In Pioneers of France in the New World, Parkman stresses the
influential role of pious aristocratic ladies at the court of Henry 1V and
Louis XIII, particularly Madame de Querchcille, who contributed generously
to finance the first Jesuit mission to North America. Fathers Enemond
Massie and Pierre Biard sailed for Acadia in 1611 and Parkman introduces
the Society of Jesus to his readers for the first time:
Then first did this mighty Proteus, this many sided Society of
Jesus, enter upon the rude field of toil and woe, where in after
years the devoted zeal of its apostles was to lend dignity to
their order and do honor to humanity. Few were the regions of
the known world to which the potent brotherhood had not
stretched the vast network of its influence. Jesuits had
disputed in theology with the bonzes of Japan, and taught
astronomy to the Mandarins of China; had wrought prodigies of
sudden conversion among the followers of Brahma, preached the
papal supremacy to Abyssinian schismatics, carried the cross
among the savages of Caffaria, wrought reputed miracles in
Brazil and gathered the tribes of Paraguay beneath their
paternal sway. And now with the aid of the Virgin and her
votary at court, they would build another empire among the
tribes of New France. The omens were sinister and the outset was
unpropitious. The Society was destined to reap few laurels from
the brief apostleship of Biard and Masse. Fr. Masse tried
living among the forest Indians with signal ill success. Hard
fare, smoke and filth had reduced him to a lamentable plight of
body and mind, worn him to a skeleton and sent him back to Port
Royal without a single convert.
Father Biard was captured by the English in the abortiveFrench colony
off Mount Desert, Maine, and after many adventures he was returned to
France where says Parkman he perhaps resumed "the tranquil honors of his
chair of Theology at Lyons."
Parkman speculates on one of the might-have-beens of history if the
French colony in Maine had succeeded. Seven years after its demise the
Mayflower landed the Pilgrims at Plymouth: "What would have been the
issue" had New England been preoccupied with a Jesuit colony? "A collision
of adverse elements, a conflict of water and fire; the death grapple of
the iron Puritans with these indomitable priests."
Although Parkman treats of Jesuits in all seven volumes of his France
and England in North America, it is volume II, Jesuits in North America in
the Seventeenth Century, which attracts most of the attention. This
volume describes the activities of the famous North American martyrs, the
Jesuit Fathers: Br�beuf, Lalemant, Garnier, Chabanel, Daniel and Jogues,
and the two laymen, the donn�s of the mission, Goupil and Lalande. It
covers the years of 1632 to 1670, a period in which the Jesuits had made
great progress in Christianizing the Hurons, but in 1640, the Iroquois
launched a series of assaults on the Hurons and destroyed the Jesuit
mission villages in the Georgian Bay region of Lake Huron. Parkman relied
heavily on the Jesuit Relations letters of the Canadian Jesuits to their
superior in France. Unable to travel because of illness, he spent five
years in concentrated study in the Boston Athenaeum and Harvard College
Library, and he developed a wide correspondence among pioneer historians
in Canadian history who helped him gather a large library of pertinent
documents. His research was thorough and exacting; his dramatic and
vivacious style born of a great gift for writing, and his intimate
knowledge of his subject has made his histories live in a manner that no
other historian has ever equalled. Thus, he describes the little band of
Jesuits at Quebec in 1634:
These men aimed at the conversion of a continent. From their
hovel on St. Charles, they surveyed a field of labor whose
vastness might tire the wings of thought itself; darkened with
omens of peril and woe. They were the advance guard of the great
army of Loyola.
Parkman goes on to describe the Canadian winter of 1632-1633, which
was unusually severe:
The St. Lawrence and the St. Charles were hard frozen rivers;
forests and rocks were mantled alike in dazzling sheets of snow.
The humble mission house of Notre Dame des Anges was half buried
in the drifts, which, heaped up in front where a path had been
dug through them, rose two feet above the low eaves. The
priests sitting at night before the blazing
logs of their wide throated chimney, heard the trees in the
neighboring forest cracking with frost. Le Jeune's ink froze,
and his fingers were benumbed, as he toiled at his declensions
and conjugations or translated the Pater Noster into blundering
Algonquin. The water in the cask beside the fire froze nightly,
and the ice was broken every morning with hatchets. The
blankets of the two priests were fringed with the icicles of
their congealed breath and the frost lay in a thick coating on
the lozenge shaped glass of their cells.
FATHER JEAN DE BREBEUF
Parkman reserves his highest praise for Father Jean de Brebeuf who
possessed all the masculine virtues that he admired - courage,
intelligence, strength, endurance, and cheerfulness in the face of
incredible adversity. If he had lived in the 13th century he would have
been a Norman knight doing battle for God and Lord. Instead, he had
chosen the life of religion: "Nature had given him all the passions of a
vigorous manhood and religion had crushed them, curbed them, or tamed them
to do her work - like a dammed up torrent, sluiced and guided to
grind and saw and weave for the good of man."
In the summer of 1634 Fathers Brebeuf, Davost and Daniel and the
Indians set out for the Huron country, a distance of 900 miles from
Quebec. The journey took them by canoe up the St. Lawrence River to the
site of the future Montreal, then up the Ottawa River to Lake Nipissing
and from there down the French River to the Georgian Bay region of Lake
Huron.
Their only food was a pittance of Indian corn, crushed between two
stones and mixed with water. The toil was extreme. Brebeuf counted
thirty-five portages where the canoe was lifted from the water and carried
on the shoulders of the voyagers. More than 50 times, besides, they were
forced to wade in the raging current, plus pushing up their empty barks,
or dragging them with ropes. Brebeuf tried to do his part but the
boulders and sharp rocks wounded his naked feet and compelled him to
desist. He and his companions bore their share of the baggage across the
portages sometimes a distance of several miles. Four trips at the least,
were required to convey the whole.
Here Parkman draws on his own intimate experience with the forest:
The way was through the dense forest, encumbered with rocks and
logs tangled with roots and underbrush, damp with perpetual
shade, and redolent of decayed leaves and moldering wood.
Brebeuf, a man of iron frame and a nature unconquerably resolute
doubted if his strength would sustain him to the journey's end.
He complained he had no moment to read his Breviary, except by
moonlight, when stretched out to sleep on a bare rock by some
savage cataract of the Ottawa, or in a damp nook of the adjacent
forest.
Brebeuf was left by his Indian companions on a lonely inlet of
Thunder Bay. He fell on his knees to thank God for bringing him so far in
safety and then found his way to the nearest Huron village where he was
greeted with shouts of "Echon, Echon has come!" [Echon was the Huron
attempt to approximate Jean.] The three Jesuits were soon settled into the
Indian life. The Hurons built a bark lodge for them. They worked a year
without making a single adult conversion, although baptizing several dying
infants. Parkman delivers one of his stingers in quoting Father Garnier,
who on writing to his brother, describes the great joy he experiences in
baptizing an infant who dies a short time later, as turning a little
Indian into an angel. Says Parkman, "This form of benevolence is beyond
heretic appreciation."
But the patience, kindness, and intrepidity of the Jesuits gained the
confidence and good will of the Huron population:
Their manifest disinterestedness, the blamelessness of their
lives, and the tact which, in the utmost fervors of their zeal
never failed them, won the hearts of these wayward savages; and
chiefs of distant villages came to urge that they would make
their abode with them. As yet the results of the mission had
been faint and few; but the priests toiled on courageously, high
in hope that an abundant harvest of souls would one dayreward
their labors.
In 1635-36 more Jesuits joined the mission. "These were no stern
exiles," says Parkman "seeking in barbarous shores an asylum for a
persecuted faith. Rank, wealth, power and royalty itself smiled on their
enterprise and bade them God speed. Yet, withal, a fervor more intense, a
self abnegation more complete, a self devotion more constant and enduring
will scarcely find its record on the pages of human history." Parkman then
takes off on one of his more tooth rattling passages describing Holy
Mother Church:
Linked in sordid wedlock to governments and thrones. This mighty
Church of Rome in her imposing march along the high road of
history, heralded as infallible and divine, astounds the gazing
world with prodigies of contradiction...but it was her nobler
and purer part that gave life to the early mission of New
France. That gloomy wilderness, those hordes of savages had
nothing to tempt the ambitious, the proud, the grasping or the
indolent. Obscure toil, solitude, privation, hardship and death
were to be the missionary's portion. He who set sail for the
country of the Hurons left behind him the world and all its
prizes. The letters of these priests departing for the scene of
their labors breathe a spirit of enthusiastic exaltation which
to a colder nature and a colder faith, sometimes seem
overstrained but which is in no way disproportionate to the
vastness of the effort and the sacrifice demanded of them.
The Jesuit Fathers occasionally baptized infants against their
parents' wishes. Parkman accuses them of "that equivocal morality lashed
by Pascal, a morality built on the doctrine that all means are permissible
for saving souls from perdition and sin itself is no sin when its object
is the `Greater glory of God'". Parkman allows that such alleged
"`equivocal morality' found far less scope in the rude wilderness of the
Hurons than among the interests, ambitions and passions of civilized
life."
Smallpox broke out in the mission villages. The Jesuit fathers never
flagged in their zeal to bring the Christian message to the sick and dying
and comforting their physical needs with a little senna or a spoonful of
sugar water. The Indians were slow to accept the French paradise: "I wish
to go where my relations and ancestors have gone" was a common reply.
"Heaven is a good place for Frenchmen" said another "but I wish to be
among Indians, for the French will give me nothing to eat when I get
there." "Do they hunt in heaven, or make war, or go to feasts?" asked an
anxious inquirer. "Oh, no" replied the father. "Then I will not go. It
is no good to be lazy." Yet the Jesuits refused to water down thefaith to
win converts. In one of the towns the Indians had tried all possible
means to get rid of the sickness; feasts, dances and preposterous
ceremonies by their medicine men had failed. In desperation they asked
Fr. Brebeuf what they would have to do to get his God on their side.
Brebeuf's answer, says Parkman, was uncompromising:
Believe in Him, keep His commandments, abjure your faith in
dreams, take but one wife and be true to her, give up your
superstitious feasts, renounce your assemblies of debauchery,
eat no human flesh, never give feasts to demons, and make a vow
that if God will deliver you from this pest you will build a
chapel to offer Him thanksgiving and praise.
The terms were too hard. They agreed to put up a chapel, "but
Brebeuf would bate them nothing and the council broke up in despair."
Throughout the 1640s the Iroquois waged unrelenting war against their
Huron enemies. The climax came in 1649 when a large Iroquois war party
overran the Jesuit mission villages along Georgian Bay. Fathers Brebeuf
and Lalement were captured, tortured terribly, scorched from head to foot,
doused in scalding water and finally put to death. Brebeuf did not flinch
under the torture. As Parkman puts it:
The indomitable priest stood like a rock and they tried other
means to overcome him. Finally a chief tore out his heart and
his warriors closed in to drink the blood of so valiant a man:
Thus died Jean de Brebeuf, founder of the Huron mission, its
truest hero and its greatest martyr. Scion of a Norman family
in whose veins flowed the blood of the English Earls of Arundel
but never did the mailed barons of his line face so appalling a
fate with such prodigious a constancy. To the last he refused
to flinch, and his death was the astonishment of his murderers.
In him an enthusiastic devotion was grafted on an heroic nature.
His bodily endowments were as remarkable as the temper of his
mind. His manly proportions, his strength, and his endurance,
which incessant fasts and penances could not undermine, had
always won for him the respect of the Indians, no less than a
courage unconscious of fear, and yet redeemed from rashness by a
cool and vigorous judgment; for, extravagant as were the
chimeras which fed the fires of his zeal, they were consistent
with the soberest good sense on matters of practical bearing.
Father Lalement, constitutionally weak almost to emaciation, was
unequal to a display of fortitude like that of his colleague. His robust
companion had lived less than four hours, under the torture while he
survived it for nearly seventeen.
Garnier, Chabanel, and Daniel suffered more merciful deaths, falling
to the tomahawk or the musket.
FATHER ISAAC JOGUES
The story of Father Isaac Jogues is incredibly dramatic. Tortured
terribly by the Iroquois, then made a slave of the tribe he, with the help
of the Calvinst Dutch at Ft. Orange, escaped his captors and returned to
France. He begged to be returned to the Canadian missions and his wish
was granted. Two years later in 1646 he was sent on a diplomatic mission
to the Iroquois and he and his donn� companion Jean LaLande were murdered
by them. Of him Parkman writes: "He was the purest example of Roman
Catholic virtue this Western Continent has seen. With all his gentleness,
he had a certain warmth or vivacity of temperament; and we have seen how,
during this first captivity, while humbly submitting to every caprice of
his tyrants and appearing to rejoice in abasement, a derisive word against
his faith would change the lamb into the lion, and the lips that seemed so
tame would speak in sharp, bold tones of menace and reproof..."
The destruction of the Huron villages left the Huron nation decimated
and the beaten refugees from that disaster fled back to Montreal and
Quebec where they intermingled among other tribes and ceased to exist as a
nation. The Jesuit dream of peaceful Indian communities ruled by the
gentle Fathers was destroyed by Iroquois guns and tomahawks. Parkman
never doubted that English liberty would prevail over French absolutism
but if the Jesuits had been successful it would have made the task so much
more difficult for "prosperous Indian communities would be established
along the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi Valley. The swift decline
of the Indian population would have been arrested, habits of agriculture
would have been developed and their instincts of mutual slaughter
repressed..."
"Liberty", says Parkman "may thank the Iroquois, that by their
insensate fury the plans of her adversary were brought to nought. The
Jesuit Fathers saw their hopes struck down; and their faith, though not
shaken, was sorely tried." Parkman concludes with a generous gesture to
the defeated with his little zinger thrown in: "Meanwhile let those who
have prevailed yield due honor to the defeated. Their virtues shine
amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the
torrent."
As Parkman continues his France and England and takes the story into
the latter half of the 17th century he strains to see a difference in the
Jesuits of that age compared to those of the Heroic Age. "The Canadian
Jesuit is less and less an apostle and more an explorer, a man of science
and a politician," he says, "the missionary still sends out stories of
conversions, baptisms and the exemplary conduct of neophytes" which
Parkman finds "intolerably tedious" but they also report mundane things
like observations on winds, currents and tides in the Great Lakes,
accounts of copper mines and speculation on geography like the direction
and terminus of that great mysterious river that the Indians have reported
to them. Still these latter day Jesuits founded mission villages at Sault
St. Marie, Michilmachinac, Green Bay and LaPointe, on Lake Superior. He
tells the story of Father Louis Andr� who was cut from the old cloth: In
the winter of 1670 he stayed with the Ottawas and the Nipissings: "The
staple of his diet was acorns and tripe de roche, a species of lichen,
which, being boiled, resolved itself into a black glue, nauseous, but not
void of nourishment. At times he was reduced to moss, the bark of trees,
or moccasins and old moose skins cut into strips and boiled. His hosts
treated him very ill, and the worst of their fare was always his portion.
When spring came to his relief, he returned to his post of St. Simon, with
impaired digestion and unabated zeal."
Father Marquette, one of the latter day Jesuits, certainly fills the
heroic mold. Parkman relates his epic voyage with his companion Joliet
from Green Bay down the Mississippi to the river Arkansas and back,
without a bit of editorializing.
He is high on La Salle and Frontenac and presents the Jesuits as
enemies of these two heroes but sees their opposition based on resistance
to the growing civil power over the spiritual. The Jesuits were still
hoping to build in the Mississippi Valley peaceful Indian communities and
feared that French penetration into this area would bring with it the
corrupting influences that would destroy the Indian. He clearly doesn't
like Bishop Laval, who is backed by the Jesuits against the civil power,
but the Jesuits fade into the background as his history progresses. Over
the years he developed a warm and close relationship with the great
Canadian historian, Abbe Casgrain. Casgrain supported Laval University's
plan to give Parkman in 1879 an honorary degree which occasioned bitter
opposition from some quarters in Canada, so much so that the Rector of the
University had to withdraw the offer.
TRIBUTES TO PARKMAN
As a good priest, Casgrain must have shuddered under the impact of
some of Parkman's more anti-Catholic shafts. In a sketch of Parkman's
life he said, "The work of Parkman is the negation of all religious
belief, Protestant as well as Catholic. He is purely a rationalist, who
admits of no other principle than the vague theorycalled Modern
Civilization. One glimpses a righteous soul, born for the truth, but lost
without compass in an ocean without shores. Hence these aspirations
toward the truth, these brilliant avowals, this homage to the truth,
followed, alas, by strange declines, by outbursts of astonishing
fanaticism.
"In short, the writings of Mr. Parkman, in which good and evil
are mingled, are the image of human nature. The sky is not
without clouds, the light not without shadows, but nevertheless
it is day. One recognizes throughout the elevated mind, the
honest heart, which, throughout all his gropings, admires the
beautiful, searches for the truth, and loves the good. He has
gone to the very sources of our history; he has studied them
with a care, a love worthy of all praise; he has then told the
story, just as he has found it, and said: `Accept or reject my
conclusions; but here are the facts.'"
"We can scarcely hope more of an impartial enemy."
He concludes that, despite the objections Catholics must make to
Parkman's book, Canadians owed him a great debt, for no other writer has
done so much to make their country's history known and admired abroad.
And to admire the history is to admire the religion that shaped it.
Finally Casgrain suggests that Parkman unwittingly served the design of
Providence; for his books helped to break down the barriers which divided
the races of the New World, who were destined to unite in a civilization
which would rule the Globe. And then he paid a fine tribute to his friend:
When you have come to the end of your career, you can lay down
on your books your head whitened by toil, and give this
testimony: I have used my life to the good of my fellows, with a
right and pure purpose; I can lay myself down to sleep with the
hope that this will be held to my credit. (Mason Wade, P. Heroic
Historian, pp. 405-407).
In 1923 the Centenary of Parkman's birth was held in Montreal. The
passions evoked by his rationalist treatment of a great Catholic epoch had
died down and his name and works were lauded to the skies. Mr. Egidius
Fauteux, a Canadian archivist, in his address described Parkman's works as
possessing the freshness of youth but at the same time never neglecting
the first obligation of the historian - exactitude. To the dryness of
fact he superimposed the magic style. Finally his works possess the gift
of vitality. Commenting on these remarks of Fauteux, Samuel Eliot Morison,
a great historian and a Parkman devotee, says: "Parkman's work is forever
young with the `immortal youth of art.' His men and women are alive, they
feel, think, and act within the framework of a living nature. In
Parkman's prose the forests ever murmur, the rapids perpetually foam and
roar; the people have parts and passions. Like that `sylvan historian' of
Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, he caught the spirit of an age and fixed it
for all time, `forever panting and forever young.'"
Taken from the Spring 1993 issue of "The Dawson Newsletter." For
subscriptions send $8.00 to "The Dawson Newsletter", P.O. Box 332,
Fayetteville, AR 72702. John J. Mulloy, Editor
