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A Martyred Missionary's Eyewitness Account

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

The Rev. Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit priest from France, was murdered by Indians in 1646. He was the first Catholic missionary to work in what is now New York State, and he was the first to be martyred.

Before he was killed, Jogues wrote a brief account of his capture by upstate Indians, his release to Dutch authorities in New Amsterdam, where between August, 1642, and November, 1643, he witnessed the atrocities of the Dutch-Indian wars.

In 1642, six years after his arrival in Canada, he was captured by Mohawks somewhere in northern New York. A year later, he escaped and fled to Albany, where Dutch authorities put him on a boat and sent him downriver to New Amsterdam. There, he was put on a boat to France.

His keen eye during the 10 months he lived at New Amsterdam before sailing home to France provide readers today with an extraordinary look at a troubled time and place. He begins by describing the layout of the Dutch fort at New Amsterdam, saying there were 400 people living on the island ``of different sects and nations,'' who spoke ``eighteen different languages.'' They were Calvinists, Catholics, English Puritans, Lutherans and Anabaptists.

Of the bloodshed that spilled across the Lower Hudson River Valley and into western Long Island, Jogues wrote:

Some nations near the sea having murdered some Hollanders of the most distant settlement, the Hollanders killed 150 Indians, men, woman and children ... And in the beginning of winter the grass being low and some snow on the ground they pursued them with six hundred men, keeping two hundred always on the move and constantly relieving each other, so that the Indians, pent up in a large island and finding it impossible to escape, on account of women and children, were cut to pieces to the number of sixteen hundred, woman and children included. This obliged the rest of the Indians to make peace, which still continues. This occurred in 1643 and 1644.

In 1646, Jogues was back in Montreal. In the fall of that year, he was working as a missionary in Mohawk country, near Lake George, where he had earlier lived as a captive. There, according to one account, the Indians blamed Jogues for the failure of their crops, and they killed him with an ax. Jogues' life and death are still remembered today in many Catholic schools. He was canonized in 1930.