Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/293

Rh being ferociously and atrociously speeded in his diabolical work. The victory was complete, unredeemed by a single relenting of human pity, but blackened by breach of faith and by every enormity of barbarity to those whom he boasted that he had given to slaughter — one hundred and forty-two in number — “not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.” The prisoners, with their hands tied behind them, in groups of four, were led to the massacre and hewn down with axes. Their bodies were dismembered, transfixed on spears, and hung upon the trees.

Enough of the destined victims escaped, by well-nigh superhuman effort and endurance, to leave for history full and harrowing narratives of the appalling tragedy, made so, not by its bringing human beings to the inevitable lot, but by its circumstances and aggravations of horror. How does it shock and stagger our conscious sentiment of what is, of what belongs to, and what should be wrought by, religion to contemplate a scene like that upon a garden panorama of Nature, the pines, the palms, and the flowers dressing it and wreathing it in gorgeous beauty! And how stands the doctrine and hope of an immortal life for the animating essence of being in humanity — whether Catholic or heretic, Christian or heathen — amid such a wrack of raving passions and agonies? A few escaped, returning to France, some of them to England, to tell the tale. They had rushed from the fort under the knives, the spears, and the blunderbusses of the Spanish devils. Crawling through the woods, wading up to their arm-pits in the marshes, lacerated by thorns, tripped by vines, famished and despairing, warned off even by the Indians who feared to protect them, some of them, including Laudonnière, were finally rescued by the boats of their friends and taken on board their vessels. And what meanwhile was the meaning of the scene for the natives, who were to be blessed and saved by the gospel of the white men?

Hakluyt has given us narrations of the colony by Ribault,