Isaac Jogues was born at Orléans, France, January 10, 1607. His first schooling was at Rouen and he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Paris in his seventeenth year. Having finished his studies and period of teaching we find him in his twenty-ninth year reaching Canada in 1636 in the same vessel as Champlain's successor, Montmagny. Two or three weeks later, that same October, Jogues began his missionary work, joining a flotilla of Huron canoes and sailing 900 miles over dangerous rivers and lakes, skirting rapids and precipices and making many toilsome "portages" through dense forests, pools and marshes, to the great Lake Huron which was known as "Fresh Water Sea."
[Illustration: JOGUES, THE JESUIT MISSIONARY]
Such was Jogues' first experience of missionary life. Living on Indian corn and water, sleeping on rocks and in the woods, battling day after day against a rapid current, dragging heavy burdens over the long portages, a part of the time with a sick boy on his shoulder--till he staggered through the triple stockade of the Indian town of Ihonitiria and fell into the arms of de Brébeuf and his Jesuit companions. In this new mission field one of the first works entrusted to his practical sagacity, which stood his fellow missionaries in good stead, was the construction of Fort Ste. Marie, whose ruins, discovered in 1859, testify to the solidity of the outworks. His first apostolic work away from Fort Ste. Marie was among the Petuns, or Tobacco Indians. In September, 1641, he went with the Jesuit Raimbault to found a mission among the Ojibways or Chippewas on the upper reaches of Lake Huron at a place called by the missionaries Sault Ste. Marie, today a great centre of commerce. They were the first white men to stand on the shores of Lake Superior.
We next find him back at Georgian Bay. Supplies were being exhausted and Jogues offered to go to Quebec, a thousand miles off, for them. This done, on the way back in the first week of August, 1642, his party was surprised by the hostile Mohawks and captured. While being taken up country he was most brutally tortured, beaten by sticks, clubs and knives, and his wounds torn open by the long nails of the Indians. The joints of his fingers were gnawed off or burned off at intervals. On the arrival of the party at Ossernenon, on the north bank of the Mohawk, a captive Christian woman was compelled, under threat of death, to saw off with a jagged shell the thumb of the priest. But he was not killed, as so many of his party were.