Menendez instantly sent forty or fifty men in boats to reconnoitre.  Next, he called the chaplain,—­for he would fain have him at his elbow to countenance the devilish deeds he meditated,—­and embarked, with him, twelve soldiers, and two Indian guides, in another boat.  They rowed along the channel between Anastasia Island and the main shore; then landed, struck across the country on foot, traversed plains and marshes, readied the sea towards night, and searched along-shore till ten o’clock to find their comrades who had gone before.  At length, with mutual joy, the two parties met, and bivouacked together on the sands.  Not far distant they could see lights.  They were the camp-fires of the shipwrecked French.

And now, to relate the fortunes of these unhappy men.  To do so with precision is impossible, for henceforward the French narratives are no longer the narratives of eye-witnesses.

It has been seen how, when on the point of assailing the Spaniards of St. Augustine, John Ribaut was thwarted by a gale which the former hailed as a divine interposition.  The gale rose to a tempest of strange fury.  Within a few days, all the French ships were cast on shore, the greater number near Cape Canaveral.  According to the letter of Menendez, many of those on board were lost, but others affirm that all escaped but the captain, La Grange, an officer of high merit, who was washed from a floating mast.  One of the ships was wrecked at a point farther northward than the rest, and it was her company whose camp-fires were seen by the Spaniards at their bivouac among the sands of Anastasia Island.  They were endeavoring to reach Fort Caroline, of whose fate they knew nothing, while Ribaut with the remainder was farther southward, struggling through the wilderness towards the same goal.  What befell the latter will appear hereafter.  Of the fate of the former party there is no French record.  What we know of it is due to three Spanish writers, Mendoza, Doctor Solis de las Meras, and Menendez himself.  Solis was a priest, and brother-in-law to Menendez.  Like Mendoza, he minutely describes what he saw, and, like him, was a red-hot zealot, lavishing applause on the darkest deeds of his chief.  Before me lie the long despatches, now first brought to light from the archives of Seville, which Menendez sent from Florida to the King, a cool record of atrocities never surpassed, and inscribed on the back with the royal indorsement,—­“Say to him that he has done well.”

When the Adelantado saw the French fires in the distance, he lay close in his bivouac, and sent two soldiers to reconnoitre.  At two in the morning they came back and reported that it was impossible to get at the enemy, since they were on the farther side of an arm of the sea, probably Matanzas Inlet.  Menendez, however, gave orders to march, and before daybreak reached the hither bank, where he hid his men in a bushy hollow.  Thence, as it grew light, they could discern the enemy, many of whom were searching along the sands and shallows for shell-fish, for they were famishing.  A thought struck Menendez, an inspiration, says Mendoza, of the Holy Spirit.  He put on the clothes of a sailor, entered a boat which had been brought to the spot, and rowed towards the shipwrecked men, the better to learn their condition.  A Frenchman swam out to meet him.  Menendez demanded what men they were.