They were under injunction "to seek out pearl fisheries," "to
catch bison-calves, tame them and take their wool," and "to look for
mines." What employment for the founders of an empire! [Footnote: In one
of the branches of that river at whose mouth they settled I saw a summer
or two ago, one of the men of that valley wading in its water, still in
search of pearls. A pearl worth a thousand dollars had once been found
near by, and so (in the same hope that animated the mind of King Louis
XIV) man after man in that neighborhood had abandoned his fertile farm to
search for pearls, only to be reduced, as the poor settlers of early,
Louisiana, to live upon the shell-fish in which the pearls refused to
grow.]
One cannot resist the temptation to say again: If only Louis XIV had had
the good sense, unblinded of pearls and gold and bigotry and some other
things, to let the industrious, skilled Huguenots, flying from France
after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, settle in Louisiana, instead
of forcing them to swell the numbers of the English colonies on the
Atlantic coast, and eventually assist them in taking the New France from
which they had been debarred!
The French engineer of an English ship, appearing on the river one day,
had furtively handed Bienville a petition of four hundred Huguenots in the
Carolinas to be allowed to settle in Louisiana and to have the privilege
of worship, such as is enjoyed to-day.
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