God's Mercies by Douglas Hunter

Author:Douglas Hunter [Hunter, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67268-9
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2007-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

Champlain had arrived at Tadoussac on his first visit to the St. Lawrence on May 24, 1603. The sauvages—Maliséet, Montagnais, and Algonquin—appeared three days later in a fleet of canoes several hundred strong, following a great victory over the Iroquois. They had slain one hundred, and the warriors and their families gathered at the mouth of the Saguenay to celebrate, before trading began.

At first they camped a few miles away, along the St. Lawrence at Pointe aux Vaches, but after a welcoming visit from the French, they broke camp with astonishing speed and built a new sprawl of bark-covered wigwams, each nation keeping to its own compound, at Tadoussac’s harbour. Their shelters intrigued Champlain: inside the wigwams he found upwards of ten families sleeping around fires whose smoke escaped through a gap at the peak. “They sleep on skins all together, and their dogs with them,” he related in Des Sauvages.

“All these people have a very cheerful disposition, laughing often,” he reported, “yet at the same time they are somewhat phlegmatic. They talk very deliberately, as if desiring to make themselves well understood, and stopping suddenly, they reflect for a long time, when they resume their discourse. This is their usual manner at their harangues in council, where only the leading men, the elders, are present, the women and children not attending at all.”

He appreciated the precariousness of their lives, the threat of freezing and starvation in winter. He supposed that cannibalism could never be far away, but he never suggested they were any more predisposed to it than shipwrecked Frenchmen. Their eating methods he could scarcely tolerate. Meat was retrieved from the boiling water of a cauldron and distributed on serving platters made of bark. They removed grease from their hands, he wrote, by wiping them on their hair, or on their dogs.

Champlain had little to say about the physical appearance of these people. In 1626, Charles Lalement, superior of the new Jesuit mission in Canada, would write from Quebec to his brother, Father Jérôme, explaining how the faces of native men “are usually painted red or grayish brown, and this is done in different styles, according to the fancy of the women, who paint their husbands and children, whose hair they also oil with bear or moose grease.” In 1632, Paul le Jeune would arrive at Tadoussac en route to taking command of the Jesuit mission, soon after another successful campaign had been concluded against the Iroquois. A chief and ten or twelve companions came aboard his ship to visit. Le Jeune did not know their particular tribe, but the first impression they delivered was, to say the least, striking. “When I saw them enter our Captain’s room, where I happened to be, it seemed to me that I was looking at those maskers who run about France in Carnival time. There were some whose noses were painted blue, the eyes, eyebrows, and cheeks painted black, and the rest of the face red; and these colours are bright

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