Yet during these years, while convents and hospitals were founded, while brave gentlemen and cultured women gave up their lives to their country and their faith, while the bells were ever calling their congregations to mass and vespers, the country was defended by a mere handful of inhabitants, huddled together at Quebec, at Three Rivers, and at the little settlement of Ville-Marie. The canoes of the Iroquois were constantly passing on the lakes and rivers of Canada, from Georgian Bay to the Richelieu, and bands of those terrible foes of the French and their Indian allies were ever lurking in the woods that came so dangerously close to the white settlements and the Indian villages.
In 1642, Father Isaac Jogues was returning from the missions on Lake Huron, with Couture, an interpreter, and Goupil, a young medical attendant--both donnés or lay followers of the Jesuits. They were in the company of a number of Hurons who were bringing furs to the traders on the St. Lawrence, when the Iroquois surprised them at the western end of Lake St. Peter's. The prisoners were taken by the Richelieu to the Mohawk country and Father Jogues was the first Frenchman to pass through Lake George[1]--with its picturesque hills and islets--which in a subsequent journey he named Lac du Saint-Sacrament, because he reached it on the eve of Corpus Christi. The Frenchmen were carried from village to village of the Iroquois, and { 138} tortured with all the cruel ingenuity usual in such cases. Goupil's thumb was cut off with a clam shell, as one way of prolonging pain. At night the prisoners were stretched on their backs with their ankles and wrists bound to stakes. Couture was adopted into the tribe, and was found useful in later years as an intermediary between the French and Mohawks. Goupil was murdered and his body tossed into a stream rushing down a steep ravine. Despite his sufferings Father Jogues never desisted from his efforts to baptise children and administer the rites of his Church to the tortured prisoners. On one occasion he performed the sacred office for a dying Huron with some rain or dewdrops which were still clinging to an ear of green corn which had been thrown to him for food. After indescribable misery, he was taken to Fort Orange, where the Dutch helped him to escape to France, but he returned to Canada in the following year.