Ursuline Nuns
Montmagny was adévotésurrounded by a suite as pious as himself. Through these amenable spiritsthe Jesuits were supreme not only in matters of religion, but in matters of state. Indeed, in this ecclesiastically governed community there was little distinction between sacred and secular matters. The church was the centre of affairs. A stake was planted before the sacred edifice bearing a placard of warning against blasphemy, drunkenness, and neglect of the Mass. A pillory, with chain and iron collar, and a wooden horse, stood close by—suggestive means of religious correction.
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Even the recreations of the people partook of a religious character. The feast of St. Joseph, the patron saint of New France, was celebrated withpious display. On May-Day the young people of Quebec tripped about a maypole surmounted by a triple crown in honour of Jesus, Maria, and Joseph. The annual visits of the Company's ships from France, however, temporarily disturbed the calm of the monastic city. The genuflexions of drunken sailors were seldom in honour of St. Joseph; and the ribald humours of visiting mariners profaned for a season the quiet rock of Quebec.
Chateau St. Louis, 1694
But throughout this missionary period the hatchet of the Iroquois was suspended over the city. Their dreaded war-cry rang all too often through the adjacent forests, and their stealthy tomahawks found victims even under the guns of Fort St. Louis. So daring became the incursions of the implacable savages that the settlers did not dare to till their lands. To pass from one post to another without a strong escort meant risk of death or capture; and capture was more dreaded than death itself. Every year had its tale of surprises and massacres.The sleepless sentries on the ramparts, and the staunch palisades of the fort seemed insufficient protection against a foe as silent as an arrow and as swift in speeding upon its victim. At this time also the Jesuit missions among the distant Hurons were suffering unknown horrors; but the tale of their disasters is for another chapter.
Successive governors of Quebec—Montmagny, D'Ailleboust, and D'Argenson—pleaded with the home authorities to send reinforcements for their feeble garrison, by whom alone Quebec hoped to escape the ever-dreaded catastrophe. Through press of home affairs, and official neglect and indifference, these requests continued to be disregarded. Reprisals were taken against the Iroquois whenever opportunities occurred; but even these were all too rare.
In May, 1660, an Iroquois captive was brought to Quebec. A stake was erected in thePlace d'Armes, and in the sight of the populace the Indian was burned to death. A deed of this nature, occurring with the apparent sanction of the religious governor of a civilised community, must be taken to reflect the terrible pressure of suffering which made such inhuman reprisals possible. The savage nature of this vengeance was softened to the eyes of many by the poor casuistry of the Jesuits, who gave out, and believed, that the soul of the Mohawk would gostraight to Paradise on the wings of his unwelcome baptism.
This particular Indian met his fate with the wonderful fortitude of his race, but not with their stoic silence. Instead, he breathed out threatenings, and promised the fell destruction of the pale-faced interlopers. Even now, he told them, hundreds of his kinsmen were gathering upon the Ottawa and St. Lawrence for the final effacement of Quebec, and with hideous fury the baptized savage called down upon them the wrath of his gods.
Forthwith Quebec became deeply alarmed. The desultory attacks of the Iroquois were now to be exchanged for a deliberate assault in which the whole strength of the Five Nations should be thrown into the struggle. The Ursulines and nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu forsook their convents to take refuge in the fortified college of the Jesuits, whither the fugitives from the surrounding settlements also fled. A company of soldiers took up their quarters in the Ursuline Convent, the redoubts of the fort were strengthened, and barricades were erected in the streets of Lower Town. All night long sentries paced the parapets, peering anxiously into the surrounding darkness, and straining their ears for the creeping tread in the thicket.
After several days of watching, however, no Iroquois appeared, and the inhabitants began tobreathe freely again. The more courageous returned to their deserted homes and farms, but the timid still clung to the blockhouse. The panic had also spread to Ville Marie,[5]and the imminence of this danger produced one of the most brilliant exploits which Canadian history records—a feat of daring closely resembling, and not surpassed by, the achievement of Leonidas in the Pass of Thermopylæ.
The story is one of the finest in the picturesque pages of Parkman, part of whose narrative is here transcribed.
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 rank in France, and it was not long before he set on foot a remarkable Indian enterprise. Sixteen young men caught his spirit, struck hands with him, and pledged their word. They bound themselves by oath to accept no quarter, made their wills, confessed, and received the sacrament. After a solemn farewell, they embarked in several canoes, well supplied with arms and ammunition. Descending the St. Lawrence, they entered the mouth of the Ottawa, crossed the Lake of Two Mountains, and slowly advanced against the current of the river. A few days later theyreached the foot of the formidable rapid called the "Long Sault," where a tumult of waters foaming among ledges and boulders barred their onward way. Besides, it was needless to go farther. The Iroquois were sure to pass the Sault, and could be fought here as well as elsewhere.
The Ursulaines' Convent
Just below the rapid stood a palisade fort, the work of an Algonquin war-party of the preceding 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. They made their fires and slung their kettles on the neighbouring shore. Here they were soon afterwards joined by a small party of friendly Indians, consisting of about forty Hurons from Quebec, under their braveand wily chief Étienne Annahotaha, and five Algonquins led by Mituvemeg. Daulac made no objection to their company, so they all bivouacked together.
In a day or two their scouts came in with tidings that two Iroquois canoes were coming down the Sault. Daulac had only time to set his men in ambush before the advance canoes of the enemy swept down the river. A few of the Iroquois escaped the Frenchmen's volley, and fleeing into the forest, they reported their mischance to their main body, 200 in number, on the river above. Thereupon 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 attack, but being repulsed, they withdrew and fell to building a rude fort of their own in the neighbouring forest. This gave the French breathing-time, and they used it for strengthening their defences. 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 twenty loopholes or more, 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 againstthe palisade; but so brisk and steady a fire met them that they recoiled, and at last gave way. Again and again, however, they came on, each time leaving many of their bravest fighters dead upon the ground. At length, their spirits dashed, the warriors drew back. A canoe was hastily sent down the river to call to their aid five hundred Iroquois who were mustered near the mouth of the Richelieu.
Meanwhile, the defenders of the fort were harassed night and day 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 a narrow prison, fought and prayed by turns. Deprived as they were of water, they could not swallow the crushed Indian corn 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 meagre supply only tantalised their thirst, and they now dug a hole in the fort, to be rewarded at last by a little muddy water oozing through the clay.
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. Soon a crowd of warriors mustered for the attack. Cautiously they advanced, screeching, leaping, and firing as they cameon; 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 vigour of the defence, fell back discomfited. The fire of the French had told upon them with deadly effect. Three days more wore away in a series of futile attacks; and during all this time Daulac and his men, reeling with exhaustion, fought and prayed, sure of a martyr's reward.
At length the Iroquois determined upon a grand final assault. Large and heavy shields, four or five feet high, were made by lashing together three split logs with the aid of cross-bars, and covered with these mantelets a 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. Daulac had crammed a large musketoon with powder, and lighting a fuse, he tried to throw it over the barrier, to burst like a grenade among the 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. In the confusion which followed, the Iroquois got possession of the loopholes,and thrusting in their guns, fired on those within. In a moment they had torn a breach in the palisade, then another and another. The brave Daulac was struck dead, but the survivors kept up the now hopeless fight. With sword, hatchet, or knife, 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.
To the colony it proved salvation. The Iroquois had had fighting enough. If seventeen Frenchmen and a handful of Indian allies, 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 Ville Marie, but returned to their villages dejected and amazed, to howl over their losses, and nurse their dashed courage for a day of vengeance.
If on its material side French colonial policy took account of the Indian, it did so much more on its religious side. Quebec was the farthest outpost of Catholicism. New France was for ever to be free from the taint of heresy, allowing none but Catholic settlers within her gates; and Huguenots, as we have seen, were specifically excluded. The Indians were to be rescued from heathen darkness and led into the sacred light of the Church. Jesuit missions thus became a salient feature in the early history of Quebec, the nerve centre of the movement being the palisaded convent on the little St. Charles.
To go back in review. On the retrocession of Quebec by the English, under the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, in the time of Champlain, the influence of the Jesuits was sufficient to secure for themselves the undivided control of the Canadian mission. Returning to Quebec in 1632, Father LeJeune and his two companions had established themselves in the half-ruined convent of Notre Dame des Anges, built by the Récollets sixteen years before. The log stockade enclosed two buildings, the smaller of which served as storehouse, stable, and workshop, and the larger as chapel and refectory. Four tiny cells opened off the latter, and in these the fathers lodged, while the lay brothers and the workmen found apartments in the garret and the cellar. The regimen of this crude establishment was severely ascetic. The day began with early Mass and closed with evening prayers. The intervening time was spent by the laymen in cultivating the little clearing, and by the fathers in hearing confessions at the fort a mile away, or in struggling with the Algonquin idiom, by the vague assistance of one Pierre, an Indian proselyte, who, in weakness of flesh, ran away when the season of Lent drew near.
The strength of the Jesuits was increased in the spring of 1633 by the arrival of four new priests. Of these the most remarkable was Jean de Brébeuf, the descendant of a noble family in Normandy, and destined to prove his own nobility by an intrepid zeal and an almost incredible courage.
Le Jeune's distressful experiment with a band of wandering Algonquins had convinced the Jesuits that their schemes of mission-conquest could not bear much fruit if they were confined to the vagranttribes of the north. Farther west in the peninsula of the great lakes lived Indians of fixed habits and domicile, and otherwise further advanced towards civilisation than the improvident hunting tribes round about Quebec. Of these the most notable were the Hurons. As long before as 1615 the Récollet Le Caron had gone among them, and several years later Brébeuf had made the perilous lodges of Ihonatiria his habitation, but had at length returned to France. On his coming to Quebec again in the spring of 1633, Brébeuf anxiously turned his thoughts towards his former mission, awaiting only a favourable opportunity to forsake the comparative safety of the city of Quebec for the gloomy shores of Lake Huron and "the greater glory of God."
Midsummer brought the annual swarm of Hurons to the trading fair at Quebec. For a week the all but naked savages overran the little settlement, their animal curiosity almost driving the French to distraction, and their casual peculations causing much annoyance. But their presence was a necessary evil, if the Fur Company was to declare its dividends. Hence long-suffering courtesy became essential both to the peace of the city and to future interests so much at stake.
A powerful consideration with the community was the anxiety of the Jesuits to go back with the Indians to their villages on Lake Huron. Champlain, whengovernor, had espoused this project in the most seductive of his speeches. "These are our fathers," he had announced to the sixty chiefs gathered for the nonce in the quadrangle of the Fort. "We love them more than we love ourselves. The whole French nation honours them. They do not go among you for your furs. They have left their friends and their country to show you the way to the happy hunting-grounds. If you love the French, as you say you do, then love and honour these our fathers, and care for them in your distant villages."
But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the Indian mind was no more sure. Above all else it lacked definiteness; it was touched by rhetoric. Champlain's auditors had been thrilled with deep emotion. They were for embarking at once with the Jesuits. Then they had faltered, and by the next day they had decided to depart without them. For another year, therefore, the fathers had remained at Notre Dame des Anges, studying the Huron language for future use, and caring meantime for the spiritual welfare of the half-hundred French residents of Quebec.
The summer of 1634 once more saw the city given over to the visiting Hurons. The old persuasive palaver was repeated, and this time with more success. When the trading fair was over, Brébeuf, Daniel, andDavost set off with the savage fleet, each in a different canoe, facing a journey of nine hundred miles fraught with many perils, but with none so ominous as the sullen and menacing mood of their heathen conductors.
Week after week they pressed toilfully up the St. Lawrence and Ottawa; barefooted they struggled over the rocky portages, with a pittance of pounded maize for their daily ration, and mother-earth for their nightly couch. Davost's guide robbed and abandoned him at an island in the Upper Ottawa. Daniel was likewise deserted; but the giant Brébeuf yielded to no hardships, and surpassed even the seasoned savages in strength and endurance. On the shore of the Georgian Bay, however, his guide at length abandoned him. But Brébeuf had been here in a former year, and his instinctive woodcraft guided him twenty miles through the forest to the palisaded village of Ihonatiria.
"Echom has come again," cried the inhabitants, as they recognised the towering figure of the Jesuit who had departed from them five years before; and they opened again their lodges to the missionary.
Monument to the First Canadian Missionary
After days of anxious waiting, Brébeuf had the joy of seeing Daniel and Davost arrive at Ihonatiria. The hardships and dangers they had endured, and the indignities they had suffered from their brutal guides, were only outweighed by their zealous delightin reaching at length the scene of their devoted labours. The Hurons aided them in the construction of a log mission-house; and when the fathers had decorated the interior with highly-coloured pictures of the saints and the glittering regalia of the Church, the red men filled it to overflowing. A striking clock and a magnifying glass, however, were the chief objectsof wonderment, and the credulous Indians regarded the priests as the workers of miracles. This awe and respect the fathers turned to good account, gathering the children into the mission-house for daily instruction. With a mind also to the physical welfare of their flock, they succeeded in reconstructing the palisades and fort of the Huron village.
Yet with all the outward respect in which the Jesuits were held, their doctrines made little or no impression upon the Indian mind. The adult Hurons had a superstitious fear of baptism, and shunned the sign of the cross as a spell. Under these difficulties the Jesuits laboured, saving stricken children from a dark hereafter by the furtive administration of the dreaded sacrament.
With what boldness they dared to assume, Brébeuf and his companions condemned the infernal practices of the so-called medicine-men, whose accomplishments ranged from the curing of snake-bites to the casting out of devils. To them all diseases of the body called for much the same treatment, varied only in the proportion of vehemence allowed in their incantations and at medicine-feasts. The disgraceful orgies attending these "cures" led the priests to interfere: a policy which enraged the sorcerers of the tribe, and presently put the lives of the missionaries in jeopardy.
The summer of 1635 was marked by a greatdrought. The maize and beans withered in the sun; and in spite of the hoarse invocations of the medicine-men and the fierce efforts of the tribal rain-maker the sky stayed cloudless. Thereupon the Jesuits were accused. The cross upon the mission-house had frightened the bird of thunder[6]away from Ihonatiria. Such were the charges which the sorcerers brought against the Jesuits; and the superstitious Hurons believed that they were true. However, a timely vow was made to St. Joseph, the chosen protector of the Hurons, and in answer to their ardent prayers the rain fell in welcome torrents—so Brébeuf writes—and calamity was averted for a time.
Meanwhile the work of the Jesuits extended. With headquarters still at Ihonatiria, they made visits to the neighbouring villages; and for the greater success of the mission, new priests were drawn from Quebec. By 1640 those labouring among the Hurons and the neutral nation further south numbered thirteen.
Brébeuf
It is not possible within the limits of a single chapter to portray the character and follow thefortunes of all those heroic souls, who gave up home and country and worldly ambition to bury themselves in the unknown wilds of the West, and to walk with their lives in their hands among the cannibal tribes of New France. The motto which Ignatius Loyola had adopted for his order was, "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam," and in their perilous missions its members practised absolute obedience to quasi-military discipline. To name but four, Brébeuf, Lalement, Garnier, andJogues were all destined to tragic deaths, and the story of their martyrdom is one of the most sorrowful in the history of the land.
Lalement
The suffering caused by the pestilence of 1637 was much more severe than those periodical afflictions by which the Indians were visited. Virulent smallpox was a feature of the plague, and the pious offices of priests and the incantations of the medicine-men alike proved unavailing. Clearly, some black spell had been cast upon the nation. First it was ascribedto a serpent, then to a spotted frog, then to a demon in the muskets of the French. The Jesuits were accused of compassing death by magic. The striking clock, which aforetime had merely astonished them, was now an engine of calamity; and the litanies floating out through the windows of the mission-house were fatal incantations. Yet the Indians were afraid to lay hands upon these dealers in death. Awe held them back from wreaking their sinister designs upon the fearless men who went as ever into the pestilential tepees, that through the mystic drop and sign they might rescue the poor victims from an eternity of woe.
At length it became clear to the Jesuits that fear alone would not much longer stay the hatchets of the now hopeless Hurons. Daily they expected to meet a violent death, and a letter, still extant, drawn up by five priests in the form of a last testament, shows the unfaltering fortitude of men whose dearest ambition was a martyr's death. The intervention of a squaw saved Du Peron from the tomahawk uplifted to brain him; an unseen hand delivered Ragueneau; Le Mercier and Brébeuf confounded their assailants with the courage of their demeanour; and only Chaumont suffered, being assaulted and severely wounded. Knowing, however that their death had been finally decided upon, the Jesuits gave afestin d'adieu—one of those farewell feasts which Huron custom enjoinedon those about to die; and the courageous resignation of this band of martyrs filled even the tents of the ungodly with a superstitious awe. Once more the annihilating blow was averted; and from this time forward the peril threatening the Jesuit mission came not from the Hurons themselves, but from their implacable enemies, the Iroquois.
The year 1640 was drawing to a close when, after a few years' respite, the terrible war-whoop of the Five Nation Indians again rang through Canadian woods. Quebec was continually threatened by the Mohawks, whose highway of attack was the river Richelieu; and the Hurons were assailed by the Western tribe of the Iroquois confederacy. The pestilence of 1637 had ruined Ihonatiria, and for greater security the Jesuits resolved upon a large central establishment, in lieu of small missions in the several Huron villages. They chose for a site the mouth of the river Wye, which empties into Matchedash Bay. Here, in 1639, they built the mission of Ste. Marie. In the extreme peril of Indian warfare, the Hurons fled thither for food and baptism; and the hunger of three thousand neophytes and refugees soon put the fortified mission on short rations.
Isaac Jogues and a score of Huron warriors were despatched to Quebec for food and clothing. They reached the city in safety, although the St. Lawrence was closely beset by hostile Iroquois. Returning intwelve canoes laden with necessaries for the destitute Ste. Marie, Father Jogues and his companions fell into the hands of a Mohawk war-party. Some were killed on the spot, and the others were carried up the Richelieu and across Lake Champlain to a more awful fate. First they were made to run a gauntlet of Mohawk war-clubs; then they were placed upon a scaffold, where the women lacerated them with knives and clam-shells, and the children applied fire-brands to their naked bodies. This torture was repeated in each of the three Mohawk villages. Goupil, a lay brother, was soon afterwards murdered, and Jogues lived the life of a slave until some Dutch settlers on the Hudson effected his ransom and put him on board a ship bound for France.
In the following year, however, Jogues came back to Quebec, and on behalf of the suffering city he undertook to negotiate a peace with the Mohawks. Armed with gifts and belts of wampum, he set out fearlessly to face his former tormentors. For a short time the wampum saved him, but he was soon obliged to return to Quebec. The French, however, were determined to win the Iroquois, politically and religiously, and no danger was great enough to check them. Accordingly, in the late summer of 1646, Jogues was again despatched to the post which by this time had come to be known as the Mission of the Martyrs; and at last, on the 18th of October, hewas foully murdered in the lodge of a Mohawk chief.
In the preceding winter Anne de Nouë, a Jesuit of noble descent and frail physique, set off from Quebec to minister to the garrison at Fort Richelieu. In spite of his sixty-three years, he did not shrink from the perils of frost and snow which lay before him. On his snow-shoes and with a few days' provisions he set forth upon the path of sacrifice. A blizzard overtook him on the frozen river, he lost his way, and some days later his martyred body was discovered kneeling in the snow.
Meanwhile the dangers farther west were not decreasing. Iroquois attacks and Huron reprisals were ever threatening the Jesuit missions, and the last great blow was soon to fall. In the summer of 1648 an Iroquois war-party crept up to the gates of St. Joseph. Most of the warriors had gone to Quebec, but the palisade still contained Father Daniel and close upon a thousand women and children and old men. An early Mass had crowded the chapel, and the priest, clothed in full vestments, was exhorting the neophytes to be strong in the faith, when the dreaded war-cry rang through the village. The panic-stricken Hurons sought in vain to save themselves from stark slaughter, but Daniel met his death calmly at the door of his burning church. Seven hundred prisoners were taken, andthe retiring Iroquois left of St. Joseph only a heap of ruins.
The destruction of the mission was, however, but the prelude to the final extinction of the Huron nation. Terror-stricken they awaited the blow, in spite of the efforts of the Jesuits to rouse them to strong defence. All winter a formidable war-party of the Mohawks and Senecas roved through the Huron woods, and in early spring they fell upon St. Ignace and St. Louis. The first village was burned with no show of resistance, and its four hundred inhabitants were either tomahawked or kept for torture. Only three escaped, and these fled to St. Louis, about a league away. Here Brébeuf and Lalement endeavoured to rally the panic-stricken villagers. By sunrise the invaders were upon them. Brought to bay, the Hurons fought bravely. The giant Brébeuf stood in the breach and cheered them by his hopeful courage. Twice the Iroquois fell back, but at their third advance drove in the shattered palisade. Those of the Hurons who still lived were made prisoners; the two Jesuits were bound together, and the clustering cabins of St. Louis were given to the flames.
Returning to the ruins of St. Ignace, the Iroquois made preparations for the despatch of their prisoners. Brébeuf and Lalement were stricken to the soul by the carnival of blood; yet their own martyrdomwas to be made the most cruel of all. Brébeuf was first bound to a stake, all the while continuing to speak words of comfort to his fellow-captives. Enraged by this behaviour, the Iroquois tore away his lower lip and thrust a hot iron into his throat. No sound or sign of pain escaped the tortured priest. Then Lalement was also led out, that each might witness the other's pangs. Strips of bark smeared with pitch enveloped the naked body of Lalement, and after making him fast to a stake they set the bark on fire. Round Brébeuf's neck a collar of red-hot hatchets was hung; and in mockery of baptism the savages poured kettles of scalding water upon the heads of both. Brébeuf was scalped, his tormentors drinking the blood, thus to endow themselves with his unflinching courage. After four hours the noblest Jesuit of all was dead; but Lalement was kept alive for seventeen hours, until a pitiful hatchet ended his voiceless misery. So died two men whose memory has ennobled the history of the land for which they laboured, and adds to the fame and honour of their race.
At Ste. Marie, Bressani, Ragueneau, and their French companions awaited the Iroquois onslaught. But the fugitive Hurons, gathering for a last resistance, had checked the Iroquois' further advance, and after a fierce battle the latterwithdrew southward with an army of wretched captives.
That day the Hurons as a nation ceased to exist. Abandoning their remaining villages, they dispersed in small bands to roam northward and eastward, while a few established themselves at Isle St. Joseph, thinking to protect themselves here from their inveterate foes. As for the Jesuits, Garnier and Chabanel still laboured among the Tobacco nation farther to the south; but they too became the victims of the Iroquois before this fatal year was over.
Famine and the rigours of winter presently worked sad havoc upon the little band to whom Ragueneau now ministered at Isle St. Joseph, and in the spring renewed attacks of the Iroquois led the Hurons to decide upon a remarkable enterprise. This was to migrate to Quebec and take refuge under the guns of Fort St. Louis.
On the 10th of June all was ready for the departure, the sorrowing Hurons bidding good-bye to the home of their fathers, and the Jesuits to the country consecrated by the blood of their martyrs. Proceeding by the Georgian Bay, Lake Nipissing, the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, the fleet of canoes reached Quebec before the end of July, 1650. And while Quebec was ready to open her gates to the sorrowful remnant of a once great nation, her ownposition was sorely beset. Food was scarce and lodgings scarcer in the palisaded city. However, the Ursulines and the nuns of the Hospital made every effort to provide shelter for the exiled race, and the Jesuits themselves bore the chief burden of their converts. In the following year, 1651, four hundred more Hurons found their way to Quebec, and together they established a settlement on the Island of Orleans. Here, in sight of the protecting ramparts of the city, this decimated people lived for a time secure. But the Iroquois were set upon nothing less than their annihilation, and in 1656 they made a descent upon the quiet island and carried off many captives. The terrified Hurons were then removed to the city itself and lodged in a square enclosure almost adjoining Fort St. Louis. A map of 1660 places the "Fort des Sauvages" on the site of the presentPlace d'Armes. Here they dwelt for about ten years in the same uncertain security enjoyed by Quebec itself. Then they removed to Ste. Foye, four miles west of the city, and again changing their abode six years later, they founded the village of Old Lorette.
Standing to-day on Dufferin Terrace, the observer sees spread beneath him the picturesque Côte de Beaupré, a graceful upland losing itself in the Laurentian foot-hills. A shining spire in the middle distance arrests the eye. It marks the village ofAncient Lorette, a nine miles' drive from Quebec, where a pitiful moiety of Canada's noblest Indian tribe ekes out an existence by the making of baskets and beaded moccasins, and by that nonchalant culture of the soil which still marks the primitive man.
In the year 1660 the French population of Quebec numbered something over six hundred. The fur company continued to drive a fair trade in peltries, but the prosperity of the city itself was woefully retarded by the constant menace of the Iroquois. The Baron d'Avaugour held the office of Governor, and his strong sense of military authority brought him into conflict with the Church, by this time become the real controller of the State. This revered power was still further to impose its authority and influence through and by the person of François-Xavier Laval, the first Bishop of Canada, a man of as great ability as piety, an ecclesiastical statesman trained in the school of Mazarin. His career gives significance to a later epoch.
The fur traders had always found brandy their most attractive commodity in dealing with the thirsty savage; and Père Lalement gives a sad picture of the misery entailed. "They have brought themselves to nakedness," he writes, "and their families to beggary. They have even gone so far as to sell their children to procure the means of satisfying their raging passion. I cannot describe the evils caused by these disorders to the infant Church. My ink is not black enough to paint them in proper colours. It would require the gall of the dragon to express the bitterness we have experienced from them. It may suffice to say that we lose in one month the fruits of the toil and labour of thirty years." Accordingly, the Church now decided to prohibit it entirely, and a law was passed making it a capital offence. Two men paid the extreme penalty; and a woman also was condemned to the scaffold. When, however, the clergy interfered to save her, the rigorous but consistent D'Avaugour declared he would punish no more breaches of this law. Brandy now flowed like water, and the thunder of the pulpit was henceforth disregarded. Exasperated by this treatment, the priests carried their grievance to the Louvre, where they received little satisfaction.
Colbert
In the same year a deputy of another sort journeyed to France. Pierre Boucher's mission was to lay before the King the desperate condition of the colony, particularly in the matter of defence. Louis XIV. had but recently ascended the throne of the Bourbons, and Richelieu and Mazarin had been in turn succeeded by Colbert as the royaladviser. The envoy from Quebec was presently received at the Court, and the tale of suffering and neglect which he unfolded convinced Colbert that the Company of One Hundred Associates was scandalously evading the obligations imposed by its charter. Accordingly, in 1663, a royal edict went forth revoking its powers and privileges. This was a turning-point in the history of New France; for although the company founded by Richelieu was succeeded by an unwieldy corporation of Colbert'sdesign, from this time forward the Crown itself took over the control of the distant colony.
The Grand Monarch, indeed, took a finely comprehensive view of his position. He held himself in every sense the father of his people, and by a nice condescension the citizens of Quebec were included in the patriarchal fold. The far-away city on the borders of the world was no longer to be abandoned to the avaricious whims of a trading company: the King himself would now take it under his royal care. Daniel de Rémy, Sieur de Courcelles, was appointed Governor, with Jean Baptiste Talon as Intendant; and the valorous Marquis de Tracy was commissioned to New France as the King's personal representative, with instructions to settle the domestic friction of the colony, and to deal a fatal blow to the Iroquois, the "scourge of Canada."
On the 30th of June, 1665, De Tracy's caravels cast anchor in the basin of Quebec, the ships of De Courcelles and the Intendant being still at sea. The cannon of Fort St. Louis boomed a welcome down the gorge of the St. Lawrence, while the eager burghers crowded the ramparts and prepared to welcome the most distinguished company in the most brilliant pageant yet seen upon the soil of New France.
The royal pennant flew at the flag-ship's masthead, and the decks were thronged with the brilliant uniforms of the regiment of Carignan-Salières, whom the King had sent to destroy the enemies of New France. In the midst stood the stately Marquis, gorgeous in viceregal robes and attended by a suite of nobles and gallants from the court of Fontainebleau. The mysteries and wonders of the West had stirred the romantic minds of the volatile courtiers, and the mission to convert New France to the Catholic faith gave to De Tracy's expedition the complexion of a mediæval crusade.
Presently the gaily-decked pinnace drew in to the landing-stage of the Cul-de-sac, where stood the notables of the New World city. Bishop Laval in pontificals, surrounded by the priests of his diocese, awaited the royal envoy at the top of Mountain Hill, which was then the only practicable highway between the Lower and the Upper Town. To-day the visitor landing at the quay reaches the terrace by the same route; but the present graceful declivity of Mountain Hill is little like the tortuous pathway of corduroy by which De Tracy and his glittering retinue made their toilsome way to the public square by the Jesuits' College. First came a company of guards in the royal livery, then four pages and six valets, and by the side of the King's Lieutenant-General, resplendent in gold lace and gay ribbons, walked the youngnobles of his train. The cathedral bells pealed forth joyously, and theTe Deumbegan a day of public rejoicing.
The vessels bearing the new Governor and Intendant, however, suffered the most hapless violence. Talon's ship was 117 days at sea, and De Courcelles' was hardly more fortunate; but at length they, too, cast anchor beneath the rocky battlement, and Quebec was now flooded with soldiers of the regiment of Carignan-Salières. These bronzed veterans of Savoy came to New France fresh from the Turkish wars, and the sight of their plumed helmets and leathern bandoleers, as they marched through the narrow streets, promised the colonists a speedy riddance of their enemies. The health of Louis XIV. was nowhere in his broad dominions drunk more heartily than in Quebec.
At the close of the year extensive preparations were made for the chastisement of the Iroquois. De Courcelles had determined upon a stroke of almost foolhardy boldness: to march over the snow into the country of the Mohawks, a distance of three hundred leagues. Thick ice had formed on the St. Lawrence, and on the 9th of January the audacious Governor set off at the head of his fiery columns.
Officers and men alike shared the burdens of transport, but the soldiers of Europe were embarrassed by the unaccustomed snow-shoes whichthe deep snow forced them to use. Some got no farther than Three Rivers, but the more hardy held their way up the valley of the Richelieu to Lake Champlain and across the Hudson. An unfortunate circumstance, however, had deprived them of guides, and all efforts to find and surprise the Mohawk towns proved unsuccessful. Wandering by mistake beyond Saratoga Lake, they came near to the Dutch village of Corlaer,[7]where, half-frozen and half-starved, they bivouacked in the neighbouring woods. A few days later envoys appeared from Albany to demand why the French had invaded the territories of the Duke of York; and then, for the first time, De Courcelles learned that the New Netherlands had passed into English hands.
De Courcelles' explanation was courteously accepted, and having been supplied with provisions, he prepared to retrace his steps to Quebec. His intended victims, the Mohawks, harassed the retreat, killing and taking prisoners; while sixty of his men perished from hunger and exposure before he came in sight of the St. Lawrence, and many more fell before he reached Quebec.
In spite of apparent failure, however, this expedition, like that undertaken by Daulac, had a good effect upon the Iroquois, who had come to regard themselves as too remote for French assault.