Roaming by river, swamp, and forest, they visited in turn the villages of five petty chiefs, whom they called kings, feasted everywhere on hominy, beans, and game, and loaded with gifts.  One of these chiefs, named Audusta, invited them to the grand religious festival of his tribe.  Thither, accordingly, they went.  The village was alive with preparation, and troops of women were busied in sweeping the great circular area, surrounded by the lodges, where the ceremonies were to take place.  But as the noisy and impertinent guests showed disposition to undue merriment, the chief shut them all in his wigwam, lest their gentile eyes should profane the mysteries.  Here, immured in darkness, they listened to the howls, yelpings, and lugubrious songs that resounded from without.  One of them, however, by some artifice, contrived to escape, hid behind a bush, and saw the whole solemnity:  the procession of the medicine-men and the bedaubed and befeathered warriors; the drumming, the dancing, the stamping; the wild lamentation of the women, as they gashed the arms of the young girls with sharp mussel-shells and flung the blood into the air with dismal outcries.  A scene of ravenous feasting followed, in which the French, released from durance, were summoned to share.

Their carousal over, they returned to Charlesfort, where they were soon pinched with hunger.  The Indians, never niggardly of food, brought them supplies as long as their own lasted; but the harvest was not yet ripe, and their means did not match their good-will.  They told the French of two other kings, Ouade and Couexis, who dwelt towards the South, and were rich beyond belief in maize, beans, and squashes.  Embarking without delay, the mendicant colonists steered for the wigwams of these potentates, not by the open sea, but by a perplexing inland navigation, including, as it seems, Calibogue Sound and neighboring waters.  Arrived at the friendly villages, on or near the Savannah, they were feasted to repletion, and their boat laden with vegetables and corn.  They returned rejoicing; but their joy was short.  Their storehouse at Charlesfort, taking fire in the night, burned to the ground, and with it their newly acquired stock.  Once more they set forth for the realms of King Ouade, and once more returned laden with supplies.  Nay, more, the generous savage assured them, that, so long as his cornfields yielded their harvests, his friends should not want.

How long this friendship would have lasted may well be matter of doubt.  With the perception that the dependants on their bounty were no demigods, but a crew of idle and helpless beggars, respect would soon have changed to contempt and contempt to ill-will.  But it was not to Indian war-clubs that the embryo colony was to owe its ruin.  Within itself it carried its own destruction.  The ill-assorted band of landsmen and sailors, surrounded by that influence of the wilderness which wakens the dormant savage in the breasts of men, soon fell into quarrels.