There is a lot of little-known American history in this book.
I ran across a brief mention of the “Pélican Girls” while researching a previous work of fiction set in Mobile; thought, “Hmmm, that’s interesting,” and tucked it away for later study. When the opportunity came to write a whole series based on the colorful history of my birthplace, the logical place to start seemed to be with the larger-than-life Le Moyne brothers—Canadian explorers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and swashbuckling adventurers, who placed their stamp upon a whole territory in the name of Sun King Louis XIV of France.
Because my storytelling “sweet spot” is romance, my curiosity was drawn to the women who married and civilized those first French-Canadian settlers of Louisiane. Who were they and where did they come from? Why take on a three-month journey across an ocean to what would have been little more than a hostile, mosquito-infested bog for the sole purpose of marrying a stranger? How did these mainly convent-raised young women, teenagers with few practical survival skills, manage to establish homes and raise children? What kinds of relationships did they build with the native peoples, and what influences did they bring to one another?
Those were some of the questions I brought to my initial research. Little did I realize the depth of knowledge required to build that world from the ground up, people it with compelling characters—some of them historical figures with documented biographies, some purely conjured from my imagination—and cast my protagonists and villains into book-length conflict. By the time the basic story line had bloomed into a ten-page synopsis, I had begun to realize the challenges of writing in English about characters who spoke and viewed life through a French and/or Native American lens—over three centuries ago! I found some primary resources—baptismal and burial records, letters, contracts, journals, maps, and the like—plus historical internet sites and a few good nonfiction books (I’m largely indebted to Jay Higginbotham’s wonderfully detailed and readable Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisane, 1702–1711).
I visited local museums and read the Higginbotham book before beginning to write the manuscript. Still, I daily found myself stumped by questions about things like refrigeration, funerals, midwifery, baking, grinding corn, shooting a musket . . . and on and on. I’m pretty much the ultimate history geek, so I found myself loading the story with way too much information for the average fiction reader (I suspect I’ll have critics on both ends of the spectrum). At my editor’s suggestion, I decided to put some of that information here, to keep from bogging down the action in the novel.
The Pelican Bride is essentially a romance, embedded in a particular political, religious, and economic historical climate. So who were the big players on the North American continent in 1704?
England controlled the Atlantic seaboard, from Massachusetts south to Georgia, with the Appalachian Mountains forming the western border. Spain held Florida, Texas, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. France had claimed Canada and the Great Lakes. If you look at period maps, it’s clear that whichever power could lay claim to the rivers bisecting the continent from the Lakes to the Gulf Coast would gain a chokehold on American commerce. No wonder all three were anxious to find and claim the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The courage, cunning, and sheer persistence of such explorers as La Salle, Levasseur, Iberville, and Bienville—under the leadership of Minister of Marine Pontchartrain—gave the edge to the French. They established Fort Maurepas at present-day Biloxi, Mississippi, then Fort Louis twenty-seven miles up the Alabama River north of present-day Mobile; eventually, New Orleans became the capital of the Louisiana Territory. But at the turn of the eighteenth century, Iberville—commander of the French outpost on the Gulf—found himself a political juggler responsible for maintaining alliance with the Spanish in Pensacola, keeping the British from encroaching from the east, and courting trade with the natives.
The local Mobile Indians were generally friendly to the French settlers, who brought European commodities such as guns and ammunition, farming and building implements, and textiles. However, the French faced constant threat of attack from the more warlike northern Alabama clans who had discovered the value of slave trade with English tobacco farmers. The Indians as depicted in The Pelican Bride are as accurate as I could make them from available resources. Records kept by the Catholic Diocese of Mobile indicate that there was a good deal of intermarriage between natives and Europeans at the turn of the eighteenth century, as well as mutual leveraging of resources and economic power.
Religion was another critical factor in the success or failure of French settlements along the Gulf Coast. Even before King Louis XIV took the reins of power in 1661, France had been sending Jesuit and seminary missionaries into Indian villages, both as evangelists and ambassadors. These competing orders of priests sometimes created as much headache as benefit for military commanders.
Since the beginning of the Reformation, cycles of civil war, uneasy peace, and bloody massacre escalated between Protestants (known as Huguenots) and Catholics in France, until Protestant-turned-Catholic monarch Henry IV issued the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which protected those who wished to worship peacefully outside the Roman tradition. Then in 1685, Louis XIV declared himself free from foreign conflict and ready to rid the nation of “the memory of the troubles, the confusion, and the evils which the progress of this false religion has caused in this kingdom” (see the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes). Persecution of the “R.P.R.”—so-called reformed religion—renewed and intensified, until the Abbé of Chaila brought the King’s forces into the mountainous Cévennes region of southern France to enforce conversions to the Catholic faith. Soldiers were billeted with Reformist families in an effort to make them convert or emigrate. Those who refused to comply were arrested, deported, or sentenced to the galleys, and their property confiscated or burned.
An interesting real-life character, educated young apprenticed baker Jean Cavalier, arose from that conflict in the Cévennes. Cavalier, a natural orator and genius of irregular warfare, led armed Protestant civilians—known as Black Camisards—in resisting the persecution. While winning several pitched battles against His Majesty’s experienced and trained military, Cavalier was never captured but managed to negotiate some concessions from the royal commander. After Louis XIV died in 1715, hostilities finally ended, and the Protestant remnant in the Cévennes was left in peace. Some years later, Cavalier went over to the British and in 1738 was made governor of the island of Jersey.
Those facts were enough to give me an intriguing background for my heroine, Geneviève Gaillain, and I hope historians will forgive whatever details I had to tweak or exaggerate for the sake of story.
Native Mobilians will perhaps recognize character names from the annals of local history. The “Pelican Girls” of 1704 were real people who married, raised children, and died in real time. Little was recorded about most of them, beyond the usual church records, which left me free to use their names and embellish their stories. Gabrielle Bonnet (my Ysabeau), for example, was noted for going mad and walking about in her underclothes. There is no record of her marriage. Other names I changed or simplified (due to the seventeenth-century practice of naming children after saints, resulting in a confusing plethora of Maries, Jeannes, and Catherines) for readability. Geneviève and Aimée Gaillain are products of my imagination, as are Nika, Tristan, Marc-Antoine, Julien, and Father Mathieu. For details on the life of the famous Le Moyne brothers, whose exploits are well-documented, I recommend titles such as Jean Baptiste Le Moyne: Sieur de Bienville by Grace King, Colonial Mobile by Peter J. Hamilton, and of course Jay Higginbotham’s brilliant Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702–1711.