Read America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback for Free Online Page A

sail for France, but their meager food supplies ran out. Forced to eat shoe leather and dried animal skins and to drink their urine, the men were ultimately reduced to that most unthinkable act of desperation. “Finally it was suggested that it would be wiser that one die rather than all of them. The lot fell on . . . Larcher. He was killed and his flesh was equally divided among them. Then they drank his warm blood.”15
    Undeterred by this disaster, French Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny won royal permission for a return to America. With Ribault languishing in an English prison, the new expedition was led by René de Laudonnière, Ribault’s second in command during the earlier voyage. With some three hundred colonists, men and women, aboard three ships, this was a large, well-organized venture, carrying livestock, seeds, and agricultural supplies. Also aboard was a force of soldiers, cannons, and other weapons to arm a fort. Landing in June 1564, the Huguenot colonists settled on the banks of the river where Ribault had left his stone marker. After assembling to give thanks to God— in essence, the true first American “Thanksgiving”—they set about constructing a wooden fort they called Fort Caroline, in honor of King Charles.
    Initially far better equipped than the later English settlers would be, these Huguenot pilgrims added storehouses and wood-frame living | 31 \
    America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory quarters, along with a flour mill, bakery, and blacksmith. And in true Gallic fashion, they found some local grapes and made twenty barrels of wine. Relations with the Timucuans were reasonably good at first, and several French colonists took Indian women as wives. The settlers also learned the local Indian practice of smoking a local herb, and tobacco was soon very popular.
    The Indians they encountered were eastern Timucuans, part of a larger grouping of at least fifteen different tribes scattered across what is now northern Florida and southern Georgia. Living inside palisaded circular towns with thatched-roof houses, the coastal-dwelling eastern Timucuans fished, hunted, and farmed, growing corn and beans as staples. The tribe near Fort Caroline was led by a chief named Utina, who enlisted the French in a series of attacks on a neighboring tribe, the Potano. Forging an alliance pitting one local tribe against another repeated the strategy that Cortés had successfully used in Mexico and would be employed by the English in Massachusetts as well.
    Expecting resupply ships from France, the French quickly went through their food stores. Many of the colonists had been lured to America by visions of finding the earth littered with gold. Instead of planting crops, they spent far more time looking for gold and silver.
    The friendly trade relations between the French and natives soured as the Indians began to experience the disastrous epidemics introduced by Europeans. When the supply of desirable French trade goods dwindled and the Indians jacked up prices on the desperate settlers, the French commander ordered the chief Utina taken hostage, leading to a brief standoff. 16
    With the Timucuans unwilling to feed the French, tensions grew and discontent among the settlers spilled into outright mutiny. One | 32 \
    Isabella’s Pigs
    group of colonists commandeered a boat and sailed off to attack a Spanish outpost in Cuba, bringing swift Spanish retaliation. A second contingent did the same and was quickly captured. Since treasure ships bound for Spain had to sail past the Florida coast as they caught the Gulf Stream, these French attacks on Spanish shipping set the stage for King Philip’s order to Admiral Menéndez.
    When the expected relief failed to appear, the dwindling French colonists contemplated a return home and set about building a ship.
    Like good Calvinists, they probably prayed for deliverance, which unexpectedly arrived in the form of an English slave-trading pirate. In August 1565, several English ships under