Miles Harvey

continued

their lust for acquisition. It was a fascinating — even a spine-tingling — story elegantly told in an evocative prose that never got in the way.

And the story clearly didn't end. While promoting that book, Harvey found himself in Florida, where someone took him out to Fort Caroline National Memorial, a place he'd never heard of. Fort Caroline memorializes an almost forgotten mid-sixteenth-century colony that was founded by French Protestants in Florida more than half a century before the Puritans got their foothold in Massachusetts. That colony was almost entirely destroyed by the Spanish, who didn't want any French influence in their New World and certainly didn't want any heretical Protestants exercising influence over the native populations. One of the few people who managed to survive the massacre was a young cartographer and painter, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues.