man below. The fellow's blundering might have cost Radisson's life; but the youth had not been a captive among crafty Mohawks for nothing. Radisson feigned surprise at the accusation. That quieted the Mohawk suspicions and they were presently deep in the beer pots of the Dutch. Again the soldier spoke, this time in French. It was the first time that Radisson had heard his native tongue for months. He answered in French. At that the soldier emitted shouts of delight, for he, too, was French, and these strangers in an alien land threw their arms about each other like a pair of long-lost brothers with exclamations of joy too great for words.
[Illustration: The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time.]
From that moment Radisson became the lion of Fort Orange. The women dragged him to their houses and forced more dainties on him than he could eat. He was conducted from house to house in triumph, to the amazed delight of the Indians. The Dutch offered to ransom him at any price; but that would have exposed the Dutch settlement to the resentment of the Mohawks and placed Radisson under heavy obligation to people who were the enemies of New France. Besides, his honor was pledged to return to his Indian parents; and it was a long way home to have to sail to Europe and back again to Quebec. Perhaps, too, there was deep in his heart what he did not realize—a rooted love for the wilds that was to follow him all through life. By the devious course of captivity, he had tasted of a new freedom and could not give it up. He declined the offer of the Dutch. In two days he was back among the Mohawks ten times more a hero than he had ever been. Mother and sisters were his slaves.
But between love of the wilds and love of barbarism is a wide difference. He had not been back for two weeks when that glimpse of crude civilization at Orange recalled torturing memories of the French home in Three Rivers. The filthy food, the smoky lodges, the cruelties of the Mohawks, filled him with loathing. The nature of the white man, which had been hidden under the grease and paint of the savage—and in danger of total eclipse—now came upper-most. With Radisson, to think was to act. He determined to escape if it cost him his life.
Taking only a hatchet as if he were going to cut wood, Radisson left the Indian lodge early one morning in the fall of 1653. Once out of sight from the village, he broke into a run, following the trail through the dense forests of the Mohawk Valley toward Fort Orange. On and on he ran, all that day, without pause to rest or eat, without backward glance, with eye ever piercing through the long leafy vistas of the forest on the watch for the fresh-chipped bark of the trees that guided his course, or the narrow indurated path over the spongy mould worn by running warriors. And when night filled the forest with the hoot of owl, and the far, weird cries of wild creatures on the rove, there sped through the aisled columns of star light and shadow, the ghostly figure of the French boy slim, and lithe as a willow, with muscles tense as ironwood, and step silent as the mountain-cat. All that night he ran without a single stop. Chill daybreak found him still staggering on, over rocks slippery with the night frost, over windfall tree on tree in a barricade, through brawling mountain brooks where his moccasins broke the skim of ice at the edge, past rivers where he half waded, half swam. He was now faint from want of food; but fear spurred him on. The morning air was so cold that he found it better to run than rest. By four of the afternoon he came to a clearing in the forest, where was the cabin of a settler. A man was chopping wood. Radisson ascertained that there were no Iroquois in the cabin, and, hiding in it, persuaded the settler to carry a message to Fort Orange, two miles farther on. While he waited Indians passed the cabin, singing and shouting. The settler's wife concealed him behind sacks of wheat and put out all lights. Within an hour came a rescue party from Orange, who conducted him safely to the fort. For three days Radisson hid in Orange, while the Mohawks wandered through the fort, calling him by name.
Gifts of money from the Jesuit, Poncet, and from a Dutch merchant, enabled Radisson to take ship from Orange to New York, and from New York to Europe.
[Illustration: Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in
Holland. This view of Fort Amsterdam on the Manhattan is copied from
an ancient engraving executed in Holland. The fort was erected in 1623
but finished upon the above model by Governor Van Twiller in 1635.]
Père Poncet had been captured by the Mohawks the preceding summer, but had escaped to Orange.[12] Embarking on a small sloop, Radisson sailed down the Hudson to New York, which then consisted of some five hundred houses, with stores, barracks, a stone church, and a dilapidated fort. Central Park was a forest; goats and cows pastured on what is now Wall Street; and to east and west was a howling wilderness of marsh and woods. After a stay of three weeks, Radisson embarked for Amsterdam, which he reached in January, 1654.
[1] Benjamin Sulte in Chronique Trifluvienne.
[2] It was in August of this same year, 1652, that the governor of Three Rivers was slain by the Iroquois. Parkman gives this date, 1653, Garneau, 1651, L'Abbé Tanguay, 1651; Dollier de Casson, 1651, Belmont, 1653. Sulte gives the name of the governor Duplessis-Kerbodot, not Bochart, as given in Parkman.
[3] Dr. Bryce has unearthed the fact that in a petition to the House of Commons, 1698, Radisson sets down his age as sixty-two. This gives the year of his birth as 1636. On the other hand, Sulte has record of a Pierre Radisson registered at Quebec in 1681, aged fifty-one, which would make him slightly older, if it is the same Radisson. Mr. Sulte's explanation is as follows: Sébastien Hayet of St. Malo married Madeline Hénault. Their daughter Marguerite married Chouart, known as Groseillers. Madeline Hénault then married Pierre Esprit Radisson of Paris, whose children were Pierre, our hero, and two daughters.
[4] A despatch from M. Talon in 1666 shows there were 461 families in Three Rivers. State papers from the Minister to M. Frontenac in 1674 show there were only 6705 French in all the colony. Averaging five a family, there must have been 2000 people at Three Rivers. Fear of the Iroquois must have driven the country people inside the fort, so that the population enrolled was larger than the real population of Three Rivers. Sulte gives the normal population of Three Rivers in 1654 as 38 married couples, 13 bachelors, 38 boys, 26 girls—in all not 200.
[5] At first flush, this seems a slip in Radisson's Relation. Where did the Mohawks get their guns? New York Colonial Documents show that between 1640 and 1650 the Dutch at Fort Orange had supplied the Mohawks alone with four hundred guns.
[6] One of many instances of Radisson's accuracy in detail. All tribes have a trick of browning food on hot stones or sand that has been taken from fire. The Assiniboines gained their name from this practice: they were the users of "boiling stones."
[7] I have asked both natives and old fur-traders what combination of sounds in English most closely resembles the Indian war-cry, and they have all given the words that I have quoted. One daughter of a chief factor, who went through a six weeks' siege by hostiles in her father's fort, gave a still more graphic description. She said: "you can imagine the snarls of a pack of furiously vicious dogs saying 'ah-oh' with a whoop, you have it; and you will not forget it!"
[8] This practice was a binding law on many tribes. Catlin relates it of the Mandans, and Hearne of the Chipewyans. The latter considered it a crime to kiss wives and children after a massacre without the bath of purification. Could one know where and when that universal custom of washing blood-guilt arose, one mystery of existence would be unlocked.
[9]
