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Updated: June 24, 2025
Daylight only could bring an answer to the question. At length it came, and as the sun rose, its earliest beams fell upon seven tall ships riding easily at anchor outside the bar. From each was displayed in the golden light the fair lily banner of France. At this glorious sight there was indeed joy on board the ship of Laudonniere. At last the long-looked-for reinforcements had come.
Lest they should pay the penalty of their extortion, they would not enter the fort, but lay in their canoes in the river, beyond gunshot, waiting for their customers to come out to them. "Oftentimes," says Laudonniere, "our poor soldiers were constrained to give away the very shirts from their backs to get one fish.
On the third of August, Laudonniere, perturbed and oppressed, was walking on the hill, when, looking seaward, he saw a sight that sent a thrill through his exhausted frame. A great ship was standing towards the river's mouth. Then another came in sight, and another, and another. He despatched a messenger with the tidings to the fort below.
Stalwart natives, whom Laudonnière, one of the officers, describes as "mighty and as well shapen and proportioned of body as any people in the world," greeted them hospitably. Overhead was the luxuriant semi-tropical vegetation, giant oaks festooned with gray moss trailing to the ground and towering magnolias opening their great white, fragrant cups.
Laudonnière wanted them so that he might send them back to the chief of the Thimagoes as a proof that he at least was still friendly, for he already regretted his unwise treaty. But when Satouriona heard Laudonnière's request he was very angry and treated it with scorn. "Tell your chief," he said, "that he has broken his oath, and I will not give him any of my prisoners."
But being descried as they came holding downe their heads within two hundred paces from the Fort, the Gunner being vpon the terrace of the Fort, after he had cried, Arme, Arme, these be French men, discharged twise vpon them a coluerine, wherein the Armes of France were grauen, which had bin taken from Laudonniere.
Laudonniere thought he recognized the inlet as one leading into a broad river, on the opposite side of which was located an Indian village called Seloy.
They were no sooner gone than the unfortunate Laudonniere was gladdened in his solitude by the approach of his fast friends Ottigny and Arlac, who conveyed him to the fort and reinstated him. The entire command was reorganized, and new officers appointed. The colony was wofully depleted; but the bad blood had been drawn off, and thenceforth all internal danger was at an end.
The admiral was highly indignant when he heard of the mutiny, and would have punished the mutineers severely had not Laudonniere pleaded for them, giving their sufferings and their despair of the arrival of reinforcements as their excuse. The closest attention was paid to the tale of the brave deeds of Réné de Veaux.
Laudonnière, with questionable judgment, entangled himself in these Indian feuds, and entered into an offensive alliance with the first of these chiefs whom he encountered, Satouriona.... A new source of trouble, however, soon beset the unhappy colonists. Their quarrels had left them no time for tilling the soil, and they were wholly dependent on the Indians for food.
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