[21] Quoted by Gaillardin, Histoire du Règne de Louis XIV, vol. iv. p. 311.
[22] See extract from a letter written by him in Faillon, vol. iii. p. 315. The Récollet, Père Leclercq, is uncharitable enough to hint that the canoe accident may have been made to cover a lack of the documents which the explorer professed to have had with him.
[23] See the Recit d'un ami de l'Abbé Galinée, in Margry, vol. i.
[24] Mère de l'Incarnation remarked even in her day the decrease of the native population. "When we arrived in this country," she says, "the Indians were so numerous that it seemed as if they were going to grow into a vast population; but after they were baptized God called them to Himself either by disease or by the hands of the Iroquois. It was perhaps His wise design to permit their death lest their hearts should turn to wickedness."—Lettres Spirituelles, edition of 1681, p. 230.
[25] Colden pithily sums up the result of the campaign in the following words: "Thus a very chargeable and fatiguing expedition (which was to strike terror of the French name into the stubborn hearts of the Five Nations) ended in a scold between the French general and an old Indian."
[26] Saint Vallier, Etat présent de l'Eglise et de la Colonie Française, p. 84.
[27] New York Colonial Documents, vol. ix. p. 268. See also "Transactions between England and France, relating to Hudson's Bay, 1687," in Canadian Archives, 1883, p. 173.
[28] Clément, Vie de Colbert, p. 456.
[29] "In dealing with indigenous races," observes M. Lorin, "governors were sometimes obliged to sacrifice a few victims to the ferocity of savages; and it was not on the eve of a campaign that it would have been wise to exhibit towards the Iroquois a humanity that would have been mistaken for weakness."—Comte de Frontenac, p. 333. We may certainly agree that it would have been difficult for those who had captured peaceful and unsuspecting natives for the horrible régime of the galleys to adopt a high humanitarian tone in reproving the cruelties of their Indian confederates and converts.
[30] New York Colonial Documents, vol. ix. p. 389.