so unsuccessful. Coligny, in 1562,
obtained permission from Charles IX. to found a Protestant colony in
Florida. Two ships left Dieppe with emigrants, and, reaching the
American shores, entered a large, deep river called _Port Royal_, which
name it still retains, and is, by coincidence, the spot recently
captured by the United States forces.[F] Fort Charles, in honor of the
reigning king of France, was built near by, and in a fertile land of
flowers, fruits, and singing birds. The country itself was called
_Carolina_. Reduced to the most cruel extremities of famine and death,
the remaining colonists returned to Europe.

Still undismayed by these two disastrous attempts, Coligny, the Huguenot
leader, dispatched a third expedition of three vessels to our shores,
making another attempt near the mouth of the St. John's River (Fort
Caroline). Philip II. was then on the throne, and would not brook the
heresy of the Huguenots, or Calvinism, in his American provinces.
Priests, soldiers, and Jesuits were dispatched to Florida, where the new
settlers, 'Frenchmen and Lutherans,' were destroyed in blood. Such was
the melancholy issue of the earliest attempts to establish a Huguenot or
Protestant settlement in North America. And nearly one hundred years
before it was occupied by the English, Carolina, for an instant, as it
were, was occupied by a band of Christian colonists, but, through the
remorseless spirit of religious persecution, again fell under the
dominion of the uncivilized savages. We refer to these earliest efforts
as proper to the general historical connection of our subject, although
not absolutely necessary to its investigation.

At the commencement of the seventeenth century, England, on her own
behalf, took up the generous plans of Coligny. Possessing twelve
colonies in America, when the edict of Nantes was revoked, that nation
resolved here to offer peaceful homes to persecuted Huguenots from
France. This mercy she had extended to them in England and Ireland; now
her inviting American colonies were thrown open for the same generous
purpose. Even before that insane and fatal measure of Louis XIV., the
Revocation, and especially after the fall of brave La Rochelle, numerous
Protestant fugitives, mostly from the western provinces of France, had
already emigrated, for safety, to British America. In 1662 the French
government made it a crime for the ship-owners of Rochelle to convey
emigrants to any country or dependen