At length, their friendship began to abate; their visits grew less
frequent, and during December had wholly ceased, when a calamity fell
upon the French.
A malignant scurvy broke out among them. Man after man went down before
the hideous disease, till twenty-five were dead, and only three or four
were left in health. The sound were too few to attend the sick, and the
wretched sufferers lay in helpless despair, dreaming of the sun and the
vines of France. The ground, hard as flint, defied their feeble efforts,
and, unable to bury their dead, they hid them in snow-drifts. Cartier
appealed to the saints; but they turned a deaf ear. Then he nailed
against a tree an image of the Virgin, and on a Sunday summoned forth
his woe-begone followers, who, haggard, reeling, bloated with their
maladies, moved in procession to the spot, and, kneeling in the snow,
sang litanies and psalms of David. That day died Philippe Rougemont, of
Amboise, aged twenty-two years. The Holy Virgin deigned no other
response.
There was fear that the Indians, learning their misery, might finish the
work that scurvy had begun. None of them, therefore, were allowed to
approach the fort; and when a party of savages lingered within hearing,
Cartier forced his invalid garrison to beat with sticks and stones
against the walls, that their dangerous neighbors, deluded by the
clatter, might think them engaged in hard labor.
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