Pierre was thirteen and looked at least three years older.  He could not remember when his people and their Huguenot neighbors had not lived in dread of prison, exile or death.  When he was not more than ten years old he had guided their old pastor to safety in a mountain cave, and seen men die, singing, for their faith.  After the death of his father and mother he had lived for awhile with his mother’s people in Navarre, and since they were poor and bread was hard to come by he had run away the year before and found his way to Paris, where Dominic de Gourgues had found him.  If the Huguenots had a safe home he might be able to repay the kindness of his cousins.  Meanwhile the country, the wild creatures, the copper-colored people and the hard work of landing colonists and supplies were full of interest and excitement for Pierre.

Satouriona, the Indian chief, showed the French officers the pillar which Ribault’s party had set up on their previous visit to mark their discovery.  The faithful savages had kept it wreathed with evergreens and decked with offerings of maize and fruits as if it were an altar.

Unfortunately not all the colonists were of heroic mind.  Most who had left France to seek their fortunes were merchants, craftsman and young Huguenot noblemen whose swords were uneasy in time of peace.  French farm-laborers were mainly serfs on Catholic estates, and landowners did not wish to come to the New World.  Thus the people of the settlement were city folk with little experience or inclination for cultivating the soil.  The Indians grew tired of supplying the wants of so large a number of strangers.  Quarrels arose among the French.  A discontented group of adventurers mutinied and went off on a wild attempt at piracy.  They plundered two ships in the Spanish Indies and were caught by the Spanish governor.  The twenty-six who escaped his clutches fled back to the fort, which Laudonniere had built and named Carolina.  His faithful lieutenant La Caille arrested them and dragged them to judgment.  “Say what you will,” said one of the culprits ruefully, “if Laudonniere does not hang us I will never call him an honest man.”  The four leaders were promptly sentenced to be hanged, but the sentence was commuted to shooting.  After that order reigned, for a time.

Some of the tradesmen ranged the wilderness, bringing back feather mantles, arrows tipped with gold, curiously wrought quivers of beautiful fur, wedges of a green stone like beryl.  There were reports of a gold mine somewhere in the northern mountains.  Ribault did not return with the expected supplies, the Indians had mostly left the neighborhood, and misery and starvation followed, for the game, like the Indians fled the presence of the white men.  The Governor began to think of crowding the survivors into the two little ships he had and returning to France.

Matters were in this unsatisfactory state when Captain John Hawkins in his great seven-hundred-ton ship the Jesus, with three smaller ones, the Solomon, the Tiger and the Swallow, put in at the River of May for a supply of fresh water.  He gave them provisions, and offered readily to take them back to France on his way to England, but this offer Laudonniere declined.