CHAPTER 12
1684 ~ 1714
AND SO THE VOYAGE TO END HIS LONG SUFFERING commenced.
Earlier journeys had begun with equally keen prospects, for on diverse occasions Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers had embarked upon grand quests to right their fortunes and defeat the improbable fates that ailed them. From the moment he’d laid claim to his manhood, the determination had been borne in Des Gros to locate the Northwest Passage—not the one fools sought to China, rather, the one to the Rupert and Nelson rivers, inside the Great Salt Bay where Cree gathered fur by the canoe-full. So rampant and consistent had been their misfortune that he finally quit, way back in 1682, and Radisson, always the honourable friend, agreed to relinquish the gambit also. Des Gros built a log cabin for himself near Trois-Rivières. Purchased a rooster and a dozen hens. Yet, even in that comparatively peaceful glen, adversity found him. A fox nabbed a few of the hens, and the fearful rooster ran off. On four consecutive mornings, he sat listening on his stoop to the cock crow, awakening the dawn with its lecherous screech from a woodland refuge before a fox got him as well, or mere hunger despoiled him.
“No more for us, that’s what we swore,” Radisson was recounting to a cabin boy, the first person in a while to take an interest in his tales. Shy in the beginning, the lad was drawn to the legendary figure. Now that the ship moved upon the waters and the days passed, grey and rainy, the waves rhythmic, the winds steady on the starboard quarter, the lad wanted to know the truth behind the fables he’d heard in London and Southampton, tales related to Radisson and Des Gros. He believed every word that fell from the lips of this weathered, scarred man, his visage craggy and punitive under a rampage of overgrown beard and hair. He had been discovering that the truth eclipsed even the legends recited in their daring and raw adventure, and wished that he could live such a life as had this man, this Radisson.
The Happy Return plodded on, old timbers creaking, sails full and by.
“A sadder day,” Radisson reflected. Along the leeward rail they sat amidships, the frothy sea skimming past them, their feet comfortably wedged against the bulwarks to keep them safely onboard. “Aye,” he said, for he was speaking English to the lad somewhat as an Englishman might, although he blended the diction of soldiers and sailors and the language of various provinces. He further vexed his speech with accents both French and Iroquois. “The guv’ner hauled Des Gros to prison off, that wretched hour, stealing our furs after what we had done for him and his lot! Saved Ville-Marie! Saved New France! What we received in return was a merci beaucoup—and prison time. Our furs stolen out of our canoes. A wonder he left us our canoes, that man, that guv’ner!”
“I’d be so pissed!” the lad decried.
“I was so pissed!” Radisson concurred. “In more ways than one, and stayed that way—pissed!—for months. I would’ve stayed pissed longer, but money ran dry. Ah, lad, that was a sadder day.”
“What did you do after that?” The lad knew well that Radisson had never stayed put for long.
The coureur de bois sucked his pipe, savouring the smoke that helped to carry his mind back in time. “I waited for Des Gros to conclude his time in the stockade. When he got out, we hauled down to Boston. We talked to merchants, and Groseilliers, aye, he repeated one point, always whispering so when he spoke it, the Boston men had to cock an ear. He’d whisper that he had never told the French of our discovery. In his heart, he believed that the Boston men should be the ones to take advantage of the knowledge only we knew, if they’d but loan us a ship.”
“Did they?”
“The Boston men did, yes. They loaned us a ship, and it was our intention to sail north, to find the entrance to what we called the Great Salt Bay. We had been there, from the south, by canoe. A hard paddle, lad, dangerous when we turned back. Iroquois marauding the rapids and anywhere we might portage. One time, we’d set out with a hundred canoes, but forty turned back, giving up—for the diligence required, lad, the courage, I would say, could not be found in the marrow of every man, in French or Huron or Cree. Now, we thought, what if we could fill the hold of a ship with the furs of a thousand canoes? That’s what we told the Boston men. Their ears tipped down, their greedy eyes preening up, and they loaned us a ship.”
“And you went there, didn’t you?” the boy asked, his hair tousled by the wind, his shyness gone, enveloped by the spirit of the tale. “Where we’re bound to? The Great Salt Bay?”
“Not that year,” Radisson recalled, bobbing his head. “Ice turned us back. Ice as tall as mountains, as broad as Ireland, but sailing just as ships do upon the sea, pushed by the wind and tide. We could sail around those mountains, we thought in our zeal, and so we did, only to come upon ice that locked the sea for as far as any man could see. We had to turn back that year. We were defeated then.”
“That’s too bad.” In his mind’s eye, the boy witnessed ice cast upon endless horizons, heaving, yawing, as a flow of lava upon the earth, mauling vessels.
“Defeated,” Radisson assured the youth, “but never fully disheartened. We knew—Groseilliers, now there’s a man, he knew for a certainty, he had the idea fixed in his head as definitely as the North Star lies fixed in the heavens, he knew that we might yet find a way through the ice. But we could tell, upon our return, that the Boston men were displeased with us, they were dispirited.” Radisson puffed upon his pipe, reflecting. He shrugged. “So we sailed, me and Des Gros, for England. That would be in 1665. Four years after that, we sailed from England, with two ships, for the Great Salt Sea.”
The wind whistled in the rigging, indicating a gale’s approach, half a day on.
“This time you made it?” the boy assumed.
“Des Gros made it aboard his ship, the Nonsuch, with that good Captain Henry Hudson. I did not. My vessel floundered. The Eaglet, she was called. A brave craft, but myself and all aboard were lucky to survive. We had to head back, so damaged we were. But the Nonsuch, stout and true like this fair lass, weathered the storms and made the journey, and when she returned to England’s shore, I saw her from a distance. I held my spyglass upon the horizon every morning and each afternoon for an hour at a time. I spied the Nonsuch, lad, weighed down by beaver pelts to the brim! The hold packed tight to the brim!”
“You must have made a fortune!”
Radisson considered this, then shrugged, then shook his head. “Fortunes are not so easily earned. That is the one thing I will draw from my life, if nothing else. This journey, now, this journey will make my fortune. That is guaranteed! Back then, we were compensated, that is true. I will not judge it unfair. We had incurred the expense of two ships, with only one returned home filled with furs. Add on the king’s commission. The price of furs that year was paltry—I don’t know why. I would say I suffered a greater disappointment than our poor reward, to hear the name of Henry Hudson attached now to the Great Salt Bay, rather than the name Groseilliers! It had been his dream and purpose, his vision, and he got there with Hudson, but Hudson would never have arrived without Médard!” He shrugged again and smacked his lips regretfully. “That’s how it goes sometimes. Glory lands in the laps of others. All in all, we added enough to our wallets to know that a second journey from England would be worth the while. On that second voyage, my ship succeeded as well, and we sailed much deeper into the bay, all the way to the mouth of the Nelson River! That was the year that the Hudson’s Bay Company was formed, once we had made it through the Northwest Passage inside the bay, and there we conducted the first grand transaction for furs in the life of the company.”
“Blimey!” the boy complained. Bells had sounded.
Radisson smiled. “Your watch begins,” he noted. “We shall pick up the story again when time allows.”
Radisson lingered on the deck awhile, breathing the cool salt air, savouring the last of his pipe. When done, he knocked out the ashes and cleaned the bowl with care and ceremony, then deposited the pipe, still warm, in his pocket, fastened the button and returned below. The air was not so foul as it would be by journey’s end, neither was it sweet-smelling, but damp and close, rife with human sweat. Radisson took to his hammock, located in the hold among the soldiers and sailors aboard, although he had been given the privilege of a segregated corner against a centre bulkhead, where the motion of the ship was least and the hatches that received air close by. He lay upon his back, his body swaying to the vessel’s gentle yaw as his thoughts fell to a lull.
The boy had done this to him, provoked this bittersweet remembering.
At times, he felt as though he had never possessed his own life. He was not even positive that he had been born in Paris, although he said so when asked, as his first memories had formed there. He had arrived in Trois-Rivières from Paris, the equivalent, he thought now, of sailing upon the Happy Return from England and landing on the moon. As a youngster, he had been abducted by the Iroquois and treated as one of their own, learning their language perfectly, their customs, their woodland savvy and arts of war. He was one of them, and yet a separate part of him had remained French. He had continued to dream in that language. He could not share his red brothers’ bloodthirstiness for his own people. So he’d fled.
He had left the Iroquois at Schenectady and run all the way to Trois-Rivières through the woods afoot. Yet Mohawk warriors pursued him. At Trois-Rivières they captured him again before he’d placed a foot inside his father’s front door. This time, they did not treat him well, and never again as one of their own. They ripped at his skin, burned hot coals into his armpits, his chest and his arse. They smashed his fingers and broke his toes. They rubbed his testicles with poison ivy, and in the days ahead laughed in the glee of his anguish. They made him their slave. What was he then? He was not a Frenchman anymore, at least not one who could raise a pig and harvest cabbages and take communion on a Sunday and, within the hour, shoot marauding Iroquois off his back porch. He was more Iroquois than Frenchman, but the Iroquois did not agree. They made him haul the heavy loads and shackled him to a birch at night. They fed him old corn and ferns while they gnawed upon the thighs of tender deer. They never let him eat the berries they made him pick as the women did. He fled again, a more difficult task this time, yet he was wiser, knowing better than to suffer a third capture.
So he had knocked around, and visited Nieuw Amsterdam, the place the English were calling New York, and he had become a hero among the Jesuits that same summer, rescuing them from attack and destruction by leading an evacuation from danger. He had joined his brother-in-law and a lowly priest, Father Charles Albanel, on a voyage around the Great Lakes deep into the Huron, Cree and Saulteur territories. Yet, was he an explorer, like La Salle, Marquette or Joliet? Apparently not, for the king of France had grown more interested in the explorations that went west and south than those that travelled north. The north frightened the king—that land of snow and ice and darkness for months of the year. Talk of the north sounded like the coldest and darkest hell to him—not even the fiery furnace of his imagination, but worse, a place where there was no life, no movement, no colour. A place where he would freeze and die should ever he visit. So the explorers who went west and south, down the Mississippi to Louisiana, or out onto the plains to the Salt Lake, these were the true explorers in the king’s eye. Radisson and Groseilliers, who dared go north to expand the land of the furs, to wander where even the Iroquois feared to paddle, and who worked for the French one year and the English the next, could not be considered explorers in a true sense.
Which was one reason why he sailed upon an English ship again.
Who was he, then? French? English? Iroquois? A woodsman? A Londoner? A sailor? A coureur de bois? A soldier? A naval officer? He had been all these things, and still his fortune had alluded him. Nor could he indicate who Pierre-Esprit Radisson might possibly become. Perhaps he was finding himself in the boy’s eyes, believing that he was the very man the youth espied. The adventurer. The misfit. The wild, reckless and courageous man of dreams.
The myth.
“On that second voyage, lad, I had the good sense to take along Cartier’s dagger.”
“Then it’s true,” the youth confirmed. They were sailing under the stars, a half-moon five degrees above the horizon, setting. Spindrift lifted off the caps of waves and blew across the sea. White spumes in the moonlight flew up from the bow wave, necessitating that Radisson, along with his new young friend, move farther aft from their favoured spot. “It exists.”
“The dagger exists, lad. That’s true.”
“Do you have it with you, on this voyage?”
Radisson knew what the boy’s next question would be: Can I see it? He smiled. “On this voyage, no. For I have given it to the safekeeping of my true love. She holds it in ransom for my safe return.”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Have you also heard of the knife’s great powers? I have married into the family that formed the Hudson’s Bay Company, and is it not the greatest company on the face of the earth today? There’s your proof. I took it with me on that voyage to the bay, and that’s when we formed the company. I gave it to my love as a wedding gift, and my marriage and the company’s fortunes have only prospered since.”
The lad craned his neck, studying the stars. He had a sextant in his kit, a gift from a sailing uncle. Developing a facility with celestial navigation formed an aspect of his education on this, his first distant voyage. Radisson looked up also. He adored these times upon the ocean the most: at night, the seas whipped up, the skies still clear, the firmament so bright and salutary that no distinction seemed to exist between air and water.
“There’s an aspect to the knife that’s not been considered. For at one time it had fallen into the hands of the Kirke brothers, when they raided Quebec, before they bequeathed it to their king. Now it remains in the care of my true love, who is a Kirke herself, and it is another generation of Kirkes that has formed ‘The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, Trading into Hudson’s Bay.’ Now, for short, we call it the Hudson’s Bay Company. Don’t you see? The fate of the family appears blended to the northern part of North America, despite the fact that that part is considered French. English merchants don’t countenance my people, except for me and Des Gros. So their fate is also married to the Cartier Dagger. Interesting, isn’t it, the fates the stars decree?”
The boy considered this tale, yet it only whetted his thirst for another. “After that?” he asked.
“After that, me and Des Gros made our voyages, year after year, to the land of the Great Salt Bay—Hudson’s Bay, they are calling it now—and the years were good to us. We prospered from our furs. Prices were paltry, commissions paid to the king’s court too great, but we prospered. I have no lasting complaint.”
“Then what happened?” the insatiable boy inquired.
Radisson continued to gaze high, to the stars, as though he might find the answer there. “This brings us to 1674, does it not?” he asked the boy. “What turn of fortune would cause us, deep in Hudson’s Bay, to come across a Frenchman there, a man we knew from the old days, a Jesuit, an Assiniboine captive, one Charles Albanel? What bend of starlight, lad, could cause a meeting with an old friend to occur in that far-flung place?”
He paused, as though his own question had so snagged his attention that further progress to his tales might be delayed that night. The boy did not press him, and yawned, and watched as the man took up his pipe and filled the bowl, tamping the tobacco down with his thumb, curving his hands over the match to light his pipe in the wind. For sure, the man was a mariner who could light his bowl with a single match in gusty conditions yet think nothing of the skill. The boy observed the ritual, awaiting the day when he might enjoy his own smoke this way.
“Charles Albanel,” Radisson repeated, as though summoning a spirit from the deep of the night as the moon behind a cloud bled orange, “a prisoner, a slave, prevailed upon Médard and me to return to the love of France, to work in the service of the king of France again.”
“Did you?” the boy asked, rapt.
Radisson nodded. “We did.”
“Why?” the youth inquired, for this seemed an odd disclosure to him.
Again, Radisson paused, to mull his words.
“Am I not French?” he asked. When the boy shrugged his skinny shoulders, Radisson gazed up at the stars again, as if to make the same inquiry, as if to revisit that question.
“Are you not French?” Charles Albanel demanded to know.
These Jesuits. You had to admire them, even though, as Médard would say, they were the scourge of the earth. Tortured, maimed, enslaved, horribly slaughtered and never particularly successful in their missions, they continued to come back to the wilderness, to what they called their Indian children, whom they so adored even as these same sauvages burned their toes or yanked out their tongues or before their eyes consumed captive infants from another tribe. Always so intent on the welfare of a man’s soul, the Jesuits would forgo the welfare of their own lives. “A praying Jesuit,” Groseilliers had said one time, “is like a canoe.”
They had been paddling on the Rupert River, through that hardscrabble land of scruff jack pine and worn rock, where the animals and birds they’d encountered had likely never spied a two-legged before, certainly not one with a white skin and a full black beard, and whenever the pair stepped ashore their footprints were likely the first upon that soil in all the human account. Radisson brought his canoe alongside Groseilliers’s so that they might enjoy a few moments’ respite while merely running the river’s flow.
“Tell me, why is a praying Jesuit like a canoe?”
“The time comes when we must carry both on our backs.”
Radisson took his friend’s meaning. At Long Sault, three Jesuits had been kneeling in prayer just as the hour had come to portage. They refused to respond to the voyageurs’ requests to keep moving. So he and Groseilliers and another man each picked up a praying Jesuit, slung him over his shoulder and carried him across the portage, and the Jesuits never stopped murmuring prayers all the way across, not until they were dropped down into their canoes again and the paddling recommenced.
“This is what I don’t understand about Jesuits,” Radisson continued in a similar vein. Apparently, for their morning entertainment, they were going to make fun of priests. “Always there’s more, but they’re celibate. How do they procreate so well?”
They were the scourge of the earth, but the woodsmen and the Indians admired them. Here, at the mouth of the Rupert River, a Jesuit priest, Charles Albanel—a slave to Indians, a man with burn marks on his arms, his fingers gnarled where they’d been broken and blackened where they had frozen, with each of the long nails missing, for they’d been extracted by the Iroquois just so they could watch him wince—was presuming to rail at Groseilliers and Radisson for failing to be properly French.
“I’m as French as you!” Radisson shot back. He had a few days’ ration of the Englishman’s rum in him. “Maybe more French!”
“I’m Frenchier than both of you,” Groseilliers maintained.
“What flag do I see on the stern of your ship? Is it Spanish? Is it Dutch? Is it Portuguese? Hmm. That looks like an English flag to me.”
The flag was English, the two conceded, yet Radisson remained undeterred. “The flag—what does it matter? Me, I’m still French.”
“Your wife—tell me, is she an English girl or French? Your children, Radisson, English or French? Do they ever speak a word of French? Where do they live—in London, or in the English countryside?”
“Stop pestering me,” the fur trader complained.
“Pestering you? When will you stop pestering me? When will you stop pestering every Frenchman in the world? Stop pestering your king! Your French king, I’m talking about. I don’t know if you pester your English king, though you probably do that, too.”
Radisson was becoming more furious while Groseilliers chuckled lightly to himself, getting a kick out of the exchange. They knew the man from the old days, from Radisson’s first voyage to Lake Superior, when Albanel had taken leave of his mission at Tadoussac and come along, as he had said then, “for the experience.” Not a priest who had distinguished himself, he was poorly considered by his superiors. But the governor had called upon him to investigate the Great Salt Bay and a report of English ships guided there by Groseilliers. Albanel had come to the bay and told the Indians that he had pretty much single-handedly dispatched the Iroquois from their trading routes. He’d been under the misapprehension that the Indians were living so far north out of fear of the Iroquois, but few of them had actually seen a member of that southern tribe. Albanel returned to Quebec and hand-delivered a report, but the governor had to conclude that he had not exacted any promise from the Indians to desist from trading with the English, and his Jesuit superiors had clucked their tongues as though to suggest that they’d forewarned the governor that Albanel had been the wrong man for the job. He’d come back to make amends, but this time the journey had exhausted him. As he had arrived at the Great Salt Bay near death, and not knowing what else to do with him, the Cree gave him to the Assiniboines to be their slave, and, by extension, their problem.
The largest of the three, Groseilliers, was sitting on a log, whittling a maple branch he intended to implant in a wobbly boot. He continued to chuckle.
“What are you talking about?” Radisson complained. “I pester nobody! I don’t even pester you, although I should, the way you pester me with crazy talk. Are you crazy, Father?”
“Are you?” He was a dour-looking priest, as though he’d never had a proper meal or a decent laugh in his life. Yet no one could doubt his wiry strength or the resolve of his frail constitution. Exhaustion and slavery had not broken his spirit.
“I’m fine. At least I’m not some Indian chief’s cook, like you are now.”
“You’ve noticed. That surprises me.” He was picking at an aching molar, and on occasion spitting.
“What’s so hard not to notice? How’d you get to be a priest, Father—a lame fool like you? I’m surprised any chief would take you as a slave. You’re lucky you didn’t have your throat slit.”
Albanel folded his arms across his chest, as though he was a burly man when he was not, and glared with his rather large grey eyes at Radisson. “You notice that I’m a slave. Have you noticed how you’ve enslaved your own people?”
“Huh? What?”
His eyes had that grey tint to them, and as he grew more intense they’d widen like an owl’s. “You two villains brought the English to the north country, almost completing the circle around us French. All this land should be French land, so that our brothers are secure to create a great nation for France. But now, we have to fight, and persevere, and worry what calamity the English will bring upon us next, what alliances they will form. We’re enslaved by our fears and the treachery of the English and their puppets, the Iroquois. Every summer, the Indians attack, murder us in our beds and in our fields and slay our children. Does the king of France send more men at arms for our protection?”
“He does not,” Radisson concurred. “That’s the king of France for you! Aha!”
“It’s all your fault,” Albanel declared.
“What? My fault? You just said it’s the king’s fault. You can’t change your mind like that. You’re not too bright for a Jesuit, are you?”
Albanel shook his head in dismay and spoke as though he was speaking a basic truth to a child. “Thanks to you, the English take the furs out of Hudson’s Bay on their big ships. With all that wealth going to England, why should the king of France care about his subjects who die uselessly over here? Now, if the king of France, and not of England, were benefiting from all those furs out of the bay, do you not think he’d be interested in protecting his subjects, in securing that source of new wealth? Today, when a French women dies horribly at the hands of the Iroquois, and her husband buries the mother of his children, he says over her grave, ‘Radisson and Groseilliers, this is on your souls!’”
“He does not!” Radisson jumped to his feet and drew his dagger, set to stab the priest through his gizzard. “I’ll slice open your lying black heart!” he cried.
“He says exactly that.” Albanel shrugged at the sight of the dagger. “Whether the husbands or the wives believe it these days matters not. They say it under their breath anyway. It’s like a curse. If a child, at play, running in the woods, trips over a root, he says, ‘Damn Radisson!’”
“He does, she does—boys and girls both! And when we French fall ill with a fever—I have heard it many times, my friend, I know of what I speak, for the feverish call me to their beds so that I might console them in their misery—we French say, ‘The grippe! Des Gros is in my blood today. My body is wracked by Radisson!’”
“No!” Radisson exclaimed, panicky.
Groseilliers was listening to this, not laughing anymore either. “We’re hated?” he asked.
“You’re despised. We French, we bring up our children to despise you more than the devil’s own. To the devil we’d show compassion, if only he would come to us on a penitent knee. To Groseilliers, to Radisson, we’d lock our doors even if winter were at its coldest and you were naked upon your bellies, beseeching your God with prayer. If you were to arrive at the fur fair in Montreal …” The priest let his voice trail off, shaking his head forlornly.
“What?” Radisson begged to know. “What would happen?”
The priest screwed up his face, not wanting to imagine the result.
“Tell me!” Radisson insisted.
“Put away your knife and I will tell you,” bargained the priest. “I don’t want you cutting my heart out in a fit of temper.” When Radisson dutifully sheathed his dagger, Albanel whispered, “The people, I fear, would stone you.”
Groseilliers and Radisson considered these things. They didn’t know quite what to believe, but they had been out of touch with the French for so many years, and had discussed in the past what their own people might think of them, working for the English.
“Don’t they know we were robbed?” Radisson lamented. “Over and over again, they stole our furs. Médard was thrown in prison when all he did was save the colony! We’ve been treated with contempt, with disdain—that’s the French for you!”
Albanel chided him with a clucking sound.
“Why are you talking to me like a duck?” Radisson asked.
“Never have you been treated badly by the French. Only by the governor. The French revered you. They adored you. At one time, every Frenchman in New France would have been honoured to have you sleep in his cabin and feast at his table. Every French soul would have slaughtered a pig to show you a proper welcome. My God, it’s true! At one time, any true Frenchman, any one at all, would have paraded his daughters before you for your close inspection, and had you chosen his loveliest, he’d have doubled the dowry on the spot. It’s too bad. A shame, is it not? I wonder … No, it’s impossible now. The two of you, you’re too English to ever be French again.”
“What’s he talking about?” Radisson said to his friend. He slapped a mosquito on his neck.
Groseilliers expressed an interest. “Say what you mean, priest.”
“All right … dwell on this … think of it in that tiny corner of your souls the devil hasn’t yet seized …” Crouched, he dragged himself closer to the men, to the limits of his rope restraint. “If you were to take a few canoes of furs and paddle back to Montreal with me, if you were to vow to deliver the bay back to the French, then would you not be heroes again? Never mind what the governor thinks. The king of France himself would honour you. He’d ply you with riches. You could probably choose whatever estate you prefer in France. But—” The priest shook his head again, as though downtrodden, defeated, then smacked a mosquito on his wrist.
“But what?” Radisson asked quietly, gravely.
“I suppose the English pay you astonishing livres for your furs. I suppose you are great lords of London now. The king of England has given you lands and riches, it’s rumoured. I’ve heard it said that Groseilliers is a knight. Is that true?”
“A Knight of the Garter!” Radisson cried out. “It’s the greatest English honour.”
“And you, I suppose, his squire. You must be much endowed, with estates, with many servants.”
Groseilliers and Radisson glanced quickly at one another. They had been discussing their status in recent months. While Groseilliers had been honoured for bringing the English into the bay, their sailors knew the route now, and their sea captains had formed their own good alliances with the Cree and Assiniboines. In truth, Groseilliers and Radisson were needed no more—they had surrendered the whole of their knowledge to the English. Their new situation was reflected in the diminishment of their sinecure from the sale of furs brought back to England. They had begun to understand that they served no function anymore, and with a stroke of a pen could be denied even the most meagre portion of the profits. Both men, in recent months, had had a sense that they had left themselves vulnerable.
Whispering still, for the men had unconsciously crept closer to the chained priest, his voice clear in the salient night air, Father Charles Albanel decreed, “And if you take furs and canoes south to Montreal, then, of course, you will also take me.”
“We could also leave you here, Father. Radisson will tell you. I prefer my own cooking upon the trail,” Groseilliers warned.
“You need me to intercede. Without me, the moment you step foot upon the island of Montreal you’ll be stoned to death. Cursed first, then stoned by a mob.”
“We have a shipload of furs already,” Radisson pointed out.
“Then take the furs back to England aboard the ship,” Albanel conspired. “But take me with you. Together we shall cross the channel to France, where on your behalf I will make an intercession before the king.”
On that starry night, on the shores of the Great Salt Bay, they hatched their scheme to restore the northern portion of the continent to the French. Once again, they would save the colony, and this time, they believed, they’d be rewarded greatly. At long last the riches they deserved would be bestowed upon them, and they would enter into the glory of France, to be honoured among their people.
“What will the English think?” Radisson whispered to Groseilliers as the two lay themselves down to sleep on an earth floor under a canopy of cedar boughs.
“I fear the loss of my knighthood,” the older man admitted.
“I fear the loss of my wife,” Radisson confessed.
They listened to the wind in the high tops of the trees as it blew across the stark, silent bay and whisked upon their shore like the animal ghosts of this latitude, timeless and grim, perpetually lurking.
“The French king received you well?” the cabin boy inquired. They sat below, taking their evening meal. Above them, a lamp swayed with the ship’s motion, and around them, others ate at this late hour or snored in the slump of their hammocks.
“He wanted to know why my wife had not joined me. ‘Will she be coming across the Channel?’ That was a question that vexed him, and my replies, I fear, did not allay his concerns.”
The cabin boy found this aspect confusing. He consumed two spoonfuls of his stew, mulling the matter over, hesitant to make a further inquiry lest he appear dumb. Finally, he had to say, “I don’t understand. Why did the king care about your wife?”
Radisson shook his head as though to suggest that he, too, was mystified by this development, but that was not true. What bothered him was that he had been incapable of doing anything about the problem. “He cared about my loyalty. If my wife remained in England—the king’s advisors, those are the rascals who made him think this way—then the way was kept clear for me to return across the Channel. I was viewed with suspicion. But the king grasped the significance of our presence, and he sent Groseilliers and me back across the Atlantic. We were to introduce ourselves to the guv’ner of New France, and he, Frontenac, would see to it that we were properly supplied and encouraged before our search. We were back in Quebec, back in Montreal, and the people kept their distance. They regarded us with suspicion, as Albanel had foretold, but we told them of our plans, to bring the north back into the service of the king. Men supported us, relieved to have us with them again. Many wished us a good result as we awaited Frontenac’s disposition and his dispatch.”
As though he was one of those citizens himself, the boy awaited the man’s further account.
“We were summoned back to Frontenac’s chateau, where he inquired if we were willing to take an expedition down the Mississippi. He had been educated on Quebec by his king, and he didn’t want to counter the king’s preferences. We told him, we pleaded with him to believe us, for we were back in Quebec under the king’s letter—and yet, he asked, if we did not want to paddle down the Mississippi, would we then lead a warring party against the Iroquois at Ticonderoga? Frontenac had next to no interest in Hudson’s Bay! He would not provide us with ships and men for us to take back the bay in the name of France.”
The boy shook his head sadly. Although an English lad, in this conflict between the powers of the two neighbours he sided not with his own king or the one from France, but with the ragamuffin from the woods, Radisson. “What did you do?” the boy asked.
“Groseilliers returned to Trois-Rivières to plant corn and raise children, and me, I joined the French navy.”
“You didn’t!” The boy was genuinely astonished, that the man of the woods would enlist for a life at sea.
“I did. I sailed to the Antilles, and along the coast of Africa. It’s a good life for seeing the world, and I commend it to you, lad. You’ve chosen well.”
Still, the boy appeared confused. “The French took back the bay. I’m quite sure of that,” he postulated.
“Patience, lad. Patience. Allow love to take its course.”
“Love?”
Radisson gathered up his cutlery and plate. “Step lively, lad. We’ll take a walk around the deck, stretch our sea legs. I shall like to breathe the night air before I sleep.”
They watched dolphins prance in the bow wave. The air was much cooler now, as they had journeyed north, where light lingered almost to midnight.
“I love my wife, lad. It’s a tribulation, love is, between a man and a woman when she is of a merchant class, and English, and the man is French and a coureur de bois. Our two countries have been warring as long as I’ve been alive, and I would guess they’ll still be on the battlefield after my death. To make matters worse, I’m a rough man, a man who has lived among the Iroquois and was considered their equal by them, so to the merchants of London I’m half-Indian myself. Not exactly the choice that a leader of the mercantile class intends for his daughter.”
“That’s something I can imagine,” the cabin boy acknowledged. Wild Radisson in the home of an English lady—he had to smile just thinking about it. And yet, the woodsman had married the girl, and despite distance and dangers and war between their countries, they had persevered as man and wife.
“You can imagine a part of it, I don’t doubt, but never the whole. To this day, my wife lives under the influence of her father more than under mine. Whenever I invite her to France, or to North America, she declines. She remains at home, awaiting the day my adventuring concludes. Awaiting the day, I should say, when I, like Des Gros, will satisfy myself raising chickens.”
“Is that why you sail under an English flag again?” the young sailor inquired.
Radisson watched a dolphin skim below the surface, then break into the air a moment. “One, I suppose,” he agreed. “After five years in the navy, I was yearning for grander adventures again. I counted my life a failure, and I wanted to be at my wife’s side awhile. I begged her—I begged her, lad, although I’m ashamed to admit it—to come to France with me, to be my proper wife. This was in ‘81. Yet she declined, which surely broke my heart. Live or die, I didn’t much care, so I beseeched the king one more time. ‘Don’t send me to Quebec,’ I told him, ‘where I’m despised.’ In Quebec, I knew, I’d only be asked to shoot Indians, in the hope that an Indian would shoot me. This time, the king undertook the project himself. Frustrated, he was, with Frontenac. I sent for Groseilliers, who was frustrated himself with the growth of his corn, and together, we took two ships into the Great Salt Bay, and did we not take it back from the English, lad? We did! And seized a Boston ship for good measure!”
“A Boston ship!”
“Loaded with furs, it was! Fully laden, we sailed our three ships back to France. We’d done our duty. We had reclaimed the Great Salt Bay for France and had paid for the cost of the expedition many times over with the bounty of our furs.”
“And now you’re going back,” the boy mentioned, “to reclaim the bay for England. Why? Is that love also?”
Without speaking, Radisson continued his stroll around the deck. Halfway round, he seized the lad by the arm and drew him close for a whisper. “When we got back to France with our cargo and our ships, but more importantly with the news of our conquest, that we had reclaimed the north of the continent for France, Groseilliers and me—we were rebuffed.”
“No,” the boy decried. “Again?”
“Again! We were not paid properly for our furs, for it was decided that we were indebted to France for leading the English to the bay years before, therefore we had to forfeit our proper portion. That was the year, 1682, that was the time, just two years ago, when me and Groseilliers decided, once and for all, to quit.”
They continued their walk, reaching the gangway to the cabin below.
“This time, do you think,” the boy yearned to know, “will your fortune be made?” He was less certain now of their intended success, for had not Radisson repeatedly come to the bay? Each time, despite victories, despite acquiring prizes of great value, had he not been, as he said, rebuffed?
“This time I shall seize the bay for England, for this is what my true love wishes me to do. Her father, also. Her father will see to it, if I do this thing, that I will be—at long last—compensated properly. Groseilliers could not be talked into accompanying me this time. He’s a defeated man. I’m not. I took the bay for France in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and eighty-two, and I shall take it back for England again, in this year of our Lord sixteen hundred and eighty-four. Then I shall retire to an estate in England and live out my days with my true love. As God is my witness.”
The cabin boy nodded. “That sounds nice,” he said. He clambered below. He now felt less confident that a good end to their excursion would come to pass. Why should he trust Radisson to succeed and prosper, which in turn would allow all aboard to prosper, when in truth the adventurer had never known success?
After Radisson had claimed the northern fur trade for France—in 1682, two years before he returned to proclaim the same trade for the English—during that time when the men of Ville-Marie would have again doffed their caps to him had he walked by, while keeping their daughters concealed from his eyes, a beautiful young socialite of fine character and high intelligence remained alone in her room as her mother, under the same roof, gradually passed on. She would not emerge from her chamber to be with her ailing parent, whom she loved, to either gaze upon her or utter a final word. Only when her mother had died did the young woman step from her quarters to visit the corpse. She held the dead woman’s hand, kissed her cooling lips, helped prepare the body for burial, then returned to the solitude of her room.
She did not attend the funeral.
Her mother had been one of the King’s Girls, and had married well enough to have prospered in the New World. At a time when the colony, reckless with bachelors, remained underpopulated, the king opposed the notion of depopulating France of its able, tax-bearing men who were also suitable, beyond the value of their professions, as soldiers. So he devised a compromise: he’d send women instead. New France would grow through its natural fecundity. In agreeing to the plan, the intendant of New France negotiated to receive only young women of sound character, physical stamina and admirable beauty. He expressly insisted that every girl “be entirely free from any natural blemish or anything personally repulsive,” so that the seed of the wild men of the New World might know provident, auspicious wombs in which to create a new nation.
The first group to arrive had been chosen from among the orphaned girls of Paris, as this helped alleviate the significant cost of their care to the king’s purse. While lovely, they proved too sickly for the regimen of farm life. Country girls from around Rouen were selected next, and they adapted to the conditions best. Over a span of eight years, a thousand young women, often less than sixteen years of age, made the voyage to New France, into the arms of grinning, excited young men.
The mother of Jeanne Le Ber had been among the first of these, one of the Paris orphans, and had fared well as the wife of an increasingly wealthy fur baron. Yet her constitution had never proven strong. She managed to deliver only two children, and after considerable sickliness, she died. She lived long enough to know that the daughter she’d nurtured to young womanhood, who would not visit her as she lay dying, was singular in her devotions.
As a child, Jeanne Le Ber committed one flagrantly sinful act each year. In April, from the age of five onwards, she would slip away from her home, in disobedience of her parents’ wishes, and make her way a few blocks to the old market square. The voyageurs were gathering there, the coureurs de bois, fur traders bound for Indian lands. Before embarking, the men would be left alone to drink, to laugh themselves silly and to brawl. Oh, how they loved to brawl! Tucked away behind a sleigh or concealed behind horses’ hooves, the little girl could catch as many as a dozen fights at a time. Men slammed their fists into one another’s heads and butted their heads into one another’s bellies. As their faces were smashed, they’d grunt and bleed and kick and snarl like beasts, and the wee girl would watch them topple, one by one, and collapse upon the snowy pavement and lie still, defeated, unconscious or just dazed, while the victor roared and scanned his peers for the next foolhardy challenger.
After an hour or two of such excitement, or upon being spotted, little Jeanne would scamper home, terrified and thrilled, bursting with an incomprehensible joy.
Yet these excursions were kept secret from her mother, and were not among the attributes that would distinguish her as a child who had been touched by her devotions, either in the minds of her parents, or in the hearts and understanding of the people of Ville-Marie on the island of Montreal.
Having witnessed the brawls, she would sneak away to visit her godmother at the Hôtel-Dieu, the woman after whom she’d been named, Jeanne Mance. The child had already demonstrated a keen interest in the mysteries of the divine, and her comments, at age five, at six, and through her growing years, were original and smart. As a young woman being prepared for marriage, she’d attend the social parties of her set, yet depart early to pay strict adherence to her habits of prayer, for although she was civil and bright and socially adept, she was withdrawing from the world, step by step, moment by moment.
Ribbons were ripped from the gift of a cushion, the adornment offensive to her eyes. She wept when required to wear an ornate robe in a Biblical play, ashamed that her body would ever know such accoutrement. She desired to be locked up, fully segregated from the world, and upon the death of her best friend, a nun, she renounced all attachment to the world.
Uncertain what to do with her, an abbé suggested a limited seclusion for a fixed term of five years, to be served inside her own room within her own home. The room was made especially bare, to please her, with every accoutrement or artifact removed, all colour, save for the greyness of her blankets, taken away. Eagerly, Jeanne entered her confinement, declining to emerge either for the death of her mother or to tend to the monstrous injuries her brother suffered in a battle with the Iroquois. For him, as well, she stepped from her room only after his death to help prepare the body for viewing, before she quickly withdrew.
As a recluse, she was similar to ascetics in various times and places, yet with a few distinguishing characteristics. She managed her own economic affairs, as her father had seen to her initial temporal needs and, if she was not to marry, allowed her access to her dowry. She had investments and charitable contributions to supervise. She wore a hairshirt and inflicted the scourge upon herself, yet she maintained a maid and happily ate meat. Naturally, she was chaste, yet in weaker moments, thoughts did wander to the infinite wilderness and the rapacious coureurs de bois, and she wondered about Radisson, for she had heard countless tales of his exploits at her father’s table. She felt drawn to the legend, even while her fur-baron father had railed against him, perhaps because he was simply the most notorious of the wild men and brawlers and therefore representative of them all, yet also because he was seeking his fortune, while she had renounced hers. While she sought her destiny in the austerity of a cell, he was off plunging into the austere wilderness of the north. She and Radisson were so diametrically opposed, she had imagined—they had never met, although she had seen him in a spring brawl—that they were inextricably linked.
She dreamed of Radisson and she prayed to God, and following her initial five-year experiment, Jeanne Le Ber chose to make her vows perpetual, continuing to live alone in her room in her father’s house.
That she could well imagine the universe outside her door, that she acutely envisioned the wilderness and pictured the rowdy men who roamed freely there, gave her confinement its definition, its prerequisite bitterness. In this way, she persevered inside her room.
Jeanne Le Ber had only begun to inhabit her ascetic vision.
Outside her home, fur traders still brawled every spring, and as they returned in late summer, they fought marauding Iroquois, the bands who continued to vex the settlers through the fall and plot with the English, over winter months, to find ways to further harm the French. Peace remained implausible. Would Radisson’s return and seizure of the great northern bay help? The governor, some said, had been working towards a truce with the Iroquois. Could that come to pass—peace with an enemy governed neither by remorse nor sanctity, who profited by war? Annihilation remained a prospect. Of these things, Jeanne Le Ber professed no interest, although her father sat outside her door on occasion, and through the grille created for passing food spoke of such matters. The brawling voyageurs remained rambunctious in her dreams, yet during her waking hours she maintained a diligent schedule of prayer, needlepoint and the reading of religious texts to help her limit the world. As was true among the other settlers, fear crept into her consciousness, of Iroquois removing her from her private cell and slicing off the top of her head. She possessed a peculiar premonition, that one day the Indians would come to the island of Montreal and politely wait outside her door. She assumed that the only reason they would come would be to burn her at the stake. Yet she resisted such thoughts, not wanting to indulge in sweet images of affliction that mimicked her Lord’s passion. Whenever such images beckoned her attention, she prayed all the more zealously.
Among her daily disciplines—though no one would have guessed, least of all Jeanne Le Ber herself—the quality of her needlepoint as much as the fervour of her prayer would be called upon to save the colony from extinction. Nor could she have guessed that the Indians would indeed come to Ville-Marie, and one would wait politely outside her door, but that a man, a great chief, would take no interest in furthering her suffering, but would arrive to plead only for her counsel.
The cabin boy had been forewarned: he’d be entering another world, another time. Yet no such prophecy could prepare him for the eerie dimension of the immense salt bay. The largest beasts he’d yet imagined—behemoths, great white polar bears—loped along a scraggly beach of sand, rock and pale driftwood deformed into elaborate shapes bleached white by the sun. Small whales blew plumes of vaporous air from their spouts and tagged along behind the ship, patient marauders—or, like them, curiously cautious, too. Brisk air felt just born, as if it were an entity, and the sky, in its unique pale beauty, contributed to his sense that he had not merely entered another world or time, but timelessness, a place where worlds and all their unjust conceits were vanquished.
Upon Radisson’s signal, longboats were lowered while the Happy Return maintained way on. Soldiers were dispatched into the stunted woods. As the ship eased into the harbour of Port Nelson and dropped anchor, Radisson, standing straight up like an admiral, was rowed ashore. He demanded the surrender of the community. Initially, the French traders chuckled, for they were well armed and sufficiently bored that they’d welcome a fight, but once their eyes had been directed to the surrounding woods, and it dawned on them that Radisson had arrived not merely with merchant sailors but with English soldiers, too, their capitulation was complete. Port Nelson was English again. Given its name, that seemed fitting.
On he sailed to the Hayes River, and there, to his surprise, he encountered his nephew, Médard Chouart, Des Gros’s boy. By early dawn, Radisson had persuaded him, and his friends the Assiniboines, to support England. The territory, then, was restored to the care of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he emptied the French storehouses there and loaded a season’s furs into the hold of his ship. The Happy Return would be making another happy return, this one to England and, he presumed, to his long-overdue grand reward.
“Tell us a story, Radisson,” the cabin boy pleaded. Their new recruits, French and Assiniboine, were seated around the campfire, enjoying the shank of a deer.
“What story do you want to hear?” he asked the lad back.
“A new one,” the boy suggested.
The voyageur thought a moment. With Indian and French and English ears attentive, he had best make certain that he offended none in this company.
“Let me tell you true tales about The Rat,” he told them. “Chief Kondiaronk, of the Huron. For when the story of this land is put to rest, mark the words you hear tonight. The Rat will be one Indian who will have had his say. For he is the wisest of the Indian chiefs, more clever than the French guv’ners. He has more wit in his smallest toe than can be found in the courts of either king, English or French.”
The Assiniboines, in particular, were enjoying this account, and nodded, and rocked. Everyone around the campfire had heard of Kondiaronk, but none, save Radisson, had met him.
“Kondiaronk is a sage man, but I know him to be a cruel man also when he needs to be. A determined man. Do you see this scar here?” In the firelight, Radisson opened his shirt and displayed the scar, in the shape of an X, across the centre of his chest. When all had had a good look, he said, “Kondiaronk, The Rat, gave me this. As a warning. For I had cheated him. I had taken two hundred and twenty pelts and told him only two hundred. So he marked my chest with his knife, to show me where he will cut out my heart if I try cheating him again. That, of course, will not happen. For he is too wise a chief, too clever a man, too cruel a warrior, for me to cross him twice.
“This, then,” Radisson declared, and poked at the fire with a stick, sending sparks into the night sky as though summoning the spirit of the man of whom he spoke to attend these proceedings, although the man was still very much alive, “is the story of The Rat.”
The boy leaned in, his attention rapt, yet no more so than the others.
The French needed allies. The English hemmed them in from every side, and their colonies were growing with rampant immigration, while the French had to grow their community primarily, and diligently, through childbirth. The Iroquois were hideous in their attacks, and the Huron, so often defeated, were reluctant to continue on the French side. Or so The Rat, Chief Kondiaronk, led the governor of New France, the Marquis de Denonville, to believe.
“If we are eliminated,” the governor pressed him, “if we either abandon this land or perish with Iroquois tomahawks planted in our skulls—”
“A fortunate way to die,” the Huron chief demurred.
“Excuse me?”
“A skull, split by a tomahawk. I have seen many deaths, and this is the best way to die at the hands of the Iroquois. If your people are to die, may they go that way.”
The marquis was momentarily taken aback. He had heard that the chief had a knack for repartee, that he should expect both wit and subterfuge from the man. “It’s not a picture I care to contemplate,” he said.
“You prefer to burn, do you, the little fire at your feet? Slowly, the fire climbs up your calves to your knees, to your thighs, higher. Scorching, blackening. You will cry out—any Frenchman would—as the hot flames lick your balls. That is when even the strongest man who is burning, even a Jesuit priest, pleads for a tomahawk—” Making a hatchet with his fingers, the chief in his raiment used it to divide his skull.
“Quite,” Denonville reluctantly concurred.
Kondiaronk wore feathers in his hair and across a highly embroidered breastplate. His moose hide was fashionable, with decorative beads and a leather fringe, right down to his elaborate moccasins, which he’d never wear except to meet the governor of New France, to impress him with his haberdashery. The Rat had been a student of the Jesuit, Daniel Greysolon Dulhut, who had set out in the middle portion of the century on a clandestine mission to gather Indian tribes westward from the Great Lakes, the Saulteurs and the Sioux in particular, into an alliance against the English. With these tribes on the side of the French, the groundwork would be prepared to allow the remainder of the continent, south to Louisiana and west to the sea, to become French. Yet, for the allegiance of the tribes to be meaningful, they had first to make peace with one another. Dulhut succeeded eventually, coming to an agreement in the place that would later bear a scrambled approximation of his name, Duluth, in the land called Minnesota. As a young man in his company, being persuaded by some arguments and taking issue with others, Kondiaronk learned about politics and negotiations, to the point where he would one day supersede his mentor. From Dulhut, Kondiaronk had learned to comprehend—and more fully imagine—the potential power of peace.
“Scalped alive, that’s another way to go,” The Rat mentioned to the squeamish governor.
“But if we, Chief, are treated to such horrible acts, then what will become of the Huron, after we are gone?”
Kondiaronk knew the answer to that question. He lifted one side of his derrière and pointed to the protuberance. “Our asses,” the chief declared, “will look like French heads after they’ve been scalped.”
The marquis chose not to reflect upon that outcome. Why did The Rat have to continually make reference to gruesome details? “Then surely, Kondiaronk, we are agreed. The French and the Huron must fight together, side by side, in our mutual defence against the Iroquois.” Except for the bloodiness of certain images, the discussion, Denonville believed, was going well.
“Maybe,” Kondiaronk said.
“Maybe?” The marquis expressed dismay.
“Maybe means perhaps. The French and their English brothers have too many words. Why do you have two words to mean the same thing?”
“Why do you say maybe?” Denonville demanded to know, not interested in the Indian’s perpetual interest in semantics.
“Rather than perhaps?” the chief asked him.
“No! Why do you say that only maybe, only perhaps, will the Huron stand side by side with their French brothers?”
“Ah,” the chief said, and helped himself to a grape from the plate before them. These foods the French enjoyed, that arrived from time to time on ships, were a marvel on the tongue, well worth the drudgery of these meetings. “It’s simple. I need what you call, in your language, guarantees.”
“Such as?”
“The French must fight,” Kondiaronk insisted. He made a fist and flexed it before the governor, to indicate that the French must not only fight, but that they must fight hard.
Denonville objected to the implication. “We fight!” he claimed.
“You fight when you are attacked,” the Huron pointed out to him. He was a strong man with broad shoulders and a stout chest, although shorter than most men of his tribe. In his middle years, he’d grown a paunch he was fond of patting while he ate. “When you have no choice, when it’s fight or die, you fight. Usually, you French do both. You fight, then you die.”
“So what’s the problem? We fight!”
“You do not attack! You rely upon the Huron to attack the Iroquois on their land. The French must also attack. If not, then the Huron, too, we will only wait to be attacked, seeking the enemy no more. Perhaps, maybe, perhaps, maybe, we will run and hide. To protect our asses, you understand.”
Now the discussion was not going so well for the governor. He needed to create the semblance of a broad front and a redoubtable force, for he had engaged the Iroquois in secret talks about peace—secret from his visitor, as well—and for those negotiations to succeed, he needed to appear strong. On his part, Kondiaronk needed only one thing: a commitment from the governor to make no separate peace with the Iroquois, but to fight them at every opportunity. Peace between the Iroquois and the French would allow the Iroquois to concentrate on fighting the Huron, and his people, he knew, who had already sustained grievous losses, would be annihilated in any such war.
“If you do this, what I suggest, strike a clever blow against the Iroquois, then we French will also attack. But I need to witness this commitment from you, Chief Kondiaronk, before we proceed.”
The agreement pleased both men, and Kondiaronk commenced the long trek back to his lands around the Michigan lake, dreaming strategies of war.
On the way home, he stopped at the French fort that guarded the great river where it flowed out from Lake Ontario. He was welcomed there, as the commandant always enjoyed his company, more than that of any Indian. Over a meal, without being aware of the secrecy that was meant to govern certain information he’d received, the commandant spoke freely to Kondiaronk.
“How did you find the marquis, Chief? Is he well?”
“I left him in good spirits.”
The commandant sipped wine. “Wonderful! He’s talking to so many Indians these days, it’s good news that you got him off to a happy start.”
“Yes, yes. Talking to Indians, many Indians. Ah, who’s next, did he say?”
“The Iroquois, I suppose.”
“That’s right, I remember that now. Who exactly—have you heard? I hope it’s not Conaymasteeyahgah. He’ll make the governor irritable. Or Klow, who will only put a knot in his bowels—he does that every time, to everyone he meets.”
Smacking his tongue around his lips to clean them up, the commandant leaned forward to the centre of the table, ripped the last leg off the roasted turkey and blithely waved it in the air. “Whomever they chose to be their ambassadors, they will go. Whatever team they choose to negotiate the peace.”
“Yes, the peace between the French and the Iroquois.” Kondiaronk spoke as though this was old news to him, while a knot in his own belly began to fester.
“Precipitous, don’t you think?” The commandant was always amused that he could use a word like that in front of Kondiaronk and the chief wouldn’t blink, wouldn’t indicate any lack of comprehension. He was a noble chief, that much was understood by the French and Huron both, and even by most Iroquois and English. Vicious, too, rumours told. They said of Kondiaronk—and the commandant had heard the governor himself say it—that he made his moves in the present in order to influence the future, and no one possessed clearer insight into the future than The Rat. “I don’t know who they’ll send. Perhaps the sachem, from their ruling council. Probably not chiefs for a first meeting. The Iroquois will be suspicious of a trap, don’t you think? It is all great news. Peace!”
The commandant reached for his goblet.
“This is good, this is good.” Already defining his next move to counter the white man’s never-ending treachery, Kondiaronk feigned passive agreement. After the meal, he headed back the way he’d just come, departing in the dark so the French would not notice his reversal of direction. Following several days of hard paddling, in the Adirondack Mountains well south of Montreal, he ambushed the Iroquois peace delegates, killing a couple and capturing the remainder.
His warriors had been under strict instructions to take most delegates alive and to scalp none.
By the side of the river, the Huron made camp and cooked rabbit from their stores. Kondiaronk threw scraps at the feet of his captives, and slowly, the men bound at their ankles consented to eat also.
“I’m sorry about this,” Kondiaronk told them. “It’s the French. They made me do it. I had to promise I’d come down here and attack you.”
“They did not,” the man who would speak for the group protested.
“Why else would I be here, a Huron from Michilimackinac? The governor sent me to massacre you, to roast you over a slow fire. ‘Cut off their balls and feed them to the bullfrogs,’ he said. ‘When I hear the frogs croaking, I want to know that dead Iroquois are moaning in their bellies.’ So that’s what I will do. I will feed your manhood to the frogs. I want to remain on good terms with the governor.”
“We were on our way to see the French governor!” an Iroquois maintained.
Another was equally adamant. “He asked us to go there, to talk about a peace! Does the governor send Huron to kill us when he wants a peace?”
Kondiaronk expressed his astonishment. “A peace? He asked you to come to him to talk peace, then sends me down to feed you to the bullfrogs along the way? What black deed is this? My brothers! I’m sorry. There has been a terrible mistake. How can I be a part of this treachery? Such black and wicked deeds! The white man! Who can understand his animal ways? He is a wolverine on two legs! I shall never be happy, my brothers, until the five tribes of the Iroquois avenge this day! Huron! Cut loose our Iroquois brothers!”
The captives were freed, and Kondiaronk gave them gifts of beads and rabbit meat and delectable deer for the inconvenience and tragedy of the unwarranted attack. He confessed his shame to them and repeated his horror at having been used in such a repulsive scheme. “Ah,” he cautioned, just before the Iroquois were about to embark northward again in their canoes, “I do have a slain warrior.”
No Iroquois could recollect firing a shot. They’d been outnumbered and taken by surprise in the open, and in that circumstance had been quick to surrender. That any of their own had died had been unfortunate, as there had been no need for the Huron to kill them in order to win the fight. That an attacker had died remained inexplicable, although perhaps a shot had been fired by an Iroquois who was now dead. The dead Huron lay visible, lying at a distance through the trees upon a mound, his body awaiting disposal.
As was the practice, an Iroquois captive would take the place of the dead Huron and remain behind with the invading tribe. Less that one man and their dead, the Iroquois continued on, burdened now by the gifts they’d received.
Once they had disappeared behind a bend downstream, and the lone Iroquois captive was distracted by his slave duties, five Huron climbed the hillock to bury their dead brother. Six men returned from the task. The party then returned to their territory and to the fort at Michilimackinac, by Lake Michigan, where Kondiaronk approached the commandant upon arriving.
“What do we have here?” the Frenchman inquired, for he did not normally see one Indian bound in the company of others.
“Iroquois spy,” Kondiaronk bristled, and spat.
“Is that right?” the commandant inquired of the prisoner.
“I am not spy,” the Iroquois insisted. “I came to negotiate peace with the French governor.”
The Rat shook his head solemnly. “He’s crazy,” he said. “He’s a madman. What should I do with him, Commandant? I can’t keep him—he’s too crazy.”
The military man eyed the Iroquois up and down. He was not from a tribe that came into his area very often, although he was not the first Iroquois prisoner that Kondiaronk had brought to him. He looked like a formidable warrior, taller and more muscular than the majority of Huron men. The Iroquois pleaded again that he had come to talk peace with the governor, which confirmed that he was either a spy or crazy.
“Shoot him,” the commandant decided.
“You shoot him,” Kondiaronk said. “We Indians, you know, we prefer to roast our prisoners alive.”
The commandant nodded, and consented to the arrangement.
The Rat visited him again that night.
“You shot my prisoner,” he pointed out to him.
“You wanted me to.”
“We have a custom.”
“What custom?” He had often negotiated with Kondiaronk, and had learned long ago that he was unlikely to win any advantage over him. He considered himself fortunate if he managed to keep his uniform on.
“You shot my prisoner. You have to give me one back in exchange.”
“But you wanted me to deal with him, Kondiaronk. Not only that, you brought me the other prisoners in the first place! They were your prisoners!”
The Rat shrugged. “I’m a poor Indian. I could not afford to feed them. But now you must give me one back.”
“Why must I?”
“It’s the custom. It’s the price you pay for shooting prisoners.”
The commandant remained frustrated. He sensed that Kondiaronk was up to something, but he could not comprehend what. “How will you feed him now if you couldn’t feed him before?”
“I won’t. I’ll just send him home.”
“What’s the good of that?”
“It’s the custom.” The chief shrugged.
“Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What are you up to, Kondiaronk? They don’t call you The Rat for nothing!”
“They call me The Rat because I draw a rat to sign my name. But they don’t call you a wise commandant for nothing, either.”
The officer thought a moment, trying to imagine how this might hurt him in any unforeseen way. Soon defeated by the train of thought, he nodded. “Go ahead. Take whatever prisoner you want. Just don’t—”
Kondiaronk waited politely, then asked his question. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t burn him alive. Or slice his scalp off. Or eat him, or anything vile.”
Enjoying a good laugh, The Rat tapped the Frenchman on the shoulder. “I will send him home. That’s all. You will see.”
“Yes, yes, I know. It’s the custom.”
“It’s the custom.”
Kondiaronk did send him home. He spoke to the man first, who was trembling, wishing that he had been left in the custody of the French and not in the hands of the only Huron the Iroquois feared.
“What did you see here today?” The Rat asked him.
“You returned.”
“What else?”
“The French. They shot an Iroquois.”
“One of your brothers. Go home. Tell your people this. Tell them what your eyes have seen. That the French shoot Iroquois while they talk of peace.”
He made it sound as though he was trying to frighten the prisoner, as if his message would send fear through the Iroquois confederacy. The Indian who was freed mocked him for this when he told his brothers the sad tale of the Iroquois warrior shot by the French. His brothers raised their knives and whooped, and in the firelight each man could see the warring spirit in his brothers’ eyes. The French and the Huron would discover that the Iroquois would not be intimidated. And the first lesson would be inflicted upon those who had talked of peace: the French.
August 5, 1689.
Rain had fallen with hard fury through the night, a racket in the leaves, as noisy as a waterfall when it turned to hail and beat upon the settlers’ wooden roofs. Thunder boomed low over the hills and rumbled across the plateau, and the farming people at Lachine, on the island of Montreal, slept fitfully as lightning lit up the skies. Soldiers in the three forts by Lachine were driven inside, and they would not budge to go out in such a torrent. Their commanding officers were not around to tell them otherwise, having gone into Montreal to visit Governor Denonville, who was down from Quebec. Under the cover of darkness, as the lightning moved on, under the fury of rain, under the bedlam of brisk wind that chased all sound away from the forts, Iroquois landed by the riverside and beached their canoes.
They laboured diligently and in silence.
Fifteen hundred warriors split up and surrounded each settler’s home.
They waited in the rain.
At dawn, upon a signal, they sounded a fierce, calamitous war whoop.
Soldiers remained asleep, or kept watch from their turrets, hearing nothing but the storming wind and rain.
The attack was perfectly executed. The Iroquois burst into homes and bludgeoned the skulls of the settlers in their sleep. In cabins that had been barricaded, the French fought back, only to have the dwellings set ablaze. They ran out from the fires to be slaughtered. Each home had to pitch its own battle. No farmer could come to the aid of another. In a short time, the community was overrun, with all citizens either dead or captive.
The Indians took their time, relishing the victory. Stakes were implanted in the earth, and men and women strapped to them. Small fires were stoked at their feet. Spits over bonfires were created and children roasted. Pregnant women were brought forth to have the fetuses ripped from their wombs. Their dying eyes watched their unborn children being cooked and consumed. The storm continued unabated, suffocating their screams, their outcry before God.
Once word of the attack reached him, Denonville ordered the Marquis de Vaudreuil, who was in charge of the Montreal garrison, to take no chances in quelling the enemy. The integrity of the garrison was more important than revenge. The marquis failed to apply his men to the task of driving off the Iroquois. Soldiers remained hunkered down in their forts while the invaders continued to maraud the island for two more months, pillaging, murdering and taking prisoners. They harvested the crops for themselves and burned seed and winter stores, and as they departed in October they released ninety fierce yells to proclaim that they were taking ninety prisoners home with them, to put to work, then mutilate at their leisure.
They paddled past the forts. Their chief shouted out before each one, “You deceived us! Now we have deceived you!”
In Ville-Marie, the citizens fell to another winter of despair.
In Michigan, the chief who had been named The Rat preached on Sunday mornings, for through his admiration for the Jesuits, and in particular Dulhut, he had come to embrace Christianity. When he spoke in church, his words were received with gravity and thoughtfulness. Learning of the massacre, he grieved for the lives lost, yet also welcomed the safety this would mean for his own community. If the French wanted peace as he wanted peace, he deliberated during the winter months, they would have to learn how to make that peace. Clearly, they did not know how to do it on their own. He, Kondiaronk, the chief of the Huron at Michilimackinac, who signed his name by drawing a rat—he would be the one to teach them.
For there could not be a peace, he preached, if one tribe was left vulnerable to destruction. The peace that was required must exist in a way that all tribes, and the French, and the English in New York and Boston, might prosper. He, Kondiaronk, The Rat, contemplated these things and talked of what he dared to imagine the long winter through, and in the spring he hoed the soil he believed might assist the seed of his vision to finally take root.
On the feast day of Our Lady of the Snows, August 5, 1695, François Dollier de Casson, a mountain of a man and the superior of the Sulpicians in Montreal, concluded the vespers’ chants in his parish church. With magisterial élan, he departed down the centre aisle. Clergy fell in behind him. Ville-Marie’s administrative officials stepped in behind them, followed by the great spiritual women of the colony, led by Marguerite Bourgeoys and a gathering of nuns from the Congregation of Notre Dame. Representatives of the military came next, marching, then citizens prominent in the fur trade and other mercantile affairs, and finally settlers noted for their devotions. The procession moved outside into the warm night and continued to grow as ordinary folk also traipsed down the centre of Notre Dame Street, bound for the home of the fur baron Jacques Le Ber.
Upon arriving, Dollier de Casson knocked upon the door.
His knock was severe, hard, final, like a judge’s gavel. He stood back from the door and waited with an expression that was formally grave. He was a unique man among the Sulpicians, one the Indians especially admired for his exceptional size and strength. He had entered the priesthood after a distinguished career in the military, and loved to tell the story of spotting an enemy igniting the wick of a cannon at short range. The cannonball had been aimed precisely at his head, yet, bound by a French officer’s code, he was forbidden to duck. As the wick burned down, Dollier took out his handkerchief and let it drop. As the cannon roared, he was bending over to pick it up. He heard the ball whoosh above him. Then he straightened himself up and carried on the fight.
Such stories were accepted due to the native integrity of the man, as well as to the manner in which he had equipped himself, since his arrival in France, in battle against the Iroquois. A story was told of him at prayer one evening, deep in his beloved forests, which he much preferred to the seminary. A young Indian youth tormented him with obscene gestures. The youth grew too bold, coming too close, and Dollier, still on his knees, dropped him with a single stupendous punch. While the young man moaned and tried to regain his senses, stopping up the blood from his nose, the priest carried on praying.
He was a man who had built the first modest church of Notre Dame, and the Sulpician Seminary, and he had half-dug the Lachine Canal before his superiors in Paris, mindful of the cost, ordered the project halted. For all his physical might and energy, he was a devout man and a careful chronicler of the history of the community, recording stories from out of the mouths of Jeanne Mance and others among the first settlers.
So as he knocked upon the door of Jacques Le Ber, he did so with authority, and with deep appreciation of the occasion.
The merchant emerged. He was sixty-one years old, an ancient age for their community. The people called him Abraham, as a tribute to his years but also in deference to this ceremony, for would he not be leading his daughter to become a victim of sacrifice?
Jeanne Le Ber stepped out from the house behind him. Thirty-three years old, she wore a long, grey woollen gown cinched by a black belt. With her father at her side, she joined the procession, taking her place behind only Dollier de Casson, and the great devout tribe walked back through the streets the way they had come, returning to the chapel.
Where they prayed.
Jacques Le Ber was overcome, his anguish too grave for him to endure any more, and he departed the service before its conclusion. An Abraham, then, who could not bring his sword down upon the neck of his only surviving child. He had become one of the wealthiest fur barons, a man who had broken the rules by not waiting for the return of the coureurs in Montreal, but by travelling farther and farther west to intercept them, to garner the best pelts. While he was respected as a pious man, his daughter’s passion extended far beyond mere piety and he could not sustain himself through to the ceremony’s conclusion. The words that broke his endurance were spoken by his last remaining child’s spiritual advisor, who declared, “You are dead. You are enshrouded in your solitude as in a tomb. The dead do not speak, nor are they spoken to.”
Following the prayers and dedication, Dollier led Jeanne Le Ber to her new home. According to her precise plans, a cell, composed of three rooms, one above the other, had been constructed behind the altar at the Convent of Notre Dame. Jeanne Le Ber had financed the project through her own impressive dowry, and had donated a large sum to the convent as well and would continue to pay an annual tribute. She had used her influence to have the dwelling built to her exact specifications, and had managed to replicate the chapel at Loretto in Italy, which legend held to be the actual home of the Virgin Mary, transported there by a company of angels. Here, she would be locked inside for the remainder of her life, speaking to rare visitors only through a grille, addressing the convent sisters through it from time to time as though hers was a voice from the grave. She’d take her meals upon the floor, sleep upon a straw mat that would harden over time to the composition of rock and which she would not allow to be replaced, and she’d emerge only after dusk, once the chapel door had been locked, to prostrate herself before the cross.
When not at prayer or reading religious books, Jeanne Le Ber would busy herself with needlepoint, making sacerdotal vestments for the churches in the vicinity. Her silk embroidery, pleasing in design, the details eminent and lovingly rendered, worked against the circumference of her drab solitude and her denial of earthly comfort, giving expression to her love of God. She still kept her maid. Indeed, her contract with the convent demanded a substitute whenever her own lady-in-waiting was absent. While she had a private garden outside her lower door, she would not use it, and many would whisper that she never glanced out a window again. As her spiritual advisor had informed her, “Even the ascetics of old would permit themselves a walk in the woods, to commune with God.” But not Jeanne Le Ber.
… and then, at my Lord’s bidding, the door is shut, and I am at last more fully alone. No longer in my father’s house, but in my cell, a final seclusion from which there can be no release but death, no expectation of life or variance or possibility. I lie prone upon the floor, alone. Dead, yet not dead. Still abject, for my joy surrounds me and overtakes me, and my aloneness—this, too, is a blessing. My very solitude is a pleasure I must defeat, for I must overcome even the slightest attachment to this world. If I am pleased by my suffering, then my suffering becomes my joy and what is real becomes illusion, and I am defeated. All becomes naught. For I know nothing of the joy of death, only its replication, and I must not be pleased with the artifice. The voyageurs would beat one another before they embarked into the wilderness to prepare themselves for the struggles and the reality of that realm. So must I be dead, but to truly suffer while alive, I must acknowledge that I am not dead, nor can I strain for the glory of death before its time, for I must allow my suffering to linger, yet draw no sweetness from the lingering. I must permit even my glorious solitude intermittently to be broken. For I am dead, but not dead. That is how my life is broken. That is how I will truly suffer for my Lord.
Three historic visits to the little grille through which she spoke gave evidence of her life and spiritual responsibility. The first startled her, yet she was prepared for the task by her days as a small child watching the voyageurs punch one another senseless. When she was told that the Huron chief Kondiaronk had requested an audience with Sister Jeanne Le Ber, the mother superior assumed that she would decline, yet the recluse promptly agreed, for she believed that the meeting had been ordained by God. Wobbly on his feet, accompanied to the Congregation of Notre Dame by sixteen Huron warriors, the chief, in his finery and elegant countenance, was guided to the rear of the chapel alone. He sat on the small stool before the scant opening and adjusted his attire, waiting. He had been informed that the sister would respond to him only when her prayers had properly concluded, that he was not to knock or cough to announce his presence. Yet he was troubled, for a cough had indeed seized his diaphragm, and to suppress it took immense will. Then the port was slid away, and while he could not see her, he was aware of the breathing of Jeanne Le Ber, then he heard her voice, distinct and low, in frail greeting. Rather than say hello, he released his pent-up cough, and the frail woman returned one of her own. The Indian’s own breathing proved difficult, and he often had to interrupt himself to cough again, to which Jeanne Le Ber would cough in return, for both were feeling unwell.
“Do you know who I am?” The Rat asked the ascetic.
“I have heard of you. Yet not for some time. News from the outside rarely extends to me. I remember that you are called The Rat. I remember also that you were a Christian. Are you still?”
“I am, Sister.” Part of her contract called for her to be admitted to the Order of the Congregation of Notre Dame, and referred to as Sister, although she would never be obliged to participate in the life of the convent. Then the chief surprised her by asking, “Are you?”
“Has my solitude claimed my spirit, you’re asking? Chief Kondiaronk, my spirit is ever the more fervently committed to the Blessed Sacrement.”
“And are you comfortable in there, are you happy, are you content?”
“I must dissuade you from this discourse. My happiness, my contentment, my comforts, are of no interest to me and should be of no concern to anyone. I will permit no such indulgence. Now, if you have come seeking help for yourself, or for your people, then that is a matter we might discuss.”
He had wanted to speak to this saintly creature, this prisoner of God, who had removed her beauty from the world of men and her intelligence from the affairs of her colony to devote herself to life’s mysteries and to the command of God. What did she learn from the experience, or was learning in itself an excitement to the senses she had vowed to decline? He had been close to shamans who had delivered themselves to personal cleansing in the forests and a solitude of the spirit, yet they would return and dwell among their people. This refusal to walk under the sky, to be brightened by the sun, this repudiation of human contact, was a fanaticism that he wanted to witness before he died. “There is one thing,” The Rat confided.
He told her then of his predicament. Of how he had been working to create a peace among all the Indian tribes, that one thousand and three hundred peace delegates had arrived to represent them. From Wisconsin to the west, and Acadia to the east, the Indians had come, an occasion that was grand and festive. The Montagnais and Assiniboine from the north were there, as were the Sioux, Cree, Saulteurs and his own Huron nation from the west. Indians had arrived even from Florida. The Iroquois had also paddled to the meeting.
“The Iroquois are here, in Ville-Marie, to make peace?” She had difficulty suffocating her enthusiasm, for she forbade herself such interests in any form.
“Yes, the Iroquois are here. If you heard guns firing in recent weeks, they were fired to honour the arrival of delegates. We have a rather new governor in New France, Louis-Hector de Callières. He’s been here for a couple of years now. A nice man. Together, with great difficulty, we have fabricated this peace. The Indians agree that we shall never again war with one another. We agree also that if the English and the French make war upon one another, all the Indian tribes shall remain neutral. This will allow the French to control the lands to the west and down the Mississippi. The English will lose their allies, and therefore their power. But they will not be attacked, either—not by the French, who do not have enough warriors. The only difficulty may be that the English have the power to attack the French on their own. This may yet occur, and it disturbs me, Sister.”
News of the outside world was not unwelcome. She had to moderate the pleasure this conversation had provided, and terminate it quickly. Still, she needed to know if she could be of service. “Is there something, Chief Kondiaronk, that I may do for you, under the eyes of God?”
The Rat leaned in more closely to the grille. “Sister, part of the agreement requires that each tribe bring its prisoners and its slaves here to the island of Montreal. Here, they will be returned to their tribes, or, if they are French, to the French. If they are English, we will send them home.”
The scratchy, coughing voice behind the grille praised him. “You have created a wonderful peace.”
“Yet there is a problem. The Iroquois have arrived, and they have not brought their slaves with them, nor have they brought any prisoners. We know they have more than anyone. What shall I do, Sister? I need to be guided on this matter by one so close to God as you.”
Jeanne Le Ber pondered the problem awhile. “In this life, I hope that I am the furthest soul from God in all the world. To be close to God is to know His comfort, and I wish no such relief in this life, lest that gift separate me from the Blessed Sacrament.”
“I am sorry for my words, Sister,” The Rat told her.
“The Iroquois,” Jeanne Le Ber continued, “accept that they are the most hated ones. They have given you a reason to hate them more. If you are to break the peace, then break the peace over this issue, Chief Kondiaronk. If you are not to break the peace, then ignore this matter, and the Iroquois will then know that you do not intend to break the peace. For if you do not do it when they give you a reason, they know that you will not do it when they give you none. Now, I must retire. The time has come to recite my prayers.”
Kondiaronk thanked her, but the grille plate had already slid shut.
The Rat did as Jeanne Le Ber suggested. He oversaw the transfer of prisoners, including Iroquois prisoners back to the Iroquois, and made no mention to them that their own account was in deficit. Many of the other tribes saw this as a humiliation directed at Kondiaronk, and they wondered how he might respond. If the peace were broken here, each man knew, it would never be regained.
His cough had progressed to a fever, and he felt too weak to stand when the time came for him to address the sacred gathering. Thirteen hundred warriors, delegates from all the tribes, and the French governor and the governors of the largest French towns, were waiting, but he could not stand. The French brought him a stool. He did not have the strength to sit upon it, and swayed in his fever. Out of the home of a merchant, a large and imposing armchair was brought to him, a rich man’s extravagance, and this satisfied his posture, his dizziness and his weakened knees. All looked upon the Huron chief in the sumptuous chair and waited for him to speak. Still, his voice was weak, his throat parched. Kondiaronk was offered wine. He stated a preference for the syrup of the maidenhair fern. After considerable delay, this was brought to him, and at last The Rat began to speak.
Though his voice was scarcely audible, so anxious was everyone to hear his words that the silence of the gathering was complete. Everyone leaned in to hear. Would Kondiaronk bring peace or war?
Humbly, yet comprehensively, he described the steps that he had undertaken to bring a lasting peace to the Indian nations. He counselled them on the necessity of peace, and reiterated the prosperity and benefits that it might bring. Then, still in his big armchair, he turned toward Governor Callières. “Act,” he told him, “in a manner that no man can accuse you of betraying the trust we place in you today.”
At that, his voice failed. He was done. The great throng of French and Indians applauded and whooped. Indians beat their drums. He was carried, still in the armchair, to the Hôtel-Dieu. Early the next morning, having offered his prayers to God and received the sacraments, Kondiaronk died.
The French carried his body from the Hôtel-Dieu to his tepee, where they laid him upon beaver skins. His gun and his sword were placed by his side, and a kettle, for his use in the spirit world. Sixty Iroquois moved in solemn procession towards him, and they, his most vicious enemies in life, paid tribute to him in death. Their chief declared the day to be devoted to grieving, and the Iroquois themselves were the ones who covered the body in sorrow and in dignity.
Not since the procession of Jeanne Le Ber to her chapel had Ville-Marie seen one that matched The Rat’s funeral. Sixty military men led the entourage, followed by sixteen Huron warriors, four abreast. Wearing beaver skins, the natives had painted their faces black in mourning, and they held their guns with the barrels pointed down. The clergy followed in their black robes, genuflecting and carrying their Bibles. Six war chiefs from six different tribes bore the body. The corpse was covered in flowers, and upon his stomach The Rat held a plumed hat, a gorget over his throat, and, at his side, a sword. His brothers and children followed immediately behind the body, then the remaining chiefs of the tribes and the leaders of the tribal councils. Then came the wife of the intendant of New France, the governor of Montreal, and the governor of New France, who had worked so closely with him to create the peace. Like a Moses of old, Kondiaronk had been allowed to see the paradise of his vision, but he would not be permitted to inhabit the realm. As his body was buried in the crypt at Notre Dame, muskets—military and Indian—fired in his honour.
In her cell, Jeanne Le Ber permitted herself to smile at the sound of the guns. The Iroquois wars were over. Never again would her people fear being scalped overnight or live with the horror of knowing that their children might be roasted or that they themselves might be slowly burned from the feet up. Peace with the Iroquois had depended upon the acumen of the governor and the vision of a far-flung Huron chief who lived all the way in Michilimackinac, and she was glad that in his final days they had had a chance to speak. God had arranged that meeting, a knowledge that strengthened her faith. Even from her cell, she might be of use to others.
The second call upon Jeanne Le Ber came in 1711, a decade after the peace with the Iroquois had been signed and Kondiaronk had died. The English, finally realizing that the continent was becoming French, that the Iroquois no longer imposed their will on the people to the north or moved to restrict their movements or commerce, embarked upon a full-scale attack to rout the French once and for all and seize the entire colony for England. They moved an army overland toward Montreal and sent a great fleet up the St. Lawrence to Quebec. The people heard the dire reports and knew that their military was ill prepared. Once again, the colony lay in mortal peril, with scant hope of salvation.
Jeanne Le Ber was told of these perilous circumstances and was exhorted to intercede. To the dismay of the clergy, she turned to her needlepoint.
Normally, she slept only briefly, rising at 4 A.M. between Easter and All Saint’s Day, and at four-thirty through the darker, cold months. Now she did not sleep, but embroidered a banner. On one side, she created an exquisite image of the Virgin Mary, and on the other she inscribed the words, “She is as terrible as an army in battle array. She will help us to vanquish our enemies.”
When she was done, she called for the abbé to visit her again.
The banner was blessed by the Abbé de Belmont, although he feared it might be too little, too late. But that night, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a storm ransacked the English fleet. Ships were damaged, a few floundered on rocks, others lost their bearings, and every ship lost contact with the other. One by one, the surviving vessels limped back to Boston. As the commanders in the field were informed of the disaster, their own interest in the expedition quickly faded, and after days of deliberations, the army returned home as well. Once again, Montreal had been spared. This time, Jeanne Le Ber did not indulge herself in a smile, but prostrated herself before the altar of the chapel at night, and pleaded forgiveness for her ongoing involvement in temporal affairs.
She would live three more years, and near the end of her days she received another visit from the Abbé de Belmont. He asked her if she had benefited well and been sustained by her life of devotion. She told him she had received sweetness and tranquility from her life of prayer when she had been at home in her father’s house. Since entering her cell, she had experienced no such blessings, but had given herself to the gloom and despair of her days, receiving no divine guidance or consolation, no satisfaction or delight. Yet she persevered, and as she lay dying, she dispatched her nurse to the chapel so that she would be more alone, and she had the curtains drawn to complete the coming shroud of death. At nine o’clock in the morning, on the third day of October, at the age of fifty-three, after twenty years in her crypt, Jeanne Le Ber stepped into the death she had so long cherished, and this time it proved both real and final.
The gentleman who called in 1710 was dressed smartly, if not as a man of royalty, then from a class that had not crossed Radisson’s door in many years. He had heard the man give his name—perhaps it had rung a bell, perhaps not—to be sure, his recollections were not what they had once been. “You are, sir, by name?” he asked, perhaps for the fifth time, but he could not be confident of the number of repetitions either.
“Charles Smythe Hamilton, sir,” the man replied, smiling, willing to indulge the feeble man his proclivities. “I am waiting for you to recognize me, sir. Perhaps that will be best. If you come to understand that you know me, I think it will be the preferred course for our discussions.”
“You confuse me, sir. You are who, did you say, by name?”
Radisson received his visitor from his bed. When the knock had come upon the door, he had barked out the command to enter, twice, three times, before he heard the squeaky hinges on the door respond and heard the announcement of boots upon the floor. A man’s. He had shouted out again, so that the visitor would know which way to turn, and soon enough, the smartly attired gentleman in a waistcoat with cummerbund, a tall hat held under one arm, stood to face him squarely in the doorway. If this was Death, he possessed accoutrements superior to those Radisson had expected. If he were the devil, his kingdom could not be so bad.
Seated on a wooden chair he’d pulled up alongside the bed, Charles Smythe Hamilton took hold of the old man’s hand, a gesture that startled the invalid for its tenderness and sympathy. Although he flinched briefly, he did not pull back his grip, permitting his palm to rest in the visitor’s. In a moment, he mustered a measure of strength to exert a responsive pressure through his fingers.
“You are who, sir, by name?” he asked again. He rocked his head from side to side. “It’s no use testing my memory, for it has failed me. You say I know you, sir, but my recollections are feeble. From where do I know you?”
“Do you remember the Happy Return? A stout ship, you called her.”
Radisson nodded. He gestured for a drink of water, and his guest passed him the ladle. “Surely,” he recalled. “A stout ship. We took back Hudson’s Bay with her. For the English … I think it was for the English that one time. Was it for the French?”
“The English. Then you returned, I understand, to the Great Salt Bay.”
“I returned, yes. I thought to make it my home.”
He bore all the marks of having lived a difficult, yet active, life, one that had succumbed to age, disease and imminent dissolution. His thinned white hair, scraggly and unwashed, fell down the sides of his face upon the filthy pillow. Careless scissors had haphazardly chomped away at his beard, his skin had turned a sallow colour, and the old man frequently coughed, spitting up bloody phlegm. His nose was moist, and the visitor noticed how it had been bent out of shape, this way and that, during the man’s lifetime, most probably from the famous fistfights in Ville-Marie each spring before the voyageurs embarked for the Indian lands. His nightshirt lay open to expire his internal heat, and Smythe saw the X carved there by Chief Kondiaronk to warn him against cheating. The man must have been born under a lucky star not to have had that incision struck through to the quick.
“I loved the wilderness,” Radisson recalled, as though in a reverie now, finding his strength and voice. “My wife in England, here, was not inclined to respect my nature. My own children know not my face. So I procured for myself an end to the marriage, under the Lord. These matters can be arranged, under the Lord, when your wife is the daughter of a powerful man. I went back to the Great Salt Bay to harvest my days. A wilderness, the wildest a man can know, yet with no Iroquois! A paradise to me. I could make a coin there. No fortune—I gave up all promise of that. But I could make a coin for my old age and live beside the icy water.”
“So what happened?” the visitor asked. He relished hearing the old man’s storytelling voice again, and so posed the question even though he knew the reply.
“I had gone where no man could find me. But the French, they found me. They held some grievance. Louis XIV, silly arse, the king himself, issued a proclamation for my arrest and sent a lackey, some sort of chevalier, to fetch me out.” Radisson paused, then asked for more water, which he promptly received. “Groseilliers, now he was a knight, a Knight of the Garter.”
“I heard that,” the man recalled. “A distinguished honour.”
“A chevalier—the same as a knight, but of low rank. Chevalier Pierre de Troyes, that’s who they sent. Do you know him? Are you French or English, sir?”
“I’m an Englishman, sir, in the merchant marine.”
“Oh yes? What do they call you, by name? I was a sailor myself one time.”
“I know that. In the French navy—”
“The navy, and in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company, too.”
“My employer now,” the visitor noted.
Radisson, in his infirmity and frailty, fought through the vagueness of his perceptions to place this man, even to comprehend that he had a visitor at all, one more distinguished than the usual riffraff that filed through his doors.
“Employed by the company, you say?” he asked the man. “On ships? What rank, sir, if I may so inquire of you?”
“That, sir, may depend on you.”
“Me?”
“You, sir. Pierre-Esprit Radisson.”
Now the ailing man was confused, although not in the same way as before. Instinctively, he believed that a man in full command of his faculties might be no less beguiled. “Even when I lived in toil for the company, I dispensed to no man his rank. Why do you say, sir, that your rank depends on me?”
As though to indicate the delicacy of his mission, the visitor lugged his chair under him a tad closer to the bed. He leaned near enough that his breath could be felt upon the old man’s pale, weathered skin.
“Radisson,” he whispered, “do you remember the keen blade? The Dagger of Cartier, they call it?”
“Aye,” Radisson made known, yet whispering also.
“You had given it to your wife, for safekeeping,” the visitor reminded him.
“Aye,” suspiciously, Radisson concurred.
“Yet, when you and your wife parted company, you took back the knife.”
“Aye,” the old man recalled. “Her father had promised me an estate. He did not give me an estate when I sailed back to England on the Happy Return. A vow to me, broken—as all men, it seems, do. They may keep their vows between one another, but to me and to Des Gros, we are not worthy of any man’s faithful word. That’s what I learned in my comings and goings throughout my long life. No king, no chevalier, no wife—and I’ve had three—no child—and I’ve had nine, I’m told—no company—though I have toiled only for the one—has stood by a significant vow to me, sir. I took the dagger back from the man who took back the estate that I had most solemnly been promised.”
“And where,” the man whispered, yet more quietly with each word, and more slowly, “would said knife, the Dagger of Cartier, sir, be now?”
Radisson glared at the man awhile, and a glimmer seemed to register in the darker patches of his mind—a memory, perchance, but he could not be certain or trustful of his own reactions. He was enjoying the company. That’s all he really knew. “Who be asking?” he wanted to know. “By name.”
“Charles Smy—”
“I know that much!” Radisson spit out. “I’m not clueless yet. Who are you, lad, and be quick about your answer if you know what’s good for you!”
“It’s been a while,” Charles Smythe Hamilton replied, and he grinned broadly, “since you’ve called me ‘lad.’”
The glimmer in the dark patch of his mind began to glow a bit, and the old man could see a light. “Hey, there … hey there, now, you’re that lad. That cabin boy!”
“Aboard the Happy Return, sir. I’m proud to make your acquaintance again.”
“Look at you! All grown up! Straight and true! What are you, lad? Speak your rank to me. It’s not cabin boy, I can see!”
Hamilton smiled, and told him, “It could be captain, sir. That’s up to you. I could have my own commission, if only you would wish it.”
“I wish it upon you, lad! But how can this be? What are you saying to me?”
Resorting to a conspiratorial tone of voice again, Hamilton explained. “The company, sir—specifically the younger Mr. Kirke, sir, he knows about our fondness for one another, from the old days. I’ve spoken of it often enough. Proud, I am to have made your acquaintance, to have shared conversation under starry nights.”
“We knew a few rough days at sea, lad!”
“We did, sir. At any rate, Mr. Kirke, sir, knows that you possess the Dagger of Cartier, for you took it back from his aunt—that would be your wife—and rightly so, I must say, when your nuptials failed to endure as you had reason to expect.”
Radisson regarded the young man with a cold eye, wondering what villainy had breached his portal this time. “What do you want from me, lad—the knife?”
“Radisson, your time is nearly done for this earth. If you go and the knife remains hidden, the knife is forever gone also. Certainly, it is gone from the hands of the younger Mr. Kirke, sir.”
The old coureur de bois nodded, comprehending. “His family took everything from me that I delivered to them. My furs by the shipload. Hudson’s Bay itself. My true knowledge of the north that did guide the company west. I have been stripped of every sweetness in life, and all good comforts, and the only payment I have received is my citizenship as an Englishman. Citizenship! That’s what they offered, and that’s what I have claimed! A knighthood? No, no, only Groseilliers deserved that. Me, they made a mere citizen, like all the rest. They had to. France would not have me. And now—” A hacking fit interrupted him.
“Sir, I have not knocked upon your door to torment you—”
“Listen! And now, as I lie dying, when I hope that death comes running like a hare, the company desires the one thing I have left. The Cartier Dagger! This, too, your young Mr. Kirke wishes to extract from me. From one generation to the next, do these gentlemen have no depth to their greed, their desire, their endless need to extract from me all that I might possess?”
The visitor had no kind answer to that question, and so kept his peace.
“What’s in it for you, lad?” Radisson asked.
Hamilton looked up. He felt dispirited, forlorn, defeated in his mission here. “A commission. I am to be made a captain, if, and only if, I deliver the knife. I will be given my commission so that I can seek my fortune, as you did, sir. Perhaps I shall find it, perhaps not. Perhaps, like you, I will find it many times over, only to have it denied me by those of lofty authority. But I have come here to you, sir, to plead that I be offered the opportunity in my time. That once more we go forth, your spirit in me and upon my ship, once more we go forth to seek our destiny.”
Again, Radisson requested water, and this time the visitor held the ladle to his lips himself while the old man drank.
“Of all the bargains I’ve been offered in my long life,” he said, slowly, thoughtfully, “this must surely be the poorest one.”
The man’s eyes were downcast.
“But you have not come to steal from me, have you, lad?”
“You have not come to cheat me.”
“No, sir.”
“You spoke an honest word. No guff. That means something to me. I have nothing. Soon I’ll be dead—may the hare be swift. I will give you what I cannot take with me. Make certain, lad, that you gain that commission. Promise me! Have the ship under your feet and your crew about you, have your captain’s papers in one hand and your sailing manifest in t’other. Only then, lad, do you hand over the knife to our young Mr. Kirke, the son of a rascal and a rascal himself! Promise me!”
Hamilton grasped the old man’s forearm, which still contained the sinew, if not the muscle, of a bygone day. “I promise, sir. I vow it.”
“You’ll need a pick and shovel.”
“I’m capable, sir.”
“You’ll get yourself more dirty than an Iroquois set for battle!”
“I’m willing, sir.”
“Then go forth, young man. Captain Hamilton. Seek your fortune. I ask: do not be cheated of your commission, and take me along, sir, in spirit.”
“That I vow, sir.”
Taking his leave the next morning, Charles Hamilton was unable to say his final thanks or farewell. All he could do was to close down the lids on the old man’s eyes and walk forth, determined to keep his promises. Which he did. He did not deliver the Cartier Dagger into the hands of the Hudson’s Bay Company until after his feet stood upon his ship, and the young Mr. Kirke, knife in hand, had to scamper with great urgency to disembark as the bow and spring lines were being tossed.
The following year, Captain Charles Smythe Hamilton carried a cargo of soldiers from Boston for a jolly raid on Quebec, intending to drive the French from North America forever. A banner of the Virgin Mary, created by Jeanne Le Ber, rose up against the stout ship. The doomed sailors and soldiers did not know that, and would have considered it a laughable fortification. Yet they were further entreated by the most violent of storms. Hamilton’s ship floundered. Many of the ship’s company washed up on shore, alive, to be imprisoned and later returned to the English. A score drowned. Hamilton himself drowned, his body recovered on the beach and buried near Tadoussac. Old men who dug his grave didn’t know him or care that he was a captain, although he would have welcomed their acquaintance, for they were all aging coureurs de bois of whom he’d heard so many tales.
Slowly, with their old bones and weary muscles, they dug.
A wind whistled up from the river, passing through the trees.
As one, the old men ceased their chore and gazed up a moment, then into the dark forest. As one, they felt the ghost of an old friend pass by, paddling the rivers inland. How had he arrived again, and made his way here, upon this shore? That iron will. Did he paddle again to the Great Salt Bay?