[bert]

When growing up, my Favorite book was “The Flamingo Feather” by kirk monroe. It was written in 1854 and details the Ft Caroline colony and a boy that was abandoned when the Spanish destroyed the colony. He became Indian royalty.

Recently headed to Florida Keys my wife wanted to go out to Jacksonville Beach. I didn’t want to go but did. On the way out off I 95 she noticed Ft Caroline National Historical Park. To my astonishment it was the site of the plot of the Flamingo Feather. I had poured overmaps at various times for at least 40 years speculating where it was. My thought it was further north at the St Mayr’s river. I didn’t miss the park because it wasn’t there. It is recent, established after my various hunts for the site. It is sort of an NPS diversity effort...... include the French

Any way, there was a fantastic book there for sale. “The Three Voyages” by Rene Laudonniere, a Hugenot. It goes into great detail describing the three voyages the author made in 1562-1565 to Ft Caroline. It has details of the problems internal and external with the Indians and the Spanish. It has great detail and woodcuts of Indian life. It describes expeditions by the colonists to as far away as western NC and possibly east Tennessee.

The book is first hand recounting of the effort and pain required by those tremendously adventurous souls that colonized America. I strongly recommend it and of course The Flamingo Feather

[muawiyah]

Thanks for the info. BTW, the Coligny expedition to found a colony started at St. Malo, which is in Brittany. Most of the members of the expedition were Breton, not French, and even the Coligny family were essentially Bourbonnaise who had married up into rural Breton nobility.

A peculiar thing happened to the Protestant reformation in Britanny. The rural nobles became Protestant but the city and town nobles stayed Catholic. The peasantry, as ever incredibly conservative, were probably still worshipping the devil on Samhain for all anybody knows, but they were of no help to the Protestants or the Catholics.

One of the stranger things was the Breton liberation movement. They sought to remove French suzerainity and replace it with Spanish (or Hapsburg) suzerainity. In the end, at the end of the religious wars, many Protestant Bretons went to Spain and the Spanish new world while the Catholics sought to pursue an attempt to acquire property in what became Canada.

During the 1500s a great number of Bretons captained or served as officers on board ships plying the trade routes to the Pacific, Indian and South Atlantic destinations. They hopped on the whaling business in the 1700s as well.

They still aren't French!