BLACK ROBE ON THE KENNEBEC, by Mary R. Calvert, The Monmouth Press, 292 pages, hardcover, $22.95.

As one of the most controversial characters in New England history, Father Sebastian Rale has generated a lot of ink since he died in 1724. Much of it has surrounded the debate over whether he was a French incendiary, or a holy martyr, or maybe both. Often overlooked is the man’s status as an astute diplomat, and as a scholar who was one of the most important chroniclers of Abenaki culture and language.

Mary Calvert’s book is an important addition to the published material about Rale. It’s certainly the most comprehensive telling of his story in English. Essentially sympathetic, Calvert is nevertheless objective. Well-documented and clearly written, her book includes new material, with special touches that make it a delight to read.

Rale lived with the Norridgewock Indians between 1695 and 1724 in what is today the town of Madison. He was killed there by English militia in a massacre near the end of Lovewell’s War. During that time he was the Indians’ friend and mentor, a testimony to the fact that the French had won the religious war for the Indians’ souls, if not the military war for their land.

At the same time, Calvert makes a point ignored by some historians, that the Indians tried to remain an independent nation acting in their own best interests, not as the puppets of French or English. She also notes that they were not always unified, and that it was a test of Rale’s powers to exercise leadership.

Calvert’s book is one of a series she has written about the river along whose banks she grew up in Madison a short distance from the site of the Indian village. Her research relied on both primary and secondary sources, including information she collected on a trip to France.

It includes some unexpected information. For instance, she learned from a priest in Quebec City that Rale’s leg injury that plagued him for much of his life was caused when he fell off a church steeple.

She even took the unusual step of submitting Rale’s handwriting to an analyst who informed her, “He was a perfectionist. He had high goals and had the enthusiasm and initiative to reach those goals.”

Several letters by Rale are published here for the first time, along with some interesting sections of the Abenaki dictionary that he spent 31 years compiling before it was stolen by English soldiers.

The book also includes a number of photographs giving the reader a visual sense of where Rale came from in France and where he ended his life at a bend in the Kennebec River in the land claimed by French, English and Indians.

Still unsettled after all these years is the symbolic question of whether Rale died a martyr with his Indian friends in a hail of English gunfire, by the cross in the center of the village (the Indian version), or whether he died in a shootout with a soldier after stabbing a young English captive (the English version). In keeping with the tone of her book, Calvert makes a sensible case for the Indian version, but its fair to say that this detail and other questions about Rale’s life will never be solved to everybody’s satisfaction unless major new sources of information are uncovered.

Wayne E. Reilly is editor of the Special Assignments Desk.