With promises which he was by no means sure he could keep, Anthony put the canoe in tow and helped the soldier into his own boat to take him to the fort. He had been sent from the stockade to beg for stores at Biloxi. Hunger-weary he had mistaken Deer Island for the beach and had run his felucca ashore there. If Anthony had not happened to see him he might have perished and the remaining soldiers at the stockade have waited in vain for the return of their messenger.
It was with a grave face that Anthony sailed the soldier's boat into Biloxi Bay and with a still heavier heart that he answered the hail of another coastwise sailing-vessel which was coming to meet him from the east. This second man was also a Frenchman, one of the colonists at Mobile. A glance at his yellow skin, sunken cheeks, and burning eyes told his whole story to Anthony. He, too, had been sent to beg for stores. There were women and little children, some old priests and helpless slaves in Mobile.
"We have eaten up our goats and our pigs; only the cows are left," was the report of the Mobile colonist as he and the Mississippi soldier were brought into the fort and presented to the Biloxi commandant by Anthony. "The Sieur de Iberville sent some of our men to live among the Indians who have a little but not much more than we ourselves. He sailed some time ago for France to send provisions back to us with the greatest possible haste. Until they come will you share with us?"
They had nothing to share. The few men still at Dauphin Island and Ship's Island were in equal straits. From these pitiful beggars before the commandant Anthony turned and looked out of a loophole over the waste where his own and the other settlers' gardens should have been in toothsome bearing. Nothing was growing.
"I did not come to the New World to raise cabbages," he thought, resentfully. "I could have done that in Picardy without going out of my own gate. I came to seek my fortune, to carry home a galleon of gold." He smiled ruefully to think that if he could go back now to France he could take little besides his own bones.
As he felt so did all the adventurers. They spent their days in voyaging romantically up and down the Great River and through the bayous and among the islands round its estuary hunting for the gold and pearls which they expected to see shining in the sand or outcropping from the banks. Their nights were taken up with dreams of how they should spend this wealth when once it was found and shoveled into the boats and taken to France.
To be sure, Anthony with the best intentions had said to his Indian flunkies the same thing the other Frenchmen said to theirs: "Plant me some of those juicy melons you know so well how to raise, and potatoes and plenty of maize and beans for the sickquatash, and some of that delightfully bad tobacco. Here are imported French seeds of cabbages and turnips and Old World vegetables. Plant them also."
The docile Indians had sowed the plantations. In the virgin alluvial soil under the warm spring rains the astonished seed from Picardy had grown like Jack's beanstalk. The Indians watching these huge creations were filled with superstitious fears. When an immense cabbage head had burst they shrieked in chorus, "Bad Medicine!" and ran away. Nothing could induce them to return. So the Frenchmen ordered the negroes—there were only a handful of them—"You tend the gardens."
The darkies promised. They really meant to do so that day or the next or the next. If the masters had directed them and stood over them there would have been provisions in plenty. But the masters went gold-hunting and the darkies lay in the shade and waited for the weeds to stop growing so they could pull them all at once. Now the gardens were in ruins and the owners hungry.