9. IX.
THE SACRIFICE OF THE VICTIMS.
The captured fortress was won with a singular facility, and
with so little loss to the assailants, as to confirm them in the
conviction that the service was acceptable to God. He had
strengthened their hearts and arms—HE had hung his shield of
protection over them—HE had made, through the sting of conscience,
the souls of the murderous Spaniards to quake in fear at
the very sight of the avengers! The fortress of La Caroline
was found to have been as well supplied with all necessaries for
defence, as it had been amply garrisoned. It was defended by
five double culverins, by four minions, and divers other cannon
of smaller calibre suitable for such a forest fortress. “Eighteen
great cakes of gunpowder,” (it would seem that this combustible
was put up in those days moistened, and in a different form from
the present, and hence the frequent necessity for drying it, of
which we read,) and every variety of weapon proper to the
keeping of the fortress, had been supplied to the Spaniards; so
that, but for the unaccountable error of the sortié, and but for
the panic which possessed them, and which may reasonably be
ascribed to the natural terrors of a guilty conscience, it was
scarcely possible that the Chevalier de Gourgues, with all his
prowess, could have succeeded in the assault. He transferred all
the arms to his vessels, but the gunpowder took fire from the
carelessness of one of the savages, who, ignorant of its qualities,
proceeded to seethe his fish in the neighborhood of a train, which
took fire, and blew up the store-house with all its moveables, destroying
all the houses within its sweep! The poor savage himself
seems to have been the only human victim. The fortress
was then razed to the ground, Gourgues having no purpose to reestablish
a colony which he had not the power to maintain.
But his vengeance was not complete. The final act of expiation
was yet to take place; and, bringing all his prisoners together, he
had them conducted to the fatal tree upon which the Spaniards
had done to death their Huguenot captives! This was at a short
distance from the fortress.
Mournful was the spectacle that met the eyes of the Frenchmen
as they reached the spot. There still hung the withered and
wasted skeletons of their brethren, naked, bare of flesh, bleached,
and rattling against the branches of the thrice-accursed tree!
The tempest had beaten wildly against their wasted forms—the
obscene birds had preyed upon their carcasses—some had fallen,
and lay in undistinguished heaps upon the earth; but the entire
skeletons of many, unbroken, still waved in the unconscious
breezes of heaven! For two weary years had they been thus
tossed and shaken in the tempest. For two years had they thus
waved, ghastly, white, and terrible, in mockery of the blessed
sunshine! And now, in the genial breezes of April, they still
shook aloft in horrible contrast with the green leaves, and the
purple blossoms of the spring around them! But they were now
decreed to take their shame from the suffering eyes of day! A
solemn service was said over the wretched remains, which were
taken down with cautious hands, as considerately as if they were
still accessible to hurt, and buried in one common grave! The
red-men looked on wondering, and in grave silence; and Holata
Cara, leaning upon his spear, might almost be thought to weep
at the cruel spectacle.
But his aspect changed when the Spanish captives were brought
forth. They were ranged, manacled in pairs, beneath the same
tree of sacrifice. Briefly, and in stern accents, did Gourgues recite
the crime of which they had been guilty, and which they were
now to expiate by a sufferance of the same fate which they had
decreed to their victims! Prayers and pleadings were alike in
vain. The priest who had performed the solemn rites for the
dead, now performed the last duties for the living judged! He
heard their confessions. One of the wretched victims confessed
that the judgment under which he was about to suffer was a just
one; that he himself, with his own hands, had hung no less than
five of the wretched Huguenots. With such a confession ringing
in their ears, it was not possible for the French to be merciful!
At a given signal, the victims were run up to the deadly branches,
which they themselves had accursed by such employment; and
even while their suspended forms writhed and quivered with the
last fruitless efforts of expiring consciousness, the chieftain Holata
Cara looked upon them with a cold, hard eye, stern and tearless,
as if he felt the dreadful propriety of this wild and unrelenting
justice! The deed done—the expiation made—Gourgues then
procured a huge plank of pine, upon which he caused to be
branded, with a searing iron, in rude, but large, intelligible characters,
these words, corresponding to that inscription put by the
Spaniards over the Huguenots, and as a fitting commentary upon
it:—
“These are not hung as Spaniards,
nor as Mariners, but as
Traitors, Robbers, and
Murderers!”
How long they hung thus, bleaching in storm and sunshine; how
long this terrible inscription remained as a record of their crime
and of this history, the chronicle does not show, nor is it needful.
The record is inscribed in pages that survive storm, and wreck,
and fire;—more indelibly written than on pillars of brass and
marble! It hangs on high forever, where the eyes of the criminal
may read how certainly will the vengeance of heaven alight, or
soon or late, upon the offender, who wantonly exults in the moment
of security in the commission of great crimes done upon
suffering humanity.
