From Mobile, the oldest and for many years the chief French settlement, the genius of Iberville and Bienville Lemoyne, aided by ardent and indefatigable missioners, reached out to remote Indian tribes, conciliating and binding them as allies. They dealt fairly with the Indian, but in cases of treachery used the Indian’s own method of punishment. From the Indians they also adopted the custom of making slaves of hostile captives. Negro slavery also existed in these settlements from very early years, for in the quaint baptismal register of 1704-1778, forming a part of the archives of the Catholic Cathedral of Mobile, is recorded the baptism of two negro children belonging to Bienville in 1707, and in the same year a negro woman belonging to him bore the first negro child born on the Gulf coast.[11] Gold was not found, nor did the French settlements on the Gulf lay in the wake of the treasure-ladened Spanish galleons, but the climate was benign, the lands rich, and the forests afforded an abundance of food, and in times of scarcity Bienville sometimes quartered his soldiers among the friendly natives. There was leisure for the amenities, and the priest and nun who had given up life and ambition in the Old World were not only the spiritual advisers and educators of the young of New France, but as missioners guided and instructed the Indian and the slave. Their institutions became asylums for the sick and desolate of any race, and to their influence may be traced the easy, happy condition of the negro slave among the French of Louisiana. There was that in the temperament of these French which while appropriating the Indian’s and negro’s usefulness at the same time beguiled and won them. An incident of a slave’s heroic loyalty to the French is related by Gayarré in his _Louisiana_. After the French settlements passed under Spanish control, New Orleans revolted, and the leaders were sentenced to be shot; Jeannot the negro hangman cut off his right arm rather than raise it against a Frenchman. In March, 1724, Bienville issued a code, one clause of which forbade marriages between whites and blacks. Such marriages had taken place, and had given rise to what afterwards became an extensive Afro-Latin population. In many places along the Gulf coast it is among these so-called Creoles who have clung to their original habitations along the river banks, the creeks, and bays, that the old French names are found and a patois spoken. The result of this amalgamation did not seem mongrel, but distinctive, and in their local history, covering two hundred years, during which time they have lived under five different flags, there has been a pride of race which has kept the original strain pure. Deeply religious, they have been characterized by honesty, frugality, and industry. They were never slaves, but were in many instances slave owners.