Thus the poor immigrants were put on land where there was always more or less of famine, sometimes even of starvation, and where the provisions which the concessioners had brought with them to feed their own Engages were taken away from the ships by force to feed the soldiers, and the immigrants were told to subsists on what they might be able to catch on the beach, standing for the most part of the day in the salt water up to the waist--crabs oysters, and the like- and on the corn which the Biloxi, the Pasacagoula, and the Chacta, and the Mobile Indians might let them have. Governor Bienville repeatedly demanded that these immigrants should not be landed on the gulf coast at all, but should be taken up the Mississippi River to the place where he intended to establish his headquarters and build the city of New Orleans;because thence they could easily reach the concessions, a majority of which were on the banks of the Mississippi. But the question whether large vessels could enter and ascend the great river --the French directors pretended not to know this yet, although the colony had been in existence for about twenty years--and the little and the big quarrels between the directors and the governor, whom they would never admit to be right, did not permit this rational solution of the difficulty. Furthermore, as a very large number of smaller boats, by which immigrants might easily have been taken to the concessions by inland route through Lake Ponchartrain, had been allowed to go to wreck on the sands of Biloxi, the newcomers, especially those who arrived in 1721, had to stay for many months in Biloxi and on Dauphine Island, where they starved in masses or died of epidemic diseases...The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana,.. by Hanno Deiler
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 03:58:54 +0000
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