To love a great deal,—to love unconditionally, so as to be loved a little in return,—that is the whole moral of the story of Gudbrand.
The Huguenot Families In America.
II.
The brave Admiral Coligny first conceived the plan of a colony in America for the safety of his persecuted Huguenot brethren of France. Such an enterprise was undertaken as early as the year 1555, with two vessels, having on board mechanics, laborers, and gentlemen, and a few ministers of the Reformed faith. They entered the great river which the Portuguese had already named Rio Janeiro, and built a fort, calling it 'Coligny.' Here they sought a new country, where they might adore God in freedom. Unforeseen difficulties, however, discouraged these bold Frenchmen, and the pious expedition failed, some dispersing in different directions, while others regained the shores of France with great difficulty. A second attempt was also unsuccessful. Coligny, in 1562, obtained permission from Charles IX. to found a Protestant colony in Florida. Two ships left Dieppe with emigrants, and, reaching the American shores, entered a large, deep river called Port Royal, which name it still retains, and is, by coincidence, the spot recently captured by the United States forces.[6] Fort Charles, in honor of the reigning king of France, was built near by, and in a fertile land of flowers, fruits, and singing birds. The country itself was called Carolina. Reduced to the most cruel extremities of famine and death, the remaining colonists returned to Europe.
Still undismayed by these two disastrous attempts, Coligny, the Huguenot leader, dispatched a third expedition of three vessels to our shores, making another attempt near the mouth of the St. John's River (Fort Caroline). Philip II. was then on the throne, and would not brook the heresy of the Huguenots, or Calvinism, in his American provinces. Priests, soldiers, and Jesuits were dispatched to Florida, where the new settlers, 'Frenchmen and Lutherans,' were destroyed in blood. Such was the melancholy issue of the earliest attempts to establish a Huguenot or Protestant settlement in North America. And nearly one hundred years before it was occupied by the English, Carolina, for an instant, as it were, was occupied by a band of Christian colonists, but, through the remorseless spirit of religious persecution, again fell under the dominion of the uncivilized savages. We refer to these earliest efforts as proper to the general historical connection of our subject, although not absolutely necessary to its investigation.
At the commencement of the seventeenth century, England, on her own behalf, took up the generous plans of Coligny. Possessing twelve colonies in America, when the edict of Nantes was revoked, that nation resolved here to offer peaceful homes to persecuted Huguenots from France. This mercy she had extended to them in England and Ireland; now her inviting American colonies were thrown open for the same generous purpose. Even before that insane and fatal measure of Louis XIV., the Revocation, and especially after the fall of brave La Rochelle, numerous Protestant fugitives, mostly from the western provinces of France, had already emigrated, for safety, to British America. In 1662 the French government made it a crime for the ship-owners of Rochelle to convey emigrants to any country or dependency of Great Britain. The fine for such an offence was ten livres to the king, nine hundred for charitable objects, three hundred to the palace chapel, one hundred for prisoners, and five hundred to the mendicant monks. One sea-captain, Brunet, was accused of having favored the escape of thirty-six young men, and condemned to return them within a year, or to furnish a legal certificate of their death, on pain of one thousand livres, with exemplary punishment.[7] It is imagined that these young voluntary Huguenot exiles emigrated to Massachusetts, from the fact that the same year when this strange cause was tried in France, Jean Touton, a French doctor, requested from the authorities of that colony the privilege of sojourning there. This favor was immediately granted; and from that period Boston possessed establishments formed by Huguenots, which attracted new emigrants.
In 1679, Elie Nean, the head of an eminent family from the principality of Soubise, in Saintonge, reached that city. This refugee, sailing afterwards in his own merchant vessel for the island of Jamaica, was captured by a privateer, carried back to France, confined in the galleys, and only restored to his liberty through the intercession of Lord Portland.
One of the first acts of the Boston Huguenots was to settle a minister, giving him forty pounds a year, and increasing his salary afterwards. Surrounded by the savages on every side, they erected a fort, the traces of which, it is said, can still be seen, and now overgrown with roses, currant bushes, and other shrubbery. Mrs. Sigourney, herself the wife of a Huguenot descendant, during a visit to this time-honored spot, wrote the beautiful lines,—