Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [75]
It is not only in this country that we have this reputation [as poisoners and sorcerers], for these false reports have been carried even to strange nations, who consider us as the masters and arbiters of life and death. . . . On the day of the baptism of Pierre Tsiouendaentaha, we had exhibited an excellent representation of the judgment, where the damned are depicted,—some with serpents and dragons tearing out their entrails, and the greater part with some kind of instrument of their punishment. Many obtained some benefit from this spectacle; but some persuaded themselves that this multitude of men, desperate, and heaped one upon the other, were all those we had caused to die during this Winter; that these flames represented the heats of this pestilential fever, and these dragons and serpents, the venomous beasts that we made use of in order to poison them. This was said in open feast at Ouenrio, according to the report of Captain Enditsacon. Another one afterward asked us if it were really true that we were raising the malady in our house as if it were a domestic animal, saying that this was quite a common opinion in the country. And very recently, when I was returning from Ossossané, a woman who was coming from her field caught a grasshopper and brought it to me, begging me earnestly to teach her some contrivance for killing these little creatures that eat the corn, adding that she had been told that we were past masters in this art.
Source: Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (Cleveland, Burrows Bros. Co., 1896–1901), v. 13, 101–7, 111, 131–33, 155–59, 163–65; v. 14, 53–55, 99, 103–5.
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3. The Execution of Isaac Jogues, 1646
Jerome Lalemant was a Jesuit in Quebec. In his Relation of 1647, he reported the death of Father Isaac Jogues (1607–1646), who had reached Canada in the summer of 1636 and preached to the Hurons. In 1642, Jogues was captured and tortured by the Iroquois. During his captivity and residence in the town of Ossernenon, he tended to the sick, performed Catholic rites, and, it seems, played the part of a shaman. Jogues returned briefly to France, and then went back to Canada in 1646 and was put in charge of a mission to the Mohawks. Twin misfortunes befell the Mohawks: worms infested their corn, and people sickened and died. Was Jogues a witch?
The 24th of September of last year, 1646, Father Isaac Jogues left Three Rivers in order to go to the country of the Agneronon Hiroquois, to the end of maintaining the peace which they had so solemnly concluded, and in order to cultivate and augment the seed of the Gospel which he had begun to cast into that wretched and thankless land. Before he arrived in that country, this people had sent presents to the Hiroquois of the upper countries,—whom we call Onondageronons, Sountwaronons, and some others,—in order strongly to confirm their alliances, and to form a conspiracy for the ruin of the French and of their allied tribes. The cause of this treachery proceeds, in my opinion, from their warlike temper, which cannot stay at rest, and from the glory and advantages which they drew from war; and, furthermore, from their superstition, and from the hatred which the captive Hurons have given them for the doctrine of Jesus Christ. Those captives—having seen us the reproach of their whole country, on account of the contagious and general diseases, of which they made us the Authors through our prayers, which they called charms—have cast these notions into the minds of the Hiroquois, that we carried the Demons and that we and our doctrine tended only to their ruin; insomuch that they accused Father