While meditating in what way to take advantage of this weakness, he was agreeably surprised by the commission of an error, on the part of the garrison, which materially abridged his difficulties. The Spanish governor, either with a nervous anxiety to anticipate events, or with a fool-hardiness which fancied that they might be controlled by a wholesome audacity, ordered a sortié; and Gourgues with delight beheld a detachment of threescore soldiers, deliberately passing the trenches and marching steadily into the very jaws of ruin.
Holata Cara, as if aware by instinct, was at once at the side of our chevalier, with his spear pointing to the fated detachment. In a moment, the warrior sped with the commands of Gourgues, to his lieutenant, Cazenove, who, with twenty arquebusiers, covered by the wood, contrived to throw himself between the fortress and the advancing party, cutting off all their chances of escape. Then it was that, with wild cries of “France! France!” the chevalier rose from his place of hiding, with all his band, and rushed out upon his prey, reserving his fire until sufficiently near to render every shot certain. The Spaniards recoiled from the assault; but, as they fled, were encountered in the rear by the squad under Cazenove. The battle cry of the French, resounding at once in front and rear, completed their panic, and they offered but a feeble resistance to enemies who neither asked nor offered quarter. It was a massacre rather than a fight; and still, as the French paused in the work of death, a shrill death-cry in their midst aroused them anew, and they could behold the lithe form of the red chief, Holata Cara, speeding from foe to foe, with his macana only, smiting with fearful edge—a single stroke at each several victim, followed ever by the agonizing yell of death! Not a Spaniard escaped of all that passed through the trenches on that miserable sortié!
Terrified by this disaster, so sudden and so complete, the garrison were no longer capable of defence. They no longer hearkened to the commands or the encouragements of their governor. They left, or leaped, the walls; they threw wide the gates, and rushed wildly into the neighboring thickets, in the vain hope to find security in their dark recesses, and under cover of the night. But they knew not well how the woods were occupied. At once a torrent of yells, of torture and of triumph, startled the echoes on every side. The swift arrow, the sharp javelin, the long spear, the stone hatchet, each found an unresisting victim; and the miserable fugitives, maddened with terror, darted back upon the fortress, which was already in the possession of the French. They had seized the opportunity, and in the moment when the insubordinate garrison threw wide the gates, and leaped blindly from the parapets, they had swiftly occupied their places. The fugitive Spaniards, recoiling from the savages, only changed one form of death for another. They suffered on all hands—were mercilessly shot down as they fled, or stabbed as they surrendered; those only excepted who were chosen to expiate, more solemnly and terribly, the great crime of which they had been guilty!
[IX.]
THE SACRIFICE OF THE VICTIMS.
The captured fortress was won with a singular facility, and with so little loss to the assailants, as to confirm them in the conviction that the service was acceptable to God. HE had strengthened their hearts and arms—HE had hung his shield of protection over them—HE had made, through the sting of conscience, the souls of the murderous Spaniards to quake in fear at the very sight of the avengers! The fortress of La Caroline was found to have been as well supplied with all necessaries for defence, as it had been amply garrisoned. It was defended by five double culverins, by four minions, and divers other cannon of smaller calibre suitable for such a forest fortress. “Eighteen great cakes of gunpowder,” (it would seem that this combustible was put up in those days moistened, and in a different form from the present, and hence the frequent necessity for drying it, of which we read,) and every variety of weapon proper to the keeping of the fortress, had been supplied to the Spaniards; so that, but for the unaccountable error of the sortié, and but for the panic which possessed them, and which may reasonably be ascribed to the natural terrors of a guilty conscience, it was scarcely possible that the Chevalier de Gourgues, with all his prowess, could have succeeded in the assault. He transferred all the arms to his vessels, but the gunpowder took fire from the carelessness of one of the savages, who, ignorant of its qualities, proceeded to seethe his fish in the neighborhood of a train, which took fire, and blew up the store-house with all its moveables, destroying all the houses within its sweep! The poor savage himself seems to have been the only human victim. The fortress was then razed to the ground, Gourgues having no purpose to reestablish a colony which he had not the power to maintain.
But his vengeance was not complete. The final act of expiation was yet to take place; and, bringing all his prisoners together, he had them conducted to the fatal tree upon which the Spaniards had done to death their Huguenot captives! This was at a short distance from the fortress.
Mournful was the spectacle that met the eyes of the Frenchmen as they reached the spot. There still hung the withered and wasted skeletons of their brethren, naked, bare of flesh, bleached, and rattling against the branches of the thrice-accursed tree! The tempest had beaten wildly against their wasted forms—the obscene birds had preyed upon their carcasses—some had fallen, and lay in undistinguished heaps upon the earth; but the entire skeletons of many, unbroken, still waved in the unconscious breezes of heaven! For two weary years had they been thus tossed and shaken in the tempest. For two years had they thus waved, ghastly, white, and terrible, in mockery of the blessed sunshine! And now, in the genial breezes of April, they still shook aloft in horrible contrast with the green leaves, and the purple blossoms of the spring around them! But they were now decreed to take their shame from the suffering eyes of day! A solemn service was said over the wretched remains, which were taken down with cautious hands, as considerately as if they were still accessible to hurt, and buried in one common grave! The red-men looked on wondering, and in grave silence; and Holata Cara, leaning upon his spear, might almost be thought to weep at the cruel spectacle.
But his aspect changed when the Spanish captives were brought forth. They were ranged, manacled in pairs, beneath the same tree of sacrifice. Briefly, and in stern accents, did Gourgues recite the crime of which they had been guilty, and which they were now to expiate by a sufferance of the same fate which they had decreed to their victims! Prayers and pleadings were alike in vain. The priest who had performed the solemn rites for the dead, now performed the last duties for the living judged! He heard their confessions. One of the wretched victims confessed that the judgment under which he was about to suffer was a just one; that he himself, with his own hands, had hung no less than five of the wretched Huguenots. With such a confession ringing in their ears, it was not possible for the French to be merciful! At a given signal, the victims were run up to the deadly branches, which they themselves had accursed by such employment; and even while their suspended forms writhed and quivered with the last fruitless efforts of expiring consciousness, the chieftain Holata Cara looked upon them with a cold, hard eye, stern and tearless, as if he felt the dreadful propriety of this wild and unrelenting justice! The deed done—the expiation made—Gourgues then procured a huge plank of pine, upon which he caused to be branded, with a searing iron, in rude, but large, intelligible characters, these words, corresponding to that inscription put by the Spaniards over the Huguenots, and as a fitting commentary upon it:—
“These are not hung as Spaniards,
nor as Mariners, but as
Traitors, Robbers, and
Murderers!”
How long they hung thus, bleaching in storm and sunshine; how long this terrible inscription remained as a record of their crime and of this history, the chronicle does not show, nor is it needful. The record is inscribed in pages that survive storm, and wreck, and fire;—more indelibly written than on pillars of brass and marble! It hangs on high forever, where the eyes of the criminal may read how certainly will the vengeance of heaven alight, or soon or late, upon the offender, who wantonly exults in the moment of security in the commission of great crimes done upon suffering humanity.