A French Connection - the REAL first Thanksgiving

[groovedaddy]

TO commemorate the arrival of the first pilgrims to America’s shores, a June date would be far more appropriate, accompanied perhaps by coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux. After all, the first European arrivals seeking religious freedom in the “New World” were French. And they beat their English counterparts by 50 years. That French settlers bested the Mayflower Pilgrims may surprise Americans raised on our foundational myth, but the record is clear.

Long before the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, another group of dissident Christians sought a haven in which to worship freely. These French Calvinists, or Huguenots, hoped to escape the sectarian fighting between Catholics and Protestants that had bloodied France since 1560.

Landing in balmy Florida in June of 1564, at what a French explorer had earlier named the River of May (now the St. Johns River near Jacksonville), the French émigrés promptly held a service of “thanksgiving.” Carrying the seeds of a new colony, they also brought cannons to fortify the small, wooden enclosure they named Fort Caroline, in honor of their king, Charles IX.

In short order, these French pilgrims built houses, a mill and bakery, and apparently even managed to press some grapes into a few casks of wine. At first, relationships with the local Timucuans were friendly, and some of the French settlers took native wives and soon acquired the habit of smoking a certain local “herb.” Food, wine, women — and tobacco by the sea, no less. A veritable Gallic paradise.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/opinion/26davis.html?th&emc=th

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. I didn't know this

thanks for sharing!

[laconicsax]

2. Why do you hate America?

Those creation myths we have are an important part of our national heritage. There's a time and a place to cast doubt on them, and that time and place is NEVER!

:sarcasm:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. "With this, America’s first pilgrims disappeared from the pages of history."

I don't think that's entirely true.

There were a number of french colonists in Florida and a number of islands in the Carribbean that were displaced in the 16th century due to Spanish attacks. These colonists used an indigenous roasting platform called a "buccan." The natives had used it to roast manatee. The french colonists mainly used it for goats. After being displaced by the Spanish, the survivors took to the high seas to get revenge on the Spanish. History would remember them as the buccaneers.

[charlie]

4. That's a fun tidbit

The scourges of the sea were named after a barbecue. I didn't know that.

[Igel]

5. It's one of those bits of trivia that are awesomely important.

To the writer, at least. I'm sure he has some wonderfully subversive point about how everybody's wrong about the history of the US except him, and he's out to enlighten us.

To others ... not so meaningful. There's no continuity between the French in Florida and the usual narrative of the US. Only slight pressure for Britain to get into the colony-game in the Americas--part of a game that also accounts, in large measure, for why Mexico was suddenly interested in the early 1800s in the areas that later became Texas. Few, if any of us--neither Protestant nor Catholic--look to the Huguenots as our forebears in any meaningful sense, and don't see the colonization by the French and uprooting of the French by the Spanish as part of the start of the US. Any more than we see St. Augustine as a cornerstone of the 13 colonies.

Because it's not meaningful. It's a coincidence of geography, and ethnicity and geography have but a tenuous relationship to each other in this case. While it's easy to construct a nice narrative in which white Europeans are exclusively good guys--and equally easy to use the same kind of flimsy evidence to construct one in which white Europeans are exclusively bad guys--it's hard to construct a narrative of how the US was formed that's in any sense coherent that includes the French colonists in Florida. The same with the Russian outposts in Alaska and California, or the Spanish outpost in Louisiana. We may like to have visited the Spanish Quarter in NOLA, but seldom do we think of Louisiana as having a Castilian culture, or deep roots in Spain ... because the cultural effect was brief, at most lightly impinging on the local culture and how it developed.