There is reason to believe that he sometimes exercised a humanizing influence over his flock. The war which he helped to kindle was marked by fewer barbarities--fewer tortures, mutilations of the dead, and butcheries of women and infants--than either of the preceding wars. It is fair to assume that this was due in part to him, though it was chiefly the result of an order given, at the outset, by Shute that non-combatants in exposed positions should be sent to places of safety in the older settlements.[266]
[228] In 1700, however, there was an agreement, under the treaty of Ryswick, which extended the English limits as far as the river St. George, a little west of the Penobscot.
[229] See "Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century."
[230] So written by himself in an autograph letter of 18 November, 1712. It is also spelled Rasle, Rasles, Ralle, and, very incorrectly, Rallé, or Rallee.
[231] The above particulars are taken from an inscription on a manuscript map in the library of the Maine Historical Society, made in 1716 by Joseph Heath, one of the principal English settlers on the Kennebec, and for a time commandant of the fort at Brunswick.
[232] When Colonel Westbrook and his men came to Norridgewock in 1722, they found a paper pinned to the church door, containing, among others, the following words, in the handwriting of Rale, meant as a fling at the English invaders: "It [the church] is ill built, because the English don't work well. It is not finished, although five or six Englishmen have wrought here during four years, and the Undertaker [contractor], who is a great Cheat, hath been paid in advance for to finish it." The money came from the Canadian government.
[234] The site of the Indian village is still called Indian Old Point. Norridgewock is the Naurantsouak, or Narantsouak, of the French. For Rale's mission life, see two letters of his, 15 October, 1722, and 12 October, 1722, and a letter of Père La Chasse, Superior of the Missions, 29 October, 1724. These are printed in the _Lettres Édifiantes_, xvii. xxiii.
[235] Père La Chasse, in his eulogy of Rale, says that there was not a language on the continent with which he had not some acquaintance. This is of course absurd. Besides a full knowledge of the Norridgewock Abenaki, he had more or less acquaintance with two other Algonquin languages,--the Ottawa and the Illinois,--and also with the Huron; which is enough for one man.