case for him. Indeed, a girl, seeing seven or eight of her relatives carried off in a few days, had actually had the boldness to go to his Cabin with the determination to accuse him of being the cause of their death; and as he was not there, she talked to his wife so freely, and with so much passion, that the son, happening to come in, laid down his robe, and, taking a hatchet, went off in a transport of rage to the cabin where these evil suspicions had originated. Sitting down in the middle of the room, he addressed one Tioncharon, and said to him with a steadfast countenance and a confident mien: “If thou thinkest it is we who make thee die, take now this hatchet and split open my head; I will not stir.” Tioncharon replied to him, “We will not kill thee now at thy word, but the first time we shall take thee in the act.” The matter remained thus for that time, but they were always regarded with a great deal of ill will. These peoples are extremely suspicious, especially when life is involved; the experiences that they think they have had in this matter, and a thousand instances of people whom they believe to have died through witchcraft or poison, maintain them in this distrust. On the same day that this incident occurred, the Father Superior having gone to visit a sick man, they showed him a sort of charm he had just been made to throw up by means of an emetic; it consisted of some hairs, a tobacco seed, a green leaf, and a little cedar twig. But as ill luck would have it, in their opinion, one of these little charms was broken, the other part having remained in his body, and that had caused his death. You hear nothing else talked about in this country, there being hardly any sick people who do not think they have been poisoned. Only recently, when the Father Superior was passing through the village of Andiatae, he was shown a grasshopper’s leg twined about with a few hairs, which a sick person had just vomited. If Sorcerers are as common in the country as they are often upon the lips of the Savages, we can truthfully say that we are preëminently in medio nationis pravœ [in the midst of a depraved nation]; and yet, with all this, in the opinion of many of them, we are past masters in this art, and have an understanding with the devils. . . .
For our part, we have now every reason to praise God, who has granted to us all the favor of passing the winter in very good health, although the greater part of the time we have been among the sick and the dead, and although we have seen many fall sick and die, merely through the communication that they had with one another. The Savages were astonished at it, and are still astonished every day, saying in reference to us, “Those people are not men, they are demons.” . . . Our poor village continued to be afflicted until spring, and is almost entirely ruined. We are not surprised at this, for the greater part of them showed that their belief consisted only in fine words, and that in their hearts they have no other God than the belly, and the one who will promise them absolutely to restore them to health in their illnesses. . . .
[June, 1637]
They are still saying, almost as much as ever, that we are the cause of the malady. These reports are partly founded upon the fact that it is in this season much more fatal than it was during the severe cold of the winter, and consequently the greater part of those we baptize, die. Besides this, very recently a certain Algonquin captain has given our Hurons to understand that they were mistaken in thinking that the devils caused them to die,—that they should blame only the French for this; and that he had seen, as it were, a French woman who was infecting the whole country with her breath and her exhalations. Our Savages imagine that it is the sister of the late Estienne Bruslé, who is avenging her brother’s death. This Sorcerer added that we, even we ourselves, meddle with sorcery; that for this purpose we employ the images of our saints,—that, when we show them, certain tainted influences issue therefrom which steal down into the chests of