France, 1720. One stolen document. One ruined life. One way out.
Pierre Mayeux has done nothing wrong. That will not save him.
He has a comfortable home on his father's tax farm in northern France and Simone, the sharecropper's daughter who shares his bed and his secrets. Then Simone robs a passing carriage and takes the hidden receipt book of Antoine Patin — proof that one of France's most powerful tax farmers is stealing from the Crown. The Royal Guard comes for Pierre, not her. Convicted of a crime he did not commit, he is sentenced to three years as an engagé, bound for John Law's wilderness concession at the Arkansas Post in the Louisiana colony.
His family escorts him to La Rochelle to watch him go. On the docks he meets Adrien, who boards La Profond not in chains but by choice. And somewhere between the gangplank and open water, he meets Marie Françoise Sellier — crossing to a country she has never seen, for reasons she will not explain.
Three months of open ocean follow. Storms, sickness, hunger, and a hurricane that drives the ship to the edge of survival. And something none of them planned for: love, taking root in the least likely place on earth.
When La Profond finally limps into Nouveau Biloxi, Pierre steps ashore into a raw and unforgiving new world — carrying a hope he never expected to have.
What he does not know is that Simone, back in France, is carrying something too.
Based on true events. Pierre Mayeux's name survives in the colonial archives of French Louisiana: a passenger landed at Nouveau Biloxi in September 1720, a witness on a marriage certificate in New Orleans, an entry in the census rolls. This is his story, reconstructed from the record.
For readers of Outlander, Pachinko, and The Name of the Rose.
Book One of The 14th Colony series.
THE 14TH COLONY — a four-book saga, 1720 to 1803
Book One: The Struggles of a Young Frenchman to Reach the Louisiana Colony (1720)
Book Two: The Wilderness Takes Root (1720–1729)
Book Three: The Ground That Holds (1729–1769)
Book Four: What the River Keeps (1769–1803)
Books One and Two are available now. Books Three and Four are written and forthcoming.
"Fiction Meets Family History in Mayeux's Louisiana Saga" — The Marksville Weekly News / Bunkie Record
France in 1720 was gripped by an economic obsession. Pierre Mayeux unexpectedly got caught up in the mania. The 14th Colony is based on a true story about the father of a surname in the Louisiana Colony. Pierre suddenly finds himself, literally and figuratively, on a passenger list of the La Profond, a tall sailing ship, headed to the Louisiana Colony. The story begins in northern France. Everyone in France wanted to buy shares of the Company of the Indies, later nicknamed the Mississippi Company. The numerous wars by King Louis XIV had left a financial strain on France that could only be relieved by one man, John Law, so the Crown thought. After the death of the Sun King on September 1, 1715 and because of the minority of King Louis XV, the crown was placed in the hands of a regent, Philippi II, Duke of Orleans. John Law, a Scottish aristocrat trained in commerce and economics, managed to gain the ear of the regent and they triggered a speculative frenzy which ended in the Mississippi Bubble. At the time, France claimed a vast territory in the Mississippi valley of North America from the Hudson Bay in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The Crown granted the Mississippi Company the exclusive right of all trade within the colony including the lucrative fur trade. The company gained the monopoly on the tobacco and African slave trades and started issuing concessions (land grants) to French aristocrats and nobles in the Louisiana Colony. Engages were sent to the colony to work the concessions. The company also gained the monopoly over the collection of French taxes in the motherland, the minting of coins and soon started issuing paper banknotes in the stead of specie, the French gold and silver livre. Paper money was the scheme of John Law. The initial price of 500 livre for one share of company stock soon soared to 18,000 livre. The stockpile of banknotes skyrocketed chasing too few goods resulting in a rash of inflation. The company’s stock and board of directors became intricately tied to France’s ruling class and its economy. When the under-performing value of Mississippi Company shares plummeted, the bubble burst causing a stock market crash in France and other European countries. The ensuing financial hardships of its citizenry were imported to the Louisiana colony. Young Pierre’s arrival in the colony proceeded the news of the collapse. Plucked from a privileged life on a tax farm in France, he was deposited in primitive conditions in the colony surrounded by often hostile Native American Indians. His riveting saga of suspense, love and fortune emulates the hardships of the journeys made by hundreds of subsequent sojourners to New France. Yet those survivors managed to eke out a living and propagate. From the newly founded New Orleans, ascending the Mississippi River through various posts along the river to John Law’s personal concession at the Arkansas post, Pierre married, built homes, had children and grandchildren and became a landowner and businessman, all while overcoming the adversities of nature and the ferocity of the savages. Follow Pierre's journey from France to the New World in this first book, The 14th Colony, of the trilogy, Nouvelle France.
