Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/408

388 homeward voyage on the appearance of the Jesuit Fathers Biard and Masse, who, as the first of their Order to set foot in New France, arrived after four months of peril on the sea, at an anchorage at Port Royal, on the feast of Pentecost, May 22, 1611. They both wrote home their first report, June 10, 1611. Their letters are given in Carayon's “Première Mission, etc.” Gilbert Du Thet, the third of the Fathers, joined his brethren in 1612, and soon went back; but returned here again the next year with a fourth missionary, Du Quentin. Biard applied himself with great zeal and industry to master the language of the savages, that he might improve upon the method of La Fleche; for he had resolved that while he baptized as many infants as possible, he would delay the rite for adults till he had offered them something in the form of Christian instruction. It seems that he was sadly trifled with by a waggish or a scoffing Indian, upon whose aid he relied as an interpreter. Putting himself in the place of a pupil before his naked and presumptuous instructor, he received in good faith the Indian terms offered to him as equivalents for such sacred words as Faith, Hope, Charity, Sacraments, Baptism, Eucharist, Trinity, Incarnation, etc. Whether or not the Indian vocabulary had equivalent terms, is a question that can hardly be raised to palliate the trick put upon the good Father by his swarthy teacher, who gave him as definitions some of the foulest and filthiest words that ever came from the tongues of the natives. As these were introduced by the Father into his catechism, they were of course received with shouts of derision, when he repeated them in his teachings in the wigwams. The same trick was afterwards played upon Le Jeune, one of the missionaries to the Hurons, by his Algonquin teacher, who, as a famous sorcerer, was his rival. It may deserve mention that the Apostle Eliot does not appear ever to have been made the subject of such trifling, which would have introduced foul blots into his Indian Bible.