Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/291

Rh are exhausted by the sea-tossed roamers in describing the lavish loveliness, the exceeding fertility and glory of the scene. With equal fondness and exuberance they rehearse the mild and generous behavior and munificence of the natives in their peaceful welcome, in their wild delights over their visitors, and their heaped donations of the best of their food. After building a fort, which they named Caroline, Ribault returned to France, leaving thirty colonists — as Columbus had done at La Navidad, on going back from his first voyage — to plant a permanent colony. The result of this second good intention, as had been that of its precedent, was but woful disaster. The colony was reinforced the next year by Laudonnière. The new comers, in response to the magnanimity of the chieftain of the tribe within whose bounds they had settled, had hastily entered into a pledge of amity with him, which included an alliance with him against his native enemies. It proved that he was weaker than one of his neighbor chieftains with whom he was at war. The colonists perfidiously made terms with the stronger party; and their perfidy, with their arrogance, their exactions, and their outrages against their first friends, brought them into complications of mischief. This, with a mutinous spirit among themselves, their laziness, wastefulness, and self-abandonment, crowned the fate of their enterprise. They were about abandoning it, in despair of help from France, by having recourse to a leaky craft of their own making, when temporary relief came.

A strange episode cheered these forlorn exiles when at their lowest depths in mutiny and starvation among the exasperated natives. On a fair morning in August, 1565, four vessels, one of great bulk, were sighted on the horizon. They might be a supply fleet from France; they might be a vengeful company of cutthroats from Spain. They were neither. On board the largest vessel, named “Jesus,” was the commander Sir John Hawkins, of world-wide fame for