Some five, however, escaped and it was through one of them Louis, "a good Christian but a poor soldier"—that the first news was brought at last to Montreal, on June 3d, that so many of the enemy had been killed within and without the fort that the bodies served to make a path to ascend the palisades and pass over into the fort. Gradually the news was confirmed by others arriving, and the truth was sifted from the conflicting accounts of these cowards, whose stories strove to shield their shameful desertion of their friends.
Shortly after the disaster the fur trader, Radisson, passed down the Long Sault after a brush with the Iroquois. He visited the palisaded fort and saw the gaping wounds in the stockade burnt by the assailants and saw the scalps of the Indians still flaunting from the pickets. In the neighbourhood there was not a tree, he remarks, that was not shot with bullets. "It was terrible," he says, "for we came there eight days after the defeat." Not until he reached Montreal did he learn of the full significance of what he had seen.
The dearly bought victory made the Iroquois shy for a time of engaging with the French, for if, they said, but seventeen could hold out so long in a paltry palisaded picket against such odds, and with such great loss to their assailants, it would be better to leave them alone in their own houses and settlements. Thus the tide of war was checked. The threatened extermination of the whites was averted. Quebec and Three Rivers breathed again. It was the voluntary sacrifice of the picked flowers of the Montreal youth, that found its Thermopylae at the Long Sault, and thus saved Canada!
"This was the common belief at the time," says Dollier de Casson, who arrived in Montreal in the sixth year after this event and whose relation is the basis of all modern accounts of this magnificent disaster, "for otherwise the country would have been swept away and lost, which leads men to say that even if the establishment of Montreal had only had the advantage of having saved the country in this adventure, and of having served as a public victim in the persons of seventeen of its sons who then lost their lives, it ought, for all posterity, if ever Canada comes to anything, to be accounted as of some considerable importance since it has saved it on this occasion, without mentioning others." [86]
"What though beside the foaming flood entombed their ashes lie,
All earth becomes the monument of men who nobly die."
We must now descend from the poetic to the commonplace of prose. In doing so, we shall have an insight into the customs of the time.
The inventory of the belongings of Adam Dullard, then in the possession of his partner, Picoté de Bélestre, is preserved in the city archives dated October 6, 1660, as well as the record of the sale by auction which took place November 9, 1661, before the door of the house of Jean Gervaise. Every item is recorded, belonging to the deceased down to his night cap. Such things as a sword with a broken handle; a baldric, of English cow leather, with iron buckles; a poor jerkin of gray with a poor lining in the same colour; a little packet of poor linen; a poor black hat; a bad pair of Indian racquettes, and so on. The most valuable article was a jerkin with breeches and white hose, the whole of superior material, estimated at eighteen livres. But this apparel, according to the note adjoined, was returned by order of the governor to Sieur de Brigeac, to whom they belonged.
