110 THE FRENCH BLOOD IN AMERICA 



DeGourges 

 Revenge 



dreadful end Coligny's last hope to found a Protestant 

 colony in America. On the spot of the La Caroline 

 massacre Meneudez placed a tablet bearing this inscrip- 

 A Fatal Tablet tiou : " Huug uot as Frenchmen, but as Lutheran." 



Two years later, Dominique de Gourges, a gallant 

 French oflicer, determined to avenge this slaughter of 

 his countrymen, though he was not a Huguenot. The 

 brutality of the Spaniards had aroused great indignation 

 in France, yet the court remonstrances had not succeeded 

 in obtaining any redress from the Spanish King. 

 Hence de Gourgues took vengeance into his own hands. 

 Selling his patrimony, with his brothers' help he fitted 

 out three small vessels, and after a perilous voyage he 

 reached the Florida coast, enlisted the service of the 

 fi-iendly Indians, and falling upon La Caroline, took prison- 

 ers the Spanish forces left to garrison it. Then he put 

 most of them to the sword, and hung the remainder upon 

 the trees from which Meneudez had hung his French 

 prisoners ; and upon the other side of the tablet which 

 the Spaniard had placed near by, he inscribed these 

 words: "I do this not as unto Spaniards, nor as unto 

 seamen, but as unto traitors, robbers, and murderers." It 

 was a pity that Meneudez himself could not have re- 

 ceived the punishment he so richly merited. 



It should be said, in closing this dreary record, that 

 the French in their short residence had made a deep im- 

 pression upon the Indians, whom they treated in a man- 

 ner quite unlike that of the Spaniards and Portuguese. 

 Their habitual gayety and good nature and kindliness 

 attracted the natives, and the singing of the Huguenots, 

 who were like Cromwell's men great and sonorous singers 

 of hymns, printed itself upon the Indian memory, so that 

 loug afterwards the European cruising along the coast 

 would be saluted, says Baird, with some snatch of a 

 French psalm, uncouthly rendered by Indian voices, in 

 strains caught from the Calvinist soldier on palrol. No 

 fierce imprecation or profane expletive lingered in the 



French 

 Influence 

 Upon the 

 Natives 



