Outside the Gates of Sultan

If my fifty year old memory serves me faithfully, it was some weeks after returning from the Ocean Youth Club trip to the Baltic in the summer of 1975 that I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France. La Rochelle adopted Reformist ideas during the Renaissance, and thence became the unoffical capital of Protestant (Huguenot) France, that is from the year of the Edict of Nantes (1568) which, issued by Henri IV, accorded French Protestants certain rights, until 1627 when a British-aided Protestant uprising resulted in the Siege of la Rochelle, during which Cardinal Richelieu blockaded the city for 14 months. Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 some 200.000 Huguenots migrated during what has become known as Le Refuge. Among the destinations of the Huguenot diaspora were North America, notably New York and South Carolina, Great Britain and Ulster, Germany, Dutch South Africa and the Netherlands. London became a key Huguenot centre. In South Carolina they rapidly integrated into the nascent Southern Anglo-American society.
My best RNR oppo Colin, who had been with me on the La Rochelle voyage phoned me only a few years ago from his East London home to remind me of one memorable evening we spent in the city:

In a stygian tavern we fell in with some wild locals led by a Romany-like minstrel and his winsome female companion who spoke to me protectively possibly fearing that as military men Colin and I might be in some physical peril, and a fiery Welsh ex-pat called Taffy...and on the way back to our ship from a night club in the early hours of the morning we were set upon not by local cutthroats but a pack of mangy looking pariah dogs; and it was Colin who coaxed them into backing off...