sailing to what is now the St. John's River, and arriving on May-day, they called it "River of May," and found in it that charm which it has held for all explorers, down to the successive military expeditions that occupied and abandoned it dur ing our own civil war. Here they were again received by a picturesque crowd of savages, wading into the water up to their shoulders, and bringing little baskets of maize and of white and red mulberries, while others offered to help their visitors ashore. Other rivers also the Frenchmen visited, naming them after rivers of France-the Seine, the Loireand then sailing farther north, they entered Port Royal Harbor, "finding the same one of the fayrest and greatest Havens of the worlde," says the quaint old translation of Thomas Hackit. Here they left behind a colony of thirty men, under Albert de la Pierria, to complete a fort called Charlesfort. It was the only Christian colony north of Mexico, and the site of the fort, though still disputed, was undoubtedly not far from Beaufort, South Carolina. The lonely colonists spent a winter of absolute poverty and wretchedness. They were fed by the Indians, and wronged them in return. They built for themselves vessels in which they sailed for France, reaching it after sufferings too great to tell.

Still another French Protestant colony followed in 1564, led by René de Laudonnière. He too sought the "River of May;" he too was cordially received by the Indians; and he built above what is now called St. John's Bluff, on the river of that name, a stronghold called Fort Caroline. "The place is so pleasant," wrote he, "that those which are melancholike would be enforced to change their humor." The adventures of this colony are told in the narrative of the artist Le Moyne -lately reproduced, with heliotypes of all his quaint illustra tions, by J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston. These designs—some of which I am permitted by the publishers to copy-are so graphic that we seem in the midst of the scenes described.

They set before us the very costumes of the Frenchmen, and the absence of costume among the Indians. We see the domestic habits, the religious sacrifices, the warlike contests, the Indian faces alone being conventionalized, and made far too European for strict fidelity. We see also the animals that excited the artist's wonder, and especially the alligator, which is rendered with wonderful accuracy, though exaggerated in size. We see here also the column which had been erected by Ribaut on his previous voyage, and how the Indians had decked it, after worshipping there as at an altar.

The career of the colony was a tragedy. Fort Caroline was built; the colonists mutinied, and sought to become buccaneers, "calling us cowards and greenhorns," says Le Moyne,

"for not joining in the piracy." Failing miserably in this, and wearing out the patience of their generous Indian friends, they almost perished of famine. The very fact that they were a Protestant colony brought with it a certain disadvantage, so long as the colonists were French. Protestantism in England reached the lower classes, but never in France. The Hugue

nots belonged, as a rule, to the middle and higher classes, and the peasants, so essential to the foundation of a colony, would neither emigrate nor change their religion. There were plenty of adventurers, but no agriculturists. The English Hawkins visited and relieved them. Ribaut came from France and again gave them aid, and their lives were prolonged only to

meet cruel destruction from the energy and perfidy of a Spaniard, Don Pedro de Menendez. He came with a great squadron of thirty-four vessels-his flag-ship being nearly a thousand tons burden-to conquer and settle the vast continent, then known as Florida. Parkman has admirably told the story of Menendez's victory; suffice it to say that he overcame the little colony, and then, after taking an oath upon the Bible, adding the sign of the cross, and giving a pledge, written and sealed, to spare their lives, he proceeded to massacre every man in cold blood, sparing only, as Le Moyne tells us, a drummer, a fifer, and a fiddler. It is the French tradition that he hanged his prisoners on trees, with this inscription: "I do this not as to Frenchmen, but as to Lutherans." This was the same Menendez who in that same year (1565) had founded the Spanish colony of St. Augustine, employing for this purpose the negro slaves he had brought from Africa-the first introduction, probably, of slave labor upon the soil now included in the United States. Menendez was the true type of the Spanish conqueror of that day-a race of whom scarcely one in a thousand, as poor Le Moyne declares, was capable of a sensation of pity.

Menendez thanked God with tears for his victory over the little garrison. But his act aroused a terrible demand for vengeance in France, and this eager desire was satisfied by a Frenchman-this time by one who was probably not a Huguenot, but a Catholic. Dominique de Gourgues had been chained to the oar as a galley-slave when a prisoner to the Spaniards, and finding his king unable or unwilling to avenge the insult given to his nation in America, De Gourgues sold his patrimony that he might organize an expedition of his own. It is enough to say that he absolutely annihilated, in 1568, the colony that Menendez had left behind him in Florida, and hanged the Spaniards to the same trees where they had hanged the French, nailing above them this inscription:

"I do this not as to Spaniards or Moors (Marannes), but as to traitors, robbers, and murderers."

All these southern and Protestant colonies failed at last. It was farther north, in the lands of the most zealous of Roman Catholics, and in the regions explored long since by Cartier, that the brilliant career of French colonization in America was to have its course. Yet for many years the French voyages to the north-eastern coasts of America were for fishing or trade, not religion: the rover went before the priest. The Cabots are said by Peter Martyr to have found in use on the Banks of Newfoundland the word Baccalaos as applied to cod-fish; and as this is a Basque word, the fact has led some writers to believe that the Basque fishermen had already reached there, though this argument is not now generally admitted. Cape Breton, which is supposed to be the oldest French name on the continent of North America, belongs to a region described on a Portuguese map of 1520 as "discovered by the Bretons." There were French fishing vessels off Newfoundland in 1517, and in 1578 there were as many as