this time was completed, on the 13th of December, 1683, he repairs to France. In 1684, with four vessels and two hundred and eighty-four emigrants, he sets sail from the shores of his native land for the Gulf of Mexico. Early in the following year, he reaches his point of destination. After vainly searching for the mouths of the Mississippi, he anchors his vessels in the Bay of Matagorda and disembarks his little colony upon the sandy shore. But here he experiences sad disasters. One by one, he loses all his vessels by shipwreck and desertion. After making scanty provisions for his colony, he explores the country. He searches for the mouths of the Mississippi and for his lost ship, Belle, but with ill success. He now pursues in ecstacy golden visions for the mines of St. Barbe, but in a few months, he returns in rags and sadness to his dejected colony—diminished by fatal fevers and savage massacres. Cut off from France by the loss of his ships, misfortune constantly attending him, he resolves to seek assistance in Canada. Having made arrangements for his colony during his absence, he sets out for the northern lakes with a company of twenty men. He had not proceeded far when a mutiny sprang up among his followers, and he was the victim of assassination. His little colony which had cost him so much labor, solicitude and misfortune, was soon visited by the Spaniards and all of its members killed, save five, who were spared on account of their youth, and a few men who escaped to the woods and were never heard of more.
During the next five years, France is too much engaged in war to turn her attention to her distant possessions. After the peace of Ryswick, another colony was sent out under her auspices. Early in 1699, Lemoine De Iberville, a distinguished Canadian officer, established a little settlement near the Bay of Baloxi. While exploring one of the mouths of the Mississippi he obtained Tonty's letter to La Salle from the wandering savages. It will be recollected that this was the individual whom La Salle had left in
