Fort Caroline and the Matanzas Massacre

In the summer of fifteen sixty-four, a fleet of French ships anchored in the wide mouth of the River of May and put ashore a party of Huguenot colonists, Protestant refugees who hoped to build a new life far from the religious wars tearing apart their homeland. Under the command of René de Laudonnière, they constructed a triangular earthwork fort on the south bank and named it Fort Caroline, in honor of their king, Charles the Ninth. The colony was precarious from the start.

Supplies ran low. Mutineers stole the boats. Relations with the Timucua chiefs fluctuated between alliance and tension.

Yet for about a year the settlement endured, and the French cartographers and naturalists among the party produced some of the earliest and most detailed European images of Florida's landscape and people. The Spanish crown had been watching. Florida sat astride the sea-lanes that carried silver from New Spain back to Seville, and no Protestant colony could be tolerated on that coastline.

In the late summer of fifteen sixty-five, a Spanish fleet commanded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sailed north from the new settlement of Saint Augustine. On September twentieth, his soldiers waded through a nighttime storm and overwhelmed Fort Caroline before dawn. Most of the French garrison was killed, though Laudonnière escaped to a ship and dozens of women and children were taken prisoner rather than killed.

The Spanish renamed the fort San Mateo. What followed was colder still. Hundreds of French soldiers who had attempted to sail for home were wrecked in a storm south of the fort.

Menéndez accepted their surrender, marched them behind the dunes near a coastal inlet, and executed them in groups. Perhaps two hundred fifty men died there. The Spanish called it a place of grace, and the inlet still bears that name today.

Spain's grip on the peninsula would last two and a half centuries more.