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Updated: June 15, 2025
The whole face of nature has been denuded and blackened by the atrocious enemy." When the train had been under way a couple of minutes Captain Ribaut leaned forward. "Look over there," he said, "and you will see where your regiment will he housed for the next two or three days.
A continent was their solitary prison, and the pitiless Atlantic shut them in. Not one of them knew how to build a ship; but Ribaut had left them a forge, with tools and iron, and strong desire supplied the place of skill. Trees were hewn down and the work begun.
Philip Hardin's stern features relax into some show of feeling as Valois places his wife's hands in his. That mute adieu to lovely Dolores moves him. "May God deal with you, Hardin, as you deal with my wife and child," solemnly says Valois. The lips of Francois Ribaut piously add "Amen. Amen." Padre Francisco comes back to the boat. With French impulsiveness, he throws himself in Valois' arms.
After three hours of absence, he came back in the canoe, and told the Adelantado that some of his people were ready to surrender at discretion, but that many refused. "They can do as they please," was the reply. In behalf of those who surrendered, Ribaut offered a ransom of a hundred thousand ducats. "It would much grieve me," said Menendez, "not to accept it; for I have great need of it."
No longer in dread of the Spaniards, the colonists saluted the new-comers with the cannon by which a moment before they had hoped to blow them out of the water. Laudonniere issued from his stronghold to welcome them, and regaled them with what cheer he could. Ribaut was present, conspicuous by his long beard, an astonishment to the Indians; and here, too, were officers, old friends of Laudonniere.
This time a shell struck just behind the parados. There was an avalanche of shell fragments, but none flew into the trench, the parados preventing. "Captain Ribaut, a word with you," Dick urged, stepping down and laying a hand on the French officer's arm. They stepped further along the trench.
Accordingly, on the first day of May, 1562, two little vessels under the command of Captain Jean Ribaut found themselves off the mouth of a great river which, because of the date, they called the River of May, now known as the St. John's. When they landed, it seemed to the sea-worn Frenchmen as if they had set foot in an enchanted world.
One of the ships was wrecked at a point farther northward than the rest, and it was her company whose campfires were seen by the Spaniards at their bivouac on the sands of Anastasia Island. They were endeavoring to reach Fort Caroline, of the fate of which they knew nothing, while Ribaut with the remainder was farther southward, struggling through the wilderness towards the same goal.
At the eleventh hour, the long looked for succors were come. Ribaut had been commissioned to sail with seven ships for Florida.
That Ribaut, a man whose good sense and courage were both reputed high, should have submitted himself and his men to Menendez without positive assurance of safety, is scarcely credible; nor is it lack of charity to believe that a bigot so savage in heart and so perverted in conscience would act on the maxim, current among certain casuists of the day, that faith ought not to be kept with heretics.
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