured that their pastor himself had seen the error of his ways and bowed in submission to Holy Church. In midwinter, not quite a year after their capture, the prisoners were visited by a gleam of hope. John Sheldon, accompanied by young John Wells, of Deerfield, and Captain Livingston, of Albany, came to Montreal with letters from Governor Dudley, proposing an exchange. Sheldon's wife and infant child, his brother-in-law, and his son-in-law had been killed. Four of his children, with his daughter-in-law, Hannah,—the same who had sprained her ankle in leaping from her chamber window,—besides others of his near relatives and connections, were[Pg 86] prisoners in Canada; and so also was the mother of young Wells. In the last December, Sheldon and Wells had gone to Boston and begged to be sent as envoys to the French governor. The petition was readily granted, and Livingston, who chanced to be in the town, was engaged to accompany them. After a snow-shoe journey of extreme hardship they reached their destination, and were received with courtesy by Vaudreuil. But difficulties arose. The French, and above all the clergy, were unwilling to part with captives, many of whom they hoped to transform into Canadians by conversion and adoption. Many also were in the hands of the Indians, who demanded payment for them,—which Dudley had always refused, declaring that he would not "set up an Algiers trade" by buying them from their pretended owners; and he wrote to Vaudreuil that for his own part he "would never permit a savage to tell him that any Christian prisoner was at his disposal." Vaudreuil had insisted that his Indians could not be compelled to give up their captives, since they were not subjects of France, but only allies,—which, so far as concerned the mission Indians within the colony, was but a pretext. It is true, however, that the French authorities were in such fear of offending even these that they rarely ventured to cross their interests or their passions. Other difficulties were raised, and though the envoys remained in Canada till late in spring, they accomplished little. At last, probably to get rid of their importunities, five prisoners[Pg 87] were given up to them,—Sheldon's daughter-in-law, Hannah; Esther Williams, eldest daughter of the minister; a certain Ebenezer Carter; and two others unknown. With these, Sheldon and his companions set out in May on their return; and soon after they were gone, four young men,—Baker, Nims, Kellogg, and Petty,—desperate at being left in captivity, made their escape from Montreal, and reached Deerfield before the end of June, half dead with hunger. Sheldon and his party were escorted homeward by eight soldiers under Courtemanche, an officer of distinction, whose orders were to "make himself acquainted with the country." He fell ill at Boston, where he was treated with much kindness, and on his recovery was sent home by sea, along with Captain Vetch and Samuel Hill, charged to open a fresh negotiation. With these, at the request of Courtemanche, went young William Dudley, son of the governor.[70] They were received at Quebec with a courtesy qualified by extreme caution, lest they should spy out the secrets of the land. The mission was not very successful, though the elder Dudley had now a good number of French prisoners in his hands, captured in Acadia or on the adjacent seas. A few only of the English were released, including the boy,[Pg 88] Stephen Williams, whom Vaudreuil had bought for forty crowns from his Indian master. In the following winter John Sheldon made another journey on foot to Canada, with larger powers than before. He arrived in March, 1706, and returned with forty-four of his released countrymen, who, says Williams, were chiefly adults permitted to go because there was no hope of converting them. The English governor had by this time seen the necessity of greater concessions, and had even consented to release the noted Captain Baptiste, whom the Boston merchants regarded as a pirate. In the same summer Samuel Appleton and John Bonner, in the brigantine "Hope," brought a considerable number of French prisoners to Quebec, and returned to Boston at the end of October with fifty-seven English, of all ages. For three, at least, of this number money was paid by the English, probably on account of prisoners bought by Frenchmen from the Indians. The minister, Williams, was exchanged for Baptiste, the so-called pirate, and two of his children were also redeemed, though the Caughnawagas, or their missionaries, refused to part with his daughter Eunice. Williams says that the priests made great efforts to induce the prisoners to remain in Canada, tempting some with the prospect of pensions from the King, and frightening others with promises of damnation, joined with predictions of shipwreck on the way home. He thinks that about one hundred were left in Canada, many of whom were children in the hands of the[Pg 89] Indians, who could easily hide them in the woods, and who were known in some cases to have done so. Seven more were redeemed in the following year by the indefatigable Sheldon, on a third visit to Canada.[71] The exchanged prisoners had been captured at various times and places. Those from Deerfield amounted in all to about sixty, or a little more than half the whole number carried off. Most of the others were dead or converted. Some married Canadians, and others their fellow-captives. The history of some of them can be traced with certainty. Thus, Thomas French, blacksmith and town clerk of Deerfield, and deacon of the church, was captured, with his wife and six children. His wife and infant child were killed on the way to Canada. He and his two eldest children were exchanged and brought home. His daughter Freedom was converted, baptized under the name of Marie Fran?oise, and married to Jean Daulnay, a Canadian. His daughter Martha was baptized as Marguerite, and married to Jacques Roy, on whose death she married Jean Louis Ménard, by whom she became ancestress of Joseph Plessis, eleventh bishop of Quebec. Elizabeth Corse, eight[Pg 90] years old when captured, was baptized under her own name, and married to Jean Dumontel. Abigail Stebbins, baptized as Marguerite, lived many years at Boucherville, wife of Jacques de Noyon, a sergeant in the colony troops. The widow, Sarah Hurst, whose youngest child, Benjamin, had been murdered on the Deerfield meadows, was baptized as Marie Jeanne.[72] Joanna Kellogg, eleven years old when taken, married a Caughnawaga chief, and became, at all points, an Indian squaw. She was not alone in this strange transformation. Eunice Williams, the namesake of her slaughtered mother, remained in the wigwams of the Caughnawagas, forgot, as we have seen, her English and her catechism, was baptized, and in due time married to an Indian of the tribe, who thenceforward called himself Williams. Thus her hybrid children bore her family name. Her father, who returned to his parish at Deerfield, and her brother Stephen, who became a minister like his parent, never ceased to pray for her return to her country and her faith.[Pg 91] Many years after, in 1740, she came with her husband to visit her relatives in Deerfield, dressed as a squaw and wrapped in an Indian blanket. Nothing would induce her to stay, though she was persuaded on one occasion to put on a civilized dress and go to church; after which she impatiently discarded her gown and resumed her blanket. As she was kindly treated by her relatives, and as no attempt was made to detain her against her will, she came again in the next year, bringing two of her half-breed children, and twice afterwards repeated the visit. She and her husband were offered a tract of land if they would settle in New England; but she positively refused, saying that it would endanger her soul. She lived to a great age, a squaw to the last.[73] One of her grandsons, Eleazer Williams, turned Protestant, was educated at Dartmouth College at the charge of friends in New England, and was for a time missionary to the Indians of Green Bay, in Wisconsin. His character for veracity was not of the best. He deceived the excellent antiquarian, Hoyt, by various inventions touching the attack on Deerfield, and in the latter part of his life tried to pass himself off as the lost Dauphin, son of Louis XVI.[74] [Pg 92]Here it may be observed that the descendants of young captives brought into Canada by the mission Indians during the various wars with the English colonies became a considerable element in the Canadian population. Perhaps the most prominent example is that of the Gill family. In June, 1697, a boy named Samuel Gill, then in his tenth year, was captured by the Abenakis at Salisbury in Massachusetts, carried to St. Francis, and converted. Some years later he married a young English girl, said to have been named James, and to have been captured at Kennebunk.[75] In 1866 the late Abbé Maurault, missionary at St. Francis, computed their descendants[Pg 93] at nine hundred and fifty-two, in whose veins French, English, and Abenaki blood were mixed in every conceivable proportion. He gives the tables of genealogy in full, and says that two hundred and thirteen of this prolific race still bear the surname of Gill. "If," concludes the worthy priest, "one should trace out all the English families brought into Canada by the Abenakis, one would be astonished at the number of persons who to-day are indebted to these savages for the blessing of being Catholics and the advantage of being Canadians,"[76]—an advantage for which French-Canadians are so ungrateful that they migrate to the United States by myriads. FOOTNOTES: [53] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1703; Ibid., 3 Avril, 1704; Vaudreuil et Beauharnois au Ministre 17 Novembre, 1704. French writers say that the English surprised and killed some of the Abenakis, who thereupon asked help from Canada. This perhaps refers to the expeditions of Colonel March and Captain Tyng, who, after the bloody attacks upon the settlements of Maine, made reprisal upon Abenaki camps. [54] English accounts make the whole number 342. [55] Stephen W. Williams, Biographical Memoir of Rev. John Williams. [56] Account of ye destruction at Derefd, February 29, 1703/4. [57] Papers in the Archives of Massachusetts. Among these, a letter of Rev. John Williams to the governor, 21 October, 1703, states that the palisade is rotten, and must be rebuilt. [58] The names of nearly all the inhabitants are preserved, and even the ages of most of them have been ascertained, through the indefatigable research of Mr. George Sheldon, of Deerfield, among contemporary records. The house of Thomas French, the town clerk, was not destroyed, and his papers were saved. [59] On the thirty-first of May, 1704, Jonathan Wells and Ebenezer Wright petitioned the General Court for compensation for the losses of those who drove the enemy out of Deerfield and chased them into the meadow. The petition, which was granted, gives an account of the affair, followed by a list of all the men engaged. They number fifty-seven, including the nine who were killed. A list of the plunder retaken from the enemy, consisting of guns, blankets, hatchets, etc., is also added. Several other petitions for the relief of men wounded at the same time are preserved in the archives of Massachusetts. In 1736 the survivors of the party, with the representatives of those who had died, petitioned the General Court for allotments of land, in recognition of their services. This petition also was granted. It is accompanied by a narrative written by Wells. These and other papers on the same subject have been recently printed by Mr. George Sheldon, of Deerfield. [60] After the old house was demolished, this door was purchased by my friend Dr. Daniel Denison Slade, and given by him to the town of Deerfield, on condition that it should be carefully preserved. For an engraving of "the Old Indian House," see Hoyt, Indian Wars (ed. 1824). [61] Governor Dudley, writing to Lord —— on 21 April, 1704, says that thirty dead bodies of the enemy were found in the village and on the meadow. Williams, the minister, says that they did not seem inclined to rejoice over their success, and continued for several days to bury members of their party who died of wounds on the return march. He adds that he learned in Canada that they lost more than forty, though Vaudreuil assured him that they lost but eleven. [62] On the attack of Deerfield, see Williams, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. This is the narrative of the minister, John Williams. Account of the Captivity of Stephen Williams, written by himself. This is the narrative of one of the minister's sons, eleven years old when captured. It is printed in the Appendix to the Biographical Memoir of Rev. John Williams (Hartford, 1837); An account of ye destruction at Derefd. febr. 29, 1703/4, in Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Soc., 1867, p. 478. This valuable document was found among the papers of Fitz-John Winthrop, governor of Connecticut. The authorities of that province, on hearing of the catastrophe at Deerfield, promptly sent an armed force to its relief, which, however, could not arrive till long after the enemy were gone. The paper in question seems to be the official report of one of the Connecticut officers. After recounting what had taken place, he gives a tabular list of the captives, the slain, and those who escaped, with the estimated losses in property of each inhabitant. The list of captives is not quite complete. Compare the lists given by Stephen Williams at the end of his narrative. The town records of Hatfield give various particulars concerning the attack on its unfortunate neighbor, as do the letters of Colonel Samuel Partridge, commanding the militia of the county. Hoyt, Antiquarian Researches, gives a valuable account of it. The careful and unwearied research of Mr. George Sheldon, the lineal descendant of Ensign John Sheldon, among all sources, public or private, manuscript or in print, that could throw light on the subject cannot be too strongly commended, and I am indebted to him for much valued information. Penhallow's short account is inexact, and many of the more recent narratives are not only exaggerated, but sometimes absurdly incorrect. The French notices of the affair are short, and give few particulars. Vaudreuil in one letter sets the number of prisoners at one hundred and fifty, and increases it in another to two hundred and fifty. Ramesay, governor of Montreal, who hated Hertel de Rouville, and bore no love to Vaudreuil, says that fifty-six women and children were murdered on the way to Canada,—which is a gross exaggeration. (Ramesay au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1704.) The account by Dr. Ethier in the Revue Canadienne of 1874 is drawn entirely from the Redeemed Captive of Williams, with running comments by the Canadian writer, but no new information. The comments chiefly consist in praise of Williams for truth when he speaks favorably of the Canadians, and charges of lying when he speaks otherwise. [63] John Williams, The Redeemed Captive. Compare Stephen Williams, Account of the Captivity, etc. [64] The small stream at the mouth of which Williams is supposed to have preached is still called Williams River. [65] Stephen Williams, Account of the Captivity, etc. His father also notices the incident. [66] The name Macquas (Mohawks) is always given to the Caughnawagas by the elder Williams. [67] The Iroquois are well known to have had superstitions in connection with sexual abstinence. [68] Williams remarks that the Seminary had also been burned three years before. This was the fire of November, 1701. See "Old Régime in Canada," 451. [69] Note of Mr. George Sheldon. [70] The elder Dudley speaks with great warmth of Courtemanche, who, on his part, seems equally pleased with his entertainers. Young Dudley was a boy of eighteen. "Il a du mérite," says Vaudreuil. Dudley to Vaudreuil, 4 July, 1705; Vaudreuil au Ministre, 19 Octobre, 1705. [71] In 1878 Miss C. Alice Baker, of Cambridge, Mass., a descendant of Abigail Stebbins, read a paper on John Sheldon before the Memorial Association at Deerfield. It is the result of great research, and contains much original matter, including correspondence between Sheldon and the captives when in Canada, as well as a full and authentic account of his several missions. Mr. George Sheldon has also traced out with great minuteness the history of his ancestor's negotiations. [72] The above is drawn mainly from extracts made by Miss Baker from the registers of the Church of Notre Dame at Montreal. Many of the acts of baptism bear the signature of Father Meriel, so often mentioned in the narrative of Williams. Apparently, Meriel spoke English. At least there is a letter in English from him, relating to Eunice Williams, in the Massachusetts Archives, vol. 51. Some of the correspondence between Dudley and Vaudreuil concerning exchange of prisoners will be found among the Paris documents in the State House at Boston. Copies of these papers were printed at Quebec in 1883-1885, though with many inaccuracies. [73] Stephen W. Williams, Memoir of the Rev. John Williams, 53. Sermon preached at Mansfield, August 4, 1741, on behalf of Mrs. Eunice, the daughter of Rev. John Williams; by Solomon Williams, A.M. Letter of Mrs. Colton, great granddaughter of John Williams (in appendix to the Memoir of Rev. John Williams). [74] I remember to have seen Eleazer Williams at my father's house in Boston, when a boy. My impression of him is that of a good-looking and somewhat portly man, showing little trace of Indian blood, and whose features, I was told, resembled those of the Bourbons. Probably this likeness, real or imagined, suggested the imposition he was practising at the time. The story of the "Bell of St. Regis" is probably another of his inventions. It is to the effect that the bell of the church at Deerfield was carried by the Indians to the mission of St. Regis, and that it is there still. But there is reason to believe that there was no church bell at Deerfield, and it is certain that St. Regis did not exist till more than a half-century after Deerfield was attacked. It has been said that the story is true, except that the name of Caughnawaga should be substituted for that of St. Regis; but the evidence for this conjecture is weak. On the legend of the bell, see Le Moine, Maple Leaves, New Series (1873), 29; Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Soc., 1869, 1870, 311; Hist. Mag. 2d Series, ix. 401. Hough, Hist. St. Lawrence and Franklin Counties, 116, gives the story without criticism. [75] The earlier editions of this book follow, in regard to Samuel Gill, the statements of Maurault, which are erroneous, as has been proved by the careful and untiring research of Miss C. Alice Baker, to whose kindness I owe the means of correcting them. Papers in the archives of Massachusetts leave no doubt as to the time and place of Samuel Gill's capture. [76] Maurault, Hist. des Abenakis, 377. I am indebted to R. A. Ramsay, Esq., of Montreal, for a paper on the Gill family, by Mr. Charles Gill, who confirms the statements of Maurault so far as relates to the genealogies. John and Zechariah Tarbell, captured when boys at Groton, became Caughnawaga chiefs; and one of them, about 1760, founded the mission of St. Regis. Green, Groton during the Indian Wars, 116, 117-120. CHAPTER V. 1704-1713. THE TORMENTED FRONTIER. Border Raids.—Haverhill.—Attack and Defence.—War to the Knife.—Motives of the French.—Proposed Neutrality.—Joseph Dudley.—Town and Country. [Pg 94]I have told the fate of Deerfield in full, as an example of the desolating raids which for years swept the borders of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The rest of the miserable story may be passed more briefly. It is in the main a weary detail of the murder of one, two, three, or more men, women, or children waylaid in fields, woods, and lonely roads, or surprised in solitary cabins. Sometimes the attacks were on a larger scale. Thus, not long after the capture of Deerfield, a band of fifty or more Indians fell at dawn of day on a hamlet of five houses near Northampton. The alarm was sounded, and they were pursued. Eight of the prisoners were rescued, and three escaped; most of the others being knocked in the head by their captors. At Oyster River the Indians attacked a loopholed house, in which the women of the neighboring farms had taken refuge[Pg 95] while the men were at work in the fields. The women disguised themselves in hats and jackets, fired from the loopholes, and drove off the assailants. In 1709 a hundred and eighty French and Indians again attacked Deerfield, but failed to surprise it, and were put to flight. At Dover, on a Sunday, while the people were at church, a scalping-party approached a fortified house, the garrison of which consisted of one woman,—Esther Jones, who, on seeing them, called out to an imaginary force within, "Here they are! come on! come on!" on which the Indians disappeared. Soon after the capture of Deerfield, the French authorities, being, according to the prisoner Williams, "wonderfully lifted up with pride," formed a grand war-party, and assured the minister that they would catch so many prisoners that they should not know what to do with them. Beaucour, an officer of great repute, had chief command, and his force consisted of between seven and eight hundred men, of whom about a hundred and twenty were French, and the rest mission Indians.[77] They declared that they would lay waste all the settlements on the Connecticut,—meaning, it seems, to begin with Hatfield. "This army," says Williams, "went away in such a boasting, triumphant manner that I had great hopes God would discover and disappoint their designs." In fact, their plans came to nought, owing, according to French accounts, to the fright of the Indians; for[Pg 96] a soldier having deserted within a day's march of the English settlements, most of them turned back, despairing of a surprise, and the rest broke up into small parties to gather scalps on the outlying farms.[78] In the summer of 1708 there was a more successful attempt. The converts of all the Canadian missions were mustered at Montreal, where Vaudreuil, by exercising, as he says, "the patience of an angel," soothed their mutual jealousies and persuaded them to go upon a war-party against Newbury, Portsmouth, and other New England villages. Fortunately for the English, the Caughnawagas were only half-hearted towards the enterprise; and through them the watchful Peter Schuyler got hints of it which enabled him, at the eleventh hour, to set the intended victims on their guard. The party consisted of about four hundred, of whom one hundred were French, under twelve young officers and cadets; the whole commanded by Saint-Ours des Chaillons and Hertel de Rouville. For the sake of speed and secrecy, they set out in three bodies, by different routes. The rendezvous was at Lake Winnepesaukee, where they were to be joined by the Norridgewocks, Penobscots, and other eastern Abenakis. The Caughnawagas and Hurons turned back by reason of evil omens and a disease which broke out among them. The rest met on the shores of the lake,—probably at Alton[Pg 97] Bay,—where, after waiting in vain for their eastern allies, they resolved to make no attempt on Portsmouth or Newbury, but to turn all their strength upon the smaller village of Haverhill, on the Merrimac. Advancing quickly under cover of night, they made their onslaught at half an hour before dawn, on Sunday, the twenty-ninth of August. Haverhill consisted of between twenty and thirty dwelling-houses, a meeting-house, and a small picket fort. A body of militia from the lower Massachusetts towns had been hastily distributed along the frontier, on the vague reports of danger sent by Schuyler from Albany; and as the intended point of attack was unknown, the men were of necessity widely scattered. French accounts say that there were thirty of them in the fort at Haverhill, and more in the houses of the villagers; while others still were posted among the distant farms and hamlets. In spite of darkness and surprise, the assailants met a stiff resistance and a hot and persistent fusillade. Vaudreuil says that they could dislodge the defenders only by setting fire to both houses and fort. In this they were not very successful, as but few of the dwellings were burned. A fire was kindled against the meeting-house, which was saved by one Davis and a few others, who made a dash from behind the adjacent parsonage, drove the Indians off, and put out the flames. Rolfe, the minister, had already been killed while defending his house. His wife and one of his children were butchered; but two[Pg 98] others—little girls of six and eight years—were saved by the self-devotion of his maid-servant, Hagar, apparently a negress, who dragged them into the cellar and hid them under two inverted tubs, where they crouched, dumb with terror, while the Indians ransacked the place without finding them. English accounts say that the number of persons killed—men, women, and children—was forty-eight; which the French increase to a hundred. The distant roll of drums was presently heard, warning the people on the scattered farms; on which the assailants made a hasty retreat. Posted near Haverhill were three militia officers,—Turner, Price, and Gardner,—lately arrived from Salem. With such men as they had with them, or could hastily get together, they ambushed themselves at the edge of a piece of woods, in the path of the retiring enemy, to the number, as the French say, of sixty or seventy, which it is safe to diminish by a half. The French and Indians, approaching rapidly, were met by a volley which stopped them for the moment; then, throwing down their packs, they rushed on, and after a sharp skirmish broke through the ambuscade and continued their retreat. Vaudreuil sets their total loss at eight killed and eighteen wounded,—the former including two officers, Verchères and Chambly. He further declares that in the skirmish all the English, except ten or twelve, were killed outright; while the English accounts say that the French and Indians took to the woods, leaving nine[Pg 99] of their number dead on the spot, along with their medicine chest and all their packs.[79] Scarcely a hamlet of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire borders escaped a visit from the nimble enemy. Groton, Lancaster, Exeter, Dover, Kittery, Casco, Kingston, York, Berwick, Wells, Winter Harbor, Brookfield, Amesbury, Marlborough, were all more or less infested, usually by small scalping-parties, hiding in the outskirts, waylaying stragglers, or shooting men at work in the fields, and disappearing as soon as their blow was struck. These swift and intangible persecutors were found a far surer and more effectual means of annoyance than larger bodies. As all the warriors were converts of the Canadian missions, and as prisoners were an article of value, cases of torture were not very common; though now and then, as at Exeter, they would roast some poor wretch alive, or bite off his fingers and sear the stumps with red-hot tobacco pipes. This system of petty, secret, and transient attack put the impoverished colonies to an immense charge in maintaining a cordon of militia along their northern frontier,—a precaution often as vain as it was costly; for the wily savages, covered by the forest, found little difficulty in dodging the scouting-parties, pouncing on their victims, and escaping. Rewards were offered for scalps; but one writer calculates[Pg 100] that, all things considered, it cost Massachusetts a thousand pounds of her currency to kill an Indian.[80] In 1703-1704 six hundred men were kept ranging the woods all winter without finding a single Indian, the enemy having deserted their usual haunts and sought refuge with the French, to emerge in February for the destruction of Deerfield. In the next summer nineteen hundred men were posted along two hundred miles of frontier.[81] This attitude of passive defence exasperated the young men of Massachusetts, and it is said that five hundred of them begged Dudley for leave to make a raid into Canada, on the characteristic condition of choosing their own officers. The governor consented; but on a message from Peter Schuyler that he had at last got a promise from the Caughnawagas and other mission Indians to attack the New England borders no more, the raid was countermanded, lest it should waken the tempest anew.[82] What was the object of these murderous attacks,[Pg 101] which stung the enemy without disabling him, confirmed the Indians in their native savagery, and taught the French to emulate it? In the time of Frontenac there was a palliating motive for such barbarous warfare. Canada was then prostrate and stunned under the blows of the Iroquois war. Successful war-parties were needed as a tonic and a stimulant to rouse the dashed spirits of French and Indians alike; but the remedy was a dangerous one, and it drew upon the colony the attack under Sir William Phips, which was near proving its ruin. At present there was no such pressing call for butchering women, children, and peaceful farmers. The motive, such as it was, lay in the fear that the Indian allies of France might pass over to the English, or at least stand neutral. These allies were the Christian savages of the missions, who, all told, from the Caughnawagas to the Micmacs, could hardly have mustered a thousand warriors. The danger was that the Caughnawagas, always open to influence from Albany, might be induced to lay down the hatchet and persuade the rest to follow their example. Therefore, as there was for the time a virtual truce with New York, no pains were spared to commit them irrevocably to war against New England. With the Abenaki tribes of Maine and New Hampshire the need was still more urgent, for they were continually drawn to New England by the cheapness and excellence of English goods; and the only sure means to prevent their trading with the enemy was[Pg 102] to incite them to kill him. Some of these savages had been settled in Canada, to keep them under influence and out of temptation; but the rest were still in their native haunts, where it was thought best to keep them well watched by their missionaries, as sentinels and outposts to the colony. There were those among the French to whom this barbarous warfare was repugnant. The minister, Ponchartrain, by no means a person of tender scruples, also condemned it for a time. After the attack on Wells and other places under Beaubassin in 1703, he wrote: "It would have been well if this expedition had not taken place. I have certain knowledge that the English want only peace, knowing that war is contrary to the interests of all the colonies. Hostilities in Canada have always been begun by the French."[83] Afterwards, when these bloody raids had produced their natural effect and spurred the sufferers to attempt the ending of their woes once for all by the conquest of Canada, Ponchartrain changed his mind and encouraged the[Pg 103] sending out of war-parties, to keep the English busy at home. The schemes of a radical cure date from the attack on Deerfield and the murders of the following summer. In the autumn we find Governor Dudley urging the capture of Quebec. "In the last two years," he says, "the Assembly of Massachusetts has spent about £50,000 in defending the Province, whereas three or four of the Queen's ships and fifteen hundred New England men would rid us of the French and make further outlay needless,"—a view, it must be admitted, sufficiently sanguine.[84] But before seeking peace with the sword, Dudley tried less strenuous methods. It may be remembered that in 1705 Captain Vetch and Samuel Hill, together with the governor's young son William, went to Quebec to procure an exchange of prisoners. Their mission had also another object. Vetch carried a letter from Dudley to Vaudreuil, proposing a treaty of neutrality between their respective colonies, and Vaudreuil seems to have welcomed the proposal. Notwithstanding the pacific relations between Canada and New York, he was in constant fear that Dutch and English influence might turn the Five Nations into open enemies of the French; and he therefore declared himself ready to accept the proposals of Dudley, on condition that New York and the other English colonies should be included in the treaty, and that the English should be excluded from fishing[Pg 104] in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Acadian seas. The first condition was difficult, and the second impracticable; for nothing could have induced the people of New England to accept it. Vaudreuil, moreover, would not promise to give up prisoners in the hands of the Indians, but only to do what he could to persuade their owners to give them up. The negotiations dragged on for several years. For the first three or four months Vaudreuil stopped his war-parties; but he let them loose again in the spring, and the New England borders were tormented as before. The French governor thought that the New England country people, who had to bear the brunt of the war, were ready to accept his terms. The French court approved the plan, though not without distrust; for some enemy of the governor told Ponchartrain that under pretence of negotiations he and Dudley were carrying on trading speculations,—which is certainly a baseless slander.[85] Vaudreuil on his part had strongly suspected Dudley's emissary, Vetch, of illicit trade during his visit to Quebec; and perhaps there was ground for the suspicion. It is certain that Vetch, who had visited the St. Lawrence before, lost no opportunity of studying the river, and looked forward to a time when he could turn his knowledge to practical account.[86] [Pg 105]Joseph Dudley, governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, was the son of a former governor of Massachusetts,—that upright, sturdy, narrow, bigoted old Puritan, Thomas Dudley, in whose pocket was found after his death the notable couplet,— "Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch." Such a son of such a father was the marvel of New England. Those who clung to the old traditions and mourned for the old theocracy under the old charter, hated Joseph Dudley as a renegade; and the worshippers of the Puritans have not forgiven him to this day. He had been president of the council under the detested Andros, and when that representative of the Stuarts was overthrown by a popular revolution, both he and Dudley were sent prisoners to England. Here they found a reception different from the expectations and wishes of those who sent them. Dudley became a member of Parliament and lieutenant-governor of the Isle of Wight, and was at length, in the beginning of the reign of Queen Anne, sent back to govern those who had cast him out. Any governor imposed on them by England would have been an offence; but Joseph Dudley was more than they could bear. He found bitter opposition from the old Puritan party. The two Mathers, father and son, who through policy had at first favored him, soon denounced him with insolent malignity, and the honest[Pg 106] and conscientious Samuel Sewall regarded him with as much asperity as his kindly nature would permit. To the party of religious and political independency he was an abomination, and great efforts were made to get him recalled. Two pamphlets of the time, one printed in 1707 and the other in the next year, reflect the bitter animosity he excited.[87] Both seem to be the work of several persons, one of whom, there can be little doubt, was Cotton Mather; for it is not easy to mistake the mingled flippancy and pedantry of his style. He bore the governor a grudge, for Dudley had chafed him in his inordinate vanity and love of power. If Dudley loved himself first, he loved his native New England next, and was glad to serve her if he could do so in his own way and without too much sacrifice of his own interests. He was possessed by a restless ambition, apparently of the cheap kind that prefers the first place in a small community to the second in a large one. He was skilled in the arts of the politician, and knew how, by attentions, dinners, or commissions in the militia, to influence his Council and Assembly to do his will. His abilities were beyond question, and his manners easy and graceful; but his instincts were arbitrary. He stood fast for[Pg 107] prerogative, and even his hereditary Calvinism had strong Episcopal leanings. He was a man of the world in the better as well as the worse sense of the term; was loved and admired by some as much as he was hated by others; and in the words of one of his successors, "had as many virtues as can consist with so great a thirst for honor and power."[88] His enemies, however, set no bounds to their denunciation. "All the people here are bought and sold betwixt the governour and his son Paul," says one. "It is my belief," says another, probably Cotton Mather, "that he means to help the French and Indians to destroy all they can." And again, "He is a criminal governour.... His God is Mammon, his aim is the ruin of his country." The meagreness and uncertainty of his salary, which was granted by yearly votes of the Assembly, gave color to the charge that he abused his official position to improve his income. The worst accusation against him was that of conniving in trade with the French and Indians under pretence of exchanging prisoners. Six prominent men of the colony—Borland, Vetch, Lawson, Rous, Phillips, and Coffin, only three of whom were of New England origin—were brought to trial before the Assembly for trading at Port Royal; and it was said that Dudley, though he had no direct share in the business, found means to make profit from it. All the accused were convicted and fined. The more strenuous of their judges were for[Pg 108] sending them to jail, and Rous was to have been sentenced to "sit an hour upon the gallows with a rope about his neck;" but the governor and council objected to these severities, and the Assembly forbore to impose them. The popular indignation against the accused was extreme, and probably not without cause.[89] There was no doubt an illicit trade between Boston and the French of Acadia, who during the war often depended on their enemies for the necessaries of life, since supplies from France, precarious at the best, were made doubly so by New England cruisers. Thus the Acadians and their Indian allies were but too happy to exchange their furs for very modest supplies of tools, utensils, and perhaps, at times, of arms, powder, and lead.[90] What with privateering and illicit trade, it was clear that the war was a source of profit to some of the chief persons in Boston. That place, moreover, felt itself tolerably safe from attack, while the borders were stung from end to end as by a swarm of wasps; and[Pg 109] thus the country conceived the idea that the town was fattening at its expense. Vaudreuil reports to the minister that the people of New England want to avenge themselves by an attack on Canada, but that their chief men are for a policy of defence. This was far from being wholly true; but the notion that the rural population bore a grudge against Boston had taken strong hold of the French, who even believed that if the town were attacked, the country would not move hand or foot to help it. Perhaps it was well for them that they did not act on the belief, which, as afterwards appeared, was one of their many mistakes touching the character and disposition of their English neighbors. The sentences on Borland and his five companions were annulled by the Queen and Council, on the ground that the Assembly was not competent to try the case.[91] The passionate charges against Dudley and a petition to the Queen for his removal were equally unavailing. The Assemblies of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the chief merchants, the officers of militia, and many of the ministers sent addresses to the Queen in praise of the governor's administration;[92] and though his enemies declared that the votes and signatures were obtained by the arts familiar to him, his recall was prevented, and he held his office seven years longer. FOOTNOTES: [77] Vaudreuil et Beauharnois au Ministre, 17 Novembre, 1704. [78] Vaudreuil et Beauharnois au Ministre, 17 Novembre, 1704; Vaudreuil au Ministre, 16 Novembre, 1704; Ramesay au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1704. Compare Penhallow. [79] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Novembre, 1708; Vaudreuil et Raudot au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1708; Hutchinson, ii. 156; Mass. Hist. Coll. 2d Series, iv. 129; Sewall, Diary, ii. 234. Penhallow. [80] The rewards for scalps were confined to male Indians thought old enough to bear arms,—that is to say, above twelve years. Act of General Court, 19 August, 1706. [81] Dudley to Lord ——, 21 April, 1704. Address of Council and Assembly to the Queen, 12 July, 1704. The burden on the people was so severe that one writer—not remarkable, however, for exactness of statement—declares that he "is credibly informed that some have been forced to cut open their beds and sell the feathers to pay their taxes." The general poverty did not prevent a contribution in New England for the suffering inhabitants of the Island of St. Christopher. [82] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12 Novembre, 1708. Vaudreuil says that he got his information from prisoners. [83] Resumé d'une Lettre de MM. de Vaudreuil et de Beauharnois du 15 Novembre, 1703, avec les Observations du Ministre. Subercase, governor of Acadia, writes on 25 December, 1708, that he hears that a party of Canadians and Indians have attacked a place on the Maramet (Merrimac), "et qu'ils y ont égorgé 4 à 500 personnes sans faire quartier aux femmes ni aux enfans." This is an exaggerated report of the affair of Haverhill. M. de Chevry writes in the margin of the letter: "Ces actions de cruauté devroient être modérées:" to which Ponchartrain adds: "Bon; les défendre." His attitude, however, was uncertain; for as early as 1707 we find him approving Vaudreuil for directing the missionaries to prompt the Abenakis to war. N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 805. [84] Dudley to ——, 26 November, 1704. [85] Abrégé d'une lettre de M. de Vaudreuil, avec les notes du Ministre, 19 Octobre, 1705. [86] On the negotiations for neutrality, see the correspondence and other papers in the Paris Documents in the Boston State House; also N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 770, 776, 779, 809; Hutchinson, ii. 141. [87] A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New England, Boston, 1707. The Deplorable State of New England, by Reason of a Covetous and Treacherous Governour and Pusillanimous Counsellors, London, 1708. The first of the above is answered by a pamphlet called a Modest Inquiry. All three are reprinted in Mass. Hist. Coll., 5th Series, vi. [88] Hutchinson, ii. 194. [89] The agent of Massachusetts at London, speaking of the three chief offenders, says that they were neither "of English extraction, nor natives of the place, and two of them were very new comers." Jeremiah Dummer, Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the late Expedition to Canada. [90] The French naval captain Bonaventure says that the Acadians were forced to depend on Boston traders, who sometimes plundered them, and sometimes sold them supplies. (Bonaventure au Ministre, 30 Novembre, 1705.) Colonel Quary, Judge of Admiralty at New York, writes: "There hath been and still is, as I am informed, a Trade carried on with Port Royal by some of the topping men of that government [Boston], under colour of sending and receiving Flaggs of truce."—Quary to the Lords of Trade, 10 January, 1708. [91] Council Record, in Hutchinson, ii. 144. [92] These addresses are appended to A Modest Inquiry into the Grounds and Occasions of a late Pamphlet intituled a Memorial of the present Deplorable State of New England. London, 1707. CHAPTER VI. 1700-1710. THE OLD RéGIME IN ACADIA. The Fishery Question.—Privateers and Pirates.—Port Royal.—Official Gossip.—Abuse of Brouillan.—Complaints of De Goutin.—Subercase and his Officers.—Church and State.—Paternal Government. [Pg 110]The French province of Acadia, answering to the present Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, was a government separate from Canada and subordinate to it. Jacques Fran?ois de Brouillan, appointed to command it, landed at Chibucto, the site of Halifax, in 1702, and crossed by hills and forests to the Basin of Mines, where he found a small but prosperous settlement. "It seems to me," he wrote to the minister, "that these people live like true republicans, acknowledging neither royal authority nor courts of law."[93] It was merely that their remoteness and isolation made them independent, of necessity, so far as concerned temporal government. When Brouillan reached Port Royal he found a different state of things. The fort and garrison were in bad condition; but the adjacent settlement, primitive as it was, appeared on the whole duly submissive. [Pg 111]Possibly it would have been less so if it had been more prosperous; but the inhabitants had lately been deprived of fishing, their best resource, by a New England privateer which had driven their craft from the neighboring seas; and when the governor sent Lieutenant Neuvillette in an armed vessel to seize the interloping stranger, a fight ensued, in which the lieutenant was killed, and his vessel captured. New England is said to have had no less than three hundred vessels every year in these waters.[94] Before the war a French officer proposed that New England sailors should be hired to teach the Acadians how to fish, and the King seems to have approved the plan.[95] Whether it was adopted or not, New England in peace or war had a lion's share of the Acadian fisheries. "It grieves me to the heart," writes Subercase, Brouillan's successor, "to see Messieurs les Bastonnais enrich themselves in our domain; for the base of their commerce is the fish which they catch off our coasts, and send to all parts of the world." When the war broke out, Brouillan's fighting resources were so small that he was forced to depend largely for help on sea-rovers of more than doubtful character. They came chiefly from the West Indies,—the old haunt of buccaneers,—and were sometimes mere pirates, and sometimes semi-piratical privateers[Pg 112] commissioned by French West Indian governors. Brouillan's successor writes that their opportunities are good, since at least a thousand vessels enter Boston every year.[96] Besides these irregular allies, the governor usually had at his disposal two French frigates of thirty and sixty guns, to which was opposed the Massachusetts navy, consisting of a ship of fifty-six guns, and the "province galley," of twenty-two. In 1710 one of these Massachusetts vessels appeared off the coast escorting a fishing-fleet of no less than two hundred and fifty sail, some of which were afterwards captured by French corsairs. A good number of these last, however, were taken from time to time by Boston sea-rovers, who, like their enemies, sometimes bore a close likeness to pirates. They seized French fishing and trading vessels, attacked French corsairs, sometimes traded with the Acadians, and sometimes plundered them. What with West India rum brought by the French freebooters, and New England rum brought by the English, it is reported that one could get drunk in Acadia for two sous. Port Royal, now Annapolis, was the seat of government, and the only place of any strength in the colony. The fort, a sodded earthwork, lately put into tolerable repair by the joint labor of the soldiers and inhabitants, stood on the point of land between the mouth of the river Annapolis and that of the small stream now called Allen's River, whence it[Pg 113] looked down the long basin, or land-locked bay, which, framed in hills and forests, had so won the heart of the Baron de Poutrincourt a century before.[97] The garrison was small, counting in 1704 only a hundred and eighty-five soldiers and eight commissioned officers. At the right of the fort, between it and the mouth of the Annapolis, was the Acadian village, consisting of seventy or eighty small houses of one story and an attic, built of planks, boards, or logs, simple and rude, but tolerably comfortable. It had also a small, new wooden church, to the building of which the inhabitants had contributed eight hundred francs, while the King paid the rest. The inhabitants had no voice whatever in public affairs, though the colonial minister had granted them the privilege of travelling in time of peace without passports. The ruling class, civil and military, formed a group apart, living in or near the fort, in complete independence of public opinion, supposing such to have existed. They looked only to their masters at Versailles; and hence a state of things as curious as it was lamentable. The little settlement was a hot-bed of gossip, backbiting, and slander. Officials of every degree were continually trying to undermine and supplant one another, besieging the minister with mutual charges. Brouillan, the governor, was a frequent object of attack. He seems to have been of an irritable temper, aggravated perhaps by an old unhealed wound in the cheek, which gave him constant[Pg 114] annoyance. One writer declares that Acadia languishes under selfish greed and petty tyranny; that everything was hoped from Brouillan when he first came, but that hope has changed to despair; that he abuses the King's authority to make money, sells wine and brandy at retail, quarrels with officers who are not punctilious enough in saluting him, forces the inhabitants to catch seal and cod for the King, and then cheats them of their pay, and countenances an obnoxious churchwarden whose daughter is his mistress. "The country groans, but dares not utter a word," concludes the accuser, as he closes his indictment.[98] Brouillan died in the autumn of 1705, on which M. de Goutin, a magistrate who acted as intendant, and was therefore at once the colleague of the late governor and a spy upon him, writes to the minister that "the divine justice has at last taken pity on the good people of this country," but that as it is base to accuse a dead man, he will not say that the public could not help showing their joy at the late governor's departure; and he adds that the deceased was charged with a scandalous connection with the Widow de Freneuse. Nor will he reply, he says, to the governor's complaint to the court about a pretended cabal, of which he, De Goutin, was the head, and which was in reality only three or four honest men, incapable of any kind of deviation, who used to meet in[Pg 115] a friendly way, and had given offence by not bowing down before the beast.[99] Then he changes the subject, and goes on to say that on a certain festal occasion he was invited by Bonaventure, who acted as governor after the death of Brouillan, to share with him the honor of touching off a bonfire before the fort gate; and that this excited such envy, jealousy, and discord that he begs the minister, once for all, to settle the question whether a first magistrate has not the right to the honor of touching off a bonfire jointly with a governor. De Goutin sometimes discourses of more serious matters. He tells the minister that the inhabitants have plenty of cattle, and more hemp than they can use, but neither pots, scythes, sickles, knives, hatchets, kettles for the Indians, nor salt for themselves. "We should be fortunate if our enemies would continue to supply our necessities and take the beaver-skins with which the colony is gorged;" adding, however, that the Acadians hate the English, and will not trade with them if they can help it.[100] In the next year the "Bastonnais" were again[Pg 116] bringing supplies, and the Acadians again receiving them. The new governor, Subercase, far from being pleased at this, was much annoyed, or professed to be so, and wrote to Ponchartrain, "Nobody could suffer more than I do at seeing the English so coolly carry on their trade under our very noses." Then he proceeds to the inevitable personalities. "You wish me to write without reserve of the officers here; I have little good to tell you;" and he names two who to the best of his belief have lost their wits, a third who is incorrigibly lazy, and a fourth who is eccentric; adding that he is tolerably well satisfied with the rest, except M. de la Ronde. "You see, Monseigneur, that I am as much in need of a madhouse as of barracks; and what is worse, I am afraid that the mauvais esprit of this country will drive me crazy too."[101] "You write to me," he continues, "that you are informed that M. Labat has killed some cattle belonging to the inhabitants. If so, he has expiated his fault by blowing off his thumb by the bursting of his gun while he was firing at a sheep. I am sure that the moon has a good deal to do with his behavior; he always acts very strangely when she is on the wane." The charge brought against Brouillan in regard to Madame de Freneuse was brought also against Bonaventure in connection with the same lady. "The story," says Subercase, "was pushed as far as[Pg 117] hell could desire;"[102] and he partially defends the accused, declaring that at least his fidelity to the King is beyond question. De Goutin had a quarrel with Subercase, and writes: "I do all that is possible to live on good terms with him, and to that end I walk as if in the chamber of a sick prince whose sleep is of the lightest." As Subercase defends Bonaventure, De Goutin attacks him, and gives particulars concerning him and Madame de Freneuse which need not be recounted here. Then comes a story about a quarrel caused by some cows belonging to Madame de Freneuse which got into the garden of Madame de Saint-Vincent, and were driven out by a soldier who presumed to strike one of them with a long stick. "The facts," gravely adds De Goutin, "have been certified to me as I have the honor to relate them to your Grandeur."[103] Then the minister is treated to a story of one Allein. "He insulted Madame de Belleisle at the church door after high mass, and when her son, a boy of fourteen, interposed, Allein gave him such a box on the ear that it drew blood; and I am assured that M. Petit, the priest, ran to the rescue in his sacerdotal robes." Subercase, on his side, after complaining that the price of a certain canoe had been unjustly deducted from his pay, though he never had the said canoe at all, protests to Ponchartrain, "there is no country on[Pg 118] earth where I would not rather live than in this, by reason of the ill-disposed persons who inhabit it."[104] There was the usual friction between the temporal and the spiritual powers. "The Church," writes Subercase, "has long claimed the right of commanding here, or at least of sharing authority with the civil rulers."[105] The Church had formerly been represented by the Capuchin friars, and afterwards by the Récollets. Every complaint was of course carried to the minister. In 1700 we find M. de Villieu, who then held a provisional command in the colony, accusing the ecclesiastics of illicit trade with the English.[106] Bonaventure reports to Ponchartrain that Père Félix, chaplain of the fort, asked that the gate might be opened, in order that he might carry the sacraments to a sick man, his real object being to marry Captain Duvivier to a young woman named Marie Muis de Poubomcoup,—contrary, as the governor thought, to the good of the service. He therefore forbade the match; on which the priests told him that when they had made up their minds to do anything, nobody had power to turn them from it; and the chaplain presently added that he cared no more for the governor than for the mud on his shoes.[107] He carried his point, and married Duvivier in spite of the commander. Every king's ship from Acadia brought to Ponchartrain letters full of matters like these. In one[Pg 119] year, 1703, he got at least fourteen such. If half of what Saint-Simon tells us of him is true, it is not to be supposed that he gave himself much trouble concerning them. This does not make it the less astonishing that in the midst of a great and disastrous war a minister of State should be expected to waste time on matters worthy of a knot of old gossips babbling round a tea-table. That pompous spectre which calls itself the Dignity of History would scorn to take note of them; yet they are highly instructive, for the morbid anatomy of this little colony has a scientific value as exhibiting, all the more vividly for the narrowness of the field, the workings of an unmitigated paternalism acting from across the Atlantic. The King's servants in Acadia pestered his minister at Versailles with their pettiest squabbles, while Marlborough and Eugene were threatening his throne with destruction.[108] The same system prevailed in Canada; but as there the field was broader and the men often larger, the effects are less whimsically vivid than they appear under the Acadian microscope. The two provinces, however, were ruled alike; and about this time the Canadian Intendant Raudot was writing to Ponchartrain in a strain worthy of De Goutin, Subercase, or Bonaventure.[109] FOOTNOTES: [93] Brouillan au Ministre, 6 Octobre, 1702. [94] Mémoire de Subercase. [95] Mémoire du Roy au Sieur de Brouillan, 23 Mars, 1700; Le Ministre à Villebon, 9 Avril, 1700. [96] Subercase au Ministre, 3 Janvier, 1710. [97] Pioneers of France in the New World, 253. [98] La Touche, Mémoire sur l'Acadie, 1702 (adressé à Ponchartrain). [99] "Que trois ou quatre amis, honnêtes gens, incapables de gauchir en quoique ce soit, pour n'avoir pas fléché devant la bête, aient été qualifiés de cabalistes."—De Goutin au Ministre, 4 Décembre, 1705. [100] De Goutin au Ministre, 22 Décembre, 1707. In 1705 Bonaventure, in a time of scarcity, sent a vessel to Boston to buy provisions, on pretence of exchanging prisoners. Bonaventure au Ministre, 30 Novembre, 1705. [101] "Ne me fasse à mon tour tourner la cervelle."—Subercase au Ministre, 20 Décembre, 1708. [102] "On a poussé la chose aussi loin que l'enfer le pouvait désirer."—Subercase au Ministre, 20 Décembre, 1708. [103] De Goutin au Ministre, 29 Décembre, 1708. [104] Subercase au Ministre, 20 Décembre, 1708. [105] Ibid. [106] Villieu au Ministre, 20 Octobre, 1700. [107] "Il répondit qu'il se soucioit de moi comme de la boue de ses souliers."—Bonaventure au Ministre, 30 Novembre, 1705. [108] These letters of Acadian officials are in the Archives du Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies at Paris. Copies of some of them will be found in the 3d series of the Correspondance Officielle at Ottawa. [109] Raudot au Ministre, 20 Septembre, 1709. The copy before me covers 108 folio pages, filled with gossiping personalities. CHAPTER VII. 1704-1710. ACADIA CHANGES HANDS. Reprisal for Deerfield.—Major Benjamin Church: his Ravages at Grand-Pré.—Port Royal Expedition.—Futile Proceedings.—A Discreditable Affair.—French Successes in Newfoundland.—Schemes of Samuel Vetch.—A Grand Enterprise.—Nicholson's Advance.—An Infected Camp.—Ministerial Promises Broken.—A New Scheme.—Port Royal Attacked.—Acadia Conquered. [Pg 120]When war-parties from Canada struck the English borders, reprisal was difficult against those who had provoked it. Canada was made almost inaccessible by a hundred leagues of pathless forest, prowled by her Indian allies, who were sure to give the alarm of an approaching foe; while, on the other hand, the New Englanders could easily reach Acadia by their familiar element, the sea; and hence that unfortunate colony often made vicarious atonement for the sins of her northern sister. It was from French privateers and fishing-vessels on the Acadian seas that Massachusetts drew most of the prisoners whom she exchanged for her own people held captive in Canada. [Pg 121]Major Benjamin Church, the noted Indian fighter of King Philip's War, was at Tiverton in Rhode Island when he heard of Hertel de Rouville's attack on Deerfield. Boiling with rage, he mounted his horse and rode to Boston to propose a stroke of retaliation. Church was energetic, impetuous, and bull-headed, sixty-five years old, and grown so fat that when pushing through the woods on the trail of Indians, he kept a stout sergeant by him to hoist him over fallen trees. Governor Dudley approved his scheme, and appointed him to command the expedition, with the rank of colonel. Church repaired to his native Duxbury; and here, as well as in Plymouth and other neighboring settlements, the militia were called out, and the veteran readily persuaded a sufficient number to volunteer under him. With the Indians of Cape Cod he found more difficulty, they being, as his son observes, "a people that need much treating, especially with drink." At last, however, some of them were induced to join him. Church now returned to Boston, and begged that an attack on Port Royal might be included in his instructions,—which was refused, on the ground that a plan to that effect had been laid before the Queen, and that nothing could be done till her answer was received. The governor's enemies seized the occasion to say that he wished Port Royal to remain French, in order to make money by trading with it. The whole force, including Indians and sailors,[Pg 122] amounted to about seven hundred men; they sailed to Matinicus in brigs and sloops, the province galley, and two British frigates. From Matinicus most of the sailing-vessels were sent to Mount Desert to wait orders, while the main body rowed eastward in whale-boats. Touching at Saint-Castin's fort, where the town of Castine now stands, they killed or captured everybody they found there. Receiving false information that there was a large war-party on the west side of Passamaquoddy Bay, they hastened to the place, reached it in the night, and pushed into the woods in hope of surprising the enemy. The movement was difficult; and Church's men, being little better than a mob, disregarded his commands, and fell into disorder. He raged and stormed; and presently, in the darkness and confusion, descrying a hut or cabin on the farther side of a small brook, with a crowd gathered about it, he demanded what was the matter, and was told that there were Frenchmen inside who would not come out. "Then knock them in the head," shouted the choleric old man; and he was obeyed. It was said that the victims belonged to a party of Canadians captured just before, under a promise of life. Afterwards, when Church returned to Boston, there was an outcry of indignation against him for this butchery. In any case, however, he could have known nothing of the alleged promise of quarter. To hunt Indians with an endless forest behind them was like chasing shadows. The Acadians[Pg 123] were surer game. Church sailed with a part of his force up the Bay of Fundy, and landed at Grand Pré,—a place destined to a dismal notoriety half a century later. The inhabitants of this and the neighboring settlements made some slight resistance, and killed a lieutenant named Baker, and one soldier, after which they fled; when Church, first causing the houses to be examined, to make sure that nobody was left in them, ordered them to be set on fire. The dikes were then broken, and the tide let in upon the growing crops.[110] In spite of these harsh proceedings, he fell far short in his retaliation for the barbarities at Deerfield, since he restrained his Indians and permitted no woman or child to be hurt,—at the same time telling his prisoners that if any other New England village were treated as Deerfield had been, he would come back with a thousand Indians and leave them free to do what they pleased. With this bluster, he left the unfortunate peasants in the extremity of terror, after carrying off as many of them as were needed for purposes of exchange. A small detachment was sent to Beaubassin, where it committed similar havoc. Church now steered for Port Royal, which he had been forbidden to attack. The two frigates and the[Pg 124] transports had by this time rejoined him, and in spite of Dudley's orders to make no attempt on the French fort, the British and provincial officers met in council to consider whether to do so. With one voice they decided in the negative, since they had only four hundred men available for landing, while the French garrison was no doubt much stronger, having had ample time to call the inhabitants to its aid. Church, therefore, after trying the virtue of a bombastic summons to surrender, and destroying a few houses, sailed back to Boston. It was a miserable retaliation for a barbarous outrage; as the guilty were out of reach, the invaders turned their ire on the innocent.[111] If Port Royal in French hands was a source of illicit gain to some persons in Boston, it was also an occasion of loss by the privateers and corsairs it sent out to prey on trading and fishing vessels, while at the same time it was a standing menace as the possible naval base for one of those armaments against the New England capital which were often threatened, though never carried into effect. Hence, in 1707 the New England colonists made, in their bungling way, a serious attempt to get possession of it. Dudley's enemies raised the old cry that at heart[Pg 125] he wished Port Royal to remain French, and was only forced by popular clamor to countenance an attack upon it. The charge seems a malicious slander. Early in March he proposed the enterprise to the General Court; and the question being referred to a committee, they reported that a thousand soldiers should be raised, vessels impressed, and her Majesty's frigate "Deptford," with the province galley, employed to convoy them. An Act was passed accordingly.[112] Two regiments were soon afoot, one uniformed in red, and the other in blue; one commanded by Colonel Francis Wainwright, and the other by Colonel Winthrop Hilton. Rhode Island sent eighty more men, and New Hampshire sixty, while Connecticut would do nothing. The expedition sailed on the thirteenth of May, and included one thousand and seventy-six soldiers, with about four hundred and fifty sailors. The soldiers were nearly all volunteers from the rural militia, and their training and discipline were such as they had acquired in the uncouth frolics and plentiful New England rum of the periodical "muster days." There chanced to be one officer who knew more or less of the work in hand. This was the English engineer Rednap, sent out to look after the fortifications of New York and New England. The commander-in-chief was Colonel John March, of[Pg 126] Newbury, who had popular qualities, had seen frontier service, and was personally brave, but totally unfit for his present position. Most of the officers were civilians from country towns,—Ipswich, Topsfield, Lynn, Salem, Dorchester, Taunton, or Weymouth.[113] In the province galley went, as secretary of the expedition, that intelligent youth, William Dudley, son of the governor. New England has been blamed for not employing trained officers to command her levies; but with the exception of Rednap, and possibly of Captain Samuel Vetch, there were none in the country, nor were they wanted. In their stubborn and jealous independence, the sons of the Puritans would have resented their presence. The provincial officers were, without exception, civilians. British regular officers, good, bad, or indifferent, were apt to put on airs of superiority which galled the democratic susceptibilities of the natives, who, rather than endure a standing military force imposed by the mother-country, preferred to suffer if they must, and fight their own battles in their own crude way. Even for irregular warfare they were at a disadvantage; Canadian feudalism developed good partisan leaders, which was rarely the case with New England democracy. Colonel John March was a tyro set over a crowd of ploughboys, fishermen, and mechanics, officered by tradesmen, farmers, blacksmiths, village[Pg 127] magnates, and deacons of the church,—for the characters of deacon and militia officer were often joined in one. These improvised soldiers commonly did well in small numbers, and very ill in large ones. Early in June the expedition sailed into Port Royal Basin, and Lieutenant-Colonel Appleton, with three hundred and fifty men, landed on the north shore, four or five miles below the fort, marched up to the mouth of the Annapolis, and was there met by an ambushed body of French, who, being outnumbered, presently took to their boats and retreated to the fort. Meanwhile, March, with seven hundred and fifty men, landed on the south shore and pushed on to the meadows of Allen's River, which they were crossing in battle array when a fire blazed out upon them from a bushy hill on the farther bank, where about two hundred French lay in ambush under Subercase, the governor. March and his men crossed the stream, and after a skirmish that did little harm to either side, the French gave way. The English then advanced to a hill known as the Lion Rampant, within cannon-shot of the fort, and here began to intrench themselves, stretching their lines right and left towards the Annapolis on the one hand, and Allen's River on the other, so as to form a semicircle before the fort, where all the inhabitants had by this time taken refuge. Soon all was confusion in the New England camp,—the consequence of March's incapacity for a large command, and the greenness and ignorance of both[Pg 128] himself and his subordinates. There were conflicting opinions, wranglings, and disputes. The men, losing all confidence in their officers, became unmanageable. "The devil was at work among us," writes one of those present. The engineer, Rednap, the only one of them who knew anything of the work in hand, began to mark out the batteries; but he soon lost temper, and declared that "it was not for him to venture his reputation with such ungovernable and undisciplined men and inconstant officers."[114] He refused to bring up the cannon, saying that it could not be done under the fire of the fort; and the naval captains were of the same opinion. One of the chaplains, Rev. John Barnard, being of a martial turn and full of zeal, took it upon himself to make a plan of the fort; and to that end, after providing himself with pen, ink, paper, and a horse-pistol, took his seat at a convenient spot; but his task was scarcely begun when it was ended by a cannon-ball that struck the ground beside him, peppered him with gravel, and caused his prompt retreat.[115] French deserters reported that there were five hundred men in the fort, with forty-two heavy cannon, and that four or five hundred more were expected every day. This increased the general bewilderment of the besiegers. There was a council of war. Rednap declared that it would be useless[Pg 129] to persist; and after hot debate and contradiction, it was resolved to decamp. Three days after, there was another council, which voted to bring up the cannon and open fire, in spite of Rednap and the naval captains; but in the next evening a third council resolved again to raise the siege as hopeless. This disgusted the rank and file, who were a little soothed by an order to destroy the storehouse and other buildings outside the fort; and, ill led as they were, they did the work thoroughly. "Never did men act more boldly," says the witness before quoted; "they threatened the enemy to his nose, and would have taken the fort if the officers had shown any spirit. They found it hard to bring them off. At the end we broke up with the confusion of Babel, and went about our business like fools."[116] The baffled invaders sailed crestfallen to Casco Bay, and a vessel was sent to carry news of the miscarriage to Dudley, who, vexed and incensed, ordered another attempt. March was in a state of helpless indecision, increased by a bad cold; but the governor would not recall him, and chose instead the lamentable expedient of sending three members of the provincial council to advise and direct him. Two of them had commissions in the militia; the third, John Leverett, was a learned bachelor of divinity, formerly a tutor in Harvard College, and soon after[Pg 130] its president,—capable, no doubt, of preaching Calvinistic sermons to the students, but totally unfit to command men or conduct a siege. Young William Dudley was writing meanwhile to his father how jealousies and quarrels were rife among the officers, how their conduct bred disorder and desertion among the soldiers, and how Colonel March and others behaved as if they had nothing to do but make themselves popular.[117] Many of the officers seem, in fact, to have been small politicians in search of notoriety, with an eye to votes or appointments. Captain Stuckley, of the British frigate, wrote to the governor in great discontent about the "nonsensical malice" of Lieutenant-Colonel Appleton, and adds, "I don't see what good I can do by lying here, where I am almost murdered by mosquitoes."[118] The three commissioners came at last, with a reinforcement of another frigate and a hundred recruits, which did not supply losses, as the soldiers had deserted by scores. In great ill-humor, the expedition sailed back to Port Royal, where it was found that reinforcements had also reached the French, including a strongly manned privateer from Martinique. The New England men landed, and there was some sharp skirmishing in an orchard. Chaplain Barnard took part in the fray. "A shot brushed my wig," he says, "but I was mercifully preserved.[Pg 131] We soon drove them out of the orchard, killed a few of them, desperately wounded the privateer captain, and after that we all embarked and returned to Boston as fast as we could." This summary statement is imperfect, for there was a good deal of skirmishing from the thirteenth August to the twentieth, when the invaders sailed for home. March was hooted as he walked Boston streets, and children ran after him crying, "Wooden sword!" There was an attempt at a court-martial; but so many officers were accused, on one ground or another, that hardly enough were left to try them, and the matter was dropped. With one remarkable exception, the New England militia reaped scant laurels on their various expeditions eastward; but of all their shortcomings, this was the most discreditable.[119] Meanwhile events worthy of note were passing in Newfoundland. That island was divided between the two conflicting powers,—the chief station of the French being at Placentia, and that of the English at St. John. In January, 1705, Subercase, who soon[Pg 132] after became governor of Acadia, marched with four hundred and fifty soldiers, Canadians, and buccaneers, aided by a band of Indians, against St. John,—a fishing-village defended by two forts, the smaller, known as the castle, held by twelve men, and the larger, called Fort William, by forty men under Captain Moody. The latter was attacked by the French, who were beaten off; on which they burned the unprotected houses and fishing-huts with a brutality equal to that of Church in Acadia, and followed up the exploit by destroying the hamlet at Ferryland and all the defenceless hovels and fish-stages along the shore towards Trinity Bay and Bonavista.[120] Four years later, the Sieur de Saint-Ovide, a nephew of Brouillan, late governor at Port Royal, struck a more creditable blow. He set out from Placentia on the thirteenth of December, 1708, with one hundred and sixty-four men, and on the first of January approached Fort William two hours before day, found the gate leading to the covered way open, entered with a band of volunteers, rapidly crossed the ditch, planted ladders against the wall, and leaped into the fort, then, as he declares, garrisoned by a hundred men. His main body followed close. The English were taken unawares; their commander,[Pg 133] who showed great courage, was struck down by three shots, and after some sharp fighting the place was in the hands of the assailants. The small fort at the mouth of the harbor capitulated on the second day, and the palisaded village of the inhabitants, which, if we are to believe Saint-Ovide, contained nearly six hundred men, made little resistance. St. John became for the moment a French possession; but Costebelle, governor at Placentia, despaired of holding it, and it was abandoned in the following summer.[121] About this time a scheme was formed for the permanent riddance of New England from war-parties by the conquest of Canada.[122] The prime mover in it was Samuel Vetch, whom we have seen as an emissary to Quebec for the exchange of prisoners, and also as one of the notables fined for illicit trade with the French. He came of a respectable Scotch family. His grandfather, his father, three of his uncles, and one of his brothers were Covenanting ministers, who had suffered some persecution under Charles II. He himself was destined for the ministry; but his inclinations being in no way clerical, he[Pg 134] and his brother William got commissions in the army, and took an active part in the war that ended with the Peace of Ryswick. In the next year the two brothers sailed for the Isthmus of Panama as captains in the band of adventurers embarked in the disastrous enterprise known as the Darien Scheme. William Vetch died at sea, and Samuel repaired to New York, where he married a daughter of Robert Livingston, one of the chief men of the colony, and engaged largely in the Canadian trade. From New York he went to Boston, where we find him when the War of the Spanish Succession began. During his several visits to Canada he had carefully studied the St. Lawrence and its shores, and boasted that he knew them better than the Canadians themselves.[123] He was impetuous, sanguine, energetic, and headstrong, astute withal, and full of ambition. A more vigorous agent for the execution of the proposed plan of conquest could not have been desired. The General Court of Massachusetts, contrary to its instinct and its past practice, resolved, in view of the greatness of the stake, to ask this time for help from the mother-country, and Vetch sailed for England, bearing an address to the Queen, begging for an armament to aid in the reduction of Canada and Acadia. The scheme waxed broader yet in the ardent brain of the agent;[Pg 135] he proposed to add Newfoundland to the other conquests, and when all was done in the North, to sail to the Gulf of Mexico and wrest Pensacola from the Spaniards; by which means, he writes, "Her Majesty shall be sole empress of the vast North American continent." The idea was less visionary than it seems. Energy, helped by reasonable good luck, might easily have made it a reality, so far as concerned the possessions of France. The court granted all that Vetch asked. On the eleventh of March he sailed for America, fully empowered to carry his plans into execution, and with the assurance that when Canada was conquered, he should be its governor. A squadron bearing five regiments of regular troops was promised. The colonies were to muster their forces in all haste. New York was directed to furnish eight hundred men; New Jersey, two hundred; Pennsylvania, one hundred and fifty; and Connecticut, three hundred and fifty,—the whole to be at Albany by the middle of May, and to advance on Montreal by way of Wood Creek and Lake Champlain, as soon as they should hear that the squadron had reached Boston. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island were to furnish twelve hundred men, to join the regulars in attacking Quebec by way of the St. Lawrence.[124] [Pg 136]Vetch sailed from Portsmouth in the ship "Dragon," accompanied by Colonel Francis Nicholson, late lieutenant-governor of New York, who was to take an important part in the enterprise. The squadron with the five regiments was to follow without delay. The weather was bad, and the "Dragon," beating for five weeks against headwinds, did not enter Boston harbor till the evening of the twenty-eighth of April. Vetch, chafing with impatience, for every moment was precious, sent off expresses that same night to carry the Queen's letters to the governors of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Dudley and his council met the next morning, and to them Vetch delivered the royal message, which was received, he says, "with the dutiful obedience becoming good subjects, and all the marks of joy and thankfulness."[125] Vetch, Nicholson, and the Massachusetts authorities quickly arranged their plans. An embargo was laid on the shipping; provision was made for raising men and supplies and providing transportation. When all was in train, the two emissaries hired a sloop for New York, and touching by the way at Rhode Island, found it in the throes of the annual election of governor. Yet every warlike preparation was already made, and Vetch and his companion sailed at once for New Haven to meet Saltonstall, the newly elected governor of Connecticut.[Pg 137] Here too, all was ready, and the envoys, well pleased, continued their voyage to New York, which they reached on the eighteenth of May. The governor, Lord Lovelace, had lately died, and Colonel Ingoldsby, the lieutenant-governor, acted in his place. The Assembly was in session, and being summoned to the council-chamber, the members were addressed by Vetch and Nicholson with excellent effect. In accepting the plan of conquest, New York completely changed front. She had thus far stood neutral, leaving her neighbors to defend themselves, and carrying on an active trade with the French and their red allies. Still, it was her interest that Canada should become English, thus throwing open to her the trade of the Western tribes; and the promises of aid from England made the prospects of the campaign so flattering that she threw herself into the enterprise, though not without voices of protest,—for while the frontier farmers and some prominent citizens like Peter Schuyler thought that the time for action had come, the Albany traders and their allies, who fattened on Canadian beaver, were still for peace at any price.[126] With Pennsylvania and New Jersey the case was different. The one, controlled by non-combatant Quakers and safe from French war-parties, refused all aid; while the other, in less degree under the same military blight, would give no men, though granting a slow and reluctant contribution of £3,000,[Pg 138] taking care to suppress on the record every indication that the money was meant for military uses. New York, on the other hand, raised her full contingent, and Massachusetts and New Hampshire something more, being warm in the faith that their borders would be plagued with war-parties no longer. It remained for New York to gain the help of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, to which end Abraham Schuyler went to Onondaga, well supplied with presents. The Iroquois capital was now, as it had been for years, divided between France and England. French interests were represented by the two Jesuits, Mareuil and Jacques Lamberville. The skilful management of Schuyler, joined to his gifts and his rum, presently won over so many to the English party, and raised such excitement in the town that Lamberville thought it best to set out for Montreal with news of what was going on. The intrepid Joncaire, agent of France among the Senecas, was scandalized at what he calls the Jesuit's flight, and wrote to the commandant of Fort Frontenac that its effect on the Indians was such that he, Joncaire, was in peril of his life.[127] Yet he stood his ground, and managed so well that he held the Senecas firm in their neutrality. Lamberville's colleague, Mareuil, whose position was still more critical, was persuaded by Schuyler that his only safety was in going with him to Albany, which he did; and on this the Onondagas, excited by rum, plundered and burned the Jesuit mission-house[Pg 139] and chapel.[128] Clearly, the two priests at Onondaga were less hungry for martyrdom than their murdered brethren Jogues, Brébeuf, Lalemant, and Charles Garnier; but it is to be remembered that the Canadian Jesuit of the first half of the seventeenth century was before all things an apostle, and his successor of a century later was before all things a political agent. As for the Five Nations, that once haughty confederacy, in spite of divisions and waverings, had conceived the idea that its true policy lay, not in siding with either of the European rivals, but in making itself important to both, and courted and caressed by both. While some of the warriors sang the war-song at the prompting of Schuyler, they had been but half-hearted in doing so; and even the Mohawks, nearest neighbors and best friends of the English, sent word to their Canadian kindred, the Caughnawagas, that they took up the hatchet only because they could not help it. The attack on Canada by way of the Hudson and Lake Champlain was to have been commanded by Lord Lovelace or some officer of his choice; but as he was dead, Ingoldsby, his successor in the government of the province, jointly with the governors of several adjacent colonies who had met at New York, appointed Colonel Nicholson in his stead.[129] Nicholson[Pg 140] went to Albany, whence, with about fifteen hundred men, he moved up the Hudson, built a stockade fort opposite Saratoga, and another at the spot known as the Great Carrying Place. This latter he called Fort Nicholson,—a name which it afterwards exchanged for that of Fort Lydius, and later still for that of Fort Edward, which the town that occupies the site owns to this day.[130] Thence he cut a rough roadway through the woods to where Wood Creek, choked with beaver dams, writhed through flat green meadows, walled in by rock and forest. Here he built another fort, which was afterwards rebuilt and named Fort Anne. Wood Creek led to Lake Champlain, and Lake Champlain to Chambly and Montreal,—the objective points of the expedition. All was astir at the camp. Flat-boats and canoes were made, and stores brought up from Albany, till everything was ready for an advance the moment word should come that the British fleet had reached Boston. Vetch, all impatience, went thither to meet it, as if his presence could hasten its arrival. Reports of Nicholson's march to Wood Creek had reached Canada, and Vaudreuil sent Ramesay, governor of Montreal, with fifteen hundred troops, Canadians, and Indians, to surprise his camp. Ramesay's fleet of canoes had reached Lake Champlain,[Pg 141] and was halfway to the mouth of Wood Creek, when his advance party was discovered by English scouts, and the French commander began to fear that he should be surprised in his turn; in fact, some of his Indians were fired upon from an ambuscade. All was now doubt, perplexity, and confusion. Ramesay landed at the narrows of the lake, a little south of the place now called Crown Point. Here, in the dense woods, his Indians fired on some Canadians whom they took for English. This was near producing a panic. "Every tree seemed an enemy," writes an officer present. Ramesay lost himself in the woods, and could not find his army. One Deruisseau, who had gone out as a scout, came back with the report that nine hundred Englishmen were close at hand. Seven English canoes did in fact appear, supported, as the French in their excitement imagined, by a numerous though invisible army in the forest; but being fired upon, and seeing that they were entering a hornet's nest, the English sheered off. Ramesay having at last found his army, and order being gradually restored, a council of war was held, after which the whole force fell back to Chambly, having accomplished nothing.[131] [Pg 142]Great was the alarm in Canada when it became known that the enemy aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the colony. One La Plaine spread a panic at Quebec by reporting that, forty-five leagues below, he had seen eight or ten ships under sail and heard the sound of cannon. It was afterwards surmised that the supposed ships were points of rocks seen through the mist at low tide, and the cannon the floundering of whales at play.[132] Quebec, however, was all excitement, in expectation of attack. The people of the Lower Town took refuge on the rock above; the men of the neighboring parishes were ordered within the walls; and the women and children, with the cattle and horses, were sent to hiding-places in the forest. There had been no less consternation at Montreal, caused by exaggerated reports of Iroquois hostility and the movements of Nicholson. It was even proposed to abandon Chambly and Fort Frontenac, and concentrate all available force to defend the heart of the colony. "A most bloody war is imminent," wrote Vaudreuil to the minister, Ponchartrain. Meanwhile, for weeks and months Nicholson's little army lay in the sultry valley of Wood Creek,[Pg 143] waiting those tidings of the arrival of the British squadron at Boston which were to be its signal of advance. At length a pestilence broke out. It is said to have been the work of the Iroquois allies, who thought that the French were menaced with ruin, and who, true to their policy of balancing one European power against the other, poisoned the waters of the creek by throwing into it, above the camp, the skins and offal of the animals they had killed in their hunting. The story may have some foundation, though it rests only on the authority of Charlevoix. No contemporary writer mentions it; and Vaudreuil says that the malady was caused by the long confinement of the English in their fort. Indeed, a crowd of men, penned up through the heats of midsummer in a palisaded camp, ill-ordered and unclean as the camps of the raw provincials usually were, and infested with pestiferous swarms of flies and mosquitoes, could hardly have remained in health. Whatever its cause, the disease, which seems to have been a malignant dysentery, made more havoc than the musket and the sword. A party of French who came to the spot late in the autumn, found it filled with innumerable graves. The British squadron, with the five regiments on board, was to have reached Boston at the middle of May. On the twentieth of that month the whole contingent of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island was encamped by Boston harbor, with transports and stores, ready to embark for Quebec at[Pg 144] ten hours' notice.[133] When Vetch, after seeing everything in readiness at New York, returned to Boston on the third of July, he found the New England levies encamped there still, drilled diligently every day by officers whom he had brought from England for the purpose. "The bodies of the men," he writes to Lord Sunderland, "are in general better than in Europe, and I hope their courage will prove so too; so that nothing in human probability can prevent the success of this glorious enterprise but the too late arrival of the fleet."[134] But of the fleet there was no sign. "The government here is put to vast expense," pursues Vetch, "but they cheerfully pay it, in hopes of being freed from it forever hereafter. All that they can do now is to fast and pray for the safe and speedy arrival of the fleet, for which they have already had two public fast-days kept." If it should not come in time, he continues, "it would be the last disappointment to her Majesty's colonies, who have so heartily complied with her royal order, and would render them much more miserable than if such a thing had never been undertaken." Time passed, and no ships appeared. Vetch wrote again: "I shall only presume to acquaint your Lordship how vastly uneasy all her Majesty's loyall subjects here on this continent are. Pray God[Pg 145] hasten the fleet."[135] Dudley, scarcely less impatient, wrote to the same effect. It was all in vain, and the soldiers remained in their camp, monotonously drilling day after day through all the summer and half the autumn. At length, on the eleventh of October, Dudley received a letter from Lord Sunderland, informing him that the promised forces had been sent to Portugal to meet an exigency of the European war. They were to have reached Boston, as we have seen, by the middle of May. Sunderland's notice of the change of destination was not written till the twenty-seventh of July, and was eleven weeks on its way, thus imposing on the colonists a heavy and needless tax in time, money, temper, and, in the case of the expedition against Montreal, health and life.[136] What was left of Nicholson's force had fallen back before Sunderland's letter came, making a scapegoat of the innocent Vetch, cursing him, and wishing him hanged. In New England the disappointment and vexation were extreme; but, not to lose all the fruits of their efforts, the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island met and resolved to attack Port Royal if the captains of several British frigates then at New York and Boston would take part in the enterprise. To the disgust of the provincials, the captains, with one exception, refused,[Pg 146] on the score of the late season and the want of orders. A tenacious energy has always been a characteristic of New England, and the hopes of the colonists had been raised too high to be readily abandoned. Port Royal was in their eyes a pestilent nest of privateers and pirates that preyed on the New England fisheries; and on the refusal of the naval commanders to join in an immediate attack, they offered to the court to besiege the place themselves next year, if they could count on the help of four frigates and five hundred soldiers, to be at Boston by the end of March.[137] The Assembly of Massachusetts requested Nicholson, who was on the point of sailing for Europe, to beg her Majesty to help them in an enterprise which would be so advantageous to the Crown, "and which, by the long and expensive war, we are so impoverished and enfeebled as not to be in a capacity to effect."[138] Nicholson sailed in December, and Peter Schuyler soon followed. New York, having once entered on[Pg 147] the path of war, saw that she must continue in it; and to impress the Five Nations with the might and majesty of the Queen, and so dispose them to hold fast to the British cause, Schuyler took five Mohawk chiefs with him to England. One died on the voyage; the rest arrived safe, and their appearance was the sensation of the hour. They were clad, at the Queen's expense, in strange and gay attire, invented by the costumer of one of the theatres; were lodged and feasted as the guests of the nation, driven about London in coaches with liveried servants, conducted to dockyards, arsenals, and reviews, and saluted with cannon by ships of war. The Duke of Shrewsbury presented them to Queen Anne,—one as emperor of the Mohawks, and the other three as kings,—and the Archbishop of Canterbury solemnly gave each of them a Bible. Steele and Addison wrote essays about them, and the Dutch artist Verelst painted their portraits, which were engraved in mezzotint.[139] Their presence and the speech made in their name before the court seem to have had no small effect in drawing attention to the war in America and inclining the ministry towards the proposals of Nicholson. These were accepted, and he sailed for America commissioned[Pg 148] to command the enterprise against Port Royal, with Vetch as adjutant-general.[140] Colonel Francis Nicholson had held some modest military positions, but never, it is said, seen active service. In colonial affairs he had played an important part, and in the course of his life governed, at different times, Virginia, New York, Maryland, and Carolina. He had a robust, practical brain, capable of broad views and large schemes. One of his plans was a confederacy of the provinces to resist the French, which, to his great indignation, Virginia rejected. He had Jacobite leanings, and had been an adherent of James II.; but being no idealist, and little apt to let his political principles block the path of his interests, he turned his back on the fallen cause and offered his services to the Revolution. Though no pattern of domestic morals, he seems to have been officially upright, and he wished well to the colonies, saving always the dominant interests of England. He was bold, ambitious, vehement, and sometimes headstrong and perverse. Though the English ministry had promised aid, it was long in coming. The Massachusetts Assembly had asked that the ships should be at Boston before the end of March; but it was past the middle of May before they sailed from Plymouth. Then, towards midsummer, a strange spasm of martial energy seems to have seized the ministry, for Viscount[Pg 149] Shannon was ordered to Boston with an additional force, commissioned to take the chief command and attack, not Port Royal, but Quebec.[141] This ill-advised change of plan seems to have been reconsidered; at least, it came to nothing.[142] Meanwhile, the New England people waited impatiently for the retarded ships. No order had come from England for raising men, and the colonists resolved this time to risk nothing till assured that their labor and money would not be wasted. At last, not in March, but in July, the ships appeared. Then all was astir with preparation. First, the House of Representatives voted thanks to the Queen for her "royal aid." Next, it was proclaimed that no vessel should be permitted to leave the harbor "till the service is provided;" and a committee of the House proceeded to impress fourteen vessels to serve as transports. Then a vote was passed that nine hundred men be raised as the quota of Massachusetts, and a month's pay in advance, together with a coat worth thirty shillings, was promised to volunteers; a committee of three being at the same time appointed to provide the coats. On the next[Pg 150] day appeared a proclamation from the governor announcing the aforesaid "encouragements," calling on last year's soldiers to enlist again, promising that all should return home as soon as Port Royal was taken, and that each might keep as his own forever the Queen's musket that would be furnished him. Now came an order to colonels of militia to muster their regiments on a day named, read the proclamation at the head of each company, and if volunteers did not come forward in sufficient number, to draft as many men as might be wanted, appointing, at the same time, officers to conduct them to the rendezvous at Dorchester or Cambridge; and, by a stringent and unusual enactment, the House ordered that they should be quartered in private houses, with or without the consent of the owners, "any law or usage to the contrary notwithstanding." Sailors were impressed without ceremony to man the transports; and, finally, it was voted that a pipe of wine, twenty sheep, five pigs, and one hundred fowls be presented to the Honorable General Nicholson for his table during the expedition.[143] The above, with slight variation, may serve as an example of the manner in which, for several generations, men were raised in Massachusetts to serve against the French. Autumn had begun before all was ready. Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island sent their contingents; there was a dinner at the Green[Pg 151] Dragon Tavern in honor of Nicholson, Vetch, and Sir Charles Hobby, the chief officers of the expedition; and on the eighteenth of September the whole put to sea. On the twenty-fourth the squadron sailed into the narrow entrance of Port Royal, where the tide runs like a mill-stream. One vessel was driven upon the rocks, and twenty-six men were drowned. The others got in safely, and anchored above Goat Island, in sight of the French fort. They consisted of three fourth-rates,—the "Dragon," the "Chester," and the "Falmouth;" two fifth-rates,—the "Lowestoffe" and the "Feversham;" the province galley, one bomb-ketch, twenty-four small transports, two or three hospital ships, a tender, and several sloops carrying timber to make beds for cannon and mortars. The landing force consisted of four hundred British marines, and about fifteen hundred provincials, divided into four battalions.[144] Its unnecessary numbers were due to the belief of Nicholson that the fort had been reinforced and strengthened. In the afternoon of the twenty-fifth they were all on shore,—Vetch with his two battalions on the north side, and Nicholson with the other two on the south. Vetch marched to his camping-ground, on which, in the words of Nicholson's journal, "the[Pg 152] French began to fire pretty thick." On the next morning Nicholson's men moved towards the fort, hacking their way through the woods and crossing the marshes of Allen's River, while the French fired briskly with cannon from the ramparts, and small-arms from the woods, houses, and fences. They were driven back, and the English advance guard intrenched itself within four hundred yards of the works. Several days passed in landing artillery and stores, cannonading from the fort and shelling from the English bomb-ketch, when on the twenty-ninth, Ensign Perelle, with a drummer and a flag of truce, came to Nicholson's tent, bringing a letter from Subercase, who begged him to receive into his camp and under his protection certain ladies of the fort who were distressed by the bursting of the English shells. The conduct of Perelle was irregular, as he had not given notice of his approach by beat of drum and got himself and attendants blindfolded before entering the camp. Therefore Nicholson detained him, sending back an officer of his own with a letter to the effect that he would receive the ladies and lodge them in the same house with the French ensign, "for the queen, my royal mistress, hath not sent me hither to make war against women." Subercase on his part detained the English officer, and wrote to Nicholson,— Sir,—You have one of my officers, and I have one of yours; so that now we are equal. However, that hinders me not from believing that once you have given me your[Pg 153] word, you will keep it very exactly. On that ground I now write to tell you, sir, that to prevent the spilling of both English and French blood, I am ready to hold up both hands for a capitulation that will be honorable to both of us.[145] In view of which agreement, he adds that he defers sending the ladies to the English camp. Another day passed, during which the captive officers on both sides were treated with much courtesy. On the next morning, Sunday, October 1, the siege-guns, mortars, and coehorns were in position; and after some firing on both sides, Nicholson sent Colonel Tailor and Captain Abercrombie with a summons to surrender the fort. Subercase replied that he was ready to listen to proposals; the firing stopped, and within twenty-four hours the terms were settled. The garrison were to march out with the honors of war, and to be carried in English ships to Rochelle or Rochefort. The inhabitants within three miles of the fort were to be permitted to remain, if they chose to do so, unmolested, in their homes during two years, on taking an oath of allegiance and fidelity to the Queen. Two hundred provincials marched to the fort gate and formed in two lines on the right and left. Nicholson advanced between the ranks, with Vetch on one hand and Hobby on the other, followed by all[Pg 154] the field-officers. Subercase came to meet them, and gave up the keys, with a few words of compliment. The French officers and men marched out with shouldered arms, drums beating, and colors flying, saluting the English commander as they passed; then the English troops marched in, raised the union flag, and drank the Queen's health amid a general firing of cannon from the fort and ships. Nicholson changed the name of Port Royal to Annapolis Royal; and Vetch, already commissioned as governor, took command of the new garrison, which consisted of two hundred British marines, and two hundred and fifty provincials who had offered themselves for the service. The English officers gave a breakfast to the French ladies in the fort. Sir Charles Hobby took in Madame de Bonaventure, and the rest followed in due order of precedence; but as few of the hosts could speak French, and few of the guests could speak English, the entertainment could hardly have been a lively one. The French officers and men in the fort when it was taken were but two hundred and fifty-eight. Some of the soldiers and many of the armed inhabitants deserted during the siege, which, no doubt, hastened the surrender; for Subercase, a veteran of more than thirty years' service, had borne fair repute as a soldier. Port Royal had twice before been taken by New England men,—once under Major Sedgwick in 1654,[Pg 155] and again under Sir William Phips in the last war; and in each case it had been restored to France by treaty. This time England kept what she had got; and as there was no other place of strength in the province, the capture of Port Royal meant the conquest of Acadia.[146] FOOTNOTES: [110] Church, Entertaining Passages. "Un habitant des Mines a dit que les ennemis avaient été dans toutes les rivières, qu'il n'y restait plus que quatre habitations en entier, le restant ayant été brulé."—Expéditions faites par les Anglois, 1704. "Qu'ils avaient ... brulé toutes les maisons à la reserve du haut des rivières."—Labat, Invasion des Anglois, 1704. [111] On this affair, Thomas Church, Entertaining Passages (1716). The writer was the son of Benjamin Church. Penhallow; Belknap, i. 266; Dudley to ——, 21 April, 1704; Hutchinson, ii. 132; Deplorable State of New England; Entreprise des Anglais sur l'Acadie, 1704; Expéditions faites par les Anglais de la Nouvelle Angleterre, 1704; Labat, Invasion des Anglois de Baston, 1704. [112] Report of a Committee to consider his Excellency's Speech, 12 March, 1707. Resolve for an Expedition against Port Royal (Massachusetts Archives). [113] Autobiography of Rev. John Barnard, one of the five chaplains of the expedition. [114] A Boston Gentleman to his Friend, 13 June, 1707 (Mass. Archives). [115] Autobiography of Rev. John Barnard. [116] A Boston Gentleman to his Friend, 13 June (old style) , 1707. The final attack here alluded to took place on the night of the sixteenth of June (new style). [117] William Dudley to Governor Dudley, 24 June, 1707. [118] Stuckley to Dudley, 28 June, 1707. [119] A considerable number of letters and official papers on this expedition will be found in the 51st and 71st volumes of the Massachusetts Archives. See also Hutchinson, ii. 151, and Belknap, i. 273. The curious narrative of the chaplain, Barnard, is in Mass. Hist. Coll., 3d Series, v. 189-196. The account in the Deplorable State of New England is meant solely to injure Dudley. The chief French accounts are Entreprise des Anglois contre l'Acadie, 26 Juin, 1707; Subercase au Ministre, même date; Labat au Ministre, 6 Juillet, 1707; Relation appended to Dièreville, Voyage de l'Acadie. The last is extremely loose and fanciful. Subercase puts the English force at three thousand men, whereas the official returns show it to have been, soldiers and sailors, about half this number. [120] Penhallow puts the French force at five hundred and fifty. Jeremiah Dummer, Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the late Expedition to Canada, says that the havoc committed occasioned a total loss of £80,000. [121] Saint-Ovide au Ministre, 20 Janvier, 1709; Ibid., 6 Septembre, 1709; Rapport de Costebelle, 26 Février, 1709. Costebelle makes the French force one hundred and seventy-five. [122] Some of the French officials in Acadia foresaw aggressive action on the part of the English in consequence of the massacre at Haverhill. "Le coup que les Canadiens viennent de faire, où Mars, plus féroce qu'en Europe, a donné carrière à sa rage, me fait appréhender une représaille."—De Goutin au Ministre, 29 Décembre, 1708. [123] Patterson, Memoir of Hon. Samuel Vetch, in Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, iv. Compare a paper by General James Grant Wilson in International Review, November, 1881. [124] Instructions to Colonel Vetch, 1 March, 1709; The Earl of Sunderland to Dudley, 28 April, 1709; The Queen to Lord Lovelace, 1 March, 1709; The Earl of Sunderland to Lord Lovelace, 28 April, 1709. [125] Journal of Vetch and Nicholson (Public Record Office). This is in the form of a letter, signed by both, and dated at New York, 29 June, 1709. [126] Thomas Cockerill to Mr. Popple, 2 July, 1709. [127] Joncaire in N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 838. [128] Mareuil in N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 836, text and note. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1709. [129] "If I had not accepted the command, there would have been insuperable difficulties" (arising from provincial jealousies).—Nicholson to Sunderland, 8 July, 1709. [130] Forts Nicholson, Lydius, and Edward were not the same, but succeeded each other on the same ground. [131] Mémoire sur le Canada, Année 1709. This paper, which has been ascribed to the engineer De Léry, is printed in Collection de Manuscrits relatifs à la Nouvelle France, i. 615 (Quebec, 1883), printed from the MS. Paris Documents in the Boston State House. The writer of the Mémoire was with Ramesay's expedition. Also Ramesay à Vaudreuil, 19 Octobre, 1709, and Vaudreuil au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1709. Charlevoix says that Ramesay turned back because he believed that there were five thousand English at Wood Creek; but Ramesay himself makes their number only one thousand whites and two hundred Indians. He got his information from two Dutchmen caught just after the alarm near Pointe à la Chevelure (Crown Point). He turned back because he had failed to surprise the English, and also, it seems, because there were disagreements among his officers. [132] Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l'H?pital Général de Québec, 203. [133] Dudley to Sunderland, 14 August, 1709. [134] Vetch to Sunderland, 2 August, 1709. The pay of the men was nine shillings a week, with eightpence a day for provisions; and most of them had received an enlistment bounty of £12. [135] Vetch to Sunderland, 12 August, 1709. Dudley writes with equal urgency two days later. [136] Letters of Nicholson, Dudley, and Vetch, 20 June to 24 October, 1709. [137] Joint Letter of Nicholson, Dudley, Vetch, and Moody to Sunderland, 24 October, 1709; also Joint Letter of Dudley, Vetch, and Moody to Sunderland, 25 October, 1709; Abstracts of Letters and Papers relating to the Attack of Port Royal, 1709 (Public Record Office); Address of ye Inhabitants of Boston and Parts adjacent, 1709. Moody, named above, was the British naval captain who had consented to attack Port Royal. [138] Order of Assembly, 27 October, 1709. Massachusetts had spent about £22,000 on her futile expedition of 1707, and, with New Hampshire and Rhode Island, a little more than £46,000 on that of 1709, besides continual outlay in guarding her two hundred miles of frontier,—a heavy expense for the place and time. [139] See J. R. Bartlett, in Magazine of American History, March, 1878, and Schuyler, Colonial New York, ii. 34-39. The chiefs returned to America in May on board the "Dragon." An elaborate pamphlet appeared in London, giving an account of them and their people. A set of the mezzotint portraits, which are large and well executed, is in the John Carter Brown collection at Providence. For photographic reproductions, see Winsor, Nar. and Crit. Hist., v. 107. Compare Smith, Hist. N. Y., i. 204 (1830). [140] Commission of Colonel Francis Nicholson, 18 May, 1710. Instructions to Colonel Nicholson, same date. [141] Instructions to Richard Viscount Shannon, July, 1710. A report of the scheme reached Boston. Hutchinson, ii. 164. [142] The troops, however, were actually embarked. True State of the Forces commanded by the Right Honble The Lord Viscount Shannon, as they were Embarkd the 14th of October, 1710. The total was three thousand two hundred and sixty-five officers and men. Also, Shannon to Sunderland, 16 October, 1710. The absurdity of the attempt at so late a season is obvious. Yet the fleet lay some weeks more at Portsmouth, waiting for a fair wind. [143] Archives of Massachusetts, vol. lxxi., where the original papers are preserved. [144] Nicholson and Vetch to the Secretary of State, 16 September, 1710; Hutchinson, ii. 164; Penhallow. Massachusetts sent two battalions of four hundred and fifty men each, and Connecticut one battalion of three hundred men, while New Hampshire and Rhode Island united their contingents to form a fourth battalion. [145] The contemporary English translation of this letter is printed among the papers appended to Nicholson's Journal in Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, i. [146] In a letter to Ponchartrain, 1 October, 1710 (new style), Subercase declares that he has not a sou left, nor any credit. "I have managed to borrow enough to maintain the garrison for the last two years, and have paid what I could by selling all my furniture." Charlevoix's account of the siege has been followed by most writers, both French and English; but it is extremely incorrect. It was answered by one De Gannes, apparently an officer under Subercase, in a paper called Observations sur les Erreurs de la Relation du Siège du Port Royal ... faittes sur de faux mémoires par le révérend Père Charlevoix, whom De Gannes often contradicts flatly. Thus Charlevoix puts the besieging force at thirty-four hundred men, besides officers and sailors, while De Gannes puts it at fourteen hundred; and while Charlevoix says that the garrison were famishing, his critic says that they were provisioned for three months. See the valuable notes to Shea's Charlevoix, v. 227-232. The journal of Nicholson was published "by authority" in the Boston News Letter, November, 1710, and has been reprinted, with numerous accompanying documents, including the French and English correspondence during the siege, in the Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, i. Vaudreuil, before the siege, sent a reinforcement to Subercase, who, by a strange infatuation, refused it. N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 853. CHAPTER VIII. 1710, 1711. WALKER'S EXPEDITION. Scheme of La Ronde Denys.—Boston warned against British Designs.—Boston to be ruined.—Plans of the Ministry.—Canada doomed.—British Troops at Boston.—The Colonists denounced.—The Fleet sails for Quebec.—Forebodings of the Admiral.—Storm and Wreck.—Timid Commanders.—Retreat.—Joyful News for Canada.—Pious Exultation.—Fanciful Stories.—Walker Disgraced. [Pg 156]Military aid from Old England to New, promised in one year and actually given in the next, was a fact too novel and surprising to escape the notice either of friends or of foes. The latter drew strange conclusions from it. Two Irish deserters from an English station in Newfoundland appeared at the French post of Placentia full of stories of British and provincial armaments against Canada. On this, an idea seized the French commandant, Costebelle, and he hastened to make it known to the colonial minister. It was to the effect that the aim of England was not so much to conquer the French colonies as to reduce her own to submission, especially Massachusetts,—a kind of republic[Pg 157] which has never willingly accepted a governor from its king.[147] In sending ships and soldiers to the "Bastonnais" under pretence of helping them to conquer their French neighbors, Costebelle is sure that England only means to bring them to a dutiful subjection. "I do not think," he writes on another occasion, "that they are so blind as not to see that they will insensibly be brought under the yoke of the Parliament of Old England; but by the cruelties that the Canadians and Indians exercise in continual incursions upon their lands, I judge that they would rather be delivered from the inhumanity of such neighbors than preserve all the former powers of their little republic."[148] He thinks, however, that the design of England ought to be strongly represented to the Council at Boston, and that M. de la Ronde Denys will be a good man to do it, as he speaks English, has lived in Boston, and has many acquaintances there.[149] [Pg 158]The minister, Ponchartrain, was struck by Costebelle's suggestion, and wrote both to him and to Vaudreuil in high approval of it. To Vaudreuil he says: "Monsieur de Costebelle has informed me that the chief object of the armament made by the English last year was to establish their sovereignty at Boston and New York, the people of these provinces having always maintained a sort of republic, governed by their council, and having been unwilling to receive absolute governors from the kings of England. This destination of the armament seems to me probable, and it is much to be wished that the Council at Boston could be informed of the designs of the English court, and shown how important it is for that province to remain in the state of a republic. The King would even approve our helping it to do so. If you see any prospect of success, no means should be spared to secure it. The matter is of the greatest importance, but care is essential to employ persons who have the talents necessary for conducting it, besides great secrecy and prudence, as well as tried probity and fidelity. This affair demands your best attention, and must be conducted with great care and precaution, in order that no false step may be taken."[150] Ponchartrain could not be supposed to know that while under her old charter Massachusetts, called by[Pg 159] him and other Frenchmen the government of Boston, had chosen her own governor, New York had always received hers from the court. What is most curious in this affair is the attitude of Louis XIV., who abhorred republics, and yet was prepared to bolster up one or more of them beyond the Atlantic,—thinking, no doubt, that they would be too small and remote to be dangerous. Costebelle, who had suggested the plan of warning the Council at Boston, proceeded to unfold his scheme for executing it. This was to send La Ronde Denys to Boston in the spring, under the pretext of treating for an exchange of prisoners, which would give him an opportunity of insinuating to the colonists that the forces which the Queen of England sends to join their own for the conquest of Acadia and Canada have no object whatever but that of ravishing from them the liberties they have kept so firmly and so long, but which would be near ruin if the Queen should become mistress of New France by the fortune of war; and that either they must have sadly fallen from their ancient spirit, or their chiefs have been corrupted by the Court of London, if they do not see that they are using their own weapons for the destruction of their republic.[151] La Ronde Denys accordingly received his instructions, which authorized him to negotiate with the "Bastonnais" as with an independent people, and offer them complete exemption from French hostility[Pg 160] if they would promise to give no more aid to Old England either in ships or men. He was told at the same time to approach the subject with great caution, and unless he found willing listeners, to pass off the whole as a pleasantry.[152] He went to Boston, where he was detained in consequence of preparations then on foot for attacking Canada. He tried to escape; but his vessel was seized and moored under the guns of the town, and it is needless to say that his mission was a failure. The idea of Costebelle, or rather of La Ronde,—for it probably originated with him,—was not without foundation; for though there is no reason to believe that in sending ships and soldiers against the French, England meant to use them against the liberties of her own colonies, there can be no doubt that she thought those liberties excessive and troublesome; and, on the other side, while the people of Massachusetts were still fondly attached to the land of their fathers, and still called it "Home," they were at the same time enamoured of their autonomy, and jealously watchful against any abridgment of it. While La Ronde Denys was warning Massachusetts of the danger of helping England to conquer Canada,[Pg 161] another Frenchman, in a more prophetic spirit, declared that England would make a grave mistake if she helped her colonies to the same end. "There is an antipathy," this writer affirms, "between the English of Europe and those of America, who will not endure troops from England even to guard their forts;" and he goes on to say that if the French colonies should fall, those of England would control the continent from Newfoundland to Florida. "Old England"—such are his words—"will not imagine that these various provinces will then unite, shake off the yoke of the English monarchy, and erect themselves into a democracy."[153] Forty or fifty years later, several Frenchmen made the same prediction; but at this early day, when the British provinces were so feeble and divided, it is truly a remarkable one. The anonymous prophet regards the colonies of England, Massachusetts above all, as a standing menace to those of France; and he proposes a drastic remedy against the danger. This is a powerful attack on Boston by land and sea, for which he hopes that God will prepare the way. "When Boston is reduced, we would call together all the chief men of the other towns of New England, who would pay heavy sums to be spared from the flames. As for Boston, it should be pillaged, its workshops,[Pg 162] manufactures, shipyards, all its fine establishments ruined, and its ships sunk." If these gentle means are used thoroughly, he thinks that New England will cease to be a dangerous rival for some time, especially if "Rhodelene" (Rhode Island) is treated like Boston.[154] While the correspondent of the French court was thus consigning New England to destruction, an attack was preparing against Canada less truculent but quite as formidable as that which he urged against Boston. The French colony was threatened by an armament stronger in proportion to her present means of defence than that which brought her under British rule half a century later. But here all comparison ceases; for there was no Pitt to direct and inspire, and no Wolfe to lead. The letters of Dudley, the proposals of Vetch, the representations of Nicholson, the promptings of Jeremiah Dummer, agent of Massachusetts in England, and the speech made to the Queen by the four Indians who had been the London sensation of the last year, had all helped to draw the attention of the[Pg 163] ministry to the New World, and the expediency of driving the French out of it. Other influences conspired to the same end, or in all likelihood little or nothing would have been done. England was tiring of the Continental war, the costs of which threatened ruin. Marlborough was rancorously attacked, and his most stanch supporters the Whigs had given place to the Tories, led by the Lord Treasurer Harley, and the Secretary of State St. John, soon afterwards Lord Bolingbroke. Never was party spirit more bitter; and the new ministry found a congenial ally in the coarse and savage but powerful genius of Swift, who, incensed by real or imagined slights from the late minister, Godolphin, gave all his strength to the winning side. The prestige of Marlborough's victories was still immense. Harley and St. John dreaded it as their chief danger, and looked eagerly for some means of counteracting it. Such means would be supplied by the conquest of New France. To make America a British continent would be an achievement almost worth Blenheim or Ramillies, and one, too, in which Britain alone would be the gainer; whereas the enemies of Marlborough, with Swift at their head, contended that his greatest triumphs turned more to the profit of Holland or Germany than of England.[155] Moreover, to send a part of his army across the Atlantic would tend to cripple his movements and diminish his fame. [Pg 164]St. John entered with ardor into the scheme. Seven veteran regiments, five of which were from the army in Flanders, were ordered to embark. But in the choice of commanders the judgment of the ministers was not left free; there were influences that they could not disregard. The famous Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, lately the favorite of the feeble but wilful queen, had lost her good graces and given place to Mrs. Masham, one of the women of her bedchamber. The new favorite had a brother, John Hill, known about the court as Jack Hill, whom Marlborough had pronounced good for nothing, but who had been advanced to the rank of colonel, and then of brigadier, through the influence of Mrs. Masham; and though his agreeable social qualities were his best recommendation, he was now appointed to command the troops on the Canada expedition. It is not so clear why the naval command was given to Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker, a man whose incompetence was soon to become notorious. Extreme care was taken to hide the destination of the fleet. Even the Lords of the Admiralty were kept ignorant of it. Some thought the ships bound for the West Indies; some for the South Sea. Nicholson was sent to America with orders to the several colonies to make ready men and supplies. He landed at Boston on the eighth of June. The people of the town, who were nearly all Whigs, were taken by surprise, expecting no such enterprise on[Pg 165] the part of the Tory ministry; and their perplexity was not diminished when they were told that the fleet was at hand, and that they were to supply it forthwith with provisions for ten weeks.[156] There was no time to lose. The governors of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were summoned to meet at New London, and Dudley and Nicholson went thither to join them. Here plans were made for the double attack; for while Walker and Hill were to sail up the St. Lawrence against Quebec, Nicholson, as in the former attempt, was to move against Montreal by way of Lake Champlain. In a few days the arrangements were made, and the governors hastened back to their respective posts.[157] When Dudley reached Boston, he saw Nantasket Roads crowded with transports and ships of war, and the pastures of Noddle's Island studded with tents. The fleet had come on the twenty-fourth, having had what the Admiral calls "by the blessing of God a favorable and extraordinary passage, being but seven weeks and two days between Plymouth and Nantasket."[158] The Admiral and the General had been welcomed[Pg 166] with all honor. The provincial Secretary, with two members of the Council, conducted them to town amid salutes from the batteries of Copp's Hill and Fort Hill, and the Boston militia regiment received them under arms; after which they were feasted at the principal tavern, and accompanied in ceremony to the lodgings provided for them.[159] When the troops were disembarked and the tents pitched, curious townspeople and staring rustics crossed to Noddle's Island, now East Boston, to gaze with wonder on a military pageant the like of which New England had never seen before. Yet their joy at this unlooked-for succor was dashed with deep distrust and jealousy. They dreaded these new and formidable friends, with their imperious demeanor and exacting demands. The British officers, on their part, were no better pleased with the colonists, and one of them, Colonel King, of the artillery, thus gives vent to his feelings: "You'll find in my Journal what Difficultyes we mett with through the Misfortune that the Coloneys were not inform'd of our Coming two Months sooner, and through the Interestedness, ill Nature, and Sowerness of these People, whose Government, Doctrine, and Manners, whose Hypocracy and canting, are insupportable; and no man living but one of Gen'l Hill's good Sense and good Nature could have managed them. But if such a Man mett with nothing he could depend on,[Pg 167] altho' vested with the Queen's Royal Power and Authority, and Supported by a Number of Troops sufficient to reduce by force all the Coloneys, 'tis easy to determine the Respect and Obedience her Majesty may reasonably expect from them." And he gives it as his conviction that till all the colonies are deprived of their charters and brought under one government, "they will grow more stiff and disobedient every Day."[160] It will be seen that some coolness on the part of the Bostonians was not unnatural. But whatever may have been the popular feeling, the provincial authorities did their full part towards supplying the needs of the new-comers; for Dudley, with his strong Tory leanings, did not share the prevailing jealousy, and the country members of the Assembly were anxious before all things to be delivered from war-parties. The problem was how to raise the men and furnish the supplies in the least possible time. The action of the Assembly, far from betraying any slackness, was worthy of a military dictatorship. All ordinary business was set aside. Bills of credit for £40,000 were issued to meet the needs of the expedition. It was ordered that the prices of provisions and other necessaries of the service should stand fixed at the point where they stood before the approach of the fleet was known. Sheriffs and constables, jointly with the Queen's officers, were ordered to search all the town for provisions and liquors, and[Pg 168] if the owners refused to part with them at the prescribed prices, to break open doors and seize them. Stringent and much-needed Acts were passed against harboring deserters. Provincial troops, in greater number than the ministry had demanded, were ordered to be raised at once, and quartered upon the citizens, with or without their consent, at the rate of eightpence a day for each man.[161] Warrants were issued for impressing pilots, and also mechanics and laborers, who, in spite of Puritan scruples, were required to work on Sundays. Such measures, if imposed by England, would have roused the most bitter resentment. Even when ordered by their own representatives, they caused a sullen discontent among the colonists, and greatly increased the popular dislike of their military visitors. It was certain that when the expedition sailed and the operation of the new enactments ceased, prices would rise; and hence the compulsion to part with goods at low fixed rates was singularly trying to the commercial temper. It was a busy season, too, with the farmers, and they showed no haste to bring their produce to the camp. Though many of the principal inhabitants bound themselves by mutual agreement to live on their family stores of salt provisions, in order that the troops might be better supplied with fresh, this failed to soothe the[Pg 169] irritation of the British officers, aggravated by frequent desertions, which the colonists favored, and by the impossibility of finding pilots familiar with the St. Lawrence. Some when forced into the service made their escape, to the great indignation of Walker, who wrote to the governor: "Her Majesty will resent such actions in a very signal manner; and when it shall be represented that the people live here as if there were no king in Israel, but every one does what seems right in his own eyes, measures will be taken to put things upon a better foot for the future."[162] At length, however, every preparation was made, the supplies were all on board, and after a grand review of the troops on the fields of Noddle's Island, the whole force set sail on the thirtieth of July, the provincials wishing them success, and heartily rejoicing that they were gone. The fleet consisted of nine ships of war and two bomb-ketches, with about sixty transports, store-ships, hospital-ships, and other vessels, British and provincial. They carried the seven British regiments, numbering, with the artillery train, about fifty-five hundred men, besides six hundred marines and fifteen hundred provincials; counting, with the sailors, nearly twelve thousand in all.[163] [Pg 170]Vetch commanded the provincials, having been brought from Annapolis for that purpose. The great need was of pilots. Every sailor in New England who had seen the St. Lawrence had been pressed into the service, though each and all declared themselves incapable of conducting the fleet to Quebec. Several had no better knowledge of the river than they had picked up when serving as soldiers under Phips twenty-one years before. The best among them was the veteran Captain Bonner, who afterwards amused his old age by making a plan of Boston, greatly prized by connoisseurs in such matters. Vetch had studied the St. Lawrence in his several visits to Quebec, but, like Bonner, he had gone up the river only in sloops or other small craft, and was, moreover, no sailor. One of Walker's ships, the "Chester," sent in advance to cruise in the Gulf, had captured a French vessel commanded by one Paradis, an experienced old voyager, who knew the river well. He took a bribe of five hundred pistoles to act as pilot; but the fleet would perhaps have fared better if he had refused the money. He gave such dismal accounts of the Canadian winter that the Admiral could see nothing but ruin ahead, even if he should safely reach his destination. His tribulation is recorded in his Journal. "That which now chiefly[Pg 171] took up my thoughts, was contriving how to secure the ships if we got up to Quebec; for the ice in the river freezing to the bottom would have utterly destroyed and bilged them as much as if they had been squeezed between rocks."[164] These misgivings may serve to give the measure of his professional judgment. Afterwards, reflecting on the situation, he sees cause for gratitude in his own mishaps; "because, had we arrived safe at Quebec, our provisions would have been reduced to a very small proportion, not exceeding eight or nine weeks at short allowance, so that between ten and twelve thousand men must have been left to perish with the extremity of cold and hunger. I must confess the melancholy contemplation of this (had it happened) strikes me with horror; for how dismal must it have been to have beheld the seas and earth locked up by adamantine frosts, and swoln with high mountains of snow, in a barren and uncultivated region; great numbers of brave men famishing with hunger, and drawing lots who should die first to feed the rest."[165] All went well till the eighteenth of August, when there was a strong head-wind, and the ships ran into the Bay of Gaspé. Two days after, the wind shifted to the southeast, and they set sail again, Walker in his flagship, the "Edgar," being at or near the head of the fleet. On the evening of the twenty-second they were at some distance above the great Island of Anticosti. The river is here about seventy miles[Pg 172] wide, and no land had been seen since noon of the day before. There was a strong east wind, with fog. Walker thought that he was not far from the south shore, when in fact he was at least fifty miles from it, and more than half that distance north of his true course. At eight in the evening the Admiral signalled the fleet to bring to, under mizzen and main-topsails, with heads turned southward. At half-past ten, Paddon, the captain of the "Edgar," came to tell him that he saw land which he supposed must be the south shore; on which Walker, in a fatal moment, signalled for the ships to wear and bring to, with heads northward. He then turned into his berth, and was falling asleep, when a military officer, Captain Goddard, of Seymour's regiment, hastily entered, and begged him to come on deck, saying that there were breakers on all sides. Walker, scornful of a landsman, and annoyed at being disturbed, answered impatiently and would not stir. Soon after, Goddard appeared again, and implored him for Heaven's sake to come up and see for himself, or all would be lost. At the same time the Admiral heard a great noise and trampling, on which he turned out of his berth, put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and going in this attire on deck, found a scene of fright and confusion. At first he could see nothing, and shouted to the men to reassure them; but just then the fog opened, the moon shone out, and the breaking surf was plainly visible to leeward. The French pilot, who at first could not be found, now[Pg 173] appeared on deck, and declared, to the astonishment of both the Admiral and Captain Paddon, that they were off the north shore. Paddon, in his perplexity, had ordered an anchor to be let go; Walker directed the cable to be cut, and, making all sail, succeeded in beating to windward and gaining an offing.[166] The ship that carried Colonel King, of the artillery, had a narrow escape. King says that she anchored in a driving rain, "with a shoal of rocks on each quarter within a cable's length of us, which we plainly perceived by the waves breaking over them in a very violent manner." They were saved by a lull in the gale; for if it had continued with the same violence, he pursues, "our anchors could not have held, and the wind and the vast seas which ran, would have broke our ship into ten thousand pieces against the rocks. All night we heard nothing but ships firing and showing lights, as in the utmost distress."[167] Vetch, who was on board the little frigate "Despatch," says that he was extremely uneasy at the course taken by Walker on the night of the storm. "I told Colonel Dudley and Captain Perkins, commander of the 'Despatch,' that I wondered what the Flag meant by that course, and why he did not steer west and west-by-south."[168] The "Despatch" kept well astern, and so escaped the danger. Vetch heard through the fog guns firing signals of distress; but[Pg 174] three days passed before he knew how serious the disaster was. The ships of war had all escaped; but eight British transports, one store-ship, and one sutler's sloop were dashed to pieces.[169] "It was lamentable to hear the shrieks of the sinking, drowning, departing souls," writes the New England commissary, Sheaf, who was very near sharing their fate. The disaster took place at and near a rocky island, with adjacent reefs, lying off the north shore and called Isle aux ?ufs. On the second day after it happened, Walker was told by the master of one of the wrecked transports that eight hundred and eighty-four soldiers had been lost, and he gives this hasty estimate in his published Journal; though he says in his Introduction to it that the total loss of officers, soldiers, and sailors was scarcely nine hundred.[170] According to a later and more trustworthy statement, the loss of the troops was twenty-nine officers, six hundred and seventy-six sergeants, corporals, drummers, and private soldiers, and thirty-five women attached to the regiments; that is, a total of seven hundred and forty lives.[171] The loss of the sailors is not given; but it could scarcely have exceeded two hundred. [Pg 175]The fleet spent the next two days in standing to and fro between the northern and southern shores, with the exception of some of the smaller vessels employed in bringing off the survivors from the rocks of Isle aux ?ufs. The number thus saved was, according to Walker, four hundred and ninety-nine. On the twenty-fifth he went on board the General's ship, the "Windsor," and Hill and he resolved to call a council of war. In fact, Hill had already got his colonels together. Signals were made for the captains of the men-of-war to join them, and the council began. "Jack Hill," the man about town, placed in high command by the influence of his sister, the Queen's tire-woman, had now an opportunity to justify his appointment and prove his mettle. Many a man of pleasure and fashion, when put to the proof, has revealed the latent hero within him; but Hill was not one of them. Both he and Walker seemed to look for nothing but a pretext for retreat; and when manhood is conspicuously wanting in the leaders, a council of war is rarely disposed to supply it. The pilots were called in and examined, and they all declared themselves imperfectly acquainted with the St. Lawrence, which, as some of the captains observed, they had done from the first. Sir William Phips, with pilots still more ignorant, had safely carried his fleet to Quebec in 1690, as Walker must have known, for he had with him Phips's Journal of the voyage. The expedition had lost about a twelfth part of its[Pg 176] soldiers and sailors, besides the transports that carried them; with this exception there was no reason for retreat which might not as well have been put forward when the fleet left Boston. All the war-ships were safe, and the loss of men was not greater than might have happened in a single battle. Hill says that Vetch, when asked if he would pilot the fleet to Quebec, refused to undertake it;[172] but Vetch himself gives his answer as follows: "I told him [the Admiral] I never was bred to sea, nor was it any part of my province; but I would do my best by going ahead and showing them where the difficulty of the river was, which I knew pretty well."[173] The naval captains, however, resolved that by reason of the ignorance of the pilots and the dangerous currents it was impossible to go up to Quebec.[174] So discreditable a backing out from a great enterprise will hardly be found elsewhere in English annals. On the next day Vetch, disappointed and indignant, gave his mind freely to the Admiral. "The late disaster cannot, in my humble opinion, be anyways imputed to the difficulty of the navigation, but to the wrong course we steered, which most unavoidably carried us upon the north shore. Who directed that course you best know; and as our return without any[Pg 177] further attempt would be a vast reflection upon the conduct of this affair, so it would be of very fatal consequence to the interest of the Crown and all the British colonies upon this continent."[175] His protest was fruitless. The fleet retraced its course to the gulf, and then steered for Spanish River,—now the harbor of Sydney,—in the Island of Cape Breton; the Admiral consoling himself with the reflection that the wreck was a blessing in disguise and a merciful intervention of Providence to save the expedition from the freezing, starvation, and cannibalism which his imagination had conjured up.[176] The frigate "Sapphire" was sent to Boston with news of the wreck and the retreat, which was at once despatched to Nicholson, who, if he continued his movement on Montreal, would now be left to conquer Canada alone. His force consisted of about twenty-three hundred men, white and red, and when the fatal news reached him he was encamped on Wood Creek, ready to pass Lake Champlain. Captain Butler, a New York officer at the camp, afterwards told Kalm, the Swedish naturalist, that when Nicholson heard what had happened, he was beside himself with rage, tore off his wig, threw it on the ground and stamped upon it, crying out, "Roguery! Treachery!"[177] When his fit was over, he did all that was now left for him to do,—burned the wooden[Pg 178] forts he had built, marched back to Albany, and disbanded his army, after leaving one hundred and fifty men to protect the frontier against scalping-parties.[178] Canada had been warned of the storm gathering against her. Early in August, Vaudreuil received letters from Costebelle, at Placentia, telling him that English prisoners had reported mighty preparations at Boston against Quebec, and that Montreal was also to be attacked.[179] The colony was ill prepared for the emergency, but no effort was spared to give the enemy a warm reception. The militia were mustered, Indians called together, troops held in readiness, and defences strengthened. The saints were invoked, and the aid of Heaven was implored by masses, processions, and penances, as in New England by a dismal succession of fasts. Mother Juchereau de Saint-Denis tells us how devout Canadians prayed for help from God and the most holy Virgin; "since their glory was involved, seeing that the true religion would quickly perish if the English should prevail." The general alarm produced effects which, though transient, were thought highly commendable while they lasted. The ladies, according to Mother Juchereau, gave up their ornaments, and became more modest and more pious. "Those of Montreal," pursues the worthy nun, "even outdid those of Quebec; for they bound themselves by oath to wear neither ribbons nor lace, to keep[Pg 179] their throats covered, and to observe various holy practices for the space of a year." The recluse of Montreal, Mademoiselle Le Ber, who, by reason of her morbid seclusion and ascetic life, was accounted almost a saint, made a flag embroidered with a prayer to the Virgin, to be borne against the heretical bands of Nicholson. When that commander withdrew, his retreat, though not the cause of it, was quickly known at Montreal, and the forces gathered there went down to Quebec to aid in repelling the more formidable attack by sea. Here all was suspense and expectancy till the middle of October, when the report came that two large ships had been seen in the river below. There was great excitement, for they were supposed to be the van of the British fleet; but alarm was soon turned to joy by the arrival of the ships, which proved to be French. On the nineteenth, the Sieur de la Valterie, who had come from Labrador in September, and had been sent down the river again by Vaudreuil to watch for the English fleet, appeared at Quebec with tidings of joy. He had descended the St. Lawrence in a canoe, with two Frenchmen and an Indian, till, landing at Isle aux ?ufs on the first of October, they met two French sailors or fishermen loaded with plunder, and presently discovered the wrecks of seven English ships, with, as they declared, fifteen or sixteen hundred dead bodies on the strand hard by, besides dead horses, sheep, dogs, and hens, three or four hundred large iron-[Pg 180]hooped casks, a barrel of wine and a barrel and a keg of brandy, cables, anchors, chains, planks, boards, shovels, picks, mattocks, and piles of old iron three feet high.[180] "The least devout," writes Mother Juchereau, "were touched by the grandeur of the miracle wrought in our behalf,—a marvellous effect of God's love for Canada, which, of all these countries, is the only one that professes the true religion." Quebec was not ungrateful. A solemn mass was ordered every month during a year, to be followed by the song of Moses after the destruction of Pharaoh and his host.[181] Amazing reports were spread concerning the losses of the English. About three thousand of "these wretches"—so the story ran—died after reaching land, without counting the multitudes drowned in the attempt; and even this did not satisfy divine justice, for God blew up one of the ships by lightning during the storm. Vessels were sent to gather up the spoils of the wreck, and they came back, it was reported, laden with marvellous treasures, including rich clothing, magnificent saddles, plate, silver-hilted swords, and the like; bringing also the gratifying announcement that though the autumn tides had swept away many corpses, more than two thousand still lay on the rocks, naked and in attitudes[Pg 181] of despair.[182] These stories, repeated by later writers, find believers to this day.[183] When Walker and his ships reached Spanish River, he called another council of war. The question was whether, having failed to take Quebec, they should try to take Placentia; and it was resolved that the short supply of provisions, the impossibility of getting more from Boston before the first of November, and the risks of the autumnal storms, made the attempt impracticable. Accordingly, the New England transports sailed homeward, and the British fleet steered for the Thames. Swift writes on the sixth of October in his Journal to Stella: "The news of Mr. Hill's miscarriage in his expedition came to-day, and I went to visit Mrs. Masham and Mrs. Hill, his two sisters, to condole with them." A week after, he mentions the arrival of the general himself; and again on the sixteenth writes thus: "I was to see Jack Hill this morning, who made that unfortunate expedition; and there is still more misfortune, for that ship which was admiral of his fleet [the "Edgar"] is blown up in the Thames by an accident and carelessness of some rogue, who[Pg 182] was going, as they think, to steal some gunpowder: five hundred men are lost." A report of this crowning disaster reached Quebec, and Mother Juchereau does not fail to improve it. According to her, the Admiral, stricken with divine justice, and wrought to desperation, blew up the ship himself, and perished with all on board, except only two men. There was talk of an examination into the causes of the failure, but nothing was done. Hill, strong in the influence of Mrs. Masham, reaped new honors and offices. Walker, more answerable for the result, and less fortunate in court influence, was removed from command, and his name was stricken from the half-pay list. He did not, however, blow himself up, but left England and emigrated to South Carolina, whence, thinking himself ill-treated by the authorities, he removed to Barbadoes, and died some years later.[184] FOOTNOTES: [147] Rapport de Costebelle, 14 Octobre, 1709. Ibid., 3 Décembre, 1709. [148] "Je ne les crois pas assez aveugles pour ne point s'apercevoir qu'insensiblement ils vont subir le joug du parlement de la vieille Angleterre, mais par les cruautés que les Canadiens et sauvages exercent sur leurs terres par des courses continuelles je juge qu'ils aiment encore mieux se délivrer de l'inhumanité de semblables voisins que de conserver toute l'ancienne autorité de leur petite république."—Costebelle au Ministre, 3 Décembre, 1710. He clung tenaciously to this idea, and wrote again in 1712 that "les cruautés de nos sauvages, qui font horreur à rapporter," would always incline the New England people to peace. They had, however, an opposite effect. [149] It is more than probable that La Ronde Denys, who had studied the "Bastonnais" with care, first gave the idea to Costebelle. [150] Ponchartrain à Vaudreuil, 10 Ao?t, 1710. Ponchartrain à Costebelle, même date. These letters are in answer to the reports of Costebelle, before cited. [151] Costebelle à Ponchartrain, 3 Décembre, 1710. [152] Instruction pour Monsieur de la Ronde, Capitaine d'Infanterie des Détachements de la Marine, 1711. "Le dit sieur de la Ronde pourroit entrer en négociation et se promettre de faire cesser toutes sortes d'hostilités du c?té du Canada, supposé que les Bastonnais promissent d'en faire de même de leur c?té, et qu'ils ne donassent aucun secours à l'avenir, d'hommes ni de vaisseaux, aux puissances de la vieille Angleterre et d'Ecosse." [153] "La vieille Angleterre ne s'imaginera pas que ces diverses Provinces se réuniront, et, secouant le joug de la monarchie Anglaise, s'érigeront en démocratie."—Mémoire sur la Nouvelle Angleterre, 1710, 1711. (Archives de la Marine.) [154] "Pour Baston, il faudrait la piller, ruiner ses ateliers, ses manufactures, tous ses beaux établissements, couler bas ses navires, ... ruiner les ateliers de construction de navires."—Mémoire sur la Nouvelle Angleterre, 1710, 1711. The writer was familiar with Boston and its neighborhood, and had certainly spent some time there. Possibly he was no other than La Ronde Denys himself, after the failure of his mission to excite the "Bastonnais" to refuse co-operation with British armaments. He enlarges with bitterness on the extent of the fisheries, foreign trade, and ship-building of New England. [155] See Swift, Conduct of the Allies. [156] Boston, devoted to fishing, shipbuilding, and foreign trade, drew most of its provisions from neighboring colonies. (Dummer, Letter to a Noble Lord.) The people only half believed that the Tory ministry were sincere in attacking Canada, and suspected that the sudden demand for provisions, so difficult to meet at once, was meant to furnish a pretext for throwing the blame of failure upon Massachusetts. Hutchinson, ii. 173. [157] Minutes of Proceedings of the Congress of Governors, June, 1711. [158] Walker to Burchett, Secretary of the Admiralty, 14 August, 1711. [159] Abstract of the Journal of the Governor, Council, and Assembly of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay. [160] King to Secretary St. John, 25 July, 1711. [161] The number demanded from Massachusetts was one thousand, and that raised by her was eleven hundred and sixty. Dudley to Walker, 27 July, 1711. [162] Walker prints this letter in his Journal. Colonel King writes in his own Journal: "The conquest of Canada will naturally lead the Queen into changing their present disorderly government;" and he thinks that the conviction of this made the New Englanders indifferent to the success of the expedition. [163] The above is drawn from the various lists and tables in Walker, Journal of the Canada Expedition. The armed ships that entered Boston in June were fifteen in all; but several had been detached for cruising. The number of British transports, store-ships, etc., was forty, the rest being provincial. [164] Walker, Journal; Introduction. [165] Ibid., 25. [166] Walker, Journal, 124, 125. [167] King, Journal. [168] Vetch, Journal. [169] King, Journal. [170] Compare Walker, Journal, 45, and Ibid., 127, 128. He elsewhere intimates that his first statement needed correction. [171] Report of ye Soldiers, etc., Lost. (Public Record Office.) This is a tabular statement, giving the names of the commissioned officers and the positions of their subordinates, regiment by regiment. All the French accounts of the losses are exaggerations. [172] Hill to Dudley, 25 August, 1711. [173] Vetch, Journal. His statement is confirmed by the report of the council. [174] Report of a Consultation of Sea Officers belonging to the Squadron under Command of Sir Hovenden Walker, Kt., 25 August, 1711. Signed by Walker and eight others. [175] Vetch to Walker, 26 August, 1711. [176] Walker, Journal, Introduction, 25. [177] Kalm, Travels, ii. 135. [178] Schuyler, Colonial New York, ii. 48. [179] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 25 Octobre, 1711. [180] Déposition de Fran?ois de Marganne, Sieur de la Valterie; par devant Nous, Paul Dupuy, Ecuyer, Conseiller du Roy, etc., 19 Octobre, 1711. [181] Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier et l'Histoire de l'H?pital Général de Quebec, 209. [182] Juchereau, Histoire de l'H?tel-Dieu de Québec, 473-491. La Ronde Denys says that nearly one thousand men were drowned, and that about two thousand died of injuries received. La Ronde au Ministre, 30 Décembre, 1711. [183] Some exaggeration was natural enough. Colonel Lee, of the Rhode Island contingent, says that a day or two after the wreck he saw "the bodies of twelve or thirteen hundred brave men, with women and children, lying in heaps." Lee to Governor Cranston, 12 September, 1711. [184] Walker's Journal was published in 1720, with an Introduction of forty-eight pages, written in bad temper and bad taste. The Journal contains many documents, printed in full. In the Public Record Office are preserved the Journals of Hill, Vetch, and King. Copies of these, with many other papers on the same subject, from the same source, are before me. Vetch's Journal and his letter to Walker after the wreck are printed in the Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, vol. iv. It appears by the muster-rolls of Massachusetts that what with manning the coast-guard vessels, defending the frontier against Indians, and furnishing her contingent to the Canada expedition, more than one in five of her able-bodied men were in active service in the summer of 1711. Years passed before she recovered from the effects of her financial exhaustion. CHAPTER IX. 1712-1749. LOUISBOURG AND ACADIA. Peace of Utrecht.—Perilous Questions.—Louisbourg founded.—Annapolis attacked.—Position of the Acadians.—Weakness of the British Garrison.—Apathy of the Ministry.—French Intrigue.—Clerical Politicians.—The Oath of Allegiance.—Acadians refuse it: their Expulsion proposed; they take the Oath. [Pg 183]The great European war was drawing to an end, and with it the American war, which was but its echo. An avalanche of defeat and disaster had fallen upon the old age of Louis XIV., and France was burdened with an insupportable load of debt. The political changes in England came to her relief. Fifty years later, when the elder Pitt went out of office and Bute came in, France had cause to be grateful; for the peace of 1763 was far more favorable to her than it would have been under the imperious war minister. It was the same in 1712. The Whigs who had fallen from power would have wrung every advantage from France; the triumphant Tories were eager to close with her on any terms not so easy as to excite popular indignation. The result[Pg 184] was the Treaty of Utrecht, which satisfied none of the allies of England, and gave to France conditions more favorable than she had herself proposed two years before. The fall of Godolphin and the disgrace of Marlborough were a godsend to her. Yet in America Louis XIV. made important concessions. The Five Nations of the Iroquois were acknowledged to be British subjects; and this became in future the preposterous foundation for vast territorial claims of England. Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Acadia, "according to its ancient limits," were also given over by France to her successful rival; though the King parted from Acadia with a reluctance shown by the great offers he made for permission to retain it.[185] But while the Treaty of Utrecht seemed to yield so much, and yielded so much in fact, it staved off the settlement of questions absolutely necessary for future peace. The limits of Acadia, the boundary line between Canada and the British colonies, and the boundary between those colonies and the great western wilderness claimed by France, were all left unsettled, since the attempt to settle them would have rekindled the war. The peace left the embers of war still smouldering, sure, when the time should come, to burst into flame. The next thirty years were years of chronic, smothered war, disguised,[Pg 185] but never quite at rest. The standing subjects of dispute were three, very different in importance. First, the question of Acadia: whether the treaty gave England a vast country, or only a strip of seacoast. Next, that of northern New England and the Abenaki Indians, many of whom French policy still left within the borders of Maine, and whom both powers claimed as subjects or allies. Last and greatest was the question whether France or England should hold the valleys of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, and with them the virtual control of the continent. This was the triple problem that tormented the northern English colonies for more than a generation, till it found a solution at last in the Seven Years' War. Louis XIV. had deeply at heart the recovery of Acadia. Yet the old and infirm King, whose sun was setting in clouds after half a century of unrivalled splendor, felt that peace was a controlling necessity, and he wrote as follows to his plenipotentiaries at Utrecht: "It is so important to prevent the breaking off of the negotiations that the King will give up both Acadia and Cape Breton, if necessary for peace; but the plenipotentiaries will yield this point only in the last extremity, for by this double cession Canada will become useless, the access to it will be closed, the fisheries will come to an end, and the French marine be utterly destroyed."[186] And he adds that if the English will restore Acadia, he, the King, will[Pg 186] give them, not only St. Christopher, but also the islands of St. Martin and St. Bartholomew. The plenipotentiaries replied that the offer was refused, and that the best they could do without endangering the peace was to bargain that Cape Breton should belong to France.[187] On this, the King bid higher still for the coveted province, and promised that if Acadia were returned to him, the fortifications of Placentia should be given up untouched, the cannon in the forts of Hudson Bay abandoned to the English, and the Newfoundland fisheries debarred to Frenchmen,[188]—a remarkable concession; for France had fished on the banks of Newfoundland for two centuries, and they were invaluable to her as a nursery of sailors. Even these offers were rejected, and England would not resign Acadia. Cape Breton was left to the French. This large island, henceforth called by its owners Isle Royale, lies east of Acadia, and is separated from it only by the narrow Strait of Canseau. From its position, it commands the chief entrance of the gulf and river of St. Lawrence. Some years before, the intendant Raudot had sent to the court an able paper, in which he urged its occupation and settlement, chiefly on commercial and industrial grounds. The war was then at its height; the plan was not carried into[Pg 187] effect, and Isle Royale was still a wilderness. It was now proposed to occupy it for military and political reasons. One of its many harbors, well fortified and garrisoned, would guard the approaches of Canada, and in the next war furnish a base for attacking New England and recovering Acadia. After some hesitation the harbor called Port à l'Anglois was chosen for the proposed establishment, to which the name of Louisbourg was given, in honor of the King. It lies near the southeastern point of the island, where an opening in the ironbound coast, at once easily accessible and easily defended, gives entrance to a deep and sheltered basin, where a fleet of war-ships may find good anchorage. The proposed fortress was to be placed on the tongue of land that lies between this basin and the sea. The place, well chosen from the point of view of the soldier or the fisherman, was unfit for an agricultural colony, its surroundings being barren hills studded with spruce and fir, and broad marshes buried in moss. In spite of the losses and humiliations of the war, great expectations were formed from the new scheme. Several years earlier, when the proposals of Raudot were before the Marine Council, it was confidently declared that a strong fortress on Cape Breton would make the King master of North America. The details of the establishment were settled in advance. The King was to build the fortifications, supply them with cannon, send out eight companies of soldiers,[Pg 188] besides all the usual officers of government, establish a well-endowed hospital, conducted by nuns, as at Quebec, provide Jesuits and Récollets as chaplains, besides Filles de la Congrégation to teach girls, send families to the spot, support them for two years, and furnish a good number of young women to marry the soldiers.[189] This plan, or something much like it, was carried into effect. Louisbourg was purely and solely the offspring of the Crown and its ally, the Church. In time it grew into a compact fishing town of about four thousand inhabitants, with a strong garrison and a circuit of formidable ramparts and batteries. It became by far the strongest fortress on the Atlantic coast, and so famous as a resort of privateers that it was known as the Dunquerque of America. What concerns us now is its weak and troubled infancy. It was to be peopled in good part from the two lost provinces of Acadia and Newfoundland, whose inhabitants were to be transported to Louisbourg or other parts of Isle Royale, which would thus be made at once and at the least possible cost a dangerous neighbor to the newly acquired possessions of England. The Micmacs of Acadia, and even some of the Abenakis, were to be included in this scheme of immigration. In the autumn, the commandant of Plaisance, or Placentia,—the French stronghold in Newfoundland,—received the following mandate from the King:[Pg 189]— Monsieur de Costebelle,—I have caused my orders to be given you to evacuate the town and forts of Plaisance and the other places of your government of Newfoundland, ceded to my dear sister the Queen of Great Britain. I have given my orders for the equipment of the vessels necessary to make the evacuation and transport you, with the officers, garrison, and inhabitants of Plaisance and other places of Newfoundland, to my Isle Royale, vulgarly called Cape Breton; but as the season is so far advanced that this cannot be done without exposing my troops and my subjects to perishing from cold and misery, and placing my vessels in evident peril of wreck, I have judged it proper to defer the transportation till the next spring.[190] The inhabitants of Placentia consisted only of twenty-five or thirty poor fishermen, with their families,[191] and some of them would gladly have become English subjects and stayed where they were; but no choice was given them. "Nothing," writes Costebelle, "can cure them of the error, to which they obstinately cling, that they are free to stay or go, as best suits their interest."[192] They and their fishing-boats were in due time transported to Isle Royale, where for a while their sufferings were extreme. Attempts were made to induce the Indians of Acadia to move to the new colony; but they refused, and to compel them was out of the question. But[Pg 190] by far the most desirable accession to the establishment of Isle Royale would be that of the Acadian French, who were too numerous to be transported in the summary manner practised in the case of the fishermen of Placentia. It was necessary to persuade rather than compel them to migrate, and to this end great reliance was placed on their priests, especially Fathers Pain and Dominique. Ponchartrain himself wrote to the former on the subject. The priest declares that he read the letter to his flock, who answered that they wished to stay in Acadia; and he adds that the other Acadians were of the same mind, being unwilling to leave their rich farms and risk starvation on a wild and barren island.[193] "Nevertheless," he concludes, "we shall fulfil the intentions of his Majesty by often holding before their eyes that religion for which they ought to make every sacrifice." He and his brother priests kept their word. Freedom of worship was pledged on certain conditions to the Acadians by the Treaty of Utrecht, and no attempt was ever made to deprive them of it; yet the continual declaration of their missionaries that their souls were in danger under English rule was the strongest spur to impel them to migrate. The condition of the English in Acadia since it fell into their hands had been a critical one. Port Royal, thenceforth called Annapolis Royal, or simply Annapolis, had been left, as before mentioned, in[Pg 191] charge of Colonel Vetch, with a heterogeneous garrison of four hundred and fifty men.[194] The Acadians of the banlieue—a term defined as covering a space of three miles round the fort—had been included in the capitulation, and had taken an oath of allegiance to Queen Anne, binding so long as they remained in the province. Some of them worked, for the garrison and helped to repair the fort, which was in a ruinous condition. Meanwhile the Micmac Indians remained fiercely hostile to the English; and in June, 1711, aided by a band of Penobscots, they ambuscaded and killed or captured nearly seventy of them. This completely changed the attitude of the Acadians. They broke their oath, rose against their new masters, and with their Indian friends, invested the fort to the number of five or six hundred. Disease, desertion, and the ambuscade had reduced the garrison to about two hundred effective men, and the defences of the place were still in bad condition.[195] The assailants, on the other hand, had no better leader than the priest, Gaulin, missionary of the Micmacs[Pg 192] and prime mover in the rising. He presently sailed for Placentia to beg for munitions and a commander; but his errand failed, the siege came to nought, and the besiegers dispersed. Vaudreuil, from whom the Acadians had begged help, was about to send it when news of the approach of Walker's fleet forced him to keep all his strength for his own defence. From this time to the end of the war, the chief difficulties of the governor of Acadia rose, not from the enemy, but from the British authorities at home. For more than two years he, with his starved and tattered garrison, were treated with absolute neglect. He received no orders, instructions, or money.[196] Acadia seemed forgotten by the ministry, till Vetch heard at last that Nicholson was appointed to succeed him. Now followed the Treaty of Utrecht, the cession of Acadia to England, and the attempt on the part of France to induce the Acadians to remove to Isle Royale. Some of the English officials had once been of opinion that this French Catholic population should be transported to Martinique or some other distant French colony, and its place supplied by Protestant families sent from England or Ireland.[197] Since the English Revolution, Protestantism was bound up with the new political order, and Catholicism[Pg 193] with the old. No Catholic could favor the Protestant succession, and hence politics were inseparable from creed. Vetch, who came of a race of hot and stubborn Covenanters, had been one of the most earnest for replacing the Catholic Acadians by Protestants; but after the peace he and others changed their minds. No Protestant colonists appeared, nor was there the smallest sign that the government would give itself the trouble to attract any. It was certain that if the Acadians removed at all, they would go, not to Martinique or any other distant colony, but to the new military establishment of Isle Royale, which would thus become a strong and dangerous neighbor to the feeble British post of Annapolis. Moreover, the labor of the French inhabitants was useful and sometimes necessary to the English garrison, which depended mainly on them for provisions; and if they left the province, they would leave it a desert, with the prospect of long remaining so. Hence it happened that the English were for a time almost as anxious to keep the Acadians in Acadia as they were forty years later to get them out of it; nor had the Acadians themselves any inclination to leave their homes. But the French authorities needed them at Isle Royale, and made every effort to draw them thither. By the fourteenth article of the Treaty of Utrecht such of them as might choose to leave Acadia were free to do so within the space of a year, carrying with them their personal[Pg 194] effects; while a letter of Queen Anne, addressed to Nicholson, then governor of Acadia, permitted the emigrants to sell their lands and houses. The missionary Félix Pain had reported, as we have seen, that they were, in general, disposed to remain where they were; on which Costebelle, who now commanded at Louisbourg, sent two officers, La Ronde Denys and Pensens, with instructions to set the priests at work to persuade their flocks to move.[198] La Ronde Denys and his colleague repaired to Annapolis, where they promised the inhabitants vessels for their removal, provisions for a year, and freedom from all taxation for ten years. Then, having been well prepared in advance, the heads of families were formed in a circle, and in presence of the English governor, the two French officers, and the priests Justinien, Bonaventure, and Gaulin, they all signed, chiefly with crosses, a paper to the effect that they would live and die subjects of the King of France.[199] A few embarked at once for Isle Royale in the vessel "Marie-Joseph," and the rest were to follow within the year. This result was due partly to the promises of La Ronde Denys, and still more to a pastoral letter from the Bishop of Quebec, supporting the assurances of the missionaries that the heretics would rob them of the ministrations of the Church. This was not[Pg 195] all. The Acadians about Annapolis had been alienated by the conduct of the English authorities, which was not conciliating, and on the part of the governor was sometimes outrageous.[200] Yet those of the banlieue had no right to complain, since they had made themselves liable to the penalties of treason by first taking an oath of allegiance to Queen Anne, and then breaking it by trying to seize her fort.[201] Governor Nicholson, like his predecessor, was resolved to keep the Acadians in the province if he could. This personage, able, energetic, perverse, headstrong, and unscrupulous, conducted himself, even towards the English officers and soldiers, in a manner that seems unaccountable, and that kindled their utmost indignation.[202] Towards the Acadians his behavior was still worse. As Costebelle did not keep his promise to send vessels to bring them to Isle Royale, they built small ones for themselves, and the French authorities at Louisbourg sent them the necessary rigging. Nicholson ordered it back, forbade the sale of their lands and houses,—a needless stretch of power, as there was nobody to buy,—and would not let them sell even their personal[Pg 196] effects, coolly setting at nought both the Treaty of Utrecht and the letter of the Queen.[203] Nicholson was but a short time at Annapolis, leaving the government, during most of his term, to his deputies, Caulfield and afterwards Doucette, both of whom roundly denounce their principal for his general conduct; while both, in one degree or another, followed his example in preventing so far as they could the emigration of the Acadians. Some of them, however, got away, and twelve or fifteen families who settled at Port Toulouse, on Isle Royale, were near perishing from cold and hunger.[204] From Annapolis the French agents, La Ronde Denys and Pensens, proceeded to the settlements about Chignecto and the Basin of Mines,—the most populous and prosperous parts of Acadia. Here they were less successful than before. The people were doubtful and vacillating,—ready enough to promise, but slow to perform. While declaring with perfect sincerity their devotion to "our invincible monarch," as they called King Louis, who had just been compelled to surrender their country, they clung tenaciously to the abodes of their fathers. If they had wished to emigrate, the English governor had no power to stop them. From Baye Verte, on the isthmus, they had frequent and easy communication[Pg 197] with the French at Louisbourg, which the English did not and could not interrupt. They were armed, and they far outnumbered the English garrison; while at a word they could bring to their aid the Micmac warriors, who had been taught to detest the English heretics as foes of God and man. To say that they wished to leave Acadia, but were prevented from doing so by a petty garrison at the other end of the province, so feeble that it could hardly hold Annapolis itself, is an unjust reproach upon a people who, though ignorant and weak of purpose, were not wanting in physical courage. The truth is that from this time to their forced expatriation in 1755, all the Acadians, except those of Annapolis and its immediate neighborhood, were free to go or stay at will. Those of the eastern parts of the province especially, who formed the greater part of the population, were completely their own masters. This was well known to the French authorities. The governor of Louisbourg complains of the apathy of the Acadians.[205] Saint-Ovide declares that they do not want to fulfil the intentions of the King and remove to Isle Royale. Costebelle makes the same complaint; and again, after three years of vain attempts to overcome their reluctance, he writes that every effort has failed to induce them to migrate. From this time forward the state of affairs in Acadia was a peculiar one. By the Treaty of Utrecht it was a British province, and the nominal sovereignty[Pg 198] resided at Annapolis, in the keeping of the miserable little fort and the puny garrison, which as late as 1743 consisted of but five companies, counting, when the ranks were full, thirty-one men each.[206] More troops were often asked for, and once or twice were promised; but they were never sent. "This has been hitherto no more than a mock government, its authority never yet having extended beyond cannon-shot of the fort," wrote Governor Philipps in 1720. "It would be more for the honour of the Crown, and profit also, to give back the country to the French, than to be contented with the name only of government."[207] Philipps repaired the fort, which, as the engineer Mascarene says, "had lain tumbling down" before his arrival; but Annapolis and the whole province remained totally neglected and almost forgotten by England till the middle of the century. At one time the soldiers were in so ragged a plight that Lieutenant-Colonel Armstrong was forced to clothe them at his own expense.[208] While this seat of British sovereignty remained in unchanging feebleness for more than forty years, the French Acadians were multiplying apace. Before[Pg 199] 1749 they were the only white inhabitants of the province, except ten or twelve English families who, about the year 1720, lived under the guns of Annapolis. At the time of the cession the French population seems not to have exceeded two thousand souls, about five hundred of whom lived within the banlieue of Annapolis, and were therefore more or less under English control. They were all alike a simple and ignorant peasantry, prosperous in their humble way, and happy when rival masters ceased from troubling, though vexed with incessant quarrels among themselves, arising from the unsettled boundaries of their lands, which had never been properly surveyed. Their mental horizon was of the narrowest, their wants were few, no military service was asked of them by the English authorities, and they paid no taxes to the government. They could even indulge their strong appetite for litigation free of cost; for when, as often happened, they brought their land disputes before the Council at Annapolis, the cases were settled and the litigants paid no fees. Their communication with the English officials was carried on through deputies chosen by themselves, and often as ignorant as their constituents, for a remarkable equality prevailed through this primitive little society. Except the standing garrison at Annapolis, Acadia was as completely let alone by the British government as Rhode Island or Connecticut. Unfortunately, the traditional British policy of inaction[Pg 200] towards her colonies was not applicable in the case of a newly conquered province with a disaffected population and active, enterprising, and martial neighbors bent on recovering what they had lost. Yet it might be supposed that a neglect so invigorating in other cases might have developed among the Acadians habits of self-reliance and faculties of self-care. The reverse took place; for if England neglected Acadia, France did not; and though she had renounced her title to it, she still did her best to master it and make it hers again. The chief instrument of her aggressive policy was the governor of Isle Royale, whose station was the fortress of Louisbourg, and who was charged with the management of Acadian affairs. At all the Acadian settlements he had zealous and efficient agents in the missionary priests, who were sent into the province by the Bishop of Quebec, or in a few cases by their immediate ecclesiastical superiors in Isle Royale. The Treaty of Utrecht secured freedom of worship to the Acadians under certain conditions. These were that they should accept the sovereignty of the British Crown, and that they and their pastors should keep within the limits of British law.[209] Even supposing that by swearing allegiance to Queen Anne the Acadians had acquired the freedom of[Pg 201] worship which the treaty gave them on condition of their becoming British subjects, it would have been an abuse of this freedom to use it for subverting the power that had granted it. Yet this is what the missionaries did. They were not only priests of the Roman Church, they were also agents of the King of France; and from first to last they labored against the British government in the country that France had ceded to the British Crown. So confident were they, and with so much reason, of the weakness of their opponents that they openly avowed that their object was to keep the Acadians faithful to King Louis. When two of their number, Saint-Poncy and Chevereaux, were summoned before the Council at Annapolis, they answered, with great contempt, "We are here on the business of the King of France." They were ordered to leave Acadia. One of them stopped among the Indians at Cape Sable; the other, in defiance of the Council, was sent back to Annapolis by the Governor of Isle Royale.[210] Apparently he was again ordered away; for four years later the French governor, in expectation of speedy war, sent him to Chignecto with orders secretly to prepare the Acadians for an attack on Annapolis.[211] The political work of the missionaries began with the cession of the colony, and continued with increasing activity till 1755, kindling the impotent wrath of[Pg 202] the British officials, and drawing forth the bitter complaints of every successive governor. For this world and the next, the priests were fathers of their flocks, generally commanding their attachment, and always their obedience. Except in questions of disputed boundaries, where the Council alone could settle the title, the ecclesiastics took the place of judges and courts of justice, enforcing their decisions by refusal of the sacraments.[212] They often treated the British officials with open scorn. Governor Armstrong writes to the Lords of Trade: "Without some particular directions as to the insolent behavior of those priests, the people will never be brought to obedience, being by them incited to daily acts of rebellion." Another governor complains that they tell the Acadians of the destitution of the soldiers and the ruinous state of the fort, and assure them that the Pretender will soon be King of England, and that Acadia will then return to France.[213] "The bearer, Captain Bennett," writes Armstrong, "can further tell your Grace of the disposition of the French inhabitants of this province, and of the conduct of their missionary priests, who instil hatred into both Indians and French against the English."[214] As to the Indians, Governor Philipps declares that their priests hear a general confession from them twice a year, and give[Pg 203] them absolution on condition of always being enemies of the English.[215] The condition was easy, thanks to the neglect of the British government, which took no pains to conciliate the Micmacs, while the French governor of Isle Royale corresponded secretly with them and made them yearly presents. In 1720 Philipps advised the recall of the French priests, and the sending of others in their place, as the only means of making British subjects of the Acadians,[216] who at that time, having constantly refused the oath of allegiance, were not entitled, under the treaty, to the exercise of their religion. Governor Armstrong wrote sixteen years after: "By some of the above papers your Grace will be informed how high the French government carries its pretensions over its priests' obedience; and how to prevent the evil consequences I know not, unless we could have missionaries from places independent of that Crown."[217] He expresses a well-grounded doubt whether the home government will be at the trouble and expense of such a change, though he adds that there is not a missionary among either Acadians or Indians who is not in the pay of France.[218] Gaulin,[Pg 204] missionary of the Micmacs, received a "gratification" of fifteen hundred livres, besides an annual allowance of five hundred, and is described in the order granting it as a "brave man, capable even of leading these savages on an expedition."[219] In 1726 he was brought before the Council at Annapolis charged with incendiary conduct among both Indians and Acadians; but on asking pardon and promising nevermore to busy himself with affairs of government, he was allowed to remain in the province, and even to act as curé of the Mines.[220] No evidence appears that the British authorities ever molested a priest, except when detected in practices alien to his proper functions and injurious to the government. On one occasion when two cures were vacant, one through sedition and the other apparently through illness or death, Lieutenant-Governor Armstrong requested the governor of Isle Royale to send two priests "of known probity" to fill them.[221] Who were answerable for the anomalous state of affairs in the province,—the imperium in imperio where the inner power waxed and strengthened every day, and the outer relatively pined and dwindled? It[Pg 205] was not mainly the Crown of France nor its agents, secular or clerical. Their action under the circumstances, though sometimes inexcusable, was natural, and might have been foreseen. Nor was it the Council at Annapolis, who had little power either for good or evil. It was mainly the neglect and apathy of the British ministers, who seemed careless as to whether they kept Acadia or lost it, apparently thinking it not worth their notice. About the middle of the century they wakened from their lethargy, and warned by the signs of the times, sent troops and settlers into the province at the eleventh hour. France and her agents took alarm, and redoubled their efforts to keep their hold on a country which they had begun to regard as theirs already. The settlement of the English at Halifax startled the French into those courses of intrigue and violence which were the immediate cause of the removal of the Acadians in 1755. At the earlier period which we are now considering, the storm was still remote. The English made no attempt either to settle the province or to secure it by sufficient garrisons; they merely tried to bind the inhabitants by an oath of allegiance which the weakness of the government would constantly tempt them to break. When George I. came to the throne, Deputy-Governor Caulfield tried to induce the inhabitants to swear allegiance to the new monarch. The Acadians asked advice of Saint-Ovide, governor at Louisbourg, who sent them elaborate directions how[Pg 206] to answer the English demand and remain at the same time faithful children of France. Neither Caulfield nor his successor could carry their point. The Treaty of Utrecht, as we have seen, gave the Acadians a year in which to choose between remaining in the province and becoming British subjects, or leaving it as subjects of the King of France. The year had long ago expired, and most of them were still in Acadia, unwilling to leave it, yet refusing to own King George. In 1720 General Richard Philipps, the governor of the province, set himself to the task of getting the oath taken, while the missionaries and the French officers at Isle Royale strenuously opposed his efforts. He issued a proclamation ordering the Acadians to swear allegiance to the King of England or leave the country, without their property, within four months. In great alarm, they appealed to their priests, and begged the Récollet, Père Justinien, curé of Mines, to ask advice and help from Saint-Ovide, successor of Costebelle at Louisbourg, protesting that they would abandon all rather than renounce their religion and their King.[222] At the same time they prepared for a general emigration by way of the isthmus and Baye Verte, where it would have been impossible to stop them.[223] [Pg 207]Without the influence of their spiritual and temporal advisers, to whom they turned in all their troubles, it is clear that the Acadians would have taken the oath and remained in tranquil enjoyment of their homes; but it was then thought important to French interests that they should remove either to Isle Royale or to Isle St. Jean, now Prince Edward's Island. Hence no means were spared to prevent them from becoming British subjects, if only in name; even the Micmacs were enlisted in the good work, and induced to threaten them with their enmity if they should fail in allegiance to King Louis. Philipps feared that the Acadians would rise in arms if he insisted on the harsh requirements of his proclamation; in which case his position would have been difficult, as they now outnumbered his garrison about five to one. Therefore he extended indefinitely the term of four months, that he had fixed for their final choice, and continued to urge and persuade, without gaining a step towards the desired result. In vain he begged for aid from the British authorities. They would do nothing for him, but merely observed that while the French officers and priests had such influence over the Acadians, they would never be good subjects, and so had better be put out of the country.[224] This was easier said than done; for at this very time there were signs that the Acadians and the Micmacs would unite to put out the English garrison.[225] [Pg 208]Philipps was succeeded by a deputy-governor, Lieutenant-Colonel Armstrong,—a person of ardent impulses and unstable disposition. He applied himself with great zeal and apparent confidence to accomplishing the task in which his principal had failed. In fact, he succeeded in 1726 in persuading the inhabitants about Annapolis to take the oath, with a proviso that they should not be called upon for military service; but the main body of the Acadians stiffly refused. In the next year he sent Ensign Wroth to Mines, Chignecto, and neighboring settlements to renew the attempt on occasion of the accession of George II. The envoy's instructions left much to his discretion or his indiscretion, and he came back with the signatures, or crosses, of the inhabitants attached to an oath so clogged with conditions that it left them free to return to their French allegiance whenever they chose. Philipps now came back to Acadia to resume his difficult task. And here a surprise meets us. He reported a complete success. The Acadians, as he declared, swore allegiance without reserve to King George; but he does not tell us how they were brought to do so. Compulsion was out of the question. They could have cut to pieces any part of the paltry English garrison that might venture outside[Pg 209] the ditches of Annapolis, or they might have left Acadia, with all their goods and chattels, with no possibility of stopping them. The taking of the oath was therefore a voluntary act. But what was the oath? The words reported by Philipps were as follows: "I promise and swear sincerely, on the faith of a Christian, that I will be entirely faithful, and will truly obey his Majesty King George the Second, whom I recognize as sovereign lord of Acadia or Nova Scotia. So help me God." To this the Acadians affixed their crosses, or, in exceptional cases, their names. Recently, however, evidence has appeared that, so far at least as regards the Acadians on and near Mines Basin, the effect of the oath was qualified by a promise on the part of Philipps that they should not be required to take up arms against either French or Indians,—they on their part promising never to take up arms against the English. This statement is made by Gaudalie, curé of the parish of Mines, and Noiville, priest at Pigiquid, or Pisiquid, now Windsor.[226] In fact, the English never had the folly to call on the Acadians to fight for them; and the greater part of this peace-loving people were true to their promise not to take arms against the English, though a considerable number of them did so, especially at the beginning[Pg 210] of the Seven Years' War. It was to this promise, whether kept or broken, that they owed their name of Neutral French. From first to last, the Acadians remained in a child-like dependence on their spiritual and temporal guides. Not one of their number stands out prominently from among the rest. They seem to have been totally devoid of natural leaders, and, unhappily for themselves, left their fate in the hands of others. Yet they were fully aware of their numerical strength, and had repeatedly declared, in a manner that the English officers called insolent, that they would neither leave the country nor swear allegiance to King George. The truth probably is that those who governed them had become convinced that this simple population, which increased rapidly, and could always be kept French at heart, might be made more useful to France in Acadia than out of it, and that it was needless further to oppose the taking of an oath which would leave them in quiet possession of their farms without making any change in their feelings, and probably none in their actions. By force of natural increase Acadia would in time become the seat of a large population ardently French and ardently Catholic; and while officials in France sometimes complained of the reluctance of the Acadians to move to Isle Royale, those who directed them in their own country seem to have become willing that they should stay where they were, and place themselves in such relations with the English as should[Pg 211] leave them free to increase and multiply undisturbed. Deceived by the long apathy of the British government, French officials did not foresee that a time would come when it would bestir itself to make Acadia English in fact as well as in name.[227] FOOTNOTES: [185] Offres de la France; Demandes de l'Angleterre et Réponses de la France, in Memorials of the English and French Commissaries concerning the Limits of Acadia. [186] Mémoire du Roy à ses Plénipotentiaires, 20 Mars, 1712. [187] Précis de ce qui s'est passé pendant la Négotiation de la Paix d'Utrecht au Sujet de l'Acadie; Juillet, 1711-Mai, 1712. [188] Mémoire du Roy, 20 Avril, 1712. [189] Mémoire sur l'Isle du Cap Breton, 1709. [190] Le Roy à Costebelle, 29 Septembre, 1713. [191] Recensement des Habitans de Plaisance et Iles de St. Pierre, rendus à Louisbourg avec leurs Femmes et Enfans, 5 Novembre, 1714. [192] Costebelle au Ministre, 19 Juillet, 1713. [193] Félix Pain à Costebelle, 23 Septembre, 1713. [194] Vetch was styled "General and Commander-in-chief of all his Majesty's troops in these parts, and Governor of the fort of Annapolis Royal, country of l'Accady and Nova Scotia." Hence he was the first English governor of Nova Scotia after its conquest in 1710. He was appointed a second time in 1715, Nicholson having served in the interim. [195] Narrative of Paul Mascarene, addressed to Nicholson. According to French accounts, a pestilence at Annapolis had carried off three fourths of the garrison. Gaulin à ——, 5 Septembre, 1711; Cahouet au Ministre, 20 Juillet, 1711. In reality a little more than one hundred had died. [196] Passages from Vetch's letters, in Patterson, Memoir of Vetch. [197] Vetch to the Earl of Dartmouth, 22 January, 1711; Memorial of Council of War at Annapolis, 14 October, 1710. [198] Costebelle, Instruction au Capitaine de la Ronde, 1714. [199] écrit des Habitants d'Annapolis Royale, 25 Aoust, 1714; Mémoire de La Ronde Denys, 30 Aoust, 1714. [200] In 1711, however, the missionary Félix Pain says, "The English have treated the Acadians with much humanity."—Père Félix à ----, 8 Septembre, 1711. [201] This was the oath taken after the capitulation, which bound those who took it to allegiance so long as they remained in the province. [202] "As he used to curse and Damm Governor Vetch and all his friends, he is now served himself in the same manner."—Adams to Steele, 24 January, 1715. [203] For a great number of extracts from documents on this subject see a paper by Abbé Casgrain in Canada Fran?ais, i. 411-414; also the documentary supplement of the same publication. [204] La Ronde Denys au Ministre, 3 Décembre, 1715. [205] Costebelle au Ministre, 15 Janvier, 1715. [206] Governor Mascarene to the Secretary of State, 1 December, 1743. At this time there was also a blockhouse at Canseau, where a few soldiers were stationed. These were then the only British posts in the province. In May, 1727, Philipps wrote to the Lords of Trade: "Everything there [at Annapolis] is wearing the face of ruin and decay," and the ramparts are "lying level with the ground in breaches sufficiently wide for fifty men to enter abreast." [207] Philipps to Secretary Craggs, 26 September, 1720. [208] Selections from the Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 18, note. [209] "Those who are willing to remain there [in Acadia] and to be subject to the kingdom of Great Britain, are to enjoy the free exercise of their religion according to the usage of the Church of Home, as far as the laws of Great Britain do allow the same."—Treaty of Utrecht, 14th article. [210] Minutes of Council, 18 May, 1736. Governor Armstrong to the Secretary of State, 22 November, 1736. [211] Minutes of Council, 18 September, 1740, in Nova Scotia Archives. [212] Governor Mascarene to Père des Enclaves, 29 June, 1741. [213] Deputy-Governor Doucette to the Secretary of State, 5 November, 1717. [214] Governor Armstrong to the Secretary of State, 30 April, 1727. [215] Governor Philipps to Secretary Craggs, 26 September, 1720. [216] Ibid., 26 May, 1720. [217] Armstrong to the Secretary of State, 22 November, 1736. The dismissal of French priests and the substitution of others was again recommended some time after. [218] The motives for paying priests for instructing the people of a province ceded to England are given in a report of the French Marine Council. The Acadians "ne pourront jamais conserver un véritable attachement à la religion et à leur légitime souverain sans le secours d'un missionnaire" (Délibérations du Conseil de Marine, 23 Mai, 1719, in Le Canada-Fran?ais). The Intendant Bégon highly commends the efforts of the missionaries to keep the Acadians in the French interest (Bégon au Ministre, 25 Septembre, 1715), and Vaudreuil praises their zeal in the same cause (Vaudreuil au Ministre, 31 Octobre, 1717). [219] Délibérations du Conseil de Marine, 3 Mai, 1718. [220] Record of Council at Annapolis, 11 and 24 October, 1726. [221] Armstrong to Saint-Ovide, 17 June, 1732. [222] The Acadians to Saint-Ovide, 6 May, 1720, in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 25. This letter was evidently written for them,—no doubt by a missionary. [223] "They can march off at their leisure, by way of the Baye Verte, with their effects, without danger of being molested by this garrison, which scarce suffices to secure the Fort."—Philipps to Secretary Craggs, 26 May, 1720. [224] The Board of Trade to Philipps, 28 December, 1720. [225] Délibérations du Conseil de Marine, Aoust, 1720. The attempt against the garrison was probably opposed by the priests, who must have seen the danger that it would rouse the ministry into sending troops to the province, which would have been disastrous to their plans. [226] Certificat de Charles de la Gaudalie, prêtre, curé missionnaire de la paroisse des Mines, et No?l-Alexandre Noiville, ... curé de l'Assomption et de la Sainte Famille de Pigiguit; printed in Rameau, Une Colonie Féodale en Amérique (ed. 1889), ii. 53. [227] The preceding chapter is based largely on two collections of documents relating to Acadia,—the Nova Scotia Archives, or Selections from the Public Documents of Nova Scotia, printed in 1869 by the government of that province, and the mass of papers collected by Rev. H. R. Casgrain and printed in the documentary department of Le Canada-Fran?ais, a review published under direction of Laval University at Quebec. Abbé Casgrain, with passionate industry, has labored to gather everything in Europe or America that could tell in favor of the French and against the English. Mr. Akins, the editor of the Nova Scotia Archives, leans to the other side, so that the two collections supplement each other. Both are copious and valuable. Besides these, I have made use of various documents from the archives of Paris not to be found in either of the above-named collections. CHAPTER X. 1713-1724. SEBASTIEN RALE. Boundary Disputes.—Outposts of Canada.—The Earlier and Later Jesuits.—Religion and Politics.—The Norridgewocks and their Missionary.—A Hollow Peace.—Disputed Land Claims.—Council at Georgetown.—Attitude of Rale.—Minister and Jesuit.—The Indians waver.—An Outbreak.—Covert War.—Indignation against Rale.—War declared.—Governor and Assembly.—Speech of Samuel Sewall.—Penobscots attack Fort St. George.—Reprisal.—Attack on Norridgewock.—Death of Rale. [Pg 212]Before the Treaty of Utrecht, the present Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and a part of Maine were collectively called Acadia by the French; but after the treaty gave Acadia to England, they insisted that the name meant only Nova Scotia. The English on their part claimed that the cession of Acadia made them owners, not only of the Nova Scotian peninsula, but of all the country north of it to the St. Lawrence, or at least to the dividing ridge or height of land. This and other disputed questions of boundary were to be settled by commissioners of the two powers; but their meeting was put off for forty years, and then their discussions ended in the Seven Years'[Pg 213] War. The claims of the rival nations were in fact so discordant that any attempt to reconcile them must needs produce a fresh quarrel. The treaty had left a choice of evils. To discuss the boundary question meant to renew the war; to leave it unsettled was a source of constant irritation; and while delay staved off a great war, it quickly produced a small one. The river Kennebec, which was generally admitted by the French to be the dividing line between their possessions and New England,[228] was regarded by them with the most watchful jealousy. Its headwaters approached those of the Canadian river Chaudière, the mouth of which is near Quebec; and by ascending the former stream and crossing to the headwaters of the latter, through an intricacy of forests, hills, ponds, and marshes, it was possible for a small band of hardy men, unencumbered by cannon, to reach the Canadian capital,—as was done long after by the followers of Benedict Arnold. Hence it was thought a matter of the last importance to close the Kennebec against such an attempt. The Norridgewock band of the Abenakis, who lived on the banks of that river, were used to serve this purpose and to form a sort of advance-guard to the French colony, while other kindred bands on the Penobscot, the St. Croix, and the St. John were expected to aid in opposing a living barrier to English[Pg 214] intrusion. Missionaries were stationed among all these Indians to keep them true to Church and King. The most important station, that of the Norridgewocks, was in charge of Father Sebastien Rale, the most conspicuous and interesting figure among the later French-American Jesuits. Since the middle of the seventeenth century a change had come over the Jesuit missions of New France. Nothing is more striking or more admirable than the self-devoted apostleship of the earlier period.[229] The movement in Western Europe known as the Renaissance was far more than a revival of arts and letters,—it was an awakening of intellectual, moral, and religious life; the offspring of causes long in action, and the parent of other movements in action to this day. The Protestant Reformation was a part of it. That revolt against Rome produced a counter Renaissance in the bosom of the ancient Church herself. In presence of that peril she woke from sloth and corruption, and girded herself to beat back the invading heresies, by force or by craft, by inquisitorial fires, by the arms of princely and imperial allies, and by the self-sacrificing enthusiasm of her saints and martyrs. That time of danger produced the exalted zeal of Xavier and the intense, thoughtful, organizing zeal of Loyola. After a century had passed, the flame still burned, and it never shone with a purer or brighter radiance than in the early missions of New France. [Pg 215]Such ardors cannot be permanent; they must subside, from the law of their nature. If the great Western mission had been a success, the enthusiasm of its founders might have maintained itself for some time longer; but that mission was extinguished in blood. Its martyrs died in vain, and the burning faith that had created it was rudely tried. Canada ceased to be a mission. The civil and military powers grew strong, and the Church no longer ruled with undivided sway. The times changed, and the men changed with them. It is a characteristic of the Jesuit Order, and one of the sources of its strength, that it chooses the workman for his work, studies the qualities of its members, and gives to each the task for which he is fitted best. When its aim was to convert savage hordes and build up another Paraguay in the Northern wilderness, it sent a Jogues, a Brébeuf, a Charles Garnier, and a Gabriel Lalemant, like a forlorn hope, to storm the stronghold of heathendom. In later times it sent other men to meet other needs and accomplish other purposes. Before the end of the seventeenth century the functions of the Canadian Jesuit had become as much political as religious; but if the fires of his apostolic zeal burned less high, his devotion to the Order in which he had merged his personality was as intense as before. While in constant friction with the civil and military powers, he tried to make himself necessary to them, and in good measure he suc[Pg 216]ceeded. Nobody was so able to manage the Indian tribes and keep them in the interest of France. "Religion," says Charlevoix, "is the chief bond by which the savages are attached to us;" and it was the Jesuit above all others who was charged to keep this bond firm. The Christianity that was made to serve this useful end did not strike a deep root. While humanity is in the savage state, it can only be Christianized on the surface; and the convert of the Jesuits remained a savage still. They did not even try to civilize him. They taught him to repeat a catechism which he could not understand, and practise rites of which the spiritual significance was incomprehensible to him. He saw the symbols of his new faith in much the same light as the superstitions that had once enchained him. To his eyes the crucifix was a fetich of surpassing power, and the mass a beneficent "medicine," or occult influence, of supreme efficacy. Yet he would not forget his old rooted beliefs, and it needed the constant presence of the missionary to prevent him from returning to them. Since the Iroquois had ceased to be a danger to Canada, the active alliance of the Western Indians had become less important to the colony. Hence the missions among them had received less attention, and most of these tribes had relapsed into heathenism. The chief danger had shifted eastward, and was, or was supposed to be, in the direction of New England. Therefore the Eastern missions were cultivated with[Pg 217] diligence,—whether those within or adjoining the settled limits of Canada, like the Iroquois mission of Caughnawaga, the Abenaki missions of St. Francis and Becancour, and the Huron mission of Lorette, or those that served as outposts and advance-guards of the colony, like the Norridgewock Abenakis of the Kennebec, or the Penobscot Abenakis of the Penobscot. The priests at all these stations were in close correspondence with the government, to which their influence over their converts was invaluable. In the wilderness dens of the Hurons or the Iroquois, the early Jesuit was a marvel of self-sacrificing zeal; his successor, half missionary and half agent of the King, had thought for this world as well as the next. Sebastien Rale,[230] born in Franche-Comté in 1657, was sent to the American missions in 1689 at the age of thirty-two. After spending two years among the Abenakis of Canada, then settled near the mouth of the Chaudière, he was sent for two years more to the Illinois, and thence to the Abenakis of the Kennebec, where he was to end his days. Near where the town of Norridgewock now stands, the Kennebec curved round a broad tongue of meadow land, in the midst of a picturesque wilderness of hills and forests. On this tongue of land, on ground a few feet above the general level, stood the village of[Pg 218] the Norridgewocks, fenced with a stockade of round logs nine feet high. The enclosure was square; each of its four sides measured one hundred and sixty feet, and each had its gate. From the four gates ran two streets, or lanes, which crossed each other in the middle of the village. There were twenty-six Indian houses, or cabins, within the stockade, described as "built much after the English manner," though probably of logs. The church was outside the enclosure, about twenty paces from the east gate.[231] Such was the mission village of Norridgewock in 1716. It had risen from its ashes since Colonel Hilton destroyed it in 1705, and the church had been rebuilt by New England workmen hired for the purpose.[232] A small bell, which is still preserved at Brunswick, rang for mass at early morning, and for vespers at sunset. Rale's leisure hours were few. He preached, exhorted, catechised the young converts, counselled their seniors for this world and the next, nursed them in sickness, composed their quarrels,[Pg 219] tilled his own garden, cut his own firewood, cooked his own food, which was of Indian corn, or, at a pinch, of roots and acorns, worked at his Abenaki vocabulary, and, being expert at handicraft, made ornaments for the church, or moulded candles from the fruit of the bayberry, or wax-myrtle.[233] Twice a year, summer and winter, he followed his flock to the sea-shore and the islands, where they lived at their ease on fish and seals, clams, oysters, and seafowl. This Kennebec mission had been begun more than half a century before; yet the conjurers, or "medicine men,"—natural enemies of the missionary,—still remained obdurate and looked on the father askance, though the body of the tribe were constant at mass and confession, and regarded him with loving reverence. He always attended their councils, and, as he tells us, his advice always prevailed; but he was less fortunate when he told them to practise no needless cruelty in their wars, on which point they were often disobedient children.[234] Rale was of a strong, enduring frame, and a keen, vehement, caustic spirit. He had the gift of tongues, and was as familiar with the Abenaki and several[Pg 220] other Indian languages as he was with Latin.[235] Of the genuineness of his zeal there is no doubt, nor of his earnest and lively interest in the fortunes of the wilderness flock of which he was the shepherd for half his life. The situation was critical for them and for him. The English settlements were but a short distance below, while those of the French could be reached only by a hard journey of twelve or fourteen days. With two intervals of uneasy peace, the borders of Maine had been harried by war-parties for thirty-eight years; and since 1689 these raids had been prompted and aided by the French. Thus it happened that extensive tracts, which before Philip's War were dotted with farmhouses and fishing hamlets, had been abandoned, and cultivated fields were turning again to forests. The village of Wells had become the eastern frontier. But now the Treaty of Utrecht gave promise of lasting tranquillity. The Abenakis, hearing that they were to be backed no longer by the French, became alarmed, sent messengers to Casco, and asked for peace. In July there was a convention at Portsmouth, when delegates of the Norridgewocks, Penobscots, Malicites, and other Abenaki bands met Governor Dudley and the councillors[Pg 221] of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. A paper was read to them by sworn interpreters, in which they confessed that they had broken former treaties, begged pardon for "past rebellions, hostilities, and violations of promises," declared themselves subjects of Queen Anne, pledged firm friendship with the English, and promised them that they might re-enter without molestation on all their former possessions. Eight of the principal Abenaki chiefs signed this document with their totemic marks, and the rest did so, after similar interpretation, at another convention in the next year.[236] Indians when in trouble can waive their pride, and lavish professions and promises; but when they called themselves subjects of Queen Anne, it is safe to say that they did not know what the words meant. Peace with the Indians was no sooner concluded than a stream of settlers began to move eastward to reoccupy the lands that they owned or claimed in the region of the lower Kennebec. Much of this country was held in extensive tracts, under old grants of the last century, and the proprietors offered great inducements to attract emigrants. The government of[Pg 222] Massachusetts, though impoverished by three wars, of which it had borne the chief burden, added what encouragements it could. The hamlets of Saco, Scarborough, Falmouth, and Georgetown rose from their ashes; mills were built on the streams, old farms were retilled, and new ones cleared. A certain Dr. Noyes, who had established a sturgeon fishery on the Kennebec, built at his own charge a stone fort at Cushnoc, or Augusta; and it is said that as early as 1714 a blockhouse was built many miles above, near the mouth of the Sebasticook.[237] In the next year Fort George was built at the lower falls of the Androscoggin, and some years later Fort Richmond, on the Kennebec, at the site of the present town of Richmond.[238] Some of the claims to these Kennebec lands were based on old Crown patents, some on mere prescription, some on Indian titles, good or bad. Rale says that an Englishman would give an Indian a bottle of rum, and get from him in return a large tract of land.[239] Something like this may have happened; though in other cases the titles were as good as Indian titles usually are, the deeds being in regular form and signed by the principal chiefs for a consideration[Pg 223] which they thought sufficient. The lands of Indians, however, are owned, so far as owned at all, by the whole community; and in the case of the Algonquin tribes the chiefs had no real authority to alienate them without the consent of the tribesmen. Even supposing this consent to have been given, the Norridgewocks would not have been satisfied; for Rale taught them that they could not part with their lands, because they held them in trust for their children, to whom their country belonged as much as to themselves. Long years of war and mutual wrong had embittered the Norridgewocks against their English neighbors, with whom, nevertheless, they wished to be at peace, because they feared them, and because their trade was necessary to them. The English borderers, on their part, regarded the Indians less as men than as vicious and dangerous wild animals. In fact, the benevolent and philanthropic view of the American savage is for those who are beyond his reach: it has never yet been held by any whose wives and children have lived in danger of his scalping-knife. In Boston and other of the older and safer settlements, the Indians had found devoted friends before Philip's War; and even now they had apologists and defenders, prominent among whom was that relic of antique Puritanism, old Samuel Sewall, who was as conscientious and humane as he was prosy, narrow, and sometimes absurd, and whose benevolence towards the former owners of the soil[Pg 224] was trebly reinforced by his notion that they were descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.[240] The intrusion of settlers, and the building of forts and blockhouses on lands which they still called their own, irritated and alarmed the Norridgewocks, and their growing resentment was fomented by Rale, both because he shared it himself, and because he was prompted by Vaudreuil. Yet, dreading another war with the English, the Indians kept quiet for a year or two, till at length the more reckless among them began to threaten and pilfer the settlers. In 1716 Colonel Samuel Shute came out to succeed Dudley as governor; and in the next summer he called the Indians to a council at Georgetown, a settlement on Arrowsick Island, at the mouth of the Kennebec. Thither he went in the frigate "Squirrel," with the councillors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire; while the deputies of the Norridgewocks, Penobscots, Pequawkets, or Abenakis of the Saco, and Assagunticooks, or Abenakis of the Androscoggin, came in canoes to meet him, and set up their wigwams on a neighboring island. The council opened on the ninth of August, under a large tent, over which waved the British flag. The oath was administered to the interpreters by the aged Judge Sewall, and Shute then made the Indians a speech in which he told them that the English and they were subjects of the great, good, and wise King George; that as[Pg 225] both peoples were under the same King, he would gladly see them also of the same religion, since it was the only true one; and to this end he gave them a Bible and a minister to teach them,—pointing to Rev. Joseph Baxter, who stood near by. And he further assured them that if any wrong should be done them, he would set it right. He then condescended to give his hand to the chiefs, telling them, through the interpreter, that it was to show his affection. The Indians, after their usual custom, deferred their answer to the next day, when the council again met, and the Norridgewock chief, Wiwurna, addressed the governor as spokesman for his people. In defiance of every Indian idea of propriety, Shute soon began to interrupt him with questions and remarks. Wiwurna remonstrated civilly; but Shute continued his interruptions, and the speech turned to a dialogue, which may be abridged thus, Shute always addressing himself, not to the Indian orator, but to the interpreter. The orator expressed satisfaction at the arrival of the governor, and hoped that peace and friendship would now prevail. Governor (to the interpreter). Tell them that if they behave themselves, I shall use them kindly. Orator (as rendered by the interpreter). Your Excellency was pleased to say that we must obey King George. We will if we like his way of treating us. [Pg 226]Governor. They must obey him. Orator. We will if we are not disturbed on our lands. Governor. Nor must they disturb the English on theirs. Orator. We are pleased that your Excellency is ready to hear our complaints when wrong is done us. Governor. They must not pretend to lands that belong to the English. Orator. We beg leave to go on in order with our answer. Governor. Tell him to go on. Orator. If there should be any quarrel and bloodshed, we will not avenge ourselves, but apply to your Excellency. We will embrace in our bosoms the English that have come to settle on our land. Governor. They must not call it their land, for the English have bought it of them and their ancestors. Orator. We pray leave to proceed with our answer, and talk about the land afterwards. Wiwurna, then, with much civility, begged to be excused from receiving the Bible and the minister, and ended by wishing the governor good wind and weather for his homeward voyage. There was another meeting in the afternoon, in which the orator declared that his people were willing that the English should settle on the west side of the Kennebec as far up the river as a certain mill; on which the governor said to the interpreter: "Tell[Pg 227] them we want nothing but our own, and that that we will have;" and he ordered an old deed of sale, signed by six of their chiefs, to be shown and explained to them. Wiwurna returned that though his tribe were uneasy about their lands, they were willing that the English should keep what they had got, excepting the forts. On this point there was a sharp dialogue, and Shute said bluntly that if he saw fit, he should build a fort at every new settlement. At this all the Indians rose abruptly and went back to their camp, leaving behind an English flag that had been given them. Rale was at the Indian camp, and some of them came back in the evening with a letter from him, in which he told Shute that the governor of Canada had asked the King of France whether he had ever given the Indians' land to the English, to which the King replied that he had not, and would help the Indians to repel any encroachment upon them. This cool assumption on the part of France of paramount right to the Abenaki country incensed Shute, who rejected the letter with contempt. As between the governor and the Indian orator, the savage had shown himself by far the more mannerly; yet so unwilling were the Indians to break with the English that on the next morning, seeing Shute about to re-embark, they sent messengers to him to apologize for what they called their rudeness, beg that the English flag might be returned to them, and ask for another interview, saying that they[Pg 228] would appoint another spokesman instead of Wiwurna, who had given so much offence. Shute consented, and the meeting was held. The new orator presented a wampum belt, expressed a wish for peace, and said that his people wished the English to extend their settlements as far as they had formerly done. Shute, on his part, promised that trading-houses should be established for supplying their needs, and that they should have a smith to mend their guns, and an interpreter of their own choice. Twenty chiefs and elders then affixed their totemic marks to a paper, renewing the pledges made four years before at Portsmouth, and the meeting closed with a dance in honor of the governor.[241] The Indians, as we have seen, had shown no eagerness to accept the ministrations of Rev. Joseph Baxter. The Massachusetts Assembly had absurdly tried to counteract the influence of Rale by offering £150 a year in their depreciated currency to any one of their ministers who would teach Calvinism to the Indians. Baxter, whom Rale, with characteristic exaggeration, calls the ablest of the Boston ministers, but who was far from being so, as he was the pastor of the small country village of Medfield, took up the task, and, with no experience of Indian life or knowledge of any Indian language, entered the lists[Pg 229] against an adversary who had spent half his days among savages, had gained the love and admiration of the Norridgewocks, and spoke their language fluently. Baxter, with the confidence of a novice, got an interpreter and began to preach, exhort, and launch sarcasms against the doctrines and practices of the Roman Church. Rale excommunicated such of his flock as listened to him;[242] yet some persisted in doing so, and three of these petitioned the English governor to order "a small praying-house" to be built for their use.[243] Rale, greatly exasperated, opened a correspondence with Baxter, and wrote a treatise for his benefit, in which, through a hundred pages of polemical Latin, he proved that the Church of Rome was founded on a rock. This he sent to Baxter, and challenged him to overthrow his reasons. Baxter sent an answer for which Rale expresses great scorn as to both manner and matter. He made a rejoinder, directed not only against his opponent's arguments, but against his Latin, in which he picked flaws with great apparent satisfaction. He says that he heard no more from Baxter for a long time, but at last got another letter, in which there was nothing to the purpose, the minister merely charging him with an irascible and censorious spirit. This letter is still preserved, and[Pg 230] it does not answer to Rale's account of it. Baxter replies to his correspondent vigorously, defends his own Latin, attacks that of Rale, and charges him with losing temper.[244] Rale's correspondence with the New England ministers seems not to have been confined to Baxter. A paper is preserved, translated apparently from a Latin original, and entitled, "Remarks out of the Fryar Sebastian Rale's Letter from Norridgewock, February 7, 1720." This letter appears to have been addressed to some Boston minister, and is of a scornful and defiant character, using language ill fitted to conciliate, as thus: "You must know that a missionary is not a cipher, like a minister;" or thus: "A Jesuit is not a Baxter or a Boston minister." The tone is one of exasperation dashed with contempt, and the chief theme is English encroachment and the inalienability of Indian lands.[245] Rale says that Baxter gave up his mission after receiving the treatise on the infallible supremacy of the true Church; but this is a mistake, as the minister made three successive visits to the Eastern country before he tired of his hopeless mission. [Pg 231]In the letter just quoted, Rale seems to have done his best to rasp the temper of his New England correspondent. He boasts of his power over the Indians, who, as he declares, always do as he advises them. "Any treaty with the governor," he goes on to say, "and especially that of Arrowsick, is null and void if I do not approve it, for I give them so many reasons against it that they absolutely condemn what they have done." He says further that if they do not drive the English from the Kennebec, he will leave them, and that they will then lose both their lands and their souls; and he adds that, if necessary, he will tell them that they may make war.[246] Rale wrote also to Shute; and though the letter is lost, the governor's answer shows that it was sufficiently aggressive. The wild Indian is unstable as water. At Arrowsick, the Norridgewocks were all for peace; but when they returned to their village their mood changed, and, on the representations of Rale, they began to kill the cattle of the English settlers on the river below, burn their haystacks, and otherwise [Pg 232]annoy them.[247] The English suspected that the Jesuit was the source of their trouble; and as they had always regarded the lands in question as theirs, by virtue of the charter of the Plymouth Company in 1620, and the various grants under it, as well as by purchase from the Indians, their ire against him burned high. Yet afraid as the Indians were of another war, even Rale could scarcely have stirred them to violence but for the indignities put upon them by Indian-hating ruffians of the border, vicious rum-selling traders, and hungry land-thieves. They had still another cause of complaint. Shute had promised to build trading-houses where their wants should be supplied without fraud and extortion; but he had not kept his word, and could not keep it, for reasons that will soon appear. In spite of such provocations, Norridgewock was divided in opinion. Not only were the Indians in great dread of war, but they had received English presents to a considerable amount, chiefly from private persons interested in keeping them quiet. Hence, to Rale's great chagrin, there was an English party in the village so strong that when the English authorities demanded reparation for the mischief done to the settlers, the Norridgewocks promised two hundred beaver-skins as damages, and gave four hostages as security that they would pay for misdeeds[Pg 233] in the past, and commit no more in the future.[248] Rale now feared that his Indians would all go over to the English and tamely do their bidding; for though most of them, when he was present, would denounce the heretics and boast of the brave deeds they would do against them, yet after a meeting with English officials, they would change their minds and accuse their spiritual father of lying. It was clear that something must be done to end these waverings, lest the lands in dispute should be lost to France forever. The Norridgewocks had been invited to another interview with the English at Georgetown; and Rale resolved, in modern American phrase, to "capture the meeting." Vaudreuil and the Jesuit La Chasse, superior of the mission, lent their aid. Messengers were sent to the converted Indians of Canada, whose attachment to France and the Church was past all doubt, and who had been taught to abhor the English as children of the Devil. The object of the message was to induce them to go to the meeting at Georgetown armed and equipped for any contingency. They went accordingly,—Abenakis from Becancour[Pg 234] and St. Francis, Hurons from Lorette, and Iroquois from Caughnawaga, besides others, all stanch foes of heresy and England. Rale and La Chasse directed their movements and led them first to Norridgewock, where their arrival made a revolution. The peace party changed color like a chameleon, and was all for war. The united bands, two hundred and fifty warriors in all, paddled down the Kennebec along with the two Jesuits and two French officers, Saint-Castin and Croisil. In a few days the English at Georgetown saw them parading before the fort, well armed, displaying French flags,—feathers dangling from their scalp-locks, and faces fantastically patterned in vermilion, ochre, white clay, soot, and such other pigments as they could find or buy. They were met by Captain Penhallow and other militia officers of the fort, to whom they gave the promised two hundred beaver-skins, and demanded the four hostages in return; but the hostages had been given as security, not only for the beaver-skins, but also for the future good behavior of the Indians, and Penhallow replied that he had no authority to surrender them. On this they gave him a letter to the governor, written for them by Père de la Chasse, and signed by their totems. It summoned the English to leave the country at once, and threatened to rob and burn their houses in case of refusal.[249] The[Pg 235] threat was not executed, and they presently disappeared, but returned in September in increased numbers, burned twenty-six houses and attacked the fort, in which the inhabitants had sought refuge. The garrison consisted of forty men, who, being reinforced by the timely arrival of several whale-boats bringing thirty more, made a sortie. A skirmish followed; but being outnumbered and outflanked, the English fell back behind their defences.[250] The French authorities were in a difficult position. They thought it necessary to stop the progress of English settlement along the Kennebec; and yet, as there was peace between the two Crowns, they could not use open force. There was nothing for it but to set on the Abenakis to fight for them. "I am well pleased," wrote Vaudreuil to Rale, "that you and[Pg 236] Père de la Chasse have prompted the Indians to treat the English as they have done. My orders are to let them want for nothing, and I send them plenty of ammunition." Rale says that the King allowed him a pension of six thousand livres a year, and that he spent it all "in good works." As his statements are not remarkable for precision, this may mean that he was charged with distributing the six thousand livres which the King gave every year in equal shares to the three Abenaki missions of Medoctec, Norridgewock, and Panawamské, or Penobscot, and which generally took the form of presents of arms, gunpowder, bullets, and other munitions of war, or of food and clothing to support the squaws and children while the warriors were making raids on the English.[251] Vaudreuil had long felt the delicacy of his position, and even before the crisis seemed near he tried to provide against it, and wrote to the minister that he had never called the Abenakis subjects of France, but only allies, in order to avoid responsibility for anything they might do.[252] "The English," he says elsewhere, "must be prevented from settling on Abenaki lands; and to this end we must let the Indians act for us (laisser agir les sauvages)."[253] Yet while urging the need of precaution, he was too zealous to be always prudent; and once, at least,[Pg 237] he went so far as to suggest that French soldiers should be sent to help the Abenakis,—which, he thought, would frighten the English into retreating from their settlements; whereas if such help were refused, the Indians would go over to the enemy.[254] The court was too anxious to avoid a rupture to permit the use of open force, and would only promise plenty of ammunition to Indians who would fight the English, directing at the same time that neither favors nor attentions should be given to those who would not.[255] The half-breed officer, Saint-Castin, son of Baron Vincent de Saint-Castin by his wife, a Penobscot squaw, bore the double character of a French lieutenant and an Abenaki chief, and had joined with the Indians in their hostile demonstration at Arrowsick Island. Therefore, as chief of a tribe styled subjects of King George, the English seized him, charged him with rebellion, and brought him to Boston, where he was examined by a legislative committee. He showed both tact and temper, parried the charges against him, and was at last set at liberty. His arrest, however, exasperated his tribesmen, who soon began to burn houses, kill settlers, and commit various acts of violence, for all of which Rale was believed to be mainly answerable. There was great indignation against him. He himself says that a reward of a thousand pounds sterling was[Pg 238] offered for his head, but that the English should not get it for all their sterling money. It does not appear that such a reward was offered, though it is true that the Massachusetts House of Representatives once voted five hundred pounds in their currency—then equal to about a hundred and eighty pounds sterling—for the same purpose; but as the governor and Council refused their concurrence, the Act was of no effect. All the branches of the government, however, presently joined in sending three hundred men to Norridgewock, with a demand that the Indians should give up Rale "and the other heads and fomenters of their rebellion." In case of refusal they were to seize the Jesuit and the principal chiefs and bring them prisoners to Boston. Colonel Westbrook was put in command of the party. Rale, being warned of their approach by some of his Indians, swallowed the consecrated wafers, hid the sacred vessels, and made for the woods, where, as he thinks, he was saved from discovery by a special intervention of Providence. His papers fell into the hands of Westbrook, including letters that proved beyond all doubt that he had acted as agent of the Canadian authorities in exciting his flock against the English.[256] [Pg 239]Incensed by Westbrook's invasion, the Indians came down the Kennebec in large numbers, burned the village of Brunswick, and captured nine families at Merry-meeting Bay; though they soon set them free, except five men whom they kept to exchange for the four hostages still detained at Boston.[257] At the same time they seized several small vessels in the harbors along the coast. On this the governor and Council declared war against the Eastern Indians, meaning the Abenakis and their allies, whom they styled traitors and robbers. In Massachusetts many persons thought that war could not be justified, and were little disposed to push it with vigor. The direction of it belonged to the governor in his capacity of Captain-General of the Province. Shute was an old soldier who had served with credit as lieutenant-colonel under Marlborough; but he was hampered by one of those disputes which in times of crisis were sure to occur in every British province whose governor was appointed by the Crown. The Assembly, jealous of the representative of royalty, and looking back mournfully to their virtual independence under the lamented old charter, had from the first let slip no opportunity to increase its own powers and abridge those of the governor, refused him the means of establishing the promised trading-houses in the Indian country, and would grant no money for presents to conciliate the Norridgewocks. The House now wanted, not only[Pg 240] to control supplies for the war, but to direct the war itself and conduct operations by committees of its own. Shute made his plans of campaign, and proceeded to appoint officers from among the frontier inhabitants, who had at least the qualification of being accustomed to the woods. One of them, Colonel Walton, was obnoxious to some of the representatives, who brought charges against him, and the House demanded that he should be recalled from the field to answer to them for his conduct. The governor objected to this as an encroachment on his province as commander-in-chief. Walton was now accused of obeying orders of the governor in contravention of those of the representatives, who thereupon passed a vote requiring him to lay his journal before them. This was more than Shute could bear. He had the character of a good-natured man; but the difficulties and mortifications of his position had long galled him, and he had got leave to return to England and lay his case before the King and Council. The crisis had now come. The Assembly were for usurping all authority, civil and military. Accordingly, on the first of January, 1723, the governor sailed in a merchant ship, for London, without giving notice of his intention to anybody except two or three servants.[258] The burden of his difficult and vexatious office fell upon the lieutenant-governor, William Dummer.[Pg 241] When he first met the Council in his new capacity, a whimsical scene took place. Here, among the rest, was the aged, matronly countenance of the worthy Samuel Sewall, deeply impressed with the dignity and importance of his position as senior member of the Board. At his best he never had the faintest sense of humor or perception of the ludicrous, and being now perhaps touched with dotage, he thought it incumbent upon him to address a few words of exhortation and encouragement to the incoming chief magistrate. He rose from his seat with long locks, limp and white, drooping from under his black skullcap,—for he abhorred a wig as a sign of backsliding,—and in a voice of quavering solemnity spoke thus:— "If your Honour and this Honourable Board please to give me leave, I would speak a Word or two upon this solemn Occasion. Altho the unerring Providence of God has brought you to the Chair of Government in a cloudy and tempestuous season, yet you have this for your Encouragement, that the people you Have to do with are a part of the Israel of God, and you may expect to have of the Prudence and Patience of Moses communicated to you for your Conduct. It is evident that our Almighty Saviour counselled the first planters to remove hither and Settle here, and they dutifully followed his Advice, and therefore He will never leave nor forsake them nor Theirs; so that your Honour must needs be happy in sincerely seeking their Interest and Welfare, which your Birth and Education will incline you to do. Difficilia qu? pulchra.[Pg 242] I promise myself that they who sit at this Board will yield their Faithful Advice to your Honour according to the Duty of their Place." Having thus delivered himself to an audience not much more susceptible of the ludicrous than he was, the old man went home well pleased, and recorded in his diary that the lieutenant-governor and councillors rose and remained standing while he was speaking, "and they expressed a handsom Acceptance of what I had said; Laus Deo."[259] Dummer was born in New England, and might, therefore, expect to find more favor than had fallen to his predecessor; but he was the representative of royalty, and could not escape the consequences of being so. In earnest of what was in store for him, the Assembly would not pay his salary, because he had sided with the governor in the late quarrel. The House voted to dismiss Colonel Walton and Major Moody, the chief officers appointed by Shute; and when Dummer reminded it that this was a matter belonging to him as commander-in-chief, it withheld the pay of the obnoxious officers and refused all supplies for the war till they should be removed. Dummer was forced to yield.[260] The House would probably have pushed him still farther, if the members had not dreaded the effect of Shute's representations at court, and feared lest persistent encroachment on the functions of the governor might cost them[Pg 243] their charter, to which, insufficient as they thought it, and far inferior to the one they had lost, they clung tenaciously as the palladium of their liberties. Yet Dummer needed the patience of Job; for his Assembly seemed more bent on victories over him than over the Indians. There was another election, which did not improve the situation. The new House was worse than the old, being made up largely of narrow-minded rustics, who tried to relieve the governor of all conduct of the war by assigning it to a committee chosen from among themselves; but the Council would not concur with them. Meanwhile the usual ravages went on. Farmhouses were burned, and the inmates waylaid and killed, while the Indians generally avoided encounters with armed bodies of whites. Near the village of Oxford four of them climbed upon the roof of a house, cut a hole in it with their hatchets, and tried to enter. A woman who was alone in the building, and who had two loaded guns and two pistols, seeing the first savage struggling to shove himself through the hole, ran to him in desperation and shot him; on which the others dragged the body back and disappeared.[261] There were several attempts of a more serious kind. The small wooden fort at the river St. George, the most easterly English outpost, was attacked, but the assailants were driven off. A few weeks later it[Pg 244] was attacked again by the Penobscots under their missionary, Father Lauverjat. Other means failing, they tried to undermine the stockade; but their sap caved in from the effect of rains, and they retreated, with severe loss. The warlike contagion spread to the Indians of Nova Scotia. In July the Micmacs seized sixteen or seventeen fishing-smacks at Canseau; on which John Eliot, of Boston, and John Robinson, of Cape Ann, chased the marauders in two sloops, retook most of the vessels, and killed a good number of the Indians. In the autumn a war-party, under the noted chief Grey Lock, prowled about the village of Rutland, met the minister, Joseph Willard, and attacked him. He killed one savage and wounded another, but was at last shot and scalped.[262] The representatives had long been bent on destroying the mission village of the Penobscots on the river of that name; and one cause of their grudge against Colonel Walton was that, by order of the governor, he had deferred a projected attack upon it. His successor, Colonel Westbrook, now took the work in hand, went up the Penobscot in February with two hundred and thirty men in sloops and whale-boats, left these at the head of navigation, and pushed through the forest to the Indian town called Panawamské by the French. It stood apparently above Bangor, at or near Passadumkeag. Here the party found a stockade enclosure fourteen feet high, seventy yards long, and fifty yards wide, containing[Pg 245] twenty-three houses, which Westbrook, a better woodsman than grammarian, reports to have been "built regular." Outside the stockade stood the chapel, "well and handsomely furnished within and without, and on the south side of that the Fryer's dwelling-house."[263] This "Fryer" was Father Lauverjat, who had led his flock to the attack of the fort at the St. George. Both Indians and missionary were gone. Westbrook's men burned the village and chapel, and sailed back to the St. George. In the next year, 1724, there was a more noteworthy stroke; for Dummer, more pliant than Shute, had so far soothed his Assembly that it no longer refused money for the war. It was resolved to strike at the root of the evil, seize Rale, and destroy Norridgewock. Two hundred and eight men in four companies, under Captains Harmon, Moulton, and Brown, and Lieutenant Bean, set out from Fort Richmond in seventeen whaleboats on the eighth of August. They left the boats at Taconic Falls in charge of a lieutenant and forty men, and on the morning of the tenth the main body, accompanied by three Mohawk Indians, marched through the forest for Norridgewock. Towards evening they saw two squaws, one of whom they brutally shot, and captured the other, who proved to be the wife of the noted chief Bomazeen. She gave them a full account of the state of the village, which they approached early in the afternoon[Pg 246] of the twelfth. In the belief that some of the Indians would be in their cornfields on the river above, Harmon, who was in command, divided the force, and moved up the river with about eighty men, while Moulton, with as many more, made for the village, advancing through the forest with all possible silence. About three o'clock he and his men emerged from a tangle of trees and bushes, and saw the Norridgewock cabins before them, no longer enclosed with a stockade, but open and unprotected. Not an Indian was stirring, till at length a warrior came out from one of the huts, saw the English, gave a startled war-whoop, and ran back for his gun. Then all was dismay and confusion. Squaws and children ran screaming for the river, while the warriors, fifty or sixty in number, came to meet the enemy. Moulton ordered his men to reserve their fire till the Indians had emptied their guns. As he had foreseen, the excited savages fired wildly, and did little or no harm. The English, still keeping their ranks, returned a volley with deadly effect. The Indians gave one more fire, and then ran for the river. Some tried to wade to the farther side, the water being low; others swam across, while many jumped into their canoes, but could not use them, having left the paddles in their houses. Moulton's men followed close, shooting the fugitives in the water or as they climbed the farther bank. When they returned to the village they found Rale in one of the houses, firing upon some of their com[Pg 247]rades who had not joined in the pursuit. He presently wounded one of them, on which a lieutenant named Benjamin Jaques burst open the door of the house, and, as he declared, found the priest loading his gun for another shot. The lieutenant said further that he called on him to surrender, and that Rale replied that he would neither give quarter nor take it; on which Jaques shot him through the head.[264] Moulton, who had given orders that Rale should not be killed, doubted this report of his subordinate so far as concerned the language used by Rale, though believing that he had exasperated the lieutenant by provoking expressions of some kind. The old chief Mogg had shut himself up in another house, from which he fired and killed one of Moulton's three Mohawks, whose brother then beat in the door and shot the chief dead. Several of the English followed, and brutally murdered Mogg's squaw and his two children. Such plunder as the village afforded, consisting of three barrels of gunpowder, with a few guns, blankets, and kettles, was then seized; and the Puritan militia thought it a meritorious act to break what they called the "idols" in the church, and carry off the sacred vessels. Harmon and his party returned towards night from their useless excursion to the cornfields, where they found nobody. In the morning a search was[Pg 248] made for the dead, and twenty-six Indians were found and scalped, including the principal chiefs and warriors of the place. Then, being anxious for the safety of their boats, the party marched for Taconic Falls. They had scarcely left the village when one of the two surviving Mohawks, named Christian, secretly turned back, set fire to the church and the houses, and then rejoined the party. The boats were found safe, and embarking, they rowed down to Richmond with their trophies.[265] The news of the fate of the Jesuit and his mission spread joy among the border settlers, who saw in it the end of their troubles. In their eyes Rale was an incendiary, setting on a horde of bloody savages to pillage and murder. While they thought him a devil, he passed in Canada for a martyred saint. He was neither the one nor the other, but a man with the qualities and faults of a man,—fearless,[Pg 249] resolute, enduring; boastful, sarcastic, often bitter and irritating; a vehement partisan; apt to see things, not as they were, but as he wished them to be; given to inaccuracy and exaggeration, yet no doubt sincere in opinions and genuine in zeal; hating the English more than he loved the Indians; calling himself their friend, yet using them as instruments of worldly policy, to their danger and final ruin. In considering the ascription of martyrdom, it is to be remembered that he did not die because he was an apostle of the faith, but because he was the active agent of the Canadian government. There is reason to believe that he sometimes exercised a humanizing influence over his flock. The war which he helped to kindle was marked by fewer barbarities—fewer tortures, mutilations of the dead, and butcheries of women and infants—than either of the preceding wars. It is fair to assume that this was due in part to him, though it was chiefly the result of an order given, at the outset, by Shute that non-combatants in exposed positions should be sent to places of safety in the older settlements.[266] FOOTNOTES: [228] In 1700, however, there was an agreement, under the treaty of Ryswick, which extended the English limits as far as the river St. George, a little west of the Penobscot. [229] See "Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century." [230] So written by himself in an autograph letter of 18 November, 1712. It is also spelled Rasle, Rasles, Ralle, and, very incorrectly, Rallé, or Rallee. [231] The above particulars are taken from an inscription on a manuscript map in the library of the Maine Historical Society, made in 1716 by Joseph Heath, one of the principal English settlers on the Kennebec, and for a time commandant of the fort at Brunswick. [232] When Colonel Westbrook and his men came to Norridgewock in 1722, they found a paper pinned to the church door, containing, among others, the following words, in the handwriting of Rale, meant as a fling at the English invaders: "It [the church] is ill built, because the English don't work well. It is not finished, although five or six Englishmen have wrought here during four years, and the Undertaker [contractor], who is a great Cheat, hath been paid in advance for to finish it." The money came from the Canadian government. [233] Myrica cerifera. [234] The site of the Indian village is still called Indian Old Point. Norridgewock is the Naurantsouak, or Narantsouak, of the French. For Rale's mission life, see two letters of his, 15 October, 1722, and 12 October, 1722, and a letter of Père La Chasse, Superior of the Missions, 29 October, 1724. These are printed in the Lettres édifiantes, xvii. xxiii. [235] Père La Chasse, in his eulogy of Rale, says that there was not a language on the continent with which he had not some acquaintance. This is of course absurd. Besides a full knowledge of the Norridgewock Abenaki, he had more or less acquaintance with two other Algonquin languages,—the Ottawa and the Illinois,—and also with the Huron; which is enough for one man. [236] This treaty is given in full by Penhallow. It is also printed from the original draft by Mr. Frederic Kidder, in his Abenaki Indians: their Treaties of 1713 and 1717. The two impressions are substantially the same, but with verbal variations. The version of Kidder is the more complete, in giving not only the Indian totemic marks, but also the autographs in facsimile of all the English officials. Rale gives a dramatic account of the treaty, which he may have got from the Indians, and which omits their submission and their promises. [237] It was standing in 1852, and a sketch of it is given by Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, v. 185. I have some doubts as to the date of erection. [238] Williamson, History of Maine, ii. 88, 97. Compare Penhallow. [239] Remarks out of the Fryar Sebastian Rale's Letter from Norridgewock, 7 February, 1720, in the Common Place Book of Rev. Henry Flynt. [240] Sewall's Memorial relating to the Kennebec Indians is an argument against war with them. [241] A full report of this conference was printed at the time in Boston. It is reprinted in N. H. Historical Collections, ii. 242, and N. H. Provincial Papers, iii. 693. Penhallow was present at the meeting, but his account of it is short. The accounts of Williamson and Hutchinson are drawn from the above-mentioned report. [242] Shute to Rale, 21 February, 1718. [243] This petition is still in the Massachusetts Archives, and is printed by Dr. Francis in Sparks's American Biography, New Series, xvii. 259. [244] This letter was given by Mr. Adams, of Medfield, a connection of the Baxter family, to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in whose possession it now is, in a worn condition. It was either captured with the rest of Rale's papers and returned to the writer, or else is a duplicate kept by Baxter. [245] This curious paper is in the Common Place Book of Rev. Henry Flynt, of which the original is in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society. [246] See Francis, Life of Rale, where the entire passage is given. [247] Rale wrote to the governor of Canada that it was "sur Les Représentations qu'Il Avoit fait aux Sauvages de Sa Mission" that they had killed "un grand nombre de Bestiaux apartenant aux Anglois," and threatened them with attack if they did not retire. (Réponse fait par MM. Vaudreuil et Bégon au Mémoire du Roy du 8 Juin, 1721.) Rale told the governor of Massachusetts, on another occasion, that his character as a priest permitted him to give the Indians nothing but counsels of peace. Yet as early as 1703 he wrote to Vaudreuil that the Abenakis were ready, at a word from him, to lift the hatchet against the English. Beauharnois et Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Novembre, 1703. [248] Joseph Heath and John Minot to Shute, 1 May, 1719. Rale says that these hostages were seized by surprise and violence; but Vaudreuil complains bitterly of the faintness of heart which caused the Indians to give them (Vaudreuil à Rale, 15 Juin, 1721), and both he and the intendant lay the blame on the English party at Norridgewock, who, "with the consent of all the Indians of that mission, had the weakness to give four hostages." Réponse de Vaudreuil et Bégon au Mémoire du Roy du 8 Juin, 1721. [249] Eastern Indians' Letter to the Governour, 27 July, 1721, in Mass., Hist. Coll., Second Series, viii. 259. This is the original French. It is signed with totems of all the Abenaki bands, and also of the Caughnawagas, Iroquois of the Mountain, Hurons, Micmacs, Montagnais, and several other tribes. On this interview, Penhallow; Belknap, ii. 51; Shute to Vaudreuil, 21 July, 1721 (O. S.); Ibid., 23 April, 1722; Rale in Lettres édifiantes, xvii. 285. Rale blames Shute for not being present at the meeting, but a letter of the governor shows that he had never undertaken to be there. He could not have come in any case, from the effects of a fall, which disabled him for some months even from going to Portsmouth to meet the Legislature. Provincial Papers of New Hampshire, iii. 822. [250] Williamson, Hist. of Maine, ii. 119; Penhallow. Rale's account of the affair, found among his papers at Norridgewock, is curiously exaggerated. He says that he himself was with the Indians, and "to pleasure the English" showed himself to them several times,—a point which the English writers do not mention, though it is one which they would be most likely to seize upon. He says that fifty houses were burned, and that there were five forts, two of which were of stone, and that in one of these six hundred armed men, besides women and children, had sought refuge, though there was not such a number of men in the whole region of the Kennebec. [251] Vaudreuil, Mémoire adressé au Roy, 5 Juin, 1723. [252] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 6 Septembre, 1716. [253] Extrait d'une Liasse de Papiers concernant le Canada, 1720. (Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères.) [254] Réponse de Vaudreuil et Bégon au Mémoire du Roy, 8 Juin, 1721. [255] Bégon à Rale, 14 Juin, 1721. [256] Some of the papers found in Rale's "strong box" are still preserved in the Archives of Massachusetts, including a letter to him from Vaudreuil, dated at Quebec, 25 September, 1721, in which the French governor expresses great satisfaction at the missionary's success in uniting the Indians against the English, and promises military aid, if necessary. [257] Wheeler, History of Brunswick, Topsham, and Harpswell, 54. [258] Hutchinson, ii. 261. On these dissensions compare Palfrey, Hist. of New England, iv. 406-428. [259] Sewall Papers, iii. 317, 318. [260] Palfrey, iv. 432, 433. [261] Penhallow. Hutchinson, ii. 279. [262] Penhallow. Temple and Sheldon, History of Northfield, 195. [263] Westbrook to Dummer, 23 March, 1723, in Collections Mass. Hist. Soc., Second Series, viii. 264. [264] Hutchinson, ii. 283 (ed. 1795). Hutchinson had the story from Moulton. Compare the tradition in the family of Jaques, as told by his great-grandson, in Historical Magazine, viii. 177. [265] The above rests on the account of Hutchinson, which was taken from the official Journal of Harmon, the commander of the expedition, and from the oral statements of Moulton, whom Hutchinson examined on the subject. Charlevoix, following a letter of La Chasse in the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes, gives a widely different story. According to him, Norridgewock was surprised by eleven hundred men, who first announced their presence by a general volley, riddling all the houses with bullets. Rale, says La Chasse, Tan out to save his flock by drawing the rage of the enemy on himself; on which they raised a great shout and shot him dead at the foot of the cross in the middle of the village. La Chasse does not tell us where he got the story; but as there were no French witnesses, the story must have come from the Indians, who are notorious liars where their interest and self-love are concerned. Nobody competent to judge of evidence can doubt which of the two statements is the more trustworthy. [266] It is also said that Rale taught some of his Indians to read and write,—which was unusual in the Jesuit missions. On his character, compare the judicial and candid Life of Rale, by Dr. Convers Francis, in Sparks's American Biography, New Series, vii. CHAPTER XI. 1724, 1725. LOVEWELL'S FIGHT. Vaudreuil and Dummer.—Embassy to Canada.—Indians intractable.—Treaty of Peace.—The Pequawkets.—John Lovewell.—A Hunting Party.—Another Expedition.—The Ambuscade.—The Fight.—Chaplain Frye: his Fate.—The Survivors.—Susanna Rogers. [Pg 250]The death of Rale and the destruction of Norridgewock did not at once end the war. Vaudreuil turned all the savages of the Canadian missions against the borders, not only of Maine, but of western Massachusetts, whose peaceful settlers had given no offence. Soon after the Norridgewock expedition, Dummer wrote to the French governor, who had lately proclaimed the Abenakis his allies: "As they are subjects of his Britannic Majesty, they cannot be your allies, except through me, his representative. You have instigated them to fall on our people in the most outrageous manner. I have seen your commission to Sebastien Rale. But for your protection and incitements they would have made peace long ago."[267] In reply, Vaudreuil admitted that he had given a safe-conduct and a commission to Rale, which he[Pg 251] could not deny, as the Jesuit's papers were in the hands of the English governor. "You will have to answer to your king for his murder," he tells Dummer. "It would have been strange if I had abandoned our Indians to please you. I cannot help taking the part of our allies. You have brought your troubles upon yourself. I advise you to pull down all the forts you have built on the Abenaki lands since the Peace of Utrecht. If you do so, I will be your mediator with the Norridgewocks. As to the murder of Rale, I leave that to be settled between the two Crowns."[268] Apparently the French court thought it wise to let the question rest, and make no complaint. Dummer, however, gave his views on the subject to Vaudreuil. "Instead of preaching peace, love, and friendship, agreeably to the Christian religion, Rale was an incendiary, as appears by many letters I have by me. He has once and again appeared at the head of a great many Indians, threatening and insulting us. If such a disturber of the peace has been killed in the heat of action, nobody is to blame but himself. I have much more cause to complain that Mr. Willard, minister of Rutland, who is innocent of all that is charged against Rale, and always confined himself to preaching the Gospel, was slain and scalped by your Indians, and his scalp carried in triumph to Quebec." Dummer then denies that France has any claim to[Pg 252] the Abenakis, and declares that the war between them and the English is due to the instigations of Rale and the encouragements given them by Vaudreuil. But he adds that in his wish to promote peace he sends two prominent gentlemen, Colonel Samuel Thaxter and Colonel William Dudley, as bearers of his letter.[269] Mr. Atkinson, envoy on the part of New Hampshire, joined Thaxter and Dudley, and the three set out for Montreal, over the ice of Lake Champlain. Vaudreuil received them with courtesy. As required by their instructions, they demanded the release of the English prisoners in Canada, and protested against the action of the French governor in setting on the Indians to attack English settlements when there was peace between the two Crowns. Vaudreuil denied that he had done so, till they showed him his own letters to Rale, captured at Norridgewock. These were unanswerable; but Vaudreuil insisted that the supplies sent to the Indians were only the presents which they received every year from the King. As to the English prisoners, he said that those in the hands of the Indians were beyond his power; but that the envoys could have those whom the French had bought from their captors, on paying back the price they had cost. The demands were exorbitant, but sixteen prisoners were ransomed, and bargains were made for ten more. Vaudreuil proposed[Pg 253] to Thaxter and his colleagues to have an interview with the Indians, which they at first declined, saying that they had no powers to treat with them, though, if the Indians wished to ask for peace, they were ready to hear them. At length a meeting was arranged. The French governor writes: "Being satisfied that nothing was more opposed to our interests than a peace between the Abenakis and the English, I thought that I would sound the chiefs before they spoke to the English envoys, and insinuate to them everything that I had to say."[270] This he did with such success that, instead of asking for peace, the Indians demanded the demolition of the English forts, and heavy damages for burning their church and killing their missionary. In short, to Vaudreuil's great satisfaction, they talked nothing but war. The French despatch reporting this interview has the following marginal note: "Nothing better can be done than to foment this war, which at least retards the settlements of the English;" and against this is written, in the hand of the colonial minister, the word "Approved."[271] This was, in fact, the policy pursued from the first, and Rale had been an instrument of it. The Jesuit La Chasse, who[Pg 254] spoke both English and Abenaki, had acted as interpreter, and so had had the meeting in his power, as he could make both parties say what he pleased. The envoys thought him more anti-English than Vaudreuil himself, and ascribed the intractable mood of the Indians to his devices. Under the circumstances, they made a mistake in consenting to the interview at all. The governor, who had treated them with civility throughout, gave them an escort of soldiers for the homeward journey, and they and the redeemed prisoners returned safely to Albany. The war went on as before, but the Indians were fast growing tired of it. The Penobscots had made themselves obnoxious by their attacks on Fort St. George, and Captain Heath marched across country from the Kennebec to punish them. He found their village empty. It was built, since Westbrook's attack, at or near the site of Bangor, a little below Indian Old Town,—the present abode of the tribe,—and consisted of fifty wigwams, which Heath's men burned to the ground. One of the four hostages still detained at Boston, together with another Indian captured in the war, was allowed to visit his people, under a promise to return. Strange to say, the promise was kept. They came back bringing a request for peace from their tribesmen. On this, commissioners were sent to the St. George, where a conference was held with some of the Penobscot chiefs, and it was arranged that deputies of that people should be sent to Boston to[Pg 255] conclude a solid peace. After long delay, four chiefs appeared, fully empowered, as they said, to make peace, not for the Penobscots only, but for the other Abenaki tribes, their allies. The speeches and ceremonies being at last ended, the four deputies affixed their marks to a paper in which, for themselves and those they represented, they made submission "unto his most excellent Majesty George, by the grace of God king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, defender of the Faith," etc., promising to "cease and forbear all acts of hostility, injuries, and discord towards all his subjects, and never confederate or combine with any other nation to their prejudice." Here was a curious anomaly. The English claimed the Abenakis as subjects of the British Crown, and at the same time treated with them as a foreign power. Each of the four deputies signed the above-mentioned paper, one with the likeness of a turtle, the next with that of a bird, the third with the untutored portrait of a beaver, and the fourth with an extraordinary scrawl, meant, it seems, for a lobster,—such being their respective totems. To these the lieutenant-governor added the seal of the province of Massachusetts, coupled with his own autograph. In the next summer, and again a year later, other meetings were held at Casco Bay with the chiefs of the various Abenaki tribes, in which, after prodigious circumlocution, the Boston treaty was ratified, and [Pg 256]the war ended.[272] This time the Massachusetts Assembly, taught wisdom by experience, furnished a guarantee of peace by providing for government trading-houses in the Indian country, where goods were supplied, through responsible hands, at honest prices. The Norridgewocks, with whom the quarrel began, were completely broken. Some of the survivors joined their kindred in Canada, and others were merged in the Abenaki bands of the Penobscot, Saco, or Androscoggin. Peace reigned at last along the borders of New England; but it had cost her dear. In the year after the death of Rale, there was an incident of the conflict too noted in its day, and too strongly rooted in popular tradition, to be passed unnoticed. Out of the heart of the White Mountains springs the river Saco, fed by the bright cascades that leap from the crags of Mount Webster, brawling among rocks and bowlders down the great defile of the Crawford Notch, winding through the forests and intervales of Conway, then circling northward by the village of Fryeburg in devious wanderings by meadows, woods, and mountains, and at last turning eastward and southward to join the sea. On the banks of this erratic stream lived an Abenaki tribe called the Sokokis. When the first white man visited the country, these Indians lived at the Falls, a few miles from the mouth of the river. They retired before the English settlers, and either joined their kindred in Maine, or migrated to St. Francis[Pg 257] and other Abenaki settlements in Canada; but a Sokoki band called Pigwackets, or Pequawkets, still kept its place far in the interior, on the upper waters of the Saco, near Pine Hill, in the present town of Fryeburg. Except a small band of their near kindred on Lake Ossipee, they were the only human tenants of a wilderness many thousand square miles in extent. In their wild and remote abode they were difficult of access, and the forest and the river were well stocked with moose, deer, bear, beaver, otter, lynx, fisher, mink, and marten. In this, their happy hunting-ground, the Pequawkets thought themselves safe; and they would have been so for some time longer if they had not taken up the quarrel of the Norridgewocks and made bloody raids against the English border, under their war-chief, Paugus. Not far from where their wigwams stood clustered in a bend of the Saco was the small lake now called Lovewell's Pond, named for John Lovewell of Dunstable, a Massachusetts town on the New Hampshire line. Lovewell's father, a person of consideration in the village, where he owned a "garrison house," had served in Philip's War, and taken part in the famous Narragansett Swamp Fight. The younger Lovewell, now about thirty-three years of age, lived with his wife, Hannah, and two or three children on a farm of two hundred acres. The inventory of his effects, made after his death, includes five or six cattle, one mare, two steel traps with chains, a gun, two or three books, a feather-bed, and[Pg 258] "under-bed," or mattress, along with sundry tools, pots, barrels, chests, tubs, and the like,—the equipment, in short, of a decent frontier yeoman of the time.[273] But being, like the tough veteran, his father, of a bold and adventurous disposition, he seems to have been less given to farming than to hunting and bush-fighting. Dunstable was attacked by Indians in the autumn of 1724, and two men were carried off. Ten others went in pursuit, but fell into an ambush, and nearly all were killed, Josiah Farwell, Lovewell's brother-in-law, being, by some accounts, the only one who escaped.[274] Soon after this, a petition, styled a "Humble Memorial," was laid before the House of Representatives at Boston. It declares that in order "to kill and destroy their enemy Indians," the petitioners and forty or fifty others are ready to spend one whole year in hunting them, "provided they can meet with Encouragement suitable." The petition is signed by John Lovewell, Josiah Farwell, and Jonathan Robbins, all of Dunstable, Lovewell's name being well written, and the others after a cramped and unaccustomed fashion. The representatives accepted the proposal and voted to give each adventurer two shillings and sixpence a day,—then equal in[Pg 259] Massachusetts currency to about one English shilling,—out of which he was to maintain himself. The men were, in addition, promised large rewards for the scalps of male Indians old enough to fight. A company of thirty was soon raised. Lovewell was chosen captain, Farwell, lieutenant, and Robbins, ensign. They set out towards the end of November, and reappeared at Dunstable early in January, bringing one prisoner and one scalp. Towards the end of the month Lovewell set out again, this time with eighty-seven men, gathered from the villages of Dunstable, Groton, Lancaster, Haverhill, and Billerica. They ascended the frozen Merrimac, passed Lake Winnepesaukee, pushed nearly to the White Mountains, and encamped on a branch of the upper Saco. Here they killed a moose,—a timely piece of luck, for they were in danger of starvation, and Lovewell had been compelled by want of food to send back a good number of his men. The rest held their way, filing on snow-shoes through the deathlike solitude that gave no sign of life except the light track of some squirrel on the snow, and the brisk note of the hardy little chickadee, or black-capped titmouse, so familiar to the winter woods. Thus far the scouts had seen no human footprint; but on the twentieth of February they found a lately abandoned wigwam, and, following the snow-shoe tracks that led from it, at length saw smoke rising at a distance out of the gray forest. The party lay close till two o'clock in the morning; then cautiously approached, found one[Pg 260] or more wigwams, surrounded them, and killed all the inmates, ten in number. They were warriors from Canada on a winter raid against the borders. Lovewell and his men, it will be seen, were much like hunters of wolves, catamounts, or other dangerous beasts, except that the chase of this fierce and wily human game demanded far more hardihood and skill. They brought home the scalps in triumph, together with the blankets and the new guns furnished to the slain warriors by their Canadian friends; and Lovewell began at once to gather men for another hunt. The busy season of the farmers was at hand, and volunteers came in less freely than before. At the middle of April, however, he had raised a band of forty-six, of whom he was the captain, with Farwell and Robbins as his lieutenants. Though they were all regularly commissioned by the governor, they were leaders rather than commanders, for they and their men were neighbors or acquaintances on terms of entire social equality. Two of the number require mention. One was Seth Wyman, of Woburn, an ensign; and the other was Jonathan Frye, of Andover, the chaplain, a youth of twenty-one, graduated at Harvard College in 1723, and now a student of theology. Chaplain though he was, he carried a gun, knife, and hatchet like the others, and not one of the party was more prompt to use them. They began their march on April 15. A few days afterwards, one William Cummings, of Dunstable, became so disabled by the effects of a wound[Pg 261] received from Indians some time before, that he could not keep on with the rest, and Lovewell sent him back in charge of a kinsman, thus reducing their number to forty-four. When they reached the west shore of Lake Ossipee, Benjamin Kidder, of Nutfield, fell seriously ill. To leave him defenceless in a place so dangerous was not to be thought of; and his comrades built a small fort, or palisaded log-cabin, near the water, where they left the sick man in charge of the surgeon, together with Sergeant Woods and a guard of seven men. The rest, now reduced to thirty-four, continued their march through the forest northeastward towards Pequawket, while the savage heights of the White Mountains, still covered with snow, rose above the dismal, bare forests on their left. They seem to have crossed the Saco just below the site of Fryeburg, and in the night of May 7, as they lay in the woods near the northeast end of Lovewell's Pond, the men on guard heard sounds like Indians prowling about them. At daybreak the next morning, as they stood bareheaded, listening to a prayer from the young chaplain, they heard the report of a gun, and soon after discovered an Indian on the shore of the pond at a considerable distance. Apparently he was shooting ducks; but Lovewell, suspecting a device to lure them into an ambuscade, asked the men whether they were for pushing forward or falling back, and with one voice they called upon him to lead them on. They were then in a piece of open pine woods traversed by a small brook.[Pg 262] He ordered them to lay down their packs and advance with extreme caution. They had moved forward for some time in this manner when they met an Indian coming towards them through the dense trees and bushes. He no sooner saw them than he fired at the leading men. His gun was charged with beaver-shot; but he was so near his mark that the effect was equal to that of a bullet, and he severely wounded Lovewell and one Whiting; on which Seth Wyman shot him dead, and the chaplain and another man scalped him. Lovewell, though believed to be mortally hurt, was still able to walk, and the party fell back to the place where they had left their packs. The packs had disappeared, and suddenly, with frightful yells, the whole body of the Pequawket warriors rushed from their hiding-places, firing as they came on. The survivors say that they were more than twice the number of the whites,—which is probably an exaggeration, though their conduct, so unusual with Indians, in rushing forward instead of firing from their ambush, shows a remarkable confidence in their numerical strength.[275] They no doubt expected to strike their enemies with a panic. Lovewell received another mortal wound; but he fired more than once on the Indians as he lay dying. His two lieutenants, Farwell and Robbins, were also badly hurt. Eight others fell; but the rest stood their[Pg 263] ground, and pushed the Indians so hard that they drove them back to cover with heavy loss. One man played the coward, Benjamin Hassell, of Dunstable, who ran off, escaped in the confusion, and made with his best speed for the fort at Lake Ossipee. The situation of the party was desperate, and nothing saved them from destruction but the prompt action of their surviving officers, only one of whom, Ensign Wyman, had escaped unhurt. It was probably under his direction that the men fell back steadily to the shore of the pond, which was only a few rods distant. Here the water protected their rear, so that they could not be surrounded; and now followed one of the most obstinate and deadly bush-fights in the annals of New England. It was about ten o'clock when the fight began, and it lasted till night. The Indians had the greater agility and skill in hiding and sheltering themselves, and the whites the greater steadiness and coolness in using their guns. They fought in the shade; for the forest was dense, and all alike covered themselves as they best could behind trees, bushes, or fallen trunks, where each man crouched with eyes and mind intent, firing whenever he saw, or thought he saw, the head, limbs, or body of an enemy exposed to sight for an instant. The Indians howled like wolves, yelled like enraged cougars, and made the forest ring with their whoops; while the whites replied with shouts and cheers. At one time the Indians ceased firing and drew back among the trees and undergrowth,[Pg 264] where, by the noise they made, they seemed to be holding a "pow-wow," or incantation to procure victory; but the keen and fearless Seth Wyman crept up among the bushes, shot the chief conjurer, and broke up the meeting. About the middle of the afternoon young Frye received a mortal wound. Unable to fight longer, he lay in his blood, praying from time to time for his comrades in a faint but audible voice. Solomon Keyes, of Billerica, received two wounds, but fought on till a third shot struck him. He then crawled up to Wyman in the heat of the fight, and told him that he, Keyes, was a dead man, but that the Indians should not get his scalp if he could help it. Creeping along the sandy edge of the pond, he chanced to find a stranded canoe, pushed it afloat, rolled himself into it, and drifted away before the wind. Soon after sunset the Indians drew off and left the field to their enemies, living and dead, not even stopping to scalp the fallen,—a remarkable proof of the completeness of their discomfiture. Exhausted with fatigue and hunger,—for, having lost their packs in the morning, they had no food,—the surviving white men explored the scene of the fight. Jacob Farrar lay gasping his last by the edge of the water. Robert Usher and Lieutenant Robbins were unable to move. Of the thirty-four men, nine had escaped without serious injury, eleven were badly wounded, and the rest were dead or dying, except the coward who had run off. About midnight, an hour or more before the set[Pg 265]ting of the moon, such as had strength to walk left the ground. Robbins, as he lay helpless, asked one of them to load his gun, saying, "The Indians will come in the morning to scalp me, and I'll kill another of 'em if I can." They loaded the gun and left him. To make one's way even by daylight through the snares and pitfalls of a New England forest is often a difficult task; to do so in the darkness of night and overshadowing boughs, among the fallen trees and the snarl of underbrush, was wellnigh impossible. Any but the most skilful woodsmen would have lost their way. The Indians, sick of fighting, did not molest the party. After struggling on for a mile or more, Farwell, Frye, and two other wounded men, Josiah Jones and Eleazer Davis, could go no farther, and, with their consent, the others left them, with a promise to send them help as soon as they should reach the fort. In the morning the men divided into several small bands, the better to elude pursuit. One of these parties was tracked for some time by the Indians, and Elias Barron, becoming separated from his companions, was never again heard of, though the case of his gun was afterwards found by the bank of the river Ossipee. Eleven of the number at length reached the fort, and to their amazement found nobody there. The runaway, Hassell, had arrived many hours before them, and to excuse his flight told so frightful a story of the fate of his comrades that his hearers were seized with a panic, shamefully abandoned their[Pg 266] post, and set out for the settlements, leaving a writing on a piece of birch-bark to the effect that all the rest were killed. They had left a supply of bread and pork, and while the famished eleven rested and refreshed themselves they were joined by Solomon Keyes, the man who, after being thrice wounded, had floated away in a canoe from the place of the fight. After drifting for a considerable distance, the wind blew him ashore, when, spurred by necessity and feeling himself "wonderfully strengthened," he succeeded in gaining the fort. Meanwhile Frye, Farwell, and their two wounded companions, Davis and Jones, after waiting vainly for the expected help, found strength to struggle forward again, till the chaplain stopped and lay down, begging the others to keep on their way, and saying to Davis, "Tell my father that I expect in a few hours to be in eternity, and am not afraid to die." They left him, and, says the old narrative, "he has not been heard of since." He had kept the journal of the expedition, which was lost with him. Farwell died of exhaustion. The remaining two lost their way and became separated. After wandering eleven days, Davis reached the fort at Lake Ossipee, and, finding food there, came into Berwick on the twenty-seventh. Jones, after fourteen days in the woods, arrived, half dead, at the village of Biddeford. Some of the eleven who had first made their way to the fort, together with Keyes, who joined them[Pg 267] there, came into Dunstable during the night of the thirteenth, and the rest followed one or two days later. Ensign Wyman, who was now the only commissioned officer left alive, and who had borne himself throughout with the utmost intrepidity, decision, and good sense, reached the same place along with three other men on the fifteenth. The runaway, Hassell, and the guard at the fort, whom he had infected with his terror, had lost no time in making their way back to Dunstable, which they seem to have reached on the evening of the eleventh. Horsemen were sent in haste to carry the doleful news to Boston, on which the governor gave orders to Colonel Tyng of the militia, who was then at Dunstable, to gather men in the border towns, march with all speed to the place of the fight, succor the wounded if any were still alive, and attack the Indians, if he could find them. Tyng called upon Hassell to go with him as a guide; but he was ill, or pretended to be so, on which one of the men who had been in the fight and had just returned offered to go in his place. When the party reached the scene of the battle, they saw the trees plentifully scarred with bullets, and presently found and buried the bodies of Lovewell, Robbins, and ten others. The Indians, after their usual custom, had carried off or hidden their own dead; but Tyng's men discovered three of them buried together, and one of these was recognized as the war-chief Paugus, killed by Wyman, or, accord[Pg 268]ing to a more than doubtful tradition, by John Chamberlain.[276] Not a living Indian was to be seen. The Pequawkets were cowed by the rough handling they had met when they plainly expected a victory. Some of them joined their Abenaki kinsmen in Canada and remained there, while others returned after the peace to their old haunts by the Saco; but they never again raised the hatchet against the English. Lovewell's Pond, with its sandy beach, its two green islands, and its environment of lonely forests, reverted for a while to its original owners,—the wolf, bear, lynx, and moose. In our day all is changed. Farms and dwellings possess those peaceful shores, and hard by, where, at the bend of the Saco, once stood, in picturesque squalor, the wigwams of the vanished Pequawkets, the village of Fryeburg preserves the name of the brave young[Pg 269] chaplain, whose memory is still cherished, in spite of his uncanonical turn for scalping.[277] He had engaged himself to a young girl of a neighboring village, Susanna Rogers, daughter of John Rogers, minister of Boxford. It has been said that Frye's parents thought her beneath him in education and position; but this is not likely, for her father belonged to what has been called the "Brahmin caste" of New England, and, like others of his family, had had, at Harvard, the best education that the country could supply. The girl herself, though only fourteen years old, could make verses, such as they were; and she wrote an elegy on the death of her lover which, bating some grammatical lapses, deserves the modest praise of being no worse than many New England rhymes of that day. The courage of Frye and his sturdy comrades contributed greatly to the pacification which in the next year relieved the borders from the scourge of Indian war.[278] FOOTNOTES: [267] Dummer to Vaudreuil, 15 September, 1724. [268] Vaudreuil à Dummer, 29 Octobre, 1724. [269] Dummer to Vaudreuil, 19 January, 1725. This, with many other papers relating to these matters, is in the Massachusetts Archives. [270] Dépêche de Vaudreuil, 7 Ao?t, 1725. "Comme j'ai toujours été persuadé que rien n'est plus opposé à nos intérêts que la paix des Abenakis avec les Anglais (la sureté de cette colonie du c?té de l'est ayant été l'unique objet de cette guerre), je songeai à pressentir ces sauvages avant qu'ils parlassant aux Anglais et à leur insinuer tout ce que j'avais à leur dire."—Vaudreuil au Ministre, 22 Mai, 1725. [271] N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 949. [272] Penhallow gives the Boston treaty. For the ratifications, see Collections of the Maine Hist. Soc., iii. 377, 407. [273] See the inventory, in Kidder, The Expeditions of Captain John Lovewell, 93, 94. [274] Other accounts say that eight of the ten were killed. The headstone of one of the number, Thomas Lund, has these words: "This man, with seven more that lies in this grave, was slew All in A day by the Indiens." [275] Penhallow puts their number at seventy, Hutchinson at eighty, Williamson at sixty-three, and Belknap at forty-one. In such cases the smallest number is generally nearest the truth. [276] The tradition is that Chamberlain and Paugus went down to the small brook, now called Fight Brook, to clean their guns, hot and foul with frequent firing; that they saw each other at the same instant, and that the Indian said to the white man, in his broken English, "Me kill you quick!" at the same time hastily loading his piece; to which Chamberlain coolly replied, "Maybe not." His firelock had a large touch-hole, so that the powder could be shaken out into the pan, and the gun made to prime itself. Thus he was ready for action an instant sooner than his enemy, whom he shot dead just as Paugus pulled trigger, and sent a bullet whistling over his head. The story has no good foundation, while the popular ballad, written at the time, and very faithful to the facts, says that, the other officers being killed, the English made Wyman their captain,— "Who shot the old chief Paugus, which did the foe defeat, Then set his men in order and brought off the retreat." [277] The town, however, was not named for the chaplain, but for his father's cousin, General Joseph Frye, the original grantee of the land. [278] Rev. Thomas Symmes, minister of Bradford, preached a sermon on the fate of Lovewell and his men immediately after the return of the survivors, and printed it, with a much more valuable introduction, giving a careful account of the affair, on the evidence of "the Valorous Captain Wyman and some others of good Credit that were in the Engagement." Wyman had just been made a captain, in recognition of his conduct. The narrative is followed by an attestation of its truth signed by him and two others of Lovewell's band. A considerable number of letters relating to the expedition are preserved in the Massachusetts Archives, from Benjamin Hassell, Colonel Tyng, Governor Dummer of Massachusetts, and Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire. They give the various reports received from those in the fight, and show the action taken in consequence. The Archives also contain petitions from the survivors and the families of the slain; and the legislative Journals show that the petitioners received large grants of land. Lovewell's debts contracted in raising men for his expeditions were also paid. The papers mentioned above, with other authentic records concerning the affair, have been printed by Kidder in his Expeditions of Captain John Lovewell, a monograph of thorough research. The names of all Lovewell's party, and biographical notices of some of them, are also given by Mr. Kidder. Compare Penhallow, Hutchinson, Fox, History of Dunstable, and Bouton, Lovewell's Great Fight. For various suggestions touching Lovewell's Expedition, I am indebted to Mr. C. W. Lewis, who has made it the subject of minute and careful study. A ballad which was written when the event was fresh, and was long popular in New England, deserves mention, if only for its general fidelity to the facts. The following is a sample of its eighteen stanzas:— "'T was ten o'clock in the morning when first the fight begun, And fiercely did continue till the setting of the sun, Excepting that the Indians, some hours before 't was night, Drew off into the bushes, and ceased awhile to fight; "But soon again returnèd in fierce and furious mood, Shouting as in the morning, but yet not half so loud; For, as we are informèd, so thick and fast they fell, Scarce twenty of their number at night did get home well. "Our worthy Captain Lovewell among them there did die; They killed Lieutenant Robbins, and wounded good young Frye, Who was our English chaplain; he many Indians slew, And some of them he scalped when bullets round him flew." Frye, as mentioned in the text, had engaged himself to Susanna Rogers, a young girl of the village of Boxford, who, after his death, wrote some untutored verses to commemorate his fate. They are entitled, A Mournful Elegy on Mr. Jonathan Frye, and begin thus: "Assist, ye muses, help my quill, Whilst floods of tears does down distil; Not from mine eyes alone, but all That hears the sad and doleful fall Of that young student, Mr. Frye, Who in his blooming youth did die. Fighting for his dear country's good, He lost his life and precious blood. His father's only son was he; His mother loved him tenderly; And all that knew him loved him well; For in bright parts he did excel Most of his age; for he was young,— Just entering on twenty-one; A comely youth, and pious too; This I affirm, for him I knew." She then describes her lover's brave deeds, and sad but heroic death, alone in a howling wilderness; condoles with the bereaved parents, exhorts them to resignation, and touches modestly on her own sorrow. In more recent times the fate of Lovewell and his companions has inspired several poetical attempts, which need not be dwelt upon. Lovewell's Fight, as Dr. Palfrey observes, was long as famous in New England as Chevy Chase on the Scottish Border. CHAPTER XII. 1712. THE OUTAGAMIES AT DETROIT. The West and the Fur-trade.—New York and Canada.—Indian Population.—The Firebrands of the West.—Detroit in 1712.—Dangerous Visitors.—Suspense.—Timely Succors.—The Outagamies attacked: their Desperate Position.—Overtures.—Wavering Allies.—Conduct of Dubuisson.—Escape of the Outagamies.—Pursuit and Attack.—Victory and Carnage. [Pg 272]We have seen that the Peace of Utrecht was followed by a threefold conflict for ascendency in America,—the conflict for Acadia, the conflict for northern New England, and the conflict for the Great West; which last could not be said to take at once an international character, being essentially a competition for the fur-trade. Only one of the English colonies took an active part in it,—the province of New York. Alone among her sister communities she had a natural thoroughfare to the West, not comparable, however, with that of Canada, to whose people the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and their tributary waters were a continual invitation to the vast interior. Virginia and Pennsylvania were not yet serious rivals in the fur-trade; and New England, the most active of the British colonies, was barred out from it[Pg 273] by the interposition of New York, which lay across her westward path, thus forcing her to turn her energies to the sea, where half a century later her achievements inspired the glowing panegyrics of Burke before the House of Commons. New York, then, was for many years the only rival of Canada for the control of the West. It was a fatal error in the rulers of New France that they did not, in the seventeenth century, use more strenuous efforts to possess themselves, by purchase, exchange, or conquest, of this troublesome and dangerous neighbor. There was a time, under the reign of Charles II., when negotiation for the purchase of New York might have been successful; and if this failed, the conquest of the province, if attempted by forces equal to the importance of the object, would have been far from hopeless. With New York in French hands, the fate of the continent would probably have been changed. The British possessions would have been cut in two. New England, isolated and placed in constant jeopardy, would have vainly poured her unmanageable herds of raw militia against the disciplined veterans of Old France intrenched at the mouth of the Hudson. Canada would have gained complete control of her old enemies, the Iroquois, who would have been wholly dependent on her for the arms and ammunition without which they could do nothing. The Iroquois, as the French had been accustomed to call them, were known to the English as the Five[Pg 274] Nations,—a name which during the eighteenth century the French also adopted. Soon after the Peace of Utrecht, a kindred tribe, the Tuscaroras, was joined to the original five members of the confederacy, which thenceforward was sometimes called the Six Nations, though the Tuscaroras were never very prominent in its history; and, to avoid confusion, we will keep the more familiar name of the Five Nations, which the French used to the last. For more than two generations this league of tribes had held Canada in terror, and more than once threatened it with destruction. But now a change had come over the confederates. Count Frontenac had humbled their pride. They were crowded between the rival European nations, both of whom they distrusted. Their traditional hatred of the French would have given the English of New York a controlling influence over them if the advantage had been used with energy and tact. But a narrow and short-sighted conduct threw it away. A governor of New York, moreover, even were he as keen and far-seeing as Frontenac himself, would often have been helpless. When the Five Nations were attacked by the French, he had no troops to defend them, nor could he, like a Canadian governor, call out the forces of his province by a word, to meet the exigency. The small revenues of New York were not at his disposal. Without the votes of the frugal representatives of an impoverished people, his hands were tied. Hence the Five Nations, often left unaided[Pg 275] when they most needed help, looked upon their Dutch and English neighbors as slothful and unwarlike. Yet their friendship was of the greatest importance to the province, in peace as well as in war, and was indispensable in the conflict that New York was waging single-handed for the control of the western fur-trade. The Five Nations, as we have seen,[279] acted as middlemen between the New York merchants and the tribes of the far interior, and through them English goods and English influence penetrated all the lake country, and reached even to the Mississippi. These vast western regions, now swarming with laborious millions, were then scantily peopled by savage hordes, whose increase was stopped by incessant mutual slaughter. This wild population had various centres or rallying-points, usually about the French forts, which protected them from enemies and supplied their wants. Thus the Pottawattamies, Ottawas, and Hurons were gathered about Detroit, and the Illinois about Fort St. Louis, on the river Illinois, where Henri de Tonty and his old comrade, La Forest, with fifteen or twenty Frenchmen, held a nominal monopoly of the neighboring fur-trade. Another focus of Indian population was near the Green Bay of Lake Michigan, and on Fox River, which enters it. Here were grouped the Sacs, Winnebagoes, and Menominies, with the Outagamies, or Foxes, a formidable tribe, the source of endless trouble to the French. [Pg 276]The constant aim of the Canadian authorities was to keep these western savages at peace among themselves, while preventing their establishing relations of trade with the Five Nations, and carrying their furs to them in exchange for English goods. The position was delicate, for while a close understanding between the western tribes and the Five Nations would be injurious to French interests, a quarrel would be still more so, since the French would then be forced to side with their western allies, and so be drawn into hostilities with the Iroquois confederacy, which of all things they most wished to avoid. Peace and friendship among the western tribes; peace without friendship between these tribes and the Five Nations,—thus became maxims of French policy. The Canadian governor called the western Indians his "children," and a family quarrel among them would have been unfortunate, since the loving father must needs have become involved in it, to the detriment of his trading interests. Yet to prevent such quarrels was difficult, partly because they had existed time out of mind, and partly because it was the interest of the English to promote them. Dutch and English traders, it is true, took their lives in their hands if they ventured among the western Indians, who were encouraged by their French father to plunder and kill them, and who on occasion rarely hesitated to do so. Hence English communication with the West was largely carried on through the Five Nations. Iroquois messengers,[Pg 277] hired for the purpose, carried wampum belts "underground"—that is, secretly—to such of the interior tribes as were disposed to listen with favor to the words of Corlaer, as they called the governor of New York. In spite of their shortcomings, the English had one powerful attraction for all the tribes alike. This was the abundance and excellence of their goods, which, with the exception of gunpowder, were better as well as cheaper than those offered by the French. The Indians, it is true, liked the taste of French brandy more than that of English rum; yet as their chief object in drinking was to get drunk, and as rum would supply as much intoxication as brandy at a lower price, it always found favor in their eyes. In the one case, to get thoroughly drunk often cost a beaver-skin; in the other, the same satisfaction could generally be had for a mink-skin. Thus the French found that some of their western children were disposed to listen to English seductions, look askance at their father Onontio, and turn their canoes, not towards Montreal, but towards Albany. Nor was this the worst; for there were some of Onontio's wild and unruly western family too ready to lift their hatchets against their brethren and fill the wilderness with discord. Consequences followed most embarrassing to the French, and among them an incident prominent in the early annals of Detroit, that new establishment so obnoxious to the English, because it barred their way to the northern[Pg 278] lakes, so that they were extremely anxious to rid themselves of it. In the confused and tumultuous history of the savages of this continent one now and then sees some tribe or league of tribes possessed for a time with a spirit of conquest and havoc that made it the terror of its neighbors. Of this the foremost example is that of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, who, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, swept all before them and made vast regions a solitude. They were now comparatively quiet; but far in the Northwest, another people, inferior in number, organization, and mental capacity, but not in ferocity or courage, had begun on a smaller scale, and with less conspicuous success, to play a similar part. These were the Outagamies, or Foxes, with their allies, the Kickapoos and the Mascoutins, all living at the time within the limits of the present States of Wisconsin and Illinois,—the Outagamies near Fox River, and the others on Rock River.[280] The Outagamies, in particular, seem to have been seized with an access of homicidal fury. Their hand was against every man, and for twenty years and more they were the firebrands of the West, and a ceaseless peril to French interests in that region. They were, however, on good terms with the Five Nations, by means of whom, as French writers say, the Dutch and English of Albany sent them gifts and messages to incite[Pg 279] them to kill French traders and destroy the French fort at Detroit. This is not unlikely, though the evidence on the point is far from conclusive. Fort Ponchartrain, better known as Fort Detroit, was an enclosure of palisades, flanked by blockhouses at the corners, with an open space within to serve as a parade-ground, around which stood small wooden houses thatched with straw or meadow-grass. La Mothe-Cadillac, founder of the post, had been made governor of the new colony of Louisiana, and the Sieur Dubuisson now commanded at Detroit. There were about thirty French traders, voyageurs, and coureurs de bois in the place, but at this time no soldiers. The village of the Pottawattamies was close to the French fort; that of the Hurons was not far distant, by the edge of the river. Their houses were those structures of bark, "very high, very long, and arched like garden arbors," which were common to all the tribes of Iroquois stock, and both villages were enclosed by strong double or triple stockades, such as Cartier had found at Hochelaga, and Champlain in the Onondaga country. Their neighbors, the Ottawas, who were on the east side of the river, had imitated, with imperfect success, their way of housing and fortifying themselves. These tribes raised considerable crops of peas, beans, and Indian corn; and except when engaged in their endless dances and games of ball, dressed, like the converts of the mission villages, in red or blue cloth.[281] The Hurons[Pg 280] were reputed the most intelligent as well as the bravest of all the western tribes, and, being incensed by various outrages, they bore against the Outagamies a deadly grudge, which was shared by the other tribes, their neighbors. All these friendly Indians were still absent on their winter hunt, when, at the opening of spring, Dubuisson and his Frenchmen were startled by a portentous visitation. Two bands of Outagamies and Mascoutins, men, women, and children, counting in all above a thousand, of whom about three hundred were warriors, appeared on the meadows behind the fort, approached to within pistol-shot of the palisades, and encamped there. It is by no means certain that they came with deliberate hostile intent. Had this been the case, they would not have brought their women and children. A paper ascribed to the engineer Léry says, moreover, that their visit was in consequence of an invitation from the late commandant, La Mothe-Cadillac, whose interest it was to attract to Detroit as many Indians as possible, in order to trade for their furs.[282] Dubuisson, however, was satisfied that they meant mischief, especially when, in spite of all his efforts to prevent them, they fortified themselves by cutting down young trees and surrounding their wigwams with a rough fence of palisades. They were rude and insolent, declared that all that country was theirs, and killed fowls and pigeons[Pg 281] belonging to the French, who, in the absence of their friends, the Hurons and Ottawas, dared not even remonstrate. Dubuisson himself was forced to submit to their insults in silence, till a party of them came one day into the fort bent on killing two of the French, a man and a girl, against whom they had taken some offence. The commandant then ordered his men to drive them out; which was done, and henceforward he was convinced that the Outagamies and Mascoutins were only watching their opportunity to burn the fort and butcher its inmates. Soon after, their excitement redoubled. News came that a band of Mascoutins, who had wintered on the river St. Joseph, had been cut off by the Ottawas and Pottawattamies, led by an Ottawa chief named Saguina; on which the behavior of the dangerous visitors became so threatening that Dubuisson hastily sent a canoe to recall the Hurons and Ottawas from their hunting-grounds, and a second to invite the friendly Ojibwas and Mississagas to come to his aid. No doubt there was good cause for alarm; yet if the dangerous strangers had resolved to strike, they would have been apt to strike at once, instead of waiting week after week, when they knew that the friends and allies of the French might arrive at any time. Dubuisson, however, felt that the situation was extremely critical, and he was confirmed in his anxiety by a friendly Outagamie, who, after the news of the massacre on the St. Joseph, told him that his tribesmen meant to burn the fort. [Pg 282]The church was outside the palisade, as were also several houses, one of which was stored with wheat. This the Outagamies tried to seize. The French fired on them, drove them back, and brought most of the wheat into the fort; then they demolished the church and several of the houses, which would have given cover to the assailants and enabled them to set fire to the palisade, close to which the buildings stood. The French worked at their task in the excitement of desperation, for they thought that all was lost. The irritation of their savage neighbors so increased that an outbreak seemed imminent, when, on the thirteenth of May, the Sieur de Vincennes arrived, with seven or eight Frenchmen, from the Miami country. The reinforcement was so small that instead of proving a help it might have provoked a crisis. Vincennes brought no news of the Indian allies, who were now Dubuisson's only hope. "I did not know on what saint to call," he writes, almost in despair, when suddenly a Huron Indian came panting into the fort with the joyful news that both his people and the Ottawas were close at hand. Nor was this all. The Huron messenger announced that Makisabie, war-chief of the Pottawattamies, was then at the Huron fort, and that six hundred warriors of various tribes, deadly enemies of the Outagamies and Mascoutins, would soon arrive and destroy them all. Here was an unlooked-for deliverance. Yet the danger was not over; for there was fear lest the Outagamies and their allies, hearing of the approach[Pg 283]ing succor, might make a desperate onslaught, burn the French fort, and kill its inmates before their friends could reach them. An interval of suspense followed, relieved at last by a French sentinel, who called to Dubuisson that a crowd of Indians was in sight. The commandant mounted to the top of a blockhouse, and, looking across the meadows behind the fort, saw a throng of savages coming out of the woods,—Pottawattamies, Sacs, Menominies, Illinois, Missouris, and other tribes yet more remote, each band distinguished by a kind of ensign. These were the six hundred warriors promised by the Huron messenger, and with them, as it proved, came the Ottawa war-chief Saguina. Having heard during the winter that the Outagamies and Mascoutins would go to Detroit in the spring, these various tribes had combined to attack the common enemy; and they now marched with great ostentation and some show of order, not to the French fort, but to the fortified village of the Hurons, who with their neighbors, the Ottawas, had arrived just before them. The Hurons were reputed leaders among the western tribes, and they hated the Outagamies, not only by reason of bitter wrongs, but also through jealousy of the growing importance which these fierce upstarts had won by their sanguinary prowess. The Huron chiefs came to meet the motley crew of warriors, and urged them to instant action. "You must not stop to encamp," said the Huron spokesman; "we must all go this moment to the fort of our[Pg 284] fathers, the French, and fight for them." Then, turning to the Ottawa war-chief: "Do you see that smoke, Saguina, rising from the camp of our enemies? They are burning three women of your village, and your wife is one of them." The Outagamies had, in fact, three Ottawa squaws in their clutches; but the burning was an invention of the crafty Huron. It answered its purpose, and wrought the hearers to fury. They ran with yells and whoops towards the French fort, the Hurons and Ottawas leading the way. A burst of answering yells rose from the camp of the enemy, and about forty of their warriors ran out in bravado, stripped naked and brandishing their weapons; but they soon fell back within their defences before the approaching multitude. Just before the arrival of the six hundred allies, Dubuisson, whose orders were to keep the peace, if he could, among the western tribes, had sent Vincennes to the Huron village with a proposal that they should spare the lives of the Outagamies and Mascoutins, and rest content with driving them away; to which the Hurons returned a fierce and haughty refusal. There was danger that, if vexed or thwarted, the rabble of excited savages now gathered before the fort might turn from friends into enemies, and in some burst of wild caprice lift parricidal tomahawks against their French fathers. Dubuisson saw no choice but to humor them, put himself at their head, aid them in their vengeance, and even set them on. Therefore, when they called out for admittance,[Pg 285] he did not venture to refuse it, but threw open the gate. The savage crew poured in till the fort was full. The chiefs gathered for council on the parade, and the warriors crowded around, a living wall of dusky forms, befeathered heads, savage faces, lank snaky locks, and deep-set eyes that glittered with a devilish light. Their orator spoke briefly, but to the purpose. He declared that all present were ready to die for their French father, who had stood their friend against the bloody and perfidious Outagamies. Then he begged for food, tobacco, gunpowder, and bullets. Dubuisson replied with equal conciseness, thanked them for their willingness to die for him, said that he would do his best to supply their wants, and promised an immediate distribution of powder and bullets; to which the whole assembly answered with yells of joy. Then the council dissolved, and the elder warriors stalked about the fort, haranguing their followers, exhorting them to fight like men and obey the orders of their father. The powder and bullets were served out, after which the whole body, white men and red, yelled the war-whoop together,—"a horrible cry, that made the earth tremble," writes Dubuisson.[283] An answering howl, furious and defiant, rose close at hand from the palisaded camp of the enemy, the firing began on both sides, and bullets and arrows filled the air. [Pg 286]The French and their allies outnumbered their enemies fourfold, while the Outagamie and Mascoutin warriors were encumbered with more than seven hundred women and children. Their frail defences might have been carried by assault; but the loss to the assailants must needs have been great against so brave and desperate a foe, and such a mode of attack is repugnant to the Indian genius. Instead, therefore, of storming the palisaded camp, the allies beleaguered it with vindictive patience, and wore out its defenders by a fire that ceased neither day nor night. The French raised two tall scaffolds, from which they overlooked the palisade, and sent their shot into the midst of those within, who were forced, for shelter, to dig holes in the ground four or five feet deep, and ensconce themselves there. The situation was almost hopeless, but their courage did not fail. They raised twelve red English blankets on poles as battle-flags, to show that they would fight to the death, and hung others over their palisades, calling out that they wished to see the whole earth red, like them, with blood; that they had no fathers but the English, and that the other tribes had better do as they did, and turn their backs to Onontio. The great war-chief of the Pottawattamies now mounted to the top of one of the French scaffolds, and harangued the enemy to this effect: "Do you think, you wretches, that you can frighten us by hanging out those red blankets? If the earth is red with blood, it will be your own. You talk about the[Pg 287] English. Their bad advice will be your ruin. They are enemies of religion, and that is why the Master of Life punishes both them and you. They are cowards, and can only defend themselves by poisoning people with their firewater, which kills a man the instant he drinks it. We shall soon see what you will get for listening to them." This Homeric dialogue between the chief combatants was stopped by Dubuisson, who saw that it distracted the attention of the warriors, and so enabled the besieged to run to the adjacent river for water. The firing was resumed more fiercely than ever. Before night twelve of the Indian allies were killed in the French fort, though the enemy suffered a much greater loss. One house had been left standing outside the French palisades, and the Outagamies raised a scaffold behind its bullet-proof gable, under cover of which they fired with great effect. The French at length brought two swivels to bear upon the gable, pierced it, knocked down the scaffold, killed some of the marksmen, and scattered the rest in consternation. Famine and thirst were worse for the besieged than the bullets and arrows of the allies. Parched, starved, and fainting, they could no longer find heart for bravado, and they called out one evening from behind their defences to ask Dubuisson if they might come to speak with him. He called together the allied chiefs, and all agreed that here was an opportunity to get out of the hands of the Outagamies the three[Pg 288] Ottawa women whom they held prisoners. The commandant, therefore, told them that if they had anything to say to their father before dying, they might come and say it in safety. In the morning all the red blankets had disappeared, and a white flag was waving over the hostile camp. The great Outagamie chief, Pemoussa, presently came out, carrying a smaller white flag and followed by two Indian slaves. Dubuisson sent his interpreter to protect him from insult and conduct him to the parade, where all the allied chiefs presently met to hear him. "My father," he began, "I am a dead man. The sky is bright for you, and dark as night for me." Then he held out a belt of wampum, and continued: "By this belt I ask you, my father, to take pity on your children, and grant us two days in which our old men may counsel together to find means of appeasing your wrath." Then, offering another belt to the assembled chiefs, "This belt is to pray you to remember that you are of our kin. If you spill our blood, do not forget that it is also your own. Try to soften the heart of our father, whom we have offended so often. These two slaves are to replace some of the blood you have lost. Grant us the two days we ask, for I cannot say more till our old men have held counsel." To which Dubuisson answered in the name of all: "If your hearts were really changed, and you honestly accepted Onontio as your father, you would have[Pg 289] brought back the three women who are prisoners in your hands. As you have not done so, I think that your hearts are still bad. First bring them to me, if you expect me to hear you. I have no more to say." "I am but a child," replied the envoy. "I will go back to my village, and tell our old men what you have said." The council then broke up, and several Frenchmen conducted the chief back to his followers. Three other chiefs soon after appeared, bearing a flag and bringing the Ottawa squaws, one of whom was the wife of the war-chief, Saguina. Again the elders met in council on the parade, and the orator of the deputation spoke thus: "My father, here are the three pieces of flesh that you ask of us. We would not eat them, lest you should be angry. Do with them what you please, for you are the master. Now we ask that you will send away the nations that are with you, so that we may seek food for our women and children, who die of hunger every day. If you are as good a father as your other children say you are, you will not refuse us this favor." But Dubuisson, having gained his point and recovered the squaws, spoke to them sternly, and referred them to his Indian allies for their answer. Whereupon the head chief of the Illinois, being called upon by the rest to speak in their behalf, addressed the envoys to this effect: "Listen to me, you who have troubled all the earth. We see plainly that you[Pg 290] mean only to deceive our father. If we should leave him, as you wish, you would fall upon him and kill him. You are dogs who have always bitten him. You thought that we did not know all the messages you have had from the English, telling you to cut our father's throat, and then bring them into this our country. We will not leave him alone with you. We shall see who will be the master. Go back to your fort. We are going to fire at you again." The envoys went back with a French escort to prevent their being murdered on the way, and then the firing began again. The Outagamies and Mascoutins gathered strength from desperation, and sent flights of fire-arrows into the fort to burn the straw-thatched houses. The flames caught in many places; but with the help of the Indians they were extinguished, though several Frenchmen were wounded, and there was great fright for a time. But the thatch was soon stripped off and the roofs covered with deer and bear skins, while mops fastened to long poles, and two large wooden canoes filled with water, were made ready for future need. A few days after, a greater peril threatened the French. If the wild Indian has the passions of a devil, he has also the instability of a child; and this is especially true when a number of incoherent tribes or bands are joined in a common enterprise. Dubuisson's Indians became discouraged, partly at the stubborn resistance of the enemy, and partly at the scarcity of food. Some of them declared openly[Pg 291] that they could never conquer those people; that they knew them well, and that they were braver than anybody else. In short, the French saw themselves on the point of being abandoned by their allies to a fate the most ghastly and appalling; and they urged upon the commandant the necessity of escaping to Michilimackinac before it was too late. Dubuisson appears to have met the crisis with equal resolution and address. He braced the shaken nerves of his white followers by appeals to their sense of shame, threats of the governor's wrath, and assurances that all would yet be well; then set himself to the more difficult task of holding the Indian allies to their work. He says that he scarcely ate or slept for four days and nights, during which time he was busied without ceasing in private and separate interviews with all the young war-chiefs, persuading them, flattering them, and stripping himself of all he had to make them presents. When at last he had gained them over, he called the tribes to a general council. "What, children!" thus he addressed them, "when you are on the very point of destroying these wicked people, do you think of shamefully running away? How could you ever hold up your heads again? All the other nations would say: 'Are these the brave warriors who deserted the French and ran like cowards?'" And he reminded them that their enemies were already half dead with famine, and that they could easily make an end of them, thereby gain[Pg 292]ing great honor among the nations, besides the thanks and favors of Onontio, the father of all. At this the young war-chiefs whom he had gained over interrupted him and cried out, "My father, somebody has been lying to you. We are not cowards. We love you too much to abandon you, and we will stand by you till the last of your enemies is dead." The elder men caught the contagion, and cried, "Come on, let us show our father that those who have spoken ill of us are liars." Then they all raised the war-whoop, sang the war-song, danced the war-dance, and began to fire again. Among the enemy were some Sakis, or Sacs, fighting for the Outagamies, while others of their tribe were among the allies of the French. Seeing the desperate turn of affairs, they escaped from time to time and came over to the winning side, bringing reports of the state of the beleaguered camp. They declared that sixty or eighty women and children were already dead from hunger and thirst, besides those killed by bullets and arrows; that the fire of the besiegers was so hot that the bodies could not be buried, and that the camp of the Outagamies and Mascoutins was a den of infection. The end was near. The besieged savages called from their palisades to ask if they might send another deputation, and were told that they were free to do so. The chief, Pemoussa, soon appeared at the gate of the fort, naked, painted from head to foot with green earth, wearing belts of wampum about his[Pg 293] waist, and others hanging from his shoulders, besides a kind of crown of wampum beads on his head. With him came seven women, meant as a peace-offering, all painted and adorned with wampum. Three other principal chiefs followed, each with a gourd rattle in his hand, to the cadence of which the whole party sang and shouted at the full stretch of their lungs an invocation to the spirits for help and pity. They were conducted to the parade, where the French and the allied chiefs were already assembled, and Pemoussa thus addressed them:— "My father, and all the nations here present, I come to ask for life. It is no longer ours, but yours. I bring you these seven women, who are my flesh, and whom I put at your feet, to be your slaves. But do not think that I am afraid to die; it is the life of our women and children that I ask of you." He then offered six wampum belts, in token that his followers owned themselves beaten, and begged for mercy. "Tell us, I pray you,"—these were his last words,—"something that will lighten the hearts of my people when I go back to them." Dubuisson left the answer to his allies. The appeal of the suppliant fell on hearts of stone. The whole concourse sat in fierce and sullen silence, and the envoys read their doom in the gloomy brows that surrounded them. Eight or ten of the allied savages presently came to Dubuisson, and one of them said in a low voice: "My father, we come to ask your leave to knock these four great chiefs in the head.[Pg 294] It is they who prevent our enemies from surrendering without conditions. When they are dead, the rest will be at our mercy." Dubuisson told them that they must be drunk to propose such a thing. "Remember," he said, "that both you and I have given our word for their safety. If I consented to what you ask, your father at Montreal would never forgive me. Besides, you can see plainly that they and their people cannot escape you." The would-be murderers consented to bide their time, and the wretched envoys went back with their tidings of despair. "I confess," wrote Dubuisson to the governor, a few days later, "that I was touched with compassion; but as war and pity do not agree well together, and especially as I understood that they were hired by the English to destroy us, I abandoned them to their fate." The firing began once more, and the allied hordes howled round the camp of their victims like troops of ravenous wolves. But a surprise awaited them. Indians rarely set guards at night, and they felt sure now of their prey. It was the nineteenth day of the siege.[284] The night closed dark and rainy, and when morning came, the enemy were gone. All among them that had strength to move had glided away through the gloom with the silence of shadows, passed the camps of their sleeping enemies, and[Pg 295] reached a point of land projecting into the river opposite the end of Isle au Cochon, and a few miles above the French fort. Here, knowing that they would be pursued, they barricaded themselves with trunks and branches of trees. When the astonished allies discovered their escape, they hastily followed their trail, accompanied by some of the French, led by Vincennes. In their eagerness they ran upon the barricade before seeing it, and were met by a fire that killed and wounded twenty of them. There was no alternative but to forego their revenge and abandon the field, or begin another siege. Encouraged by Dubuisson, they built their wigwams on the new scene of operations; and, being supplied by the French with axes, mattocks, and two swivels, they made a wall of logs opposite the barricade, from which they galled the defenders with a close and deadly fire. The Mississagas and Ojibwas, who had lately arrived, fished and hunted for the allies, while the French furnished them with powder, ball, tobacco, Indian corn, and kettles. The enemy fought desperately for four days, and then, in utter exhaustion, surrendered at discretion.[285] The women and children were divided among the victorious hordes, and adopted or enslaved. To the men no quarter was given. "Our Indians amused themselves," writes Dubuisson, "with shooting four[Pg 296] or five of them every day." Here, however, another surprise awaited the conquerors and abridged their recreation, for about a hundred of these intrepid warriors contrived to make their escape, and among them was the great war-chief Pemoussa. The Outagamies were crippled, but not disabled, for but a part of the tribe was involved in this bloody affair. The rest were wrought to fury by the fate of their kinsmen, and for many years they remained thorns in the sides of the French. There is a disposition to assume that events like that just recounted were a consequence of the contact of white men with red; but the primitive Indian was quite able to enact such tragedies without the help of Europeans. Before French or English influence had been felt in the interior of the continent, a great part of North America was the frequent witness of scenes still more lurid in coloring, and on a larger scale of horror. In the first half of the seventeenth century the whole country, from Lake Superior to the Tennessee, and from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, was ravaged by wars of extermination, in which tribes, large and powerful by Indian standards, perished, dwindled into feeble remnants, or were absorbed by other tribes and vanished from sight. French pioneers were sometimes involved in the carnage, but neither they nor other Europeans were answerable for it.[286] FOOTNOTES: [279] See Chapter I. [280] Memoir on the Indians between Lake Erie and the Mississippi, in N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 885. [281] Memoir on the Indians between Lake Erie and the Mississippi. [282] This paper is printed, not very accurately, in the Collection de Documents relatifs à la Nouvelle France, i. 623 (Québec, 1883). [283] "Cri horrible, dont la terre trembla."—Dubuisson à Vaudreuil, 15 Juin, 1712. This is the official report of the affair. [284] According to the paper ascribed to Léry it was only the eighth. [285] The paper ascribed to Léry says that they surrendered on a promise from Vincennes that their lives should be spared, but that the promise availed nothing. [286] Dubuisson à Vaudreuil, 15 Juin, 1712. This is Dubuisson's report to the governor, which soon after the event he sent to Montreal by the hands of Vincennes. He says that the great fatigue through which he has just passed prevents him from giving every detail, and he refers Vaudreuil to the bearer for further information. The report is, however, long and circumstantial. état de ce que M. Dubuisson a dépensé pour le service du Roy pour s'attirer les Nations et les mettre dans ses intérêts afin de résister aux Outagamis et aux Mascoutins qui étaient payés des Anglais pour détruire le poste du Fort de Ponchartrain du Détroit, 14 Octobre, 1712. Dubuisson reckons his outlay at 2,901 livres. These documents, with the narrative ascribed to the engineer Léry, are the contemporary authorities on which the foregoing account is based. CHAPTER XIII. 1697-1750. LOUISIANA. The Mississippi to be occupied.—English Rivalry.—Iberville.—Bienville.—Huguenots.—Views of Louis XIV.—Wives for the Colony.—Slaves.—La Mothe-Cadillac.—Paternal Government.—Crozat's Monopoly.—Factions.—The Mississippi Company.—New Orleans.—The Bubble bursts.—Indian Wars.—The Colony firmly established.—The two Heads of New France. [Pg 298]At the beginning of the eighteenth century an event took place that was to have a great influence on the future of French America. This was the occupation by France of the mouth of the Mississippi, and the vindication of her claim to the vast and undefined regions which La Salle had called Louisiana. La Salle's schemes had come to nought, but they were revived, seven years after his death, by his lieutenant, the gallant and faithful Henri de Tonty, who urged the seizure of Louisiana for three reasons,—first, as a base of attack upon Mexico; secondly, as a dép?t for the furs and lead ore of the interior; and thirdly, as the only means of preventing the English from becoming masters of the West.[287] [Pg 299]Three years later, the Sieur de Rémonville, a friend of La Salle, proposed the formation of a company for the settlement of Louisiana, and called for immediate action as indispensable to anticipate the English.[288] The English were, in fact, on the point of taking possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, and were prevented only by the prompt intervention of the rival nation. If they had succeeded, colonies would have grown up on the Gulf of Mexico after the type of those already planted along the Atlantic: voluntary immigrants would have brought to a new home their old inheritance of English freedom; would have ruled themselves by laws of their own making, through magistrates of their own choice; would have depended on their own efforts, and not on government help, in the invigorating consciousness that their destinies were in their own hands, and that they themselves, and not others, were to gather the fruits of their toils. Out of conditions like these would have sprung communities, not brilliant, but healthy, orderly, well rooted in the soil, and of hardy and vigorous growth. But the principles of absolutism, and not those of a regulated liberty, were to rule in Louisiana. The new French colony was to be the child of the Crown. Cargoes of emigrants, willing or unwilling, were to be shipped by authority to the fever-stricken banks[Pg 300] of the Mississippi,—cargoes made up in part of those whom fortune and their own defects had sunk to dependence; to whom labor was strange and odious, but who dreamed of gold mines and pearl fisheries, and wealth to be won in the New World and spent in the Old; who wore the shackles of a paternal despotism which they were told to regard as of divine institution; who were at the mercy of military rulers set over them by the King, and agreeing in nothing except in enforcing the mandates of arbitrary power and the withering maxim that the labor of the colonist was due, not to himself, but to his masters. It remains to trace briefly the results of such conditions. The before-mentioned scheme of Rémonville for settling the Mississippi country had no result. In the next year the gallant Le Moyne d'Iberville—who has been called the Cid, or, more fitly, the Jean Bart, of Canada—offered to carry out the schemes of La Salle and plant a colony in Louisiana.[289] One thing had become clear,—France must act at once, or lose the Mississippi. Already there was a movement in London to seize upon it, under a grant to two noblemen. Iberville's offer was accepted; he was ordered to build a fort at the mouth of the great river, and leave a garrison to hold it.[290] He sailed with two frigates, the "Badine" and the "Marin,"[Pg 301] and towards the end of January, 1699, reached Pensacola. Here he found two Spanish ships, which would not let him enter the harbor. Spain, no less than England, was bent on making good her claim to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, and the two ships had come from Vera Cruz on this errand. Three hundred men had been landed, and a stockade fort was already built. Iberville left the Spaniards undisturbed and unchallenged, and felt his way westward along the coasts of Alabama and Mississippi, exploring and sounding as he went. At the beginning of March his boats were caught in a strong muddy current of fresh water, and he saw that he had reached the object of his search, the "fatal river" of the unfortunate La Salle. He entered it, encamped, on the night of the third, twelve leagues above its mouth, climbed a solitary tree, and could see nothing but broad flats of bushes and canebrakes.[291] Still pushing upward against the current, he reached in eleven days a village of the Bayagoula Indians, where he found the chief attired in a blue capote, which was probably put on in honor of the white strangers, and which, as the wearer declared, had been given him by Henri de Tonty, on his descent of the Mississippi in search of La Salle, thirteen years before. Young Le Moyne de Bienville, who accompanied his brother Iberville in a canoe, brought him, some time after, a letter from Tonty which the writer had left in the hands of another[Pg 302] chief, to be delivered to La Salle in case of his arrival, and which Bienville had bought for a hatchet. Iberville welcomed it as convincing proof that the river he had entered was in truth the Mississippi.[292] After pushing up the stream till the twenty-fourth, he returned to the ships by way of lakes Maurepas and Ponchartrain. Iberville now repaired to the harbor of Biloxi, on the coast of the present State of Mississippi. Here he built a small stockade fort, where he left eighty men, under the Sieur de Sauvolle, to hold the country for Louis XIV.; and this done, he sailed for France. Thus the first foundations of Louisiana were laid in Mississippi. Bienville, whom his brother had left at Biloxi as second in command, was sent by Sauvolle on an exploring expedition up the Mississippi with five men in two canoes. At the bend of the river now called English Turn,—Tour à l'Anglais,—below the site of New Orleans, he found an English corvette of ten guns, having, as passengers, a number of French Protestant families taken on board from the Carolinas, with the intention of settling on the Mississippi. The commander, Captain Louis Bank,[Pg 303] declared that his vessel was one of three sent from London by a company formed jointly of Englishmen and Huguenot refugees for the purpose of founding a colony.[293] Though not quite sure that they were upon the Mississippi, they were on their way up the stream to join a party of Englishmen said to be among the Chickasaws, with whom they were trading for Indian slaves. Bienville assured Bank that he was not upon the Mississippi, but on another river belonging to King Louis, who had a strong fort there and several settlements. "The too-credulous Englishman," says a French writer, "believed these inventions and turned back."[294] First, however, a French engineer in the service of Bank contrived to have an interview with Bienville, and gave him a petition to the King of France, signed by four hundred Huguenots who had taken refuge in the Carolinas after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The petitioners begged that they might have leave to settle in Louisiana, with liberty of conscience, under the French Crown. In due time they got[Pg 304] their answer. The King replied, through the minister, Ponchartrain, that he had not expelled heretics from France in order that they should set up a republic in America.[295] Thus, by the bigotry that had been the bane of Canada and of France herself, Louis XIV. threw away the opportunity of establishing a firm and healthy colony at the mouth of the Mississippi. So threatening was the danger that England would seize the country, that Iberville had scarcely landed in France when he was sent back with a reinforcement. The colonial views of the King may be gathered from his instructions to his officer. Iberville was told to seek out diligently the best places for establishing pearl-fisheries, though it was admitted that the pearls of Louisiana were uncommonly bad. He was also to catch bison calves, make a fenced park to hold them, and tame them for the sake of their wool, which was reputed to be of value for various fabrics. Above all, he was to look for mines, the finding of which the document declares to be "la grande affaire."[296] On the eighth of January, Iberville reached Biloxi, and soon after went up the Mississippi to that remarkable tribe of sun-worshippers, the Natchez, whose villages were on and near the site of the city that now bears their name. Some thirty miles above he[Pg 305] found a kindred tribe, the Taensas, whose temple took fire during his visit, when, to his horror, he saw five living infants thrown into the flames by their mothers to appease the angry spirits.[297] Retracing his course, he built a wooden redoubt near one of the mouths of the Mississippi to keep out the dreaded English. In the next year he made a third voyage, and ordered the feeble establishment at Biloxi to be moved to the bay of Mobile. This drew a protest from the Spaniards, who rested their claims to the country on the famous bull of Pope Alexander VI. The question was referred to the two Crowns. Louis XIV., a stanch champion of the papacy when his duties as a Catholic did not clash with his interests as a king, refused submission to the bull, insisted that the Louisiana country was his, and declared that he would hold fast to it because he was bound, as a son of Holy Church, to convert the Indians and keep out the English heretics.[298] Spain was then at peace with France, and her new King, the Duc d'Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV., needed the support of his powerful kinsman; hence his remonstrance against French encroachment was of the mildest.[299] [Pg 306]Besides Biloxi and Mobile Bay, the French formed a third establishment at Dauphin Island. The Mississippi itself, which may be called the vital organ of the colony, was thus far neglected, being occupied by no settlement and guarded only by a redoubt near one of its mouths. Of the emigrants sent out by the court to the new land of promise, the most valuable by far were a number of Canadians who had served under Iberville at Hudson Bay. The rest were largely of the sort who are described by that officer as "beggars sent out to enrich themselves," and who expected the government to feed them while they looked for pearls and gold mines. The paternal providence of Versailles, mindful of their needs, sent them, in 1704, a gift of twenty marriageable girls, described as "nurtured in virtue and piety, and accustomed to work." Twenty-three more came in the next year from the same benignant source, besides seventy-five soldiers, five priests, and two nuns. Food, however, was not sent in proportion to the consumers; and as no crops were raised in Louisiana, famine and pestilence followed, till the starving colonists were forced to live on shell-fish picked up along the shores. Disorder and discord filled the land of promise. Nicolas de la Salle, the commissaire ordonnateur, an official answering to the Canadian intendant, wrote to the minister Ponchartrain that Iberville and his[Pg 307] brothers, Bienville and Chateauguay, were "thieves and knaves."[300] La Vente, curé of Mobile, joined in the cry against Bienville, and stirred soldiers and settlers to disaffection; but the bitterest accuser of that truly valuable officer was the worthy matron who held the unenviable post of directress of the "King's girls,"—that is, the young women sent out as wives for the colonists. It seems that she had matrimonial views for herself as well as for her charge; and she wrote to Ponchartrain that Major Boisbriant, commander of the garrison, would certainly have married her if Bienville had not interfered and dissuaded him. "It is clear," she adds, "that M. de Bienville has not the qualities necessary for governing the colony."[301] Bienville was now chief in authority. Charges of peculation and other offences poured in against him, and at last, though nothing was proved, one De Muys was sent to succeed him, with orders to send him home a prisoner if on examination the accusations should prove to be true. De Muys died on the voyage. D'Artaguette, the new intendant, proceeded to make the inquiry, but refused to tell Bienville the nature of the charges against him, saying that he had orders not to do so. Nevertheless, when he had finished his investigation he reported to the minister[Pg 308] that the accused was innocent; on which Nicolas de la Salle, whom he had supplanted as intendant, wrote to Ponchartrain that D'Artaguette had deceived him, being no better than Bienville himself. La Salle further declared that Barrot, the surgeon of the colony, was an ignoramus, and that he made money by selling the medicines supplied by the King to cure his Louisianian subjects. Such were the transatlantic workings of the paternalism of Versailles. Bienville, who had been permitted to resume his authority, paints the state of the colony to his masters, and tells them that the inhabitants are dying of hunger,—not all, however, for he mentions a few exceptional cases of prosperity. These were certain thrifty colonists from Rochelle, who, says Bienville, have grown rich by keeping dram-shops, and now want to go back to France; but he has set a watch over them, thinking it just that they should be forced to stay in the colony.[302] This was to add the bars of a prison to the other attractions of the new home. As the colonists would not work, there was an attempt to make Indian slaves work for them; but as these continually ran off, Bienville proposed to open a barter with the French West Indies, giving three red slaves for two black ones,—an exchange which he thought would be mutually advantageous, since the Indians, being upon islands, could no longer escape. The court disapproved the plan, on the ground that the West Indians would give only their[Pg 309] worst negroes in exchange, and that the only way to get good ones was to fetch them from Guinea. Complaints against Bienville were renewed till the court sent out La Mothe-Cadillac to succeed him, with orders to examine the charges against his predecessor, whom it was his interest to condemn, in order to keep the governorship. In his new post, Cadillac displayed all his old faults; began by denouncing the country in unmeasured terms, and wrote in his usual sarcastic vein to the colonial minister: "I have seen the garden on Dauphin Island, which had been described to me as a terrestrial paradise. I saw there three seedling pear-trees, three seedling apple-trees, a little plum-tree about three feet high, with seven bad plums on it, a vine some thirty feet long, with nine bunches of grapes, some of them withered or rotten and some partly ripe, about forty plants of French melons, and a few pumpkins. This is M. d'Artaguette's terrestrial paradise, M. de Rémonville's Pomona, and M. de Mandeville's Fortunate Islands. Their stories are mere fables." Then he slanders the soil, which, he declares, will produce neither grain nor vegetables. D'Artaguette, no longer fancying himself in Eden, draws a dismal picture of the state of the colony. There are, he writes, only ten or twelve families who cultivate the soil. The inhabitants, naturally lazy, are ruined by the extravagance of their wives. "It is necessary to send out girls and laboring-men. I am convinced that we shall easily discover mines[Pg 310] when persons are sent us who understand that business."[303] The colonists felt no confidence in the future of Louisiana. The King was its sole support, and if, as was likely enough, he should tire of it, their case would be deplorable. When Bienville ruled over them, they had used him as their scapegoat; but that which made the colony languish was not he, but the vicious system it was his business to enforce. The royal edicts and arbitrary commands that took the place of law proceeded from masters thousands of miles away, who knew nothing of the country, could not understand its needs, and scarcely tried to do so. In 1711, though the mischievous phantom of gold and silver mines still haunted the colony, we find it reported that the people were beginning to work, and were planting tobacco. The King, however, was losing patience with a dependency that cost him endless expense and trouble, and brought little or nothing in return,—and this at a time when he had a costly and disastrous war on his hands, and was in no mood to bear supernumerary burdens. The plan of giving over a colony to a merchant, or a company of merchants, was not new. It had been tried in other French colonies with disastrous effect. Yet it was now tried again. Louisiana was farmed out for fifteen years to Antoine Crozat, a wealthy man of[Pg 311] business. The countries made over to him extended from the British colonies on the east to New Mexico on the west, and the Rio del Norte on the south, including the entire region watered by the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, and their tributaries, as far north as the Illinois. In comparison with this immense domain, which was all included under the name of Louisiana, the present State so called is but a small patch on the American map. To Crozat was granted a monopoly of the trade, wholesale and retail, domestic and foreign, of all these countries, besides the product of all mines, after deducting one-fourth reserved for the King. He was empowered to send one vessel a year to Guinea for a cargo of slaves. The King was to pay the governor and other Crown officers, and during the first nine years the troops also; though after that time Crozat was to maintain them till the end of his term. In consideration of these and other privileges, the grantee was bound to send to Louisiana a specified number of settlers every year. His charter provided that the royal edicts and the Coutume de Paris should be the law of the colony, to be administered by a council appointed by the King. When Louisiana was thus handed over to a speculator for a term of years, it needed no prophet to foretell that he would get all he could out of it, and put as little into it as possible. When Crozat took possession of the colony, the French court had been[Pg 312] thirteen years at work in building it up. The result of its labors was a total population, including troops, government officials, and clergy, of 380 souls, of whom 170 were in the King's pay. Only a few of the colonists were within the limits of the present Louisiana. The rest lived in or around the feeble stockade forts at Mobile, Biloxi, Ship Island, and Dauphin Island. This last station had been partially abandoned; but some of the colonists proposed to return to it, in order to live by fishing, and only waited, we are told, for help from the King. This incessant dependence on government relaxed the fibres of the colony and sapped its life-blood. The King was now exchanged for Crozat and his grinding monopoly. The colonists had carried on a modest trade with the Spaniards at Pensacola in skins, fowls, Indian corn, and a few other articles, bringing back a little money in return. This, their only source of profit, was now cut off; they could sell nothing, even to one another. They were forbidden to hold meetings without permission; but some of them secretly drew up a petition to La Mothe-Cadillac, who was still the official chief of the colony, begging that the agents of Crozat should be restricted to wholesale dealings, and that the inhabitants might be allowed to trade at retail. Cadillac denounced the petition as seditious, threatened to hang the bearer of it, and deigned no other answer. He resumed his sarcasms against the colony. "In my opinion this country is not worth a straw (ne vaut[Pg 313] pas un fétu). The inhabitants are eager to be taken out of it. The soldiers are always grumbling, and with reason." As to the council, which was to be the only court of justice, he says that no such thing is possible, because there are no proper persons to compose it; and though Duclos, the new intendant, has proposed two candidates, the first of these, the Sieur de Lafresnière, learned to sign his name only four months ago, and the other, being chief surgeon of the colony, is too busy to serve.[304] Between Bienville, the late governor, and La Mothe-Cadillac, who had supplanted him, there was a standing quarrel; and the colony was split into hostile factions, led by the two disputants. The minister at Versailles was beset by their mutual accusations, and Bienville wrote that his refusal to marry Cadillac's daughter was the cause of the spite the governor bore him.[305] The indefatigable curé De la Vente sent to Ponchartrain a memorial, in the preamble of which he says that since Monsieur le Ministre wishes to be informed exactly of the state of things in Louisiana, he, La Vente, has the honor, with malice to nobody, to make known the pure truth; after which he goes on to say that the inhabitants "are nearly all drunkards, gamblers, blasphemers, and enemies of everything[Pg 314] good;" and he proceeds to illustrate the statement with many particulars.[306] As the inhabitants were expected to work for Crozat, and not for themselves, it naturally followed that they would not work at all; and idleness produced the usual results. The yearly shipment of girls continued; but there was difficulty in finding husbands for them. The reason was not far to seek. Duclos, the intendant, reports the arrival of an invoice of twelve of them, "so ugly that the inhabitants are in no hurry to take them."[307] The Canadians, who formed the most vigorous and valuable part of the population, much preferred Indian squaws. "It seems to me," pursues the intendant, "that in the choice of girls, good looks should be more considered than virtue." This latter requisite seems, at the time, to have found no more attention than the other, since the candidates for matrimony were drawn from the Parisian hospitals and houses of correction, from the former of which Crozat was authorized to take one hundred girls a year, "in order to increase the population." These hospitals were compulsory asylums for the poor and vagrant of both sexes, of whom the great H?pital Général of Paris contained at one time more than six thousand.[308] [Pg 315]Crozat had built his chief hopes of profit on a trade, contraband or otherwise, with the Mexican ports; but the Spanish officials, faithful instruments of the exclusive policy of their government, would not permit it, and were so vigilant that he could not elude them. At the same time, to his vexation, he found that the King's officers in Louisiana, with more address or better luck, and in contempt of his monopoly, which it was their business to protect, carried on, for their own profit, a small smuggling trade with Vera Cruz. He complained that they were always thwarting his agents and conspiring against his interests. At last, finding no resource left but an unprofitable trade with the Indians, he gave up his charter, which had been a bane to the colony and a loss to himself. Louisiana returned to the Crown, and was soon passed over to the new Mississippi Company, called also the Western Company.[309] That charlatan of genius, the Scotchman John Law, had undertaken, with the eager support of the Regent Duke of Orleans, to deliver France from financial ruin through a prodigious system of credit, of which Louisiana, with its imaginary gold mines, was made the basis. The government used every[Pg 316] means to keep up the stock of the Mississippi Company. It was ordered that the notes of the royal bank and all certificates of public debt should be accepted at par in payment for its shares. Powers and privileges were lavished on it. It was given the monopoly of the French slave-trade, the monopoly of tobacco, the profits of the royal mint, and the farming of the revenues of the kingdom. Ingots of gold, pretending to have come from the new Eldorado of Louisiana, were displayed in the shop-windows of Paris. The fever of speculation rose to madness, and the shares of the company were inflated to monstrous and insane proportions. When Crozat resigned his charter, Louisiana, by the highest estimates, contained about seven hundred souls, including soldiers, but not blacks or Indians. Crozat's successors, however, say that the whole number of whites, men, women, and children, was not above four hundred.[310] When the Mississippi Company took the colony in charge, it was but a change of despots. Louisiana was a prison. But while no inhabitant could leave it without permission of the authorities, all Jews were expelled, and all Protestants excluded. The colonists could buy nothing except from the agents of the company, and sell nothing except to the same all-powerful masters, always at prices fixed by them. Foreign vessels were forbidden to enter any port of Louisiana, on pain of confiscation. The coin in circulation was nearly all Spanish, and[Pg 317] in less than two years the Company, by a series of decrees, made changes of about eighty per cent in its value. Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, of trade, and of action, were alike denied. Hence voluntary immigration was not to be expected; "but," says the Duc de Saint-Simon, "the government wished to establish effective settlements in these vast countries, after the example of the English; and therefore, in order to people them, vagabonds and beggars, male and female, including many women of the town, were seized for the purpose both in Paris and throughout France."[311] Saint-Simon approves these proceedings in themselves, as tending at once to purge France and people Louisiana, but thinks the business was managed in a way to cause needless exasperation among the lower classes. In 1720 it was ordered by royal edict that no more vagabonds or criminals should be sent to Louisiana. The edict, it seems, touched only one sex, for in the next year eighty girls were sent to the colony from the Parisian House of Correction called the Salpêtrière. There had been a more or less constant demand for wives, as appears by letters still preserved in the archives of Paris, the following extract from one of which is remarkable for the freedom with which the writer, a M. de Chassin, takes it upon him to address a minister of State in a court where punctilio reigned supreme. "You see, Monseigneur, that nothing is wanting now to make a solid settlement[Pg 318] in Louisiana but a certain piece of furniture which one often repents having got, and with which I shall dispense, like the rest, till the Company sends us girls who have at least some show of virtue. If there happens to be any young woman of your acquaintance who wants to make the voyage for love of me, I should be much obliged to her, and would do my best to show her my gratitude."[312] The Company, which was invested with sovereign powers, began its work by sending to Louisiana three companies of soldiers and sixty-nine colonists. Its wisest act was the removal of the governor, L'épinay, who had supplanted La Mothe-Cadillac, and the reappointment of Bienville in his place. Bienville immediately sought out a spot for establishing a permanent station on the Mississippi. Fifty men were sent to clear the ground, and in spite of an inundation which overflowed it for a time, the feeble foundations of New Orleans were laid. Louisiana, hitherto diffused through various petty cantonments, far and near, had at last a capital, or the germ of one. It was the sixth of September, 1717, when the charter of the Mississippi Company was entered in the registers of the Parliament of Paris; and from that time forward, before the offices of the Company in the Rue Quincampoix, crowds of crazed speculators jostled and fought from morning till night to get their names inscribed among the stockholders.[Pg 319] Within five years after, the huge glittering bubble had burst. The shares, each one of which had seemed a fortune, found no more purchasers, and in its fall the Company dragged down with it its ally and chief creditor, the bank. All was dismay and despair, except in those who had sold out in time, and turned delusive paper into solid values. John Law, lately the idol and reputed savior of France, fled for his life, amid a howl of execration. Yet the interests of the kingdom required that Louisiana should be sustained. The illusions that had given to the Mississippi Company a morbid and intoxicated vitality were gone, but the Company lingered on, and the government still lent it a helping hand. A French writer remarks that the few Frenchmen who were famishing on the shores of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico had cost the King, since the colony began, more than 150,000 livres a year. The directors of the Company reported that they had shipped 7,020 persons to the colony, besides four hundred already there when they took possession, and that 5,420 still remained, the rest having died or escaped.[313] Besides this importation of whites, they had also brought six hundred slaves from Guinea. It is reckoned that the King, Crozat, and the Mississippi Company had spent among them[Pg 320] about eight million livres on Louisiana, without any return.[314] The bursting of the Mississippi bubble did not change the principles of administration in Louisiana. The settlers, always looking to France to supply their needs and protect them against their own improvidence, were in the habit of butchering for food the livestock sent them for propagation. The remedy came in the shape of a royal edict forbidding any colonist to kill, without permission of the authorities, any cow, sheep, or lamb belonging to himself, on pain of a fine of three hundred livres; or to kill any horse, cow, or bull belonging to another, on pain of death. Authority and order were the watchwords, and disorder was the rule. The agents of power quarrelled among themselves, except when they leagued together to deceive their transatlantic masters and cover their own misdeeds. Each maligned the other, and it was scarcely possible for the King or the Company to learn the true state of affairs in their distant colony. Accusations were renewed against Bienville, till in 1724 he was ordered to France to give account of his conduct, and the Sieur Perier was sent out to take his place. Perier had no easy task. The Natchez Indians, among whom the French had made a settlement and built a fort called Fort Rosalie, suddenly rose on their white neighbors and massacred nearly[Pg 321] all of them.[315] Then followed a long course of Indian wars. The French believed that there was a general conspiracy among the southern tribes for their destruction,—though this was evidently an exaggeration of the danger, which, however, was serious. The Chickasaws, a brave and warlike people, living chiefly in what is now western Tennessee and Kentucky, made common cause with the Natchez, while the more numerous Choctaws, most of whose villages were in the present State of Mississippi, took part with the French. More than a thousand soldiers had been sent to Louisiana; but Perier pronounced them "so bad that they seem to have been made on purpose for the colony."[316] There were also about eight hundred militia. Perier showed little vigor, and had little success. His chief resource was to set the tribes against one another. He reports that his Indian allies had brought him a number of Natchez prisoners, and that he had caused six of them, four men and two women, to be burned alive, and had sent the rest as slaves to St. Domingo. The Chickasaws, aided by English traders from the Carolinas, proved formidable adversaries, and when attacked, ensconced themselves in stockade forts so strong that, as the governor complains, there was no dislodging the defenders without cannon and heavy mortars. [Pg 322]In this state of things the directors of the Mississippi Company, whose affairs had gone from bad to worse, declared that they could no longer bear the burden of Louisiana, and begged the King to take it off their hands. The colony was therefore transferred from the mercantile despotism of the Company to the paternal despotism of the Crown, and it profited by the change. Commercial monopoly was abolished. Trade between France and Louisiana was not only permitted, but encouraged by bounties and exemption from duties; and instead of paying to the Company two hundred per cent of profit on indispensable supplies, the colonists now got them at a reasonable price. Perier was removed, and again Bienville was made governor. Diron d'Artaguette, who came with him as intendant, reported that the colonists were flying the country to escape starvation, and Bienville adds that during the past year they had subsisted for three months on the seed of reeds and wild grasses.[317] The white population had rather diminished than increased during the last twelve years, while the blacks, who had lately conspired to massacre all the French along the Mississippi, had multiplied to two thousand.[318] A French writer says: "There must have been a worm gnawing the root of the tree that had been transplanted into so rich a soil, to make it wither instead[Pg 323] of growing. What it needed was the air of liberty." But the air of liberty is malaria to those who have not learned to breathe it. The English colonists throve in it because they and their forefathers had been trained in a school of self-control and self-dependence; and what would have been intoxication for others, was vital force to them. Bienville found the colony again threatened with a general rising, or, as he calls it, a revolt, of the Indian tribes. The Carolina traders, having no advantage of water-ways, had journeyed by land with pack-horses through a thousand miles of wilderness, and with the aid of gifts had instigated the tribes to attack the French. The Chickasaws especially, friends of the English and arch-enemies of Louisiana, became so threatening that a crushing blow against them was thought indispensable. The forces of the colony were mustered to attempt it; the enterprise was mismanaged, and failed completely.[319] Bienville tried to explain the disaster, but his explanation was ill received at court; he was severely rebuked, reproved at the same time for permitting two families to emigrate to St. Domingo, and sharply ordered to suffer nobody to leave Louisiana without express license from Versailles. Deeply wounded, he offered his resignation, and it was accepted. Whatever his failings, he had faithfully served the colony, and gained from posterity the title of Father of Louisiana. [Pg 324]With the help of industrious nursing,—or, one might almost say, in spite of it,—Louisiana began at last to strike roots into the soil and show signs of growth, though feebly as compared with its sturdy rivals along the Atlantic seaboard, which had cost their King nothing, and had been treated, for the most part, with the coolest neglect. Cavelier de la Salle's dream of planting a firm settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi, and utilizing, by means of it, the resources of the vast interior, was, after half a century, in some measure realized. New France (using that name in its broadest geographical sense) had now two heads,—Canada and Louisiana; one looking upon the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the other upon the Gulf of Mexico. Canada was not without jealousy of her younger and weaker sister, lest she might draw away, as she had begun to do at the first, some of the most active and adventurous elements of the Canadian population; lest she might prove a competitor in the fur-trade; and lest she should encroach on the Illinois and other western domains, which the elder and stronger sister claimed as her own. These fears were not unfounded; yet the vital interests of the two French colonies were the same, and each needed the help of the other in the prime and all-essential task of keeping the British colonies in check. The chiefs of Louisiana looked forward to a time when the great southern tribes,—Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and even the dreaded Chickasaws,—won over by French missionaries to the[Pg 325] Church, and therefore to France, should be turned against the encroaching English to stop their westward progress and force them back to the borders of the Atlantic. Meanwhile the chiefs of Canada were maturing the plan—pursued with varying assiduity, but always kept in view—of connecting the two vital extremities of New France by a chain of forts to control the passes of the West, keep communications open, and set English invasion at defiance. FOOTNOTES: [287] Henri de Tonty à Cabart de Villermont, 11 Septembre, 1694 (Margry, iv. 3). [288] Mémoire sur le Projet d'establir une nouvelle Colonie au Mississippi, 1697 (Margry, iv. 21). [289] Iberville au Ministre, 18 Juin, 1698 (Margry, iv. 51). [290] Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction au Sieur d'Iberville (Margry, iv. 72). [291] Journal d'Iberville (Margry, iv. 131). [292] This letter, which D'Iberville gives in his Journal, is dated "Du Village des Quinipissas, le 20 Avril, 1685." Iberville identifies the Quinipissas with the Bayagoulas. The date of the letter was evidently misread, as Tonty's journey was in 1686. See "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West," 455, note. Iberville's lieutenant, Sugères, commanding the "Marin," gives the date correctly. Journal de la Frégate le Marin, 1698, 1699 (Margry, iv.). [293] Journal du Voyage du Chevalier d'Iberville sur le Vaisseau du Roy la Renommée en 1699 (Margry, iv. 395). [294] Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane (1846), i. 69. Bénard de la Harpe, Journal historique (1831), 20. Coxe says, in the preface to his Description of Carolana (1722), that "the present proprietor of Carolana, my honour'd Father, ... was the author of this English voyage to the Mississippi, having in the year 1698 equipp'd and fitted out Two Ships for Discovery by Sea, and also for building a Fortification and settling a Colony by land; there being in both vessels, besides Sailors and Common Men, above Thirty English and French Volunteers." Coxe adds that the expedition would have succeeded if one of the commanders had not failed to do his duty. [295] Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane (1846), i. 69. [296] Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction au Sieur d'Iberville (Margry, iv. 348). [297] Journal du Voyage du Chevalier d'Iberville sur le Vaisseau du Roy la Renommée, 1699, 1700. [298] Mémoire de la Junte de Guerre des Indes. Le Ministre de la Marine au Duc d'Harcourt (Margry, iv. 553, 568). [299] Iberville wrote in 1701 a long memorial, in which he tried to convince the Spanish court that it was for the interest of Spain that the French should form a barrier between her colonies and those of England, which, he says, were about to seize the country as far as the Mississippi and beyond it. [300] Nicolas de la Salle au Ministre, 7 Septembre, 1706. [301] "Il est clair que M. de Bienville n'a pas les qualités nécessaires pour bien gouverner la colonie." Gayarré found this curious letter in the Archives de la Marine. [302] Dépêche de Bienville, 12 Octobre, 1708. [303] D'Artaguette in Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane. This valuable work consists of a series of documents, connected by a thread of narrative. [304] La Mothe-Cadillac au Ministre, in Gayarré, i. 104, 105. [305] "Que si M. de Lamothe-Cadillac lui portoit tant d'animositié, c'étoit à cause du refus qu'il avoit fait d'épouser sa fille."—Bienville in Gayarré, i. 116. [306] Mémoire du Curé de la Vente, 1714. [307] The earlier cargoes of girls seem to have been better chosen, and there was no difficulty in mating them. Serious disputes sometimes rose from the competition of rival suitors.—Dumont, Mémoires historiques de la Louisiane, chap. v. [308] Prominent officials of the colony are said to have got wives from these sources. Nicolas de la Salle is reported to have had two in succession, both from the hospitals. Bénard de la Harpe, 107 (ed. 1831). [309] Lettres patentes en forme d'édit portant établissement de la Compagnie d'Occident, in Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, i. 47. [310] Règlement de Régie, 1721. [311] Saint-Simon, Mémoires (ed. Chéruel), xvii. 461. [312] De Chassin au Ministre, 1 Juillet, 1722, in Gayarré, i. 190. [313] A considerable number of the whites brought to Louisiana in the name of the Company had been sent at the charge of persons to whom it had granted lands in various parts of the colony. Among these was John Law himself, who had the grant of large tracts on the Arkansas. [314] Bénard de la Harpe, 371 (ed. 1831). [315] Lettre du Père le Petit, in Lettres édifiantes; Dumont, Mémoires historiques, chap. xxvii. [316] "Nos soldats, qui semblent être faits exprès pour la colonie, tants ils sont mauvais."—Dépêche de Perier, 18 Mars, 1730. [317] Mémoire de Bienville, 1730. [318] For a curious account of the discovery of this negro plot, see Le Page du Pratz, iii. 304. [319] Dépêche de Bienville, 6 Mai, 1740. Compare Le Page du Pratz, iii. chap. xxiv. CHAPTER XIV. 1700-1732. THE OUTAGAMIE WAR. The Western Posts.—Detroit.—The Illinois.—Perils of the West.—The Outagamies.—Their Turbulence.—English Instigation.—Louvigny's Expedition.—Defeat of Outagamies.—Hostilities renewed.—Lignery's Expedition.—Outagamies attacked by Villiers; by Hurons and Iroquois.—La Butte des Morts.—The Sacs and Foxes. [Pg 326]The rulers of Canada labored without ceasing in their perplexing task of engrossing the fur-trade of the West and controlling the western tribes to the exclusion of the English. Every day made it clearer that to these ends the western wilderness must be held by forts and trading-posts; and this policy of extension prevailed more and more, in spite of the league of merchants, who wished to draw the fur-trade to Montreal,—in spite of the Jesuits, who felt that their influence over the remoter tribes would be compromised by the presence among them of officers, soldiers, and traders; and in spite of the King himself, who feared that the diffusion of the colony would breed disorder and insubordination. Detroit, the most important of the western posts, struggled through a critical infancy in the charge of[Pg 327] its founder, La Mothe-Cadillac, till, by a choice not very judicious, he was made governor of Louisiana. During his rule the population had slowly increased to about two hundred souls; but after he left the place it diminished to a point that seemed to threaten the feeble post with extinction. About 1722 it revived again; voyageurs and discharged soldiers settled about the fort, and the parish register shows six or eight births in the course of the year.[320] Meanwhile, on the banks of the Mississippi another settlement was growing up which did not owe its birth to official patronage, and yet was destined to become the most noteworthy offspring of Canada in the West. It was known to the French as "the Illinois," from the name of the group of tribes belonging to that region. La Salle had occupied the banks of the river Illinois in 1682; but the curious Indian colony which he gathered about his fort on the rock of St. Louis[321] dispersed after his death, till few or none were left except the Kaskaskias, a sub-tribe of the Illinois. These still lived in the meadow below Fort St. Louis, where the Jesuits Marquette, Allouez, Rale, Gravier, and Marest labored in turn for their conversion, till, in 1700, they or some of them followed Marest to the Mississippi and set up their wigwams where the town of Kaskaskia now stands, near the mouth of the little river which bears the same name. Charlevoix, who was here in 1721, calls this[Pg 328] the oldest settlement of the Illinois,[322]—though there is some reason to believe that the village of Cahokia, established as a mission by the Jesuit Pinet, sixty miles or more above Kaskaskia, and nearly opposite the present city of St. Louis, is, by a few weeks, the elder of the two. The voyageurs, coureurs de bois, and other roving Canadians made these young settlements their resort, took to wife converted squaws,[323] and ended with making the Illinois their home. The missions turned to parishes, the missionaries to curés, and the wigwams to those compact little Canadian houses that cause one to marvel at the ingenuity which can store so multitudinous a progeny within such narrow limits. White women from Canada or Louisiana began to find their way to these wilderness settlements, which with every generation grew more French and less Indian. The river Mississippi was at once their friend and their enemy. It carried their produce to New Orleans, but undermined their rich alluvial shores, cut away fields and meadows, and swept them in its turbid eddies thirteen hundred miles southward, as a contribution to the mud-banks of the delta. When the Mississippi Company came into power, the Illinois, hitherto a dependency of Canada, was[Pg 329] annexed to Louisiana. Pierre Dugué de Boisbriant was sent to take command of it, and under his direction a fort was built on the bank of the Mississippi sixteen miles above Kaskaskia. It was named Fort Chartres, in honor of the Duc de Chartres, son of the Regent, who had himself once borne the same title. This work, built at first of wood and earth, was afterwards rebuilt of stone, and became one of the chief links in the chain of military communication between Canada and Louisiana. Here, with the commandant at its head, sat the council of three which ruled over the little settlement.[324] Here too was a garrison to enforce the decrees of the council, keep order among the settlers, and give them a protection which they greatly needed, since they were within striking distance of the formidable Chickasaws, the effects of whose hostility appear year after year on the parish register of deaths at Kaskaskia. Worse things were in store; for the gallant young Pierre d'Artaguette, who was appointed to the command in 1734, and who marched against the Chickasaws with a band of Frenchmen and Indians, was defeated, captured, and burned alive, astonishing his torturers by the fortitude with which he met his fate. The settlement had other foes not less dangerous. These were the Outagamies,[Pg 330] or Foxes, between whom and the tribes of the Illinois there was a deadly feud. We have seen how, in 1712, a band of Outagamies, with their allies, the Mascoutins, appeared at Detroit and excited an alarm, which, after a savage conflict, was ended with their ruin. In 1714 the Outagamies made a furious attack upon the Illinois, and killed or carried off seventy-seven of them.[325] A few years later they made another murderous onslaught in the same quarter. They were the scourge of the West, and no white man could travel between Canada and Louisiana except at the risk of his life. In vain the French parleyed with them; threats and blandishments were useless alike. Their chiefs would promise, sometimes in good faith, to keep the peace and no more offend their father Onontio; but nearly all the tribes of the Lake country were their hereditary enemies, and some bloody revenge for ancient wrongs would excite their young warriors to a fury which the elders could not restrain. Thus, in 1722 the Saginaws, a fierce Algonquin band on the eastern borders of Michigan, killed twenty-three Outagamies; the tribesmen of the slain returned the blow, other tribes joined the fray, and the wilderness was again on fire.[326] The Canadian authorities were sorely perplexed, for this fierce inter-tribal war threatened their whole system of western trade. Meanwhile the English[Pg 331] and Dutch of New York were sending wampum belts to the Indians of the upper lakes, inviting them to bring their furs to Albany; and Ramesay, governor of Montreal, complains that they were all disposed to do so. "Twelve of the upper tribes," says Lord Cornbury, "have come down this year to trade at Albany;" but he adds that as the Indians have had no presents for above six years, he is afraid "we shall lose them before next summer."[327] The governor of Canada himself is said to have been in collusion with the English traders for his own profit.[328] The Jesuits denied the charge, and Father Marest wrote to the governor, after the disaster to Walker's fleet on its way to attack Quebec, "The protection you have given to the missions has drawn on you and the colony the miraculous protection of God."[329] Whether his accusers did him wrong or not, Vaudreuil felt the necessity of keeping the peace among the western Indians and suppressing the Outagamie incendiaries. In fact, nothing would satisfy him but their destruction. "They are the common enemies of all the western tribes," he writes. "They have lately murdered three Frenchmen and five Hurons at Detroit. The Hurons ask for our help against them, and we must give it, or all the tribes will despise us."[330] [Pg 332]He put his chief trust in Louvigny, formerly commandant at Michilimackinac. That officer proposed to muster the friendly tribes and march on the Outagamies just as their corn was ripening, fight them if they stood their ground, or if not, destroy their crops, burn their wigwams, and encamp on the spot till winter; then send out parties to harass them as they roamed the woods seeking a meagre subsistence by hunting. In this way he hoped to cripple, if not destroy them.[331] The Outagamies lived at this time on the Fox River of Green Bay,—a stream which owes its name to them.[332] Their chief village seems to have been between thirty and forty miles from the mouth of the river, where it creeps through broad tracts of rushes, willows, and wild rice. In spite of their losses at Detroit in 1712, their strength was far from being broken. During two successive summers preparations were made to attack them; but the march was delayed, once by the tardiness of the Indian allies, and again by the illness of Louvigny. At length, on the first of May, 1716, he left Montreal with two hundred and twenty-five Frenchmen, while two hundred more waited to join him at Detroit and Michilimackinac, where the Indian allies were also to meet him. To[Pg 333] save expense in pay and outfit, the Canadians recruited for the war were allowed to take with them goods for trading with the Indians. Hence great disorder and insubordination, especially as more than forty barrels of brandy were carried in the canoes, as a part of these commercial ventures, in consequence of which we hear that when French and Indians were encamped together, "hell was thrown open."[333] The Outagamies stood their ground. Louvigny says, with probable exaggeration, that when he made his attack their village held five hundred warriors, and no less than three thousand women,—a disparity of sexes no doubt due to the inveterate fighting habits of the tribe. The wigwams were enclosed by a strong fence, consisting of three rows of heavy oaken palisades. This method of fortification was used also by tribes farther southward. When Bienville attacked the Chickasaws, he was foiled by the solid wooden wall that resisted his cannon, being formed of trunks of trees as large as a man's body, set upright, close together, and made shot-proof by smaller trunks, planted within so as to close the interstices of the outer row.[334] The fortified village of the Outagamies was of a somewhat different construction. The defences consisted of three rows of palisades, those of the middle row being probably planted upright, and the other[Pg 334] two set aslant against them. Below, along the inside of the triple row, ran a sort of shallow trench or rifle-pit, where the defenders lay ensconced, firing through interstices left for the purpose between the palisades.[335] Louvigny had brought with him two cannon and a mortar; but being light, they had little effect on the wooden wall, and as he was provided with mining tools, he resolved to attack the Outagamie stronghold by regular approaches, as if he were besieging a fortress of Vauban. Covered by the fire of three pieces of artillery and eight hundred French and Indian small-arms, he opened trenches during the night within seventy yards of the palisades, pushed a sap sixty feet nearer before morning, and on the third night burrowed to within about twenty-three yards of the wall. His plan was to undermine and blow up the palisades. The Outagamies had made a furious resistance, in which their women took part with desperation; but dreading the threatened explosion, and unable to resist the underground approaches of their enemy, they asked for a parley, and owned themselves beaten. Louvigny demanded that they should make peace with all tribes friendly to the French, give up all[Pg 335] prisoners, and make war on distant tribes, such as the Pawnees, in order to take captives who should supply the place of those they had killed among the allies of the French; that they should pay, in furs, the costs of the war, and give six chiefs, or sons of chiefs, as hostages for the fulfilment of these conditions.[336] On the twelfth of October Louvigny reached Quebec in triumph, bringing with him the six hostages. The Outagamie question was settled for a time. The tribe remained quiet for some years, and in 1718 sent a deputation to Montreal and renewed their submission, which the governor accepted, though they had evaded the complete fulfilment of the conditions imposed on them. Yet peace was not secure for a moment. The Kickapoos and Mascoutins would not leave their neighbors, the Illinois, at rest; the Saginaws made raids on the Miamis; and a general war seemed imminent. "The difficulty is inconceivable of keeping these western tribes quiet," writes the governor, almost in despair.[337] At length the crisis came. The Illinois captured the nephew of Oushala, the principal Outagamie war-chief, and burned him alive; on which the Outagamies attacked them, drove them for refuge to the top of the rock on which La Salle's fort of St. Louis had been built, and held them there at mercy. They would have starved to death, had not the victors,[Pg 336] dreading the anger of the French, suffered them to escape.[338] For this they took to themselves great credit, not without reason, in view of the provocation. At Versailles, however, their attack on the Illinois seemed an unpardonable offence, and the next ship from France brought a letter from the colonial minister declaring that the Outagamies must be effectually put down, and that "his Majesty will reward the officer who will reduce, or rather destroy, them."[339] The authorities of Canada were less truculent than their masters at the court, or were better able to count the costs of another war. Longueuil, the provisional governor, persisted in measures of peace, and the Sieur de Lignery called a council of the Outagamies and their neighbors, the Sacs and Winnebagoes, at Green Bay. He told them that the Great Onontio, the King, ordered them, at their peril, to make no more attacks on the Illinois; and they dutifully promised to obey, while their great chief, Oushala, begged that a French officer might be sent to his village to help him keep his young warriors from the war-path.[340] The pacific policy of Longueuil was not approved by Desliettes, then commanding in the Illinois country; and he proposed to settle accounts with the Outagamies by exterminating them.[Pg 337] "This is very well," observes a writer of the time; "but to try to exterminate them and fail would be disastrous."[341] The Marquis de Beauharnois, who came out as governor of Canada in 1726, was averse to violent measures, since if an attempt to exterminate the offending tribe should be made without success, the life of every Frenchman in the West would be in jeopardy.[342] Lignery thought that if the Outagamies broke the promises they had made him at Green Bay, the forces of Canada and Louisiana should unite to crush them. The missionary, Chardon, advised that they should be cut off from all supplies of arms, ammunition, and merchandise of any kind, and that all the well-disposed western tribes should then be set upon them,—which, he thought, would infallibly bring them to reason.[343] The new governor, perplexed by the multitude of counsellors, presently received a missive from the King, directing him not to fight the Outagamies if he could help it, "since the consequences of failure would be frightful."[344] On the other hand, Beauharnois was told that the English had sent messages to the Lake tribes urging them to kill the French in their country, and that the Outagamies had promised to do[Pg 338] so. "This," writes the governor, "compels us to make war in earnest. It will cost sixty thousand livres."[345] Dupuy, the intendant, had joined with Beauharnois in this letter to the minister; but being at the time in a hot quarrel with the governor, he soon after sent a communication of his own to Versailles, in which he declares that the war against the Outagamies was only a pretext of Beauharnois for spending the King's money, and enriching himself by buying up all the furs of the countries traversed by the army.[346] Whatever the motives of the expedition, it left Montreal in June, under the Sieur de Lignery, followed the rugged old route of the Ottawa, and did not reach Michilimackinac till after midsummer. Thence, in a flotilla of birch canoes carrying about a thousand Indians and five hundred French, the party set out for the fort at the head of Green Bay.[347] Here they caught one Outagamie warrior and three Winnebagoes, whom the Indian allies tortured to death. Then they paddled their canoes up Fox River, reached a Winnebago village on the twenty-fourth of August, followed the channel of the stream, a ribbon of lazy water twisting in a vague, perplexing way through the broad marsh of wild rice and flags, till they saw the chief village of the Outagamies[Pg 339] on a tract of rising ground a little above the level of the bog.[348] It consisted of bark wigwams, without palisades or defences of any kind. Its only inmates were three squaws and one old man. These were all seized, and, to the horror of Père Crespel, the chaplain, were given to the Indian allies, who kept the women as slaves, and burned the old man at a slow fire.[349] Then, after burning the village and destroying the crop of maize, peas, beans, and squashes that surrounded it, the whole party returned to Michilimackinac.[350] The expedition was not a success. Lignery had hoped to surprise the enemy; but the alert and nimble savages had escaped him. Beauharnois makes the best of the miscarriage, and writes that "the army did good work;" but says a few weeks later that something must be done to cure the contempt which the western allies of the French have conceived for them "since the last affair."[351] Two years after Lignery's expedition, there was another attempt to humble the Outagamies. Late in the autumn of 1730 young Coulon de Villiers, who twenty-four years later defeated Washington at Fort Necessity, appeared at Quebec with news that the Sieur de Villiers, his father, who commanded the[Pg 340] post on the St. Joseph, had struck the Outagamies a deadly blow and killed two hundred of their warriors, besides six hundred of their women and children. The force under Villiers consisted of a body of Frenchmen gathered from various western posts, another body from the Illinois, led by the Sieurs de Saint-Ange, father and son, and twelve or thirteen hundred Indian allies from many friendly tribes.[352] The accounts of this affair are obscure and not very trustworthy. It seems that the Outagamies began the fray by an attack on the Illinois at La Salle's old station of Le Rocher, on the river Illinois. On hearing of this, the French commanders mustered their Indian allies, hastened to the spot, and found the Outagamies intrenched in a grove which they had surrounded with a stockade. They defended themselves with their usual courage, but, being hard pressed by hunger and thirst, as well as by the greatly superior numbers of their assailants, they tried to escape during a dark night, as their tribesmen had done at Detroit in 1712. The French and[Pg 341] their allies pursued, and there was a great slaughter, in which many warriors and many more women and children were the victims.[353] The offending tribe must now, one would think, have ceased to be dangerous; but nothing less than its destruction would content the French officials. To this end, their best resource was in their Indian allies, among whom the Outagamies had no more deadly enemy than the Hurons of Detroit, who, far from relenting in view of their disasters, were more eager than ever to wreak their ire on their unfortunate foe. Accordingly, they sent messengers to the converted Iroquois at the Mission of Two Mountains, and invited them to join in making an end of the Outagamies. The invitation was accepted, and in the autumn of 1731 forty-seven warriors from the Two Mountains appeared at Detroit. The party was soon made up. It consisted of seventy-four Hurons, forty-six Iroquois, and four Ottawas. They took the trail to the mouth of the river St. Joseph, thence around the head of Lake Michigan to the Chicago portage, and thence westward to Rock River. Here were the villages of the Kickapoos and Mascoutins, who had been allies of the Outagamies, but having lately quarrelled with them, received the strangers as friends and gave them guides. The party now filed northward, by forests and prairies, towards the[Pg 342] Wisconsin, to the banks of which stream the Outagamies had lately removed their villages. The warriors were all on snow-shoes, for the weather was cold and the snow deep. Some of the elders, overcome by the hardships of the way, called a council and proposed to turn back; but the juniors were for pushing on at all risks, and a young warrior declared that he would rather die than go home without killing somebody. The result was a division of the party; the elders returned to Chicago, and the younger men, forty Hurons and thirty Iroquois, kept on their way. At last, as they neared the Wisconsin, they saw on an open prairie three Outagamies, who ran for their lives. The Hurons and Iroquois gave chase, till from the ridge of a hill they discovered the principal Outagamie village, consisting, if we may believe their own story, of forty-six wigwams, near the bank of the river. The Outagamie warriors came out to meet them, in number, as they pretended, much greater than theirs; but the Huron and Iroquois chiefs reminded their followers that they had to do with dogs who did not believe in God, on which they fired two volleys against the enemy, then dropped their guns and charged with the knife in one hand and the war-club in the other. According to their own story, which shows every sign of mendacity, they drove back the Outagamies into their village, killed seventy warriors, and captured fourteen more, without counting eighty women and children killed, and a hundred and forty taken prisoners. In short,[Pg 343] they would have us believe that they destroyed the whole village, except ten men, who escaped entirely naked, and soon froze to death. They declared further that they sent one of their prisoners to the remaining Outagamie villages, ordering him to tell the inhabitants that they had just devoured the better part of the tribe, and meant to stay on the spot two days; that the tribesmen of the slain were free to attack them if they chose, but in that case, they would split the heads of all the women and children prisoners in their hands, make a breastwork of the dead bodies, and then finish it by piling upon it those of the assailants.[354] Nothing is more misleading than Indian tradition, which is of the least possible value as evidence. It may be well, however, to mention another story, often repeated, touching these dark days of the Outagamies. It is to the effect that a French trader named Marin, whom they had incensed by levying blackmail from him, raised a party of Indians, with whose aid he surprised and defeated the unhappy tribe at the Little Butte des Morts, that they retired to the Great Butte des Morts, higher up Fox River, and that Marin here attacked them again, killing or capturing the whole. Extravagant as the story seems, it may have some foundation, though various dates, from 1725 to 1746, are assigned to the alleged exploit, and contemporary documents are silent concerning[Pg 344] it. It is certain that the Outagamies were not destroyed, as the tribe exists to this day.[355] In 1736 it was reported that sixty or eighty Outagamie warriors were still alive.[356] Their women, who when hard pushed would fight like furies, were relatively numerous and tolerably prolific, and their villages were full of sturdy boys, likely to be dangerous in a few years. Feeling their losses and their weakness, the survivors of the tribe incorporated themselves with their kindred and neighbors, the Sacs, Sakis, or Saukies, the two forming henceforth one tribe, afterwards known to the Americans as the Sacs and Foxes. Early in the nineteenth century they were settled on both banks of the upper Mississippi. Brave and restless like their forefathers, they were a continual menace to the American frontiersmen, and in 1832 they rose in open war, under their famous chief, Blackhawk, displaying their hereditary prowess both on foot and on horseback, and more than once defeating superior numbers of American mounted militia. In the next year that excellent artist,[Pg 345] Charles Bodmer, painted a group of them from life,—grim-visaged savages, armed with war-club, spear, or rifle, and wrapped in red, green, or brown blankets, their heads close shaven except the erect and bristling scalp-lock, adorned with long eagle-plumes, while both heads and faces are painted with fantastic figures in blue, white, yellow, black, and vermilion.[357] Three or four years after, a party of their chiefs and warriors was conducted through the country by order of the Washington government, in order to impress them with the number and power of the whites. At Boston they danced a war-dance on the Common in full costume, to the delight of the boy spectators, of whom I was one. FOOTNOTES: [320] Rameau, Notes historiques sur la Colonie Canadienne du Detroit. [321] See "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West," 315. [322] "Ce poste, le premier de tous par droit d'antiquité."—Journal historique, 403 (ed. 1744). [323] The old parish registers of Kaskaskia are full of records of these mixed marriages. See Edward G. Mason, Illinois in the Eighteenth Century. [324] The two other members were La Loire des Ursins, director of the Mississippi Company, and Michel Chassin, its commissary,—he who wrote the curious letter to Ponchartrain, asking for a wife, quoted in the last chapter, pp. 317-318. [325] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 16 Septembre, 1714. [326] Idem, 2 Octobre, 1723. [327] N. Y. Col. Docs., v. 65. [328] Mémoire présenté au Comte de Ponchartrain par M. d'Auteuil, procureur-général du Roy, 1708. [329] Marest à Vaudreuil, 21 Janvier, 1712. [330] Vaudreuil et Bégon au Ministre, 15 Novembre, 1713. [331] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 16 Septembre, 1714. [332] "Les Renards [Outagamies] sont placez sur une rivière qui tombe dans la Baye des Puants [Green Bay]."—Registre du Conseil de la Marine, 28 Mars, 1716. [333] "Où il y a des Fran?ois et des sauvages, c'est un enfer ouvert."—Registre du Conseil de Marine, 28 Mars, 1716. [334] Le Page du Pratz. [335] Louvigny au Ministre, 14 Octobre, 1716. Louvigny's account of the Outagamie defences is short, and not very clear. La Mothe-Cadillac, describing similar works at Michilimackinac, says that the palisades of the innermost row alone were set close together, those of the two other rows being separated by spaces of six inches or more, through which the defenders fired from their loopholes. The plan seems borrowed from the Iroquois. [336] Dépêche de Vaudreuil, 14 Octobre, 1716. [337] Vaudreuil au Conseil de Marine, 28 Octobre, 1719. [338] Paroles des Renards [Outagamies] dans un Conseil tenu le 6 Septembre, 1722. [339] Réponse du Ministre à la lettre du Marquis de Vaudreuil du 11 Octobre, 1723. [340] Mémoire sur les Renards, 27 Avril, 1727. [341] Mémoire concernant la Paix que M. de Lignery a faite avec les Chefs des Renards, Sakis [Sacs], et Puants [Winnebagoes], 7 Juin, 1726. [342] Mémoire sur les Renards, 27 Avril, 1727. [343] Ibid. [344] Mémoire du Roy, 29 Avril, 1727. [345] Beauharnois et Dupuy au Ministre, 25 Octobre, 1727. [346] Mémoire de Dupuy, 1728. [347] Desliettes came to meet them, by way of Chicago, with five hundred Illinois warriors and twenty Frenchmen. La Perrière et La Fresnière à Beauharnois, 10 Septembre, 1728. [348] Guignas à Beauharnois, 29 Mai, 1728. [349] Dépêche de Beauharnois, 1 Septembre, 1728. [350] The best account of this expedition is that of Père Emanuel Crespel. Lignery made a report which seems to be lost, as it does not appear in the Archives. [351] Beauharnois au Ministre, 15 Mai, 1729; Ibid., 21 Juillet, 1729. [352] Beauharnois et Hocquart au Ministre, 2 Novembre, 1730. An Indian tradition says that about this time there was a great battle between the Outagamies and the French, aided by their Indian allies, at the place called Little Butte des Morts, on the Fox River. According to the story, the Outagamies were nearly destroyed. Perhaps this is a perverted version of the Villiers affair. (See Wisconsin Historical Collections, viii, 207.) Beauharnois also reports, under date of 6 May, 1730, that a party of Outagamies, returning from a buffalo hunt, were surprised by two hundred Ottawas, Ojibwas, Menominies, and Winnebagoes, who killed eighty warriors and three hundred women and children. [353] Some particulars of this affair are given by Ferland, Cours d'Histoire du Canada, ii. 437; but he does not give his authority. I have found no report of it by those engaged. [354] Relation de la Défaite des Renards par les Sauvages Hurons et Iroquois, le 28 Février, 1732. (Archives de la Marine.) [355] The story is told in Snelling, Tales of the Northwest (1830), under the title of La Butte des Morts, and afterwards, with variations, by the aged Augustus Grignon, in his Recollections, printed in the Collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society, iii.; also by Judge M. L. Martin and others. Grignon, like all the rest, was not born till after the time of the alleged event. The nearest approach to substantial evidence touching it is in a letter of Beauharnois, who writes in 1730 that the Sieur Dubuisson was to attack the Outagamies with fifty Frenchmen and five hundred and fifty Indians, and that Marin, commander at Green Bay, was to join him. Beauharnois au Ministre, 25 Juin, 1730. [356] Mémoire sur le Canada, 1736. [357] Charles Bodmer was the artist who accompanied Prince Maximilian of Wied in his travels in the interior of North America. The name Outagamie is Algonquin for a fox. Hence the French called the tribe Renards, and the Americans, Foxes. They called themselves Musquawkies, which is said to mean "red earth," and to be derived from the color of the soil near one of their villages. CHAPTER XV. 1697-1741. FRANCE IN THE FAR WEST. French Explorers.—Le Sueur on the St. Peter.—Canadians on the Missouri.—Juchereau de Saint-Denis.—Bénard de la Harpe on Red River.—Adventures of Du Tisné.—Bourgmont visits the Comanches.—The Brothers Mallet in Colorado and New Mexico.—Fabry de la Bruyère. [Pg 346]The occupation by France of the lower Mississippi gave a strong impulse to the exploration of the West, by supplying a base for discovery, stimulating enterprise by the longing to find gold mines, open trade with New Mexico, and get a fast hold on the countries beyond the Mississippi in anticipation of Spain; and to these motives was soon added the hope of finding an overland way to the Pacific. It was the Canadians, with their indomitable spirit of adventure, who led the way in the path of discovery. As a bold and hardy pioneer of the wilderness, the Frenchman in America has rarely found his match. His civic virtues withered under the despotism of Versailles, and his mind and conscience were kept in leading-strings by an absolute Church; but the forest and the prairie offered him an unbridled liberty, which, lawless as it was, gave scope to his energies,[Pg 347] till these savage wastes became the field of his most noteworthy achievements. Canada was divided between two opposing influences. On the one side were the monarchy and the hierarchy, with their principles of order, subordination, and obedience; substantially at one in purpose, since both wished to keep the colony within manageable bounds, domesticate it, and tame it to soberness, regularity, and obedience. On the other side was the spirit of liberty, or license, which was in the very air of this wilderness continent, reinforced in the chiefs of the colony by a spirit of adventure inherited from the Middle Ages, and by a spirit of trade born of present opportunities; for every official in Canada hoped to make a profit, if not a fortune, out of beaver-skins. Kindred impulses, in ruder forms, possessed the humbler colonists, drove them into the forest, and made them hardy woodsmen and skilful bush-fighters, though turbulent and lawless members of civilized society. Time, the decline of the fur-trade, and the influence of the Canadian Church gradually diminished this erratic spirit, and at the same time impaired the qualities that were associated with it. The Canadian became a more stable colonist and a steadier farmer; but for forest journeyings and forest warfare he was scarcely his former self. At the middle of the eighteenth century we find complaints that the race of voyageurs is growing scarce. The taming process was most apparent in the central and lower parts of[Pg 348] the colony, such as the C?te de Beaupré and the opposite shore of the St. Lawrence, where the hands of the government and of the Church were strong; while at the head of the colony,—that is, about Montreal and its neighborhood,—which touched the primeval wilderness, an uncontrollable spirit of adventure still held its own. Here, at the beginning of the century, this spirit was as strong as it had ever been, and achieved a series of explorations and discoveries which revealed the plains of the Far West long before an Anglo-Saxon foot had pressed their soil. The expedition of one Le Sueur to what is now the State of Minnesota may be taken as the starting-point of these enterprises. Le Sueur had visited the country of the Sioux as early as 1683. He returned thither in 1689 with the famous voyageur Nicolas Perrot.[358] Four years later, Count Frontenac sent him to the Sioux country again. The declared purpose of the mission was to keep those fierce tribes at peace with their neighbors; but the governor's enemies declared that a contraband trade in beaver was the true object, and that Frontenac's secretary was to have half the profits.[359] Le Sueur returned after two years, bringing to Montreal a Sioux chief and his squaw,—the first of the tribe ever seen there. He then went to France, and represented to the court that he had built a fort at Lake Pepin, on the[Pg 349] upper Mississippi; that he was the only white man who knew the languages of that region; and that if the French did not speedily seize upon it, the English, who were already trading upon the Ohio, would be sure to do so. Thereupon he asked for the command of the upper Mississippi, with all its tributary waters, together with a monopoly of its fur-trade for ten years, and permission to work its mines, promising that if his petition were granted, he would secure the country to France without expense to the King. The commission was given him. He bought an outfit and sailed for Canada, but was captured by the English on the way. After the peace he returned to France and begged for a renewal of his commission. Leave was given him to work the copper and lead mines, but not to trade in beaver-skins. He now formed a company to aid him in his enterprise, on which a cry rose in Canada that under pretence of working mines he meant to trade in beaver,—which is very likely, since to bring lead and copper in bark canoes to Montreal from the Mississippi and Lake Superior would cost far more than the metal was worth. In consequence of this clamor his commission was revoked. Perhaps it was to compensate him for the outlays into which he had been drawn that the colonial minister presently authorized him to embark for Louisiana and pursue his enterprise with that infant colony, instead of Canada, as his base of operations. Thither, therefore, he went; and in April, 1700, set[Pg 350] out for the Sioux country with twenty-five men, in a small vessel of the kind called a "felucca," still used in the Mediterranean. Among the party was an adventurous youth named Penecaut, a ship-carpenter by trade, who had come to Louisiana with Iberville two years before, and who has left us an account of his voyage with Le Sueur.[360] The party slowly made their way, with sail and oar, against the muddy current of the Mississippi, till they reached the Arkansas, where they found an English trader from Carolina. On the tenth of June, spent with rowing, and half starved, they stopped to rest at a point fifteen leagues above the mouth of the Ohio. They had staved off famine with the buds and leaves of trees; but now, by good luck, one of them killed a bear, and, soon after, the Jesuit Limoges arrived from the neighboring mission of the Illinois, in a canoe well stored with provisions. Thus refreshed, they passed the mouth of the Missouri on the thirteenth of July, and soon after were met by three Canadians, who brought them a letter from the Jesuit Marest, warning them that the river was infested by war-parties. In fact, they presently saw seven canoes of Sioux warriors, bound against the Illinois; and not long after, five Canadians appeared, one of whom had been badly wounded in a recent encounter with a band of Outagamies, Sacs, and[Pg 351] Winnebagoes bound against the Sioux. To take one another's scalps had been for ages the absorbing business and favorite recreation of all these Western tribes. At or near the expansion of the Mississippi called Lake Pepin, the voyagers found a fort called Fort Perrot, after its builder;[361] and on an island near the upper end of the lake, another similar structure, built by Le Sueur himself on his last visit to the place. These forts were mere stockades, occupied from time to time by the roving fur-traders as their occasions required. Towards the end of September, Le Sueur and his followers reached the mouth of the St. Peter, which they ascended to Blue Earth River. Pushing a league up this stream, they found a spot well suited to their purpose, and here they built a fort, of which there was great need, for they were soon after joined by seven Canadian traders, plundered and stripped to the skin by the neighboring Sioux. Le Sueur named the new post Fort l'Huillier. It was a fence of pickets, enclosing cabins for the men. The neighboring plains were black with buffalo, of which the party killed four hundred, and cut them into quarters,[Pg 352] which they placed to freeze on scaffolds within the enclosure. Here they spent the winter, subsisting on the frozen meat, without bread, vegetables, or salt, and, according to Penecaut, thriving marvellously, though the surrounding wilderness was buried five feet deep in snow. Band after band of Sioux appeared, with their wolfish dogs and their sturdy and all-enduring squaws burdened with the heavy hide coverings of their teepees, or buffalo-skin tents. They professed friendship and begged for arms. Those of one band had blackened their faces in mourning for a dead chief, and calling on Le Sueur to share their sorrow, they wept over him, and wiped their tears on his hair. Another party of warriors arrived with yet deeper cause of grief, being the remnant of a village half exterminated by their enemies. They, too, wept profusely over the French commander, and then sang a dismal song, with heads muffled in their buffalo-robes.[362] Le Sueur took the needful precautions against his dangerous visitors, but got from them a large supply of beaver-skins in exchange for his goods. When spring opened, he set out in search of mines, and found, not far above the fort, those beds of blue and green earth to which the stream owes its name. Of this his men dug out a large quantity, and selecting[Pg 353] what seemed the best, stored it in their vessel as a precious commodity. With this and good store of beaver-skins, Le Sueur now began his return voyage for Louisiana, leaving a Canadian named D'éraque and twelve men to keep the fort till he should come back to reclaim it, promising to send him a canoe-load of ammunition from the Illinois. But the canoe was wrecked, and D'éraque, discouraged, abandoned Fort l'Huillier, and followed his commander down the Mississippi.[363] Le Sueur, with no authority from government, had opened relations of trade with the wild Sioux of the Plains, whose westward range stretched to the Black Hills, and perhaps to the Rocky Mountains. He reached the settlements of Louisiana in safety, and sailed for France with four thousand pounds of his worthless blue earth.[364] Repairing at once to Versailles, he begged for help to continue his enterprise. His petition seems to have been granted. After long delay, he sailed again for Louisiana, fell ill on the voyage, and died soon after landing.[365] Before 1700, the year when Le Sueur visited the St. Peter, little or nothing was known of the country west of the Mississippi, except from the report of[Pg 354] Indians. The romances of La Hontan and Mathieu Sagean were justly set down as impostures by all but the most credulous. In this same year we find Le Moyne d'Iberville projecting journeys to the upper Missouri, in hopes of finding a river flowing to the Western Sea. In 1703, twenty Canadians tried to find their way from the Illinois to New Mexico, in hope of opening trade with the Spaniards and discovering mines.[366] In 1704 we find it reported that more than a hundred Canadians are scattered in small parties along the Mississippi and the Missouri;[367] and in 1705 one Laurain appeared at the Illinois, declaring that he had been high up the Missouri and had visited many tribes on its borders.[368] A few months later, two Canadians told Bienville a similar story. In 1708 Nicolas de la Salle proposed an expedition of a hundred men to explore the same mysterious river; and in 1717 one Hubert laid before the Council of Marine a scheme for following the Missouri to its source, since, he says, "not only may we find the mines worked by the Spaniards, but also discover the great river that is said to rise in the mountains where the Missouri has its source, and is believed to flow to the Western Sea." And he advises that a hundred and fifty men be sent up the[Pg 355] river in wooden canoes, since bark canoes would be dangerous, by reason of the multitude of snags.[369] In 1714 Juchereau de Saint-Denis was sent by La Mothe-Cadillac to explore western Louisiana, and pushed up Red River to a point sixty-eight leagues, as he reckons, above Natchitoches. In the next year, journeying across country towards the Spanish settlements, with a view to trade, he was seized near the Rio Grande and carried to the city of Mexico. The Spaniards, jealous of French designs, now sent priests and soldiers to occupy several points in Texas. Juchereau, however, was well treated, and permitted to marry a Spanish girl with whom he had fallen in love on the way; but when, in the autumn of 1716, he ventured another journey to the Mexican borders, still hoping to be allowed to trade, he and his goods were seized by order of the Mexican viceroy, and, lest worse should befall him, he fled empty-handed, under cover of night.[370] In March, 1719, Bénard de la Harpe left the feeble little French post at Natchitoches with six soldiers and a sergeant.[371] His errand was to explore the country, open trade if possible with the Spaniards, and establish another post high up Red River. He and his party soon came upon that vast entanglement[Pg 356] of driftwood, or rather of uprooted forests, afterwards known as the Red River raft, which choked the stream and forced them to make their way through the inundated jungle that bordered it. As they pushed or dragged their canoes through the swamp, they saw with disgust and alarm a good number of snakes, coiled about twigs and boughs on the right and left, or sometimes over their heads. These were probably the deadly water-moccason, which in warm weather is accustomed to crawl out of its favorite element and bask itself in the sun, precisely as described by La Harpe. Their nerves were further discomposed by the splashing and plunging of alligators lately wakened from their wintry torpor. Still, they pushed painfully on, till they reached navigable water again, and at the end of the month were, as they thought, a hundred and eight leagues above Natchitoches. In four days more they reached the Nassonites. These savages belonged to a group of stationary tribes, only one of which, the Caddoes, survives to our day as a separate community. Their enemies, the Chickasaws, Osages, Arkansas, and even the distant Illinois, waged such deadly war against them that, according to La Harpe, the unfortunate Nassonites were in the way of extinction, their numbers having fallen, within ten years, from twenty-five hundred souls to four hundred.[372] La Harpe stopped among them to refresh his men,[Pg 357] and build a house of cypress-wood as a beginning of the post he was ordered to establish; then, having heard that a war with Spain had ruined his hopes of trade with New Mexico, he resolved to pursue his explorations. With him went ten men, white, red, and black, with twenty-two horses bought from the Indians, for his journeyings were henceforth to be by land. The party moved in a northerly and westerly course, by hills, forests, and prairies, passed two branches of the Wichita, and on the third of September came to a river which La Harpe calls the southwest branch of the Arkansas, but which, if his observation of latitude is correct, must have been the main stream, not far from the site of Fort Mann. Here he was met by seven Indian chiefs, mounted on excellent horses saddled and bridled after the Spanish manner. They led him to where, along the plateau of the low, treeless hills that bordered the valley, he saw a string of Indian villages, extending for a league and belonging to nine several bands, the names of which can no longer be recognized, and most of which are no doubt extinct. He says that they numbered in all six thousand souls; and their dwellings were high, dome-shaped structures, built of clay mixed with reeds and straw, resting, doubtless, on a frame of bent poles.[Pg 358][373] With them were also some of the roving Indians of the plains, with their conical teepees of dressed buffalo-skin. The arrival of the strangers was a great and amazing event for these savages, few of whom had ever seen a white man. On the day after their arrival the whole multitude gathered to receive them and offer them the calumet, with a profusion of songs and speeches. Then warrior after warrior recounted his exploits and boasted of the scalps he had taken. From eight in the morning till two hours after midnight the din of drums, songs, harangues, and dances continued without relenting, with a prospect of twelve hours more; and La Harpe, in desperation, withdrew to rest himself on a buffalo-robe, begging another Frenchman to take his place. His hosts left him in peace for a while; then the chiefs came to find him, painted his face blue, as a tribute of respect, put a cap of eagle-feathers on his head, and laid numerous gifts at his feet. When at last the ceremony ended, some of the performers were so hoarse from incessant singing that they could hardly speak.[374] La Harpe was told by his hosts that the Spanish settlements could be reached by ascending their river; but to do this was at present impossible. He began his backward journey, fell desperately ill of a fever, and nearly died before reaching Natchitoches. [Pg 359]Having recovered, he made an attempt, two years later, to explore the Arkansas in canoes, from its mouth, but accomplished little besides killing a good number of buffalo, bears, deer, and wild turkeys. He was confirmed, however, in the belief that the Comanches and the Spaniards of New Mexico might be reached by this route. In the year of La Harpe's first exploration, one Du Tisné went up the Missouri to a point six leagues above Grand River, where stood the village of the Missouris. He wished to go farther, but they would not let him. He then returned to the Illinois, whence he set out on horseback with a few followers across what is now the State of Missouri, till he reached the village of the Osages, which stood on a hill high up the river Osage. At first he was well received; but when they found him disposed to push on to a town of their enemies, the Pawnees, forty leagues distant, they angrily refused to let him go. His firmness and hardihood prevailed, and at last they gave him leave. A ride of a few days over rich prairies brought him to the Pawnees, who, coming as he did from the hated Osages, took him for an enemy and threatened to kill him. Twice they raised the tomahawk over his head; but when the intrepid traveller dared them to strike, they began to treat him as a friend. When, however, he told them that he meant to go fifteen days' journey farther, to the Padoucas, or Comanches, their deadly enemies, they fiercely forbade him; and after planting a French flag in their[Pg 360] village, he returned as he had come, guiding his way by compass, and reaching the Illinois in November, after extreme hardships.[375] Early in 1721 two hundred mounted Spaniards, followed by a large body of Comanche warriors, came from New Mexico to attack the French at the Illinois, but were met and routed on the Missouri by tribes of that region.[376] In the next year, Bienville was told that they meant to return, punish those who had defeated them, and establish a post on the river Kansas; whereupon he ordered Boisbriant, commandant at the Illinois, to anticipate them by sending troops to build a French fort at or near the same place. But the West India Company had already sent one Bourgmont on a similar errand, the object being to trade with the Spaniards in time of peace, and stop their incursions in time of war.[377] It was hoped also that, in the interest of trade, peace might be made between the Comanches and the tribes of the Missouri.[378] Bourgmont was a man of some education, and well acquainted with these tribes, among whom he had[Pg 361] traded for years. In pursuance of his orders he built a fort, which he named Fort Orléans, and which stood on the Missouri not far above the mouth of Grand River. Having thus accomplished one part of his mission, he addressed himself to the other, and prepared to march for the Comanche villages. Leaving a sufficient garrison at the fort, he sent his ensign, Saint-Ange, with a party of soldiers and Canadians, in wooden canoes, to the villages of the Kansas higher up the stream, and on the third of July set out by land to join him, with a hundred and nine Missouri Indians and sixty-eight Osages in his train. A ride of five days brought him again to the banks of the Missouri, opposite a Kansas town. Saint-Ange had not yet arrived, the angry and turbid current, joined to fevers among his men, having retarded his progress. Meanwhile Bourgmont drew from the Kansas a promise that their warriors should go with him to the Comanches. Saint-Ange at last appeared, and at daybreak of the twenty-fourth the tents were struck and the pack-horses loaded. At six o'clock the party drew up in battle array on a hill above the Indian town, and then, with drum beating and flag flying, began their march. "A fine prairie country," writes Bourgmont, "with hills and dales and clumps of trees to right and left." Sometimes the landscape quivered under the sultry sun, and sometimes thunder bellowed over their heads, and rain fell in floods on the steaming plains. [Pg 362]Renaudière, engineer of the party, one day stood by the side of the path and watched the whole procession as it passed him. The white men were about twenty in all. He counted about three hundred Indian warriors, with as many squaws, some five hundred children, and a prodigious number of dogs, the largest and strongest of which dragged heavy loads. The squaws also served as beasts of burden; and, says the journal, "they will carry as much as a dog will drag." Horses were less abundant among these tribes than they afterwards became, so that their work fell largely upon the women. On the sixth day the party was within three leagues of the river Kansas, at a considerable distance above its mouth. Bourgmont had suffered from dysentery on the march, and an access of the malady made it impossible for him to go farther. It is easy to conceive the regret with which he saw himself compelled to return to Fort Orléans. The party retraced their steps, carrying their helpless commander on a litter. First, however, he sent one Gaillard on a perilous errand. Taking with him two Comanche slaves bought for the purpose from the Kansas, Gaillard was ordered to go to the Comanche villages with the message that Bourgmont had been on his way to make them a friendly visit, and, though stopped by illness, hoped soon to try again, with better success. Early in September, Bourgmont, who had arrived[Pg 363] safely at Fort Orléans, received news that the mission of Gaillard had completely succeeded; on which, though not wholly recovered from his illness, he set out again on his errand of peace, accompanied by his young son, besides Renaudière, a surgeon, and nine soldiers. On reaching the great village of the Kansas he found there five Comanche chiefs and warriors, whom Gaillard had induced to come thither with him. Seven chiefs of the Otoes presently appeared, in accordance with an invitation of Bourgmont; then six chiefs of the Iowas and the head chief of the Missouris. With these and the Kansas chiefs a solemn council was held around a fire before Bourgmont's tent; speeches were made, the pipe of peace was smoked, and presents were distributed. On the eighth of October the march began, the five Comanches and the chiefs of several other tribes, including the Omahas, joining the cavalcade. Gaillard and another Frenchman named Quesnel were sent in advance to announce their approach to the Comanches, while Bourgmont and his followers moved up the north side of the river Kansas till the eleventh, when they forded it at a point twenty leagues from its mouth, and took a westward and southwestward course, sometimes threading the grassy valleys of little streams, sometimes crossing the dry upland prairie, covered with the short, tufted dull-green herbage since known as "buffalo grass." Wild turkeys clamored along every watercourse; deer were seen on all sides, buffalo were without number,[Pg 364] sometimes in grazing droves, and sometimes dotting the endless plain as far as the eye could reach. Ruffian wolves, white and gray, eyed the travellers askance, keeping a safe distance by day, and howling about the camp all night. Of the antelope and the elk the journal makes no mention. Bourgmont chased a buffalo on horseback and shot him with a pistol,—which is probably the first recorded example of that way of hunting. The stretches of high, rolling, treeless prairie grew more vast as the travellers advanced. On the seventeenth, they found an abandoned Comanche camp. On the next day as they stopped to dine, and had just unsaddled their horses, they saw a distant smoke towards the west, on which they set the dry grass on fire as an answering signal. Half an hour later a body of wild horsemen came towards them at full speed, and among them were their two couriers, Gaillard and Quesnel, waving a French flag. The strangers were eighty Comanche warriors, with the grand chief of the tribe at their head. They dashed up to Bourgmont's bivouac and leaped from their horses, when a general shaking of hands ensued, after which white men and red seated themselves on the ground and smoked the pipe of peace. Then all rode together to the Comanche camp, three leagues distant.[379] [Pg 365]Bourgmont pitched his tents at a pistol-shot from the Comanche lodges, whence a crowd of warriors presently came to visit him. They spread buffalo-robes on the ground, placed upon them the French commander, his officers, and his young son; then lifted each, with its honored load, and carried them all, with yells of joy and gratulation, to the lodge of the Great Chief, where there was a feast of ceremony lasting till nightfall. On the next day Bourgmont displayed to his hosts the marvellous store of gifts he had brought for them,—guns, swords, hatchets, kettles, gunpowder, bullets, red cloth, blue cloth, hand-mirrors, knives, shirts, awls, scissors, needles, hawks' bells, vermilion, beads, and other enviable commodities, of the like of which they had never dreamed. Two hundred savages gathered before the French tents, where Bourgmont, with the gifts spread on the ground before him, stood with a French flag in his hand, surrounded by his officers and the Indian chiefs of his party, and harangued the admiring auditors. He told them that he had come to bring them a message from the King, his master, who was the Great Chief of all the nations of the earth, and whose will it was that the Comanches should live in peace with his other children,—the Missouris, Osages, Kansas, Otoes, Omahas, and Pawnees,—with whom[Pg 366] they had long been at war; that the chiefs of these tribes were now present, ready to renounce their old enmities; that the Comanches should henceforth regard them as friends, share with them the blessing of alliance and trade with the French, and give to these last free passage through their country to trade with the Spaniards of New Mexico. Bourgmont then gave the French flag to the Great Chief, to be kept forever as a pledge of that day's compact. The chief took the flag, and promised in behalf of his people to keep peace inviolate with the Indian children of the King. Then, with unspeakable delight, he and his tribesmen took and divided the gifts. The next two days were spent in feasts and rejoicings. "Is it true that you are men?" asked the Great Chief. "I have heard wonders of the French, but I never could have believed what I see this day." Then, taking up a handful of earth, "The Spaniards are like this; but you are like the sun." And he offered Bourgmont, in case of need, the aid of his two thousand Comanche warriors. The pleasing manners of his visitors, and their unparalleled generosity, had completely won his heart. As the object of the expedition was accomplished, or seemed to be so, the party set out on their return. A ride of ten days brought them again to the Missouri; they descended in canoes to Fort Orléans, and sang Te Deum in honor of the peace.[380] [Pg 367]No farther discovery in this direction was made for the next fifteen years. Though the French had explored the Missouri as far as the site of Fort Clark and the Mandan villages, they were possessed by the idea—due, perhaps, to Indian reports concerning the great tributary river, the Yellowstone—that in its upper course the main stream bent so far southward as to form a waterway to New Mexico, with which it was the constant desire of the authorities of Louisiana to open trade. A way thither was at last made known by two brothers named Mallet, who with six companions went up the Platte to its South Fork, which they called River of the Padoucas,—a name given it on some maps down to the middle of this century. They followed the South Fork for some distance, and then, turning southward and southwestward, crossed the plains of Colorado. Here the dried dung of the buffalo was their only fuel; and it has continued to feed the camp-fire of the traveller in this treeless region within the memory of many now living. They crossed the upper Arkansas, and apparently the Cimarron, passed Taos, and on the twenty-second of July reached Santa Fé, where they spent the winter. On the first of May, 1740, they began their return journey, three of them crossing the plains to the Pawnee villages, and the rest descending the Arkansas to the Mississippi.[381] [Pg 368]The bold exploit of the brothers Mallet attracted great attention at New Orleans, and Bienville resolved to renew it, find if possible a nearer and better way to Santa Fé, determine the nature and extent of these mysterious western regions, and satisfy a lingering doubt whether they were not contiguous to China and Tartary.[382] A naval officer, Fabry de la Bruyère, was sent on this errand, with the brothers Mallet and a few soldiers and Canadians. He ascended the Canadian Fork of the Arkansas, named by him the St. André, became entangled in the shallows and quicksands of that difficult river, fell into disputes with his men, and, after protracted efforts, returned unsuccessful.[383] While French enterprise was unveiling the remote Southwest, two indomitable Canadians were pushing still more noteworthy explorations into more northern regions of the continent. Part 7 PREFACE. The names on the titlepage stand as representative of the two nations whose final contest for the control of North America is the subject of the book. A very large amount of unpublished material has been used in its preparation, consisting for the most part of documents copied from the archives and libraries of France and England, especially from the Archives de la Marine et des Colonies, the Archives de la Guerre, and the Archives Nationales at Paris, and the Public Record Office and the British Museum at London. The papers copied for the present work in France alone exceed six thousand folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the "Paris Documents" procured for the State of New York under the agency of Mr. Brodhead. The copies made in England form ten volumes, besides many English documents consulted in the original manuscript. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on this side of the Atlantic. viii V1 I owe to the kindness of the present Marquis de Montcalm the permission to copy all the letters written by his ancestor, General Montcalm, when in America, to members of his family in France. General Montcalm, from his first arrival in Canada to a few days before his death, also carried on an active correspondence with one of his chief officers, Bourlamaque, with whom he was on terms of intimacy. These autograph letters are now preserved in a private collection. I have examined them, and obtained copies of the whole. They form an interesting complement to the official correspondence of the writer, and throw the most curious side-lights on the persons and events of the time. Besides manuscripts, the printed matter in the form of books, pamphlets, contemporary newspapers, and other publications relating to the American part of the Seven Years' War, is varied and abundant; and I believe I may safely say that nothing in it of much consequence has escaped me. The liberality of some of the older States of the union, especially New York and Pennsylvania, in printing the voluminous records of their colonial history, has saved me a deal of tedious labor. The whole of this published and unpublished mass of evidence has been read and collated with extreme care, and more than common pains have ix V1 been taken to secure accuracy of statement. The study of books and papers, however, could not alone answer the purpose. The plan of the work was formed in early youth; and though various causes have long delayed its execution, it has always been kept in view. Meanwhile, I have visited and examined every spot where events of any importance in connection with the contest took place, and have observed with attention such scenes and persons as might help to illustrate those I meant to describe. In short, the subject has been studied as much from life and in the open air as at the library table. These two volumes are a departure from chronological sequence. The period between 1700 and 1748 has been passed over for a time. When this gap is filled, the series of "France and England in North America" will form a continuous history of the French occupation of the continent. The portrait in the first volume is from a photograph of the original picture in possession of the Marquis de Montcalm; that in the second, from a photograph of the original picture in possession of Admiral Warde. Boston, Sept. 16, 1884.. INTRODUCTION. It is the nature of great events to obscure the great events that came before them. The Seven Years War in Europe is seen but dimly through revolutionary convulsions and Napoleonic tempests; and the same contest in America is half lost to sight behind the storm-cloud of the War of Independence. Few at this day see the momentous issues involved in it, or the greatness of the danger that it averted. The strife that armed all the civilized world began here. "Such was the complication of political interests," says Voltaire, "that a cannon-shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe in a blaze." Not quite. It was not a cannon-shot, but a volley from the hunting-pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by a Virginian youth, George Washington. To us of this day, the result of the American part of the war seems a foregone conclusion. It was far from being so; and very far from being so regarded by our forefathers. The numerical superiority of the British colonies was offset by organic weaknesses fatal to vigorous and united action. Nor at the outset did they, or the mother-country, 2 V1 aim at conquering Canada, but only at pushing back her boundaries. Canada—using the name in its restricted sense—was a position of great strength; and even when her dependencies were overcome, she could hold her own against forces far superior. Armies could reach her only by three routes,—the Lower St. Lawrence on the east, the Upper St. Lawrence on the west, and Lake Champlain on the south. The first access was guarded by a fortress almost impregnable by nature, and the second by a long chain of dangerous rapids; while the third offered a series of points easy to defend. During this same war, Frederic of Prussia held his ground triumphantly against greater odds, though his kingdom was open on all sides to attack. It was the fatuity of Louis XV. and his Pompadour that made the conquest of Canada possible. Had they not broken the traditionary policy of France, allied themselves to Austria, her ancient enemy, and plunged needlessly into the European war, the whole force of the kingdom would have been turned, from the first, to the humbling of England and the defence of the French colonies. The French soldiers left dead on inglorious Continental battle-fields could have saved Canada, and perhaps made good her claim to the vast territories of the West. But there were other contingencies. The possession of Canada was a question of diplomacy as well as of war. If England conquered her, she might restore her, as she had lately restored Cape 3 V1 Breton. She had an interest in keeping France alive on the American continent. More than one clear eye saw, at the middle of the last century, that the subjection of Canada would lead to a revolt of the British colonies. So long as an active and enterprising enemy threatened their borders, they could not break with the mother-country, because they needed her help. And if the arms of France had prospered in the other hemisphere; if she had gained in Europe or Asia territories with which to buy back what she had lost in America, then, in all likelihood, Canada would have passed again into her hands. The most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent was: Shall France remain here, or shall she not? If, by diplomacy or war, she had preserved but the half, or less than the half, of her American possessions, then a barrier would have been set to the spread of the English-speaking races; there would have been no Revolutionary War; and for a long time, at least, no independence. It was not a question of scanty populations strung along the banks of the St. Lawrence; it was—or under a government of any worth it would have been—a question of the armies and generals of France. America owes much to the imbecility of Louis XV. and the ambitious vanity and personal dislikes of his mistress. The Seven Years War made England what she is. It crippled the commerce of her rival, ruined France in two continents, and blighted her as a 4 V1 colonial power. It gave England the control of the seas and the mastery of North America and India, made her the first of commercial nations, and prepared that vast colonial system that has planted new Englands in every quarter of the globe. And while it made England what she is, it supplied to the United States the indispensable condition of their greatness, if not of their national existence. Before entering on the story of the great contest, we will look at the parties to it on both sides of the Atlantic. CHAPTER I. 1745-1755. THE COMBATANTS. England in the Eighteenth Century ? Her Political and Social Aspects ? Her Military Condition ? France ? Her Power and Importance ? Signs of Decay ? The Court, the Nobles, the Clergy, the People ? The King and Pompadour ? The Philosophers ? Germany ? Prussia ? Frederic II ? Russia ? State of Europe ? War of the Austrian Succession ? American Colonies of France and England ? Contrasted Systems and their Results ? Canada ? Its Strong Military Position ? French Claims to the Continent ? British Colonies ? New England ? Virginia ? Pennsylvania ? New York ? Jealousies, Divisions, Internal Disputes, Military Weakness. The latter half of the reign of George II. was one of the most prosaic periods in English history. The civil wars and the Restoration had had their enthusiasms, religion and liberty on one side, and loyalty on the other; but the old fires declined when William III. came to the throne, and died to ashes under the House of Hanover. Loyalty lost half its inspiration when it lost the tenet of the divine right of kings; and nobody could now hold that tenet with any consistency except the defeated and despairing Jacobites. Nor had anybody as yet proclaimed the rival dogma of the divine right of the people. The reigning 6 V1 monarch held his crown neither of God nor of the nation, but of a parliament controlled by a ruling class. The Whig aristocracy had done a priceless service to English liberty. It was full of political capacity, and by no means void of patriotism; but it was only a part of the national life. Nor was it at present moved by political emotions in any high sense. It had done its great work when it expelled the Stuarts and placed William of Orange on the throne; its ascendency was now complete. The Stuarts had received their death-blow at Culloden; and nothing was left to the dominant party but to dispute on subordinate questions, and contend for office among themselves. The Troy squires sulked in their country-houses, hunted foxes, and grumbled against the reigning dynasty; yet hardly wished to see the nation convulsed by a counter-revolution and another return of the Stuarts. If politics had run to commonplace, so had morals; and so too had religion. Despondent writers of the day even complained that British courage had died out. There was little sign to the common eye that under a dull and languid surface, forces were at work preparing a new life, material, moral, and intellectual. As yet, Whitefield and Wesley had not wakened the drowsy conscience of the nation, nor the voice of William Pitt roused it like a trumpet-peal. It was the unwashed and unsavory England of Hogarth, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; of Tom Jones, Squire Western, Lady Bellaston, and Parson Adams; of the "Rake's Progress" and "Marriage 7 V1 à la Mode;" of the lords and ladies who yet live in the undying gossip of Horace Walpole, be-powdered, be-patched, and be-rouged, flirting at masked balls, playing cards till daylight, retailing scandal, and exchanging double meanings. Beau Nash reigned king over the gaming-tables of Bath; the ostrich-plumes of great ladies mingled with the peacock-feathers of courtesans in the rotunda at Ranelagh Gardens; and young lords in velvet suits and embroidered ruffles played away their patrimony at White's Chocolate-House or Arthur's Club. Vice was bolder than to-day, and manners more courtly, perhaps, but far more coarse. The humbler clergy were thought—sometimes with reason—to be no fit company for gentlemen, and country parsons drank their ale in the squire's kitchen. The passenger-wagon spent the better part of a fortnight in creeping from London to York. Travellers carried pistols against footpads and mounted highwaymen. Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard were popular heroes. Tyburn counted its victims by scores; and as yet no Howard had appeared to reform the inhuman abominations of the prisons. The middle class, though fast rising in importance, was feebly and imperfectly represented in parliament. The boroughs were controlled by the nobility and gentry, or by corporations open to influence or bribery. Parliamentary corruption had been reduced to a system; and offices, sinecures, pensions, and gifts of money were freely used to keep ministers in power. The great offices of state 8 V1 were held by men sometimes of high ability, but of whom not a few divided their lives among politics, cards, wine, horse-racing, and women, till time and the gout sent them to the waters of Bath. The dull, pompous, and irascible old King had two ruling passions,—money, and his Continental dominions of Hanover. His elder son, the Prince of Wales, was a centre of opposition to him. His younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, a character far more pronounced and vigorous, had won the day at Culloden, and lost it at Fontenoy; but whether victor or vanquished, had shown the same vehement bull-headed courage, of late a little subdued by fast growing corpulency. The Duke of Newcastle, the head of the government, had gained power and kept it by his rank and connections, his wealth, his county influence, his control of boroughs, and the extraordinary assiduity and devotion with which he practised the arts of corruption. Henry Fox, grasping, unscrupulous, with powerful talents, a warm friend after his fashion, and a most indulgent father; Carteret, with his strong, versatile intellect and jovial intrepidity; the two Townshends, Mansfield, Halifax, and Chesterfield,—were conspicuous figures in the politics of the time. One man towered above them all. Pitt had many enemies and many critics. They called him ambitious, audacious, arrogant, theatrical, pompous, domineering; but what he has left for posterity is a loftiness of soul, undaunted courage, fiery and passionate eloquence, proud incorruptibility, domestic virtues rare in his day, 9 V1 unbounded faith in the cause for which he stood, and abilities which without wealth or strong connections were destined to place him on the height of power. The middle class, as yet almost voiceless, looked to him as its champion; but he was not the champion of a class. His patriotism was as comprehensive as it was haughty and unbending. He lived for England, loved her with intense devotion, knew her, believed in her, and made her greatness his own; or rather, he was himself England incarnate. The nation was not then in fighting equipment. After the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the army within the three kingdoms had been reduced to about eighteen thousand men. Added to these were the garrisons of Minorca and Gibraltar, and six or seven independent companies in the American colonies. Of sailors, less than seventeen thousand were left in the Royal Navy. Such was the condition of England on the eve of one of the most formidable wars in which she was ever engaged. Her rival across the Channel was drifting slowly and unconsciously towards the cataclysm of the Revolution; yet the old monarchy, full of the germs of decay, was still imposing and formidable. The House of Bourbon held the three thrones of France, Spain, and Naples; and their threatened union in a family compact was the terror of European diplomacy. At home France was the foremost of the Continental nations; and she boasted herself second only to Spain as a colonial power. 10 V1 She disputed with England the mastery of India, owned the islands of Bourbon and Mauritius, held important possessions in the West Indies, and claimed all North America except Mexico and a strip of sea-coast. Her navy was powerful, her army numerous, and well appointed; but she lacked the great commanders of the last reign. Soubise, Maillebois, Contades, Broglie, and Clermont were but weak successors of Condé, Turenne, Vend?me, and Villars. Marshal Richelieu was supreme in the arts of gallantry, and more famous for conquests of love than of war. The best generals of Louis XV. were foreigners. Lowendal sprang from the royal house of Denmark; and Saxe, the best of all, was one of the three hundred and fifty-four bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. He was now, 1750, dying at Chambord, his iron constitution ruined by debaucheries. The triumph of the Bourbon monarchy was complete. The government had become one great machine of centralized administration, with a king for its head; though a king who neither could nor would direct it. All strife was over between the Crown and the nobles; feudalism was robbed of its vitality, and left the mere image of its former self, with nothing alive but its abuses, its caste privileges, its exactions, its pride and vanity, its power to vex and oppress. In England, the nobility were a living part of the nation, and if they had privileges, they paid for them by constant service to the state; in France, they had no political life, 11 V1 and were separated from the people by sharp lines of demarcation. From warrior chiefs, they had changed to courtiers. Those of them who could afford it, and many who could not, left their estates to the mercy of stewards, and gathered at Versailles to revolve about the throne as glittering satellites, paid in pomp, empty distinctions, or rich sinecures, for the power they had lost. They ruined their vassals to support the extravagance by which they ruined themselves. Such as stayed at home were objects of pity and scorn. "Out of your Majesty's presence," said one of them, "we are not only wretched, but ridiculous." Versailles was like a vast and gorgeous theatre, where all were actors and spectators at once; and all played their parts to perfection. Here swarmed by thousands this silken nobility, whose ancestors rode cased in iron. Pageant followed pageant. A picture of the time preserves for us an evening in the great hall of the Chateau, where the King, with piles of louis d'or before him, sits at a large oval green table, throwing the dice, among princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, ambassadors, marshals of France, and a vast throng of courtiers, like an animated bed of tulips; for men and women alike wear bright and varied colors. Above are the frescos of Le Brun; around are walls of sculptured and inlaid marbles, with mirrors that reflect the restless splendors of the scene and the blaze of chandeliers, sparkling with crystal pendants. Pomp, magnificence, profusion, were a business and a duty at the Court. Versailles was a gulf 12 V1 into which the labor of France poured its earnings; and it was never full. Here the graces and charms were a political power. Women had prodigious influence, and the two sexes were never more alike. Men not only dressed in colors, but they wore patches and carried muffs. The robust qualities of the old nobility still lingered among the exiles of the provinces, while at Court they had melted into refinements tainted with corruption. Yet if the butterflies of Versailles had lost virility, they had not lost courage. They fought as gayly as they danced. In the halls which they haunted of yore, turned now into a historical picture-gallery, one sees them still, on the canvas of Lenfant, Lepaon, or Vernet, facing death with careless gallantry, in their small three-cornered hats, powdered perukes, embroidered coats, and lace ruffles. Their valets served them with ices in the trenches, under the cannon of besieged towns. A troop of actors formed part of the army-train of Marshal Saxe. At night there was a comedy, a ballet, or a ball, and in the morning a battle. Saxe, however, himself a sturdy German, while he recognized their fighting value, and knew well how to make the best of it, sometimes complained that they were volatile, excitable, and difficult to manage. The weight of the Court, with its pomps, luxuries, and wars, bore on the classes least able to support it. The poorest were taxed most; the richest not at all. The nobles, in the main, were free from imposts. The clergy, who had vast possessions, 13 V1 were wholly free, though they consented to make voluntary gifts to the Crown; and when, in a time of emergency, the minister Machault required them, in common with all others hitherto exempt, to contribute a twentieth of their revenues to the charges of government, they passionately refused, declaring that they would obey God rather than the King. The cultivators of the soil were ground to the earth by a threefold extortion,—the seigniorial dues, the tithes of the Church, and the multiplied exactions of the Crown, enforced with merciless rigor by the farmers of the revenue, who enriched themselves by wringing the peasant on the one hand, and cheating the King on the other. A few great cities shone with all that is most brilliant in society, intellect, and concentrated wealth; while the country that paid the costs lay in ignorance and penury, crushed and despairing. Of the inhabitants of towns, too, the demands of the tax-gatherer were extreme; but here the immense vitality of the French people bore up the burden. While agriculture languished, and intolerable oppression turned peasants into beggars or desperadoes; while the clergy were sapped by corruption, and the nobles enervated by luxury and ruined by extravagance, the middle class was growing in thrift and strength. Arts and commerce prospered, and the seaports were alive with foreign trade. Wealth tended from all sides towards the centre. The King did not love his capital; but he and his favorites amused themselves with adorning it. Some of the chief embellishments 14 V1 that make Paris what it is to-day—the Place de la Concorde, the Champs élysées, and many of the palaces of the Faubourg St. Germain—date from this reign. One of the vicious conditions of the time was the separation in sympathies and interests of the four great classes of the nation,—clergy, nobles, burghers, and peasants; and each of these, again, divided itself into incoherent fragments. France was an aggregate of disjointed parts, held together by a meshwork of arbitrary power, itself touched with decay. A disastrous blow was struck at the national welfare when the Government of Louis XV. revived the odious persecution of the Huguenots. The attempt to scour heresy out of France cost her the most industrious and virtuous part of her population, and robbed her of those most fit to resist the mocking scepticism and turbid passions that burst out like a deluge with the Revolution. Her manifold ills were summed up in the King. Since the Valois, she had had no monarch so worthless. He did not want understanding, still less the graces of person. In his youth the people called him the "Well-beloved;" but by the middle of the century they so detested him that he dared not pass through Paris, lest the mob should execrate him. He had not the vigor of the true tyrant; but his langour, his hatred of all effort, his profound selfishness, his listless disregard of public duty, and his effeminate libertinism, mixed with superstitious devotion, made him no less a national curse. Louis XIII. was equally unfit 15 V1 to govern; but he gave the reins to the Great Cardinal. Louis XV. abandoned them to a frivolous mistress, content that she should rule on condition of amusing him. It was a hard task; yet Madame de Pompadour accomplished it by methods infamous to him and to her. She gained and long kept the power that she coveted: filled the Bastille with her enemies; made and unmade ministers; appointed and removed generals. Great questions of policy were at the mercy of her caprices. Through her frivolous vanity, her personal likes and dislikes, all the great departments of government—army, navy, war, foreign affairs, justice, finance—changed from hand to hand incessantly, and this at a time of crisis when the kingdom needed the steadiest and surest guidance. Few of the officers of state, except, perhaps, D'Argenson, could venture to disregard her. She turned out Orry, the comptroller-general, put her favorite, Machault, into his place, then made him keeper of the seals, and at last minister of marine. The Marquis de Puysieux, in the ministry of foreign affairs, and the Comte de St.-Florentin, charged with the affairs of the clergy, took their cue from her. The King stinted her in nothing. First and last, she is reckoned to have cost him thirty-six million francs,—answering now to more than as many dollars. The prestige of the monarchy was declining with the ideas that had given it life and strength. A growing disrespect for king, ministry, and clergy was beginning to prepare the catastrophe that was 16 V1 still some forty years in the future. While the valleys and low places of the kingdom were dark with misery and squalor, its heights were bright with a gay society,—elegant, fastidious, witty,—craving the pleasures of the mind as well as of the senses, criticising everything, analyzing everything, believing nothing. Voltaire was in the midst of it, hating, with all his vehement soul, the abuses that swarmed about him, and assailing them with the inexhaustible shafts of his restless and piercing intellect. Montesquieu was showing to a despot-ridden age the principles of political freedom. Diderot and D'Alembert were beginning their revolutionary Encyclop?dia. Rousseau was sounding the first notes of his mad eloquence,—the wild revolt of a passionate and diseased genius against a world of falsities and wrongs. The salons of Paris, cloyed with other pleasures, alive to all that was racy and new, welcomed the pungent doctrines, and played with them as children play with fire, thinking no danger; as time went on, even embraced them in a genuine spirit of hope and good-will for humanity. The Revolution began at the top,—in the world of fashion, birth, and intellect,—and propagated itself downwards. "We walked on a carpet of flowers," Count Ségur afterwards said, "unconscious that it covered an abyss;" till the gulf yawned at last, and swallowed them. Eastward, beyond the Rhine, lay the heterogeneous patchwork of the Holy Roman, or Germanic, 17 V1 Empire. The sacred bonds that throughout the Middle Ages had held together its innumerable fragments, had lost their strength. The Empire decayed as a whole; but not so the parts that composed it. In the south the House of Austria reigned over a formidable assemblage of states; and in the north the House of Brandenburg, promoted to royalty half a century before, had raised Prussia into an importance far beyond her extent and population. In her dissevered rags of territory lay the destinies of Germany. It was the late King, that honest, thrifty, dogged, headstrong despot, Frederic William, who had made his kingdom what it was, trained it to the perfection of drill, and left it to his son, Frederic II. the best engine of war in Europe. Frederic himself had passed between the upper and nether millstones of paternal discipline. Never did prince undergo such an apprenticeship. His father set him to the work of an overseer, or steward, flung plates at his head in the family circle, thrashed him with his rattan in public, bullied him for submitting to such treatment, and imprisoned him for trying to run away from it. He came at last out of purgatory; and Europe felt him to her farthest bounds. This bookish, philosophizing, verse-making cynic and profligate was soon to approve himself the first warrior of his time, and one of the first of all time. Another power had lately risen on the European world. Peter the Great, half hero, half savage, had roused the inert barbarism of Russia into a 18 V1 titanic life. His daughter Elizabeth had succeeded to his throne,—heiress of his sensuality, if not of his talents. Over all the Continent the aspect of the times was the same. Power had everywhere left the plains and the lower slopes, and gathered at the summits. Popular life was at a stand. No great idea stirred the nations to their depths. The religious convulsions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were over, and the earthquake of the French Revolution had not begun. At the middle of the eighteenth century the history of Europe turned on the balance of power; the observance of treaties; inheritance and succession; rivalries of sovereign houses struggling to win power or keep it, encroach on neighbors, or prevent neighbors from encroaching; bargains, intrigue, force, diplomacy, and the musket, in the interest not of peoples but of rulers. Princes, great and small, brooded over some real or fancied wrong, nursed some dubious claim born of a marriage, a will, or an ancient covenant fished out of the abyss of time, and watched their moment to make it good. The general opportunity came when, in 1740, the Emperor Charles VI. died and bequeathed his personal dominions of the House of Austria to his daughter, Maria Theresa. The chief Powers of Europe had been pledged in advance to sustain the will; and pending the event, the veteran Prince Eugene had said that two hundred thousand soldiers would be worth all their 19 V1 guaranties together. The two hundred thousand were not there, and not a sovereign kept his word. They flocked to share the spoil, and parcel out the motley heritage of the young Queen. Frederic of Prussia led the way, invaded her province of Silesia, seized it, and kept it. The Elector of Bavaria and the King of Spain claimed their share, and the Elector of Saxony and the King of Sardinia prepared to follow the example. France took part with Bavaria, and intrigued to set the imperial crown on the head of the Elector, thinking to ruin her old enemy, the House of Austria, and rule Germany through an emperor too weak to dispense with her support. England, jealous of her designs, trembling for the balance of power, and anxious for the Hanoverian possessions of her king, threw herself into the strife on the side of Austria. It was now that, in the Diet at Presburg, the beautiful and distressed Queen, her infant in her arms, made her memorable appeal to the wild chivalry of her Hungarian nobles; and, clashing their swords, they shouted with one voice: "Let us die for our king, Maria Theresa;" Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria Theresia,—one of the most dramatic scenes in history; not quite true, perhaps, but near the truth. Then came that confusion worse confounded called the war of the Austrian Succession, with its Mollwitz, its Dettingen, its Fontenoy, and its Scotch episode of Culloden. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle closed the strife in 1748. Europe had time to breathe; but the germs of discord remained alive. 20 V1 The American Combatants The French claimed all America, from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains, and from Mexico and Florida to the North Pole, except only the ill-defined possessions of the English on the borders of Hudson Bay; and to these vast regions, with adjacent islands, they gave the general name of New France. They controlled the highways of the continent, for they held its two great rivers. First, they had seized the St. Lawrence, and then planted themselves at the mouth of the Mississippi. Canada at the north, and Louisiana at the south, were the keys of a boundless interior, rich with incalculable possibilities. The English colonies, ranged along the Atlantic coast, had no royal road to the great inland, and were, in a manner, shut between the mountains and the sea. At the middle of the century they numbered in all, from Georgia to Maine, about eleven hundred and sixty thousand white inhabitants. By the census of 1754 Canada had but fifty-five thousand.[1] Add those of Louisiana and Acadia, and the whole white population under the French flag might be something more than eighty thousand. Here is an enormous disparity; and hence it has been argued that the success of the English colonies and the failure of the French was not due to difference of religious and political systems, but 21 V1 simply to numerical preponderance. But this preponderance itself grew out of a difference of systems. We have said before, and it cannot be said too often, that in making Canada a citadel of the state religion,—a holy of holies of exclusive Roman Catholic orthodoxy,—the clerical monitors of the Crown robbed their country of a trans-Atlantic empire. New France could not grow with a priest on guard at the gate to let in none but such as pleased him. One of the ablest of Canadian governors, La Galissonière, seeing the feebleness of the colony compared with the vastness of its claims, advised the King to send ten thousand peasants to occupy the valley of the Ohio, and hold back the British swarm that was just then pushing its advance-guard over the Alleghanies. It needed no effort of the King to people his waste domain, not with ten thousand peasants, but with twenty times ten thousand Frenchmen of every station,—the most industrious, most instructed, most disciplined by adversity and capable of self-rule, that the country could boast. While La Galissonière was asking for colonists, the agents of the Crown, set on by priestly fanaticism, or designing selfishness masked with fanaticism, were pouring volleys of musketry into Huguenot congregations, imprisoning for life those innocent of all but their faith,—the men in the galleys, the women in the pestiferous dungeons of Aigues Mortes,—hanging their ministers, kidnapping their children, and reviving, in short, the dragonnades. Now, as in the past century, many 22 V1 of the victims escaped to the British colonies, and became a part of them. The Huguenots would have hailed as a boon the permission to emigrate under the fleur-de-lis, and build up a Protestant France in the valleys of the West. It would have been a bane of absolutism, but a national glory; would have set bounds to English colonization, and changed the face of the continent. The opportunity was spurned. The dominant Church clung to its policy of rule and ruin. France built its best colony on a principle of exclusion, and failed; England reversed the system, and succeeded. [1] Censuses of Canada, iv. 61. Rameau (La France aux Colonies, II. 81) estimates the Canadian population, in 1755, at sixty-six thousand, besides voyageurs, Indian traders, etc. Vaudreuil, in 1760, places it at seventy thousand. I have shown elsewhere the aspects of Canada, where a rigid scion of the old European tree was set to grow in the wilderness. The military Governor, holding his miniature Court on the rock of Quebec; the feudal proprietors, whose domains lined the shores of the St. Lawrence; the peasant; the roving bushranger; the half-tamed savage, with crucifix and scalping-knife; priests; friars; nuns; and soldiers,—mingled to form a society the most picturesque on the continent. What distinguished it from the France that produced it was a total absence of revolt against the laws of its being,—an absolute conservatism, an unquestioning acceptance of Church and King. The Canadian, ignorant of everything but what the priest saw fit to teach him, had never heard of Voltaire; and if he had known him, would have thought him a devil. He had, it is true, a spirit of insubordination born of the freedom of the forest; but if his instincts rebelled, his mind and soul 23 V1 were passively submissive. The unchecked control of a hierarchy robbed him of the independence of intellect and character, without which, under the conditions of modern life, a people must resign itself to a position of inferiority. Yet Canada had a vigor of her own. It was not in spiritual deference only that she differed from the country of her birth. Whatever she had caught of its corruptions, she had caught nothing of its effeminacy. The mass of her people lived in a rude poverty,—not abject, like the peasant of old France, nor ground down by the tax-gatherer; while those of the higher ranks—all more or less engaged in pursuits of war or adventure, and inured to rough journeyings and forest exposures—were rugged as their climate. Even the French regular troops, sent out to defend the colony, caught its hardy spirit, and set an example of stubborn fighting which their comrades at home did not always emulate. Canada lay ensconced behind rocks and forests. All along her southern boundaries, between her and her English foes, lay a broad tract of wilderness, shaggy with primeval woods. Innumerable streams gurgled beneath their shadows; innumerable lakes gleamed in the fiery sunsets; innumerable mountains bared their rocky foreheads to the wind. These wastes were ranged by her savage allies, Micmacs, Etechémins, Abenakis, Caughnawagas; and no enemy could steal upon her unawares. Through the midst of them stretched Lake Champlain, pointing straight to the heart of 24 V1 the British settlements,—a watery thoroughfare of mutual attack, and the only approach by which, without a long détour by wilderness or sea, a hostile army could come within striking distance of the colony. The French advanced post of Fort Frederic, called Crown Point by the English, barred the narrows of the lake, which thence spread northward to the portals of Canada guarded by Fort St. Jean. Southwestward, some fourteen hundred miles as a bird flies, and twice as far by the practicable routes of travel, was Louisiana, the second of the two heads of New France; while between lay the realms of solitude where the Mississippi rolled its sullen tide, and the Ohio wound its belt of silver through the verdant woodlands. To whom belonged this world of prairies and forests? France claimed it by right of discovery and occupation. It was her explorers who, after De Soto, first set foot on it. The question of right, it is true, mattered little; for, right or wrong, neither claimant would yield her pretensions so long as she had strength to uphold them; yet one point is worth a moment's notice. The French had established an excellent system in the distribution of their American lands. Whoever received a grant from the Crown was required to improve it, and this within reasonable time. If he did not, the land ceased to be his, and was given to another more able or industrious. An international extension of her own principle would have destroyed the pretensions of France to all the countries of the West. She had called them 25 V1 hers for three fourths of a century, and they were still a howling waste, yielding nothing to civilization but beaver-skins, with here and there a fort, trading-post, or mission, and three or four puny hamlets by the Mississippi and the Detroit. We have seen how she might have made for herself an indisputable title, and peopled the solitudes with a host to maintain it. She would not; others were at hand who both would and could; and the late claimant, disinherited and forlorn, would soon be left to count the cost of her bigotry. The thirteen British colonies were alike, insomuch as they all had representative governments, and a basis of English law. But the differences among them were great. Some were purely English; others were made up of various races, though the Anglo-Saxon was always predominant. Some had one prevailing religious creed; others had many creeds. Some had charters, and some had not. In most cases the governor was appointed by the Crown; in Pennsylvania and Maryland he was appointed by a feudal proprietor, and in Connecticut and Rhode Island he was chosen by the people. The differences of disposition and character were still greater than those of form. The four northern colonies, known collectively as New England, were an exception to the general rule of diversity. The smallest, Rhode Island, had features all its own; but the rest were substantially one in nature and origin. The principal among them, Massachusetts, may serve as the type 26 V1 of all. It was a mosaic of little village republics, firmly cemented together, and formed into a single body politic through representatives sent to the "General Court" at Boston. Its government, originally theocratic, now tended to democracy, ballasted as yet by strong traditions of respect for established worth and ability, as well as by the influence of certain families prominent in affairs for generations. Yet there were no distinct class-lines, and popular power, like popular education, was widely diffused. Practically Massachusetts was almost independent of the mother-country. Its people were purely English, of sound yeoman stock, with an abundant leaven drawn from the best of the Puritan gentry; but their original character had been somewhat modified by changed conditions of life. A harsh and exacting creed, with its stiff formalism and its prohibition of wholesome recreation; excess in the pursuit of gain,—the only resource left to energies robbed of their natural play; the struggle for existence on a hard and barren soil; and the isolation of a narrow village life,—joined to produce, in the meaner sort, qualities which were unpleasant, and sometimes repulsive. Puritanism was not an unmixed blessing. Its view of human nature was dark, and its attitude towards it one of repression. It strove to crush out not only what is evil, but much that is innocent and salutary. Human nature so treated will take its revenge, and for every vice that it loses find another instead. Nevertheless, while New England Puritanism bore its 27 V1 peculiar crop of faults, it produced also many good and sound fruits. An uncommon vigor, joined to the hardy virtues of a masculine race, marked the New England type. The sinews, it is true, were hardened at the expense of blood and flesh,—and this literally as well as figuratively; but the staple of character was a sturdy conscientiousness, an undespairing courage, patriotism, public spirit, sagacity, and a strong good sense. A great change, both for better and for worse, has since come over it, due largely to reaction against the unnatural rigors of the past. That mixture, which is now too common, of cool emotions with excitable brains, was then rarely seen. The New England colonies abounded in high examples of public and private virtue, though not always under the most prepossessing forms. They were conspicuous, moreover, for intellectual activity, and were by no means without intellectual eminence. Massachusetts had produced at least two men whose fame had crossed the sea,—Edwards, who out of the grim theology of Calvin mounted to sublime heights of mystical speculation; and Franklin, famous already by his discoveries in electricity. On the other hand, there were few genuine New Englanders who, however personally modest, could divest themselves of the notion that they belonged to a people in an especial manner the object of divine approval; and this self-righteousness, along with certain other traits, failed to commend the Puritan colonies to the favor of their fellows. Then, as now, New England was best known to her neighbors by her worst side. 28 V1 In one point, however, she found general applause. She was regarded as the most military among the British colonies. This reputation was well founded, and is easily explained. More than all the rest, she lay open to attack. The long waving line of the New England border, with its lonely hamlets and scattered farms, extended from the Kennebec to beyond the Connecticut, and was everywhere vulnerable to the guns and tomahawks of the neighboring French and their savage allies. The colonies towards the south had thus far been safe from danger. New York alone was within striking distance of the Canadian war-parties. That province then consisted of a line of settlements up the Hudson and the Mohawk, and was little exposed to attack except at its northern end, which was guarded by the fortified town of Albany, with its outlying posts, and by the friendly and warlike Mohawks, whose "castles" were close at hand. Thus New England had borne the heaviest brunt of the preceding wars, not only by the forest, but also by the sea; for the French of Acadia and Cape Breton confronted her coast, and she was often at blows with them. Fighting had been a necessity with her, and she had met the emergency after a method extremely defective, but the best that circumstances would permit. Having no trained officers and no disciplined soldiers, and being too poor to maintain either, she borrowed her warriors from the workshop and the plough, and officered them with lawyers, merchants, mechanics, or farmers. To compare them with good 29 V1 regular troops would be folly; but they did, on the whole, better than could have been expected, and in the last war achieved the brilliant success of the capture of Louisburg. This exploit, due partly to native hardihood and partly to good luck, greatly enhanced the military repute of New England, or rather was one of the chief sources of it. The great colony of Virginia stood in strong contrast to New England. In both the population was English; but the one was Puritan with Roundhead traditions, and the other, so far as concerned its governing class, Anglican with Cavalier traditions. In the one, every man, woman, and child could read and write; in the other, Sir William Berkeley once thanked God that there were no free schools, and no prospect of any for a century. The hope had found fruition. The lower classes of Virginia were as untaught as the warmest friend of popular ignorance could wish. New England had a native literature more than respectable under the circumstances, while Virginia had none; numerous industries, while Virginia was all agriculture, with but a single crop; a homogeneous society and a democratic spirit, while her rival was an aristocracy. Virginian society was distinctively stratified. On the lowest level were the negro slaves, nearly as numerous as all the rest together; next, the indented servants and the poor whites, of low origin, good-humored, but boisterous, and sometimes vicious; next, the small and despised class of tradesmen and mechanics; next, the farmers and lesser planters, who were mainly of good 30 English stock, and who merged insensibly into the ruling class of the great landowners. It was these last who represented the colony and made the laws. They may be described as English country squires transplanted to a warm climate and turned slave-masters. They sustained their position by entails, and constantly undermined it by the reckless profusion which ruined them at last. Many of them were well born, with an immense pride of descent, increased by the habit of domination. Indolent and energetic by turns; rich in natural gifts and often poor in book-learning, though some, in the lack of good teaching at home, had been bred in the English universities; high-spirited, generous to a fault; keeping open house in their capacious mansions, among vast tobacco-fields and toiling negroes, and living in a rude pomp where the fashions of St. James were somewhat oddly grafted on the roughness of the plantation,—what they wanted in schooling was supplied by an education which books alone would have been impotent to give, the education which came with the possession and exercise of political power, and the sense of a position to maintain, joined to a bold spirit of independence and a patriotic attachment to the Old Dominion. They were few in number; they raced, gambled, drank, and swore; they did everything that in Puritan eyes was most reprehensible; and in the day of need they gave the United Colonies a body of statesmen and orators which had no equal on the continent. A vigorous aristocracy favors the growth of personal eminence, even in those who are not of it, but only near it. 31 V1 The essential antagonism of Virginia and New England was afterwards to become, and to remain for a century, an element of the first influence in American history. Each might have learned much from the other; but neither did so till, at last, the strife of their contending principles shook the continent. Pennsylvania differed widely from both. She was a conglomerate of creeds and races,—English, Irish, Germans, Dutch, and Swedes; Quakers, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Romanists, Moravians, and a variety of nondescript sects. The Quakers prevailed in the eastern districts; quiet, industrious, virtuous, and serenely obstinate. The Germans were strongest towards the centre of the colony, and were chiefly peasants; successful farmers, but dull, ignorant, and superstitious. Towards the west were the Irish, of whom some were Celts, always quarrelling with their German neighbors, who detested them; but the greater part were Protestants of Scotch descent, from Ulster; a vigorous border population. Virginia and New England had each a strong distinctive character. Pennsylvania, with her heterogeneous population, had none but that which she owed to the sober neutral tints of Quaker existence. A more thriving colony there was not on the continent. Life, if monotonous, was smooth and contented. Trade and the arts grew. Philadelphia, next to Boston, was the largest town in British America; and was, moreover, the intellectual centre of the middle and southern colonies. Unfortunately, for her credit in the approaching 32 V1 war, the Quaker influence made Pennsylvania non-combatant. Politically, too, she was an anomaly; for, though utterly unfeudal in disposition and character, she was under feudal superiors in the persons of the representatives of William Penn, the original grantee. New York had not as yet reached the relative prominence which her geographical position and inherent strength afterwards gave her. The English, joined to the Dutch, the original settlers, were the dominant population; but a half-score of other languages were spoken in the province, the chief among them being that of the Huguenot French in the southern parts, and that of the Germans on the Mohawk. In religion, the province was divided between the Anglican Church, with government support and popular dislike, and numerous dissenting sects, chiefly Lutherans, Independents, Presbyterians, and members of the Dutch Reformed Church. The little city of New York, like its great successor, was the most cosmopolitan place on the continent, and probably the gayest. It had, in abundance, balls, concerts, theatricals, and evening clubs, with plentiful dances and other amusements for the poorer classes. Thither in the winter months came the great hereditary proprietors on the Hudson; for the old Dutch feudality still held its own, and the manors of Van Renselaer, Cortland, and Livingston, with their seigniorial privileges, and the great estates and numerous tenantry of the Schuylers and other leading families, formed the basis of an aristocracy, 33 V1 some of whose members had done good service to the province, and were destined to do more. Pennsylvania was feudal in form, and not in spirit; Virginia in spirit, and not in form; New England in neither; and New York largely in both. This social crystallization had, it is true, many opponents. In politics, as in religion, there were sharp antagonisms and frequent quarrels. They centred in the city; for in the well-stocked dwellings of the Dutch farmers along the Hudson there reigned a tranquil and prosperous routine; and the Dutch border town of Albany had not its like in America for unruffled conservatism and quaint picturesqueness. Of the other colonies, the briefest mention will suffice: New Jersey, with its wholesome population of farmers; tobacco-growing Maryland, which, but for its proprietary government and numerous Roman Catholics, might pass for another Virginia, inferior in growth, and less decisive in features; Delaware, a modest appendage of Pennsylvania; wild and rude North Carolina; and, farther on, South Carolina and Georgia, too remote from the seat of war to take a noteworthy part in it. The attitude of these various colonies towards each other is hardly conceivable to an American of the present time. They had no political tie except a common allegiance to the British Crown. Communication between them was difficult and slow, by rough roads traced often through primeval forests. Between some of them there was less of sympathy than of jealousy kindled by conflicting interests or perpetual 34 V1 disputes concerning boundaries. The patriotism of the colonist was bounded by the lines of his government, except in the compact and kindred colonies of New England, which were socially united, though politically distinct. The country of the New Yorker was New York, and the country of the Virginian was Virginia. The New England colonies had once confederated; but, kindred as they were, they had long ago dropped apart. William Penn proposed a plan of colonial union wholly fruitless. James II. tried to unite all the northern colonies under one government; but the attempt came to naught. Each stood aloof, jealously independent. At rare intervals, under the pressure of an emergency, some of them would try to act in concert; and, except in New England, the results had been most discouraging. Nor was it this segregation only that unfitted them for war. They were all subject to popular legislatures, through whom alone money and men could be raised; and these elective bodies were sometimes factious and selfish, and not always either far-sighted or reasonable. Moreover, they were in a state of ceaseless friction with their governors, who represented the king, or, what was worse, the feudal proprietary. These disputes, though varying in intensity, were found everywhere except in the two small colonies which chose their own governors; and they were premonitions of the movement towards independence which ended in the war of Revolution. The occasion of difference mattered little. Active or latent, the quarrel was always present. In New 35 V1 York it turned on a question of the governor's salary; in Pennsylvania on the taxation of the proprietary estates; in Virginia on a fee exacted for the issue of land patents. It was sure to arise whenever some public crisis gave the representatives of the people an opportunity of extorting concessions from the representative of the Crown, or gave the representative of the Crown an opportunity to gain a point for prerogative. That is to say, the time when action was most needed was the time chosen for obstructing it. In Canada there was no popular legislature to embarrass the central power. The people, like an army, obeyed the word of command,—a military advantage beyond all price. Divided in government; divided in origin, feelings, and principles; jealous of each other, jealous of the Crown; the people at war with the executive, and, by the fermentation of internal politics, blinded to an outward danger that seemed remote and vague,—such were the conditions under which the British colonies drifted into a war that was to decide the fate of the continent. This war was the strife of a united and concentred few against a divided and discordant many. It was the strife, too, of the past against the future; of the old against the new; of moral and intellectual torpor against moral and intellectual life; of barren absolutism against a liberty, crude, incoherent, and chaotic, yet full of prolific vitality. CHAPTER II. 1749-1752. CéLORON DE BIENVILLE. La Galissonière ? English Encroachment ? Mission of Céloron ? The Great West ? Its European Claimants ? Its Indian Population ? English Fur-Traders ? Céloron on the Alleghany ? His Reception ? His Difficulties ? Descent of the Ohio ? Covert Hostility ? Ascent of the Miami ? La Demoiselle ? Dark Prospects for France ? Christopher Gist ? George Croghan ? Their Western Mission ? Pickawillany ? English Ascendency ? English Dissension and Rivalry ? The Key of the Great West. When the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed, the Marquis de la Galissonière ruled over Canada. Like all the later Canadian governors, he was a naval officer; and, a few years after, he made himself famous by a victory, near Minorca, over the English admiral Byng,—an achievement now remembered chiefly by the fate of the defeated commander, judicially murdered as the scapegoat of an imbecile ministry. Galissonière was a humpback; but his deformed person was animated by a bold spirit and a strong and penetrating intellect. He was the chief representative of the American policy of France. He felt that, cost what it might, she must hold fast to Canada, and link her to Louisiana by chains of forts strong enough to hold back the British colonies, and cramp their growth 37 V1 by confinement within narrow limits; while French settlers, sent from the mother-country, should spread and multiply in the broad valleys of the interior. It is true, he said, that Canada and her dependencies have always been a burden; but they are necessary as a barrier against English ambition; and to abandon them is to abandon ourselves; for if we suffer our enemies to become masters in America, their trade and naval power will grow to vast proportions, and they will draw from their colonies a wealth that will make them preponderant in Europe.[2] [2] La Galissonière, Mémoire sur les Colonies de la France dans l'Amérique septentrionale. The treaty had done nothing to settle the vexed question of boundaries between France and her rival. It had but staved off the inevitable conflict. Meanwhile, the English traders were crossing the mountains from Pennsylvania and Virginia, poaching on the domain which France claimed as hers, ruining the French fur-trade, seducing the Indian allies of Canada, and stirring them up against her. Worse still, English land speculators were beginning to follow. Something must be done, and that promptly, to drive back the intruders, and vindicate French rights in the valley of the Ohio. To this end the Governor sent Céloron de Bienville thither in the summer of 1749. He was a chevalier de St. Louis and a captain in the colony troops. Under him went fourteen officers and cadets, twenty soldiers, a hundred and eighty Canadians, and a band of Indians, 38 V1 all in twenty-three birch-bark canoes. They left La Chine on the fifteenth of June, and pushed up the rapids of the St. Lawrence, losing a man and damaging several canoes on the way. Ten days brought them to the mouth of the Oswegatchie, where Ogdensburg now stands. Here they found a Sulpitian priest, Abbé Piquet, busy at building a fort, and lodging for the present under a shed of bark like an Indian. This enterprising father, ostensibly a missionary, was in reality a zealous political agent, bent on winning over the red allies of the English, retrieving French prestige, and restoring French trade. Thus far he had attracted but two Iroquois to his new establishment; and these he lent to Céloron. Reaching Lake Ontario, the party stopped for a time at the French fort of Frontenac, but avoided the rival English post of Oswego, on the southern shore, where a trade in beaver skins, disastrous to French interests, was carried on, and whither many tribes, once faithful to Canada, now made resort. On the sixth of July Céloron reached Niagara. This, the most important pass of all the western wilderness, was guarded by a small fort of palisades on the point where the river joins the lake. Thence, the party carried their canoes over the portage road by the cataract, and launched them upon Lake Erie. On the fifteenth they landed on the lonely shore where the town of Portland now stands; and for the next seven days were busied in shouldering canoes and baggage up and down the steep hills, through the 39 V1 dense forest of beech, oak, ash, and elm, to the waters of Chautauqua Lake, eight or nine miles distant. Here they embarked again, steering southward over the sunny waters, in the stillness and solitude of the leafy hills, till they came to the outlet, and glided down the peaceful current in the shade of the tall forests that overarched it. This prosperity was short. The stream was low, in spite of heavy rains that had drenched them on the carrying place. Father Bonnecamp, chaplain of the expedition, wrote, in his Journal: "In some places—and they were but too frequent—the water was only two or three inches deep; and we were reduced to the sad necessity of dragging our canoes over the sharp pebbles, which, with all our care and precaution, stripped off large slivers of the bark. At last, tired and worn, and almost in despair of ever seeing La Belle Rivière, we entered it at noon of the 29th." The part of the Ohio, or "La Belle Rivière," which they had thus happily reached, is now called the Alleghany. The Great West lay outspread before them, a realm of wild and waste fertility. French America had two heads,—one among the snows of Canada, and one among the canebrakes of Louisiana; one communicating with the world through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the other through the Gulf of Mexico. These vital points were feebly connected by a chain of military posts,—slender, and often interrupted,—circling through the wilderness nearly three thousand miles. Midway between Canada and Louisiana 40 V1 lay the valley of the Ohio. If the English should seize it, they would sever the chain of posts, and cut French America asunder. If the French held it, and entrenched themselves well along its eastern limits, they would shut their rivals between the Alleghanies and the sea, control all the tribes of the West, and turn them, in case of war, against the English borders,—a frightful and insupportable scourge. The Indian population of the Ohio and its northern tributaries was relatively considerable. The upper or eastern half of the valley was occupied by mingled hordes of Delawares, Shawanoes, Wyandots, and Iroquois, or Indians of the Five Nations, who had migrated thither from their ancestral abodes within the present limits of the State of New York, and who were called Mingoes by the English traders. Along with them were a few wandering Abenakis, Nipissings, and Ottawas. Farther west, on the waters of the Miami, the Wabash, and other neighboring streams, was the seat of a confederacy formed of the various bands of the Miamis and their kindred or affiliated tribes. Still farther west, towards the Mississippi, were the remnants of the Illinois. France had done but little to make good her claims to this grand domain. East of the Miami she had no military post whatever. Westward, on the Maumee, there was a small wooden fort, another on the St. Joseph, and two on the Wabash. On the meadows of the Mississippi, in the Illinois country, stood Fort Chartres,—a much stronger 41 V1 work, and one of the chief links of the chain that connected Quebec with New Orleans. Its four stone bastions were impregnable to musketry; and, here in the depths of the wilderness, there was no fear that cannon would be brought against it. It was the centre and citadel of a curious little forest settlement, the only vestige of civilization through all this region. At Kaskaskia, extended along the borders of the stream, were seventy or eighty French houses; thirty or forty at Cahokia, opposite the site of St. Louis; and a few more at the intervening hamlets of St. Philippe and Prairie à la Roche,—a picturesque but thriftless population, mixed with Indians, totally ignorant, busied partly with the fur-trade, and partly with the raising of corn for the market of New Orleans. They communicated with it by means of a sort of row galley, of eighteen or twenty oars, which made the voyage twice a year, and usually spent ten weeks on the return up the river.[3] [3] Gordon, Journal, 1766, appended to Pownall, Topographical Description. In the Dép?t des Cartes de la Marine at Paris, C. 4,040, are two curious maps of the Illinois colony, made a little after the middle of the century. In 1753 the Marquis Duquesne denounced the colonists as debauched and lazy. The Pope and the Bourbons had claimed this wilderness for seventy years, and had done scarcely more for it than the Indians, its natural owners. Of the western tribes, even of those living at the French posts, the Hurons or Wyandots alone were Christian.[4] The devoted zeal of the early 42 V1 missionaries and the politic efforts of their successors had failed alike. The savages of the Ohio and the Mississippi, instead of being tied to France by the mild bonds of the faith, were now in a state which the French called defection or revolt; that is, they received and welcomed the English traders. [4] "De toutes les nations domiciliées dans les postes des pays d'en haut, il n'y a que les hurons du détroit qui aient embrassé la Réligion chretienne." Mémoirs du Roy pour servir d'instruction au Sr. Marquis de Lajonquière. These traders came in part from Virginia, but chiefly from Pennsylvania. Dinwiddie, governor of Virginia, says of them: "They appear to me to be in general a set of abandoned wretches;" and Hamilton, governor of Pennsylvania, replies: "I concur with you in opinion that they are a very licentious people." [5] Indian traders, of whatever nation, are rarely models of virtue; and these, without doubt, were rough and lawless men, with abundant blackguardism and few scruples. Not all of them, however, are to be thus qualified. Some were of a better stamp; among whom were Christopher Gist, William Trent, and George Croghan. These and other chief traders hired men on the frontiers, crossed the Alleghanies with goods packed on the backs of horses, descended into the valley of the Ohio, and journeyed from stream to stream and village to village along the Indian trails, with which all this wilderness was seamed, and which the traders widened to make them practicable. More rarely, they carried their goods on horses to the upper waters of the Ohio, and embarked them in large wooden canoes, in which 43 V1 they descended the main river, and ascended such of its numerous tributaries as were navigable. They were bold and enterprising; and French writers, with alarm and indignation, declare that some of them had crossed the Mississippi and traded with the distant Osages. It is said that about three hundred of them came over the mountains every year. [5] Dinwiddie to Hamilton, 21 May, 1753. Hamilton to Dinwiddie,—May, 1753. On reaching the Alleghany, Céloron de Bienville entered upon the work assigned him, and began by taking possession of the country. The men were drawn up in order; Louis XV. was proclaimed lord of all that region, the arms of France, stamped on a sheet of tin, were nailed to a tree, a plate of lead was buried at its foot, and the notary of the expedition drew up a formal act of the whole proceeding. The leaden plate was inscribed as follows: "Year 1749, in the reign of Louis Fifteenth, King of France. We, Céloron, commanding the detachment sent by the Marquis de la Galissonière, commander-general of New France, to restore tranquillity in certain villages of these cantons, have buried this plate at the confluence of the Ohio and the Kanaouagon [Conewango], this 29th July, as a token of renewal of possession heretofore taken of the aforesaid River Ohio, of all streams that fall into it, and all lands on both sides to the source of the aforesaid streams, as the preceding Kings of France have enjoyed or ought to have enjoyed it, and which they have upheld by force of arms and by treaties, notably by those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle." 44 V1 This done, the party proceeded on its way, moving downward with the current, and passing from time to time rough openings in the forest, with clusters of Indian wigwams, the inmates of which showed a strong inclination to run off at their approach. To prevent this, Chabert de Joncaire was sent in advance, as a messenger of peace. He was himself half Indian, being the son of a French officer and a Seneca squaw, speaking fluently his maternal tongue, and, like his father, holding an important place in all dealings between the French and the tribes who spoke dialects of the Iroquois. On this occasion his success was not complete. It needed all his art to prevent the alarmed savages from taking to the woods. Sometimes, however, Céloron succeeded in gaining an audience; and at a village of Senecas called La Paille Coupée he read them a message from La Galissonière couched in terms sufficiently imperative: "My children, since I was at war with the English, I have learned that they have seduced you; and not content with corrupting your hearts, have taken advantage of my absence to invade lands which are not theirs, but mine; and therefore I have resolved to send you Monsieur de Céloron to tell you my intentions, which are that I will not endure the English on my land. Listen to me, children; mark well the word that I send you; follow my advice, and the sky will always be calm and clear over your villages. I expect from you an answer worthy of true children." And he urged them to stop all trade with the intruders, and send 45 V1 them back to whence they came. They promised compliance; "and," says the chaplain, Bonnecamp, "we should all have been satisfied if we had thought them sincere; but nobody doubted that fear had extorted their answer." Four leagues below French Creek, by a rock scratched with Indian hieroglyphics, they buried another leaden plate. Three days after, they reached the Delaware village of Attiqué, at the site of Kittanning, whose twenty-two wigwams were all empty, the owners having fled. A little farther on, at an old abandoned village of Shawanoes, they found six English traders, whom they warned to begone, and return no more at their peril. Being helpless to resist, the traders pretended obedience; and Céloron charged them with a letter to the Governor of Pennsylvania, in which he declared that he was "greatly surprised" to find Englishmen trespassing on the domain of France. "I know," concluded the letter, "that our Commandant-General would be very sorry to be forced to use violence; but his orders are precise, to leave no foreign traders within the limits of his government." [6] [6] Céloron, Journal. Compare the letter as translated in N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 532; also Colonial Records of Pa., V. 425. On the next day they reached a village of Iroquois under a female chief, called Queen Alequippa by the English, to whom she was devoted. Both Queen and subjects had fled; but among the deserted wigwams were six more Englishmen, whom Céloron warned off like the others, and 46 V1 who, like them, pretended to obey. At a neighboring town they found only two withered ancients, male and female, whose united ages, in the judgment of the chaplain, were full two centuries. They passed the site of the future Pittsburg; and some seventeen miles below approached Chiningué, called Logstown by the English, one of the chief places on the river. [7] Both English and French flags were flying over the town, and the inhabitants, lining the shore, greeted their visitors with a salute of musketry,—not wholly welcome, as the guns were charged with ball. Céloron threatened to fire on them if they did not cease. The French climbed the steep bank, and encamped on the plateau above, betwixt the forest and the village, which consisted of some fifty cabins and wigwams, grouped in picturesque squalor, and tenanted by a mixed population, chiefly of Delawares, Shawanoes, and Mingoes. Here, too, were gathered many fugitives from the deserted towns above. Céloron feared a night attack. The camp was encircled by a ring of sentries; the officers walked the rounds till morning; a part of the men were kept under arms, and the rest ordered to sleep in their clothes. Joncaire discovered through some women of his acquaintance that an attack was intended. Whatever the danger may have been, the precautions of the French averted it; and instead of a battle, there was a council. Céloron delivered to the assembled chiefs a message from 47 V1 the Governor more conciliatory than the former, "Through the love I bear you, my children, I send you Monsieur de Céloron to open your eyes to the designs of the English against your lands. The establishments they mean to make, and of which you are certainly ignorant, tend to your complete ruin. They hide from you their plans, which are to settle here and drive you away, if I let them. As a good father who tenderly loves his children, and though far away from them bears them always in his heart, I must warn you of the danger that threatens you. The English intend to rob you of your country; and that they may succeed, they begin by corrupting your minds. As they mean to seize the Ohio, which belongs to me, I send to warn them to retire." [7] There was another Chiningué, the Shenango of the English, on the Alleghany. The reply of the chiefs, though sufficiently humble, was not all that could be wished. They begged that the intruders might stay a little longer, since the goods they brought were necessary to them. It was in fact, these goods, cheap, excellent, and abundant as they were, which formed the only true bond between the English and the Western tribes. Logstown was one of the chief resorts of the English traders; and at this moment there were ten of them in the place. Céloron warned them off. "They agreed," says the chaplain, "to all that was demanded, well resolved, no doubt, to do the contrary as soon as our backs were turned." Having distributed gifts among the Indians, the French proceeded on their way, and at or 48 V1 near the mouth of Wheeling Creek buried another plate of lead. They repeated the same ceremony at the mouth of the Muskingum. Here, half a century later, when this region belonged to the United States, a party of boys, bathing in the river, saw the plate protruding from the bank where the freshets had laid it bare, knocked it down with a long stick, melted half of it into bullets, and gave what remained to a neighbor from Marietta, who, hearing of this mysterious relic, inscribed in an unknown tongue, came to rescue it from their hands.[8] It is now in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society.[9] On the eighteenth of August, Céloron buried yet another plate, at the mouth of the Great Kenawha. This, too, in the course of a century, was unearthed by the floods, and was found in 1846 by a boy at play, by the edge of the water.[10] The inscriptions on all these plates were much alike, with variations of date and place. [8] O. H. Marshall, in Magazine of American History, March, 1878. [9] For papers relating to it, see Trans. Amer. Antiq. Soc., II. [10] For a fac-simile of the inscription on this plate, see Olden Time, I. 288. Céloron calls the Kenawha, Chinodahichetha. The inscriptions as given in his Journal correspond with those on the plates discovered. The weather was by turns rainy and hot; and the men, tired and famished, were fast falling ill. On the twenty-second they approached Scioto, called by the French St. Yotoc, or Sinioto, a large Shawanoe town at the mouth of the river which bears the same name. Greatly doubting what welcome awaited them, they filled their powder-horns and prepared for the worst. Joncaire was 49 V1 sent forward to propitiate the inhabitants; but they shot bullets through the flag that he carried, and surrounded him, yelling and brandishing their knives. Some were for killing him at once; others for burning him alive. The interposition of a friendly Iroquois saved him; and at length they let him go. Céloron was very uneasy at the reception of his messenger. "I knew," he writes, "the weakness of my party, two thirds of which were young men who had never left home before, and would all have run at the sight of ten Indians. Still, there was nothing for me but to keep on; for I was short of provisions, my canoes were badly damaged, and I had no pitch or bark to mend them. So I embarked again, ready for whatever might happen. I had good officers, and about fifty men who could be trusted." As they neared the town, the Indians swarmed to the shore, and began the usual salute of musketry. "They fired," says Céloron, "full a thousand shots; for the English give them powder for nothing." He prudently pitched his camp on the farther side of the river, posted guards, and kept close watch. Each party distrusted and feared the other. At length, after much ado, many debates, and some threatening movements on the part of the alarmed and excited Indians, a council took place at the tent of the French commander; the chiefs apologized for the rough treatment of Joncaire, and Céloron replied with a rebuke, which would doubtless have been less mild, had he felt himself stronger. He gave them also a 50 V1 message from the Governor, modified, apparently, to suit the circumstances; for while warning them of the wiles of the English, it gave no hint that the King of France claimed mastery of their lands. Their answer was vague and unsatisfactory. It was plain that they were bound to the enemy by interest, if not by sympathy. A party of English traders were living in the place; and Céloron summoned them to withdraw, on pain of what might ensue. "My instructions," he says, "enjoined me to do this, and even to pillage the English; but I was not strong enough; and as these traders were established in the village and well supported by the Indians, the attempt would have failed, and put the French to shame." The assembled chiefs having been regaled with a cup of brandy each,—the only part of the proceeding which seemed to please them,—Céloron reimbarked, and continued his voyage. On the thirtieth they reached the Great Miami, called by the French, Rivière à la Roche; and here Céloron buried the last of his leaden plates. They now bade farewell to the Ohio, or, in the words of the chaplain, to "La Belle Rivière,—that river so little known to the French, and unfortunately too well known to the English." He speaks of the multitude of Indian villages on its shores, and still more on its northern branches. "Each, great or small, has one or more English traders, and each of these has hired men to carry his furs. Behold, then, the English well advanced upon our lands, and, what is worse, under the 51 V1 protection of a crowd of savages whom they have drawn over to them, and whose number increases daily." The course of the party lay up the Miami; and they toiled thirteen days against the shallow current before they reached a village of the Miami Indians, lately built at the mouth of the rivulet now called Loramie Creek. Over it ruled a chief to whom the French had given the singular name of La Demoiselle, but whom the English, whose fast friend he was, called Old Britain. The English traders who lived here had prudently withdrawn, leaving only two hired men in the place. The object of Cèloron was to induce the Demoiselle and his band to leave this new abode and return to their old villages near the French fort on the Maumee, where they would be safe from English seduction. To this end, he called them to a council, gave them ample gifts, and made them an harangue in the name of the Governor. The Demoiselle took the gifts, thanked his French father for his good advice, and promised to follow it at a more convenient time.[11] In vain Céloron insisted that he and his tribesmen should remove at once. Neither blandishments nor threats would prevail, and the French commander felt that his negotiation had failed. [11] Céloron, Journal. Compare A Message from the Twightwees (Miamis) in Colonial Records of Pa., V. 437, where they say that they refused the gifts. He was not deceived. Far from leaving his village, the Demoiselle, who was Great Chief of 52 V1 the Miami Confederacy, gathered his followers to the spot, till, less than two years after the visit of Céloron, its population had increased eightfold. Pique Town, or Pickawillany, as the English called it, became one of the greatest Indian towns of the West, the centre of English trade and influence, and a capital object of French jealousy. Céloron burned his shattered canoes, and led his party across the long and difficult portage to the French post on the Maumee, where he found Raymond, the commander, and all his men, shivering with fever and ague. They supplied him with wooden canoes for his voyage down the river; and, early in October, he reached Lake Erie, where he was detained for a time by a drunken debauch of his Indians, who are called by the chaplain "a species of men made to exercise the patience of those who have the misfortune to travel with them." In a month more he was at Fort Frontenac; and as he descended thence to Montreal, he stopped at the Oswegatchie, in obedience to the Governor, who had directed him to report the progress made by the Sulpitian, Abbé Piquet, at his new mission. Piquet's new fort had been burned by Indians, prompted, as he thought, by the English of Oswego; but the priest, buoyant and undaunted, was still resolute for the glory of God and the confusion of the heretics. At length Céloron reached Montreal; and, closing his Journal, wrote thus: "Father Bonnecamp, who is a Jesuit and a great mathematician, reckons that we have travelled twelve hundred leagues; I and 53 V1 my officers think we have travelled more. All I can say is, that the nations of these countries are very ill-disposed towards the French, and devoted entirely to the English." [12] If his expedition had done no more, it had at least revealed clearly the deplorable condition of French interests in the West. [12] Journal de la Campagne que moy Céloron, Chevalier de l'Ordre Royal et Militaire de St. Louis, Capitaine Commandant un détachement envoyé dans la Belle Rivière par les ordres de M. le Marquis de La Galissonière, etc. Relation d'un voyage dans la Belle Rivière sous les ordres de M. de Céloron, par le Père Bonnecamp, en 1749. While Céloron was warning English traders from the Ohio, a plan was on foot in Virginia for a new invasion of the French domain. An association was formed to settle the Ohio country; and a grant of five hundred thousand acres was procured from the King, on condition that a hundred families should be established upon it within seven years, a fort built, and a garrison maintained. The Ohio Company numbered among its members some of the chief men of Virginia, including two brothers of Washington; and it had also a London partner, one Hanbury, a person of influence, who acted as its agent in England. In the year after the expedition of Céloron, its governing committee sent the trader Christopher Gist to explore the country and select land. It must be "good level land," wrote the Committee; "we had rather go quite down to the Mississippi than take mean, broken land." [13] In November Gist reached Logstown, the Chiningué of Céloron, where he found 54 V1 what he calls a "parcel of reprobate Indian traders." Those whom he so stigmatizes were Pennsylvanians, chiefly Scotch-Irish, between whom and the traders from Virginia there was great jealousy. Gist was told that he "should never go home safe." He declared himself the bearer of a message from the King. This imposed respect, and he was allowed to proceed. At the Wyandot village of Muskingum he found the trader George Croghan, sent to the Indians by the Governor of Pennsylvania, to renew the chain of friendship. [14] "Croghan," he says, "is a mere idol among his countrymen, the Irish traders;" yet they met amicably, and the Pennsylvanian had with him a companion, Andrew Montour, the interpreter, who proved of great service to Gist. As Montour was a conspicuous person in his time, and a type of his class, he merits a passing notice. He was the reputed grandson of a French governor and an Indian squaw. His half-breed mother, Catharine Montour, was a native of Canada, whence she was carried off by the Iroquois, and adopted by them. She lived in a village at the head of Seneca Lake, and still held the belief, inculcated by the guides of her youth, that Christ was a Frenchman crucified by the English. [15] Her son Andrew is thus described by the Moravian Zinzendorf, who knew him: 55 V1 "His face is like that of a European, but marked with a broad Indian ring of bear's-grease and paint drawn completely round it. He wears a coat of fine cloth of cinnamon color, a black necktie with silver spangles, a red satin waistcoat, trousers over which hangs his shirt, shoes and stockings, a hat, and brass ornaments, something like the handle of a basket, suspended from his ears." [16] He was an excellent interpreter, and held in high account by his Indian kinsmen. [13] Instructions to Gist, in appendix to Pownall, Topographical Description of North America. [14] Mr. Croghan's Transactions with the Indians, in N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 267; Croghan to Hamilton, 16 Dec. 1750. [15] This is stated by Count Zinzendorf, who visited her among the Senecas. Compare Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV., p. 376. In a plan of the "Route of the Western Army," made in 1779, and of which a tracing is before me, the village where she lived is still called "French Catharine's Town." [16] Journal of Zinzendorf, quoted in Schweinitz, Life of David Zeisberger, 112, note. After leaving Muskingum, Gist, Croghan, and Montour went together to a village on White Woman's Creek,—so called from one Mary Harris, who lived here. She was born in New England, was made prisoner when a child forty years before, and had since dwelt among her captors, finding such comfort as she might in an Indian husband and a family of young half-breeds. "She still remembers," says Gist, "that they used to be very religious in New England, and wonders how white men can be so wicked as she has seen them in these woods." He and his companions now journeyed southwestward to the Shawanoe town at the mouth of the Scioto, where they found a reception very different from that which had awaited Céloron. Thence they rode northwestward along the forest path that led to Pickawillany, the Indian town on the upper waters of the Great Miami. Gist was delighted with the country; and reported to his employers that "it is fine, rich, level land, well 56 V1 timbered with large walnut, ash, sugar trees and cherry trees; well watered with a great number of little streams and rivulets; full of beautiful natural meadows, with wild rye, blue-grass, and clover, and abounding with turkeys, deer, elks, and most sorts of game, particularly buffaloes, thirty or forty of which are frequently seen in one meadow." A little farther west, on the plains of the Wabash and the Illinois, he would have found them by thousands. They crossed the Miami on a raft, their horses swimming after them; and were met on landing by a crowd of warriors, who, after smoking with them, escorted them to the neighboring town, where they were greeted by a fusillade of welcome. "We entered with English colors before us, and were kindly received by their king, who invited us into his own house and set our colors upon the top of it; then all the white men and traders that were there came and welcomed us." This "king" was Old Britain, or La Demoiselle. Great were the changes here since Céloron, a year and a half before, had vainly enticed him to change his abode, and dwell in the shadow of the fleur-de-lis. The town had grown to four hundred families, or about two thousand souls; and the English traders had built for themselves and their hosts a fort of pickets, strengthened with logs. There was a series of councils in the long house, or town-hall. Croghan made the Indians a present from the Governor of Pennsylvania; and he and Gist delivered speeches of friendship and good 57 V1 advice, which the auditors received with the usual monosyllabic plaudits, ejected from the depths of their throats. A treaty of peace was solemnly made between the English and the confederate tribes, and all was serenity and joy; till four Ottawas, probably from Detroit, arrived with a French flag, a gift of brandy and tobacco, and a message from the French commandant inviting the Miamis to visit him. Whereupon the great war-chief rose, and, with "a fierce tone and very warlike air," said to the envoys: "Brothers the Ottawas, we let you know, by these four strings of wampum, that we will not hear anything the French say, nor do anything they bid us." Then addressing the French as if actually present: "Fathers, we have made a road to the sun-rising, and have been taken by the hand by our brothers the English, the Six Nations, the Delawares, Shawanoes, and Wyandots. [17] We assure you, in that road we will go; and as you threaten us with war in the spring, we tell you that we are ready to receive you." Then, turning again to the four envoys: "Brothers the Ottawas, you hear what I say. Tell that to your fathers the French, for we speak it from our hearts." The chiefs then took down the French flag which the Ottawas had planted in the town, and dismissed the envoys with their answer of defiance. [17] Compare Message of Miamis and Hurons to the Governor of Pennsylvania in N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 594; and Report of Croghan in Colonial Records of Pa., V. 522, 523. On the next day the town-crier came with a message from the Demoiselle, inviting his English 58 V1 guests to a "feather dance," which Gist thus describes: "It was performed by three dancing-masters, who were painted all over of various colors, with long sticks in their hands, upon the ends of which were fastened long feathers of swans and other birds, neatly woven in the shape of a fowl's wing; in this disguise they performed many antic tricks, waving their sticks and feathers about with great skill, to imitate the flying and fluttering of birds, keeping exact time with their music." This music was the measured thumping of an Indian drum. From time to time a warrior would leap up, and the drum and the dancers would cease as he struck a post with his tomahawk, and in a loud voice recounted his exploits. Then the music and the dance began anew, till another warrior caught the martial fire, and bounded into the circle to brandish his tomahawk and vaunt his prowess. On the first of March Gist took leave of Pickawillany, and returned towards the Ohio. He would have gone to the Falls, where Louisville now stands, but for a band of French Indians reported to be there, who would probably have killed him. After visiting a deposit of mammoth bones on the south shore, long the wonder of the traders, he turned eastward, crossed with toil and difficulty the mountains about the sources of the Kenawha, and after an absence of seven months reached his frontier home on the Yadkin, whence he proceeded to Roanoke with the report of his journey. [18] [18] Journal of Christopher Gist, in appendix to Pownall, Topographical Description. Mr. Croghan's Transactions with the Indians in N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 267. 59 V1 All looked well for the English in the West; but under this fair outside lurked hidden danger. The Miamis were hearty in the English cause, and so perhaps were the Shawanoes; but the Delawares had not forgotten the wrongs that drove them from their old abodes east of the Alleghanies, while the Mingoes, or emigrant Iroquois, like their brethren of New York, felt the influence of Joncaire and other French agents, who spared no efforts to seduce them. [19] Still more baneful to British interests were the apathy and dissensions of the British colonies themselves. The Ohio Company had built a trading-house at Will's Creek, a branch of the Potomac, to which the Indians resorted in great numbers; whereupon the jealous traders of Pennsylvania told them that the Virginians meant to steal away their lands. This confirmed what they had been taught by the French emissaries, whose intrigues it powerfully aided. The governors of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia saw the importance of Indian alliances, and felt their own responsibility in regard to them; but they could do nothing without their assemblies. Those of New York and Pennsylvania were largely composed of tradesmen and farmers, absorbed in local interests, and possessed by two motives,—the saving of the people's money, and opposition to the governor, who stood for the royal prerogative. It was Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, who had sent Croghan 60 V1 to the Miamis to "renew the chain of friendship;" and when the envoy returned, the Assembly rejected his report. "I was condemned," he says, "for bringing expense on the Government, and the Indians were neglected." [20] In the same year Hamilton again sent him over the mountains, with a present for the Mingoes and Delawares. Croghan succeeded in persuading them that it would be for their good if the English should build a fortified trading-house at the fork of the Ohio, where Pittsburg now stands; and they made a formal request to the Governor that it should be built accordingly. But, in the words of Croghan, the Assembly "rejected the proposal, and condemned me for making such a report." Yet this post on the Ohio was vital to English interests. Even the Penns, proprietaries of the province, never lavish of their money, offered four hundred pounds towards the cost of it, besides a hundred a year towards its maintenance; but the Assembly would not listen. [21] The Indians were so well convinced that a strong English trading-station in their country would add to their safety and comfort, that when Pennsylvania refused it, they repeated the proposal to Virginia; but here, too, it found for the present little favor. [19] Joncaire made anti-English speeches to the Ohio Indians under the eyes of the English themselves, who did not molest him. Journal of George Croghan, 1751, in Olden Time, I. 136. [20] Mr. Croghan's Transactions with the Indians, N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 267. [21] Colonial Records of Pa., V. 515, 529, 547. At a council at Logstown (1751), the Indians said to Croghan: "The French want to cheat us out of our country; but we will stop them, and, Brothers the English, you must help us. We expect that you will build a strong house on the River Ohio, that in case of war we may have a place to secure our wives and children, likewise our brothers that come to trade with us." Report of Treaty at Logstown, Ibid., V. 538. 61 V1 The question of disputed boundaries had much to do with this most impolitic inaction. A large part of the valley of the Ohio, including the site of the proposed establishment, was claimed by both Pennsylvania and Virginia; and each feared that whatever money it might spend there would turn to the profit of the other. This was not the only evil that sprang from uncertain ownership. "Till the line is run between the two provinces," says Dinwiddie, governor of Virginia, "I cannot appoint magistrates to keep the traders in good order." [22] Hence they did what they pleased, and often gave umbrage to the Indians. Clinton, of New York, appealed to his Assembly for means to assist Pennsylvania in "securing the fidelity of the Indians on the Ohio," and the Assembly refused. [23] "We will take care of our Indians, and they may take care of theirs:" such was the spirit of their answer. He wrote to the various provinces, inviting them to send commissioners to meet the tribes at Albany, "in order to defeat the designs and intrigues of the French." All turned a deaf ear except Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Carolina, who sent the commissioners, but supplied them very meagrely with the indispensable presents. [24] Clinton says further: "The Assembly of this province have not given one farthing for Indian affairs, nor for a year past have they provided for 62 the subsistence of the garrison at Oswego, which is the key for the commerce between the colonies and the inland nations of Indians." [25] [22] Dinwiddie to the Lords of Trade, 6 Oct. 1752. [23] Journals of New York Assembly, II. 283, 284. Colonial Records of Pa., V. 466. [24] Clinton to Hamilton, 18 Dec. 1750. Clinton to Lords of Trade, 13 June, 1751; Ibid., 17 July, 1751. [25] Clinton to Bedford, 30 July, 1750. In the heterogeneous structure of the British colonies, their clashing interests, their internal disputes, and the misplaced economy of penny-wise and short-sighted assembly-men, lay the hope of France. The rulers of Canada knew the vast numerical preponderance of their rivals; but with their centralized organization they felt themselves more than a match for any one English colony alone. They hoped to wage war under the guise of peace, and to deal with the enemy in detail; and they at length perceived that the fork of the Ohio, so strangely neglected by the English, formed, together with Niagara, the key of the Great West. Could France hold firmly these two controlling passes, she might almost boast herself mistress of the continent. Note.—The Journal of Céloron (Archives de la Marine) is very long and circumstantial, including the procès verbaux, and reports of councils with Indians. The Journal of the chaplain, Bonnecamp (Dép?t de la Marine), is shorter, but is the work of an intelligent and observing man. The author, a Jesuit, was skilled in mathematics, made daily observations, and constructed a map of the route, still preserved at the Dép?t de la Marine. Concurrently with these French narratives, one may consult the English letters and documents bearing on the same subjects, in the Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, the Archives of Pennsylvania, and the Colonial Documents of New York. Three of Céloron's leaden plates have been found,—the two mentioned in the text, and another which was never buried, and which the Indians, who regarded these mysterious tablets as "bad medicine," procured by a trick from Joncaire, or, according to Governor Clinton, stole from him. A Cayuga chief brought it to Colonel Johnson, on the Mohawk, who interpreted the "Devilish writing" in such a manner as best to inspire horror of French designs. CHAPTER III. 1749-1753. CONFLICT FOR THE WEST. The Five Nations ? Caughnawaga ? Abbé Piquet ? His Schemes ? His Journey ? Fort Frontenac ? Toronto ? Niagara ? Oswego ? Success of Piquet ? Detroit ? La Jonquière ? His Intrigues ? His Trials ? His Death ? English Intrigues ? Critical State of the West ? Pickawillany Destroyed ? Duquesne ? His Grand Enterprise. The Iroquois, or Five Nations, sometimes called Six Nations after the Tuscaroras joined them, had been a power of high importance in American international politics. In a certain sense they may be said to have held the balance between their French and English neighbors; but their relative influence had of late declined. So many of them had emigrated and joined the tribes of the Ohio, that the centre of Indian population had passed to that region. Nevertheless, the Five Nations were still strong enough in their ancient abodes to make their alliance an object of the utmost consequence to both the European rivals. At the western end of their "Long House," or belt of confederated villages, Joncaire intrigued to gain them for France; while in the east he was counteracted 64 V1 by the young colonel of militia, William Johnson, who lived on the Mohawk, and was already well skilled in managing Indians. Johnson sometimes lost his temper; and once wrote to Governor Clinton to complain of the "confounded wicked things the French had infused into the Indians' heads; among the rest that the English were determined, the first opportunity, to destroy them all. I assure your Excellency I had hard work to beat these and several other cursed villanous things, told them by the French, out of their heads." [26] [26] Johnson to Clinton, 28 April, 1749. In former times the French had hoped to win over the Five Nations in a body, by wholesale conversion to the Faith; but the attempt had failed. They had, however, made within their own limits an asylum for such converts as they could gain, whom they collected together at Caughnawaga, near Montreal, to the number of about three hundred warriors. [27] These could not be trusted to fight their kinsmen, but willingly made forays against the English borders. Caughnawaga, like various other Canadian missions, was divided between the Church, the army, and the fur-trade. It had a chapel, fortifications, and storehouses; two Jesuits, an officer, and three chief traders. Of these last, two were maiden ladies, the Demoiselles Desauniers; and one of the Jesuits, their friend Father Tournois, was their partner in business. 65 V1 They carried on by means of the Mission Indians, and in collusion with influential persons in the colony, a trade with the Dutch at Albany, illegal, but very profitable. [28] [27] The estimate of a French official report, 1736, and of Sir William Johnson, 1763. [28] La Jonquière au Ministre, 27 Fév. 1750. Ibid., 29 Oct. 1751. Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1751. Notice biographique de la Jonquière. La Jonquière, governor of Canada, at last broke up their contraband trade, and ordered Tournois to Quebec. Besides this Iroquois mission, which was chiefly composed of Mohawks and Oneidas, another was now begun farther westward, to win over the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. This was the establishment of Father Piquet, which Céloron had visited in its infancy when on his way to the Ohio, and again on his return. Piquet was a man in the prime of life, of an alert, vivacious countenance, by no means unprepossessing; [29] an enthusiastic schemer, with great executive talents; ardent, energetic, vain, self-confident, and boastful. The enterprise seems to have been of his own devising; but it found warm approval from the Government. [30] La Présentation, as he called the new mission, stood on the bank of the River Oswegatchie where it enters the St. Lawrence. Here the rapids ceased, and navigation was free to Lake Ontario. The place commanded the main river, and could bar the way to hostile war-parties or contraband traders. Rich meadows, forests, and abundance of fish and game, made it attractive to Indians, and the Oswegatchie gave access to the Iroquois 66 V1 towns. Piquet had chosen his site with great skill. His activity was admirable. His first stockade was burned by Indian incendiaries; but it rose quickly from its ashes, and within a year or two the mission of La Présentation had a fort of palisades flanked with blockhouses, a chapel, a storehouse, a barn, a stable, ovens, a saw-mill, broad fields of corn and beans, and three villages of Iroquois, containing, in all, forty-nine bark lodges, each holding three or four families, more or less converted to the Faith; and, as time went on, this number increased. The Governor had sent a squad of soldiers to man the fort, and five small cannon to mount upon it. The place was as safe for the new proselytes as it was convenient and agreeable. The Pennsylvanian interpreter, Conrad Weiser, was told at Onondaga, the Iroquois capital, that Piquet had made a hundred converts from that place alone; and that, "having clothed them all in very fine clothes, laced with silver and gold, he took them down and presented them to the French Governor at Montreal, who received them very kindly, and made them large presents." [31] [29] I once saw a contemporary portrait of him at the mission of Two Mountains, where he had been stationed. [30] Rouillé à la Jonquière, 1749. The Intendant Bigot gave him money and provisions. N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 204. [31] Journal of Conrad Weiser, 1750. Such were some of the temporal attractions of La Présentation. The nature of the spiritual instruction bestowed by Piquet and his fellow-priests may be partly inferred from the words of a proselyte warrior, who declared with enthusiasm that he had learned from the Sulpitian missionary that the King of France was the eldest son of the wife of 67 V1 Jesus Christ. [32] This he of course took in a literal sense, the mystic idea of the Church as the spouse of Christ being beyond his savage comprehension. The effect was to stimulate his devotion to the Great Onontio beyond the sea, and to the lesser Onontio who represented him as Governor of Canada. [32] Lalande, Notice de l'Abbé Piquet, in Lettres édifiantes. See also Tassé in Revue Canadienne, 1870, p. 9. Piquet was elated by his success; and early in 1752 he wrote to the Governor and Intendant: "It is a great miracle that, in spite of envy, contradiction, and opposition from nearly all the Indian villages, I have formed in less than three years one of the most flourishing missions in Canada. I find myself in a position to extend the empire of my good masters, Jesus Christ and the King, even to the extremities of this new world; and, with some little help from you, to do more than France and England have been able to do with millions of money and all their troops." [33] [33] Piquet à la Jonquière et Bigot, 8 Fév. 1752. See Appendix A. In spite of Piquet's self-laudation, and in spite also of the detraction of the author of the Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760, there can be no doubt of his practical capacity and his fertility of resource. Duquesne, when governor of the colony, highly praises "ses talents et son activité pour le service de Sa Majesté." The letter from which this is taken was written to urge upon the Government a scheme in which the zealous priest could see nothing impracticable. He proposed to raise a war-party of thirty-eight hundred Indians, eighteen hundred of whom were to be drawn from the Canadian missions, the Five Nations, and the tribes of the Ohio, while the remaining 68 V1 two thousand were to be furnished by the Flatheads, or Choctaws, who were at the same time to be supplied with missionaries. The united force was first to drive the English from the Ohio, and next attack the Dog Tribe, or Cherokees, who lived near the borders of Virginia, with the people of which they were on friendly terms. "If," says Piquet, "the English of Virginia give any help to this last-named tribe,—which will not fail to happen,—they [the war-party] will do their utmost against them, through a grudge they bear them by reason of some old quarrels." In other words, the missionary hopes to set a host of savages to butchering English settlers in time of peace! [34] His wild project never took effect, though the Governor, he says, at first approved it. [34] Appendix A. In the preceding year the "Apostle of the Iroquois," as he was called, made a journey to muster recruits for his mission, and kept a copious diary on the way. By accompanying him, one gets a clear view of an important part of the region in dispute between the rival nations. Six Canadians paddled him up the St. Lawrence, and five Indian converts followed in another canoe. Emerging from among the Thousand Islands, they stopped at Fort Frontenac, where Kingston now stands. Once the place was a great resort of Indians; now none were here, for the English post of Oswego, on the other side of the lake, had greater attractions. Piquet and his company found the pork and bacon very bad, and he complains that "there was not 69 V1 brandy enough in the fort to wash a wound." They crossed to a neighboring island, where they were soon visited by the chaplain of the fort, the storekeeper, his wife, and three young ladies, glad of an excursion to relieve the monotony of the garrison. "My hunters," says Piquet, "had supplied me with means of giving them a pretty good entertainment. We drank, with all our hearts, the health of the authorities, temporal and ecclesiastical, to the sound of our musketry, which was very well fired, and delighted the islanders." These islanders were a band of Indians who lived here. Piquet gave them a feast, then discoursed of religion, and at last persuaded them to remove to the new mission. During eight days he and his party coasted the northern shore of Lake Ontario, with various incidents, such as an encounter between his dog Cerberus and a wolf, to the disadvantage of the latter, and the meeting with "a very fine negro of twenty-two years, a fugitive from Virginia." On the twenty-sixth of June they reached the new fort of Toronto, which offered a striking contrast to their last stopping-place. "The wine here is of the best; there is nothing wanting in this fort; everything is abundant, fine, and good." There was reason for this. The Northern Indians were flocking with their beaver-skins to the English of Oswego; and in April, 1749, an officer named Portneuf had been sent with soldiers and workmen to build a stockaded trading-house at Toronto, in order to intercept them,—not by force, which would 70 V1 have been ruinous to French interests, but by a tempting supply of goods and brandy. [35] Thus the fort was kept well stocked, and with excellent effect. Piquet found here a band of Mississagas, who would otherwise, no doubt, have carried their furs to the English. He was strongly impelled to persuade them to migrate to La Présentation; but the Governor had told him to confine his efforts to other tribes; and lest, he says, the ardor of his zeal should betray him to disobedience, he reimbarked, and encamped six leagues from temptation. [35] On Toronto, La Jonquière et Bigot au Ministre, 1749. La Jonquière au Ministre, 30 Ao?t, 1750. N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 201, 246. Two days more brought him to Niagara, where he was warmly received by the commandant, the chaplain, and the storekeeper,—the triumvirate who ruled these forest outposts, and stood respectively for their three vital principles, war, religion, and trade. Here Piquet said mass; and after resting a day, set out for the trading-house at the portage of the cataract, recently built, like Toronto, to stop the Indians on their way to Oswego. [36] Here he found Joncaire, and here also was encamped a large band of Senecas; though, being all drunk, men, women, and children, they were in no condition to receive the Faith, or appreciate the temporal advantages that attended it. On the next morning, finding them partially sober, he invited them to remove to La Présentation; "but as they had still something left in their bottles, I could get no answer till the following day." "I pass in 71 V1 silence," pursues the missionary, "an infinity of talks on this occasion. Monsieur de Joncaire forgot nothing that could help me, and behaved like a great servant of God and the King. My recruits increased every moment. I went to say my breviary while my Indians and the Senecas, without loss of time, assembled to hold a council with Monsieur de Joncaire." The result of the council was an entreaty to the missionary not to stop at Oswego, lest evil should befall him at the hands of the English. He promised to do as they wished, and presently set out on his return to Fort Niagara, attended by Joncaire and a troop of his new followers. The journey was a triumphal progress. "Whenever was passed a camp or a wigwam, the Indians saluted me by firing their guns, which happened so often that I thought all the trees along the way were charged with gunpowder; and when we reached the fort, Monsieur de Becancour received us with great ceremony and the firing of cannon, by which my savages were infinitely flattered." [36] La Jonquière au Ministre, 23 Fév. 1750. Ibid., 6 Oct. 1751. Compare Colonial Records of Pa., V. 508. His neophytes were gathered into the chapel for the first time in their lives, and there rewarded with a few presents. He now prepared to turn homeward, his flock at the mission being left in his absence without a shepherd; and on the sixth of July he embarked, followed by a swarm of canoes. On the twelfth they stopped at the Genesee, and went to visit the Falls, where the city of Rochester now stands. On the way, the Indians found a populous resort of rattlesnakes, and attacked the 72 V1 gregarious reptiles with great animation, to the alarm of the missionary, who trembled for his bare-legged retainers. His fears proved needless. Forty-two dead snakes, as he avers, requited the efforts of the sportsmen, and not one of them was bitten. When he returned to camp in the afternoon he found there a canoe loaded with kegs of brandy. "The English," he says, "had sent it to meet us, well knowing that this was the best way to cause disorder among my new recruits and make them desert me. The Indian in charge of the canoe, who had the look of a great rascal, offered some to me first, and then to my Canadians and Indians. I gave out that it was very probably poisoned, and immediately embarked again." He encamped on the fourteenth at Sodus Bay, and strongly advises the planting of a French fort there. "Nevertheless," he adds, "it would be still better to destroy Oswego, and on no account let the English build it again." On the sixteenth he came in sight of this dreaded post. Several times on the way he had met fleets of canoes going thither or returning, in spite of the rival attractions of Toronto and Niagara. No English establishment on the continent was of such ill omen to the French. It not only robbed them of the fur-trade, by which they lived, but threatened them with military and political, no less than commercial, ruin. They were in constant dread lest ships of war should be built here, strong enough to command Lake Ontario, thus separating Canada from Louisiana, and cutting New France asunder. To 73 V1 meet this danger, they soon after built at Fort Frontenac a large three-masted vessel, mounted with heavy cannon; thus, as usual, forestalling their rivals by promptness of action. [37] The ground on which Oswego stood was claimed by the Province of New York, which alone had control of it; but through the purblind apathy of the Assembly, and their incessant quarrels with the Governor, it was commonly left to take care of itself. For some time they would vote no money to pay the feeble little garrison; and Clinton, who saw the necessity of maintaining it, was forced to do so on his own personal credit. [38] "Why can't your Governor and your great men [the Assembly] agree?" asked a Mohawk chief of the interpreter, Conrad Weiser. [39] [37] Lieutenant Lindesay to Johnson, July, 1751. [38] Clinton to Lords of Trade, 30 July, 1750. [39] Journal of Conrad Weiser, 1750. Piquet kept his promise not to land at the English fort; but he approached in his canoe, and closely observed it. The shores, now covered by the city of Oswego, were then a desolation of bare hills and fields, studded with the stumps of felled trees, and hedged about with a grim border of forests. Near the strand, by the mouth of the Onondaga, were the houses of some of the traders; and on the higher ground behind them stood a huge block-house with a projecting upper story. This building was surrounded by a rough wall of stone, with flankers at the angles, forming what was called the fort. [40] Piquet reconnoitred it from his canoe with the eye of a soldier. "It is 74 V1 commanded," he says, "on almost every side; two batteries, of three twelve-pounders each, would be more than enough to reduce it to ashes." And he enlarges on the evils that arise from it. "It not only spoils our trade, but puts the English into communication with a vast number of our Indians, far and near. It is true that they like our brandy better than English rum; but they prefer English goods to ours, and can buy for two beaver-skins at Oswego a better silver bracelet than we sell at Niagara for ten." [40] Compare Doc. Hist. N. Y., I. 463. The burden of these reflections was lightened when he approached Fort Frontenac. "Never was reception more solemn. The Nipissings and Algonkins, who were going on a war-party with Monsieur Belêtre, formed a line of their own accord, and saluted us with three volleys of musketry, and cries of joy without end. All our little bark vessels replied in the same way. Monsieur de Verchères and Monsieur de Valtry ordered the cannon of the fort to be fired; and my Indians, transported with joy at the honor done them, shot off their guns incessantly, with cries and acclamations that delighted everybody." A goodly band of recruits joined him, and he pursued his voyage to La Présentation, while the canoes of his proselytes followed in a swarm to their new home; "that establishment"—thus in a burst of enthusiasm he closes his Journal—"that establishment which I began two years ago, in the midst of opposition; that establishment which may be regarded as a key of the colony; that establishment which officers, 75 V1 interpreters, and traders thought a chim?ra,—that establishment, I say, forms already a mission of Iroquois savages whom I assembled at first to the number of only six, increased last year to eighty-seven, and this year to three hundred and ninety-six, without counting more than a hundred and fifty whom Monsieur Chabert de Joncaire is to bring me this autumn. And I certify that thus far I have received from His Majesty—for all favor, grace, and assistance—no more than a half pound of bacon and two pounds of bread for daily rations; and that he has not yet given a pin to the chapel, which I have maintained out of my own pocket, for the greater glory of my masters, God and the King." [41] [41] Journal qui peut servir de Mémoire et de Relation du Voyage que j'ay fait sur le Lac Ontario pour attirer au nouvel établissement de La Présentation les Sauvages Iroquois des Cinq Nations, 1751. The last passage given above is condensed in the rendering, as the original is extremely involved and ungrammatical. In his late journey he had made the entire circuit of Lake Ontario. Beyond lay four other inland oceans, to which Fort Niagara was the key. As that all-essential post controlled the passage from Ontario to Erie, so did Fort Detroit control that from Erie to Huron, and Fort Michillimackinac that from Huron to Michigan; while Fort Ste. Marie, at the outlet of Lake Superior, had lately received a garrison, and changed from a mission and trading-station to a post of war. [42] This immense extent of inland navigation was safe in the hands of France so long as she held Niagara. 76 V1 Niagara lost, not only the lakes, but also the Valley of the Ohio was lost with it. Next in importance was Detroit. This was not a military post alone, but also a settlement; and, except the hamlets about Fort Chartres, the only settlement that France owned in all the West. There were, it is true, but a few families; yet the hope of growth seemed good; for to such as liked a wilderness home, no spot in America had more attraction. Father Bonnecamp stopped here for a day on his way back from the expedition of Céloron. "The situation," he says, "is charming. A fine river flows at the foot of the fortifications; vast meadows, asking only to be tilled, extend beyond the sight. Nothing can be more agreeable than the climate. Winter lasts hardly two months. European grains and fruits grow here far better than in many parts of France. It is the Touraine and Beauce of Canada." [43] The white flag of the Bourbons floated over the compact little palisaded town, with its population of soldiers and fur-traders; and from the block-houses which served as bastions, one saw on either hand the small solid dwellings of the habitants, ranged at intervals along the margin of the water; while at a little distance three Indian villages—Ottawa, Pottawattamie, and Wyandot—curled their wigwam smoke into the pure summer air. [44] [42] La Jonquière au Ministre, 24 Ao?t, 1750. [43] Relation du Voiage de la Belle Rivière, 1749. [44] A plan of Detroit is before me, made about this time by the engineer Lery. When Céloron de Bienville returned from the Ohio, he went, with a royal commission, sent him 77 V1 a year before, to command at Detroit. [45] His late chaplain, the very intelligent Father Bonnecamp, speaks of him as fearless, energetic, and full of resource; but the Governor calls him haughty and insubordinate. Great efforts were made, at the same time, to build up Detroit as a centre of French power in the West. The methods employed were of the debilitating, paternal character long familiar to Canada. All emigrants with families were to be carried thither at the King's expense; and every settler was to receive in free gift a gun, a hoe, an axe, a ploughshare, a scythe, a sickle, two augers, large and small, a sow, six hens, a cock, six pounds of powder, and twelve pounds of lead; while to these favors were added many others. The result was that twelve families were persuaded to go, or about a twentieth part of the number wanted. [46] Detroit was expected to furnish supplies to the other posts for five hundred miles around, control the neighboring Indians, thwart English machinations, and drive off English interlopers. [45] Le Ministre à la Jonquière et Bigot, 14 Mai, 1749. Le Ministre à Céloron, 23 Mai, 1749. [46] Ordonnance du 2 Jan. 1750. La Jonquière et Bigot au Ministre, 1750. Forty-six persons of all ages and both sexes had been induced by La Galissonière to go the year before. Lettres communes de la Jonquière et Bigot, 1749. The total fixed population of Detroit and its neighborhood in 1750 is stated at four hundred and eighty-three souls. In the following two years, a considerable number of young men came of their own accord, and Céloron wrote to Montreal to ask for girls to marry them. La Galissonière no longer governed Canada. He had been honorably recalled, and the Marquis de la Jonquière sent in his stead. [47] La Jonquière, like his predecessor, was a naval officer of high repute; 78 V1 he was tall and imposing in person, and of undoubted capacity and courage; but old and, according to his enemies, very avaricious. [48] The Colonial Minister gave him special instructions regarding that thorn in the side of Canada, Oswego. To attack it openly would be indiscreet, as the two nations were at peace; but there was a way of dealing with it less hazardous, if not more lawful. This was to attack it vicariously by means of the Iroquois. "If Abbé Piquet succeeds in his mission," wrote the Minister to the new Governor, "we can easily persuade these savages to destroy Oswego. This is of the utmost importance; but act with great caution." [49] In the next year the Minister wrote again: "The only means that can be used for such an operation in time of peace are those of the Iroquois. If by making these savages regard such an establishment [Oswego] as opposed to their liberty, and, so to speak, a usurpation by which the English mean to get possession of their lands, they could be induced to undertake its destruction, an operation of the sort is not to be neglected; but M. le Marquis de la Jonquière should feel with what circumspection such an affair should be conducted, and he should labor to accomplish it in a manner not to commit himself." [50] To this La 79 V1 Jonquière replies that it will need time; but that he will gradually bring the Iroquois to attack and destroy the English post. He received stringent orders to use every means to prevent the English from encroaching, but to act towards them at the same time "with the greatest politeness." [51] This last injunction was scarcely fulfilled in a correspondence which he had with Clinton, governor of New York, who had written to complain of the new post at the Niagara portage as an invasion of English territory, and also of the arrest of four English traders in the country of the Miamis. Niagara, like Oswego, was in the country of the Five Nations, whom the treaty of Utrecht declared "subject to the dominion of Great Britain." [52] This declaration, preposterous in itself, was binding on France, whose plenipotentiaries had signed the treaty. The treaty also provided that the subjects of the two Crowns "shall enjoy full liberty of going and coming on account of trade," and Clinton therefore demanded that La Jonquière should disavow the arrest of the four traders and punish its authors. The French Governor replied with great asperity, spurned the claim that the Five Nations were British subjects, and justified the arrest. [53] He presently went further. Rewards were offered by his officers for the scalps of Croghan and of another trader named Lowry. [54] When this reached the ears 80 V1 of William Johnson, on the Mohawk, he wrote to Clinton in evident anxiety for his own scalp: "If the French go on so, there is no man can be safe in his own house; for I can at any time get an Indian to kill any man for a small matter. Their going on in that manner is worse than open war." [47] Le Ministre à la Galissonière, 14 Mai, 1749. [48] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. The charges made here and elsewhere are denied, somewhat faintly, by a descendant of La Jonquière in his elaborate Notice biographique of his ancestor. [49] Le Ministre à La Jonquière, Mai, 1749. The instructions given to La Jonquière before leaving France also urge the necessity of destroying Oswego. [50] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres; à MM. de la Jonquière et Bigot, 15 Avril, 1750. See Appendix A. for original. [51] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1750. [52] Chalmers, Collection of Treaties, I. 382. [53] La Jonquière à Clinton, 10 Ao?t, 1751. [54] Deposition of Morris Turner and Ralph Kilgore, in Colonial Records of Pa., V. 482. The deponents had been prisoners at Detroit. The French on their side made counter-accusations. The captive traders were examined on oath before La Jonquière, and one of them, John Patton, is reported to have said that Croghan had instigated Indians to kill Frenchmen. [55] French officials declared that other English traders were guilty of the same practices; and there is very little doubt that the charge was true. [55] Précis des Faits, avec leurs Pièces justificatives, 100. The dispute with the English was not the only source of trouble to the Governor. His superiors at Versailles would not adopt his views, and looked on him with distrust. He advised the building of forts near Lake Erie, and his advice was rejected. "Niagara and Detroit," he was told, "will secure forever our communications with Louisiana." [56] "His Majesty," again wrote the Colonial Minister, "thought that expenses would diminish after the peace; but, on the contrary, they have increased. There must be great abuses. You and the Intendant must look to it." [57] Great abuses there were; and of the money sent to Canada for the service of the King the larger part found its way into the pockets of peculators. The colony was eaten to the heart with official 81 V1 corruption; and the centre of it was Fran?ois Bigot, the intendant. The Minister directed La Jonquière's attention to certain malpractices which had been reported to him; and the old man, deeply touched, replied: "I have reached the age of sixty-six years, and there is not a drop of blood in my veins that does not thrill for the service of my King. I will not conceal from you that the slightest suspicion on your part against me would cut the thread of my days." [58] [56] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1750. [57] Ibid., 6 Juin, 1751. [58] La Jonquière au Ministre, 19 Oct. 1751. Perplexities increased; affairs in the West grew worse and worse. La Jonquière ordered Céloron to attack the English at Pickawillany; and Céloron could not or would not obey. "I cannot express," writes the Governor, "how much this business troubles me; it robs me of sleep; it makes me ill." Another letter of rebuke presently came from Versailles. "Last year you wrote that you would soon drive the English from the Ohio; but private letters say that you have done nothing. This is deplorable. If not expelled, they will seem to acquire a right against us. Send force enough at once to drive them off, and cure them of all wish to return." [59] La Jonquière answered with bitter complaints against Céloron, and then begged to be recalled. His health, already shattered, was ruined by fatigue and vexation; and he took to his bed. Before spring he was near his end. [60] It is said that, though very rich, his 82 V1 habits of thrift so possessed his last hours that, seeing wax-candles burning in his chamber, he ordered others of tallow to be brought instead, as being good enough to die by. Thus frugally lighted on its way, his spirit fled; and the Baron de Longueuil took his place till a new governor should arrive. [59] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1751. [60] He died on the sixth of March, 1752 (Bigot au Ministre, 6 Mai); not on the seventeenth of May, as stated in the Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Sinister tidings came thick from the West. Raymond, commandant at the French fort on the Maumee, close to the centre of intrigue, wrote: "My people are leaving me for Detroit. Nobody wants to stay here and have his throat cut. All the tribes who go to the English at Pickawillany come back loaded with gifts. I am too weak to meet the danger. Instead of twenty men, I need five hundred…. We have made peace with the English, yet they try continually to make war on us by means of the Indians; they intend to be masters of all this upper country. The tribes here are leaguing together to kill all the French, that they may have nobody on their lands but their English brothers. This I am told by Coldfoot, a great Miami chief, whom I think an honest man, if there is any such thing among Indians…. If the English stay in this country we are lost. We must attack, and drive them out." And he tells of war-belts sent from tribe to tribe, and rumors of plots and conspiracies far and near. Without doubt, the English traders spared no pains to gain over the Indians by fair means or foul; sold them goods at low rates, made ample 83 V1 gifts, and gave gunpowder for the asking. Saint-Ange, who commanded at Vincennes, wrote that a storm would soon burst on the heads of the French. Joncaire reported that all the Ohio Indians sided with the English. Longueuil informed the Minister that the Miamis had scalped two soldiers; that the Piankishaws had killed seven Frenchmen; and that a squaw who had lived with one of the slain declared that the tribes of the Wabash and Illinois were leaguing with the Osages for a combined insurrection. Every letter brought news of murder. Small-pox had broken out at Detroit. "It is to be wished," says Longueuil, "that it would spread among our rebels; it would be fully as good as an army…. We are menaced with a general outbreak, and even Toronto is in danger…. Before long the English on the Miami will gain over all the surrounding tribes, get possession of Fort Chartres, and cut our communications with Louisiana." [61] [61] Dépêches de Longueuil; Lettres de Raymond; Benoit de Saint-Clerc à la Jonquière, Oct. 1751. The moving spirit of disaffection was the chief called Old Britain, or the Demoiselle, and its focus was his town of Pickawillany, on the Miami. At this place it is said that English traders sometimes mustered to the number of fifty or more. "It is they," wrote Longueuil, "who are the instigators of revolt and the source of all our woes." [62] Whereupon the Colonial Minister reiterated his instructions to drive them off and plunder them, 84 V1 which he thought would "effectually disgust them," and bring all trouble to an end. [63] [62] Longueuil au Ministre, 21 Avril, 1752. [63] Le Ministre à la Jonquière, 1752. Le Ministre à Duquesne, 9 Juillet, 1752. La Jonquière's remedy had been more heroic, for he had ordered Céloron to attack the English and their red allies alike; and he charged that officer with arrogance and disobedience because he had not done so. It is not certain that obedience was easy; for though, besides the garrison of regulars, a strong body of militia was sent up to Detroit to aid the stroke, [64] the Indians of that post, whose co-operation was thought necessary, proved half-hearted, intractable, and even touched with disaffection. Thus the enterprise languished till, in June, aid came from another quarter. Charles Langlade, a young French trader married to a squaw at Green Bay, and strong in influence with the tribes of that region, came down the lakes from Michillimackinac with a fleet of canoes manned by two hundred and fifty Ottawa and Ojibwa warriors; stopped a while at Detroit; then embarked again, paddled up the Maumee to Raymond's fort at the portage, and led his greased and painted rabble through the forest to attack the Demoiselle and his English friends. They approached Pickawillany at about nine o'clock on the morning of the twenty-first. The scared squaws fled from the cornfields into the town, where the wigwams of the Indians clustered about the fortified warehouse of the traders. Of these there were at the 85 V1 time only eight in the place. Most of the Indians also were gone on their summer hunt, though the Demoiselle remained with a band of his tribesmen. Great was the screeching of war-whoops and clatter of guns. Three of the traders were caught outside the fort. The remaining five closed the gate, and stood on their defence. The fight was soon over. Fourteen Miamis were shot down, the Demoiselle among the rest. The five white men held out till the afternoon, when three of them surrendered, and two, Thomas Burney and Andrew McBryer, made their escape. One of the English prisoners being wounded, the victors stabbed him to death. Seventy years of missionaries had not weaned them from cannibalism, and they boiled and eat the Demoiselle. [65] [64] La Jonquière à Céloron, 1 Oct. 1751. [65] On the attack of Pickawillany, Longueuil au Ministre, 18 Ao?t, 1752; Duquesne au Ministre, 25 Oct. 1752; Colonial Records of Pa., V. 599; Journal of William Trent, 1752. Trent was on the spot a few days after the affair. The captive traders, plundered to the skin, were carried by Langlade to Duquesne, the new governor, who highly praised the bold leader of the enterprise, and recommended him to the Minister for such reward as befitted one of his station. "As he is not in the King's service, and has married a squaw, I will ask for him only a pension of two hundred francs, which will flatter him infinitely." The Marquis Duquesne, sprung from the race of the great naval commander of that name, had arrived towards midsummer; and he began his rule by a general review of troops and militia. 86 V1 His lofty bearing offended the Canadians; but he compelled their respect, and, according to a writer of the time, showed from the first that he was born to command. He presently took in hand an enterprise which his predecessor would probably have accomplished, had the Home Government encouraged him. Duquesne, profiting by the infatuated neglect of the British provincial assemblies, prepared to occupy the upper waters of the Ohio, and secure the passes with forts and garrisons. Thus the Virginian and Pennsylvanian traders would be debarred all access to the West, and the tribes of that region, bereft henceforth of English guns, knives, hatchets, and blankets, English gifts and English cajoleries, would be thrown back to complete dependence on the French. The moral influence, too, of such a movement would be incalculable; for the Indian respects nothing so much as a display of vigor and daring, backed by force. In short, the intended enterprise was a master-stroke, and laid the axe to the very root of disaffection. It is true that, under the treaty, commissioners had been long in session at Paris to settle the question of American boundaries; but there was no likelihood that they would come to agreement; and if France would make good her Western claims, it behooved her, while there was yet time, to prevent her rival from fastening a firm grasp on the countries in dispute. Yet the Colonial Minister regarded the plan with distrust. "Be on your guard," he wrote to Duquesne, "against new undertakings; private 87 V1 interests are generally at the bottom of them. It is through these that new posts are established. Keep only such as are indispensable, and suppress the others. The expenses of the colony are enormous; and they have doubled since the peace." Again, a little later: "Build on the Ohio such forts as are absolutely necessary, but no more. Remember that His Majesty suspects your advisers of interested views." [66] [66] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1753. No doubt there was justice in the suspicion. Every military movement, and above all the establishment of every new post, was an opportunity to the official thieves with whom the colony swarmed. Some band of favored knaves grew rich; while a much greater number, excluded from sharing the illicit profits, clamored against the undertaking, and wrote charges of corruption to Versailles. Thus the Minister was kept tolerably well informed; but was scarcely the less helpless, for with the Atlantic between, the disorders of Canada defied his control. Duquesne was exasperated by the opposition that met him on all hands, and wrote to the Minister: "There are so many rascals in this country that one is forever the butt of their attacks." [67] [67] Duquesne au Ministre, 29 Sept. 1754. It seems that unlawful gain was not the only secret spring of the movement. An officer of repute says that the Intendant, Bigot, enterprising in his pleasures as in his greed, was engaged in an intrigue with the wife of Chevalier Péan; and 88 V1 wishing at once to console the husband and to get rid of him, sought for him a high command at a distance from the colony. Therefore while Marin, an able officer, was made first in rank, Péan was made second. The same writer hints that Duquesne himself was influenced by similar motives in his appointment of leaders. [68] [68] Pouchot, Mémoire sur la dernière Guerre de l'Amérique septentrionale (ed. 1781), I. 8. He mustered the colony troops, and ordered out the Canadians. With the former he was but half satisfied; with the latter he was delighted; and he praises highly their obedience and alacrity. "I had not the least trouble in getting them to march. They came on the minute, bringing their own guns, though many people tried to excite them to revolt; for the whole colony opposes my operations." The expedition set out early in the spring of 1753. The whole force was not much above a thousand men, increased by subsequent detachments to fifteen hundred; but to the Indians it seemed a mighty host; and one of their orators declared that the lakes and rivers were covered with boats and soldiers from Montreal to Presquisle. [69] Some Mohawk hunters by the St. Lawrence saw them as they passed, and hastened home to tell the news to Johnson, whom they wakened at midnight, "whooping and hollowing in a frightful manner." [70] Lieutenant Holland at Oswego saw a fleet of canoes upon the lake, and was told by a roving Frenchman that they belonged to an army of six thousand 89 V1 men going to the Ohio, "to cause all the English to quit those parts." [71] [69] Duquesne au Ministre, 27 Oct. 1753. [70] Johnson to Clinton, 20 April, 1753, in N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 778. [71] Holland to Clinton, 15 May, 1753, in N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 780. The main body of the expedition landed at Presquisle, on the southeastern shore of Lake Erie, where the town of Erie now stands; and here for a while we leave them. CHAPTER IV. 1710-1754. CONFLICT FOR ACADIA. Acadia ceded to England ? Acadians swear Fidelity ? Halifax founded ? French Intrigue ? Acadian Priests ? Mildness of English Rule ? Covert Hostility of Acadians ? The New Oath ? Treachery of Versailles ? Indians incited to War ? Clerical Agents of Revolt ? Abbé Le Loutre ? Acadians impelled to emigrate ? Misery of the Emigrants ? Humanity of Cornwallis and Hopson ? Fanaticism and Violence of Le Loutre ? Capture of the "St. Fran?ois" ? The English at Beaubassin ? Le Loutre drives out the Inhabitants ? Murder of Howe ? Beauséjour ? Insolence of Le Loutre ? His Harshness to the Acadians ? The Boundary Commission ? Its Failure ? Approaching War While in the West all the signs of the sky foreboded storm, another tempest was gathering the East, less in extent, but not less in peril. The conflict in Acadia has a melancholy interest, since it ended in a catastrophe which prose and verse have joined to commemorate, but of which the causes have not been understood. Acadia—that it to say, the peninsula of Nova Scotia, with the addition, as the English claimed, of the present New Brunswick and some adjacent country—was conquered by General Nicholson in 1710, and formally transferred by France to the British Crown, three years later, by the treaty of Utrecht. By that treaty it was "expressly provided" that such of the French inhabitants as 91 V1 "are willing to remain there and to be subject to the Kingdom of Great Britain, are to enjoy the free exercise of their religion according to the usage of the Church of Rome, as far as the laws of Great Britain do allow the same;" but that any who choose may remove, with their effects, if they do so within a year. Very few availed themselves of this right; and after the end of the year those who remained were required to take an oath of allegiance to King George. There is no doubt that in a little time they would have complied, had they been let alone; but the French authorities of Canada and Cape Breton did their utmost to prevent them, and employed agents to keep them hostile to England. Of these the most efficient were the French priests, who, in spite of the treaty, persuaded their flocks that they were still subjects of King Louis. Hence rose endless perplexity to the English commanders at Annapolis, who more than suspected that the Indian attacks with which they were harassed were due mainly to French instigation. [72] It was not till seventeen years after the treaty that the Acadians could be brought to take the oath without qualifications which made it almost useless. The English authorities seem to have shown throughout an unusual patience and forbearance. At length, about 1730, nearly all the inhabitants signed by crosses, since few of them could write, an oath 92 V1 recognizing George II. as sovereign of Acadia, and promising fidelity and obedience to him. [73] This restored comparative quiet till the war of 1745, when some of the Acadians remained neutral, while some took arms against the English, and many others aided the enemy with information and supplies. [72] See the numerous papers in Selections from the Public Documents of the Province of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1869), pp. 1-165; a Government publication of great value. [73] The oath was literatim as follows: "Je Promets et Jure Sincerement en Foi de Chrétien que Je serai entierement Fidele, et Obeierai Vraiment Sa Majesté Le Roy George Second, qui (sic) Je reconnoi pour Le Souvrain Seigneur de l'Accadie ou Nouvelle Ecosse. Ainsi Dieu me Soit en Aide." English power in Acadia, hitherto limited to a feeble garrison at Annapolis and a feebler one at Canseau, received at this time a great accession. The fortress of Louisbourg, taken by the English during the war, had been restored by the treaty; and the French at once prepared to make it a military and naval station more formidable than ever. Upon this the British Ministry resolved to establish another station as a counterpoise; and the harbor of Chebucto, on the south coast of Acadia, was chosen as the site of it. Thither in June, 1749, came a fleet of transports loaded with emigrants, tempted by offers of land and a home in the New World. Some were mechanics, tradesmen, farmers, and laborers; others were sailors, soldiers, and subaltern officers thrown out of employment by the peace. Including women and children, they counted in all about twenty-five hundred. Alone of all the British colonies on the continent, this new settlement was the offspring, not of private enterprise, but of royal authority. 93 V1 Yet is was free like the rest, with the same popular representation and local self-government. Edward Cornwallis, uncle of Lord Cornwallis of the Revolutionary War, was made governor and commander-in-chief. Wolfe calls him "a man of approved courage and fidelity;" and even the caustic Horace Walpole speaks of him as "a brave, sensible young man, of great temper and good nature." Before summer was over, the streets were laid out, and the building-lot of each settler was assigned to him; before winter closed, the whole were under shelter, the village was fenced with palisades and defended by redoubts of timber, and the battalions lately in garrison at Louisbourg manned the wooden ramparts. Succeeding years brought more emigrants, till in 1752 the population was above four thousand. Thus was born into the world the city of Halifax. Along with the crumbling old fort and miserably disciplined garrison at Annapolis, besides six or seven small detached posts to watch the Indians and Acadians, it comprised the whole British force on the peninsula; for Canseau had been destroyed by the French. The French had never reconciled themselves to the loss of Acadia, and were resolved, by diplomacy or force, to win it back again; but the building of Halifax showed that this was to be no easy task, and filled them at the same time with alarm for the safety of Louisbourg. On one point, at least, they saw their policy clear. The Acadians, though those of them who were not above thirty-five 94 V1 had been born under the British flag, must be kept French at heart, and taught that they were still French subjects. In 1748 they numbered eighty-eight hundred and fifty communicants, or from twelve to thirteen thousand souls; but an emigration, of which the causes will soon appear, had reduced them in 1752 to but little more than nine thousand. [74] These were divided into six principal parishes, one of the largest being that of Annapolis. Other centres of population were Grand Pré, on the basin of Mines; Beaubassin, at the head of Chignecto Bay; Pisiquid, now Windsor; and Cobequid, now Truro. Their priests, who were missionaries controlled by the diocese of Quebec, acted also as their magistrates, ruling them for this world and the next. Bring subject to a French superior, and being, moreover, wholly French at heart, they formed in this British province a wheel within a wheel, the inner movement always opposing the outer. [74] Description de l'Acadie, avec le Nom des Paroisses et le Nombre des Habitants, 1748. Mémoire à présenter à la Cour sur la Necessité de fixer les Limites de l'Acadie, par l'Abbé de l'Isle-Dieu, 1753 (1754?). Compare the estimates in Censuses of Canada (Ottawa, 1876.) Although, by the twelfth article of the treaty of Utrecht, France had solemnly declared the Acadians to be British subjects, the Government of Louis XV. intrigued continually to turn them from subjects into enemies. Before me is a mass of English documents on Acadian affairs from the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle to the catastrophe of 1755, and above a thousand pages of French official 95 V1 papers from the archives of Paris, memorials, reports, and secret correspondence, relating to the same matters. With the help of these and some collateral lights, it is not difficult to make a correct diagnosis of the political disease that ravaged this miserable country. Of a multitude of proofs, only a few can be given here; but these will suffice. It was not that the Acadians had been ill-used by the English; the reverse was the case. They had been left in free exercise of their worship, as stipulated by treaty. It is true that, from time to time, there were loud complaints from French officials that religion was in danger, because certain priests had been rebuked, arrested, brought before the Council at Halifax, suspended from their functions, or required, on pain of banishment, to swear that they would do nothing against the interests of King George. Yet such action on the part of the provincial authorities seems, without a single exception, to have been the consequence of misconduct on the part of the priest, in opposing the Government and stirring his flock to disaffection. La Jonquière, the determined adversary of the English, reported to the bishop that they did not oppose the ecclesiastics in the exercise of their functions, and an order of Louis XV. admits that the Acadians have enjoyed liberty of religion. [75] In a long document addressed in 1750 to 96 V1 the Colonial Minister at Versailles, Roma, an officer at Louisbourg, testifies thus to the mildness of British rule, though he ascribes it to interested motives. "The fear that the Acadians have of the Indians is the controlling motive which makes them side with the French. The English, having in view the conquest of Canada, wished to give the French of that colony, in their conduct towards the Acadians, a striking example of the mildness of their government. Without raising the fortune of any of the inhabitants, they have supplied them for more than thirty-five years with the necessaries of life, often on credit and with an excess of confidence, without troubling their debtors, without pressing them, without wishing to force them to pay. They have left them an appearance of liberty so excessive that they have not intervened in their disputes or even punished their crimes. They have allowed them to refuse with insolence certain moderate rents payable in grain and lawfully due. They have passed over in silence the contemptuous refusal of the Acadians to take titles from them for the new lands which they chose to occupy. [76] [75] La Jonquière à l'évêque de Québec, 14 Juin, 1750. Mémoire du Roy pour servir d'Instruction au Comte de Raymond, commandant pour Sa Majesté à l'Isle Royale [Cape Breton], 24 Avril, 1751. [76] See Appendix B. "We know very well," pursues Roma, "the fruits of this conduct in the last war; and the English know it also. Judge then what will be the wrath and vengeance of this cruel nation." The fruits to which Roma alludes were the hostilities, open or secret, committed by the Acadians against the English. He now ventures the 97 V1 prediction that the enraged conquerors will take their revenge by drafting all the young Acadians on board their ships of war, and there destroying them by slow starvation. He proved, however, a false prophet. The English Governor merely required the inhabitants to renew their oath of allegiance, without qualification or evasion. It was twenty years since the Acadians had taken such an oath; and meanwhile a new generation had grown up. The old oath pledged them to fidelity and obedience; but they averred that Phillips, then governor of the province, had given them, at the same time, assurance that they should not be required to bear arms against either French or Indians. In fact, such service had not been demanded of them, and they would have lived in virtual neutrality, had not many of them broken their oaths and joined the French war-parties. For this reason Cornwallis thought it necessary that, in renewing the pledge, they should bind themselves to an allegiance as complete as that required of other British subjects. This spread general consternation. Deputies from the Acadian settlements appeared at Halifax, bringing a paper signed with the marks of a thousand persons. The following passage contains the pith of it. "The inhabitants in general, sir, over the whole extent of this country are resolved not to take the oath which your Excellency requires of us; but if your Excellency will grant us our old oath, with an exemption for ourselves and our heirs from taking up arms, we 98 V1 will accept it." [77] The answer of Cornwallis was by no means so stern as it has been represented. [78] After the formal reception he talked in private with the deputies; and "they went home in good humor, promising great things." [79] [77] Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 173. [78] See Ibid., 174, where the answer is printed. [79] Cornwallis to the Board of Trade, 11 Sept. 1749. The refusal of the Acadians to take the required oath was not wholly spontaneous, but was mainly due to influence from without. The French officials of Cape Breton and Isle St. Jean, now Prince Edward Island, exerted themselves to the utmost, chiefly through the agency of the priests, to excite the people to refuse any oath that should commit them fully to British allegiance. At the same time means were used to induce them to migrate to the neighboring islands under French rule, and efforts were also made to set on the Indians to attack the English. But the plans of the French will best appear in a despatch sent by La Jonquière to the Colonial Minister in the autumn of 1749. "Monsieur Cornwallis issued an order on the tenth of the said month [August], to the effect that if the inhabitants will remain faithful subjects of the King of Great Britain, he will allow them priests and public exercise of their religion, with the understanding that no priest shall officiate without his permission or before taking an oath of fidelity to the King of Great Britain. Secondly, that the inhabitants shall not be 99 V1 exempted from defending their houses, their lands, and the Government. Thirdly, that they shall take an oath of fidelity to the King of Great Britain, on the twenty-sixth of this month, before officers sent them for that purpose." La Jonquière proceeds to say that on hearing these conditions the Acadians were filled with perplexity and alarm, and that he, the governor, had directed Boishébert, his chief officer on the Acadian frontier, to encourage them to leave their homes and seek asylum on French soil. He thus recounts the steps he has taken to harass the English of Halifax by means of their Indian neighbors. As peace had been declared, the operation was delicate; and when three of these Indians came to him from their missionary, Le Loutre, with letters on the subject, La Jonquière was discreetly reticent. "I did not care to give them any advice upon the matter, and confined myself to a promise that I would on no account abandon them; and I have provided for supplying them with everything, whether arms, ammunition, food, or other necessaries. It is to be desired that these savages should succeed in thwarting the designs of the English, and even their settlement at Halifax. They are bent on doing so; and if they can carry out their plans, it is certain that they will give the English great trouble, and so harass them that they will be a great obstacle in their path. These savages are to act alone; neither soldier nor French inhabitant is to join them; everything will be done of 100 V1 their own motion, and without showing that I had any knowledge of the matter. This is very essential; therefore I have written to the Sieur de Boishébert to observe great prudence in his measures, and to act very secretly, in order that the English may not perceive that we are providing for the needs of the said savages. "It will be the missionaries who will manage all the negotiation, and direct the movements of the savages, who are in excellent hands, as the Reverend Father Germain and Monsieur l'Abbé Le Loutre are very capable of making the most of them, and using them to the greatest advantage for our interests. They will manage their intrigue in such a way as not to appear in it." La Jonquière then recounts the good results which he expects from these measures: first, the English will be prevented from making any new settlements; secondly, we shall gradually get the Acadians out of their hands; and lastly, they will be so discouraged by constant Indian attacks that they will renounce their pretensions to the parts of the country belonging to the King of France. "I feel, Monseigneur,"—thus the Governor concludes his despatch,—"all the delicacy of this negotiation; be assured that I will conduct it with such precaution that the English will not be able to say that my orders had any part in it." [80] [80] La Jonquière au Ministre, 9 Oct. 1749. See Appendix B. He kept his word, and so did the missionaries. The Indians gave great trouble on the outskirts of Halifax, and murdered many harmless settlers; 101 V1 yet the English authorities did not at first suspect that they were hounded on by their priests, under the direction of the Governor of Canada, and with the privity of the Minister at Versailles. More than this; for, looking across the sea, we find royalty itself lending its august countenance to the machination. Among the letters read before the King in his cabinet in May, 1750, was one from Desherbiers, then commanding at Louisbourg, saying that he was advising the Acadians not to take the oath of allegiance to the King of England; another from Le Loutre, declaring that he and Father Germain were consulting together how to disgust the English with their enterprise of Halifax; and a third from the Intendant, Bigot, announcing that Le Loutre was using the Indians to harass the new settlement, and that he himself was sending them powder, lead, and merchandise, "to confirm them in their good designs." [81] [81] Resumé des Lettres lues au Travail du Roy, Mai, 1750. To this the Minister replies in a letter to Desherbiers: "His Majesty is well satisfied with all you have done to thwart the English in their new establishment. If the dispositions of the savages are such as they seem, there is reason to hope that in the course of the winter they will succeed in so harassing the settlers that some of them will become disheartened." Desherbiers is then told that His Majesty desires him to aid English deserters in escaping from Halifax. [82] Supplies for the 102 V1 Indians are also promised; and he is informed that twelve medals are sent him by the frigate "La Mutine," to be given to the chiefs who shall most distinguish themselves. In another letter Desherbiers is enjoined to treat the English authorities with great politeness. [83] [82] In 1750 nine captured deserters from Phillips's regiment declared on their trial that the French had aided them and supplied them all with money. Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 193. [83] Le Ministre à Desherbiers, 23 Mai, 1750; Ibid., 31 Mai, 1750. When Count Raymond took command at Louisbourg, he was instructed, under the royal hand, to give particular attention to the affairs of Acadia, especially in two points,—the management of the Indians, and the encouraging of Acadian emigration to countries under French rule. "His Majesty," says the document, "has already remarked that the savages have been most favorably disposed. It is of the utmost importance that no means be neglected to keep them so. The missionaries among them are in a better position than anybody to contribute to this end, and His Majesty has reason to be satisfied with the pains they take therein. The Sieur de Raymond will excite these missionaries not to slacken their efforts; but he will warn them at the same time so to contain their zeal as not to compromise themselves with the English, and give just occasion of complaint." [84] That is, the King orders his representative to encourage the missionaries in instigating their flocks to butcher English settlers, but to see that they take care not to be found out. The injunction was hardly needed. "Monsieur Desherbiers," says a 103 V1 letter of earlier date, "has engaged Abbé Le Loutre to distribute the usual presents among the savages, and Monsieur Bigot has placed in his hands an additional gift of cloth, blankets, powder, and ball, to be given them in case they harass the English at Halifax. This missionary is to induce them to do so." [85] In spite of these efforts, the Indians began to relent in their hostilities; and when Longueuil became provisional governor of Canada, he complained to the Minister that it was very difficult to prevent them from making peace with the English, though Father Germain was doing his best to keep them on the war-path. [86] La Jonquière, too, had done his best, even to the point of departing from his original policy of allowing no soldier or Acadian to take part with them. He had sent a body of troops under La Corne, an able partisan officer, to watch the English frontier; and in the same vessel was sent a supply of "merchandise, guns, and munitions for the savages and the Acadians who may take up arms with them; and the whole is sent under pretext of trading in furs with the savages." [87] On another occasion La Jonquière wrote: "In order that the savages may do their part courageously, a few Acadians, dressed and painted in their way, could join them to strike the English. I cannot help consenting to what these savages do, because we have our hands tied [by the peace], and 104 V1 so can do nothing ourselves. Besides, I do not think that any inconvenience will come of letting the Acadians mingle among them, because if they [the Acadians] are captured, we shall say that they acted of their own accord." [88] In other words, he will encourage them to break the peace; and then, by means of a falsehood, have them punished as felons. Many disguised Acadians did in fact join the Indian war-parties; and their doing so was no secret to the English. "What we call here an Indian war," wrote Hopson, successor of Cornwallis, "is no other than a pretence for the French to commit hostilities on His Majesty's subjects." [84] Mémoire du Roy pour servir d'Instruction au Comte de Raymond, 24 Avril, 1751. [85] Lettre commune de Desherbiers et Bigot au Ministre, 15 Ao?t, 1749. [86] Longueuil au Ministre, 26 Avril, 1752. [87] Bigot au Ministre, 1749. [88] Dépêches de la Jonquière, 1 Mai, 1751. See Appendix B. At length the Indians made peace, or pretended to do so. The chief of Le Loutre's mission, who called himself Major Jean-Baptiste Cope, came to Halifax with a deputation of his tribe, and they all affixed their totems to a solemn treaty. In the next summer they returned with ninety or a hundred warriors, were well entertained, presented with gifts, and sent homeward in a schooner. On the way they seized the vessel and murdered the crew. This is told by Prévost, intendant at Louisbourg, who does not say that French instigation had any part in the treachery. [89] It is nevertheless certain that the Indians were paid for this or some contemporary murder; for Prévost, writing just four weeks later, says: "Last month the savages 105 V1 took eighteen English scalps, and Monsieur Le Loutre was obliged to pay them eighteen hundred livres, Acadian money, which I have reimbursed him." [90] [89] Prévost au Ministre, 12 Mars, 1753; Ibid., 17 July, 1753. Prévost was ordonnateur, or intendant, at Louisbourg. The treaty will be found in full in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 683. [90] Prévost au Ministre, 16 Ao?t, 1753. From the first, the services of this zealous missionary had been beyond price. Prévost testifies that, though Cornwallis does his best to induce the Acadians to swear fidelity to King George, Le Loutre keeps them in allegiance to King Louis, and threatens to set his Indians upon them unless they declare against the English. "I have already," adds Prévost, "paid him 11,183 livres for his daily expenses; and I never cease advising him to be as economical as possible, and always to take care not to compromise himself with the English Government." [91] In consequence of "good service to religion and the state," Le Loutre received a pension of eight hundred livres, as did also Maillard, his brother missionary on Cape Breton. "The fear is," writes the Colonial Minister to the Governor of Louisbourg, "that their zeal may carry them too far. Excite them to keep the Indians in our interests, but do not let them compromise us. Act always so as to make the English appear as aggressors." [92] [91] Ibid., 22 Juillet, 1750. [92] Le Ministre au Comte de Raymond, 21 Juillet, 1752. It is curious to compare these secret instructions, given by the Minister to the colonial officials, with a letter which the same Minister, Rouillé, wrote ostensibly to La Jonquière, but which was really meant for the eye of the British Minister at Versailles, Lord Albemarle, to whom it was shown in proof of French good faith. It was afterwards printed, along with other papers, in a small volume called Précis des Faits, avec leurs Pièces justificatives which was sent by the French Government to all the courts of Europe to show that the English alone were answerable for the war. The letter, it is needless to say, breathes the highest sentiments of international honor. 106 V1 All the Acadian clergy, in one degree or another, seem to have used their influence to prevent the inhabitants from taking the oath, and to persuade them that they were still French subjects. Some were noisy, turbulent, and defiant; others were too tranquil to please the officers of the Crown. A missionary at Annapolis is mentioned as old, and therefore inefficient; while the curé at Grand Pré, also an elderly man, was too much inclined to confine himself to his spiritual functions. It is everywhere apparent that those who chose these priests, and sent them as missionaries into a British province, expected them to act as enemies of the British Crown. The maxim is often repeated that duty to religion is inseparable from the duty to the King of France. The Bishop of Quebec desired the Abbé de l'Isle-Dieu to represent to the Court the need of more missionaries to keep the Acadians Catholic and French; but, he adds, there is danger that they (the missionaries) will be required to take an oath to do nothing contrary to the interests of the King of Great Britain. [93] It is a wonder that such a pledge was not always demanded. It was exacted in a few cases, notably in that of Girard, priest at Cobequid, who, on charges of instigating his flock to disaffection, had been sent prisoner to Halifax, but released on taking an oath in the above terms. 107 V1 Thereupon he wrote to Longueuil at Quebec that his parishioners wanted to submit to the English, and that he, having sworn to be true to the British King, could not prevent them. "Though I don't pretend to be a casuist," writes Longueuil, "I could not help answering him that he is not obliged to keep such an oath, and that he ought to labor in all zeal to preserve and increase the number of the faithful." Girard, to his credit, preferred to leave the colony, and retired to Isle St. Jean. [94] [93] L'Isle-Dieu, Mémoire sur l'état actuel des Missions, 1753 (1754?). [94] Longueuil au Ministre, 27 Avril, 1752. Cornwallis soon discovered to what extent the clergy stirred their flocks to revolt; and he wrote angrily to the Bishop of Quebec: "Was it you who sent Le Loutre as a missionary to the Micmacs? and is it for their good that he excites these wretches to practise their cruelties against those who have shown them every kindness? The conduct of the priests of Acadia has been such that by command of his Majesty I have published an Order declaring that if any one of them presumes to exercise his functions without my express permission he shall be dealt with according to the laws of England." [95] [95] Cornwallis to the Bishop of Quebec, 1 Dec. 1749. The English, bound by treaty to allow the Acadians the exercise of their religion, at length conceived the idea of replacing the French priests by others to be named by the Pope at the request of the British Government. This, becoming known to the French, greatly alarmed them, and the Intendant at Louisbourg wrote to the Minister that the 108 V1 matter required serious attention. [96] It threatened, in fact, to rob them of their chief agents of intrigue; but their alarm proved needless, as the plan was not carried into execution. [96] Daudin, prêtre, à Prévost, 23 Oct. 1753. Prévost au Ministre, 24 Nov. 1753. The French officials would have been better pleased had the conduct of Cornwallis been such as to aid their efforts to alienate the Acadians; and one writer, while confessing the "favorable treatment" of the English towards the inhabitants, denounces it as a snare. [97] If so, it was a snare intended simply to reconcile them to English rule. Nor was it without effect. "We must give up altogether the idea of an insurrection in Acadia," writes an officer of Cape Breton. "The Acadians cannot be trusted; they are controlled by fear of the Indians, which leads them to breathe French sentiments, even when their inclinations are English. They will yield to their interests; and the English will make it impossible that they should either hurt them or serve us, unless we take measures different from those we have hitherto pursued." [98] [97] Mémoire à présenter à la Cour, 1753. [98] Roma au Ministre, 11 Mars, 1750. During all this time, constant efforts were made to stimulate Acadian emigration to French territory, and thus to strengthen the French frontier. In this work the chief agent was Le Loutre. "This priest," says a French writer of the time, "urged the people of Les Mines, Port Royal [Annapolis], and other places, to come and join the French, and promised to all, in the name of the Governor, to 109 V1 settle and support them for three years, and even indemnify them for any losses they might incur; threatening if they did not do as he advised, to abandon them, deprive them of their priests, have their wives and children carried off, and their property laid waste by the Indians." [99] Some passed over the isthmus to the shores of the gulf, and others made their way to the Strait of Canseau. Vessels were provided to convey them, in the one case to Isle St. Jean, now Prince Edward Island, and in the other to Isle Royale, called by the English, Cape Breton. Some were eager to go; some went with reluctance; some would scarcely be persuaded to go at all. "They leave their homes with great regret," reports the Governor of Isle St. Jean, speaking of the people of Cobequid, "and they began to move their luggage only when the savages compelled them." [100] These savages were the flock of Abbé Le Loutre, who was on the spot to direct the emigration. Two thousand Acadians are reported to have left the peninsula before the end of 1751, and many more followed within the next two years. Nothing could exceed the misery of a great part of these emigrants, who had left perforce most of their effects behind. They became disheartened and apathetic. The Intendant at Louisbourg says that they will not take the trouble to clear the land, and that some of them live, like Indians, under huts of spruce-branches. [101] The Governor of 110 V1 Isle St. Jean declares that they are dying of hunger. [102] Girard, the priest who had withdrawn to this island rather than break his oath to the English, writes: "Many of them cannot protect themselves day or night from the severity of the cold. Most of the children are entirely naked; and when I go into a house they are all crouched in the ashes, close to the fire. They run off and hide themselves, without shoes, stockings, or shirts. They are not all reduced to this extremity but nearly all are in want." [103] Mortality among them was great, and would have been greater but for rations supplied by the French Government. [99] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. [100] Bonaventure à Desherbiers, 26 Juin, 1751. [101] Prévost au Ministre, 25 Nov. 1750. [102] Bonaventure, ut supra. [103] Girard à (Bonaventure?), 27 Oct. 1753. During these proceedings, the English Governor, Cornwallis, seems to have justified the character of good temper given him by Horace Walpole. His attitude towards the Acadians remained on the whole patient and conciliatory. "My friends," he replied to a deputation of them asking a general permission to leave the province, "I am not ignorant of the fact that every means has been used to alienate the hearts of the French subjects of His Britannic Majesty. Great advantages have been promised you elsewhere, and you have been made to imagine that your religion was in danger. Threats even have been resorted to in order to induce you to remove to French territory. The savages are made use of to molest you; they are to cut the throats of all who remain in their native country, attached to their own interests and 111 V1 faithful to the Government. You know that certain officers and missionaries, who came from Canada last autumn, have been the cause of all our trouble during the winter. Their conduct has been horrible, without honor, probity, or conscience. Their aim is to embroil you with the Government. I will not believe that they are authorized to do so by the Court of France, that being contrary to good faith and the friendship established between the two Crowns." What foundation there was for this amiable confidence in the Court of Versailles has been seen already. "When you declared your desire to submit yourselves to another Government," pursues Cornwallis, "our determination was to hinder nobody from following what he imagined to be his interest. We know that a forced service is worth nothing, and that a subject compelled to be so against his will is not far from being an enemy. We confess, however, that your determination to go gives us pain. We are aware of your industry and temperance, and that you are not addicted to any vice or debauchery. This province is your country. You and your fathers have cultivated it; naturally you ought yourselves to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Such was the design of the King, our master. You know that we have followed his orders. You know that we have done everything to secure to you not only the occupation of your lands, but the ownership of them forever. We have given you also every possible assurance of the free and 112 V1 public exercise of the Roman Catholic religion. But I declare to you frankly that, according to our laws, nobody can possess lands or houses in the province who shall refuse to take the oath of allegiance to his King when required to do so. You know very well that there are ill-disposed and mischievous persons among you who corrupt the others. Your inexperience, your ignorance of the affairs of government, and your habit of following the counsels of those who have not your real interests at heart, make it an easy matter to seduce you. In your petitions you ask for a general leave to quit the province. The only manner in which you can do so is to follow the regulations already established, and provide yourselves with our passport. And we declare that nothing shall prevent us from giving such passports to all who ask for them, the moment peace and tranquillity are re-established." [104] He declares as his reason for not giving them at once, that on crossing the frontier "you will have to pass the French detachments and savages assembled there, and that they compel all the inhabitants who go there to take up arms" against the English. How well this reason was founded will soon appear. [104] The above passages are from two address of Cornwallis, read to the Acadian deputies in April and May, 1750. The combined extracts here given convey the spirit of the whole. See Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 185-190. Hopson, the next governor, described by the French themselves as a "mild and peaceable officer," was no less considerate in his treatment of the Acadians; and at the end of 1752 he issued 113 V1 the following order to his military subordinates: "You are to look on the French inhabitants in the same light as the rest of His Majesty's subjects, as to the protection of the laws and government; for which reason nothing is to be taken from them by force, or any price set upon their goods but what they themselves agree to. And if at any time the inhabitants should obstinately refuse to comply with what His Majesty's service may require of them, you are not to redress yourself by military force or in any unlawful manner, but to lay the case before the Governor and wait his orders thereon." [105] Unfortunately, the mild rule of Cornwallis and Hopson was not always maintained under their successor, Lawrence. [105] Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 197. Louis Joseph Le Loutre, vicar-general of Acadia and missionary to the Micmacs, was the most conspicuous person in the province, and more than any other man was answerable for the miseries that overwhelmed it. The sheep of which he was the shepherd dwelt, at a day's journey from Halifax, by the banks of the River Shubenacadie, in small cabins of logs, mixed with wigwams of birch-bark. They were not a docile flock; and to manage them needed address, energy, and money,—with all of which the missionary was provided. He fed their traditional dislike of the English, and fanned their fanaticism, born of the villanous counterfeit of Christianity which he and his predecessors had imposed on them. Thus he contrived to use them on the one hand to murder the English, and on 114 V1 the other to terrify the Acadians; yet not without cost to the French Government; for they had learned the value of money, and, except when their blood was up, were slow to take scalps without pay. Le Loutre was a man of boundless egotism, a violent spirit of domination, an intense hatred of the English, and a fanaticism that stopped at nothing. Towards the Acadians he was a despot; and this simple and superstitious people, extremely susceptible to the influence of their priests, trembled before him. He was scarcely less masterful in his dealings with the Acadian clergy; and, aided by his quality of the Bishop's vicar-general, he dragooned even the unwilling into aiding his schemes. Three successive governors of New France thought him invaluable, yet feared the impetuosity of his zeal, and vainly tried to restrain it within safe bounds. The Bishop, while approving his objects, thought his medicines too violent, and asked in a tone of reproof: "Is it right for you to refuse the Acadians the sacraments, to threaten that they shall be deprived of the services of a priest, and that the savages shall treat them as enemies?" [106] "Nobody," says a French Catholic contemporary, "was more fit than he to carry discord and desolation into a country." [107] Cornwallis called him "a good-for-nothing scoundrel," and offered a hundred pounds for his head. [108] [106] L'évêque de Québec à Le Loutre; translation in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 240. [107] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. [108] On Le Loutre, compare Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 178-180, note, with authorities there cited; N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 11; Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760 (Quebec, 1838). 115 V1 The authorities at Halifax, while exasperated by the perfidy practised on them, were themselves not always models of international virtue. They seized a French vessel in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the charge—probably true—that she was carrying arms and ammunition to the Acadians and Indians. A less defensible act was the capture of the armed brig "St. Fran?ois," laden with supplies for a fort lately re-established by the French, at the mouth of the River St. John, on ground claimed by both nations. Captain Rous, a New England officer commanding a frigate in the Royal Navy, opened fire on the "St. Fran?ois," took her after a short cannonade, and carried her into Halifax, where she was condemned by the court. Several captures of small craft, accused of illegal acts, were also made by the English. These proceedings, being all of an overt nature, gave the officers of Louis XV. precisely what they wanted,—an occasion for uttering loud complaints, and denouncing the English as breakers of the peace. But the movement most alarming to the French was the English occupation of Beaubassin,—an act perfectly lawful in itself, since, without reasonable doubt, the place was within the limits of Acadia, and therefore on English ground.[109] Beaubassin was a considerable settlement on the isthmus that joins the Acadian peninsula to the mainland. Northwest of the settlement lay a wide marsh, through which ran a stream called 116 V1 the Missaguash, some two miles beyond which rose a hill called Beauséjour. On and near this hill were stationed the troops and Canadians sent under Boishébert and La Corne to watch the English frontier. This French force excited disaffection among the Acadians through all the neighboring districts, and constantly helped them to emigrate. Cornwallis therefore resolved to send an English force to the spot; and accordingly, towards the end of April, 1750, Major Lawrence landed at Beaubassin with four hundred men. News of their approach had come before them, and Le Loutre was here with his Micmacs, mixed with some Acadians whom he had persuaded or bullied to join him. Resolved that the people of Beaubassin should not live under English influence, he now with his own hand set fire to the parish church, while his white and red adherents burned the houses of the inhabitants, and thus compelled them to cross to the French side of the river. [110] This was the first forcible removal of the Acadians. It was as premature as it was violent; since Lawrence, being threatened by La Corne, whose force was several times greater than his own, presently reimbarked. In the following September he returned with seventeen small vessels and about seven hundred men, and again attempted 117 V1 to land on the strand of Beaubassin. La Jonquière says that he could only be resisted indirectly, because he was on the English side of the river. This indirect resistance was undertaken by Le Loutre, who had thrown up a breastwork along the shore and manned it with his Indians and his painted and be-feathered Acadians. Nevertheless the English landed, and, with some loss, drove out the defenders. Le Loutre himself seems not to have been among them; but they kept up for a time a helter-skelter fight, encouraged by two other missionaries, Germain and Lalerne, who were near being caught by the English. [111] Lawrence quickly routed them, took possession of the cemetery, and prepared to fortify himself. The village of Beaubassin, consisting, it is said, of a hundred and forty houses, had been burned in the spring; but there were still in the neighborhood, on the English side, many hamlets and farms, with barns full of grain and hay. Le Loutre's Indians now threatened to plunder and kill the inhabitants if they did not take arms against the English. Few complied, and the greater part fled to the woods. [112] On this the Indians and their Acadian allies set the houses and barns on fire, and laid waste the whole district, leaving the inhabitants no choice but to seek food and shelter with the French. [113] [109] La Jonquière himself admits that he thought so. "Cette partie là étant, à ce que je crois, dépendante de l'Acadie." La Jonquière au Ministre, 3 Oct. 1750. [110] It has been erroneously stated that Beaubassin was burned by its own inhabitants. "Laloutre, ayant vu que les Acadiens ne paroissoient pas fort pressés d'abandonner leurs biens, avoit lui-même mis le feu à l'église, et l'avoit fait mettre aux maisons des habitants par quelques-uns de ceux qu'il avoit gagnés," etc. Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. "Les sauvages y mirent le feu." Précis des Faits, 85. "Les sauvages mirent le feu aux maisons." Prévost au Ministre, 22 Juillet, 1750. [111] La Vallière, Journal de ce qui s'est passé à Chenitou [Chignecto] et autres parties des Frontières de l'Acadie, 1750-1751. La Vallière was an officer on the spot to the footnote written. [112] Prévost au Ministre, 27 Sept. 1750. [113] "Les sauvages et Accadiens mirent le feu dans toutes les maisons et granges, pleines de bled et de fourrages, ce qui a causé une grande disette." La Vallière, ut supra. 118 V1 The English fortified themselves on a low hill by the edge of the marsh, planted palisades, built barracks, and named the new work Fort Lawrence. Slight skirmishes between them and the French were frequent. Neither party respected the dividing line of the Missaguash, and a petty warfare of aggression and reprisal began, and became chronic. Before the end of the autumn there was an atrocious act of treachery. Among the English officers was Captain Edward Howe, an intelligent and agreeable person, who spoke French fluently, and had been long stationed in the province. Le Loutre detested him; dreading his influence over the Acadians, by many of whom he was known and liked. One morning, at about eight o'clock, the inmates of Fort Lawrence saw what seemed an officer from Beauséjour, carrying a flag, and followed by several men in uniform, wading through the sea of grass that stretched beyond the Missaguash. When the tide was out, this river was but an ugly trench of reddish mud gashed across the face of the marsh, with a thread of half-fluid slime lazily crawling along the bottom; but at high tide it was filled to the brim with an opaque torrent that would have overflowed, but for the dikes thrown up to confine it. Behind the dike on the farther bank stood the seeming officer, waving his flag in sign that he desired a parley. He was in reality no officer, but one of Le Loutre's Indians in disguise, étienne Le Batard, or, as others say, the great chief, Jean-Baptiste Cope. Howe, carrying a white flag, and accompanied by 119 V1 a few officers and men, went towards the river to hear what he had to say. As they drew near, his looks and language excited their suspicion. But it was too late; for a number of Indians, who had hidden behind the dike during the night, fired upon Howe across the stream, and mortally wounded him. They continued their fire on his companions, but could not prevent them from carrying the dying man to the fort. The French officers, indignant at this villany, did not hesitate to charge it upon Le Loutre; "for," says one of them, "what is not a wicked priest capable of doing?" But Le Loutre's brother missionary, Maillard, declares that it was purely an effect of religious zeal on the part of the Micmacs, who, according to him, bore a deadly grudge against Howe because, fourteen years before, he had spoken words disrespectful to the Holy Virgin. [114] Maillard adds that the Indians were much pleased with what they had done. Finding, however, that they could effect little against the English troops, they changed their field of action, repaired to the outskirts of Halifax, murdered about thirty settlers, and carried off eight or ten prisoners. [114] Maillard, Les Missions Micmaques. On the murder of Howe, Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 194, 195, 210; Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760, where it is said that Le Loutre was present at the deed; La Vallière, Journal, who says that some Acadians took part in it; Dépêches de la Jonquière, who says "les sauvages de l'Abbé le Loutre l'ont tué par trahison;" and Prévost au Ministre, 27 Oct. 1750. Strong reinforcements came from Canada. The French began a fort on the hill of Beauséjour, and the Acadians were required to work at it with no 120 V1 compensation but rations. They were thinly clad, some had neither shoes nor stockings, and winter was begun. They became so dejected that it was found absolutely necessary to give them wages enough to supply their most pressing needs. In the following season Fort Beauséjour was in a state to receive a garrison. It stood on the crown of the hill, and a vast panorama stretched below and around it. In front lay the Bay of Chignecto, winding along the fertile shores of Chipody and Memeramcook. Far on the right spread the great Tantemar marsh; on the left lay the marsh of the Missaguash; and on a knoll beyond it, not three miles distant, the red flag of England waved over the palisades of Fort Lawrence, while hills wrapped in dark forests bounded the horizon. How the homeless Acadians from Beaubassin lived through the winter is not very clear. They probably found shelter at Chipody and its neighborhood, where there were thriving settlements of their countrymen. Le Loutre, fearing that they would return to their lands and submit to the English, sent some of them to Isle St. Jean. "They refused to go," says a French writer; "but he compelled them at last, by threatening to make the Indians pillage them, carry off their wives and children, and even kill them before their eyes. Nevertheless he kept about him such as were most submissive to his will." [115] In the spring after the English occupied Beaubassin, La Jonquière issued a strange proclamation. It commanded 121 V1 all Acadians to take forthwith an oath of fidelity to the King of France, and to enroll themselves in the French militia, on pain of being treated as rebels. [116] Three years after, Lawrence, who then governed the province, proclaimed in his turn that all Acadians who had at any time sworn fidelity to the King of England, and who should be found in arms against him, would be treated as criminals. [117] Thus were these unfortunates ground between the upper and nether millstones. Le Loutre replied to this proclamation of Lawrence by a letter in which he outdid himself. He declared that any of the inhabitants who had crossed to the French side of the line, and who should presume to return to the English, would be treated as enemies by his Micmacs; and in the name of these, his Indian adherents, he demanded that the entire eastern half of the Acadian peninsula, including the ground on which Fort Lawrence stood, should be at once made over to their sole use and sovereign ownership, [118]—"which being read and considered," says the record of the Halifax Council, "the contents appeared too insolent and absurd to be answered." [115] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. [116] Ordonnance du 12 Avril, 1751. [117] écrit donné aux Habitants réfugiés à Beauséjour, 10 Ao?t, 1754. [118] Copie de la Lettre de M. l'Abbé Le Loutre, Prêtre Missionnaire des Sauvages de l'Accadie, à M. Lawrence à Halifax, 26 Ao?t, 1754. There is a translation in Public Documents of Nova Scotia. The number of Acadians who had crossed the line and were collected about Beauséjour was now large. Their countrymen of Chipody began to find them a burden, and they lived chiefly on 122 V1 Government rations. Le Loutre had obtained fifty thousand livres from the Court in order to dike in, for their use, the fertile marshes of Memeramcook; but the relief was distant, and the misery pressing. They complained that they had been lured over the line by false assurances, and they applied secretly to the English authorities to learn if they would be allowed to return to their homes. The answer was that they might do so with full enjoyment of religion and property, if they would take a simple oath of fidelity and loyalty to the King of Great Britain, qualified by an oral intimation that they would not be required for the present to bear arms. [119] When Le Loutre heard this, he mounted the pulpit, broke into fierce invectives, threatened the terrified people with excommunication, and preached himself into a state of exhaustion. [120] The military commandant at Beauséjour used gentler means of prevention; and the Acadians, unused for generations to think or act for themselves, remained restless, but indecisive, waiting till fate should settle for them the question, under which king? [119] Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 205, 209. [120] Compare Mémoires, 1749-1760, and Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 229, 230. Meanwhile, for the past three years, the commissioners appointed under the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to settle the question of boundaries between France and England in America had been in session at Paris, waging interminable war on paper; La Galissonière and Silhouette for France, 123 V1 Shirley and Mildmay for England. By the treaty of Utrecht, Acadia belonged to England; but what was Acadia? According to the English commissioners, it comprised not only the peninsula now called Nova Scotia, but all the immense tract of land between the River St. Lawrence on the north, the Gulf of the same name on the east, the Atlantic on the south, and New England on the west. [121] The French commissioners, on their part, maintained that the name Acadia belonged of right only to about a twentieth part of this territory, and that it did not even cover the whole of the Acadian peninsula, but only its southern coast, with an adjoining belt of barren wilderness. When the French owned Acadia, they gave it boundaries as comprehensive as those claimed for it by the English commissioners; now that it belonged to a rival, they cut it down to a paring of its former self. The denial that Acadia included the whole peninsula was dictated by the need of a winter communication between Quebec and Cape Breton, which was possible only with the eastern portions in French hands. So new was this denial that even La Galissonière himself, the foremost in making it, had declared without reservation two years before that Acadia was the entire peninsula. [122] "If," says a writer on the question, "we 124 V1 had to do with a nation more tractable, less grasping, and more conciliatory, it would be well to insist also that Halifax should be given up to us." He thinks that, on the whole, it would be well to make the demand in any case, in order to gain some other point by yielding this one. [123] It is curious that while denying that the country was Acadia, the French invariably called the inhabitants Acadians. Innumerable public documents, commissions, grants, treaties, edicts, signed by French kings and ministers, had recognized Acadia as extending over New Brunswick and a part of Maine. Four censuses of Acadia while it belonged to the French had recognized the mainland as included in it; and so do also the early French maps. Its prodigious shrinkage was simply the consequence of its possession by an alien. [121] The commission of De Monts, in 1603, defines Acadia as extending from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degrees of latitude,—that is, from central New Brunswick to southern Pennsylvania. Neither party cared to produce the document. [122] "L'Acadie suivant ses anciennes limites est la presquisle bornée par son isthme." La Galissonière au Ministre, 25 Juillet, 1749. The English commissioners were, of course, ignorant of this admission. [123] Mémoire de l'Abbé de l'Isle-Dieu, 1753 (1754?). Other questions of limits, more important and equally perilous, called loudly for solution. What line should separate Canada and her western dependencies from the British colonies? Various principles of demarcation were suggested, of which the most prominent on the French side was a geographical one. All countries watered by streams falling into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi were to belong to her. This would have planted her in the heart of New York and along the crests of the Alleghanies, giving her all the interior of the continent, and leaving nothing to England but a strip of sea-coast. Yet in view of what France had achieved; of the patient gallantry 125 V1 of her explorers, the zeal of her missionaries, the adventurous hardihood of her bushrangers, revealing to civilized mankind the existence of this wilderness world, while her rivals plodded at their workshops, their farms, or their fisheries,—in view of all this, her pretensions were moderate and reasonable compared with those of England. The treaty of Utrecht had declared the Iroquois, or Five Nations, to be British subjects; therefore it was insisted that all countries conquered by them belonged to the British Crown. But what was an Iroquois conquest? The Iroquois rarely occupied the countries they overran. Their military expeditions were mere raids, great or small. Sometimes, as in the case of the Hurons, they made a solitude and called it peace; again, as in the case of the Illinois, they drove off the occupants of the soil, who returned after the invaders were gone. But the range of their war-parties was prodigious; and the English laid claim to every mountain, forest, or prairie where an Iroquois had taken a scalp. This would give them not only the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, but also that between Lake Huron and the Ottawa, thus reducing Canada to the patch on the American map now represented by the province of Quebec,—or rather, by a part of it, since the extension of Acadia to the St. Lawrence would cut off the present counties of Gaspé, Rimouski, and Bonaventure. Indeed among the advocates of British claims there were those who denied that France had any rights whatever on the south side of the St. 126 V1 Lawrence. [124] Such being the attitude of the two contestants, it was plain that there was no resort but the last argument of kings. Peace must be won with the sword. [124] The extent of British claims is best shown on two maps of the time, Mitchell's Map of the British and French Dominions in North America and Huske's New and Accurate Map of North America; both are in the British Museum. Dr. John Mitchell, in his Contest in America (London, 1757) pushes the English claim to its utmost extreme, and denies that the French were rightful owners of anything in North America except the town of Quebec and the trading-post of Tadoussac. Besides the claim founded on the subjection of the Iroquois to the British Crown, the English somewhat inconsistently advanced others founded on titles obtained by treaty from these same tribes, and others still, founded on the original grants of some of the colonies, which ran indefinitely westward across the continent. The commissioners at Paris broke up their sessions, leaving as the monument of their toils four quarto volumes of allegations, arguments, and documentary proofs. [125] Out of the discussion rose also a swarm of fugitive publications in French, English, and Spanish; for the question of American boundaries had become European. There was one among them worth notice from its amusing absurdity. It is an elaborate disquisition, under the title of Roman politique, by an author faithful to the traditions of European diplomacy, and inspired at the same time by the new philosophy of the school of Rousseau. He insists that the balance of power must be preserved in America as well as in Europe, because "Nature," "the aggrandizement of the human soul," and the "felicity of man" are unanimous in demanding it. The English colonies are more populous and wealthy than the French; therefore 127 V1 the French should have more land, to keep the balance. Nature, the human soul, and the felicity of man require that France should own all the country beyond the Alleghanies and all Acadia but a strip of the south coast, according to the "sublime negotiations" of the French commissioners, of which the writer declares himself a "religious admirer." [126] [125] Mémoires des Commissaires de Sa Majesté Très Chrétienne et de ceux de Sa Majesté Brittanique. Paris, 1755. Several editions appeared. [126] Roman politique sur l'état présent des Affaires de l'Amérique (Amsterdam, 1756). For extracts from French Documents, see Appendix B. We know already that France had used means sharper than negotiation to vindicate her claim to the interior of the continent; had marched to the sources of the Ohio to entrench herself there, and hold the passes of the West against all comers. It remains to see how she fared in her bold enterprise. CHAPTER V. 1753, 1754. WASHINGTON. The French occupy the Sources of the Ohio ? Their Sufferings ? Fort Le B?uf ? Legardeur de Saint-Pierre ? Mission of Washington ? Robert Dinwiddie ? He opposes the French ? His Dispute with the Burgesses ? His Energy ? His Appeals for Help ? Fort Duquesne ? Death of Jumonville ? Washington at the Great Meadows ? Coulon de Villiers ? Fort Necessity. Towards the end of spring the vanguard of the expedition sent by Duquesne to occupy the Ohio landed at Presquisle, where Erie now stands. This route to the Ohio, far better than that which Céloron had followed, was a new discovery to the French; and Duquesne calls the harbor "the finest in nature." Here they built a fort of squared chestnut logs, and when it was finished they cut a road of several leagues through the woods to Rivière aux B?ufs, now French Creek. At the farther end of this road they began another wooden fort and called it Fort Le B?uf. Thence, when the water was high, they could descend French Creek to the Allegheny, and follow that stream to the main current of the Ohio. It was heavy work to carry the cumbrous load of baggage across the portages. Much of it is said 129 V1 to have been superfluous, consisting of velvets, silks, and other useless and costly articles, sold to the King at enormous prices as necessaries of the expedition. [127] The weight of the task fell on the Canadians, who worked with cheerful hardihood, and did their part to admiration. Marin, commander of the expedition, a gruff, choleric old man of sixty-three, but full of force and capacity, spared himself so little that he was struck down with dysentery, and, refusing to be sent home to Montreal, was before long in a dying state. His place was taken by Péan, of whose private character there is little good to be said, but whose conduct as an officer was such that Duquesne calls him a prodigy of talents, resources, and zeal. [128] The subalterns deserve no such praise. They disliked the service, and made no secret of their discontent. Rumors of it filled Montreal; and Duquesne wrote to Marin: "I am surprised that you have not told me of this change. Take note of the sullen and discouraged faces about you. This sort are worse than useless. Rid yourself of them at once; send them to Montreal, that I may make an example of them." [129] Péan wrote at the end of September that Marin was in extremity; and the Governor, disturbed and alarmed, for he knew the value of the sturdy old officer, looked anxiously for a successor. He chose another 130 veteran, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, who had just returned from a journey of exploration towards the Rocky Mountains, [130] and whom Duquesne now ordered to the Ohio. [127] Pouchot, Mémoires sur la dernière Guerre de l'Amérique Septentrionale, I. 8. [128] Duquesne au Ministre, 2 Nov. 1753; compare Mémoire pour Michel-Jean Hugues Péan. [129] Duquesne à Marin, 27 Ao?t, 1753. [130] Mémoire ou Journal sommaire du Voyage de Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre. Meanwhile the effects of the expedition had already justified it. At first the Indians of the Ohio had shown a bold front. One of them, a chief whom the English called the Half-King, came to Fort Le B?uf and ordered the French to leave the country; but was received by Marin with such contemptuous haughtiness that he went home shedding tears of rage and mortification. The Western tribes were daunted. The Miamis, but yesterday fast friends of the English, made humble submission to the French, and offered them two English scalps to signalize their repentance; while the Sacs, Pottawattamies, and Ojibwas were loud in professions of devotion. [131] Even the Iroquois, Delawares, and Shawanoes on the Alleghany had come to the French camp and offered their help in carrying the baggage. It needed but perseverance and success in the enterprise to win over every tribe from the mountains to the Mississippi. To accomplish this and to curb the English, Duquesne had planned a third fort, at the junction of French Creek with the Alleghany, or at some point lower down; then, leaving the three posts well garrisoned, Péan was to descend 131 V1 the Ohio with the whole remaining force, impose terror on the wavering tribes, and complete their conversion. Both plans were thwarted; the fort was not built, nor did Péan descend the Ohio. Fevers, lung diseases, and scurvy made such deadly havoc among troops and Canadians, that the dying Marin saw with bitterness that his work must be left half done. Three hundred of the best men were kept to garrison Forts Presquisle and Le B?uf; and then, as winter approached, the rest were sent back to Montreal. When they arrived, the Governor was shocked at their altered looks. "I reviewed them, and could not help being touched by the pitiable state to which fatigues and exposures had reduced them. Past all doubt, if these emaciated figures had gone down the Ohio as intended, the river would have been strewn with corpses, and the evil-disposed savages would not have failed to attack the survivors, seeing that they were but spectres." [132] [131] Rapports de Conseils avec les Sauvages à Montreal, Juillet, 1753. Duquesne au Ministre, 31 Oct. 1753. Letter of Dr. Shuckburgh in N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 806. [132] Duquesne au Ministre, 29 Nov. 1753. On this expedition, compare the letter of Duquesne in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 255, and the deposition of Stephen Coffen, Ibid., VI. 835. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre arrived at the end of autumn, and made his quarters at Fort Le B?uf. The surrounding forests had dropped their leaves, and in gray and patient desolation bided the coming winter. Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy "clearing," and drenched the palisades and log-built barracks, raw from the axe. Buried in the wilderness, the military exiles resigned themselves as they might to months of monotonous solitude; 132 V1 when, just after sunset on the eleventh of December, a tall youth came out of the forest on horseback, attended by a companion much older and rougher than himself, and followed by several Indians and four or five white men with packhorses. Officers from the fort went out to meet the strangers; and, wading through mud and sodden snow, they entered at the gate. On the next day the young leader of the party, with the help of an interpreter, for he spoke no French, had an interview with the commandant, and gave him a letter from Governor Dinwiddie. Saint-Pierre and the officer next in rank, who knew a little English, took it to another room to study it at their ease; and in it, all unconsciously, they read a name destined to stand one of the noblest in the annals of mankind; for it introduced Major George Washington, Adjutant-General of the Virginia militia. [133] [133] Journal of Major Washington. Journal of Mr. Christopher Gist. Dinwiddie, jealously watchful of French aggression, had learned through traders and Indians that a strong detachment from Canada had entered the territories of the King of England, and built forts on Lake Erie and on a branch of the Ohio. He wrote to challenge the invasion and summon the invaders to withdraw; and he could find none so fit to bear his message as a young man of twenty-one. It was this rough Scotchman who launched Washington on his illustrious career. Washington set out for the trading station of the Ohio Company on Will's Creek; and thence, 133 V1 at the middle of November, struck into the wilderness with Christopher Gist as a guide, Vanbraam, a Dutchman, as French interpreter, Davison, a trader, as Indian interpreter, and four woodsmen as servants. They went to the forks of the Ohio, and then down the river to Logstown, the Chiningué of Céloron de Bienville. There Washington had various parleys with the Indians; and thence, after vexatious delays, he continued his journey towards Fort Le B?uf, accompanied by the friendly chief called the Half-King and by three of his tribesmen. For several days they followed the traders' path, pelted with unceasing rain and snow, and came at last to the old Indian town of Venango, where French Creek enters the Alleghany. Here there was an English trading-house; but the French had seized it, raised their flag over it, and turned it into a military outpost. [134] Joncaire was in command, with two subalterns; and nothing could exceed their civility. They invited the strangers to supper; and, says Washington, "the wine, as they dosed themselves pretty plentifully with it, soon banished the restraint which at first appeared in their conversation, and gave a license to their tongues to reveal their sentiments more freely. They told me that it was their absolute design to take possession of the Ohio, and, by G——, they would do it; for that although they were sensible the English could raise two men for 134 V1 their one, yet they knew their motions were too slow and dilatory to prevent any undertaking of theirs." [135] [134] Marin had sent sixty men in August to seize the house, which belonged to the trader Fraser. Dépêches de Duquesne. They carried off two men whom they found here. Letter of Fraser in Colonial Records of Pa., V. 659. [135] Journal of Washington, as printed at Williamsburg, just after his return. With all their civility, the French officers did their best to entice away Washington's Indians; and it was with extreme difficulty that he could persuade them to go with him. Through marshes and swamps, forests choked with snow, and drenched with incessant rain, they toiled on for four days more, till the wooden walls of Fort Le B?uf appeared at last, surrounded by fields studded thick with stumps, and half-encircled by the chill current of French Creek, along the banks of which lay more than two hundred canoes, ready to carry troops in the spring. Washington describes Legardeur de Saint-Pierre as "an elderly gentleman with much the air of a soldier." The letter sent him by Dinwiddie expressed astonishment that his troops should build forts upon lands "so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain." "I must desire you," continued the letter, "to acquaint me by whose authority and instructions you have lately marched from Canada with an armed force, and invaded the King of Great Britain's territories. It becomes my duty to require your peaceable departure; and that you would forbear prosecuting a purpose so interruptive of the harmony and good understanding which His Majesty is desirous to continue and cultivate with the Most Christian King. I persuade myself 135 V1 you will receive and entertain Major Washington with the candor and politeness natural to your nation; and it will give me the greatest satisfaction if you return him with an answer suitable to my wishes for a very long and lasting peace between us." Saint-Pierre took three days to frame the answer. In it he said that he should send Dinwiddie's letter to the Marquis Duquesne and wait his orders; and that meanwhile he should remain at his post, according to the commands of his general. "I made it my particular care," so the letter closed, "to receive Mr. Washington with a distinction suitable to your dignity as well as his own quality and great merit." [136] No form of courtesy had, in fact, been wanting. "He appeared to be extremely complaisant," says Washington, "though he was exerting every artifice to set our Indians at variance with us. I saw that every stratagem was practised to win the Half-King to their interest." Neither gifts nor brandy were spared; and it was only by the utmost pains that Washington could prevent his red allies from staying at the fort, conquered by French blandishments. [136] "La Distinction qui convient à votre Dignitté à sa Qualité et à son grand Mérite." Copy of original letter sent by Dinwiddie to Governor Hamilton. After leaving Venango on his return, he found the horses so weak that, to arrive the sooner, he left them and their drivers in charge of Vanbraam and pushed forward on foot, accompanied by Gist alone. Each was wrapped to the throat in an Indian 136 V1 "matchcoat," with a gun in his hand and a pack at his back. Passing an old Indian hamlet called Murdering Town, they had an adventure which threatened to make good the name. A French Indian, whom they met in the forest, fired at them, pretending that his gun had gone off by chance. They caught him, and Gist would have killed him; but Washington interposed, and they let him go. [137] Then, to escape pursuit from his tribesmen, they walked all night and all the next day. This brought them to the banks of the Alleghany. They hoped to have found it dead frozen; but it was all alive and turbulent, filled with ice sweeping down the current. They made a raft, shoved out into the stream, and were soon caught helplessly in the drifting ice. Washington, pushing hard with his setting-pole, was jerked into the freezing river; but caught a log of the raft, and dragged himself out. By no efforts could they reach the farther bank, or regain that which they had left; but they were driven against an island, where they landed, and left the raft to its fate. The night was excessively cold, and Gist's feet and hands were badly frost-bitten. In the morning, the ice had set, and the river was a solid floor. They crossed it, and succeeded in reaching the house of the trader Fraser, on the Monongahela. It was the middle of January when Washington arrived at Williamsburg and made his report to Dinwiddie. [137] Journal of Mr. Christopher Gist, in Mass. Hist. Coll., 3rd Series, V. Robert Dinwiddie was lieutenant-governor of Virginia, in place of the titular governor, Lord 137 V1 Albemarle, whose post was a sinecure. He had been clerk in a government office in the West Indies; then surveyor of customs in the "Old Dominion,"—a position in which he made himself cordially disliked; and when he rose to the governorship he carried his unpopularity with him. Yet Virginia and all the British colonies owed him much; for, though past sixty, he was the most watchful sentinel against French aggression and its most strenuous opponent. Scarcely had Marin's vanguard appeared at Presquisle, when Dinwiddie warned the Home Government of the danger, and urged, what he had before urged in vain on the Virginian Assembly, the immediate building of forts on the Ohio. There came in reply a letter, signed by the King, authorizing him to build the forts at the cost of the Colony, and to repel force by force in case he was molested or obstructed. Moreover, the King wrote, "If you shall find that any number of persons shall presume to erect any fort or forts within the limits of our province of Virginia, you are first to require of them peaceably to depart; and if, notwithstanding your admonitions, they do still endeavor to carry out any such unlawful and unjustifiable designs, we do hereby strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms." [138] [138] Instructions to Our Trusty and Well-beloved Robert Dinwiddie, Esq., 28 Aug. 1753. The order was easily given; but to obey it needed men and money, and for these Dinwiddie was dependent on his Assembly, or House of Burgesses. 138 V1 He convoked them for the first of November, sending Washington at the same time with the summons to Saint-Pierre. The burgesses met. Dinwiddie exposed the danger, and asked for means to meet it. [139] They seemed more than willing to comply; but debates presently arose concerning the fee of a pistole, which the Governor had demanded on each patent of land issued by him. The amount was trifling, but the principle was doubtful. The aristocratic republic of Virginia was intensely jealous of the slightest encroachment on its rights by the Crown or its representative. The Governor defended the fee. The burgesses replied that "subjects cannot be deprived of the least part of their property without their consent," declared the fee unlawful, and called on Dinwiddie to confess it to be so. He still defended it. They saw in his demand for supplies a means of bringing him to terms, and refused to grant money unless he would recede from his position. Dinwiddie rebuked them for "disregarding the designs of the French, and disputing the rights of the Crown"; and he "prorogued them in some anger." [140] [139] Address of Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie to the Council and Burgesses, 1 Nov. 1753. [140] Dinwiddie Papers. Thus he was unable to obey the instructions of the King. As a temporary resource, he ventured to order a draft of two hundred men from the militia. Washington was to have command, with the trader, William Trent, as his lieutenant. His orders were to push with all speed to the forks of 139 V1 the Ohio, and there build a fort; "but in case any attempts are made to obstruct the works by any persons whatsoever, to restrain all such offenders, and, in case of resistance, to make prisoners of, or kill and destroy them." [141] The Governor next sent messengers to the Catawbas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Iroquois of the Ohio, inviting them to take up the hatchet against the French, "who, under pretence of embracing you, mean to squeeze you to death." Then he wrote urgent letters to the governors of Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Maryland, and New Jersey, begging for contingents of men, to be at Wills Creek in March at the latest. But nothing could be done without money; and trusting for a change of heart on the part of the burgesses, he summoned them to meet again on the fourteenth of February. "If they come in good temper," he wrote to Lord Fairfax, a nobleman settled in the colony, "I hope they will lay a fund to qualify me to send four or five hundred men more to the Ohio, which, with the assistance of our neighboring colonies, may make some figure." [141] Ibid. Instructions to Major George Washington, January, 1754. The session began. Again, somewhat oddly, yet forcibly, the Governor set before the Assembly the peril of the situation, and begged them to postpone less pressing questions to the exigency of the hour. [142] This time they listened; and voted ten thousand pounds in Virginia currency to defend 140 V1 the frontier. The grant was frugal, and they jealously placed its expenditure in the hands of a committee of their own. [143] Dinwiddie, writing to the Lords of Trade, pleads necessity as his excuse for submitting to their terms. "I am sorry," he says, "to find them too much in a republican way of thinking." What vexed him still more was their sending an agent to England to complain against him on the irrepressible question of the pistole fee; and he writes to his London friend, the merchant Hanbury: "I have had a great deal of trouble from the factious disputes and violent heats of a most impudent, troublesome party here in regard to that silly fee of a pistole. Surely every thinking man will make a distinction between a fee and a tax. Poor people! I pity their ignorance and narrow, ill-natured spirits. But, my friend, consider that I could by no means give up this fee without affronting the Board of Trade and the Council here who established it." His thoughts were not all of this harassing nature, and he ends his letter with the following petition: "Now, sir, as His Majesty is pleased to make me a military officer, please send for Scott, my tailor, to make me a proper suit of regimentals, to be here by His Majesty's birthday. I do not much like gayety in dress, but I conceive this necessary. I do not much care for lace on the coat, but a neat embroidered button-hole; though you do not deal that way, I know you have a good taste, that I may show my friend's fancy in that suit of 141 V1 clothes; a good laced hat and two pair stockings, one silk, the other fine thread." [144] [142] Speech of Lieutenant-Governor Dinwiddie to the Council and Burgesses 14 Feb., 1754. [143] See the bill in Hening, Statutes of Virginia, VI. 417. [144] Dinwiddie to Hanbury, 12 March, 1754; Ibid., 10 May, 1754. If the Governor and his English sometimes provoke a smile, he deserves admiration for the energy with which he opposed the public enemy, under circumstances the most discouraging. He invited the Indians to meet him in council at Winchester, and, as bait to attract them, coupled the message with a promise of gifts. He sent circulars from the King to the neighboring governors, calling for supplies, and wrote letter upon letter to rouse them to effort. He wrote also to the more distant governors, Delancey of New York, and Shirley of Massachusetts, begging them to make what he called a "faint" against Canada, to prevent the French from sending so large a force to the Ohio. It was to the nearer colonies, from New Jersey to South Carolina, that he looked for direct aid; and their several governors were all more or less active to procure it; but as most of them had some standing dispute with their assemblies, they could get nothing except on terms with which they would not, and sometimes could not, comply. As the lands invaded by the French belonged to one of the two rival claimants, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the other colonies had no mind to vote money to defend them. Pennsylvania herself refused to move. Hamilton, her governor, could do nothing against the placid obstinacy of the Quaker non-combatants and the stolid obstinacy of the German farmers 142 V1 who chiefly made up his Assembly. North Carolina alone answered the appeal, and gave money enough to raise three or four hundred men. Two independent companies maintained by the King in New York, and one in South Carolina, had received orders from England to march to the scene of action; and in these, with the scanty levies of his own and the adjacent province, lay Dinwiddie's only hope. With men abundant and willing, there were no means to put them into the field, and no commander whom they would all obey. From the brick house at Williamsburg pompously called the Governor's Palace, Dinwiddie despatched letters, orders, couriers, to hasten the tardy reinforcements of North Carolina and New York, and push on the raw soldiers of the Old Dominion, who now numbered three hundred men. They were called the Virginia regiment; and Joshua Fry, an English gentleman, bred at Oxford, was made their colonel, with Washington as next in command. Fry was at Alexandria with half the so-called regiment, trying to get it into marching order; Washington, with the other half, had pushed forward to the Ohio Company's storehouse at Wills Creek, which was to form a base of operations. His men were poor whites, brave, but hard to discipline; without tents, ill armed, and ragged as Falstaff's recruits. Besides these, a band of backwoodsmen under Captain Trent had crossed the mountains in February to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburg now stands,—a spot which Washington had examined 143 when on his way to Fort Le B?uf, and which he had reported as the best for the purpose. The hope was that Trent would fortify himself before the arrival of the French, and that Washington and Fry would join him in time to secure the position. Trent had begun the fort; but for some unexplained reason had gone back to Wills Creek, leaving Ensign Ward with forty men at work upon it. Their labors were suddenly interrupted. On the seventeenth of April a swarm of bateaux and canoes came down the Alleghany, bringing, according to Ward, more than a thousand Frenchmen, though in reality not much above five hundred, who landed, planted cannon against the incipient stockade, and summoned the ensign to surrender, on pain of what might ensue. [145] He complied, and was allowed to depart with his men. Retracing his steps over the mountains, he reported his mishap to Washington; while the French demolished his unfinished fort, began a much larger and better one, and named it Fort Duquesne. [145] See the summons in Précis des Faits, 101. They had acted with their usual promptness. Their Governor, a practised soldier, knew the value of celerity, and had set his troops in motion with the first opening of spring. He had no refractory assembly to hamper him; no lack of money, for the King supplied it; and all Canada must march at his bidding. Thus, while Dinwiddie was still toiling to muster his raw recruits, Duquesne's lieutenant, Contrec?ur, successor of 144 V1 Saint-Pierre, had landed at Presquisle with a much greater force, in part regulars, and in part Canadians. Dinwiddie was deeply vexed when a message from Washington told him how his plans were blighted; and he spoke his mind to his friend Hanbury: "If our Assembly had voted the money in November which they did in February, it's more than probable the fort would have been built and garrisoned before the French had approached; but these things cannot be done without money. As there was none in our treasury, I have advanced my own to forward the expedition; and if the independent companies from New York come soon, I am in hopes the eyes of the other colonies will be opened; and if they grant a proper supply of men, I hope we shall be able to dislodge the French or build a fort on that river. I congratulate you on the increase of your family. My wife and two girls join in our most sincere respects to good Mrs. Hanbury." [146] [146] Dinwiddie to Hanbury, 10 May, 1754. The seizure of a king's fort by planting cannon against it and threatening it with destruction was in his eyes a beginning of hostilities on the part of the French; and henceforth both he and Washington acted much as if war had been declared. From their station at Wills Creek, the distance by the traders' path to Fort Duquesne was about a hundred and forty miles. Midway was a branch of the Monongahela called Redstone Creek, at the mouth of which the Ohio Company had built 145 V1 another storehouse. Dinwiddie ordered all the forces to cross the mountains and assemble at this point, until they should be strong enough to advance against the French. The movement was critical in presence of an enemy as superior in discipline as he was in numbers, while the natural obstacles were great. A road for cannon and wagons must be cut through a dense forest and over two ranges of high mountains, besides countless hills and streams. Washington set all his force to the work, and they spent a fortnight in making twenty miles. Towards the end of May, however, Dinwiddie learned that he had crossed the main ridge of the Alleghanies, and was encamped with a hundred and fifty men near the parallel ridge of Laurel Hill, at a place called the Great Meadows. Trent's backwoodsmen had gone off in disgust; Fry, with the rest of the regiment, was still far behind; and Washington was daily expecting an attack. Close upon this, a piece of good news, or what seemed such, came over the mountains and gladdened the heart of the Governor. He heard that a French detachment had tried to surprise Washington, and that he had killed or captured the whole. The facts were as follows. Washington was on the Youghiogany, a branch of the Monongahela, exploring it in hopes that it might prove navigable, when a messenger came to him from his old comrade, the Half-King, who was on the way to join him. The message was to the effect that the French had marched from their fort, 146 V1 and meant to attack the first English they should meet. A report came soon after that they were already at the ford of the Youghiogany, eighteen miles distant. Washington at once repaired to the Great Meadows, a level tract of grass and bushes, bordered by wooded hills, and traversed in one part by a gully, which with a little labor the men turned into an entrenchment, at the same time cutting away the bushes and clearing what the young commander called "a charming field for an encounter." Parties were sent out to scour the woods, but they found no enemy. Two days passed; when, on the morning of the twenty-seventh, Christopher Gist, who had lately made a settlement on the farther side of Laurel Hill, twelve or thirteen miles distant, came to the camp with news that fifty Frenchmen had been at his house towards noon of the day before, and would have destroyed everything but for the intervention of two Indians whom he had left in charge during his absence. Washington sent seventy-five men to look for the party; but the search was vain, the French having hidden themselves so well as to escape any eye but that of an Indian. In the evening a runner came from the Half-King, who was encamped with a few warriors some miles distant. He had sent to tell Washington that he had found the tracks of two men, and traced them towards a dark glen in the forest, where in his belief all the French were lurking. Washington seems not to have hesitated a moment. Fearing a stratagem to surprise his camp, 147 V1 he left his main force to guard it, and at ten o'clock set out for the Half-King's wigwams at the head of forty men. The night was rainy, and the forest, to use his own words, "as black as pitch." "The path," he continues, "was hardly wide enough for one man; we often lost it, and could not find it again for fifteen or twenty minutes, and we often tumbled over each other in the dark." [147] Seven of his men were lost in the woods and left behind. The rest groped their way all night, and reached the Indian camp at sunrise. A council was held with the Half-King, and he and his warriors agreed to join in striking the French. Two of them led the way. The tracks of the two French scouts seen the day before were again found, and, marching in single file, the party pushed through the forest into the rocky hollow where the French were supposed to be concealed. They were there in fact; and they snatched their guns the moment they saw the English. Washington gave the word to fire. A short fight ensued. Coulon de Jumonville, an ensign in command, was killed, with nine others; twenty-two were captured, and none escaped but a Canadian who had fled at the beginning of the fray. After it was over, the prisoners told Washington that the party had been sent to bring him a summons from Contrec?ur, the commandant at Fort Duquesne. [147] Journal of Washington in Précis des Faits, 109. This Journal, which is entirely distinct from that before cited, was found by the French among the baggage left on the field after the defeat of Braddock in 1755, and a translation of it was printed by them as above. The original has disappeared. 148 V1 Five days before, Contrec?ur had sent Jumonville to scour the country as far as the dividing ridge of the Alleghanies. Under him were another officer, three cadets, a volunteer, an interpreter, and twenty-eight men. He was provided with a written summons, to be delivered to any English he might find. It required them to withdraw from the domain of the King of France, and threatened compulsion by force of arms in case of refusal. But before delivering the summons Jumonville was ordered to send two couriers back with all speed to Fort Duquesne to inform the commandant that he had found the English, and to acquaint him when he intended to communicate with them. [148] It is difficult to imagine any object for such an order except that of enabling Contrec?ur to send to the spot whatever force might be needed to attack the English on their refusal to withdraw. Jumonville had sent the two couriers, and had hidden himself, apparently to wait the result. He lurked nearly two days within five miles of Washington's camp, sent out scouts to reconnoitre it, but gave no notice of his presence; played to perfection the part of a skulking enemy, and brought destruction on himself by conduct which can only be ascribed to a sinister motive on the one hand, or to extreme folly on the other. French deserters told Washington that the party came as spies, and were to show the summons only if threatened by a superior force. This last assertion is confirmed by 149 V1 the French officer Pouchot, who says that Jumonville, seeing himself the weaker party, tried to show the letter he had brought. [149] [148] The summons and the instructions to Jumonville are in Précis des Faits. [149] Pouchot, Mémoire sur la dernière Guerre. French writers say that, on first seeing the English, Jumonville's interpreter called out that he had something to say to them; but Washington, who was at the head of his men, affirms this to be absolutely false. The French say further that Jumonville was killed in the act of reading the summons. This is also denied by Washington, and rests only on the assertion of the Canadian who ran off at the outset, and on the alleged assertion of Indians who, if present at all, which is unlikely, escaped like the Canadian before the fray began. Druillon, an officer with Jumonville, wrote two letters to Dinwiddie after his capture, to claim the privileges of the bearer of a summons; but while bringing forward every other circumstance in favor of the claim, he does not pretend that the summons was read or shown either before or during the action. The French account of the conduct of Washington's Indians is no less erroneous. "This murder," says a chronicler of the time, "produced on the minds of the savages an effect very different from that which the cruel Washington had promised himself. They have a horror of crime; and they were so indignant at that which had just been perpetrated before their eyes, that they abandoned him, and offered themselves to us in order to take vengeance." [150] 150 V1 Instead of doing this, they boasted of their part in the fight, scalped all the dead Frenchmen, sent one scalp to the Delawares as an invitation to take up the hatchet for the English, and distributed the rest among the various Ohio tribes to the same end. [150] Poulin de Lumina, Histoire de la Guerre contre les Anglois, 15. Coolness of judgment, a profound sense of public duty, and a strong self-control, were even then the characteristics of Washington; but he was scarcely twenty-two, was full of military ardor, and was vehement and fiery by nature. Yet it is far from certain that, even when age and experience had ripened him, he would have forborne to act as he did, for there was every reason for believing that the designs of the French were hostile; and though by passively waiting the event he would have thrown upon them the responsibility of striking the first blow, he would have exposed his small party to capture or destruction by giving them time to gain reinforcements from Fort Duquesne. It was inevitable that the killing of Jumonville should be greeted in France by an outcry of real or assumed horror; but the Chevalier de Lévis, second in command to Montcalm, probably expresses the true opinion of Frenchmen best fitted to judge when he calls it "a pretended assassination." [151] Judge it as we may, this obscure skirmish began the war that set the world on fire. [152] [151] Lévis, Mémoire sur la Guerre du Canada. [152] On this affair, Sparks, Writings of Washington, II. 25-48, 447. Dinwiddie Papers. Letter of Contrec?ur in Précis des Faits. Journal of Washington, Ibid. Washington to Dinwiddie, 3 June, 1754. Dussieux, 151 V1 Le Canada sous la Domination Fran?aise, 118. Gaspé, Anciens Canadiens, appendix, 396. The assertion of Abbé de l'Isle-Dieu, that Jumonville showed a flag of truce, is unsupported. Adam Stephen, who was in the fight, says that the guns of the English were so wet that they had to trust mainly to the bayonet. The Half-King boasted that he killed Jumonville with his tomahawk. Dinwiddie highly approved Washington's conduct. In 1755 the widow of Jumonville received a pension of one hundred and fifty francs. In 1775 his daughter, Charlotte Aimable, wishing to become a nun, was given by the King six hundred francs for her "trousseau" on entering the convent. Dossier de Jumonville et de sa Veuve, 22 Mars, 1755. Mémoire pour Mlle. de Jumonville, 10 Juillet, 1775. Réponse du Garde des Sceaux, 25 Juillet, 1775. Washington returned to the camp at the Great Meadows; and, expecting soon to be attacked, sent for reinforcements to Colonel Fry, who was lying dangerously ill at Wills Creek. Then he set his men to work at an entrenchment, which he named Fort Necessity, and which must have been of the slightest, as they finished it within three days. [153] The Half-King now joined him, along with the female potentate known as Queen Alequippa, and some thirty Indian families. A few days after, Gist came from Wills Creek with news that Fry was dead. Washington succeeded to the command of the regiment, the remaining three companies of which presently appeared and joined their comrades, raising the whole number to three hundred. Next arrived the independent company from South Carolina; and the Great Meadows became an animated scene, with the wigwams of the Indians, the camp-sheds of the rough Virginians, the cattle grazing on the tall grass or drinking at the lazy brook that traversed it; the surrounding heights and forests; and over all, four miles away, the lofty green ridge of Laurel Hill. [153] Journal of Washington in Précis des Faits. 152 V1 The presence of the company of regulars was a doubtful advantage. Captain Mackay, its commander, holding his commission from the King, thought himself above any officer commissioned by the Governor. There was great courtesy between him and Washington; but Mackay would take no orders, nor even the countersign, from the colonel of volunteers. Nor would his men work, except for an additional shilling a day. To give this was impossible, both from want of money, and from the discontent it would have bred in the Virginians, who worked for nothing besides their daily pay of eightpence. Washington, already a leader of men, possessed himself in a patience extremely difficult to his passionate temper; but the position was untenable, and the presence of the military drones demoralized his soldiers. Therefore, leaving Mackay at the Meadows, he advanced towards Gist's settlement, cutting a wagon road as he went. On reaching the settlement the camp was formed and an entrenchment thrown up. Deserters had brought news that strong reinforcements were expected at Fort Duquesne, and friendly Indians repeatedly warned Washington that he would soon be attacked by overwhelming numbers. Forty Indians from the Ohio came to the camp, and several days were spent in councils with them; but they proved for the most part to be spies of the French. The Half-King stood fast by the English, and sent out three of his young warriors as scouts. Reports of attack thickened. Mackay and his men were sent for, and they 153 V1 arrived on the twenty-eighth of June. A council of war was held at Gist's house; and as the camp was commanded by neighboring heights, it was resolved to fall back. The horses were so few that the Virginians had to carry much of the baggage on their backs, and drag nine swivels over the broken and rocky road. The regulars, though they also were raised in the provinces, refused to give the slightest help. Toiling on for two days, they reached the Great Meadows on the first of July. The position, though perhaps the best in the neighborhood, was very unfavorable, and Washington would have retreated farther, but for the condition of his men. They were spent with fatigue, and there was no choice but to stay and fight. Strong reinforcements had been sent to Fort Duquesne in the spring, and the garrison now consisted of about fourteen hundred men. When news of the death of Jumonville reached Montreal, Coulon de Villiers, brother of the slain officer, was sent to the spot with a body of Indians from all the tribes in the colony. He made such speed that at eight o'clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth of June he reached the fort with his motley following. Here he found that five hundred Frenchmen and a few Ohio Indians were on the point of marching against the English, under Chevalier Le Mercier; but in view of his seniority in rank and his relationship to Jumonville, the command was now transferred to Villiers. Hereupon, the march was postponed; the newly-arrived 154 V1 warriors were called to council, and Contrec?ur thus harangued them: "The English have murdered my children, my heart is sick; to-morrow I shall send my French soldiers to take revenge. And now, men of the Saut St. Louis, men of the Lake of Two Mountains, Hurons, Abenakis, Iroquois of La Présentation, Nipissings, Algonquins, and Ottawas,—I invite you all by this belt of wampum to join your French father and help him to crush the assassins. Take this hatchet, and with it two barrels of wine for a feast." Both hatchet and wine were cheerfully accepted. Then Contrec?ur turned to the Delawares, who were also present: "By these four strings of wampum I invite you, if you are true children of Onontio, to follow the example of your brethren;" and with some hesitation they also took up the hatchet. The next day was spent by the Indians in making moccasons for the march, and by the French in preparing for an expedition on a larger scale than had been at first intended. Contrec?ur, Villiers, Le Mercier, and Longueuil, after deliberating together, drew up a paper to the effect that "it was fitting (convenable) to march against the English with the greatest possible number of French and savages, in order to avenge ourselves and chastise them for having violated the most sacred laws of civilized nations;" that, thought their conduct justified the French in disregarding the existing treaty of peace, yet, after thoroughly punishing them, and compelling them to withdraw from the domain of the King, they should be told that, in pursuance 155 V1 of his royal orders, the French looked on them as friends. But it was further agreed that should the English have withdrawn to their own side of the mountains, "they should be followed to their settlements to destroy them and treat them as enemies, till that nation should give ample satisfaction and completely change its conduct." [154] [154] Journal de Campagne de M. de Villiers depuis son Arrivée au Fort Duquesne jusqu'à son Retour au dit Fort. These and other passages are omitted in the Journal as printed in Précis des Faits. Before me is a copy from the original in the Archives de la Marine. The party set out on the next morning, paddled their canoes up the Monongahela, encamped, heard Mass; and on the thirtieth reached the deserted storehouse of the Ohio Company at the mouth of Redstone Creek. It was a building of solid logs, well loopholed for musketry. To please the Indians by asking their advice, Villiers called all the chiefs to council; which, being concluded to their satisfaction, he left a sergeant's guard at the storehouse to watch the canoes, and began his march through the forest. The path was so rough that at the first halt the chaplain declared he could go no farther, and turned back for the storehouse, though not till he had absolved the whole company in a body. Thus lightened of their sins, they journeyed on, constantly sending out scouts. On the second of July they reached the abandoned camp of Washington at Gist's settlement; and here they bivouacked, tired, and drenched all night by rain. At daybreak they marched again, and passed through the gorge of Laurel Hill. It rained without ceasing; but Villiers pushed his 156 V1 way through the dripping forest to see the place, half a mile from the road, where his brother had been killed, and where several bodies still lay unburied. They had learned from a deserter the position of the enemy, and Villiers filled the woods in front with a swarm of Indian scouts. The crisis was near. He formed his men in column, and ordered every officer to his place. Washington's men had had a full day at Fort Necessity; but they spent it less in resting from their fatigue than in strengthening their rampart with logs. The fort was a simple square enclosure, with a trench said by a French writer to be only knee deep. On the south, and partly on the west, there was an exterior embankment, which seems to have been made, like a rifle-pit, with the ditch inside. The Virginians had but little ammunition, and no bread whatever, living chiefly on fresh beef. They knew the approach of the French, who were reported to Washington as nine hundred strong, besides Indians. Towards eleven o'clock a wounded sentinel came in with news that they were close at hand; and they presently appeared at the edge of the woods, yelling, and firing from such a distance that their shot fell harmless. Washington drew up his men on the meadow before the fort, thinking, he says, that the enemy, being greatly superior in force, would attack at once; and choosing for some reason to meet them on the open plain. But Villiers had other views. "We approached the English," he writes, "as near as possible, without uselessly exposing the lives of the King's 157 V1 subjects;" and he and his followers made their way through the forest till they came opposite the fort, where they stationed themselves on two densely wooded hills, adjacent, though separated by a small brook. One of these was about a hundred paces from the English, and the other about sixty. Their position was such that the French and Indians, well sheltered by trees and bushes, and with the advantage of higher ground, could cross their fire upon the fort and enfilade a part of it. Washington had meanwhile drawn his followers within the entrenchment; and the firing now began on both sides. Rain fell all day. The raw earth of the embankment was turned to soft mud, and the men in the ditch of the outwork stood to the knee in water. The swivels brought back from the camp at Gist's farm were mounted on the rampart; but the gunners were so ill protected that the pieces were almost silenced by the French musketry. The fight lasted nine hours. At times the fire on both sides was nearly quenched by the showers, and the bedrenched combatants could do little but gaze at each other through a gray veil of mist and rain. Towards night, however, the fusillade revived, and became sharp again until dark. At eight o'clock the French called out to propose a parley. Villiers thus gives his reason for these overtures. "As we had been wet all day by the rain, as the soldiers were very tired, as the savages said that they would leave us the next morning, and as there was a report that drums and the firing of 158 V1 cannon had been heard in the distance, I proposed to M. Le Mercier to offer the English a conference." He says further that ammunition was falling short, and that he thought the enemy might sally in a body and attack him. [155] The English, on their side, were in a worse plight. They were half starved, their powder was nearly spent, their guns were foul, and among them all they had but two screw-rods to clean them. In spite of his desperate position, Washington declined the parley, thinking it a pretext to introduce a spy; but when the French repeated their proposal and requested that he would send an officer to them, he could hesitate no longer. There were but two men with him who knew French, Ensign Peyroney, who was disabled by a wound, and the Dutchman, Captain Vanbraam. To him the unpalatable errand was assigned. After a long absence he returned with articles of capitulation offered by Villiers; and while the officers gathered about him in the rain, he read and interpreted the paper by the glimmer of a sputtering candle kept alight with difficulty. Objection was made to some of the terms, and they were changed. Vanbraam, however, apparently anxious to get the capitulation signed and the affair ended, mistranslated several passages, and rendered the words l'assassinat du Sieur de Jumonville as the death of the Sieur de Jumonville. [156] As 159 V1 thus understood, the articles were signed about midnight. They provided that the English should march out with drums beating and the honors of war, carrying with them one of their swivels and all their other property; that they should be protected against insult from French or Indians; that the prisoners taken in the affair of Jumonville should be set free; and that two officers should remain as hostages for their safe return to Fort Duquesne. The hostages chosen were Vanbraam and a brave but eccentric Scotchman, Robert Stobo, an acquaintance of the novelist Smollett, said to be the original of his Lismahago. [155] Journal de Villiers, original. Omitted in the Journal as printed by the French Government. A short and very incorrect abstract of this Journal will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. [156] See Appendix C. On the fight at Great Meadows, compare Sparks, Writings of Washington, II. 456-468; also a letter of Colonel Innes to Governor Hamilton, written a week after the event, in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 50, and a letter of Adam Stephen in Pennsylvania Gazette, 1754. Washington reports that twelve of the Virginians were killed on the spot, and forty-three wounded, while on the casualties in Mackay's company no returns appear. Villiers reports his own loss at only twenty in all. [157] The numbers engaged are uncertain. The six companies of the Virginia regiment counted three hundred and five men and officers, and Mackay's company one hundred; but many were on the sick list, and some had deserted. About three hundred and fifty may have taken part in the fight. On the side of the French, Villiers says that the detachment as originally formed consisted of five hundred white men. These were increased after his arrival at Fort Duquesne, and one of the party 160 V1 reports that seven hundred marched on the expedition. [158] The number of Indians joining them is not given; but as nine tribes and communities contributed to it, and as two barrels of wine were required to give the warriors a parting feast, it must have been considerable. White men and red, it seems clear that the French force was more than twice that of the English, while they were better posted and better sheltered, keeping all day under cover, and never showing themselves on the open meadow. There were no Indians with Washington. Even the Half-King held aloof; though, being of a caustic turn, he did not spare his comments on the fight, telling Conrad Weiser, the provincial interpreter, that the French behaved like cowards, and the English like fools. [159] [157] Dinwiddie writes to the Lords of Trade that thirty in all were killed, and seventy wounded, on the English side; and the commissary Varin writes to Bigot that the French lost seventy-two killed and wounded. [158] A Journal had from Thomas Forbes, lately a Private Soldier in the King of France's Service. (Public Record Office.) Forbes was one of Villiers' soldiers. The commissary Varin puts the number of French at six hundred, besides Indians. [159] Journal of Conrad Weiser, in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 150. The Half-King also remarked that Washington "was a good-natured man, but had no experience, and would by no means take advice from the Indians, but was always driving them on to fight by his directions; that he lay at one place from one full moon to the other, and made no fortifications at all, except that little thing upon the meadow, where he thought the French would come up to him in open field." In the early morning the fort was abandoned and the retreat began. The Indians had killed all the horses and cattle, and Washington's men were so burdened with the sick and wounded, whom they were obliged to carry on their backs, that most of the baggage was perforce left behind. Even then they could march but a few miles, and then encamped to wait for wagons. The Indians 161 V1 increased the confusion by plundering, and threatening an attack. They knocked to pieces the medicine-chest, thus causing great distress to the wounded, two of whom they murdered and scalped. For a time there was danger of panic; but order was restored, and the wretched march began along the forest road that led over the Alleghanies, fifty-two miles to the station at Wills Creek. Whatever may have been the feelings of Washington, he has left no record of them. His immense fortitude was doomed to severer trials in the future; yet perhaps this miserable morning was the darkest of his life. He was deeply moved by sights of suffering; and all around him were wounded men borne along in torture, and weary men staggering under the living load. His pride was humbled, and his young ambition seemed blasted in the bud. It was the fourth of July. He could not foresee that he was to make that day forever glorious to a new-born nation hailing him as its father. The defeat at Fort Necessity was doubly disastrous to the English, since it was a new step and a long one towards the ruin of their interest with the Indians; and when, in the next year, the smouldering war broke into flame, nearly all the western tribes drew their scalping-knives for France. Villiers went back exultant to Fort Duquesne, burning on his way the buildings of Gist's settlement and the storehouse at Redstone Creek. Not an English flag now waved beyond the Alleghanies. CHAPTER VI. 1754, 1755. THE SIGNAL OF BATTLE. Troubles of Dinwiddie ? Gathering of the Burgesses ? Virginian Society ? Refractory Legislators ? The Quaker Assembly ? It refuses to resist the French ? Apathy of New York ? Shirley and the General Court of Massachusetts ? Short-sighted Policy ? Attitude of Royal Governors ? Indian Allies waver ? Convention at Albany ? Scheme of union ? It fails ? Dinwiddie and Glen ? Dinwiddie calls on England for Help ? The Duke of Newcastle ? Weakness of the British Cabinet ? Attitude of France ? Mutual Dissimulation ? Both Powers send Troops to America ? Collision ? Capture of the "Alcide" and the "Lis." The defeat of Washington was a heavy blow to the Governor, and he angrily ascribed it to the delay of the expected reinforcements. The King's companies from New York had reached Alexandria, and crawled towards the scene of action with thin ranks, bad discipline, thirty women and children, no tents, no blankets, no knapsacks, and for munitions one barrel of spoiled gunpowder. [161] The case was still worse with the regiment from North Carolina. It was commanded by Colonel Innes, a countryman and friend of Dinwiddie, who wrote to him: "Dear James, I now wish that we had none from your colony but yourself, for I foresee nothing but confusion among them." The men 163 V1 were, in fact, utterly unmanageable. They had been promised three shillings a day, while the Virginians had only eightpence; and when they heard on the march that their pay was to be reduced, they mutinied, disbanded, and went home. [161] Dinwiddie to the Lords of Trade, 24 July, 1754. Ibid. to Delancey, 20 June, 1754. "You may easily guess," says Dinwiddie to a London correspondent, "the great fatigue and trouble I have had, which is more than I ever went through in my life." He rested his hopes on the session of his Assembly, which was to take place in August; for he thought that the late disaster would move them to give him money for defending the colony. These meetings of the burgesses were the great social as well as political event of the Old Dominion, and gave a gathering signal to the Virginian gentry scattered far and wide on their lonely plantations. The capital of the province was Williamsburg, a village of about a thousand inhabitants, traversed by a straight and very wide street, and adorned with various public buildings, conspicuous among which was William and Mary College, a respectable structure, unjustly likened by Jefferson to a brick kiln with a roof. The capitol, at the other end of the town, had been burned some years before, and had just risen from its ashes. Not far distant was the so-called Governor's Palace, where Dinwiddie with his wife and two daughters exercised such official hospitality as his moderate salary and Scottish thrift would permit. [162] [162] For a contemporary account of Williamsburg, Burnaby, Travels in North America, 6. Smyth, Tour in America, I. 17, describes it some years later. 164 V1 In these seasons of festivity the dull and quiet village was transfigured. The broad, sandy street, scorching under a southern sun, was thronged with coaches and chariots brought over from London at heavy cost in tobacco, though soon to be bedimmed by Virginia roads and negro care; racing and hard-drinking planters; clergymen of the Establishment, not much more ascetic than their boon companions of the laity; ladies, with manners a little rusted by long seclusion; black coachmen and footmen, proud of their masters and their liveries; young cavaliers, booted and spurred, sitting their thoroughbreds with the careless grace of men whose home was the saddle. It was a proud little provincial society, which might seem absurd in its lofty self-appreciation, had it not soon approved itself so prolific in ability and worth. [163] [163] The English traveller Smyth, in his Tour, gives a curious and vivid picture of Virginian life. For the social condition of this and other colonies before the Revolution, one cannot do better than to consult Lodge's Short History of the English Colonies. The burgesses met, and Dinwiddie made them an opening speech, inveighing against the aggressions of the French, their "contempt of treaties," and "ambitious views for universal monarchy;" and he concluded: "I could expatiate very largely on these affairs, but my heart burns with resentment at their insolence. I think there is no room for many arguments to induce you to raise a considerable supply to enable me to defeat the designs of these troublesome people and enemies of mankind." The burgesses in their turn expressed 165 V1 the "highest and most becoming resentment," and promptly voted twenty thousand pounds; but on the third reading of the bill they added to it a rider which touched the old question of the pistole fee, and which, in the view of the Governor, was both unconstitutional and offensive. He remonstrated in vain; the stubborn republicans would not yield, nor would he; and again he prorogued them. This unexpected defeat depressed him greatly. "A governor," he wrote, "is really to be pitied in the discharge of his duty to his king and country, in having to do with such obstinate, self-conceited people…. I cannot satisfy the burgesses unless I prostitute the rules of government. I have gone through monstrous fatigues. Such wrong-headed people, I thank God, I never had to do with before." [164] A few weeks later he was comforted; for, having again called the burgesses, they gave him the money, without trying this time to humiliate him. [165] [164] Dinwiddie to Hamilton, 6 Sept., 1754. Ibid. to J. Abercrombie, 1 Sept., 1754. [165] Hening, VI. 435. In straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, aristocratic Virginia was far outdone by democratic Pennsylvania. Hamilton, her governor, had laid before the Assembly a circular letter from the Earl of Holdernesse directing him, in common with other governors, to call on his province for means to repel any invasion which might be made "within the undoubted limits of His Majesty's dominion." [166] The Assembly of Pennsylvania was curiously unlike 166 V1 that of Virginia, as half and often more than half of its members were Quaker tradesmen in sober raiment and broad-brimmed hats; while of the rest, the greater part were Germans who cared little whether they lived under English rule or French, provided that they were left in peace upon their farms. The House replied to the Governor's call: "It would be highly presumptuous in us to pretend to judge of the undoubted limits of His Majesty's dominions;" and they added: "the Assemblies of this province are generally composed of a majority who are constitutionally principled against war, and represent a well-meaning, peaceable people." [167] They then adjourned, telling the Governor that, "As those our limits have not been clearly ascertained to our satisfaction, we fear the precipitate call upon us as the province invaded cannot answer any good purpose at this time." [166] The Earl of Holdernesse to the Governors in America, 28 Aug. 1753. [167] Colonial Records of Pa., V. 748. In the next month they met again, and again Hamilton asked for means to defend the country. The question was put, Should the Assembly give money for the King's use? and the vote was feebly affirmative. Should the sum be twenty thousand pounds? The vote was overwhelming in the negative. Fifteen thousand, ten thousand, and five thousand, were successively proposed, and the answer was always, No. The House would give nothing but five hundred pounds for a present to the Indians; after which they adjourned "to the sixth of the month called May." [168] At their next meeting 167 V1 they voted to give the Governor ten thousand pounds; but under conditions which made them for some time independent of his veto, and which, in other respects, were contrary to his instructions from the King, as well as from the proprietaries of the province, to whom he had given bonds to secure his obedience. He therefore rejected the bill, and they adjourned. In August they passed a similar vote, with the same result. At their October meeting they evaded his call for supplies. In December they voted twenty thousand pounds, hampered with conditions which were sure to be refused, since Morris, the new governor, who had lately succeeded Hamilton, was under the same restrictions as his predecessor. They told him, however, that in the present case they felt themselves bound by no Act of Parliament, and added: "We hope the Governor, notwithstanding any penal bond he may have entered into, will on reflection think himself at liberty and find it consistent with his safety and honor to give his assent to this bill." Morris, who had taken the highest legal advice on the subject in England, declined to compromise himself, saying: "Consider, gentlemen, in what light you will appear to His Majesty while, instead of contributing towards your own defence, you are entering into an ill-timed controversy concerning the validity of royal instructions which may be delayed to a more convenient time without the least injury to the rights of the people." [169] They would not yield, and 168 V1 told him "that they had rather the French should conquer them than give up their privileges." [170] "Truly," remarks Dinwiddie, "I think they have given their senses a long holiday." [168] Pennsylvania Archives, II. 235. Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 22-26. Works of Franklin, III. 265. [169] Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 215. [170] Morris to Penn, 1 Jan. 1755. New York was not much behind her sisters in contentious stubbornness. In answer to the Governor's appeal, the Assembly replied: "It appears that the French have built a fort at a place called French Creek, at a considerable distance from the River Ohio, which may, but does not by any evidence or information appear to us to be an invasion of any of His Majesty's colonies." [171] So blind were they as yet to "manifest destiny!" Afterwards, however, on learning the defeat of Washington, they gave five thousand pounds to aid Virginia. [172] Maryland, after long delay, gave six thousand. New Jersey felt herself safe behind the other colonies, and would give nothing. New England, on the other hand, and especially Massachusetts, had suffered so much from French war-parties that they were always ready to fight. Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, had returned from his bootless errand to settle the boundary question at Paris. His leanings were strongly monarchical; yet he believed in the New Englanders, and was more or less in sympathy with them. Both he and they were strenuous against the French, and they had mutually helped each other to reap laurels in the last war. Shirley was cautious of giving 169 V1 umbrage to his Assembly, and rarely quarrelled with it, except when the amount of his salary was in question. He was not averse to a war with France; for though bred a lawyer, and now past middle life, he flattered himself with hopes of a high military command. On the present occasion, making use of a rumor that the French were seizing the carrying-place between the Chaudière and the Kennebec, he drew from the Assembly a large grant of money, and induced them to call upon him to march in person to the scene of danger. He accordingly repaired to Falmouth (now Portland); and, though the rumor proved false, sent eight hundred men under Captain John Winslow to build two forts on the Kennebec as a measure of precaution. [173] [171] Address of the Assembly to Lieutenant-Governor Delancey, 23 April, 1754. Lords of Trade to Delancey, 5 July, 1754. [172] Delancey to Lords of Trade, 8 Oct. 1754. [173] Massachusetts Archives, 1754. Hutchinson, III. 26. Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated. Journals of the Board of Trade, 1754. While to these northern provinces Canada was an old and pestilent enemy, those towards the south scarcely knew her by name; and the idea of French aggression on their borders was so novel and strange that they admitted it with difficulty. Mind and heart were engrossed in strife with their governors: the universal struggle for virtual self-rule. But the war was often waged with a passionate stupidity. The colonist was not then an American; he was simply a provincial, and a narrow one. The time was yet distant when these dissevered and jealous communities should weld themselves into one broad nationality, capable, at need, of the mightiest efforts to purge 170 V1 itself of disaffection and vindicate its commanding unity. In the interest of that practical independence which they had so much at heart, two conditions were essential to the colonists. The one was a field for expansion, and the other was mutual help. Their first necessity was to rid themselves of the French, who, by shutting them between the Alleghanies and the sea, would cramp them into perpetual littleness. With France on their backs, growing while they had no room to grow, they must remain in helpless wardship, dependent on England, whose aid they would always need; but with the West open before them, their future was their own. King and Parliament would respect perforce the will of a people spread from the ocean to the Mississippi, and united in action as in aims. But in the middle of the last century the vision of the ordinary colonist rarely reached so far. The immediate victory over a governor, however slight the point at issue, was more precious in his eyes than the remote though decisive advantage which he saw but dimly. The governors, representing the central power, saw the situation from the national point of view. Several of them, notably Dinwiddie and Shirley, were filled with wrath at the proceedings of the French; and the former was exasperated beyond measure at the supineness of the provinces. He had spared no effort to rouse them, and had failed. His instincts were on the side of authority; but, under the circumstances, it is hardly to be imputed 171 V1 to him as a very deep offence against human liberty that he advised the compelling of the colonies to raise men and money for their own defence, and proposed, in view of their "intolerable obstinacy and disobedience to his Majesty's commands," that Parliament should tax them half-a-crown a head. The approaching war offered to the party of authority temptations from which the colonies might have saved it by opening their purse-strings without waiting to be told. The Home Government, on its part, was but half-hearted in the wish that they should unite in opposition to the common enemy. It was very willing that the several provinces should give money and men, but not that they should acquire military habits and a dangerous capacity of acting together. There was one kind of union, however, so obviously necessary, and at the same time so little to be dreaded, that the British Cabinet, instructed by the governors, not only assented to it, but urged it. This was joint action in making treaties with the Indians. The practice of separate treaties, made by each province in its own interest, had bred endless disorders. The adhesion of all the tribes had been so shaken, and the efforts of the French to alienate them were so vigorous and effective, that not a moment was to be lost. Joncaire had gained over most of the Senecas, Piquet was drawing the Onondagas more and more to his mission, and the Dutch of Albany were alienating their best friends, the Mohawks, by encroaching on their lands. Their chief, 172 V1 Hendrick, came to New York with a deputation of the tribe to complain of their wrongs; and finding no redress, went off in anger, declaring that the covenant chain was broken. [174] The authorities in alarm called William Johnson to their aid. He succeeded in soothing the exasperated chief, and then proceeded to the confederate council at Onondaga, where he found the assembled sachems full of anxieties and doubts. "We don't know what you Christians, English and French, intend," said one of their orators. "We are so hemmed in by you both that we have hardly a hunting-place left. In a little while, if we find a bear in a tree, there will immediately appear an owner of the land to claim the property and hinder us from killing it, by which we live. We are so perplexed between you that we hardly know what to say or think." [175] No man had such power over the Five Nations as Johnson. His dealings with them were at once honest, downright, and sympathetic. They loved and trusted him as much as they detested the Indian commissioners at Albany, whom the province of New York had charged with their affairs, and who, being traders, grossly abused their office. [174] N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 788. Colonial Records of Pa., V. 625. [175] N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 813. It was to remedy this perilous state of things that the Lords of Trade and Plantations directed the several governors to urge on their assemblies the sending of commissioners to make a joint treaty with the wavering tribes. [176] Seven of the 173 V1 provinces, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the four New England colonies, acceded to the plan, and sent to Albany, the appointed place of meeting, a body of men who for character and ability had never had an equal on the continent, but whose powers from their respective assemblies were so cautiously limited as to preclude decisive action. They met in the court-house of the little frontier city. A large "chain-belt" of wampum was provided, on which the King was symbolically represented, holding in his embrace the colonies, the Five Nations, and all their allied tribes. This was presented to the assembled warriors, with a speech in which the misdeeds of the French were not forgotten. The chief, Hendrick, made a much better speech in reply. "We do now solemnly renew and brighten the covenant chain. We shall take the chain-belt to Onondaga, where our council-fire always burns, and keep it so safe that neither thunder nor lightning shall break it." The commissioners had blamed them for allowing so many of their people to be drawn away to Piquet's mission. "It is true," said the orator, "that we live disunited. We have tried to bring back our brethren, but in vain; for the Governor of Canada is like a wicked, deluding spirit. You ask why we are so dispersed. The reason is that you have neglected us for these three years past." Here he took a stick and threw it behind him. "You have thus thrown us behind your back; whereas the French are a subtle and vigilant people, always using their utmost endeavors 174 V1 to seduce and bring us over to them." He then told them that it was not the French alone who invaded the country of the Indians. "The Governor of Virginia and the Governor of Canada are quarrelling about lands which belong to us, and their quarrel may end in our destruction." And he closed with a burst of sarcasm. "We would have taken Crown Point [in the last war], but you prevented us. Instead, you burned your own fort at Saratoga and ran away from it,—which was a shame and a scandal to you. Look about your country and see: you have no fortifications; no, not even in this city. It is but a step from Canada hither, and the French may come and turn you out of doors. You desire us to speak from the bottom of our hearts, and we shall do it. Look at the French: they are men; they are fortifying everywhere. But you are all like women, bare and open, without fortifications." [177] [176] Circular Letter of Lords of Trade to Governors in America, 18 Sept. 1753. Lords of Trade to Sir Danvers Osborne, in N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 800. [177] Proceedings of the Congress at Albany, N. Y. Col. Docs., VI. 853. A few verbal changes, for the sake of brevity, are made in the above extracts. Hendrick's brother Abraham now took up the word, and begged that Johnson might be restored to the management of Indian affairs, which he had formerly held; "for," said the chief, "we love him and he us, and he has always been our good and trusty friend." The commissioners had not power to grant the request, but the Indians were assured that it should not be forgotten; and they returned to their villages soothed, but far from satisfied. Nor were the commissioners empowered 175 V1 to take any effective steps for fortifying the frontier. The congress now occupied itself with another matter. Its members were agreed that great danger was impending; that without wise and just treatment of the tribes, the French would gain them all, build forts along the back of the British colonies, and, by means of ships and troops from France, master them one by one, unless they would combine for mutual defence. The necessity of some form of union had at length begun to force itself upon the colonial mind. A rough woodcut had lately appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette, figuring the provinces under the not very flattering image of a snake cut to pieces, with the motto, "Join, or die." A writer of the day held up the Five Nations for emulation, observing that if ignorant savages could confederate, British colonists might do as much. [178] Franklin, the leading spirit of the congress, now laid before it his famous project of union, which has been too often described to need much notice here. Its fate is well known. The Crown rejected it because it gave too much power to the colonies; the colonies, because it gave too much power to the Crown, and because it required each of them to transfer some of its functions of self-government to a central council. Another plan was afterwards devised by the friends of prerogative, perfectly agreeable to the King, since it placed all power in the hands 176 V1 of a council of governors, and since it involved compulsory taxation of the colonists, who, for the same reasons, would have doggedly resisted it, had an attempt been made to carry it into effect. [179] [178] Kennedy, Importance of gaining and preserving the Friendship of the Indians. [179] On the Albany plan of union, Franklin's Works, I. 177. Shirley thought it "a great strain upon the prerogative of the Crown," and was for requiring the colonies to raise money and men "without farther consulting them upon any points whatever." Shirley to Robinson, 24 Dec. 1754. Even if some plan of union had been agreed upon, long delay must have followed before its machinery could be set in motion; and meantime there was need of immediate action. War-parties of Indians from Canada, set on, it was thought, by the Governor, were already burning and murdering among the border settlements of New York and New Hampshire. In the south Dinwiddie grew more and more alarmed, "for the French are like so many locusts; they are collected in bodies in a most surprising manner; their number now on the Ohio is from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred." He writes to Lord Granville that, in his opinion, they aim to conquer the continent, and that "the obstinacy of this stubborn generation" exposes the country "to the merciless rage of a rapacious enemy." What vexed him even more than the apathy of the assemblies was the conduct of his brother-governor, Glen of South Carolina, who, apparently piqued at the conspicuous part Dinwiddie was acting, wrote to him in a "very dictatorial style," found fault with his measures, jested at his activity in writing letters, and even questioned the 177 V1 right of England to lands on the Ohio; till he was moved at last to retort: "I cannot help observing that your letters and arguments would have been more proper from a French officer than from one of His Majesty's governors. My conduct has met with His Majesty's gracious approbation; and I am sorry it has not received yours." Thus discouraged, even in quarters where he had least reason to expect it, he turned all his hopes to the Home Government; again recommended a tax by Act of Parliament, and begged, in repeated letters, for arms, munitions, and two regiments of infantry. [180] His petition was not made in vain. [180] Dinwiddie Papers; letters to Granville, Albemarle, Halifax, Fox, Holdernesse, Horace Walpole, and Lords of Trade. England at this time presented the phenomenon of a prime minister who could not command the respect of his own servants. A more preposterous figure than the Duke of Newcastle never stood at the head of a great nation. He had a feverish craving for place and power, joined to a total unfitness for both. He was an adept in personal politics, and was so busied with the arts of winning and keeping office that he had no leisure, even if he had had ability, for the higher work of government. He was restless, quick in movement, rapid and confused in speech, lavish of worthless promises, always in a hurry, and at once headlong, timid, and rash. "A borrowed importance and real insignificance," says Walpole, who knew him well, "gave him the perpetual air of a solicitor…. He had no pride, though infinite self-love. He 178 V1 loved business immoderately; yet was only always doing it, never did it. When left to himself, he always plunged into difficulties, and then shuddered for the consequences." Walpole gives an anecdote showing the state of his ideas on colonial matters. General Ligonier suggested to him that Annapolis ought to be defended. "To which he replied with his lisping, evasive hurry: 'Annapolis, Annapolis! Oh, yes, Annapolis must be defended,—where is Annapolis?'" [181] Another contemporary, Smollett, ridicules him in his novel of Humphrey Clinker, and tells a similar story, which, founded in fact or not, shows in what estimation the minister was held: "Captain C. treated the Duke's character without any ceremony. 'This wiseacre,' said he, 'is still abed; and I think the best thing he can do is to sleep on till Christmas; for when he gets up he does nothing but expose his own folly. In the beginning of the war he told me in a great fright that thirty thousand French had marched from Acadia to Cape Breton. Where did they find transports? said I.—Transports! cried he, I tell you they marched by land.—By land to the island of Cape Breton!—What, is Cape Breton an island?—Certainly.—Ha! are you sure of that?—When I pointed it out on the map, he examined it earnestly with his spectacles; then, taking me in his arms,—My dear C., cried he, you always bring us good news. Egad! I'll go directly and tell the King that Cape Breton is an island.'" [181] Walpole, George II., I. 344. 179 V1 His wealth, county influence, flagitious use of patronage, and long-practised skill in keeping majorities in the House of Commons by means that would not bear the light, made his support necessary to Pitt himself, and placed a fantastic political jobber at the helm of England in a time when she needed a patriot and a statesman. Newcastle was the growth of the decrepitude and decay of a great party, which had fulfilled its mission and done its work. But if the Whig soil had become poor for a wholesome crop, it was never so rich for toadstools. Sir Thomas Robinson held the Southern Department, charged with the colonies; and Lord Mahon remarks of him that the Duke had achieved the feat of finding a secretary of state more incapable than himself. He had the lead of the House of Commons. "Sir Thomas Robinson lead us!" said Pitt to Henry Fox; "the Duke might as well send his jackboot to lead us." The active and aspiring Halifax was at the head of the Board of Trade and Plantations. The Duke of Cumberland commanded the army,—an indifferent soldier, though a brave one; harsh, violent, and headlong. Anson, the celebrated navigator, was First Lord of the Admiralty,—a position in which he disappointed everybody. In France the true ruler was Madame de Pompadour, once the King's mistress, now his procuress, and a sort of feminine prime minister. Machault d'Arnouville was at the head of the Marine and Colonial Department. The diplomatic representatives of the two Crowns were more conspicuous 180 V1 for social than for political talents. Of Mirepoix, French ambassador at London, Marshal Saxe had once observed: "It is a good appointment; he can teach the English to dance." Walpole says concerning him: "He could not even learn to pronounce the names of our games of cards,—which, however, engaged most of the hours of his negotiation. We were to be bullied out of our colonies by an apprentice at whist!" Lord Albemarle, English ambassador at Versailles, is held up by Chesterfield as an example to encourage his son in the pursuit of the graces: "What do you think made our friend Lord Albemarle colonel of a regiment of Guards, Governor of Virginia, Groom of the Stole, and ambassador to Paris,—amounting in all to sixteen or seventeen thousand pounds a year? Was it his birth? No; a Dutch gentleman only. Was it his estate? No; he had none. Was it his learning, his parts, his political abilities and application? You can answer these questions as easily and as soon as I can ask them. What was it then? Many people wondered; but I do not, for I know, and will tell you,—it was his air, his address, his manners, and his graces." The rival nations differed widely in military and naval strength. England had afloat more than two hundred ships of war, some of them of great force; while the navy of France counted little more than half the number. On the other hand, England had reduced her army to eighteen thousand men, and France had nearly ten times as many under arms. Both alike were weak in 181 V1 leadership. That rare son of the tempest, a great commander, was to be found in neither of them since the death of Saxe. In respect to the approaching crisis, the interests of the two Powers pointed to opposite courses of action. What France needed was time. It was her policy to put off a rupture, wreathe her face in diplomatic smiles, and pose in an attitude of peace and good faith, while increasing her navy, reinforcing her garrisons in America, and strengthening her positions there. It was the policy of England to attack at once, and tear up the young encroachments while they were yet in the sap, before they could strike root and harden into stiff resistance. When, on the fourteenth of November, the King made his opening speech to the Houses of Parliament, he congratulated them on the prevailing peace, and assured them that he should improve it to promote the trade of his subjects, "and protect those possessions which constitute one great source of their wealth." America was not mentioned; but his hearers understood him, and made a liberal grant for the service of the year. [182] Two regiments, each of five hundred men, had already been ordered to sail for Virginia, where their numbers were to be raised by enlistment to seven hundred. [183] Major-General Braddock, a man after the 182 V1 Duke of Cumberland's own heart, was appointed to the chief command. The two regiments—the forty-fourth and the forty-eighth—embarked at Cork in the middle of January. The soldiers detested the service, and many had deserted. More would have done so had they foreseen what awaited them. [182] Entick, Late War, I. 118. [183] Robinson to Lords of the Admiralty, 30 Sept. 1754. Ibid., to Board of Ordnance, 10 Oct. 1754. Ibid., Circular Letter to American Governors, 26 Oct. 1754. Instructions to our Trusty and Well-beloved Edward Braddock, 25 Nov. 1754. This movement was no sooner known at Versailles than a counter expedition was prepared on a larger scale. Eighteen ships of war were fitted for sea at Brest and Rochefort, and the six battalions of La Reine, Bourgogne, Languedoc, Guienne, Artois, and Béarn, three thousand men in all, were ordered on board for Canada. Baron Dieskau, a German veteran who had served under Saxe, was made their general; and with him went the new governor of French America, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, destined to succeed Duquesne, whose health was failing under the fatigues of his office. Admiral Dubois de la Motte commanded the fleet; and lest the English should try to intercept it, another squadron of nine ships, under Admiral Macnamara, was ordered to accompany it to a certain distance from the coast. There was long and tedious delay. Doreil, commissary of war, who had embarked with Vaudreuil and Dieskau in the same ship, wrote from the harbor of Brest on the twenty-ninth of April: "At last I think we are off. We should have been outside by four o'clock this morning, if M. de Macnamara had not been obliged to ask Count Dubois de la Motte to wait till noon to mend some important part of the 183 V1 rigging (I don't know the name of it) which was broken. It is precious time lost, and gives the English the advantage over us of two tides. I talk of these things as a blind man does of colors. What is certain is that Count Dubois de la Motte is very impatient to get away, and that the King's fleet destined for Canada is in very able and zealous hands. It is now half-past two. In half an hour all may be ready, and we may get out of the harbor before night." He was again disappointed; it was the third of May before the fleet put to sea. [184] [184] Lettres de Cremille, de Rostaing, et de Doreil au Ministre, Avril 18, 24, 28, 29, 1755. Liste des Vaisseaux de Guerre qui composent l'Escadre armée à Brest, 1755. Journal of M. de Vaudreuil's Voyage to Canada, in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 297. Pouchot, I. 25. During these preparations there was active diplomatic correspondence between the two Courts. Mirepoix demanded why British troops were sent to America. Sir Thomas Robinson answered that there was no intention to disturb the peace or offend any Power whatever; yet the secret orders to Braddock were the reverse of pacific. Robinson asked on his part the purpose of the French armament at Brest and Rochefort; and the answer, like his own, was a protestation that no hostility was meant. At the same time Mirepoix in the name of the King proposed that orders should be given to the American governors on both sides to refrain from all acts of aggression. But while making this proposal the French Court secretly sent orders to Duquesne to attack and destroy Fort Halifax, one of the two forts lately built by Shirley 184 V1 on the Kennebec,—a river which, by the admission of the French themselves, belonged to the English. But, in making this attack, the French Governor was expressly enjoined to pretend that he acted without orders. [185] He was also told that, if necessary, he might make use of the Indians to harass the English. [186] Thus there was good faith on neither part; but it is clear through all the correspondence that the English expected to gain by precipitating an open rupture, and the French by postponing it. Projects of convention were proposed on both sides, but there was no agreement. The English insisted as a preliminary condition that the French should evacuate all the western country as far as the Wabash. Then ensued a long discussion of their respective claims, as futile as the former discussion at Paris on Acadian boundaries. [187] [185] Machault à Duquesne, 17 Fév. 1755. The letter of Mirepoix proposing mutual abstinence from aggression, is dated on the 6th of the same month. The French dreaded Fort Halifax, because they thought it prepared the way for an advance on Quebec by way of the Chaudière. [186] Ibid. [187] This correspondence is printed among the Pièces justificatives of the Précis des Faits. The British Court knew perfectly the naval and military preparations of the French. Lord Albemarle had died at Paris in December; but the secretary of the embassy, De Cosne, sent to London full information concerning the fleet at Brest and Rochefort. [188] On this, Admiral Boscawen, with eleven ships of the line and one frigate, was ordered to intercept it; and as his force was plainly too small, Admiral Holbourne, with seven more ships, was 185 V1 sent, nearly three weeks after, to join him if he could. Their orders were similar,—to capture or destroy any French vessels bound to North America. [189] Boscawen, who got to sea before La Motte, stationed himself near the southern coast of Newfoundland to cut him off; but most of the French squadron eluded him, and safely made their way, some to Louisbourg, and the others to Quebec. Thus the English expedition was, in the main, a failure. Three of the French ships, however, lost in fog and rain, had become separated from the rest, and lay rolling and tossing on an angry sea not far from Cape Race. One of them was the "Alcide," commanded by Captain Hocquart; the others were the "Lis" and the "Dauphin." The wind fell; but the fogs continued at intervals; till, on the afternoon of the seventh of June, the weather having cleared, the watchman on the maintop saw the distant ocean studded with ships. It was the fleet of Boscawen. Hocquart, who gives the account, says that in the morning they were within three leagues of him, crowding all sail in pursuit. Towards eleven o'clock one of them, the "Dunkirk," was abreast of him to windward, within short speaking distance; and the ship of the Admiral, displaying a red flag as a signal to engage, was not far off. Hocquart called out: "Are we at peace, or war?" He declares that Howe, captain of the "Dunkirk," replied in French: "La paix, la paix." 186 V1 Hocquart then asked the name of the British admiral; and on hearing it said: "I know him; he is a friend of mine." Being asked his own name in return, he had scarcely uttered it when the batteries of the "Dunkirk" belched flame and smoke, and volleyed a tempest of iron upon the crowded decks of the "Alcide." She returned the fire, but was forced at length to strike her colors. Rostaing, second in command of the troops, was killed; and six other officers, with about eighty men, were killed or wounded. [190] At the same time the "Lis" was attacked and overpowered. She had on board eight companies of the battalions of La Reine and Languedoc. The third French ship, the "Dauphin," escaped under cover of a rising fog. [191] [188] Particulars in Entick, I. 121. [189] Secret Instructions for our Trusty and Well-beloved Edward Boscawen, Esq., Vice-Admiral of the Blue, 16 April, 1755. Most secret Instructions for Francis Holbourne, Esq., Rear-Admiral of the Blue, 9 May, 1755. Robinson to Lords of the Admiralty, 8 May, 1755. [190] Liste des Officiers tués et blessés dans le Combat de l'Alcide et du Lis. [191] Hocquart's account is given in full by Pichon, Lettres et Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Cap-Breton. The short account in Précis des Faits, 272, seems, too, to be drawn from Hocquart. Also Boscawen to Robinson, 22 June, 1755. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1755. Entick, I. 137. Some English accounts say that Captain Howe, in answer to the question, "Are we at peace, or war?" returned, "I don't know; but you had better prepare for war." Boscawen places the action on the 10th, instead of the 8th, and puts the English loss at seven killed and twenty-seven wounded. Here at last was an end to negotiation. The sword was drawn and brandished in the eyes of Europe. CHAPTER VII. 1755. BRADDOCK. Arrival of Braddock ? His Character ? Council at Alexandria ? Plan of the Campaign ? Apathy of the Colonists ? Rage of Braddock ? Franklin ? Fort Cumberland ? Composition of the Army ? Offended Friends ? The March ? The French Fort ? Savage Allies ? The Captive ? Beaujeu ? He goes to meet the English ? Passage of the Monongahela ? The Surprise ? The Battle ? Rout of Braddock ? His Death ? Indian Ferocity ? Reception of the Ill News ? Weakness of Dunbar ? The Frontier abandoned. "I have the pleasure to acquaint you that General Braddock came to my house last Sunday night," writes Dinwiddie, at the end of February, to Governor Dobbs of North Carolina. Braddock had landed at Hampton from the ship "Centurion," along with young Commodore Keppel, who commanded the American squadron. "I am mighty glad," again writes Dinwiddie, "that the General is arrived, which I hope will give me some ease; for these twelve months past I have been a perfect slave." He conceived golden opinions of his guest. "He is, I think, a very fine officer, and a sensible, considerate gentleman. He and I live in great harmony." Had he known him better, he might have praised him less. William Shirley, son of the Governor of 188 V1 Massachusetts, was Braddock's secretary; and after an acquaintance of some months wrote to his friend Governor Morris: "We have a general most judiciously chosen for being disqualified for the service he is employed in in almost every respect. He may be brave for aught I know, and he is honest in pecuniary matters." [192] The astute Franklin, who also had good opportunity of knowing him, says: "This general was, I think, a brave man, and might probably have made a good figure in some European war. But he had too much self-confidence; too high an opinion of the validity of regular troops; too mean a one of both Americans and Indians." [193] Horace Walpole, in his function of gathering and immortalizing the gossip of his time, has left a sharply drawn sketch of Braddock in two letters to Sir Horace Mann, written in the summer of this year: "I love to give you an idea of our characters as they rise upon the stage of history. Braddock is a very Iroquois in disposition. He had a sister who, having gamed away all her little fortune at Bath, hanged herself with a truly English deliberation, leaving only a note upon the table with those lines: 'To die is landing on some silent shore,' etc. When Braddock was told of it, he only said: 'Poor Fanny! I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up.'" Under the name of Miss Sylvia S———, Goldsmith, in his life of Nash, tells the story of this unhappy woman. 189 V1 She was a rash but warm-hearted creature, reduced to penury and dependence, not so much by a passion for cards as by her lavish generosity to a lover ruined by his own follies, and with whom her relations are said to have been entirely innocent. Walpole continues: "But a more ridiculous story of Braddock, and which is recorded in heroics by Fielding in his Covent Garden Tragedy, was an amorous discussion he had formerly with a Mrs. Upton, who kept him. He had gone the greatest lengths with her pin-money, and was still craving. One day, that he was very pressing, she pulled out her purse and showed him that she had but twelve or fourteen shillings left. He twitched it from her: 'Let me see that.' Tied up at the other end he found five guineas. He took them, tossed the empty purse in her face, saying: 'Did you mean to cheat me?' and never went near her more. Now you are acquainted with General Braddock." [192] Shirley the younger to Morris, 23 May, 1755. [193] Franklin, Autobiography. "He once had a duel with Colonel Gumley, Lady Bath's brother, who had been his great friend. As they were going to engage, Gumley, who had good-humor and wit (Braddock had the latter), said: 'Braddock, you are a poor dog! Here, take my purse; if you kill me, you will be forced to run away, and then you will not have a shilling to support you.' Braddock refused the purse, insisted on the duel, was disarmed, and would not even ask his life. However, with all his brutality, he has lately been governor of Gibraltar, where he made himself adored, 190 V1 and where scarce any governor was endured before." [194] [194] Letters of Horace Walpole (1866), II. 459, 461. It is doubtful if Braddock was ever governor of Gibraltar; though, as Mr. Sargent shows, he once commanded a regiment there. Another story is told of him by an accomplished actress of the time, George Anne Bellamy, whom Braddock had known from girlhood, and with whom his present relations seem to have been those of an elderly adviser and friend. "As we were walking in the Park one day, we heard a poor fellow was to be chastised; when I requested the General to beg off the offender. Upon his application to the general officer, whose name was Dury, he asked Braddock how long since he had divested himself of the brutality and insolence of his manners? To which the other replied: 'You never knew me insolent to my inferiors. It is only to such rude men as yourself that I behave with the spirit which I think they deserve.'" Braddock made a visit to the actress on the evening before he left London for America. "Before we parted," she says, "the General told me that he should never see me more; for he was going with a handful of men to conquer whole nations; and to do this they must cut their way through unknown woods. He produced a map of the country, saying at the same time: 'Dear Pop, we are sent like sacrifices to the altar,'" [195]—a strange presentiment for a man of his sturdy temper. [195] Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, written by herself, II. 204 (London, 1786). 191 V1 Whatever were his failings, he feared nothing, and his fidelity and honor in the discharge of public trusts were never questioned. "Desperate in his fortune, brutal in his behavior, obstinate in his sentiments," again writes Walpole, "he was still intrepid and capable." [196] He was a veteran in years and in service, having entered the Coldstream Guards as ensign in 1710. [196] Walpole, George II., I. 390. The transports bringing the two regiments from Ireland all arrived safely at Hampton, and were ordered to proceed up the Potomac to Alexandria, where a camp was to be formed. Thither, towards the end of March, went Braddock himself, along with Keppel and Dinwiddie, in the Governor's coach; while his aide-de-camp, Orme, his secretary, Shirley, and the servants of the party followed on horseback. Braddock had sent for the elder Shirley and other provincial governors to meet him in council; and on the fourteenth of April they assembled in a tent of the newly formed encampment. Here was Dinwiddie, who thought his troubles at an end, and saw in the red-coated soldiery the near fruition of his hopes. Here, too, was his friend and ally, Dobbs of North Carolina; with Morris of Pennsylvania, fresh from Assembly quarrels; Sharpe of Maryland, who, having once been a soldier, had been made a sort of provisional commander-in-chief before the arrival of Braddock; and the ambitious Delancey of New York, who had lately led the opposition against the Governor of that province, and now 192 V1 filled the office himself,—a position that needed all his manifold adroitness. But, next to Braddock, the most noteworthy man present was Shirley, governor of Massachusetts. There was a fountain of youth in this old lawyer. A few years before, when he was boundary commissioner in Paris, he had had the indiscretion to marry a young Catholic French girl, the daughter of his landlord; and now, when more than sixty years old, he thirsted for military honors, and delighted in contriving operations of war. He was one of a very few in the colonies who at this time entertained the idea of expelling the French from the continent. He held that Carthage must be destroyed; and, in spite of his Parisian marriage, was the foremost advocate of the root-and-branch policy. He and Lawrence, governor of Nova Scotia, had concerted an attack on the French fort of Beauséjour; and, jointly with others in New England, he had planned the capture of Crown Point, the key of Lake Champlain. By these two strokes and by fortifying the portage between the Kennebec and the Chaudière, he thought that the northern colonies would be saved from invasion, and placed in a position to become themselves invaders. Then, by driving the enemy from Niagara, securing that important pass, and thus cutting off the communication between Canada and her interior dependencies, all the French posts in the West would die of inanition. [197] In order to commend these schemes to the Home Government, he had painted 193 V1 in gloomy colors the dangers that beset the British colonies. Our Indians, he said, will all desert us if we submit to French encroachment. Some of the provinces are full of negro slaves, ready to rise against their masters, and of Roman Catholics, Jacobites, indented servants, and other dangerous persons, who would aid the French in raising a servile insurrection. Pennsylvania is in the hands of Quakers, who will not fight, and of Germans, who are likely enough to join the enemy. The Dutch of Albany would do anything to save their trade. A strong force of French regulars might occupy that place without resistance, then descend the Hudson, and, with the help of a naval force, capture New York and cut the British colonies asunder. [198] [197] Correspondence of Shirley, 1754, 1755. [198] Shirley to Robinson, 24 Jan. 1755. The plans against Crown Point and Beauséjour had already found the approval of the Home Government and the energetic support of all the New England colonies. Preparation for them was in full activity; and it was with great difficulty that Shirley had disengaged himself from these cares to attend the council at Alexandria. He and Dinwiddie stood in the front of opposition to French designs. As they both defended the royal prerogative and were strong advocates of taxation by Parliament, they have found scant justice from American writers. Yet the British colonies owed them a debt of gratitude, and the American States owe it still. Braddock, laid his instructions before the Council, and Shirley found them entirely to his mind; 194 V1 while the General, on his part, fully approved the schemes of the Governor. The plan of the campaign was settled. The French were to be attacked at four points at once. The two British regiments lately arrived were to advance on Fort Duquesne; two new regiments, known as Shirley's and Pepperell's, just raised in the provinces, and taken into the King's pay, were to reduce Niagara; a body of provincials from New England, New York, and New Jersey was to seize Crown Point; and another body of New England men to capture Beauséjour and bring Acadia to complete subjection. Braddock himself was to lead the expedition against Fort Duquesne. He asked Shirley, who, though a soldier only in theory, had held the rank of colonel since the last war, to charge himself with that against Niagara; and Shirley eagerly assented. The movement on Crown Point was intrusted to Colonel William Johnson, by reason of his influence over the Indians and his reputation for energy, capacity, and faithfulness. Lastly, the Acadian enterprise was assigned to Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, a regular officer of merit. To strike this fourfold blow in time of peace was a scheme worthy of Newcastle and of Cumberland. The pretext was that the positions to be attacked were all on British soil; that in occupying them the French had been guilty of invasion; and that to expel the invaders would be an act of self-defence. Yet in regard to two of these positions, the French, if they had no other right, might at least claim one of prescription. Crown 195 V1 Point had been twenty-four years in their undisturbed possession, while it was three quarters of a century since they first occupied Niagara; and, though New York claimed the ground, no serious attempt had been made to dislodge them. Other matters now engaged the Council. Braddock, in accordance with his instructions, asked the governors to urge upon their several assemblies the establishment of a general fund for the service of the campaign; but the governors were all of opinion that the assemblies would refuse,—each being resolved to keep the control of its money in its own hands; and all present, with one voice, advised that the colonies should be compelled by Act of Parliament to contribute in due proportion to the support of the war. Braddock next asked if, in the judgment of the Council, it would not be well to send Colonel Johnson with full powers to treat with the Five Nations, who had been driven to the verge of an outbreak by the misconduct of the Dutch Indian commissioners at Albany. The measure was cordially approved, as was also another suggestion of the General, that vessels should be built at Oswego to command Lake Ontario. The Council then dissolved. Shirley hastened back to New England, burdened with the preparation for three expeditions and the command of one of them. Johnson, who had been in the camp, though not in the Council, went back to Albany, provided with a commission as sole superintendent of Indian affairs, and 196 V1 charged, besides, with the enterprise against Crown Point; while an express was despatched to Monckton at Halifax, with orders to set at once to his work of capturing Beauséjour. [199] [199] Minutes of a Council held at the Camp at Alexandria, in Virginia, April 14, 1755. Instructions to Major-General Braddock, 25 Nov. 1754. Secret Instructions to Major-General Braddock, same date. Napier to Braddock, written by Order of the Duke of Cumberland, 25 Nov. 1754, in Précis des Faits, Pièces justificatives, 168. Orme, Journal of Braddock's Expedition. Instructions to Governor Shirley. Correspondence of Shirley. Correspondence of Braddock (Public Record Office). Johnson Papers. Dinwiddie Papers. Pennsylvania Archives, II. In regard to Braddock's part of the campaign, there had been a serious error. If, instead of landing in Virginia and moving on Fort Duquesne by the long and circuitous route of Wills Creek, the two regiments had disembarked at Philadelphia and marched westward, the way would have been shortened, and would have lain through one of the richest and most populous districts on the continent, filled with supplies of every kind. In Virginia, on the other hand, and in the adjoining province of Maryland, wagons, horses, and forage were scarce. The enemies of the Administration ascribed this blunder to the influence of the Quaker merchant, John Hanbury, whom the Duke of Newcastle had consulted as a person familiar with American affairs. Hanbury, who was a prominent stockholder in the Ohio Company, and who traded largely in Virginia, saw it for his interest that the troops should pass that way; and is said to have brought the Duke to this opinion. [200] A 197 V1 writer of the time thinks that if they had landed in Pennsylvania, forty thousand pounds would have been saved in money, and six weeks in time. [201] [200] Shebbeare's Tracts, Letter I. Dr. Shebbeare was a political pamphleteer, pilloried by one ministry, and rewarded by the next. He certainly speaks of Hanbury, though he does not give his name. Compare Sargent, 107, 162. [201] Gentleman's Magazine, Aug. 1755. Not only were supplies scarce, but the people showed such unwillingness to furnish them, and such apathy in aiding the expedition, that even Washington was provoked to declare that "they ought to be chastised." [202] Many of them thought that the alarm about French encroachment was a device of designing politicians; and they did not awake to a full consciousness of the peril till it was forced upon them by a deluge of calamities, produced by the purblind folly of their own representatives, who, instead of frankly promoting the expedition, displayed a perverse and exasperating narrowness which chafed Braddock to fury. He praises the New England colonies, and echoes Dinwiddie's declaration that they have shown a "fine martial spirit," and he commends Virginia as having done far better than her neighbors; but for Pennsylvania he finds no words to express his wrath. [203] He knew nothing of the intestine war between proprietaries and people, and hence could see no palliation for a conduct which threatened to ruin both the expedition and the colony. Everything depended on speed, and speed was impossible; 198 V1 for stores and provisions were not ready, though notice to furnish them had been given months before. The quartermaster-general, Sir John Sinclair, "stormed like a lion rampant," but with small effect. [204] Contracts broken or disavowed, want of horses, want of wagons, want of forage, want of wholesome food, or sufficient food of any kind, caused such delay that the report of it reached England, and drew from Walpole the comment that Braddock was in no hurry to be scalped. In reality he was maddened with impatience and vexation. [202] Writings of Washington, II. 78. He speaks of the people of Pennsylvania. [203] Braddock to Robinson, 18 March, 19 April, 5 June, 1755, etc. On the attitude of Pennsylvania, Colonial Records of Pa., VI., passim. [204] Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 368. A powerful ally presently came to his aid in the shape of Benjamin Franklin, then postmaster-general of Pennsylvania. That sagacious personage,—the sublime of common-sense, about equal in his instincts and motives of character to the respectable average of the New England that produced him, but gifted with a versatile power of brain rarely matched on earth,—was then divided between his strong desire to repel a danger of which he saw the imminence, and his equally strong antagonism to the selfish claims of the Penns, proprietaries of Pennsylvania. This last motive had determined his attitude towards their representative, the Governor, and led him into an opposition as injurious to the military good name of the province as it was favorable to its political longings. In the present case there was no such conflict of inclinations; he could help Braddock without hurting Pennsylvania. He and his son had visited 199 V1 the camp, and found the General waiting restlessly for the report of the agents whom he had sent to collect wagons. "I stayed with him," says Franklin, "several days, and dined with him daily. When I was about to depart, the returns of wagons to be obtained were brought in, by which it appeared that they amounted only to twenty-five, and not all of these were in serviceable condition." On this the General and his officers declared that the expedition was at an end, and denounced the Ministry for sending them into a country void of the means of transportation. Franklin remarked that it was a pity they had not landed in Pennsylvania, where almost every farmer had his wagon. Braddock caught eagerly at his words, and begged that he would use his influence to enable the troops to move. Franklin went back to Pennsylvania, issued an address to the farmers appealing to their interest and their fears, and in a fortnight procured a hundred and fifty wagons, with a large number of horses. [205] Braddock, grateful to his benefactor, and enraged at everybody else, pronounced him "Almost the only instance of ability and honesty I have known in these provinces." [206] More wagons and more horses gradually arrived, and at the eleventh hour the march began. [205] Franklin, Autobiography. Advertisement of B. Franklin for Wagons; Address to the Inhabitants of the Counties of York, Lancaster, and Cumberland, in Pennsylvania Archives, II. 294. [206] Braddock to Robinson, 5 June, 1755. The letters of Braddock here cited are the originals in the Public Record Office. On the tenth of May Braddock reached Wills Creek, where the whole force was now gathered, 200 V1 having marched thither by detachments along the banks of the Potomac. This old trading-station of the Ohio Company had been transformed into a military post and named Fort Cumberland. During the past winter the independent companies which had failed Washington in his need had been at work here to prepare a base of operations for Braddock. Their axes had been of more avail than their muskets. A broad wound had been cut in the bosom of the forest, and the murdered oaks and chestnuts turned into ramparts, barracks, and magazines. Fort Cumberland was an enclosure of logs set upright in the ground, pierced with loopholes, and armed with ten small cannon. It stood on a rising ground near the point where Wills Creek joined the Potomac, and the forest girded it like a mighty hedge, or rather like a paling of gaunt brown stems upholding a canopy of green. All around spread illimitable woods, wrapping hill, valley, and mountain. The spot was an oasis in a desert of leaves,—if the name oasis can be given to anything so rude and harsh. In this rugged area, or "clearing," all Braddock's force was now assembled, amounting, regulars, provincials, and sailors, to about twenty-two hundred men. The two regiments, Halket's and Dunbar's, had been completed by enlistment in Virginia to seven hundred men each. Of Virginians there were nine companies of fifty men, who found no favor in the eyes of Braddock or his officers. To Ensign Allen of Halket's regiment was assigned the duty of "making them as 201 V1 much like soldiers as possible." [207]—that is, of drilling them like regulars. The General had little hope of them, and informed Sir Thomas Robinson that "their slothful and languid disposition renders them very unfit for military service,"—a point on which he lived to change his mind. Thirty sailors, whom Commodore Keppel had lent him, were more to his liking, and were in fact of value in many ways. He had now about six hundred baggage-horses, besides those of the artillery, all weakening daily on their diet of leaves; for no grass was to be found. There was great show of discipline, and little real order. Braddock's executive capacity seems to have been moderate, and his dogged, imperious temper, rasped by disappointments, was in constant irritation. "He looks upon the country, I believe," writes Washington, "as void of honor or honesty. We have frequent disputes on this head, which are maintained with warmth on both sides, especially on his, as he is incapable of arguing without it, or giving up any point he asserts, be it ever so incompatible with reason or common sense." [208] Braddock's secretary, the younger Shirley, writing to his friend Governor Morris, spoke thus irreverently of his chief: "As the King said of a neighboring governor of yours [Sharpe], when proposed for the command of the American forces about a twelvemonth ago, and recommended as a very honest man, though not remarkably able, 'a little 202 V1 more ability and a little less honesty upon the present occasion might serve our turn better.' It is a joke to suppose that secondary officers can make amends for the defects of the first; the mainspring must be the mover. As to the others, I don't think we have much to boast; some are insolent and ignorant, others capable, but rather aiming at showing their own abilities than making a proper use of them. I have a very great love for my friend Orme, and think it uncommonly fortunate for our leader that he is under the influence of so honest and capable a man; but I wish for the sake of the public he had some more experience of business, particularly in America. I am greatly disgusted at seeing an expedition (as it is called), so ill-concerted originally in England, so improperly conducted since in America." [209] [207] Orme, Journal. [208] Writings of Washington, II. 77. [209] Shirley the younger to Morris, 23 May, 1755, in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 404. Captain Robert Orme, of whom Shirley speaks, was aide-de-camp to Braddock, and author of a copious and excellent Journal of the expedition, now in the British Museum.[210] His portrait, painted at full length by Sir Joshua Reynolds, hangs in the National Gallery at London. He stands by his horse, a gallant young figure, with a face pale, yet rather handsome, booted to the knee, his scarlet coat, ample waistcoat, and small three-cornered hat all heavy with gold lace. The General had two other aides-de-camp, Captain Roger Morris 203 V1 and Colonel George Washington, whom he had invited, in terms that do him honor, to become one of his military family. [210] Printed by Sargent, in his excellent monograph of Braddock's Expedition. It has been said that Braddock despised not only provincials, but Indians. Nevertheless he took some pains to secure their aid, and complained that Indian affairs had been so ill conducted by the provinces that it was hard to gain their confidence. This was true; the tribes had been alienated by gross neglect. Had they been protected from injustice and soothed by attentions and presents, the Five Nations, Delawares, and Shawanoes would have been retained as friends. But their complaints had been slighted, and every gift begrudged. The trader Croghan brought, however, about fifty warriors, with as many women and children, to the camp at Fort Cumberland. They were objects of great curiosity to the soldiers, who gazed with astonishment on their faces, painted red, yellow, and black, their ears slit and hung with pendants, and their heads close shaved, except the feathered scalp-lock at the crown. "In the day," says an officer, "they are in our camp, and in the night they go into their own, where they dance and make a most horrible noise." Braddock received them several times in his tent, ordered the guard to salute them, made them speeches, caused cannon to be fired and drums and fifes to play in their honor, regaled them with rum, and gave them a bullock for a feast; whereupon, being much pleased, they danced a war-dance, described by one spectator as "droll and 204 V1 odd, showing how they scalp and fight;" after which, says another, "they set up the most horrid song or cry that ever I heard." [211] These warriors, with a few others, promised the General to join him on the march; but he apparently grew tired of them, for a famous chief, called Scarroyaddy, afterwards complained: "He looked upon us as dogs, and would never hear anything that we said to him." Only eight of them remained with him to the end. [212] [211] Journal of a Naval Officer, in Sargent. The Expedition of Major-General Braddock, being Extracts of Letters from an Officer (London, 1755). [212] Statement of George Croghan, in Sargent, appendix iii. Another ally appeared at the camp. This was a personage long known in Western fireside story as Captain Jack, the Black Hunter, or the Black Rifle. It was said of him that, having been a settler on the farthest frontier, in the Valley of the Juniata, he returned one evening to his cabin and found it burned to the ground by Indians, and the bodies of his wife and children lying among the ruins. He vowed undying vengeance, raised a band of kindred spirits, dressed and painted like Indians, and became the scourge of the red man and the champion of the white. But he and his wild crew, useful as they might have been, shocked Braddock's sense of military fitness; and he received them so coldly that they left him. [213] [213] See several traditional accounts and contemporary letters in Hazard's Pennsylvania Register, IV. 389, 390, 416; V. 191. It was the tenth of June before the army was well on its march. Three hundred axemen led the way, to cut and clear the road; and the long 205 V1 train of packhorses, wagons, and cannon toiled on behind, over the stumps, roots, and stones of the narrow track, the regulars and provincials marching in the forest close on either side. Squads of men were thrown out on the flanks, and scouts ranged the woods to guard against surprise; for, with all his scorn of Indians and Canadians, Braddock did not neglect reasonable precautions. Thus, foot by foot, they advanced into the waste of lonely mountains that divided the streams flowing to the Atlantic from those flowing to the Gulf of Mexico,—a realm of forests ancient as the world. The road was but twelve feet wide, and the line of march often extended four miles. It was like a thin, long party-colored snake, red, blue, and brown, trailing slowly through the depth of leaves, creeping round inaccessible heights, crawling over ridges, moving always in dampness and shadow, by rivulets and waterfalls, crags and chasms, gorges and shaggy steps. In glimpses only, through jagged boughs and flickering leaves, did this wild primeval world reveal itself, with its dark green mountains, flecked with the morning mist, and its distant summits pencilled in dreamy blue. The army passed the main Alleghany, Meadow Mountain, and Great Savage Mountain, and traversed the funereal pine-forest afterwards called the Shades of Death. No attempt was made to interrupt their march, though the commandant of Fort Duquesne had sent out parties for that purpose. A few French and Indians hovered about them, now and then scalping 206 V1 a straggler or inscribing filthy insults on trees; while others fell upon the border settlements which the advance of the troops had left defenceless. Here they were more successful, butchering about thirty persons, chiefly women and children. It was the eighteenth of June before the army reached a place called the Little Meadows, less than thirty miles from Fort Cumberland. Fever and dysentery among the men, and the weakness and worthlessness of many of the horses, joined to the extreme difficulty of the road, so retarded them that they could move scarcely more than three miles a day. Braddock consulted with Washington, who advised him to leave the heavy baggage to follow as it could, and push forward with a body of chosen troops. This counsel was given in view of a report that five hundred regulars were on the way to reinforce Fort Duquesne. It was adopted. Colonel Dunbar was left to command the rear division, whose powers of movement were now reduced to the lowest point. The advance corps, consisting of about twelve hundred soldiers, besides officers and drivers, began its march on the nineteenth with such artillery as was thought indispensable, thirty wagons, and a large number of packhorses. "The prospect," writes Washington to his brother, "conveyed infinite delight to my mind, though I was excessively ill at the time. But this prospect was soon clouded, and my hopes brought very low indeed when I found that, instead of pushing on with vigor without regarding a little rough road, they 207 V1 were halting to level every mole-hill, and to erect bridges over every brook, by which means we were four days in getting twelve miles." It was not till the seventh of July that they neared the mouth of Turtle Creek, a stream entering the Monongahela about eight miles from the French fort. The way was direct and short, but would lead them through a difficult country and a defile so perilous that Braddock resolved to ford the Monongahela to avoid this danger, and then ford it again to reach his destination. Fort Duquesne stood on the point of land where the Alleghany and the Monongahela join to form the Ohio, and where now stands Pittsburg, with its swarming population, its restless industries, the clang of its forges, and its chimneys vomiting foul smoke into the face of heaven. At that early day a white flag fluttering over a cluster of palisades and embankments betokened the first intrusion of civilized men upon a scene which, a few months before, breathed the repose of a virgin wilderness, voiceless but for the lapping of waves upon the pebbles, or the note of some lonely bird. But now the sleep of ages was broken, and bugle and drum told the astonished forest that its doom was pronounced and its days numbered. The fort was a compact little work, solidly built and strong, compared with others on the continent. It was a square of four bastions, with the water close on two sides, and the other two protected by ravelins, ditch, glacis, and covered way. The ramparts on these sides were of squared logs, filled 208 V1 in with earth, and ten feet or more thick. The two water sides were enclosed by a massive stockade of upright logs, twelve feet high, mortised together and loopholed. The armament consisted of a number of small cannon mounted on the bastions. A gate and drawbridge on the east side gave access to the area within, which was surrounded by barracks for the soldiers, officers' quarters, the lodgings of the commandant, a guard-house, and a storehouse, all built partly of logs and partly of boards. There were no casemates, and the place was commanded by a high woody hill beyond the Monongahela. The forest had been cleared away to the distance of more than a musket shot from the ramparts, and the stumps were hacked level with the ground. Here, just outside the ditch, bark cabins had been built for such of the troops and Canadians as could not find room within; and the rest of the open space was covered with Indian corn and other crops. [214] [214] M'Kinney's Description of Fort Duquesne, 1756, in Hazard's Pennsylvania Register, VIII. 318. Letters of Robert Stobo, Hostage at Fort Duquesne, 1754, in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 141, 161. Stobo's Plan of Fort Duquesne, 1754. Journal of Thomas Forbes, 1755. Letter of Captain Haslet, 1758, in Olden Time, I. 184. Plan of Fort Duquesne in Public Record Office. The garrison consisted of a few companies of the regular troops stationed permanently in the colony, and to these were added a considerable number of Canadians. Contrec?ur still held the command. [215] Under him were three other captains, Beaujeu, Dumas, and Ligneris. Besides the troops and Canadians, eight hundred Indian warriors, 209 V1 mustered from far and near, had built their wigwams and camp-sheds on the open ground, or under the edge of the neighboring woods,—very little to the advantage of the young corn. Some were baptized savages settled in Canada,—Caughnawagas from Saut St. Louis, Abenakis from St. Francis, and Hurons from Lorette, whose chief bore the name of Anastase, in honor of that Father of the Church. The rest were unmitigated heathen,—Pottawattamies and Ojibwas from the northern lakes under Charles Langlade, the same bold partisan who had led them, three years before, to attack the Miamis at Pickawillany; Shawanoes and Mingoes from the Ohio; and Ottawas from Detroit, commanded, it is said, by that most redoubtable of savages, Pontiac. The law of the survival of the fittest had wrought on this heterogeneous crew through countless generations; and with the primitive Indian, the fittest was the hardiest, fiercest, most adroit, and most wily. Baptized and heathen alike, they had just enjoyed a diversion greatly to their taste. A young Pennsylvanian named James Smith, a spirited and intelligent boy of eighteen, had been waylaid by three Indians on the western borders of the province and led captive to the fort. When the party came to the edge of the clearing, his captors, who had shot and scalped his companion, raised the scalp-yell; whereupon a din of responsive whoops and firing of guns rose from all the Indian camps, and their inmates swarmed out like bees, while the French in the fort shot off muskets and cannon to honor the occasion. The 210 V1 unfortunate boy, the object of this obstreperous rejoicing, presently saw a multitude of savages, naked, hideously bedaubed with red, blue, black, and brown, and armed with sticks or clubs, ranging themselves in two long parallel lines, between which he was told that he must run, the faster the better, as they would beat him all the way. He ran with his best speed, under a shower of blows, and had nearly reached the end of the course, when he was knocked down. He tried to rise, but was blinded by a handful of sand thrown into his face; and then they beat him till he swooned. On coming to his senses he found himself in the fort, with the surgeon opening a vein in his arm and a crowd of French and Indians looking on. In a few days he was able to walk with the help of a stick; and, coming out from his quarters one morning, he saw a memorable scene. [216] [215] See Appendix D. [216] Account of Remarkable Occurrences in the Life of Colonel James Smith, written by himself. Perhaps the best of all the numerous narratives of captives among the Indians. Three days before, an Indian had brought the report that the English were approaching; and the Chevalier de la Perade was sent out to reconnoitre. [217] He returned on the next day, the seventh, with news that they were not far distant. On the eighth the brothers Normanville went out, and found that they were within six leagues of the fort. The French were in great excitement and alarm; but Contrec?ur at length took a resolution, which seems to have been inspired by Beaujeu. [218] 211 V1 It was determined to meet the enemy on the march, and ambuscade them if possible at the crossing of the Monongahela, or some other favorable spot. Beaujeu proposed the plan to the Indians, and offered them the war-hatchet; but they would not take it. "Do you want to die, my father, and sacrifice us besides?" That night they held a council, and in the morning again refused to go. Beaujeu did not despair. "I am determined," he exclaimed, "to meet the English. What! will you let your father go alone?" [219] The greater part caught fire at his words, promised to follow him, and put on their war-paint. Beaujeu received the communion, then dressed himself like a savage, and joined the clamorous throng. Open barrels of gunpowder and bullets were set before the gate of the fort, and James Smith, painfully climbing the rampart with the help of his stick, looked down on the warrior rabble as, huddling together, wild with excitement, they scooped up the contents to fill their powder-horns and pouches. Then, band after band, they filed off along the forest track that led to the ford of the Monongahela. They numbered six hundred and thirty-seven; and with them went thirty-six French officers and cadets, seventy-two regular soldiers, and a hundred and forty-six Canadians, or about nine hundred in all. [220] 212 V1 At eight o'clock the tumult was over. The broad clearing lay lonely and still, and Contrec?ur, with what was left of his garrison, waited in suspense for the issue. [217] Relation de Godefroy, in Shea, Bataille du Malangueulé (Monongahela). [218] Dumas, however, declares that Beaujeu adopted the plan at his suggestion. Dumas au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1756. [219] Relation depuis le Départ des Trouppes de Québec jusqu'au 30 du Mois de Septembre, 1755. [220] Liste des Officiers, Cadets, Soldats, Miliciens, et Sauvages qui composaient le Détachement qui a été au devant d'un Corps de 2,000 Anglois à 3 Lieues du Fort Duquesne, le 9 Juillet, 1755; joint à la Lettre de M. Bigot du 6 Ao?t, 1755. It was near one o'clock when Braddock crossed the Monongahela for the second time. If the French made a stand anywhere, it would be, he thought, at the fording-place; but Lieutenant-Colonel Gage, whom he sent across with a strong advance-party, found no enemy, and quietly took possession of the farther shore. Then the main body followed. To impose on the imagination of the French scouts, who were doubtless on the watch, the movement was made with studied regularity and order. The sun was cloudless, and the men were inspirited by the prospect of near triumph. Washington afterwards spoke with admiration of the spectacle. [221] The music, the banners, the mounted officers, the troop of light cavalry, the naval detachment, the red-coated regulars, the blue-coated Virginians, the wagons and tumbrils, cannon, howitzers, and coehorns, the train of packhorses, and the droves of cattle, passed in long procession through the rippling shallows, and slowly entered the bordering forest. Here, when all were over, a short halt was ordered for rest and refreshment. [221] Compare the account of another eye-witness, Dr. Walker, in Hazard's Pennsylvania Register, VI. 104. Why had not Beaujeu defended the ford? This was his intention in the morning; but he had been 213 V1 met by obstacles, the nature of which is not wholly clear. His Indians, it seems, had proved refractory. Three hundred of them left him, went off in another direction, and did not rejoin him till the English had crossed the river. [222] Hence perhaps it was that, having left Fort Duquesne at eight o'clock, he spent half the day in marching seven miles, and was more than a mile from the fording-place when the British reached the eastern shore. The delay, from whatever cause arising, cost him the opportunity of laying an ambush either at the ford or in the gullies and ravines that channelled the forest through which Braddock was now on the point of marching. [222] Relation de Godefroy, in Shea, Bataille du Malangueulé. Not far from the bank of the river, and close by the British line of march, there was a clearing and a deserted house that had once belonged to the trader Fraser. Washington remembered it well. It was here that he found rest and shelter on the winter journey homeward from his mission to Fort Le B?uf. He was in no less need of rest at this moment; for recent fever had so weakened him that he could hardly sit his horse. From Fraser's house to Fort Duquesne the distance was eight miles by a rough path, along which the troops were now beginning to move after their halt. It ran inland for a little; then curved to the left, and followed a course parallel to the river along the base of a line of steep hills that here bordered the valley. These and all the country were buried in dense and heavy forest, 214 V1 choked with bushes and the carcases of fallen trees. Braddock has been charged with marching blindly into an ambuscade; but it was not so. There was no ambuscade; and had there been one, he would have found it. It is true that he did not reconnoitre the woods very far in advance of the head of the column; yet, with this exception, he made elaborate dispositions to prevent surprise. Several guides, with six Virginian light horsemen, led the way. Then, a musket-shot behind, came the vanguard; then three hundred soldiers under Gage; then a large body of axemen, under Sir John Sinclair, to open the road; then two cannon with tumbrils and tool-wagons; and lastly the rear-guard, closing the line, while flanking-parties ranged the woods on both sides. This was the advance-column. The main body followed with little or no interval. The artillery and wagons moved along the road, and the troops filed through the woods close on either hand. Numerous flanking-parties were thrown out a hundred yards and more to right and left; while, in the space between them and the marching column, the pack horses and cattle, with their drivers, made their way painfully among the trees and thickets; since, had they been allowed to follow the road, the line of march would have been too long for mutual support. A body of regulars and provincials brought up the rear. Gage, with his advance-column, had just passed a wide and bushy ravine that crossed their path, and the van of the main column was on the point 215 V1 of entering it, when the guides and light horsemen in the front suddenly fell back; and the engineer, Gordon, then engaged in marking out the road, saw a man, dressed like an Indian, but wearing the gorget of an officer, bounding forward along the path. [223] He stopped when he discovered the head of the column, turned, and waved his hat. The forest behind was swarming with French and savages. At the signal of the officer, who was probably Beaujeu, they yelled the war-whoop, spread themselves to right and left, and opened a sharp fire under cover of the trees. Gage's column wheeled deliberately into line, and fired several volleys with great steadiness against the now invisible assailants. Few of them were hurt; the trees caught the shot, but the noise was deafening under the dense arches of the forest. The greater part of the Canadians, to borrow the words of Dumas, "fled shamefully, crying 'Sauve qui peut!'" [224] Volley followed volley, and at the third Beaujeu dropped dead. Gage's two cannon were now brought to bear, on which the Indians, like the Canadians, gave way in confusion, but did not, like them, abandon the field. The close scarlet ranks of the English were plainly to be seen through the trees and the smoke; they were moving forward, cheering lustily, and shouting "God save the King!" Dumas, now chief in command, thought that all was lost. "I advanced," he says, "with the assurance that comes 216 V1 from despair, exciting by voice and gesture the few soldiers that remained. The fire of my platoon was so sharp that the enemy seemed astonished." The Indians, encouraged, began to rally. The French officers who commanded them showed admirable courage and address; and while Dumas and Ligneris, with the regulars and what was left of the Canadians, held the ground in front, the savage warriors, screeching their war-cries, swarmed through the forest along both flanks of the English, hid behind trees, bushes, and fallen trunks, or crouched in gullies and ravines, and opened a deadly fire on the helpless soldiery, who, themselves completely visible, could see no enemy, and wasted volley after volley on the impassive trees. The most destructive fire came from a hill on the English right, where the Indians lay in multitudes, firing from their lurking-places on the living target below. But the invisible death was everywhere, in front, flank, and rear. The British cheer was heard no more. The troops broke their ranks and huddled together in a bewildered mass, shrinking from the bullets that cut them down by scores. [223] Journal of the Proceeding of the Detachment of Seamen, in Sargent. [224] Dumas au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1756. Contrec?ur à Vaudreuil, 14 Juillet, 1755. See Appendix D, where extracts are given. When Braddock heard the firing in the front, he pushed forward with the main body to the support of Gage, leaving four hundred men in the rear, under Sir Peter Halket, to guard the baggage. At the moment of his arrival Gage's soldiers had abandoned their two cannon, and were falling back to escape the concentrated fire of the Indians. Meeting the advancing troops, 217 V1 they tried to find cover behind them. This threw the whole into confusion. The men of the two regiments became mixed together; and in a short time the entire force, except the Virginians and the troops left with Halket, were massed in several dense bodies within a small space of ground, facing some one way and some another, and all alike exposed without shelter to the bullets that pelted them like hail. Both men and officers were new to this blind and frightful warfare of the savage in his native woods. To charge the Indians in their hiding-places would have been useless. They would have eluded pursuit with the agility of wildcats, and swarmed back, like angry hornets, the moment that it ceased. The Virginians alone were equal to the emergency. Fighting behind trees like the Indians themselves, they might have held the enemy in check till order could be restored, had not Braddock, furious at a proceeding that shocked all his ideas of courage and discipline, ordered them, with oaths, to form into line. A body of them under Captain Waggoner made a dash for a fallen tree lying in the woods, far out towards the lurking-places of the Indians, and, crouching behind the huge trunk, opened fire; but the regulars, seeing the smoke among the bushes, mistook their best friends for the enemy, shot at them from behind, killed many, and forced the rest to return. A few of the regulars also tried in their clumsy way to fight behind trees; but Braddock beat them with his sword, and compelled them to stand with the rest, an 218 V1 open mark for the Indians. The panic increased; the soldiers crowded together, and the bullets spent themselves in a mass of human bodies. Commands, entreaties, and threats were lost upon them. "We would fight," some of them answered, "if we could see anybody to fight with." Nothing was visible but puffs of smoke. Officers and men who had stood all the afternoon under fire afterwards declared that they could not be sure they had seen a single Indian. Braddock ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Burton to attack the hill where the puffs of smoke were thickest, and the bullets most deadly. With infinite difficulty that brave officer induced a hundred men to follow him; but he was soon disabled by a wound, and they all faced about. The artillerymen stood for some time by their guns, which did great damage to the trees and little to the enemy. The mob of soldiers, stupefied with terror, stood panting, their foreheads beaded with sweat, loading and firing mechanically, sometimes into the air, sometimes among their own comrades, many of whom they killed. The ground, strewn with dead and wounded men, the bounding of maddened horses, the clatter and roar of musketry and cannon, mixed with the spiteful report of rifles and the yells that rose from the indefatigable throats of six hundred unseen savages, formed a chaos of anguish and terror scarcely paralleled even in Indian war. "I cannot describe the horrors of that scene," one of Braddock's officers wrote three weeks after; "no pen could do it. The yell of the Indians is fresh 219 V1 on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me till the hour of my dissolution." [225] [225] Leslie to a Merchant of Philadelphia, 30 July, 1755, in Hazard's Pennsylvania Register, V. 191. Leslie was a lieutenant of the Forty-fourth. Braddock showed a furious intrepidity. Mounted on horseback, he dashed to and fro, storming like a madman. Four horses were shot under him, and he mounted a fifth. Washington seconded his chief with equal courage; he too no doubt using strong language, for he did not measure words when the fit was on him. He escaped as by miracle. Two horses were killed under him, and four bullets tore his clothes. The conduct of the British officers was above praise. Nothing could surpass their undaunted self-devotion; and in their vain attempts to lead on the men, the havoc among them was frightful. Sir Peter Halket was shot dead. His son, a lieutenant in his regiment, stooping to raise the body of his father, was shot dead in turn. Young Shirley, Braddock's secretary, was pierced through the brain. Orme and Morris, his aides-de-camp, Sinclair, the quartermaster-general, Gates and Gage, both afterwards conspicuous on opposite sides in the War of the Revolution, and Gladwin, who, eight years later, defended Detroit against Pontiac, were all wounded. Of eighty-six officers, sixty-three were killed or disabled; [226] while out of thirteen hundred and seventy-three non-commissioned officers 220 V1 and privates, only four hundred and fifty-nine came off unharmed. [227] [226] A List of the Officers who were present, and of those killed and wounded, in the Action on the Banks of the Monongahela, 9 July, 1755 (Public Record Office, America and West Indies, LXXXII.). [227] Statement of the engineer, Mackellar. By another account, out of a total, officers and men, of 1,460, the number of all ranks who escaped was 583. Braddock's force, originally 1,200, was increased, a few days before the battle, by detachments from Dunbar. Braddock saw that all was lost. To save the wreck of his force from annihilation, he at last commanded a retreat; and as he and such of his officers as were left strove to withdraw the half-frenzied crew in some semblance of order, a bullet struck him down. The gallant bulldog fell from his horse, shot through the arm into the lungs. It is said, though on evidence of no weight, that the bullet came from one of his own men. Be this as it may, there he lay among the bushes, bleeding, gasping, unable even to curse. He demanded to be left where he was. Captain Stewart and another provincial bore him between them to the rear. It was about this time that the mob of soldiers, having been three hours under fire, and having spent their ammunition, broke away in a blind frenzy, rushed back towards the ford, "and when," says Washington, "we endeavored to rally them, it was with as much success as if we had attempted to stop the wild bears of the mountains." They dashed across, helter-skelter, plunging through the water to the farther bank, leaving wounded comrades, cannon, baggage, the military chest, and the General's papers, a prey to the Indians. About fifty of these followed to the edge of the river. Dumas and Ligneris, who had 221 V1 now only about twenty Frenchmen with them, made no attempt to pursue, and went back to the fort, because, says Contrec?ur, so many of the Canadians had "retired at the first fire." The field, abandoned to the savages, was a pandemonium of pillage and murder. [228] [228] "Nous pr?mes le parti de nous retirer en vue de rallier notre petite armée." Dumas au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1756. On the defeat of Braddock, besides authorities already cited,—Shirley to Robinson, 5 Nov. 1755, accompanying the plans of the battle reproduced in this volume (Public Record Office, America and West Indies, LXXXII.). The plans were drawn at Shirley's request by Patrick Mackellar, chief engineer of the expedition, who was with Gage in the advance column when the fight began. They were examined and fully approved by the chief surviving officers, and they closely correspond with another plan made by the aide-de-camp Orme,—which, however, shows only the beginning of the affair. Report of the Court of Inquiry into the Behavior of the Troops at the Monongahela. Letters of Dinwiddie. Letters of Gage. Burd to Morris, 25 July, 1755. Sinclair to Robinson, 3 Sept. Rutherford to———, 12 July. Writings of Washington, II. 68-93. Review of Military Operations in North America. Entick, I. 145. Gentleman's Magazine (1755), 378, 426. Letter to a Friend on the Ohio Defeat (Boston, 1755). Contrec?ur à Vaudreuil, 14 Juillet, 1755. Estat de l'Artillerie, etc., qui se sont trouvés sur le Champ de Bataille. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Ao?t, 1755. Bigot au Ministre, 27 Ao?t. Relation du Combat du 9 Juillet. Relation depuis le Départ des Trouppes de Québec jusqu'au 30 du Mois de Septembre. Lotbinière à d'Argenson, 24 Oct. Relation officielle imprimée au Louvre. Relation de Godefroy (Shea). Extraits du Registre du Fort Duquesne (Ibid.). Relation de diverses Mouvements (Ibid.). Pouchot, I. 37. James Smith, the young prisoner at Fort Duquesne, had passed a day of suspense, waiting the result. "In the afternoon I again observed a great noise and commotion in the fort, and, though at that time I could not understand French, I found it was the voice of joy and triumph, and feared that they had received what I called bad news. I had observed some of the old-country soldiers speak Dutch; as I spoke Dutch, I went to one of them and asked him what was 222 V1 the news. He told me that a runner had just arrived who said that Braddock would certainly be defeated; that the Indians and French had surrounded him, and were concealed behind trees and in gullies, and kept a constant fire upon the English; and that they saw the English falling in heaps; and if they did not take the river, which was the only gap, and make their escape, there would not be one man left alive before sundown. Some time after this, I heard a number of scalp-halloos, and saw a company of Indians and French coming in. I observed they had a great number of bloody scalps, grenadiers' caps, British canteens, bayonets, etc., with them. They brought the news that Braddock was defeated. After that another company came in, which appeared to be about one hundred, and chiefly Indians; and it seemed to me that almost every one of this company was carrying scalps. After this came another company with a number of wagon-horses, and also a great many scalps. Those that were coming in and those that had arrived kept a constant firing of small arms, and also the great guns in the fort, which were accompanied with the most hideous shouts and yells from all quarters, so that it appeared to me as though the infernal regions had broke loose. "About sundown I beheld a small party coming in with about a dozen prisoners, stripped naked, with their hands tied behind their backs and their faces and part of their bodies blacked; these prisoners they burned to death on the bank of 223 V1 Alleghany River, opposite the fort. I stood on the fort wall until I beheld them begin to burn one of these men; they had him tied to a stake, and kept touching him with firebrands, red-hot irons, etc., and he screaming in a most doleful manner, the Indians in the meantime yelling like infernal spirits. As this scene appeared too shocking for me to behold, I retired to my lodging, both sore and sorry. When I came into my lodgings I saw Russel's Seven Sermons, which they had brought from the field of battle, which a Frenchman made a present of to me." The loss of the French was slight, but fell chiefly on the officers, three of whom were killed, and four wounded. Of the regular soldiers, all but four escaped untouched. The Canadians suffered still less, in proportion to their numbers, only five of them being hurt. The Indians, who won the victory, bore the principal loss. Of those from Canada, twenty-seven were killed and wounded; while the casualties among the Western tribes are not reported. [229] All of these last went off the next morning with their plunder and scalps, leaving Contrec?ur in great anxiety lest the remnant of Braddock's troops, reinforced by the division under Dunbar, should attack him again. His doubts would have vanished had he known the condition of his defeated enemy. [229] Liste des Officiers, Soldats, Miliciens, et Sauvages de Canada qui ont été tués et blessés le 9 Juillet, 1755. In the pain and languor of a mortal wound, Braddock showed unflinching resolution. His bearers 224 V1 stopped with him at a favorable spot beyond the Monongahela; and here he hoped to maintain his position till the arrival of Dunbar. By the efforts of the officers about a hundred men were collected around him; but to keep them there was impossible. Within an hour they abandoned him, and fled like the rest. Gage, however, succeeded in rallying about eighty beyond the other fording-place; and Washington, on an order from Braddock, spurred his jaded horse towards the camp of Dunbar to demand wagons, provisions, and hospital stores. Fright overcame fatigue. The fugitives toiled on all night, pursued by spectres of horror and despair; hearing still the war-whoops and the shrieks; possessed with the one thought of escape from the wilderness of death. In the morning some order was restored. Braddock was placed on a horse; then, the pain being insufferable, he was carried on a litter, Captain Orme having bribed the carriers by the promise of a guinea and a bottle of rum apiece. Early in the succeeding night, such as had not fainted on the way reached the deserted farm of Gist. Here they met wagons and provisions, with a detachment of soldiers sent by Dunbar, whose camp was six miles farther on; and Braddock ordered them to go to the relief of the stragglers left behind. At noon of that day a number of wagoners and packhorse-drivers had come to Dunbar's camp with wild tidings of rout and ruin. More fugitives followed; and soon after a wounded officer was brought in upon a sheet. The drums beat to arms. 225 V1 The camp was in commotion; and many soldiers and teamsters took to flight, in spite of the sentinels, who tried in vain to stop them. [230] There was a still more disgraceful scene on the next day, after Braddock, with the wreck of his force, had arrived. Orders were given to destroy such of the wagons, stores, and ammunition as could not be carried back at once to Fort Cumberland. Whether Dunbar or the dying General gave these orders is not clear; but it is certain that they were executed with shameful alacrity. More than a hundred wagons were burned; cannon, coehorns, and shells were burst or buried; barrels of gunpowder were staved, and the contents thrown into a brook; provisions were scattered through the woods and swamps. Then the whole command began its retreat over the mountains to Fort Cumberland, sixty miles distant. This proceeding, for which, in view of the condition of Braddock, Dunbar must be held answerable, excited the utmost indignation among the colonists. If he could not advance, they thought, he might at least have fortified himself and held his ground till the provinces could send him help; thus covering the frontier, and holding French war-parties in check. [230] Depositions of Matthew Laird, Michael Hoover, and Jacob Hoover, Wagoners, in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 482. Braddock's last moment was near. Orme, who, though himself severely wounded, was with him till his death, told Franklin that he was totally silent all the first day, and at night said only, "Who would have thought it?" that all the 226 V1 next day he was again silent, till at last he muttered, "We shall better know how to deal with them another time," and died a few minutes after. He had nevertheless found breath to give orders at Gist's for the succor of the men who had dropped on the road. It is said, too, that in his last hours "he could not bear the sight of a red coat," but murmured praises of "the blues," or Virginians, and said that he hoped he should live to reward them. [231] He died at about eight o'clock in the evening of Sunday, the thirteenth. Dunbar had begun his retreat that morning, and was then encamped near the Great Meadows. On Monday the dead commander was buried in the road; and men, horses, and wagons passed over his grave, effacing every sign of it, lest the Indians should find and mutilate the body. [231] Bolling to his Son, 13 Aug. 1755. Bolling was a Virginian gentleman whose son was at school in England. Colonel James Innes, commanding at Fort Cumberland, where a crowd of invalids with soldiers' wives and other women had been left when the expedition marched, heard of the defeat, only two days after it happened, from a wagoner who had fled from the field on horseback. He at once sent a note of six lines to Lord Fairfax: "I have this moment received the most melancholy news of the defeat of our troops, the General killed, and numbers of our officers; our whole artillery taken. In short, the account I have received is so very bad, that as, please God, I intend to make a stand here, 'tis highly necessary to raise 227 V1 the militia everywhere to defend the frontiers." A boy whom he sent out on horseback met more fugitives, and came back on the fourteenth with reports as vague and disheartening as the first. Innes sent them to Dinwiddie. [232] Some days after, Dunbar and his train arrived in miserable disorder, and Fort Cumberland was turned into a hospital for the shattered fragments of a routed and ruined army. [232] Innes to Dinwiddie, 14 July, 1755. On the sixteenth a letter was brought in haste to one Buchanan at Carlisle, on the Pennsylvanian frontier:— Sir,—I thought it proper to let you know that I was in the battle where we were defeated. And we had about eleven hundred and fifty private men, besides officers and others. And we were attacked the ninth day about twelve o'clock, and held till about three in the afternoon, and then we were forced to retreat, when I suppose we might bring off about three hundred whole men, besides a vast many wounded. Most of our officers were either wounded or killed; General Braddock is wounded, but I hope not mortal; and Sir John Sinclair and many others, but I hope not mortal. All the train is cut off in a manner. Sir Peter Halket and his son, Captain Polson, Captain Gethan, Captain Rose, Captain Tatten killed, and many others. Captain Ord of the train is wounded, but I hope not mortal. We lost all our artillery entirely, and everything else. To Mr. John Smith and Buchannon, and give it to the next post, and let him show this to Mr. George Gibson in Lancaster, and Mr. Bingham, at the sign of the Ship, and you'll oblige, Yours to command, John Campbell, Messenger.[233] [233] Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 481. 228 V1 The evil tidings quickly reached Philadelphia, where such confidence had prevailed that certain over-zealous persons had begun to collect money for fireworks to celebrate the victory. Two of these, brother physicians named Bond, came to Franklin and asked him to subscribe; but the sage looked doubtful. "Why, the devil!" said one of them, "you surely don't suppose the fort will not be taken?" He reminded them that war is always uncertain; and the subscription was deferred. [234] The Governor laid the news of the disaster before his Council, telling them at the same time that his opponents in the Assembly would not believe it, and had insulted him in the street for giving it currency. [235] [234] Autobiography of Franklin. [235] Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 480. Dinwiddie remained tranquil at Williamsburg, sure that all would go well. The brief note of Innes, forwarded by Lord Fairfax, first disturbed his dream of triumph; but on second thought he took comfort. "I am willing to think that account was from a deserter who, in a great panic, represented what his fears suggested. I wait with impatience for another express from Fort Cumberland, which I expect will greatly contradict the former." The news got abroad, and the slaves showed signs of excitement. "The villany of the negroes on any emergency is what I always feared," continues the Governor. "An example of one or two at first may prevent these creatures entering into combinations and wicked 229 V1 designs." [236] And he wrote to Lord Halifax: "The negro slaves have been very audacious on the news of defeat on the Ohio. These poor creatures imagine the French will give them their freedom. We have too many here; but I hope we shall be able to keep them in proper subjection." Suspense grew intolerable. "It's monstrous they should be so tardy and dilatory in sending down any farther account." He sent Major Colin Campbell for news; when, a day or two later, a courier brought him two letters, one from Orme, and the other from Washington, both written at Fort Cumberland on the eighteenth. The letter of Orme began thus: "My dear Governor, I am so extremely ill in bed with the wound I have received that I am under the necessity of employing my friend Captain Dobson as my scribe." Then he told the wretched story of defeat and humiliation. "The officers were absolutely sacrificed by their unparalleled good behavior; advancing before their men sometimes in bodies, and sometimes separately, hoping by such an example to engage the soldiers to follow them; but to no purpose. Poor Shirley was shot through the head, Captain Morris very much wounded. Mr. Washington had two horses shot under him, and his clothes shot through in several places; behaving the whole time with the greatest courage and resolution." [236] Dinwiddie to Colonel Charles Carter, 18 July, 1755. Washington wrote more briefly, saying that, as Orme was giving a full account of the affair, it 230 V1 was needless for him to repeat it. Like many others in the fight, he greatly underrated the force of the enemy, which he placed at three hundred, or about a third of the actual number,—a natural error, as most of the assailants were invisible. "Our poor Virginians behaved like men, and died like soldiers; for I believe that out of three companies that were there that day, scarce thirty were left alive. Captain Peronney and all his officers down to a corporal were killed. Captain Polson shared almost as hard a fate, for only one of his escaped. In short, the dastardly behavior of the English soldiers exposed all those who were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death. It is imagined (I believe with great justice, too) that two thirds of both killed and wounded received their shots from our own cowardly dogs of soldiers, who gathered themselves into a body, contrary to orders, ten and twelve deep, would then level, fire, and shoot down the men before them." [237] [237] These extracts are taken from the two letters preserved in the Public Record Office, America and West Indies, LXXIV. LXXXII. To Orme, Dinwiddie replied: "I read your letter with tears in my eyes; but it gave me much pleasure to see your name at the bottom, and more so when I observed by the postscript that your wound is not dangerous. But pray, dear sir, is it not possible by a second attempt to retrieve the great loss we have sustained? I presume the General's chariot is at the fort. In it you may come here, and my house is heartily at your command. Pray 231 V1 take care of your valuable health; keep your spirits up, and I doubt not of your recovery. My wife and girls join me in most sincere respects and joy at your being so well, and I always am, with great truth, dear friend, your affectionate humble servant." To Washington he is less effusive, though he had known him much longer. He begins, it is true, "Dear Washington," and congratulates him on his escape; but soon grows formal, and asks: "Pray, sir, with the number of them remaining, is there no possibility of doing something on the other side of the mountains before the winter months? Surely you must mistake. Colonel Dunbar will not march to winter-quarters in the middle of summer, and leave the frontiers exposed to the invasions of the enemy! No; he is a better officer, and I have a different opinion of him. I sincerely wish you health and happiness, and am, with great respect, sir, your obedient, humble servant." Washington's letter had contained the astonishing announcement that Dunbar meant to abandon the frontier and march to Philadelphia. Dinwiddie, much disturbed, at once wrote to that officer, though without betraying any knowledge of his intention. "Sir, the melancholy account of the defeat of our forces gave me a sensible and real concern"—on which he enlarges for a while; then suddenly changes style: "Dear Colonel, is there no method left to retrieve the dishonor done to the British arms? As you now command all 232 V1 the forces that remain, are you not able, after a proper refreshment of your men, to make a second attempt? You have four months now to come of the best weather of the year for such an expedition. What a fine field for honor will Colonel Dunbar have to confirm and establish his character as a brave officer." Then, after suggesting plans of operation, and entering into much detail, the fervid Governor concludes: "It gives me great pleasure that under our great loss and misfortunes the command devolves on an officer of so great military judgment and established character. With my sincere respect and hearty wishes for success to all your proceedings, I am, worthy sir, your most obedient, humble servant." Exhortation and flattery were lost on Dunbar. Dinwiddie received from him in reply a short, dry note, dated on the first of August, and acquainting him that he should march for Philadelphia on the second. This, in fact, he did, leaving the fort to be defended by invalids and a few Virginians. "I acknowledge," says Dinwiddie, "I was not brought up to arms; but I think common sense would have prevailed not to leave the frontiers exposed after having opened a road over the mountains to the Ohio, by which the enemy can the more easily invade us…. Your great colonel," he writes to Orme, "is gone to a peaceful colony, and left our frontiers open…. The whole conduct of Colonel Dunbar appears to me monstrous…. To march off all the regulars, and leave the fort and frontiers to be defended by four hundred sick and 233 V1 wounded, and the poor remains of our provincial forces, appears to me absurd." [238] [238] Dinwiddie's view of Dunbar's conduct is fully justified by the letters of Shirley, Governor Morris, and Dunbar himself. He found some comfort from the burgesses, who gave him forty thousand pounds, and would, he thinks, have given a hundred thousand if another attempt against Fort Duquesne had been set afoot. Shirley, too, whom the death of Braddock had made commander-in-chief, approved the Governor's plan of renewing offensive operations, and instructed Dunbar to that effect; ordering him, however, should they prove impracticable, to march for Albany in aid of the Niagara expedition. [239] The order found him safe in Philadelphia. Here he lingered for a while; then marched to join the northern army, moving at a pace which made it certain that he could not arrive in time to be of the least use. [239] Orders for Colonel Thomas Dunbar, 12 Aug. 1755. These supersede a previous order of August 6, by which Shirley had directed Dunbar to march northward at once. Thus the frontier was left unguarded; and soon, as Dinwiddie had foreseen, there burst upon it a storm of blood and fire. CHAPTER VIII. 1755-1763. REMOVAL OF THE ACADIANS. State of Acadia ? Threatened Invasion ? Peril of the English ? Their Plans ? French Forts to be attacked ? Beauséjour and its Occupants ? French Treatment of the Acadians ? John Winslow ? Siege and Capture of Beauséjour ? Attitude of Acadians ? Influence of their Priests ? They Refuse the Oath of Allegiance ? Their Condition and Character ? Pretended Neutrals ? Moderation of English Authorities ? The Acadians persist in their Refusal ? Enemies or Subjects? ? Choice of the Acadians ? The Consequence ? Their Removal determined ? Winslow at Grand Pré ? Conference with Murray ? Summons to the Inhabitants ? Their Seizure ? Their Embarkation ? Their Fate ? Their Treatment in Canada ? Misapprehension concerning them. By the plan which the Duke of Cumberland had ordained and Braddock had announced in the Council at Alexandria, four blows were to be struck at once to force back the French boundaries, lop off the dependencies of Canada, and reduce her from a vast territory to a petty province. The first stroke had failed, and had shattered the hand of the striker; it remains to see what fortune awaited the others. It was long since a project of purging Acadia of French influence had germinated in the fertile mind of Shirley. We have seen in a former chapter the condition of that afflicted province. Several thousands of its inhabitants, wrought upon 235 V1 by intriguing agents of the French Government; taught by their priests that fidelity to King Louis was inseparable from fidelity to God, and that to swear allegiance to the British Crown was eternal perdition; threatened with plunder and death at the hands of the savages whom the ferocious missionary, Le Loutre, held over them in terror,—had abandoned, sometimes willingly, but oftener under constraint, the fields which they and their fathers had tilled, and crossing the boundary line of the Missaguash, had placed themselves under the French flag planted on the hill of Beauséjour. [240] Here, or in the neighborhood, many of them had remained, wretched and half starved; while others had been transported to Cape Breton, Isle St. Jean, or the coasts of the Gulf,—not so far, however, that they could not on occasion be used to aid in an invasion of British Acadia. [241] Those of their countrymen who still lived under the British flag were chiefly the inhabitants of the district of Mines and of the valley of the River Annapolis, who, with other less important settlements, numbered a little more than nine thousand souls. We have shown already, by the evidence of the French themselves, that neither they nor their 236 V1 emigrant countrymen had been oppressed or molested in matters temporal or spiritual, but that the English authorities, recognizing their value as an industrious population, had labored to reconcile them to a change of rulers which on the whole was to their advantage. It has been shown also how, with a heartless perfidy and a reckless disregard of their welfare and safety, the French Government and its agents labored to keep them hostile to the Crown of which it had acknowledged them to be subjects. The result was, that though they did not, like their emigrant countrymen, abandon their homes, they remained in a state of restless disaffection, refused to supply English garrisons with provisions, except at most exorbitant rates, smuggled their produce to the French across the line, gave them aid and intelligence, and sometimes, disguised as Indians, robbed and murdered English settlers. By the new-fangled construction of the treaty of Utrecht which the French boundary commissioners had devised, [242] more than half the Acadian peninsula, including nearly all the cultivated land and nearly all the population of French descent, was claimed as belonging to France, though England had held possession of it more than forty years. Hence, according to the political ethics adopted at the time by both nations, it would be lawful for France to reclaim it by force. England, on her part, it will be remembered, claimed vast tracts beyond the isthmus; and, on the same pretext, held that 237 V1 she might rightfully seize them and capture Beauséjour, with the other French garrisons that guarded them. [240] See ante, Chapter IV. [241] Rameau (La France aux Colonies, I. 63), estimates the total emigration from 1748 to 1755 at 8,600 souls,—which number seems much too large. This writer, though vehemently anti-English, gives the following passage from a letter of a high French official: "que les Acadiens émigrés et en grande misère comptaient se retirer à Québec et demander des terres, mais il conviendrait mieux qu'ils restent où ils sont, afin d'avoir le voisinage de l'Acadie bien peuplé et défriché, pour approvisionner l'Isle Royale [Cape Breton] et tomber en cas de guerre sur l'Acadie." Rameau, I. 133. [242] Supra, p. 123. On the part of France, an invasion of the Acadian peninsula seemed more than likely. Honor demanded of her that, having incited the Acadians to disaffection, and so brought on them the indignation of the English authorities, she should intervene to save them from the consequences. Moreover the loss of the Acadian peninsula had been gall and wormwood to her; and in losing it she had lost great material advantages. Its possession was necessary to connect Canada with the Island of Cape Breton and the fortress of Louisbourg. Its fertile fields and agricultural people would furnish subsistence to the troops and garrisons in the French maritime provinces, now dependent on supplies illicitly brought by New England traders, and liable to be cut off in time of war when they were needed most. The harbors of Acadia, too, would be invaluable as naval stations from which to curb and threaten the northern English colonies. Hence the intrigues so assiduously practised to keep the Acadians French at heart, and ready to throw off British rule at any favorable moment. British officers believed that should a French squadron with a sufficient force of troops on board appear in the Bay of Fundy, the whole population on the Basin of Mines and along the Annapolis would rise in arms, and that the emigrants beyond the isthmus, armed and trained by French officers, 238 V1 would come to their aid. This emigrant population, famishing in exile, looked back with regret to the farms they had abandoned; and, prevented as they were by Le Loutre and his colleagues from making their peace with the English, they would, if confident of success, have gladly joined an invading force to regain their homes by reconquering Acadia for Louis XV. In other parts of the continent it was the interest of France to put off hostilities; if Acadia alone had been in question, it would have been her interest to precipitate them. Her chances of success were good. The French could at any time send troops from Louisbourg or Quebec to join those maintained upon the isthmus; and they had on their side of the lines a force of militia and Indians amounting to about two thousand, while the Acadians within the peninsula had about an equal number of fighting men who, while calling themselves neutrals, might be counted on to join the invaders. The English were in no condition to withstand such an attack. Their regular troops were scattered far and wide through the province, and were nowhere more than equal to the local requirement; while of militia, except those of Halifax, they had few or none whom they dared to trust. Their fort at Annapolis was weak and dilapidated, and their other posts were mere stockades. The strongest place in Acadia was the French fort of Beauséjour, in which the English saw a continual menace. 239 V1 Their apprehensions were well grounded. Duquesne, governor of Canada, wrote to Le Loutre, who virtually shared the control of Beauséjour with Vergor, its commandant: "I invite both yourself and M. Vergor to devise a plausible pretext for attacking them [the English] vigorously." [243] Three weeks after this letter was written, Lawrence, governor of Nova Scotia, wrote to Shirley from Halifax: "Being well informed that the French have designs of encroaching still farther upon His Majesty's rights in this province, and that they propose, the moment they have repaired the fortifications of Louisbourg, to attack our fort at Chignecto [Fort Lawrence], I think it high time to make some effort to drive them from the north side of the Bay of Fundy." [244] This letter was brought to Boston by Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, who was charged by Lawrence to propose to Shirley the raising of two thousand men in New England for the attack of Beauséjour and its dependent forts. Almost at the moment when Lawrence was writing these proposals to Shirley, Shirley was writing with the same object to Lawrence, enclosing a letter from Sir Thomas Robinson, concerning which he said: "I construe the contents to be orders to us to act in concert for taking any advantages to drive the French of Canada out of Nova Scotia. If that is your sense of them, and your honor will be pleased to let 240 V1 me know whether you want any and what assistance to enable you to execute the orders, I will endeavor to send you such assistance from this province as you shall want." [245] [243] Duquesne à Le Loutre, 15 Oct. 1754; extract in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 239. [244] Lawrence to Shirley, 5 Nov. 1754. Instructions of Lawrence to Monckton, 7 Nov. 1754. [245] Shirley to Lawrence, 7 Nov. 1754. The letter of Sir Thomas Robinson, of which a duplicate had already been sent to Lawrence, was written in answer to one of Shirley informing the Minister that the Indians of Nova Scotia, prompted by the French, were about to make an attack on all the English settlements east of the Kennebec; whereupon Robinson wrote: "You will without doubt have given immediate intelligence thereof to Colonel Lawrence, and will have concerted the properest measures with him for taking all possible advantage in Nova Scotia itself from the absence of those Indians, in case Mr. Lawrence shall have force enough to attack the forts erected by the French in those parts, without exposing the English settlements; and I am particularly to acquaint you that if you have not already entered into such a concert with Colonel Lawrence, it is His Majesty's pleasure that you should immediately proceed thereupon." [246] [246] Robinson to Shirley, 5 July, 1754. The Indian raid did not take place; but not the less did Shirley and Lawrence find in the Minister's letter their authorization for the attack of Beauséjour. Shirley wrote to Robinson that the expulsion of the French from the forts on the isthmus was a necessary measure of self-defence; that they meant to seize the whole country as far as Mines 241 V1 Basin, and probably as far as Annapolis, to supply their Acadian rebels with land; that of these they had, without reckoning Indians, fourteen hundred fighting men on or near the isthmus, and two hundred and fifty more on the St. John, with whom, aided by the garrison of Beauséjour, they could easily take Fort Lawrence; that should they succeed in this, the whole Acadian population would rise in arms, and the King would lose Nova Scotia. We should anticipate them, concludes Shirley, and strike the first blow. [247] [247] Shirley to Robinson, 8 Dec. 1754. Ibid., 24 Jan. 1755. The Record Office contains numerous other letters of Shirley on the subject. "I am obliged to your Honor for communicating to me the French Mémoire, which, with other reasons, puts it out of doubt that the French are determined to begin an offensive war on the peninsula as soon as ever they shall think themselves strengthened enough to venture up it, and that they have thoughts of attempting it in the ensuing spring. I enclose your Honor extracts from two letters from Annapolis Royal, which show that the French inhabitants are in expectation of its being begun in the spring." Shirley to Lawrence, 6 Jan. 1755. He opened his plans to his Assembly in secret session, and found them of one mind with himself. Preparation was nearly complete, and the men raised for the expedition, before the Council at Alexandria, recognized it as a part of a plan of the summer campaign. The French fort of Beauséjour, mounted on its hill between the marshes of Missaguash and Tantemar, was a regular work, pentagonal in form, with solid earthern ramparts, bomb-proofs, and an armament of twenty-four cannon and one mortar. The commandant, Duchambon de Vergor, a captain in the colony regulars, was a dull man of no education, of stuttering speech, unpleasing countenance, 242 V1 and doubtful character. He owed his place to the notorious Intendant, Bigot, who, it is said, was in his debt for disreputable service in an affair of gallantry, and who had ample means of enabling his friends to enrich themselves by defrauding the King. Beauséjour was one of those plague-spots of official corruption which dotted the whole surface of New France. Bigot, sailing for Europe in the summer of 1754, wrote thus to his confederate: "Profit by your place, my dear Vergor; clip and cut—you are free to do what you please—so that you can come soon to join me in France and buy an estate near me." [248] Vergor did not neglect his opportunities. Supplies in great quantities were sent from Quebec for the garrison and the emigrant Acadians. These last got but a small part of them. Vergor and his confederates sent the rest back to Quebec, or else to Louisbourg, and sold them for their own profit to the King's agents there, who were also in collusion with him. [248] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. This letter is also mentioned in another contemporary document, Mémoire sur les Fraudes commises dans la Colonie. Vergor, however, did not reign alone. Le Loutre, by force of energy, capacity, and passionate vehemence, held him in some awe, and divided his authority. The priest could count on the support of Duquesne, who had found, says a contemporary, that "he promised more than he could perform, and that he was a knave," but who nevertheless felt compelled to rely upon him for keeping the 243 V1 Acadians on the side of France. There was another person in the fort worthy of notice. This was Thomas Pichon, commissary of stores, a man of education and intelligence, born in France of an English mother. He was now acting the part of a traitor, carrying on a secret correspondence with the commandant of Fort Lawrence, and acquainting him with all that passed at Beauséjour. It was partly from this source that the hostile designs of the French became known to the authorities of Halifax, and more especially the proceedings of "Moses," by which name Pichon always designated Le Loutre, because he pretended to have led the Acadians from the land of bondage. [249] [249] Pichon, called also Tyrrell from the name of his mother, was author of Genuine Letters and Memoirs relating to Cape Breton,—a book of some value. His papers are preserved at Halifax, and some of them are printed in the Public Documents of Nova Scotia. These exiles, who cannot be called self-exiled, in view of the outrageous means used to force most of them from their homes, were in a deplorable condition. They lived in constant dread of Le Loutre, backed by Vergor and his soldiers. The savage missionary, bad as he was, had in him an ingredient of honest fanaticism, both national and religious; though hatred of the English held a large share in it. He would gladly, if he could, have forced the Acadians into a permanent settlement on the French side of the line, not out of love for them, but in the interest of the cause with which he had identified his own ambition. His efforts had failed. There was not land enough for their subsistence and that of the older settlers; 244 V1 and the suffering emigrants pined more and more for their deserted farms. Thither he was resolved that they should not return. "If you go," he told them, "you will have neither priests nor sacraments, but will die like miserable wretches." [250] The assertion was false. Priests and sacraments had never been denied them. It is true that Daudin, priest of Pisiquid, had lately been sent to Halifax for using insolent language to the commandant, threatening him with an insurrection of the inhabitants, and exciting them to sedition; but on his promise to change conduct, he was sent back to his parishioners. [251] Vergor sustained Le Loutre, and threatened to put in irons any of the exiles who talked of going back to the English. Some of them bethought themselves of an appeal to Duquesne, and drew up a petition asking leave to return home. Le Loutre told the signers that if they did not efface their marks from the paper they should have neither sacraments in this life nor heaven in the next. He nevertheless allowed two of them to go to Quebec as deputies, writing at the same time to the Governor, that his mind might be duly prepared. Duquesne replied: "I think that the two rascals of deputies whom you sent me will not soon recover from the fright I gave them, notwithstanding the emollient I administered after my reprimand; and since I told them that they 245 V1 were indebted to you for not being allowed to rot in a dungeon, they have promised me to comply with your wishes." [252] [250] Pichon to Captain Scott, 14 Oct. 1754, in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 229. [251] Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 223, 224, 226, 227, 238. [252] Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 239. An entire heartlessness marked the dealings of the French authorities with the Acadians. They were treated as mere tools of policy, to be used, broken, and flung away. Yet, in using them, the sole condition of their efficiency was neglected. The French Government, cheated of enormous sums by its own ravenous agents, grudged the cost of sending a single regiment to the Acadian border. Thus unsupported, the Acadians remained in fear and vacillation, aiding the French but feebly, though a ceaseless annoyance and menace to the English. This was the state of affairs at Beauséjour while Shirley and Lawrence were planning its destruction. Lawrence had empowered his agent, Monckton, to draw without limit on two Boston merchants, Apthorp and Hancock. Shirley, as commander-in-chief of the province of Massachusetts, commissioned John Winslow to raise two thousand volunteers. Winslow was sprung from the early governors of Plymouth colony; but, though well-born, he was ill-educated, which did not prevent him from being both popular and influential. He had strong military inclinations, had led a company of his own raising in the luckless attack on Carthagena, had commanded the force sent in the preceding summer to occupy the Kennebec, and on various other occasions had left his Marshfield 246 V1 farm to serve his country. The men enlisted readily at his call, and were formed into a regiment, of which Shirley made himself the nominal colonel. It had two battalions, of which Winslow, as lieutenant-colonel, commanded the first, and George Scott the second, both under the orders of Monckton. Country villages far and near, from the western borders of the Connecticut to uttermost Cape Cod, lent soldiers to the new regiment. The muster-rolls preserve their names, vocations, birthplaces, and abode. Obadiah, Nehemiah, Jedediah, Jonathan, Ebenezer, Joshua, and the like Old Testament names abound upon the list. Some are set down as "farmers," "yeomen," or "husbandmen;" others as "shopkeepers," others as "fishermen," and many as "laborers;" while a great number were handicraftsmen of various trades, from blacksmiths to wig-makers. They mustered at Boston early in April, where clothing, haversacks, and blankets were served out to them at the charge of the King; and the crooked streets of the New England capital were filled with staring young rustics. On the next Saturday the following mandate went forth: "The men will behave very orderly on the Sabbath Day, and either stay on board their transports, or else go to church, and not stroll up and down the streets." The transports, consisting of about forty sloops and schooners, lay at Long Wharf; and here on Monday a grand review took place,—to the gratification, no doubt, of a populace whose amusements were few. All was ready except the 247 V1 muskets, which were expected from England, but did not come. Hence the delay of a month, threatening to ruin the enterprise. When Shirley returned from Alexandria he found, to his disgust, that the transports still lay at the wharf where he had left them on his departure. [253] The muskets arrived at length, and the fleet sailed on the twenty-second of May. Three small frigates, the "Success," the "Mermaid," and the "Siren," commanded by the ex-privateersman, Captain Rous, acted as convoy; and on the twenty-sixth the whole force safely reached Annapolis. Thence after some delay they sailed up the Bay of Fundy, and at sunset on the first of June anchored within five miles of the hill of Beauséjour. [253] Shirley to Robinson, 20 June, 1755. At two o'clock on the next morning a party of Acadians from Chipody roused Vergor with the news. In great alarm, he sent a messenger to Louisbourg to beg for help, and ordered all the fighting men of the neighborhood to repair to the fort. They counted in all between twelve and fifteen hundred; [254] but they had no appetite for war. The force of the invaders daunted them; and the hundred and sixty regulars who formed the garrison of Beauséjour were too few to revive their confidence. Those of them who had crossed from the English side dreaded what might ensue should they be caught in arms; and, to prepare an excuse beforehand, they begged Vergor to threaten them 248 V1 with punishment if they disobeyed his order. He willingly complied, promised to have them killed if they did not fight, and assured them at the same time that the English could never take the fort. [255] Three hundred of them thereupon joined the garrison, and the rest, hiding their families in the woods, prepared to wage guerilla war against the invaders. [254] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. An English document, State of the English and French Forts in Nova Scotia, says 1,200 to 1,400. [255] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Monckton, with all his force, landed unopposed, and encamped at night on the fields around Fort Lawrence, whence he could contemplate Fort Beauséjour at his ease. The regulars of the English garrison joined the New England men; and then, on the morning of the fourth, they marched to the attack. Their course lay along the south bank of the Missaguash to where it was crossed by a bridge called Pont-à-Buot. This bridge had been destroyed; and on the farther bank there was a large blockhouse and a breastwork of timber defended by four hundred regulars, Acadians, and Indians. They lay silent and unseen till the head of the column reached the opposite bank; then raised a yell and opened fire, causing some loss. Three field-pieces were brought up, the defenders were driven out, and a bridge was laid under a spattering fusillade from behind bushes, which continued till the English had crossed the stream. Without further opposition, they marched along the road to Beauséjour, and, turning to the right, encamped among the woody hills half a league from the fort. That night there was a grand illumination, for 249 V1 Vergor set fire to the church and all the houses outside the ramparts. [256] [256] Winslow, Journal and Letter Book. Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Letters from officers on the spot in Boston Evening Post and Boston News Letter. Journal of Surgeon John Thomas. The English spent some days in preparing their camp and reconnoitring the ground. Then Scott, with five hundred provincials, seized upon a ridge within easy range of the works. An officer named Vannes came out to oppose him with a hundred and eighty men, boasting that he would do great things; but on seeing the enemy, quietly returned, to become the laughing-stock of the garrison. The fort fired furiously, but with little effect. In the night of the thirteenth, Winslow, with a part of his own battalion, relieved Scott, and planted in the trenches two small mortars, brought to the camp on carts. On the next day they opened fire. One of them was disabled by the French cannon, but Captain Hazen brought up two more, of larger size, on ox-wagons; and, in spite of heavy rain, the fire was brisk on both sides. Captain Rous, on board his ship in the harbor, watched the bombardment with great interest. Having occasion to write to Winslow, he closed his letter in a facetious strain. "I often hear of your success in plunder, particularly a coach. [257] I hope you have some fine horses for it, at least four, to draw it, that it may be said a New England colonel [rode in] his coach and four in Nova Scotia. If 250 V1 you have any good saddle-horses in your stable, I should be obliged to you for one to ride round the ship's deck on for exercise, for I am not likely to have any other." [257] "11 June. Capt. Adams went with a Company of Raingers, and Returned at 11 Clock with a Coach and Sum other Plunder." Journal of John Thomas. Within the fort there was little promise of a strong defence. Le Loutre, it is true, was to be seen in his shirt-sleeves, with a pipe in his mouth, directing the Acadians in their work of strengthening the fortifications. [258] They, on their part, thought more of escape than of fighting. Some of them vainly begged to be allowed to go home; others went off without leave,—which was not difficult, as only one side of the place was attacked. Even among the officers there were some in whom interest was stronger than honor, and who would rather rob the King than die for him. The general discouragement was redoubled when, on the fourteenth, a letter came from the commandant of Louisbourg to say that he could send no help, as British ships blocked the way. On the morning of the sixteenth, a mischance befell, recorded in these words in the diary of Surgeon John Thomas: "One of our large shells fell through what they called their bomb-proof, where a number of their officers were sitting, killed six of them dead, and one Ensign Hay, which the Indians had took prisoner a few days agone and carried to the fort." The party was at breakfast when the unwelcome visitor burst in. Just opposite was a second bomb-proof, where was Vergor himself, with Le Loutre, another priest, and several 251 V1 officers, who felt that they might at any time share the same fate. The effect was immediate. The English, who had not yet got a single cannon into position, saw to their surprise a white flag raised on the rampart. Some officers of the garrison protested against surrender; and Le Loutre, who thought that he had everything to fear at the hands of the victors, exclaimed that it was better to be buried under the ruins of the fort than to give it up; but all was in vain, and the valiant Vannes was sent out to propose terms of capitulation. They were rejected, and others offered, to the following effect: the garrison to march out with the honors of war and to be sent to Louisbourg at the charge of the King of England, but not to bear arms in America for the space of six months. The Acadians to be pardoned the part they had just borne in the defence, "seeing that they had been compelled to take arms on pain of death." Confusion reigned all day at Beauséjour. The Acadians went home loaded with plunder. The French officers were so busy in drinking and pillaging that they could hardly be got away to sign the capitulation. At the appointed hour, seven in the evening, Scott marched in with a body of provincials, raised the British flag on the ramparts, and saluted it by a general discharge of the French cannon, while Vergor as a last act of hospitality gave a supper to the officers. [259] [258] Journal of Pichon, cited by Beamish Murdoch. [259] On the capture of Beauséjour, Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760; Pichon, Cape Breton, 318; Journal of Pichon, cited by Murdoch; and the English accounts already mentioned. 252 V1 Le Loutre was not to be found; he had escaped in disguise with his box of papers, and fled to Baye Verte to join his brother missionary, Manach. Thence he made his way to Quebec, where the Bishop received him with reproaches. He soon embarked for France; but the English captured him on the way, and kept him eight years in Elizabeth Castle, on the Island of Jersey. Here on one occasion a soldier on guard made a dash at the father, tried to stab him with his bayonet, and was prevented with great difficulty. He declared that, when he was with his regiment in Acadia, he had fallen into the hands of Le Loutre, and narrowly escaped being scalped alive, the missionary having doomed him to this fate, and with his own hand drawn a knife round his head as a beginning of the operation. The man swore so fiercely that he would have his revenge, that the officer in command transferred him to another post. [260] [260] Knox, Campaigns in North America, I. 114, note. Knox, who was stationed in Nova Scotia, says that Le Loutre left behind him "a most remarkable character for inhumanity." Throughout the siege, the Acadians outside the fort, aided by Indians, had constantly attacked the English, but were always beaten off with loss. There was an affair of this kind on the morning of the surrender, during which a noted Micmac chief was shot, and being brought into the camp, recounted the losses of his tribe; "after which, and taking a dram or two, he quickly died," writes Winslow in his Journal. 253 V1 Fort Gaspereau, at Baye Verte, twelve miles distant, was summoned by letter to surrender. Villeray, its commandant, at once complied; and Winslow went with a detachment to take possession. [261] Nothing remained but to occupy the French post at the mouth of the St. John. Captain Rous, relieved at last from inactivity, was charged with the task; and on the thirtieth he appeared off the harbor, manned his boats, and rowed for shore. The French burned their fort, and withdrew beyond his reach. [262] A hundred and fifty Indians, suddenly converted from enemies to pretended friends, stood on the strand, firing their guns into the air as a salute, and declaring themselves brothers of the English. All Acadia was now in British hands. Fort Beauséjour became Fort Cumberland,—the second fort in America that bore the name of the royal Duke. [261] Winslow, Journal. Villeray au Ministre, 20 Sept. 1755. [262] Drucour au Ministre, 1 Déc. 1755. The defence had been of the feeblest. Two years later, on pressing demands from Versailles, Vergor was brought to trial, as was also Villeray. The Governor, Vaudreuil, and the Intendant, Bigot, who had returned to Canada, were in the interest of the chief defendant. The court-martial was packed; adverse evidence was shuffled out of sight; and Vergor, acquitted and restored to his rank, lived to inflict on New France another and a greater injury. [263] [263] Mémoire sur les Fraudes commises dans la Colonie, 1759. Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Now began the first act of a deplorable drama. 254 V1 Monckton, with his small body of regulars, had pitched their tents under the walls of Beauséjour. Winslow and Scott, with the New England troops, lay not far off. There was little intercourse between the two camps. The British officers bore themselves towards those of the provincials with a supercilious coldness common enough on their part throughout the war. July had passed in what Winslow calls "an indolent manner," with prayers every day in the Puritan camp, when, early in August, Monckton sent for him, and made an ominous declaration. "The said Monckton was so free as to acquaint me that it was determined to remove all the French inhabitants out of the province, and that he should send for all the adult males from Tantemar, Chipody, Aulac, Beauséjour, and Baye Verte to read the Governor's orders; and when that was done, was determined to retain them all prisoners in the fort. And this is the first conference of a public nature I have had with the colonel since the reduction of Beauséjour; and I apprehend that no officer of either corps has been made more free with." Monckton sent accordingly to all the neighboring settlements, commanding the male inhabitants to meet him at Beauséjour. Scarcely a third part of their number obeyed. These arrived on the tenth, and were told to stay all night under the guns of the fort. What then befell them will appear from an entry in the diary of Winslow under date of August eleventh: "This day was one extraordinary to the inhabitants of Tantemar, 255 V1 Oueskak, Aulac, Baye Verte, Beauséjour, and places adjacent; the male inhabitants, or the principal of them, being collected together in Fort Cumberland to hear the sentence, which determined their property, from the Governor and Council of Halifax; which was that they were declared rebels, their lands, goods, and chattels forfeited to the Crown, and their bodies to be imprisoned. Upon which the gates of the fort were shut, and they all confined, to the amount of four hundred men and upwards." Parties were sent to gather more, but caught very few, the rest escaping to the woods. Some of the prisoners were no doubt among those who had joined the garrison at Beauséjour, and had been pardoned for doing so by the terms of the capitulation. It was held, however, that, though forgiven this special offence, they were not exempted from the doom that had gone forth against the great body of their countrymen. We must look closely at the motives and execution of this stern sentence. At any time up to the spring of 1755 the emigrant Acadians were free to return to their homes on taking the ordinary oath of allegiance required of British subjects. The English authorities of Halifax used every means to persuade them to do so; yet the greater part refused. This was due not only to Le Loutre and his brother priests, backed by the military power, but also to the Bishop of Quebec, who enjoined the Acadians to demand of the English certain concessions, the 256 V1 chief of which were that the priests should exercise their functions without being required to ask leave of the Governor, and that the inhabitants should not be called upon for military service of any kind. The Bishop added that the provisions of the treaty of Utrecht were insufficient, and that others ought to be exacted. [264] The oral declaration of the English authorities, that for the present the Acadians should not be required to bear arms, was not thought enough. They, or rather their prompters, demanded a written pledge. [264] L'évêque de Québec à Le Loutre, Nov. 1754, in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 240. The refusal to take the oath without reservation was not confined to the emigrants. Those who remained in the peninsula equally refused it, though most of them were born and had always lived under the British flag. Far from pledging themselves to complete allegiance, they showed continual signs of hostility. In May three pretended French deserters were detected among them inciting them to take arms against the English. [265] [265] Ibid., 242. On the capture of Beauséjour the British authorities found themselves in a position of great difficulty. The New England troops were enlisted for the year only, and could not be kept in Acadia. It was likely that the French would make a strong effort to recover the province, sure as they were of support from the great body of its people. The presence of this disaffected population was for the French commanders a continual inducement to invasion; and Lawrence was not strong enough 257 V1 to cope at once with attack from without and insurrection from within. Shirley had held for some time that there was no safety for Acadia but in ridding it of the Acadians. He had lately proposed that the lands of the district of Chignecto, abandoned by their emigrant owners, should be given to English settlers, who would act as a check and a counterpoise to the neighboring French population. This advice had not been acted upon. Nevertheless Shirley and his brother Governor of Nova Scotia were kindred spirits, and inclined to similar measures. Colonel Charles Lawrence had not the good-nature and conciliatory temper which marked his predecessors, Cornwallis and Hopson. His energetic will was not apt to relent under the softer sentiments, and the behavior of the Acadians was fast exhausting his patience. More than a year before, the Lords of Trade had instructed him that they had no right to their lands if they persisted in refusing the oath. [266] Lawrence replied, enlarging on their obstinacy, treachery, and "ingratitude for the favor, indulgence, and protection they have at all times so undeservedly received from His Majesty's Government;" declaring at the same time that, "while they remain without taking the oaths, and have incendiary French priests among them, there are no hopes of their amendment;" and that "it would be much better, if they refuse the oaths, that they were away." [267] "We were in 258 V1 hopes," again wrote the Lords of Trade, "that the lenity which had been shown to those people by indulging them in the free exercise of their religion and the quiet possession of their lands, would by degrees have gained their friendship and assistance, and weaned their affections from the French; but we are sorry to find that this lenity has had so little effect, and that they still hold the same conduct, furnishing them with labor, provisions, and intelligence, and concealing their designs from us." In fact, the Acadians, while calling themselves neutrals, were an enemy encamped in the heart of the province. These are the reasons which explain and palliate a measure too harsh and indiscriminate to be wholly justified. [266] Lords of Trade to Lawrence, 4 March, 1754. [267] Lawrence to Lords of Trade, 1 Aug. 1754. Abbé Raynal, who never saw the Acadians, has made an ideal picture of them, [268] since copied and improved in prose and verse, till Acadia has become Arcadia. The plain realities of their condition and fate are touching enough to need no exaggeration. They were a simple and very ignorant peasantry, industrious and frugal till evil days came to discourage them; living aloof from the world, with little of that spirit of adventure which an easy access to the vast fur-bearing interior had developed in their Canadian kindred; having few wants, and those of the rudest; fishing a little and hunting in the winter, but chiefly employed in cultivating the meadows along the River Annapolis, or rich marshes reclaimed by dikes from the tides of the Bay of Fundy. The British Government left 259 V1 them entirely free of taxation. They made clothing of flax and wool of their own raising, hats of similar materials, and shoes or moccasons of moose and seal skin. They bred cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses in abundance; and the valley of the Annapolis, then as now, was known for the profusion and excellence of its apples. For drink, they made cider or brewed spruce-beer. French officials describe their dwellings as wretched wooden boxes, without ornaments or conveniences, and scarcely supplied with the most necessary furniture. [269] Two or more families often occupied the same house; and their way of life, though simple and virtuous, was by no means remarkable for cleanliness. Such as it was, contentment reigned among them, undisturbed by what modern America calls progress. Marriages were early, and population grew apace. This humble society had its disturbing elements; for the Acadians, like the Canadians, were a litigious race, and neighbors often quarrelled about their boundaries. Nor were they without a bountiful share of jealousy, gossip, and backbiting, to relieve the monotony of their lives; and every village had its turbulent spirits, sometimes by fits, though rarely long, contumacious even toward the curé, the guide, counsellor, and ruler of his flock. Enfeebled by hereditary mental subjection, and too long kept in leading-strings to walk alone, they needed him, not for the next world only, but for this; and their submission, compounded of love and fear, was commonly without bounds. He was their 260 V1 true government; to him they gave a frank and full allegiance, and dared not disobey him if they would. Of knowledge he gave them nothing; but he taught them to be true to their wives and constant at confession and Mass, to stand fast for the Church and King Louis, and to resist heresy and King George; for, in one degree or another, the Acadian priest was always the agent of a double-headed foreign power,—the Bishop of Quebec allied with the Governor of Canada. [270] [268] Histoire philosophique et politique, VI. 242 (ed. 1772). [269] Beauharnois et Hocquart au Comte de Maurepas, 12 Sept. 1745. [270] Franquet, Journal, 1751, says of the Acadians: "Ils aiment l'argent, n'ont dans toute leur conduite que leur intérêt pour objet, sont, indifféremment des deux sexes, d'une inconsidération dans leurs discours qui dénote de la méchanceté." Another observer, Dieréville, gives a more favorable picture. When Monckton and the Massachusetts men laid siege to Beauséjour, Governor Lawrence thought the moment favorable for exacting an unqualified oath of allegiance from the Acadians. The presence of a superior and victorious force would help, he thought, to bring them to reason; and there were some indications that this would be the result. A number of Acadian families, who at the promptings of Le Loutre had emigrated to Cape Breton, had lately returned to Halifax, promising to be true subjects of King George if they could be allowed to repossess their lands. They cheerfully took the oath; on which they were reinstated in their old homes, and supplied with food for the winter. [271] Their example unfortunately found few imitators. [271] Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 228. Early in June the principal inhabitants of Grand Pré and other settlements about the Basin 261 V1 of Mines brought a memorial, signed with their crosses, to Captain Murray, the military commandant in their district, and desired him to send it to Governor Lawrence, to whom it was addressed. Murray reported that when they brought it to him they behaved with the greatest insolence, though just before they had been unusually submissive. He thought that this change of demeanor was caused by a report which had lately got among them of a French fleet in the Bay of Fundy; for it had been observed that any rumor of an approaching French force always had a similar effect. The deputies who brought the memorial were sent with it to Halifax, where they laid it before the Governor and Council. It declared that the signers had kept the qualified oath they had taken, "in spite of the solicitations and dreadful threats of another power," and that they would continue to prove "an unshaken fidelity to His Majesty, provided that His Majesty shall allow us the same liberty that he has [hitherto] granted us." Their memorial then demanded, in terms highly offensive to the Council, that the guns, pistols, and other weapons, which they had lately been required to give up, should be returned to them. They were told in reply that they had been protected for many years in the enjoyment of their lands, though they had not complied with the terms on which the lands were granted; "that they had always been treated by the Government with the greatest lenity and tenderness, had enjoyed more privileges than other English 262 V1 subjects, and had been indulged in the free exercise of their religion;" all which they acknowledged to be true. The Governor then told them that their conduct had been undutiful and ungrateful; "that they had discovered a constant disposition to assist His Majesty's enemies and to distress his subjects; that they had not only furnished the enemy with provisions and ammunition, but had refused to supply the [English] inhabitants or Government, and when they did supply them, had exacted three times the price for which they were sold at other markets." The hope was then expressed that they would no longer obstruct the settlement of the province by aiding the Indians to molest and kill English settlers; and they were rebuked for saying in their memorial that they would be faithful to the King only on certain conditions. The Governor added that they had some secret reason for demanding their weapons, and flattered themselves that French troops were at hand to support their insolence. In conclusion, they were told that now was a good opportunity to prove their sincerity by taking the oath of allegiance, in the usual form, before the Council. They replied that they had not made up their minds on that point, and could do nothing till they had consulted their constituents. Being reminded that the oath was personal to themselves, and that six years had already been given them to think about it, they asked leave to retire and confer together. This was granted, and at the end of an hour they came back with the same 263 V1 answer as before; whereupon they were allowed till ten o'clock on the next morning for a final decision. [272] [272] Minutes of Council at Halifax, 3 July, 1755, in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 247-255. At the appointed time the Council again met, and the deputies were brought in. They persisted stubbornly in the same refusal. "They were then informed," says the record, "that the Council could no longer look on them as subjects to His Britannic Majesty, but as subjects to the King of France, and as such they must hereafter be treated; and they were ordered to withdraw." A discussion followed in the Council. It was determined that the Acadians should be ordered to send new deputies to Halifax, who should answer for them, once for all, whether they would accept the oath or not; that such as refused it should not thereafter be permitted to take it; and "that effectual measures ought to be taken to remove all such recusants out of the province." The deputies, being then called in and told this decision, became alarmed, and offered to swear allegiance in the terms required. The answer was that it was too late; that as they had refused the oath under persuasion, they could not be trusted when they took it under compulsion. It remained to see whether the people at large would profit by their example. "I am determined," wrote Lawrence to the Lords of Trade, "to bring the inhabitants to a compliance, or rid the province of such perfidious 264 V1 subjects." [273] First, in answer to the summons of the Council, the deputies from Annapolis appeared, declaring that they had always been faithful to the British Crown, but flatly refusing the oath. They were told that, far from having been faithful subjects, they had always secretly aided the Indians, and that many of them had been in arms against the English; that the French were threatening the province; and that its affairs had reached a crisis when its inhabitants must either pledge themselves without equivocation to be true to the British Crown, or else must leave the country. They all declared that they would lose their lands rather than take the oath. The Council urged them to consider the matter seriously, warning them that, if they now persisted in refusal, no farther choice would be allowed them; and they were given till ten o'clock on the following Monday to make their final answer. [273] Lawrence to Lords of Trade, 18 July, 1755. When that day came, another body of deputies had arrived from Grand Pré and the other settlements of the Basin of Mines; and being called before the Council, both they and the former deputation absolutely refused to take the oath of allegiance. These two bodies represented nine tenths of the Acadian population within the peninsula. "Nothing," pursues the record of the Council, "now remained to be considered but what measures should be taken to send the inhabitants away, and where they should be sent to." If they were sent to Canada, Cape Breton, 265 V1 or the neighboring islands, they would strengthen the enemy, and still threaten the province. It was therefore resolved to distribute them among the various English colonies, and to hire vessels for the purpose with all despatch. [274] [274] Minutes of Council, 4 July—28 July, in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 255-267. Copies of these and other parts of the record were sent at the time to England, and are now in the Public Record Office, along with the letters of Lawrence. The oath, the refusal of which had brought such consequences, was a simple pledge of fidelity and allegiance to King George II. and his successors. Many of the Acadians had already taken an oath of fidelity, though with the omission of the word "allegiance," and, as they insisted, with a saving clause exempting them from bearing arms. The effect of this was that they did not regard themselves as British subjects, and claimed, falsely as regards most of them, the character of neutrals. It was to put an end to this anomalous state of things that the oath without reserve had been demanded of them. Their rejection of it, reiterated in full view of the consequences, is to be ascribed partly to a fixed belief that the English would not execute their threats, partly to ties of race and kin, but mainly to superstition. They feared to take part with heretics against the King of France, whose cause, as already stated, they had been taught to regard as one with the cause of God; they were constrained by the dread of perdition. "If the Acadians are miserable, remember that the priests are the cause of it," writes 266 V1 the French officer Boishébert to the missionary Manach. [275] [275] On the oath and its history, compare a long note by Mr. Akin in Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 263-267. Winslow in his Journal gives an abstract of a memorial sent him by the Acadians, in which they say that they had refused the oath, and so forfeited their lands, from motives of religion. I have shown in a former chapter that the priests had been the chief instruments in preventing them from accepting the English government. Add the following:— "Les malheurs des Accadiens sont beaucoup moins leur ouvrage que le fruit des sollicitations et des démarches des missionnaires." Vaudreuil au Ministre, 6 Mai, 1760. "Si nous avons la guerre, et si les Accadiens sont misérables, souvenez-vous que ce sont les prêtres qui en sont la cause." Boishébert à Manach, 21 Fév. 1760. Both these writers had encouraged the priests in their intrigues so long as there were likely to profit the French Government, and only blamed them after they failed to accomplished what was expected of them. "Nous avons six missionnaires dont l'occupation perpetuelle est de porter les esprits au fanatisme et à la vengeance…. Je ne puis supporter dans nos prêtres ces odieuses déclamations qu'ils font tous les jours aux sauvages: 'Les Anglois sont les ennemis de Dieu, les compagnons du Diable.'" Pichon, Lettres et Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Cap-Breton, 160, 161. (La Haye, 1760.) The Council having come to a decision, Lawrence acquainted Monckton with the result, and ordered him to seize all the adult males in the neighborhood of Beauséjour; and this, as we have seen, he promptly did. It remains to observe how the rest of the sentence was carried into effect. Instructions were sent to Winslow to secure the inhabitants on or near the Basin of Mines and place them on board transports, which, he was told, would soon arrive from Boston. His orders were stringent: "If you find that fair means will not do with them, you must proceed by the most vigorous measures possible, not only in compelling them to embark, but in depriving those who shall 267 V1 escape of all means of shelter or support, by burning their houses and by destroying everything that may afford them the means of subsistence in the country." Similar orders were given to Major Handfield, the regular officer in command at Annapolis. On the fourteenth of August Winslow set out from his camp at Fort Beauséjour, or Cumberland, on his unenviable errand. He had with him but two hundred and ninety-seven men. His mood of mind was not serene. He was chafed because the regulars had charged his men with stealing sheep; and he was doubly vexed by an untoward incident that happened on the morning of his departure. He had sent forward his detachment under Adams, the senior captain, and they were marching by the fort with drums beating and colors flying, when Monckton sent out his aide-de-camp with a curt demand that the colors should be given up, on the ground that they ought to remain with the regiment. Whatever the soundness of the reason, there was no courtesy in the manner of enforcing it. "This transaction raised my temper some," writes Winslow in his Diary; and he proceeds to record his opinion that "it is the most ungenteel, ill-natured thing that ever I saw." He sent Monckton a quaintly indignant note, in which he observed that the affair "looks odd, and will appear so in future history;" but his commander, reckless of the judgments of posterity, gave him little satisfaction. Thus ruffled in spirit, he embarked with his men and sailed down Chignecto Channel to the Bay of 268 V1 Fundy. Here, while they waited the turn of the tide to enter the Basin of Mines, the shores of Cumberland lay before them dim in the hot and hazy air, and the promontory of Cape Split, like some misshapen monster of primeval chaos, stretched its portentous length along the glimmering sea, with head of yawning rock, and ridgy back bristled with forests. Borne on the rushing flood, they soon drifted through the inlet, glided under the rival promontory of Cape Blomedon, passed the red sandstone cliffs of Lyon's Cove, and descried the mouths of the rivers Canard and Des Habitants, where fertile marshes, diked against the tide, sustained a numerous and thriving population. Before them spread the boundless meadows of Grand Pré, waving with harvests or alive with grazing cattle; the green slopes behind were dotted with the simple dwellings of the Acadian farmers, and the spire of the village church rose against a background of woody hills. It was a peaceful, rural scene, soon to become one of the most wretched spots on earth. Winslow did not land for the present, but held his course to the estuary of the River Pisiquid, since called the Avon. Here, where the town of Windsor now stands, there was a stockade called Fort Edward, where a garrison of regulars under Captain Alexander Murray kept watch over the surrounding settlements. The New England men pitched their tents on shore, while the sloops that had brought them slept on the soft bed of tawny mud left by the fallen tide. 269 V1 Winslow found a warm reception, for Murray and his officers had been reduced too long to their own society not to welcome the coming of strangers. The two commanders conferred together. Both had been ordered by Lawrence to "clear the whole country of such bad subjects;" and the methods of doing so had been outlined for their guidance. Having come to some understanding with his brother officer concerning the duties imposed on both, and begun an acquaintance which soon grew cordial on both sides, Winslow embarked again and retraced his course to Grand Pré, the station which the Governor had assigned him. "Am pleased," he wrote to Lawrence, "with the place proposed by your Excellency for our reception [the village church]. I have sent for the elders to remove all sacred things, to prevent their being defiled by heretics." The church was used as a storehouse and place of arms; the men pitched their tents between it and the graveyard; while Winslow took up his quarters in the house of the priest, where he could look from his window on a tranquil scene. Beyond the vast tract of grassland to which Grand Pré owed its name, spread the blue glistening breast of the Basin of Mines; beyond this again, the distant mountains of Cobequid basked in the summer sun; and nearer, on the left, Cape Blomedon reared its bluff head of rock and forest above the sleeping waves. As the men of the settlement greatly outnumbered his own, Winslow set his followers to surrounding the camp with a stockade. Card-playing 270 V1 was forbidden, because it encouraged idleness, and pitching quoits in camp, because it spoiled the grass. Presently there came a letter from Lawrence expressing a fear that the fortifying of the camp might alarm the inhabitants. To which Winslow replied that the making of the stockade had not alarmed them in the least, since they took it as a proof that the detachment was to spend the winter with them; and he added, that as the harvest was not yet got in, he and Murray had agreed not to publish the Governor's commands till the next Friday. He concludes: "Although it is a disagreeable part of duty we are put upon, I am sensible it is a necessary one, and shall endeavor strictly to obey your Excellency's orders." On the thirtieth, Murray, whose post was not many miles distant, made him a visit. They agreed that Winslow should summon all the male inhabitants about Grand Pré to meet him at the church and hear the King's orders, and that Murray should do the same for those around Fort Edward. Winslow then called in his three captains,—Adams, Hobbs, and Osgood,—made them swear secrecy, and laid before them his instructions and plans; which latter they approved. Murray then returned to his post, and on the next day sent Winslow a note containing the following: "I think the sooner we strike the stroke the better, therefore will be glad to see you here as soon as conveniently you can. I shall have the orders for assembling ready written for your approbation, only the day blank, and am hopeful everything will 271 V1 succeed according to our wishes. The gentlemen join me in our best compliments to you and the Doctor." On the next day, Sunday, Winslow and the Doctor, whose name was Whitworth, made the tour of the neighborhood, with an escort of fifty men, and found a great quantity of wheat still on the fields. On Tuesday Winslow "set out in a whale-boat with Dr. Whitworth and Adjutant Kennedy, to consult with Captain Murray in this critical conjuncture." They agreed that three in the afternoon of Friday should be the time of assembling; then between them they drew up a summons to the inhabitants, and got one Beauchamp, a merchant, to "put it into French." It ran as follows:— By John Winslow, Esquire, Lieutenant-Colonel and Commander of His Majesty's troops at Grand Pré, Mines, River Canard, and places adjacent. To the inhabitants of the districts above named, as well ancients as young men and lads. Whereas His Excellency the Governor has instructed us of his last resolution respecting the matters proposed lately to the inhabitants, and has ordered us to communicate the same to the inhabitants in general in person, His Excellency being desirous that each of them should be fully satisfied of His Majesty's intentions, which he has also ordered us to communicate to you, such as they have been given him. We therefore order and strictly enjoin by these presents to all the inhabitants, as well of the above-named districts as of all the other districts, both old men and young men, as well as all the lads of ten years of age, to attend at the church in Grand Pré on Friday, the fifth instant, at three of the clock in the afternoon, that we may impart what we are ordered to communicate to them; declaring that no 272 V1 excuse will be admitted on any pretence whatsoever, on pain of forfeiting goods and chattels in default. Given at Grand Pré, the second of September, in the twenty-ninth year of His Majesty's reign, a.d. 1755. A similar summons was drawn up in the name of Murray for the inhabitants of the district of Fort Edward. Captain Adams made a reconnoissance of the rivers Canard and Des Habitants, and reported "a fine country and full of inhabitants, a beautiful church, and abundance of the goods of the world." Another reconnoissance by Captains Hobbs and Osgood among the settlements behind Grand Pré brought reports equally favorable. On the fourth, another letter came from Murray: "All the people quiet, and very busy at their harvest; if this day keeps fair, all will be in here in their barns. I hope to-morrow will crown all our wishes." The Acadians, like the bees, were to gather a harvest for others to enjoy. The summons was sent out that afternoon. Powder and ball were served to the men, and all were ordered to keep within the lines. On the next day the inhabitants appeared at the hour appointed, to the number of four hundred and eighteen men. Winslow ordered a table to be set in the middle of the church, and placed on it his instructions and the address he had prepared. Here he took his stand in his laced uniform, with one or two subalterns from the regulars at Fort Edward, and such of the Massachusetts officers as were not on guard duty; strong, 273 V1 sinewy figures, bearing, no doubt, more or less distinctly, the peculiar stamp with which toil, trade, and Puritanism had imprinted the features of New England. Their commander was not of the prevailing type. He was fifty-three years of age, with double chin, smooth forehead, arched eyebrows, close powdered wig, and round, rubicund face, from which the weight of an odious duty had probably banished the smirk of self-satisfaction that dwelt there at other times. [276] Nevertheless, he had manly and estimable qualities. The congregation of peasants, clad in rough homespun, turned their sunburned faces upon him, anxious and intent; and Winslow "delivered them by interpreters the King's orders in the following words," which, retouched in orthography and syntax, ran thus:— Gentlemen,—I have received from His Excellency, Governor Lawrence, the King's instructions, which I have in my hand. By his orders you are called together to hear His Majesty's final resolution concerning the French inhabitants of this his province of Nova Scotia, who for almost half a century have had more indulgence granted them than any of his subjects in any part of his dominions. What use you have made of it you yourselves best know. The duty I am now upon, though necessary, is very disagreeable to my natural make and temper, as I know it must be grievous to you, who are of the same species. But it is not my business to animadvert on the orders I have received, but to obey them; and therefore without hesitation I shall deliver to you His Majesty's instructions and commands, which are that your lands and tenements and cattle and live-stock of all kinds are forfeited to the Crown, with all your other effects, except money and household goods, and that you yourselves are to be removed from this his province. The peremptory orders of His Majesty are that all the French inhabitants of these districts be removed; and through His Majesty's goodness I am directed to allow you the liberty of carrying with you your money and as many of your household 274 V1 goods as you can take without overloading the vessels you go in. I shall do everything in my power that all these goods be secured to you, and that you be not molested in carrying them away, and also that whole families shall go in the same vessel; so that this removal, which I am sensible must give you a great deal of trouble, may be made as easy as His Majesty's service will admit; and I hope that in whatever part of the world your lot may fall, you may be faithful subjects, and a peaceable and happy people. I must also inform you that it is His Majesty's pleasure that you remain in security under the inspection and direction of the troops that I have the honor to command. [276] See his portrait, at the rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He then declared them prisoners of the King. "They were greatly struck," he says, "at this determination, though I believe they did not imagine that they were actually to be removed." After delivering the address, he returned to his quarters at the priest's house, whither he was followed by some of the elder prisoners, who begged leave to tell their families what had happened, "since they were fearful that the surprise of their detention would quite overcome them." Winslow consulted with his officers, and it was arranged that the Acadians should choose twenty of their number each day to revisit their homes, the rest being held answerable for their return. A letter, dated some days before, now came from Major Handfield at Annapolis, saying that 275 V1 he had tried to secure the men of that neighborhood, but that many of them had escaped to the woods. Murray's report from Fort Edward came soon after, and was more favorable: "I have succeeded finely, and have got a hundred and eighty-three men into my possession." To which Winslow replies: "I have the favor of yours of this day, and rejoice at your success, and also for the smiles that have attended the party here." But he adds mournfully: "Things are now very heavy on my heart and hands." The prisoners were lodged in the church, and notice was sent to their families to bring them food. "Thus," says the Diary of the commander, "ended the memorable fifth of September, a day of great fatigue and trouble." There was one quarter where fortune did not always smile. Major Jedediah Preble, of Winslow's battalion, wrote to him that Major Frye had just returned from Chipody, whither he had gone with a party of men to destroy the settlements and bring off the women and children. After burning two hundred and fifty-three buildings he had reimbarked, leaving fifty men on shore at a place called Peticodiac to give a finishing stroke to the work by burning the "Mass House," or church. While thus engaged, they were set upon by three hundred Indians and Acadians, led by the partisan officer Boishébert. More than half their number were killed, wounded, or taken. The rest ensconced themselves behind the neighboring dikes, and Frye, hastily landing 276 V1 with the rest of his men, engaged the assailants for three hours, but was forced at last to reimbark. [277] Captain Speakman, who took part in the affair, also sent Winslow an account of it, and added: "The people here are much concerned for fear your party should meet with the same fate (being in the heart of a numerous devilish crew), which I pray God avert." [277] Also Boishébert à Drucourt, 10 Oct. 1755, an exaggerated account. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 18 Oct. 1755, sets Boishébert's force at one hundred and twenty-five men. Winslow had indeed some cause for anxiety. He had captured more Acadians since the fifth; and had now in charge nearly five hundred able-bodied men, with scarcely three hundred to guard them. As they were allowed daily exercise in the open air, they might by a sudden rush get possession of arms and make serious trouble. On the Wednesday after the scene in the church some unusual movements were observed among them, and Winslow and his officers became convinced that they could not safely be kept in one body. Five vessels, lately arrived from Boston, were lying within the mouth of the neighboring river. It was resolved to place fifty of the prisoners on board each of these, and keep them anchored in the Basin. The soldiers were all ordered under arms, and posted on an open space beside the church and behind the priest's house. The prisoners were then drawn up before them, ranked six deep,—the young unmarried men, as the most dangerous, being told off and placed on the left, to the number of a hundred and forty-one. Captain Adams, 277 V1 with eighty men, was then ordered to guard them to the vessels. Though the object of the movement had been explained to them, they were possessed with the idea that they were to be torn from their families and sent away at once; and they all, in great excitement, refused to go. Winslow told them that there must be no parley or delay; and as they still refused, a squad of soldiers advanced towards them with fixed bayonets; while he himself, laying hold of the foremost young man, commanded him to move forward. "He obeyed; and the rest followed, though slowly, and went off praying, singing, and crying, being met by the women and children all the way (which is a mile and a half) with great lamentation, upon their knees, praying." When the escort returned, about a hundred of the married men were ordered to follow the first party; and, "the ice being broken," they readily complied. The vessels were anchored at a little distance from shore, and six soldiers were placed on board each of them as a guard. The prisoners were offered the King's rations, but preferred to be supplied by their families, who, it was arranged, should go in boats to visit them every day; "and thus," says Winslow, "ended this troublesome job." He was not given to effusions of feeling, but he wrote to Major Handfield: "This affair is more grievous to me than any service I was ever employed in." [278] [278] Haliburton, who knew Winslow's Journal only by imperfect extracts, erroneously states that the men put on board the vessels were sent away immediately. They remained at Grand Pré several weeks, and were then sent off at intervals with their families. 278 V1 Murray sent him a note of congratulation: "I am extremely pleased that things are so clever at Grand Pré, and that the poor devils are so resigned. Here they are more patient than I could have expected for people in their circumstances; and what surprises me still more is the indifference of the women, who really are, or seem, quite unconcerned. I long much to see the poor wretches embarked and our affair a little settled; and then I will do myself the pleasure of meeting you and drinking their good voyage." This agreeable consummation was still distant. There was a long and painful delay. The provisions for the vessels which were to carry the prisoners did not come; nor did the vessels themselves, excepting the five already at Grand Pré. In vain Winslow wrote urgent letters to George Saul, the commissary, to bring the supplies at once. Murray, at Fort Edward, though with less feeling than his brother officer, was quite as impatient of the burden of suffering humanity on his hands. "I am amazed what can keep the transports and Saul. Surely our friend at Chignecto is willing to give us as much of our neighbors' company as he well can." [279] Saul came at last with a shipload of provisions; but the lagging transports did not appear. Winslow grew heartsick at the daily sight of miseries which he himself had occasioned, and wrote to a friend at Halifax: "I know they deserve all and more than they feel; yet it hurts me to hear their weeping and wailing 279 V1 and gnashing of teeth. I am in hopes our affairs will soon put on another face, and we get transports, and I rid of the worst piece of service that ever I was in." [279] Murray to Winslow, 26 Sept. 1755. After weeks of delay, seven transports came from Annapolis; and Winslow sent three of them to Murray, who joyfully responded: "Thank God, the transports are come at last. So soon as I have shipped off my rascals, I will come down and settle matters with you, and enjoy ourselves a little." Winslow prepared for the embarkation. The Acadian prisoners and their families were divided into groups answering to their several villages, in order that those of the same village might, as far as possible, go in the same vessel. It was also provided that the members of each family should remain together; and notice was given them to hold themselves in readiness. "But even now," he writes, "I could not persuade the people I was in earnest." Their doubts were soon ended. The first embarkation took place on the eighth of October, under which date the Diary contains this entry: "Began to embark the inhabitants who went off very solentarily [sic] and unwillingly, the women in great distress, carrying off their children in their arms; others carrying their decrepit parents in their carts, with all their goods; moving in great confusion, and appeared a scene of woe and distress." [280] [280] In spite of Winslow's care, some cases of separation of families occurred; but they were not numerous. 280 V1 Though a large number were embarked on this occasion, still more remained; and as the transports slowly arrived, the dismal scene was repeated at intervals, with more order than at first, as the Acadians had learned to accept their fate as a certainty. So far as Winslow was concerned, their treatment seems to have been as humane as was possible under the circumstances; but they complained of the men, who disliked and despised them. One soldier received thirty lashes for stealing fowls from them; and an order was issued forbidding soldiers or sailors, on pain of summary punishment, to leave their quarters without permission, "that an end may be put to distressing this distressed people." Two of the prisoners, however, while trying to escape, were shot by a reconnoitring party. At the beginning of November Winslow reported that he had sent off fifteen hundred and ten persons, in nine vessels, and that more than six hundred still remained in his district. [281] The last of these were not embarked till late in December. Murray finished his part of the work at the end of October, having sent from the district of Fort Edward eleven hundred persons in four frightfully crowded transports. [282] At the close of that month sixteen hundred and sixty-four had been sent from the district of Annapolis, where many others escaped to the woods. [283] A detachment 281 V1 which was ordered to seize the inhabitants of the district of Cobequid failed entirely, finding the settlements abandoned. In the country about Fort Cumberland, Monckton, who directed the operation in person, had very indifferent success, catching in all but little more than a thousand. [284] Le Guerne, missionary priest in this neighborhood, gives a characteristic and affecting incident of the embarkation. "Many unhappy women, carried away by excessive attachment to their husbands, whom they had been allowed to see too often, and closing their ears to the voice of religion and their missionary, threw themselves blindly and despairingly into the English vessels. And now was seen the saddest of spectacles; for some of these women, solely from a religious motive, refused to take with them their grown-up sons and daughters." [285] They would expose their own souls to perdition among heretics, but not those of their children. [281] Winslow to Monckton, 3 Nov. 1755. [282] Ibid. [283] Captain Adams to Winslow, 29 Nov. 1755; see also Knox, I. 85, who exactly confirms Adams's figures. [284] Monckton to Winslow, 7 Oct. 1755. [285] Le Guerne à Prévost, 10 Mars, 1756. When all, or nearly all, had been sent off from the various points of departure, such of the houses and barns as remained standing were burned, in obedience to the orders of Lawrence, that those who had escaped might be forced to come in and surrender themselves. The whole number removed from the province, men, women, and children, was a little above six thousand. Many remained behind; and while some of these withdrew to Canada, Isle St. Jean, and other distant retreats, the rest lurked in the woods or returned to their old 282 V1 haunts, whence they waged, for several years a guerilla warfare against the English. Yet their strength was broken, and they were no longer a danger to the province. Of their exiled countrymen, one party overpowered the crew of the vessel that carried them, ran her ashore at the mouth of the St. John, and escaped. [286] The rest were distributed among the colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia, the master of each transport having been provided with a letter from Lawrence addressed to the Governor of the province to which he was bound, and desiring him to receive the unwelcome strangers. The provincials were vexed at the burden imposed upon them; and though the Acadians were not in general ill-treated, their lot was a hard one. Still more so was that of those among them who escaped to Canada. The chronicle of the Ursulines of Quebec, speaking of these last, says that their misery was indescribable, and attributes it to the poverty of the colony. But there were other causes. The exiles found less pity from kindred and fellow Catholics than from the heretics of the English colonies. Some of them who had made their way to Canada from Boston, whither they had been transported, sent word to a gentleman of that place who had befriended them, that they wished to return. [287] Bougainville, the celebrated navigator, then aide-de-camp to Montcalm, says concerning them: 283 V1 "They are dying by wholesale. Their past and present misery, joined to the rapacity of the Canadians, who seek only to squeeze out of them all the money they can, and then refuse them the help so dearly bought, are the cause of this mortality." "A citizen of Quebec," he says farther on, "was in debt to one of the partners of the Great Company [Government officials leagued for plunder]. He had no means of paying. They gave him a great number of Acadians to board and lodge. He starved them with hunger and cold, got out of them what money they had, and paid the extortioner. Quel pays! Quels m?urs!" [288] [286] Lettre commune de Drucour et Prévost au Ministre, 6 Avril, 1756. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 1 Juin, 1756. [287] Hutchinson, Hist. Mass., III. 42, note. [288] Bougainville, Journal, 1756-1758. His statements are sustained by Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Many of the exiles eventually reached Louisiana, where their descendants now form a numerous and distinct population. Some, after incredible hardship, made their way back to Acadia, where, after the peace, they remained unmolested, and, with those who had escaped seizure, became the progenitors of the present Acadians, now settled in various parts of the British maritime provinces, notably at Madawaska, on the upper St. John, and at Clare, in Nova Scotia. Others were sent from Virginia to England; and others again, after the complete conquest of the country, found refuge in France. In one particular the authors of the deportation were disappointed in its results. They had hoped to substitute a loyal population for a disaffected one; but they failed for some time to 284 V1 find settlers for the vacated lands. The Massachusetts soldiers, to whom they were offered, would not stay in the province; and it was not till five years later that families of British stock began to occupy the waste fields of the Acadians. This goes far to show that a longing to become their heirs had not, as has been alleged, any considerable part in the motives for their removal. New England humanitarianism, melting into sentimentality at a tale of woe, has been unjust to its own. Whatever judgment may be passed on the cruel measure of wholesale expatriation, it was not put in execution till every resource of patience and persuasion had been tried in vain. The agents of the French Court, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, had made some act of force a necessity. We have seen by what vile practices they produced in Acadia a state of things intolerable, and impossible of continuance. They conjured up the tempest; and when it burst on the heads of the unhappy people, they gave no help. The Government of Louis XV. began with making the Acadians its tools, and ended with making them its victims. [289] [289] It may not be remembered that the predecessor of Louis XV., without the slightest provocation or the pretence of any, gave orders that the whole Protestant population of the colony of New York, amounting to about eighteen thousand, should be seized, despoiled of their property, placed on board his ships, and dispersed among the other British colonies in such a way that they could not reunite. Want of power alone prevented the execution of the order. See Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV., 189, 190. CHAPTER IX. 1755. DIESKAU. Expedition against Crown Point ? William Johnson ? Vaudreuil ? Dieskau ? Johnson and the Indians ? The Provincial Army ? Doubts and Delays ? March to Lake George ? Sunday in Camp ? Advance of Dieskau ? He changes Plan ? Marches against Johnson ? Ambush ? Rout of Provincials ? Battle of Lake George ? Rout of the French ? Rage of the Mohawks ? Peril of Dieskau ? Inaction of Johnson ? The Homeward March ? Laurels of Victory. The next stroke of the campaign was to be the capture of Crown Point, that dangerous neighbor which, for a quarter of a century, had threatened the northern colonies. Shirley, in January, had proposed an attack on it to the Ministry; and in February, without waiting their reply, he laid the plan before his Assembly. They accepted it, and voted money for the pay and maintenance of twelve hundred men, provided the adjacent colonies would contribute in due proportion. [290] Massachusetts showed a military activity worthy of the reputation she had won. Forty-five hundred of 286 V1 her men, or one in eight of her adult males, volunteered to fight the French, and enlisted for the various expeditions, some in the pay of the province, and some in that of the King. [291] It remained to name a commander for the Crown Point enterprise. Nobody had power to do so, for Braddock was not yet come; but that time might not be lost, Shirley, at the request of his Assembly, took the responsibility on himself. If he had named a Massachusetts officer, it would have roused the jealousy of the other New England colonies; and he therefore appointed William Johnson of New York, thus gratifying that important province and pleasing the Five Nations, who at this time looked on Johnson with even more than usual favor. Hereupon, in reply to his request, Connecticut voted twelve hundred men, New Hampshire five hundred, and Rhode Island four hundred, all at their own charge; while New York, a little later, promised eight hundred more. When, in April, Braddock and the Council at Alexandria approved the plan and the commander, Shirley gave Johnson the commission of major-general of the levies of Massachusetts; and the governors of the other provinces contributing to the expedition gave him similar commissions for their respective contingents. Never did general take the field with authority so heterogeneous. [290] Governor Shirley's Message to his Assembly, 13 Feb. 1755. Resolutions of the Assembly of Massachusetts, 18 Feb. 1755. Shirley's original idea was to build a fort on a rising ground near Crown Point, in order to command it. This was soon abandoned for the more honest and more practical plan of direct attack. [291] Correspondence of Shirley, Feb. 1755. The number was much increased later in the season. He had never seen service, and knew nothing of war. By birth he was Irish, of good family, 287 V1 being nephew of Admiral Sir Peter Warren, who, owning extensive wild lands on the Mohawk, had placed the young man in charge of them nearly twenty years before. Johnson was born to prosper. He had ambition, energy, an active mind, a tall, strong person, a rough, jovial temper, and a quick adaptation to his surroundings. He could drink flip with Dutch boors, or Madeira with royal governors. He liked the society of the great, would intrigue and flatter when he had an end to gain, and foil a rival without looking too closely at the means; but compared with the Indian traders who infested the border, he was a model of uprightness. He lived by the Mohawk in a fortified house which was a stronghold against foes and a scene of hospitality to friends, both white and red. Here—for his tastes were not fastidious—presided for many years a Dutch or German wench whom he finally married; and after her death a young Mohawk squaw took her place. Over his neighbors, the Indians of the Five Nations, and all others of their race with whom he had to deal, he acquired a remarkable influence. He liked them, adopted their ways, and treated them kindly or sternly as the case required, but always with a justice and honesty in strong contrast with the rascalities of the commission of Albany traders who had lately managed their affairs, and whom they so detested that one of their chiefs called them "not men, but devils." Hence, when Johnson was made Indian superintendent there was joy through all the Iroquois 288 V1 confederacy. When, in addition, he was made a general, he assembled the warriors in council to engage them to aid the expedition. This meeting took place at his own house, known as Fort Johnson; and as more than eleven hundred Indians appeared at his call, his larder was sorely taxed to entertain them. The speeches were interminable. Johnson, as master of Indian rhetoric, knew his audience too well not to contest with them the palm of insufferable prolixity. The climax was reached on the fourth day, and he threw down the war-belt. An Oneida chief took it up; Stevens, the interpreter, began the war-dance, and the assembled warriors howled in chorus. Then a tub of punch was brought in, and they all drank the King's health. [292] They showed less alacrity, however, to fight his battles, and scarcely three hundred of them would take the war-path. Too many of their friends and relatives were enlisted for the French. [292] Report of Conference between Major-General Johnson and the Indians, June, 1755. While the British colonists were preparing to attack Crown Point, the French of Canada were preparing to defend it. Duquesne, recalled from his post, had resigned the government to the Marquis de Vaudreuil, who had at his disposal the battalions of regulars that had sailed in the spring from Brest under Baron Dieskau. His first thought was to use them for the capture of Oswego; but the letters of Braddock, found on the battle-field, warned him of the design against 289 V1 Crown Point; while a reconnoitring party which had gone as far as the Hudson brought back news that Johnson's forces were already in the field. Therefore the plan was changed, and Dieskau was ordered to lead the main body of his troops, not to Lake Ontario, but to Lake Champlain. He passed up the Richelieu, and embarked in boats and canoes for Crown Point. The veteran knew that the foes with whom he had to deal were but a mob of countrymen. He doubted not of putting them to rout, and meant never to hold his hand till he had chased them back to Albany. [293] "Make all haste," Vaudreuil wrote to him; "for when you return we shall send you to Oswego to execute our first design." [294] [293] Bigot au Ministre, 27 Ao?t, 1755. Ibid., 5 Sept. 1755. [294] Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction à M. le Baron de Dieskau, Maréchal des Camps et Armées du Roy, 15 Ao?t, 1755. Johnson on his part was preparing to advance. In July about three thousand provincials were encamped near Albany, some on the "Flats" above the town, and some on the meadows below. Hither, too, came a swarm of Johnson's Mohawks,—warriors, squaws, and children. They adorned the General's face with war-paint, and he danced the war-dance; then with his sword he cut the first slice from the ox that had been roasted whole for their entertainment. "I shall be glad," wrote the surgeon of a New England regiment, "if they fight as eagerly as they ate their ox and drank their wine." Above all things the expedition needed promptness; yet everything moved slowly. Five popular 290 V1 legislatures controlled the troops and the supplies. Connecticut had refused to send her men till Shirley promised that her commanding officer should rank next to Johnson. The whole movement was for some time at a deadlock because the five governments could not agree about their contributions of artillery and stores. [295] The New Hampshire regiment had taken a short cut for Crown Point across the wilderness of Vermont; but had been recalled in time to save them from probable destruction. They were now with the rest in the camp at Albany, in such distress for provisions that a private subscription was proposed for their relief. [296] [295] The Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated (London, 1758). [296] Blanchard to Wentworth, 28 Aug. 1755, in Provincial Papers of New Hampshire, VI. 429. Johnson's army, crude as it was, had in it good material. Here was Phineas Lyman, of Connecticut, second in command, once a tutor at Yale College, and more recently a lawyer,—a raw soldier, but a vigorous and brave one; Colonel Moses Titcomb, of Massachusetts, who had fought with credit at Louisbourg; and Ephraim Williams, also colonel of a Massachusetts regiment, a tall and portly man, who had been a captain in the last war, member of the General Court, and deputy-sheriff. He made his will in the camp at Albany, and left a legacy to found the school which has since become Williams College. His relative, Stephen Williams, was chaplain of his regiment, and his brother Thomas was its surgeon. Seth Pomeroy, gunsmith at Northampton, 291 V1 who, like Titcomb, had seen service at Louisbourg, was its lieutenant-colonel. He had left a wife at home, an excellent matron, to whom he was continually writing affectionate letters, mingling household cares with news of the camp, and charging her to see that their eldest boy, Seth, then in college at New Haven, did not run off to the army. Pomeroy had with him his brother Daniel; and this he thought was enough. Here, too, was a man whose name is still a household word in New England,—the sturdy Israel Putnam, private in a Connecticut regiment; and another as bold as he, John Stark, lieutenant in the New Hampshire levies, and the future victor of Bennington. The soldiers were no soldiers, but farmers and farmers' sons who had volunteered for the summer campaign. One of the corps had a blue uniform faced with red. The rest wore their daily clothing. Blankets had been served out to them by the several provinces, but the greater part brought their own guns; some under the penalty of a fine if they came without them, and some under the inducement of a reward. [297] They had no bayonets, but carried hatchets in their belts as a sort of substitute. [298] At their sides were slung powder-horns, on which, in the leisure of the camp, they carved quaint devices with the points of their jack-knives. They came chiefly from plain New England homesteads,—rustic abodes, unpainted and dingy, with 292 V1 long well-sweeps, capacious barns, rough fields of pumpkins and corn, and vast kitchen chimneys, above which in winter hung squashes to keep them from frost, and guns to keep them from rust. [297] Proclamation of Governor Shirley, 1755. [298] Second Letter to a Friend on the Battle of Lake George. As to the manners and morals of the army there is conflict of evidence. In some respects nothing could be more exemplary. "Not a chicken has been stolen," says William Smith, of New York; while, on the other hand, Colonel Ephraim Williams writes to Colonel Israel Williams, then commanding on the Massachusetts frontier: "We are a wicked, profane army, especially the New York and Rhode Island troops. Nothing to be heard among a great part of them but the language of Hell. If Crown Point is taken, it will not be for our sakes, but for those good people left behind." [299] There was edifying regularity in respect to form. Sermons twice a week, daily prayers, and frequent psalm-singing alternated with the much-needed military drill. [300] "Prayers among us night and morning," writes Private Jonathan Caswell, of Massachusetts, to his father. "Here we lie, knowing not when we shall march for Crown Point; but I hope not long to tarry. Desiring your prayers to God for me as I am going to war, I am Your Ever Dutiful son." [301] [299] Papers of Colonel Israel Williams. [300] Massachusetts Archives. [301] Jonathan Caswell to John Caswell, 6 July, 1755. To Pomeroy and some of his brothers in arms it seemed that they were engaged in a kind of crusade against the myrmidons of Rome. "As you have at heart the Protestant cause," he wrote 293 V1 to his friend Israel Williams, "so I ask an interest in your prayers that the Lord of Hosts would go forth with us and give us victory over our unreasonable, encroaching, barbarous, murdering enemies." Both Williams the surgeon and Williams the colonel chafed at the incessant delays. "The expedition goes on very much as a snail runs," writes the former to his wife; "it seems we may possibly see Crown Point this time twelve months." The Colonel was vexed because everything was out of joint in the department of transportation: wagoners mutinous for want of pay; ordnance stores, camp-kettles, and provisions left behind. "As to rum," he complains, "it won't hold out nine weeks. Things appear most melancholy to me." Even as he was writing, a report came of the defeat of Braddock; and, shocked at the blow, his pen traced the words: "The Lord have mercy on poor New England!" Johnson had sent four Mohawk scouts to Canada. They returned on the twenty-first of August with the report that the French were all astir with preparation, and that eight thousand men were coming to defend Crown Point. On this a council of war was called; and it was resolved to send to the several colonies for reinforcements. [302] Meanwhile the main body had moved up the river to the spot called the Great Carrying Place, where Lyman had begun a fortified 294 V1 storehouse, which his men called Fort Lyman, but which was afterwards named Fort Edward. Two Indian trails led from this point to the waters of Lake Champlain, one by way of Lake George, and the other by way of Wood Creek. There was doubt which course the army should take. A road was begun to Wood Creek; then it was countermanded, and a party was sent to explore the path to Lake George. "With submission to the general officers," Surgeon Williams again writes, "I think it a very grand mistake that the business of reconnoitring was not done months agone." It was resolved at last to march for Lake George; gangs of axemen were sent to hew out the way; and on the twenty-sixth two thousand men were ordered to the lake, while Colonel Blanchard, of New Hampshire, remained with five hundred to finish and defend Fort Lyman. [302] Minutes of Council of War, 22 Aug. 1755. Ephraim Williams to Benjamin Dwight, 22 Aug. 1755. The train of Dutch wagons, guarded by the homely soldiery, jolted slowly over the stumps and roots of the newly made road, and the regiments followed at their leisure. The hardships of the way were not without their consolations. The jovial Irishman who held the chief command made himself very agreeable to the New England officers. "We went on about four or five miles," says Pomeroy in his Journal, "then stopped, ate pieces of broken bread and cheese, and drank some fresh lemon-punch and the best of wine with General Johnson and some of the field-officers." It was the same on the next day. "Stopped about noon and dined with General Johnson by 295 V1 a small brook under a tree; ate a good dinner of cold boiled and roast venison; drank good fresh lemon-punch and wine." That afternoon they reached their destination, fourteen miles from Fort Lyman. The most beautiful lake in America lay before them; then more beautiful than now, in the wild charm of untrodden mountains and virgin forests. "I have given it the name of Lake George," wrote Johnson to the Lords of Trade, "not only in honor of His Majesty, but to ascertain his undoubted dominion here." His men made their camp on a piece of rough ground by the edge of the water, pitching their tents among the stumps of the newly felled trees. In their front was a forest of pitch-pine; on their right, a marsh, choked with alders and swamp-maples; on their left, the low hill where Fort George was afterwards built; and at their rear, the lake. Little was done to clear the forest in front, though it would give excellent cover to an enemy. Nor did Johnson take much pains to learn the movements of the French in the direction of Crown Point, though he sent scouts towards South Bay and Wood Creek. Every day stores and bateaux, or flat boats, came on wagons from Fort Lyman; and preparation moved on with the leisure that had marked it from the first. About three hundred Mohawks came to the camp, and were regarded by the New England men as nuisances. On Sunday the gray-haired Stephen Williams preached to these savage allies a long Calvinistic sermon, which must have 296 V1 sorely perplexed the interpreter whose business it was to turn it into Mohawk; and in the afternoon young Chaplain Newell, of Rhode Island, expounded to the New England men the somewhat untimely text, "Love your enemies." On the next Sunday, September seventh, Williams preached again, this time to the whites from a text in Isaiah. It was a peaceful day, fair and warm, with a few light showers; yet not wholly a day of rest, for two hundred wagons came up from Fort Lyman, loaded with bateaux. After the sermon there was an alarm. An Indian scout came in about sunset, and reported that he had found the trail of a body of men moving from South Bay towards Fort Lyman. Johnson called for a volunteer to carry a letter of warning to Colonel Blanchard, the commander. A wagoner named Adams offered himself for the perilous service, mounted, and galloped along the road with the letter. Sentries were posted, and the camp fell asleep. While Johnson lay at Lake George, Dieskau prepared a surprise for him. The German Baron had reached Crown Point at the head of three thousand five hundred and seventy-three men, regulars, Canadians, and Indians. [303] He had no thought of waiting there to be attacked. The troops were told to hold themselves ready to move at a moment's notice. Officers—so ran the order—will take nothing with them but one spare shirt, one spare pair of shoes, a blanket, a bearskin, and 297 V1 provisions for twelve days; Indians are not to amuse themselves by taking scalps till the enemy is entirely defeated, since they can kill ten men in the time required to scalp one. [304] Then Dieskau moved on, with nearly all his force, to Carillon, or Ticonderoga, a promontory commanding both the routes by which alone Johnson could advance, that of Wood Creek and that of Lake George. [303] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 25 Sept. 1755. [304] Livre d'Ordres, Ao?t, Sept. 1755. The Indians allies were commanded by Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the officer who had received Washington on his embassy to Fort Le B?uf. These unmanageable warriors were a constant annoyance to Dieskau, being a species of humanity quite new to him. "They drive us crazy," he says, "from morning till night. There is no end to their demands. They have already eaten five oxen and as many hogs, without counting the kegs of brandy they have drunk. In short, one needs the patience of an angel to get on with these devils; and yet one must always force himself to seem pleased with them." [305] [305] Dieskau à Vaudreuil, 1 Sept. 1755. They would scarcely even go out as scouts. At last, however, on the fourth of September, a reconnoitring party came in with a scalp and an English prisoner caught near Fort Lyman. He was questioned under the threat of being given to the Indians for torture if he did not tell the truth; but, nothing daunted, he invented a patriotic falsehood; and thinking to lure his captors into a trap, told them that the English army had fallen back to 298 V1 Albany, leaving five hundred men at Fort Lyman, which he represented as indefensible. Dieskau resolved on a rapid movement to seize the place. At noon of the same day, leaving a part of his force at Ticonderoga, he embarked the rest in canoes and advanced along the narrow prolongation of Lake Champlain that stretched southward through the wilderness to where the town of Whitehall now stands. He soon came to a point where the lake dwindled to a mere canal, while two mighty rocks, capped with stunted forests, faced each other from the opposing banks. Here he left an officer named Roquemaure with a detachment of troops, and again advanced along a belt of quiet water traced through the midst of a deep marsh, green at that season with sedge and water-weeds, and known to the English as the Drowned Lands. Beyond, on either hand, crags feathered with birch and fir, or hills mantled with woods, looked down on the long procession of canoes. [306] As they neared the site of Whitehall, a passage opened on the right, the entrance to a sheet of lonely water slumbering in the shadow of woody mountains, and forming the lake then, as now, called South Bay. They advanced to its head, landed where a small stream enters it, left the canoes under a guard, and began their march through the forest. They counted in all two hundred and sixteen regulars of the battalions of Languedoc and La Reine, six hundred 299 V1 and eighty-four Canadians, and above six hundred Indians. [307] Every officer and man carried provisions for eight days in his knapsack. They encamped at night by a brook, and in the morning, after hearing Mass, marched again. The evening of the next day brought them near the road that led to Lake George. Fort Lyman was but three miles distant. A man on horseback galloped by; it was Adams, Johnson's unfortunate messenger. The Indians shot him, and found the letter in his pocket. Soon after, ten or twelve wagons appeared in charge of mutinous drivers, who had left the English camp without orders. Several of them were shot, two were taken, and the rest ran off. The two captives declared that, contrary to the assertion of the prisoner at Ticonderoga, a large force lay encamped at the lake. The Indians now held a council, and presently gave out that they would not attack the fort, which they thought well supplied with cannon, but that they were willing to attack the camp at Lake George. Remonstrance was lost upon them. Dieskau was not young, but he was daring to rashness, and inflamed to emulation by the victory over Braddock. The enemy were reported greatly to outnumber him; but his Canadian advisers had assured him that the English colony militia were the worst troops on the face of the earth. "The more there are," he said to the Canadians and Indians, "the more we shall kill;" and in the morning the order was given to march for the lake. [306] I passed this way three weeks ago. There are some points where the scene is not much changed since Dieskau saw it. [307] Mémoire sur l'Affaire du 8 Septembre. 300 V1 They moved rapidly on through the waste of pines, and soon entered the rugged valley that led to Johnson's camp. On their right was a gorge where, shadowed in bushes, gurgled a gloomy brook; and beyond rose the cliffs that buttressed the rocky heights of French Mountain, seen by glimpses between the boughs. On their left rose gradually the lower slopes of West Mountain. All was rock, thicket, and forest; there was no open space but the road along which the regulars marched, while the Canadians and Indians pushed their way through the woods in such order as the broken ground would permit. They were three miles from the lake, when their scouts brought in a prisoner who told them that a column of English troops was approaching. Dieskau's preparations were quickly made. While the regulars halted on the road, the Canadians and Indians moved to the front, where most of them hid in the forest along the slopes of West Mountain, and the rest lay close among the thickets on the other side. Thus, when the English advanced to attack the regulars in front, they would find themselves caught in a double ambush. No sight or sound betrayed the snare; but behind every bush crouched a Canadian or a savage, with gun cocked and ears intent, listening for the tramp of the approaching column. The wagoners who escaped the evening before had reached the camp about midnight, and reported that there was a war-party on the road near Fort Lyman. Johnson had at this time 301 V1 twenty-two hundred effective men, besides his three hundred Indians. [308] He called a council of war in the morning, and a resolution was taken which can only be explained by a complete misconception as to the force of the French. It was determined to send out two detachments of five hundred men each, one towards Fort Lyman, and the other towards South Bay, the object being, according to Johnson, "to catch the enemy in their retreat." [309] Hendrick, chief of the Mohawks, a brave and sagacious warrior, expressed his dissent after a fashion of his own. He picked up a stick and broke it; then he picked up several sticks, and showed that together they could not be broken. The hint was taken, and the two detachments were joined in one. Still the old savage shook his head. "If they are to be killed," he said, "they are too many; if they are to fight, they are too few." Nevertheless, he resolved to share their fortunes; and mounting on a gun-carriage, he harangued his warriors with a voice so animated and gestures so expressive, that the New England officers listened in admiration, though they understood not a word. One difficulty remained. He was too old and fat to go afoot; but Johnson lent him a horse, which he bestrode, and trotted to the head of the column, 302 V1 followed by two hundred of his warriors as fast as they could grease, paint, and befeather themselves. [308] Wraxall to Lieutenant-Governor Delancey, 10 Sept. 1755. Wraxall was Johnson's aide-de-camp and secretary. The Second Letter to a Friend says twenty-one hundred whites and two hundred or three hundred Indians. Blodget, who was also on the spot, sets the whites at two thousand. [309] Letter to the Governors of the several Colonies, 9 Sept. 1755. Captain Elisha Hawley was in his tent, finishing a letter which he had just written to his brother Joseph; and these were the last words: "I am this minute agoing out in company with five hundred men to see if we can intercept 'em in their retreat, or find their canoes in the Drowned Lands; and therefore must conclude this letter." He closed and directed it; and in an hour received his death-wound. It was soon after eight o'clock when Ephraim Williams left the camp with his regiment, marched a little distance, and then waited for the rest of the detachment under Lieutenant-Colonel Whiting. Thus Dieskau had full time to lay his ambush. When Whiting came up, the whole moved on together, so little conscious of danger that no scouts were thrown out in front or flank; and, in full security, they entered the fatal snare. Before they were completely involved in it, the sharp eye of old Hendrick detected some sign of an enemy. At that instant, whether by accident or design, a gun was fired from the bushes. It is said that Dieskau's Iroquois, seeing Mohawks, their relatives, in the van, wished to warn them of danger. If so, the warning came too late. The thickets on the left blazed out a deadly fire, and the men fell by scores. In the words of Dieskau, the head of the column "was doubled up like a pack of cards." Hendrick's horse was 303 V1 shot down, and the chief was killed with a bayonet as he tried to rise. Williams, seeing a rising ground on his right, made for it, calling on his men to follow; but as he climbed the slope, guns flashed from the bushes, and a shot through the brain laid him dead. The men in the rear pressed forward to support their comrades, when a hot fire was suddenly opened on them from the forest along their right flank. Then there was a panic; some fled outright, and the whole column recoiled. The van now became the rear, and all the force of the enemy rushed upon it, shouting and screeching. There was a moment of total confusion; but a part of Williams's regiment rallied under command of Whiting, and covered the retreat, fighting behind trees like Indians, and firing and falling back by turns, bravely aided by some of the Mohawks and by a detachment which Johnson sent to their aid. "And a very handsome retreat they made," writes Pomeroy; "and so continued till they came within about three quarters of a mile of our camp. This was the last fire our men gave our enemies, which killed great numbers of them; they were seen to drop as pigeons." So ended the fray long known in New England fireside story as the "bloody morning scout." Dieskau now ordered a halt, and sounded his trumpets to collect his scattered men. His Indians, however, were sullen and unmanageable, and the Canadians also showed signs of wavering. The veteran who commanded them all, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, had been killed. At length they 304 V1 were persuaded to move again, the regulars leading the way. About an hour after Williams and his men had begun their march, a distant rattle of musketry was heard at the camp; and as it grew nearer and louder, the listeners knew that their comrades were on the retreat. Then, at the eleventh hour, preparations were begun for defence. A sort of barricade was made along the front of the camp, partly of wagons, and partly of inverted bateaux, but chiefly of the trunks of trees hastily hewn down in the neighboring forest and laid end to end in a single row. The line extended from the southern slopes of the hill on the left across a tract of rough ground to the marshes on the right. The forest, choked with bushes and clumps of rank ferns, was within a few yards of the barricade, and there was scarcely time to hack away the intervening thickets. Three cannon were planted to sweep the road that descended through the pines, and another was dragged up to the ridge of the hill. The defeated party began to come in; first, scared fugitives both white and red; then, gangs of men bringing the wounded; and at last, an hour and a half after the first fire was heard, the main detachment was seen marching in compact bodies down the road. Five hundred men were detailed to guard the flanks of the camp. The rest stood behind the wagons or lay flat behind the logs and inverted bateaux, the Massachusetts men on the right, and the Connecticut men on the left. Besides 305 V1 Indians, this actual fighting force was between sixteen and seventeen hundred rustics, very few of whom had been under fire before that morning. They were hardly at their posts when they saw ranks of white-coated soldiers moving down the road, and bayonets that to them seemed innumerable glittering between the boughs. At the same time a terrific burst of war-whoops rose along the front; and, in the words of Pomeroy, "the Canadians and Indians, helter-skelter, the woods full of them, came running with undaunted courage right down the hill upon us, expecting to make us flee." [310] Some of the men grew uneasy; while the chief officers, sword in hand, threatened instant death to any who should stir from their posts. [311] If Dieskau had made an assault at that instant, there could be little doubt of the result. [310] Seth Pomeroy to his Wife, 10 Sept. 1755. [311] Dr. Perez Marsh to William Williams, 25 Sept. 1755. This he well knew; but he was powerless. He had his small force of regulars well in hand; but the rest, red and white, were beyond control, scattering through the woods and swamps, shouting, yelling, and firing from behind trees. The regulars advanced with intrepidity towards the camp where the trees were thin, deployed, and fired by platoons, till Captain Eyre, who commanded the artillery, opened on them with grape, broke their ranks, and compelled them to take to cover. The fusillade was now general on both sides, and soon grew furious. "Perhaps," Seth Pomeroy wrote to his wife, two days after, "the 306 V1 hailstones from heaven were never much thicker than their bullets came; but, blessed be God! that did not in the least daunt or disturb us." Johnson received a flesh-wound in the thigh, and spent the rest of the day in his tent. Lyman took command; and it is a marvel that he escaped alive, for he was four hours in the heat of the fire, directing and animating the men. "It was the most awful day my eyes ever beheld," wrote Surgeon Williams to his wife; "there seemed to be nothing but thunder and lightning and perpetual pillars of smoke." To him, his colleague Doctor Pynchon, one assistant, and a young student called "Billy," fell the charge of the wounded of his regiment. "The bullets flew about our ears all the time of dressing them; so we thought best to leave our tent and retire a few rods behind the shelter of a log-house." On the adjacent hill stood one Blodget, who seems to have been a sutler, watching, as well as bushes, trees, and smoke would let him, the progress of the fight, of which he soon after made and published a curious bird's-eye view. As the wounded men were carried to the rear, the wagoners about the camp took their guns and powder-horns, and joined in the fray. A Mohawk, seeing one of these men still unarmed, leaped over the barricade, tomahawked the nearest Canadian, snatched his gun, and darted back unhurt. The brave savage found no imitators among his tribesmen, most of whom did nothing but utter a few war-whoops, saying that they had come to see their 307 V1 English brothers fight. Some of the French Indians opened a distant flank fire from the high ground beyond the swamp on the right, but were driven off by a few shells dropped among them. Dieskau had directed his first attack against the left and centre of Johnson's position. Making no impression here, he tried to force the right, where lay the regiments of Titcomb, Ruggles, and Williams. The fire was hot for about an hour. Titcomb was shot dead, a rod in front of the barricade, firing from behind a tree like a common soldier. At length Dieskau, exposing himself within short range of the English line, was hit in the leg. His adjutant, Montreuil, himself wounded, came to his aid, and was washing the injured limb with brandy, when the unfortunate commander was again hit in the knee and thigh. He seated himself behind a tree, while the Adjutant called two Canadians to carry him to the rear. One of them was instantly shot down. Montreuil took his place; but Dieskau refused to be moved, bitterly denounced the Canadians and Indians, and ordered the Adjutant to leave him and lead the regulars in a last effort against the camp. It was too late. Johnson's men, singly or in small squads, already crossing their row of logs; and in a few moments the whole dashed forward with a shout, falling upon the enemy with hatchets and the butts of their guns. The French and their allies fled. The wounded General still sat helpless by the tree, when he saw a 308 V1 soldier aiming at him. He signed to the man not to fire; but he pulled trigger, shot him across the hips, leaped upon him, and ordered him in French to surrender. "I said," writes Dieskau, "'You rascal, why did you fire? You see a man lying in his blood on the ground, and you shoot him!' He answered: 'How did I know that you had not got a pistol? I had rather kill the devil than have the devil kill me.' 'You are a Frenchman?' I asked. 'Yes,' he replied; 'it is more than ten years since I left Canada;' whereupon several others fell on me and stripped me. I told them to carry me to their general, which they did. On learning who I was, he sent for surgeons, and, though wounded himself, refused all assistance till my wounds were dressed." [312] [312] Dialogue entre le Maréchal de Saxe et le Baron de Dieskau aux Champs élysées. This paper is in the Archives de la Guerre, and was evidently written or inspired by Dieskau himself. In spite of its fanciful form, it is a sober statement of the events of the campaign. There is a translation of it in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 340. It was near five o'clock when the final rout took place. Some time before, several hundred of the Canadians and Indians had left the field and returned to the scene of the morning fight, to plunder and scalp the dead. They were resting themselves near a pool in the forest, close beside the road, when their repose was interrupted by a volley of bullets. It was fired by a scouting party from Fort Lyman, chiefly backwoodsmen, under Captains Folsom and McGinnis. The assailants were greatly outnumbered; but after a hard fight the Canadians and Indians 309 V1 broke and fled. McGinnis was mortally wounded. He continued to give orders till the firing was over; then fainted, and was carried, dying, to the camp. The bodies of the slain, according to tradition, were thrown into the pool, which bears to this day the name of Bloody Pond. The various bands of fugitives rejoined each other towards night, and encamped in the forest; then made their way round the southern shoulder of French Mountain, till, in the next evening, they reached their canoes. Their plight was deplorable; for they had left their knapsacks behind, and were spent with fatigue and famine. Meanwhile their captive general was not yet out of danger. The Mohawks were furious at their losses in the ambush of the morning, and above all at the death of Hendrick. Scarcely were Dieskau's wounds dressed, when several of them came into the tent. There was a long and angry dispute in their own language between them and Johnson, after which they went out very sullenly. Dieskau asked what they wanted. "What do they want?" returned Johnson. "To burn you, by God, eat you, and smoke you in their pipes, in revenge for three or four of their chiefs that were killed. But never fear; you shall be safe with me, or else they shall kill us both." [313] The Mohawks soon came back, and another talk ensued, excited at first, and then more calm; till at length 310 V1 the visitors, seemingly appeased, smiled, gave Dieskau their hands in sign of friendship, and quietly went out again. Johnson warned him that he was not yet safe; and when the prisoner, fearing that his presence might incommode his host, asked to be removed to another tent, a captain and fifty men were ordered to guard him. In the morning an Indian, alone and apparently unarmed, loitered about the entrance, and the stupid sentinel let him pass in. He immediately drew a sword from under a sort of cloak which he wore, and tried to stab Dieskau; but was prevented by the Colonel to whom the tent belonged, who seized upon him, took away his sword, and pushed him out. As soon as his wounds would permit, Dieskau was carried on a litter, strongly escorted, to Fort Lyman, whence he was sent to Albany, and afterwards to New York. He is profuse in expressions of gratitude for the kindness shown him by the colonial officers, and especially by Johnson. Of the provincial soldiers he remarked soon after the battle that in the morning they fought like good boys, about noon like men, and in the afternoon like devils. [314] In the spring of 1757 he sailed for England, and was for a time at Falmouth; whence Colonel Matthew Sewell, fearing that he might see and learn too much, wrote to the Earl of Holdernesse: "The Baron has great penetration and quickness of apprehension. His long service under Marshal Saxe renders him a man of real consequence, to be 311 V1 cautiously observed. His circumstances deserve compassion, for indeed they are very melancholy, and I much doubt of his being ever perfectly cured." He was afterwards a long time at Bath, for the benefit of the waters. In 1760 the famous Diderot met him at Paris, cheerful and full of anecdote, though wretchedly shattered by his wounds. He died a few years later. [313] See the story as told by Dieskau to the celebrated Diderot, at Paris, in 1760. Mémoires de Diderot, I. 402 (1830). Compare N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 343. [314] Dr. Perez Marsh to William Williams, 25 Sept. 1755. On the night after the battle the yeomen warriors felt the truth of the saying that, next to defeat, the saddest thing is victory. Comrades and friends by scores lay scattered through the forest. As soon as he could snatch a moment's leisure, the overworked surgeon sent the dismal tidings to his wife: "My dear brother Ephraim was killed by a ball through his head; poor brother Josiah's wound I fear will prove mortal; poor Captain Hawley is yet alive, though I did not think he would live two hours after bringing him in." Daniel Pomeroy was shot dead; and his brother Seth wrote the news to his wife Rachel, who was just delivered of a child: "Dear Sister, this brings heavy tidings; but let not your heart sink at the news, though it be your loss of a dear husband. Monday the eighth instant was a memorable day; and truly you may say, had not the Lord been on our side, we must all have been swallowed up. My brother, being one that went out in the first engagement, received a fatal shot through the middle of the head." Seth Pomeroy found a moment to write also to his own wife, whom he tells that another attack is expected; 312 V1 adding, in quaintly pious phrase: "But as God hath begun to show mercy, I hope he will go on to be gracious." Pomeroy was employed during the next few days with four hundred men in what he calls "the melancholy piece of business" of burying the dead. A letter-writer of the time does not approve what was done on this occasion. "Our people," he says, "not only buried the French dead, but buried as many of them as might be without the knowledge of our Indians, to prevent their being scalped. This I call an excess of civility;" his reason being that Braddock's dead soldiers had been left to the wolves. The English loss in killed, wounded, and missing was two hundred and sixty-two; [315] and that of the French by their own account, two hundred and twenty-eight, [316]—a somewhat modest result of five hours' fighting. The English loss was chiefly in the ambush of the morning, where the killed greatly outnumbered the wounded, because those who fell and could not be carried away were tomahawked by Dieskau's Indians. In the fight at the camp, both Indians and Canadians kept themselves so well under cover that it was very difficult for the New England men to pick them off, while they on their part lay close behind their row of logs. On the French side, the regular officers and troops bore the brunt of the battle 313 V1 and suffered the chief loss, nearly all of the former and nearly half of the latter being killed or wounded. [315] Return of Killed, Wounded, and Missing at the Battle of Lake George. [316] Doreil au Ministre, 20 Oct. 1755. Surgeon Williams gives the English loss as two hundred and sixteen killed, and ninety-six wounded. Pomeroy thinks that the French lost four or five hundred. Johnson places their loss at four hundred. Johnson did not follow up his success. He says that his men were tired. Yet five hundred of them had stood still all day, and boats enough for their transportation were lying on the beach. Ten miles down the lake, a path led over a gorge of the mountains to South Bay, where Dieskau had left his canoes and provisions. It needed but a few hours to reach and destroy them; but no such attempt was made. Nor, till a week after, did Johnson send out scouts to learn the strength of the enemy at Ticonderoga. Lyman strongly urged him to make an effort to seize that important pass; but Johnson thought only of holding his own position. "I think," he wrote, "we may expect very shortly a more formidable attack." He made a solid breastwork to defend his camp; and as reinforcements arrived, set them at building a fort on a rising ground by the lake. It is true that just after the battle he was deficient in stores, and had not bateaux enough to move his whole force. It is true, also, that he was wounded, and that he was too jealous of Lyman to delegate the command to him; and so the days passed till, within a fortnight, his nimble enemy were entrenched at Ticonderoga in force enough to defy him. The Crown Point expedition was a failure disguised under an incidental success. The northern provinces, especially Massachusetts and Connecticut, 314 V1 did what they could to forward it, and after the battle sent a herd of raw recruits to the scene of action. Shirley wrote to Johnson from Oswego; declared that his reasons for not advancing were insufficient, and urged him to push for Ticonderoga at once. Johnson replied that he had not wagons enough, and that his troops were ill-clothed, ill-fed, discontented, insubordinate, and sickly. He complained that discipline was out of the question, because the officers were chosen by popular election; that many of them were no better than the men, unfit for command, and like so many "heads of a mob." [317] The reinforcements began to come in, till, in October, there were thirty-six hundred men in the camp; and as most of them wore summer clothing and had but one thin domestic blanket, they were half frozen in the chill autumn nights. [317] Shirley to Johnson, 19 Sept. 1755. Ibid., 24 Sept. 1755. Johnson to Shirley, 22 Sept. 1755. Johnson to Phipps, 10 Oct. 1755 (Massachusetts Archives). Johnson called a council of war; and as he was suffering from inflamed eyes, and was still kept in his tent by his wound, he asked Lyman to preside,—not unwilling, perhaps, to shift the responsibility upon him. After several sessions and much debate, the assembled officers decided that it was inexpedient to proceed. [318] Yet the army lay more than a month longer at the lake, while the disgust of the men increased daily under the rains, frosts, and snows of a dreary November. On the twenty-second, Chandler, chaplain of one of the 315 V1 Massachusetts regiments, wrote in the interleaved almanac that served him as a diary: "The men just ready to mutiny. Some clubbed their firelocks and marched, but returned back. Very rainy night. Miry water standing the tents. Very distressing time among the sick." The men grew more and more unruly, and went off in squads without asking leave. A difficult question arose: Who should stay for the winter to garrison the new forts, and who should command them? It was settled at last that a certain number of soldiers from each province should be assigned to this ungrateful service, and that Massachusetts should have the first officer, Connecticut the second, and New York the third. Then the camp broke up. "Thursday the 27th," wrote the chaplain in his almanac, "we set out about ten of the clock, marched in a body, about three thousand, the wagons and baggage in the centre, our colonel much insulted by the way." The soldiers dispersed to their villages and farms, where in blustering winter nights, by the blazing logs of New England hearthstones, they told their friends and neighbors the story of the campaign. [318] Reports of Council of War, 11-21 Oct. 1755. The profit of it fell to Johnson. If he did not gather the fruits of victory, at least he reaped its laurels. He was a courtier in his rough way. He had changed the name of Lac St. Sacrement to Lake George, in compliment to the King. He now changed that of Fort Lyman to Fort Edward, in compliment to one of the King's grandsons; and, in compliment to another, called his new fort at the lake, 316 V1 William Henry. Of General Lyman he made no mention in his report of the battle, and his partisans wrote letters traducing that brave officer; though Johnson is said to have confessed in private that he owed him the victory. He himself found no lack of eulogists; and, to quote the words of an able but somewhat caustic and prejudiced opponent, "to the panegyrical pen of his secretary, Mr. Wraxall, and the sic volo sic jubeo of Lieutenant-Governor Delancey, is to be ascribed that mighty renown which echoed through the colonies, reverberated to Europe, and elevated a raw, inexperienced youth into a kind of second Marlborough." [319] Parliament gave him five thousand pounds, and the King made him a baronet. [319] Review of Military Operations in North America, in a Letter to a Nobleman (ascribed to William Livingston). On the Battle of Lake George a mass of papers will be found in the N. Y. Col. Docs., Vols. VI. and X. Those in Vol. VI., taken chiefly from the archives of New York, consist of official and private letters, reports, etc., on the English side. Those in Vol. X. are drawn chiefly from the archives of the French War Department, and include the correspondence of Dieskau and his adjutant Montreuil. I have examined most of them in the original. Besides these I have obtained from the Archives de la Marine and other sources a number of important additional papers, which have never been printed, including Vaudreuil's reports to the Minister of War, and his strictures on Dieskau, whom he accuses of disobeying orders by dividing his force; also the translation of an English journal of the campaign found in the pocket of a captured officer, and a long account of the battle sent by Bigot to the Minister of Marine, 4 Oct. 1755. I owe to the kindness of Theodore Pomeroy, Esq., a copy of the Journal of Lieutenant-Colonel Seth Pomeroy, whose letters are full of interest; as are those of Surgeon Williams, from the collection of William L. Stone, Esq. The papers of Colonel Israel Williams, in the Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, contain many other curious letters relating to the campaign, extracts from some of which are given in the text. One of the most curious records of the battle is A Prospective-Plan of the Battle near Lake George, with an Explanation 317 V1 thereof, containing a full, though short, History of that important Affair, by Samuel Blodget, occasionally at the Camp when the Battle was fought. It is an engraving, printed at Boston soon after the fight, of which it gives a clear idea. Four years after, Blodget opened a shop in Boston, where, as appears by his advertisements in the newspapers, he sold "English Goods, also English Hatts, etc." The engraving is reproduced in the Documentary History of New York, IV., and elsewhere. The Explanation thereof is only to be found complete in the original. This, as well as the anonymous Second Letter to a Friend, also printed at Boston in 1755, is excellent for the information it gives as to the condition of the ground where the conflict took place, and the position of the combatants. The unpublished Archives of Massachusetts; the correspondence of Sir William Johnson; the Review of Military Operations in North America; Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, III.; and Hoyt, Antiquarian Researches on Indian Wars,—should also be mentioned. Dwight and Hoyt drew their information from aged survivors of the battle. I have repeatedly examined the localities. In the odd effusion of the colonial muse called Tilden's Poems, chiefly to Animate and Rouse the Soldiers, printed 1756, is a piece styled The Christian Hero, or New England's Triumphs, beginning with the invocation,— "O Heaven, indulge my feeble Muse, Teach her what numbers for to choose!" and containing the following stanza:— "Their Dieskau we from them detain, While Canada aloud complains And counts the numbers of their slain And makes a dire complaint; The Indians to their demon gods; And with the French there's little odds, While images receive their nods, Invoking rotten saints." CHAPTER X. 1755, 1756. SHIRLEY. BORDER WAR. The Niagara Campaign ? Albany ? March to Oswego ? Difficulties ? The Expedition abandoned ? Shirley and Johnson ? Results of the Campaign ? The Scourge of the Border ? Trials of Washington ? Misery of the Settlers ? Horror of their Situation ? Philadelphia and the Quakers ? Disputes with the Penns ? Democracy and Feudalism ? Pennsylvanian Population ? Appeals from the Frontier ? Quarrel of Governor and Assembly ? Help refused ? Desperation of the Borderers ? Fire and Slaughter ? The Assembly alarmed ? They pass a mock Militia Law ? They are forced to yield. The capture of Niagara was to finish the work of the summer. This alone would have gained for England the control of the valley of the Ohio, and made Braddock's expedition superfluous. One marvels at the short-sightedness, the dissensions, the apathy which had left this key of the interior so long in the hands of France without an effort to wrest it from her. To master Niagara would be to cut the communications of Canada with the whole system of French forts and settlements in the West, and leave them to perish like limbs of a girdled tree. Major-General Shirley, in the flush of his new martial honors, was to try his prentice hand at the work. The lawyer-soldier could plan a campaign boldly and well. It remained to see how 319 V1 he would do his part towards executing it. In July he arrived at Albany, the starting-point of his own expedition as well as that of Johnson. This little Dutch city was an outpost of civilization. The Hudson, descending from the northern wilderness, connected it with the lakes and streams that formed the thoroughfare to Canada; while the Mohawk, flowing from the west, was a liquid pathway to the forest homes of the Five Nations. Before the war was over, a little girl, Anne MacVicar, daughter of a Highland officer, was left at Albany by her father, and spent several years there in the house of Mrs. Schuyler, aunt of General Schuyler of the Revolution. Long after, married and middle-aged, she wrote down her recollections of the place,—the fort on the hill behind; the great street, grassy and broad, that descended thence to the river, with market, guard-house, town-hall, and two churches in the middle, and rows of quaint Dutch-built houses on both sides, each detached from its neighbors, each with its well, garden, and green, and its great overshadowing tree. Before every house was a capacious porch, with seats where the people gathered in the summer twilight; old men at one door, matrons at another, young men and girls mingling at a third; while the cows with their tinkling bells came from the common at the end of the town, each stopping to be milked at the door of its owner; and children, porringer in hand, sat on the steps, watching the process and waiting their evening meal. 320 V1 Such was the quiet picture painted on the memory of Anne MacVicar, and reproduced by the pen of Mrs. Anne Grant. [320] The patriarchal, semi-rural town had other aspects, not so pleasing. The men were mainly engaged in the fur-trade, sometimes legally with the Five Nations, and sometimes illegally with the Indians of Canada,—an occupation which by no means tends to soften the character. The Albany Dutch traders were a rude, hard race, loving money, and not always scrupulous as to the means of getting it. Coming events, too, were soon to have their effect on this secluded community. Regiments, red and blue, trumpets, drums, banners, artillery trains, and all the din of war transformed its peaceful streets, and brought some attaint to domestic morals hitherto commendable; for during the next five years Albany was to be the principal base of military operations on the continent. [320] Memoirs of an American Lady (Mrs. Schuyler), Chap. VI. A genuine picture of colonial life, and a charming book, though far from being historically trustworthy. Compare the account of Albany in Kalm, II. 102. Shirley had left the place, and was now on his way up the Mohawk. His force, much smaller than at first intended, consisted of the New Jersey regiment, which mustered five hundred men, known as the Jersey Blues, and of the fiftieth and fifty-first regiments, called respectively Shirley's and Pepperell's. These, though paid by the King and counted as regulars, were in fact raw provincials, just raised in the colonies, and wearing their gay uniforms with an awkward, unaccustomed air. 321 V1 How they gloried in them may be gathered from a letter of Sergeant James Gray, of Pepperell's, to his brother John: "I have two Holland shirts, found me by the King, and two pair of shoes and two pair of worsted stockings; a good silver-laced hat (the lace I could sell for four dollars); and my clothes is as fine scarlet broadcloth as ever you did see. A sergeant here in the King's regiment is counted as good as an ensign with you; and one day in every week we must have our hair or wigs powdered." [321] Most of these gorgeous warriors were already on their way to Oswego, their first destination. [321] James Gray to John Gray, 11 July, 1755. Shirley followed, embarking at the Dutch village of Schenectady, and ascending the Mohawk with about two hundred of the so-called regulars in bateaux. They passed Fort Johnson, the two villages of the Mohawks, and the Palatine settlement of German Flats; left behind the last trace of civilized man, rowed sixty miles through a wilderness, and reached the Great Carrying Place, which divided the waters that flow to the Hudson from those that flow to Lake Ontario. Here now stands the city which the classic zeal of its founders has adorned with the name of Rome. Then all was swamp and forest, traversed by a track that led to Wood Creek,—which is not to be confounded with the Wood Creek of Lake Champlain. Thither the bateaux were dragged on sledges and launched on the dark and tortuous stream, which, fed by a decoction of forest leaves 322 V1 that oozed from the marshy shores, crept in shadow through depths of foliage, with only a belt of illumined sky gleaming between the jagged tree-tops. Tall and lean with straining towards the light, their rough, gaunt stems trickling with perpetual damps, stood on either hand the silent hosts of the forest. The skeletons of their dead, barkless, blanched, and shattered, strewed the mudbanks and shallows; others lay submerged, like bones of drowned mammoths, thrusting lank, white limbs above the sullen water; and great trees, entire as yet, were flung by age or storms athwart the current,—a bristling barricade of matted boughs. There was work for the axe as well as for the oar; till at length Lake Oneida opened before them, and they rowed all day over its sunny breast, reached the outlet, and drifted down the shallow eddies of the Onondaga, between walls of verdure, silent as death, yet haunted everywhere with ambushed danger. It was twenty days after leaving Schenectady when they neared the mouth of the river; and Lake Ontario greeted them, stretched like a sea to the pale brink of the northern sky, while on the bare hill at their left stood the miserable little fort of Oswego. Shirley's whole force soon arrived; but not the needful provisions and stores. The machinery of transportation and the commissariat was in the bewildered state inevitable among a peaceful people at the beginning of a war; while the news of Braddock's defeat produced such an effect on 323 V1 the boatmen and the draymen at the carrying-places, that the greater part deserted. Along with these disheartening tidings, Shirley learned the death of his eldest son, killed at the side of Braddock. He had with him a second son, Captain John Shirley, a vivacious young man, whom his father and his father's friends in their familiar correspondence always called "Jack." John Shirley's letters give a lively view of the situation. "I have sat down to write to you,"—thus he addresses Governor Morris, of Pennsylvania, who seems to have had a great liking for him,—"because there is an opportunity of sending you a few lines; and if you will promise to excuse blots, interlineations, and grease (for this is written in the open air, upon the head of a pork-barrel, and twenty people about me), I will begin another half-sheet. We are not more than about fifteen hundred men fit for duty; but that, I am pretty sure, if we can go in time in our sloop, schooner, row-galleys, and whale-boats, will be sufficient to take Frontenac; after which we may venture to go upon the attack of Niagara, but not before. I have not the least doubt with myself of knocking down both these places yet this fall, if we can get away in a week. If we take or destroy their two vessels at Frontenac, and ruin their harbor there, and destroy the two forts of that and Niagara, I shall think we have done great things. Nobody holds it out better than my father and myself. We shall all of us relish a good house over our heads, being all encamped, 324 V1 except the General and some few field-officers, who have what are called at Oswego houses; but they would in other countries be called only sheds, except the fort, where my father is. Adieu, dear sir; I hope my next will be directed from Frontenac. Yours most affectionately, John Shirley." [322] [322] The young author of this letter was, like his brother, a victim of the war. "Permit me, good sir, to offer you my hearty condolence upon the death of my friend Jack, whose worth I admired, and feel for him more than I can express…. Few men of his age had so many friends." Governor Morris to Shirley, 27 Nov. 1755. "My heart bleeds for Mr. Shirley. He must be overwhelmed with Grief when he hears of Capt. John Shirley's Death, of which I have an Account by the last Post from New York, where he died of a Flux and Fever that he had contracted at Oswego. The loss of Two Sons in one Campaign scarcely admits of Consolation. I feel the Anguish of the unhappy Father, and mix my Tears very heartily with his. I have had an intimate Acquaintance with Both of Them for many Years, and know well their inestimable Value." Morris to Dinwiddie, 29 Nov. 1755. Fort Frontenac lay to the northward, fifty miles or more across the lake. Niagara lay to the westward, at the distance of four or five days by boat or canoe along the south shore. At Frontenac there was a French force of fourteen hundred regulars and Canadians. [323] They had vessels and canoes to cross the lake and fall upon Oswego as soon as Shirley should leave it to attack Niagara; for Braddock's captured papers had revealed to them the English plan. If they should take it, Shirley would be cut off from his supplies and placed in desperate jeopardy, with the enemy in his rear. Hence it is that John Shirley insists on taking Frontenac before attempting Niagara. But the task was not easy; for the French force 325 V1 at the former place was about equal in effective strength to that of the English at Oswego. At Niagara, too, the French had, at the end of August, nearly twelve hundred Canadians and Indians from Fort Duquesne and the upper lakes. [324] Shirley was but imperfectly informed by his scouts of the unexpected strength of the opposition that awaited him; but he knew enough to see that his position was a difficult one. His movement on Niagara was stopped, first by want of provisions, and secondly because he was checkmated by the troops at Frontenac. He did not despair. Want of courage was not among his failings, and he was but too ready to take risks. He called a council of officers, told them that the total number of men fit for duty was thirteen hundred and seventy-six, and that as soon as provisions enough should arrive he would embark for Niagara with six hundred soldiers and as many Indians as possible, leaving the rest to defend Oswego against the expected attack from Fort Frontenac. [325] [323] Bigot au Ministre, 27 Ao?t, 1755. [324] Bigot au Ministre, 5 Sept. 1755. [325] Minutes of a Council of War at Oswego, 18 Sept. 1755. "All I am uneasy about is our provisions," writes John Shirley to his friend Morris; "our men have been upon half allowance of bread these three weeks past, and no rum given to 'em. My father yesterday called all the Indians together and made 'em a speech on the subject of General Johnson's engagement, which he calculated to inspire them with a spirit of revenge." After the 326 V1 speech he gave them a bullock for a feast, which they roasted and ate, pretending that they were eating the Governor of Canada! Some provisions arriving, orders were given to embark on the next day; but the officers murmured their dissent. The weather was persistently bad, their vessels would not hold half the party, and the bateaux, made only for river navigation, would infallibly founder on the treacherous and stormy lake. "All the field-officers," says John Shirley, "think it too rash an attempt; and I have heard so much of it that I think it my duty to let my father know what I hear." Another council was called; and the General, reluctantly convinced of the danger, put the question whether to go or not. The situation admitted but one reply. The council was of opinion that for the present the enterprise was impracticable; that Oswego should be strengthened, more vessels built, and preparation made to renew the attempt as soon as spring opened. [326] All thoughts of active operations were now suspended, and during what was left of the season the troops exchanged the musket for the spade, saw, and axe. At the end of October, leaving seven hundred men at Oswego, Shirley returned to Albany, and narrowly escaped drowning on the way, while passing a rapid in a whale-boat, to try the fitness of that species of craft for river navigation. [327] [326] Minutes of a Council of War at Oswego, 27 Sept. 1755. [327] On the Niagara expedition, Braddock's Instructions to Major-General Shirley. Correspondence of Shirley, 1755. Conduct of Major-General Shirley (London, 1758). Letters of John Shirley in Pennsylvania Archives, II. Bradstreet to Shirley, 17 Aug. 1755. MSS. in Massachusetts Archives. Review of Military Operations in North America. Gentleman's Magazine, 1757, p. 73. London Magazine, 1759, p. 594. Trumbull, Hist. Connecticut, II. 370. 327 V1 Unfortunately for him, he had fallen out with Johnson, whom he had made what he was, but who now turned against him,—a seeming ingratitude not wholly unprovoked. Shirley had diverted the New Jersey regiment, destined originally for Crown Point, to his own expedition against Niagara. Naturally inclined to keep all the reins in his own hands, he had encroached on Johnson's new office of Indian superintendent, held conferences with the Five Nations, and employed agents of his own to deal with them. These agents were persons obnoxious to Johnson, being allied with the clique of Dutch traders at Albany, who hated him because he had supplanted them in the direction of Indian affairs; and in a violent letter to the Lords of Trade, he inveighs against their "licentious and abandoned proceedings," "villanous conduct," "scurrilous falsehoods," and "base and insolent behavior." [328] "I am considerable enough," he says, "to have enemies and to be envied;" [329] and he declares he has proof that Shirley told the Mohawks that he, Johnson, was an upstart of his creating, whom he had set up and could pull down. Again, he charges Shirley's agents with trying to "debauch the Indians from joining him;" while Shirley, on his side, retorts the same complaint against his accuser. [330] When, 328 V1 by the death of Braddock, Shirley became commander-in-chief, Johnson grew so restive at being subject to his instructions that he declined to hold the management of Indian affairs unless it was made independent of his rival. The dispute became mingled with the teapot-tempest of New York provincial politics. The Lieutenant-Governor, Delancey, a politician of restless ambition and consummate dexterity, had taken umbrage at Shirley, of whose rising honors, not borne with remarkable humility, he appears to have been jealous. Delancey had hitherto favored the Dutch faction in the Assembly, hostile to Johnson; but he now changed attitude, and joined hands with him against the object of their common dislike. The one was strong in the prestige of a loudly-trumpeted victory, and the other had means of influence over the Ministry. Their coalition boded ill to Shirley, and he soon felt its effects. [331] [328] Johnson to the Lords of Trade, 3 Sept. 1755. [329] Johnson to the Lords of Trade, 17 Jan. 1756. [330] John Shirley to Governor Morris, 12 Aug. 1755. [331] On this affair, see various papers in N. Y. Col. Docs., VI., VII. Smith, Hist. New York, Part II., Chaps. IV. V. Review of Military Operations in North America. Both Smith and Livingston, the author of the Review, were personally cognizant of the course of the dispute. The campaign was now closed,—a sufficiently active one, seeing that the two nations were nominally at peace. A disastrous rout on the Monongahela, failure at Niagara, a barren victory at Lake George, and three forts captured in Acadia, were the disappointing results on the part of England. Nor had her enemies cause to boast. The Indians, it is true, had won a battle for them: but they had suffered mortifying defeat from a raw 329 V1 militia; their general was a prisoner; and they had lost Acadia past hope. The campaign was over; but not its effects. It remains to see what befell from the rout of Braddock and the unpardonable retreat of Dunbar from the frontier which it was his duty to defend. Dumas had replaced Contrec?ur in the command of Fort Duquesne; and his first care was to set on the Western tribes to attack the border settlements. His success was triumphant. The Delawares and Shawanoes, old friends of the English, but for years past tending to alienation through neglect and ill-usage, now took the lead against them. Many of the Mingoes, or Five Nation Indians on the Ohio, also took up the hatchet, as did various remoter tribes. The West rose like a nest of hornets, and swarmed in fury against the English frontier. Such was the consequence of the defeat of Braddock aided by the skilful devices of the French commander. "It is by means such as I have mentioned," says Dumas, "varied in every form to suit the occasion, that I have succeeded in ruining the three adjacent provinces, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, driving off the inhabitants, and totally destroying the settlements over a tract of country thirty leagues wide, reckoning from the line of Fort Cumberland. M. de Contrec?ur had not been gone a week before I had six or seven different war-parties in the field at once, always accompanied by Frenchmen. Thus far, we have lost only two officers and a few soldiers; but the 330 V1 Indian villages are full of prisoners of every age and sex. The enemy has lost far more since the battle than on the day of his defeat." [332] [332] Dumas au Ministre, 24 Juillet, 1756. Dumas, required by the orders of his superiors to wage a detestable warfare against helpless settlers and their families, did what he could to temper its horrors, and enjoined the officers who went with the Indians to spare no effort to prevent them from torturing prisoners. [333] The attempt should be set down to his honor; but it did not avail much. In the record of cruelties committed this year on the borders, we find repeated instances of children scalped alive. "They kill all they meet," writes a French priest; "and after having abused the women and maidens, they slaughter or burn them." [334] [333] Mémoires de Famille de l'Abbé Casgrain, cited in Le Foyer Canadien, III. 26, where an extract is given from an order of Dumas to Baby, a Canadian officer. Orders of Contrec?ur and Ligneris to the same effect are also given. A similar order, signed by Dumas, was found in the pocket of Douville, an officer killed by the English on the Frontier. Writings of Washington, II. 137, note. [334] Rec. Claude Godefroy Cocquard, S. J., à son Frère, Mars (?), 1757. Washington was now in command of the Virginia regiment, consisting of a thousand men, raised afterwards to fifteen hundred. With these he was to protect a frontier of three hundred and fifty miles against more numerous enemies, who could choose their time and place of attack. His headquarters were at Winchester. His men were an ungovernable crew, enlisted chiefly on the turbulent border, and resenting every kind of discipline as levelling them with negroes; while the 331 V1 sympathizing House of Burgesses hesitated for months to pass any law for enforcing obedience, lest it should trench on the liberties of free white men. The service was to the last degree unpopular. "If we talk of obliging men to serve their country," wrote London Carter, "we are sure to hear a fellow mumble over the words 'liberty' and 'property' a thousand times." [335] The people, too, were in mortal fear of a slave insurrection, and therefore dared not go far from home. [336] Meanwhile a panic reigned along the border. Captain Waggoner, passing a gap in the Blue Ridge, could hardly make his way for the crowd of fugitives. "Every day," writes Washington, "we have accounts of such cruelties and barbarities as are shocking to human nature. It is not possible to conceive the situation and danger of this miserable country. Such numbers of French and Indians are all around that no road is safe." [335] Extract in Writings of Washington, II. 145, note. [336] Letters of Dinwiddie, 1755. These frontiers had always been at peace. No forts of refuge had thus far been built, and the scattered settlers had no choice but flight. Their first impulse was to put wife and children beyond reach of the tomahawk. As autumn advanced, the invading bands grew more and more audacious. Braddock had opened a road for them by which they could cross the mountains at their ease; and scouts from Fort Cumberland reported that this road was beaten by as many feet as when the English army passed last summer. Washington 332 V1 was beset with difficulties. Men and officers alike were unruly and mutinous. He was at once blamed for their disorders and refused the means of repressing them. Envious detractors published slanders against him. A petty Maryland captain, who had once had a commission from the King, refused to obey his orders, and stirred up factions among his officers. Dinwiddie gave him cold support. The temper of the old Scotchman, crabbed at the best, had been soured by disappointment, vexation, weariness, and ill-health. He had, besides, a friend and countryman, Colonel Innes, whom, had he dared, he would gladly have put in Washington's place. He was full of zeal in the common cause, and wanted to direct the defence of the borders from his house at Williamsburg, two hundred miles distant. Washington never hesitated to obey; but he accompanied his obedience by a statement of his own convictions and his reasons for them, which, though couched in terms the most respectful, galled his irascible chief. The Governor acknowledged his merit; but bore him no love, and sometimes wrote to him in terms which must have tried his high temper to the utmost. Sometimes, though rarely, he gave words to his emotion. "Your Honor," he wrote in April, "may see to what unhappy straits the distressed inhabitants and myself are reduced. I see inevitable destruction in so clear a light, that unless vigorous measures are taken by the Assembly, and speedy assistance sent from below, the poor inhabitants 333 V1 that are now in forts must unavoidably fall, while the remainder are flying before the barbarous foe. In fine, the melancholy situation of the people; the little prospect of assistance; the gross and scandalous abuse cast upon the officers in general, which is reflecting upon me in particular for suffering misconduct of such extraordinary kinds; and the distant prospect, if any, of gaining honor and reputation in the service,—cause me to lament the hour that gave me a commission, and would induce me at any other time than this of imminent danger to resign, without one hesitating moment, a command from which I never expect to reap either honor or benefit, but, on the contrary, have almost an absolute certainty of incurring displeasure below, while the murder of helpless families may be laid to my account here. "The supplicating tears of the women and moving petitions of the men melt me into such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare, if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people's ease." [337] [337] Writings of Washington, II. 143. In the turmoil around him, patriotism and public duty seemed all to be centred in the breast of one heroic youth. He was respected and generally beloved, but he did not kindle enthusiasm. His were the qualities of an unflagging courage, an all-enduring fortitude, and a deep trust. He showed an astonishing maturing of character, and the kind of mastery over others which begins 334 V1 with mastery over self. At twenty-four he was the foremost man, and acknowledged as such, along the whole long line of the western border. To feel the situation, the nature of these frontiers must be kept in mind. Along the skirts of the southern and middle colonies ran for six or seven hundred miles a loose, thin, dishevelled fringe of population, the half-barbarous pioneers of advancing civilization. Their rude dwellings were often miles apart. Buried in woods, the settler lived in an appalling loneliness. A low-browed cabin of logs, with moss stuffed in the chinks to keep out the wind, roof covered with sheets of bark, chimney of sticks and clay, and square holes closed by a shutter in place of windows; an unkempt matron, lean with hard work, and a brood of children with bare heads and tattered garments eked out by deerskin,—such was the home of the pioneer in the remoter and wilder districts. The scene around bore witness to his labors. It was the repulsive transition from savagery to civilization, from the forest to the farm. The victims of his axe lay strewn about the dismal "clearing" in a chaos of prostrate trunks, tangled boughs, and withered leaves, waiting for the fire that was to be the next agent in the process of improvement; while around, voiceless and grim, stood the living forest, gazing on the desolation, and biding its own day of doom. The owner of the cabin was miles away, hunting in the woods for the wild turkey and venison which were the chief food of himself and his 335 V1 family till the soil could be tamed into the bearing of crops. Towards night he returned; and as he issued from the forest shadows he saw a column of blue smoke rising quietly in the still evening air. He ran to the spot; and there, among the smouldering logs of his dwelling, lay, scalped and mangled, the dead bodies of wife and children. A war-party had passed that way. Breathless, palpitating, his brain on fire, he rushed through the thickening night to carry the alarm to his nearest neighbor, three miles distant. Such was the character and the fate of many incipient settlements of the utmost border. Farther east, they had a different aspect. Here, small farms with well-built log-houses, cattle, crops of wheat and Indian corn, were strung at intervals along some woody valley of the lower Alleghanies: yesterday a scene of hardy toil; to-day swept with destruction from end to end. There was no warning; no time for concert, perhaps none for flight. Sudden as the leaping panther, a pack of human wolves burst out of the forest, did their work, and vanished. If the country had been an open one, like the plains beyond the Mississippi, the situation would have been less frightful; but the forest was everywhere, rolled over hill and valley in billows of interminable green,—a leafy maze, a mystery of shade, a universal hiding-place, where murder might lurk unseen at its victim's side, and Nature seemed formed to nurse the mind with wild and 336 V1 dark imaginings. The detail of blood is set down in the untutored words of those who saw and felt it. But there was a suffering that had no record,—the mortal fear of women and children in the solitude of their wilderness homes, haunted, waking and sleeping, with nightmares of horror that were but the forecast of an imminent reality. The country had in past years been so peaceful, and the Indians so friendly, that many of the settlers, especially on the Pennsylvanian border, had no arms, and were doubly in need of help from the Government. In Virginia they had it, such as it was. In Pennsylvania they had for months none whatever; and the Assembly turned a deaf ear to their cries. Far to the east, sheltered from danger, lay staid and prosperous Philadelphia, the home of order and thrift. It took its stamp from the Quakers, its original and dominant population, set apart from the other colonists not only in character and creed, but in the outward symbols of a peculiar dress and a daily sacrifice of grammar on the altar of religion. The even tenor of their lives counteracted the effects of climate, and they are said to have been perceptibly more rotund in feature and person than their neighbors. Yet, broad and humanizing as was their faith, they were capable of extreme bitterness towards opponents, clung tenaciously to power, and were jealous for the ascendency of their sect, which had begun to show signs of wavering. On other sects they looked askance; and regarded the 337 V1 Presbyterians in particular with a dislike which in moments of crisis rose to detestation. [338] They held it sin to fight, and above all to fight against Indians. [338] See a crowd of party pamphlets, Quaker against Presbyterian, which appeared at Philadelphia in 1764, abusively acrimonious on both sides. Here was one cause of military paralysis. It was reinforced by another. The old standing quarrel between governor and assembly had grown more violent than ever; and this as a direct consequence of the public distress, which above all things demanded harmony. The dispute turned this time on a single issue,—that of the taxation of the proprietary estates. The estates in question consisted of vast tracts of wild land, yielding no income, and at present to a great extent worthless, being overrun by the enemy. [339] The Quaker Assembly had refused to protect them; and on one occasion had rejected an offer of the proprietaries to join them in paying the cost of their defence. [340] But though they would not defend the land, they insisted on taxing it; and farther insisted that the taxes upon it should be laid by the provincial assessors. By a law of the province, these assessors were chosen by popular vote; and in consenting to this law, the proprietaries had expressly provided that their estates 338 V1 should be exempted from all taxes to be laid by officials in whose appointment they had no voice.[341] Thomas and Richard Penn, the present proprietaries, had debarred their deputy, the Governor, both by the terms of his commission and by special instruction, from consenting to such taxation, and had laid him under heavy bonds to secure his obedience. Thus there was another side to the question than that of the Assembly; though our American writers have been slow to acknowledge it. [339] The productive estates of the proprietaries were taxed through the tenants. [340] The proprietaries offered to contribute to the cost of building and maintaining a fort on the spot where the French soon after built Fort Duquesne. This plan, vigorously executed, would have saved the province from a deluge of miseries. One of the reasons assigned by the Assembly for rejecting it was that it would irritate the enemy. See supra, p. 60. [341] A Brief View of the Conduct of Pennsylvania for the year 1755. Benjamin Franklin was leader in the Assembly and shared its views. The feudal proprietorship of the Penn family was odious to his democratic nature. It was, in truth, a pestilent anomaly, repugnant to the genius of the people; and the disposition and character of the present proprietaries did not tend to render it less vexatious. Yet there were considerations which might have tempered the impatient hatred with which the colonists regarded it. The first proprietary, William Penn, had used his feudal rights in the interest of a broad liberalism; and through them had established the popular institutions and universal tolerance which made Pennsylvania the most democratic province in America, and nursed the spirit of liberty which now revolted against his heirs. The one absorbing passion of Pennsylvania was resistance to their deputy, the Governor. The badge of feudalism, though light, was insufferably irritating; and the sons of William Penn were moreover detested 339 V1 by the Quakers as renegades from the faith of their father. Thus the immediate political conflict engrossed mind and heart; and in the rancor of their quarrel with the proprietaries, the Assembly forgot the French and Indians. In Philadelphia and the eastern districts the Quakers could ply their trades, tend their shops, till their farms, and discourse at their ease on the wickedness of war. The midland counties, too, were for the most part tolerably safe. They were occupied mainly by crude German peasants, who nearly equalled in number all the rest of the population, and who, gathered at the centre of the province, formed a mass politically indigestible. Translated from servitude to the most ample liberty, they hated the thought of military service, which reminded them of former oppression, cared little whether they lived under France or England, and, thinking themselves out of danger, had no mind to be taxed for the defence of others. But while the great body of the Germans were sheltered from harm, those of them who lived farther westward were not so fortunate. Here, mixed with Scotch Irish Presbyterians and Celtic Irish Catholics, they formed a rough border population, the discordant elements of which could rarely unite for common action; yet, though confused and disjointed, they were a living rampart to the rest of the colony. Against them raged the furies of Indian war; and, maddened with distress and terror, they cried aloud for help. 340 V1 Petition after petition came from the borders for arms and ammunition, and for a militia law to enable the people to organize and defend themselves. The Quakers resisted. "They have taken uncommon pains," writes Governor Morris to Shirley, "to prevent the people from taking up arms." [342] Braddock's defeat, they declared, was a just judgment on him and his soldiers for molesting the French in their settlements on the Ohio. [343] A bill was passed by the Assembly for raising fifty thousand pounds for the King's use by a tax which included the proprietary lands. The Governor, constrained by his instructions and his bonds, rejected it. "I can only say," he told them, "that I will readily pass a bill for striking any sum in paper money the present exigency may require, provided funds are established for sinking the same in five years." Messages long and acrimonious were exchanged between the parties. The Assembly, had they chosen, could easily have raised money enough by methods not involving the point in dispute; but they thought they saw in the crisis a means of forcing the Governor to yield. The Quakers had an alternative motive: if the Governor gave way, it was a political victory; if he stood fast, their non-resistance principles would triumph, and in this triumph their ascendency as a sect would be confirmed. The debate grew every day more bitter and unmannerly. The Governor could not yield; the Assembly would not. There 341 V1 was a complete deadlock. The Assembly requested the Governor "not to make himself the hateful instrument of reducing a free people to the abject state of vassalage." [344] As the raising of money and the control of its expenditure was in their hands; as he could not prorogue or dissolve them, and as they could adjourn on their own motion to such time as pleased them; as they paid his support, and could withhold it if he offended them,—which they did in the present case,—it seemed no easy task for him to reduce them to vassalage. "What must we do," pursued the Assembly, "to please this kind governor, who takes so much pains to render us obnoxious to our sovereign and odious to our fellow-subjects? If we only tell him that the difficulties he meets with are not owing to the causes he names,—which indeed have no existence,—but to his own want of skill and abilities for his station, he takes it extremely amiss, and says 'we forget all decency to those in authority.' We are apt to think there is likewise some decency due to the Assembly as a part of the government; and though we have not, like the Governor, had a courtly education, but are plain men, and must be very imperfect in our politeness, yet we think we have no chance of improving by his example." [345] Again, in another Message, the Assembly, with a thrust at Morris himself, tell him that colonial governors have often been "transient persons, of broken fortunes, greedy of money, destitute of all 342 V1 concern for those they govern, often their enemies, and endeavoring not only to oppress, but to defame them." [346] In such unseemly fashion was the battle waged. Morris, who was himself a provincial, showed more temper and dignity; though there was not too much on either side. "The Assembly," he wrote to Shirley, "seem determined to take advantage of the country's distress to get the whole power of government into their own hands." And the Assembly proclaimed on their part that the Governor was taking advantage of the country's distress to reduce the province to "Egyptian bondage." [342] Morris to Shirley, 16 Aug. 1755. [343] Morris to Sir Thomas Robinson, 28 Aug. 1755. [344] Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 584. [345] Message of the Assembly to the Governor, 29 Sept. 1755 (written by Franklin), in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 631, 632. [346] Writings of Franklin, III. 447. The Assembly at first suppressed this paper, but afterwards printed it. Petitions poured in from the miserable frontiersmen. "How long will those in power, by their quarrels, suffer us to be massacred?" demanded William Trent, the Indian trader. "Two and forty bodies have been buried on Patterson's Creek; and since they have killed more, and keep on killing." [347] Early in October news came that a hundred persons had been murdered near Fort Cumberland. Repeated tidings followed of murders on the Susquehanna; then it was announced that the war-parties had crossed that stream, and were at their work on the eastern side. Letter after letter came from the sufferers, bringing such complaints as this: "We are in as bad circumstances as ever any poor Christians were ever in; for the cries of widowers, widows, fatherless and motherless children, are enough to pierce the most hardest of 343 V1 hearts. Likewise it's a very sorrowful spectacle to see those that escaped with their lives with not a mouthful to eat, or bed to lie on, or clothes to cover their nakedness, or keep them warm, but all they had consumed into ashes. These deplorable circumstances cry aloud for your Honor's most wise consideration; for it is really very shocking for the husband to see the wife of his bosom her head cut off, and the children's blood drunk like water, by these bloody and cruel savages." [348] [347] Trent to James Burd, 4 Oct. 1755. [348] Adam Hoops to Governor Morris, 3 Nov. 1755. Morris was greatly troubled. "The conduct of the Assembly," he wrote to Shirley, "is to me shocking beyond parallel." "The inhabitants are abandoning their plantations, and we are in a dreadful situation," wrote John Harris from the east bank of the Susquehanna. On the next day he wrote again: "The Indians are cutting us off every day, and I had a certain account of about fifteen hundred Indians, besides French, being on their march against us and Virginia, and now close on our borders, their scouts scalping our families on our frontiers daily." The report was soon confirmed; and accounts came that the settlements in the valley called the Great Cove had been completely destroyed. All this was laid before the Assembly. They declared the accounts exaggerated, but confessed that outrages had been committed; hinted that the fault was with the proprietaries; and asked the Governor to explain why the Delawares and Shawanoes had become unfriendly. "If they have suffered wrongs," 344 V1 said the Quakers, "we are resolved to do all in our power to redress them, rather than entail upon ourselves and our posterity the calamities of a cruel Indian war." The Indian records were searched, and several days spent in unsuccessful efforts to prove fraud in a late land-purchase. Post after post still brought news of slaughter. The upper part of Cumberland County was laid waste. Edward Biddle wrote from Reading: "The drum is beating and bells ringing, and all the people under arms. This night we expect an attack. The people exclaim against the Quakers." "We seem to be given up into the hands of a merciless enemy," wrote John Elder from Paxton. And he declares that more than forty persons have been killed in that neighborhood, besides numbers carried off. Meanwhile the Governor and Assembly went on fencing with words and exchanging legal subtleties; while, with every cry of distress that rose from the west, each hoped that the other would yield. On the eighth of November the Assembly laid before Morris for his concurrence a bill for emitting bills of credit to the amount of sixty thousand pounds, to be sunk in four years by a tax including the proprietary estates. [349] "I shall not," he replied, "enter into a dispute whether the proprietaries ought to be taxed or not. It is sufficient for me that they have given me no power in that case; and I cannot think it consistent either with my duty or safety to exceed the powers of my 345 V1 commission, much less to do what that commission expressly prohibits." [350] He stretched his authority, however, so far as to propose a sort of compromise by which the question should be referred to the King; but they refused it; and the quarrel and the murders went on as before. "We have taken," said the Assembly, "every step in our power, consistent with the just rights of the freemen of Pennsylvania, for the relief of the poor distressed inhabitants; and we have reason to believe that they themselves would not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." [351] Then the borderers deserved neither; for, rather than be butchered, they would have let the proprietary lands lie untaxed for another year. "You have in all," said the Governor, "proposed to me five money bills, three of them rejected because contrary to royal instructions; the other two on account of the unjust method proposed for taxing the proprietary estate. If you are disposed to relieve your country, you have many other ways of granting money to which I shall have no objection. I shall put one proof more both of your sincerity and mine in our professions of regard for the public, by offering to agree to any bill in the present exigency which it is consistent with my duty to pass; lest, before our present disputes can be brought to an issue, we 346 V1 should neither have a privilege to dispute about, nor a country to dispute in." [352] They stood fast; and with an obstinacy for which the Quakers were chiefly answerable, insisted that they would give nothing, except by a bill taxing real estate, and including that of the proprietaries. [349] Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 682. [350] Message of the Governor to the Assembly, 8 Nov. 1755, in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 684. [351] Message of the Assembly to the Governor, 11 Nov. Ibid., VI. 692. The words are Franklin's. [352] Message of the Governor to the Assembly, 22 Nov. 1755, in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 714. But now the Assembly began to feel the ground shaking under their feet. A paper, called a "Representation," signed by some of the chief citizens, was sent to the House, calling for measures of defence. "You will forgive us, gentlemen," such was its language, "if we assume characters somewhat higher than that of humble suitors praying for the defence of our lives and properties as a matter of grace or favor on your side. You will permit us to make a positive and immediate demand of it." [353] This drove the Quakers mad. Preachers, male and female, harangued in the streets, denouncing the iniquity of war. Three of the sect from England, two women and a man, invited their brethren of the Assembly to a private house, and fervently exhorted them to stand firm. Some of the principal Quakers joined in an address to the House, in which they declared that any action on its part "inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess and have borne to the world appears to us in its consequences to be destructive of our religious liberties." [354] And they protested that they would rather "suffer" 347 V1 than pay taxes for such ends. Consistency, even in folly, has in it something respectable; but the Quakers were not consistent. A few years after, when heated with party-passion and excited by reports of an irruption of incensed Presbyterian borderers, some of the pacific sectaries armed for battle; and the streets of Philadelphia beheld the curious conjunction of musket and broad-brimmed hat. [355] [353] Pennsylvania Archives, II. 485. [354] Ibid., II. 487. [355] See Conspiracy of Pontiac, II. 143, 152. The mayor, aldermen, and common council next addressed the Assembly, adjuring them, "in the most solemn manner, before God and in the name of all our fellow-citizens," to provide for defending the lives and property of the people. [356] A deputation from a band of Indians on the Susquehanna, still friendly to the province, came to ask whether the English meant to fight or not; for, said their speaker, "if they will not stand by us, we will join the French." News came that the settlement of Tulpehocken, only sixty miles distant, had been destroyed; and then that the Moravian settlement of Gnadenhütten was burned, and nearly all its inmates massacred. Colonel William Moore wrote to the Governor that two thousand men were coming from Chester County to compel him and the Assembly to defend the province; and Conrad Weiser wrote that more were coming from Berks on the same errand. Old friends of the Assembly began to cry out against them. Even the Germans, hitherto their 348 V1 fast allies, were roused from their attitude of passivity, and four hundred of them came in procession to demand measures of war. A band of frontiersmen presently arrived, bringing in a wagon the bodies of friends and relatives lately murdered, displaying them at the doors of the Assembly, cursing the Quakers, and threatening vengeance. [357] [356] A Remonstrance, etc., in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 734. [357] Mante, 47; Entick, I. 377. Finding some concession necessary, the House at length passed a militia law,—probably the most futile ever enacted. It specially exempted the Quakers, and constrained nobody; but declared it lawful, for such as chose, to form themselves into companies and elect officers by ballot. The company officers thus elected might, if they saw fit, elect, also by ballot, colonels, lieutenant-colonels, and majors. These last might then, in conjunction with the Governor, frame articles of war; to which, however, no officer or man was to be subjected unless, after three days' consideration, he subscribed them in presence of a justice of the peace, and declared his willingness to be bound by them. [358] [358] This remarkable bill, drawn by Franklin, was meant for political rather than military effect. It was thought that Morris would refuse to pass it, and could therefore be accused of preventing the province from defending itself; but he avoided the snare by signing it. This mockery could not appease the people; the Assembly must raise money for men, arms, forts, and all the detested appliances of war. Defeat absolute and ignominious seemed hanging over the House, when an incident occurred which 349 V1 gave them a decent pretext for retreat. The Governor informed them that he had just received a letter from the proprietaries, giving to the province five thousand pounds sterling to aid in its defence, on condition that the money should be accepted as a free gift, and not as their proportion of any tax that was or might be laid by the Assembly. They had not learned the deplorable state of the country, and had sent the money in view of the defeat of Braddock and its probable consequences. The Assembly hereupon yielded, struck out from the bill before them the clause taxing the proprietary estates, and, thus amended, presented it to the Governor, who by his signature made it a law. [359] [359] Minutes of Council, 27 Nov. 1755. The House had failed to carry its point. The result disappointed Franklin, and doubly disappointed the Quakers. His maxim was: Beat the Governor first, and then beat the enemy; theirs: Beat the Governor, and let the enemy alone. The measures that followed, directed in part by Franklin himself, held the Indians in check, and mitigated the distress of the western counties; yet there was no safety for them throughout the two or three years when France was cheering on her hell-hounds against this tormented frontier. As in Pennsylvania, so in most of the other colonies there was conflict between assemblies and governors, to the unspeakable detriment of the public service. In New York, though here no obnoxious proprietary stood between the people 350 V1 and the Crown, the strife was long and severe. The point at issue was an important one,—whether the Assembly should continue their practice of granting yearly supplies to the Governor, or should establish a permanent fund for the ordinary expenses of government,—thus placing him beyond their control. The result was a victory for the Assembly. Month after month the great continent lay wrapped in snow. Far along the edge of the western wilderness men kept watch and ward in lonely blockhouses, or scoured the forest on the track of prowling war-parties. The provincials in garrison at forts Edward, William Henry, and Oswego dragged out the dreary winter; while bands of New England rangers, muffled against the piercing cold, caps of fur on their heads, hatchets in their belts, and guns in the mittened hands, glided on skates along the gleaming ice-floor of Lake George, to spy out the secrets of Ticonderoga, or seize some careless sentry to tell them tidings of the foe. Thus the petty war went on; but the big war was frozen into torpor, ready, like a hibernating bear, to wake again with the birds, the bees, and the flowers. [360] [360] On Pennsylvanian disputes,—A Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania (London, 1755). A Brief View of the Conduct of Pennsylvania (London, 1756). These are pamphlets on the Governor's side, by William Smith, D.D., Provost of the College of Pennsylvania. An Answer to an invidious Pamphlet, intituled a Brief State, etc. (London, 1755). Anonymous. A True and Impartial State of the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1759). Anonymous. The last two works attack the first two with great vehemence. The True and Impartial State is an able presentation of the case of the Assembly, omitting, however, essential facts. 351 V1 But the most elaborate work on the subject is the Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, inspired and partly written by Franklin. It is hotly partisan, and sometimes sophistical and unfair. Articles on the quarrel will also be found in the provincial newspapers, especially the New York Mercury, and in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1755 and 1756. But it is impossible to get any clear and just view of it without wading through the interminable documents concerning it in the Colonial Records of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Archives. CHAPTER XI. 1712-1756. MONTCALM. War declared ? State of Europe ? Pompadour and Maria Theresa ? Infatuation of the French Court ? The European War ? Montcalm to command in America ? His early Life ? An intractable Pupil ? His Marriage ? His Family ? His Campaigns ? Preparation for America ? His Associates ? Lévis, Bourlamaque, Bougainville ? Embarkation ? The Voyage ? Arrival ? Vaudreuil ? Forces of Canada ? Troops of the Line, Colony Troops, Militia, Indians ? The Military Situation ? Capture of Fort Bull ? Montcalm at Ticonderoga. On the eighteenth of May, 1756, England, after a year of open hostility, at length declared war. She had attacked France by land and sea, turned loose her ships to prey on French commerce, and brought some three hundred prizes into her ports. It was the act of a weak Government, supplying by spasms of violence what it lacked in considerate resolution. France, no match for her amphibious enemy in the game of marine depredation, cried out in horror; and to emphasize her complaints and signalize a pretended good faith which her acts had belied, ostentatiously released a British frigate captured by her cruisers. She in her turn declared war on the ninth of June: and now began the most terrible conflict of the eighteenth century; 353 V1 one that convulsed Europe and shook America, India, the coasts of Africa, and the islands of the sea. In Europe the ground was trembling already with the coming earthquake. Such smothered discords, such animosities, ambitions, jealousies, possessed the rival governments; such entanglements of treaties and alliances, offensive or defensive, open or secret,—that a blow at one point shook the whole fabric. Hanover, like the heel of Achilles, was the vulnerable part for which England was always trembling. Therefore she made a defensive treaty with Prussia, by which each party bound itself to aid the other, should its territory be invaded. England thus sought a guaranty against France, and Prussia against Russia. She had need. Her King, Frederic the Great, had drawn upon himself an avalanche. Three women—two empresses and a concubine—controlled the forces of the three great nations, Austria, Russia, and France; and they all hated him: Elizabeth of Russia, by reason of a distrust fomented by secret intrigue and turned into gall by the biting tongue of Frederic himself, who had jibed at her amours, compared her to Messalina, and called her "infame catin du Nord;" Maria Theresa of Austria, because she saw in him a rebellious vassal of the Holy Roman Empire, and, above all, because he had robbed her of Silesia; Madame de Pompadour, because when she sent him a message of compliment, he answered, "Je ne la connais pas," forbade his ambassador to visit her, and in his 354 V1 mocking wit spared neither her nor her royal lover. Feminine pique, revenge, or vanity had then at their service the mightiest armaments of Europe. The recovery of Silesia and the punishment of Frederic for his audacity in seizing it, possessed the mind of Maria Theresa with the force of a ruling passion. To these ends she had joined herself in secret league with Russia; and now at the prompting of her minister Kaunitz she courted the alliance of France. It was a reversal of the hereditary policy of Austria; joining hands with an old and deadly foe, and spurning England, of late her most trusty ally. But France could give powerful aid against Frederic; and hence Maria Theresa, virtuous as she was high-born and proud, stooped to make advances to the all-powerful mistress of Louis XV., wrote her flattering letters, and addressed her, it is said, as "Ma chère cousine." Pompadour was delighted, and could hardly do enough for her imperial friend. She ruled the King, and could make and unmake ministers at will. They hastened to do her pleasure, disguising their subserviency by dressing it out in specious reasons of state. A conference at her summer-house, called Babiole, "Bawble," prepared the way for a treaty which involved the nation in the anti-Prussian war, and made it the instrument of Austria in the attempt to humble Frederic,—an attempt which if successful would give the hereditary enemy of France a predominance over Germany. France engaged to aid the cause with twenty-four thousand men; but in the zeal of her 355 V1 rulers began with a hundred thousand. Thus the three great Powers stood leagued against Prussia. Sweden and Saxony joined them; and the Empire itself, of which Prussia was a part, took arms against its obnoxious member. Never in Europe had power been more centralized, and never in France had the reins been held by persons so pitiful, impelled by motives so contemptible. The levity, vanity, and spite of a concubine became a mighty engine to influence the destinies of nations. Louis XV., enervated by pleasures and devoured by ennui, still had his emotions; he shared Pompadour's detestation of Frederic, and he was tormented at times by a lively fear of damnation. But how damn a king who had entered the lists as champion of the Church? England was Protestant, and so was Prussia; Austria was supremely Catholic. Was it not a merit in the eyes of God to join her in holy war against the powers of heresy? The King of the Parc-aux-Cerfs would propitiate Heaven by a new crusade. Henceforth France was to turn her strength against her European foes; and the American war, the occasion of the universal outbreak, was to hold in her eyes a second place. The reasons were several: the vanity of Pompadour, infatuated by the advances of the Empress-Queen, and eager to secure her good graces; the superstition of the King; the anger of both against Frederic; the desire of D'Argenson, minister of war, that the army, and not the navy, should play the foremost 356 V1 part; and the passion of courtiers and nobles, ignorant of the naval service, to win laurels in a continental war,—all conspired to one end. It was the interest of France to turn her strength against her only dangerous rival; to continue as she had begun, in building up a naval power that could face England on the seas and sustain her own rising colonies in America, India, and the West Indies: for she too might have multiplied herself, planted her language and her race over all the globe, and grown with the growth of her children, had she not been at the mercy of an effeminate profligate, a mistress turned procuress, and the favorites to whom they delegated power. Still, something must be done for the American war; at least there must be a new general to replace Dieskau. None of the Court favorites wanted a command in the backwoods, and the minister of war was free to choose whom he would. His choice fell on Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon de Saint-Véran. Montcalm was born in the south of France, at the Chateau of Candiac, near N?mes, on the twenty-ninth of February, 1712. At the age of six he was placed in the charge of one Dumas, a natural son of his grandfather. This man, a conscientious pedant, with many theories of education, ruled his pupil stiffly; and, before the age of fifteen, gave him a good knowledge of Latin, Greek, and history. Young Montcalm had a taste for books, continued his reading in such intervals 357 V1 of leisure as camps and garrisons afforded, and cherished to the end of his life the ambition of becoming a member of the Academy. Yet, with all his liking for study, he sometimes revolted against the sway of the pedagogue who wrote letters of complaint to his father protesting against the "judgments of the vulgar, who, contrary to the experience of ages, say that if children are well reproved they will correct their faults." Dumas, however, was not without sense, as is shown by another letter to the elder Montcalm, in which he says that the boy had better be ignorant of Latin and Greek "than know them as he does without knowing how to read, write, and speak French well." The main difficulty was to make him write a good hand,—a point in which he signally failed to the day of his death. So refractory was he at times, that his master despaired. "M. de Montcalm," Dumas informs the father, "has great need of docility, industry, and willingness to take advice. What will become of him?" The pupil, aware of these aspersions, met them by writing to his father his own ideas of what his aims should be. "First, to be an honorable man, of good morals, brave, and a Christian. Secondly, to read in moderation; to know as much Greek and Latin as most men of the world; also the four rules of arithmetic, and something of history, geography, and French and Latin belles-lettres, as well as to have a taste for the arts and sciences. Thirdly, and above all, to be obedient, docile, and very submissive to your orders and those of my 358 V1 dear mother; and also to defer to the advice of M. Dumas. Fourthly, to fence and ride as well as my small abilities will permit." [361] [361] This passage is given by Somervogel from the original letter. If Louis de Montcalm failed to satisfy his preceptor, he had a brother who made ample amends. Of this infant prodigy it is related that at six years he knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and had some acquaintance with arithmetic, French history, geography, and heraldry. He was destined for the Church, but died at the age of seven; his precocious brain having been urged to fatal activity by the exertions of Dumas. Other destinies and a more wholesome growth were the lot of young Louis. At fifteen he joined the army as ensign in the regiment of Hainaut. Two years after, his father bought him a captaincy, and he was first under fire at the siege of Philipsbourg. His father died in 1735, and left him heir to a considerable landed estate, much embarrassed by debt. The Marquis de la Fare, a friend of the family, soon after sought for him an advantageous marriage to strengthen his position and increase his prospects of promotion; and he accordingly espoused Mademoiselle Angélique Louise Talon du Boulay,—a union which brought him influential alliances and some property. Madame de Montcalm bore him ten children, of whom only two sons and four daughters were living in 1752. "May God preserve them all," he writes in his autobiography, "and make them prosper for this world and the next! Perhaps 359 V1 it will be thought that the number is large for so moderate a fortune, especially as four of them are girls; but does God ever abandon his children in their need?" "'Aux petits des oiseaux il donne la pature, Et sa bonté s'étend sur toute la nature.'" He was pious in his soldierly way, and ardently loyal to Church and King. His family seat was Candiac; where, in the intervals of campaigning, he found repose with his wife, his children, and his mother, who was a woman of remarkable force of character and who held great influence over her son. He had a strong attachment to this home of his childhood; and in after years, out of the midst of the American wilderness, his thoughts turned longingly towards it. "Quand reverrai-je mon cher Candiac!" In 1741 Montcalm took part in the Bohemian campaign. He was made colonel of the regiment of Auxerrois two years later, and passed unharmed through the severe campaign of 1744. In the next year he fought in Italy under Maréchal de Maillebois. In 1746, at the disastrous action under the walls of Piacenza, where he twice rallied his regiment, he received five sabre-cuts,—two of which were in the head,—and was made prisoner. Returning to France on parole, he was promoted in the year following to the rank of brigadier; and being soon after exchanged, rejoined the army, and was again wounded by a musket-shot. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle now 360 V1 gave him a period of rest. [362] At length, being on a visit to Paris late in the autumn of 1755, the minister, D'Argenson, hinted to him that he might be appointed to command the troops in America. He heard no more of the matter till, after his return home, he received from D'Argenson a letter dated at Versailles the twenty-fifth of January, at midnight. "Perhaps, Monsieur," it began, "you did not expect to hear from me again on the subject of the conversation I had with you the day you came to bid me farewell at Paris. Nevertheless I have not forgotten for a moment the suggestion I then made you; and it is with the greatest pleasure that I announce to you that my views have prevailed. The King has chosen you to command his troops in North America, and will honor you on your departure with the rank of major-general." [362] The account of Montcalm up to this time is chiefly from his unpublished autobiography, preserved by his descendants, and entitled Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de ma Vie. Somervogel, Comme on servait autrefois; Bonnechose, Montcalm et le Canada; Martin, Le Marquis de Montcalm; éloge de Montcalm; Autre éloge de Montcalm; Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760, and other writings in print and manuscript have also been consulted. The Chevalier de Lévis, afterwards Marshal of France, was named as his second in command, with the rank of brigadier, and the Chevalier de Bourlamaque as his third, with the rank of colonel; but what especially pleased him was the appointment of his eldest son to command a regiment in France. He set out from Candiac for the Court, and occupied himself on the way with reading Charlevoix. "I take great pleasure in 361 V1 it," he writes from Lyons to his mother; "he gives a pleasant account of Quebec. But be comforted; I shall always be glad to come home." At Paris he writes again: "Don't expect any long letter from me before the first of March; all my business will be done by that time, and I shall begin to breathe again. I have not yet seen the Chevalier de Montcalm [his son]. Last night I came from Versailles, and am going back to-morrow. The King gives me twenty-five thousand francs a year, as he did to M. Dieskau, besides twelve thousand for my equipment, which will cost me above a thousand crowns more; but I cannot stop for that. I embrace my dearest and all the family." A few days later his son joined him. "He is as thin and delicate as ever, but grows prodigiously tall." On the second of March he informs his mother, "My affairs begin to get on. A good part of the baggage went off the day before yesterday in the King's wagons; an assistant-cook and two liverymen yesterday. I have got a good cook. Estève, my secretary, will go on the eighth; Joseph and Déjean will follow me. To-morrow evening I go to Versailles till Sunday, and will write from there to Madame de Montcalm [his wife]. I have three aides-de-camp; one of them, Bougainville, a man of parts, pleasant company. Madame Mazade was happily delivered on Wednesday; in extremity on Friday with a malignant fever; Saturday and yesterday, reports favorable. I go there twice a day, and am just going now. She 362 V1 has a girl. I embrace you all." Again, on the fifteenth: "In a few hours I set out for Brest. Yesterday I presented my son, with whom I am well pleased, to all the royal family. I shall have a secretary at Brest, and will write more at length." On the eighteenth he writes from Rennes to his wife: "I arrived, dearest, this morning, and stay here all day. I shall be at Brest on the twenty-first. Everything will be on board on the twenty-sixth. My son has been here since yesterday for me to coach him and get him a uniform made, in which he will give thanks for his regiment at the same time that I take leave in my embroidered coat. Perhaps I shall leave debts behind. I wait impatiently for the bills. You have my will; I wish you would get it copied, and send it to me before I sail." Reaching Brest, the place of embarkation, he writes to his mother: "I have business on hand still. My health is good, and the passage will be a time of rest. I embrace you, and my dearest, and my daughters. Love to all the family. I shall write up to the last moment." No translation can give an idea of the rapid, abrupt, elliptical style of this familiar correspondence, where the meaning is sometimes suggested by a single word, unintelligible to any but those for whom it is written. At the end of March Montcalm, with all his following, was ready to embark; and three ships of the line, the "Léopard," the "Héros," and the "Illustre," fitted out as transports, were ready to 363 V1 receive the troops; while the General, with Lévis and Bourlamaque, were to take passage in the frigates "Licorne," "Sauvage," and "Sirène." "I like the Chevalier de Lévis," says Montcalm, "and I think he likes me." His first aide-de-camp, Bougainville, pleased him, if possible, still more. This young man, son of a notary, had begun life as an advocate in the Parliament of Paris, where his abilities and learning had already made him conspicuous, when he resigned the gown for the sword, and became a captain of dragoons. He was destined in later life to win laurels in another career, and to become one of the most illustrious of French navigators. Montcalm, himself a scholar, prized his varied talents and accomplishments, and soon learned to feel for him a strong personal regard. The troops destined for Canada were only two battalions, one belonging to the regiment of La Sarre, and the other to that of Royal Roussillon. Louis XV. and Pompadour sent a hundred thousand men to fight the battles of Austria, and could spare but twelve hundred to reinforce New France. These troops marched into Brest at early morning, breakfasted in the town, and went at once on board the transports, "with an incredible gayety," says Bougainville. "What a nation is ours! Happy he who commands it, and commands it worthily!" [363] Montcalm and he embarked in the "Licorne," and sailed on the third of April, leaving 364 V1 Lévis and Bourlamaque to follow a few days after. [364] [363] Journal de Bougainville. This is a fragment; his Journal proper begins a few weeks later. [364] Lévis à——, 5 Avril, 1756. The voyage was a rough one. "I have been fortunate," writes Montcalm to his wife, "in not being ill nor at all incommoded by the heavy gale we had in Holy Week. It was not so with those who were with me, especially M. Estève, my secretary, and Joseph, who suffered cruelly,—seventeen days without being able to take anything but water. The season was very early for such a hard voyage, and it was fortunate that the winter has been so mild. We had very favorable weather till Monday the twelfth; but since then till Saturday evening we had rough weather, with a gale that lasted ninety hours, and put us in real danger. The forecastle was always under water, and the waves broke twice over the quarter-deck. From the twenty-seventh of April to the evening of the fourth of May we had fogs, great cold, and an amazing quantity of icebergs. On the thirtieth, when luckily the fog lifted for a time, we counted sixteen of them. The day before, one drifted under the bowsprit, grazed it, and might have crushed us if the deck-officer had not called out quickly, Luff. After speaking of our troubles and sufferings, I must tell you of our pleasures, which were fishing for cod and eating it. The taste is exquisite. The head, tongue, and liver are morsels worthy of an epicure. Still, I would not advise anybody to make the voyage for their sake. My health is as good as it has been for a long 365 V1 time. I found it a good plan to eat little and take no supper; a little tea now and then, and plenty of lemonade. Nevertheless I have taken very little liking for the sea, and think that when I shall be so happy as to rejoin you I shall end my voyages there. I don't know when this letter will go. I shall send it by the first ship that returns to France, and keep on writing till then. It is pleasant, I know, to hear particulars about the people one loves, and I thought that my mother and you, my dearest and most beloved, would be glad to read all these dull details. We heard Mass on Easter Day. All the week before, it was impossible, because the ship rolled so that I could hardly keep my legs. If I had dared, I think I should have had myself lashed fast. I shall not soon forget that Holy Week." This letter was written on the eleventh of May, in the St. Lawrence, where the ship lay at anchor, ten leagues below Quebec, stopped by ice from proceeding farther. Montcalm made his way to the town by land, and soon after learned with great satisfaction that the other ships were safe in the river below. "I see," he writes again, "that I shall have plenty of work. Our campaign will soon begin. Everything is in motion. Don't expect details about our operations; generals never speak of movements till they are over. I can only tell you that the winter has been quiet enough, though the savages have made great havoc in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and carried off, according to their custom, men, women, and 366 V1 children. I beg you will have High Mass said at Montpellier or Vauvert to thank God for our safe arrival and ask for good success in future." [365] [365] These extracts are translated from copies of the original letters, in possession of the present Marquis de Montcalm. Vaudreuil, the governor-general, was at Montreal, and Montcalm sent a courier to inform him of his arrival. He soon went thither in person, and the two men met for the first time. The new general was not welcome to Vaudreuil, who had hoped to command the troops himself, and had represented to the Court that it was needless and inexpedient to send out a general officer from France. [366] The Court had not accepted his views; [367] and hence it was with more curiosity than satisfaction that he greeted the colleague who had been assigned him. He saw before him a man of small stature, with a lively countenance, a keen eye, and, in moments of animation, rapid, vehement utterance, and nervous gesticulation. Montcalm, we may suppose, regarded the Governor with no less attention. Pierre Fran?ois Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, who had governed Canada early in the century; and he himself had been governor of Louisiana. He had not the force of character which his position demanded, lacked decision in times of crisis; and though tenacious of authority, was more jealous in asserting than self-reliant in exercising it. One of his traits was a sensitive egotism, which 367 V1 made him forward to proclaim his own part in every success, and to throw on others the burden of every failure. He was facile by nature, and capable of being led by such as had skill and temper for the task. But the impetuous Montcalm was not of their number; and the fact that he was born in France would in itself have thrown obstacles in his way to the good graces of the Governor. Vaudreuil, Canadian by birth, loved the colony and its people, and distrusted Old France and all that came out of it. He had been bred, moreover, to the naval service; and, like other Canadian governors, his official correspondence was with the minister of marine, while that of Montcalm was with the minister of war. Even had Nature made him less suspicious, his relations with the General would have been critical. Montcalm commanded the regulars from France, whose very presence was in the eyes of Vaudreuil an evil, though a necessary one. Their chief was, it is true, subordinate to him in virtue of his office of governor; [368] yet it was clear that for the conduct of the war the trust of the Government was mainly in Montcalm; and the Minister of War had even suggested that he should have the immediate command, not only of the troops from France, but of the colony regulars and the militia. An order of the King to this effect was sent to Vaudreuil, with instructions to communicate it to 368 V1 Montcalm or withhold it, as he should think best. [369] He lost no time in replying that the General "ought to concern himself with nothing but the command of the troops from France;" and he returned the order to the minister who sent it. [370] The Governor and the General represented the two parties which were soon to divide Canada,—those of New France and of Old. [366] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 30 Oct. 1755. [367] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, Fév. 1756. [368] Le Ministre à Vaudreuil, 15 Mars, 1756. Commission du Marquis de Montcalm. Mémoire du Roy pour servir d'Instruction au Marquis de Montcalm. [369] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1756. Le Ministre à Vaudreuil, 15 Mars, 1756. [370] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 16 Juin, 1756. "Qu'il ne se mêle que du commandement des troupes de terre." A like antagonism was seen in the forces commanded by the two chiefs. These were of three kinds,—the troupes de terre, troops of the line, or regulars from France; the troupes de la marine, or colony regulars; and lastly the militia. The first consisted of the four battalions that had come over with Dieskau and the two that had come with Montcalm, comprising in all a little less than three thousand men. [371] Besides these, the battalions of Artois and Bourgogne, to the number of eleven hundred men, were in garrison at Louisbourg. All these troops wore a white uniform, faced with blue, red, yellow, or violet, [372] 369 V1 a black three-cornered hat, and gaiters, generally black, from the foot to the knee. The subaltern officers in the French service were very numerous, and were drawn chiefly from the class of lesser nobles. A well-informed French writer calls them "a generation of petits-ma?tres, dissolute, frivolous, heedless, light-witted; but brave always, and ready to die with their soldiers, though not to suffer with them." [373] In fact the course of the war was to show plainly that in Europe the regiments of France were no longer what they had once been. It was not so with those who fought in America. Here, for enduring gallantry, officers and men alike deserve nothing but praise. [371] Of about twelve hundred who came with Montcalm, nearly three hundred were now in hospital. The four battalions that came with Dieskau are reported at the end of May to have sixteen hundred and fifty-three effective men. état de la Situation actuelle des Bataillons, appended to Montcalm's despatch of 12 June. Another document, Dêtail de ce qui s'est passé en Canada, Juin, 1755, jusqu'à Juin, 1756, sets the united effective strength of the battalions in Canada at twenty-six hundred and seventy-seven, which was increased by recruits which arrived from France about midsummer. [372] Except perhaps, the battalion of Béarn, which formerly wore, and possibly wore still, a uniform of light blue. [373] Susane, Ancienne Infanterie Fran?aise. In the atlas of this work are colored plates of the uniforms of all the regiments of foot. The troupes de la marine had for a long time formed the permanent military establishment of Canada. Though attached to the naval department, they served on land, and were employed as a police within the limits of the colony, or as garrisons of the outlying forts, where their officers busied themselves more with fur-trading than with their military duties. Thus they had become ill-disciplined and inefficient, till the hard hand of Duquesne restored them to order. They originally consisted of twenty-eight independent companies, increased in 1750 to thirty companies, at first of fifty, and afterwards of sixty-five men each, forming a total of nineteen hundred and fifty rank and file. In March, 1757, ten more 370 V1 companies were added. Their uniform was not unlike that of the troops attached to the War Department, being white, with black facings. They were enlisted for the most part in France; but when their term of service expired, and even before, in time of peace, they were encouraged to become settlers in the colony, as was also the case with their officers, of whom a great part were of European birth. Thus the relations of the troupes de la marine with the colony were close; and they formed a sort of connecting link between the troops of the line and the native militia. [374] Besides these colony regulars, there was a company of colonial artillery, consisting this year of seventy men, and replaced in 1757 by two companies of fifty men each. [374] On the troupes de la marine,—Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction à MM. Jonquière et Bigot, 30 Avril, 1749. Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1750. Ibid., 1755. Ibid., 1757. Instruction pour Vaudreuil, 22 Mars, 1755. Ordonnance pour l'Augmentation de Soldats dans les Compagnies de Canada, 14 Mars, 1755. Duquesne au Ministre, 26 Oct. 1753. Ibid., 30 Oct. 1753. Ibid., 29 Fév. 1754. Duquesne à Marin, 27 Ao?t, 1753. Atlas de Susane. All the effective male population of Canada, from fifteen years to sixty, was enrolled in the militia, and called into service at the will of the Governor. They received arms, clothing, equipment, and rations from the King, but no pay; and instead of tents they made themselves huts of bark or branches. The best of them were drawn from the upper parts of the colony, where habits of bushranging were still in full activity. Their fighting qualities were much like those of the Indians, whom they rivalled in endurance 371 V1 and in the arts of forest war. As bush-fighters they had few equals; they fought well behind earthworks, and were good at a surprise or sudden dash; but for regular battle on the open field they were of small account, being disorderly, and apt to break and take to cover at the moment of crisis. They had no idea of the great operations of war. At first they despised the regulars for their ignorance of woodcraft, and thought themselves able to defend the colony alone; while the regulars regarded them in turn with a contempt no less unjust. They were excessively given to gasconade, and every true Canadian boasted himself a match for three Englishmen at least. In 1750 the militia of all ranks counted about thirteen thousand; and eight years later the number had increased to about fifteen thousand. [375] Until the last two years of the war, those employed in actual warfare were but few. Even in the critical year 1758 only about eleven hundred were called to arms, except for two or three weeks in summer; [376] though about four thousand were employed in transporting troops and supplies, for which service they received pay. [375] Récapitulation des Milices du Gouvernement de Canada, 1750. Dénombrement des Milices, 1758, 1759. On the militia, see also Bougainville in Margry, Rélations et Mémoires inédits, 60, and N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 680. [376] Montcalm au Ministre, 1 Sept. 1758. To the white fighting force of the colony are to be added the red men. The most trusty of them were the Mission Indians, living within or near the settled limits of Canada, chiefly the Hurons of Lorette, the Abenakis of St. Francis and Batiscan, 372 V1 the Iroquois of Caughnawaga and La Présentation, and the Iroquois and Algonkins at the Two Mountains on the Ottawa. Besides these, all the warriors of the west and north, from Lake Superior to the Ohio, and from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, were now at the beck of France. As to the Iroquois or Five Nations who still remained in their ancient seats within the present limits of New York, their power and pride had greatly fallen; and crowded as they were between the French and the English, they were in a state of vacillation, some leaning to one side, some to the other, and some to each in turn. As a whole, the best that France could expect from them was neutrality. Montcalm at Montreal had more visits than he liked from his red allies. "They are vilains messieurs," he informs his mother, "even when fresh from their toilet, at which they pass their lives. You would not believe it, but the men always carry to war, along with their tomahawk and gun, a mirror to daub their faces with various colors, and arrange feathers on their heads and rings in their ears and noses. They think it a great beauty to cut the rim of the ear and stretch it till it reaches the shoulder. Often they wear a laced coat, with no shirt at all. You would take them for so many masqueraders or devils. One needs the patience of an angel to get on with them. Ever since I have been here, I have had nothing but visits, harangues, and deputations of these gentry. The Iroquois ladies, who always take 373 V1 part in their government, came also, and did me the honor to bring me belts of wampum, which will oblige me to go to their village and sing the war-song. They are only a little way off. Yesterday we had eighty-three warriors here, who have gone out to fight. They make war with astounding cruelty, sparing neither men, women, nor children, and take off your scalp very neatly,—an operation which generally kills you. "Everything is horribly dear in this country; and I shall find it hard to make the two ends of the year meet, with the twenty-five thousand francs the King gives me. The Chevalier de Lévis did not join me till yesterday. His health is excellent. In a few days I shall send him to one camp, and M. de Bourlamaque to another; for we have three of them: one at Carillon, eighty leagues from here, towards the place where M. de Dieskau had his affair last year; another at Frontenac, sixty leagues; and the third at Niagara, a hundred and forty leagues. I don't know when or whither I shall go myself; that depends on the movements of the enemy. It seems to me that things move slowly in this new world; and I shall have to moderate my activity accordingly. Nothing but the King's service and the wish to make a career for my son could prevent me from thinking too much of my expatriation, my distance from you, and the dull existence here, which would be duller still if I did not manage to keep some little of my natural gayety." 374 V1 The military situation was somewhat perplexing. Iroquois spies had brought reports of great preparations on the part of the English. As neither party dared offend these wavering tribes, their warriors could pass with impunity from one to the other, and were paid by each for bringing information, not always trustworthy. They declared that the English were gathering in force to renew the attempt made by Johnson the year before against Crown Point and Ticonderoga, as well as that made by Shirley against forts Frontenac and Niagara. Vaudreuil had spared no effort to meet the double danger. Lotbinière, a Canadian engineer, had been busied during the winter in fortifying Ticonderoga, while Pouchot, a captain in the battalion of Béarn, had rebuilt Niagara, and two French engineers were at work in strengthening the defences of Frontenac. The Governor even hoped to take the offensive, anticipate the movements of the English, capture Oswego, and obtain the complete command of Lake Ontario. Early in the spring a blow had been struck which materially aided these schemes. The English had built two small forts to guard the Great Carrying Place on the route to Oswego. One of these, Fort Williams, was on the Mohawk; the other, Fort Bull, a mere collection of storehouses surrounded by a palisade, was four miles distant, on the bank of Wood Creek. Here a great quantity of stores and ammunition had imprudently been collected against the opening campaign. In February Vaudreuil sent Léry, a 375 V1 colony officer, with three hundred and sixty-two picked men, soldiers, Canadians, and Indians, to seize these two posts. Towards the end of March, after extreme hardship, they reached the road that connected them, and at half-past five in the morning captured twelve men going with wagons to Fort Bull. Learning from them the weakness of that place, they dashed forward to surprise it. The thirty provincials of Shirley's regiment who formed the garrison had barely time to shut the gate, while the assailants fired on them through the loopholes, of which they got possession in the tumult. Léry called on the defenders to yield; but they refused, and pelted the French for an hour with bullets and hand-grenades. The gate was at last beat down with axes, and they were summoned again; but again refused, and fired hotly through the opening. The French rushed in, shouting Vive le roi, and a frightful struggle followed. All the garrison were killed, except two or three who hid themselves till the slaughter was over; the fort was set on fire and blown to atoms by the explosion of the magazines; and Léry then withdrew, not venturing to attack Fort Williams. Johnson, warned by Indians of the approach of the French, had pushed up the Mohawk with reinforcements; but came too late. [377] [377] Bigot au Ministre, 12 Avril, 1756. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 1 Juin, 1756. Ibid., 8 Juin, 1756. Journal de ce qui s'est passé en Canada depuis le Mois d'Octobre, 1755, jusqu'au Mois de Juin, 1756. Shirley to Fox, 7 May, 1756. Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated. Information of Captain John Vicars, of the Fiftieth (Shirley's) Regiment. Eastburn, Faithful Narrative. Entick, I. 471. The French accounts place the number of English at sixty or eighty. 376 V1 Vaudreuil, who always exaggerates any success in which he has had part, says that besides bombs, bullets, cannon-balls, and other munitions, forty-five thousand pounds of gunpowder were destroyed on this occasion. It is certain that damage enough was done to retard English operations in the direction of Oswego sufficiently to give the French time for securing all their posts on Lake Ontario. Before the end of June this was in good measure done. The battalion of Béarn lay encamped before the now strong fort of Niagara, and the battalions of Guienne and La Sarre, with a body of Canadians, guarded Frontenac against attack. Those of La Reine and Languedoc had been sent to Ticonderoga, while the Governor, with Montcalm and Lévis, still remained at Montreal watching the turn of events. [378] Hither, too, came the intendant Fran?ois Bigot, the most accomplished knave in Canada, yet indispensable for his vigor and executive skill; Bougainville, who had disarmed the jealousy of Vaudreuil, and now stood high in his good graces; and the Adjutant-General, Montreuil, clearly a vain and pragmatic personage, who, having come to Canada with Dieskau the year before, thought it behooved him to give the General the advantage of his experience. "I like M. de Montcalm very much," he writes to the minister, "and will do the impossible to deserve his confidence. I have spoken to him in the same terms as to M. Dieskau; thus: 'Trust only the French regulars for an expedition, 377 V1 but use the Canadians and Indians to harass the enemy. Don't expose yourself; send me to carry your orders to points of danger.' The colony officers do not like those from France. The Canadians are independent, spiteful, lying, boastful; very good for skirmishing, very brave behind a tree, and very timid when not under cover. I think both sides will stand on the defensive. It does not seem to me that M. de Montcalm means to attack the enemy; and I think he is right. In this country a thousand men could stop three thousand." [379] [378] Correspondance de Montcalm, Vaudreuil, et Lévis. [379] Montreuil au Ministre, 12 Juin, 1756. The original is in cipher. "M. de Vaudreuil overwhelms me with civilities," Montcalm writes to the Minister of War. "I think that he is pleased with my conduct towards him, and that it persuades him there are general officers in France who can act under his orders without prejudice or ill-humor." [380] "I am on good terms with him," he says again; "but not in his confidence, which he never gives to anybody from France. His intentions are good, but he is slow and irresolute." [381] [380] Montcalm au Ministre, 12 Juin, 1756. [381] Ibid., 19 Juin, 1756. "Je suis bien avec luy, sans sa confiance, qu'il ne donne jamais à personne de la France." Erroneously rendered in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 421. Indians presently brought word that ten thousand English were coming to attack Ticonderoga. A reinforcement of colony regulars was at once despatched to join the two battalions already there; a third battalion, Royal Roussillon, was sent after them. The militia were called out and ordered to 378 V1 follow with all speed, while both Montcalm and Lévis hastened to the supposed scene of danger. [382] They embarked in canoes on the Richelieu, coasted the shore of Lake Champlain, passed Fort Frederic or Crown Point, where all was activity and bustle, and reached Ticonderoga at the end of June. They found the fort, on which Lotbinière had been at work all winter, advanced towards completion. It stood on the crown of the promontory, and was a square with four bastions, a ditch, blown in some parts out of the solid rock, bomb-proofs, barracks of stone, and a system of exterior defences as yet only begun. The rampart consisted of two parallel walls ten feet apart, built of the trunks of trees, and held together by transverse logs dovetailed at both ends, the space between being filled with earth and gravel well packed. [383] Such was the first Fort Ticonderoga, or Carillon,—a structure quite distinct from the later fort of which the ruins still stand on the same spot. The forest had been hewn away for some distance around, and the tents of the regulars and huts of the Canadians had taken its place; innumerable bark canoes lay along the strand, and gangs of men toiled at the unfinished works. [382] Montcalm au Ministre, 26 Juin, 1756. Détail de ce qui s'est passé, Oct. 1755—Juin, 1756. [383] Lotbinière au Ministre, 31 Oct. 1756. Montcalm au Ministre, 20 Juillet, 1756. Ticonderoga was now the most advanced position of the French, and Crown Point, which had before held that perilous honor, was in the second line. Lévis, to whom had been assigned the 379 V1 permanent command of this post of danger, set out on foot to explore the neighboring woods and mountains, and slept out several nights before he reappeared at the camp. "I do not think," says Montcalm, "that many high officers in Europe would have occasion to take such tramps as this. I cannot speak too well of him. Without being a man of brilliant parts, he has good experience, good sense, and a quick eye; and, though I had served with him before, I never should have thought that he had such promptness and efficiency. He has turned his campaigns to good account." [384] Lévis writes of his chief with equal warmth. "I do not know if the Marquis de Montcalm is pleased with me, but I am sure that I am very much so with him, and shall always be charmed to serve under his orders. It is not for me, Monseigneur, to speak to you of his merit and his talents. You know him better than anybody else; but I may have the honor of assuring you that he has pleased everybody in this colony, and manages affairs with the Indians extremely well." [385] [384] Montcalm au Ministre, 20 Juillet, 1756. [385] Lévis au Ministre, 17 Juillet, 1756. The danger from the English proved to be still remote, and there was ample leisure in the camp. Duchat, a young captain in the battalion of Languedoc, used it in writing to his father a long account of what he saw about him,—the forests full of game; the ducks, geese, and partridges; the prodigious flocks of wild pigeons that darkened 380 V1 the air, the bears, the beavers; and above all the Indians, their canoes, dress, ball-play, and dances. "We are making here," says the military prophet, "a place that history will not forget. The English colonies have ten times more people than ours; but these wretches have not the least knowledge of war, and if they go out to fight, they must abandon wives, children, and all that they possess. Not a week passes but the French send them a band of hairdressers, whom they would be very glad to dispense with. It is incredible what a quantity of scalps they bring us. In Virginia they have committed unheard-of cruelties, carried off families, burned a great many houses, and killed an infinity of people. These miserable English are in the extremity of distress, and repent too late the unjust war they began against us. It is a pleasure to make war in Canada. One is troubled neither with horses nor baggage; the King provides everything. But it must be confessed that if it costs no money, one pays for it in another way, by seeing nothing but pease and bacon on the mess-table. Luckily the lakes are full of fish, and both officers and soldiers have to turn fishermen." [386] [386] Relation de M. Duchat, Capitaine au Régiment de Languedoc, écrite au Camp de Carillon, 15 Juillet, 1756. Meanwhile, at the head of Lake George, the raw bands of ever-active New England were mustering for the fray. CHAPTER XII. 1756. OSWEGO. The new Campaign ? Untimely Change of Commanders ? Eclipse of Shirley ? Earl of Loudon ? Muster of Provincials ? New England Levies ? Winslow at Lake George ? Johnson and the Five Nations ? Bradstreet and his Boatmen ? Fight on the Onondaga ? Pestilence at Oswego ? Loudon and the Provincials ? New England Camps ? Army Chaplains ? A sudden Blow ? Montcalm attacks Oswego ? Its Fall. When, at the end of the last year, Shirley returned from his bootless Oswego campaign, he called a council of war at New York and laid before it his scheme for the next summer's operations. It was a comprehensive one: to master Lake Ontario by an overpowering naval force and seize the French forts upon it, Niagara, Frontenac, and Toronto; attack Ticonderoga and Crown Point on the one hand, and Fort Duquesne on the other, and at the same time perplex and divide the enemy by an inroad down the Chaudière upon the settlements about Quebec. [387] The council approved the scheme; but to execute it the provinces must raise at least sixteen thousand men. This they 382 V1 refused to do. Pennsylvania and Virginia would take no active part, and were content with defending themselves. The attack on Fort Duquesne was therefore abandoned, as was also the diversion towards Quebec. The New England colonies were discouraged by Johnson's failure to take Crown Point, doubtful of the military abilities of Shirley, and embarrassed by the debts of the last campaign; but when they learned that Parliament would grant a sum of money in partial compensation for their former sacrifices, [388] they plunged into new debts without hesitation, and raised more men than the General had asked; though, with their usual jealousy, they provided that their soldiers should be employed for no other purpose than the attack on Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Shirley chose John Winslow to command them, and gave him a commission to that effect; while he, to clinch his authority, asked and obtained supplementary commissions from every government that gave men to the expedition. [389] For the movement against the forts of Lake Ontario, which Shirley meant to command in person, he had the remains of his own and Pepperell's regiments, the two shattered battalions brought over by Braddock, the "Jersey Blues," four provincial companies from North Carolina, and the four King's companies of 383 V1 New York. His first care was to recruit their ranks and raise them to their full complement; which, when effected, would bring them up to the insufficient strength of about forty-four hundred men. [387] Minutes of Council of War held at New York, 12 and 13 Dec. 1755. Shirley to Robinson, 19 Dec. 1755. The Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated. Review of Military Operations in North America. [388] Lords of Trade to Lords of the Treasury, 12 Feb. 1756. Fox to American Governors, 13 March, 1756. Shirley to Phipps, 15 June, 1756. The sum was £115,000, divided in proportion to the expense incurred by the several colonies; Massachusetts having £54,000, Connecticut £26,000, and New York £15,000, the rest being given to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. [389] Letter and Order Books of General Winslow, 1756. While he was struggling with contradictions and cross purposes, a withering blow fell upon him; he learned that he was superseded in the command. The cabal formed against him, with Delancey at its head, had won over Sir Charles Hardy, the new governor of New York, and had painted Shirley's conduct in such colors that the Ministry removed him. It was essential for the campaign that a successor should be sent at once, to form plans on the spot and make preparations accordingly. The Ministry were in no such haste. It was presently announced that Colonel Daniel Webb would be sent to America, followed by General James Abercromby; who was to be followed in turn by the Earl of Loudon, the destined commander-in-chief. Shirley was to resign his command to Webb, Webb to Abercromby, and Abercromby to Loudon. [390] It chanced that the two former arrived in June at about the same time, while the Earl came in July; and meanwhile it devolved on Shirley to make ready for them. Unable to divine what their plans would be, he prepared the campaign in accordance with his own. [390] Fox to Shirley, 13 March, 1756. Ibid., 31 March, 1756. Order to Colonel Webb, 31 March, 1756. Order to Major-General Abercromby, 1 April, 1756. Halifax to Shirley, 1 April, 1756. Shirley to Fox, 13 June, 1756. 384 V1 His star, so bright a twelvemonth before, was now miserably dimmed. In both his public and private life he was the butt of adversity. He had lost two promising sons; he had made a mortifying failure as a soldier; and triumphant enemies were rejoicing in his fall. It is to the credit of his firmness and his zeal in the cause that he set himself to his task with as much vigor as if he, and not others, were to gather the fruits. His chief care was for his favorite enterprise in the direction of Lake Ontario. Making Albany his headquarters, he rebuilt the fort at the Great Carrying Place destroyed in March by the French, sent troops to guard the perilous route to Oswego, and gathered provisions and stores at the posts along the way. Meanwhile the New England men, strengthened by the levies of New York, were mustering at Albany for the attack of Crown Point. At the end of May they moved a short distance up the Hudson, and encamped at a place called Half-Moon, where the navigation was stopped by rapids. Here and at the posts above were gathered something more than five thousand men, as raw and untrained as those led by Johnson in the summer before. [391] The four New England colonies were much alike in their way of raising and equipping men, and the example of Massachusetts may serve for them all. The Assembly or "General Court" voted the required number, and chose a committee of war authorized to impress 385 V1 provisions, munitions, stores, clothing, tools, and other necessaries, for which fair prices were to be paid within six months. The Governor issued a proclamation calling for volunteers. If the full number did not appear within the time named, the colonels of militia were ordered to muster their regiments, and immediately draft out of them men enough to meet the need. A bounty of six dollars was offered this year to stimulate enlistment, and the pay of a private soldier was fixed at one pound six shillings a month, Massachusetts currency. If he brought a gun, he had an additional bounty of two dollars. A powder-horn, bullet-pouch, blanket, knapsack, and "wooden bottle," or canteen, were supplied by the province; and if he brought no gun of his own, a musket was given him, for which, as for the other articles, he was to account at the end of the campaign. In the next year it was announced that the soldier should receive, besides his pay, "a coat and soldier's hat." The coat was of coarse blue cloth, to which breeches of red or blue were afterwards added. Along with his rations, he was promised a gill of rum each day, a privilege of which he was extremely jealous, deeply resenting every abridgment of it. He was enlisted for the campaign, and could not be required to serve above a year at farthest. [391] Letter and Order Books of Winslow, 1756. The complement of a regiment was five hundred, divided into companies of fifty; and as the men and officers of each were drawn from the same neighborhood, they generally knew each 386 V1 other. The officers, though nominally appointed by the Assembly, were for the most part the virtual choice of the soldiers themselves, from whom they were often indistinguishable in character and social standing. Hence discipline was weak. The pay—or, as it was called, the wages—of a colonel was twelve pounds sixteen shillings, Massachusetts currency, a month; that of a captain, five pounds eight shillings,—an advance on the pay of the last year; and that of a chaplain, six pounds eight shillings. [392] Penalties were enacted against "irreligion, immorality, drunkenness, debauchery, and profaneness." The ordinary punishments were the wooden horse, irons, or, in bad cases, flogging. [392] Vote of General Court, 26 Feb. 1756. Much difficulty arose from the different rules adopted by the various colonies for the regulation of their soldiers. Nor was this the only source of trouble. Besides its war committee, the Assembly of each of the four New England colonies chose another committee "for clothing, arming, paying, victualling, and transporting" its troops. They were to go to the scene of operations, hire wagons, oxen, and horses, build boats and vessels, and charge themselves with the conveyance of all supplies belonging to their respective governments. They were to keep in correspondence with the committee of war at home, to whom they were responsible; and the officer commanding the contingent of their colony was required to furnish them with guards and escorts. Thus four independent committees were 387 V1 engaged in the work of transportation at the same time, over the same roads, for the same object. Each colony chose to keep the control of its property in its own hands. The inconveniences were obvious: "I wish to God," wrote Lord Loudon to Winslow, "you could persuade your people to go all one way." The committees themselves did not always find their task agreeable. One of their number, John Ashley, of Massachusetts, writes in dudgeon to Governor Phipps: "Sir, I am apt to think that things have been misrepresented to your Honor, or else I am certain I should not suffer in my character, and be styled a damned rascal, and ought to be put in irons, etc., when I am certain I have exerted myself to the utmost of my ability to expedite the business assigned me by the General Court." At length, late in the autumn, Loudon persuaded the colonies to forego this troublesome sort of independence, and turn over their stores to the commissary-general, receipts being duly given. [393] [393] The above particulars are gathered from the voluminous papers in the State House at Boston, Archives, Military, Vols. LXXV., LXXVI. These contain the military acts of the General Court, proclamations, reports of committees, and other papers relating to military affairs in 1755 and 1756. The Letter and Order Books of Winslow, in the Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, have supplied much concurrent matter. See also Colonial Records of R. I., V., and Provincial Papers of N. H., VI. From Winslow's headquarters at Half-Moon a road led along the banks of the Hudson to Stillwater, whence there was water carriage to Saratoga. Here stores were again placed in wagons and carried several miles to Upper Falls; thence 388 V1 by boat to Fort Edward; and thence, fourteen miles across country, to Fort William Henry at Lake George, where the army was to embark for Ticonderoga. Each of the points of transit below Fort Edward was guarded by a stockade and two or more companies of provincials. They were much pestered by Indians, who now and then scalped a straggler, and escaped with their usual nimbleness. From time to time strong bands of Canadians and Indians approached by way of South Bay or Wood Creek, and threatened more serious mischief. It is surprising that some of the trains were not cut off, for the escorts were often reckless and disorderly to the last degree. Sometimes the invaders showed great audacity. Early in June Colonel Fitch at Albany scrawls a hasty note to Winslow: "Friday, 11 o'clock: Sir, about half an hour since, a party of near fifty French and Indians had the impudence to come down to the river opposite to this city and captivate two men;" and Winslow replies with equal quaintness: "We daily discover the Indians about us; but not yet have been so happy as to obtain any of them." [394] [394] Vaudreuil, in his despatch of 12 August, gives particulars of these raids, with an account of the scalps taken on each occasion. He thought the results disappointing. Colonel Jonathan Bagley commanded at Fort William Henry, where gangs of men were busied under his eye in building three sloops and making several hundred whaleboats to carry the army of Ticonderoga. The season was advancing fast, 389 V1 and Winslow urged him to hasten on the work; to which the humorous Bagley answered: "Shall leave no stone unturned; every wheel shall go that rum and human flesh can move." [395] A fortnight after he reports: "I must really confess I have almost wore the men out, poor dogs. Pray where are the committee, or what are they about?" He sent scouts to watch the enemy, with results not quite satisfactory. "There is a vast deal of news here; every party brings abundance, but all different." Again, a little later: "I constantly keep out small scouting parties to the eastward and westward of the lake, and make no discovery but the tracks of small parties who are plaguing us constantly; but what vexes me most, we can't catch one of the sons of——. I have sent out skulking parties some distance from the sentries in the night, to lie still in the bushes to intercept them; but the flies are so plenty, our people can't bear them." [396] Colonel David Wooster, at Fort Edward, was no more fortunate in his attempts to take satisfaction on his midnight visitors; and reports that he has not thus far been able "to give those villains a dressing." [397] The English, however, were fast learning the art of forest war, and the partisan chief, Captain Robert Rogers, began already to be famous. On the seventeenth of June he and his band lay hidden in the bushes within the outposts of Ticonderoga, 390 V1 and made a close survey of the fort and surrounding camps. [398] His report was not cheering. Winslow's so-called army had now grown to nearly seven thousand men; and these, it was plain, were not too many to drive the French from their stronghold. [395] Bagley to Winslow, 2 July, 1756. [396] Ibid., 15 July, 1756. [397] Wooster to Winslow, 2 June, 1756. [398] Report of Rogers, 19 June, 1756. Much abridged in his published Journals. While Winslow pursued his preparations, tried to settle disputes of rank among the colonels of the several colonies, and strove to bring order out of the little chaos of his command, Sir William Johnson was engaged in a work for which he was admirably fitted. This was the attaching of the Five Nations to the English interest. Along with his patent of baronetcy, which reached him about this time, he received, direct from the Crown, the commission of "Colonel, Agent, and Sole Superintendent of the Six Nations and other Northern Tribes." [399] Henceforth he was independent of governors and generals, and responsible to the Court alone. His task was a difficult one. The Five Nations would fain have remained neutral, and let the European rivals fight it out; but, on account of their local position, they could not. The exactions and lies of the Albany traders, the frauds of land-speculators, the contradictory action of the different provincial governments, joined to English weakness and mismanagement in the last war, all conspired to alienate them and to aid the efforts of the French agents, who cajoled and 391 V1 threatened them by turns. But for Johnson these intrigues would have prevailed. He had held a series of councils with them at Fort Johnson during the winter, and not only drew from them a promise to stand by the English, but persuaded all the confederated tribes, except the Cayugas, to consent that the English should build forts near their chief towns, under the pretext of protecting them from the French. [400] [399] Fox to Johnson, 13 March, 1756. Papers of Sir William Johnson. [400] Conferences between Sir William Johnson and the Indians, Dec. 1755, to Feb. 1756, in N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 44-74. Account of Conferences held and Treaties made between Sir William Johnson, Bart., and the Indian Nations of North America (London, 1756). In June he went to Onondaga, well escorted, for the way was dangerous. This capital of the Confederacy was under a cloud. It had just lost one Red Head, its chief sachem; and first of all it behooved the baronet to condole their affliction. The ceremony was long, with compliments, lugubrious speeches, wampum-belts, the scalp of an enemy to replace the departed, and a final glass of rum for each of the assembled mourners. The conferences lasted a fortnight; and when Johnson took his leave, the tribes stood pledged to lift the hatchet for the English. [401] [401] Minutes of Councils of Onondaga, 19 June to 3 July, 1756, in N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 134-150. When he returned to Fort Johnson a fever seized him, and he lay helpless for a time; then rose from his sick bed to meet another congregation of Indians. These were deputies of the Five Nations, with Mohegans from the Hudson, and Delawares and Shawanoes from the Susquehanna, 392 V1 whom he had persuaded to visit him in hope that he might induce them to cease from murdering the border settlers. All their tribesmen were in arms against the English; but he prevailed at last, and they accepted the war-belt at his hands. The Delawares complained that their old conquerors, the Five Nations, had forced them "to wear the petticoat," that is, to be counted not as warriors but as women. Johnson, in presence of all the Assembly, now took off the figurative garment, and pronounced them henceforth men. A grand war-dance followed. A hundred and fifty Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Delawares, Shawanoes, and Mohegans stamped, whooped, and yelled all night. [402] In spite of Piquet, the two Joncaires, and the rest of the French agents, Johnson had achieved a success. But would the Indians keep their word? It was more than doubtful. While some of them treated with him on the Mohawk, others treated with Vaudreuil at Montreal. [403] A display of military vigor on the English side, crowned by some signal victory, would alone make their alliance sure. [402] Minutes of Councils at Fort Johnson, 9 July to 12 July, in N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 152-160. [403] Conferences between M. de Vaudreuil and the Five Nations, 28 July to 20 Aug., in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 445-453. It was not the French only who thwarted the efforts of Johnson; for while he strove to make friends of the Delawares and Shawanoes, Governor Morris of Pennsylvania declared war against them, and Governor Belcher of New Jersey followed his example; though persuaded at last to hold his 393 V1 hand till the baronet had tried the virtue of pacific measures. [404] [404] Johnson to Lords of Trade, 28 May, 1756. Ibid., 17 July, 1756. Johnson to Shirley, 24 April, 1756. Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 75, 88, 194. What Shirley longed for was the collecting of a body of Five Nation warriors at Oswego to aid him in his cherished enterprise against Niagara and Frontenac. The warriors had promised him to come; but there was small hope that they would do so. Meanwhile he was at Albany pursuing his preparations, posting his scanty force in the forts newly built on the Mohawk and the Great Carrying Place, and sending forward stores and provisions. Having no troops to spare for escorts, he invented a plan which, like everything he did, was bitterly criticised. He took into pay two thousand boatmen, gathered from all parts of the country, including many whalemen from the eastern coasts of New England, divided them into companies of fifty, armed each with a gun and a hatchet, and placed them under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel John Bradstreet. [405] Thus organized, they would, he hoped, require no escort. Bradstreet was a New England officer who had been a captain in the last war, somewhat dogged and self-opinioned, but brave, energetic, and well fitted for this kind of service. [405] Shirley to Fox, 7 May, 1756. Shirley to Abercromby, 27 June, 1756. London to Fox, 19 Aug. 1756. In May Vaudreuil sent Coulon de Villiers with eleven hundred soldiers, Canadians, and Indians, to harass Oswego and cut its communications 394 V1 with Albany. [406] Nevertheless Bradstreet safely conducted a convoy of provisions and military stores to the garrison; and on the third of July set out on his return with the empty boats. The party were pushing their way up the river in three divisions. The first of these, consisting of a hundred boats and three hundred men, with Bradstreet at their head, were about nine miles from Oswego, when, at three in the afternoon, they received a heavy volley from the forest on the east bank. It was fired by a part of Villiers' command, consisting, by English accounts, of about seven hundred men. A considerable number of the boatmen were killed or disabled, and the others made for the shelter of the western shore. Some prisoners were taken in the confusion; and if the French had been content to stop here, they might fairly have claimed a kind of victory: but, eager to push their advantage, they tried to cross under cover of an island just above. Bradstreet saw the movement, and landed on the island with six or eight followers, among whom was young Captain Schuyler, afterwards General Schuyler of the Revolution. Their fire kept the enemy in check till others joined them, to the number of about twenty. These a second and a third time beat back the French, who now gave over the attempt, and made for another ford at some distance above. Bradstreet saw their intention; and collecting two hundred and fifty men, was about to advance up the west bank to oppose them, when Dr. Kirkland, 395 V1 a surgeon, came to tell him that the second division of boats had come up, and that the men had landed. Bradstreet ordered them to stay where they were, and defend the lower crossing: then hastened forward; but when he reached the upper ford, the French had passed the river, and were ensconced in a pine-swamp near the shore. Here he attacked them; and both parties fired at each other from behind trees for an hour, with little effect. Bradstreet at length encouraged his men to make a rush at the enemy, who were put to flight and driven into the river, where many were shot or drowned as they tried to cross. Another party of the French had meanwhile passed by a ford still higher up to support their comrades; but the fight was over before they reached the spot, and they in their turn were set upon and driven back across the stream. Half an hour after, Captain Patten arrived from Onondaga with the grenadiers of Shirley's regiment; and late in the evening two hundred men came from Oswego to reinforce the victors. In the morning Bradstreet prepared to follow the French to their camp, twelve miles distant; but was prevented by a heavy rain which lasted all day. On the Monday following, he and his men reached Albany, bringing two prisoners, eighty French muskets, and many knapsacks picked up in the woods. He had lost between sixty and seventy killed, wounded, and taken. [407] [406] Détail de ce qui s'est passé en Canada, Oct. 1755—Juin, 1756. [407] Letter of J. Choate, Albany, 12 July, 1756, in Massachusetts Archives, LV. Three Letters from Albany, July, Aug. 1756, in Doc. Hist. of N. Y., I. 482. Review of Military Operations. Shirley to Fox, 26 July, 1756. Abercromby to Sir Charles Hardy, 11 July, 1756. Niles, in Mass. His. Coll., Fourth Series, V. 417. Lossing, Life of Schuyler, I. 131 (1860). Mante, 60. Bradstreet's conduct on this occasion afterwards gained for him the warm praises of Wolfe. 396 V1 This affair was trumpeted through Canada as a victory of the French. Their notices of it are discordant, though very brief. One of them says that Villiers had four hundred men. Another gives him five hundred, and a third eight hundred, against fifteen hundred English, of whom they killed eight hundred, or an Englishman apiece. A fourth writer boasts that six hundred Frenchmen killed nine hundred English. A fifth contents himself with four hundred; but thinks that forty more would have been slain if the Indians had not fired too soon. He says further that there were three hundred boats; and presently forgetting himself, adds that five hundred were taken or destroyed. A sixth announces a great capture of stores and provisions, though all the boats were empty. A seventh reports that the Canadians killed about three hundred, and would have killed more but for the bad quality of their tomahawks. An eighth, with rare modesty, puts the English loss at fifty or sixty. That of Villiers is given in every proportion of killed or wounded, from one up to ten. Thus was Canada roused to martial ardor, and taught to look for future triumphs cheaply bought. [408] [408] Nouvelles du Camp établi au Portage de Chouaguen, première Relation. Ibid., Séconde Relation, 10 Juillet, 1756. Bougainville, Journal, who gives the report as he heard it. Lettre du R. P. Cocquard, S. J., 1756. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 10 Juillet, 1756. Ursulines de Québec, II. 292. N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 434, 467, 477, 483. Some prisoners taken in the first attack were brought to Montreal, where their presence gave countenance to these fabrications. 397 V1 The success of Bradstreet silenced for a time the enemies of Shirley. His cares, however, redoubled. He was anxious for Oswego, as the two prisoners declared that the French meant to attack it, instead of waiting to be attacked from it. Nor was the news from that quarter reassuring. The engineer, Mackellar, wrote that the works were incapable of defence; and Colonel Mercer, the commandant, reported general discontent in the garrison. [409] Captain John Vicars, an invalid officer of Shirley's regiment, arrived at Albany with yet more deplorable accounts. He had passed the winter at Oswego, where he declared the dearth of food to have been such that several councils of war had been held on the question of abandoning the place from sheer starvation. More than half his regiment died of hunger or disease; and, in his own words, "had the poor fellows lived they must have eaten one another." Some of the men were lodged in barracks, though without beds, while many lay all winter in huts on the bare ground. Scurvy and dysentery made frightful havoc. "In January," says Vicars, "we were informed by the Indians that we were to be attacked. The garrison was then so weak that the strongest guard we proposed to mount was a subaltern and twenty men; but we were seldom able to mount more than sixteen or eighteen, and half of those were obliged to have sticks in their hands to support them. The men were so weak that the sentries often fell down on their posts, and lay there till 398 V1 the relief came and lifted them up." His own company of fifty was reduced to ten. The other regiment of the garrison, Pepperell's, or the fifty-first, was quartered at Fort Ontario, on the other side of the river; and being better sheltered, suffered less. [409] Mackellar to Shirley, June, 1756. Mercer to Shirley, 2 July, 1756. The account given by Vicars of the state of the defences was scarcely more flattering. He reported that the principal fort had no cannon on the side most exposed to attack. Two pieces had been mounted on the trading-house in the centre; but as the concussion shook down stones from the wall whenever they were fired, they had since been removed. The second work, called Fort Ontario, he had not seen since it was finished, having been too ill to cross the river. Of the third, called New Oswego, or "Fort Rascal," he testifies thus: "It never was finished, and there were no loopholes in the stockades; so that they could not fire out of the fort but by opening the gate and firing out of that." [410] [410] Information of Captain John Vicars, of the Fiftieth (Shirley's) Regiment, enclosed with a despatch of Lord Loudon. Vicars was a veteran British officer who left Oswego with Bradstreet on the third of July. Shirley to Loudon, 5 Sept. 1756. Through the spring and early summer Shirley was gathering recruits, often of the meanest quality, and sending them to Oswego to fill out the two emaciated regiments. The place must be defended at any cost. Its fall would ruin not only the enterprise against Niagara and Frontenac, but also that against Ticonderoga and Crown Point; since, having nothing more to fear on Lake 399 V1 Ontario, the French could unite their whole force on Lake Champlain, whether for defence or attack. Towards the end of June Abercromby and Webb arrived at Albany, bringing a reinforcement of nine hundred regulars, consisting of Otway's regiment, or a part of it, and a body of Highlanders. Shirley resigned his command, and Abercromby requested him to go to New York, wait there till Lord Loudon arrived, and lay before him the state of affairs. [411] Shirley waited till the twenty-third of July, when the Earl at length appeared. He was a rough Scotch lord, hot and irascible; and the communications of his predecessor, made, no doubt, in a manner somewhat pompous and self-satisfied, did not please him. "I got from Major-General Shirley," he says, "a few papers of very little use; only he insinuated to me that I would find everything prepared, and have nothing to do but to pull laurels; which I understand was his constant conversation before my arrival." [412] [411] Shirley to Fox, 4 July, 1756. [412] Loudon (to Fox?), 19 Aug. 1756. Loudon sailed up the Hudson in no placid mood. On reaching Albany he abandoned the attempt against Niagara and Frontenac; and had resolved to turn his whole force against Ticonderoga, when he was met by an obstacle that both perplexed and angered him. By a royal order lately issued, all general and field officers with provincial commissions were to take rank only as eldest 400 V1 captains when serving in conjunction with regular troops. [413] Hence the whole provincial army, as Winslow observes, might be put under the command of any British major. [414] The announcement of this regulation naturally caused great discontent. The New England officers held a meeting, and voted with one voice that in their belief its enforcement would break up the provincial army and prevent the raising of another. Loudon, hearing of this, desired Winslow to meet him at Albany for a conference on the subject. Thither Winslow went with some of his chief officers. The Earl asked them to dinner, and there was much talk, with no satisfactory result; whereupon, somewhat chafed, he required Winslow to answer in writing, yes or no, whether the provincial officers would obey the commander-in-chief and act in conjunction with the regulars. Thus forced to choose between acquiescence and flat mutiny, they declared their submission to his orders, at the same time asking as a favor that they might be allowed to act independently; to which Loudon gave for the present an unwilling assent. Shirley, who, in spite of his removal from command, had the good of the service deeply at heart, was much troubled at this affair, and wrote strong letters to Winslow in the interest of harmony. [415] [413] Order concerning the Rank of Provincial General and Field Officers in North America. Given at our Court at Kensington, 12 May, 1756. [414] Winslow to Shirley, 21 Aug. 1756. [415] Correspondence of Loudon, Abercromby, and Shirley, July, Aug. 1756. Record of Meeting of Provincial Officers, July, 1756. Letter and Order Books of Winslow. 401 V1 Loudon next proceeded to examine the state of the provincial forces, and sent Lieutenant-Colonel Burton, of the regulars, to observe and report upon it. Winslow by this time had made a forward movement, and was now at Lake George with nearly half his command, while the rest were at Fort Edward under Lyman, or in detachments at Saratoga and the other small posts below. Burton found Winslow's men encamped with their right on what are now the grounds of Fort William Henry Hotel, and their left extending southward between the mountain in their front and the marsh in their rear. "There are here," he reports, "about twenty-five hundred men, five hundred of them sick, the greatest part of them what they call poorly; they bury from five to eight daily, and officers in proportion; extremely indolent, and dirty to a degree." Then, in vernacular English, he describes the infectious condition of the fort, which was full of the sick. "Their camp," he proceeds, "is nastier than anything I could conceive; their——, kitchens, graves, and places for slaughtering cattle all mixed through their encampment; a great waste of provisions, the men having just what they please; no great command kept up. Colonel Gridley governs the general; not in the least alert; only one advanced guard of a subaltern and twenty-four men. The cannon and stores in great confusion." Of the camp at Fort Edward he gives a better account. "It is much cleaner than at Fort William Henry, but not sufficiently so to 402 V1 keep the men healthy; a much better command kept up here. General Lyman very ready to order out to work and to assist the engineers with any number of men they require, and keeps a succession of scouting-parties out towards Wood Creek and South Bay." [416] [416] Burton to Loudon, 27 Aug. 1756. The prejudice of the regular officer may have colored the picture, but it is certain that the sanitary condition of the provincial camps was extremely bad. "A grievous sickness among the troops," writes a Massachusetts surgeon at Fort Edward; "we bury five or six a day. Not more than two thirds of our army fit for duty. Long encampments are the bane of New England men." [417] Like all raw recruits, they did not know how to take care of themselves; and their officers had not the experience, knowledge, or habit of command to enforce sanitary rules. The same evils were found among the Canadians when kept long in one place. Those in the camp of Villiers are reported at this time as nearly all sick. [418] [417] Dr. Thomas Williams to Colonel Israel Williams, 28 Aug. 1756. [418] Bougainville, Journal. Another penman, very different from the military critic, was also on the spot, noting down every day what he saw and felt. This was John Graham, minister of Suffield, in Connecticut, and now chaplain of Lyman's regiment. His spirit, by nature far from buoyant, was depressed by bodily ailments, and still more by the extremely 403 V1 secular character of his present surroundings. It appears by his Diary that he left home "under great exercise of mind," and was detained at Albany for a time, being, as he says, taken with an ague-fit and a quinsy; but at length he reached the camp at Fort Edward, where deep despondency fell upon him. "Labor under great discouragements," says the Diary, under date of July twenty-eighth; "for find my business but mean in the esteem of many, and think there's not much for a chaplain to do." Again, Tuesday, August seventeenth: "Breakfasted this morning with the General. But a graceless meal; never a blessing asked, nor thanks given. At the evening sacrifice a more open scene of wickedness. The General and head officers, with some of the regular officers, in General Lyman's tent, within four rods of the place of public prayers. None came to prayers; but they fixed a table without the door of the tent, where a head colonel was posted to make punch in the sight of all, they within drinking, talking, and laughing during the whole of the service, to the disturbance and disaffection of most present. This was not only a bare neglect, but an open contempt, of the worship of God by the heads of this army. 'Twas but last Sabbath that General Lyman spent the time of divine service in the afternoon in his tent, drinking in company with Mr. Gordon, a regular officer. I have oft heard cursing and swearing in his presence by some provincial field-officers, but never heard a reproof nor so much as a check to them come from his 404 V1 mouth, though he never uses such language himself. Lord, what is man! Truly, the May-game of Fortune! Lord, make me know my duty, and what I ought to do!" That night his sleep was broken and his soul troubled by angry voices under his window, where one Colonel Glasier was berating, in unhallowed language, the captain of the guard; and here the chaplain's Journal abruptly ends. [419] [419] I owe to my friend George S. Hale, Esq., the opportunity of examining the autograph Journal; it has since been printed in the Magazine of American History for March, 1882. A brother minister, bearing no likeness to the worthy Graham, appeared on the same spot some time after. This was Chaplain William Crawford, of Worcester, who, having neglected to bring money to the war, suffered much annoyance, aggravated by what he thought a want of due consideration for his person and office. His indignation finds vent in a letter to his townsman, Timothy Paine, member of the General Court: "No man can reasonably expect that I can with any propriety discharge the duty of a chaplain when I have nothing either to eat or drink, nor any conveniency to write a line other than to sit down upon a stump and put a piece of paper upon my knee. As for Mr. Weld [another chaplain], he is easy and silent whatever treatment he meets with, and I suppose they thought to find me the same easy and ductile person; but may the wide yawning earth devour me first! The state of the camp is just such as one at 405 V1 home would guess it to be,—nothing but a hurry and confusion of vice and wickedness, with a stygian atmosphere to breathe in." [420] The vice and wickedness of which he complains appear to have consisted in a frequent infraction of the standing order against "Curseing and Swareing," as well as of that which required attendance on daily prayers, and enjoined "the people to appear in a decent manner, clean and shaved," at the two Sunday sermons. [421] [420] The autograph letter is in Massachusetts Archives, LVI. no. 142. The same volume contains a letter from Colonel Frye, of Massachusetts, in which he speaks of the forlorn condition in which Chaplain Weld reached the camp. Of Chaplain Crawford, he says that he came decently clothed, but without bed or blanket, till he, Frye, lent them to him, and got Captain Learned to take him into his tent. Chaplains usually had a separate tent, or shared that of the colonel. [421] Letter and Order Books of Winslow. At the beginning of August Winslow wrote to the committees of the several provinces: "It looks as if it won't be long before we are fit for a remove,"—that is, for an advance on Ticonderoga. On the twelfth Loudon sent Webb with the forty-fourth regiment and some of Bradstreet's boatmen to reinforce Oswego. [422] They had been ready for a month; but confusion and misunderstanding arising from the change of command had prevented their departure. [423] Yet the utmost anxiety had prevailed for the safety of that important post, and on the twenty-eighth Surgeon Thomas Williams wrote: "Whether Oswego is yet ours is uncertain. Would hope it is, as the 406 V1 reverse would be such a terrible shock as the country never felt, and may be a sad omen of what is coming upon poor sinful New England. Indeed we can't expect anything but to be severely chastened till we are humbled for our pride and haughtiness." [424] [422] Loudon (to Fox?), 19 Aug. 1756. [423] Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated. Shirley to Loudon, 4 Sept. 1756. Shirley to Fox, 16 Sept. 1756. [424] Thomas Williams to Colonel Israel Williams, 28 Aug. 1756. His foreboding proved true. Webb had scarcely reached the Great Carrying Place, when tidings of disaster fell upon him like a thunderbolt. The French had descended in force upon Oswego, taken it with all its garrison; and, as report ran, were advancing into the province, six thousand strong. Wood Creek had just been cleared, with great labor, of the trees that choked it. Webb ordered others to be felled and thrown into the stream to stop the progress of the enemy; then, with shameful precipitation, he burned the forts of the Carrying Place, and retreated down the Mohawk to German Flats. Loudon ordered Winslow to think no more of Ticonderoga, but to stay where he was and hold the French in check. All was astonishment and dismay at the sudden blow. "Oswego has changed masters, and I think we may justly fear that the whole of our country will soon follow, unless a merciful God prevent, and awake a sinful people to repentance and reformation." Thus wrote Dr. Thomas Williams to his wife from the camp at Fort Edward. "Such a shocking affair has never found a place in English annals," wrote the surgeon's young relative, Colonel William Williams. "The loss 407 V1 is beyond account; but the dishonor done His Majesty's arms is infinitely greater." [425] It remains to see how the catastrophe befell. [425] Colonel William Williams to Colonel Israel Williams, 30 Aug. 1756. Since Vaudreuil became chief of the colony he had nursed the plan of seizing Oswego, yet hesitated to attempt it. Montcalm declares that he confirmed the Governor's wavering purpose; but Montcalm himself had hesitated. In July, however, there came exaggerated reports that the English were moving upon Ticonderoga in greatly increased numbers; and both Vaudreuil and the General conceived that a feint against Oswego would draw off the strength of the assailants, and, if promptly and secretly executed, might even be turned successfully into a real attack. Vaudreuil thereupon recalled Montcalm from Ticonderoga. [426] Leaving the post in the keeping of Lévis and three thousand men, he embarked on Lake Champlain, rowed day and night, and reached Montreal on the nineteenth. Troops were arriving from Quebec, and Indians from the far west. A band of Menomonies from beyond Lake Michigan, naked, painted, plumed, greased, stamping, uttering sharp yelps, shaking feathered lances, brandishing tomahawks, danced the war-dance before the Governor, to the thumping of the Indian drum. Bougainville looked on astonished, and thought of the Pyrrhic dance of the Greeks. [426] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12 Ao?t, 1756. Montcalm à sa Femme, 20 Juillet, 1756. Montcalm and he left Montreal on the twenty-first, and reached Fort Frontenac in eight days. 408 V1 Rigaud, brother of the Governor, had gone thither some time before, and crossed with seven hundred Canadians to the south side of the lake, where Villiers was encamped at Niaouré Bay, now Sackett's Harbor, with such of his detachment as war and disease had spared. Rigaud relieved him, and took command of the united bands. With their aid the engineer, Descombles, reconnoitred the English forts, and came back with the report that success was certain. [427] It was but a confirmation of what had already been learned from deserters and prisoners, who declared that the main fort was but a loopholed wall held by six or seven hundred men, ill fed, discontented, and mutinous. [428] Others said that they had been driven to desert by the want of good food, and that within a year twelve hundred men had died of disease at Oswego. [429] [427] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 4 Ao?t, 1756. Vaudreuil à Bourlamaque,—Juin, 1756. [428] Bougainville, Journal. [429] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 10 Juillet, 1756. Résumé des Nouvelles du Canada, Sept. 1756. The battalions of La Sarre, Guienne, and Béarn, with the colony regulars, a body of Canadians, and about two hundred and fifty Indians, were destined for the enterprise. The whole force was a little above three thousand, abundantly supplied with artillery. La Sarre and Guienne were already at Fort Frontenac. Béarn was at Niagara, whence it arrived in a few days, much buffeted by the storms of Lake Ontario. On the fourth of August all was ready. Montcalm embarked at night with 409 V1 the first division, crossed in darkness to Wolf Island, lay there hidden all day, and embarking again in the evening, joined Rigaud at Niaouré Bay at seven o'clock in the morning of the sixth. The second division followed, with provisions, hospital train, and eighty artillery boats; and on the eighth all were united at the bay. On the ninth Rigaud, covered by the universal forest, marched in advance to protect the landing of the troops. Montcalm followed with the first division; and, coasting the shore in bateaux, landed at midnight of the tenth within half a league of the first English fort. Four cannon were planted in battery upon the strand, and the men bivouacked by their boats. So skilful were the assailants and so careless the assailed that the English knew nothing of their danger, till in the morning, a reconnoitring canoe discovered the invaders. Two armed vessels soon came to cannonade them; but their light guns were no match for the heavy artillery of the French, and they were forced to keep the offing. Descombles, the engineer, went before dawn to reconnoitre the fort, with several other officers and a party of Indians. While he was thus employed, one of these savages, hungry for scalps, took him in the gloom for an Englishman, and shot him dead. Captain Pouchot, of the battalion of Béarn, replaced him; and the attack was pushed vigorously. The Canadians and Indians, swarming through the forest, fired all day on the fort under cover of the trees. The second division 410 V1 came up with twenty-two more cannon; and at night the first parallel was marked out at a hundred and eighty yards from the rampart. Stumps were grubbed up, fallen trunks shoved aside, and a trench dug, sheltered by fascines, gabions, and a strong abattis. Fort Ontario, counted as the best of the three forts at Oswego, stood on a high plateau at the east or right side of the river where it entered the lake. It was in the shape of a star, and was formed of trunks of trees set upright in the ground, hewn flat on two sides, and closely fitted together,—an excellent defence against musketry or swivels, but worthless against cannon. The garrison, three hundred and seventy in all, were the remnant of Pepperell's regiment, joined to raw recruits lately sent up to fill the places of the sick and dead. They had eight small cannon and a mortar, with which on the next day, Friday, the thirteenth, they kept up a brisk fire till towards night; when, after growing more rapid for a time, it ceased, and the fort showed no sign of life. Not a cannon had yet opened on them from the trenches; but it was certain that with the French artillery once in action, their wooden rampart would be shivered to splinters. Hence it was that Colonel Mercer, commandant at Oswego, thinking it better to lose the fort than to lose both fort and garrison, signalled to them from across the river to abandon their position and join him on the other side. Boats were sent to bring them off; and they passed over unmolested, after 411 V1 spiking their cannon and firing off their ammunition or throwing it into the well. The fate of Oswego was now sealed. The principal work, called Old Oswego, or Fort Pepperell, stood at the mouth of the river on the west side, nearly opposite Fort Ontario, and less than five hundred yards distant from it. The trading-house, which formed the centre of the place, was built of rough stone laid in clay, and the wall which enclosed it was of the same materials; both would crumble in an instant at the touch of a twelve-pound shot. Towards the west and south they had been protected by an outer line of earthworks, mounted with cannon, and forming an entrenched camp; while the side towards Fort Ontario was left wholly exposed, in the rash confidence that this work, standing on the opposite heights, would guard against attack from that quarter. On a hill, a fourth of a mile beyond Old Oswego, stood the unfinished stockade called New Oswego, Fort George, or, by reason of its worthlessness, Fort Rascal. It had served as a cattle pen before the French appeared, but was now occupied by a hundred and fifty Jersey provincials. Old Oswego with its outwork was held by Shirley's regiment, chiefly invalids and raw recruits, to whom were now joined the garrison of Fort Ontario and a number of sailors, boatmen, and laborers. Montcalm lost no time. As soon as darkness set in he began a battery at the brink of the height on which stood the captured fort. His whole 412 V1 force toiled all night, digging, setting gabions, and dragging up cannon, some of which had been taken from Braddock. Before daybreak twenty heavy pieces had been brought to the spot, and nine were already in position. The work had been so rapid that the English imagined their enemies to number six thousand at least. The battery soon opened fire. Grape and round shot swept the intrenchment and crashed through the rotten masonry. The English, says a French officer, "were exposed to their shoe-buckles." Their artillery was pointed the wrong way, in expectation of an attack, not from the east, but from the west. They now made a shelter of pork-barrels, three high and three deep, planted cannon behind them, and returned the French fire with some effect. Early in the morning Montcalm had ordered Rigaud to cross the river with the Canadians and Indians. There was a ford three quarters of a league above the forts; [430] and here they passed over unopposed, the English not having discovered the movement. [431] The only danger was from the river. Some of the men were forced to swim, others waded to the waist, others to the neck; but they all crossed safely, and presently showed themselves at the edge of the woods, yelling and firing their guns, too far for much execution, but not too far to discourage the garrison. [430] Bougainville, Journal. [431] Pouchot, I. 76. The garrison were already disheartened. Colonel Mercer, the soul of the defence, had just been cut in 413 V1 two by a cannon-shot while directing the gunners. Up to this time the defenders had behaved with spirit; but despair now seized them, increased by the screams and entreaties of the women, of whom there were more than a hundred in the place. There was a council of officers, and then the white flag was raised. Bougainville went to propose terms of capitulation. "The cries, threats, and hideous howling of our Canadians and Indians," says Vaudreuil, "made them quickly decide." "This," observes the Reverend Father Claude Godefroy Cocquard, "reminds me of the fall of Jericho before the shouts of the Israelites." The English surrendered prisoners of war, to the number, according to the Governor, of sixteen hundred, [432] which included the sailors, laborers, and women. The Canadians and Indians broke through all restraint, and fell to plundering. There was an opening of rum-barrels and a scene of drunkenness, in which some of the prisoners had their share; while others tried to escape in the confusion, and were tomahawked by the excited savages. Many more would have been butchered, but for the efforts of Montcalm, who by unstinted promises succeeded in appeasing his ferocious 414 V1 allies, whom he dared not offend. "It will cost the King," he says, "eight or ten thousand livres in presents." [433] [432] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 20 Ao?t, 1756. He elsewhere makes the number somewhat greater. That the garrison, exclusive of civilians, did not exceed at the utmost fourteen hundred, is shown by Shirley to Loudon, 5 Sept. 1756. Loudon had charged Shirley with leaving Oswego weakly garrisoned; and Shirley replies by alleging that the troops there were in the number as above. It was of course his interest to make them appear as numerous as possible. In the printed Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated, they are put at only ten hundred and fifty. [433] Several English writers say, however, that fifteen or twenty young men were given up to the Indians to be adopted in place of warriors lately killed. The loss on both sides is variously given. By the most trustworthy accounts, that of the English did not reach fifty killed, and that of the French was still less. In the forts and vessels were found above a hundred pieces of artillery, most of them swivels and other light guns, with a large quantity of powder, shot, and shell. The victors burned the forts and the vessels on the stocks, destroyed such provisions and stores as they could not carry away, and made the place a desert. The priest Piquet, who had joined the expedition, planted amid the ruin a tall cross, graven with the words, In hoc signo vincunt; and near it was set a pole bearing the arms of France, with the inscription, Manibus date lilia plenis. Then the army decamped, loaded with prisoners and spoil, descended to Montreal, hung the captured flags in the churches, and sang Te Deum in honor of their triumph. It was the greatest that the French arms had yet achieved in America. The defeat of Braddock was an Indian victory; this last exploit was the result of bold enterprise and skilful tactics. With its laurels came its fruits. Hated Oswego had been laid in ashes, and the would-be 415 V1 assailants forced to a vain and hopeless defence. France had conquered the undisputed command of Lake Ontario, and her communications with the West were safe. A small garrison at Niagara and another at Frontenac would now hold those posts against any effort that the English could make this year; and the whole French force could concentrate at Ticonderoga, repel the threatened attack, and perhaps retort it by seizing Albany. If the English, on the other side, had lost a great material advantage, they had lost no less in honor. The news of the surrender was received with indignation in England and in the colonies. Yet the behaviour of the garrison was not so discreditable as it seemed. The position was indefensible, and they could have held out at best but a few days more. They yielded too soon; but unless Webb had come to their aid, which was not to be expected, they must have yielded at last. The French had scarcely gone, when two English scouts, Thomas Harris and James Conner, came with a party of Indians to the scene of desolation. The ground was strewn with broken casks and bread sodden with rain. The remains of burnt bateaux and whaleboats were scattered along the shore. The great stone trading-house in the old fort was a smoking ruin; Fort Rascal was still burning on the neighboring hill; Fort Ontario was a mass of ashes and charred logs, and by it stood two poles on which 416 V1 were written words which the visitors did not understand. They went back to Fort Johnson with their story; and Oswego reverted for a time to the bears, foxes, and wolves. [434] [434] On the capture of Oswego, the authorities examined have been very numerous, and only the best need be named. Livre d'Ordres, Campagne de 1756, contains all orders from headquarters. Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction à M. le Marquis de Montcalm, 21 Juillet; 1756, signé Vaudreuil. Bougainville, Journal. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Juin, 1756 (designs against Oswego). Ibid., 13 Ao?t, 1755. Ibid., 30 Ao?t. Pouchot, I. 67-81. Relation de la Prise des Forts de Chouaguen. Bigot au Ministre, 3 Sept. 1756 Journal du Siége de Chouaguen. Précis des événements, 1756. Montcalm au Ministre, 20 Juillet, 1756. Ibid., 28 Ao?t, 1756. Desandrouins à———, même date. Montcalm à sa Femme, 30 Ao?t. Translations of several of the above papers, along with others less important, will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., X., and Doc. Hist. N. Y., I. State of Facts relating to the Loss of Oswego, in London Magazine for 1757, p. 14. Correspondence of Shirley. Correspondence of Loudon. Littlehales to Loudon, 30 Aug. 1756. Hardy to Lords of Trade, 5 Sept. 1756. Conduct of Major-General Shirley briefly stated. Declaration of some Soldiers of Shirley's Regiment, in N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 126. Letter from an officer present, in Boston Evening Post of 16 May, 1757. The published plans and drawings of Oswego at this time are very inexact. CHAPTER XIII. 1756, 1757. PARTISAN WAR. Failure of Shirley's Plan ? Causes ? Loudon and Shirley ? Close of the Campaign ? The Western Border ? Armstrong destroys Kittanning ? The Scouts of Lake George ? War Parties from Ticonderoga ? Robert Rogers ? The Rangers ? Their Hardihood and Daring ? Disputes as to Quarters of Troops ? Expedition of Rogers ? A Desperate Bush-fight ? Enterprise of Vaudreuil ? Rigaud attacks Fort William Henry. Shirley's grand scheme for cutting New France in twain had come to wreck. There was an element of boyishness in him. He made bold plans without weighing too closely his means of executing them. The year's campaign would in all likelihood have succeeded if he could have acted promptly; if he had had ready to his hand a well-trained and well-officered force, furnished with material of war and means of transportation, and prepared to move as soon as the streams and lakes of New York were open, while those of Canada were still sealed with ice. But timely action was out of his power. The army that should have moved in April was not ready to move till August. Of the nine discordant semi-republics whom he asked to join in the work, three or four refused, some of the others were lukewarm, and all were 418 V1 slow. Even Massachusetts, usually the foremost, failed to get all her men into the field till the season was nearly ended. Having no military establishment, the colonies were forced to improvise a new army for every campaign. Each of them watched its neighbors, or, jealous lest it should do more than its just share, waited for them to begin. Each popular assembly acted under the eye of a frugal constituency, who, having little money, were as chary of it as their descendants are lavish; and most of them were shaken by internal conflicts, more absorbing than the great question on which hung the fate of the continent. Only the four New England colonies were fully earnest for the war, and one, even of these, was ready to use the crisis as a means of extorting concessions from its Governor in return for grants of money and men. When the lagging contingents came together at last, under a commander whom none of them trusted, they were met by strategical difficulties which would have perplexed older soldiers and an abler general; for they were forced to act on the circumference of a vast semicircle, in a labyrinth of forests, without roads, and choked with every kind of obstruction. Opposed to them was a trained army, well organized and commanded, focused at Montreal, and moving for attack or defence on two radiating lines,—one towards Lake Ontario, and the other towards Lake Champlain,—supported by a martial peasantry, supplied from France with money and 419 V1 material, dependent on no popular vote, having no will but that of its chief, and ready on the instant to strike to right or left as the need required. It was a compact military absolutism confronting a heterogeneous group of industrial democracies, where the force of numbers was neutralized by diffusion and incoherence. A long and dismal apprenticeship waited them before they could hope for success; nor could they ever put forth their full strength without a radical change of political conditions and an awakened consciousness of common interests and a common cause. It was the sense of powerlessness arising from the want of union that, after the fall of Oswego, spread alarm through the northern and middle colonies, and drew these desponding words from William Livingston, of New Jersey: "The colonies are nearly exhausted, and their funds already anticipated by expensive unexecuted projects. Jealous are they of each other; some ill-constituted, others shaken with intestine divisions, and, if I may be allowed the expression, parsimonious even to prodigality. Our assemblies are diffident of their governors, governors despise their assemblies; and both mutually misrepresent each other to the Court of Great Britain." Military measures, he proceeds, demand secrecy and despatch; but when so many divided provinces must agree to join in them, secrecy and despatch are impossible. In conclusion he exclaims: "Canada must be demolished,—Delenda est Carthago,—or we are undone." [435] But Loudon 420 V1 was not Scipio, and cis-Atlantic Carthage was to stand for some time longer. [435] Review of Military Operations, 187, 189 (Dublin, 1757). The Earl, in search of a scapegoat for the loss of Oswego, naturally chose Shirley, attacked him savagely, told him that he was of no use in America, and ordered him to go home to England without delay. [436] Shirley, who was then in Boston, answered this indecency with dignity and effect. [437] The chief fault was with Loudon himself, whose late arrival in America had caused a change of command and of plans in the crisis of the campaign. Shirley well knew the weakness of Oswego; and in early spring had sent two engineers to make it defensible, with particular instructions to strengthen Fort Ontario. [438] But they, thinking that the chief danger lay on the west and south, turned all their attention thither, and neglected Ontario till it was too late. Shirley was about to reinforce Oswego with a strong body of troops when the arrival of Abercromby took the control out of his hands and caused ruinous delay. He cannot, however, be acquitted of mismanagement in failing to supply the place with wholesome provisions in the preceding autumn, before the streams were stopped with ice. Hence came the ravages of disease and famine which, before spring, reduced the garrison to a hundred and 421 V1 forty effective men. Yet there can be no doubt that the change of command was a blunder. This is the view of Franklin, who knew Shirley well, and thus speaks of him: "He would in my opinion, if continued in place, have made a much better campaign than that of Loudon, which was frivolous, expensive, and disgraceful to our nation beyond conception. For though Shirley was not bred a soldier, he was sensible and sagacious in himself, and attentive to good advice from others, capable of forming judicious plans, and quick and active in carrying them into execution." [439] He sailed for England in the autumn, disappointed and poor; the bull-headed Duke of Cumberland had been deeply prejudiced against him, and it was only after long waiting that this strenuous champion of British interests was rewarded in his old age with the petty government of the Bahamas. [436] Loudon to Shirley, 6 Sept. 1756. [437] The correspondence on both sides is before me, copied from the originals in the Public Record Office. [438] "The principal thing for which I sent Mr. Mackellar to Oswego was to strengthen Fort Ontario as much as he possibly could." Shirley to Loudon, 4 Sept. 1756. [439] Works of Franklin, I. 220. Loudon had now about ten thousand men at his command, though not all fit for duty. They were posted from Albany to Lake George. The Earl himself was at Fort Edward, while about three thousand of the provincials still lay, under Winslow, at the lake. Montcalm faced them at Ticonderoga, with five thousand three hundred regulars and Canadians, in a position where they could defy three times their number. [440] "The sons of Belial are too strong for me," jocosely wrote 422 V1 Winslow; [441] and he set himself to intrenching his camp; then had the forest cut down for the space of a mile from the lake to the mountains, so that the trees, lying in what he calls a "promiscuous manner," formed an almost impenetrable abatis. An escaped prisoner told him that the French were coming to visit him with fourteen thousand men; [442] but Montcalm thought no more of stirring than Loudon himself; and each stood watching the other, with the lake between them, till the season closed. [440] "Nous sommes tant à Carillon qu'aux postes avancés 5,300 hommes." Bougainville, Journal. [441] Winslow to Loudon, 29 Sept. 1756. [442] Examination of Sergeant James Archibald. Meanwhile the western borders were still ravaged by the tomahawk. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia all writhed under the infliction. Each had made a chain of blockhouses and wooden forts to cover its frontier, and manned them with disorderly bands, lawless, and almost beyond control. [443] The case was at the worst in Pennsylvania, where the tedious quarrelling of Governor and Assembly, joined to the doggedly pacific attitude of the Quakers, made vigorous defence impossible. Rewards were offered for prisoners and scalps, so bountiful that the hunting of men would have been a profitable vocation, but for the extreme wariness and agility of the game. [444] Some of the forts were well built stockades; others were almost worthless; but the 423 V1 enemy rarely molested even the feeblest of them, preferring to ravage the lonely and unprotected farms. There were two or three exceptions. A Virginian fort was attacked by a war-party under an officer named Douville, who was killed, and his followers were put to flight. [445] The assailants were more fortunate at a small stockade called Fort Granville, on the Juniata. A large body of French and Indians attacked it in August while most of the garrison were absent protecting the farmers at their harvest; they set it on fire, and, in spite of a most gallant resistance by the young lieutenant left in command, took it, and killed all but one of the defenders. [446] [443] In the Public Record Office, America and West Indies, LXXXII., is a manuscript map showing the positions of such of these posts as were north of Virginia. They are thirty-five in number, from the head of James River to a point west of Esopus, on the Hudson. [444] Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 76. [445] Washington to Morris,—April, 1756 [446] Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 232, 242; Pennsylvania Archives, II. 744. What sort of resistance the Pennsylvanian borderers would have made under political circumstances less adverse may be inferred from an exploit of Colonel John Armstrong, a settler of Cumberland. After the loss of Fort Granville the Governor of the province sent him with three hundred men to attack the Delaware town of Kittanning, a populous nest of savages on the Alleghany, between the two French posts of Duquesne and Venango. Here most of the war-parties were fitted out, and the place was full of stores and munitions furnished by the French. Here, too, lived the redoubted chief called Captain Jacobs, the terror of the English border. Armstrong set out from Fort Shirley, the farthest outpost, on the last of August, and, a week after, was within 424 V1 six miles of the Indian town. By rapid marching and rare good luck, his party had escaped discovery. It was ten o'clock at night, with a bright moon. The guides were perplexed, and knew neither the exact position of the place nor the paths that led to it. The adventurers threaded the forest in single file, over hills and through hollows, bewildered and anxious, stopping to watch and listen. At length they heard in the distance the beating of an Indian drum and the whooping of warriors in the war-dance. Guided by the sounds, they cautiously moved forward, till those in the front, scrambling down a rocky hill, found themselves on the banks of the Alleghany, about a hundred rods below Kittanning. The moon was near setting; but they could dimly see the town beyond a great intervening field of corn. "At that moment," says Armstrong, "an Indian whistled in a very singular manner, about thirty perches from our front, in the foot of the cornfield." He thought they were discovered; but one Baker, a soldier well versed in Indian ways, told him that it was only some village gallant calling to a young squaw. The party then crouched in the bushes, and kept silent. The moon sank behind the woods, and fires soon glimmered through the field, kindled to drive off mosquitoes by some of the Indians who, as the night was warm, had come out to sleep in the open air. The eastern sky began to redden with the approach of day. Many of the party, spent with a rough march of thirty miles, had fallen asleep. They were now cautiously roused; and 425 V1 Armstrong ordered nearly half of them to make their way along the ridge of a bushy hill that overlooked the town, till they came opposite to it, in order to place it between two fires. Twenty minutes were allowed them for the movement; but they lost their way in the dusk, and reached their station too late. When the time had expired, Armstrong gave the signal to those left with him, who dashed into the cornfield, shooting down the astonished savages or driving them into the village, where they turned and made desperate fight. It was a cluster of thirty log-cabins, the principal being that of the chief, Jacobs, which was loopholed for musketry, and became the centre of resistance. The fight was hot and stubborn. Armstrong ordered the town to be set on fire, which was done, though not without loss; for the Delawares at this time were commonly armed with rifles, and used them well. Armstrong himself was hit in the shoulder. As the flames rose and the smoke grew thick, a warrior in one of the houses sang his death-song, and a squaw in the same house was heard to cry and scream. Rough voices silenced her, and then the inmates burst out, but were instantly killed. The fire caught the house of Jacobs, who, trying to escape through an opening in the roof, was shot dead. Bands of Indians were gathering beyond the river, firing from the other bank, and even crossing to help their comrades; but the assailants held to their work till the whole place was destroyed. "During 426 V1 the burning of the houses," says Armstrong, "we were agreeably entertained by the quick succession of charged guns, gradually firing off as reached by the fire; but much more so with the vast explosion of sundry bags and large kegs of gunpowder, wherewith almost every house abounded; the prisoners afterwards informing us that the Indians had frequently said they had a sufficient stock of ammunition for ten years' war with the English." These prisoners were eleven men, women, and children, captured in the border settlements, and now delivered by their countrymen. The day was far spent when the party withdrew, carrying their wounded on Indian horses, and moving perforce with extreme slowness, though expecting an attack every moment. None took place; and they reached the settlements at last, having bought their success with the loss of seventeen killed and thirteen wounded. [447] A medal was given to each officer, not by the Quaker-ridden Assembly, but by the city council of Philadelphia. [447] Report of Armstrong to Governor Denny, 14 Sept. 1756, in Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 257,—a modest yet very minute account. A List of the Names of the Persons killed, wounded, and missing in the late Expedition against the Kittanning. Hazard, Pennsylvania Register, I. 366. The report of this affair made by Dumas, commandant at Fort Duquesne, is worth noting. He says that Attiqué, the French name of Kittanning, was attacked by "le Général Wachinton," with three or four hundred men on horseback; that the Indians gave way; but that five or six Frenchmen who were in the town held the English in check 427 V1 till the fugitives rallied; that Washington and his men then took to flight, and would have been pursued but for the loss of some barrels of gunpowder which chanced to explode during the action. Dumas adds that several large parties are now on the track of the enemy, and he hopes will cut them to pieces. He then asks for a supply of provisions and merchandise to replace those which the Indians of Attiqué had lost by a fire. [448] Like other officers of the day, he would admit nothing but successes in the department under his command. [448] Dumas à Vaudreuil, 9 Sept. 1756, cited in Bigot au Ministre, 6 Oct. 1756, and in Bougainville, Journal. Vaudreuil wrote singular despatches at this time to the minister at Versailles. He takes credit to himself for the number of war-parties that his officers kept always at work, and fills page after page with details of the coups they had struck; how one brought in two English scalps, another three, another one, and another seven. He owns that they committed frightful cruelties, mutilating and sometimes burning their prisoners; but he expresses no regret, and probably felt none, since he declares that the object of this murderous warfare was to punish the English till they longed for peace. [449] [449] Dépêches de Vaudreuil, 1756. The waters and mountains of Lake George, and not the western borders, were the chief centre of partisan war. Ticonderoga was a hornet's nest, pouring out swarms of savages to infest the highways 428 V1 and byways of the wilderness. The English at Fort William Henry, having few Indians, could not retort in kind; but they kept their scouts and rangers in active movement. What they most coveted was prisoners, as sources of information. One Kennedy, a lieutenant of provincials, with five followers, white and red, made a march of rare audacity, passed all the French posts, took a scalp and two prisoners on the Richelieu, and burned a magazine of provisions between Montreal and St. John. The party were near famishing on the way back; and Kennedy was brought into Fort William Henry in a state of temporary insanity from starvation. [450] Other provincial officers, Peabody, Hazen, Waterbury, and Miller, won a certain distinction in this adventurous service, though few were so conspicuous as the blunt and sturdy Israel Putnam. Winslow writes in October that he has just returned from the best "scout" yet made, and that, being a man of strict truth, he may be entirely trusted. [451] Putnam had gone with six followers down Lake George in a whaleboat to a point on the east side, opposite the present village of Hague, hid the boat, crossed northeasterly to Lake Champlain, three miles from the French fort, climbed the mountain that overlooks it, and made a complete reconnoissance; then approached it, chased three Frenchmen, who escaped within the lines, climbed the mountain again, and moving 429 V1 westward along the ridge, made a minute survey of every outpost between the fort and Lake George. [452] These adventures were not always fortunate. On the nineteenth of September Captain Hodges and fifty men were ambushed a few miles from Fort William Henry by thrice their number of Canadians and Indians, and only six escaped. Thus the record stands in the Letter Book of Winslow. [453] By visiting the encampments of Ticonderoga, one may learn how the blow was struck. [450] Minute of Lieutenant Kennedy's Scout. Winslow to Loudon, 20 Sept. 1756. [451] Winslow to Loudon, 16 Oct. 1756. [452] Report of a Scout to Ticonderoga, Oct. 1756, signed Israel Putnam. [453] Compare Massachusetts Archives, LXXVI. 81. After much persuasion, much feasting, and much consumption of tobacco and brandy, four hundred Indians, Christians from the Missions and heathen from the far west, were persuaded to go on a grand war-party with the Canadians. Of these last there were a hundred,—a wild crew, bedecked and bedaubed like their Indian companions. Perière, an officer of colony regulars, had nominal command of the whole; and among the leaders of the Canadians was the famous bushfighter, Marin. Bougainville was also of the party. In the evening of the sixteenth they all embarked in canoes at the French advance-post commanded by Contrec?ur, near the present steamboat-landing, passed in the gloom under the bare steeps of Rogers Rock, paddled a few hours, landed on the west shore, and sent scouts to reconnoitre. These came back with their reports on the next day, and an Indian crier called the chiefs to council. Bougainville describes them as they stalked gravely to the 430 V1 place of meeting, wrapped in colored blankets, with lances in their hands. The accomplished young aide-de-camp studied his strange companions with an interest not unmixed with disgust. "Of all caprice," he says, "Indian caprice is the most capricious." They were insolent to the French, made rules for them which they did not observe themselves, and compelled the whole party to move when and whither they pleased. Hiding the canoes, and lying close in the forest by day, they all held their nocturnal course southward, by the lofty heights of Black Mountain, and among the islets of the Narrows, till the eighteenth. That night the Indian scouts reported that they had seen the fires of an encampment on the west shore; on which the whole party advanced to the attack, an hour before dawn, filing silently under the dark arches of the forest, the Indians nearly naked, and streaked with their war-paint of vermilion and soot. When they reached the spot, they found only the smouldering fires of a deserted bivouac. Then there was a consultation; ending, after much dispute, with the choice by the Indians of a hundred and ten of their most active warriors to attempt some stroke in the neighborhood of the English fort. Marin joined them with thirty Canadians, and they set out on their errand; while the rest encamped to await the result. At night the adventurers returned, raising the death-cry and firing their guns; somewhat depressed by losses they had suffered, but boasting that they had surprised 431 V1 fifty-three English, and killed or taken all but one. It was a modest and perhaps an involuntary exaggeration. "The very recital of the cruelties they committed on the battle-field is horrible," writes Bougainville. "The ferocity and insolence of these black-souled barbarians makes one shudder. It is an abominable kind of war. The air one breathes is contagious of insensibility and hardness." [454] This was but one of the many such parties sent out from Ticonderoga this year. [454] Bougainville, Journal. Early in September a band of New England rangers came to Winslow's camp, with three prisoners taken within the lines of Ticonderoga. Their captain was Robert Rogers, of New Hampshire,—a strong, well-knit figure, in dress and appearance more woodsman than soldier, with a clear, bold eye, and features that would have been good but for the ungainly proportions of the nose. [455] He had passed his boyhood in the rough surroundings of a frontier village. Growing to manhood, he engaged in some occupation which, he says, led him to frequent journeyings in the wilderness between the French and English settlements, and gave him a good knowledge of both. [456] It taught him also to speak a little French. He does not disclose the nature of this mysterious employment; but there can be little doubt that it was a smuggling trade with Canada. His character leaves much to be desired. He had been charged with 432 V1 forgery, or complicity in it, seems to have had no scruple in matters of business, and after the war was accused of treasonable dealings with the French and Spaniards in the west. [457] He was ambitious and violent, yet able in more ways than one, by no means uneducated, and so skilled in woodcraft, so energetic and resolute, that his services were invaluable. In recounting his own adventures, his style is direct, simple, without boasting, and to all appearance without exaggeration. During the past summer he had raised a band of men, chiefly New Hampshire borderers, and made a series of daring excursions which gave him a prominent place in this hardy by-play of war. In the spring of the present year he raised another company, and was commissioned as its captain, with his brother Richard as his first lieutenant, and the intrepid John Stark as his second. In July still another company was formed, and Richard Rogers was promoted to command it. Before the following spring there were seven such; and more were afterwards added, forming a battalion dispersed on various service, but all under the orders of Robert Rogers, with the rank of major. [458] These rangers wore a sort of woodland uniform, which varied in the different companies, and were armed with smooth-bore guns, loaded with buckshot, bullets, or sometimes both. [455] A large engraved portrait of him, nearly at full length, is before me, printed at London in 1776. [456] Rogers, Journals, Introduction (1765). [457] Provincial Papers of New Hampshire, VI. 364. Correspondence of Gage, 1766. N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 990. Caleb Stark, Memoir and Correspondence of John Stark, 386. [458] Rogers, Journals. Report of the Adjutant-General of New Hampshire (1866), II. 158, 159. 433 V1 The best of them were commonly employed on Lake George; and nothing can surpass the adventurous hardihood of their lives. Summer and winter, day and night, were alike to them. Embarked in whaleboats or birch-canoes, they glided under the silent moon or in the languid glare of a breathless August day, when islands floated in dreamy haze, and the hot air was thick with odors of the pine; or in the bright October, when the jay screamed from the woods, squirrels gathered their winter hoard, and congregated blackbirds chattered farewell to their summer haunts; when gay mountains basked in light, maples dropped leaves of rustling gold, sumachs glowed like rubies under the dark green of the unchanging spruce, and mossed rocks with all their painted plumage lay double in the watery mirror: that festal evening of the year, when jocund Nature disrobes herself, to wake again refreshed in the joy of her undying spring. Or, in the tomb-like silence of the winter forest, with breath frozen on his beard, the ranger strode on snow-shoes over the spotless drifts; and, like Dürer's knight, a ghastly death stalked ever at his side. There were those among them for whom this stern life had a fascination that made all other existence tame. Rogers and his men had been in active movement since midwinter. In January they skated down Lake George, passed Ticonderoga, hid themselves by the forest-road between that post and Crown Point, intercepted two sledges loaded with provisions, and carried the drivers to Fort William 434 V1 Henry. In February they climbed a hill near Crown Point and made a plan of the works; then lay in ambush by the road from the fort to the neighboring village, captured a prisoner, burned houses and barns, killed fifty cattle, and returned without loss. At the end of the month they went again to Crown Point, burned more houses and barns, and reconnoitred Ticonderoga on the way back. Such excursions were repeated throughout the spring and summer. The reconnoissance of Ticonderoga and the catching of prisoners there for the sake of information were always capital objects. The valley, four miles in extent, that lay between the foot of Lake George and the French fort, was at this time guarded by four distinct outposts or fortified camps. Watched as it was at all points, and ranged incessantly by Indians in the employ of France, Rogers and his men knew every yard of the ground. On a morning in May he lay in ambush with eleven followers on a path between the fort and the nearest camp. A large body of soldiers passed; the rangers counted a hundred and eighteen, and lay close in their hiding-place. Soon after came a party of twenty-two. They fired on them, killed six, captured one, and escaped with him to Fort William Henry. In October Rogers was passing with twenty men in two whaleboats through the seeming solitude of the Narrows when a voice called to them out of the woods. It was that of Captain Shepherd, of the New Hampshire regiment, who had been captured two months before, and had lately made 435 V1 his escape. He told them that the French had the fullest information of the numbers and movements of the English; that letters often reached them from within the English lines; and that Lydius, a Dutch trader at Albany, was their principal correspondent. [459] Arriving at Ticonderoga, Rogers cautiously approached the fort, till, about noon, he saw a sentinel on the road leading thence to the woods. Followed by five of his men, he walked directly towards him. The man challenged, and Rogers answered in French. Perplexed for a moment, the soldier suffered him to approach; till, seeing his mistake, he called out in amazement, "Qui êtes vous?" "Rogers," was the answer; and the sentinel was seized, led in hot haste to the boats, and carried to the English fort, where he gave important information. [459] Letter and Order Books of Winslow. "One Lydiass … whom we suspect for a French spy; he lives better than anybody, without any visible means, and his daughters have had often presents from Mr. Vaudreuil." Loudon (to Fox?), 19 Aug. 1756. An exploit of Rogers towards midsummer greatly perplexed the French. He embarked at the end of June with fifty men in five whaleboats, made light and strong, expressly for this service, rowed about ten miles down Lake George, landed on the east side, carried the boats six miles over a gorge of the mountains, launched them again in South Bay, and rowed down the narrow prolongation of Lake Champlain under cover of darkness. At dawn they were within six miles of Ticonderoga. They landed, hid their boats, and lay close all day. Embarking again in the evening, 436 V1 they rowed with muffled oars under the shadow of the eastern shore, and passed so close to the French fort that they heard the voices of the sentinels calling the watchword. In the morning they had left it five miles behind. Again they hid in the woods; and from their lurking-place saw bateaux passing, some northward, and some southward, along the narrow lake. Crown Point was ten or twelve miles farther on. They tried to pass it after nightfall, but the sky was too clear and the stars too bright; and as they lay hidden the next day, nearly a hundred boats passed before them on the way to Ticonderoga. Some other boats which appeared about noon landed near them, and they watched the soldiers at dinner, within a musket-shot of their lurking-place. The next night was more favorable. They embarked at nine in the evening, passed Crown Point unseen, and hid themselves as before, ten miles below. It was the seventh of July. Thirty boats and a schooner passed them, returning towards Canada. On the next night they rowed fifteen miles farther, and then sent men to reconnoitre, who reported a schooner at anchor about a mile off. They were preparing to board her, when two sloops appeared, coming up the lake at but a short distance from the land. They gave them a volley, and called on them to surrender; but the crews put off in boats and made for the opposite shore. They followed and seized them. Out of twelve men their fire had killed three and wounded two, one of whom, says Rogers in his report, "could 437 V1 not march, therefore we put an end to him, to prevent discovery." [460] They sank the vessels, which were laden with wine, brandy, and flour, hid their boats on the west shore, and returned on foot with their prisoners. [461] [460] Report of Rogers to Sir William Johnson, July, 1756. This incident is suppressed in the printed Journals, which merely say that the man "soon died." [461] Rogers, Journals, 20. Shirley to Fox, 26 July, 1756. "This afternoon Capt. Rogers came down with 4 scalps and 8 prisoners which he took on Lake Champlain, between 20 and 30 miles beyond Crown Point." Surgeon Williams to his Wife, 16 July, 1756. Some weeks after, Rogers returned to the place where he had left the boats, embarked in them, reconnoitred the lake nearly to St. John, hid them again eight miles north of Crown Point, took three prisoners near that post, and carried them to Fort William Henry. In the next month the French found several English boats in a small cove north of Crown Point. Bougainville propounds five different hypotheses to account for their being there; and exploring parties were sent out in the vain attempt to find some water passage by which they could have reached the spot without passing under the guns of two French forts. [462] [462] Bougainville, Journal. The French, on their side, still kept their war-parties in motion, and Vaudreuil faithfully chronicled in his despatches every English scalp they brought in. He believed in Indians, and sent them to Ticonderoga in numbers that were sometimes embarrassing. Even Pottawattamies from Lake Michigan were prowling about Winslow's camp and silently killing his sentinels with arrows, while 438 V1 their "medicine men" remained at Ticonderoga practising sorcery and divination to aid the warriors or learn how it fared with them. Bougainville writes in his Journal on the fifteenth of October: "Yesterday the old Pottawattamies who have stayed here 'made medicine' to get news of their brethren. The lodge trembled, the sorcerer sweated drops of blood, and the devil came at last and told him that the warriors would come back with scalps and prisoners. A sorcerer in the medicine lodge is exactly like the Pythoness on the tripod or the witch Canidia invoking the shades." The diviner was not wholly at fault. Three days after, the warriors came back with a prisoner. [463] [463] This kind of divination was practised by Algonkin tribes from the earliest times. See Pioneers of France in the New World, 315. Till November, the hostile forces continued to watch each other from the opposite ends of Lake George. Loudon repeated his orders to Winslow to keep the defensive, and wrote sarcastically to the Colonial Minister: "I think I shall be able to prevent the provincials doing anything very rash, without their having it in their power to talk in the language of this country that they could have taken all Canada if they had not been prevented by the King's servants." Winslow tried to console himself for the failure of the campaign, and wrote in his odd English to Shirley: "Am sorry that this year's performance has not succeeded as was intended; have only to say I pushed things to the utmost of my power to have been sooner in motion, which was the only thing that should have carried 439 V1 us to Crown Point; and though I am sensible that we are doing our duty in acting on the defensive, yet it makes no eclate [sic], and answers to little purpose in the eyes of my constituents." On the first of the month the French began to move off towards Canada, and before many days Ticonderoga was left in the keeping of five or six companies. [464] Winslow's men followed their example. Major Eyre, with four hundred regulars, took possession of Fort William Henry, and the provincials marched for home, their ranks thinned by camp diseases and small-pox. [465] In Canada the regulars were quartered on the inhabitants, who took the infliction as a matter of course. In the English provinces the question was not so simple. Most of the British troops were assigned to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston; and Loudon demanded free quarters for them, according to usage then prevailing in England during war. Nor was the demand in itself unreasonable, seeing that the troops were sent over to fight the battles of the colonies. In Philadelphia lodgings were given them in the public-houses, which, however, could not hold them all. A long dispute followed between the Governor, who seconded Loudon's demand, and the Assembly, during which about half the soldiers lay on straw in outhouses and sheds till near midwinter, many sickening, and some dying from exposure. Loudon grew furious, and threatened, if shelter were not provided, to send Webb with another regiment and 440 V1 billet the whole on the inhabitants; on which the Assembly yielded, and quarters were found. [466] [464] Bougainville, Journal. Malartic, Journal. [465] Letter and Order Books of Winslow. Winslow to Halifax, 30 Dec. 1756. [466] Loudon to Denny, 28 Oct. 1756. Colonial Records of Pa., VII. 358-380. Loudon to Pitt, 10 March, 1757. Notice of Colonel Bouquet, in Pennsylvania Magazine, III. 124. The Conduct of a Noble Commander in America impartially reviewed (1758). In New York the privates were quartered in barracks, but the officers were left to find lodging for themselves. Loudon demanded that provision should be made for them also. The city council hesitated, afraid of incensing the people if they complied. Cruger, the mayor, came to remonstrate. "God damn my blood!" replied the Earl; "if you do not billet my officers upon free quarters this day, I'll order here all the troops in North America, and billet them myself upon this city." Being no respecter of persons, at least in the provinces, he began with Oliver Delancey, brother of the late acting Governor, and sent six soldiers to lodge under his roof. Delancey swore at the unwelcome guests, on which Loudon sent him six more. A subscription was then raised among the citizens, and the required quarters were provided. [467] In Boston there was for the present less trouble. The troops were lodged in the barracks of Castle William, and furnished with blankets, cooking utensils, and other necessaries. [468] [467] Smith, Hist. of N. Y., Part II. 242. William Corry to Johnson, 15 Jan., 1757, in Stone, Life of Sir William Johnson, II. 24, note. Loudon to Hardy, 21 Nov. 1756. [468] Massachusetts Archives, LXXVI. 153. Major Eyre and his soldiers, in their wilderness exile by the borders of Lake George, whiled the winter away with few other excitements than the 441 V1 evening howl of wolves from the frozen mountains, or some nocturnal savage shooting at a sentinel from behind a stump on the moonlit fields of snow. A livelier incident at last broke the monotony of their lives. In the middle of January Rogers came with his rangers from Fort Edward, bound on a scouting party towards Crown Point. They spent two days at Fort William Henry in making snow-shoes and other preparation, and set out on the seventeenth. Captain Spikeman was second in command, with Lieutenants Stark and Kennedy, several other subalterns, and two gentlemen volunteers enamoured of adventure. They marched down the frozen lake and encamped at the Narrows. Some of them, unaccustomed to snow-shoes, had become unfit for travel, and were sent back, thus reducing the number to seventy-four. In the morning they marched again, by icicled rocks and icebound waterfalls, mountains gray with naked woods and fir-trees bowed down with snow. On the nineteenth they reached the west shore, about four miles south of Rogers Rock, marched west of north eight miles, and bivouacked among the mountains. On the next morning they changed their course, marched east of north all day, passed Ticonderoga undiscovered, and stopped at night some five miles beyond it. The weather was changing, and rain was coming on. They scraped away the snow with their snow-shoes, piled it in a bank around them, made beds of spruce-boughs, built fires, and lay down to sleep, while the sentinels kept watch in the outer gloom. 442 V1 In the morning there was a drizzling rain, and the softened snow stuck to their snow-shoes. They marched eastward three miles through the dripping forest, till they reached the banks of Lake Champlain, near what is now called Five Mile Point, and presently saw a sledge, drawn by horses, moving on the ice from Ticonderoga towards Crown Point. Rogers sent Stark along the shore to the left to head it off, while he with another party, covered by the woods, moved in the opposite direction to stop its retreat. He soon saw eight or ten more sledges following the first, and sent a messenger to prevent Stark from showing himself too soon; but Stark was already on the ice. All the sledges turned back in hot haste. The rangers ran in pursuit and captured three of them, with seven men and six horses, while the rest escaped to Ticonderoga. The prisoners, being separately examined, told an ominous tale. There were three hundred and fifty regulars at Ticonderoga; two hundred Canadians and forty-five Indians had lately arrived there, and more Indians were expected that evening,—all destined to waylay the communications between the English forts, and all prepared to march at a moment's notice. The rangers were now in great peril. The fugitives would give warning of their presence, and the French and Indians, in overwhelming force, would no doubt cut off their retreat. Rogers at once ordered his men to return to their last night's encampment, rekindle the fires, and dry their guns, which were wet by the rain of 443 V1 the morning. Then they marched southward in single file through the snow-encumbered forest, Rogers and Kennedy in the front, Spikeman in the centre, and Stark in the rear. In this order they moved on over broken and difficult ground till two in the afternoon, when they came upon a valley, or hollow, scarcely a musket-shot wide, which ran across their line of march, and, like all the rest of the country, was buried in thick woods. The front of the line had descended the first hill, and was mounting that on the farther side, when the foremost men heard a low clicking sound, like the cocking of a great number of guns; and in an instant a furious volley blazed out of the bushes on the ridge above them. Kennedy was killed outright, as also was Gardner, one of the volunteers. Rogers was grazed in the head by a bullet, and others were disabled or hurt. The rest returned the fire, while a swarm of French and Indians rushed upon them from the ridge and the slopes on either hand, killing several more, Spikeman among the rest, and capturing others. The rangers fell back across the hollow and regained the hill they had just descended. Stark with the rear, who were at the top when the fray began, now kept the assailants in check by a brisk fire till their comrades joined them. Then the whole party, spreading themselves among the trees that covered the declivity, stubbornly held their ground and beat back the French in repeated attempts to dislodge them. As the assailants were more than two to one, what Rogers had most to dread was a 444 V1 movement to outflank him and get into his rear. This they tried twice, and were twice repulsed by a party held in reserve for the purpose. The fight lasted several hours, during which there was much talk between the combatants. The French called out that it was a pity so many brave men should be lost, that large reinforcements were expected every moment, and that the rangers would then be cut to pieces without mercy; whereas if they surrendered at once they should be treated with the utmost kindness. They called to Rogers by name, and expressed great esteem for him. Neither threats nor promises had any effect, and the firing went on till darkness stopped it. Towards evening Rogers was shot through the wrist; and one of the men, John Shute, used to tell in his old age how he saw another ranger trying to bind the captain's wound with the ribbon of his own queue. As Ticonderoga was but three miles off, it was destruction to stay where they were; and they withdrew under cover of night, reduced to forty-eight effective and six wounded men. Fourteen had been killed, and six captured. Those that were left reached Lake George in the morning, and Stark, with two followers, pushed on in advance to bring a sledge for the wounded. The rest made their way to the Narrows, where they encamped, and presently descried a small dark object on the ice far behind them. It proved to be one of their own number, Sergeant Joshua Martin, who had received a severe wound in the fight, and was left 445 V1 for dead; but by desperate efforts had followed on their tracks, and was now brought to camp in a state of exhaustion. He recovered, and lived to an advanced age. The sledge sent by Stark came in the morning, and the whole party soon reached the fort. Abercromby, on hearing of the affair, sent them a letter of thanks for gallant conduct. Rogers reckons the number of his assailants at about two hundred and fifty in all. Vaudreuil says that they consisted of eighty-nine regulars and ninety Canadians and Indians. With his usual boastful exaggeration, he declares that forty English were left dead on the field, and that only three reached Fort William Henry alive. He says that the fight was extremely hot and obstinate, and admits that the French lost thirty-seven killed and wounded. Rogers makes the number much greater. That it was considerable is certain, as Lusignan, commandant at Ticonderoga, wrote immediately for reinforcements. [469] [469] Rogers, Journals, 38-44. Caleb Stark, Memoir and Correspondence of John Stark, 18, 412. Return of Killed, Wounded, and Missing in the Action near Ticonderoga, Jan. 1757; all the names are here given. James Abercromby, aide-de-camp to his uncle, General Abercromby, wrote to Rogers from Albany: "You cannot imagine how all ranks of people here are pleased with your conduct and your men's behavior." The accounts of the French writers differ from each other, but agree in placing the English force at from seventy to eighty, and their own much higher. The principal report is that of Vaudreuil au Ministre, 19 Avril, 1757 (his second letter of this date). Bougainville, Montcalm, Malartic, and Montreuil all speak of the affair, placing the English loss much higher than is shown by the returns. The story, repeated in most of the French narratives, that only three of the rangers reached Fort William Henry, seems to have arisen from the fact that Stark with two men went thither in advance of the rest. As regards the antecedents of the combat, the French and English accounts agree. 446 V1 The effects of his wound and an attack of small-pox kept Rogers quiet for a time. Meanwhile the winter dragged slowly away, and the ice of Lake George, cracking with change of temperature, uttered its strange cry of agony, heralding that dismal season when winter begins to relax its grip, but spring still holds aloof; when the sap stirs in the sugar-maples, but the buds refuse to swell, and even the catkins of the willows will not burst their brown integuments; when the forest is patched with snow, though on its sunny slopes one hears in the stillness the whisper of trickling waters that ooze from the half-thawed soil and saturated beds of fallen leaves; when clouds hang low on the darkened mountains, and cold mists entangle themselves in the tops of the pines; now a dull rain, now a sharp morning frost, and now a storm of snow powdering the waste, and wrapping it again in the pall of winter. In this cheerless season, on St. Patrick's Day, the seventeenth of March, the Irish soldiers who formed a part of the garrison of Fort William Henry were paying homage to their patron saint in libations of heretic rum, the product of New England stills; and it is said that John Stark's rangers forgot theological differences in their zeal to share the festivity. The story adds that they were restrained by their commander, and that their enforced sobriety proved the saving of the fort. This may be doubted; for without counting the English soldiers of the garrison who had no special call to be drunk that day, the fort was in no 447 V1 danger till twenty-four hours after, when the revellers had had time to rally from their pious carouse. Whether rangers or British soldiers, it is certain that watchmen were on the alert during the night between the eighteenth and nineteenth, and that towards one in the morning they heard a sound of axes far down the lake, followed by the faint glow of a distant fire. The inference was plain, that an enemy was there, and that the necessity of warming himself had overcome his caution. Then all was still for some two hours, when, listening in the pitchy darkness, the watchers heard the footsteps of a great body of men approaching on the ice, which at the time was bare of snow. The garrison were at their posts, and all the cannon on the side towards the lake vomited grape and round-shot in the direction of the sound, which thereafter was heard no more. Those who made it were a detachment, called by Vaudreuil an army, sent by him to seize the English fort. Shirley had planned a similar stroke against Ticonderoga a year before; but the provincial levies had come in so slowly, and the ice had broken up so soon, that the scheme was abandoned. Vaudreuil was more fortunate. The whole force, regulars, Canadians, and Indians, was ready to his hand. No pains were spared in equipping them. Overcoats, blankets, bearskins to sleep on, tarpaulins to sleep under, spare moccasons, spare mittens, kettles, axes, needles, awls, flint and steel, and many miscellaneous articles 448 V1 were provided, to be dragged by the men on light Indian sledges, along with provisions for twelve days. The cost of the expedition is set at a million francs, answering to more than as many dollars of the present time. To the disgust of the officers from France, the Governor named his brother Rigaud for the chief command; and before the end of February the whole party was on its march along the ice of Lake Champlain. They rested nearly a week at Ticonderoga, where no less than three hundred short scaling-ladders, so constructed that two or more could be joined in one, had been made for them; and here, too, they received a reinforcement, which raised their number to sixteen hundred. Then, marching three days along Lake George, they neared the fort on the evening of the eighteenth, and prepared for a general assault before daybreak. The garrison, including rangers, consisted of three hundred and forty-six effective men. [470] The fort was not strong, and a resolute assault by numbers so superior must, it seems, have overpowered the defenders; but the Canadians and Indians who composed most of the attacking force were not suited for such work; and, disappointed in his hope of a surprise, Rigaud withdrew them at daybreak, after trying in vain to burn the buildings outside. A few hours after, the whole body reappeared, filing off to surround the fort, on which they kept up a 449 V1 brisk but harmless fire of musketry. In the night they were heard again on the ice, approaching as if for an assault; and the cannon, firing towards the sound, again drove them back. There was silence for a while, till tongues of flame lighted up the gloom, and two sloops, ice-bound in the lake, and a large number of bateaux on the shore were seen to be on fire. A party sallied to save them; but it was too late. In the morning they were all consumed, and the enemy had vanished. [470] Strength of the Garrison of Fort William Henry when the Enemy came before it, enclosed in the letter of Major Eyre to Loudon, 26 March, 1757. There were also one hundred and twenty-eight invalids. It was Sunday, the twentieth. Everything was quiet till noon, when the French filed out of the woods and marched across the ice in procession, ostentatiously carrying their scaling-ladders, and showing themselves to the best effect. They stopped at a safe distance, fronting towards the fort, and several of them advanced, waving a red flag. An officer with a few men went to meet them, and returned bringing Le Mercier, chief of the Canadian artillery, who, being led blindfold into the fort, announced himself as bearer of a message from Rigaud. He was conducted to the room of Major Eyre, where all the British officers were assembled; and, after mutual compliments, he invited them to give up the place peaceably, promising the most favorable terms, and threatening a general assault and massacre in case of refusal. Eyre said that he should defend himself to the last; and the envoy, again blindfolded, was led back to whence he came. The whole French force now advanced as if to storm the works, and the garrison prepared to 450 V1 receive them. Nothing came of it but a fusillade, to which the British made no reply. At night the French were heard advancing again, and each man nerved himself for the crisis. The real attack, however, was not against the fort, but against the buildings outside, which consisted of several storehouses, a hospital, a saw-mill, and the huts of the rangers, besides a sloop on the stocks and piles of planks and cord-wood. Covered by the night, the assailants crept up with fagots of resinous sticks, placed them against the farther side of the buildings, kindled them, and escaped before the flame rose; while the garrison, straining their ears in the thick darkness, fired wherever they heard a sound. Before morning all around them was in a blaze, and they had much ado to save the fort barracks from the shower of burning cinders. At ten o'clock the fires had subsided, and a thick fall of snow began, filling the air with a restless chaos of large moist flakes. This lasted all day and all the next night, till the ground and the ice were covered to a depth of three feet and more. The French lay close in their camps till a little before dawn on Tuesday morning, when twenty volunteers from the regulars made a bold attempt to burn the sloop on the stocks, with several storehouses and other structures, and several hundred scows and whaleboats which had thus far escaped. They were only in part successful; but they fired the sloop and some buildings near it, and stood far out on the ice watching the flaming vessel, a superb bonfire amid the wilderness of snow. The 451 V1 spectacle cost the volunteers a fourth of their number killed and wounded. On Wednesday morning the sun rose bright on a scene of wintry splendor, and the frozen lake was dotted with Rigaud's retreating followers toiling towards Canada on snow-shoes. Before they reached it many of them were blinded for a while by the insufferable glare, and their comrades led them homewards by the hand. [471] [471] Eyre to Loudon, 24 March, 1757. Ibid., 25 March, enclosed in Loudon's despatch of 25 April, 1757. Message of Rigaud to Major Eyre, 20 March, 1757. Letter from Fort William Henry, 26 March, 1757, in Boston Gazette, No. 106, and Boston Evening Post, No. 1,128. Abstract of Letters from Albany, in Boston News Letter, No. 2,860. Caleb Stark, Memoir and Correspondence of John Stark, 22, a curious mixture of truth and error. Relation de la Campagne sur le Lac St. Sacrement pendant l'Hiver, 1757. Bougainville, Journal. Malartic, Journal. Montcalm au Ministre, 24 Avril, 1757. Montreuil au Ministre, 23 Avril, 1757. Montcalm à sa Mère, 1 Avril, 1757. Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. The French loss in killed and wounded is set by Montcalm at eleven. That of the English was seven, slightly wounded, chiefly in sorties. They took three prisoners. Stark was touched by a bullet, for the only time in his adventurous life. CHAPTER XIV. 1757. MONTCALM AND VAUDREUIL. The Seat of War ? Social Life at Montreal ? Familiar Correspondence of Montcalm ? His Employments ? His Impressions of Canada ? His Hospitalities ? Misunderstandings with the Governor ? Character of Vaudreuil ? His Accusations ? Frenchmen and Canadians ? Foibles of Montcalm ? The opening Campaign ? Doubts and Suspense ? London's Plan ? His Character ? Fatal Delays ? Abortive Attempt against Louisbourg ? Disaster to the British Fleet. Spring came at last, and the Dutch burghers of Albany heard, faint from the far height, the clamor of the wild-fowl, streaming in long files northward to their summer home. As the a?rial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks, Half-Moon, Stillwater, Saratoga, and the geometric lines and earthen mounds of Fort Edward. Then a broad belt of dingy evergreen; and beyond, released from wintry fetters, the glistening breast of Lake George, with Fort William Henry at its side, amid charred ruins and a desolation of prostrate forests. Hence the lake stretched northward, like some broad river, 453 V1 trenched between mountain ranges still leafless and gray. Then they looked down on Ticonderoga, with the flag of the Bourbons, like a flickering white speck, waving on its ramparts; and next on Crown Point with its tower of stone. Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude. They passed over the bastioned square of Fort St. John, Fort Chambly guarding the rapids of the Richelieu, and the broad belt of the St. Lawrence, with Montreal seated on its bank. Here we leave them, to build their nests and hatch their brood among the fens of the lonely North. Montreal, the military heart of Canada, was in the past winter its social centre also, where were gathered conspicuous representatives both of Old France and of New; not men only, but women. It was a sparkling fragment of the reign of Louis XV. dropped into the American wilderness. Montcalm was here with his staff and his chief officers, now pondering schemes of war, and now turning in thought to his beloved Chateau of Candiac, his mother, children, and wife, to whom he sent letters with every opportunity. To his wife he writes: "Think of me affectionately; give love to my girls. I hope next year I may be with you all. I love you tenderly, dearest." He says that he has sent 454 V1 her a packet of marten-skins for a muff; "and another time I shall send some to our daughter; but I should like better to bring them myself." Of this eldest daughter he writes in reply to a letter of domestic news from Madame de Montcalm: "The new gown with blonde trimmings must be becoming, for she is pretty." Again, "There is not an hour in the day when I do not think of you, my mother and my children." He had the tastes of a country gentleman, and was eager to know all that was passing on his estate. Before leaving home he had set up a mill to grind olives for oil, and was well pleased to hear of its prosperity. "It seems to be a good thing, which pleases me very much. Bougainville and I talk a great deal about the oil-mill." Some time after, when the King sent him the coveted decoration of the cordon rouge, he informed Madame de Montcalm of the honor done him, and added: "But I think I am better pleased with what you tell me of the success of my oil-mill." To his mother he writes of his absorbing occupations, and says: "You can tell my dearest that I have no time to occupy myself with the ladies, even if I wished to." Nevertheless he now and then found leisure for some little solace in his banishment; for he writes to Bourlamaque, whom he had left at Quebec, after a visit which he had himself made there early in the winter: "I am glad you sometimes speak of me to the three ladies in the Rue du Parloir; and I am flattered by their remembrance, especially by that of one of them, in 455 V1 whom I find at certain moments too much wit and too many charms for my tranquillity." These ladies of the Rue du Parloir are several times mentioned in his familiar correspondence with Bourlamaque. His station obliged him to maintain a high standard of living, to his great financial detriment, for Canadian prices were inordinate. "I must live creditably, and so I do; sixteen persons at table every day. Once a fortnight I dine with the Governor-General and with the Chevalier de Lévis, who lives well too. He has given three grand balls. As for me, up to Lent I gave, besides dinners, great suppers, with ladies, three times a week. They lasted till two in the morning; and then there was dancing, to which company came uninvited, but sure of a welcome from those who had been at supper. It is very expensive, not very amusing, and often tedious. At Quebec, where we spent a month, I gave receptions or parties, often at the Intendant's house. I like my gallant Chevalier de Lévis very much. Bourlamaque was a good choice; he is steady and cool, with good parts. Bougainville has talent, a warm head, and warm heart; he will ripen in time. Write to Madame Cornier that I like her husband; he is perfectly well, and as impatient for peace as I am. Love to my daughters, and all affection and respect to my mother. I live only in the hope of joining you all again. Nevertheless, Montreal is as good a place as Alais even in time of peace, and better now, because the Government 456 V1 is here; for the Marquis de Vaudreuil, like me, spent only a month at Quebec. As for Quebec, it is as good as the best cities of France, except ten or so. Clear sky, bright sun; neither spring nor autumn, only summer and winter. July, August, and September, hot as in Languedoc: winter insupportable; one must keep always indoors. The ladies spirituelles, galantes, dévotes. Gambling at Quebec, dancing and conversation at Montreal. My friends the Indians, who are often unbearable, and whom I treat with perfect tranquillity and patience, are fond of me. If I were not a sort of general, though very subordinate to the Governor, I could gossip about the plans of the campaign, which it is likely will begin on the tenth or fifteenth of May. I worked at the plan of the last affair [Rigaud's expedition to Fort William Henry], which might have turned out better, though good as it was. I wanted only eight hundred men. If I had had my way, Monsieur de Lévis or Monsieur de Bougainville would have had charge of it. However, the thing was all right, and in good hands. The Governor, who is extremely civil to me, gave it to his brother; he thought him more used to winter marches. Adieu, my heart; I adore and love you!" To meet his manifold social needs, he sends to his wife orders for prunes, olives, anchovies, muscat wine, capers, sausages, confectionery, cloth for liveries, and many other such items; also for scent-bags of two kinds, and perfumed pomatum for presents; closing in postscript with an 457 V1 injunction not to forget a dozen pint-bottles of English lavender. Some months after, he writes to Madame de Saint-Véran: "I have got everything that was sent me from Montpellier except the sausages. I have lost a third of what was sent from Bordeaux. The English captured it on board the ship called 'La Superbe;' and I have reason to fear that everything sent from Paris is lost on board 'La Liberté.' I am running into debt here. Pshaw! I must live. I do not worry myself. Best love to you, my mother." When Rigaud was about to march with his detachment against Fort William Henry, Montcalm went over to La Prairie to see them. "I reviewed them," he writes to Bourlamaque, "and gave the officers a dinner, which, if anybody else had given it, I should have said was a grand affair. There were two tables, for thirty-six persons in all. On Wednesday there was an Assembly at Madame Varin's; on Friday the Chevalier de Lévis gave a ball. He invited sixty-five ladies, and got only thirty, with a great crowd of men. Rooms well lighted, excellent order, excellent service, plenty of refreshments of every sort all through the night; and the company stayed till seven in the morning. As for me, I went to bed early. I had had that day eight ladies at a supper given to Madame Varin. To-morrow I shall have half-a-dozen at another supper, given to I don't know whom, but incline to think it will be La Roche Beaucour. The gallant Chevalier is to give us still another ball." 458 V1 Lent put a check on these festivities. "To-morrow," he tells Bourlamaque, "I shall throw myself into devotion with might and main (à corps perdu). It will be easier for me to detach myself from the world and turn heavenward here at Montreal than it would be at Quebec." And, some time after, "Bougainville spent Monday delightfully at Isle Ste. Hélène, and Tuesday devoutly with the Sulpitian Fathers at the Mountain. I was there myself at four o'clock, and did them the civility to sup in their refectory at a quarter before six." In May there was a complete revival of social pleasures, and Montcalm wrote to Bourlamaque: "Madame de Beaubassin's supper was very gay. There were toasts to the Rue du Parloir and to the General. To-day I must give a dinner to Madame de Saint-Ours, which will be a little more serious. Péan is gone to establish himself at La Chine, and will come back with La Barolon, who goes thither with a husband of hers, bound to the Ohio with Villejoin and Louvigny. The Chevalier de Lévis amuses himself very much here. He and his friends spend all their time with Madame de Lenisse." Under these gayeties and gallantries there were bitter heart-burnings. Montcalm hints at some of them in a letter to Bourlamaque, written at the time of the expedition to Fort William Henry, which, in the words of Montcalm, who would have preferred another commander, the Governor had ordered to march "under the banners of brother 459 V1 Rigaud." "After he got my letter on Sunday evening," says the disappointed General, "Monsieur de Vaudreuil sent me his secretary with the instructions he had given his brother," which he had hitherto withheld. "This gave rise after dinner to a long conversation with him; and I hope for the good of the service that his future conduct will prove the truth of his words. I spoke to him with frankness and firmness of the necessity I was under of communicating to him my reflections; but I did not name any of the persons who, to gain his good graces, busy themselves with destroying his confidence in me. I told him that he would always find me disposed to aid in measures tending to our success, even should his views, which always ought to prevail, be different from mine; but that I dared flatter myself that he would henceforward communicate his plans to me sooner; for, though his knowledge of the country gave greater weight to his opinions, he might rest satisfied that I should second him in methods and details. This explanation passed off becomingly enough, and ended with a proposal to dine on a moose's nose [an estimed morsel] the day after to-morrow. I burn your letters, Monsieur, and I beg you to do the same with mine, after making a note of anything you may want to keep." But Bourlamaque kept all the letters, and bound them in a volume, which still exists. [472] [472] The preceding extracts are from Lettres de Montcalm à Madame de Saint-Véran, sa Mère, et à Madame de Montcalm, sa Femme, 1756, 1757 (Papiers de Famille); and Lettres de Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 1757. See Appendix E. 460 V1 Montcalm was not at this time fully aware of the feeling of Vaudreuil towards him. The touchy egotism of the Governor and his jealous attachment to the colony led him to claim for himself and the Canadians the merit of every achievement and to deny it to the French troops and their general. Before the capture of Oswego was known, he wrote to the naval minister that Montcalm would never have dared attack that place if he had not encouraged him and answered his timid objections. [473] "I am confident that I shall reduce it," he adds; "my expedition is sure to succeed if Monsieur de Montcalm follows the directions I have given him." When the good news came he immediately wrote again, declaring that the victory was due to his brother Rigaud and the Canadians, who, he says, had been ill-used by the General, and not allowed either to enter the fort or share the plunder, any more than the Indians, who were so angry at the treatment they had met that he had great difficulty in appeasing them. He hints that the success was generally ascribed to him. "There has been a great deal of talk here; but I will not do myself the honor of repeating it to you, especially as it relates to myself. I know how to do violence to my self-love. The measures I took assured our victory, in spite of opposition. If I had been less vigilant and firm, Oswego would still be in the hands of the English. I cannot sufficiently congratulate myself on the zeal which my brother and the Canadians and 461 V1 Indians showed on this occasion; for without them my orders would have been given in vain. The hopes of His Britannic Majesty have vanished, and will hardly revive again; for I shall take care to crush them in the bud." [474] [473] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 13 Ao?t, 1756. [474] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 1 Sept. 1756. The pronouns "I" and "my" recur with monotonous frequency in his correspondence. "I have laid waste all the British provinces." "By promptly uniting my forces at Carillon, I have kept General Loudon in check, though he had at his disposal an army of about twenty thousand men;" [475] and so without end, in all varieties of repetition. It is no less characteristic that he here assigns to his enemies double their actual force. [475] Ibid., 6 Nov. 1756. He has the faintest of praise for the troops from France. "They are generally good, but thus far they have not absolutely distinguished themselves. I do justice to the firmness they showed at Oswego; but it was only the colony troops, Canadians, and Indians who attacked the forts. Our artillery was directed by the Chevalier Le Mercier and M. Frémont [colony officers], and was served by our colony troops and our militia. The officers from France are more inclined to defence than attack. Far from spending the least thing here, they lay by their pay. They saved the money allowed them for refreshments, and had it in pocket at the end of the campaign. They get a profit, too, out of their provisions, by having certificates made under borrowed names, so that they can draw 462 V1 cash for them on their return. It is the same with the soldiers, who also sell their provisions to the King and get paid for them. In conjunction with M. Bigot, I labor to remedy all these abuses; and the rules we have established have saved the King a considerable expense. M. de Montcalm has complained very much of these rules." The Intendant Bigot, who here appears as a reformer, was the centre of a monstrous system of public fraud and robbery; while the charges against the French officers are unsupported. Vaudreuil, who never loses an opportunity of disparaging them, proceeds thus:— "The troops from France are not on very good terms with our Canadians. What can the soldiers think of them when they see their officers threaten them with sticks or swords? The Canadians are obliged to carry these gentry on their shoulders, through the cold water, over rocks that cut their feet; and if they make a false step they are abused. Can anything be harder? Finally, Monsieur de Montcalm is so quick-tempered that he goes to the length of striking the Canadians. How can he restrain his officers when he cannot restrain himself? Could any example be more contagious? This is the way our Canadians are treated. They deserve something better." He then enlarges on their zeal, hardihood, and bravery, and adds that nothing but their blind submission to his commands prevents many of them from showing resentment at the usage they had to endure. The Indians, he goes on to say, are not so gentle and 463 V1 yielding; and but for his brother Rigaud and himself, might have gone off in a rage. "After the campaign of Oswego they did not hesitate to tell me that they would go wherever I sent them, provided I did not put them under the orders of M. de Montcalm. They told me positively that they could not bear his quick temper. I shall always maintain the most perfect union and understanding with M. le Marquis de Montcalm, but I shall be forced to take measures which will assure to our Canadians and Indians treatment such as their zeal and services merit." [476] [476] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 23 Oct. 1756. The above extracts are somewhat condensed in the translation. See the letter in Dussieux, 279. To the subject of his complaints Vaudreuil used a different language; for Montcalm says, after mentioning that he had had occasion to punish some of the Canadians at Oswego: "I must do Monsieur de Vaudreuil the justice to say that he approved my proceedings." He treated the General with the blandest politeness. "He is a good-natured man," continues Montcalm, "mild, with no character of his own, surrounded by people who try to destroy all his confidence in the general of the troops from France. I am praised excessively, in order to make him jealous, excite his Canadian prejudices, and prevent him from dealing with me frankly, or adopting my views when he can help it." [477] He elsewhere complains that Vaudreuil gave to both him and Lévis orders couched in such equivocal 464 V1 terms that he could throw the blame on them in case of reverse. [478] Montcalm liked the militia no better than the Governor liked the regulars. "I have used them with good effect, though not in places exposed to the enemy's fire. They know neither discipline nor subordination, and think themselves in all respects the first nation on earth." He is sure, however, that they like him: "I have gained the utmost confidence of the Canadians and Indians; and in the eyes of the former, when I travel or visit their camps, I have the air of a tribune of the people." [479] "The affection of the Indians for me is so strong that there are moments when it astonishes the Governor." [480] "The Indians are delighted with me," he says in another letter; "the Canadians are pleased with me; their officers esteem and fear me, and would be glad if the French troops and their general could be dispensed with; and so should I." [481] And he writes to his mother: "The part I have to play is unique: I am a general-in-chief subordinated; sometimes with everything to do, and sometimes nothing; I am esteemed, respected, beloved, envied, hated; I pass for proud, supple, stiff, yielding, polite, devout, gallant, etc.; and I long for peace." [482] [477] Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 11 Juillet, 1757. [478] Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 1 Nov. 1756. [479] Ibid., 18 Sept. 1757. [480] Ibid., 4 Nov. 1757. [481] Ibid., 28 Ao?t, 1756. [482] Montcalm à Madame de Saint-Véran, 23 Sept. 1757. The letters of the Governor and those of the General, it will be seen, contradict each other flatly at several points. Montcalm is sustained by his 465 V1 friend Bougainville, who says that the Indians had a great liking for him, and that he "knew how to manage them as well as if he had been born in their wigwams." [483] And while Vaudreuil complains that the Canadians are ill-used by Montcalm, Bougainville declares that the regulars are ill-used by Vaudreuil. "One must be blind not to see that we are treated as the Spartans treated the Helots." Then he comments on the jealous reticence of the Governor. "The Marquis de Montcalm has not the honor of being consulted; and it is generally through public rumor that he first hears of Monsieur de Vaudreuil's military plans." He calls the Governor "a timid man, who can neither make a resolution nor keep one;" and he gives another trait of him, illustrating it, after his usual way, by a parallel from the classics: "When V. produces an idea he falls in love with it, as Pygmalion did with his statue. I can forgive Pygmalion, for what he produced was a masterpiece." [484] [483] Bougainville à Saint-Laurens, 19 Ao?t, 1757. [484] Bougainville, Journal. The exceeding touchiness of the Governor was sorely tried by certain indiscretions on the part of the General, who in his rapid and vehement utterances sometimes forgot the rules of prudence. His anger, though not deep, was extremely impetuous; and it is said that his irritation against Vaudreuil sometimes found escape in the presence of servants and soldiers. [485] There was no lack of 466 V1 reporters, and the Governor was told everything. The breach widened apace, and Canada divided itself into two camps: that of Vaudreuil with the colony officers, civil and military, and that of Montcalm with the officers from France. The principal exception was the Chevalier de Lévis. This brave and able commander had an easy and adaptable nature, which made him a sort of connecting link between the two parties. "One should be on good terms with everybody," was a maxim which he sometimes expressed, and on which he shaped his conduct with notable success. The Intendant Bigot also, an adroit and accomplished person, had the skill to avoid breaking with either side. [485] événements de la Guerre en Canada, 1759, 1760. But now the season of action was near, and domestic strife must give place to efforts against the common foe. "God or devil!" Montcalm wrote to Bourlamaque, "we must do something and risk a fight. If we succeed, we can, all three of us [you, Lévis, and I], ask for promotion. Burn this letter." The prospects, on the whole, were hopeful. The victory at Oswego had wrought marvels among the Indians, inspired the faithful, confirmed the wavering, and daunted the ill-disposed. The whole West was astir, ready to pour itself again in blood and fire against the English border; and even the Cherokees and Choctaws, old friends of the British colonies, seemed on the point of turning against them. [486] The Five Nations were half won for France. In 467 V1 November a large deputation of them came to renew the chain of friendship at Montreal. "I have laid Oswego in ashes," said Vaudreuil; "the English quail before me. Why do you nourish serpents in your bosom? They mean only to enslave you." The deputies trampled under foot the medals the English had given them, and promised the "Devourer of Villages," for so they styled the Governor, that they would never more lift the hatchet against his children. The chief difficulty was to get rid of them; for, being clothed and fed at the expense of the King, they were in no haste to take leave; and learning that New Year's Day was a time of visits, gifts, and health-drinking, they declared that they would stay to share its pleasures; which they did, to their own satisfaction and the annoyance of those who were forced to entertain them and their squaws. [487] An active siding with France was to be expected only from the western bands of the Confederacy. Neutrality alone could be hoped for from the others, who were too near the English safely to declare against them; while from one of the tribes, the Mohawks, even neutrality was doubtful. [486] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 19 Avril, 1757. [487] Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 24 Avril, 1757; Relation de l'Ambassade des Cinq Nations à Montreal, jointe à la lettre précédente. Procès-verbal de différentes Entrevues entre M. de Vaudreuil et les Députés des Nations sauvages du 13 au 30 Déc. 1756. Malartic, Journal. Montcalm à Madame de Saint-Véran, 1 Avril, 1757. Vaudreuil, while disliking the French regulars, felt that he could not dispense with them, and had asked for a reinforcement. His request was granted; and the Colonial Minister informed him 468 V1 that twenty-four hundred men had been ordered to Canada to strengthen the colony regulars and the battalions of Montcalm. [488] This, according to the estimate of the Minister, would raise the regular force in Canada to sixty-six hundred rank and file. [489] The announcement was followed by another, less agreeable. It was to the effect that a formidable squadron was fitting out in British ports. Was Quebec to be attacked, or Louisbourg? Louisbourg was beyond reach of succor from Canada; it must rely on its own strength and on help from France. But so long as Quebec was threatened, all the troops in the colony must be held ready to defend it, and the hope of attacking England in her own domains must be abandoned. Till these doubts were solved, nothing could be done; and hence great activity in catching prisoners for the sake of news. A few were brought in, but they knew no more of the matter than the French themselves; and Vaudreuil and Montcalm rested for a while in suspense. [488] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, Mars, 1757. [489] Ministerial Minute on the Military Force in Canada, 1757, in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 523. The truth, had they known it, would have gladdened their hearts. The English preparations were aimed at Louisbourg. In the autumn before, Loudon, prejudiced against all plans of his predecessor, Shirley, proposed to the Ministry a scheme of his own, involving a possible attack on Quebec, but with the reduction of Louisbourg as its immediate object,—an important object, no doubt, but 469 V1 one that had no direct bearing on the main question of controlling the interior of the continent. Pitt, then for a brief space at the head of the Government, accepted the suggestion, and set himself to executing it; but he was hampered by opposition, and early in April was forced to resign. Then, followed a contest of rival claimants to office; and the war against France was made subordinate to disputes of personal politics. Meanwhile one Florence Hensey, a spy at London, had informed the French Court that a great armament was fitting out for America, though he could not tell its precise destination. Without loss of time three French squadrons were sent across the Atlantic, with orders to rendezvous at Louisbourg, the conjectured point of attack. The English were as tardy as their enemies were prompt. Everything depended on speed; yet their fleet, under Admiral Holbourne, consisting of fifteen ships of the line and three frigates, with about five thousand troops on board, did not get to sea till the fifth of May, when it made sail for Halifax, where Loudon was to meet it with additional forces. Loudon had drawn off the best part of the troops from the northern frontier, and they were now at New York waiting for embarkation. That the design might be kept secret, he laid an embargo on colonial shipping,—a measure which exasperated the colonists without answering its purpose. Now ensued a long delay, during which the troops, the provincial levies, the transports destined to carry 470 V1 them, and the ships of war which were to serve as escort, all lay idle. In the interval Loudon showed great activity in writing despatches and other avocations more or less proper to a commander, being always busy, without, according to Franklin, accomplishing anything. One Innis, who had come with a message from the Governor of Pennsylvania, and had waited above a fortnight for the General's reply, remarked of him that he was like St. George on a tavern sign, always on horseback, and never riding on. [490] Yet nobody longed more than he to reach the rendezvous at Halifax. He was waiting for news of Holbourne, and he waited in vain. He knew only that a French fleet had been seen off the coast strong enough to overpower his escort and sink all his transports. [491] But the season was growing late; he must act quickly if he was to act at all. He and Sir Charles Hardy agreed between them that the risk must be run; and on the twentieth of June the whole force put to sea. They met no enemy, and entered Halifax harbor on the thirtieth. Holbourne and his fleet had not yet appeared; but his ships soon came straggling in, and before the tenth of July all were at anchor before the town. Then there was more delay. The troops, nearly twelve thousand in all, were landed, and weeks were spent in drilling them and planting vegetables for their refreshment. 471 V1 Sir Charles Hay was put under arrest for saying that the nation's money was spent in sham battles and raising cabbages. Some attempts were made to learn the state of Louisbourg; and Captain Gorham, of the rangers, who reconnoitred it from a fishing vessel, brought back an imperfect report, upon which, after some hesitation, it was resolved to proceed to the attack. The troops were embarked again, and all was ready, when, on the fourth of August, a sloop came from Newfoundland, bringing letters found on board a French vessel lately captured. From these it appeared that all three of the French squadrons were united in the harbor of Louisbourg, to the number of twenty-two ships of the line, besides several frigates, and that the garrison had been increased to a total force of seven thousand men, ensconced in the strongest fortress of the continent. So far as concerned the naval force, the account was true. La Motte, the French admiral, had with him a fleet carrying an aggregate of thirteen hundred and sixty cannon, anchored in a sheltered harbor under the guns of the town. Success was now hopeless, and the costly enterprise was at once abandoned. Loudon with his troops sailed back for New York, and Admiral Holbourne, who had been joined by four additional ships, steered for Louisbourg, in hopes that the French fleet would come out and fight him. He cruised off the port; but La Motte did not accept the challenge. [490] Works of Franklin, I. 219. Franklin intimates that while Loudon was constantly writing, he rarely sent off despatches. This is a mistake; there is abundance of them, often tediously long, in the Public Record Office. [491] Loudon to Pitt, 30 May, 1757. He had not learned Pitt's resignation. 472 V1 The elements declared for France. A September gale, of fury rare even on that tempestuous coast, burst upon the British fleet. "It blew a perfect hurricane," says the unfortunate Admiral, "and drove us right on shore." One ship was dashed on the rocks, two leagues from Louisbourg. A shifting of the wind in the nick of time saved the rest from total wreck. Nine were dismasted; others threw their cannon into the sea. Not one was left fit for immediate action; and had La Motte sailed out of Louisbourg, he would have had them all at his mercy. Delay, the source of most of the disasters that befell England and her colonies at this dismal epoch, was the ruin of the Louisbourg expedition. The greater part of La Motte's fleet reached its destination a full month before that of Holbourne. Had the reverse taken place, the fortress must have fallen. As it was, the ill-starred attempt, drawing off the British forces from the frontier, where they were needed most, did for France more than she could have done for herself, and gave Montcalm and Vaudreuil the opportunity to execute a scheme which they had nursed since the fall of Oswego. [492] [492] Despatches of Loudon, Feb. to Aug. 1757. Knox, Campaigns in North America, I. 6-28. Knox was in the expedition. Review of Mr. Pitt's Administration (London, 1763). The Conduct of a Noble Commander in America impartially reviewed (London, 1758). Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, II. 49-59. Answer to the Letter to two Great Men (London, 1760). Entick, II. 168, 169. Holbourne to Loudon, 4 Aug. 1757. Holbourne to Pitt, 29 Sept. 1757. Ibid., 30 Sept. 1757. Holbourne to Pownall, 2 Nov. 1757. Mante, 86, 97. Relation du Désastre arrivé à la Flotte 473 V1 Anglaise commandée par l'Amiral Holbourne. Chevalier Johnstone, Campaign of Louisbourg. London Magazine, 1757, 514. Gentleman's Magazine, 1757, 463, 476. Ibid., 1758, 168-173. It has been said that Loudon was scared from his task by false reports of the strength of the French at Louisbourg. This was not the case. The Gazette de France, 621, says that La Motte had twenty-four ships of war. Bougainville says that as early as the ninth of June there were twenty-one ships of war, including five frigates, at Louisbourg. To this the list given by Knox closely answers. CHAPTER XV. 1757. FORT WILLIAM HENRY. Another Blow ? The War-song ? The Army at Ticonderoga ? Indian Allies ? The War-feast ? Treatment of Prisoners ? Cannibalism ? Surprise and Slaughter ? The War Council ? March of Lévis ? The Army embarks ? Fort William Henry ? Nocturnal Scene ? Indian Funeral ? Advance upon the Fort ? General Webb ? His Difficulties ? His Weakness ? The Siege begun ? Conduct of the Indians ? The Intercepted Letter ? Desperate Position of the Besieged ? Capitulation ? Ferocity of the Indians ? Mission of Bougainville ? Murder of Wounded Men ? A Scene of Terror ? The Massacre ? Efforts of Montcalm ? The Fort burned. "I am going on the ninth to sing the war-song at the Lake of Two Mountains, and on the next day at Saut St. Louis,—a long, tiresome ceremony. On the twelfth I am off; and I count on having news to tell you by the end of this month or the beginning of next." Thus Montcalm wrote to his wife from Montreal early in July. All doubts had been solved. Prisoners taken on the Hudson and despatches from Versailles had made it certain that Loudon was bound to Louisbourg, carrying with him the best of the troops that had guarded the New York frontier. The time was come, not only to strike the English on Lake George, but perhaps to seize Fort Edward and carry terror to 475 V1 Albany itself. Only one difficulty remained, the want of provisions. Agents were sent to collect corn and bacon among the inhabitants; the curés and militia captains were ordered to aid in the work; and enough was presently found to feed twelve thousand men for a month. [493] [493] Vaudreuil, Lettres circulates aux Curés et aux Capitaines de Milice des Paroisses du Gouvernement de Montreal, 16 Juin, 1757. The emissaries of the Governor had been busy all winter among the tribes of the West and North; and more than a thousand savages, lured by prospect of gifts, scalps, and plunder, were now encamped at Montreal. Many of them had never visited a French settlement before. All were eager to see Montcalm, whose exploit in taking Oswego had inflamed their imagination; and one day, on a visit of ceremony, an orator from Michillimackinac addressed the General thus: "We wanted to see this famous man who tramples the English under his feet. We thought we should find him so tall that his head would be lost in the clouds. But you are a little man, my Father. It is when we look into your eyes that we see the greatness of the pine-tree and the fire of the eagle." [494] [494] Bougainville, Journal. It remained to muster the Mission Indians settled in or near the limits of the colony; and it was to this end that Montcalm went to sing the war-song with the converts of the Two Mountains. Rigaud, Bougainville, young Longueuil, and others were of the party; and when they landed, the 476 V1 Indians came down to the shore, their priests at their head, and greeted the General with a volley of musketry; then received him after dark in their grand council-lodge, where the circle of wild and savage visages, half seen in the dim light of a few candles, suggested to Bougainville a midnight conclave of wizards. He acted vicariously the chief part in the ceremony. "I sang the war-song in the name of M. de Montcalm, and was much applauded. It was nothing but these words: 'Let us trample the English under our feet,' chanted over and over again, in cadence with the movements of the savages." Then came the war-feast, against which occasion Montcalm had caused three oxen to be roasted. [495] On the next day the party went to Caughnawaga, or Saut St. Louis, where the ceremony was repeated; and Bougainville, who again sang the war-song in the name of his commander, was requited by adoption into the clan of the Turtle. Three more oxen were solemnly devoured, and with one voice the warriors took up the hatchet. [495] Bougainville describes a ceremony in the Mission Church of the Two Mountains in which warriors and squaws sang in the choir. Ninety-nine years after, in 1856, I was present at a similar ceremony on the same spot, and heard the descendants of the same warriors and squaws sing like their ancestors. Great changes have since taken place at this old mission. Meanwhile troops, Canadians and Indians, were moving by detachments up Lake Champlain. Fleets of bateaux and canoes followed each other day by day along the capricious lake, in calm or storm, sunshine or rain, till, towards the end of 477 V1 July, the whole force was gathered at Ticonderoga, the base of the intended movement. Bourlamaque had been there since May with the battalions of Béarn and Royal Roussillon, finishing the fort, sending out war-parties, and trying to discover the force and designs of the English at Fort William Henry. Ticonderoga is a high rocky promontory between Lake Champlain on the north and the mouth of the outlet of Lake George on the south. Near its extremity and close to the fort were still encamped the two battalions under Bourlamaque, while bateaux and canoes were passing incessantly up the river of the outlet. There were scarcely two miles of navigable water, at the end of which the stream fell foaming over a high ledge of rock that barred the way. Here the French were building a saw-mill; and a wide space had been cleared to form an encampment defended on all sides by an abattis, within which stood the tents of the battalions of La Reine, La Sarre, Languedoc, and Guienne, all commanded by Lévis. Above the cascade the stream circled through the forest in a series of beautiful rapids, and from the camp of Lévis a road a mile and a half long had been cut to the navigable water above. At the end of this road there was another fortified camp, formed of colony regulars, Canadians, and Indians, under Rigaud. It was scarcely a mile farther to Lake George, where on the western side there was an outpost, chiefly of Canadians and Indians; while advanced parties were stationed at Bald Mountain, 478 V1 now called Rogers Rock, and elsewhere on the lake, to watch the movements of the English. The various encampments just mentioned were ranged along a valley extending four miles from Lake Champlain to Lake George, and bordered by mountains wooded to the top. Here was gathered a martial population of eight thousand men, including the brightest civilization and the darkest barbarism: from the scholar-soldier Montcalm and his no less accomplished aide-de-camp; from Lévis, conspicuous for graces of person; from a throng of courtly young officers, who would have seemed out of place in that wilderness had they not done their work so well in it; from these to the foulest man-eating savage of the uttermost northwest. Of Indian allies there were nearly two thousand. One of their tribes, the Iowas, spoke a language which no interpreter understood; and they all bivouacked where they saw fit: for no man could control them. "I see no difference," says Bougainville, "in the dress, ornaments, dances, and songs of the various western nations. They go naked, excepting a strip of cloth passed through a belt, and paint themselves black, red, blue, and other colors. Their heads are shaved and adorned with bunches of feathers, and they wear rings of brass wire in their ears. They wear beaver-skin blankets, and carry lances, bows and arrows, and quivers made of the skins of beasts. For the rest they are straight, well made, and generally very tall. Their religion is brute 479 V1 paganism. I will say it once for all, one must be the slave of these savages, listen to them day and night, in council and in private, whenever the fancy takes them, or whenever a dream, a fit of the vapors, or their perpetual craving for brandy, gets possession of them; besides which they are always wanting something for their equipment, arms, or toilet, and the general of the army must give written orders for the smallest trifle,—an eternal, wearisome detail, of which one has no idea in Europe." It was not easy to keep them fed. Rations would be served to them for a week; they would consume them in three days, and come for more. On one occasion they took the matter into their own hands, and butchered and devoured eighteen head of cattle intended for the troops; nor did any officer dare oppose this "St. Bartholomew of the oxen," as Bougainville calls it. "Their paradise is to be drunk," says the young officer. Their paradise was rather a hell; for sometimes, when mad with brandy, they grappled and tore each other with their teeth like wolves. They were continually "making medicine," that is, consulting the Manitou, to whom they hung up offerings, sometimes a dead dog, and sometimes the belt-cloth which formed their only garment. The Mission Indians were better allies than these heathen of the west; and their priests, who followed them to the war, had great influence over them. They were armed with guns, which they well knew how to use. Their dress, though savage, 480 V1 was generally decent, and they were not cannibals; though in other respects they retained all their traditional ferocity and most of their traditional habits. They held frequent war-feasts, one of which is described by Roubaud, Jesuit missionary of the Abenakis of St. Francis, whose flock formed a part of the company present. "Imagine," says the father, "a great assembly of savages adorned with every ornament most suited to disfigure them in European eyes, painted with vermilion, white, green, yellow, and black made of soot and the scrapings of pots. A single savage face combines all these different colors, methodically laid on with the help of a little tallow, which serves for pomatum. The head is shaved except at the top, where there is a small tuft, to which are fastened feathers, a few beads of wampum, or some such trinket. Every part of the head has its ornament. Pendants hang from the nose and also from the ears, which are split in infancy and drawn down by weights till they flap at last against the shoulders. The rest of the equipment answers to this fantastic decoration: a shirt bedaubed with vermilion, wampum collars, silver bracelets, a large knife hanging on the breast, moose-skin moccasons, and a belt of various colors always absurdly combined. The sachems and war-chiefs are distinguished from the rest: the latter by a gorget, and the former by a medal, with the King's portrait on one side, and on the other Mars and Bellona joining hands, with the device, Virtues et Honor." 481 V1 Thus attired, the company sat in two lines facing each other, with kettles in the middle filled with meat chopped for distribution. To a dignified silence succeeded songs, sung by several chiefs in succession, and compared by the narrator to the howling of wolves. Then followed a speech from the chief orator, highly commended by Roubaud, who could not help admiring this effort of savage eloquence. "After the harangue," he continues, "they proceeded to nominate the chiefs who were to take command. As soon as one was named he rose and took the head of some animal that had been butchered for the feast. He raised it aloft so that all the company could see it, and cried: 'Behold the head of the enemy!' Applause and cries of joy rose from all parts of the assembly. The chief, with the head in his hand, passed down between the lines, singing his war-song, bragging of his exploits, taunting and defying the enemy, and glorifying himself beyond all measure. To hear his self-laudation in these moments of martial transport one would think him a conquering hero ready to sweep everything before him. As he passed in front of the other savages, they would respond by dull broken cries jerked up from the depths of their stomachs, and accompanied by movements of their bodies so odd that one must be well used to them to keep countenance. In the course of his song the chief would utter from time to time some grotesque witticism; then he would stop, as if pleased with himself, or rather to listen to the thousand confused 482 V1 cries of applause that greeted his ears. He kept up his martial promenade as long as he liked the sport; and when he had had enough, ended by flinging down the head of the animal with an air of contempt, to show that his warlike appetite craved meat of another sort." [496] Others followed with similar songs and pantomime, and the festival was closed at last by ladling out the meat from the kettles, and devouring it. [496] Lettre du Père … (Roubaud), Missionnaire chez les Abnakis, 21 Oct. 1757, in Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, VI. 189 (1810). Roubaud was one day near the fort, when he saw the shore lined with a thousand Indians, watching four or five English prisoners, who, with the war-party that had captured them, were approaching in a boat from the farther side of the water. Suddenly the whole savage crew broke away together and ran into the neighboring woods, whence they soon emerged, yelling diabolically, each armed with a club. The wretched prisoners were to be forced to "run the gauntlet," which would probably have killed them. They were saved by the chief who commanded the war-party, and who, on the persuasion of a French officer, claimed them as his own and forbade the game; upon which, according to rule in such cases, the rest abandoned it. On this same day the missionary met troops of Indians conducting several bands of English prisoners along the road that led through the forest from the camp of Lévis. Each of the captives was held by a cord made fast about the neck; and the sweat was 483 V1 starting from their brows in the extremity of their horror and distress. Roubaud's tent was at this time in the camp of the Ottawas. He presently saw a large number of them squatted about a fire, before which meat was roasting on sticks stuck in the ground; and, approaching, he saw that it was the flesh of an Englishman, other parts of which were boiling in a kettle, while near by sat eight or ten of the prisoners, forced to see their comrade devoured. The horror-stricken priest began to remonstrate; on which a young savage fiercely replied in broken French: "You have French taste; I have Indian. This is good meat for me;" and the feasters pressed him to share it. Bougainville says that this abomination could not be prevented; which only means that if force had been used to stop it, the Ottawas would have gone home in a rage. They were therefore left to finish their meal undisturbed. Having eaten one of their prisoners, they began to treat the rest with the utmost kindness, bringing them white bread, and attending to all their wants,—a seeming change of heart due to the fact that they were a valuable commodity, for which the owners hoped to get a good price at Montreal. Montcalm wished to send them thither at once, to which after long debate the Indians consented, demanding, however, a receipt in full, and bargaining that the captives should be supplied with shoes and blankets. [497] [497] Journal de l'Expédition contre le Fort George [William Henry] du 12 Juillet au 16 Ao?t, 1757. Bougainville, Journal. Lettre du P. Roubaud. 484 V1 These unfortunates belonged to a detachment of three hundred provincials, chiefly New Jersey men, sent from Fort William Henry under command of Colonel Parker to reconnoitre the French outposts. Montcalm's scouts discovered them; on which a band of Indians, considerably more numerous, went to meet them under a French partisan named Corbière, and ambushed themselves not far from Sabbath Day Point. Parker had rashly divided his force; and at daybreak of the twenty-sixth of July three of his boats fell into the snare, and were captured without a shot. Three others followed, in ignorance of what had happened, and shared the fate of the first. When the rest drew near, they were greeted by a deadly volley from the thickets, and a swarm of canoes darted out upon them. The men were seized with such a panic that some of them jumped into the water to escape, while the Indians leaped after them and speared them with their lances like fish. "Terrified," says Bougainville, "by the sight of these monsters, their agility, their firing, and their yells, they surrendered almost without resistance." About a hundred, however, made their escape. The rest were killed or captured, and three of the bodies were eaten on the spot. The journalist adds that the victory so elated the Indians that they became insupportable; "but here in the forests of America we can no more do without them than without cavalry on the plain." [498] [498] Bougainville, Journal. Malartic, Journal. Montcalm à Vaudreuil, 27 Juillet, 1757. Webb to Loudon, 1 Aug. 1757. Webb to Delancey, 30 July, 1757. Journal de l'Expédition contre le Fort George. London Magazine, 1757, 457. Miles, French and Indian Wars. Boston Gazette, 15 Aug. 1757. 485 V1 Another success at about the same time did not tend to improve their manners. A hundred and fifty of them, along with a few Canadians under Marin, made a dash at Fort Edward, killed or drove in the pickets, and returned with thirty-two scalps and a prisoner. It was found, however, that the scalps were far from representing an equal number of heads, the Indians having learned the art of making two or three out of one by judicious division. [499] [499] This affair was much exaggerated at the time. I follow Bougainville, who had the facts from Marin. According to him, the thirty-two scalps represented eleven killed; which exactly answers to the English loss as stated by Colonel Frye in a letter from Fort Edward. Preparations were urged on with the utmost energy. Provisions, camp equipage, ammunition, cannon, and bateaux were dragged by gangs of men up the road from the camp of Lévis to the head of the rapids. The work went on through heat and rain, by day and night, till, at the end of July, all was done. Now, on the eve of departure, Montcalm, anxious for harmony among his red allies, called them to a grand council near the camp of Rigaud. Forty-one tribes and sub-tribes, Christian and heathen, from the east and from the west, were represented in it. Here were the mission savages,—Iroquois of Caughnawaga, Two Mountains, and La Présentation; Hurons of Lorette and Detroit; Nipissings of Lake Nipissing; Abenakis of St. Francis, Becancour, Missisqui, and the Penobscot; Algonkins of Three 486 V1 Rivers and Two Mountains; Micmacs and Malecites from Acadia: in all eight hundred chiefs and warriors. With these came the heathen of the west,—Ottawas of seven distinct bands; Ojibwas from Lake Superior, and Mississagas from the region of Lakes Erie and Huron; Pottawattamies and Menomonies from Lake Michigan; Sacs, Foxes, and Winnebagoes from Wisconsin; Miamis from the prairies of Illinois, and Iowas from the banks of the Des Moines: nine hundred and seventy-nine chiefs and warriors, men of the forests and men of the plains, hunters of the moose and hunters of the buffalo, bearers of steel hatchets and stone war-clubs, of French guns and of flint-headed arrows. All sat in silence, decked with ceremonial paint, scalp-locks, eagle plumes, or horns of buffalo; and the dark and wild assemblage was edged with white uniforms of officers from France, who came in numbers to the spectacle. Other officers were also here, all belonging to the colony. They had been appointed to the command of the Indian allies, over whom, however, they had little or no real authority. First among them was the bold and hardy Saint-Luc de la Corne, who was called general of the Indians; and under him were others, each assigned to some tribe or group of tribes,—the intrepid Marin; Charles Langlade, who had left his squaw wife at Michillimackinac to join the war; Niverville, Langis, La Plante, Hertel, Longueuil, Herbin, Lorimier, Sabrevois, and Fleurimont; men familiar from childhood with forests and savages. 487 V1 Each tribe had its interpreter, often as lawless as those with whom he had spent his life; and for the converted tribes there were three missionaries,—Piquet for the Iroquois, Mathevet for the Nipissings, who were half heathen, and Roubaud for the Abenakis. [500] [500] The above is chiefly from Tableau des Sauvages qui se trouvent à l'Armée du Marquis de Montcalm, le 28 Juillet, 1757. Forty-one tribes and sub-tribes are here named, some, however, represented by only three or four warriors. Besides those set down under the head of Christians, it is stated that a few of the Ottawas of Detroit and Michillimackinac still retained the faith. There was some complaint among the Indians because they were crowded upon by the officers who came as spectators. This difficulty being removed, the council opened, Montcalm having already explained his plans to the chiefs and told them the part he expected them to play. Pennahouel, chief of the Ottawas, and senior of all the Assembly, rose and said: "My father, I, who have counted more moons than any here, thank you for the good words you have spoken. I approve them. Nobody ever spoke better. It is the Manitou of War who inspires you." Kikensick, chief of the Nipissings, rose in behalf of the Christian Indians, and addressed the heathen of the west. "Brothers, we thank you for coming to help us defend our lands against the English. Our cause is good. The Master of Life is on our side. Can you doubt it, brothers, after the great blow you have just struck? It covers you with glory. The lake, red with the blood of Corlaer [the English] bears witness forever 488 V1 to your achievement. We too share your glory, and are proud of what you have done." Then, turning to Montcalm: "We are even more glad than you, my father, who have crossed the great water, not for your own sake, but to obey the great King and defend his children. He has bound us all together by the most solemn of ties. Let us take care that nothing shall separate us." The various interpreters, each in turn, having explained this speech to the Assembly, it was received with ejaculations of applause; and when they had ceased, Montcalm spoke as follows: "Children, I am delighted to see you all joined in this good work. So long as you remain one, the English cannot resist you. The great King has sent me to protect and defend you; but above all he has charged me to make you happy and unconquerable, by establishing among you the union which ought to prevail among brothers, children of one father, the great Onontio." Then he held out a prodigious wampum belt of six thousand beads: "Take this sacred pledge of his word. The union of the beads of which it is made is the sign of your united strength. By it I bind you all together, so that none of you can separate from the rest till the English are defeated and their fort destroyed." Pennahouel took up the belt and said: "Behold, brothers, a circle drawn around us by the great Onontio. Let none of us go out from it; for so long as we keep in it, the Master of Life will help all our undertakings." Other chiefs spoke to the 489 V1 same effect, and the council closed in perfect harmony. [501] Its various members bivouacked together at the camp by the lake, and by their carelessness soon set it on fire; whence the place became known as the Burned Camp. Those from the missions confessed their sins all day; while their heathen brothers hung an old coat and a pair of leggings on a pole as tribute to the Manitou. This greatly embarrassed the three priests, who were about to say Mass, but doubted whether they ought to say it in presence of a sacrifice to the devil. Hereupon they took counsel of Montcalm. "Better say it so than not at all," replied the military casuist. Brandy being prudently denied them, the allies grew restless; and the greater part paddled up the lake to a spot near the place where Parker had been defeated. Here they encamped to wait the arrival of the army, and amused themselves meantime with killing rattlesnakes, there being a populous "den" of those reptiles among the neighboring rocks. [501] Bougainville, Journal. Montcalm sent a circular letter to the regular officers, urging them to dispense for a while with luxuries, and even comforts. "We have but few bateaux, and these are so filled with stores that a large division of the army must go by land;" and he directed that everything not absolutely necessary should be left behind, and that a canvas shelter to every two officers should serve them for a tent, and a bearskin for a bed. "Yet I do not forbid a mattress," he adds. "Age and infirmities 490 V1 may make it necessary to some; but I shall not have one myself, and make no doubt that all who can will willingly imitate me." [502] [502] Circulaire du Marquis de Montcalm, 25 Juillet, 1757. The bateaux lay ready by the shore, but could not carry the whole force; and Lévis received orders to march by the side of the lake with twenty-five hundred men, Canadians, regulars, and Iroquois. He set out at daybreak of the thirtieth of July, his men carrying nothing but their knapsacks, blankets, and weapons. Guided by the unerring Indians, they climbed the steep gorge at the side of Rogers Rock, gained the valley beyond, and marched southward along a Mohawk trail which threaded the forest in a course parallel to the lake. The way was of the roughest; many straggled from the line, and two officers completely broke down. The first destination of the party was the mouth of Ganouskie Bay, now called Northwest Bay, where they were to wait for Montcalm, and kindle three fires as a signal that they had reached the rendezvous. [503] [503] Guerre du Canada, par le Chevalier de Lévis. This manuscript of Lévis is largely in the nature of a journal. Montcalm left a detachment to hold Ticonderoga; and then, on the first of August, at two in the afternoon, he embarked at the Burned Camp with all his remaining force. Including those with Lévis, the expedition counted about seven thousand six hundred men, of whom more than sixteen hundred were Indians. [504] At five in the 491 V1 afternoon they reached the place where the Indians, having finished their rattlesnake hunt, were smoking their pipes and waiting for the army. The red warriors embarked, and joined the French flotilla; and now, as evening drew near, was seen one of those wild pageantries of war which Lake George has often witnessed. A restless multitude of birch canoes, filled with painted savages, glided by shores and islands, like troops of swimming water-fowl. Two hundred and fifty bateaux came next, moved by sail and oar, some bearing the Canadian militia, and some the battalions of Old France in trim and gay attire: first, La Reine and Languedoc; then the colony regulars; then La Sarre and Guienne; then the Canadian brigade of Courtemanche; then the cannon and mortars, each on a platform sustained by two bateaux lashed side by side, and rowed by the militia of Saint-Ours; then the battalions of Béarn and Royal Roussillon; then the Canadians of Gaspé, with the provision-bateaux and the field-hospital; and, lastly, a rear guard of regulars closed the line. So, under the flush of sunset, they held their course along the romantic lake, to play their part in the historic drama that lends a stern enchantment to its fascinating scenery. They passed the Narrows in mist and darkness; and when, a little before dawn, they rounded the high promontory of Tongue Mountain, 492 V1 they saw, far on the right, three fiery sparks shining through the gloom. These were the signal-fires of Lévis, to tell them that he had reached the appointed spot. [505] [504] état de l'Armée Fran?aise devant le Fort George, autrement Guillaume-Henri, le 3 Ao?t, 1757. Tableau des Sauvages qui se trouvent à l'Armée du Marquis de Montcalm, le 28 Juillet, 1757. This gives a total of 1,799 Indians, of whom some afterwards left the army. état de l'Armée du Roi en Canada, sur le Lac St. Sacrement et dans les Camps de Carillon, le 29 Juillet, 1757. This gives a total of 8,019 men, of whom about four hundred were left in garrison at Ticonderoga. [505] The site of the present village of Bolton. Lévis had arrived the evening before, after his hard march through the sultry midsummer forest. His men had now rested for a night, and at ten in the morning he marched again. Montcalm followed at noon, and coasted the western shore, till, towards evening, he found Lévis waiting for him by the margin of a small bay not far from the English fort, though hidden from it by a projecting point of land. Canoes and bateaux were drawn up on the beach, and the united forces made their bivouac together. The earthen mounds of Fort William Henry still stand by the brink of Lake George; and seated at the sunset of an August day under the pines that cover them, one gazes on a scene of soft and soothing beauty, where dreamy waters reflect the glories of the mountains and the sky. As it is to-day, so it was then; all breathed repose and peace. The splash of some leaping trout, or the dipping wing of a passing swallow, alone disturbed the summer calm of that unruffled mirror. About ten o'clock at night two boats set out from the fort to reconnoitre. They were passing a point of land on their left, two miles or more down the lake, when the men on board descried through the gloom a strange object against the bank; and they rowed towards it to learn what it 493 V1 might be. It was an awning over the bateaux that carried Roubaud and his brother missionaries. As the rash oarsmen drew near, the bleating of a sheep in one of the French provision-boats warned them of danger; and turning, they pulled for their lives towards the eastern shore. Instantly more than a thousand Indians threw themselves into their canoes and dashed in hot pursuit, making the lake and the mountains ring with the din of their war-whoops. The fugitives had nearly reached land when their pursuers opened fire. They replied; shot one Indian dead, and wounded another; then snatched their oars again, and gained the beach. But the whole savage crew was upon them. Several were killed, three were taken, and the rest escaped in the dark woods.[506] The prisoners were brought before Montcalm, and gave him valuable information of the strength and position of the English. [507] [506] Lettre du Père Roubaud, 21 Oct. 1757. Roubaud, who saw the whole, says that twelve hundred Indians joined the chase, and that their yells were terrific. [507] The remains of Fort William Henry are now—1882—crowded between a hotel and the wharf and station of a railway. While I write, a scheme is on foot to level the whole for other railway structures. When I first knew the place the ground was in much the same state as in the time of Montcalm. The Indian who was killed was a noted chief of the Nipissings; and his tribesmen howled in grief for their bereavement. They painted his face with vermilion, tied feathers in his hair, hung pendants in his ears and nose, clad him in a resplendent war-dress, put silver bracelets on his arms, hung a gorget on his breast with a flame 494 V1 colored ribbon, and seated him in state on the top of a hillock, with his lance in his hand, his gun in the hollow of his arm, his tomahawk in his belt, and his kettle by his side. Then they all crouched about him in lugubrious silence. A funeral harangue followed; and next a song and solemn dance to the booming of the Indian drum. In the gray of the morning they buried him as he sat, and placed food in the grave for his journey to the land of souls. [508] [508] Lettre du Père Roubaud. As the sun rose above the eastern mountains the French camp was all astir. The column of Lévis, with Indians to lead the way, moved through the forest towards the fort, and Montcalm followed with the main body; then the artillery boats rounded the point that had hid them from the sight of the English, saluting them as they did so with musketry and cannon; while a host of savages put out upon the lake, ranged their canoes abreast in a line from shore to shore, and advanced slowly, with measured paddle-strokes and yells of defiance. The position of the enemy was full in sight before them. At the head of the lake, towards the right, stood the fort, close to the edge of the water. On its left was a marsh; then the rough piece of ground where Johnson had encamped two years before; then a low, flat, rocky hill, crowned with an entrenched camp; and, lastly, on the extreme left, another marsh. Far around the fort and up the slopes of the western mountain the 495 V1 forest had been cut down and burned, and the ground was cumbered with blackened stumps and charred carcasses and limbs of fallen trees, strewn in savage disorder one upon another. [509] This was the work of Winslow in the autumn before. Distant shouts and war-cries, the clatter of musketry, white puffs of smoke in the dismal clearing and along the scorched edge of the bordering forest, told that Lévis' Indians were skirmishing with parties of the English, who had gone out to save the cattle roaming in the neighborhood, and burn some out-buildings that would have favored the besiegers. Others were taking down the tents that stood on a plateau near the foot of the mountain on the right, and moving them to the entrenchment on the hill. The garrison sallied from the fort to support their comrades, and for a time the firing was hot. [509] Précis des événements de la Campagne de 1757 en la Nouvelle France. Fort William Henry was an irregular bastioned square, formed by embankments of gravel surmounted by a rampart of heavy logs, laid in tiers crossed one upon another, the interstices filled with earth. The lake protected it on the north, the marsh on the east, and ditches with chevaux-de-frise on the south and west. Seventeen cannon, great and small, besides several mortars and swivels, were mounted upon it; [510] and a brave Scotch veteran, Lieutenant-Colonel Monro, of the thirty-fifth regiment, was in command. [510] état des Effets et Munitions de Guerre qui se sont trouvés au Fort Guillaume-Henri. There were six more guns in the entrenched camp. 496 V1 General Webb lay fourteen miles distant at Fort Edward, with twenty-six hundred men, chiefly provincials. On the twenty-fifth of July he had made a visit to Fort William Henry, examined the place, given some orders, and returned on the twenty-ninth. He then wrote to the Governor of New York, telling him that the French were certainly coming, begging him to send up the militia, and saying: "I am determined to march to Fort William Henry with the whole army under my command as soon as I shall hear of the farther approach of the enemy." Instead of doing so he waited three days, and then sent up a detachment of two hundred regulars under Lieutenant-Colonel Young, and eight hundred Massachusetts men under Colonel Frye. This raised the force at the lake to two thousand and two hundred, including sailors and mechanics, and reduced that of Webb to sixteen hundred, besides half as many more distributed at Albany and the intervening forts. [511] If, according to his spirited intention, he should go to the rescue of Monro, he must leave some of his troops behind him to protect the lower posts from a possible French inroad by way of South Bay. Thus his power of aiding Monro was slight, so rashly had Loudon, intent on Louisburg, left this frontier open to attack. The defect, however, was as much in Webb himself as in his resources. His conduct in the past year had raised doubts of his 497 V1 personal courage; and this was the moment for answering them. Great as was the disparity of numbers, the emergency would have justified an attempt to save Monro at any risk. That officer sent him a hasty note, written at nine o'clock on the morning of the third, telling him that the French were in sight on the lake; and, in the next night, three rangers came to Fort Edward, bringing another short note, dated at six in the evening, announcing that the firing had begun, and closing with the words: "I believe you will think it proper to send a reinforcement as soon as possible." Now, if ever, was the time to move, before the fort was invested and access cut off. But Webb lay quiet, sending expresses to New England for help which could not possibly arrive in time. On the next night another note came from Monro to say that the French were upon him in great numbers, well supplied with artillery, but that the garrison were all in good spirits. "I make no doubt," wrote the hard-pressed officer, "that you will soon send us a reinforcement;" and again on the same day: "We are very certain that a part of the enemy have got between you and us upon the high road, and would therefore be glad (if it meets with your approbation) the whole army was marched." [512] But Webb gave no sign. [513] [511] Frye, Journal of the Attack of Fort William Henry. Webb to Loudon, 1 Aug. 1757. Ibid., 5 Aug. 1757. [512] Copy of four Letters from Lieutenant-Colonel Monro to Major-General Webb, enclosed in the General's Letter of the fifth of August to the Earl of Loudon. [513] "The number of troops remaining under my Command at this place [Fort Edward], excluding the Posts on Hudson's River, amounts to but sixteen hundred men fit for duty, with which Army, so much inferior to that of the enemy, I did not think it prudent to pursue my first intentions of Marching to their Assistance." Webb to Loudon, 5 Aug. 1757. 498 V1 When the skirmishing around the fort was over, La Corne, with a body of Indians, occupied the road that led to Fort Edward, and Lévis encamped hard by to support him, while Montcalm proceeded to examine the ground and settle his plan of attack. He made his way to the rear of the entrenched camp and reconnoitred it, hoping to carry it by assault; but it had a breastwork of stones and logs, and he thought the attempt too hazardous. The ground where he stood was that where Dieskau had been defeated; and as the fate of his predecessor was not of flattering augury, he resolved to besiege the fort in form. He chose for the site of his operations the ground now covered by the village of Caldwell. A little to the north of it was a ravine, beyond which he formed his main camp, while Lévis occupied a tract of dry ground beside the marsh, whence he could easily move to intercept succors from Fort Edward on the one hand, or repel a sortie from Fort William Henry on the other. A brook ran down the ravine and entered the lake at a small cove protected from the fire of the fort by a point of land; and at this place, still called Artillery Cove, Montcalm prepared to debark his cannon and mortars. Having made his preparations, he sent Fontbrune, one of his aides-de-camp, with a letter to Monro. "I owe it to humanity," he wrote, "to 499 V1 summon you to surrender. At present I can restrain the savages, and make them observe the terms of a capitulation, as I might not have power to do under other circumstances; and an obstinate defence on your part could only retard the capture of the place a few days, and endanger an unfortunate garrison which cannot be relieved, in consequence of the dispositions I have made. I demand a decisive answer within an hour." Monro replied that he and his soldiers would defend themselves to the last. While the flags of truce were flying, the Indians swarmed over the fields before the fort; and when they learned the result, an Abenaki chief shouted in broken French: "You won't surrender, eh! Fire away then, and fight your best; for if I catch you, you shall get no quarter." Monro emphasized his refusal by a general discharge of his cannon. The trenches were opened on the night of the fourth,—a task of extreme difficulty, as the ground was covered by a profusion of half-burned stumps, roots, branches, and fallen trunks. Eight hundred men toiled till daylight with pick, spade, and axe, while the cannon from the fort flashed through the darkness, and grape and round-shot whistled and screamed over their heads. Some of the English balls reached the camp beyond the ravine, and disturbed the slumbers of the officers off duty, as they lay wrapped in their blankets and bear-skins. Before daybreak the first parallel was made; a battery was nearly finished on the left, 500 V1 and another was begun on the right. The men now worked under cover, safe in their burrows; one gang relieved another, and the work went on all day. The Indians were far from doing what was expected of them. Instead of scouting in the direction of Fort Edward to learn the movements of the enemy and prevent surprise, they loitered about the camp and in the trenches, or amused themselves by firing at the fort from behind stumps and logs. Some, in imitation of the French, dug little trenches for themselves, in which they wormed their way towards the rampart, and now and then picked off an artillery-man, not without loss on their own side. On the afternoon of the fifth, Montcalm invited them to a council, gave them belts of wampum, and mildly remonstrated with them. "Why expose yourselves without necessity? I grieve bitterly over the losses that you have met, for the least among you is precious to me. No doubt it is a good thing to annoy the English; but that is not the main point. You ought to inform me of everything the enemy is doing, and always keep parties on the road between the two forts." And he gently hinted that their place was not in his camp, but in that of Lévis, where missionaries were provided for such of them as were Christians, and food and ammunition for them all. They promised, with excellent docility, to do everything he wished, but added that there was something on their hearts. Being encouraged to relieve themselves of the 501 V1 burden, they complained that they had not been consulted as to the management of the siege, but were expected to obey orders like slaves. "We know more about fighting in the woods than you," said their orator; "ask our advice, and you will be the better for it." [514] [514] Bougainville, Journal. Montcalm assured them that if they had been neglected, it was only through the hurry and confusion of the time; expressed high appreciation of their talents for bush-fighting, promised them ample satisfaction, and ended by telling them that in the morning they should hear the big guns. This greatly pleased them, for they were extremely impatient for the artillery to begin. About sunrise the battery of the left opened with eight heavy cannon and a mortar, joined, on the next morning, by the battery of the right, with eleven pieces more. The fort replied with spirit. The cannon thundered all day, and from a hundred peaks and crags the astonished wilderness roared back the sound. The Indians were delighted. They wanted to point the guns; and to humor them, they were now and then allowed to do so. Others lay behind logs and fallen trees, and yelled their satisfaction when they saw the splinters fly from the wooden rampart. Day after day the weary roar of the distant cannonade fell on the ears of Webb in his camp at Fort Edward. "I have not yet received the least reinforcement," he writes to Loudon; "this is the 502 V1 disagreeable situation we are at present in. The fort, by the heavy firing we hear from the lake, is still in our possession; but I fear it cannot long hold out against so warm a cannonading if I am not reinforced by a sufficient number of militia to march to their relief." The militia were coming; but it was impossible that many could reach him in less than a week. Those from New York alone were within call, and two thousand of them arrived soon after he sent Loudon the above letter. Then, by stripping all the forts below, he could bring together forty-five hundred men; while several French deserters assured him that Montcalm had nearly twelve thousand. To advance to the relief of Monro with a force so inferior, through a defile of rocks, forests, and mountains, made by nature for ambuscades,—and this too with troops who had neither the steadiness of regulars nor the bush-fighting skill of Indians,—was an enterprise for firmer nerve than his. He had already warned Monro to expect no help from him. At midnight of the fourth, Captain Bartman, his aide-de-camp, wrote: "The General has ordered me to acquaint you he does not think it prudent to attempt a junction or to assist you till reinforced by the militia of the colonies, for the immediate march of which repeated expresses have been sent." The letter then declared that the French were in complete possession of the road between the two forts, that a prisoner just brought in reported their force in men and cannon to be very great, and that, unless the militia came soon, 503 V1 Monro had better make what terms he could with the enemy. [515] [515] Frye, in his Journal, gives the letter in full. A spurious translation of it is appended to a piece called Jugement impartial sur les Opérations militaires en Canada. The chance was small that this letter would reach its destination; and in fact the bearer was killed by La Corne's Indians, who, in stripping the body, found the hidden paper, and carried it to the General. Montcalm kept it several days, till the English rampart was half battered down; and then, after saluting his enemy with a volley from all his cannon, he sent it with a graceful compliment to Monro. It was Bougainville who carried it, preceded by a drummer and a flag. He was met at the foot of the glacis, blindfolded, and led through the fort and along the edge of the lake to the entrenched camp, where Monro was at the time. "He returned many thanks," writes the emissary in his Diary, "for the courtesy of our nation, and protested his joy at having to do with so generous an enemy. This was his answer to the Marquis de Montcalm. Then they led me back, always with eyes blinded; and our batteries began to fire again as soon as we thought that the English grenadiers who escorted me had had time to re-enter the fort. I hope General Webb's letter may induce the English to surrender the sooner." [516] [516] Bougainville, Journal. Bougainville au Ministre, 19 Ao?t, 1757. By this time the sappers had worked their way to the angle of the lake, where they were stopped by a marshy hollow, beyond which was a tract of high ground, reaching to the fort and serving as 504 V1 the garden of the garrison. [517] Logs and fascines in large quantities were thrown into the hollow, and hurdles were laid over them to form a causeway for the cannon. Then the sap was continued up the acclivity beyond, a trench was opened in the garden, and a battery begun, not two hundred and fifty yards from the fort. The Indians, in great number, crawled forward among the beans, maize, and cabbages, and lay there ensconced. On the night of the seventh, two men came out of the fort, apparently to reconnoitre, with a view to a sortie, when they were greeted by a general volley and a burst of yells which echoed among the mountains; followed by responsive whoops pealing through the darkness from the various camps and lurking-places of the savage warriors far and near. [517] Now (1882) the site of Fort William Henry Hotel, with its grounds. The hollow is partly filled by the main road of Caldwell. The position of the besieged was now deplorable. More than three hundred of them had been killed and wounded; small-pox was raging in the fort; the place was a focus of infection, and the casemates were crowded with the sick. A sortie from the entrenched camp and another from the fort had been repulsed with loss. All their large cannon and mortars had been burst, or disabled by shot; only seven small pieces were left fit for service; [518] and the whole of Montcalm's thirty-one cannon and fifteen mortars and howitzers would soon open fire, while the walls were already 505 V1 breached, and an assault was imminent. Through the night of the eighth they fired briskly from all their remaining pieces. In the morning the officers held a council, and all agreed to surrender if honorable terms could be had. A white flag was raised, a drum was beat, and Lieutenant-Colonel Young, mounted on horseback, for a shot in the foot had disabled him from walking, went, followed by a few soldiers, to the tent of Montcalm. [518] Frye, Journal. It was agreed that the English troops should march out with the honors of war, and be escorted to Fort Edward by a detachment of French troops; that they should not serve for eighteen months; and that all French prisoners captured in America since the war began should be given up within three months. The stores, munitions, and artillery were to be the prize of the victors, except one field-piece, which the garrison were to retain in recognition of their brave defence. Before signing the capitulation Montcalm called the Indian chiefs to council, and asked them to consent to the conditions, and promise to restrain their young warriors from any disorder. They approved everything and promised everything. The garrison then evacuated the fort, and marched to join their comrades in the entrenched camp, which was included in the surrender. No sooner were they gone than a crowd of Indians clambered through the embrasures in search of rum and plunder. All the sick men unable to leave their beds were instantly butchered. [519] "I was 506 V1 witness of this spectacle," says the missionary Roubaud; "I saw one of these barbarians come out of the casemates with a human head in his hand, from which the blood ran in streams, and which he paraded as if he had got the finest prize in the world." There was little left to plunder; and the Indians, joined by the more lawless of the Canadians, turned their attention to the entrenched camp, where all the English were now collected. [519] Attestation of William Arbuthnot, Captain in Frye's Regiment. The French guard stationed there could not or would not keep out the rabble. By the advice of Montcalm the English stove their rum-barrels; but the Indians were drunk already with homicidal rage, and the glitter of their vicious eyes told of the devil within. They roamed among the tents, intrusive, insolent, their visages besmirched with war-paint; grinning like fiends as they handled, in anticipation of the knife, the long hair of cowering women, of whom, as well as of children, there were many in the camp, all crazed with fright. Since the last war the New England border population had regarded Indians with a mixture of detestation and horror. Their mysterious warfare of ambush and surprise, their midnight onslaughts, their butcheries, their burnings, and all their nameless atrocities, had been for years the theme of fireside story; and the dread they excited was deepened by the distrust and dejection of the time. The confusion in the camp lasted through the afternoon. "The Indians," says Bougainville, "wanted to plunder the 507 V1 chests of the English; the latter resisted; and there was fear that serious disorder would ensue. The Marquis de Montcalm ran thither immediately, and used every means to restore tranquillity: prayers, threats, caresses, interposition of the officers and interpreters who have some influence over these savages." [520] "We shall be but too happy if we can prevent a massacre. Detestable position! of which nobody who has not been in it can have any idea, and which makes victory itself a sorrow to the victors. The Marquis spared no efforts to prevent the rapacity of the savages and, I must say it, of certain persons associated with them, from resulting in something worse than plunder. At last, at nine o'clock in the evening, order seemed restored. The Marquis even induced the Indians to promise that, besides the escort agreed upon in the capitulation, two chiefs for each tribe should accompany the English on their way to Fort Edward." [521] He also ordered La Corne and the other Canadian officers attached to the Indians to see that no violence took place. He might well have done more. In view of the disorders of the afternoon, it would not have been too much if he had ordered the whole body of regular troops, whom alone he could trust for the purpose, to hold themselves ready to move to the spot in case of outbreak, and shelter their defeated foes behind a hedge of bayonets. [520] Bougainville au Ministre, 19 Ao?t, 1757. [521] Bougainville, Journal. 508 V1 Bougainville was not to see what ensued; for Montcalm now sent him to Montreal, as a special messenger to carry news of the victory. He embarked at ten o'clock. Returning daylight found him far down the lake; and as he looked on its still bosom flecked with mists, and its quiet mountains sleeping under the flush of dawn, there was nothing in the wild tranquillity of the scene to suggest the tragedy which even then was beginning on the shore he had left behind. The English in their camp had passed a troubled night, agitated by strange rumors. In the morning something like a panic seized them; for they distrusted not the Indians only, but the Canadians. In their haste to be gone they got together at daybreak, before the escort of three hundred regulars had arrived. They had their muskets, but no ammunition; and few or none of the provincials had bayonets. Early as it was, the Indians were on the alert; and, indeed, since midnight great numbers of them had been prowling about the skirts of the camp, showing, says Colonel Frye, "more than usual malice in their looks." Seventeen wounded men of his regiment lay in huts, unable to join the march. In the preceding afternoon Miles Whitworth, the regimental surgeon, had passed them over to the care of a French surgeon, according to an agreement made at the time of the surrender; but, the Frenchman being absent, the other remained with them attending to their wants. The French surgeon had 509 V1 caused special sentinels to be posted for their protection. These were now removed, at the moment when they were needed most; upon which, about five o'clock in the morning, the Indians entered the huts, dragged out the inmates, and tomahawked and scalped them all, before the eyes of Whitworth, and in presence of La Corne and other Canadian officers, as well as of a French guard stationed within forty feet of the spot; and, declares the surgeon under oath, "none, either officer or soldier, protected the said wounded men." [522] The opportune butchery relieved them of a troublesome burden. [522] Affidavit of Miles Whitworth. See Appendix F. A scene of plundering now began. The escort had by this time arrived, and Monro complained to the officers that the capitulation was broken; but got no other answer than advice to give up the baggage to the Indians in order to appease them. To this the English at length agreed; but it only increased the excitement of the mob. They demanded rum; and some of the soldiers, afraid to refuse, gave it to them from their canteens, thus adding fuel to the flame. When, after much difficulty, the column at last got out of the camp and began to move along the road that crossed the rough plain between the entrenchment and the forest, the Indians crowded upon them, impeded their march, snatched caps, coats, and weapons from men and officers, tomahawked those that resisted, and, seizing upon shrieking women and children, dragged them off or murdered them 510 V1 on the spot. It is said that some of the interpreters secretly fomented the disorder. [523] Suddenly there rose the screech of the war-whoop. At this signal of butchery, which was given by Abenaki Christians from the mission of the Penobscot, [524] a mob of savages rushed upon the New Hampshire men at the rear of the column, and killed or dragged away eighty of them. [525] A frightful tumult ensued, when Montcalm, Lévis, Bourlamaque, and many other French officers, who had hastened from their camp on the first news of disturbance, threw themselves among the Indians, and by promises and threats tried to allay their frenzy. "Kill me, but spare the English who are under my protection," exclaimed Montcalm. He took from one of them a young officer whom the savage had seized; upon which several other Indians immediately tomahawked their prisoners, lest they too should be taken from them. One writer says that a French grenadier was killed and two wounded in attempting to restore order; but the statement is doubtful. The English seemed paralyzed, and fortunately did not attempt a resistance, which, without ammunition as they were, would have ended in a general massacre. Their broken column straggled forward in wild disorder, amid the din of whoops and shrieks, till they reached the 511 V1 French advance-guard, which consisted of Canadians; and here they demanded protection from the officers, who refused to give it, telling them that they must take to the woods and shift for themselves. Frye was seized by a number of Indians, who, brandishing spears and tomahawks, threatened him with death and tore off his clothing, leaving nothing but breeches, shoes, and shirt. Repelled by the officers of the guard, he made for the woods. A Connecticut soldier who was present says of him that he leaped upon an Indian who stood in his way, disarmed and killed him, and then escaped; but Frye himself does not mention the incident. Captain Burke, also of the Massachusetts regiment, was stripped, after a violent struggle, of all his clothes; then broke loose, gained the woods, spent the night shivering in the thick grass of a marsh, and on the next day reached Fort Edward. Jonathan Carver, a provincial volunteer, declares that, when the tumult was at its height, he saw officers of the French army walking about at a little distance and talking with seeming unconcern. Three or four Indians seized him, brandished their tomahawks over his head, and tore off most of his clothes, while he vainly claimed protection from a sentinel, who called him an English dog, and violently pushed him back among his tormentors. Two of them were dragging him towards the neighboring swamp, when an English officer, stripped of everything but his scarlet breeches, ran by. One of Carver's captors sprang upon him, but was 512 V1 thrown to the ground; whereupon the other went to the aid of his comrade and drove his tomahawk into the back of the Englishman. As Carver turned to run, an English boy, about twelve years old, clung to him and begged for help. They ran on together for a moment, when the boy was seized, dragged from his protector, and, as Carver judged by his shrieks, was murdered. He himself escaped to the forest, and after three days of famine reached Fort Edward. [523] This is stated by Pouchot and Bougainville; the latter of whom confirms the testimony of the English witnesses, that Canadian officers present did nothing to check the Indians. [524] See note, end of chapter. [525] Belknap, History of New Hampshire, says that eighty were killed. Governor Wentworth, writing immediately after the event, says "killed or captivated." The bonds of discipline seem for the time to have been completely broken; for while Montcalm and his chief officers used every effort to restore order, even at the risk of their lives, many other officers, chiefly of the militia, failed atrociously to do their duty. How many English were killed it is impossible to tell with exactness. Roubaud says that he saw forty or fifty corpses scattered about the field. Lévis says fifty; which does not include the sick and wounded before murdered in the camp and fort. It is certain that six or seven hundred persons were carried off, stripped, and otherwise maltreated. Montcalm succeeded in recovering more than four hundred of them in the course of the day; and many of the French officers did what they could to relieve their wants by buying back from their captors the clothing that had been torn from them. Many of the fugitives had taken refuge in the fort, whither Monro himself had gone to demand protection for his followers; and here 513 V1 Roubaud presently found a crowd of half-frenzied women, crying in anguish for husbands and children. All the refugees and redeemed prisoners were afterwards conducted to the entrenched camp, where food and shelter were provided for them and a strong guard set for their protection until the fifteenth, when they were sent under an escort to Fort Edward. Here cannon had been fired at intervals to guide those who had fled to the woods, whence they came dropping in from day to day, half dead with famine. On the morning after the massacre the Indians decamped in a body and set out for Montreal, carrying with them their plunder and some two hundred prisoners, who, it is said, could not be got out of their hands. The soldiers were set to the work of demolishing the English fort; and the task occupied several days. The barracks were torn down, and the huge pine-logs of the rampart thrown into a heap. The dead bodies that filled the casemates were added to the mass, and fire was set to the whole. The mighty funeral pyre blazed all night. Then, on the sixteenth, the army reimbarked. The din of ten thousand combatants, the rage, the terror, the agony, were gone; and no living thing was left but the wolves that gathered from the mountains to feast upon the dead. [526] [526] The foregoing chapter rests largely on evidence never before brought to light, including the minute Journal of Bougainville,—a document which can hardly be commended too much,—the correspondence of Webb, a letter of Colonel Frye, written just after the massacre, and a journal of the siege, sent by him to Governor Pownall as his official report. Extracts 514 V1 from these, as well as from the affidavit of Dr. Whitworth, which is also new evidence, are given in Appendix F. The Diary of Malartic and the correspondence of Montcalm, Lévis, Vaudreuil, and Bigot, also throw light on the campaign, as well as numerous reports of the siege, official and semi-official. The long letter of the Jesuit Roubaud, printed anonymously in the Lettres édifiantes et Curieuses, gives a remarkably vivid account of what he saw. He was an intelligent person, who may be trusted where he has no motive for lying. Curious particulars about him will be found in a paper called, The deplorable Case of Mr. Roubaud, printed in the Historical Magazine, Second Series, VIII. 282. Compare Verreau, Report on Canadian Archives, 1874. Impressions of the massacre at Fort William Henry have hitherto been derived chiefly from the narrative of Captain Jonathan Carver, in his Travels. He has discredited himself by his exaggeration of the number killed; but his account of what he himself saw tallies with that of the other witnesses. He is outdone in exaggeration by an anonymous French writer of the time, who seems rather pleased at the occurrence, and affirms that all the English were killed except seven hundred, these last being captured, so that none escaped (Nouvelles du Canada envoyées de Montréal, Ao?t, 1757). Carver puts killed and captured together at fifteen hundred. Vaudreuil, who always makes light of Indian barbarities, goes to the other extreme, and avers that no more than five or six were killed. Lévis and Roubaud, who saw everything, and were certain not to exaggerate the number, give the most trustworthy evidence on this point. The capitulation, having been broken by the allies of France, was declared void by the British Government. The Signal of Butchery. Montcalm, Bougainville, and several others say that the massacre was begun by the Abenakis of Panaouski. Father Martin, in quoting the letter in which Montcalm makes this statement, inserts the word idolatres, which is not in the original. Dussieux and O'Callaghan give the passage correctly. This Abenaki band, ancestors of the present Penobscots, were no idolaters, but had been converted more than half a century. In the official list of the Indian allies they are set down among the Christians. Roubaud, who had charge of them during the expedition, speaks of these and other converts with singular candor: "Vous avez d? vous apercevoir … que nos sauvages, pour être Chrétiens, n'en sont pas plus irrépréhensibles dans leur conduite." END OF VOL. I. CHAPTER XVI. 1757, 1758. A WINTER OF DISCONTENT. Boasts of Loudon ? A Mutinous Militia ? Panic ? Accusations of Vaudreuil ? His Weakness ? Indian Barbarities ? Destruction of German Flats ? Discontent of Montcalm ? Festivities at Montreal ? Montcalm's Relations with the Governor ? Famine ? Riots ? Mutiny ? Winter at Ticonderoga ? A desperate Bush-fight ? Defeat of the Rangers ? Adventures of Roche and Pringle. Loudon, on his way back from Halifax, was at sea off the coast of Nova Scotia when a despatch-boat from Governor Pownall of Massachusetts startled him with news that Fort William Henry was attacked; and a few days after he learned by another boat that the fort was taken and the capitulation "inhumanly and villanously broken." On this he sent Webb orders to hold the enemy in check without risking a battle till he should himself arrive. "I am on the way," these were his words, "with a force sufficient to turn the scale, with God's assistance; and then I hope we shall teach the French to comply with the laws of nature and humanity. For although I abhor barbarity, the knowledge I have of Mr. Vaudreuil's 2 V2 behavior when in Louisiana, from his own letters in my possession, and the murders committed at Oswego and now at Fort William Henry, will oblige me to make those gentlemen sick of such inhuman villany whenever it is in my power." He reached New York on the last day of August, and heard that the French had withdrawn. He nevertheless sent his troops up the Hudson, thinking, he says, that he might still attack Ticonderoga; a wild scheme, which he soon abandoned, if he ever seriously entertained it. [527] [527] Loudon to Webb, 20 Aug. 1757. London to Holdernesse, Oct. 1757. Loudon to Pownall, 16 [18?] Aug. 1757. A passage in this last letter, in which Loudon says that he shall, if prevented by head-winds from getting into New York, disembark the troops on Long Island, is perverted by that ardent partisan, William Smith, the historian of New York, into the absurd declaration "that he should encamp on Long Island for the defence of the continent." Webb had remained at Fort Edward in mortal dread of attack. Johnson had joined him with a band of Mohawks; and on the day when Fort William Henry surrendered there had been some talk of attempting to throw succors into it by night. Then came the news of its capture; and now, when it was too late, tumultuous mobs of militia came pouring in from the neighboring provinces. In a few days thousands of them were bivouacked on the fields about Fort Edward, doing nothing, disgusted and mutinous, declaring that they were ready to fight, but not to lie still without tents, blankets, or kettles. Webb writes on the fourteenth that most of those from New York had deserted, threatening to kill their officers if 3 V2 they tried to stop them. Delancey ordered them to be fired upon. A sergeant was shot, others were put in arrest, and all was disorder till the seventeenth; when Webb, learning that the French were gone, sent them back to their homes. [528] [528] Delancey to [Holdernesse?], 24 Aug. 1757. Close on the fall of Fort William Henry came crazy rumors of disaster, running like wildfire through the colonies. The number and ferocity of the enemy were grossly exaggerated; there was a cry that they would seize Albany and New York itself; [529] while it was reported that Webb, as much frightened as the rest, was for retreating to the Highlands of the Hudson. [530] This was the day after the capitulation, when a part only of the militia had yet appeared. If Montcalm had seized the moment, and marched that afternoon to Fort Edward, it is not impossible that in the confusion he might have carried it by a coup-de-main. [529] Captain Christie to Governor Wentworth, 11 Aug. 1757. Ibid., to Governor Pownall, same date. [530] Smith, Hist. N.Y., Part II. 254. Here was an opportunity for Vaudreuil, and he did not fail to use it. Jealous of his rival's exploit, he spared no pains to tarnish it; complaining that Montcalm had stopped half way on the road to success, and, instead of following his instructions, had contented himself with one victory when he should have gained two. But the Governor had enjoined upon him as a matter of the last necessity that the Canadians should be at their homes before September to gather the crops, and he would have been the first to complain had 4 V2 the injunction been disregarded. To besiege Fort Edward was impossible, as Montcalm had no means of transporting cannon thither; and to attack Webb without them was a risk which he had not the rashness to incur. It was Bougainville who first brought Vaudreuil the news of the success on Lake George. A day or two after his arrival, the Indians, who had left the army after the massacre, appeared at Montreal, bringing about two hundred English prisoners. The Governor rebuked them for breaking the capitulation, on which the heathen savages of the West declared that it was not their fault, but that of the converted Indians, who, in fact, had first raised the war-whoop. Some of the prisoners were presently bought from them at the price of two kegs of brandy each; and the inevitable consequences followed. "I thought," writes Bougainville, "that the Governor would have told them they should have neither provisions nor presents till all the English were given up; that he himself would have gone to their huts and taken the prisoners from them; and that the inhabitants would be forbidden, under the severest penalties, from selling or giving them brandy. I saw the contrary; and my soul shuddered at the sights my eyes beheld. On the fifteenth, at two o'clock, in the presence of the whole town, they killed one of the prisoners, put him into the kettle, and forced his wretched countrymen to eat of him." The Intendant Bigot, the friend of the Governor, confirms this story; and 5 V2 another French writer says that they "compelled mothers to eat the flesh of their children." [531] Bigot declares that guns, canoes, and other presents were given to the Western tribes before they left Montreal; and he adds, "they must be sent home satisfied at any cost." Such were the pains taken to preserve allies who were useful chiefly through the terror inspired by their diabolical cruelties. This time their ferocity cost them dear. They had dug up and scalped the corpses in the graveyard of Fort William Henry, many of which were remains of victims of the small-pox; and the savages caught the disease, which is said to have made great havoc among them. [532] [531] "En chemin faisant et même en entrant à Montréal ils les ont mangés et fait manger aux autres prisonniers." Bigot au Ministre, 24 Ao?t, 1757. "Des sauvages ont fait manger aux mères la chair de leurs enfants." Jugement impartial sur les Opérations militaires en Canada. A French diary kept in Canada at this time, and captured at sea, is cited by Hutchinson as containing similar statements. [532] One of these corpses was that of Richard Rogers, brother of the noted partisan Robert Rogers. He had died of small-pox some time before. Rogers, Journals, 55, note. Vaudreuil, in reporting what he calls "my capture of Fort William Henry," takes great credit to himself for his "generous procedures" towards the English prisoners; alluding, it seems, to his having bought some of them from the Indians with the brandy which was sure to cause the murder of others. [533] His obsequiousness to his red allies did not cease with permitting them to kill and devour before his eyes those whom he was bound in honor and duty to protect. "He let 6 V2 them do what they pleased," says a French contemporary; "they were seen roaming about Montreal, knife in hand, threatening everybody, and often insulting those they met. When complaint was made, he said nothing. Far from it; instead of reproaching them, he loaded them with gifts, in the belief that their cruelty would then relent." [534] [533] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Sept. 1757. [534] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Nevertheless, in about a fortnight all, or nearly all, the surviving prisoners were bought out of their clutches; and then, after a final distribution of presents and a grand debauch at La Chine, the whole savage rout paddled for their villages. The campaign closed in November with a partisan exploit on the Mohawk. Here, at a place called German Flats, on the farthest frontier, there was a thriving settlement of German peasants from the Palatinate, who were so ill-disposed towards the English that Vaudreuil had had good hope of stirring them to revolt, while at the same time persuading their neighbors, the Oneida Indians, to take part with France. [535] As his measures to this end failed, he resolved to attack them. Therefore, at three o'clock in the morning of the twelfth of November, three hundred colony troops, Canadians and Indians, under an officer named Belêtre, wakened the unhappy peasants by a burst of yells, and attacked the small picket forts which they had built as places of refuge. These were taken one by one and set on fire. The sixty dwellings of the settlement, with their barns and 7 V2 outhouses, were all burned, forty or fifty of the inhabitants were killed, and about three times that number, chiefly women and children, were made prisoners, including Johan Jost Petrie, the magistrate of the place. Fort Herkimer was not far off, with a garrison of two hundred men under Captain Townshend, who at the first alarm sent out a detachment too weak to arrest the havoc; while Belêtre, unable to carry off his booty, set on his followers to the work of destruction, killed a great number of hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses, and then made a hasty retreat. Lord Howe, pushing up the river from Schenectady with troops and militia, found nothing but an abandoned slaughter-field. Vaudreuil reported the affair to the Court, and summed up the results with pompous egotism: "I have ruined the plans of the English; I have disposed the Five Nations to attack them; I have carried consternation and terror into all those parts." [536] [535] Dépêches de Vaudreuil, 1757. [536] Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 12 Fév. 1758. Ibid., 28 Nov. 1758. Bougainville, Journal. Summary of M. de Belêtre's Campaign, in N.Y. Col. Docs., X. 672. Extravagant reports of the havoc made were sent to France. It was pretended that three thousand cattle, three thousand sheep (Vaudreuil says four thousand), and from five hundred to fifteen hundred horses were destroyed, with other personal property to the amount of 1,500,000 livres. These official falsehoods are contradicted in a letter from Quebec, Daine au Maréchal de Belleisle, 19 Mai, 1758. Lévis says that the whole population of the settlement, men, women, and children, was not above three hundred. Montcalm, his summer work over, went to Montreal; and thence in September to Quebec, a place more to his liking. "Come as soon as you can," he wrote to Bourlamaque, "and I will tell a certain 8 V2 fair lady how eager you are." Even Quebec was no paradise for him; and he writes again to the same friend: "My heart and my stomach are both ill at ease, the latter being the worse." To his wife he says: "The price of everything is rising. I am ruining myself; I owe the treasurer twelve thousand francs. I long for peace and for you. In spite of the public distress, we have balls and furious gambling." In February he returned to Montreal in a sleigh on the ice of the St. Lawrence,—a mode of travelling which he describes as cold but delicious. Montreal pleased him less than ever, especially as he was not in favor at what he calls the Court, meaning the circle of the Governor-General. "I find this place so amusing," he writes ironically to Bourlamaque, "that I wish Holy Week could be lengthened, to give me a pretext for neither making nor receiving visits, staying at home, and dining there almost alone. Burn all my letters, as I do yours." And in the next week: "Lent and devotion have upset my stomach and given me a cold; which does not prevent me from having the Governor-General at dinner to-day to end his lenten fast, according to custom here." Two days after he announces: "To-day a grand dinner at Martel's; twenty-three persons, all big-wigs (les grosses perruques); no ladies. We still have got to undergo those of Péan, Deschambault, and the Chevalier de Lévis. I spend almost every evening in my chamber, the place I like best, and where I am least bored." 9 V2 With the opening spring there were changes in the modes of amusement. Picnics began, Vaudreuil and his wife being often of the party, as too was Lévis. The Governor also made visits of compliment at the houses of the seigniorial proprietors along the river; "very much," says Montcalm, as "Henri IV. did to the bourgeois notables of Paris. I live as usual, fencing in the morning, dining, and passing the evening at home or at the Governor's. Péan has gone up to La Chine to spend six days with the reigning sultana [Péan's wife, mistress of Bigot]. As for me, my ennui increases. I don't know what to do, or say, or read, or where to go; and I think that at the end of the next campaign I shall ask bluntly, blindly, for my recall, only because I am bored." [537] [537] Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 22 Mai, 1758. His relations with Vaudreuil were a constant annoyance to him, notwithstanding the mask of mutual civility. "I never," he tells his mother, "ask for a place in the colony troops for anybody. You need not be an ?dipus to guess this riddle. Here are four lines from Corneille:— "'Mon crime véritable est d'avoir aujourd'hui Plus de nom que … [Vaudreuil], plus de vertus que lui, Et c'est de là que part cette secrète haine Que le temps ne rendra que plus forte et plus pleine.' Nevertheless I live here on good terms with everybody, and do my best to serve the King. If they could but do without me; if they could but spring some trap on me, or if I should happen to meet with some check!" 10 V2 Vaudreuil meanwhile had written to the Court in high praise of Lévis, hinting that he, and not Montcalm, ought to have the chief command. [538] [538] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 16 Sept. 1757. Ibid., au Ministre de la Guerre, même date. Under the hollow gayeties of the ruling class lay a great public distress, which broke at last into riot. Towards midwinter no flour was to be had in Montreal; and both soldiers and people were required to accept a reduced ration, partly of horse-flesh. A mob gathered before the Governor's house, and a deputation of women beset him, crying out that the horse was the friend of man, and that religion forbade him to be eaten. In reply he threatened them with imprisonment and hanging; but with little effect, and the crowd dispersed, only to stir up the soldiers quartered in the houses of the town. The colony regulars, ill-disciplined at the best, broke into mutiny, and excited the battalion of Béarn to join them. Vaudreuil was helpless; Montcalm was in Quebec; and the task of dealing with the mutineers fell upon Lévis, who proved equal to the crisis, took a high tone, threatened death to the first soldier who should refuse horse-flesh, assured them at the same time that he ate it every day himself, and by a characteristic mingling of authority and tact, quelled the storm. [539] [539] Bougainville, Journal. Montcalm à Mirepoix, 20 Avril, 1758. Lévis, Journal de la Guerre du Canada. The prospects of the next campaign began to open. Captain Pouchot had written from Niagara that three thousand savages were waiting to 11 V2 be let loose against the English borders. "What a scourge!" exclaims Bougainville. "Humanity groans at being forced to use such monsters. What can be done against an invisible enemy, who strikes and vanishes, swift as the lightning? It is the destroying angel." Captain Hebecourt kept watch and ward at Ticonderoga, begirt with snow and ice, and much plagued by English rangers, who sometimes got into the ditch itself. [540] This was to reconnoitre the place in preparation for a winter attack which Loudon had planned, but which, like the rest of his schemes, fell to the ground. [541] Towards midwinter a band of these intruders captured two soldiers and butchered some fifteen cattle close to the fort, leaving tied to the horns of one of them a note addressed to the commandant in these terms: "I am obliged to you, sir, for the rest you have allowed me to take and the fresh meat you have sent me. I shall take good care of my prisoners. My compliments to the Marquis of Montcalm." Signed, Rogers. [542] [540] Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 28 Mars, 1758. [541] Loudon to Pitt, 14 Feb. 1758. [542] Journal de ce qui s'est passé en Canada, 1757, 1758. Compare Rogers, Journals, 72-75. A few weeks later Hebecourt had his revenge. About the middle of March a report came to Montreal that a large party of rangers had been cut to pieces a few miles from Ticonderoga, and that Rogers himself was among the slain. This last announcement proved false; but the rangers had suffered a crushing defeat. Colonel Haviland, commanding at Fort Edward, sent a hundred and 12 V2 eighty of them, men and officers, on a scouting party towards Ticonderoga; and Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche, of the twenty-seventh regiment, joined them as volunteers, no doubt through a love of hardy adventure, which was destined to be fully satisfied. Rogers commanded the whole. They passed down Lake George on the ice under cover of night, and then, as they neared the French outposts, pursued their way by land behind Rogers Rock and the other mountains of the western shore. On the preceding day, the twelfth of March, Hebecourt had received a reinforcement of two hundred Mission Indians and a body of Canadians. The Indians had no sooner arrived than, though nominally Christians, they consulted the spirits, by whom they were told that the English were coming. On this they sent out scouts, who came back breathless, declaring that they had found a great number of snow-shoe tracks. The superhuman warning being thus confirmed, the whole body of Indians, joined by a band of Canadians and a number of volunteers from the regulars, set out to meet the approaching enemy, and took their way up the valley of Trout Brook, a mountain gorge that opens from the west upon the valley of Ticonderoga. Towards three o'clock on the afternoon of that day Rogers had reached a point nearly west of the mountain that bears his name. The rough and rocky ground was buried four feet in snow, and all around stood the gray trunks of the forest, bearing aloft their skeleton arms and tangled 13 V2 intricacy of leafless twigs. Close on the right was a steep hill, and at a little distance on the left was the brook, lost under ice and snow. A scout from the front told Rogers that a party of Indians was approaching along the bed of the frozen stream, on which he ordered his men to halt, face to that side, and advance cautiously. The Indians soon appeared, and received a fire that killed some of them and drove back the rest in confusion. Not suspecting that they were but an advance-guard, about half the rangers dashed in pursuit, and were soon met by the whole body of the enemy. The woods rang with yells and musketry. In a few minutes some fifty of the pursuers were shot down, and the rest driven back in disorder upon their comrades. Rogers formed them all on the slope of the hill; and here they fought till sunset with stubborn desperation, twice repulsing the overwhelming numbers of the assailants, and thwarting all their efforts to gain the heights in the rear. The combatants were often not twenty yards apart, and sometimes they were mixed together. At length a large body of Indians succeeded in turning the right flank of the rangers. Lieutenant Phillips and a few men were sent by Rogers to oppose the movement; but they quickly found themselves surrounded, and after a brave defence surrendered on a pledge of good treatment. Rogers now advised the volunteers, Pringle and Roche, to escape while there was time, and offered them a sergeant as guide; 14 V2 but they gallantly resolved to stand by him. Eight officers and more than a hundred rangers lay dead and wounded in the snow. Evening was near and the forest was darkening fast, when the few survivors broke and fled. Rogers with about twenty followers escaped up the mountain; and gathering others about him, made a running fight against the Indian pursuers, reached Lake George, not without fresh losses, and after two days of misery regained Fort Edward with the remnant of his band. The enemy on their part suffered heavily, the chief loss falling on the Indians; who, to revenge themselves, murdered all the wounded and nearly all the prisoners, and tying Lieutenant Phillips and his men to trees, hacked them to pieces. Captain Pringle and Lieutenant Roche had become separated from the other fugitives; and, ignorant of woodcraft, they wandered by moonlight amid the desolation of rocks and snow, till early in the night they met a man whom they knew as a servant of Rogers, and who said that he could guide them to Fort Edward. One of them had lost his snow-shoes in the fight; and, crouching over a miserable fire of broken sticks, they worked till morning to make a kind of substitute with forked branches, twigs, and a few leather strings. They had no hatchet to cut firewood, no blankets, no overcoats, and no food except part of a Bologna sausage and a little ginger which Pringle had brought with him. There was no game; not even a squirrel was astir; and their 15 V2 chief sustenance was juniper-berries and the inner bark of trees. But their worst calamity was the helplessness of their guide. His brain wandered; and while always insisting that he knew the country well, he led them during four days hither and thither among a labyrinth of nameless mountains, clambering over rocks, wading through snowdrifts, struggling among fallen trees, till on the fifth day they saw with despair that they had circled back to their own starting-point. On the next morning, when they were on the ice of Lake George, not far from Rogers Rock, a blinding storm of sleet and snow drove in their faces. Spent as they were, it was death to stop; and bending their heads against the blast, they fought their way forward, now on the ice, and now in the adjacent forest, till in the afternoon the storm ceased, and they found themselves on the bank of an unknown stream. It was the outlet of the lake; for they had wandered into the valley of Ticonderoga, and were not three miles from the French fort. In crossing the torrent Pringle lost his gun, and was near losing his life. All three of the party were drenched to the skin; and, becoming now for the first time aware of where they were, they resolved on yielding themselves prisoners to save their lives. Night, however, again found them in the forest. Their guide became delirious, saw visions of Indians all around, and, murmuring incoherently, straggled off a little way, seated himself in the snow, and was soon dead. The two officers, themselves but half alive, 16 V2 walked all night round a tree to keep the blood in motion. In the morning, again toiling on, they presently saw the fort across the intervening snowfields, and approached it, waving a white handkerchief. Several French officers dashed towards them at full speed, and reached them in time to save them from the clutches of the Indians, whose camps were near at hand. They were kindly treated, recovered from the effects of their frightful ordeal, and were afterwards exchanged. Pringle lived to old age, and died in 1800, senior major-general of the British army. [543] [543] Rogers, two days after reaching Fort Edward, made a detailed report of the fight, which was printed in the New Hampshire Gazette and other provincial papers. It is substantially incorporated in his published Journals, which also contain a long letter from Pringle to Colonel Haviland, dated at Carillon (Ticonderoga), 28 March, and giving an excellent account of his and Roche's adventures. It was sent by a flag of truce, which soon after arrived from Fort Edward with a letter for Vaudreuil. The French accounts of the fight are Hebecourt à [Vaudreuil?], 15 Mars, 1758. Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, 10 Avril, 1758. Doreil à Belleisle, 30 Avril, 1758. Bougainville, Journal. Relation de l'Affaire de Roger, 19 Mars, 1758. Autre Relation, même date. Lévis, Journal. According to Lévis, the French force consisted of 250 Indians and Canadians, and a number of officers, cadets, and soldiers. Roger puts it at 700. Most of the French writers put the force of the rangers, correctly, at about 180. Rogers reports his loss at 125. None of the wounded seem to have escaped, being either murdered after the fight, or killed by exposure in the woods. The Indians brought in 144 scalps, having no doubt divided some of them, after their ingenious custom. Rogers threw off his overcoat during the fight, and it was found on the field, with his commission in the pocket; whence the report of his death. There is an unsupported tradition that he escaped by sliding on his snow-shoes down a precipice of Rogers Rock. CHAPTER XVII. 1753-1760. BIGOT. His Life and Character ? Canadian Society ? Official Festivities ? A Party of Pleasure ? Hospitalities of Bigot ? Desperate Gambling ? Chateau Bigot ? Canadian Ladies ? Cadet ? La Friponne ? Official Rascality ? Methods of Peculation ? Cruel Frauds on the Acadians ? Military Corruption ? Péan ? Love and Knavery ? Varin and his Partners ? Vaudreuil and the Peculators ? He defends Bigot; praises Cadet and Péan ? Canadian Finances ? Peril of Bigot ? Threats of the Minister ? Evidence of Montcalm ? Impending Ruin of the Confederates. At this stormy epoch of Canadian history the sinister figure of the Intendant Bigot moves conspicuous on the scene. Not that he was answerable for all the manifold corruption that infected the colony, for much of it was rife before his time, and had a vitality of its own; but his office and character made him the centre of it, and, more than any other man, he marshalled and organized the forces of knavery. In the dual government of Canada the Governor represented the King and commanded the troops; while the Intendant was charged with trade, finance, justice, and all other departments of civil administration. [544] In former times the two 18 V2 functionaries usually quarrelled; but between Vaudreuil and Bigot there was perfect harmony. [544] See Old Régime in Canada. Fran?ois Bigot, in the words of his biographer, was "born in the bosom of the magistracy," both his father and his grandfather having held honorable positions in the parliament of Bordeaux. [545] In appearance he was not prepossessing, though his ugly, pimpled face was joined with easy and agreeable manners. In spite of indifferent health, he was untiring both in pleasure and in work, a skilful man of business, of great official experience, energetic, good-natured, free-handed, ready to oblige his friends and aid them in their needs at the expense of the King, his master; fond of social enjoyments, lavish in hospitality. [545] Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres, Mémoire pour Messire Fran?ois Bigot, accusé, contre Monsieur le Procureur-Général du Roi, accusateur. A year or two before the war began, the engineer Franquet was sent from France to strengthen Louisbourg and inspect the defences of Canada. He kept a copious journal, full of curious observation, and affording bright glimpses not only of the social life of the Intendant, but of Canadian society in the upper or official class. Thus, among various matters of the kind, he gives us the following. Bigot, who was in Quebec, had occasion to go to Montreal to meet the Governor; and this official journey was turned into a pleasure excursion, of which the King paid all the costs. Those favored with invitations, a privilege highly prized, were Franquet, with seven or eight military officers and a corresponding number of ladies, including the 19 V2 wife of Major Péan, of whom Bigot was enamoured. A chief steward, cooks, servants, and other attendants, followed the party. The guests had been requested to send their portmanteaus to the Intendant's Palace six days before, that they might be sent forward on sledges along with bedding, table service, cooking utensils, and numberless articles of comfort and luxury. Orders were given to the inhabitants along the way, on pain of imprisonment, to level the snowdrifts and beat the road smooth with ox-teams, as also to provide relays of horses. It is true that they were well paid for this last service; so well that the hire of a horse to Montreal and back again would cost the King the entire value of the animal. On the eighth of February the party met at the palace; and after a grand dinner set out upon their journey in twenty or more sleighs, some with two guests and a driver, and the rest with servants and attendants. The procession passed at full trot along St. Vallier street amid the shouts of an admiring crowd, stopped towards night at Pointe-aux-Trembles, where each looked for lodging; and then they all met and supped with the Intendant. The militia captain of the place was ordered to have fresh horses ready at seven in the morning, when Bigot regaled his friends with tea, coffee, and chocolate, after which they set out again, drove to Cap-Santé, and stopped two hours at the house of the militia captain to breakfast and warm themselves. In the afternoon they reached Ste. Anne-de-la-Pérade, when Bigot gave them a supper at the house in 20 V2 which he lodged, and they spent the evening at cards. The next morning brought them to Three Rivers, where Madame Marin, Franquet's travelling companion, wanted to stop to see her sister, the wife of Rigaud, who was then governor of the place. Madame de Rigaud, being ill, received her visitors in bed, and ordered an ample dinner to be provided for them; after which they returned to her chamber for coffee and conversation. Then they all set out again, saluted by the cannon of the fort. Their next stopping-place was Isle-au-Castor, where, being seated at cards before supper, they were agreeably surprised by the appearance of the Governor, who had come down from Montreal to meet them with four officers, Duchesnaye, Marin, Le Mercier, and Péan. Many were the embraces and compliments; and in the morning they all journeyed on together, stopping towards night at the largest house they could find, where their servants took away the partitions to make room, and they sat down to a supper, followed by the inevitable game of cards. On the next night they reached Montreal and were lodged at the intendency, the official residence of the hospitable Bigot. The succeeding day was spent in visiting persons of eminence and consideration, among whom are to be noted the names, soon to become notorious, of Varin, naval commissary, Martel, King's storekeeper, Antoine Penisseault, and Fran?ois Maurin. A succession of festivities followed, including the 21 V2 benediction of three flags for a band of militia on their way to the Ohio. All persons of quality in Montreal were invited on this occasion, and the Governor gave them a dinner and a supper. Bigot, however, outdid him in the plenitude of his hospitality, since, in the week before Lent, forty guests supped every evening at his table, and dances, masquerades, and cards consumed the night. [546] [546] Franquet, Journal. His chief abode was at Quebec, in the capacious but somewhat ugly building known as the Intendant's Palace. Here it was his custom during the war to entertain twenty persons at dinner every day; and there was also a hall for dancing, with a gallery to which the citizens were admitted as spectators. [547] The bounteous Intendant provided a separate dancing-hall for the populace; and, though at the same time he plundered and ruined them, his gracious demeanor long kept him a place in their hearts. Gambling was the chief feature of his entertainments, and the stakes grew deeper as the war went on. He played desperately himself, and early in 1758 lost two hundred and four thousand francs,—a loss which he well knew how to repair. Besides his official residence on the banks of the St. Charles, he had a country house about five miles distant, a massive old stone building in the woods at the foot of the mountain of Charlebourg; its ruins are now known as Chateau Bigot. In its day it was called the Hermitage; 22 V2 though the uses to which it was applied savored nothing of asceticism. Tradition connects it and its owner with a romantic, but more than doubtful, story of love, jealousy, and murder. [547] De Gaspé, Mémoires, 119. The chief Canadian families were so social in their habits and so connected by intermarriage that, along with the French civil and military officers of the colonial establishment, they formed a society whose members all knew each other, like the corresponding class in Virginia. There was among them a social facility and ease rare in democratic communities; and in the ladies of Quebec and Montreal were often seen graces which visitors from France were astonished to find at the edge of a wilderness. Yet this small though lively society had anomalies which grew more obtrusive towards the close of the war. Knavery makes strange companions; and at the tables of high civil officials and colony officers of rank sat guests as boorish in manners as they were worthless in character. Foremost among these was Joseph Cadet, son of a butcher at Quebec, who at thirteen went to sea as a pilot's boy, then kept the cows of an inhabitant of Charlebourg, and at last took up his father's trade and prospered in it. [548] In 1756 Bigot got him appointed commissary-general, and made a contract with him which flung wide open the doors of peculation. In the next two years Cadet and his associates, Péan, Maurin, Corpron, and 23 V2 Penisseault, sold to the King, for about twenty-three million francs, provisions which cost them eleven millions, leaving a net profit of about twelve millions. It was not legally proved that the Intendant shared Cadet's gains; but there is no reasonable doubt that he did so. Bigot's chief profits rose, however, from other sources. It was his business to see that the King's storehouses for the supply of troops, militia, and Indians were kept well stocked. To this end he and Bréard, naval comptroller at Quebec, made a partnership with the commercial house of Gradis and Son at Bordeaux. He next told the Colonial Minister that there were stores enough already in Canada to last three years, and that it would be more to the advantage of the King to buy them in the colony than to take the risk of sending them from France. [549] Gradis and Son then shipped them to Canada in large quantities, while Bréard or his agent declared at the custom-house that they belonged to the King, and so escaped the payment of duties. They were then, as occasion rose, sold to the King at a huge profit, always under fictitious names. Often they were sold to some favored merchant or speculator, who sold them in turn to Bigot's confederate, the King's storekeeper; and sometimes they passed through several successive hands, till the price rose to double or triple the first cost, the Intendant and his partners sharing the gains with friends and allies. They would let nobody else sell to the King; and thus a grinding 24 V2 monopoly was established, to the great profit of those who held it. [550] [548] Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres, Mémoire pour Messire Fran?ois Bigot. Compare Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. [549] Bigot au Ministre, 8 Oct. 1749. [550] Procés de Bigot, Cadet, et autres. Mémoire sur les Fraudes commises dans la Colonie. Compare Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Under the name of a trader named Claverie, Bigot, some time before the war, set up a warehouse on land belonging to the King and not far from his own palace. Here the goods shipped from Bordeaux were collected, to be sold in retail to the citizens, and in wholesale to favored merchants and the King. This establishment was popularly known as La Friponne, or The Cheat. There was another Friponne at Montreal, which was leagued with that of Quebec, and received goods from it. Bigot and his accomplices invented many other profitable frauds. Thus he was charged with the disposal of the large quantity of furs belonging to his master, which it was his duty to sell at public auction, after due notice, to the highest bidder. Instead of this, he sold them privately at a low price to his own confederates. It was also his duty to provide transportation for troops, artillery, provisions, and stores, in which he made good profit by letting to the King, at high prices, boats or vessels which he had himself bought or hired for the purpose. [551] [551] Jugement rendu souverainement dans l'Affaire du Canada. Yet these and other illicit gains still left him but the second place as public plunderer. Cadet, the commissary-general, reaped an ampler harvest, and became the richest man in the colony. One of the 25 V2 operations of this scoundrel, accomplished with the help of Bigot, consisted in buying for six hundred thousand francs a quantity of stores belonging to the King, and then selling them back to him for one million four hundred thousand. [552] It was further shown on his trial that in 1759 he received 1,614,354 francs for stores furnished at the post of Miramichi, while the value of those actually furnished was but 889,544 francs; thus giving him a fraudulent profit of more than seven hundred and twenty-four thousand. [553] Cadet's chief resource was the falsification of accounts. The service of the King in Canada was fenced about by rigid formalities. When supplies were wanted at any of the military posts, the commandant made a requisition specifying their nature and quantity, while, before pay could be drawn for them, the King's storekeeper, the local commissary, and the inspector must set their names as vouchers to the list, and finally Bigot must sign it. [554] But precautions were useless where all were leagued to rob the King. It appeared on Cadet's trial that by gifts of wine, brandy, or money he had bribed the officers, both civil and military, at all the principal forts to attest the truth of accounts in which the supplies furnished by him were set at more than twice their true amount. Of the many frauds charged against him there was one peculiarly 26 V2 odious. Large numbers of refugee Acadians were to be supplied with rations to keep them alive. Instead of wholesome food, mouldered and unsalable salt cod was sent them, and paid for by the King at inordinate prices. [555] It was but one of many heartless outrages practised by Canadian officials on this unhappy people. [552] Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres, Requête du Procureur-Général, 19 Dec. 1761. [553] Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres, Mémoire pour Messire Fran?ois Bigot. [554] Mémoire sur le Canada (Archives Nationales). [555] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Cadet told the Intendant that the inhabitants were hoarding their grain, and got an order from him requiring them to sell it at a low fixed price, on pain of having it seized. Thus nearly the whole fell into his hands. Famine ensued; and he then sold it at a great profit, partly to the King, and partly to its first owners. Another of his devices was to sell provisions to the King which, being sent to the outlying forts, were falsely reported as consumed; on which he sold them to the King a second time. Not without reason does a writer of the time exclaim: "This is the land of abuses, ignorance, prejudice, and all that is monstrous in government. Peculation, monopoly, and plunder have become a bottomless abyss." [556] [556] Considérations sur l'état présent du Canada. The command of a fort brought such opportunities of making money that, according to Bougainville, the mere prospect of appointment to it for the usual term of three years was thought enough for a young man to marry upon. It was a favor in the gift of the Governor, who was accused of sharing the profits. These came partly 27 V2 from the fur-trade, and still more from frauds of various kinds. For example, a requisition was made for supplies as gifts to the Indians in order to keep them friendly or send them on the war-path; and their number was put many times above the truth in order to get more goods, which the commandant and his confederates then bartered for furs on their own account, instead of giving them as presents. "And," says a contemporary, addressing the Colonial Minister, "those who treat the savages so basely are officers of the King, depositaries of his authority, ministers of that Great Onontio whom they call their father." [557] At the post of Green Bay, the partisan officer Marin, and Rigaud, the Governor's brother, made in a short time a profit of three hundred and twelve thousand francs. [558] "Why is it," asks Bougainville, "that of all which the King sends to the Indians two thirds are stolen, and the rest sold to them instead of being given?" [559] [557] Considérations sur l'état présent du Canada. [558] Mémoire sur les Fraudes commises dans la Colonie. Bougainville, Mémoire sur l'état de la Nouvelle France. [559] Bougainville, Journal. The transportation of military stores gave another opportunity of plunder. The contractor would procure from the Governor or the local commandant an order requiring the inhabitants to serve him as boatmen, drivers, or porters, under a promise of exemption that year from duty as soldiers. This saved him his chief item of expense, and the profits of his contract rose in proportion. 28 V2 A contagion of knavery ran through the official life of the colony; and to resist it demanded no common share of moral robustness. The officers of the troops of the line were not much within its influence; but those of the militia and colony regulars, whether of French or Canadian birth, shared the corruption of the civil service. Seventeen of them, including six chevaliers of St. Louis and eight commandants of forts, were afterwards arraigned for fraud and malversation, though some of the number were acquitted. Bougainville gives the names of four other Canadian officers as honorable exceptions to the general demoralization,—Beno?t, Repentigny, Lainé, and Le Borgne; "not enough," he observes, "to save Sodom." Conspicuous among these military thieves was Major Péan, whose qualities as a soldier have been questioned, but who nevertheless had shown almost as much vigor in serving the King during the Ohio campaign of 1753 as he afterwards displayed effrontery in cheating him. "Le petit Péan" had married a young wife, Mademoiselle Desméloizes, Canadian like himself, well born, and famed for beauty, vivacity, and wit. Bigot, who was near sixty, became her accepted lover; and the fortune of Péan was made. His first success seems to have taken him by surprise. He had bought as a speculation a large quantity of grain, with money of the King lent him by the Intendant. Bigot, officially omnipotent, then issued an order raising the commodity to a price far above that paid by Péan, who thus made a profit of fifty 29 V2 thousand crowns. [560] A few years later his wealth was estimated at from two to four million francs. Madame Péan became a power in Canada, the dispenser of favors and offices; and all who sought opportunity to rob the King hastened to pay her their court. Péan, jilted by his own wife, made prosperous love to the wife of his partner, Penisseault; who, though the daughter of a Montreal tradesman, had the air of a woman of rank, and presided with dignity and grace at a hospitable board where were gathered the clerks of Cadet and other lesser lights of the administrative hierarchy. It was often honored by the presence of the Chevalier de Lévis, who, captivated by the charms of the hostess, condescended to a society which his friends condemned as unworthy of his station. He succeeded Péan in the graces of Madame Penisseault, and after the war took her with him to France; while the aggrieved husband found consolation in the wives of the small functionaries under his orders. [561] [560] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Mémoire sur les Fraudes, etc. Compare Pouchot, I. 8. [561] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Another prominent name on the roll of knavery was that of Varin, commissary of marine, and Bigot's deputy at Montreal, a Frenchman of low degree, small in stature, sharp witted, indefatigable, conceited, arrogant, headstrong, capricious, and dissolute. Worthless as he was, he found a place in the Court circle of the Governor, and aspired to supplant Bigot in the intendancy. To 30 V2 this end, as well as to save himself from justice, he had the fatuity to turn informer and lay bare the sins of his confederates, though forced at the same time to betray his own. Among his comrades and allies may be mentioned Deschenaux, son of a shoemaker at Quebec, and secretary to the Intendant; Martel, King's storekeeper at Montreal; the humpback Maurin, who is not to be confounded with the partisan officer Marin; and Corpron, a clerk whom several tradesmen had dismissed for rascality, but who was now in the confidence of Cadet, to whom he made himself useful, and in whose service he grew rich. Canada was the prey of official jackals,—true lion's providers, since they helped to prepare a way for the imperial beast, who, roused at last from his lethargy, was gathering his strength to seize her for his own. Honesty could not be expected from a body of men clothed with arbitrary and ill-defined powers, ruling with absolute sway an unfortunate people who had no voice in their own destinies, and answerable only to an apathetic master three thousand miles away. Nor did the Canadian Church, though supreme, check the corruptions that sprang up and flourished under its eye. The Governor himself was charged with sharing the plunder; and though he was acquitted on his trial, it is certain that Bigot had him well in hand, that he was intimate with the chief robbers, and that they found help in his weak compliances and wilful blindness. He put his stepson, Le Verrier, in command at 31 V2 Michillimackinac, where, by fraud and the connivance of his stepfather, the young man made a fortune. [562] When the Colonial Minister berated the Intendant for maladministration, Vaudreuil became his advocate, and wrote thus in his defence: "I cannot conceal from you, Monseigneur, how deeply M. Bigot feels the suspicions expressed in your letters to him. He does not deserve them, I am sure. He is full of zeal for the service of the King; but as he is rich, or passes as such, and as he has merit, the ill-disposed are jealous, and insinuate that he has prospered at the expense of His Majesty. I am certain that it is not true, and that nobody is a better citizen than he, or has the King's interest more at heart." [563] For Cadet, the butcher's son, the Governor asked a patent of nobility as a reward for his services. [564] When Péan went to France in 1758, Vaudreuil wrote to the Colonial Minister: "I have great confidence in him. He knows the colony and its needs. You can trust all he says. He will explain everything in the best manner. I shall be extremely sensible to any kindness you may show him, and hope that when you know him you will like him as much as I do." [565] [562] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. [563] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Oct. 1759. [564] Ibid., 7 Nov. 1759. [565] Ibid., 6 Ao?t, 1758. Administrative corruption was not the only bane of Canada. Her financial condition was desperate. The ordinary circulating medium consisted of what was known as card money, and amounted to only 32 V2 a million of francs. This being insufficient, Bigot, like his predecessor Hocquart, issued promissory notes on his own authority, and made them legal tender. They were for sums from one franc to a hundred, and were called ordonnances. Their issue was blamed at Versailles as an encroachment on the royal prerogative, though they were recognized by the Ministry in view of the necessity of the case. Every autumn those who held them to any considerable amount might bring them to the colonial treasurer, who gave in return bills of exchange on the royal treasury in France. At first these bills were promptly paid; then delays took place, and the notes depreciated; till in 1759 the Ministry, aghast at the amount, refused payment, and the utmost dismay and confusion followed. [566] [566] Réflexions sommaires sur le Commerce qui s'est fait en Canada. état présent du Canada. Compare Stevenson, Card Money of Canada, in Transactions of the Historical Society of Quebec, 1873-1875. The vast jarring, discordant mechanism of corruption grew incontrollable; it seized upon Bigot, and dragged him, despite himself, into perils which his prudence would have shunned. He was becoming a victim to the rapacity of his own confederates, whom he dared not offend by refusing his connivance and his signature of frauds which became more and more recklessly audacious. He asked leave to retire from office, in the hope that his successor would bear the brunt of the ministerial displeasure. Péan had withdrawn already, and with the fruits of his plunder bought land in 33 V2 France, where he thought himself safe. But though the Intendant had long been an object of distrust, and had often been warned to mend his ways, [567] yet such was his energy, his executive power, and his fertility of resource, that in the crisis of the war it was hard to dispense with him. Neither his abilities, however, nor his strong connections in France, nor an ally whom he had secured in the bureau of the Colonial Minister himself, could avail him much longer; and the letters from Versailles became appalling in rebuke and menace. [567] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1751-1758. "The ship 'Britannia,'" wrote the Minister, Berryer, "laden with goods such as are wanted in the colony, was captured by a privateer from St.-Malo, and brought into Quebec. You sold the whole cargo for eight hundred thousand francs. The purchasers made a profit of two millions. You bought back a part for the King at one million, or two hundred thousand more than the price for which you sold the whole. With conduct like this it is no wonder that the expenses of the colony become insupportable. The amount of your drafts on the treasury is frightful. The fortunes of your subordinates throw suspicion on your administration." And in another letter on the same day: "How could it happen that the small-pox among the Indians cost the King a million francs? What does this expense mean? Who is answerable for it? Is it the officers who command the posts, or is it the storekeepers? 34 V2 You give me no particulars. What has become of the immense quantity of provisions sent to Canada last year? I am forced to conclude that the King's stores are set down as consumed from the moment they arrive, and then sold to His Majesty at exorbitant prices. Thus the King buys stores in France, and then buys them again in Canada. I no longer wonder at the immense fortunes made in the colony." [568] Some months later the Minister writes: "You pay bills without examination, and then find an error in your accounts of three million six hundred thousand francs. In the letters from Canada I see nothing but incessant speculation in provisions and goods, which are sold to the King for ten times more than they cost in France. For the last time, I exhort you to give these things your serious attention, for they will not escape from mine." [569] [568] Le Ministre à Bigot, 19 Jan. 1759. [569] Ibid., 29 Ao?t, 1759. "I write, Monsieur, to answer your last two letters, in which you tell me that instead of sixteen millions, your drafts on the treasury for 1758 will reach twenty-four millions, and that this year they will rise to from thirty-one to thirty-three millions. It seems, then, that there are no bounds to the expenses of Canada. They double almost every year, while you seem to give yourself no concern except to get them paid. Do you suppose that I can advise the King to approve such an administration? or do you think that you can take the immense sum of thirty-three millions out 35 V2 of the royal treasury by merely assuring me that you have signed drafts for it? This, too, for expenses incurred irregularly, often needlessly, always wastefully; which make the fortune of everybody who has the least hand in them, and about which you know so little that after reporting them at sixteen millions, you find two months after that they will reach twenty-four. You are accused of having given the furnishing of provisions to one man, who, under the name of commissary-general, has set what prices he pleased; of buying for the King at second or third hand what you might have got from the producer at half the price; of having in this and other ways made the fortunes of persons connected with you; and of living in splendor in the midst of a public misery, which all the letters from the colony agree in ascribing to bad administration, and in charging M. de Vaudreuil with weakness in not preventing." [570] [570] Le Ministre à Bigot?, 29 Ao?t, 1759 (second letter of this date). These drastic utterances seem to have been partly due to a letter written by Montcalm in cipher to the Maréchal de Belleisle, then minister of war. It painted the deplorable condition of Canada, and exposed without reserve the peculations and robberies of those intrusted with its interests. "It seems," said the General, "as if they were all hastening to make their fortunes before the loss of the colony; which many of them perhaps desire as a veil to their conduct." He gives among other cases that of Le Mercier, chief of Canadian artillery, who had come to 36 V2 Canada as a private soldier twenty years before, and had so prospered on fraudulent contracts that he would soon be worth nearly a million. "I have often," continues Montcalm, "spoken of these expenditures to M. de Vaudreuil and M. Bigot; and each throws the blame on the other." [571] And yet at the same time Vaudreuil was assuring the Minister that Bigot was without blame. [571] Montcalm au Ministre de la Guerre, Lettre confidentielle, 12 Avril, 1759. Some two months before Montcalm wrote this letter, the Minister, Berryer, sent a despatch to the Governor and Intendant which filled them with ire and mortification. It ordered them to do nothing without consulting the general of the French regulars, not only in matters of war, but in all matters of administration touching the defence and preservation of the colony. A plainer proof of confidence on one hand and distrust on the other could not have been given. [572] [572] Le Ministre à Vaudreuil et Bigot, 20 Fév. 1759. One Querdisien-Tremais was sent from Bordeaux as an agent of Government to make investigation. He played the part of detective, wormed himself into the secrets of the confederates, and after six months of patient inquisition traced out four distinct combinations for public plunder. Explicit orders were now given to Bigot, who, seeing no other escape, broke with Cadet, and made him disgorge two millions of stolen money. The Commissary-General and his partners became so terrified that they afterwards gave up nearly seven 37 V2 millions more. [573] Stormy events followed, and the culprits found shelter for a time amid the tumults of war. Peculation did not cease, but a day of reckoning was at hand. [573] Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres, Mémoire pour Fran?ois Bigot, 3me partie. Note.—The printed documents of the trial of Bigot and the other peculators include the defence of Bigot, of which the first part occupies 303 quarto pages, and the second part 764. Among the other papers are the arguments for Péan, Varin, Saint-Blin, Boishébert, Martel, Joncaire-Chabert and several more, along with the elaborate Jugement rendu, the Requêtes du Procureur-Général, the Réponse aux Mémoires de M. Bigot et du Sieur Péan, etc., forming together five quarto volumes, all of which I have carefully examined. These are in the Library of Harvard University. There is another set, also of five volumes, in the Library of the Historical Society of Quebec, containing most of the papers just mentioned, and, bound with them, various others in manuscript, among which are documents in defence of Vaudreuil (printed in part), Estèbe, Corpron, Penisseault, Maurin, and Bréard. I have examined this collection also. The manuscript Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1751-1760, as well as the letters of Vaudreuil, Bougainville, Daine, Doreil, and Montcalm throw much light on the maladministration of the time; as do many contemporary documents, notably those entitled Mémoire sur les Fraudes commises dans la Colonie, état présent du Canada, and Mémoire sur le Canada (Archives Nationales). The remarkable anonymous work printed by the Historical Society of Quebec under the title Mémoires sur le Canada depuis 1749 jusqu'à 1760, is full of curious matter concerning Bigot and his associates which squares well with other evidence. This is the source from which Smith, in his History of Canada (Quebec, 1815), drew most of his information on the subject. A manuscript which seems to be the original draft of this valuable document was preserved at the Bastile, and, with other papers, was thrown into the street when that castle was destroyed. They were gathered up, and afterwards bought by a Russian named Dubrowski, who carried them to St. Petersburg. Lord Dufferin, when minister there, procured a copy of the manuscript in question, which is now in the keeping of Abbé H. Verreau at Montreal, to whose kindness I owe the opportunity of examining it. In substance it differs little from the printed work, though the language and the arrangement often vary from it. The author, whoever he may have been, was deeply versed in Canadian affairs of the time, and though often caustic, is generally trustworthy. CHAPTER XVIII. 1757, 1758. PITT. Frederic of Prussia ? The Coalition against him ? His desperate Position ? Rossbach ? Leuthen ? Reverses of England ? Weakness of the Ministry ? A Change ? Pitt and Newcastle ? Character of Pitt ? Sources of his Power ? His Aims ? Louis XV. ? Pompadour ? She controls the Court, and directs the War ? Gloomy Prospects of England ? Disasters ? The New Ministry ? Inspiring Influence of Pitt ? The Tide turns ? British Victories ? Pitt's Plans for America ? Louisbourg, Ticonderoga, Duquesne ? New Commanders ? Naval Battles. The war kindled in the American forest was now raging in full conflagration among the kingdoms of Europe; and in the midst stood Frederic of Prussia, a veritable fire-king. He had learned through secret agents that he was to be attacked, and that the wrath of Maria Theresa with her two allies, Pompadour and the Empress of Russia, was soon to wreak itself upon him. With his usual prompt audacity he anticipated his enemies, marched into Saxony, and began the Continental war. His position seemed desperate. England, sundered from Austria, her old ally, had made common cause with him; but he had no other friend worth the counting. France, Russia, Austria, Sweden, Saxony, the collective Germanic Empire, and most of the smaller German States had joined 39 V2 hands for his ruin, eager to crush him and divide the spoil, parcelling out his dominions among themselves in advance by solemn mutual compact. Against the five millions of Prussia were arrayed populations of more than a hundred million. The little kingdom was open on all sides to attack, and her enemies were spurred on by the bitterest animosity. It was thought that one campaign would end the war. The war lasted seven years, and Prussia came out of it triumphant. Such a warrior as her indomitable king Europe has rarely seen. If the Seven Years War made the maritime and colonial greatness of England, it also raised Prussia to the rank of a first-class Power. Frederic began with a victory, routing the Austrians in one of the fiercest of recorded conflicts, the battle of Prague. Then in his turn he was beaten at Kolin. All seemed lost. The hosts of the coalition were rolling in upon him like a deluge. Surrounded by enemies, in the jaws of destruction, hoping for little but to die in battle, this strange hero solaced himself with an exhaustless effusion of bad verses, sometimes mournful, sometimes cynical, sometimes indignant, and sometimes breathing a dauntless resolution; till, when his hour came, he threw down his pen to achieve those feats of arms which stamp him one of the foremost soldiers of the world. The French and Imperialists, in overwhelming force, thought to crush him at Rossbach. He put them to shameful rout; and then, instead of bonfires and Te Deums, mocked at them in doggerel 40 V2 rhymes of amazing indecency. While he was beating the French, the Austrians took Silesia from him. He marched to recover it, found them strongly posted at Leuthen, eighty thousand men against thirty thousand, and without hesitation resolved to attack them. Never was he more heroic than on the eve of this, his crowning triumph. "The hour is at hand," he said to his generals. "I mean, in spite of the rules of military art, to attack Prince Karl's army, which is nearly thrice our own. This risk I must run, or all is lost. We must beat him or die, all of us, before his batteries." He burst unawares upon the Austrian right, and rolled their whole host together, corps upon corps, in a tumult of irretrievable ruin. While her great ally was reaping a full harvest of laurels, England, dragged into the Continental war because that apple of discord, Hanover, belonged to her King, found little but humiliation. Minorca was wrested from her, and the Ministry had an innocent man shot to avert from themselves the popular indignation; while the same Ministry, scared by a phantom of invasion, brought over German troops to defend British soil. But now an event took place pregnant with glorious consequence. The reins of power fell into the hands of William Pitt. He had already held them for a brief space, forced into office at the end of 1756 by popular clamor, in spite of the Whig leaders and against the wishes of the King. But the place was untenable. Newcastle's Parliament would not support him; the Duke of Cumberland 41 V2 opposed him; the King hated him; and in April, 1757, he was dismissed. Then ensued eleven weeks of bickering and dispute, during which, in the midst of a great war, England was left without a government. It became clear that none was possible without Pitt; and none with him could be permanent and strong unless joined with those influences which had thus far controlled the majorities of Parliament. Therefore an extraordinary union was brought about; Lord Chesterfield acting as go-between to reconcile the ill-assorted pair. One of them brought to the alliance the confidence and support of the people; the other, Court management, borough interest, and parliamentary connections. Newcastle was made First Lord of the Treasury, and Pitt, the old enemy who had repeatedly browbeat and ridiculed him, became Secretary of State, with the lead of the House of Commons and full control of the war and foreign affairs. It was a partnership of magpie and eagle. The dirty work of government, intrigue, bribery, and all the patronage that did not affect the war, fell to the share of the old politician. If Pitt could appoint generals, admirals, and ambassadors, Newcastle was welcome to the rest. "I will borrow the Duke's majorities to carry on the government," said the new secretary; and with the audacious self-confidence that was one of his traits, he told the Duke of Devonshire, "I am sure that I can save this country, and that nobody else can." England hailed with one acclaim the undaunted leader who asked for no 42 V2 reward but the honor of serving her. The hour had found the man. For the next four years this imposing figure towers supreme in British history. He had glaring faults, some of them of a sort not to have been expected in him. Vanity, the common weakness of small minds, was the most disfiguring foible of this great one. He had not the simplicity which becomes greatness so well. He could give himself theatrical airs, strike attitudes, and dart stage lightnings from his eyes; yet he was formidable even in his affectations. Behind his great intellectual powers lay a burning enthusiasm, a force of passion and fierce intensity of will, that gave redoubled impetus to the fiery shafts of his eloquence; and the haughty and masterful nature of the man had its share in the ascendency which he long held over Parliament. He would blast the labored argument of an adversary by a look of scorn or a contemptuous wave of the hand. The Great Commoner was not a man of the people in the popular sense of that hackneyed phrase. Though himself poor, being a younger son, he came of a rich and influential family; he was patrician at heart; both his faults and his virtues, his proud incorruptibility and passionate, domineering patriotism, bore the patrician stamp. Yet he loved liberty and he loved the people, because they were the English people. The effusive humanitarianism of to-day had no part in him, and the democracy of to-day would detest him. Yet to the middle-class England of his own time, that unenfranchised England which 43 V2 had little representation in Parliament, he was a voice, an inspiration, and a tower of strength. He would not flatter the people; but, turning with contempt from the tricks and devices of official politics, he threw himself with a confidence that never wavered on their patriotism and public spirit. They answered him with a boundless trust, asked but to follow his lead, gave him without stint their money and their blood, loved him for his domestic virtues and his disinterestedness, believed him even in his self-contradiction, and idolized him even in his bursts of arrogant passion. It was he who waked England from her lethargy, shook off the spell that Newcastle and his fellow-enchanters had cast over her, and taught her to know herself again. A heart that beat in unison with all that was British found responsive throbs in every corner of the vast empire that through him was to become more vast. With the instinct of his fervid patriotism he would join all its far-extended members into one, not by vain assertions of parliamentary supremacy, but by bonds of sympathy and ties of a common freedom and a common cause. The passion for power and glory subdued in him all the sordid parts of humanity, and he made the power and glory of England one with his own. He could change front through resentment or through policy; but in whatever path he moved, his objects were the same: not to curb the power of France in America, but to annihilate it; crush her navy, cripple her foreign trade, ruin her in 44 V2 India, in Africa, and wherever else, east or west, she had found foothold; gain for England the mastery of the seas, open to her the great highways of the globe, make her supreme in commerce and colonization; and while limiting the activities of her rival to the European continent, give to her the whole world for a sphere. To this British Roman was opposed the pampered Sardanapalus of Versailles, with the silken favorite who by calculated adultery had bought the power to ruin France. The Marquise de Pompadour, who began life as Jeanne Poisson,—Jane Fish,—daughter of the head clerk of a banking house, who then became wife of a rich financier, and then, as mistress of the King, rose to a pinnacle of gilded ignominy, chose this time to turn out of office the two ministers who had shown most ability and force,—Argenson, head of the department of war, and Machault, head of the marine and colonies; the one because he was not subservient to her will, and the other because he had unwittingly touched the self-love of her royal paramour. She aspired to a share in the conduct of the war, and not only made and unmade ministers and generals, but discussed campaigns and battles with them, while they listened to her prating with a show of obsequious respect, since to lose her favor was to risk losing all. A few months later, when blows fell heavy and fast, she turned a deaf ear to representations of financial straits and military disasters, played the heroine, affected a greatness of soul superior to misfortune, 45 V2 and in her perfumed boudoir varied her tiresome graces by posing as a Roman matron. In fact she never wavered in her spite against Frederic, and her fortitude was perfect in bearing the sufferings of others and defying dangers that could not touch her. When Pitt took office it was not over France, but over England that the clouds hung dense and black. Her prospects were of the gloomiest. "Whoever is in or whoever is out," wrote Chesterfield, "I am sure we are undone both at home and abroad: at home by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill-luck and incapacity. We are no longer a nation." And his despondency was shared by many at the beginning of the most triumphant Administration in British history. The shuffling weakness of his predecessors had left Pitt a heritage of tribulation. From America came news of Loudon's manifold failures; from Germany that of the miscarriage of the Duke of Cumberland, who, at the head of an army of Germans in British pay, had been forced to sign the convention of Kloster-Zeven, by which he promised to disband them. To these disasters was added a third, of which the new Government alone had to bear the burden. At the end of summer Pitt sent a great expedition to attack Rochefort; the military and naval commanders disagreed, and the consequence was failure. There was no light except from far-off India, where Clive won the great victory of Plassey, avenged the Black Hole of Calcutta, and prepared the 46 V2 ruin of the French power and the undisputed ascendency of England. If the English had small cause as yet to rejoice in their own successes, they found comfort in those of their Prussian allies. The rout of the French at Rossbach and of the Austrians at Leuthen spread joy through their island. More than this, they felt that they had found at last a leader after their own heart; and the consciousness regenerated them. For the paltering imbecility of the old Ministry they had the unconquerable courage, the iron purpose, the unwavering faith, the inextinguishable hope, of the new one. "England has long been in labor," said Frederic of Prussia, "and at last she has brought forth a man." It was not only that instead of weak commanders Pitt gave her strong ones; the same men who had served her feebly under the blight of the Newcastle Administration served her manfully and well under his robust impulsion. "Nobody ever entered his closet," said Colonel Barré, "who did not come out of it a braver man." That inspiration was felt wherever the British flag waved. Zeal awakened with the assurance that conspicuous merit was sure of its reward, and that no officer who did his duty would now be made a sacrifice, like Admiral Byng, to appease public indignation at ministerial failures. As Nature, languishing in chill vapors and dull smothering fogs, revives at the touch of the sun, so did England spring into fresh life under the kindling influence of one great man. 47 V2 With the opening of the year 1758 her course of Continental victories began. The Duke of Cumberland, the King's son, was recalled in disgrace, and a general of another stamp, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, was placed in command of the Germans in British pay, with the contingent of English troops now added to them. The French, too, changed commanders. The Duke of Richelieu, a dissolute old beau, returned to Paris to spend in heartless gallantries the wealth he had gained by plunder; and a young soldier-churchman, the Comte de Clermont, took his place. Prince Ferdinand pushed him hard with an inferior force, drove him out of Hanover, and captured eleven thousand of his soldiers. Clermont was recalled, and was succeeded by Contades, another incapable. One of his subordinates won for him the battle of Lutterberg; but the generalship of Ferdinand made it a barren victory, and the campaign remained a success for the English. They made descents on the French coasts, captured St.-Servan, a suburb of St.-Malo, and burned three ships of the line, twenty-four privateers, and sixty merchantmen; then entered Cherbourg, destroyed the forts, carried off or spiked the cannon, and burned twenty-seven vessels,—a success partially offset by a failure on the coast of Brittany, where they were repulsed with some loss. In Africa they drove the French from the Guinea coast, and seized their establishment at Senegal. It was towards America that Pitt turned his heartiest efforts. His first aim was to take Louisbourg, 48 V2 as a step towards taking Quebec; then Ticonderoga, that thorn in the side of the northern colonies; and lastly Fort Duquesne, the Key of the Great West. He recalled Loudon, for whom he had a fierce contempt; but there were influences which he could not disregard, and Major-General Abercromby, who was next in order of rank, an indifferent soldier, though a veteran in years, was allowed to succeed him, and lead in person the attack on Ticonderoga. [574] Pitt hoped that Brigadier Lord Howe, an admirable officer, who was joined with Abercromby, would be the real commander, and make amends for all shortcomings of his chief. To command the Louisbourg expedition, Colonel Jeffrey Amherst was recalled from the German war, and made at one leap a major-general. [575] He was energetic and resolute, somewhat cautious and slow, but with a bulldog tenacity of grip. Under him were three brigadiers, Whitmore, Lawrence, and Wolfe, of whom the youngest is the most noteworthy. In the luckless Rochefort expedition, Colonel James Wolfe was conspicuous by a dashing gallantry that did not escape the eye of Pitt, always on the watch for men to do his work. The young officer was ardent, headlong, void of fear, often rash, almost fanatical in his devotion to military duty, and reckless of life when the glory of England or his own was at stake. The third 49 V2 expedition, that against Fort Duquesne, was given to Brigadier John Forbes, whose qualities well fitted him for the task. [574] Order, War Office, 19 Dec. 1757. [575] Pitt to Abercromby, 27 Jan. 1758. Instructions for our Trusty and Well-beloved Jeffrey Amherst, Esq., Major-General of our Forces in North America, 3 March, 1758. During his first short term of office, Pitt had given a new species of troops to the British army. These were the Scotch Highlanders, who had risen against the House of Hanover in 1745, and would rise against it again should France accomplish her favorite scheme of throwing a force into Scotland to excite another insurrection for the Stuarts. But they would be useful to fight the French abroad, though dangerous as their possible allies at home; and two regiments of them were now ordered to America. Delay had been the ruin of the last year's attempt against Louisbourg. This time preparation was urged on apace; and before the end of winter two fleets had put to sea: one, under Admiral Boscawen, was destined for Louisbourg; while the other, under Admiral Osborn, sailed for the Mediterranean to intercept the French fleet of Admiral La Clue, who was about to sail from Toulon for America. Osborn, cruising between the coasts of Spain and Africa, barred the way to the Straits of Gibraltar, and kept his enemy imprisoned. La Clue made no attempt to force a passage; but several combats of detached ships took place, one of which is too remarkable to pass unnoticed. Captain Gardiner of the "Monmouth," a ship of four hundred and seventy men and sixty-four guns, engaged the French ship "Foudroyant," carrying a thousand men and eighty-four guns of 50 V2 heavier metal than those of the Englishman. Gardiner had lately been reproved by Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, for some alleged misconduct or shortcoming, and he thought of nothing but retrieving his honor. "We must take her," he said to his crew as the "Foudroyant" hove in sight. "She looks more than a match for us, but I will not quit her while this ship can swim or I have a soul left alive;" and the sailors answered with cheers. The fight was long and furious. Gardiner was killed by a musket shot, begging his first lieutenant with his dying breath not to haul down his flag. The lieutenant nailed it to the mast. At length the "Foudroyant" ceased from thundering, struck her colors, and was carried a prize to England. [576] [576] Entick, III. 56-60. The typical British naval officer of that time was a rugged sea-dog, a tough and stubborn fighter, though no more so than the politer generations that followed, at home on the quarter-deck, but no ornament to the drawing-room, by reason of what his contemporary, Entick, the strenuous chronicler of the war, calls, not unapprovingly, "the ferocity of his manners." While Osborn held La Clue imprisoned at Toulon, Sir Edward Hawke, worthy leader of such men, sailed with seven ships of the line and three frigates to intercept a French squadron from Rochefort convoying a fleet of transports with troops for America. The French ships cut their cables and ran for the shore, where most of them stranded in 51 V2 the mud, and some threw cannon and munitions overboard to float themselves. The expedition was broken up. Of the many ships fitted out this year for the succor of Canada and Louisbourg, comparatively few reached their destination, and these for the most part singly or by twos and threes. Meanwhile Admiral Boscawen with his fleet bore away for Halifax, the place of rendezvous, and Amherst, in the ship "Dublin," followed in his wake. CHAPTER XIX. 1758. LOUISBOURG. Condition of the Fortress ? Arrival of the English ? Gallantry of Wolfe ? The English Camp ? The Siege begun ? Progress of the Besiegers ? Sallies of the French ? Madame Drucour ? Courtesies of War ? French Ships destroyed ? Conflagration ? Fury of the Bombardment ? Exploit of English Sailors ? The End near ? The White Flag ? Surrender ? Reception of the News in England and America ? Wolfe not satisfied ? His Letters to Amherst ? He destroys Gaspé ? Returns to England. The stormy coast of Cape Breton is indented by a small land-locked bay, between which and the ocean lies a tongue of land dotted with a few grazing sheep, and intersected by rows of stone that mark more or less distinctly the lines of what once were streets. Green mounds and embankments of earth enclose the whole space, and beneath the highest of them yawn arches and caverns of ancient masonry. This grassy solitude was once the "Dunkirk of America;" the vaulted caverns where the sheep find shelter from the rain were casemates where terrified women sought refuge from storms of shot and shell, and the shapeless green mounds were citadel, bastion, rampart, and glacis. Here stood Louisbourg; and not all the efforts of its conquerors, nor all the 53 V2 havoc of succeeding times, have availed to efface it. Men in hundreds toiled for months with lever, spade, and gunpowder in the work of destruction, and for more than a century it has served as a stone quarry; but the remains of its vast defences still tell their tale of human valor and human woe. Stand on the mounds that were once the King's Bastion. The glistening sea spreads eastward three thousand miles, and its waves meet their first rebuff against this iron coast. Lighthouse Point is white with foam; jets of spray spout from the rocks of Goat Island; mist curls in clouds from the seething surf that lashes the crags of Black Point, and the sea boils like a caldron among the reefs by the harbor's mouth; but on the calm water within, the small fishing vessels rest tranquil at their moorings. Beyond lies a hamlet of fishermen by the edge of the water, and a few scattered dwellings dot the rough hills, bristled with stunted firs, that gird the quiet basin; while close at hand, within the precinct of the vanished fortress, stand two small farmhouses. All else is a solitude of ocean, rock, marsh, and forest. [577] [577] Louisbourg is described as I saw it ten days before writing the above, after an easterly gale. At the beginning of June, 1758, the place wore another aspect. Since the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle vast sums had been spent in repairing and strengthening it; and Louisbourg was the strongest fortress in French or British America. Nevertheless it had its weaknesses. The original plan of 54 V2 the works had not been fully carried out; and owing, it is said, to the bad quality of the mortar, the masonry of the ramparts was in so poor a condition that it had been replaced in some parts with fascines. The circuit of the fortifications was more than a mile and a half, and the town contained about four thousand inhabitants. The best buildings in it were the convent, the hospital, the King's storehouses, and the chapel and governor's quarters, which were under the same roof. Of the private houses, only seven or eight were of stone, the rest being humble wooden structures, suited to a population of fishermen. The garrison consisted of the battalions of Artois, Bourgogne, Cambis, and Volontaires étrangers, with two companies of artillery and twenty-four of colony troops from Canada,—in all three thousand and eighty regular troops, besides officers; [578] and to these were added a body of armed inhabitants and a band of Indians. In the harbor were five ships of the line and seven frigates, carrying in all five hundred and forty-four guns and about three thousand men. [579] Two hundred and nineteen cannon and seventeen mortars were mounted on the walls and outworks. [579] Of these last the most 55 V2 important were the Grand Battery on the shore of the harbor opposite its mouth, and the Island Battery on the rocky islet at its entrance. [578] Journal du Siége de Louisbourg. Twenty-nine hundred regulars were able to bear arms when the siege began. Houllière, Commandant des Troupes, au Ministre, 6 Ao?t, 1758. [579] Le Prudent, 74 guns; Entreprenant, 74; Capricieux, 64; Célèbre, 64; Bienfaisant, 64; Apollon, 50; Chèvre, 22; Biche, 18; Fidèle, 22; écho, 26; Aréthuse, 36; Comète, 30. The Bizarre, 64, sailed for France on the eighth of June, and was followed by the Comète. [580] état d'Artillerie, appended to the Journal of Drucour. There were also forty-four cannon in reserve. The strongest front of the works was on the land side, along the base of the peninsular triangle on which the town stood. This front, about twelve hundred yards in extent, reached from the sea on the left to the harbor on the right, and consisted of four bastions with their connecting curtains, the Princess's, the Queen's, the King's, and the Dauphin's. The King's Bastion formed part of the citadel. The glacis before it sloped down to an extensive marsh, which, with an adjacent pond, completely protected this part of the line. On the right, however, towards the harbor, the ground was high enough to offer advantages to an enemy, as was also the case, to a less degree, on the left, towards the sea. The best defence of Louisbourg was the craggy shore, that, for leagues on either hand, was accessible only at a few points, and even there with difficulty. All these points were vigilantly watched. There had been signs of the enemy from the first opening of spring. In the intervals of fog, rain, and snow-squalls, sails were seen hovering on the distant sea; and during the latter part of May a squadron of nine ships cruised off the mouth of the harbor, appearing and disappearing, sometimes driven away by gales, sometimes lost in fogs, and sometimes approaching to within cannon-shot of the batteries. Their object was to blockade the port,—in which they failed; for 56 V2 French ships had come in at intervals, till, as we have seen, twelve of them lay safe anchored in the harbor, with more than a year's supply of provisions for the garrison. At length, on the first of June, the southeastern horizon was white with a cloud of canvas. The long-expected crisis was come. Drucour, the governor, sent two thousand regulars, with about a thousand militia and Indians, to guard the various landing-places; and the rest, aided by the sailors, remained to hold the town. [581] [581] Rapport de Grucour. Journal du Siége. At the end of May Admiral Boscawen was at Halifax with twenty-three ships of the line, eighteen frigates and fire-ships, and a fleet of transports, on board of which were eleven thousand and six hundred soldiers, all regulars, except five hundred provincial rangers. [582] Amherst had not yet arrived, and on the twenty-eighth, Boscawen, in pursuance of his orders and to prevent loss of time, put to sea without him; but scarcely had the fleet sailed out of Halifax, when they met the ship that bore the expected general. Amherst took command of the troops; and the expedition held its way till the second of June, when they saw the rocky shore-line of Cape Breton, and descried the masts of the French squadron in the harbor of Louisbourg. [582] Of this force, according to Mante, only 9,900 were fit for duty. The table printed by Knox (I. 127) shows a total of 11,112, besides officers, artillery, and rangers. The Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator, puts the force at 11,326 men, besides officers. Entick makes the whole 11,936. 57 V2 Boscawen sailed into Gabarus Bay. The sea was rough; but in the afternoon Amherst, Lawrence, and Wolfe, with a number of naval officers, reconnoitred the shore in boats, coasting it for miles, and approaching it as near as the French batteries would permit. The rocks were white with surf, and every accessible point was strongly guarded. Boscawen saw little chance of success. He sent for his captains, and consulted them separately. They thought, like him, that it would be rash to attempt a landing, and proposed a council of war. One of them alone, an old sea officer named Ferguson, advised his commander to take the responsibility himself, hold no council, and make the attempt at every risk. Boscawen took his advice, and declared that he would not leave Gabarus Bay till he had fulfilled his instructions and set the troops on shore. [583] [583] Entick, III. 224. West of Louisbourg there were three accessible places, Freshwater Cove, four miles from the town, and Flat Point, and White Point, which were nearer, the last being within a mile of the fortifications. East of the town there was an inlet called Lorambec, also available for landing. In order to distract the attention of the enemy, it was resolved to threaten all these places, and to form the troops into three divisions, two of which, under Lawrence and Whitmore, were to advance towards Flat Point and White Point, while a detached regiment was to make a feint at Lorambec. Wolfe, with the third division, was to make the 58 V2 real attack and try to force a landing at Freshwater Cove, which, as it proved, was the most strongly defended of all. When on shore Wolfe was an habitual invalid, and when at sea every heave of the ship made him wretched; but his ardor was unquenchable. Before leaving England he wrote to a friend: "Being of the profession of arms, I would seek all occasions to serve; and therefore have thrown myself in the way of the American war, though I know that the very passage threatens my life, and that my constitution must be utterly ruined and undone." On the next day, the third, the surf was so high that nothing could be attempted. On the fourth there was a thick fog and a gale. The frigate "Trent" struck on a rock, and some of the transports were near being stranded. On the fifth there was another fog and a raging surf. On the sixth there was fog, with rain in the morning and better weather towards noon, whereupon the signal was made and the troops entered the boats; but the sea rose again, and they were ordered back to the ships. On the seventh more fog and more surf till night, when the sea grew calmer, and orders were given for another attempt. At two in the morning of the eighth the troops were in the boats again. At daybreak the frigates of the squadron, anchoring before each point of real or pretended attack, opened a fierce cannonade on the French intrenchments; and, a quarter of an hour after, the three divisions rowed towards the shore. That of the left, under Wolfe, 59 V2 consisted of four companies of grenadiers, with the light infantry and New England rangers, followed and supported by Fraser's Highlanders and eight more companies of grenadiers. They pulled for Freshwater Cove. Here there was a crescent-shaped beach, a quarter of a mile long, with rocks at each end. On the shore above, about a thousand Frenchmen, under Lieutenant-Colonel de Saint-Julien, lay behind entrenchments covered in front by spruce and fir trees, felled and laid on the ground with the tops outward. [584] Eight cannon and swivels were planted to sweep every part of the beach and its approaches, and these pieces were masked by young evergreens stuck in the ground before them. [584] Drucour reports 985 soldiers as stationed here under Saint-Julien; there were also some Indians. Freshwater Cove, otherwise Kennington Cove, was called La Cormorandière by the French. The English were allowed to come within close range unmolested. Then the batteries opened, and a deadly storm of grape and musketry was poured upon the boats. It was clear in an instant that to advance farther would be destruction; and Wolfe waved his hand as a signal to sheer off. At some distance on the right, and little exposed to the fire, were three boats of light infantry under Lieutenants Hopkins and Brown and Ensign Grant; who, mistaking the signal or wilfully misinterpreting it, made directly for the shore before them. It was a few rods east of the beach; a craggy coast and a strand strewn with rocks and lashed with breakers, but sheltered from 60 V2 the cannon by a small projecting point. The three officers leaped ashore, followed by their men. Wolfe saw the movement, and hastened to support it. The boat of Major Scott, who commanded the light infantry and rangers, next came up, and was stove in an instant; but Scott gained the shore, climbed the crags, and found himself with ten men in front of some seventy French and Indians. Half his followers were killed and wounded, and three bullets were shot through his clothes; but with admirable gallantry he held his ground till others came to his aid. [585] The remaining boats now reached the landing. Many were stove among the rocks, and others were overset; some of the men were dragged back by the surf and drowned; some lost their muskets, and were drenched to the skin: but the greater part got safe ashore. Among the foremost was seen the tall, attenuated form of Brigadier Wolfe, armed with nothing but a cane, as he leaped into the surf and climbed the crags with his soldiers. As they reached the top they formed in compact order, and attacked and carried with the bayonet the nearest French battery, a few rods distant. The division of Lawrence soon came up; and as the attention of the enemy was now distracted, they made their landing with little opposition at the farther end of the beach, whither they were followed by Amherst himself. The French, attacked on right and left, and fearing, with good reason, that they would be cut off from the town, 61 V2 abandoned all their cannon and fled into the woods. About seventy of them were captured and fifty killed. The rest, circling among the hills and around the marshes, made their way to Louisbourg, and those at the intermediate posts joined their flight. The English followed through a matted growth of firs till they reached the cleared ground; when the cannon, opening on them from the ramparts, stopped the pursuit. The first move of the great game was played and won. [586] [585] Pichon, Mémoires du Cap-Breton, 284. [586] Journal of Amherst, in Mante, 117. Amherst to Pitt, 11 June, 1758. Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator, 11. General Orders of Amherst, 3-7 June, 1759. Letter from an Officer, in Knox, I. 191; Entick, III. 225. The French accounts generally agree in essentials with the English. The English lost one hundred and nine, killed, wounded, and drowned. Amherst made his camp just beyond range of the French cannon, and Flat Point Cove was chosen as the landing-place of guns and stores. Clearing the ground, making roads, and pitching tents filled the rest of the day. At night there was a glare of flames from the direction of the town. The French had abandoned the Grand Battery after setting fire to the buildings in it and to the houses and fish-stages along the shore of the harbor. During the following days stores were landed as fast as the surf would permit: but the task was so difficult that from first to last more than a hundred boats were stove in accomplishing it; and such was the violence of the waves that none of the siege-guns could be got ashore till the eighteenth. The camp extended two miles along a stream that flowed down 62 V2 to the Cove among the low, woody hills that curved around the town and harbor. Redoubts were made to protect its front, and blockhouses to guard its left and rear from the bands of Acadians known to be hovering in the woods. Wolfe, with twelve hundred men, made his way six or seven miles round the harbor, took possession of the battery at Lighthouse Point which the French had abandoned, planted guns and mortars, and opened fire on the Island Battery that guarded the entrance. Other guns were placed at different points along the shore, and soon opened on the French ships. The ships and batteries replied. The artillery fight raged night and day; till on the twenty-fifth the island guns were dismounted and silenced. Wolfe then strengthened his posts, secured his communications, and returned to the main army in front of the town. Amherst had reconnoitred the ground and chosen a hillock at the edge of the marsh, less than half a mile from the ramparts, as the point for opening his trenches. A road with an epaulement to protect it must first be made to the spot; and as the way was over a tract of deep mud covered with water-weeds and moss, the labor was prodigious. A thousand men worked at it day and night under the fire of the town and ships. When the French looked landward from their ramparts they could see scarcely a sign of the impending storm. Behind them Wolfe's cannon were playing busily from Lighthouse Point and the heights around the harbor; but, before them, the 63 V2 broad flat marsh and the low hills seemed almost a solitude. Two miles distant, they could descry some of the English tents; but the greater part were hidden by the inequalities of the ground. On the right, a prolongation of the harbor reached nearly half a mile beyond the town, ending in a small lagoon formed by a projecting sandbar, and known as the Barachois. Near this bar lay moored the little frigate "Aréthuse," under a gallant officer named Vauquelin. Her position was a perilous one; but so long as she could maintain it she could sweep with her fire the ground before the works, and seriously impede the operations of the enemy. The other naval captains were less venturous; and when the English landed, they wanted to leave the harbor and save their ships. Drucour insisted that they should stay to aid the defence, and they complied; but soon left their moorings and anchored as close as possible under the guns of the town, in order to escape the fire of Wolfe's batteries. Hence there was great murmuring among the military officers, who would have had them engage the hostile guns at short range. The frigate "écho," under cover of a fog, had been sent to Quebec for aid; but she was chased and captured; and, a day or two after, the French saw her pass the mouth of the harbor with an English flag at her mast-head. When Wolfe had silenced the Island Battery, a new and imminent danger threatened Louisbourg. Boscawen might enter the harbor, overpower the French naval force, and cannonade the town on 64 V2 its weakest side. Therefore Drucour resolved to sink four large ships at the entrance; and on a dark and foggy night this was successfully accomplished. Two more vessels were afterwards sunk, and the harbor was then thought safe. The English had at last finished their preparations, and were urging on the siege with determined vigor. The landward view was a solitude no longer. They could be seen in multitudes piling earth and fascines beyond the hillock at the edge of the marsh. On the twenty-fifth they occupied the hillock itself, and fortified themselves there under a shower of bombs. Then they threw up earth on the right, and pushed their approaches towards the Barachois, in spite of a hot fire from the frigate "Aréthuse." Next they appeared on the left towards the sea about a third of a mile from the Princess's Bastion. It was Wolfe, with a strong detachment, throwing up a redoubt and opening an entrenchment. Late on the night of the ninth of July six hundred French troops sallied to interrupt the work. The English grenadiers in the trenches fought stubbornly with bayonet and sword, but were forced back to the second line, where a desperate conflict in the dark took place; and after severe loss on both sides the French were driven back. Some days before, there had been another sortie on the opposite side, near the Barachois, resulting in a repulse of the French and the seizure by Wolfe of a more advanced position. Various courtesies were exchanged between the two commanders. Drucour, on occasion of a flag 65 V2 of truce, wrote to Amherst that there was a surgeon of uncommon skill in Louisbourg, whose services were at the command of any English officer who might need them. Amherst on his part sent to his enemy letters and messages from wounded Frenchmen in his hands, adding his compliments to Madame Drucour, with an expression of regret for the disquiet to which she was exposed, begging her at the same time to accept a gift of pineapples from the West Indies. She returned his courtesy by sending him a basket of wine; after which amenities the cannon roared again. Madame Drucour was a woman of heroic spirit. Every day she was on the ramparts, where her presence roused the soldiers to enthusiasm; and every day with her own hand she fired three cannon to encourage them. The English lines grew closer and closer, and their fire more and more destructive. Desgouttes, the naval commander, withdrew the "Aréthuse" from her exposed position, where her fire had greatly annoyed the besiegers. The shot-holes in her sides were plugged up, and in the dark night of the fourteenth of July she was towed through the obstructions in the mouth of the harbor, and sent to France to report the situation of Louisbourg. More fortunate than her predecessor, she escaped the English in a fog. Only five vessels now remained afloat in the harbor, and these were feebly manned, as the greater part of their officers and crews had come ashore, to the number of two thousand, lodging under tents in the town, 66 V2 amid the scarcely suppressed murmurs of the army officers. On the eighth of July news came that the partisan Boishébert was approaching with four hundred Acadians, Canadians, and Micmacs to attack the English outposts and detachments. He did little or nothing, however, besides capturing a few stragglers. On the sixteenth, early in the evening, a party of English, led by Wolfe, dashed forward, drove off a band of French volunteers, seized a rising ground called Hauteur-de-la-Potence, or Gallows Hill, and began to entrench themselves scarcely three hundred yards from the Dauphin's Bastion. The town opened on them furiously with grape-shot; but in the intervals of the firing the sound of their picks and spades could plainly be heard. In the morning they were seen throwing up earth like moles as they burrowed their way forward; and on the twenty-first they opened another parallel, within two hundred yards of the rampart. Still their sappers pushed on. Every day they had more guns in position, and on right and left their fire grew hotter. Their pickets made a lodgment along the foot of the glacis, and fired up the slope at the French in the covered way. The twenty-first was a memorable day. In the afternoon a bomb fell on the ship "Célèbre" and set her on fire. An explosion followed. The few men on board could not save her, and she drifted from her moorings. The wind blew the flames into the rigging of the "Entreprenant," and then into that 67 V2 of the "Capricieux." At night all three were in full blaze; for when the fire broke out the English batteries turned on them a tempest of shot and shell to prevent it from being extinguished. The glare of the triple conflagration lighted up the town, the trenches, the harbor, and the surrounding hills, while the burning ships shot off their guns at random as they slowly drifted westward, and grounded at last near the Barachois. In the morning they were consumed to the water's edge; and of all the squadron the "Prudent" and the "Bienfaisant" alone were left. In the citadel, of which the King's Bastion formed the front, there was a large oblong stone building containing the chapel, lodgings for men and officers, and at the southern end the quarters of the Governor. On the morning after the burning of the ships a shell fell through the roof among a party of soldiers in the chamber below, burst, and set the place on fire. In half an hour the chapel and all the northern part of the building were in flames; and no sooner did the smoke rise above the bastion than the English threw into it a steady shower of missiles. Yet soldiers, sailors, and inhabitants hastened to the spot, and labored desperately to check the fire. They saved the end occupied by Drucour and his wife, but all the rest was destroyed. Under the adjacent rampart were the casemates, one of which was crowded with wounded officers, and the rest with women and children seeking shelter in these subterranean dens. Before the entrances there 68 V2 was a long barrier of timber to protect them from exploding shells; and as the wind blew the flames towards it, there was danger that it would take fire and suffocate those within. They rushed out, crazed with fright, and ran hither and thither with outcries and shrieks amid the storm of iron. In the neighboring Queen's Bastion was a large range of barracks built of wood by the New England troops after their capture of the fortress in 1745. So flimsy and combustible was it that the French writers call it a "house of cards" and "a paper of matches." Here were lodged the greater part of the garrison: but such was the danger of fire, that they were now ordered to leave it; and they accordingly lay in the streets or along the foot of the ramparts, under shelters of timber which gave some little protection against bombs. The order was well timed; for on the night after the fire in the King's Bastion, a shell filled with combustibles set this building also in flames. A fearful scene ensued. All the English batteries opened upon it. The roar of mortars and cannon, the rushing and screaming of round-shot and grape, the hissing of fuses and the explosion of grenades and bombs mingled with a storm of musketry from the covered way and trenches; while, by the glare of the conflagration, the English regiments were seen drawn up in battle array, before the ramparts, as if preparing for an assault. Two days after, at one o'clock in the morning, a burst of loud cheers was heard in the distance, followed by confused cries and the noise of musketry, 69 V2 which lasted but a moment. Six hundred English sailors had silently rowed into the harbor and seized the two remaining ships, the "Prudent" and the "Bienfaisant." After the first hubbub all was silent for half an hour. Then a light glowed through the thick fog that covered the water. The "Prudent" was burning. Being aground with the low tide, her captors had set her on fire, allowing the men on board to escape to the town in her boats. The flames soon wrapped her from stem to stern; and as the broad glare pierced the illumined mists, the English sailors, reckless of shot and shell, towed her companion-ship, with all on board, to a safe anchorage under Wolfe's batteries. The position of the besieged was deplorable. Nearly a fourth of their number were in the hospitals; while the rest, exhausted with incessant toil, could find no place to snatch an hour of sleep; "and yet," says an officer, "they still show ardor." "To-day," he again says, on the twenty-fourth, "the fire of the place is so weak that it is more like funeral guns than a defence." On the front of the town only four cannon could fire at all. The rest were either dismounted or silenced by the musketry from the trenches. The masonry of the ramparts had been shaken by the concussion of their own guns; and now, in the Dauphin's and King's bastions, the English shot brought it down in masses. The trenches had been pushed so close on the rising grounds at the right that a great part of the covered way was enfiladed, while a battery on a hill across the 70 V2 harbor swept the whole front with a flank fire. Amherst had ordered the gunners to spare the houses of the town; but, according to French accounts, the order had little effect, for shot and shell fell everywhere. "There is not a house in the place," says the Diary just quoted, "that has not felt the effects of this formidable artillery. From yesterday morning till seven o'clock this evening we reckon that a thousand or twelve hundred bombs, great and small, have been thrown into the town, accompanied all the time by the fire of forty pieces of cannon, served with an activity not often seen. The hospital and the houses around it, which also serve as hospitals, are attacked with cannon and mortar. The surgeon trembles as he amputates a limb amid cries of Gare la bombe! and leaves his patient in the midst of the operation, lest he should share his fate. The sick and wounded, stretched on mattresses, utter cries of pain, which do not cease till a shot or the bursting of a shell ends them." [587] On the twenty-sixth the last cannon was silenced in front of the town, and the English batteries had made a breach which seemed practicable for assault. [587] Early in the siege Drucour wrote to Amherst asking that the hospitals should be exempt from fire. Amherst answered that shot and shell might fall on any part of so small a town, but promised to insure the sick and wounded from molestation if Drucour would send them either to the island at the mouth of the harbor, or to any of the ships, if anchored apart from the rest. The offer was declined, for reasons not stated. Drucour gives the correspondence in his Diary. On the day before, Drucour, with his chief officers and the engineer, Franquet, had made the 71 V2 tour of the covered way, and examined the state of the defences. All but Franquet were for offering to capitulate. Early on the next morning a council of war was held, at which were present Drucour, Franquet, Desgouttes, naval commander, Houllière, commander of the regulars, and the several chiefs of battalions. Franquet presented a memorial setting forth the state of the fortifications. As it was he who had reconstructed and repaired them, he was anxious to show the quality of his work in the best light possible; and therefore, in the view of his auditors, he understated the effects of the English fire. Hence an altercation arose, ending in a unanimous decision to ask for terms. Accordingly, at ten o'clock, a white flag was displayed over the breach in the Dauphin's Bastion, and an officer named Loppinot was sent out with offers to capitulate. The answer was prompt and stern: the garrison must surrender as prisoners of war; a definite reply must be given within an hour; in case of refusal the place will be attacked by land and sea. [588] [588] Mante and other English writers give the text of this reply. Great was the emotion in the council; and one of its members, D'Anthonay, lieutenant-colonel of the battalion of Volontaires étrangers, was sent to propose less rigorous terms. Amherst would not speak with him; and jointly with Boscawen despatched this note to the Governor:— Sir,—We have just received the reply which it has pleased your Excellency to make as to the conditions of the capitulation offered you. We shall not change in the least 72 V2 our views regarding them. It depends on your Excellency to accept them or not; and you will have the goodness to give your answer, yes or no, within half an hour. We have the honor to be, etc., E. Boscawen. J. Amherst. [589] Drucour answered as follows:— Gentlemen,—To reply to your Excellencies in as few words as possible, I have the honor to repeat that my position also remains the same, and that I persist in my first resolution. I have the honor to be, etc., The Chevalier de Drucour. [589] Translated from the Journal of Drucour. In other words, he refused the English terms, and declared his purpose to abide the assault. Loppinot was sent back to the English camp with this note of defiance. He was no sooner gone than Prévost, the intendant, an officer of functions purely civil, brought the Governor a memorial which, with or without the knowledge of the military authorities, he had drawn up in anticipation of the emergency. "The violent resolution which the council continues to hold," said this document, "obliges me, for the good of the state, the preservation of the King's subjects, and the averting of horrors shocking to humanity, to lay before your eyes the consequences that may ensue. What will become of the four thousand souls who compose the families of this town, of the thousand or twelve hundred sick in the hospitals, and the officers and crews of our unfortunate ships? They will be delivered over to carnage and the rage of 73 V2 an unbridled soldiery, eager for plunder, and impelled to deeds of horror by pretended resentment at what has formerly happened in Canada. Thus they will all be destroyed, and the memory of their fate will live forever in our colonies…. It remains, Monsieur," continues the paper, "to remind you that the councils you have held thus far have been composed of none but military officers. I am not surprised at their views. The glory of the King's arm and the honor of their several corps have inspired them. You and I alone are charged with the administration of the colony and the care of the King's subjects who compose it. These gentlemen, therefore, have had no regard for them. They think only of themselves and their soldiers, whose business it is to encounter the utmost extremity of peril. It is at the prayer of an intimidated people that I lay before you the considerations specified in this memorial." "In view of these considerations," writes Drucour, "joined to the impossibility of resisting an assault, M. le Chevalier de Courserac undertook in my behalf to run after the bearer of my answer to the English commander and bring it back." It is evident that the bearer of the note had been in no hurry to deliver it, for he had scarcely got beyond the fortifications when Courserac overtook and stopped him. D'Anthonay, with Duvivier, major of the battalion of Artois, and Loppinot, the first messenger, was then sent to the English camp, empowered to accept the terms imposed. An English spectator thus describes their arrival: "A lieutenant-colonel 74 V2 came running out of the garrison, making signs at a distance, and bawling out as loud as he could, 'We accept! We accept!' He was followed by two others; and they were all conducted to General Amherst's headquarters." [590] At eleven o'clock at night they returned with the articles of capitulation and the following letter:— Sir,—We have the honor to send your Excellency the articles of capitulation signed. Lieutenant-Colonel D'Anthonay has not failed to speak in behalf of the inhabitants of the town; and it is nowise our intention to distress them, but to give them all the aid in our power. Your Excellency will have the goodness to sign a duplicate of the articles and send it to us. It only remains to assure your Excellency that we shall with great pleasure seize every opportunity to convince your Excellency that we are with the most perfect consideration, Sir, your Excellency's most obedient servants, E. Boscawen. J. Amherst. [590] Authentic Account of the Siege of Louisbourg, by a Spectator. The articles stipulated that the garrison should be sent to England, prisoners of war, in British ships; that all artillery, arms, munitions, and stores, both in Louisbourg and elsewhere on the Island of Cape Breton, as well as on Isle St.-Jean, now Prince Edward's Island, should be given up intact; that the gate of the Dauphin's Bastion should be delivered to the British troops at eight o'clock in the morning; and that the garrison should lay down their arms at noon. The victors, 75 V2 on their part, promised to give the French sick and wounded the same care as their own, and to protect private property from pillage. Drucour signed the paper at midnight, and in the morning a body of grenadiers took possession of the Dauphin's Gate. The rude soldiery poured in, swarthy with wind and sun, and begrimed with smoke and dust; the garrison, drawn up on the esplanade, flung down their muskets and marched from the ground with tears of rage; the cross of St. George floated over the shattered rampart; and Louisbourg, with the two great islands that depended on it, passed to the British Crown. Guards were posted, a stern discipline was enforced, and perfect order maintained. The conquerors and the conquered exchanged greetings, and the English general was lavish of courtesies to the brave lady who had aided the defence so well. "Every favor she asked was granted," says a Frenchman present. Drucour and his garrison had made a gallant defence. It had been his aim to prolong the siege till it should be too late for Amherst to co-operate with Abercromby in an attack on Canada; and in this, at least, he succeeded. Five thousand six hundred and thirty-seven officers, soldiers, and sailors were prisoners in the hands of the victors. Eighteen mortars and two hundred and twenty-one cannon were found in the town, along with a great quantity of arms, munitions, and stores. [591] At the middle of August such 76 V2 of the prisoners as were not disabled by wounds or sickness were embarked for England, and the merchants and inhabitants were sent to France. Brigadier Whitmore, as governor of Louisbourg, remained with four regiments to hold guard over the desolation they had made. [591] Account of the Guns, Mortars, Shot, Shell, etc., found in the Town of Louisbourg upon its Surrender this day, signed Jeffrey Amherst, 27 July, 1758. The fall of the French stronghold was hailed in England with noisy rapture. Addresses of congratulation to the King poured in from all the cities of the kingdom, and the captured flags were hung in St. Paul's amid the roar of cannon and the shouts of the populace. The provinces shared these rejoicings. Sermons of thanksgiving resounded from countless New England pulpits. At Newport there were fireworks and illuminations; and, adds the pious reporter, "We have reason to believe that Christians will make wise and religious improvement of so signal a favor of Divine Providence." At Philadelphia a like display was seen, with music and universal ringing of bells. At Boston "a stately bonfire like a pyramid was kindled on the top of Fort Hill, which made a lofty and prodigious blaze;" though here certain jealous patriots protested against celebrating a victory won by British regulars, and not by New England men. At New York there was a grand official dinner at the Province Arms in Broadway, where every loyal toast was echoed by the cannon of Fort George; and illuminations and fireworks closed the day. [592] In the camp of Abercromby at Lake George, Chaplain Cleaveland, of Bagley's 77 V2 Massachusetts regiment, wrote: "The General put out orders that the breastwork should be lined with troops, and to fire three rounds for joy, and give thanks to God in a religious way." [593] But nowhere did the tidings find a warmer welcome than in the small detached forts scattered through the solitudes of Nova Scotia, where the military exiles, restless from inaction, listened with greedy ears for every word from the great world whence they were banished. So slow were their communications with it that the fall of Louisbourg was known in England before it had reached them all. Captain John Knox, then in garrison at Annapolis, tells how it was greeted there more than five weeks after the event. It was the sixth of September. A sloop from Boston was seen coming up the bay. Soldiers and officers ran down to the wharf to ask for news. "Every soul," says Knox, "was impatient, yet shy of asking; at length, the vessel being come near enough to be spoken to, I called out, 'What news from Louisbourg?' To which the master simply replied, and with some gravity, 'Nothing strange.' This answer, which was so coldly delivered, threw us all into great consternation, and we looked at each other without being able to speak; some of us even turned away with an intent to return to the fort. At length one of our soldiers, not yet satisfied, called out with some warmth: 'Damn you, Pumpkin, isn't Louisbourg taken yet?' The poor New England man then answered: 'Taken, yes, above a month 78 V2 ago, and I have been there since; but if you have never heard it before, I have got a good parcel of letters for you now.' If our apprehensions were great at first, words are insufficient to express our transports at this speech, the latter part of which we hardly waited for; but instantly all hats flew off, and we made the neighboring woods resound with our cheers and huzzas for almost half an hour. The master of the sloop was amazed beyond expression, and declared he thought we had heard of the success of our arms eastward before, and had sought to banter him." [594] At night there was a grand bonfire and universal festivity in the fort and village. [592] These particulars are from the provincial newspapers. [593] Cleaveland, Journal. [594] Knox, Historical Journal, I. 158. Amherst proceeded to complete his conquest by the subjection of all the adjacent possessions of France. Major Dalling was sent to occupy Port Espagnol, now Sydney. Colonel Monckton was despatched to the Bay of Fundy and the River St. John with an order "to destroy the vermin who are settled there." [595] Lord Rollo, with the thirty-fifth regiment and two battalions of the sixtieth, received the submission of Isle St.-Jean, and tried to remove the inhabitants,—with small success; for out of more than four thousand he could catch but seven hundred. [595] [595] Orders of Amherst to Wolfe, 15 Aug. 1758; Ibid. to Monckton, 24 Aug. 1758; Report of Monckton, 12 Nov. 1758. [596] Villejouin, commandant à l'Isle St.-Jean, au Ministre, 8 Sept. 1758. The ardent and indomitable Wolfe had been the life of the siege. Wherever there was need of a quick eye, a prompt decision, and a bold dash, 79 V2 there his lank figure was always in the front. Yet he was only half pleased with what had been done. The capture of Louisbourg, he thought, should be but the prelude of greater conquests; and he had hoped that the fleet and army would sail up the St. Lawrence and attack Quebec. Impetuous and impatient by nature, and irritable with disease, he chafed at the delay that followed the capitulation, and wrote to his father a few days after it: "We are gathering strawberries and other wild fruits of the country, with a seeming indifference about what is doing in other parts of the world. Our army, however, on the continent wants our help." Growing more anxious, he sent Amherst a note to ask his intentions; and the General replied, "What I most wish to do is to go to Quebec. I have proposed it to the Admiral, and yesterday he seemed to think it impracticable." On which Wolfe wrote again: "If the Admiral will not carry us to Quebec, reinforcements should certainly be sent to the continent without losing a moment. This damned French garrison take up our time and attention, which might be better bestowed. The transports are ready, and a small convoy would carry a brigade to Boston or New York. With the rest of the troops we might make an offensive and destructive war in the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I beg pardon for this freedom, but I cannot look coolly upon the bloody inroads of those hell-hounds, the Canadians; and if nothing further is to be done, I must desire leave to quit the army." 80 V2 Amherst answered that though he had meant at first to go to Quebec with the whole army, late events on the continent made it impossible; and that he now thought it best to go with five or six regiments to the aid of Abercromby. He asked Wolfe to continue to communicate his views to him, and would not hear for a moment of his leaving the army; adding, "I know nothing that can tend more to His Majesty's service than your assisting in it." Wolfe again wrote to his commander, with whom he was on terms of friendship: "An offensive, daring kind of war will awe the Indians and ruin the French. Blockhouses and a trembling defensive encourage the meanest scoundrels to attack us. If you will attempt to cut up New France by the roots, I will come with pleasure to assist." Amherst, with such speed as his deliberate nature would permit, sailed with six regiments for Boston to reinforce Abercromby at Lake George, while Wolfe set out on an errand but little to his liking. He had orders to proceed to Gaspé, Miramichi, and other settlements on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, destroy them, and disperse their inhabitants; a measure of needless and unpardonable rigor, which, while detesting it, he executed with characteristic thoroughness. "Sir Charles Hardy and I," he wrote to his father, "are preparing to rob the fishermen of their nets and burn their huts. When that great exploit is at an end, I return to Louisbourg, and thence to England." Having finished the work, he wrote to 81 V2 Amherst: "Your orders were carried into execution. We have done a great deal of mischief, and spread the terror of His Majesty's arms through the Gulf, but have added nothing to the reputation of them." The destruction of property was great; yet, as Knox writes, "he would not suffer the least barbarity to be committed upon the persons of the wretched inhabitants." [597] [597] "Les Anglais ont très-bien traités les prisonniers qu'ils ont faits dans cette partie" [Gaspé, etc]. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 4 Nov. 1758. He returned to Louisbourg, and sailed for England to recruit his shattered health for greater conflicts. Note.—Four long and minute French diaries of the siege of Louisbourg are before me. The first, that of Drucour, covers a hundred and six folio pages, and contains his correspondence with Amherst, Boscawen, and Desgouttes. The second is that of the naval captain Tourville, commander of the ship "Capricieux," and covers fifty pages. The third is by an officer of the garrison whose name does not appear. The fourth, of about a hundred pages, is by another officer of the garrison, and is also anonymous. It is an excellent record of what passed each day, and of the changing conditions, moral and physical, of the besieged. These four Journals, though clearly independent of each other, agree in nearly all essential particulars. I have also numerous letters from the principal officers, military, naval, and civil, engaged in the defence,—Drucour, Desgouttes, Houllière, Beaussier, Marolles, Tourville, Courserac, Franquet, Villejouin, Prévost, and Querdisien. These, with various other documents relating to the siege, were copied from the originals in the Archives de la Marine. Among printed authorities on the French side may be mentioned Pichon, Lettres et Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Cap-Breton, and the Campaign of Louisbourg, by the Chevalier Johnstone, a Scotch Jacobite serving under Drucour. The chief authorities on the English side are the official Journal of Amherst, printed in the London Magazine and in other contemporary periodicals, and also in Mante, History of the Late War; five letters from Amherst to Pitt, written during the siege (Public Record Office); an excellent private Journal called An Authentic Account of the Reduction of Louisbourg, by a Spectator, parts of which have been copied verbatim by Entick without acknowledgement; the admirable Journal of Captain John Knox, which contains numerous letters and orders relating to the 82 V2 siege; and the correspondence of Wolfe contained in his Life by Wright. Before me is the Diary of a captain or subaltern in the army of Amherst at Louisbourg, found in the garret of an old house at Windsor, Nova Scotia, on an estate belonging in 1760 to Chief Justice Deschamps. I owe the use of it to the kindness of George Wiggins, Esq., of Windsor, N. S. Mante gives an excellent plan of the siege operations, and another will be found in Jefferys, Natural and Civil History of French Dominions in North America. CHAPTER XX. 1758. TICONDEROGA. Activity of the Provinces ? Sacrifices of Massachusetts ? The Army at Lake George ? Proposed Incursion of Lévis ? Perplexities of Montcalm ? His Plan of Defence ? Camp of Abercromby ? His Character ? Lord Howe ? His Popularity ? Embarkation of Abercromby ? Advance down Lake George ? Landing ? Forest Skirmish ? Death of Howe ? Its Effects ? Position of the French ? The Lines of Ticonderoga ? Blunders of Abercromby ? The Assault ? A Frightful Scene ? Incidents of the Battle ? British Repulse ? Panic ? Retreat ? Triumph of Montcalm. In the last year London called on the colonists for four thousand men. This year Pitt asked them for twenty thousand, and promised that the King would supply arms, ammunition, tents, and provisions, leaving to the provinces only the raising, clothing, and pay of their soldiers; and he added the assurance that Parliament would be asked to make some compensation even for these. [598] Thus encouraged, cheered by the removal of Loudon, and animated by the unwonted vigor of British military preparation, the several provincial assemblies voted men in abundance, though the usual vexatious delays took place in raising, equipping, and sending them to the field. [598] Pitt to the Colonial Governors, 30 Dec. 1757. 84 V2 In this connection, an able English writer has brought against the colonies, and especially against Massachusetts, charges which deserve attention. Viscount Bury says: "Of all the colonies, Massachusetts was the first which discovered the designs of the French and remonstrated against their aggressions; of all the colonies she most zealously promoted measures of union for the common defence, and made the greatest exertions in furtherance of her views." But he adds that there is a reverse to the picture, and that "this colony, so high-spirited, so warlike, and apparently so loyal, would never move hand or foot in her own defence till certain of repayment by the mother country." [599] The groundlessness of this charge is shown by abundant proofs, one of which will be enough. The Englishman Pownall, who had succeeded Shirley as royal governor of the province, made this year a report of its condition to Pitt. Massachusetts, he says, "has been the frontier and advanced guard of all the colonies against the enemy in Canada," and has always taken the lead in military affairs. In the three past years she has spent on the expeditions of Johnson, Winslow, and Loudon £242,356, besides about £45,000 a year to support the provincial government, at the same time maintaining a number of forts and garrisons, keeping up scouting-parties, and building, equipping, and manning a ship of twenty guns for the service of the King. In the first two months of the present year, 1758, she made 85 V2 a further military outlay of £172,239. Of all these sums she has received from Parliament a reimbursement of only £70,117, and hence she is deep in debt; yet, in addition, she has this year raised, paid, maintained, and clothed seven thousand soldiers placed under the command of General Abercromby, besides above twenty-five hundred more serving the King by land or sea; amounting in all to about one in four of her able-bodied men. [599] Bury, Exodus of the Western Nations, II., 250, 251. Massachusetts was extremely poor by the standards of the present day, living by fishing, farming, and a trade sorely hampered by the British navigation laws. Her contributions of money and men were not ordained by an absolute king, but made by the voluntary act of a free people. Pownall goes on to say that her present war-debt, due within three years, is 366,698 pounds sterling, and that to meet it she has imposed on herself taxes amounting, in the town of Boston, to thirteen shillings and twopence to every pound of income from real and personal estate; that her people are in distress, that she is anxious to continue her efforts in the public cause, but that without some further reimbursement she is exhausted and helpless. [600] Yet in the next year she incurred a new and heavy debt. In 1760 Parliament repaid her £59,575. [601] Far from being fully reimbursed, the 86 V2 end of the war found her on the brink of bankruptcy. Connecticut made equal sacrifices in the common cause,—highly to her honor, for she was little exposed to danger, being covered by the neighboring provinces; while impoverished New Hampshire put one in three of her able-bodied men into the field. [602] [600] Pownall to Pitt, 30 Sept. 1758 (Public Record Office, America and West Indies, LXXI.). "The province of Massachusetts Bay has exerted itself with great zeal and at vast expense for the public service." Registers of Privy Council, 26 July, 1757. [601] Bollan, Agent of Massachusetts, to Speaker of Assembly, 20 March, 1760. It was her share of £200,000 granted to all the colonies in the proportion of their respective efforts. [602] Address to His Majesty from the Governor, Council, and Assembly of New Hampshire, Jan. 1759. In June the combined British and provincial force which Abercromby was to lead against Ticonderoga was gathered at the head of Lake George; while Montcalm lay at its outlet around the walls of the French stronghold, with an army not one fourth so numerous. Vaudreuil had devised a plan for saving Ticonderoga by a diversion into the valley of the Mohawk under Lévis, Rigaud, and Longueuil, with sixteen hundred men, who were to be joined by as many Indians. The English forts of that region were to be attacked, Schenectady threatened, and the Five Nations compelled to declare for France. [603] Thus, as the Governor gave out, the English would be forced to cease from aggression, leave Montcalm in peace, and think only of defending themselves. [604] "This," writes Bougainville on the fifteenth of June, "is what M. de Vaudreuil thinks will happen, because he never doubts anything. Ticonderoga, which is the point really threatened, is abandoned without support to the troops of the line and their general. 87 V2 It would even be wished that they might meet a reverse, if the consequences to the colony would not be too disastrous." [603] Lévis au Ministre, 17 Juin, 1758. Doreil au Ministre, 16 Juin, 1758. Montcalm à sa Femme, 18 Avril, 1758. [604] Correspondance de Vaudreuil, 1758. Livre d'Ordres, Juin, 1758. The proposed movement promised, no doubt, great advantages; but it was not destined to take effect. Some rangers taken on Lake George by a partisan officer named Langy declared with pardonable exaggeration that twenty-five or thirty thousand men would attack Ticonderoga in less than a fortnight. Vaudreuil saw himself forced to abandon his Mohawk expedition, and to order Lévis and his followers, who had not yet left Montreal, to reinforce Montcalm. [605] Why they did not go at once is not clear. The Governor declares that there were not boats enough. From whatever cause, there was a long delay, and Montcalm was left to defend himself as he could. [605] Bigot au Ministre, 21 Juillet, 1758. He hesitated whether he should not fall back to Crown Point. The engineer, Lotbinière, opposed the plan, as did also Le Mercier. [606] It was but a choice of difficulties, and he stayed at Ticonderoga. His troops were disposed as they had been in the summer before; one battalion, that of Berry, being left near the fort, while the main body, under Montcalm himself, was encamped by the saw-mill at the Falls, and the rest, under Bourlamaque, occupied the head of the portage, with a small advanced force at the landing-place 88 V2 on Lake George. It remained to determine at which of these points he should concentrate them and make his stand against the English. Ruin threatened him in any case; each position had its fatal weakness or its peculiar danger, and his best hope was in the ignorance or blundering of his enemy. He seems to have been several days in a state of indecision. [606] N.Y. Col. Docs., X. 893. Lotbinière's relative, Vaudreuil, confirms the statement. Montcalm had not, as has been said, begun already to fall back. In the afternoon of the fifth of July the partisan Langy, who had again gone out to reconnoitre towards the head of Lake George, came back in haste with the report that the English were embarked in great force. Montcalm sent a canoe down Lake Champlain to hasten Lévis to his aid, and ordered the battalion of Berry to begin a breastwork and abattis on the high ground in front of the fort. That they were not begun before shows that he was in doubt as to his plan of defence; and that his whole army was not now set to work at them shows that his doubt was still unsolved. It was nearly a month since Abercromby had begun his camp at the head of Lake George. Here, on the ground where Johnson had beaten Dieskau, where Montcalm had planted his batteries, and Monro vainly defended the wooden ramparts of Fort William Henry, were now assembled more than fifteen thousand men; and the shores, the foot of the mountains, and the broken plains between them were studded thick with tents. Of regulars there were six thousand three hundred and sixty-seven, officers and soldiers, 89 V2 and of provincials nine thousand and thirty-four. [607] To the New England levies, or at least to their chaplains, the expedition seemed a crusade against the abomination of Babylon; and they discoursed in their sermons of Moses sending forth Joshua against Amalek. Abercromby, raised to his place by political influence, was little but the nominal commander. "A heavy man," said Wolfe in a letter to his father; "an aged gentleman, infirm in body and mind," wrote William Parkman, a boy of seventeen, who carried a musket in a Massachusetts regiment, and kept in his knapsack a dingy little note-book, in which he jotted down what passed each day. [608] The age of the aged gentleman was fifty-two. [607] Abercromby to Pitt, 12 July, 1758. [608] Great-uncle of the writer, and son of the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, a graduate of Harvard, and minister of Westborough, Mass. Pitt meant that the actual command of the army should be in the hands of Brigadier Lord Howe, [609] and he was in fact its real chief; "the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time, and the best soldier in the British army," says Wolfe. [610] And he elsewhere speaks of him as "that great man." Abercromby testifies to the universal respect and love with which officers and men regarded him, and Pitt calls him "a character of ancient times; a complete model of military virtue." [611] High as this praise is, it seems to have been deserved. The young nobleman, who was 90 V2 then in his thirty-fourth year, had the qualities of a leader of men. The army felt him, from general to drummer-boy. He was its soul; and while breathing into it his own energy and ardor, and bracing it by stringent discipline, he broke through the traditions of the service and gave it new shapes to suit the time and place. During the past year he had studied the art of forest warfare, and joined Rogers and his rangers in their scouting-parties, sharing all their hardships and making himself one of them. Perhaps the reforms that he introduced were fruits of this rough self-imposed schooling. He made officers and men throw off all useless incumbrances, cut their hair close, wear leggings to protect them from briers, brown the barrels of their muskets, and carry in their knapsacks thirty pounds of meal, which they cooked for themselves; so that, according to an admiring Frenchman, they could live a month without their supply-trains. [612] "You would laugh to see the droll figure we all make," writes an officer. "Regulars as well as provincials have cut their coats so as scarcely to reach their waists. No officer or private is allowed to carry more than one blanket and a bearskin. A small portmanteau is allowed each officer. No women follow the camp to wash our linen. Lord Howe has already shown an example by going to the brook and washing his own." [613] [609] Chesterfield, Letters, IV. 260 (ed. Mahon). [610] Wolfe to his Father, 7 Aug. 1758, in Wright, 450. [611] Pitt to Grenville, 22 Aug. 1758, in Grenville Papers, I. 262. [612] Pouchot, Dernière Guerre de l'Amérique, I. 140. [613] Letter from Camp, 12 June, 1758, in Boston Evening Post. Another, in Boston News Letter, contains similar statements. Here, as in all things, he shared the lot of the soldier, and required his officers to share it. A 91 V2 story is told of him that before the army embarked he invited some of them to dinner in his tent, where they found no seats but logs, and no carpet but bearskins. A servant presently placed on the ground a large dish of pork and peas, on which his lordship took from his pocket a sheath containing a knife and fork and began to cut the meat. The guests looked on in some embarrassment; upon which he said: "Is it possible, gentlemen, that you have come on this campaign without providing yourselves with what is necessary?" And he gave each of them a sheath, with a knife and fork, like his own. Yet this Lycurgus of the camp, as a contemporary calls him, is described as a man of social accomplishments rare even in his rank. He made himself greatly beloved by the provincial officers, with many of whom he was on terms of intimacy, and he did what he could to break down the barriers between the colonial soldiers and the British regulars. When he was at Albany, sharing with other high officers the kindly hospitalities of Mrs. Schuyler, he so won the heart of that excellent matron that she loved him like a son; and, though not given to such effusion, embraced him with tears on the morning when he left her to lead his division to the lake. [614] In Westminster Abbey may be seen the tablet on which Massachusetts pays grateful tribute to his virtues, and commemorates "the affection her officers and soldiers bore to his command." [614] Mrs. Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady, 226 (ed. 1876). 92 V2 On the evening of the fourth of July, baggage, stores, and ammunition were all on board the boats, and the whole army embarked on the morning of the fifth. The arrangements were perfect. Each corps marched without confusion to its appointed station on the beach, and the sun was scarcely above the ridge of French Mountain when all were afloat. A spectator watching them from the shore says that when the fleet was three miles on its way, the surface of the lake at that distance was completely hidden from sight. [615] There were nine hundred bateaux, a hundred and thirty-five whaleboats, and a large number of heavy flatboats carrying the artillery. The whole advanced in three divisions, the regulars in the centre, and the provincials on the flanks. Each corps had its flags and its music. The day was fair and men and officers were in the highest spirits. [615] Letter from Lake George, in Boston News Letter. Before ten o'clock they began to enter the Narrows; and the boats of the three divisions extended themselves into long files as the mountains closed on either hand upon the contracted lake. From front to rear the line was six miles long. The spectacle was superb: the brightness of the summer day; the romantic beauty of the scenery; the sheen and sparkle of those crystal waters; the countless islets, tufted with pine, birch, and fir; the bordering mountains, with their green summits and sunny crags; the flash of oars and glitter of weapons; the banners, the varied uniforms, 93 V2 and the notes of bugle, trumpet, bagpipe, and drum, answered and prolonged by a hundred woodland echoes. "I never beheld so delightful a prospect," wrote a wounded officer at Albany a fortnight after. Rogers with the rangers, and Gage with the light infantry, led the way in whaleboats, followed by Bradstreet with his corps of boatmen, armed and drilled as soldiers. Then came the main body. The central column of regulars was commanded by Lord Howe, his own regiment, the fifty-fifth, in the van, followed by the Royal Americans, the twenty-seventh, forty-fourth, forty-sixth, and eightieth infantry, and the Highlanders of the forty-second, with their major, Duncan Campbell of Inverawe, silent and gloomy amid the general cheer, for his soul was dark with foreshadowings of death. [616] With this central column came what are described as two floating castles, which were no doubt batteries to cover the landing of the troops. On the right hand and the left were the provincials, uniformed in blue, regiment after regiment, from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. Behind them all came the bateaux, loaded with stores and baggage, and the heavy flatboats that carried the artillery, while a rear-guard of provincials and regulars closed the long procession. [617] [616] See Appendix G. [617] Letter from Lake George, in Boston News Letter. Even Rogers, the ranger, speaks of the beauty of the scene. At five in the afternoon they reached Sabbath-Day Point, twenty-five miles down the lake, where 94 V2 they stopped till late in the evening, waiting for the baggage and artillery, which had lagged behind; and here Lord Howe, lying on a bearskin by the side of the ranger, John Stark, questioned him as to the position of Ticonderoga and its best points of approach. At about eleven o'clock they set out again, and at daybreak entered what was then called the Second Narrows; that is to say, the contraction of the lake where it approaches its outlet. Close on their left, ruddy in the warm sunrise, rose the vast bare face of Rogers Rock, whence a French advanced party, under Langy and an officer named Trepezec, was watching their movements. Lord Howe, with Rogers and Bradstreet, went in whaleboats to reconnoitre the landing. At the place which the French called the Burnt Camp, where Montcalm had embarked the summer before, they saw a detachment of the enemy too weak to oppose them. Their men landed and drove them off. At noon the whole army was on shore. Rogers, with a party of rangers, was ordered forward to reconnoitre, and the troops were formed for the march. From this part of the shore [618] a plain covered with forest stretched northwestward half a mile or more to the mountains behind which lay the valley of Trout Brook. On this plain the army began its march in four columns, with the intention of passing round the western bank of the river of the outlet, since the bridge over it had been destroyed. Rogers, with the provincial regiments of Fitch 95 V2 and Lyman, led the way, at some distance before the rest. The forest was extremely dense and heavy, and so obstructed with undergrowth that it was impossible to see more than a few yards in any direction, while the ground was encumbered with fallen trees in every stage of decay. The ranks were broken, and the men struggled on as they could in dampness and shade, under a canopy of boughs that the sun could scarcely pierce. The difficulty increased when, after advancing about a mile, they came upon undulating and broken ground. They were now not far from the upper rapids of the outlet. The guides became bewildered in the maze of trunks and boughs; the marching columns were confused, and fell in one upon the other. They were in the strange situation of an army lost in the woods. [618] Between the old and new steamboat-landings, and parts adjacent. The advanced party of French under Langy and Trepezec, about three hundred and fifty in all, regulars and Canadians, had tried to retreat; but before they could do so, the whole English army had passed them, landed, and placed itself between them and their countrymen. They had no resource but to take to the woods. They seem to have climbed the steep gorge at the side of Rogers Rock and followed the Indian path that led to the valley of Trout Brook, thinking to descend it, and, by circling along the outskirts of the valley of Ticonderoga, reach Montcalm's camp at the saw-mill. Langy was used to bushranging; but he too became perplexed in the blind intricacies of the forest. Towards the close of the day he 96 V2 and his men had come out from the valley of Trout Brook, and were near the junction of that stream with the river of the outlet, in a state of some anxiety, for they could see nothing but brown trunks and green boughs. Could any of them have climbed one of the great pines that here and there reared their shaggy spires high above the surrounding forest, they would have discovered where they were, but would have gained not the faintest knowledge of the enemy. Out of the woods on the right they would have seen a smoke rising from the burning huts of the French camp at the head of the portage, which Bourlamaque had set on fire and abandoned. At a mile or more in front, the saw-mill at the Falls might perhaps have been descried, and, by glimpses between the trees, the tents of the neighboring camp where Montcalm still lay with his main force. All the rest seemed lonely as the grave; mountain and valley lay wrapped in primeval woods, and none could have dreamed that, not far distant, an army was groping its way, buried in foliage; no rumbling of wagons and artillery trains, for none were there; all silent but the cawing of some crow flapping his black wings over the sea of tree-tops. Lord Howe, with Major Israel Putnam and two hundred rangers, was at the head of the principal column, which was a little in advance of the three others. Suddenly the challenge, Qui vive! rang sharply from the thickets in front. Fran?ais! was the reply. Langy's men were not deceived; they fired out of the bushes. The shots were 97 V2 returned; a hot skirmish followed; and Lord Howe dropped dead, shot through the breast. All was confusion. The dull, vicious reports of musketry in thick woods, at first few and scattering, then in fierce and rapid volleys, reached the troops behind. They could hear, but see nothing. Already harassed and perplexed, they became perturbed. For all they knew, Montcalm's whole army was upon them. Nothing prevented a panic but the steadiness of the rangers, who maintained the fight alone till the rest came back to their senses. Rogers, with his reconnoitring party, and the regiments of Fitch and Lyman, were at no great distance in front. They all turned on hearing the musketry, and thus the French were caught between two fires. They fought with desperation. About fifty of them at length escaped; a hundred and forty-eight were captured, and the rest killed or drowned in trying to cross the rapids. The loss of the English was small in numbers, but immeasurable in the death of Howe. "The fall of this noble and brave officer," says Rogers, "seemed to produce an almost general languor and consternation through the whole army." "In Lord Howe," writes another contemporary, Major Thomas Mante, "the soul of General Abercromby's army seemed to expire. From the unhappy moment the General was deprived of his advice, neither order nor discipline was observed, and a strange kind of infatuation usurped the place of resolution." The death of one man was the ruin of fifteen thousand. 98 V2 The evil news was despatched to Albany, and in two or three days the messenger who bore it passed the house of Mrs. Schuyler on the meadows above the town. "In the afternoon," says her biographer, "a man was seen coming from the north galloping violently without his hat. Pedrom, as he was familiarly called, Colonel Schuyler's only surviving brother, was with her, and ran instantly to inquire, well knowing that he rode express. The man galloped on, crying out that Lord Howe was killed. The mind of our good aunt had been so engrossed by her anxiety and fears for the event impending, and so impressed with the merit and magnanimity of her favorite hero, that her wonted firmness sank under the stroke, and she broke out into bitter lamentations. This had such an effect on her friends and domestics that shrieks and sobs of anguish echoed through every part of the house." The effect of the loss was seen at once. The army was needlessly kept under arms all night in the forest, and in the morning was ordered back to the landing whence it came. [619] Towards noon, however, Bradstreet was sent with a detachment of regulars and provincials to take possession of the saw-mill at the Falls, which Montcalm had abandoned the evening before. Bradstreet rebuilt the bridges destroyed by the retiring enemy, and sent word to his commander that the way was open; on which Abercromby again put his army in motion, reached the Falls late in the afternoon, 99 V2 and occupied the deserted encampment of the French. [619] Abercromby to Pitt, 12 July, 1758. Montcalm with his main force had held this position at the Falls through most of the preceding day, doubtful, it seems, to the last whether he should not make his final stand there. Bourlamaque was for doing so; but two old officers, Bernès and Montguy, pointed out the danger that the English would occupy the neighboring heights; [620] whereupon Montcalm at length resolved to fall back. The camp was broken up at five o'clock. Some of the troops embarked in bateaux, while others marched a mile and a half along the forest road, passed the place where the battalion of Berry was still at work on the breastwork begun in the morning, and made their bivouac a little farther on, upon the cleared ground that surrounded the fort. [620] Pouchot, I. 145. The peninsula of Ticonderoga consists of a rocky plateau, with low grounds on each side, bordering Lake Champlain on the one hand, and the outlet of Lake George on the other. The fort stood near the end of the peninsula, which points towards the southeast. Thence, as one goes westward, the ground declines a little, and then slowly rises, till, about half a mile from the fort, it reaches its greatest elevation, and begins still more gradually to decline again. Thus a ridge is formed across the plateau between the steep declivities that sink to the low grounds on right and left. Some weeks before, a French officer named Hugues had suggested 100 V2 the defence of this ridge by means of an abattis. [621] Montcalm approved his plan; and now, at the eleventh hour, he resolved to make his stand here. The two engineers, Pontleroy and Desandrouin, had already traced the outline of the works, and the soldiers of the battalion of Berry had made some progress in constructing them. At dawn of the seventh, while Abercromby, fortunately for his enemy, was drawing his troops back to the landing-place, the whole French army fell to their task. The regimental colors were planted along the line, and the officers, stripped to the shirt, took axe in hand and labored with their men. The trees that covered the ground were hewn down by thousands, the tops lopped off, and the trunks piled one upon another to form a massive breastwork. The line followed the top of the ridge, along which it zig-zagged in such a manner that the whole front could be swept by flank-fires of musketry and grape. Abercromby describes the wall of logs as between eight and nine feet high; [622] in which case there must have been a rude banquette, or platform to fire from, on the inner side. It was certainly so high that nothing could be seen over it but the crowns of the soldiers' hats. The upper tier was formed of single logs, in which notches were cut to serve as loopholes; and in some places sods and bags of sand were piled along the top, with narrow spaces to fire through. [623] From the central part of 101 V2 the line the ground sloped away like a natural glacis; while at the sides, and especially on the left, it was undulating and broken. Over this whole space, to the distance of a musket-shot from the works, the forest was cut down, and the trees left lying where they fell among the stumps, with tops turned outwards, forming one vast abattis, which, as a Massachusetts officer says, looked like a forest laid flat by a hurricane. [624] But the most formidable obstruction was immediately along the front of the breastwork, where the ground was covered with heavy boughs, overlapping and interlaced, with sharpened points bristling into the face of the assailant like the quills of a porcupine. As these works were all of wood, no vestige of them remains. The earthworks now shown to tourists as the lines of Montcalm are of later construction; and though on the same ground, are not on the same plan. [625] [621] N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 708. [622] Abercromby to Barrington, 12 July, 1758. "At least eight feet high." Rogers, Journals, 116. [623] A Swiss officer of the Royal Americans, writing on the 14th, says that there were two, and in some parts three, rows of loopholes. See the letter in Pennsylvania Archives, III. 472. [624] Colonel Oliver Partridge to his Wife, 12 July, 1758. [625] A new line of works was begun four days after the battle, to replace the log breastwork. Malartic, Journal. Travaux faits à Carillon, 1758. Here, then, was a position which, if attacked in front with musketry alone, might be called impregnable. But would Abercromby so attack it? He had several alternatives. He might attempt the flank and rear of his enemy by way of the low grounds on the right and left of the plateau, a movement which the precautions of Montcalm had made difficult, but not impossible. Or, instead of leaving his artillery idle on the strand 102 V2 of Lake George, he might bring it to the front and batter the breastwork, which, though impervious to musketry, was worthless against heavy cannon. Or he might do what Burgoyne did with success a score of years later, and plant a battery on the heights of Rattlesnake Hill, now called Mount Defiance, which commanded the position of the French, and whence the inside of their breastwork could be scoured with round-shot from end to end. Or, while threatening the French front with a part of his army, he could march the rest a short distance through the woods on his left to the road which led from Ticonderoga to Crown Point, and which would soon have brought him to the place called Five-Mile Point, where Lake Champlain narrows to the width of an easy rifle-shot, and where a battery of field-pieces would have cut off all Montcalm's supplies and closed his only way of retreat. As the French were provisioned for but eight days, their position would thus have been desperate. They plainly saw the danger; and Doreil declares that had the movement been made, their whole army must have surrendered. [626] Montcalm had done what he could; but the danger of his position was inevitable and extreme. His hope lay in Abercromby; and it was a hope well founded. The action of the English general answered the utmost wishes of his enemy. [626] Doreil au Ministre, 28 Juillet, 1758. The Chevalier Johnstone thought that Montcalm was saved by Abercromby's ignorance of the ground. A Dialogue in Hades (Quebec Historical Society). 103 V2 Abercromby had been told by his prisoners that Montcalm had six thousand men, and that three thousand more were expected every hour. Therefore he was in haste to attack before these succors could arrive. As was the general, so was the army. "I believe," writes an officer, "we were one and all infatuated by a notion of carrying every obstacle by a mere coup de mousqueterie." [627] Leadership perished with Lord Howe, and nothing was left but blind, headlong valor. [627] See the letter in Knox, I. 148. Clerk, chief engineer, was sent to reconnoitre the French works from Mount Defiance; and came back with the report that, to judge from what he could see, they might be carried by assault. Then, without waiting to bring up his cannon, Abercromby prepared to storm the lines. The French finished their breastwork and abattis on the evening of the seventh, encamped behind them, slung their kettles, and rested after their heavy toil. Lévis had not yet appeared; but at twilight one of his officers, Captain Pouchot, arrived with three hundred regulars, and announced that his commander would come before morning with a hundred more. The reinforcement, though small, was welcome, and Lévis was a host in himself. Pouchot was told that the army was half a mile off. Thither he repaired, made his report to Montcalm, and looked with amazement at the prodigious amount of work accomplished in one day. [628] Lévis himself arrived in the course of the night, and approved the arrangement of the troops. They 104 V2 lay behind their lines till daybreak; then the drums beat, and they formed in order of battle. [629] The battalions of La Sarre and Languedoc were posted on the left, under Bourlamaque, the first battalion of Berry with that of Royal Roussillon in the centre, under Montcalm, and those of La Reine, Béarn, and Guienne on the right, under Lévis. A detachment of volunteers occupied the low grounds between the breastwork and the outlet of Lake George; while, at the foot of the declivity on the side towards Lake Champlain, were stationed four hundred and fifty colony regulars and Canadians, behind an abattis which they had made for themselves; and as they were covered by the cannon of the fort, there was some hope that they would check any flank movement which the English might attempt on that side. Their posts being thus assigned, the men fell to work again to strengthen their defences. Including those who came with Lévis, the total force of effective soldiers was now thirty-six hundred. [630] [628] Pouchot, I. 137. [629] Livre d'Ordres, Disposition de Défense des Retranchements, 8 Juillet, 1758. [630] Montcalm, Relation de la Victoire remportée à Carillon, 8 Juillet, 1758. Vaudreuil puts the number at 4,760, besides officers, which includes the garrison and laborers at the fort. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 28 Juillet, 1758. Soon after nine o'clock a distant and harmless fire of small-arms began on the slopes of Mount Defiance. It came from a party of Indians who had just arrived with Sir William Johnson, and who, after amusing themselves in this manner for a time, remained for the rest of the day safe spectators of the fight. The soldiers worked 105 V2 undisturbed till noon, when volleys of musketry were heard from the forest in front. It was the English light troops driving in the French pickets. A cannon was fired as a signal to drop tools and form for battle. The white uniforms lined the breastwork in a triple row, with the grenadiers behind them as a reserve, and the second battalion of Berry watching the flanks and rear. Meanwhile the English army had moved forward from its camp by the saw-mill. First came the rangers, the light infantry, and Bradstreet's armed boatmen, who, emerging into the open space, began a spattering fire. Some of the provincial troops followed, extending from left to right, and opening fire in turn; then the regulars, who had formed in columns of attack under cover of the forest, advanced their solid red masses into the sunlight, and passing through the intervals between the provincial regiments, pushed forward to the assault. Across the rough ground, with its maze of fallen trees whose leaves hung withering in the July sun, they could see the top of the breastwork, but not the men behind it; when, in an instant, all the line was obscured by a gush of smoke, a crash of exploding firearms tore the air, and grapeshot and musket-balls swept the whole space like a tempest; "a damnable fire," says an officer who heard them screaming about his ears. The English had been ordered to carry the works with the bayonet; but their ranks were broken by the obstructions through which they 106 V2 struggled in vain to force their way, and they soon began to fire in turn. The storm raged in full fury for an hour. The assailants pushed close to the breastwork; but there they were stopped by the bristling mass of sharpened branches, which they could not pass under the murderous cross-fires that swept them from front and flank. At length they fell back, exclaiming that the works were impregnable. Abercromby, who was at the saw-mill, a mile and a half in the rear, sent order to attack again, and again they came on as before. The scene was frightful: masses of infuriated men who could not go forward and would not go back; straining for an enemy they could not reach, and firing on an enemy they could not see; caught in the entanglement of fallen trees; tripped by briers, stumbling over logs, tearing through boughs; shouting, yelling, cursing, and pelted all the while with bullets that killed them by scores, stretched them on the ground, or hung them on jagged branches in strange attitudes of death. The provincials supported the regulars with spirit, and some of them forced their way to the foot of the wooden wall. The French fought with the intrepid gayety of their nation, and shouts of Vive le Roi! and Vive notre Général! mingled with the din of musketry. Montcalm, with his coat off, for the day was hot, directed the defence of the centre, and repaired to any part of the line where the danger for the time seemed greatest. He is warm in praise of 107 V2 his enemy, and declares that between one and seven o'clock they attacked him six successive times. Early in the action Abercromby tried to turn the French left by sending twenty bateaux, filled with troops, down the outlet of Lake George. They were met by the fire of the volunteers stationed to defend the low grounds on that side, and, still advancing, came within range of the cannon of the fort, which sank two of them and drove back the rest. A curious incident happened during one of the attacks. De Bassignac, a captain in the battalion of Royal Roussillon, tied his handkerchief to the end of a musket and waved it over the breastwork in defiance. The English mistook it for a sign of surrender, and came forward with all possible speed, holding their muskets crossed over their heads in both hands, and crying Quarter. The French made the same mistake; and thinking that their enemies were giving themselves up as prisoners, ceased firing, and mounted on the top of the breastwork to receive them. Captain Pouchot, astonished, as he says, to see them perched there, looked out to learn the cause, and saw that the enemy meant anything but surrender. Whereupon he shouted with all his might: "Tirez! Tirez! Ne voyez-vous pas que ces gens-là vont vous enlever?" The soldiers, still standing on the breastwork, instantly gave the English a volley, which killed some of them, and sent back the rest discomfited. [631] [631] Pouchot, I. 153. Both Niles and Entick mention the incident. 108 V2 This was set to the account of Gallic treachery. "Another deceit the enemy put upon us," says a military letter-writer: "they raised their hats above the breastwork, which our people fired at; they, having loopholes to fire through, and being covered by the sods, we did them little damage, except shooting their hats to pieces." [632] In one of the last assaults a soldier of the Rhode Island regiment, William Smith, managed to get through all obstructions and ensconce himself close under the breastwork, where in the confusion he remained for a time unnoticed, improving his advantages meanwhile by shooting several Frenchmen. Being at length observed, a soldier fired vertically down upon him and wounded him severely, but not enough to prevent his springing up, striking at one of his enemies over the top of the wall, and braining him with his hatchet. A British officer who saw the feat, and was struck by the reckless daring of the man, ordered two regulars to bring him off; which, covered by a brisk fire of musketry, they succeeded in doing. A letter from the camp two or three weeks later reports him as in a fair way to recover, being, says the writer, much braced and invigorated by his anger against the French, on whom he was swearing to have his revenge. [633] [632] Letter from Saratoga, 12 July, 1758, in New Hampshire Gazette. Compare Pennsylvania Archives, III. 474. [633] Letter from Lake George, 26 July, 1758, in Boston Gazette. The story is given, without much variation, in several other letters. Toward five o'clock two English columns joined in a most determined assault on the extreme 109 V2 right of the French, defended by the battalions of Guienne and Béarn. The danger for a time was imminent. Montcalm hastened to the spot with the reserves. The assailants hewed their way to the foot of the breastwork; and though again and again repulsed, they again and again renewed the attack. The Highlanders fought with stubborn and unconquerable fury. "Even those who were mortally wounded," writes one of their lieutenants, "cried to their companions not to lose a thought upon them, but to follow their officers and mind the honor of their country. Their ardor was such that it was difficult to bring them off." [634] Their major, Campbell of Inverawe, found his foreboding true. He received a mortal shot, and his clansmen bore him from the field. Twenty-five of their officers were killed or wounded, and half the men fell under the deadly fire that poured from the loopholes. Captain John Campbell and a few followers tore their way through the abattis, climbed the breastwork, leaped down among the French, and were bayoneted there. [635] [634] Letter of Lieutenant William Grant, in Maclachlan's Highlands, II. 340 (ed. 1875). [635] Ibid., II. 339. As the colony troops and Canadians on the low ground were left undisturbed, Lévis sent them an order to make a sortie and attack the left flank of the charging columns. They accordingly posted themselves among the trees along the declivity, and fired upwards at the enemy, who presently shifted their position to the right, out of the line of shot. The assault still continued, but 110 V2 in vain; and at six there was another effort, equally fruitless. From this time till half-past seven a lingering fight was kept up by the rangers and other provincials, firing from the edge of the woods and from behind the stumps, bushes, and fallen trees in front of the lines. Its only objects were to cover their comrades, who were collecting and bringing off the wounded, and to protect the retreat of the regulars, who fell back in disorder to the Falls. As twilight came on, the last combatant withdrew, and none were left but the dead. Abercromby had lost in killed, wounded, and missing, nineteen hundred and forty-four officers and men. [636] The loss of the French, not counting that of Langy's detachment, was three hundred and seventy-seven. Bourlamaque was dangerously wounded; Bougainville slightly; and the hat of Lévis was twice shot through. [637] [636] See Appendix G. [637] Lévis au Ministre, 13 Juillet, 1758 Montcalm, with a mighty load lifted from his soul, passed along the lines, and gave the tired soldiers the thanks they nobly deserved. Beer, wine, and food were served out to them, and they bivouacked for the night on the level ground between the breastwork and the fort. The enemy had met a terrible rebuff; yet the danger was not over. Abercromby still had more than thirteen thousand men, and he might renew the attack with cannon. But, on the morning of the ninth, a band of volunteers who had gone out to watch him brought back the report that he was in full 111 V2 retreat. The saw-mill at the Falls was on fire, and the last English soldier was gone. On the morning of the tenth, Lévis, with a strong detachment, followed the road to the landing-place, and found signs that a panic had overtaken the defeated troops. They had left behind several hundred barrels of provisions and a large quantity of baggage; while in a marshy place that they had crossed was found a considerable number of their shoes, which had stuck in the mud, and which they had not stopped to recover. They had embarked on the morning after the battle, and retreated to the head of the lake in a disorder and dejection wofully contrasted with the pomp of their advance. A gallant army was sacrificed by the blunders of its chief. Montcalm announced his victory to his wife in a strain of exaggeration that marks the exaltation of his mind. "Without Indians, almost without Canadians or colony troops,—I had only four hundred,—alone with Lévis and Bourlamaque and the troops of the line, thirty-one hundred fighting men, I have beaten an army of twenty-five thousand. They repassed the lake precipitately, with a loss of at least five thousand. This glorious day does infinite honor to the valor of our battalions. I have no time to write more. I am well, my dearest, and I embrace you." And he wrote to his friend Doreil: "The army, the too-small army of the King, has beaten the enemy. What a day for France! If I had had two hundred Indians to send out at the head of a thousand 112 V2 picked men under the Chevalier de Lévis, not many would have escaped. Ah, my dear Doreil, what soldiers are ours! I never saw the like. Why were they not at Louisbourg?" On the morrow of his victory he caused a great cross to be planted on the battle-field, inscribed with these lines, composed by the soldier-scholar himself,— "Quid dux? quid miles? quid strata ingentia ligna? En Signum! en victor! Deus h?c, Deus ipse triumphat." "Soldier and chief and rampart's strength are nought; Behold the conquering Cross! 'T is God the triumph wrought." [638] [638] Along with the above paraphrase I may give that of Montcalm himself, which was also inscribed on the cross:— "Chrétien! ce ne fut point Montcalm et la prudence, Ces arbres renversés, ces héros, leurs exploits, Qui des Anglais confus ont brisé l'espérance; C'est le bras de ton Dieu, vainqueur sur cette croix." In the same letter in which Montcalm sent these lines to his mother he says: "Je vous envoie, pour vous amuser, deux chansons sur le combat du 8 Juillet, dont l'une est en style des poissardes de Paris." One of these songs, which were written by soldiers after the battle, begins,— "Je chante des Fran?ois La valeur et la gloire, Qui toujours sur l'Anglois Remportent la victoire. Ce sont des héros, Tous nos généraux, Et Montcalm et Lévis, Et Bourlamaque aussi. "Mars, qui les engendra Pour l'honneur de la France, D'abord les anima De sa haute vaillance, Et les transporta Dans le Canada, Où l'on voit les Fran?ois Culbuter les Anglois." 113 V2 The other effusion of the military muse is in a different strain, "en style des poissardes de Paris." The following is a specimen, given literatim:— "L'aum?nier fit l'exhortation, Puis il donnit l'absolution; Aisément cela se peut croire. Enfants, dit-il, animez-vous! L'bon Dieu, sa mère, tout est pour vous. S—é! j'sommes catholiques. Les Anglois sont des hérétiques. "Ce sont des chiens; à coups d'pieds, a coups d'poings faut leur casser la gueule et la machoire." "Soldats, officiers, généraux, Chacun en ce jour fut héros. Aisément cela se peut croire. Montcalm, comme défunt Annibal, S'montroit soldat et général. S—é! sil y avoit quelqu'un qui ne l'aimit point!" "Je veux être un chien; à coups d'pieds, a coups d'poings, j'lui cass'rai la gueule et la machoire." This is an allusion to Vaudreuil. On the battle of Ticonderoga, see Appendix G. CHAPTER XXI. 1758. FORT FRONTENAC. The Routed Army ? Indignation at Abercromby ? John Cleaveland and his Brother Chaplains ? Regulars and Provincials ? Provincial Surgeons ? French Raids ? Rogers defeats Marin ? Adventures of Putnam ? Expedition of Bradstreet ? Capture of Fort Frontenac. The rashness of Abercromby before the fight was matched by his poltroonery after it. Such was his terror that on the evening of his defeat he sent an order to Colonel Cummings, commanding at Fort William Henry, to send all the sick and wounded and all the heavy artillery to New York without delay. [639] He himself followed so closely upon this disgraceful missive that Cummings had no time to obey it. [639] Cunningham, aide-de-camp of Abercromby, to Cummings, 8 July, 1758. The defeated and humbled troops proceeded to reoccupy the ground they had left a few days before in the flush of confidence and pride; and young Colonel Williams, of Massachusetts, lost no time in sending the miserable story to his uncle Israel. His letter, which is dated "Lake George (sorrowful situation), July ye 11th," ends thus: "I have told facts; you may put the epithets upon them. In one word, what with fatigue, want of 115 V2 sleep, exercise of mind, and leaving the place we went to capture, the best part of the army is unhinged. I have told enough to make you sick, if the relation acts on you as the facts have on me." In the routed army was the sturdy John Cleaveland, minister of Ipswich, and now chaplain of Bagley's Massachusetts regiment, who regarded the retreat with a disgust that was shared by many others. "This day," he writes in his Diary, at the head of Lake George, two days after the battle, "wherever I went I found people, officers and soldiers, astonished that we left the French ground, and commenting on the strange conduct in coming off." From this time forth the provincials called their commander Mrs. Nabbycromby. [640] He thought of nothing but fortifying himself. "Towards evening," continues the chaplain, "the General, with his Rehoboam counsellors, came over to line out a fort on the rocky hill where our breastwork was last year. Now we begin to think strongly that the grand expedition against Canada is laid aside, and a foundation made totally to impoverish our country." The whole army was soon intrenched. The chaplain of Bagley's, with his brother Ebenezer, chaplain of another regiment, one day walked round the camp and carefully inspected it. The tour proved satisfactory to the militant divines, and John Cleaveland reported to his wife: "We have built an extraordinary good 116 V2 breastwork, sufficient to defend ourselves against twenty thousand of the enemy, though at present we have not above a third part of that number fit for duty." Many of the troops had been sent to the Mohawk, and others to the Hudson. [640] Trumbull, Hist. Connecticut, II. 392. "Nabby" (Abigail) was then a common female name in New England. In the regiment of which Cleaveland was chaplain there was a young surgeon from Danvers, Dr. Caleb Rea, who also kept a copious diary, and, being of a serious turn, listened with edification to the prayers and exhortations to which the yeoman soldiery were daily summoned. In his zeal, he made an inquest among them for singers, and chose the most melodious to form a regimental choir, "the better to carry on the daily service of singing psalms;" insomuch that the New England camp was vocal with rustic harmony, sincere, if somewhat nasal. These seemly observances were not inconsistent with a certain amount of disorder among the more turbulent spirits, who, removed from the repressive influence of tight-laced village communities, sometimes indulged in conduct which grieved the conscientious surgeon. The rural New England of that time, with its narrowness, its prejudices, its oddities, its combative energy, and rugged, unconquerable strength, is among the things of the past, or lingers in remote corners where the whistle of the locomotive is never heard. It has spread itself in swarming millions over half a continent, changing with changing conditions; and even the part of it that clings to the ancestral hive has transformed and continues to transform itself. 117 V2 The provincials were happy in their chaplains, among whom there reigned a marvellous harmony, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists meeting twice a week to hold prayer-meetings together. "A rare instance indeed," says Dr. Rea, "and perhaps scarce ever was an army blessed with such a set of chaplains before." On one occasion, just before the fatal expedition, nine of them, after prayers and breakfast, went together to call upon the General. "He treated us very kindly," says the chaplain of Bagley's, "and told us that he hoped we would teach the people to do their duty and be courageous; and told us a story of a chaplain in Germany, where he was, who just before the action told the soldiers he had not time to say much, and therefore should only say: 'Be courageous; for no cowards go to heaven.' The General treated us to a bowl of punch and a bottle of wine, and then we took our leave of him." [641] [641] For the use of the Diary of Chaplain Cleaveland, as well as of his letters to his wife, I am indebted to the kindness of Miss Abby E. Cleaveland, his descendant. When Cleaveland and the more gifted among his brethren preached of a Sunday, officers and men of the regulars, no less than the provincials, came to listen; yet that pious Sabbatarian, Dr. Rea, saw much to afflict his conscience. "Sad, sad it is to see how the Sabbath is profaned in the camp," above all by "the horrid custom of swearing, more especially among the regulars; and I can't but charge our defeat on this sin." It would have been well had the harmony that prevailed among the chaplains found its counterpart 118 V2 among the men of the sword; but between the British regular officers and those of the provinces there was anything but an equal brotherhood. It is true that Pitt, in the spirit of conciliation which he always showed towards the colonies, had procured a change in the regulations concerning the relative rank of British and provincial officers, thus putting them in a position much nearer equality; but this, while appeasing the provincials, seems to have annoyed the others. Till the campaign was nearly over, not a single provincial colonel had been asked to join in a council of war; and, complains Cleaveland, "they know no more of what is to be done than a sergeant, till the orders come out." Of the British officers, the greater part had seen but little active service. Most of them were men of family, exceedingly prejudiced and insular, whose knowledge of the world was limited to certain classes of their own countrymen, and who looked down on all others, whether domestic or foreign. Towards the provincials their attitude was one of tranquil superiority, though its tranquillity was occasionally disturbed by what they regarded as absurd pretension on the part of the colony officers. One of them gave vent to his feelings in an article in the London Chronicle, in which he advanced the very reasonable proposition that "a farmer is not to be taken from the plough and made an officer in a day;" and he was answered wrathfully, at great length, in the Boston Evening Post, by a writer signing himself "A New England Man." The 119 V2 provincial officers, on the other hand, and especially those of New England, being no less narrow and prejudiced, filled with a sensitive pride and a jealous local patriotism, and bred up in a lofty appreciation of the merits and importance of their country, regarded British superciliousness with a resentment which their strong love for England could not overcome. This feeling was far from being confined to the officers. A provincial regiment stationed at Half-Moon, on the Hudson, thought itself affronted by Captain Cruikshank, a regular officer; and the men were so incensed that nearly half of them went off in a body. The deportment of British officers in the Seven Years War no doubt had some part in hastening on the Revolution. What with levelling Montcalm's siege works, planting palisades, and grubbing up stumps in their bungling and laborious way, the regulars found abundant occupation. Discipline was stiff and peremptory. The wooden horse and the whipping-post were conspicuous objects in the camp, and often in use. Caleb Rea, being tender-hearted, never went to see the lash laid on; for, as he quaintly observes, "the cries were satisfactory to me, without the sight of the strokes." He and the rest of the doctors found active exercise for such skill as they had, since fever and dysentery were making scarcely less havoc than the bullets at Ticonderoga. This came from the bad state of the camps and unwholesome food. The provincial surgeons seem to have been very little 120 V2 impressed with the importance of sanitary regulations, and to have thought it their business not to prevent disease, but only to cure it. The one grand essential in their eyes was a well-stocked medicine-chest, rich in exhaustless stores of rhubarb, ipecacuanha, and calomel. Even this sometimes failed. Colonel Williams reports "the sick destitute of everything proper for them; medicine-chest empty; nothing but their dirty blankets for beds; Dr. Ashley dead, Dr. Wright gone home, low enough; Bille worn off his legs,—such is our case. I have near a hundred sick. Lost a sergeant and a private last night." [642] Chaplain Cleaveland himself, though strong of frame, did not escape; but he found solace in his trouble from the congenial society of a brother chaplain, Mr. Emerson, of New Hampshire, "a right-down hearty Christian minister, of savory conversation," who came to see him in his tent, breakfasted with him, and joined him in prayer. Being somewhat better, he one day thought to recreate himself with the apostolic occupation of fishing. The sport was poor; the fish bit slowly; and as he lay in his boat, still languid with his malady, he had leisure to reflect on the contrasted works of Providence and man,—the bright lake basking amid its mountains, a dream of wilderness beauty, and the swarms of harsh humanity on the shore beside him, with their passions, discords, and miseries. But it was with the strong meat of Calvinistic theology, and not with reveries like these, 121 V2 that he was accustomed to nourish his military flock. [642] Colonel William Williams to Colonel Israel Williams, 4 Sept. 1758. While at one end of the lake the force of Abercromby was diminished by detachments and disease, that of Montcalm at the other was so increased by reinforcements that a forward movement on his part seemed possible. He contented himself, however, with strengthening the fort, reconstructing the lines that he had defended so well, and sending out frequent war-parties by way of Wood Creek and South Bay, to harass Abercromby's communications with Fort Edward. These parties, some of which consisted of several hundred men, were generally more or less successful; and one of them, under La Corne, surprised and destroyed a large wagon train escorted by forty soldiers. When Abercromby heard of it, he ordered Rogers, with a strong detachment of provincials, light infantry, and rangers, to go down the lake in boats, cross the mountains to the narrow waters of Lake Champlain, and cut off the enemy. But though Rogers set out at two in the morning, the French retreated so fast that he arrived too late. As he was on his way back, he was met by a messenger from the General with orders to intercept other French parties reported to be hovering about Fort Edward. On this he retraced his steps, marched through the forest to where Whitehall now stands, and thence made his way up Wood Creek to old Fort Anne, a relic of former wars, abandoned and falling to decay. Here, on the neglected "clearing" that surrounded the ruin, 122 V2 his followers encamped. They counted seven hundred in all, and consisted of about eighty rangers, a body of Connecticut men under Major Putnam, and a small regular force, chiefly light infantry, under Captain Dalzell, the brave officer who was afterwards killed by Pontiac's warriors at Detroit. Up to this time Rogers had observed his usual caution, commanding silence on the march, and forbidding fires at night; but, seeing no signs of an enemy, he forgot himself; and on the following morning, the eighth of August, he and Lieutenant Irwin, of the light infantry, amused themselves by firing at a mark on a wager. The shots reached the ears of four hundred and fifty French and Indians under the famous partisan Marin, who at once took steps to reconnoitre and ambuscade his rash enemy. For nearly a mile from the old fort the forest had formerly been cut down and burned; and Nature had now begun to reassert herself, covering the open tract with a dense growth of bushes and saplings almost impervious to anything but a wild-cat, had it not been traversed by a narrow Indian path. Along this path the men were forced to march in single file. At about seven o'clock, when the two marksmen had decided their bet, and before the heavy dew of the night was dried upon the bushes, the party slung their packs and set out. Putnam was in the front with his Connecticut men; Dalzell followed with the regulars; and Rogers, with his rangers, brought up the rear of the long and slender line. Putnam himself led the way, shouldering through the bushes, gun in 123 V2 hand; and just as the bluff yeoman emerged from them to enter the forest-growth beyond, the air was rent with yells, the thickets before him were filled with Indians, and one of them, a Caughnawaga chief, sprang upon him, hatchet in hand. He had time to cock his gun and snap it at the breast of his assailant; but it missed fire, and he was instantly seized and dragged back into the forest, as were also a lieutenant named Tracy and three private men. Then the firing began. The French and Indians, lying across the path in a semicircle, had the advantage of position and surprise. The Connecticut men fell back among the bushes in disorder; but soon rallied, and held the enemy in check while Dalzell and Rogers—the latter of whom was nearly a mile behind—were struggling through briers and thickets to their aid. So close was the brushwood that it was full half an hour before they could get their followers ranged in some kind of order in front of the enemy; and even then each man was forced to fight for himself as best he could. Humphreys, the biographer of Putnam, blames Rogers severely for not coming at once to the aid of the Connecticut men; but two of their captains declare that he came with all possible speed; while a regular officer present highly praised him to Abercromby for cool and officer-like conduct. [643] As a man his deserts were small; as a bushfighter he was beyond reproach. [643] Letter from the Camp at Lake George, 5 Sept. 1758, signed by Captains Maynard and Giddings, and printed in the Boston Weekly Advertiser. "Rogers deserves much to be commended." Abercromby to Pitt, 19 Aug. 1758. 124 V2 Another officer recounts from hearsay the remarkable conduct of an Indian, who sprang into the midst of the English and killed two of them with his hatchet; then mounted on a log and defied them all. One of the regulars tried to knock him down with the butt of his musket; but though the blow made him bleed, he did not fall, and would have killed his assailant if Rogers had not shot him dead. [644] The firing lasted about two hours. At length some of the Canadians gave way, and the rest of the French and Indians followed. [645] They broke into small parties to elude pursuit, and reuniting towards evening, made their bivouac on a spot surrounded by impervious swamps. [644] Thomas Barnsley to Bouquet, 7 Sept. 1758. [645] Doreil au Ministre, 31 Ao?t, 1757. Rogers remained on the field and buried all his own dead, forty-nine in number. Then he resumed his march to Fort Edward, carrying the wounded on litters of branches till the next day, when he met a detachment coming with wagons to his relief. A party sent out soon after for the purpose reported that they had found and buried more than a hundred French and Indians. From this time forward the war-parties from Ticonderoga greatly relented in their activity. The adventures of the captured Putnam were sufficiently remarkable. The Indians, after dragging him to the rear, lashed him fast to a tree so that he could not move a limb, and a young savage amused himself by throwing a hatchet at 125 V2 his head, striking it into the wood as close as possible to the mark without hitting it. A French petty officer then thrust the muzzle of his gun violently against the prisoner's body, pretended to fire it at him, and at last struck him in the face with the butt; after which dastardly proceeding he left him. The French and Indians being forced after a time to fall back, Putnam found himself between the combatants and exposed to bullets from both sides; but the enemy, partially recovering the ground they had lost, unbound him, and led him to a safe distance from the fight. When the retreat began, the Indians hurried him along with them, stripped of coat, waistcoat, shoes, and stockings, his back burdened with as many packs of the wounded as could be piled upon it, and his wrists bound so tightly together that the pain became intense. In his torment he begged them to kill him; on which a French officer who was near persuaded them to untie his hands and take off some of the packs, and the chief who had captured him gave him a pair of moccasons to protect his lacerated feet. When they encamped at night, they prepared to burn him alive, stripped him naked, tied him to a tree, and gathered dry wood to pile about him. A sudden shower of rain interrupted their pastime; but when it was over they began again, and surrounded him with a circle of brushwood which they set on fire. As they were yelling and dancing their delight at the contortions with which he tried to avoid the rising flames, Marin, 126 V2 hearing what was going forward, broke through the crowd, and with a courageous humanity not too common among Canadian officers, dashed aside the burning brush, untied the prisoner, and angrily upbraided his tormentors. He then restored him to the chief who had captured him, and whose right of property in his prize the others had failed to respect. The Caughnawaga treated him at first with kindness; but, with the help of his tribesmen, took effectual means to prevent his escape, by laying him on his back, stretching his arms and legs in the form of a St. Andrew's cross, and binding the wrists and ankles fast to the stems of young trees. This was a mode of securing prisoners in vogue among Indians from immemorial time; but, not satisfied with it, they placed brushwood upon his body, and then laid across it the long slender stems of saplings, on the ends of which several warriors lay down to sleep, so that the slightest movement on his part would rouse them. Thus he passed a night of misery, which did not prevent him from thinking of the ludicrous figure he made in the hands of the tawny Philistines. On the next night, after a painful march, he reached Ticonderoga, where he was questioned by Montcalm, and afterwards sent to Montreal in charge of a French officer, who showed him the utmost kindness. On arriving, wofully tattered, bruised, scorched, and torn, he found a friend in Colonel Schuyler, himself a prisoner on parole, who helped him in his need, and through whose 127 V2 good offices the future major-general of the Continental Army was included in the next exchange of prisoners. [646] [646] On Putnam's adventures, Humphreys, 57 (1818). He had the story from Putnam himself, and seems to give it with substantial correctness, though his account of the battle is at several points erroneous. The "Molang" of his account is Marin. On the battle, besides authorities already cited, Recollections of Thomson Maxwell, a soldier present (Essex Institute, VII. 97). Rogers, Journals, 117. Letter from camp in Boston Gazette, no. 117. Another in New Hampshire Gazette, no. 104. Gentleman's Magazine, 1758, p. 498. Malartic, Journal du Régiment de Béarn. Lévis, Journal de la Guerre en Canada. The French notices of the affair are few and brief. They admit a defeat, but exaggerate the force and the losses of the English, and underrate their own. Malartic, however, says that Marin set out with four hundred men, and was soon after joined by an additional number of Indians; which nearly answers to the best English accounts. The petty victory over Marin was followed by a more substantial success. Early in September Abercromby's melancholy camp was cheered with the tidings that the important French post of Fort Frontenac, which controlled Lake Ontario, which had baffled Shirley in his attempt against Niagara, and given Montcalm the means of conquering Oswego, had fallen into British hands. "This is a glorious piece of news, and may God have all the glory of the same!" writes Chaplain Cleaveland in his Diary. Lieutenant-Colonel Bradstreet had planned the stroke long before, and proposed it first to Loudon, and then to Abercromby. Loudon accepted it; but his successor received it coldly, though Lord Howe was warm in its favor. At length, under the pressure of a council of war, Abercromby consented that the attempt should be made, and gave Bradstreet three thousand men, nearly all provincials. With these he made his 128 V2 way, up the Mohawk and down the Onondaga, to the lonely and dismal spot where Oswego had once stood. By dint of much persuasion a few Oneidas joined him; though, like most of the Five Nations, they had been nearly lost to the English through the effects of the defeat at Ticonderoga. On the twenty-second of August his fleet of whaleboats and bateaux pushed out on Lake Ontario; and, three days after, landed near the French fort. On the night of the twenty-sixth Bradstreet made a lodgment within less than two hundred yards of it; and early in the morning De Noyan, the commandant, surrendered himself and his followers, numbering a hundred and ten soldiers and laborers, prisoners of war. With them were taken nine armed vessels, carrying from eight to eighteen guns, and forming the whole French naval force on Lake Ontario. The crews escaped. An enormous quantity of provisions, naval stores, munitions, and Indian goods intended for the supply of the western posts fell into the hands of the English, who kept what they could carry off, and burned the rest. In the fort were found sixty cannon and sixteen mortars, which the victors used to batter down the walls; and then, reserving a few of the best, knocked off the trunnions of the others. The Oneidas were bent on scalping some of the prisoners. Bradstreet forbade it. They begged that he would do as the French did,—turn his back and shut his eyes; but he forced them to abstain from all violence, and consoled them by a lion's share of the plunder. In accordance 129 V2 with the orders of Abercromby, the fort was dismantled, and all the buildings in or around it burned, as were also the vessels, except the two largest, which were reserved to carry off some of the captured goods. Then, with boats deeply laden, the detachment returned to Oswego; where, after unloading and burning the two vessels, they proceeded towards Albany, leaving a thousand of their number at the new fort which Brigadier Stanwix was building at the Great Carrying Place of the Mohawk. Next to Louisbourg, this was the heaviest blow that the French had yet received. Their command of Lake Ontario was gone. New France was cut in two; and unless the severed parts could speedily reunite, all the posts of the interior would be in imminent jeopardy. If Bradstreet had been followed by another body of men to reoccupy and rebuild Oswego, thus recovering a harbor on Lake Ontario, all the captured French vessels could have been brought thither, and the command of this inland sea assured at once. Even as it was, the advantages were immense. A host of savage warriors, thus far inclined to France or wavering between the two belligerents, stood henceforth neutral, or gave themselves to England; while Fort Duquesne, deprived of the supplies on which it depended, could make but faint resistance to its advancing enemy. Amherst, with five regiments from Louisbourg, came, early in October, to join Abercromby at Lake George, and the two commanders discussed 130 V2 the question of again attacking Ticonderoga. Both thought the season too late. A fortnight after, a deserter brought news that Montcalm was breaking up his camp. Abercromby followed his example. The opposing armies filed off each to its winter quarters, and only a few scouting parties kept alive the embers of war on the waters and mountains of Lake George. Meanwhile Brigadier Forbes was climbing the Alleghanies, hewing his way through the forests of western Pennsylvania, and toiling inch by inch towards his goal of Fort Duquesne. [647] [647] On the capture of Fort Frontenac, Bradstreet to Abercromby, 31 Aug. 1758. Impartial Account of Lieutenant-Colonel Bradstreet's Expedition, by a Volunteer in the Expedition (London, 1759). Letter from a New York officer to his colonel, in Boston Gazette, no. 182. Several letters from persons in the expedition, in Boston Evening Post, no. 1,203, New Hampshire Gazette, no. 104, and Boston News Letter, no. 2,932. Abercromby to Pitt, 25 Nov. 1758. Lieutenant Macauley to Horatio Gates, 30 Aug. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 30 Oct. 1758. Pouchot, I. 162. Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. CHAPTER XXII. 1758. FORT DUQUESNE. Dinwiddie and Washington ? Brigadier Forbes ? His Army ? Conflicting Views ? Difficulties ? Illness of Forbes ? His Sufferings ? His Fortitude ? His Difference with Washington ? Sir John Sinclair ? Troublesome Allies ? Scouting Parties ? Boasts of Vaudreuil ? Forbes and the Indians ? Mission of Christian Frederic Post ? Council of Peace ? Second Mission of Post ? Defeat of Grant ? Distress of Forbes ? Dark Prospects ? Advance of the Army ? Capture of the French Fort ? The Slain of Braddock's Field ? Death of Forbes. During the last year Loudon, filled with vain schemes against Louisbourg, had left the French scalping-parties to their work of havoc on the western borders. In Virginia Washington still toiled at his hopeless task of defending with a single regiment a forest frontier of more than three hundred miles; and in Pennsylvania the Assembly thought more of quarrelling with their governor than of protecting the tormented settlers. Fort Duquesne, the source of all the evil, was left undisturbed. In vain Washington urged the futility of defensive war, and the necessity of attacking the enemy in his stronghold. His position, trying at the best, was made more so by the behavior of Dinwiddie. That crusty Scotchman had conceived a dislike to 132 V2 him, and sometimes treated him in a manner that must have been unspeakably galling to the proud and passionate young man, who nevertheless, unconquerable in his sense of public duty, curbed himself to patience, or the semblance of it. Dinwiddie was now gone, and a new governor had taken his place. The conduct of the war, too, had changed, and in the plans of Pitt the capture of Fort Duquesne held an important place. Brigadier John Forbes was charged with it. He was a Scotch veteran, forty-eight years of age, who had begun life as a student of medicine, and who ended it as an able and faithful soldier. Though a well-bred man of the world, his tastes were simple; he detested ceremony, and dealt frankly and plainly with the colonists, who both respected and liked him. In April he was in Philadelphia waiting for his army, which as yet had no existence; for the provincials were not enlisted, and an expected battalion of Highlanders had not arrived. It was the end of June before they were all on the march; and meanwhile the General was attacked with a painful and dangerous malady, which would have totally disabled a less resolute man. His force consisted of provincials from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, with twelve hundred Highlanders of Montgomery's regiment and a detachment of Royal Americans, amounting in all, with wagoners and camp followers, to between six and seven thousand men. The Royal American regiment was a new corps raised, in the colonies, largely from among the Germans of 133 V2 Pennsylvania. Its officers were from Europe; and conspicuous among them was Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Bouquet, a brave and accomplished Swiss, who commanded one of the four battalions of which the regiment was composed. Early in July he was encamped with the advance-guard at the hamlet of Raystown, now the town of Bedford, among the eastern heights of the Alleghanies. Here his tents were pitched in an opening of the forest by the banks of a small stream; and Virginians in hunting-shirts, Highlanders in kilt and plaid, and Royal Americans in regulation scarlet, labored at throwing up intrenchments and palisades, while around stood the silent mountains in their mantles of green. Now rose the question whether the army should proceed in a direct course to Fort Duquesne, hewing a new road through the forest, or march thirty-four miles to Fort Cumberland, and thence follow the road made by Braddock. It was the interest of Pennsylvania that Forbes should choose the former route, and of Virginia that he should choose the latter. The Old Dominion did not wish to see a highway cut for her rival to those rich lands of the Ohio which she called her own. Washington, who was then at Fort Cumberland with a part of his regiment, was earnest for the old road; and in an interview with Bouquet midway between that place and Raystown, he spared no effort to bring him to the same opinion. But the quartermaster-general, Sir John Sinclair, who was supposed to know the country, had advised the Pennsylvania route; and both Bouquet and Forbes were resolved to take it. 134 V2 It was shorter, and when once made would furnish readier and more abundant supplies of food and forage; but to make it would consume a vast amount of time and labor. Washington foretold the ruin of the expedition unless it took Braddock's road. Ardent Virginian as he was, there is no cause to believe that his decision was based on any but military reasons; but Forbes thought otherwise, and found great fault with him. Bouquet did him more justice. "Colonel Washington," he writes to the General, "is filled with a sincere zeal to aid the expedition, and is ready to march with equal activity by whatever way you choose." The fate of Braddock had impressed itself on all the army, and inspired a caution that was but too much needed; since, except Washington's men and a few others among the provincials, the whole, from general to drummer-boy, were total strangers to that insidious warfare of the forest in which their enemies, red and white, had no rival. Instead of marching, like Braddock, at one stretch for Fort Duquesne, burdened with a long and cumbrous baggage-train, it was the plan of Forbes to push on by slow stages, establishing fortified magazines as he went, and at last, when within easy distance of the fort, to advance upon it with all his force, as little impeded as possible with wagons and pack-horses. He bore no likeness to his predecessor, except in determined resolution, and he did not hesitate to embrace military heresies which would have driven Braddock to fury. To Bouquet, in whom he placed a well-merited trust, he wrote, 135 V2 "I have been long in your opinion of equipping numbers of our men like the savages, and I fancy Colonel Burd, of Virginia, has most of his best people equipped in that manner. In this country we must learn the art of war from enemy Indians, or anybody else who has seen it carried on here." His provincials displeased him, not without reason; for the greater part were but the crudest material for an army, unruly, and recalcitrant to discipline. Some of them came to the rendezvous at Carlisle with old province muskets, the locks tied on with a string; others brought fowling-pieces of their own, and others carried nothing but walking-sticks; while many had never fired a gun in their lives. [648] Forbes reported to Pitt that their officers, except a few in the higher ranks, were "an extremely bad collection of broken inn-keepers, horse-jockeys, and Indian traders;" nor is he more flattering towards the men, though as to some of them he afterwards changed his mind. [649] [648] Correspondence of Forbes and Bouquet, July, August, 1758. [649] Forbes to Pitt, 6 Sept. 1758. While Bouquet was with the advance at Raystown, Forbes was still in Philadelphia, trying to bring the army into shape, and collecting provisions, horses, and wagons; much vexed meantime by the Assembly, whose tedious disputes about taxing the proprietaries greatly obstructed the service. "No sergeant or quartermaster of a regiment," he says, "is obliged to look into more details than I am; and if I did not see to everything myself, we should never get out of this town." July had 136 V2 begun before he could reach the frontier village of Carlisle, where he found everything in confusion. After restoring some order, he wrote to Bouquet: "I have been and still am but poorly, with a cursed flux, but shall move day after to-morrow." He was doomed to disappointment; and it was not till the ninth of August that he sent another letter from the same place to the same military friend. "I am now able to write after three weeks of a most violent and tormenting distemper, which, thank God, seems now much abated as to pain, but has left me as weak as a new-born infant. However, I hope to have strength enough to set out from this place on Friday next." The disease was an inflammation of the stomach and other vital organs; and when he should have been in bed, with complete repose of body and mind, he was racked continually with the toils and worries of a most arduous campaign. He left Carlisle on the eleventh, carried on a kind of litter made of a hurdle slung between two horses; and two days later he wrote from Shippensburg: "My journey here from Carlisle raised my disorder and pains to so intolerable a degree that I was obliged to stop, and may not get away for a day or two." Again, on the eighteenth: "I am better, and partly free from the excruciating pain I suffered; but still so weak that I can scarce bear motion." He lay helpless at Shippensburg till September was well advanced. On the second he says: "I really cannot describe how I have suffered both in body and mind of late, and the relapses 137 V2 have been worse as the disappointment was greater;" and on the fourth, still writing to Bouquet, who in the camp at Raystown was struggling with many tribulations: "I am sorry you have met with so many cross accidents to vex you, and have such a parcel of scoundrels as the provincials to work with; mais le vin est tiré, and you must drop a little of the gentleman and treat them as they deserve. Seal and send off the enclosed despatch to Sir John by some sure hand. He is a very odd man, and I am sorry it has been my fate to have any concern with him. I am afraid our army will not admit of division, lest one half meet with a check; therefore I would consult Colonel Washington, though perhaps not follow his advice, as his behavior about the roads was noways like a soldier. I thank my good cousin for his letter, and have only to say that I have all my life been subject to err; but I now reform, as I go to bed at eight at night, if able to sit up so late." Nobody can read the letters of Washington at this time without feeling that the imputations of Forbes were unjust, and that here, as elsewhere, his ruling motive was the public good. [650] Forbes himself, seeing the rugged and difficult nature of the country, began to doubt whether after all he had not better have chosen the old road of Braddock. He soon had an interview with its chief advocates, 138 V2 the two Virginia colonels, Washington and Burd, and reported the result to Bouquet, adding: "I told them that, whatever they thought, I had acted on the best information to be had, and could safely say for myself, and believed I might answer for you, that the good of the service was all we had at heart, not valuing provincial interests, jealousies, or suspicions one single twopence." It must be owned that, considering the slow and sure mode of advance which he had wisely adopted, the old soldier was probably right in his choice; since before the army could reach Fort Duquesne, the autumnal floods would have made the Youghiogany and the Monongahela impassable. [650] Besides the printed letters, there is an autograph collection of his correspondence with Bouquet in 1758 (forming vol. 21,641, Additional Manuscripts, British Museum). Copies of the whole are before me. The Sir John mentioned by Forbes was the quartermaster-general, Sir John Sinclair, who had gone forward with Virginians and other troops from the camp of Bouquet to make the road over the main range of the Alleghanies, whence he sent back the following memorandum of his requirements: "Pickaxes, crows, and shovels; likewise more whiskey. Send me the newspapers, and tell my black to send me a candlestick and half a loaf of sugar." He was extremely inefficient; and Forbes, out of all patience with him, wrote confidentially to Bouquet that his only talent was for throwing everything into confusion. Yet he found fault with everybody else, and would discharge volleys of oaths at all who met his disapproval. From this cause or some other, Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen, of the Virginians, told him that he would break his sword rather than be longer under his 139 V2 orders. "As I had not sufficient strength," says Sinclair, "to take him by the neck from among his own men, I was obliged to let him have his own way, that I might not be the occasion of bloodshed." He succeeded at last in arresting him, and Major Lewis, of the same regiment, took his place. The aid of Indians as scouts and skirmishers was of the last importance to an army so weak in the arts of woodcraft, and efforts were made to engage the services of the friendly Cherokees and Catawbas, many of whom came to the camp, where their caprice, insolence, and rapacity tried to the utmost the patience of the commanders. That of Sir John Sinclair had already been overcome by his dealings with the provincial authorities; and he wrote in good French, at the tail of a letter to the Swiss colonel: "Adieu, my dear Bouquet. The greatest curse that our Lord can pronounce against the worst of sinners is to give them business to do with provincial commissioners and friendly Indians." A band of sixty warriors told Colonel Burd that they would join the army on condition that it went by Braddock's road. "This," wrote Forbes, on hearing of the proposal, "is a new system of military discipline truly, and shows that my good friend Burd is either made a cat's-foot of himself, or little knows me if he imagines that sixty scoundrels are to direct me in my measures." [651] Bouquet, with a pliant tact rarely seen in the born Briton, took great pains to please these troublesome allies, 140 V2 and went so far as to adopt one of them as his son. [652] A considerable number joined the army; but they nearly all went off when the stock of presents provided for them was exhausted. [651] The above extracts are from the Bouquet and Haldimand Papers, British Museum. [652] Bouquet to Forbes, 3 June, 1758. Forbes was in total ignorance of the strength and movements of the enemy. The Indians reported their numbers to be at least equal to his own; but nothing could be learned from them with certainty, by reason of their inveterate habit of lying. Several scouting-parties of whites were therefore sent forward, of which the most successful was that of a young Virginian officer, accompanied by a sergeant and five Indians. At a little distance from the French fort, the Indians stopped to paint themselves and practise incantations. The chief warrior of the party then took certain charms from an otter-skin bag and tied them about the necks of the other Indians. On that of the officer he hung the otter-skin itself; while to the sergeant he gave a small packet of paint from the same mystic receptacle. "He told us," reports the officer, "that none of us could be shot, for those things would turn the balls from us; and then shook hands with us, and told us to go and fight like men." Thus armed against fate, they mounted the high ground afterwards called Grant's Hill, where, covered by trees and bushes, they had a good view of the fort, and saw plainly that the reports of the French force were greatly exaggerated. [653] [653] Journal of a Reconnoitring Party, Aug. 1758. The writer seems to have been Ensign Chew, of Washington's regiment. 141 V2 Meanwhile Bouquet's men pushed on the heavy work of road-making up the main range of the Alleghanies, and, what proved far worse, the parallel mountain ridge of Laurel Hill, hewing, digging, blasting, laying fascines and gabions to support the track along the sides of steep declivities, or worming their way like moles through the jungle of swamp and forest. Forbes described the country to Pitt as an "immense uninhabited wilderness, overgrown everywhere with trees and brushwood, so that nowhere can one see twenty yards." In truth, as far as eye or mind could reach, a prodigious forest vegetation spread its impervious canopy over hill, valley, and plain, and wrapped the stern and awful waste in the shadows of the tomb. Having secured his magazines at Raystown, and built a fort there named Fort Bedford, Bouquet made a forward movement of some forty miles, crossed the main Alleghany and Laurel Hill, and, taking post on a stream called Loyalhannon Creek, began another depot of supplies as a base for the final advance on Fort Duquesne, which was scarcely fifty miles distant. Vaudreuil had learned from prisoners the march of Forbes, and, with his usual egotism, announced to the Colonial Minister what he had done in consequence. "I have provided for the safety for Fort Duquesne." "I have sent reinforcements to M. de Ligneris, who commands there." "I have done the impossible to supply him with provisions, and I am now sending them in abundance, in order that 142 V2 the troops I may perhaps have occasion to send to drive off the English may not be delayed." "A stronger fort is needed on the Ohio; but I cannot build one till after the peace; then I will take care to build such a one as will thenceforth keep the English out of that country." Some weeks later he was less confident, and very anxious for news from Ligneris. He says that he has sent him all the succors he could, and ordered troops to go to his aid from Niagara, Detroit, and Illinois, as well as the militia of Detroit, with the Indians there and elsewhere in the West,—Hurons, Ottawas, Pottawattamies, Miamis, and other tribes. What he fears is that the English will not attack the fort till all these Indians have grown tired of waiting, and have gone home again. [654] This was precisely the intention of Forbes, and the chief object of his long delays. [654] Vaudreuil au Ministre, Juillet, Ao?t, Octobre 1758. He had another good reason for making no haste. There was hope that the Delawares and Shawanoes, who lived within easy reach of Fort Duquesne, and who for the past three years had spread havoc throughout the English border, might now be won over from the French alliance. Forbes wrote to Bouquet from Shippensburg: "After many intrigues with Quakers, the Provincial Commissioners, the Governor, etc., and by the downright bullying of Sir William Johnson, I hope I have now brought about a general convention of the Indians." [655] The convention was to include the Five 143 V2 Nations, the Delawares, the Shawanoes, and other tribes, who had accepted wampum belts of invitation, and promised to meet the Governor and Commissioners of the various provinces at the town of Easton, before the middle of September. This seeming miracle was wrought by several causes. The Indians in the French interest, always greedy for presents, had not of late got enough to satisfy them. Many of those destined for them had been taken on the way from France by British cruisers, and the rest had passed through the hands of official knaves, who sold the greater part for their own profit. Again, the goods supplied by French fur-traders were few and dear; and the Indians remembered with regret the abundance and comparative cheapness of those they had from the English before the war. At the same time it was reported among them that a British army was marching to the Ohio strong enough to drive out the French from all that country; and the Delawares and Shawanoes of the West began to waver in their attachment to the falling cause. The eastern Delawares, living at Wyoming and elsewhere on the upper Susquehanna, had made their peace with the English in the summer before; and their great chief, Teedyuscung, thinking it for his interest that the tribes of the Ohio should follow his example, sent them wampum belts, inviting them to lay down the hatchet. The Five Nations, with Johnson at one end of the Confederacy and Joncaire at the other,—the one cajoling them in behalf of England, and the other in behalf of 144 V2 France,—were still divided in counsel; but even among the Senecas, the tribe most under Joncaire's influence, there was a party so far inclined to England that, like the Delaware chief, they sent wampum to the Ohio, inviting peace. But the influence most potent in reclaiming the warriors of the West was of a different kind. Christian Frederic Post, a member of the Moravian brotherhood, had been sent at the instance of Forbes as an envoy to the hostile tribes from the Governor and Council of Pennsylvania. He spoke the Delaware language, knew the Indians well, had lived among them, had married a converted squaw, and, by his simplicity of character, directness, and perfect honesty, gained their full confidence. He now accepted his terrible mission, and calmly prepared to place himself in the clutches of the tiger. He was a plain German, upheld by a sense of duty and a single-hearted trust in God; alone, with no great disciplined organization to impel and support him, and no visions and illusions such as kindled and sustained the splendid heroism of the early Jesuit martyrs. Yet his errand was no whit less perilous. And here we may notice the contrast between the mission settlements of the Moravians in Pennsylvania and those which the later Jesuits and the Sulpitians had established at Caughnawaga, St. Francis, La Présentation, and other places. The Moravians were apostles of peace, and they succeeded to a surprising degree in weaning their converts from their ferocious instincts and warlike habits; while the Mission Indians of Canada 145 V2 retained all their native fierceness, and were systematically impelled to use their tomahawks against the enemies of the Church. Their wigwams were hung with scalps, male and female, adult and infant; and these so-called missions were but nests of baptized savages, who wore the crucifix instead of the medicine-bag, and were encouraged by the Government for purposes of war. [656] [655] Forbes to Bouquet, 18 Aug. 1758. [656] Of the Hurons of the mission of Lorette, Bougainville says: "Ils sont toujours sauvages autant que ceux qui sont les moins apprivoisés." And yet they had been converts under Jesuit control for more than four generations. The case was no better at the other missions; and at St. Francis it seems to have been worse. The Moravian envoy made his way to the Delaware town of Kushkushkee, on Beaver Creek, northwest of Fort Duquesne, where the three chiefs known as King Beaver, Shingas, and Delaware George received him kindly, and conducted him to another town on the same stream. Here his reception was different. A crowd of warriors, their faces distorted with rage, surrounded him, brandishing knives and threatening to kill him; but others took his part, and, order being at last restored, he read them his message from the Governor, which seemed to please them. They insisted, however, that he should go with them to Fort Duquesne, in order that the Indians assembled there might hear it also. Against this dangerous proposal he protested in vain. On arriving near the fort, the French demanded that he should be given up to them, and, being refused, offered a great reward for his scalp; on which his friends advised him to keep close by the camp-fire, as 146 V2 parties were out with intent to kill him. "Accordingly," says Post, "I stuck to the fire as if I had been chained there. On the next day the Indians, with a great many French officers, came out to hear what I had to say. The officers brought with them a table, pens, ink, and paper. I spoke in the midst of them with a free conscience, and perceived by their looks that they were not pleased with what I said." The substance of his message was an invitation to the Indians to renew the old chain of friendship, joined with a warning that an English army was on its way to drive off the French, and that they would do well to stand neutral. He addressed an audience filled with an inordinate sense of their own power and importance, believing themselves greater and braver than either of the European nations, and yet deeply jealous of both. "We have heard," they said, "that the French and English mean to kill all the Indians and divide the land among themselves." And on this string they harped continually. If they had known their true interest, they would have made no peace with the English, but would have united as one man to form a barrier of fire against their farther progress; for the West in English hands meant farms, villages, cities, the ruin of the forest, the extermination of the game, and the expulsion of those who lived on it; while the West in French hands meant but scattered posts of war and trade, with the native tribes cherished as indispensable allies. 147 V2 After waiting some days, the three tribes of the Delawares met in council, and made their answer to the message brought by Post. It was worthy of a proud and warlike race, and was to the effect that since their brothers of Pennsylvania wished to renew the old peace-chain, they on their part were willing to do so, provided that the wampum belt should be sent them in the name, not of Pennsylvania alone, but of the rest of the provinces also. Having now accomplished his errand, Post wished to return home; but the Indians were seized with an access of distrust, and would not let him go. This jealousy redoubled when they saw him writing in his notebook. "It is a troublesome cross and heavy yoke to draw this people," he says; "they can punish and squeeze a body's heart to the utmost. There came some together and examined me about what I had wrote yesterday. I told them I writ what was my duty. 'Brothers, I tell you I am not afraid of you. I have a good conscience before God and man. I tell you, brothers, there is a bad spirit in your hearts, which breeds jealousy, and will keep you ever in fear.'" At last they let him go; and, eluding a party that lay in wait for his scalp, he journeyed twelve days through the forest, and reached Fort Augusta with the report of his mission. [657] [657] Journal of Christian Frederic Post, July, August, September, 1758. As the result of it, a great convention of white men and red was held at Easton in October. 148 V2 The neighboring provinces had been asked to send their delegates, and some of them did so; while belts of invitation were sent to the Indians far and near. Sir William Johnson, for reasons best known to himself, at first opposed the plan; but was afterwards led to favor it and to induce tribes under his influence to join in the grand pacification. The Five Nations, with the smaller tribes lately admitted into their confederacy, the Delawares of the Susquehanna, the Mohegans, and several kindred bands, all had their representatives at the meeting. The conferences lasted nineteen days, with the inevitable formalities of such occasions, and the weary repetition of conventional metaphors and long-winded speeches. At length, every difficulty being settled, the Governor of Pennsylvania, in behalf of all the English, rose with a wampum belt in his hand, and addressed the tawny congregation thus: "By this belt we heal your wounds; we remove your grief; we take the hatchet out of your heads; we make a hole in the earth, and bury it so deep that nobody can dig it up again." Then, laying the first belt before them, he took another, very large, made of white wampum beads, in token of peace: "By this belt we renew all our treaties; we brighten the chain of friendship; we put fresh earth to the roots of the tree of peace, that it may bear up against every storm, and live and flourish while the sun shines and the rivers run." And he gave them the belt with the request that they would send it to their friends and allies, and invite 149 V2 them to take hold also of the chain of friendship. Accordingly all present agreed on a joint message of peace to the tribes of the Ohio. [658] [658] Minutes of Conferences at Easton, October, 1758. Frederic Post, with several white and Indian companions, was chosen to bear it. A small escort of soldiers that attended him as far as the Alleghany was cut to pieces on its return by a band of the very warriors to whom he was carrying his offers of friendship; and other tenants of the grim and frowning wilderness met the invaders of their domain with inhospitable greetings. "The wolves made a terrible music this night," he writes at his first bivouac after leaving Loyalhannon. When he reached the Delaware towns his reception was ominous. The young warriors said: "Anybody can see with half an eye that the English only mean to cheat us. Let us knock the messengers in the head." Some of them had attacked an English outpost, and had been repulsed; hence, in the words of Post, "They were possessed with a murdering spirit, and with bloody vengeance were thirsty and drunk. I said: 'As God has stopped the mouths of the lions that they could not devour Daniel, so he will preserve us from their fury.'" The chiefs and elders were of a different mind from their fierce and capricious young men. They met during the evening in the log-house where Post and his party lodged; and here a French officer presently arrived with a string of wampum from the commandant, inviting them to help him drive back the army of Forbes. 150 V2 The string was scornfully rejected. "They kicked it from one to another as if it were a snake. Captain Peter took a stick, and with it flung the string from one end of the room to the other, and said: 'Give it to the French captain; he boasted of his fighting, now let us see him fight. We have often ventured our lives for him, and got hardly a loaf of bread in return; and now he thinks we shall jump to serve him.' Then we saw the French captain mortified to the uttermost. He looked as pale as death. The Indians discoursed and joked till midnight, and the French captain sent messengers at midnight to Fort Duquesne." There was a grand council, at which the French officer was present; and Post delivered the peace message from the council at Easton, along with another with which Forbes had charged him. "The messages pleased all the hearers except the French captain. He shook his head in bitter grief, and often changed countenance. Isaac Still [an Indian] ran him down with great boldness, and pointed at him, saying, 'There he sits!' They all said: 'The French always deceived us!' pointing at the French captain; who, bowing down his head, turned quite pale, and could look no one in the face. All the Indians began to mock and laugh at him. He could hold it no longer, and went out." [659] [659] Journal of Christian Frederic Post, October, November, 1758. The overtures of peace were accepted, and the Delawares, Shawanoes, and Mingoes were no longer enemies of the English. The loss was the more 151 V2 disheartening to the French, since, some weeks before, they had gained a success which they hoped would confirm the adhesion of all their wavering allies. Major Grant, of the Highlanders, had urged Bouquet to send him to reconnoitre Fort Duquesne, capture prisoners, and strike a blow that would animate the assailants and discourage the assailed. Bouquet, forgetting his usual prudence, consented; and Grant set out from the camp at Loyalhannon with about eight hundred men, Highlanders, Royal Americans, and provincials. On the fourteenth of September, at two in the morning, he reached the top of the rising ground thenceforth called Grant's Hill, half a mile or more from the French fort. The forest and the darkness of the night hid him completely from the enemy. He ordered Major Lewis, of the Virginians, to take with him half the detachment, descend to the open plain before the fort, and attack the Indians known to be encamped there; after which he was to make a feigned retreat to the hill, where the rest of the troops were to lie in ambush and receive the pursuers. Lewis set out on his errand, while Grant waited anxiously for the result. Dawn was near, and all was silent; till at length Lewis returned, and incensed his commander by declaring that his men had lost their way in the dark woods, and fallen into such confusion that the attempt was impracticable. The morning twilight now began, but the country was wrapped in thick fog. Grant abandoned his first plan, and sent a few Highlanders into the 152 V2 cleared ground to burn a warehouse that had been seen there. He was convinced that the French and their Indians were too few to attack him, though their numbers in fact were far greater than his own. [660] Infatuated with this idea, and bent on taking prisoners, he had the incredible rashness to divide his force in such a way that the several parts could not support each other. Lewis, with two hundred men, was sent to guard the baggage two miles in the rear, where a company of Virginians, under Captain Bullitt, was already stationed. A hundred Pennsylvanians were posted far off on the right, towards the Alleghany, while Captain Mackenzie, with a detachment of Highlanders, was sent to the left, towards the Monongahela. Then, the fog having cleared a little, Captain Macdonald, with another company of Highlanders, was ordered into the open plain to reconnoitre the fort and make a plan of it, Grant himself remaining on the hill with a hundred of his own regiment and a company of Maryland men. "In order to put on a good countenance," he says, "and convince our men they had no reason to be afraid, I gave directions to our drums to beat the reveille. The troops were in an advantageous post, and I must own I thought we had nothing to fear." Macdonald 153 V2 was at this time on the plain, midway between the woods and the fort, and in full sight of it. The roll of the drums from the hill was answered by a burst of war-whoops, and the French came swarming out like hornets, many of them in their shirts, having just leaped from their beds. They all rushed upon Macdonald and his men, who met them with a volley that checked their advance; on which they surrounded him at a distance, and tried to cut off his retreat. The Highlanders broke through, and gained the woods, with the loss of their commander, who was shot dead. A crowd of French followed close, and soon put them to rout, driving them and Mackenzie's party back to the hill where Grant was posted. Here there was a hot fight in the forest, lasting about three quarters of an hour. At length the force of numbers, the novelty of the situation, and the appalling yells of the Canadians and Indians, completely overcame the Highlanders, so intrepid in the ordinary situations of war. They broke away in a wild and disorderly retreat. "Fear," says Grant, "got the better of every other passion; and I trust I shall never again see such a panic among troops." [660] Grant to Forbes, no date. "Les rapports sur le nombre des Fran?ais varient de 3,000 à 1,200." Bouquet à Forbes, 17 Sept. 1758. Bigot says that 3,500 daily rations were delivered at Fort Duquesne throughout the summer. Bigot au Ministre, 22 Nov. 1758. In October the number had fallen to 1,180, which included Indians. Ligneris à Vaudreuil, 18 Oct. 1758. His only hope was in the detachment he had sent to the rear under Lewis to guard the baggage. But Lewis and his men, when they heard the firing in front, had left their post and pushed forward to help their comrades, taking a straight course through the forest; while Grant was retreating along the path by which he had advanced the night before. 154 V2 Thus they missed each other; and when Grant reached the spot where he expected to find Lewis, he saw to his dismay that nobody was there but Captain Bullitt and his company. He cried in despair that he was a ruined man; not without reason, for the whole body of French and Indians was upon him. Such of his men as held together were forced towards the Alleghany, and, writes Bouquet, "would probably have been cut to pieces but for Captain Bullitt and his Virginians, who kept up the fight against the whole French force till two thirds of them were killed." They were offered quarter, but refused it; and the survivors were driven at last into the Alleghany, where some were drowned, and others swam over and escaped. Grant was surrounded and captured, and Lewis, who presently came up, was also made prisoner, along with some of his men, after a stiff resistance. Thus ended this mismanaged affair, which cost the English two hundred and seventy three killed, wounded, and taken. The rest got back safe to Loyalhannon. [661] [661] On Grant's defeat, Grant to Forbes, no date, a long and minute report, written while a prisoner. Bouquet à Forbes, 17 Sept. 1758. Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 1 Nov. 1758. Letters from camp in Boston Evening Post, Boston Weekly Advertiser, Boston News Letter, and other provincial newspapers of the time. List of Killed, Wounded, and Missing in the Action of Sept. 14. Gentleman's Magazine, XXIX. 173. Hazard's Pennsylvania Register, VIII. 141. Olden Time, I. 179. Vaudreuil, with characteristic exaggeration, represents all Grant's party as killed or taken, except a few who died of starvation. The returns show that 540 came back safe, out of 813. The invalid General was deeply touched by this reverse, yet expressed himself with a moderation that does him honor. He wrote to Bouquet from Raystown: "Your letter of the seventeenth I read 155 V2 with no less surprise than concern, as I could not believe that such an attempt would have been made without my knowledge and concurrence. The breaking in upon our fair and flattering hopes of success touches me most sensibly. There are two wounded Highland officers just now arrived, who give so lame an account of the matter that one can draw nothing from them, only that my friend Grant most certainly lost his wits, and by his thirst of fame brought on his own perdition, and ran great risk of ours." [662] [662] Forbes to Bouquet, 23 Sept. 1758. The French pushed their advantage with spirit. Early in October a large body of them hovered in the woods about the camp at Loyalhannon, drove back a detachment sent against them, approached under cover of the trees, and, though beaten off, withdrew deliberately, after burying their dead and killing great numbers of horses and cattle. [663] But, with all their courageous energy, their position was desperate. The militia of Louisiana and the Illinois left the fort in November and went home; the Indians of Detroit and the Wabash would stay no longer; and, worse yet, the supplies destined for Fort Duquesne had been destroyed by Bradstreet at Fort Frontenac. Hence Ligneris was compelled by prospective starvation to dismiss the greater part of his force, and await the approach of his enemy with those that remained. [663] Burd to Bouquet, 12 Oct. 1758. Bouquet à Forbes, 13 Oct. 1758. Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758. Letter from Loyalhannon, 14 Oct., in Olden Time, I. 180. Letters from camp, in Boston News Letter. Ligneris à Vaudreuil, 18 Oct. 1758. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 20 Nov. 1758. 156 V2 His enemy was in a plight hardly better than his own. Autumnal rains, uncommonly heavy and persistent, had ruined the newly-cut road. On the mountains the torrents tore it up, and in the valleys the wheels of the wagons and cannon churned it into soft mud. The horses, overworked and underfed, were fast breaking down. The forest had little food for them, and they were forced to drag their own oats and corn, as well as supplies for the army, through two hundred miles of wilderness. In the wretched condition of the road this was no longer possible. The magazines of provisions formed at Raystown and Loyalhannon to support the army on its forward march were emptied faster than they could be filled. Early in October the elements relented; the clouds broke, the sky was bright again, and the sun shone out in splendor on mountains radiant in the livery of autumn. A gleam of hope revisited the heart of Forbes. It was but a flattering illusion. The sullen clouds returned, and a chill, impenetrable veil of mist and rain hid the mountains and the trees. Dejected Nature wept and would not be comforted. Above, below, around, all was trickling, oozing, pattering, gushing. In the miserable encampments the starved horses stood steaming in the rain, and the men crouched, disgusted, under their dripping tents, while the drenched picket-guard in the neighboring forest paced dolefully through black mire and spongy mosses. The rain turned to snow; the descending flakes clung to the many-colored foliage, or melted from sight in the trench of half-liquid clay that 157 V2 was called a road. The wheels of the wagons sank in it to the hub, and to advance or retreat was alike impossible. Forbes from his sick bed at Raystown wrote to Bouquet: "Your description of the road pierces me to the very soul." And a few days later to Pitt: "I am in the greatest distress, occasioned by rains unusual at this season, which have rendered the clay roads absolutely impracticable. If the weather does not favor, I shall be absolutely locked up in the mountains. I cannot form any judgment how I am to extricate myself, as everything depends on the weather, which snows and rains frightfully." There was no improvement. In the next week he writes to Bouquet: "These four days of constant rain have completely ruined the road. The wagons would cut it up more in an hour than we could repair in a week. I have written to General Abercromby, but have not had one scrape of a pen from him since the beginning of September; so it looks as if we were either forgot or left to our fate." [664] Wasted and tortured by disease, the perplexed commander was forced to burden himself with a multitude of details which would else have been neglected, and to do the work of commissary and quartermaster as well as general. "My time," he writes, "is disagreeably spent between business and medicine." [664] Forbes to Bouquet, 15 Oct. 1758. Ibid., 25 Oct. 1758. Forbes to Pitt, 20 Oct. 1758. In the beginning of November he was carried to Loyalhannon, where the whole army was then 158 V2 gathered. There was a council of officers, and they resolved to attempt nothing more that season; but, a few days later, three prisoners were brought in who reported the defenceless condition of the French, on which Forbes gave orders to advance again. The wagons and all the artillery, except a few light pieces, were left behind; and on the eighteenth of November twenty-five hundred picked men marched for Fort Duquesne, without tents or baggage, and burdened only with knapsacks and blankets. Washington and Colonel Armstrong, of the Pennsylvanians, had opened a way for them by cutting a road to within a day's march of the French fort. On the evening of the twenty-fourth, the detachment encamped among the hills of Turkey Creek; and the men on guard heard at midnight a dull and heavy sound booming over the western woods. Was it a magazine exploded by accident, or were the French blowing up their works? In the morning the march was resumed, a strong advance-guard leading the way. Forbes came next, carried in his litter; and the troops followed in three parallel columns, the Highlanders in the centre under Montgomery, their colonel, and the Royal Americans and provincials on the right and left, under Bouquet and Washington. [665] Thus, guided by the tap of the drum at the head of each column, they moved slowly through the forest, over damp, fallen leaves, crisp with frost, beneath an endless entanglement of bare gray twigs that sighed and 159 V2 moaned in the bleak November wind. It was dusk when they emerged upon the open plain and saw Fort Duquesne before them, with its background of wintry hills beyond the Monongahela and the Alleghany. During the last three miles they had passed the scattered bodies of those slain two months before at the defeat of Grant; and it is said that, as they neared the fort, the Highlanders were goaded to fury at seeing the heads of their slaughtered comrades stuck on poles, round which the kilts were hung derisively, in imitation of petticoats. Their rage was vain; the enemy was gone. Only a few Indians lingered about the place, who reported that the garrison, to the number of four or five hundred, had retreated, some down the Ohio, some overland towards Presquisle, and the rest, with their commander, up the Alleghany to Venango, called by the French, Fort Machault. They had burned the barracks and storehouses, and blown up the fortifications. [665] Letter from a British Officer in the Expedition, 25 Feb. 1759, Gentleman's Magazine, XXIX. 171. The first care of the victors was to provide defence and shelter for those of their number on whom the dangerous task was to fall of keeping what they had won. A stockade was planted around a cluster of traders' cabins and soldiers' huts, which Forbes named Pittsburg, in honor of the great minister. It was not till the next autumn that General Stanwix built, hard by, the regular fortified work called Fort Pitt. [666] Captain West, brother of Benjamin West, the painter, led a detachment of Pennsylvanians, with Indian 160 V2 guides, through the forests of the Monongahela, to search for the bones of those who had fallen under Braddock. In the heart of the savage wood they found them in abundance, gnawed by wolves and foxes, and covered with the dead leaves of four successive autumns. Major Halket, of Forbes' staff, had joined the party; and, with the help of an Indian who was in the fight, he presently found two skeletons lying under a tree. In one of them he recognized, by a peculiarity of the teeth, the remains of his father, Sir Peter Halket, and in the other he believed that he saw the bones of a brother who had fallen at his father's side. The young officer fainted at the sight. The two skeletons were buried together, covered with a Highland plaid, and the Pennsylvanian woodsmen fired a volley over the grave. The rest of the bones were undistinguishable; and, being carefully gathered up, they were all interred in a deep trench dug in the freezing ground. [667] [666] Stanwix to Pitt, 20 Nov. 1759. [667] Galt, Life of Benjamin West, I. 64 (ed. 1820). The work of the new fort was pushed on apace, and the task of holding it for the winter was assigned to Lieutenant-Colonel Mercer, of the Virginians, with two hundred provincials. The number was far too small. It was certain that, unless vigorously prevented by a counter attack, the French would gather in early spring from all their nearer western posts, Niagara, Detroit, Presquisle, Le B?uf, and Venango, to retake the place; but there was no food for a larger garrison, and the risk must be run. 161 V2 The rest of the troops, with steps quickened by hunger, began their homeward march early in December. "We would soon make M. de Ligneris shift his quarters at Venango," writes Bouquet just after the fort was taken, "if we only had provisions; but we are scarcely able to maintain ourselves a few days here. After God, the success of this expedition is entirely due to the General, who, by bringing about the treaty with the Indians at Easton, struck the French a stunning blow, wisely delayed our advance to wait the effects of that treaty, secured all our posts and left nothing to chance, and resisted the urgent solicitation to take Braddock's road, which would have been our destruction. In all his measures he has shown the greatest prudence, firmness, and ability." [668] No sooner was his work done, than Forbes fell into a state of entire prostration, so that for a time he could neither write a letter nor dictate one. He managed, however, two days after reaching Fort Duquesne, to send Amherst a brief notice of his success, adding: "I shall leave this place as soon as I am able to stand; but God knows when I shall reach Philadelphia, if I ever do." [669] On the way back, a hut with a chimney was built for him at each stopping-place, and on the twenty-eighth of December Major Halket writes from "Tomahawk Camp:" "How great was our disappointment, on coming to this ground last night, to find that the chimney was unlaid, no fire made, 162 V2 nor any wood cut that would burn. This distressed the General to the greatest degree, by obliging him after his long journey to sit above two hours without any fire, exposed to a snowstorm, which had very near destroyed him entirely; but with great difficulty, by the assistance of some cordials, he was brought to." [670] At length, carried all the way in his litter, he reached Philadelphia, where, after lingering through the winter, he died in March, and was buried with military honors in the chancel of Christ Church. [668] Bouquet to Chief Justice Allen, 25 Nov. 1758. [669] Forbes to Amherst, 26 Nov. 1758. [670] Halket to Bouquet, 28 Dec. 1758. If his achievement was not brilliant, its solid value was above price. It opened the Great West to English enterprise, took from France half her savage allies, and relieved the western borders from the scourge of Indian war. From southern New York to North Carolina, the frontier populations had cause to bless the memory of the steadfast and all-enduring soldier. So ended the campaign of 1758. The centre of the French had held its own triumphantly at Ticonderoga; but their left had been forced back by the capture of Louisbourg, and their right by that of Fort Duquesne, while their entire right wing had been well nigh cut off by the destruction of Fort Frontenac. The outlook was dark. Their own Indians were turning against them. "They have struck us," wrote Doreil to the Minister of War; "they have seized three canoes loaded with furs on Lake Ontario, and murdered the men in them: sad forerunner of what 163 V2 we have to fear! Peace, Monseigneur, give us peace! Pardon me, but I cannot repeat that word too often." Note.—The Bouquet and Haldimand Papers in the British Museum contain a mass of curious correspondence of the principal persons engaged in the expedition under Forbes; copies of it all are before me. The Public Record Office, America and West Indies, has also furnished much material, including the official letters of Forbes. The Writings of Washington, the Archives and Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, and the magazines and newspapers of the time may be mentioned among the sources of information, along with a variety of miscellaneous contemporary letters. The Journals of Christian Frederic Post are printed in full in the Olden Time and elsewhere. CHAPTER XXIII. 1758, 1759. THE BRINK OF RUIN. Jealousy of Vaudreuil ? He asks for Montcalm's Recall ? His Discomfiture ? Scene at the Governor's House ? Disgust of Montcalm ? The Canadians Despondent ? Devices to encourage them ? Gasconade of the Governor ? Deplorable State of the Colony ? Mission of Bougainville ? Duplicity of Vaudreuil ? Bougainville at Versailles ? Substantial Aid refused to Canada ? A Matrimonial Treaty ? Return of Bougainville ? Montcalm abandoned by the Court ? His Plans of Defence ? Sad News from Candiac ? Promises of Vaudreuil. "Never was general in a more critical position than I was: God has delivered me; his be the praise! He gives me health, though I am worn out with labor, fatigue, and miserable dissensions that have determined me to ask for my recall. Heaven grant that I may get it!" Thus wrote Montcalm to his mother after his triumph at Ticonderoga. That great exploit had entailed a train of vexations, for it stirred the envy of Vaudreuil, more especially as it was due to the troops of the line, with no help from Indians, and very little from Canadians. The Governor assured the Colonial Minister that the victory would have bad results, though he gives no hint what these might be; that Montcalm had mismanaged the whole affair; that he would 165 V2 have been beaten but for the manifest interposition of Heaven; [671] and, finally, that he had failed to follow his (Vaudreuil's) directions, and had therefore enabled the English to escape. The real directions of the Governor, dictated, perhaps, by dread lest his rival should reap laurels, were to avoid a general engagement; and it was only by setting them at nought that Abercromby had been routed. After the battle a sharp correspondence passed between the two chiefs. The Governor, who had left Montcalm to his own resources before the crisis, sent him Canadians and Indians in abundance after it was over; while he cautiously refrained from committing himself by positive orders, repeated again and again that if these reinforcements were used to harass Abercromby's communications, the whole English army would fall back to the Hudson, and leave baggage and artillery a prey to the French. These preposterous assertions and tardy succors were thought by Montcalm to be a device for giving color to the charge that he had not only failed to deserve victory, but had failed also to make use of it. [672] He did what was possible, and sent strong detachments to act in the English rear; which, though they did not, and could not, compel the enemy to fall back, caused no slight annoyance, till Rogers checked them by the defeat of Marin. Nevertheless Vaudreuil pretended 166 V2 on one hand that Montcalm had done nothing with the Canadians and Indians sent him, and on the other that these same Canadians and Indians had triumphed over the enemy by their mere presence at Ticonderoga. "It was my activity in sending these succors to Carillon [Ticonderoga] that forced the English to retreat. The Marquis de Montcalm might have made their retreat difficult; but it was in vain that I wrote to him, in vain that the colony troops, Canadians and Indians, begged him to pursue the enemy." [673] The succors he speaks of were sent in July and August, while the English did not fall back till the first of November. Neither army left its position till the season was over, and Abercromby did so only when he learned that the French were setting the example. Vaudreuil grew more and more bitter. "As the King has intrusted this colony to me, I cannot help warning you of the unhappy consequences that would follow if the Marquis de Montcalm should remain here. I shall keep him by me till I receive your orders. It is essential that they reach me early." "I pass over in silence all the infamous conduct and indecent talk he has held or countenanced; but I should be wanting in my duty to the King if I did not beg you to ask for his recall." [674] [671] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 8 Ao?t, 1758. [672] Much of the voluminous correspondence on these matters will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. [673] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 8 Avril, 1759. [674] Ibid. He does not say what is meant by infamous conduct and indecent talk; but the allusion is probably to irreverent utterances touching the Governor in which the officers from France were 167 V2 apt to indulge, not always without the knowledge of their chief. Vaudreuil complained of this to Montcalm, adding, "I am greatly above it, and I despise it." [675] To which the General replied: "You are right to despise gossip, supposing that there has been any. For my part, though I hear that I have been torn to pieces without mercy in your presence, I do not believe it." [676] In these infelicities Bigot figures as peacemaker, though with no perceptible success. Vaudreuil's cup of bitterness was full when letters came from Versailles ordering him to defer to Montcalm on all questions of war, or of civil administration bearing upon war. [677] He had begged hard for his rival's recall, and in reply his rival was set over his head. [675] Vaudreuil à Montcalm, 1 Ao?t, 1758. [676] Montcalm à Vaudreuil, 6 Ao?t, 1758. [677] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, 1758, 1759. The two yokefellows were excellently fitted to exasperate each other: Montcalm, with his southern vivacity of emotion and an impetuous, impatient volubility that sometimes forgot prudence; and Vaudreuil, always affable towards adherents, but full of suspicious egotism and restless jealousy that bristled within him at the very thought of his colleague. Some of the byplay of the quarrel may be seen in Montcalm's familiar correspondence with Bourlamaque. One day the Governor, in his own house, brought up the old complaint that Montcalm, after taking Fort William Henry, did not take Fort Edward also. The General, for the 168 V2 twentieth time, gave good reasons for not making the attempt. "I ended," he tells Bourlamaque, "by saying quietly that when I went to war I did the best I could; and that when one is not pleased with one's lieutenants, one had better take the field in person. He was very much moved, and muttered between his teeth that perhaps he would; at which I said that I should be delighted to serve under him. Madame de Vaudreuil wanted to put in her word. I said: 'Madame, saving due respect, permit me to have the honor to say that ladies ought not to talk war.' She kept on. I said: 'Madame, saving due respect, permit me to have the honor to say that if Madame de Montcalm were here, and heard me talking war with Monsieur le Marquis de Vaudreuil, she would remain silent.' This scene was in presence of eight officers, three of them belonging to the colony troops; and a pretty story they will make of it." These letters to Bourlamaque, in their detestable handwriting, small, cramped, confused, without stops, and sometimes almost indecipherable, betray the writer's state of mind. "I should like as well as anybody to be Marshal of France; but to buy the honor with the life I am leading here would be too much." He recounts the last news from Fort Duquesne, just before its fall. "Mutiny among the Canadians, who want to come home; the officers busy with making money, and stealing like mandarins. Their commander sets the example, and will come back with three or four hundred thousand francs; the pettiest ensign, 169 V2 who does not gamble, will have ten, twelve, or fifteen thousand. The Indians don't like Ligneris, who is drunk every day. Forgive the confusion of this letter; I have not slept all night with thinking of the robberies and mismanagement and folly. Pauvre Roi, pauvre France, cara patria!" "Oh, when shall we get out of this country! I think I would give half that I have to go home. Pardon this digression to a melancholy man. It is not that I have not still some remnants of gayety; but what would seem such in anybody else is melancholy for a Languedocian. Burn my letter, and never doubt my attachment." "I shall always say, Happy he who is free from the proud yoke to which I am bound. When shall I see my chateau of Candiac, my plantations, my chestnut grove, my oil-mill, my mulberry-trees? O bon Dieu! Bon soir; br?lez ma lettre." [678] [678] The above extracts are from letters of 5 and 27 Nov. and 9 Dec. 1758, and 18 and 23 March, 1759. Never was dispute more untimely than that between these ill-matched colleagues. The position of the colony was desperate. Thus far the Canadians had never lost heart, but had obeyed with admirable alacrity the Governor's call to arms, borne with patience the burdens and privations of the war, and submitted without revolt to the exactions and oppressions of Cadet and his crew; loyal to their native soil, loyal to their Church, loyal to the wretched government that crushed and belittled them. When the able-bodied were ordered to the war, where 170 V2 four fifths of them were employed in the hard and tedious work of transportation, the women, boys, and old men tilled the fields and raised a scanty harvest, which always might be, and sometimes was, taken from them in the name of the King. Yet the least destitute among them were forced every winter to lodge soldiers in their houses, for each of whom they were paid fifteen francs a month, in return for substance devoured and wives and daughters debauched. [679] [679] Mémoire sur le moyen d'entretenir 10,000 Hommes de Troupes dans les Colonies, 1759. No pains had been spared to keep up the courage of the people and feed them with flattering illusions. When the partisan officer Boishébert was tried for peculation, his counsel met the charge by extolling the manner in which he had fulfilled the arduous duty of encouraging the Acadians, "putting on an air of triumph even in defeat; using threats, caresses, stratagems; painting our victories in vivid colors; hiding the strength and successes of the enemy; promising succors that did not and could not come; inventing plausible reasons why they did not come, and making new promises to set off the failure of the old; persuading a starved people to forget their misery; taking from some to give to others; and doing all this continually in the face of a superior enemy, that this country might be snatched from England and saved to France." [680] What Boishébert was doing in Acadia, Vaudreuil was doing on a 171 V2 larger scale in Canada. By indefatigable lying, by exaggerating every success and covering over every reverse, he deceived the people and in some measure himself. He had in abundance the Canadian gift of gasconade, and boasted to the Colonial Minister that one of his countrymen was a match for from three to ten Englishmen. It is possible that he almost believed it; for the midnight surprise of defenceless families and the spreading of panics among scattered border settlements were inseparable from his idea of war. Hence the high value he set on Indians, who in such work outdid the Canadians themselves. Sustained by the intoxication of flattering falsehoods, and not doubting that the blunders and weakness of the first years of the war gave the measure of English efficiency, the colonists had never suspected that they could be subdued. [680] Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres, Mémoire pour le Sieur de Boishébert. But now there was a change. The reverses of the last campaign, hunger, weariness, and possibly some incipient sense of atrocious misgovernment, began to produce their effect; and some, especially in the towns, were heard to murmur that further resistance was useless. The Canadians, though brave and patient, needed, like Frenchmen, the stimulus of success. "The people are alarmed," said the modest Governor, "and would lose courage if my firmness did not rekindle their zeal to serve the King." [681] [681] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 10 Avril, 1759. "Rapacity, folly, intrigue, falsehood, will soon ruin this colony which has cost the King so dear," 172 V2 wrote Doreil to the Minister of War. "We must not flatter ourselves with vain hope; Canada is lost if we do not have peace this winter." "It has been saved by miracle in these past three years; nothing but peace can save it now, in spite of all the efforts and the talents of M. de Montcalm." [682] Vaudreuil himself became thoroughly alarmed, and told the Court in the autumn of 1758 that food, arms, munitions, and everything else were fast failing, and that without immediate peace or heavy reinforcements all was lost. [682] Doreil au Ministre, 31 Juillet, 1758. Ibid. 12 Ao?t, 1758. Ibid. 31 Ao?t, 1758. Ibid. 1 Sept. 1758. The condition of Canada was indeed deplorable. The St. Lawrence was watched by British ships; the harvest was meagre; a barrel of flour cost two hundred francs; most of the cattle and many of the horses had been killed for food. The people lived chiefly on a pittance of salt cod or on rations furnished by the King; all prices were inordinate; the officers from France were starving on their pay; while a legion of indigenous and imported scoundrels fattened on the general distress. "What a country!" exclaims Montcalm. "Here all the knaves grow rich, and the honest men are ruined." Yet he was resolved to stand by it to the last, and wrote to the Minister of War that he would bury himself under its ruins. "I asked for my recall after the glorious affair of the eighth of July; but since the state of the colony is so bad, I must do what I can to help it and retard 173 V2 its fall." The only hope was in a strong appeal to the Court; and he thought himself fortunate in persuading Vaudreuil to consent that Bougainville should be commissioned to make it, seconded by Doreil. They were to sail in different ships, in order that at least one of them might arrive safe. Vaudreuil gave Bougainville a letter introducing him to the Colonial Minister in high terms of praise: "He is in all respects better fitted than anybody else to inform you of the state of the colony. I have given him my instructions, and you can trust entirely in what he tells you." [683] Concerning Doreil he wrote to the Minister of War: "I have full confidence in him, and he may be entirely trusted. Everybody here likes him." [684] While thus extolling the friends of his rival, the Governor took care to provide against the effects of his politic commendations, and wrote thus to his patron, the Colonial Minister: "In order to condescend to the wishes of M. de Montcalm, and leave no means untried to keep in harmony with him, I have given letters to MM. Doreil and Bougainville; but I have the honor to inform you, Monseigneur, that they do not understand the colony, and to warn you that they are creatures of M. de Montcalm." [685] [683] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 4 Nov. 1758. [684] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Guerre, 11 Oct. 1758. [685] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 3 Nov. 1758. The two envoys had sailed for France. Winter was close at hand, and the harbor of Quebec was nearly empty. One ship still lingered, the last of 174 V2 the season, and by her Montcalm sent a letter to his mother: "You will be glad to have me write to you up to the last moment to tell you for the hundredth time that, occupied as I am with the fate of New France, the preservation of the troops, the interest of the state, and my own glory, I think continually of you all. We did our best in 1756, 1757, and 1758; and so, God helping, we will do in 1759, unless you make peace in Europe." Then, shut from the outer world for half a year by barriers of ice, he waited what returning spring might bright forth. Both Bougainville and Doreil escaped the British cruisers and safely reached Versailles, where, in the slippery precincts of the Court, as new to him as they were treacherous, the young aide-de-camp justified all the confidence of his chief. He had interviews with the ministers, the King, and, more important than all, with Madame de Pompadour, whom he succeeded in propitiating, though not, it seems, without difficulty and delay. France, unfortunate by land and sea, with finances ruined and navy crippled, had gained one brilliant victory, and she owed it to Montcalm. She could pay for it in honors, if in nothing else. Montcalm was made lieutenant-general, Lévis major-general, Bourlamaque brigadier, and Bougainville colonel and chevalier of St. Louis; while Vaudreuil was solaced with the grand cross of that order. [686] But when the two envoys asked substantial aid for the imperilled colony, the response was chilling. The 175 V2 Colonial Minister, Berryer, prepossessed against Bougainville by the secret warning of Vaudreuil, received him coldly, and replied to his appeal for help: "Eh, Monsieur, when the house is on fire one cannot occupy one's self with the stable." "At least, Monsieur, nobody will say that you talk like a horse," was the irreverent answer. [686] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, Janvier, Février, 1759. Bougainville laid four memorials before the Court, in which he showed the desperate state of the colony and its dire need of help. Thus far, he said, Canada has been saved by the dissensions of the English colonies; but now, for the first time, they are united against her, and prepared to put forth their strength. And he begged for troops, arms, munitions, food, and a squadron to defend the mouth of the St. Lawrence. [687] The reply, couched in a letter to Montcalm, was to the effect that it was necessary to concentrate all the strength of the kingdom for a decisive operation in Europe; that, therefore, the aid required could not be sent; and that the King trusted everything to his zeal and generalship, joined with the valor of the victors of Ticonderoga. [688] All that could be obtained was between three and four hundred recruits for the regulars, sixty engineers, sappers, and artillerymen, and gunpowder, arms, and provisions sufficient, along with the supplies brought over by the contractor, Cadet, to carry the colony through the next campaign. [689] [687] Mémoire remis au Ministre par M. de Bougainville, Décembre, 1758. [688] Le Ministre à Montcalm, 3 Fév. 1759. [689] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, Février, 1759. 176 V2 Montcalm had intrusted Bougainville with another mission, widely different. This was no less than the negotiating of suitable marriages for the eldest son and daughter of his commander, with whom, in the confidence of friendship, he had had many conversations on the matter. "He and I," Montcalm wrote to his mother, Madame de Saint-Véran, "have two ideas touching these marriages,—the first, romantic and chimerical; the second, good, practicable." [690] Bougainville, invoking the aid of a lady of rank, a friend of the family, acquitted himself well of his delicate task. Before he embarked for Canada, in early spring, a treaty was on foot for the marriage of the young Comte de Montcalm to an heiress of sixteen; while Mademoiselle de Montcalm had already become Madame d'Espineuse. "Her father will be delighted," says the successful negotiator. [691] [690] Montcalm à Madame de Saint-Véran, 24 Sept. 1758. [691] Lettres de Bougainville à Madame de Saint-Véran, 1758, 1759. Again he crossed the Atlantic and sailed up the St. Lawrence as the portentous spring of 1759 was lowering over the dissolving snows of Canada. With him came a squadron bearing the supplies and the petty reinforcement which the Court had vouchsafed. "A little is precious to those who have nothing," said Montcalm on receiving them. Despatches from the ministers gave warning of a great armament fitted out in English ports for the attack of Quebec, while a letter to the General from the Maréchal de Belleisle, minister of war, told what was expected of him, and why he and 177 V2 the colony were abandoned to their fate. "If we sent a large reinforcement of troops," said Belleisle, "there would be great fear that the English would intercept them on the way; and as the King could never send you forces equal to those which the English are prepared to oppose to you, the attempt would have no other effect than to excite the Cabinet of London to increased efforts for preserving its superiority on the American continent." "As we must expect the English to turn all their force against Canada, and attack you on several sides at once, it is necessary that you limit your plans of defence to the most essential points and those most closely connected, so that, being concentrated within a smaller space, each part may be within reach of support and succor from the rest. How small soever may be the space you are able to hold, it is indispensable to keep a footing in North America; for if we once lose the country entirely, its recovery will be almost impossible. The King counts on your zeal, courage, and persistency to accomplish this object, and relies on you to spare no pains and no exertions. Impart this resolution to your chief officers, and join with them to inspire your soldiers with it. I have answered for you to the King; I am confident that you will not disappoint me, and that for the glory of the nation, the good of the state, and your own preservation, you will go to the utmost extremity rather than submit to conditions as shameful as those imposed at Louisbourg, the memory of which 178 V2 you will wipe out." [692] "We will save this unhappy colony, or perish," was the answer of Montcalm. [692] Belleisle à Montcalm, 19 Fév. 1759. It was believed that Canada would be attacked with at least fifty thousand men. Vaudreuil had caused a census to be made of the governments of Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec. It showed a little more than thirteen thousand effective men. [693] To these were to be added thirty-five hundred troops of the line, including the late reinforcement, fifteen hundred colony troops, a body of irregulars in Acadia, and the militia and coureurs-de-bois of Detroit and the other upper posts, along with from one to two thousand Indians who could still be counted on. Great as was the disparity of numbers, there was good hope that the centre of the colony could be defended; for the only avenues by which an enemy could approach were barred by the rock of Quebec, the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and the strong position of Isle-aux-Noix, at the outlet of Lake Champlain. Montcalm had long inclined to the plan of concentration enjoined on him by the Minister of War. Vaudreuil was of another mind; he insisted on still occupying Acadia and the forts of the upper country: matters on which he and the General exchanged a correspondence that widened the breach between them. [693] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 8 Avril, 1759. The Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760, says 15,229 effective men. Should every effort of resistance fail, and the invaders force their way into the heart of Canada, 179 V2 Montcalm proposed the desperate resort of abandoning the valley of the St. Lawrence, descending the Mississippi with his troops and as many as possible of the inhabitants, and making a last stand for France among the swamps of Louisiana. [694] [694] Mémoire sur le Canada remis au Ministre, 27 Déc. 1758. In April, before Bougainville's return, he wrote to his wife: "Can we hope for another miracle to save us? I trust in God; he fought for us on the eighth of July. Come what may, his will be done! I wait the news from France with impatience and dread. We have had none for eight months; and who knows if much can reach us at all this year? How dearly I have to pay for the dismal privilege of figuring two or three times in the gazettes!" A month later, after Bougainvile had come: "Our daughter is well married. I think I would renounce every honor to join you again; but the King must be obeyed. The moment when I see you once more will be the brightest of my life. Adieu, my heart! I believe that I love you more than ever." Bougainville had brought sad news. He had heard before sailing from France that one of Montcalm's daughters was dead, but could not learn which of them. "I think," says the father, "that it must be poor Mirète, who was like me, and whom I loved very much." He was never to know if this conjecture was true. To Vaudreuil came a repetition of the detested order that he should defer to Montcalm on all questions of war; and moreover that he should 180 V2 not take command in person except when the whole body of the militia was called out; nor, even then, without consulting his rival. [695] His ire and vexation produced an access of jealous self-assertion, and drove him into something like revolt against the ministerial command. "If the English attack Quebec, I shall always hold myself free to go thither myself with most of the troops and all the militia and Indians I can assemble. On arriving I shall give battle to the enemy; and I shall do so again and again, till I have forced him to retire, or till he has entirely crushed me by excessive superiority of numbers. My obstinacy in opposing his landing will be the more à propos, as I have not the means of sustaining a siege. If I succeed as I wish, I shall next march to Carillon to arrest him there. You see, Monseigneur, that the slightest change in my arrangements would have the most unfortunate consequences." [696] [695] Ordres du Roy et Dépêches des Ministres, Lettre à Vaudreuil, 3 Fév. 1759. [696] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 8 Avril, 1759. Whether he made good this valorous declaration will presently be seen. Note.—The Archives de la Guerre and the Archives de la Marine contain a mass of letters and documents on the subjects treated in the above chapter; these I have carefully read and collated. The other principal authorities are the correspondence of Montcalm with Bourlamaque and with his own family; the letters of Vaudreuil preserved in the Archives Nationales; and the letters of Bougainville and Doreil to Montcalm and Madame de Saint-Véran while on their mission to France. For copies of these last I am indebted to the present Marquis de Montcalm. CHAPTER XXIV. 1758, 1759. WOLFE. The Exiles of Fort Cumberland ? Relief ? The Voyage to Louisbourg ? The British Fleet ? Expedition against Quebec ? Early Life of Wolfe ? His Character ? His Letters to his Parents ? His Domestic Qualities ? Appointed to command the Expedition ? Sails for America. Captain John Knox, of the forty-third regiment, had spent the winter in garrison at Fort Cumberland, on the hill of Beauséjour. For nearly two years he and his comrades had been exiles amid the wilds of Nova Scotia, and the monotonous inaction was becoming insupportable. The great marsh of Tantemar on the one side, and that of Missaguash on the other, two vast flat tracts of glaring snow, bounded by dark hills of spruce and fir, were hateful to their sight. Shooting, fishing, or skating were a dangerous relief; for the neighborhood was infested by "vermin," as they called the Acadians and their Micmac allies. In January four soldiers and a ranger were waylaid not far from the fort, disabled by bullets, and then scalped alive. They were found the next morning on the snow, contorted in the agonies of death, and frozen like marble statues. 182 V2 St. Patrick's Day brought more cheerful excitements. The Irish officers of the garrison gave their comrades a feast, having laid in during the autumn a stock of frozen provisions, that the festival of their saint might be duly honored. All was hilarity at Fort Cumberland, where it is recorded that punch to the value of twelve pounds sterling, with a corresponding supply of wine and beer, was consumed on this joyous occasion. [697] [697] Knox, Historical Journal, I. 228. About the middle of April a schooner came up the bay, bringing letters that filled men and officers with delight. The regiment was ordered to hold itself ready to embark for Louisbourg and join an expedition to the St. Lawrence, under command of Major-General Wolfe. All that afternoon the soldiers were shouting and cheering in their barracks; and when they mustered for the evening roll-call, there was another burst of huzzas. They waited in expectancy nearly three weeks, and then the transports which were to carry them arrived, bringing the provincials who had been hastily raised in New England to take their place. These Knox describes as a mean-looking set of fellows, of all ages and sizes, and without any kind of discipline; adding that their officers are sober, modest men, who, though of confined ideas, talk very clearly and sensibly, and make a decent appearance in blue, faced with scarlet, though the privates have no uniform at all. At last the forty-third set sail, the cannon of the fort saluting them, and the soldiers cheering 183 V2 lustily, overjoyed to escape from their long imprisonment. A gale soon began; the transports became separated; Knox's vessel sheltered herself for a time in Passamaquoddy Bay; then passed the Grand Menan, and steered southward and eastward along the coast of Nova Scotia. A calm followed the gale; and they moved so slowly that Knox beguiled the time by fishing over the stern, and caught a halibut so large that he was forced to call for help to pull it in. Then they steered northeastward, now lost in fogs, and now tossed mercilessly on those boisterous waves; till, on the twenty-fourth of May, they saw a rocky and surf-lashed shore, with a forest of masts rising to all appearance out of it. It was the British fleet in the land-locked harbor of Louisbourg. On the left, as they sailed through the narrow passage, lay the town, scarred with shot and shell, the red cross floating over its battered ramparts; and around in a wide semicircle rose the bristling back of rugged hills, set thick with dismal evergreens. They passed the great ships of the fleet, and anchored among the other transports towards the head of the harbor. It was not yet free from ice; and the floating masses lay so thick in some parts that the reckless sailors, returning from leave on shore, jumped from one to another to regain their ships. There was a review of troops, and Knox went to see it; but it was over before he reached the place, where he was presently told of a characteristic reply just made by Wolfe to some officers who had apologized for not having 184 V2 taught their men the new exercise. "Poh, poh!—new exercise—new fiddlestick. If they are otherwise well disciplined, and will fight, that's all I shall require of them." Knox does not record his impressions of his new commander, which must have been disappointing. He called him afterwards a British Achilles; but in person at least Wolfe bore no likeness to the son of Peleus, for never was the soul of a hero cased in a frame so incongruous. His face, when seen in profile, was singular as that of the Great Condé. The forehead and chin receded; the nose, slightly upturned, formed with the other features the point of an obtuse triangle; the mouth was by no means shaped to express resolution; and nothing but the clear, bright, and piercing eye bespoke the spirit within. On his head he wore a black three-cornered hat; his red hair was tied in a queue behind; his narrow shoulders, slender body, and long, thin limbs were cased in a scarlet frock, with broad cuffs and ample skirts that reached the knee; while on his left arm he wore a band of crape in mourning for his father, of whose death he had heard a few days before. James Wolfe was in his thirty-third year. His father was an officer of distinction, Major-General Edward Wolfe, and he himself, a delicate and sensitive child, but an impetuous and somewhat headstrong youth, had served the King since the age of fifteen. From childhood he had dreamed of the army and the wars. At sixteen he was in Flanders, adjutant of his regiment, discharging the 185 V2 duties of the post in a way that gained him early promotion and, along with a painstaking assiduity, showing a precocious faculty for commanding men. He passed with credit through several campaigns, took part in the victory of Dettingen, and then went to Scotland to fight at Culloden. Next we find him at Stirling, Perth, and Glasgow, always ardent and always diligent, constant in military duty, and giving his spare hours to mathematics and Latin. He presently fell in love; and being disappointed, plunged into a variety of dissipations, contrary to his usual habits, which were far above the standard of that profligate time. At twenty-three he was a lieutenant-colonel, commanding his regiment in the then dirty and barbarous town of Inverness, amid a disaffected and turbulent population whom it was his duty to keep in order: a difficult task, which he accomplished so well as to gain the special commendation of the King, and even the goodwill of the Highlanders themselves. He was five years among these northern hills, battling with ill-health, and restless under the intellectual barrenness of his surroundings. He felt his position to be in no way salutary, and wrote to his mother: "The fear of becoming a mere ruffian and of imbibing the tyrannical principles of an absolute commander, or giving way insensibly to the temptations of power till I became proud, insolent, and intolerable,—these considerations will make me wish to leave the regiment before next winter; that by frequenting men above myself I may know my true condition, and by discoursing 186 V2 with the other sex may learn some civility and mildness of carriage." He got leave of absence, and spent six months in Paris, where he was presented at Court and saw much of the best society. This did not prevent him from working hard to perfect himself in French, as well as in horsemanship, fencing, dancing, and other accomplishments, and from earnestly seeking an opportunity to study the various armies of Europe. In this he was thwarted by the stupidity and prejudice of the commander-in-chief; and he made what amends he could by extensive reading in all that bore on military matters. His martial instincts were balanced by strong domestic inclinations. He was fond of children; and after his disappointment in love used to say that they were the only true inducement to marriage. He was a most dutiful son, and wrote continually to both his parents. Sometimes he would philosophize on the good and ill of life; sometimes he held questionings with his conscience; and once he wrote to his mother in a strain of self-accusation not to be expected from a bold and determined soldier. His nature was a compound of tenderness and fire, which last sometimes showed itself in sharp and unpleasant flashes. His excitable temper was capable almost of fierceness, and he could now and then be needlessly stern; but towards his father, mother, and friends he was a model of steady affection. He made friends readily, and kept them, and was usually a pleasant companion, though subject to sallies of imperious irritability which occasionally broke through his strong 187 V2 sense of good breeding. For this his susceptible constitution was largely answerable, for he was a living barometer, and his spirits rose and fell with every change of weather. In spite of his impatient outbursts, the officers whom he had commanded remained attached to him for life; and, in spite of his rigorous discipline, he was beloved by his soldiers, to whose comfort he was always attentive. Frankness, directness, essential good feeling, and a high integrity atoned for all his faults. In his own view, as expressed to his mother, he was a person of very moderate abilities, aided by more than usual diligence; but this modest judgment of himself by no means deprived him of self-confidence, nor, in time of need, of self-assertion. He delighted in every kind of hardihood; and, in his contempt for effeminacy, once said to his mother: "Better be a savage of some use than a gentle, amorous puppy, obnoxious to all the world." He was far from despising fame; but the controlling principles of his life were duty to his country and his profession, loyalty to the King, and fidelity to his own ideal of the perfect soldier. To the parent who was the confidant of his most intimate thoughts he said: "All that I wish for myself is that I may at all times be ready and firm to meet that fate we cannot shun, and to die gracefully and properly when the hour comes." Never was wish more signally fulfilled. Again he tells her: "My utmost desire and ambition is to look steadily upon danger;" and his desire was accomplished. His intrepidity was complete. No 188 V2 form of death had power to daunt him. Once and again, when bound on some deadly enterprise of war, he calmly counts the chances whether or not he can compel his feeble body to bear him on till the work is done. A frame so delicately strung could not have been insensible to danger; but forgetfulness of self, and the absorption of every faculty in the object before him, shut out the sense of fear. He seems always to have been at his best in the thick of battle; most complete in his mastery over himself and over others. But it is in the intimacies of domestic life that one sees him most closely, and especially in his letters to his mother, from whom he inherited his frail constitution, without the beauty that distinguished her. "The greatest happiness that I wish for here is to see you happy." "If you stay much at home I will come and shut myself up with you for three weeks or a month, and play at piquet from morning till night; and you shall laugh at my short red hair as much as you please." The playing at piquet was a sacrifice to filial attachment; for the mother loved cards, and the son did not. "Don't trouble yourself about my room or my bedclothes; too much care and delicacy at this time would enervate me and complete the destruction of a tottering constitution. Such as it is, it must serve me now, and I'll make the best of it while it holds." At the beginning of the war his father tried to dissuade him from offering his services on board the fleet; and he replies in a letter to Mrs. Wolfe: "It is no time to think of what is 189 V2 convenient or agreeable; that service is certainly the best in which we are the most useful. For my part, I am determined never to give myself a moment's concern about the nature of the duty which His Majesty is pleased to order us upon. It will be a sufficient comfort to you two, as far as my person is concerned,—at least it will be a reasonable consolation,—to reflect that the Power which has hitherto preserved me may, if it be his pleasure, continue to do so; if not, that it is but a few days or a few years more or less, and that those who perish in their duty and in the service of their country die honorably." Then he proceeds to give particular directions about his numerous dogs, for the welfare of which in his absence he provides with anxious solicitude, especially for "my friend C?sar, who has great merit and much good-humor." After the unfortunate expedition against Rochefort, when the board of general officers appointed to inquire into the affair were passing the highest encomiums upon his conduct, his parents were at Bath, and he took possession of their house at Blackheath, whence he wrote to his mother: "I lie in your chamber, dress in the General's little parlor, and dine where you did. The most perceptible difference and change of affairs (exclusive of the bad table I keep) is the number of dogs in the yard; but by coaxing Ball [his father's dog] and rubbing his back with my stick, I have reconciled him with the new ones, and put them in some measure under his protection." 190 V2 When about to sail on the expedition against Louisbourg, he was anxious for his parents, and wrote to his uncle, Major Wolfe, at Dublin: "I trust you will give the best advice to my mother, and such assistance, if it should be wanted, as the distance between you will permit. I mention this because the General seems to decline apace, and narrowly escaped being carried off in the spring. She, poor woman, is in a bad state of health, and needs the care of some friendly hand. She has long and painful fits of illness, which by succession and inheritance are likely to devolve on me, since I feel the early symptoms of them." Of his friends Guy Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, and George Warde, the companion of his boyhood, he also asks help for his mother in his absence. His part in the taking of Louisbourg greatly increased his reputation. After his return he went to Bath to recruit his health; and it seems to have been here that he wooed and won Miss Katherine Lowther, daughter of an ex-Governor of Barbadoes, and sister of the future Lord Lonsdale. A betrothal took place, and Wolfe wore her portrait till the night before his death. It was a little before this engagement that he wrote to his friend Lieutenant-Colonel Rickson: "I have this day signified to Mr. Pitt that he may dispose of my slight carcass as he pleases, and that I am ready for any undertaking within the compass of my skill and cunning. I am in a very bad condition both with the gravel and rheumatism; 191 V2 but I had much rather die than decline any kind of service that offers. If I followed my own taste it would lead me into Germany. However, it is not our part to choose, but to obey. My opinion is that I shall join the army in America." Pitt chose him to command the expedition then fitting out against Quebec; made him a major-general, though, to avoid giving offence to older officers, he was to hold that rank in America alone; and permitted him to choose his own staff. Appointments made for merit, and not through routine and patronage, shocked the Duke of Newcastle, to whom a man like Wolfe was a hopeless enigma; and he told George II. that Pitt's new general was mad. "Mad is he?" returned the old King; "then I hope he will bite some others of my generals." At the end of January the fleet was almost ready, and Wolfe wrote to his uncle Walter: "I am to act a greater part in this business than I wished. The backwardness of some of the older officers has in some measure forced the Government to come down so low. I shall do my best, and leave the rest to fortune, as perforce we must when there are not the most commanding abilities. We expect to sail in about three weeks. A London life and little exercise disagrees entirely with me, but the sea still more. If I have health and constitution enough for the campaign, I shall think myself a lucky man; what happens afterwards is of no great consequence." He sent to his 192 V2 mother an affectionate letter of farewell, went to Spithead, embarked with Admiral Saunders in the ship "Neptune," and set sail on the seventeenth of February. In a few hours the whole squadron was at sea, the transports, the frigates, and the great line-of-battle ships, with their ponderous armament and their freight of rude humanity armed and trained for destruction; while on the heaving deck of the "Neptune," wretched with sea-sickness and racked with pain, stood the gallant invalid who was master of it all. The fleet consisted of twenty-two ships of the line, with frigates, sloops-of-war, and a great number of transports. When Admiral Saunders arrived with his squadron off Louisbourg, he found the entrance blocked by ice, and was forced to seek harborage at Halifax. The squadron of Admiral Holmes, which had sailed a few days earlier, proceeded to New York to take on board troops destined for the expedition, while the squadron of Admiral Durell steered for the St. Lawrence to intercept the expected ships from France. In May the whole fleet, except the ten ships with Durell, was united in the harbor of Louisbourg. Twelve thousand troops were to have been employed for the expedition; but several regiments expected from the West Indies were for some reason countermanded, while the accessions from New York and the Nova Scotia garrisons fell far short of the looked-for numbers. Three weeks before leaving Louisbourg, Wolfe writes to his uncle Walter that he has an army of nine thousand 193 V2 men. The actual number seems to have been somewhat less. [698] "Our troops are good," he informs Pitt; "and if valor can make amends for the want of numbers, we shall probably succeed." [698] See Grenville Correspondence, I. 305. Three brigadiers, all in the early prime of life, held command under him: Monckton, Townshend, and Murray. They were all his superiors in birth, and one of them, Townshend, never forgot that he was so. "George Townshend," says Walpole, "has thrust himself again into the service; and, as far as wrongheadedness will go, is very proper for a hero." [699] The same caustic writer says further that he was of "a proud, sullen, and contemptuous temper," and that he "saw everything in an ill-natured and ridiculous light." [700] Though his perverse and envious disposition made him a difficult colleague, Townshend had both talents and energy; as also had Monckton, the same officer who commanded at the capture of Beauséjour in 1755. Murray, too, was well matched to the work in hand, in spite of some lingering remains of youthful rashness. [699] Horace Walpole, Letters III. 207 (ed. Cunningham, 1857). [700] Ibid. George II., II. 345. On the sixth of June the last ship of the fleet sailed out of Louisbourg harbor, the troops cheering and the officers drinking to the toast, "British colors on every French fort, port, and garrison in America." The ships that had gone before lay to till the whole fleet was reunited, and then all 194 V2 steered together for the St. Lawrence. From the headland of Cape Egmont, the Micmac hunter, gazing far out over the shimmering sea, saw the horizon flecked with their canvas wings, as they bore northward on their errand of havoc. Note.—For the material of the foregoing sketch of Wolfe I am indebted to Wright's excellent Life of him and the numerous letters contained in it. Several autograph letters which have escaped the notice of Mr. Wright are preserved in the Public Record Office. The following is a characteristic passage from one of these, written on board the "Neptune," at sea, on the sixth of June, the day when the fleet sailed from Louisbourg. It is directed to a nobleman of high rank in the army, whose name does not appear, the address being lost (War Office Records: North America, various, 1756-1763): "I have had the honour to receive two letters from your Lordship, one of an old date, concerning my stay in this country [after the capture of Louisbourg], in answer to which I shall only say that the Marshal told me I was to return at the end of the campaign; and as General Amherst had no other commands than to send me to winter at Halifax under the orders of an officer [Brigadier Lawrence] who was but a few months before put over my head, I thought it was much better to get into the way of service and out of the way of being insulted; and as the style of your Lordship's letter is pretty strong, I must take the liberty to inform you that … rather than receive orders in the Government [of Nova Scotia] from an officer younger than myself (though a very worthy man), I should certainly have desired leave to resign my commission; for as I neither ask nor expect any favour, so I never intend to submit to any ill-usage whatsoever." Many other papers in the Public Record Office have been consulted in preparing the above chapter, including the secret instructions of the King to Wolfe and to Saunders, and the letters of Amherst to Wolfe and to Pitt. Other correspondence touching the same subjects is printed in Selections from the Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 441-450. Knox, Mante, and Entick are the best contemporary printed sources. A story has gained currency respecting the last interview of Wolfe with Pitt, in which he is said to have flourished his sword and boasted of what he would achieve. This anecdote was told by Lord Temple, who was present at the interview, to Mr. Grenville, who, many years after, told it to Earl Stanhope, by whom it was made public. That the incident underwent essential changes in the course of these transmissions,—which extended over more than half a century, for Earl Stanhope was not born till 1805,—can never be doubted by one who considers the known character of Wolfe, who may have uttered some vehement expression, but who can never be suspected of gasconade. CHAPTER XXV. 1759. WOLFE AT QUEBEC. French Preparation ? Muster of Forces ? Gasconade of Vaudreuil ? Plan of Defence ? Strength of Montcalm ? Advance of Wolfe ? British Sailors ? Landing of the English ? Difficulties before them ? Storm ? Fireships ? Confidence of French Commanders ? Wolfe occupies Point Levi ? A Futile Night Attack ? Quebec bombarded ? Wolfe at the Montmorenci ? Skirmishes ? Danger of the English Position ? Effects of the Bombardment ? Desertion of Canadians ? The English above Quebec ? Severities of Wolfe ? Another Attempt to burn the Fleet ? Desperate Enterprise of Wolfe ? The Heights of Montmorenci ? Repulse of the English. In early spring the chiefs of Canada met at Montreal to settle a plan of defence. What at first they most dreaded was an advance of the enemy by way of Lake Champlain. Bourlamaque, with three battalions, was ordered to take post at Ticonderoga, hold it if he could, or, if overborne by numbers, fall back to Isle-aux-Noix, at the outlet of the lake. La Corne was sent with a strong detachment to intrench himself at the head of the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and oppose any hostile movement from Lake Ontario. Every able-bodied man in the colony, and every boy who could fire a gun, was to be called to the field. Vaudreuil sent a circular letter to the militia captains of all the parishes, with orders to read it to 196 V2 the parishioners. It exhorted them to defend their religion, their wives, their children, and their goods from the fury of the heretics; declared that he, the Governor, would never yield up Canada on any terms whatever; and ordered them to join the army at once, leaving none behind but the old, the sick, the women, and the children. [701] The Bishop issued a pastoral mandate: "On every side, dearest brethren, the enemy is making immense preparations. His forces, at least six times more numerous than ours, are already in motion. Never was Canada in a state so critical and full of peril. Never were we so destitute, or threatened with an attack so fierce, so general, and so obstinate. Now, in truth, we may say, more than ever before, that our only resource is in the powerful succor of our Lord. Then, dearest brethren, make every effort to deserve it. 'Seek first the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.'" And he reproves their sins, exhorts them to repentance, and ordains processions, masses, and prayers. [702] [701] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. [702] I am indebted for a copy of this mandate to the kindness of Abbé Bois. As printed by Knox, it is somewhat different, though the spirit is the same. Vaudreuil bustled and boasted. In May he wrote to the Minister: "The zeal with which I am animated for the service of the King will always make me surmount the greatest obstacles. I am taking the most proper measures to give the enemy a good reception whenever he may attack us. I keep in view the defence of Quebec. I have given orders in the parishes below to muster the 197 V2 inhabitants who are able to bear arms, and place women, children, cattle, and even hay and grain, in places of safety. Permit me, Monseigneur, to beg you to have the goodness to assure His Majesty that, to whatever hard extremity I may be reduced, my zeal will be equally ardent and indefatigable, and that I shall do the impossible to prevent our enemies from making progress in any direction, or, at least, to make them pay extremely dear for it." [703] Then he writes again to say that Amherst with a great army will, as he learns, attack Ticonderoga; that Bradstreet, with six thousand men, will advance to Lake Ontario; and that six thousand more will march to the Ohio. "Whatever progress they may make," he adds, "I am resolved to yield them nothing, but hold my ground even to annihilation." He promises to do his best to keep on good terms with Montcalm, and ends with a warm eulogy of Bigot. [704] [703] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 8 Mai, 1759. [704] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 20 [?] Mai, 1759. It was in the midst of all these preparations that Bougainville arrived from France with news that a great fleet was on its way to attack Quebec. The town was filled with consternation mixed with surprise, for the Canadians had believed that the dangerous navigation of the St. Lawrence would deter their enemies from the attempt. "Everybody," writes one of them, "was stupefied at an enterprise that seemed so bold." In a few days a crowd of sails was seen approaching. They were not enemies, but friends. It was the fleet 198 V2 of the contractor Cadet, commanded by officer named Kanon, and loaded with supplies for the colony. They anchored in the harbor, eighteen sail in all, and their arrival spread universal joy. Admiral Durell had come too late to intercept them, catching but three stragglers that had lagged behind the rest. Still others succeeded in eluding him, and before the first of June five more ships had come safely into port. When the news brought by Bougainville reached Montreal, nearly the whole force of the colony, except the detachments of Bourlamaque and La Corne, was ordered to Quebec. Montcalm hastened thither, and Vaudreuil followed. The Governor-General wrote to the Minister in his usual strain, as if all the hope of Canada rested in him. Such, he says, was his activity, that, though very busy, he reached Quebec only a day and a half after Montcalm; and, on arriving, learned from his scouts that English ships-of-war had already appeared at Isle-aux-Coudres. These were the squadron of Durell. "I expect," Vaudreuil goes on, "to be sharply attacked, and that our enemies will make their most powerful efforts to conquer this colony; but there is no ruse, no resource, no means which my zeal does not suggest to lay snares for them, and finally, when the exigency demands it, to fight them with an ardor, and even a fury, which exceeds the range of their ambitious designs. The troops, the Canadians, and the Indians are not ignorant of the resolution I have taken, and from which I shall not recoil under 199 V2 any circumstance whatever. The burghers of this city have already put their goods and furniture in places of safety. The old men, women, and children hold themselves ready to leave town. My firmness is generally applauded. It has penetrated every heart; and each man says aloud: 'Canada, our native land, shall bury us under its ruins before we surrender to the English!' This is decidedly my own determination, and I shall hold to it inviolably." He launches into high praise of the contractor Cadet, whose zeal for the service of the King and the defence of the colony he declares to be triumphant over every difficulty. It is necessary, he adds, that ample supplies of all kinds should be sent out in the autumn, with the distribution of which Cadet offers to charge himself, and to account for them at their first cost; but he does not say what prices his disinterested friend will compel the destitute Canadians to pay for them. [705] [705] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 28 Mai, 1759. Five battalions from France, nearly all the colony troops, and the militia from every part of Canada poured into Quebec, along with a thousand or more Indians, who, at the call of Vaudreuil, came to lend their scalping-knives to the defence. Such was the ardor of the people that boys of fifteen and men of eighty were to be seen in the camp. Isle-aux-Coudres and Isle d'Orléans were ordered to be evacuated, and an excited crowd on the rock of Quebec watched hourly for the approaching fleet. Days passed and weeks passed, yet it did not appear. Meanwhile Vaudreuil held 200 V2 council after council to settle a plan of defence, They were strange scenes: a crowd of officers of every rank, mixed pell-mell in a small room, pushing, shouting, elbowing each other, interrupting each other; till Montcalm, in despair, took each aside after the meeting was over, and made him give his opinion in writing. [706] [706] Journal du Siége de Québec déposé à la Bibliothêque de Hartwell, en Angleterre. (Printed at Quebec, 1836.) He himself had at first proposed to encamp the army on the plains of Abraham and the meadows of the St. Charles, making that river his line of defence; [707] but he changed his plan, and, with the concurrence of Vaudreuil, resolved to post his whole force on the St. Lawrence below the city, with his right resting on the St. Charles, and his left on the Montmorenci. Here, accordingly, the troops and militia were stationed as they arrived. Early in June, standing at the northeastern brink of the rock of Quebec, one could have seen the whole position at a glance. On the curving shore from the St. Charles to the rocky gorge of the Montmorenci, a distance of seven or eight miles, the whitewashed dwellings of the parish of Beauport stretched down the road in a double chain, and the fields on both sides were studded with tents, huts, and Indian wigwams. Along the borders of the St. Lawrence, as far as the eye could distinguish them, gangs of men were throwing up redoubts, batteries, and lines of intrenchment. About midway between the two extremities of the 201 V2 encampment ran the little river of Beauport; and on the rising ground just beyond it stood a large stone house, round which the tents were thickly clustered; for here Montcalm had made his headquarters. [707] Livre d'Ordres, Disposition pour s'opposer à la Descente. A boom of logs chained together was drawn across the mouth of the St. Charles, which was further guarded by two hulks mounted with cannon. The bridge of boats that crossed the stream nearly a mile above, formed the chief communication between the city and the camp. Its head towards Beauport was protected by a strong and extensive earthwork; and the banks of the stream on the Quebec side were also intrenched, to form a second line of defence in case the position at Beauport should be forced. In the city itself every gate, except the Palace Gate, which gave access to the bridge, was closed and barricaded. A hundred and six cannon were mounted on the walls. [708] A floating battery of twelve heavy pieces, a number of gunboats, eight fireships, and several firerafts formed the river defences. The largest merchantmen of Kanon's fleet were sacrificed to make the fireships; and the rest, along with the frigates that came with them, were sent for safety up the St. Lawrence beyond the River Richelieu, whence about a thousand of their sailors returned to man the batteries and gunboats. [708] This number was found after the siege. Knox, II. 151. Some French writers make it much greater. In the camps along the Beauport shore were about fourteen thousand men, besides Indians. The 202 V2 regulars held the centre; the militia of Quebec and Three Rivers were on the right, and those of Montreal on the left. In Quebec itself there was a garrison of between one and two thousand men under the Chevalier de Ramesay. Thus the whole number, including Indians, amounted to more than sixteen thousand; [709] and though the Canadians who formed the greater part of it were of little use in the open field, they could be trusted to fight well behind intrenchments. Against this force, posted behind defensive works, on positions almost impregnable by nature, Wolfe brought less than nine thousand men available for operations on land. [710] The steep and lofty heights that lined the river made the cannon of the ships for the most part useless, while the exigencies of the naval service forbade employing the sailors on shore. In two or three instances only, throughout the siege, small squads of them landed to aid in moving and working cannon; and the actual fighting fell to the troops alone. [709] See Appendix H. [710] Ibid. Vaudreuil and Bigot took up their quarters with the army. The Governor-General had delegated the command of the land-forces to Montcalm, whom, in his own words, he authorized "to give orders everywhere, provisionally." His relations with him were more than ever anomalous and critical; for while Vaudreuil, in virtue of his office, had a right to supreme command, Montcalm, now a lieutenant-general, held a military grade far above him; and the Governor, while always writing himself down 203 V2 in his despatches as the head and front of every movement, had too little self-confidence not to leave the actual command in the hands of his rival. Days and weeks wore on, and the first excitement gave way to restless impatience. Why did not the English come? Many of the Canadians thought that Heaven would interpose and wreck the English fleet, as it had wrecked that of Admiral Walker half a century before. There were processions, prayers, and vows towards this happy consummation. Food was scarce. Bigot and Cadet lived in luxury; fowls by thousands were fattened with wheat for their tables, while the people were put on rations of two ounces of bread a day. [711] Durell and his ships were reported to be still at Isle-aux-Coudres. Vaudreuil sent thither a party of Canadians, and they captured three midshipmen, who, says Montcalm, had gone ashore pour polissonner, that is, on a lark. These youths were brought to Quebec, where they increased the general anxiety by grossly exaggerating the English force. [711] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. At length it became known that eight English vessels were anchored in the north channel of Orleans, and on the twenty-first of June the masts of three of them could plainly be seen. One of the fireships was consumed in a vain attempt to burn them, and several firerafts and a sort of infernal machine were tried with no better success; the unwelcome visitors still held their posts. Meanwhile the whole English fleet had slowly advanced, piloted by Denis de Vitré, a Canadian of 204 V2 good birth, captured at sea some time before, and now compelled to serve, under a threat of being hanged if he refused. [712] Nor was he alone; for when Durell reached the place where the river pilots were usually taken on board, he raised a French flag to his mast-head, causing great rejoicings among the Canadians on shore, who thought that a fleet was come to their rescue, and that their country was saved. The pilots launched their canoes and came out to the ships, where they were all made prisoners; then the French flag was lowered, and the red cross displayed in its stead. The spectators on shore turned from joy to despair; and a priest who stood watching the squadron with a telescope is said to have dropped dead with the revulsion of feeling. [712] Mémorial de Jean-Denis de Vitré au Très-honorable William Pitt. Towards the end of June the main fleet was near the mountain of Cape Tourmente. The passage called the Traverse, between the Cape and the lower end of the Island of Orleans, was reputed one of the most dangerous parts of the St. Lawrence; and as the ships successively came up, the captive pilots were put on board to carry them safely through, on pain of death. One of these men was assigned to the transport "Goodwill," in which was Captain Knox, who spoke French, and who reports thus in his Diary: "He gasconaded at a most extravagant rate, and gave us to understand that it was much against his will that he was become an English pilot. The poor fellow assumed great latitude in his conversation, and said 'he made no doubt that 205 V2 some of the fleet would return to England, but they should have a dismal tale to carry with them; for Canada should be the grave of the whole army, and he expected in a short time to see the walls of Quebec ornamented with English scalps.' Had it not been in obedience to the Admiral, who gave orders that he should not be ill-used, he would certainly have been thrown overboard." The master of the transport was an old sailor named Killick, who despised the whole Gallic race, and had no mind to see his ship in charge of a Frenchman. "He would not let the pilot speak," continues Knox, "but fixed his mate at the helm, charged him not to take orders from any person but himself, and going forward with his trumpet to the forecastle, gave the necessary instructions. All that could be said by the commanding officer and the other gentlemen on board was to no purpose; the pilot declared we should be lost, for that no French ship ever presumed to pass there without a pilot. 'Ay, ay, my dear,' replied our son of Neptune, 'but, damn me, I'll convince you that an Englishman shall go where a Frenchman dare not show his nose.' The 'Richmond' frigate being close astern of us, the commanding officer called out to the captain and told him our case; he inquired who the master was, and was answered from the forecastle by the man himself, who told him 'he was old Killick, and that was enough.' I went forward with this experienced mariner, who pointed out the channel to me as we passed; showing me by the ripple and color of the water where there was any danger, and distinguishing 206 V2 the places where there were ledges of rocks (to me invisible) from banks of sand, mud, or gravel. He gave his orders with great unconcern, joked with the sounding-boats which lay off on each side with different colored flags for our guidance; and when any of them called to him and pointed to the deepest water, he answered: 'Ay, ay, my dear, chalk it down, a damned dangerous navigation, eh! If you don't make a sputter about it you'll get no credit in England.' After we had cleared this remarkable place, where the channel forms a complete zigzag, the master called to his mate to give the helm to somebody else, saying, 'Damn me if there are not a thousand places in the Thames fifty times more hazardous than this; I am ashamed that Englishmen should make such a rout about it.' The Frenchman asked me if the captain had not been there before. I assured him in the negative; upon which he viewed him with great attention, lifting at the same time his hands and eyes to heaven with astonishment and fervency." [713] [713] Others, as well as the pilot, were astonished. "The enemy passed sixty ships of war where we hardly dared risk a vessel of a hundred tons." "Notwithstanding all our precautions, the English, without any accident, by night, as well as by day, passed through it [the Traverse] their ships of seventy and eighty guns, and even many of them together." Vaudreuil au Ministre, 22 Oct. 1759. Vaudreuil was blamed for not planting cannon at a certain plateau on the side of the mountain of Cape Tourmente, where the gunners would have been inaccessible, and whence they could have battered every passing ship with a plunging fire. As it was, the whole fleet sailed safely through. 207 V2 On the twenty-sixth they were all anchored off the south shore of the Island of Orleans, a few miles from Quebec; and, writes Knox, "here we are entertained with a most agreeable prospect of a delightful country on every side; windmills, watermills, churches, chapels, and compact farmhouses, all built with stone, and covered, some with wood, and others with straw. The lands appear to be everywhere well cultivated; and with the help of my glass I can discern that they are sowed with flax, wheat, barley, peas, etc., and the grounds are enclosed with wooden pales. The weather to-day is agreeably warm. A light fog sometimes hangs over the highlands, but in the river we have a fine clear air. In the curve of the river, while we were under sail, we had a transient view of a stupendous natural curiosity called the waterfall of Montmorenci." That night Lieutenant Meech, with forty New England rangers, landed on the Island of Orleans, and found a body of armed inhabitants, who tried to surround him. He beat them off, and took possession of a neighboring farmhouse, where he remained till daylight; then pursued the enemy, and found that they had crossed to the north shore. The whole army now landed, and were drawn up on the beach. As they were kept there for some time, Knox and several brother officers went to visit the neighboring church of Saint-Laurent, where they found a letter from the parish priest, directed to "The Worthy Officers of the British Army," praying that they would protect the 208 V2 sacred edifice, and also his own adjoining house, and adding, with somewhat needless civility, that he wished they had come sooner, that they might have enjoyed the asparagus and radishes of his garden, now unhappily going to seed. The letter concluded with many compliments and good wishes, in which the Britons to whom they were addressed saw only "the frothy politeness so peculiar to the French." The army marched westward and encamped. Wolfe, with his chief engineer, Major Mackellar, and an escort of light infantry, advanced to the extreme point of the island. Here he could see, in part, the desperate nature of the task he had undertaken. Before him, three or four miles away, Quebec sat perched upon her rock, a congregation of stone houses, churches, palaces, convents, and hospitals; the green trees of the Seminary garden and the spires of the Cathedral, the Ursulines, the Recollets, and the Jesuits. Beyond rose the loftier height of Cape Diamond, edged with palisades and capped with redoubt and parapet. Batteries frowned everywhere; the Chateau battery, the Clergy battery, the Hospital battery, on the rock above, and the Royal, Dauphin's, and Queen's batteries on the strand, where the dwellings and warehouses of the lower town clustered beneath the cliff. Full in sight lay the far-extended camp of Montcalm, stretching from the St. Charles, beneath the city walls, to the chasm and cataract of the Montmorenci. From the cataract to the river of Beauport, its front was covered by earthworks along 209 V2 the brink of abrupt and lofty heights; and from the river of Beauport to the St. Charles, by broad flats of mud swept by the fire of redoubts, intrenchments, a floating battery, and the city itself. Above the city, Cape Diamond hid the view; but could Wolfe have looked beyond it, he would have beheld a prospect still more disheartening. Here, mile after mile, the St. Lawrence was walled by a range of steeps, often inaccessible, and always so difficult that a few men at the top could hold an army in check; while at Cap-Rouge, about eight miles distant, the high plateau was cleft by the channel of a stream which formed a line of defence as strong as that of the Montmorenci. Quebec was a natural fortress. Bougainville had long before examined the position, and reported that "by the help of intrenchments, easily and quickly made, and defended by three or four thousand men, I think the city would be safe. I do not believe that the English will make any attempt against it; but they may have the madness to do so, and it is well to be prepared against surprise." Not four thousand men, but four times four thousand, now stood in its defence; and their chiefs wisely resolved not to throw away the advantages of their position. Nothing more was heard of Vaudreuil's bold plan of attacking the invaders at their landing; and Montcalm had declared that he would play the part, not of Hannibal, but of Fabius. His plan was to avoid a general battle, run no risks, and protract the 210 V2 defence till the resources of the enemy were exhausted, or till approaching winter forced them to withdraw. Success was almost certain but for one contingency. Amherst, with a force larger than that of Wolfe, was moving against Ticonderoga. If he should capture it, and advance into the colony, Montcalm would be forced to weaken his army by sending strong detachments to oppose him. Here was Wolfe's best hope. This failing, his only chance was in audacity. The game was desperate; but, intrepid gamester as he was in war, he was a man, in the last resort, to stake everything on the cast of the dice. The elements declared for France. On the afternoon of the day when Wolfe's army landed, a violent squall swept over the St. Lawrence, dashed the ships together, drove several ashore, and destroyed many of the flat-boats from which the troops had just disembarked. "I never saw so much distress among shipping in my whole life," writes an officer to a friend in Boston. Fortunately the storm subsided as quickly as it rose. Vaudreuil saw that the hoped-for deliverance had failed; and as the tempest had not destroyed the British fleet, he resolved to try the virtue of his fireships. "I am afraid," says Montcalm, "that they have cost us a million, and will be good for nothing after all." This remained to be seen. Vaudreuil gave the chief command of them to a naval officer named Delouche; and on the evening of the twenty-eighth, after long consultation and much debate among their respective 211 V2 captains, they set sail together at ten o'clock. The night was moonless and dark. In less than an hour they were at the entrance of the north channel. Delouche had been all enthusiasm; but as he neared the danger his nerves failed, and he set fire to his ship half an hour too soon, the rest following his example. [714] [714] Foligny, Journal mémoratif. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. Journal du Siége (Bibliothêque de Hartwell). There was an English outpost at the Point of Orleans; and, about eleven o'clock, the sentries descried through the gloom the ghostly outlines of the approaching ships. As they gazed, these mysterious strangers began to dart tongues of flame; fire ran like lightning up their masts and sails, and then they burst out like volcanoes. Filled as they were with pitch, tar, and every manner of combustible, mixed with fireworks, bombs, grenades, and old cannon, swivels, and muskets loaded to the throat, the effect was terrific. The troops at the Point, amazed at the sudden eruption, the din of the explosions, and the showers of grapeshot that rattled among the trees, lost their wits and fled. The blazing dragons hissed and roared, spouted sheets of fire, vomited smoke in black, pitchy volumes and vast illumined clouds, and shed their infernal glare on the distant city, the tents of Montcalm, and the long red lines of the British army, drawn up in array of battle, lest the French should cross from their encampments to attack them in the confusion. Knox calls the display "the grandest 212 V2 fireworks that can possibly be conceived." Yet the fireships did no other harm than burning alive one of their own captains and six or seven of his sailors who failed to escape in their boats. Some of them ran ashore before reaching the fleet; the others were seized by the intrepid English sailors, who, approaching in their boats, threw grappling-irons upon them and towed them towards land, till they swung round and stranded. Here, after venting their fury for a while, they subsided into quiet conflagration, which lasted till morning. Vaudreuil watched the result of his experiment from the steeple of the church at Beauport; then returned, dejected, to Quebec. Wolfe longed to fight his enemy; but his sagacious enemy would not gratify him. From the heights of Beauport, the rock of Quebec, or the summit of Cape Diamond, Montcalm could look down on the river and its shores as on a map, and watch each movement of the invaders. He was hopeful, perhaps confident; and for a month or more he wrote almost daily to Bourlamaque at Ticonderoga, in a cheerful, and often a jocose vein, mingling orders and instructions with pleasantries and bits of news. Yet his vigilance was unceasing. "We pass every night in bivouac, or else sleep in our clothes. Perhaps you are doing as much, my dear Bourlamaque." [715] [715] Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 27 Juin, 1759. All these letters are before me. Of the two commanders, Vaudreuil was the more sanguine, and professed full faith that all 213 V2 would go well. He too corresponded with Bourlamaque, to whom he gave his opinion, founded on the reports of deserters, that Wolfe had no chance of success unless Amherst should come to his aid. This he pronounced impossible; and he expressed a strong desire that the English would attack him, "so that we may rid ourselves of them at once." [716] He was courageous, except in the immediate presence of danger, and failed only when the crisis came. [716] Vaudreuil à Bourlamaque, 8 Juillet, 1759. Wolfe, held in check at every other point, had one movement in his power. He could seize the heights of Point Levi, opposite the city; and this, along with his occupation of the Island of Orleans, would give him command of the Basin of Quebec. Thence also he could fire on the place across the St. Lawrence, which is here less than a mile wide. The movement was begun on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, when, shivering in a north wind and a sharp frost, a part of Monckton's brigade was ferried over to Beaumont, on the south shore, and the rest followed in the morning. The rangers had a brush with a party of Canadians, whom they drove off, and the regulars then landed unopposed. Monckton ordered a proclamation, signed by Wolfe, to be posted on the door of the parish church. It called on the Canadians, in peremptory terms, to stand neutral in the contest, promised them, if they did so, full protection in property and religion, and threatened that, if they presumed to resist the invaders, their 214 V2 houses, goods, and harvests should be destroyed, and their churches despoiled. As soon as the troops were out of sight the inhabitants took down the placard and carried it to Vaudreuil. The brigade marched along the river road to Point Levi, drove off a body of French and Indians posted in the church, and took possession of the houses and the surrounding heights. In the morning they were intrenching themselves, when they were greeted by a brisk fire from the edge of the woods. It came from a party of Indians, whom the rangers presently put to flight, and, imitating their own ferocity, scalped nine of them. Wolfe came over to the camp on the next day, went with an escort to the heights opposite Quebec, examined it with a spy-glass, and chose a position from which to bombard it. Cannon and mortars were brought ashore, fascines and gabions made, intrenchments thrown up, and batteries planted. Knox came over from the main camp, and says that he had "a most agreeable view of the city of Quebec. It is a very fair object for our artillery, particularly the lower town." But why did Wolfe wish to bombard it? Its fortifications were but little exposed to his fire, and to knock its houses, convents, and churches to pieces would bring him no nearer to his object. His guns at Point Levi could destroy the city, but could not capture it; yet doubtless they would have good moral effect, discourage the French, and cheer his own soldiers with the flattering belief that they were achieving something. 215 V2 The guns of Quebec showered balls and bombs upon his workmen; but they still toiled on, and the French saw the fatal batteries fast growing to completion. The citizens, alarmed at the threatened destruction, begged the Governor for leave to cross the river and dislodge their assailants. At length he consented. A party of twelve or fifteen hundred was made up of armed burghers, Canadians from the camp, a few Indians, some pupils of the Seminary, and about a hundred volunteers from the regulars. Dumas, an experienced officer, took command of them; and, going up to Sillery, they crossed the river on the night of the twelfth of July. They had hardly climbed the heights of the south shore when they grew exceedingly nervous, though the enemy was still three miles off. The Seminary scholars fired on some of their own party, whom they mistook for English; and the same mishap was repeated a second and a third time. A panic seized the whole body, and Dumas could not control them. They turned and made for their canoes, rolling over each other as they rushed down the heights, and reappeared at Quebec at six in the morning, overwhelmed with despair and shame. [717] [717] événements de la Guerre en Canada (Hist. Soc. Quebec, 1861). Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. L'Abeille, II. No. 14 (a publication of the Quebec Seminary). Journal du Siége de Québec (Bibliothêque de Hartwell). Panet, Journal du Siége. Foligny, Journal mémoratif. Memoirs of the Siege of Quebec, by John Johnson, Clerk and Quartermaster-Sergeant to the Fifty-eighth Regiment. The presentiment of the unhappy burghers proved too true. The English batteries fell to 216 V2 their work, and the families of the town fled to the country for safety. In a single day eighteen houses and the cathedral were burned by exploding shells; and fiercer and fiercer the storm of fire and iron hailed upon Quebec. Wolfe did not rest content with distressing his enemy. With an ardor and a daring that no difficulties could cool, he sought means to strike an effective blow. It was nothing to lay Quebec in ruins if he could not defeat the army that protected it. To land from boats and attack Montcalm in front, through the mud of the Beauport flats or up the heights along the neighboring shore, was an enterprise too rash even for his temerity. It might, however, be possible to land below the cataract of Montmorenci, cross that stream higher up, and strike the French army in flank or rear; and he had no sooner secured his positions at the points of Levi and Orleans, than he addressed himself to this attempt. On the eighth several frigates and a bomb-ketch took their stations before the camp of the Chevalier de Lévis, who, with his division of Canadian militia, occupied the heights along the St. Lawrence just above the cataract. Here they shelled and cannonaded him all day; though, from his elevated position, with very little effect. Towards evening the troops on the Point of Orleans broke up their camp. Major Hardy, with a detachment of marines, was left to hold that post, while the rest embarked at night in the boats of the fleet. They were the brigades of Townshend and Murray, 217 V2 consisting of five battalions, with a body of grenadiers, light infantry, and rangers,—in all three thousand men. They landed before daybreak in front of the parish of L'Ange Gardien, a little below the cataract. The only opposition was from a troop of Canadians and Indians, whom they routed, after some loss, climbed the heights, gained the plateau above, and began to intrench themselves. A company of rangers, supported by detachments of regulars, was sent into the neighboring forest to protect the parties who were cutting fascines, and apparently, also, to look for a fording-place. Lévis, with his Scotch-Jacobite aide-de-camp, Johnstone, had watched the movements of Wolfe from the heights across the cataract. Johnstone says that he asked his commander if he was sure there was no ford higher up on the Montmorenci, by which the English could cross. Lévis averred that there was none, and that he himself had examined the stream to its source; on which a Canadian who stood by whispered to the aide-de-camp: "The General is mistaken; there is a ford." Johnstone told this to Lévis, who would not believe it, and so browbeat the Canadian that he dared not repeat what he had said. Johnstone, taking him aside, told him to go and find somebody who had lately crossed the ford, and bring him at once to the General's quarters; whereupon he soon reappeared with a man who affirmed that he had crossed it the night before with a sack of wheat on his back. A detachment was immediately 218 V2 sent to the place, with orders to intrench itself, and Repentigny, lieutenant of Lévis, was posted not far off with eleven hundred Canadians. Four hundred Indians passed the ford under the partisan Langlade, discovered Wolfe's detachment, hid themselves, and sent their commander to tell Repentigny that there was a body of English in the forest, who might all be destroyed if he would come over at once with his Canadians. Repentigny sent for orders to Lévis, and Lévis sent for orders to Vaudreuil, whose quarters were three or four miles distant. Vaudreuil answered that no risk should be run, and that he would come and see to the matter himself. It was about two hours before he arrived; and meanwhile the Indians grew impatient, rose from their hiding-place, fired on the rangers, and drove them back with heavy loss upon the regulars, who stood their ground, and at last repulsed the assailants. The Indians recrossed the ford with thirty-six scalps. If Repentigny had advanced, and Lévis had followed with his main body, the consequences to the English might have been serious; for, as Johnstone remarks, "a Canadian in the woods is worth three disciplined soldiers, as a soldier in a plain is worth three Canadians." Vaudreuil called a council of war. The question was whether an effort should be made to dislodge Wolfe's main force. Montcalm and the Governor were this time of one mind, and both thought it inexpedient to attack, with militia, a body of regular troops whose numbers and position were imperfectly known. Bigot gave 219 V2 his voice for the attack. He was overruled, and Wolfe was left to fortify himself in peace. [718] [718] The above is from a comparison of the rather discordant accounts of Johnstone, the Journal tenu à l'Armée, the Journal of Panet, and that of the Hartwell Library. The last says that Lévis crossed the Montmorenci. If so, he accomplished nothing. This affair should not be confounded with a somewhat similar one which took place on the 26th. His occupation of the heights of Montmorenci exposed him to great risks. The left wing of his army at Point Levi was six miles from its right wing at the cataract, and Major Hardy's detachment on the Point of Orleans was between them, separated from each by a wide arm of the St. Lawrence. Any one of the three camps might be overpowered before the others could support it; and Hardy with his small force was above all in danger of being cut to pieces. But the French kept persistently on the defensive; and after the failure of Dumas to dislodge the English from Point Levi, Vaudreuil would not hear of another such attempt. Wolfe was soon well intrenched; but it was easier to defend himself than to strike at his enemy. Montcalm, when urged to attack him, is said to have answered: "Let him amuse himself where he is. If we drive him off he may go to some place where he can do us harm." His late movement, however, had a discouraging effect on the Canadians, who now for the first time began to desert. His batteries, too, played across the chasm of Montmorenci upon the left wing of the French army with an effect extremely annoying. The position of the hostile forces was a remarkable one. They were separated by the vast gorge 220 V2 that opens upon the St. Lawrence; an amphitheatre of lofty precipices, their brows crested with forests, and their steep brown sides scantily feathered with stunted birch and fir. Into this abyss leaps the Montmorenci with one headlong plunge of nearly two hundred and fifty feet, a living column of snowy white, with its spray, its foam, its mists, and its rainbows; then spreads itself in broad thin sheets over a floor of rock and gravel, and creeps tamely to the St. Lawrence. It was but a gunshot across the gulf, and the sentinels on each side watched each other over the roar and turmoil of the cataract. Captain Knox, coming one day from Point Levi to receive orders from Wolfe, improved a spare hour to visit this marvel of nature. "I had very nigh paid dear for my inquisitiveness; for while I stood on the eminence I was hastily called to by one of our sentinels, when, throwing my eyes about, I saw a Frenchman creeping under the eastern extremity of their breastwork to fire at me. This obliged me to retire as fast as I could out of his reach, and, making up to the sentry to thank him for his attention, he told me the fellow had snapped his piece twice, and the second time it flashed in the pan at the instant I turned away from the Fall." Another officer, less fortunate, had a leg broken by a shot from the opposite cliffs. Day after day went by, and the invaders made no progress. Flags of truce passed often between the hostile camps. "You will demolish the town, no doubt," said the bearer of one of them, "but 221 V2 you shall never get inside of it." To which Wolfe replied: "I will have Quebec if I stay here till the end of November." Sometimes the heat was intense, and sometimes there were floods of summer rain that inundated the tents. Along the river, from the Montmorenci to Point Levi, there were ceaseless artillery fights between gunboats, frigates, and batteries on shore. Bands of Indians infested the outskirts of the camps, killing sentries and patrols. The rangers chased them through the woods; there were brisk skirmishes, and scalps lost and won. Sometimes the regulars took part in these forest battles; and once it was announced, in orders of the day, that "the General has ordered two sheep and some rum to Captain Cosnan's company of grenadiers for the spirit they showed this morning in pushing those scoundrels of Indians." The Indians complained that the British soldiers were learning how to fight, and no longer stood still in a mass to be shot at, as in Braddock's time. The Canadian coureurs-de-bois mixed with their red allies and wore their livery. One of them was caught on the eighteenth. He was naked, daubed red and blue, and adorned with a bunch of painted feathers dangling from the top of his head. He and his companions used the scalping-knife as freely as the Indians themselves; nor were the New England rangers much behind them in this respect, till an order came from Wolfe forbidding "the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canadians dressed like Indians." 222 V2 A part of the fleet worked up into the Basin, beyond the Point of Orleans; and here, on the warm summer nights, officers and men watched the cannon flashing and thundering from the heights of Montmorenci on one side, and those of Pont Levi on the other, and the bombs sailing through the air in fiery semicircles. Often the gloom was lighted up by the blaze of the burning houses of Quebec, kindled by incendiary shells. Both the lower and the upper town were nearly deserted by the inhabitants, some retreating into the country, and some into the suburb of St. Roch; while the Ursulines and Hospital nuns abandoned their convents to seek harborage beyond the range of shot. The city was a prey to robbers, who pillaged the empty houses, till an order came from headquarters promising the gallows to all who should be caught. News reached the French that Niagara was attacked, and that the army of Amherst was moving against Ticonderoga. The Canadians deserted more and more. They were disheartened by the defensive attitude in which both Vaudreuil and Montcalm steadily persisted; and accustomed as they were to rapid raids, sudden strokes, and a quick return to their homes, they tired of long weeks of inaction. The English patrols caught one of them as he was passing the time in fishing. "He seemed to be a subtle old rogue," says Knox, "of seventy years of age, as he told us. We plied him well with port wine, and then his heart was more open; and seeing that we laughed at the exaggerated accounts he 223 V2 had given us, he said he 'wished the affair was well over, one way or the other; that his countrymen were all discontented, and would either surrender, or disperse and act a neutral part, if it were not for the persuasions of their priests and the fear of being maltreated by the savages, with whom they are threatened on all occasions.'" A deserter reported on the nineteenth of July that nothing but dread of the Indians kept the Canadians in the camp. Wolfe's proclamation, at first unavailing, was now taking effect. A large number of Canadian prisoners, brought in on the twenty-fifth, declared that their countrymen would gladly accept his offers but for the threats of their commanders that if they did so the Indians should be set upon them. The prisoners said further that "they had been under apprehension for several days past of having a body of four hundred barbarians sent to rifle their parish and habitations." [719] Such threats were not wholly effectual. A French chronicler of the time says: "The Canadians showed their disgust every day, and deserted at every opportunity, in spite of the means taken to prevent them." "The people were intimidated, seeing all our army kept in one body and solely on the defensive; while the English, though far less numerous, divided their forces, and undertook various bold enterprises without meeting resistance." [720] [719] Knox, I. 347; compare pp. 339, 341, 346. [720] Journal du Siége (Bibliothêque de Hartwell). On the eighteenth the English accomplished a feat which promised important results. The 224 V2 French commanders had thought it impossible for any hostile ship to pass the batteries of Quebec; but about eleven o'clock at night, favored by the wind, and covered by a furious cannonade from Point Levi, the ship "Sutherland," with a frigate and several small vessels, sailed safely by and reached the river above the town. Here they at once attacked and destroyed a fireship and some small craft that they found there. Now, for the first time, it became necessary for Montcalm to weaken his army at Beauport by sending six hundred men, under Dumas, to defend the accessible points in the line of precipices between Quebec and Cap-Rouge. Several hundred more were sent on the next day, when it became known that the English had dragged a fleet of boats over Point Levi, launched them above the town, and despatched troops to embark in them. Thus a new feature was introduced into the siege operations, and danger had risen on a side where the French thought themselves safe. On the other hand, Wolfe had become more vulnerable than ever. His army was now divided, not into three parts, but into four, each so far from the rest that, in case of sudden attack, it must defend itself alone. That Montcalm did not improve his opportunity was apparently due to want of confidence in his militia. The force above the town did not lie idle. On the night of the twentieth, Colonel Carleton, with six hundred men, rowed eighteen miles up the river, and landed at Pointe-aux-Trembles, on the north shore. Here some of the families of Quebec 225 V2 had sought asylum; and Wolfe had been told by prisoners that not only were stores in great quantity to be found here, but also letters and papers throwing light on the French plans. Carleton and his men drove off a band of Indians who fired on them, and spent a quiet day around the parish church; but found few papers, and still fewer stores. They withdrew towards evening, carrying with them nearly a hundred women, children, and old men; any they were no sooner gone than the Indians returned to plunder the empty houses of their unfortunate allies. The prisoners were treated with great kindness. The ladies among them were entertained at supper by Wolfe, who jested with them on the caution of the French generals, saying: "I have given good chances to attack me, and am surprised that they have not profited by them." [721] On the next day the prisoners were all sent to Quebec under a flag of truce. [721] Journal tenu à l'Armée que commandoit feu M. le Marquis de Montcalm. Thus far Wolfe had refrained from executing the threats he had affixed the month before to the church of Beaumont. But now he issued another proclamation. It declared that the Canadians had shown themselves unworthy of the offers he had made them, and that he had therefore ordered his light troops to ravage their country and bring them prisoners to his camp. Such of the Canadian militia as belonged to the parishes near Quebec were now in a sad dilemma; for Montcalm threatened them on one side, and 226 V2 Wolfe on the other. They might desert to their homes, or they might stand by their colors; in the one case their houses were to be burned by French savages, and in the other by British light infantry. Wolfe at once gave orders in accord with his late proclamation; but he commanded that no church should be profaned, and no woman or child injured. The first effects of his stern policy are thus recorded by Knox: "Major Dalling's light infantry brought in this afternoon to our camp two hundred and fifty male and female prisoners. Among this number was a very respectable looking priest, and about forty men fit to bear arms. There was almost an equal number of black cattle, with about seventy sheep and lambs, and a few horses. Brigadier Monckton entertained the reverend father and some other fashionable personages in his tent, and most humanely ordered refreshments to all the rest of the captives; which noble example was followed by the soldiery, who generously crowded about those unhappy people, sharing the provisions, rum, and tobacco with them. They were sent in the evening on board of transports in the river." Again, two days later: "Colonel Fraser's detachment returned this morning, and presented us with more scenes of distress and the dismal consequences of war, by a great number of wretched families, whom they brought in prisoners, with some of their effects, and near three hundred black cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses." 227 V2 On the next night the attention of the excellent journalist was otherwise engaged. Vaudreuil tried again to burn the English fleet. "Late last night," writes Knox, under date of the twenty-eighth, "the enemy sent down a most formidable fireraft, which consisted of a parcel of schooners, shallops, and stages chained together. It could not be less than a hundred fathoms in length, and was covered with grenades, old swivels, gun and pistol barrels loaded up to their muzzles, and various other inventions and combustible matters. This seemed to be their last attempt against our fleet, which happily miscarried, as before; for our gallant seamen, with their usual expertness, grappled them before they got down above a third part of the Basin, towed them safe to shore, and left them at anchor, continually repeating, All's well. A remarkable expression from some of these intrepid souls to their comrades on this occasion I must not omit, on account of its singular uncouthness; namely: 'Damme, Jack, didst thee ever take hell in tow before?'" According to a French account, this aquatic infernal machine consisted of seventy rafts, boats, and schooners. Its failure was due to no shortcoming on the part of its conductors; who, under a brave Canadian named Courval, acted with coolness and resolution. Nothing saved the fleet but the courage of the sailors, swarming out in their boats to fight the approaching conflagration. It was now the end of July. More than half the summer was gone, and Quebec seemed as far 228 V2 as ever beyond the grasp of Wolfe. Its buildings were in ruins, and the neighboring parishes were burned and ravaged; but its living rampart, the army of Montcalm, still lay in patient defiance along the shores of Beauport, while above the city every point where a wildcat could climb the precipices was watched and guarded, and Dumas with a thousand men held the impregnable heights of Cap-Rouge. Montcalm persisted in doing nothing that his enemy wished him to do. He would not fight on Wolfe's terms, and Wolfe resolved at last to fight him on his own; that is, to attack his camp in front. The plan was desperate; for, after leaving troops enough to hold Point Levi and the heights of Montmorenci, less than five thousand men would be left to attack a position of commanding strength, where Montcalm at an hour's notice could collect twice as many to oppose them. But Wolfe had a boundless trust in the disciplined valor of his soldiers, and an utter scorn of the militia who made the greater part of his enemy's force. Towards the Montmorenci the borders of the St. Lawrence are, as we have seen, extremely high and steep. At a mile from the gorge of the cataract there is, at high tide, a strand, about the eighth of a mile wide, between the foot of these heights and the river; and beyond this strand the receding tide lays bare a tract of mud nearly half a mile wide. At the edge of the dry ground the French had built a redoubt mounted with cannon, 229 V2 and there were other similar works on the strand a quarter of a mile nearer the cataract. Wolfe could not see from the river that these redoubts were commanded by the musketry of the intrenchments along the brink of the heights above. These intrenchments were so constructed that they swept with cross-fires the whole face of the declivity, which was covered with grass, and was very steep. Wolfe hoped that, if he attacked one of the redoubts, the French would come down to defend it, and so bring on a general engagement; or, if they did not, that he should gain an opportunity of reconnoitring the heights to find some point where they could be stormed with a chance of success. In front of the gorge of the Montmorenci there was a ford during several hours of low tide, so that troops from the adjoining English camp might cross to co-operate with their comrades landing in boats from Point Levi and the Island of Orleans. On the morning of the thirty-first of July, the tide then being at the flood, the French saw the ship "Centurion," of sixty-four guns, anchor near the Montmorenci and open fire on the redoubts. Then two armed transports, each of fourteen guns, stood in as close as possible to the first redoubt and fired upon it, stranding as the tide went out, till in the afternoon they lay bare upon the mud. At the same time a battery of more than forty heavy pieces, planted on the lofty promontory beyond the Montmorenci, began a furious cannonade upon the flank of the French intrenchments. 230 V2 It did no great harm, however, for the works were protected by a great number of traverses, which stopped the shot; and the Canadians, who manned this part of the lines, held their ground with excellent steadiness. About eleven o'clock a fleet of boats filled with troops, chiefly from Point Levi, appeared in the river and hovered off the shore west of the parish church of Beauport, as if meaning to land there. Montcalm was perplexed, doubting whether the real attack was to be made here, or toward the Montmorenci. Hour after hour the boats moved to and fro, to increase his doubts and hide the real design; but he soon became convinced that the camp of Lévis at the Montmorenci was the true object of his enemy; and about two o'clock he went thither, greeted as he rode along the lines by shouts of Vive notre Général! Lévis had already made preparations for defence with his usual skill. His Canadians were reinforced by the battalions of Béarn, Guienne, and Royal Roussillon; and, as the intentions of Wolfe became certain, the right of the camp was nearly abandoned, the main strength of the army being gathered between the river of Beauport and the Montmorenci, where, according to a French writer, there were, towards the end of the afternoon, about twelve thousand men. [722] [722] Panet, Journal. At half-past five o'clock the tide was out, and the crisis came. The batteries across the Montmorenci, the distant batteries of Point Levi, the 231 V2 cannon of the "Centurion," and those of the two stranded ships, all opened together with redoubled fury. The French batteries replied; and, amid this deafening roar of artillery, the English boats set their troops ashore at the edge of the broad tract of sedgy mud that the receding river had left bare. At the same time a column of two thousand men was seen, a mile away, moving in perfect order across the Montmorenci ford. The first troops that landed from the boats were thirteen companies of grenadiers and a detachment of Royal Americans. They dashed swiftly forward; while at some distance behind came Monckton's brigade, composed of the fifteenth, or Amherst's regiment, and the seventy-eighth, or Fraser's Highlanders. The day had been fair and warm; but the sky was now thick with clouds, and large rain-drops began to fall, the precursors of a summer storm. With the utmost precipitation, without orders, and without waiting for Monckton's brigade to come up, the grenadiers in front made a rush for the redoubt near the foot of the hill. The French abandoned it; but the assailants had no sooner gained their prize than the thronged heights above blazed with musketry, and a tempest of bullets fell among them. Nothing daunted, they dashed forward again, reserving their fire, and struggling to climb the steep ascent; while, with yells and shouts of Vive le Roi! the troops and Canadians at the top poured upon them a hailstorm of musket-balls and buckshot, and dead and wounded in 232 V2 numbers rolled together down the slope. At that instant the clouds burst, and the rain fell in torrents. "We could not see half way down the hill," says the Chevalier Johnstone, who was at this part of the line. Ammunition was wet on both sides, and the grassy steeps became so slippery that it was impossible to climb them. The English say that the storm saved the French; the French, with as much reason, that it saved the English. The baffled grenadiers drew back into the redoubt. Wolfe saw the madness of persisting, and ordered a retreat. The rain ceased, and troops of Indians came down the heights to scalp the fallen. Some of them ran towards Lieutenant Peyton, of the Royal Americans, as he lay disabled by a musket-shot. With his double-barrelled gun he brought down two of his assailants, when a Highland sergeant snatched him in his arms, dragged him half a mile over the mud-flats, and placed him in one of the boats. A friend of Peyton, Captain Ochterlony, had received a mortal wound, and an Indian would have scalped him but for the generous intrepidity of a soldier of the battalion of Guienne; who, seizing the enraged savage, held him back till several French officers interposed, and had the dying man carried to a place of safety. The English retreated in good order, after setting fire to the two stranded vessels. Those of the grenadiers and Royal Americans who were left alive rowed for the Point of Orleans; the fifteenth regiment rowed for Point Levi; and the 233 V2 Highlanders, led by Wolfe himself, joined the column from beyond the Montmorenci, placing themselves in its rear as it slowly retired along the flats and across the ford, the Indians yelling and the French shouting from the heights, while the British waved their hats, daring them to come down and fight. The grenadiers and the Royal Americans, who had borne the brunt of the fray, bore also nearly all the loss; which, in proportion to their numbers, was enormous. Knox reports it at four hundred and forty-three, killed, wounded, and missing, including one colonel, eight captains, twenty-one lieutenants, and three ensigns. Vaudreuil, delighted, wrote to Bourlamaque an account of the affair. "I have no more anxiety about Quebec. M. Wolfe, I can assure you, will make no progress. Luckily for him, his prudence saved him from the consequences of his mad enterprise, and he contented himself with losing about five hundred of his best soldiers. Deserters say that he will try us again in a few days. That is what we want; he'll find somebody to talk to (il trouvera à qui parler)." Note.—Among the killed in this affair was Edward Botwood, sergeant in the grenadiers of the forty-seventh, or Lascelles' regiment. "Ned Botwood" was well known among his comrades as a poet; and the following lines of his, written on the eve of the expedition to Quebec, continued to be favorites with the British troops during the War of the Revolution (see Historical Magazine, II., First Series, 164). It may be observed here that the war produced a considerable quantity of indifferent verse on both sides. On that of the English it took the shape of occasional ballads, such as "Bold General Wolfe," printed on broadsides, or of patriotic effusions scattered through magazines and newspapers, while the French celebrated all their victories with songs. 234 V2 HOT STUFF. Air,—Lilies of France. Come, each death-doing dog who dares venture his neck, Come, follow the hero that goes to Quebec; Jump aboard of the transports, and loose every sail, Pay your debts at the tavern by giving leg-bail; And ye that love fighting shall soon have enough: Wolfe commands us, my boys; we shall give them Hot Stuff. Up the River St. Lawrence our troops shall advance, To the Grenadiers' March we will teach them to dance. Cape Breton we have taken, and next we will try At their capital to give them another black eye. Vaudreuil, 't is in vain you pretend to look gruff,— Those are coming who know how to give you Hot Stuff. With powder in his periwig, and snuff in his nose, Monsieur will run down our descent to oppose; And the Indians will come: but the light infantry Will soon oblige them to betake to a tree. From such rascals as these may we fear a rebuff? Advance, grenadiers, and let fly your Hot Stuff! When the forty-seventh regiment is dashing ashore, While bullets are whistling and cannons do roar, Says Montcalm: "Those are Shirley's—I know the lappels." "You lie," says Ned Botwood, "we belong to Lascelles'! Tho' our cloathing is changed, yet we scorn a powder-puff; So at you, ye b——s, here's give you Hot Stuff." On the repulse at Montmorenci, Wolfe to Pitt, 2 Sept. 1759. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. Panet, Journal du Siége. Johnstone, Dialogue in Hades. Journal tenu à l'Armée, etc. Journal of the Siege of Quebec, by a Gentleman in an eminent Station on the Spot. Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Fraser, Journal of the Siege. Journal du Siége d'après un MS. déposé à la Bibliothêque Hartwell. Foligny, Journal mémoratif. Journal of Transactions at the Siege of Quebec, in Notes and Queries, XX. 164. John Johnson, Memoirs of the Siege of Quebec. Journal of an Expedition on the River St. Lawrence. An Authentic Account of the Expedition against Quebec, by a Volunteer on that Expedition. J. Gibson to Governor Lawrence, 1 Aug. 1759. Knox, I. 354. Mante, 244. CHAPTER XXVI. 1759. AMHERST. NIAGARA. Amherst on Lake George ? Capture of Ticonderoga and Crown Point ? Delays of Amherst ? Niagara Expedition ? La Corne attacks Oswego ? His Repulse ? Niagara besieged ? Aubry comes to its Relief ? Battle ? Rout of the French ? The Fort taken ? Isle-aux-Noix ? Amherst advances to attack it ? Storm ? The Enterprise abandoned ? Rogers attacks St. Francis ? Destroys the Town ? Sufferings of the Rangers. Pitt had directed that, while Quebec was attacked, an attempt should be made to penetrate into Canada by way of Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Thus the two armies might unite in the heart of the colony, or, at least, a powerful diversion might be effected in behalf of Wolfe. At the same time Oswego was to be re-established, and the possession of Fort Duquesne, or Pittsburg, secured by reinforcements and supplies; while Amherst, the commander-in-chief, was further directed to pursue any other enterprise which in his opinion would weaken the enemy, without detriment to the main objects of the campaign. [723] He accordingly resolved to attempt the capture of Niagara. Brigadier Prideaux was charged with 236 V2 this stroke; Brigadier Stanwix was sent to conduct the operations for the relief of Pittsburg; and Amherst himself prepared to lead the grand central advance against Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Montreal. [724] [723] Pitt to Amherst, 23 Jan., 10 March, 1759. [724] Amherst to Pitt, 19 June, 1759. Amherst to Stanwix, 6 May, 1759. Towards the end of June he reached that valley by the head of Lake George which for five years past had been the annual mustering-place of armies. Here were now gathered about eleven thousand men, half regulars and half provincials, [725] drilling every day, firing by platoons, firing at marks, practising man?uvres in the woods; going out on scouting parties, bathing parties, fishing parties; gathering wild herbs to serve for greens, cutting brushwood and meadow hay to make hospital beds. The sick were ordered on certain mornings to repair to the surgeon's tent, there, in prompt succession, to swallow such doses as he thought appropriate to their several ailments; and it was further ordered that "every fair day they that can walk be paraded together and marched down to the lake to wash their hands and faces." Courts-martial were numerous; culprits were flogged at the head of each regiment in turn, and occasionally one was shot. A frequent employment was the cutting of spruce tops to make spruce beer. This innocent beverage was reputed sovereign against scurvy; and such was the fame of its virtues that a copious supply of the West Indian molasses used in concocting it 237 V2 was thought indispensable to every army or garrison in the wilderness. Throughout this campaign it is repeatedly mentioned in general orders, and the soldiers are promised that they shall have as much of it as they want at a halfpenny a quart. [726] [725] Mante, 210. [726] Orderly Book of Commissary Wilson in the Expedition against Ticonderoga, 1759. Journal of Samuel Warner, a Massachusetts Soldier, 1759. General and Regimental Orders, Army of Major-General Amherst, 1759. Diary of Sergeant Merriman, of Ruggles's Regiment, 1759. I owe to William L. Stone, Esq., the use of the last two curious documents. The rear of the army was well protected from insult. Fortified posts were built at intervals of three or four miles along the road to Fort Edward, and especially at the station called Half-way Brook; while, for the whole distance, a broad belt of wood on both sides was cut down and burned, to deprive a skulking enemy of cover. Amherst was never long in one place without building a fort there. He now began one, which proved wholly needless, on that flat rocky hill where the English made their intrenched camp during the siege of Fort William Henry. Only one bastion of it was ever finished, and this is still shown to tourists under the name of Fort George. The army embarked on Saturday, the twenty-first of July. The Reverend Benjamin Pomeroy watched their departure in some concern, and wrote on Monday to Abigail, his wife: "I could wish for more appearance of dependence on God than was observable among them; yet I hope God will grant deliverance unto Israel by them." There was another military pageant, another long procession of boats and banners, among the mountains 238 V2 and islands of Lake George. Night found them near the outlet; and here they lay till morning, tossed unpleasantly on waves ruffled by a summer gale. At daylight they landed, beat back a French detachment, and marched by the portage road to the saw-mill at the waterfall. There was little resistance. They occupied the heights, and then advanced to the famous line of intrenchment against which the army of Abercromby had hurled itself in vain. These works had been completely reconstructed, partly of earth, and partly of logs. Amherst's followers were less numerous than those of his predecessor, while the French commander, Bourlamaque, had a force nearly equal to that of Montcalm in the summer before; yet he made no attempt to defend the intrenchment, and the English, encamping along its front, found it an excellent shelter from the cannon of the fort beyond. Amherst brought up his artillery and began approaches in form, when, on the night of the twenty-third, it was found that Bourlamaque had retired down Lake Champlain, leaving four hundred men under Hebecourt to defend the place as long as possible. This was in obedience to an order from Vaudreuil, requiring him on the approach of the English to abandon both Ticonderoga and Crown Point, retreat to the outlet of Lake Champlain, take post at Isle-aux-Noix, and there defend himself to the last extremity; [727] a course 239 V2 unquestionably the best that could have been taken, since obstinacy in holding Ticonderoga might have involved the surrender of Bourlamaque's whole force, while Isle-aux-Noix offered rare advantages for defence. [727] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 8 Nov. 1759. Instructions pour M. de Bourlamaque, 20 Mai, 1759, signé Vaudreuil. Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 4 Juin, 1759. The fort fired briskly; a cannon-shot killed Colonel Townshend, and a few soldiers were killed and wounded by grape and bursting shells; when, at dusk on the evening of the twenty-sixth, an unusual movement was seen among the garrison, and, about ten o'clock, three deserters came in great excitement to the English camp. They reported that Hebecourt and his soldiers were escaping in their boats, and that a match was burning in the magazine to blow Ticonderoga to atoms. Amherst offered a hundred guineas to any one of them who would point out the match, that it might be cut; but they shrank from the perilous venture. All was silent till eleven o'clock, when a broad, fierce glare burst on the night, and a roaring explosion shook the promontory; then came a few breathless moments, and then the fragments of Fort Ticonderoga fell with clatter and splash on the water and the land. It was but one bastion, however, that had been thus hurled skyward. The rest of the fort was little hurt, though the barracks and other combustible parts were set on fire, and by the light the French flag was seen still waving on the rampart. [728] A sergeant of the light infantry, 240 V2 braving the risk of other explosions, went and brought it off. Thus did this redoubted stronghold of France fall at last into English hands, as in all likelihood it would have done a year sooner, if Amherst had commanded in Abercromby's place; for, with the deliberation that marked all his proceedings, he would have sat down before Montcalm's wooden wall and knocked it to splinters with his cannon. [728] Journal of Colonel Amherst (brother of General Amherst). Vaudreuil au Ministre, 8 Nov. 1759. Amherst to Prideaux, 28 July, 1759. Amherst to Pitt, 27 July, 1759. Mante, 213. Knox, I., 397-403. Vaudreuil à Bourlamaque, 19 Juin, 1759. He now set about repairing the damaged works and making ready to advance on Crown Point; when on the first of August his scouts told him that the enemy had abandoned this place also, and retreated northward down the lake. [729] Well pleased, he took possession of the deserted fort, and, in the animation of success, thought for a moment of keeping the promise he had given to Pitt "to make an irruption into Canada with the utmost vigor and despatch." [730] Wolfe, his brother in arms and his friend, was battling with the impossible under the rocks of Quebec, and every motive, public and private, impelled Amherst to push to his relief, not counting costs, or balancing risks too nicely. He was ready enough to spur on others, for he wrote to Gage: "We must all be alert and active day and night; if we all do our parts the French must fall;" [731] but, far from doing his, he set the army to building a new fort at Crown Point, telling them that it would "give plenty, 241 V2 peace, and quiet to His Majesty's subjects for ages to come." [732] Then he began three small additional forts, as outworks to the first, sent two parties to explore the sources of the Hudson; one party to explore Otter Creek; another to explore South Bay, which was already well known; another to make a road across what is now the State of Vermont, from Crown Point to Charlestown, or "Number Four," on the Connecticut; and another to widen and improve the old French road between Crown Point and Ticonderoga. His industry was untiring; a great deal of useful work was done: but the essential task of making a diversion to aid the army of Wolfe was needlessly postponed. [729] Amherst to Pitt, 5 Aug. 1759. [730] Ibid., 19 June, 1759. [731] Amherst to Gage, 1 Aug. 1759. [732] General Orders, 13 Aug. 1759. It is true that some delay was inevitable. The French had four armed vessels on the lake, and this made it necessary to provide an equal or superior force to protect the troops on their way to Isle-aux-Noix. Captain Loring, the English naval commander, was therefore ordered to build a brigantine; and, this being thought insufficient, he was directed to add a kind of floating battery, moved by sweeps. Three weeks later, in consequence of farther information concerning the force of the French vessels, Amherst ordered an armed sloop to be put on the stocks; and this involved a long delay. The saw-mill at Ticonderoga was to furnish planks for the intended navy; but, being overtasked in sawing timber for the new works at Crown Point, it was continually breaking down. Hence much time was lost, and autumn was 242 V2 well advanced before Loring could launch his vessels. [733] [733] Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759. This letter, which is in the form of a journal, covers twenty-one folio pages. Meanwhile news had come from Prideaux and the Niagara expedition. That officer had been ordered to ascend the Mohawk with five thousand regulars and provincials, leave a strong garrison at Fort Stanwix, on the Great Carrying Place, establish posts at both ends of Lake Oneida, descend the Onondaga to Oswego, leave nearly half his force there under Colonel Haldimand, and proceed with the rest to attack Niagara. [734] These orders he accomplished. Haldimand remained to reoccupy the spot that Montcalm had made desolate three years before; and, while preparing to build a fort, he barricaded his camp with pork and flour barrels, lest the enemy should make a dash upon him from their station at the head of the St. Lawrence Rapids. Such an attack was probable; for if the French could seize Oswego, the return of Prideaux from Niagara would be cut off, and when his small stock of provisions had failed, he would be reduced to extremity. Saint-Luc de la Corne left the head of the Rapids early in July with a thousand French and Canadians and a body of Indians, who soon made their appearance among the stumps and bushes that surrounded the camp at Oswego. The priest Piquet was of the party; and five deserters declared that he solemnly blessed them, and told them to give the English no quarter. [735] Some 243 V2 valuable time was lost in bestowing the benediction; yet Haldimand's men were taken by surprise. Many of them were dispersed in the woods, cutting timber for the intended fort; and it might have gone hard with them had not some of La Corne's Canadians become alarmed and rushed back to their boats, oversetting Father Piquet on the way. [736] These being rallied, the whole party ensconced itself in a tract of felled trees so far from the English that their fire did little harm. They continued it about two hours, and resumed it the next morning; when, three cannon being brought to bear on them, they took to their boats and disappeared, having lost about thirty killed and wounded, including two officers and La Corne himself, who was shot in the thigh. The English loss was slight. [734] Instructions of Amherst to Prideaux, 17 May, 1759. Prideaux to Haldimand, 30 June, 1759. [735] Journal of Colonel Amherst. [736] Pouchot, II. 130. Compare Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760; N. Y. Col. Docs., VII. 395; and Letter from Oswego, in Boston Evening Post, No. 1,248. Prideaux safely reached Niagara, and laid siege to it. It was a strong fort, lately rebuilt in regular form by an excellent officer, Captain Pouchot, of the battalion of Béarn, who commanded it. It stood where the present fort stands, in the angle formed by the junction of the River Niagara with Lake Ontario, and was held by about six hundred men, well supplied with provisions and munitions of war. [737] Higher up the river, a mile and a half above the cataract, there was another fort, called Little Niagara, built of wood, and commanded by 244 V2 the half-breed officer, Joncaire-Chabert, who with his brother, Joncaire-Clauzonne, and a numerous clan of Indian relatives, had so long thwarted the efforts of Johnson to engage the Five Nations in the English cause. But recent English successes had had their effect. Joncaire's influence was waning, and Johnson was now in Prideaux's camp with nine hundred Five Nation warriors pledged to fight the French. Joncaire, finding his fort untenable, burned it, and came with his garrison and his Indian friends to reinforce Niagara. [738] [737] Pouchot says 515, besides 60 men from Little Niagara; Vaudreuil gives a total of 589. [738] Pouchot, II. 52, 59. Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres, Mémoire pour Daniel de Joncaire-Chabert. Pouchot had another resource, on which he confidently relied. In obedience to an order from Vaudreuil, the French population of the Illinois, Detroit, and other distant posts, joined with troops of Western Indians, had come down the Lakes to recover Pittsburg, undo the work of Forbes, and restore French ascendency on the Ohio. Pittsburg had been in imminent danger; nor was it yet safe, though General Stanwix was sparing no effort to succor it. [739] These mixed bands of white men and red, bushrangers and savages, were now gathered, partly at Le B?uf and Venango, but chiefly at Presquisle, under command of Aubry, Ligneris, Marin, and other partisan chiefs, the best in Canada. No sooner did Pouchot learn that the English were coming to attack him than he sent a messenger to summon them all to his aid. [740] [739] Letters of Colonel Hugh Mercer, commanding at Pittsburg, January-June, 1759. Letters of Stanwix, May-July, 1759. Letter from Pittsburg, in Boston News Letter, No. 3,023. Narrative of John Ormsby. [740] Pouchot, II. 46. 245 V2 The siege was begun in form, though the English engineers were so incompetent that the trenches, as first laid out, were scoured by the fire of the place, and had to be made anew. [741] At last the batteries opened fire. A shell from a coehorn burst prematurely, just as it left the mouth of the piece, and a fragment striking Prideaux on the head, killed him instantly. Johnson took command in his place, and made up in energy what he lacked in skill. In two or three weeks the fort was in extremity. The rampart was breached, more than a hundred of the garrison were killed or disabled, and the rest were exhausted with want of sleep. Pouchot watched anxiously for the promised succors; and on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July a distant firing told him that they were at hand. [741] Rutherford to Haldimand, 14 July, 1759. Prideaux was extremely disgusted. Prideaux to Haldimand, 13 July, 1759. Allan Macleane, of the Highlanders, calls the engineers "fools and blockheads, G—d d—n them." Macleane to Haldimand, 21 July, 1759. Aubry and Ligneris, with their motley following, had left Presquisle a few days before, to the number, according to Vaudreuil, of eleven hundred French and two hundred Indians. [742] Among them was a body of colony troops; but the Frenchmen of the party were chiefly traders and bushrangers from the West, connecting links between civilization and savagery; some of them indeed were mere 246 V2 white Indians, imbued with the ideas and morals of the wigwam, wearing hunting-shirts of smoked deer-skin embroidered with quills of the Canada porcupine, painting their faces black and red, tying eagle feathers in their long hair, or plastering it on their temples with a compound of vermilion and glue. They were excellent woodsmen, skilful hunters, and perhaps the best bushfighters in all Canada. [742] "Il n'y avoit que 1,100 Fran?ois et 200 sauvages." Vaudreuil au Ministre, 30 Oct. 1759. Johnson says "1,200 men, with a number of Indians." Johnson to Amherst, 25 July, 1759. Portneuf, commanding at Presquisle, wrote to Pouchot that there were 1,600 French and 1,200 Indians. Pouchot, II. 94. A letter from Aubry to Pouchot put the whole at 2,500, half of them Indians. Historical Magazine, V., Second Series, 199. When Pouchot heard the firing, he went with a wounded artillery officer to the bastion next the river; and as the forest had been cut away for a great distance, they could see more than a mile and a half along the shore. There, by glimpses among trees and bushes, they descried bodies of men, now advancing, and now retreating; Indians in rapid movement, and the smoke of guns, the sound of which reached their ears in heavy volleys, or a sharp and angry rattle. Meanwhile the English cannon had ceased their fire, and the silent trenches seemed deserted, as if their occupants were gone to meet the advancing foe. There was a call in the fort for volunteers to sally and destroy the works; but no sooner did they show themselves along the covered way than the seemingly abandoned trenches were thronged with men and bayonets, and the attempt was given up. The distant firing lasted half an hour, then ceased, and Pouchot remained in suspense; till, at two in the afternoon, a friendly Onondaga, who had passed unnoticed through the English lines, came to him with the announcement that the French 247 V2 and their allies had been routed and cut to pieces. Pouchot would not believe him. Nevertheless his tale was true. Johnson, besides his Indians, had with him about twenty-three hundred men, whom he was forced to divide into three separate bodies,—one to guard the bateaux, one to guard the trenches, and one to fight Aubry and his band. This last body consisted of the provincial light infantry and the pickets, two companies of grenadiers, and a hundred and fifty men of the forty-sixth regiment, all under command of Colonel Massey. [743] They took post behind an abattis at a place called La Belle Famille, and the Five Nation warriors placed themselves on their flanks. These savages had shown signs of disaffection; and when the enemy approached, they opened a parley with the French Indians, which, however, soon ended, and both sides raised the war-whoop. The fight was brisk for a while; but at last Aubry's men broke away in a panic. The French officers seem to have made desperate efforts to retrieve the day, for nearly all of them were killed or captured; while their followers, after heavy loss, fled to their canoes and boats above the cataract, hastened back to Lake Erie, burned Presquisle, Le B?uf, and Venango, and, joined by the garrisons of those forts, retreated to Detroit, leaving the whole region of the upper Ohio in undisputed possession of the English. [743] Johnson to Amherst, 25 July, 1759. Knox, II. 135. Captain Delancey to———, 25 July, 1759. This writer commanded the light infantry in the fight. 248 V2 At four o'clock on the day of the battle, after a furious cannonade on both sides, a trumpet sounded from the trenches, and an officer approached the fort with a summons to surrender. He brought also a paper containing the names of the captive French officers, though some of them were spelled in a way that defied recognition. Pouchot, feigning incredulity, sent an officer of his own to the English camp, who soon saw unanswerable proof of the disaster; for here, under a shelter of leaves and boughs near the tent of Johnson, sat Ligneris, severely wounded, with Aubry, Villiers, Montigny, Marin, and their companions in misfortune,—in all, sixteen officers, four cadets, and a surgeon. [744] [744] Johnson gives the names in his private Diary, printed in Stone, Life of Johnson, II. 394. Compare Pouchot, II. 105, 106. Letter from Niagara, in Boston Evening Post, No. 1,250. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 30 Oct. 1759. Pouchot had now no choice but surrender. By the terms of the capitulation, the garrison were to be sent prisoners to New York, though honors of war were granted them in acknowledgment of their courageous conduct. There was a special stipulation that they should be protected from the Indians, of whom they stood in the greatest terror, lest the massacre of Fort William Henry should be avenged upon them. Johnson restrained his dangerous allies, and, though the fort was pillaged, no blood was shed. The capture of Niagara was an important stroke. Thenceforth Detroit, Michillimackinac, the Illinois, and all the other French interior posts, were severed 249 V2 from Canada, and left in helpless isolation; but Amherst was not yet satisfied. On hearing of Prideaux's death he sent Brigadier Gage to supersede Johnson and take command on Lake Ontario, directing him to descend the St. Lawrence, attack the French posts at the head of the rapids, and hold them if possible for the winter. The attempt was difficult; for the French force on the St. Lawrence was now greater than that which Gage could bring against it, after providing for the safety of Oswego and Niagara. Nor was he by nature prone to dashing and doubtful enterprise. He reported that the movement was impossible, much to the disappointment of Amherst, who seemed to expect from subordinates an activity greater than his own. [744] [745] Amherst to Gage, 28 July, 1 Aug., 14 Aug., 11 Sept. 1759. Diary of Sir William Johnson, in Stone, Life of Johnson, II. 394-429. He, meanwhile, was working at his fort at Crown Point, while the season crept away, and Bourlamaque lay ready to receive him at Isle-aux-Noix. "I wait his coming with impatience," writes the French commander, "though I doubt if he will venture to attack a post where we are intrenched to the teeth, and armed with a hundred pieces of cannon." [746] Bourlamaque now had with him thirty-five hundred men, in a position of great strength. Isle-aux-Noix, planted in mid-channel of the Richelieu soon after it issues from Lake Champlain, had been diligently fortified since the spring. On each side of it was an arm of the river, closed against 250 V2 an enemy with chevaux-de-frise. To attack it in front in the face of its formidable artillery would be a hazardous attempt, and the task of reducing it was likely to be a long one. The French force in these parts had lately received accessions. After the fall of Niagara the danger seemed so great, both in the direction of Lake Ontario and that of Lake Champlain, that Lévis had been sent up from Quebec with eight hundred men to command the whole department of Montreal. [747] A body of troops and militia was encamped opposite that town, ready to march towards either quarter, as need might be, while the abundant crops of the neighboring parishes were harvested by armed bands, ready at a word to drop the sickle for the gun. [746] Bourlamaque à (Bernetz?), 22 Sept. 1759. [747] Montcalm à Bourlamaque, 9 Ao?t, 1759. Rigaud à Bourlamaque, 14 Ao?t, 1759. Lévis à Bourlamaque, 25 Ao?t, 1759. Thus the promised advance of Amherst into Canada would be not without its difficulties, even when his navy, too tardily begun, should be ready to act its part. But if he showed no haste in succoring Wolfe, he at least made some attempts to communicate with him. Early in August he wrote him a letter, which Ensign Hutchins, of the rangers, carried to him in about a month by the long and circuitous route of the Kennebec, and which, after telling the news of the campaign, ended thus: "You may depend on my doing all I can for effectually reducing Canada. Now is the time!" [748] Amherst soon after tried another expedient, 251 V2 and sent Captains Kennedy and Hamilton with a flag of truce and a message of peace to the Abenakis of St. Francis, who, he thought, won over by these advances, might permit the two officers to pass unmolested to Quebec. But the Abenakis seized them and carried them prisoners to Montreal; on which Amherst sent Major Robert Rogers and a band of rangers to destroy their town. [749] [748] Amherst to Wolfe, 7 Aug. 1759. [749] Amherst to Pitt, 22 Oct. 1759. Rogers, Journals, 144. It was the eleventh of October before the miniature navy of Captain Loring—the floating battery, the brig, and the sloop that had been begun three weeks too late—was ready for service. They sailed at once to look for the enemy. The four French vessels made no resistance. One of them succeeded in reaching Isle-aux-Noix; one was run aground; and two were sunk by their crews, who escaped to the shore. Amherst, meanwhile, leaving the provincials to work at the fort, embarked with the regulars in bateaux, and proceeded on his northern way till, on the evening of the twelfth, a head-wind began to blow, and, rising to a storm, drove him for shelter into Ligonier Bay, on the west side of the lake. [750] On the thirteenth, it blew a gale. The lake raged like an angry sea, and the frail bateaux, fit only for smooth water, could not have lived a moment. Through all the next night the gale continued, with floods of driving rain. "I hope it will soon change," wrote Amherst on the fifteenth, "for I 252 V2 have no time to lose." He was right. He had waited till the season of autumnal storms, when nature was more dangerous than man. On the sixteenth there was frost, and the wind did not abate. On the next morning it shifted to the south, but soon turned back with violence to the north, and the ruffled lake put on a look of winter, "which determined me," says the General, "not to lose time by striving to get to the Isle-aux-Noix, where I should arrive too late to force the enemy from their post, but to return to Crown Point and complete the works there." This he did, and spent the remnant of the season in the congenial task of finishing the fort, of which the massive remains still bear witness to his industry. [750] Orderly Book of Commissary Wilson. When Lévis heard that the English army had fallen back, he wrote, well pleased, to Bourlamaque: "I don't know how General Amherst will excuse himself to his Court, but I am very glad he let us alone, because the Canadians are so backward that you could count on nobody but the regulars." [751] [751] Lévis à Bourlamaque, 1 Nov. 1759. Concerning this year's operations on the Lakes, it may be observed that the result was not what the French feared, or what the British colonists had cause to hope. If, at the end of winter, Amherst had begun, as he might have done, the building of armed vessels at the head of the navigable waters of Lake Champlain, where Whitehall now stands, he would have had a navy ready to his hand before August, and would have been able to follow the 253 V2 retreating French without delay, and attack them at Isle-aux-Noix before they had finished their fortifications. And if, at the same time, he had directed Prideaux, instead of attacking Niagara, to co-operate with him by descending the St. Lawrence towards Montreal, the prospect was good that the two armies would have united at the place, and ended the campaign by the reduction of all Canada. In this case Niagara and all the western posts would have fallen without a blow. Major Robert Rogers, sent in September to punish the Abenakis of St. Francis, had addressed himself to the task with his usual vigor. These Indians had been settled for about three quarters of a century on the River St. Francis, a few miles above its junction with the St. Lawrence. They were nominal Christians, and had been under the control of their missionaries for three generations; but though zealous and sometimes fanatical in their devotion to the forms of Romanism, they remained thorough savages in dress, habits, and character. They were the scourge of the New England borders, where they surprised and burned farmhouses and small hamlets, killed men, women, and children without distinction, carried others prisoners to their village, subjected them to the torture of "running the gantlet," and compelled them to witness dances of triumph around the scalps of parents, children, and friends. Amherst's instructions to Rogers contained the following: "Remember the barbarities that have been committed by the enemy's Indian scoundrels. 254 V2 Take your revenge, but don't forget that, though those dastardly villains have promiscuously murdered women and children of all ages, it is my order that no women or children be killed or hurt." Rogers and his men set out in whaleboats, and, eluding the French armed vessels, then in full activity, came, on the tenth day, to Missisquoi Bay, at the north end of Lake Champlain. Here he hid his boats, leaving two friendly Indians to watch them from a distance, and inform him should the enemy discover them. He then began his march for St. Francis, when, on the evening of the second day, the two Indians overtook him with the startling news that a party of about four hundred French had found the boats, and that half of them were on his tracks in hot pursuit. It was certain that the alarm would soon be given, and other parties sent to cut him off. He took the bold resolution of outmarching his pursuers, pushing straight for St. Francis, striking it before succors could arrive, and then returning by Lake Memphremagog and the Connecticut. Accordingly he despatched Lieutenant McMullen by a circuitous route back to Crown Point, with a request to Amherst that provisions should be sent up the Connecticut to meet him on the way down. Then he set his course for the Indian town, and for nine days more toiled through the forest with desperate energy. Much of the way was through dense spruce swamps, with no dry resting-place at night. At length the party reached the River St. Francis, fifteen miles above the town, and, hooking their 255 V2 arms together for mutual support, forded it with extreme difficulty. Towards evening, Rogers climbed a tree, and descried the town three miles distant. Accidents, fatigue, and illness had reduced his followers to a hundred and forty-two officers and men. He left them to rest for a time, and, taking with him Lieutenant Turner and Ensign Avery, went to reconnoitre the place; left his two companions, entered it disguised in an Indian dress, and saw the unconscious savages yelling and signing in the full enjoyment of a grand dance. At two o'clock in the morning he rejoined his party, and at three led them to the attack, formed them in a semicircle, and burst in upon the town half an hour before sunrise. Many of the warriors were absent, and the rest were asleep. Some were killed in their beds, and some shot down in trying to escape. "About seven o'clock in the morning," he says, "the affair was completely over, in which time we had killed at least two hundred Indians and taken twenty of their women and children prisoners, fifteen of whom I let go their own way, and five I brought with me, namely, two Indian boys and three Indian girls. I likewise retook five English captives." English scalps in hundreds were dangling from poles over the doors of the houses. [752] The town was pillaged and burned, not excepting the church, where ornaments of some value were found. On 256 V2 the side of the rangers, Captain Ogden and six men were wounded, and a Mohegan Indian from Stockbridge was killed. Rogers was told by his prisoners that a party of three hundred French and Indians was encamped on the river below, and that another party of two hundred and fifteen was not far distant. They had been sent to cut off the retreat of the invaders, but were doubtful as to their designs till after the blow was struck. There was no time to lose. The rangers made all haste southward, up the St. Francis, subsisting on corn from the Indian town; till, near the eastern borders of Lake Memphremagog, the supply failed, and they separated into small parties, the better to sustain life by hunting. The enemy followed close, attacked Ensign Avery's party, and captured five of them; then fell upon a band of about twenty, under Lieutenants Dunbar and Turner, and killed or captured nearly all. The other bands eluded their pursuers, turned southeastward, reached the Connecticut, some here, some there, and, giddy with fatigue and hunger, toiled wearily down the wild and lonely stream to the appointed rendezvous at the mouth of the Amonoosuc. [752] Rogers says "about six hundred." Other accounts say six or seven hundred. The late Abbé Maurault, missionary of the St. Francis Indians, and their historian, adopts the latter statement, though it is probably exaggerated. This was the place to which Rogers had requested that provisions might be sent; and the hope of finding them there had been the breath of life to the famished wayfarers. To their horror, the place was a solitude. There were fires still burning, but those who made them were gone. Amherst had sent Lieutenant Stephen up 257 V2 the river from Charlestown with an abundant supply of food; but finding nobody at the Amonoosuc, he had waited there two days, and then returned, carrying the provisions back with him; for which outrageous conduct he was expelled from the service. "It is hardly possible," says Rogers, "to describe our grief and consternation." Some gave themselves up to despair. Few but their indomitable chief had strength to go father. There was scarcely any game, and the barren wilderness yielded no sustenance but a few lily bulbs and the tubers of the climbing plant called in New England the ground-nut. Leaving his party to these miserable resources, and promising to send them relief within ten days, Rogers made a raft of dry pine logs, and drifted on it down the stream, with Captain Ogden, a ranger, and one of the captive Indian boys. They were stopped on the second day by rapids, and gained the shore with difficulty. At the foot of the rapids, while Ogden and the ranger went in search of squirrels, Rogers set himself to making another raft; and, having no strength to use the axe, he burned down the trees, which he then divided into logs by the same process. Five days after leaving his party he reached the first English settlement, Charlestown, or "Number Four," and immediately sent a canoe with provisions to the relief of the sufferers, following himself with other canoes two days later. Most of the men were saved, though some died miserably of famine and exhaustion. Of the few who had been captured, 258 V2 we are told by French contemporary that they "became victims of the fury of the Indian women," from whose clutches the Canadians tried in vain to save them. [753] [753] événements de la guerre en Canada, 1759, 1760. Compare N. Y, Colonial Docs., X. 1042. Note.—On the day after he reached "Number Four," Rogers wrote a report of his expedition to Amherst. This letter is printed in his Journals, in which he gives also a supplementary account, containing further particulars. The New Hampshire Gazette, Boston Evening Post, and other newspapers of the time recount the story in detail. Hoyt (Indian Wars, 302) repeats it, with a few additions drawn from the recollections of survivors, long after. There is another account, very short and unsatisfactory, by Thompson Maxwell, who says that he was of the party, which is doubtful. Mante (223) gives horrible details of the sufferings of the rangers. An old chief of the St. Francis Indians, said to be one of those who pursued Rogers after the town was burned, many years ago told Mr. Jesse Pennoyer, a government land surveyor, that Rogers laid an ambush for the pursuers, and defeated them with great loss. This, the story says, took place near the present town of Sherbrooke; and minute details are given, with high praise of the skill and conduct of the famous partisan. If such an incident really took place, it is scarcely possible that Rogers would not have made some mention of it. On the other hand, it is equally incredible that the Indians would have invented the tale of their own defeat. I am indebted for Pennoyer's puzzling narrative to the kindness of R. A. Ramsay, Esq., of Montreal. It was printed, in 1869, in the History of the Eastern Townships, by Mrs. C. M. Day. All things considered, it is probably groundless. Vaudreuil describes the destruction of the village in a letter to the Minister dated October 26, and says that Rogers had a hundred and fifty men; that St. Francis was burned to ashes; that the head chief and others were killed; that he (Vaudreuil), hearing of the march of the rangers, sent the most active of the Canadians to oppose them, and that Longueuil sent all the Canadians and Indians he could muster to pursue them on their retreat; that forty-six rangers were killed, and ten captured; that he thinks all the rest will starve to death; and, finally, that the affair is very unfortunate. I once, when a college student, followed on foot the route of Rogers from Lake Memphremagog to the Connecticut. CHAPTER XXVII. 1759. THE HEIGHTS OF ABRAHAM. Elation of the French ? Despondency of Wolfe ? The Parishes laid waste ? Operations above Quebec ? Illness of Wolfe ? A New Plan of Attack ? Faint Hope of Success ? Wolfe's Last Despatch ? Confidence of Vaudreuil ? Last Letters of Montcalm ? French Vigilance ? British Squadron at Cap-Rouge ? Last Orders of Wolfe ? Embarkation ? Descent of the St. Lawrence ? The Heights scaled ? The British Line ? Last Night of Montcalm ? The Alarm ? March of French Troops ? The Battle ? The Rout ? The Pursuit ? Fall of Wolfe and of Montcalm. Wolfe was deeply moved by the disaster at the heights of Montmorenci, and in a General Order on the next day he rebuked the grenadiers for their precipitation. "Such impetuous, irregular, and unsoldierlike proceedings destroy all order, make it impossible for the commanders to form any disposition for an attack, and put it out of the general's power to execute his plans. The grenadiers could not suppose that they could beat the French alone." The French were elated by their success. "Everybody," says the commissary Berniers, "thought that the campaign was as good as ended, gloriously for us." They had been sufficiently confident even before their victory; and 260 V2 the bearer of a flag of truce told the English officers that he had never imagined they were such fools as to attack Quebec with so small a force. Wolfe, on the other hand, had every reason to despond. At the outset, before he had seen Quebec and learned the nature of the ground, he had meant to begin the campaign by taking post on the Plains of Abraham, and thence laying siege to the town; but he soon discovered that the Plains of Abraham were hardly more within his reach than was Quebec itself. Such hope as was left him lay in the composition of Montcalm's army. He respected the French commander, and thought his disciplined soldiers not unworthy of the British steel; but he held his militia in high scorn, and could he but face them in the open field, he never doubted the result. But Montcalm also distrusted them, and persisted in refusing the coveted battle. Wolfe, therefore, was forced to the conviction that his chances were of the smallest. It is said that, despairing of any decisive stroke, he conceived the idea of fortifying Isle-aux-Coudres, and leaving a part of his troops there when he sailed for home, against another attempt in the spring. The more to weaken the enemy and prepare his future conquest, he began at the same time a course of action which for his credit one would gladly wipe from the record; for, though far from inhuman, he threw himself with extraordinary intensity into whatever work he had in hand, and, to accomplish it, spared others scarcely more than 261 V2 he spared himself. About the middle of August he issued a third proclamation to the Canadians, declaring that as they had refused his offers of protection and "had made such ungrateful returns in practising the most unchristian barbarities against his troops on all occasions, he could no longer refrain in justice to himself and his army from chastising them as they deserved." The barbarities in question consisted in the frequent scalping and mutilating of sentinels and men on outpost duty, perpetrated no less by Canadians than by Indians. Wolfe's object was twofold: first, to cause the militia to desert, and, secondly, to exhaust the colony. Rangers, light infantry, and Highlanders were sent to waste the settlements far and wide. Wherever resistance was offered, farmhouses and villages were laid in ashes, though churches were generally spared. St. Paul, far below Quebec, was sacked and burned, and the settlements of the opposite shore were partially destroyed. The parishes of L'Ange Gardien, Chateau Richer, and St. Joachim were wasted with fire and sword. Night after night the garrison of Quebec could see the light of burning houses as far down as the mountain of Cape Tourmente. Near St. Joachim there was a severe skirmish, followed by atrocious cruelties. Captain Alexander Montgomery, of the forty-third regiment, who commanded the detachment, and who has been most unjustly confounded with the revolutionary general, Richard Montgomery, ordered the prisoners to be shot in cold blood, to the indignation 262 V2 of his own officers. [754] Robineau de Portneuf, curé of St. Joachim, placed himself at the head of thirty parishioners and took possession of a large stone house in the adjacent parish of Chateau Richer, where for a time he held the English at bay. At length he and his followers were drawn out into an ambush, where they were surrounded and killed; and, being disguised as Indians, the rangers scalped them all. [755] [754] Fraser Journal. Fraser was an officer under Montgomery, of whom he speaks with anger and disgust. [755] Knox, II. 32. Most of the contemporary journals mention the incident. Most of the French writers of the time mention these barbarities without much comment, while Vaudreuil loudly denounces them. Yet he himself was answerable for atrocities incomparably worse, and on a far larger scale. He had turned loose his savages, red and white, along a frontier of six hundred miles, to waste, burn, and murder at will. "Women and children," such were the orders of Wolfe, "are to be treated with humanity; if any violence is offered to a woman, the offender shall be punished with death." These orders were generally obeyed. The English, with the single exception of Montgomery, killed none but armed men in the act of resistance or attack; Vaudreuil's war-parties spared neither age nor sex. Montcalm let the parishes burn, and still lay fast intrenched in his lines of Beauport. He would not imperil all Canada to save a few hundred farmhouses; and Wolfe was as far as ever from the battle that he coveted. Hitherto, his attacks had been 263 V2 made chiefly below the town; but, these having failed, he now changed his plan and renewed on a larger scale the movements begun above it in July. With every fair wind, ships and transports passed the batteries of Quebec, favored by a hot fire from Point Levi, and generally succeeded, with more or less damage, in gaining the upper river. A fleet of flatboats was also sent thither, and twelve hundred troops marched overland to embark in them, under Brigadier Murray. Admiral Holmes took command of the little fleet now gathered above the town, and operations in that quarter were systematically resumed. To oppose them, Bougainville was sent from the camp at Beauport with fifteen hundred men. His was a most arduous and exhausting duty. He must watch the shores for fifteen or twenty miles, divide his force into detachments, and subject himself and his followers to the strain of incessant vigilance and incessant marching. Murray made a descent at Pointe-aux-Trembles, and was repulsed with loss. He tried a second time at another place, was met before landing by a body of ambushed Canadians, and was again driven back, his foremost boats full of dead and wounded. A third time he succeeded, landed at Deschambault, and burned a large building filled with stores and all the spare baggage of the French regular officers. The blow was so alarming that Montcalm hastened from Beauport to take command in person; but when he arrived the English were gone. 264 V2 Vaudreuil now saw his mistake in sending the French frigates up the river out of harm's way, and withdrawing their crews to serve the batteries of Quebec. Had these ships been there, they might have overpowered those of the English in detail as they passed the town. An attempt was made to retrieve the blunder. The sailors were sent to man the frigates anew and attack the squadron of Holmes. It was too late. Holmes was already too strong for them, and they were recalled. Yet the difficulties of the English still seemed insurmountable. Dysentery and fever broke out in their camps, the number of their effective men was greatly reduced, and the advancing season told them that their work must be done quickly, or not done at all. On the other side, the distress of the French grew greater every day. Their army was on short rations. The operations of the English above the town filled the camp of Beauport with dismay, for troops and Canadians alike dreaded the cutting off of their supplies. These were all drawn from the districts of Three Rivers and Montreal; and, at best, they were in great danger, since when brought down in boats at night they were apt to be intercepted, while the difficulty of bringing them by land was extreme, through the scarcity of cattle and horses. Discipline was relaxed, disorder and pillage were rife, and the Canadians deserted so fast, that towards the end of August two hundred of them, it is said, would sometimes go off in one night. Early in the month the disheartening 265 V2 news came of the loss of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, the retreat of Bourlamaque, the fall of Niagara, and the expected advance of Amherst on Montreal. It was then that Lévis was despatched to the scene of danger; and Quebec was deplorably weakened by his absence. About this time the Lower Town was again set on fire by the English batteries, and a hundred and sixty-seven houses were burned in a night. In the front of the Upper Town nearly every building was a ruin. At the General Hospital, which was remote enough to be safe from the bombardment, every barn, shed, and garret, and even the chapel itself, were crowded with sick and wounded, with women and children from the town, and the nuns of the Ursulines and the H?tel-Dieu, driven thither for refuge. Bishop Pontbriand, though suffering from a mortal disease, came almost daily to visit and console them from his lodging in the house of the curé at Charlesbourg. Towards the end of August the sky brightened again. It became known that Amherst was not moving on Montreal, and Bourlamaque wrote that his position at Isle-aux-Noix was impregnable. On the twenty-seventh a deserter from Wolfe's army brought the welcome assurance that the invaders despaired of success, and would soon sail for home; while there were movements in the English camps and fleet that seemed to confirm what he said. Vaudreuil breathed more freely, and renewed hope and confidence visited the army of Beauport. 266 V2 Meanwhile a deep cloud fell on the English. Since the siege began, Wolfe had passed with ceaseless energy from camp to camp, animating the troops, observing everything, and directing everything; but now the pale face and tall lean form were seen no more, and the rumor spread that the General was dangerously ill. He had in fact been seized by an access of the disease that had tortured him for some time past; and fever had followed. His quarters were at a French farmhouse in the camp at Montmorenci; and here, as he lay in an upper chamber, helpless in bed, his singular and most unmilitary features haggard with disease and drawn with pain, no man could less have looked the hero. But as the needle, though quivering, points always to the pole, so, through torment and languor and the heats of fever, the mind of Wolfe dwelt on the capture of Quebec. His illness, which began before the twentieth of August, had so far subsided on the twenty-fifth that Knox wrote in his Diary of that day: "His Excellency General Wolfe is on the recovery, to the inconceivable joy of the whole army." On the twenty-ninth he was able to write or dictate a letter to the three brigadiers, Monckton, Townshend, and Murray: "That the public service may not suffer by the General's indisposition, he begs the brigadiers will meet and consult together for the public utility and advantage, and consider of the best method to attack the enemy." The letter then proposes three plans, all bold to audacity. The first was to send a part of the 267 V2 army to ford the Montmorenci eight or nine miles above its mouth, march through the forest, and fall on the rear of the French at Beauport, while the rest landed and attacked them in front. The second was to cross the ford at the mouth of the Montmorenci and march along the strand, under the French intrenchments, till a place could be found where the troops might climb the heights. The third was to make a general attack from boats at the Beauport flats. Wolfe had before entertained two other plans, one of which was to scale the heights at St. Michel, about a league above Quebec; but this he had abandoned on learning that the French were there in force to receive him. The other was to storm the Lower Town; but this also he had abandoned, because the Upper Town, which commanded it, would still remain inaccessible. The brigadiers met in consultation, rejected the three plans proposed in the letter, and advised that an attempt should be made to gain a footing on the north shore above the town, place the army between Montcalm and his base of supply, and so force him to fight or surrender. The scheme was similar to that of the heights of St. Michel. It seemed desperate, but so did all the rest; and if by chance it should succeed, the gain was far greater than could follow any success below the town. Wolfe embraced it at once. Not that he saw much hope in it. He knew that every chance was against him. Disappointment in the past and gloom in the future, the pain and 268 V2 exhaustion of disease, toils, and anxieties "too great," in the words of Burke, "to be supported by a delicate constitution, and a body unequal to the vigorous and enterprising soul that it lodged," threw him at times into deep dejection. By those intimate with him he was heard to say that he would not go back defeated, "to be exposed to the censure and reproach of an ignorant populace." In other moods he felt that he ought not to sacrifice what was left of his diminished army in vain conflict with hopeless obstacles. But his final resolve once taken, he would not swerve from it. His fear was that he might not be able to lead his troops in person. "I know perfectly well you cannot cure me," he said to his physician; "but pray make me up so that I may be without pain for a few days, and able to do my duty: that is all I want." In a despatch which Wolfe had written to Pitt, Admiral Saunders conceived that he had ascribed to the fleet more than its just share in the disaster at Montmorenci; and he sent him a letter on the subject. Major Barré kept it from the invalid till the fever had abated. Wolfe then wrote a long answer, which reveals his mixed dejection and resolve. He affirms the justice of what Saunders had said, but adds: "I shall leave out that part of my letter to Mr. Pitt which you object to. I am sensible of my own errors in the course of the campaign, see clearly wherein I have been deficient, and think a little more or less blame to a man that must necessarily be ruined, of little or no 269 V2 consequence. I take the blame of that unlucky day entirely upon my own shoulders, and I expect to suffer for it." Then, speaking of the new project of an attack above Quebec, he says despondingly: "My ill state of health prevents me from executing my own plan; it is of too desperate a nature to order others to execute." He proceeds, however, to give directions for it. "It will be necessary to run as many small craft as possible above the town, with provisions for six weeks, for about five thousand, which is all I intend to take. My letters, I hope, will be ready to-morrow, and I hope I shall have strength to lead these men to wherever we can find the enemy." On the next day, the last of August, he was able for the first time to leave the house. It was on this same day that he wrote his last letter to his mother: "My writing to you will convince you that no personal evils worse than defeats and disappointments have fallen upon me. The enemy puts nothing to risk, and I can't in conscience put the whole army to risk. My antagonist has wisely shut himself up in inaccessible intrenchments, so that I can't get at him without spilling a torrent of blood, and that perhaps to little purpose. The Marquis de Montcalm is at the head of a great number of bad soldiers, and I am at the head of a small number of good ones, that wish for nothing so much as to fight him; but the wary old fellow avoids an action, doubtful of the behavior of his army. People must be of the profession to understand the disadvantages and difficulties we labor 270 V2 under, arising from the uncommon natural strength of the country." On the second of September a vessel was sent to England with his last despatch to Pitt. It begins thus: "The obstacles we have met with in the operations of the campaign are much greater than we had reason to expect or could foresee; not so much from the number of the enemy (though superior to us) as from the natural strength of the country, which the Marquis of Montcalm seems wisely to depend upon. When I learned that succors of all kinds had been thrown into Quebec; that five battalions of regular troops, completed from the best inhabitants of the country, some of the troops of the colony, and every Canadian that was able to bear arms, besides several nations of savages, had taken the field in a very advantageous situation,—I could not flatter myself that I should be able to reduce the place. I sought, however, an occasion to attack their army, knowing well that with these troops I was able to fight, and hoping that a victory might disperse them." Then, after recounting the events of the campaign with admirable clearness, he continues: "I found myself so ill, and am still so weak, that I begged the general officers to consult together for the general utility. They are all of opinion that, as more ships and provisions are now got above the town, they should try, by conveying up a corps of four or five thousand men (which is nearly the whole strength of the army after the Points of Levi and Orleans are left in a proper state of defence), to draw the enemy 271 V2 from their present situation and bring them to an action. I have acquiesced in the proposal, and we are preparing to put it into execution." The letter ends thus: "By the list of disabled officers, many of whom are of rank, you may perceive that the army is much weakened. By the nature of the river, the most formidable part of this armament is deprived of the power of acting; yet we have almost the whole force of Canada to oppose. In this situation there is such a choice of difficulties that I own myself at a loss how to determine. The affairs of Great Britain, I know, require the most vigorous measures; but the courage of a handful of brave troops should be exerted only when there is some hope of a favorable event; however, you may be assured that the small part of the campaign which remains shall be employed, as far as I am able, for the honor of His Majesty and the interest of the nation, in which I am sure of being well seconded by the Admiral and by the generals; happy if our efforts here can contribute to the success of His Majesty's arms in any other parts of America." Some days later, he wrote to the Earl of Holdernesse: "The Marquis of Montcalm has a numerous body of armed men (I cannot call it an army), and the strongest country perhaps in the world. Our fleet blocks up the river above and below the town, but can give no manner of aid in an attack upon the Canadian army. We are now here [off Cap-Rouge] with about thirty-six hundred men, waiting to attack them when and wherever they 272 V2 can best be got at. I am so far recovered as to do business; but my constitution is entirely ruined, without the consolation of doing any considerable service to the state, and without any prospect of it." He had just learned, through the letter brought from Amherst by Ensign Hutchins, that he could expect no help from that quarter. Perhaps he was as near despair as his undaunted nature was capable of being. In his present state of body and mind he was a hero without the light and cheer of heroism. He flattered himself with no illusions, but saw the worst and faced it all. He seems to have been entirely without excitement. The languor of disease, the desperation of the chances, and the greatness of the stake may have wrought to tranquillize him. His energy was doubly tasked: to bear up his own sinking frame, and to achieve an almost hopeless feat of arms. Audacious as it was, his plan cannot be called rash if we may accept the statement of two well-informed writers on the French side. They say that on the tenth of September the English naval commanders held a council on board the flagship, in which it was resolved that the lateness of the season required the fleet to leave Quebec without delay. They say further that Wolfe then went to the Admiral, told him that he had found a place where the heights could be scaled, that he would send up a hundred and fifty picked men to feel the way, and that if they gained a lodgment at the top, the other troops should follow; if, on the other hand, the French were there in force to 273 V2 oppose them, he would not sacrifice the army in a hopeless attempt, but embark them for home, consoled by the thought that all had been done that man could do. On this, concludes the story, the Admiral and his officers consented to wait the result. [756] [756] This statement is made by the Chevalier Johnstone, and, with some variation, by the author of the valuable Journal tenu à l'Armée que commandoit feu M. le Marquis de Montcalm. Bigot says that, after the battle, he was told by British officers that Wolfe meant to risk only an advance party of two hundred men, and to reimbark if they were repulsed. As Wolfe had informed Pitt, his army was greatly weakened. Since the end of June his loss in killed and wounded was more than eight hundred and fifty, including two colonels, two majors, nineteen captains, and thirty-four subalterns; and to these were to be added a greater number disabled by disease. The squadron of Admiral Holmes above Quebec had now increased to twenty-two vessels, great and small. One of the last that went up was a diminutive schooner, armed with a few swivels, and jocosely named the "Terror of France." She sailed by the town in broad daylight, the French, incensed at her impudence, blazing at her from all their batteries; but she passed unharmed, anchored by the Admiral's ship, and saluted him triumphantly with her swivels. Wolfe's first move towards executing his plan was the critical one of evacuating the camp at Montmorenci. This was accomplished on the third of September. Montcalm sent a strong force to fall on the rear of the retiring English. Monckton 274 V2 saw the movement from Point Levi, embarked two battalions in the boats of the fleet, and made a feint of landing at Beauport. Montcalm recalled his troops to repulse the threatened attack; and the English withdrew from Montmorenci unmolested, some to the Point of Orleans, others to Point Levi. On the night of the fourth a fleet of flatboats passed above the town with the baggage and stores. On the fifth, Murray, with four battalions, marched up to the River Etechemin, and forded it under a hot fire from the French batteries at Sillery. Monckton and Townshend followed with three more battalions, and the united force, of about thirty-six hundred men, was embarked on board the ships of Holmes, where Wolfe joined them on the same evening. These movements of the English filled the French commanders with mingled perplexity, anxiety, and hope. A deserter told them that Admiral Saunders was impatient to be gone. Vaudreuil grew confident. "The breaking up of the camp at Montmorenci," he says, "and the abandonment of the intrenchments there, the reimbarkation on board the vessels above Quebec of the troops who had encamped on the south bank, the movements of these vessels, the removal of the heaviest pieces of artillery from the batteries of Point Levi,—these and the lateness of the season all combined to announce the speedy departure of the fleet, several vessels of which had even sailed down the river already. The prisoners and the deserters who daily came in told us that this was the common 275 V2 report in their army." [757] He wrote to Bourlamaque on the first of September: "Everything proves that the grand design of the English has failed." [757] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. Yet he was ceaselessly watchful. So was Montcalm; and he, too, on the night of the second, snatched a moment to write to Bourlamaque from his headquarters in the stone house, by the river of Beauport: "The night is dark; it rains; our troops are in their tents, with clothes on, ready for an alarm; I in my boots; my horses saddled. In fact, this is my usual way. I wish you were here; for I cannot be everywhere, though I multiply myself, and have not taken off my clothes since the twenty-third of June." On the eleventh of September he wrote his last letter to Bourlamaque, and probably the last that his pen ever traced. "I am overwhelmed with work, and should often lose temper, like you, if I did not remember that I am paid by Europe for not losing it. Nothing new since my last. I give the enemy another month, or something less, to stay here." The more sanguine Vaudreuil would hardly give them a week. Meanwhile, no precaution was spared. The force under Bougainville above Quebec was raised to three thousand men. [758] He was ordered to watch the shore as far as Jacques-Cartier, and follow with his main body every movement of Holmes's 276 V2 squadron. There was little fear for the heights near the town; they were thought inaccessible. [759] Even Montcalm believed them safe, and had expressed himself to that effect some time before. "We need not suppose," he wrote to Vaudreuil, "that the enemy have wings;" and again, speaking of the very place where Wolfe afterwards landed, "I swear to you that a hundred men posted there would stop their whole army." [760] He was right. A hundred watchful and determined men could have held the position long enough for reinforcements to come up. [758] Journal du Siége (Bibliothêque de Hartwell). Journal tenu à l'Armée, etc. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. [759] Pontbriand, Jugement impartial. [760] Montcalm à Vaudreuil, 27 Juillet. Ibid., 29 Juillet, 1759. The hundred men were there. Captain de Vergor, of the colony troops, commanded them, and reinforcements were within his call; for the battalion of Guienne had been ordered to encamp close at hand on the Plains of Abraham. [761] Vergor's post, called Anse du Foulon, was a mile and a half from Quebec. A little beyond it, by the brink of the cliffs, was another post, called Samos, held by seventy men with four cannon; and, beyond this again, the heights of Sillery were guarded by a hundred and thirty men, also with cannon. [762] These were outposts of Bougainville, whose headquarters were at Cap-Rouge, six miles above Sillery, and whose troops were in continual movement along the intervening shore. Thus all was vigilance; for while the French were strong in the hope of speedy delivery, they felt that there was no safety 277 V2 till the tents of the invader had vanished from their shores and his ships from their river. "What we knew," says one of them, "of the character of M. Wolfe, that impetuous, bold, and intrepid warrior, prepared us for a last attack before he left us." [761] Foligny, Journal mémoratif. Journal tenu à l'Armée, etc. [762] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. Wolfe had been very ill on the evening of the fourth. The troops knew it, and their spirits sank; but, after a night of torment, he grew better, and was soon among them again, rekindling their ardor, and imparting a cheer that he could not share. For himself he had no pity; but when he heard of the illness of two officers in one of the ships, he sent them a message of warm sympathy, advised them to return to Point Levi, and offered them his own barge and an escort. They thanked him, but replied that, come what might, they would see the enterprise to an end. Another officer remarked in his hearing that one of the invalids had a very delicate constitution. "Don't tell me of constitution," said Wolfe; "he has good spirit, and good spirit will carry a man through everything." [763] An immense moral force bore up his own frail body and forced it to its work. [763] Knox, II. 61, 65. Major Robert Stobo, who, five years before, had been given as a hostage to the French at the capture of Fort Necessity, arrived about this time in a vessel from Halifax. He had long been a prisoner at Quebec, not always in close custody, and had used his opportunities to acquaint himself with the neighborhood. In the spring of this year he 278 V2 and an officer of rangers named Stevens had made their escape with extraordinary skill and daring; and he now returned to give his countrymen the benefit of his local knowledge. [764] His biographer says that it was he who directed Wolfe in the choice of a landing-place. [765] Be this as it may, Wolfe in person examined the river and the shores as far as Pointe-aux-Trembles; till at length, landing on the south side a little above Quebec, and looking across the water with a telescope, he descried a path that ran with a long slope up the face of the woody precipice, and saw at the top a cluster of tents. They were those of Vergor's guard at the Anse du Foulon, now called Wolfe's Cove. As he could see but ten or twelve of them, he thought that the guard could not be numerous, and might be overpowered. His hope would have been stronger if he had known that Vergor had once been tried for misconduct and cowardice in the surrender of Beauséjour, and saved from merited disgrace by the friendship of Bigot and the protection of Vaudreuil. [766] [764] Letters in Boston Post Boy, No. 97, and Boston Evening Post, No. 1,258. [765] Memoirs of Major Robert Stobo. Curious, but often inexact. [766] See supra, Vol I. p. 253. The morning of the seventh was fair and warm, and the vessels of Holmes, their crowded decks gay with scarlet uniforms, sailed up the river to Cap-Rouge. A lively scene awaited them; for here were the headquarters of Bougainville, and here lay his principal force, while the rest watched the banks above and below. The cove into which 279 V2 the little river runs was guarded by floating batteries; the surrounding shore was defended by breastworks; and a large body of regulars, militia, and mounted Canadians in blue uniforms moved to and fro, with restless activity, on the hills behind. When the vessels came to anchor, the horsemen dismounted and formed in line with the infantry; then, with loud shouts, the whole rushed down the heights to man their works at the shore. That true Briton, Captain Knox, looked on with a critical eye from the gangway of his ship, and wrote that night in his Diary that they had made a ridiculous noise. "How different!" he exclaims, "how nobly awful and expressive of true valor is the customary silence of the British troops!" In the afternoon the ships opened fire, while the troops entered the boats and rowed up and down as if looking for a landing-place. It was but a feint of Wolfe to deceive Bougainville as to his real design. A heavy easterly rain set in on the next morning, and lasted two days without respite. All operations were suspended, and the men suffered greatly in the crowded transports. Half of them were therefore landed on the south shore, where they made their quarters in the village of St. Nicolas, refreshed themselves, and dried their wet clothing, knapsacks, and blankets. For several successive days the squadron of Holmes was allowed to drift up the river with the flood tide and down with the ebb, thus passing and repassing incessantly between the neighborhood 280 V2 of Quebec on one hand, and a point high above Cap-Rouge on the other; while Bougainville, perplexed, and always expecting an attack, followed the ships to and fro along the shore, by day and by night, till his men were exhausted with ceaseless forced marches. [767] [767] Joannès, Major de Québec, Mémoire sur la Campagne de 1759. At last the time for action came. On Wednesday, the twelfth, the troops at St. Nicolas were embarked again, and all were told to hold themselves in readiness. Wolfe, from the flagship "Sutherland," issued his last general orders. "The enemy's force is now divided, great scarcity of provisions in their camp, and universal discontent among the Canadians. Our troops below are in readiness to join us; all the light artillery and tools are embarked at the Point of Levi; and the troops will land where the French seem least to expect it. The first body that gets on shore is to march directly to the enemy and drive them from any little post they may occupy; the officers must be careful that the succeeding bodies do not by any mistake fire on those who go before them. The battalions must form on the upper ground with expedition, and be ready to charge whatever presents itself. When the artillery and troops are landed, a corps will be left to secure the landing-place, while the rest march on and endeavor to bring the Canadians and French to a battle. The officers and men will remember what their country expects from them, and what a determined body of soldiers inured to war is capable 281 V2 of doing against five weak French battalions mingled with a disorderly peasantry." The spirit of the army answered to that of its chief. The troops loved and admired their general, trusted their officers, and were ready for any attempt. "Nay, how could it be otherwise," quaintly asks honest Sergeant John Johnson, of the fifty-eighth regiment, "being at the heels of gentlemen whose whole thirst, equal with their general, was for glory? We had seen them tried, and always found them sterling. We knew that they would stand by us to the last extremity." Wolfe had thirty-six hundred men and officers with him on board the vessels of Holmes; and he now sent orders to Colonel Burton at Point Levi to bring to his aid all who could be spared from that place and the Point of Orleans. They were to march along the south bank, after nightfall, and wait further orders at a designated spot convenient for embarkation. Their number was about twelve hundred, so that the entire forced destined for the enterprise was at the utmost forty-eight hundred. [768] With these, Wolfe meant to climb the heights of Abraham in the teeth of an enemy who, though much reduced, were still twice as numerous as their assailants. [769] [768] See Note, end of chapter. [769] Including Bougainville's command. An escaped prisoner told Wolfe, a few days before, that Montcalm still had fourteen thousand men. Journal of an Expedition on the River St. Lawrence. This meant only those in the town and the camps of Beauport. "I don't believe their whole army amounts to that number," wrote Wolfe to Colonel Burton, on the tenth. He knew, however, that if Montcalm could bring all his troops together, the French would outnumber him more than two to one. 282 V2 Admiral Saunders lay with the main fleet in the Basin of Quebec. This excellent officer, whatever may have been his views as to the necessity of a speedy departure, aided Wolfe to the last with unfailing energy and zeal. It was agreed between them that while the General made the real attack, the Admiral should engage Montcalm's attention by a pretended one. As night approached, the fleet ranged itself along the Beauport shore; the boats were lowered and filled with sailors, marines, and the few troops that had been left behind; while ship signalled to ship, cannon flashed and thundered, and shot ploughed the beach, as if to clear a way for assailants to land. In the gloom of the evening the effect was imposing. Montcalm, who thought that the movements of the English above the town were only a feint, that their main force was still below it, and that their real attack would be made there, was completely deceived, and massed his troops in front of Beauport to repel the expected landing. But while in the fleet of Saunders all was uproar and ostentatious menace, the danger was ten miles away, where the squadron of Holmes lay tranquil and silent at its anchorage off Cap-Rouge. It was less tranquil than it seemed. All on board knew that a blow would be struck that night, though only a few high officers knew where. Colonel Howe, of the light infantry, called for volunteers to lead the unknown and desperate venture, promising, in the words of one of them, "that if any of us survived we might depend on 283 V2 being recommended to the General." [770] As many as were wanted—twenty-four in all—soon came forward. Thirty large bateaux and some boats belonging to the squadron lay moored alongside the vessels; and late in the evening the troops were ordered into them, the twenty-four volunteers taking their place in the foremost. They held in all about seventeen hundred men. The rest remained on board. [770] Journal of the Particular Transactions during the Siege of Quebec. The writer, a soldier in the light infantry, says he was one of the first eight who came forward. See Notes and Queries, XX. 370. Bougainville could discern the movement, and misjudged it, thinking that he himself was to be attacked. The tide was still flowing; and, the better to deceive him, the vessels and boats were allowed to drift upward with it for a little distance, as if to land above Cap-Rouge. The day had been fortunate for Wolfe. Two deserters came from the camp of Bougainville with intelligence that, at ebb tide on the next night, he was to send down a convoy of provisions to Montcalm. The necessities of the camp at Beauport, and the difficulties of transportation by land, had before compelled the French to resort to this perilous means of conveying supplies; and their boats, drifting in darkness under the shadows of the northern shore, had commonly passed in safety. Wolfe saw at once that, if his own boats went down in advance of the convoy, he could turn the intelligence of the deserters to good account. 284 V2 He was still on board the "Sutherland." Every preparation was made, and every order given; it only remained to wait the turning of the tide. Seated with him in the cabin was the commander of the sloop-of-war "Porcupine," his former school-fellow, John Jervis, afterwards Earl St. Vincent. Wolfe told him that he expected to die in the battle of the next day; and taking from his bosom a miniature of Miss Lowther, his betrothed, he gave it to him with a request that he would return it to her if the presentiment should prove true. [771] [771] Tucker, Life of Earl St. Vincent, I. 19. (London, 1844.) Towards two o'clock the tide began to ebb, and a fresh wind blew down the river. Two lanterns were raised into the maintop shrouds of the "Sutherland." It was the appointed signal; the boats cast off and fell down with the current, those of the light infantry leading the way. The vessels with the rest of the troops had orders to follow a little later. To look for a moment at the chances on which this bold adventure hung. First, the deserters told Wolfe that provision-boats were ordered to go down to Quebec that night; secondly, Bougainville countermanded them; thirdly, the sentries posted along the heights were told of the order, but not of the countermand; [772] fourthly, Vergor at the Anse du Foulon had permitted most of his men, chiefly Canadians from Lorette, to go home for a time and work at their harvesting, on condition, it is said, that they should afterwards work 285 V2 in a neighboring field of his own; [773] fifthly, he kept careless watch, and went quietly to bed; sixthly, the battalion of Guienne, ordered to take post on the Plains of Abraham, had, for reasons unexplained, remained encamped by the St. Charles; [774] and lastly, when Bougainville saw Holmes's vessels drift down the stream, he did not tax his weary troops to follow them, thinking that they would return as usual with the flood tide. [775] But for these conspiring circumstances New France might have lived a little longer, and the fruitless heroism of Wolfe would have passed, with countless other heroisms, into oblivion. [772] Journal tenu à l'Armée, etc. [773] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. [774] Foligny, Journal mémoratif. Journal tenu à l'Armée, etc. [775] Johnstone, Dialogue. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. For full two hours the procession of boats, borne on the current, steered silently down the St. Lawrence. The stars were visible, but the night was moonless and sufficiently dark. The General was in one of the foremost boats, and near him was a young midshipman, John Robison, afterwards professor of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He used to tell in his later life how Wolfe, with a low voice, repeated Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard to the officers about him. Probably it was to relieve the intense strain of his thoughts. Among the rest was the verse which his own fate was soon to illustrate,— "The paths of glory lead but to the grave." "Gentlemen," he said, as his recital ended, "I would rather have written those lines than take 286 V2 Quebec." None were there to tell him that the hero is greater than the poet. As they neared their destination, the tide bore them in towards the shore, and the mighty wall of rock and forest towered in darkness on their left. The dead stillness was suddenly broken by the sharp Qui vive! of a French sentry, invisible in the thick gloom. France! answered a Highland officer of Fraser's regiment from one of the boats of the light infantry. He had served in Holland, and spoke French fluently. à quel régiment? De la Reine, replied the Highlander. He knew that a part of that corps was with Bougainville. The sentry, expecting the convoy of provisions, was satisfied, and did not ask for the password. Soon after, the foremost boats were passing the heights of Samos, when another sentry challenged them, and they could see him through the darkness running down to the edge of the water, within range of a pistol-shot. In answer to his questions, the same officer replied, in French: "Provision-boats. Don't make a noise; the English will hear us." [776] In fact, the sloop-of-war "Hunter" was anchored in the stream not far off. This time, again, the sentry let them pass. In a few moments they rounded the headland above the Anse du Foulon. There was no sentry there. The strong current swept the boats of the light infantry a 287 V2 little below the intended landing-place. [777] They disembarked on a narrow strand at the foot of heights as steep as a hill covered with trees can be. The twenty-four volunteers led the way, climbing with what silence they might, closely followed by a much larger body. When they reached the top they saw in the dim light a cluster of tents at a short distance, and immediately made a dash at them. Vergor leaped from bed and tried to run off, but was shot in the heel and captured. His men, taken by surprise, made little resistance. One or two were caught, the rest fled. [776] See a note of Smollett, History of England, V. 56 (ed. 1805). Sergeant Johnson, Vaudreuil, Foligny, and the Journal of Particular Transactions give similar accounts. [777] Saunders to Pitt, 20 Sept. Journal of Sergeant Johnson. Compare Knox, II. 67. The main body of troops waited in their boats by the edge of the strand. The heights near by were cleft by a great ravine choked with forest trees; and in its depths ran a little brook called Ruisseau St.-Denis, which, swollen by the late rains, fell plashing in the stillness over a rock. Other than this no sound could reach the strained ear of Wolfe but the gurgle of the tide and the cautious climbing of his advance-parties as they mounted the steeps at some little distance from where he sat listening. At length from the top came a sound of musket-shots, followed by loud huzzas, and he knew that his men were masters of the position. The word was given; the troops leaped from the boats and scaled the heights, some here, some there, clutching at trees and bushes, their muskets slung at their backs. Tradition still points out the place, near the mouth of the 288 V2 ravine, where the foremost reached the top. Wolfe said to an officer near him: "You can try it, but I don't think you'll get up." He himself, however, found strength to drag himself up with the rest. The narrow slanting path on the face of the heights had been made impassable by trenches and abattis; but all obstructions were soon cleared away, and then the ascent was easy. In the gray of the morning the long file of red-coated soldiers moved quickly upward, and formed in order on the plateau above. Before many of them had reached the top, cannon were heard close on the left. It was the battery at Samos firing on the boats in the rear and the vessels descending from Cap-Rouge. A party was sent to silence it; this was soon effected, and the more distant battery at Sillery was next attacked and taken. As fast as the boats were emptied they returned for the troops left on board the vessels and for those waiting on the southern shore under Colonel Burton. The day broke in clouds and threatening rain. Wolfe's battalions were drawn up along the crest of the heights. No enemy was in sight, though a body of Canadians had sallied from the town and moved along the strand towards the landing-place, whence they were quickly driven back. He had achieved the most critical part of his enterprise; yet the success that he coveted placed him in imminent danger. On one side was the garrison of Quebec and the army of Beauport, and Bougainville was on the other. Wolfe's alternative was 289 V2 victory or ruin; for if he should be overwhelmed by a combined attack, retreat would be hopeless. His feelings no man can know; but it would be safe to say that hesitation or doubt had no part in them. He went to reconnoitre the ground, and soon came to the Plains of Abraham, so called from Abraham Martin, a pilot known as Ma?tre Abraham, who had owned a piece of land here in the early times of the colony. The Plains were a tract of grass, tolerably level in most parts, patched here and there with cornfields, studded with clumps of bushes, and forming a part of the high plateau at the eastern end of which Quebec stood. On the south it was bounded by the declivities along the St. Lawrence; on the north, by those along the St. Charles, or rather along the meadows through which that lazy stream crawled like a writhing snake. At the place that Wolfe chose for his battle-field the plateau was less than a mile wide. Thither the troops advanced, marched by files till they reached the ground, and then wheeled to form their line of battle, which stretched across the plateau and faced the city. It consisted of six battalions and the detached grenadiers from Louisbourg, all drawn up in ranks three deep. Its right wing was near the brink of the heights along the St. Lawrence; but the left could not reach those along the St. Charles. On this side a wide space was perforce left open, and there was danger of being outflanked. To prevent this, Brigadier Townshend was stationed here with two battalions, 290 V2 drawn up at right angles with the rest, and fronting the St. Charles. The battalion of Webb's regiment, under Colonel Burton, formed the reserve; the third battalion of Royal Americans was left to guard the landing; and Howe's light infantry occupied a wood far in the rear. Wolfe, with Monckton and Murray, commanded the front line, on which the heavy fighting was to fall, and which, when all the troops had arrived, numbered less than thirty-five hundred men. [778] [778] See Note, end of chapter. Quebec was not a mile distant, but they could not see it; for a ridge of broken ground intervened, called Buttes-à-Neveu, about six hundred paces off. The first division of troops had scarcely come up when, about six o'clock, this ridge was suddenly thronged with white uniforms. It was the battalion of Guienne, arrived at the eleventh hour from its camp by the St. Charles. Some time after there was hot firing in the rear. It came from a detachment of Bougainville's command attacking a house where some of the light infantry were posted. The assailants were repulsed, and the firing ceased. Light showers fell at intervals, besprinkling the troops as they stood patiently waiting the event. Montcalm had passed a troubled night. Through all the evening the cannon bellowed from the ships of Saunders, and the boats of the fleet hovered in the dusk off the Beauport shore, threatening every moment to land. Troops lined the intrenchments till day, while the General walked the field that 291 V2 adjoined his headquarters till one in the morning, accompanied by the Chevalier Johnstone and Colonel Poulariez. Johnstone says that he was in great agitation, and took no rest all night. At daybreak he heard the sound of cannon above the town. It was the battery at Samos firing on the English ships. He had sent an officer to the quarters of Vaudreuil, which were much nearer Quebec, with orders to bring him word at once should anything unusual happen. But no word came, and about six o'clock he mounted and rode thither with Johnstone. As they advanced, the country behind the town opened more and more upon their sight; till at length, when opposite Vaudreuil's house, they saw across the St. Charles, some two miles away, the red ranks of British soldiers on the heights beyond. "This is a serious business," Montcalm said; and sent off Johnstone at full gallop to bring up the troops from the centre and left of the camp. Those of the right were in motion already, doubtless by the Governor's order. Vaudreuil came out of the house. Montcalm stopped for a few words with him; then set spurs to his horse, and rode over the bridge of the St. Charles to the scene of danger. [779] He rode with a fixed look, uttering not a word. [780] [779] Johnstone, Dialogue. [780] Malartic à Bourlamaque,—Sept. 1759. The army followed in such order as it might, crossed the bridge in hot haste, passed under the northern rampart of Quebec, entered at the Palace 292 V2 Gate, and pressed on in headlong march along the quaint narrow streets of the warlike town: troops of Indians in scalplocks and war-paint, a savage glitter in their deep-set eyes; bands of Canadians whose all was at stake,—faith, country, and home; the colony regulars; the battalions of Old France, a torrent of white uniforms and gleaming bayonets, La Sarre, Languedoc, Roussillon, Béarn,—victors of Oswego, William Henry, and Ticonderoga. So they swept on, poured out upon the plain, some by the gate of St. Louis, and some by that of St. John, and hurried, breathless, to where the banners of Guienne still fluttered on the ridge. Montcalm was amazed at what he saw. He had expected a detachment, and he found an army. Full in sight before him stretched the lines of Wolfe: the close ranks of the English infantry, a silent wall of red, and the wild array of the Highlanders, with their waving tartans, and bagpipes screaming defiance. Vaudreuil had not come; but not the less was felt the evil of a divided authority and the jealousy of the rival chiefs. Montcalm waited long for the forces he had ordered to join him from the left wing of the army. He waited in vain. It is said that the Governor had detained them, lest the English should attack the Beauport shore. Even if they did so, and succeeded, the French might defy them, could they but put Wolfe to rout on the Plains of Abraham. Neither did the garrison of Quebec come to the aid of Montcalm. He sent 293 V2 to Ramesay, its commander, for twenty-five field-pieces which were on the Palace battery. Ramesay would give him only three, saying that he wanted them for his own defence. There were orders and counter-orders; misunderstanding, haste, delay, perplexity. Montcalm and his chief officers held a council of war. It is said that he and they alike were for immediate attack. His enemies declare that he was afraid lest Vaudreuil should arrive and take command; but the Governor was not a man to assume responsibility at such a crisis. Others say that his impetuosity overcame his better judgment; and of this charge it is hard to acquit him. Bougainville was but a few miles distant, and some of his troops were much nearer; a messenger sent by way of Old Lorette could have reached him in an hour and a half at most, and a combined attack in front and rear might have been concerted with him. If, moreover, Montcalm could have come to an understanding with Vaudreuil, his own force might have been strengthened by two or three thousand additional men from the town and the camp of Beauport; but he felt that there was no time to lose, for he imagined that Wolfe would soon be reinforced, which was impossible, and he believed that the English were fortifying themselves, which was no less an error. He has been blamed not only for fighting too soon, but for fighting at all. In this he could not choose. Fight he must, for Wolfe was now in a position to cut off all his supplies. His men were full of ardor, and he resolved to 294 V2 attack before their ardor cooled. He spoke a few words to them in his keen, vehement way. "I remember very well how he looked," one of the Canadians, then a boy of eighteen, used to say in his old age; "he rode a black or dark bay horse along the front of our lines, brandishing his sword, as if to excite us to do our duty. He wore a coat with wide sleeves, which fell back as he raised his arm, and showed the white linen of the wristband." [781] [781] Recollections of Joseph Trahan, in Revue Canadienne, IV. 856. The English waited the result with a composure which, if not quite real, was at least well feigned. The three field-pieces sent by Ramesay plied them with canister-shot, and fifteen hundred Canadians and Indians fusilladed them in front and flank. Over all the plain, from behind bushes and knolls and the edge of cornfields, puffs of smoke sprang incessantly from the guns of these hidden marksmen. Skirmishers were thrown out before the lines to hold them in check, and the soldiers were ordered to lie on the grass to avoid the shot. The firing was liveliest on the English left, where bands of sharpshooters got under the edge of the declivity, among thickets, and behind scattered houses, whence they killed and wounded a considerable number of Townshend's men. The light infantry were called up from the rear. The houses were taken and retaken, and one or more of them was burned. Wolfe was everywhere. How cool he was, and why his followers loved him, is shown by an incident that happened in the course of the morning. 295 V2 One of his captains was shot through the lungs; and on recovering consciousness he saw the General standing at his side. Wolfe pressed his hand, told him not to despair, praised his services, promised him early promotion, and sent an aide-de-camp to Monckton to beg that officer to keep the promise if he himself should fall. [782] [782] Sir Denis Le Marchant, cited by Wright, 579. Le Marchant knew the captain in his old age. Monckton kept Wolfe's promise. It was towards ten o'clock when, from the high ground on the right of the line, Wolfe saw that the crisis was near. The French on the ridge had formed themselves into three bodies, regulars in the centre, regulars and Canadians on right and left. Two field-pieces, which had been dragged up the heights at Anse du Foulon, fired on them with grape-shot, and the troops, rising from the ground, prepared to receive them. In a few moments more they were in motion. They came on rapidly, uttering loud shouts, and firing as soon as they were within range. Their ranks, ill ordered at the best, were further confused by a number of Canadians who had been mixed among the regulars, and who, after hastily firing, threw themselves on the ground to reload. [783] The British advanced a few rods; then halted and stood still. When the French were within forty paces the word of command rang out, and a crash of musketry answered all along the line. The volley was delivered with remarkable precision. In the 296 V2 battalions of the centre, which had suffered least from the enemy's bullets, the simultaneous explosion was afterwards said by French officers to have sounded like a cannon-shot. Another volley followed, and then a furious clattering fire that lasted but a minute or two. When the smoke rose, a miserable sight was revealed: the ground cumbered with dead and wounded, the advancing masses stopped short and turned into a frantic mob, shouting, cursing, gesticulating. The order was given to charge. Then over the field rose the British cheer, mixed with the fierce yell of the Highland slogan. Some of the corps pushed forward with the bayonet; some advanced firing. The clansmen drew their broadswords and dashed on, keen and swift as bloodhounds. At the English right, though the attacking column was broken to pieces, a fire was still kept up, chiefly, it seems, by sharpshooters from the bushes and cornfields, where they had lain for an hour or more. Here Wolfe himself led the charge, at the head of the Louisbourg grenadiers. A shot shattered his wrist. He wrapped his handkerchief about it and kept on. Another shot struck him, and he still advanced, when a third lodged in his breast. He staggered, and sat on the ground. Lieutenant Brown, of the grenadiers, one Henderson, a volunteer in the same company, and a private soldier, aided by an officer of artillery who ran to join them, carried him in their arms to the rear. He begged them to lay him down. They did so, and asked if he would have a surgeon. "There's no need," he 297 V2 answered; "it's all over with me." A moment after, one of them cried out: "They run; see how they run!" "Who run?" Wolfe demanded, like a man roused from sleep. "The enemy, sir. Egad, they give way everywhere!" "Go, one of you, to Colonel Burton," returned the dying man; "tell him to march Webb's regiment down to Charles River, to cut off their retreat from the bridge." Then, turning on his side, he murmured, "Now, God be praised, I will die in peace!" and in a few moments his gallant soul had fled. [783] "Les Canadiens, qui étaient mêlés dans les bataillons, se pressèrent de tirer et, dès qu'ils l'eussent fait, de mettre ventre à terre pour charger, ce qui rompit tout l'ordre." Malartic à Bourlamaque, 25 Sept. 1759. Montcalm, still on horseback, was borne with the tide of fugitives towards the town. As he approached the walls a shot passed through his body. He kept his seat; two soldiers supported him, one on each side, and led his horse through the St. Louis Gate. On the open space within, among the excited crowd, were several women, drawn, no doubt, by eagerness to know the result of the fight. One of them recognized him, saw the streaming blood, and shrieked, "O mon Dieu! mon Dieu! le Marquis est tué!" "It's nothing, it's nothing," replied the death-stricken man; "don't be troubled for me, my good friends." ("Ce n'est rien, ce n'est rien; ne vous affligez pas pour moi, mes bonnes amies.") Note.—There are several contemporary versions of the dying words of Wolfe. The report of Knox, given above, is by far the best attested. Knox says that he took particular pains at the time to learn them accurately from those who were with Wolfe when they were uttered. The anecdote of Montcalm is due to the late Hon. Malcolm Fraser, of Quebec. He often heard it in his youth from an old woman, who, when a girl, was one of the group who saw the wounded general led by, and to whom the words were addressed. 298Force of the English and French at the Battle of Quebec.—The tabular return given by Knox shows the number of officers and men in each corps engaged. According to this, the battalions as they stood on the Plains of Abraham before the battle varied in strength from 322 (Monckton's) to 683 (Webb's), making a total of 4,828, including officers. But another return, less specific, signed George Townshend, Brigadier, makes the entire number only 4,441. Townshend succeeded Wolfe in the command; and this return, which is preserved in the Public Record Office, was sent to London a few days after the battle. Some French writers present put the number lower, perhaps for the reason that Webb's regiment and the third battalion of Royal Americans took no part in the fight, the one being in the rear as a reserve, and the other also invisible, guarding the landing place. Wolfe's front line, which alone met and turned the French attack, was made up as follows, the figures including officers and men:— Regiment Size Making a total of 3,265 Thirty-fifth 519 Fifty-eighth 335 Seventy-eighth 662 Louisbourg Grenadiers 241 Twenty-eighth 421 Forty-seventh 360 Forty-third 327 Light Infantry 400 The French force engaged cannot be precisely given. Knox, on information received from "an intelligent Frenchman," states the number, corps by corps, the aggregate being 7,520. This, on examination, plainly appears exaggerated. Fraser puts it at 5,000; Townshend at 4,470, including militia. Bigot says, 3,500, which may perhaps be as many as actually advanced to the attack, since some of the militia held back. Including Bougainville's command, the militia and the artillerymen left in the Beauport camp, the sailors at the town batteries, and the garrison of Quebec, at least as many of the French were out of the battle as were in it; and the numbers engaged on each side seem to have been about equal. For authorities of the foregoing chapter, see Appendix I. CHAPTER XXVIII. 1759. FALL OF QUEBEC. After the Battle ? Canadians resist the Pursuit ? Arrival of Vaudreuil ? Scene in the Redoubt ? Panic ? Movements of the Victors ? Vaudreuil's Council of War ? Precipitate Retreat of the French Army ? Last Hours of Montcalm ? His Death and Burial ? Quebec abandoned to its Fate ? Despair of the Garrison ? Lévis joins the Army ? Attempts to relieve the Town ? Surrender ? The British occupy Quebec ? Slanders of Vaudreuil ? Reception in England of the News of Wolfe's Victory and Death ? Prediction of Jonathan Mayhew. "Never was rout more complete than that of our army," says a French official. [784] It was the more so because Montcalm held no troops in reserve, but launched his whole force at once against the English. Nevertheless there was some resistance to the pursuit. It came chiefly from the Canadians, many of whom had not advanced with the regulars to the attack. Those on the right wing, instead of doing so, threw themselves into an extensive tract of bushes that lay in front of the English left; and from this cover they opened a fire, too distant for much effect, till the victors advanced in their turn, when the shot of the hidden marksmen told severely upon them. Two battalions, therefore, deployed before the bushes, fired volleys into them, and drove their occupants out. [784] Daine au Ministre, 9 Oct. 1759. 300 V2 Again, those of the Canadians who, before the main battle began, attacked the English left from the brink of the plateau towards the St. Charles, withdrew when the rout took place, and ran along the edge of the declivity till, at the part of it called C?te Ste.-Geneviève, they came to a place where it was overgrown with thickets. Into these they threw themselves; and were no sooner under cover than they faced about to fire upon the Highlanders, who presently came up. As many of these mountaineers, according to their old custom, threw down their muskets when they charged, and had no weapons but their broadswords, they tried in vain to dislodge the marksmen, and suffered greatly in the attempt. Other troops came to their aid, cleared the thickets, after stout resistance, and drove their occupants across the meadow to the bridge of boats. The conduct of the Canadians at the C?te Ste.-Geneviève went far to atone for the shortcomings of some of them on the battle-field. A part of the fugitives escaped into the town by the gates of St. Louis and St. John, while the greater number fled along the front of the ramparts, rushed down the declivity to the suburb of St. Roch, and ran over the meadows to the bridge, protected by the cannon of the town and the two armed hulks in the river. The rout had but just begun when Vaudreuil crossed the bridge from the camp of Beauport. It was four hours since he first heard the alarm, and his quarters were not much more than two miles from the 301 V2 battle-field. He does not explain why he did not come sooner; it is certain that his coming was well timed to throw the blame on Montcalm in case of defeat, or to claim some of the honor for himself in case of victory. "Monsieur the Marquis of Montcalm," he says, "unfortunately made his attack before I had joined him." [785] His joining him could have done no good; for though he had at last brought with him the rest of the militia from the Beauport camp, they had come no farther than the bridge over the St. Charles, having, as he alleges, been kept there by an unauthorized order from the chief of staff, Montreuil. [786] He declares that the regulars were in such a fright that he could not stop them; but that the Canadians listened to his voice, and that it was he who rallied them at the C?te Ste.-Geneviève. Of this the evidence is his own word. From other accounts it would appear that the Canadians rallied themselves. Vaudreuil lost no time in recrossing the bridge and joining the militia in the redoubt at the farther end, where a crowd of fugitives soon poured in after him. [785] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 21 Sept. 1759. [786] Ibid., 5 Oct. 1759. The aide-de-camp Johnstone, mounted on horseback, had stopped for a moment in what is now the suburb of St. John to encourage some soldiers who were trying to save a cannon that had stuck fast in a marshy hollow; when, on spurring his horse to the higher ground, he saw within musket-shot a long line of British troops, who immediately 302 V2 fired upon him. The bullets whistled about his ears, tore his clothes, and wounded his horse; which, however, carried him along the edge of the declivity to a windmill, near which was a roadway to a bakehouse on the meadow below. He descended, crossed the meadow, reached the bridge, and rode over it to the great redoubt or hornwork that guarded its head. The place was full of troops and Canadians in a wild panic. "It is impossible," says Johnstone, "to imagine the disorder and confusion I found in the hornwork. Consternation was general. M. de Vaudreuil listened to everybody, and was always of the opinion of him who spoke last. On the appearance of the English troops on the plain by the bakehouse, Montguet and La Motte, two old captains in the regiment of Béarn, cried out with vehemence to M. de Vaudreuil 'that the hornwork would be taken in an instant by assault, sword in hand; that we all should be cut to pieces without quarter; and that nothing would save us but an immediate and general capitulation of Canada, giving it up to the English.'" [787] Yet the river was wide and deep, and the hornwork was protected on the water side by strong palisades, with cannon. Nevertheless there rose a general cry to cut the bridge of boats. By doing so more than half the army, who had not yet crossed, would have been sacrificed. The 303 V2 axemen were already at work, when they were stopped by some officers who had not lost their wits. [787] Confirmed by Journal tenu à l'Armée, etc. "Divers officiers des troupes de terre n'hésitèrent point à dire, tout haut en présence du soldat, qu'il ne nous restoit d'autre ressource que celle de capituler promptement pour toute la colonie," etc. "M. de Vaudreuil," pursues Johnstone, "was closeted in a house in the inside of the hornwork with the Intendant and some other persons. I suspected they were busy drafting the articles for a general capitulation, and I entered the house, where I had only time to see the Intendant, with a pen in his hand, writing upon a sheet of paper, when M. de Vaudreuil told me I had no business there. Having answered him that what he had said was true, I retired immediately, in wrath to see them intent on giving up so scandalously a dependency for the preservation of which so much blood and treasure had been expended." On going out he met Lieutenant-colonels Dalquier and Poulariez, whom he begged to prevent the apprehended disgrace; and, in fact, if Vaudreuil really meant to capitulate for the colony, he was presently dissuaded by firmer spirits than his own. Johnstone, whose horse could carry him no farther, set out on foot for Beauport, and, in his own words, "continued sorrowfully jogging on, with a very heavy heart for the loss of my dear friend M. de Montcalm, sinking with weariness, and lost in reflection upon the changes which Providence had brought about in the space of three or four hours." Great indeed were these changes. Montcalm was dying; his second in command, the Brigadier Senezergues, was mortally wounded; the army, routed and demoralized, was virtually without a 304 V2 head; and the colony, yesterday cheered as on the eve of deliverance, was plunged into sudden despair. "Ah, what a cruel day!" cries Bougainville; "how fatal to all that was dearest to us! My heart is torn in its most tender parts. We shall be fortunate if the approach of winter saves the country from total ruin." [788] [788] Bougainville à Bourlamaque, 18 Sept. 1759. The victors were fortifying themselves on the field of battle. Like the French, they had lost two generals; for Monckton, second in rank, was disabled by a musket-shot, and the command had fallen upon Townshend at the moment when the enemy were in full flight. He had recalled the pursuers, and formed them again in line of battle, knowing that another foe was at hand. Bougainville, in fact, appeared at noon from Cap-Rouge with about two thousand men; but withdrew on seeing double that force prepared to receive him. He had not heard till eight o'clock that the English were on the Plains of Abraham; and the delay of his arrival was no doubt due to his endeavors to collect as many as possible of his detachments posted along the St. Lawrence for many miles towards Jacques-Cartier. Before midnight the English had made good progress in their redoubts and intrenchments, had brought cannon up the heights to defend them, planted a battery on the C?te Ste.-Geneviève, descended into the meadows of the St. Charles, and taken possession of the General Hospital, with its crowds of sick and wounded. Their 305 V2 victory had cost them six hundred and sixty-four of all ranks, killed, wounded, and missing. The French loss is placed by Vaudreuil at about six hundred and forty, and by the English official reports at about fifteen hundred. Measured by the numbers engaged, the battle of Quebec was but a heavy skirmish; measured by results, it was one of the great battles of the world. Vaudreuil went from the hornwork to his quarters on the Beauport road and called a council of war. It was a tumultuous scene. A letter was despatched to Quebec to ask advice of Montcalm. The dying General sent a brief message to the effect that there was a threefold choice,—to fight again, retreat to Jacques-Cartier, or give up the colony. There was much in favor of fighting. When Bougainville had gathered all his force from the river above, he would have three thousand men; and these, joined to the garrison of Quebec, the sailors at the batteries, and the militia and artillerymen of the Beauport camp, would form a body of fresh soldiers more than equal to the English then on the Plains of Abraham. Add to these the defeated troops, and the victors would be greatly outnumbered. [789] Bigot gave his voice for 306 V2 fighting. Vaudreuil expressed himself to the same effect; but he says that all the officers were against him. "In vain I remarked to these gentlemen that we were superior to the enemy, and should beat them if we managed well. I could not at all change their opinion, and my love for the service and for the colony made me subscribe to the views of the council. In fact, if I had attacked the English against the advice of all the principal officers, their ill-will would have exposed me to the risk of losing the battle and the colony also." [790] [789] Bigot, as well as Vaudreuil, sets Bougainville's force at three thousand. "En réunissant le corps M. de Bougainville, les bataillons de Montréal [laissés au camp de Beauport] et la garnison de la ville, il nous restoit encore près de 5,000 hommes de troupes fra?ches." Journal tenu à l'Armée. Vaudreuil says that there were fifteen hundred men in garrison at Quebec who did not take part in the battle. If this is correct, the number of fresh troops after it was not five thousand, but more than six thousand; to whom the defeated force is to be added, making, after deducting killed and wounded, some ten thousand in all. [790] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. It was said at the time that the officers voted for retreat because they thought Vaudreuil unfit to command an army, and, still more, to fight a battle. [791] There was no need, however, to fight at once. The object of the English was to take Quebec, and that of Vaudreuil should have been to keep it. By a march of a few miles he could have joined Bougainville; and by then intrenching himself at or near Ste.-Foy he would have placed a greatly superior force in the English rear, where his position might have been made impregnable. Here he might be easily furnished with provisions, and from hence he could readily throw men and supplies into Quebec, which the English were too few to invest. He could harass the besiegers, or attack them, should opportunity offer, and either raise the siege or so protract it that they would be forced by approaching winter to sail homeward, robbed of the fruit of their victory. [791] Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. 307 V2 At least he might have taken a night for reflection. He was safe behind the St. Charles. The English, spent by fighting, toil, and want of sleep, were in no condition to disturb him. A part of his own men were in deadly need of rest; the night would have brought refreshment, and the morning might have brought wise counsel. Vaudreuil would not wait, and orders were given at once for retreat. [792] It began at nine o'clock that evening. Quebec was abandoned to its fate. The cannon were left in the lines of Beauport, the tents in the encampments, and provisions enough in the storehouses to supply the army for a week. "The loss of the Marquis de Montcalm," says a French officer then on the spot, "robbed his successors of their senses, and they thought of nothing but flight; such was their fear that the enemy would attack the intrenchments the next day. The army abandoned the camp in such disorder that the like was never known." [793] "It was not a retreat," says Johnstone, who was himself a part of it, "but an abominable flight, with such disorder and confusion that, had the English known it, three hundred men sent after us would have been sufficient to cut all our army to pieces. The soldiers were all mixed, scattered, dispersed, and running as hard as they could, as if the English army were at their heels." They passed Charlesbourg, Lorette, and St. Augustin, till, on the fifteenth, they found rest on the impregnable hill 308 V2 of Jacques-Cartier, by the brink of the St. Lawrence, thirty miles from danger. [792] Livre d'Ordres, Ordre du 13 Sept. 1759. [793] Foligny, Journal mémoratif. In the night of humiliation when Vaudreuil abandoned Quebec, Montcalm was breathing his last within its walls. When he was brought wounded from the field, he was placed in the house of the Surgeon Arnoux, who was then with Bourlamaque at Isle-aux-Noix, but whose younger brother, also a surgeon, examined the wound and pronounced it mortal. "I am glad of it," Montcalm said quietly; and then asked how long he had to live. "Twelve hours, more or less," was the reply. "So much the better," he returned. "I am happy that I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec." He is reported to have said that since he had lost the battle it consoled him to have been defeated by so brave an enemy; and some of his last words were in praise of his successor, Lévis, for whose talents and fitness for command he expressed high esteem. When Vaudreuil sent to ask his opinion, he gave it; but when Ramesay, commandant of the garrison, came to receive his orders, he replied: "I will neither give orders nor interfere any further. I have much business that must be attended to, of greater moment than your ruined garrison and this wretched country. My time is very short; therefore pray leave me. I wish you all comfort, and to be happily extricated from your present perplexities." Nevertheless he thought to the last of those who had been under his command, and sent the following note to Brigadier Townshend: 309 V2 "Monsieur, the humanity of the English sets my mind at peace concerning the fate of the French prisoners and the Canadians. Feel towards them as they have caused me to feel. Do not let them perceive that they have changed masters. Be their protector as I have been their father." [794] [794] I am indebted to Abbé Bois for a copy of this note. The last words of Montcalm, as above, are reported partly by Johnstone, and partly by Knox. Bishop Pontbriand, himself fast sinking with mortal disease, attended his death-bed and administered the last sacraments. He died peacefully at four o'clock on the morning of the fourteenth. He was in his forty-eighth year. In the confusion of the time no workman could be found to make a coffin, and an old servant of the Ursulines, known as Bonhomme Michel, gathered a few boards and nailed them together so as to form a rough box. In it was laid the body of the dead soldier; and late in the evening of the same day he was carried to his rest. There was no tolling of bells or firing of cannon. The officers of the garrison followed the bier, and some of the populace, including women and children, joined the procession as it moved in dreary silence along the dusky street, shattered with cannon-ball and bomb, to the chapel of the Ursuline convent. Here a shell, bursting under the floor, had made a cavity which had been hollowed into a grave. Three priests of the Cathedral, several nuns, Ramesay with his officers, and a throng of towns-people were present at the rite. After the service 310 V2 and the chant, the body was lowered into the grave by the light of torches; and then, says the chronicle, "the tears and sobs burst forth. It seemed as if the last hope of the colony were buried with the remains of the General." [795] In truth, the funeral of Montcalm was the funeral of New France. [796] [795] Ursulines de Québec, III. 10. [796] See Appendix J. It was no time for grief. The demands of the hour were too exigent and stern. When, on the morning after the battle, the people of Quebec saw the tents standing in the camp of Beauport, they thought the army still there to defend them. [797] Ramesay knew that the hope was vain. On the evening before, Vaudreuil had sent two hasty notes to tell him of his flight. "The position of the enemy," wrote the Governor, "becomes stronger every instant; and this, with other reasons, obliges me to retreat." "I have received all your letters. As I set out this moment, I pray you not to write again. You shall hear from me to-morrow. I wish you good evening." With these notes came the following order: "M. de Ramesay is not to wait till the enemy carries the town by assault. As soon as provisions fail, he will raise the white flag." This order was accompanied by a memorandum of terms which Ramesay was to ask of the victors. [798] [797] Mémoire du Sieur de Ramesay. [798] Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction à M. de Ramesay, 13 Sept. 1759. Appended, with the foregoing notes, to the Mémoire de Ramesay. "What a blow for me," says the unfortunate commandant, "to find myself abandoned so soon 311 V2 by the army, which alone could defend the town!" His garrison consisted of between one and two hundred troops of the line, some four or five hundred colony troops, a considerable number of sailors, and the local militia. [799] These last were in a state of despair. The inhabitants who, during the siege, had sought refuge in the suburb of St. Roch, had returned after the battle, and there were now twenty-six hundred women and children, with about a housand invalids and other non-combatants to be supported, though the provisions in the town, even at half rations, would hardly last a week. Ramesay had not been informed that a good supply was left in the camps of Beauport; and when he heard at last that it was there, and sent out parties to get it, they found that the Indians and the famished country people had carried it off. [799] The English returns give a total of 615 French regulars in the place besides sailors and militia. "Despondency," he says again, "was complete; discouragement extreme and universal. Murmurs and complaints against the army that had abandoned us rose to a general outcry. I could not prevent the merchants, all of whom were officers of the town militia, from meeting at the house of M. Daine, the mayor. There they declared for capitulating, and presented me a petition to that effect, signed by M. Daine and all the principal citizens." Ramesay called a council of war. One officer alone, Fiedmont, captain of artillery, was for 312 V2 reducing the rations still more, and holding out to the last. All the others gave their voices for capitulation. [800] Ramesay might have yielded without dishonor; but he still held out till an event fraught with new hope took place at Jacques-Cartier. [800] Copie du Conseil de Guerre tenu par M. de Ramesay à Québec, 15 Sept. 1759. This event was the arrival of Lévis. On the afternoon of the battle Vaudreuil took one rational step; he sent a courier to Montreal to summon that able officer to his aid. [801] Lévis set out at once, reached Jacques-Cartier, and found his worst fears realized. "The great number of fugitives that I began to meet at Three Rivers prepared me for the disorder in which I found the army. I never in my life knew the like of it. They left everything behind in the camp at Beauport; tents, baggage, and kettles." [801] Lévis à Bourlamaque, 15 Sept. 1759. Lévis, Guerre du Canada. He spoke his mind freely; loudly blamed the retreat, and urged Vaudreuil to march back with all speed to whence he came. [802] The Governor, stiff at ordinary times, but pliant at a crisis, welcomed the firmer mind that decided for him, consented that the troops should return, and wrote afterwards in his despatch to the Minister: "I was much charmed to find M. de Lévis disposed to march with the army towards Quebec." [803] [802] Bigot au Ministre, 15 Oct. 1759. Malartic à Bourlamaque, 28 Sept. 1759. [803] "Je fus bien charmé," etc. Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759. Lévis, on his part, wrote: "The condition in which I found the army, bereft of everything, did 313 V2 not discourage me, because M. de Vaudreuil told me that Quebec was not taken, and that he had left there a sufficiently numerous garrison; I therefore resolved, in order to repair the fault that had been committed, to engage M. de Vaudreuil to march the army back to the relief of the place. I represented to him that this was the only way to prevent the complete defection of the Canadians and Indians; that our knowledge of the country would enable us to approach very near the enemy, whom we knew to be intrenching themselves on the heights of Quebec and constructing batteries to breach the walls; that if we found their army ill posted, we could attack them, or, at any rate, could prolong the siege by throwing men and supplies into the town; and that if we could not save it, we could evacuate and burn it, so that the enemy could not possibly winter there." [804] [804] Lévis au Ministre, 10 Nov. 1759. Lévis quickly made his presence felt in the military chaos about him. Bigot bestirred himself with his usual vigor to collect provisions; and before the next morning all was ready. [805] Bougainville had taken no part in the retreat, but sturdily held his ground at Cap-Rouge while the fugitive mob swept by him. A hundred of the mounted Canadians who formed part of his command were now sent to Quebec, each with a bag of biscuit across his saddle. They were to circle round to the Beauport side, where there was no enemy, and whence they could cross the 314 V2 St. Charles in canoes to the town. Bougainville followed close with a larger supply. Vaudreuil sent Ramesay a message, revoking his order to surrender if threatened with assault, telling him to hold out to the last, and assuring him that the whole army was coming to his relief. Lévis hastened to be gone; but first he found time to write a few lines to Bourlamaque. "We have had a very great loss, for we have lost M. de Montcalm. I regret him as my general and my friend. I found our army here. It is now on the march to retrieve our fortunes. I can trust you to hold your position; as I have not M. de Montcalm's talents, I look to you to second me and advise me. Put a good face on it. Hide this business as long as you can. I am mounting my horse this moment. Write me all the news." [806] [805] Livre d'Ordres, Ordre du 17-18 Sept. 1759. [806] Lévis a Bourlamaque, 18 Sept. 1759. The army marched that morning, the eighteenth. In the evening it reached St. Augustin; and here it was stopped by the chilling news that Quebec had surrendered. Utter confusion had reigned in the disheartened garrison. Men deserted hourly, some to the country, and some to the English camp; while Townshend pushed his trenches nearer and nearer to the walls, in spite of the cannonade with which Fiedmont and his artillerymen tried to check them. On the evening of the seventeenth, the English ships of war moved towards the Lower Town, and a column of troops was seen approaching over the meadows of the St. Charles, as if to storm the Palace Gate. 315 V2 The drums beat the alarm; but the militia refused to fight. Their officers came to Ramesay in a body; declared that they had no mind to sustain an assault; that they knew he had orders against it; that they would carry their guns back to the arsenal; that they were no longer soldiers, but citizens; that if the army had not abandoned them they would fight with as much spirit as ever; but that they would not get themselves killed to no purpose. The town-major, Joannès, in a rage, beat two of them with the flat of his sword. The white flag was raised; Joannès pulled it down, thinking, or pretending to think, that it was raised without authority; but Ramesay presently ordered him to go to the English camp and get what terms he could. He went, through driving rain, to the quarters of Townshend, and, in hope of the promised succor, spun out the negotiation to the utmost, pretended that he had no power to yield certain points demanded, and was at last sent back to confer with Ramesay, under a promise from the English commander that, if Quebec were not given up before eleven o'clock, he would take it by storm. On this Ramesay signed the articles, and Joannès carried them back within the time prescribed. Scarcely had he left the town, when the Canadian horsemen appeared with their sacks of biscuit and a renewed assurance that help was near; but it was too late. Ramesay had surrendered, and would not break his word. He dreaded an assault, which he knew he could not withstand, and he but half believed in the 316 V2 promised succor. "How could I trust it?" he asks. "The army had not dared to face the enemy before he had fortified himself; and could I hope that it would come to attack him in an intrenched camp, defended by a formidable artillery?" Whatever may be thought of his conduct, it was to Vaudreuil, and not to him, that the loss of Quebec was due. The conditions granted were favorable, for Townshend knew the danger of his position, and was glad to have Quebec on any terms. The troops and sailors of the garrison were to march out of the place with the honors of war, and to be carried to France. The inhabitants were to have protection in person and property, and free exercise of religion. [807] [807] Articles de Capitulation, 18 Sept. 1759. In the afternoon a company of artillerymen with a field-piece entered the town, and marched to the place of arms, followed by a body of infantry. Detachments took post at all the gates. The British flag was raised on the heights near the top of Mountain Street, and the capital of New France passed into the hands of its hereditary foes. The question remained, should they keep, or destroy it? It was resolved to keep it at every risk. The marines, the grenadiers from Louisbourg, and some of the rangers were to reimbark in the fleet; while the ten battalions, with the artillery and one company of rangers, were to remain behind, bide the Canadian winter, and defend the ruins of Quebec against the efforts of 317 V2 Lévis. Monckton, the oldest brigadier, was disabled by his wound, and could not stay; while Townshend returned home, to parade his laurels and claim more than his share of the honors of victory. [808] The command, therefore, rested with Murray. [808] Letter to an Honourable Brigadier-General [Townshend], printed in 1760. A Refutation soon after appeared, angry, but not conclusive. Other replies will be found in the Imperial Magazine for 1760. The troops were not idle. Levelling their own field-works, repairing the defences of the town, storing provisions sent ashore from the fleet, making fascines, and cutting firewood, busied them through the autumn days bright with sunshine, or dark and chill with premonition of the bitter months to come. Admiral Saunders put off his departure longer than he had once thought possible; and it was past the middle of October when he fired a parting salute, and sailed down the river with his fleet. In it was the ship "Royal William," carrying the embalmed remains of Wolfe. Montcalm lay in his soldier's grave before the humble altar of the Ursulines, never more to see the home for which he yearned, the wife, mother, and children whom he loved, the olive-trees and chestnut-groves of his beloved Candiac. He slept in peace among triumphant enemies, who respected his memory, though they hardly knew his resting-place. It was left for a fellow-countryman—a colleague and a brother-in-arms—to belittle his achievements and blacken his name. The jealous 318 V2 spite of Vaudreuil pursued him even in death. Leaving Lévis to command at Jacques-Cartier, whither the army had again withdrawn, the Governor retired to Montreal, whence he wrote a series of despatches to justify himself at the expense of others, and above all of the slain general, against whom his accusations were never so bitter as now, when the lips were cold that could have answered them. First, he threw on Ramesay all the blame of the surrender of Quebec. Then he addressed himself to his chief task, the defamation of his unconscious rival. "The letter that you wrote in cipher, on the tenth of February, to Monsieur the Marquis of Montcalm and me, in common, [809] flattered his self-love to such a degree that, far from seeking conciliation, he did nothing but try to persuade the public that his authority surpassed mine. From the moment of Monsieur de Montcalm's arrival in this colony, down to that of his death, he did not cease to sacrifice everything to his boundless ambition. He sowed dissension among the troops, tolerated the most indecent talk against the government, attached to himself the most disreputable persons, used means to corrupt the most virtuous, and, when he could not succeed, became their cruel enemy. He wanted to be Governor-General. He privately flattered with favors and promises of patronage every officer of the colony troops who adopted his ideas. He spared no pains to gain over the people of whatever calling, and persuade 319 V2 them of his attachment; while, either by himself or by means of the troops of the line, he made them bear the most frightful yoke (le joug le plus affreux). He defamed honest people, encouraged insubordination, and closed his eyes to the rapine of his soldiers." [809] See ante, p. 167. This letter was written to Vaudreuil's official superior and confidant, the Minister of the Marine and Colonies. In another letter, written about the same time to the Minister of War, who held similar relations to his rival, he declares that he "greatly regretted Monsieur de Montcalm." [810] [810] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Guerre, 1 Nov. 1759. His charges are strange ones from a man who was by turns the patron, advocate, and tool of the official villains who cheated the King and plundered the people. Bigot, Cadet, and the rest of the harpies that preyed on Canada looked to Vaudreuil for support, and found it. It was but three or four weeks since he had written to the Court in high eulogy of Bigot and effusive praise of Cadet, coupled with the request that a patent of nobility should be given to that notorious public thief. [811] The corruptions which disgraced his government were rife, not only in the civil administration, but also among the officers of the colony troops, over whom he had complete control. They did not, as has been seen already, extend to the officers of the line, who were outside the circle of peculation. It was these who were the habitual associates of Montcalm; and when Vaudreuil 320 V2 charges him with "attaching to himself the most disreputable persons, and using means to corrupt the most virtuous," the true interpretation of his words is that the former were disreputable because they disliked him (the Governor), and the latter virtuous because they were his partisans. [811] See ante, p. 31. Vaudreuil continues thus: "I am in despair, Monseigneur, to be under the necessity of painting you such a portrait after death of Monsieur the Marquis of Montcalm. Though it contains the exact truth, I would have deferred it if his personal hatred to me were alone to be considered; but I feel too deeply the loss of the colony to hide from you the cause of it. I can assure you that if I had been the sole master, Quebec would still belong to the King, and that nothing is so disadvantageous in a colony as a division of authority and the mingling of troops of the line with marine [colony] troops. Thoroughly knowing Monsieur de Montcalm, I did not doubt in the least that unless I condescended to all his wishes, he would succeed in ruining Canada and wrecking all my plans." He then charges the dead man with losing the battle of Quebec by attacking before he, the Governor, arrived to take command; and this, he says, was due to Montcalm's absolute determination to exercise independent authority, without caring whether the colony was saved or lost. "I cannot hide from you, Monseigneur, that if he had had his way in past years Oswego and Fort George [William Henry] would never have been attacked or 321 V2 taken; and he owed the success at Ticonderoga to the orders I had given him." [812] Montcalm, on the other hand, declared at the time that Vaudreuil had ordered him not to risk a battle, and that it was only through his disobedience that Ticonderoga was saved. [812] Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 30 Oct. 1759. Ten days later Vaudreuil wrote again: "I have already had the honor, by my letter written in cipher on the thirteenth of last month, to give you a sketch of the character of Monsieur the Marquis of Montcalm; but I have just been informed of a stroke so black that I think, Monseigneur, that I should fail in my duty to you if I did not tell you of it." He goes on to say that, a little before his death, and "no doubt in fear of the fate that befell him," Montcalm placed in the hands of Father Roubaud, missionary at St. Francis, two packets of papers containing remarks on the administration of the colony, and especially on the manner in which the military posts were furnished with supplies; that these observations were accompanied by certificates; and that they involved charges against him, the Governor, of complicity in peculation. Roubaud, he continues, was to send these papers to France; "but now, Monseigneur, that you are informed about them, I feel no anxiety, and I am sure that the King will receive no impression from them without acquainting himself with their truth or falsity." Vaudreuil's anxiety was natural; and so was the action of Montcalm in making known to the Court 322 V2 the outrageous abuses that threatened the King's service with ruin. His doing so was necessary, both for his own justification and for the public good; and afterwards, when Vaudreuil and others were brought to trial at Paris, and when one of the counsel for the defence charged the late general with slanderously accusing his clients, the Court ordered the charge to be struck from the record. [813] The papers the existence of which, if they did exist, so terrified Vaudreuil, have thus far escaped research. But the correspondence of the two rivals with the chiefs of the departments on which they severally depended is in large measure preserved; and while that of the Governor is filled with defamation of Montcalm and praise of himself, that of the General is neither egotistic nor abusive. The faults of Montcalm have sufficiently appeared. They were those of an impetuous, excitable, and impatient nature, by no means free from either ambition or vanity; but they were never inconsistent with the character of a man of honor. His impulsive utterances, reported by retainers and sycophants, kept Vaudreuil in a state of chronic rage; and, void as he was of all magnanimity, gnawed with undying jealousy, and mortally in dread of being compromised by the knaveries to which he had lent his countenance, he could not contain himself within the bounds of decency or sense. In another letter he had the baseness to say that Montcalm met his death in trying to escape from the English. [813] Procès de Bigot, Cadet, et autres. 323 V2 Among the Governor's charges are some which cannot be flatly denied. When he accuses his rival of haste and precipitation in attacking the English army, he touches a fair subject of criticism; but, as a whole, he is as false in his detraction of Montcalm as in his praises of Bigot and Cadet. The letter which Wolfe sent to Pitt a few days before his death, written in what may be called a spirit of resolute despair, and representing success as almost hopeless, filled England with a dejection that found utterance in loud grumblings against the Ministry. Horace Walpole wrote the bad news to his friend Mann, ambassador at Florence: "Two days ago came letters from Wolfe, despairing as much as heroes can despair. Quebec is well victualled, Amherst is not arrived, and fifteen thousand men are encamped to defend it. We have lost many men by the enemy, and some by our friends; that is, we now call our nine thousand only seven thousand. How this little army will get away from a much larger, and in this season, in that country, I don't guess: yes, I do." Hardly were these lines written when tidings came that Montcalm was defeated, Quebec taken, and Wolfe killed. A flood of mixed emotions swept over England. Even Walpole grew half serious as he sent a packet of newspapers to his friend the ambassador. "You may now give yourself what airs you please. An ambassador is the only man in the world whom bullying becomes. All precedents are on your side: Persians, Greeks, Romans, always insulted their neighbors when they took 324 V2 Quebec. Think how pert the French would have been on such an occasion! What a scene! An army in the night dragging itself up a precipice by stumps of trees to assault a town and attack an enemy strongly intrenched and double in numbers! The King is overwhelmed with addresses on our victories; he will have enough to paper his palace." [814] [814] Letters of Horace Walpole, III. 254, 257 (ed. Cunningham, 1857). When, in soberer mood, he wrote the annals of his time, and turned, not for the better, from the epistolary style to the historical, he thus described the impression made on the English public by the touching and inspiring story of Wolfe's heroism and death: "The incidents of dramatic fiction could not be conducted with more address to lead an audience from despondency to sudden exaltation than accident prepared to excite the passions of a whole people. They despaired, they triumphed, and they wept; for Wolfe had fallen in the hour of victory. Joy, curiosity, astonishment, was painted on every countenance. The more they inquired, the more their admiration rose. Not an incident but was heroic and affecting." [815] England blazed with bonfires. In one spot alone all was dark and silent; for here a widowed mother mourned for a loving and devoted son, and the people forbore to profane her grief with the clamor of their rejoicings. [815] Walpole, Memoirs of George II., II. 384. New England had still more cause of joy than Old, and she filled the land with jubilation. The 325 V2 pulpits resounded with sermons of thanksgiving, some of which were worthy of the occasion that called them forth. Among the rest, Jonathan Mayhew, a young but justly celebrated minister of Boston, pictured with enthusiasm the future greatness of the British-American colonies, with the continent thrown open before them, and foretold that, "with the continued blessing of Heaven, they will become, in another century or two, a mighty empire;" adding in cautious parenthesis, "I do not mean an independent one." He read Wolfe's victory aright, and divined its far-reaching consequence. Note.—The authorities of this chapter are, in the main, the same as those of the preceding, with some additions, the principal of which is the Mémoire du Sieur de Ramezay, Chevalier de l'Ordre royal et militaire de St.-Louis, cy-devant Lieutenant pour le Roy commandant à Québec, au sujet de la Reddition de cette Ville, qui a été suivie de la Capitulation du 18 7bre, 1759 (Archives de la Marine). To this document are appended a number of important "pièces justificatives." These, with the Mémoire, have been printed by the Quebec Historical Society. The letters of Vaudreuil cited in this chapter are chiefly from the Archives Nationales. If Montcalm, as Vaudreuil says, really intrusted papers to the care of the Jesuit missionary Roubaud, he was not fortunate in his choice of a depositary. After the war Roubaud renounced his Order, adjured his faith, and went over to the English. He gave various and contradictory accounts of the documents said to be in his hands. On one occasion he declared that Montcalm's effects left with him at his mission of St. Francis had been burned to prevent their falling into the hands of the enemy (see Verreau, Report on Canadian Archives, 1874, p. 183). Again, he says that he had placed in the hands of the King of England certain letters of Montcalm (see Mr. Roubaud's Deplorable Case, humbly submitted to Lord North's Consideration, in Historical Magazine, Second Series, VIII. 283). Yet again, he speaks of these same letters as "pretended" (Verreau, as above). He complains that some of them had been published, without his consent, "by a Lord belonging to His Majesty's household" (Mr. Roubaud's Deplorable Case). The allusion here is evidently to a pamphlet printed in London, in 1777, in French and English, and entitled, Lettres de Monsieur le Marquis de Montcalm, Gouverneur-Général en Canada, à Messieurs de Berryer et de 326 V2 la Molé, écrites dans les Années 1757, 1758, et 1759, avec une Version Angloise. They profess to be observations by Montcalm on the English colonies, their political character, their trade, and their tendency to independence. They bear the strongest marks of being fabricated to suit the times, the colonies being then in revolt. The principal letter is one addressed to Molé, and bearing date Quebec, Aug. 24, 1759. It foretells the loss of her colonies as a consequence to England of her probable conquest of Canada. I laid before the Massachusetts Historical Society my reasons for believing this letter, like the rest, an imposture (see the Proceedings of that Society for 1869-1870, pp. 112-128). To these reasons it may be added that at the date assigned to the letter all correspondence was stopped between Canada and France. From the arrival of the English fleet, at the end of spring, till its departure, late in autumn, communication was completely cut off. It was not till towards the end of November, when the river was clear of English ships, that the naval commander Kanon ran by the batteries of Quebec and carried to France the first news from Canada. Some of the letters thus sent were dated a month before, and had waited in Canada till Kanon's departure. Abbé Verreau—a high authority on questions of Canadian history—tells me a comparison of the handwriting has convinced him that these pretended letters of Montcalm are the work of Roubaud. On the burial of Montcalm, see Appendix J. CHAPTER XXIX. 1759, 1760. SAINTE-FOY. Quebec after the Siege ? Captain Knox and the Nuns ? Escape of French Ships ? Winter at Quebec ? Threats of Lévis ? Attacks ? Skirmishes ? Feat of the Rangers ? State of the Garrison ? The French prepare to retake Quebec ? Advance of Lévis ? The Alarm ? Sortie of the English ? Rash Determination of Murray ? Battle of Ste.-Foy ? Retreat of the English ? Lévis besieges Quebec ? Spirit of the Garrison ? Peril of their Situation ? Relief ? Quebec saved ? Retreat of Lévis ? The News in England. The fleet was gone; the great river was left a solitude; and the chill days of a fitful November passed over Quebec in alternations of rain and frost, sunshine and snow. The troops, driven by cold from their encampment on the Plains, were all gathered within the walls. Their own artillery had so battered the place that it was not easy to find shelter. The Lower Town was a wilderness of scorched and crumbling walls. As you ascend Mountain Street, the Bishop's Palace, on the right, was a skeleton of tottering masonry, and the buildings on the left were a mass of ruin, where ragged boys were playing at see-saw among the fallen planks and timbers. [816] Even in the Upper 328 V2 Town few of the churches and public buildings had escaped. The Cathedral was burned to a shell. The solid front of the College of the Jesuits was pockmarked by numberless cannon-balls, and the adjacent church of the Order was wofully shattered. The church of the Recollects suffered still more. The bombshells that fell through the roof had broken into the pavement, and as they burst had thrown up the bones and skulls of the dead from the graves beneath. [817] Even the more distant H?tel-Dieu was pierced by fifteen projectiles, some of which had exploded in the halls and chambers. [818] [816] Drawings made on the spot by Richard Short. These drawings, twelve in number, were engraved and published in 1761. [817] Short's Views in Quebec, 1759. Compare Pontbriand, in N. Y. Col. Docs., X. 1,057. [818] Casgrain, H?tel-Dieu de Québec, 445. The Commissary-General, Berniers, thus describes to Bourlamaque the state of the town: "Quebec is nothing but a shapeless mass of ruins. Confusion, disorder, pillage reign even among the inhabitants, for the English make examples of severity every day. Everybody rushes hither and thither, without knowing why. Each searches for his possessions, and, not finding his own, seizes those of other people. English and French, all is chaos alike. The inhabitants, famished and destitute, escape to the country. Never was there seen such a sight." [819] [819] Berniers à Bourlamaque, 27 Sept. 1759. Quebec swarmed with troops. There were guard-houses at twenty different points; sentinels paced the ramparts, squads of men went the rounds, soldiers off duty strolled the streets, some in mitre 329 V2 caps and some black three-cornered hats; while a ceaseless rolling of drums and a rigid observance of military forms betrayed the sense of a still imminent danger. While some of the inhabitants left town, others remained, having no refuge elsewhere. They were civil to the victors, but severe towards their late ruler. "The citizens," says Knox, "particularly the females, reproach M. Vaudreuil upon every occasion, and give full scope to bitter invectives." He praises the agreeable manners and cheerful spirit of the Canadian ladies, concerning whom another officer also writes: "It is very surprising with what ease the gayety of their tempers enables them to bear misfortunes which to us would be insupportable. Families whom the calamities of war have reduced from the height of luxury to the want of common necessaries laugh, dance, and sing, comforting themselves with this reflection—Fortune de guerre. Their young ladies take the utmost pains to teach our officers French; with what view I know not, if it is not that they may hear themselves praised, flattered, and courted without loss of time." [820] [820] Alexander Campbell to John Floyd, 22 Oct. 1759. Campbell was a lieutenant of the Highlanders; Lloyd was a Connecticut merchant. Knox was quartered in a small stable, with a hayloft above and a rack and manger at one end: a lodging better than fell to the lot of many of his brother officers; and, by means of a stove and some help from a carpenter, he says that he made himself tolerably comfortable. The change, however, was an agreeable one when he was ordered 330 V2 for a week to the General Hospital, a mile out of the town, where he was to command the guard stationed to protect the inmates and watch the enemy. Here were gathered the sick and wounded of both armies, nursed with equal care by the nuns, of whom Knox speaks with gratitude and respect. "When our poor fellows were ill and ordered to be removed from their odious regimental hospital to this general receptacle, they were indeed rendered inexpressibly happy. Each patient has his bed, with curtains, allotted to him, and a nurse to attend him. Every sick or wounded officer has an apartment to himself, and is attended by one of these religious sisters, who in general are young, handsome, courteous, rigidly reserved, and very respectful. Their office of nursing the sick furnishes them with opportunities of taking great latitudes if they are so disposed; but I never heard any of them charged with the least levity." The nuns, on their part, were well pleased with the conduct of their new masters, whom one of them describes as the "most moderate of all conquerors." "I lived here," Knox continues, "at the French King's table, with an agreeable, polite society of officers, directors, and commissaries. Some of the gentlemen were married, and their ladies honored us with their company. They were generally cheerful, except when we discoursed on the late revolution and the affairs of the campaign; then they seemingly gave way to grief, uttered by profound sighs, followed by an O mon Dieu!" He walked in the garden with the French officers, 331 V2 played at cards with them, and passed the time so pleasantly that his short stay at the hospital seemed an oasis in his hard life of camp and garrison. Mère de Sainte-Claude, the Superior, a sister of Ramesay, late commandant of Quebec, one morning sent him a note of invitation to what she called an English breakfast; and though the repast answered to nothing within his experience, he says that he "fared exceedingly well, and passed near two hours most agreeably in the society of this ancient lady and her virgin sisters." The excellent nuns of the General Hospital are to-day what their predecessors were, and the scene of their useful labors still answers at many points to that described by the careful pen of their military guest. Throughout the war they and the nuns of the H?tel-Dieu had been above praise in their assiduous devotion to the sick and wounded. Brigadier Murray, now in command of Quebec, was a gallant soldier, upright, humane, generous, eager for distinction, and more daring than prudent. He befriended the Canadians, issued strict orders against harming them in person or property, hanged a soldier who had robbed a citizen of Quebec, and severely punished others for slighter offences of the same sort. In general the soldiers themselves showed kindness towards the conquered people; during harvest they were seen helping them to reap their fields, without compensation, and sharing with them their tobacco and rations. The inhabitants were disarmed, and 332 V2 required to take the oath of allegiance. Murray reported in the spring that the whole country, from Cap-Rouge downward, was in subjection to the British Crown. [821] [821] Murray to Pitt, 25 May, 1760. Murray, Journal, 1759, 1760. Late in October it was rumored that some of the French ships in the river above Quebec were preparing to run by the batteries. This was the squadron which had arrived in the spring with supplies, and had lain all summer at Batiscan, in the Richelieu, and at other points beyond reach of the English. After nearly a month of expectancy, they at length appeared, anchored off Sillery on the twenty-first of November, and tried to pass the town on the dark night of the twenty-fourth. Seven or eight of them succeeded; four others ran aground and were set on fire by their crews, excepting one which was stranded on the south shore and abandoned. Captain Miller, with a lieutenant and above forty men, boarded her; when, apparently through their own carelessness, she blew up. [822] Most of the party were killed by the explosion, and the rest, including the two officers, were left in a horrible condition between life and death. Thus they remained till a Canadian, venturing on board in search of plunder, found them, called his neighbors to his aid, carried them to his own house, and after applying, with the utmost kindness, what simple remedies he knew, went over to Quebec and told of the disaster. Fortunately for themselves, the sufferers soon died. [822] Murray to Amherst, 25 Jan. 1760. Not, as some believed, by a train laid by the French. 333 V2 December came, and brought the Canadian winter, with its fierce light and cold, glaring snowfields, and piercing blasts that scorch the cheek like a firebrand. The men were frost-bitten as they dug away the dry, powdery drifts that the wind had piled against the rampart. The sentries were relieved every hour; yet feet and fingers were continually frozen. The clothing of the troops was ill-suited to the climate, and, though stoves had been placed in the guard and barrack rooms, the supply of fuel constantly fell short. The cutting and dragging of wood was the chief task of the garrison for many weeks. Parties of axemen, strongly guarded, were always at work in the forest of Ste.-Foy, four or five miles from Quebec, and the logs were brought to town on sledges dragged by the soldiers. Eight of them were harnessed in pairs to each sledge; and as there was always danger from Indians and bushrangers, every man carried his musket slung at his back. The labor was prodigious; for frequent snowstorms made it necessary again and again to beat a fresh track through the drifts. The men bore their hardships with admirable good humor; and once a party of them on their return, dragging their load through the street, met a Canadian, also with a load of wood, which was drawn by a team of dogs harnessed much like themselves. They accosted them as yoke-fellows, comrades, and brothers; asked them what allowance of pork and rum they got; and invited them and their owner to mess at the regimental barracks. 334 V2 The appearance of the troops on duty within the town, as described by Knox, was scarcely less eccentric. "Our guards on the grand parade make a most grotesque appearance in their different dresses; and our inventions to guard us against the extreme rigor of this climate are various beyond imagination. The uniformity as well as nicety of the clean, methodical soldier is buried in the rough, fur-wrought garb of the frozen Laplander; and we rather resemble a masquerade than a body of regular troops, insomuch that I have frequently been accosted by my acquaintances, whom, though their voices were familiar to me, I could not discover, or conceive who they were. Besides, every man seems to be in a continual hurry; for instead of walking soberly through the streets, we are obliged to observe a running or trotting pace." Early in January there was a storm of sleet, followed by severe frost, which glazed the streets with ice. Knox, being ordered to mount guard in the Lower Town, found the descent of Mountain Street so slippery that it was impossible to walk down with safety, especially as the muskets of the men were loaded; and the whole party, seating themselves on the ground, slid one after another to the foot of the hill. The Highlanders, in spite of their natural hardihood, suffered more from the cold than the other troops, as their national costume was but a sorry defence against the Canadian winter. A detachment of these breechless warriors being on guard at the General 335 V2 Hospital, the nuns spent their scanty leisure in knitting for them long woollen hose, which they gratefully accepted, though at a loss to know whether modesty or charity inspired the gift. From the time when the English took possession of Quebec, reports had come in through deserters that Lévis meant to attack and recover it. Early in November there was a rumor that he was about to march upon it with fifteen thousand men. In December word came that he was on his way, resolved to storm it on or about the twenty-second, and dine within the walls, under the French flag, on Christmas Day. He failed to appear; but in January a deserter said that he had prepared scaling-ladders, and was training his men to use them by assaults on mock ramparts of snow. There was more tangible evidence that the enemy was astir. Murray had established two fortified outposts, one at Ste.-Foy, and the other farther on, at Old Lorette. War-parties hovered round both, and kept the occupants in alarm. A large body of French grenadiers appeared at the latter place in February, and drove off a herd of cattle; when a detachment of rangers, much inferior in number, set upon them, put them to flight, and recovered the plunder. At the same time a party of regulars, Canadians, and Indians took up a strong position near the church at Point Levi, and sent a message to the English officers that a large company of expert hairdressers were ready to wait upon them whenever they required their services. The allusion was of course 336 V2 to the scalp-lifting practices of the Indians and bushrangers. The river being now hard frozen, Murray sent over a detachment of light infantry under Major Dalling. A sharp fight ensued on the snow, around the church, and in the neighboring forest, where the English soldiers, taught to use snow-shoes by the rangers, routed the enemy, and killed or captured a considerable number. A third post was then established at the church and the priest's house adjacent. Some days after, the French came back in large numbers, fortified themselves with felled trees, and then attacked the English position. The firing being heard at Quebec, the light infantry went over to the scene of action, and Murray himself followed on the ice, with the Highlanders and other troops. Before he came up, the French drew off and retreated to their breastwork, where they were attacked and put to flight, the nimble Highlanders capturing a few, while the greater part made their escape. As it became known that the French held a strong post at Le Calvaire, near St. Augustin, two days' march from Quebec, Captain Donald MacDonald was sent with five hundred men to attack it. He found the enemy behind a breastwork of logs protected by an abattis. The light infantry advanced and poured in a brisk fire; on which the French threw down their arms and fled. About eighty of them were captured; but their commander, Herbin, escaped, leaving to the victors his watch, hat and feather, wine, liquor-case, and 337 V2 mistress. The English had six men wounded and nearly a hundred frost-bitten. [823] [823] Knox, II. 275. Murray, Journal. Fraser, Journal. Vaudreuil, in his usual way, multiplies the English force by three. Captain Hazen and his rangers soon after had a notable skirmish. They were posted in a house not far from the station at Lorette. A scout came in with news that a large party of the enemy was coming to attack them; on which Hazen left a sergeant and fourteen men in the house, and set out for Lorette with the rest to ask a reinforcement. On the way he met the French, who tried to surround him; and he told his men to fall back to the house. They remonstrated, saying that they "felt spry," and wanted to show the regulars that provincials could fight as well as red-coats. Thereupon they charged the enemy, gave them a close volley of buckshot and bullets, and put them to flight; but scarcely had they reloaded their guns when they were fired upon from behind. Another body of assailants had got into their rear, in order to cut them off. They faced about, attacked them, and drove them back like the first. The two French parties then joined forces, left Hazen to pursue his march, and attacked the fourteen rangers in the house, who met them with a brisk fire. Hazen and his men heard the noise; and, hastening back, fell upon the rear of the French, while those in the house sallied and attacked them in front. They were again routed; and the rangers chased them two miles, killing six of them and capturing seven. Knox, in whose eyes provincials usually 338 V2 find no favor, launches this time into warm commendation of "our simply honest New England men." Fresh reports came in from time to time that the French were gathering all their strength to recover Quebec; and late in February these stories took a definite shape. A deserter from Montreal brought Murray a letter from an officer of rangers, who was a prisoner at that place, warning him that eleven thousand men were on the point of marching to attack him. Three other deserters soon after confirmed the news, but added that the scheme had met with a check; for as it was intended to carry the town by storm, a grand rehearsal had taken place, with the help of scaling-ladders planted against the wall of a church; whereupon the Canadians rushed with such zeal to the assault that numerous broken legs, arms, and heads ensued, along with ruptures, sprains, bruises, and dislocations; insomuch, said the story, that they became disgusted with the attempt. All remained quiet till after the middle of April, when the garrison was startled by repeated assurances that at the first breaking-up of the ice all Canada would be upon them. Murray accordingly ordered the French inhabitants to leave the town within three days. [824] [824] Ordonnance faite à Québec le 21 Avril, 1760, par son Excellence, Jacques Murray. In some respects the temper of the troops was excellent. In the petty warfare of the past winter they had generally been successful, proving themselves 339 V2 a match for the bushrangers and Indians on their own ground; so that, as Sergeant Johnson remarks, in his odd way, "Very often a small number of our men would put to flight a considerable party of those Cannibals." They began to think themselves invincible; yet they had the deepest cause for anxiety. The effective strength of the garrison was reduced to less than half, and of those that remained fit for duty, hardly a man was entirely free from scurvy. The rank and file had no fresh provisions; and, in spite of every precaution, this malignant disease, aided by fever and dysentery, made no less havoc among them than among the crews of Jacques Cartier at this same place two centuries before. Of about seven thousand men left at Quebec in the autumn, scarcely more than three thousand were fit for duty on the twenty-fourth of April. [825] About seven hundred had found temporary burial in the snowdrifts, as the frozen ground was impenetrable as a rock. [825] Return of the present State of His Majesty's Forces in Garrison at Quebec, 24 April, 1760 (Public Record Office). Meanwhile Vaudreuil was still at Montreal, where he says that he "arrived just in time to take the most judicious measures and prevent General Amherst from penetrating into the colony." [826] During the winter some of the French regulars were kept in garrison at the outposts, and the rest quartered on the inhabitants; while the Canadians were dismissed to their homes, subject to be 340 V2 mustered again at the call of the Governor. Both he and Lévis were full of the hope of retaking Quebec. He had spies and agents among Murray's soldiers; and though the citizens had sworn allegiance to King George, some of them were exceedingly useful to his enemies. Vaudreuil had constant information of the state of the garrison. He knew that the scurvy was his active and powerful ally, and that the hospitals and houses of Quebec were crowded with the sick. At the end of March he was informed that more than half the British were on the sick-list; and it was presently rumored that Murray had only two thousand men able to bear arms. [827] With every allowance for exaggeration in these reports, it was plain that the French could attack their invaders in overwhelming force. [826] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 30 Oct. 1759. [827] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 15 Avril, 1760. The difficulty was to find means of transportation. The depth of the snow and the want of draught animals made it necessary to wait till the river should become navigable; but preparation was begun at once. Lévis was the soul of the enterprise. Provisions were gathered from far and near; cannon, mortars, and munitions of war were brought from the frontier posts, and butcher-knives were fitted to the muzzles of guns to serve the Canadians in place of bayonets. All the workmen about Montreal were busied in making tools and gun-carriages. Stores were impressed from the merchants; and certain articles, which could not otherwise be had, were smuggled, with extraordinary 341 V2 address, out of Quebec itself. [828] Early in spring the militia received orders to muster for the march. There were doubts and discontent; but, says a contemporary, "sensible people dared not speak, for if they did they were set down as English." Some there were who in secret called the scheme "Lévis' folly;" yet it was perfectly rational, well conceived, and conducted with vigor and skill. Two frigates, two sloops-of-war, and a number of smaller craft still remained in the river, under command of Vauquelin, the brave officer who had distinguished himself at the siege of Louisbourg. The stores and cannon were placed on board these vessels, the army embarked in a fleet of bateaux, and on the twentieth of April the whole set out together for the scene of action. They comprised eight battalions of troops of the line and two of colony troops; with the colonial artillery, three thousand Canadians, and four hundred Indians. When they left Montreal, their effective strength, besides Indians, is said by Lévis to have been six thousand nine hundred and ten, a number which was increased as he advanced by the garrisons of Jacques-Cartier, Déschambault, and Pointe-aux-Trembles, as well as by the Canadians on both side of the St. Lawrence below Three Rivers; for Vaudreuil had ordered the militia captains to join his standard, with all their followers, armed and equipped, on pain of death. [829] 342 V2 These accessions appear to have raised his force to between eight and nine thousand. [828] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 23 Avril, 1760. [829] Vaudreuil aux Capitaines de Milice, 16 Avril, 1760. I am indebted to Abbé H. R. Casgrain for a copy of this letter. The ice still clung to the river banks, the weather was bad, and the navigation difficult; but on the twenty-sixth the army landed at St. Augustin, crossed the river of Cap-Rouge on bridges of their own making, and moved upon the English outpost at Old Lorette. The English abandoned it and fell back to Ste.-Foy. Lévis followed. Night came on, with a gale from the southeast, a driving rain, and violent thunder, unusual at that season. The road, a bad and broken one, led through the marsh called La Suède. Causeways and bridges broke down under the weight of the marching columns and plunged the men into water, mud, and half-thawed ice. "It was a frightful night," says Lévis; "so dark that but for the flashes of lightning we should have been forced to stop." The break of day found the vanguard at the edge of the woods bordering the farther side of the marsh. The storm had abated; and they saw before them, a few hundred yards distant, through the misty air, a ridge of rising ground on which stood the parish church of Ste.-Foy, with a row of Canadian houses stretching far to right and left. This ridge was the declivity of the plateau of Quebec; the same which as it approaches the town, some five or six miles towards the left, takes the names of C?te d'Abraham and C?te Ste.-Geneviève. The church and the houses were occupied by British troops, who, as the French debouched from the woods, opened on them with cannon, and compelled 343 V2 them to fall back. Though the ridge at this point is not steep, the position was a strong one; but had Lévis known how few were as yet there to oppose him, he might have carried it by an assault in front. As it was, he resolved to wait till night, and then flank the enemy by a march to the right along the border of the wood. It was the morning of Sunday, the twenty-seventh. Till late in the night before, Murray and the garrison of Quebec were unaware of the immediate danger; and they learned it at last through a singular stroke of fortune. Some time after midnight the watch on board the frigate "Racehorse," which had wintered in the dock at the Lower Town, heard a feeble cry of distress from the midst of the darkness that covered the St. Lawrence. Captain Macartney was at once informed of it; and, through an impulse of humanity, he ordered a boat to put out amid the drifting ice that was sweeping up the river with the tide. Guided by the faint cries, the sailors found a man lying on a large cake of ice, drenched, and half dead with cold; and, taking him with difficulty into their boat, they carried him to the ship. It was long before he was able to speak intelligibly; but at last, being revived by cordials and other remedies, he found strength to tell his benefactors that he was a sergeant of artillery in the army that had come to retake Quebec; that in trying to land a little above Cap-Rouge, his boat had been overset, his companions drowned, and he himself saved by climbing upon the cake of ice where they had 344 V2 discovered him; that he had been borne by the ebb tide down to the Island of Orleans, and then brought up to Quebec by the flow; and, finally, that Lévis was marching on the town with twelve thousand men at his back. He was placed in a hammock and carried up Mountain Street to the quarters of the General, who was roused from sleep at three o'clock in the morning to hear his story. The troops were ordered under arms; and soon after daybreak Murray marched out with ten pieces of cannon and more than half the garrison. His principal object was to withdraw the advanced posts at Ste.-Foy, Cap-Rouge, Sillery, and Anse du Foulon. The storm had turned to a cold, drizzling rain, and the men, as they dragged their cannon through snow and mud, were soon drenched to the skin. On reaching Ste.-Foy, they opened a brisk fire from the heights upon the woods which now covered the whole army of Lévis; and being rejoined by the various outposts, returned to Quebec in the afternoon, after blowing up the church, which contained a store of munitions that they had no means of bringing off. When they entered Quebec a gill of rum was served out to each man; several houses in the suburb of St. Roch were torn down to supply them with firewood for drying their clothes; and they were left to take what rest they could against the morrow. The French, meanwhile, took possession of the abandoned heights; and while some filled the houses, barns, and sheds of Ste.-Foy and its neighborhood, 345 V2 others, chiefly Canadians, crossed the plateau to seek shelter in the village of Sillery. Three courses were open to Murray. He could defend Quebec, fortify himself outside the walls on the Buttes-à-Neveu, or fight Lévis at all risks. The walls of Quebec could not withstand a cannonade, and he had long intended to intrench his army on the Buttes, as a better position of defence; but the ground, frozen like a rock, had thus far made the plan impracticable. Even now, though the surface was thawed, the soil beneath was still frost-bound, making the task of fortification extremely difficult, if indeed the French would give him time for it. Murray was young in years, and younger still in impulse. He was ardent, fearless, ambitious, and emulous of the fame of Wolfe. "The enemy," he soon after wrote to Pitt, "was greatly superior in number, it is true; but when I considered that our little army was in the habit of beating the enemy, and had a very fine train of field artillery; that shutting ourselves at once within the walls was putting all upon the single chance of holding out for a considerable time a wretched fortification, I resolved to give them battle; and, half an hour after six in the morning, we marched with all the force I could muster, namely, three thousand men." [830] Some of these had left the hospitals of their own accord in their eagerness to take part in the fray. [830] Murray to Pitt, 25 May, 1760. The rain had ceased; but as the column emerged from St. Louis Gate, the scene before them was a 346 V2 dismal one. As yet there was no sign of spring. Each leafless bush and tree was dark with clammy moisture; patches of bare earth lay oozy and black on the southern slopes: but elsewhere the ground was still covered with snow, in some places piled in drifts, and everywhere sodden with rain; while each hollow and depression was full of that half-liquid, lead-colored mixture of snow and water which New England schoolboys call "slush," for all drainage was stopped by the frozen subsoil. The troops had with them two howitzers and twenty field-pieces, which had been captured when Quebec surrendered, and had formed a part of that very battery which Ramesay refused to Montcalm at the battle of the autumn before. As there were no horses, the cannon were dragged by some of the soldiers, while others carried picks and spades; for as yet Murray seems not to have made up his mind whether to fortify or fight. Thus they advanced nearly half a mile; till reaching the Buttes-à-Neveu, they formed in order of battle along their farther slopes, on the same ground that Montcalm had occupied on the morning of his death. Murray went forward to reconnoitre. Immediately before him was a rising ground, and, beyond it, a tract of forest called Sillery Wood, a mile or more distant. Nearer, on the left, he could see two blockhouses built by the English in the last autumn, not far from the brink of the plateau above the Anse du Foulon where Wolfe climbed the heights. On the right, at the opposite brink of the plateau, was a house and a fortified windmill 347 V2 belonging to one Dumont. The blockhouses, the mill, and the rising ground between them were occupied by the vanguard of Lévis' army; while, behind, he could descry the main body moving along the road from Ste.-Foy, then turning, battalion after battalion, and rapidly marching across the plateau along the edge of Sillery Wood. The two brigades of the leading column had already reached the blockhouses by the Anse du Foulon, and formed themselves as the right wing of the French line of battle; but those behind were not yet in position. Murray, kindling at the sight, thought that so favorable a moment was not to be lost, and ordered an advance. His line consisted of eight battalions, numbering a little above two thousand. In the intervals between them the cannon were dragged through slush and mud by five hundred men; and, at a little distance behind, the remaining two battalions followed as a reserve. The right flank was covered by Dalling's light infantry; the left by Hazen's company of rangers and a hundred volunteers under Major MacDonald. They all moved forward till they were on nearly the same ground where Wolfe's army had been drawn up. Then the cannon unlimbered, and opened on the French with such effect that Lévis, who was on horseback in the middle of the field, sent orders to the corps of his left to fall back to the cover of the woods. The movement caused some disorder. Murray mistook it for retreat, and commanded a farther advance. The whole British line, extending itself 348 V2 towards the right, pushed eagerly forward: in doing which it lost the advantage of the favorable position it had occupied; and the battalions of the right soon found themselves on low grounds, wading in half-melted snow, which in some parts was knee deep. Here the cannon could no longer be worked with effect. Just in front, a small brook ran along the hollow, through soft mud and saturated snowdrifts, then gurgled down the slope on the right, to lose itself in the meadows of the St. Charles. A few rods before this brook stood the house and windmill of Dumont, occupied by five companies of French grenadiers. The light infantry at once attacked them. A furious struggle ensued, till at length the French gave way, and the victors dashed forward to follow up their advantage. Their ardor cost them dear. The corps on the French left, which had fallen back into the woods, now advanced again as the cannon ceased to play, rushing on without order but with the utmost impetuosity, led by a gallant old officer, Colonel Dalquier, of the battalion of Béarn. A bullet in the body could not stop him. The light infantry were overwhelmed; and such of them as were left alive were driven back in confusion upon the battalions behind them, along the front of which they remained dispersed for some minutes, preventing the troops from firing on the advancing French, who thus had time to reform their ranks. At length the light infantry got themselves out of the way and retired to the rear, where, having lost nearly all their officers, they remained during the rest of the 349 V2 fight. Another struggle followed for the house and mill of Dumont, of which the French again got possession, to be again driven out; and it remained, as if by mutual consent, unoccupied for some time by either party. For above an hour more the fight was hot and fierce. "We drove them back as long as we had ammunition for our cannon," says Sergeant Johnson; but now it failed, and no more was to be had, because, in the eccentric phrase of the sergeant, the tumbrils were "bogged in deep pits of snow." While this was passing on the English right, it fared still worse with them on the left. The advance of the line was no less disastrous here than there. It brought the troops close to the woods which circled round to this point from the French rear, and from which the Canadians, covered by the trees, now poured on them a deadly fire. Here, as on the right, Lévis had ordered his troops to fall back for a time; but when the fire of the English cannon ceased, they advanced again, and their artillery, though consisting of only three pieces, played its part with good effect. Hazen's rangers and MacDonald's volunteers attacked and took the two adjacent blockhouses, but could not hold them. Hazen was wounded, MacDonald killed, and their party overpowered. The British battalions held their ground till the French, whose superior numbers enabled them to extend themselves on both sides beyond the English line, made a furious attack on the left wing, in front and flank. The reserves were 350 V2 ordered up, and the troops stood for a time in sullen desperation under the storm of bullets; but they were dropping fast in the blood-stained snow, and the order came at length to fall back. They obeyed with curses: "Damn it, what is falling back but retreating?" [831] The right wing, also outflanked, followed the example of the left. Some of the corps tried to drag off their cannon; but being prevented by the deep mud and snow they spiked the pieces and abandoned them. The French followed close, hoping to cut off the fugitives from the gates of Quebec; till Lévis, seeing that the retreat, though precipitate, was not entirely without order, thought best to stop the pursuit. [831] Knox, II. 295. The fight lasted about two hours, and did credit to both sides. The Canadians not only showed their usual address and courage when under cover of woods, but they also fought well in the open field; and the conduct of the whole French force proved how completely they had recovered from the panic of the last autumn. From the first they were greatly superior in number, and at the middle and end of the affair, when they had all reached the field, they were more than two against one. [832] The English, on the other hand, besides the opportunity of attacking before their enemies had completely formed, had a vastly superior artillery and a favorable position, both which advantages they lost after their second advance. [832] See Appendix K. Some curious anecdotes are told of the retreat. Colonel Fraser, of the Highlanders, received a bullet 351 V2 which was no doubt half spent, and which, with excellent precision, hit the base of his queue, so deadening the shock that it gave him no other inconvenience than a stiff neck. Captain Hazen, of the rangers, badly wounded, was making his way towards the gate, supported by his servant, when he saw at a great distance a French officer leading a file of men across a rising ground; whereupon he stopped and told the servant to give him his gun. A volunteer named Thompson, who was near by and who tells the story, thought that he was out of his senses; but Hazen persisted, seated himself on the ground, took a long aim, fired, and brought down his man. Thompson congratulated him. "A chance shot may kill the devil," replied Hazen; and resigning himself again to the arms of his attendant, he reached the town, recovered from his wound, and lived to be a general of the Revolution. [833] [833] Thompson, deceived by Hazen's baptismal name, Moses, thought that he was a Jew. (Revue Canadienne, IV. 865.) He was, however, of an old New England Puritan family. See the Hazen genealogy in Historic-Genealogical Register, XXXIII. The English lost above a thousand, or more than a third of their whole number, killed, wounded, and missing. [834] They carried off some of their wounded, but left others behind; and the greater part of these were murdered, scalped, and mangled by the Indians, all of whom were converts from the mission villages. English writers put the French loss at two thousand and upwards, which is no doubt a gross exaggeration. Lévis declares 352 V2 that the number did not exceed six or eight hundred; but afterwards gives a list which makes it eight hundred and thirty-three. [834] Return of Killed, Wounded, and Missing, signed J. Murray. Murray had left three or four hundred men to guard Quebec when the rest marched out; and adding them to those who had returned scathless from the fight, he now had about twenty-four hundred rank and file fit for duty. Yet even the troops that were rated as effective were in so bad a condition that the hyperbolical Sergeant Johnson calls them "half-starved, scorbutic skeletons." That worthy soldier, commonly a model of dutiful respect to those above him, this time so far forgets himself as to criticise his general for the "mad, enthusiastic zeal" by which he nearly lost the fruits of Wolfe's victory. In fact, the fate of Quebec trembled in the balance. "We were too few and weak to stand an assault," continues Johnson, "and we were almost in as deep a distress as we could be." At first there was some drunkenness and some plundering of private houses; but Murray stopped the one by staving the rum-barrels of the sutlers, and the other by hanging the chief offender. Within three days order, subordination, hope, and almost confidence were completely restored. Not a man was idle. The troops left their barracks and lay in tents close to their respective alarm posts. On the open space by St. Louis Gate a crowd of convalescents were busy in filling sand-bags to strengthen the defences, while the sick and wounded in the hospitals made wadding for the cannon. The ramparts 353 V2 were faced with fascines, of which a large stock had been provided in the autumn; chevaux-de-frise were planted in exposed places; an outwork was built to protect St. Louis Gate; embrasures were cut along the whole length of the walls; and the French cannon captured when the town was taken were planted against their late owners. Every man was tasked to the utmost of his strength; and the garrison, gaunt, worn, besmirched with mud, looked less like soldiers than like overworked laborers. The conduct of the officers troubled the spirit of Sergeant Johnson. It shocked his sense of the fitness of things to see them sharing the hard work of the private men, and he thus gives utterance to his feelings: "None but those who were present on the spot can imagine the grief of heart the soldiers felt to see their officers yoked in the harness, dragging up cannon from the Lower Town; to see gentlemen, who were set over them by His Majesty to command and keep them to their duty, working at the batteries with the barrow, pickaxe, and spade." The effect, however, was admirable. The spirit of the men rose to the crisis. Murray, no less than his officers, had all their confidence; for if he had fallen into a fatal error, he atoned for it now by unconquerable resolution and exhaustless fertility of resource. Deserters said that Lévis would assault the town; and the soldiers replied: "Let him come on; he will catch a Tartar." Lévis and his army were no less busy in digging 354 V2 trenches along the stony back of the Buttes-à-Neveu. Every day the English fire grew hotter; till at last nearly a hundred and fifty cannon vomited iron upon them from the walls of Quebec, and May was well advanced before they could plant a single gun to reply. Their vessels had landed artillery at the Anse du Foulon; but their best hope lay in the succors they daily expected from the river below. In the autumn Lévis, with a view to his intended enterprise, had sent a request to Versailles that a ship laden with munitions and heavy siege-guns should be sent from France in time to meet him at Quebec in April; while he looked also for another ship, which had wintered at Gaspé, and which therefore might reach him as soon as navigation opened. The arrival of these vessels would have made the position of the English doubly critical; and, on the other hand, should an English squadron appear first, Lévis would be forced to raise the siege. Thus each side watched the river with an anxiety that grew constantly more intense; and the English presently descried signals along the shore which seemed to say that French ships were moving up the St. Lawrence. Meantime, while doing their best to compass each other's destruction, neither side forgot the courtesies of war. Lévis heard that Murray liked spruce-beer for his table, and sent him a flag of truce with a quantity of spruce-boughs and a message of compliment; Murray responded with a Cheshire cheese, and Lévis rejoined with a present of partridges. 355 V2 Bad and scanty fare, excessive toil, and broken sleep were telling ominously on the strength of the garrison when, on the ninth of May, Murray, as he sat pondering over the fire at his quarters in St. Louis Street, was interrupted by an officer who came to tell him that there was a ship-of-war in the Basin beating up towards the town. Murray started from his revery, and directed that British colors should be raised immediately on Cape Diamond. [835] The halyards being out of order, a sailor climbed the staff and drew up the flag to its place. The news had spread; men and officers, divided between hope and fear, crowded to the rampart by the Chateau, where Durham Terrace now overlooks the St. Lawrence, and every eye was strained on the approaching ship, eager to see whether she would show the red flag of England or the white one of France. Slowly her colors rose to the mast-head and unfurled to the wind the red cross of St. George. It was the British frigate "Lowestoffe." She anchored before the Lower Town, and saluted the garrison with twenty-one guns. "The gladness of the troops," says Knox, "is not to be expressed. Both officers and soldiers mounted the parapet in the face of the enemy and huzzaed with their hats in the air for almost an hour. The garrison, the enemy's camp, the bay, and circumjacent country resounded with our shouts and the thunder of our artillery; for the gunners were so elated that they did nothing but load and fire for a considerable time. In short, the general satisfaction 356 V2 is not to be conceived, except by a person who had suffered the extremities of a siege, and been destined, with his brave friends and countrymen, to the scalping-knives of a faithless conqueror and his barbarious allies." The "Lowestoffe" brought news that a British squadron was at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and would reach Quebec in a few days. [835] Thompson in Revue Canadienne, IV. 866. Lévis, in ignorance of this, still clung to the hope that French ships would arrive strong enough to overpower the unwelcome stranger. His guns, being at last in position, presently opened fire upon a wall that was not built to bear the brunt of heavy shot; but an artillery better and more numerous than his own almost silenced them, and his gunners were harassed by repeated sallies. The besiegers had now no real chance of success unless they could carry the place by storm, to which end they had provided abundant scaling-ladders as well as petards to burst in the gates. They made, however, no attempt to use them. A week passed, when, on the evening of the fifteenth, the ship of the line "Vanguard" and the frigate "Diana" sailed into the harbor; and on the next morning the "Diana" and the "Lowestoffe" passed the town to attack the French vessels in the river above. These were six in all,—two frigates, two smaller armed ships, and two schooners; the whole under command of the gallant Vauquelin. He did not belie his reputation; fought his ship with persistent bravery till his ammunition was spent, refused even then to strike his flag, and being 357 V2 made prisoner, was treated by his captors with distinguished honor. The other vessels made little or no resistance. One of them threw her guns overboard and escaped; the rest ran ashore and were burned. The destruction of his vessels was a death-blow to the hopes of Lévis, for they contained his stores of food and ammunition. He had passed the preceding night in great agitation; and when the cannonade on the river ceased, he hastened to raise the siege. In the evening deserters from his camp told Murray that the French were in full retreat; on which all the English batteries opened, firing at random through the darkness, and sending cannon-balls en ricochet, bowling by scores together, over the Plains of Abraham on the heels of the retiring enemy. Murray marched out at dawn of day to fall upon their rear; but, with a hundred and fifty cannon bellowing behind them, they had made such speed that, though he pushed over the marsh to Old Lorette, he could not overtake them; they had already crossed the river of Cap-Rouge. Why, with numbers still superior, they went off in such haste, it is hard to say. They left behind them thirty-four cannon and six mortars, with petards, scaling-ladders, tents, ammunition, baggage, intrenching tools, many of their muskets, and all their sick and wounded. The effort to recover Quebec did great honor to the enterprise of the French; but it availed them nothing, served only to waste resources that seemed already at the lowest ebb, and gave fresh opportunity 358 V2 of plunder to Cadet and his crew, who failed not to make use of it. After the battle of Ste.-Foy Murray sent the frigate "Racehorse" to Halifax with news of his defeat, and from Halifax it was sent to England. The British public were taken by surprise. "Who the deuce was thinking of Quebec?" says Horace Walpole. "America was like a book one has read and done with; but here we are on a sudden reading our book backwards." Ten days passed, and then came word that the siege was raised and that the French were gone; upon which Walpole wrote to General Conway: "Well, Quebec is come to life again. Last night I went to see the Holdernesses. I met my Lady in a triumphal car, drawn by a Manx horse, thirteen little fingers high, with Lady Emily. Mr. Milbank was walking by himself in ovation after the car, and they were going to see the bonfire at the alehouse at the corner. The whole procession returned with me; and from the Countess's dressing-room we saw a battery fired before the house, the mob crying, 'God bless the good news!' These are all the particulars I know of the siege. My Lord would have showed me the journal; but we amused ourselves much better in going to eat peaches from the new Dutch stoves [hot-houses]." Note.—On the battle of Ste.-Foy and the subsequent siege, Lévis, Guerre du Canada. Relation de la seconde Bataille de Québec et du Siége de cette Ville (there are several copies of this paper, with different titles and some variation). Murray to Amherst, 30 April, 1760. Murray, Journal kept at Quebec from Sept. 18, 1759, to May 17, 1760 (Public Record Office, America and West Indies, XCIX.). Murray to Pitt, 25 May, 1760. Letter 359 V2 from an Officer of the Royal Americans at Quebec, 24 May, 1760 (in London Magazine and several periodical papers of the time). Fraser, Journal (Quebec Hist. Soc.); Johnstone, Campaign of 1760 (Ibid.). Relation de ce qui s'est passé au Siége de Québec, par une Réligieuse de l'H?pital Général (Ibid.). Memoirs of the Siege of Quebec, by Sergeant John Johnson. Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760. Letters of Lévis, Bourlamaque, and Vaudreuil, May, June, 1760. Several letters from officers at Quebec in provincial newspapers. Knox, II. 292-322. Plan of the Battle and Situation of the British and French on the Heights of Abraham, the 28th of April, 1760,—an admirable plan, attached to the great plan of operations at Quebec before mentioned, and necessary to an understanding of the position and movements of the two armies (British Museum, King's Maps). The narratives of Mante, Entick, Wynne, Smith, and other secondary writers give no additional light. On the force engaged on each side, see Appendix K. CHAPTER XXX. 1760. FALL OF CANADA. Desperate Situation ? Efforts of Vaudreuil and Lévis ? Plans of Amherst ? A Triple Attack ? Advance of Murray ? Advance of Haviland ? Advance of Amherst ? Capitulation of Montreal ? Protest of Lévis ? Injustice of Louis XV. ? Joy in the British Colonies ? Character of the War. The retreat of Lévis left Canada little hope but in a speedy peace. This hope was strong, for a belief widely prevailed that, even if the colony should be subdued, it would be restored to France by treaty. Its available force did not exceed eight or ten thousand men, as most of the Canadians below the district of Three Rivers had sworn allegiance to King George; and though many of them had disregarded the oath to join the standard of Lévis, they could venture to do so no longer. The French had lost the best of their artillery, their gunpowder was falling short, their provisions would barely carry them to harvest time, and no more was to be hoped for, since a convoy of ships which had sailed from France at the end of winter, laden with supplies of all kinds, had been captured by the English. The blockade of the St. Lawrence was complete. The Western Indians would not 361 V2 fight, and even those of the mission villages were wavering and insolent. Yet Vaudreuil and Lévis exerted themselves for defence with an energy that does honor to them both. "Far from showing the least timidity," says the ever-modest Governor, "I have taken positions such as may hide our weakness from the enemy." [836] He stationed Rochbeaucourt with three hundred men at Pointe-aux-Trembles; Repentigny with two hundred at Jacques-Cartier; and Dumas with twelve hundred at Deschambault to watch the St. Lawrence and, if possible, prevent Murray from moving up the river. Bougainville was stationed at Isle-aux-Noix to bar the approach from Lake Champlain, and a force under La Corne was held ready to defend the rapids above Montreal, should the English attempt that dangerous passage. Prisoners taken by war parties near Crown Point gave exaggerated reports of hostile preparation, and doubled and trebled the forces that were mustering against Canada. [836] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 22 Juin, 1760. These forces were nevertheless considerable. Amherst had resolved to enter the colony by all its three gates at once, and, advancing from east, west, and south, unite at Montreal and crush it as in the jaws of a vice. Murray was to ascend the St. Lawrence from Quebec, while Brigadier Haviland forced an entrance by way of Lake Champlain, and Amherst himself led the main army down the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario. This last route was long, circuitous, difficult, and full of 362 V2 danger from the rapids that obstructed the river. His choice of it for his chief line of operation, instead of the shorter and easier way of Lake Champlain, was meant, no doubt, to prevent the French army from escaping up the Lakes to Detroit and the other wilderness posts, where it might have protracted the war for an indefinite time; while the plan adopted, if successful, would make its capture certain. The plan was a critical one. Three armies advancing from three different points, hundreds of miles apart, by routes full of difficulty, and with no possibility of intercommunication, were to meet at the same place at the same time, or, failing to do so, run the risk of being destroyed in detail. If the French troops could be kept together, and if the small army of Murray or of Haviland should reach Montreal a few days before the co-operating forces appeared, it might be separately attacked and overpowered. In this lay the hope of Vaudreuil and Lévis. [837] [837] Lévis à Bourlamaque, Juillet, Ao?t, 1760. After the siege of Quebec was raised, Murray had an effective force of about twenty-five hundred rank and file. [838] As the spring opened the invalids were encamped on the Island of Orleans, where fresh air, fresh provisions, and the change from the pestiferous town hospitals wrought such wonders on the scorbutic patients, that in a few weeks a considerable number of them were again fit for garrison duty, if not for the field. 363 V2 Thus it happened that on the second of July twenty-four hundred and fifty men and officers received orders to embark for Montreal; and on the fifteenth they set sail, in thirty-two vessels, with a number of boats and bateaux. [839] They were followed some time after by Lord Rollo, with thirteen hundred additional men just arrived from Louisbourg, the King having ordered that fortress to be abandoned and dismantled. They advanced slowly, landing from time to time, skirmishing with detachments of the enemy who followed them along the shore, or more frequently trading with the farmers who brought them vegetables, poultry, eggs, and fresh meat. They passed the fortified hill of Jacques-Cartier, whence they were saluted with shot and shell, stopped at various parishes, disarmed the inhabitants, administered oaths of neutrality, which were taken without much apparent reluctance, and on the fourth of August came within sight of Three Rivers, then occupied by a body of troops expecting an attack. "But," says Knox, "a delay here would be absurd, as that wretched place must share the fate of Montreal. Our fleet sailed this morning. The French troops, apparently about two thousand, lined their different works, and were in general clothed as regulars, except a very few Canadians and about fifty naked Picts or savages, their bodies being painted of a reddish color and their faces of different colors, which I plainly discerned with my glass. Their light cavalry, who 364 V2 paraded along shore, seemed to be well appointed, clothed in blue, faced with scarlet; but their officers had white uniforms. In fine, their troops, batteries, fair-looking houses; their situation on the banks of a delightful river; our fleet sailing triumphantly before them, with our floating batteries drawn up in line of battle; the country on both sides interspersed with neat settlements, together with the verdure of the fields and trees and the clear, pleasant weather, afforded as agreeable a prospect as the most lively imagination can conceive." [838] Return of the Present State of His Majesty's Forces in Garrison at Quebec, 21 May, 1760. [839] Knox, II. 344, 348. This excellent lover of the picturesque was still more delighted as the fleet sailed among the islands of St. Peter. "I think nothing could equal the beauties of our navigation this morning: the meandering course of the narrow channel; the awfulness and solemnity of the dark forests with which these islands are covered; the fragrancy of the spontaneous fruits, shrubs, and flowers; the verdure of the water by the reflection of the neighboring woods; the wild chirping notes of the feathered inhabitants; the masts and sails of ships appearing as if among the trees, both ahead and astern: formed altogether an enchanting diversity." The evening recalled him from dreams to realities; for towards seven o'clock they reached the village of Sorel, where they found a large body of troops and militia intrenched along the strand. Bourlamaque was in command here with two or three thousand men, and Dumas, with another body, was on the northern shore. Both had orders 365 V2 to keep abreast of the fleet as it advanced; and thus French and English alike drew slowly towards Montreal, where lay the main French force under Lévis, ready to unite with Bourlamaque and Dumas, and fall upon Murray at the first opportunity. Montreal was now but a few leagues distant, and the situation was becoming delicate. Murray sent five rangers towards Lake Champlain to get news of Haviland, and took measures at the same time to cause the desertion of the Canadians, who formed the largest part of the opposing force. He sent a proclamation among the parishes, advising the inhabitants to remain peacefully at home, promising that those who did so should be safe in person and property, and threatening to burn every house from which the men of the family were absent. These were not idle words. A detachment sent for the purpose destroyed a settlement near Sorel, the owners of which were in arms under Bourlamaque. "I was under the cruel necessity of burning the greatest part of these poor unhappy people's houses," wrote Murray. "I pray God this example may suffice, for my nature revolts when this becomes a necessary part of my duty." [840] On the other hand, he treated with great kindness all who left the army and returned to their families. The effect was soon felt. The Canadians came in by scores and by hundreds to give up their arms and take the oath of neutrality, till, before the end of August, half Bourlamaque's force had disappeared. Murray encamped on Isle 366 V2 Ste.-Thérèse, just below Montreal, and watched and waited for Haviland and Amherst to appear. [841] [840] Murray to Pitt, 24 Aug. 1760. [841] Knox, II. 382, 384. Mante, 340. Vaudreuil on his part was not idle. He sent a counter-proclamation through the parishes as an antidote to that of Murray. "I have been compelled," he writes to the Minister, "to decree the pain of death to the Canadians who are so dastardly as to desert or give up their arms to the enemy, and to order that the houses of those who do not join our army shall be burned." [842] Execution was to be summary, without court-martial. [843] Yet desertion increased daily. The Canadians felt themselves doubly ruined, for it became known that the Court had refused to redeem the paper that formed the whole currency of the colony; and, in their desperation, they preferred to trust the tried clemency of the enemy rather than exasperate him by persisting in a vain defence. Vaudreuil writes in his usual strain: "I am taking the most just measures to unite our forces, and, if our situation permits, fight a battle, or several battles. It is to be feared that we shall go down before an enemy so numerous and strong; but, whatever may be the event, we will save the honor of the King's arms. I have the honor to repeat to you, Monseigneur, that if any resource were left me, whatever the progress the English might make, I would maintain myself in some part of the colony with my remaining troops, after having 367 V2 fought with the greatest obstinacy; but I am absolutely without the least remnant of the necessary means. In these unhappy circumstances I shall continue to use every man?uvre and device to keep the enemy in check; but if we succumb in the battles we shall fight, I shall apply myself to obtaining a capitulation which may avert the total ruin of a people who will remain forever French, and who could not survive their misfortunes but for the hope of being restored by the treaty of peace to the rule of His Most Christian Majesty. It is with this view that I shall remain in this town, the Chevalier de Lévis having represented to me that it would be an evil to the colonists past remedy if any accident should happen to me." Lévis was willing to go very far in soothing the susceptibilities of the Governor; but it may be suspected this time that he thought him more useful within four walls than in the open field. [842] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 29 Ao?t, 1760. [843] Lévis à Bourlamaque, 25 Ao?t, 1760. There seemed good hope of stopping the advance of Haviland. To this end Vaudreuil had stationed Bougainville at Isle-aux-Noix with seventeen hundred men, and Roquemaure at St. John, a few miles distant, with twelve or fifteen hundred more, besides all the Indians. [844] Haviland embarked at Crown Point with thirty-four hundred regulars, provincials, and Indians. [845] Four days brought him to Isle-aux-Noix; he landed, planted cannon in 368 V2 the swamp, and opened fire. Major Darby with the light infantry, and Rogers with the rangers, dragged three light pieces through the forest, and planted them on the river-bank in the rear of Bougainville's position, where lay the French naval force, consisting of three armed vessels and several gunboats. The cannon were turned upon the principal ship; a shot cut her cable, and a strong west wind drove her ashore into the hands of her enemies. The other vessels and gunboats made all sail for St. John, but stranded in a bend of the river, where the rangers, swimming out with their tomahawks, boarded and took one of them, and the rest soon surrendered. It was a fatal blow to Bougainville, whose communications with St. John were now cut off. In accordance with instructions from Vaudreuil, he abandoned the island on the night of the twenty-seventh of August, and, making his way with infinite difficulty through the dark forest, joined Roquemaure at St. John, twelve miles below. Haviland followed, the rangers leading the way. Bougainville and Roquemaure fell back, abandoned St. John and Chambly, and joined Bourlamaque on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where the united force at first outnumbered that of Haviland, though fast melted away by discouragement and desertion. Haviland opened communication with Murray, and they both looked daily for the arrival of Amherst, whose approach was rumored by prisoners and deserters. [846] [844] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 29 Ao?t, 1760. [845] A List of the Forces employed in the Expedition against Canada, 1760. Compare Mante, 340, Knox, II. 392, and Rogers, 188. Chevalier Johnstone, who was with Bougainville, says "about four thousand," which Vaudreuil multiplies to twelve thousand. [846] Rogers, Journals. Diary of a Sergeant in the Army of Haviland. Johnstone, Campaign of 1760. Bigot au Ministre, 29 Ao?t, 1760. 369 V2 The army of Amherst had gathered at Oswego in July. On the tenth of August it was all afloat on Lake Ontario, to the number of ten thousand one hundred and forty-two men, besides about seven hundred Indians under Sir William Johnson. [847] Before the fifteenth the whole had reached La Présentation, otherwise called Oswegatchie or La Galette, the seat of Father Piquet's mission. Near by was a French armed brig, the "Ottawa," with ten cannon and a hundred men, threatening destruction to Amherst's bateaux and whaleboats. Five gunboats attacked and captured her. Then the army advanced again, and were presently joined by two armed vessels of their own which had lingered behind, bewildered among the channels of the Thousand Islands. [847] A List of the Forces employed in the Expedition against Canada. Compare Mante, 301, and Knox, II. 403. Near the head of the rapids, a little below La Galette, stood Fort Lévis, built the year before on an islet in mid-channel. Amherst might have passed its batteries with slight loss, continuing his voyage without paying it the honor of a siege; and this was what the French commanders feared that he would do. "We shall be fortunate," Lévis wrote to Bourlamaque, "if the enemy amuse themselves with capturing it. My chief anxiety is lest Amherst should reach Montreal so soon that we may not have time to unite our forces to attack Haviland or Murray." If he had better known the English commander, Lévis would have seen that he was not the man to leave a post of 370 V2 the enemy in his rear under any circumstances; and Amherst had also another reason for wishing to get the garrison into his hands, for he expected to find among them the pilots whom he needed to guide his boats down the rapids. He therefore invested the fort, and, on the twenty-third, cannonaded it from his vessels, the mainland, and the neighboring islands. It was commanded by Pouchot, the late commandant of Niagara, made prisoner in the last campaign, and since exchanged. As the rocky islet had but little earth, the defences, though thick and strong, were chiefly of logs, which flew in splinters under the bombardment. The French, however, made a brave resistance. The firing lasted all day, was resumed in the morning, and continued two days more; when Pouchot, whose works were in ruins, surrendered himself and his garrison. On this, Johnson's Indians prepared to kill the prisoners; and, being compelled to desist, three fourths of them went home in a rage. [848] [848] On the capture of Fort Lévis, Amherst to Pitt, 26 Aug. 1760. Amherst to Monckton, same date. Pouchot, II. 264-282. Knox, II. 405-413. Mante, 303-306. All Canada in the Hands of the English (Boston, 1760). Journal of Colonel Nathaniel Woodhull. Now began the critical part of the expedition, the descent of the rapids. The Galops, the Rapide Plat, the Long Saut, the C?teau du Lac were passed in succession, with little loss, till they reached the Cedars, the Buisson, and the Cascades, where the reckless surges dashed and bounded in the sun, beautiful and terrible as young tigers at play. Boat after boat, borne on 371 V2 their foaming crests, rushed madly down the torrent. Forty-six were totally wrecked, eighteen were damaged, and eighty-four men were drowned. [849] La Corne was watching the rapids with a considerable body of Canadians; and it is difficult to see why this bold and enterprising chief allowed the army to descend undisturbed through passes so dangerous. At length the last rapid was left behind; and the flotilla, gliding in peace over the smooth breast of Lake St. Louis, landed at Isle Perrot, a few leagues from Montreal. In the morning, September sixth, the troops embarked again, landed unopposed at La Chine, nine miles from the city, marched on without delay, and encamped before its walls. [849] Amherst to Pitt, 8 Sept. 1760. The Montreal of that time was a long, narrow assemblage of wooden or stone houses, one or two stories high, above which rose the peaked towers of the Seminary, the spires of three churches, the walls of four convents, with the trees of their adjacent gardens, and, conspicuous at the lower end, a high mound of earth, crowned by a redoubt, where a few cannon were mounted. The whole was surrounded by a shallow moat and a bastioned stone wall, made for defence against Indians, and incapable of resisting cannon. [850] [850] An East View of Montreal, drawn on the Spot by Thomas Patten (King's Maps, British Museum), Plan of Montreal, 1759. A Description of Montreal, in several magazines of the time. The recent Canadian publication called Le Vieux Montréal, is exceedingly incorrect as to the numbers of the British troops and the position of their camps. On the morning after Amherst encamped above the place, Murray landed to encamp below it; and 372 V2 Vaudreuil, looking across the St. Lawrence, could see the tents of Haviland's little army on the southern shore. Bourlamaque, Bougainville, and Roquemaure, abandoned by all their militia, had crossed to Montreal with the few regulars that remained with them. The town was crowded with non-combatant refugees. Here, too, was nearly all the remaining force of Canada, consisting of twenty-two hundred troops of the line and some two hundred colony troops; for all the Canadians had by this time gone home. Many of the regulars, especially of the colony troops, had also deserted; and the rest were so broken in discipline that their officers were forced to use entreaties instead of commands. The three armies encamped around the city amounted to seventeen thousand men; [851] Amherst was bringing up his cannon from La Chine, and the town wall would have crumbled before them in an hour. [851] A List of the Forces employed in the Expedition against Canada. See Smith, History of Canada, I. Appendix xix. Vaudreuil writes to Charles Langlade, on the ninth, that the three armies amount to twenty thousand, and raises the number to thirty-two thousand in a letter to the Minister on the next day. Berniers says twenty thousand; Lévis, for obvious reasons, exaggerates the number to forty thousand. On the night when Amherst arrived, the Governor called a council of war. [852] It was resolved that since all the militia and many of the regulars had abandoned the army, and the Indian allies of France had gone over to the enemy, further resistance was impossible. Vaudreuil laid before the assembled officers a long paper that he had drawn up, containing fifty-five articles of capitulation to 373 V2 be proposed to the English; and these were unanimously approved. [853] In the morning Bougainville carried them to the tent of Amherst. He granted the greater part, modified some, and flatly refused others. That which the French officers thought more important than all the rest was the provision that the troops should march out with arms, cannon, and the honors of war; to which it was replied: "The whole garrison of Montreal and all other French troops in Canada must lay down their arms, and shall not serve during the present war." This demand was felt to be intolerable. The Governor sent Bougainville back to remonstrate; but Amherst was inflexible. Then Lévis tried to shake his resolution, and sent him an officer with the following note: "I send your Excellency M. de la Pause, Assistant Quartermaster-General of the Army, on the subject of the too rigorous article which you dictate to the troops by the capitulation, to which it would not be possible for us to subscribe." Amherst answered the envoy: "I am fully resolved, for the infamous part the troops of France have acted in exciting the savages to perpetrate the most horrid and unheard of barbarities in the whole progress of the war, and for other open treacheries and flagrant breaches of faith, to manifest to all the world by this capitulation my detestation of such practices;" and he dismissed La Pause with a short note, refusing to change the conditions. [852] Vaudreuil au Ministre, 10 Sept. 1760. [853] Procès-verbal de la Déliberation du Conseil de Guerre tenu à Montréal, 6 Sept. 1760. 374 V2 On the next morning, September eighth, Vaudreuil yielded, and signed the capitulation. By it Canada and all its dependencies passed to the British Crown. French officers, civil and military, with French troops and sailors, were to be sent to France in British ships. Free exercise of religion was assured to the people of the colony, and the religious communities were to retain their possessions, rights, and privileges. All persons who might wish to retire to France were allowed to do so, and the Canadians were to remain in full enjoyment of feudal and other property, including negro and Indian slaves. [854] [854] Articles of Capitulation, 8 Sept. 1760. Amherst to Pitt, same date. The greatest alarm had prevailed among the inhabitants lest they should suffer violence from the English Indians, and Vaudreuil had endeavored to provide that these dangerous enemies should be sent back at once to their villages. This was refused, with the remark: "There never have been any cruelties committed by the Indians of our army." Strict precautions were taken at the same time, not only against the few savages whom the firm conduct of Johnson at Fort Lévis had not driven away, but also against the late allies of the French, now become a peril to them. In consequence, not a man, woman, or child was hurt. Amherst, in general orders, expressed his confidence "that the troops will not disgrace themselves by the least appearance of inhumanity, or by any unsoldierlike behavior in seeking for plunder; and that as the Canadians are now become British subjects, 375 V2 they will feel the good effects of His Majesty's protection." They were in fact treated with a kindness that seemed to surprise them. Lévis was so incensed at the demand that the troops should lay down their arms and serve no longer during the war that, before the capitulation was signed, he made a formal protest [855] in his own name and that of the officers from France, and insisted that the negotiation should be broken off. "If," he added, "the Marquis de Vaudreuil, through political motives, thinks himself obliged to surrender the colony at once, we ask his permission to withdraw with the troops of the line to the Island of St. Helen, in order to uphold there, on our own behalf, the honor of the King's arms." The proposal was of course rejected, as Lévis knew that it would be, and he and his officers were ordered to conform to the capitulation. When Vaudreuil reached France, three months after, he had the mortification to receive from the Colonial Minister a letter containing these words: "Though His Majesty was perfectly aware of the state of Canada, nevertheless, after the assurances you had given to make the utmost efforts to sustain the honor of his arms, he did not expect to hear so soon of the surrender of Montreal and the whole colony. But, granting that capitulation was a necessity, his Majesty was not the less surprised 376 V2 and ill pleased at the conditions, so little honorable, to which you submitted, especially after the representations made you by the Chevalier de Lévis." [856] The brother of Vaudreuil complained to the Minister of the terms of this letter, and the Minister replied: "I see with regret, Monsieur, that you are pained by the letter I wrote your brother; but I could not help telling him what the King did me the honor to say to me; and it would have been unpleasant for him to hear it from anybody else." [857] [855] Protêt de M. de Lévis à M. de Vaudreuil contre la Clause dans les Articles de Capitulation qui exige que les Troupes mettront bas les Armes, avec l'Ordre de M. de Vaudreuil au Chevalier de Lévis de se conformer à la Capitulation proposée. Vaudreuil au Ministre de la Marine, 10 Sept. 1760. Lévis au Ministre de la Guerre, 27 Nov. 1760. [856] Le Ministre à Vaudreuil, 5 Déc. 1760. [857] Le Ministre au Vicomte de Vaudreuil, Frère du Gouverneur, 21 Déc. 1760. It is true that Vaudreuil had in some measure drawn this reproach upon himself by his boastings about the battles he would fight; yet the royal displeasure was undeserved. The Governor had no choice but to give up the colony; for Amherst had him in his power, and knew that he could exact what terms he pleased. Further resistance could only have ended in surrender at the discretion of the victor, and the protest of Lévis was nothing but a device to save his own reputation and that of his brother officers from France. Vaudreuil had served the King and the colony in some respects with ability, always with an unflagging zeal; and he loved the land of his birth with a jealous devotion that goes far towards redeeming his miserable defects. The King himself, and not the servants whom he abandoned to their fate, was answerable for the loss of New France. Half the continent had changed hands at the scratch of a pen. Governor Bernard, of Massachusetts, 377 V2 proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for the great event, and the Boston newspapers recount how the occasion was celebrated with a parade of the cadets and other volunteer corps, a grand dinner in Faneuil Hall, music, bonfires, illuminations, firing of cannon, and, above all, by sermons in every church of the province; for the heart of early New England always found voice through her pulpits. Before me lies a bundle of these sermons, rescued from sixscore years of dust, scrawled on their title-pages with names of owners dead long ago, worm-eaten, dingy, stained with the damps of time, and uttering in quaint old letterpress the emotions of a buried and forgotten past. Triumph, gratulation, hope, breathe in every line, but no ill-will against a fallen enemy. Thomas Foxcroft, pastor of the "Old Church in Boston," preaches from the text, "The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad." "Long," he says, "had it been the common opinion, Delenda est Carthago, Canada must be conquered, or we could hope for no lasting quiet in these parts; and now, through the good hand of our God upon us, we see the happy day of its accomplishment. We behold His Majesty's victorious troops treading upon the high places of the enemy, their last fortress delivered up, and their whole country surrendered to the King of Britain in the person of his general, the intrepid, the serene, the successful Amherst." The loyal John Mellen, pastor of the Second Church in Lancaster, exclaims, boding nothing of 378 V2 the tempest to come: "Let us fear God and honor the King, and be peaceable subjects of an easy and happy government. And may the blessing of Heaven be ever upon those enemies of our country that have now submitted to the English Crown, and according to the oath they have taken lead quiet lives in all godliness and honesty." Then he ventures to predict that America, now thrown open to British colonists, will be peopled in a century and a half with sixty million souls: a prophecy likely to be more than fulfilled. "God has given us to sing this day the downfall of New France, the North American Babylon, New England's rival," cries Eli Forbes to his congregation of sober farmers and staid matrons at the rustic village of Brookfield. Like many of his flock, he had been to the war, having served two years as chaplain of Ruggles's Massachusetts regiment; and something of a martial spirit breathes through his discourse. He passes in review the events of each campaign down to their triumphant close. "Thus God was our salvation and our strength; yet he who directs the great events of war suffered not our joy to be uninterrupted, for we had to lament the fall of the valiant and good General Wolfe, whose death demands a tear from every British eye, a sigh from every Protestant heart. Is he dead? I recall myself. Such heroes are immortal; he lives on every loyal tongue; he lives in every grateful breast; and charity bids me give him a place among the princes of heaven." Nor does he forget the praises of Amherst, "the 379 V2 renowned general, worthy of that most honorable of all titles, the Christian hero; for he loves his enemies, and while he subdues them he makes them happy. He transplants British liberty to where till now it was unknown. He acts the General, the Briton, the Conqueror, and the Christian. What fair hopes arise from the peaceful and undisturbed enjoyment of this good land, and the blessing of our gracious God with it! Methinks I see towns enlarged, settlements increased, and this howling wilderness become a fruitful field which the Lord hath blessed; and, to complete the scene, I see churches rise and flourish in every Christian grace where has been the seat of Satan and Indian idolatry." Nathaniel Appleton, of Cambridge, hails the dawning of a new era. "Who can tell what great and glorious things God is about to bring forward in the world, and in this world of America in particular? Oh, may the time come when these deserts, which for ages unknown have been regions of darkness and habitations of cruelty, shall be illuminated with the light of the glorious Gospel, and when this part of the world, which till the later ages was utterly unknown, shall be the glory and joy of the whole earth!" On the American continent the war was ended, and the British colonists breathed for a space, as they drifted unwittingly towards a deadlier strife. They had learned hard and useful lessons. Their mutual jealousies and disputes, the quarrels of their governors and assemblies, the want of any 380 V2 general military organization, and the absence, in most of them, of military habits, joined to narrow views of their own interest, had unfitted them to the last degree for carrying on offensive war. Nor were the British troops sent for their support remarkable in the beginning for good discipline or efficient command. When hostilities broke out, the army of Great Britain was so small as to be hardly worth the name. A new one had to be created; and thus the inexperienced Shirley and the incompetent Loudon, with the futile Newcastle behind them, had, besides their own incapacity, the disadvantage of raw troops and half-formed officers; while against them stood an enemy who, though weak in numbers, was strong in a centralized military organization, skilful leaders armed with untrammelled and absolute authority, practised soldiers, and a population not only brave, but in good part inured to war. The nature of the country was another cause that helped to protract the contest. "Geography," says Von Moltke, "is three fourths of military science;" and never was the truth of his words more fully exemplified. Canada was fortified with vast outworks of defence in the savage forests, marshes, and mountains that encompassed her, where the thoroughfares were streams choked with fallen trees and obstructed by cataracts. Never was the problem of moving troops, encumbered with baggage and artillery, a more difficult one. The question was less how to fight the enemy than how to get at him. If a few practicable roads had crossed 381 V2 this broad tract of wilderness, the war would have been shortened and its character changed. From these and other reasons, the numerical superiority of the English was to some extent made unavailing. This superiority, though exaggerated by French writers, was nevertheless immense if estimated by the number of men called to arms; but only a part of these could be employed in offensive operations. The rest garrisoned forts and blockhouses and guarded the far reach of frontier from Nova Scotia to South Carolina, where a wily enemy, silent and secret as fate, choosing their own time and place of attack, and striking unawares at every unguarded spot, compelled thousands of men, scattered at countless points of defence, to keep unceasing watch against a few hundred savage marauders. Full half the levies of the colonies, and many of the regulars, were used in service of this kind. In actual encounters the advantage of numbers was often with the French, through the comparative ease with which they could concentrate their forces at a given point. Of the ten considerable sieges or battles of the war, five, besides the great bushfight in which the Indians defeated Braddock, were victories for France; and in four of these—Oswego, Fort William Henry, Montmorenci, and Ste.-Foy—the odds were greatly on her side. Yet in this the most picturesque and dramatic of American wars, there is nothing more noteworthy than the skill with which the French and Canadian 382 V2 leaders used their advantages; the indomitable spirit with which, slighted and abandoned as they were, they grappled with prodigious difficulties, and the courage with which they were seconded by regulars and militia alike. In spite of occasional lapses, the defence of Canada deserves a tribute of admiration. CHAPTER XXXI. 1758-1763. THE PEACE OF PARIS. Exodus of Canadian Leaders ? Wreck of the "Auguste" ? Trial of Bigot and his Confederates ? Frederic of Prussia ? His Triumphs ? His Reverses ? His Peril ? His Fortitude ? Death of George II. ? Change of Policy ? Choiseul ? His Overtures of Peace ? The Family Compact ? Fall of Pitt ? Death of the Czarina ? Frederic saved ? War with Spain ? Capture of Havana ? Negotiations ? Terms of Peace ? Shall Canada be restored? ? Speech of Pitt ? The Treaty signed ? End of the Seven Years War. In accordance with the terms of the capitulation of Montreal, the French military officers, with such of the soldiers as could be kept together, as well as all the chief civil officers of the colony, sailed for France in vessels provided by the conquerors. They were voluntarily followed by the principal members of the Canadian noblesse, and by many of the merchants who had no mind to swear allegiance to King George. The peasants and poorer colonists remained at home to begin a new life under a new flag. Though this exodus of the natural leaders of Canada was in good part deferred till the next year, and though the number of persons to be immediately embarked was reduced by the desertion of many French soldiers who had married 384 V2 Canadian wives, yet the English authorities were sorely perplexed to find vessels enough for the motley crowd of passengers. When at last they were all on their way, a succession of furious autumnal storms fell upon them. The ship that carried Lévis barely escaped wreck, and that which bore Vaudreuil and his wife fared little better. [858] Worst of all was the fate of the "Auguste," on board of which was the bold but ruthless partisan, Saint-Luc de la Corne, his brother, his children, and a party of Canadian officers, together with ladies, merchants, and soldiers. A worthy ecclesiastical chronicler paints the unhappy vessel as a floating Babylon, and sees in her fate the stern judgment of Heaven. [859] It is true that New France ran riot in the last years of her existence; but before the "Auguste" was well out of the St. Lawrence she was so tossed and buffeted, so lashed with waves and pelted with rain, that the most alluring forms of sin must have lost their charm, and her inmates passed days rather of penance than transgression. There was a violent storm as the ship entered the Gulf; then a calm, during which she took fire in the cook's galley. The crew and passengers subdued the flames after desperate efforts; but their only food thenceforth was dry biscuit. Off the coast of Cape Breton another gale rose. They lost their reckoning and lay tossing blindly amid the tempest. The exhausted sailors took, in despair, to their hammocks, 385 V2 from which neither commands nor blows could rouse them, while amid shrieks, tears, prayers, and vows to Heaven, the "Auguste" drove towards the shore, struck, and rolled over on her side. La Corne with six others gained the beach; and towards night they saw the ship break asunder, and counted a hundred and fourteen corpses strewn along the sand. Aided by Indians and by English officers, La Corne made his way on snow-shoes up the St. John, and by a miracle of enduring hardihood reached Quebec before the end of winter. [860] [858] Lévis à Belleisle, 27 Nov. 1760. [859] Faillon, Vie de Mademoiselle Le Ber, 363-370. [860] Journal du Voyage de M. Saint-Luc de la Corne. This is his own narrative. The other ships weathered the November gales, and landed their passengers on the shores of France, where some of them found a dismal welcome, being seized and thrown into the Bastille. These were Vaudreuil, Bigot, Cadet, Péan, Bréard, Varin, Le Mercier, Penisseault, Maurin, Corpron, and others accused of the frauds and peculations that had helped to ruin Canada. In the next year they were all put on trial, whether as an act of pure justice or as a device to turn public indignation from the Government. In December, 1761, judges commissioned for the purpose began their sessions at the Chatelet, and a prodigious mass of evidence was laid before them. Cadet, with brazen effrontery, at first declared himself innocent, but ended with full and unblushing confession. Bigot denied everything till silenced point by point with papers bearing his own signature. The prisoners defended themselves by accusing each other. Bigot 386 V2 and Vaudreuil brought mutual charges, while all agreed in denouncing Cadet. Vaudreuil, as before mentioned, was acquitted. Bigot was banished from France for life, his property was confiscated, and he was condemned to pay fifteen hundred thousand francs by way of restitution. Cadet was banished for nine years from Paris and required to refund six millions; while others were sentenced in sums varying from thirty thousand to eight hundred thousand francs, and were ordered to be held in prison till the money was paid. Of twenty-one persons brought to trial ten were condemned, six were acquitted, three received an admonition, and two were dismissed for want of evidence. Thirty-four failed to appear, of whom seven were sentenced in default, and judgment was reserved in the case of the rest. [861] Even those who escaped from justice profited little by their gains, for unless they had turned them betimes into land or other substantial values, they lost them in a discredited paper currency and dishonored bills of exchange. [861] Jugement rendu souverainement et en dernier Ressort dans l'Affaire du Canada. Papers at the Chatelet of Paris, cited by Dussieux. While on the American continent the last scenes of the war were drawing to their close, the contest raged in Europe with unabated violence. England was in the full career of success; but her great ally, Frederic of Prussia, seemed tottering to his ruin. In the summer of 1758 his glory was at its height. French, Austrians, and Russians had all fled before him. But the autumn brought 387 V2 reverses; and the Austrian general, Daun, at the head of an overwhelming force, gained over him a partial victory, which his masterly strategy robbed of its fruits. It was but a momentary respite. His kingdom was exhausted by its own triumphs. His best generals were dead, his best soldiers killed or disabled, his resources almost spent, the very chandeliers of his palace melted into coin; and all Europe was in arms against him. The disciplined valor of the Prussian troops and the supreme leadership of their undespairing King had thus far held the invading hosts at bay; but now the end seemed near. Frederic could not be everywhere at once; and while he stopped one leak the torrent poured in at another. The Russians advanced again, defeated General Wedell, whom he sent against them, and made a junction with the Austrians. In August, 1759, he attacked their united force at Kunersdorf, broke their left wing to pieces, took a hundred and eighty cannon, forced their centre to give ground, and after hours of furious fighting was overwhelmed at last. In vain he tried to stop the rout. The bullets killed two horses under him, tore his clothes, and crushed a gold snuff-box in his waistcoat pocket. "Is there no b—— of a shot that can hit me, then?" he cried in his bitterness, as his aides-de-camp forced him from the field. For a few days he despaired; then rallied to his forlorn task, and with smiles on his lip and anguish at his heart watched, man?uvred, and fought with cool and stubborn desperation. To his friend D'Argens he wrote 388 V2 soon after his defeat: "Death is sweet in comparison to such a life as mine. Have pity on me and it; believe that I still keep to myself a great many evil things, not wishing to afflict or disgust anybody with them, and that I would not counsel you to fly these unlucky countries if I had any ray of hope. Adieu, mon cher!" It was well for him and for Prussia that he had strong allies in the dissensions and delays of his enemies. But his cup was not yet full. Dresden was taken from him, eight of his remaining generals and twelve thousand men were defeated and captured at Maxen, and "this infernal campaign," as he calls it, closed in thick darkness. "I wrap myself in my stoicism as best I can," he writes to Voltaire. "If you saw me you would hardly know me: I am old, broken, gray-headed, wrinkled. If this goes on there will be nothing left of me but the mania of making verses and an inviolable attachment to my duties and to the few virtuous men I know. But you will not get a peace signed by my hand except on conditions honorable to my nation. Your people, blown up with conceit and folly, may depend on this." The same stubborn conflict with overmastering odds, the same intrepid resolution, the same subtle strategy, the same skill in eluding the blow and lightning-like quickness in retorting it, marked Frederic's campaign of 1760. At Liegnitz three armies, each equal to his own, closed round him, and he put them all to flight. While he was fighting in Silesia, the Allies marched upon Berlin, 389 V2 took it, and held it three days, but withdrew on his approach. For him there was no peace. "Why weary you with the details of my labors and my sorrows?" he wrote again to his faithful D'Argens. "My spirits have forsaken me; all gayety is buried with the loved noble ones to whom my heart was bound." He had lost his mother and his devoted sister Wilhelmina. "You as a follower of Epicurus put a value upon life; as for me, I regard death from the Stoic point of view. I have told you, and I repeat it, never shall my hand sign a humiliating peace. Finish this campaign I will, resolved to dare all, to succeed, or find a glorious end." Then came the victory of Torgau, the last and one of the most desperate of his battles: a success dearly bought, and bringing neither rest nor safety. Once more he wrote to D'Argens: "Adieu, dear Marquis; write to me sometimes. Don't forget a poor devil who curses his fatal existence ten times a day." "I live like a military monk. Endless business, and a little consolation from my books. I don't know if I shall outlive this war, but if I do I am firmly resolved to pass the rest of my life in solitude in the bosom of philosophy and friendship. Your nation, you see, is blinder than you thought. These fools will lose their Canada and Pondicherry to please the Queen of Hungary and the Czarina." The campaign of 1761 was mainly defensive on the part of Frederic. In the exhaustion of his resources he could see no means of continuing the 390 V2 struggle. "It is only Fortune," says the royal sceptic, "that can extricate me from the situation I am in. I escape out of it by looking at the universe on the great scale like an observer from some distant planet. All then seems to be so infinitely small that I could almost pity my enemies for giving themselves so much trouble about so very little. I read a great deal, I devour my books. But for them I think hypochondria would have had me in Bedlam before now. In fine, dear Marquis, we live in troublous times and desperate situations. I have all the properties of a stage hero; always in danger, always on the point of perishing." [862] And in another mood: "I begin to feel that, as the Italians say, revenge is a pleasure for the gods. My philosophy is worn out by suffering. I am no saint, and I will own that I should die content if only I could first inflict a part of the misery that I endure." [862] The above extracts are as translated by Carlyle in his History of Frederick II. of Prussia. While Frederic was fighting for life and crown, an event took place in England that was to have great influence on the war. Walpole recounts it thus, writing to George Montagu on the twenty-fifth of October, 1760: "My man Harry tells me all the amusing news. He first told me of the late Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's; so I must tell you all I know of departed majesty. He went to bed well last night, rose at six this morning as usual, looked, I suppose, if all his money was in his purse, and called for his chocolate. 391 V2 A little after seven he went into the closet; the German valet-de-chambre heard a noise, listened, heard something like a groan, ran in, and found the hero of Oudenarde and Dettingen on the floor with a gash on his right temple by falling against the corner of a bureau. He tried to speak, could not, and expired. The great ventricle of the heart had burst. What an enviable death!" The old King was succeeded by his grandson, George III., a mirror of domestic virtues, conscientious, obstinate, narrow. His accession produced political changes that had been preparing for some time. His grandfather was German at heart, loved his Continental kingdom of Hanover, and was eager for all measures that looked to its defence and preservation. Pitt, too, had of late vigorously supported the Continental war, saying that he would conquer America in Germany. Thus with different views the King and the Minister had concurred in the same measures. But George III. was English by birth, language, and inclination. His ruling passion was the establishment and increase of his own authority. He disliked Pitt, the representative of the people. He was at heart averse to a war, the continuance of which would make the Great Commoner necessary, and therefore powerful, and he wished for a peace that would give free scope to his schemes for strengthening the prerogative. He was not alone in his pacific inclinations. The enemies of the haughty Minister, who had ridden rough-shod over men far above him in rank, were tired of his ascendency, and saw 392 V2 no hope of ending it but by ending the war. Thus a peace party grew up, and the young King became its real, though not at first its declared, supporter. The Tory party, long buried, showed signs of resurrection. There were those among its members who, even in a king of the hated line of Hanover, could recognize and admire the same spirit of arbitrary domination that had marked their fallen idols, the Stuarts; and they now joined hands with the discontented Whigs in opposition to Pitt. The horrors of war, the blessings of peace, the weight of taxation, the growth of the national debt, were the rallying cries of the new party; but the mainspring of their zeal was hostility to the great Minister. Even his own colleagues chafed under his spirit of mastery; the chiefs of the Opposition longed to inherit his power; and the King had begun to hate him as a lion in his path. Pitt held to his purpose regardless of the gathering storm. That purpose, as proclaimed by his adherents, was to secure a solid and lasting peace, which meant the reduction of France to so low an estate that she could no more be a danger to her rival. In this he had the sympathy of the great body of the nation. Early in 1761 the King, a fanatic for prerogative, set his enginery in motion. The elections for the new Parliament were manipulated in his interest. If he disliked Pitt as the representative of the popular will, he also disliked his colleague, the shuffling and uncertain Newcastle, as the representative of a too powerful nobility. Elements 393 V2 hostile to both were introduced into the Cabinet and the great offices. The King's favorite, the Earl of Bute, supplanted Holdernesse as Secretary of State for the Northern Department; Charles Townshend, an opponent of Pitt, was made Secretary of War; Legge, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was replaced by Viscount Barrington, who was sure for the King; while a place in the Cabinet was also given to the Duke of Bedford, one of the few men who dared face the formidable Minister. It was the policy of the King and his following to abandon Prussia, hitherto supported by British subsidies, make friends with Austria and Russia at her expense, and conclude a separate peace with France. France was in sore need of peace. The infatuation that had turned her from her own true interest to serve the passions of Maria Theresa and the Czarina Elizabeth had brought military humiliation and financial ruin. Abbé de Bernis, Minister of Foreign Affairs, had lost the favor of Madame de Pompadour, and had been supplanted by the Duc de Choiseul. The new Minister had gained his place by pleasing the favorite; but he kept it through his own ability and the necessities of the time. The Englishman Stanley, whom Pitt sent to negotiate with him, drew this sketch of his character: "Though he may have his superiors, not only in experience of business, but in depth and refinement as a statesman, he is a person of as bold and daring a spirit as any man whatever in our country or in his own. Madame Pompadour 394 V2 has ever been looked upon by all preceding courtiers and ministers as their tutelary deity, under whose auspices only they could exist, and who was as much out of their reach as if she were of a superior class of beings; but this Minister is so far from being in subordination to her influence that he seized the first opportunity of depriving her not of an equality, but of any share of power, reducing her to the necessity of applying to him even for those favors that she wants for herself and her dependents. He has effected this great change, which every other man would have thought impossible, in the interior of the Court, not by plausibility, flattery, and address, but with a high hand, with frequent railleries and sarcasms which would have ruined any other, and, in short, by a clear superiority of spirit and resolution." [863] [863] Stanley to Pitt, 6 Aug. 1761, in Grenville Correspondence, I. 367, note. Choiseul was vivacious, brilliant, keen, penetrating; believing nothing, fearing nothing; an easy moralist, an uncertain ally, a hater of priests; light-minded, inconstant; yet a kind of patriot, eager to serve France and retrieve her fortunes. He flattered himself with no illusions. "Since we do not know how to make war," he said, "we must make peace;" [864] and he proposed a congress of all the belligerent Powers at Augsburg. At the same time, since the war in Germany was distinct from the maritime and colonial war of France and England, he proposed a separate negotiation with the British Court in order to settle the questions 395 V2 between them as a preliminary to the general pacification. Pitt consented, and Stanley went as envoy to Versailles; while M. de Bussy came as envoy to London and, in behalf of Choiseul, offered terms of peace, the first of which was the entire abandonment of Canada to England. [865] But the offers were accompanied by the demand that Spain, which had complaints of its own against England, should be admitted as a party to the negotiation, and even hold in some measure the attitude of a mediator. Pitt spurned the idea with fierce contempt. "Time enough to treat of all that, sir, when the Tower of London is taken sword in hand." [866] He bore his part with the ability that never failed him, and with a supreme arrogance that rose to a climax in his demand that the fortress of Dunkirk should be demolished, not because it was any longer dangerous to England, but because the nation would regard its destruction "as an eternal monument of the yoke imposed on France." [867] [864] Flassan, Diplomatie Fran?aise, V. 376 (Paris, 1809). [865] See the proposals in Entick, V. 161. [866] Beatson, Military Memoirs, II. 434. The Count de Fuentes to the Earl of Egremont, 25 Dec. 1761, in Entick, V. 264. [867] On this negotiation, see Mémoire historique sur la Négociation de la France et de l'Angleterre (Paris, 1761), a French Government publication containing papers on both sides. The British Ministry also published such documents as they saw fit, under the title of Papers relating to the Rupture with Spain. Compare Adolphus, George III., I. 31-39. Choiseul replied with counter-propositions less humiliating to his nation. When the question of accepting or rejecting them came before the Ministry, the views of Pitt prevailed by a majority of one, and, to the disappointment of Bute and the 396 V2 King, the conferences were broken off. Choiseul, launched again on the billows of a disastrous war, had seen and provided against the event. Ferdinand VI. of Spain had died, and Carlos III. had succeeded to his throne. Here, as in England, change of kings brought change of policy. While negotiating vainly with Pitt, the French Minister had negotiated secretly and successfully with Carlos; and the result was the treaty known as the Family Compact, having for its object the union of the various members of the House of Bourbon in common resistance to the growing power of England. It provided that in any future war the Kings of France and Spain should act as one towards foreign Powers, insomuch that the enemy of either should be the enemy of both; and the Bourbon princes of Italy were invited to join in the covenant. [868] What was more to the present purpose, a special agreement was concluded on the same day, by which Spain bound herself to declare war against England unless that Power should make peace with France before the first of May, 1762. For the safety of her colonies and her trade Spain felt it her interest to join her sister nation in putting a check on the vast expansion of British maritime power. She could bring a hundred ships of war to aid the dilapidated navy of France, and the wealth of the Indies to aid her ruined treasury. [868] Flassan, Diplomatie Fran?aise, V. 317 (Paris, 1809). Pitt divined the secret treaty, and soon found evidence of it. He resolved to demand at once 397 V2 full explanation from Spain; and, failing to receive a satisfactory reply, attack her at home and abroad before she was prepared. On the second of October he laid his plan before a Cabinet Council held at a house in St. James Street. There were present the Earl of Bute, the Duke of Newcastle, Earl Granville, Earl Temple, and others of the Ministry. Pitt urged his views with great warmth. "This," he exclaimed, "is the time for humbling the whole House of Bourbon!" [869] His brother-in-law, Temple, supported him. Newcastle kept silent. Bute denounced the proposal, and the rest were of his mind. "If these views are to be followed," said Pitt, "this is the last time I can sit at this board. I was called to the administration of affairs by the voice of the people; to them I have always considered myself as accountable for my conduct; and therefore cannot remain in a situation which makes me responsible for measures I am no longer allowed to guide." Nothing could be more offensive to George III. and his adherents. [869] Beatson, II. 438. The veteran Carteret, Earl Granville, replied angrily: "I find the gentleman is determined to leave us; nor can I say I am sorry for it, since otherwise he would certainly have compelled us to leave him. But if he is resolved to assume the office of exclusively advising His Majesty and directing the operations of the war, to what purpose are we called to this council? When he talks of being responsible to the people, he talks the language of the House of Commons, and forgets that at this 398 V2 board he is responsible only to the King. However, though he may possibly have convinced himself of his infallibility, still it remains that we should be equally convinced before we can resign our understandings to his direction, or join with him in the measure he proposes." [870] [870] Annual Register, 1761, p. 44. Adolphus, George III., I. 40. Thackeray, Life of Chatham, I. 592. Pitt resigned, and his colleagues rejoiced. [871] Power fell to Bute and the Tories; and great was the fall. The mass of the nation was with the defeated Minister. On Lord Mayor's Day Bute and Barrington were passing St. Paul's in a coach, which the crowd mistook for that of Pitt, and cheered lustily; till one man, looking in at the window, shouted to the rest: "This isn't Pitt; it's Bute, and be damned to him!" The cheers turned forthwith to hisses, mixed with cries of "No Bute!" "No Newcastle salmon!" "Pitt forever!" Handfuls of mud were showered against the coach, and Barrington's ruffles were besmirched with it. [872] [871] Walpole, George III., I. 80, and note by Sir Denis Le Marchant, 80-82. [872] Nuthall to Lady Chatham, 12 Nov. 1761, in Chatham Correspondence, II. 166. The fall of Pitt was like the knell of doom to Frederic of Prussia. It meant abandonment by his only ally, and the loss of the subsidy which was his chief resource. The darkness around him grew darker yet, and not a hope seemed left; when as by miracle the clouds broke, and light streamed out of the blackness. The bitterest of his foes, the Czarina Elizabeth, she whom he had called 399 V2 infame catin du Nord, died, and was succeeded by her nephew, Peter III. Here again, as in England and Spain, a new sovereign brought new measures. The young Czar, simple and enthusiastic, admired the King of Prussia, thought him the paragon of heroes, and proclaimed himself his friend. No sooner was he on the throne than Russia changed front. From the foe of Frederic she became his ally; and in the opening campaign of 1762 the army that was to have aided in crushing him was ranged on his side. It was a turn of fortune too sharp and sudden to endure. Ill-balanced and extreme in all things, Peter plunged into headlong reforms, exasperated the clergy and the army, and alienated his wife, Catherine, who had hoped to rule in his name, and who now saw herself supplanted by his mistress. Within six months he was deposed and strangled. Catherine, one of whose lovers had borne part in the murder, reigned in his stead, conspicuous by the unbridled disorders of her life, and by powers of mind that mark her as the ablest of female sovereigns. If she did not share her husband's enthusiasm for Frederic, neither did she share Elizabeth's hatred of him. He, on his part, taught by hard experience, conciliated instead of insulting her, and she let him alone. Peace with Russia brought peace with Sweden, and Austria with the Germanic Empire stood alone against him. France needed all her strength to hold her own against the mixed English and German force under Ferdinand of Brunswick in the 400 V2 Rhine countries. She made spasmodic efforts to seize upon Hanover, but the result was humiliating defeat. In England George III. pursued his policy of strengthening the prerogative, and, jealous of the Whig aristocracy, attacked it in the person of Newcastle. In vain the old politician had played false with Pitt, and trimmed to please his young master. He was worried into resigning his place in the Cabinet, and Bute, the obsequious agent of the royal will, succeeded him as First Lord of the Treasury. Into his weak and unwilling hands now fell the task of carrying on the war; for the nation, elated with triumphs and full of fight, still called on its rulers for fresh efforts and fresh victories. Pitt had proved a true prophet, and his enemies were put to shame; for the attitude of Spain forced Bute and his colleagues to the open rupture with her which the great Minister had vainly urged upon them; and a new and formidable war was now added to the old. [873] Their counsels were weak and half-hearted; but the armies and navies of England still felt the impulsion that the imperial hand of Pitt had given and the unconquerable spirit that he had roused. [873] Declaration of War against the King of Spain, 4 Jan. 1762. This spirit had borne them from victory to victory. In Asia they had driven the French from Pondicherry and all their Indian possessions; in Africa they had wrested from them Gorée and the Senegal country; in the West Indies they had taken Guadeloupe and Dominica; in the European 401 V2 seas they had captured ship after ship, routed and crippled the great fleet of Admiral Conflans, seized Belleisle, and defeated a bold attempt to invade Ireland. The navy of France was reduced to helplessness. Pitt, before his resignation, had planned a series of new operations, including an attack on Martinique, with other West Indian islands still left to France, and then in turn on the Spanish possessions of Havana, Panama, Manila, and the Philippines. Now, more than ever before, the war appeared in its true character. It was a contest for maritime and colonial ascendency; and England saw herself confronted by both her great rivals at once. Admiral Rodney sailed for Martinique, and Brigadier Monckton joined him with troops from America. Before the middle of February the whole island was in their hands; and Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent soon shared its fate. The Earl of Albemarle and Admiral Sir George Pococke sailed in early spring on a more important errand, landed in June near Havana with eleven thousand soldiers, and attacked Moro Castle, the key of the city. The pitiless sun of the tropic midsummer poured its fierce light and heat on the parched rocks where the men toiled at the trenches. Earth was so scarce that hardly enough could be had to keep the fascines in place. The siege works were little else than a mass of dry faggots; and when, after exhausting toil, the grand battery opened on the Spanish defences, it presently took fire, was consumed, and had to be made anew. 402 V2 Fresh water failed, and the troops died by scores from thirst; fevers set in, killed many, and disabled nearly half the army. The sea was strewn with floating corpses, and carrion-birds in clouds hovered over the populous graveyards and infected camps. Yet the siege went on: a formidable sally was repulsed; Moro Castle was carried by storm; till at length, two months and eight days after the troops landed, Havana fell into their hands. [874] At the same time Spain was attacked at the antipodes, and the loss of Manila and the Philippines gave her fresh cause to repent her rash compact with France. She was hardly more fortunate near home; for having sent an army to invade Portugal, which was in the interest of England, a small British force, under Brigadier Burgoyne, foiled it, and forced it to retire. [874] Journal of the Siege, by the Chief Engineer, in Beatson, II. 544. Mante, 398-465. Entick, V. 363-383. The tide of British success was checked for an instant in Newfoundland, where a French squadron attacked St. John's and took it, with its garrison of sixty men. The news reached Amherst at New York; his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Amherst, was sent to the scene of the mishap. St. John's was retaken, and its late conquerers were made prisoners of war. The financial condition of France was desperate. Her people were crushed with taxation; her debt grew apace; and her yearly expenditure was nearly double her revenue. Choiseul felt the need of immediate peace; and George III. and Bute were 403 V2 hardly less eager for it, to avert the danger of Pitt's return to power and give free scope to their schemes for strengthening the prerogative. Therefore, in September, 1762, negotiations were resumed. The Duke of Bedford was sent to Paris to settle the preliminaries, and the Duc de Nivernois came to London on the same errand. The populace were still for war. Bedford was hissed as he passed through the streets of London, and a mob hooted at the puny figure of Nivernois as he landed at Dover. The great question was, Should Canada be restored? Should France still be permitted to keep a foothold on the North American continent? Ever since the capitulation of Montreal a swarm of pamphlets had discussed the momentous subject. Some maintained that the acquisition of Canada was not an original object of the war; that the colony was of little value and ought to be given back to its old masters; that Guadeloupe should be kept instead, the sugar trade of that island being worth far more than the Canadian fur trade; and, lastly, that the British colonists, if no longer held in check by France, would spread themselves over the continent, learn to supply all their own wants, grow independent, and become dangerous. Nor were these views confined to Englishmen. There were foreign observers who clearly saw that the adhesion of her colonies to Great Britain would be jeopardized by the extinction of French power in America. Choiseul warned Stanley that they "would not fail to shake off their dependence the 404 V2 moment Canada should be ceded;" while thirteen years before, the Swedish traveller Kalm declared that the presence of the French in America gave the best assurance to Great Britain that its own colonies would remain in due subjection. [875] [875] Kalm, Travels in North America, I. 207. The most noteworthy argument on the other side was that of Franklin, whose words find a strange commentary in the events of the next few years. He affirmed that the colonies were so jealous of each other that they would never unite against England. "If they could not agree to unite against the French and Indians, can it reasonably be supposed that there is any danger of their uniting against their own nation, which it is well known they all love much more than they love one another? I will venture to say union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible;" that is, he prudently adds, without "the most grievous tyranny and oppression," like the bloody rule of "Alva in the Netherlands." [876] [876] Interest of Great Britain in regard to her Colonies (London, 1760). Lord Bath argues for retaining Canada in A Letter addressed to Two Great Men on the Prospect of Peace (1759). He is answered by another pamphlet called Remarks on the Letter to Two Great Men (1760). The Gentleman's Magazine for 1759 has an ironical article styled Reasons for restoring Canada to the French; and in 1761 a pamphlet against the restitution appeared under the title, Importance of Canada considered in Two Letters to a Noble Lord. These are but a part of the writings on the question. If Pitt had been in office he would have demanded terms that must ruin past redemption the maritime and colonial power of France; but 405 V2 Bute was less exacting. In November the plenipotentiaries of England, France, and Spain agreed on preliminaries of peace, in which the following were the essential points. France ceded to Great Britain Canada and all her possessions on the North American continent east of the River Mississippi, except the city of New Orleans and a small adjacent district. She renounced her claims to Acadia, and gave up to the conqueror the Island of Cape Breton, with all other islands in the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence. Spain received back Havana, and paid for it by the cession of Florida, with all her other possessions east of the Mississippi. France, subject to certain restrictions, was left free to fish in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off a part of the coast of Newfoundland; and the two little islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were given her as fishing stations on condition that she should not fortify or garrison them. In the West Indies, England restored the captured islands of Guadeloupe, Marigalante, Désirade, and Martinique, and France ceded Grenada and the Grenadines; while it was agreed that of the so-called neutral islands, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago should belong to England, and St. Lucia to France. In Europe, each side promised to give no more help to its allies in the German war. France restored Minorca, and England restored Belleisle; France gave up such parts of Hanoverian territory as she had occupied, and evacuated certain fortresses belonging to Prussia, pledging herself at the same time to demolish, under the inspection 406 V2 of English engineers, her own maritime fortress of Dunkirk. In Africa France ceded Senegal, and received back the small Island of Gorée. In India she lost everything she had gained since the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; recovered certain trading stations, but renounced the right of building forts or maintaining troops in Bengal. On the day when the preliminaries were signed, France made a secret agreement with Spain, by which she divested herself of the last shred of her possessions on the North American continent. As compensation for Florida, which her luckless ally had lost in her quarrel, she made over to the Spanish Crown the city of New Orleans, and under the name of Louisiana gave her the vast region spreading westward from the Mississippi towards the Pacific. On the ninth of December the question of approving the preliminaries came up before both Houses of Parliament. There was a long debate in the Commons. Pitt was not present, confined, it was said, by gout; till late in the day the House was startled by repeated cheers from the outside. The doors opened, and the fallen Minister entered, carried in the arms of his servants, and followed by an applauding crowd. His bearers set him down within the bar, and by the help of a crutch he made his way with difficulty to his seat. "There was a mixture of the very solemn and the theatric in this apparition," says Walpole, who was present. "The moment was so well timed, the importance of the man and his services, 407 V2 the languor of his emaciated countenance, and the study bestowed on his dress were circumstances that struck solemnity into a patriot mind, and did a little furnish ridicule to the hardened and insensible. He was dressed in black velvet, his legs and thighs wrapped in flannel, his feet covered with buskins of black cloth, and his hands with thick gloves." Not for the first time, he was utilizing his maladies for purposes of stage effect. He spoke for about three hours, sometimes standing, and sometimes seated; sometimes with a brief burst of power, more often with the accents of pain and exhaustion. He highly commended the retention of Canada, but denounced the leaving to France a share in the fisheries, as well as other advantages tending to a possible revival of her maritime power. But the Commons listened coldly, and by a great majority approved the preliminaries of peace. These preliminaries were embodied in the definitive treaty concluded at Paris on the tenth of February, 1763. Peace between France and England brought peace between the warring nations of the Continent. Austria, bereft of her allies, and exhausted by vain efforts to crush Frederic, gave up the attempt in despair, and signed the treaty of Hubertsburg. The Seven Years War was ended. CHAPTER XXXII. 1763-1884. CONCLUSION. Results of the War ? Germany ? France ? England ? Canada ? The British Provinces. "This," said Earl Granville on his deathbed, "has been the most glorious war and the most triumphant peace that England ever knew." Not all were so well pleased, and many held with Pitt that the House of Bourbon should have been forced to drain the cup of humiliation to the dregs. Yet the fact remains that the Peace of Paris marks an epoch than which none in modern history is more fruitful of grand results. With it began a new chapter in the annals of the world. To borrow the words of a late eminent writer, "It is no exaggeration to say that three of the many victories of the Seven Years War determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, with that of Plassey the influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander on the nations of the East; with the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States." [877] [877] Green, History of the English People, IV. 193 (London, 1880). 409 V2 So far, however, as concerns the war in the Germanic countries, it was to outward seeming but a mad debauch of blood and rapine, ending in nothing but the exhaustion of the combatants. The havoc had been frightful. According to the King of Prussia's reckoning, 853,000 soldiers of the various nations had lost their lives, besides hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who had perished from famine, exposure, disease, or violence. And with all this waste of life not a boundary line had been changed. The rage of the two empresses and the vanity and spite of the concubine had been completely foiled. Frederic had defied them all, and had come out of the strife intact in his own hereditary dominions and master of all that he had snatched from the Empress-Queen; while Prussia, portioned out by her enemies as their spoil, lay depleted indeed, and faint with deadly striving, but crowned with glory, and with the career before her which, through tribulation and adversity, was to lead her at last to the headship of a united Germany. Through centuries of strife and vicissitude the French monarchy had triumphed over nobles, parliaments, and people, gathered to itself all the forces of the State, beamed with illusive splendors under Louis the Great, and shone with the phosphorescence of decay under his contemptible successor; till now, robbed of prestige, burdened with debt, and mined with corruption, it was moving swiftly and more swiftly towards the abyss of ruin. 410 V2 While the war hastened the inevitable downfall of the French monarchy, it produced still more notable effects. France under Colbert had embarked on a grand course of maritime and colonial enterprise, and followed it with an activity and vigor that promised to make her a great and formidable ocean power. It was she who led the way in the East, first trained the natives to fight her battles, and began that system of mixed diplomacy and war which, imitated by her rival, enabled a handful of Europeans to master all India. In North America her vast possessions dwarfed those of every other nation. She had built up a powerful navy and created an extensive foreign trade. All this was now changed. In India she was reduced to helpless inferiority, with total ruin in the future; and of all her boundless territories in North America nothing was left but the two island rocks on the coast of Newfoundland that the victors had given her for drying her codfish. Of her navy scarcely forty ships remained; all the rest were captured or destroyed. She was still great on the continent of Europe, but as a world power her grand opportunities were gone. In England as in France the several members of the State had battled together since the national life began, and the result had been, not the unchecked domination of the Crown, but a system of balanced and adjusted forces, in which King, Nobility, and Commons all had their recognized places and their share of power. Thus in the war just ended two great conditions of success had been 411 V2 supplied: a people instinct with the energies of ordered freedom, and a masterly leadership to inspire and direct them. All, and more than all, that France had lost England had won. Now, for the first time, she was beyond dispute the greatest of maritime and colonial Powers. Portugal and Holland, her precursors in ocean enterprise, had long ago fallen hopelessly behind. Two great rivals remained, and she had humbled the one and swept the other from her path. Spain, with vast American possessions, was sinking into the decay which is one of the phenomena of modern history; while France, of late a most formidable competitor, had abandoned the contest in despair. England was mistress of the seas, and the world was thrown open to her merchants, explorers, and colonists. A few years after the Peace the navigator Cook began his memorable series of voyages, and surveyed the strange and barbarous lands which after times were to transform into other Englands, vigorous children of this great mother of nations. It is true that a heavy blow was soon to fall upon her; her own folly was to alienate the eldest and greatest of her offspring. But nothing could rob her of the glory of giving birth to the United States; and, though politically severed, this gigantic progeny were to be not the less a source of growth and prosperity to the parent that bore them, joined with her in a triple kinship of laws, language, and blood. The war or series of wars that ended with the Peace of Paris secured the 412 V2 opportunities and set in action the forces that have planted English homes in every clime, and dotted the earth with English garrisons and posts of trade. With the Peace of Paris ended the checkered story of New France; a story which would have been a history if faults of constitution and the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode. Yet it is a noteworthy one in both its lights and its shadows: in the disinterested zeal of the founder of Quebec, the self-devotion of the early missionary martyrs, and the daring enterprise of explorers; in the spiritual and temporal vassalage from which the only escape was to the savagery of the wilderness; and in the swarming corruptions which were the natural result of an attempt to rule, by the absolute hand of a master beyond the Atlantic, a people bereft of every vestige of civil liberty. Civil liberty was given them by the British sword; but the conqueror left their religious system untouched, and through it they have imposed upon themselves a weight of ecclesiastical tutelage that finds few equals in the most Catholic countries of Europe. Such guardianship is not without certain advantages. When faithfully exercised it aids to uphold some of the tamer virtues, if that can be called a virtue which needs the constant presence of a sentinel to keep it from escaping: but it is fatal to mental robustness and moral courage; and if French Canada would fulfil its aspirations it must cease to be one of the most priest-ridden communities of the modern world. 413 V2 Scarcely were they free from the incubus of France when the British provinces showed symptoms of revolt. The measures on the part of the mother-country which roused their resentment, far from being oppressive, were less burdensome than the navigation laws to which they had long submitted; and they resisted taxation by Parliament simply because it was in principle opposed to their rights as freemen. They did not, like the American provinces of Spain at a later day, sunder themselves from a parent fallen into decrepitude; but with astonishing audacity they affronted the wrath of England in the hour of her triumph, forgot their jealousies and quarrels, joined hands in the common cause, fought, endured, and won. The disunited colonies became the United States. The string of discordant communities along the Atlantic coast has grown to a mighty people, joined in a union which the earthquake of civil war served only to compact and consolidate. Those who in the weakness of their dissensions needed help from England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations on which that 414 V2 prosperity rests, and turn some fair proportion of her vast mental forces to other objects than material progress and the game of party politics. She has tamed the savage continent, peopled the solitude, gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable; and now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the masses is consistent with the highest growth of the individual; that democracy can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant, ideas as energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and strong, as any of the systems which it boasts to supplant.