heir Indian allies were ever lurking in the woods that
came so dangerously close to the white settlements and the Indian
villages.

In 1642, Father Isaac Jogues was returning from the missions on Lake
Huron, with Couture, an interpreter, and Goupil, a young medical
attendant--both donnes or lay followers of the Jesuits. They were in
the company of a number of Hurons who were bringing furs to the traders
on the St. Lawrence, when the Iroquois surprised them at the western
end of Lake St. Peter's. The prisoners were taken by the Richelieu to
the Mohawk country and Father Jogues was the first Frenchman to pass
through Lake George[1]--with its picturesque hills and islets--which in
a subsequent journey he named Lac du Saint-Sacrament, because he
reached it on the eve of Corpus Christi. The Frenchmen were carried
from village to village of the Iroquois, and {138} tortured with all
the cruel ingenuity usual in such cases. Goupil's thumb was cut off
with a clam shell, as one way of prolonging pain. At night the
prisoners were stretched on their backs with their ankles and wrists
bound to stakes. Couture was adopted into the tribe, and was found
useful in later years as an intermediary between the French and
Mohawks. Goupil was murdered and his body tossed into a stream rushing
down a steep ravine. Despite his sufferings Father Jogues never
desisted from his efforts to baptise children and administer the rites
of his Church to the tortured prisoners. On one occasion he performed
the sacred office for a dying Huron with some rain or dewdrops which
were still clinging to an ear of green corn which had been thrown to
him for food. After indescribable misery, he was taken to Fort Orange,
where the Dutch helped him to escape to France, but he returned to
Canada in the following year.

Bands of Iroquois continued to wage war with relentless fury on all the
Algonquin tribes from the Chaudiere Falls of the Ottawa to the upper
waters of the Saguenay. Bressani, a highly cultured Italian priest,
was taken prisoner on the St. Lawrence, while on his way to the Huron
missions, and carried to the Mohawk villages, where he went through the
customary ordeal of torture. He was eventually given to an old woman
who had lost a member of her family, but when she saw his maimed
hands--one split between the little finger and the ring-finger--she
sent him to the Dutch, who ransomed and sent him to France, whence he
came back like Jogues,