This is a peculiar book about a peculiar episode: the all-but forgotten Huguenot colony of Fort Caroline in Florida, the last and most catastrophic of three Huguenot or part-Huguenot attempts to establish colonies in the Americas in the 1550s and 1560s. It was on the face of it an idealistic project, or even a performatively moralistic one. Its backers and leaders – ultimately Admiral Coligny, and on the ground the mercurial commander, René Laudonnière – set themselves against the brutality, rapine and enslavement that the emerging Black Legend already associated firmly with Spanish conquests in the New World. Their colony would be a French and, more importantly, a Protestant riposte to such atrocities: their watchword in dealing with the indigenous people would be love. They would deal honestly with them, forming a free alliance for mutual benefit, and as a central part of this the allure of the colonists’ pure religion would draw God's chosen amongst the native people to their eternal destiny. Indeed, this book argues, their ambition was deeper and more unexpected than that: having converted the indigenous people, their ultimate hope was to find a new American Christian king to whom they might subject themselves, who might form a virtuous and manly Calvinist counterpart to the popery and corruption of the Spanish and even of the French crowns. It helped that the king on whom they pinned their hopes, Houstaqua, was said to have rich goldfields in his territories. Of course, the reality turned out to be messier. The people whom the settlers encountered were generally friendly enough, often fulsomely so, but they had their own agendas and power struggles, and would not conform readily to the roles that had been scripted for them. That was not, however, what doomed the colony in the end. In 1565 the Spanish found it and wiped it out in a single attack.

Laudonnière escaped with a handful of others; his narrative was published soon afterwards in both French and English, and, along with a couple of other, less detailed accounts from participants, it tells us virtually everything we know about the colony. This does present historians of the subject with a problem: assuming that we do not wish merely to summarise or reframe our single dominant source, what can we do? Heather Martel's book does not even attempt to tell the colony's story: anyone trying to reconstruct the narrative of events or even to identify the key characters from this book will find it pretty hard going. Nor does she write directly about the indigenous people, being rightly sceptical about the extent to which we can read Laudonnière's ethnographic writing against the grain in order to extract a tolerably authentic picture of them. The reports from the othering gaze of these alien settlers tells us about their presumptions, not about what they saw. Inevitably, then, this is a book about the settlers.

But the settlers are not the only ones here with an othering gaze derived from their prior assumptions: we as historians are too, and Martel is particularly susceptible to this problem. The book is written out of the centre of America's culture wars and positions itself as an intervention in them – specifically, as the subtitle indicates, as a study of the origins of American ‘whiteness’. The problem is that Fort Caroline does not fit terribly well into this story. One of the book's main themes is that the Huguenots did not view the differences between themselves and the indigenous people in racial terms at all, but instead used humoral concepts of the body (as well as their theological assumptions) to see those differences as acquired, environmental and fluid. They believed both that their new neighbours could in short order be transformed into something more Christian and European, and also that they themselves might, in this new setting, come to share some of the indigenous people's characteristics. All their talk of friendship, love and allure was built on this fundamental conviction of deep human commonality. Amongst other things this fostered a persistent tendency to minimise difference and to read the indigenous people's customs and manners through European eyes. ‘Whiteness’, or any such notion of ineradicable separation, was very much not their view.

Martel knows this: in fact, she tells us it repeatedly, so much so that she seems to be struggling to persuade herself. She is convinced that readers will find it deeply surprising: ‘Modern racial ideology’, that is, the deep racist norms of the modern age, ‘has made it impossible to imagine white Christians willing to look for fellow elect among Indigenous people’ (p. 188), and she does indeed seem to struggle to imagine that. At times she does emphasise the settlers’ authentic openness to and sometimes starry-eyed admiration of their new neighbours. Yet Laudonnière is an odd hero, and Martel is deeply unwilling to allow him and his compatriots that role. They may not have been racist in the modern sense, but she is writing a story about the origins of American racial categories, and the only role open to them in that story is that of villain. So Coligny's order that the settlers ‘cultivate love rather than hate’ (p. 18) with the indigenous people becomes a sinister ploy; the gathering of funds for the colony from Protestants in England and France, a ‘Protestant imperial conspiracy’ (p. 15). The settlers’ double-dealing with their neighbours is ascribed to Calvinist techniques of dissimulation under persecution, without an apparent recognition of Calvinism's forthright rejection of such techniques. And their humoral approach to otherness is indicative of ‘the gendered and eroticized relations that would become American white supremacy and biogenetic racism’ (p. 3). They were, in other words, deeply implicated in later ideologies that flatly contradicted their own beliefs.

Martel squares this circle by arguing that the colony's catastrophic end turned it into a dreadful warning for later Protestant colonial projects, with the Spanish attack framed as a providential judgement for the sin of too much dallying with the heathen. In that sense, it taught the English in North America that whites should stay white. This may be so, but it is unsettlingly neat: a way of fitting this quixotic and naïve enterprise into modern and frankly teleological narratives so that it teaches us the kind of lessons we like to hear. By the book's end, I felt the force of Martel's warning about how little the colonists’ othering gaze could truly see, because her gaze at the colonists themselves seems similarly problematic. Determinedly analysing them through modern categories, she does not really allow them to speak for themselves, nor was I convinced by her attempts to inhabit their position or see the world through their eyes. Slicing the material neatly into her preferred categories – a series of chapters with one-word titles such as ‘Power’, ‘Gender’ and ‘Sexuality’, leading inevitably to a conclusion titled ‘Race’ – avoids any danger that the colonists might ‘allure’ us into unexpected or uncomfortable perspectives. Fascinating and learned as this book is, in the end I found it to be more revealing about the twenty-first century than the sixteenth.