river after another, till they came, on the 27th May, to the beautiful harbor of Port Royal, near the southern boundary of the present Carolina, where Ribault determined to plant a colony.
A fort was erected to begin with, and named Fort Charles, or Carolina, in honor of Charles IX. of France; and leaving thirty of his men, under the command of an experienced soldier named Pierria, to form the nucleus of a settlement, Ribault returned to France for reinforcements. On his arrival in his native land, however, he found his co-religionists in greater distress than ever, and not until after the peace of 1562 was the good Coligny able to devote any attention to the affairs of the emigrants in the West.
In 1564 three ships were sent out to their relief, under the command of Captain Renè de Laudonnière, who had been with Ribault on his first trip; but on his arrival at the River of May, he was met with the intelligence that Fort Charles had been abandoned, and by degrees the whole story of the sufferings of his predecessors leaked out. Relying on Ribault's promise of speedy reinforcements, and missing his bracing influence, the unlucky Huguenots forgot all about the primary object of their exile, the founding of a church in the wilderness, and gave themselves up to indolence and luxury. As a result, their provisions quickly failed, and, though the Indians befriended them to the best of their ability, they began to succumb to famine. Discontent and mutiny ensued; Pierria was assassinated in revenge for the severe discipline he endeavored to maintain, and his successor, Nicolas Barre, determined to build a small pinnace, in which to return to France.
With infinite difficulty this plan was carried out. A vessel of some kind was constructed, and in it, with no provisions but a little corn given by the natives, the survivors embarked. For three weeks they tossed about at the mercy of the waves, unable to make any considerable progress eastward; and then, all the corn being consumed, they resorted to the awful expedient of obtaining food by slaying one of their number. Lots were drawn, and the ghastly ceremony resulted in the murder of a certain La Chère, a soldier who had been pre-eminent in insubordination under Captain Pierria, and banished by him to an island outside Port Royal, had been rescued by his comrades, only to meet with a yet more awful fate than death by starvation.
Soon after the awful banquet, the blood-stained cannibals—for such had the zealous sufferers for the Huguenot faith now become—were met by an
