Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. by Various

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Ribaut thinks that the Broad River of Port Royal is the _Jordan_
of the Spanish navigator Vasquez de Ayllon, who was here in 1520,
and gave the name St. Helena to a neighboring cape (_La Vega,
Florida del Inca_). The adjacent district, now called St. Helena,
is the Chicora of the old Spanish maps.]

Ranging the woods, they found them full of game, wild turkeys and
partridges, bears and lynxes. Two deer, of unusual size, leaped up from
the underbrush. Crossbow and arquebuse were brought to the level; but the
Huguenot captain, "moved with the singular fairness and bigness of them,"
forbade his men to shoot.

Preliminary exploration, not immediate settlement, had been the object of
the voyage, but all was still rose-color in the eyes of the voyagers, and
many of their number would fain linger in the New Canaan. Ribaut was more
than willing to humor them. He mustered his company on deck, and made them
a stirring harangue: appealed to their courage and their patriotism, told
them how, from a mean origin, men rise by enterprise and daring to fame
and fortune, and demanded who among them would stay behind and hold Port
Royal for the king. The greater part came forward, and "with such a good
will and joly corage," writes the commander, "as we had much to do to stay
their importunitie." Thirty were chosen, and Albert de Pierria was named
to command them.

A fort was forthwith begun, on a small stream called the Chenonceau,
probably Archer's Creek, about six miles from the site of Beaufort. They
named it Charlesfort, in honor of the unhappy son of Catherine de Medicis,
Charles IX., the future hero of St. Bartholomew. Ammunition and stores
were sent on shore, and, on the eleventh of June, with his diminished
company, Ribaut, again embarking, spread his sails for France.

From the beach at Hilton Head Albert and his companions might watch the
receding ships, growing less and less on the vast expanse of blue,
dwindling to faint specks, then vanishing on the pale verge of the waters.
They were alone in those fearful solitudes. From the North Pole to Mexico
no Christian denizen but they.

But how were they to subsist? Their thought was not of subsistence, but of
gold. Of the thirty, the greater number were soldiers and sailors, with a
few gentlemen, that is to say, men of the sword, born within the pale of
nobility, who at home could neither labor nor trade without derogation
from their rank. For a time they busied themselves with finishing their
fort, and, this done, set forth in quest of adventures.

The Indians had lost all fear of them. Ribaut had enjoined upon them to
use all kindness and gentleness in their dealing with the men of the
woods; and they more than obeyed him. They were soon hand and glove with
chiefs, warriors, and squaws; and as with Indians the adage that
familiarity breeds contempt holds with peculiar force, they quickly
divested themselves of the prestige which had attached at the outset to
their supposed character of children of the sun. Goodwill, however,
remained, and this the colonists abused to the utmost

Roaming by river, swamp, and forest, they visited in turn the villages of
five petty chiefs, whom they called kings, feasted everywhere on hominy,
beans, and game, and loaded with gifts. One of these chiefs, named
Audusta, invited them to the grand religious festival of his tribe.
Thither, accordingly, they went. The village was alive with preparation,
and troops of women were busied in sweeping the great circular area,
surrounded by the lodges, where the ceremonies were to take place. But as
the noisy and impertinent guests showed disposition to undue merriment,
the chief shut them all in his wigwam, lest their gentile eyes should
profane the mysteries. Here, immured in darkness, they listened to the
howls, yelpings, and lugubrious songs that resounded from without. One of
them, however, by some artifice, contrived to escape, hid behind a bush,
and saw the whole solemnity: the procession of the medicine-men and the
bedaubed and befeathered warriors; the drumming, the dancing, the
stamping; the wild lamentation of the women, as they gashed the arms of
the young girls with sharp mussel-shells and flung the blood into the air
with dismal outcries. A scene of ravenous feasting followed, in which the
French, released from durance, were summoned to share.

Their carousal over, they returned to Charlesfort, where they were soon
pinched with hunger. The Indians, never niggardly of food, brought them
supplies as long as their own lasted; but the harvest was not yet ripe,
and their means did not match their good-will. They told the French of two
other kings, Ouade and Couexis, who dwelt towards the South, and were rich
beyond belief in maize, beans, and squashes. Embarking without delay, the
mendicant colonists steered for the wigwams of these potentates, not by
the open sea, but by a perplexing inland navigation, including, as it
seems, Calibogue Sound and neighboring waters. Arrived at the friendly
villages, on or near the Savannah, they were feasted to repletion, and
their boat laden with vegetables and corn. They returned rejoicing; but
their joy was short. Their storehouse at Charlesfort, taking fire in the
night, burned to the ground, and with it their newly acquired stock. Once
more they set forth for the realms of King Ouade, and once more returned
laden with supplies. Nay, more, the generous savage assured them, that, so
long as his cornfields yielded their harvests, his friends should not
want.

How long this friendship would have lasted may well be matter of doubt.
With the perception that the dependants on their bounty were no demigods,
but a crew of idle and helpless beggars, respect would soon have changed
to contempt and contempt to ill-will. But it was not to Indian war-clubs
that the embryo colony was to owe its ruin. Within itself it carried its
own destruction. The ill-assorted band of landsmen and sailors, surrounded
by that influence of the wilderness which wakens the dormant savage in the
breasts of men, soon fell into quarrels. Albert, a rude soldier, with a
thousand leagues of ocean betwixt him and responsibility, grew harsh,
domineering, and violent beyond endurance. None could question or oppose
him without peril of death. He hanged a drummer who had fallen under his
displeasure, and banished La Chere, a soldier, to a solitary island, three
leagues from the fort, where he left him to starve. For a time his
comrades chafed in smothered fury. The crisis came at length. A few of the
fiercer spirits leagued together, assailed their tyrant, and murdered him.
The deed done, and the famished soldier delivered, they called to the
command one Nicholas Barre, a man of merit. Barre took the command, and
thenceforth there was peace.

Peace, such as it was, with famine, homesickness, disgust. The rough
ramparts and rude buildings of Charlesfort, hatefully familiar to their
weary eyes, the sweltering forest, the glassy river, the eternal silence
of the wild monotony around them, oppressed the senses and the spirits.
Did they feel themselves the pioneers of religious freedom, the
advance-guard of civilization? Not at all. They dreamed of ease, of home,
of pleasures across the sea,--of the evening cup on the bench before the
cabaret, of dances with kind damsels of Dieppe. But how to escape? A
continent was their solitary prison, and the pitiless Atlantic closed the
egress. Not one of them knew how to build a ship; but Ribaut had left them
a forge, with tools and iron, and strong desire supplied the place of
skill. Trees were hewn down and the work begun. Had they put forth, to
maintain themselves at Port Royal, the energy and resource which they
exerted to escape from it, they might have laid the cornerstone of a solid
colony.

All, gentle and simple, labored with equal zeal. They calked the seams
with the long moss which hung in profusion from the neighboring trees; the
pines supplied them with pitch; the Indians made for them a kind of
cordage; and for sails they sewed together their shirts and bedding. At
length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Crusoe floated on the waters of the
Chenonceau. They laid in what provision they might, gave all that remained
of their goods to the delighted Indians, embarked, descended the river,
and put to sea. A fair wind filled their patchwork sails and bore them
from the hated coast. Day after day they held their course, till at length
the favoring breeze died away and a breathless calm fell on the face of
the waters. Florida was far behind; France farther yet before. Floating
idly on the glassy waste, the craft lay motionless. Their supplies gave
out. Twelve kernels of maize a day were each man's portion; then the maize
failed, and they ate their shoes and leather jerkins. The water-barrels
were drained, and they tried to slake their thirst with brine. Several
died, and the rest, giddy with exhaustion and crazed with thirst, were
forced to ceaseless labor, baling out the water that gushed through every
seam. Head-winds set in, increasing to a gale, and the wretched
brigantine, her sails close-reefed, tossed among the savage billows at the
mercy of the storm. A heavy sea rolled down upon her, and threw her on her
side. The surges broke over her, and, clinging with desperate gripe to
spars and cordage, the drenched voyagers gave up all for lost. At length
she righted. The gale subsided, the wind changed, and the crazy,
water-logged vessel again bore slowly towards France.

Gnawed with deadly famine, they counted the leagues of barren ocean that
still stretched before. With haggard, wolfish eyes they gazed on each
other, till a whisper passed from man to man, that one, by his death,
might ransom all the rest. The choice was made. It fell on La Chere, the
same wretched man whom Albert had doomed to starvation on a lonely island,
and whose mind was burdened with the fresh memories of his anguish and
despair. They killed him, and with ravenous avidity portioned out his
flesh. The hideous repast sustained them till the French coast rose in
sight, when, it is said, in a delirium of insane joy, they could no longer
steer their vessel, but let her drift at the will of the tide. A small
English bark bore down upon them, took them all on board, and, after
landing the feeblest, carried the rest prisoners to Queen Elizabeth.

Thus closed another of those scenes of woe whose lurid clouds were thickly
piled around the stormy dawn of American history.

It was but the opening act of a wild and tragic drama. A tempest of
miseries awaited those who essayed to plant the banners of France and of
Calvin in the Southern forests; and the bloody scenes of the religious war
were acted in epitome on the shores of Florida.

* * * * *

HER EPITAPH.

The handful here, that once was Mary's earth,
Held, while it breathed, so beautiful a soul,
That, when she died, all recognized her birth,
And had their sorrow in serene control.

"Not here! not here!" to every mourner's heart
The wintry wind seemed whispering round her bier;
And when the tomb-door opened, with a start
We heard it echoed from within,--"Not here!"

Shouldst thou, sad pilgrim, who mayst hither pass,
Note in these flowers a delicater hue,
Should spring come earlier to this hallowed grass,
Or the bee later linger on the dew,

Know that her spirit to her body lent
Such sweetness, grace, as only goodness can,
That even her dust, and this her monument,
Have yet a spell to stay one lonely man,--

Lonely through life, but looking for the day
When what is mortal of himself shall sleep,
When human passion shall have passed away,
And Love no longer be a thing to weep.

* * * * *

OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY.

Becoming an inhabitant of a great English town, I often turned aside from
the prosperous thoroughfares, (where the edifices, the shops, and the
bustling crowd differed not so much from scenes with which I was familiar
in my own country,) and went designedly astray among precincts that
reminded me of some of Dickens's grimiest pages. There I caught glimpses
of a people and a mode of life that were comparatively new to my
observation, a sort of sombre phantasmagoric spectacle, exceedingly
undelightful to behold, yet involving a singular interest and even
fascination in its ugliness.

Dirt, one would fancy, is plenty enough all over the world, being the
symbolic accompaniment of the foul incrustation which began to settle over
and bedim all earthly things as soon as Eve had bitten the apple; ever
since which hapless epoch, her daughters have chiefly been engaged in a
desperate and unavailing struggle to get rid of it. But the dirt of a
poverty-stricken English street is a monstrosity unknown on our side of
the Atlantic. It reigns supreme within its own limits, and is
inconceivable everywhere beyond them. We enjoy the great advantage, that
the brightness and dryness of our atmosphere keep everything clean that
the sun shines upon, converting the larger portion of our impurities into
transitory dust which the next wind can sweep away, in contrast with the
damp, adhesive grime that incorporates itself with all surfaces (unless
continually and painfully cleansed) in the chill moisture of the English
air. Then the all-pervading smoke of the city, abundantly intermingled
with the sable snow-flakes of bituminous coal, hovering overhead,
descending, and alighting on pavements and rich architectural fronts, on
the snowy muslin of the ladies, and the gentlemen's starched collars and
shirt-bosoms, invests even the better streets in a half-mourning garb. It
is beyond the resources of Wealth to keep the smut away from its premises
or its own fingers' ends; and as for Poverty, it surrenders itself to the
dark influence without a struggle. Along with disastrous circumstances,
pinching need, adversity so lengthened out as to constitute the rule of
life, there comes a certain chill depression of the spirits which seems
especially to shudder at cold water. In view of so wretched a state of
things, we accept the ancient Deluge not merely as an insulated
phenomenon, but as a periodical necessity, and acknowledge that nothing
less than such a general washing-day could suffice to cleanse the slovenly
old world of its moral and material dirt.

Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are numerous in the
vicinity of these poor streets, and are set off with the magnificence of
gilded doorposts, tarnished by contact with the unclean customers who
haunt there. Ragged children come thither with old shaving-mugs, or
broken-nosed tea-pots, or any such make-shift receptacle, to get a little
poison or madness for their parents, who deserve no better requital at
their hands for having engendered them. Inconceivably sluttish women enter
at noonday and stand at the counter among boon-companions of both sexes,
stirring up misery and jollity in a bumper together, and quaffing off the
mixture with a relish. As for the men, they lounge there continually,
drinking till they are drunken,--drinking as long as they have a halfpenny
left, and then, as it seemed to me, waiting for a sixpenny miracle to be
wrought in their pockets, so as to enable them to be drunken again. Most
of these establishments have a significant advertisement of "Beds,"
doubtless for the accommodation of their customers in the interval between
one intoxication and the next. I never could find it in my heart, however,
utterly to condemn these sad revellers, and should certainly wait till I
had some better consolation to offer before depriving them of their dram
of gin, though death itself were in the glass; for methought their poor
souls needed such fiery stimulant to lift them a little way out of the
smothering squalor of both their outward and interior life, giving them
glimpses and suggestions, even if bewildering ones, of a spiritual
existence that limited their present misery. The temperance-reformers
unquestionably derive their commission from the Divine Beneficence, but
have never been taken fully into its counsels. All may not be lost, though
those good men fail.

Pawn-brokers' establishments, distinguished by the mystic symbol of the
three golden balls, were conveniently accessible; though what personal
property these wretched people could possess, capable of being estimated
in silver or copper, so as to afford a basis for a loan, was a problem
that still perplexes me. Old clothes-men, likewise, dwelt hard by, and
hung out ancient garments to dangle in the wind. There were butchers'
shops, too, of a class adapted to the neighborhood, presenting no such
generously fattened carcasses as Englishmen love to gaze at in the market,
no stupendous halves of mighty beeves, no dead hogs or muttons ornamented
with carved bas-reliefs of fat on their ribs and shoulders, in a
peculiarly British style of art,--not these, but bits and gobbets of lean
meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and stringy morsels, bare
bones smitten away from joints by the cleaver, tripe, liver, bullocks'
feet, or whatever else was cheapest and divisible into the smallest lots.
I am afraid that even such delicacies came to many of their tables hardly
oftener than Christmas. In the windows of other little shops you saw half
a dozen wizened herrings, some eggs in a basket, looking so dingily
antique that your imagination smelt them, fly-speckled biscuits, segments
of a hungry cheese, pipes and papers of tobacco. Now and then a sturdy
milk-woman passed by with a wooden yoke over her shoulders, supporting a
pail on either side, filled with a whitish fluid, the composition of which
was water and chalk and the milk of a sickly cow, who gave the best she
had, poor thing! but could scarcely make it rich or wholesome, spending
her life in some close city-nook and pasturing on strange food. I have
seen, once or twice, a donkey coming into one of these streets with
panniers full of vegetables, and departing with a return cargo of what
looked like rubbish and street-sweepings. No other commerce seemed to
exist, except, possibly, a girl might offer you a pair of stockings or a
worked collar, or a man whisper something mysterious about wonderfully
cheap cigars. And yet I remember seeing female hucksters in those regions,
with their wares on the edge of the sidewalk and their own seats right in
the carriage-way, pretending to sell half-decayed oranges and apples,
toffy, Ormskirk cakes, combs and cheap jewelry, the coarsest kind of
crockery, and little plates of oysters,--knitting patiently all day long,
and removing their undiminished stock in trade at nightfall. All
indispensable importations from other quarters of the town were on a
remarkably diminutive scale: for example, the wealthier inhabitants
purchased their coal by the wheelbarrow-load, and the poorer ones by the
peck-measure. It was a curious and melancholy spectacle, when an overladen
coal-cart happened to pass through the street and drop a handful or two of
its burden in the mud, to see half a dozen women and children scrambling
for the treasure-trove, like a dock of hens and chickens gobbling up some
spilt corn. In this connection I may as well mention a commodity of boiled
snails (for such they appeared to me, though probably a marine production)
which used to be peddled from door to door, piping hot, as an article of
cheap nutriment.

The population of these dismal abodes appeared to consider the side-walks
and middle of the street as their common hall. In a drama of low life, the
unity of place might be arranged rigidly according to the classic rule,
and the street be the one locality in which every scene and incident
should occur. Courtship, quarrels, plot and counterplot, conspiracies for
robbery and murder, family difficulties or agreements,--all such matters,
I doubt not, are constantly discussed or transacted in this sky-roofed
saloon, so regally hung with its sombre canopy of coal-smoke. Whatever the
disadvantages of the English climate, the only comfortable or wholesome
part of life, for the city-poor, must be spent in the open air. The
stifled and squalid rooms where they lie down at night, whole families and
neighborhoods together, or sulkily elbow one another in the day-time, when
a settled rain drives them within doors, are worse horrors than it is
worth while (without a practical object in view) to admit into one's
imagination. No wonder that they creep forth from the foul mystery of
their interiors, stumble down from their garrets, or scramble up out of
their cellars, on the upper step of which you may see the grimy housewife,
before the shower is ended, letting the rain-drops gutter down her visage;
while her children (an impish progeny of cavernous recesses below the
common sphere of humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that
they know of personal purification in the nearest mud-puddle. It might
almost make a man doubt the existence of his own soul, to observe how
Nature has flung these little wretches into the street and left them
there, so evidently regarding them as nothing worth, and how all mankind
acquiesce in the great mother's estimate of her offspring. For, if they
are to have no immortality, what superior claim can I assert for mine? And
how difficult to believe that anything so precious as a germ of immortal
growth can have been buried under this dirt-heap, plunged into this
cesspool of misery and vice! As often as I beheld the scene, it affected
me with surprise and loathsome interest, much resembling, though in a far
intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a boy, I used to turn over a
plank or an old log that had long lain on the damp ground, and found a
vivacious multitude of unclean and devilish-looking insects scampering to
and fro beneath it. Without an infinite faith, there seemed as much
prospect of a blessed futurity for those hideous bugs and many-footed
worms as for these brethren of our humanity and co-heirs of all our
heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a mystery! Slowly, slowly, as after groping
at the bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope struggles upward
to the surface, bearing the half-drowned body of a child along with it,
and heaving it aloft for its life, and my own life, and all our lives.
Unless these slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling
celestial air, I know not how the purest and most intellectual of us can
reasonably expect ever to taste a breath of it. The whole question of
eternity is staked there. If a single one of those helpless little ones be
lost, the world is lost!

The women and children greatly preponderate in such places; the men
probably wandering abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner and a
drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better
follow out their catlike rambles through the dark. Here are women with
young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, tanned and blear-eyed with
the smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,--it being too
precious for its warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them sit
on the door-steps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we will
glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all womanhood, because
the fairest spectacle is here the foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark
abodes, is strangely identical with what we have all known it to be in the
happiest homes. Nothing, as I remember, smote me with more grief and pity
(all the more poignant because perplexingly entangled with an inclination
to smile) than to hear a gaunt and ragged mother priding herself on the
pretty ways of her ragged and skinny infant, just as a young matron might,
when she invites her lady-friends to admire her plump, white-robed darling
in the nursery. Indeed, no womanly characteristic seemed to have
altogether perished out of these poor souls. It was the very same creature
whose tender torments make the rapture of our young days, whom we love,
cherish, and protect, and rely upon in life and death, and whom we delight
to see beautify her beauty with rich robes and set it off with jewels,
though now fantastically masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit
for her to handle. I recognized her, over and over again, in the groups
round a door-step or in the descent of a cellar, chatting with prodigious
earnestness about intangible trifles, laughing for a little jest,
sympathizing at almost the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and
another's shadow, wise, simple, sly, and patient, yet easily perturbed,
and breaking into small feminine ebullitions of spite, wrath, and
jealousy, tornadoes of a moment, such as vary the social atmosphere of her
silken-skirted sisters, though smothered into propriety by dint of a
well-bred habit. Not that there was an absolute deficiency of
good-breeding, even here. It often surprised me to witness a courtesy and
deference among these ragged folks, which, having seen it, I did not
thoroughly believe in, wondering whence it should have come. I am
persuaded, however, that there were laws of intercourse which they never
violated,--a code of the cellar, the garret, the common staircase, the
doorstep, and the pavement, which perhaps had as deep a foundation in
natural fitness as the code of the drawing-room.

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