, Ottigny, to
spy out the secrets of the interior, and to learn, above all, "what this
Thimagoa might be, whereof the Paracoussy Satouriona had spoken to us so
often." As Laudonniere stood pledged to attack the Thimagoas, the chief
gave Ottigny two Indian guides, who, says the record, were so eager for
the fray that they seemed as if bound to a wedding feast.

The lazy waters of the St. John's, tinged to coffee color by the
exudations of the swamps, curled before the prow of Ottigny's sail-boat
as he advanced into the prolific wilderness which no European eye had
ever yet beheld. By his own reckoning, he sailed thirty leagues up the
river, which would have brought him to a point not far below Palatka.
Here, more than two centuries later, the Bartrams, father and son,
guided their skiff and kindled their nightly bivouac-fire; and here,
too, roamed Audubon, with his sketch-book and his gun. It was a paradise
for the hunter and the naturalist. Earth, air, and water teemed with
life, in endless varieties of beauty and ugliness. A half-tropical
forest shadowed the low shores, where the palmetto and the cabbage palm
mingled with the oak, the maple, the cypress, the liquid-ambar, the
laurel, the myrtle, and the broad glistening leaves of the evergreen
magnolia. Here was the haunt of bears, wild-cats, lynxes, cougars, and
the numberless deer of which they made their prey. In the sedges and
the mud the alligator stretched his brutish length; turtles with
outstretched necks basked on half-sunken logs; the rattlesnake sunned
himself on the sandy bank, and the yet more dangerous moccason lurked
under the water-lilies in inlets and sheltered coves. The air and the
water were populous as the earth. The river swarmed with fish, from the
fierce and restless gar, cased in his horny armor, to the lazy cat-fish
in the muddy depths. There were the golden eagle and the white-headed
eagle, the gray pelican and the white pelican, the blue heron and the
white heron, the egret, the ibis, ducks of various sorts, the whooping
crane, the black vulture, and the cormorant; and when at sunset the
voyagers drew their boat upon the strand and built their camp-fire under
the arches of the woods, the owls whooped around them all night long,
and when morning came the sultry mists that wrapped the river were vocal
with the clamor of wild turkeys.

When Ottigny was about twenty leagues from Fort Caroline, his two Indian
guides, who were always on the watch