THE FLEUR-DE-LIS IN FLORIDA.
[In the July number of this magazine is a sketch of the attempt of the Huguenots, under the auspices of Coligny, to found a colony at Port Royal. Two years later, an attempt was made to establish a Protestant community on the banks of the River St. John's, in Florida. The following paper embodies the substance of the letters and narratives of the actors in this striking episode of American history.]
CHAPTER I.
On the 25th of June, 1564, a French squadron anchored a second time off the mouth of the River of May. There were three vessels, the smallest of sixty tons, the largest of one hundred and twenty, all crowded with men. René de Laudonnière held command. He was of a noble race of Poitou, attached to the House of Châtillon, 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 thoughtful and somewhat pensive look, as if already shadowed by the destiny that awaited him.
The intervening year since Ribaut's voyage had been a dark and deadly 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 respite. 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 Condé, 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. With pains and zeal, men were mustered for the work. In name, at least, they were all Huguenots; yet again, as before, the staple of the projected colony was unsound: soldiers, paid out of the royal treasury, hired artisans and tradesmen, joined with a swarm of volunteers from the young Huguenot noblesse, whose restless swords had rusted in their scabbards since the peace. The foundation-stone was left out. There were no tillers of the soil. Such, indeed, were rare among the Huguenots; 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.
With a few officers and twelve soldiers, Laudonnière landed where Ribaut had landed before him; and as their boat neared the shore, they saw an Indian chief who ran to meet them, whooping and clamoring welcome from afar. It was Satouriona, the savage potentate who ruled some thirty villages around the lower St. John's and northward along the coast. With him came two stalwart sons, and behind trooped a host of tribesmen arrayed in smoke-tanned deerskins stained with wild devices in gaudy colors. They crowded around the voyagers with beaming visages and yelps of gratulation. The royal Satouriona could not contain the exuberance of his joy, since in the person of the French commander he recognized the brother of the Sun, descended from the skies to aid him against his great rival, Outina.
Hard by stood the column of stone, graven with the fleur-de-lis, planted here on the former voyage. The Indians had crowned the mystic emblem with evergreens, and placed offerings of maize on the ground before it; for with an affectionate and reverent wonder they had ever remembered the steel-clad strangers whom, two summers before, John Ribaut had led to their shores.
Five miles up the St. John's, or River of May, there stands, on the southern bank, a hill some forty feet high, boldly thrusting itself into the broad and lazy waters. It is now called St. John's Bluff. Thither the Frenchmen repaired, pushed through the dense semi-tropical forest, and climbed the steep acclivity. Thence they surveyed their Canaan. Beneath them moved the unruffled river, gliding around the reed-grown shores of marshy islands, the haunt of alligators, and betwixt the bordering expanse of wide, wet meadows, studded with island-like clumps of pine and palmetto, and bounded by the sunny verge of distant forests. Far on their right, seen by glimpses between the shaggy cedar-boughs, the glistening sea lay stretched along the horizon. Before, in hazy distance, the softened green of the woodlands was veined with the mazes of the countless interlacing streams that drain the watery region behind St. Mary's and Fernandina. To the left, the St. John's flowed gleaming betwixt verdant shores beyond whose portals lay the El Dorado of their dreams. "Briefly," writes Laudonnière, "the place is so pleasant that those which are melancholicke would be inforced to change their humour."
A fresh surprise awaited them. The allotted span of mortal life was quadrupled in that benign climate. Laudonnière's lieutenant, Ottigny, ranging the neighboring forest with a party of soldiers, met a troop of Indians who invited him to their dwellings. Mounted on the back of a stout savage, who plunged with him through the deep marshes, and guided him by devious pathways through the tangled thickets, he arrived at length, and beheld a wondrous spectacle. In the lodge sat a venerable chief, who assured him 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." Despite his dismal condition, the visitor was 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 wonder and admiration.
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 content himself and his men, Laudonnière weighed anchor, and sailed for a time along the neighboring coasts. Returning, confirmed in his first impression, he set forth 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 and sultry 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 broad meadow, a running brook, a lofty wall of encircling forests. The men called it the Vale of Laudonnière. 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.