The French and Indians on Isle St Joseph, though safe from attack, were really prisoners on the island. Mohawks and Senecas remained in the forests near by, ready to pounce on any who ventured to the mainland. When winter bridged with ice the channel between the island and the main shore, it was necessary for the soldiers of the mission to stand incessantly on guard. And now another enemy than the Iroquois stalked among the fugitives. The fathers had abundant food for themselves and their assistants; but the Hurons, in their hurried flight, had made no provision for the winter. The famishing hordes subsisted on acorns and roots, and even greedily devoured the dead bodies of dogs and foxes. Disease joined forces with famine, and by spring fully half the Hurons at Ste Marie had perished. Some fishing and hunting parties left the island in search of food, but few returned.
It soon appeared that for the Hurons to remain on the island meant extinction. Two of the leading chiefs waited on Father Ragueneau and begged him to move the remnant of their people to Quebec, where under the sheltering walls of the fortress they might keep together as a people. It was a bitter draught for the Jesuits; but there was no other course. They made ready for the migration; and on the 10th of June (1650) the thirteen priests and four lay brothers of the mission, with their donnes, hired men, and soldiers, in all sixty French, and about three hundred Hurons, entered canoes and headed for the French River. On their way down the Ottawa they met Father Bressani, who had gone to Quebec in the previous autumn for supplies, and who now joined the retreating party. And on the 28th of July, after a journey of fifty days, all arrived safely at the capital of New France.
[Footnote: For a time the Hurons encamped in the vicinity of the Hotel-Dieu. In the spring of 1651 they moved to the island of Orleans. Five years later their settlement was raided by Mohawks and seventy-one were killed or taken prisoner. The island was abandoned and shelter sought in Quebec under the guns of Fort St Louis, and here they remained until 1668, when they removed to Beauport. In the following year they were placed at Notre-Dame-de-Foy, about four miles from Quebec. In 1673 a site affording more land was given them on the St Charles river about nine miles from the fortress. Here at Old Lorette a chapel was built for them and here they remained for twenty-four years. In 1697 they moved to New Lorette—Jeune Lorette—in the seigneury of St Michel, and at this place, by the rapids of the St Charles, four or five hundred of this once numerous tribe may still be found.]
The war-lust of the Five Nations remained still unsatiated. They continued to harass the Petuns, who finally fled in terror, most of them to Mackinaw Island. Still in dread of the Iroquois, they moved thence to the western end of Lake Superior; but here they came into conflict with the Sioux, and had to migrate once more. A band of them finally moved to Detroit and Sandusky, where, under the name of Wyandots, we find them figuring in history at a later period. The Iroquois then found occasion for quarrels with the Neutrals, the Eries, and the Andastes; and soon practically all the Indian tribes from the shores of Maine to the Mississippi and as far south as the Carolinas were under tribute to the Five Nations. Only the Algonquin tribes of Michigan and Wisconsin and the tribes of the far north had not suffered from these bloodthirsty conquerors.
The Huron mission was ended. For a quarter of a century the Jesuits had struggled to build up a spiritual empire among the heathen of North America, but, to all appearances, they had struggled in vain. In all twenty-five fathers had toiled in Huronia. Of these, as we have seen, four had been murdered by the Iroquois and one by an apostate Huron. Nor was this the whole story of martyrdom. Six years after the dispersion Leonard Garreau was to die by an Iroquois bullet while journeying up the Lake of Two Mountains on his way to the Algonquin missions of the west. Another of the fathers, Rene Menard, while following a party of Algonquins to the wilds of Wisconsin, lost his way in the forest and perished from exposure or starvation; and Anne de Noue, Brebeuf's earliest comrade in Huronia, in an effort to bring assistance to a party of French soldiers storm-bound on Lake St Peter, was frozen to death. But misfortune did not cool the zeal of the Jesuits. Into the depths of the forest they went with their wandering flocks, and raised the Cross by lake and stream as far west as the Mississippi and as far north as Hudson Bay. Already they had found their way into the Long Houses of the Iroquois.
CHAPTER VIII
THE IROQUOIS MISSION
While labouring among the Hurons the Jesuits had their minds on the Iroquois. It was, they thought, within their sphere of duty even to tame these human tigers. They well knew that such an attempt would involve dangers vastly greater than those encountered in Huronia; but the greater the danger and suffering the greater the glory. And yet for a time it seemed impossible to make a beginning of missionary work among the Iroquois. As we have seen, Champlain had made them the uncompromising enemies of the French, and since then all Frenchmen stood in constant peril of their lives from marauding bands in ambush near every settlement and along the highways of travel. Thus nearly twenty years passed after the arrival of the Jesuits in Canada before an opening came for winning a way to the hearts of these ruthless destroyers.
It came at last, fraught with tragedy. From 1636 to 1642 Father Isaac Jogues had been engaged in missionary work in Huronia. He was a man of saintly character, delicate, refined, scholarly; yet he had borne hardships among the Petuns enough to break the spirit of any man. He had toiled, too, among the Algonquin tribes, and at one time had preached to a gathering of two thousand at Sault Ste Marie. In 1642 he was chosen to bring much-needed supplies to Huronia—a dangerous task, as in that year large bodies of Iroquois were on the war-path. And in August he was ascending Lake St Peter with thirty-six Hurons and three Frenchmen in twelve canoes. His French companions were a labourer and two donnes—Rene Goupil, who, having had some hospital experience, was going to Ste Marie as a surgeon, and Guillaume Couture, a man of devotion, energy, and courage. The canoes bearing the party were threading the clustered islands at the western end of Lake St Peter, and had reached a spot where the thickly wooded shores were almost hidden from view by tall reeds that swayed in the summer wind, when suddenly out of the reeds darted a number of Iroquois warriors in canoes. The surprise was complete; three of the Hurons were killed on the spot, and Jogues, Goupil, and Couture, and twenty-two Hurons were taken prisoner. The raiders then plundered the canoes and set out southward, up the Richelieu, with their prisoners. At every stopping-place on the way Jogues and the donnes were brutally tortured; finally, in the Mohawk country they were dragged through the three chief towns of the nation, held up to ridicule, beaten with clubs, their fingers broken or lopped off, and their bodies burned with red-hot coals. Couture had slain a Mohawk warrior during the attack on Lake St Peter; but his courageous bearing so impressed the savages that one of them adopted him in place of a dead relative, and he thus escaped death. Goupil, after several months among the Mohawks, was brutally murdered. But Jogues's life was providentially preserved, and during nearly a year, a year of intense suffering, he went among his persecutors glorying in the opportunity of preaching the Gospel under these hard conditions.
At length a fishing and trading party of Mohawks took him to the Dutch settlement at Fort Orange (Albany). Already the Dutch authorities had tried in vain to gain his release. They now took advantage of his presence among them, generously braving the wrath of his tyrant masters, and aided him to escape. He found shelter on a Dutch vessel and finally succeeded in reaching France. The story of his capture had arrived before him, and his brothers in France welcomed him as a saint and martyr, as one miraculously snatched from the jaws of death. But he had no thought of remaining to enjoy the cloistered quiet and peace of a college in France; back to the hardships and dangers of North America his unconquerable spirit demanded that he should go. According to the rules of the Church he could not administer the sacraments with his mutilated hands; but, having obtained a special dispensation from the Pope, he once more fearlessly crossed the ocean, in search of the crown of martyrdom.