LITMIR.BIZ

       ONE A Feast of Flowers and Blood

      ON THE MORNING of 20 September 1565, the sixty-year-old carpenter Nicolas le Challeux awoke to the sound of rain pelting down on the palm-leaf thatch overhead. It had not stopped for days, and a muddy morass awaited him outside.

      When he had arrived in Florida the previous month, a sunnier prospect had beckoned. He had left the terrors of his native France far behind, and come to a place where he could practise his craft and religion in peace. Its very name suggested renewal, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León calling it Florida after the season in which he first sighted its shores: Easter Week, or Pascua Florida, ‘the feast of flowers’.

      Florida could furnish all that a man could wish on earth, Challeux had been told. It had received a particular favour from heaven, suffering neither the snow nor raw frost of the North, nor the drying, burning heat of the South. The soil was so fertile, the forest so full of wild animals, the honest and gentle natives could live off the land without having to cultivate it. There were even reports of unicorns, and of veins of gold in a great mountain range to the north called the ‘Appalatcy’. It was ‘impossible that a man could not find there great pleasure and delight,’ Challeux was assured.¹

      The contrast with the state of his homeland was stark. Europe was in turmoil. To the south, the Catholic Spanish and Holy Roman empires, offshoots of a single dynasty, domineered. In the north, Queen Elizabeth reigned over Europe’s upstart Protestant monarchy England, while her subjects egged on their co-religionists in the Low Countries (modern Netherlands and Belgium), who were fighting for independence from their Spanish overlords. To the east stretched the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent resting an elbow upon the Balkans, a heel upon Basra. And in the middle lay France, a Catholic country penetrated by a powerful Protestant or ‘Huguenot’ minority. Exposed to so many religious and political tensions, it threatened to disintegrate, and in 1562, a series of civil wars erupted across the kingdom that were so brutal, they gave the word massacre, French for a butcher’s block, its modern meaning.

      It was from the midst of this maelstrom that Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Huguenots, had dispatched a fleet under the command of his kinsman René de Laudonnière to found a Protestant refuge in Florida. To the eyes of Coligny’s Catholic enemies, this was a provocative move. Though its coastline was still only hazily charted, and some even doubted it was a single land mass, all of North America was claimed

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