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Laudonnière quieted the chief Satouriona by promising to aid him against his enemies, a tribe up the river, called the Thimagoas. Next, misled by a story of great riches up the river, he actually made an alliance with Outina, the chief of the Thimagoas. Thus the French were engaged at the same time to help both sides.
As Laudonniere stood pledged to attack the Thimagoas, the chief gave Ottigny two Indian guides, who, says the record, were so eager for the fray that they seemed as if bound to a wedding feast. The lazy waters of the St.
The chief told him by signs, that he had taken it in war from a people called Thimagoas, who lived higher up the River, and who were his mortal enemies; on which the French captain had the folly to promise that he would join in an expedition against them. Satouriona was delighted, and declared that, if he kept his word, he should have gold and silver to his heart's content.
He told them that he was one of the forty vassal chiefs of the great Outina, lord of all the Thimagoas, whose warriors wore armor of gold and silver plate. He told them, too, of Potanou, his enemy, "a man cruell in warre;" and of the two kings of the distant Appalachian Mountains, Onatheaqua and Houstaqua, "great lords and abounding in riches."
Vasseur replied that he had set upon them and put them to utter rout. But as the chief, seeming as yet unsatisfied, continued his inquiries, the sergeant Francois de la Caille drew his sword, and, like Falstaff, reenacted his deeds of valor, pursuing and thrusting at the imaginary Thimagoas, as they fled before his fury.
To their great disgust, Ottigny permitted the Thimagoas to run their canoes ashore and escape to the woods. Far from keeping Laudonniere's senseless promise to light them, he wished to make them friends; to which end he now landed with some of his men, placed a few trinkets in their canoes, and withdrew to a distance to watch the result.
As the villages of the Thimagoas lay between them and the imagined treasures, they shrank from a quarrel, and Laudonniere repented already of his promised alliance with Satouriona. Vasseur was two days' sail from the fort when two Indians hailed him from the shore, inviting him to their dwellings.
The first was that of Satouriona; and the second was that of the people called Thimagoas, who, under a chief named Outina, dwelt in forty villages high up the St. John's.
Mollua, well pleased, promised that each of Outina's vassal chiefs should requite their French allies with a heap of gold and silver two feet high. Thus, while Laudonniere stood pledged to Satouriona, Vasseur made alliance with his mortal enemy. On his return, he passed a night in the lodge of one of Satouriona's chiefs, who questioned him touching his dealings with the Thimagoas.
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