And now, in ample measure, the French began to reap the harvest of their folly.  Conquest, gold, military occupation,—­such had been their aims.  Not a rood of ground had been stirred with the spade.  Their stores were consumed; the expected supplies had not come.  The Indians, too, were hostile.  Satouriona hated them as allies of his enemies; and his tribesmen, robbed and maltreated by the lawless soldiers, exulted in their miseries.  Yet in these, their dark and subtle neighbors, was their only hope.

May-day came, the third anniversary of the day when Ribaut and his companions, full of delighted anticipations, had explored the flowery borders of the St. John’s.  Dire was the contrast; for, within the homesick precinct of Fort Caroline, a squalid band, dejected and worn, dragged their shrunken limbs about the sun-scorched area, or lay stretched in listless wretchedness under the shade of the barracks.  Some were digging roots in the forest, or gathering a kind of sorrel upon the meadows.  One collected refuse fish-bones and pounded them into meal.  Yet, giddy with weakness, their skin clinging to their bones, they dragged themselves in turn to the top of St. John’s Bluff, straining their eyes across the sea to descry the anxiously expected sail.

Had Coligny left them to perish? or had some new tempest of calamity, let loose upon France, drowned the memory of their exile?  In vain the watchman on the hill surveyed the solitude of waters.  A deep dejection fell upon them, a dejection that would have sunk to despair, could their eyes have pierced the future.

The Indians had left the neighborhood, but, from time to time, brought in meagre supplies of fish, which they sold to the famished soldiers at exorbitant prices.  Lest they should pay the penalty of their extortion, they would not enter the fort, but lay in their canoes in the river, beyond gunshot, waiting for their customers to come out to them.  “Oftentimes,” says Laudonniere, “our poor soldiers were constrained to give away the very shirts from their backs to get one fish.  If at any time they shewed unto the savages the excessive price which they tooke, these villaines would answere them roughly and churlishly:  If thou make so great account of thy marchandise, eat it, and we will eat our fish:  then fell they out a laughing and mocked us with open throat.”

The spring wore away, and no relief appeared.  One thought now engrossed the colonists, the thought of return to France.  Vasseur’s ship, the Breton, still remained in the river, and they had also the Spanish brigantine brought by the mutineers.  But these vessels were insufficient, and they prepared to build a new one.  The energy of reviving hope lent new life to their exhausted frames.  Some gathered pitch in the pine forests; some made charcoal; some cut and sawed the timber.  The maize began to ripen, and this brought some relief; but the Indians, exasperated and greedy, sold it with reluctance, and murdered two half-famished Frenchmen who gathered a handful in the fields.