Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/237

Rh Spaniard in the sparse ranks of each crew of the invaders, one or even many hundred of the Indians were to be found acting as guides, purveyors, or actual and vigorous combatants. The rival caciques of Peru, as well as Montezuma and his heirs, found that the intruding white man was constituting himself an umpire in their intestine quarrels. When the French were seeking their first foothold in Canada they happened to fall among the Hurons, who were ready to be their friends against hostile neighbors across the lakes who had already humbled them. In the early abortive attempts of French colonization in Florida, — those of the Huguenots under Ribault and Laudonnière, in 1562 and 1564, — it proved that there were several rival confederacies of native tribes on that peninsula. They had been at bitter feud, and engaged in deadly strife with each other for a hold on the soil, previous to the arrival of the French. With three of these warring and jealous bands the commanders came into intercourse. At a critical stage in his enterprise Ribault saved his company from the threatening violence of the tribe on whose soil he was about erecting a fort, by agreeing upon an alliance with its chief in his projected raid upon his nearest enemy. The commander entered upon the covenant, but was perfidious to it, and made friends with the other tribes so far as to serve his own temporary ends. The first French missionaries in Acadia found the Souriquois, or Micmaks, in fierce warfare with the Esquimaux, paddling by sea thirty or forty miles to attack them. The rapidity with which the process, well-nigh exterminating, of Indians against Indians, went on may be inferred from a statement made by the heroic Father Brebeuf. While he was living among the Hurons, he estimated their numbers, perhaps excessively, at thirty thousand, distributed in twenty villages, besides a dozen numerous sedentary tribes speaking their language. All these had been well-nigh exterminated at the close of the seventeenth century by the fiercer Iroquois,