government, their enterprise found its birth and its achievement. They
were of the boldest and most earnest of their sect. There were such
among the French disciples of Calvin; but no Mayflower ever sailed from
a port of France. Coligny's colonists were of a different stamp, and
widely different was their fate.

An excellent seaman and stanch Protestant, Jean Ribaut of Dieppe,
commanded the expedition. Under him, besides sailors, were a band of
veteran soldiers, and a few young nobles. Embarked in two of those
antiquated craft whose high poops and tub-like porportions are preserved
in the old engravings of De Bry, they sailed from Havre on the
eighteenth of February, 1562. They crossed the Atlantic, and on the
thirtieth of April, in the latitude of twenty-nine and a half degrees,
saw the long, low line where the wilderness of waves met the wilderness
of woods. It was the coast of Florida. They soon descried a jutting
point, which they called French Cape, perhaps one of the headlands of
Matanzas Inlet. They turned their prows northward, coasting the fringes
of that waste of verdure which rolled in shadowy undulation far to the
unknown West.

On the next morning, the first of May, they found themselves off the
mouth of a great river. Riding at anchor on a sunny sea, they lowered
their boats, crossed the bar that obstructed the entrance, and floated
on a basin of deep and sheltered water, "boyling and roaring," says
Ribaut, "through the multitude of all kind of fish." Indians were
running along the beach, and out upon the sand-bars, beckoning them to
land. They pushed their boats ashore and disembarked,--sailors,
soldiers, and eager young nobles. Corselet and morion, arquebuse and
halberd, flashed in the sun that flickered through innumerable leaves,
as, kneeling on the ground, they gave thanks to God, who had guided