Missionary was
subjected to every kind of indignity from the Indian children and every
one else.
A child cut off one of the captive's fingers. He was afterwards,
with his companion, tied up during two nights, half suspended in the air;
this made both suffer horribly; burning coals were applied to their flesh.
Finally, the missionary was handed over to an old squaw; he shortly after
became free, and returned to Quebec on the 5th of November, 1653, to the
joy of everybody.
His comrade, Tranchelot, after having had his fingers burnt, was finally
consumed by fire on the 8th September, 1653. Such were some of the
thrilling incidents of daily occurrence at Sillery two centuries ago.
What with breaches of military etiquette by M. de Maisonneuve's colonists,
the ferocity of skulking Iroquois, and the scrapes their own neophytes
occasionally got into, the reverend fathers in charge of the Sillery
mission must now and again have had lively times, and needed, we would
imagine, the patience of Job, with the devotion of martyrs, to carry out
their benevolent views.
We read in history [181] how, on one Sunday morning in 1652, the Sillery
Indians being all at mass, a beaver skin was stolen from one of the wig-
wams, on which a council of the chiefs being called, it was decided that
the robbery had been committed by a Frenchman, [182] enough to justify the
young men to rush out and seize two Frenchmen then accidentally passing
by, and in no wise connected - as the Indians even admitted - with the
theft. The Indian youths were for instantly stripping the prisoners, in
order to compel the Governor of the colony to repair the injury suffered
by the loss of the peltry. One of them, more thoughtful than the rest,
suggested to refer the matter to the missionary father, informing him at
the same time that in cases of robbery it was the Indian custom to lay
hold of the first individual they met belonging to the family or nation of
the suspected robber, strip him of his property, and retain it until the
family or nation repaired the wrong. The father succeeded, by appealing to
them as Christians, to release the prisoners. Fortunately, the real thief,
who was not a Frenchman, became alarmed, and had the beaver skin restored.
Old writers of that day occasionally let us into quaint glimpses of a
churchman's tribulations in those primitive times. The historian Faillon
tells some strange things about Bishop Laval and Governor D'Argenson:
their squabble about holy bread. (Histoire de la Colonie Francaise en
Canada, vol. ii., p. 467.) At page 470, is an account of a country
girl, ordered to be brought to town by Bishop Laval and shut up in the
Hotel-Dieu, she being considered under a spell, cast on her by a miller
whom she had rejected when he popped the question: the diabolical suitor
was jailed as a punishment. Champlain relates how a pugnacious parson was
dealt with by a pugnacious clergyman of a different persuasion respecting
some knotty controversial points.
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