Review: Como Era Gostoso o meu Frances (1971)

Como Era Gostoso o meu Frances translates into English as How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman. This movie was produced in 1971 about the experiences of a French captive among the Tupi Indians in Brazil. There is strong evidence that there were Tupi immigrants living in coastal Georgia and South Carolina at the time of first European contact. […]

Quest for Fort Caroline

Current academic consensus holds that the French settlement of Fort Caroline was located on the St. Johns River in modern-day Jacksonville, Florida. Yet details in both French and Spanish written accounts as well as details in drawings left behind by the colony’s resident artist, Jacques Le Moyne, have always contradicted this location. These accounts suggest […]

Charlesbourg-Royal in Quebec

The first European colony in Canada (after the Vikings in 1000 AD) was the French colony of Charlesbourg-Royal in modern-day Quebec, Canada. Built in 1544 it would be preceded by only one other European colony on the East Coast of North America: San Miguel de Gualdape built in 1526 in Georgia. Thus Charlesbourg-Royal is the second […]

Review: Painter in a Savage Land

In 1564 the French attempted the first permanent settlement in what would later become the United States of America. They brought along with them a painter named Jacques le Moyne de Morgues. He was the first European artist to step foot in America and created the first artwork depicting Native Americans and their lifeways that […]

Narrative of Le Moyne

AN ARTIST WHO ACCOMPANIED THE FRENCH EXPEDITION TO FLORIDA UNDER LAUDONNIERE, 1564. Introduction The Spaniards, having made several disastrous expeditions into Florida, had left it for a time unmolested. The French Protestants, attempting to colonize under Ribaud, built Charlefort at Port Royal in 1562, and Fort Caroline under Laudonniere, at the River May (now St. John’s, Florida), in 1564. […]