The Bull of the Pope, in its division of the world, had assigned America to Spain. Florida, which had been discovered by Ponce de Leon, and the present coast of our Republic on the Gulf of Mexico, were not, in the sixteenth century, disputed with Spain by any other nation. Spain claimed, however, under the name of Florida, the whole sea-coast as far as Newfoundland and even to the remotest north, so that, so far as asserted ownership was involved, the whole of our coast was Spanish domain.
The poor, persecuted, weather-beaten Huguenots of France, had been active in plans of Colonization for escape from the mingled imbecility and terrorism of Charles IX. They saw that it was not well to stay in the land of their birth. The Admiral de Coligny, one of the ablest leaders of the French Protestants, was zealous in his efforts to found a Gallic empire of his fellow subjects and sufferers on this continent. He desired, at least, a refuge for them; and in 1562, entrusted to John Ribault, of Dieppe, the command of an expedition to the American shores. The first soil of this virgin hemisphere that was baptised by the tread of refugees flying from the terrors of the future hero of St. Bartholomew—of men who were seeking freedom from persecution for the sake of their religion—was that of South Carolina. Ribault first visited St. John's River, in Florida, and then slowly coasted the low shores northward, until he struck the indenture where Hilton-Head Island, and Hunting and St. Helen's Islands are divided by the entrance into the ocean of Broad River at Port Royal.
It was a beautiful region, where venerable oaks shadowed a luxuriant soil, while the mild air, delicious with the fragrance of forest-flowers, forever diffused a balmy temperature, free alike from the fire of the tropics and the frost of the north. Here, in this pleasant region, he built Fort Carolina, and landed his humble colony of twenty persons who were to keep possession of the chosen land.
But Frenchmen are not precisely at home in the wilderness. They require the aggregation of large villages or cities. The Frenchman is a social being, and regret for the loss of civil comforts soon spoils his vivacious temper, and fills him with discontent. Accordingly, dissensions broke forth in the colony soon after the departure of Ribault for France; and, most of the dissatisfied colonists, finding their way back to Europe as best they could, the settlement was broken up forever.
Yet, Coligny was not to be thwarted. In 1564, he again resolved to colonize Florida, and entrusted Laudonnière—a seaman rather than a soldier, who had already visited the American coasts,—with three ships which had been conceded by the king. An abundance of colonists, not disheartened by the failure of their predecessors, soon offered for the voyage, and, after a passage of sixty days, the eager adventurers hailed the American coast. They did not go to the old site, marked as it was by disaster, but nestled on the embowered banks of the beautiful St. John's, or, as it was then known—"The River of May."
But the French of that era, when in pursuit of qualified self-government or of any principle, either civil or religious, were not unlike their countrymen of the present time. They found it difficult to make enthusiasm subordinate to the mechanism of progress, and to restrain the elastic vapor which properly directed gives energy to humanity, but which heedlessly handled destroys what it should impel or guide. Religious enthusiasm is not miraculously fed by ravens in the wilderness. Coligny's emigrants were improvident or careless settlers. Their supplies wasted. They were not only gratified by the sudden relief from royal oppression, but the removal of a weight, gave room for the display of that secret avarice, which, more or less, possesses the hearts of all men. They had heard of the Spaniard's success, and were seized with a passion for sudden wealth. They became discontented with the toil of patient labor and slow accretion. Mutiny ripened into rebellion. A party compelled Laudonnière to suffer it to embark for Mexico; but its two vessels were soon employed in piratical enterprises against the Spaniards. Some of the reckless insurgents fell into the hands of the men they assailed, and were made prisoners and sold as slaves, while the few who escaped, were, on their return, executed by orders of Laudonnière.
The main body of the colonists who had either remained true to their duty or were kept in subjection, had, meanwhile, become greatly disheartened by these occurrences and by the failing supplies of their settlement, when they were temporarily relieved by the arrival of the celebrated English adventurer—Sir John Hawkins. Ribault soon after came out from France to take command, and brought with him new emigrants, seeds, animals, agricultural implements, and fresh supplies of every kind.
These occurrences, it will be recollected, took place in Florida, within the ancient claim of Spain. It is true that the country was a wilderness; but Spain still asserted her dominion, though no beneficial use had been made of the neglected forest and tangled swamp. At this epoch, a certain Pedro Melendez de Aviles—a coarse, bold, bloody man, who signalized himself in the wars in Holland against the Protestants, and was renowned in Spanish America for deeds which, even in the loose law of that realm, had brought him to justice, was then hanging about the Court of Philip II. in search of plunder or employment. He perceived a tempting "mission" of combined destruction and colonization in the French Protestant settlement in Florida; and, accordingly, a compact was speedily made between himself and his sovereign, by which he was empowered, in consideration of certain concessions and rights, to invade Florida with at least five hundred men, and to establish the Spanish authority and Catholic religion.
An expedition, numbering under its banner more than twenty-five hundred persons, was soon prepared. After touching, with part of these forces, on the Florida coast, in the neighborhood of the present river Matanzas, the adventurer sailed in quest of the luckless Huguenots, whose vessels were soon descried escaping seaward from a combat for which they were unprepared. For a while, Melendez pursued them, but abandoning the chase, steered south once more, and entering the harbor on the coast he had just before visited, laid the foundations of that quaint old Spanish town of St. Augustine, which is the parent of civic civilization on our continent. Ribault, meanwhile, who had put to sea with his craft, lost most of his vessels in a sudden storm on the coast, though the greater part of his companions escaped.
But Melendez, whose ships suffered slightly from this tempest, had no sooner placed his colonists in security, at St. Augustine, than he set forth with a resolute band across the marshy levels which intervened between his post and the St. John's. With savage fury the reckless Spaniard fell on the Huguenots. The carnage was dreadful. It seems to have been rather slaughter than warfare. The Huguenots, unprepared for battle, little dreamed that the wars of the old world would be transferred to the new, and vainly imagined that human passion could find victims enough for its malignity without crossing the dangerous seas. Full two hundred fell. Many fled to the forest. A few surrendered, and were slain. Some escaped in two French vessels that fortunately still lingered in the harbor. The wretches who had been providentially saved from the wreck, were next followed and found by this Castilian monster. "Let them surrender their flags and arms," said he, "and thus placing themselves at my discretion, I may do with them what God in his mercy desires!" Yet, as soon as they yielded, they were bound and marched through the forest to St. Augustine, and, as they approached the fort which had been hastily raised on the level shores, the sudden blast of a trumpet was the signal for the musketeers to pour into the crowd a volley that laid them dead on the spot. It was asserted that these victims of reliance on Spanish mercy, were massacred, "not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans;"—and thus, about nine hundred Protestant human beings, were the first offering on the soil of our present Union to the devilish fanaticism of the age.