Few passages of history are more striking than those which record the efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians. Full as they are of dramatic and philosophic interest, bearing strongly on the political destinies of America, and closely involved with the history of its native population, it is wonderful that they have been left so long in obscurity.
So, the title to this book sounds ABSOLUTELY RIVETING, right? Like, oh, boy, the Jesuits?! In the seventeenth century?! Man, what a page-turner this thing is going to be, right? It sounds about as exciting as an academic dissertation on paint drying. So, let me blow your mind. This book is amazing. It’s focused on the first generations of Jesuit missionaries who came to the New World specifically intending to convert the Native Americans. And it is a non-stop barrage of bizarre characters engaging in action-packed adventures of conflict and survival.
I should briefly mention that this book is problematic in some ways. In the first book of this series, Parkman really didn’t deal with the indigenous population in a particularly focused way. But the Native American population of these regions is essentially half the story of this book, right? Half the players are the Jesuit missionaries, but their entire mission is to convert the Native Americans, so the other half of the characters come from the various Indian tribes the Jesuits contact. So, the book opens with a really long section dedicated entirely to the Native American culture and, in particular, their vision of spirituality. So, yes, sections of this book are racially problematic. And Parkman was, for his time, somewhat progressive; he was an abolitionist and a supporter of the Union during the Civil War. But still, he’s a white guy writing about Native Americans in the 1860s and he’s using source material written by other white guys in the 1600s . . . sooooo . . . yeah, things are not super great. But Parkman at least views Native Americans as human beings and he’s willing to portray them as capable of intelligence and bravery and even kindness. Of course, he also portrays the violent cruelties they practiced on a regular basis, but, well, look, a lot of that stuff is true and, as a Native American myself, I don’t want the Natives of history to be exonerated of the nasty stuff they were up to just because we’re know acknowledging that the white people of history were also up to nasty stuff. So, everybody’s mileage will vary here; I personally didn’t find the problematic passages to really detract from the book that much; you take it with a grain of salt when you need to and you move on.
But I found this book overall incredibly compelling and entertaining. Parkman’s kind of fascinated by these first couple of groups of Jesuits because they had to be quite unique in order to give up their lives of relative ease in France in order to travel to these incredibly harsh areas in order to risk their lives (and, quite often, lose them) for purely spiritual reasons. And these guys are pretty wacky. And, of course, this is a huge culture clash narrative because the Natives don’t know what to make of these guys and their new religion, just as the Jesuits are woefully unprepared for the Native cultures. This book is often quite funny for these reasons. It’s also full of wars and kidnappings and heroic sacrifices and nature at its most extreme and escapes and all sorts of things. The most compelling story for my money, and this connects back to what I was saying above about Parkman’s depictions of Natives, is the story of a Native American woman taken prisoner by an enemy tribe. She suffers horrible tortures, including, though Parkman has to dance around this a bit, sexual abuse. But she’s able to escape, actually take revenge by killing some of her captors and then flee into the wilderness in the dead of a Canadian winter, COMPLETELY NAKED, and then she strikes off for civilization with the enemy tribe hot on her heels the entire time. Parkman flat out says at the end of this story that basically you couldn’t find a white man on the continent who could have survived what this Native American woman went through. Anyway, I enjoyed the first book in this series just fine; but this one is next level. Do I suspect that some of these stories are perhaps a bit exaggerated? Yeah, I do, but who cares? This is history at its most exciting and adventurous. 4 stars.
tl;dr – behind a dry title is a book of epic adventures, wars and survival; racially problematic at times, but a cracking read, history as page-turner. 4 stars.