JOGUES, THE JESUIT MISSIONARY
Such was Jogues' first experience of missionary life. Living on Indian corn and water, sleeping on rocks and in the woods, battling day after day against a rapid current, dragging heavy burdens over the long portages, a part of the time with a sick boy on his shoulder—till he staggered through the triple stockade of the Indian town of Ihonitiria and fell into the arms of de Brébeuf and his Jesuit companions. In this new mission field one of the first works entrusted to his practical sagacity, which stood his fellow missionaries in good stead, was the construction of Fort Ste. Marie, whose ruins, discovered in 1859, testify to the solidity of the outworks. His first apostolic work away from Fort Ste. Marie was among the Petuns, or Tobacco Indians. In September, 1641, he went with the Jesuit Raimbault to found a mission among the Ojibways or Chippewas on the upper reaches of Lake Huron at a place called by the missionaries Sault Ste. Marie, today a great centre of commerce. They were the first white men to stand on the shores of Lake Superior.
We next find him back at Georgian Bay. Supplies were being exhausted and Jogues offered to go to Quebec, a thousand miles off, for them. This done, on the way back in the first week of August, 1642, his party was surprised by the hostile Mohawks and captured. While being taken up country he was most brutally tortured, beaten by sticks, clubs and knives, and his wounds torn open by the long nails of the Indians. The joints of his fingers were gnawed off or burned off at intervals. On the arrival of the party at Ossernenon, on the north bank of the Mohawk, a captive Christian woman was compelled, under threat of death, to saw off with a jagged shell the thumb of the priest. But he was not killed, as so many of his party were.
On the 29th of September, 1642, René Goupil, his faithful companion, was tomahawked in the skull for making the sign of the cross on the head of a child. The place is identified as Auriesville.
When Goupil was dead, Jogues was alone and began his awful captivity of more than a year, each moment of which was a martyrdom. In the "Relation," which his superior commanded him to write, he has left us a partial account of the horrors he endured. Employed in the filthiest and most degrading of occupations he was regarded with greater contempt than the most degraded squaw of the village. Heavy burdens were heaped on his crippled and mangled shoulders, and he was made to tramp fifty, sixty and sometimes a hundred miles after his savage masters, who delighted to exhibit him wherever they went. His naked feet left bloody tracks upon the ice or flints of the road; his flesh was rotting with disease, and his wounds were gangrened; he was often beaten to the earth by the fists or clubs of crazy and drunken Indians, and more than once he saw the tomahawk above his head and heard his death sentence pronounced. The wretched deerskin they persuaded him to wear was swarming with vermin; he was often in a condition of semi-starvation as he crouched in a corner of the filthy wigwam and saw the savages gorging themselves with meat, which had been first offered to the demons, and which he therefore refused to eat, though his savage masters raged against the implied contempt to their gods. For thirteen months he thus remained a captive. Yet he baptized more than seventy persons, most of them Huron captives, at the point of death. Often Jogues would rush into the flames up to the stake for this purpose. During this time, on June 30, 1643, he secured a scrap of paper on which he wrote to Montmagny that the Mohawks were about to make a raid on Fort Richelieu. This message, carried for him by a Huron, warned the garrison in time and the Indians were repulsed. This defeat was traced to Jogues and his death was expected. But in the meantime an order came from Governor Kieft of Manhattan to the commandant at Fort Orange to secure his release at all costs. This required the co-operation of Jogues. In spite of his harsh treatment the prisoner was unwilling at first to enter into the plot, feeling it to be his duty to remain at his post. At last he consented. He was conveyed to the Dutch settlement of Fort Orange (Albany), which the angry Mohawks threatened to burn, but fearful of risking a war with the Dutch while they were fighting with the French, after a parley they consented to relinquish their claim on the black robe for 300 livres. A six-day journey brought him to Manhattan which he described as "seven leagues in circuit and on it is a fort to serve as a commencement of a town to be built there, and to be called New Amsterdam." At this town, as at the place of his escape, he was kindly treated by the famous Dominic Johannes Megapolensis, Jr., the first person who went to New York at the invitation of Killaen van Rensselaer to look after the spiritual affairs of the colony. After a month's sojourn at Manhattan, Father Jogues left on November 5, 1643, in a wretched little vessel which, after a severe tossing on the Atlantic, reached Falmouth, in Cornwall, at the end of December, hotly pursued by some of Cromwell's ships, for the rebellion against Charles I was then in progress.
NEW YORK AS SEEN BY LE MOYNE
In Falmouth he was robbed, at the point of the pistol, of all his belongings, by some marauders lurking round the port. At last, having secured a free passage in a dirty collier, he was flung on Christmas morning, 1643, on the coast of Brittany, but after eight days he reached the Jesuit College at Rennes—and at last the emaciated, haggard tramp was recognized as the lost Isaac Jogues, of whose capture the "Relations" had warned them.