THE 14th COLONY: The Struggles of a Young Frenchman to Reach the Louisiana Colony
About
France, 1720. One stolen document. One ruined life. One way out.
Pierre Mayeux had everything a young man could want — a comfortable home on his father’s tax farm in northern France, and Simone, the sharecropper’s daughter who shared his bed and his secrets.
Then one night changed everything.
When Simone robbed a passing carriage and stole the hidden receipt book of Antoine Patin — proof that one of France’s most powerful tax farmers was robbing the Crown — Pierre was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Royal Guard came for him, not her. Convicted of the crime, he was sentenced to three years as an engagé, bound for John Law’s wilderness concession at the Arkansas Post in the Louisiana Colony.
His family escorted him to La Rochelle to see him off. On the docks he met Adrien, a restless young man who chose to board the La Profond not in chains but by his own free will. And somewhere between the gangplank and the open sea, Pierre met Marie.
What followed was three months of open ocean — storms, sickness, hunger, and a hurricane that pushed them to the edge of survival. And something unexpected: love, taking root in the most unlikely of places.
When the La Profond finally limped into New Biloxi, Pierre Mayeux stepped ashore into a raw and unforgiving new world — carrying hope he hadn’t planned on.
What he didn’t know was that Simone, back in France, was carrying something too.
The 14th Colony is the story of a man wrongly torn from everything he knew — and the journey that made him someone new.
Book One of The 14th Colony series.