Voyage of the Paper Canoe: A Geographical Journey of 2500 miles, from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, during the years 1874-5.Bishop, Nathaniel H. (Nathaniel Holmes)
History
Voyage of the Paper Canoe: A Geographical Journey of 2500 miles, from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, during the years 1874-5.
Bishop, Nathaniel H. (Nathaniel Holmes)
Atlantic Coast (Canada) -- Description and travel; Atlantic Coast (U.S.) -- Description and travel; Bishop, Nathaniel H. (Nathaniel Holmes), 1837-1902 -- Travel -- Canada, Eastern; Bishop, Nathaniel H. (Nathaniel Holmes), 1837-1902 -- Travel -- United States; Canada, Eastern -- Description and trave
"Like a fair naiad of the wilderness it slumbered between the
guardian mountains that breathe from crag and forest the stern
poetry of war. But all then was solitude; and the clang of
trumpets, the roar of cannon, and the deadly crack of the rifle
had never as yet awakened their angry echoes. Again the canoes
were launched and the wild flotilla glided on its way, now in
the shadow of the heights, now on the broad expanse, now among
the devious channels of the Narrows, beset with woody islets
where the hot air was redolent of the pine, the spruce, and the
cedar,--till they neared that tragic shore where, in the
following century, New England rustics baffled the soldiers of
Dieskau, where Montcalm planted his batteries, where the red
cross waved so long amid the smoke, and where, at length, the
summer night was hideous with carnage, and an honored name was
stained with a memory of blood. The Indians landed at or near
the future site of Fort William Henry, left their canoes, and
with their prisoners began their march for the nearest Mohawk
town."
Father Jogues lived among his captors until the fall of 1643, when he
escaped in a vessel from the Dutch settlement of Rensselaerswyck
(Albany), to which place the Iroquois had gone to trade with the
inhabitants. He arrived at the Jesuit college of Rennes, France, in a
most destitute condition, on the 5th of January, 1644, where he was
joyfully received and kindly cared for. When he appeared before Queen
Anne of Austria, the woman who wore a diadem thought it a privilege to
kiss his mutilated hands. In the Roman Catholic church a deformed or
mutilated priest cannot say mass; he must be a perfect man in body and
mind before the Lord. Father Jogues wished to return to his old
missionary field; so, to restore to him his lost right of saying mass,
the Pope granted his prayer by a special dispensation. In the spring of
1643 he returned to the St. Lawrence country to found a new mission, to
be called the Mission of Martyrs. His Superior at Montreal ordered him
to proceed to the country of the Mohawks, and in company with Sieur
Bourdon, a government engineer, and six Indians, he followed the
Richelieu and Champlain, which the savages called "the doorway of the
country," until the little party stood on the northern end of Lake
George, on the evening of Corpus Christi; and with the catholic spirit
of the Jesuit missionary he christened it Lac St. Sacrement, and this
name it bore for a whole century. On the 18th of October, 1646, the
tomahawk of the savage ended the life of Father Jogues, who, after
suffering many tortures and indignities from his Iroquois captors, died
in their midst while working for their salvation in his field of
Christian labor.
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