Hawkins relieved their immediate wants with provisions and other comforts and offered to convey them back to France. The generous offer was declined with expressions of gratitude, and instead Laudonnière arranged for the purchase of one of his ships, stocked with provisions, to make the home voyage independently. Then with mutual exchange of good wishes Hawkins departed for his homeward voyage. The tragic end of the hapless Huguenot colony was not far off. When shortly after Hawkins’s departure, Laudonnière and his people were about to embark on the ship bought from him, sails were descried of the long-looked-for French fleet approaching their port. These welcome ships brought out Ribault to take the command, with emigrants in families, implements of husbandry, domestic animals, and every supply for a well-equipped colony. New life and hope were instilled into the colony by the new comers. Then suddenly the terrible Pedro Menendez de Aviles burst upon them with an invading army of Spaniards and destroyed them with awful massacre, “Not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans,” as he proclaimed, only a few escaping, Laudonnière and Le Moyne, the artist of the colony (to whom we are indebted for the first drawings of American natives and scenes), among these, to tell the tale. And then, two years afterward, Menendez’s act was avenged by the fiery soldier of Gascony, Dominic de Gourgues, with massacre of Spaniards in Florida, “Not,” as he in turn proclaimed, “as unto Spaniards but as unto Traitors, Robbers and Murderers.” All this as told in the accounts of Laudonnière and others reproduced by Hakluyt, constitutes one of the saddest and bloodiest chapters in early American history. Hawkins’s return voyage was tempestuous. Contrary winds beset the fleet and so prolonged the passage that their provisions ran short. Relief was had, however, on the banks of Newfoundland by a large take of cod; and farther along when two French ships were met sufficient supplies for the remainder of the voyage were bought from them. Home was at length reached on the twentieth of September, when the fleet arrived at Padstow, Cornwall. Commercially it had been a most prosperous voyage, for it had brought “great profit” not alone to the venturers but “to the whole realme.” In addition to the gains from the unholy traffic in human beings Hawkins brought his ship home freighted with “great store” of gold, silver, pearls, and other jewels. Accordingly the chronicler reverently closes his account with the pious and doubtless sincere prayer, “His Name therefore be praised for evermore Amen.” A third voyage was soon planned, to be made over the same course, with a second visit to Florida. In this Francis Drake, a young kinsman of Hawkins, later destined to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, had part. It ended in disaster through conflict with a Spanish fleet in the Gulf of Mexico, but its consequences were large in after performances, especially of Drake.