leader fit to stand with Cortés and Pizarro; but he was matched with a
man as cool, skilful, prompt, and daring as himself. The traces that
have come down to us indicate, in Ribaut, one far above the common
stamp: "a distinguished man, of many high qualities," as even the
fault-finding Le Moyne calls him, devout after the best spirit of the
Reform, and with a human heart under his steel breastplate.

La Grange and other officers took part with Laudonnière and opposed the
plan of an attack by sea; but Ribaut's conviction was unshaken, and the
order was given. All his own soldiers fit for duty embarked in haste,
and with them went La Caille, Arlac, and, as it seems, Ottigny, with the
best of Laudonnière's men. Even Le Moyne, though wounded in the fight
with Outina's warriors, went on board to bear his part in the fray, and
would have sailed with the rest, had not Ottigny, seeing his disabled
condition, ordered him back to the fort.

On the tenth, the ships, crowded with troops, set sail. Ribaut was gone,
and with him the pith and sinew of the colony. The miserable remnant
watched his receding sails with dreary foreboding, a foreboding which
seemed but too just, when, on the next day, a storm, more violent than
the Indians had ever known, howled through the forest and lashed the
ocean into fury, Most forlorn was the plight of these exiles, left, it
might be, the prey of a band of ferocious bigots more terrible than the
fiercest hordes of the wilderness. And when night closed on the stormy
river and the gloomy waste of pines, what dreams of terror may not have
haunted the helpless women who crouched under the hovels of Fort
Caroline!

The fort was in a ruinous state, the palisade on the water side broken
down, and three breaches in the rampart. In the driving rain, urged by