At the commencement of the seventeenth century, England, on her own behalf, took up the generous plans of Coligny. Possessing twelve colonies in America, when the edict of Nantes was revoked, that nation resolved here to offer peaceful homes to persecuted Huguenots from France. This mercy she had extended to them in England and Ireland; now her inviting American colonies were thrown open for the same generous purpose. Even before that insane and fatal measure of Louis XIV., the Revocation, and especially after the fall of brave La Rochelle, numerous Protestant fugitives, mostly from the western provinces of France, had already emigrated, for safety, to British America. In 1662 the French government made it a crime for the ship-owners of Rochelle to convey emigrants to any country or dependency of Great Britain. The fine for such an offence was ten livres to the king, nine hundred for charitable objects, three hundred to the palace chapel, one hundred for prisoners, and five hundred to the mendicant monks. One sea-captain, Brunet, was accused of having favored the escape of thirty-six young men, and condemned to return them within a year, or to furnish a legal certificate of their death, on pain of one thousand livres, with exemplary punishment.[G] It is imagined that these young voluntary Huguenot exiles emigrated to Massachusetts, from the fact that the same year when this strange cause was tried in France, Jean Touton, a French doctor, requested from the authorities of that colony the privilege of sojourning there. This favor was immediately granted; and from that period _Boston_ possessed establishments formed by Huguenots, which attracted new emigrants. In 1679, Elie Nean, the head of an eminent family from the principality of Soubise, in Saintonge, reached that city. This refugee, sailing afterwards in his own merchant vessel for the island of Jamaica, was captured by a privateer, carried back to France, confined in the galleys, and only restored to his liberty through the intercession of Lord Portland. One of the first acts of the Boston Huguenots was to settle a minister, giving him forty pounds a year, and increasing his salary afterwards. Surrounded by the savages on every side, they erected a fort, the traces of which, it is said, can still be seen, and now overgrown with roses, currant bushes, and other shrubbery. Mrs. Sigourney, herself the wife of a Huguenot descendant, during a visit to this time-honored spot, wrote the beautiful lines,-- 'Green vine, that mantlest in thy fresh embrace Yon old gray rock, I hear that thou with them Didst brave the ocean surge. Say, drank thus from The dews of Languedoc? or slow uncoiled An infant fibre 'mid the faithful mold Of smiling Roussillon? Didst thou shrink From the fierce footsteps of fighting unto death At fair Rochelle? Hast thou no tale for me?'