by John Farrow
“Did you?” the boy asked, rapt.
Radisson nodded. “We did.”
“Why?” the youth inquired, for this seemed an odd disclosure to him.
Again, Radisson paused, to mull his words.
“Am I not French?” he asked. When the boy shrugged his skinny shoulders, Radisson gazed up at the stars again, as if to make the same inquiry, as if to revisit that question.
“Are you not French?” Charles Albanel demanded to know.
These Jesuits. You had to admire them, even though, as Médard would say, they were the scourge of the earth. Tortured, maimed, enslaved, horribly slaughtered and never particularly successful in their missions, they continued to come back to the wilderness, to what they called their Indian children, whom they so adored even as these same sauvages burned their toes or yanked out their tongues or before their eyes consumed captive infants from another tribe. Always so intent on the welfare of a man’s soul, the Jesuits would forgo the welfare of their own lives. “A praying Jesuit,” Groseilliers had said one time, “is like a canoe.”
They had been paddling on the Rupert River, through that hardscrabble land of scruff jack pine and worn rock, where the animals and birds they’d encountered had likely never spied a two-legged before, certainly not one with a white skin and a full black beard, and whenever the pair stepped ashore their footprints were likely the first upon that soil in all the human account. Radisson brought his canoe alongside Groseilliers’s so that they might enjoy a few moments’ respite while merely running the river’s flow.
“Tell me, why is a praying Jesuit like a canoe?”
“The time comes when we must carry both on our backs.”
Radisson took his friend’s meaning. At Long Sault, three Jesuits had been kneeling in prayer just as the hour had come to portage. They refused to respond to the voyageurs’ requests to keep moving. So he and Groseilliers and another man each picked up a praying Jesuit, slung him over his shoulder and carried him across the portage, and the Jesuits never stopped murmuring prayers all the way across, not until they were dropped down into their canoes again and the paddling recommenced.
“This is what I don’t understand about Jesuits,” Radisson continued in a similar vein. Apparently, for their morning entertainment, they were going to make fun of priests. “Always there’s more, but they’re celibate. How do they procreate so well?”
They were the scourge of the earth, but the woodsmen and the Indians admired them. Here, at the mouth of the Rupert River, a Jesuit priest, Charles Albanel—a slave to Indians, a man with burn marks on his arms, his fingers gnarled where they’d been broken and blackened where they had frozen, with each of the long nails missing, for they’d been extracted by the Iroquois just so they could watch him wince—was presuming to rail at Groseilliers and Radisson for failing to be properly French.
“I’m as French as you!” Radisson shot back. He had a few days’ ration of the Englishman’s rum in him. “Maybe more French!”
“I’m Frenchier than both of you,” Groseilliers maintained.
“What flag do I see on the stern of your ship? Is it Spanish? Is it Dutch? Is it Portuguese? Hmm. That looks like an English flag to me.”
The flag was English, the two conceded, yet Radisson remained undeterred. “The flag—what does it matter? Me, I’m still French.”
“Your wife—tell me, is she an English girl or French? Your children, Radisson, English or French? Do they ever speak a word of French? Where do they live—in London, or in the English countryside?”
“Stop pestering me,” the fur trader complained.
“Pestering you? When will you stop pestering me? When will you stop pestering every Frenchman in the world? Stop pestering your king! Your French king, I’m talking about. I don’t know if you pester your English king, though you probably do that, too.”
Radisson was becoming more furious while Groseilliers chuckled lightly to himself, getting a kick out of the exchange. They knew the man from the old days, from Radisson’s first voyage to Lake Superior, when Albanel had taken leave of his mission at Tadoussac and come along, as he had said then, “for the experience.” Not a priest who had distinguished himself, he was poorly considered by his superiors. But the governor had called upon him to investigate the Great Salt Bay and a report of English ships guided there by Groseilliers. Albanel had come to the bay and told the Indians that he had pretty much single-handedly dispatched the Iroquois from their trading routes. He’d been under the misapprehension that the Indians were living so far north out of fear of the Iroquois, but few of them had actually seen a member of that southern tribe. Albanel returned to Quebec and hand-delivered a report, but the governor had to conclude that he had not exacted any promise from the Indians to desist from trading with the English, and his Jesuit superiors had clucked their tongues as though to suggest that they’d forewarned the governor that Albanel had been the wrong man for the job. He’d come back to make amends, but this time the journey had exhausted him. As he had arrived at the Great Salt Bay near death, and not knowing what else to do with him, the Cree gave him to the Assiniboines to be their slave, and, by extension, their problem.
The largest of the three, Groseilliers, was sitting on a log, whittling a maple branch he intended to implant in a wobbly boot. He continued to chuckle.
“What are you talking about?” Radisson complained. “I pester nobody! I don’t even pester you, although I should, the way you pester me with crazy talk. Are you crazy, Father?”
“Are you?” He was a dour-looking priest, as though he’d never had a proper meal or a decent laugh in his life. Yet no one could doubt his wiry strength or the resolve of his frail constitution. Exhaustion and slavery had not broken his spirit.
“I’m fine. At least I’m not some Indian chief’s cook, like you are now.”
“You’ve noticed. That surprises me.” He was picking at an aching molar, and on occasion spitting.
“What’s so hard not to notice? How’d you get to be a priest, Father—a lame fool like you? I’m surprised any chief would take you as a slave. You’re lucky you didn’t have your throat slit.”
Albanel folded his arms across his chest, as though he was a burly man when he was not, and glared with his rather large grey eyes at Radisson. “You notice that I’m a slave. Have you noticed how you’ve enslaved your own people?”
“Huh? What?”
His eyes had that grey tint to them, and as he grew more intense they’d widen like an owl’s. “You two villains brought the English to the north country, almost completing the circle around us French. All this land should be French land, so that our brothers are secure to create a great nation for France. But now, we have to fight, and persevere, and worry what calamity the English will bring upon us next, what alliances they will form. We’re enslaved by our fears and the treachery of the English and their puppets, the Iroquois. Every summer, the Indians attack, murder us in our beds and in our fields and slay our children. Does the king of France send more men at arms for our protection?”
“He does not,” Radisson concurred. “That’s the king of France for you! Aha!”
“It’s all your fault,” Albanel declared.
“What? My fault? You just said it’s the king’s fault. You can’t change your mind like that. You’re not too bright for a Jesuit, are you?”
Albanel shook his head in dismay and spoke as though he was speaking a basic truth to a child. “Thanks to you, the English take the furs out of Hudson’s Bay on their big ships. With all that wealth going to England, why should the king of France care about his subjects who die uselessly over here? Now, if the king of France, and not of England, were benefiting from all those furs out of the bay, do you not think he’d be interested in protecting his subjects, in securing that source of new wealth? Today, when a French women dies horribly at the hands of the Iroquois, and her husband buries the mother of his children, he says over her grave, ‘Radisson and Groseilliers, this is on your so
uls!’”
“He does not!” Radisson jumped to his feet and drew his dagger, set to stab the priest through his gizzard. “I’ll slice open your lying black heart!” he cried.
“He says exactly that.” Albanel shrugged at the sight of the dagger. “Whether the husbands or the wives believe it these days matters not. They say it under their breath anyway. It’s like a curse. If a child, at play, running in the woods, trips over a root, he says, ‘Damn Radisson!’”
“He does not!”
“He does, she does—boys and girls both! And when we French fall ill with a fever—I have heard it many times, my friend, I know of what I speak, for the feverish call me to their beds so that I might console them in their misery—we French say, ‘The grippe! Des Gros is in my blood today. My body is wracked by Radisson!’”
“No!” Radisson exclaimed, panicky.
Groseilliers was listening to this, not laughing anymore either. “We’re hated?” he asked.
“You’re despised. We French, we bring up our children to despise you more than the devil’s own. To the devil we’d show compassion, if only he would come to us on a penitent knee. To Groseilliers, to Radisson, we’d lock our doors even if winter were at its coldest and you were naked upon your bellies, beseeching your God with prayer. If you were to arrive at the fur fair in Montreal …” The priest let his voice trail off, shaking his head forlornly.
“What?” Radisson begged to know. “What would happen?”
The priest screwed up his face, not wanting to imagine the result.
“Tell me!” Radisson insisted.
“Put away your knife and I will tell you,” bargained the priest. “I don’t want you cutting my heart out in a fit of temper.” When Radisson dutifully sheathed his dagger, Albanel whispered, “The people, I fear, would stone you.”
Groseilliers and Radisson considered these things. They didn’t know quite what to believe, but they had been out of touch with the French for so many years, and had discussed in the past what their own people might think of them, working for the English.
“Don’t they know we were robbed?” Radisson lamented. “Over and over again, they stole our furs. Médard was thrown in prison when all he did was save the colony! We’ve been treated with contempt, with disdain—that’s the French for you!”
Albanel chided him with a clucking sound.
“Why are you talking to me like a duck?” Radisson asked.
“Never have you been treated badly by the French. Only by the governor. The French revered you. They adored you. At one time, every Frenchman in New France would have been honoured to have you sleep in his cabin and feast at his table. Every French soul would have slaughtered a pig to show you a proper welcome. My God, it’s true! At one time, any true Frenchman, any one at all, would have paraded his daughters before you for your close inspection, and had you chosen his loveliest, he’d have doubled the dowry on the spot. It’s too bad. A shame, is it not? I wonder … No, it’s impossible now. The two of you, you’re too English to ever be French again.”
“What’s he talking about?” Radisson said to his friend. He slapped a mosquito on his neck.
Groseilliers expressed an interest. “Say what you mean, priest.”
“All right … dwell on this … think of it in that tiny corner of your souls the devil hasn’t yet seized …” Crouched, he dragged himself closer to the men, to the limits of his rope restraint. “If you were to take a few canoes of furs and paddle back to Montreal with me, if you were to vow to deliver the bay back to the French, then would you not be heroes again? Never mind what the governor thinks. The king of France himself would honour you. He’d ply you with riches. You could probably choose whatever estate you prefer in France. But—” The priest shook his head again, as though downtrodden, defeated, then smacked a mosquito on his wrist.
“But what?” Radisson asked quietly, gravely.
“I suppose the English pay you astonishing livres for your furs. I suppose you are great lords of London now. The king of England has given you lands and riches, it’s rumoured. I’ve heard it said that Groseilliers is a knight. Is that true?”
“A Knight of the Garter!” Radisson cried out. “It’s the greatest English honour.”
“And you, I suppose, his squire. You must be much endowed, with estates, with many servants.”
Groseilliers and Radisson glanced quickly at one another. They had been discussing their status in recent months. While Groseilliers had been honoured for bringing the English into the bay, their sailors knew the route now, and their sea captains had formed their own good alliances with the Cree and Assiniboines. In truth, Groseilliers and Radisson were needed no more—they had surrendered the whole of their knowledge to the English. Their new situation was reflected in the diminishment of their sinecure from the sale of furs brought back to England. They had begun to understand that they served no function anymore, and with a stroke of a pen could be denied even the most meagre portion of the profits. Both men, in recent months, had had a sense that they had left themselves vulnerable.
Whispering still, for the men had unconsciously crept closer to the chained priest, his voice clear in the salient night air, Father Charles Albanel decreed, “And if you take furs and canoes south to Montreal, then, of course, you will also take me.”
“We could also leave you here, Father. Radisson will tell you. I prefer my own cooking upon the trail,” Groseilliers warned.
“You need me to intercede. Without me, the moment you step foot upon the island of Montreal you’ll be stoned to death. Cursed first, then stoned by a mob.”
“We have a shipload of furs already,” Radisson pointed out.
“Then take the furs back to England aboard the ship,” Albanel conspired. “But take me with you. Together we shall cross the channel to France, where on your behalf I will make an intercession before the king.”
On that starry night, on the shores of the Great Salt Bay, they hatched their scheme to restore the northern portion of the continent to the French. Once again, they would save the colony, and this time, they believed, they’d be rewarded greatly. At long last the riches they deserved would be bestowed upon them, and they would enter into the glory of France, to be honoured among their people.
“What will the English think?” Radisson whispered to Groseilliers as the two lay themselves down to sleep on an earth floor under a canopy of cedar boughs.
“I fear the loss of my knighthood,” the older man admitted.
“I fear the loss of my wife,” Radisson confessed.
They listened to the wind in the high tops of the trees as it blew across the stark, silent bay and whisked upon their shore like the animal ghosts of this latitude, timeless and grim, perpetually lurking.
“The French king received you well?” the cabin boy inquired. They sat below, taking their evening meal. Above them, a lamp swayed with the ship’s motion, and around them, others ate at this late hour or snored in the slump of their hammocks.
“He wanted to know why my wife had not joined me. ‘Will she be coming across the Channel?’ That was a question that vexed him, and my replies, I fear, did not allay his concerns.”
The cabin boy found this aspect confusing. He consumed two spoonfuls of his stew, mulling the matter over, hesitant to make a further inquiry lest he appear dumb. Finally, he had to say, “I don’t understand. Why did the king care about your wife?”
Radisson shook his head as though to suggest that he, too, was mystified by this development, but that was not true. What bothered him was that he had been incapable of doing anything about the problem. “He cared about my loyalty. If my wife remained in England—the king’s advisors, those are the rascals who made him think this way—then the way was kept clear for me to return across the Channel. I was viewed with suspicion. But the king grasped the significance of our presence, and he sent Groseilliers and me back across the Atlantic. We were to introduce ourselves to the guv’ner of New France, and he, Frontenac,
would see to it that we were properly supplied and encouraged before our search. We were back in Quebec, back in Montreal, and the people kept their distance. They regarded us with suspicion, as Albanel had foretold, but we told them of our plans, to bring the north back into the service of the king. Men supported us, relieved to have us with them again. Many wished us a good result as we awaited Frontenac’s disposition and his dispatch.”
As though he was one of those citizens himself, the boy awaited the man’s further account.
“We were summoned back to Frontenac’s chateau, where he inquired if we were willing to take an expedition down the Mississippi. He had been educated on Quebec by his king, and he didn’t want to counter the king’s preferences. We told him, we pleaded with him to believe us, for we were back in Quebec under the king’s letter—and yet, he asked, if we did not want to paddle down the Mississippi, would we then lead a warring party against the Iroquois at Ticonderoga? Frontenac had next to no interest in Hudson’s Bay! He would not provide us with ships and men for us to take back the bay in the name of France.”
The boy shook his head sadly. Although an English lad, in this conflict between the powers of the two neighbours he sided not with his own king or the one from France, but with the ragamuffin from the woods, Radisson. “What did you do?” the boy asked.
“Groseilliers returned to Trois-Rivières to plant corn and raise children, and me, I joined the French navy.”
“You didn’t!” The boy was genuinely astonished, that the man of the woods would enlist for a life at sea.
“I did. I sailed to the Antilles, and along the coast of Africa. It’s a good life for seeing the world, and I commend it to you, lad. You’ve chosen well.”
Still, the boy appeared confused. “The French took back the bay. I’m quite sure of that,” he postulated.
“Patience, lad. Patience. Allow love to take its course.”
“Love?”
Radisson gathered up his cutlery and plate. “Step lively, lad. We’ll take a walk around the deck, stretch our sea legs. I shall like to breathe the night air before I sleep.”