However, Coligny’s exiles had found Florida untouched by the Spanish, and settled themselves on the banks of the River of May (now called St John’s River, near modern Jacksonville), on a ‘pleasant open space covered with various kinds of grasses and plants’. They called their new home Fort Caroline, after France’s Catholic King Charles IX, in the hope of forestalling reprisals. Old Challeux had arrived the following year with another consignment of refugees, on a supply ship captained by Jean Ribault, a prominent Huguenot, as well as one of France’s most accomplished seamen.3
Conditions for the newcomers turned out to be less Elysian than advertised. The hundred or so settlers who had been there a year had run out of supplies, and were living off wild fruits, berries, the occasional crocodile, and goods stolen from the local Indians. There were also reports that the Spanish had been tipped off about Coligny’s project, and had sent a fleet which was even now roving the coast.
Over the coming weeks, Challeux joined a team of workmen who, under the direction of John de Hais, master carpenter, tried to reinforce La Caroline’s fragile palisade. The state of the fort’s defences was pitiful. The triangular layout was breached in two places, along the western side, and the long southerly wall facing the river, where the foundations for a ‘grange’ to store the settlement’s artillery and munitions lay partially built.
The weather hampered the workmen’s efforts. Daily deluges washed away the embankment supporting the palisade wall, and intervals of baking sunshine were too fleeting to allow the damage to be repaired. Meanwhile, the surrounding landscape became more and more saturated. Rivers burst their banks, meadows became marshland.
And so, on this September morning, Challeux faced another day of hard labour in the remorseless rain. Nevertheless, he managed to rouse himself, put on a damp and rotting cloak, and gather his tools.
A few hundred yards away, beyond the curtain of incessant rain, Don Pedro de Menéndez de Avilés lay in wait at the head of a column of five hundred soaking, disgruntled but well-armed Spanish troops. Menéndez was a Spanish noble and naval commander. He had arrived in Florida with a fleet of Spanish galleons a few days before Ribault, with orders to exterminate the ‘Lutherans’ and establish himself as Adelantado or governor of Florida, which King Philip II of Spain declared extended all the way from the keys on the southernmost tip of the Florida peninsula to Newfoundland.4
Menéndez had anchored his ships in the River of Dolphins (modern Matanzas River), about thirty-five miles south of Fort Caroline. There, on 28 August, he had set about building a military base, which he called St Augustine, in honour of the feast day upon which construction work had begun. After several weeks gathering intelligence about Fort Caroline from local Indians, and harrying Ribault’s fleet, he decided to mount a land attack on the French settlement.
The journey from St Augustine to Fort Caroline had proved dangerous and tiring. Though led by Francis Jean, a French defector who had lived in Fort Caroline, Menéndez’s troops got lost. They had to make their way through ‘morasses and desert paths never yet trod’, often up to their armpits in water, holding heavy knapsacks, ladders (for scaling the fort’s palisade) and harquebuses (a heavy forerunner to the musket) above their heads. They had finally reached a ‘little rise in the ground’ overlooking Fort Caroline in the early morning of 20 September, ‘the eve of the day of the Blessed Apostle and Evangelist St Matthew’.5
Menéndez commanded his men to stay hidden in the woodland while the camp master, Don Pedro de Valdes, and Francis Jean were sent ahead. They made their way through the thick undergrowth until they found their path blocked by a fallen tree. Turning back, a French sentinel who was patrolling nearby glimpsed them through the thicket. ‘Qui va la? [Who goes there?]’ he called. ‘Un Français [a Frenchman],’ the Spanish captain replied, in a convincing accent. The sentinel approached, and as soon as he was within reach, Valdes drew his sword and slashed him across the face. The sentinel fell backwards, giving a shout.
The cry carried through the thicket of trees, across the waterlogged clearing and turf embankment surrounding the French fort, through the wide gaps of its palisade, reaching the ears of Challeux as he was leaving his quarters. Guards were summoned, and they rushed out to see what had happened, leaving the fort’s gates open behind them.
At the same moment, Menéndez, thinking the cry was from his own camp master, gave the order to attack. Spanish troops burst from the cover of trees and poured through the fort’s still-open gates, firing and slashing at the panicking French settlers, who emerged from their quarters in their nightshirts to see what was going on.
Challeux saw a Spanish pikeman charging at him, and ran to a ladder or scaffold leaning up against one section of the fort’s rampart. ‘Nothing but the grace of God enabled me to double my effort,’ he recalled. ‘Old grey-haired man that I am, I nevertheless jumped over the ramparts, which if I thought about it, I could not have done, for they were eight or nine feet in height.’6
Not until he reached the cover of trees did he dare look back. He beheld ‘the horrible slaughter of our people’. Some managed to reach boats moored along the nearby shore, and row out to Ribault’s fleet, which was anchored in the river. The rest were killed where they stood, the Spanish vying ‘with each other as to who could best cut the throats of our men’. They even attacked the ill, the old, women and children, Challeux claimed, ‘in such a way that it is impossible to conceive of a massacre which could be equal to this one in cruelty and barbarity’.7
Once the savagery had subsided, the corpses were dragged out of the fort and dumped on the river bank. The Spanish soldiers, frustrated that so many had escaped, ‘vented their wrath and bloody cruelty on the dead’, scooping out their victims’ eyeballs, sticking them on the points of their daggers, and hurling them into the river ‘with shrieks of abuse and ribald laughter’.
Challeux fled into the woods, and made his way to the coast. He was picked up by one of Ribault’s ships the next day, and reached France a few weeks later, where he published a sensational account of his experiences. Others, including Jean Ribault, were less fortunate. Caught in a storm, they were shipwrecked back on the Florida coast. Exhausted and starving, they eventually surrendered to the Spanish, who bound them two by two, took them behind a sand dune, and slaughtered them. Only seven were spared, four who claimed to be Catholics, together with a drummer, a fife player and a carpenter, required by Menéndez to supplement his own troops.8
In a report of his actions sent to King Philip, Menéndez boasted, ‘I made war with fire and blood as Governor and Captain General of these Provinces upon all who might have come here to settle and to plant this evil Lutheran sect’. Having ‘come to this coast to burn and hang’ the hated Huguenots, he pledged to continue pursuing them ‘by sea and by land’ until they were annihilated.
To prevent any other adherents of that ‘wicked Lutheran sect’ returning to North America – particularly the English, who he noted had nominated Ribault ‘Captain General of all [their] fleet’ – Menéndez now urged the King to secure the entire eastern coast of North America. In particular, the Spanish should build a fort at the ‘Bahia de Santa Maria’ at thirty-seven degrees of northerly latitude, ‘the key to all the fortifications in this land’. This was the region that would later come to be dubbed by the English ‘Virginia’.9
Even