The Ultimate Romance
The life and death of St. Isaac Jogues
CONCLUSION
The conclusion of the short biography of St. Isaac Jogues, S.J., begun in the March 2010 issue of The Angelus
The Hurons made it to land, and there the battle raged. Isaac’s canoe was upset near the shore and he was dumped into some tall reeds that concealed him. There he remained briefly, but suddenly emerged, walking unarmed into the midst of the battle. The Iroquois were startled and amazed.
Isaac had seen a Huron, a catechumen, wounded by a musket shot and feared he may have been dying. So, cupping some water in his hands, he walked into the mayhem, knelt and baptized him.
The Huron convert, Atieronhonk, survived and later recounted the incident: “Ondessonk forgot himself at the sight of danger. He thought only of me and my salvation; he feared not to lose his own life, but feared lest mine should be lost forever.”
During the same battle, two of the lay workers attached to the Jesuit missions, William Couture and René Goupil, were also captured. Couture had escaped and could have continued on, but he had vowed not to leave Isaac. So he returned and an Iroquois, upon seeing him, pointed a musket at his chest and pulled the trigger. But the gun misfired. Couture then fired his own gun, killing the war chief.
The Iroquois fell upon him, tore out his fingernails and ran a sword through his right hand. Isaac went to him and held him in his arms, telling him to offer his suffering to God. The Iroquois were initially stunned by this behavior, then attacked the priest, beating him until he was unconscious; then, to bring him to, they tore out his fingernails and chewed his forefingers. Goupil was treated likewise.
When the Iroquois had triumphed, they bound their prisoners: 20 Hurons and 3 Frenchmen. But when they tried to bind Isaac, he told them there was no need: he would never leave so long as they held his friends captive. So they left him untied and loaded their prizes into their canoes.
The Iroquois were Mohawks, one of the five nations of the Iroquois, whose territory covered central New York state. The Iroquois were as fierce as they were ambitious. They had decided upon a war of extermination against the Hurons and Algonquins and were determined to drive out the French. Their allies were the Dutch.
Montmangy was wisely distrustful of his Indian allies, whose sentiments were ever volatile, and he refused to give them firearms. The Dutch had no such scruples. They cultivated the fur trade among the Indians and saw the French as their rivals in commerce as well as in religion: the Dutch were mostly Calvinists. They gave the Iroquois muskets, which in turn gave the Iroquois superiority in battle against the other tribes and made them, in some measure, the equal of the French.
It took 13 days for the war party to bring their prize captives to the village of Ossernenon. Before they arrived there, on the eve of the Assumption 1642, another war party met them and formed a gauntlet. The captives were stripped and beaten savagely. Isaac was especially “caressed,” as he was not only French, but one of the sorcerers the Dutch had warned them of. He was beaten unconscious and had to be dragged up the hill.
The following days comprise a catalogue of horrors painful to describe. The captives were led through three villages and at each village the same pattern of unspeakable tortures awaited them. Thumbs were sawed off; fingernails torn out; fingers chewed to nubs; flesh burnt by flaming torches; blows and kicks administered continuously. At night, the prisoners would be staked to the ground naked and the children would amuse themselves by placing hot coals on their bodies to see if they could shake them off.
Eustace Ahatsistari and the two other Huron chiefs were condemned to be burned to death, but not until the Iroquois had had their fill of tormenting them in every way they could imagine. Couture was given to the family of the chief he had killed, who eventually adopted him. The rest of the Hurons were awarded to various families, who were permitted to kill, enslave or adopt them. Isaac was made a slave, as was Goupil.
But Goupil was not to live long. Word reached the village that the Iroquois had suffered a major defeat at the hands of the French, who had established a fortress on the Richelieu River. The Iroquois were enraged and the French captives would be made to pay. Less than two months after their capture, Goupil and Isaac were walking together in the woods near Ossernenon when they were met by two braves who took up a position behind them. When they entered the village, one brave produced a tomahawk from beneath a blanket and split Goupil’s head.
But it was not entirely the French rout of the Iroquois that precipitated his death, although it may have hastened it. He had taught an Indian child to make the sign of the cross a few days earlier, and the head of the clan had decreed that he must die on this count. It was only a matter of time before the decree would be acted on by a brave eager to kill a Frenchman.
Earlier in their captivity, Goupil had asked to take the vows of a Jesuit brother. Isaac had received him in the name of the Society of Jesus. So Goupil became the first Jesuit martyr.
For 14 months Isaac led the life of a slave. He was made to do the work of a squaw. As one historian has remarked of the Indians, their women were their mules. He had to bear great burdens during the hunts and to endure relentless abuse and ridicule. Attempts to ransom him failed. During a visit to a Dutch settlement he was offered the means to escape, but refused. He thought it wrong to desert the post at which God had placed him. During the time of his captivity, he counted 70 souls he had baptized, some of them captives dying on the torture platform.
Who would be there to offer these souls baptism and absolution if he left? His life was not about his own freedom or ease, but about saving souls for Christ, and to that mission he remained faithful.
Isaac learned, however, that the Iroquois were planning a massive assault upon the French and intended to execute their plan by means of treachery: they would parley peace, then attack. He managed to write a letter of warning and dispatch it to Montmangy through an Iroquois chief who had been a Huron but was adopted by the Mohawks. The chief, unaware of the letter’s contents, thought it an excellent ruse for getting close to the French before they were aware of his real intentions. In the letter, Isaac had urged that no consideration of his personal safety should prevent the governor from taking immediate action. Upon reading it, Montmangy pointed his artillery at the Iroquois and opened fire.
Word of Ondessonk’s warning to the French and the defeat of the Iroquois traveled back to Ossernenon. His death was decreed. But Isaac was with a trading party at Fort Orange at the time, so the Iroquois would wait for his return. The Dutch, meanwhile, who had come to feel a great respect and affection for Isaac, learned of what awaited him if he returned to Ossernenon. They urged him to escape and arranged the means. Isaac realized that he could no longer minister to the captives or dying Iroquois if he were executed, so he agreed.
Still, the Dutch were frightened. They first moved Isaac to a ship anchored in the Hudson, then moved him back to town and hid him, just in case the Iroquois became unmanageable and they would have to surrender him to save themselves. In all of this Isaac acquiesced, not wanting to be the cause of suffering for the Dutch, nor to place his own desires above the designs of Providence.
But the story of Isaac Jogues’ captivity and torments, some of it coming through reports from the Dutch, had spread to France, where the Jesuit Relations were read and recounted with the sort of interest now accorded to great adventure novels. Isaac had not only become a hero to his fellow Jesuits, but something of a national celebrity. Word of his trials reached the Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, who insisted that the Netherlands arrange for his release and return. The Director General of New Amsterdam received an order to secure the freedom of Father Jogues immediately. He in turn ordered the commander of Fort Orange, Van Corlear, to deliver Father Jogues to him.
Van Corlear tried to bribe the Iroquois, with the price reaching 300 guldens, but they stubbornly refused. Finally, he admitted that Ondessonk was under his protection and that if the Iroquois did not agree to his ransom, the Dutch would no longer trade with them.
Trade with the Dutch gave them the source of their superiority over the other tribes–firearms–and the Iroquois would not risk losing such an advantage. So, Ondessonk made his way at last to New Amsterdam, and, thereafter, across the Atlantic to Cornwall. There, he obtained passage on a coal boat crossing the channel to Brittany. Near the coast, at his request, he was rowed ashore.
On Christmas morning 1643, Father Isaac Jogues set foot on French soil. His one thought was to hear Mass. As he approached a fisherman’s cottage, the family watched this curious man in ill-fitting, beggarly clothes and an oversized sailor’s cap make his way across the sands. Who and what could he be?
Isaac greeted them courteously and asked them where he might hear Mass. There was a monastery of the Franciscan Recollet Fathers nearby, they told him, but insisted he needed a proper hat to wear to Church on Christmas morning and provided him with one, also obtaining his promise that he would dine with them after Mass.
It had been 17 months since he had heard Mass and received Communion. First, he confessed. He later recounted that the one sin of which he was guilty during his captivity was a “complacency toward death.” As a Jesuit, he should not have preferred life to death or vice versa, as the Spiritual Exercises state.
When he returned to the cottage, the family noticed his mutilated hands, They treated him with great kindness, and when they learned his identity, they arranged for a visiting trader to take him to the Jesuit house at Rennes. Before he left, the daughter of the cottage, a little girl, placed in his palm the few pennies she had been saving. He accepted them as a gift of love, blessed the people, then set out on horseback for the 200-mile trek.
When he arrived at Rennes, the porter looked at the ragged figure suspiciously. Isaac asked to see the rector, saying he was someone who had news from Canada. When told this, the rector, who had been vesting for Mass, asked that the man be shown in. He immediately inquired if he had any news of Father Isaac Jogues. The man said he did. The rector asked if he knew Father Jogues.
“I know him very well,” he replied.
The rector then asked if he were still captive among the Iroquois or had he been killed?
“No, he is alive and at liberty…and it is he who speaks to you.”
He then knelt and asked for the rector’s blessing.
It was a memorable Christmas for the Jesuits at Rennes. And soon, all of France learned of Isaac’s escape. Queen Anne of Austria requested that he come to Paris for an audience. Isaac complied.
The slave of the savages stood amid the royal court, humbly and patiently answering the questions put to him about the natives of New France and his own sufferings, all the while keeping his hands enfolded in the sleeves of his cassock. At last, he was asked to show those hands.
As he did so, Queen Anne left her throne and approached Isaac. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she bent her head and kissed the mutilated fingers. “People write romances for us,” she said. “But was there ever such a romance as this?”
To Isaac, his missing fingers and mangled hands meant only one thing: he could not say Mass. It was for this reason alone that he grieved over his deformities. His Jesuit superiors, aided by Queen Anne, sought a special dispensation from the pope so that Isaac might be permitted to hold the host in other than the prescribed manner. Pope Urban readily granted the dispensation, writing: “It would be shameful that a martyr of Christ be not allowed to drink the Blood of Christ.”
Isaac had suffered among the Iroquois, and now he was suffering among the French. The public adulation that greeted him everywhere was a trial to him, as it chafed against his humility. And he also felt that time spent in France was time lost among the Indians, where he knew he belonged. His one burning desire was to return to the Iroquois as a missionary.
His Jesuit superiors acquiesced to his petitions and in May 1644, having been in France less than six months, Isaac was on a ship bound for New France. Before he left, he visited his mother in Orleans. What must she have felt as she ran her fingers tenderly over the knife scars and burn marks on his face and neck and held his hands in hers? He said Mass in her presence and placed the host on her tongue. Before he departed, her face wet with tears, she said to her dear Isaac, “Adieu till we meet again, though it may not be until we meet in Heaven.”
In June, for the second time in his life, Isaac approached his paradise, not as a young man with dreams of spiritual adventure, but as a tried warrior steeled to renew the combats he knew so well. He learned that the Iroquois had become an even greater menace during his absence. They were engaged in a renewed campaign of genocide against the Hurons and Algonquins and terrorized the French settlements.
Isaac was sent to Montreal, an outpost established only a few years earlier and now under fierce assault by the Iroquois. There, he tended to the physical and spiritual needs of the sick and dying.
By the following summer, the contending parties all agreed to a parley in Three Rivers. The Iroquois delegation was surprised to see the former slave, Ondessonk, seated in a position of honor next to the powerful chief of the French, Governor Montmangy. The council dragged on, for the Indians were fond of oratory. The key to securing peace was an agreement to the terms of the treaty by the Mohawks. An ambassador would have to accompany the Iroquois deputies back to a council of the chiefs and argue the advantages of ceasing hostilities. Ondessonk was the obvious choice, for no one understood the language and habits of the Iroquois better than he.
It was decided that he should not appear in his cassock, but rather in doublet and hose, as he was to be a representative of the governor, not a missionary of the Church. He agreed.
He traveled south, coming for a second time to Lake George but able to appreciate for the first time its placid beauty. He called it the Lake of the Blessed Sacrament, for it was on the eve of Corpus Christi that he made his way into its waters.
He visited first the Dutch at Fort Orange and repaid them the 300 guldens they had given for his ransom, then went on to Ossernenon, the place of his torture and captivity. A council was convened at which Ondessonk presented wampum belts as peace offerings and urged the chiefs to accept the terms agreed upon during the Three Rivers peace parley.
The Mohawks agreed, but told Isaac that he and his Algonquin companions must leave immediately or risk meeting returning Iroquois war parties unaware of the truce. Isaac returned to Quebec and delivered the assurances given him by the Mohawks. Both the governor and his Jesuit superiors refused to accept the words of the Mohawks at face value, for all the Iroquois were notoriously treacherous and frequently violated the most hallowed traditions among the Indians to gain an advantage over an enemy.
Experience counseled patience: wait and see whether the Mohawks were sincere. Isaac asked that he be allowed to return and spend the winter at Ossernenon as a missionary, rather than a government envoy. The Jesuits held their own council and agreed that it would be imprudent to allow Isaac to return until the Mohawks had proven their good faith, but they said that should some favorable opportunity arise, it should be taken as Providential and his return allowed.
The opportunity came. The Hurons decided to send a deputation to the Mohawks in September to discuss further details of the peace. Isaac was allowed to accompany them. But no sooner did he learn that his request to return was granted, than he was seized with fear. He remembered the torture platform and his fingers being chewed to pulp. He also had a strong premonition that his death was imminent. He wrote to a Jesuit friend in France: “Ibo et non redibo.”–I will go but I will not return.
While en route, the party met some Indians who told them the Mohawks had broken the peace and were on the warpath. The Hurons immediately deserted Isaac and his young companion, Jean de Lalande. Lalande, like Rene Goupil, was a donné, that is, a layman who had taken a private lifelong vow to serve the Jesuits in the missions.
Isaac and Jean paddled on until they reached the point of land at which they had to leave their canoe and proceed through the forest.
Meanwhile, an epidemic had struck Ossernenon. The blame fell on Isaac. On his earlier visit as a government emissary, he had anticipated returning in his role as priest, to which end he had left a black box with the old woman with whom he had lived during his time of captivity. It contained Mass utensils and some books. He unlocked it in the presence of several Indians to satisfy any suspicions about its contents, then locked it again.
Some Huron captives, fearful of their fate, tried to ingratiate themselves with the Mohawks by telling them that the plague was the work of a demon in Ondessonk’s black box. The explanation was accepted; the black box was sunk in the middle of the river, still locked so that the demon could not escape, and war parties dispatched to capture Ondessonk and bring him back to answer for his evil. They intercepted Isaac and Jean in the forest, stripped and beat them, then led them into Ossernenon in triumph.
Isaac was taken to the cabin where he had been a slave, there to await his execution, which he was told would occur the next day. But the evening before he expected to die, October 18, a member of the Bear Clan, always the most hostile to the Blackrobes and the French, invited him to a feast. He could not refuse, although he expected treachery. As the flap was raised for him to enter the dwelling, a tomahawk came down upon his head, and he fell to the ground, dead. His head was immediately cut off and, with wild whoops of triumph and defiance, the Mohawks placed it on a stake in the palisade, facing their enemies to the north.
Jean, hearing of Ondessonk’s death, wanted to salvage some relics from his body, which the Iroquois had thrown on the ground outside the lodge where he was killed. But braves were watching for Jean, and as he left his cabin, a tomahawk split his skull. His head was placed alongside Isaac’s on the palisade, and two more names were added to the role of the eight Jesuits who would become known as the North American Martyrs.
The tide of history has largely erased the tribes who once roamed the mostly uninhabited reaches of the vast wilderness of the Eastern seaboard and its great lakes and rivers. The Wyandots, about 3,000 in Quebec and smaller groups scattered about what used to be the Indian Territory in the United States, are said to be a remnant of the kingdom of Huronia. Epidemics, wars, and the relentless incursion of European immigrants accounted for the virtual disappearance of the other Indian nations. If you type the word “Iroquois” into an Internet search engine, you will learn about the amenities and rates of a luxury hotel by that name in mid-town Manhattan. Mohawk is known primarily as the name of a carpet company or else refers to a punk hairstyle.
The Jesuits, too, bear little resemblance to the order that formed Isaac Jogues and his martyred brothers in religion. And I wonder: if a band of Jesuits such as Isaac Jogues could be found these days, and were they to land on the shores of the New World as presently constituted, would they not feel in some way as their forefathers in the Faith felt about New France: that here is a barbarous land, its morals dissolute; its people ruled by their demon gods of lust and greed and violence?
And how would they set about the work of conversion? Their first problem would be that which confronted Isaac and his confreres: language. How could they communicate the truths of the Catholic faith to a people for whom the words sin and virtue, grace and sacrament, salvation and damnation are sounds without meaning? Or words from a dark past from which they believe that they had emerged into the light of the present?
And, indeed, conversion is all the other way now: it is the barbarians who proselytize the Catholics, or what remains of us. And we who hold to Tradition, are we not somewhat like the Wyandots, the scattered remnant of a once great race of believers?
But we know that the Church will endure. We need not know the number of the elect. But we can be certain that among them will be those whom Isaac Jogues baptized and absolved. And like Isaac, we should remember that no amount of effort should be spared if it might save a single soul, including our own.
St. Isaac Jogues, and you children of the wilderness whom he saved, pray for us.
A great many books have been written about the North American Martyrs. Two that can be highly recommended for scholarship and style are:
Saint Among Savages by Francis Talbot, S.J. (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1935); reissued by Ignatius Press in 2002.
Saints of the American Wilderness by John A. O’Brien (Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1953), originally titled The American Martyrs; reissued in 2004 by Sophia Institute Press.
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