But the admiral and Montgomery followed up this clever deed by a blunder so bad that the Reformed suffered for it for years afterward, and were saved from losing Béarn, perhaps, as they had almost lost it before, by the intervention of the Peace of St. Germain. Coligny’s original plan was to pass the rest of the winter and until harvest in Gascony and Guyenne, with Port Ste. Marie as his base and to have heavy artillery brought from the fortresses of Béarn with which to take all the towns upon the Garonne as far as Bordeaux. The bridge assured them control of two of the richest provinces of France, for they were absolute masters of the field. By this means Bordeaux would have been at their mercy, for the sea power of the Huguenots at Blaye[1425] was sufficient to close the city upon the sea side. It could not have held out for more than three months, for already corn was selling there at ten livres per sack. Bordeaux itself was rich and strong but situated in a barren country, so that, deprived of the Garonne and Dordogne, it could presently be reduced to famine. As for the Protestant army it would have fared well. The lesser towns like Libourne and Lectoure must inevitably have succumbed with their stores, and the viscounts were in full possession of Comenge and Loumaigne, the most fertile counties of all Guyenne. There were numerous stores of grain here, for it was a practice of the dealers and even gentlemen, to accumulate three or four years’ store in anticipation of a dear year. Had the Huguenots once got Bordeaux in their clutches, they might have boasted that they had the best and strongest angle of the kingdom, both by land and sea, commanding five navigable rivers. The bridges over the Charente at Saintes and Cognac, being in their hands, no one could pass from Saintonge to Bordeaux where La Noue lay, “as valiant a man as any that ever was in France.” The river system of the southwest—the Charente, Ile, Dordogne, Lot, and Garonne—could have been made to bind the whole region into a compact whole if this plan had been carried out, and from behind these natural barriers the Protestants might have defied all the King’s armies. Yet although Coligny’s army tasted of Bordeaux wine and his reiters watered their horses in the Garonne, he did not go on. He failed to see that the most vital need of the Huguenots was to gain complete mastery of the sea. This is what La Noue perceived and Coligny did not. After the loss of Rouen they had but one important port town at their command, La Rochelle, which the blunders of the government in the second civil war had permitted the Protestants to make their own, on which depended Brouage, reputed the fairest and most commodious haven in all the kingdom, and the chief staple for salt in all the southwest.[1426]