Menendez: Lutherans and Florida

Ribault's vessels, meanwhile, had all been wrecked near Cape Canaveral, on the Florida coast. All of his people were saved from the sea, but perished at the hands of the less merciful Spaniards. They tried to make their way to Fort Carolina, ignorant of its sad fate. Ribault, with one hundred and fifty men, was betrayed by one of the sailors who had deserted Laudonniere and turned pirate, and under a promise of mercy he cast himself upon the clemency of Menendez. That leader proceeded to put to death the brave captain and his companions. "Seeing that they were Lutherans," says Mendoza, "the General condemned them all to death; but as I was a priest, and had the bowels of a man, I besought him to accord to me the favor, that he would not put to death those whom we should discover to be Christians. He granted my request. I made inquiry, and found ten or twelve, whom we selected from the number. All the others were executed because they were Lutherans, enemies of our holy Catholic faith." They were led out in parcels of ten, and with their hands tied behind them and at a line drawn in the sand with a cane, by Menendez, they were butchered. So, also, says Barcia, the Spanish historian, who regarded Menendez as the chosen instrument of the Almighty to vindicate his cause. Mendoza tells us, when writing of the massacre at Fort Carolina, that "the Holy Spirit enlightened the understanding" of the commander "to enable him to gain so great a victory."

A knowledge of these horrid crimes in Florida and the avowed cause of their commission, excited the greatest indignation throughout Europe, and the unchristian spirit of revenge glowed in many a manly bosom. The French Roman Catholics were greatly moved by this outrage upon their countrymen by the hated Spaniards. The relatives of the victims appealed to the French king to vindicate the wrongs of the emigrants who had been sent out under his sanction and authority. Coligni joined in the appeal; but the king and court, ruled by Catharine, whose theological views were then in a transition state, were profoundly indifferent. No remonstrances or complaint was sent to the Spanish court. No doubt information of the expedition of Ribault had been sent from the French court to Philip and caused the issuing of his bloody commission to Menendez. The courtiers of Charles the Ninth, who feared and hated Coligni because he was a Huguenot and a patriot, rejoiced at the failure of his scheme, and he was utterly unable to do more for his colony.

At this juncture a fiery avenger appeared. It was the Chevalier Dominic de Gourges, a gentleman of Gascony, member of an eminent family and a devoted Roman Catholic. In the military service of his country he had been made a prisoner by the Spaniards, who compelled him to do slave's work in Spanish galleys. His hatred of the Spanish blood thereby engendered was undying. When he heard of the treatment of his countrymen in Florida, at their hands, he was in retirement. Filled with indignation because of the crime and the criminal indifference of his king, he determined to fit out an expedition at his own expense, to punish the offenders. That was in 1567. He sold his property, borrowed money of his friends, and fitted out three small vessels, manned by one hundred soldiers (many of them gentlemen volunteers), and eighty mariners prepared with cross-bows and picks to act as soldiers. His vessels were so flat-bottomed that they might pass over the sand-bars of rivers.