nd was joyfully greeted by the
kindly Indians.

The lieutenant, Ottigny, strolling off into the woods with a few men, met
some Indians and was conducted to their village. There, he {78} gravely
tells us, he met a venerable chief who told him that he was two hundred
and fifty years old. But, after all, he might probably expect to live a
hundred years more, for he introduced another patriarch as his father.
This shrunken anatomy, blind, almost speechless, and more like "a dead
carkeis than a living body," he said, was likely to last thirty or forty
years longer.

Probably the Frenchman had heard of the fabled fountain of Bimini, which
lured Ponce de Leon to his ruin, and the river Jordan, which was said to
be somewhere in Florida and to possess the same virtue, and he fancied
that the gourd of cool water which had just been given him might come
from such a spring.[1]

{79}

This example shows how credulous these Frenchmen were, moving in a world
of fancy, the glamour of romantic dreams about the New World still fresh
upon them, visions of unmeasured treasures of silver and gold and gems
floating through their brains.

It would make a tedious tale to relate all their follies, surrounded as
they were by a bountiful nature and a kindly people, and yet soon reduced
to abject want. In the party there were brawling soldiers and piratical
sailors, with only a few quiet, decent artisans and shop-keepers, but
with a swarm of reckless young nobles, who had nothing to recommend them
but a long name, and who expected to prove themselves Pizarros in
fighting and treasure-getting. Unfortunately, the kind of man who is the
backbone of a colony, "the man with the hoe," was not there.

This motley crew soon finished a fort, which stood on the river, a little
above what is now called St. John's Bluff and was named Fort {80}
Caroline, in honor of Charles the Ninth. Then they began to look around,
keen for gold and adventure.

The Indians had shown themselves hostile when they saw the Frenchmen
building a fort, which was evidence that they had come to stay.
Laudonniere quieted the chief Satouriona by promising to aid him against
his enemies, a tribe up the river, called the Thimagoas. Next, misled by
a story of great riches up the river, he actually made an alliance with
Outina, the chief of the Thimagoas. Thus the French were engaged at the
same time to help both sides. But the craze for gold was now at
fever-heat, and they