CHAPTER I.

FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA, PART FIRST

PIONEERS OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD

By Francis Parkman

INTRODUCTION.

The springs of American civilization, unlike those of the elder world,

lie revealed in the clear light of History. In appearance they 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. On 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 adolescence 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 ascendency of a regulated freedom;--Feudalism

still strong in life, though enveloped and overborne by new-born

Centralization; Monarchy in 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 seigniories and hordes of savage

retainers.

Along the borders of the sea an adverse power was strengthening and

widening, with 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.

Here the prize was within every man's reach: patient industry need never

doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in

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 compose 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 compassed 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 commonwealths;

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, each 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. Borne 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 camp-fires 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, knit in close fellowship

on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed

continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; 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. Men 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 nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry,

here, with their dauntless hardihood, 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 historic 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 co-operation, for which the writer owes obligations too

many for recognition at present, but of which he trusts to make fitting

acknowledgment 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 Hon. Henry

Black of Quebec. Nor can he refrain from expressing his obligation to

the skilful 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 in

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

a 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 at least as relates to the present volume, nothing 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 precluding it. Indeed, for two periods,

each of several years, any attempt at bookish occupation would have been

merely suicidal. A condition of sight 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 completed narratives. Some progress has been

made in others.

Boston. January 1,1865.

Part One

HUGOENOTS IN FLORIDA

PREFATORY NOTE TO THE

HUGUENOTS IN FLORIDA.

The story of New France opens with a tragedy. The political and

religious enmities which were soon to bathe Europe in blood broke out

with an intense and concentrated fury in the distant wilds of Florida.

It was under equivocal auspices that Coligny and his partisans essayed

to build up a Calvinist France in America, and the attempt was met by

all the forces of national rivalry, personal interest, and religious

hate.

This striking passage of our early history is remarkable for the

fullness and precision of the authorities that illustrate it. The

incidents of the Huguenot occupation of Florida are recorded by eight

eye-witnesses. Their evidence is marked by an unusual accord in respect

to essential facts, as well as by a minuteness of statement which

vividly pictures the events described. The following are the principal

authorities consulted for the main body of the narrative.

Ribauld, 'The Whole and True Discovery of Terra Florida,' This is

Captain Jean Ribaut's account of his voyage to Florida in 1562. It

was "prynted at London," "newly set forthe in Englishe," in 1563, and

reprinted by Hakluyt in 1582 in his black-letter tract entitled 'Divers

Voyages.' It is not known to exist in the original French.

'L'Histoire Notable de la Floride, mise en lumiere par M. Basanier'

(Paris, 1586). The most valuable portion of this work consists of the

letters of Rene de Laudonniere, the French commandant in Florida in

1564-65. They are interesting, and, with necessary allowance for the

position and prejudices of the writer, trustworthy.

Challeux, Discours de l'Histoire de la Floride (Dieppe, 1566). Challeux

was a carpenter, who went to Florida in 1565. He was above sixty years

of age, a zealous Huguenot, and a philosopher in his way. His story is

affecting from its simplicity. Various editions of it appeared under

various titles.

Le Moyne, Brevis Narratio eorum qucs in Florida Americce Provincia

Gallis acciderunt. Le Moyne was Laudonniere's artist. His narrative

forms the Second Part of the Grands Voyages of De Bry (Frankfort, 1591).

It is illustrated by numerous drawings made by the writer from memory,

and accompanied with descriptive letter-press.

Coppie d'une Lettre venant de la Floride (Paris, 1565). This is a letter

from one of the adventurers under Laudonniere. It is reprinted in the

Recueil de Pieces sur la Floride of Ternaux.-Compans. Ternaux also

prints in the same volume a narrative called Histoire memorable du

dernier Voyage faict par le Capitaine Jean Ribaut. It is of no original

value, being compiled from Laudonniere and Challeux.

Une Bequete au Roy, faite en forme de Complainte (1566). This is a

petition for redress to Charles the Ninth from the relatives of the

French massacred in Florida by the Spaniards. It recounts many incidents

of that tragedy.

La Reprinse de la Floride par le Cappitaine Gourgue. This is a

manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale, printed in the Recueil of

Ternaux-Compans. It contains a detailed account of the remarkable

expedition of Dominique de Gourgues against the Spaniards in Florida in

1567-68.

Charlevoix, in his Histoire de la Nouvelle France, speaks of another

narrative of this expedition in manuscript, preserved in the Gourgues

family. A copy of it, made in 1831 by the Vicomte de Gourgues, has been

placed at the writer's disposal.

Popeliniere, De Thou, Wytfleit, D'Aubigne De Laet, Brantome, Lescarbot,

Champlain, and other writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

have told or touched upon the story of the Huguenots in Florida; but

they all draw their information from one or more of the sources named

above.

Lettres et Papiers d' Estat du Sieur de Forguevaulx (Bibliotheque

Nationale). These include the correspondence of the French and Spanish

courts concerning the massacre of the Huguenots. They are printed by

Gaffarel in his Histoire de le Floride Francaise.

The Spanish authorities are the following--Barcia (Cardenas y Cano),

Ensayo Cronologico para la Historia General de la Florida (Madrid,

1723). This annalist had access to original documents of great interest.

Some of them are used as material for his narrative, others are copied

entire. Of these, the most remarkable is that of Solis de las Meras,

Memorial de todas las Jornadas de la Conquista de la Florida.

Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, Relacion de la Jornada de Pedro

Menendez de Aviles en la Florida (Documentos Ineditos del Archivo de

Indias, III. 441). A French translation of this journal will be found

in the Recueil de Pieces sur let Floride of Ternaux-Compans. Mendoza was

chaplain of the expedition commanded by Menendez de Aviles, and, like

Solfs, he was an eye-witness of the events which he relates.

Pedro Menendez de Aviles, Siete Cartas escritas al Rey, Anos de 1565 y

1566, MSS. These are the despatches of the Adelantado Menendez to Philip

the Second. They were procured for the writer, together with other

documents, from the archives of Seville, and their contents are now for

the first time made public. They consist of seventy-two closely written

foolscap pages, and are of the highest interest and value as regards the

present subject, confirming and amplifying the statements of Solis and

Mendoza, and giving new and curious information with respect to the

designs of Spain upon the continent of North America.

It is unnecessary to specify the authorities for the introductory and

subordinate portions of the narrative.

The writer is indebted to Mr. Buckingham Smith, for procuring copies of

documents from the archives of Spain; to Mr. Bancroft, the historian of

the United States, for the use of the Vicomte de Gourgues's copy of the

journal describing the expedition of his ancestor against the Spaniards;

and to Mr. Charles Russell Lowell, of the Boston Athenaeum, and Mr.

John Langdon Sibley, Librarian of Harvard College, for obliging aid in

consulting books and papers.

HUGUENOTS IN FLORIDA.

CHAPTER I.

1512-1561.

EARLY SPANISH ADVENTURE.

Towards 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 knight-errant with the bigotry of

inquisitors and 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 archipelagoes, 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 Porto 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. [1] 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. [2]

Ponce de Leon found the island of Bimini, but not the fountain. Farther

westward, in the latitude of thirty degrees and 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 Porto 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. [3]

The voyages of Garay and Vasquez de Ayllon threw new light on the

discoveries of Ponce, and the general outline of the coasts of Florida

became known to the Spaniards. [4] 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 seat of surpassing wealth, and Pamphilo de Narvaez

essayed to possess himself of its fancied 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 forests with three hundred men. Nothing could exceed their

sufferings. Nowhere could they find the gold they came to seek. The

village of Appalache, 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 [5] 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 waves, melted them away. Narvaez

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. [6]

The interior of the vast country then comprehended under the name of

Florida still remained unexplored. The Spanish voyager, as his caravel

ploughed 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 hid a rich harvest for some future conqueror; perhaps a

second Mexico with its royal palace and sacred pyramids, or another

Cuzco with its temple of the Sun, encircled with a frieze of gold.

Haunted by such visions, the ocean chivalry of Spain could not long

stand idle.

Hernando 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 a nobleman. [7] 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 in agitation,

Cabeca de Vaca, one of those who had survived the expedition of Narvaez,

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 Espiritu

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 clangor

of trumpets, the neighing of horses, the fluttering of pennons, the

glittering of helmet and lance, startled the ancient forest with

unwonted greeting. Amid this pomp of chivalry, religion was not

forgotten. The sacred vessels and vestments 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 especial 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. For

month after month and year after year, the procession of priests and

cavaliers, crossbowmen, arquebusiers, and Indian captives laden with

the baggage, still wandered on through wild and boundless wastes, lured

hither and thither by the ignis fatuus of their hopes. They traversed

great portions of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, everywhere

inflicting and 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 drift-wood on its turbid current.

The Spaniards crossed over at a point above the mouth of the Arkansas.

They advanced westward, but found no treasures,--nothing indeed 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, rank 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. Finding neither

gold nor the South Sea, for both of which they had hoped, they returned

to the banks of the Mississippi.

De Soto, says one of those who accompanied him, was a "stern man, and of

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 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

most forlorn. Few of their horses remained alive; their baggage had been

destroyed at the burning of the Indian town of Mavila, 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

Espiritu 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 gantlet between hostile tribes, who fiercely attacked them. Reaching

the Gulf, though not without the 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. [7]

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 Cancello, 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

find a spot suitable for the establishment. [8] After his return, a

squadron, commanded by Angel de Villafane, and freighted with supplies

and men, put to sea from San Juan d'Ulloa; 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 northward towards the polar sea. This vast territory

was claimed by Spain in right of the discoveries of Columbus, the

grant of the Pope, and the various expeditions mentioned above. England

claimed it in right of the discoveries of Cabot; while France could

advance no better title than might be derived from the voyage of

Verazzano and 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

1550-1558.

VILLEGAGNON.

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.

A tyranny of monks and inquisitors, with their swarms of spies and

informers, their racks, their dungeons, and their fagots, crushed all

freedom of thought or speech; 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. Perverse

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 thews and

sinews formed in his days of vigor. Philip the Second 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 Escorial, dreary and silent, and

bent like a scribe over his papers, was the type and the champion

of arbitrary power. More than the Pope himself, he was the head of

Catholicity. In doctrine and in deed, the inexorable bigotry of Madrid

was ever in advance of Rome.

Not so with France. She was full of life,--a discordant and struggling

vitality. Her monks and priests, unlike those of Spain, were rarely

either fanatics or bigots; yet not the less did they ply the rack and

the fagot, and howl for heretic blood. 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 great high-priest. Thence

intrepid colporteurs, 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 fraction of the warlike noblesse

were also of the new faith; and above them all, preeminent in character

as in station, stood Gaspar de Coligny, Admiral of France.

The old palace of the Louvre, reared by the "Roi 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 brood of Valois.

Corruption and intrigue ran riot at the court. Factious nobles, bishops,

and cardinals, with no God but pleasure and ambition, contended around

the throne or the sick-bed of the futile King. Catherine de Medicis,

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 lands of impoverished nobles. Montmorency, Conde, and

Navarre leaned towards the Reform,--doubtful and inconstant chiefs,

whose faith weighed 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,

sagacious, 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. Among and around them tossed the 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 the Fifth 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 surcoats of crimson blazoned with the white cross, bore the

brunt of the assault. Conspicuous among them was Nicolas Durand de

Villegagnon. A Moorish cavalier, rushing upon him, pierced his arm with

a lance, and wheeled to repeat the blow; but the knight leaped on the

infidel, stabbed him with his dagger, flung him from his horse, and

mounted in his place. Again, a Moslem host landed in Malta and beset the

Cite Notable. The garrison was weak, disheartened, and without a leader.

Villegagnon with six followers, all friends of his own, passed under

cover of night through the infidel leaguer, 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 Christendom against the Mussuhuan. 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 Crichton of

France had proved himself an associate nowise desirable. His sleepless

intellect was matched with a spirit as restless, vain, unstable, and

ambitious, as it was enterprising and bold. Addicted to dissent, and

enamoured 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 of Brittany, he was deep in a feud with the Governor of

Brest. Disgusted at home, his fancy crossed the seas. He aspired to

build for France and himself an empire amid 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 gantlet of the English fleet,

and borne Mary Stuart of Scotland in safety to her espousals with

the Dauphin, might well be intrusted with a charge of moment so far

inferior. Henry the Second was still on the throne. The lance of

Montgomery had not yet rid France of that infliction. 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 Villegagnon 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

Guise. 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

emigration 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 twelfth of July,

1555, and early in November saw the shores of Brazil. Entering the

harbor of Rio Janeiro, then called Ganabara, Villegagnon landed men

and stores 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.

Villegagnon signalized his new-born Protestantism by an intolerable

solicitude for the manners and morals of his followers. The whip and

the pillory requited 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 Villegagnon 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 the Second, under

Bois-Lecomte, a nephew of Villegagnon. 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, fifes, and trumpets, they unfurled their sails at

Honfleur. 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 short of 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 Ganabara, and saw the fleur-de-lis floating above

the walls of Fort Coligny. Amid salutes of cannon, the boats, crowded

with sea-worn emigrants, moved towards the landing. It was an edifying

scene when Villegagnon, in the picturesque attire which marked the

warlike nobles of the period, came down to the shore to greet the sombre

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 aliment had

surpassed their expectations, the ministers were little prepared for

the meagre provision which awaited their temporal cravings; for, with

appetites whetted 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 rain-water. They found their consolation in the

inward graces of the commandant, whom they likened to the Apostle Paul.

For a time all was ardor 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 succession,

and Villegagnon 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 emigrants was a student of

the Sorbonne, one Cointac, between whom and the ministers arose a fierce

and unintermitted 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.

Villegagnon took part with the student, and between them they devised a

new doctrine, abhorrent alike to Geneva and to Rome. The advent of this

nondescript heresy was the signal of redoubled strife. The dogmatic

stiffness of the Geneva ministers chafed Villegagnon 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 is said, in terms

which restored him forthwith to the bosom of the Church. Villegagnon

now affirmed that he had been deceived in Calvin, 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 harbor should be ready to carry them

back to France. Having rid himself of the ministers, he caused three of

the more zealous 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

those detestable doctrines should share the fate of their three

comrades; and, his harangue 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 descried

across the waste of sea the faint, cloud-like line that marked the coast

of Brittany. Their perils were not past; for, if we may believe one of

them, Jean de Lery, they bore a sealed letter from Villegagnon to the

magistrates of the first French port at 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.

Villegagnon 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 knight often worsted the theologian at 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. Spain and Portugal made good their claim to the vast domain,

the mighty vegetation, and undeveloped riches of "Antarctic France."

CHAPTER III.

1562, 1563.

JEAN RIBAUT.

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 profaned, hearth-stones

made desolate, the robes of Justice herself bedrenched with murder. In

the gloom without lay Spain, imminent and terrible. As on the hill

by the field of Dreux, 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, a second Huguenot colony sailed for the New

World. The calm, stern man who represented and led the Protestantism

of France felt to his inmost heart the peril of the time. He would

fain build up a city of refuge for the persecuted sect. Yet Gaspar de

Coligny, 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

commonwealth. 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 Marot among rocks and caverns. Joined 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 noblesse, from

Conde, who aspired to the crown,

"Ce petit homme tant joli,

Qui toujours chante, toujours rit,"

to the younger son of the impoverished seigneur 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 religions.

America was still a land of wonder. The ancient spell 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 ignis fatuus 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. Coligny's colonists were of a different stamp, and

widely different was their fate.

An excellent seaman and stanch Protestant, Jean Ribaut of Dieppe,

commanded the expedition. Under him, besides 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 porportions are

preserved in the old engravings of De Bry, they sailed from Havre on

the eighteenth of February, 1562. They crossed the Atlantic, and on the

thirtieth 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 descried a jutting

point, which they called French Cape, perhaps one of the headlands of

Matanzas Inlet. They turned their prows northward, coasting the fringes

of that waste of verdure 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 and sheltered water, "boyling and roaring," says

Ribaut, "through the multitude of all kind of fish." Indians were

running along the beach, and out upon the sand-bars, beckoning them

to land. They pushed their boats ashore and disembarked,--sailors,

soldiers, and eager young nobles. Corselet and morion, arquebuse 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. "They be all naked and of a goodly stature,

mightie, and as well shapen and proportioned of body as any people in ye

world; and the fore part of their body and armes be painted with pretie

deuised workes, of Azure, red, and blacke, so well and so properly as

the best Painter of Europe could not amende it." With their squaws and

children, they presently drew near, and, strewing the earth with laurel

boughs, sat down among the Frenchmen. Their visitors were much pleased

with them, and Ribaut gave the chief, whom he calls the king, a robe of

blue cloth, worked in yellow with the regal fleur-de-lis.

But Ribaut 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 May-day. The quaint old narrative is exuberant with

delight. The tranquil air, the warm sun, woods fresh with young verdure,

meadows bright with flowers; the palm, the cypress, the pine, the

magnolia; the grazing deer; herons, curlews, bitterns, woodcock, and

unknown water-fowl that waded in the ripple of the beach; cedars 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 roamings, till their new-discovered land seemed "the fairest,

fruitfullest, and pleasantest of al the world."

They found a tree covered with caterpillars, and hereupon the ancient

black-letter says: "Also there be Silke wormes in meruielous number, a

great deale fairer and better then be our silk wormes. To bee short, it

is a thing vnspeakable to consider the thinges that bee seene there, and

shalbe founde more and more in this incomperable lande." [9]

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, "as great

as an Acorne at ye least," 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 Cibola, 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 Ribault, "we returned to land againe,

accompanied with the Captaines, Gentlemen, and Souldiers, and others of

our small troope, carrying with us a Pillour or columne of harde stone,

our king's armes graved therein, to plant and set the same in the

enterie of the Porte; and being come thither we espied on the south

syde of the River a place very fitte for that purpose upon a little

hill compassed with Cypres, Bayes, Paulmes, and other trees, with sweete

smelling and pleasant shrubbes." 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 Seine. 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 "espied an innumerable number of footesteps of great Hartes and

Hindes of a wonderfull greatnesse, the steppes being all fresh and new,

and it seemeth that the people doe nourish them like tame Cattell." By

two or three weeks of exploration they seem to have gained a clear idea

of this rich semi-aquatic region. Ribaut describes it as "a countrie

full of hauens, riuers, and Ilands, of such fruitfulnes as cannot with

tongue be expressed." Slowly moving northward, they named each river, or

inlet supposed to be a river, after some stream of France,--the Loire,

the Charente, the Garonne, the Gironde. At length, opening betwixt flat

and sandy shores, they saw a commodious haven, and named it Port Royal.

On the twenty-seventh of May they crossed the bar where the war-ships of

Dupont crossed three hundred years later, passed Hilton Head, and held

their course along the peaceful bosom of Broad River. [10] On the left

they saw a stream which they named Libourne, 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 Medicis; 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. Cross-bow and arquebuse 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. Ribaut

was more than willing to humor them. He mustered his company on deck,

and made them a harangue. He appealed to their courage and 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 a good will and joly corage," writes the commander, "as

we had much to do to stay their importunitie." Thirty were chosen, and

Albert de Pierria was named to command them.

A fort was begun on a small stream called the Chenonceau, probably

Archer's Creek, about six miles from the site of Beaufort. [11]

They named it Charlesfort, in honor of the unhappy son of Catherine

de Medicis, Charles the Ninth, the future hero of St. Bartholomew.

Ammunition and stores were sent on shore, and on the eleventh of June,

with his diminished company, Ribaut 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 the

waters. They were alone in those fearful solitudes. From the north pole

to Mexico there was 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 from 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. Ribaut 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. Good-will, 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 Audusta, 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. But as the noisy and impertinent guests

showed a disposition to undue merriment, the chief shut them all in

his wigwam, lest their Gentile eyes should profane the mysteries.

Here, immured 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 solemnity,--the procession of the medicinemen and the bedaubed

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 mussel-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 carousal they returned to Charlesfort, where they were soon

pinched with hunger. The Indians, never niggardly 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 good-will. They told the French of

two other kings, Ouade and Couexis, 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 sea, but by a

perplexing inland navigation, including, as it seems, Calibogue Sound

and neighboring waters. Reaching the friendly villages, on or near the

Savannah, they were feasted to repletion, and their boat was laden with

vegetables and corn. They returned rejoicing; but their joy was short.

Their store-house at Charlesfort, taking fire in the night, burned to

the ground, and with it their newly acquired stock.

Once more they set out for the realms of King Ouade, and once more

returned laden with supplies. Nay, the generous savage assured them

that, so long as his cornfields yielded their harvests, his friends

should not want.

How long this friendship would have lasted may well be doubted. With the

perception that the dependants on 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 lands-men 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 La Chore, 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 Nicolas

Barre, a man of merit. Barre 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

weary eyes, the sweltering forest, the glassy river, the eternal silence

of the lifeless wilds around them, oppressed the senses and the spirits.

They dreamed of ease, of home, of pleasures across the sea, of the

evening cup on the bench before the cabaret, and dances with kind

wenches of Dieppe. But how to escape? A continent was their solitary

prison, and the pitiless Atlantic shut them in. Not one of them knew how

to build a ship; but Ribaut had left 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 calked 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 sails they sewed together their shirts and bedding. At

length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Crusoe floated on the waters of

the Chenonceau. They laid in what provision they could, gave all that

remained of their goods to the Indians, embarked, descended the river,

and put 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.

Floating 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. Head-winds set in, increasing to a

gale, and the wretched brigantine, with sails close-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. At length she righted. The gale

subsided, the wind changed, and the crazy, water-logged vessel again

bore slowly towards France.

Gnawed 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 La Chore, the same

wretched man whom Albert had doomed to starvation on a lonely island.

They killed him, and with ravenous avidity portioned out his flesh. The

hideous repast sustained them till the land rose in sight, when, it is

said, in a delirium of joy, they could no longer steer 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. [12]

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.

CHAPTER IV.

1564.

LAUDONNIERE.

ON the twenty-fifth 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. Rene de Laudonniere held command. He was of a noble

race of Poiton, attached to the house of Chatillon, of which Coligny

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 short cloak. His thin oval face, with curled

moustache and close-trimmed beard, wears a somewhat pensive look, as if

already shadowed by the destiny that awaited him.

The intervening year since Ribaut'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 masked their rancor

under hollow smiles. The king and the queen-mother, helpless amid the

storm of factions which threatened their destruction, smiled now on

Conde, now on Guise,--gave ear to the Cardinal of Lorraine, or listened

in secret to the emissaries of Theodore Beza. Coligny was again strong

at Court. He used his opportunity, and solicited with success the means

of renewing his enterprise of colonization.

Men were mustered for the work. In name, at least, they were all

Huguenots 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 Huguenot 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 Huegonots; for the dull peasants who guided

the plough 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 an empire beyond the sea.

On Thursday, the twenty-second of June, Laudonniere saw the low

coast-line 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 northward, 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 Ribaut two years before.

They were scarcely on shore when they saw an Indian chief, "which having

espied us cryed very far off, Antipola! Antipola! and being so joyful

that he could not containe himselfe, he came to meet us accompanied with

two of his sonnes, as faire and mightie persons as might be found in

al the world. There was in their trayne a great number of men and women

which stil made very much of us, and by signes made us understand

how glad they were of our arrival. This good entertainment past, the

Paracoussy [chief] prayed me to goe see the pillar which we had

erected in the voyage of John Ribault." 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 Laudonniere by the hand, telling him that he was

named Satouriona, and pointed out the extent of his dominions, far up

the river and along the adjacent coasts. One of his sons, a man "perfect

in beautie, wisedome, and honest sobrietie," then gave the French

commander a wedge of silver, and received some trifles in return, after

which the voyagers went back to their ships. "I prayse God continually,"

says Laudonniere, "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 eighty or more, seated under a shelter

of boughs, in festal attire of smoke-tanned deer-skins, painted in many

colors. The party then rowed 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, sedgy 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, flowing 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 Laudonniere stopped to rest while his

lieutenant, Ottigny, 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, when 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

carkeis 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 onely word but with exceeding great paine." 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, Ottigny 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 Ottigny and his followers returned to report what they had

seen. Laudonniere was waiting for them on the side of the hill; and now,

he says, "I went right to the toppe thereof, where we found nothing

else but Cedars, Palme, and Baytrees of so sovereigne odour that Baulme

smelleth nothing like in comparison." From this high standpoint they

surveyed their Canaan. The unruffled river lay before them, with its

marshy islands overgrown with sedge and bulrushes; while on the farther

side the flat, green meadows spread mile on mile, veined with countless

creeks and belts of torpid 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's stretched westward between

verdant shores, a highway to their fancied Eldorado. "Briefly,"

writes Laudonniere, "the place is so pleasant that those which are

melancholicke would be inforced to change their humour."

On their way back to the ships they stopped for another parley with the

chief Satouriona, and Laudonniere 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 Thimagoas, 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. Satouriona 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 glittered before the dreaming vision of the

colonists. Yet, the better to satisfy himself and his men, Laudonniere

weighed anchor, and sailed for a time along the neighboring coasts.

Returning, confirmed in his first impression, he set out with a party 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 Vale of Laudonniere. The afternoon was spent, and the

sun was near its setting, when they reached the bank of the river. They

strewed the ground with boughs and leaves, and, stretched on that sylvan

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 or more 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. [13] 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 lent a hand to complete it. On the river side the defences

were a palisade of timber. On the two other sides were a ditch, and a

rampart of fascines, 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

Laudonniere and his officers. In honor of Charles the Ninth the fort was

named Fort Caroline.

Meanwhile Satouriona, "lord of all that country," as the narratives

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 Frenchmen saw the neighboring height

of St. John's swarming with naked warriors. Laudonniere set his men in

array, and for a season, pick and spade were dropped for arquebuse and

pike. The savage chief descended to the camp. The artist Le Moyne,

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, blowing hideous discord through pipes of

reeds, while he seated himself on the ground "like a monkey," as Le

Moyne has it in the grave Latin of his Brevis Narratio. A council

followed, in which broken words were aided by signs and pantomime; and

a treaty of alliance was made, Laudonniere renewing his rash promise to

aid the chief against his enemies. Satouriona, well pleased, ordered his

Indians to help the French in their work. They obeyed with alacrity,

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 three of which the French came

into contact. The first was that of Satouriona; and the second was that

of the people called Thimagoas, who, under a chief named Outina, dwelt

in forty villages high up the St. John's. The third was that of the

chief, cacique, or paracoussy whom the French called King Potanou, and

whose dominions lay among the pine barrens, 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 forests.

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.

Some wore their straight black hair flowing loose to the waist; 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 the 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 or lords, vassals of the great monarch Satouriona, Outina, 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, Laudonniere declares that he "would

not lose the minute of an houre without employing of the same in some

vertuous exercise;" and he therefore sent his lieutenant, Ottigny, to

spy out the secrets of the interior, and to learn, above all, "what this

Thimagoa might be, whereof the Paracoussy Satouriona had spoken to us so

often." As Laudonniere stood pledged to attack the Thimagoas, the chief

gave Ottigny two Indian guides, who, says the record, 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 Ottigny's sail-boat

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 point not far below Palatka.

Here, more than two centuries later, the Bartrams, father and son,

guided their skiff and kindled their nightly bivouac-fire; and here,

too, roamed Audubon, with his sketch-book and his gun. It was a paradise

for the hunter and the naturalist. Earth, air, and water teemed 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-ambar, 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 of which they made their prey. In the sedges and

the mud the alligator stretched his brutish length; turtles with

outstretched necks basked on half-sunken logs; the rattlesnake sunned

himself on the sandy bank, and the yet more dangerous moccason lurked

under the water-lilies in inlets and sheltered coves. The air and the

water were populous as the earth. The river swarmed with fish, from the

fierce and restless gar, cased in his horny armor, to the lazy cat-fish

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 at sunset the

voyagers drew their boat upon the strand and built their camp-fire 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 Ottigny was about twenty leagues from Fort Caroline, his two Indian

guides, who were always on the watch, descried three canoes, and in

great excitement cried, "Thimagoa! Thimagoa!" As they drew near, one of

them snatched up a halberd and the other a sword, and in their fury they

seemed ready to jump into the water to get at the enemy. To their great

disgust, Ottigny permitted the Thimagoas to run their canoes ashore and

escape to the woods. Far from keeping Laudonniere's senseless promise to

light 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 Ottigny 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, Ottigny, on the next day,

followed ten 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 Mayrra,

marvellously rich, who lived three days' journey up the river; and with

these welcome tidings Ottigny went back to Fort Caroline.

A fortnight later, an officer named Vasseur went up the river to pursue

the adventure. The fever for gold had seized upon the French. As the

villages of the Thimagoas lay between them and the imagined treasures,

they shrank from a quarrel, and Laudonniere repented already of his

promised alliance with Satouriona.

Vasseur 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 Mollua, the chief, seated in the place of honor,

and plentifully regaled with fish and bread. The repast over, Mollua

made a speech. He told them that he was one of the forty vassal chiefs

of the great Outina, lord of all the Thimagoas, whose warriors wore

armor of gold and silver plate. He told them, too, of Potanou, his

enemy, "a man cruell in warre;" and of the two kings of the distant

Appalachian Mountains,--Onatheaqua and Houstaqua, "great lords and

abounding in riches." While thus, with earnest pantomime and broken

words, the chief discoursed with his guests, Vasseur, intent and

eager, strove to follow his meaning; and no sooner did he hear of these

Appalachian treasures than he promised to join Outina in war against

the two potentates of the mountains. Mollua, well pleased, promised that

each of Outina's vassal chiefs should requite their French allies with

a heap of gold and silver two feet high. Thus, while Laudonniere stood

pledged to Satouriona, Vasseur made alliance with his mortal enemy.

On his return, he passed a night in the lodge of one of Satouriona's

chiefs, who questioned him touching his dealings with the Thimagoas.

Vasseur 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 la Caille drew his sword, and, like Falstaff,

reenacted his deeds of valor, pursuing and thrusting at the imaginary

Thimagoas, 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.

Satouriona, elated by Laudonniere's delusive promises of aid, had

summoned his so-called vassals to war. Ten chiefs and some five hundred

warriors had mustered at his call, and the forest was alive with their

bivouacs. When all was ready, Satouriona reminded the French commander

of his pledge, and claimed its fulfilment, 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 Satouriona 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, or covered with the heads and skins of wolves, cougars,

bears, or eagles. Satouriona, 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 exulting, 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 Laudonniere. Resolved, cost what

it might, to make a friend of Outina, 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 Satouriona 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, Laudonniere, at the head of

twenty soldiers, proceeded to the Indian town, placed a guard at the

opening of the great lodge, entered with his arquebusiers, and seated

himself without ceremony in the highest place. Here, to show his

displeasure, he remained in silence for half an hour. At length he

spoke, renewing his demand. For some moments Satouriona made no

reply; then he coldly observed that the sight of so many armed men had

frightened the prisoners away. Laudonniere grew peremptory, when the

chief's son, Athore, went out, and presently returned with the two

Indians, whom the French led back to Fort Caroline.

Satouriona, says Laudonniere, "was wonderfully offended with his

bravado, and bethought himselfe by all meanes 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 good-will the outrage rankled 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.

Vasseur, with the Swiss ensign Arlac, a sergeant, and ten soldiers,

went up the river early in September to carry back the two prisoners

to Outina. Laudonniere declares that they sailed eighty leagues, which

would have carried them far above Lake Monroe; 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 tortuous

stream, winding between swampy forests, or through the vast savanna,

a verdant sea of brushes and grass. At length they came to a village

called Mayarqua, and thence, with the help of their oars, made their way

to another cluster of wigwams, apparently on a branch of the main

river. Here they found Outina himself, whom, prepossessed with ideas of

feudality, they regarded as the suzerain of a host of subordinate lords

and princes, ruling over the surrounding swamps and pine barrens. Outina

gratefully received the two prisoners whom Laudonniere had sent to

propitiate him, feasted the wonderful strangers, and invited them to

join him on a raid against his rival, Potanou. Laudonniere had promised

to join Satouriona against Outina, and Vasseur now promised to join

Outina against Potanon, the hope of finding gold being in both cases the

source of this impolitic compliance. Vasseur went back to Fort Caroline

with five of the men, and left Arlac with the remaining five to fight

the battles of Ontina.

The warriors mustered to the number of some two hundred, and the

combined force of white men and 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 barrens, with their

myriads of bare gray 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 wire-grass, and dotted with the little mounds that mark the

burrows 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 waded to the neck in grass; or

the deep swamp, where, out of the black and root-encumbered slough, rise

the huge buttressed trunks of the Southern cypress, the gray Spanish

moss drooping from every bough 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 parts in the

universal tragedy of nature.

The allies held their way through forest, savanna, and swamp, with

Outina'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 Potanon swarmed out to meet them; but the sight of

the bearded strangers, the flash and report of the fire-arms, and the

fall of their foremost chief, shot through the brain by Arlac, filled

them with consternation, and they fled within their defences. Pursuers

and pursued entered pell-mell together. The place was pillaged and

burned, its inmates captured or killed, and the victors returned

triumphant.

CHAPTER V.

1564, 1565.

CONSPIRACY.

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 conquest and gold, 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 inveighed against the commandant. Why are we put on

half-rations, when he told us that 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 Ottigny,

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 element 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 Laudonniere, 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

Laudonniere, he said, their fortunes would all be made. He found an ally

in a gentleman named Genre, one of Laudonniere'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 enfourmed

the Souldiers that were already suborned by La Roquette, that I would

deprive them of this great game, in that I did set them dayly on worke,

not sending them on every side to discover the Countreys; therefore

that it were a good deede to dispatch mee out of the way, and to choose

another Captaine in my place." The soldiers listened too well. They made

a flag of an old shirt, which they carried with them to the rampart

when they went to their work, at the same time wearing their arms; and,

pursues Laudonniere, "these gentle Souldiers did the same for none other

ende but to have killed mee 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 Laudonniere,

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 Laudonniere of peculation,

favoritism, and tyranny.

On the fourth of September, Captain Bourdet, apparently a private

adventurer, had arrived from France with a small vessel. When he

returned, about the tenth of November, Laudonniere persuaded him to

carry home seven or eight of the malcontent soldiers. Bourdet left some

of his sailors in their place. The exchange proved most disastrous.

These pirates joined with others whom they had won over, stole

Laudonniere's two pinnaces, 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, Francois de la Caille [13] came to Laudonniere's

quarters, and, in the name of the whole company, requested him to come

to the parade ground. He complied, and issuing forth, his inseparable

Ottigny at his side, he saw some thirty of his officers, soldiers, and

gentlemen volunteers waiting before the building with fixed and sombre

countenances. La Caille, advancing, begged leave to read, in behalf

of the rest, a paper which he held in his hand. It opened with

protestations of duty and obedience; next came complaints of hard work,

starvation, and broken promises, and a request 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.

Laudonniere refused, but assured them that, as soon as the defences 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

thickened. Their spokesman, La Caille, however, seeing whither the

affair tended, broke with them, and, except Ottigny, Yasseur, and the

brave Swiss Arlac, was the only officer who held to his duty.

A severe illness again seized Laudonniere, and confined him to his bed.

Improving their advantage, the malcontents gained over nearly all the

best soldiers in the fort. The ringleader was one Fourneaux, a man of

good birth, but whom Le Moyne calls an avaricious hypocrite. He drew up

a paper, to which sixty-six names were signed. La Caille boldly opposed

the conspirators, and they resolved to kill him. His room-mate, Le

Moyne, who had also refused to sign, received a hint of the design from

a friend; upon which he warned La Caille, who escaped to the woods. It

was late in the night. Fourneaux, with twenty men armed to the teeth,

knocked fiercely at the commandant's door. Forcing an entrance, they

wounded a gentleman who opposed them, and crowded around the sick man's

bed. Fourneaux, armed with steel cap and cuirass, held his arquebuse

to Laudonniere'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 oaths 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 rowed him to the ship anchored in the

river.

Two other gangs at the same time visited Ottigny and Arlac, whom they

disarmed, and ordered 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. Fourneaux drew up a commission for his meditated

West India cruise, which he required Laudonniere 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 bestirred 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 the King's cannon,

munitions, and stores. Trenchant, 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 set

sail on the eighth of December, taunting those who remained, calling

them greenhorns, and threatening condign punishment if, on their

triumphant return, they should be refused free entrance to the fort.

They were no sooner gone than the unfortunate Laudonniere was gladdened

in his solitude by the approach of his fast friends Ottigny and Arlac,

who conveyed him to the fort and reinstated him. The entire command

was reorganized, and new officers appointed. The colony was wofully

depleted; but the bad blood had been drawn off, and thenceforth all

internal danger was at an end. In finishing the fort, 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 twenty-fifth of March, when an Indian came in with the tidings that

a vessel was hovering off the coast. Laudonniere 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,

Landonniere sent down La Caille, with thirty soldiers concealed at

the bottom of his little vessel. Seeing only two or three on deck, the

pirates allowed her to come alongside; when, to their amazement, they

were boarded and taken before they could snatch their arms. Discomfited,

woebegone, 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 caravel, 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 island. 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 official deceived them, and, on pretence of

negotiating for the sum demanded,--together with "four or six parrots,

and as many monkeys of the sort called sanguins, 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 Fourneaux,

and also the pilot Trenchant, who, eager to return to Fort Caroline,

whence 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 fort. They

chose the latter course, and bore away for the St. John's. A few casks

of Spanish wine yet remained, and nobles and soldiers, fraternizing

in the common peril of a halter, joined in a last carouse. 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 counsel for the

defence; "but if Laudonniere 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 month

of the river, and then putting to sea again; but this was frustrated

by La Caille's sudden attack. A court-martial was called near Fort

Caroline, and all were found guilty. Fourneaux and three others were

sentenced to be hanged.

"Comrades," said one of the condemned, appealing to the soldiers, "will

you stand by and see us butchered?"

"These," retorted Laudonniere, "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 reigned

at Fort Caroline.

CHAPTER VI. 1564, 1565.

FAMINE. WAR. SUCCOR.

While the mutiny was brewing, one La Roche Ferriere had been sent out as

an agent or emissary among the more distant tribes. Sagacious, bold,

and restless, he pushed his way from town to town, and pretended to

have reached the mysterious mountains of Appalache. He sent to the fort

mantles woven with feathers, quivers covered with choice furs, arrows

tipped with gold, wedges of a green stone like beryl or emerald, and

other trophies of his wanderings. A gentleman named Grotaut took up

the quest, and penetrated to the dominions of Hostaqua, who, it was

pretended, could muster three or four thousand warriors, and who

promised, with the aid of a hundred arquebusiers, to conquer all the

kings of the adjacent mountains, and subject them and their gold mines

to the rule of the French. A humbler adventurer was Pierre Gambie, a

robust and daring youth, who had been brought up in the household of

Coligny, and was now a soldier under Laudonniere. The latter gave him

leave to trade with the Indians,--a privilege which he used so well that

he grew rich with his traffic, became prime favorite with the chief

of the island of Edelano, married his daughter, and, in his absence,

reigned in his stead. But, as his sway verged towards despotism, his

subjects took offence, and split his head with a hatchet.

During the winter, Indians from the neighborhood of Cape Canaveral

brought to the fort two Spaniards, wrecked fifteen years before on the

southwestern extremity of the peninsula. They were clothed like the

Indians,--in other words, were not clothed at all,--and their uncut hair

streamed loose down their backs. They brought strange tales of those

among whom they had dwelt. They told of the King of Cabs, on whose

domains they had been wrecked, a chief mighty in stature and in power.

In one of his villages was a pit, six feet deep and as wide as a

hogshead, filled with treasure gathered from Spanish wrecks on adjacent

reefs and keys. The monarch was a priest too, and a magician, with power

over the elements. Each year he withdrew from the public gaze to hold

converse in secret with supernal or infernal powers; and each year he

sacrificed to his gods one of the Spaniards whom the fortune of the sea

had cast upon his shores. The name of the tribe is preserved in that of

the river Caboosa. In close league with him was the mighty Oathcaqua,

dwelling near Cape Canaveral, who gave his daughter, a maiden of

wondrous beauty, in marriage to his great ally. But as the bride with

her bridesmaids was journeying towards Calos, escorted by a chosen band,

they were assailed by a wild and warlike race, inhabitants of an island

called Sarrope, in the midst of a lake, who put the warriors to flight,

bore the maidens captive to their watery fastness, espoused them all,

and, we are assured, "loved them above all measure." [15]

Outina, taught by Arlac the efficacy of the French fire-arms, begged

for ten arquebusiers to aid him on a new raid among the villages of

Potanou,--again alluring his greedy allies by the assurance, that, thus

reinforced, he would conquer for them a free access to the phantom gold

mines of Appalache. Ottigny set forth on this fool's errand with thrice

the force demanded. Three hundred Thirnagoas and thirty Frenchmen took

up their march through the pine barrens. Outina's conjurer was of the

number, and had wellnigh ruined the enterprise. Kneeling on Ottigny's

shield, that he might not touch the earth, with hideous grimaces,

howlings, and contortions, he wrought himself into a prophetic frenzy,

and proclaimed to the astounded warriors that to advance farther would

be destruction. [16] Outina was for instant retreat, but Ottigny's

sarcasms shamed him into a show of courage. Again they moved forward,

and soon encountered Potanou with all his host. [17] The arquebuse did

its work,--panic, slaughter, and a plentiful harvest of scalps. But no

persuasion could induce Outina to follow up his victory. He went home

to dance round his trophies, and the French returned disgusted to Fort

Caroline.

And now, in ample measure, the French began to reap the harvest of their

folly. Conquest, gold, and military occupation had alone been their

aims. Not a rod of ground had been stirred with the spade. Their stores

were consumed, and the expected supplies had not come. The Indians, too,

were hostile. Satouriona hated them as allies of his enemies; and his

tribesmen, robbed and maltreated by the lawless soldiers, exulted in

their miseries. Yet in these, their dark and subtle neighbors, was their

only hope.

May-day came, the third anniversary of the day when Ribaut and his

companions, full of delighted anticipation, had first explored the

flowery borders of the St. John's. The contrast was deplorable; for

within the precinct of Fort Caroline a homesick, squalid band, dejected

and worn, dragged their shrunken limbs about the sun-scorched area, or

lay stretched in listless wretchedness under the shade of the barracks.

Some were digging roots in the forest, or gathering a kind of sorrel

upon the meadows. If they had had any skill in hunting and fishing, the

river and the woods would have supplied their needs; but in this point,

as in others, they were lamentably unfit for the work they had taken in

hand. "Our miserie," says Laudonniere, "was so great that one was found

that gathered up all the fish-bones that he could finde, which he dried

and beate into powder to make bread thereof. The effects of this hideous

famine appeared incontinently among us, for our bones eftsoones beganne

to cleave so neere unto the skinne, that the most part of the souldiers

had their skinnes pierced thorow with them in many partes of their

bodies." Yet, giddy with weakness, they dragged themselves in turn to

the top of St. John's Bluff, straining their eyes across the sea to

descry the anxiously expected sail.

Had Coligny left them to perish? Or had some new tempest of calamity,

let loose upon France, drowned the memory of their exile? In vain the

watchman on the hill surveyed the solitude of waters. A deep dejection

fell upon them,--a dejection that would have sunk to despair could their

eyes have pierced the future.

The Indians had left the neighborhood, but from time to time brought

in meagre supplies of fish, which they sold to the famished soldiers at

exorbitant prices. Lest they should pay the penalty of their extortion,

they would not enter the fort, but lay in their canoes in the river,

beyond gunshot, waiting for their customers to come out to them.

"Oftentimes," says Laudonniere, "our poor soldiers were constrained to

give away the very shirts from their backs to get one fish. If at any

time they shewed unto the savages the excessive price which they tooke,

these villaines would answere them roughly and churlishly: If thou make

so great account of thy marchandise, eat it, and we will eat our fish:

then fell they out a laughing, and mocked us with open throat."

The spring wore away, and no relief appeared. One thought now engrossed

the colonists, that of return to France. Vasseur's ship, the "Breton,"

still remained in the river, and they had also the Spanish brigantine

brought by the mutineers. But these vessels were insufficient, and they

prepared to build a new one. The energy of reviving hope lent new life

to their exhausted frames. Some gathered pitch in the pine forests; some

made charcoal; some cut and sawed timber. The maize began to ripen, and

this brought some relief; but the Indians, exasperated and greedy,

sold it with reluctance, and murdered two half-famished Frenchmen who

gathered a handful in the fields.

The colonists applied to Outina, who owed them two victories. The result

was a churlish message and a niggardly supply of corn, coupled with

an invitation to aid him against an insurgent chief, one Astina, the

plunder of whose villages would yield an ample supply. The offer was

accepted. Ottigny and Vasseur set out, but were grossly deceived, led

against a different enemy, and sent back empty-handed and half-starved.

They returned to the fort, in the words of Laudonniere, "angry and

pricked deepely to the quicke for being so mocked," and, joined by all

their comrades, fiercely demanded to be led against Outina, to seize

him, punish his insolence, and extort from his fears the supplies which

could not be looked for from his gratitude. The commandant was forced

to comply. Those who could bear the weight of their armor put it on,

embarked, to the number of fifty, in two barges, and sailed up the river

under Laudonniere himself. Having reached Outina's landing, they marched

inland, entered his village, surrounded his mud-plastered palace, seized

him amid the yells and howlings of his subjects, and led him prisoner

to their boats. Here, anchored in mid-stream, they demanded a supply of

corn and beans as the price of his ransom.

The alarm spread. Excited warriors, bedaubed with red, came thronging

from all his villages. The forest along the shore was full of them; and

the wife of the chief, followed by all the women of the place, uttered

moans and outcries from the strand. Yet no ransom was offered, since,

reasoning from their own instincts, they never doubted that, after the

price was paid, the captive would be put to death.

Laudonniere waited two days, and then descended the river with his

prisoner. In a rude chamber of Fort Caroline the sentinel stood his

guard, pike in hand, while before him crouched the captive chief, mute,

impassive, and brooding on his woes. His old enemy, Satouriona, keen

as a hound on the scent of prey, tried, by great offers, to bribe

Laudonniere to give Outina into his hands; but the French captain

refused, treated his prisoner kindly, and assured him of immediate

freedom on payment of the ransom.

Meanwhile his captivity was bringing grievous affliction on his

tribesmen; for, despairing of his return, they mustered for the election

of a new chief. Party strife ran high. Some were for a boy, his son, and

some for an ambitious kinsman. Outina chafed in his prison on learning

these dissentions; and, eager to convince his over-hasty subjects that

their chief still lived, he was so profuse of promises that he was again

embarked and carried up the river.

At no great distance from Lake George, a small affluent of the St.

John's gave access by water to a point within six French leagues of

Outina's principal town. The two barges, crowded with soldiers, and

bearing also the captive Outina, rowed up this little stream. Indians

awaited them at the landing, with gifts of bread, beans, and fish, and

piteous prayers for their chief, upon whose liberation they promised an

ample supply of corn. As they were deaf to all other terms, Laudonniere

yielded, released his prisoner, and received in his place two hostages,

who were fast bound in the boats. Ottigny and Arlac, with a strong

detachment of arquebusiers, went to receive the promised supplies, for

which, from the first, full payment in merchandise had been offered. On

their arrival at the village, they filed into the great central lodge,

within whose dusky precincts were gathered the magnates of the tribe.

Council-chamber, forum, banquet-hall, and dancing-hall all in one, the

spacious structure could hold half the population. Here the French made

their abode. With armor buckled, and arquebuse matches lighted, they

watched with anxious eyes the strange, dim scene, half revealed by the

daylight that streamed down through the hole at the apex of the roof.

Tall, dark forms stalked to and fro, with quivers at their backs, and

bows and arrows in their hands, while groups, crouched in the shadow

beyond, eyed the hated guests with inscrutable visages, and malignant,

sidelong eyes. Corn came in slowly, but warriors mustered fast. The

village without was full of them. The French officers grew anxious, and

urged the chiefs to greater alacrity in collecting the promised ransom.

The answer boded no good: "Our women are afraid when they see the

matches of your guns burning. Put them out, and they will bring the corn

faster."

Outina was nowhere to be seen. At length they learned that he was in

one of the small huts adjacent. Several of the officers went to him,

complaining of the slow payment of his ransom. The kindness of his

captors at Fort Caroline seemed to have won his heart. He replied, that

such was the rage of his subjects that he could no longer control them;

that the French were in danger; and that he had seen arrows stuck in

the ground by the side of the path, in token that war was declared. The

peril was thickening hourly, and Ottigny resolved to regain the boats

while there was yet time.

On the twenty-seventh of July, at nine in the morning, he set his men in

order. Each shouldering a sack of corn, they marched through the rows

of huts that surrounded the great lodge, and out betwixt the overlapping

extremities of the palisade that encircled the town. Before them

stretched a wide avenue, three or four hundred paces long, flanked by

a natural growth of trees,--one of those curious monuments of native

industry to which allusion has already been made. Here Ottigny halted

and formed his line of march. Arlac, with eight matchlock men, was sent

in advance, and flanking parties were thrown into the woods on either

side. Ottigny told his soldiers that, if the Indians meant to attack

them, they were probably in ambush at the other end of the avenue. He

was right. As Arlac's party reached the spot, the whole pack gave

tongue at once. The war-whoop rose, and a tempest of stone-headed arrows

clattered against the breast-plates of the French, or, scorching like

fire, tore through their unprotected limbs. They stood firm, and sent

back their shot so steadily that several of the assailants were laid

dead, and the rest, two or three hundred in number, gave way as Ottigny

came up with his men.

They moved on for a quarter of a mile through a country, as it seems,

comparatively open, when again the war-cry pealed in front, and three

hundred savages bounded to the assault. Their whoops were echoed from

the rear. It was the party whom Arlac had just repulsed, and who,

leaping and showering their arrows, were rushing on again with a

ferocity restrained only by their lack of courage. There was no panic

among the French. The men threw down their bags of corn, and took

to their weapons. They blew their matches, and, under two excellent

officers, stood well to their work. The Indians, on their part, showed

good discipline after their fashion, and were perfectly under the

control of their chiefs. With cries that imitated the yell of owls, the

scream of cougars, and the howl of wolves, they ran up in successive

bands, let fly their arrows, and instantly fell back, giving place to

others. At the sight of the leveled arquebuse, they dropped flat on the

ground. Whenever the French charged upon them, sword in hand, they fled

through the woods like foxes; and whenever the march was resumed, the

arrows were showering again upon the flanks and rear of the retiring

band. As they fell, the soldiers picked them up and broke them. Thus,

beset with swarming savages, the handful of Frenchmen pushed slowly

onward, fighting as they went.

The Indians gradually drew off, and the forest was silent again. Two of

the French had been killed and twenty-two wounded, several so severely

that they were supported to the boats with the utmost difficulty. Of the

corn, two bags only had been brought off.

Famine and desperation now reigned at Fort Caroline. The Indians had

killed two of the carpenters; hence long delay in the finishing of

the new ship. They would not wait, but resolved to put to sea in the

"Breton" and the brigantine. The problem was to find food for the

voyage; for now, in their extremity, they roasted and ate snakes, a

delicacy in which the neighborhood abounded.

On the third of August, Laudonniere, perturbed and oppressed, was

walking on the hill, when, looking seaward, he saw a sight that sent a

thrill through his exhausted frame. A great ship was standing towards

the river's mouth. Then another came in sight, and another, and another.

He despatched a messenger with the tidings to the fort below. The

languid forms of his sick and despairing men rose and danced for joy,

and voices shrill with weakness joined in wild laughter and acclamation,

insomuch, he says, "that one would have thought them to bee out of their

wittes."

A doubt soon mingled with their joy. Who were the strangers? Were they

the friends so long hoped for in vain? or were they Spaniards, their

dreaded enemies? They were neither. The foremost ship was a stately one,

of seven hundred tons, a great burden at that day. She was named the

"Jesus;" and with her were three smaller vessels, the "Solomon," the

"Tiger," and the "Swallow." Their commander was "a right worshipful

and valiant knight,"--for so the record styles him,--a pious man and a

prudent, to judge him by the orders he gave his crew when, ten months

before, he sailed out of Plymouth: "Serve God daily, love one another,

preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keepe good companie."

Nor were the crew unworthy the graces of their chief; for the devout

chronicler of the voyage ascribes their deliverance from the perils of

the sea to "the Almightie God, who never suffereth his Elect to perish."

Who then were they, this chosen band, serenely conscious of a special

Providential care? They were the pioneers of that detested traffic

destined to inoculate with its infection nations yet unborn, the parent

of discord and death, filling half a continent with the tramp of armies

and the clash of fratricidal swords. Their chief was Sir John Hawkins,

father of the English slave-trade.

He had been to the coast of Guinea, where he bought and kidnapped

a cargo of slaves. These he had sold to the jealous Spaniards of

Hispaniola, forcing them, with sword, matchlock, and culverin, to grant

him free trade, and then to sign testimonials that he had borne himself

as became a peaceful merchant. Prospering greatly by this summary

commerce, but distressed by the want of water, he had put into the River

of May to obtain a supply.

Among the rugged heroes of the British marine, Sir John stood in the

front rank, and along with Drake, his relative, is extolled as "a man

borne for the honour of the English name.... Neither did the West of

England yeeld such an Indian Neptunian paire as were these two Ocean

peeres, Hawkins and Drake." So writes the old chronicler, Purchas, and

all England was of his thinking. A hardy and skilful seaman, a bold

fighter, a loyal friend and a stern enemy, overbearing towards equals,

but kind, in his bluff way, to those beneath him, rude in speech,

somewhat crafty withal and avaricious, he buffeted his way to riches

and fame, and died at last full of years and honor. As for the abject

humanity stowed between the reeking decks of the ship "Jesus," they were

merely in his eyes so many black cattle tethered for the market. [18]

Hawkins came up the river in a pinnace, and landed at Fort Caroline,

accompanied, says Laudonniere, "with gentlemen honorably apparelled,

yet unarmed." Between the Huguenots and the English Puritans there was

a double tie of sympathy. Both hated priests, and both hated Spaniards.

Wakening from their apathetic misery, the starveling garrison hailed

him as a deliverer. Yet Hawkins secretly rejoiced when he learned their

purpose to abandon Florida; for although, not to tempt his cupidity,

they hid from him the secret of their Appalachian gold mine, he coveted

for his royal mistress the possession of this rich domain. He shook his

head, however, when he saw the vessels in which they proposed to embark,

and offered them all a free passage to France in his own ships. This,

from obvious motives of honor and prudence, Laudonniere declined, upon

which Hawkins offered to lend or sell to him one of his smaller vessels.

Laudonniere hesitated, and hereupon arose a great clamor. A mob of

soldiers and artisans beset his chamber, threatening loudly to desert

him, and take passage with Hawkins, unless the offer were accepted. The

commandant accordingly resolved to buy the vessel. The generous slaver,

whose reputed avarice nowhere appears in the transaction, desired him to

set his own price; and, in place of money, took the cannon of the fort,

with other articles now useless to their late owners. He sent them, too,

a gift of wine and biscuit, and supplied them with provisions for the

voyage, receiving in payment Laudonniere's note; "for which," adds the

latter, "untill this present I am indebted to him." With a friendly

leave taking, he returned to his ships and stood out to sea, leaving

golden opinions among the grateful inmates of Fort Caroline.

Before the English top-sails had sunk beneath the horizon, the colonists

bestirred themselves to depart. In a few days their preparations were

made. They waited only for a fair wind. It was long in coming, and

meanwhile their troubled fortunes assumed a new phase.

On the twenty eighth of August, the two captains Vasseur and Verdier

came in with tidings of an approaching squadron. Again the fort was

wild with excitement. Friends or foes, French or Spaniards, succor

or death,--betwixt these were their hopes and fears divided. On the

following morning, they saw seven barges rowing up the river, bristling

with weapons, and crowded with men in armor. The sentries on the bluff

challenged, and received no answer. One of them fired at the advancing

boats, and still there was no response. Laudonniere was almost

defenceless. He had given his heavier cannon to Hawkins, and only two

field-pieces were left. They were levelled at the foremost boats, and

the word to fire was about to be given, when a voice from among the

strangers called out that they were French, commanded by Jean Ribaut.

At the eleventh hour, the long looked for succors were come. Ribaut had

been commissioned to sail with seven ships for Florida. A disorderly

concourse of disbanded soldiers, mixed with artisans and their families,

and young nobles weary of a two years' peace, were mustered at the port

of Dieppe, and embarked, to the number of three hundred men, bearing

with them all things thought necessary to a prosperous colony.

No longer in dread of the Spaniards, the colonists saluted the

new-comers with the cannon by which a moment before they had hoped to

blow them out of the water. Laudonniere issued from his stronghold to

welcome them, and regaled them with what cheer he could. Ribaut was

present, conspicuous by his long beard, an astonishment to the Indians;

and here, too, were officers, old friends of Laudonniere. Why, then,

had they approached in the attitude of enemies? The mystery was soon

explained; for they expressed to the commandant their pleasure at

finding that the charges made against him had proved false. He begged

to know more; on which Ribaut, taking him aside, told him that the

returning ships had brought home letters filled with accusations

of arrogance, tyranny, cruelty, and a purpose of establishing an

independent command,--accusations which he now saw to be unfounded, but

which had been the occasion of his unusual and startling precaution.

He gave him, too, a letter from Admiral Coligny. In brief but courteous

terms, it required him to resign his command, and requested his return

to France to clear his name from the imputations cast upon it. Ribaut

warmly urged him to remain; but Laudonniere declined his friendly

proposals.

Worn in body and mind, mortified and wounded, he soon fell ill again. A

peasant woman attended him, who was brought over, he says, to nurse the

sick and take charge of the poultry, and of whom Le Moyne also speaks

as a servant, but who had been made the occasion of additional charges

against him, most offensive to the austere Admiral.

Stores were landed, tents were pitched, women and children were sent on

shore, feathered Indians mingled in the throng, and the borders of the

River of May swarmed with busy life. "But, lo, how oftentimes misfortune

doth search and pursue us, even then when we thinke to be at rest!"

exclaims the unhappy Laudonniere. Amidst the light and cheer of

renovated hope, a cloud of blackest omen was gathering in the east.

At half-past eleven on the night of Tuesday, the fourth of September,

the crew of Ribaut's flag-ship, anchored on the still sea outside the

bar, saw a huge hulk, grim with the throats of cannon, drifting towards

them through the gloom; and from its stern rolled on the sluggish air

the portentous banner of Spain.

CHAPTER VII. 1565.

MENENDEZ.

The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of

Spain,--sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and

narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her

people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over

a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate.

Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong

nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a

scourge as dire as ever fell on man.

Day was breaking on the world. Light, hope, and freedom pierced with

vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the

prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay

and death. Kindled with new life, the nations gave birth to a progeny of

heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened

Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,--a monastic cell, an

inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of

the Church, against whose adamantine wall the waves of innovation beat

in vain. [19] In every country of Europe the party of freedom and

reform was the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was

the Spanish party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help. Above all,

it was so in France; and, while within her bounds there was for a time

some semblance of peace, the national and religious rage burst forth

on a wilder theatre. Thither it is for us to follow it, where, on the

shores of Florida, the Spaniard and the Frenchman, the bigot and the

Huguenot, met in the grapple of death.

In a corridor of his palace, Philip the Second was met by a man who had

long stood waiting his approach, and who with proud reverence placed a

petition in the hand of the pale and sombre King.

The petitioner was Pedro Menendez de Aviles, one of the ablest and most

distinguished officers of the Spanish marine. He was born of an ancient

Asturian family. His boyhood had been wayward, ungovernable, and fierce.

He ran off at eight years of age, and when, after a search of six

months, he was found and brought back, he ran off again. This time he

was more successful, escaping on board a fleet bound against the

Barbary corsairs, where his precocious appetite for blood and blows had

reasonable contentment. A few years later, he found means to build a

small vessel, in which he cruised against the corsairs and the French,

and, though still hardly more than a boy, displayed a singular address

and daring. The wonders of the New World now seized his imagination.

He made a voyage thither, and the ships under his charge came back

freighted with wealth. The war with France was then at its height. As

captain-general of the fleet, he was sent with troops to Flanders; and

to their prompt arrival was due, it is said, the victory of St. Quentin.

Two years later, he commanded the luckless armada which bore back Philip

to his native shore. On the way, the King narrowly escaped drowning in

a storm off the port of Laredo. This mischance, or his own violence and

insubordination, wrought to the prejudice of Menendez. He complained

that his services were ill repaid. Philip lent him a favoring ear, and

despatched him to the Indies as general of the fleet and army. Here he

found means to amass vast riches; and, in 1561, on his return to Spain,

charges were brought against him of a nature which his too friendly

biographer does not explain. The Council of the Indies arrested him. He

was imprisoned and sentenced to a heavy fine; but, gaining his release,

hastened to court to throw himself on the royal clemency. His petition

was most graciously received. Philip restored his command, but remitted

only half his fine, a strong presumption of his guilt.

Menendez kissed the royal hand; he had another petition in reserve. His

son had been wrecked near the Bermudas, and he would fain go thither

to find tidings of his fate. The pious King bade him trust in God, and

promised that he should be despatched without delay to the Bermudas and

to Florida, with a commission to make an exact survey of the neighboring

seas for the profit of future voyagers; but Menendez was not content

with such an errand. He knew, he said, nothing of greater moment to his

Majesty than the conquest and settlement of Florida. The climate was

healthful, the soil fertile; and, worldly advantages aside, it was

peopled by a race sunk in the thickest shades of infidelity. "Such

grief," he pursued, "seizes me, when I behold this multitude of wretched

Indians, that I should choose the conquest and settling of Florida above

all commands, offices, and dignities which your Majesty might bestow."

Those who take this for hypocrisy do not know the Spaniard of the

sixteenth century.

The King was edified by his zeal. An enterprise of such spiritual and

temporal promise was not to be slighted, and Menendez was empowered

to conquer and convert Florida at his own cost. The conquest was to be

effected within three years. Menendez was to take with him five hundred

men, and supply them with five hundred slaves, besides horses, cattle,

sheep, and hogs. Villages were to be built, with forts to defend them,

and sixteen ecclesiastics, of whom four should be Jesuits, were to

form the nucleus of a Floridan church. The King, on his part, granted

Menendez free trade with Hispaniola, Porto Rico, Cuba, and Spain, the

office of Adelantado of Florida for life, with the right of naming his

successor, and large emoluments to be drawn from the expected conquest.

The compact struck, Menendez hastened to his native Asturias to raise

money among his relatives. Scarcely was he gone, when tidings reached

Madrid that Florida was already occupied by a colony of French

Protestants, and that a reinforcement, under Ribaut, was on the point

of sailing thither. A French historian of high authority declares that

these advices came from the Catholic party at the French court, in whom

every instinct of patriotism was lost in their hatred of Coligny and the

Huguenots. Of this there can be little doubt, though information also

came about this time from the buccaneer Frenchmen captured in the West

Indies.

Foreigners had invaded the territory of Spain. The trespassers, too,

were heretics, foes of God, and liegemen of the Devil. Their doom was

fixed. But how would France endure an assault, in time of peace, on

subjects who had gone forth on an enterprise sanctioned by the Crown,

and undertaken in its name and under its commission?

The throne of France, in which the corruption of the nation seemed

gathered to a head, was trembling between the two parties of the

Catholics and the Huguenots, whose chiefs aimed at royalty. Flattering

both, caressing both, playing one against the other, and betraying both,

Catherine de Medicis, by a thousand crafty arts and expedients of the

moment, sought to retain the crown on the head of her weak and vicious

son. Of late her crooked policy had led her towards the Catholic party,

in other words the party of Spain; and she had already given ear to the

savage Duke of Alva, urging her to the course which, seven years later,

led to the carnage of St. Bartholomew. In short, the Spanish policy was

in the ascendant, and no thought of the national interest or honor

could restrain that basest of courts from abandoning by hundreds to

the national enemy those whom it was itself meditating to immolate by

thousands. It might protest for form's sake, or to quiet public clamor;

but Philip of Spain well knew that it would end in patient submission.

Menendez was summoned back in haste to the Spanish court. His force must

be strengthened. Three hundred and ninety-four men were added at the

royal charge, and a corresponding number of transport and supply ships.

It was a holy war, a crusade, and as such was preached by priest and

monk along the western coasts of Spain. All the Biscayan ports flamed

with zeal, and adventurers crowded to enroll themselves; since to

plunder heretics is good for the soul as well as the purse, and broil

and massacre have double attraction when promoted into a means of

salvation. It was a fervor, deep and hot, but not of celestial kindling;

nor yet that buoyant and inspiring zeal which, when the Middle Age was

in its youth and prime, glowed in the souls of Tancred, Godfrey, and St.

Louis, and which, when its day was long since past, could still find

its home in the great heart of Columbus. A darker spirit urged the new

crusade,--born not of hope, but of fear, slavish in its nature, the

creature and the tool of despotism; for the typical Spaniard of the

sixteenth century was not in strictness a fanatic, he was bigotry

incarnate.

Heresy was a plague-spot, an ulcer to be eradicated with fire and the

knife, and this foul abomination was infecting the shores which the

Vicegerent of Christ had given to the King of Spain, and which the Most

Catholic King had given to the Adelantado. Thus would countless heathen

tribes be doomed to an eternity of flame, and the Prince of Darkness

hold his ancient sway unbroken; and for the Adelantado himself, the vast

outlays, the vast debts of his bold Floridan venture would be all in

vain, and his fortunes be wrecked past redemption through these tools

of Satan. As a Catholic, as a Spaniard, and as an adventurer, his course

was clear.

The work assigned him was prodigious. He was invested with power almost

absolute, not merely over the peninsula which now retains the name of

Florida, but over all North America, from Labrador to Mexico; for

this was the Florida of the old Spanish geographers, and the Florida

designated in the commission of Menendez. It was a continent which he

was to conquer and occupy out of his own purse. The impoverished King

contracted with his daring and ambitious subject to win and hold for

him the territory of the future United States and British Provinces.

His plan, as afterwards exposed at length in his letters to Philip

the Second, was, first, to plant a garrison at Port Royal, and next

to fortify strongly on Chesapeake Bay, called by him St. Mary's.

He believed that adjoining this bay was an arm of the sea, running

northward and eastward, and communicating with the Gulf of St. Lawrence,

thus making New England, with adjacent districts, an island. His

proposed fort on the Chesapeake, securing access by this imaginary

passage, to the seas of Newfoundland, would enable the Spaniards to

command the fisheries, on which both the French and the English had long

encroached, to the great prejudice of Spanish rights. Doubtless, too,

these inland waters gave access to the South Sea, and their occupation

was necessary to prevent the French from penetrating thither; for that

ambitious people, since the time of Cartier, had never abandoned their

schemes of seizing this portion of the dominions of the King of Spain.

Five hundred soldiers and one hundred sailors must, he urges, take

possession, without delay, of Port Royal and the Chesapeake. [20]

Preparation for his enterprise was pushed with furious energy. His whole

force, when the several squadrons were united, amounted to two thousand

six hundred and forty-six persons, in thirty-four vessels, one of

which, the San Pelayo, bearing Menendez himself, was of nine hundred

and ninety-six tons burden, and is described as one of the finest ships

afloat. [21] There were twelve Franciscans and eight Jesuits, besides

other ecclesiastics; and many knights of Galicia, Biscay, and the

Asturias took part in the expedition. With a slight exception, the

whole was at the Adelantado's charge. Within the first fourteen months,

according to his admirer, Barcia, the adventure cost him a million

ducats. [22]

Before the close of the year, Sancho do Arciniega was commissioned to

join Menendez with an additional force of fifteen hundred men.

Red-hot with a determined purpose, the Adelantado would brook no delay.

To him, says the chronicler, every day seemed a year. He was eager to

anticipate Ribaut, of whose designs and whose force he seems to have

been informed to the minutest particular, but whom he hoped to thwart

and ruin by gaining Fort Caroline before him. With eleven ships,

therefore, he sailed from Cadiz, on the twenty-ninth of June, 1565,

leaving the smaller vessels of his fleet to follow with what speed they

might. He touched first at the Canaries, and on the eighth of July left

them, steering for Dominica. A minute account of the voyage has come

down to us, written by Mendoza, chaplain of the expedition,--a somewhat

dull and illiterate person, who busily jots down the incidents of

each passing day, and is constantly betraying, with a certain awkward

simplicity, how the cares of this world and of the next jostle each

other in his thoughts.

On Friday, the twentieth of July, a storm fell upon them with appalling

fury. The pilots lost their wits, and the sailors gave themselves up to

their terrors. Throughout the night, they beset Mendoza for confession

and absolution, a boon not easily granted, for the seas swept the

crowded decks with cataracts of foam, and the shriekings of the gale

in the rigging overpowered the exhortations of the half-drowned priest.

Cannon, cables, spars, water-casks, were thrown overboard, and the

chests of the sailors would have followed, had not the latter, in spite

of their fright, raised such a howl of remonstrance that the order was

revoked. At length day dawned, Plunging, reeling, half under water,

quivering with the shock of the seas, whose mountain ridges rolled down

upon her before the gale, the ship lay in deadly peril from Friday till

Monday noon. Then the storm abated; the sun broke out; and again she

held her course.

They reached Dominica on Sunday, the fifth of August. The chaplain

tells us how he went on shore to refresh himself; how, while his Italian

servant washed his linen at a brook, he strolled along the beach and

picked up shells; and how he was scared, first, by a prodigious turtle,

and next by a vision of the cannibal natives, which caused his prompt

retreat to the boats.

On the tenth, they anchored in the harbor of Porto Rico, where they

found two ships of their squadron, from which they had parted in the

storm. One of them was the "San Pelayo," with Menendez on board. Mendoza

informs us, that in the evening the officers came on board the ship

to which he was attached, when he, the chaplain, regaled them with

sweetmeats, and that Menendez invited him not only to supper that night,

but to dinner the next day, "for the which I thanked him, as reason

was," says the gratified churchman.

Here thirty men deserted, and three priests also ran off, of which

Mendoza bitterly complains, as increasing his own work. The motives of

the clerical truants may perhaps be inferred from a worldly temptation

to which the chaplain himself was subjected. "I was offered the service

of a chapel where I should have got a peso for every mass I said, the

whole year round; but I did not accept it, for fear that what I hear

said of the other three would be said of me. Besides, it is not a

place where one can hope for any great advancement, and I wished to try

whether, in refusing a benefice for the love of the Lord, He will not

repay me with some other stroke of fortune before the end of the voyage;

for it is my aim to serve God and His blessed Mother."

The original design had been to rendezvous at Havana, but with

the Adelantado the advantages of despatch outweighed every other

consideration. He resolved to push directly for Florida. Five of his

scattered ships had by this time rejoined company, comprising, exclusive

of officers, a force of about five hundred soldiers, two hundred

sailors, and one hundred colonists. Bearing northward, he advanced by

an unknown and dangerous course along the coast of Hayti and through the

intricate passes of the Bahamas. On the night of the twenty-sixth, the

"San Pelayo" struck three times on the shoals; "but," says the chaplain,

"inasmuch as our enterprise was undertaken for the sake of Christ and

His blessed Mother, two heavy seas struck her abaft, and set her afloat

again."

At length the ships lay becalmed in the Bahama Channel, slumbering on

the glassy sea, torpid with the heats of a West Indian August. Menendez

called a council of the commanders. There was doubt and indecision.

Perhaps Ribaut had already reached the French fort, and then to attack

the united force would be an act of desperation. Far better to await

their lagging comrades. But the Adelantado was of another mind; and,

even had his enemy arrived, ho was resolved that he should have no time

to fortify himself.

"It is God's will," he said, "that our victory should be due, not to our

numbers, but to His all-powerful aid. Therefore has He stricken us with

tempests, and scattered our ships." And he gave his voice for instant

advance.

There was much dispute; even the chaplain remonstrated; but nothing

could bend the iron will of Menendez. Nor was a sign of celestial

approval wanting. At nine in the evening, a great meteor burst forth in

mid-heaven, and, blazing like the sun, rolled westward towards the coast

of Florida. The fainting spirits of the crusaders were revived. Diligent

preparation was begun. Prayers and masses were said; and, that the

temporal arm might not fail, the men were daily practised on deck in

shooting at marks, in order, says the chronicle, that the recruits might

learn not to be afraid of their guns.

The dead calm continued. "We were all very tired," says the chaplain,

"and I above all, with praying to God for a fair wind. To-day, at about

two in the afternoon, He took pity on us, and sent us a breeze." Before

night they saw land,--the faint line of forest, traced along the watery

horizon, that marked the coast of Florida. But where, in all this vast

monotony, was the lurking-place of the French? Menendez anchored, and

sent a captain with twenty men ashore, who presently found a band

of Indians, and gained from them the needed information. He stood

northward, till, on the afternoon of Tuesday, the fourth of September,

he descried four ships anchored near the mouth of a river. It was the

river St. John's, and the ships were four of Ribaut's squadron. The prey

was in sight. The Spaniards prepared for battle, and bore down upon the

Lutherans; for, with them, all Protestants alike were branded with the

name of the arch-heretic. Slowly, before the faint breeze, the ships

glided on their way; but while, excited and impatient, the fierce crews

watched the decreasing space, and when they were still three leagues

from their prize, the air ceased to stir, the sails flapped against the

mast, a black cloud with thunder rose above the coast, and the warm rain

of the South descended on the breathless sea. It was dark before the

wind stirred again and the ships resumed their course. At half-past

eleven they reached the French. The "San Pelayo" slowly moved to

windward of Ribaut's flag-ship, the "Trinity," and anchored very near

her. The other ships took similar stations. While these preparations

were making, a work of two hours, the men labored in silence, and the

French, thronging their gangways, looked on in equal silence. "Never,

since I came into the world," writes the chaplain, "did I know such a

stillness."

It was broken at length by a trumpet from the deck of the "San Pelayo."

A French trumpet answered. Then Menendez, "with much courtesy," says his

Spanish eulogist, inquired, "Gentlemen, whence does this fleet come?"

"From France," was the reply.

"What are you doing here?" pursued the Adelantado.

"Bringing soldiers and supplies for a fort which the King of France has

in this country, and for many others which he soon will have."

"Are you Catholics or Lutherans?"

Many voices cried out together, "Lutherans, of the new religion." Then,

in their turn, they demanded who Menendez was, and whence he came.

He answered: "I am Pedro Menendez, General of the fleet of the King of

Spain, Don Philip the Second, who have come to this country to hang

and behead all Lutherans whom I shall find by land or sea, according to

instructions from my King, so precise that I have power to pardon none;

and these commands I shall fulfil, as you will see. At daybreak I shall

board your ships, and if I find there any Catholic, he shall be well

treated; but every heretic shall die."

The French with one voice raised a cry of wrath and defiance.

"If you are a brave man, don't wait till day. Come on now, and see what

you will get!"

And they assailed the Adelantado with a shower of scoffs and insults.

Menendez broke into a rage, and gave the order to board. The men slipped

the cables, and the sullen black hulk of the "San Pelayo" drifted down

upon the "Trinity." The French did not make good their defiance. Indeed,

they were incapable of resistance, Ribaut with his soldiers being ashore

at Fort Caroline. They cut their cables, left their anchors, made sail,

and fled. The Spaniards fired, the French replied. The other Spanish

ships had imitated the movement of the "San Pelayo;" "but," writes the

chaplain, Mendoza, "these devils are such adroit sailors, and maneuvred

so well, that we did not catch one of them." Pursuers and pursued ran

out to sea, firing useless volleys at each other.

In the morning Menendez gave over the chase, turned, and, with the

"San Pelayo" alone, ran back for the St. John's. But here a welcome was

prepared for him. He saw bands of armed men drawn up on the beach, and

the smaller vessels of Ribaut's squadron, which had crossed the bar

several days before, anchored behind it to oppose his landing. He would

not venture an attack, but, steering southward, sailed along the coast

till he came to an inlet which he named San Augustine, the same which

Laudonniere had named the River of Dolphins.

Here he found three of his ships already debarking their troops, guns,

and stores. Two officers, Patiflo and Vicente, had taken possession

of the dwelling of the Indian chief Seloy, a huge barn-like structure,

strongly framed of entire trunks of trees, and thatched with palmetto

leaves. Around it they were throwing up entrenchments of fascines and

sand, and gangs of negroes were toiling at the work. Such was the birth

of St. Augustine, the oldest town of the United States.

On the eighth, Menendez took formal possession of his domain. Cannon

were fired, trumpets sounded, and banners displayed, as he landed in

state at the head of his officers and nobles. Mendoza, crucifix in hand,

came to meet him, chanting Te Deum laudamus, while the Adelantado

and all his company, kneeling, kissed the crucifix, and the assembled

Indians gazed in silent wonder.

Meanwhile the tenants of Fort Caroline were not idle. Two or three

soldiers, strolling along the beach in the afternoon, had first seen the

Spanish ships, and hastily summoned Ribaut. He came down to the mouth

of the river, followed by an anxious and excited crowd; but, as they

strained their eyes through the darkness, they could see nothing but the

flashes of the distant guns. At length the returning light showed,

far out at sea, the Adelantado in hot chase of their flying comrades.

Pursuers and pursued were soon out of sight. The drums beat to arms.

After many hours of suspense, the "San Pelayo" reappeared, hovering

about the mouth of the river, then bearing away towards the south. More

anxious hours ensued, when three other sail came in sight, and they

recognized three of their own returning ships. Communication was opened,

a boat's crew landed, and they learned from Cosette, one of the French

captains, that, confiding in the speed of his ship, he had followed the

Spaniards to St. Augustine, reconnoitred their position, and seen them

land their negroes and intrench themselves.

Laudonniere lay sick in bed in his chamber at Fort Caroline when Ribaut

entered, and with him La Grange, Sainte Marie, Ottigny, Yonville, and

other officers. At the bedside of the displaced commandant, they held

their council of war. Three plans were proposed: first, to remain

where they were and fortify themselves; next, to push overland for St.

Augustine and attack the invaders in their intrenchments; and, finally,

to embark and assail them by sea. The first plan would leave their

ships a prey to the Spaniards; and so, too, in all likelihood, would

the second, besides the uncertainties of an overland march through

an unknown wilderness. By sea, the distance was short and the route

explored. By a sudden blow they could capture or destroy the Spanish

ships, and master the troops on shore before reinforcements could

arrive, and before they had time to complete their defences.

Such were the views of Ribaut, with which, not unnaturally, Laudonniere

finds fault, and Le Moyne echoes the censures of his chief. And yet

the plan seems as well conceived as it was bold, lacking nothing but

success. The Spaniards, stricken with terror, owed their safety to the

elements, or, as they say, to the special interposition of the Holy

Virgin. Menendez was a leader fit to stand with Cortes and Pizarro;

but he was matched with a man as cool, skilful, prompt, and daring as

himself. The traces that have come down to us indicate in Ribaut one far

above the common stamp,--"a distinguished man, of many high qualities,"

as even the fault-finding Le Moyne calls him; devout after the

best spirit of the Reform; and with a human heart under his steel

breastplate.

La Grange and other officers took part with Landonniere, and opposed the

plan of an attack by sea; but Ribaut's conviction was unshaken, and the

order was given. All his own soldiers fit for duty embarked in haste,

and with them went La Caille, Arlac, and, as it seems, Ottigny, with the

best of Laudonniere's men. Even Le Moyne, though wounded in the fight

with Outina's warriors, went on board to bear his part in the fray, and

would have sailed with the rest had not Ottigny, seeing his disabled

condition, ordered him back to the fort.

On the tenth, the ships, crowded with troops, set sail. Ribaut was gone,

and with him the bone and sinew of the colony. The miserable remnant

watched his receding sails with dreary foreboding,--a fore-boding which

seemed but too just, when, on the next day, a storm, more violent than

the Indians had ever known, howled through the forest and lashed the

ocean into fury. Most forlorn was the plight of these exiles, left, it

might be, the prey of a band of ferocious bigots more terrible than the

fiercest hordes of the wilderness; and when night closed on the stormy

river and the gloomy waste of pines, what dreams of terror may not

have haunted the helpless women who crouched under the hovels of Fort

Caroline!

The fort was in a ruinous state, with the palisade on the water side

broken down, and three breaches in the rampart. In the driving rain,

urged by the sick Laudonniere, the men, bedrenched and disheartened,

labored as they could to strengthen their defences. Their muster-roll

shows but a beggarly array. "Now," says Laudonniere, "let them which

have bene bold to say that I had men ynough left me, so that I had

meanes to defend my selfe, give care a little now vnto mee, and if they

have eyes in their heads, let them see what men I had." Of Ribaut's

followers left at the fort, only nine or ten had weapons, while only two

or three knew how to use them. Four of them were boys, who kept Ribaut's

dogs, and another was his cook. Besides these, he had left a brewer, an

old crossbow-maker, two shoemakers, a player on the spinet, four valets,

a carpenter of threescore,--Challeux, no doubt, who has left us the

story of his woes,--with a crowd of women, children, and eighty-six

camp-followers. To these were added the remnant of Laudonniere's men,

of whom seventeen could bear arms, the rest being sick or disabled by

wounds received in the fight with Outina.

Laudonniere divided his force, such as it was, into two watches,

over which he placed two officers, Saint Cler and La Vigne, gave them

lanterns for going the rounds, and an hour-glass for setting the time;

while he himself, giddy with weakness and fever, was every night at the

guard-room.

It was the night of the nineteenth of September, the season of tempests;

floods of rain drenched the sentries on the rampart, and, as day dawned

on the dripping barracks and deluged parade, the storm increased in

violence. What enemy could venture out on such a night? La Vigne, who

had the watch, took pity on the sentries and on himself, dismissed them,

and went to his quarters. He little knew what human energies, urged by

ambition, avarice, bigotry, and desperation, will dare and do.

To return to the Spaniards at St. Augustine. On the morning of the

eleventh, the crew of one of their smaller vessels, lying outside the

bar, with Menendez himself on board, saw through the twilight of early

dawn two of Ribaut's ships close upon them. Not a breath of air was

stirring. There was no escape, and the Spaniards fell on their knees in

supplication to Our Lady of Utrera, explaining to her that the heretics

were upon them, and begging her to send them a little wind. "Forthwith,"

says Mendoza, "one would have said that Our Lady herself came down upon

the vessel." A wind sprang up, and the Spaniards found refuge behind the

bar. The returning day showed to their astonished eyes all the ships

of Ribaut, their decks black with men, hovering off the entrance of the

port; but Heaven had them in its charge, and again they experienced its

protecting care. The breeze sent by Our Lady of Utrera rose to a gale,

then to a furious tempest; and the grateful Adelantado saw through rack

and mist the ships of his enemy tossed wildly among the raging waters

as they struggled to gain an offing. With exultation in his heart, the

skilful seaman read their danger, and saw them in his mind's eye dashed

to utter wreck among the sand-bars and breakers of the lee shore.

A bold thought seized him. He would march overland with five hundred

men, and attack Fort Caroline while its defenders were absent. First he

ordered a mass, and then he called a council. Doubtless it was in that

great Indian lodge of Seloy, where he had made his headquarters;

and here, in this dim and smoky abode, nobles, officers, and priests

gathered at his summons. There were fears and doubts and murmurings, but

Menendez was desperate; not with the mad desperation that strikes wildly

and at random, but the still white heat that melts and burns and seethes

with a steady, unquenchable fierceness. "Comrades," he said, "the time

has come to show our courage and our zeal. This is God's war, and we

must not flinch. It is a war with Lutherans, and we must wage it with

blood and fire."

But his hearers gave no response. They had not a million of ducats

at stake, and were not ready for a cast so desperate. A clamor of

remonstrance rose from the circle. Many voices, that of Mendoza among

the rest, urged waiting till their main forces should arrive. The

excitement spread to the men without, and the swarthy, black-bearded

crowd broke into tumults mounting almost to mutiny, while an officer was

heard to say that he would not go on such a hare-brained errand to

be butchered like a beast. But nothing could move the Adelantado.

His appeals or his threats did their work at last; the confusion was

quelled, and preparation was made for the march.

On the morning of the seventeenth, five hundred arquebusiers and pikemen

were drawn up before the camp. To each was given six pounds of biscuit

and a canteen filled with wine. Two Indians and a renegade Frenchman,

called Francois Jean, were to guide them, and twenty Biscayan axemen

moved to the front to clear the way. Through floods of driving rain, a

hoarse voice shouted the word of command, and the sullen march began.

With dismal misgiving, Mendoza watched the last files as they vanished

in the tempestuous forest. Two days of suspense ensued, when a messenger

came back with a letter from the Adelantado, announcing that he had

nearly reached the French fort, and that on the morrow, September the

twentieth, at sunrise, he hoped to assault it. "May the Divine Majesty

deign to protect us, for He knows that we have need of it," writes the

scared chaplain; "the Adelantado's great zeal and courage make us hope

he will succeed, but, for the good of his Majesty's service, he ought to

be a little less ardent in pursuing his schemes."

Meanwhile the five hundred pushed their march, now toiling across the

inundated savanrias, waist-deep in bulrushes and mud; now filing through

the open forest to the moan and roar of the storm-racked pines: now

hacking their way through palmetto thickets; and now turning from their

path to shun some pool, quagmire, cypress swamp, or "hummock," matted

with impenetrable bushes, brambles, and vines. As they bent before the

tempest, the water trickling from the rusty head-piece crept clammy and

cold betwixt the armor and the skin; and when they made their wretched

bivouac, their bed was the spongy soil, and the exhaustless clouds their

tent.

The night of Wednesday, the nineteenth, found their vanguard in a deep

forest of pines, less than a mile from Fort Caroline, and near the

low hills which extended in its rear, and formed a continuation of

St. John's Bluff. All around was one great morass. In pitchy darkness,

knee-deep in weeds and water, half starved, worn with toil and lack of

sleep, drenched to the skin, their provisions spoiled, their ammunition

wet, and their spirit chilled out of them, they stood in shivering

groups, cursing the enterprise and the author of it. Menendez heard

Fernando Perez, an ensign, say aloud to his comrades: "This Asturian

Corito, who knows no more of war on shore than an ass, has betrayed

us all. By God, if my advice had been followed, he would have had his

deserts, the day he set out on this cursed journey!"

The Adelantado pretended not to hear.

Two hours before dawn he called his officers about him. All night, he

said, he had been praying to God and the Virgin.

"Senores, what shall we resolve on? Our ammunition and provisions are

gone. Our case is desperate." And he urged a bold rush on the fort.

But men and officers alike were disheartened and disgusted. They

listened coldly and sullenly; many were for returning at every risk;

none were in the mood for fight. Menendez put forth all his eloquence,

till at length the dashed spirits of his followers were so far revived

that they consented to follow him.

All fell on their knees in the marsh; then, rising, they formed their

ranks and began to advance, guided by the renegade Frenchman, whose

hands, to make sure of him, were tied behind his back. Groping and

stumbling in the dark among trees, roots, and underbrush, buffeted by

wind and rain, and lashed in the face by the recoiling boughs which they

could not see, they soon lost their way, fell into confusion, and came

to a stand, in a mood more savagely desponding than before. But soon a

glimmer of returning day came to their aid, and showed them the dusky

sky, and the dark columns of the surrounding pines. Menendez ordered the

men forward on pain of death. They obeyed, and presently, emerging from

the forest, could dimly discern the ridge of a low hill, behind which,

the Frenchman told them, was the fort. Menendez, with a few officers

and men, cautiously mounted to the top. Beneath lay Fort Caroline, three

bow-shots distant; but the rain, the imperfect light, and a cluster

of intervening houses prevented his seeing clearly, and he sent

two officers to reconnoiter. As they descended, they met a solitary

Frenchman. They knocked him down with a sheathed sword, wounded him,

took him prisoner, kept him for a time, and then stabbed him as they

returned towards the top of the hill. Here, clutching their weapons, all

the gang stood in fierce expectancy.

"Santiago!" cried Menendez. "At them! God is with us! Victory!" And,

shouting their hoarse war-cries, the Spaniards rushed down the slope

like starved wolves.

Not a sentry was on the rampart. La Vigne, the officer of the guard, had

just gone to his quarters; but a trumpeter, who chanced to remain, saw,

through sheets of rain, the swarm of assailants sweeping down the hill.

He blew the alarm, and at the summons a few half-naked soldiers ran

wildly out of the barracks. It was too late. Through the breaches

and over the ramparts the Spaniards came pouring in, with shouts of

"Santiago! Santiago!"

Sick men leaped from their beds. Women and children, blind with fright,

darted shrieking from the houses. A fierce, gaunt visage, the thrust of

a pike, or blow of a rusty halberd,--such was the greeting that met all

alike. Laudonniere snatched his sword and target, and ran towards the

principal breach, calling to his soldiers. A rush of Spaniards met

him; his men were cut down around him; and he, with a soldier named

Bartholomew, was forced back into the yard of his house. Here stood a

tent, and, as the pursuers stumbled among the cords, he escaped behind

Ottigny's house, sprang through the breach in the western rampart, and

fled for the woods.

Le Moyne had been one of the guard. Scarcely had he thrown himself into

a hammock which was slung in his room, when a savage shout, and a wild

uproar of shrieks, outcries, and the clash of weapons, brought him to

his feet. He rushed by two Spaniards in the doorway, ran behind the

guard-house, leaped through an embrasure into the ditch, and escaped to

the forest.

Challeux, the carpenter, was going betimes to his work, a chisel in

his hand. He was old, but pike and partisan brandished at his back gave

wings to his flight. In the ecstasy of his terror, he leaped upward,

clutched the top of the palisade, and threw himself over with the

agility of a boy. He ran up the hill, no one pursuing, and, as he neared

the edge of the forest, turned and looked back. From the high ground

where he stood, he could see the butchery, the fury of the conquerors,

and the agonizing gestures of the victims. He turned again in horror,

and plunged into the woods. As he tore his way through the briers

and thickets, he met several fugitives escaped like himself. Others

presently came up, haggard and wild, like men broken loose from the jaws

of death. They gathered together and consulted. One of them, known as

Master Robert, in great repute for his knowledge of the Bible, was for

returning and surrendering to the Spaniards. "They are men," he said;

"perhaps, when their fury is over, they will spare our lives; and, even

if they kill us, it will only be a few moments' pain. Better so, than to

starve here in the woods, or be torn to pieces by wild beasts."

The greater part of the naked and despairing company assented, but

Challeux was of a different mind. The old Huguenot quoted Scripture,

and called the names of prophets and apostles to witness, that, in the

direst extremity, God would not abandon those who rested their faith

in Him. Six of the fugitives, however, still held to their desperate

purpose. Issuing from the woods, they descended towards the fort, and,

as with beating hearts their comrades watched the result, a troop of

Spaniards rushed out, hewed them down with swords and halberds, and

dragged their bodies to the brink of the river, where the victims of the

massacre were already flung in heaps.

Le Moyne, with a soldier named Grandehemin, whom he had met in his

flight, toiled all day through the woods and marshes, in the hope of

reaching the small vessels anchored behind the bar. Night found them in

a morass. No vessel could be seen, and the soldier, in despair, broke

into angry upbraidings against his companion,--saying that he would go

back and give himself up. Le Moyne at first opposed him, then yielded.

But when they drew near the fort, and heard the uproar of savage revelry

that rose from within, the artist's heart failed him. He embraced his

companion, and the soldier advanced alone. A party of Spaniards came out

to meet him. He kneeled, and begged for his life. He was answered by

a death-blow; and the horrified Le Moyne, from his hiding-place in the

thicket, saw his limbs hacked apart, stuck on pikes, and borne off in

triumph.

Meanwhile, Menendez, mustering his followers, had offered thanks to

God for their victory; and this pious butcher wept with emotion as he

recounted the favors which Heaven had showered upon their enterprise.

His admiring historian gives it in proof of his humanity, that, after

the rage of the assault was spent, he ordered that women, infants, and

boys under fifteen should thenceforth be spared. Of these, by his own

account, there were about fifty. Writing in October to the King, he

says that they cause him great anxiety, since he fears the anger of God

should he now put them to death in cold blood, while, on the other hand,

he is in dread lest the venom of their heresy should infect his men.

A hundred and forty-two persons were slain in and around the fort,

and their bodies lay heaped together on the bank of the river. Nearly

opposite was anchored a small vessel, called the "Pearl," commanded by

Jacques Ribaut, son of the Admiral. The ferocious soldiery, maddened

with victory and drunk with blood, crowded to the water's edge, shouting

insults to those on board, mangling the corpses, tearing out their eyes,

and throwing them towards the vessel from the points of their daggers.

Thus did the Most Catholic Philip champion the cause of Heaven in the

New World.

It was currently believed in France, and, though no eye-witness attests

it, there is reason to think it true, that among those murdered at

Fort Caroline there were some who died a death of peculiar ignominy.

Menendez, it is affirmed, hanged his prisoners on trees, and placed

over them the inscription, "I do this, not as to Frenchmen, but as to

Lutherans."

The Spaniards gained a great booty in armor, clothing, and provisions.

"Nevertheless," says the devout Mendoza, after closing his inventory of

the plunder, "the greatest profit of this victory is the triumph which

our Lord has granted us, whereby His holy Gospel will be introduced

into this country, a thing so needful for saving so many souls from

perdition." Again he writes in his journal, "We owe to God and His

Mother, more than to human strength, this victory over the adversaries

of the holy Catholic religion."

To whatever influence, celestial or other, the exploit may best be

ascribed, the victors were not yet quite content with their success. Two

small French vessels, besides that of Jacques Ribaut, still lay within

range of the fort. When the storm had a little abated, the cannon were

turned on them. One of them was sunk, but Ribaut, with the others,

escaped down the river, at the mouth of which several light craft,

including that bought from the English, had been anchored since the

arrival of his father's squadron.

While this was passing, the wretched fugitives were flying from the

scene of massacre through a tempest, of whose persistent violence all

the narratives speak with wonder. Exhausted, starved, half naked,--for

most of them had escaped in their shirts,--they pushed their toilsome

way amid the ceaseless wrath of the elements. A few sought refuge in

Indian villages; but these, it is said, were afterwards killed by the

Spaniards. The greater number attempted to reach the vessels at the

mouth of the river. Among the latter was Le Moyne, who, notwithstanding

his former failure, was toiling through the mazes of tangled forests,

when he met a Belgian soldier, with the woman described as Laudonniere's

maid-servant, who was wounded in the breast; and, urging their flight

towards the vessels, they fell in with other fugitives, including

Laudonniere himself. As they struggled through the salt marsh, the

rank sedge cut their naked limbs, and the tide rose to their waists.

Presently they descried others, toiling like themselves through the

matted vegetation, and recognized Challeux and his companions, also in

quest of the vessels. The old man still, as he tells us, held fast to

his chisel, which had done good service in cutting poles to aid the

party to cross the deep creeks that channelled the morass. The united

band, twenty-six in all, were cheered at length by the sight of a

moving sail. It was the vessel of Captain Mallard, who, informed of the

massacre, was standing along shore in the hope of picking up some of

the fugitives. He saw their signals, and sent boats to their rescue; but

such was their exhaustion, that, had not the sailors, wading to their

armpits among the rushes, borne them out on their shoulders, few could

have escaped. Laudonniere was so feeble that nothing but the support of

a soldier, who held him upright in his arms, had saved him from drowning

in the marsh.

On gaining the friendly decks, the fugitives counselled together. One

and all, they sickened for the sight of France.

After waiting a few days, and saving a few more stragglers from the

marsh, they prepared to sail. Young Ribaut, though ignorant of his

father's fate, assented with something more than willingness; indeed,

his behavior throughout had been stamped with weakness and poltroonery.

On the twenty-fifth of September they put to sea in two vessels; and,

after a voyage the privations of which were fatal to many of them, they

arrived, one party at Rochelle, the other at Swansea, in Wales.

CHAPTER VIII

1565.

MASSACRE OF THE HERETICS.

In suspense and fear, hourly looking seaward for the dreaded fleet of

Jean Ribaut, the chaplain Mendoza and his brother priests held watch and

ward at St. Augustine in the Adelantado's absence. Besides the celestial

guardians whom they ceased not to invoke, they had as protectors

Bartholomew Menendez, the brother of the Adelantado, and about a

hundred soldiers. Day and night they toiled to throw up earthworks and

strengthen their position.

A week elapsed, when they saw a man running towards them, shouting as he

ran.

Mendoza went to meet him.

"Victory! victory!" gasped the breathless messenger. "The French fort is

ours!" And he flung his arms about the chaplain's neck.'

"To-day," writes the priest in his journal, "Monday, the twenty-fourth,

came our good general himself, with fifty soldiers, very tired, Like all

those who were with him. As soon as they told me he was coming, I ran to

my lodging, took a new cassock, the best I had, put on my surplice, and

went out to meet him with a crucifix in my hand; whereupon he, like a

gentleman and a good Christian, kneeled down with all his followers,

and gave the Lord a thousand thanks for the great favors he had received

from Him."

In solemn procession, with four priests in front chanting Te Deum, the

victors entered St. Augustine in triumph.

On the twenty-eighth, when the weary Adelantado was taking his siesta

under the sylvan roof of Seloy, a troop of Indians came in with news

that quickly roused him from his slumbers. They had seen a French vessel

wrecked on the coast towards the south. Those who escaped from her were

four or six leagues off, on the banks of a river or arm of the sea,

which they could not cross.

Menendez instantly sent forty or fifty men in boats to reconnoitre.

Next, he called the chaplain,--for he would fain have him at his elbow

to countenance the deeds he meditated,--and, with him twelve soldiers

and two Indian guides, embarked in another boat. They rowed along the

channel between Anastasia Island and the main shore; then they landed,

struck across the island on foot, traversed plains and marshes, reached

the sea towards night, and searched along shore till ten o'clock to

find their comrades who had gone before. At length, with mutual joy, the

two parties met, and bivouacked together on the sands. Not far distant

they could see lights. These were the camp-fires of the shipwrecked

French.

To relate with precision the fortunes of these unhappy men is

impossible; for henceforward the French narratives are no longer the

narratives of eye-witnesses.

It has been seen how, when on the point of assailing the Spaniards at

St. Augustine, Jean Ribaut was thwarted by a gale, which they hailed

as a divine interposition. The gale rose to a tempest of strange fury.

Within a few days, all the French ships were cast on shore, between

Matanzas Inlet and Cape Canaveral. According to a letter of Menendez,

many of those on hoard were lost; but others affirm that all escaped but

a captain, La Grange, an officer of high merit, who was washed from a

floating mast. One of the ships was wrecked at a point farther northward

than the rest, and it was her company whose campfires were seen by the

Spaniards at their bivouac on the sands of Anastasia Island. They were

endeavoring to reach Fort Caroline, of the fate of which they knew

nothing, while Ribaut with the remainder was farther southward,

struggling through the wilderness towards the same goal. What befell the

latter will appear hereafter. Of the fate of the former party there

is no French record. What we know of it is due to three Spanish

eye-witnesses, Mendoza, Doctor Soils de las Meras, and Menendez himself.

Soils was a priest, and brother-in-law to Menendez. Like Mendoza, he

minutely describes what he saw, and, like him, was a red-hot zealot,

lavishing applause on the darkest deeds of his chief. But the principal

witness, though not the most minute or most trustworthy, is Menendez, in

his long despatches sent from Florida to the King, and now first brought

to light from the archives of Seville,--a cool record of unsurpassed

atrocities, inscribed on the back with the royal indorsement, "Say to

him that he has done well."

When the Adelantado saw the French fires in the distance, he lay close

in his bivouac, and sent two soldiers to reconnoitre. At two o'clock in

the morning they came back, and reported that it was impossible to get

at the enemy, since they were on the farther side of an arm of the sea

(Matanzas Inlet). Menendez, however, gave orders to march, and before

daybreak reached the hither bank, where he hid his men in a bushy

hollow. Thence, as it grew light, they could discern the enemy, many

of whom were searching along the sands and shallows for shell-fish, for

they were famishing. A thought struck Menendez, an inspiration, says

Mendoza, of the Holy Spirit. He put on the clothes of a sailor, entered

a boat which had been brought to the spot, and rowed towards the

shipwrecked men, the better to learn their condition. A Frenchman swam

out to meet him. Menendez demanded what men they were.

"Followers of Ribaut, Viceroy of the King of France," answered the

swimmer.

"Are you Catholics or Lutherans?"

"All Lutherans."

A brief dialogue ensued, during which the Adelantado declared his name

and character, and the Frenchman gave an account of the designs of

Ribaut, and of the disaster that had thwarted them. He then swam back

to his companions, but soon returned, and asked safe conduct for his

captain and four other gentlemen, who wished to hold conference with the

Spanish general. Menendez gave his word for their safety, and, returning

to the shore, sent his boat to bring them over. On their landing, he

met them very courteously. His followers were kept at a distance, so

disposed behind hills and among bushes as to give an exaggerated idea

of their force,--a precaution the more needful, as they were only about

sixty in number, while the French, says Solfs, were above two hundred.

Menendez, however, declares that they did not exceed a hundred and

forty. The French officer told him the story of their shipwreck, and

begged him to lend them a boat to aid them in crossing the rivers which

lay between them and a fort of their King, whither they were making

their way.

Then came again the ominous question,

"Are you Catholics or Lutherans?"

"We are Lutherans."

"Gentlemen," pursued Menendez, "your fort is taken, and all in it are

put to the sword." And, in proof of his declaration, he caused articles

plundered from Fort Caroline to be shown to the unhappy petitioners. He

then left them, and went to breakfast with his officers, first ordering

food to be placed before them. Having breakfasted, he returned to them.

"Are you convinced now," he asked, "that what I have told you is true?"

The French captain assented, and implored him to lend them ships in

which to return home. Menendez answered that he would do so willingly if

they were Catholics, and if he had ships to spare, but he had none.

The supplicants then expressed the hope that at least they and their

followers would be allowed to remain with the Spaniards till ships could

be sent to their relief, since there was peace between the two nations,

whose kings were friends and brothers.

"All Catholics," retorted the Spaniard, "I will befriend; but as you are

of the New Sect, I hold you as enemies, and wage deadly war against you;

and this I will do with all cruelty [crueldad] in this country, where I

command as Viceroy and Captain-General for my King. I am here to plant

the Holy Gospel, that the Indians may be enlightened and come to the

knowledge of the Holy Catholic faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the

Roman Church teaches it. If you will give up your arms and banners, and

place yourselves at my mercy, you may do so, and I will act towards you

as God shall give me grace. Do as you will, for other than this you can

have neither truce nor friendship with me."

Such were the Adelantado's words, as reported by a bystanders his

admiring brother-in-law and that they contain an implied assurance

of mercy has been held, not only by Protestants, but by Catholics

and Spaniards. The report of Menendez himself is more brief, and

sufficiently equivocal:--

"I answered, that they could give up their arms and place themselves

under my mercy,--that I should do with them what our Lord should order;

and from that I did not depart, nor would I, unless God our Lord should

otherwise inspire."

One of the Frenchmen recrossed to consult with his companions. In two

hours he returned, and offered fifty thousand ducats to secure their

lives; but Menendez, says his brother-in-law, would give no pledges. On

the other hand, expressions in his own despatches point to the inference

that a virtual pledge was given, at least to certain individuals.

The starving French saw no resource but to yield themselves to his

mercy. The boat was again sent across the river. It returned laden

with banners, arquebuses, swords, targets, and helmets. The Adelantado

ordered twenty soldiers to bring over the prisoners, ten at a time. He

then took the French officers aside behind a ridge of sand, two gunshots

from the bank. Here, with courtesy on his lips and murder at his heart,

he said:

"Gentlemen, I have but few men, and you are so many that, if you were

free, it would be easy for you to take your satisfaction on us for the

people we killed when we took your fort. Therefore it is necessary that

you should go to my camp, four leagues from this place, with your hands

tied."

Accordingly, as each party landed, they were led out of sight behind the

sand-hill, and their hands tied behind their backs with the match-cords

of the arquebuses, though not before each had been supplied with

food. The whole day passed before all were brought together, bound and

helpless, under the eye of the inexorable Adelantado. But now Mendoza

interposed. "I was a priest," he says, "and had the bowels of a man."

He asked that if there were Christians--that is to say, Catholics--among

the prisoners, they should be set apart. Twelve Breton sailors professed

themselves to be such; and these, together with four carpenters and

calkers, "of whom," writes Menendez, "I was in great need," were put on

board the boat and sent to St. Augustine. The rest were ordered to march

thither by land.

The Adelantado walked in advance till he came to a lonely spot, not far

distant, deep among the bush-covered hills. Here he stopped, and with

his cane drew a line in the sand. The sun was set when the captive

Huguenots, with their escort, reached the fatal goal thus marked out.

And now let the curtain drop; for here, in the name of Heaven, the

hounds of hell were turned loose, and the savage soldiery, like wolves

in a sheepfold, rioted in slaughter. Of all that wretched company, not

one was left alive.

"I had their hands tied behind their backs," writes the chief criminal,

"and themselves put to the knife. It appeared to me that, by thus

chastising them, God our Lord and your Majesty were served; whereby in

future this evil sect will leave us more free to plant the Gospel in

these parts."

Again Menendez returned triumphant to St. Augustine, and behind him

marched his band of butchers, steeped in blood to the elbows, but still

unsated. Great as had been his success, he still had cause for anxiety.

There was ill news of his fleet. Some of the ships were lost, others

scattered, or lagging tardily on their way. Of his whole force, less

than a half had reached Florida, and of these a large part were still at

Fort Caroline. Ribaut could not be far off; and, whatever might be the

condition of his shipwrecked company, their numbers would make them

formidable, unless taken at advantage. Urged by fear and fortified by

fanaticism, Menendez had well begun his work of slaughter; but rest for

him there was none,--a darker deed was behind.

On the tenth of October, Indians came with the tidings that, at the spot

where the first party of the shipwrecked French had been found, there

was now another party still larger. This murder-loving race looked

with great respect on Menendez for his wholesale butchery of the night

before,--an exploit rarely equalled in their own annals of massacre.

On his part, he doubted not that Ribaut was at hand. Marching with a

hundred and fifty men, he crossed the bush-covered sands of Anastasia

Island, followed the strand between the thickets and the sea, reached

the inlet at midnight, and again, like a savage, ambushed himself on

the bank. Day broke, and he could plainly see the French on the farther

side. They had made a raft, which lay in the water ready for crossing.

Menendez and his men showed themselves, when, forthwith, the French

displayed their banners, sounded drums and trumpets, and set their sick

and starving ranks in array of battle. But the Adelantado, regardless

of this warlike show, ordered his men to seat themselves at breakfast,

while he with three officers walked unconcernedly along the shore. His

coolness had its effect. The French blew a trumpet of parley, and showed

a white flag. The Spaniards replied. A Frenchman came out upon the raft,

and, shouting across the water, asked that a Spanish envoy should be

sent over.

"You have a raft," was the reply; "come yourselves."

An Indian canoe lay under the bank on the Spanish side. A French sailor

swam to it, paddled back unmolested, and presently returned, bringing

with him La Caille, Ribaut's sergeant-major. He told Menendez that the

French were three hundred and fifty in all, and were on their way to

Fort Caroline; and, like the officers of the former party, he begged for

boats to aid them in crossing the river.

"My brother," said Menendez, "go and tell your general, that, if he

wishes to speak with me, he may come with four or six companions, and

that I pledge my word he shall go back safe."

La Caille returned; and Ribaut, with eight gentlemen, soon came over

in the canoe. Menendez met them courteously, caused wine and preserved

fruits to be placed before them,--he had come well provisioned on his

errand of blood,--and next led Ribaut to the reeking Golgotha, where,

in heaps upon the sand, lay the corpses of his slaughtered followers.

Ribaut was prepared for the spectacle,--La Caille had already seen

it,--but he would not believe that Fort Caroline was taken till a part

of the plunder was shown him. Then, mastering his despair, he turned

to the conqueror. "What has befallen us," he said, "may one day befall

you." And, urging that the kings of France and Spain were brothers

and close friends, he begged, in the name of that friendship, that the

Spaniard would aid him in conveying his followers home. Menendez gave

him the same equivocal answer that he had given the former party, and

Ribaut returned to consult with his officers. After three hours of

absence, he came back in the canoe, and told the Adelantado that some of

his people were ready to surrender at discretion, but that many refused.

"They can do as they please," was the reply. In behalf of those who

surrendered, Ribaut offered a ransom of a hundred thousand ducats. "It

would much grieve me," said Menendez, "not to accept it; for I have

great need of it."

Ribaut was much encouraged. Menendez could scarcely forego such a

prize, and he thought, says the Spanish narrator, that the lives of

his followers would now be safe. He asked to be allowed the night for

deliberation, and at sunset recrossed the river. In the morning he

reappeared among the Spaniards, and reported that two hundred of his men

had retreated from the spot, but that the remaining hundred and fifty

would surrender. At the same time he gave into the hands of Menendez the

royal standard and other flags, with his sword, dagger, helmet, buckler,

and the official seal given him by Coligny. Menendez directed an officer

to enter the boat and bring over the French by tens. He next led Ribaut

among the bushes behind the neighboring sand-hill, and ordered his hands

to be bound fast. Then the scales fell from the prisoner's eyes. Face

to face his fate rose up before him. He saw his followers and himself

entrapped,--the dupes of words artfully framed to lure them to their

ruin. The day wore on; and, as band after band of prisoners was brought

over, they were led behind the sand-hill out of sight from the farther

shore, and bound like their general. At length the transit was finished.

With bloodshot eyes and weapons bared, the Spaniards closed around their

victims.

"Are you Catholics or Lutherans? and is there any one among you who will

go to confession?"

Ribaut answered, "I and all here are of the Reformed Faith."

And he recited the Psalm, "Domine, memento mei."

"We are of earth," he continued, "and to earth we must return; twenty

years more or less can matter little;" and, turning to the Adelantado,

he bade him do his will.

The stony-hearted bigot gave the signal; and those who will may paint to

themselves the horrors of the scene.

A few, however, were spared. "I saved," writes Menendez, "the lives of

two young gentlemen of about eighteen years of age, as well as of three

others, the fifer, the drummer, and the trumpeter; and I caused Juan

Ribao [Ribaut] with all the rest to be put to the knife, judging this to

be necessary for the service of God our Lord and of your Majesty. And I

consider it great good fortune that he [Juan Ribao] should be dead, for

the King of France could effect more with him and five hundred ducats

than with other men and five thousand; and he would do more in one year

than another in ten, for he was the most experienced sailor and naval

commander known, and of great skill in this navigation of the Indies

and the coast of Florida. He was, besides, greatly liked in England,

in which kingdom his reputation was such that he was appointed

Captain-General of all the English fleet against the French Catholics in

the war between England and France some years ago."

Such is the sum of the Spanish accounts,--the self-damning testimony

of the author and abettors of the crime; a picture of lurid and awful

coloring; and yet there is reason to believe that the truth was darker

still. Among those who were spared was one Christophe le Breton, who

was carried to Spain, escaped to France, and told his story to Challeux.

Among those struck down in the butchery was a sailor of Dieppe, stunned

and left for dead under a heap of corpses. In the night he revived,

contrived to draw his knife, cut the cords that bound his hands, and

made his way to an Indian village. The Indians, not without reluctance,

abandoned him to the Spaniards, who sold him as a slave; but, on his way

in fetters to Portugal, the ship was taken by the Huguenots, the sailor

set free, and his story published in the narrative of Le Moyne. When the

massacre was known in France, the friends and relatives of the victims

sent to the King, Charles the Ninth, a vehement petition for redress;

and their memorial recounts many incidents of the tragedy. From these

three sources is to be drawn the French version of the story. The

following is its substance.

Famished and desperate, the followers of Ribaut were toiling northward

to seek refuge at Fort Caroline, when they found the Spaniards in their

path. Some were filled with dismay; others, in their misery, almost

hailed them as deliverers. La Caille, the sergeant-major, crossed the

river. Menendez met him with a face of friendship, and protested that he

would spare the lives of the shipwrecked men, sealing the promise

with an oath, a kiss, and many signs of the cross. He even gave it in

writing, under seal. Still, there were many among the French who would

not place themselves in his power. The most credulous crossed the river

in a boat. As each successive party landed, their hands were bound fast

at their backs; and thus, except a few who were set apart, they were all

driven towards the fort, like cattle to the shambles, with curses and

scurrilous abuse. Then, at sound of drums and trumpets, the Spaniards

fell upon them, striking them down with swords, pikes, and halberds.

Ribaut vainly called on the Adelantado to remember his oath. By his

order, a soldier plunged a dagger into the French commander's heart; and

Ottigny, who stood near, met a similar fate. Ribaut's beard was cut off,

and portions of it sent in a letter to Philip the Second. His head was

hewn into four parts, one of which was displayed on the point of a lance

at each corner of Fort St. Augustine. Great fires were kindled, and the

bodies of the murdered burned to ashes.

Such is the sum of the French accounts. The charge of breach of faith

contained in them was believed by Catholics as well as Protestants;

and it was as a defence against this charge that the narrative of the

Adelantado's brother-in-law was published. That Ribaut, a man whose good

sense and courage were both reputed high, should have submitted himself

and his men to Menendez without positive assurance of safety, is

scarcely credible; nor is it lack of charity to believe that a bigot so

savage in heart and so perverted in conscience would act on the maxim,

current among certain casuists of the day, that faith ought not to be

kept with heretics.

It was night when the Adelantado again entered St. Augustine. There were

some who blamed his cruelty; but many applauded. "Even if the French had

been Catholics,"--such was their language,--"he would have done right,

for, with the little provision we have, they would all have starved;

besides, there were so many of them that they would have cut our

throats."

And now Menendez again addressed himself to the despatch, already

begun, in which he recounts to the King his labors and his triumphs, a

deliberate and business-like document, mingling narratives of butchery

with recommendations for promotions, commissary details, and petitions

for supplies,--enlarging, too, on the vast schemes of encroachment which

his successful generalship had brought to naught. The French, he says,

had planned a military and naval depot at Los Martires, whence they

would make a descent upon Havana, and another at the Bay of Ponce

de Leon, whence they could threaten Vera Cruz. They had long been

encroaching on Spanish rights at Newfoundland, from which a great arm of

the sea--doubtless meaning the St. Lawrence--would give them access to

the Moluccas and other parts of the East Indies. He adds, in a later

despatch, that by this passage they may reach the mines of Zacatecas

and St. Martin, as well as every part of the South Sea. And, as already

mentioned, he urges immediate occupation of Chesapeake Bay, which, by

its supposed water communication with the St. Lawrence, would enable

Spain to vindicate her rights, control the fisheries of Newfoundland,

and thwart her rival in vast designs of commercial and territorial

aggrandizement. Thus did France and Spain dispute the possession of

North America long before England became a party to the strife. [24]

Some twenty days after Menendez returned to St. Augustine, the Indians,

enamoured of carnage, and exulting to see their invaders mowed down,

came to tell him that on the coast southward, near Cape Canaveral, a

great number of Frenchmen were intrenching themselves. They were those

of Ribaut's party who had refused to surrender. Having retreated to the

spot where their ships had been cast ashore, they were trying to build a

vessel from the fragments of the wrecks.

In all haste Menendez despatched messengers to Fort Caroline, named by

him San Mateo, ordering a reinforcement of a hundred and fifty men. In

a few days they came. He added some of his own soldiers, and, with a

united force of two hundred and fifty, set out, as he tells us, on the

second of November. A part of his force went by sea, while the rest

pushed southward along the shore with such merciless energy that several

men dropped dead with wading night and day through the loose sands.

When, from behind their frail defences, the French saw the Spanish

pikes and partisans glittering into view, they fled in a panic, and took

refuge among the hills. Menendez sent a trumpet to summon them, pledging

his honor for their safety. The commander and several others told the

messenger that they would sooner be eaten by the savages than trust

themselves to Spaniards; and, escaping, they fled to the Indian towns.

The rest surrendered; and Menendez kept his word. The comparative number

of his own men made his prisoners no longer dangerous. They were led

back to St. Augustine, where, as the Spanish writer affirms, they were

well treated. Those of good birth sat at the Adelantado's table, eating

the bread of a homicide crimsoned with the slaughter of their comrades.

The priests essayed their pious efforts, and, under the gloomy menace of

the Inquisition, some of the heretics renounced their errors. The fate

of the captives may be gathered from the endorsement, in the handwriting

of the King, on one of the despatches of Menendez.

"Say to him," writes Philip the Second, "that, as to those he has

killed, he has done well; and as to those he has saved, they shall be

sent to the galleys."

CHAPTER IX.

1565-1567.

CHARLES IX. AND PHILLIP II.

The state of international relations in the sixteenth century is hardly

conceivable at this day. The Puritans of England and the Huguenots of

France regarded Spain as their natural enemy, and on the high seas and

in the British Channel they joined hands with godless freebooters to

rifle her ships, kill her sailors, or throw them alive into the sea.

Spain on her side seized English Protestant sailors who ventured into

her ports, and burned them as heretics, or consigned them to a living

death in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Yet in the latter half of

the century these mutual outrages went on for years while the nations

professed to be at peace. There was complaint, protest, and occasional

menace, but no redress, and no declaration of war.

Contemporary writers of good authority have said that, when the news of

the massacres in Florida reached the court of France, Charles the

Ninth and Catherine de Medicis submitted to the insult in silence; but

documents lately brought to light show that a demand for redress was

made, though not insisted on. A cry of horror and execration had risen

from the Huguenots and many even of the Catholics had echoed it; yet the

perpetrators of the crime, and not its victims, were the first to make

complaint. Philip the Second resented the expeditions of Ribaut and

Laudonniere as an invasion of the American domains of Spain, and ordered

D'Alava, his ambassador at Paris, to denounce them to the French

King. Charles, thus put on the defensive, replied, that the country

in question belonged to France, having been discovered by Frenchmen a

hundred years before, and named by them Terre des Bretons. This alludes

to the tradition that the Bretons and Basques visited the northern

coasts of America before the voyage of Columbus. In several maps of the

sixteenth century the region of New England and the neighboring states

and provinces is set down as Terre des Bretons, or Tierra de los

Bretones, and this name was assumed by Charles to extend to the Gulf of

Mexico, as the name of Florida was assumed by the Spaniards to extend to

the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and even beyond it. Philip spurned the claim,

asserted the Spanish right to all Florida, and asked whether or not the

followers of Ribaut and Laudonniere had gone thither by authority of

their King. The Queen Mother, Catherine de Medicis, replied in her son's

behalf, that certain Frenchmen had gone to a country called Terre aux

Bretons, discovered by French subjects, and that in so doing they had

been warned not to encroach on lands belonging to the King of Spain. And

she added, with some spirit, that the Kings of France were not in the

habit of permitting themselves to be threatened.

Philip persisted in his attitude of injured innocence; and Forquevaulx,

French ambassador at Madrid, reported that, as a reward for murdering

French subjects, Menendez was to receive the title of Marquis of

Florida. A demand soon followed from Philip, that Admiral Coligny should

be punished for planting a French colony on Spanish ground, and thus

causing the disasters that ensued. It was at this time that the first

full account of the massacres reached the French court, and the Queen

Mother, greatly moved, complained to the Spanish ambassador, saying that

she could not persuade herself that his master would refuse reparation.

The ambassador replied by again throwing the blame on Coligny and the

Huguenots; and Catherine de Medicis returned that, Huguenots or not, the

King of Spain had no right to take upon himself the punishment of French

subjects. Forquevaulx was instructed to demand redress at Madrid; but

Philip only answered that he was very sorry for what had happened, and

again insisted that Coligny should be punished as the true cause of it.

Forquevaulx, an old soldier, remonstrated with firmness, declared that

no deeds so execrable had ever been committed within his memory, and

demanded that Menendez and his followers should be chastised as they

deserved. The King said that he was sorry that the sufferers chanced to

be Frenchmen, but, as they were pirates also, they ought to be treated

as such. The ambassador replied, that they were no pirates, since they

bore the commission of the Admiral of France, who in naval affairs

represented the King; and Philip closed the conversation by saying that

he would speak on the subject with the Duke of Alva. This was equivalent

to refusal, for the views of the Duke were well known; "and so, Madame,"

writes the ambassador to the Queen Mother, "there is no hope that any

reparation will be made for the aforesaid massacre."

On this, Charles wrote to Forquevaulx "It is my will that you renew

your complaint, and insist urgently that, for the sake of the union and

friendship between the two crowns, reparation be made for the wrong done

me and the cruelties committed on my subjects, to which I cannot submit

without too great loss of reputation." And, jointly with his mother,

he ordered the ambassador to demand once more that Menendez and his

men should be punished, adding, that he trusts that Philip will grant

justice to the King of France, his brother-in-law and friend, rather

than pardon a gang of brigands. "On this demand," concludes Charles,

"the Sieur de Forquevaulx will not fail to insist, be the answer what it

may, in order that the King of Spain shall understand that his Majesty

of France has no less spirit than his predecessors to repel an insult."

The ambassador fulfilled his commission, and Philip replied by referring

him to the Duke of Alva. "I have no hope," reports Forquevaulx, "that

the Duke will give any satisfaction as to the massacre, for it was he

who advised it from the first." A year passed, and then he reported that

Menendez had returned from Florida, that the King had given him a warm

welcome, and that his fame as a naval commander was such that he was

regarded as a sort of Neptune.

In spite of their brave words, Charles and the Queen Mother tamely

resigned themselves to the affront, for they would not quarrel with

Spain. To have done so would have been to throw themselves into the arms

of the Protestant party, adopt the principle of toleration, and save

France from the disgrace and blight of her later years. France was

not so fortunate. The enterprise of Florida was a national enterprise,

undertaken at the national charge, with the royal commission, and under

the royal standard; and it had been crushed in time of peace by a power

professing the closest friendship. Yet Huguenot influence had prompted

and Huguenot hands executed it. That influence had now ebbed low;

Coligny's power had waned; Charles, after long vacillation, was leaning

more and more towards the Guises and the Catholics, and fast subsiding

into the deathly embrace of Spain, for whom, at last, on the bloody

eve of St. Bartholomew, he was to become the assassin of his own best

subjects.

In vain the relatives of the slain petitioned him for redress; and had

the honor of the nation rested in the keeping of its King, the blood of

hundreds of murdered Frenchmen would have cried from the ground in vain.

But it was not to be so. Injured humanity found an avenger, and outraged

France a champion. Her chivalrous annals may be searched in vain for

a deed of more romantic daring than the vengeance of Dominique de

Gourgues.

CHAPTER X.

1567-1583.

DOMINIQUE DE GOURGUES.

There was a gentleman of Mont-de-Marsan, Dominique de Gourgues, a

soldier of ancient birth and high renown. It is not certain that he was

a Huguenot. The Spanish annalist calls him a "terrible heretic;" but the

French Jesuit, Charlevoix, anxious that the faithful should share the

glory of his exploits, affirms that, like his ancestors before him,

he was a good Catholic. If so, his faith sat lightly upon him; and,

Catholic or heretic, he hated the Spaniards with a mortal hate. Fighting

in the Italian wars,--for from boyhood he was wedded to the sword,--he

had been taken prisoner by them near Siena, where he had signalized

himself by a fiery and determined bravery. With brutal insult, they

chained him to the oar as a galley slave. After he had long endured

this ignominy the Turks captured the vessel and carried her to

Constantinople. It was but a change of tyrants but, soon after, while

she was on a cruise, Gourgues still at the oar, a galley of the knights

of Malta hove in sight, bore down on her, recaptured her, and set

the prisoner free. For several years after, his restless spirit found

employment in voyages to Africa, Brazil, and regions yet more remote.

His naval repute rose high, but his grudge against the Spaniards still

rankled within him; and when, returned from his rovings, he learned the

tidings from Florida, his hot Gascon blood boiled with fury.

The honor of France had been foully stained, and there was none to

wipe away the shame. The faction-ridden King was dumb. The nobles who

surrounded him were in the Spanish interest. Then, since they proved

recreant, he, Dominique de Gourgues, a simple gentleman, would take upon

him to avenge the wrong, and restore the dimmed lustre of the French

name. He sold his inheritance, borrowed money from his brother, who held

a high post in Guienne, and equipped three small vessels, navigable

by sail or oar. On board he placed a hundred arquebusiers and eighty

sailors, prepared to fight on land, if need were. The noted Blaise de

Montluc, then lieutenant for the King in Guienne, gave him a commission

to make war on the negroes of Benin,--that is, to kidnap them as slaves,

an adventure then held honorable.

His true design was locked within his own breast. He mustered his

followers,--not a few of whom were of rank equal to his own, feasted

them, and, on the twenty-second of August, 1567, sailed from the mouth

of the Charente. Off Cape Finisterre, so violent a storm buffeted his

ships that his men clamored to return; but Gourgues's spirit prevailed.

He bore away for Africa, and, landing at the Rio del Oro, refreshed and

cheered them as he best might. Thence he sailed to Cape Blanco, where

the jealous Portuguese, who had a fort in the neighborhoods set upon him

three negro chiefs. Gourgues beat them off, and remained master of

the harbor; whence, however, he soon voyaged onward to Cape Verd, and,

steering westward, made for the West Indies. Here, advancing from island

to island, he came to Hispaniola, where, between the fury of a hurricane

at sea and the jealousy of the Spaniards on shore, he was in no small

jeopardy,--"the Spaniards", exclaims the indignant journalist, "who

think that this New World was made for nobody but them, and that no

other living man has a right to move or breathe here!" Gourgues landed,

however, obtained the water of which he was in need, and steered for

Cape San Antonio, at the western end of Cuba. There he gathered his

followers about him, and addressed them with his fiery Gascon eloquence.

For the first time, he told them his true purpose, inveighed against

Spanish cruelty, and painted, with angry rhetoric, the butcheries of

Fort Caroline and St. Augustine.

"What disgrace," he cried, "if such an insult should pass unpunished!

What glory to us if we avenge it! To this I have devoted my fortune. I

relied on you. I thought you jealous enough of your country's glory to

sacrifice life itself in a cause like this. Was I deceived? I will show

you the way; I will be always at your head; I will bear the brunt of the

danger. Will you refuse to follow me?"

At first his startled hearers listened in silence; but soon the passions

of that adventurous age rose responsive to his words. The combustible

French nature burst into flame. The enthusiasm of the soldiers rose to

such a pitch that Gourgues had much ado to make them wait till the moon

was full before tempting the perils of the Bahama Channel. His time came

at length. The moon rode high above the lonely sea, and, silvered in its

light, the ships of the avenger held their course.

Meanwhile, it had fared ill with the Spaniards in Florida; the good-will

of the Indians had vanished. The French had been obtrusive and vexatious

guests; but their worst trespasses had been mercy and tenderness

compared to the daily outrage of the new-comers. Friendship had changed

to aversion, aversion to hatred, and hatred to open war. The forest

paths were beset; stragglers were cut off; and woe to the Spaniard who

should venture after nightfall beyond call of the outposts.

Menendez, however, had strengthened himself in his new conquest. St.

Augustine was well fortified; Fort Caroline, now Fort San Mateo, was

repaired; and two redoubts, or small forts, were thrown up to guard the

mouth of the River of May,--one of them near the present lighthouse at

Mayport, and the other across the river on Fort George Island. Thence,

on an afternoon in early spring, the Spaniards saw three sail steering

northward. They suspected no enemy, and their batteries boomed a salute.

Gourgues's ships replied, then stood out to sea, and were lost in the

shades of evening.

They kept their course all night, and, as day broke, anchored at the

mouth of a river, the St. Mary's, or the Santilla, by their reckoning

fifteen leagues north of the River of May. Here, as it grew light,

Gourgues saw the borders of the sea thronged with savages, armed and

plumed for war. They, too, had mistaken the strangers for Spaniards, and

mustered to meet their tyrants at the landing. But in the French ships

there was a trumpeter who had been long in Florida, and knew the Indians

well. He went towards them in a boat, with many gestures of friendship;

and no sooner was he recognized, than the naked crowd, with yelps of

delight, danced for joy along the sands. Why had he ever left them?

they asked; and why had he not returned before? The intercourse thus

auspiciously begun was actively kept up. Gourgues told the principal

chief,--who was no other than Satouriona, once the ally of the

French,--that he had come to visit them, make friendship with them, and

bring them presents. At this last announcement, so grateful to Indian

ears the dancing was renewed with double zeal. The next morning was

named for a grand council, and Satouriona sent runners to summon all

Indians within call; while Gourgues, for safety, brought his vessels

within the mouth of the river.

Morning came, and the woods were thronged with warriors. Gourgues and

his soldiers landed with martial pomp. In token of mutual confidence,

the French laid aside their arquebuses, and the Indians their bows

and arrows. Satouriona came to meet the strangers, and seated their

commander at his side, on a wooden stool, draped and cushioned with the

gray Spanish moss. Two old Indians cleared the spot of brambles, weeds,

and grass; and, when their task was finished, the tribesmen took their

places, ring within ring, standing, sitting, and crouching on the

ground,--a dusky concourse, plumed in festal array, waiting with grave

visages and intent eyes. Gourgues was about to speak, when the chief,

who, says the narrator, had not learned French manners, anticipated

him, and broke into a vehement harangue, denouncing the cruelty of the

Spaniards.

Since the French fort was taken, he said, the Indians had not had one

happy day. The Spaniards drove them from their cabins, stole their corn,

ravished their wives and daughters, and killed their children; and all

this they had endured because they loved the French. There was a French

boy who had escaped from the massacre at the fort; they had found him

in the woods and though the Spaniards, who wished to kill him, demanded

that they should give him up, they had kept him for his friends.

"Look!" pursued the chief, "here he is! "--and he brought forward a

youth of sixteen, named Pierre Debre, who became at once of the greatest

service to the French, his knowledge of the Indian language making him

an excellent interpreter.

Delighted as he was at this outburst against the Spaniards, Gourgues did

not see fit to display the full extent of his satisfaction. He thanked

the Indians for their good-will, exhorted them to continue in it, and

pronounced an ill-merited eulogy on the greatness and goodness of his

King. As for the Spaniards, he said, their day of reckoning was at hand;

and, if the Indians had been abused for their love of the French, the

French would be their avengers. Here Satouriona forgot his dignity, and

leaped up for joy.

"What!" he cried, "will you fight the Spaniards?"

"I came here," replied Gourgues, "only to reconnoitre the country and

make friends with you, and then go back to bring more soldiers; but,

when I hear what you are suffering from them, I wish to fall upon them

this very day, and rescue you from their tyranny." All around the ring a

clamor of applauding voices greeted his words.

"But you will do your part," pursued the Frenchman; "you will not leave

us all the honor."

"We will go," replied Satouriona, "and die with you, if need be."

"Then, if we fight, we ought to fight at once. How soon can you have

your warriors ready to march?"

The chief asked three days for preparation. Gourgues cautioned him to

secrecy, lest the Spaniards should take alarm.

"Never fear," was the answer; "we hate them more than you do."

Then came a distribution of gifts,--knives, hatchets, mirrors, bells,

and beads,--while the warrior rabble crowded to receive them, with eager

faces and outstretched arms. The distribution over, Gourgues asked the

chiefs if there was any other matter in which he could serve them. On

this, pointing to his shirt, they expressed a peculiar admiration for

that garment, and begged each to have one, to be worn at feasts

and councils during life, and in their graves after death. Gourgues

complied; and his grateful confederates were soon stalking about him,

fluttering in the spoils of his wardrobe.

To learn the strength and position of the Spaniards, Gourgues now sent

out three scouts; and with them went Olotoraca, Satourioria's nephew, a

young brave of great renown.

The chief, eager to prove his good faith, gave as hostages his only

surviving son and his favorite wife. They were sent on board the

ships, while the Indians dispersed to their encampments, with leaping,

stamping, dancing, and whoops of jubilation.

The day appointed came, and with it the savage army, hideous in

war-paint, and plumed for battle. The woods rang back their songs and

yells, as with frantic gesticulation they brandished their war-clubs and

vaunted their deeds of prowess. Then they drank the black drink, endowed

with mystic virtues against hardship and danger; and Gourgues himself

pretended to swallow the nauseous decoction. [25]

These ceremonies consumed the day. It was evening before the allies

filed off into their forests, and took the path for the Spanish forts.

The French, on their part, were to repair by sea to the rendezvous.

Gourgues mustered and addressed his men. It was needless: their ardor

was at fever height. They broke in upon his words, and demanded to be

led at once against the enemy. Francois Bourdelais, with twenty sailors,

was left with the ships, and Gourgues affectionately bade him farewell.

"If I am slain in this most just enterprise," he said, "I leave all in

your charge, and pray you to carry back my soldiers to France."

There were many embracings among the excited Frenchmen,--many

sympathetic tears from those who were to stay behind,--many messages

left with them for wives, children, friends, and mistresses; and then

this valiant band pushed their boats from shore. It was a hare-brained

venture, for, as young Debre had assured them, the Spaniards on the

River of May were four hundred in number, secure behind their ramparts.

Hour after hour the sailors pulled at the oar. They glided slowly by the

sombre shores in the shimmering moonlight, to the sound of the surf and

the moaning pine-trees. In the gray of the morning, they came to the

mouth of a river, probably the Nassau; and here a northeast wind set

in with a violence that almost wrecked their boats. Their Indian

allies were waiting on the bank, but for a while the gale delayed

their crossing. The bolder French would lose no time, rowed through the

tossing waves, and, landing safely, left their boats, and pushed into

the forest. Gourgues took the lead, in breastplate and back-piece. At

his side marched the young chief Olotoraca, with a French pike in his

hand; and the files of arquebuse-men and armed sailors followed close

behind. They plunged through swamps, hewed their way through brambly

thickets and the matted intricacies of the forests, and, at five in

the afternoon, almost spent with fatigue and hunger, came to a river or

inlet of the sea, not far from the first Spanish fort. Here they found

three hundred Indians waiting for them.

Tired as he was, Gourgues would not rest. He wished to attack at

daybreak, and with ten arquebusiers and his Indian guide he set out to

reconnoitre. Night closed upon him. It was a vain task to struggle on,

in pitchy darkness, among trunks of trees, fallen logs, tangled vines,

and swollen streams. Gourgues returned, anxious and gloomy. An Indian

chief approached him, read through the darkness his perturbed look,

and offered to lead him by a better path along the margin of the sea.

Gourgues joyfully assented, and ordered all his men to march. The

Indians, better skilled in wood-craft, chose the shorter course through

the forest.

The French forgot their weariness, and pressed on with speed. At dawn

they and their allies met on the bank of a stream, probably Sister

Creek, beyond which, and very near, was the fort. But the tide was in,

and they tried in vain to cross. Greatly vexed,--for he had hoped to

take the enemy asleep,--Gourgues withdrew his soldiers into the forest,

where they were no sooner ensconced than a drenching rain fell, and they

had much ado to keep their gun-matches burning. The light grew fast.

Gourgues plainly saw the fort, the defences of which seemed slight

and unfinished. He even saw the Spaniards at work within. A feverish

interval elapsed, till at length the tide was out,--so far, at least,

that the stream was fordable. A little higher up, a clump of trees lay

between it and the fort. Behind this friendly screen the passage

was begun. Each man tied his powder-flask to his steel cap, held his

arquebuse above his head with one hand, and grasped his sword with the

other. The channel was a bed of oysters. The sharp shells cut their feet

as they waded through. But the farther bank was gained. They emerged

from the water, drenched, lacerated, and bleeding, but with unabated

mettle. Gourgues set them in array under cover of the trees. They stood

with kindling eyes, and hearts throbbing, but not with fear. Gourgues

pointed to the Spanish fort, seen by glimpses through the boughs. "Look

I" he said, "there are the robbers who have stolen this land from our

King; there are the murderers who have butchered our countrymen!" With

voices eager, fierce, but half suppressed, they demanded to be led on.

Gourgues gave the word. Cazenove, his lientenant, with thirty men,

pushed for the fort gate; he himself, with the main body, for the

glacis. It was near noon; the Spaniards had just finished their meal,

and, says the narrative, "were still picking their teeth," when a

startled cry rang in their ears:--"To arms! to arms! The French are

coming! The French are coming!"

It was the voice of a cannoneer who had that moment mounted the rampart

and seen the assailants advancing in unbroken ranks, with heads lowered

and weapons at the charge. He fired his cannon among them. He even had

time to load and fire again, when the light-limbed Olotoraca bounded

forward, ran up the glacis, leaped the unfinished ditch, and drove his

pike through the Spaniard from breast to back. Gourgues was now on the

glacis, when he heard Cazenove shouting from the gate that the Spaniards

were escaping on that side. He turned and led his men thither at a run.

In a moment, the fugitives, sixty in all, were enclosed between his

party and that of his lieutenant. The Indians, too, came leaping to the

spot. Not a Spaniard escaped. All were cut down but a few, reserved by

Gourgues for a more inglorious end.

Meanwhile the Spaniards in the other fort, on the opposite shore,

cannonaded the victors without ceasing. The latter turned four captured

guns against them. One of Gourgues's boats, a very large one, had been

brought along-shore, and, entering it with eighty soldiers, he pushed

for the farther bank. With loud yells, the Indians leaped into the

river, which is here about three fourths of a mile wide. Each held his

bow and arrows aloft in one hand, while he swam with the other. A panic

seized the garrison as they saw the savage multitude. They broke out of

the fort and fled into the forest. But the French had already landed;

and, throwing themselves in the path of the fugitives, they greeted them

with a storm of lead. The terrified wretches recoiled; but flight

was vain. The Indian whoop rang behind them, and war-clubs and arrows

finished the work. Gourgues's utmost efforts saved but fifteen, not out

of mercy, but from a refinement of vengeance.

The next day was Quasimodo Sunday, or the Sunday after Easter. Gourgues

and his men remained quiet, making ladders for the assault on Fort San

Mateo. Meanwhile the whole forest was in arms, and, far and near, the

Indians were wild with excitement. They beset the Spanish fort till not

a soldier could venture out. The garrison, aware of their danger, though

ignorant of its extent, devised an expedient to gain information; and

one of them, painted and feathered like an Indian, ventured within

Gourgues's outposts. He himself chanced to be at hand, and by his side

walked his constant attendant, Olotoraca. The keen-eyed young savage

pierced the cheat at a glance. The spy was seized, and, being examined,

declared that there were two hundred and sixty Spaniards in San Mateo,

and that they believed the French to be two thousand, and were so

frightened that they did not know what they were doing.

Gourgues, well pleased, pushed on to attack them. On Monday evening he

sent forward the Indians to ambush themselves on both sides of the fort.

In the morning he followed with his Frenchmen; and, as the glittering

ranks came into view, defiling between the forest and the river, the

Spaniards opened on them with culverins from a projecting bastion. The

French took cover in the woods with which the hills below and behind the

fort were densely overgrown. Here, himself unseen, Gourgues could survey

whole extent of the defences, and he presently descried a strong party

of Spaniards issuing from their works, crossing the ditch, and advancing

to reconnoitre.

On this, he sent Cazenove, with a detachment, to station himself at

a point well hidden by trees on the flank of the Spaniards, who, with

strange infatuation, continued their advance. Gourgues and his followers

pushed on through the thickets to meet them. As the Spaniards reached

the edge of the open ground, a deadly fire blazed in their faces, and,

before the smoke cleared, the French were among them, sword in hand.

The survivors would have fled; but Cazenove's detachment fell upon their

rear, and all were killed or taken.

When their comrades in the fort beheld their fate, a panic seized them.

Conscious of their own deeds, perpetrated on this very spot, they could

hope no mercy, and their terror multiplied immeasurably the numbers of

their enemy. They abandoned the fort in a body, and fled into the woods

most remote from the French. But here a deadlier foe awaited them; for a

host of Indians leaped up from ambush. Then rose those hideous war-cries

which have curdled the boldest blood and blanched the manliest cheek.

The forest warriors, with savage ecstasy, wreaked their long arrears of

vengeance, while the French hastened to the spot, and lent their swords

to the slaughter. A few prisoners were saved alive; the rest were slain;

and thus did the Spaniards make bloody atonement for the butchery of

Fort Caroline.

But Gourgues's vengeance was not yet appeased. Hard by the fort, the

trees were pointed out to him on which Menendez had hanged his captives,

and placed over them the inscription, "Not as to Frenchmen, but as to

Lutherans."

Gourgues ordered the Spanish prisoners to be led thither.

"Did you think," he sternly said, as the pallid wretches stood ranged

before him, "that so vile a treachery, so detestable a cruelty, against

a King so potent and a nation so generous, would go unpunished? I, one

of the humblest gentlemen among my King's subjects, have charged myself

with avenging it. Even if the Most Christian and the Most Catholic Kings

had been enemies, at deadly war, such perfidy and extreme cruelty

would still have been unpardonable. Now that they are friends and close

allies, there is no name vile enough to brand your deeds, no punishment

sharp enough to requite them. But though you cannot suffer as you

deserve, you shall suffer all that an enemy can honorably inflict, that

your example may teach others to observe the peace and alliance which

you have so perfidiously violated."

They were hanged where the French had hung before them; and over them

was nailed the inscription, burned with a hot iron on a tablet of pine,

"Not as to Spaniards, but as to Traitors, Robbers, and Murderers."

Gourgues's mission was fulfilled. To occupy the country had never been

his intention; nor was it possible, for the Spaniards were still in

force at St. Augustine. His was a whirlwind visitation,--to ravage,

ruin, and vanish. He harangued the Indians, and exhorted them to

demolish the fort. They fell to the work with eagerness, and in less

than a day not one stone was left on another.

Gourgues returned to the forts at the mouth of the river, destroyed

them also, and took up his march for his ships. It was a triumphal

procession. The Indians thronged around the victors with gifts of fish

and game; and an old woman declared that she was now ready to die, since

she had seen the French once more.

The ships were ready for sea. Gourgues bade his disconsolate allies

farewell, and nothing would content them but a promise to return soon.

Before embarking, he addressed his own men:--"My friends, let us give

thanks to God for the success He has granted us. It is He who saved us

from tempests; it is He who inclined the hearts of the Indians towards

us; it is He who blinded the understanding of the Spaniards. They were

four to one, in forts well armed and provisioned. Our right was our only

strength; and yet we have conquered. Not to our own swords, but to God

only, we owe our victory. Then let us thank Him, my friends; let us

never forget His favors; and let us pray that He may continue them,

saving us from dangers, and guiding us safely home. Let us pray, too,

that He may so dispose the hearts of men that our perils and toils may

find favor in the eyes of our King and of all France, since all we have

done was done for the King's service and for the honor of our country."

Thus Spaniards and Frenchmen alike laid their reeking swords on God's

altar.

Gourgues sailed on the third of May, and, gazing back along their

foaming wake, the adventurers looked their last on the scene of their

exploits. Their success had cost its price. A few of their number had

fallen, and hardships still awaited the survivors. Gourgues, however,

reached Rochelle on the day of Pentecost, and the Huguenot citizens

greeted him with all honor. At court it fared worse with him. The King,

still obsequious to Spain, looked on him coldly and askance. The Spanish

minister demanded his head. It was hinted to him that he was not safe,

and he withdrew to Ronen, where he found asylum among his friends. His

fortune was gone; debts contracted for his expedition weighed heavily on

him; and for years he lived in obscurity, almost in misery.

At length his prospects brightened. Elizabeth of England learned his

merits and his misfortunes, and invited him to enter her service. The

King, who, says the Jesuit historian, had always at heart been delighted

with his achievement, openly restored him to favor; while, some years

later, Don Antonio tendered him command of his fleet, to defend his

right to the crown of Portugal against Philip the Second. Gourgues,

happy once more to cross swords with the Spaniards, gladly embraced this

offer; but in 1583, on his way to join the Portuguese prince, he died

at Tours of a sudden illness. The French mourned the loss of the man who

had wiped a blot from the national scutcheon, and respected his memory

as that of one of the best captains of his time. And, in truth, if a

zealous patriotism, a fiery valor, and skilful leadership are worthy

of honor, then is such a tribute due to Dominique de Gourgues,

slave-catcher and half-pirate as he was, like other naval heroes of that

wild age.

Romantic as was his exploit, it lacked the fullness of poetic justice,

since the chief offender escaped him. While Gourgues was sailing towards

Florida, Menendez was in Spain, high in favor at court, where he told

to approving ears how he had butchered the heretics. Borgia, the sainted

General of the Jesuits, was his fast friend; and two years later, when

he returned to America, the Pope, Paul the Fifth, regarding him as an

instrument for the conversion of the Indians, wrote him a letter with

his benediction. He re-established his power in Florida, rebuilt Fort

San Mateo, and taught the Indians that death or flight was the only

refuge from Spanish tyranny. They murdered his missionaries and spurned

their doctrine. "The Devil is the best thing in the world," they cried;

"we adore him; he makes men brave." Even the Jesuits despaired, and

abandoned Florida in disgust.

Menendez was summoned home, where fresh honors awaited him from the

Crown, though, according to the somewhat doubtful assertion of the

heretical Grotius, his deeds had left a stain upon his name among the

people. He was given command of the armada of three hundred sail and

twenty thousand men, which, in 1574, was gathered at Santander against

England and Flanders. But now, at the height of his fortunes, his career

was abruptly closed. He died suddenly, at the age of fifty-five. Grotius

affirms that he killed himself; but, in his eagerness to point the moral

of his story, he seems to have overstepped the bounds of historic truth.

The Spanish bigot was rarely a suicide; for the rites of Christian

burial and repose in consecrated ground were denied to the remains of

the self-murderer. There is positive evidence, too, in a codicil to

the will of Menendez, dated at Santander on the fifteenth of September,

1574, that he was on that day seriously ill, though, as the instrument

declares, "of sound mind." There is reason, then, to believe that this

pious cut-throat died a natural death, crowned with honors, and soothed

by the consolations of his religion.

It was he who crushed French Protestantism in America. To plant

religious freedom on this western soil was not the mission of France. It

was for her to rear in northern forests the banner of absolutism and of

Rome; while among the rocks of Massachusetts England and Calvin fronted

her in dogged opposition, long before the ice-crusted pines of Plymouth

had listened to the rugged psalmody of the Puritan, the solitudes of

Western New York and the stern wilderness of Lake Huron were trodden by

the iron heel of the soldier and the sandalled foot of the Franciscan

friar. France was the true pioneer of the Great West. They who bore the

fleur-de-lis were always in the van, patient, daring, indomitable.

And foremost on this bright roll of forest chivalry stands the

half-forgotten name of Samuel de Champlain.

Part 2

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN AND HIS ASSOCIATES;

WITH A VIEW OF EARLIER FRENCH ADVENTURE IN AMERICA, AND THE LEGENDS OF

THE NORTHERN COASTS.

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN.

CHAPTER I.

1488-1543.

EARLY FRENCH ADVENTURE IN NORTH AMERICA.

When America was first made known to Europe, the part assumed by France

on the borders of that new world was peculiar, and is little recognized.

While the Spaniard roamed sea and land, burning for achievement, red-hot

with bigotry and avarice, and while England, with soberer steps and

a less dazzling result, followed in the path of discovery and

gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first

learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry.

A French writer, however, advances a more ambitious claim. In the

year 1488, four years before the first voyage of Columbus, America, he

maintains, was found by Frenchmen. Cousin, a navigator of Dieppe, being

at sea off the African coast, was forced westward, it is said, by winds

and currents to within sight of an unknown shore, where he presently

descried the mouth of a great river. On board his ship was one Pinzon,

whose conduct became so mutinous that, on his return to Dieppe, Cousin

made complaint to the magistracy, who thereupon dismissed the offender

from the maritime service of the town. Pinzon went to Spain, became

known to Columbus, told him the discovery, and joined him on his voyage

of 1492.

To leave this cloudland of tradition, and approach the confines

of recorded history. The Normans, offspring of an ancestry of

conquerors,--the Bretons, that stubborn, hardy, unchanging race, who,

among Druid monuments changeless as themselves, still cling with Celtic

obstinacy to the thoughts and habits of the past,--the Basques, that

primeval people, older than history,--all frequented from a very early

date the cod-banks of Newfoundland. There is some reason to believe

that this fishery existed before the voyage of Cabot, in 1497; there is

strong evidence that it began as early as the year 1504; and it is

well established that, in 1517, fifty Castilian, French, and Portuguese

vessels were engaged in it at once; while in 1527, on the third of

August, eleven sail of Norman, one of Breton, and two of Portuguese

fishermen were to be found in the Bay of St. John.

From this time forth, the Newfoundland fishery was never abandoned.

French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese made resort to the Banks,

always jealous, often quarrelling, but still drawing up treasure from

those exhaustless mines, and bearing home bountiful provision against

the season of Lent.

On this dim verge of the known world there were other perils than those

of the waves. The rocks and shores of those sequestered seas had, so

thought the voyagers, other tenants than the seal, the walrus, and the

screaming sea-fowl, the bears which stole away their fish before their

eyes, and the wild natives dressed in seal-skins. Griffius--so ran

the story--infested the mountains of Labrador. Two islands, north of

Newfoundland, were given over to the fiends from whom they derived

their name, the Isles of Demons. An old map pictures their occupants

at length,--devils rampant, with wings, horns, and tail. The passing

voyager heard the din of their infernal orgies, and woe to the sailor or

the fisherman who ventured alone into the haunted woods. "True it is,"

writes the old cosmographer Thevet, "and I myself have heard it, not

from one, but from a great number of the sailors and pilots with whom I

have made many voyages, that, when they passed this way, they heard

in the air, on the tops and about the masts, a great clamor of men's

voices, confused and inarticulate, such as you may hear from the crowd

at a fair or market-place whereupon they well knew that the Isle of

Demons was not far off." And he adds, that he himself, when among the

Indians, had seen them so tormented by these infernal persecutors, that

they would fall into his arms for relief; on which, repeating a passage

of the Gospel of St. John, he had driven the imps of darkness to a

speedy exodus. They are comely to look upon, he further tells us; yet,

by reason of their malice, that island is of late abandoned, and all who

dwelt there have fled for refuge to the main.

While French fishermen plied their trade along these gloomy coasts, the

French government spent it's energies on a different field. The vitality

of the kingdom was wasted in Italian wars. Milan and Naples offered a

more tempting prize than the wilds of Baccalaos. Eager for glory and for

plunder, a swarm of restless nobles followed their knight-errant King,

the would-be paladin, who, misshapen in body and fantastic in mind, had

yet the power to raise a storm which the lapse of generations could

not quell. Under Charles the Eighth and his successor, war and intrigue

ruled the day; and in the whirl of Italian politics there was no leisure

to think of a new world.

Yet private enterprise was not quite benumbed. In 1506, one Denis of

Honfleur explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence; 2 two years later, Aubert

of Dieppe followed on his track; and in 1518, the Baron de Lery made an

abortive attempt at settlement on Sable Island, where the cattle left by

him remained and multiplied.

The crown passed at length to Francis of Angouleme. There were in

his nature seeds of nobleness,--seeds destined to bear little fruit.

Chivalry and honor were always on his lips; but Francis the First, a

forsworn gentleman, a despotic king, vainglorious, selfish, sunk in

debaucheries, was but the type of an era which retained the forms of the

Middle Age without its soul, and added to a still prevailing barbarism

the pestilential vices which hung fog-like around the dawn of

civilization. Yet he esteemed arts and letters, and, still more, coveted

the eclat which they could give. The light which was beginning to pierce

the feudal darkness gathered its rays around his throne. Italy was

rewarding the robbers who preyed on her with the treasures of her

knowledge and her culture; and Italian genius, of whatever stamp, found

ready patronage at the hands of Francis. Among artists, philosophers,

and men of letters enrolled in his service stands the humbler name of a

Florentine navigator, John Verrazzano.

He was born of an ancient family, which could boast names eminent in

Florentine history, and of which the last survivor died in 1819. He has

been called a pirate, and he was such in the same sense in which Drake,

Hawkins, and other valiant sea-rovers of his own and later times,

merited the name; that is to say, he would plunder and kill a Spaniard

on the high seas without waiting for a declaration of war.

The wealth of the Indies was pouring into the coffers of Charles the

Fifth, and the exploits of Cortes had given new lustre to his crown.

Francis the First begrudged his hated rival the glories and profits

of the New World. He would fain have his share of the prize; and

Verrazzano, with four ships, was despatched to seek out a passage

westward to the rich kingdom of Cathay.

Some doubt has of late been cast on the reality of this voyage of

Verrazzano, and evidence, mainly negative in kind, has been adduced to

prove the story of it a fabrication; but the difficulties of incredulity

appear greater than those of belief, and no ordinary degree of

scepticism is required to reject the evidence that the narrative is

essentially true.

Towards the end of the year 1523, his four ships sailed from Dieppe;

but a storm fell upon him, and, with two of the vessels, he ran back in

distress to a port of Brittany. What became of the other two does not

appear. Neither is it clear why, after a preliminary cruise against the

Spaniards, he pursued his voyage with one vessel alone, a caravel called

the "Dauphine." With her he made for Madeira, and, on the seventeenth

of January, 1524, set sail from a barren islet in its neighborhood, and

bore away for the unknown world. In forty-nine days they neared a low

shore, not far from the site of Wilmington in North Carolina, "a newe

land," exclaims the voyager, "never before seen of any man, either

auncient or moderne." Verrazzano steered southward in search of a

harbor, and, finding none, turned northward again. Presently he sent a

boat ashore. The inhabitants, who had fled at first, soon came down to

the strand in wonder and admiration, pointing out a landing-place, and

making gestures of friendship. "These people," says Verrazzano, "goe

altogether naked, except only certain skinnes of beastes like unto

marterns [martens], which they fasten onto a narrowe girdle made of

grasse. They are of colour russet, and not much unlike the Saracens,

their hayre blacke, thicke, and not very long, which they tye togeather

in a knot behinde, and weare it like a taile."

He describes the shore as consisting of small low hillocks of fine sand,

intersected by creeks and inlets, and beyond these a country "full of

Palme [pine?] trees, Bay trees, and high Cypresse trees, and many other

sortes of trees, vnknowne in Europe, which yeeld most sweete sanours,

farre from the shore." Still advancing northward, Verrazzano sent a boat

for a supply of water. The surf ran high, and the crew could not land;

but an adventurous young sailor jumped overboard and swam shoreward with

a gift of beads and trinkets for the Indians, who stood watching him.

His heart failed as he drew near; he flung his gift among them, turned,

and struck out for the boat. The surf dashed him back, flinging him with

violence on the beach among the recipients of his bounty, who seized him

by the arms and legs, and, while he called lustily for aid, answered him

with outcries designed to allay his terrors. Next they kindled a

great fire,--doubtless to roast and devour him before the eyes of

his comrades, gazing in horror from their boat. On the contrary,

they carefully warmed him, and were trying to dry his clothes, when,

recovering from his bewilderment, he betrayed a strong desire to escape

to his friends; whereupon, "with great love, clapping him fast about,

with many embracings," they led him to the shore, and stood watching

till he had reached the boat.

It only remained to requite this kindness, and an opportunity soon

occurred; for, coasting the shores of Virginia or Maryland, a party went

on shore and found an old woman, a young girl, and several children,

hiding with great terror in the grass. Having, by various blandishments,

gained their confidence, they carried off one of the children as a

curiosity, and, since the girl was comely, would fain have taken her

also, but desisted by reason of her continual screaming.

Verrazzano's next resting-place was the Bay of New York. Rowing up in

his boat through the Narrows, under the steep heights of Staten Island,

he saw the harbor within dotted with canoes of the feathered natives,

coming from the shore to welcome him. But what most engaged the eyes

of the white men were the fancied signs of mineral wealth in the

neighboring hills.

Following the shores of Long Island, they came to an island, which may

have been Block Island, and thence to a harbor, which was probably that

of Newport. Here they stayed fifteen days, most courteously received by

the inhabitants. Among others appeared two chiefs, gorgeously arrayed

in painted deer-skins,--kings, as Verrazzano calls them, with attendant

gentlemen; while a party of squaws in a canoe, kept by their jealous

lords at a safe distance from the caravel, figure in the narrative

as the queen and her maids. The Indian wardrobe had been taxed to

its utmost to do the strangers honor,--copper bracelets, lynx-skins,

raccoon-skins, and faces bedaubed with gaudy colors.

Again they spread their sails, and on the fifth of May bade farewell to

the primitive hospitalities of Newport, steered along the rugged coasts

of New England, and surveyed, ill pleased, the surf-beaten rocks, the

pine-tree and the fir, the shadows and the gloom of mighty forests. Here

man and nature alike were savage and repellent. Perhaps some plundering

straggler from the fishing-banks, some manstealer like the Portuguese

Cortereal, or some kidnapper of children and ravisher of squaws like

themselves, had warned the denizens of the woods to beware of the

worshippers of Christ. Their only intercourse was in the way of trade.

From the brink of the rocks which overhung the sea the Indians would let

down a cord to the boat below, demand fish-hooks, knives, and steel, in

barter for their furs, and, their bargain made, salute the voyagers

with unseemly gestures of derision and scorn. The French once ventured

ashore; but a war-whoop and a shower of arrows sent them back to their

boats.

Verrazzano coasted the seaboard of Maine, and sailed northward as far as

Newfoundland, whence, provisions failing, he steered for France. He had

not found a passage to Cathay, but he had explored the American coast

from the thirty-fourth degree to the fiftieth, and at various points had

penetrated several leagues into the country. On the eighth of July, he

wrote from Dieppe to the King the earliest description known to exist of

the shores of the United States.

Great was the joy that hailed his arrival, and great were the hopes of

emolument and wealth from the new-found shores. The merchants of Lyons

were in a flush of expectation. For himself, he was earnest to return,

plant a colony, and bring the heathen tribes within the pale of the

Church. But the time was inauspicious. The year of his voyage was to

France a year of disasters,--defeat in Italy, the loss of Milan, the

death of the heroic Bayard; and, while Verrazzano was writing his

narrative at Dieppe, the traitor Bourbon was invading Provence.

Preparation, too, was soon on foot for the expedition which, a few

months later, ended in the captivity of Francis on the field of Pavia.

Without a king, without an army, without money, convulsed within,

and threatened from without, France after that humiliation was in no

condition to renew her Transatlantic enterprise.

Henceforth few traces remain of the fortunes of Verrazzano. Ramusio

affirms, that, on another voyage, he was killed and eaten by savages,

in sight of his followers; and a late writer hazards the conjecture that

this voyage, if made at all, was made in the service of Henry the Eighth

of England. But a Spanish writer affirms that, in 1527, he was hanged

at Puerto del Pico as a pirate, and this assertion is fully confirmed by

authentic documents recently brought to light.

The fickle-minded King, always ardent at the outset of an enterprise and

always flagging before its close, divided, moreover, between the smiles

of his mistresses and the assaults of his enemies, might probably have

dismissed the New World from his thoughts. But among the favorites of

his youth was a high-spirited young noble, Philippe de BrionChabot, the

partner of his joustings and tennis-playing, his gaming and gallantries.

He still stood high in the royal favor, and, after the treacherous

escape of Francis from captivity, held the office of Admiral of France.

When the kingdom had rallied in some measure from its calamnities, he

conceived the purpose of following up the path which Verrazzano had

opened.

The ancient town of St. Malo--thrust out like a buttress into the

sea, strange and grim of aspect, breathing war front its walls and

battlements of ragged stone, a stronghold of privateers, the home of a

race whose intractable and defiant independence neither time nor change

has subdued--has been for centuries a nursery of hardy mariners. Among

the earliest and most eminent on its list stands the name of Jacques

Cartier. His portrait hangs in the town-hall of St. Malo,--bold, keen

features bespeaking a spirit not apt to quail before the wrath of man

or of the elements. In him Chabot found a fit agent of his design, if,

indeed, its suggestion is not due to the Breton navigator.

Sailing from St. Malo on the twentieth of April, 1534, Cartier steered

for Newfoundland, passed through the Straits of Belle Isle, entered the

Gulf of Chaleurs, planted a cross at Gaspe, and, never doubting that he

was on the high road to Cathay, advanced up the St. Lawrence till he

saw the shores of Anticosti. But autumnal storms were gathering. The

voyagers took counsel together, turned their prows eastward, and bore

away for France, carrying thither, as a sample of the natural products

of the New World, two young Indians, lured into their clutches by an act

of villanous treachery. The voyage was a mere reconnoissance.

The spirit of discovery was awakened. A passage to India could be found,

and a new France built up beyond the Atlantic. Mingled with such views

of interest and ambition was another motive scarcely less potent. The

heresy of Luther was convulsing Germany, and the deeper heresy of Calvin

infecting France. Devout Catholics, kindling with redoubled zeal, would

fain requite the Church for her losses in the Old World by winning to

her fold the infidels of the New. But, in pursuing an end at once

so pious and so politic, Francis the First was setting at naught the

supreme Pontiff himself, since, by the preposterous bull of Alexander

the Sixth, all America had been given to the Spaniards.

In October, 1534, Cartier received from Chabot another commission, and,

in spite of secret but bitter opposition from jealous traders of St.

Malo, he prepared for a second voyage. Three vessels, the largest not

above a hundred and twenty tons, were placed at his disposal, and Claude

de Pontbriand, Charles de la Pommeraye, and other gentlemen of birth,

enrolled themselves for the adventure. On the sixteenth of May, 1535,

officers and sailors assembled in the cathedral of St. Malo, where,

after confession and mass, they received the parting blessing of the

bishop. Three days later they set sail. The dingy walls of the rude

old seaport, and the white rocks that line the neighboring shores

of Brittany, faded from their sight, and soon they were tossing in a

furious tempest. The scattered ships escaped the danger, and, reuniting

at the Straits of Belle Isle, steered westward along the coast

of Labrador, till they reached a small bay opposite the island of

Anticosti. Cartier called it the Bay of St. Lawrence,--a name afterwards

extended to the entire gulf, and to the great river above.

To ascend this great river, and tempt the hazards of its intricate

navigation with no better pilots than the two young Indians kidnapped

the year before, was a venture of no light risk. But skill or fortune

prevailed; and, on the first of September, the voyagers reached in

safety the gorge of the gloomy Saguenay, with its towering cliffs and

sullen depth of waters. Passing the Isle aux Coudres, and the lofty

promontory of Cape Tourmente, they came to anchor in a quiet channel

between the northern shore and the margin of a richly wooded island,

where the trees were so thickly hung with grapes that Cartier named it

the Island of Bacchus.

Indians came swarming from the shores, paddled their canoes about the

ships, and clambered to the decks to gaze in bewilderment at the novel

scene, and listen to the story of their travelled countrymen, marvellous

in their ears as a visit to another planet. Cartier received them

kindly, listened to the long harangue of the great chief Donnacona,

regaled him with bread and wine; and, when relieved at length of his

guests, set forth in a boat to explore the river above.

As he drew near the opening of the channel, the Hochelaga again spread

before him the broad expanse of its waters. A mighty promontory, rugged

and bare, thrust its scarped front into the surging current. Here,

clothed in the majesty of solitude, breathing the stern poetry of the

wilderness, rose the cliffs now rich with heroic memories, where the

fiery Count Frontenac cast defiance at his foes, where Wolfe, Montcalm,

and Montgomery fell. As yet, all was a nameless barbarism, and a cluster

of wigwams held the site of the rock-built city of Quebec. Its name was

Stadacone, and it owned the sway of the royal Donnacona.

Cartier set out to visit this greasy potentate; ascended the river

St. Charles, by him called the St. Croix, landed, crossed the meadows,

climbed the rocks, threaded the forest, and emerged upon a squalid

hamlet of bark cabins. When, having satisfied their curiosity, he and

his party were rowing for the ships, a friendly interruption met them at

the mouth of the St. Charles. An old chief harangued them from the bank,

men, boys, and children screeched welcome from the meadow, and a troop

of hilarious squaws danced knee-deep in the water. The gift of a few

strings of beads completed their delight and redoubled their agility;

and, from the distance of a mile, their shrill songs of jubilation still

reached the ears of the receding Frenchmen.

The hamlet of Stadacone, with its king, Donnacona, and its naked lords

and princes, was not the metropolis of this forest state, since a town

far greater--so the Indians averred--stood by the brink of the river,

many days' journey above. It was called Hochelaga, and the great river

itself, with a wide reach of adjacent country, had borrowed its name.

Thither, with his two young Indians as guides, Cartier resolved to go;

but misgivings seized the guides as the time drew near, while Donnacona

and his tribesmen, jealous of the plan, set themselves to thwart it. The

Breton captain turned a deaf ear to their dissuasions; on which, failing

to touch his reason, they appealed to his fears.

One morning, as the ships still lay at anchor, the French beheld three

Indian devils descending in a canoe towards them, dressed in black and

white dog-skins, with faces black as ink, and horns long as a man's arm.

Thus arrayed, they drifted by, while the principal fiend, with fixed

eyes, as of one piercing the secrets of futurity, uttered in a loud

voice a long harangue. Then they paddled for the shore; and no sooner

did they reach it than each fell flat like a dead man in the bottom of

the canoe. Aid, however, was at hand; for Donnacona and his tribesmen,

rushing pell-mell from the adjacent woods, raised the swooning

masqueraders, and, with shrill clamors, bore them in their arms within

the sheltering thickets. Here, for a full half-hour, the French could

hear them haranguing in solemn conclave. Then the two young Indians whom

Cartier had brought back from France came out of the bushes, enacting a

pantomime of amazement and terror, clasping their hands, and calling

on Christ and the Virgin; whereupon Cartier, shouting from the vessel,

asked what was the matter. They replied, that the god Coudonagny had

sent to warn the French against all attempts to ascend the great river,

since, should they persist, snows, tempests, and drifting ice would

requite their rashness with inevitable ruin. The French replied that

Coudonagny was a fool; that he could not hurt those who believed in

Christ; and that they might tell this to his three messengers. The

assembled Indians, with little reverence for their deity, pretended

great contentment at this assurance, and danced for joy along the beach.

Cartier now made ready to depart. And, first, he caused the two larger

vessels to be towed for safe harborage within the mouth of the St.

Charles. With the smallest, a galleon of forty tons, and two open boats,

carrying in all fifty sailors, besides Pontbriand, La Pommeraye, and

other gentlemen, he set out for Hochelaga.

Slowly gliding on their way by walls of verdure brightened in the

autumnal sun, they saw forests festooned with grape-vines, and waters

alive with wild-fowl; they heard the song of the blackbird, the thrush,

and, as they fondly thought, the nightingale. The galleon grounded; they

left her, and, advancing with the boats alone, on the second of October

neared the goal of their hopes, the mysterious Hochelaga.

Just below where now are seen the quays and storehouses of Montreal,

a thousand Indians thronged the shore, wild with delight, dancing,

singing, crowding about the strangers, and showering into the boats

their gifts of fish and maize; and, as it grew dark, fires lighted up

the night, while, far and near, the French could see the excited savages

leaping and rejoicing by the blaze.

At dawn of day, marshalled and accoutred, they marched for Hochelaga.

An Indian path led them through the forest which covered the site of

Montreal. The morning air was chill and sharp, the leaves were changing

hue, and beneath the oaks the ground was thickly strewn with acorns.

They soon met an Indian chief with a party of tribesmen, or, as the

old narrative has it, "one of the principal lords of the said city,"

attended with a numerous retinue. Greeting them after the concise

courtesy of the forest, he led them to a fire kindled by the side of the

path for their comfort and refreshment, seated them on the ground, and

made them a long harangue, receiving in requital of his eloquence two

hatchets, two knives, and a crucifix, the last of which he was invited

to kiss. This done, they resumed their march, and presently came upon

open fields, covered far and near with the ripened maize, its leaves

rustling, and its yellow grains gleaming between the parting husks.

Before them, wrapped in forests painted by the early frosts, rose the

ridgy back of the Mountain of Montreal, and below, encompassed with its

corn-fields, lay the Indian town. Nothing was visible but its encircling

palisades. They were of trunks of trees, set in a triple row. The outer

and inner ranges inclined till they met and crossed near the summit,

while the upright row between them, aided by transverse braces, gave to

the whole an abundant strength. Within were galleries for the defenders,

rude ladders to mount them, and magazines of stones to throw down on the

heads of assailants. It was a mode of fortification practised by all the

tribes speaking dialects of the Iroquois.

The voyagers entered the narrow portal. Within, they saw some fifty of

those large oblong dwellings so familiar in after years to the eyes of

the Jesuit apostles in Iroquois and Huron forests. They were about fifty

yards in length, and twelve or fifteen wide, framed of sapling poles

closely covered with sheets of bark, and each containing several fires

and several families. In the midst of the town was an open area, or

public square, a stone's throw in width. Here Cartier and his

followers stopped, while the surrounding houses of bark disgorged their

inmates,--swarms of children, and young women and old, their infants

in their arms. They crowded about the visitors, crying for delight,

touching their beards, feeling their faces, and holding up the

screeching infants to be touched in turn. The marvellous visitors,

strange in hue, strange in attire, with moustached lip and bearded chin,

with arquebuse, halberd, helmet, and cuirass, seemed rather demigods

than men.

Due time having been allowed for this exuberance of feminine rapture,

the warriors interposed, banished the women and children to a distance,

and squatted on the ground around the French, row within row of swarthy

forms and eager faces, "as if," says Cartier, "we were going to act a

play." Then appeared a troop of women, each bringing a mat, with which

they carpeted the bare earth for the behoof of their guests. The

latter being seated, the chief of the nation was borne before them on a

deerskin by a number of his tribesmen, a bedridden old savage, paralyzed

and helpless, squalid as the rest in his attire, and distinguished only

by a red fillet, inwrought with the dyed quills of the Canada porcupine,

encircling his lank black hair. They placed him on the ground at

Cartier's feet and made signs of welcome for him, while he pointed

feebly to his powerless limbs, and implored the healing touch from

the hand of the French chief. Cartier complied, and received in

acknowledgment the red fillet of his grateful patient. Then from

surrounding dwellings appeared a woeful throng, the sick, the lame, the

blind, the maimed, the decrepit, brought or led forth and placed on the

earth before the perplexed commander, "as if," he says, "a god had

come down to cure them." His skill in medicine being far behind the

emergency, he pronounced over his petitioners a portion of the Gospel

of St. John, made the sign of the cross, and uttered a prayer, not

for their bodies only, but for their miserable souls. Next he read the

passion of the Saviour, to which, though comprehending not a word, his

audience listened with grave attention. Then came a distribution of

presents. The squaws and children were recalled, and, with the warriors,

placed in separate groups. Knives and hatchets were given to the men,

and beads to the women, while pewter rings and images of the Agnus

Dei were flung among the troop of children, whence ensued a vigorous

scramble in the square of Hochelaga. Now the French trumpeters pressed

their trumpets to their lips, and blew a blast that filled the air with

warlike din and the hearts of the hearers with amazement and delight.

Bidding their hosts farewells the visitors formed their ranks and

defiled through the gate once more, despite the efforts of a crowd of

women, who, with clamorous hospitality, beset them with gifts of fish,

beans, corn, and other viands of uninviting aspect, which the Frenchmen

courteously declined.

A troop of Indians followed, and guided them to the top of the

neighboring mountain. Cartier called it Mont Royal, Montreal; and hence

the name of the busy city which now holds the site of the vanished

Iloclielaga. Stadacone and Hochelaga, Quebec and Montreal, in the

sixteenth century as in the nineteenth, were the centres of Canadian

population.

From the summit, that noble prospect met his eye which at this day is

the delight of tourists, but strangely changed, since, first of white

men, the Breton voyager gazed upon it. Tower and dome and spire,

congregated roofs, white sail, and gliding steamer, animate its vast

expanse with varied life. Cartier saw a different scene. East, west, and

south, the mantling forest was over all, and the broad blue ribbon of

the great river glistened amid a realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds

of Mexico, stretched a leafy desert, and the vast hive of industry,

the mighty battle-ground of later centuries, lay sunk in savage torpor,

wrapped in illimitable woods.

The French re-embarked, bade farewell to Hochelaga, retraced their

lonely course down the St. Lawrence, and reached Stadacone in safety. On

the bank of the St. Charles, their companions had built in their absence

a fort of palisades, and the ships, hauled up the little stream, lay

moored before it. Here the self-exiled company were soon besieged by the

rigors of the Canadian winter. The rocks, the shores, the pine-trees,

the solid floor of the frozen river, all alike were blanketed in snow

beneath the keen cold rays of the dazzling sun. The drifts rose above

the sides of their ships; masts, spars, and cordage were thick with

glittering incrustations and sparkling rows of icicles; a frosty armor,

four inches thick, encased the bulwarks. Yet, in the bitterest weather,

the neighboring Indians, "hardy," says the journal, "as so many beasts,"

came daily to the fort, wading, half naked, waist-deep through the

snow. At length, their friendship began to abate; their visits grew less

frequent, and during December had wholly ceased, when a calamity fell

upon the French.

A malignant scurvy broke out among them. Man after man went down before

the hideous disease, till twenty-five were dead, and only three or four

were left in health. The sound were too few to attend the sick, and the

wretched sufferers lay in helpless despair, dreaming of the sun and the

vines of France. The ground, hard as flint, defied their feeble efforts,

and, unable to bury their dead, they hid them in snow-drifts. Cartier

appealed to the saints; but they turned a deaf ear. Then he nailed

against a tree an image of the Virgin, and on a Sunday summoned forth

his woe-begone followers, who, haggard, reeling, bloated with their

maladies, moved in procession to the spot, and, kneeling in the snow,

sang litanies and psalms of David. That day died Philippe Rougemont,

of Amboise, aged twenty-two years. The Holy Virgin deigned no other

response.

There was fear that the Indians, learning their misery, might finish

the work that scurvy had begun. None of them, therefore, were allowed to

approach the fort; and when a party of savages lingered within hearing,

Cartier forced his invalid garrison to beat with sticks and stones

against the walls, that their dangerous neighbors, deluded by the

clatter, might think them engaged in hard labor. These objects of their

fear proved, however, the instruments of their salvation. Cartier,

walking one day near the river, met an Indian, who not long before had

been prostrate, like many of his fellows, with the scurvy, but who was

now, to all appearance, in high health and spirits. What agency had

wrought this marvellous recovery? According to the Indian, it was a

certain evergreen, called by him ameda, a decoction of the leaves of

which was sovereign against the disease. The experiment was tried. The

sick men drank copiously of the healing draught,--so copiously indeed

that in six days they drank a tree as large as a French oak. Thus

vigorously assailed, the distemper relaxed its hold, and health and hope

began to revisit the hapless company.

When this winter of misery had worn away, and the ships were thawed

from their icy fetters, Cartier prepared to return. He had made notable

discoveries; but these were as nothing to the tales of wonder that had

reached his ear,--of a land of gold and rubies, of a nation white like

the French, of men who lived without food, and of others to whom Nature

had granted but one leg. Should he stake his credit on these marvels? It

were better that they who had recounted them to him should, with their

own lips, recount them also to the King, and to this end he resolved

that Donnacona and his chiefs should go with him to court. He lured them

therefore to the fort, and led them into an ambuscade of sailors, who,

seizing the astonished guests, hurried them on board the ships. Having

accomplished this treachery, the voyagers proceeded to plant the emblem

of Christianity. The cross was raised, the fleur-de-lis planted near it,

and, spreading their sails, they steered for home. It was the sixteenth

of July, 1536, when Cartier again cast anchor under the walls of St.

Malo.

A rigorous climate, a savage people, a fatal disease, and a soil

barren of gold were the allurements of New France. Nor were the times

auspicious for a renewal of the enterprise. Charles the Fifth, flushed

with his African triumphs, challenged the Most Christian King to single

combat. The war flamed forth with renewed fury, and ten years elapsed

before a hollow truce varnished the hate of the royal rivals with a thin

pretence of courtesy. Peace returned; but Francis the First was sinking

to his ignominious grave, under the scourge of his favorite goddess, and

Chabot, patron of the former voyages, was in disgrace.

Meanwhile the ominous adventure of New France had found a champion in

the person of Jean Francois de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval, a nobleman

of Picardy. Though a man of high account in his own province, his past

honors paled before the splendor of the titles said to have been now

conferred on him, Lord of Norembega, Viceroy and Lieutenant-General

in Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay, Newfoundland, Belle Isle, Carpunt,

Labrador, the Great Bay, and Baccalaos. To this windy gift of ink and

parchment was added a solid grant from the royal treasury, with which

five vessels were procured and equipped; and to Cartier was given the

post of Captain-General. "We have resolved," says Francis, "to send him

again to the lands of Canada and Hochelaga, which form the extremity

of Asia towards the west." His commission declares the objects of

the enterprise to be discovery, settlement, and the conversion of the

Indians, who are described as "men without knowledge of God or use of

reason,"--a pious design, held doubtless in full sincerity by the royal

profligate, now, in his decline, a fervent champion of the Faith and a

strenuous tormentor of heretics. The machinery of conversion was of

a character somewhat questionable, since Cartier and Roberval were

empowered to ransack the prisons for thieves, robbers, and other

malefactors, to complete their crews and strengthen the colony.

"Whereas," says the King, "we have undertaken this voyage for the honor

of God our Creator, desiring with all our heart to do that which shall

be agreeable to Him, it is our will to perform a compassionate and

meritorious work towards criminals and malefactors, to the end that they

may acknowledge the Creator, return thanks to Him, and mend their lives.

Therefore we have resolved to cause to be delivered to our aforesaid

lieutenant (Roberval), such and so many of the aforesaid criminals

and malefactors detained in our prisons as may seem to him useful and

necessary to be carried to the aforesaid countries." Of the expected

profits of the voyage the adventurers were to have one third and the

King another, while the remainder was to be reserved towards defraying

expenses.

With respect to Donnacona and his tribesmen, basely kidnapped at

Stadacone, their souls had been better cared for than their bodies; for,

having been duly baptized, they all died within a year or two, to the

great detriment, as it proved, of the expedition.

Meanwhile, from beyond the Pyrenees, the Most Catholic King, with

alarmed and jealous eye, watched the preparations of his Most Christian

enemy. America, in his eyes, was one vast province of Spain, to be

vigilantly guarded against the intruding foreigner. To what end were

men mustered, and ships fitted out in the Breton seaports? Was it for

colonization, and if so, where? Was it in Southern Florida, or on the

frozen shores of Baccalaos, of which Breton cod-fishers claimed the

discovery? Or would the French build forts on the Bahamas, whence they

could waylay the gold ships in the Bahama Channel? Or was the expedition

destined against the Spanish settlements of the islands or the Main?

Reinforcements were despatched in haste, and a spy was sent to France,

who, passing from port to port, Quimper, St. Malo, Brest, Morlaix, came

back freighted with exaggerated tales of preparation. The Council of the

Indies was called. "The French are bound for Baccalaos,"--such was

the substance of their report; "your Majesty will do well to send two

caravels to watch their movements, and a force to take possession of the

said country. And since there is no other money to pay for it, the gold

from Peru, now at Panama, might be used to that end." The Cardinal of

Seville thought lightly of the danger, and prophesied that the French

would reap nothing from their enterprise but disappointment and loss.

The King of Portugal, sole acknowledged partner with Spain in the

ownership of the New World, was invited by the Spanish ambassador to

take part in an expedition against the encroaching French. "They can do

no harm at Baccalaos," was the cold reply; "and so," adds the indignant

ambassador, "this King would say if they should come and take him here

at Lisbon; such is the softness they show here on the one hand, while,

on the other, they wish to give law to the whole world."

The five ships, occasions of this turmoil and alarm, had lain at St.

Malo waiting for cannon and munitions from Normandy and Champagne. They

waited in vain, and as the King's orders were stringent against delay,

it was resolved that Cartier should sail at once, leaving Roberval to

follow with additional ships when the expected supplies arrived.

On the twenty-third of May, 1541, the Breton captain again spread his

canvas for New France, and, passing in safety the tempestuous Atlantic,

the fog-banks of Newfoundland, the island rocks clouded with screaming

sea-fowl, and the forests breathing piny odors from the shore, cast

anchor again beneath the cliffs of Quebec. Canoes came out from shore

filled with feathered savages inquiring for their kidnapped chiefs.

"Donnacona," replied Cartier, "is dead;" but he added the politic

falsehood, that the others had married in France, and lived in state,

like great lords. The Indians pretended to be satisfied; but it was soon

apparent that they looked askance on the perfidious strangers.

Cartier pursued his course, sailed three leagues and a half up the St.

Lawrence, and anchored off the mouth of the River of Cap Rouge. It

was late in August, and the leafy landscape sweltered in the sun. The

Frenchmen landed, picked up quartz crystals on the shore and thought

them diamonds, climbed the steep promontory, drank at the spring near

the top, looked abroad on the wooded slopes beyond the little river,

waded through the tall grass of the meadow, found a quarry of slate,

and gathered scales of a yellow mineral which glistened like gold, then

returned to their boats, crossed to the south shore of the St. Lawrence,

and, languid with the heat, rested in the shade of forests laced with an

entanglement of grape-vines.

Now their task began, and while some cleared off the woods and sowed

turnip-seed, others cut a zigzag road up the height, and others built

two forts, one at the summit, and one on the shore below. The forts

finished, the Vicomte de Beaupre took command, while Cartier went with

two boats to explore the rapids above Hochelaga. When at length he

returned, the autumn was far advanced; and with the gloom of a Canadian

November came distrust, foreboding, and homesickness. Roberval had not

appeared; the Indians kept jealously aloof; the motley colony was

sullen as the dull, raw air around it. There was disgust and ire at

Charlesbourg-Royal, for so the place was called.

Meanwhile, unexpected delays had detained the impatient Roberval; nor

was it until the sixteenth of April, 1542, that, with three ships and

two hundred colonists, he set sail from Rochelle. When, on the eighth

of June, he entered the harbor of St. John, he found seventeen

fishing-vessels lying there at anchor. Soon after, he descried three

other sail rounding the entrance of the haven, and, with anger and

amazement, recognized the ships of Jacques Cartier. That voyager had

broken up his colony and abandoned New France. What motives had prompted

a desertion little consonant with the resolute spirit of the man it is

impossible to say,--whether sickness within, or Indian enemies without,

disgust with an enterprise whose unripened fruits had proved so hard

and bitter, or discontent at finding himself reduced to a post of

subordination in a country which he had discovered and where he had

commanded. The Viceroy ordered him to return; but Cartier escaped with

his vessels under cover of night, and made sail for France, carrying

with him as trophies a few quartz diamonds from Cap Rouge, and grains

of sham gold from the neighboring slate ledges. Thus closed the third

Canadian voyage of this notable explorer. His discoveries had gained

for him a patent of nobility, and he owned the seigniorial mansion of

Limoilou, a rude structure of stone still standing. Here, and in the

neighboring town of St. Malo, where also he had a house, he seems to

have lived for many years.

Roberval once more set sail, steering northward to the Straits of Belle

Isle and the dreaded Isles of Demons. And here an incident befell which

the all-believing Thevet records in manifest good faith, and which,

stripped of the adornments of superstition and a love of the marvellous,

has without doubt a nucleus of truth. I give the tale as I find it.

The Viceroy's company was of a mixed complexion. There were nobles,

officers, soldiers, sailors, adventurers, with women too, and children.

Of the women, some were of birth and station, and among them a damsel

called Marguerite, a niece of Roberval himself. In the ship was a

young gentleman who had embarked for love of her. His love was too well

requited; and the stern Viceroy, scandalized and enraged at a passion

which scorned concealment and set shame at defiance, cast anchor by the

haunted island, landed his indiscreet relative, gave her four arquebuses

for defence, and, with an old Norman nurse named Bastienne, who had

pandered to the lovers, left her to her fate. Her gallant threw himself

into the surf, and by desperate effort gained the shore, with two more

guns and a supply of ammunition.

The ship weighed anchor, receded, vanished, and they were left alone.

Yet not so, for the demon lords of the island beset them day and night,

raging around their hut with a confused and hungry clamoring, striving

to force the frail barrier. The lovers had repented of their sin, though

not abandoned it, and Heaven was on their side. The saints vouchsafed

their aid, and the offended Virgin, relenting, held before them her

protecting shield. In the form of beasts or other shapes abominably and

unutterably hideous, the brood of hell, howling in baffled fury, tore

at the branches of the sylvan dwelling; but a celestial hand was ever

interposed, and there was a viewless barrier which they might not pass.

Marguerite became pregnant. Here was a double prize, two souls in one,

mother and child. The fiends grew frantic, but all in vain. She stood

undaunted amid these horrors; but her lover, dismayed and heartbroken,

sickened and died. Her child soon followed; then the old Norman nurse

found her unhallowed rest in that accursed soil, and Marguerite was

left alone. Neither her reason nor her courage failed. When the demons

assailed her, she shot at them with her gun, but they answered with

hellish merriment, and thenceforth she placed her trust in Heaven alone.

There were foes around her of the upper, no less than of the nether

world. Of these, the bears were the most redoubtable; yet, being

vulnerable to mortal weapons, she killed three of them, all, says the

story, "as white as an egg."

It was two years and five months from her landing on the island, when,

far out at sea, the crew of a small fishing-craft saw a column of smoke

curling upward from the haunted shore. Was it a device of the fiends to

lure them to their ruin? They thought so, and kept aloof. But misgiving

seized them. They warily drew near, and descried a female figure in wild

attire waving signals from the strand. Thus at length was Marguerite

rescued and restored to her native France, where, a few years later, the

cosmographer Thevet met her at Natron in Perigord, and heard the tale of

wonder from her own lips.

Having left his offending niece to the devils and bears of the Isles of

Demons, Roberval held his course up the St. Lawrence, and dropped anchor

before the heights of Cap Rouge. His company landed; there were bivouacs

along the strand, a hubbub of pick and spade, axe, saw, and hammer; and

soon in the wilderness uprose a goodly structure, half barrack, half

castle, with two towers, two spacious halls, a kitchen, chambers,

storerooms, workshops, cellars, garrets, a well, an oven, and two

watermills. Roberval named it France-Roy, and it stood on that bold

acclivity where Cartier had before intrenched himself, the St. Lawrence

in front, and on the right the River of Cap Rouge. Here all the colony

housed under the same roof, like one of the experimental communities

of recent days,--officers, soldiers, nobles, artisans, laborers, and

convicts, with the women and children in whom lay the future hope of New

France.

Experience and forecast had both been wanting. There were storehouses,

but no stores; mills, but no grist; an ample oven, and a dearth of

bread. It was only when two of the ships had sailed for France that

they took account of their provision and discovered its lamentable

shortcoming. Winter and famine followed. They bought fish from the

Indians, and dug roots and boiled them in whale-oil. Disease broke out,

and, before spring, killed one third of the colony. The rest would have

quarrelled, mutinied, and otherwise aggravated their inevitable woes,

but disorder was dangerous under the iron rule of the inexorable

Roberval. Michel Gaillon was detected in a petty theft, and hanged. Jean

de Nantes, for a more venial offence, was kept in irons. The quarrels of

men and the scolding of women were alike requited at the whipping-post,

"by which means," quaintly says the narrative, "they lived in peace."

Thevet, while calling himself the intimate friend of the Viceroy, gives

a darker coloring to his story. He says that, forced to unceasing

labor, and chafed by arbitrary rules, some of the soldiers fell under

Roberval's displeasure, and six of them, formerly his favorites, were

hanged in one day. Others were banished to an island, and there kept in

fetters; while, for various light offences, several, both men and women,

were shot. Even the Indians were moved to pity, and wept at the sight of

their woes.

And here, midway, our guide deserts us; the ancient narrative is broken,

and the latter part is lost, leaving us to divine as we may the future

of the ill-starred colony. That it did not long survive is certain. The

King, in great need of Roberval, sent Cartier to bring him home, and

this voyage seems to have taken place in the summer of 1543. It is said

that, in after years, the Viceroy essayed to repossess himself of his

Transatlantic domain, and lost his life in the attempt. Thevet, on

the other hand, with ample means of learning the truth, affirms that

Roberval was slain at night, near the Church of the Innocents, in the

heart of Paris.

With him closes the prelude of the French-American drama. Tempestuous

years and a reign of blood and fire were in store for France. The

religious wars begot the hapless colony of Florida, but for more than

half a century they left New France a desert. Order rose at length

out of the sanguinary chaos; the zeal of discovery and the spirit of

commercial enterprise once more awoke, while, closely following, more

potent than they, moved the black-robed forces of the Roman Catholic

reaction.