Missionaries — Layman, Friar and Jesuit A. D. 1615-1625
Champlain—The Franciscans in New France - A first horror -Colonists few—Algonquins, Montaignais—No aid from exploits of trade—Friars call for Jesuits—Brebeuf, Masse and Charles Lalemant in Canada, 1625—Winter hunt with the Montaignais.
Happen what might in New France there was one man who would not desist from his efforts to transplant thither the civilization of his native country. He was not a priest, but he had the missionary spirit. He was very devout. When governor, as a means of telling the hours, when timepieces were few, he introduced the custom of ringing the Angelus morning, noon and evening. Civilization for him meant religion as well as social prosperity and trade. He had witnessed the dis asters brought about in Port Royal at the attempt to make Christianity subservient to barter. Samuel Champlain kept constantly urging that some good religious should go to New France and that persons of means should provide for their expenses. The Franciscans were ready, and the cardinals and bishops contributed fifteen hundred livres for their mission. April 24, 1615, they embarked at Hon fleur. In one month they were at Tadoussac, in time to witness a scene which made them realize how much needed their services were. The Montaignais tribe of that place had captured two prisoners from another tribe. They bound them, bit off their thumbs, burned them with irons, had the women scalp them, then stoned, and cooked and ate them. It was the challenge of savagery to civilization. The Franciscans could not prevent it. However, what their Founder had done to the wild beast at Gubbio, they would do for these beasts in human form.
In June the friars Jamet, Le Caron and Dolbeau were at Montreal. Jamet saw at once that they could make little headway with the roving Montaignais and Algonquins, but that they might make some impression on the stay-at-home Hurons. In August, Le Caron had penetrated into their lake country and at Ihonatiria he was dwelling in his combination cabin and chapel. Like the Jesuits at Port Royal three years before, they found that the French colonists needed spiritual care as much as the Indians. How few Frenchmen there were then in the colony we can gather from the fact that between 1608 and 1640 only two hundred and ninety-six men, women and children had arrived there, less than ten per year, most of them coming after 1633, chiefly from Normandy, Le Perche, Ile-de-France, and Aunis. The principal tribes occupying territory from Quebec to the Huron country at that time were the Algonquins, and a special family of them known as the Montaignais. The Algonquins were everywhere from the coast to our Middle West, and they ranged from our Kentucky border as far up as Hudson Bay. They were the most numerous of the Indian peoples. The Montaignais were on the lower St. Lawrence. Biard calculated that of the tribe and family both, there were not more than four thousand in this region.(20) Both tribes were improvident, begging, arrogant, superstitious, drunken, implacable as enemies, polygamous. The Algonquins were cruel, treacherous and given to foul language, but had a certain modesty in manner, simplicity and patience. The Montaignais were good-natured, peaceable, hospitable, honest, and contented. There was a sort of balance between their dispositions and their habits. The missionaries all agreed that they could be Christianized if they could be induced to settle in one place.
The friars could look for little help from the colonial commercial agents. Their financiers in France had promised the king to aid the missions, but they exacted from the agents all they made. They did not want Canada to be colonized: that would interfere with their monopoly. Champlain and the Franciscans were bent on attracting to the new country as many Frenchmen as possible, who would clear the forests, build houses, till the soil trade honestly and thus give the natives an object lesson which would recommend the teaching of the missionaries. Le Caron spent ten months with the Hurons. Part of the time Champlain was with him.
They argued with the Indians in and out of season. Their only rejoinder was that they could not comprehend what was said to them about the God adored by Christians. They too made it plain that they wished to see first how belief in God and the lives of Christians would make the lot of a people better than their own.
With Champlain, Jamet and Le Caron returned to France in 1616, in order to urge the need of peopling New France on the Company of Associates. The Calvinists among these Associates could not see why they should help to send anyone to a new country for the purpose of Catholicizing it. Others of the group cared little for the appeal on behalf of civilizing a land whence they sought only fish and fur. Their monopoly was menaced by the Huguenot settlement which the Prince of Conde had encouraged on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Champlain and the Franciscans failed to move them.
Like the Benedictines of the early Middle Ages, the friars undaunted returned to their mission, determined to do their part for the civilization which others would not promote. They cut the forests and brought the land under, and were soon feeding their household without aid from abroad. They opened a school for the Montaignais at Tadoussac; a college for young Indian boys at Quebec. Several of them they sent to their own schools in France. They were generous beyond their resources and energetic beyond their strength. Champlain, confirmed as lieutenant by the new viceroy, Montmorency persisted in his endeavors to break the monopoly of the Associates. This he succeeded in doing, but only to have them supplanted by a new company organized by the de Caen brothers, both Huguenots. The fortunes of New France seemed to be bound up with this sect. They managed to control in large measure its trade and to impede its colonization. Had they sought to realize Coligny's dream, they might have established a Protestant France in America. They preferred profit to population. The new company promised, as had other financial groups before them, to promote religion in Canada among natives and colonists, but without performance. They would not even provide for the defence of their own citadel, Quebec, on which all depended for trade as well as security against the inroads of the Iroquois. In vain another Franciscan, Le Bailiff, pleaded with the king to require the de Caen Company to live up to its promises. He recognized the justice of the plea; he ordered the Company to send out every two years six families of laborers, carpenters and masons; but all to no purpose. He was at the time too busily engaged in suppressing Huguenot seditions at home to exact an account from them for the neglect of his ordinances at such a distance.(21)
It was altogether a noble fight that the Franciscans made to minister to the Indians without the resources necessary. Le Caron stuck to his post. There was every reason for discouragement, but that is rarely a Frenchman's temptation. He knew all the difficulties in the way of leading the Indians to adopt Christianity, but he had the wisdom of patience. Some day it would be done. He would do his part. Other Franciscans came, a Sagard who grew enthusiastic over the prospect of winning a new people for Christ; a Viel who was to come to Le Caron's relief, hold the fort at Huronia until aid would come from a new source, and then perish at the hands of those to whom he would give salvation. Knowing they could not provide either men or means enough to make the Indians Christian, they decided to call on the Jesuits, and accordingly Piat was commissioned to invite them into the very territory in which they themselves were working. This was in 1625. That year three Jesuits arrived at Quebec in time to meet the Indian traders from Huronia who had just murdered Viel and his catechist, and thrown them into the rapids at the spot which still bears the name Sault-au-Recollet.
Brebeuf was one of this first group, with Masse and Charles Lalemant. They did not go at once to the Hurons, as they could not trust them at the time. Instead, Brebeuf wintered with the Algonquins, learning their ways and their language. What manner of life this was, we have from one who was to lead it about ten years later and who describes it vividly in one of his famous "Relations".
Le Jeune will write in 1634:
"Now, when we arrived at the place where we were to camp, the women, armed with axes, went here and there in the great forests, cutting the framework of the hostelry where we were to lodge; meantime the men, having drawn the plan thereof, cleared away the snow with their snowshoes, or with shovels which they make and carry expressly for this purpose. Imagine now a great ring or square in the snow, two, three or four feet deep, according to the weather or the place where they encamp. This depth of snow makes a white wall for us, which surrounds us on all sides, except the end where it is broken through to form the door. The framework having been brought, which consists of twenty or thirty poles, more or less, according to the size of the cabin, it is planted, not upon the ground but upon the snow; then they throw upon these poles, which converge a little at the top, two or three rolls of bark sewed together, beginning at the bottom; and behold, the house is made. The ground inside, as well as the wall of snow which extends all around the cabin, is covered with little branches of fir; and as a finishing touch, a stretched skin is fastened to two poles to serve as a door, the doorposts being the snow itself. Now let us examine in detail all the comforts of this elegant mansion.
"You cannot stand upright in this house, as much on account of its low roof as the suffocating smoke; and consequently you must always lie down, or sit flat upon the ground, the usual posture of the savages.
When you go out, the cold, the snow, and the danger of getting lost in these great woods drive you in again more quickly than the wind, and keep you a prisoner in a dungeon which has neither lock nor key.
"This prison, in addition to the uncomfortable position that one must occupy on a bed of earth, has four other great discomforts,—cold, heat, smoke, and dogs. As to the cold you have the snow at your head with only a pine branch between, often nothing but your hat, and the winds are free to enter in a thousand places. . .
When I lay down at night I could study through this opening [in the roof] both the stars and the moon as easily as if I had been in the open fields.
"Nevertheless, the cold did not annoy me as much as the heat from the fire. A little place like their cabins is easily heated by a good fire, which sometimes roasted and broiled me on all sides, for the cabin was so narrow that I could not protect myself against the heat. . . .
"But, as to the smoke, I confess to you that it is martyrdom. It almost killed me, and made me weep continually, although I had neither grief nor sadness in my heart. It sometimes grounded all of us who were in the cabin; that is, it caused us to place our mouths against the earth in order to breathe. ... I sometimes thought I was going blind; my eyes burned like fire, they wept or distilled drops like an alembic; I no longer saw anything distinctly, like the good man who said, "I see men walking about like trees"; Mark, viii, 24. I repeated the psalms of my Breviary as best I could, knowing them half by heart, and waited until the pain might relax a little to recite the lessons; and when I came to read them they seemed written in letters of fire, or of scarlet. . . . "As to the dogs, which I have mentioned as one of the discomforts of the savages' houses, I do not know that I ought to blame them, for they have sometimes rendered me good service. True, they exacted from me the same courtesy they gave, so that we reciprocally aided each other, illustrating the idea of mutual benevolence.
These poor beasts, not being able to live outdoors, came and lay down sometimes upon my shoulders, sometimes upon my feet, and as I only had one blanket to serve both as covering and mattress, I was not sorry for this protection, willingly restoring to them a part of the heat which I drew from them. It is true that, as they were large and numerous, they occasionally crowded and annoyed me so much, that in giving me a little heat they robbed me of my sleep, so that I very often drove them away. In doing this one night, there happened to me a little incident which caused some confusion and laughter; for, a savage having thrown himself upon me while asleep, I thought it was a dog, and finding a club at hand, I hit him, crying out, Ache, Ache, the words they use to drive away the dogs. My man woke up greatly astonished, thinking that all was lost; but having discovered whence came the blows, "Thou hast no sense," he said to me, "it is not a dog, it is I." At these words I do not know who was the more astonished of us two; I gently dropped my club, very sorry at having found it so near me. . . .
"When I first went away with them, as they salt neither their soup nor their meat, and as filth itself presides over their cooking, I could not eat their mixtures, and contented myself with a few sea biscuit and smoked eel; until at last my host took me to task because I ate so little, saying that I would starve myself before the famine overtook us. ... It was not Our Lord's will that they should be so long without capturing anything; but we usually had something to eat once in two days, —indeed, we very often had a beaver in the morning, and in the evening of the next day a porcupine as big as a sucking pig. This was not much for nineteen of us, it is true, but this little sufficed to keep us alive. When I could have, toward the end of our supply of food, the skin of an eel for my day's fare, I considered that I had breakfasted, dined, and supped well.
"At first, I had used one of these skins to patch the cloth gown that I wore, as I forgot to bring some pieces with me; but, when I was so sorely pressed with hunger, I ate my pieces; and, if my gown had been made of the same stuff, I assure you I would have brought it back home much shorter than it was. Indeed, I ate old moose skins, which are much tougher than those of the eel; I went about through the woods biting the ends of the branches, and gnawing the more tender bark, as I shall relate in the journal. . . .
"So these are the things that must be expected before undertaking to follow them; for, although they may not be pressed with famine every year, yet they run the risk every winter of not having food, or very little unless there are heavy snowfalls and a great many moose, which does not always happen....
"It remains to me yet to speak of their conversation, in order to make it clearly understood what there is to suffer among these people. I had gone in company with my host and the renegade, on condition that we should not pass the winter with the sorcerer, whom I knew as a very wicked man. They had granted my conditions, but they were faithless, and kept not one of them, involving me in trouble with this pretended magician, as I shall relate hereafter...."Suffice it to say, that he sometimes attacked God to displease me; and that he tried to make me the laughingstock of small and great, abusing me in the other cabins as well as in ours.
He never had, however, the satisfaction of inciting our neighboring savages against me; they merely hung their heads when they heard the blessings he showered upon me. As to the servants, instigated by his example, and supported by his authority, they continually heaped upon me a thousand taunts and a thousand insults; and I was reduced to such a state, that, in order not to irritate them or give them any occasion to get angry, I passed whole days without opening my mouth. Believe me, if I have brought back no other fruits from the savages, I have at least learned many of the insulting words of their language. . . So these are some of the things that have to be endured among these people. This must not frighten anyone; good soldiers are animated with courage at the sight of their blood and their wounds, and God is greater than our hearts. One does not always encounter a famine; one does not always meet sorcerers or jugglers with so bad a temper as that one had; in a word, if we could understand the language, and reduce it to rules, there would be no more need of following these barbarians. As to the stationary tribes, from which we expect the greatest fruit, we can have our cabins apart, and consequently be freed from many of these great inconveniences...