Bands of Iroquois continued to wage war with relentless fury on all the Algonquin tribes from the Chaudiere Falls of the Ottawa to the upper waters of the Saguenay. Bressani, a highly cultured Italian priest, was taken prisoner on the St. Lawrence, while on his way to the Huron missions, and carried to the Mohawk villages, where he went through the customary ordeal of torture. He was eventually given to an old woman who had lost a member of her family, but when she saw his maimed hands--one split between the little finger and the ring-finger--she sent him to the Dutch, who ransomed and sent him to France, whence he came back like Jogues, a year later. {139} In 1645 the Mohawks made peace with the French, but the other members of the Five Nations refused to be bound by the treaty. Father Isaac Jogues ventured into their country in 1646, and after a successful negotiation returned to consult the governor at Quebec; but unhappily for him he left behind a small box, filled with some necessaries of his simple life, with which he did not wish to encumber himself on this flying visit. The medicine-men or sorcerers, who always hated the missionaries as the enemies of their vile superstitious practices, made the Indians believe that this box contained an evil spirit which was the origin of disease, misfortune, and death. When Father Jogues came back, he found the village divided into two parties--one wishing his death, the other inclined to show him mercy, and after infinite wrangling between the factions, he was suddenly killed by a blow from a tomahawk as he was entering a long-house, to attend a feast to which he had been invited. His body was treated with contumely, and his head affixed to a post of the palisades of the village. He was the first martyr who suffered death at the hands of the Iroquois. The "black robe" was now to be seen in every Indian community of Canada; among the Hurons and Algonquins as far as Lake Huron, among the White Fish tribe at the head-waters of the Saguenay, and even among the Abenakis of the Kennebec. Father Gabriel Druilletes, who had served an apprenticeship among the Montagnais, was in charge of this Abenaki mission, and in the course of years {140} visited Boston, Plymouth, and Salem, in the interests of the Canadian French, who wished to enter into commercial relations with New England, and also induce its governments to enter into an alliance against the Iroquois. The authorities of the New England confederacy eventually refused to evoke the hostility of the dangerous Five Nations. Father Druilletes, however, won for Canada the enduring friendship of the Abenakis, as Acadian history shows.