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Updated: May 15, 2025
"I am not come here to deliberate, but to act," answered he; "it is my duty, as well as an honor to me, to found a colony at Montreal, and I shall go, though every tree were an Iroquois!" On the 16th of May, 1642, the new colonists had scarcely disembarked when they were mustered around Father Vimont, a Jesuit, clothed in his pontifical vestments.
He says that the Iroquois fell upon the Hurons at the outset, and took twenty-three prisoners, killing many others; after which they made the attack at Villemarie. Relation, 1643, 62. Faillon thinks that Vimont was unwilling to publish the treachery of the Hurons, lest the interests of the Huron mission should suffer in consequence.
Accompanied by Father Vimont, the superior of the Jesuits, and Governor Montmagny, Maisonneuve went up the river, and took formal possession of the island on the 15th of October in the name of the 'Society of Our Lady of Montreal. The colonists spent the winter at St Michel, near Sillery, for there was no room for the Montrealers in the buildings at Quebec.
He enjoys the details. Pere Francois enters the colonel's rooms, with grave air. While Vimont frets over his cigar, in the courtyard, the story of Marie Berard is partly told. She will not live through the night. At her bedside, Sisters of Charity twain, tell the beads and watch the flickering pulse of the poor lost girl. The police have done their perfunctory work.
In the following spring, two women of the party also escaped; and, after suffering almost incredible hardships, reached Three Rivers, torn with briers, nearly naked, and in a deplorable state of bodily and mental exhaustion. One of them told her story to Father Buteux, who translated it into French, and gave it to Vimont to be printed in the Relation of 1642.
They starved for weeks together, subsisting on the bark of trees or the thongs of raw hide which formed the net-work of their snow-shoes. The mortality among them was prodigious. "Where, eight years ago," writes Father Vimont, "one would see a hundred wigwams, one now sees scarcely five or six.
"Every one admitted," says Vimont, "that he was eloquent and pathetic. In short, he showed himself an excellent actor, for one who has had no instructor but Nature. I gathered only a few fragments of his speech from the mouth of the interpreter, who gave us but broken portions of it, and did not translate consecutively."
The next night, in the rooms of the miner, the padre and Peyton hold a council of war. An engine waits at the "Gare du Nord." When sunlight gilds once more Notre Dame, Peyton enters the car with a lady, clad in black. A maid, selected by Joseph Vimont, is of the party. "Monsieur Joseph" himself strolls into the depot. He jumps into the cab with the engineer. "Allons!" They are off.
It was not until 1641, or five years after Champlain's death, that Father Vimont gave to the world an account of Nicolet's journey, which, no doubt, stimulated the interest that was felt in the mysterious region of the west.
Vimont offered it in behalf of all the company, and the ship glided into the open sea unharmed. They arrived at Tadoussac on the fifteenth of July; and the nuns ascended to Quebec in a small craft deeply laden with salted codfish, on which, uncooked, they subsisted until the first of August, when they reached their destination.
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