The Most Remarkable Books: The Jesuit Relations

"Some say to us : ' Do you think you are going to succeed in overturning the Country?' Thus do they style the change from their Pagan and Barbarous life to one that is civilized and Christian. We reply that we are not so presumptuous, but that what is impossible to man is not only possible but easy to God."

-- St. Jean de Brebeuf, Ihonateria, July 16^th, 1636; as reported in the Relation of 1636 by Fr. Paul Le Jeune,Volume X, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents.

It was a pilgrimage of sorts, the first trip I made to the Wisconsin Historical Society to find a copy of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Although the gray monolithic building looms over a well-traveled campus mall directly across from the Memorial Library and I’d spent seven years at the UW-Madison, I had never set foot inside of the place. I wound my way up and around the stairway to the second floor, not really sure where I was going, but my instinct for books was unerring. A simple doorway awaited. I always expected more fanfare entering a library, trumpets sounding perhaps, and a majestic unfolding like the gates of Heaven. The modest room beyond was pretentious only in its high ceiling and its view to an adjoining space twice its size endlessly rowed with card catalogues. This was before computerization finally found the Society.

I eagerly filled out the form to apply for a library card. Yes, I was a resident of Wisconsin, yes, yes, yes, I was everything they needed me to be to get a gloriously free library card and turn me loose into those hallowed stacks. And so I was off through another unpretentious entry into a world of books reeking of history, dust, old leather and countless lives of those who had gone before.

They were not hard to find, only up one level, dusty and neglected, and yet I thought I’d found the grail of books. They were old as the grail, or so it seemed, because the paper was yellow and brittle and the bindings were loose with age. I had found an original Burrows Brothers edition a good one hundred years old. Only seven hundred and fifty were ever published. How was it that just anyone – and that is all that I was, just anyone – could come and handle these precious works? I know now that even reprinted editions of this seventy-three volume set sell for thousands of dollars.

For several years thereafter I trundled volumes back home over three hundred miles north, photocopied them, and shipped them carefully packed back to Madison. I wanted them in any form, even photocopied and fastened together in cheap business folders. I hated the idea that I was handling them, flattening them a little, loosening them of flecks of paper and binding no matter how hard I tried to be careful. They would not last forever. But I wanted them.

The Jesuit Relations were, and still are, a curious obsession, I know. I think it all began when I somehow discovered that Allouez Bay on the shore of Superior, Wisconsin, was named for a Jesuit priest, Claude Allouez, who had come to this country over three hundred years earlier. Although four-lane highways now connect Superior with the rest of the world and thousand foot ore carriers navigate Saint Louis Bay, this is still rugged country. It seemed astonishing to me that white men had come here long before the Declaration of Independence had been signed in Philadelphia, even more astonishing that some of them had been priests. They must have been extraordinary people.

My initial sally to the public library led me to a novel by Brian Moore entitled Black Robe. I read it eagerly but not so eagerly as the introductory pages where Moore acknowledged his reliance upon The Jesuits in Seventeenth Century North America by Francis Parkman and Parkman’s reliance in turn upon the Jesuit Relations. I had no idea then what the Relations were much less where to find them, but during another pilgrimage to Madison, scouring shelves at The University Book Store, I found a Library of America edition of Francis Parkman, which included The Jesuits in Seventeenth Century North America. I could scarcely believe my good fortune.

Although I had never before heard of Francis Parkman, I not only discovered him to be one of the pre-eminent American historians, I found him to be a writer of astonishing ability. Few historians share his gift for infusing history with all the drama and suspense of the greatest novels. His seven-volume work on France and England in the New World has often been compared to Gibbons’ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Parkman’s repeated references to the Relations only whetted my appetite for the real thing. Thereafter I located a volume of excerpts from the Relations in the local public library, but it was not enough. My search continued. It was some time later that I located that copy of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, edited and translated by another remarkable historian, Reuben Gold Thwaites, at the State Historical Society. My laborious copying of the volumes, of which I’d reproduced about half, ended with the happy discovery of an Adobe Digital Edition at Quintin Publications. The Relations can also be found online at Creighton University and the Library and Archives Canada.

None of this quite explains my fascination with, and reverence for, these remarkable books…or should I say for the writing that came to be the substance of them. If I find it amazing that priests came to North America during the seventeenth century, traveling a thousand miles inland to the very shores I see every day, I find it even more extraordinary that they had transported pens, paper and ink to scratch out the daily martyrdom that was to be their lot in a dangerous and forbidding land.

They were literate, educated men who gave up comfortable lives back home in France for the cause of saving the souls of “savages” under the most difficult of conditions. Aside from the innate suspicions and even open hostility from those they would save, there was the initial barrier of language. Most acquired a facility with the Algonquin and Huron languages that were to be their primary tools of conversion. Beyond the barrier of language, the resistance of native belief systems to Christianity was even more daunting. All this was to be carried out under some of the harshest, most deplorable living conditions imaginable. Time, space and the opportunity to write were in extremely limited supply. Rueben Gold Thwaites described it in the Historical Introduction to his seventy-three volume translation this way:

“Many of the Relations were written in Indian camps, amid a chaos of distractions. Insects innumerable tormented the journalists, they were immersed in scenes of squalor and degradation, overcome by fatigue and lack of proper sustenance, often suffering from wounds and disease, maltreated in a hundred ways by hosts who, at times, might more properly be called jailers ; and not seldom had savage superstition risen to such a height, that to be seen making a memorandum was certain to arouse the ferocious enmity of the band. It is not surprising that the composition of these journals of the Jesuits is sometimes crude ; the wonder is, that they could be written at all…. We gain from his pages a vivid picture of life in the primeval forest, as he lived it; we seem to see him upon his long canoe journeys, squatted amidst his dusky fellows, working his passage at the paddles, and carrying cargoes upon the portage trail; we see him the butt and scorn of the savage camp, sometimes deserted in the heart of the wilderness, and obliged to wait for another flotilla, or to make his way alone as best he can. Arrived at last, at his journey’s end, we often find him vainly seeking for shelter in the squalid huts of the natives, with every man’s hand against him, but his own heart open to them all.”

The Indians regarded the very act of writing as some kind of black magic, and their suspicions of the priests’ motives often placed their lives in danger, especially when epidemics of small pox took many lives for which the priests were sometimes held responsible.

You don’t necessarily have to buy into the Jesuit missionaries’ austere Catholic belief system to appreciate the depth of their faith, courage, discipline and dedication to duty. Some of them were tortured and martyred. More will be said of them in future posts to The Silent Life. The writing of the Relations was one of those duties with which they were officially charged, and most certainly a good part of their purpose was to raise money for their cause. Yet, if they are not always completely objective in observation, few serious doubts have been raised about their accuracy.

Since few of us have the time or inclination to read a full seventy-three volume set of writings, a great deal of which is matter-of-fact reportage, two other books can be commended to you. The Jesuit Relations And Allied Documents: Travels And Explorations Of The Jesuit Missionaries In North America 1610-1791, edited by Edna Kenton, with a forward by Mr. Thwaites, is probably the most detailed and complete. A shorter, more selective volume of excerpts is The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (The Bedford Series in History and Culture) by Alan Greer.

If a visual sampling is all you require of this subject, Black Robe was made into an excellent movie of the same name.