On another occasion he was with them at a great distance from home, when the alarm was given that the English were within a few hours' march of the encampment. All insisted on his flying back to the village. At daybreak he started with two Indians as his escort. The journey was long, the provisions were out, and the father had for his only food a species of wood, which he softened by boiling. In crossing a lake, which had begun to thaw, he narrowly escaped being drowned himself in his effort to assist another. Saved from this danger, he was not the less exposed to death from cold. On the following day they crossed the river on broken pieces of ice, and were soon at the village. He was welcomed back by a sumptuous feast, consisting of corn and bear's meat; and when he expressed his astonishment and thanks for such a banquet, the Indians replied: "What, father! you have been fasting for two days; can we do less? Oh! would to God we could always regale you so!" But while he was thus feasting, his children elsewhere were mourning over his supposed death. His deserted cabin on the shore led some, who knew nothing of his flight, to believe that he had been killed. One of these erected a stake on the banks of a river, and to it attached a piece of paper-birch bark, on which he had drawn with charcoal a picture of some English surrounding F. Rale, and one was represented cutting off the Black Gown's head. When the main body of the Indians came that way, and saw the pictorial writing, its meaning sank deep into their hearts, and they were overwhelmed with grief. They tore out the long scalp-locks from their heads, and then sat on the ground around the stake, where they remained motionless and without uttering a word till the next day. Such was their mode of manifesting the most intense grief. But what must have been their joy, when, on returning to the village, they saw their beloved father reciting his Office on the banks of the river!
It would appear, from a letter in the Massachusetts Historical Collections, attributed to F. Rale, that he accompanied the expedition that destroyed Berwick. It is quite evident, from what has been related of the determination of the English to destroy him, and of the repeated efforts they made to accomplish that deadly purpose, that F. Rale would not have been safe at Norridgewock or anywhere apart from the main body of his people. It is not likely that his devoted children, who saw his danger, and were solicitous for his safety, would permit him to remain behind, exposed to the constant attempts of his enemies upon his life. His presence in the expedition against Berwick was enough, with his enemies, to confirm their charge that he led them on to war against the English. The truth is, their own pursuit of him rendered his presence there justifiable, as necessary for his own safety, if it were not justifiable on the ground that he was their chaplain in war as in peace, and that his presence among them was more necessary for the religious consolation of the dying, as well as for moderating, by the counsels we have already seen him giving them, the usual cruelties of war. It does not become his accusers, however, to dwell upon this charge, who themselves have boasted of the warlike feats of the Rev. Mr. Fry, who scalped and killed his Indian in Lovell's expedition, and was killed fighting in the thickest of the engagement.
It has already been seen how the Indians were, by repeated injuries, driven at last to take up the hatchet. When once at war, they prosecuted it with terrible energy and destructive fury. And though their humanity on several occasions contrasted with the cruelty of their civilized antagonists, the young settlements of New England suffered much at their hands during this contest.
In the summer of 1724, hostilities on the part of the Indians had begun to moderate, and peace was already spoken of between the respective parties. But this did not restrain the fury of the English. On the 23d of August an expedition of little over two hundred, consisting of English and their Mohawk allies, rushed suddenly from the thickets upon the unconscious village of Norridgewock. The first notice the Indians received was the rattling of the volleys of their assailants among their bark cabins. Consternation seized upon the inhabitants; the women and children fled, but the few braves who were then at the village rushed to arms to defend their altar and their homes. The struggle was indeed a desperate one. F. Rale, when he perceived the cause of the excitement in the village, knew that himself was the chief object of the enemy's pursuit. Hoping, too, to draw off the fury of the assailants from his neophytes upon himself, he went forth. No sooner had he reached the Mission Cross, where the fight was raging, than a shout of exultation arose from two hundred hostile voices, and, though a non-combatant, a discharge of musketry was immediately levelled at his venerable form. Pierced with balls, he fell lifeless at the foot of the cross. Seven principal chiefs lay dead around their saintly pastor and devoted father. The battle was now over, but the victory seemed too easy for the victors; they approached to wreak further vengeance upon the lifeless form of F. Rale. They hacked and mutilated the corpse, split open the head, broke the legs, and otherwise brutally disfigured it. Then proceeding to the house of God, the assailants rifled the altar, desecrated the sacred vessels and the adorable Host, and then committed the church to the devouring flames. After the English had retired, some of the orphaned flock of Norridgewock returned to their desolated home; they first sought for the body of their good father, and, having found it, they piously interred it beneath the spot where the altar stood.
After reading the incidents of the life of F. Rale, the reader would be astonished to peruse the accounts given by New England writers. But the latter bear on their face the evidence that they were the result, not of candid investigation, but of the bitterest partisan prejudice. There may be some explanation of their tone, though no voucher for their accuracy, in the fact that Penhallow derived his accounts from interpreters, who were known not to be faithful. Charlevoix and De la Chasse knew F. Rale personally, and they give us the strongest assurances of his innocence, his sanctity, and his many heroic virtues. M. de Bellemont, Superior of the Sulpician Seminary at Montreal, entertained so exalted an opinion of his merits that he did not hesitate to apply to him the words of S. Augustine: "Injuriam facit martyri, qui orat pro eo."
The accounts hostile to F. Rale have been derived chiefly from Penhallow, who was actuated by the strongest party feeling. A single specimen from his pen will show how he felt towards the person, as well as the religion, of F. Rale; it contains a repetition of the old calumny about the merit of destroying heretics, which no educated person would in our day repeat: "We scalped twenty-six besides M. Rale, the Jesuit, a most bloody incendiary, and instrumental to most of the mischiefs done us by preaching up the doctrine of meriting salvation by the destruction of heretics. He even made the offices of devotion serve as incentives to their ferocity, and kept a flag on which was depicted a cross surrounded by bows and arrows, which he used to hoist on a pole at the door of his church when he gave them absolution previous to their engaging in any warlike enterprise." Now, the flag that awakened so much horror in the breast of the New England chronicler was a simple Indian Sunday-school banner, than which nothing could have been more innocent. F. Rale, artist as well as priest, had decorated his Indian church with pious paintings executed by himself, to excite the piety and zeal of his neophytes. Amongst other similar representations, suitable for pleasing the simple tastes of the natives, was the flag in question, ornamented with the cross and the arrow, emblems of the faith and of the country. A glance would have convinced any passer-by that it was the banner of an Indian church, and no sensible person in our day could object to see such an one used by the Indians of Florida, Oregon, or other hostile Indian country within our territory or bordering on our frontier.
Dr. Francis, who in his life of Rale follows by preference the New England accounts, sums up his estimate of our missionary's character as follows: "But whatever abatements from indiscriminate praise his faults or frailties may require, I cannot review his history without receiving a deep impression that he was a pious, devoted, and extraordinary man. Here was a scholar, nurtured amid European learning, and accustomed to the refinements of one of the most intellectual nations of the Old World, who banished himself from the pleasures of home and from the attractions of his native land, and passed thirty-five years of his life in the forests of an unbroken wilderness, on a distant shore, amidst the squalid rudeness of savage life, and with no companions during those long years but the wild men of the woods. With them he lived as a friend, as a benefactor, as a brother; sharing their coarse fare, their disgusting modes of life, their perils, their exposures under the stern inclemency of a hard climate; always holding his life cheap in the toil of duty, and at last yielding himself a victim to dangers which he disdained to escape. And all this that he might gather these rude men, as he believed, into the fold of the church; that he might bring them to what he sincerely held to be the truth of God and the light of heaven."
Mr. Bancroft thus describes the life and character of the subject of this memoir: "At Norridgewock, on the banks of the Kennebec, the venerable Sebastian Rale, for more than a quarter of a century the companion and instructor of savages, had gathered a flourishing village round a church, which, rising in the desert, made some pretensions to magnificence. Severely ascetic—using no wine, and little food except pounded maize, a rigorous observer of the days of Lent—he built his own cabin, tilled his own garden, drew for himself wood and water, prepared his own hominy, and, distributing all that he received, gave an example of religious poverty. And yet he was laborious in garnishing up his forest sanctuary, believing the faith of the savage must be quickened by striking appeals to the senses. Himself a painter, he adorned the humble walls of his church with pictures. There he gave instruction almost daily. Following his pupils to their wigwams, he tempered the spirit of devotion with familiar conversation and innocent gaiety, winning the mastery over their souls by his powers of persuasion. He had trained a little band of forty young savages, arrayed in cassock and surplice, to assist in the service and chant the hymns of the church; and their public processions attracted a great concourse of red men. Two chapels were built near the village, one dedicated to the Virgin and adorned with her statue in relief, another to the guardian angel; and before them the hunter muttered his prayer on his way to the river or the woods. When the tribe descended to the seaside in the season of wild fowl, they were followed by Rale; and on some islet a little chapel of bark was quickly consecrated."
The scene so peaceful, so happy, so beautiful, in the days of F. Rale, that it has been appropriately called one of "nature's sweet retirements," is described by the poet Whittier after the rude hand of war had blasted its beauty and destroyed its altar and its priest, as it appeared to some Indian warriors who revisited the field after the battle, in the following lines:
"No wigwam smoke is curling there,
The very earth is scorched and bare;
And they pause and listen to catch a sound
Of breathing life, but there comes not one,
Save the fox's bark and the rabbit's bound;
And here and there on the blackened ground
White bones are glistening in the sun.
And where the house of prayer arose,
And the holy hymn at daylight's close,
And the aged priest stood up to bless
The children of the wilderness,
There is naught but ashes sodden and dank,
And the birchen boats of the Norridgewock,
Tethered to tree, and stump, and rock,
Rotting along the river-bank!"