In these days of fear, a Huguenot colony sailed for the New World.  The calm, stern man who represented and led the Protestantism of France felt to his inmost heart the peril of the time.  He would fain build up a city of refuge for the persecuted sect.  Yet Gaspar de Coligny, too high in power and rank to be openly assailed, was forced to act with caution.  He must act, too, in the name of the Crown, and in virtue of his office of Admiral of France.  A nobleman and a soldier,—­for the Admiral of France was no seaman,—­he shared the ideas and habits of his class; nor is there reason to believe him to have been in advance of others of his time in a knowledge of the principles of successful colonization.  His scheme promised a military colony, not a free commonwealth.  The Huguenot party was already a political, as well as a religious party.  At its foundation lay the religious element, represented by Geneva, the martyrs, and the devoted fugitives who sang the psalms of Marot among rocks and caverns.  Joined to these were numbers on whom the faith sat lightly, whose hope was in commotion and change.  Of these, in great part, was the Huguenot noblesse, from Conde, who aspired to the crown,—­

    “Ce petit homme tant joli,
     Qui toujours chante, toujours rit,”—­

to the younger son of the impoverished seigneur whose patrimony was his sword.  More than this, the restless, the factious, the discontented began to link their fortunes to a party whose triumph would involve confiscation of the bloated wealth of the only rich class in France.  An element of the great revolution was already mingling in the strife of religions.

America was still a land of wonder.  The ancient spell still hung unbroken over the wild, vast world of mystery beyond the sea.  A land of romance, of adventure, of gold.

Fifty-eight years later, the Puritans landed on the sands of Massachusetts Bay.  The illusion was gone,—­the ignis-fatuus of adventure, the dream of wealth.  The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard-won independence.  In their own hearts, not in the promptings of a great leader or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its birth and its achievement.  They were of the boldest, the most earnest of their sect.  There were such among the French disciples of Calvin; but no Mayflower ever sailed from a port of France.  Coligny’s colonists were of a different stamp, and widely different was their fate.

An excellent seaman and stanch Protestant, John Ribaut of Dieppe, commanded the expedition.  Under him, besides sailors, were a band of veteran soldiers, and a few young nobles.  Embarked in two of those antiquated craft whose high poops and tub-like proportions are preserved in the old engravings of De Bry, they sailed from Havre on the eighteenth of February, 1562.  They crossed the Atlantic, and on the thirtieth of April, in the latitude of twenty-nine and a half degrees, saw the long, low line where the wilderness of waves met the wilderness of woods.  It was the coast of Florida.  Soon they descried a jutting point, which they called French Cape, perhaps one of the headlands of Matanzas Inlet.  They turned their prows northward, skirting the fringes of that waste of verdure which rolled in shadowy undulation far to the unknown West.