Journal of Southern History

The history of Fort Caroline is short and bitter. In the 1560s, French Huguenots attempted to establish an outpost in what is now northern Florida. Their effort to ally with the local Timucuas against the Spanish quickly floundered as the French ran out of food. The commander lost control of his mutinous men. Fortunately, reinforcements arrived. Tragically, so did the Spanish, who massacred the French and destroyed their fort. Survivors made it back to Europe, where their published accounts became popular examples of early modern travel literature.

It was not the brief existence of this small, hapless colony that matters so much as the lessons Heather Martel decodes from the widely circulated accounts about it. She sees the Huguenots “attempt[ing] to form lasting relationships” with “healthy . . . and handsome” Indigenous Americans in a “transcultural love story” (pp. 1, 3, 2). The Huguenots wanted to “allure the Indigenous people into alliances that would support Protestant ambitions for colonizing the region and gaining access to its wealth,” and then convert them to Reformed Protestantism (p. 2). Sadly, they found themselves in “a love triangle” with their “jealous, Christian god” who decided to punish “the French for their love for Indigenous kings” (p. 2). After reading these accounts, advocates of “later colonial projects in New England” decided on a “separatist” strategy that would “resist transformative relations of love and friendship with Indigenous people, in order to secure their Christian identities” (p. 3). They would instead “establish a hierarchy privileging the elect, who would exert masculine dominance over the rest of humanity and come to think of themselves as white,” thus establishing Protestant America’s “white supremacist system” (p. 3).

Martel unlocks the “hidden plans for imperial autonomy” in the travel accounts primarily through the concept of humoralism (p. 14). Briefly, it claimed that health depended on a combination of factors, including diet, the local environment, and physical activity. Since bodies could change in different environments, the Huguenots in Florida had to be wary of becoming like the Timucuas. The resulting anxiety pervaded French accounts. Virtue, we learn in Martel’s introduction, is “the potency of any body, be it . . . animal . . . or mineral” (p. 5). The word deadly suggests the threat of contact, explored in chapters on “Friendship,” “Health,” “Power,” “Gender,” “Sexuality,” “Idolatry,” and “Grace.” Concluding with “Race,” Martel writes, “The logic behind white supremacist violence makes no sense unless we remember that its roots spring from the hybridization of humoralism and Calvinism in sixteenth-century colonialism” (p. 197).

It is difficult to evaluate a book that wants to make such tremendous claims based on such little research and whose accomplishments fail to match its [End Page 109] proclaimed results. Aside from arguably making far too much out of the brief Fort Caroline episode, the author ignores a vast range of relevant historiographies: on the book, Huguenots, travel literature, European encounters with “others” outside of North America, science, early New England, the Timucuas, Calvinism, and so on. It is a peculiar text that cites Ta-Nehisi Coates but reads more like an early 1980s mash-up of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (New York, 1978) and Robert F. Berkhoffer Jr.’s The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978), spiced up with a dash of Michel Foucault. One wonders why the quest for “friendship” (also known as alliance) entails “love.” The argument is advanced through bold but often unsupported and frequently unconvincing assertions. The Timucuas are “unknowable,” portrayed as simply “the People” (p. 8). One can no better guess their motives than the Huguenots did. The Huguenots, by contrast, are eminently knowable, from their most personal thoughts to their darkest sexual desires, even though Martel rarely uses French-language sources or scholarship. Scholars of travel accounts may find her claims interesting. Others trying to make sense of this highly...