The Canadian martyrs

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FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUF
Slain by the Iroquois, March 16, 16J/9

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Canadian Martyrs

By

E. J. Devine, S.J.

Member of the Canadian Authors Association.

Member of the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society of Montreal.

Editor of the Canadian Messenger.

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•

SECOND EDITION r<

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MONTREAL

Published by The Canadian Messenger

1075 Rachel Street East

1923

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y^HE author declares his entire sub-
■*■ mission to the Decree of Urban Till,
relative to the attribution of martyrdom,
sanctity, etc. Any such term employed in
this little work is to be taken in its
ordinary acceptation only, and not in any
nay as attempting to forestall the judg-
ment of the Holy See.

Permissu Superiorum

Nihil obstat

25 ianuarii, 1916

Carolus Lecoq. Censor Delegatus.

•Imprimatur:

Die 21a ianuarii, 1916

t Pavlus, Arch. Marianopolitanus.

PREFACE

The rapidity toith which the first edition of these short
biographies disappeared, and the many requests which have
reached us for a new edition, are assurances that our
people are taking more that a passing interest in the lives
and sufferings of the Jesuit martyrs of early Canada. All
the testimony in favor of their Beatification, given before
the Apostolic Commission at Quebec during the past couple
of years, has reached Rome, where it is being submitted
to the scrutiny of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. It
is the ardent prayer of the friends of those old heroes of
the Cross that the verdict of that august tribunal shall be
favorable to their Cause.

Meanwhile we are asked to make a deeper study of their
lives, in order the better to know what manner of men
they were, how intense were the sufferings they endured
for the Faith, how great must have been the reward of
their sacrifices, how absolute the confidence we should
have in their power before the throne of God, and how
signal the favors we may expecjt by appealing to their
intercession.

May the day soon arrive when they shall enjoy the
honors of the altar, and when, with the sanction of the
Infallible Church, we may invoke them publicly: Blessed
John de BrCbeuf and Companions, way for us .'

Contents

Father John de Brebeuf 1

Father Gabriel Lalemant 2.1

Father Anthony Daniel 43

Father Charles Gamier 63

Father Noel Chabanel 85

Father Isaac Jogues 197

Rene Goupil 127

John de la Lande 149

Father John de Brebeuf

APOSTLE OF THE HURONS

THE Brebeuf family was of Norman origin; it can bo
traced as far back as the middle of the eleventh
century. William, Duke of Normandy, had a Brebeuf with
him at the battle of Hastings in 1066.
His birth and Another accompanied Saint Louis, two cen-
early years turies later, in his crusade against the
Turks, and bravely led the Norman nobles
during the siege of Damietta. In 1251, a Nicholas de
Brebeuf is mentioned in the chronicles of the family as
one of the chief citizens of Bayeux. According to Du
Hamel, the annalist, the Arundels of England and the
Brebeufs of Normandy both descended from a common
ancestry, but posterity is impressed less by the ties of
Norman blood which may have linked those two ancient
families together than by the sacrifices they both made,
even to martyrdom, to preserve their ancient faith.

It was at Conde-sur-Vire, in the diocese of Bayeux, that
John de Brebeuf was born, on March 25, 1593. We have no
details regarding his early years, but the child undoubtedly
received the training in piety and learning which was one
of the traditions of his race. It would be hard to believe
that religious influences had not molded the youth of one
who was destined later to do great deeds for God in the
forests of the New World, and who, when the supreme
sacrifice was demanded, showed a heroism in torture and
suffering almost unparalleled in the history of the Church.

2 FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUF

At the age of twenty-four John de Brebeuf entered the
Jesuit novitiate at Rouen, November 8, 1617. In that home

of peace and piety the young man devoted
He enters the two years to prayer and reflection, and to
Jesuit Order the cultivation of those little virtues Avhich

were to be the foundation stones of his
future holiness. Secluded from the distractions of the
world, he labored seriously to acquire self-knowledge and
to exercise himself in the practice of humility, a virtue
he pushed so far that he desired to abandon all aspirations
to the priesthood to become a lay-brother in the Order.
But his superiors, assured that the humbler the novice
the stronger the indications that he would one day give
more glory to God in the priesthood, refused Brebeuf's
request and counselled him to accept whatever grade in
the Society of Jesus obedience would decide.

At the end of his noviceshiip the young Jesuit was sent
to teach grammar in the college at Rouen. There the
religious kept pace with the professor; while Brebeuf
taught the rules of grammar to his pupils he did not
neglect to implant in their minds and hearts the principles
of Christian virtue. With untiring devotedness he spent
two years in this important work; but his zeal in the
class-room exacted its price. His labors undermined his
health and forced him to retire and seek absolute rest.
However, a young religious who had been taught to set
a high value on the fleeting minutes could not stay idle.
Brebeuf applied himself privately to the study of theology,
and acquired sufficient knowledge for the duties of the
sacred ministry. He was raised to the priesthood at

Pontoise, near Paris, at the beginning of
Raised to the Lent, 1623., and celebrated his first Mass on
priesthood the transferred feast of the Annunciation,

April 4, of the same year. Years of waiting
only intensifies one's consolations when the goal is reached,
and the sentiments of the future victim of the Iroquois may

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 3

be easily gauged the morning he called down from Heaven,
for the first time, the Spotless Victim, and adored Him Who
lay on the altar hidden under the sacramental veil. One
grace followed another; after his ordination the health of
the young Jesuit priest improved rapidly, and he was named
bursar of the college at Rouen.

While the months were passing thus peacefully away in
the city of Rouen, events of vast importance were happen-
ing in the little French colony beyond the Atlantic. Cham-
plain had founded Quebec in 1608; he had established the
fur trade, and had already visited several of the native
tribes. This pious statesman stood aghast at the multitude
of souls he witnessed lying in the darkness of infidelity
and superstition, and he resolved to bring to them a know-
ledge of the Christian faith. Through his efforts the Re-
collects had crossed the ocean in 1615; a couple of them had
even penetrated to the shore of Georgian Bay; but the vast-
ness of New France, its large number of savage tribes, and
the conditions of life prevailing among them, forced the Re-
collect missionaries to admit that they alone could not stem
the tide of paganism. They appealed in consequence to the
Society of Jesus to share the field with them, but it was
only in 1625 that their appeal was successful.

Three Jesuit priests, Charles Lalemant, Ennemond Masse
and John de Brebeuf, were chosen for the arduous missions
of New France. In years Brebeuf was the
Ke arrives m youngest of the three, but he was their
New France equal in virtue. When the order was re-
ceived to cross the Atlantic, he did not
hesitate to sever the ties of blood and family affection, to
abandon his homeland and consecrate himself forever to
the salvation of the Indians of the New World. Nature
had well prepared him for this calling; he was now in
perfect health, and in possession of a herculean frame;
he was in the flower of manhood — thirty-two years of
age — a splendid type of manliness and strength. These

4 FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUF

physical qualities, so necessary in a foreign missionary,
were crowned with a prudence and a maturity of judgment
which made his advice on all matters valuable and eagerly
sought for.

Such was John de Brebeuf, the missionary, who reached
Quebec in the summer of 1625. His first impulse on land-
ing was to proceed immediately to the Huron country to
begin the study of the language and prepare himself for
his ministry; and he was about to start on the long and
trying journey up the Ottawa when the news of the murder
of the Recollect, Nicholas Viel, contrived by treacherous
pagans Hurons on the route he would have to pass, made
his superior take no risks; Father Charles Lalemant re-
called him to Quebec to await a more favorable moment.

A whole year elapsed before the opportunity of going
presented itself again; meanwhile, as a
His first preparation for his future career among

experiences the Hurons, the young missionary decided

to taste its trials and hardships nearer
home. In order to inure himself more thoroughly in the
ways of savage life, he spent the winter of 1825-1626 among
the Montagnais, a tribe living along the Lower St. Law-
rence. The language of this tribe differed from that of
the Hurons, but Brebeuf knew that the time spent in
acquiring it would not be lost; it could not fail to be
useful some day. That first experience among the savages
during the rigors of a Canadian winter would have broken
the spirit of a man less hardy than he, but his "iron
frame and unconquerably resolute nature" were proof
against such bitter trials. In those long winter months his
days were spent following the Indians on the chase, his
nights in bark wigwams suffering from cold and hunger,
breathing an atmosphere foul with the smoke of the fire-
places. Add to this the continual jibes and insults shower-
ed on him by the uncouth Indians for his faults in trying
to speak their tongue, and we can form an idea of the lif<*

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 5

he led during his first months in New France. His success,
however, was such that the following spring Charles Lale-
mant could write in a letter to the General of the Order :
"Father de Brebeuf, a pious and prudent man, and of robust
constitution, has passed a rude winter season among the
savages, and has acquired an extensive knowledge of their
tongue." Brebeuf had begun to show the precious talent
which was later to give him such mastery over the Huron
language.

The flotilla from the Huron country had reached Quebec
early in 1626; the savages had bartered all their furs and
were on the eve of their return homeward*.
He goes to This opportunity could not be lost, and

the Hurons rather than wait another year, Brebeuf

made every effort — even urging the inter-
vention of Champlain — to assure his passage in the canoes.
He had some difficulty, however; the Indians complained
of his weight; a frail canoe could not carry him safely
hundreds of miles against the swift currents and over the
dangerous rapids of the Upper Ottawa. A few gifts solved
the objections of the savage traders, and Brebeuf, accom-
panied by Father de Noue and the Recollect, de la Roche
de Daillon, set out over the famous Ottawa and Nipissing
route to the Huron nation. After thirty days of painful
effort the three men floated out of French River and
coasted down the eastern shore of Georgian Bay. A few
wigwams, scattered here and there along the shore, gave
evidences of human occupation, and soon the shouts of his
tawny cohorts told Brebeuf that he had reached Otouacha,
the landing place of the Huron village of Toanche,1 and
the end of his journey.

The missionary's first care was to secure a cabin — or
annonchia, as Sagard called it — built of long poles driven
into the ground and then bent forward till their topmost

1 On Pentang Bay. Cf. Jones' Old Huronia, diagr. III. p. 3«;
then pp. 4 1>, 47, 59; colored sketch, p. 22b.

6 FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUF

ends met. A covering of bark thrown over this tunnel-
shaped skeleton provided a habitation into which he could
retire. Father de Brebeuf had come to preach the Gospel
of Christ to a race of savages who had never known the
true God, and he began at once to acquire a knowledge
of the Huron tongue, the only means of communication

with them. His first weeks were passed
Studies the in plying them with questions, writing

language down their answers as they sounded to his

ear, and thus augmenting daily his stock
of words; his evenings beside the cpmp-fire were spent
in classifying them, in forming sentences, and in trying
to discover the mechanism of the strange tongue. Nature
had given Brebeuf a retentive memory and a marvellous
facility for seizing the laws governing language, gifts which
he thanked God for more than once, and he made such
rapid progress that in a short time he had acquired a
tolerable knowledge of the Huron tongue. His two com-
panions were less gifted, and after a sojourn of a year in
the Huron country, both Daillon and de Xoue were re-
called to Quebec.

Brebeuf was now alone in the Huron solitude. He began

his lonely life by planting a large cross
He lives alone before his cabin, so that its shadow might
in Kuronia bless him and his labors. He visited the

homes of the Indians, gathered them to-
gether, explained to them the rudiments of the Christian
faith, and tried to impress on them the existence of the
true God, of heaven and hell, and the other great truths of
religion. But the weeks and months were passing and he
had not yet been able to make any impression on minds and
hearts hardened by centuries of superstition. He struggled
on patiently during the winters of 1627-1623 and 1628-1629,
hoping that the hour of grace would soon strike, consoling
himself meanwhile with the baptism of a few children in
danger of death. More than once, however, during the

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 7

second year he had the satisfaction of seeing sick and
infirm adults yielding to his burning zeal, and he had hopes
even of forming the nucleus of a congregation among the
converts of Toanche and its neighborhood, when an order
came from his superior summoning him back to civilization.
The missionary reached Quebec in July, 1629, and found
the little French colony in the grip of famine. Vessels
carrying provisions from the motherland had either found-
ered at sea or had been seized by English corsairs in the
Gulf. The future looked dark; France and England were
on the verge of war; during the previous year an expedition
under Admiral Kerkt had come to take Quebec; but the
haughty reception given him by Champlain
He is sent had put off the inevitable for a time.

back Kerkt, however, intent on getting pos-

to France session of the colony, returned again in

1629. Hunger and want obliged Champlain
to surrender, and together with the Jesuits, Recollects and
a number of French colonists, he was taken back to Europe.
This turn of events wrecked many a bright hope in the
heart of Brebeuf. Even the sight of his beloved France,
after an absence of four years, could not reconcile him to
the loss of his Huron mission. He knew not what the
future had in store for the colony on the St. Lawrence,
but he knew that the souls of thousands of pagan Hurons
were awaiting salvation on Georgian Bay, and he resolved
to return thither as soon as the occasion should present
itself.

Three years were to elapse before this resolve could
be carried out. However, they were years of solid spiritual
profit for the future apostle of the Hurons. While at
Rouen, in 1630, he pronounced his final vows as a Jesuit,
thereby binding himself irrevocably to the service of
His Divine Master. "A few days before," he wrote, "I felt
a strong desire to suffer something for Jesus Christ; and

S FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUF

I said : 'Lord, make me a man according to Thine own
Heart. Let me know Thy holy will. Let nothing separate
me from Thy love, neither nakedness, nor the sword, nor
death itself. Thou hast made me a member of Thy Society
and an apostle in Canada, not, it is true, by the gift of
tongues but by a facility in learning them.' " These noble
sentiments were still uppermost in his soul when, a year
later, he signed with his own blood the following solemn
offering of himself :

Lord, Jesus, my Redeemer, Thou hast saved vie with
Thy Blood and precious Death. In return for this favor,
I promise to serve Thee all my life in Thy Society of
Jesus, and never to serve anyone out Thee. I sign this
promise with my own blood, ready to sacrifice it all as
willingly as I do this drop.

JOHN DE BREBEUF, S. J.

God did not forget this generous promise, but eighteen
years had to elapse before the Iroquois gave Brebeuf the
opportunity to redeem it. Meanwhile he was waiting
patiently for the moment to return to his Hurons. Nego-
tiations for the transfer of Canada back to France were

being pushed vigorously, and resulted in
He returns the treaty which was signed at St. Germain-

to Canada en-Laye, March 29, 1632. Canada became

again a French colony, and the way was
open to resume work among the native tribes.

Two Jesuits, Paul Le Jeune and Anne de Noue, were
sent at once to Canada, while Brebeuf, notwithstanding
his ardent supplications, had to wait another year. He
sailed from Dieppe, March 23, 1633, his ship casting anchor
before Quebec two months later. He had hardly set foot
on Canadian soil when he started for the Huron country,
but difficulties again barred his way. The Algonquins of
Allumette Island, through Avhose country the Hurons had

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 9

to pass on their way up and down, had grown jealous of
the trade relations which had sprung up between the
latter and the French, and they feared the influence of
the missionaries. They threatened violence to the Black-
gowns if they persevered in their intention to make the
journey; and yet Le Jeune wrote : "I never saw more
resolute men than Brebeuf and his companions when told
that they might lose their lives on the way." Prudence,
however, forbade risking the enmity of the Algonquins,
possibly of closing indefinitely the route to the Huron
country, and Brebeuf returned to Quebec, as he had done
in 1625, to wait another year. He bowed his head to the
will of God and resolved to find work near home.

The summer of 1634 found him at Three Rivers seeking
anew the opportunity to embark for Huronia. The objec-
tions put forward the previous year by the Indians were
again resorted to, but a few presents smoothed the nego-
tiation and the zealous missionary found a place in one of

their canoes. "Never did I witness a start."
Is again with he wrote, "about which there was so much
the Hurons quibbling and opposition, all, I believe,

being the tactics of the enemy of man's
salvation. It was by a providential chance that we man-
aged to get away, and by the power of glorious St. Joseph
in whose honor God inspired me in my despair to offer
twenty Masses." While on his way westward with Fathers
Daniel and Davost, he wrote to Le Jeune, "We are going
by short stages, and we are quite well. We paddle all
day because our savages are sick. What ought we not to
do for God and for souls redeemed by the Blood of His
Son ?... Your Reverence will excuse this writing, order
and all; we start so early in the morning, lie down so
late and paddle so continually, that we hardly have time
for our prayers. Indeed I have been obliged to finish this
letter by the light of the fire."

10 FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUF

The missionaries travelled in separate canoes, and had
been gone a few days when news reached Quebec — news
which could not be verified — that Brebeuf was suffering
greatly and that Daniel had died of starvation. Le Jeune
exclaimed when he heard it, "If Father de Brebeuf should
die, the little we know of the Huron tongue will be lost,
and then we shall have to begin over again, thus retard-
ing the fruits that we wish to gather on this mission."
Happily the news turned out to be false, and on the feast
of Our Lady of the Snows, August 5, 1634, after thirty days'
travel, Brebeuf landed alone on the beach where he had
first set foot on Huron territory eight years before. Con-
fiding in the help of the Guardian Angels of the country,
he trudged on alone over a trail overgrown and deserted,
and finally he was able to contemplate, with tenderness
and emotion, the spot where he had lived and celebrated
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass from 1626 to 1629.

But Toanche had disappeared, and after a short stay at
Teandeouiata, awaiting the arrival of Daniel and Davost,
he and his two companions settled at Ihonatiria1 on the
north shore of the peninsula. Brebeuf's previous know-
ledge of the Huron tongue proved a valuable asset now;
he began to visit the cabins, instructing adults and baptiz-
ing children. He gathered the Indians together, and then,
clothed in surplice and biretta — to give majesty to his
appearance, he remarked — he taught them the Sign of the
Cross, the Commandments of God and prayers in their
own tongue. On Sundays he assembled them in his cabin
to hear Mass and to answer questions in the catechism.
Little presents given to the children enkindled in them so
great a desire to learn that, the Relations inform us, there
was not one in Ihonatiria who did not wish to be taught;
and as they were all fairly intelligent, they made quite

1 Father Jones places Ihonatiria in the immediate neighborhood
of Todd's Point, lot 6, concession xx, xxi. Tiny township. (For his
praofs, cf. Old Huronia, pp. 28-81.)

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS H

rapid progress. The fruits were being gathered in slowly.
"They would be greater," Father de
Success ia Brebeuf asserted, "if I could only leave

the ministry this village and visit others." Accordingly
he made flying visits to the Tobacco
nation and to Teanaostaye,2 the largest settlement of the
Cord clan. He summed up the results in a letter dated
June 16, 1636, claiming eighty baptisms in 1635, whilst he
had only fourteen the year before.

The missionaries were growing more numerous, and
the moment was favorable for greater apostolic activity.
The Huron flotilla brought up a couple of Jesuits every
year who, as soon as they secured a smattering of the
languge, began to instruct and baptize in many of the
hamlets with which the country was dotted. Ossossane,
the largest village of the Bear clan, situated on Notta-
wasaga Bay, became a residence.1

In 1637, a strange pestilence visited the Huron nation
and carried hundreds of Indians to the grave. The
sorcerers, whose influence among their people was supreme
and who feared a loss of prestige, laid the blame of this
scourge on the Black-gowns. Every motive was seized
upon to accuse them, and the lives of isolation and hard-
ship which those devoted men underwent were to have
an aftermath in persecution. Brebeuf was declared to be
a dangerous sorcerer, in fact the most
Persecuted dangerous in the country; he was held

by the Huron responsible for the calamities that were
savages weighing heavily on the tribe. Not merely

the death of their fellow-Indians, but the

2 This village, known as St. Joseph II, was situated on the
Flanagan farm, west half of lot 7, concession iv, Medonte township.
(Cf. Jones' Old Huronia, p. 19, and fig. 1, plate p. 21.)

1 Known as La Rochelle by the French fur traders, and by the
missionaries as the residence of the Immaculate Conception. The
four successive sites of Ossossane all lay in the neighborhood of
Varwood Point on Nottawasaga Bay. (Cf. Jones' Old HuronUl>
P. 27.)

12 FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUF

absence of rain, the failure of crops and lack of success
on the chase, were laid at his door by the malcontents,
who more than once threatened to cleave his head with
a tomahawk. Affairs had assumed so serious a turn in
the autumn of 1637, and Brebeuf was so convinced that his
hour had come, that he wrote to his superior in Quebec
a farewell letter, revealing the greatest resignation to
whatever fate God might have in store for him.

Wishing to show the superstitious Huron Indians
his utter contempt for his own safety and the little value
he placed on this miserable life, he invited them to what
the savages called a "farewell feast", which those con-
demned to death were accustomed to provide. Many
accepted the invitation and listened in mournful silence
while the holy man told them that death had no terrors
for him, that it meant eternal life for himself and his
brethren; but he warned the Hurons of the crime they
were about to commit. Meanwhile the days slipped away
quietly, without any act of violence. A complete change
had taken place in the hearts of the wretched Hurons, a

change which Father de Brebeuf attributed
Happy results to the intercession of St. Joseph in whose
of a VOW honor the missionaries had vowed to say

Mass for nine consecutive days.
The arrival of Jerome Lalemant, in the summer of
1638, to replace Brebeuf as superior of the Huron mission,
gave the latter greater freedom to go from village to
village. Ihonatiria had been abandoned; Ossossane had
become the chief residence of the Bear clan; a residence
had also been established at Teanaostaye. On these two
centers of population depended many minor villages, and
with the help of new recruits a crusade was started
throughout the length and breadth of Huronia. Numerous
striking conversions are recorded in the Relations, showing
that sorcery and native superstition were losing their hold

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 13

on the tribe, and that an era of further expansion
would have ensued had not the Iroquois begun their
depredations. Those inveterate enemies of the Hurons had
become active and irritating. Their presence was a menace
both to the missionaries and their neophytes, and it was

decided to build a permanent residence
The central and fortify it strongly enough to resist the

residence attacks of those cunning foes of both

French and Hurons. The result of this
decision was Fort Ste. Marie on the "Wye river, built in 1639,
a "home of peace" which, while it would protect the mis-
sionaries from their enemies, would also be a shelter where
they could retire occasionally and recuperate their physical
and spiritual strength.1

The plans of the missionaries were being carried out
harmoniously; the work of catechising the Hurons was
going on vigorously, when a new scourge swept down on
that unfortunate race. Small-pox appeared and began to
ravage Ossossane, Teanaostaye and dependent villages. As
usual the Black-gowns were held responsible for the new
pestilence, and Brebeuf, who was looked on as the chief
of the French sorcerers, had the lion's share of savage
resentment. An accident, the fracture of his shoulder-
blade, which happened to him during a visit to the Neutral
nation along Lake Erie, in 1641, obliged him to go to Quebec
for treatment; he did not return to the Huron country
until 1644.

Many changes had taken place there in those three years.
The incursions of the Iroquois had become more frequent.
Small detachments were often encountered; everywhere
they were leaving behind them a trail of blood. The terri-
fied Hurons palisaded their villages and took precautions,
as best as they could, against those onslaughts. As if they

1 This venerable spot is well known. The foundations may still be
seen at Old Fort, on the Grand Trunk Railway, three miles from
Midland, Ont.

14 FATHER JOHN' DE BREBEUF

had a presentiment of their coming doom and wishing
to meet it fully prepared, they flocked around the Fathers
in greater numbers than ever to hear the Word of Life.
Although in constant peril Brebeuf and his fellow-mission-
aries went from village to village, spend-
Iroquois ing themselves in this arduous work. The

depredations harvest was growing; hundreds were
clamoring for baptism. But amid their
consolations the Jesuits saw that the clouds were lower-
ing; disaster was following disaster; and all, even the
missionaries themselves, were at a loss to say what the
future would bring forth. They were soon to learn.

There were now eighteen Jesuits actively engaged
among the Hurons, one of these being Gabriel Lalemant,
who had arrived only in September, 1648. He had been
sent to live with Father de Brebeuf at St. Ignace, a small
village which had been removed the previous winter to
a strongly fortified site,1 about three miles nearer Fort
Ste. Marie. It was there, in March, 1649, that the supreme
sacrifice, so long sought for, awaited Brebeuf and his
companion. Both missionaries happened to be at th«
neighboring village of St. Louis,2 three miles away,
instructing the neophytes, when, at early dawn of March
16, fully a thousand Iroquois stealthily approached St.
Ignace. They flung themselves on the unsuspecting and
unprepared Hurons, murdering and making prisoners of
them all. Only three escaped and hurried to St. Louis
to warn Father de Brebeuf and the people; but at their

1 Identified by Father Jones, in 1903, on the Campbell farm, east
of lot 4, concession vii, Tay township. The spot is now known as
Fort St. Ignace, about a mile from the C. P. R. station of the earn*
name. This is the site of the shrine built in honor of the Huron
victims of the Iroquois. (Cf. Jones' Old Huronia, p. 121 et seq.)

2 Situated on the Newton farm, west half of lot 11. concession vi.
of Tay township. Ash-beds, kitchen refuse, potsherds, etc., have
been found there in abundance.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 15

heels rushed the Iroquois, and another massacre took

place at that village. Although the two

Brebreuf is a Jesuits were urged repeatedly to flee and

prisoner save themselves, they refused to do so.

They were then seized, bound and brought
back to St. Ignace, where their inhuman captors had
already made preparations for their torture and death.

Christopher Regnaut, a domestic who helped to bring
the charred bodies back to Fort Ste. Marie, three days
after the tragedy, has left us a thrilling account, gathered
from the lips of the Huron Christians who had escaped,
of the barbarous treatment the two holy missionaries
received.1 "They (the Iroquois) took them both and
stripped them entirely naked and fastened each to a post.
They tied both their hands together. They tore the nails
from their fingers. They beat them with a shower of
blows with sticks on their shoulders, loins, legs and face,
no part of their body being exempt from this torment.
Although Father de Brebeuf was overwhelmed by the
weight of these blows, the holy man did not cease to speak
of God and to encourage his fellow-captives to suffer well
that they might die well . . . Whilst he was thus encour-
aging these good people, a wretched" Huron renegade, who

had remained a captive with the Iroquois,
He endures aod whom Father de Brebeuf had formerly

cruel tortures instructed and baptized, hearing him speak

of Paradise and holy baptism, was irri-
tated and said to him, 'Echon,' (Father de Brebeuf s Huron
name) 'thou sayest that baptism and the sufferings of
this life lead straight to Paradise; thou shalt go thither
soon, for I am about to baptize thee and make thee suffer
well, in order that thou mayest go sooner to thy Paradise.'
The barbarian having said this, took a kettle full of boiling
water which he poured over his head three different times

1 From a MS. obtained by Mr. Brymner, in Pans, in 183o, and now
preserved in tin.' Canadian Archives, Ottawa.

1G FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUP

in derision of holy baptism. And each time that he baptized
him in this manner the barbarian said to him, with bitter
sarcasm, 'Go to Heaven, for thou art well baptized.' After
that they made him suffer several other torments. The
first was to heat hatchets red-hot and apply them to the
loins and under the armpits. They made a collar of these
red-hot hatchets and put it on the neck of the good Father.
Here is the way I have seen the collar made for other
prisoners : they heat six hatchets red-hot, take a stout
withe, draw the two ends together, and then put it round
the neck of the sufferer. I have seen no torment which
moved me more to compassion than this; for you see a
man, bound naked to a post, who, having this collar on
his neck, knows not what posture to take. If he lean
forward, the hatchets on the shoulder weigh more heavily
on him; if he lean back, those on his breast make him
suffer the same torment; if he keep erect, without lean-
ing to one side or another, the burning axes, applied
equally to both sides, give him a double torture. After
that they put on him a belt full of pitch and resin, and
set fire to it; this roasted his whole body. During all
these torments Father de Brebeuf stood like a rock,
insensible to fire and flame, which astonished all the
blood-thirsty executioners who tormented him. His zeal
was so great that he preached continually to those infidels
to try to convert them. His tormentors were enraged
against him for constantly speaking to them of God and
of their conversion. To prevent him from speaking again
of these things, they cut out his tongue and cut off his
upper and lower lips. After that they set themselves to
stripping the flesh from his legs, thighs and arms, to the
very bone, and put it to roast before his eyes, in order to
eat it. Whilst they were tormenting him in this manner
the wretches derided him, saying, 'Thou seest well that
we treat thee as a friend, since we shall be the cause of
thy eternal happiness. Thank us, then, for these good

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 17

offices which we render thee, for the more thou shalt
have suffered the more will thy God reward thee.' The
monsters, seeing that the Father began to grow weak, made

him sit down on the ground, and one of
The supreme them, taking a knife, cut off the skin from
sacrifice his skull. Another barbarian, seeing that

he would soon die. made an opening in
the upper part of his chest, tore out his heart, roasted
and ate it. Others came to drink his blood still warm,
which they did with both hands, saying that Father de
Brebeuf had been very brave to endure all the pain they
had caused him, and that in drinking his blood they would
become brave like him."

After several hours of these inhuman tortures, the
holy apostle of the Hurons expired at four in the after-
noon, March 16, 1649. He was fifty-six years of age,
sixteen of which he had spent in the Canadian missions.
His long and painful ministry was at last ended; nothing
now remained but the charred and blackened bones and
flesh of the heroic missionary. Several Frenchmen were
sent from Fort Ste. Marie to bring back the bodies
and give them Christian burial. They found at St. Ignace
a spectacle of horror; or rather, as Ragueneau wrote,
"the relics of that love of God which alone triumphs in
the death of martyrs." "I would gladly call them by that
glorious name," he asserted in the Relation of 1640, 'if I
were allowed to do so, not merely because for the love

and the salvation of their neighbor they
Ra^ueneau's voluntarily exposed themselves to death
testimony and to a cruel death, if ever there was one

in the world — but much rather would I
call them martys because... hatred for the faith and con-
tempt for the name of God were among the most power-
ful incentives which influenced the minds of the barbarians
to practise upon them as many cruelties as ever the rage
of tyrants obliged martyrs to endure." "Not one of us

18 FATHER JOHN DE BREBEUF

could ever prevail upon himself to pray to God for them,
as if they had had any need of prayer, but our minds
were at once directed towards Heaven where we have no
doubt their souls are."

In 1650, when the Huron mission was abandoned
forever, the bones of Fathers de Brebeuf and Gabriel
Lalemant were raised from the grave at Fort Ste. Marie

and brought to Quebec, where they were
His relics are held in high veneration. A rich silver
brought reliquary was sent from France — probably

to Quebec by the Brebeuf family — to receive the skull

of the venerable victim of the Iroquois.
Other portions of his relics were distributed among the
Canadian communities; others were sent to France. Few
of these survived the depredations of the French Revolu-
tions, but there is still a relic of Brebeuf honorably treasur-
ed in the Jesuit college at Canterbury, in England.

And yet it is well to say that perhaps the most precious
heirloom that has come down to us of this venerable servant
of God is the story of his life and labors which has been
preserved in the Jesuit Relations. This monumental record
of the heroism of the early Canadian missionaries has
always excited the admiratian of historians. Not all of
them, however, — notably Parkman — have done complete
justice to the lofty motives which could inspire a man like
Brebeuf to bury himself in the forests along Georgian Bay
and finally sacrifice his life — all he had to sacrifice — for
the conversion of the aborigines of New France. Others,
better qualified to judge, have been fairer to his memory,
when they credit the grace of God with his victories and
make him say with St. Paul, "I can do all in Him who
strengtheneth me." "His death," wrote Paul Ragueneau,
his superior, "has crowned his life, and perseverance has
been the seal of his holiness. He died while preaching and
exercising truly apostolic offices, and by a death which
the first Apostle of the Hurons deserved."

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 19

John de Brebeuf was looked on a martyr from time of
his heroic death, and he would have been proclaimed a
martyr even from that moment had his contemporaries
dared to forestall the infallible decision of the Church.
The veneration in which he and his fellow-Jesuits, victims
of the Iroquois, was held urged the Archbishop of Rouen,
three years later, to secure authenticated evidence of the
heroism of their virtues. A precious MS. dated 1652, the
contents of which are attested under oath by Father Rague-
neau, is still extant to show that the Relations did not ex-
aggerate "Brebeuf s gentleness which won all hearts, his
courage truly generous in enterprises, his long suffering in
awaiting the moments of God, his patience in enduring
everything, his zeal in undertaking everything he saw was
for the glory of God."

Nor has the veneration given from the earliest years
to this victim of Iroquois cruelty yielded to the dissolving
influences of time. Over two centuries and a half have
elapsed since the dim tragedy was enacted at Bourg St.
Ignace, Simcoe county, Ontario, and the name of John
de Brebeuf is still a household word in every home in
America. The hope of seeing him and his companions some
day on the altar urged the Canadian Bishops assembled
in council at Quebec, in 1886, to petition the Holy See
to permit the Cause of their Beatification to be introduced.
Already much progress has been made in this necessarily
slow work. Meanwhile the instances of the intercessory
power of John de Brebeuf and his companions, manifested
in favor of the sick and infirm, are being carefully gather-
ed and sifted. Let us hope that they will become sufficient-
ly evident to justify the Holy See in conferring on those
heroic missionaries the honors of the Beatified.

FATHER GABRIEL LALEMANT
Slain by the Iroquois, March 11, 161$

Father Gabriel Lalernant

VICTIM OF THE IROQUOIS

THE name of Lalernant is well known in the missionary
annals of New France. During the second quarter of
the seventeenth century three of this family, members of
the Society of Jesus, came to Canada and distinguished
themselves in the work of spreading the Catholic faith
among the native tribes. They were pioneers in this
country, men who labored and suffered for their com-
mon Master; and when they died they left behind them
memories which are still precious to all students of our
early history. The first of these was Charles Lalernant,
who arrived at Quebec when the Recollects called the

Jesuits to their aid in 1625. He heads the
A family of list of that long line of Jesuit superiors
missionaries who guided the labors of their religious

brethren in Canada uninterruptedly for
one hundred and seventy-five years, that is, until the
complete extinction of the old Order in the first year of
the nineteenth century.1 The second, Jerome Lalernant,
brother of Charles, is undoubtedly one the most illustrious
figures in the history of New France. He reached Canada
in 1638 and went immediately to the Huron country, where
he succeeded John de Brebeuf as superior. During his
seven years' occupancy of that office he built Fort Ste.
Marie, the foundations of which are still visible on the
shore of Georgian Bay, systematized the work of evan-
gelization among the Hurons, and extended the influence

1 The Jesuits did not return to Canada until 1842.

22 FATHER GABRIEL, LALEMANT

of the missionaries far and wide. In 1645 he returned to
Quebec to superintend all the Jesuit missions in New
France, fulfilling that duty from 1645 to 1650, and again
from 1659 to 1665. We have from his pen the Huron
Relations from 1639 to 1643 and the more elaborate
Relations of New France from 1646 to 1649 and from 1660
to 1664.

It was reserved, however, for Gabriel Lalemant, the
nephew of Charles and Jerome, to give still greater luster
to the name of this excellent family by the heroic death
he suffered at the hands of the savage Iroquois in March,
1649. After having spent barely three years in this portion
of the Master's vineyard, he received the highest reward
that God can give a servant here below, death for His
sake. "Being made perfect in a short space he fulfilled
a long time: for his soul pleased God; therefore He hasten-
ed to bring him out of the midst of iniquities.'' (Wis. iv,
13. 14.)

Gabriel was a native of Paris, where his father, a
lawyer, held an office of some importance in Parliament.
He was born on October 10, 1610, and was the youngest

son in a family of six children. From his
Gabriel earliest years he aspired to the foreign

La'emant's apostolate, and with that end in view

early years consecrated his life to God in the Society

of Jesus. On March 14, 1630, though not
yet twenty years of age, and delicate in health, he entered
the novitiate at Paris, there to lay the foundation of his
sanctity.

The young man had chosen the proper outlet for his
future missionary activities; his Jesuit brethren were at
the full tide of their apostolic expansion. They had
already penetrated Asia, Africa and South America.
France, even then the fruitful mother of missionaries, was
sending her soldiers of the Cross into the foreign fields;
several of them had begun their labors among the naiive

THK CANADIAN MARTYRS 23

tribes in the new colony beyond the Atlantic. Unhappily,
the seizure of Quebec by the English corsair, David Kerkt,
in 1629, had deprived France of her possessions on the
St. Lawrence and had compelled the Jesuits living there
to abandon their work and return home. But the Jesuits
themselves felt that this was only a temporary interrup-
tion. The active negotiations that were actually under
way between Cardinal Richelieu and Charles I. of England,
buoyed up their hopes, and they made no secret of their
keenness to return as soon as the colony was restored.

All these topics were familiar to the young Jesuit
novice in Paris, and often helped to carry him in spirit
across the Atlantic to New France. Besides, the visits
he received from his uncle Charles, who had already tasted
the trials of Canadian missionary life and who was then

in Paris, after his escape from shipwreck
He asks for on the Acadian coast, had undoubtedly
the missions given Gabriel vivid pictures of the life

led among the Indians and filled him with
the desire of sharing in it some day. He had more than
once expressed this desire formally, and asked his
superiors to be considered a future missionary of New
France. His holy ambition, however, brought opposition
from his own family, who did not relish the departure to
the ends of the earth, even in after years, of one so well
loved. And yet his later life showed that considerations
of this kind could have had little weight with Gabriel
Lalemant; he was not one to allow the ties of flesh and
blood to stand between him and duty. While his affection
for his family had not cooled on entering the Jesuit Order,
the religious training he was receiving in the novitiate
was teaching him how to purify this natural sentiment
and subordinate it to the higher love he owed to God.
The following passage, found among his writings after
his death, gives the true character of his love for his
own. "I am indebted to my relations, to my mother," he

24 FATHER GABRIEL LALEMANT

wrote, " and to my brothers, and I must try to draw
down on them the mercy of God, Never permit, 0 God, that
any of my family, for whom Thou hast shown so much
love, perish in Thy sight, or that there be one amongst
them who will blaspheme Thee for eternity. Let me be
a victim for them ! Quoniam ego in flagella paratus sum:
hie ure, hie seca, ut in aeternum parcas /"

These were the sentiments which animated Lalemant
when he entered on his religious career; and yet one is
at a loss to find a reason for the young man's ardent
prayer, for the later life of Gabriel's family was a striking
instance of sacrifice and religious fervor. After the death
of her husband, which occurred while her children were
still in minor age, Madame Lalemant had evidently taken
to heart the task of bringing them up conformably to
the Divine will. With the exception of a son who remain-
ed in civil life and attained eminence at the Parisian
bar, all the other members of the family consecrated
themselves to God in the religious state. The oldest son,
Bruno, became a Carthusian monk; two daughters entered
the convent of the Assumption in Paris, while another
adopted the strict rule of the Carmelite nuns shortly
before Gabriel entered the Jesuit Order. And to put a
fitting crown to this edifying holocaust of her family,
when the news reached Paris that her son Gabriel had
shed his blood for the faith, Madame Lalemant herself
retired behind the cloister of the Recolletines and gave
up the rest of her life to prayer and meditation.

Gabriel Lalemant completed his novitiate and pro-
nounced his three vows in 1632. Evidently obeying a
Divine inspiration he obtained from his superiors at the
same time the permission to add a fourth vow to con-
secrate himself to the foreign missions. But while he
persevered unflinchingly in this determination, Heaven

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 25

desired to prepare him well for the great sacrifice he
would one day be called to make; sixteen years were
to elapse before he saw the realization of his holy
wishes. During this long period the future victim of the
Iroquois was employed in colleges in France exercising
the various functions of his Order. Owing either to his
frail health or to the thoroughness of the classical studies

he had made previous to his admission,
He prepares he was sent immediately after his novice-
for his ship to teach in the college at Moulins. In

future work the Jesuit system of formation, if age or

health be not an obstacle, members of the
Order rarely pass to their higher studies and the priesthood
without a preliminary halt in colleges of four or five years.
The reason is evident; barring actual contact with the
world and worldlings, nowhere may one study human
nature to better advantage than in the din and battle of
college life. The same clashing of temperaments, the
same ambitions, the same craving for success, that one
meets in the outside world, are active in the throbbing
hearts of students on their way to manhood. A young
Jesuit professor, therefore, gains experience in the class-
room or on the playground that is of life-long utility;
he has ample opportunities for character study which will
serve him well in the ministry of after-life.

Lalemant was employed three years in this important
Avork before he was sent to study for the prieshood at
Bourges where he was ordained in 1638. The following

year he was appointed prefect of students
And sets out in the famous college at La Fleche, and
for New in 1641, professor of philosophy at Moulins.

France He was employed as prefect in the college

at Bourges, in 1646, when the news, so
anxiously looked for and so long put off, reached him that
he had been chosen for the Canadian missions. His
delicate health had apparently been the cause of the long

26 FATHER GABRIEL. LALEMANT

delay. "He had been for several years," the Relations
tell us, " asking God, with tears and sighs, to be sent to
these far-away missions, but his body had not the strength
except that given by the Spirit of God and his desire to
suffer for His name." However, the long, weary sixteen
years of intense desire had at last ended, and he joyfully
prepared for his journey across the ocean. He quitted
France during the same summer and after a tedious voyage
of nearly three months' duration, landed at Quebec where
his uncle Jerome Lalemant, the superior of all the Can-
adian missions, gave him a generous welcome.

Fourteen years had elapsed since the treaty of St.

Germain-en-Laye had restored Canada to France, in 1632.

The Jesuits, who returned to these shores as soon as the

treaty was signed, were passing through a period of

ferverish activity. Quebec had possessed a college since

1635; residences had been established at

Missionary Tadousac, Three Rivers and Montreal;

activities fresh accessions of missionaries, arriving

from France every summer, had enabled

the Order to spread over an immense territory and give

their services to many natives tribes. Jesuits were found

at work on both banks of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa

rivers and along the Great Lakes. They had missions in

Acadia, and were preparing to establish others in Maine

and on the reserves in New York State. They were

evangelizing and gathering in converts to the Christian

faith among the Hurons, Montagnais, Abenakis, Ottawas,

Algonquins, Otchipwes and Iroquois. Several of them had

known what it was to suffer for Christ; Bressani, Jogues,

and Goupil had already given testimony even unto blood

for the faith that was in them.

These results had been accomplished when Gabriel
Lalemant reached Quebec in September, 1646. Carried
away by his enthusiasm, his first impulse was to start at
once for some Indian tribe or other to begin the study

THH CANADIAN MARTYRS 27

of the language, but his superior, Jerome Lalemant, moved
by the prudence which was the result of long experience,
put a curb on his nephew's excessive zeal and found work

for him to do nearer home, during two
Lalemact's years, among the French colonists in

first labors Quebec, Sillery, Beauport and Three

Rivers. The Journal des Jcsuites recalls
various incidents which help us to follow his career during
those two years. On Christmas Day, 1646, he said Mass
at the Ursulines, in Quebec; on the last day of the same
year he was present, with other Fathers, at a represen-
tation of the Cid given in honor of the Governor de Mont-
magny; he preached every Sunday at Beauport during
the Lenten season of 1647; he went to Three Rivers in
September to exercise the ministry, a fact which is attested
by entries in the baptismal register still carefully pre-
served there. He returned to Quebec later on, for we
find him in the following summer, 164S, taking part in
the procession on Corpus Christi.

While the young missionary was destined ultimately
for some mission among the native tribes, it was appar-
ently not the intention of his superior that he should go
to the Hurons. This conclusion may be gathered from
other entries in the Journal des Jesuites. At the date,
July 16th, 1647, Jerome Lalemant writes that when Father
Le Jeune returned from Montreal he consulted him on
several topics; among these were the safety of the Huron
route, the sending of supplies to missionaries, and the
disposal of the services of Gabriel Lalemant. Although
the Huron route was infested by Iroquois marauders, it
was decided that some one should risk the journey at the
first favorable opportunity and carry succor to Huronia;
but it was also decided that Father Gabriel should betake
himself to the Montagnais, a peaceful tribe living on the
Lower St. Lawrence, and too far away from the ferocious
Iroquois to be molested by them. One might ask, had

28 FATHER GABRIEL LALEMANT

Lalemant gone to live with the Montagnais would the
crown of martyrdom awaiting him in the Huron country
ever have been his ? And, besides, how would the great
desire of his life have been accomplished ? Among his
writings found after his death, it was learned that "befoiv
coming to Canada he had consecrated himself to our Lord
for the purpose of receiving from His hand a violent death
either in exposing himself among the plague-stricken in
Old France or in seeking to save the souls of savages in
the New" — with the added clause that he would esteem
it a favor if he were allowed to die for God's glory in
the flower of his age.

Providence evidently had its own designs on the career
of this privileged soul.

Behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping-

Watch above His own.

The favor that Gabriel Lalemant so ardently desired was
to be granted him in all its fullness. The mission to the
peaceful Montagnais was cancelled, and he was allowed to
leave Quebec on July 24th, 1648, for Three Rivers to join
the Hurons on their return homewards. On the 6th of
August, a flotilla of fifty or sixty canoes started from that
trading post near the St. Maurice to begin the long journey

of seven hundred miles to the shore of
He goes to Georgian Bay. Thirty years had elapsed

tbe Hurons since the first missionary, the Recollect

Joseph le Caron had gone over this route
for the first time, a route which was now as familiar to
the French as it had been to the Indians for centuries.
Every cape and rock and rapid had a local habitation and
a name well known to missionary and fur-trader; but
unhappily a knowledge of the topography of the route that
led to the Huron country did not diminish the sufferings
the Europeans had to undergo, or minimize the dangers
that were always imminent.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 29

Paddling up the St. Lawrence, Lalemant's frail bark
canoe entered the Riviere des Prairies at the foot of the
Island of Montreal. After surmounting the rapid at Sault

au Recollet, the first of the thirty-five he
Difficulties was to meet, he floated out into the

of the route pleasant Lake of Two Mountains. A few

more hours brought him to the main body
of the Ottawa River, flowing through a wilderness of pine
and maple trees, and easy recognized by the murky color
of its waters. Skipping the Long Sault at Carillon, a spot
destined a few years later, through the heroic resistance
of Dollard and his seventeen companions against a legion
of Iroquois, to become the Thermopylae of New France
Lalemant moved in close to the shore, not merely to avoid
the stronger currents of the mid-stream, but rather to let
the panorama of water and islands, of bare rock and
luxurious vegetation, pass quickly and silently before his
wondering eyes. After three or four days' steady work,
the sound of falling waters was heard, a sound familiar
to the savage ear but strange and not unwelcome music
to the young missionary. A glance to the left revealed
to him a small stream tumbling over a cliff and paying
the gracious tribute of its waters to the larger river
beneath. This was Rideau Fall on the present site of the
city of Ottawa. But a more imposing view awaited him
a little further on. While passing at the foot of what is
now Parliament Hill, a distant rumbling sound told him
that he was approaching the famous Asticou of the sav-
ages, known even in those times, as it is today, by the
name which Champlain had given it thirty years before —
the "Chaudiere" or "Big Kettle" — where the entire Ottawa

River hurls itself with terrific force over
Its dangers a semi-circular cliff into a seething pit

and fatigues below. Long before the mass of waters

reaches the brink of this precipice, it is
broken by rocks and islands; but then, deep and treach-

30 FATHER GABRIEL LA l.EM ANT

erously silent, it rushes onward in its mad career, carrying
to destruction whatever falls in its way. Many a tragedy
was enacted at this spot in those early times, and no
Huron or Algonquin ever passed up or down the river
without chanting his superstitious dirge or offering his
sacrifice of tobacco leaves to appease the angry genius
of the fall.

The course of the Ottawa thenceforward was broken
by many rapids and obstructions, and must have wasted
the physical strength as well as exercised the patience of
the delicate Lalemant who was forced to land and pack
his burden over the trails as the wiry Hurons themselves
had to do. "Yv^hen these rapids and torrents are reached",
wrote Brebeuf, thirteen years before, "one must land and
carry on his shoulder, through the forest or over high
rocks, all the baggage and the canoes. This is not accom-
plished without great labor, for there are portages one
and two and three leagues long, and for each, several
trips back and forth must be made, no matter how few
our bundles may be. In some places where the current
is as violent as the rapids, though easier at the outset,
the savages get into the water and haul their canoes after
them. This is a dangerous operation, for they sometimes
sink up to the neck; they are then obliged to abandon their
canoes and save themselves as best they can." The inter-
vals of excessive work were the portaging when the canoes
were usually swung over the heads of the more muscular
Hurons, who let the weight rest on their shoulders, and
then started off over the trails to the smoother waters
above.

Portaging was undoubtedly the hardest task the mis-
sionaries had to endure on their tiresome
Incidents journeys westward, and after one of those

on the way fatiguing spells both Indian and white men

rested for a few hours, usually for the
night. The Recollect Sagard, who wrote from experience,

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 31

gives us a graphic description of a night's repose on the
Ottawa route. "The savages' first care," he tells us, "was
to look for a spot where they could find dry wood to make
their fire and prepare supper. Once the spot was chosen,
they carried up their canoes, packages and everything
belonging to them, and set to work immediately to pre-
pare for the night. One went to gather dry wood, another
to cut poles for the cabins, another to strike fire, another
to set over the fire the pot which was attached to a stick
driven into the earth, another to look for two flat stones to
grind the corn with which to make sagamite. When the
poles were raised rolls of birch bark were stretched over
them, and the bundles of merchandise were placed around
inside, while the canoes were turned upside down and left
outside. Then each savage took his place within the cabin,
his back leaning against the bundles, stretched himself,
and indulged in a smoke with a pipe until the pot of corn
began to boil. Once the sagamite was ready, each savage
received his share in a bark dipper, which he carried with
him as part of his personal baggage. After supper they
lay down to sleep on the ground, usually on a skin cover-
ing a few cedar branches. At dawn they were at work
again preparing for their day's journey by another meal
of corn, rolling up their birch bark and replacing their
bundles in the canoes."1

it is doubtful whether Gabriel Lalemant had to use
the paddle or not. After 1634 the Jesuits provided their
Huron missionaries with a sail which they could attach
to their canoes; but even that slight improvement dit not
lessen the torment of sitting at the bottom of those frail
vessels for five or six weeks at a time. At last, in the
beginning of September, 1648, after his wearying journey
up the Ottawa, across Lake Nipissing and dawn the French
River, Gabriel Lalemant reached Fort Ste. Marie, the head-

1 Sagard: Eistoire du Canada, p. I S3.

go FATHER GABRIEL I-ALEMANT

quarters of the Jesuits in Huronia. This residence, built
by his uncle Jerome in 1639, nine years
He reaches before, was accomplishing the purpose for

Huronia which it was intended. "It is a resort

for the whole country," wrote Paul Rague-
neau, "where the Christians find a hospital when sick, a
refuge when panic-stricken, and a shelter when they come
to visit us. During the past year we have counted over
three thousand persons to whom we have given hospitality,
and sometimes within a fortnight to from six to seven
hundred Christians, which as a rule means three meals
to each one. This does not include a large number who
come continually and pass the whole day and to whom
we give charity." "As a rule only two or three of our
Fathers reside in this house," he wrote elsewhere; "the
others are scattered throughout the missions, now ten in
number... A single Father has at times to take charge
of ten or twelve villages; some have to range much
further, over eighty or a hundred leagues... We try,
however, to meet together two or three times a year in
order to commune with ourselves, to think of God alone
in the repose of prayer, and afterwards to confer together
respecting the means and light that experience and the
Holy Spirit continue to give us daily to make the con-
version of those peoples easier for us. After that we must
hurry back to our work as soon as possible."

The Huron flotilla of 164S brought up a large con-
tingent to strengthen the missionary forces. Besides
Gabriel Lalemant, there were among the new arrivals,
Fathers Joseph Bressani, Adrian Greslon, Daran, two
coadjutor brothers, and several laymen who were to be
employed in various functions. "We number forty-two
Frenchmen in the midst of all these unbelieving nations,"
wrote Father Ragueneau in 1648; "eighteen of our Society;
the remainder are picked men, most of whom have made
up their minds to live and die with us." The newly arrived

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 33

Fathers devoted themselves during the first months in
Huronia to the study of the language and acted as as-
sistants to the missionaries in the principal villages.

One of the chief villages with a resident missionary-
was St. Ignace, a village known in Huron as Taenha-
tentaron.1 It had been established only about three years,

and is first mentioned in the Relation of
He is named 1645; but during that short period it had
to assist become an important center of Gospel

F.de Brebeuf activity. Its distance, however, from Fort

Ste. Marie and its exposed position made
it an easy mark for the Iroquois who for over a year had
been spreading terror throughout the neighborhood. The
whole country was threatened in the summer of 1647 by an
army of these marauders. Three hundred had attacked a
village of the Neutral nation and massacred or made pri-
soners all who dared to resist. This onslaught intimated
to the Hurons further north what was in store for them,
and, in fact, the following spring, while three hundred
Hurons, "nearly all Christians who had come together the
better to say their prayers night and morning, who lived
in innocence and spread everywhere the sweet odor of
Christianity," were encamped in the woods near St. Ignace,
they fell a prey to the treacherous Iroquois, who killed
seven on the spot and carried of twenty-four into captivity.
Looking on this ominous visit as the prelude to others
in the near future, Father de Brebeuf, who had charge of
the mission of St. Ignace, decided to transfer his neophytes

to a spot nearer Fort Ste. Marie, where
At St. Ignace they would have whatever protection the
village French could give. The site chosen for

the new residence of St. Ignace was an
elevation located close to the border of a little stream
emptying into Sturgeon Bay. It was fortified by nature

1 Situated on the east half of lot 12, concession viii. J. Medonte
township.

34 FATHER GABRIEL LALEMANT

on three sides and required artificial strengthening only
on the fourth side to make it relatively impregnable. Aided
by French workmen the Hurons surrounded the top of this
hill with a palisade of posts fifteen or sixteen feet high,
and it is presumed that, having had Brebeuf for engineer,
they profited by the practical lessons gained at Ossossane,
and built t"ieir fort square with towers at the corners,
thereby providing for defence even with a small garrison.
This new village was called St. Ignace II, and the mission-
ary in charge had supervision of the neighboring villages
of Ste. Anne, St. Louis, St. Denis and St. John.1 Thither
the Hurons transferred their goods and chattels in the
spring of 1648, and thither also went Father Gabriel
Lalemant in February, 1649, as assistant to Father de
Brebeuf.

Meanwhile the Iroquois had grown more aggressive.
The Christians of the mission of St. John Baptist, at
Cahiague,2 on the outskirts of the tribe, were obliged to

disband and betake themselves to more
Iroqsiois populous centers. The massacre of Father

massacres Daniel and his people at Teanaostaye, in

July, 1648, served as a warning to the
neophytes and catechumens of the various villages to pre-
pare for the worst. It served also as an incentive for
them to lead better lives, and, as a result, a wave of fervor
swept over the land. Ragueneau tells us that between
July, 1648, and the following March the Fathers baptized
more than fourteen hundred Hurons.

Worried beyond measure by the uncertainties of the
moment, the Jesuits took every precaution to safeguard
the interests of their Christians. Regardless of their own
safety they went from village to village to give spiri-

1 The sites of these Huron Tillages have all been located. (Cf.
Jones: Old Huronia, p. 2fi3.)

2 East half of lot 20, concession x, of Oro township.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 35

tual strength to their wards and prepare them to die
well if that crisis were reached. Missionaries as well as
savages had a presentiment that they were on the eve of
a catastrophe, and no one was penetrated with this feeling '
more deeply than Gabriel Lalemant who had long before
acquiesced, if necessary, in the sacrifice of his life. "My
Jesus and my Love." he wrote, "Thy Blood,
Lalemant shed for barbarians as well as for us, must

offers his life be efficaciously applied for their salva-
tion. Aided by Thy grace, I offer myself
to co-operate in this work and to sacrifice myself for
them."

God was about to accept this co-operation and this
sacrifice made out of pure love for Him; the supreme
moment had at last arrived. During the first days of
March, 1649, the Iroquois, numbering about a thousand
strong and well equipped with firearms which they had
obtained from the Dutch, had arrived on the frontier of

Huronia. They had started from their
St. Ignace own country along the Mohawk in the

is attacked autumn of 1648; had lived by hunting on

the way during the winter, and were ready
for operations in the spring. At dawn on March 16, they
attacked the palisade of St. Ignace on its weakest side,
and so stealthily did they do their work that they were
masters of the place before the inmates had time to make
any defence. They worked quickly and successfully; many
Hurons were massacred during the onslaught; others were
made captives, the losses amounting to about four hundred
souls. Three men alone escaped and hurried across the
snow to give the alarm to the neighboring village, St.
Louis, about three miles away, where Brebeuf and
Lalemant were stationed for the moment. Elated at
their victory at St. Ignace, the Iroquois rushed to St. Louis
to continue their carnage, but not before more than five
hundred of the inhabitants, mostly women and children,

36 FATHER OABRIBL LALEMANT

had time to escape in the direction of Fort Ste. Marie.
Eighty Huron warriors met the ferocious enemy outside
the walls and killed thirty of the more daring. But the
Iroquois had the advantage of numbers; they battered
down the palisades with their tomahawks and opened
passages for themselves to the interior of the stockade.
The scene which ensued is one of the most heartrending
in the history of the Huron missions. Beside themselves
with rage at the opposition offered, the Iroquois aimed
their blows at every Huron they met, and blood soon ran
like water. During the massacre the
The Jesuits Christians begged Fathers de Brebeuf

refuse aQd Lalemant to flee and save them-

to escape selves. But these devoted pastors stead-

fastly refused to go away. The salvation
of their flock was dearer to them than their own lives,
and while the Iroquois were slaughtering and scalping
their Huron children, the two Fathers stood in the midst
of them, baptizing, giving them absolution and animating
them to die nobly for the faith. However, in this unequal
struggle the end came quickly. The few Hurons who still
lived were seized and made prisoners by their cruel
enemies, and with them Brebeuf and Lalemant who were
specially reserved for torture. The Iroquois set fire to
St. Louis, and then hurried back to St. Ignace with the
Jesuits, whom they had stripped naked and bound with
thongs. When the two prisoners reached the village they
were obliged to run the gauntlet under a shower of blows
on their shoulders, loins, legs, breasts and faces, there
being no part of their bodies which did not endure this
torment. Seeing some of his flock nearby, the heroic
Brebeuf exclaimed : "My children raise your eyes to heaven
in this affliction; remember that God is watching your
sufferings and will soon be your exceeding great reward.
Let us die together in the faith, and hope from His good-
ness the fulfilment of His promises. I pity you more than

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 37

I do myself. Keep your courage up in the few remaining
torments; these will end with our lives; the glory which
follows them will have no end."

These earnest words consoled the Christians in their
agonies, but irritated some Huron apostates who had been
incorporated into the Iroquois tribe, and to show their
resentment they cut off the saintly missionary's lips. They
then tore off their finger-nails and pierced the flesh of
both Brebeuf and Lalemant with sharp awls; they applied
red-hot hatchets under their arm-pits, and put a necklace
of them around their shoulders. In derision of holy
baptism they poured kettles of boiling water on their
quivering flesh until their entire bodies were bathed with
it. At the same time they mocked them saying : "We
baptise you so that you may be blessed in your heaven."
Others added in derision, "Do we not treat you as friends
since we shall be the cause of your greater happiness in
Heaven ? Thank us, then, for our good services, for the
more you suffer the more your God will reward you."
The more the tortures increased, the more the two sufferers
entreated God to pardon those unfortunate renegades.
While Brebeuf, impassive and lion-like, withstood the
excruciating torments, his more delicate companion Lale-
mant raised his eyes to heaven and uttered sighs to God
to come to his aid. The final episode of this awful tragedy
was the tying of the two men to posts, when the Iroquois
again applied flaming torches to their bodies, then gouged
out their eyes and inserted burning coals in the empty
sockets.

These tortures, seemingly beyond the power of human
endurance, were soon to end for Brebeuf. He expired
about four o'clock in the afternoon of the day of his
capture; but his companion still lived. A cousin of
Father Gabriel, also a missionary in Huronia, Father
Poncet de la Riviere, writing two months later, to his

38 FATHER GABRIEL LALEMANT

brother in Prance,1 gives a few details which are not
found in the Relation of 1649. He tells us that owing to
Brebeuf's more perfect knowledge of the Huron tongue,
it was this Father who instructed and heard the con-
fessions of the Christians during the assault on St. Louis,

while to Father Lalemant fell the task of
His heroic administering most of the baptisms. The

end baptism of boiling water, therefore, which

he received, was a form of torment most
appropriate to him who was occupied chiefly in this
apostolic function. Lalemant did not preach to the Hurons,
and the barbarians did not cut off his lips as they did to
Father Brebeuf, but they split his jaws, drew his mouth
wide open and drove burning brands down his throat. A
hatchet blow over his left ear penetrated the skull and
left the brain exposed. Though he was completely charred
with fire, the executioners left his body entire, so that
his sufferings might be longer and more intense during
the coming night.

Let this suffice; the pen refuses to enter into further
details. But the reader will have remarked the strange
paradox ! While the powerful Brebeuf died after a few
hours' agony, the frail Lalemant, he who had been a prey
to physical weakness and ill health from childhood, with-
stood the tortures of the Iroquois for twelve hours longer.
He gave up his soul to God only at nine o'clock the follow-
ing morning, March 17th, 1649. When the precious remains
of both victims were brought to Fort Ste. Marie, three days
later, it was found that their breasts had been cut open.
Their hearts had been torn out and had evidently been
eaten by their captors. The two heroic Jesuits were
buried on Sunday, March 21st, "with so much consolation,"
wrote Father Ragueneau, "and with such tender feelings
•of devotion in all who were present at the funeral, that

1 Chroniques de I'Ordre du Carmel, torn. iv.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 39

I know of none who did not desire a similar fate rather
than fear it... Not one of us could ever prevail upon
himself to pray to God for them, as if they had any need
of prayer; but our minds were at once directed towards
heaven, where we had no doubt their souls had gone."

Thus ended the short but glorious career of the young
French missionary. Barely seven months had elapsed since
he reached Huronia and he had already borne off the
crown. Although the last in the field, he had been chosen
by God as one of the first victims to be sacrificed out of
hatred of the Christian name. The news of the massacre

did not reach Quebec until the following
Quebec hears July; the Journal des Jesuites, at the date
the news July 20th, 1649, has this simple entry :

"The sad account of the destruction of the
Hurons and of the martyrdom of three Fathers arrived
tonight."1

Father Jerome Lalemant did not leave to any one else
the duty of announcing the news to the family in France.
He wrote to the Carmelite sister of the victim to assure
her that, far from deploring the event, she should glorify
God. "What a happiness for our family !" he exclaimed. . .
"It seems to me that the news should help you to raise
your mind and heart to God. The baptisms of more than

two thousand seven hundred savages — a
The family ceremony which accompanied his death —

notified proves that the blood he shed had a

more than ordinary efficacy; I myself
have felt on different occasions the effect of invoking
him. . . And yet," he adds, "it is not we who make saints;
the Church requires striking miracles. It is this that
prevents me from listening to the demands of large
numbers of devout persons (for relics). I cannot, how-
ever, refuse his sister a portion of the scalp torn from

1 News travelled slowly in those days. The third Father was
Anthony Daniel, slain the previous summer at Teanaostaye.

40 FATHER GABRIEL LALEMANT

his head by his executioners... It bears the glorious
marks impressed with iron on his frail and delicate body.
There is nothing more to add. It is at his feet and at
those of his good Master that we must learn to live and
die."2

During nearly two hundred and eighty years the name
of Lalemant, a man "almost too feeble to live but strong
enough to die in torture without a murmur," coupled with
that of the "towering Brebeuf whose
Reputation enthusiasm would not shrink from the

for holiness necklace of red-hot tomahawks that was
in store for him,"1 has become in Amer-
ican annals a synonym for heroism in suffering for Christ's
name. To this admiration for the victim of the Iroquois,
expressed by writers of all shades, should be added the
element of devotion to his memory which is strong among
Canadian Catholics. The Eishops of Canada assembled in
council at Quebec, in 1886, sent a petition to the Holy See
to permit the introduction of the Cause of his Beatification.
Let us hope that the pious wish of the Church and her
Members in Canada may some day be gratified, that of
seeing the name Gabriel Lalemant among the Beatified.

2 Chroniques de I'Ordre <iu Carmel, torn. iv. A relic of Gabriel
Lalemant is honorably preserved in the Jesuit college at Canterbury,
England.

1 Smith: Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony. New York,
19*7, p. 17.

FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL
Slain by the Iroquois, July If, 1648

Father Anthony Daniel

VICTIM OF THE IROQUOIS

ANTHONY Daniel, the first Jesuit to give his life for
the faith in the Huron country, was born at Dieppe,
in Normandy, May 27th, 1593. His parents had intended
him for the bar, and after the completion of his classical
studies he began a course of jurisprudence. But already
the call to eschew worldly honors and riches had sounded

in his ear; God was inspiring him to give
His early years himself to His service. Yielding to the
and training supernatural impulse, the young student —

then twenty-three years of age — threw
aside his law-books and entered the novitiate of the Society
of Jesus at Rouen, in 1621 . After he had completed his
two years of probation and made his religious profession,
he was sent to the Jesuit college in the same city to begin
the term of teaching and regency through which members
of his Order usually pass before they proceed to the study
of theology and the priesthood.

A circumstance, trivial in itself, occurring in these years,
evidently turned the young professor's attention to the
Canadian missions. In a letter to his brother Jerome from
Quebec, in 1626, Father Charles Lalemant writes: "A little
Huron is going to see you; he longs to visit France. He
is very fond of us and manifests a strong desire to be

instructed. It is important that he should
First thoughts be thoroughly satisfied; for if he is once
of Canada well taught, he will make our way easy

into the tribes where he will be useful."
This interesting youth was Amantacha, a Huron, who was

44 FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL

taken to Rouen and baptized under the name of Louis de
Sainte Foy, having as sponsors the Due de Longuevihe
and Madame de Villars. While at the college of Rouen
his instruction was confided to Father Daniel, and the
ease with which the young savage assimilated the know-
ledge provided for him undoubtedly excited his teacher's
interest in the land whence he had come, and gave him
the desire to work among the members of the Huron tribe.
Other reasons also may explain Daniel's vocation. Charles
Lalemant had returned to Paris in 1627; he was at the
college of Clermont when Daniel reached there for his
theology in the same year. The missionary and the young
student undoubtedly met and gained each other's con-
fidence. Besides, the "League of Prayer for the Canadian
Missions" was active in those years in the famous Parisian
college. When future apostles like Paul Le Jeune, Jerome
Lalemant, Simon Le Moyne and others, could claim mem-
bership in it, there is little doubt but that Anthony Daniel
was also of the number. After his ordination to ths
priesthood in 1630, the call of the Indian missions in
Canada grew louder and more imperative, but he had to
wait for two years at the college of Eu before he saw the
accomplishment of his desire to cross the Atlantic.

The occasion which presented itself in 1632 could hard-
ly be more favorable. His brother, Charles Daniel, a sea
c.iptain in the employ of the De Caen Company, who had
already distinguished himself along the coast of New
France during the English occupation of Quebec, w;t:;
about to sail for Cape Breton, and he offer-
He quits his ed carry his missionary brother with him.
native country The latter, accompanied by Father Am-
brose Davost, who had also volunteered
for the Canada missions, set sail and arrived at St. Anne's
Bay, in the summer of the same year. The two Jesuits
had hardly landed when they began to exercise their
ministry along the Bras d'Or estuary, among the few
French colonists and fishermen who had been hitherto

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 45

deprived of spiritual succor. During a whole year they
lived with muse poor people, helping them to bear patient-
ly their isolation, providing them with Mass and Sacra-
ments and reconciling them to God.

This work, however, was only temporary- Both men
were destined for the Huron missions on Georgian Bay and
were called to Quebec by Paul Le Jeune to prepare for

their future labors. They reached the little
Spends a year settlement on the St. Lawrence on June
in Quebec 24th, 1633. and there under the guidance

of Father de Brebeuf who had returned to
Canada the same summer, began to study the Huron
tongue, without which their presence among the savages
would be useless. It was the wish of all three to start
for Georgian Bay immediately, but the danger of falling
into the hands of lurking Iroquois along the route was
always imminent, and they were dissuaded from under-
taking the perilous journey. "I never saw more resolute
men than Daniel and Davost when told that they might
lose their lives on the road," wrote Le Jeune; "but as
that would involve the French in war, it was agreed with
M. de Champlain that the preservation of peace among
the tribes was preferable to the consolation they would
experience in dying. They put off their departure till
the following year and decided to spend the interval in
the study of the language. A few months later, their
superior, Paul Le Jeune, gave them this testimonial :
"Fathers Daniel and Davost are both quiet men. They
have studied the Huron language thoroughly. I took care
that they should not be diverted from this work which I
believe to be of very great importance."

In 1634 the three Jesuits set out for Huronia. Brebeuf
had already been over the arduous route, and had had a
bitter experience of the hardships suffered thereon, but

46 FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL

Daniel and Davost were to taste for the first time a journey
which on this occasion, Brebeuf himself
He goes to asserted, "was accompanied with more

Huronia fatigues, losses and expenses than any-

former one." Their troubles began at the
trading post of Three Rivers, the terminus of the Huron
flotillas. When they reached there eleven canoes were
already manned and about to start, but the savages showed
great unwillingness to find room for the three Jesuits and
their seven French workmen. It required the intervention
of the commandant of the post, Duplessis-Bochart, coupled
with several substantial presents, to find places in the
canoes for them. Father Daniel had to be satisfied with a
reduced amount of baggage, taking with him only what was
necessary to say Mass with and the minor necessaries for
Jife.

"Barefooted and armed with a paddle, the young mis-
sionary started out for his long journey up the St. Law-
rence and the Ottawa, across Lake Nipissing and down its
great tributary the French River to Georgian Bay. Hunger
and pain and sleeplessness were his portion during a whole
month. A little Indian corn crushed between two stones
,and boiled in water was his food; the bare earth or a hard
rock covered with a few branches, his bed; while his daily
wading through water and mud during the long and tiring

portages, the entanglements of the forest
Trials met with shrubbery, to which must be added the
on the way stings of insects and constant intercourse

with filthy savages, rendered his plight
painful indeed. The almost absolute silence which mission-
aries ignorant of the language had ordinarily to observe
along the route was another great trial he had to undergo.
Happily, Father Daniel had had a year's study of the
Huron tongue; he could make himself understood well
enough to let his Indian companions know how keenly
he felt the injustice of the act they were to perpetrate

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 47

when they reached the Algonquins on Allumette Island.
There the Hurons had decided to abandon him to his late
and to start off without him, and his lot would have been
a hard one had not a friendly captain from Ossossane
overtaken the dissatisfied and mutinous crew and relieved
them of their unwelcome guest for the rest of the journey.
Daniel's progress in the language gave him advantages
fully appreciated by Brebeuf who had been an excellent
master to him during his year in Quebec. In fact, Brebeuf
generously wrote that, "the pupil knew the language as well
as he," and Daniel gave a proof of his ability when he
translated into Huron the Lord's Prayer
Progress in and obliged the savages to learn it by

the language heart and sing it — a method which helped
him greatly in teaching them the rudiments
of the faith. Daniel's proficiency in the tongue gave
Brebeuf the occasion to set on foot a plan long con-
templated by the missionaries.

One of the projects that appealed to both the Jesuits,
and to the Recollects who preceded them in those early
years of the colony, was the training of the native children
apart from their families. The devoted men were buoyed
up with the hope that when those children had been fully
instructed in the faith and in civilized ways, and had re-
turned to their villages, their words and examples would
raise the Christian religion in the esteem of their elders,
and ultimately lead to their conversion. " I see no other
way than that which your Reverence suggests," wrote Le
Jeune,1 "of sending a boy every year to France. Having
been there two years he will return with a knowledge of
our tongue, and having become accustomed to our ways,
he will not leave us to return to his countrymen."

This experiment suggested by the superiors in Europe,
of sending Huron youths to France was tried and deemed

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit. vol. vi, p. 85.

4$ FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL

impracticable for many reasons, and some plan that could
be carried out nearer home was resolved
The seminary upon. "If a small seminary of a dozen
project or so of Hurons could be founded at

Kebec," wrote Le Jeune, in the Relation
of 1635, "in a few years incredible aid could be drawn
from them to help in converting their fathers and in plant-
ing a flourishing Church in the Huron nation." "If we
had only a fund for the purpose !" exclaimed the same
writer elsewhere.1 "We have marked out a little spot for
the beginnings of the seminary while waiting until a
special house will be erected for the purpose If we had
one built, I have hopes that in a couple of years Father
de Brebeuf could send us some children."

Meanwhile Brebeuf was not idle. He, too, had entered
fully into the plan because it appealed to him; already,
owing to his tact and the ascendency he had acquired
over the tribe, he had secured the promise of twelve intelli-
gent boys who should be sent to Quebec. The important
task of taking the youths down to the colony and of acting
as father and teacher to them while there, was entrusted
to Father Anthony Daniel; and lest an accident should
befall him on his journey down the Ottawa, Davost was
named to accompany him. The date fixed for the departure
was July 22nd, 1636, and everything was
He starts ready; but the missionaries had not

for Quebec reckoned on the inconstancy of the savage

character or on the love of Huron parents
for their offspring. The tears and wailings of the mothers
became so eloquent at the moment of leaving that the boys
refused to enter the canoes; of the twelve who promised
only three could be prevailed upon to go.

The journey promised to be rapid and pleasant, wrote
Daniel to Duplessis-Bochart, and everything went well

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. vi, p. 83.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 49

until the flotilla reached the nation of the Algonquins on
Allumette Island. Those Indians were naturally jealous
of the growing commercial relations of the Hurons with
the French colony, and the sight of canoes laden with
furs which had begun to pass down yearly excited their
enmity. Besides, they had for years arrogantly claimed
control of the Ottawa river and tried under various pretexts
to hinder the passage of the Hurons. This year the
specious reason put forward for their refusal was the fact
that the body of their great captain, recently deceased,
had not yet been laid away. This captain was Le Borgne,

the second Algonquin chief of that name,
Hardships of known to the missionaries as "unusually
the journey arrogant and malicious,"1 who continued

till his death to be a wily enemy of the
French. A regular blockade was declared, but in a
letter which Father Daniel succeeded in getting through,
he informed the commandant of Three Rivers that the
savages were willing to let the French pass down the
Ottawa; as for the Hurons they should have to return
home. This would have wrecked his plans completely,
and he resolved not to continue downward if the Hurons
were not allowed to accompany him. Only after infinite
parleying were the Algonquins persuaded to permit the
flotilla to proceed.

A pleasant incident of this memorable journey of Father
Daniel was his meeting, somewhere on the Upper Ottawa,
with Fathers Gamier and Chastellain. fresh from France
and on their way to Huronia. "They both wore their
shoes in their canoes and carried no paddles," he wrote,
"which led me to believe that they were kindly treated.
This urged me to do something for their men that I had
not done for my own. I made them a present of an herb

1 Jrvuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. viii, p. 2S6.

50 FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL

which they adore and which we do not like — tobacco,
which is high-priced this year."1

The zeal of the devoted missionary found occasion to
exercise itself further down the river. At Petite Nation,
another Algonquin settlement on the Ottawa, he found
an Iroquois prisoner tied to a stake awaiting torture and
death by fire. The deep interest he took in his fate and
the kind words he spoke to him, softened the heart of the
poor pagan prisoner, who before his death had the hap-
piness of being baptized.

On August 18th, 1636, the flotilla, with Daniel and the
three Huron youths, arrived at Three Rivers. When the
canoes hove in sight the little population hastened to the
river bank to welcome them. "Our hearts
Arrival at melted," wrote Le Jeune, "at the sight of

Three Rivers Father Daniel. His face was gay and
happy, but greatly emaciated; he was bare-
footed, had a paddle in his hand, and was clad in a wretched
cassock, his breviary suspended to his neck, and his shirt
rotting on his back. We embraced him, and having led
him to our little room, after having blessed and adored
our Lord, he related to us in what condition was the cause
of Christianity among the Hurons. He handed me the
letters and the Relation sent from that country, and we
sang a Te Deum as a thanksgiving for the blessings God
was pouring out upon this new Church." Daniel's absence
from the new Church was a great sacrifice. He was really
necessary there, wrote Le Mercier, "for only he and Father
de Brebeuf are able to wield the language easily." And yet
the sacrifice was made only with the hope of gathering
greater spiritual fruit. A few days later, the interpreter,
Jean Nicolet, brought three more recruits from Huronia,
and with his little flock of six, Father Daniel went down
to Quebec, full of hope that one of the problems of the

l Jesuit Relations, Clev. deit., vol. ix. p. 273.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 51

missions was about to be solved. Meanwhile other Indian
boys nearer home had been persuaded to enter the semin-
ary, and soon fifteen, including a few Montagnais, were
gathered together at Notre Dame des Anges, on the banks
of the St. Charles, two miles from Quebec.

But the trials and tribulations which usually go hand
in hand with all works undertaken for God, were about
to begin for the Huron seminary. One of the students,
Tsi-ko, fell sick, and his illness became so serious that
Father Daniel was at his side day and
The Huron night. Tsi-ko was the nephew of a well-

students known Huron orator; he showed consider-

able talent, and much was expected later
from this young man ; but in a short time he was a lifeless
corpse. He had hardly been in his grave when Sabouta,
another Huron youth, was carried off. These deaths
affected Father Daniel very much, for they threatened to
compromise the future of the seminary. What would the
Huron parents and relatives on Georgian Bay say when
they heard that their sons were dead in Quebec ? The
worries were greater than the missionary could bear;
Daniel himself broke down with fatigue and strain, and so
ill did he become that for a time his life was despaired of.
Happily the illness passed away; he continued his work
of instructing the few remaining Hurons,
Fresh trials and the first months promised good results.

and sufferings A rule of life had been given the students
which mingled a great deal of recreation
with a relative amount of study. This was necessary, for
"a wild ass is not given to greater freedom than these
little Canadians. Still they wait upon the priest at the
altar with as much grace and modesty as if they had
been brought up in a well regulated academy. They are
ready with their lessons at the proper hour, but it is also
necessary to give them time for play, and as they are not

§2 FATHER ANTHONY DANIEI,

led by fear, one must seize the occasion to subdue them
by love."1

The only drawback to this idyllic state of things was
the isolation of Notre Dame des Anges on the St. Charles
River, where the Huron seminary had been temporarily
located. "Experience is showing us," wrote Le Jeune,
"that it must be established among the bulk of the French
population, so that the French children may attract the
little savages." Convinced that something should be done
to bring those two elements together, the energetic
superior began to consider a project which had been
already discussed, but which had been delayed for several
years, that of founding a college at Quebec. In 1626, a
French nobleman, the Marquis de Gamache, had made a
donation of sixteen thousand gold ecus- "for the establish-
ment of a school in Canada," but the seizure of Quebec
by the English, in 1629, had put off indefinitely the carry-
ing out of this important work. Father Le Jeune took it
up when he came to the colony three years later, and in
1635 laid the foundation of the college which in after years
became the chief source of education for the entire country.
This institution, founded two years before Harvard, was

destined to flourish for nearly a century
The seminary and a half, but its beginnings were modest
a failure enough, comprising only a few pupils and

a professor. There the children of the
French colonists were taught catechism and the rudiments
of learning, and thither came the young Hurons and
Montagnais from Notre Dame des Anges. It was hoped
that their contact with the Europeans would civilize them
and eventually facilitate the christianizing of their country-
men; but unhappily this commingling of races never
fulfilled the expectations so hopefully looked for by
the early Jesuits in Canada. After having made the ex-

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xvi, p. 181.

2 An ecu was Talued at about sixty cents.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 53

periment for five years they had to acknowledge failure.
The Relation for 1642 informs us that ''the Huron seminary
which had been established at Notre Dame des Anges some
years ago, to educate children of that nation has been
interrupted for good reasons, the chief one being because
no noteworthy fruit is seen among the Indians. Our
experience of beginning the instruction of a nation through
its children has made us recognize this fact."

The transfer of the Hurons from Notre Dame des Anges
left Father Daniel free for work elsewhere;1 he did not
stay long enough in Quebec to witness the failure of the

seminary scheme. In the fall of 1637
He returns to rumors had reached the colony that the
Huronia Hurons on Georgian Bay had risen up

against the French and massacred their
missionaries; Governor de Montmagny, stirred by this
news, decided to send military aid to his countrymen, and
a small company of soldiers quitted Quebec for Huronia
in the following spring. They were accompanied by
Father Daniel who took as his companion Armand, one of
the seminarians. The trip nearly proved fatal for both.
While doubling a point on the Upper Ottawa river, the
surging of the water upset the canoe occupied by the
young Huron, and he went to the bottom with the mission-
ary's altar equipment and baggage. Daniel who had reach-
ed the shore to begin a portage was not a witness of the
struggles of his companion, but perceiving the upturned
canoe he flung himself on his knees and begged God to
save the life of the young man. A moment later the Huron
appeared on the surface; he caught hold of some branches
protruding from the water and was soon rescued from his
dangerous position. The first mishap, including the loss
of a portable altar and baggage for the mission, was
followed shortly after by another far more serious. The

1 Father Ambrose Davost replaced him and taught both Freneh
and Hurons from 1637 till 1642.

54 FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL

Huron canoes generally travelled apart, being oftentimes
at quite a distance from one another, and meeting rarely
except at the usual hour for camping in the evening.
Daniel occupied the last canoe, and was within a day's
paddling from Allumette Island. While making a portage
to the head of what is probably now know as Split Rock
rapid, he lost his trail in the thick woods. The unfor-
tunate man has left us his own account of the tragic
incident. "We started early one morning," he writes,

"without eating or drinking, and tra-
Narrow escape veiling rapidly over a very bad road
from death and in extreme heat, I was burdened with

my little baggage, and supposed that the
others would stop about noon to eat something. But they
kept right on and left me far behind. My weakness in-
creasing with the heat of the day, I stopped and, almost
fainting, threw myself on the ground unable to move.
After having rested a little while and eating some berries,
which did not help me much, I tried to start again. But I
was compelled to lie down, as my head ached severely.
I felt a great weakness through my whole body. . . I re-
mained an hour or two in this condition when my people,
having noticed that I delayed too long, came back and
found me."

After weeks of hardship and suffering Daniel reached
Huronia on July 9th, 1638; he was never again to travel
over a route of which he, perhaps more than any of the
early Jesuits, retained the most painful souvenirs. It was
pleasant, however, for him to learn that the rumors of
the Huron uprising were false. During his two years'
absence missionary activity had not abated throughout the

country; it promised, in fact, to extend
He arrives at still further in the near future. Daniel
Ossossaiie was sent to Ossossane, a mission on Not-

tawasaga Bay, which had been opened the
year before and was already solidly fortified against

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 55

attacks of the enemy. When he went to reside there, in
the summer of 1638, the residence was enclosed within a
palisade of posts ten or twelve feet high, with a bastion
built up of some thirty odd posts at one of the angles.
This was known as the residence of the Immaculate Con-
ception, and was occupied by Brebeuf, Le Mercier, Rague-
neau and Gamier, while the other and older residence,
Ihonatiria, harbored Pijart, Chastelain, and Jogues.
However, Ihonatiria had lost its importance as a mission
center. The bulk of the inhabitants had been carried off
it entirely.

The result of this decision was the establishment of
Ossossane just mentioned, and of Teanaostaye, the latter
being the largest town of the Cord clan. Four hundred
families resided in the latter place, many of whom were
favorably disposed to the missionaries; if won to the faith
they would exercise a great influence for good over the
minor villages in the neighborhood. Accordingly, in 1638,
Father de Brebeuf betook himself thither, conferred with
the inhabitants, and carried on his negotiations with such
tact and prudence that the Hurons decided to receive the
Fathers and provide a cabin and chapel for them. The
first Mass was said at Teanaostaye on June 25th, and
thenceforward, while not always used as a residence after
Fort Ste. Marie on the River Wye was built, in 1639, this
mission, known as St. Joseph II, became one of the most
important in the Huron country.

Father Daniel's presence there is recorded in the
Relation of 1641, when, with Simon Le Moyne as assistant,
he had under his pastoral care both Teanaostaye and
Cahiague. For the coming nine years he exercised his zeal
in these two places which were the nearest to the eastern
frontier of the Huron country and consequently the most
exposed to the Iroquois marauders. Cahiague was situated

56 FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL

near the shore of Lake Simcoe, about a mile from the
present town of Hawkstone, and was one
He is sent to of the best known spots in the country.
the Cord clan Champlain spent the winter of 1615-16
there, before he continued his warlike
expedition southward to the Iroquois country. In his
time it contained two hundred lodges occupied by the
Arendaenronnons, or nation of the Rock, a tribe partly
Huron, partly Neutral. The memory of the great white
chief was still vivid among them and had done much to
link the Hurons to the French; they were the first to
engage in the trade with the French and regarded them-
selves as their special allies. Daniel profiting by this
circumstance, immediately started his work of instructing
them. He had not to begin, as was the case in other
Huron villages, the task of gaining their good will; this
was already secured to him, and his five
His zeal and years' residence in the mission of St. John
its results Baptist at Cahiague, and in the surround-

ing villages, were years of fruitful toil.
The number of fervent Christians began to grow so rapidly
that the devoted missionary was no longer equal to the
task. The Relation for 1641 devotes a chapter to the
frontier missions of Cahiague and Teanaostaye and asserts
that they were sufficiently well peopled to give employ-
ment to six or eight laborers; but the fewness of the
missionaries obliged them to unite those two important
villages under the care of Anthony Daniel and Simon Le
Moyne. Their labor and fatigues were augmented by the
distances between the settlements and by the dangers they
were exposed to from the wandering Iroquois, but "their
joy increased in proportion to their sufferings, since the
steps one takes for the conquest of a single soul are so
many steps toward Heaven. "The two devoted mission-
aries," Jerome Lalemant informs us, "travelled from town
to town and from village to village, gathering in those ears

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 57

of corn which the angels separate from the tares, so that
in Heaven they may make the crown of the Elect which
cost so many labors and fatigues to the Son of God."

So successful had been Father Daniel's ministry along
the border of Lake Simcoe that a permanent residence
might have been looked for at Cahiague, had not the
Iroquois begun to make their presence felt. The village
lay on the route to and from their country and was subject
to hostile surprises ; it was in the danger zone, so to speak,
and prudence urged the natives to disperse or to retire

to spots less exposed to the enemy. This
He goes to migration, chronicled by Ragueneau in

Teanaostaye 1648, had begun in 1646, and had brought

a large number of the Rock clan to St.
Joseph's mission at Teanaostaye. Father Daniel followed
them thither and replaced Charles Gamier who had gone
to begin his cruel apprenticeship in the Tobacco nation.
But Teanaostaye was not beyond the reach of the Iroquois,
and the brave Daniel, during the two years which preceded
his great sacrifice, "carried his life in his hands, awaiting
with hope and supernatural love the death which fell to
his lot."

The Iroquois had grown more daring in the spring of
1648, especially along the frontiers of Huronia. Small
parties of them appeared here and there and then vanish-
ed, after having raised the scalp of some unfortunate
Huron or carried him off to captivity. They had begun
to raid what was exclusively Huron territory, and the
Jesuits and their neophytes, notably those
Fresh Iroquois at St. Ignace, drew nearer to Fort Ste.
invasions Marie where they looked for better pro-

tection. In the same spring a large con-
tingent of warriors accompanied the flotilla to Quebec,
not merely to protect the canoes from encounters with

58 FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL

the enemy along the route, but also to purchase arms and
ammunition from the French. Many of those warriors
belonged to Teanatostaye; under the circumstances their
departure from their own home was unfortunate, as it left
their village with only a few defenders in case of attack.
The incident, however, showed how confident the Hurons
at St. Joseph II were that all was safe for the moment.

Towards the close of the month of June, Daniel had
gone to Fort Ste. Marie to make his annual retreat. He

spent eight whole days there conferring
They attack with God alone in preparation for his
TeaB?.ostaye passage to eternity. While unconscious of

any proximate danger, he was evidently
inspired to hurry back to his mission; for his retreat,
having ended on July 2nd. the Relation tells us he refused
to rest even a day at Fort Ste. Marie and returned to
Teanaostaye. On the morning of July 4th, he had just said
Mass when a swarm of Iroquois appeared behind the
palisades of the town. The pious Hurons, according to
their custom, were still at their devotions when the cry
was heard outside : "To arms ! the enemy is here !"
Terror seized the poor Indians; they rose from their
knees; some took the flight; others prepared for their
defence. Father Daniel realized in a moment how des-
perate the situation was; he stood up in their midst ana
encouraged them to defend themselves. He gave absolu-
tion to the Christians still kneeling at his feet and exhort-
ed the catechumens present to prepare for baptism which
they had not yet received. Unable to confer the sacrament
on each one singly, he seized a handkerchief, dipped it
in water, raised it above his head and sprinkled the dozens
of kneeling forms before him, while he pronounced the
words which brought the grace of regeneration into their
souls.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 59

Meanwhile the enemy had broken through the palisades
and were becoming masters of the village. Instead of

taking flight, as many of the Indians were
Daniel's doing, the heroic missionary hurried from

heroic death cabin to cabin to baptize, to absolve

the old and the sick, and encourage them
to die bravely. The holy man then made his way back to
the church which was now filled with terrified Hurona.
Closely on his heels came the barbarians whose savage
howls rent the morning air. After a second absolution
and a word of consolation to his flock, Daniel went
forward fearlessly and faced the enemy at the door. The
Iroquois, astonished at the sight of the black-gown stand-
ing so stoically before them, suddenly recoiled. A moment
later they surrounded him from every side, aimed their
arrows and guns at him and fired. The arrows penetrated
his body in many places, while a bullet from an arquebuse
pierced his breast, inflicting a mortal wound. A moment
later Father Daniel yielded up his soul to God, truly as
a good pastor who exposes his life for the salvation of his

flock. The enraged Iroquois rushed upon
He is flung his prostrate form, and, as if he alone had

into the flames been the object of their hatred, washed

their hands and faces with his blood,
"because," wrote Bressani, "it was formed in so brave a
heart."1 They stripped his body naked, covered it with
blows, and, having set fire to the church, threw the
remains of the martyr into the flames. Thus ended the
career of this holy Jesuit, a career precious before God
and men. He was the first missionary to die among the
Hurons and had for fourteen years borne the trials and
sufferings so plentiful in the begining of that missionary
field. In the words of Father Ragueneau, "he seemed to
have been born only for the salvation of these peoples;
he had no stronger desire than to die for them, and we

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxxix, ;>. 241

60 FATHER ANTHONY DANIEL,

hope all .this country will have in him a powerful inter-
cessor before God."

The destruction of Teanaostaye was complete. The
number of those killed or taken captive was probably
about seven hundred souls, mostly women and children;
the number of those, however, who escaped was much
greater. They fled in the direetion of Fort Ste. Marie
where the Fathers, despite their own poverty, tried to assist
them, to mourn with them in their affliction, and to console
them with the hope of Paradise. Father Ragueneau feel-
ingly concludes his account of the disaster in these words :
"If only God will receive His glory from our losses, there
will always be a source of gladness to us. That is enough
for us, whatever it may cost us, provided we see the
number of the Elect increased for eternity, since it is
for heaven we labor and not for earth."

Heaven did not wait long to testify to the heroic holiness
of Father Daniel. He appeared twice after
Appears after his death to Father Chaumonot who had
his death been his companion at various times in the

mission-field, whom he had once saved
from drowning, and with whom he had lived in a holy
intimacy. The first apparition took place at the village
of Ossossane when he came to Chaumonot in a dream with
the features of a man about thirty years of age and
surrounded with glory. According to Chaumonot's own
account he seemed to be with other Fathers who wer«
conferring together about the means to convert the sav-
ages. Realizing that he was in presence of one who had
left this world and that he was present there miraculously,
Chaumonot was seized with a great desire to speak to
him, but out of respect for others who were present, the
thought came to him that if Father Daniel was a saint,
as he believed he was, he could speak to him intellectually,
and he asked him to come to him. Father Daniel ap-
proached and embraced him. When Chaumonot asked to-

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 61

tell him what God required most particularly of him, the
vision repeated the fifth demand of the Our Father,
"Forgive us our trespasses," and then kissed his cheek.
On awaking, the good Father Chaumonot was so persuaded
of the reality of the apparition and so filled with com-
punction and fear of the justice of God, that those senti-
ments remained with him during the rest of his life in
the Huron mission.

The same Father was favored later by a second appar-
ition of Father Daniel. This time moved
Appears a by the desire to honor him through his

second time relics, he asked him why the Divine good-

ness had permitted his precious body to
be so unworthily treated after his death, so that no one
had the happiness of being able to gather up its ashes.
Daniel replied that he had been well rewarded; God, holy
and adorable, had considered his death and sufferings and
made them a great help to the souls in Purgatory. This
answer filled the heart of the pious Chaumonot with fervor
and devotion towards the suffering souls, and urged him
ever after to make acts of humiliation and interior mor-
tification for their alleviation. Father Ragueneau himself
in 1652, three years after the death of the holy missionary,
asserted under oath that what he wrote in the Relation of
1649 was the result of his personal observation and of the
public testimony of more than two hundred Christian
Hurons who had escaped death when St. Joseph II was
destroyed, many of whom were baptized by him even while
his church was in flames and who saw him giving up his
life heroically for them. The Holy See will some day
examine the life and virtues of this Servant of God and
will give the true interpretation of the supernatural occur-
rences here related; for Anthony Daniel's name figures
among the "Canadian Martyrs" whose Cause has been
deferred to Rome for final adjudication. Meanwhile we
may ask God to hasten the day when we shall see Daniel
and his companions favored with the honors of the Altar.

FATHER CHARLES GARNIER
Slain by the Iroquois, December 7, 16^9

Father Charles Gamier

VICTIM OF THE IROQUOIS

CHARLES Gamier was the son of a rich and noble
Parisian family; he was born on the feast of the
Annunciation, March 25th, 1605 (or 1606), and from his
earliest years he was singled out as one on whom God
had lofty designs. His innocence of life, coupled with
a frank and manly character, gave him a prestige which
imposed respect among the companions of his own age.
While he was a student in the Jesuit college in his native
city, his father was accustomed to give
His early years him a few pieces of silver every month,
and education either as a reward for his application to
study or to enable him to gratify his
personal fancies; but the boy rarely applied this money
to his own use, preferring to throw it into the almsbox
of one of the city prisons, the Petit Chatelet. One day,
while crossing the Pont Neuf in Paris, Charles saw an
impious book for sale. With his small monthly allow-
ance he purchased the volume and destroyed it, "lest
some one by reading it might offend God." His horror
of everything that could wound the Heart of God he
attributed to the love he had for our Lady whom he
called his Mother and to whom he gave all his confidence.
"It was she," he asserted in after-life, "who carried me
in her arms during my youthful years; it was she who
called me to the Society of her Son."1

Thia call to the religious profession was promptly
answered by the young man; Charles decided to con-

1 Jesuit Relations, Cler. edit., toI. iky, p. 11».

g4 FATHER CHARGES GARNIER

secrate his life to God's service in the Society of Jesus.
Monsieur Garnier, who evidently had other plans in view
for his son, opposed this pious design and endeavored
to dissuade Charles from the irrevocable step. He yielded,
however, after he had been convinced that his son was
not the plaything of a passing illusion; and nobly did
he make the sacrifice. When the moment of separation
came, he told the superiors of the Order that he was
giving them a child, "who from his birth had never com-
mitted the least disobedience, and never caused him the
least displeasure."2

Charles Garnier entered the Jesuit novitiate in Paris,
on September 5th, 1624, and soon became
He enters the a model of exact observance of the rule.
Jesuit Order His angelic modesty shone in a face beam-
ing with happiness; he was held up as
a "mirror of holiness" to those around him. So deep
was the impression Garnier made on his fellow religious
that all felt that his was a favored soul and that God
had other gifts in store for him. After the young novice
had completed his term of probation and pronounced his
vows, in 1626, he was sent to study in the college of
Clermont, one of the chief institutions of the Jesuit Order
in France. From 1629 to 1632 he taught in the college
of Eu, returning to Clermont only in the latter year to
study theology and prepare himself for the priesthood, a
dignity he was raised to in 1635.

The missions of Canada had begun to attract the
young religious. The perusal of the letters sent back by
his Jesuit brethren from those distant shores, the accounts
of the spiritual conquests which were being made among
the savage tribes, the pathetic call for more laborers in
the vineyard, had set his heart afire. His superiors, to

2 Ibid., p. 146.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 65

whom he had confided his secret longing, were willing
to give full scope to Charles Garnier's zeal, and would

have allowed hirn to leave France for
His vocation to Canada immediately after his ordination
the missions in 1635, but "having desired that his

father should give his consent on account
of special obligations to him which the Order was under,"
they delayed his departure. This delay only served to
augment the young priest's desire for the mission-field
beyond the Atlantic. His one thought day and night was
the conversion of the Indians and the prospect of life
among them. The permission to sail, however, was
granted in 1636, and he quitted the shores of France in
the fleet which brought out Monsieur de Montmagny, the
successor of Champlain, as governor of New France.
During the voyage he seized the opportunity of effecting
a remarkable conversion. Among the members of the
crew was a sailor "without conscience, without religion
and without God," who had not gone to confession for
over ten years, a dereliction of Christian duty that was
looked on as tragic in that age of faith and practice.
The unhappy man was avoided by every one on board
until Father Garnier, urged by his zeal for souls, took
him in hand. After many kind services and delicate
attentions he succeeded in winning him over, heard his
confession, and restored him to the friendship of God.
This conversion brought such peace and joy of conscience
to the poor sailor that the hearts of all on board were
touched.1

This edifying incident helped to shorten what was
already a remarkably rapid voyage across the ocean.
The vessel, with M. de Montmagny, entered the Gulf,

sailed up the St. Lawrence and arrived
He arrives in at Quebec on June 11th, 1636. The gov-
New France ernor, "having arrived before Kebec on

the night of St. Barnabas," wrote LeJeune

1 Jesuit Relation*, Clev. •dit, vol. xxxv, p. 121.

66 FATHER CHARLES GARNIER

"he cast anchor without announcing himself; the next
morning we had word that he was in the vessel which
the darkness had hidden from us. We went down to
the shore of the river to receive him and found that
Father Peter Chastelain and Father Charles Garnier were
in his company." The two young missionaries were
present at his solemn installation and had the privilege
of witnessing the profound Catholic faith of the second
governor of New France. "Monsieur de Champlain," con-
tinued LeJeune, "having left us during the last year of
his ministration to go to Heaven, we were anxious as to
what zeal his successor would have for this infant
Church... If first actions are prognostications of those
to come, we have reason to thank God in the person of
Monsieur de Montmagny. One of his first acts, after the
usual installation festivities were ended, was to stand
sponsor for an Indian about to be pabtized." When in-
vited to fill this function, the pious governor very will-
ingly accepted and "rejoiced in his good fortune that in
beginning his official life he could help to open the door
of the Church to a poor soul who wished to enter the
fold of Jesus Christ."2 The Father who had prepared
the savage asked Father Chastelain whether he would
not be glad to begin his labors in New France with a
baptism. The newly arrived missionary accepted the
offer with the greatest alacrity, and it is easy to surmise
that Father Garnier, his companion on the voyage, assisted
at this consoling ceremony.

Being destined for the mission on Georgian Bay, the
sojourn of the two Jesuits in Quebec was of short duration,

and on July 1st, Chastelain and Garnier,
Chosen for the with two other Jesuits, Buteux and Quen-
Kuron missions tin, embarked for Three Rivers, a mission

which had been founded by Paul LeJeune
two years before, and which had become the terminus of

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. viii, p. 217.

2 Ibid., vol. viii, p. 219.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS $7

the Huron flotillas from the West. Governor de Mont-
magny escorted the four men to the river bank, "with
matchless courtesy and affection," and had three cannon
shots fired as a farewell salute at their departure. They
travelled up the St. Lawrence, Buteux and Chastelain in
one canoe and Quentin and Gamier in the other, and
received at Three Rivers such a cordial welcome from
Father LeJeune that "the demonstration of affection im-
pressed the natives present." A feast next day completely
won the savage hearts and, as we shall see, made the
route to the Huron Country smoother for the missionaries.
AVhile at Three Rivers Father Gamier had a consolation
similar to the one Chastelain experienced at Quebec; he
was initiated into his ministry in Canada by baptizing a
little Indian girl on July 7th, 1636.

On the twenty-first of the same month they embarked
in their canoes and started for Huronia — "the happiest
men in the world," the Relation recorded, 1 Their passage
was so easily secured — and yet "the affairs
He starts for of God are generally so crossed at the
Huronia beginning," LeJeune remarked — that it

was almost suspected something had gone
wrong. The missionaries, however, were treated well on
way. In the first place they were allowed to wear their
shoes. This was a special privilege, for usually the
Jesuits were obliged to travel bare-footed lest they should
deposit sand or dirt in the small canoes. In cold or
hot weather they had to adapt themselves to this custom
unless they met with Indians kind enough to let them
follow their own. They enjoyed another privilege in not
being obliged to paddle. This favor they evidently ap-
preciated, for the Relation of 1636 remarked, "It is hard
work, especially at first, when one is not accustomed to
it... We give to every canoe in which any of our
Fathers embark a large sheet which serves as a sail to

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. ix, i. 247.

68 FATHER CHARLES GARNIER

relieve them from this work; but although these bar-
barians are told that the sail is the Fathers' paddle, and
they do not wield any other, they do not fail sometimes
to make them take a wooden one, which has to be well
worked to satisfy them."1

A canoe full of savages on their way to Three Rivers
met them at Petite Nation2 on the Ottawa, and Garnier
seized the occasion to drop a note to Father LeJeune.
"The bearer of this," he wrote, "will tell you better than
we can the name of the place where they met us. We
are in good health, thank God, and gliding along swiftly
in our bark gondolas. We are flying to
Happenings our long sought Paradise with an in-

<m the roule crease of courage which God had given
us."3 He had a kind word for Kionche
and Aenons, the two Indians who had charge of their
canoes. Chastelain, in his turn, wrote when they reached
Lake Nipissing, August 8th: "We have been here since
yesterday among the Nipissings, so happy and in such
good health that I am quite ashamed of it; for if I had
had heart and courage enough, I feel that God would have
given me a bit of His cross to bear, as He has done to
our Fathers who have been over this route before us. If
He had done me this favor I would be a little more cast
down than I am. May He be blessed by all the angels !
He has treated a child like a child; I did not paddle;
I carried only my own baggage, except three days at
the portages, when I carried a little package that some
one offered me because one of our savages was ill...
We arrived at the (Allumette) Island on the eve of St.
Ignatius (July 30th) ; our peas having given out, we
bought some Indian corn. This corn lasted us until we

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. ix I. p. 243.

2 This was an Algonquin reserve in the seventeenth century. The
name, "Petite Nation," is still preserved.

3 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. ix., 251.

TIIp: CANADIAN MARTYRS 69

reached here."1 Evidently God was waiting His own good
time; the young missionary would soon have other op-
portunities of suffering and thus make up for the easy
journey to Georgian Bay. Gamier reached Huronia on
the 13th of August and went direct to Ihonatiria; Chas-
telain had arrived there the day before. Both men had
gone to devote their lives and labors for the salvation
of the Hurons and naturally were received with joy by
Father de Brebeuf and his brethren already there.

Unhappily, this joy was shortlived and threatened to
turn to sorrow. Early in September, 1636, a mysterious

illness, which the Relation called "purple
His first mis- fever," attacked the village of Ihonatiria
sionary trials and incapacitated both white men and

Indians. Father Isaac Jogues, a recent
arrival in the country, was the first victim and nearly
succumbed; the next was Chastelain who received the
last Sacraments. Father Garnier was a witness of this
domestic affliction, and although occupied with the exer-
cises of his yearly retreat, he asked to be allowed to in-
terrupt them so that he might aid the patients. His
physical strength, however, was not as great as his
charity; he, too, was seized with the fever, and the little
residence at Ihonatiria became for the nonce a hospital.
The Bufferings of the sick, occasioned by a lack of skilled
medical attention and the accompaniments of poverty,
were severe. "If a bed of feathers," wrote Father Le
Mercier to LeJeune, "often seems hard to a sick person,
I leave it to Your Reverence to imagine if he could rest
easily upon a bed which was nothing but a mat of rushes
spread over some bark and at most a blanket or a piece
of skin thrown over it." Yet "one and all were never
more cheerful; the sick were as content to die as to live,
and by their patience, piety and devotion greatly lightened
the little trouble we took for them night and day."1

1 Jesuit Relation*, Clev. edit., vol. xiii, p. 99.

70 FA1 IHARLES GAUNIER

Blood-letting, the panacea for so many ills in the seven-
teenth century, was freely resorted to, the sick mission-
aries recovered slowly and continued their work among
the savages.

Ihonatiria was the first really permanent mission
the Jesuits had in Huronia; it was situated in the im-
mediate neighborhood of what is now Todd's Point, in
Simcoe County,1 and had been established two years
previously, in 1634. A large cabin serving as chapel and
dwelling had been built; the Fathers had gained the
sympathy of the Hurons, and were actively occupied in
catechising there. The location however,
Ossossane is was not deemed central enough, and it
founded was decided to go elsewhere at the first

favorable opportunity. Ossossane, the
principal village of the Bear clan, appeared to Brebeuf
to be a more favorable center for a mission. He had
already marked the spot, but the frequent changes of
the sites of Huron villages, prompted usually by scarcity
of fuel, poverty of the soil, or stress of war, prevented
him for the moment from making the transfer. Although
Ossossane never moved far from where it originally
stood, it had already changed its site three times,2 and
Brebeuf did not care to risk the expense involved in the
construction of a church and house which might be after
all only temporary. However, in the spring of 1637 he
suggested to the Hurons of that village his project of
migrating thither from Ihonatiria. Not merely was the
proposal accepted, but the savages even offered to build
a cabin for the Fathers. So rapidly were operations
carried out that, a month later, Brebeuf could write:
"Since my last letter (dated May 20th), a new residence

1 Lot 6, concession xx, xxi. Tiny township. (Cf. Jones' Old
Huronia, pp. 28-31.)

2 The successive sites of Ossassane lay in the neighborhood of
Varwood Point, on Nottawasaga Bay. (Cf. Jones' Old Huronia,
p. 27.)

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 71

of the Immaculate Conception has been established, and
we began to occupy it on the feast of SS. Primus and
Felician, martyrs, June 9th... Forty or fifty Indians,
men and women, came to Ihonatiria to fetch our grain
and our few pieces of furniture."1 Ossossane, also called
La Rochelle by the French fur-traders from some fancied
resemblance to the seaport of that name in France, be-
came a center of immense missionary activity, and re-
mained such during its short existence, that is, until the
completion of the central residence, Fort Ste. Marie, in
1639.

In a letter, a year later, to his brother Henry, a Car-
melite friar in Paris, Father Garnier wrote: "I must tell
you how the time was spent since I wrote you last year.
I was at that time at the little village of Ihonatiria; I
came hither a few days after Corpus Christi... There
are forty Indian lodges, and ours bears the name of the

Immaculate Conception of Our Lady."2
Goes to live at One of his letters to his father, in the
Ossossane same city, gives us a lively description

of Ossossane. "You must know," he wrote,
"that we are here living in a fortress which has nothing
like it in France. We are encircled by a wall quite dif-
ferent from that of the Bastille. Yesterday they com-
pleted one of the towers, and we stand less in dread of
Spanish cannon than you do in Paris. But I fear that
some cunning fellow will be ready to tell you that it is
because cannon can scarcely be brought nearer here than
some three hundred leagues, that our ramparts consist of
an enclosure of posts ten or twelve feet high and half
a foot thick, and posts that our tower is made up of some
thirty odd planted at one angle of the ramparts so as to
command two of the sides of the enclosure, and that an-

1 Carayon: Premiere mission des Jesuites <iu Canada, p. 161. Pa-
ris, 1864.

2 Garnier'3 I-,etterH. p. %%.

72 FA THEE CHARLES GARNIER

other will be built to defend the other two... It will be
enough to put you on your guard against such eaves-
droppers if I tell you that the Hurons
He describes admire our fortification, and imagine that
the spot those in France are modelled on about

the same pattern. You see how different
their ideas are from ours. This is why I have gained
much by leaving France where you used to twit me for
not having any beard, for the Indians on that account
think me handsome."1 The witty word or joyous com-
ment, denoting Father Garnier's sprightly character as
well as his desire to give a moment of pleasure to dear
ones beyond the sea, was frequently displayed in his
correspondence. And yet the letters from his pen which
have been preserved for us, breathe a sweet rsignation
amid sufferings that were acute and dangers that were
always imminent.

The arrival of new laborers in the vineyard urged the
Jesuits to extend their activities and carry the Word of
Life as soon as possible to the neighboring settlements,
They established themselves at Teanaostaye the chief
town of the Cord clan, they went from village to village,
instructing and baptizing children and adults in danger
of death, and would have continued to do so indefinitely
had not the incursions of the Iroquois become more

frequent and threatening, and obliged
Mission acti- them to provide for their own security
vity in Huronia and that of their neophytes who were

gradually increasing in numbers. . A
strongly fortified residence, where they could retire in
the hours of danger, was considered necessary, but the
funds to build it were evidently lacking. The French
government was indirectly appealed to, nor was the appeal
made in vain, for we learn from a letter written by Paul
LeJeune to Mutius Vitelleschi, General of the Jesuits, in

1 Garnier's Letters, p. 26.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 73

1642, that Cardinal Richelieu, at the request of his niece,
the Duchess d'Aiguillon, granted thirty thousand livres

from the Royal treasury for the construc-
Building of tion of a fort in Huronia strong enough

Fort Ste. Marie to withstand the attacks of hostile savages.

This fort, known as Fort Ste. Marie, the
foundations of which are still visible after nearly three
centuries, was built on the east bank fo a little stream *
connecting Lake Isiargui with Georgian Bay. When it
was completed in 1639, it became the headquarters of the
Huron missionaries; Ossossane was abandoned and the
Fathers and their effects were transferred to their new
home.

Meanwhile the desire to extend the influence of the
Gospel was uppermost with the Jesuits, and a couple
of tentative expeditions were made to sound the disposi-
tions of the neighboring tribes. Brebeuf and Chaumonot
spent the winter of 1640-1641 with the Neutral nation
southward along Lake Erie, while Garnier was taken
from Fort Ste. Marie and sent, with Jogues and Pijart,
in a westerly direction to the Petun or Tobacco nation,
who dwelt on the peninsula lying between Nottawasaga
Bay and Lake Huron. But the ill-success of both at-
tempts showed that the time was not yet ripe for ex-
tension. "Last year," wrote Jerome Lalemant in the
Relation of 1641, "we undertook a mission to the Petuns,
but we have deemed it more expedient to concentrate
our energies and not continue our labors
His first visit among those more distant peoples until
to the Petuns the nearer tribes have been won over,
more especially when we take into ac-
count the small number of our men." The only fruits
reaped during Father Garnier's visit to the Petuns were
the baptisms of a few children and adults in danger of
deaht. The mass of the population resisted the grace

1 Now known as the Wye River. This venerable spot is at Old
Fort on the Grand Trunk Railway, three miles from Midland, Ont.

74 FATHER CHARLES GARNIER

so freely offered to them; they accused the missionary
of sorcery and cruelly drove him away. But God did
not allow his faithful servant to go unavenged. "The
town of Ehwae, the principal town of the mission,'' con-
tinued Jerome Lalemant, "whence Father Gamier had
been driven last year, underwent every conceivable mis-
fortune before the close of the twelvemonth. Most of the
lodges were burned by the enemy three months later;
many inhabitants died of hunger, cold and smallpox;
others perished in the waves, and numbers were taken
by the enemy. In fact, the matter appeared so extra-
ordinary that the captain of a neighboring village could
not help noticing it, and attributed the desolation of the
village to no other cause than the refusal it made to
hear the preachers of the Gospel last year."

Ill-success, however, could not daunt the courage of
the young missionary. He had now several years' ex-
perience in Huronia, and he was ready to fill any position

in the field, chiefly on account of his
Appreciated complete mastery of the Huron tongue
by Brebeuf which gave him a remarkable ascendency

over the tribes. Father de Brebeuf, him-
self an excellent judge in this matter, writing to the General
in 1637, asserted that the missionaries in Huronia were in
every way extraordinary workers, who combined, in an
unusual manner, eloquence and union with God with a
burning zeal for souls. "So persistant and studious are
they all," he wrote, "that in only one or two years they
have gained a truly wonderful proficiency in a language
still rude and not reduced to grammatical rules. How-
ever, in this regard," he added, "Father Gamier ranks
first." "He mastered the language of the Indians so thor-
oughly," wrote Ragueneau, in his turn, twelve years later,
"that they themselves were astonished at him." An inde-
fatigable laborer and replete with every gift of nature and
grace, he became an accomplished missionary.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 75

A more fruiful field than any yet offered him, where
he would find ample scope for his zeal, was now alloted
to him. This was Teanaostaye,1 the largest village of the
Cord clan, where a mission had been established in 1638.
Here for six years he spent himself with all the devoted-
ness and self-sacrifice of which he was capable. From
1640 to 1646 he labored in season and out of season,
instructing the dusky Hurons in the truths of religion,
rooting out their superstitions, teaching them to recognize
the one true God, urging them to pray to Him, conferring
baptism on them, following them on the chase, strengthen-
ing their souls with the Sacraments, and burying them
when they were dead. So thorough was his knowledge
of the Indian character, so deeply did he penetrate their
hearts, and so powerful was the eloquence of his example
that he drew the Hurons to him. His face, his eyes, his
gestures, even his smiles, proclaimed his holiness; his

very presence raised Huron hearts to God.
His persona! Tne Relation of 1650 tells us that several
influence were converted to the faith at the mere

aspect of his angelic face, and all who
came in contact with him took away with them the liveliest
impression of his virtue. "The love of God." wrote Rague-
neau, "which reigned in his heart animated all his move-
ments and made them holy." This interior perfection of
soul was, after the manner of the saints, sustained by a
rigid penitential life. Father Garnier's self-imposed bodily
mortifications were many and severe. His bed, a combina-
tion of saplings and bark, was hard and uninviting; every
time he returned from his mission journeys he sharpened
the iron points of the belt which he wore next to his
naked flesh; his only food was that of the Hurons them-
selves, that is to say, "the least the most miserable tramp

1 Known also as St. Joseph II, situated on the Flanagan farm,
west half of lot 7, concession iv, Medonte township. (Cf. Jones'
Old Huronia, p. 19.)

76 FATHER CHARLES GARNIER

could hope for in France." And thus this holy man
preached the Kingdom of God both by word and example
to his people at Teanaostaye for six years.

During the alarms caused by the visits of the cruel
Iroquois, and especially during the pestilence which raged
several times in Huronia, when the missionaries were
treated as sorcerers and when all doors were closed against
them, Father Gamier went fearlessly
His labor and from village to village and cabin to cabin,
untiring zeal wherever he knew there was a soul to
save; his zeal and charity always found
the means to break through the obstacles placed in his
way. He had little to do with mere human prudence, and
had recourse to the Angels whose powerful help he always
invoked. Hurons whom he went to assist at the hour of
death asserted that they had seen him accompanied by a
young man of rare beauty and majestic brilliancy.

In October, 1646, Father Gamier handed over to Father
Daniel the flourishing mission of St. Joseph, at Teana-
ostaye, and betook himself with Father Garreau to the
Petun nation whence he had been driven out six years be-
fore as a sorcerer. It was the Petuns themselves who now
asked for missionaries to instruct them in the Christian
religion and to establish centers among them. Two large
villages, Etharita in the Wolf clan, and Ekarenniondi in
the Deer clan, were chosen as the most favorable sites for
missionary activity, and the missions of St. John and St.
Mathias were founded.1 In this fresh field .Gamier found
an outlet for his devouring zeal. In a letter to the Gen-
eral of the Jesuits, April 25th, 1647, he wrote, "Good Father
Garreau and I are nearly always separated, for he makes
a stay of ten or twelve days in one village and I in the
other. Then he will come to join me and I him, and after

1 A third mission, St. Matthew, was founded among the Fetuns,
im Feb. 1649, and placed in charge of Father Noel Chabanel, whs
was to shed his blood a few months later.

THE CANADIAN .MARTYRS 77

spending two or three days together he will go to the
village where I had been previously and I to the village
where he had been. Thus we live without companionship
save that of the Good Angels and that of the souls we are
instructing." !

Isolation among savages was one of the hardships
which had to be borne patiently, and Gamier evidently
carried this cross joyously. But other crosses were ap-
pearing on the horizon. The Iroquois had
The darkening already proved that they were bent on the
horizon effacement of the Huron nation and would

show no mercy to those who fell into their
hands. The destruction of his old mission of Teanaostaye
in July, 1648, and the violent death of Father Daniel, his
successor there, gave Gamier food for serious reflection,
but it did not dampen the ardor of his zeal among the
Petuns at Etharita. Encouraged by his own success and
that of Garreau, his companion at St. Mathias, he entertain-
ed the hope that the Iroquois would limit their destructive
activities to the Hurons proper and would and would
leave the Petuns undisturbed. In this, however, Father
Gamier was to meet with a cruel disappointment.

After the invasion by the enemy in the spring of 1649,
the mission centers among the Hurons were destroyed;
only Fort Ste. Marie still stood intact. During the rest
of that year the bands of Iroquois savages remained prowl-
ing about the country, seizing and slaying
The Iroquois all who fell in their way. The Petun
invasion village nearest to their haunts, and ne-

cessarily the most exposed, was Etharita,
Father Garnier's own mission, containing five or six hun-
dred families. Spies had been sent out to watch the move-
ments of the enemy, and anticipating an attack, a body
of Petun warriors went out on December 5th, 1649, to meet
them, leaving the village quite unprotected. But the astute
Iroquois, always on the alert, avoided their advance, took a

78 FATHER CHARLES GARNIER

roundabout way, and seizing two straggling Petuns, learn-
ed from them of the absence of the warriors from Etharita
and the desperate straits of the women and children left
behind. Losing no time the dreaded enemy appeared
before the gates of Etharita at three o'clock in the after-
noon of December 7th, 1649, and attacked the defenceless
inhabitants. Some sought safety in flight; others were
slain on the spot; others were taken prisoners; but the
Iroquois fearing the return of the absent warriors, hasten-
ed to complete their sanguinary work, and then retreated
precipitately, putting to death all who could not keep up
with them in their flight.

Father Gamier was one of the victims of this hideous
massacre. When the enemy appeared he was instructing
the people in their cabins. At the first alarm he went
straight to the chapel where he found some Christians.1
"We are dead men now, brothers," he said to them; "pray
to God and escape by whatever v/ay you can; but keep
your faith as long as life remains, and may death find you
thinking of God !" He gave them his blessing and then
left hurriedly to help other souls. The whole village was
in despair; defense was useless. Several
He falls mortal- about to flee implored Father Garnier to
ly wounded go with them, but he refused; and unmind-
ful of self he thought only of the salvation
of the unfortunate victims around him. Urged on by his
zeal he hastened hither and thither, giving absolution to
the Christians whom he met. In the burning cabins he
sought the children, the sick, or the catechumens, and
over them, even in the midst of the flames, he poured the
waters of baptism, his own heart burning with no other
fire than that kindled by the love of God.

It was while engaged in this holy work that he met his

1 The account of Father Garnier's death is found in the Relation
of 1650. Ciev. edit., vol. xxxv, p. Ill et seq.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 79

death. A musket ball struck him, penetrating his body
a little below the breast; another, from the same volley,

tearing open his stomach and lodging in
His heroism the thigh, brought him to the ground. His
even in death courage, however, was unabated. The

Iroquois savage who had fired at him
stripped him of his cassock, and leaving him weltering in
his blood, went in pursuit of the other fugitives. Father
Gamier, a short time after, was seen to clasp his hands
in prayer; then, looking about him, he perceived, some
feet away, a poor man who, like himself, had received
his death wound, but who still gave signs of life. Mur-
muring a few words of prayer, the dying missionary, in
whom zeal for souls was stronger than death, struggled
to his knees, and, rising with difficulty, dragged himself
as best he could toward the sufferer, in order to assist
him. He had made but three or four steps when he fell
again, somewhat heavily. Raising himself a second time,
he got once more upon his knees and strove to approach
the wounded Petun, but his body, drained of its blood
which was flowing in abundance from his wounds, was
not equal to his heroism. After advancing five or six
steps he fell a third time. "Further than this," the
Relation adds, "we have not been able to ascertain what
he accomplished. The good Christian woman who faith-
fully related all this to us, saw no more of him, being
herself overtaken by an Iroquois, who struck her on the
head with a war-hatchet, felling her upon the spot, though
she afterward escaped. The Father, shortly after, received
from a hatchet two blows upon the temples, one on either
side, which penetrated to the brain. To him it was the
recompense for all past services, the richest he had hoped
for from God's goodness. His body was stripped, and left
entirely naked where it lay."

A remnant of fugitive Christians, all covered with blood,
arrived hurriedly at Ekarenniondi, twelve miles away, and

SO FATHER CHARLES GARNIER

gave the news of the massacre. Fearing that a similar
misfortune was in store for them, the night of December
7th was one of continual alarm for the people of St.
Mathias. However, early on the 8th, it was ascertained
that the enemy had retired, and Fathers Garreau and
Greslon set out at once for Etharita. A sad spectacle
awaited them. They saw only dead bodies heaped to-
gether, some almost consumed by fire, others deluged with
their own blood. The few who still showed signs of life
were all covered with wounds, but looking for death and
blessing God in their wretchedness. After investigation
they found the body of Father Gamier completely covered
with blood and ashes. They buried him in the spot where
the church had stood, although there remained no longer

any trace of the building, the fire having
Finding of his consumed all. "It was truly a rich trea-
mangled body sure," we read in the Relation of 1650.

"to deposit in so desolate a spot the body
of so noble a servant of God; but that great God will
surely find a way to reunite us all in Heaven since it is
for His sake alone that we are thus scattered both during
life and after death."

Two days later the Petun warriors who had gone to
intercept the Iroquois, returned to Etharita, only to find
their village in ashes and the dead and mangled bodies of
their wives and children. For half a day they maintained
a profound silence, seated after the manner of savages on
the ground, without lifting their eyes or uttering a sigh,
like marble statues without speech, without sight and
without movement. The loss of the pastor and his flock
was another heavy blow to the Huron mission, but "the
missionaries adored the Divine hand and disposed them-
selves to accept all the He willed even to the end."

Thus ended the mission of St. John, at Etharita, and the
heroic Father Charles Gamier. No trace has yet been
discovered of this once flourishing Petun village. While

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 81

the site of St. Mathias has undoubtedly been located, owing
to its proximity to Ekarenniondi, or Standing Rock, a
monumental landmark, forty feet high, still to be found In
Simcoe county, Etharita, where Father Garnier was
interred under the ruins of his chapel, has not yet been
discovered. Data given in the Relations place it four
leagues in a southwesterly direction from Standing Rock.
Possibly the presence of ash beds or refuge heaps, the
only sure sign of ancient villages sites, may be traced
some day in that neighborhood to renew public interest
in Father Garnier's life and labors.2

It must be said, however, that the memory of this
Jesuit is one of the most highly cherished in Canadian

missionary annals. His youth, his patri-
His memory cian birth, his abandonment of worldly
recalled prospects, his untiring zeal, his tragic

end, have all provided topics for writers
of fiction. A couple of these writers have in recent years
woven details entirely unauthentic into his early life and
thrown a glamor of romance about his name and his
career. Suffice it to say, the imaginations of novelists will
find very little promising material to work on in Garnier's
life. Father Paul Ragueneau, who was his spiritual adviser
for twelve years and who knew all the secrets of his heart,
pays an admirable tribute in the Relation of 1650 to the
holiness of Garnier. "His great aspirations after sanctity,"
he wrote, "had grown with him from his infancy. I can
truly say that in those twelve years I do not think that,
save in sleep, he spent a single hour without these burning
and vehement desires of progressing more and more in
the ways of God and of helping forward in them his fellow-
men. Outside of these considerations, nothing in the world
affected him, neither relatives, nor friends, nor rest, nor
hardships, nor fatigues. God was his all; and apart from
this, all else was to him as nothing."

2 Cf. Jones' Old Huronia, pp. 260-261.

32 FATHER CHARLES GARNIER

The Council of Bishops convened in Quebec, in 1886,
linked Father Garnier's name with those of the other Can-
adian missionary victims of the Iroquois, in the petition
presented to the Holy See for the introduction of the cause
of Beatification of Father John de Brebeuf and his com-
panions.

FATHER NOEL CHABANEL
Slain by a Huron Apostate, December 8. 161,8

Father Noel Chabanel

HURON MISSIONARY

PIE diocese of Mende in the department of Lozere, in
France, now a restless hive of human industries, pre-
sented a very quiet and rustic aspect in the first years of
the seventeenth century. Its numerous hills, open to the
bright sunshine and balmy air of southern France, were
wooded with forests, thick and dark, the undisturbed
growth of ages; its valleys furnished pasturage for
immense flocks of sheep whose wool formed one of the
staple products of the country; its soil was fertile;

minerals were found in abundance — in a
His birth and word, Nature had given Lozere all the re-
early years sources that made for the peace and

happiness of its large peasant population.
Unhappily, those good people were still feeling the after
effects of the religious wars waged by the Huguenots. A
few years previously, the turbulent sectaries had destroy-
ed the splendid cathedral of Mende, which had been
built by the Bishop, Frangois de la Rovere, afterwards
Pope Urban V; in the name of freedom of conscience they
overran the country, invaded private homes, killed the
inhabitants and spread desolation throughout the diocese.
Peace, it is true, had been restored between the
Catholics and the Huguenots, but the echoes of the former
stormy years were still occasionally heard in and around
Mende, when Noel Chabanel was born there on February 2,
1613. The name of the town or hamlet where this child

S6 FATHER NOEL CHAEANEL

first saw the light of day has escaped the chroniclers
of his life. The only detail preserved to us of his early
years is the fact that he decided to consecrate himself to

God in the Society of Jesus; he entered
He becomes the novitiate at Toulouse, on February
a Jesuit 8th, 1630. The spirit of God had spoken

early to this favored soul, for Noel
was only a boy of seventeen when the new epoch in his
career began. Two full years were given up to the study
and practice of the rules and constitutions of his Order
and to the cultivation of humility and abnegation of self,
two virtues which were to be so conspicuous in his after-
life.

Noel Chabanel pronounced his vows and bound himself
to God and the Order in 1632. After studying philosophy
at Toulouse, he was appointed, in 1634, to teach grammar
in the Jesuit college in the same city. He spent five
consecutive years in the professor's chair, advancing yearly
with his pupils into humanities and rhetoric, until 1639,
when he was sent to pursue his theological studies and
prepare for the priesthood. After his ordination in 1641,
he again taught rhetoric at Rodez, and in 1642 passed
through his third year of probation, the final stage in the
formation of the members of the Jesuit Order. Noel
Chabanel had now reached the age of thirty and was ready
for any field of labor.

The desire to devote his life to the Canadian mis-
sions had evidently haunted him for a long time — or
as the Jesuit Relation of 1650 puts it.
He starts for "God gave him a strong vocation for
New France these countries,"1 — and on May Sth, 1643,
he boarded a French vessel for the voyage
to Canada, a formidable undertaking which was to last
ninety-six days. In this age of ocean greyhounds and

1 Jesuit Relation*. Clev. edit., vol. xxxv, p. 157.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 87

floating palaces it would be impossible to conceive the
hardships and actual physical sufferings transatlantic
travellers had to endure during a three months' voyage
in the seventeenth century. The poverty of space on the
sailing ships, the huddling together of all classes, the lack
of sanitation, the difficulty of securing fresh food and
water, were ordeals that only the stout-hearted could
face.

Even a hundred years later, when the French King's
vessels had begun to ply regularly between France and
Canada, conditions showed little signs of improvement.
One of Noel Chabanel's successors, Father Luke Nau, a
Jesuit missionary in Canada, writing in 1734, gives ua a
glimpse of an eighty-day passage from La Rochelle to
Quebec in a French man-of-war. he Ruby. "We were

packed into the dismal and noisome hold
Trials met on like sardines in a barrel," he writes. "Y/e
the voyage could make our way to our hammocks

only after sustaining sundry bumps and
knocks on limbs and head. A sense of delicacy forbade
our disrobing, and our clothes, in time, made our backs
ache. The rolling and pitching loosened the fastenings
of our hammocks and hopelessly entangled them. On one
occasion I was pitched out sprawling on a poor officer,
and it was quite a time before I could extricate myself
from the ropes and covering... Another disagreable
feature was the company we were thrown in with day
and night... A third was the stench and vermin. We
had on board a hundred soldiers or so, freshly enrolled,
each one of whom carried with him a whole regiment of
picards (vermin) which in less than a week migrated in
all directions..."1 Father Chabanel suffered all these
inconveniences during ninety-six days, and he hailed with
evident satisfaction the end of a voyage so long delayed.

1 The Aulneau Letters, pp. 22-23.

88 FATHER NOEL CITABANEI.

The affairs of the colony in 3 643 were in a pitiable
condition. Supplies were anxiously awaited from the

mother country; the season was advancing,
Sad state of and the non-arrival of the vessels from
the colony across the sea made the colonists fear

that a disaster bad taken place. It was
not until the middle of August, on the feast of the Assump-
tion, that the welcome news came that ships were round-
ing Point Levis. "As we were about to begin Mass," wrote
Father Bartholomew Vimont, in the Relation of 1643, "two
sails appeared, a league distant from our port. Joy and
consolation filled the hearts of the inhabitants, but it was
very greatly doubled when a ship's boat put off and
brought us the news that Father Quentin was on board,
with three worthy workers, religious of our Society,
Fathers Leonard Garreau, Gabriel Druillettes and Noel
Chabanel."1

The arrival of these three recruits, men whose names
were to live in our annals, was a welcome addition to the

missionary forces already at work, for
Welcomed by the Jesuits were anxious to carry a know-
his brethren ledge of Christianity to fresh fields. Up

to this the sedentary Hurons had absorbed
moat of their energies, whilst other tribes, notably the
Algonquins, were asking for missionaries. Unlike the
Hurons, the Algonquins were nomadic; they roamed over
the vast territory watered by the Ottawa River and Lake
Nipissing. In the seventeenth century they had a few
settlements in the valley of the Ottawa, the largest being
on the island now known as Allumette Island. The fact
that the route to the Hurons lay almost exclusively through
the country occupied by those Indians brought them in
contact with the French missionaries from the first years
of the colony, but owing probably to their wandering

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxlii, p. 287.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 89

habits no effort had been made to establish missions
among them.

The time had come, however, to make a
Karons and move in that direction, and reasons were
Algonquins not wanting why it should be made as

soon as possible. While the Algonquins
had always lived on more or less friendly terms with the
Hurons, they had been for several years looking askance
at the growing trade relations between the latter and the
French. The Algonquins claimed control of the Ottawa
River, and the passing up and down before their very
doors of Huron flotillas laden with furs and other supplies,
was causing a coolness which might any day develop into
open conflict. Eleven years before, in 1633, the Algonquins
of Allumette Island did not hide their mistrust of the
missionaries whose influence was bringing the French and
Hurons together, and they even threatened to do them
violence. Years of calm had intervened, but no one knew
how long peace would last, and it was evidently in the
interests of the Jesuit missionaries to prevent any dis-
turbance which might close the route to their missions on
Georgian Bay.

Another cogent reason for fostering friendly relations
between the Algonquins and the Hurons
Terrorized by was the obligation of being prepared to
the Iroquois resist the common enemy of both. The
relentless Iroquois were terrorizing not
only the French but also the savages tribes. In 1642 forty
Hurons were overpowered by them on their way down to
Quebec; Father Isaac Jogues and his companion, Rene
Goupil, were captured and taken to the cantons on the
Mohawk, one to be tortured, the other to be killed. Bands
of Iroquois kept incessant watch along the St. Lawrence
and the Ottawa Rivers to intercept both Hurons and
Algonquins and to slay pitilessly all who fell into their
hands. The route to Georgian Bay was practically closed;

90 FATHER NOEL CHABANEI.

no flotilla had reached the colony in 1643; and the critical
state of the missionaries who depended on Quebec for
supplies was causing anxiety to the superiors of the Order.
Besides, the lives of the missionaries in Huronia might
be in danger; letters from them had been intercepted by
the Iroquois, and no news had been received from them
for over a year. The prospects looked so dark that a
council was called by the Governor, de Montmagny, before
the return home of the vessels which brought Chabanel
from France, and it was decided to ask the mother country
to send out military aid in the following spring.

Owing to all these dangers and alarms Chabanel and

Garreau were kept in Quebec during the
He is retained winter' of 1643-1644. preparing themselves
in the colony for their future arduous labors. They

were fortunate in having with them a
veteran in the field, Father John de Brebeuf, who was
then in the colony, and whose counsels were invaluable
to the young and inexperienced missionaries. Brebeuf
had been over sixteen years among the Hurons; he knew
their language, their laws, customs, superstitions, the
dangers as well as the consolations of the ministry among
them, and his frankness on other occasions, for instance,
in his admirable letter of instructions to young mission-
aries, published in the Relation of 1637, leads us to
surmise that he held nothing back from the two recruits
who arrived in 1643.

The winter passed slowly away, and with the opening
of navigation in the spring of 1644 an attempt was made
to carry succor to the Jesuits in Huronia. Father Joseph

Bressani started in April, but the Iroquois
Starts for t!:s were already on the alert; they seized him
Huron country and hurried him into captivity. Four

Huron flotillas, however, succeeded in
running the blockade and reached Quebec safely. Three
started back immediately with supplies, but they were

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 91

captured on the way. Meanwhile the soldiers asked for in
the previous autumn had arrived from France, and the
fourth flotilla which left the colony later in the summer
of 1644, was able to advance westward in safety under
military protection. After it had started. Vimont wrote,
"The governor gave more than a score of brave soldiers
from among those whom the queen has sent over this year
to this country. They have gone to the Hurons to winter
in their villages and to serve as an escort to them next
year when they come down to Kebec."

On their long and lonesome journey to Huronia the
strange but picturesque sights which met the eyes of those
French soldiers and missionaries at every turn helped
them to overlook the intolerable heat of summer, the
fatigues of incessant paddling, the trudging over portages,
the annoyance of insects and vermin, and the sleeplessness
which was the result. The Ottawa route, destined to be
famous for a couple of centuries in missionary and fur-
trading annals, was still in its primeval wildness. Nature
left to herself had covered the banks of the Ottawa and
French Rivers and Lake Nipissing with pine and maple,
and the only sounds heard echoing through those thick
forests were the splashing of paddles and the chattering of
Indians — novel scenes surely for eyes and ears fresh from
the cities of Old France. The Ottawa valley has changed
its face in the past two centuries, and so have the facilities
which travellers enjoy who go through it on their way
westward to the Great Lakes; in the middle of the seven-
teenth century conditions were primitive indeed, and the
journey from Quebec to Georgian Bay was a formidable
undertaking. However, the flotilla arrived safely at Fort
Ste. Marie on September 7th; it was accompanied by three
missionaries, Father de Brebeuf who had been absent three
years and whose return was welcomed by all, Father
Leonard Garreau who was to labor among the Algonquins
at Endarahy, in the Parry Sound region, and Father Noel

92 FATHER NOEL CHABANEL

Chabanel who was to begin the study of the Algonquin
language and prepare himself for work among the members
of this tribe who were living among the Hurons.

We may gather from a perusal of the Relations that

Father Chabanel's first impressions of mis-
His first sionary life were evidently of a mixed char-

impressions ater. He had arrived in Huronia under

military guard and amid the alarms of war.
He had not yet met the Iroquois, but he knew that they
were lying in wait for him and his brethren, and ready
at the first opportunity to cleave his head with the
tomahawk; it did not need immediate contact with this
tribe of savages, whose ferocity and notorious deeds were
well known in France, to bring home to his sensitive and
timid nature the extent of the sacrifice he had made in
quitting his native land. Besides, the wild aspect of the
new country, with its half-naked population, it3 bark
cabins, its poverty and squalor, made a profound impres-
sion on him, and we may infer from the story of his life
that his heart often travelled back to the peaceful class-
rooms in Toulouse and Rodez. As the months rolled by,
the prospect of long years among savages came before
his mind more vividly; it began to dawn on him that his

life henceforward was to be an unbroken
A "bloodless chain of cares and disppointments — a
martyrdom" "bloodless martyrdom" he himself calls

it — but he had put his hand to the
plough and, with the help of Him who strengthens the
weak, he was resolved not to turn back till he had reached
the end of the furrow. The Relations do not hide the
fact that as a missionary Chabanel had from the very out-
set many personal drawbacks to contend with.. Although
gifted with talent, as is evident from the years he success-
fully occupied the chairs of classics and rhetoric in France,
his progress in the study of the barbarous Huron and
Algonquin idioms was so slow that at the end of the first

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 93

-winter (1844-1645) he could hardly make himself under-
stood "even in ordinary matters." The winter of 1645-46
passed by with similar non-success, and this to him was
a subject of great mortification. It was, in fact, something
more than this : it was a serious obstacle to the work he
had come to do in Huronia. Without a knowledge of the
language he was useless; he could not preach or catechize
or enter in any practical way into communication with the
tribe.

But these were not the only crosses Noel Chabanel had
to carry. Notwithstanding his evident vocation to live and
labor in the Canadian missions, a vocation he himself never
questioned, his repugnance to Indian life and Indian
custom* grew with the months he spent amongst the

natives. So opposed was his natural
Hardships of temperament to their gross ways and
his ministry manners that he saw nothing in them to

please him; the very sight of them, their
conversation, all that concerned them, was extremely
irksome to him; residence in their filthy cabins did such
violence to his entire nature that he found therein nothing
but the bitterest hardship, without the intermingling of
any form of consolation. When the Jesuits visited villages
where no permanent churches were established, they had
to lead the Indian life and follow Indian customs closely.
They slept on the bare ground at night and lived all day
in cabins filled with smoke. In summer the conditions
were not so bad, for life in the open was a luxury all could
enjoy; but during their visits in the winter months they
had to dwell in cabins where they suffered from the
unbearable heat from the fireplaces in the beginning of
the nights, and near the end suffered just as much from
the piercing cold. In the morning they found themselves
covered with snow which had drifted in through holes and
crevices in the bark walls. Stench and vermin abounded
in the Huron cabins; every sense was tormented night

94 FATHER NOEL CHAEANEL

and day. Father Chabanel could not accustom himself to
the food of the country, the best prepared being usually
a paste made of Indian corn-meal boiled in water. Though
so poorly nourished he worked incessantly at the language
even while visiting the villages; but there was no seclu-
sion, no privacy, no room or other apartment where he
could retire to study; no spot which was not open all day
to the gaze of a mob of Hurons; he had no light but that
furnished by the smoky fireplaces, and while reading his
breviary or writing notes he was surrounded by ten or
fifteen persons, children of all ages, who screamed, wept
and wrangled.

This is a faithful picture of the missionary life led by
Chabanel, and although the Relation mentions only casually

his physical sufferings and inconveniences.
He resolves to we are left to infer that, had God not
persevere strengthened this holy man, his courage

would have failed him. Grace from heaven
as well as a strong human will was required to give
stability to the resolution of a man of culture like Chabanel
to live and die amid the conditions we have prescribed.
Heaviest cross of all. God hid His presence now and then
from him and left the missionary not merely a prey to all
the repugnances of nature but overpowered with desolation
of spirit. These are trials too severe for ordinary virtue,
and the love of God must be intense in a human heart
that can rise above them; supernatural courage must be
strong, indeed, not to fail utterly amid such spiritual
abandonment. And yet we know that God never withdrew
His presence from Father Chabanel for a long period.
Consoling graces were showered upon him to strengthen
him and make him realize that he was not working alone,
that the Supreme Consoler was watching him and would
be his exceeding great reward. Amid all this Chabanel
felt his own unworthiness and his failure as a worker in
the vineyard, but he was inspired by the example of his

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 95

fellow-missionaries. He persevered in the ungrateful task
of trying to learn an Indian language and to assimilate
Indian ways and customs, and left to God and His own
good time the task of lightening the crosses which were
bearing heavily on him.

Meanwhile he witnessed the beginning of a new era. In
September, 1644, Paul Ragueneau replaced Jerome
Lalemant as superior of the Huron mission. The letter
received from the General of the Order,
Changes among in Rome, sanctioning this change, had
missionaries been intercepted by the Iroquois, but an
unofficial communication from Quebec had
reached Fort Ste. Marie informing Lalemant that he had
been promoted to the superior generalship of all the Can-
adian missions, while Ragueneau was to replace him in
Huronia. The latter took up his burden immediately, but
the season was advanced and, as no opportunity offered
for a passage to Quebec in 1644, Jerome Lalemant had to
wait a whole year before he could return to the colony to
assume the new and more important duties imposed upon
him.

This change of superiors did not affect the rank and file
of the missionary forces in Huronia. The visits to the
Indian villages went on as usual, the savages were
instructed, the number of converts increased, the Fathers
were as steadily employed in summer as in winter, village
missions became residences, chapels were enlarged, cem-
eteries blessed, processions were held, interments made
according to the rites of the Church,
Rapid progress crosses were set up and solemnly vener-
everywhere ated. The progress of the work was ex-

tremely consoling. "Of the seven churches
im Huronia," wrote Jerome Lalemant, May 15th, 1645,
"there are six with residences attached; the first at Ste.
Marie; the five others at the five principal towns of the
Hurons, namely, the Conception, St. Joseph, St. Michael,

96 FATHER \OEL CHABANEL

St. Ignace and St. John Baptist. The seventh church, that
of the Holy Ghost, is made up of Algonquins who this
year, together with a number of other nations, winter
about twenty-five leagues from us on the great lake of
the Hurons." Three missionaries, Claude Pijart and Rene
M6nard, in 1642, and Leonard Garreau, in 1644, visited the
Algonquins, and for months at a time they followed this
homeless people "in the woods and on the rivers, over
rocks and across lakes, having for shelter but a bark hut,
nothing for a floor but the damp earth or the surface of
some rough rock which served as table, chair, bed, room,
kitchen, cellar, garret, chapel and all."1

Noel Chabanel was also engaged with the same tribe
in 1644, but some difficulty is experienced in following
his career in the years of 1665, 1666, and 1647. While
Jerome Lalemant was superior in Huronia he was a faith-
ful chronicler of events; in his Relations he gave names
of the men and the places they visited and made easy the
work of following the movements of the missionaries; but
his successor, Paul Ragueneau, was not so considerate for
posterity. Although as assidisous as his predecessor in
recording details of the work done in the vineyard, he
rarely gave the names of the workers. For this reason
we are left to conjecture the whereabouts of Noel Chabanel
in the years just mentioned. It is presumed, however, that

he continued his labors among those Al-
Lives with the gonquins who selected a site close to the
Algonquins Hurons of Fort Ste. Marie in order to

profit by the protection the French could
give them against the Iroquois. We find traces of him in
the winter of 1647, when, after a short stay at Ossossane
with Father Simon LeMoyne, he returned to the Algon-
quins and remained with them till the spring of 1648,
when they dispersed to their summer haunts.

1 Jesuit Relations. Clev. edit., vol. xxvlii, p. 47.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 97

Four years had now passed away in Huronia, and
Father Chabanel's slow progress in acquiring a knowledge
of the Indian tongue had placed him at such a disad-
vantage, and had been such an obstacle to his success as
a missionary, that none felt his position more keenly
than he. He began to feel that he was a worthless member
of the community — a drone among busy men; and his
fidelity to his vocation for the savages was put to a severe

test. His deep sense of his uselessness
His trials and overpowered him so completely that the
temptations temptation came to him to abandon the

field and return to France. The arch-
enemy of souls represented to him that by going back to
his native land he would have the comforts and the
satisfaction which he formerly enjoyed, and would there
find employment better suited to his talents and character,
employment in which so many saintly souls were practising
the virtues of charity and zeal and spending their lives
for the salvation of their fellow-men. Why could he not
do in France what so many others were doing ? Why
spend his life fruitlessly in a barbarous land ? The reasons
were plausible and the temptation was strong; but Noel
Chabanel had nailed himself to the Cross and he would

not now ask God to take him down from
Makes a vow it- In order to link himself to Huronia
of stability without hope of recall and to forestall

similar temptations in the future, he bound
himself by the following vow, on the feast of Corpus
Christi, 1647, to remain in the Canadian missions until
death :

"Jesus Christ, my Saviour, who by a wonderful dispensa-
tion of Thy paternal Providence, hast willed that I, though
altogether unworthy, should be a fellow-helper of Thy holy
apostles in this vineyard of the Hurons; impelled by the
desire to obey the xoill of the Holy Spirit regarding me,
that I should help forward the conversion to the faith of

98 FATHER NOEL CHABANEL

the barbarians of this Huron country : I. Noel Chabanel,
being in the presence of the Most Blessed Sacrament of
Thy Body and Thy Precious Blood which is the tabernacle
of God among men, make a vow of perpetual stability in
this mission of the Hurons; understanding all things as the
Superiors of the Society shall explain them and as they
choose to dispose of me. I conjure Thee, therefore, oh my
Saviour, to be pleased to receive me as a perpetual servant
of this mission and to make me ivorthy of so lofty a
ministry. Amen."

The heroic act was done and it was irrevocable; Cha-
banel had burned his ships behind him; and though
rebellious nature continued to tax his virtue, grace pre-
vailed. We shall see that God granted him the perse-
verance he so ardently desired.

The continual inroads of the Iroquois had obliged the
Jesuits to abandon their isolated residences for more
populous settlements where they should be better able to
defend themselves. One of the residences thus affected
was St. Ignace which was transferred to within two
leagues of Fort Ste. Marie. Chabanel aided Brebeuf in

this work in the spring of 1648, and became
Is ordered to his companion and assistant at the neigh-
the Peiains boring hamlet of St. Louis. In February,

1649, having received an order to quit St.
Ignace and proceed of the Petun nation, he was succeeded
by Gabriel Lalemant who, a month later, was seized, cruelly
tortured for eighteen hours and then put to death.

This opportunity of suffering for Christ, so near at hand
and so quickly lost, was keenly felt by Father Chabanel.
In a letter to his brother Pierre, a Jesuit in France, he
revealed his humility, his holy desire to suffer, and his
disappointment that another had wrenched from him the

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS $$

martyr's crown. "Judging from human appearances," he
wrote, "Your Reverence came very near
He writes to to possessing a brother a martyr; but,
his brother alas ! in the mind of God, the honor of

martyrdom requires virtues of another
stamp than mine. The Reverend Father Gabriel Lalemant,
one of the three whom our Relation mentions as having
suffered for Jesus Christ, had taken my place in the village
of St. Louis, a month before his death, while I, being
more robust of body, was sent upon a mission more remote
and more laborious, but not so fruitful in palms and crowns
as that of which my cowardice has, in the sight of God,
rendered me unworthy. It will be when it shall please the
Divine goodness, provided I strive to realize in my person
m.artyrem in umbra et martyrivm sine sanguine. The
ravages of the Iroquois in this country will perhaps some
day supply what is wanting, through the merits of those
saints with whom I have the consolation of living so
peaceful an existence in the midst of turmoil and continual
danger." The holy man would not have long to wait for
the crown he sighed for. Before the year 1649 was ended
the opportunity to suffer for Christ would come; the
glorious destiny he envied Father Gabriel Lalemant would
also be his own.

The Petuns, whither he was to be sent, occupied the
large territory, now so peaceful and prosperous, known
as Nottawasaga township. Three missions, St John, St.

Mathias and St. Matthew, had been already
He starts out established there, the largest being St.
for the Petals John, at Etharita. This village had a

population of five or six hundred families
and Father Cliabanel was named to supplement the labors
of the zealous Charles Gamier. While he was still at
Fort Ste. Marie preparing for his departure, numerous
and well defined presentiments began to crowd in upon
him that God's designs in his regard were on the eve of

100 FATHER NOEL, CHABANEL

fulfilment. When bidding farewell to Father Chastellain,
hie confessor, he remarked to him, "My dear Father, may
it be for good and all this time I give myself to God !
May I belong to Him !" These words uttered with
emphasis and with a countenance beaming with true
sanctity, made such an impression on Chastellain that he
was visibly affected, and happening at that hour to meet
a third person he could not refrain from exclaiming,
"Truly I am deeply moved. Father Ghabanel had just
now spoken to me with the voice of a victim who is about
to be immolated. I know not what may be God's designs,
but I see that in this Father, He is fashioning a great
saint." And Ghabanel himself remarked
Presentiments to one of his intimate friends. "I do not
ef the end know what is going on within me or what

God wishes to do with me, but in one
respect I feel entirely changed. I am naturally very timid,
but now that I am going to a dangerous post, and it seems
to me that death is not far off, I no longer have any fear;
and yet this frame of mind does not come from myself."

Obedience had undoubtedly allotted a dangerous post
to this holy man; God was leading him to the sacrifice.
Events were developing so rapidly that his words, written
to his brother in France, a few months before, began to
assume a prophetic meaning that could be easily under-
stood, "I entreat Your Reverence to remember me at the
holy altar as a victim doomed, it may be to the fire of
the Iroquois, that, with the help of the
Asks prayers saints, I may obtain a victory worthy of
for himself the struggle." Time and circumstances

showed that this was not an idle request.
Fifteen Huron villages had already been devastated and the
inhabitants dispersed in thickets and forests, on lakes and
streams, and on islands unknown to the enemy. Many of
them had sought refuge even among the Petuns. Only
Fort Ste. Marie was left standing in the terror-stricken

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 101

region; but as this "home of peace" was no longer a
refuge, the Jesuits resolved to destroy it also, so that it
should not fall into the hands of the Iroquois, and then
seek elsewhere a safer and more advantageous shelter.
On May 15th, the whole establishment was given over to
the flames by the missionaries themselves; a month later
they built rafts and crossed over to St. Joseph's Island
where three hundred families, refugees from the enemy,
were already settled.

The Iroquois had roamed on the outskirts of the Petun
territory all through the winter of 1648-1649; they were
threatening the villages of the nation during the following
spring and summer. The Petuns, however, owing to their
isolation from the Hurons proper, hoped that the enemy
would pass them by. But this hope was vain; Huron
captives had assured Father Ragueneau that the Iroquois

were on the point of attacking the Petun
The Iroquois villages. This information excited his
massacre fears; the prudent superior felt that, in

the crisis at which the affairs of the
mission had arrived, it would be unwise to expose the
lives of the two Fathers, Gamier and Chabanel, at
Etharita, and he sent an order to the latter to return at
once to St. Joseph's Island. He set out early on December
5th; two days later the Iroquois swooped down on Etha-
rita while the main body of the Petun warriors were
absent; they slaughtered Father Gamier and most of the
inhabitants, and reduced the town to ashes. Evidently
unware of this catastrophe, the heroic Chabanel continued
his own journey. While passing through St. Mathias he

remarked to Father Garreau, "I know not
Chabanel quits why obedience calls me back, or whether
Etharita I shall be permitted to return to my post;

but whether or no, I shall persevere and
serve God even unto death." Accompanied by six or seven
Christian Hurons, he quitted St. Mathias on the morning

102 FATHER NOEL CHABANBL

of December 7th, and travelled six long leagues over a
difficult road. He was overtaken that night in the thick
of a forest, and while his fellow-travellers were asleep
and resting, Chabanel remained awake and prayed. To-
wards midnight he heard a noise, accompanied by songs
and shoutings, which evidently proceeded from a party
of Iroquois jubilant over their great victory at Etharita
and from the Petun captives who were singing their
customary war-songs. Father Chabanel aroused his com-
panions who fled at once into the forest or returned
quickly to one of the Petun missions. Later they reported
that the holy man had accompanied them a certain distance,
but then, undoubtedly through sheer exhaustion, he fell
on his knees, remarking to one of them, "It matters not
whether I live or die; this life is of small consideration.
The Iroquois cannot rob me of the joys of heaven."

Here the thread of events is broken. Nothing further
Is known of the missionary's movements. He probably
rested a short time and started again at
But is wavlaid daybreak, December 8th, to continue his
and slain journey to St. Joseph's Island. A Huron

who met him on the bank of the Notta-
wasaga River gave out the news later that Father
Chabanel, in order to make his walking easier, had thrown
away his hat, blanket and the bag containing his writings.

The holy missionary was no longer seen alive. At
first it was uncertain whether he had fallen a victim to
the Iroquois who had slain thirty persons in the neigh-
borhood, or whether he had lost his way and perished
from cold and hunger in the December snow. "After all,"
says the Relation of 1650, "it seems to us most probable
that he was murdered by the Huron who was the last
to see him alive." Suspicion fell on this savage who was
well known as an apostate of Etharita; it was surmised
that after he had killed the missionary and robbed him,
he threw his body into the little river. Sufficient evidence,

THE CANAOIAN MARTYRS 103

however, could not be obtained to convict the assassin, and
in the general misery of the moment the Jesuits judged
it wise to smother their suspicions. If the Huron were
guilty it was enough to know that God's purposes had
been served and that He would avenge His servant in
His own good time.

This was the story of the disappearance of Father
Chabanel as given in the annual Relation of 1650. After
it was written and sent to France for publication, Paul
Pfi£ueneau received information that the apostate Huron,
Louis Honareannhak, the man on whom suspicion rested,
had really done away with Father Chabanel. The assassin
himself confessed his crime and added
The assassin that he did it out of hatred of the faith,
confesses seeing that he and his family had met

with all kinds of misfortunes and ad-
versities from the moment they embraced the Christian
religion. This information is given in Ragueneau's own
handwriting in a document compiled in 1652, which is still
unpublished and kept in the archives of St. Mary's College,
Montreal.

God did not allow the death of his faithful servant to
go unpunished. Misfortunes still greater than those re-
ferred to by himself soon overpowered the unfortunate
Huron apostate. His mother Genevieve, once a fervent
Christian, became an impious wretch and followed her
son's footsteps in crime and deviltry. The whole family
fled southward to the Neutral nation where, in less than
two years, they were destroyed by the Iroquois. Some
perished by fire, others by the tomahawk, while others were
carried into captivity. And thus God avenged his heroic
servant who in season and out of season, in trials and
tribulations, kept his vow of stability and persevered to the
end.

Chabanel is one of the six names which always . stands
out prominently when we recall the heroic age of the

104 FATHER NOEL CHABANEL

Canadian missions. He was only thirty-six years of age
when he died, and had spent six years among the savages.
The "shadow of martyrdom" followed him closely during

those years, but the reality overtook him
A cherished at last. His assassination, perpetrated out
memory of hatred for the faith, according to the

testimony of the criminal responsible for
it. is our strongest motive for trying to keep his memory
green until the Infallible Church put a final seal to the
reputation for sanctity that this servant of God has enjoyed
amongst us for over two centuries and a half. "Chabanel's
death," wrote Charlevoix, the historian of New France,
"while less striking in the eyes of man, was not less
precious in the eyes of God, who judges us according to
the disposition of our heart, and who keeps as strict an
account of what we would like to have done as of what
we have really done and suffered."

FATHER ISAAC JOGUES
Slain by the Iroquois, October 18, 161/6

Father Isaac Jogues

APOSTLE OF THE IROQUOIS

HPHIS heroic missionary who shed his blood for Christ
*■ in New France, near the middle of the seventeenth
century, and who has left an illustrious name in our
annals, was the son of a pious couple, Lawrence Jogues
and Francoise de Saint-Mesmin. He was born at Orleans,
in France, on January 10, 1607. While he was still young
his father died, leaving him exclusively in the care of his
"honored mether" (as he was pleased to call her in his

letters), who had the privilege of directing
His birth and in the paths of virtue the early footsteps
early years of this great servant of God. In 1617 the

boy began his studies in the Jesuit college
which had been recently founded in his native city, and
had reached the class of rhetoric when he heard the call
of God; at the age of seventeen he entered the novitiate
of the Society of Jesus, in Paris, October 24, 1624.

A desire for active service on foreign missions had
already begun to reveal itself in the generous soul of the
young novice. The arduous field of Ethiopia appealed
to him at first and he asked to be sent thither; but prudent
counsel turned these holy aspirations in another direction.
His spiritual director told him that work among the
natives of New France would amply gratify his ambition
for trials and suffering; the savage Iroquois and Hurons
would be worthy objects of his apostolic zeal. The
novice bent his head in acquiescence; henceforward the
missions beyond the Atlantic became for him the longed-
for goal. Meanwhile, as several years of preparation

108 FATHER ISAAC JOGUES

would necessarily intervene before the young religious
could exercise his ministry, he set actively to work to
acquire those virtues which would prepare him for his
future apostolate.

At the end of his term of probation in 1626, Isaac
Jogues was sent to the college of his Order at La Fleche
where he spent three years in the fascinating study of
philosophy. In 1629 we find him occupying a professor's
chair in Rouen, whither he had gone to begin the term
of teaching which usually forms part of a Jesuit's career.
Shortly after his arrival there he had the consolation of
meeting Father John de Brebeuf, Charles Lalemant and
Ennemond Masse, three of his Jesuit brethren who had
been driven back to France when the English seized
Quebec, and who had gone to Rouen to await the out-
come of Champlain's negociations to regain the colony.

The presence of those three pioneers of
His vocation the Canadian missions in the college of
is confirmed Rouen and the young professor's daily

contact with them, especially with Father
de Brebeuf who had spent several years among the savage
Hurons, undoubtedly strengthened his vocation and in-
spired him to be their generous rival in the coming
years. In 1632 he returned to the college of Clermont,
in Paris, to study theology and prepare for the priest-
hood. He was ordained early in 1636 and started for
Canada in the summer of the same year.

After a wearying voyage of eight weeks the young
missionary stepped ashore at Quebec, determined to give
the best years of his manhood — he was only twenty-
nine — to the service of God and souls. His first duty
on landing was to inform his mother in Old France of
his safe arrival in the New. "I do not know," he wrote
her, "what it is to enter Heaven, but I do know that it
would be hard to feel in this world a joy more intense
or more overpowing than I felt when I set foot in this
a»w world."

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS \Q2

Father Jogues did not tarry long at Quebec. He had
been named for the missions on the Lower St. Lawrence,
but the call for more laborers in the Huron country
changed the decision of his superiors in his regard. He
was chosen to go to Huronia, and he set out immediately
for Three Rivers to join the flotilla of canoes which was
soon to start for Georgian Bay. At that
He starts for little fort, recently built at the mouth of
Georgian Bay the St. Maurice, he had his first glimpse
of what missionary life meant when he
beheld the arrival from Huronia of a brother Jesuit,
Father Anthony Daniel, bare-footed, broken with fatigue,
his cassock in tatters, his breviary hanging from his neck
by a cord. But the sight of the intrepid Daniel, haggard
and way worm, did not chill the ardor of the young priest;
rather it spurred him on to similar sacrifices. He bravely
stepped into a Huron canoe, waved farewell to his friends
on shore, and started westward on his long journey.

The trip to Georgian Bay was the first great trial of
a Huron missionary, a sort of initiation in the physical
hardships of his future life. In Father Jogues' case,
however, the journey was remarkable not so much for
the trials he had to endure as for the rapidity with which
it was accomplished. "I quitted Three Rivers on August
24," he wrote to his mother, "and such haste did we
make that, instead of twenty-five or thirty days which
the trip usually takes, only nineteen were required to
reach the spot where five of our Fathers were stationed."

His brethren at Ihonatiria gave him a joyous wel-
come; unhappily their joy was soon turned into the
gravest anxiety. The Relation of 1637 informs us that
Father Jogues arrived in good health, but a week had
hardly elapsed when he was seized with
His serious a dangerous fever which threatened to

illness cut short his missionary career. The

crushing poverty of the place, with its
lack of medical aid and physical comforts, helped to ag-

13 0 FATHER ISAAC JOGUES

gravate his condition until his life hung by a thread.
The illness of Father Jogues at last developed such
alarming symptoms that blood-letting, the panacea for
many ills in those times, was resorted to, the patient
himself acting as his own surgeon. A change for the
better ensued, the fever gradually left him, his strength
returned, his health continued slowly to improve. Be-
fore the winter set in he had begun to apply himself to
the study of the language without which his presence
in Huronia would have been useless. He accompanied
the missionaries, future martyrs like himself, on their
rounds through the neighboring villages, baptizing little
children in danger of death, and imparting religious
instruction to the sick and dying.

These first essays in the ministry among the Huron?
gave the young missionary much consolation and helped
to excite his zeal for future conquests. However, neither
he nor his fellow Jesuits were without apprehensions,
and in their letters to France they did not exaggerate
the difficulties and dangers of their situa-
Missionary tion. They were living and laboring in

difficulties the midst of superstitious savages who,

while willing to receive the attentions of
the Black-robes, dreaded their preternatural power, and
attributed to their influence the evils which had begun
to visit the nation. Father Jogues had been hardly a
year among the Hurons when a pestilence broke out which
carried off hundreds of the tribe. The Indians blamed
the missionaries for these disasters and in their terror
resolved to do away with them. Fearing that the un-
happy wretches might carry out their murderous design,
and feeling it to be his duty to acquaint his brethren in
Quebec of the danger they were incurring, Father &e
Brebeuf wrote a farewell letter in which he and his fel-
low-missionaries revealed a complete resignation to what-
ever fate God had in store for them. This interesting
document, which has been preserved for us in the

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS HI

Relation of 1638, was signed by all the Fathers of Osdo-3-
sane, Brebeuf adding in a postcript, "I have left at the
residence of St. Joseph (Ihonatiria) Father Peter Pijart
and Father Isaac Jogues who are animated by the same
sentiments."

Ihonatiria had been the scene of Jogues' labors during
the first two years of his sojourn in Huronia. It was

there he studied the intricacies of the
Cast out by Huron tongue, there he accustomed him-
the Petuns self to the discomforts of life among the

savages. When that residence was trans-
ferred to Teanaostaye, in 1638, Father Jogues was sent
thither, and in November of the following year he started
with Father Garnier to visit the Petuns, or Tobacco tribe,
the first missionary expedition made beyond the Blue
Hills. Unhappily, superstitious and ill-disposed Hurons
had preceded them and had sown distrust in the minds
of the Petuns. When the two Jesuits arrived they were
received as dangerous sorcerers and treated as such.
The savages refused to listen to them and finally drove
them from their country.

In September, 1641, a native ceremony, known as the
"feast of the dead," brought together various nations
bordering on Huronia. Among the delegates were a num-
ber of Sauteux, a tribe dwelling along the river which
links the great lakes Huron and Superior. No Blackrobes
had as yet gone so far west, and a press-
Welcomed by ing invitation to them to make the journey
the Sauteux was gladly accepted. Father Jogues, ac-
companied by Father Charles Raymbault.
set out in a bark canoe; after seventeen days' paddling
they reached the village situated on or near the present
site of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. The two missionaries were
given a generous welcome by those pagans, and they
would gladly have remained with them had not their
services been needed nearer home. Other members of
their Order took up the work of evangelization among this

112 FATHER ISAAC JOGUES

branch of the Algonquins in after years, but history
records the fact that Jogues and Raymbault were the
first whitemen who set eyes on Lake Superior; or, as the
historian Bancroft puts it, "Thus did the religious zeal
of the French bear the cross to the banks of the St. Mary
and the confines of Lake Superior, and look wistfully
towards the homes of the Sioux in the valley of the Mis-
sissippi, five years before the New England Eliot had ad-
dressed the tribe of Indians within six miles of Boston
harbor."

Fort Ste. Marie, the large building planned by Father

Jerome Lalemant as a central residence
Residence for the Huron missionaries on the river

Sainte-Marie Wye, was then nearing completion. The

main edifice was opened in the autumn
of 1639, but various additions were made in the following
three years to provide a home for the French in the
service of the mission as well as a rendezvous for the
Huron neophytes who were invited to come and renew
their piety within its walls. During those three years
Father Jogues was in charge. It was his privilege to
welcome not merely the Indians whom he and Father Du-
Peron had converted in the neighboring villages, but also
those who came from the villages in the interior. In
this important office he had the consolation of witnessing
the results of the work of his fellow-missionaries.

However, while the Jesuits were gathering in the
fruits of their ministry the situation was far from en-
couraging from a temporal point of view.
Seat down to Owing to the hostility of the Iroquois
Qaebec who had blocked the Ottawa route, no

communication had been held with the
French colony for a couple of years and the missionaries
were reduced to the direst need. As the necessaries of
life were wanting and as something had to be done to
relieve the situation, it was decided in the spring of 1642
to attempt to reach Quebec. A flotilla, under the leader-

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS Jig

ship of Father Jogues, quitted Huronia and was success-
ful in running the Iroquois blockade. The missionary
laid before the authorities the desperate plight of the
men on Georgian Bay, and canoes were soon on their
way back laden with supplies. Father Jogues hoped to
be as lucky on the home journey as he was on the down-
ward trip, but he had not calculated with his crafty
enemies. He had reached a spot thirty-one miles above
Three Rivers when the flotilla was waylaid by a band

of ferocious Iroquois who were awaiting
Seized by the its return. Several Hurons were killed
Iroquois outright in the skirmish; the rest, with

the Jesuit and two young Frenchman,
Ren6 Goupil and Guillaume Couture, were seized, beaten
with clubs, tightly bound with thongs, flung into canoes
and then taken up the Richelieu River over Lake Cham-
plain and Lake George, to the village of Ossernenon 1 in
the Mohawk country, where Father Jogues and his com-
panions had to submit to other tortures.

Shortly before his departure from Huronia, while
kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, alone in the chapel
at Ste Marie, he begged God to grant him the favor to
suffer for His glory. He heard an interior voice telling
him that his prayer would be heard, and counselling him
to be strong and patient. The answer to his prayer came
in the first days of his captivity. The barbarous Iroquois

showered blows on him with sticks and
He is crueHy iron rods, plucked out his beard, tore off
tortured his finger-nails and then with their teeth

crushed the bleeding finger-tips; a squaw

1 Ossernenon, on the south bank of the Mohawk river, about forty
miles from Albany, N. Y. This village, afterwards known anions
the Iroquois as Kendaougue or Caughnawaga, was the birthplace
of Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks.

A Jesuit mission was established there in 1667 and lasted
for seventeen years. The exact site of this famous village has been
identified with that of Auriesville, Montgomery Co., N. Y., where a
shrine has been erected in recent years to recall the memories of
Father Isaac Jogues, Ren6 Goupil and Jean de la Lande, slain by
the Iroquois in the middle of the seventeenth century.

114 FATHER ISAAC JOGUES

sawed off the thumb of his left hand; the little Indian
children applied to his flesh burning coals and red hot
irons. The Huron prisoners fared worse. They were
hurried from village to village, notably Andaragon and
Tionnontoguen, in each of which they were tortured
anew and forced to mount platforms where in their pitiable
state they were exposed to the ridicule and insolence of
those barbarians. The poor missionary was spared this
sorrowful journey, but he had meanwhile, notwithstanding
his bleeding wounds and his intense pain, to submit to
the cruel ordeal of suspension between two posts by
cords tightly wound around his wrists. Goupil and Cou-
ture had also their share in these various tortures which

happily, in Goupil's case, were soon to
Death of his end. Three blows from a tomahawk, Sep-
compaaion tember 29, six weeks after his capture,

gave the saintly young man the reward
he so heroically purchased. This tragedy deeply im-
pressed Father Jogues and led him to expect a similar
fate in the near future. He had, in fact, been warned
that his end would soon come, and he would probably
have been slain had not some Dutch traders from Fort
Orange (now Albany) intervened when they heard of his
captivity and sufferings.

The sympathetic fur-traders succeeded in saving the
missionary's life but they did not secure his release from
captivity. Already he had been formally adopted as a
slave by one of the Mohawk clans and he had to under-
take the most degrading menial labors, carrying burdens
on his back over rough trails from village to village, fol-
lowing and serving his masters on the hunt and during
their fishing expeditions, meanwhile bending under their
blows when his efforts did not win their approval.

While at home in Ossernenon he was al-
A slave among lowed to wander freely through the vil-
the Iroquois lage, but the eyes of his masters were

continually watching him. He had been

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 115

warned that his life was in danger if he passed beyond
the limits of the village, and yet he escaped frequently
to the neighboring forest to kneel before a cross he had
carved in a large birch tree and there pour out his soul
in prayer to God, "Whom he alone in those vast wilds
adored." Perhaps the greatest torture the heroic sufferer
had to endure was the desolation of spirit and mental
anguish with which he was frequently overwhelmed.
These trials he bore with unconquerable patience, but
God oftentimes rewarded him by flooding his soul with
sweetness and light. In these moments of ecstasy his
physical suffering lost its poignancy, and he offered him-
self to his Heavenly Comforter to suffer even more for
the glory of His name.

Weeks and months passed away in this rigid cap-
tivity. Father Jogues had been given up for dead; the
news that he was still alive relieved the anxiety of his
friends in France and Canada and urged them to take
measures to free him from his unhappy lot. The Dutch
in Fort Orange were also moved to sympathy and sought
occasions for him to escape, but much to their surprise

the holy man's zeal would not permit him
His zeal during to run away from a field of labor where
captivity there was still something to do for souls

of the Christian Hurons who had been
taken with him. He looked upon his slavery as a special
disposition of Providence in their regard. Writing to his
superior in France, in the summer of 1643, he asked who
would, in the event of his release from captivity, remain
to console and absolve his fellow captives ? who would
keep the Hurons attentive to their duties ? who would
teach the new prisoners, fortify them in their tortures
and baptize them before they went to the stake ? who
would look after the dying children of the Mohawks and
instruct the adults ? In a letter which he sent to the
governor at Quebec thirteen months after his capture, he
wrote, "I have taken a resolution, which grows stronger

116 FATHER ISAAC JOGUES

every day, to stay here as long as It pleases our Lord,
and not to seek my freedom, even though the occasion
present itself. I do not wish to deprive the French, Huron
and Algonquin prisoners of the help which they get from
my ministry. I have given baptism to many who have
since gone to heaven."

In the same letter he notified Montmagny that an at-
tack was projected on the new fort which had recently
been built by the French at the mouth of the Richelieu.
This warning, which had been sent secretly, made the
Iroquois suspect treachery somewhere; it put Father
Jogues' life in such danger again that Keift, the Dutch
governor of Manhattan, gave ordres to the commandant
at Fort Orange to secure his freedom if possible. When
this fresh effort in his behalf was made known to him,
the holy Jesuit once more refused to listen; nor unless

it was plainly the will of Heaven would
His escape from he throw off his shackles. On this oc-
the Iroquois casion, however, he spent a whole night

in prayer asking God to inspire him what
to do, whether or no it were His will that he should
remain a slave. After mature deliberation and evidently
with a clear conscience, he decided to make a strike for
freedom; shortly afterwards he disappeared while the
Mohawks were fishing in the Hudson. He fled to Fort
Orange where he lay hidden and in constant danger of
being apprehended by the savages who were furious at
his flight. After six weeks of exciting adventures he
succeeded in boarding a vessel which brought him down
the Hudson river, accompanied by Jan Megapolensis, a
Calvinist minister, who proved himself a sincere friend
of the Jesuit. Six days later he reached New Amsterdam
{New York) where he received a warm welcome from
the governor. His arrival caused a sensation in the
Dutch settlement, the marks of his tortures, plainly visible,
and his wretched poverty exciting the sympathy of all.
One of the colonists fell at his feet and kissed his mangled

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS H7

hands, exclaiming, "Martyr of Jesus Christ !" a testimony
which echoed the sentiments of the whole Calvinist com-
munity.

Father Jogues had no alterntaive left now but to
return to France; to retrace his steps to Canada through
the Mohawk country meant certain death. After a month's
delay in New Amsterdam the opportunity of a voyage to
Europe presented itself. A bark of fifty
He returns to tons weighed anchor in Manhattan harbor
Old France and sailed down the bay to the Atlantic,

with the Jesuit on board. Clothes had
been given to him by the Dutch to replace the rags of
his captivity, but he suffered much hardship and penury
during the voyage. Being without money to pay his
passage or to procure the necessaries of life, Father
Jogues had to depend on the charity of a Calvinist crew
who were not as indulgent as their brethren in Manhattan.
After seven weeks the coast of England was sighted, and
on Christmas Day the bark ran into Falmouth harbor, in
Cornwall. Even there ill-luck and misery pursued the
poor missionary. While the sailors were ashore, robbers
entered the vessel and snatched from him the coat and
hat which had been given him by the Dutch to shield
him from the wintry weather. A French brig brought
him across the channel, and the day after Christmas he
landed on the coast of Brittany in the direst distress,
with hardly clothing enough to cover his weak and
emaciated body. He would have perished from cold and
hunger had not a charitable merchant helped him to pay
his way to the Jesuit college at Rennes. There Father
Jogues met his brethren in religion who made him for-
get for the nonce all his trials and sufferings.

The Jesuit Relations, published in France every year
and read so extensively, had made the Iroquois savages
well known in that country and had given them an un-
enviable notoriety. When the news spread about that a
missionary had arrived who had been a victim of their

118 FATHER ISAAC JOGUE8

cruelties, Father Jogues was looked on as a confessor
of the faith, and sympathy and veneration were shown
him on every side. In Paris the Court of France wished
to see and speak with the servant of God. When the
Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, saw the marks of his
sufferings and when she heard from his own lips the
tale of his captivity, she was moved to deep compassion,
and remarked that this was a case where
Yearning for truth was stranger than fiction. All
the missions these expressions of esteem and sym-
pathy grieved the humble missionary, and
he sought to hide what were in reality the tokens of his
heroism. Meanwhile his health continued to improve;
the gentle care lavished on him in his homeland gave him
a new lease of life. There was one cross, however, which
he had still to carry; if that were lifted his happiness
would be complete. Owing to the loss of an index finger
and the mutilation of the others, he was deprived of the
privilege of saying Mass. This was an impediment which
could be removed by the Sovereign Pontiff and a petition
was accordingly sent to Rome. Urban VIII graciously
granted the holy man permission to officiate at the altar
again, remarking, at the same time, that a martyr of
Christ should not be prevented from drinking the Blood
of Christ — Indignum- esset martyrem Christi non biberr
sanguinem Christi.

While a six months' sojourn in France had had a
salutary effect on the health of Father Jogues, it had also
given him new courage and spurred him on to further
sacrifices. The foretaste of martyrdom which he had
received among the Iroquois had inspired this athlete of
the Cross with a desire to drink deeper of the bitter
cup; but he knew that he could not quench this thirst
in his native land. The lure of the Canadian missions
had seized the intrepid missionary again; he was ready
to face another voyage across the Atlantic to reach them.
In the spring of 1644 he sailed from La Rochelle for the

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 119

land "where the fragrance of his virtues refreshed and
comforted all those who had the happiness of knowing
and conversing with him."

Montreal, then in the second year of its existence, was
the first scene of his ministry after his return from
France. Sieur Chomedy de Maisonneuve was the guiding
genius of the little colony begun under the Auspices of
Mary at the foot of Mount Royal, and Jogues lent his aid
to the founder to strengthen the souls of those brave
pioneers whose communal life recalled the fervor and
simplicity of the primitive Christian Church.

In 1644 Montreal was the outpost of French civiliza-
tion in Canada nearest the Iroquois and was necessarily
exposed to their raids; but Quebec and Three Rivers,
further down the St. Lawrence, were also
Sad state of in danger. No spot in the French colony
the colony was safe from those roving savages, and

Montmagny was at a loss to know how
it was all going to end. The affairs of the French were
at a low ebb; their military strength was well nigh ex-
hausted; their Huron allies were demoralized; the fur
trade was waning; the colonists lived in dread of the
Iroquois who were constantly prowling around the settle-
mnets and along the waterways. The governor of the
colony knew well that he could neither punish those
daring enemies nor dictate terms of peace to them; his
only fear was that they were aware of his precarious
situation.

On the other hand, De Montmagny had learned from
prisoners and others that the Iroquois were also showing
signs of weakness as a result of the long struggle, and
a hope arose within him that perhaps some sort of treaty
might be concluded with the Confederacy. From among
the prisoners whom the French still held, the governor
selected a Mohawk chief whom he sent back to his country
to feel the pulse of the nation and learn whether or no
his fellow countrymen would be willing to bury the

U# FATHER ISAAC JOGUES

hatchet. This proposal, accompanied as it was by
presents, was received with evident satisfaction, for the
Mohawk returned shortly after with other chiefs to dis-
cuss terms of peace. Conferences were held at Three
Rivers in which Father Jogues was called to take part,
his knowledge of the Iroquois tongue and the experience
gained during his captivity making him a valuable inter-
preter as well as prudent counsellor.
He assists at a There was much talk but little progress
peace treaty during those parleys, but in the end
mutual promises of peace and good will
were made, and the Iroquois delegates returned to their
cantons. The French, however, were not enthusiastic over
the results of the deliberations; they had had such thrill-
ing experiences of the double dealing and treachery of
the Iroquois that they did not put much confidence in
their profession of future peace. Still it would have been
impolitic to reveal these suspicions, and, two years later,
the governor suggested the sending of an embassy from
Quebec to show how satisfied he was at the happy out-
come of the negociations. A French embassy would
flatter the Iroquois and might possibly impress them.

Father Jogues was chosen as one of the ambassadors.
This new task called for courage and abnegation; it meant
going back to the land of his tortures and his thirteen
months' captivity. At the first intimation he received of
this new mission a moment of fear and hesitation arose
in the bosom of the heroic man. "Would you believe that
on opening Your Reverence's letter," he wrote to Jerome
Lalemant, his superior at Quebec, "my heart was, as it

were, seized with dread . . My poor
Ambassador to nature quailed when it recalled the past,
the Iroquois but our Lord in His goodness has calmed

it and will continue to do so." A pa-
triotic duty called Jogues to make this new sacrifice, and
stifling all sentiment of fear, he set out on May 16, 1646,

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 121

for the Mohawk cantons, accompanied by Jean Bourdon,
one of the chief citizens of the colony. His instructions
were not merely to express the governor's feelings regard-
ing the future peace between the French and Iroquois, but
also to secure the adhesion of the cantons which had held
back on the plea that they had not been invited to the
conferences at Three Rivers. In this mission Father Jogues
was not entirely successful. At an assembly which he
convoked at Ossernenon in June, only the Mohawks and a
few Onondaga delegates were present. The other Iroquois
cantons were so little interested in the peace proposals of
the French governor that at that moment they were hidden
here and there along the Ottawa river looking for the scalps
of French, Huron and Algonquin stragglers. Even the
Mohawks themselves, then the most powerful unit of the
Iroquois Confederacy, were divided. The Wolf and Turtle
clans were willing to stand by the treaty of Three Rivers,
but the Bear clan refused to be bound by barriers of any
kind ; they were resolved to go to war when their interests
called for it. However, Father Jogues had secured the
adherence of the majority — a pyrrhic victory at most — and
after an absence of six weeks he was back in Three Rivers.
Although undertaken for reasons of state this second
visit to "the land of his crosses" had revealed anew to
the furture martyr the spiritual destitution of the unfor-
tunate Iroquois. It excited his zeal for the conversion
of his former persecutors and he promised himself an
early return to them, perhaps in the autumn. So con-
fident was he that no opposition would be offered in the
colony to this project that he left in the safe-keeping of
the Indians a box of clothes and religious articles in order

to avoid the annoyance and expense of
Returns as a double transportation. His plans fully met
missionary the wishes of his superiors who desired

nothing better than that the new era of
peace should be employed in spreading the Gospel among

122 FATHER ISAAC JOGUES

the Iroquois. The Jesuits determined to attempt the
establisment of a mission in the cantons along the Mohawk
river and Father Jogues was the man to attempt it. And
yet, notwithstanding this decision and his own heroic
abnegation, the holy man had his presentiments of danger.
He wrote to a friend in France, "My heart tells me that
if I have the blessing of being employed on this mission,
ibo et non redibo, I will go but shall not return. But I

will be happy if our Lord be willing to
Presentiments finish the sacrifice where He began it,
of the end and if the little blood which I have shed

in that land be a pledge of what I would
willingly yield from every vein in my body." In giv-
ing expression to these grave words Father Jogues was
prophesying better than he knew. After his return
from the embassy in the previous June a change in
public sentiment in his regard had taken place among
the Mohawks. A pestilence had broken out and had carried
off many victims; the crop of Indian corn was destroyed
by worms, and the superstitious Indians laid the blame
on the box which the Blackrobe had left behind him in
their care. The box, they said, concealed an evil spirit
which was spreading the contagion and causing their
people to die. This apparently trifling incident was used
by the Bear clan to justify their irreconcilable attitude
towards the French and their missionaries. Why should
they join the Wolf and the Turtle clans in welcoming one
who was showing himself a public malefactor ?

The holy missionary, quite unconscious of these happen-
ings, was preparing to go to live among them. Even had
he known of the threatening danger it is doubtful whether
the nearness of death would have alarmed him or caused
him to put off the beginning of so great a work. After
having said farewell to his brethren in Three Rivers, a
farewell which was to be his last, he set out on September

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 1^3

24, 1646. with a companion, Jean de la Lande, and a few
Hurons. After that date he was seen no more by white-
men. It was learned later that he had arrived at the vil-
lage of Anadaragon on October 17. The wretched bar-
barians hardly gave him time to reach his cabin when
they seized him, stripped him of his cloth-
Treatment by ing and cruelly beat him. "You shall die
the Mohawks tomorow," one them exclaimed; "but do
not fear; you shall not be burned; you
shall fall under our tomahawks." The humble victim, now
completely at their mercy, tried to make them realize the
enormity of their crime. He reminded them of the treaty
of peace entered into between the French and themselves.
He came to them as a friend, to live with them, to show
them the way to heaven. He feared neither torture nor
death— why, then, did they seek his life ? Did they not
fear the vengeance of the Great Spirit ? These words,
however, were received with derision. The only response
the treacherous Iroquois gave him was to cut bits of flesh
from his arms and devour them before his eyes. In the
evening of the following day, October 18, 16-16, a couple
of savages accompanied him to his lodge,
Treacherously where a traitor armed with a tomahawk
assassinated was hiding behind the door. The un-
happy missionary had hardly crossed the
threshold when a blow split his head open and he fell
lifeless to the ground bathed in his own blood. He was
decapitated and his head placed on a picket. The next
day his body was thrown into the Mohawk river.

The news of the murder did not reach Quebec until
June of the following year. A letter from Kieft, the
Dutch governor, to Montmagny announced that Father
Jogues had been assassinated shortly after his arrival in
the country, the only reason given for the atrocious deed
being that the missionary had concealed an evil spirit

1 Sea No. S of this series.

124 FATHER ISAAC' JOGUBS

among some clothes which he had left in their custody
This spirit had spread pestilence in the country and caused
their crops of corn to fail. A second letter from the
same quarter gave the details of the murder which we
have cited above and added that it was the Bear clan that
had put him to death.

This tragic event created a painful sensation in the
French colony and showed what little reliance could be
placed in the promises of the treacherous Iroquois. The
Jesuits, on their side, were deeply moved; Father Jogues
was the first of their Order in Canada to
His death is be slain by the savages. But his death
deplored was looked upon as a triumph; all were

convinced that this victim of savage hatred
had gone to Heaven; the blood he shed for Christ had won
him an eternal crown. Both missionaries and citizens
looked on him as a martyr of the faith. "We have honored
this death," writes Lalemant, "as that of a martyr. Al-
though far apart without being able to confer with each
other, many of us could not resolve to say Mass for hie
soul. But we offered the adorable Sacrifice in thanks-
giving for the favor which God had bestowed on him. The
lay people who knew him intimately and our religious
communities had also the same sentiments; they were
drawn rather to invoke him than to pray for his soul."

Father Jerome Lalemant, to whom we are indebted for
the account of the glorious death of Jogues, discusses
his case in the Relation of 1647 and continues in this
strain : "In the opinion of many learned men (whose
opinion seems reasonable) a man is really a martyr
before God, first, if he gives testimony before Heaven and
earth that he values the faith and the preaching of the
Gospel more than his life; and, secondly, if truly conscious
of the danger he incurs, he still throws himself into it
for Jesus Christ, protesting that he is willing to die to
make Him known. It was in this way that Father Joguee

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 125

gave up his soul to Jesus Christ and for Jesus Christ. I
will say more : not merely did he take the means to spread
the Gospel, means which caused his death, but we may
be assured also that he was killed out of hatred of the
doctrines of Christ... In the Primitive
Looked on as Church the reproach was cast against the
a martyr children of Christ that they caused mis-

fortunes everywhere, and some of them
were slain on that account; likewise are we persecuted
here because of our doctrines, which are none other than
those of Christ. We are told we depopulate their countries.
It is for these doctrines that they killed Father Jogues,
and consequently we may regard him as a martyr before
God."

This verdict, given in the seventeenth century, has been
that of posterity. Not merely has the name of Father
Jogues become a symbol in American history of heroic
endurance in suffering, but he has always been looked
upon as a martyr as well. The veneration with which his
memory has been surrounded has culminated in the desire
to see him granted the honors of Beatification. In 1884 the
Fathers of the Third Council of Baltimore petitioned the
Holy See to permit the introduction of his Cause and that
of his companion, Rene Goupil, before the Roman
tribunals. In August, 1916,, the Decree was published by
the Sacred Congregation of Rites permitting the Cause
to proceed. Let us hope that we may soon be able to
invoke this heroic missionary as one of the officially
proclaimed martyrs of God's Church.

RENE GOUPIL
/SZain by the Iroquois, September 29, 161ft

Rene Goupi!

VICTIM OF THE IROQUOIS

RENE Goupil, the Jesuit novice whose Beatification is
now being urged before the Sacred Congregation of
Rites, was a worthy companion of the heroic missionaries
who shed their blood for Christ in Canada in the seven-
teenth century. Apart from the fact that he was a native
of Anjou, in France, and that he was born about the year
1607, the documents which we possess tell us very little
about his early years. We are indebted to Father Isaac
Jogues, his fellow prisoner among the Iroquois, and
himself a martyr, for the few details which have come
down to us concerning this servant of God.

Goupil was evidently the child of pious parents, for
when he was old enough to appreciate the
Piety of his value of his soul and to weigh his own
early years spiritual responsibility, he aspired to give

himself entirely to God in the the religious
life, and he turned to the Society of Jesus as the goal of
his desires. "In the bloom of his youth," writes Father
Jogues, "he urgently requested to be received into our
novitiate at Paris."2. While there he gave great edifica-
tion by his strict observance of the rules and regulations
which are imposed on all those who would become
followers of St. Ignatius. While his fervor was constant,
his physical strength was not equal to the strain put upon
it. The young novice was forced to abandon the hope of

2 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxviii, p. 117.

128 RENE GOUFIL

persevering in the Jesuit Order or of consecrating himself
to the life of study which the Order called for. However,
he did not murmur at this upsetting of his plans; God
was evidently satisfied with his good will and He would
find him other ways of carrying out His eternal designs
in his regard. Suffice it to say that the short time the
young man spent in the novitiate had an influence on the
rest of his career.

Rene Goupil returned to secular life and applied him-
self to the study of surgery. Yet, while
His zeal and hard at work at this branch of human
self-sacrifice science, the fire of zeal and self-sacrifice
burned in his generous soul; the desire
to serve God more intimately had undergone no change.
He regretted that the priestly career had been closed to
him; however, if it were not the wish of the Great Master
to accept him for His service at the altar, Goupil did not
despair of serving Him in a humbler sphere.

Since the year 1626 the Jesuits had been actively at
work in the New World. Invited by the Recollects to
share their labors among the native tribes, the sons of
St. Ignatius had founded missions among the Montagnais
on the St. Lawrence, and had begun a similar work among
the thirty thousand Hurons living on Georgian Bay. After
three years of untiring energy and zeal, they were banished

to France when the English seized Quebec
The missions in 1629, but they returned as soon as the
of New France colony was ceded back, in 1632, by the

treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye. They were
again in the arduous field and more numerous than ever.
Fresh contingents arrived every summer to open new
centers of evangelical activity and to spread the influence
of Christianity among thousands of poor pagans who had
never heard of the true God or of His salutary redemption.
Their labors were begining to bear fruit; they were
gathering in a rich harvest of souls; thousands of convertu

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 129

to the faith were the reward of those heroic men who had
abandoned home and country to labor for Christ and suffer
for His name. Those labors and sufferings were known
and appreciated in the mother country through the pub-
lication of the Relations, a series of remarkable documents
begun in 1635 and continued until 1673, and about which,
owing to their influence on the career of Goupil, a few
remarks here should not be out of place.

Every summer the missionaries sent in from the various
parts of the mission-field detailed reports of their labors,
notes on the tribes they lived with, their customs, their
superstitions, the record of individual con-
The Jesuit versions, even the virtues practised by the

Relations neophytes. The superior at Quebec, in

his turn, made a summary of these reports,
sometimes using the missionaries' own words, at other
times changing them to give harmony to the style, and
when this task was completed he sent the manuscript to
France. For forty years a little volume, bound in vellum,
appeared in Paris yearly; it was read by thousands; it
kept the missions well in the public eye and rendered
other valuable services to the new French colony beyond
the sea.

A recent writer claims even that the Jesuit Relations
saved the colony to the motherland. "The avarice of the
fur-traders was bearing its natural fruit," he writes, "and
the untiring efforts of Champlain, a devoted, zealous
patriot, had been unavailing to counteract it. The colony
sorely needed the self-sacrificing Jesuits, but for whom
it would have undoubtedly been cast off by the mother
country as a worthless burden. To them Canada, indeed,
owed its life; for when the king grew weary of spending
treasure on this unprofitable colony, the stirring appeals
of the Relatons moved both king and people to sustain

130 RENE GOUFIL

it until the time arrived when New France was valued as
as barrier against New England."1

But these remarkable documents produced other ben-
eficial results as well. Besides exciting the zeal of future
apostles, many of whom got their first notions of sacrifice
from them, they aroused the enthusiasm and prompted
the generosity of pious and wealthy Catholics in France,
and were the occasion of endowing Canada with institu-
tions which, after nearly three centuries, are still doing
God's work. It was the reading of the Relations that
urged Madame de la Peltrie to consecrate her personal
service and her fortune to the establishment of the
Ursulines at Quebec; the Duchess d'Aiguillon, niece of
Cardinal Richelieu, and Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance,
impressed by the perusal of the little volumes, gave their
noblest efforts to help the sick and unfortunate in New
France; the hospitals of Hotel Dieu in Quebec and
Montreal are monuments still flourishing that bear test-
imony to the influence the Relations had on those two
heroines of charity. Another institution which traced its
origin to the same source was the Algonquin mission
established at Sillery, in 1637, through the generosity of
Noel Brulart, Chevalier de Sillery.1

Owing to his environment in Paris and his constant
contact with his former spiritual masters, it is hard to

1 The Jesuit Missions, by Thomas Guthrie Marquis ("Chronicle
of Canada" series). Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co., 1916, (p. 14).

1 The Jesuits performed a great service to mankind in publishing
their annals, which are, for historian, geographer, and ethnologist,
among our first and best authorities. Many of the Relations were
written in Indian camps amid a choas of distractions. Insects in-
numerable tormented the journalists, they were immersed in scenes
of squalor and degradation, overcome by fatigue and lack of proper
sustenance, often suffering from wounds and disease, maltreated in
a hundred ways by hosts who, at times, might more properly be
called jailers; and not seldom had savage superstition risen to such
a height that to be seen making a memorandum was certain to
arouse the ferocious enmity of the band. It is not surprising that
the composition of these journals of the Jesuits is sometimes crude;
the wonder is, that they could be written at all. Nearly always the
style is simple and direct. Never does the narrator descend to self-

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 131

believe that these human documents did not also fall under
the eyes of the young surgeon, or that the perusal of them
did not speak to his soul and make him feel that there
was work waiting for him on the other side of the Atlantic.
There was a field in which, if he could not work directly
in the apostolate for souls as he wished, he could at least
help those who did. Such noble aspirations were not
to lie dormant; the young man set about realizing his
plans; and acting under the advice of the Jesuits, with

whom he remained intimately united, he
He arrives in decided to give himself to the missions
New France of Canada. "When his health improved,"

writes Father Jogues. "he journeyed to
New France in order to serve the Society there, since he

glorification, or dwell unnecessarily upon the details of his own
continual martyrdom; he never complains of his lot; but sets forth
his experience In phrases the most matter-of-fact. His meaning is
seldom obscure. We gain from his pages vivid pictures of life in
the primeval forest, as he lived it; we seem to see him upon his
long canoe journeys, squatted amidst his dusky fellows, working his
passage at the paddles, and carrying cargoes upon the portage trail ;
we see him the butt and scorn of the savage camp, sometimes
deserted in the heart of the wilderness, and obliged to wait for
another flotilla, or to make his way alone as best he can. Arrived
at last, at his journey's end, we often find him vainly seeking for
shelter in the squalid huts of the natives, with every man's hand
against him, but his own heart open to them all. We find him.
even when at last domiciled in some far-away village, working
against hope to save the un-baptized from eternal damnation: wo
seem to see the rising storm of opposition, invoked by native medi-
cine-men— who to his seventeenth century imagination seem devils
indeed — and at last the bursting climax of superstitious frenzy
which sweeps him and his before it. Not only do these devoted
missionaries — never in any field has been witnessed greater personal
heroism than theirs — live and breathe before us in the Relations; but
we have in them our first competent account of the Red Indian, a'
a time when relatively uncontaminated by contact with Europeans.
We seem, in the Relations, to know this crafty savage, to measure
him intellectually as well as physically, his inmost thoughts as well
as open speech. ThePathors did not understand him, from an
ethnological joint of view, as well as he is to-day understood; their
minds were tinctured with the scientific fallacies of their time.
But, with what is known to-day, the photographic reports in the
Relations help the student to an accurate picture of the untamed
aborigine, and much that mystified the Fathers is now by aid of
their careful journals, easily susceptible of explanation. Few
periods of history are so well illuminated as the French regime in
North America. Th's we owe in large measure to the existence cf
the Jesuit Relation*. — Reuben Gold Thwaites: Introduction to the
Cleveland edition of the Relations, 1896, (p. 39-41).

132 RENE GOUFIL

had not the blessing of giving to it in Old France."1 The
young man reached Canada about the year 1640, and
from the moment of his arrival gave himself up to the
service of the missionaries. "Although he was fully
master of his own actions," writes Jogues, "he submitted
himself with great humility to the superior of the missions
who employed him for two whole years in the lowliest
offices of the house." There were several others who
aided the Jesuits in a similar way. The Canadian missions
had in their employ a certain number of lay helpers,
known as dotines, or oblates, who served without wage
and looked to God for their reward, the Fathers on their
side guaranteeing to provide for their needs till the end
of their days.

This was the class to which Rene Goupil was admitted
when he arrived in Canada. The taste of the life he had
led during his few months of novitiate in Paris, and the
principles he imbided there, had given him the desire to
do all he could for God in this humble sphere. There was
scope enough for him in Quebec to exercise his skill as
a surgeon; the college with its teachers and students, the
flourishing Algonquin mission at Sillery, the seminary at

Notre Dame des Anges, were more than
His active life enough to keep him employed. But his
in Quebec busy life in these institutions did not

prevent him from being useful elsewhere.
Father Jogues informs us that the Hotel Dieu, then at
the beginning of its long career of usefulness, profited by
his professional skill. He was assiduous in serving the
sick and wounded there; like so many saints before him
in the history of the Church, the young man saw Our
Lord in His suffering members and treated them with all
the patience and charity which he would have shown to
the Master Himself.

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxviii, p. 117.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 133

Goupil had now been two years in Canada and was
witnessing the French colony growing in numbers and in
prestige. The Jesuits were very successful in their
missions on the St. Lawrence, but they were much con-
cerned about their brethren among the Hurons on far-off
Georgian Bay, no word having reached them from that
quarter for two summers. Watchful Iroquois were prowl-
ing along the Ottawa, making communication with that
distant field almost impossible. The fears expressed at
Quebec that the missionaries were in dire straits and were
lacking the necessaries of life, had indeed a solid found-
ation. "Their clothes were falling to pieces," writes Ban-
croft; "they had no wine for the chalice but the juice of
the wild grape, and scarce bread enough for consecra-
tion."1 In fact, so critical had the situation become among
the Huron missionaries that in the spring of 1642 it was
decided, notwithstanding the perils of the route, to
attempt the journey down to Quebec and bring back
supplies as quickly as possible. Twenty-five stalwart
Hurons started from Fort Ste. Marie on June 13, in four
large bark canoes, accompanied by Father Jogues and
Father Charles Raymbault, the latter returning to Quebec
to die. By clever maneuvring they succeeded in running
the Iroquois blockade on the Ottawa, and after thirty-five
days' paddling they reached Three Rivers. A few days
later they were in Quebec, gathering in supplies for their
return journey.

The visit of Father Jogues to Quebec proved the turn-
ing point in the career of Rene Goupil. The young man

met the missionary, and heard from his
A new career own lips the conditions of life on Georgian
opens up Bay, the crushing poverty of the Jesuits

there, and above all the need there was
of medical aid among the Hurons. Jogues spoke out of
the fullness of his own experience; he had been brought

1 History of the United States, vol. ii, p. 78S.

134 RENE GOUPIL,

to death's door in 1636 when he was forced to act as his
own surgeon. Besides, the frequent recurrence of con-
tagious diseases which were thinning out the Indian
population, made the presence of one who could treat the
Hurons professionally an absolute necessity. The young
man was won over. He was aware that his departure
would deprive Sillery and Quebec of his precious services,
but other and higher considerations prevailed. The
greater good for the greater number was a motive that
appealed to him; it would be easier to replace him at
Quebec than it would be to get a volunteer for Georgian
Bay. He offered himself for service on the Huron mission
if the superior were willing to let him go.

Jogues petitioned Father Vimont to allow the young
surgeon to accompany him to Huronia, and greatly to the
satisfaction of both the permission was granted. "I cannot
express the joy he felt," writes Jogues, "when the superior
told him to prepare for the journey." The missionary did

not conceal from Goupil the perils he
He starts for might encounter. He impressed upon him
Huronia that the Iroquois were at war with the

French and were lurking along the Ottawa,
ready to seize both French and Huron whom they met on
the way. These apprehensions had no effect on the mind
of the heroic man; his decision had been made and it
was irrevocable. Meanwhile the flotilla was preparing
to start; supplies had been laid in the canoes : clothing,
church ornaments, house utensils, books, and — touching
detail !— several bundles of letters and messages for the
missionaries in Huronia from their friends and relatives
in Old France.

The first halt was made at Three Rivers. Although
only ninety miles from Quebec, this post was the extreme
westerly limit of French civilization in the year 1642. It
had been founded eight years before by Sieur Laviolette
and the fur-traders, its favorable site at the mouth of

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 135

the St. Maurice making it a fitting meeting-place for the
numerous Indian tribes who assembled there to barter
their furs. Jogues and Goupil reached the trading-post
on July 31, in time to celebrate with their brethren,
Buteux and Poncet, the feast of the founder of their
Order. The following day the twenty-two Hurons held a
council, as was their custom in critical circomstances,
during which they encouraged one another to face the
common enemies bravely should they chance to meet them.
There were still pagans in the Huron party, but the greater
number were fervent neophytes who did not fail to pray
God for a safe return to their country. The tone of their
speeches revealed a complete submission to the will of
Divine Providence, although they hoped that as they had
made the downward journey safely the Iroquois would let
them go back in peace.

Early on August 2, they set out. During that first
day nothing happened that would presage an interrupted
journey. They had paddled thirty-one miles and had
camped for the night on the shore opposite an island in

Lake St. Peter. Early next morning
Captured by human tracks were discerned freshly
the Iroquois imprinted on the sand, and a moment of

hesitation and doubt intervened. However,
whether these traces of human passage were made by
friend or enemy, they were few in number, and the
travellers decided to proceed. But there again the
craftiness of the foe was in evidence. A mile or two
further west the flotilla fell into an ambush of seventy
Iroquois who had been hiding in the long reeds and wild
grass that lined the borders of the lake. The enemy
quietly waited until the canoes were within firing distance
when they rose from their crouching position, uttered
terrifying war-whoops, and fired on the unsuspecting
Hurons. A couple of the latter were wounded, and the
Iroquois bullets pierced the canoes. When these frail

136 :i~' CJOUFIL

vessels began to leak the occupants turned their prows
shoreward and leaped out. Some disappeared quickly in
the forest; others, less agile, were surrounded by the
enemy. Among the latter were Father Jogues, Rene
Goupil and Guillaume Couture. Notwithstanding the yells
and wild gesticulations of the blood-thirsty Iroquois, the
dozen Hurons who had not escaped decided to sell their
lives as dearly as possible. They were valiantly resisting
when they perceived a new contingent of forty Iroquois
hastening across the river to aid their captors. The
struggle was now unequal; several Hurons who were still
able fled to the woods, leaving the Frenchmen and a few
faithful neophytes who heroically stood their ground and
refused to abandon the missionary. While the Iroquois
were pursuing the fleeing Hurons Rene Goupil threw
himself at the feet of Father Jogues, made his confession,
received absolution, and then offered himself in sacrifice
to God.

His virtue revealed itself at that critical moment
of his life. In a sublime act of resignation he turned to
his priestly companion and exclaimed, "Father, may God
be blessed ! He has permited this; may
He is cruelly His holy will be done ! I accept this
(tortured cross; I desire it; I embrace it with all

my heart I"1 Meanwhile the Iroquois had
returned with the unhappy Hurons. They seized Goupil,
tore off his finger nails, crushed his bleeding fingers be-
tween their teeth, stripped him of his clothing and show-
ered blow after blow on him with their fists and knotty
sticks. Notwithstanding the excruciating pain he was en-
during, the young man showed great fortitude and presence
of mind. Amid his tortures he called the attention of Father
Jogues to an aged Huron whom the Iroquois were about to
despatch with a tomahawk. He also helped the missionary

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxviii, p. 119.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 137

to instruct a Huron captain who had not yet been baptized
and who was begging to receive the sacrament.

Preparations for the departure to the Mohawk country
were begun at once. When the Iroquois had bound their
wretched prisoners tightly with cords they flung them into
their canoes. They then started across Lake Saint Peter
and halted only when they had reached the mouth of the
Richelieu river. There they divided among themselves
the supplies which were destined for the missions on
Georgian Bay. As they opened the various parcels — "the
riches of the poor Hurons and things very precious to
us," exclaimed Jogues — their shouts of joy echoed through-
out the surrounding forests. When the news reached
Quebec, Father Vimont wrote : "All these things have
fallen into hands of the barbarians. The poor Fathers
will regret the loss of their letters. The Iroquois scattered
them here and there on the bank of the river, and the
waters carried them away."

The mournful convoy with its score of prisoners then
started up the river and over Lake Champlain and Lake
George, a journey which was the occasion
Carried into of new tortures for the unhappy victims.

captivity They lay tied and crouching at the bottom

of the canoes without food or sleep, ex-
posed to the excessive summer heat and writhing with
the pain of their still fresh and bleeding wounds. In a
letter to France shortly after this tragic capture. Vimont
wrote : "Of the twenty-three taken some were massacred
while others were garrotted and carried away to the
country of those barbarians who will perhaps make a
more bloody meal of them than hounds do of a stag. God
be praised for the courage he has given to the Father
(Jogues) and for the piety he has inspired in the two
young Frenchmen (Goupil and Couture) ! If those tigers
burn them, if they roast them, if they boil them, if they
eat them, they will procure for them sweeter refreshment

138 RENE GOUF1L

in the house of the Great God for whose love they have
exposed themselves to such perils. . . A number of Hurons
captured are Christians. Perhaps they will convey a good
impression of the faith." Father Jogues, on his side,
ignoring his own sufferings, tells us later what caused
him the greatest pain on that journey was to see among
the prisoners some of the oldest and worthiest Christians
of the Church in Huronia. Their plight drew tears from
his eyes in the fear "lest the cruelties they endured might
impede the progress of the faith still incipient there."

Father Jogues and Rene Goupil were evidently in the
same canoe, for the missionary informs us that while on
the road Goupil was always occupied with God. When he
spoke, his words and discourses all plainly showed his
entire submission to His holy will. "He accepted the

death that God was sending him, offering
He takes the himself in sacrifice many times, even to
Jesuit vows be reduced to ashes, and seeking only

to please God in all things and every-
where." The two had been a few days on the way when
the young man confided to his companion the secret of
his life. "Father," he said, "God has always given me a
great desire to consecrate myself to His service by the
vows of religion in His holy Society. Up to this my sins
have rendered me unworthy of this grace. Nevertheless
I hope that our Lord will be pleased with the offering
which I now wish to make to Him by taking in the best
way I can the vows of the Society in the presence of God
and before you." l

We have here another instance of the influence his
few months in religion had on the life of Rene Goupil.
Undoubtedly he had learned in the novitiate in Paris, that
while one's actions done without the obligation of doing
them might be more pleasing to God than corresponding

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxviii, p. 121.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 139

actions done under obligation, if the former proceeds from
a more intense love of God, he had also learned that,
other things being equal, actions done under vow are
more perfect than those done without it, and he was
wise enough to wish to profit to the full by his present
sad plight. Father Jogues sympathised with the pious
desire of the holy young man, and allowed him to take
the vows which admitted him into the Order. This new
obligation would bind him closely to God and give a
double merit to the sufferings he was now undergoing
for His sake.

The canoes had been on the road eight days; and were
still on Lake Champlain, when two hundred Iroquois were
sighted. These savages were encamped on an island and
were on their way to attack the French. The arrival of
a score of prisoners was hailed by them with shouts of
joy. it being considered a good omen if they had an
opportunity of exercising their cruelty before going to war.
The prisoners were released from the cords which bound
them and were taken ashore where they
inflicted were forced to run the gauntlet between

New tortures two rows of Iroquois, who amused them-
selves by plucking out the hair and beard
of the Frenchmen and tearing the tender parts of their
bodies with their finger nails which, the Relation informs
us, were extremely sharp. After this new ordeal Rene
Goupil presented a pitiable sight. He was covered with
blood, and he staggered under the blows which his in-
human tormentors showered upon him. But the saints
have the secret of returning good for evil. One of the
Iroquois fell sick and Goupil employed his surgical skill
in opening a vein for him, with as much patience and
charity as if he were doing the act for a friend.

On the tenth day they had reached the southern end
of Lake George where the prisoners made the rest of the
journey on foot and by portaging to the Mohawk cantons,

14q RENE GOUFIL

thirty or forty miles away. Although weak from hunger
and loss or blood, the unfortunate men were forced to
carry on their backs the parcels destined for the Huron
mission. Mile after mile they trudged over the Indian
trails, staggering under their heavy
Among the burdens, and urged on by the blows and

Mohawks the insults of their captors. Finally on

the thirteenth day, eve of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin Mary, about the twentieth hour,
"they arrived at the river which flows past the village
of the Iroquois." After having crossed the river and
climbed the hill they came to the village itself, Os-
sernenon, fortified by double palisades and containing
about six hundred inhabitants. The whole population,
armed with clubs and iron rods, were on foot to welcome
the visitors. Two hedges were formed along the trail,
and as the prisoners passed between them they received
a shower of blows from men, women and children. Goupil
was horribly disfigured. When he reached the gate of
the enclosure he fell to the ground, a bruised and bleed-
ing mass of wounds. Writing of his condition,1 Father
Jogues continues : "Having fallen under a shower of
blows from clubs and iron rods with which they attacked
him, and being unable to rise, he was carried half dead
as it were, on to a scaffold raised in the middle of the
village in so pitiable a condition that he would have
inspired compassion in cruelty itself. He was all bruised
with blows and in his features one distinguished nothing
but the white of his eyes. But he was so much the more
beautiful in" the sight of the angels, as he was disfigured
and similar to Him of whom it was said, 'We have thought
Him as it were a leper; there was no beauty on Him, nor

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxviii, p. 125.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS L41

comeliness.' Hardly had they grantd him time to breathe
when they gave him three other blows on the shoulders
with a heavy club. They then cut off his right thumb at
the first joint. This torture caused the heroic Goupil to
heave a sigh and to call on Jesus ! Mary !
Suffers further Joseph ! for strength to bear the pain.
tortures At night he was tied to stakes planted in

the ground and while he lay on his back
the Iroquois children amused themselves by throwing burn-
ing coals and cinders on his bare breast. However, during
the time he was exposed to all who wished to wreak their
cruelty on him, Goupil showed admirable gentleness and
resignation.

Two days were spent in this fashion at Ossernenon, after
which the Hurons prisoners were hurried to Andaragon
where their tortures were repeated, then to Tionnontoguen,
finally to a fourth village the name of which is not fully
identified in the Relations. Father Jogues and Rene Goupil
were taken to Andaragon, but they were spared the rest
of this sorrowful way of the Cross, their weakness being
so great that they were unable to walk. The Huron pris-
oners were publicly notified that they should meet their
death by fire, "news assuredly full of horror, but softened
by the thought of the Divine will and the hope of a better
life." The dread sentence was carried out on several of
them in the various villages. They went to the stake giving
examples of that savage stoicism when their training on
Georgian Bay had changed into Christian courage and
resignation. Jogues and Goupil were not condemned to
this frightful death; their sentence had been put off for
the moment, and having been brought back to Ossernenon
they were allowed a certain freedom within the limits of
the village.

142 RENE GOUFIL,

Meanwhile the news that white men had been seized
and were held as captives among the Iroquois had reached
!the Dutch at Fort Orange, and had aroused
Attempts to their sympathy. The commandant, Arendt
ransom him Van Corlaer, with two interpreters, came
to Ossernenon to intercede for them and
treat for their ransom. Van Corlaer offered two hundred
and sixty dollars, an offer which was haughtily refused.
Father Jogues remarked that the Dutch envoys spent
several days in consultation, offering much but obtaining
little. Not wishing to offend their allies, the wily bar-
barians promised that they themselves would conduct the
prisoners back to the French colony.

These efforts to free the missionary and his companion

were frowned on by the Iroquois and made them more

wary. Meanwhile the two men usually retired outside the

village walls where they could be alone with God and

their devotions. But even there they were not alone;

spies were watching all their actions, and their fervor and

the length of their prayers excited the fury of those enemies

of God. Rene Goupil had become the special object of

their hatred, and the reason of his assassination is given

in detail by Father Jogues in the document quoted so

often in these ages. One day a little child, three or four

years old, entered Goupil's cabin while he was at prayer.

With an excess of devotion and of love for the Cross, and

with a simplicity which in the circumstances, Father

Jogues avers, was not prudent according to the flesh, he

removed the cap from the child's head and then made a

great sign of the Cross on the little one's brow and breast.

The grandfather of the child, a superstitious old pagan,

witnessed this scene. He had heard from

Threatened the Calvinists of Fort Orange that the

with death sign of the Cross was a hateful sign, and

fearing some misfortune from the action

of the Frenchman, he became enraged at him, and com-

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 143

manded a young Indian who was about to leave for the
war to kill him. The savage took the order to heart and
sought the first opportunity to carry it out.

Unconscious of these dangers and yet wishing to give
no cause for complaint, Jogues and Goupil kept aloof from
the others in the village; they lived in close companion-
ship and performed their devotions together. Six weeks
after their arrival at Ossernenon, they were walking in
the neighborhood of the village reciting the rosary, when
the young savages ordered them to return to their cabins
at once. Father Jogues had some presentiment of what
was going to happen and remarked to Goupil, "My dear
Brother, let us recommend ourselves to our Lord and to
His good Mother the Blessed Virgin; I think these people
have some evil design." 1 The same Father tells us they
had with much fervor offered themselves to God shortly
before, beseeching Him to receive their lives and their
blood and to unite them to His Life and His Blood for
the salvation of the Iroquois. Accordingly, they returned
towards the village reciting the rosary, and had said the

fourth decade when they reached the gate.
He is cruelly They stopped to listen to what the young
slain at last men were saying when one of these drew

a hatchet which he had kept concealed
beneath his blanket and dealt a blow with it on the head
of Rene Goupil, felling the victim to the ground. Goupil
was still conscious, for he recalled at that moment an
agreement he had made with Father Jogues to invoke the
Holy Name of Jesus in order to obtain the indulgence.
Looking for a similar end, the Jesuit knelt to receive his
blow, but the murderer remarked that he had not per-
mission to kill him, as he was under the protection of
another family. Jogues then rose to his feet, and pro-
nounced a last absolution over the young man who was

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxviii, p. 127.

144 RENE GOUPIL

unconscious but still breathing. Two more blows of the
hatchet completed the murderous deed; the soul of the
heroic Goupil left his body and went to meet its Maker.

"It was on the twenty-ninth of September, feast of
St. Michael," wrote Father Jogues later, "when this angel
of innocence and martyr of Jesus Christ gave his life
for Him who had given him His. They ordered me to
return to my cabin where I waited the rest of the day
looking for the same fate. It was fully their purpose to
kill me; but our Lord did not permit it. The next morning
I went to enquire where they had thrown the blessed
body, for I wished to bury it at any cost. Certain Iroquois
said to me : 'You have no sense. Don't you see that
they are seeking you everywhere to kill you, and still
you go out ! Your are looking for a body already half
destroyed, which they have dragged far from here. The
young men will kill you if they find you oustide the

stockade.' That did not stop me; our Lord
Respect for gave me courage enough to wish to die

his relics in this act of charity. With the aid of an

Algonquin prisoner I found the body.
After his (Goupil's) death the children had stripped him
and putting a rope about his neck dragged him to a
ravine which is near their village. The dogs had mangled
him and I could not keep my tears back at the sight. I
took the body, and with the aid of the Algonquin I put it
in the water and then weighted it down with stones so
that it might not be seen. It was my intention to come
the next day with a mattock, when no one was looking, to
dig a grave and place the remains therein. I thought the
corpse had been well concealed but perhaps some of the
young men had perceived me. During the night it rained,
and the water in the ravine rose to an uncommon height.
I borrowed a mattock from another cabin the better to
conceal my design, but when I reached the spot I could
not find the blessed deposit. I went into the water and

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 145

sounded with my feet to see whether the torrent had not
carried it away. I could find nothing."1

The kind-hearted missionary gave up the task. He
learned later that the young men of the village had
dragged Goupil's body from the ravine into a little wood
nearby where it became the food of wild animals. Only
in the following spring, after he had made a fourth
attempt, did he succeed in finding the skull and a few
half-gnawed bones. These he buried with the intention
of carrying them back to Three Rivers should he succeed
in gaining his liberty. "Before placing
Considered a them in the ground," he remarks, "I kissed
martyr them very devoutly several times as the

bones of a martyr of Jesus Christ. I
give him this title not only because he was killed by the
enemies of God and His Church and in the exercise of an
ardent charity towards his neighbor by placing himself
in evident peril for the love of God, but especially because
he was killed on account of prayer and notably for the
sign of the Holy Cross." 2

Thus ended one of the most pathetic incidents in the
history of the early missions of America. Within recent
years the site of Qssernenon, where Rene Goupil met his
tragic death, with the ravine into which his body was
cast, had been located near the present village of Auries-
ville, on the banks of the Mohawk river, about forty miles
from Albany. This spot, rendered sacred by so many
venerable souvenirs, has been set aside as a place of
pilgrimage where a shrine has been erected and dedicated
to Our Lady of Martyrs. Large numbers of the faithful
assemble there every summer to recall the tragic happen-
ings of the seventeenth century and to implore the inter-
cession of the young martyr whose blood, shed for the
sign of the Cross, has hallowed the soil. Rene Goupil's

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxviii, p. 133.

2 Ibid., Clev. edit., vol. xxviii, p. 131.

146 RENE GOUPIL

gentle disposition, his zeal in the service of God, his
fortitude and resignation in his suffering, crowned by his

heroic death, have given a halo to his
His memory memory which time has not obliterated.
still fresh The Third Council of Baltimore, held in

1884, coupled his name with that of Isaac
Jogues, his companion in captivity and torture, in a
petition to the Holy See asking for their beatification.
A Decree, issued in August, 1916, by the Sacred Congrega-
tion of Rites, shows that much progress has been made.
It gives us reason of hope that in the not too distant
future the Church may permit us to invoke the interces*
sion of this young Christian hero who shed his blood for
the faith in the early years of our country.

m m

JOHN DE LA LANDE
Slain by the Iroquois. October 19, 16i€

John de la Lande

VICTIM OF THE IROQUOIS

THE martyrdom of John de la Lande, the saintly com-
panion of Father Jogues, which took place in 1646, on
the banks of the Mohawk river, is one of those incidents
which left their impress on the early history of the
American missions; it recalls the age when the ferocious
Iroquois, the sworn enemy of the French missionaries,
were spreading terror throughout New France. Those
savages occupied the picturesque and fruiful valleys and
uplands which extend from the headquarters of the Hudson
river to the Genesee, in the present State of New York,
and roamed far and wide on their warlike expeditions.
An unfortunate encounter with Champlain,1 in 1609, on
the shores of the lake which bears his name, first taught
the Iroquois the efficacity of fire arms, weapons which
they easily procured from the Dutch who were to settle
on the banks of the Hudson; in a very few years they
had discarded their bows and arrows for powder and shot.
This first act of hostility, in which several Iroquois were
slain, became a source of alienation from the French dur-
ing the rest of the seventeenth century. The Dutch foster-
ed the bitterness between the French and the Iroquois by
instilling into the minds of the latter their own religious
prejudices which they had brought with them across the

1 Oeuvrcs de Champlain, (Quebec, 1870), Bk. ii, ch. ix, pp. 193-196.

150 JOHN DE LA LANDE

Atlantic; and, as the sequel proved, their insidious

maneuvring had serious consequences for
French and the French missionaries who went to

Iroquois labor among those Indians in later years.

As yet the Iroquois had not come In
contact with the Jesuits, but what they learned from the
followers of Calvin excited their ill-will against a religious
system which aimed at exterminating their sorcery and
pagan customs. The poor aborigenes readily accepted as
true the testimony of their white allies; it justified them
in their belief that the famine and pestilence and other
misfortunes which visited them from time to time were
the work of the missionaries. Inspired by the evil
counsels of the Dutch as well as by their own supersti-
tions, the Iroquois grew to hate the doctrines of the
Catholic Church and to despise and fear those who taught
them. Father Jerome Lalemant wrote in the Relation of
1649, "The Iroquois have an intense hatred of our holy
religion." The circumstances attending the martyrdom
of Brebeuf, Jogues, Goupil, and others, amply prove that,

while some of the Indians dreaded even
Intrigues of the objects devoted to Catholic worship
the Dutch as sources of evil, others, more daring,

scorned the sacraments and practices of
our holy religion, and they were fully disposed to do away
with those who labored to propagate it. All this ignorance
and prejudice recoiled in time on the heroic French mis-
sionaries who paid the price in tortures and death.

But the French and their missionaries were not the
only objects of Iroquois resentment; those savages extend-
ed their hatred to the native tribes who had been con-
verted and were friendly to the French, and their geo-
graphical position made their warlike incursions against
the French allies a comparatively easy task. The valley
of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries were well within
their reach through Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario,

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 151

over whose waters they could move in large war parties,
to carry devastation into the French settlements of Quebec,
Montreal and Three Rivers, and from the western fringe
of their territory they could advance quickly over Lake
Erie into the present Province of Ontario and attack the
allied Indian tribes in their own domain. Profiting by
these advantages and by their desire for vengeance, they
destroyed the flourishing missions among the Hurons on
Georgian Bay, killing or capturing several thousand of
these unfortunate Indians with their missionaries; they
ravaged the Montagnais settlements on the Lower St.
Lawrence, the Neutrals along Lake Erie, the Algonquins
on Ottawa, and the Attikamegs, a peaceful nation living
on Upper St. Maurice. A punitive expedition directed by
the French, in 1865, reduced the Iroquois for a time to
inactivity, but during the rest of the century they remain-
ed what history tells they had always been, a cruel, sullen
and treacherous race, in whom all humane feelings were
dormant. Prisoners taken by them were subjected t»
fiendish tortures; their scalps and finger nails were torn
off; their flesh was cut away piecemeal and eaten before
their eyes; and when the victims survived these ordeals
they were usually burned at the stake or condemned te
imprisonment and slavery worse than death.

And, yet, in those strenuous years of the seventeenth
century there were Jesuits brave enough
Jesuits among to go among the Iroquois, along the
the Iroquois Mohawk river and the lakes of central
New York, to live with them and preach
the Gospel to them. The first of these heroes of the
Cross was Father Isaac Jogues, whom a tragic accident
threw into the hands of those ferocious savages for the
first time in 1642. While on his way to the Huron mission
on Georgian Bay, whither he was returning with supplies
for his famine-stricken brethren, he fell into an ambuscade
of Iroquois, a few miles west of Three Rivers, together

152 JOHN DE LA LANDE

with two Frenchmen, Ren6 Goupil and Guillaume Couture,
and a score of Hurons. All were cruelly beaten and tor-
tured and then carried off as prisoners to the Mohawk
valley. Father Jogues' companion was slain six weeks
later, September 29, 1842, while only after thirteen months
of degrading slavery did the Jesuit succeed in making his
©scape. The holy missionary has left us a vivid narration
of the trials he had to undergo during this captivity. Two
years later, in 1644, another Jesuit, Father Joseph
Bressani, was seized. Three pathetic letters written by
this servant of God have been preserved and give details
of the tortures inflicted on him which, after nearly three
centuries, still cause a thrill of horror in the reader. The
Iroquois, he pathetically relates, began by obliging him
to throw away all his writings, their superstition fearing
that some malicious charm was attached to them, and

"they were surprised," he remarks, "to
Tortures of the witness how sensitive this loss was to me,
missionaries seeing that I had given no sign of regret

for the rest." After incredible hardship
and fatigue the unhappy captive reached the Mohawk
country where he was received by the tribe in a cruel
fashion. He was stripped of his clothes and obliged to
run the gauntlet between two rows of howling savages
who showered blows on him with sticks and iron rods.
With a sharp knife they split his fingers open and nearly
severed his hand in two. Covered with blood he was forced
to mount a platform in the middle of the village, where he
became the object of their jeers and insults. This, how-
ever, was only the beginning of his sufferings. He was
taken from village to village and in each tortured by fire,
his captors' favorite method being to light their calumets
and then push the victim's fingers into the bowls. Eighteen
times they applied fire to his lacerated hands until at last
they were a mass of festering wounds. These tortures
were usually inflicted at night, during which he was

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS ; f, :J

securely tied to stakes and forced to lie uncovered on the
bare ground. The poor sufferer tells us that, when finally
he was condemned to be burned at the stake, he wished
to die, but he begged the ruthless Iroquois to despatch him
in any way but by fire. "Taken prisoner while on his
way to the Hurons," writes the historian Bancroft, "beaten,
mangled, mutilated; driven barefoot over rough paths,
through briers and thickets; scourged by a whole village;
burned, tortured, wounded and scarred, he was eye-witness
to the fate of his companions who were boiled and eaten;
ye t some mysterious awe protected his life." x Father
Bressani himself acknowledged that he received this pro-
tection from God and His Blessed Mother. He was given
into slavery and remained in that condition until, like his
predecessor Father Jogues, he was humanely ransomed
by the Dutch at Fort Orange. These two examples will
suffice to show us what kind of savages the Jesuits had
to deal with in their work of spreading the Gospel. In
blood and tears the devoted men tried to impress the
Divine Master's message on souls steeped
Work among *°r centuries in superstition and the most
the Iroquois degrading sorcery. Jogues and Bressani
carried the marks of their heroism in
their mutilated members till death. One of them, as we
shall see in a moment, not satisfied with what he had
already suffered among the Mohawks, returned with his
companion, John de la Lande, when both of them offered
up the sacrifice of their lives.

Between the years 1642 and 1644 the Iroquois grew so
daring, and their incursions so numerous, that the French
colony became alarmed Peaceful farmers were seized
while working in their fields; Indians were often seen
hiding under the very shadow of the settlers' dwellings;
war-parties were constantly prowling along the Ottawa

1 History of the United State*. Bk. ii, p 793

154 JOHN DE LA LAN'l E

river and on the Lower St. Lawrence, waiting like tigers
for their prey. They had blocked the route to the Huron
country, and menaced not merely the fur-trade but the
very existence of the Jesuit missions on Georgian Bay
Matters had reached such a pass in 1644 that the French
governor Montmagny felt that something had to be done.
Hoping to put an end to the Iroquois depreciations and
to the reign of terror which was paralysing the colony,
he suggested a treaty of peace with the Confederacy. The
suggestion was received favorably; delegates were ap-
pointed on both sides, and conferences
The Jesuit were held at Three Rivers in the summer

Ambassador of 1614, at which Jogues assisted. Certain
stipulations were agreed to by both French
and Iroquois, and everything foreshadowed a brighter and
more peaceful era. However, the treacherous savages
had so often given evidence of bad faith that some unusual
measure was thought necessary by the French to prevail
on them to keep their pledges. Two years later an
embassy to the Mohawks was proposed and Father Jogues
was chosen as ambassador. His long captivity among
them, in 1642, and his ready knowledge of their tongue,
would make him a valuable agent to urge the savages to
ratify the articles of peace. We learn from his eor-
respondence that the holy missionary started on this
second journey to the Mohawks with some trepidation.
He carried out the mandate entrusted to him, and while
he was not entirely successful, as the sequel showed, his
visit to the cantons made a very deep impression on his
mind The abominable superstitions he had witnessed
during his thirteen months' captivity were as rife as
ever, and he was disconsolate at the thought that those
abandoned savages, who bore the image of God on their
souls, should be allowed to live and die in their wretched-
ness without some effort being made to help them. The
Redeemer, he pleaded, had shed His precious Blood for

TUB CANADIAN MARTYRS 155

the poor, untutored Iroquois, as He had for the rest of
men, and he resolved to repay them for their former
cruelties to him by returning as soon as possible to preach
God's law to them and help them to save their souls. So
fully determined was he to resume his apostolic labors
among his former persecutors that, in order to save him-
self the worry of double transportation, as we have
already seen, he left in the care of a Mohawk family a
box containing church vestments and a few personal
•ffects.

When the heroic man laid the project before his
superiors at Quebec he received their entire approbation;
in fact, the Jesuits had hoped that this
De la Lande would be one of the results of Father
chosen Jogues' embassy. And yet while his

energy and zeal were equal to the task
ahead of him, the holy man did not minimize the danger,
he even had presentiments that the great sacrifice of his
life would be demanded of him, as we learn from a letter
he wrote to a friend in France, but he joyfully began his
preparations for the journey. His first care was to choose
a companion, a layman who should be animated with the
same sentiments as he himself was, one in whom self-
sacrifice and entire devotedness excelled, and who would
be ready to yield up his life if he were asked to do so
for the sake of souls. Father Jogues found these admirable
qualities in a young man, John de la Lande, a native of
Dieppe, in Normandy, who had been in the French colony
only a short time, and had been remarked for his piety
and hfs zeal in the service of the missionaries at Quebec.
When the opportunity of sacrifice in the Mohawk country
was proposed to him, he gladly offered himself for the
enterprise, looking only to God for his reward.

In thus choosing a layman to accompany him, Father
Jogues was observing a custom already adopted by the
missionaries. This was a necessary precaution, owing

156 JOHN DE LA LANDE

to the conditions of the people and the country in which
they were forced to live. It is not an
The difficulties easy task, in this age of comfort and easy
of trave'5 transportation, to form a true idea of the

difficulties and hardships the early Jesuits
on this continent had to contend with in their apostolic
wanderings. In the seventeenth century canoes and
baggage had to be carried on shoulders over rapids and
rocky places; long day3 of weary trudging on foot, or
handling the paddle, had to be undergone if one wished to
make any progress over the vast solitudes of land and
water.

Needless to say, the services of a devoted layman
were a welcome solace in the fatigues of those dreary
journeys. The missionary's scanty meals of ground corn
boiled in water were prepared by his companion, who
gathered the wood and built the camp fire, thus giving
him leisure to recite his breviary and go through his
other devotions. When darkness obliged him to halt at
the foot of some rapid or hill, the lay companion cut the
cedar branches which formed his bed for the night; and
in the early morning when the missionary set up his
portable altar in the forest and celebrated Mass, it was
his lay companion who assisted him. But it was in the
permanent missions already established far from French
posts, that the services, of those devoted laymen were
appreciated. Like their neophytes and converts, the
Jesuits had to depend on fishing, hunting and the cultiva-
tion of the soil for their daily food; they could not rely
on the charity of inconstant Indians; they needed the help
of men fully devoted to them to provide for their temporal
wants. For this purpose they organized a class of lay
helpers, men of unblemished character who were willing
to labor for the love of God and look to Him alone, as
the missionaries did, for their reward. These helpers
were known as donnes, or oblates, that is, men who made

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 157

the oblation of themselves and their services to the mis-
sionaries. There were few lay-brothers of the Order in
New France, and besides, as Jerome Lalemant admits, the
oblates were preferred to lay-brothers for the reason that
they could do all the latter could do and much that they
were debarred from doing; for instance, the carrying of

firearms, an important detail in those
Usefulness of Btrenuous years of Iroquois inroads and
the oblates barbarities. In the missions they taught

the native converts how to build cabins
and how to till the soil profitably; during times of pest-
ilence they acted as surgeons and nurses to the sick.
Jerome Lalemant tells us that they were skilful in bleed-
ing sick savages and in preparing medicines for them.
Father de Carheil, writing from the Iroquois country a
quarter of a century after Lalemant, praises his oblate
companion who was able to mix medicine, dress wounds,
treat the sick, and render himself useful in various ways.
"Would to God," he exclaimed, "that we had a man like
him in every mission !"

The oblates made themselves all things to all men and
rendered valuable services to both French and Indians.
An interesting story is related of one of them, Robert Le
Coq, known as Robert the Good, whose activity among
the Fathers on Georgian Bay missions is described at
length in the Relation of 1640. While in the wlderness,
on one of his trips over the Ottawa route to Quebec, Le
Coq met a. poor Huron Indian who, owing to illness, had
been abandoned by his companions. He was touched with
compassion and resolved to save the Huron's life. He
built a cabin for him, covered him with his own clothing,
and then started out to fish and hunt to provide food
for him. He stayed with him in the forest and served
him day and night with so much charity that he restored
the Indians to health again. A year later, while travelling

158 JOHN DE LA LANDB

over the same route, Le Coq himself was seized with small-
pox, then prevalent in the neighborhood.
An example of In a few days his body was covered with
their charity the loathsome disease. His Huron com-
panions, overcome with horror of him and
feeling that his end was near, took away his clothes and
his canoe, and left him to perish on a bare rock on the
shore of Georgian Bay. For twelve or thirteen days the
unhappy man struggled with death when, by a happy
coincidence, the Indian whom he had succored the year
before happened to come along. At first, Le Coq was not
recognized in his disfigurement, but the Huron had not
forgotten the sound of his voice; and moved to com-
passion, in his turn, at the thought of the services that
had been rendered himself, he carried the sick man on
his back for four days till he reached a spot where he
could call for assistance.1

Kind acts like these performed by the laymen in the
service of the missions, created bonds of sympathy between
the Indians and the Jesuits, and made the work of the
latter all the easier. And yet, notwithstanding their
evident usefulness, the innovation did not meet with the
entire approval of the General of the Jesuits. Some of
the oblates had been allowed to take vows of devotion
and to wear a religious habit, and besides, this class
resembled too closely a Third Order for which no provision
had been made in the Constitutions of the founder. Mutius
Vitelleschi ordered its dissolution in 1643 and counselled
his brethren in Canada not to revive it in future. If the
labors of those lay-helpers were essential to the welfare
of the missions, he instructed the superiors to modify the
conditions of their existence. This was cheerfully done
the following year, and the oblates continued to work as
before with much fruit and edification. The verdict that

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., xix, p. 108. Robert Le Coq was
Blain by the Iroquois at Three Rivers, in 1650.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 159

one must draw from the reading of the Relations is that
these laymen rendered priceless services to the Canadian
missions and contributed greatly, by their devotedness and
self-sacrifice, to the success obtained by
Praised by the Jesuits in the New World. In 1649,

Ragueneau the year of the destruction of the Hurons,

there were twenty-seven oblates in the
service of the missions on Georgian Bay, we learn from
a letter of Paul Ragueneau to Father Vincent Caraffa,
General of the Order; "all chosen men," he writes, "most
of whom have resolved to live and die with us; they
assist us in our labor and industries with a courage, a
fidelity and a holiness that assuredly are not of earth.
Consequently they look to God for their reward, deeming
themselves only too happy to pour out not only their
sweat but, if need be, their blood also, to contribute as
much as they can towards the conversion of the barbar-
ian."1 "Without being initiated members," writes Ban-
croft, in his turn, "they were chosen men, ready to shed
their blood for their faith."2

John de la Lande, it would seem, belonged to this
chosen class of auxiliaries. When he was invited to accom-
pany Father Isaac Jogues on his apostolic mission to the
ferocious Iroquois, he did not stand to reckon the cost of
the sacrifice he was about to make. "Although he was
aware of the danger," wrote Bressani afterwards, "he
faced it courageously, without hope of any reward but
Paradise." 3

Preparations having been completed, Father Jogues
quitted Three Rivers on August 24, 1646. A few sturdy
Hurons who were going to visit their captive relatives
accompanied the missionary and de la Lande, and after
crossing Lake St. Peter they began to paddle up the

1 Jesuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxxiii, p. 75.

2 History of the United States. Bk. ii, ch. 20.

3 Jesuit Relations, C!ev. edit., vol. xxxix, p. 287.

160 JOHN DE I. A LANDE

Richelieu river on their way to Lake Charnplain. They
usually kept near the shore to avoid the strong current,
and they landed to rest when fatigue overcame them.
Father Jogues' mutilated hands, relics of his captivity four
years before, prevented him from using the paddle, but he
was generously aided by John de la Lande whose willing
arms did double work, thus forestalling any signs of
discontent among the Hurons who wanted everyone to do
his share while on the way. When night came on and
the canoes were pulled ashore, it was de la Lande who

built the fire and prepared the evening
De la Lande meal of sagamitg for the missionary. The
aids Jogues two men recited the rosary together and

then lay down on their bed of branches
to get a few hours' rest. At dawn, after their morning
prayers and breakfast, they started off to cover another
section of their journey, portaging their canoes over the
rapids in the Richelieu river and finally entering Lake
Charnplain. During those long painful days de la Lande
proved himself a true friend to Father Jogues, looking
after the personal needs of one who had only the partial
use of his members and taking care of the baggage which
must have been considerable, seeing that the two men were
resolved to spend the winter in the "land of crosses," as
the Jesuit appropriately called the Mohawk country.

Meanwhile events were taking place among the
Mohawks which were to have dire results for both Jogues
and de la Lande. After the departure of the priest in the
previous June, a pestilence had broken out in that nation
and had made many victims. In addition to this, a worm
had attacked the roots of the Indian corn and threatened

to ruin the crop. Famine and death star-
Symptoms of ed the superstitious savages in the face
trouble and, according to their custom, they sought

a reason for the disasters which threatened
them. They laid the blame on the box of church goods

THE CANADIAN .MARTYRS Igl

which the missionary had left behind him at Ossernenon.
This box had, in fact, become an object of suspicion from
the moment it had been confided to their care; they feared
that its presence in their midst would bring them some
misfortune. Now their fears were more than realized;
they were persuaded that Jogues had concealed therein
an evil spirit which was carrying out its master's mandate
to destroy their nation. It did not take the Iroquois long
to come to a decision. Without daring to open the box,
they threw it into the river, and during the whole month
previous to the missionary's arrival, the Bear clan spread
bitter reports against him. These calumnies greatly ex-
cited the Mohawks, and as it had been well known that
he intended to return they did not promise to add much
to the warmth of his welcome. The more reasonable,
however, among the families of the Wolf and Turtle
clans, those especially who had known Father Jogues
during his captivity, counselled moderation; they wished
to give him an opportunity to explain the contents of the
box. He had already done this for them when he left it
in their care, but the subsequent pestilence and the
visitation of the worm evidently called for further ex-
planation. The more petulant members of the Bear clan
refused to listen to this wise advice, and craftily used
the incident as a pretext for continuing war against the
French whom they accused of having sent Father Jogues
among them. They did not wait for his arrival before
they took action; two parties raised the war-cry among
their kinsmen and immediately set out in the direction of
New France.

Quite unconscious of this change in public sentiment,
Jogues, de la Lande and the Hurons were slowly paddling
southward. They had crossed Lake Champlain, and had
reached the lower end of the Lake of the Blessed Sacra-
ment,1 where they were met by one of the war parties.

1 A name given to it by Father Jogues; now called Lake George.

Ig2 JOHN DB LA LANDE

The hostile attitude the Mohawks at once assumed caused
such alarm that the timid Hurons, realizing what it meant
for them if they were taken prisoners, fled in terror,
leaving the missionary and his companion at the mercy
of the Mohawks. With fiendish delight these wild savages
threw themselves on the two men, robbed them of their
baggage, stripped them naked, and began to belabor them
with blows. Father Jogues had already
Seized by the had his share of this cruel treatment; ha
savages carried on his frail body the marks of

former tortures; but the new experience
must have been a thrilling one for John de la Lande.
However, he did not falter. "This good young man," we
read in the Relation of 1647, "saw the danger into which
he was going when he started on the perilous voyage,
but he protested at his departure that the desire to serve
God drew him to that country where he felt that death
was awaiting him." l The hour had come at last when
his aspirations were to be fulfilled, when his virtue was
to be put to its first heroic rest. He was to taste at
last the bitter cup which God presents to the lips of His
martyrs before He gives them their heavenly crown. But
the young oblate knew well, too, that "the souls of the
Just are in the hands of God and the torments of death
shall not touch them" until He gives the word. John de
la Lande resigned himself to the will of his Heavenly
Father; while he was beaten, stripped naked and led in
that condition by his captors to Andagaron, he possessed
his soul in peace. A few miles had still to be covered
before they sighted the Mohawk village; two days later
the Iroquois made their triumphal entry
Inhumanly into Andagaron with their prisoners. The

tortured village was familiar to Father Jogues who

had spent his thirteen months' captivity
there, but it was a terrifying sight that now met his gaze.

1 Jctuit Relations, Clev. edit., vol. xxxi, p. 123.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 163

Men, women and children, howling and gesticulating, and
wild with joy over his capture, hurled menaces against
him of torture and death. John de la Lande shared these
insults and barbarous treatment with his saintly com-
panion. "You shall both die to-morrow," the chiefs ex-
claimed; "your heads will fall under our tomahawks and
will be placed on our palisades to show your brethren
what fate awaits them." These wild threats were echoed
from mouth to mouth by the savages, and to show the
two prisoners how deeply in earnest they were, they
began to cut bits of flesh from their arms and devour them
before their eyes.

And yet, amid those horrors the two men had a few
friends among the Wolf and Turtle clans of the Mohawk
nation who sympathized with them and wished to save
them. But the members of the Bear clan would not
listen; they ignored the pledges taken at the treaty of
Three Rivers and clamored all the louder for vengeance;
only the death of the two whitemen would placate them.
Still, higher interests had to be safeguarded; the treaty
was an accomplished fact; the present affair affected the
welfare of the whole nation; and as private vengeance
urged by the hostile Bear clan was not offcially recognized,
it was decided to convoke an assembly to discuss the
situation at Tionontoguen, the largest of the Mohawk
villages, ten or twelve miles away. There the promoters
of peace and leniency had the upperhand; it was decided

that Father Jogues and de la Lande should
Their fate is be set at liberty. This decision was a
discussed setback to the designs of their enemies

who were intent on their destruction and
who would not be easily done out of their prey. Fearing
that the assembly would take the means to protect the
prisoners, the blood-thirsty wretches of the Bear clan de-
termined to take the affair into their own hands and
commit the crime secretly. Before the delegates had time

1^4 JOHN DE LA LANDE

to return to Andaragon, a couple of savages invited Father
Jogues to sup with them in their cabin. The holy man
saw in this only a mark of frienship, and he readily
accepted the invitation. He had hardly crossed the
threshold when a blow from a tomahawk, which one of
the cowardly savages had hidden under his blanket, felled
him to the gound. His skull was split open; his sacrifice
was at last accomplished. This crime took place on the
evening of October 18, 1646.

Lack of details prevent us from following the move-
ments of John de la Lande during the few hours subse-
quent to the assassination of Father Jogues, or of sound-
ing the sentiments which must have animated his soul
throughout the long night that followed. Alone with his
fiendish enemies and completely at their mercy, he
evidently expected the same fate as his holy companion,
and he prepared himself for it. God does not abandon his
servants in such solemn moments; He undoubtedly inspir-
ed de la Lande to renew the offering he had so often and
so generously made since his departure from Three Rivers,
and He gave him the courage and fortitude to make the
supreme sacrifice. "This frame of mind," we read in the

Relation of 1647, "enabled him to pass into
De la Lande a life which no longer fears either the rage
suffers death of barbarians, or the fury of demons, or

the pangs of death." x Next morning the
heroic young oblate was seized by the savages and put
to death with a blow from a tomahawk, as his companion
has been the evening before. The heads of the two martyrs
were detached from their bodies and placed on pickets
in the palisades facing the road by which they had entered
the village.

When the news of this double assassination was bruited
about, it created a profound impression among the

1 Jesuit Relation*, Clev. edit., vol. xxxi. p. 123.

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS 165

Mohawks. Those who had had dealings with the French,
either as peacemakers or as prisoners, were loud in their
denunciation of the crime, claiming that the tomahawk
strokes that killed Jogues and De la Lande would bring
down misfortunes on the tribe. Kiotsaeton, a powerful
Mohawk orator who distinguished himself at the peace
conferences at Three Rivers, hastened to condemn the
foul deed. He was so outspoken against the treachery of
his kinsmen that he was suspected of showing too much
partiality to the French. Another who deplored the crime
was a prominent Mohawk, known as "The Shepherd". He
was moved to sympathy by the fact that he had once been
seized by the Algonquins and condemned to die at the
stake, but had been freed through the intervention of the
French governor. A Mohawk captain who had a Huron
prisoner in his keeping was so incensed that he gave him
his liberty to go and tell the French how much he
deplored the act of his countrymen. However, these
regrets came too late to be effective. The report of the

tragedy did not reach the French colony
News reaches until the following year, when a couple
the colony of letters written by the Dutch at Fort

Orange gave the meager details which
were inserted in the Relation of 1647. In the same year
a Mohawk prisoner taken at Three Rivers volunteered
further information that, after the assassination of Father
Jogues, whom he tried to save, he became the protector
of the young Frenchman who accompanied him. He warn-
ed De la Lande not to go far from him, as his life was
not safe. But the young man, having gone to get some
object which he had brought with him, was slain with a
tomahawk by those who were watching him.

Thus ended the short but tragic career of John de la
Lande. It is not surprising that for two and a half
centuries he should be looked on as a martyr, or that his
name should be linked with those of his fellow-oblate

166 JOHN DE LA LAN'DE

Rene Goupil and the Jesuit missionaries who yielded up
the lives for the cause of Christ between 1642 and 1649.
When the Relations mention the young man's name it is
only to extol his piety and his charity in the service of
the missionaries. De la Lande was gifted with a profound
faith in the truths of our holy religion and with a firm

hope in God's promises. These admirable
The virtues of virtues inspired him with strength and
de la Lande courage to meet every trial, and when the

moment arrived he faced death willingly,
in order to share not merely the sacrifices but also tha
merits of the missionary life. As a reward for his gen-
erosity, God gave him the greatest prize that He can bestow
on man here below, the palm of martyrdom.

The death of John de la Lande added another name to
the list of the victims of the Iroquois, namely, John de
Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Anthony Daniel, Charles
Gamier, Noel Chabanel, Isaac Jogues and Rene Goupil.
So deep was the conviction both in France and Canada
that De la Lande and his seven companions had shed their
blood for the faith that precautions were taken almost
immediately by the Archbishop of Rouen, under whose
jurisdiction the French colony had been placed, to pre-
serve the memory of their trials and sufferings. Father

Paul Ragueneau, the superior of the Can-
Kis memory adian missions, who had known the eight
preserved martyrs personally, testified under oath,

in 1652, to the truth of the facts which
had been published in the various Relations concerning
these servants of God. Owing to the troublous times
through which the Church was passing in Europe in the
seventeenth and the eighteenth century, as well as the
political changes which took place in America, nothing
further was done to revive the blessed memory of the men
who shed such luster on the early missions among the
Hurons and the Mohawks. The story of their lives, how-

THE CANADIAN MARTYRS ^57

ever, was preserved as a precious legacy by succeeding
generations, and writers of every shade, even non-Cath-
olics, while not always discerning enough to sound the
motives that inspired the deeds of those holy men, were
generous in their tributes to their heroism.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, interest began
to grow in the victims of the Iroquois. The translation and
publication of Father Bressani's Italian work on the early
missions of New France in 1853, and the new edition of
the Jesuit Relations published in 1858, quickened the public
desire to see something done to rehabilitate the memory
of the martyrs. In 1884 the first move was made to
interest the Holy See in the Cause of their Beatification,
wben the Fathers of the Third Plenary Council of
Baltimore petitioned the Sovereign Pontiff to proclaim
the martyrdom of Father Isaac Jogues and Rene Goupil
who had shed their blood for the faith on what is now
the soil of the United States. Other martyrs, however,
merited the same honors, and two years later, the Seventh
Provincial Council of Quebec issued a postulatum to the
Holy See praying for the glorification of the missionaries
who were put to death in Canada in the seventeenth
century and who had always been venerated as true
martyrs.

In 1904 the Archbishop of Quebec instituted the
preliminary canonical enquiry. Over two hundred sessions
were held and much pertinent testimony was gathered
and forwarded to the Sacred Congregation of Rites rela-
tive to the virtues of the men whose lives were submitted

to investigation. In 1909 the archbishops
Process of and bishops, assembled in Plenary Council

Beatification at Quebec, sent a letter to Pius X. asking

His Holiness to hasten the work already
begun. This very pressing supplication was strengthened
by others from a vast number of prelates and civic offi-
cials, and evidently hastened the examination of thd

1(58 JOHN DE LA LANDE

testimony taken in 1904. In March, 1912, a Decree issued
by the Sacred Congregation of Rites certified that nothing
opposed the further progress of the Cause. In August,
1916, the same high tribunal met to decide whether there
was just reason to sign the Commission for the Intro-
duction of the Beatification or the Declaration of Martyr-
dom of the servants of God who were put to death by the
Iroquois in New France in the seventeenth century. The
answer was in the affirmative and a Decree was ordered
to be published to that effect. Within the past couple of
years an Apostolic Commission, in session at Quebec, has
received further testimony regarding the lives and virtues
of the Jesuit missionaries. The Sacred Congregation of
Rites has all this testimony, comprising several thousand
pages, now in hand, and is studying it carefully. The Holy
See is doing its share for the honor of our martyrs; it
remains for the Catholics of America to cultivate a devo-
tion to those eight servants of God, and to hasten by their
prayers the day when they shall receive the full honors
of the altar.

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