Lamy of Santa Fe (5 page)

In a day or two Machebeuf heard from his sister at home that their father was inconsolably chagrined that his son should have left home without taking leave.

“Very dear Papa,” he wrote at once, “let me assure you that it was not through indifference or lack of consideration for you, but in reality through obedience to the Superior of the Seminary, who enjoined upon me the most inviolable secrecy. In the face of all the longing which I had to tell you goodbye, he insisted that the interview would be too painful for both of us.… The sacrifice was great for me, but my course was marked out and I had to hold to it.

When Bishop Purcell arrived in Paris from Bordeaux, he learned that one of his recruits was in disgrace at home, and wrote on his behalf.

“Dear Sir,” he addressed the elder Machebeuf, “my heart feels fully the sorrow that the departure of your dear son for the missions of America has caused you,” and went on to speak of a father's love which on occasion must include sacrifice. Begging him to forgive his son, the bishop offered an august consolation.

“It was in this manner,” he wrote, “that the great Apostle of the Indias, St Francis Xavier, passed the house of his parents without saluting them, to go to a barbarous land much farther away than ours,” and he closed by assuring the baker of Riom that he would love his son for him, who would pray for him and render him blessed on earth and in heaven by the souls who would be saved by his ministry. Then, “pray for him, and for me,” concluded Purcell. Full forgiveness came from Riom in early July, along with a gift of five hundred francs to the young Father Machebeuf, who reported that the bishop was delighted. It would be possible to go to America with a lighter heart.

Purcell was a large-natured man with whom Lamy and his new followers were able to establish lifelong confidence and affection. Born in Ireland in 1800, he emigrated to the United States in 1818, where he began his theological studies, completing them and receiving ordination in Paris in 1826. At thirty-three he was made bishop of Cincinnati, and when he joined Lamy and the others in the rue du Bac, he was thirty-nine years old, a well-fleshed man with dark expressive eyes under black brows, an amiable mouth, and a strong chin.

There was much to organize for the voyage westward. The party was to consist of fifteen people, including old Bishop Flaget, who was returning to America for the last time. In addition to five priests (four of whom were to become bishops), three nuns were emigrating. Purcell made a hurried trip to London, and from there would proceed to Dieppe, where Machebeuf was instructed to join him for various duties. On a Thursday morning Machebeuf left the rue du Bac to reserve his seat in the Dieppe coach and attend to his passport.

Lamy did not accompany him on the errand. Suddenly, during the little while that Machebeuf was absent arranging for his ticket, Lamy
collapsed, “deprived of all his strength,” evidently on the verge of falling seriously ill. On his return from his brief errand, Machebeuf was astonished at the change in Lamy, put him to bed at once, and sent for the seminary doctor, who questioned the patient extensively and concluded that there was nothing critical to be concerned about—it was only a curious weak spell. But Lamy's fever kept rising, and Machebeuf remembered a letter he had had a few days before from a fellow priest in Clermont who told how Lamy was “always ill,” had been bled twice, and treated fifteen times with leeches on the abdomen. Behind that serene control, that lamb-like gentleness, and within his square peasant frame, Lamy's tendency to nervous response sometimes appeared in moments of irrevocable commitment.

Privately, Machebeuf feared Lamy might not be well enough to sail with the mission party on 8 July, and only hoped that if this were so he might follow with another party sailing ten or eleven days later. Hard as it was to leave his friend ill in bed, Machebeuf must go to meet Purcell. After all, he said in practicality, as he put Lamy in the care of others, he had already reserved his coach seat. When he met Purcell at Dieppe, he could describe how affected the bishop was by the news of Lamy's collapse.

But there was much to do—the bishop had tasks in the neighborhood, and Dieppe was a port where Machebeuf had his first glimpse of the sea, and ships, and above all a steamship—a sort of amazing vessel which, in addition to sails, had a tall chimney to carry away smoke. It was a beautiful ship, he said, handsomely decorated with a green interior, and a chocolate-colored exterior with gilt-work. But Lamy was in his thought, and a week or so later hurrying back to Paris without the bishop, who was to proceed to Le Havre where they would all embark, he was relieved and amazed to find Lamy happily “promenading after supper,” talking about him, as it happened, with the remaining colleagues who had arrived from Auvergne to join the expedition—Fathers Rappe and De Goesbriand. With them, Lamy had spent recent days in seeing the sights of Paris. He was well enough now to make the Atlantic crossing.

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America

B
Y 7
J
ULY
1839 they were at Le Havre, waiting to sail on the following day. Purcell was there already. Sailing day, Monday the eighth, was stormy, and the boarding was postponed until eight o'clock the next morning. In the deeply land-locked harbor, masts and spars made a web of fine lines like bare trees against the sky. The sail packet
Sylvie de Grasse
was at her dock. Her captain, an affable master from Bordeaux, knew Purcell, who as a seminarian fifteen years earlier had crossed to France with him in the same ship.

The captain now oversaw the boarding of his complement of passengers—the ship would be full—and at nine o'clock, as the deck-hands sang their capstan song under a fine sky, while a crowd watched from the quayside, and a blessing was given from the pier, the voyage began. The
Sylvie de Grasse
made her way down bay, past the great stone fortress, moving so slowly (the wind was set against her) that a steam tug was summoned to help her out of the narrow harbor entrance. Presently the wind changed, the tug cast off, and the wooden ship leaned and made for the open sea under her own sail, though still so slowly that not until night was falling did the voyagers lose sight of land “and then,” said one, as distance and darkness engulfed France, “we began to get acquainted with the other passengers.”

There were about sixty, mostly Protestants, in that part of the ship where the bishop's party were cabined. They included young men and women returning to the United States after studying in Paris, and solid businessmen emigrating to establish themselves in America. In the steerage were emigrant Germans—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish. They were all crowded into one open space separated from the crew's quarters by a partition. There they slept, cooked, passed the time. Their fare—150 francs—did not include food. They brought their own. The ship provided only wood and water. The air was so foul in the steerage that a visitor was forced away in a hurry—though he noted that all the Germans seemed healthy enough.

Comforts were greater for Purcell and his people. The captain seated them at his own table, to honor their calling and to spare them the
company of ordinary passengers, most of whom appeared to be wanting in manners. The captain's guests had “everything of the best which one might find at a Parisian hotel”—fresh mutton, fowl, imported wines, oranges in abundance, bread baked fresh daily, milk, butter; and potatoes with every meal, a serving which the missioners enjoyed most of all. The chef was a Negro, “very clever at his profession.” His supplies included enough fresh fruit and vegetables for the first eight days of the voyage, which was expected to take four or five weeks. Below decks, in addition to storerooms for provisions, were pens for sheep and cows.

The
Sylvie de Grasse
presented unexpected style. Mahogany panelling, with pilasters whose bases and capitals were finished in gold leaf, lined the dining saloon, the ladies' saloon, and the sleeping cabins. The staterooms were only six feet square, and though ordinarily they accommodated two passengers, the missioners were assigned six to a room, in three levels of two bunks each. With Lamy, Machebeuf, and their Auvergnat companions, a Bavarian Franciscan was quartered. The stateroom looked like a “fruitstand with its many shelves.” If she was typical of the ships of her time, she was under two hundred feet in length, and of about a thousand tons gross weight—a three-masted, full-rigged veteran of the North Atlantic run.

Several of the party felt the sea at first and spent their days in their bunks. Lamy was among them—his seasickness lasted three weeks. Another missioner was resigned to die until Machebeuf took him up on deck, where he rapidly recovered. The marvel of the voyage was old Bishop Flaget, who kept everyone in spirits with his nimble gaiety and his edifying example of long daily devotions. He was always the first one every morning to say his orisons in the little deckhouse. Even when a heavy timber rolled loose across the deck and struck the old man in the leg he dismissed the pain with a word. Machebeuf, too, was in danger one day while studying English on deck—Lamy and the rest also worked on the new language they would need—when a piece of rigging broke aloft, a heavy iron-bound block fell nearby and a thick rope, falling forty feet, struck Machebeuf's leg, which swelled and gave pain for two days. A passenger who saw the accident said, “a few feet closer, and Machebeuf's mission would have ended.”

On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, Low Masses were quietly said by the two bishops and the Bavarian friar—these in place of the traditional ten o'clock High Mass which Purcell decided not to sing out of recognition of the views of the surrounding Protestants, who did not hold with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and who would have thought the Catholics absurdly deranged in their practices. But that evening the travelling clergy privately sang the litany of the Virgin
Mary and other holy canticles as the ship leaned her way on westward.

Sunrise and sunset at sea were the great events of the day. Imaginations worked to find celestial mountains and castles in the clouds, and flocks of sheep, bands of great horses, parades of soldiers; and then the light would change and there would remain only sea and sky, day on day, for forty-three days.

But on the forty-third day, they heard the captain cry out, “Land, land!” and all strained to see. Those without spy-glasses saw nothing at first, not having the eyes of mariners; but when at last they saw Long Island, in the evening of 20 August, they rejoiced in the sight of houses, farms, forts, woods, lighthouses, telegraph pylons, and knew that by the next morning they would disembark at the port of New York after a voyage of forty-four days.

As they came up the bay, which was “magnificent,” they began to see the spires of the city. At the quarantine station in the Narrows, the
Sylvie de Grasse
anchored offshore. A steam lighter came to take passengers off—all but the steerage Germans, who must remain on board for two days to fulfill quarantine requirements—and brought them to the docks of South street, where the bowsprits of moored ships extended like a lattice roof above the clamorous traffic on the cobblestones below.

Purcell and his party, all in good health, were conducted across town by two friends from Cincinnati to pay a call upon Bishop Dubois of New York. After more than six weeks of inaction at sea, the travellers felt animation and purpose. They would leave the very next day on their journey inland. Purcell was not one to waste time, and there were still three hundred leagues to go until they should come to Cincinnati, nineteen days later. Their first duty on the inland journey was to pay respects to Archbishop Eccleston at Baltimore.

Going by canal, they found themselves in a cabined flatboat which resembled Noah's ark in a child's drawing. The barge was drawn by horse teams on the tow paths, the movement was at the pace of a horse's walk, and the passengers from France had their first view of farther America as it went slowly past the narrow windows of the cabin. The barges of the day combined flourishes with discomforts. Some of them contained small musical organs on which itinerant “professors” played concerts. In 1842 Charles Dickens travelled in a barge in whose common cabin men and women were separated only by a drawn curtain. The sleeping bunks were let down from the wall, were sixteen inches wide “exactly,” and had to be vacated soon after daybreak to serve as seating benches. Dickens was obliged to wash in dirty canal water poured into a tin basin which was chained to the wall for the use of all passengers, and to dry himself must use the
single roller towel provided for all. If the weather was mild, passengers rode on top of the cabin, and on moonlit nights, passing through hills or gorges—for the canal boats went along by day and night—saw how the wilderness scenery held every gleam and shadow of dreamlike strangeness, in the manner of romantic painting.

At Baltimore, the party transferred to stage coaches pulled by four horses at a fast sustained trot. There were three ranks of seats within, the sides of the coach were open except in rain when leather curtains were buttoned to wooden window frames, and the coach rocked on unimpeded. The coach was slung on leather straps instead of springs, and many occupants found the motion distressing.

Heading for Wheeling [West Virginia] the missioners crossed the Alleghenies and at a cost of one dollar for every sixteen miles followed the rude roads through continuous forests and woods, with only an occasional village to reassure them with the sight of boulder and log houses by day, and a lighted window or two by night. At Wheeling they took passage on the steam packet down-bound from Pittsburgh, which would carry them with many twists and turns of the Ohio River in a generally southwestward course to Cincinnati.

As they voyaged downriver, Purcell prepared the newcomers for what they would see at the journey's end. Cincinnati was a cathedral city—but like none they had ever seen at home. It was embraced by a great curve of the Ohio River, whose banks rose away to the north with only a few streets, and on those, only scattered buildings. The waterfront where the steamers tied up presented a row of shops, chandleries, and warehouses. Here and there the hillsides on which the city spread showed a few sizable houses, some of brick or masonry, but most of wood. There was much open land, with trees, within the town. The first church—a barn-like affair—had been built of logs outside the town limits because of a local ordinance prohibiting the erection of a Catholic church within the town proper. Bishop Flaget had built it, for Cincinnati had then belonged to his see of Bardstown, Kentucky. He had later managed to have the ordinance repealed and the log church brought into the town on rollers and resituated there.