On his return to France, Bienville presented a memorial in vindication of his course. Eight years before this he had urged upon the Marine Council that he was entitled to promotion. The recapitulation of his services, with which he opened his letter, is used again in substance in the memorial: “For thirty-four years Sieur de Bienville has had the honor of serving the King, twenty-seven of them as _lieutenant du roy_ and as commandant of the colony. In 1692 he was appointed midshipman. He served seven years as such, and made seven sea-voyages in actual service on armed vessels of the navy. During these seven years he participated in all the combats waged by his brother, the late Sieur d’Iberville, upon the shores of New England, at Newfoundland, and at Hudson’s Bay; and among others in the action in the North against three English vessels. These three vessels, one of which had fifty-four guns and each of the others forty-two, attacked the said Sieur d’Iberville, then commanding a frigate of forty-two guns. In a combat of five hours he sank the fifty-four-gun ship, and took one of the others; while the third, disabled, slipped away under cover of the night. The said Sieur de Bienville was then seriously wounded in the head.”[63] He then refers to his services in the exploring expedition and in the colony, closing with the statement that his father was killed by the savages in Canada, and that seven of his brothers died in the French naval service. In support of his memorial, and to refute statements that there would be an Indian outbreak if he should return, several representatives of the Indian tribes of the colony, moved thereto by Bienville’s relatives, were admitted to an audience with the Superior Council, and there pronounced themselves friendly to him. It was thus that the red men, on whom he had relied for food at some time in nearly every year since he landed in Louisiana, rewarded him for his friendly interest in their behalf,—him who had been the advocate of the plan for exiling them to Santo Domingo, there to be exchanged for negroes; who had subdued the eight hundred warriors of the Natchez by treacherously seizing and holding their principal chiefs; who, on the 1st of February, 1723, wrote that an important advantage over the Chickasaws had been gained without the loss of a French life, “through the care that I took to set these barbarians against each other.” [Illustration]