“Monsieur Hawkins is a good fellow,” he observed dryly to La Caille, “and I am grateful to him, but that is no reason why I should abandon this land to his Queen, and that is what he is hoping that I may do.”

Others were not so long-sighted.  The soldiers and hired workmen raised a howl of wrath and disappointment when they heard that they were not to sail with Hawkins, and openly threatened to desert and sail without leave.  Laudonniere answered this threat by the cool statement that he had bought one of the English ships, the Tiger, with provisions for the voyage, and that if they would have a little patience they might soon sail for France in their own fleet.  Somewhat taken aback they ceased their clamor and awaited a favoring wind.  Before it came, Ribault came sailing back with seven ships, plenty of supplies, and three hundred new colonists.

The fleet approached as cautiously as if it were coming to attack the colony instead of relieving it, and Laudonniere, who saw many of his friends among the new arrivals, presently learned that his enemies among the colonists had written to Coligny describing him as arrogant and cruel and charging that he was about to set up an independent monarchy of his own.  The Admiral, three thousand miles away, had decided to ask the Governor to resign.  Ribault advised him to stay and fight it out, but Laudonniere was sick and disheartened.  Life was certainly far from simple when to use authority was to be accused of treason, and not to use it was to foster piracy, and he had had enough of governing colonies in remote jungles of the New World.  He was going home.

To most of the colonists, however, Ribault’s arrival promised an end of all their troubles.  Stores were landed, tents were pitched, and the women and children were bestowed in the most comfortable quarters which could be found for them just then.  To his great satisfaction Pierre found among the arrivals his cousin Barbe and her husband, a carpenter, and her three children, Marie, Suzanne and little Rene.  The two young girls regarded Cousin Pierre as a hero, especially when they learned that the bearskin on the floor of their palmetto hut had but a few months ago been the coat of a live black bear.  It had been caught feasting in the maize-fields of the Indians, by their cousin and another youth, and shot with a crossbow bolt by Pierre.  They thought the roast corn and stewed clams of their first meal ashore the most delicious food they had ever tasted, and the three-cornered enclosure in the forest with the wilderness all about it, the most wonderful place they had seen.

Little did these innocent folk imagine what was brewing in Spain.  The raid of French pirates upon the Jamaican coast had promptly been reported by the Adelantado of that island.  Spanish spies at the French court had carefully noted the movements of Coligny and Ribault.  Pedro Menendez de Avila, raising money and men in his native province of Asturia in Spain for the conquest of all Florida, learned with horror and indignation that its virgin soil had already been polluted by heretic Frenchmen.