Читать книгу Old Québec: The Fortress of New France - Gilbert Parker - Страница 25

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If on its material side French colonial policy took account of the Indian, it did so much more on its religious side. Quebec was the farthest outpost of Catholicism. New France was for ever to be free from the taint of heresy, allowing none but Catholic settlers within her gates; and Huguenots, as we have seen, were specifically excluded. The Indians were to be rescued from heathen darkness and led into the sacred light of the Church. Jesuit missions thus became a salient feature in the early history of Quebec, the nerve centre of the movement being the palisaded convent on the little St. Charles.

To go back in review. On the retrocession of Quebec by the English, under the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, in the time of Champlain, the influence of the Jesuits was sufficient to secure for themselves the undivided control of the Canadian mission. Returning to Quebec in 1632, Father Le Jeune and his two companions had established themselves in the half-ruined convent of Notre Dame des Anges, built by the Récollets sixteen years before. The log stockade enclosed two buildings, the smaller of which served as storehouse, stable, and workshop, and the larger as chapel and refectory. Four tiny cells opened off the latter, and in these the fathers lodged, while the lay brothers and the workmen found apartments in the garret and the cellar. The regimen of this crude establishment was severely ascetic. The day began with early Mass and closed with evening prayers. The intervening time was spent by the laymen in cultivating the little clearing, and by the fathers in hearing confessions at the fort a mile away, or in struggling with the Algonquin idiom, by the vague assistance of one Pierre, an Indian proselyte, who, in weakness of flesh, ran away when the season of Lent drew near.

The strength of the Jesuits was increased in the spring of 1633 by the arrival of four new priests. Of these the most remarkable was Jean de Brébeuf, the descendant of a noble family in Normandy, and destined to prove his own nobility by an intrepid zeal and an almost incredible courage.

Le Jeune's distressful experiment with a band of wandering Algonquins had convinced the Jesuits that their schemes of mission-conquest could not bear much fruit if they were confined to the vagrant tribes of the north. Farther west in the peninsula of the great lakes lived Indians of fixed habits and domicile, and otherwise further advanced towards civilisation than the improvident hunting tribes round about Quebec. Of these the most notable were the Hurons. As long before as 1615 the Récollet Le Caron had gone among them, and several years later Brébeuf had made the perilous lodges of Ihonatiria his habitation, but had at length returned to France. On his coming to Quebec again in the spring of 1633, Brébeuf anxiously turned his thoughts towards his former mission, awaiting only a favourable opportunity to forsake the comparative safety of the city of Quebec for the gloomy shores of Lake Huron and "the greater glory of God."

Midsummer brought the annual swarm of Hurons to the trading fair at Quebec. For a week the all but naked savages overran the little settlement, their animal curiosity almost driving the French to distraction, and their casual peculations causing much annoyance. But their presence was a necessary evil, if the Fur Company was to declare its dividends. Hence long-suffering courtesy became essential both to the peace of the city and to future interests so much at stake.

A powerful consideration with the community was the anxiety of the Jesuits to go back with the Indians to their villages on Lake Huron. Champlain, when governor, had espoused this project in the most seductive of his speeches. "These are our fathers," he had announced to the sixty chiefs gathered for the nonce in the quadrangle of the Fort. "We love them more than we love ourselves. The whole French nation honours them. They do not go among you for your furs. They have left their friends and their country to show you the way to the happy hunting-grounds. If you love the French, as you say you do, then love and honour these our fathers, and care for them in your distant villages."

But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the Indian mind was no more sure. Above all else it lacked definiteness; it was touched by rhetoric. Champlain's auditors had been thrilled with deep emotion. They were for embarking at once with the Jesuits. Then they had faltered, and by the next day they had decided to depart without them. For another year, therefore, the fathers had remained at Notre Dame des Anges, studying the Huron language for future use, and caring meantime for the spiritual welfare of the half-hundred French residents of Quebec.

The summer of 1634 once more saw the city given over to the visiting Hurons. The old persuasive palaver was repeated, and this time with more success. When the trading fair was over, Brébeuf, Daniel, and Davost set off with the savage fleet, each in a different canoe, facing a journey of nine hundred miles fraught with many perils, but with none so ominous as the sullen and menacing mood of their heathen conductors.

Week after week they pressed toilfully up the St. Lawrence and Ottawa; barefooted they struggled over the rocky portages, with a pittance of pounded maize for their daily ration, and mother-earth for their nightly couch. Davost's guide robbed and abandoned him at an island in the Upper Ottawa. Daniel was likewise deserted; but the giant Brébeuf yielded to no hardships, and surpassed even the seasoned savages in strength and endurance. On the shore of the Georgian Bay, however, his guide at length abandoned him. But Brébeuf had been here in a former year, and his instinctive woodcraft guided him twenty miles through the forest to the palisaded village of Ihonatiria.

"Echom has come again," cried the inhabitants, as they recognised the towering figure of the Jesuit who had departed from them five years before; and they opened again their lodges to the missionary.