"The fairest, fruitfullest and pleasantest land in all the world," Jean Ribault had said in his report two years before to Coligny the Great Admiral of France. Live-oaks and cedars untouched for a thousand years were draped in luxuriant grape-vines or wreathed with the mossy gray festoons of "old men's beard." Cypress and pine mingled with the shining foliage of magnolia and palm. From the marsh arose on sudden startled wings multitudes of water-fowl. The dogs tugged and whined eagerly as if they knew that in these vast hunting-forests there was an abundance of game. In this rich land, thus far neglected by the Spanish conquistadores because it yielded neither gold nor silver, surely the Huguenots might find prosperity and peace. Coligny was a Huguenot and a powerful friend, and if the French Protestants now hunted into the mountains or driven to take refuge in England, could be transplanted to America, France might be spared the horrors of religious civil war.
Pierre was thirteen and looked at least three years older. He could not remember when his people and their Huguenot neighbors had not lived in dread of prison, exile or death. When he was not more than ten years old he had guided their old pastor to safety in a mountain cave, and seen men die, singing, for their faith. After the death of his father and mother he had lived for awhile with his mother's people in Navarre, and since they were poor and bread was hard to come by he had run away the year before and found his way to Paris, where Dominic de Gourgues had found him. If the Huguenots had a safe home he might be able to repay the kindness of his cousins. Meanwhile the country, the wild creatures, the copper-colored people and the hard work of landing colonists and supplies were full of interest and excitement for Pierre.
Satouriona, the Indian chief, showed the French officers the pillar which Ribault's party had set up on their previous visit to mark their discovery. The faithful savages had kept it wreathed with evergreens and decked with offerings of maize and fruits as if it were an altar.
Unfortunately not all the colonists were of heroic mind. Most who had left France to seek their fortunes were merchants, craftsman and young Huguenot noblemen whose swords were uneasy in time of peace. French farm-laborers were mainly serfs on Catholic estates, and landowners did not wish to come to the New World. Thus the people of the settlement were city folk with little experience or inclination for cultivating the soil. The Indians grew tired of supplying the wants of so large a number of strangers. Quarrels arose among the French. A discontented group of adventurers mutinied and went off on a wild attempt at piracy. They plundered two ships in the Spanish Indies and were caught by the Spanish governor. The twenty-six who escaped his clutches fled back to the fort, which Laudonnière had built and named Carolina. His faithful lieutenant La Caille arrested them and dragged them to judgment. "Say what you will," said one of the culprits ruefully, "if Laudonnière does not hang us I will never call him an honest man." The four leaders were promptly sentenced to be hanged, but the sentence was commuted to shooting. After that order reigned, for a time.
Some of the tradesmen ranged the wilderness, bringing back feather mantles, arrows tipped with gold, curiously wrought quivers of beautiful fur, wedges of a green stone like beryl. There were reports of a gold mine somewhere in the northern mountains. Ribault did not return with the expected supplies, the Indians had mostly left the neighborhood, and misery and starvation followed, for the game, like the Indians fled the presence of the white men. The Governor began to think of crowding the survivors into the two little ships he had and returning to France.
Matters were in this unsatisfactory state when Captain John Hawkins in his great seven-hundred-ton ship the Jesus, with three smaller ones, the Solomon, the Tiger and the Swallow, put in at the River of May for a supply of fresh water. He gave them provisions, and offered readily to take them back to France on his way to England, but this offer Laudonnière declined.
"Monsieur Hawkins is a good fellow," he observed dryly to La Caille, "and I am grateful to him, but that is no reason why I should abandon this land to his Queen, and that is what he is hoping that I may do."
Others were not so long-sighted. The soldiers and hired workmen raised a howl of wrath and disappointment when they heard that they were not to sail with Hawkins, and openly threatened to desert and sail without leave. Laudonnière answered this threat by the cool statement that he had bought one of the English ships, the Tiger, with provisions for the voyage, and that if they would have a little patience they might soon sail for France in their own fleet. Somewhat taken aback they ceased their clamor and awaited a favoring wind. Before it came, Ribault came sailing back with seven ships, plenty of supplies, and three hundred new colonists.
The fleet approached as cautiously as if it were coming to attack the colony instead of relieving it, and Laudonnière, who saw many of his friends among the new arrivals, presently learned that his enemies among the colonists had written to Coligny describing him as arrogant and cruel and charging that he was about to set up an independent monarchy of his own. The Admiral, three thousand miles away, had decided to ask the Governor to resign. Ribault advised him to stay and fight it out, but Laudonnière was sick and disheartened. Life was certainly far from simple when to use authority was to be accused of treason, and not to use it was to foster piracy, and he had had enough of governing colonies in remote jungles of the New World. He was going home.
To most of the colonists, however, Ribault's arrival promised an end of all their troubles. Stores were landed, tents were pitched, and the women and children were bestowed in the most comfortable quarters which could be found for them just then. To his great satisfaction Pierre found among the arrivals his cousin Barbe and her husband, a carpenter, and her three children, Marie, Suzanne and little René. The two young girls regarded Cousin Pierre as a hero, especially when they learned that the bearskin on the floor of their palmetto hut had but a few months ago been the coat of a live black bear. It had been caught feasting in the maize-fields of the Indians, by their cousin and another youth, and shot with a crossbow bolt by Pierre. They thought the roast corn and stewed clams of their first meal ashore the most delicious food they had ever tasted, and the three-cornered enclosure in the forest with the wilderness all about it, the most wonderful place they had seen.