La Colonia Francesa de Florida (1562-1565)

In the second part of his work 'Grand Voyages' (1591), the engraver, printer, and editor Theodor de Bry (1528-1598) recounts the adventure of a group of French Calvinists who, under the command of captains Jean Ribault and René Laudonnière between 1562 and 1565, undertook a colonial settlement on the Florida peninsula.

The contacts with the Timucua Indians, the intervention of Spanish troops under the first Spanish governor of Florida, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, and the massacre of most of the French colonists, are the most relevant elements of an episode of the European Wars of Religion transposed to the New World.

Upon returning from the first expedition, Captain Jean Ribault, due to his Huguenot status, had to seek refuge in England, where he published his account and even obtained an audience with Queen Elizabeth I to interest her in a plan for colonies in America. This did not prevent him from being arrested on the presumption that it was a plot to steal ships and use them in French colonization efforts.

Twenty years later, Walter Raleigh obtained the support of Elizabeth I to found the first English colony in the New World, which he called Virginia. This edition publishes the magnificent watercolor engravings, whose originals were purchased by the editor-engraver Theodor de Bry in London from the widow of the painter Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, one of the few survivors of the 'Florida massacre' and among whose clients Walter Raleigh also counted. Le Moyne's illustrations constitute an exceptional ethnographic testimony on indigenous groups now completely disappeared.