12. French Attempts to colonize Florida (1562-1568).
Coligny's colony at Port Royal.
Admiral Coligny, the great Huguenot leader, was ambitious to establish a colony of French Protestants in America which should be a refuge for his persecuted countrymen whenever it became desirable for them to seek new seats. Jean Ribaut went out under his auspices in 1562, discovered St. John's River in Florida, went up Broad River, named the country Carolina, after the boy-king, Charles IX., and left twenty-six colonists at Port Royal, on Lemon Island. But the settlers soon tired of their enterprise, and the following year set out for home. An English cruiser captured the party on the high sea when it was reduced to the last extremity for want of food. The more exhausted of the company were landed in France; the rest were taken to England.
Laudonnière in Florida.
The succeeding season (1564), another colonizing expedition, made up of Protestants, headed by René Goulaine de Laudonnière, and aided by the king, sought Carolina. Avoiding Port Royal as ill-omened, they established themselves on St. John's River. The emigrants were a dissolute set, as emigrants were apt to be in an age when the sweepings of European jails and gutters were thought to furnish good colonizing material for America. Laudonnière hung some of his followers for piracy against Spanish vessels; others were captured in the act by the Spaniards, and sold into slavery in the West Indies. What remained of the colony soon lost, through dishonesty and severity, the respect of the Indians, who had at first received the intruders kindly. When, in August, 1565, Sir John Hawkins, the noted slaver and navigator, appeared with his fleet, he was able to render the now half-starved settlers most needed help. Ribaut soon came also, with recruits, provisions, seeds, domestic animals, and farming implements, greatly to the joy of the little colony.
But this happiness was not of long duration. The attention of Philip II. of Spain was at length called to this colony of French heretics which was gaining a foothold upon his domain of Florida. |The Spanish massacre.| In August, 1565, his agent, Pedro Melendez de Aviles, appeared on the scene and announced his purpose to "gibbet and behead all the Protestants in these regions." Melendez established St. Augustine, which is thus the oldest town in the United States east of the Mississippi, and then with blood-thirsty deliberateness proceeded to wipe the French settlement out of existence. French writers claim that nine hundred persons were cruelly massacred; and the Spanish estimate is not far below that number.
A Gascon soldier, Dominic de Gourgues, soon came over (1567) to avenge the wrong done his fellow-Huguenots. |The Huguenots avenged.| He captured all the Spanish establishments left by Melendez, except St. Augustine. When he found, the following year, that he could not hold his prizes, he hung the Spanish prisoners to trees and hastened back to France. His king, however, being under the influence of Spain, disavowed this act of reprisal, and relinquished all further claim to Florida.
13. The French in Canada (1589-1608).
The colonial policy of Henri IV. (1589-1610) was more progressive and enlightened than that of his immediate predecessors on the throne of France. But he had not yet learned what succeeding generations were to discover to their cost,—that criminals and paupers do not make good colonists. |De la Roche's ill-fated venture.| In 1598 the familiar error was repeated, when the Marquis de la Roche took out a company of forty jail-birds, liberated for the purpose, and landed them on the dreary, storm-washed Isle of Sable, off the Nova Scotia coast, where, eighty years earlier (1518), the Baron de Léry had made a vain attempt to start a colony. La Roche, beggared on his return home, was unable to succor his colonists, who on their inhospitable sands lived more like beasts than men. Five years later the twelve skin-clad survivors were picked up by a chance vessel and taken back to France, to tell a tale of almost matchless horror.
Champlain's first voyage.