The buccaneers now bestirred themselves to finish the two small vessels on which the carpenters had been for some time at work.  In a fortnight they were ready for sea, armed and provided with the king’s cannon, munitions, and stores.  Trenchant, an excellent pilot, was forced to join the party.  Their favorite object was the plunder of a certain church, on one of the Spanish islands, which they proposed to assail during the midnight mass of Christmas, whereby a triple end would be achieved:  first, a rich booty; secondly, the punishment of idolatry; thirdly, vengeance on the arch-enemies of their party and their faith.  They set sail on the eighth of December, taunting those who remained, calling them greenhorns, and threatening condign punishment, if, on their triumphant return, they should be refused free entrance to the fort.

They were no sooner gone than the unfortunate Laudonniere was gladdened in his solitude by the approach of his fast friends, Ottigny and Arlac, who conveyed him to the fort, and reinstated him.  The entire command was reorganized and new officers appointed.  The colony was wofully depleted; but the bad blood had been drawn, and thenceforth all internal danger was at an end.  In finishing the fort, in building two new vessels to replace those of which they had been robbed, and in various intercourse with the tribes far and near, the weeks passed until the twenty-fifth of March, when an Indian came in with the tidings that a vessel was hovering off the coast.  Laudonniere sent to reconnoitre.  The stranger lay anchored at the mouth of the river.  She was a Spanish brigantine, manned by the returning mutineers, starving, downcast, and anxious to make terms.  Yet, as their posture seemed not wholly pacific, Laudonniere sent down La Caille with thirty soldiers, concealed at the bottom of his little vessel.  Seeing only two or three on deck, the pirates allowed her to come along-side; when, to their amazement, they were boarded and taken before they could snatch their arms.  Discomfited, woebegone, and drunk, they were landed under a guard.  Their story was soon told.  Fortune had flattered them at the outset.  On the coast of Cuba, they took a brigantine, with wine and stores.  Embarking in her, they next fell in with a caravel, which they also captured.  Landing at a village of Jamaica, they plundered and caroused for a week, and had hardly reembarked when they fell in with a small vessel having on board the governor of the island.  She made desperate fight, but was taken at last, and with her a rich booty.  They thought to put the governor to ransom; but the astute official deceived them, and, on pretence of negotiating for the sum demanded, together with certain apes and parrots, for which his captors had also bargained, contrived to send instructions to his wife.  Whence it happened that at daybreak three armed vessels fell upon them, retook the prize, and captured or killed all the pirates but twenty-six,