Dablon descended to Quebec. There was long and anxious counsel in the chambers of Fort St. Louis. The Jesuits had information that, if the demands of the Onondagas were rejected, they would join the Mohawks to destroy Canada. But why were they so eager for a colony of Frenchmen? Did they want them as hostages, that they might attack the Hurons and Algonquins without risk of French interference; or would they massacre them, and then, like tigers mad with the taste of blood, turn upon the helpless settlements of the St. Lawrence? An abyss yawned on either hand. Lauson, the governor, was in an agony of indecision, but at length declared for the lesser and remoter peril, and gave his voice for the colony. The Jesuits were of the same mind, though it was they, and not he, who must bear the brunt of danger. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” said one of them, “and, if we die by the fires of the Iroquois, we shall have won eternal life by snatching souls from the fires of Hell.” Preparation was begun at once. The expense fell on the Jesuits, and the outfit is said to have cost them seven thousand livres,--a heavy sum for Canada at that day. A pious gentleman, Zachary Du Puys, major of the fort of Quebec, joined the expedition with ten soldiers; and between thirty and forty other Frenchmen also enrolled themselves, impelled by devotion or destitution. Four Jesuits, Le Mercier, the superior, with Dablon, Menard, and Frémin, besides two lay brothers of the order, formed, as it were, the pivot of the enterprise. The governor made them the grant of a hundred square leagues of land in the heart of the Iroquois country,--a preposterous act, which, had the Iroquois known it, would have rekindled the war; but Lauson had a mania for landgrants, and was himself the proprietor of vast domains which he could have occupied only at the cost of his scalp. Embarked in two large boats and followed by twelve canoes filled with Hurons, Onondagas, and a few Senecas lately arrived, they set out on the 17th of May “to attack the demons,” as Le Mercier writes, “in their very stronghold.” With shouts, tears, and benedictions, priests, soldiers, and inhabitants waved farewell from the strand. They passed the bare steeps of Cape Diamond and the mission-house nestled beneath the heights of Sillery, and vanished from the anxious eyes that watched the last gleam of their receding oars. * Meanwhile three hundred Mohawk warriors had taken the warpath, bent on killing or kidnapping the Hurons of Orleans. When they heard of the departure of the colonists for Onondaga, their rage was unbounded; for not only were they full of jealousy towards their Onondaga confederates, but they had hitherto derived great profit from the * Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettres, 1656. Le Mercier, Relation, 1657 chap. iv. Chaulmer, Nouveau Monde, II. 265, 322, 319.