On a dreary winter's day, early in the year 1564, young Rn de Veaux, who had just passed his sixteenth birthday, left the dear old chateau where he had spent his happy and careless boyhood, and started for Paris. Less than a month before both his noble father and his gentle mother had been taken from him by a terrible fever that had swept over the country, and Rn their only child, was left without a relative in the world except his uncle the Chevalier Rn de Laudonniere. . . . Poor young Rn was traveling to his uncle, then in Paris -- but ultimately the pair would end up on a warm bright island in the New World where young Rn would become the hero of the surprising adventures that this book holds. . . .