er be measured
nor judged by civilization. To the French at Onondaga came such a
temptation now. Their priests were busy launching the boats. The
departing soldiers seemed simultaneously to have become conscious of a
very black suggestion. Cooped up against the outer wall in the dead
sleep of torpid gluttony lay the leading warriors of the Iroquois
nation. Were these not the assassins of countless Frenchmen, the
murderers of women, the torturers of children? Had Providence not
placed the treacherous Iroquois in the hands of fifty Frenchmen? If
these warriors were slain, it would be an easy matter to march to the
villages of the Confederacy, kill the old men, and take prisoners the
women. New France would be forever free of her most deadly enemy.
Like the Indians, the white men were trying to justify a wrong under
pretence of good. By chance, word of the conspiracy was carried to the
Jesuits. With all the authority of the church, the priests forbade the
crime. "Their answer was," relates Radisson, "that they were sent to
instruct in the faith of Jesus Christ and not to destroy, and that the
cross must be their sword."

Locking the sally-port, the company--as the Jesuit father
records--"shook the dust of Onondaga from their feet," launched out on
the swift-flowing, dark river and escaped "as the children of Israel
escaped by night from the land of Egypt." They had not gone far
through the darkness before the roar of waters told them of a cataract
ahead. They were four hours carrying baggage and boats over this
_portage_. Sleet beat upon their backs. The rocks were slippery with
glazed ice; and through the rotten, half-thawed snow, the men sank to
mid-waist. Navigation became worse on Lake Ontario; for the wind
tossed the lake like a sea, and ice had whirled against the St.
Lawrence in a jam. On the St. Lawrence, they had to wait for the
current to carry the ice out. At places they cut a passage through the
honeycombed ice with their hatchets, and again they were compelled to
_portage_ over the ice. The water was so high that the rapids were
safely ridden by all the boats but one, which was shipwrecked, and
three of the men were drowned.

They had left Onondaga on the 20th of March, 1658. On the evening of
April 3d they came to Montreal, where they learned that New France had
all winter suffered intolerable insolence from the Iroquois, lest
punishment of the hostiles should endanger the French at Onon