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By the fifteenth belt, Kiotsaton declared that the Iroquois had always wished to send home Jogues and Bressani to their friends, and had meant to do so; but that Jogues was stolen from them by the Dutch, and they had given Bressani to them because he desired it. "If he had but been patient," added the ambassador, "I would have brought him back myself. Now I know not what has befallen him.
Le Jeune, Massé, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Ragueneau, Le Dablon, Jogues, Gamier, Raymbault, Péron, Moyne, Allouez, Druilletes, Chaumonot, Ménard, Bressani, Daniel, Chabanel, and a hundred others, they soon formed that legion whose works of courage and devotion stand forth so prominently in the early annals of New France.
They ventured upon it, and pushed forward all that day and all the following night, shivering and famished, to find refuge in the towns of the Tobacco Nation. Here, when they arrived, they spread a universal panic. Ragueneau, Bressani, and their companions waited in suspense at Sainte Marie.
The next missionary to reach the Iroquois country was Father Joseph Bressani, an Italian priest who had been attracted to the Canadian mission-field through reading the Relations of the missionaries to Huronia. On April 27, 1644, with six Hurons and a French boy twelve years old, he set out from Three Rivers.
His scouts had also been alarmed by discovering the footprints of Ragueneau's Indians; and for some time the two parties stood on their guard, each taking the other for an enemy. When at length they discovered their mistake, they met with embraces and rejoicing. Bressani and his Frenchmen had come too late.
Then, under a burning sun, they crossed to the spot on which the town of Sorel now stands at the mouth of the river Richelieu, where they encamped. The first is a long letter, written in Latin, by Jogues, to the Father Provincial at Paris. There is a French translation in Martin's Bressani, and an English translation, by Mr. Shea, in the New York Hist. Coll. of 1857.
He took little or no interest in the news from France, which, at intervals of from one to three years, found its way to the Huron towns. His companion Bressani says, that he would walk thirty or forty miles in the hottest summer day, to baptize some dying Indian, when the country was infested by the enemy.
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