With a few officers and twelve soldiers, Laudonniere landed where Ribaut had landed before him; and as their boat neared the shore, they saw an Indian chief who ran to meet them, whooping and clamoring welcome from afar.  It was Satouriona, the savage potentate who ruled some thirty villages around the lower St. John’s and northward along the coast.  With him came two stalwart sons, and behind trooped a host of tribesmen arrayed in smoke-tanned deerskins stained with wild devices in gaudy colors.  They crowded around the voyagers with beaming visages and yelps of gratulation.  The royal Satouriona could not contain the exuberance of his joy, since in the person of the French commander he recognized the brother of the Sun, descended from the skies to aid him against his great rival, Outina.

Hard by stood the column of stone, graven with the fleur-de-lis, planted here on the former voyage.  The Indians had crowned the mystic emblem with evergreens, and placed offerings of maize on the ground before it; for with an affectionate and reverent wonder they had ever remembered the steel-clad strangers whom, two summers before, John Ribaut had led to their shores.

Five miles up the St. John’s, or River of May, there stands, on the southern bank, a hill some forty feet high, boldly thrusting itself into the broad and lazy waters.  It is now called St. John’s Bluff.  Thither the Frenchmen repaired, pushed through the dense semi-tropical forest, and climbed the steep acclivity.  Thence they surveyed their Canaan.  Beneath them moved the unruffled river, gliding around the reed-grown shores of marshy islands, the haunt of alligators, and betwixt the bordering expanse of wide, wet meadows, studded with island-like clumps of pine and palmetto, and bounded by the sunny verge of distant forests.  Far on their right, seen by glimpses between the shaggy cedar-boughs, the glistening sea lay stretched along the horizon.  Before, in hazy distance, the softened green of the woodlands was veined with the mazes of the countless interlacing streams that drain the watery region behind St. Mary’s and Fernandina.  To the left, the St. John’s flowed gleaming betwixt verdant shores beyond whose portals lay the El Dorado of their dreams.  “Briefly,” writes Laudonniere, “the place is so pleasant that those which are melancholicke would be inforced to change their humour.”

A fresh surprise awaited them.  The allotted span of mortal life was quadrupled in that benign climate.  Laudonniere’s lieutenant, Ottigny, ranging the neighboring forest with a party of soldiers, met a troop of Indians who invited him to their dwellings.  Mounted on the back of a stout savage, who plunged with him through the deep marshes, and guided him by devious pathways through the tangled thickets, he arrived at length, and beheld a wondrous spectacle.  In the lodge sat a venerable chief, who assured him that he was the father of five successive generations, and that he had lived two hundred and fifty years.