Chapter VII
RENÉ DE LAUDONNIÈRE
PLANTING A COLONY ON THE ST. JOHN'S RIVER
René de Laudonnière's Expedition to the St. John's.—Absurd Illusions of the Frenchmen.—Their Bad Faith to the Indians, and its Fatal Results.—The Thirst for Gold, and how it was rewarded.—Buccaneering.—A Storm-cloud gathers in Spain.—Misery in the Fort on the St. John's.—Relieved by Sir John Hawkins.—Arrival of Ribaut with Men and Supplies.—Don Pedro Menendez captures Fort Caroline and massacres the Garrison and Shipwrecked Crews.—Dominique de Gourgues takes Vengeance.
The failure at Port Royal did not discourage Admiral Coligny from sending out another expedition, in the spring of 1564, under the command of Rene de Laudonnière, who had been with Ribaut in 1562. It reached the mouth of the St. John's on the 25th of June and was joyfully greeted by the kindly Indians.
The lieutenant, Ottigny, strolling off into the woods with a few men, met some Indians and was conducted to their village. There, he gravely tells us, he met a venerable chief who told him that he was two hundred and fifty years old. But, after all, he might probably expect to live a hundred years more, for he introduced another patriarch as his father. This shrunken anatomy, blind, almost speechless, and more like "a dead carkeis than a living body," he said, was likely to last thirty or forty years longer.
Probably the Frenchman had heard of the fabled fountain of Bimini, which lured Ponce de Leon to his ruin, and the river Jordan, which was said to be somewhere in Florida and to possess the same virtue, and he fancied that the gourd of cool water which had just been given him might come from such a spring.[1]