Conclusion

This chapter explains how the story of Fort Caroline underpins the history of American white supremacy through a review of the scholarship on the history of race, placing the category “elect” into a historical continuum with whiteness. As with the status of the elect, whiteness seemed to be fixed and visible: apparent in their handsome, masculine bodies; in their stable, obedient, and moral families; and in their wealth and status. When Calvinist predestinarian logic enters the historical narrative of American race, it becomes possible to see it was the virtue of grace that made whites construct their own identities as naturally moral, trustworthy, and worthy of liberty.

Grace

In trying to make sense of the tragic failures and miraculous survivals of the first Calvinist colonies, including Fort Caroline, Protestants looked to the examples of those few who lived through such tragedies for positive models and examples of the “elect.” Survivors like Le Moyne or the carpenter Le Challeux in Florida and Léry or Staden in Brazil reinforced their belief that the Christian god had elected some to be saved by grace. Le Moyne and Le Challeux demonstrated this grace throughout the confusing and violent night of the massacre of Fort Caroline with displays of faith that proved that they innately deserved their redemption.

Idolatry

In addition to assessing the hygienic customs of Indigenous people, these sources catalogued visual clues defining who were graced or damned according to Calvinists’ predestinarian framework. Travelers in Florida and the Atlantic world divided humanity into two stable categories that people were born into: elect “visible saints,” the reformed Christians, and damned, visible idolaters, cannibals, sodomites, and other heretics, including Catholics. Though they hoped to meet elect members among Indigenous people, they met with resistance to Christianity that they interpreted as a lack of grace.

Power

Protestants at first expressed kinship with Indigenous people also subjugated by the Spanish, seeking an alliance initiated by an agent of Fort Caroline with a neighboring Indigenous King Houstaqua. Identifying as refugees caused the French leader Laudonnière to lie to his superiors, including Indigenous leader King Saturiwa, but especially to his patrons in France, by concealing his dependence on Indigenous kings, as well as relationships with Indigenous people that might cause identity issues. This chapter will develop this analysis through a broader look at French Protestant relations of power, dependence, and the contagion of identity, as played out with Indigenous people and in the Fort Caroline colonial order, including several mutinies among the French and a hostage crisis and war with Indigenous people.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book as an account of the transcultural love story imagined by Protestants that historicizes the meanings of love and friendship in a colonial context. While historians have looked at greed and power in colonialism, this book examines Protestants’ belief systems as another historical motivation, one shaped by events at Fort Caroline. As an introduction, this chapter states the thesis, sets the scene, introduces the science of humoralism, defines categories and labels used for groups discussed, and identifies historiographic contexts for the book.

Health

According to early European understandings of the body and identity, love could cause a fundamental transformation: a personality change or a change of cultural, spiritual, and political allegiance. With a change in hygienic customs, the human body would change form, color, and even gender. This chapter explains the larger framework of health and identity common to all early modern Europeans, humoralism (or Galenic medicine), an ancient science that defined human bodies as mutable and expected to change with the environment, diet, behavior, and emotion. Seemingly ethnographic descriptions of Indigenous people applied this framework in order to anticipate and prevent the transformation of Christians by Indigenous people and the environments of the Atlantic world and Florida.

Friendship

The French Protestants defined a diplomatic policy of romantic friendship, which would be earned through what they called “allure,” intended as a means for powerfully befriending Indigenous allies and making them obedient, as well as of gathering information on economically valuable resources. Through this diplomacy of love, the French also sought to create a broad Indigenous and Protestant opposition to the Spanish. However, in their relationships with Indigenous people, the French lied, revealing their sense of political weakness, and ultimately became dependent on the Indigenous King Saturiwa.

Sexuality

In the early Atlantic Protestant gendered hierarchy of beauty and power, political, social, spiritual, and imperial relationships were eroticized, and desire signaled effeminacy defined by recognition of power, influence, and the more virtuous, masculine body. The French Calvinists had hoped the Indigenous kings Saturiwa, Outina, and Houstaqua would recognize their beauty, fall in love, and so willingly subordinate themselves, coming to emulate Protestantism and French culture in a normative form of homoeroticism. Instead, critics of the French at Fort Caroline implied that the slippages of some Christian travelers (who lost control to their desires, became dependent on Indigenous hospitality, and sometimes assimilated into Indigenous societies) became idolatrous, which was akin to committing sodomy and amounting to sexual slavery.

Gender

This chapter theorizes gender at Fort Caroline and in the early Protestant Atlantic as an historically, culturally specific system for defining relations of power, which marked some as more masculine (powerful, dominant) and others as less masculine or feminine (weak, dependent, submissive) in relation to those with more masculinity. Long after their authors were dead, the Protestant travel narratives that are the sources for this study continued to do the gendered work of colonialism by characterizing Indigenous gender systems, hygienic customs, third gender–specific roles and fashions, and instances when Indigenous women demonstrated power as transgressions of Christian gender norms that Protestant colonizers obliged themselves to “fix” by imposing Christian norms.