d other officers took part with Laudonniere 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 Laudonniere'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
the sick Laudonniere, the men, bedrenched and disheartened, labored as
they might to strengthen their defences. Their muster-roll shows but a
beggarly array. "Now," says Laudonniere, "let them which have bene bold
to say that I had men ynongh left me, so that I had meanes to defend my
selfe, give care a little now vnto mee, and if they have eyes in their
heads, let them see what men I had." Of Ribaut's followers left at the
fort, only nine or ten had weapons, while only two or three knew how to
use them. Four of them were boys, who kept Ribaut's dogs, and another
was his cook. Besides these, he had left a brewer, an old
crossbow-maker, two shoemakers, a player on the spinet, four valets, a
carpenter of threescore--Challeux, no doubt, who has left us the story
of his woes,--and a crowd of women, children, and eighty-six
camp-followers. To these were added the remnant of Laudonniere's men, of
whom seventeen could bear arms, the rest being sick or disabled by
wounds received in the fight with Outina.

Laudonniere divided his force, such as it was, into two watche