University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION.

Along the whole north shore of Lake Huron, extending
over not much less than five degrees of latitude from north to
south, and varying from forty to one hundred miles in width,
there lies a vast expanse of navigable water, known as the
Georgian bay; the shores of which to this hour are almost
untrodden, except by the moccasined foot of the red man, and
the surface of which is almost unfurrowed by the keel of modern
adventure.

Divided by a long promontory, the precipitous cape of which
has taken its name of Cabot's head from a huge projecting
bowlder on its summit, and by the extended and almost continuous
chain of the Manitoulin islands, from the main lake, the
Georgian bay, from its size, its depth, the great rivers which
it receives, and the unnumbered harbors of refuge with which
its iron-bound coasts are indented, deserves rather to be regarded
as in itself a lake, than merely as a portion of the
gigantic Huron.

Yet, in spite of its magnificent extent, the unrivalled purity
of its deep, dark blue, yet wondrously transparent waters, the
wild magnificence of its iron scenery, I know nothing so
lonely, nothing which impresses the mind of the voyager with
so utter a sense of solitariness, as a sail on its unfrequented
bosom.

For days — for days — you may steam or sail right onward,
with the mainland, or the thousand islands, ever in
view, yet not a sail, not the bark of an Indian, not the smoke
of a wigwam shall vary the desolate sublimity of the scene;
unless you leave the direct course, to visit some one of the
Indian villages or the miners' stations, which of late are beginning
to grow up along the northern shore.

Only three vessels, to this day, cross the waters of the Georgian
bay; one a small schooner employed for the supply of
the Bruce mines; the second, a clever little steamer, the Gore,
plying between Penetanguishine, whence there is an easy
portage to Toronto and the Sault St. Marie; and the third, the
Mohawk man-of-war steamer, whose summer cruising-ground
embraces all the upper lakes from the great Falls of Niagara to
the lovely rapids of the Sault St. Marie. The great line of
western travel, lying along the southern and western shores
which are visited daily, I had almost said hourly during the
summer months, by steamers of most luxurious accommodation,
and sailing craft of every rig and almost every burthen, leaves
the stormy and rock-bound expanse of the Georgian bay far
aloof; and few are the visiters who have seen its wondrous beauties,
or penetrated into the mysteries of rock, wilderness, and
river, cataract, rapid, swamp, and rice lake, which diversify
its northern shore with an endless labyrinth of most romantic
beauty.

Neither the highlands of the Hudson, nor the thousand isles
of the far-famed St. Lawrence, have to me the charm of the

wild, solitary, silent grandeur of the Huron. Waters so clear,
that you can mark each prominence or cranny of the granite
rock, number each long and sinuous blade of the watergrass,
count every fish that wags a fin, five fathoms deep, more easily
than so many inches in our eastern streams or lakelets —
shores so bold, that a man-of-war can lie broadside against the
rocks, moored to the mighty pines, whose foliage makes wild
music to the gale from which they shelter her, many and
many a yard above her topmasts. No sounds or sights of life
save the plash of the heavy sturgeon falling back on the mirrored
surface, and breaking the green-wood picture, which slept
there so calmly bright, into a thousand glancing ripples; save the
wild, tremulous note, how like the Ossianic notion of a spirit's
cry, of the great northern diver; save the circling swoops of
the snowy terns and gulls; and, now perhaps and again, at
rare intervals, the heavy shadow cast on the sunny lake from
the broad wings of the bald-headed eagle, sailing between it
and the sun, and overcoming its clear surface most like a summer
cloud.

Such, and such only, are the sounds and sights which he
will hear and see, who voyages across those lonely waters, in
these days of vaunted progress and increased civilization.

But not so it was two hundred years ago; for then those
grand, and good, and brave discoverers, those only real civilizers,
only consistent benefactors of the savage, the French
Jesuits, were in their full career of enterprise, and usefulness,
and charity. Whatever may have been the course, in the Old
World, of this great, active, energetic, self-devoting sect, one
thing at least is certain, that from the first to the last in the
New World, of North America at least, they have been signally,
confessedly, and incontrovertibly, the benefactors of
mankind.

Strange it would seem, but so it is, that from the first introduction

of catholicism by the French into the northern, and
by Lord Baltimore into the southern, regions of North America,
the very genius of that religion changed its nature.

While the various sects of the protestants were martyring
one another, and combining only to butcher and rob the red
man; while the puritans were hanging quakers, banishing
baptists, burning witches, depopulating the catholic settlements,
and barbarously misusing the mild and peaceful settlers
of Acadia, offering rewards for the scalps of heathen, and
coolly sentencing independent princes, such as the brave Canonchet,
last of the Narragansets, or the right royal Wampanoag
Philip, to cold-blooded slaughter, the Jesuits with a pure
zeal, an humble self-devotion, worthy the followers of Him
whose followers they claim to be, were incurring pains and
perils equal almost to those of the first apostles, valuing their
lives at nothing, and dying with serene and Christian fortitude,
prompted by no desire but that of winning converts to the
Christian fold, and aiming at no other object than the precept
of their order, the sublime ad majorem Dei gloriam.

The great discoverers, and first explorers, the most authentic
and trustworthy historians, of our inland waters and far western
territories, neither climate nor distance, neither peril nor
suffering, deterred the dauntless Jesuits, where there were
wonders of nature to be rescued from the gloom of the primeval
forest, or souls of mortal men to be snatched from the
more perilous darkness of heathendom.

To the honor of the Frenchmen and the Jesuit, then, be it
recorded, and I, though neither of his race nor his religion.
will never cease to insist on its remembrance, that in no single
instance, do we find him using his superior force or his superior
wisdom, otherwise than as a true friend, and to the extent
of his lights, an honest spiritual counsellor, of the North
American savage.

Unlike the proud ecclesiastics, luxurious, greedy, fierce, and
cruel, who hounded the Cortez and the Pizarros against the
softer savage of the southern hemisphere, kindling the fagot
and sanctioning the rack, and baptizing with blood and fire
only, the French Jesuit used no weapons for conversion but
purity of life, humility of bearing, faith, charity, and a zeal
unconquerable for the extension of his religion.

Never the torturers, often the tortured, of their half-barbarous
converts, men often of the highest birth; men always of
the brightest parts and profoundest learning; they took upon
themselves the cross of Christ, and exchanged the most polished
court and country of the then world, for the howling
wilderness; and that without the hope of temporal or spiritual
advancement, without the possibility of gaining wealth or
fame, at the total sacrifice of every worldly comfort, at the
almost certain risk of their lives. They lived unselfish, and
they died undaunted, ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Honor to the memory peace to the ashes, of the French
Jesuits! Their bodies have long mouldered away under the
sere leaves of the forest; the very tribes whom they taught,
and by whose hands they fell, have long since vanished from
the face of the earth; but their souls live for ever in His keeping,
who sees the motive of the heart as clearly as the deed
of the hand, and will repay a thousand-fold the good works
wrought in his name, and for his love and honor.

I have wandered among the sites of their ruined stations; I
have sat on the grassy mounds, whence they perchance preached
the word of life to their dusky converts; whereon perchance
they writhed in torment at the stake, invoking mercy from on
high with their last breath upon their ignorant destroyers.

And I know nothing more affecting, nothing that leaves a
deeper or more melancholy impress on the heart, than when,
after walking miles along some difficult Indian trace, or paddling

the birch canoe over the dim and solemn waters of some
forest-embowed river, one suddenly emerges, under the glimmering
moonlight, or the fresh, dewy dawn, into the long-deserted
clearing, once fertilized by the hands of the good churchmen;
and gazes upon the ruins of the outposts erected in the
extremest solitudes, not against earthly foes, but against the
arch-enemy of man.

There one may trace, even now, by the surrounding objects,
the routine of their innocent and blameless lives; there, was
the garden where they raised their frugal stores; even now
all wild, degenerated, and untrained, he may discover the
scions of the European fruit-trees, which they brought from
the apple-orchards of old Normandy, or the richer districts of
Touraine; here is the spring, whence they drew the water
which, it may well be, sealed the Christianity of Iroquois or
Huron neophytes, long ere the Ojibwas or Pottowatomies
brought fire and havoc from their southern hunting-grounds,
and quenched the altars with the blood of their own unresisting
ministers.

Many a legend dwells, to this day, about the places which
their deaths and their lives have alike rendered holy; and
although these are related now by the descendants of the very
tribes who slaughtered them, yet they are told with sympathy,
and oftentimes with real sorrow; for the Ojibwas now no more
sacrifice the white dog at the full of the moon, but are gathered
for the most part under the same mild Christian rule professed
by the froquois, whom two centuries ago they slaughtered as
idolaters.

None of these struck me as more sadly solemn, than this of
Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng, or the Reed-shake-by-the-wind,
an Ojibwa girl, who, in those dark and bloody days,
brought, like another Helen, havoc and desolation whither she
had laid up her fatal, though not guilty love.