The Eyes Of The Savages - That Race Who Pride
Themselves On Their Stoicism - Were Actually Dimmed With Tears As They
Watched The Vessel Fading Away In The Distance.
For four years "ye gentle sauvage" pursued the even tenor of his way,
and consoled himself as best he could for the absence of the lively
revelers who had cheered his solitude; then, presumably to his delight
(in 1610), he saw Poutrincourt returning.
That nobleman had promised the
king to exert himself for the conversion of the Indians. Three years
later a company of Jesuits sailed for this port with the same object in
view; but, losing their reckoning, they founded settlements at Mt.
Desert instead.
Madame de Guercheville, a true woman indeed, who was honored and
respected in a dissolute court where honor was almost unknown, had
become a zealous advocate of the conversion of Indians in America; and
through her means and influence several priests of the Jesuit order were
sent out in 1612 to this settlement. The sachems, with members of their
tribes living at Port Royal, were baptized, twenty-one at one time, with
much show of rejoicing typified by firing of cannon, waving of banners,
blaring of trumpets. Some doubt is expressed whether the savages fully
understood what it was all about, and what their confession of faith
fully signified; as one chief, on being instructed in the Lord's Prayer,
objected to asking for bread alone, saying that he wished for moose
flesh and fish also; and when one of the priests deliberately set to
work, with notebook and quill, to learn the language of the aborigines
by asking one man the Indian words for various French ones (to him
totally incomprehensible), the savage, with malice aforethought,
purposely gave him words of evil signification, which did not assist
the Frenchman in enlightening other members of this benighted race.
Perceiving the trick which had been played upon him by the savage, who
had been so perplexed by his questioning, the priest declared that
Indian possessed by the Devil!
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