wind, at first favorable, soon turned against them, and famine stared
them in the face. Driven to the last resort of starving seamen, they
cast lots for a victim, and the lot, by a strange chance, fell upon
the very man whose punishment had been a chief count against De
Pierria. Life was supported by this hideous relief, till they came in
sight of the French coast. Even then their troubles were not over. An
English privateer bore down upon them and captured them. The miseries
of the prisoners seem, in some measure, to have touched their enemies.
A few of the weakest were landed on French soil. The rest ended their
wanderings in an English prison.

The needs of the abandonment of the colony did not reach France till
long after the event. Before its arrival a fleet was sent out to the
relief of the colony. Three ships were dispatched, the largest of a
hundred and twenty tons, the least of sixty tons, under the command of
René Laudonnière, a young Poitevin of good birth. On their outward
voyage they touched at Teneriffe and Dominica, and found ample
evidence at each place of the terror which the Spaniards had inspired
among the natives. In June the French reached the American shore south
of Port Royal. As before, their reception by the Indians was friendly.
Some further exploration failed to discover a more suitable site than
that which had first presented itself, and accordingly a wooden fort
was soon built with a timber palisade and bastions of earthen work.
Before long the newcomers found that their intercourse with the
Indians was attended with unlooked-for difficulties. There were three
tribes of importance, each under the command of a single chief, and
all more or less hostile to the other. In the South the power of the
chiefs seems to have been far more dreaded, and their influence over
the national policy more authoritative than among the tribes of New
England and Canada. Laudonnière, with questionable judgment, entangled