Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/407

Rh voyager, explorer, administrator, and organizer of the most successful of the whole series of undertakings, fills the eye with the majesty of his form and bearing, and meets the scrutiny of the keenest study of his motives and of his whole career. Poutrincourt and his son Biencourt, who are identified with the hopes and the disasters which gave such a checkered series of fortunes to Acadia, win our regard for their persistency under sharp discomfitures. Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, as fellow-passengers, had abundant time on their long voyage for initiating the contentions to be pursued on the virgin soil. Poutrincourt brought with him to Port Royal a secular priest, La Fleche, who at once set himself to the work of making Christians of the natives, so far as could be done by baptizing them. A famous chief, named Membertou, figures prominently in the early narrative. He appears to have been an astute and wily savage, making himself very pliant and serviceable to the adventurers, and finding his account in it. He is said, when he appears on the scene, to have been of the age of one hundred and ten years, and all that time in the service of the Devil, — reckoning probably by the sum of his sins, rather than by the number of seasons which had toughened him. His end, however, satisfied the standard of his priestly instructors. La Fleche first took him in hand, and with all the pomp and manifestation which the resources of time and circumstance admitted, baptized him and his family of twenty-one members — squaws, children, and grandchildren — on the shore of Port Royal. The historian Lescarbot describes the scene, solemnized by a procession, the Te Deum, and a volley of cannon. The savage group received the names respectively of the members of the royal family, and of some of the high nobles of the empire; and the registry of their baptisms was sent to France. La Fleche seemed, however, to have been very willing, after having in one year diligently performed the rite for more than a hundred of such converts, to take his