At length the Iroquois determined upon a grand final assault. Large and heavy shields, four or five feet high, were made by lashing together three split logs with the aid of cross-bars, and covered with these mantelets a chosen band advanced, followed by the motley throng of warriors. In spite of a brisk fire they reached the palisade, and crouching below the range of shot, hewed furiously with their hatchets to cut their way through. Daulac had crammed a large musketoon with powder, and lighting a fuse, he tried to throw it over the barrier, to burst like a grenade among the savages without; but it struck the ragged top of one of the palisades, fell back among the Frenchmen and exploded, killing and wounding several of them. In the confusion which followed, the Iroquois got possession of the loopholes, and thrusting in their guns, fired on those within. In a moment they had torn a breach in the palisade, then another and another. The brave Daulac was struck dead, but the survivors kept up the now hopeless fight. With sword, hatchet, or knife, they threw themselves against the throng of enemies, striking and stabbing with the fury of madmen, till the Iroquois, despairing of taking them alive, fired volley after volley and shot them down. All was over, and a burst of triumphant yells proclaimed the dear-bought victory.
To the colony it proved salvation. The Iroquois had had fighting enough. If seventeen Frenchmen and a handful of Indian allies, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such fighting behind walls of stone? For that year they thought no more of capturing Quebec and Ville Marie, but returned to their villages dejected and amazed, to howl over their losses, and nurse their dashed courage for a day of vengeance.
CHAPTER IV
"AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM"
If on its material side French colonial policy took account of the Indian, it did so much more on its religious side. Quebec was the farthest outpost of Catholicism. New France was for ever to be free from the taint of heresy, allowing none but Catholic settlers within her gates; and Huguenots, as we have seen, were specifically excluded. The Indians were to be rescued from heathen darkness and led into the sacred light of the Church. Jesuit missions thus became a salient feature in the early history of Quebec, the nerve centre of the movement being the palisaded convent on the little St. Charles.
To go back in review. On the retrocession of Quebec by the English, under the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, in the time of Champlain, the influence of the Jesuits was sufficient to secure for themselves the undivided control of the Canadian mission. Returning to Quebec in 1632, Father Le Jeune and his two companions had established themselves in the half-ruined convent of Notre Dame des Anges, built by the Récollets sixteen years before. The log stockade enclosed two buildings, the smaller of which served as storehouse, stable, and workshop, and the larger as chapel and refectory. Four tiny cells opened off the latter, and in these the fathers lodged, while the lay brothers and the workmen found apartments in the garret and the cellar. The regimen of this crude establishment was severely ascetic. The day began with early Mass and closed with evening prayers. The intervening time was spent by the laymen in cultivating the little clearing, and by the fathers in hearing confessions at the fort a mile away, or in struggling with the Algonquin idiom, by the vague assistance of one Pierre, an Indian proselyte, who, in weakness of flesh, ran away when the season of Lent drew near.
The strength of the Jesuits was increased in the spring of 1633 by the arrival of four new priests. Of these the most remarkable was Jean de Brébeuf, the descendant of a noble family in Normandy, and destined to prove his own nobility by an intrepid zeal and an almost incredible courage.
Le Jeune's distressful experiment with a band of wandering Algonquins had convinced the Jesuits that their schemes of mission-conquest could not bear much fruit if they were confined to the vagrant tribes of the north. Farther west in the peninsula of the great lakes lived Indians of fixed habits and domicile, and otherwise further advanced towards civilisation than the improvident hunting tribes round about Quebec. Of these the most notable were the Hurons. As long before as 1615 the Récollet Le Caron had gone among them, and several years later Brébeuf had made the perilous lodges of Ihonatiria his habitation, but had at length returned to France. On his coming to Quebec again in the spring of 1633, Brébeuf anxiously turned his thoughts towards his former mission, awaiting only a favourable opportunity to forsake the comparative safety of the city of Quebec for the gloomy shores of Lake Huron and "the greater glory of God."