Sagard was himself a missionary for many years among the Hurons; and, besides a Dictionary of their language, he wrote a very interesting book upon the country and its people.[1]
He seems to have been a guileless and simple-hearted man, homesick at times, but zealous in his work. His credulity was extreme, and he was greatly disturbed by the demoniacal vaporings and tricks which were thought to infest the land and the people. He was adopted by an Indian family, and was finally reconciled to make his principal food of sagamite, the Indian maize.
The mission of the Récollets was superseded by the coming of Jesuit Fathers to Canada in 1625. Henceforth none but faithful disciples of the Roman Church were to be allowed to abide there.
As a reader of the sources of history for the time and place muses over the record, he pauses to ask whether these spiritual guides found their own countrymen or the savages the more tractable and hopeful subjects of their ghostly charge. A rough set alike they were for such oversight. One contrasts in thought and fancy the work of teaching and discipline there with that contemporaneously going on in the meeting-houses and homes of the New England Puritans. We may be sure that the Canadian was far lighter and most easy where that of the Puritans was most austere and grim; yet what verdict has time and trial set upon the long results of the two methods! The whole influence and example of Champlain and of a few devout men and women were given to encourage the priests within their own holy functions. But they had a restive, wild, and unregenerate crew around them, and it was not easy to bring them even to outward reverence for the ritual. Occasionally, after years of lawless and wholly ungirt roaming
- ↑ Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons, situé en l'Amerique vers la Mer douce, és derniers confins de la nouvelle France, dite Canada, etc. A Paris, 1632.
