O CJ «^ %a3AiNii^i\v ' yo ^wmmo/-^ ^^ME-IJN!VRy//i, ^s.rv:lOSANCFl5r.^ \i ^OFCMIFOPy/, ,^MF-l'^J!VERi"//,. ^0), "^^/idaAiNiii^v^ .# VT/ "^^AijdAiNii^^v^ yo ^NVlIieRARYQr \\\F r\'l\T!?,^/A i?" '^ '^/ia3AINn-3WV ^^tllBRARYd?^ ^^ .^lllBRARYa 1^1 _. y ■ UL/3 I I r J JVJ ^^WE•lJNIVER% 1^1 o ^lOSANCElfj^ %a3AINn-3WV^ ^OFCAIIFO/?^ . '^ ^OFCAIIFO;?^ ^^Aavaaii-i^ ^^^lllBRARYQc^ ^ILIBRARYQ^ suiViiLii;! %\^^% i _ AWEUNIVERS//, O EDITION DE LUXE, THE WORKS FRANCIS PARKMAN. VOLUME VII. Eight Copies of the Edition de Luxe of Francis Parknians Works have been printed for presentation. Wa. 8.:. Oc^vd i C Paris. Figure of Chomedey de Mai Sonne live. THE OLD REGIME IN CANADA J- ^ J- J- jk FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA • Part Fourth BY FRANCIS PARKMAN ^ ^ ot IN TWO VOLUMES Vol. I. BOSTON ^ LITTLE • BROWN AND-COMPANY^MDCCCXCVII Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by Francis Parkman, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, Copyright, 1893, By Francis I'arkman. ' Copj/ru/ht, 1S97, By Little, Brown, and Company. ^tttbcrsttg Press: JonN Wilson and Son, Cambiudge, U.S.A. 1 -^ <■ / V.I TO GEORGE EDWARD ELLIS, D.D. My Deak Dr. Ellis : When, in my youth, I proposed to write a series of books on the French in xVnierica, you encouraged the attempt, and your helpful kindness has followed it from that day to this. Pray accept the dedication of this volume in token of the grateful regard of Very faithfully yours, FRANCIS PARKMAN. 1740; NOTE TO REVISED EDITION. When this book was written, I was unable to gain access to certain indispensable papers relat- ing to the rival claimants to Acadia, — La Tour and D'Aunay, — and therefore deferred all at- tempts to treat that subject. The papers having at length come to hand, the missing chapters are supplied in the present edition, which also con- tains some additional matter of less prominence. The title of " The Old Regime in Canada " is derived from the third and principal of the three sections into which the book is divided. June 16, 1893. PREFACE. " The physiognomy of a government/' says De Tocqueville, " can best be judged in its colo- nies, for there its characteristic traits usually appear larger and more distinct. When I wish to judge of the spirit and the faults of the ad- ministration of Louis XIV., I must go to Can- ada. 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 conti- nent. 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 X PREFACE. even to us. Extremes meet, and Autocracy and Democracy often touch hands, at least m 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 everything ; and officials of higli and low degree, soldiers and civilians, friends and foes, poured letters, de- spatches, and memorials, on both sides of every question, into the lap of government. These masses of paper have m 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. Never- theless, a great deal has still remained in France uncopied and unexplored. In the course of sev- eral visits to that country, I have availed myself PREFACE. xi 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 classi- fied notes, I have collated the evidence of the various writers, and set down without reserve all the results of the examination, whether fav- orable 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 inqui- ries 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 Abbe Henri Raymond Casgrain and Grand 1 Those who wish to see the subject from a point of view oppo- site 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.) xii PREFACE. Vicar Cazeau, of Quebec ; together with those of James Le Moine, Esq., M. Eugene Tache, Hon. P. J. 0. 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 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. COHTEKTS. SECTION FIRST. THE FEUDAL CHIEFS OF ACADIA. CHAPTER I. 1497-1643. LA TOUR AND d'aUNAY. Page The Acadian Quarrel. — Biencourt. — Claude and Charles de la Tour. — Sir William Alexander. — Claude de Razilly. — Charles de Menou d'Aunay Charnisay. — Cape Sable. — Port Royal. — The Heretics of Boston and Plymouth. — Madame de la Tour. — War and Litigation. — La Tour worsted : he asks help from the Boston Puritans 3 CHAPTER II. 1643-1645. LA TOUK AND THE PURITANS. La Tour at Boston: he meets Winthrop. — Boston in 1643. — Training Day. — An Alarm. — La Tour's Bargain. — Doubts and Disputes. — The Allies sail. — La Tour and Endicott. — D'Aunay's Overture to the Puritans. — Marie's Mission- . . 21 CHAPTER IIL 1645-1710. THE VICTOR VANQUISHED. D'Aunay's Envoys : their Reception at Boston. — Winthrop and his " Papist " Guests. — Reconciliation. — Treaty. — Be- havior of La Tour. ^ Royal Favors to D'Aunay : his Hopes; his Death; his Character. — Conduct of the Court xiv CONTENTS. Page towards him. — Intrigues of La Tour. — Madame D'Aunay. — La Tour marries her. — Children of D'Aunay. — Descend- ants of La Tour 41 SECTION SECOND. CANADA A MISSION. CHAPTER IV. 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 of Chau- monot. — Omens of Destruction. — Device of the Jesuits. — The Medicine Feast. — The Escape 54 CHAPTER V. 1642-1661. THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. Dauversiere. — Mauce and Bourgeoys. — Miracle. — A Pious De- faulter. — Jesuit and Sulpitian. — Montreal in 1659. — The Hospital Nuns. — The Nuns and the Iroquois. — More Mira- cles. — The Murdered Priests. — Brigeac and Closse. — Sol- diers of the Holy Family 96 CHAPTER VI. 1660, 1661. THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. Suffering and Terror. — Fran(;ois llertel. — The Captive Wolf. — The Tlireatened Invasion. — Daulac des Ormeaux. — The Adventurers at the Long Saut. — The Attack. — A Desperate Defence. — A Final Assault. — The Fort taken 118 CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER VII. 1657-1668. the disputed bisuopric. Page Domestic Strife. — Jesuit and Sulpitian. — Abbe Queylus. — Francois de Laval. — The Zealots of Caen. — Gallicau and Ultramontane. — The Rival Claimants. — Storm at Quebec. Laval Triumphant 140 CHAPTER VIIL 1659, 1G60. LAVAL AND ARGENSON. Fran9ois de Laval : his Position and Character. — Arrival of Argeusou. — The Quarrel 161 CHAPTER IX. 1658-1063. LAVAL AND AVA0GOUR. Reception of Argeuson : his Difficulties ; his Recall. — Dubois d'Avaugour. — The Braudy Quarrel. — Distress of Laval. — Portents. — The Earthquake 173 CHAPTER X. 1661-1664. LAVAL AND DDMESML. Peroune Dumesuil. — The Old Council. — Alleged Murder. — The New Council. — Bourdon and Villeray. — Strong Meas- ures. — Escape of Dumesuil. — Views of Colbert . ... 189 CHAPTER XL 1657-1665. LAVAL AND utzY. The Bi.shop's Choice. — A Military Zealot. — Hopeful Begin- nings. — Signs of Storm. — The Quarrel. — Distress of Mezy : he refuses to yield ; his Defeat and Death 204 xvi CONTENTS. CHAPTER XII. 1062-1680. laval and the seminary. Page Laval's Visit to Court. — Tlie Seminary. — Zeal of the Bishop : his Eulogists. — Churc!: aud State. — Attitude of Laval . .219 SECTION THIRD. THE COLONY AND THE KING. CHAPTER XIII. 1661-1665. ROYAL INTERVENTION. Fontainebleau. — Louis XIV. — Colbert. — The Compauy of the West. — Evil Omens. — Action of the King. — Tracy, Cour- celle, and Talou. — The Regini'^nt of Carignau-Salieres. — Tracy at Quebec. — Miracles. — A Holy War 229 CHAPTER XIV. 1666, 1667. THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. Courcelle's March : his Failure and Return. — CourceUe and the Jesuits. — Mohawk Treachery. — Tracy's Expedition. — Burning of the Mohawk Towns. — French and English. — DoUier de Casson at St. Anne. — Peace. — The Jesuits aud the Iroquois 246 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. VOLUME ONE. Figure of Chomedey de Maisonnextve .... Frontbpiece From the Maisonneuve Monument by Philippe Hubert, in the Place D'Armes, Montreal. Canada and Ad.tacent Countries towards the Close of the Seventeenth Century .... Page 3 La Tour and the Governor " 22 Drawn by B. West Clinedinst. Marguerite Bourgeoys " 96 From an engraving by L Massard. JliROME Le RoYER DE LA DAUVERSlfeRE " 98 From an engraving by L. Massard. The Death of Dollard " 136 Bas-relief from the Maisonneuve Monument by Philippe Hi5bert, in the Place D'Armes, Montreal. Dubois d'Avaugour " 178 From an engraving by P. Auljry, in the Bibliothfeque Nationale. THE OLD REGIME IN CANADA. CANADA AND AJMxI€K:^T €©tC:jS-Tffi][ffiS \V CENTURY. %**' SECTION FIRST. THE FEUDAL CHIEFS OF ACADIA. CHAPTER I. 1497-1643. LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. The Acadian Quarrel. — Biencourt — Claude and Charles DE LA Tour. — Sir William Alexander. — Claude de Ra- ziLLY. — Charles de Menou d'Aunay Chaknisat. — Cape Sable. — Port Royal. — The Heretics of Boston and Ply- mouth. — Madame de la Tour. — War and Litigation. — La Tour worsted: he asks Help from the Boston Puritans. With the opening of the seventeenth century- began that contest for the ownership of North America which was to remain undecided for a century and a half. England claimed the continent through the discovery by the Cabots in 1497 and 1498, and France claimed it through the voyage of Verrazzano in 1524. Each resented the claim of the other; and each snatched such fragments of the prize as she could reach, and kept them if she could. In 1604, Henry IV. of France gave to De Monts all America from the 40th to the 46th degree of north latitude, 4 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1604-29. including the sites of Philadelphia on the one hand and Montreal on the other ; ^ while, eight years after, Louis XIII. gave to Madame de Guercheville and the Jesuits the whole continent from Florida to the St. La^vrence, — that is, the whole of the future British colonies. Again, in 1621, James I. of Eng- land made over a part of this generous domain to a subject of his own. Sir William Alexander, — to whom he gave, under the name of Nova Scotia, the peninsula which is now so called, together with a vast adjacent wilderness, to be held forever as a fief of the Scottish Crown.^ Sir William, not yet satis- fied, soon got an additional grant of the " River and Gulf of Canada," along with a belt of land three hundred miles wide, reaching across the continent. ^ Thus the King of France gave to Frenchmen the sites of Boston, New York, and Washington, and the King of England gave to a Scotchman the sites of Quebec and Montreal. But while the seeds of international war were thus sown broadcast over the continent, an obscure corner of the vast regions in dispute became the scene of an intestine strife like the bloody conflicts of two feudal chiefs in the depths of the Middle Ages. After the lawless inroads of Argall, the French, with young Biencourt at their head, still kept a 1 See " Pioneers of France in the New World," ii. 65. 2 Charter of New Scotland in favour of Sir William Alexander. ^ Charter of the Country and Lordship of Canada in America, 2 Feb., 1628-29, in Publications of the Prince Societi/, 1873. 1629.] YOUNG LA TOUR. 6 feeble hold on Acadia. After the death of his father, Poutriiicourt, Biencourt took his name, by which thenceforth he is usually known. In his distress he lived much like an Indian, roaming the woods with a few followers, and subsisting on fish, game, roots, and lichens. He seems, however, to have found means to build a small fort among the rocks and fogs of Cape Sable. He named it Fort Lomeron, and here he appears to have maintained himself for a time by fishing and the fur -trade. Many years before, a French boy of fourteen years, Charles Saint-Etienne de la Tour, was brought to Acadia by his father, Claude de la Tour, where he became attached to the service of Biencourt (Poutrincourt), and, as he himself says, served as his ensign and lieutenant. He says, further, that Biencourt on his death left him all his property in Acadia. It was thus, it seems, that La Tour became owner of Fort Lomeron and its dependencies at Cape Sable, whereupon he begged the King to give him help against his enemies, especially the English, who, as he thought, meant to seize the country; and he begged also for a commission to command in Acadia for his Majesty.^ In fact, Sir William Alexander soon tried to dis- possess him and seize his fort. Charles de la Tour's father had been captured at sea by the privateer "Kirke," and carried to England. Here, being a widower, he married a lady of honor of the Queen, 1 La Tour au Roy, 25 July, 1627. 6 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1629. and, being a Protestant, renounced his French allegiance. Alexander made Mm a baronet of Nova Scotia, a new title which King James had authorized Sir William to confer on persons of consideration aiding him in his work of colonizing Acadia. Alexander now fitted out two ships, with which he sent the elder La Tour to Cape Sable. On arriving, the father, says the story, made the most brilliant offers to his son if he would give up Fort Lomdron to the English, — to which young La Tour is reported to have answered in a burst of patriotism, that he would take no favors except from his sovereign, the King of France. On tliis, the English are said to have attacked the fort, and to have been beaten off. As the elder La Tour could not keep his promise to deliver the place to the English, they would have no more to do with him, on which his dutiful son offered him an asylum under condition that he should never enter the fort. A house was built for him outside the ramparts; and here the trader, Nicolas Denys, found him in 1635. It is Denys who tells the above story, ^ which he probably got from the younger La Tour, — and which, as he tells it, is inconsistent with the known character of its pretended hero, who was no model of loyalty to his king, being a chameleon whose principles took the color of his interests. Denys says, further, that the elder La Tour had been invested with the Order of the Garter, and that * Denys, Description geographique et historique. 1630.] THE BROTHERS KIRKE. 7 the same dignity was offered to his son; which is absurd. The truth is, that Sir William Alexander, thinking that the two La Tours might be useful to him, made them both baronets of Nova Scotia.^ Young La Tour, while begging Louis XIII. for a commission to command in Acadia, got from Sir William Alexander not only the title of baronet, but also a large grant of land at and near Cape Sable, to be held as a fief of the Scottish Crown. ^ Again, he got from the French King a grant of land on the river St. John, and, to make assurance doubly sure, got leave from Sir William Alexander to occupy it.^ This he soon did, and built a fort near the mouth of the river, not far from the present city of St. John. Meanwhile the French had made a lodgment on the rock of Quebec, and not many years after, all North America from Florida to the Arctic circle, and from Newfoundland to the springs of the St. Lawrence, was given by King Louis to the Company of New France, with Richelieu at its head.* Sir William Alexander, jealous of this powerful rivalry, caused a private expedition to be fitted out under the brothers Kirke. It succeeded, and the French settle- ^ Grant from Sir William Alexander to Sir Claude de St. Etienne (de la Tour), 30 Nov., 1629. Ibid, to Charles de St. Etienne, Esq., Seigneur de St. Denniscourt and Baigneux, 12 May, 1630. (Hazard, State Papers, i. 294, 298.) The names of both father and son appear on the list of baronets of Nova Scotia. 2 Patent from Sir William Alexander to Claude and Charles de la Tour, 30 April, 1630. 3 Williamson, History of Maine, i. 246. * See " Pioneers of France," ii. 258. 8 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1632. ments in Acadia and Canada were transferred by conquest to England. England soon gave them back by the treaty of St. Germain ; ^ and Claude de Razilly, a Knight of Malta, was charged to take pos- session of them in the name of King Louis.^ Full powers were given him over the restored domains, together with grants of Acadian lands for himself.^ ^-'Razilly reached Port Royal in August, 1632, with three hundred men, and the Scotch colony planted there by Alexander gave up the place in obedience to an order from the King of England. Unfortunately for Charles de la Tour, Razilly brought with him an officer destined to become La Tour's worst enemy. Tliis was Charles de Menou d'Aunay Charnisay, a gentleman of birth and character, who acted as his commander's man of trust, and who, in Razilly 's name, presently took possession of such other feeble English and Scotch settlements as had been begun by Alexander or the people of New England along the coasts of Nova Scotia and Maine. This placed the French Crown and the Company of New France in sole possession for a time of the region then called Acadia. When Acadia was restored to France, La Tour's 1 Traite de St. Germain en Lmje, 29 Mars, 1632, Article 3. For reasons of the restitution, see " Pioneers of France," ii. 272. 2 Convention avec le Sieur de Razilhj pour aller refevoir la Restitution du Port Boyal, etc., 27 Mars, 1632. Commission du Sieur de Razilly, 10 May, 1632. 8 Concession de la riviere et baye Saincte Croix a M. de Razilly, 29 May, 1632. 1635.] THE TWO RIVALS. 9 English title to his lands at Cape Sable became worthless. He hastened to Paris to fortify his posi- tion; and, suppressing his dallyings with England and Sir William Alexander, he succeeded not only in getting an extensive grant of lands at Cape Sable, but also the title of lieutenant-general for the King in Fort Lomdron and its dependencies,^ and commander at Cape Sable for the Company of New France. Razilly, who represented the King in Acadia, died in 1635, and left his authority to D'Aunay Charnisay, his relative and second in command. D'Aunay made > his headquarters at Port Royal; and nobody dis- puted his authority except La Tour, who pretended to be independent of him in virtue of his commission from the Crown and his grant from the Company. Hence rose dissensions that grew at last into war. The two rivals differed widely in position and qualities. Charles de Menou, Seigneur d'Aunay Charnisay, came of an old and distinguished family of Touraine,^ and he prided himself above all things on his character of gentilhomme frangais. Charles 1 Revocation de la Commission du Sieur Charles de Saint-Etienne, Sieur de la Tour, 23 Fev., 1641. 2 The modern representative of this family, Comte Jules de Menou, is the author of a remarkable manuscript book, written from family papers and official documents, and entitled L'Acadie colonisee par Charles de Menou d'Aunay Cliarnisay. I have followed Comte de Menou's spelling of the name. It is often written D'Aulnay, and by New England writers D'Aulney. The manu- script just mentioned is in my possession. Comte de Menou is also the author of a printed work called Preuves de I'Histoire de la Maison de Menou. 10 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1635. Saiut-Etienne de la Tour was of less conspicuous lineage.^ In fact, his father, Claude de la Tour, is said by his enemies to have been at one time so reduced in circumstances that he carried on the trade of a mason in Rue St. Germain at Paris. The son, however, is called gcntilhomme cVune naissance dis- tinguSe, both in papers of the court and in a legal document drawn up in the interest of his children. As he came to Acadia when a boy he could have had little education, and both he and D'Aunay carried on trade, — which in France would have derogated from their claims as gentlemen, though in America the fur-trade was not held inconsistent with noUesse. Of La Tour's little kingdom at Cape Sable, with its rocks, fogs, and breakers, its seal-haunted islets and iron-bound shores guarded by Fort Lom^ron, we have but dim and uncertain glimpses. After the death of Biencourt, La Tour is said to have roamed the woods with eighteen or twenty men, "living a vagabond life with no exercise of religion." 2 He himself admits that he was forced to live like the Indians, as did Biencourt before him.^ Better times had come, and he was now commander of Fort 1 The true surname of La Tour's family, which belonged to the neighborhood of Evreux, in Normandy, was Turgis. The designa- tion of La Tour was probably derived from the name of some family estate, after a custom common in France under the old regime. The Turgis's arms were " d'or au chevron de sable, accom- pagne' de trois palmes de meme." 2 Menou, L'Acadie colonisee par Charles de Menou d'Aunay Charnisay. 8 La Tour au Roy, 25 Juillet, 1627. 1641.] PORT ROYAL. 11 Lom^ron, — or, as he called it, Fort La Tour, — with a few Frenchmen and abundance of Micmac Indians. His next neighbor was the adventurer Nicolas Denys, who with a view to the timber trade had settled himself with twelve men on a small river a few leagues distant. Here Razilly had once made him a visit, and was entertained under a tent of boughs with a sylvan feast of wild pigeons, brant, teal, woodcock, snipe, and larks, cheered by profuse white wine and claret, and followed by a dessert of wild raspberries. 1 On the other side of the Acadian peninsula D'Aunay reigned at Port Royal like a feudal lord, which in fact he was. Denys, who did not like him, says that he wanted only to rule, and treated his settlers like slaves ; but this, even if true at the time, did not always remain so. D'Aunay went to France in 1641, and brought out, at his own charge, twenty families to people his seigniory. ^ He had already brought out a wife, having espoused Jeanne Molin (or Motin), daughter of the Seigneur de Courcelles. What with old settlers and new, about forty families were gathered at Port Royal and on the river Annapolis, and over these D'Aunay ruled like a feudal Robinson Crusoe.^ He gave each colonist a farm charged with a perpetual rent of one sou an arpent, or French acre. The houses of the settlers ^ Denys, Description geographique et historique. 2 Eameau, Une Colonie feodale en Amerique, i. 93 (ed. 1889). 8 Ibid., i. 96, 97. 12 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1641. were log cabins, and the manor-house of their lord was a larger building of the same kind. The most pressing need was of defence, and D'Aunay lost no time in repairing and reconstructing the old fort on the point between Allen's River and the Annapolis. He helped his tenants at their work; and his con- fessor describes him as returning to his rough manor- house on a wet day, drenched with rain and bespattered with mud, but in perfect good humor, after helping some of the inhabitants to mark out a jBeld. The confessor declares that during the eleven months of his acquaintance with him he never heard him speak ill of anybody whatever, a statement which must probably be taken with allowance. Yet this proud scion of a noble stock seems to have given himself with good grace to the rough labors of the frontiersman; while Father Ignace, the Capuchin friar, praises him for the merit, transcendent in clerical eyes, of constant attendance at mass and fre- quent confession.^ With his neighbors, the Micmac Indians, he was on the best of terms. He supplied their needs, and they brought him the furs that enabled him in some measure to bear the heavy charges of an establish- ment that could not for many years be self-support- ing. In a single year the Indians are said to have brought three thousand moose-skins to Port Royal, besides beaver and other valuable furs. Yet, from a commercial point of view, D'Aunay did not ^ Lettre du Pere Ignace de Paris, Capucin, 6 Aoust, 1653. 1642.] PORT ROYAL. 13 prosper. He had sold or mortgaged his estates in France, borrowed large sums, built sliips, bought cannon, levied soldiers, and brought over immigrants. He is reported to have had three hundred fighting men at his principal station, and sixty cannon mounted on his ships and forts; for besides Port Royal he had two or three smaller establishments.^ Port Royal was a scene for an artist, with its fort; its soldiers in breastplate and morion, armed with pike, halberd, or matchlock ; its manor-house of logs, and its seminary of like construction; its twelve Capuchin friars, with cowled heads, sandalled feet, and the cord of Saint Francis; the birch canoes of Micmac and Abenaki Indians lying along the strand, and their feathered and painted owners lounging about the place or dozing around their wigwam fires. It was medisevalism married to primeval savagery. The friars were supported by a fund supplied by Richelieu, and their chief business was to convert the Indians into vassals of France, the Church, and the Chevalier d'Aunay. Hard by was a wooden chapel, where the seignior knelt in dutiful observance of every rite, and where, under a stone chiselled with his ancient scutcheon, one of his children lay buried. In the fort he had not forgotten to provide a dungeon for his enemies. 1 Certificat a J'egard de M. d'Aunay Charnisay, signe Michel Boudrot, Lieutenmit General en VAcadie, et autres, anciens habitans au pays, 5 Oct., 1687. Lettre du Roy de gouverneur et lieutenant general es castes de VAcadie pour Charles de Menou, Sieur d'Aulnay Charnisay, Fevrier, 1647. 14 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1642. The worst of these was Charles de la Tour. Before the time of Razilly and his successor D'Aunay, La Tour had felt himself the chief man in Acadia ; but now he was confronted by a rival higher in rank, superior in resources and court influence, proud, ambitious, and masterful. ^ He was bitterly jealous of D'Aunay; and, to strengthen himself against so formidable a neighbor, he got from the Company of New France the grant of a tract of land at the mouth of the river St, John, where he built a fort and called it after his own name, though it was better known as Fort St. Jean.'^ Thither he removed from his old post at Cape Sable, and Fort St. Jean^ now became Ms chief station. It confronted its rival, Port Royal, across the intervening Bay of Fundy. Now began a bitter feud between the two chiefs, each claiming lands occupied by the other. The Court interposed to settle the dispute, but in its ignorance of Acadian geography its definitions were f^^^ so obscure that the question was more embroiled than S^ ;ever.3 1 Besides succeeding to the authority of Razilly, D'Aunay had bought of his heirs their land claims in Acadia. Arrets du Conseil, 9 Mars, 1642. 2 Concession de la Compagnie de la Nouvelle France a Charles de Saint-Etienne, Sieur de la Tour, Lieutenant General de I'Acadie, du Fort de la Tour, dans la Riviere de St. Jean, du 15 Jan., 1635, in Memoires des Commissaires, v. 113 (ed. 1756, 12mo). 2 Louis XIII. a d'Aunai/, 10 Fev., 1638. This seems to be the occasion of Charlevoix's inexact assertion that Acadia was divided into three governments, under D'Aunay, La Tour, and Nicolas Denys, respectively. The title of Denys, such as it was, had no existonce till 1654. 1633-42.] ENGLISH INTERLOPERS. 15 While the domestic feud of the rivals was gather- ing to a head, foreign heretics had fastened their clutches on various parts of the Atlantic coast which France and the Church claimed as their own. English heretics had made lodgment in Virginia, and Dutch heretics at the mouth of the Hudson; while other sectaries of the most malignant type had kennelled among the sands and pine-trees of Plymouth; and others still, slightly different, but equally venomous, had ensconced themselves on or near the small penin- sula of Shawmut, at the head of La Grande Baye, or the Bay of Massachusetts. As it was not easy to dislodge them, the French dissembled for the present, yielded to the logic of events, and bided their time. But the interlopers soon began to swarm northward and invade the soil of Aca,dia, sacred to God and the King. Small parties from Plymouth built trading- houses at Machias and at what is now Castine, on the Penobscot. As they were competitors in trade, no less than foes of God and King Louis, and as they were too few to resist, both La Tour and D'Aunay resolved to expel them; and in 1633 La Tour attacked the Plymouth trading-house at Machias, killed two of the five men he found there, carried off the other three, and seized all the goods. ^ Two years later D'Aunay attacked the Plymouth trading- station at Penobscot, the Pentegoet of the French, and took it in the name of King Louis. That he might not appear in the part of a pirate, he set a ^ Hubbard, History of New England, 163. 16 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1638-42. price on the goods of the traders, and then, having seized them, gave in return his promise to pay at some convenient time if the owners would come to him for the money. He had called on La Tour to help him in this raid against Penobscot; but La Tour, unwilling to recog- nize his right to command, had refused, and had , hoped that D'Aunay, becoming disgusted with his *;y Acadian venture, which promised neither honor nor ^' profit, would give it up, go back to France, and stay 'there. About the year 1638 D'Aunay did in fact go to France, but not to stay ; for in due time he reap- peared, bringing with him his bride, Jeanne Motin, who had had the courage to share his fortunes, and whom he now installed at Port Royal, — a sure sign, as his rival thought, that he meant to make his home there. Disappointed and angry. La Tour now lost patience, went to Port Royal, and tried to stir D'Aunay's soldiers to mutiny; then set on his Indian friends to attack a boat in which was one of D'Aunay's soldiers and a Capuchin friar, — the I soldier being Idlled, though the friar escaped.^ This ;} I was the beginning of a quarrel waged partly at Port \\ ^ I Royal and St. Jean, and partly before the admiralty court of Guienne and the royal council, partly with bullets and cannon-shot, and partly with edicts, decrees, and proch verhaux. As D'Aunay had taken a wife, so too would La Tour; and he charged his agent Desjardins to bring him one from France. 1 Menou, L'Acadie colonisee par Charles de Menou d'Aunay. 1642.] LA TOUR SURRENDERS. 17 The agent acquitted himself of his delicate mission, and shipped to Acadia one Marie Jacquelin, — daughter of a barber of Mans, if we may believe the questionable evidence of his rival. Be this as it may, Marie Jacquelin proved a prodigy of mettle and energy, espoused her husband's cause with passionate vehemence, and backed his quarrel like the intrepid Amazon she was. She joined La Tour at Fort St. Jean, and proved the most strenuous of allies. About this time, D'Aunay heard that the English of Plymouth meant to try to recover Penobscot from his hands. On this he sent nine soldiers thither,\ with provisions and munitions. La Tour seized them on the way, carried them to Fort St. Jean, and, according to his enemies, treated them like slaves. D'Aunay heard nothing of this till four months after, when, being told of it by Indians, he sailed in person to Penobscot with two small vessels, reinforced the place, and was on his way back to Port Royal when La Tour met him with two armed pinnaces. A fight took place, and one of D'Aunay's vessels was dismasted. He fought so well, however, that Cap- tain Jamin, his enemy's chief officer, was killed; and the rest, including La Tour, his new wife, and his agent Desjardins, were forced to surrender, and were carried prisoners to Port Royal. At the request of the Capuchin friars D'Aunay set them all at liberty, after compelling La Tour to sign a promise to keep the peace in future.^ Both parties 1 Menou, L'Acadie colonisSe par Charles de Menou d'Aunay. VOL. I. — 2 J' 18 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1642. now laid their cases before the French courts, and, whether from the justice of his cause or from superior influence, D'Aunay prevailed. La Tour's commis- sion was revoked, and he was ordered to report him- self in France to receive the King's commands. Trusting to his remoteness from the seat of power, and knowing that the King was often ill served and worse informed, he did not obey, but remained in Acadia exercising his authority as before. D'Aunay's father, from his house in Rue St. Germain, Avatched over his son's interests, and took care that La Tour's conduct should not be unknown at court. A decree was thereupon issued directing D'Aunay to seize his rival's forts in the name of the King, and place them in charge of trusty persons. The order was precise; but D'Aunay had not at the time force enough to execute it, and the frugal King sent him only six soldiers. Hence he could only show the royal order to La Tour, and offer him a passage to France in one of his vessels if he had the discretion to obey. La Tour refused, on which D'Aunay returned to France to report his 'rival's contumacy. At about the same time La Tour's French agent sent him a vessel with succors. The King ordered it to be seized; but the order came too late, for the vessel had already sailed from Rochelle bound to Fort St. Jean. When D'Aunay reported the audacious conduct of his enemy, the royal council ordered that the offender should be brought prisoner to France ; ^ and D'Aunay, i Arret du Conseil, 21 Fev., 1642. 1643.] LA TOUR ASKS AID OF BOSTON. 19 as the King's lieutenant-general in Acadia, was again required to execute the decree.^ La Tour was now in the position of a rebel, and all legality was on the side of his enemy, who represented royalty itself. D'Aunay sailed at once for Acadia, and in August, 1642, anchored at the mouth of the St. John, before La Tour's fort, and sent three gentlemen in a boat to read to its owner the decree of the council and the order of the King. La Tour snatched the papers, crushed them between his hands, abused the envoys roundly, put them and their four sailors into prison, and kept them there above a year.^ His position was now desperate, for he had placed himself in open revolt. Alarmed for the conse- quences, he turned for help to the heretics of Boston. True Catholics detested them as foes of God and man ; but La Tour was neither true Catholic nor true Protestant, and would join hands with anybody who could serve liis turn. Twice before he had made advances to the Boston malign ants, and sent to them first one Rochet, and then one Lestang, with pro- posals of trade and alliance. The envoys were treated with courtesy, but could get no promise of active aid.^ La Tour's agent, Desjardins, had sent him from Rochelle a ship, called the "St. Clement," manned 1 Menou, L'Acadie colonisee. * Menou, L'Acadie colonisee. Moreau, Histoire de I'Acadie, 169, 170. " Hubbard, History of New England, chap, liv, Winthrop, ii. 42, 88. 20 LA TOUR AND D'AUNAY. [1643. by a hundred and forty Huguenots, laden with stores and munitions, and commanded by Captain Mouron. In due time La Tour at his Fort St. Jean heard that the "St. Clement" lay off the mouth of the river, unable to get in because D'Aunay blockaded the entrance with two armed ships and a pinnace. On this he resolved to appeal in person to the heretics. He ran the blockade in a small boat under cover of night, and, accompanied by his wife, boarded the "St. Clement" and sailed for Boston. ^ ^ Menou, L'Acadie colonisee. CHAPTER II. 1643-1645. LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. La Tour at Boston : his Meeting with Winthrop. — Boston IN 1043. — Training Day. — An Alarm. — La Tour's Bargain. — Doubts and Disputes. — The Allies sail. — La Tour and Endicott. — D'Aunay's Overture to the Puritans. — Marie's Mission. On tlie twelfth of June, 1643, the people of the infant town of Boston saw with some misgiving a French sliip entering their harbor. It chanced that the wife of Captain Edward Gibbons, with her children, was on her way in a boat to a farm belong- ing to her husband on an island in the harbor. One of La Tour's party, who had before made a visit to Boston, and had been the guest of Gibbons, recog- nized his former hostess ; and he, with La Tour and a few sailors, cast off from the ship and went to speak to her in a boat that was towed at the stern of the "St. Clement." Mrs. Gibbons, seeing herself chased by a crew of outlandish foreigners, took refuge on the island where Fort Winthrop was afterwards built, which was then known as the "Governor's Garden," as it had an orchard, a vineyard, and 22 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1643. "many other conveniences."^ The islands in the harbor, most of which were at that time well wooded, seem to have been favorite places of cultivation, as sheep and cattle were there safe from those pests of the mainland, the wolves. La Tour, no doubt to the dismay of Mrs. Gibbons and her children, landed after them, and was presently met by the governor himself, who, with his wife, two sons, and a daughter- in-law, had apparently rowed over to their garden for the unwonted recreation of an afternoon's outing.'^ La Tour made himself known to the governor, and, after mutual civilities, told him that a ship bringing supplies from France had been stopped by his enemy, D'Aunay, and that he had come to ask for help to raise the blockade and bring her to his fort. Winthrop replied that, before answering, he must consult the magistrates. As Mrs. Gibbons and her children were anxious to get home, the governor sent them to town in his own boat, promising to follow with his party in that of La Tour, who had placed it at his disposal. Meanwhile, the people of Boston had heard of what was taking place, and were in some anxiety, since, in a truly British distrust of all Frenchmen, they feared lest their governor might be kidnapped and held for ransom. Some of them accordingly took arms, and came in three boats to the rescue. In fact, remarks Winthrop, " if La Tour had been ill-minded towards us, he had such an 1 Wood, Neio England's Prospect, part i., chap. x. 2 Winthrop, ii. 127. La Tour ami IVinthrop. 1643.] BOSTON IN 1643. 23 opportunity as we hope neither he nor any other shall ever have the like again. "^ The castle, or fort, which was on another island hard by, was defenceless, its feeble garrison having been lately withdrawn, and its cannon might easily have been turned on the town. Boston, now in its thirteenth year, was a straggling village, with houses principally of boards or logs, gathered about a plain wooden meeting-house which formed the heart or vital organ of the place. The rough peninsula on which the infant settlement stood was almost void of trees, and was crowned by a hill split into three summits, — whence the name of Tremont, or Trimount, still retained by a street of the present city. Beyond the narrow neck of the peninsula were several smaller villages with outlying farms; but the mainland was for the most part a primeval forest, possessed by its original owners, — wolves, bears, and rattlesnakes. These last unde- sirable neighbors made their favorite haunt on a high rocky hill, called Rattlesnake Hill, not far inland, where, down to the present generation, they were often seen, and where good specimens may occasion- ally be found to this day.^ Far worse than wolves or rattlesnakes were the Pequot Indians, — a warlike race who had boasted 1 Winthrop, ii. 127. ■^ Blue Hill in Milton. " Up into the country is a high hill which is called rattlesnake hill, where there is great store of these poysonous creatures." (Wood, New England's Prospect.) "They [the wolves] be the greatest inconveniency the country hath." {lUd.) .^> 24 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1643. that they would wipe the whites from the face of the earth, but who, by hard marching and fighting, had lately been brought to reason. Worse than wolves, rattlesnakes, and Indians together were the theological quarrels that threatened to kill the colony in its infancy. Children are taught that the Puritans came to New England in search of religious liberty. The liberty they sought was for themselves alone. It was the liberty to worship in their own way, and to prevent all others from doing the like. They imagined that they held a monopoly of religious truth, and were bound in conscience to defend it against all comers. Their mission was to build up a western Canaan, ruled by the law of God; to keep it pure from error, and, if need were, purge it of heresy by persecution, — to which ends they set up one of the most detestable theocracies on record. Church and State were joined in one. Church- members alone had the right to vote. There was no choice but to remain politically a cipher, or embrace, or pretend to embrace, the extremest dogmas of Calvin. Never was such a premium offered to cant and hypocrisy ; yet in the early days hypocrisy was rare, so intense and pervading was the faith of the founders of New England. It was in the churches themselves, the appointed sentinels and defenders of orthodoxy, that heresy lifted its head and threatened the State with disrup- tion. Where minds different in complexion and character were continually busied with subtle ques- 1643.] PURITAN TROUBLES. 25 tions of theology, unity of opinion could not be long maintained ; and innovation found a champion in one Mrs. Hutchinson, a woman of great controversial ability and inexhaustible fluency of tongue. Persons of a mystical turn of mind, or a natural inclination to contrariety, were drawn to her preachings; and the church of Boston, with three or four exceptions, went over to her in a body. " Sanctification," " justi- fication," "revelations," the "covenant of grace," and the "covenant of works," mixed in furious battle with all the subtleties, sophistries, and venom of theo- logical war ; while the ghastly spectre of Antinomian- ism hovered over the fray, carrying terror to the souls of the faithful. The embers of the strife still burned hot when La Tour appeared to bring another firebrand. As a "papist" or " idolater, " though a mild one, he was sorely prejudiced in Puritan eyes, while his plundering of the Plymouth trading-house some years before, and killing two of its five tenants, did not tend to produce impressions in his favor; but it being explained that all five were drunk, and had begun the fray by firing on the French, the ire against him cooled a little. Landing with Winthrop, he was received under the hospitable roof of Captain Gibbons, whose wife had recovered from her fright at his approach. He went to church on Sunday, and the gravity of his demeanor gave great satisfaction, — a solemn carriage being of itself a virtue in Puritan eyes. Hence he was well treated, and his men were permitted to come ashore daily in small numbers. 26 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1643. The stated traiuing-day of the Boston militia fell in the next week, and La Tour asked leave to exer- cise his soldiers with the rest. This was granted ; and, escorted by the Boston trained band, about forty of them marched to the muster-field, which wa« probably the Common, — a large tract of pasture- land in wliich was a marshy pool, the former home of a colony of frogs, perhaps not quite exterminated by the sticks and stones of Puritan boys. This pool, cleaned, paved, and curbed with granite, preserves to tliis day the memory of its ancient inhabitants, and is still the Frog Pond, though bereft of frogs. The Boston trained band, in steel caps and buff coats, went through its exercise; and the visitors, we are told, expressed high approval. When the di'ill was finished, the Boston officers invited La Tour's officers to dine, while his rank and file were entertained in like manner by the Puritan soldiers. There were more exercises in the afternoon, and this time it was the turn of the French, who, says Winthrop, "were very expert in all their postures and motions." A certain "judicious minister," in dread of popish conspiracies, was troubled in spirit at this martial display, and prophesied that " store of blood would be spilled in Boston," — a prediction that was not fulfilled, although an incident took place which startled some of the spectators. The Frenchmen suddenly made a sham charge, sword in hand, wliich the women took for a real one. The alarm was soon over; and as this demonstration 1643.] LA TOUR'S REQUEST. 27 ended the performance, La Tour asked leave of the governor to withdraw his men to their ship. The leave being granted, they fired a salute and marched to the wharf where their boat lay, escorted, as before, by the Boston trained band. During the whole of La Tour's visit he and Winthrop went amicably to church together every Sunday, — the governor being attended, on these and all other occasions while the strangers were in town, by a guard of honor of musketeers and halberd men. La Tour and his chief officers had their lodging and meals in the houses of the principal townsmen, and all seemed harmony and good-will. La Tour, meanwhile, had laid his request before the magistrates, and produced among other papers the commission to Mouron, captain of his ship, dated in the last April, and signed and sealed by the Vice- Admiral of France, authorizing Mouron to bring supplies to La Tour, whom the paper styled Lieuten- ant-General for the King in Acadia; La Tour also showed a letter, genuine or forged, from the agent of the Company of New France, addressed to him as lieutenant-general, and warning him to beware of D'Aunay: from all which the Boston magistrates inferred that their petitioner Avas on good terms with the French government, ^ notwithstanding a letter 1 Count Jules de Menou, in his remarkable manuscript book now before me, expresses his belief that the commission of the Vice- Admiral was genuine, but that the letter of the agent of the Com- pany was a fabrication. 28 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1643. sent them by D'Aunay the year before, assuring them that La Tour was a proclaimed rebel, which in fact he was. Throughout this affair one is perplexed by the French official papers, whose entanglements and contradictions in regard to the Acadian rivals are past um-avelling. La Tour asked only for such help as would enable him to bring his own ship to his own fort; and, as his papers seemed to prove that he was a recognized officer of his King, Winthrop and the magistrates thought that they might permit him to hire such ships and men as were disposed to join him. La Tour had tried to pass himself as a Protestant; but his professions were distrusted, notwithstanding the patience with which he had listened to the long- winded sermons of the Reverend John Cotton. As to his wife, however, there appears to have been but one opinion. She was approved as a sound Protestant "of excellent virtues;" and her denunciations of D'Aunay no doubt fortified the prejudice which was already strong against him for his seizure of the Plymouth trading-house at Penobscot, and for his aggressive and masterful character, which made him an inconvenient neighbor. With the permission of the governor and the approval of most of the magistrates, La Tour now made a bargain with his host, Captain Gibbons, and a merchant named Thomas Hawkins. They agreed to furnish him with four vessels; to arm each of these with from four to fourteen small cannon, and 1643.] DISPUTES. 29 man them with a certain number of sailors, La Tour himself completing the crews with Englishmen hired, at his own charge. Hawkins was to command the whole. The four vessels were to escort La Tour and his ship, the "St. Clement," to the mouth of the St. John, in spite of D'Aunay and all other opponents. The agreement ran for two months; and La Tour was to pay £250 sterling a month for the use of the four ships, and mortgage to Gibbons and Hawkins his fort and all his Acadian property as security. Winthrop would give no commissions to Hawkins or any others engaged in the expedition, and they were all forbidden to fight except in self-defence ; but the agreement contained the significant clause that all plunder was to be equally divided according to rule in such enterprises. Hence it seems clear that the contractors had an eye to booty; yet no means were used to hold them to their good behavior. Now rose a brisk dispute, and the conduct of Winthrop was sharply criticised. Letters poured in upon him concerning "great dangers," "sin upon the conscience," and the like. He himself was clearly in doubt as to the course he was taking, and he soon called another meeting of magistrates, in which the inevitable clergy were invited to join; and they all fell to discussing the matter anew. As every man of them had studied the Bible daily from childhood up, texts were the chief weapons of the debate. Doubts were advanced as to whether Christians could law- fully help idolaters, and Jehoshaphat, Ahab, and 30 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1643. Josias were brought forward as cases in point. Then Solomon was cited to the effect that " he that med- dleth mth the strife that belongs not to him takes a dog by the ear; " to which it was answered that the quarrel did belong to us, seeing that Providence now offered us the means to weaken our enemy, D'Aunay, without much expense or trouble to ourselves. Besides, we ought to help a neighbor in distress, seeing that Joshua helped the Gibeonites, and Jehoshaphat helped Jehoram against Moab with the approval of Elisha. The opposing party argued that "by aiding papists we advance and strengthen popery;" to which it was replied that the opposite effect might follow, since the grateful papist, touched by our charity, might be won to the true faith and turned from his idols. Then the debate continued on the more worldly grounds of expediency and statecraft, and at last Winthrop's action was approved by the majority. Still, there were many doubters, and the governor was severely blamed. John Endicott wrote to him that La Tour was not to be trusted, and that he and D'Aunay had better be left to fight it out between them, since if we help the former to put down his enemy he will be a bad neighbor to us. Presently came a joint letter from several chief men of the colony, — Saltonstall, Bradstreet, Nathaniel Ward, John Norton, and others, — saying in sub- stance: We fear international law has been ill observed; the merits of the case are not clear; we 1643.] WINTHROP BLAMED. 31 are not called upon in charity to help La Tour (see 2 Chronicles xix. 2, and Proverbs xxvi. 17); this quarrel is for England and France, and not for us ; if D'Aunay is not completely put down, we shall have endless trouble; and "he that loses his life in an unnecessary quarrel dies the devil's martyr." This letter, known as the "Ipswich letter," touched Winthrop to the quick. He thought that it trenched on his official dignity, and the asperity^ of his answer betrays his sensitiveness. He calls the remonstrance "an act of an exorbitant nature," and says that it "blows a trumpet to division and dissension." "If my neighbor is in trouble," he goes on to say, "I must help him." He maintains that "there is great difference between giving permission to hire to guard or transport, and giving commission to fight," and he adds the usual Bible text, " The fear of man bringeth a snare; but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe." ^ In spite of Winthrop's reply, the Ipswich letter had great effect; and he and the Boston magistrates were much blamed, especially in the country towns. The governor was too candid not to admit that he had been in fault, though he limits his self-accusation to three points : first, that he had given La Tour an answer too hastily ; next, that he had not sufficiently 1 Winthrop's Answer to the Ipswich Letter about La Tour (no date), in Hutchinson Papers, 122. Bradstreet writes to liim on the 21st of June, " Our ayding of Latour was very grievous to many hereabouts, the design being feared to be unwarrantable by dyvers." 32 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1643. consulted the elders or ministers ; and lastly, that he had not opened the discussion with prayer. The upshot was that La Tour and his allies sailed on the fourteenth of July. D'Aunay's three vessels fled before them to Port Royal. La Tour tried to per- suade liis Puritan friends to join him in an attack ; but Hawkins, the English commander, would give no order to that effect, on which about thirty of the Boston men volunteered for the adventure. D'Aunay's followers had ensconced themselves in a fortified mill, whence they were driven with some loss. After burning the mill and robbing a pin- nace loaded with furs, the Puritans returned home, ha\'ing broken their orders and compromised their colony. In the next summer. La Tour, expecting a serious attack from D'Aunay, — who had lately been to France, and was said to be on his way back with large reinforcements, — turned again to Massachusetts for help. The governor this time was John Endicott, of Salem. To Salem the suppliant repaired; and as Endicott spoke French, the conference was easy. The rugged bigot had before expressed his disap- proval of "having anything to do with these idola- trous French;" but, according to Hubbard, he was so moved with compassion at the woful tale of his visitor that he called a meeting of magistrates and ministers to consider if anything could be done for him. The magistrates had by this time learned caution, and the meeting would do nothing but write 1643.] D'AUNAY'S ARRIVAL. 33 a letter to D'Aunay, demanding satisfaction for his seizure of Penobscot and other aggressions, and declaring that the men who escorted La Tour to his fort in the last summer had no commission from Massachusetts, yet that if they had wronged him he should have justice, though if he seized any New England trading vessels they would hold him an- swerable. In short, La Tour's petition was not granted. D'Aunay, when in France, had pursued his litiga- tion against his rival, and the royal council had ordered that the contumacious La Tour should be seized, his goods confiscated, and he himself brought home a prisoner; which decree D'Aunay was empow- ered to execute, if he could. He had returned to Acadia the accredited agent of the royal will. It was reported at Boston that a Biscayan pirate had sunk his ship on the way ; but the wish was father to the thought, and the report proved false. D'Aunay arrived safely, and was justly incensed at the support given by the Purittxns in the last year to his enemy. But he too had strong reasons for wishing to be on good terms with his heretic neighbors. King Louis, moreover, had charged him not to offend them, since, when they helped La Tour, they had done so in the belief that he was commissioned as lieutenant-general for the King, and therefore they should be held blameless. Hence D'Aunay made overtures of peace and friendship to the Boston Puritans. Early in October, VOL. 1. — ,3 34 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1644. 1644, they were visited by one Monsieur Marie, "supposed," says the chronicle, "to be a friar, but habited like a gentleman." He was probably one of the Capuchins who formed an important part of D'Aunay's establishment at Port Royal. The gov- ernor and magistrates received him with due consid- eration; and along with credentials from D'Aunay he showed them papers under the great seal of France, wherein the decree of the royal council was set forth in full. La Tour condemned as a rebel and traitor, and orders given to arrest both him and his wife. Henceforth there was no room to doubt which of the rival cliiefs had the King and the law on his side. The envoy, while complaining of the aid given to La Tour, offered terms of peace to the gov- ernor and magistrates, — who replied to his com- plaints with their usual subterfuge, that they had given no commission to those who had aided La Tour, declaring at the same time that they could make no treaty without the concurrence of the com- missioners of the United Colonies. They then desired Marie to set down his proposals in writing ; on which he went to the house of one Mr. Fowle, where he lodged, and drew up in French his plan for a treaty, adding the proposal that the Bostonians should join D'Aunay against La Tour. Then he came back to the place of meeting and discussed the subject for half a day, — sometimes in Latin with the magis- trates, and sometimes in French mth the governor, that old soldier being probably ill versed in the classic 16M.] MARIE'S MISSION. 35 tongues. In vain they all urged that D'Aunay should come to terms with La Tour. Marie replied, that if La Tour would give himself up his life would be spared, but that if he were caught he would lose his head as a traitor; adding that his wife was worse than he, being the mainspring of his rebellion. Endicott and the magistrates refused active alliance ; but the talk ended in a provisional treaty of peace, duly drawn up in Latin, Marie keeping one copy and the governor the other. The agreement needed rati- fication by the commissioners of the United Colonies on one part, and by D'Aunay on the other. What ^ is most curious in the affair is the attitude of Massa-\^ '^ chusetts, which from first to last figures as an inde- "" pendent State, with no reference to the King under whose charter it was building up its theocratic republic, and consulting none but the infant confed- eracy of the New England colonies, of which it was itself the head. As the commissioners of the confed- eracy were not then in session, Endicott and the magistrates took the matter provisionally into their own hands. Marie had made good despatch, for he reached Boston on a Friday and left it on the next Tuesday, having finished his business in about three days, or rather two, as one of the three was "the Sabbath." He expressed surprise and gratification at the atten- tion and courtesy with which he had been treated. His hosts supplied him with horses, and some of them accompanied him to Salem, where he had left 36 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1644. his vessel, and whence he sailed for Port Royal, well pleased. Just before he came to Boston, that town had received a visit from Madame de la Tour, who, soon after her husband's successful negotiation with Winthrop in the past year, had sailed for France in the ship " St. Clement." She had labored strenuously in La Tour's cause; but the influence of D'Aunay's partisans was far too strong, and, being charged with complicity in her husband's misconduct, she was forbidden to leave France on pain of death. She set the royal command at naught, escaped to England, took passage in a ship bound for America, and after long delay landed at Boston. The English ship- master had bargained to carry her to her husband at Fort St. Jean ; but he broke his bond, and was sen- tenced by the Massachusetts courts to pay her £2,000 as damages. She was permitted to hire three armed vessels then lying in the harbor, to convey her to Fort St. Jean, where she arrived safely and rejoined La Tour. Meanwhile, D'Aunay was hovering off the coast, armed with the final and conclusive decree of the royal council, which placed both husband and wife under the ban, and enjoined him to execute its sen- tence. But a resort to force wsis costly and of doubt- ful result, and D'Aunay resolved again to try the effect of persuasion. Approaching the mouth of the St. John, he sent to the fort two boats, commanded bv his lieutenant, who carried letters from his chief, 1645.] AN ENRAGED AMAZON. 37 promising to La Tour's men pardon for their past conduct and payment of all wages due them if they would return to their duty. An adherent of D'Aunay declares that they received these advances with insults and curses. It was a little before this time that Madame de la Tour arrived from Boston. The same writer says that she fell into a transport of fury, "behaved like one possessed with a devil," and heaped contemj^t on the Catholic faith in the presence of her husband, who approved everj-thing she did; and he further affirms tliat she so berated and reviled the R^collet friars in the fort that they refused to stay, and set out for Port Royal in the depth of winter, taking with them eight soldiers of the fort who were too good Catholics to remain in such a nest of heresy and rebellion. They were permitted to go, and were provided with an old pinnace and two barrels of Indian corn, with which, unfortunately for La Tour, they safely reached their destination. On her arrival from Boston, Madame de la Tour had given her husband a piece of politic advice. Her enemies say that she had some time before renounced her faith to gain the favor of the Puritans ; but there is reason to believe that she had been a Huguenot from the first. She now advised La Tour to go to Boston, declare himself a Protestant, ask for a min- ister to preach to his men, and promise that if the Bostonians would help him to master D'Aunay and conquer Acadia, he would share the conquest with them. La Tour admired the sagacious counsels of 17401)0 38 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1645. his wife, and sailed for Boston to put them in prac- tice just before the friars and the eight deserters sailed for Port Royal, thus leaving their departure unopposed. At Port Royal both friars and deserters found a warm welcome. D'Aunay paid the eight soldiers their long arrears of wages, and lodged the friars in the seminary with his Capuchins. Then he ques- tioned them, and was well rewarded. They told him that La Tour had gone to Boston, leaving his wife with only forty-five men to defend the fort. Here was a golden opportunity. D'Aunay called his officers to council. All were of one mind. He mus- tered every man about Port Royal and embarked them in the armed ship of three hundred tons that had brought him from France; he then crossed the Bay of Fundy with all his force, anchored in a small harbor a league from Fort St. Jean, and sent the R^collet Pere Andr^ to try to seduce more of La Tour's men, — an attempt which proved a failure. D'Aunay lay two months at his anchorage, during which time another ship and a pinnace joined him from Port Royal. Then he resolved to make an attack. Meanwhile, La Tour had persuaded a Boston merchant to send one Grafton to Fort St. Jean in a small vessel loaded with provisions, and bringing also a letter to Madame de la Tour contain- ing a promise from her husband that he would join her in a month. When the Boston vessel appeared at the mouth of the St. John, D'Aunay seized it, 1645.] FORT ST. JEAN ATTACKED. 39 placed Grafton and the few men with him on an island, and finally supplied them with a leaky sail- boat to make their way home as they best could. D'Aunay now landed two cannon to batter Fort St. Jean on the land side ; and on the seventeenth of April, having brought his largest ship within pistol- shot of the water rampart, he summoned the garrison to surrender.! They answered with a volley of can- non-shot, then hung out a red flag, and, according to D'Aunay's reporter, shouted "a thousand insults and blasphemies " ! ^ Towards evening a breach was made in the wall, and D'Aunay ordered a general assault. Animated by their intrepid mistress, the defenders fought with desperation, and killed or wounded many of the assailants, not without severe loss on their own side. Numbers prevailed at last; 1 The site of Fort St. Jean, or Fort La Tour, has been matter of question. At Carleton, opposite the present city of St. John, are the remains of an earthen fort, by some supposed to be that of La Tour, but which is no doubt of later date, as the place was occupied by a succession of forts down to the Seven Years' War. On the other hand, it has been assumed that Fort La Tour was at Jemsec, whicli is about seventy miles up the river. Now, in the second mortgage deed of Fort La Tour to Major Gibbons, May 10, 1645, the fort is described as " sitiie pres de I'embouchure de la riviere de St. Jean." Moreover, there is a cataract just above the mouth of the river, which, though submerged at high tide, cannot be passed by heavy ships at any time ; and as D'Aunay brought his largest ship of war to within pistol-shot of the fort, it must have been below the cataract. Mr. W. F. Ganong, after careful examination, is con- vinced that Fort La Tour was at Portland Point, on the east side of the St. John, at its mouth. See his paper on the subject in Transac- tions of the Royal Society of Canada, 1891. - Proces Verbal d' Andre Certain, in Appendix A. 40 LA TOUR AND THE PURITANS. [1645. all resistance was overcome; the survivors of the garrison were made prisoners, and the fort wa« pil- laged. Madame de la Tour, her maid, and another woman, who were all of their sex in the place, were among the captives, also Madame de la Tour's son, a mere child. D'Aunay pardoned some of his pris- oners, but hanged the greater part, "to serve as an example to posterity," says his reporter. Nicolas Denys declares that he compelled Madame de la Tour to witness the execution with a halter about her neck; but the more trustworthy accounts say nothing of this alleged outrage. On the next day, the eigh- teenth of April, the bodies of the dead were decently buried, an inventory was made of the contents of the fort, and D'Aunay set his men to repair it for his own use. These labors occupied three weeks or more, during a part of which Madame de la Tour was left at liberty, till, being detected in an attempt to corre- spond with her husband by means of an Indian, she was put into confinement; on which, according to D'Aunay's reporter, "she fell ill with spite and rage," and died within three weeks, — after, as he tells us, renouncing her heresy in the chapel of the fort. CHAPTER III. 1645-1710. THE VICTOR VANQUISHED. D'Aunat's Envoys to the Puritans : theik Reception at Boston. — Winthrop and his " Papist " Guests. — Recon- ciliation. — Treaty. — Behavior of La Tour. — Royal Favors to D'Aunay : his Hopes ; his Death ; his Character. — Conduct of the Court towards him. — Intrigues of La Tour. —Madame D'Aunay. — La Tour marries her. — Chil- dren of D'Aunay. — Descendants of La Tour. Having triumphed over his rival, D'Aunay was left free to settle his accounts with the Massachusetts Puritans, who had offended him anew by sending pro"visions to Fort St. Jean, having always insisted that they were free to trade with either party. They, on their side, were no less indignant with him for his seizure of Grafton's vessel and harsh treatment of him and his men. After some preUminary negotiation and some rather sharp correspondence, D'Aunay, in September, 1646, sent a pinnace to Boston, bearing his former envoy, Marie, accompanied by his own secretary and by one Monsieur Louis. It was Sunday, the Puritan Sabbath, when the three envoys arrived; and the pious inhabitants were 42 THE VICTOR VANQUISHED. [164B. preparing for the afternoon sermon. Marie and his two colleagues were met at the wharf by two militia officers, and conducted through the silent and dreary streets to the house of Captain, now Major, Gibbons, who seems to have taken upon himself in an especial manner the office of entertaining strangers of consequence. All was done with much civility, but no ceremony ; for the Lord's Day must be kept inviolate. Winthrop, who had again been chosen governor, now sent an officer, with a guard of musketeers, to invite the envoys to his own house. Here he regaled them with wine and sweetmeats, and then informed them of "our manner that all men either come to our publick meetings, or keep themselves quiet in their houses."^ He then laid before them such books in Latin and French as he had, and told them that they were free to walk in his garden. Though the diver- sion offered was no doubt of the dullest, — since the literary resources of the colony then included little besides arid theology, and the walk in the garden promised but moderate delights among the bitter pot-herbs provided against days of fasting, — the victims resigned themselves with good grace, and, as the governor tells us, "gave no offence." Sunset came at last, and set the captives free. On Monday both sides fell to business. The envoys showed their credentials ; but, as the commis- sioners of the United Colonies were not yet in 1 Winthrop, ii. 273, 275. 1646.] THE ENVOYS. 43 session, nothing conclusive could be done till Tues- day. Then, all being assembled, each party made its complaints of the conduct of the other, and a long discussion followed. Meals were provided for the three visitors at the "ordinary," or inn, where the magistrates dined during the sessions of the General Court. The governor, as their host, always sat with them at the board, and strained his Latin to do honor to his guests. They, on their part, that courtesies should be evenly divided, went every morning at eight o'clock to the governor's house, whence he accompanied them to the place of meet- ing; and at night he, or some of the commissioners in his stead, attended them to their lodging at the house of Major Gibbons. Serious questions were raised on both sides; but as both wanted peace, explanations were mutually made and accepted. The chief difficulty lay in the undeniable fact, that, in escorting La Tour to his fort m 1643, the Massachusetts volunteers had chased D'Aunay to Port Royal, killed some of his men, burned his mill, and robbed his pinnace, for which wrongs the envoys demanded heavy damages. It was true that the governor and magistrates had forbidden acts of aggression on the part of the volun- teers ; but on the other hand they had had reason to believe that their prohibition would be disregarded, and had taken no measures to enforce it. The envoys clearly had good ground of complaint; and here, says Winthrop, "they did stick two days." At 44 THE VICTOR VANQUISHED. [1646. last they yielded so far as to declare that what D'Aunay wanted was not so much compensation in money as satisfaction to his honor by an acknowledg- ment of their fault on the part of the Massachusetts authorities ; and they further declared that he would accept a moderate present in token of such acknowl- edgment. The difficulty now was to find such a present. The representatives of Massachusetts pres- ently bethought themselves of a "very fair new sedan " which the Viceroy of Mexico had sent to his sister, and which had been captured in the West Indies by one Captain Cromwell, a corsair, who gave it to "our governor." Winthrop, to whom it was entirely useless, gladly parted with it in such a cause; and the sedan, being graciously accepted, ended the discussion. ^ The treaty was signed in duplicate by the commissioners of the United Colonies and the envoys of D'Aunay, and peace was at last concluded. The conference had been conducted with much courtesy on both sides. One small cloud appeared, but soon passed away. The French envoys displayed the jieur-de-lys at the masthead of their pinnace as she lay in the harbor. The townsmen were incensed ; and Monsieur Marie was told that to fly foreign colors in Boston harbor was not according to custom. He insisted for a time, but at length ordered the offending flag to be lowered. On the twenty-eighth of September the envoys bade 1 Winthrop, ii. 274. 1647.] BEHAVIOR OF LA TOUR. 45 farewell to Winthrop, who had accompanied them to their pinnace with a guard of honor. Five cannon saluted them from Boston, five from "the Castle," and three from Charlestown. A supply of mutton and a keg of sherry were sent on board their ves- sel; and then, after firing an answering salute from their swivels, they stood down the bay till their sails disappeared among the islands- La Tour had now no more to hope from his late supporters. He had lost his fort, and, what was worse, he had lost his indomitable wife. Throughout the winter that followed his disaster he had been entertained by Samuel Maverick, at his house on Noddle's Island. In the spring he begged hard for further help; and, as he begged in vain, he sailed for Newfoundland to make the same petition to Sir David Kirke, who then governed that island. Kirke refused, but lent him a pinnace and sent him back to Boston. Here some merchants had the good nature or folly to intrust him with goods for the Indian trade, to the amount of four hundred pounds. Thus equipped, he sailed for Acadia in Kirke 's pimiace, manned with his own followers and five New England men. On reaching Cape Sable, he conspired with the master of the pinnace and his own men to seize the vessel and set the New England sailors ashore, — which was done. La Tour, it is said, shooting one of them in the face with a pistol. It was winter, and the outcasts roamed along the shore for a fort- night, half frozen and half starved, till they were 46 THE VICTOR VANQUISHED. [1647. met by Micmac Indians, who gave them food and a boat, — in which, by rare good fortune, they reached Boston, where their story convinced the most infatu- ated that they had harbored a knave. "Whereby," solemnly observes the pious but much mortified Winthrop, who had been La Tour's best friend, "it appeared (as the Scripture saith) that there is no confidence in an unfaithful or carnal man."^ When the capture of Fort St. Jean was known at court the young King was well pleased, and promised to send D'Aunay the gift of a ship; ^ but he forgot to keep his word, and requited his faithful subject with the less costly reward of praises and honors. After a preamble reciting his merits, and especially his "care, courage, and valor" in "taking, by our express order, and reducing again under our authority the fort on the St. John which La Tour had rebel- liously occupied with the aid of foreign sectaries," the King confirms D'Aunay's authority in Acadia, and extends it on paper from the St. Lawrence to Virginia, — empowering him to keep for himself such parts of this broad domain as he might want, and grant out the rest to others, who were to hold of him as vassals. He could build forts and cities, at his own expense; command by land and sea; make war \*" / or peace within the limits of his grant ; appoint officers of government, justice, and police; and, in short, exercise sovereign power, with the simple 1 Winthrop, ii. 20G. 2 Le Roy a M. d'Aunay Charnisni/, 28 Sept., 1645. 1647.] D'AUNAY'S REWARD. 47 reservation of homage to the King, and a tenth part of all gold, silver, and copper to the royal treasury. A full monopoly of the fur -trade throughout his dominion was conferred on him; and any infringe- ment of it was to be punished by confiscation of ships and goods, and thirty thousand livres of damages. On his part he was enjoined to " establish the name, power, and authority of the King; subject the nations to his rule, and teach them the knowledge of the true God and the light of the Christian faith. "^ Acadia, in short, was made an hereditary fief; and D'Aunay and his heirs became lords of a domain as large as a European kingdom. D'Aunay had spent his substance in the task of civilizing a wilderness. ^ The King had not helped him; and though he belonged to a caste which held commerce in contempt, he must be a fur- trader or a bankrupt. La Tour's Fort St. Jean was a better trading-station than Port Royal, and it had wofully abridged D'Aunay's profits. Hence an ignoble com- petition in beaver-skins had greatly embittered their quarrel. All this was over; Fort St. Jean, the best trading-stand in Acadia, was now in its conqueror's hands ; and his monopoly was no longer a mere name, but a reality. ^ Lettre du Roy de Gouverneiir et Lieutenant General es costes de I'Acadie pour Charles de Menou d'Aulnay Charnisay, Fevrier, 1647. Lettre de la Reyne regente au meme, 13 Avril, 1647. 2 His heirs estimated his outlays for the colony at 800,000 livres. Memoir e des filles dufeu Seicpieur d'Aulnay Charnisay, 1686. Placet de Joseph de Menou d'Aunay Charnisay, Jils aine du feu Charles de Menou d'Aunay Charnisay, 1658. 48 THE VICTOR VANQUISHED. [1650. Everything promised a thriving trade and a growing colony, when the scene was suddenly changed. On the twenty-fourth of May, 1650, a dark and stormy day, D'Aunay and his valet were in a birch canoe in the basin of Port Royal, not far from the mouth of the Annapolis. Perhaps neither master nor man was skilled in the management of the treacherous craft that bore them. The canoe overset. D'Aunay and the valet clung to it and got astride of it, one at each end. There they sat, sunk to the shoulders, the canoe though under water having buoyancy enough to keep them from sinking farther. So they remained an hour and a half; and at the end of that time D'Aunay was dead, not from drowning but from cold, for the water still retained the chill of winter. The valet remained alive ; and in this con- dition they were found by Indians and brought to the north shore of the Annapolis, whither Father Ignace, the Superior of the Capuchins, went to find the body of his patron, brought it to the fort, and buried it in the chapel, in presence of his wife and all the soldiers and inhabitants. ^ The Father Superior highly praises the dead chief, and is astonished that the earth does not gape and devour the slanderers who say that he died in desper- ation, as one abandoned of God. He admits that in former times cavillei's might have found wherewith" to accuse him, but declares that before his death he had amended all his faults. This is the testimony 1 Lf.ttre du Rev. P. Itjnace, Capucin, 6 Aoust, 1653. 1651.] LA TOUR IN FAVOR. 49 of a Capuchin, whose fraternity he had always favored. The Rdcollets, on the other hand, whose patron was La Tour, complained that D'Aunay had ill-used them, and demanded redress. ^ He seems to have been a favorable example of his class ; loyal to his faith and his King, tempering pride with cour- tesy, and generally true to his cherished ideal of the gentilhomme Frangais. In his qualities, as in his birth, he was far above his rival; and his death was the ruin of the only French colony in Acadia that deserved the name. At the news of his enemy's fate a new hope pos- sessed La Tour. He still had agents in France interested to serve him ; while the father of D'Aunay, who acted as his attorney, was feeble with age, and his children were too young to defend their interests. There is an extraordinary document bearing date February, 1651, or less than a year after D'Aunay's death. It is a complete reversal of the decree of 1647 in his favor. La Tour suddenly appears as the favorite of royalty, and all the graces before lavished on his enemy are now heaped upon liim. The lately proscribed "rebel and traitor" is confirmed as gover- nor and lieutenant-general in New France. His services to God and the King are rehearsed "as of our certain knowledge," and he is praised with the same emphasis used towards D'Aunay in the decree 1 Papers to this effect are among the many pieces cited in the Arret du Conseil d'Etat a I'eqard du Seigneur de la Tour, 6 Mars, 1644. VOL. I. — 4 50 THE VICTOR VANQUISHED. [1651. of 1647, and almost in the same words. The paper goes on to say that he, La Tour, would have con- verted the Indians and conquered Acadia for the King if D'Aunay had not prevented him.i Unless this document is a fabrication in the inter- est of La Tour, as there is some reason to believe, it suggests strange reflections on colonial administra- tion during the minority of Louis XIV. Genuine or not, La Tour profited by it, and after a visit to France, which proved a successful and fruitful one, he returned to Acadia with revived hopes. The widow of D'Aunay had eight children, all minors; and their grandfather, the octogenarian Rend de Menou, had been appointed their guardian. He sent an incompetent and faithless person to Port Royal to fulfil the wardship of which he was no longer capable. The unfortunate widow and her children needed better help. D'Aunay had employed as his agent one Le Borgne, a merchant of Rochelle, who now succeeded in getting the old man under his influence, and induced him to sign an acknowledgment, said to be false, that D'Aunay's heirs owed him 260,000 i Confirmation de Gouvernenr et Lieutenant General pour le Roy de la Nouvelle France, a la Caste de I'Acadie, an Sr. Charles de St. Etienne, Chevalier de la Tour, 27 Fev., 1651. A copy of this strange paper is before me. Comte de Menou, and after him, his follower Moreau, doubt the genuineness of the document, which, however, is alluded to without suspicion in the legal paper entitled Memoire in re Charles de St. Etienne, Seigneur de la Tour (fils) et ses freres et soeurs, 1700. This Memoire is in the interest of the heirs of La Tour, and is to be judged accordingly. 1653.] INTRIGUES OF LE BORGNE. 51 livres.^ Le Borgne next came to Port Royal to push his schemes ; and here he inveigled or frightened the widow into signing a paper to the effect that she and her children owed him 205,286 livres. It was fortu- nate for his unscrupulous plans that he had to do with the soft and tractable Madame d'Aunay, and not with the high-spirited and intelligent Amazon Madame La Tour. Le Borgne now seized on Port Royal as security for the alleged debts; while La Tour on his return from his visit to France induced the perplexed and helpless widow to restore to him Fort St. Jean, conquered by her late husband. Madame d'Aunay, beset with insidious enemies, saw herself and her children in danger of total ruin. She applied to the Due de Vendome, grand-master, chief, and superintendent of navigation, and offered to share all her Acadian claims with him if he would help her in her distress ; but, from the first, Vendome looked more to his own interests than to hers. La Tour was not satisfied with her concessions to him, and perplexing questions rose between them touching land claims and the fur-trade. To end these troubles she took a desperate step, and on the twenty-fourth of February, 1653, married her tormentor, the foe of her late husband, who had now been dead not quite three years. ^ Her chief thought seems to have been for her children, whose rights are guarded, though 1 Memoire in re Charles de St. Etienne (fils de la Tour), etc. 2 Eameau, i. 120. Menou and Moreau think that this marriage took place two or three years later. 62 THE VICTOR VANQUISHED. [1654-1710. to little purpose, in the marriage contract. She and La Tour took up their abode at Fort St. Jean. Of the children of her first marriage four were boys and four were girls. They were ruined at last by the harpies leagued to plunder them, and sought refuge in France, where the boys were all killed in the wars of Louis XIV., and at least three of the girls became nuns. Now follow complicated disputes, without dignity or interest, and turning chiefly on the fur -trade. Le Borgne and his son, in virtue of their claims on the estate of D'Aunay, which were sustained by the French courts, got a lion's share of Acadia; a part fell also to La Tour and his children by his new wife, while Nicolas Denys kept a feeble hold on the shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence as far north as Cape Hosiers. War again broke out between France and England, and in 1654 Major Robert Sedgwick of Charlestown, Massachusetts, who had served in the civil war as a major-general of Cromwell, led a small New England force to Acadia under a commission from the Pro- tector, captured Fort St. Jean, Port Royal, and all the other French stations, and conquered the colony for Ee gland. It was restored to France by the treaty of Breda, and captured again in 1690 by Sir William Phips. The treaty of Ryswick again restored it to France, till, in 1710, it was finally seized for England by General Nicholson. 1 Menou, L'Acadie colonisie. 1666-1830.] DESCENDANTS OF LA TOUR. 53 When, after Sedgwick's expedition, the English were in possession of Acadia, La Tour, not for the first time, tried to fortify his claims by a British title, and, jointly with Thomas Temple and William Crown, obtained a grant of the colony from Cromwell, — though he soon after sold his share to his copartner. Temple. He seems to have died in 1666. ^ Descendants of his were living in Acadia in 1830, and some may probably still be found there. As for D'Aunay, no trace of his blood is left in the land where he gave wealth and life for France and the Church. 1 Rameau, i. 122. SECTION SECOOT). CANADA A MISSION. CHAPTER IV. 1653-1658. THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. The Iroquois War. — Father Poncet: his Adventures. — Jesuit Boldness. — Le Motne's Mission. — Chaumonot and Dablon. — Iroquois Ferocity. — The Mohawk Kidnappers. — Critical Position. — The Colony of Onondaga. — Speech OF Chaumonot. — Omens of Destruction. — Device of the Jesuits. — The Medicine Feast. — The Escape. In the summer of 1653 all Canada turned to fast- ing and penance, processions, vows, and supplica- tions. The saints and the Virgin were beset with unceasing prayer. The wretched little colony was like some puny garrison, starving and sick, com- passed with inveterate foes, supplies cut off, and succor hopeless. At Montreal — the advance guard of the settle- ments, 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 1653.] THE IROQUOIS WAR. 55 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. 1 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 the winter in the neighboring forest, watching for an oppor- tunity to surprise the place. Hunger drove them off, but they returned in the 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 1 Le Mercier, Relation, 1653, 3. 2 So bent were they on taking the place, that they brought their families, in order to make a permanent settlement, Marie de riucarnation, Lettre du 6 Sept., 1653. 56 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1653. 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 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 them- selves 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 twenty -sixth 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 1653.] PACIFIC OVERTURES. 67 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 won- drous 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 1 See " Jesuits in North America," ii. 264. 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. 58 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1653. 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, 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 fete of this mother of all bless- ings ; 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 1 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 (1049-50). 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. 2 The chief whose death had so enraged the Mohawks. 1653.] THE WOES OF FATHER PONCET. 59 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 Poncet his life ; and he, or rather the Holy Virgin and the holy angels, labored so well in the work of peace, that on Saint Michael's Day it was resolved in a council of the elders that the father should be con- ducted 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 com- mand 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 fright- ful 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, 1 Relation, 1653, 18. 60 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1653. 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 some- thing to soothe his thirst, and for a bowl of broth to revive his strength. Scarcely had he framed the petition when an Indian gave 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 gantlet, 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 mean- while singing the Vexilla Regis. After this prelimi- 1653.] PEACE CONCLUDED. 61 nary, 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 twenty-first of October, the nine weeks of my cap- tivity being accomplished, in honor of Saint Michael and all the holy angels. On the sixth of November the Iroquois who conducted me made their presents to confirm the peace; and thus, on a Sunday evening, eighty-and-one daj'S 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. 1 Poncet in Relation, 1653, 17. On Poncet's captivity see also Morale Pratique des Jesuites, vol. xxxiv. (4to) chap. xii. 62 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1653. 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 impunity when- ever 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 rem- nant 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 ^ See " Jesuits in Nortli America." 1653.] JESUIT BOLDNESS. 63 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 con- stantly repeating their praises. Hence their 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 64 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1654. 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 favor- able 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 Mohawl^, 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 pro- ceed 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 wilder- ness life. He and his companions had struggled all 1654.] FATHER LE MOYNE. 65 day against the surges of La Chine, and were biv- ouacked 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 dis- pelled. The inhabitants came to meet them, bring- ing roasting ears of the young maize and bread made of its pulp, than which they knew no luxury more VOL. I. — 5 66 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1654. 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 tenth of August the criers passed through the town, summoning all to hear the words of Onontio. The naked dignita- ries, sitting, squatting, or l}dng 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 dis- cord, 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 1654.] LE MOYNE AT ONONDAGA. 67 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-Jioh — 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 ene- mies, the Eries; while by another present he meta- phorically daubed their faces with the war-paint. However it may have suited the character of a Chris- tian priest to hound on these savage hordes to a war of extermination which they had themselves pro- voked, 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 overfloAving. 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 dis- 68 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1654-55. covered the famous salt-springs of Onondaga. Fish- ing and hunting, the party pursued their way till, at noon of the seventh of September, Le Moyne reached Montreal.^ When he reached Quebec, his tidings cheered for a while the anxious hearts of its tenants ; but an un- wonted 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 com- panions were set upon by a war-party 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 foreshadow- ^ ing 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 1 Journal du Pere Le Maine, Relation, 1054, chaps, vi. yii. 2 Compare Relation, 1654, 33, and Lettre de Marie de l' Incarnation, 18 Oct., 1654. 1655.] ONONDAGA DEPUTATION. 69 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 con- firm a peace made by infidels backed by heretics."^ The Mohawks received him with great rejoicing; yet his 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 ^ Copie de Deux Leitres envoyees de la Nouvelle France au Pere Procureur des Missions de la Compagnie de Jesus. 70 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1655. 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 wel- come, 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 fifteenth 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 1655.] REPLY OF THE CHIEFS. 71 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 delighted 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 thou- sand beads of wampum. "But this," saj'S 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 72 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1656. 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 abund- ant 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 provoca- tion, 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 1 See " Jesuits in North America," i. 154. 1656.] DABLON'S JOURNEY. 73 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 Ms dangerous hosts and soothe their rising jealousies. It was the second of March when Dablon began his journey. His constitution must have been of iron, or he would have succumbed to the appalling hard- ships 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, 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 jour- ney of four weeks. Dablon descended to Quebec. There was long and anxioiis 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 1 De Quen, Relation, 1656, 35. Chaumonot, in his Autobiography, ascribes the miracle to the intercession of the deceased Bre'beuf . 74 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1656. 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 he 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 iires 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, Mdnard, and Frdmin, — 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 1656] DEPARTURE. 75 twelve canoes filled with Hiirons, Onondagas, and a few Senecas lately arrived, they set out on the seven- teenth of May "to attack the demons," as Le Mercier writes, "in their very stronghold." With shouts, tears, and benedictions, priests, soldiers, and inhabit- ants 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 jeal- ousy towards their Onondaga confederates, but they had hitherto derived great profit from the 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 1 Marie de I'lncarnation, Lettres, 1656. Le Mercier, Relation, 1657, chap. iv. Chaulraer, Nouveau Monde, ii. 265, 322, 319. 76 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1656. 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, bound and flogged 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 marauders now paddled their large canoes of elm-bark stealthily down the current, passed Quebec undiscovered in the dark night of the nineteenth of May, landed in early morning on the island of Orleans, and ambushed themselves to sur- prise the Hurons as they came to labor in their corn- fields. 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 pris- oners, among whom were a great number of Huron 1 Compare Marie de I'lncarnation, Lettre 14 Aoui, 1656, Le Jeune, Relation, 1657, 9. 1656.] MOHAWK INSOLENCE. 77 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 gap- ing 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 satis- faction of pillaging a small band of Mohawk hunters, ^ See authorities just cited, and Perrot, Mceurs des Sauvages, 106. 78 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1656. in vicarious reprisal for their own wrongs. On the twenty-sixth 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 liim to their village and begun to torture him ; after which they tied him fast and lay down to sleep, thinldng to resume their pleasure on the mor- row. 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 French- men gave him food and a canoe, and the living skeleton paddled with a light heart for Quebec. The colonists themselves soon began to suffer from hunger. Their fishing failed on Lake Ontario, and they were forced to content themselves with cran- berries 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 French- men had completely lost heart. Weary and faint, they dragged their canoes up the rapids, when sud- 1656.] THE ONONDAGAS. 79 denly 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 verduTc. They knew that Chaumonot 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 re-embarking, 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 80 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1656. 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 pos- session 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 Saliua; 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 seventeenth of July, Le Mercier and Chau- monot, escorted by a file of soldiers, set out for Onon- daga, 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, 1 Le Mercier, Relation, 1657, 14. 1656.] THE IROQUOIS CAPITAL. 81 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 twenty-fourth. 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, 1 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 aic R. P. Provincial, 31 Aoik, 1658. VOL. I. — 6 82 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1656. Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas; sachems, coun- sellors, 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, and said: "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 exhorta- 1656.] THE NEW MISSION. 83 tion. 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, mosqui- toes, 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 there ? The future alone could tell. The mission, it must 1 Gannentaa or Ganuntaah is still the Iroquois name for Lake Onondaga. According to Morgan, it means " Material for Council- Fire." 84 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1656. not be forgotten, had a double scope, — half ecclesi- astical, 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 influ- ence both hard-earned and well-earned. The mis- sion at Lake Onondaga was but a base of operations. Long before they were lodged and fortified here, Chaumonot and Mdnard 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 dis- simulation 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 per- haps equalled in any civilized nation.^ 1 Women, amonfj the Iroquois, had a council of their own, which, according to Lafitau, who knew tliis people well, had the initiative in discussion, subjects presented hy them being settled in tiie 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 ITncarnation). In the torture of prisoners, great deference was 1657.] JESUIT COURAGE. 85 But while infants were baptized and squaws con- verted, 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 mth 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 paid to the judgment of the women, who, says Cliamplain, 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." Maurs des Sauvivjrs, i. 460 (ed. in 4to). 86 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1657. more of the Huroiis 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 destina- tion in company with the Onondaga warriors. The Jesuit Ragueneau, bound also for Onondaga, joined them. Five leagues al)ove Montreal, the warriors 16570 ONONDAGA TREACHERY. 87 left him behind; but he found an old canoe on the bank, in which, after abandoning most of his bag- gage, 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 third 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 pro- tested, 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 1 Lettre de Ragueneau au R. P. Provincial, d Aout, 1657 {ReL, 1657). 2 Ibid., 21 Aout, 1658 {Rel, 1658). 88 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1657. 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 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 insuf- ferable msolence; for they felt themselves masters uj. the s- tuation, 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 d' Ailleboust 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 moni- tions of their crafty elders, killed wantonly at various times thirteen Christian Hurons, captives at 1658.] FRIGHTFUL POSITION. 89 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 d'Ailleboust embarrassed the conspirators and caused delay. Messeng< rs 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 90 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1658. 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 undiscovered. 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 con- sisted 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 benevo- lent gluttony. These festins a 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 1658.] THE MEDICINE FEAST. 91 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 twentieth 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. 92 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1658. 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 them- selves 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." 1 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 ^ Lettre de Marie de I' Incarnation a son Jils, 4 Oct., 1058. 1658.] PERPLEXITY OF THE IROQUOIS. 93 cautiously descended to the shore, where their com- rades, 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 sur- face 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 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 scratch- ing 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 94 THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA. [1658. 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 third of April they reached Montreal, and on the twenty-third arrived at Quebec. They had saved their lives ; but the mission of Onon- daga was a miserable failure.^ 1 On the Onondaga mission, the authorities are Marie de rincarnation, Lettres Historiques, and Relations des J€suites, 1657 and 1658, where the story is told at length, accompanied with several interesting letters and journals. Chaumonot, in his Auto- biographie, speaks only of the Seneca mission, and refers to the Relations for the rest. Dollier de Casson, in his Histoire du Mon- treal, mentions the arrival of the fugitives at that place, the sight of which, he adds complacently, cured them of their fright. The Journal des Sup^rieurs des Jesuites chronicles with its usual brevity the ruin of the mission and the return of the party to Quebec. The contemporary Jesuits, in their account, say nothing of the superstitious character of the feast. It is Marie de ITncarnation who lets out the secret. The later Jesuit Charlevoix, much to his credit, repeats the story without reserve. Since the above chapter was written, the remarkable narratives of Pierre Esprit Radisson have been rescued from the obscurity where they have lain for more than two centuries. Radisson, a native of St. Malo, was a member of the colony at Onondaga ; but having passed into the service of England, he wrote in a language which, for want of a fitter name, may be called English. He does not say that the feast was of the kind known &8festin d manger tout, though he asserts that one of the priests pretended to have broken his arm, and that the Indians believed that the " feasting was to be done for the safe recovery of the father's health." Like the other writers, he says tliat tlie feasters gorged themselves like wolves and bfcanie completely helpless, " making strange kinds of faces that turned their eyes up and downe," till, when almost bursting, they were forced to cry Skenon, which according to Radisson means " enough." Radisson adds that it was proposed that the French, " being three and fifty in number, while the Iroquois were but 100 beasts not able to budge," should fall upon the impotent 1658.] STATEMENT OF ALLET. 95 savages and kill them all, but that the Jesuits would not consent. His account of the embarkation and escape of the colonists agrees with that of the other writers. See Second Voyage made in the Upper Country of the Iroquoits, in Publications of the Prince Society, 1886. The Sulpitian Allet, in the Morale Pratique des Jesuites, says that the French placed effigies of soldiers in the fort to deceive the Indians. CHAPTER V. 1642-1661. THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. DAOVERSlilRE. — MaNCE AND BOUEGEOTS. — MiRACLE. — A P1OU8 Defaulter. — Jesuit and Sulpitian. — Montreal in 1669. — The Hospital Nuns. — The Nuns and the Iroquois. — More Miracles. — The Murdered Priests. — Brigeac and Closse. — Soldiers of the Holt Family. On the second of July, 1659, the ship " St. Andrd " 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 comjjany set down on the old record as " sixty virtuous men and thirty-two pious girls." There were two priests also, Vignal and Le Maitre, 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 Marguerite de Bourgeoys. iHi.jSjt hv ZueU fir,.,.:, s- 1659.] BOURGEOYS AND MANCE. 97 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 Royer de la Dauversiere, founder of the sister- hood 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. Dauversiere changed countenance, and replied with a troubled voice: "My daughter, God will provide VOL. I. — 7 98 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1642-57. for you. Place your trust iu Him." ^ He was bank- rupt, 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 essen- tials of the proposed establishment were to be a semi- nary 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 pur- pose had in part been accomplished. It was seven- teen 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 1 Faillon, Vie de M'lle Manre, i. 172. This volume is illustrated with a portrait of Dauversiere. * The Jesuits in Nortli America, Le Royer de la Daiiversiere. 1657-58.] A WONDERFUL EVENT. 99 moment was without its peril. Though years 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 dis- located the wrist. Bouchard, the surgeon of Montreal, set the broken bones, but did not discover the dis- location. The arm in consequence became totally useless, and her health wasted away under incessant and violent pain. Maisonneuve, the civil and mili- tary 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 100 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1658-59. 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 attesta- tion of Mademoiselle Mance herself, written with the fingers once paralyzed and powerless.^ Neverthe- less, 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 desig- nated 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 Fleche to visit Le Royer de la Dauversifere. It was this wretched fanatic who, through visions and revelations, had first conceived the plan of a 1 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. 1659.] THE HOSPITAL NUNS. 101 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 therefore he had labored for the last eighteen years to form one at La Fleche, meaning to despatch its members in due time to Canada. The time at length was come. Three of the nuns were chosen, — Sisters Br^soles, Mac^, and Maillet, — and sent under the escort of certain pious gentlemen to Rochelle. Their exit from La Fleche was not without its difficulties. Dauversi^re was in ill odor, not only from the multi- plicity 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 Fleche," intoxicating them with religious excite- ment, 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 Dauversiere, who, hard pressed by his creditors, ^ See " The Jesuits in North America." 102 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1659. 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 liis 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 F 'tic. Marguerite Bourgeoys was no less success- ful in ;T native town of Troyes ; and she rejoined her GC' panions at Rochelle, accompanied by Sisters Ch^teP '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 bo trusted to pay their passage-money. Hereupon ensued a delay of more than two months before 1659.] DELAY AND DIFFICULTY. 103 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 chored under the rock of Quebec. High aloft, on the brink of the cliff, the .aw the fieur-de-lis waving above the fort of St. L. lis, and, beyond, the cross on the tower of the cathedrtl 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 settle- ment 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 104 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1659. uttermost parts of the colony. That is to say, they mshed 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 persist- ent opposition. The bishop and the Jesuits were especially anxious to prevent the La Fleche nuns from establishing themselves at Montreal, where they would form a separate community under Sulpitian in- fluence ; and in place of the newly arrived sisters they wished to substitute nuns from the H8tel Dieu of Que- bec, 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 1 See, for example, chapter iv. of Faillon's Life of Mademoiselle Mance. The evidence is unanswerable, the writer being the par- tisan and admirer of most of tliose whose pieuse tromperie, to use the expression of DoUier de Casson, he describes in apparent uncon- sciousness that anybody will see reason to cavil at it. 1659.] MONTREAL. 105 forty small, compact houses were ranged parallel to the river, chiefly along the line 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. 1 Fields studded with charred and blackened stumps, between which crops were grow- ing, 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 pro- vide them with shelter for the winter. As for the three nuns from La Flfeche, 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 ^ Lettre du Vicomte d'Argenson, Gouverneur die Canada, 4 Aout, 1G59, MS. 106 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1657-6L 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. jMaisonneuve the governor, and the pious Madame d'Ailleboust, 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. ^ 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 Br^soles, had in her youth, by advice of her confessor, run away from parents who were devoted to her, and immured her- self 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 1 Annales des Hospitali^res de Villemarte, jiar la Saur Mon'ii, — a contemporary record, from which Faillon gives long extracts. 1657-61.] THE SISTERS. 107 she could make soup of a marvellous relish." ^ Sister Mac^ 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 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 dis- tance 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 hol- 1 " C'etait par son recours k I'Enfant Jesus qu'elle trouvait tons ces secrets et d'autres somblables," writes in our own day the excellent annalist, Faillon. 108 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1657-61. low 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 Hotel Dieu, where the nuns showed him every attention, until, after a long con- finement, 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 main- tain 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 1657-61.] PERIL OF THE NUNS. 109 have crouched all night m a rank growth of wild mustard in the garden of the nuns, vainly hoping that one of them would come out within reach of hisl ^-, tomahawk. During summer, a month rarely passedV "^'^ 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 Br^soles 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 Mac^, as long as the alarm con- tinued, 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 Bresoles was stronger and more courageous; her terror, which she could not help, did not prevent her from attending the sick 110 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1657-61. 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 Godd and Jean Saint-P^re were on the roof of their house, laying thatch, when one of the visitors aimed his arquebusc at Saint-P^re, and brought him to the ground like a wild turkey from a tree. Now ensued a prodigy; for the assassins, having cut off liis head and carried it home to their village, were amazed to hear it speak 1057-61.] PRODIGIES. Ill to them in good Iroquois, scold them for their per- fidy, 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. 1 This stor}^, circulated at Montreal on the / alleged authority of the Indians themselves, found be- 1 lievers among the most intelligent men of the colony. Another miracle, which occurred several years later, deserves to be recorded. Le IMaitre, 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, prob- ably, 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 1 Dollier de Casson, Histoire du Montreal, 1657-1658. 5 112 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1657-6L 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 Maitre, on the voyage to Canada, had been accompanied by another priest, Guillaume de Vignal, who met a fate more deplorable than that of his com- panion, though unattended by any recorded miracle. Le Maitre had been killed in August. In the October following, Vignal went with thirteen men, in a flat-boat and several canoes, to Isle a la Pierre, nearly opposite Montreal, to get stone for the semi- nary 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 1 This story is told by Sister Morin, Marguerite Bourgeoys, and DoUier de Casson, on the authority of one Lavigne, then a prisoner among the Iroquois, who declared that he had seen the handker- chief in the hands of the returning warriors. 1657-61.] DEATH OF VIGNAL. 113 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, Rend Cuill^rier, 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 them- selves, and then began to dress the wounds of their "1 prisoners. Seeing that Vignal was unable to make IN the journey to their villages, they killed him, divided | his flesh, and roasted it for food. Brigeac and his fellows in misfortune spent a wo- ful 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. Cuill^rier, 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. 114 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1657-61. 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 follow- ing 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 moonlight 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 1 DoUior lie Casson, Hintoire du Montreal, 1601. 1G02. 1657-61.] A YEAR OF DISASTER. 115 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 hun- dred and sixty Iroquois ; in the following month, ten more Frenchmen were killed or taken; and thence- forth, 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 mar- vellous 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. "^ 1 Le Jeune, Relation, 1661, p. 3 (ed. 1858). 2 Histoire du Montreal, 1660, 1661. 116 THE HOLY WARS OF MONTREAL. [1657-GL 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, Maiy, 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 infor- mation given us from divers quarters that the Iroquois have formed the design of seizing upon this settle- ment by surprise or force, have thought it our duty, seeing that this island is the property of the Holy Virgin, 1 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 tliis capacity, to obey our orders, to the end that the country may be saved." 1 This is no figure of speech. The Associates of Montreal, after receiving a grant of the island from Jean de Lanson, placed it under the protection of the Virgin, and formally declared her to be the proprietor of it from tliat day forth forever. 1657-61.] A HOLY WAR. 117 Twenty squads, numbering in all one hundred and forty men, whose names, appended to the proclama- tion, may still be seen on the ancient records of Montreal, answered the appeal and enrolled them- selves 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.^ ^ In all that relates to Montreal, I cannot be suflBciently grate- ful to the Abbe 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, witlial, 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 princi- pal work unfinished. His Ilistoire de la Colonic Frun^aisecn Canada — it might more fitly be called Ilistoire du Montreal — is unhappily little more than half complete. CHAPTER VI. 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 Sadt. — The Attack. — A DesperateDefence. — AFiNAL 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 for- tified posts, — Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal, — which in time of danger gave asylum to the fugi- tive inhabitants. Again, their assailants were con- tinually distracted by other wars, and never, except at a few spasmodic intervals, were fully in earnest to destroy the French colony. Canada was indis- pensable 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 1660-61.] SUFFERING AND TERROR. 119 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 lingered 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 destruc- tion. 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. " Every where, " 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. " 2 And he appeals urgently for troops * Marie de I'lncarnation, Lettre, Septembre, 1661. '^ Relation, 1660 (anonymous), 3. 120 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1658. to destroy them, as a holy work inspired by God, and needful for his service. Canada was still a mission, and the influence of 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 wash- ing 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 experi- ence, he wrote urgently to the court for troops. He 1661.] FRANgOIS HERTEL. 121 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 com- munion 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 knowl- edge 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 Franqois 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, 1 Papiers d'Argenson ; Memoire stir le snjet de la guerre des Iroquois, 1G59 (1660 '?). MS. 122 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1661. 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 : — My Reverend Father, — The very day when you left Three Rivers I was captured, at about three in the after- noon, 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 teU 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, Francois Hbrtel. * Journal das J^mn'tcs, 300. 1661.] LETTER OF HERTEL. 123 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 cliild. And who was this "Fanchon," this devout and tender son of a fond motlier? 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 Francois 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.^ 1 His letters of nobility, dated 1716, will be found in Daniel's Hi.ttoire des Grandes Families Franqaixes du Canada, 404. 124 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1660. 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 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. " 1 So they let tlie Wolf burn; but 1 Relation, IGOO, 31. 1660.] QUEBEC IN DANGER. 125 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 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 Hotel Dieu took refuge in the strong and ex- tensive 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 Hotel Dieu, and the streets of the Lower Town were strongly barricaded. Everybody was in 1 Marie fie I'lncamation, Lettre, 25 Juin, lOGO. 126 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1660. arms, and the Qui vive of the sentries and patrols resounded all night. ^ 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 chil- dren remained in the house. 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 cap- tives 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 ^ On this alarm at Quebec compare Marie de I'lncarnatlon, 25 Jiiin, 1G60 ; Relation, 1G60, 5 ; Juchereau, Ilistuire de VUdtel-Dieu de Quebec, 126, and Journal des Jesuites, 282. 1660.] THE CAPTORS CAPTURED. 127 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 con- firmed his story, 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 chari- tably 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 1 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 tliey 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. 128 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1660. steel disarms the lightning of its terrors, so did the heroism of a few intrepid youtlis 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, conmiandant 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 num- bers 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 col- ony 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 1660.] DAULAC DES ORMEAUX. 129 their word. They bound themselves by oath to accept no quarter; and, havmg 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 Hotel 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 adven- ture, and the enthusiasm of faith were its motive forces. Daulac 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, pre- served 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, VOL. I. — 130 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1660. 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. Annahotaha 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, accord- ingly, 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 1660.] INDIAN ALLIES. 131 Huron chief asked the governor for a letter to Daulac, to serve as credentials. Maisonneuve hesi- tated. 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 bowlders, 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 construct- ing 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 132 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1660. 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 tlie 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 do^vn 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 1660.] THE FORT ATTACKED. 133 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 loop-holes, 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 combined 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 paltiy 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 134 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1660. 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. Amiahotaha'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 lioot- ings 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 cour- age of despair, 1660.] THE REINFORCEMENT. 135 On the fifth day an uproar of unearthly yells from seven hundred savage throats, mingled with a clatter- ing 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, screecliing, 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 per- sistent vigor of the defence, fell back discomfited. The fire of the French, who were themselves com- pletely 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 136 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1660. was resolved to make a general assault, and volun- teers 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 lasliing 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 fol- loAved, 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 despera- tion, Daulac and his followers sprang to defend it. The Death of Dollard. 1 '; 1660.] THE FORT TAKEN. 137 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 tlie 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 triumph- ant 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, regard- less 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. ^ 1 When the fugitive Hurons reached Montreal, they were un- willing 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 ITncarnation, 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, Avho this time 138 THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT. [1660. 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, fight- only pretended that ten of their number remained with the French. They afterwards admitted that all had deserted but Annahotaha, as appears from the account drawn up by Dollier de Casson, in his Histoire du Montreal. 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 Memoire 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 Montreal, giving the names and ages of Daulac's men. Radisson, the famous voyageur, says that, on his way down the Ottawa from Lake Superior, he passed the Long Saut eight days after the destruction of Daulac and his party ; and he gives an account of the fight that answers on the whole to those of the other writers. He adds, however, that the Hurons remained out- side the fort, which was too small to hold them, and that only the seventeen Frenchmen and four Algonquins — or twenty-one in all — were under cover. He also says that the reinforcement which joined the two hundred Iroquois who began the attack consisted of " five hundred and fifty Iroquoits of the lower nation [Mohawks] and fifty Orijonot" (Oneidas?), — making with the original assail- ants eight hundred in all. (Puhlicatioris of the Prince Society, 1885, 233.) lladisson, whose narratives were not written till some years after the events that they record, forgets the date of the figlit at the Long Saut, which would appear from him to have happened three years after it really took place. Abbe Faillon took extreme pains to collect the evidence touch- ing Daulac's heroism, and, tliough Radisson's writings were unknown to him, his narrative should be consulted by those in- terested in tlie subject. See his anonymous Histoire de la Colonie Franr.aise au Canada, ii. chap. xv. 1660.] THE IROQUOIS BAFFLED. 139 ing 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 VII. 1657-1668. THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. Domestic Strife. — Jesuit and Sulpitian. — Abbe Qdetlus. — Francois de Laval. — The Zealots of Caen. — Gallican AND Ultramontane. — The Rival Claimants. — Storm at QcEBEC. — 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 one another, 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 repre- 1657.] JESUIT AND SULPITIAN. 141 sent, 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 over- taxed 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 Sulj)itian fathers — Queylus, Souart, Galin^e, 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 Rdcollets 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 consti- tuted the Canadian church, they liad 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 candi- date for the new bishopric. The assembly of French ^ See "Jesuits in North America," ii. chap. xxii. 142 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1657. clergy approved, and Cardinal Mazarin 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 martjrrdoms, while as yet the Sulpitians had done nothing and endured nothing. If any body of ecclesiastics was to have the nomina- tion 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 cloth- ing 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 1657.] ABBE QUEYLUS. 143 one more potent than Queylus would soon arrive to supplant hira.^ 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 cour- teous, their partisans would not listen to the new curb'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?"^ jje denounced such of his 1 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 cles Jesuites, xxxiv. chap. xii. In chapter ten of the same volume the writer says that he visited Queylus at Mont St. Valerien, after his return from Canada. " II me prit a part ; nous nous promenames assez longtemps dans le jardin et il m'ouvrit son coeur sur la conduite des Jesuites dans le Canada et partout ailleurs. Messieurs de St. Sulpice savent bien ce qu'il m'en a pu dire, et je suis assurd qu'ils ne diront pas que je I'ai dil prendre pour des mensonges." 2 Journal cles Jesuites, Octobre, 1657. 144 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1657. 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 tlu'ough a female adherent, the pious Madame d'Ailleboust, 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 in- clined 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. 1 Journal des Jexuites, Octohre, 1G57. 2 Viger, Notice Historique sur I'Abb^de Queylus. '^ Pa piers d' Argenson. 1657.] LAVAL. 145 They made a sagacious choice. Le Jeune presented to the queen-mother the name of Francois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, Abb^ 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 much in his career to remind us that in his veins ran the blood of the stern Constable of France, Anne de Mont- morency. 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 Berni^res de Louvigni, royal treasurer at Caen, who, though a layman, was reputed almost a saint. It was B emigres 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 1 See " Jesuits in North America," i. chap. xiv. VOL. I. — 10 146 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1657-62. his admirers say, the most sublime ultramontane piety. 1 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 an abomination ; while the rigid morals of the Jansenists stood in stern contrast to the pliancy of Jesuit casuistry. Bernieres 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 oppo- nent, 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 Bernieres 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 ^ La Tour in his Vie de Laval gives his maxims at length. ^ M^nwtre pour /aire connoistre I'esprit et la conduite de la Com- paijnie etablie en la ville de Caen, appellee I' Hermitage (Bibliothfeque Nationale. Imprimes. I'artie lle'servee). Written in lOGO. 1657-62.] THE ZEALOTS AT CAEN. 147 their minds, and almost sublimed them into vapor, he rendered them capable of detecting Jansenists under any disguise, insomuch that some of his fol- lowers said that they knew them by the scent, as dogs know their game; but the aforesaid Sieur de Bernieres 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 its efforts to extirpate error by a sort of external association in the city of Caen, consisting of mer- chants, priests, officers, petty nobles, and others, all inspired and guided by Bernieres. They met every week at the Hermitage, or at the houses of one another. Similar associations existed in other cities of France, besides a fraternity in the Eue St. Dominique at Paris, which was formed by the Jesuit Bagot, and seems to have been the parent, in a cer- tain sense, of the others. They all acted together when any important object was in view. Bernieres 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 148 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1657-62. 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 Berniferes that he was in secret sympathy with the obnoxious doctrines. Thus the Hermitage and its affiliated societies con- stituted 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 atra- bilious 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 repre- sented 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 free-will and sub- stitute predestination in its place, and, in fine, con- spire to overthrow the authority of the Supreme Pontife?" Among other anecdotes, Nicole tells the following : One of the young zealots of the Hermitage took it into liis head that all Caen was full of Jansenists, 1657-62.] EXTRAVAGANCE. 149 and that the cur^s 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, with- out 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 curds, excepting two, whom they named, were abettors of the Jansenists. A mob was soon following at their heels, and there was great excitement. The magis- trates 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 ques- tioned 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 curds 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 1 Nicole is not the only authority for this story. It is also told by a very different writer. See Notice Historique de VAhhaye de Ste. Claire d' Argentan, 124. 150 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1657-62. to household cares, to exchange them for a life of mystical devotion. "These three or four persons," says Nicole, "attracted others as imbecile as them- selves." 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 neces- saiy to mortify the taste. Some 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, ^ These proceedings were probably intended to produce the result which was the constant object of the mystics of the Her- mitage ; namely, the " annihilation of self," with a view to a perfect union with God. To become despised of men was an im- portant if not an essential step in this mystical suicide. 1657-62.] EULOGY ON LAVAL. 151 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 Petrsea, who lived at the Hermitage a long time, where he was instructed in mystical theology by Monsieur de Bernieres, exercises episcopal func- tions 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." 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 pas- sage of the funeral oration pronounced over the body of Laval half a century later : — " The humble abbd was next transported into the terrestrial paradise of Monsieur de Berniferes. 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 ' [Berniferes] transformed into angels all those who had the happiness to be the 152 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1657-62. companions of his solitude and of his spiritual exer- cises. It was there that, during four years, the fervent abb6 drank the living and abounding waters of grace which have since flowed so benignly over this land of Canada. In this celestial abode his ordi- nary occupations were prayer, mortification, instruc- tion 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.^ Berniferes himself regarded 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 1 Eloge funehre de Messire Francois Xavicr de Laval-Montmorency, par Messire de la Colombiere, Vicaire General. 2 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. 1657.] GALLICAN AND ULTRAMONTANE. 153 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 Caesar, 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, main- tained 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 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 Galileans, 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 ^ See the famous Quatre Articles of 1682, in which the liberties of the Gallican Church are asserted. 154 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC, [1657. 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 Galileans, 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, — thus evading the King's nomination, and affirming that Canada, a countiy of infidel savages, was excluded from the concordat, and under his (the Pope's) jurisdiction pure and simple. The Galileans were enraged. The Archbishop of Rouen vainly ojjposed, 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 Petrsea, sailed ^ For example, not long after this time, the Jesuits, having a dispute with Innocent XL, threw themselves into the party of opposition. 1657.] LAVAL AND QUEYLUS. 155 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 ecclesias- tical 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, — Galilean against ultramontane, Sulpitian against Jesuit, Montreal against Quebec. To Montreal the recal- citrant abbd, after a brief visit to Quebec, had again retired; but even here, girt with his Sulpitian brethren and compassed with partisans, the arm of the vicar apostolic was long enough to reach him. By temperament and conviction Laval hated a divided ^./.thority, and the very shadow of a schism was an abomination in his sight. The young King, who, tht^gh 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 1 Compare La Tour, Vie de Laval, with the long statement in Faillon, Colonie Frangaise, ii. 315-335. Faillon gives various docu- ments 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. 2 Journal des Jesuites, Septembre, 1667. 156 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1659. Church.^ These instructions served as the pretext of a procedure sufficiently summary. A squad of soldiers, commanded, it is said, by the governor him- self, went up to Montreal, brought the indignant Queylus to Quebec, and shipped him thence for France. 2 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 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 1 Lf.ttre du Roi a d'Argenson, 14 Mai, 1050. 2 Belmont, Histoire du Canada, a.d. 1059. Memoir by Abbe d'Allet, in Morale Pratique des J^suitea, xxxiv. 725. 3 Lettre du Roi a Queylus, 27 Fen., 1000. 1660-61.] ANOTHER STORM. 157 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 third 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 peace- maker 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 due to him, the vicar apostolic* At the same time he sent another to the offending abbd, threatening to suspend him from priestly functions if he persisted in his rebellion.^ 1 Journal des Jesuites, AoiLt, 1661. 2 Lettre de Laval a Queylus, 4 Ao'&t, 1661. 8 Lettre de Laval a d' Argenson, Ibid. * Ibid., 5 Aout, 1661. * Lettre de Laval a Queylus, Ibid. 158 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1661. The incorrigible Queylus, who seems to have lived for some months in a simmer of continual indigna- tion, 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, declar- ing him suspended ij)so facto, if he did not instantly return and make his submission. ^ This letter, like the rest, failed of the desired effect; but the gover- nor, 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. ^ 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 Abb^ de Queylus brought out with him in 1657, and I have named for the functions of cur^ 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 ^ Lettre de Laval a Queijlus, G AoiV, 1601. 2 Lettre flu Roi a d'Anjenson, 13 Mai, 1660. ' For the governor's attitude in this affair, consult the Papiers d'Arrjenson, containing his dosi)atches. 1661.] VICTORY OF LAVAL. 159 your Holiness to let me know your will concerning the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Rouen. M. I'Abb^ 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 imme- diately to France, to render an account of his diso- bedience ; 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 aifairs, 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 live 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 dis- position. If what is said is true, that by means of fraudulent letters the right of patronage of the pre- tended parish of Montreal has been granted to the superior of this seminary, and the right of appoint- ment 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."^ 1 Lettre de Laval an Pape, 22 Oct., 1061. Printed by Faillon, from the original in the archives of the Propaganda. 160 THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC. [1668. 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 recon- ciliation 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 com- plete, to the joy of the Jesuits, — silent, if not idle, spectators of the tedious and complex quarrel. CHAPTER VIII. 1659, 1660. LAVAL AND ARGENSON. FRANgois DE Laval: his Position and Character. — Arrival OF Argenson. — The Quarrel. We are touching delicate ground. To many excel- lent 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 Hotel 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 I'lncarnation, Superior of the Ursulines, wrote to her son that the choice of such a prelate was not of man, but of God. "I will not," she adds, " say that he is a saint ; but I may say with VOL. I. 11 162 LAVAL AND ARGENSON. [1659. 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 liis master's sanctity, that "I determined," he says, "to keep everything 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." 1 Lettre du Frere Houssart, ancien serviteur de M'g'r de Laval a M. Tremblay, 1 Sej)t., 1708. This letter is printed, though with one or two important omissions, in the Abeille, vol. i. (Quebec, ISIS.) 1659.] FRANgOIS DE LAVAL. 163 These pious cares were not in vain, for the relics proved greatly in demand. 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, com- pressed 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. 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 stand- point 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 prin- cipal seems to have been an arlntrary and domineer- 164 LAVAL AND ARGENSON. [1659. ing 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 neces- sity to the ultramontane party, or the party of cen- tralization. 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 ascendency, 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, how- ever 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 con- scientious, zealous, dogged, and pugnacious priest to fight their Imttles. Nor were they ill pleased that, for the present, he was not Bishop of Canada, 1659.] APPROACHING CHANGE. 166 but only vicar apostolic; for such being tlie 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 convert- ing the Indians ; Montmagny was half -monk, for he was a Knight of Malta ; d' Ailleboust was so insanely pious that he lived with his wife like monk and nun. A change was at hand. From a mission and a trad- ing 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 166 LAVAL AND ARGENSON. [1659. 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, modera- tion, and sense, and he 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 col- lisions seem trivial, they were no less the symptoms of a grave antagonism. Argenson could have pur- chased 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 Petraea in Arabia, presently fell into a quarrel with the governor touching the relative posi- tion 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, d'Ailleboust, and a temporary settlement took place. ^ A few weeks after, on the fete of Saint Francis Xavier, when the Jesuits were accustomed to ask the digni- taries of the colony to dine in their refectory after mass, a fresh difficulty arose, — Should the governor or the bishop have tlie higher seat at table? The ^ Laleniant, in Journal des Jesuites, Septemhre, 1659. 1659-60.] DISPUTES OF PRECEDENCE. 167 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 ol)edience to an order from him, sent a subordinate to offer it to the governor, instead of offering it him- self. Laval further insisted that the priests of the choir should receive incense before the governor received it. Argenson resisted, and a bitter quarrel ensued. 2 The late governor, d'Ailleboust, had been church- warden 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, 1 Lalemant, in Journal des J^suites, Decemhre, 1659. 2 Ibid. ; Lettre d' Argenson a. MM. de la Compagnie de St. Sulpice. 8 Livre des Deliberations de la Fabrique de Quebec. * Journal des Jesnites, Novembre, 1660. 168 LAVAL AND ARGENSON. [1661. the children should be busied in some manual exer- cise 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 exception. ^ Palm Sunday came, and there could be no procession and no distribution of branches, because the gov- ernor and the bishop could not agree on points of precedence.^ On the day of the Fete Dieu, however, there was a grand procession, which stopped from time to time at temporary altars, or reposoirs^ placed at intervals alonof 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 1 Journal des J^suites, Fevrier, 1661. 2 Ibid. 8 Ibid.. Avril, 1661. * Ibid., Juin, 1661. 1661.] APPEAL OF ARGENSON. 169 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 con- ceive 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 the bishop or the governor should sit in the higher seat at table thus became a political question, for it defined to the popular under- standing 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 cere- monies; 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, 170 LAVAL AND ARGENSON. [1659-60. 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 corre- spondence with him, and, apparently sure of sym- pathy, wrote to him touching his relations with the governor. " Your brother, " he begins, "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 ser- vants 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 wliich, to his surprise, the governor had taken amiss, and had conceived, in consequence, a prejudice against his monitor. 2 Argenson, on his part, writes to the same brother, at about the same time. " The Bishop of Petrsea is so stiff in opinion, and so often transported by his zeal beyond the rights of his position, that he makes no diificulty in encroaching on the functions of others; and this with so much heat that he will * Advis et Resolutions demandis sitr la Nouvelle France. 2 Lettre de Laval a M. d'AryenMin, frere du Gouverneur, 20 Oct., 1G59. 1659-60.] CLERICAL VIGOR. 171 listen to nobody. A few clays 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 thi-ee 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 Petraea, did all in his power to have the girl given up quietly, but 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 Petraea, who says that a hishop can do what he likes, and threatens nothing but excom- munication." ^ In another letter he speaks in the same strain of this redundancy of zeal on the part of the bishop, ^ " — Qui diet quun Evesque peult ce qu'il veult et ne menace que dexcommunication." — Lettre d'Argenson a son Frere, 1659. 172 LAVAL AND ARGENSON. [1659-60. 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 Petrsea 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." 2 One of Laval's modern admirers, the worthy Abb^ 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 compel the infant colony to enter "the good path," — meaning, of course, the straitest path of Roman Catholic ortho- doxy. We may hereafter see more of this stringent system of colonial education, its success, and the results that followed. ' Lettre d'Argenson a son Frere, 21 Oct., 1659. 2 Ibid., 7 July, 16G0. CHAPTER IX. 1658-1663. LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. Reception of Argenson: his Difficulties; his Recall. — Dubois d'Avaugour. — The Brandy Quarrel. — Distress of Laval. — Portents. — The Earthquake. When Argenson arrived to assume the govern- ment, 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, bewail- ing the ruin of his people, and appealing to Argenson for aid. Jean Francois Bourdon, in the character of an Algonquin, next advanced on the platform, 174 LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. [1658, 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 "Onontio." On the next day — at his own cost, as he writes to a friend — he gave them a feast, consist- ing 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 * La Reception de Monseigneur le Vicomte d' Argenson par toutes les nations du pais de Canada a son entree an gouvernemenf. de la Nouvelle Fiance ; a Quebecq au College de la Compagnie de Jesus, le 28 de Juillet de I'ann^e 1658. The speeches, in French and Indian, are here given verbatim, with the names of all the boys who took i)art in the ceremony. 2 Papiers d' Argenson. Kebec, 5 Sept., 1C58. ^ Mimoire sur le subject (sic) de la Guerre des Iroquois, 1659. 1658-59.] TROUBLES OF ARGENSON. 175 company which he represented to send him a hundred more, who could serve as soldiers or laborers, accord- ing to the occasion. The company turned a deaf 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 punish- ment 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 gov- ernor-general ; but the local governor, Maisonneuve, 1 Papiers d' Argenson, 21 Oct., 1659. 176 LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. [1658-59. declined, or at least postponed, to take his orders and give him the keys of the fort. Argenson accord- ingly speaks of Montreal as " a place which makes so much noise, but which is 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 d'Ailleboust, who had preceded him in the government, though himself a Montrealist. Argenson says that, on going out to fight the Iroquois, he left d'Ailleboust 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, pro- vided the gloiy of our Master suffer no prejudice thereby." 2 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 1 Papiers d' Argenson, 4 Aoiit, 1659. 2 Ibid. Double de la Icttre escripte par le Vaixseau du Gaigneur, parti le G Septembre (1658). 1658-59.] TROUBLES OF ARGENSON. 177 system seem, however, to have been taxed to the utmost. His pay could not supj^ort 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 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.2 "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 1 Papiers d'Argenson. Lettre a M. de Moranrji, 5 Sept., 1658. 2 Deliberations de la Compagnie de la Nouvelle France. VOL. I. 12 178 LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. [166L 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 firm- ness of character and strong bodily health. I assure you that without these 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 Presi- dent 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 per- verseness, 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 minis- 1 Pnpiers d'Argenson. Lettre a son Frere, 1659. 2 Ibid. Lettre (a son Frere?}, 4 Nov., 1G60. The originals of Argenson's letters were destroyed in the burning of the library of the Louvre by the Commune. •* Lachcnaye, M€inoire sur le Canada. ■* Avaugour, Memoire, 4 Aoiit, 10G3. Dubois d'Avau^our. 'unoht, jSo/, hy Ziftie-. 3rcwn-,& ; Soit^ii & CfJ'aru. II 1661-62.] THE BRANDY QUARREL. 179 ter 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 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.^ 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 com- plex one, but the chief occasion of dispute was fortu- nate for the ecclesiastics, since it placed them, to a certain degree, morally in the right. ^ Lalemant, Journal des Jesuites, Sepiemhre, IGQl, 2 Leitre d' Avaugour au Ministre, 166L 180 LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. [1661-62. The question at issue was not new. It had agi- tated 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 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 per- mitted 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 1 Journal dcfs Jesiiiies, Octohre, 1661. 1661-62] THE BRANDY QUARREL. 181 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 compas- sion, came to the governor to intercede for her. Avaugour could no longer contain himself, and answered the reverend petitioner with characteristic 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 re- venge themselves for the "constraint of consciences," of which they loudly complained. The utmost con- fusion followed, and the principles on which the pious colony was built seemed upheaved from the founda- tion. Laval was distracted with grief and anger. He outpoured himself from the pulpit in threats of divine wrath, and launched fresh excommunications 1 La Tour, Vie de Laval, liv. v. 182 LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. [1662-63. against the offenders ; but such was the popular f ury that he was forced to yield and revoke them.i 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 sup- ported 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 France, to lay his comj)laints 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 ^ Journal des Jemites, F^vrier, 1662. The sentence of excom- munication is printed in tlie 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. 1663.] PORTENTS. 18S 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 with her hatchet to cut a fagot 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 1 Lalemant, Relation, 1663, 2. 2 Ihicl, 1663, 6. 184 LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. [1663. 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 conversa- tion 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 shak- ing," they cried, encouraging one another, "and do our best to upset everything." ^ 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 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 ^ Ragueneau, Vie de Catherine de St. Augiistin, liv. iv. chap. i. The same story is told by Juchereau, Lalemant, and Marie de I'Lu.'arnation, to whom Charlevoix erroneously ascribes the vision, as does also the Abbe La Tour. 1663.] THE EARTHQUAKE. 185 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 one another 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 1 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 10G3. He adds that the evi- dence that such slides have taken place on a great scale is very distinct at various points along the river, especially at Les Eboule- mens, on the nortli shore. 186 LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. [1663. 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 some- times 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 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 1663.] AVAUGOUR RECALLED. 187 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 convul- sion must have been a severe one, and it is remark- able 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 judg- ment. 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 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 magna- nimit}', and on his way wrote at Gasp6 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 1 Marie de I'lncarnation, Lettre du 20 Aout, 1063. 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. 188 LAVAL AND AVAUGOUR. [1663. greatest state in the world ; " and, in his purely mili- tary 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 impreg- nable 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 hun- dred 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." 1 He had, in truth, borne himself as a brave and experienced soldier; and he soon after died a soldier's death, while defending the fortress of Zrin, in Croatia, against the Turks. ^ ^ Avaugour, Memoire, Gasp^, 4 Ao{it, 1663. 2 Lettre de Colbert aa Marquis de True;/, 1664. Memoire du Roy, pour servir d' instruction au Sieur Talon. CHAPTER X. 1661-1664. LAVAL AND DUMESNIL. Peronne Dumesnii,. — The Old Council. — Alleged Murder. — The New Council. — Bourdon and Villeray. — Strong Meas- ures. — Escape of Dumesnil. — 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 pre- pared. 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 con- ^ To promote the objects of his mission, Boucher wrote a little book, Histoire Veritable et Naturelle des Moeurs et Productions du Pays de la Nouvelle France. He dedicates it to Colbert. 190 LAVAL AND DUMESNIL. [1660-63. dition and resources. ^ The movement 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, Pdronne 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 liad 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 1 A long journal of Dumont is printed anonymously in the Relation of 1663, 1660-63.] MONOPOLISTS. 191 now controlled by another council, established with- out the consent of the company, ^ and composed of the principal persons in the colony. The members of this council, with certain 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 ;2 and as the council- lors 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 1 Registres du Conseil du Roy ; Reponse d la reqneste presenile au Roy. * Arret du Conseil d'Etat, 7 Mars, 1657. Also Papiers d'Argen- son, and Extrait des Registres du Conseil d'Etat, 15 Mars, 1656. 192 LAVAL AND DUMESNIL. [166L powers as controller, intendant, and judge, and declared his proceedings null. He retorted by char- ging them with usurpation. The excitement in- creased, and Dumesnil's life was threatened. He had two sons in the colony. One of them, P^ronne de Maz^, was secretary to Avaugour, then on his way up the St. Lawrence to assume the government. The other, Pdronne 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 1 Dumesnil, Memoire. Under date August 31 the Journal des Jesuites makes this brief and guarded mention of the affair : " Le fils de Mons. du Mesnil . . . fut enterre le mesme lour, tue d'vn coup de pie par N." Who is meant by N. it is difficult to say. Tlie register of the parish church records the burial as follows : — " L'an 1601. Le 30 Aoust a este enterre au Cemetiere de Quebec Michel peronne dit Sr. des Touches fils de Mr. du Mesnil decede le Jour precedent a sa Maison." 1662-63.] THE NEW GOVERNMENT. 193 to his house by iUness. 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. 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 proceed- ings had disturbed. There was great need; for, what with these proceedings and the quarrel about brandy, Quebec was a little hell of discord, the earth- quake 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 1 La Tour, Vie. de Laval, liv. v. VOL. I. — 13 194 LAVAL AND DUMESNIL. [1663. 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. 2 Bearing with them blank 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 Mezy, the new governor, proceeded to construct the new council. Mdzy 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 con- trol of the government; that is to say, the Church was mistress of the civil power. 1 See the deliberations and acts to this end in Edits et Ordon- nances concernant le Canada, i. 30-32. 2 Edit de Creation du Conseil Superieur de Quebec. ^ Commission actroyee au Sieur Gaudais. Memoire 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 dis- trusted. 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 liad asked for Avaugour's recall. 1663.] THE COUNCIL. 195 Laval formed his council as follows : Jean Bourdon for attorney-general; Rouer de Villeray, Juchereau de la Fert^, Ruette d'Auteuil, Le Gardeur de Tilly, and Matthieu D' Amours 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, who had a strong interest in suppressing Dumesnil's accusations. ^ Dumesnil had laid his statements before the commis- sioner, 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 1 As substitute for the intendant, an oflScer who had been ap- pointed but who had not arrived. 2 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, 1063. 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. 196 LAVAL AND DUMESNIL. [1663. 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 the seals. La Fert^ was also one of the accused. ^ Of Villeray, the governor Argenson had written in 1659 : " 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 where- 1 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. 2 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 Ferte's are of a smaller amount. Others of the council were indirectly involved in the charges. ^ Lettre d' Argenson , 20 Nor., 16,59. 1663.] VILLERAY AND BOURDON. 197 with 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, 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 com- 1 Edit du Ron, 13 Mai, 1659. 2 Lettre de Colbert a Frontenac, 17 Mai, 1674. 198 LAVAL AND DUMESNIL. [1663. pany, 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 Pt^ronne Dumesnil should be seized and sequestered. The council consented ; and, to comj)lete 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 even- ing. " The aforesaid Sieur Dumesnil," further says Gaudais, "did not refute the opinion entertained of his violence; for he made a great noise, shouted rollers ! and tried to rouse the neighborhood, out- rageously 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 1663.] DESIGNS OF THE COUNCIL. 199 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 malver- sations." 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 rea- son of the insults, violences, and irreverences therein set forth against the aforesaid Sieur de Villeray, com- missioner, 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. 1 The above is drawn from the two memorials of Gaudais and of Dumesnil. They do not contradict each other as to the essential facts. 200 LAVAL AND DUMESNIL. [1663. Duniesnil, 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 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 accusa- tions, 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 1663.] CHARGES OF DUMESNIL. 201 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 extraordi- nary ; 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 everything that has taken place in the management of affairs."^ Whether Terron pursued the inquir}^ does not appear. Meanwhile new quarrels had arisen at 1 Lettre de Colbert a Terron RocheUe, 8 Fev., 1664. " II a spolie un agent de la Compagnie de Canada de tons ses papiers d'une maniere fort violente et extraordinaire, et ce proce'dene laisse point a douter que dans ces papiers il n'y eiit 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. 202 LAVAL AND DUMESNIL. [1663. 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, wliich 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 Dumesnil 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. Note. — Dumesnil's principal memorial, preserved in the ar- chives of the Marine and Colonies, is entitled Memoire concernant les Affaires du Canada, qui montre etfait voir que sous pretexte de la Gloire de Dieu, d' Instruction des Sauvages, de servir le Roy et dejaire la nouvelle Colonie, il a et€ pris et diverti trois millions de livres ou environ. It forms in tlie copy before me thirty-eight pages of manuscript, and bears no address, but seems meant for Colbert, or the coimcil 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 1663.] DUMESNIL'S PRINCIPAL MEMORIAL. 203 by the company for his services in Canada, " ou 11 a perdu sou fils assassine par les comptables du dit pays, qui n'ont voulu rendre compte au dit suppliant, Intendant, et ont pille 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 a Monsei- gneur 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 fimds of tlie company, under cover of pretended pa_vments 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 h, M. de Villeray de faire recherche dans la maison d'un nomine du Mesnil des papiers appartenants au Conseil concernant Sa Ma- jeste ; " and under date 18 March, 1664, " Ordre pour I'ouverture du coffre contenant les papiers de Dumesnil," and also an " Ordre pour mettre ITnventaire des biens du Sr. Dumesnil entre les mains du Sr. Fillion." CHAPTER XI. 1657-1665. LAVAL ANDM]feZY. The Bishop's Choice. — A Military Zealot. — Hopeful Begin- nings. — Signs of Storm. — The Quarrel. —Distress of Mezy : 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 Mdzy, major of the town and citadel of Caen, whom he had well known during his long stay with Berni^res at the Hermitage. M^zy was the principal member of the company of devotees formed at Caen under the influence of Bernieres 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 conver- sion had been complete, and the fervid mysticism of Bernieres acting on his vehement nature had trans- formed him into a red-hot zealot. Towards the hermits and their chief he showed a docility in Btrange contrast with his past history, and followed 1657-59.] A MILITARY ZEALOT. 205 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. M^zy and another mili- tary 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 M^zy went to the proctor of the ecclesiastical court and denounced him."i 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 Bernieres, 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 Bernieres 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 com- 1 Nicole, Memoire pour fa ire connoistre l' esprit et la conduite de la Compagnie appellee I' Hermitage. 206 LAVAL AND Ml^ZY. [1663. plained to the provincial of their order, who came to Caen to close the dispute by deposing Father Louis. Hearing of his approach, Bernieres asked aid from his military disciple, and De M^zy sent him a squad of soldiers, who guarded the convent doors and barred out the provincial. 1 Among the merits of Mdzy, his humility and charity were especially admired; and the people of Caen had more than once seen the town major stag- gering 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 Bernieres, 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, Mdzy 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 edifjdng, 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 1 Nicole, Memoire pour /aire connoistre I'esprit et la conduite de la Compagnie appellee I'Hermitage. ^ Juchereau, Histoire de I'Hdtel-Dieu, 149. 8 See the laudatory notice of Bernieres de Louvigny in the Nouvelle Biographie Universelle. 1663.] SIGNS OF STORM. 207 differed in opinion. The present instance was no exception to the rule. Mdzy removed Maisonneuve, the local governor, and immediately replaced him, — the effect being, that whereas 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 Mezy, aware of their duplicity, spoke with a decision and haughti- ness that awed the savages and astonished the eccle- siastics. 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 sud- denly 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 instru- ment of their will, his ancient pride started again into life, and his headstrong temper broke out like a 208 LAVAL AND MfiZY. [1664. 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 M4zy soon found, were wholly in the bishop's interest. On the thirteenth 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 Petraea, 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 nomi- nation ; 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 M^zy caused his declaration to be placarded about Quebec and proclaimed by sound of drum. ^ Ordre de M. de Mezy de faire sommation a I'Eveque de Petree, 13 Fev., 1664. Notification du dit Ordre, vieme date. (Registre du Conseil Superieur.) 1664.] DISTRESS OF M^ZY. 209 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 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."i Mdzy 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 1 Expanse de VEveq\ie de Petree, 16 Fev., 1664. VOL. I. 14 210 LAVAL AND M^ZY. [1664. he makes to 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. 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 calum- niator, an unjust judge, without gratitude, and per- verted 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 caiise. 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 1664.] ADVICE OF THE JESUITS. 211 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 liis 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 M^zy, 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 impo- sition of tithes had made unpopular. M^zy there- upon issued a proclamation, in which, after mentioning his opponents as the most subtle and artful persons ^ Mezy aux PP. Jesuites, Fait au Chdteau de Quebec ce dernier jour de Fevrier, 1604. 2 Lettre du P. H. Lalemant a Mr. le Gouverneur, 212 LAVAL AND MEZY. [1664. in Canada, lie declares that, in consequence of peti- tions 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 gov- ernor to the remaining members of the council ;2 on which M^zy declared him excluded from all public functions whatever, till the King's pleasure should be known. 2 Thus Church and State still frowned on each other, and new disputes soon arose to widen the breach between them. On the first establish- ment of the council, an order had been passed for the election of a mayor and two aldermen (echevins) 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 func- tionaries 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 1 Declaration da Sieur de Mezj/, 10 Mars, 1664. 2 Bourdon au Conneil, 13 Mars, 1664. 3 Ordre du Gouverneur, 13 Mars, 1664. 1664.] M^ZY REFUSES TO YIELD. 213 a mockery. On the present occasion, after an unac- countable 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 gov- ernor 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 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 appoint- ment; but agreement between them was impossible. Laval was for replacing his partisans. Bourdon, Villeray, Auteuil, and La Fertd. Mdzy 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 Pdronne de Maz^, the surviving son of Dumesnil. Again Laval pro- tested ; but Mezy proclaimed his choice by sound of drum, and caused placards to be posted, full, accord- ing to Father Lalemant, of abuse against the bishop. On this he was excluded from confession and absolu- ^ Registre du Conseil Superieur, 214 LAVAL AND MfiZY. [1664. tion. He complained loudly; "but our reply was," says the father, "that God knew every thing. " ^ This unanswerable but somewhat irrelevant re- sponse 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 M^zy, 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 the governor's confusion, all the soldiers respect- fully saluted him.^ The story may have some foun- dation, but it is not supported by contemporary evidence. On the Sunday after Mdzy's couj) d'etat^ the pulpits resounded with denunciations. The people listened, doubtless, with becoming respect; but their sympa- thies 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 accusa- tions one alone would have sufficed. Mdzy had appealed to the people. It is true that he did so 1 Journal des Jesuites, Octobre, 1664. - La Tour, Vie de Laval, liv. vii. It is charitable to ascribe this writer's many errors to carelessness. 1664.] M^ZY'S DEFEAT. 215 from no love of popular liberty, but simply to 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 advan- tage. The governors were named for three 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 Mdzy, 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 Mdzy,i 1 The royal commissioner, Gaudais, who came to Canada with Mezy, had, as before mentioned, orders to inquire with great secrecy into the conduct of Laval. The intendant, Talon, who followed immediately after, had similar instructions. 216 LAVAL AND M^ZY. [1665. 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 posses- sion 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 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 1 Lettre de Mezy au Marquis de Tracy, 26 Avril, 1665. 1665.] DEATH OF M^ZY. 217 pathetic and the quaint are curiously mingled. After prapng 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 pair of long white stockings. And in a codicil he further leaves to Angoville his best black coat, in order that he may wear mourning for him.i 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. — Mezy 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 Je'suites I'accusent d'avarice et de violences ; et lui 1 Testament du Sieur de Mezy. This will, as well as the letter, is engrossed in the registers of the council. 218 LAVAL AND MfiZY. [1665. qu'ils voulaient entreprendre sur I'autorite qui lui a ete commise par le Roy, en sorte que n'ayant que de leurs creatures dans le Conseil Souverain, toutes les resolutions s'y prenaient selon leura sentiments." The papers cited are drawn partly from the Registres du Conseil Superieur, still preserved at Quebec, and partly from the Archives of the Marine and Colonies. Laval's admirer, the Abbe La Tour, in his eagerness to justify the bishop, says that the quarrel arose from a dispute about precedence between Mezy 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 Mezy 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. CHAPTER XII. 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 Mdzy, had yet other objects and other results. Laval, vicar apostolic and titular Bishop of Petrsea, 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 con- flicts 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 Frangais, iii. 432. 220 LAVAL AND THE SEMINARY. [1662-80. 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 bisho]3ric 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 imme- diately on the Pope or on the Archbishop of Rouen. It was a revival of the old quarrel of Galilean 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 1 Anne d'Autriche a Laval, 2S Avril, 16G2; Louis XIV. an Pape, 28 Jan. 1664; Loius XIV. au Due de Creqiiy, Ambassadeur a Rome, 28 .Tune, 1664. 1662-80.] THE PARISH PRIEST. 221 its functions of instruction, it was vested with dis- tinct and extraordinary powers. Laval, 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 curd 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 cure should be remov- able 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 popula- tion, and so miserably poor, that, besides the disciplin- ary advantages of this plan, its adoption was at first almost a matter of necessit}% 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 " fixa- tion " of the curds 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 founda- tions, and at this day the system of removable curds prevails in most of the Canadian parishes.^ ^ On the establishment of the seminary. Mandement de I'Eveqne de Petr€e, pour V Etahlissement du S€mina{re de Quebec ; Approbation du Roy (Edits et Ordonnances, i. .33, 35) ; La Tour, Vie de Laval, liy. 222 LAVAL AND THE SEMINARY. [1662-80. Thus he formed his clergy into a family with him- self 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 neces- sary 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 Mezy, 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 semi- vi. ; Esquisse de la Vie de Laval, Appendix. Various papers bear- ing on the subject are printed in the Canadian Aheille, from origi- nals in the archives of the seminary. 1662-80.] ENDOWMENTS OF LAVAL. 223 nary 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 sptudies 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 ^ Annates du Petit S^minaire de Quebec, see Abeille, vol. i. ; Notice Historique sw le Petit Seminaire de Quebec, Ibid., vol. ii. ; Notice Historigue sur la Paroisse de St. Joachim, Ibid., vol. i. The Abeille is a journal published by the seminary. 224 LAVAL AND THE SEMINARY. [1662-80. 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 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 Beauprd. 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 1662-80.] LAVAL'S POSITION. 225 great; though the extraordinary influence which he exercised in the affairs of the colony were, as ah-eady 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 Colombiere 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 Mont- morency," exclaims the reverend orator, "form one of the fairest chapters in the annals of Old France ; the heroic acts of charity, humilit3% ^^^ 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 EurojDe 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 Assisi, 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 Colombiere proceeds to tell of Laval's asceticism are confirmed by other evidence, VOL. I. — 15 226 LAVAL AND THE SEMINARY. [1662-80. 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 country- men 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 neces- sary 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 bless- ing; for whoever rejects and combats them, death and a curse." ^ These were the principles which Laval 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 verhatim. 1662-80.] MENTAL CONDITION OF LAVAL. 227 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 devot, the sinister reign of petticoat and cas- sock, the era of Maintenon and Tellier, and the 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, dis- turbed, 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 rea- sonably well to his words. He thought liimself 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 sj-mpatliies had 228 LAVAL AND THE SEMINARY. [1662-80. run from childhood in ecclesiastical channels, and he cared for nothing outside the Church. Prayer, medi- tation, 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, 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. ^ See the maxims of Bernieres published by La Tour. SECTION THIRD. THE COLONY AND THE KING. CHAPTER XIII. 1661-1665. ROYAL INTERVENTION. FOKTAINEBLEAU. — LOUIS XIV. — COLBERT. — ThE CoMPANT OF THE West. — Evil Ojiens. — Action of the King. — Tract, COURCELLE, AND TaLON. — ThE ReGIMENT OF CaRIGNAN-SaLI- iiREs. — Tract at Quebec. — Miracles. — A Holt 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; 230 ROYAL INTERVENTION. [1661. 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, — all this wrought in many a young heart an enchant- ment destined to be cruelly broken. Even old cour- tiers 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 Th^rese, his tender and jealous queen; his brother, the Duke of Orleans, with his bride of six- teen, 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 Cond^, obsequious before their triumph- ant 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 Louis ^ On the visit of the court at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1661, see Memoires de Madame de Motteville, Memoires de Madame de La Fayette, Memoires de I'Abb^ de Choisy, and Walckenaer's Me- moires sur Madame de Sevign^. 1661.] LOUIS XIV. 231 XIV. The nations of Europe, exhausted by wars and dissensions, looked upon liim with respect and fear. Among weak and weary neighbors, he alone was strongo The death of Mazarin had released him from tutelage ; feudalism in the person of Condd was abject before him ; he had reduced his parliaments to submission ; and in the arrest of the ambitious prodi- gal Fouquet, he was preparing a crushing 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 cour- tiers 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 Olymj^ian Jove. He was a devout observer of the forms of religion ; and as the buoyancy of youth passed away, his zeal was stimu- lated by a profound fear of the Devil. Mazarin had reared him in ignorance ; but his faculties were excel- lent 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 232 ROYAL INTERVENTION. [1661. 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 vindi- cating 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, Louis XIV. 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. O Kings! put forth your power boldly, for it is divine and salutary to humankind. "2 For a few brief years, this King's 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 1 (Euvres de Louis XIV., ii. 283. 2 Bossuet, Politique tiree de I'Ecriiure sainte, 670 (1843). 1664.] COLBERT. 233 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 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, finan- ciers, churchmen, and all who profited by abuses. The methods of this reform were trenchant and some- times violent, and its principles were not always in accord with those of modem 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 was arrested with a strong hand. Laws were reformed and codified; feudal tyranny, which still subsisted in many quarters, was repressed; agriculture and productive industr}^ of all kinds were encouraged, roads and canals opened, trade was 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 minis- ^ On Colbert, see Cle'ment, Histoire de Colbert; Clement, Lettres et Memoires de Colbert; Cheruel, Administration monarchique en France, ii. chap. vi. ; Henri Martin, Histoire de France, xiii., etc. 234 ROYAL INTERVENTION. [1664. ter'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 domineer- ing, he sought to drive France into paths of prosper- ity, and create colonies by the 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 tliese 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 twenty-fourth of May, 1GG4. 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 forever, 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 com- pany was required to supply its possessions with a sufficient number of priests, and diligently to exclude 1664-68.] MONOPOLY. 235 all teachers of false doctrine. It was empowered to build forts and war-sliips, 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 ^^•as 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 msufficient, and the prices which it demanded were exorbitant. It was throttling its wretched victim. The Canadian merchants remon- strated.2 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 ^ Edit d'Etahlissement de la Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, 2 Lettre du Conseil Souverain a Colbert, 1668. 236 ROYAL INTERVENTION. [1664-66. 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 enter- prise 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 com- pany, with a just sense of its own unfitness, readily consenting to this suspension of one of its most important privileges. Daniel de R^my, Sieur de Courcelle, was appointed governor, and Jean Baptiste Talon intendant. 2 The nature of this duplicate ^ Arret du Conseil du Roy qui accorde a la Compagnie le quart des castors, le dixieme des orignaux et la traite de Tadoussac : Listruction de Monseigneur de Tracy et a Messieurs le Gouverneur et I' Intendant. This company prospered as little as the rest of Colbert's trad- ing companies. Within ten years it lost 3,523,000 livres, besides blighting the colonies placed under its control. {Becherckes sur les Finances, cited by Clement, Histoire de Colbert.) '' Commission de Lietitenant General en Canada, etc., pour M. de Courcelle, 23 Mars, 1665; Commission d'Intendant de la Justice, Police, et Finances en Canada, etc., pour M. Talon, 23 Mars, 1665. 1665.] ARRIVAL OF TRACY. 237 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 Mar^chal 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.^ Canada at this time was an object of very consid- erable attention at court, and especially in what was known as the parti devot. 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 fol- lowers. A throng of young nobles embarked with him, eager to explore the marvels and mysteries of the western world. The King gave him two hun- dred soldiers of the regiment of Carignan-Salieres, and promised that a thousand more should follow. After spending more than a year in the West Indies, 1 Commission de Lieutenant General de I'Aynerique Meridionale et Septenfrinnale pour M. Prouvilie de Tracy, 19 Nov., 166.3. 238 ROYAL INTERVENTION. [1665. where, as Mother Mary of the Incarnation expresses it, "he performed, marvels and reduced everybody to obedience," he at length sailed up the St. Law- rence, 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 along- side. 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 1 Juchereau says that this was his constant attendance when he went abroad. 1665.] THE REINFORCEMENT. 239 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 cathe- dral. The bells were ringing in a frenzy of wel- come. 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 auspi- cious. The deportment of the lieutenant-general 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 tAvo vessels with Monsieur de Courcelle, our governor; Monsieur Talon, our intendant, and 240 ROYAL INTERVENTION. [1665. 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 sun- beam 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 ; 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 convert- ing 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 1 Tahn nu MiniMrc, 4 Ort., 1665. 1665.] TRACY'S DEVOTION. 241 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 Fdlicit^. 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. ^ "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-Salieres was the weapon 1 Le Mercier tells the same story in tlie Relation of 1665. 2 Compare Marie de rincarnation, Lettre 16 Oct., 1600, with La Tour, Vie de Laval, chap. x. VOL. I. — 16 242 ROYAL INTERVENTION. [1665. 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 Salieres, 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 neigh- boring 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-Salieres was the first regiment of regular troops ever sent to America by the French govern- ment. 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 con- spicuous part, on the side of the King, in the battle with Condd 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 TurlvS. In the next year it was ordered to America, along with the fragment of a regiment formed of Germans, the whole being 1665.] A HOLY WAR. 243 placed under the command of Colonel de Salieres. 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 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. 1 For a long notice of the regiment of Carignan-Saliferes (Lorraine), see Susane, Ancienne Infanterie Frangaise, 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 sepa- rate 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 Memoire du Roy pour servir d'instruction au Sieur Talon, which corresponds very nearly with Susane's statement. ■■^ Besides these, there was Berthier, a captain. " Voilk," writes Talon to the King, " le 16me converti ; ainsi votre Majeste mois- eonne deja a pleines mains de la gloire pour Dieu, et pour elle bien de la renomme'e dans toute I'etendue de la Chretiente." {Lettre du 7 Oct., 1665.) 244 ROYAL INTERVENTION. [1665. The secular motives for the war were in themselves strong enough; for the growth of the colony abso- lutely 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 urg- ing 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 suffer- ings were sufficiently great. The three upper nations of the Iroquois were com- paratively 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 scalp- ing, 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 Charably, 1665.] PACIFIC OVERTURES. 245 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 Salieres, colonel of the regiment, added a third fort, two or three leagues above Chambly.i 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, Cajmgas, and Senecas — arrived at Quebec, led by Garaconti^, a famous chief whom the Jesuits had won over, and who proved ever after a stanch friend of the French. They brought back the brave Charles Le INIoyne of Montreal, whom they had captured some three months before, and now restored as a jDeace-off ering, taking credit to themselves that " not even one of his nails had been torn out, nor any part of his body burnt. "2 Garacontie made a 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 INIohawks. 1 See the map in the Relation of 10G5. Tlie accompanying text of the Relation is incorrect. 2 Explanation of the eleven Presents of the Iroquois Ambassadors^ N. Y. Colonial Docs., ix. 37. CHAPTER XIV. 1666, 1667. THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. Courcelle's March : his Failure and Keturn. — Couhcellb AND THE Jesuits. — Mohawk Treachery. — Tract's Expedi- tion. — Burning of tue Mohawk Towns. — French and Eng- lish. — DoLLiER de Casson AT St. Anne. — Peace. — Thb Jesuits and the Iroquois. The governor, Conrcelle, says Father Le Mercier, "breathed nothmg but war," and was bent on imme- diate action. He was for the present subordinate to Tracy, who, however, forbore to cool his ardor, and allowed him to proceed. The result was an enter- prise 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 diffi- culties 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 1666.] COURCELLE'S MARCH. 247 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 consid- erable 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 Chamljly, they reached at the end of the month the third fort, called Ste. Th^rese. 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 wood-craft, 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 indisjDensable. The regulars followed as they could. They were not yet the tough and experienced woodsmen that they and their descend- ^ DoUier de Casson, Histoire du Montreal, a. d. 1665, 1666. 248 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. ants afterwards became ; and their snow-shoes embar- rassed 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 wa^^ ridges of the Adii'ondacks 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-wrai')ped mountains, thence crossed to the Hudson, and groped their way through the woods in search of the Mohawk towns. They 1 One of the men, telling the story of their sufferings to Daniel Gookin, of Massachusetts, indicated this as their mode of encamp- ing. See Mass. Hist. Coll. first series, i. 101. 2 Carte des ijrands Incs, Ontario et autres . . . et des pai/s traversez par MM. de Tracy et Courcelle pour aller attaquer les ar/nies [M.ohaw'ks], 1666. 1666.] FAILURE OF COURCELLE. 249 soon went astray; for thirty Algonquins, whom they had taken as guides, had found the means of a grand debauch at Fort Ste. Thdrese, 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 strag- glers, 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 neigh- boring 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 explana- tions 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 1 Carte . . . des pays traversez par MM. de Tract/ et Courcelle, etc. 250 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. beds of snow around them were soaking slowly under a sullen rain, and there was danger that the lakes raigfht 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 w*'' 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. Thdrese. 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 caus- ing 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 Fr^min at Three Rivers, he embraced him ironically, saying, at the same time, " My father, I am the unluckiest gentleman in the world; and 1 A Relation of the Govern'', of Cannada, his March u-ith600 Volun- teirs into y" Territorj/es of Ills lioi/all Uixjhnesse the Duke of Yorke in America. See Doc. Hist. N. Y. i. 71. 1666.] MOHAWK TREACHERY. 251 you, and the rest of you, are the cause of it." ^ The pious Tracy and the prudent 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 Bechefer 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 per- fidious 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 ^ Journal des Jesuites, Mars, IGGO. 252 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. 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 tlie 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 indig- nation 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. 1 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 1 This story rests chiefly on the authority of Nicholas Perrot, M(£iirs ties Sauvar/es, 113. La I'othcrie also tells it, with the ad- dition of the chief's name. Cohlcn follows him. The Journal des Jcsiiitcs mentions that the chief wlio led tlie murderers of Cliasy arrived at Quebec on the sixth of Septemlier. Marie de I'lncarna- tioii mentions the hans^ing of an Iroquois at Quebec, late in the autiinm, for violating the peace. 1666.] MARCH OF TRACY. 253 is undertaken," Tracy and Coiircelle 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 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 sumach, 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 Heniy 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 ^ Carte . . . des pays traversez par MM, de Tracy et Courcelle, etc. 254 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. 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 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 infii-m, was inop- portunely 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, Dollier de Casson, as large as Tracy and far stronger; for the incredible story is told of him that when in good 1 Marie de I'lncarnation, Lettre du 10 Oct., 1666. 1666.] THE MOHAWK TOWNS. 255 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 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. 2 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 1 Grandet, Notice manuscrite sur Dollier de Casson, extract given by J. Viger in appendix to Histoire du Montreal (Montreal, 18G8). 2 Dollier de Casson, Histoire du Montreal, a. d. 16G5, 1666. 256 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. drums beat the charge, and they advanced to seize the place by coup-de-main. Luckily 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 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 Ur- sulines, " 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 1 Marie dc rincarnation says that there were four towns in all. I follow the Acte de prise de possession, made on the spot. Five are here mentioned. 1666.] VICTORY. 257 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 Andaraqu^, 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 that the warriors had fled. The last of the savage strong- holds 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, — strik- ing 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, VOL. I. — 17 258 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. and adapted their savage defences to the rules of European art. Andaraqud 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 platforms 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 sup- plied with carpenters' tools, domestic utensils, and many other appliances of comfort. i The only living things in Andaraqu^, 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 cMef 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 1666.] ENGLISH JEALOUSY. 259 Tracy, advancing sword in hand to the front, pro- claimed 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 JMohawk forests; and the scared savages from their hiding- places among the rocks saw their palisades, their dwellings, their stores of food, and all their posses- sions 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 Andaraqu6 but smouldering embers, rolling their pale smoke against the painted background of the October woods. Te Bewn 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 1 Acte de prise de possession, 17 Oct., 1666. 260 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. 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 enter- tained 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 — hesi- tated to act, and the affair ended in a correspondence, civil if not sincere, between Nicolls and Tracy. ^ The treaty of Brdda, in the following year, secured peace for a time between the rival colonies. The return of Tracy was less fortunate than his advance. The rivers, swollen by autumn rains, were difficult to pass; and in crossing Lake Cham- plain 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 ^ See the correspondence in N. Y. Col. Docs., iii. 118-156. Com- pfirc Hutchinson Collection, 407, and Mass. Hist. Coll., xviii. 102. 1666.] THE CURE OF ST. ANNE. 261 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 anything 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, how- ever, to hold himself ready to go at the first oppor- tunity. 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 262 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. 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 dis- tance 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 com- rades 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 cloth- ing, 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 1666.] THE CURfi OF ST. ANNE. 263 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 over- whelmed him with welcome and with thanks. One took his sack, another his portable chapel, and they led him in triumph to the fort. Fii-st 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 Luciere, 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 DoUier 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 the gentleman still lived under the cas- sock 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, witliout rising, knocked the intruder flat by a blow of his fist ; and the other 1 Grandet, Notice manuscrite sur Dollier de Casson, extracts from copy in possession of the late Jacques Viger. 264 THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED. [1666. 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 reason- able 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, DoUier 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 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 1 Grandet, Notice manuscrite sur Dollier de Casson, cited by Fail- Ion, Colonic Fran^aise, iii. 395, 39G, 1666-67.] JESUITS AND IROQUOIS. 265 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 cur Form L9-Series 4939 ^1 ill I I li t 3 1158 00437 9623 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY ^^HIBll AA 001 177 699 4 %(> ■Ok ^nMwm^^ O S'lVER^/A CP «£ r^ ^ 4? ^