ition to the American shores.
The first soil of this virgin hemisphere that was baptised by the tread
of refugees flying from the terrors of the future hero of St.
Bartholomew--of men who were seeking freedom from persecution for the
sake of their religion--was that of South Carolina. Ribault first
visited St. John's River, in Florida, and then slowly coasted the low
shores northward, until he struck the indenture where Hilton-Head
Island, and Hunting and St. Helen's Islands are divided by the entrance
into the ocean of Broad River at Port Royal.

It was a beautiful region, where venerable oaks shadowed a luxuriant
soil, while the mild air, delicious with the fragrance of
forest-flowers, forever diffused a balmy temperature, free alike from
the fire of the tropics and the frost of the north. Here, in this
pleasant region, he built Fort Carolina, and landed his humble colony of
twenty persons who were to keep possession of the chosen land.

But Frenchmen are not precisely at home in the wilderness. They require
the aggregation of large villages or cities. The Frenchman is a social
being, and regret for the loss of civil comforts soon spoils his
vivacious temper, and fills him with discontent. Accordingly,
dissensions broke forth in the colony soon after the departure of
Ribault for France; and, most of the dissatisfied colonists, finding
their way back to Europe as best they could, the settlement was broken
up forever.

Yet, Coligny was not to be thwarted. In 1564, he again resolved to
colonize Florida, and entrusted Laudonniere--a seaman rather than a
soldier, who had already visited the American coasts,--with three ships
which had been conceded by the king. An abundance of colonists, not
disheartened by the failure of their predecessors, soon offered for the
voyage, and, after a passage of sixty days, the eager adventurers hailed
the American coast. They did not go to the old site, marked as it was by
disaster, but nestled on the embowered banks of the beautiful St.
John's, or, as it was then known--"The River of May."

But the French of that era, when in pursuit of qualified self-government
or of any principle, either civil or religious, were not unlike their
countrymen of the present time. They found it difficult to make
enthusiasm subordinate to the mechanism of progress, and to restrain the
elastic vapor which properly directed gives energy to humanity, but
which heedlessly handled destroys what it should impel