Scott Berthelette
By the end of the seventeenth century, King Louis XIV of France, who styled himself Le Roi Soleil (“the Sun King”), commanded one of the largest and best-trained galley fleets in the Mediterranean Sea, with more than forty vessels manned by thousands of officers, soldiers, and rowers. Galleys were long, low vessels propelled primarily by oars, though they could also employ sails when conditions permitted. Used for warfare, trade, and transportation since antiquity, they remained an important component of Mediterranean naval power throughout the early modern period. As a branch of the French navy, the Sun King’s galleys defended coastlines, protected commerce, and projected royal power throughout the Mediterranean and the wider Catholic world.
Yet beneath this display of royal grandeur lay a system of forced labour that drew prisoners from across Europe, North Africa, and eventually even North America.[1] Father Jean-François Bion, a French galley chaplain, was so horrified by the “Sufferings and Misery the Wretches in the Galleys labour under” that he eventually abandoned France and Catholicism. After fleeing to Geneva and converting to Calvinism, he settled in London and published a firsthand account of the torments endured aboard the galleys. Bion warned his readers that the “barbarities committed in those horrid machines” surpassed all that they could possibly imagine.[2]
The galériens (galley rowers) who laboured in these “horrid machines” came from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds and spoke a multitude of languages. French criminals and Huguenots rowed alongside enslaved Muslims captured in Mediterranean warfare and European prisoners of war, all bound together in the confined and coercive world of the galley. Among these thousands of men forced to row Louis XIV’s galleys in the 1680s were thirty-six Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) prisoners from North America.[3] The Haudenosaunee – an Indigenous confederacy comprised of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), Onyota’a:ka (Oneida), Onöñda’gega’ (Onondaga), Gayogo̱hó:nǫ’ (Cayuga), and Onöndowága (Seneca) nations – had been at war with the French in North America for nearly a century.
The ordeal that brought the Haudenosaunee to Louis XIV’s Mediterranean galleys began in the summer of 1687. In preparation for an invasion of Iroquoia (the Haudenosaunee homeland in present-day New York State), Governor Jacques-René de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville ordered the seizure of hundreds of Haudenosaunee men, women, and children in the Saint-Lawrence Valley and along the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Under the false pretences of a feast intended to facilitate peace negotiations, the French sprang a trap on unsuspecting Haudenosaunee delegates, who were imprisoned at Fort Frontenac (present-day Kingston, Ontario). Thirty-six Haudenosaunee men were transported down the Saint-Lawrence River to Quebec and then unwillingly shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to France. Passing through the ports of Rochefort, Bordeaux, and Marseille, they were forced into servitude on the Sun King’s Mediterranean galleys for almost two years.
The conditions of the galleys took a severe toll on the health of the Haudenosaunee. By the time the survivors were released, nearly two-thirds were dead. Their return to North America was not an act of French compassion. It followed sustained Haudenosaunee military and diplomatic pressure against New France, pressure so intense that French officials concluded it was more expedient to repatriate the captives than to prolong the war. That thirteen of the original thirty-six prisoners survived and eventually returned home stands as a remarkable testament to Indigenous resistance, resilience, and survival. Outnumbered and surrounded by soldiers and a civilian population that feared and despised them as enemies of France’s overseas colonists, the Haudenosaunee adapted to an overwhelmingly hostile environment. In doing so, they drew upon their familiarity with Catholicism and elements of Christianity as they struggled to survive captivity in Louis XIV’s France.
Figure 1. The Haudenosaunee galériens spent most of the period between December 1687 and May 1689 at the arsenal des galères in Marseille. This late seventeenth-century map depicts thirty-two royal galleys moored in the port and shows the fortifications of Fort Saint-Nicolas and Fort Saint-Jean guarding the harbour entrance. “Place que les 32 galères du Roy occupent dans le port de Marseille avec les Baraques des Chiouomes, et l’Explication des Batiment qui remplisent le reste du Port,” dessin anonyme, fin XVIIe-début XVIIIe siècle. Service historique de la Défense, Vincennes.
On 25 October 1687, a ship carrying the Haudenosaunee prisoners arrived at the French Atlantic port of Rochefort. These thirty-six men stood on French soil, in the metropolitan heart of the empire with which they had been at war for nearly a century. Although many Haudenosaunee had travelled to colonial centres such as Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and Albany, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe was exceedingly rare. Now in the homeland of their enemy, they faced an unfamiliar and perilous environment. No one spoke their language. They could not flee to safety. They were outnumbered and surrounded by soldiers and a hostile civilian population. The publication and dissemination of the Jesuit Relations earlier in the century had conditioned many French people to fear and despise the Haudenosaunee as enemies of France’s overseas colonists.[4]
When the Haudenosaunee arrived at Marseille in late 1687, much of the surviving documentation concerning them focused on their dietary and spiritual well-being. In a series of letters, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, the Minister of the Marine, instructed Michel Bégon, the Intendant of the Galleys at Marseille, on how the newly arrived captives were to be treated. French officials already envisioned using the prisoners as leverage in future negotiations with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Governor Denonville had therefore requested that they be treated well and kept in a location from which they could be quickly recalled to Canada if circumstances required.[5]
On 18 December 1687, Minister Seignelay wrote to Bégon: “His Majesty wishes that the Iroquois are not chained provided you are certain they are thus secure and will not escape, and that they are not to be shaved… but with regard to bread, His Majesty did not think fit to increase the bread ration [above that] of a forçat [convict] which is considered strong enough to support these Iroquois.”[6] Whether in port or at sea, galley rowers subsisted on a meagre diet of bread and beans seasoned with olive oil and salt.[7] Within weeks of their arrival, however, French officials increased the Haudenosaunee’s food allotment and made further provisions for them. These accommodations reflected the Crown’s desire to preserve the captives for possible use in future negotiations with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.[8]
Responsibility for the spiritual care of the galériens fell to the Lazarists (officially known as the Congregation of the Mission founded by St. Vincent de Paul in 1625). In Marseille, the Lazarist superior Yves Lorance (or Laurence), corresponded with Minister Seignelay regarding the religious instruction of the Haudenosaunee prisoners. Like Protestant and Muslim captives, the Haudenosaunee were immersed in a highly regimented Catholic environment in which attendance at Mass, catechism, and religious instruction formed part of daily life aboard the galleys. Whether in port or at sea, Catholic prayers, sermons, and sacraments were inescapable to the enslaved rowers of Louis XIV’s fleet.[9]
Yves Lorance and Minister Seignelay were pleased to learn that some of the Haudenosaunee captives had been baptized and were already familiar with Christian doctrine through decades of exposure to Jesuit and Sulpician missionaries in North America. A letter from Minister Seignelay to Lorance attests: “I was very glad to learn, from your letter of the first of this month, that the Iroquois have some tincture of our religion and that they indicate that they have been baptized; you will have less trouble giving them the instructions you deem necessary. I write to Monsieur Begon not to put them in chains, or shave them, so that there will be no objection [to your work] … But it is necessary that you observe that your zeal and your charity do not go too far and do not treat them too favorably.”[10] The likelihood of flight was low, as the Haudenosaunee could neither speak the language nor easily find safety in an unfamiliar world. Marseille also offered one important advantage for the Haudenosaunee: there they could communicate with Joseph Le Moyne de Sérigny, a Canadian-born interpreter and Troupes de la Marine officer who spoke their language and had been assigned to look after them. Despite Seignelay’s warning not to treat them too favourably, the Haudenosaunee captives enjoyed several accommodations unavailable to many other galériens. They received increased rations, were not required to shave their heads, had access to an interpreter, did not have to sleep chained together, and were given time to acclimatize to Marseille before being put to work.
Figure 2. Galley slaves embarking at the port of Genoa. Head shaving was both a mark of infamy and a measure intended to prevent lice outbreaks. Unlike many galériens, the Haudenosaunee captives appear to have been exempted from this practice. Alessandro Magnasco, “Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the port of Genoa,” c. 1720. Oil on canvas, 116 × 143cm. Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts.
Such concessions have led some historians to characterize the treatment the Haudenosaunee received as relatively lenient. Canadian historian W.J. Eccles, for instance, argued that “the conditions on the galleys were not as bad as commonly imagined,” and suggested that, compared to Indigenous practices toward captives, the Haudenosaunee “were treated like pampered guests.”[11] Similarly, Québécois historian Jean Leclerc dismissed a later complaint by Denonville that the captives had been forced to march barefoot from Rochefort to Marseille, contending that men “well accustomed to walking barefoot in the forests of America” could hardly consider this mistreatment.[12]Leclerc’s interpretation, however, is both ethnocentric and reductive, as it overlooks the fact that Indigenous peoples of North America regularly wore footwear designed to protect their feet across varied terrains and conditions.[13] Such interpretations reveal the extent to which earlier historians minimized Indigenous suffering and relied upon reductive assumptions about Indigenous life.
These assessments risk obscuring the broader reality of their situation. Although the Haudenosaunee received certain accommodations unavailable to many other galériens, they remained prisoners in a profoundly foreign environment, transported across the Atlantic to a land far removed from their homes and kin. Their captivity was neither mild nor inconsequential: twenty-three of the thirty-six captives died in France, making their ordeal the greatest known single loss of Haudenosaunee life on French soil. While it is important not to exaggerate the severity of their treatment, neither should these men be remembered as “pampered guests.” The measures taken to preserve them reflected French political calculations as much as any impulse toward humanitarian concern.
What kinds of conversations took place between the Haudenosaunee captives, their interpreter Sérigny, the Lazarist superior, and Intendant Bégon to secure these concessions in the galleys? Although unrecorded, such negotiations must have occurred. One factor that may have aided the Haudenosaunee was their professed familiarity with Catholicism. Even in the absence of an interpreter, the captives could likely convey their knowledge of Christianity through gesture and performance. Another Haudenosaunee visitor to France, a generation earlier, gives some indication of how this could have been accomplished. When Honatteniate, who the French called “Le Berger” (“The Shepherd”), accompanied a Jesuit priest to France in the fall of 1649, he was able to nonverbally communicate his Christian devotion to a French audience at a house for recent converts in Paris.[14] Honatteniate’s hostess, the Marquise d’Ost, described his behaviour: “he never failed to be present at all the exercises of the house, and especially the prayers, where it was evident that he had been instructed. From the very first time he entered the Chapel, he took off his hat, and knelt down, took a rosary from his pocket, and with it made the sign of the Cross upon himself without any instruction.”[15] “I am deaf and mute in France,” Honatteniate had admitted to his Jesuit guardian, “I have left my tongue and my ears in my country.”[16] Despite this admission to the only person in France he could verbally communicate with, the Haudenosaunee sojourner in France made his devotion clear to his hosts who spoke only French. Also unable to speak French, the Haudenosaunee galériens in Marseille may have employed strategies similar to those used by Honatteniate. By making the sign of the cross, clasping their hands in prayer, kneeling for worship, and perhaps even fingering homemade rosaries, they could demonstrate to their captors that they too possessed access to Christian prayer and power.
Such performances could also have had tangible consequences. Some of the Haudenosaunee appear to have demonstrated their devotion by receiving the Eucharist during Mass, a development that may have led French officials to reconsider whether these men should be regarded as enslaved non-Christians. Minister Seignelay expressed satisfaction in hearing that “the Iroquois frequented the Sacraments with the devotion which they owed.”[17] Their demonstrated knowledge of Catholicism may have enabled the Haudenosaunee galériens to occupy a liminal position within the Galley Corps, where religious identity helped structure how prisoners were treated. Enslavement aboard the Sun King’s galleys was typically associated with infidels – non-believers and those who rejected Christianity – and usually referred to Turks, Moors, and West Africans. French criminals, deserters, Protestants, and European prisoners of war belonged to a separate category of forced labourers. Throughout their imprisonment in Marseille, however, French officials remained uncertain how best to categorize the Haudenosaunee prisoners.
Figure 3. Many of the Haudenosaunee captives had been exposed to Catholicism long before arriving in France through Jesuit and Sulpician missionary activity in North America. This drawing of the Sacrament of Confirmation comes from Jesuit Claude Chauchetière’s account of life at the Christian mission community of Kahnawà:ke. Archives départementales de la Gironde, F 10, Narration de la mission du Sault depuis sa fondation jusqu’en 1686.
For many Indigenous peoples, religious pluralism was the watchword. There was no inherent contradiction in praying to a Christian God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints alongside traditional ceremonial and spiritual beliefs. Even in Catholic-dominated spaces, like the mission communities of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, religious coexistence and pluralism persisted. Living in a dangerous and changing world had compelled many Indigenous peoples to seek alternative sources of spiritual power by listening to missionaries, learning the gospel, and praying to new spirits. Indigenous peoples experimented with the power of Christianity to protect themselves from disease, to withstand their enemies, and to enhance their control over people and events. Haudenosaunee participation in baptism, communion, and other Catholic sacraments was therefore not necessarily insincere. Rather, these practices may also have represented a strategy for accessing spiritual power during one of the darkest periods of their lives.[18]
Some explored and experimented with the power of Catholicism, which became a potential source of spiritual power that might protect them from deadly diseases and help them procure axes, knives, guns, powder, and shot from French newcomers to defend their villages against the instability and violence of the seventeenth century. Some Haudenosaunee had fully converted, others had not, but still dabbled in Catholic prayers, rituals, and material culture, like crucifix pendants and rosary beads, ornaments of sacred or magical associations that had parallels in Haudenosaunee society. Those who had converted and moved to places like Kahnawà:ke derived the full benefit from Christianity’s heavenly force through prayers, Mass, confession, and fasting, yet those same Haudenosaunee catechists might still turn to more traditional shamanistic healing practices, curing rites, and dream divination.[19] While the Christian residents of Kahnawà:ke may have been assiduous in their devotion to Christ, they did not necessarily abandon all their Indigenous practices for approaching the sacred and other-than-human.
In the homeland of their erstwhile enemy, the Haudenosaunee captives did what they could to endure a hostile and unforgiving environment. In a kingdom that tolerated little beyond hardline Catholicism, they appear to have outwardly conformed by participating in prayer, ritual, and expected forms of behaviour. The unrecorded conversations, negotiations, and accommodations that took place between the galériens, chaplains, and officials can only be inferred. What is clear is that these interactions yielded tangible benefits: exemptions from head-shaving and sleeping chained together, supplemental rations, the provision of an interpreter, and even a brief period to acclimatize to the port city. These concessions should not obscure the brutality of their captivity. Twenty-three Haudenosaunee died during their time in French hands. Nevertheless, the strategies adopted by the Haudenosaunee captives may have helped preserve lives under these extraordinary circumstances. That thirteen of the original thirty-six prisoners eventually returned to North America stands as a remarkable testament to Indigenous resilience, adaptation, and survival in the seventeenth century.
Bibliography
Archival Sources
Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence, France
Série C11A : Correspondance générale : lettres, mémoires, etc., envoyés en France par les administrateurs du Canada et autres personnes
Archives nationales de France (ANF), Paris, France
Archives de la Marine
MAR/B/6 – Galères
MAR/B/6/1 à MAR/B/6/76. Ordres et dépêches. 1564-1748
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Bamford, Paul W. Fighting Ships and Prisons: The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis XIV. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.
Bion, Jean-François. An account of the torments the French Protestants endure aboard the galleys. London: Printed for J. Downing in Bartholomew-Close, 1712.
Busseau, Laurent. De l’Iroquoisie à Marseille : des galériens iroquois du Roi-Soleil passant par Rochefort (1687-1689). Rochefort: Publication du Comité Rochefortais de Documentation Historique de la Marine, 2020.
Carayon, Céline. Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
Dickason, Olive Patricia. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984.
Eccles, W.J. Frontenac: The Courtier Governor. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1959.
Eccles, W.J. “Denonville et les galériens iroquois.” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Vol. 14, No. 03 (1960): 408-429.
Fisher, Linford D. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Havard, Gilles. Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut 1660-1715. Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2003.
Leavelle, Tracy Neal. The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Leclerc, Jean. “Denonville et ses captifs iroquois.” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Vol. 14, No. 04 (1961): 545-558.
Leclerc, Jean. “Denonville et ses captifs iroquois (suite et fin).” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, Vol. 15, No. 01 (1961): 41-58.
Leclerc, Jean. Le marquis de Denonville : gouverneur de la Nouvelle-France, 1685-1689. Montréal: Fides, 1976.
Marteilhe, Jean. The Memoirs of a Protestant, Condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion, Written by Himself. Translated by Oliver Goldsmith. England: J.M. Dent & Co.; Dodd, Mead & Co., 1895.
Martin, Meredith and Gillian Weiss. The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2022.
Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Rushforth, Brett. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
True, Micah. Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, editor. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Exploration of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791; the original French, Latin, and Italian texts, with English translations and notes. 73 Volumes. Cleveland: The Burrows Company, 1896-1901. (JRAD)
van Deusen, Nancy E. “Indigenous War Captives and Mobility-Oriented Punishments: An Atlantic-Mediterranean world perspective.” Atlantic Studies, Vol. 21, No. 03 (2024): 342-371.
Vigié, Marc. Les galériens du roi: 1661-1715. Paris: Fayard, 1985.
Weaver, Jace. The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Witgen, Michael. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Zysberg, André. Les galériens : Vies et destins de 60 000 forçats sur les galères de France 1680-1748. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1987.
Zysberg, André. Marseille au temps du Roi-Soleil : la ville, les galères, l’arsenal, 1660 à 1715. Marseille: J. Laffitte, 2007.
Biography
Dr. Scott Berthelette is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, whose research focuses on New France, Euro-Indigenous Relations, and the early modern Atlantic World. His first book, Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire: French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed, was published with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022. It was awarded the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society for the best book in French colonial history. Scott has also published his research findings in the Canadian Historical Review, Ethnohistory, American Indian Quarterly, and Early American Studies. Dr. Berthelette is Red River Métis (“Michif”) and a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation, the federally recognized self-government of the Métis people of Manitoba.
[1] For the Mediterranean galleys of Louis XIV, see Zysberg, Les galériens; Zysberg, Marseille au temps du Roi-Soleil; Vigié, Les galériens du roi; Bamford, Fighting Ships and Prisons; Martin and Weiss, The Sun King at Sea. For firsthand accounts, see Marteilhe, The Memoirs of a Protestant; Bion, An account of the torments the French Protestants endure aboard the galleys.
[2] Bion, An account of the torments the French Protestants endure aboard the galleys, 4-5.
[3] A few scholars have written about (or at least referenced) the Haudenosaunee capture and enslavement in Louis XIV’s Mediterranean galleys. See for example Eccles, “Denonville et les galériens iroquois”; Leclerc, “Denonville et ses captifs iroquois”; Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 156-157, 170-171; Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 146-151; Weaver, The Red Atlantic, 62-65; van Deusen, “Indigenous War Captives,” 353-358; Busseau, De l’Iroquoise à Marseille.
[4] True, Masters and Students, 104-112; Greer, Mohawk Saint, 81-82.
[5] Leclerc, Le marquis de Denonville, 194-195.
[6] ANF, MAR/B/6/19 Ordres et dépêches aux Galères (1687) A M. Begon, 18 décembre 1687.
[7] Zysberg, Les galériens, 126-134; Zysberg, Marseille au temps du Roi-Soleil, 125; Vigié, Les galériens du roi, 187-188.
[8] ANF, MAR/B/6/20 Ordres et dépêches aux Galères (1688), Au Sr. Lorance, 15 janvier 1688.
[9] Bamford, Fighting Ships and Prisons, 3, 114-16; Martin and Weiss, The Sun King at Sea, 103, 135.
[10] ANF, MAR/B/6/19 Ordres et dépêches aux Galères (1687), Au Sr. Lorance, 18 decembre 1687.
[11] Eccles, Frontenac, 186. Historian Paul Bamford likewise concluded that the Haudenosaunee galériens “were treated comparatively well.” Bamford, Fighting Ships and Prisons, 164-165.
[12] For Denonville’s complaint about the Haudenosaunee prisoners being forced to march barefoot, see ANOM, COL C11A 10/fol.70, Mémoire de Denonville à Seignelay, 10 août 1688; Leclerc, Le marquis de Denonville, 195; Leclerc, “Denonville et ses captifs iroquois (suite et fin),” 54.
[13] For an Indigenous man who horribly injured his feet by attempting to walk barefoot from Le Havre to Dieppe, see JRAD, 36: 32-34.
[14] For a summary of Honatteniate’s journey, see Dickason, The Myth of the Savage, 221-222. French colonial historian Céline Carayon has argued that sign-language, pantomime, and other nonverbal means of communication were crucial to establishing French-Indigenous intercultural relations and contributed to the emergence of cultural hybridity in the French Atlantic World. Carayon, Eloquence Embodied.
[15] JRAD, 36: 40.
[16] JRAD, 36: 34.
[17] ANF, MAR/B/6/20 Ordres et dépêches aux Galères (1688), Au Sr. Lorance, 17 septembre 1688.
[18] For Indigenous religious pluralism and reception of Christianity, see Witgen, An Infinity of Nations, 129-131; Leavelle, Catholic Calumet, 127, 136-137, 144, 183-184; Havard, Empire et métissages, 276-280, 483-494; Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening, 5, 8, 86, 108.
[19] Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 115-116; Greer, Mohawk Saint, 50-58, 104-113.