![6 Processing Instruction and Discourse
In other words, “. . . learners are driven to look for the message or
communicative intent in the input” (VanPatten 2004b: 7).
To assert the primacy of meaning in input processing is to take as
the point of departure that learners are primarily motivated to under-
stand messages, be they delivered orally during an interaction or
visually while reading print. If someone is talking to us, we assume
they have something to say that we are meant to understand. Our
task as listeners is to put forward at least an effort, if not our best
effort, to understand the speaker. When we see an advertisement, for
example, and read what it says, we assume that someone has some-
thing to communicate to us about a product, event, or service. There
is a message that we are meant to grasp and we put forth the effort
to do so. Second language learners assume the same thing; there
are messages in what they hear and read and they are meant to put
forward an effort to understand them. “Simply put, P1 states that
learners are driven [emphasis added] to look for the message in the
input (“What is this person saying to me?”) before looking for how
that message is encoded” (VanPatten 1996: 17).
VanPatten derived the Primacy of Meaning Principle from research
and theories in first and second language acquisition. From work on
first language acquisition, he cited Peters’ (1985) operating principle
that guides children during input processing. The principle states
that children pay attention to utterances that have a readily identi-
fiable meaning. For second language acquisition, he cited the work
of Sharwood Smith (1986), who posited the difference between pro-
cessing for communication, that is, meaning, and processing for
acquisition, that is, form.
Research has repeatedly uncovered the varying conditions under
which second language learners successfully make meaning from the
input. Lee (1987), for example, showed that L2 learners of Spanish
can extract the lexical meaning of verbs that are morphologically
marked as subjunctive even though they had never been exposed to
subjunctive forms in the classroom setting. They extracted meaning
as successfully as a group of learners who had already been taught
subjunctive forms. Lee and Rodríguez (1997) compared the effects
of morphosyntactic modifications on passage comprehension. Keeping](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-23-320.jpg)
![VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 15
lexical and grammatical cues to tense. Preferring lexical cues to tense
is connected to learners’ use of content words to make meaning.
“Learners will thus seek out lexical forms of semantic notions in the
input before they seek grammatical forms that encode the same
semantic notions” (VanPatten 2007: 118).
Lee, Cadierno, Glass, and VanPatten (1997) gave two groups of
learners of Spanish different versions of the same passage to listen to.
One version contained lexical temporal adverbs referring to the past
whereas the other version contained no such lexical temporal mark-
ers. In this second version, only the verb final morpheme indicated
tense, for example, admitió “he admitted.” After listening, the learn-
ers performed a tense identification task. The results showed that
the learners who listened to the passage with adverbials identified
correctly more of the temporal references than did the learners who
listened to passages with only verb morphology to mark tense.
Lee (1999) examined the comprehension and input processing
strategies of a small number of learners of Spanish as they performed
a retrospective think aloud. Half the learners read a passage that
contained lexical temporal adverbs whereas the other half read a
version of the passage that did not contain the adverbs. As Lee
(1999: 53) put it, “when subjects have adverbs they use them [to
comprehend temporal reference]. Those in the +adverb condition
only sporadically refer to verb forms.”
Rossomondo (2007) showed a very dramatic difference in tense
assignment due to the presence or absence of lexical temporal mark-
ers. She conducted introspective think aloud protocols on two groups
of learners. One group was reading and introspecting on a passage
that contained Spanish future tense verb forms along with lexical
temporal markers. The other group read and introspected on a
version of the passage that contained only verb forms but no lexical
temporal markers. She found that in the presence of a lexical tem-
poral marker, learners comprehended (i.e., rendered it in the
introspection) the future meaning of the verb form on an average
52 percent of the time; the range of scores per individual verb was
from 0 percent comprehension of the future meaning to 92 percent
comprehension. In the absence of the temporal marker, learners
comprehended the future meaning of the target verbs only .8 percent](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-32-320.jpg)
![VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 19
or opinion. The following two sentences demonstrate the processing
problems learners encounter with subjunctive mood morphology.
Dubito che George sia intelligente.
I doubt that George is intelligent.
So che George e intelligente.
I know that George is intelligent.
The meanings of the verbs dubito and so trigger the forms sia and e,
respectively. Sia and e mean exactly the same thing, is. In other words,
“. . . such [nonmeaningful] formal features of language will be
processed in the input later than those for which true form–meaning
connections can be made” (VanPatten 2007: 120).
P 1e. The Availability of Resources Principle: For learners to
process either redundant meaningful grammatical forms or non-
meaningful forms, the processing of overall sentential meaning
must not drain available processing resources.
It is not impossible for learners to direct their attention to meaning-
ful but redundant grammatical forms or to nonmeaningful gram-
matical forms. As VanPatten (1990) and Bransdorfer (1991) showed
with their simultaneous processing tasks, learners can be directed to
attend to nonmeaningful forms, but at a loss to comprehension.
“Comprehension for learners is initially quite effortful in terms of
cognitive processing and working memory. This has consequences
for what the input processing mechanisms will pay attention to. At
the same time, learners are limited capacity processors and cannot
process and store the same amount of information as native speakers
can during moment-by-moment processing” (VanPatten 2007: 116).
And so, VanPatten proposed the Availability of Resources Principle.
Getting overall sentential meaning cannot be overly effortful if
learners are to process redundant meaningful grammatical forms
or nonmeaningful forms.
Lee (1999) analyzed the comprehension and input processing
strategies of second language learners. He states: “The comprehen-
sion strategies of low comprehenders may circumvent processing](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-36-320.jpg)
![20 Processing Instruction and Discourse
text for form. It is an interesting paradox to consider that learners’
attempts to manage their comprehension has the less than desirable
effect of dislocating from their attention key aspects of the input”
(Lee 1999: 57). Comprehension difficulties can impede processing
forms in the input. In the following example, the target form is the
verb decidió (decided) or more specifically, the –ó morpheme indi-
cating past tense. Learners performed a retrospective think aloud
of a passage that contained eight target items. In the following
think aloud, comprehension was so effortful that the learner miscom-
prehended the temporal and lexical meanings of the target form.
The learner ultimately abandoned the attempt to make meaning.
Text: Hace siete años decidió volver a la universidad para
hacer un Master en leyes.
Translation: Seven years ago, [he, Rubén Blades] decided to
return to university to do a Masters in Law.
Think aloud: Um, for seven years he, seven years old he’s coming
to the university. . .but I’m not sure and seven
sounds awfully young. I would probably just
disregard that sentence. (Lee 1999: 50)
Another example from this research also demonstrates the interplay
between comprehension and input processing. In this example,
the learner initially miscomprehends the verb actuó “he acted” as the
adverb actually. What follows is the learner’s efforts to make the
meaning of the sentence make sense:
Text: En la década pasada, actuó en varias películas, como por
ejemplo, Crossover Dream y The Milagro Beanfield War.
Translation: In the past decade, [he, Rubén Blades] acted in
various films, for example, Crossover Dream and
The Milagro Beanfield War.
Think aloud: So, in the decade past, actually in various films.
I don’t think that’s actually but it looks like actually
so that’s why I guessed that. Um, maybe it’s act. Act
in various films, like the example Crossover Dream
and The Milagro Beanfield War. So that just speaks
of like if you know the context of the paragraph](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-37-320.jpg)
![VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 21
you can follow along and probably guess that, that,
uh, it’s talking about how he worked on the different
[films].
Interestingly, the learners’ second rendering of actuó was “act,” not
“acts” nor “acted.” He uses an uninflected form. Moreover, the learner
assigned no subject even though this is the sixth of eight statements
about Rubén Blades. In this think aloud we can see both the push to
get and make meaning as well as the effortful nature of comprehen-
sion. In his own words the learner tells us he used context to follow
along the meaning and he used guess work. His last statement about
the meaning of the sentence demonstrates that he is aware of the
past temporal framework of the passage he read; he states that
Blades worked on films.
As part of the think aloud procedure, the researcher made inqui-
ries about the target forms, in this sentence actuó. This learner does
make a form–meaning connection with the target, but only after
he is certain about the meaning, with which he works intensively.
The rest of the think aloud protocol now follows:
Researcher: Why did you decide that this word “actuó” does or
doesn’t mean “actually”?
Learner: Um, well, actually wouldn’t be like the word to fit in
there. Well at least to me it wouldn’t because it
wouldn’t make sense to say actually in various films.
Researcher: So what makes more sense to you then?
Learner: Um, he, he acted in various films. And also, we just
learned the past tense last night. And it looks like the
past tense, actuó. I don’t know. Good guess at least.
P 1f. The Sentence Location Principle: Learners tend to process
items in sentence initial position before those in final position and
those in medial position.
Again referring to the availability of processing resources, VanPatten
(2004) proposed the Sentence Location Principle (a principle not
included in the 1996 version). He states: “. . . elements that appear in
certain positions of an utterance are more salient to learners than](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-38-320.jpg)
![VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 29
the targeted object pronoun would differentially affect learners’
accurately assigning agent/subject. He found no difference in
learners’ performance based on the placement of the contextual
information. It is the presence of the contextual information that
helps learners not its placement. In other words, “. . . contextual
information . . . would push [learners] away from interpreting the
targeted clause the wrong way” (VanPatten 2004b: 17).
Summary of P2 and Its Associated Principles
Between 1996 and 2004, researchers gathered more data on the
conditions that favor or attenuate learners’ misassignment of the
first noun as subject so that VanPatten developed a set of associated
principles that delineate various factors that attenuate learners’
misassignment of the first noun. The associated principles are sum-
marized as follows:
P 2a. The Lexical Semantics Principle: Learners may rely on lexical
semantics, where possible, instead of the First Noun Principle
to interpret sentences (VanPatten 2007: 124).
P 2b. The Event Probabilities Principle: Learners may rely on event
probabilities, where possible, instead of the First Noun Princi-
ple to interpret sentences (VanPatten 2007: 123).
P 2c. The Contextual Constraint Principle: Learners may rely less on
the First Noun Principle (or L1 transfer) if preceding context
constrains the possible interpretation of a clause or sentence
(VanPatten 2007: 124).
These principles model “what guides learners’ processing of
linguistic data in the input as they are engaged in comprehension”
(VanPatten 2007: 116). In this section, we have explicated each of
these principles in turn and, in doing so, demonstrated some of the
evidence that supports them. It is important to keep in mind that
learners are doing two things with the language to which they are
exposed and with which they are engaged. They are, firstly, making
meaning and they are, secondly, making form–meaning connections](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-46-320.jpg)
![PERPLEXITY OF
LA SALLE.
[
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Yet he was full of doubt as to what he should do.
Four days after rejoining Beaujeu, he wrote him
the strange request to land the troops, that he
"might fulfil his commission;" that is, that he might set out against
the Spaniards.[291] More than a week passed, a gale had set in, and
nothing was done. Then La Salle wrote again, intimating some doubt
as to whether he was really at one of the mouths of the Mississippi,
and saying that, being sure that he had passed the principal mouth,
he was determined to go back to look for it.[292] Meanwhile,
Beaujeu was in a state of great irritation. The weather was stormy,
and the coast was dangerous. Supplies were scanty; and La Salle's
soldiers, still crowded in the "Joly," were consuming the provisions of
the ship. Beaujeu gave vent to his annoyance, and La Salle retorted
in the same strain.
According to Joutel, he urged the naval commander to sail back in
search of the river; and Beaujeu refused, unless La Salle should give
the soldiers provisions. La Salle, he adds, offered to supply them
with rations for fifteen days; and Beaujeu declared this insufficient.
There is reason, however, to believe that the request was neither
made by the one nor refused by the other so positively as here
appears.
FOOTNOTES:
Lettre (sans nom d'auteur) écrite de St. Domingue, 14 Nov., 1684
(Margry, ii. 492); Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Jean Cavelier sur le
Voyage de 1684. Compare Joutel.
Mémoire de MM. de Saint-Laurens et Bégon (Margry, ii. 499);
Joutel, Journal Historique, 28.
Relation de Henri Joutel (Margry, iii. 98).
Lettre (sans nom d'auteur), 14 Nov., 1684 (Margry, ii.
496).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-56-320.jpg)
![8
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The above particulars are from the memoir of La Salle's brother,
Abbé Cavelier, already cited.
Lettre de Beaujeu au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1684.
Relation de Henri Joutel (Margry, iii. 105).
Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Jean Cavelier.
Lettre de Beaujeu au Ministre, 20 Oct.,
1684.
Letter of Don Luis de Onis to the
Secretary of State (American State
Papers, xii, 27-31).
"La hauteur nous a fait
remarquer ... que ce que nous
avions vu le sixième janvier estoit
en effet la principale entrée de la
rivière que nous cherchions."—Lettre de La Salle au Ministre, 4 Mars, 1687.
Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Cavelier.
"Depuis que nous avions quitté cette rivière qu'il croyoit
infailliblement estre le fleuve Colbert [Mississippi] nous avions fait
environ 45 lieues ou 50 au plus." (Cavelier, Mémoire.) This, taken in
connection with the statement of La Salle that this "principale entrée
de la rivière que nous cherchions" was twenty-five or thirty leagues northeast
from the entrance of the Bay of St. Louis (Matagorda Bay), shows that it can
have been no other than the entrance of Galveston Bay, mistaken by him for
the chief outlet of the Mississippi. It is evident that he imagined Galveston Bay
to form a part of the chain of lagoons from which it is in fact separated. He
speaks of these lagoons as "une espèce de baye fort longue et fort large, dans
laquelle le fleuve Colbert se décharge." He adds that on his descent to the
mouth of the river in 1682 he had been deceived in supposing that this
expanse of salt water, where no shore was in sight, was the open sea. Lettre de
La Salle au Ministre, 4 Mars, 1685. Galveston Bay and the mouth of the
Mississippi differ little in latitude, though separated by about five and a half
degrees of longitude.
Lettre de La Salle à Beaujeu, 23 Jan., 1685 (Margry, ii. 526).
This letter is dated, "De l'emboucheure d'une rivière que je crois
estre une des descharges du Mississipy" (Margry, ii. 528).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-57-320.jpg)
![9
2]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-58-320.jpg)
![CHAPTER XXV.
1685.
LA SALLE IN TEXAS.
A Party of Exploration—Wreck of the "Aimable."—Landing of the
Colonists.—A Forlorn Position.—Indian Neighbors.—Friendly Advances
of Beaujeu: his Departure.—A Fatal Discovery.
Impatience to rid himself of his colleague and to command alone no
doubt had its influence on the judgment of La Salle. He presently
declared that he would land the soldiers, and send them along shore
till they came to the principal outlet of the river. On this, the
engineer Minet took up the word,—expressed his doubts as to
whether the Mississippi discharged itself into the lagoons at all;
represented that even if it did, the soldiers would be exposed to
great risks; and gave as his opinion that all should reimbark and
continue the search in company. The advice was good, but La Salle
resented it as coming from one in whom he recognized no right to
give it. "He treated me," complains the engineer, "as if I were the
meanest of mankind."[293]
He persisted in his purpose, and sent Joutel and Moranget with a
party of soldiers to explore the coast. They made their way
northeastward along the shore of Matagorda Island, till they were
stopped on the third day by what Joutel calls a river, but which was
in fact the entrance of Matagorda Bay. Here they encamped, and
tried to make a raft of drift-wood. "The difficulty was," says Joutel,
"our great number of men, and the few of them who were fit for
anything except eating. As I said before, they had all been caught by
force or surprise, so that our company was like Noah's ark, which
contained animals of all sorts." Before their raft was finished, they](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-59-320.jpg)
![LANDING OF LA
SALLE.
WRECK OF THE
descried to their great joy the ships which had followed them along
the coast.[294]
La Salle landed, and announced that here was
the western mouth of the Mississippi, and the place
to which the King had sent him. He said further
that he would land all his men, and bring the "Aimable" and the
"Belle" to the safe harborage within. Beaujeu remonstrated, alleging
the shallowness of the water and the force of the currents; but his
remonstrance was vain.[295]
The Bay of St. Louis, now Matagorda Bay, forms a broad and
sheltered harbor, accessible from the sea by a narrow passage,
obstructed by sand-bars and by the small island now called Pelican
Island. Boats were sent to sound and buoy out the channel, and this
was successfully accomplished on the sixteenth of February. The
"Aimable" was ordered to enter; and, on the twentieth, she weighed
anchor. La Salle was on shore watching her. A party of men, at a
little distance, were cutting down a tree to make a canoe. Suddenly
some of them ran towards him with terrified faces, crying out that
they had been set upon by a troop of Indians, who had seized their
companions and carried them off. La Salle ordered those about him
to take their arms, and at once set out in pursuit. He overtook the
Indians, and opened a parley with them; but when he wished to
reclaim his men, he discovered that they had been led away during
the conference to the Indian camp, a league and a half distant.
Among them was one of his lieutenants, the young Marquis de la
Sablonnière. He was deeply vexed, for the moment was critical; but
the men must be recovered, and he led his followers in haste
towards the camp. Yet he could not refrain from turning a moment
to watch the "Aimable," as she neared the shoals; and he remarked
with deep anxiety to Joutel, who was with him, that if she held that
course she would soon be aground.
They hurried on till they saw the Indian huts.
About fifty of them, oven-shaped, and covered with](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-60-320.jpg)
![walked their rounds through the dreary bivouac among the casks,
bales, and boxes which the sea had yielded up; and here, too, their
fate-hunted chief held his drearier vigil, encompassed with treachery,
darkness, and the storm.
Not only La Salle, but Joutel and others of his party, believed that
the wreck of the "Aimable" was intentional. Aigron, who commanded
her, had disobeyed orders and disregarded signals. Though he had
been directed to tow the vessel through the channel, he went in
under sail; and though little else was saved from the wreck, his
personal property, including even some preserved fruits, was all
landed safely. He had long been on ill terms with La Salle.[296]
All La Salle's company were now encamped on the sands at the
left side of the inlet where the "Aimable" was wrecked.[297] "They
were all," says the engineer Minet, "sick with nausea and dysentery.
Five or six died every day, in consequence of brackish water and bad
food. There was no grass, but plenty of rushes and plenty of oysters.
There was nothing to make ovens, so that they had to eat flour
saved from the wreck, boiled into messes of porridge with this
brackish water. Along the shore were quantities of uprooted trees
and rotten logs, thrown up by the sea and the lagoon." Of these,
and fragments of the wreck, they made a sort of rampart to protect
their camp; and here, among tents and hovels, bales, boxes, casks,
spars, dismounted cannon, and pens for fowls and swine, were
gathered the dejected men and homesick women who were to seize
New Biscay, and hold for France a region large as half Europe. The
Spaniards, whom they were to conquer, were they knew not where.
They knew not where they were themselves; and for the fifteen
thousand Indian allies who were to have joined them, they found
two hundred squalid savages, more like enemies than friends.
In fact, it was soon made plain that these their neighbors wished
them no good. A few days after the wreck, the prairie was seen on
fire. As the smoke and flame rolled towards them before the wind,
La Salle caused all the grass about the camp to be cut and carried](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-62-320.jpg)
![reinforcements. In fine, there is nothing I am not ready to do: you
have only to speak."
La Salle had begged him to send ashore a number of cannon and
a quantity of iron, stowed in the "Joly," for the use of the colony;
and Beaujeu replies: "I wish very much that I could give you your
iron, but it is impossible except in a harbor; for it is on my ballast,
and under your cannon, my spare anchors, and all my stowage. It
would take three days to get it out, which cannot be done in this
place, where the sea runs like mountains when the slightest wind
blows outside. I would rather come back to give it to you, in case
you do not send the 'Belle' to Baye du St. Esprit [Mobile Bay] to get
it.... I beg you once more to consider the offer I make you to go to
Martinique to get provisions for your people. I will ask the intendant
for them in your name; and if they are refused, I will take them on
my own account."[298]
To this La Salle immediately replied: "I received with singular
pleasure the letter you took the trouble to write me; for I found in it
extraordinary proofs of kindness in the interest you take in the
success of an affair which I have the more at heart, as it involves
the glory of the King and the honor of Monseigneur de Seignelay. I
have done my part towards a perfect understanding between us,
and have never been wanting in confidence; but even if I could be
so, the offers you make are so obliging that they would inspire
complete trust." He nevertheless declines them,—assuring Beaujeu
at the same time that he has reached the place he sought, and is in
a fair way of success if he can but have the cannon, cannonballs,
and iron stowed on board the "Joly."[299]
Directly after he writes again, "I cannot help conjuring you once
more to try to give us the iron." Beaujeu replies: "To show you how
ardently I wish to contribute to the success of your undertaking, I
have ordered your iron to be got out, in spite of my officers and
sailors, who tell me that I endanger my ship by moving everything in
the depth of the hold on a coast like this, where the seas are like](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-64-320.jpg)
![DEPARTURE OF
BEAUJEU.
mountains. I hesitated to disturb my stowage, not so much to save
trouble as because no ballast is to be got hereabout; and I have
therefore had six cannon, from my lower deck battery, let down into
the hold to take the place of the iron." And he again urges La Salle
to accept his offer to bring provisions to the colonists from
Martinique.
On the next day, the "Aimable" was wrecked.
Beaujeu remained a fortnight longer on the coast,
and then told La Salle that being out of wood,
water, and other necessaries, he must go to Mobile Bay to get them.
Nevertheless, he lingered a week more, repeated his offer to bring
supplies from Martinique, which La Salle again refused, and at last
set sail on the twelfth of March, after a leave-taking which was
courteous on both sides.[300]
La Salle and his colonists were left alone. Several of them had lost
heart, and embarked for home with Beaujeu. Among these was
Minet the engineer, who had fallen out with La Salle, and who when
he reached France was imprisoned for deserting him. Even his
brother, the priest Jean Cavelier, had a mind to abandon the
enterprise, but was persuaded at last to remain, along with his
nephew the hot-headed Moranget, and the younger Cavelier, a mere
school-boy. The two Récollet friars, Zenobe Membré and Anastase
Douay, the trusty Joutel, a man of sense and observation, and the
Marquis de la Sablonnière, a debauched noble whose patrimony was
his sword, were now the chief persons of the forlorn company. The
rest were soldiers, raw and undisciplined, and artisans, most of
whom knew nothing of their vocation. Add to these the miserable
families and the infatuated young women who had come to tempt
fortune in the swamps and cane-brakes of the Mississippi.
La Salle set out to explore the neighborhood. Joutel remained in
command of the so-called fort. He was beset with wily enemies, and
often at night the Indians would crawl in the grass around his feeble
stockade, howling like wolves; but a few shots would put them to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-65-320.jpg)
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idea of the Sieur de Beaujeu, that the Sieur de la Salle is not at the mouth
of the Mississippi. He seems to found this belief on such weak conjectures
that no great attention need be given to his account, especially as this
man has been prejudiced from the first against La Salle's enterprise."
(Lettre de Seignelay à Arnoul, 22 Juillet, 1685. Margry, ii. 604.) The
minister at the same time warns Beaujeu to say nothing in disparagement
of the enterprise, under pain of the King's displeasure. The narrative of
the engineer, Minet, sufficiently explains a curious map, made by him, as
he says, not on the spot, but on the voyage homeward, and still preserved
in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine. This map includes two distinct
sketches of the mouth of the Mississippi. The first, which corresponds to
that made by Franquelin in 1684, is entitled "Embouchure de la Rivière
comme M. de la Salle la marque dans sa Carte." The second bears the
words, "Costes et Lacs par la Hauteur de sa Rivière, comme nous les
avons trouvés." These "Costes et Lacs" are a rude representation of the
lagoons of Matagorda Bay and its neighborhood, into which the Mississippi
is made to discharge, in accordance with the belief of La Salle. A portion
of the coast-line is drawn from actual, though superficial observation. The
rest is merely conjectural.
FOOTNOTES:
Relation de Minet; Lettre de Minet à Seignelay, 6 July, 1685 (Margry, ii.
591, 602).
Joutel, Journal Historique, 68; Relation (Margry, iii. 143-146)
Compare Journal d'Esmanville (Margry, ii. 510).
Relation de Minet (Margry, ii. 591).
Procès Verbal du Sieur de la Salle sur le Naufrage de la
Flûte l'Aimable; Lettre de La Salle à Seignelay, 4 Mars,
1685; Lettre de Beaujeu à Seignelay, sans date. Beaujeu
did his best to save the cargo. The loss included nearly
all the provisions, 60 barrels of wine, 4 cannon, 1,620 balls, 400 grenades,
4,000 pounds of iron, 5,000 pounds of lead, most of the tools, a forge, a mill,
cordage, boxes of arms, nearly all the medicines, and most of the baggage of
the soldiers and colonists. Aigron returned to France in the "Joly," and was
thrown into prison, "comme il paroist clairement que cet accident est arrivé par
sa faute."—Seignelay au Sieur Arnoul, 22 Juillet, 1685 (Margry, ii. 604).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-67-320.jpg)
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A map, entitled Entrée du Lac où on a laisse le Sr. de la Salle, made by
the engineer Minet, and preserved in the Archives de la Marine,
represents the entrance of Matagorda Bay, the camp of La Salle on the
left, Indian camps on the borders of the bay, the "Belle" at anchor within,
the "Aimable" stranded at the entrance, and the "Joly" anchored in the open
sea.
Lettre de Beaujeu à La Salle, 18 Fév., 1685 (Margry, ii. 542).
Lettre de La Salle à Beaujeu, 18 Fév., 1685 (Margry, ii. 546).
The whole of this correspondence between Beaujeu and La
Salle will be found in Margry, ii.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-68-320.jpg)
![CHAPTER XXVI.
1685-1687.
ST. LOUIS OF TEXAS.
The Fort.—Misery and Dejection.—Energy of La Salle: his Journey of
Exploration.—Adventures and Accidents.—The Buffalo.—Duhaut.—
Indian Massacre.—Return Of La Salle.—A New Calamity.—A Desperate
Resolution.—Departure for Canada.—Wreck of the "Belle."—Marriage.
—Sedition.—Adventures Of la Salle's Party.—The Cenis.—The
Camanches.—The Only Hope.—The Last Farewell.
Of what avail to plant a colony by the mouth of a petty Texan
river? The Mississippi was the life of the enterprise, the condition of
its growth and of its existence. Without it, all was futile and
meaningless,—a folly and a ruin. Cost what it might, the Mississippi
must be found.
But the demands of the hour were imperative. The hapless colony,
cast ashore like a wreck on the sands of Matagorda Bay, must gather
up its shattered resources and recruit its exhausted strength, before
it essayed anew its pilgrimage to the "fatal river." La Salle during his
explorations had found a spot which he thought well fitted for a
temporary establishment. It was on the river which he named the La
Vache,[301] now the Lavaca, which enters the head of Matagorda
Bay; and thither he ordered all the women and children, and most of
the men, to remove; while the rest, thirty in number, remained with
Joutel at the fort near the mouth of the bay. Here they spent their
time in hunting, fishing, and squaring the logs of drift-wood which
the sea washed up in abundance, and which La Salle proposed to
use in building his new station on the Lavaca. Thus the time passed
till midsummer, when Joutel received orders to abandon his post,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-69-320.jpg)
![MISERY AND
DEJECTION.
and rejoin the main body of the colonists. To this end, the little
frigate "Belle" was sent down the bay. She was a gift from the King
to La Salle, who had brought her safely over the bar, and regarded
her as a main-stay of his hopes. She now took on board the stores
and some of the men, while Joutel with the rest followed along
shore to the post on the Lavaca. Here he found a state of things that
was far from cheering. Crops had been sown, but the drought and
the cattle had nearly destroyed them. The colonists were lodged
under tents and hovels; and the only solid structure was a small
square enclosure of pickets, in which the gunpowder and the brandy
were stored. The site was good, a rising ground by the river; but
there was no wood within the distance of a league, and no horses or
oxen to drag it. Their work must be done by men. Some felled and
squared the timber; and others dragged it by main force over the
matted grass of the prairie, under the scorching Texan sun. The gun-
carriages served to make the task somewhat easier; yet the
strongest men soon gave out under it. Joutel went down to the first
fort, made a raft and brought up the timber collected there, which
proved a most seasonable and useful supply. Palisades and buildings
began to rise. The men labored without spirit, yet strenuously; for
they labored under the eye of La Salle. The carpenters brought from
Rochelle proved worthless; and he himself made the plans of the
work, marked out the tenons and mortises, and directed the whole.
[302]
Death, meanwhile, made withering havoc among
his followers; and under the sheds and hovels that
shielded them from the sun lay a score of wretches
slowly wasting away with the diseases contracted at St. Domingo. Of
the soldiers enlisted for the expedition by La Salle's agents, many
are affirmed to have spent their lives in begging at the church doors
of Rochefort, and were consequently incapable of discipline. It was
impossible to prevent either them or the sailors from devouring
persimmons and other wild fruits to a destructive excess. Nearly all
fell ill; and before the summer had passed, the graveyard had more](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-70-320.jpg)
![LA SALLE'S
EXPLORATIONS.
than thirty tenants.[303] The bearing of La Salle did not aid to raise
the drooping spirits of his followers. The results of the enterprise
had been far different from his hopes; and, after a season of
flattering promise, he had entered again on those dark and
obstructed paths which seemed his destined way of life. The present
was beset with trouble; the future, thick with storms. The
consciousness quickened his energies; but it made him stern, harsh,
and often unjust to those beneath him.
Joutel was returning to camp one afternoon with the master-
carpenter, when they saw game; and the carpenter went after it. He
was never seen again. Perhaps he was lost on the prairie, perhaps
killed by Indians. He knew little of his trade, but they nevertheless
had need of him. Le Gros, a man of character and intelligence,
suffered more and more from the bite of the snake received in the
marsh on Easter Day. The injured limb was amputated, and he died.
La Salle's brother, the priest, lay ill; and several others among the
chief persons of the colony were in the same condition.
Meanwhile, the work was urged on. A large building was finished,
constructed of timber, roofed with boards and raw hides, and divided
into apartments for lodging and other uses. La Salle gave the new
establishment his favorite name of Fort St. Louis, and the
neighboring bay was also christened after the royal saint.[304] The
scene was not without its charms. Towards the southeast stretched
the bay with its bordering meadows; and on the northeast the
Lavaca ran along the base of green declivities. Around, far and near,
rolled a sea of prairie, with distant forests, dim in the summer haze.
At times, it was dotted with the browsing buffalo, not yet scared
from their wonted pastures; and the grassy swells were spangled
with the flowers for which Texas is renowned, and which now form
the gay ornaments of our gardens.
And now, the needful work accomplished, and
the colony in some measure housed and fortified,
its indefatigable chief prepared to renew his quest](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-71-320.jpg)
![LIFE AT THE
FORT.
of the "fatal river," as Joutel repeatedly calls it. Before his departure
he made some preliminary explorations, in the course of which,
according to the report of his brother the priest, he found evidence
that the Spaniards had long before had a transient establishment at
a spot about fifteen leagues from Fort St. Louis.[305]
It was the last day of October when La Salle set
out on his great journey of exploration. His brother
Cavelier, who had now recovered, accompanied
him with fifty men; and five cannon-shot from the fort saluted them
as they departed. They were lightly equipped; but some of them
wore corselets made of staves, to ward off arrows. Descending the
Lavaca, they pursued their course eastward on foot along the margin
of the bay, while Joutel remained in command of the fort. It was two
leagues above the mouth of the river; and in it were thirty-four
persons, including three Récollet friars, a number of women and
girls from Paris, and two young orphan daughters of one Talon, a
Canadian, who had lately died. Their live-stock consisted of some
hogs and a litter of eight pigs, which, as Joutel does not forget to
inform us, passed their time in wallowing in the ditch of the
palisade; a cock and hen, with a young family; and a pair of goats,
which, in a temporary dearth of fresh meat, were sacrificed to the
needs of the invalid Abbé Cavelier. Joutel suffered no man to lie idle.
The blacksmith, having no anvil, was supplied with a cannon as a
substitute. Lodgings were built for the women and girls, and
separate lodgings for the men. A small chapel was afterwards
added, and the whole was fenced with a palisade. At the four
corners of the house were mounted eight pieces of cannon, which,
in the absence of balls, were loaded with bags of bullets.[306]
Between the palisades and the stream lay a narrow strip of marsh,
the haunt of countless birds; and at a little distance it deepened into
pools full of fish. All the surrounding prairies swarmed with game,—
buffalo, deer, hares, turkeys, ducks, geese, swans, plover, snipe, and
grouse. The river supplied the colonists with turtles, and the bay
with oysters. Of these last, they often found more than they wanted;](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-72-320.jpg)
![THE BUFFALO.
for when in their excursions they shoved their log canoes into the
water, wading shoeless through the deep, tenacious mud, the sharp
shells would cut their feet like knives; "and what was worse," says
Joutel, "the salt water came into the gashes, and made them smart
atrociously."
He sometimes amused himself with shooting alligators. "I never
spared them when I met them near the house. One day I killed an
extremely large one, which was nearly four feet and a half in girth,
and about twenty feet long." He describes with accuracy that curious
native of the southwestern plains, the "horned frog," which,
deceived by its uninviting appearance, he erroneously supposed to
be venomous. "We had some of our animals bitten by snakes;
among the others, a bitch that had belonged to the deceased Sieur
le Gros. She was bitten in the jaw when she was with me, as I was
fishing by the shore of the bay. I gave her a little theriac [an
antidote then in vogue], which cured her, as it did one of our sows,
which came home one day with her head so swelled that she could
hardly hold it up. Thinking it must be some snake that had bitten
her, I gave her a dose of the theriac mixed with meal and water."
The patient began to mend at once. "I killed a good many rattle-
snakes by means of the aforesaid bitch, for when she saw one she
would bark around him, sometimes for a half hour together, till I
took my gun and shot him. I often found them in the bushes,
making a noise with their tails. When I had killed them, our hogs ate
them." He devotes many pages to the plants and animals of the
neighborhood, most of which may easily be recognized from his
description.
With the buffalo, which he calls "our daily
bread," his experiences were many and strange.
Being, like the rest of the party, a novice in the art
of shooting them, he met with many disappointments. Once, having
mounted to the roof of the large house in the fort, he saw a dark
moving object on a swell of the prairie three miles off; and rightly
thinking that it was a herd of buffalo, he set out with six or seven](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-73-320.jpg)
![RETURN OF
DUHAUT.
that they all should work." He had a scaffolding built near the fort,
and set them to smoking buffalo meat, against a day of scarcity.[307]
Thus the time passed till the middle of January;
when late one evening, as all were gathered in the
principal building, conversing perhaps, or smoking,
or playing at cards, or dozing by the fire in homesick dreams of
France, a man on guard came in to report that he had heard a voice
from the river. They all went down to the bank, and descried a man
in a canoe, who called out, "Dominic!" This was the name of the
younger of the two brothers Duhaut, who was one of Joutel's
followers. As the canoe approached, they recognized the elder, who
had gone with La Salle on his journey of discovery, and who was
perhaps the greatest villain of the company. Joutel was much
perplexed. La Salle had ordered him to admit nobody into the fort
without a pass and a watchword. Duhaut, when questioned, said
that he had none, but told at the same time so plausible a story that
Joutel no longer hesitated to receive him. As La Salle and his men
were pursuing their march along the prairie, Duhaut, who was in the
rear, had stopped to mend his moccasins, and when he tried to
overtake the party, had lost his way, mistaking a buffalo-path for the
trail of his companions. At night he fired his gun as a signal, but
there was no answering shot. Seeing no hope of rejoining them, he
turned back for the fort, found one of the canoes which La Salle had
hidden at the shore, paddled by night and lay close by day, shot
turkeys, deer, and buffalo for food, and, having no knife, cut the
meat with a sharp flint, till after a month of excessive hardship he
reached his destination. As the inmates of Fort St. Louis gathered
about the weather-beaten wanderer, he told them dreary tidings.
The pilot of the "Belle," such was his story, had gone with five men
to sound along the shore, by order of La Salle, who was then
encamped in the neighborhood with his party of explorers. The
boat's crew, being overtaken by the night, had rashly bivouacked on
the beach without setting a guard; and as they slept, a band of
Indians had rushed in upon them, and butchered them all. La Salle,
alarmed by their long absence, had searched along the shore, and at](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-75-320.jpg)
![LA SALLE'S
ADVENTURES.
length found their bodies scattered about the sands and half-
devoured by wolves.[308] Well would it have been, if Duhaut had
shared their fate.
Weeks and months dragged on, when, at the end of March,
Joutel, chancing to mount on the roof of one of the buildings, saw
seven or eight men approaching over the prairie. He went out to
meet them with an equal number, well armed; and as he drew near
recognized, with mixed joy and anxiety, La Salle and some of those
who had gone with him. His brother Cavelier was at his side, with his
cassock so tattered that, says Joutel, "there was hardly a piece left
large enough to wrap a farthing's worth of salt. He had an old cap
on his head, having lost his hat by the way. The rest were in no
better plight, for their shirts were all in rags. Some of them carried
loads of meat, because M. de la Salle was afraid that we might not
have killed any buffalo. We met with great joy and many embraces.
After our greetings were over, M. de la Salle, seeing Duhaut, asked
me in an angry tone how it was that I had received this man who
had abandoned him. I told him how it had happened, and repeated
Duhaut's story. Duhaut defended himself, and M. de la Salle's anger
was soon over. We went into the house, and refreshed ourselves
with some bread and brandy, as there was no wine left."[309]
La Salle and his companions told their story.
They had wandered on through various savage
tribes, with whom they had more than one
encounter, scattering them like chaff by the terror of their fire-arms.
At length they found a more friendly band, and learned much
touching the Spaniards, who, they were told, were universally hated
by the tribes of that country. It would be easy, said their informants,
to gather a host of warriors and lead them over the Rio Grande; but
La Salle was in no condition for attempting conquests, and the tribes
in whose alliance he had trusted had, a few days before, been at
blows with him. The invasion of New Biscay must be postponed to a
more propitious day. Still advancing, he came to a large river, which
he at first mistook for the Mississippi; and building a fort of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-76-320.jpg)
![DEPARTURE FOR
CANADA.
palisades, he left here several of his men.[310] The fate of these
unfortunates does not appear. He now retraced his steps towards
Fort St. Louis, and, as he approached it, detached some of his men
to look for his vessel, the "Belle," for whose safety, since the loss of
her pilot, he had become very anxious.
On the next day these men appeared at the fort, with downcast
looks. They had not found the "Belle" at the place where she had
been ordered to remain, nor were any tidings to be heard of her.
From that hour, the conviction that she was lost possessed the mind
of La Salle. Surrounded as he was, and had always been, with
traitors, the belief now possessed him that her crew had abandoned
the colony, and made sail for the West Indies or for France. The loss
was incalculable. He had relied on this vessel to transport the
colonists to the Mississippi, as soon as its exact position could be
ascertained; and thinking her a safer place of deposit than the fort,
he had put on board of her all his papers and personal baggage,
besides a great quantity of stores, ammunition, and tools.[311] In
truth, she was of the last necessity to the unhappy exiles, and their
only resource for escape from a position which was fast becoming
desperate.
La Salle, as his brother tells us, now fell dangerously ill,—the
fatigues of his journey, joined to the effects upon his mind of this
last disaster, having overcome his strength, though not his fortitude.
"In truth," writes the priest, "after the loss of the vessel which
deprived us of our only means of returning to France, we had no
resource but in the firm guidance of my brother, whose death each
of us would have regarded as his own."[312]
La Salle no sooner recovered than he embraced
a resolution which could be the offspring only of a
desperate necessity. He determined to make his
way by the Mississippi and the Illinois to Canada, whence he might
bring succor to the colonists, and send a report of their condition to
France. The attempt was beset with uncertainties and dangers. The](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-77-320.jpg)
![WRECK OF THE
"BELLE."
Mississippi was first to be found, then followed through all the
perilous monotony of its interminable windings to a goal which was
to be but the starting-point of a new and not less arduous journey.
Cavelier his brother, Moranget his nephew, the friar Anastase Douay,
and others to the number of twenty, were chosen to accompany
him. Every corner of the magazine was ransacked for an outfit.
Joutel generously gave up the better part of his wardrobe to La Salle
and his two relatives. Duhaut, who had saved his baggage from the
wreck of the "Aimable," was required to contribute to the necessities
of the party; and the scantily-furnished chests of those who had died
were used to supply the wants of the living. Each man labored with
needle and awl to patch his failing garments, or supply their place
with buffalo or deer skins. On the twenty-second of April, after mass
and prayers in the chapel, they issued from the gate, each bearing
his pack and his weapons, some with kettles slung at their backs,
some with axes, some with gifts for Indians. In this guise, they held
their way in silence across the prairie; while anxious eyes followed
them from the palisades of St. Louis, whose inmates, not excepting
Joutel himself, seem to have been ignorant of the extent and
difficulty of the undertaking.[313]
"On May Day," he writes, "at about two in the
afternoon, as I was walking near the house, I
heard a voice from the river below, crying out
several times, Qui vive? Knowing that the Sieur Barbier had gone
that way with two canoes to hunt buffalo, I thought that it might be
one of these canoes coming back with meat, and did not think much
of the matter till I heard the same voice again. I answered,
Versailles, which was the password I had given the Sieur Barbier, in
case he should come back in the night. But, as I was going towards
the bank, I heard other voices which I had not heard for a long time.
I recognized among the rest that of M. Chefdeville, which made me
fear that some disaster had happened. I ran down to the bank, and
my first greeting was to ask what had become of the 'Belle.' They
answered that she was wrecked on the other side of the bay, and
that all on board were drowned except the six who were in the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-78-320.jpg)
![canoe; namely, the Sieur Chefdeville, the Marquis de la Sablonnière,
the man named Teissier, a soldier, a girl, and a little boy."[314]
From the young priest Chefdeville, Joutel learned the particulars of
the disaster. Water had failed on board the "Belle"; a boat's crew of
five men had gone in quest of it; the wind rose, their boat was
swamped, and they were all drowned. Those who remained had now
no means of going ashore; but if they had no water, they had wine
and brandy in abundance, and Teissier, the master of the vessel, was
drunk every day. After a while they left their moorings, and tried to
reach the fort; but they were few, weak, and unskilful. A violent
north wind drove them on a sand-bar. Some of them were drowned
in trying to reach land on a raft. Others were more successful; and,
after a long delay, they found a stranded canoe, in which they made
their way to St. Louis, bringing with them some of La Salle's papers
and baggage saved from the wreck.
These multiplied disasters bore hard on the spirits of the colonists;
and Joutel, like a good commander as he was, spared no pains to
cheer them. "We did what we could to amuse ourselves and drive
away care. I encouraged our people to dance and sing in the
evenings; for when M. de la Salle was among us, pleasure was often
banished. Now, there is no use in being melancholy on such
occasions. It is true that M. de la Salle had no great cause for merry-
making, after all his losses and disappointments; but his troubles
made others suffer also. Though he had ordered me to allow to each
person only a certain quantity of meat at every meal, I observed this
rule only when meat was rare. The air here is very keen, and one
has a great appetite. One must eat and act, if he wants good health
and spirits. I speak from experience; for once, when I had ague
chills, and was obliged to keep the house with nothing to do, I was
dreary and down-hearted. On the contrary, if I was busy with
hunting or anything else, I was not so dull by half. So I tried to keep
the people as busy as possible. I set them to making a small cellar
to keep meat fresh in hot weather; but when M. de la Salle came
back, he said it was too small. As he always wanted to do everything](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-79-320.jpg)
![ADVENTURES OF
THE TRAVELLERS.
helpless state for more than three months. Bad as the accident was,
he was laughed at nevertheless for his rashness."
The mishaps of the friars did not end here. Father Maxime Le
Clerc was set upon by a boar belonging to the colony. "I do not
know," says Joutel, "what spite the beast had against him, whether
for a beating or some other offence; but, however this may be, I
saw the father running and crying for help, and the boar running
after him. I went to the rescue, but could not come up in time. The
father stooped as he ran, to gather up his cassock from about his
legs; and the boar, which ran faster than he, struck him in the arm
with his tusks, so that some of the nerves were torn. Thus, all three
of our good Récollet fathers were near being the victims of animals."
[315]
In spite of his efforts to encourage them, the followers of Joutel
were fast losing heart. Father Maxime Le Clerc kept a journal, in
which he set down various charges against La Salle. Joutel got
possession of the paper, and burned it on the urgent entreaty of the
friars, who dreaded what might ensue, should the absent
commander become aware of the aspersions cast upon him. The
elder Duhaut fomented the rising discontent of the colonists, played
the demagogue, told them that La Salle would never return, and
tried to make himself their leader. Joutel detected the mischief, and,
with a lenity which he afterwards deeply regretted, contented
himself with a rebuke to the offender, and words of reproof and
encouragement to the dejected band.
He had caused the grass to be cut near the fort,
so as to form a sort of playground; and here, one
evening, he and some of the party were trying to
amuse themselves, when they heard shouts from beyond the river,
and Joutel recognized the voice of La Salle. Hastening to meet him
in a wooden canoe, he brought him and his party to the fort. Twenty
men had gone out with him, and eight had returned. Of the rest,
four had deserted, one had been lost, one had been devoured by an](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-81-320.jpg)
![day they remained with their companions on the bank, lamenting in
despair for the loss of their guardian angel, for so Douay calls La
Salle.[316] It was fast growing dark, when, to their unspeakable
relief, they saw him advancing with his party along the opposite
bank, having succeeded, after great exertion, in guiding the raft to
land. How to rejoin him was now the question. Douay and his
companions, who had tasted no food that day, broke their fast on
two young eagles which they knocked out of their nest, and then
spent the night in rueful consultation as to the means of crossing the
river. In the morning they waded into the marsh, the friar with his
breviary in his hood to keep it dry, and hacked among the canes till
they had gathered enough to make another raft; on which, profiting
by La Salle's experience, they safely crossed, and rejoined him.
Next, they became entangled in a cane-brake, where La Salle, as
usual with him in such cases, took the lead, a hatchet in each hand,
and hewed out a path for his followers. They soon reached the
villages of the Cenis Indians, on and near the river Trinity,—a tribe
then powerful, but long since extinct. Nothing could surpass the
friendliness of their welcome. The chiefs came to meet them,
bearing the calumet, and followed by warriors in shirts of
embroidered deer-skin. Then the whole village swarmed out like
bees, gathering around the visitors with offerings of food and all that
was precious in their eyes. La Salle was lodged with the great chief;
but he compelled his men to encamp at a distance, lest the ardor of
their gallantry might give occasion of offence. The lodges of the
Cenis, forty or fifty feet high, and covered with a thatch of meadow-
grass, looked like huge bee-hives. Each held several families, whose
fire was in the middle, and their beds around the circumference. The
spoil of the Spaniards was to be seen on all sides,—silver lamps and
spoons, swords, old muskets, money, clothing, and a bull of the
Pope dispensing the Spanish colonists of New Mexico from fasting
during summer.[317] These treasures, as well as their numerous
horses, were obtained by the Cenis from their neighbors and allies
the Camanches, that fierce prairie banditti who then, as now,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-83-320.jpg)
![DEJECTION.
scourged the Mexican border with their bloody forays. A party of
these wild horsemen was in the village. Douay was edified at seeing
them make the sign of the cross in imitation of the neophytes of one
of the Spanish missions. They enacted, too, the ceremony of the
mass; and one of them, in his rude way, drew a sketch of a picture
he had seen in some church which he had pillaged, wherein the friar
plainly recognized the Virgin weeping at the foot of the cross. They
invited the French to join them on a raid into New Mexico; and they
spoke with contempt, as their tribesmen will speak to this day, of the
Spanish creoles, saying that it would be easy to conquer a nation of
cowards who make people walk before them with fans to cool them
in hot weather.[318]
Soon after leaving the Cenis villages, both La Salle and his
nephew Moranget were attacked by fever. This caused a delay of
more than two months, during which the party seem to have
remained encamped on the Neches, or possibly the Sabine. When at
length the invalids had recovered sufficient strength to travel, the
stock of ammunition was nearly spent, some of the men had
deserted, and the condition of the travellers was such that there
seemed no alternative but to return to Fort St. Louis. This they
accordingly did, greatly aided in their march by the horses bought
from the Cenis, and suffering no very serious accident by the way,—
excepting the loss of La Salle's servant, Dumesnil, who was seized
by an alligator while attempting to cross the Colorado.
The temporary excitement caused among the
colonists by their return soon gave place to a
dejection bordering on despair. "This pleasant
land," writes Cavelier, "seemed to us an abode of weariness and a
perpetual prison." Flattering themselves with the delusion, common
to exiles of every kind, that they were objects of solicitude at home,
they watched daily, with straining eyes, for an approaching sail.
Ships, indeed, had ranged the coast to seek them, but with no
friendly intent. Their thoughts dwelt, with unspeakable yearning, on
the France they had left behind, which, to their longing fancy, was](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-84-320.jpg)
![TWELFTH NIGHT.
pictured as an unattainable Eden. Well might they despond; for of a
hundred and eighty colonists, besides the crew of the "Belle," less
than forty-five remained. The weary precincts of Fort St. Louis, with
its fence of rigid palisades, its area of trampled earth, its buildings of
weather-stained timber, and its well-peopled graveyard without,
were hateful to their sight. La Salle had a heavy task to save them
from despair. His composure, his unfailing equanimity, his words of
encouragement and cheer, were the breath of life to this forlorn
company; for though he could not impart to minds of less
adamantine temper the audacity of hope with which he still clung to
the final accomplishment of his purposes, the contagion of his
hardihood touched, nevertheless, the drooping spirits of his
followers.[319]
The journey to Canada was clearly their only
hope; and, after a brief rest, La Salle prepared to
renew the attempt. He proposed that Joutel should
this time be of the party; and should proceed from Quebec to
France, with his brother Cavelier, to solicit succors for the colony,
while he himself returned to Texas. A new obstacle was presently
interposed. La Salle, whose constitution seems to have suffered from
his long course of hardships, was attacked in November with hernia.
Joutel offered to conduct the party in his stead; but La Salle replied
that his own presence was indispensable at the Illinois. He had the
good fortune to recover, within four or five weeks, sufficiently to
undertake the journey; and all in the fort busied themselves in
preparing an outfit. In such straits were they for clothing, that the
sails of the "Belle" were cut up to make coats for the adventurers.
Christmas came, and was solemnly observed. There was a midnight
mass in the chapel, where Membré, Cavelier, Douay, and their
priestly brethren stood before the altar, in vestments strangely
contrasting with the rude temple and the ruder garb of the
worshippers. And as Membré elevated the consecrated wafer, and
the lamps burned dim through the clouds of incense, the kneeling
group drew from the daily miracle such consolation as true Catholics
alone can know. When Twelfth Night came, all gathered in the hall,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-85-320.jpg)
![THE LAST
FAREWELL.
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and cried, after the jovial old custom, "The King drinks," with hearts,
perhaps, as cheerless as their cups, which were filled with cold
water.
On the morrow, the band of adventurers
mustered for the fatal journey.[320] The five
horses, bought by La Salle of the Indians, stood in
the area of the fort, packed for the march; and here was gathered
the wretched remnant of the colony,—those who were to go, and
those who were to stay behind. These latter were about twenty in
all,—Barbier, who was to command in the place of Joutel;
Sablonnière, who, despite his title of marquis, was held in great
contempt;[321] the friars, Membré and Le Clerc,[322] and the priest
Chefdeville, besides a surgeon, soldiers, laborers, seven women and
girls, and several children, doomed, in this deadly exile, to wait the
issues of the journey, and the possible arrival of a tardy succor. La
Salle had made them a last address, delivered, we are told, with that
winning air which, though alien from his usual bearing, seems to
have been at times a natural expression of this unhappy man.[323] It
was a bitter parting, one of sighs, tears, and embracings,—the
farewell of those on whose souls had sunk a heavy boding that they
would never meet again.[324] Equipped and weaponed for the
journey, the adventurers filed from the gate, crossed the river, and
held their slow march over the prairies beyond, till intervening
woods and hills shut Fort St. Louis forever from their sight.
FOOTNOTES:
Called by Joutel, Rivière aux Bœufs.
Joutel, Journal Historique, 108; Relation (Margry, iii. 174); Procès
Verbal fait au poste de St. Louis, le 18 Avril, 1686.
Joutel, Journal Historique, 109. Le Clerc, who was not
present, says a hundred.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-86-320.jpg)
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The Bay of St. Louis, St. Bernard's Bay, or Matagorda Bay,—for it
has borne all these names,—was also called Espiritu Santo Bay by
the Spaniards, in common with several other bays in the Gulf of
Mexico. An adjoining bay still retains the name.
Cavelier, in his report to the minister, says: "We reached a large village,
enclosed with a kind of wall made of clay and sand, and fortified with little
towers at intervals, where we found the arms of Spain engraved on a
plate of copper, with the date of 1588, attached to a stake. The
inhabitants gave us a kind welcome, and showed us some hammers and an
anvil, two small pieces of iron cannon, a small brass culverin, some pike-heads,
some old sword-blades, and some books of Spanish comedy; and thence they
guided us to a little hamlet of fishermen, about two leagues distant, where they
showed us a second stake, also with the arms of Spain, and a few old
chimneys. All this convinced us that the Spaniards had formerly been here."
(Cavelier, Relation du Voyage que mon frère entreprit pour découvrir
l'embouchure du fleuve de Missisipy.) The above is translated from the original
draft of Cavelier, which is in my possession. It was addressed to the colonial
minister, after the death of La Salle. The statement concerning the Spaniards
needs confirmation.
Compare Joutel with the Spanish account in Carta en que se da noticia
de un viaje hecho á la Bahia de Espíritu Santo y de la poblacion que
tenian ahi los Franceses; Coleccion de Varios Documentos, 25.
For the above incidents of life at Fort St. Louis, see Joutel,
Relation (Margry, iii. 185-218, passim). The printed condensation of
the narrative omits most of these particulars.
Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 206). Compare Le Clerc, ii. 296.
Cavelier, always disposed to exaggerate, says that ten men
were killed. La Salle had previously had encounters with the
Indians, and punished them severely for the trouble they had
given his men. Le Clerc says of the principal fight: "Several Indians were
wounded, a few were killed, and others made prisoners,—one of whom, a girl
of three or four years, was baptized, and died a few days after, as the first-fruit
of this mission, and a sure conquest sent to heaven."
Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 219).
Cavelier says that he actually reached the Mississippi; but, on the
one hand, the abbé did not know whether the river in question was
the Mississippi or not; and, on the other, he is somewhat inclined to
mendacity. Le Clerc says that La Salle thought he had found the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-87-320.jpg)
![[
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river. According to the Procès Verbal of 18 April, 1686, "il y arriva le 13 Février."
Joutel says that La Salle told him "qu'il n'avoit point trouvé sa rivière."
Procès Verbal fait au poste de St. Louis, le 18 Avril, 1686.
Cavelier, Relation du Voyage pour découvrir l'Embouchure du
Fleuve de Missisipy.
Joutel, Journal Historique, 140; Anastase Douay in Le Clerc,
ii. 303; Cavelier, Relation. The date is from Douay. It does not
appear, from his narrative, that they meant to go farther than
the Illinois. Cavelier says that after resting here they were to
go to Canada. Joutel supposed that they would go only to the Illinois. La Salle
seems to have been even more reticent than usual.
Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 226).
Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 244, 246.
"Ce fût une desolation extrême pour nous tous qui
desesperions de revoir jamais nostre Ange tutélaire, le Sieur
de la Salle.... Tout le jour se passa en pleurs et en larmes."—
Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 315.
Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 321; Cavelier, Relation.
Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 324, 325.
"L'égalité d'humeur du Chef rassuroit tout le monde; et il
trouvoit des resources à tout par son esprit qui relevoit les
espérances les plus abatues."—Joutel, Journal Historique, 152.
"Il seroit difficile de trouver dans l'Histoire un
courage plus intrepide et plus invincible que celuy du Sieur de la
Salle dans les évenemens contraires; il ne fût jamais abatu, et il
espéroit toujours avec le secours du Ciel de venir à bout de son
entreprise malgré tous les obstacles qui se présentoient."—Douay
in Le Clerc, ii. 327.
I follow Douay's date, who makes the day of departure the seventh of
January, or the day after Twelfth Night. Joutel thinks it was the twelfth of
January, but professes uncertainty as to all his dates at this time, as he
lost his notes.
He had to be kept on short allowance, because he was in the habit of
bargaining away everything given to him. He had squandered the little](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-88-320.jpg)
![2
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that belonged to him at St. Domingo, in amusements "indignes de sa
naissance," and in consequence was suffering from diseases which
disabled him from walking. (Procès Verbal, 18 Avril, 1686.)
Maxime le Clerc was a relative of the author of L'Établissement de la
Foi.
"Il fit une Harangue pleine d'éloquence et de cet air engageant
qui luy estoit si naturel: toute la petite Colonie y estoit presente et
en fût touchée jusques aux larmes, persuadée de la nécessité de
son voyage et de la droiture de ses intentions."—Douay in Le Clerc,
ii, 330.
"Nous nous separâmes les uns des autres, d'une manière si tendre et si
triste qu'il sembloit que nous avions tous le secret pressentiment que
nous ne nous reverrions jamais."—Joutel, Journal Historique, 158.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-89-320.jpg)
![LA SALLE'S
FOLLOWERS.
CHAPTER XXVII.
1687.
ASSASSINATION OF LA SALLE.
His Followers.—Prairie Travelling—A Hunters' Quarrel—The Murder of
Moranget.—The Conspiracy.—Death of La Salle: his Character.
The travellers were crossing a marshy prairie
towards a distant belt of woods that followed the
course of a little river. They led with them their five
horses, laden with their scanty baggage, and, with what was of no
less importance, their stock of presents for Indians. Some wore the
remains of the clothing they had worn from France, eked out with
deer-skins, dressed in the Indian manner; and some had coats of old
sail-cloth. Here was La Salle, in whom one would have known, at a
glance, the chief of the party; and the priest, Cavelier, who seems to
have shared not one of the high traits of his younger brother. Here,
too, were their nephews, Moranget and the boy Cavelier, now about
seventeen years old; the trusty soldier Joutel; and the friar Anastase
Douay. Duhaut followed, a man of respectable birth and education;
and Liotot, the surgeon of the party. At home, they might perhaps
have lived and died with a fair repute; but the wilderness is a rude
touchstone, which often reveals traits that would have lain buried
and unsuspected in civilized life. The German Hiens, the ex-
buccaneer, was also of the number. He had probably sailed with an
English crew; for he was sometimes known as Gemme Anglais, or
"English Jem."[325] The Sieur de Marie; Teissier, a pilot;
L'Archevêque, a servant of Duhaut; and others, to the number in all
of seventeen,—made up the party; to which is to be added Nika, La
Salle's Shawanoe hunter, who, as well as another Indian, had twice](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/887445-250612211224-ce084d62/85/Processing-Instruction-And-Discourse-Alessandro-G-Benati-James-F-Lee-90-320.jpg)
Processing Instruction And Discourse Alessandro G Benati James F Lee
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- 6. Processing Instruction and Discourse
- 7. This page intentionally left blank
- 8. Processing Instruction and Discourse Alessandro G. Benati and James F. Lee
- 9. Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Alessandro G. Benati and James F. Lee 2010 Alessandro G. Benati and James F. Lee have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-3496-8 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
- 10. To Bernadette, Grace, and Francesco AGB To Ali, Graci, and Lili JFL
- 11. This page intentionally left blank
- 12. Contents Acknowledgments viii Preface ix Part One: Processing Instruction: Theory, Practice, and Research 1 VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 3 2 Practical Model: Processing Instruction 32 3 Processing Instruction: Experimental Research 45 Part Two: Processing Instruction and Discourse 4 Exploring the Effects of Processing Instruction on a Discourse-level Guided Composition with the Spanish Subjunctive after the Adverb Cuando 97 with Erin M. McNulty 5 Exploring the Effects of Processing Instruction on Discourse-level Interpretation Tasks with the Japanese Passive Construction 148 with Noriko Hikima 6 Exploring the Effects of Processing Instruction on Discourse-level Interpretation Tasks with English Past Tense 178 7 Exploring the Effects of Discourse-level Structured Input Activities with French Causative 198 by Wynne Wong 8 Conclusions 217 References 226 Index 233
- 13. Acknowledgments First of all, we would like to thank Bill VanPatten for his mentoring, guidance, and friendship over the years. We say a big thank you to Wynne Wong for her contribution to this book. We hope that her chapter inspires more work with discourse-level input. We would also like to express our gratitude to Erin M. McNulty and Noriko Hikima for their work on two of the chapters of this book. Both these people have added a new linguistic item to the processing instruction research base. Another big thank you to our students who have participated in the classroom studies presented in this book. Last but not least, we are grateful to Gurdeep, Colleen, and Murali at Continuum for their help in producing this book.
- 14. Preface Processing instruction is an approach to grammar instruction for second language learning. It derives its name from the fact that the instruction (both the explicit explanation as well as the practices) attempts to influence, alter, and/or improve the way learners process input. Processing instruction contrasts with traditional grammar instruction in many ways, most princi- pally in its focus on input whereas traditional grammar instruction focuses on learners’ output. The greatest contribution of processing instruction to both theory and practice is the concept of “structured input,” a form of com- prehensible input that has been manipulated to maximize learners’ benefit of exposure to input. A growing body of research on the effects of processing instruction has given this approach to grammar instruction significant sup- port. The positive effects of processing instruction have been found for a variety of romance and nonromance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, German, English, and Japanese) and on a variety of morphological, syntac- tic, and semantic linguistic items (past and future tense morphology, object pronouns, and subjunctive mood). Previous research has focused on five important issues. A body of research has compared the effects of processing instruction to those of other types of instruction. This work affirms the supe- riority of this input-based approach over different types of output-based instruction. Another body of research has examined the roles of explicit explanation and structured input practices in order to determine the source(s) of the effects of processing instruction on language development. This work affirms the importance of structured input activities. A third line of research has measured the effects of processing instruction when delivered via computer terminals. This work affirms that processing instruction is effective no matter the way of delivery. A fourth line of investigation has examined whether learners improve if they receive enhanced structured input activities. The work affirms the main role for structured input activities as the causative factor in processing instruction. A final line of research has investigated the secondary and cumulative effects of processing instruc- tion. This work affirms that learners who have been exposed to a processing
- 15. x Preface strategy do pick up a second strategy incidentally as a result of learning the first one. Processing instruction effects have been measured through sentence and discourse-level tasks. A number of conclusions can be drawn regarding the type and mode of assessment tasks in processing instruction studies: 1. All processing instruction studies provide evidence that learners who receivedprocessinginstructionperformedsignificantlybetteroninterpre- tation sentence-level tasks than learners receiving traditional instruction or meaning output-based instruction; 2. All processing instruction studies provide evidence that both processing instruction and output-based instruction (both traditional instruction and meaning output-based instruction) cause equal improvement in learner’s performance in different sentence-level production tasks (oral and written mode). 3. One study (Van Patten and Sanz,1995) provides evidence that the effects of processing instruction are not limited to sentence-level production tasks but can be measured on written and oral discursive tasks (oral and written mode). 4. One clear gap in the current database measuring processing instruction effects is that its effects have not been assessed on discourse-level inter- pretation tasks. 5. Dekeyser, Salaberry, Robinson and Harrington (2002) argued that any true system wide effects will be revealed more clearly in the discursive-level tasks and not sentence-level tasks. Norris and Ortega (2000) underscored the fact that most research investigating the effectiveness of L2 instruc- tion has used, to date, measures that require the application of explicit declarative knowledge under controlled conditions and not the use of spontaneous, fluent, and contextualized language. In processing instruc- tion studies, the effects of processing instruction have been measured on a variety of tasks and on different modes. However, only two studies have measured the effects of processing instruction on discourse-level tasks and the effects of instruction has not been tested yet on discourse-level interpretation tasks. This book therefore addresses one important limitation on studies mea- suring and comparing the effects of processing instruction with output-based instruction approaches. It will provide new and original evidence of the effects of processing instruction on discourse-level interpretation tasks and also generalize previous finding on the effects of processing instruction on discourse-level production tasks (different type of tasks and mode).
- 16. Preface xi This book consists of two parts: Part One In the first part (Chapters 1 and 2), we present and examine the input processing model and explain the main characteristics of processing instruc- tion (both its main theoretical underpinnings as well as the guidelines for developing structured input activities). Then, in Chapter 3, we review the empirical research conducted, to date, on processing instruction so that readers will have an overview of new research carried out on the effects of processing instruction. Part Two In the second part of this book, we present and review the results of a series of studies investigating the effects of processing instruction on discourse- level interpretation and production tasks. In Chapter 4, we explore the effects of processing instruction on a discourse-level guided composition task with the Spanish subjunctive after the adverb cuando. In Chapters 5 and 6, we present the results of two empirical studies measuring the effects of processing instruction on the acquisition of Japanese passive forms and English past tense marker –ed. In Chapter 7, Wynne Wong examines the results of an investigation on the effects of discourse-level structured input activities on the acquisition of French causative. In the final chapter (Chapter 8), we summarize and reflect on the findings presented in this book and offer future directions for processing instruction research.
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- 18. Part One Processing Instruction: Theory, Practice, and Research
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- 20. Chapter 1 VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing What Is Input? What Is Input Processing? There are a variety of theories that account for different aspects of second language acquisition (Mitchell and Myles 2004; VanPatten and Williams 2007a). “Indeed, it is common ground among all theo- rists of language learning, of whatever description, that it is necessary to interpret and to process incoming language data in some form, for normal language development to take place. There is thus a consen- sus that language input of some kind is essential for normal language learning” (Mitchell and Myles 2004: 20, emphasis added). What is input? The following four definitions suffice to demonstrate that input is language, presented orally or in written form: 1. “The raw linguistic data (oral or written) to which learners are exposed” (Farley 2005: 109). 2. “Samples of language that learners are exposed to in a communi- cative context or setting” (Wong 2005: 119). 3. “Samples of second language that learners hear or see to which they attend for its propositional content (message)” (VanPatten 1996: 10). 4. “Input is defined as language the learner hears (or reads) and attends to for its meaning” (VanPatten and Williams 2007b: 9). Of additional importance to our work is that input is language presented in a communicative context insofar as learners are attend- ing to the meaning of the message(s) encoded through the language directed to them.
- 21. 4 Processing Instruction and Discourse VanPatten and Williams (2007b: 9) assert that any theory of second language acquisition will have to address in some way certain observed phenomena, or consensus statements as Mitchell and Myles might refer to it. The first of these is that exposure to input is necessary for second language acquisition to take place. Ortega (2007: 236) reviews the role of input in the nine theories of second language acquisition included in VanPatten and Williams’ (2007a) collection of essays. She notes that the role of input in each of the theories varies. In some theories, input might be the only ingredient necessary for language acquisition but is not sufficient to account for all language acquisi- tion, while in other theories, input may be a trigger or input may be the driving factor in learning. What is input processing? VanPatten developed his theory of input processing and the instructional intervention called “Processing Instruction” (1993, 1996), dealt with in Chapter 2, based on what we know about what first and second language learners do with input. They process input for its meaning and that meaning is formally encoded. The term “formally” refers to the linguistic elements encoded in the input such as verb morphemes, case markings, and syntax. Input processing, then, refers to the cognitive processes by which learners make the initial connection between a grammatical form and its meaning. In our work we are concerned with how learners make sense out of the language they hear or read (input) and how they get linguistic data or intake from the input (Wong 2005: 28). As a theoretical framework, “Input Processing is concerned with three fundamental questions that involve the assumption that an integral part of language acquisition is making form–meaning connections: Under what conditions do learners make initial form–meaning connections? Why, at a given moment in time, do they make some and not other form–meaning connections? What internal strategies do learners use in comprehending sentences and how might this affect acquisition?” (VanPatten 2007: 116).
- 22. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 5 VanPatten adds to this list of three umbrella questions the following more specific ones, the answers to which are illuminated by the research on input processing: What linguistic data do learners attend to during comprehension? Why? What linguistic data do learners not attend to? Why? How does a formal feature’s position in the utterance influence whether it gets processed? What grammatical roles do learners assign to nouns based on their position in an utterance? We are working within VanPatten’s theory of input processing as presented in its initial form in VanPatten (1996), its modified form in VanPatten (2004b), and its most recent form in VanPatten (2007). His theory of input processing in adult second language acquisition frames the research questions, methods, and procedures used in all the investigations we include in this book. It is, then, important that we begin with an explication of this theory. We draw from several sources to present our account. We draw extensively from the work of its principal theorizer (VanPatten 1996, 2000, 2004b, 2007) as well as from our own work with and within this theoretical framework (Benati and Lee 2008; Lee and Benati 2007a, 2007b, 2009). Principle 1: The Primacy of Meaning Principle In its current form, VanPatten’s theory consists of two overarching or organizing principles of input processing, each of which is further explicated with (sub)principles. The two overarching principles address two different aspects of processing. The first, the Primacy of Meaning Principle, asserts that when learners are engaged in com- municative, meaningful interchanges, they are primarily concerned with meaning. Principle 1. The Primacy of Meaning Principle. Learners process input for meaning before they process it for form (VanPatten 2004b: 11).
- 23. 6 Processing Instruction and Discourse In other words, “. . . learners are driven to look for the message or communicative intent in the input” (VanPatten 2004b: 7). To assert the primacy of meaning in input processing is to take as the point of departure that learners are primarily motivated to under- stand messages, be they delivered orally during an interaction or visually while reading print. If someone is talking to us, we assume they have something to say that we are meant to understand. Our task as listeners is to put forward at least an effort, if not our best effort, to understand the speaker. When we see an advertisement, for example, and read what it says, we assume that someone has some- thing to communicate to us about a product, event, or service. There is a message that we are meant to grasp and we put forth the effort to do so. Second language learners assume the same thing; there are messages in what they hear and read and they are meant to put forward an effort to understand them. “Simply put, P1 states that learners are driven [emphasis added] to look for the message in the input (“What is this person saying to me?”) before looking for how that message is encoded” (VanPatten 1996: 17). VanPatten derived the Primacy of Meaning Principle from research and theories in first and second language acquisition. From work on first language acquisition, he cited Peters’ (1985) operating principle that guides children during input processing. The principle states that children pay attention to utterances that have a readily identi- fiable meaning. For second language acquisition, he cited the work of Sharwood Smith (1986), who posited the difference between pro- cessing for communication, that is, meaning, and processing for acquisition, that is, form. Research has repeatedly uncovered the varying conditions under which second language learners successfully make meaning from the input. Lee (1987), for example, showed that L2 learners of Spanish can extract the lexical meaning of verbs that are morphologically marked as subjunctive even though they had never been exposed to subjunctive forms in the classroom setting. They extracted meaning as successfully as a group of learners who had already been taught subjunctive forms. Lee and Rodríguez (1997) compared the effects of morphosyntactic modifications on passage comprehension. Keeping
- 24. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 7 content constant, they manipulated subordination and whether that subordination required subjunctive mood or not. They found that L2 learners of Spanish comprehended the three versions of the passage equally well. Additionally, they substituted the target verbs (those that were subordinated and made into subjunctive mood forms) with nonsense words that conformed to the orthographic structure of Spanish. This substitution had no effect on passage comprehension. Manipulating both verbal and lexical forms did not affect passage comprehension because the readers’ task was to get the meaning of the text and they did. More evidence for how learners process input for meaning before they process it for form comes from the recall data reported in Lee (2002). The learners read a passage about the future of telecommu- nication technologies in which the last few sentences in the passage warned of the dangers of a society increasingly dependent upon technology. The last sentence they encountered was as follows: Text: El hombre, Homo sapiens, se convertirá en Homo electrónicus. Translation: Man, Homo sapiens, will become Homo electrónicus. Most learners understood the meaning of the sentence and under- stood its meaning in the context of the passage. Few, however, recalled and wrote the exact form of what they had seen in the text. That is, few learners wrote Homo electrónicus. Some learners produced terms such as Homo electricity and Homo erectus, which demonstrate that gra- phemics plays a role in recall. Others made a semantic substitution such as Homo technology and Homo technologicalus. Clearly, the semantic substitutions show us that learners processed the input for meaning before they processed it for form. Lee and Rossomondo (2004) analyzed other elements of the input passage reported in Lee (2002) and Rossomondo (2007). The passage they used in their research targeted learners’ processing of future tense verb forms in Spanish, which are morphologically marked for person/number and tense. The morpheme –á appears in word final position. The first verb in the passage was dependerá “will depend.” Their analyses revealed that learners recalled this verb in a variety of forms. The forms varied but the meaning always centered on the idea of dependence. They noted both verbal and nominal renderings
- 25. 8 Processing Instruction and Discourse of this target verb. Among the verbal forms they found the following: will depend on, depend or depends on, rely upon, relies, and will use. Among the nominal forms they found the following: dependency, dependence upon, are dependent, and will become dependent. This variety in form shows us that learners were primarily working to get the meaning not the form. P 1a. The Primacy of Content Words Principle: Learners process content words in the input before anything else. VanPatten’s theory differentiates between the value of content words and function words for their contribution to meaning from the learn- ers’ perspective and from the perspective of the push to get or make meaning. Which words are the most helpful for getting the meaning out of the input? The answer is content words, those words that represent major lexical categories as opposed to functional or minor lexical categories. VanPatten (1996: 19–20) supports the principle of content words with research by Klein (1986) and Mangubhai (1991). Klein (1986) showed that when asked to repeat utterances, early stage learners tended to repeat only the content words. Only advanced level learners could repeat the utterances correctly with content words plus functors. Mangubhai (1991) showed that learners who were being taught through Total Physical Response methodology routinely extracted the content words from the stimuli commands in order to physically respond. Carroll (2004: 299) hypothesized that “a number of distinct phonetic cues might lead learners to segment and phonologically encode words from the major lexical classes of English precisely when they are realized as prosodic words, and that would lead them not to segment and encode clitics (determiners, auxiliaries, complementizers, tense morphemes, number morphemes, etc.) This is true despite the fact that many of the functional categories express important semantic distinctions.” Her hypothesis is useful for considering why content words are attended to over function words. In layman’s terms, we might refer to content words as the “big” words and functional words as the “little” words. Learners must bring some metalinguistic knowledge with them to the task of second
- 26. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 9 language acquisition such that they can differentiate content and function words in the L2. In other words, “. . . second language learn- ers in particular know there are ‘big words’ that can help them get the meaning of what is being said to them and their internal pro- cessors attempt to isolate these aspects of the speech stream during comprehension” (VanPatten 2004b: 8). Other research has demonstrated the greater value of content words to second language learners. Bernhardt (1992) discussed the different text processing strategies employed by native and inexperi- enced nonnative readers of German. In tracking their eye movements across the lines of a text, she showed that native readers of German fixated (i.e., placed their central focal point) far more frequently than inexperienced nonnative readers did. In other words, they read more densely and intensely than the nonnative readers did. Moreover, she found that among the native readers’ more numerous fixations were those they placed on the ends of words, that is, on word final morphology. The nonnative readers tended to fixate on the centers of words, leaving word final morphology in peripheral vision. And, with their fewer in number fixations, nonnative readers tended to process content words over function words. This eye move- ment data is very interesting because it contrasts the approaches native and nonnative readers take to processing. Nonnative readers, the language learners, valued content words highly and valued word final morphology to a lesser degree. The eye movement evidence very directly supports the value of content words to learners. VanPatten (1990) conducted an experiment in which he demon- strated the interplay of content words, function words, and verb mor- phology with comprehension. He asked learners of Spanish to listen to a short passage on inflation in Latin America and assigned the learners to one of four groups. One group listened to the passage and indicated each time they heard the word inflación, which was also the title of the passage. He termed this the content + lexical item group. Another group listened to the passage and indicated each time they heard the word la, the feminine singular form of the definite article. It occurred prior to each occurrence of the word inflación. He termed this the content + functor group. The third
- 27. 10 Processing Instruction and Discourse group listened to the passage and indicated each time they heard an n at the end of a word. This verbal inflection is the morpheme that marks third person plural in Spanish. He termed this group the content + inflection group. The fourth group simply listened to the passage and had no secondary processing task to perform; he termed this the content only group. As they listened to the passage, the three groups with simultaneous listening tasks placed a checkmark on a page for each occurrence of the target item. After listening to the passage, the learners recalled as much as they could of what they had heard. VanPatten found that listening for content alone and listening for content + lexical item were complimentary activities in that learners in both conditions comprehended equal amounts of the passage. Listening for the functor and for the verbal inflection were equally detrimental activities in that comprehension fell off significantly in these conditions. From Bernhardt (1992), we know that learners tend not to process word final morphology and from VanPatten (1990) we know that if they are directed to process the word final morphology, they lose some of the meaning. These data support the thesis that content words are the building blocks of comprehension for second language learners. Drawing learners’ attention to noncontent elements of a passage, be they verb morphemes or definite articles, causes learners to lose some of the meaning. We have more evidence of how learners process content words over other sentence elements from examining the products of com- prehension. VanPatten and Wong (2004) demonstrated that learners misinterpret French causative constructions using an inappropriate word order processing strategy. They give the following example (VanPatten and Wong 2004: 98–99): Jean fait promener le chien à Marie. John makes to walk the dog to Mary. John makes Mary walk the dog. The target sentence contains two verbs each with its own subject/ agent. Learners, however, tend to take the first subject, Jean, and make it the agent of the second verb, promener. The second subject, Marie, tends to be interpreted as the dog’s owner. In the end, the
- 28. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 11 learners misinterpret the sentence, by misassigning grammatical and semantic roles, to mean the following: John walks the dog for Mary or John walks Mary’s dog. Whereas VanPatten and Wong address this processing problem from the perspective of word order and P2 the First Noun Principle (presented later in this chapter), we can also see the effects of pro- cessing content words over other sentence elements. We underline the content words to demonstrate that they are the words learners focused in on. Jean fait promener le chien à Marie. The learners took the content words and created meaning. Two important grammatical elements are not processed, fait and à. They are important because they signal the underlying semantic relationship between Jean and Marie. Another example of how learners collect content words to make meaning comes from Lee (1990). After early stage learners read a short passage about feudalism, they were asked to recall in writing as much as they could remember. The first two sentences of the passage follow: Text: Entre los años 900–1000, Europa Occidental estaba en gran desorden. El imperio de Carlomagno, que había logrado unir esa parte del mundo, se estaba dividiendo en pequeños estados. Translation: Between the years 900 and 1000, Western Europe was in great disorder. The empire of Charlemagne, which had managed to unite that part of the world, was being divided into small states. One subject recalled these two sentences as follows (misspellings in the original are preserved here). In the years around 900–1000, there was an emporer Carlomagna (sp?) that ruled an area in the world. (Lee 1990: 147)
- 29. 12 Processing Instruction and Discourse If we go back to the original text and underline the words that appear in the recall, we literally see the way the learner has collected words from the input and put them together. We also see the way he left out some words most likely due to the effortfulness of the task (VanPatten 2007, Lee 1999). Text: Entre los años 900–1000, Europa Occidental estaba en gran desorden. El imperio de Carlomagno, que había logrado unir esa parte del mundo, se estaba dividiendo en pequeños estados. This learner did not process an important function word, the pre- position de in the noun phrase imperio de Carlomagno “empire of Charlemagne.” The preposition is important because it establishes the relationship between the two “big” words. The learner put the two content words together and misassigned the meaning of one of them, making it emperor not empire. What do emperors do? They rule, which is something the learner inserted into the recall. Another learner recalled these two lines as follows: Charlemagne was the ruler. He divided the country into small states . . . (Lee 1990: 146) The content words, which this learner collected to make meaning, attribute agency to Charlemagne. Attributing agency to Charle- magne occurred quite frequently in the recalls. The learners who did so did not process the entire verb phrase, se estaba dividiendo, but rather only used the content word, dividiendo, to create meaning. The verb phrase in the original text is marked for past (estaba) as well as for imperfective aspect (–aba) and progressive aspect (–ndo). The learner, however, uses a perfective past form in his recall. We can, therefore, infer that the learner did not process these formal elements in the input; he collected content words but did not make use of their formal features in order to make meaning. We find additional evidence of the value of content words to language learners from their own accounts of what they do to under- stand. Lee (1999) analyzed think aloud protocols for the interplay between input processing strategies and comprehension strategies.
- 30. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 13 He asked early stage second language learners to perform a retro- spective think aloud of a passage in which eight past tense verb forms were the targeted linguistic items. The following excerpt is one learner’s think aloud protocol that was not included in Lee (1999) but comes from the data set that he analyzed. The tasks of the second language learner were to read the passage sentence by sentence and then think aloud his comprehension process. With regard to two of the target sentences the learner stated the following about his use of key words (from the context, we can understand “key words” as content words): Um, you can see from like different words like, um, contacto and consecuencia, like the, um, different like structure of the sentence, like if you can get the key words like that then you can kinda see what should follow it. . . . Um, a word like disco is kind of a humorous tip-off ‘cause you can tell that’s something related to music. This learner collects content words to build up his comprehension. Across the think aloud he refers to his use of words to comprehend sentence meaning 17 times. At a later point in the think aloud, he offers another example of using key/content words and other words, too: Um, “filme”, um, “ofer-”, “oferta”, “aceptó”, “Hollywood” all give you like, you know, key words, like “offer”, “accept”, “Hollywood”, uh, would tell you what the sentence is going to be about. And those are all cognates, and then other words that you already know or can figure out would tell you pretty much the meaning of that sentence. Finally, the learner also makes a distinction between key words and another type, the small words. The learner stated the following: Um, múltiples is a good cognate. And then there’s a lot of pretty small easy words like “with” and “to see”, “is.” Another type of evidence supporting the primary role of content words in comprehension comes from Carroll (2004), who points
- 31. 14 Processing Instruction and Discourse to their role in the negotiation of meaning. She specifies content words as those in major lexical categories and refers to them as prosodic words. In a footnote to her commentary on VanPatten’s model of input processing, she notes that content words have the linguistic properties that make them repeatable “as single utterances in situations where a speaker has failed to make herself understood and believes that the learner has limited language abilities” (Carroll 2004: 298). She provided the following example to underscore the point: NS: The exercises are all on my homepage. NNS: (. . .) <looks confused> NS: EXERCISES. . . HOMEPAGE NNS: oh. . . yes. . . EXERCISES (Carroll 2004: 298) The native speaker has isolated and repeated the two content words from her initial utterance. Content words are not only important to learners but to native speakers also who, apparently, assign them value for insuring comprehension for language learners. P 1b. The Lexical Preference Principle: If grammatical forms express a meaning that can also be encoded lexically (i.e., that grammatical marker is redundant), then learners will not initially process those grammatical forms until they have lexical forms to which they can match them. Languages have ways of encoding and thus signaling the same infor- mation in multiple ways; we refer to this as the natural redundancy of languages. Given the availability of limited resources to second language learners VanPatten’s theory tries to account for where learners direct their processing resources. The background research VanPatten uses to support the Lexical Preference Principle has all been focused on tense assignment. Likewise, the research on the effects of Processing Instruction framed by the Lexical Preference Principle has focused on tense assignment. The background research on tense assignment has manipulated the input to include or exclude
- 32. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 15 lexical and grammatical cues to tense. Preferring lexical cues to tense is connected to learners’ use of content words to make meaning. “Learners will thus seek out lexical forms of semantic notions in the input before they seek grammatical forms that encode the same semantic notions” (VanPatten 2007: 118). Lee, Cadierno, Glass, and VanPatten (1997) gave two groups of learners of Spanish different versions of the same passage to listen to. One version contained lexical temporal adverbs referring to the past whereas the other version contained no such lexical temporal mark- ers. In this second version, only the verb final morpheme indicated tense, for example, admitió “he admitted.” After listening, the learn- ers performed a tense identification task. The results showed that the learners who listened to the passage with adverbials identified correctly more of the temporal references than did the learners who listened to passages with only verb morphology to mark tense. Lee (1999) examined the comprehension and input processing strategies of a small number of learners of Spanish as they performed a retrospective think aloud. Half the learners read a passage that contained lexical temporal adverbs whereas the other half read a version of the passage that did not contain the adverbs. As Lee (1999: 53) put it, “when subjects have adverbs they use them [to comprehend temporal reference]. Those in the +adverb condition only sporadically refer to verb forms.” Rossomondo (2007) showed a very dramatic difference in tense assignment due to the presence or absence of lexical temporal mark- ers. She conducted introspective think aloud protocols on two groups of learners. One group was reading and introspecting on a passage that contained Spanish future tense verb forms along with lexical temporal markers. The other group read and introspected on a version of the passage that contained only verb forms but no lexical temporal markers. She found that in the presence of a lexical tem- poral marker, learners comprehended (i.e., rendered it in the introspection) the future meaning of the verb form on an average 52 percent of the time; the range of scores per individual verb was from 0 percent comprehension of the future meaning to 92 percent comprehension. In the absence of the temporal marker, learners comprehended the future meaning of the target verbs only .8 percent
- 33. 16 Processing Instruction and Discourse of the time. The learners did not comprehend the future meaning of 12 of the 13 target verbs. They managed a future meaning for one verb only 11 percent of the time. Lee (1990) examined the recall protocols of first year learners of Spanish in order to reveal the processes through which they con- structed the meaning of the passage. The passage referred to the social–political system known as feudalism. As noted above, the first line of the passage referred to the years 900–1000. The passage also contained the number 400, which was the number of years the feudal system helped maintain order, and a reference to the year 1200, the year feudalism was at its zenith. All learners read the same version of the passage, that is, there was no version of the passage in which temporal markers had been removed. Relevant to the current discus- sion of the Lexical Preference Principle is that 11 of the 13 learners Lee (1990) examined used the years 900–1000 to construct the tem- poral framework for their recalls. One learner, who had a particularly difficult time comprehending, used the years to structure the second part of his recall: In the beginning there was nothing. (STOP!) There was a society change in the era of Charlemagne a change from honor to a society of justice. I remember many years 900-start of Charlemagne 1100- ? 1200- justice and equality (Lee 1990: 148) Musumeci (1989) conducted a cross-linguistic study (Italian, French, and Spanish) in which she examined how successfully learners assigned tense at sentence level under different exposure conditions. She manipulated both linguistic and nonlinguistic cues to temporal- ity. In one condition, the baseline condition, she presented learners with sentences in which the only cue to temporal reference was the verbal inflection. In each of the subsequent conditions the learners received the verbal inflections as well as some other cue or cues. In the next condition, she added a lexical temporal adverbial as an additional cue to temporal reference. In the third condition, she supplied learners the additional cue of a typical teacher gesture
- 34. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 17 performed as the learners heard the sentences. For example, to indi- cate past, the speaker pointed her thumb over her shoulder, pointing backwards. To indicate future, the speaker gestured with her hand moving it away from her body and outward toward the side. In the fourth condition, Musumeci supplied learners with all the cues: verbal inflections, adverbials, and gestures. Overall, the results confirmed that the main factor influencing correct tense assignment was the presence or absence of temporal adverbials in the input sentences (Musumeci 1989:127). Specifically, she found that learners assigned tense more correctly in the two con- ditions that included a lexical temporal adverbial than in the other two conditions, that is, verbal inflections only and verbal inflections + gestures. Lexical items were more useful to the learners for assigning tense than were the verb forms or a teacher’s gesturing. P 1c. The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle: Learners are more likely to process nonredundant meaningful grammatical markers before they process redundant meaningful markers. VanPatten (1985b) introduced the idea that formal features of a second language, from a learner’s perspective, would be either of high or low communicative value. “Communicative value refers to the relative contribution a form makes to the referential meaning of an utterance and is based on the presence or absence of two fea- tures: inherent semantic value and redundancy within the sentence/ utterance” (VanPatten 1996: 24). VanPatten extrapolated his original principle regarding processing meaningful versus nonmeaningful morphology (1996: 24) from the morpheme acquisition studies. Why, for example, is the progressive aspect marker –ing acquired before third person singular –s in English? VanPatten’s answer is that because –ing contributes unique information to the sentential meaning (an event in progress), learners direct attention to it during processing. They do not direct attention to the third person –s because it does not offer them unique information. He provides two examples (VanPatten 2007: 119). The cat is sleeping. The cat sleeps ten hours everyday.
- 35. 18 Processing Instruction and Discourse “Thus, if learners are confronted with something like –ing on verb forms, they will be forced to make this form–meaning connection sooner than, say, third person –s because the latter is redundant and the former is not” (VanPatten 2007:119). As we saw with the Lexical Preference Principle, a grammatical marker might well have seman- tic value but other sentence elements might make it redundant. Removing the lexical item, as is done in Processing Instruction, makes the grammatical marker nonredundant. And so, the Preference for Nonredundancy Principle is highly related to the Lexical Preference Principle. P 1d. The Meaning-Before-Nonmeaning Principle: Learners are more likely to process meaningful grammatical markers before nonmeaningful grammatical markers (VanPatten 2004) Some grammatical markers do not carry any meaning; they express no real world semantic information. We can offer several examples (Lee and Benati 2007b). Grammatical gender marking in Romance languages is an example of nonmeaningful morphology. The surface- level agreement features are such that adjectives agree in number and in grammatical gender with the nouns they modify. In other words, the characteristics of the noun determine the form of the adjective. That an adjective is marked as masculine or feminine does not change its meaning. In Italian, both bassa and basso mean short. Which form to use would be determined by the noun they would be describing. Additionally, gender markings on adjectives are often a redundant marking. Consider the noun phrase mio fratello basso (my short brother) and the gender markings on the three words. The gender marking on basso is the third masculine marker in the string. Being nonmeaningful as well as redundant contribute to the processing problems second language learners face in processing these forms. Subjunctive mood verbal morphology is another grammatical form that is nonmeaningful and redundant in sentences that express doubt and opinion in Italian and other Romance languages. We use the subjunctive mood markings on the verb in a subordinate or dependent clause when the verb of the main clause expresses doubt
- 36. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 19 or opinion. The following two sentences demonstrate the processing problems learners encounter with subjunctive mood morphology. Dubito che George sia intelligente. I doubt that George is intelligent. So che George e intelligente. I know that George is intelligent. The meanings of the verbs dubito and so trigger the forms sia and e, respectively. Sia and e mean exactly the same thing, is. In other words, “. . . such [nonmeaningful] formal features of language will be processed in the input later than those for which true form–meaning connections can be made” (VanPatten 2007: 120). P 1e. The Availability of Resources Principle: For learners to process either redundant meaningful grammatical forms or non- meaningful forms, the processing of overall sentential meaning must not drain available processing resources. It is not impossible for learners to direct their attention to meaning- ful but redundant grammatical forms or to nonmeaningful gram- matical forms. As VanPatten (1990) and Bransdorfer (1991) showed with their simultaneous processing tasks, learners can be directed to attend to nonmeaningful forms, but at a loss to comprehension. “Comprehension for learners is initially quite effortful in terms of cognitive processing and working memory. This has consequences for what the input processing mechanisms will pay attention to. At the same time, learners are limited capacity processors and cannot process and store the same amount of information as native speakers can during moment-by-moment processing” (VanPatten 2007: 116). And so, VanPatten proposed the Availability of Resources Principle. Getting overall sentential meaning cannot be overly effortful if learners are to process redundant meaningful grammatical forms or nonmeaningful forms. Lee (1999) analyzed the comprehension and input processing strategies of second language learners. He states: “The comprehen- sion strategies of low comprehenders may circumvent processing
- 37. 20 Processing Instruction and Discourse text for form. It is an interesting paradox to consider that learners’ attempts to manage their comprehension has the less than desirable effect of dislocating from their attention key aspects of the input” (Lee 1999: 57). Comprehension difficulties can impede processing forms in the input. In the following example, the target form is the verb decidió (decided) or more specifically, the –ó morpheme indi- cating past tense. Learners performed a retrospective think aloud of a passage that contained eight target items. In the following think aloud, comprehension was so effortful that the learner miscom- prehended the temporal and lexical meanings of the target form. The learner ultimately abandoned the attempt to make meaning. Text: Hace siete años decidió volver a la universidad para hacer un Master en leyes. Translation: Seven years ago, [he, Rubén Blades] decided to return to university to do a Masters in Law. Think aloud: Um, for seven years he, seven years old he’s coming to the university. . .but I’m not sure and seven sounds awfully young. I would probably just disregard that sentence. (Lee 1999: 50) Another example from this research also demonstrates the interplay between comprehension and input processing. In this example, the learner initially miscomprehends the verb actuó “he acted” as the adverb actually. What follows is the learner’s efforts to make the meaning of the sentence make sense: Text: En la década pasada, actuó en varias películas, como por ejemplo, Crossover Dream y The Milagro Beanfield War. Translation: In the past decade, [he, Rubén Blades] acted in various films, for example, Crossover Dream and The Milagro Beanfield War. Think aloud: So, in the decade past, actually in various films. I don’t think that’s actually but it looks like actually so that’s why I guessed that. Um, maybe it’s act. Act in various films, like the example Crossover Dream and The Milagro Beanfield War. So that just speaks of like if you know the context of the paragraph
- 38. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 21 you can follow along and probably guess that, that, uh, it’s talking about how he worked on the different [films]. Interestingly, the learners’ second rendering of actuó was “act,” not “acts” nor “acted.” He uses an uninflected form. Moreover, the learner assigned no subject even though this is the sixth of eight statements about Rubén Blades. In this think aloud we can see both the push to get and make meaning as well as the effortful nature of comprehen- sion. In his own words the learner tells us he used context to follow along the meaning and he used guess work. His last statement about the meaning of the sentence demonstrates that he is aware of the past temporal framework of the passage he read; he states that Blades worked on films. As part of the think aloud procedure, the researcher made inqui- ries about the target forms, in this sentence actuó. This learner does make a form–meaning connection with the target, but only after he is certain about the meaning, with which he works intensively. The rest of the think aloud protocol now follows: Researcher: Why did you decide that this word “actuó” does or doesn’t mean “actually”? Learner: Um, well, actually wouldn’t be like the word to fit in there. Well at least to me it wouldn’t because it wouldn’t make sense to say actually in various films. Researcher: So what makes more sense to you then? Learner: Um, he, he acted in various films. And also, we just learned the past tense last night. And it looks like the past tense, actuó. I don’t know. Good guess at least. P 1f. The Sentence Location Principle: Learners tend to process items in sentence initial position before those in final position and those in medial position. Again referring to the availability of processing resources, VanPatten (2004) proposed the Sentence Location Principle (a principle not included in the 1996 version). He states: “. . . elements that appear in certain positions of an utterance are more salient to learners than
- 39. 22 Processing Instruction and Discourse others, namely, sentence initial position is more salient than sentence final position that in turn is more salient than sentence internal or medial position” (VanPatten 2004b: 13). That sentence initial position is the most favorable processing position is logical. Those elements that are the first encountered are the first on which process- ing resources get aligned. Through the medial portion of a sentence, the processing resources may likely still be processing the initial elements but then get redirected when the end of the sentence comes into focus. The evidence for the Sentence Location Principle strongly affirms that initial position is the most favored processing position. Barcroft and VanPatten (1997) and Rosa and O’Neill (1998) varied the loca- tion of target elements in sentences; the locations being initial, medial, and final position in the sentence. They also used both acous- tically stressed and unstressed forms. They asked learners to repeat the sentences they heard and then determined how successfully the learners repeated the target items in each position. Barcroft and VanPatten (1997) found that learners repeated items most success- fully in initial position, more than in medial and final positions. They did not find a difference between medial and final positions and also found that learners more successfully repeated the stressed targets over the unstressed ones. Rosa and O’Neill (1998) found interactions between location and acoustic stress. Both factors affect processing. By and large their results confirm that initial position is the most favorable processing position and that final position is more favorable than medial position. We use the phrase “by and large” here to indicate that in three out of four processing contexts the results demonstrated that learners more successfully repeat the targets that occur in sentence initial position than in medial position. Likewise, in three out of four processing contexts learners more successfully repeated target items that occur in sentence final position than in sentence medial position. Summary of Principle 1 and Its Associated Principles Six principles, labeled P 1a through P 1f are associated with the Primacy of Meaning Principle. Some of these principles had previously been referred to as corollaries of the main principle (VanPatten 1996)
- 40. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 23 whereas others are new developments to the theoretical framework. Each new development is meant to add to the explanatory adequacy and predictive capability of the theory. As we read through these associated principles, we find that they are meant to capture the interplay of various linguistic and cognitive processes that take place during comprehension. The principles associated with the Primacy of Meaning Principle, in their most current formulation, are summa- rized as follows: P 1a. The Primacy of Content Words Principle: Learners process content words in the input before anything else (VanPatten 2007: 117). P 1b. The Lexical Preference Principle: If grammatical forms express a meaning that can also be encoded lexically (i.e., that gram- matical marker is redundant), then learners will not initially process those grammatical forms until they have lexical forms to which they can match them (VanPatten 2007: 118). P 1c. The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle: Learners are more likely to process nonredundant meaningful grammatical markers before they process redundant meaningful markers (VanPatten 2007: 119). P 1d. The Meaning-Before-Nonmeaning Principle: Learners are more likely to process meaningful grammatical markers before nonmeaningful grammatical markers. P 1e. The Availability of Resources Principle: For learners to process either redundant meaningful grammatical forms or nonmean- ingful forms, the processing of overall sentential meaning must not drain available processing resources (VanPatten 2004b: 14). P 1f. The Sentence Location Principle: Learners tend to process items in sentence initial position before those in final position and those in medial position (VanPatten 2007: 125). Principle 2. The First Noun Principle When we listen to an utterance or read a sentence, we are presented the linguistic elements of the sentence in a rigidly linear fashion. One sentence element precedes the next such that we must (there
- 41. 24 Processing Instruction and Discourse are no options) comprehend and interpret the sentence “as it comes” to us. While regression is possible in some reading contexts, it is rarely possible in listening contexts. Research in both first and second language acquisition has found that the order of the words plays a role in comprehension and hence in language acquisition (e.g., Slobin 1973 for first language acquisition and Lee 2003 for the second language acquisition of Spanish). VanPatten’s First Noun Principle captures one powerful and pervasive processing strategy, that is, assigning the grammatical role of subject or agent to the first noun encountered in an utterance. Principle 2. The First Noun Principle: Learners tend to process the first noun or pronoun they encounter in a sentence as the subject (VanPatten 2007: 122). This second of the main principles, the First Noun Principle, asserts that the order in which learners encounter sentence elements is a powerful factor in assigning grammatical relations among sentence elements. In relation to this principle, VanPatten has commented that, “. . . the human mind may be predisposed to placing agents and subjects in a first noun position” (VanPatten 2004b: 15). This processing strategy has been documented in child first language acquisition (Bever 1970; Slobin 1966), child second lan- guage acquisition (Ervin-Tripp 1974; Nam 1975), and adult second language acquisition (Lee 1987; LoCoco 1987; VanPatten 1985a). In a sense, initial position works against a grammatical object being correctly interpreted. The problem with learners’ use of this process- ing strategy goes beyond miscomprehension but to the heart of acquisition. VanPatten states: “. . . this particular principle may have a variety of consequences in a variety of languages. It is not just that learners may get word order wrong, it is also that they may not process case markings for some time, will have difficulties with the pronoun system in some languages, and so on” (VanPatten 2004b: 16). In other words, misprocessing the form leads to incorrect information being supplied to the developing system. Even though languages have a typologically canonical word order, such as SVO for English and SOV for Japanese, other word order
- 42. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 25 permutations are permissible. González (1997) documented the acquisition of different word orders for learners of Spanish with SVO being the first acquired word order pattern and OSV and OVS being the last acquired. Strings in which the object precedes the subject present learners with difficulties. Children acquiring Spanish as a first language also acquire these word order patterns last (Echevarría 1978 cited in González 1997). LoCoco (1987) presented learners of Spanish and German with three different sentence types to process. In each of these sentence patterns, the first noun was an object of some kind: direct object, indirect object, or the object of a preposi- tion. She found that learners assigned the first noun the grammatical role of subject from 7 percent to 72 percent of the time. VanPatten (1985a) and Lee (1987) presented learners of Spanish with OVS and OV sentences, respectively, in which the objects were pronominal- ized. VanPatten documented that learners assigned the grammatical role of subject to the object pronoun from 35 percent to 70 percent of the time. Lee (1987) documented learners’ use of the first noun strategy between 27 percent and 73 percent of the time. VanPatten and Wong (2004) and Allen (2000) demonstrated that learners of French use the first noun strategy to assign the semantic role of agent to the first noun in faire-causatif sentences. As mentioned above in the section on the Primacy of Content Words Principle, learners incorrectly interpret that the agent performing the action of the second verb is the first noun. Instead of indicating that Henri reads the newspaper in the sentence Jean-Paul fait lire le journal à Henri (Jean-Paul makes to read the newspaper to Henri/Jean-Paul makes Henri read the newspaper) they indicate that Jean-Paul reads it (VanPatten and Wong 2004: 104). P 2a. The Lexical Semantics Principle: learners may rely on lexical semantics, where possible, instead of the First Noun Principle to interpret sentences. Learners do not absolutely and categorically use only the first noun strategy to assign grammatical and semantic roles. They are sensitive to other factors, one of them being lexical semantics that attenuate their use of the first noun strategy. The lexical semantics of the verb
- 43. 26 Processing Instruction and Discourse “kick,” for example, requires an animate agent. A sentence such as “The ball was kicked by the child,” is unlikely to be misinterpreted because a ball cannot perform the action. Among her target sentences LoCoco (1987: 124) included the following: La cerveza le trae el muchacho a la muchacha./Das bier bringt der Junge dem Mädchen. The beer to her brings the boy to the girl. The boy brings the beer to the girl. Las flores le da el muchacho a la niña./Die blumen gibt der Junge dem Mädcehm. The flowers to her gives the boy to the girl. The boy gives the flowers to the girl. The learners of Spanish and German never identified the first noun in these sentences as the grammatical subject/agent. The lexical semantics of the verbs bring and give do not allow inanimate subjects. In short, when “. . . only one noun is capable of the action. . . ” learn- ers correctly identify that noun as the agent (VanPatten 2007: 124). P 2b. The Event Probabilities Principle: Learners may rely on event probabilities, where possible, instead of the First Noun Principle to interpret sentences. We also use what we know about the world to interpret sentences. In the following sentences, both nouns are capable of performing the action but one interpretation is more likely than another. The event probabilities are low for the first noun being the agent and are higher for the second noun being the agent. In these scenarios, children and adult second language learners correctly identify that the second noun performed the action of the verb. The farmer was kicked by the horse. The child was bitten by the dog. Likewise, learners of French are unlikely to interpret that the professor is doing the studying in the following sentence (VanPatten and Wong 2004: 101).
- 44. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 27 Le professeur fait étudier le verbe “être” à l’élève. The professor makes to study the verb “être” to the student. The professor makes the student study the verb “être.” Learners may well use event probabilities to attenuate their use of the first noun strategy. That is, “. . . it is possible (though not necessary) that real-life scenarios might override the First Noun Principle. . . ” (VanPatten 2007: 123). We might also consider learners’ background knowledge of a set of characters as a type of real world knowledge. Houston (1997) showed that learners use their knowledge of a set of characters to overcome their use of the first noun strategy. He had learners interpret two sets of sentences in both of which he used OVS word order. One set of sentences used the names of characters from a video series the learners were seeing in class. The other used random names. As can be seen in the following example, the sentences are structurally and semantically identical: Characters Random names A Raquel la contrata don Pedro. A Silvia la contrata Ricardo. Learners used the first noun strategy only 28 percent of the time to misassign the grammatical role of subject to the character-based sentences. They misassigned the grammatical role of the first noun in the random-name sentences 48 percent of the time. Malovrh (2006) presents a finding consistent with Houston (1997). He found that learners processed OVS strings that referred to characters from the Simpsons more accurately than they processed OVS strings about made up characters. The accuracy rate was 65 percent for the Simpson-based sentences versus 50 percent for the other type. P 2c. The Contextual Constraint Principle: Learners may rely less on the First Noun Principle (or L1 transfer) if preceding context constrains the possible interpretation of a clause or sentence. Background knowledge (or topic familiarity as Malovrh labeled it) is an extralinguistic type of context. VanPatten (2004b, 2007) has added sentence-internal linguistic context as a possible constraint on
- 45. 28 Processing Instruction and Discourse learners’ use of the first noun strategy. VanPatten and Houston (1998) demonstrated the effects of context on sentence interpreta- tion. They created ten target sentences containing OVS word order in which a clause preceding the object pronoun provided contextual information. The target sentences were paired with ten sentences that contained a preceding clause that did not provide a contextual cue. The target sentences were constructed with the verbs attacked, insulted, rejected, greeted, and kissed. Note the following examples from VanPatten and Houston (1998). The OVS constructions are underlined. Context Ricardo está enojado porque lo insultó Susana en la reunión. Ricardo is angry because him insulted Susana in the meeting. Ricardo is angry because Susana insulted him in the meeting. Roberto está en el hospital porque lo atacó María con un cuchillo. Robert is in the hospital because him attacked María with a knife. Robert is in the hospital because María attacked him with a knife. No context Ricardo me dice que lo insultó Susana en la reunión. Ricardo me tells that him insulted Susana in the meeting. Ricardo tells me that Susana insulted him in the meeting. Gloria contó a sus amigas que la atacó Ramón en su casa. Gloria told to her friends that her attacked Ramón at home. Gloria told her friends that Ramón attacked her at home. VanPatten and Houston found that sentence-internal context attenuated learners’ use of the first noun strategy for assigning grammatical roles. In the “context” condition, learners assigned the grammatical role of subject to the object pronoun 59 percent of the time. In the “no context” condition, learners assigned the grammati- cal role of subject to the object pronoun 84 percent of the time. Learners use of the first noun strategy to assign grammatical roles is quite strong in both the “context” and “no context” sentence types but context does provide learners an additional clue for processing the formal elements of the sentence. Malovrh (2006) investigated whether the placement of contextual information prior to or after
- 46. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 29 the targeted object pronoun would differentially affect learners’ accurately assigning agent/subject. He found no difference in learners’ performance based on the placement of the contextual information. It is the presence of the contextual information that helps learners not its placement. In other words, “. . . contextual information . . . would push [learners] away from interpreting the targeted clause the wrong way” (VanPatten 2004b: 17). Summary of P2 and Its Associated Principles Between 1996 and 2004, researchers gathered more data on the conditions that favor or attenuate learners’ misassignment of the first noun as subject so that VanPatten developed a set of associated principles that delineate various factors that attenuate learners’ misassignment of the first noun. The associated principles are sum- marized as follows: P 2a. The Lexical Semantics Principle: Learners may rely on lexical semantics, where possible, instead of the First Noun Principle to interpret sentences (VanPatten 2007: 124). P 2b. The Event Probabilities Principle: Learners may rely on event probabilities, where possible, instead of the First Noun Princi- ple to interpret sentences (VanPatten 2007: 123). P 2c. The Contextual Constraint Principle: Learners may rely less on the First Noun Principle (or L1 transfer) if preceding context constrains the possible interpretation of a clause or sentence (VanPatten 2007: 124). These principles model “what guides learners’ processing of linguistic data in the input as they are engaged in comprehension” (VanPatten 2007: 116). In this section, we have explicated each of these principles in turn and, in doing so, demonstrated some of the evidence that supports them. It is important to keep in mind that learners are doing two things with the language to which they are exposed and with which they are engaged. They are, firstly, making meaning and they are, secondly, making form–meaning connections
- 47. 30 Processing Instruction and Discourse (Lee and VanPatten 1995, 2003). Making meaning is comprehend- ing, arriving at an idea of what the propositional content of the message is. Making form–meaning connections is input processing, attending to the grammatical forms/features in the input so as to connect the forms with their meanings or functions. While related, these are not the same processes. As we further explore VanPatten’s theory of input processing we will see both types of processes at work. Conclusion Input processing is only one part, albeit a rather important one, of what we could refer to as the entirety of second language acquisition. Exposure to input is necessary for second language acquisition to take place. In this chapter we have presented VanPatten’s theory of input processing and traced its development over time. The theory offers us two principles and their associated principles designed and formulated to explain how learners work with input, that is, how they make a connection between a form in the input and its meaning. Mitchell and Myles (2004: 187–188) see VanPatten’s theory as explain- ing “the apparent failure of second language learners to process completely the linguistic forms encountered in second language input, and hence to explain their impoverished intake which in turn restricts the development of grammatical form.” Learners do not process completely the forms in the input. Why not? Their intake restricts the development of grammatical form. Of course, learners have a limited capacity to process as well as possess an incomplete second language linguistic system. The idea behind exposing learn- ers to input is to increase their capacity to process and to make the developing system a bit more complete. Both events happen slowly over time. In this chapter we not only presented and explained each principle and subprinciple, we also supplied empirical evidence to support them. These are the foundations on which Processing Instruction has been built (Lee and VanPatten 1995, 2003; VanPatten 1993, 1996 and elsewhere). When we know what learners do with input, how
- 48. VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing 31 they work with it, we can then derive instructional techniques and write instructional materials that intervene at the time learners are working with input to make form–meaning connections and not at the time when they are practicing making output.
- 49. Chapter 2 Practical Model: Processing Instruction Processing Instruction Processing Instruction is a psycholinguistic and input-based approach to grammar instruction based on VanPatten’s input processing model. We dealt with this model extensively in Chapter 1. Of concern to models of input processing is how second language (L2) learners perceive and process linguistic data in the input to which they are exposed. When L2 learners process input they usually encounter many problems and challenges in dealing with the new properties, forms, and structures of the target language. The main purpose for Processing Instruction is to guide and focus L2 learner’s attention when they process input; to instill in them target language appro- priate processing strategies. Processing Instruction is substantially different from Traditional Instruction in terms of its characteristics and purpose. Traditional Instruction consists of drills in which learner output is manipulated and the instruction is divorced from meaning or communication. This type of instruction is not a particularly effec- tive method for enhancing language acquisition and what is needed is a new pedagogy of grammar instruction that takes as its point of departure what we know about how grammatical forms and struc- tures are acquired. This new pedagogy called Processing Instruction aims to work with input and with the processes learners use to get data from that input. As indicated by VanPatten (1996:2), Processing Instruction ‘‘is a type of grammar instruction whose purpose is to affect the ways in which learners attend to input data.’’ When learners receive or are exposed to input they tend to rely on internal strate- gies (called principles in VanPatten’s input processing model, see 2004a, 2007, and Chapter 1 in this book) to process the input they
- 50. Practical Model: Processing Instruction 33 receive. As a result of their internal processing, L2 learners might not be able to make correct form–meaning connections or parse sentences correctly. VanPatten’s input processing model presented in Chapter 1 describes how L2 learners process input and what processing strategies affect the way learners process input. As discussed in Chapter 1, input processing consists of two main subprocesses: making form–meaning connections and parsing. In the case of the first subprocess, L2 learners must be able to connect a particular meaning to a particular form in the input they receive (e.g., –ed in English refers to an event in the past). The first principle (P1) in the input processing theory indicates that L2 learners process input for meaning before anything else. This means that L2 learners will initially not be able to process any formal features of the target language. In the case of the second subprocess, L2 learners must be able to map syntactic structure onto the utterance. That is, L2 learners need to establish who the subject or agent is and which noun or pronoun is the object in a sentence they hear or read. The second principle (P2) in the input processing theory indicates that L2 learners tend to process the first noun in a sentence as the subject or agent of the sentence. The consequence of doing so is that L2 learners will in some cases misinterpret sentences. Such misinterpretations are important in that they may cause a delay in the acquisition of syntactic structures because the learners are delivering incorrect information to their developing systems. As underscored by VanPatten (1996: 6), ‘‘the purpose of Processing Instruction is to alter how learners process input and to encourage better form-meaning mapping that results in grammatically richer intake. This in turn should have a positive effect on the nature of the developing system.” The main purpose of Processing Instruction is, then, to help L2 learners to make appropriate form–meaning con- nections and parse sentences correctly so that as a result they develop their internal linguistic system for the target language. The main aim of this instructional approach is to ensure that L2 learners process correctly and efficiently forms and structures in the input they receive so that there is no delay in the acquisition of these forms or struc- tures. In order to accomplish its main goal of altering processing
- 51. 34 Processing Instruction and Discourse strategies and encouraging learners to make accurate form–meaning connections and/or parse sentences correctly, Processing Instruction must have specific characteristics. For a full description of these characteristic see also Lee and VanPatten, 1995, 2003; VanPatten, 1996; Wong, 2004a, 2005; Farley, 2005; Lee and Benati, 2007a, 2007b; and Benati and Lee, 2008. The three main components of Processing Instruction are as follows: 1. Learners are provided with explicit information about the target form or structure. 2. Learners are provided with information about processing strate- gies, both the inappropriate or inefficient one that they tend to use to process the target form or structure in the input as well as the appropriate one on which they will receive practice. 3. Learners are provided with structured input activities, practices designed to help learners abandon the inappropriate or inefficient processing strategy and make correct and appropriate form–meaning connections. In Processing Instruction L2 learners are given some information about how a linguistic structure or form works. The structural pro- perties of a specific form are presented to the learner and the empha- sis is on the explanation of the relationship between that form or structure and its meaning. The example provided in Figure 2.1 shows how explicit information might work for Italian adjective agreement. You have probably noticed descriptive adjectives have different gender: In Italian adjectives must agree in number and gender to the noun they modify. Masculine = o Feminine = a Bello Bella un ragazzo bello una ragazza bella Clinton è bello Claudia Schiffer è bella You must pay attention to the adjective ending in order to understand who and what we are referring to. In addition to that, you need to understand the meaning of the sentence containing the adjective. Figure 2.1 Explicit information
- 52. Practical Model: Processing Instruction 35 Learners are told about the forms, that is, the –o and –a endings. They are also told to pay attention to the ends of words, a processing strategy, to determine to whom the adjective refers. In Figure 2.2 we offer another example of explicit information. Here, the L2 learners are provided with more information on the processing strategy that may negatively affect the way they process the targeted form during exposure to input. Learners must be made aware of the processing strategy that they would use to process a form or a structure of the target language. For example, a common pro- cessing strategy used by L2 learners when they process input is the tendency to rely on temporal adverbs and temporal lexical markers to establish the time frame rather than processing the verbal morphology. Quite simply, if learners do not process the verbal morphology they will not acquire it. In a sentence such as: “Yesterday I played tennis with Paul in the park” L2 learners can establish the temporal framework with a lexeme (the temporal marker “Yesterday”), and they would not Explicit Information The past simple tense is one of the tenses most used to talk about events in the past. It does refer to finished actions and events. Very often the English Past Simple Tense ends in –ed: I invited John for lunch I played tennis with Paula When you talk about a finished time in the past, the English Past Simple Tense is often accompanied by a temporal adverb. Yesterday I smoked 20 cigarettes Information about the processing problem DO NOT RELY ON THE TEMPORAL ADVERB TO UNDERSTAND WHEN THE ACTION TAKES PLACE AS SOMETIMES YOU CAN HEAR A SENTENCE WITHOUT THE TEMPORAL ADVERB. YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION THE TENSE ENDING TO UNDERSTAND WHEN THE ACTION TAKES PLACE. IN THE CASE OF DESCRIBING PAST EVENTS PAY ATTENTION TO THE ENDING OF THE VERB: –ed Figure 2.2 Explicit information and information about the processing problem
- 53. 36 Processing Instruction and Discourse then also need the verb form –ed to do that. According to the Lexical Preference Principle: Learners will tend to rely on lexical items as opposed to grammatical form to get meaning when both encode the same semantic information. In addition to that, the lexeme (tem- poral adverb in this case—yesterday) makes the verb form redundant. Learners do not have to process the verb form for its meaning because it is redundant (according to the Preference for Nonredundancy Principle: Learners are more likely to process nonredundant mean- ingful grammatical form before they process redundant meaningful forms). Now that we have identified what processing strategies L2 learners are using to process this form, we can create structured input activities so that L2 learners will pay attention to the form (–ed) rather than the adverb of time (yesterday) to process meaning. Through structured input activities learners will connect the form –ed with the meaning of pastness. Structured Input Activities L2 learners are now pushed to process the form or structure during activities in which the input is manipulated in particular ways to get learners to become dependent on form to get meaning. We refer to these as structured input activities. After receiving the explicit information about the targeted linguistic feature and the informa- tion about the processing principle affecting that feature, learners are provided with different types of structured input activities (i.e., referential and affective) in which the input is structured in such a way that they are pushed to process forms (in the case of the previous example, verb forms) to understand the meaning of the sentence (in the previous example, to determine the temporal reference of the sentence). In structured input activities the input is manipulated in particular ways to push learners to become dependent on form and structure to get meaning. For example, whenever we have created structured input activities for temporal verb morphology, we never include temporal lexical markers in the input. Learners only have the verb morphology to use to process the temporal framework.
- 54. Practical Model: Processing Instruction 37 VanPatten (1996) produced the following guidelines for creating structured input activities: A. Present one thing at a time. B. Keep meaning in focus. C. Move from sentences to connected discourse. D. Use both oral and written input. E. Have the learner do something with the input. F. Keep the learner’s processing strategies in mind. A. Present one thing at a time Rules should be broken down into smaller parts and taught one at the time during the course of the lesson. Cadierno (1995), for exam- ple, used only third person singular regular preterit tense verb forms. VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) used only third person direct object pronouns. Students are presented with the linguistic feature before being exposed to structured input activities. We avoid providing L2 learners with lots of information and grammatical rules as learners possess a limited capacity for processing information. Presenting L2 learners with a smaller and more focused amount of information will clearly enhance the opportunity for learners to pay more focused attention (Lee and VanPatten 1995, 2003). We must, therefore, develop structured input activities that focus on one form at a time so that it will be easier for learners to map one form to one meaning. In the example in French below, the students listen to some sentences; each contains the French imparfait in its third person singular form. The learners’ task is to decide whether each statement refers to an activity that was taking place last summer or takes place now. Learn- ers are exposed to the forms, the third person singular imparfait, and at the same time the meaning is in focus, which is guideline B. LAST SUMMER NOW
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- 56. PERPLEXITY OF LA SALLE. [ 2 7 8] [ 2 7 9] [ 2 8 0] [ 2 Yet he was full of doubt as to what he should do. Four days after rejoining Beaujeu, he wrote him the strange request to land the troops, that he "might fulfil his commission;" that is, that he might set out against the Spaniards.[291] More than a week passed, a gale had set in, and nothing was done. Then La Salle wrote again, intimating some doubt as to whether he was really at one of the mouths of the Mississippi, and saying that, being sure that he had passed the principal mouth, he was determined to go back to look for it.[292] Meanwhile, Beaujeu was in a state of great irritation. The weather was stormy, and the coast was dangerous. Supplies were scanty; and La Salle's soldiers, still crowded in the "Joly," were consuming the provisions of the ship. Beaujeu gave vent to his annoyance, and La Salle retorted in the same strain. According to Joutel, he urged the naval commander to sail back in search of the river; and Beaujeu refused, unless La Salle should give the soldiers provisions. La Salle, he adds, offered to supply them with rations for fifteen days; and Beaujeu declared this insufficient. There is reason, however, to believe that the request was neither made by the one nor refused by the other so positively as here appears. FOOTNOTES: Lettre (sans nom d'auteur) écrite de St. Domingue, 14 Nov., 1684 (Margry, ii. 492); Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Jean Cavelier sur le Voyage de 1684. Compare Joutel. Mémoire de MM. de Saint-Laurens et Bégon (Margry, ii. 499); Joutel, Journal Historique, 28. Relation de Henri Joutel (Margry, iii. 98). Lettre (sans nom d'auteur), 14 Nov., 1684 (Margry, ii. 496).
- 57. 8 1] [ 2 8 2] [ 2 8 3] [ 2 8 4] [ 2 8 5] [ 2 8 6] [ 2 8 7] [ 2 8 8] [ 2 8 9] [ 2 9 0] [ 2 9 1] [ 2 The above particulars are from the memoir of La Salle's brother, Abbé Cavelier, already cited. Lettre de Beaujeu au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1684. Relation de Henri Joutel (Margry, iii. 105). Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Jean Cavelier. Lettre de Beaujeu au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1684. Letter of Don Luis de Onis to the Secretary of State (American State Papers, xii, 27-31). "La hauteur nous a fait remarquer ... que ce que nous avions vu le sixième janvier estoit en effet la principale entrée de la rivière que nous cherchions."—Lettre de La Salle au Ministre, 4 Mars, 1687. Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Cavelier. "Depuis que nous avions quitté cette rivière qu'il croyoit infailliblement estre le fleuve Colbert [Mississippi] nous avions fait environ 45 lieues ou 50 au plus." (Cavelier, Mémoire.) This, taken in connection with the statement of La Salle that this "principale entrée de la rivière que nous cherchions" was twenty-five or thirty leagues northeast from the entrance of the Bay of St. Louis (Matagorda Bay), shows that it can have been no other than the entrance of Galveston Bay, mistaken by him for the chief outlet of the Mississippi. It is evident that he imagined Galveston Bay to form a part of the chain of lagoons from which it is in fact separated. He speaks of these lagoons as "une espèce de baye fort longue et fort large, dans laquelle le fleuve Colbert se décharge." He adds that on his descent to the mouth of the river in 1682 he had been deceived in supposing that this expanse of salt water, where no shore was in sight, was the open sea. Lettre de La Salle au Ministre, 4 Mars, 1685. Galveston Bay and the mouth of the Mississippi differ little in latitude, though separated by about five and a half degrees of longitude. Lettre de La Salle à Beaujeu, 23 Jan., 1685 (Margry, ii. 526). This letter is dated, "De l'emboucheure d'une rivière que je crois estre une des descharges du Mississipy" (Margry, ii. 528).
- 58. 9 2]
- 59. CHAPTER XXV. 1685. LA SALLE IN TEXAS. A Party of Exploration—Wreck of the "Aimable."—Landing of the Colonists.—A Forlorn Position.—Indian Neighbors.—Friendly Advances of Beaujeu: his Departure.—A Fatal Discovery. Impatience to rid himself of his colleague and to command alone no doubt had its influence on the judgment of La Salle. He presently declared that he would land the soldiers, and send them along shore till they came to the principal outlet of the river. On this, the engineer Minet took up the word,—expressed his doubts as to whether the Mississippi discharged itself into the lagoons at all; represented that even if it did, the soldiers would be exposed to great risks; and gave as his opinion that all should reimbark and continue the search in company. The advice was good, but La Salle resented it as coming from one in whom he recognized no right to give it. "He treated me," complains the engineer, "as if I were the meanest of mankind."[293] He persisted in his purpose, and sent Joutel and Moranget with a party of soldiers to explore the coast. They made their way northeastward along the shore of Matagorda Island, till they were stopped on the third day by what Joutel calls a river, but which was in fact the entrance of Matagorda Bay. Here they encamped, and tried to make a raft of drift-wood. "The difficulty was," says Joutel, "our great number of men, and the few of them who were fit for anything except eating. As I said before, they had all been caught by force or surprise, so that our company was like Noah's ark, which contained animals of all sorts." Before their raft was finished, they
- 60. LANDING OF LA SALLE. WRECK OF THE descried to their great joy the ships which had followed them along the coast.[294] La Salle landed, and announced that here was the western mouth of the Mississippi, and the place to which the King had sent him. He said further that he would land all his men, and bring the "Aimable" and the "Belle" to the safe harborage within. Beaujeu remonstrated, alleging the shallowness of the water and the force of the currents; but his remonstrance was vain.[295] The Bay of St. Louis, now Matagorda Bay, forms a broad and sheltered harbor, accessible from the sea by a narrow passage, obstructed by sand-bars and by the small island now called Pelican Island. Boats were sent to sound and buoy out the channel, and this was successfully accomplished on the sixteenth of February. The "Aimable" was ordered to enter; and, on the twentieth, she weighed anchor. La Salle was on shore watching her. A party of men, at a little distance, were cutting down a tree to make a canoe. Suddenly some of them ran towards him with terrified faces, crying out that they had been set upon by a troop of Indians, who had seized their companions and carried them off. La Salle ordered those about him to take their arms, and at once set out in pursuit. He overtook the Indians, and opened a parley with them; but when he wished to reclaim his men, he discovered that they had been led away during the conference to the Indian camp, a league and a half distant. Among them was one of his lieutenants, the young Marquis de la Sablonnière. He was deeply vexed, for the moment was critical; but the men must be recovered, and he led his followers in haste towards the camp. Yet he could not refrain from turning a moment to watch the "Aimable," as she neared the shoals; and he remarked with deep anxiety to Joutel, who was with him, that if she held that course she would soon be aground. They hurried on till they saw the Indian huts. About fifty of them, oven-shaped, and covered with
- 61. "AIMABLE". mats and hides, were clustered on a rising ground, with their inmates gathered among and around them. As the French entered the camp, there was the report of a cannon from the seaward. The startled savages dropped flat with terror. A different fear seized La Salle, for he knew that the shot was a signal of disaster. Looking back, he saw the "Aimable" furling her sails, and his heart sank with the conviction that she had struck upon the reef. Smothering his distress,—she was laden with all the stores of the colony,—he pressed forward among the filthy wigwams, whose astonished inmates swarmed about the band of armed strangers, staring between curiosity and fear. La Salle knew those with whom he was dealing, and, without ceremony, entered the chief's lodge with his followers. The crowd closed around them, naked men and half-naked women, described by Joutel as of singular ugliness. They gave buffalo meat and dried porpoise to the unexpected guests, but La Salle, racked with anxiety, hastened to close the interview; and having without difficulty recovered the kidnapped men, he returned to the beach, leaving with the Indians, as usual, an impression of good-will and respect. When he reached the shore, he saw his worst fears realized. The "Aimable" lay careened over on the reef, hopelessly aground. Little remained but to endure the calamity with firmness, and to save, as far as might be, the vessel's cargo. This was no easy task. The boat which hung at her stern had been stove in,—it is said, by design. Beaujeu sent a boat from the "Joly," and one or more Indian pirogues were procured. La Salle urged on his men with stern and patient energy, and a quantity of gunpowder and flour was safely landed. But now the wind blew fresh from the sea; the waves began to rise; a storm came on; the vessel, rocking to and fro on the sand- bar, opened along her side, and the ravenous waves were strewn with her treasures. When the confusion was at its height, a troop of Indians came down to the shore, greedy for plunder. The drum was beat; the men were called to arms; La Salle set his trustiest followers to guard the gunpowder, in fear, not of the Indians alone, but of his own countrymen. On that lamentable night, the sentinels
- 62. walked their rounds through the dreary bivouac among the casks, bales, and boxes which the sea had yielded up; and here, too, their fate-hunted chief held his drearier vigil, encompassed with treachery, darkness, and the storm. Not only La Salle, but Joutel and others of his party, believed that the wreck of the "Aimable" was intentional. Aigron, who commanded her, had disobeyed orders and disregarded signals. Though he had been directed to tow the vessel through the channel, he went in under sail; and though little else was saved from the wreck, his personal property, including even some preserved fruits, was all landed safely. He had long been on ill terms with La Salle.[296] All La Salle's company were now encamped on the sands at the left side of the inlet where the "Aimable" was wrecked.[297] "They were all," says the engineer Minet, "sick with nausea and dysentery. Five or six died every day, in consequence of brackish water and bad food. There was no grass, but plenty of rushes and plenty of oysters. There was nothing to make ovens, so that they had to eat flour saved from the wreck, boiled into messes of porridge with this brackish water. Along the shore were quantities of uprooted trees and rotten logs, thrown up by the sea and the lagoon." Of these, and fragments of the wreck, they made a sort of rampart to protect their camp; and here, among tents and hovels, bales, boxes, casks, spars, dismounted cannon, and pens for fowls and swine, were gathered the dejected men and homesick women who were to seize New Biscay, and hold for France a region large as half Europe. The Spaniards, whom they were to conquer, were they knew not where. They knew not where they were themselves; and for the fifteen thousand Indian allies who were to have joined them, they found two hundred squalid savages, more like enemies than friends. In fact, it was soon made plain that these their neighbors wished them no good. A few days after the wreck, the prairie was seen on fire. As the smoke and flame rolled towards them before the wind, La Salle caused all the grass about the camp to be cut and carried
- 63. BEAUJEU AND LA SALLE. away, and especially around the spot where the powder was placed. The danger was averted; but it soon became known that the Indians had stolen a number of blankets and other articles, and carried them to their wigwams. Unwilling to leave his camp, La Salle sent his nephew Moranget and several other volunteers, with a party of men, to reclaim them. They went up the bay in a boat, landed at the Indian camp, and, with more mettle than discretion, marched into it, sword in hand. The Indians ran off, and the rash adventurers seized upon several canoes as an equivalent for the stolen goods. Not knowing how to manage them, they made slow progress on their way back, and were overtaken by night before reaching the French camp. They landed, made a fire, placed a sentinel, and lay down on the dry grass to sleep. The sentinel followed their example, when suddenly they were awakened by the war-whoop and a shower of arrows. Two volunteers, Oris and Desloges, were killed on the spot; a third, named Gayen, was severely wounded; and young Moranget received an arrow through the arm. He leaped up and fired his gun at the vociferous but invisible foe. Others of the party did the same, and the Indians fled. It was about this time that Beaujeu prepared to return to France. He had accomplished his mission, and landed his passengers at what La Salle assured him to be one of the mouths of the Mississippi. His ship was in danger on this exposed and perilous coast, and he was anxious to find shelter. For some time past, his relations with La Salle had been amicable, and it was agreed between them that Beaujeu should stop at Galveston Bay, the supposed chief mouth of the Mississippi; or, failing to find harborage here, that he should proceed to Mobile Bay, and wait there till April, to hear from his colleague. Two days before the wreck of the "Aimable," he wrote to La Salle: "I wish with all my heart that you would have more confidence in me. For my part, I will always make the first advances; and I will follow your counsel whenever I can do so without risking my ship. I will come back to this place, if you want to know the results of the voyage I am going to make. If you wish, I will go to Martinique for provisions and
- 64. reinforcements. In fine, there is nothing I am not ready to do: you have only to speak." La Salle had begged him to send ashore a number of cannon and a quantity of iron, stowed in the "Joly," for the use of the colony; and Beaujeu replies: "I wish very much that I could give you your iron, but it is impossible except in a harbor; for it is on my ballast, and under your cannon, my spare anchors, and all my stowage. It would take three days to get it out, which cannot be done in this place, where the sea runs like mountains when the slightest wind blows outside. I would rather come back to give it to you, in case you do not send the 'Belle' to Baye du St. Esprit [Mobile Bay] to get it.... I beg you once more to consider the offer I make you to go to Martinique to get provisions for your people. I will ask the intendant for them in your name; and if they are refused, I will take them on my own account."[298] To this La Salle immediately replied: "I received with singular pleasure the letter you took the trouble to write me; for I found in it extraordinary proofs of kindness in the interest you take in the success of an affair which I have the more at heart, as it involves the glory of the King and the honor of Monseigneur de Seignelay. I have done my part towards a perfect understanding between us, and have never been wanting in confidence; but even if I could be so, the offers you make are so obliging that they would inspire complete trust." He nevertheless declines them,—assuring Beaujeu at the same time that he has reached the place he sought, and is in a fair way of success if he can but have the cannon, cannonballs, and iron stowed on board the "Joly."[299] Directly after he writes again, "I cannot help conjuring you once more to try to give us the iron." Beaujeu replies: "To show you how ardently I wish to contribute to the success of your undertaking, I have ordered your iron to be got out, in spite of my officers and sailors, who tell me that I endanger my ship by moving everything in the depth of the hold on a coast like this, where the seas are like
- 65. DEPARTURE OF BEAUJEU. mountains. I hesitated to disturb my stowage, not so much to save trouble as because no ballast is to be got hereabout; and I have therefore had six cannon, from my lower deck battery, let down into the hold to take the place of the iron." And he again urges La Salle to accept his offer to bring provisions to the colonists from Martinique. On the next day, the "Aimable" was wrecked. Beaujeu remained a fortnight longer on the coast, and then told La Salle that being out of wood, water, and other necessaries, he must go to Mobile Bay to get them. Nevertheless, he lingered a week more, repeated his offer to bring supplies from Martinique, which La Salle again refused, and at last set sail on the twelfth of March, after a leave-taking which was courteous on both sides.[300] La Salle and his colonists were left alone. Several of them had lost heart, and embarked for home with Beaujeu. Among these was Minet the engineer, who had fallen out with La Salle, and who when he reached France was imprisoned for deserting him. Even his brother, the priest Jean Cavelier, had a mind to abandon the enterprise, but was persuaded at last to remain, along with his nephew the hot-headed Moranget, and the younger Cavelier, a mere school-boy. The two Récollet friars, Zenobe Membré and Anastase Douay, the trusty Joutel, a man of sense and observation, and the Marquis de la Sablonnière, a debauched noble whose patrimony was his sword, were now the chief persons of the forlorn company. The rest were soldiers, raw and undisciplined, and artisans, most of whom knew nothing of their vocation. Add to these the miserable families and the infatuated young women who had come to tempt fortune in the swamps and cane-brakes of the Mississippi. La Salle set out to explore the neighborhood. Joutel remained in command of the so-called fort. He was beset with wily enemies, and often at night the Indians would crawl in the grass around his feeble stockade, howling like wolves; but a few shots would put them to
- 66. CONDUCT OF BEAUJEU. flight. A strict guard was kept; and a wooden horse was set in the enclosure, to punish the sentinel who should sleep at his post. They stood in daily fear of a more formidable foe, and once they saw a sail, which they doubted not was Spanish; but she happily passed without discovering them. They hunted on the prairies, and speared fish in the neighboring pools. On Easter Day, the Sieur le Gros, one of the chief men of the company, went out after the service to shoot snipes; but as he walked barefoot through the marsh, a snake bit him, and he soon after died. Two men deserted, to starve on the prairie, or to become savages among savages. Others tried to escape, but were caught; and one of them was hung. A knot of desperadoes conspired to kill Joutel; but one of them betrayed the secret, and the plot was crushed. La Salle returned from his exploration, but his return brought no cheer. He had been forced to renounce the illusion to which he had clung so long, and was convinced at last that he was not at the mouth of the Mississippi. The wreck of the "Aimable" itself was not pregnant with consequences so disastrous. Note.—The conduct of Beaujeu, hitherto judged chiefly by the printed narrative of Joutel, is set in a new and more favorable light by his correspondence with La Salle. Whatever may have been their mutual irritation, it is clear that the naval commander was anxious to discharge his duty in a manner to satisfy Seignelay, and that he may be wholly acquitted of any sinister design. When he left La Salle on the twelfth of March, he meant to sail in search of the Bay of Mobile (Baye du St. Esprit),—partly because he hoped to find it a safe harbor, where he could get La Salle's cannon out of the hold and find ballast to take their place; and partly to get a supply of wood and water, of which he was in extreme need. He told La Salle that he would wait there till the middle of April, in order that he (La Salle) might send the "Belle" to receive the cannon; but on this point there was no definite agreement between them. Beaujeu was ignorant of the position of the bay, which he thought much nearer than it actually was. After trying two days to reach it, the strong head-winds and the discontent of his crew induced him to bear away for Cuba; and after an encounter with pirates and various adventures, he reached France about the first of July. He was coldly received by Seignelay, who wrote to the intendant at Rochelle: "His Majesty has seen what you wrote about the
- 67. [ 2 9 3] [ 2 9 4] [ 2 9 5] [ 2 9 6] idea of the Sieur de Beaujeu, that the Sieur de la Salle is not at the mouth of the Mississippi. He seems to found this belief on such weak conjectures that no great attention need be given to his account, especially as this man has been prejudiced from the first against La Salle's enterprise." (Lettre de Seignelay à Arnoul, 22 Juillet, 1685. Margry, ii. 604.) The minister at the same time warns Beaujeu to say nothing in disparagement of the enterprise, under pain of the King's displeasure. The narrative of the engineer, Minet, sufficiently explains a curious map, made by him, as he says, not on the spot, but on the voyage homeward, and still preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine. This map includes two distinct sketches of the mouth of the Mississippi. The first, which corresponds to that made by Franquelin in 1684, is entitled "Embouchure de la Rivière comme M. de la Salle la marque dans sa Carte." The second bears the words, "Costes et Lacs par la Hauteur de sa Rivière, comme nous les avons trouvés." These "Costes et Lacs" are a rude representation of the lagoons of Matagorda Bay and its neighborhood, into which the Mississippi is made to discharge, in accordance with the belief of La Salle. A portion of the coast-line is drawn from actual, though superficial observation. The rest is merely conjectural. FOOTNOTES: Relation de Minet; Lettre de Minet à Seignelay, 6 July, 1685 (Margry, ii. 591, 602). Joutel, Journal Historique, 68; Relation (Margry, iii. 143-146) Compare Journal d'Esmanville (Margry, ii. 510). Relation de Minet (Margry, ii. 591). Procès Verbal du Sieur de la Salle sur le Naufrage de la Flûte l'Aimable; Lettre de La Salle à Seignelay, 4 Mars, 1685; Lettre de Beaujeu à Seignelay, sans date. Beaujeu did his best to save the cargo. The loss included nearly all the provisions, 60 barrels of wine, 4 cannon, 1,620 balls, 400 grenades, 4,000 pounds of iron, 5,000 pounds of lead, most of the tools, a forge, a mill, cordage, boxes of arms, nearly all the medicines, and most of the baggage of the soldiers and colonists. Aigron returned to France in the "Joly," and was thrown into prison, "comme il paroist clairement que cet accident est arrivé par sa faute."—Seignelay au Sieur Arnoul, 22 Juillet, 1685 (Margry, ii. 604).
- 68. [ 2 9 7] [ 2 9 8] [ 2 9 9] [ 3 0 0] A map, entitled Entrée du Lac où on a laisse le Sr. de la Salle, made by the engineer Minet, and preserved in the Archives de la Marine, represents the entrance of Matagorda Bay, the camp of La Salle on the left, Indian camps on the borders of the bay, the "Belle" at anchor within, the "Aimable" stranded at the entrance, and the "Joly" anchored in the open sea. Lettre de Beaujeu à La Salle, 18 Fév., 1685 (Margry, ii. 542). Lettre de La Salle à Beaujeu, 18 Fév., 1685 (Margry, ii. 546). The whole of this correspondence between Beaujeu and La Salle will be found in Margry, ii.
- 69. CHAPTER XXVI. 1685-1687. ST. LOUIS OF TEXAS. The Fort.—Misery and Dejection.—Energy of La Salle: his Journey of Exploration.—Adventures and Accidents.—The Buffalo.—Duhaut.— Indian Massacre.—Return Of La Salle.—A New Calamity.—A Desperate Resolution.—Departure for Canada.—Wreck of the "Belle."—Marriage. —Sedition.—Adventures Of la Salle's Party.—The Cenis.—The Camanches.—The Only Hope.—The Last Farewell. Of what avail to plant a colony by the mouth of a petty Texan river? The Mississippi was the life of the enterprise, the condition of its growth and of its existence. Without it, all was futile and meaningless,—a folly and a ruin. Cost what it might, the Mississippi must be found. But the demands of the hour were imperative. The hapless colony, cast ashore like a wreck on the sands of Matagorda Bay, must gather up its shattered resources and recruit its exhausted strength, before it essayed anew its pilgrimage to the "fatal river." La Salle during his explorations had found a spot which he thought well fitted for a temporary establishment. It was on the river which he named the La Vache,[301] now the Lavaca, which enters the head of Matagorda Bay; and thither he ordered all the women and children, and most of the men, to remove; while the rest, thirty in number, remained with Joutel at the fort near the mouth of the bay. Here they spent their time in hunting, fishing, and squaring the logs of drift-wood which the sea washed up in abundance, and which La Salle proposed to use in building his new station on the Lavaca. Thus the time passed till midsummer, when Joutel received orders to abandon his post,
- 70. MISERY AND DEJECTION. and rejoin the main body of the colonists. To this end, the little frigate "Belle" was sent down the bay. She was a gift from the King to La Salle, who had brought her safely over the bar, and regarded her as a main-stay of his hopes. She now took on board the stores and some of the men, while Joutel with the rest followed along shore to the post on the Lavaca. Here he found a state of things that was far from cheering. Crops had been sown, but the drought and the cattle had nearly destroyed them. The colonists were lodged under tents and hovels; and the only solid structure was a small square enclosure of pickets, in which the gunpowder and the brandy were stored. The site was good, a rising ground by the river; but there was no wood within the distance of a league, and no horses or oxen to drag it. Their work must be done by men. Some felled and squared the timber; and others dragged it by main force over the matted grass of the prairie, under the scorching Texan sun. The gun- carriages served to make the task somewhat easier; yet the strongest men soon gave out under it. Joutel went down to the first fort, made a raft and brought up the timber collected there, which proved a most seasonable and useful supply. Palisades and buildings began to rise. The men labored without spirit, yet strenuously; for they labored under the eye of La Salle. The carpenters brought from Rochelle proved worthless; and he himself made the plans of the work, marked out the tenons and mortises, and directed the whole. [302] Death, meanwhile, made withering havoc among his followers; and under the sheds and hovels that shielded them from the sun lay a score of wretches slowly wasting away with the diseases contracted at St. Domingo. Of the soldiers enlisted for the expedition by La Salle's agents, many are affirmed to have spent their lives in begging at the church doors of Rochefort, and were consequently incapable of discipline. It was impossible to prevent either them or the sailors from devouring persimmons and other wild fruits to a destructive excess. Nearly all fell ill; and before the summer had passed, the graveyard had more
- 71. LA SALLE'S EXPLORATIONS. than thirty tenants.[303] The bearing of La Salle did not aid to raise the drooping spirits of his followers. The results of the enterprise had been far different from his hopes; and, after a season of flattering promise, he had entered again on those dark and obstructed paths which seemed his destined way of life. The present was beset with trouble; the future, thick with storms. The consciousness quickened his energies; but it made him stern, harsh, and often unjust to those beneath him. Joutel was returning to camp one afternoon with the master- carpenter, when they saw game; and the carpenter went after it. He was never seen again. Perhaps he was lost on the prairie, perhaps killed by Indians. He knew little of his trade, but they nevertheless had need of him. Le Gros, a man of character and intelligence, suffered more and more from the bite of the snake received in the marsh on Easter Day. The injured limb was amputated, and he died. La Salle's brother, the priest, lay ill; and several others among the chief persons of the colony were in the same condition. Meanwhile, the work was urged on. A large building was finished, constructed of timber, roofed with boards and raw hides, and divided into apartments for lodging and other uses. La Salle gave the new establishment his favorite name of Fort St. Louis, and the neighboring bay was also christened after the royal saint.[304] The scene was not without its charms. Towards the southeast stretched the bay with its bordering meadows; and on the northeast the Lavaca ran along the base of green declivities. Around, far and near, rolled a sea of prairie, with distant forests, dim in the summer haze. At times, it was dotted with the browsing buffalo, not yet scared from their wonted pastures; and the grassy swells were spangled with the flowers for which Texas is renowned, and which now form the gay ornaments of our gardens. And now, the needful work accomplished, and the colony in some measure housed and fortified, its indefatigable chief prepared to renew his quest
- 72. LIFE AT THE FORT. of the "fatal river," as Joutel repeatedly calls it. Before his departure he made some preliminary explorations, in the course of which, according to the report of his brother the priest, he found evidence that the Spaniards had long before had a transient establishment at a spot about fifteen leagues from Fort St. Louis.[305] It was the last day of October when La Salle set out on his great journey of exploration. His brother Cavelier, who had now recovered, accompanied him with fifty men; and five cannon-shot from the fort saluted them as they departed. They were lightly equipped; but some of them wore corselets made of staves, to ward off arrows. Descending the Lavaca, they pursued their course eastward on foot along the margin of the bay, while Joutel remained in command of the fort. It was two leagues above the mouth of the river; and in it were thirty-four persons, including three Récollet friars, a number of women and girls from Paris, and two young orphan daughters of one Talon, a Canadian, who had lately died. Their live-stock consisted of some hogs and a litter of eight pigs, which, as Joutel does not forget to inform us, passed their time in wallowing in the ditch of the palisade; a cock and hen, with a young family; and a pair of goats, which, in a temporary dearth of fresh meat, were sacrificed to the needs of the invalid Abbé Cavelier. Joutel suffered no man to lie idle. The blacksmith, having no anvil, was supplied with a cannon as a substitute. Lodgings were built for the women and girls, and separate lodgings for the men. A small chapel was afterwards added, and the whole was fenced with a palisade. At the four corners of the house were mounted eight pieces of cannon, which, in the absence of balls, were loaded with bags of bullets.[306] Between the palisades and the stream lay a narrow strip of marsh, the haunt of countless birds; and at a little distance it deepened into pools full of fish. All the surrounding prairies swarmed with game,— buffalo, deer, hares, turkeys, ducks, geese, swans, plover, snipe, and grouse. The river supplied the colonists with turtles, and the bay with oysters. Of these last, they often found more than they wanted;
- 73. THE BUFFALO. for when in their excursions they shoved their log canoes into the water, wading shoeless through the deep, tenacious mud, the sharp shells would cut their feet like knives; "and what was worse," says Joutel, "the salt water came into the gashes, and made them smart atrociously." He sometimes amused himself with shooting alligators. "I never spared them when I met them near the house. One day I killed an extremely large one, which was nearly four feet and a half in girth, and about twenty feet long." He describes with accuracy that curious native of the southwestern plains, the "horned frog," which, deceived by its uninviting appearance, he erroneously supposed to be venomous. "We had some of our animals bitten by snakes; among the others, a bitch that had belonged to the deceased Sieur le Gros. She was bitten in the jaw when she was with me, as I was fishing by the shore of the bay. I gave her a little theriac [an antidote then in vogue], which cured her, as it did one of our sows, which came home one day with her head so swelled that she could hardly hold it up. Thinking it must be some snake that had bitten her, I gave her a dose of the theriac mixed with meal and water." The patient began to mend at once. "I killed a good many rattle- snakes by means of the aforesaid bitch, for when she saw one she would bark around him, sometimes for a half hour together, till I took my gun and shot him. I often found them in the bushes, making a noise with their tails. When I had killed them, our hogs ate them." He devotes many pages to the plants and animals of the neighborhood, most of which may easily be recognized from his description. With the buffalo, which he calls "our daily bread," his experiences were many and strange. Being, like the rest of the party, a novice in the art of shooting them, he met with many disappointments. Once, having mounted to the roof of the large house in the fort, he saw a dark moving object on a swell of the prairie three miles off; and rightly thinking that it was a herd of buffalo, he set out with six or seven
- 74. men to try to kill some of them. After a while, he discovered two bulls lying in a hollow; and signing to the rest of his party to keep quiet, he made his approach, gun in hand. The bulls presently jumped up, and stared through their manes at the intruder. Joutel fired. It was a close shot; but the bulls merely shook their shaggy heads, wheeled about, and galloped heavily away. The same luck attended him the next day. "We saw plenty of buffalo. I approached several bands of them, and fired again and again, but could not make one of them fall." He had not yet learned that a buffalo rarely falls at once, unless hit in the spine. He continues: "I was not discouraged; and after approaching several more bands,—which was hard work, because I had to crawl on the ground, so as not to be seen,—I found myself in a herd of five or six thousand, but, to my great vexation, I could not bring one of them down. They all ran off to the right and left. It was near night, and I had killed nothing. Though I was very tired, I tried again, approached another band, and fired a number of shots; but not a buffalo would fall. The skin was off my knees with crawling. At last, as I was going back to rejoin our men, I saw a buffalo lying on the ground. I went towards it, and saw that it was dead. I examined it, and found that the bullet had gone in near the shoulder. Then I found others dead like the first. I beckoned the men to come on, and we set to work to cut up the meat,—a task which was new to us all." It would be impossible to write a more true and characteristic sketch of the experience of a novice in shooting buffalo on foot. A few days after, he went out again, with Father Anastase Douay; approached a bull, fired, and broke his shoulder. The bull hobbled off on three legs. Douay ran in his cassock to head him back, while Joutel reloaded his gun; upon which the enraged beast butted at the missionary, and knocked him down. He very narrowly escaped with his life. "There was another missionary," pursues Joutel, "named Father Maxime Le Clerc, who was very well fitted for such an undertaking as ours, because he was equal to anything, even to butchering a buffalo; and as I said before that every one of us must lend a hand, because we were too few for anybody to be waited upon, I made the women, girls, and children do their part, as well as him; for as they all wanted to eat, it was fair
- 75. RETURN OF DUHAUT. that they all should work." He had a scaffolding built near the fort, and set them to smoking buffalo meat, against a day of scarcity.[307] Thus the time passed till the middle of January; when late one evening, as all were gathered in the principal building, conversing perhaps, or smoking, or playing at cards, or dozing by the fire in homesick dreams of France, a man on guard came in to report that he had heard a voice from the river. They all went down to the bank, and descried a man in a canoe, who called out, "Dominic!" This was the name of the younger of the two brothers Duhaut, who was one of Joutel's followers. As the canoe approached, they recognized the elder, who had gone with La Salle on his journey of discovery, and who was perhaps the greatest villain of the company. Joutel was much perplexed. La Salle had ordered him to admit nobody into the fort without a pass and a watchword. Duhaut, when questioned, said that he had none, but told at the same time so plausible a story that Joutel no longer hesitated to receive him. As La Salle and his men were pursuing their march along the prairie, Duhaut, who was in the rear, had stopped to mend his moccasins, and when he tried to overtake the party, had lost his way, mistaking a buffalo-path for the trail of his companions. At night he fired his gun as a signal, but there was no answering shot. Seeing no hope of rejoining them, he turned back for the fort, found one of the canoes which La Salle had hidden at the shore, paddled by night and lay close by day, shot turkeys, deer, and buffalo for food, and, having no knife, cut the meat with a sharp flint, till after a month of excessive hardship he reached his destination. As the inmates of Fort St. Louis gathered about the weather-beaten wanderer, he told them dreary tidings. The pilot of the "Belle," such was his story, had gone with five men to sound along the shore, by order of La Salle, who was then encamped in the neighborhood with his party of explorers. The boat's crew, being overtaken by the night, had rashly bivouacked on the beach without setting a guard; and as they slept, a band of Indians had rushed in upon them, and butchered them all. La Salle, alarmed by their long absence, had searched along the shore, and at
- 76. LA SALLE'S ADVENTURES. length found their bodies scattered about the sands and half- devoured by wolves.[308] Well would it have been, if Duhaut had shared their fate. Weeks and months dragged on, when, at the end of March, Joutel, chancing to mount on the roof of one of the buildings, saw seven or eight men approaching over the prairie. He went out to meet them with an equal number, well armed; and as he drew near recognized, with mixed joy and anxiety, La Salle and some of those who had gone with him. His brother Cavelier was at his side, with his cassock so tattered that, says Joutel, "there was hardly a piece left large enough to wrap a farthing's worth of salt. He had an old cap on his head, having lost his hat by the way. The rest were in no better plight, for their shirts were all in rags. Some of them carried loads of meat, because M. de la Salle was afraid that we might not have killed any buffalo. We met with great joy and many embraces. After our greetings were over, M. de la Salle, seeing Duhaut, asked me in an angry tone how it was that I had received this man who had abandoned him. I told him how it had happened, and repeated Duhaut's story. Duhaut defended himself, and M. de la Salle's anger was soon over. We went into the house, and refreshed ourselves with some bread and brandy, as there was no wine left."[309] La Salle and his companions told their story. They had wandered on through various savage tribes, with whom they had more than one encounter, scattering them like chaff by the terror of their fire-arms. At length they found a more friendly band, and learned much touching the Spaniards, who, they were told, were universally hated by the tribes of that country. It would be easy, said their informants, to gather a host of warriors and lead them over the Rio Grande; but La Salle was in no condition for attempting conquests, and the tribes in whose alliance he had trusted had, a few days before, been at blows with him. The invasion of New Biscay must be postponed to a more propitious day. Still advancing, he came to a large river, which he at first mistook for the Mississippi; and building a fort of
- 77. DEPARTURE FOR CANADA. palisades, he left here several of his men.[310] The fate of these unfortunates does not appear. He now retraced his steps towards Fort St. Louis, and, as he approached it, detached some of his men to look for his vessel, the "Belle," for whose safety, since the loss of her pilot, he had become very anxious. On the next day these men appeared at the fort, with downcast looks. They had not found the "Belle" at the place where she had been ordered to remain, nor were any tidings to be heard of her. From that hour, the conviction that she was lost possessed the mind of La Salle. Surrounded as he was, and had always been, with traitors, the belief now possessed him that her crew had abandoned the colony, and made sail for the West Indies or for France. The loss was incalculable. He had relied on this vessel to transport the colonists to the Mississippi, as soon as its exact position could be ascertained; and thinking her a safer place of deposit than the fort, he had put on board of her all his papers and personal baggage, besides a great quantity of stores, ammunition, and tools.[311] In truth, she was of the last necessity to the unhappy exiles, and their only resource for escape from a position which was fast becoming desperate. La Salle, as his brother tells us, now fell dangerously ill,—the fatigues of his journey, joined to the effects upon his mind of this last disaster, having overcome his strength, though not his fortitude. "In truth," writes the priest, "after the loss of the vessel which deprived us of our only means of returning to France, we had no resource but in the firm guidance of my brother, whose death each of us would have regarded as his own."[312] La Salle no sooner recovered than he embraced a resolution which could be the offspring only of a desperate necessity. He determined to make his way by the Mississippi and the Illinois to Canada, whence he might bring succor to the colonists, and send a report of their condition to France. The attempt was beset with uncertainties and dangers. The
- 78. WRECK OF THE "BELLE." Mississippi was first to be found, then followed through all the perilous monotony of its interminable windings to a goal which was to be but the starting-point of a new and not less arduous journey. Cavelier his brother, Moranget his nephew, the friar Anastase Douay, and others to the number of twenty, were chosen to accompany him. Every corner of the magazine was ransacked for an outfit. Joutel generously gave up the better part of his wardrobe to La Salle and his two relatives. Duhaut, who had saved his baggage from the wreck of the "Aimable," was required to contribute to the necessities of the party; and the scantily-furnished chests of those who had died were used to supply the wants of the living. Each man labored with needle and awl to patch his failing garments, or supply their place with buffalo or deer skins. On the twenty-second of April, after mass and prayers in the chapel, they issued from the gate, each bearing his pack and his weapons, some with kettles slung at their backs, some with axes, some with gifts for Indians. In this guise, they held their way in silence across the prairie; while anxious eyes followed them from the palisades of St. Louis, whose inmates, not excepting Joutel himself, seem to have been ignorant of the extent and difficulty of the undertaking.[313] "On May Day," he writes, "at about two in the afternoon, as I was walking near the house, I heard a voice from the river below, crying out several times, Qui vive? Knowing that the Sieur Barbier had gone that way with two canoes to hunt buffalo, I thought that it might be one of these canoes coming back with meat, and did not think much of the matter till I heard the same voice again. I answered, Versailles, which was the password I had given the Sieur Barbier, in case he should come back in the night. But, as I was going towards the bank, I heard other voices which I had not heard for a long time. I recognized among the rest that of M. Chefdeville, which made me fear that some disaster had happened. I ran down to the bank, and my first greeting was to ask what had become of the 'Belle.' They answered that she was wrecked on the other side of the bay, and that all on board were drowned except the six who were in the
- 79. canoe; namely, the Sieur Chefdeville, the Marquis de la Sablonnière, the man named Teissier, a soldier, a girl, and a little boy."[314] From the young priest Chefdeville, Joutel learned the particulars of the disaster. Water had failed on board the "Belle"; a boat's crew of five men had gone in quest of it; the wind rose, their boat was swamped, and they were all drowned. Those who remained had now no means of going ashore; but if they had no water, they had wine and brandy in abundance, and Teissier, the master of the vessel, was drunk every day. After a while they left their moorings, and tried to reach the fort; but they were few, weak, and unskilful. A violent north wind drove them on a sand-bar. Some of them were drowned in trying to reach land on a raft. Others were more successful; and, after a long delay, they found a stranded canoe, in which they made their way to St. Louis, bringing with them some of La Salle's papers and baggage saved from the wreck. These multiplied disasters bore hard on the spirits of the colonists; and Joutel, like a good commander as he was, spared no pains to cheer them. "We did what we could to amuse ourselves and drive away care. I encouraged our people to dance and sing in the evenings; for when M. de la Salle was among us, pleasure was often banished. Now, there is no use in being melancholy on such occasions. It is true that M. de la Salle had no great cause for merry- making, after all his losses and disappointments; but his troubles made others suffer also. Though he had ordered me to allow to each person only a certain quantity of meat at every meal, I observed this rule only when meat was rare. The air here is very keen, and one has a great appetite. One must eat and act, if he wants good health and spirits. I speak from experience; for once, when I had ague chills, and was obliged to keep the house with nothing to do, I was dreary and down-hearted. On the contrary, if I was busy with hunting or anything else, I was not so dull by half. So I tried to keep the people as busy as possible. I set them to making a small cellar to keep meat fresh in hot weather; but when M. de la Salle came back, he said it was too small. As he always wanted to do everything
- 80. MATRIMONY. on a grand scale, he prepared to make a large one, and marked out the plan." This plan of the large cellar, like more important undertakings of its unhappy projector, proved too extensive for execution, the colonists being engrossed by the daily care of keeping themselves alive. A gleam of hilarity shot for an instant out of the clouds. The young Canadian, Barbier, usually conducted the hunting-parties; and some of the women and girls often went out with them, to aid in cutting up the meat. Barbier became enamoured of one of the girls; and as his devotion to her was the subject of comment, he asked Joutel for leave to marry her. The commandant, after due counsel with the priests and friars, vouchsafed his consent, and the rite was duly solemnized; whereupon, fired by the example, the Marquis de la Sablonnière begged leave to marry another of the girls. Joutel, the gardener's son, concerned that a marquis should so abase himself, and anxious at the same time for the morals of the fort, which La Salle had especially commended to his care, not only flatly refused, but, in the plenitude of his authority, forbade the lovers all further intercourse. Father Zenobe Membré, superior of the mission, gave unwilling occasion for further merriment. These worthy friars were singularly unhappy in their dealings with the buffalo, one of which, it may be remembered, had already knocked down Father Anastase. Undeterred by his example, Father Zenobe one day went out with the hunters, carrying a gun like the rest. Joutel shot a buffalo, which was making off, badly wounded, when a second shot stopped it, and it presently lay down. The father superior thought it was dead; and, without heeding the warning shout of Joutel, he approached, and pushed it with the butt of his gun. The bull sprang up with an effort of expiring fury, and, in the words of Joutel, "trampled on the father, took the skin off his face in several places, and broke his gun, so that he could hardly manage to get away, and remained in an almost
- 81. ADVENTURES OF THE TRAVELLERS. helpless state for more than three months. Bad as the accident was, he was laughed at nevertheless for his rashness." The mishaps of the friars did not end here. Father Maxime Le Clerc was set upon by a boar belonging to the colony. "I do not know," says Joutel, "what spite the beast had against him, whether for a beating or some other offence; but, however this may be, I saw the father running and crying for help, and the boar running after him. I went to the rescue, but could not come up in time. The father stooped as he ran, to gather up his cassock from about his legs; and the boar, which ran faster than he, struck him in the arm with his tusks, so that some of the nerves were torn. Thus, all three of our good Récollet fathers were near being the victims of animals." [315] In spite of his efforts to encourage them, the followers of Joutel were fast losing heart. Father Maxime Le Clerc kept a journal, in which he set down various charges against La Salle. Joutel got possession of the paper, and burned it on the urgent entreaty of the friars, who dreaded what might ensue, should the absent commander become aware of the aspersions cast upon him. The elder Duhaut fomented the rising discontent of the colonists, played the demagogue, told them that La Salle would never return, and tried to make himself their leader. Joutel detected the mischief, and, with a lenity which he afterwards deeply regretted, contented himself with a rebuke to the offender, and words of reproof and encouragement to the dejected band. He had caused the grass to be cut near the fort, so as to form a sort of playground; and here, one evening, he and some of the party were trying to amuse themselves, when they heard shouts from beyond the river, and Joutel recognized the voice of La Salle. Hastening to meet him in a wooden canoe, he brought him and his party to the fort. Twenty men had gone out with him, and eight had returned. Of the rest, four had deserted, one had been lost, one had been devoured by an
- 82. alligator; and the others, giving out on the march, had probably perished in attempting to regain the fort. The travellers told of a rich country, a wild and beautiful landscape,—woods, rivers, groves, and prairies; but all availed nothing, and the acquisition of five horses was but an indifferent return for the loss of twelve men. After leaving the fort, they had journeyed towards the northeast, over plains green as an emerald with the young verdure of April, till at length they saw, far as the eye could reach, the boundless prairie alive with herds of buffalo. The animals were in one of their tame or stupid moods; and they killed nine or ten of them without the least difficulty, drying the best parts of the meat. They crossed the Colorado on a raft, and reached the banks of another river, where one of the party, named Hiens, a German of Würtemberg, and an old buccaneer, was mired and nearly suffocated in a mud-hole. Unfortunately, as will soon appear, he managed to crawl out; and, to console him, the river was christened with his name. The party made a bridge of felled trees, on which they crossed in safety. La Salle now changed their course, and journeyed eastward, when the travellers soon found themselves in the midst of a numerous Indian population, where they were feasted and caressed without measure. At another village they were less fortunate. The inhabitants were friendly by day and hostile by night. They came to attack the French in their camp, but withdrew, daunted by the menacing voice of La Salle, who had heard them approaching through the cane-brake. La Salle's favorite Shawanoe hunter, Nika, who had followed him from Canada to France, and from France to Texas, was bitten by a rattlesnake; and, though he recovered, the accident detained the party for several days. At length they resumed their journey, but were stopped by a river, called by Douay, "La Rivière des Malheurs." La Salle and Cavelier, with a few others, tried to cross on a raft, which, as it reached the channel, was caught by a current of marvellous swiftness. Douay and Moranget, watching the transit from the edge of the cane-brake, beheld their commander swept down the stream, and vanishing, as it were, in an instant. All that
- 83. day they remained with their companions on the bank, lamenting in despair for the loss of their guardian angel, for so Douay calls La Salle.[316] It was fast growing dark, when, to their unspeakable relief, they saw him advancing with his party along the opposite bank, having succeeded, after great exertion, in guiding the raft to land. How to rejoin him was now the question. Douay and his companions, who had tasted no food that day, broke their fast on two young eagles which they knocked out of their nest, and then spent the night in rueful consultation as to the means of crossing the river. In the morning they waded into the marsh, the friar with his breviary in his hood to keep it dry, and hacked among the canes till they had gathered enough to make another raft; on which, profiting by La Salle's experience, they safely crossed, and rejoined him. Next, they became entangled in a cane-brake, where La Salle, as usual with him in such cases, took the lead, a hatchet in each hand, and hewed out a path for his followers. They soon reached the villages of the Cenis Indians, on and near the river Trinity,—a tribe then powerful, but long since extinct. Nothing could surpass the friendliness of their welcome. The chiefs came to meet them, bearing the calumet, and followed by warriors in shirts of embroidered deer-skin. Then the whole village swarmed out like bees, gathering around the visitors with offerings of food and all that was precious in their eyes. La Salle was lodged with the great chief; but he compelled his men to encamp at a distance, lest the ardor of their gallantry might give occasion of offence. The lodges of the Cenis, forty or fifty feet high, and covered with a thatch of meadow- grass, looked like huge bee-hives. Each held several families, whose fire was in the middle, and their beds around the circumference. The spoil of the Spaniards was to be seen on all sides,—silver lamps and spoons, swords, old muskets, money, clothing, and a bull of the Pope dispensing the Spanish colonists of New Mexico from fasting during summer.[317] These treasures, as well as their numerous horses, were obtained by the Cenis from their neighbors and allies the Camanches, that fierce prairie banditti who then, as now,
- 84. DEJECTION. scourged the Mexican border with their bloody forays. A party of these wild horsemen was in the village. Douay was edified at seeing them make the sign of the cross in imitation of the neophytes of one of the Spanish missions. They enacted, too, the ceremony of the mass; and one of them, in his rude way, drew a sketch of a picture he had seen in some church which he had pillaged, wherein the friar plainly recognized the Virgin weeping at the foot of the cross. They invited the French to join them on a raid into New Mexico; and they spoke with contempt, as their tribesmen will speak to this day, of the Spanish creoles, saying that it would be easy to conquer a nation of cowards who make people walk before them with fans to cool them in hot weather.[318] Soon after leaving the Cenis villages, both La Salle and his nephew Moranget were attacked by fever. This caused a delay of more than two months, during which the party seem to have remained encamped on the Neches, or possibly the Sabine. When at length the invalids had recovered sufficient strength to travel, the stock of ammunition was nearly spent, some of the men had deserted, and the condition of the travellers was such that there seemed no alternative but to return to Fort St. Louis. This they accordingly did, greatly aided in their march by the horses bought from the Cenis, and suffering no very serious accident by the way,— excepting the loss of La Salle's servant, Dumesnil, who was seized by an alligator while attempting to cross the Colorado. The temporary excitement caused among the colonists by their return soon gave place to a dejection bordering on despair. "This pleasant land," writes Cavelier, "seemed to us an abode of weariness and a perpetual prison." Flattering themselves with the delusion, common to exiles of every kind, that they were objects of solicitude at home, they watched daily, with straining eyes, for an approaching sail. Ships, indeed, had ranged the coast to seek them, but with no friendly intent. Their thoughts dwelt, with unspeakable yearning, on the France they had left behind, which, to their longing fancy, was
- 85. TWELFTH NIGHT. pictured as an unattainable Eden. Well might they despond; for of a hundred and eighty colonists, besides the crew of the "Belle," less than forty-five remained. The weary precincts of Fort St. Louis, with its fence of rigid palisades, its area of trampled earth, its buildings of weather-stained timber, and its well-peopled graveyard without, were hateful to their sight. La Salle had a heavy task to save them from despair. His composure, his unfailing equanimity, his words of encouragement and cheer, were the breath of life to this forlorn company; for though he could not impart to minds of less adamantine temper the audacity of hope with which he still clung to the final accomplishment of his purposes, the contagion of his hardihood touched, nevertheless, the drooping spirits of his followers.[319] The journey to Canada was clearly their only hope; and, after a brief rest, La Salle prepared to renew the attempt. He proposed that Joutel should this time be of the party; and should proceed from Quebec to France, with his brother Cavelier, to solicit succors for the colony, while he himself returned to Texas. A new obstacle was presently interposed. La Salle, whose constitution seems to have suffered from his long course of hardships, was attacked in November with hernia. Joutel offered to conduct the party in his stead; but La Salle replied that his own presence was indispensable at the Illinois. He had the good fortune to recover, within four or five weeks, sufficiently to undertake the journey; and all in the fort busied themselves in preparing an outfit. In such straits were they for clothing, that the sails of the "Belle" were cut up to make coats for the adventurers. Christmas came, and was solemnly observed. There was a midnight mass in the chapel, where Membré, Cavelier, Douay, and their priestly brethren stood before the altar, in vestments strangely contrasting with the rude temple and the ruder garb of the worshippers. And as Membré elevated the consecrated wafer, and the lamps burned dim through the clouds of incense, the kneeling group drew from the daily miracle such consolation as true Catholics alone can know. When Twelfth Night came, all gathered in the hall,
- 86. THE LAST FAREWELL. [ 3 0 1] [ 3 0 2] [ 3 and cried, after the jovial old custom, "The King drinks," with hearts, perhaps, as cheerless as their cups, which were filled with cold water. On the morrow, the band of adventurers mustered for the fatal journey.[320] The five horses, bought by La Salle of the Indians, stood in the area of the fort, packed for the march; and here was gathered the wretched remnant of the colony,—those who were to go, and those who were to stay behind. These latter were about twenty in all,—Barbier, who was to command in the place of Joutel; Sablonnière, who, despite his title of marquis, was held in great contempt;[321] the friars, Membré and Le Clerc,[322] and the priest Chefdeville, besides a surgeon, soldiers, laborers, seven women and girls, and several children, doomed, in this deadly exile, to wait the issues of the journey, and the possible arrival of a tardy succor. La Salle had made them a last address, delivered, we are told, with that winning air which, though alien from his usual bearing, seems to have been at times a natural expression of this unhappy man.[323] It was a bitter parting, one of sighs, tears, and embracings,—the farewell of those on whose souls had sunk a heavy boding that they would never meet again.[324] Equipped and weaponed for the journey, the adventurers filed from the gate, crossed the river, and held their slow march over the prairies beyond, till intervening woods and hills shut Fort St. Louis forever from their sight. FOOTNOTES: Called by Joutel, Rivière aux Bœufs. Joutel, Journal Historique, 108; Relation (Margry, iii. 174); Procès Verbal fait au poste de St. Louis, le 18 Avril, 1686. Joutel, Journal Historique, 109. Le Clerc, who was not present, says a hundred.
- 87. 0 3] [ 3 0 4] [ 3 0 5] [ 3 0 6] [ 3 0 7] [ 3 0 8] [ 3 0 9] [ 3 1 0] The Bay of St. Louis, St. Bernard's Bay, or Matagorda Bay,—for it has borne all these names,—was also called Espiritu Santo Bay by the Spaniards, in common with several other bays in the Gulf of Mexico. An adjoining bay still retains the name. Cavelier, in his report to the minister, says: "We reached a large village, enclosed with a kind of wall made of clay and sand, and fortified with little towers at intervals, where we found the arms of Spain engraved on a plate of copper, with the date of 1588, attached to a stake. The inhabitants gave us a kind welcome, and showed us some hammers and an anvil, two small pieces of iron cannon, a small brass culverin, some pike-heads, some old sword-blades, and some books of Spanish comedy; and thence they guided us to a little hamlet of fishermen, about two leagues distant, where they showed us a second stake, also with the arms of Spain, and a few old chimneys. All this convinced us that the Spaniards had formerly been here." (Cavelier, Relation du Voyage que mon frère entreprit pour découvrir l'embouchure du fleuve de Missisipy.) The above is translated from the original draft of Cavelier, which is in my possession. It was addressed to the colonial minister, after the death of La Salle. The statement concerning the Spaniards needs confirmation. Compare Joutel with the Spanish account in Carta en que se da noticia de un viaje hecho á la Bahia de Espíritu Santo y de la poblacion que tenian ahi los Franceses; Coleccion de Varios Documentos, 25. For the above incidents of life at Fort St. Louis, see Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 185-218, passim). The printed condensation of the narrative omits most of these particulars. Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 206). Compare Le Clerc, ii. 296. Cavelier, always disposed to exaggerate, says that ten men were killed. La Salle had previously had encounters with the Indians, and punished them severely for the trouble they had given his men. Le Clerc says of the principal fight: "Several Indians were wounded, a few were killed, and others made prisoners,—one of whom, a girl of three or four years, was baptized, and died a few days after, as the first-fruit of this mission, and a sure conquest sent to heaven." Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 219). Cavelier says that he actually reached the Mississippi; but, on the one hand, the abbé did not know whether the river in question was the Mississippi or not; and, on the other, he is somewhat inclined to mendacity. Le Clerc says that La Salle thought he had found the
- 88. [ 3 1 1] [ 3 1 2] [ 3 1 3] [ 3 1 4] [ 3 1 5] [ 3 1 6] [ 3 1 7] [ 3 1 8] [ 3 1 9] [ 3 2 0] [ 3 river. According to the Procès Verbal of 18 April, 1686, "il y arriva le 13 Février." Joutel says that La Salle told him "qu'il n'avoit point trouvé sa rivière." Procès Verbal fait au poste de St. Louis, le 18 Avril, 1686. Cavelier, Relation du Voyage pour découvrir l'Embouchure du Fleuve de Missisipy. Joutel, Journal Historique, 140; Anastase Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 303; Cavelier, Relation. The date is from Douay. It does not appear, from his narrative, that they meant to go farther than the Illinois. Cavelier says that after resting here they were to go to Canada. Joutel supposed that they would go only to the Illinois. La Salle seems to have been even more reticent than usual. Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 226). Joutel, Relation (Margry, iii. 244, 246. "Ce fût une desolation extrême pour nous tous qui desesperions de revoir jamais nostre Ange tutélaire, le Sieur de la Salle.... Tout le jour se passa en pleurs et en larmes."— Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 315. Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 321; Cavelier, Relation. Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 324, 325. "L'égalité d'humeur du Chef rassuroit tout le monde; et il trouvoit des resources à tout par son esprit qui relevoit les espérances les plus abatues."—Joutel, Journal Historique, 152. "Il seroit difficile de trouver dans l'Histoire un courage plus intrepide et plus invincible que celuy du Sieur de la Salle dans les évenemens contraires; il ne fût jamais abatu, et il espéroit toujours avec le secours du Ciel de venir à bout de son entreprise malgré tous les obstacles qui se présentoient."—Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 327. I follow Douay's date, who makes the day of departure the seventh of January, or the day after Twelfth Night. Joutel thinks it was the twelfth of January, but professes uncertainty as to all his dates at this time, as he lost his notes. He had to be kept on short allowance, because he was in the habit of bargaining away everything given to him. He had squandered the little
- 89. 2 1] [ 3 2 2] [ 3 2 3] [ 3 2 4] that belonged to him at St. Domingo, in amusements "indignes de sa naissance," and in consequence was suffering from diseases which disabled him from walking. (Procès Verbal, 18 Avril, 1686.) Maxime le Clerc was a relative of the author of L'Établissement de la Foi. "Il fit une Harangue pleine d'éloquence et de cet air engageant qui luy estoit si naturel: toute la petite Colonie y estoit presente et en fût touchée jusques aux larmes, persuadée de la nécessité de son voyage et de la droiture de ses intentions."—Douay in Le Clerc, ii, 330. "Nous nous separâmes les uns des autres, d'une manière si tendre et si triste qu'il sembloit que nous avions tous le secret pressentiment que nous ne nous reverrions jamais."—Joutel, Journal Historique, 158.
- 90. LA SALLE'S FOLLOWERS. CHAPTER XXVII. 1687. ASSASSINATION OF LA SALLE. His Followers.—Prairie Travelling—A Hunters' Quarrel—The Murder of Moranget.—The Conspiracy.—Death of La Salle: his Character. The travellers were crossing a marshy prairie towards a distant belt of woods that followed the course of a little river. They led with them their five horses, laden with their scanty baggage, and, with what was of no less importance, their stock of presents for Indians. Some wore the remains of the clothing they had worn from France, eked out with deer-skins, dressed in the Indian manner; and some had coats of old sail-cloth. Here was La Salle, in whom one would have known, at a glance, the chief of the party; and the priest, Cavelier, who seems to have shared not one of the high traits of his younger brother. Here, too, were their nephews, Moranget and the boy Cavelier, now about seventeen years old; the trusty soldier Joutel; and the friar Anastase Douay. Duhaut followed, a man of respectable birth and education; and Liotot, the surgeon of the party. At home, they might perhaps have lived and died with a fair repute; but the wilderness is a rude touchstone, which often reveals traits that would have lain buried and unsuspected in civilized life. The German Hiens, the ex- buccaneer, was also of the number. He had probably sailed with an English crew; for he was sometimes known as Gemme Anglais, or "English Jem."[325] The Sieur de Marie; Teissier, a pilot; L'Archevêque, a servant of Duhaut; and others, to the number in all of seventeen,—made up the party; to which is to be added Nika, La Salle's Shawanoe hunter, who, as well as another Indian, had twice
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