beans, and fish. Before them was
always the same glassy river, shimmering in the fierce midsummer heat;
around them the same silent pine forests.

The rough soldiers and sailors, accustomed to spend their leisure in
taverns, found the dull routine of existence in Chicora insupportable.
Besides, their commander irritated them by undue severity. The crisis
came when he hanged a man with his own hands for a slight offence. The
men rose in a body, murdered him, and chose Nicholas Barre to succeed
him.

Shortly afterward they formed a desperate resolve: they would build a
ship and sail home. Nothing could have seemed wilder. Not one of them
had any experience of ship-building. But they went to work with a
will. They had a forge, tools, and some iron. Soon the forest rang
with the sound of the axe and with the crash of falling trees. They
laid the keel and pushed the work with amazing energy and ingenuity,
caulked the seams with long moss gathered from the neighboring trees
and smeared the bottoms and sides with pitch from the pines. The {74}
Indians showed them how to make a kind of cordage, and their shirts and
bedding were sewn together into sails. At last their crazy little
craft was afloat, undoubtedly the first vessel built on the Atlantic
seaboard of America.

They laid in such stores as they could secure by bartering their goods,
to the Indians, deserted their post, and sailed away from a land where
they could have found an easy and comfortable living, if they had put
into the task half the thought and labor which they exerted to escape
from it.

Few voyages, even in the thrilling annals of exploration, have ever
been so full of hardship and suffering as this mad one. Alternate
calms and storms baffled, famine and thirst assailed the unfortunate
crew. Some died outright; others went crazy with thirst, leaped
overboard, and drank their fill once and forever. The wretched
survivors drew lots, killed the man whom fortune designated, and
satisfied their cravings with his flesh and blood. At last, as they
were drifting helpless, with land in sight, an English vessel bore down
on them, took them all on board, landed the feeblest, and carried the
rest as prisoners to Queen Elizabeth.

[1] These people were of the Timucua tribe, one that has since become
entirely extinct, and that was succeeded in the occupation of Florida
by the warlike Seminoles, an off-shoot of the Creeks. They belonged to
the M