Painter in a Savage Land by Miles Harvey

Author:Miles Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781588367099
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

He was urged by the king, to whom he related the whole affair on returning to France, to put it down on paper, and this he carried out faithfully in his own tongue. But he kept it private to himself and his friends and…was unwilling to publish it.

NOT EVERY SURVIVOR was so reluctant a storyteller. In May of 1566, less than six months after returning to France, the elderly carpenter Nicolas Le Challeux published an account of his own escapades, a work that would prove not just a riveting adventure tale but an incendiary piece of political propaganda.

The Spanish, in Le Challeux’s depiction, were blood-drunk butchers who “vied with one another to see who could best cut the throats of our people.” Unlike Le Moyne and Laudonnière in their later narratives, Le Challeux insisted women and children were among those annihilated in the “horrible, tragic slaughter” at Fort Caroline. He also provided a gruesome version of the Matanzas killings, purportedly based on the testimony of an escaped eyewitness. It unfolded like a New World passion play, starring Jean Ribault as a man of “grace and accustomed modesty” who was tricked into surrendering, then sacrificed by his Spanish betrayers. In the final scene, the killers sliced off the dead man’s beard as a trophy before “quarter[ing] his body and his head, which they stuck at the four corners of the fort.”

The book, which went through two editions in its first year, helped spark an anti-Spanish backlash in France. The massacre quickly became a cause célèbre, even among some Catholics, who saw it as an affront to national honor. Day by day, the inventory of supposed Spanish atrocities grew longer and more outrageous. One publication, also circulated in 1566, went so far as to assert that “Ribault was burned alive, thirty-five officers were hanged by their private parts, the captains of the marine were nailed by their ears to the masts of the ships, [while] the soldiers and sailors were sewn into the sails and thrown into the sea.”

The clamor for vengeance reverberated from many quarters, none louder than the Calvinist maritime community in Normandy. Yet while Catherine de Medici claimed to be “beside myself” with grief over the killings, she took no immediate action. Instead, a long diplomatic stalemate ensued in which Catherine called on Spain to punish Menéndez and make reparations, while King Philip countered that the real blame rested with Coligny, “the venom of that kingdom,” for establishing an illegal settlement on Spanish soil. This jockeying continued all through 1566, until Philip finally issued a one-sentence edict in December, flatly refusing all French demands.

By then, many Huguenots, appalled by Catherine’s seeming indifference to the slaughter of their brethren, were beginning to believe that the French crown had indeed joined Spain in a secret alliance aimed at wiping out religious heresy. These simmering fears boiled into an all-out panic in 1567, when ten thousand Spanish troops skirted the French border en route to crushing a Calvinist uprising in the Netherlands.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.