INTRODUCTION OF PIONEERS OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD. THE SPRINGS OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION, unlike those of the elder world, lie revealed in the clear light of history. In appearance there are feeble, in reality copious and full of force. Acting at the sources of life, instruments otherwise weak become mighty for good and evil, and men, lost elsewhere in the crowd, stand forth as agents of destiny. In their toils, their sufferings, their conflicts, momentous questions were at stake, and issues vital to the future world—the prevalence of races, the triumph of principles, health or disease, a blessing or a curse. In the obscure strife where men died by tens or by scores hung questions of as deep import for posterity as on those mighty contests of national adolescents where carnage is reckoned by thousands. The subject to which the proposed series will be devoted is that of France in the New World, the attempt of feudalism, monarchy and Rome to master a continent where, at this hour, half a million of bayonets are vindicating the ascendancy of a regulated freedom. Rome still strong in life, though enveloped and overborn by new-born centralization, monarchy and the flush of triumphant power, Rome, nerved by disaster, springing with renewed vitality from ashes and corruption, and ranging the earth to reconquer abroad what she had lost at home. These banded powers, pushing into the wilderness their indomitable soldiers and devoted priests, unveiled the secrets of the barbarous continent, pierced the forests, traced and mapped out the streams, planted their emblems, built their forts, and claimed all as their own. New France was all head. Under King, Noble and Jesuit the Lank lean body would not thrive. Even commerce wore the sword, decked itself with badges of nobility, aspired to forest seniories and hordes of savage retainers. Along the borders of the sea an adverse power was strengthening and widening, both slow but steadfast growth, full of blood and muscle, a body without a head. Each had its strength, each its weakness, each its own modes of vigorous life, but the one was fruitful, the other barren, the one instinct with hope, the other darkening with shadows of despair. By name, local position and character, one of these communities of freemen stands forth as the most conspicuous representative of this antagonism, liberty and absolutism, New England and New France. The one was the offspring of a triumphant government, the other of an oppressed and fugitive people, the one an unflinching champion of the Roman Catholic reaction, the other a vanguard of the reform. Each followed its natural laws of growth and each came to its natural result. Vitalized by the principles of its foundation, the Puritan Commonwealth grew apace. New England was preeminently the land of material progress. Where the prize was within every man's reach, patient industry need never doubt its reward, nay, in defiance of the Four Gospels, assiduity and pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. Politically she was free. Socially she suffered from that subtle and searching oppression which the dominant opinion of a free community may exercise over the members who have composed it. As a whole she grew upon the gaze of the world, a signal example of expansive energy, but she has not been fruitful in those salient and striking forms of character which often give a dramatic life to the annals of nations far less prosperous. We turn to New France and all is reversed. Here was a bold attempt to crush under the exactions of a grasping hierarchy, to stifle under the curbs and trappings of a feudal monarchy, a people composed by influences of the wildest freedom, whose schools were the forest and the sea, whose trade was an armed barter with savages, and whose daily life a lesson of lawless independence. But this fierce spirit had its vent. The story of New France is from the first a story of war. Of war, for so her founders believed, with the adversary of mankind himself. War with savage tribes and potent forest commonwells. War with the encroaching powers of heresy and of England. Her brave, unthinking people were stamped with the soldier's virtues and the soldier's faults. And in their leaders were displayed, on a grand and novel stage, the energies, aspirations and passions which belong to hopes vast and vague, ill-restricted powers and stations of command. The growth of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, which in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt. Long and valiantly her chiefs upheld their cause, leading to battle a vassal population, warlike as themselves. Born down by numbers from without, wasted by corruption from within, New France fell at last, and out of her fall grew revolutions whose influence to this hour is felt through every nation of the civilized world. The French dominion is a memory of the past, and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly campfires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knitting close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us, an untamed continent, vast wastes of forest verger, mountains silent in primeval sleep, river, lake, and glimmering pool, wilderness, oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Even steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nature, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here with their dauntless hardy-hood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil. This memorable but half-forgotten chapter in the Book of Human Life can be rightly read only by lights numerous and widely scattered. The earlier period of New France was prolific in a class of publications which are often of much historical value, but of which many are exceedingly rare. The writer, however, has at length gained access to them all. Of the unpublished records of the colonies, the archives of France are of course the grand deposit, but many documents of important bearing on the subject are to be found scattered in public and private libraries, chiefly in France and Canada. The task of collection has proved abundantly irksome and laborious. It has, however, been greatly lightened by the action of the governments of New York, Massachusetts and Canada, in collecting from Europe copies of documents, having more or less relation to their own history. It has been greatly lightened, too, by a most kind cooperation, for which the writer owes obligations too many for recognition at present, but of which he trusts to make fitting acknowledgments hereafter. Yet he cannot forbear to mention the name of Mr. John Gilmary Shea of New York, to whose labors this Department of American History has been so deeply indebted, and that of the Honorable Henry Black of Quebec. Nor can he refrain from expressing his obligation to the skillful and friendly criticism of Mr. Charles Folsom. In this and still more must it be the case in succeeding volumes the amount of reading applied to their composition is far greater than the citations represent, much of it being of a collateral and illustrative nature. This was essential to a plan whose aim it was, while scrupulously and rigorously adhering to the truth of facts, to animate them with the life of the past, and so far as might be, clothe the skeleton with flesh. If at times it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only, since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation. Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events and their bearings near and remote, in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or spectator of the action he describes. With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer's aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far as relates to the present volume, everything of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true. To those who have aided him with information and documents, the extreme slowness in the progress of the work will naturally have caused surprise. This slowness was unavoidable. During the past eighteen years, the state of his health has exacted throughout an extreme caution in regard to mental application, reducing it at best within narrow and precarious limits, and often precuding it. Indeed for two periods each of several years any attempt at bookish occupation would have been merely suicidal. A condition of slight arising from kindred sources has also retarded the work, since it has never permitted reading or writing continuously for much more than five minutes, and often has not permitted them at all. A previous work, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, was written in similar circumstances. The writer means, if possible, to carry the present design to its completion. Such a completion, however, will by no means be essential as regards the individual volumes of the series, since each will form a separate and independent work. The present work it will be seen contains two distinct and complete narratives. Some progress has been made in others. Boston. January 1st, 1865. End of introduction. Chapter 1 Early Spanish Adventure, 1512-1561. First the close of the fifteenth century, Spain achieved her final triumph over the infidels of Granada, and made her name glorious through all generations by the discovery of America. The religious zeal and romantic daring which a long course of Moorish wars had called forth, were now exalted to redoubled fervor. Every ship from the New World came freighted with marvels, which put the fictions of chivalry to shame, and to the Spaniard of that day America was a region of wonder and mystery, of vague and magnificent promise. Thither adventurers hastened, thirsting for glory and for gold, and often mingling the enthusiasm of the crusader and the valor of the night errant, with the bigotry of the inquisitors in the rapacity of pirates. They roamed over land and sea. They climbed unknown mountains, surveyed unknown oceans, pierced the sultry intricacies of tropical forests, while from year to year and from day to day new wonders were unfolded, new islands and archipelagos, new regions of gold and pearl, and barbaric empires of more than oriental wealth. The extravagance of hope and the fever of adventure knew no bounds. Nor is it surprising that amid such waking marvels the imagination should run wild in romantic dreams, that between the possible and the impossible the line of distinction should be but faintly drawn, and that men should be found ready to stake life and honor in pursuit of the most insane fantasies. Such a man was the veteran cavalier Juan Ponce de Leon. Greedy of honors and of riches he embarked at Puerto Rico with three brigantines, bent on schemes of discovery. But that which gave the chief stimulus to his enterprise was a story, current among the Indians of Cuba and Hispaniola, that on the island of Bimini, said to be one of the Bahamas, there was a fountain of such virtue that bathing in its waters, old men resumed their youth. It was said, moreover, that on a neighboring shore might be found a river gifted with the same beneficent property, and believed by some to be no other than the Jordan. Ponce de Leon found the island of Bimini, but not the fountain. Farther westward, in the latitude of thirty degrees in eight minutes, he approached an unknown land, which he named Florida, and, steering southward, explored its coast as far as the extreme point of the peninsula. When after some farther explorations he retraced his course to Puerto Rico. Ponce de Leon had not regained his youth, but his active spirit was unsubdued. Nine years later he attempted to plant a colony in Florida. The Indians attacked him fiercely, he was mortally wounded, and died soon afterwards in Cuba. The voyages of Guerre and Vazquez de Ayon threw new light on the discoveries of Ponce, and the general outline of the coast of Florida became known to the Spaniards. Meanwhile Cortes had conquered Mexico, and the fame of that iniquitous but magnificent exploit rang through all Spain. Many an impatient cavalier burned to achieve a kindred fortune. To the excited fancy of the Spaniards the unknown land of Florida seemed the seed of surpassing wealth, and Panfio de Narvez assayed to possess himself of its fanciful treasures. Landing on its shores, and proclaiming destruction to the Indians, unless they acknowledged the sovereignty of the Pope and the Emperor, he advanced into the forest with three hundred men. Nothing could exceed their sufferings. Nowhere could they find the gold they came to seek. The village of Apalacha, where they hoped to gain a rich booty, offered nothing but a few mean wigwams. The horses gave out, and the famished soldiers fed upon their flesh. The men sickened, and the Indians unceasingly harassed their march. At length, after two hundred and eighty leagues of wandering, they found themselves on the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and desperately put to sea in such crazy boats as their skill and means could construct. Cold, disease, famine, thirst, and the fury of the ways melted them away. Narvez himself perished, and of his wretched followers no more than four escaped, reaching by land, after years of vicissitude, the Christian settlements of New Spain. The interior of the vast country then comprehended under the name of Florida still remained unexplored. The Spanish voyager, as his caravelle plowed the adjacent seas, might give full scope to his imagination, and dream that beyond the long, low margin of forest which bounded his horizon lay hit a rich harvest for some future conqueror, perhaps a second Mexico with its royal palace and sacred pyramids, or another Cusco with its temple of the sun, encircled with a freeze of gold. Haunted by such visions, the ocean chivalry of Spain could not long stand idle. Fernando de Soto was the companion of Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. He had come to America a needy adventurer, with no other fortune than his sword and target. But his exploits had given him fame and fortune, and he appeared at court with the retinue of noblemen. Still his active energies could not endure repose, and his avarice and ambition goaded him to fresh enterprises. He asked and obtained permission to conquer Florida. While this design was an agitation, Cabeca de Vaca, one of those who had survived the expedition of Narvez, appeared in Spain, and for purposes of his own spread abroad the mischievous falsehood that Florida was the richest country yet discovered. De Soto's plans were embraced with enthusiasm. Nobles and gentlemen contended for the privilege of joining his standard, and setting sail with an ample armament, he landed at the bay of Espirito Santo, now Tampa Bay, in Florida, with six hundred and twenty chosen men, a band as gallant and well-appointed, as eager in purpose and audacious in hope, as ever trod the shores of the New World. The clanger of trumpets, the naing of horses, the fluttering of penins, the glittering helmet and lance, startled the ancient forest with unwanted greening. Amid this pomp of chivalry, religion was not forgotten. The sacred vessel's investments, with bread and wine for the Eucharist, were carefully provided, and De Soto himself declared that the enterprise was undertaken for God alone, and seemed to be the object of his special care. These devout marauders could not neglect the spiritual welfare of the Indians, whom they had come to plunder, and besides fetters to bind and bloodhounds to hunt them, they brought priests and monks for the saving of their souls. The adventurers began their march. Their story has been often told. Four month after month and year after year, the procession of priests and cavaliers, cross-bowmen, arch-busiers, and Indian captives laden with the baggage, still wandered on through wild and boundless wastes, lured hither and thither by the ignis fatus of their hopes. They traversed great portions of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, everywhere inflicting an enduring misery, but never approaching their phantom El Dorado. At length, in the third year of their journeying, they reached the banks of the Mississippi, a hundred and thirty-two years before its second discovery by Marquette. One of their number describes the Great River as almost half a league wide, deep, rapid, and constantly rolling down trees and driftwood on its turbid current. The Spaniards crossed over at a point above the mouth of the Arkansas. They advanced westward but found no treasures, indeed nothing but hardships, and an Indian enemy, furious, writes one of their officers as mad dogs. They heard of a country towards the north where maize could not be cultivated because the vast herds of wild cattle devoured it. They penetrated so far that they entered the range of the roving prairie tribes. For one day, as they pushed their way with difficulty across great plains covered with tall-ranked grass, they met a band of savages, who dwelt in lodges of skins sewed together, subsisting on game alone and wandering perpetually from place to place. Being neither gold nor the South Sea, for both of which they hoped, they returned to the banks of the Mississippi. De Soto, says one of those who accompanied him, was a stern man, and a few words. Even in the midst of reverses, his will had been law to his followers, and he had sustained himself through the depths of disappointment with the energy of a stubborn pride. But his hour was come. He fell into a deep dejection, followed by an attack of fever, and soon after died miserably. To preserve his body from the Indians, his followers sank it at midnight in the river, and the sullen waters of the Mississippi buried his ambition and his hopes. The adventurers were now, with few exceptions, disgusted with the enterprise, and longed only to escape from the scene of their miseries. After a vain attempt to reach Mexico by land, they again turned back to the Mississippi, and labored with all the resources which their desperate necessity could suggest, to construct vessels in which they might make their way to some Christian settlement. Their condition was forlorn. Few of their horses remained alive, their baggage had been destroyed at the burning of the Indian town of Mavia, and many of the soldiers were without armor and without weapons. In place of the gallant array which, more than three years before, had left the harbor of Espirito Santo, a company of sickly and starving men were laboring among the swampy forests of the Mississippi, some clad in skins and some in mats woven from a kind of wild vine. Seven brigantines were finished and launched, and trusting their lives on board these frail vessels, they descended the Mississippi, running the gauntlet between hostile tribes who fiercely attacked them. Reaching the gulf, though not without loss of eleven of their number, they made sail for the Spanish settlement on the river Panuco, where they arrived safely, and where the inhabitants met them with a cordial welcome. Three hundred and eleven men thus escaped with life, leaving behind them the bones of their comrades strewn broadcast through the wilderness. De Soto's fate proved an insufficient warning, for those were still found who begged a fresh commission for the conquest of Florida, but the emperor would not hear them. A more Pacific enterprise was undertaken by Cancelo, a Dominican monk, who with several brother ecclesiastics undertook to convert the natives to the true faith, but was murdered in the attempt. Nine years later a plan was formed for the colonization of Florida, and Guido de las Bazares sailed to explore the coasts, and found a spot suitable for the establishment. After his return a squadron, commanded by Angel de Vila Fane, and freighted with supplies and men, put to sea from San Juan Dulia, but the elements were adverse and the result was a total failure. Not a Spaniard had yet gained foothold in Florida. That name, as the Spaniards of that day understood it, comprehended the whole country extending from the Atlantic on the east to the longitude of New Mexico on the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico and the River of Palms indefinitely northwards toward the polar sea. This vast territory was claimed by Spain in Rite of the Discoveries of Columbus, the Grant of the Pope, and the various expeditions mentioned above. England claimed it in Rite of the Discoveries of Cabot, while France could advance no better title than might be derived from the voyage of Verenzano and the vague traditions of earlier visits of Breton adventurers. With restless jealousy Spain watched the domain which she could not occupy, and on France especially she kept an eye of deep distrust. When in 1541 Cartier and Roberval essayed to plant a colony in the part of ancient Spanish Florida now called Canada, she sent spies and fitted out caravels to watch that abortive enterprise. Her fears proved just. Canada indeed was long to remain a solitude, but despite the papal bounty gifting Spain with exclusive ownership of a hemisphere, France and heresy at length took root in the sultry forests of modern Florida. CHAPTER II OF PIONEERS OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD PART I. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. CHAPTER II. BELEGANION 1550-1558. In the middle of the sixteenth century Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous she chilled the world with her baneful shadow. Her old feudal liberties were gone, absorbed in the despotism of Madrid.  And while the Dominican held his reign of terror and force, the deeper Jesuit guided the mind from infancy into those narrow depths of bigotry from which it was never to escape. Commercial despotism was joined to political and religious despotism. The hands of the government were on every branch of industry. Force regulations, uncertain and ruinous taxes, monopolies, encouragements, prohibitions, restrictions, cramped the national energy. Mistress of the Indies, Spain swarmed with beggars. Yet verging to decay she had an ominous and appalling strength. Her condition was that of an athletic man penetrated with disease, which had not yet unstrung the thues and sinews formed in his days of vigor. Philip II could command the service of warriors and statesmen developed in the years that were past. The gathered energies of ruined feudalism were wielded by a single hand. The mysterious king, in his den in the Esqueril, dreary and silent, and vent like a scribe over his papers, he was the type and the champion of arbitrary power. More than the pope himself, he was the head of Catholicocity. In doctrine and indeed the inexorable bigotry of Madrid was ever in advance of Rome. Not so with France.  Her monks and priests, unlike those of Spain, were rarely either fanatics or bigots.  Their all was at stake. Their vast power, their bloated wealth, were wrapped up in the ancient faith. Men were burned, and women buried alive. All was in vain. To the utmost bounds of France the leaven of the reform was working. The Huguenots, fugitives from torture and death, found an asylum at Geneva, their city of refuge, gathering around Calvin their high priest. Thence intrepid coporteurs, their lives in their hands, bore the Bible and the Psalm book to city, hamlet and castle, to feed the rising flame. The scattered churches, pressed by a common danger, began to organize. An ecclesiastical republic spread its ramifications through France and grew underground to a vigorous life. Pacific at the outset, for the great body of its members were the quiet bourgeoisie, by habit as by faith, averse to violence. Yet a potent faction of the warlike noblesse were also of the new faith, and above them all, preeminent in character as in station, stood Gaspar de Colligny, admiral of France. The old palace of the Louvre, reared by the Roy Chevalier on the site of those dreary feudal towers which, of old, had guarded the banks of the Seine, held within its sculptured masonry the worthless blood of Valois. Corruption and intrigue ran riot at the court. Faxious nobles, bishops and cardinals, with no God but pleasure and ambition, contended around the throne were the sick bed of the futile king. Catherine de Medici, with her stately form, her mean spirit, her bad heart, and her fathomless depths of duplicity, strove by every subtle art to hold the balance of power among them. The bold, pitiless, insatiable guise, and his brother the cardinal of Lorraine, the incarnation of falsehood, rested their ambition on the Catholic Party. Their army was a legion of priests, and the black swarms of countless monasteries, who by the distribution of alms held in pay the rabble of cities and starving peasants on the land of impoverished nobles. Montmorency, Condé, and Navarre leaned towards the reform, doubtful and inconstant chiefs whose faith weighted light against their interests. Yet amid vacillation, selfishness, weakness, treachery, one great man was like a tower of trust, and this was Gaspar de Coligny. Firm in his convictions, steeled by perils and endurance, calm, gaseous, resolute, grave even to severity, a valiant and redoubted soldier, Coligny looked abroad on the gathering storm and read its danger in advance. He saw a strange depravity of manners, bribery and violence overriding justice, discontented nobles and peasants ground down with taxes. In the midst of this rottenness, the Calvinistic churches, patient and stern, were fast gathering to themselves the better life of the nation. Long and around them tossed surges of clerical hate. Luxurious priests and libertine monks saw their disorders rebuked by the grave virtues of the Protestant zealots. Their broad lands, their rich endowments, their vessels of silver and of gold, their dominion over souls, in itself a revenue, were all imperiled by the growing heresy. Nor was the reform less exacting, less intolerant, or when its hour came less aggressive than the ancient faith. The storm was thickening, and it must burst soon. When the Emperor Charles V. beleaguered Algiers, his camps were deluged by a blinding tempest, and at its height the infidels made a furious sally. A hundred knights of Malta, on foot, wearing over their armor circuits of crimson blazoned with the white cross, for the brunt of the assault. Conspicuous among them was Nicolas Duran de Villagagnon. A Moorish Cavalier, rushing upon him, pierced his arm with the lance, and wheeled to repeat the blow, but the knight leaped on the infidel, stabbed him with his dagger, plung him from his horse, and mounted in his place. Again a Muslim host landed in Malta, and beset the cité notable. The garrison was weak, disheartened, and without a leader. Villagagnon, with six followers, all friends of his own, passed under cover of night through the infidel eager, climbed the walls by ropes lowered from above, took command, repaired the shattered towers, aiding with his own hands in the work, and animated the garrison to a resistance so stubborn that the besiegers lost heart and betook themselves to their galleys. No less was he an able and accomplished mariner, prominent among that chivalry of the sea who held the perilous verge of chrysandum against the Muselman. He claimed other laurels than those of the sword. He was a scholar, a linguist, a controversialist, potent with the tongue and with the pen, commanding in presence, eloquent and persuasive in discourse. Yet this chryton of France had proved himself an associate no wise desirable. His sleepless intellect was matched with the spirit as restless, vain, unstable and ambitious as it was enterprising and bold. Addicted to dissent and enamored of polemics, he entered those forbidden fields of inquiry and controversy to which the reform invited him. Undaunted by his monastic vows, he battled for heresy with tongue and pen, and in the ear of Protestants professed himself a Protestant. As a commander of his order he quarreled with the grand master, a domineering Spaniard, and as Vice Admiral Brittany he was deep in feud with the Governor of Breast. Disgusted at home, his fancy crossed the seas. He aspired to build for France and himself an empire among the tropical splendors of Brazil. Few could match him in the gift of persuasion, and the intrepid seamen whose skill and valor had run the gauntlet of the English fleet and borne Mary Stuart of Scotland in safety to her espousals with the Dauphin might well be entrusted with the charge of moment so far inferior. Henry II was still on the throne. The lands of Montgomery had not yet rid France of that inflection. To win a share in the rich domain of the New World, of which Portuguese and Spanish arrogance claimed the monopoly, was the end held by Villagagnon before the eyes of the King. Of the Huguenots he said not a word. For Coligny he had another language. He spoke of an asylum for persecuted religion, a Geneva in the wilderness, far from priests and monks and Francis of guys. The Admiral gave him a ready ear, if indeed he himself had not first conceived the plan. Yet to the King, an active burner of Huguenots, Coligny too urged it as an enterprise, not for the faith but for France. In secret Geneva was made privy to it, and Calvin himself embraced it with zeal. The enterprise, in fact, had a double character, political as well as religious. It was the reply of France, the most emphatic she had yet made, to the papal bull which gave all the Western hemisphere to Portugal and Spain, and, as if to point her answer, she sent not Frenchmen only, but Protestant Frenchmen, to plant the fleur-de-lis on the shores of the New World. Two vessels were made ready in the name of the King. The body of the immigration was Huguenot, mingled with young nobles, restless, idle and poor, with reckless artisans and piratical sailors from the Norman and Breton seaports. They put to sea from Havre on the 12th of July, 1555, and early in November saw the shores of Brazil. Entering the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, then called Canabara, Vila Ganon landed men and shores on an island, built huts and threw up earthworks. In anticipation of future triumphs, the whole continent, by a strange perversion of language, was called Antarctic France, while the fort received the name of Coligny. Vila Ganon signalized his newborn Protestantism by an intolerable solicitude for the manners and morals of his followers. The whip and the pillory required the least offence. The wild and discordant crew, starved and flogged for a season into submission, conspired at length to rid themselves of him. But while they debated whether to poison him, blow him up or murder him and his officers in their sleep, three scotch soldiers, probably Calvinists, revealed the plot, and the vigorous hand of the commandant crushed it in the bud. But how was the colony to subsist? Their island was too small for culture, while the mainland was infested with hostile tribes and threatened by the Portuguese, who regarded the French occupancy as a violation of their domain. Meanwhile in France, Huguenot influence, aided by ardent letters sent home by Vila Ganon in the returning ships, was urging on the work. Nor were the Catholic chiefs averse to an enterprise which, by colonizing heresy, might tend to relieve France of its presence. Another embarkation was prepared, in the name of Henry II, under Boise Lacombe, a nephew of Vila Ganon. Most of the emigrants were Huguenots. Geneva sent a large deputation, and among them several ministers, full of zeal for their land of promise and their new church in the wilderness. There were five young women also, with a matron to watch over them. Soldiers, emigrants and sailors, two hundred and ninety in all, were embarked in three vessels, and to the sound of cannon, drums, fives and trumpets, they unfurled their sails at Hanfleur. They were no sooner on the high seas than the piratical character of the Norman sailors, in no way exceptional at that day, began to declare itself. They hailed every vessel weaker than themselves, pretended to be shorter provisions, and demanded leave to buy them. Then boarding the stranger plundered her from stem to stern. After a passage of four months, on the ninth of March, 1557, they entered the port of Canabara, and saw the fleur-de-lis floating above the walls of Fort Colony. Amid salutes of cannon, the boats, crowded with sea-worn immigrants, moved towards the landing. It was an edifying scene when Villagagnon, in the picturesque attire which marked the war-like nobles of the period, came down to the shore to greet the somber ministers of Calvin. With hands uplifted and eyes raised to heaven, he bade them welcome to the new asylum of the faithful, then launched into a long harangue full of zeal and unction. His discourse finished, he led the way to the dining-hall. If the redundancy of spiritual ailment had surpassed their expectations, the ministers were little prepared for the meager provision which awaited their temporal cravings. For, with appetites wedded by the sea, they found themselves seated at a board whereof, as one of them complains, the choicest dish was a dried fish, and the only beverage, rainwater. They found their consolation in the inward graces of the Commandant, whom they likened to the Apostle Paul. For a time all was ardour and hope. Men of birth and station, and the ministers themselves, labored with pick and shovel to finish the fort. Every day exhortations, sermons, prayers, followed in close to session, and Villagagnon was always present, kneeling on a velvet cushion brought after him by a page. Soon, however, he fell into sharp controversy with the ministers upon points of faith. Among the immigrants was a student of the Sorbonne, one Quintac, between whom and the ministers arose a fierce and interminable war of words. Is it lawful to mix water with the wine of the Eucharist? May the sacramental bread be made of meal of Indian corn? These and similar points of dispute filled the fort with wranglings, begetting cliques, factions, and feuds without number. Villagagnon took part with the student, and between them they devised a new doctrine, abhorrent alike to Geneva and Rome. The advent of this nondescript heresy was the signal of a doubled stripe. The dogmatic stiffness of the Geneva ministers chafed Villagagnon to fury. He felt himself too in a false position. On one side he depended on the Protestant, Coligny, on the other he feared the court. There were Catholics in the colony who might report him as an open heretic. On this point his doubts were set at rest, for a ship from France brought him a letter from the Cardinal of Lorraine, couched it as said in terms which restored him forthwith to the bosom of the church. Villagagnon now affirmed that he had been deceived in Calvinism, and pronounced him a frightful heretic. He became despotic beyond measure, and would bear no opposition. The ministers, reduced nearly to starvation, found themselves under a tyranny worse than that from which they had fled. At length he drove them from the fort, and forced them to Bivouac on the mainland, at the risk of being butchered by Indians, until a vessel loading with Brazil wood in the harbour should be ready to carry them back to France. Having rid himself of the ministers, he caused three of the Morzellus Calvinists to be seized, dragged to the edge of a rock, and thrown into the sea. A fourth, equally obnoxious, but who being a tailor could ill be spared, was permitted to live on condition of recantation. Then, mustering the colonists, he warned them to shun the heresies of Luther and Calvin, threatened that all who openly professed these detestable doctrines should share the fate of their three comrades, and this herang over, feasted the whole assembly, in token, says the narrator, of joy and triumph. Meanwhile, in their crazy vessel, the banished ministers drifted slowly on their way. Storms fell upon them, their provisions failed, their water casks were empty, and tossing in the wilderness of waves, or rocking on the long swells of subsiding gales, they sank almost to despair. In their famine they chewed the Brazil wood with which the vessel was laden, devoured every scrap of leather, singed and ate the horn of lanterns, hunted rats through the hold, and sold them to each other at enormous prices. At length, stretched on the deck, sick, listless, attenuated, and scarcely able to move a limb, they described across the waist of sea the faint, cloud-like line that marked the coast of Brittany. Their perils were not passed, for if we may believe one of them, Jean de Liri, they bore a sealed letter from Villagagnon to the magistrates of the first French port of which they might arrive. It denounced them as heretics, worthy to be burned. Happily, the magistrates leaned to the reform, and the malice of the commandant failed of its victims. Villagagnon himself soon sailed for France, leaving the wretched colony to its fate. He presently entered the lists against Calvin, and engaged him in a hot, controversial war, in which, according to some of his contemporaries, the night often worse than the theologian in his own weapons. Before the year 1558 was closed, Ganabara fell a prey to the Portuguese. They set upon it in force, battered down the fort, and slew the feeble garrison, or drove them to a miserable refuge among the Indians. Maine and Portugal made good their claim to the vast dominion, the mighty vegetation, and undeveloped riches of Antarctic France. CHAPTER III UGANOTS IN FLORIDA In the year 1562, a cloud of black and deadly portent was thickening over France. Surely and swiftly she glided towards the abyss of the religious wars. None could pierce the future. Perhaps none dared to contemplate it. The wild rage of fanaticism and hate, friend grappling with friend, brother with brother, father with son, altars profane, dwarf stones made desolate, the robes of justice herself be drenched with murder. In the gloom without lay Spain, imminent and terrible, as on the hill by the field of droh, her veteran bands of pikemen, dark masses of organized ferocity, stood biding their time while the battle surged below, and then swept downward to the slaughter, so did Spain watch and wait to trample and crush the hope of humanity. In these days of fear, the second Huguenot colony sailed for the new world. The calm, stern man, who represented and led the produticism of France, felt to his utmost heart the peril of the time. He would feign build up a city of refuge for the persecuted sect. Yet, Gaspar du Colignier, too high in power and rank to be openly assailed, was forced to act with caution. He must act, too, in the name of the crown, and in virtue of his office of Admiral of France. A nobleman and a soldier, for the Admiral of France was no seaman. He shared the ideas and habits of his class. Nor is there reason to believe him to have been in advance of his time in a knowledge of the principles of successful colonization. His scheme promised a military colony, not a free common wealth. The Huguenot party was already a political as well as a religious party. At its foundation lay the religious element, represented by Geneva, the martyrs, and the devoted fugitives who sang the Psalms of Miro, among rocks and caverns. Join to these were numbers on whom the faith sat lightly, whose hope was in commotion and change. Of the latter, in great part, was the Huguenot noblice, from Condé, who aspired to the crown, to the younger son of the impoverished senor, whose patrimony was his sword. More than this, the restless, the factious, and the discontented, began to link their fortunes to a party whose triumph would involve confiscation of the wealth of the only rich class in France. An element of the great revolution was already mingling in the strife of the religions. America was still a land of wonder. The ancient spells still hung unbroken over the wild, vast world of mystery beyond the sea, a land of romance, adventure, and gold. Fifty-eight years later the Puritans landed on the sands of Massachusetts Bay. The illusion was gone. The igneous, fatuous of adventure, the dream of wealth. The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard-won independence. In their own hearts, and not in the promptings of a great leader, or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its birth and its achievement. They were of the boldest and most earnest of their sect. There were such among the French disciples of Calvin, but no Mayflower ever sailed from a port of France. Colignier's colonists were of a different stamp, and widely different was their fate. An excellent seamen and staunch Protestant, Jean Rabaud of Dieppe, commanded the expedition. Under him, beside sailors, were a band of veteran soldiers and a few young nobles. Embarked in two of those antiquated craft whose high poops and tub-like proportions are preserved in the old engravings of debris, they sailed from Harve on the 18th of February, 1562. They crossed the Atlantic, and on the 30th of April, in the latitude of twenty-nine-and-a-half degrees, saw the long, low line where the wilderness of waves met the wilderness of woods. It was the coast of Florida. They soon described a judic point which they called French Cape, perhaps one of the headlands of the Matanzas Inlet. They turned their prow's northward, coasting the fringes of that waste of verger which rolled in shadowy undulation far to the unknown west. On the next morning, the first of May, they found themselves off the mouth of a great river. Riding at anchor on a sunny sea, they lowered their boats, crossed the bar that obstructed the entrance, and floated on a basin of deep sheltered water. Boiling and roaring, says Rabaud, through the multitude of all kind of fish. Indians were running along the bank, and out upon the sandbars beckoning them to land. They pushed their boats ashore and disembarked, sailors, soldiers, and eager young nobles. Corsilet and Morien, Arquebus and Halberd, flashed in the sun that flickered through innumerable leaves, as kneeling on the ground they gave thanks to God, who had guided their voyage to an issue full of promise. The Indians, seated gravely under the neighboring trees, looked on in silent respect, thinking that they worshipped the sun. Quote They be all naked, and of a goodly stature, mighty, and as well shape and in proportion of body, as any people in your world. And the four part of their body and arms be painted a pretty work of azure, red, and black, so well and so properly as the best painter of Europe could not amend it. Close quote. With their squaws and children they presently drew near, and strewing the earth with laurel bows sat down among the Frenchmen. The visitors were much pleased with them, and Rabbeau gave the chief, whom he calls the king, a robe of blue cloth, worked in yellow with the regal Flordelie. But Rabbeau and his followers, just escaped from the dull prison of their ships, were intent on admiring the wild scenes around them. Never had they known a fairer Mayday. The quaint old narrative is exuberant with the delight. The tranquil air, the warm sun, woods fresh with young verger, meadows bright with flowers, the palm, the cypress, the pine, the magnolia, the grazing deer, herons, curlews, bitterns, woodcock, and unknown waterfowl that waded in the ripples of the beach. Others bearded from crown to root with long gray moss, huge oaks smothering in the folds of enormous grapevines. Such were the objects that greeted them in their romings, till their new discovered land seemed, quote, the fairest, fruitfulest, and pleasantest of all the world. Close quote. They found a tree covered with caterpillars, and hereupon the ancient black letter says, quote, also there be silkworms in merrilius number, a great deal fairer and better than our silkworms. To be short it is a thing unspeakable to consider, the things that be seen there, and shall be found more and more in this incomparable land. Close quote. Above all it was plain to their excited fancy that the country was rich in gold and silver, turquoises and pearls. One of these last, quote, as great as an acorn at ye least, close quote, hung from the neck of an Indian who stood near their boats as they re-embarked. They gathered, too, from the signs of their savage visitors, that the wonderful land of Samola, with its seven cities and its untold riches, was distant but twenty days journey by water. In truth it was two thousand miles westward, and its wealth a fable. They named the river the River of May. It is now the St. John's. And on the next morning, says Rabo, we return to land again, accompanied with the captains, gentlemen and soldiers, and others of our small troop, carrying with us a pillar or column of hard stone, our king's arms graved therein, to plant and set the same in the entry of the port.  Here they set the column, and then, again embarking, held their course northward, happy in that benign decree which locks from mortal eyes the secrets of the future. Next they anchored near Fernandina, and to a neighboring river, probably the St. Mary's, gave the name of the Sane. Here as morning broke on the fresh moist meadows hung with mists, and on broad reaches of inland waters, which seemed like lakes, they were tempted to land again, and soon, quote, aspired an innumerable number of footsteps of great hearts and hinds of a wonderful greatness, the steps being all fresh and new, and it seemed that the people do nourish them like tame cattle, close quote. By two or three weeks of exploration they seemed to have gained a clear idea of this rich, semi-aquatic region. Rabaud describes it as, quote, a country full of havens, rivers, and lands, of such fruitfulness as cannot with tongue be expressed, close quote. Slowly moving northward, they named each river, or inlet, supposed to be a river, after some stream of France. At length, opening betwixt flat and sandy shores, they saw a commodious haven, and named it Port Royal. On the 27th of May they crossed the bar where the warships of DuPont crossed 300 years later, past Hilton Head, and held their course along the peaceful bosom of Broad River. On the left they saw a stream which they named Le Bourne, probably Skull Creek. On the right, a wide river, probably the Beaufort. When they landed, all was solitude. The frightened Indians had fled, but they lured them back with knives, beads, and looking-glasses, and enticed two of them on board their ships. Here by feeding, clothing, and caressing them, they tried to wean them from their fears, thinking to carry them to France in obedience to a command of Catherine de Medici. But the captive warriors moaned and lamented day and night, and at length made their escape. Ranging the woods, they found them full of game, wild turkeys and partridges, bears, and lynxes. Two deer of unusual size leaped from the underbrush. Crossbow and Aquabuzz were brought to the level, but the Huguenot captain, moved with the singular fairness and bigness of them, forbade his men to shoot. Preliminary exploration, not immediate settlement, had been the object of the voyage, but all was still rose color in the eyes of the voyagers, and many of their number would gladly linger in the new Canaan. Rabot was more than willing to humor them. He mustered his company on deck, and made them a harangue. He appealed to their courage in their patriotism, told them how, from a mean origin, men rise by enterprise and daring to fame and fortune, and demanded who among them would stay behind and hold port royal for the king. The greater part came forward, and with such good will and jolly courage riced the commander, as we had much to do to stay their importanity. Thirty were chosen, and Albert d. Pierreia was named to command them. A fort was begun on a small stream called the Chenisee, namely Archer's Creek, about six miles from the side of Beaufort. They named it Charles Four, in honor of the unhappy son of Catherine de Medici, Charles IX, the future hero of St. Bartholomew. Ammunition and stores were sent on shore, and on the 11th of June, with his diminished company, Rabot again embarked and spread his sails for France. From the beach at Hilton Head, Albert and his companions might watch the receding ships, growing less and less on the vast expanse of blue, dwindling to faint specks, then vanishing on the pale verge of waters. They were alone in those fearful solitudes. From the North Pole to Mexico there is no Christian denizen but they. The pressing question was how they were to subsist. Their thought was not of subsistence but of gold. Of the thirty the greater number were soldiers and sailors, with a few gentlemen, that is to say, men of the sword, born within the pale of nobility, who at home could neither labor nor trade without derogation of their rank. For a time they busied themselves with finishing their fort, and this done set forth in quest of adventures. The Indians had lost fear of them. Rabot had enjoined upon them to use all kindness and gentleness in their dealing with the men of the woods, and they more than obeyed him. They were soon hand and glove with chiefs, warriors, and squaws. And as with Indians the adage that familiarity breeds contempt holds with peculiar force, they quickly divested themselves of the prestige which had attached at the outset to their supposed character of children of the sun. Goodwill, however, remained, and this the colonists abused to the utmost. Roaming by river, swamp, and forest they visited in turn the villages of five petty chiefs, whom they called kings, feasting everywhere on hominy, beans, and game, and loaded with gifts. One of these chiefs, named Adusta, invited them to the grand religious festival of his tribe. When they arrived they found the village alive with preparation, and troops of women busied in sweeping the great circular area where the ceremonies were to take place.  Here, in murid in darkness, they listened to the howls, yelpings, and lugubrious songs that resounded from without. One of them, however, by some artifice, contrived to escape, hid behind a bush and saw the whole salinity, the procession of the medicine-men, and the bedobbed and befeathered warriors, the drumming, dancing, and stamping, the wild lamentation of the women as they gashed the arms of the young girls with sharp muscle-shells and flung the blood into the air with dismal outcries. A scene of ravenous feasting followed in which the French, released from Durance, were summoned to share. After the carousel they returned to Charlesfort, where they were soon pinched with hunger. The Indians, never-niggeredly of food, brought them supplies as long as their own lasted. But the harvest was not yet ripe, and their means did not match their goodwill. They told the French of two other kings, Uede and Coexus, who dwelt towards the south and were rich beyond belief in maize, beans, and squashes. The mendicant colonists embarked without delay, and with an Indian guide steered for the wigwams of these potentates, not by the open ocean, but by a perplexing inland navigation, meeting, as it seems, Calabogi sound and neighboring waters. Reaching the friendly villages on or near Savannah, they were feasted to repletion, and their boat was laden with vegetables and corn. They returned rejoicing, but their joy was short. The storehouse at Charlesfort, taking fire in the night, burned the ground, and with it their newly acquired stock. Once more they set out for the realms of King Uede, and once more returned laden with supplies. Nay, the generous savage assured them that so long as his cornfields yield their harvests his friends should not want. How long this friendship would have lasted may well be doubted, with the perception that the dependents of their bounty were no demigods, but a crew of idle and helpless beggars, respect would soon have changed to contempt, and contempt to ill-will. But it was not to Indian war-clubs that the infant colony was to owe its ruin. It carried within itself its own destruction. The ill-assorted band of landsmen and sailors, surrounded by that influence of the wilderness which wakens the dormant savage in the breasts of men, soon fell into quarrels. Albert, a rude soldier, with a thousand leagues of ocean betwixt him and responsibility, grew harsh, domineering, and violent beyond endurance. None could question or oppose him without peril of death. He hanged with his own hands a drummer who had fallen under his displeasure, and banished a soldier named Leshore to a solitary island, three leagues from the fort, where he left him to starve. For a time his comrades chafed in smothered fury. The crisis came at length. A few of the fiercer spirits, leagued together, assailed their tyrant, murdered him, delivered the famished soldier, and called to the command one Nicholas Barr, a man of merit. There took the command, and thenceforth there was peace. Peace such as it was, with famine, homesickness, and disgust. The rough ramparts and rude buildings of Charlesfort, hatefully familiar to their wary eyes, the sheltering forest, the sweltering forest, the glassy river, the eternal silence of the lifeless wilds around them, oppressed their senses and their spirit. They dreamed of ease, of home, of pleasure across the sea, of the evening cup on the bench before the cabaret, and dances with kind winches of Dieppe. But how to escape?  Not one of them knew how to build a ship, but Rubau had left with them a forge, with tools and iron, and strong desire supplied the place of skill. Trees were hewn down, and the work begun. Had they put forth to maintain themselves at Port Royal the energy and resource which they exerted to escape from it, they might have laid the cornerstone of a solid colony. All, gentle and simple, labored with equal zeal. They caulked the seams with the long moss which hung in profusion from the neighboring trees. The pines supplied them with pitch. The Indians made for them a kind of cordage, and for sales they sewed together their shirts and bedding. At length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Caruso floated on the waters of the Shaughnessy. They laid in what provisions they could, gave all that remained of their goods to the Indians, embarked, descended the river, and put out to sea. A fair wind filled their patchwork sails and bore them from the hated coast. Day after day they held their course. Till at length the breeze died away, and a breathless calm fell on the waters. Florida was far behind, France farther yet before. Bailing idly on the glassy waste, the craft lay motionless. Their supplies gave out. Twelve kernels of maize a day were each man's portion, then the maize failed, and they ate their shoes and leather jerkins. The water barrels were drained, and they tried to slake their thirst with brine. Several died, and the rest, giddy with exhaustion and crazed with thirst, were forced to ceaseless labor, bailing out the water that gushed through every seam. Red wind set in, increasing to a gale, and the red shed rigantine, with sails closed reefed, tossed among the savage billows at the mercy of the storm. A heavy sea rolled down upon her, and burst the bulwarks on the windward side. The surges broke over her, and, clinging with desperate grip to spars and cordage, the drenched voyagers gave up all for lost.  Nod with famine they counted the leagues of barren ocean that still stretched before, and gazed on each other with haggard, wolfish eyes, till a whisper passed from man to man that one, by his death, might ransom all the rest. The lot was cast, and it fell on Lechor, the same wretched man whom Albert had doomed to starvation on a lonely island.  The hideous repast sustained them till the land rose in sight, when, it is said, in a delirium of joy, they could no longer stir their vessel, but let her drift at the will of the tide. A small English bark bore down upon them, took them all on board, and, after landing the feeblest, carried the rest prisoners to Queen Elizabeth. Thus closed another of those scenes of woe whose lurid clouds are thickly piled around the stormy dawn of American history. It was the opening act of a wild and tragic drama. End of Chapter 3. Recording by Keith Hennig, St. Louis, Missouri. Pioneers of France in the New World by Francis Parkman. Part 1. Eugénose in Florida. Chapter 4. Laudonnière, 1564. On the 25th of June, 1564, a French squadron anchored a second time off the mouth of the River of May. There were three vessels, the smallest of sixty tons, the largest of one hundred and twenty, all crowded with men. Pernay de Laudonnière held command. He was of a noble race of Quarton, attached to the house of Chateaune, of which Colony was the head, pious we are told, and an excellent marine officer. An engraving purporting to be his likeness shows us a slender figure leaning against the mast, booted to the thigh, with slouched hat and plume, slashed doublet, and shot cloak. His thin oval face, with curled mustache and close trimmed beard wears a somewhat pensive look, as if already shadowed by the destiny that awaited him. The intervening year since Ribo's voyage had been a dark year for France. From the peaceful solitude of the River of May that voyager returned to a land reeking with slaughter. But the carnival of bigotry and hate had found a pause. The peace of Amboise had been signed. The fierce monk choked down his venom. The soldier sheathed his sword, the assassin his dagger, rival chiefs grasped hands, and massed their rancor under hollow smiles. The king and the queen mother, helpless amid the storm of factions which threatened their destruction, smiled now on Condi, now on Guise, gave ear to the cardinal of Lorraine, a listened-in secret to the emissaries of Theodore Beza. Colony was again strong at court. He used his opportunity and solicited with success the means of renewing his enterprise of colonization. Men were musted for the work. In name at least they were all huesianos. Yet now as before the staple of the projected colony was unsound. Soldiers, paid out of the royal treasury, hired artisans and tradesmen, with a swarm of volunteers from the young huesiano nobles, whose restless swords had rusted in their scabbards since the peace. The foundation stone was forgotten. There were no tillers of the soil. Such indeed were rare among the huesianos, for the dull peasants who guided the plow clung with blind tenacity to the ancient faith. Adventurous gentlemen, reckless soldiers, discontented tradesmen, all keen for novelty and heated with dreams of wealth, these were they who would build for their country and their religion and empire beyond the sea. On Thursday the twenty-second of June, Laudanier saw the low coastline of Florida and entered the harbor of St. Augustine which he named the River of Dolphins. Because that at mine arrival I saw there a great number of dolphins which were playing in the mouth thereof. Then he bore Northwood. Following the coast till on the twenty-fifth he reached the mouth of the St. John's or River of May. The vessels anchored, the boats were lowered, and he landed with his principal followers on the South Shore, near the present village of Mayport. It was the very spot where he had landed with Rebo two years before. They were scarcely on shore when they saw an Indian chief. Which having his spiders cried very far off, antipola, antipola, and being so joyful that he could not contain himself, he came to meet us accompanied with two of his sons, as fair and mighty persons as might be found in all the world. There was in their train a great number of men and women which still made very much of us, and by signs made us understand how glad they were of our arrival. This good entertainment passed, the paracusi, chief, prayed me to go see the pillar which we had erected in the voyage of John Rebo. The Indians, regarding it with mysterious awe, had crowned it with evergreens, and placed baskets full of maize before it as an offering. The chief then took Laudanier by the hand, telling him that he was named Sattoriona, and pointed out the extent of his dominions, far up the river and along the adjacent coast. One of his sons, a man, perfect in beauty, wisdom, and honest sobriety, then gave the French commander a wedge of silver and received some tribals in return, after which the voyages went back to their ships. I praise God continually, says Laudanier, for the great love I have found in these savages. In the morning the French landed again, and found their new friends on the same spot, to the number of 80 or more, seated under a shelter of boughs, in festal attire of smoked-hand deaskins, painted in many colors. The party then rode up the river, the Indians following them along the shore. As they advanced, coasting the borders of a great marsh that lay upon their left. The St. John's spread before them in vast sheets of glistening water, almost level, with its flat sedgey shores, the haunt of alligators and the resort of innumerable birds. Beyond the marsh, some five miles from the mouth of the river, they saw a ridge of high ground abutting on the water, which, plowing beneath in a deep strong current, had undermined it, and left a steep front of yellowish sand. This was the hill now called St. John's Bluff. Here they landed and entered the woods, where Lao Donnier stopped to rest while his lieutenant, Ortini, with a sergeant and a few soldiers, went to explore the country. They pushed their way through the thickets till they were stopped by a marsh choked with reeds, at the edge of which, under a great laurel tree, they had seated themselves to rest, overcome with the summer heat. Some five Indians suddenly appeared, peering timidly at them from among the bushes. Some of the men went towards them with signs of friendship, on which, taking heart, they drew near, and one of them who was evidently a chief, made a long speech inviting the strangers to their dwellings. The way was across the marsh, through which they carried the lieutenant and two or three of the soldiers on their backs, while the rest circled by a narrow path through the woods. When they reached the lodges, a crowd of Indians came out, to receive our men gallantly and feast them after their manner. One of them brought a large earthen vessel full of spring water, which was served out to each in turn in a wooden cup. But what most astonished the French was a venerable chief, who assured them that he was the father of five successive generations, and that he had lived two hundred and fifty years. Opposite sat a still more ancient veteran, the father of the first, shrunken to a mere anatomy, and, seeming to be rather a dead carcass than a living body, also pursues the history, his age was so great that the good man had lost his sight, and could not speak one only word but with exceeding great pain. In spite of his dismal condition, the visitors were told that he might expect to live in the course of nature thirty or forty years more. As the two patriarchs sat face to face, half hidden with their streaming white hair, Autigny and his credulous soldiers looked from one to the other, lost in speechless admiration. One of these veterans made a parting present to his guests of two young eagles, and Autigny and his followers returned to report what they had seen. Laudanier was waiting for them on the side of the hill, and now he says, I went right to the top thereof, where we found nothing else but cedars, palm and bay trees, of so sovereign odor that bombs smell of nothing like in comparison. From this high stand point they surveyed their Canaan, the unruffled river lay before them, with its marshy islands overgrown with sedge and bulrushes. While on the far side the flat green meadow spread mile on mile, veined with countless creeks and belts of torped water, and bounded leagues away by the verge of the dim pine forest. On the right the sea glistened along the horizon, and on the left the St. John stretched westward between verdant shores, a highway to their fancy del Dorado. Briefly writes Laudanier, the place is so pleasant that those which are melancholic would be enforced to change their humor. On their way back to the ships they stopped for another pali with the chief Satoriona, and Laudanier eagerly asked where he had got the wedge of silver that he gave him in the morning. The chief told him by signs that he had taken it in war from a people called Timigoas, who lived higher up the river, and who were his mortal enemies, on which the French captain had the folly to promise that he would join in an expedition against them. Satoriona was delighted, and declared that, if he kept his word, he should have gold and silver to his heart's content. Man and nature alike seemed to mark the borders of the river of May as the site of the new colony, for here, around the Indian towns, the harvests of maize, beans, and pumpkins promised abundant food, while the river opened a ready way to the mines of gold and silver and the stores of barbaric wealth which glided before the dreaming vision of the colonists. Yet the better to satisfy himself and his men, Laudanier weighed anchor and sailed for time along the neighboring coast. Returning, confirmed in his first impression, he set out with a potty of officers and soldiers to explore the borders of the chosen stream. The day was hot, the sun beat fiercely on the woollen caps and heavy doublets of the men, till at length they gained the shade of one of those deep forests of pine, where the dead hot air is thick with resinous odors, and the earth carpeted with fallen leaves gives no sound beneath the foot. Yet in the stillness, deer leaped up on all sides as they moved along. Then they emerged into sunlight. A meadow was before them, a running brook, and a wall of encircling forests. The men called it the veil of Laudanier. The afternoon was spent and the sun was near its setting when they reached the bank of the river. They strewed the ground with rows and leaves, and stretched on that silven couch, slept the sleep of travel-worn and weary men. They were roused at daybreak by sound of trumpet, and after singing a psalm they set themselves to their task. It was the building of a fort, and the spot they chose was a furlong amore above St. John's Bluff, where close to the water was a wide, flat knoll, raised a few feet above the marsh and the river. Boats came up the stream with laborers, tents, provisions, cannon, and tools. The engineers marked out the work in the form of a triangle, and from the noble volunteer to the meanest artisan, all lend a hand to complete it. On the riverside the defenses were a palisade of timber. On the two other sides were a ditch and a rampart of facines, earth, and sods. At each angle was a bastion, in one of which was the magazine. Within was a spacious parade. Around it were various buildings for lodging and storage, and a large house with covered galleries was built on the side towards the river for Laudoniere and his officers. In honor of Charles IX the fort was named Fort Caroline. Meanwhile, Sarturiona, lord of all that country as the narrative style him, was seized with misgivings on learning these proceedings. The work was scarcely begun and all was din and confusion around the incipient fort, when the startled Frenchman saw the neighboring height of St. John's, swarming with naked warriors. Laudoniere set his men in array, and for a season pick and spade were dropped for Acabus and Pike. The savage chief descended to the camp. The oddest Lemoine, who saw him, drew his likeness from memory. A tall, athletic figure, tattooed in token of his rank, plumed, bedecked with strings of beads, and girdled with tinkling pieces of metal which hung from the belt which formed his only garment. He came in regal state, a crowd of warriors around him, and in advance a troop of young Indians armed with spears. Twenty musicians followed, flowing hideous discord through pipes of reeds, while he seated himself on the ground, like a monkey, as Lemoine has it in the grave Latin of his brevis narratario. A council followed in which broken words were aided by signs and pandemines, and a treaty of alliance was made. Laudoniere renewing his rash promise to aid the chief against his enemies, Sartoriona, well pleased, ordered his Indians to help the French in their work. They obeyed with a lacquerty, and in two days the buildings of the fort were all thatched after the native fashion with leaves of the palmetto. These savages belonged to one of the confederacies into which the native tribes of Florida were divided, and with free of which the French came into contact. The first was that of Sartoriona, and the second was that of the people called Timigoas, who under a chief named Utina, dwelt in forty villages high up the St. John's. The third was that of the chief, Cassique, or Paracousie, whom the French called King Potanou, and whose dominions lay among the pine barons, cypress swamps, and fertile hummocks westward and northwestward of this remarkable river. These three confederacies hated each other, and were constantly at war. Their social state was more advanced than that of the wandering hunter tribes. They were an agricultural people, and around all their villages were fields of maize, beans, and pumpkins. The harvest was gathered into a public granary, and they lived on it during three-fourths of the year, dispersing in winter to hunt among the forest. They were exceedingly well formed. The men or the principal among them were tattooed on the limbs and body, and in summer were nearly naked.  Others gathered it in a knot at the crown of the head. They danced and sang about the scalps of their enemies, like the tribes of the North, and like them they had their medicine men, who combined the functions of physicians, sorcerers, and priests. The most prominent feature of their religion was sun worship. Their villages were clusters of large dome-shaped huts, framed with poles, and thatched with palmetto leaves. In the midst was a dwelling of the chief, much larger than the rest, and sometimes raised on an artificial mound. They were enclosed with palisades, and strange to say, some of them were approached by wide avenues, artificially graded, and several hundred yards in length. Traces of these may still be seen, as may also the mounds in which the Floridians, like the Hurons and various other tribes, collected at stated intervals the bones of their dead. Social distinctions were sharply defined among them. Their chiefs, whose office was hereditary, sometimes exercised a power almost absolute. Each village had its chief, subordinate to the Grand Chief of the Confederacy. In the language of the French narratives they were all kings and lords, vassals of the great monarch Saturiona, Houttina, or Potanou. All these tribes are now extinct, and it is difficult to ascertain with precision their tribal affinities. There can be no doubt that they were the authors of the aboriginal remains at present found in various parts of Florida. Having nearly finished the fort, Laudonnière declares that he would not lose the minute of an hour without employing of the same in some virtuous exercise. And he therefore sent his lieutenant, Houttigny, to spy out the secrets of the interior, and to learn, above all, what this Timagoa might be, whereof the Paracusi Saturiona had spoken to us so often. As Laudonnière stood pledged to attack the Timagoas, the chief gave Houttigny two Indian guides. Who says the reckon were so eager for the fray that they seemed as if bound to a wedding-feast? The lazy waters of the St. John's tinged to coffee-color by the exudations of the swamps, curled before the prow of Houttigny's sailboat, as he advanced into the prolific wilderness which no European eye had ever yet beheld. By his own reckoning he sailed thirty leagues up the river, which would have brought him to a low point not far below Palatacca. Here, more than two centuries later, the Batrums, father and son, guided their skiff and kindled their nightly bivouac fire, and here, too, roamed Audubon with his sketchbook and his gun. It was a paradise for the hunter and the naturalist. Earth, air, and water teamed with life in endless varieties of beauty and ugliness. A half-tropical forest shadowed the low shores, where the palmetto and the cabbage palm mingled with the oak, the maple, the cypress, the liquid amber, the laurel, the myrtle, and the broad, glistening leaves of the evergreen magnolia. Here was the haunt of bears, wild cats, lynxes, cougars, and the numberless deer which they made their prey. In the sedges in the mud the alligator stretched his brutish length. Turtles, without stretch necks, basked on half-sunk and logs. The rattlesnake sunned himself on the sandy bank, and the yet more dangerous moccasin lurked under the water lilies in inlets and sheltered coves. The air and the water were populace as the earth. The river swammed with fish from the fierce and restless guire cased in his hawny armor to the lazy catfish in the muddy depths. There were the golden eagle and the white-headed eagle, the gray pelican and the white pelican, the blue heron and the white heron, the egret, the ibis, ducks of various sorts, the whooping crane, the black vulture, and the cormorant. And when it sunset the voyages drew their boat upon the strand and built their campfire under the arches of the woods, the owls whooped around them all night long. And when morning came, the sultry mists that wrapped the river were vocal with the clamor of wild turkeys. When Otenye was about twenty leagues from Fort Caroline, his two Indian guides, who were always on the watch, described three canoes, and in great excitement cried, Timagoa, Timagoa, as they drew near one of them snatched up a halberd and the other a sawn, and in their fury they seemed ready to jump into the water to get at the enemy. To their great disgust, Otenye permitted the Timagoas to run their canoes ashore and escape to the woods. Far from keeping la donières senseless promise to fight them, he wished to make them friends, to which end he now landed with some of his men, placed a few trinkets in their canoes, and withdrew to a distance to watch the result. The fugitives presently returned step by step, and allowed the French to approach them, on which Otenye asked by signs if they had gold or silver. They replied that they had none, but that if he would give them one of his men, they would show him where it was to be found. One of the soldiers boldly offered himself for the venture and embarked with them, as, however, he failed to return according to agreement. Otenye, on the next day, owed tin leagues farther up the stream, and at length had the good luck to see him approaching in a canoe. He brought little or no gold, but reported that he had heard of a certain chief named Myra, marvelously rich, who lived three days' journey up the river, and with these welcome tidings Otenye went back to Fort Caroline. A fortnight later an officer named Vassar went up the river to pursue the adventure. The fever for gold had seized upon the French. As the villages of the Timagoas lay between them and the imagined treasures, they shrank from a quarrel, and La Donnière repented already of his promised alliance with Sartoriona. Vassar was two days' sail from the fort when two Indians hailed him from the shore, inviting him to their dwellings. He accepted their guidance, and presently saw before him the cornfields and palisades of an Indian town. He and his followers were led through the wondering crowd to the lodge of Malua, the chief, seated in the place of honor and plentifully regaled with fish and bread. The repast over, Malua made a speech. He told him that he was one of the forty vassal chiefs of the great Otenye, lord of all the Timagoas, whose warriors wore armor of gold and silver plate. He told them, too, of Potanou, his enemy, a man cruel in war, and of the two kings of the distant Appalachian mountains, Onateaqua and Hustaqua, great lords and abounding enriches, while thus with earnest pantomime and broken words the chief disgorced with his guests. Vassar, intent in eager, strove to follow his meaning, and no sooner did he hear of these Appalachian treasures than he promised to join Utena in war against the two potentates of the mountains. Malua, well pleased, promised that each of Utena's vassal chiefs should requite their French allies with a heap of gold and silver two feet high. Thus, while Laudonnière stood pledged to Sartoriona, Vassar made alliance with his mortal enemy. On his return he passed a night in the lodge of one of Sartoriona's chiefs, who questioned him touching his dealings with the Timagoas. Vassar replied that he had set upon them and put them to utter rout. But as the chief, seeming as yet unsatisfied, continued his inquiries. The sergeant, Francois de Lacaya, threw his sword, and like false staff, reenacted his deeds of valor, pursuing and thrusting at the imaginary Timagoas, as they fled before his fury. The chief, at length convinced, led the party to his lodge and entertained them with a decoction of the herb called Cassina. Sartoriona, elated by Laudonnière's delusive promises of aid, had summoned his so-called vassals to war. Tin chiefs and some five hundred warriors had mustered at his call, and the forest was alive with their bibwax. When all was ready, Sartoriona reminded the French commander of his pledge and claimed its fulfillment, but got nothing but evasions in return. He stifled his rage and prepared to go without his fickle ally. A fire was kindled near the bank of the river, and two large vessels of water were placed beside it. Here Sartoriona took his stand, while his chiefs crouched on the grass around him, and the savage visages of his five hundred warriors filled the outer circle. Their long hair, garnished with feathers, were covered with the heads and skins of wolves, coobers, bears, or eagles. Sartoriona, looking towards the country of his enemy, distorted his features into a wild expression of rage and hate, then muttered to himself, then howled an invocation to his god, the sun, then besprinkled the assembly with water from one of the vessels, and turning the other upon the fire suddenly quenched it. So, he cried, may the blood of our enemies be poured out, and their lives extinguished, and the concourse gave forth an explosion of responsive yells, till the shores resounded with the wolfish din. The rites over they set out, and in a few days returned exalting, with thirteen prisoners and a number of scalps. These last were hung on a pole before the royal lodge, and when night came it brought with it a pandemonium of dancing and whooping, drumming, and feasting. A notable scheme entered the brain of Laudanierre, resolved cost what it might to make a friend of Utina. He conceived it to be a stroke of policy to send back to him two of the prisoners. In the morning he sent a soldier to Sartoriona to demand them. The astonished chief gave a fiat refusal, adding that he owed the French no favors, for they had shamefully broken faith with him. On this, Laudanierre at the head of twenty soldiers proceeded to the Indian town, placed a guard at the opening of the great lodge, entered with his aquebousias, and seated himself without ceremony in the highest place. Here, to show his displeasure, he remained in silence for half an hour. At Linty spoke, renewing his demand. For some moment Sartoriona made no reply. Then he coldly observed that the sight of so many armed men had frightened the prisoners away. Laudanierre grew peremptory when the chief's son, Athor, went out and presently returned with the two Indians, whom the French led back to Fort Caroline. Sartoriona says Laudanierre was wonderfully offended with his bravado, and be thought himself by all means how he might be revenged of us. He dissembled for the time, and presently sent three of his followers to the fort with a gift of pumpkins. Though under this show of goodwill the outrage wrangled in his breast, and he never forgave it. The French had been unfortunate in their dealings with the Indians. They had alienated old friends in vain attempts to make new ones. Vassarre, with the Swiss ensign Arlac, a sergeant and ten soldiers, went up the river early in September to carry back the two prisoners to Utina. Laudanierre declares that they sailed eighty leagues, which would have carried them far above Lake Bunro, but it is certain that his reckoning is grossly exaggerated. Their boat crawled up the hazy St. John's, no longer a broad lake-like expanse, but a narrow and torturous stream, winding between swampy forests or through the vast savannah, a verdant sea of brushes and grass. At length they came to a village called Myarquois, and thence with the help of their oars made their way to another cluster of wigworms, apparently on a branch of the main river. Here they found Utina himself, whom, prepossessed with ideas of feudality, they regarded as the Souserain of a host of subordinate lords and princes, ruling over the surrounding swamps and pine-barons. Utina gratefully received the two prisoners whom Laudanierre had sent to propitiate him, feasted the wonderful strangers, and invited them to join him on a raid against his rival, Potanou. Laudanierre had promised to join Sartoriona against Utina, and Vassurre now promised to join Utina against Potanou, the hope of finding gold being in both cases the source of this impolitic compliance. Vassurre went back to Fort Caroline with five of the men, and left Arlac with the remaining five to fight the battles of Utina. The warriors mustered to the number of some two hundred, and the combined force of white men in red took up their march. The wilderness through which they passed has not yet quite lost its characteristic features. The bewildering monotony of the pine-barons, with their myriads of bare-grey trunks, and their canopy of perennial green, through which a scorching sun throws spots and streaks of yellow light. Here on an undergrowth of dwarf palmetto, and there on dry sands half hidden by tufted wiregrass, and dotted with the little mounds that mark the boroughs of the gopher, or those oases in the desert, the hummocks, with their wild, redundant vegetation, their entanglement of trees, bushes, and vines, their scent of flowers and song of birds, or the broad sunshine of the savanna, where they waited to the neck and grass, or the deep swamp, where out of the black and rude-encumbered slough rise the huge buttress trunks of the southern cypress, the gray Spanish moss drooping from every bow and twig, wrapping its victims like a drapery of tattered cobwebs, and slowly draining away their life, for even plants devour each other, and play their silent pots in the universal tragedy of nature. The allies held their way through forest, savanna, and swamp, with Utina's Indians in the front, till they neared the hostile villages, when the modest warriors fell to the rear and yielded the post of honor to the Frenchmen. An open country lay before them, with rough fields of maize, beans, and pumpkins, and the palisades of an Indian town. Their approach was seen, and the warriors of Potinon swammed out to meet them, but the sight of the bearded strangers, the flash and report of the firearms, and the fall of their foremost chief, shot through the brain by Arlac, filled them with consternation, and they fled within their defenses. Pursuers and pursued entered palmel together, the place was pillaged and burned, its inmates captured or killed, and the victors returned triumphant. End of Chapter 4, Recording by James O'Connor, Randolph, Massachusetts, July 2009. Chapter 5 of Pioneers of France in the New World, Part 1, Huguenots in Florida. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Pioneers of France in the New World by Frances Parkman. Part 1, Huguenots in Florida. Chapter 5 Conspiracy. 1564 and 1565. In the little world of Fort Caroline, a miniature France, cliques and parties, conspiracy and sedition, were fast stirring into life. Hopes had been dashed, and wild expectations had come to naught. The adventurers had found, not conquesting golds, but a dull exile in a petty fort by a hot and sickly river, with hard labor, bad fare, prospective famine, and nothing to break the weary sameness but some passing canoe or floating alligator. Gathered in knots, they nursed each other's wrath, and invaded against the commandant. Why are we put on half rations, when he told us that the provision should be made for a full year? Where are the reinforcements and supplies that he said should follow us from France? And why is he always closeted with Odinji, Arlac, and this and that favorite, when we, men of blood as good as theirs, cannot gain his ear for a moment? The young nobles of whom there were many, were volunteers, who had paid their own expenses in expectation of a golden harvest, and they chafed in impatience and disgust. The religious elements in the colony, unlike the former Huguenot emigration to Brazil, was evidently subordinate. The adventurers thought more of their fortunes than of their faith. Yet there were, not a few, earnest enough in the doctrine of Geneva to complain loudly and bitterly that no ministers had been sent with them. The burden of all grievances was thrown upon Lausonière, whose greatest errors seem to have arisen from weakness and a lack of judgment, fatal defects in his position. The growing discontent was brought to a partial head by one La Roquette, who gave out that, high up the river, he had discovered, by magic, a mine of gold and silver, which would give each of them a share of ten thousand crowns, besides fifteen hundred thousand for the king. But for Laudonière, he said, their fortunes would all be made. He found an ally in a gentleman named Genre, one of Laudonière's confidants, who, while still professing fast adherence to his interests, is charged by him with plotting against his life. This Genre, he says, secretly informed the soldiers that were already subordined by La Roquette's that I would deprive them of this great game, in that I did set them daily on work, not sending them on every side to discover the countries. Therefore, that it were a good deed to dispatch me out of the way, and to choose another captain in my place. The soldiers listened too well. They made a flag of an old shirt, which they carried with them to the ramparts when they went to their work. At the same time, wearing their arms, ends, pursues Laudonière, these gentle soldiers did the same for none other end, but to have killed me and my Lieutenant also, if by chance I had given them any hard speeches. About this time, overheating himself, he fell ill, and was confined to his quarters. On this, Genre made advances to the apothecary, urging him to put arsenic into his medicine, but the apothecary shrugged his shoulders. They next devised a scheme to blow him up by hiding a keg of gunpowder under his bed, but here, too, they failed. Hints of Genre's machinations, reaching the ears of Laudonière, the culprit fled to the woods, whence he wrote repentant letters, with full confession, to his commander. Two of the ships, meanwhile, returned to France, the Third, the Breton, remaining at anchor opposite the fort. The malcontents took the opportunity to send home charges against Laudonière of peculation, favoritism, and tyranny. On the Fourth of September, Captain Bordet, apparently a private adventurer, had arrived from France with a small vessel. When he returned, about the 10th of November, Laudonière persuaded him to carry home seven or eight of the malcontent soldiers. Bordet left some of his sailors in their place. The exchange proved most disastrous. These pirates, joined with others, whom they had won over, stole Laudonière's two penises, and set forth on a plundering excursion to the West Indies. They took a small Spanish vessel off the coast of Cuba, but were soon compelled by famine to put into Havana and give themselves up. Here, to make their peace with the authorities, they told all they knew of the position and purposes of their countrymen at Fort Caroline, and thus was forged the Thunderbolt, soon to be hurled against the wretched little colony. On a Sunday morning, Franciste Lacquel came to Laudonière's quarters, and in the name of the whole company requested him to come to the parade grounds. He complied, and issuing forth his inseparable autongue at his side, he saw some 30 of his officers, soldiers, and gentlemen volunteers waiting before the building with fixed and somber countenances. Lacquel, advancing, begged leave to read, in behalf of the rest, a paper which he held in his hands. It opened with protestations of duty and obedience. Next came complaints of hard work, starvation, and broken promises, and requests that the petitioners should be allowed to embark in the vessel lying in the river and cruise along the Spanish Main in order to procure provisions by purchase or otherwise. In short, the flower of the company wished to turn buccaneers. Laudonière refused, but assured them that, as soon as the defenses of the fort should be completed, a search should be begun in earnest for the Appalachian gold mine, and that, meanwhile, two small vessels, then building on the river, should be sent along the coast to barter for provisions with the Indians. With this answer they were forced to content themselves, but the fermentation continued, and the plot thickens. Their spokesmen, Lacquel, however, seeing whether the affair tended, broke with them, and, except Audenji, Yesir, and the brave Swiss Arlach, was the only officer who held to his duty. A severe illness again seized Laudonière, and confined him to his bed. Improving their advantage, the malcontents gained over nearly all the best soldiers in the forts. The ringleader was one for no, a man of good birth, but whom Lemoine calls an avaricious hypocrite. He drew up a paper to which sixty-six names were signed. Lacquel boldly opposed the conspirators, and they resolved to kill him. His roommate, Lemoine, who had refused to sign, received a hint of the design from a friend, upon which he warned Lacquel, who escaped to the woods. It was late in the night. For no, with twenty men armed to the teeth, knocked fiercely at the commandant's door.  For no, armed with seal cap and cuirass, held his archbishop to Laudonière's throat, and demanded leave to go on a cruise among the Spanish islands. The latter kept his presence of mind, and remonstrated with some firmness, on which, with oes and menaces, they dragged him from his bed, put him in fetters, carried him out to the gate of the fort, placed him in a boat, and rode him to the ship anchored in the river. Two other gangs, at the same time, visited Adengie and Arlac, whom they disarmed, in order to keep their rooms till the night following, on pain of death. Smaller parties were busied, meanwhile, in disarming all the loyal soldiers. The fort was completely in the hands of the conspirators. For no, drew up a commission of his mediated West India cruise, which he required Laudonière to sign. The sick commandant, imprisoned in the ship with one attendant, at first refused, but receiving a message from the mutineers that, if he did not comply, they would come on board and cut his throat, he at length yielded. The buccaneers now bestowed themselves to finish the two small vessels on which the carpenters had been for some time at work. In a fortnight they were ready for sea, armed and provided with a king's cannon, munitions, and stores. Trenchants, an excellent pilot, was forced to join the party. Their favorite object was the plunder of a certain church on one of the Spanish islands, which they proposed to assail during the midnight mass of Christmas, whereby a triple end would be achieved. First, a rich booty, secondly, the punishment of idolatry, thirdly, vengeance on the arch enemies of their party and their faith.  They were no sooner gone than the unfortunate Laudonière was gladdened in his solitude by the approach of his fast friends, Audenji and Arlac, who conveyed him to the fort and reinstated him. The entire command was reorganized, and new officers appointed. The colony was woefully depleted, but the bad blood had been drawn off, and thenceforth all internal danger was at an end. In finishing the forts, in building two new vessels to replace those of which they had been robbed, and in various intercourse with the tribes far and near, the weeks passed until the 25th of March, when an Indian came in with tidings that a vessel was hovering off the coast. Laudonière sent to reconnoitre. The stranger lay anchored at the mouth of the river. She was a Spanish brigantine, manned by the returning mutineers, starving, downcast, and anxious to make terms. Yet, as their posture seemed not wholly pacific, Laudonière sent down La Cal, with 30 soldiers concealed at the bottom of his little vessel. Seeing only two or three on the deck, the pirates allowed her to come alongside. When, to their amazement, they were boarded and taken before they could snatch their arms. Discomfited, woe be gone, and drunk, they were landed under a guard. Their story was soon told. Fortune had flattered them at the outset, and on the coast of Cuba they took a brigantine laden with wine and stores. Embarking in her, they next fell in with a caravelle, which also they captured. Landing at a village in Jamaica, they plundered and caroused for a week, and had hardly re-embarked when they met a small vessel having on board the governor of the islands. She made a desperate fight, but was taken at last, and with her a rich booty. They thought to put the governor to ransom, but the astute officer deceived them, and on pretensive negotiating for the sum demanded, together with four or six parrots, and as many monkeys of the sort called Sanguines, which are very beautiful, and for which his captors had also bargained, contrived to send instructions to his wife. Hence it happened that at daybreak three armed vessels fell upon them, retook the prize, and captured or killed all the pirates but twenty-six, who, cutting the moorings of their brigantine, fled out to sea. Among these was the ringleader Forno, and also the pilot Trenchant, who, eager to return to Fort Caroline, once he had been forcibly taken, succeeded during the night in bringing the vessel to the coast of Florida. Great were the wrath and consternation of the pirates when they saw their dilemma, for, having no provisions, they must either starve or seek succor at the forts. They chose the latter course and bore away for the St. John's. A few casks of Spanish wine yet remains, and nobles and soldiers, fraternizing in the common peril of a halter, joined in a last corralse, as the wine mounted to their heads, in the mirth of drink and desperation, they enacted their own trial. One personated the judge, another the commandant, witnesses were called with arguments and speeches on either side. Say what you like, said one of them, after hearing the council for the defense, but if L'Auginaire does not hang us all, I will never call him an honest man. They had some hope of getting provisions from the Indians at the mouth of the river, and then putting to sea again, but this was frustrated by Laquale's sudden attack. A court-martial was called near Fort Caroline, and all were found guilty. Forno and three others were sentenced to be hanged. Comrades, said one of the condemns, appealing to the soldiers, will you stand by and see us butchered? These, retorted L'Auginaire, are no comrades of mutineers and rebels. At the request of his followers, however, he commuted the sentence to shooting. A file of men, a rattling volley, and the debt of justice was paid. The bodies were hanged on gibbets. At the river's mouth and order reigns at Fort Caroline.


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