The most prominent feature of their religion was sun-worship.
Their villages were clusters of large dome-shaped huts, framed with poles and thatched with palmetto leaves. In the midst was the dwelling of the chief, much larger than the rest, and sometimes raised on an artificial mound. They were enclosed with palisades, and, strange to say, some of them were approached by wide avenues, artificially graded, and several hundred yards in length. Traces of these may still be seen, as may also the mounds in which the Floridians, like the Hurons and various other tribes, collected at stated intervals the bones of their dead.
Social distinctions were sharply defined among them. Their chiefs, whose office was hereditary, sometimes exercised a power almost absolute. Each village had its chief, subordinate to the grand chief of the confederacy. In the language of the French narratives, they were all kings or lords, vassals of the great monarch Satouriona, Outina, or Potanou. All these tribes are now extinct, and it is difficult to ascertain with precision their tribal affinities. There can be no doubt that they were the authors of the aboriginal remains at present found in various parts of Florida.
Having nearly finished the fort, Laudonniere declares that he "would not lose the minute of an houre without employing of the same in some vertuous exercise;" and he therefore sent his lieutenant, 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, descried three canoes, and in great excitement cried, "Thimagoa! Thimagoa!" As they drew near, one of them snatched up a halberd and the other a sword, and in their fury they seemed ready to jump into the water to get at the enemy. To their great disgust, Ottigny permitted the Thimagoas to run their canoes ashore and escape to the woods. Far from keeping Laudonniere's senseless promise to light them, he wished to make them friends; to which end he now landed with some of his men, placed a few trinkets in their canoes, and withdrew to a distance to watch the result. The fugitives presently returned, step by step, and allowed the French to approach them; on which Ottigny asked, by signs, if they had gold or silver. They replied that they had none, but that if he would give them one of his men they would show him where it was to be found. One of the soldiers boldly offered himself for the venture, and embarked with them. As, however, he failed to return according to agreement, Ottigny, on the next day, followed ten leagues farther up the stream, and at length had the good luck to see him approaching in a canoe. He brought little or no gold, but reported that he had heard of a certain chief, named Mayrra, marvellously rich, who lived three days' journey up the river; and with these welcome tidings Ottigny went back to Fort Caroline.
A fortnight later, an officer named Vasseur went up the river to pursue the adventure. The fever for gold had seized upon the French. As the villages of the Thimagoas lay between them and the imagined treasures, they shrank from a quarrel, and Laudonniere repented already of his promised alliance with Satouriona.
Vasseur was two days' sail from the fort when two Indians hailed him from the shore, inviting him to their dwellings. He accepted their guidance, and presently saw before him the cornfields and palisades of an Indian town. He and his followers were led through the wondering crowd to the lodge of Mollua, the chief, seated in the place of honor, and plentifully regaled with fish and bread. The repast over, Mollua made a speech. He told them that he was one of the forty vassal chiefs of the great Outina, lord of all the Thimagoas, whose warriors wore armor of gold and silver plate. He told them, too, of Potanou, his enemy, "a man cruell in warre;" and of the two kings of the distant Appalachian Mountains—Onatheaqua and Houstaqua, "great lords and abounding in riches." While thus, with earnest pantomime and broken words, the chief discoursed with his guests, Vasseur, intent and eager, strove to follow his meaning; and no sooner did he hear of these Appalachian treasures than he promised to join Outina in war against the two potentates of the mountains. Mollua, well pleased, promised that each of Outina's vassal chiefs should requite their French allies with a heap of gold and silver two feet high. Thus, while Laudonniere stood pledged to Satouriona, Vasseur made alliance with his mortal enemy.
On his return, he passed a night in the lodge of one of Satouriona's chiefs, who questioned him touching his dealings with the Thimagoas. Vasseur replied that he had set upon them and put them to utter rout. But as the chief, seeming as yet unsatisfied, continued his inquiries, the sergeant Francois de la Caille drew his sword, and, like Falstaff, reenacted his deeds of valor, pursuing and thrusting at the imaginary Thimagoas, as they fled before his fury. The chief, at length convinced, led the party to his lodge, and entertained them with a decoction of the herb called Cassina.
Satouriona, elated by Laudonniere's delusive promises of aid, had summoned his so-called vassals to war. Ten chiefs and some five hundred warriors had mustered at his call, and the forest was alive with their bivouacs. When all was ready, Satouriona reminded the French commander of his pledge, and claimed its fulfilment, but got nothing but evasions in return, He stifled his rage, and prepared to go without his fickle ally.
A fire was kindled near the bank of the river, and two large vessels of water were placed beside it. Here Satouriona took his stand, while his chiefs crouched on the grass around him, and the savage visages of his five hundred warriors filled the outer circle, their long hair garnished with feathers, or covered with the heads and skins of wolves, cougars, bears, or eagles. Satouriona, looking towards the country of his enemy, distorted his features into a wild expression of rage and hate; then muttered to himself; then howled an invocation to his god, the Sun; then besprinkled the assembly with water from one of the vessels, and, turning the other upon the fire, suddenly quenched it. "So," he cried, "may the blood of our enemies be poured out, and their lives extinguished!" and the concourse gave forth an explosion of responsive yells, till the shores resounded with the wolfish din.
The rites over, they set out, and in a few days returned exulting, with thirteen prisoners and a number of scalps. These last were hung on a pole before the royal lodge; and when night came, it brought with it a pandemonium of dancing and whooping, drumming and feasting.
A notable scheme entered the brain of Laudonniere. Resolved, cost what it might, to make a friend of Outina, he conceived it to be a stroke of policy to send back to him two of the prisoners. In the morning he sent a soldier to Satouriona to demand them. The astonished chief gave a fiat refusal, adding that he owed the French no favors, for they had shamefully broken faith with him. On this, Laudonniere,