The Ultimate Courage of Jean de Brébeuf

Until the Allied landings in Normandy there stood on the edge of the village of Condé-surand, seven miles from Saint-Lô, two ancient and deserted buildings, stoutly fashioned of native stone. The larger of the two seemed to have been used as a barn, or perhaps as a chapel; in the other, according to an old and persistent legend, there was born on Afarch 25, 1598, a child named Jean de Krcbcuf, who was to bring to his native village, to Normandy, and to France itself a glory that almost four centuries have failed to efface.

His ancestors, an “ancient and a noble family” of landowners, had crossed’ the Channel with William the Conqueror and followed the banners of Louis IX to the Holy Land. Jean’s personal crusade was to be of another nature: clad not in mail but in the black cassock and round Hat hat of the Society of Jesus, he was to spend his strength and zeal in faraway Canada, working for the salvation of an obscure tribe of Indians. In that effort lie would labor for many heartbreaking years with little success. In the process he would lose his life, alter excruciating tortures. But in the end he would win what was to him a higher goal: martyrdom and canonization as a saint of the Catholic Church. And he would have an honored place in a story which for pure heroism is virtually without parallel in modern history—the effort of the Jesuits over a century and a hall to convert and civilze the savages of New France.

De Brébeuf and the Jesuits tame to Canada on the crest of a spiritual renewal that was sweeping France in the seventeenth century. It was the springtime of Catholicism’s Counter Reformation, and the Jesuits themselves were sending missionaries to the farthest ends of the earth: to China and’ Japan, to Africa and South America. In France, despite a vocal Protestant minority, the colleges run by the Society were rapidly increasing in number and were becoming the popular schools of the time; in one of these, newly opened in Caen, not far from his birthplace, young Jean de Br
beuf enrolled at the age of sixteen. When the college was forced to close a year later—for a third of Normandy was Huguenot, and the Jesuits were bitterly opposed—he continued privately under his former masters and in 1617 presented himself at their novitiate at Rouen to study for the priesthood. At twenty-four he was, says his biographer, Francis X. Talbot,exceptionally tall, more than a head higher than the average Norman; he was somewhat lean. but broad-shouldered and well-built; his head was oblong, rather tapering at the top; the features were pronouncedly Xorman, with prominent nose, generous lips, high cheekbones, and good eyes, that looked steadily and unafraid: his bearing, it seemed to the Master of Novices, was that of an old-time Norman knight.

From childhood he had heard of Canada, for it seems that Norman fishermen had been going to the Newfoundland banks since before Columbus’ first voyage. A few decades later, in 1527, an English ship captain looking for a northwest passage had dropped anchor off what is now St. John’s and had reported that he saw there “eleven saile of Normans, and one Brittaine, and two Portugall barkes, and all a-fishing.” Two Jesuit priests had gone to Port Royal, France’s first settlement in North America, in 1611; at home, Jean de Brébeuf read eagerly of their missionary experiences. So it was not remarkable that when, in the fall of 1624, two years after his ordination, he met and talked with two Franciscan missionaries who had just returned from New France, everything in his experience—his family background, his Norman ancestry, the spiritual ferment of the time, and his own developing zeal—should have led de Brébeuf to volunteer for service there.

The Franciscans—called Récollets because their rule of life stressed meditation—had been brought over by Champlain in 1615. But they were poor, and they were not very numerous. Moreover, they had been the victims of political intrigue on the part of those controlling the colony. The Récollets rightly assumed that the Jesuits had the manpower, the material resources, and the influence at court to overcome these handicaps to successful missionary endeavor; the two orders united their appeals to the Duc de Ventadour, Viceroy of New France, and in March, 1625, the Jesuits were officially empowered to join their Franciscan brethren in Canada.

A month later Father de Brcbeuf, with four other Jesuits, took ship at Dieppe and after a voyage of nearly two months sailed up the broad St. Lawrence—“beautiful as the Seine, rapid as the Rhone, and deep as the sea,” Champlain had called it—and caught his first glimpse of the high rock of Quebec.

The town, which was to serve as his base of operations, was in 1625 a miserable, scraggly little settlement that almost any adverse circumstance—an epidemic, an unusually severe winter, an Indian attack—could have erased with ease. Though Cartier had planted the fleur-de-lis there almost a century before, and though the able Champlain had solidified the claim in 1608, all of New France still had only fifty-one year-round residents, two-thirds of them fur traders who spent most of their time with the Indians. Almost the only buildings in Quebec were Champlain s residence, a warehouse, and a few rude shacks. Two decades earlier, at Port Royal, a young lawyer named Marc Lescarbot had accurately set forth the conditions for successful colonization in a distant land. “Farming must be our goal, he had written, ”… for whoso has corn, wine, cattle, lincn, cloth, leather, iron, and lastly codfish, need have nought to do with treasure.” But lew peasants or artisans followed the Hag westward; not until 1663, when the all-powerful Louis XlV turned his eyes toward New France, would it receive enough colonists to give it viability. Meanwhile, it remained in the hands of a succession of mercenary fur-trading companies which opposed colonization as endangering their monopoly of the country. They also conspired against the missionaries, who threatened their trade by opposing the sale of rum to the Indians and by trying to get the wandering tribes to abandon trapping and settle down, the better to plant the seeds of civilization and Christianity among them.

With one of these tribes, the Montagnais, who occupied the country around Quebec, de Brébeuf spent his first autumn and winter in Canada. They were a shiftless, nomadic people who hunted and fished for their subsistence and never laid anything by against a lean season. Even Brother Gabriel Sagard, the sympathetic Récollet who had observed them two years before, dubbed them “the rabble of the forest.” Now, trekking with them through the countryside, sweltering on the warm, sunny autumn days and freezing as snow began to blanket the hills; sharing their feasts when game was plentiful and their hunger when it was not, Jean de Brébeuf found within himself the indispensable gift of every successful missionary: adaptability.

The child of a sophisticated culture, he was still able to conceal his disgust when at mealtime all dipped their hands into the common pot and afterward wiped them on their hair. He was sworn to celibacy, and yet as lie warded oil the advances of the promiscuous Indian girls he managed to avoid giving offence. He was honestly curious about their customs, social as well as religious. Hut his most useful talent was his ability to learn their language.

The dialects of the Canadian tribes were not easy; years later the intelligent Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, setting up in Quebec an Ursuline school for Indian girls, would complain that the words rattled around in her head like stones. Yet in those few months with the Montagnais Father de Brébeuf not only learned to converse fluently with his hosts, but compiled a Montagnais dictionary and started writing a grammar.

These were almost the only tangible fruits of that first fall and winter, but de Brébeuf did not consider that the time had been wasted. He had had a valuable introduction to Indian ways and was inwardly reassured by the fact that he himself had passed a difficult test. It would be good preparation for his work among the Indians of another tribe on which he and the rest of the Jesuit missionaries had already set their sights.

These were the proud and intelligent Hurons—“the nobility of the forest,” in Sagard’s Indian hierarchy—who inhabited the shores of Lake Huron, far to the west of Quebec. There were several reasons why the Jesuits preferred to concentrate their missionary efforts there rather than among the more available Montagnais. For one thing, the Hurons lived a relatively settled existence, and thus it would be easier to establish lasting missions among them. For another, the Récollets had already spent some time in the Huron country; priests were not total strangers there. And finally, Huronia was strategically located at the center of the vast network of rivers and lakes that controlled the heart of the continent; success there might open the way to similar conversions among the tribes to the north, south, and west.

As the brief spring days of the year 1626 lengthened into summer, Father de Brébeuf awaited the arrival of the Huron canoes, which annually made their way down to the French settlements to trade. When they came in July he managed, by dint of many presents, to secure a place between two dusky paddlers before the flotilla headed for home. With him, in other canoes, went the Récollet Joseph de la Roche Daillon and another Jesuit, Father Anne de Noüe. As de Brébeuf folded his tall frame into the narrow birch-bark boat, the great Huron mission, perhaps the most intensive evangelizing effort ever launched among a single North American tribe, had begun. What it would cost over the next twenty-five years in tears and blood would be known, finally, only to the priests who shed them.

Everything about the mission to the Hurons was difficult, beginning with the route to their country. The returning canoes headed southwestward along the St. Lawrence, passed the mouth of the Richelieu, which flows north from Lake Champlain, and turned into the Rivière des Prairies near the present site of Montreal. Having crossed the Lake of Two Mountains, they finally entered the muddy, boiling Ottawa River, and watched the days stretch into weeks a» they followed it north and west. Altogether, as they fought their way against the current, de Brébetif—pressed into service as a paddler now—counted thirty-five portages; in addition, he and his Indian companions were forced more than fifty times to get out and wade through the swift and angry waters, pushing or dragging their boats as they went. They paddled all day without rest. At night, alter a tasteless meal of sagamité—boiled, unsalted corn mush—they lay down to sleep on the forest floor, de Brébeuf nodding over his breviary by firelight before joining the others in an exhausted slumber.

Arrived in the upper readies of the Ottawa, they paused for a day or two among the friendly Nipissings, who lived near the placid lake named for their tribe, then dropped down along French River until they finally reached Lake Huron, called by Champlain the Freshwater Sea. They headed south and east then, advancing the stroke as they neared the end of their journey, and at last beached their canoes on the southeast shore of what is now Georgian Bay, near Midland, in Simcoe County, Ontario. After thirty days and a thousand miles of paddling and portaging, the Hurons were home.

How the three priests survived the long, wearing journey may be read between the lines of a set of instructions de Brébeuf later wrote for the Jesuits who would follow him:
To conciliate the Savages, you must be careful never to make them wait for you in embarking. You must provide yourself with a tinder box or with a burning mirror, or with both, to furnish them fire in the daytime to light their pipes, and in the evening when they have to encamp: these little services win their hearts. You should try to eat their sagamité or salmagundi in the way they prepare it, although it may be dirty, half-cooked, and very tasteless. …
You must be prompt in embarking and disembarking: and tuck up your gowns so that they will not get wet, and so that you will not carry either water or sand into the canoe. … Me careful not to annoy anyone in the canoe with your hat: it would be better to take your nightcap. There is no impropriety among the Savages. …

De Brébeuf himself must have observed these precautions carefully, for the two braves whose boat he had shared gave a good report of him to their chiefs, and he was well received in their villages.

Within a few weeks de la Roche Daillon left to establish contact with the Tobacco Nation to the west and the Neutral Nation to the south. De Brébeuf and de Noüe, however, remained among the Hurons. These people called themselves Ouendats; “Huron” was a French appellation after the ridge of hair which some of the men wore from nape to brow, giving their heads the look of a hure, or boar’s head. De Brébeuf estimated that they numbered some 30,000 souls, in about twenty villages between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe to the southeast. The country was wooded and hilly, but with many broad and well-watered meadows on which such crops as wheat and peas grew wild. In the main the Hurons were a sedentary people who lived by trade and agriculture. They raised beans, pumpkins, tobacco, and some fruits, but their principal crop was corn, from which they made their sagamité. This, supplemented occasionally by a bit of fish or game and served in a wooden bowl “broad as an alms dish,” was their “soup, meat, and dessert of every day.”

When the French first, came to their country the Hurons were a stone-age people whose primitive farming methods periodically exhausted the land, forcing them to move their villages every fifteen years. Yet these villages were surprisingly well constructed, and those on the east and south, nearest the country of their traditional enemies, the Iroquois, were strongly palisaded. Their houses were long, domed lodges built of saplings covered with bark. A wide aisle ran down the middle, and on either side of this a sleeping shelf was built four or five feet oil the ground. The only ventilation was a slit in the roof to let out the smoke of the cooking fires. Such a lodge, which might be over two hundred feet long by about thirty wide, was shared by more than twenty families.

The Huron way of life gave the lie to the notion, which nevertheless persisted in Europe, that the Indian uncontaminated by white civilization lived a spartan existence marked by orderly habits and natural virtue. De Brébeuf seems from the first to have conceived an affection for the Hurons quite unrelated to the fact that they were targets for conversion. Yet this did not blind him to their faults: they were dirty, and so lazy that the men did little work not forced upon them by necessity. Also, they were inveterate gamblers. One of their principal games made use of a large wooden bowl into which the player put five or six fruit stones or flattened balls colored black on one side and white or yellow on the other. These were rolled out like dice, and on the turn of the stones the Indians wagered literally everything—even their wives.

Very early in his missionary career de Brébeuf came to the conclusion that he would succeed in reaching these primitive people only if he shared their daily existence in every particular short of sin. And so, instead of building themselves a separate habitation, he and de Noüe accepted the openhanded hospitality of the native cabins.

It was a decision they would be forced to modify later on, if only to be able to observe their vow of chastity. For among the Hurons, men and women enjoyed complete sexual freedom both before and after marriage. Girls openly prostituted themselves as soon as they were old enough to do so. As a warning to later missionaries de Brébeuf wrote:
In France the great multitude and the good example of Christians, the solemnity of the Feasts, the majesty of the Churches so magnificently adorned, preach piety to you … in a word, you are almost beyond the danger of falling. … Here we have nothing, it seems, which incites toward good; we are among people who are astonished when you speak to them of God … Especially I would not dare to speak of the danger there is of ruining oneself among their impurities, in the case of anyone whose heart is not sufficiently full of God to firmly resist this poison.

It was a “poison” which, he sensed, would be a greater obstacle to their conversion than almost any other. Wisely, he decided not to launch a frontal attack upon it at once. There were other tasks, the most essential being to remove the barrier to communication.

Adept as he was at languages, de Brébeuf found that of the Hurons unusually difficult. Most of their words were made up of vowels, and they had no labial letters. The closest they could come to “Jean,” in their guttural pronunciation, was “Echon,” and this became at once their name for him. He also noted that “a relative noun with them always includes the meaning of one of the three persons of the possessive pronoun.” Hence, when later in his mission he tried to teach them the Sign of the Cross he realized that they couldn’t say, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” He wrote anxiously to his superior in Quebec asking if he might substitute: “In the name of our Father, and of His Son, and of their Holy Ghost.”

It was a humbling task, for men so well educated, to begin learning new terms for the simplest objects and ideas. “Instead of being a great master and great Theologian as in France,” de Brébeuf wrote, “you must reckon on being here a humble Scholar, and then, good God! with what masters!—women, little children, and all the Savages,—and exposed to their laughter.”

De Noüe, after a year of effort, had made almost no progress with the language, and this, combined with the fact that he did not possess de Brébeuf’s facility for getting along with the savages, led him to return to Quebec in the summer of 1627. De Brébeuf and the Récollet de la Roche Daillon—who had come back from the western and southern tribes reporting a discouraging lack of progress—labored on through that summer, fall, and winter. Late the following June, the Récollet, too, returned to Quebec to rest and to report to his superior, leaving Jean de Brébeuf the only priest in Huronia. He would have faced the future with considerably less confidence had he known that an English fleet was approaching the St. Lawrence and that only by a bald-faced bluff would Champlain be able to stave off disaster.

Meanwhile, although in two years he had made not a single convert, de Brébeuf kept at his appointed task. As the leaves fell and biting cold ushered in the winter of 1628-29, his third among the Hurons, he set himself to studying the religious beliefs of the savages. He discovered that they did not have a clear concept of a creator but they did believe that the human soul was immortal, and that after the Feast of the Dead, which was held every ten or twelve years, the souls of all who had died since the last feast would proceed via the Milky Way, which the Hurons called “the path of souls,” to a kind of heaven. The Hurons also believed there were good and bad spirits, both called oki, and that all the phenomena of Indian life—journeys and trading, wars and feasts, the flowing of streams and the blowing of the wind—fell under their jurisdiction. The Hurons sometimes made the bad oki offerings of tobacco; but they never prayed. As Francis Parkman said: “No race, perhaps, ever offered greater difficulties to those laboring for its improvement. … The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage to One Allpervading and Omnipotent Spirit, is a dream of poets, rhetoricians, and sentimentalists.” De Brébeuf realized that to replace this melange of legend and superstition with Christian concepts, many of which it was impossible even to express in the Huron language, would be a long process demanding almost superhuman patience.

He had hardly begun to confront his task when news of the previous year’s unsuccessful attack on Quebec reached him in May of 1629. His superior, fearful that the English would make another attempt soon, ordered him back to Quebec. He was bidden also to bring corn with him, for the enemy had blockaded the river and in the absence of supplies from France the tiny town was near starvation. Lescarbot’s warning still went unheeded. By contrast, the English settlements to the south, founded at about the same time Champlain had landed at Quebec, were becoming more populous and increasingly self-sufficient. The French never closed the gap. In the end the failure would cost them a continent.

Five years passed before Jean de Brébeuf was able to return to Huronia, for the expected assault on Quebec—by a ridiculously small squadron of three ships under David, Louis, and Thomas Kirke, French Huguenots serving under the English—forced Champlain to strike his flag in July, 1629. The French governor, and the Jesuits with him, were carried to England by their captors, only to learn that the war between Britain and France had been concluded almost three months before the capture of Quebec. Under the terms of the ensuing treaty the French prisoners were to be released and Canada restored to its former masters. Negotiations dragged on until 1632, and two more years elapsed before de Brébeuf found himself once more in a Huron canoe, battling the current of the Ottawa on the way to the Freshwater Sea.

This time—and until its conclusion—the Huron mission was entirely Jesuit in character, for Cardinal Richelieu had decreed that only one religious order would be permitted to send missionaries to Quebec, and he had chosen the Jesuits over the Récollets. De Brébeuf, appointed superior in Huronia, was wellcompanioned; he had two other Jesuits, Fathers Ambroise Davost and Antoine Daniel, and six French laymen to help him. Arrived in Huronia, they persuaded the Indians to build them a house of their own, with a chapel at one end, a storage place at the other, and living quarters furnished in the Huron fashion in the center.

The house of the Frenchmen soon became a mecca for the savages, for at mealtimes, following the hospitable custom of the tribe, their kettle always contained enough sagamité to feed an extra guest. Moreover, rumor quickly spread through all the native cabins that the home of the “Blackrobes” and their companions was full of marvels. The few gadgets they had managed to bring with them—a prism, a magnet, a magnifying glass—were unremarkable in France, but to the Hurons they were a source of great wonder, and they opened a small wedge for the word of God.

For the first year or so they baptized almost no adults, partly because Daniel and Davost were stillstruggling with the language, partly because all three priests were wary of accepting insufficiently instructed converts whose backsliding would embarrass them later on. They did, however, baptize dying infants, and were in the Huron houses very often, succoring the sick from their tiny stock of medicines. Almost at once they set up an informal religious school for the children. One of the priests would chant the Our Father in Latin, another translating it into simple Huron rhymes as he went along. The Jesuits then taught their small charges a few Christian prayers, gave them a bit of catechetical instruction, and at dismissal rewarded their patience with trinkets or sweets. The missionaries thought they detected, among the children, some signs of progress, but the elders of the tribe rebuffed them, saying, “It is good for the French, but we are another people, with different customs.”

With this kind of passive resistance the Jesuits felt they could cope; it was, after all, a matter of persistence, of finding a more effective approach. What they found harder was the open hostility of the Huron medicine men. The Hurons believed, with almost fanatic intensity, in the power of dreams, and the medicine men held sway over the people by professing tobe able to interpret them. They also claimed they could cure—with weird incantations, incessant shellrattling, and a bag of mysterious drugs—any illness to which a savage might fall victim.

Sometimes these ceremonial cures took the most outlandish and degrading forms. In one of them, called the Andacwandet, girls of the tribe would assemble around the sick person’s pallet, and each would be asked which brave she would like to sleep with the following night. The chosen young men would come, and the couples would spend the night together in the patient’s presence, while at each end of the lodge a medicine man sat chanting and rattling his shells. Moreover, the medicine men were adept at placing the blame for natural disasters—a crop failure, a prolonged drought, an epidemic—on the malevolent influence of the priests, so that not only the continuance of their mission but even their very lives sometimes hung by a very slender thread. Nevertheless, by 1636, de Brébeuf felt that the outlook for the Huron mission was brightening. Counting the period before the fall of Quebec, Jesuits had been in the Huron country for over five years. They were beginning to master the language, and in September three more priests, among them the redoubtable Isaac Jogues, arrived to double their numbers. The Hurons had begun to listen, at least, to what the priests told them of God and Heaven, and when one of them was in danger of death his relatives would request that he be baptized.

By early winter, de Brébeuf judged that the time for a frontal attack on the immorality of Huron life should be postponed no longer. A severe influenza epidemic was ravaging Huronia, and when the chiefs asked him to intercede for them with God, he decided to be blunt. “Do you wish to serve this Great Spirit,” he asked, “and save yourselves from the pestilence that afflicts you?” When they answered in the affirmative he spoke without mincing words:
First, you must give up your belief in the power of dreams. Secondly, when you marry, you must bind yourselves to one woman for life; you must not change wives, you must not go to other women. Thirdly, you must not indulge in vomiting feasts, since God forbids such gluttony. Fourthly, you must not hold the Andacwandet, because such mating feasts offend God. Fifthly, you must not eat human flesh, even though it be that of your enemies. …

One of the chiefs replied (the translation is modern):
Echon, my brother, I must speak to you very frankly: I believe that your proposition is impossible. I cannot be a hypocrite. I express my thoughts honestly. I judge that what you propose will be a stumbling block. We have our own ways of doing things, you have yours and other nations have theirs. When you speak to us about obeying and acknowledging Him as our master, Who, you say, has made heaven and earth, you are talking of turning the country upside down. …

And the country, de Brébeuf concluded sorrowfully, was not yet ready to be turned upside down.

At least not by the Christian Gospel. Other forces were conspiring, however, to humble the Hurons. In 1635 a severe drought had swept the country, turning the green cornstalks to dried sticks in the fields. Intermittently over the next two years had come the influenza epidemic. Then, in 1639, there descended the worst scourge of all—smallpox—which killed the Hurons by the thousands and permanently pock-marked all who survived. As late as 1636 the Jesuits had estimated the population of Huronia at 30,000. A census which they conducted during 1639 and 1640 revealed that there remained no more than 12,000 souls.

Part of this alarming decimation was the result of the Hurons’ continuing war of attrition with the Iroquois. To add to the Hurons’ troubles, these fierce and bloodthirsty tribes, armed with muskets by the Dutch at Albany, began ranging far to the north and west from their villages in what is now central New York State.

For years the Iroquois had been sending into the Huron country small raiding parties which, in the words of one Jesuit, would “approach like foxes, fight like lions, and fly away like birds.” The Hurons had reciprocated. Now, however, the Iroquois were out in force, and the toll they took was frightening.

It is probably not fair to the Jesuits to assume, as some historians do, that the wave of Huron conversions which they now began to experience was due entirely to the Indians’ belief that by worshiping the Christian God they would obtain relief from the ravages of disease and at the same time cement their ties with the French, who in turn would save them from the Iroquois. For the Jesuits had greatly augmented their forces in Huronia—by 1639 there were thirteen priests—and they had continued to work selflessly, tirelessly, and with deepening insight.

In addition, they had recently changed their approach. On the bank of the River Wye they had decided to build a central mission station, a combined fort and residence, from which they would go out to the surrounding Huron towns. The station, which they called Sainte Marie, would serve not only as a spiritual headquarters for the priests, but as a rallying point where their Indian converts would be safe from the pagan influences of their villages. When in 1644 de Brébeuf returned from Quebec, where he had been sent to rest and to recover his strength after a bad fall on the winter’s ice, he found Sainte Marie a thriving center manned by fourteen priests, two lay brothers, eleven donnés (laymen who had dedicated their lives to the missions), and nine French workmen. These intensified efforts bore results. In the year 1646–47 alone, a total of thirteen hundred Indians asked for baptism. By contrast, six years before there had been only sixty Christians in all Huronia.

Yet there is little doubt that fear played its part in inducing the savages to rally around the cross. When in 1648 one of the pagan Hurons—who blamed the French for the peril in which the tribe now found itself—murdered a donné, the Huron chief apologized to the Jesuits in words eloquent of his people’s condition:
My brother, I speak in the name of all eight Ouendat nations here assembled. We are now but a handful of people; you alone support this country. We are here to weep for your loss and ours. This country is now but a dried skeleton, without flesh, without veins, without sinews, without arteries. We are like dry bones tied together with threads. That wretched murderer thought he was aiming at the head of a young Frenchman. But he struck his own country and inflicted on it a deathly wound. My brother, have pity on this country.

Soon afterward the chiefs, among whom Christians now outnumbered pagans, declared Catholicism the official religion of the Huron tribes.

For the Jesuits, who had labored so long with such meager success, the victory was sweet. Yet it was tempered by a consciousness of impending tragedy. The Iroquois attacks were increasing in size and intensity, and the priests had already begun to suffer with their people. In 1646 Isaac Jogues and one of his donnés, Jean de La Lande, had been tortured and killed by the Iroquois. So, in 1648, had Antoine Daniel, de Brébeuf’s companion for fourteen years. Any missionary who ventured out of Sainte Marie and remained in the Huron villages was taking his life in his hands.

Father de Brébeuf had not agreed with the idea of siting up a central mission-headquarters, believing that instead, priests should be stationed in each of the main Huron settlements. To him, separation meant alienation, and he had tried since the beginning of his ministry twenty years before to identify himself as closely as possible with his people. And so, although in obedience he joined his fellow Jesuits at Sainte Marie, he asked—and was granted—permission to spend most of his time serving five outlying villages.

It was in one of these, which the French called St. Louis, that he found himself on the morning of March 16, 1649, in the company of young Father Gabriel Lalemant, who had come to Huronia only six months before. The two priests had just finished saying their morning masses when out of the forest burst three Huron braves from a neighboring village, almost breathless, fear written on their faces. “The Iroquois!” they shouted. “We alone escaped!”

In despair, the villagers of St. Louis took up the cry. “The enemy! The Iroquoisl” After an initial moment of shock, de Brébeuf and Lalemant thought about the aged, the women, and the children of St. Louis, who numbered perhaps four hundred. They must be evacuated. Quickly, adopting confident tones to stem the rising tide of panic, they hastened among the rude streets and into the lodges, gathering their flock and shepherding them along the trail toward safety. Finally, when only the able-bodied fighting men remained—they numbered less than one hundred—one of them, a Christian, shouted to the priests, “My brothers, save yourselves. Go now, while there is still time.” But the Jesuits refused.

Suddenly the Iroquois were on them with a rush. As the defenders began falling, the two priests seemed to be everywhere at once, giving absolution to their converts and baptizing the unbelievers. Once the Iroquois were driven back. Again they came on with redoubled fury, and this time the fight was fierce but brief. In a few moments only about sixty Hurons were left alive, and these, finding themselves ringed about by hostile tomahawks and muskets, laid down their arms.

The captives were herded with sticks and clubs toward the nearby town of St. Ignace, the two Jesuits having been roughly stripped to the skin. At the entrance to the town all were forced to run a gantlet of screaming, mocking Iroquois, emerging on the other side bruised, slashed, and broken. About noon the torture began in earnest. De Brébeuf, whom the Iroquois evidently regarded as a special prize, was selected as the first victim, and Lalemant and the Hurons were made to witness his torments.

A simple recital of the separate cruelties they wreaked upon his giant frame makes it clear, without benefit of gruesome adjectives, that his torture has seldom been equaled in the whole Christian martyrology. First they tied him to a post and scorched his entire body with fire, seeking to silence him as he exhorted the Christians among the Hurons to keep up their courage and put their trust in God, who would welcome them into Paradise after the brief time of trial ahead. As he continued to speak, the Iroquois thrust burning brands down his throat, but still he cried out to his followers, “Jésus taiteur!” (“Jesus, have mercy upon us!”) And from Lalemant and the Hurons the answer came back: “Jésus taiteur!” De Brébeuf had a moment of surcease as his torturers fashioned a rope of vines, strung metal axe-heads on it, and heated them red-hot in the fire. This they then placed around his neck. If he leaned forward, the axe-heads behind scorched his back; if he writhed backward, his chest felt the hot iron; if he stood still, the torture was doubled. As he bore each fresh torment without flinching or crying out, the fury of the Iroquois mounted. Next they fastened a girdle of pitch-filled bark around his waist and loins and set fire to it, but he still shouted encouragement to his flock. A renegade Huron who had been adopted into one of the Iroquois tribes now came close to de Brébeuf and said to him: “Echon, you have often told us that we must be baptized in order that we may have eternal happines after we die. In turn, we wish to be the cause of your happiness in heaven. Thank us, then, for the good turn we do you.” And, carrying out kettles of scalding water, they poured them over his head in derision of the Sacrament. Still the beleaguered Jesuit cried out, “Jésus taiteur!” At last, in a frenzy, the Iroquois came at him in a group, hacking at his flesh with their knives until a chief finally cut out his heart and ate it in triumph, thinking to absorb some of the white man’s prodigious courage. After four horrible hours Father Jean de Brébeuf, “the Ajax of the mission,” was dead.

Though he was far less sturdy of body, Lalemant, whose trial began at nightfall, survived for fifteen hours, probably because the Indians revived him periodically through the long night so that they might save him for a dawn sacrifice to one of their gods. He endured as bravely as de Brébeuf and died with equal heroism, exhorting the Huron Christians to the last.

Three days later, the Iroquois having temporarily withdrawn, a small group of Frenchmen ventured cautiously out from Sainte Marie to see what had happened, and there, in the ashes of St. Ignace, they came upon “the relics of the love of God.” Christophe Regnaut, a donné assigned to the search party, described what he saw in moving terms:
I examined first the Body of Father de Bréboeuf, which was pitiful to see, as well as that of Father L’alemant. Father de Bréboeuf had his legs, thighs and arms stripped of flesh to the very bones; I saw and touched a large number of great blisters … from the boiling water which these barbarians had poured over him in mockery of Holy Baptism. I saw and touched the wounds from a belt of bark, full of pitch and resin, which roasted his whole body. I saw and touched the marks of burns from the Collars of hatchets … I saw and touched his two lips, which they had cut off because he constantly spoke of God while they made him suffer. … In fine, I saw and touched all the wounds of his body … we buried these precious Relics on Sunday, the a 1st day of March, 1649, with much Consolation. …

The Iroquois had done their work well. Within two weeks after de Brébeuf’s death fifteen Huron villages had been abandoned, and the Hurons were finished as a nation. Most of the survivors fled through the forest and eventually sought adoption into other tribes. The remainder—a few hundred in number, mostly widows, children, and old men—huddled about the fortress of Sainte Marie. Against their better judgment the Jesuits allowed themselves to be persuaded to lead a migration to nearby Ahoendoe (now Christian) Island in Lake Huron, having first burned Sainte Marie, “the cradle of this Christian Church,” to prevent its falling into enemy hands.

The move was a mistake. The food they had brought with them was soon gone, and the resources of the island were quickly exhausted. As winter approached, news came to them that several bands of Iroquois were encamped on the mainland to the south, waiting to exterminate any foraging party and cut off any escape in that direction. In their extremity the Hurons were reduced to eating, “in secret, and with horror,” the bodies of their own dead.

In June of the next year, 1650, Father Ragueneau, the Jesuit superior, led about three hundred of the survivors northward in canoes through Lake Huron and down the Ottawa to the St. Lawrence, where the remainder joined them in the autumn. “It was not without tears,” Ragueneau wrote, “that we quitted the country that owned our hearts and held our hopes, which had already been reddened by the glorious blood of our brethren, which promised us a like happiness, and which opened to us the road to heaven and the gate of paradise. Mais quay! One must forget self, and relinquish God’s interests for God’s sake.”

Thus ended the Huron mission, the most ambitious the Jesuits were ever to undertake in New France. It probably employed more priests (twenty-nine in all), it certainly produced more martyrs, and its loss was in a way the most crushing defeat the Canadian Jesuits ever suffered. When it ended there were still, it is true, some great days ahead for the Society in New France, as well as in parts of what would later become the United States. But the Blackrobes had identified themselves with the Hurons as with no other Indian nation, succoring them in adversity and even sharing their extinction. In the process they had sacrificed their own best men and expended their zeal’s first bright flowering.

And yet, in their own minds, the price was not too high. Among the Hurons and other tribes, within a brief seven years, eight missionaries—de Brébeuf, Lalemant, Jogues, three other priests, and two donnés—achieved martyrdom and, eventually, sainthood. As Jean de Brébeuf had once written: “Jesus Christ is our true greatness; it is He alone and His cross that should be sought in running after these people, for, if you strive for anything else, you will find naught but bodily and spiritual affliction. But having found Jesus Christ in His Cross, you have found the roses in the thorns, sweetness in bitterness, all in nothing.”