Religion in the New World: The Huguenots in South Carolina

Religion in the New World: The Huguenots in South Carolina

Source

Safe Haven. As an extension of their colonizing Fort Caroline in Florida, Huguenots attempted several times to settle South Carolina. Generations before South Carolina was successfully colonized, French Protestants attempted to make it a safe haven for others facing persecution and destitution as a consequence of their religious beliefs.

Difficult Beginnings. In 1562 Jean Ribault and René Goulaine de Laudonnière tried to settle on St. John’s River. Unsatisfied there, they moved up the coast to Port Royal Harbor, within the bounds of present-day South Carolina. They constructed Charlesfort on Parris Island. While foundations of a colony were laid, the adventurers were unwilling to endure the hardships and returned to France. Ribaut and Laudonnière returned to Fort Caroline, but as they were defeated by the Spaniards the following year, further efforts to settle South Carolina were not made until 1629. The Huguenots kept their eyes on South Carolina, however. In that year the French Protestants contacted King Charles I of England to establish a colony in South Carolina. He issued a patent to Sir Robert Heath, who had worked with the Duc de Fontenany in conjunction with the Huguenots. Huguenots sailed from England in 1633 but landed in Virginia and ultimately returned to Europe. Finally, a permanent Huguenot colony was begun in South Carolina in 1670.

AZTEC MYTH

The gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca brought the earth goddess Tlalteuctli down from on high. All the joints of her body were filled with eyes and mouths biting like wild beasts. Before they got down, there was water already below, upon which the goddess then moved back and forth. They did not know who had created it.

They said to each other, “We must make the earth.” So saying, they changed themselves into two great serpents, one of whom seized the goddess from the right hand down to the left foot, the other from the left hand down to the right foot. As they tightened their grip, she broke at the middle. The half with the shoulders became the earth. The remaining half they brought to the sky—which greatly displeased the other gods.

Afterward, to compensate the earth goddess for the damage those two had inflicted upon her, all the gods came down to console her, ordaining that all the produce required for human life would issue from her. From her hair they made trees, flowers, and grasses; from her skin, very fine grasses and tiny flowers; from her eyes, wells and fountains, and small caves; from her mouth, rivers and large caves; from her nose, valleys and mountains; from her shoulders, mountains.

Sometimes at night this goddess wails, thirsting for human hearts. She will not be silent until she receives them. Nor will she bear fruit unless she is watered with human blood.

Source: The Red Swan: Myths and Tales of the American Indians, edited by John Bierhorst (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), pp. 50–51.

Source

The Huguenot Connection: The Edict of Nantes, Its Revocation, and Early French Migration to South Carolina, edited by Richard M. Golden (Boston: Kluwer, 1988).