Radio Script #921

Little Talks on Common Things
February 20, 1972

Those of you who have regularly listened to this program, have heard me say more than once that there were two sides to the controversy between English and French during their struggle for control of North America. That is especially true of the clash between the two nations in 17th century Maine. As Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent, most of us are familiar with the British side of the story, but there is a case to be made also for the French side.

Probably anyhow there has never been a dispute between nations in which one side was entirely right and the other entirely wrong. .So today I want to call your attention to a very ancient publication called the Jesuit Relations. Published in Paris annually from 1632 to 1673, this work is a compilation by the Jesuit superior in Quebec from the reports sent to him by his missionaries to the American Indians.

Mme. de Guersheville, a court beauty, raised the money to send the first French Jesuits to the New World. The movement was well under way when Henry IV, King of France, decided the time had come to introduce Christian rites in that part of America to which the Jesuits had gone, and entrusted the enterprise to that order. Father Cotas, confessor to the king, requested the Commander of the Jesuit Society to organize a definite plan of missions. One of the first to arrive was Father Biard of Grenoble. From Port Royal, Nova Scotia, he wrote to the Commander in Paris on January 31, 1612, as follows: “I have been on two journeys with M. de Biencourt. We skirted all the coast from Port Royal to the Kennebec, southwest. We entered the large rivers St. John, St. Croix, Pentagoet and Kennebec. (By Pentagoet he meant the Penobscot). We visited the French who entered this year in two places on the St. John and the St. Croix. We arrived on the Kennebec, 80 leagues from Port Royal on October 28, 1611. We landed immediately, eager to see the fort of the English. (He refers to Fort Popham at the mouth of the Kennebec). We soon saw it would be easy to construct a counter fort that would shut them up and deprive them of sea and river. Furthermore the river has several other fine mouths some distance away. For six leagues around there is not a single acre of arable land.

“As we went up the river about three leagues, we suddenly saw six canoes of the Indians coming toward us. There were 24 of them all told, and all of them were warriors. They approached, then withdrew, looking keenly at our numbers, our cannon, our arms, everything. When night came, they lodged on the other bank from our anchored ship. All night they yelled, sang and danced. Since we assumed their songs were incantations to the Devil, I had our people sing some hymns of the church. In the morning we continued up the river, the Indians keeping up with us. They made clear that, if we wanted any of their corn, we should not continue up the river, but turn to the right, mere we would meet their great chief. Some of them then preceded us, others followed, and a few went with us in our vessel. We had the long boat go ahead of us with the plummet. We had gone less than half a league when the leadsman cried, ‘One fathom – only one fathom everywhere.’ Some quickly turned back.”

The letter continues: “Meanwhile Mateconite, a chief hostile to the English, learned of our approach and came to meet us. We received him and learned there was a passage we could get through to the sea, and he went with us. We soon thought we had again been deceived, for we passed several dangerous rapids and narrows, so that we seemed surely doomed. But at last we got through safely. M. Biencourt then put on his armor to visit Chief Mateonite in his wigwam. He found the chief surrounded by grand decorations of savage majesty. He was alone in a well-thatched hut guarded by forty powerful young men, each with shield, bow and arrows. These people are no ninnies, you can believe me.

“From this chief we learned of previous English experience on this spot. In 1607 they commenced a settlement on one of the mouths of the river. They had an honorable leader who behaved well toward the natives. The Indians feared such neighbors and killed the captain. We learned that those natives have a way of killing by magic. In 1608 the English changed their tactics under a new leader. They shamelessly drove away the Indians, beat them, tore them with dogs. The abused natives resolved to kill the wolf’s cub before he had stronger teeth and claws. Their opportunity came when three longboats were out fishing. Luring the boats with pretense of friendship, the Indians attacked and killed eleven Englishmen. The others abandoned their undertaking and have not since followed it up, though they continue each summer to fish about eight leagues from the abandoned fort.”

In another letter, written from Port Royal later in 1612, Father Biard said: “The natives are few in number. The Siriquois of Nova Scotia do not exceed 2000, and those on the coast south to the Kennebec not more than the same number. They do not settle down either on the coast or in the interior, but rather roam over the land. They are nomads, hunting the woods, and are much scattered, because they live by the chase, by fruits of the earth, and by fishing. They are almost beardless, and generally are smaller end more slender than we, but have great grace and dignity. Their complexion is slightly tanned. They often paint or blacken their faces.”

Long before Father Rasle became missionary to the Kennebec Indians at Norridgewock, the Jesuits from Quebec had contacted that Indian village at Old Point. When an English raiding party from Portland attacked the village in 1724, Father Rasle, though not himself en Indian, but rather a French Jesuit, was the recognized leader. Let us see what the Jesuit later accounts have to say about that situation in 1724, where the earlier Jesuit Relations had described the original christianizing of those Indians.

A French account says: “The Puritans of New England hated all Catholics, regarding us as idolaters because of our use of the crucifix and sacred images. We soon learned that the sole aim of the English of New England was to drive all Catholics from America. Our Abnaki converts regarded these New England fanatics as enemies of their chosen Catholic religion. The Abnaki had become faithful Catholics and very devout. Before going into battle, they always knelt in prayer. The French missionaries accompanied the Abnaki into it whether against English or Iroquois, because we were religious crusaders. In 1640 an Englishman came to Canada with twenty Abnaki. The governor would not allow him to come into Quebec. Because the weather made his return by the streams impossible, the Englishman had to give himself up to the French. He was put aboard a ship to Europe and his Abnakis returned to their own Country on the Kennebec. At that time those Abnakis had not accepted our religion. But ten years later, in 1650, our superior sent Fr. Druillettes to the Abnaki on the Kennebec. The Father went down the river to its mouth, and there took ship to Boston to discuss with the English a plan by Which French and British would jointly protect the Abnakis from their great enemies, the Iroquois. The Massachusetts government gave Fr. Druillettes to understand that he could expect some help. He was treated kindly, and during his stay in Boston was lodged at the home of Gen. Gibbons. On this journey, the Father also visited Eliot, the English missionary to the Indians. Then the Father returned to the Indians on the Kennebec.

“Since no help came from the English, Fr. Druillettes again in 1651 went to Boston to try to conclude a treaty. He found that, during the year, the English views had changed completely. The governor informed him that the provincial government of Massachusetts would forego any advantages such a treaty might bring rather than risk a provincial war against the Iroquois. Abnaki-Iroquois relations, he said, were strictly Indian business. When Fr. Druillettes announced that decision to the Kennebec Indians, their hatred of the English was greatly intensified and they became still closer allied with the French. The English made a firm treaty with the Iroquois and our Jesuit fathers were excluded from Iroquois territory.”

Commenting on that portion of that French account, a later writer explained: “Massachusetts was the only New England colony that passed a law excluding Catholic priests, but the same practice, without support of law, was exercised in New York and Virginia for brief periods. It has been charged that numerous Catholic immigrants to New England changed their names and their religion because Catholicism was proscribed, but actually in most places could have lived securely as Catholics. Only in Boston and its environs was the feeling against them extreme. Immigrants, in any event, usually go to colonies where they have friends or have heard of others prospering there, and there is no reason why Irish Catholics, with twelve other colonies to choose from, should pick Boston if persecution prevailed there.”

That was written more than a century before the great influx of following Irish into Boston, the potato famine of the 1840s.

As late as 1700, when English traders were making contact with the Indians, the red man told the English that they had been taught that Christ was a Frenchman who had been murdered by the English. Business and industry has for long played an important part in conflicts between nations. A fact concerning the Canadian French has too long been neglected by historians. Because the French government in Quebec refused admission to British immigrants, Quebec had great scarcity of merchants and artisans. Most of the French immigrants were peasant farmers or adventurers who became coureurs de s bois, the roving fur traders of the northern woods. It was reliably reported that for the sixty crucial years between 1690 and 1750, the French commanders who organized the French and Indian raids on Maine settlements had instructions to be on the watch for blacksmiths and carpenters, to ,be sure not to kill them, but bring them captives to Quebec. It is said that two such captives built the first Quebec sawmill.

And with these somewhat scattered remarks, about French and English relations in colonial Maine, we say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1972