La Grange and other officers took part with Laudonniere and opposed the plan of an attack by sea; but Ribaut’s conviction was unshaken, and the order was given.  All his own soldiers fit for duty embarked in haste, and with them went La Caille, Arlac, and, as it seems, Ottigny, with the best of Laudonniere’s men.  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 pith and sinew of the colony.  The miserable remnant watched his receding sails with dreary foreboding, a foreboding which seemed but too just, when, on the next day, a storm, more violent than the Indians had ever known, howled through the forest and lashed the ocean into fury, Most forlorn was the plight of these exiles, left, it might be, the prey of a band of ferocious bigots more terrible than the fiercest hordes of the wilderness.  And when night closed on the stormy river and the gloomy waste of pines, what dreams of terror may not have haunted the helpless women who crouched under the hovels of Fort Caroline!

The fort was in a ruinous state, the palisade on the water side broken down, and three breaches in the rampart.  In the driving rain, urged by the sick Laudonniere, the men, bedrenched and disheartened, labored as they might to strengthen their defences.  Their muster-roll shows but a beggarly array.  “Now,” says Laudonniere, “let them which have bene bold to say that I had men ynongh left me, so that I had meanes to defend my selfe, give care a little now vnto mee, and if they have eyes in their heads, let them see what men I had.”  Of Ribaut’s followers left at the fort, only nine or ten had weapons, while only two or three knew how to use them.  Four of them were boys, who kept Ribaut’s dogs, and another was his cook.  Besides these, he had left a brewer, an old crossbow-maker, two shoemakers, a player on the spinet, four valets, a carpenter of threescore—­Challeux, no doubt, who has left us the story of his woes,—­and a crowd of women, children, and eighty-six camp-followers.  To these were added the remnant of Laudonniere’s men, of whom seventeen could bear arms, the rest being sick or disabled by wounds received in the fight with Outina.

Laudonniere divided his force, such as it was, into two watches, over which he placed two officers, St. Cler and La Vigne, gave them lanterns to go the rounds, and an hour-glass to set the time; while he himself, giddy with weakness and fever, was every night at the guard-room.

It was the night of the nineteenth of September; floods of rain bedrenched the sentries on the rampart, and as day dawned on the dripping barracks and deluged parade, the storm increased in violence.  What enemy could have ventured forth on such a night?  La Vigne, who had the watch, took pity on the sentries and on himself, dismissed them, and went to his quarters.  He little knew what mortal energies, urged by ambition, avarice, bigotry, desperation, will dare and do.