These barbarous ingenuities of torture by the savages, however relieved in endurance by the training which had fitted them to bear as well as to inflict them, were wrapped in intenser horror for all Christian eyes when the bodies of the sufferers, after life had been driven from its last refuge, were embowelled and severed by the tormentors, and then committed by the squaws to the caldrons for a fiendish banquet. We may leave untranslated the words of Lafitau concerning the savages and a victim: “Ne lui donnent point d'autre sepulture que leur ventre.”[1]
That such distressing scenes should have come under the eyes of Europeans calling themselves Christians, without engaging their sternest rebuke and prohibition, is to us hardly conceivable. But what shall we say about a trained connivance with them?
Baron La Hontan, often a dubious but sometimes a trustworthy authority, gives the following contemporary narrative of a scene at Quebec, of which it would appear that he was an eye-witness. It was an episode of that warfare, equally ferocious on both sides, waged between the French and the Iroquois. In the beginning of the year 1692, Frontenac had sent out one hundred and fifty men under Chevalier Beaucour, with fifty friendly savages, who in an encounter with a party of sixty Iroquois had killed all of them but twelve, who were brought as prisoners to Quebec: —
“After they arrived, M. Frontenac did very judiciously
condemn two of the wickedest of the company to be burnt alive with
a slow fire. This sentence extremely terrified the governor's lady
and the Jesuits. The lady used all manner of supplication to
procure a moderation of the terrible sentence; but the judge was
inexorable, and the Jesuits employed all their eloquence in vain
upon this occasion. The governor answered them, ‘That it was
absolutely necessary to make some terrible examples of severity to
frighten the Iroquois; that since these barbarians burnt almost all
the French who had the misfortune to fall into their hands, they
- ↑ Vol. ii. p. 279.
