Chapter 2

To give you an idea of their preparatory ceremony for a declaration of war, I shall here select for you a recent example, in the one that broke out not long ago between the Micmaquis, and Maricheets. These last had put a cruel affront on the former, the nature of which you will see in the course of the following description: but I shall call the Micmaquis the aggressors, because the first acts of hostility in the field began from them. Those who mean to begin the war, detach a certain number of men to make incursions on the territories of their enemies, to ravage the country, to destroy the game on it, and ruin all the beaver-huts they can find on their rivers and lakes, whether entirely, or only half-built. From this expedition they return laden with game and peltry; upon which the whole nation assembles to feast on the meat, in a manner that has more of the carnivorous brute in it than of the human creature. Whilst they are eating, or rather devouring, all of them, young and old, great and little, engage themselves by the sun, the moon, and the name of their ancestors, to do as much by the enemy-nation.

When they have taken care to bring off with them a live beast, from the quarter in which they have committed their ravage, they cut its throat, drink its blood, and even the boys with their teeth tear the heart and entrails to pieces, which they ravenously devour, giving thereby to understand, that those of the enemies who shall fall into their hands, have no better treatment to expect at them.

After this they bring out _Oorakins_, (bowls of bark) full of that coarse vermillion which is found along the coast of Chibucto, and on the west-side of Acadia (Nova-Scotia) which they moisten with the blood of the animal if any remains, and add water to compleat the dilution. Then the old, as well as the young, smear their faces, belly and back with this curious paint; after which they trim their hair shorter, some of one side of the head, some of the other; some leave only a small tuft on the crown of their head; others cut their hair entirely off on the left or right side of it; some again leave nothing on it but a lock, just on the top of their forehead, and of the breadth of it, that falls back on the nape of the neck. Some of them bore their ears, and pass through the holes thus made in them, the finest fibril-roots of the fir, which they call _Toobee_, and commonly use for thread; but on this occasion serve to string certain small shells. This military masquerade, which they use at once for terror and disguise, being compleated, all the peltry of the beasts killed in the enemy's country, is piled in a heap; the oldest _Sagamo_, or chieftain of the assembly gets up, and asks, "What weather it is? Is the sky clear? Does the sun shine?" On being answered in the affirmative, he orders the young men to carry the pile of peltry to a rising-ground, or eminence, at some little distance from the cabbin, or place of assembly. As this is instantly done, he follows them, and as he walks along begins, and continues his address to the sun in the following terms:

"Be witness, thou great and beautiful luminary, of what we are this day going to do in the face of thy orb! If thou didst disapprove us, thou wouldst, this moment, hide thyself, to avoid affording the light of thy rays to all the actions of this assembly. Thou didst exist of old, and still existeth. Thou remainest for ever as beautiful, as radiant, and as beneficent, as when our first fore fathers beheld thee. Thou wilt always be the same. The father of the day can never fail us, he who makes every thing vegetate, and without whom cold, darkness, and horror, would every where prevail. Thou knowest all the iniquitous procedure of our enemies towards us. What perfidy have they not used, what deceit have they not employed, whilst we had no room to distrust them? There are now more than five, six, seven, eight moons revolved since we left the principal amongst our daughters with them, in order thereby to form the most durable alliance with them, (for, in short, we and they are the same thing as to our being, constitution, and blood); and yet we have seen them look on these girls of the most distinguished rank, _Kayheepidetchque_, as mere playthings for them, an amusement, a pastime put by us into their hands, to afford them a quick and easy consolation, for the fatal blows we had given them in the preceding war. Yet, we had made them sensible, that this supply of our principal maidens was, in order that they should re-people their country more honorably, and to put them under a necessity of conviction, that we were now become sincerely their friends, by delivering to them so sacred a pledge of amity, as our principal blood. Can we then, unmoved, behold them so basely abusing that thorough confidence of ours? Beautiful, all-seeing, all-penetrating luminary! without whose influence the mind of man has neither efficacy nor vigor, thou hast seen to what a pitch that nation (who are however our brothers) has carried its insolence towards our principal maidens. Our resentment would not have been so extreme with respect to girls of more common birth, and the rank of whose fathers had not a right to make such an impression on us. But here we are wounded in a point there is no passing over in silence or unrevenged. Beautiful luminary! who art thyself so regular in thy course, and in the wise distribution thou makest of thy light from morning to evening, wouldst thou have us not imitate thee? And whom can we better imitate? The earth stands in need of thy governing thyself as thou dost towards it. There are certain places, where thy influence does not suffer itself to be felt, because thou dost not judge them worthy of it. But, as for us, it is plain that we are thy children; for we can know no origin but that which thy rays have given us, when first marrying efficaciously, with the earth we inhabit, they impregnated its womb, and caused us to grow out of it like the herbs of the field, and the trees of the forest, of which thou art equally the common father. To imitate thee then, we cannot do better than no longer to countenance or cherish those, who have proved themselves so unworthy thereof. They are no longer, as to us, under a favorable aspect. They shall dearly pay for the wrong they have done us. They have not, it is true, deprived us of the means of hunting for our maintenance and cloathing; they have not cut off the free passage of our canoes, on the lakes and rivers of this country; but they have done worse; they have supposed in us a tameness of sentiments, which does not, nor cannot, exist in us. They have defloured our principal maidens in wantonness, and lightly sent them back to us. This is the just motive which cries out for our vengeance. Sun! be thou favorable to us in this point, as thou art in that of our hunting, when we beseech thee to guide us in quest of our daily support. Be propitious to us, that we may not fail of discovering the ambushes that may be laid for us; that we may not be surprized unawares in our cabbins, or elsewhere; and, finally, that we may not fall into the hands of our enemies. Grant them no chance with us, for they deserve none. Behold the skins of their beasts now a burnt-offering to thee! Accept it, as if the fire-brand I hold in my hands, and now set to the pile, was lighted immediately by thy rays, instead of our domestic fire."

Every one of the assistants, as well men as women, listen attentively to this invocation, with a kind of religious terror, and in a profound silence. But scarce is the pile on a blaze, but the shouts and war-cries begin from all parts. Curses and imprecations are poured forth without mercy or reserve, on the enemy-nation. Every one, that he may succeed in destroying any particular enemy he may have in the nation against which war is declared, vows so many skins or furs to be burnt in the same place in honor of the sun. Then they bring and throw into the fire, the hardest stones they can find of all sizes, which are calcined in it. They take out the properest pieces for their purpose, to be fastened to the end of a stick, made much in the form of a hatchet-handle. They slit it at one end, and fix in the cleft any fragment of those burnt stones, that will best fit it, which they further secure, by binding it tightly round with the strongest _Toobee_, or fibrils of fir-root above-mentioned; and then make use of it, as of a hatchet, not so much for cutting of wood, as for splitting the skull of the enemy, when they can surprize him. They form also other instruments of war; such as long poles, one of which is armed with bone of elk, made pointed like a small-sword, and edge of both sides, in order to reach the enemy at a distance, when he is obliged to take to the woods. The arrows are made at the same time, pointed at the end with a sharp bone. The wood of which these arrows are made, as well as the bows, must have been dried at the mysterious fire, and even the guts of which the strings are made. But you are here to observe, I am speaking of an incident that happened some years ago; for, generally speaking, they are now better provided with arms, and iron, by the Europeans supplying them, for their chace, in favor of their dealings with them for their peltry. But to return to my narration.

Whilst the fire is still burning, the women come like so many furies, with more than bacchanalian madness, making the most hideous howlings, and dancing without any order, round the fire. Then all their apparent rage turns of a sudden against the men. They threaten them, that if they do not supply them with scalps, they will hold them very cheap, and look on them as greatly inferior to themselves; that they will deny themselves to their most lawful pleasures; that their daughters shall be given to none but such as have signalized themselves by some military feat; that, in short, they will themselves find means to be revenged of them, which cannot but be easy to do on cowards.

The men, at this, begin to parley with one another, and order the women to withdraw, telling them, that they shall be satisfied; and that, in a little time, they may expect to have prisoners brought to them, to do what they will with them.

The next thing they agree on is to send a couple of messengers, in the nature of heralds at arms, with their hatchets, quivers, bows, and arrows, to declare war against the nation by whom they conceive themselves aggrieved. These go directly to the village where the bulk of the nation resides, observing a sullen silence by the way, without speaking to any that may meet them. When they draw near the village, they give the earth several strokes with their hatchets, as a signal of commencing hostilities in form; and to confirm it the more, they shoot two of their best arrows at the village, and retire with the utmost expedition. The war is now kindled in good earnest, and it behoves each party to stand well on its guard. The heralds, after this, return to make a report of what they have done; and to prove their having been at the place appointed, they do not fail of bringing away with them some particular marks of that spot of the country. Then it is, that the inhabitants of each nation begin to think seriously, whether they shall maintain their ground by staying in their village, and fortifying it in their manner, or look out for a place of greater safety, or go directly in quest of the enemy. Upon these questions they assemble, deliberate, and hold endless consultations, though withal not uncurious ones: for it is on these occasions, that those of the greatest sagacity and eloquence display all their talents, and make themselves distinguished. One of their most common stratagems, when there were reasons for not attacking one another, or coming to a battle directly, was for one side to make as if they had renounced all thoughts of acting offensively. A party of those who made this feint of renunciation, would disperse itself in a wood, observing to keep near the borders of it; when, if any stragglers of the enemy's appeared, some one would counterfeit to the life the particular cry of that animal, in the imitation of which he most excelled; and this childish decoy would, however, often succeed, in drawing in the young men of the opposite party into their ambushes.

Sometimes the scheme was to examine what particular spot lay so, that the enemies must, in all necessity, pass through it, to hunt, or provide bark for making their canoes. It was commonly in these passes, or defiles, that the bloodiest encounters or engagements happened, when whole nations have been known to destroy one another, with such an exterminating rage on both sides, that few have been left alive on either; and to say the truth, they were, generally speaking, mere cannibals. It was rarely the case that they did not devour some limbs, at least, of the prisoners they made upon one another, after torturing them to death in the most cruel and shocking manner: but they never failed of drinking their blood like water; it is now, some time, that our Micmakis especially are no longer in the taste of exercising such acts of barbarity. I have, yet, lately myself seen amongst them some remains of that spirit of ferocity; some tendencies and approaches to those inhumanities; but they are nothing in comparison to what they used to be, and seem every day wearing out. The religion to which we have brought them over, and our remonstrances have greatly contributed to soften that savage temper, and atrocious vindictiveness that heretofore reigned amongst them. But remember, Sir, that as to this point I am now only speaking, upon my own knowlege, of the Micmakis and Mariquects, who, though different in language, have the same customs and manners, and are of the same way of thinking and acting.

But to arrive at any tolerable degree of conjecture, whence these people derive their origin own myself at a loss: possibly some light might be got into it, by discovering whether there was any affinity or not between their language, and that of the Orientalists, as the Chinese or Tartars. In the mean time, the abundance of words in this language surprized, and continues to surprize me every day the deeper I get into it. Every thing is proper in it; nothing borrowed, as amongst us. Here are no auxiliary verbs. The prepositions are in great number. This it is that gives great ease, fluency, and richness to the expression of whatever you require, when you are once master enough to join them to the verbs. In all their absolute verbs they have a dual number. What we call the imperfect, perfect, and preter-perfect tenses of the indicative mood, admits, as with us, of varied inflexions of the terminations to distinguish the person; but the difference of the three tenses is express, for the preter-perfect by the preposition _Keetch_; for the preter-pluperfect by _Keetch Keeweeh_: the imperfect is again distinguished from them by having no preposition at all.

They have no feminine termination, either for the verbs or nouns. This greatly facilitates to me my composition of songs and hymns for them, especially as their prose itself naturally runs into poetry, from the frequency of their tropes and metaphors; and into rhime, from their nouns being susceptible of the same termination, as that of the words in the verbs which express the different persons. In speaking of persons absent, the words change their termination, as well in the nouns as in the verbs.

They have two distinctions of style; the one noble, or elevated, for grave and important subjects, the other ignoble, or trivial, for familiar or vulgar ones. But this distinction is not so much with them, as with us, marked by a difference of words, but of terminations. Thus, when they are treating of solemn, or weighty matters, they terminate the verb and the noun by another inflexion, than what is used for trivial or common conversation.

I do not know, whether I explain clearly enough to you this so material a point of their elocution; but it makes itself clearly distinguished, when once one comes to understand the language, in which it supplies the place of the most pathetic emphasis, though even that they do not want, nor great expression in their gestures and looks. All their conjugations are regular and distinct.

Yet, with all these advantages of language, the nation itself is extreamly ignorant as to what concerns itself, or its origin, and their traditions are very confused and defective. They know nothing of the first peopling of their country, of which they imagine themselves the Aborigines. They often talk of their ancestors, but have nothing to say of them that is not vague or general. According to them, they were all great hunters, great wood-rangers, expert managers of canoes, intrepid warriors, that took to wives as many as they could maintain by hunting. They had too a custom amongst them, that if a woman grew pregnant whilst she was sucking a child, they obliged her to use means for procuring an abortion, in favor of the first-come, who they supposed would otherwise be defrauded of his due nourishment. Most of them also value themselves on being descended from their Jugglers, who are a sort of men that pretend to foretel futurity by a thousand ridiculous contorsions and grimaces, and by frightful and long-winded howlings.

The great secret of these Jugglers consists in having a great _Oorakin_ full of water, from any river in which it was known there were beaver-huts. Then he takes a certain number of circular turns round this Oorakin, as it stands on the ground, pronouncing all the time with a low voice, a kind of gibberish of broken words, unintelligible to the assistants, and most probably so to himself, but which those, on whom he means to impose, believe very efficacious. After this he draws near to the bowl, and bending very low, or rather lying over it, looks at himself in it as in a glass. If he sees the water in the least muddy, or unsettled, he recovers his erect posture, and begins his rounds again, till he finds the water as clear as he could wish it for his purpose, and then he pronounces over it his magic words. If after having repeated them twice or thrice, he does not find the question proposed to him resolved by this inspection of the water, nor the wonders he wants operated by it, he says with a loud voice and a grave tone, that the _Manitoo_, or _Miewndoo_, (the great spirit) or genius, which, according to them, has all knowledge of future events, would not declare himself till every one of the assistants should have told him (the Juggler) in the ear what were his actual thoughts, or greatest secret. [A Romish missionary must, with a very bad grace, blame the Jugglers, for what himself makes such a point of religion in his _auricular confession_. Even the appellation of _Juggler_ is not amiss applicable to those of their craft, considering all their tricks and mummery not a whit superior to those of these poor savages, in the eyes of common-sense. Who does not know, that the low-burlesque word of _Hocus-pocus_, is an humorous corruption of their _Hoc est corpus meum_, by virtue of which, they make a _God_ out of a vile wafer, and think it finely solved, by calling it a _mystery_, which, by the way is but another name for _nonsense_. Is there any thing amongst the savages half so absurd or so impious?] To this purpose he gets up, laments, and bitterly inveighs against the bad dispositions of those of the assistants, whose fault it was, that the effects of his art were obstructed. Then going round the company, he obliges them to whisper him in the ear, whatever held the first place in their minds; and the simplicity of the greater number is such, as to make them reveal to him what it would be more prudent to conceal. By these means it is, that these artful Jugglers renders themselves formidable to the common people, and by getting into the secrets of most of the families of the nation, acquire a hank over them. Some, indeed, of the most sensible see through this pitiful artifice, and look on the Jugglers in their proper light of cheats, quacks, and tyrants; but out of fear of their established influence over the bulk of the nation, they dare not oppose its swallowing their impostures, or its regarding all their miserable answers as so many oracles. When the Juggler in exercise, has collected all that he can draw from the inmost recesses of the minds of the assistants, he replaces himself, as before, over the mysterious bowl of water, and now knows what he has to say. Then, after twice or thrice laying his face close to the surface of the water, and having as often made his evocations in uncouth, unintelligible words, he turns his face to his audience, sometimes he will say, "I can only give a half-answer upon such an article; there is an obstacle yet unremoved in the way, before I can obtain an entire solution, and that is, there are some present here who are in such and such a case. That I may succeed in what is asked of me, and that interests the whole nation, I appoint that person, without my knowing, as yet, who it is, to meet me at such an hour of the night. I name no place of assignation but will let him know by a signal of lighted fire, where he may come to me, and suffer himself to be conducted wherever I shall carry him. The _Manitoo_ orders me to spare his reputation, and not expose him; for if there is any harm in it to him, there is also harm to me."

Thus it is the Juggler has the art of imposing on these simple credulous creatures, and even often succeeds by it in his divinations. Sometimes he does not need all this ceremonial. He pretends to foretell off-hand, and actually does so, when he is already prepared by his knowledge, cunning, or natural penetration. His divinations chiefly turn on the expedience of peace with one nation, or of war with another; upon matches between families, upon the long life of some, or the short life of others; how such and such persons came by their deaths, violently or naturally; whether the wife of some great _Sagamo_ has been true to his bed or not; who it could be that killed any particular persons found dead of their wounds in the woods, or on the coast. Sometimes they pretend it's the deed of the _Manitoo_, for reasons to them unknown: this last incident strikes the people with a religious awe. But what the Jugglers are chiefly consulted upon, and what gives them the greatest credit, is to know whether the chace of such a particular species of beasts should be undertaken; at what season, or on which side of the country; how best may be discovered the designs of any nation with which they are at war; or at what time such or such persons shall return from their journey. The Juggler pretends to see all this, and more, in his bowl of water: divination by coffee-grounds is a trifle to it. He is also applied to, to know whether a sick person shall recover or die of his illness. But what I have here told you of the procedure of these Jugglers, you are to understand only of the times that preceded the introduction of Christianity amongst these people, or of those parts where it is not yet received: for these practices are no longer suffered where we have any influence.