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Updated: June 15, 2025
Menendez called a council of the commanders. There was doubt and indecision. Perhaps Ribaut had already reached the French fort, and then to attack the united force would be an act of desperation. Far better to await their lagging comrades. But the Adelantado was of another mind; and, even had his enemy arrived, ho was resolved that he should have no time to fortify himself.
Yet in these, their dark and subtle neighbors, was their only hope. May-day came, the third anniversary of the day when Ribaut and his companions, full of delighted anticipation, had first explored the flowery borders of the St. John's.
He kneels by the bed of the wounded innocent, and softly quavers a little old Spanish hymn. It is a memory of his Californian days. Great God! her lips are moving; her right hand feebly marks his words, and as he bends over the sufferer, he hears "Santa Maria, Madre de Dios." Francois Ribaut falls on his knees in prayer.
They named it Charlesfort, in honor of the unhappy son of Catherine de Médicis, Charles IX., the future hero of St. Bartholomew. Ammunition and stores were sent on shore, and, on the eleventh of June, with his diminished company, Ribaut, again embarking, spread his sails for France.
With their squaws and children, they presently drew near, and, strewing the earth with laurel boughs, sat down among the Frenchmen. Their visitors were much pleased with them, and Ribaut gave the chief, whom he calls the king, a robe of blue cloth, worked in yellow with the regal fleur-de-lis.
At length, after hours of sickening suspense, the question was answered, they were Frenchmen under the command of Ribaut. The long-looked-for help had come at last. It had come when it was no longer looked for, when it was indeed unwelcome to many. For the colonists had grown utterly weary of that sunlit cruel land, and they only longed to go home.
And, urging that the kings of France and Spain were brothers and close friends, he begged, in the name of that friendship, that the Spaniard would aid him in conveying his followers home. Menendez gave him the same equivocal answer that he had given the former party, and Ribaut returned to consult with his officers.
In this modest assumption of the point at issue, he ignores John Cabot and his son Sebastian, who discovered North America more than twenty-five years before the voyage of Verrazzano, and more than sixty years before that of Ribaut.
Here, by feeding, clothing, and caressing them, they tried to wean them from their fears, but the captive warriors moaned and lamented day and night, till Ribaut, with the prudence and humanity which seem always to have characterized him, gave over his purpose of carrying them to France, and set them ashore again.
Even Le Moyne, though wounded in the fight with Outina's warriors, went on board to bear his part in the fray, and would have sailed with the rest had not Ottigny, seeing his disabled condition, ordered him back to the fort. On the tenth, the ships, crowded with troops, set sail. Ribaut was gone, and with him the bone and sinew of the colony.
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