Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/192

 Commander Maury of the American Navy, who by his writings has made the family name universally known. It is satisfactory, in referring to Knight’s English Cyclopedia, to have ocular demonstration of his descent from James Fontaine and Matthew Maury, for we find that Matthew Fontaine Maury, author of " The Physical Geography of the Sea," was born in Spottsylvania county, Virginia, on the 14th January 1806. 



Elie Neau, when only eighteen years of age, that is, in 1679, saw how persecution in France was always advancing to the climax of the extermination of the Protestants. Professor Weiss styles him “the chief of a great family from the principality of Soubise, in Saintonge.” Yet he made up his mind to be a voluntary exile. Being by profession a sailor, he had no dread of the ocean, and his first place of refuge was the island of St. Domingo. At the beginning of the reign of William and Mary he was at New York; and his application for naturalisation as a British subject having been forwarded to London, he was naturalised on the 31st January 1690. His name is in the Patent Rolls of that date; and the reader will find it anglicized into Elias Neau, in the Historical Introduction to this volume, List XVII. About this time he married, and his friends provided him with a trading vessel, in command of which he made a first voyage. But it was also the last; his vessel was unarmed, and had to surrender without resistance to a French privateer. The prisoners were taken to St. Malo; and when it was known that he was a French Protestant he was tried for the crime of disobedience to the Proclamation of Louis XIV., recalling the fugitive Protestants to their native country. He was sent to the galleys, and underwent the severest treatment, of which an account was published in the French language. An abridged account was printed in English, and from the copy in the British Museum my readers are presented with the following transcript of it. It is in the brave martyr’s own words.

It is not out of any vanity that I have been induced to publish the following account of my sufferings while I remained on board the French king’s galleys or in the dungeons of Marseilles. But the Lord out of his infinite mercy having saved me out of my distresses, brought me out of darkness and broken my fetters, some pious persons have thought I should be ungrateful did I not praise the Lord for his goodness, and publish his wonderful works to the children of men.

I left the kingdom of France on account of my religion in the year 1679, being then about eighteen years of age, and went to St. Domingo, and from thence to New York, where I married some time after. As I had been bred to the sea, some friends of mine fitted out a small ship of 80 tons, which they trusted to my care and command, I having been made a free denizen of England by his present Majesty, in the first year of his reign.

I sailed from New York on the 15th August 1692, bound for Jamaica, and was taken on the 29th by a privateer from St. Malo, who was returning home from St. Domingo. I continued two months on board his ship, after which I was put in prison with other seamen and prisoners of war. The judge of the Admiralty, being informed that I was a French Protestant, gave notice thereof to the King’s Attorney, who, having acquainted Monsieur De Pontchartrain with it, received orders to persuade me to change my religion, or, in case I proved obstinate, to condemn me to the galleys. This order was signified unto me; but God was pleased to assist me in such a manner that I was not terrified in the least, and did not hesitate at all to answer that I could not comply with their desire, seeing it was against my conscience.

Their solicitations proving vain, I was brought before the court to be examined, and asked why I was not returned into the kingdom, when the king had, by a proclamation, recalled all his subjects who were in foreign countries. I answered it was because the Gospel commanded me, when I was persecuted in one kingdom to fly into another country. The Judge, being likely a stranger to Scripture maxims and expressions, told me that I blasphemed; but I having desired him to tell me wherein, he would not, and repeated the same word. I replied