Even before Jamestown or the Plymouth Colony, the oldest permanent European colony in what is now the United States was founded in September 1565 by a Spanish soldier named Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in St. Augustine, Florida. Menéndez chose the name of the colony because he spotted the site on August 28, the feast day of Saint Augustine.
Menéndez’s expedition was not the first group of Spanish explorers to attempt to found a colony in Florida, something Juan Ponce de León had claimed for Spain in 1513. And unlike other colonizers, he did not He wasn’t there to find gold or create a trading network with the native tribes.
Instead, Menéndez’s main mission was simple: to get rid of the French Huguenot settlers who were trying to usurp the Spanish claim. The year before, the French had established an outpost at Fort Caroline, near present-day Jacksonville. A French base in Florida posed a potential threat not only to Spanish territorial claims, but also to the Spanish treasure fleet that sailed from South America and Mexico along the Florida coast before crossing the Atlantic to Spain. Spain’s King Philippe II wanted the French threat to be eliminated, especially because the settlers were Protestants and for Philippe, a Catholic, this made them intolerable.
Outnumbered Spanish settlers are lucky
The massacre of the French at Fort Caroline on the Saint John River, Florida, by Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in September 1565.
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Menéndez almost failed. Philip wanted him to destroy the French colony before France could send military forces to Florida to protect it. But by the time Menéndez arrived in Florida in August 1565, he discovered that a force of French reinforcements had arrived before him, according to David Arbesú, associate professor of Spanish at the University of South Florida and editor-in-chief and translator of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés: a new manuscript, an account of the expedition of Menéndez’s brother-in-law, Gonzalo Solís de Merás.
“He went up to the fort, by boat, where he discovered that the French had a very large fleet,” says Arbesú. “So he retreated to a place he had discovered the week before and called Saint-Augustin, and waited for the French to attack.
Menéndez and his men were vastly outnumbered and practically defenseless. But then nature gave Menéndez a chance.
“The French fleet appears and is ready to crush the Spaniards, when at this precise moment, a big storm or a hurricane blows the French fleet towards the south and makes them sink, saving the Spaniards from the disaster”, explains Arbesú.
Instead of being slaughtered, “all Pedro Menéndez had to do in the next two days was march to Fort Caroline, which now had very few soldiers inside, and conquer it without even paying a fee. drop of blood from the Spaniards, ”said. Arbesú.
“It seems that the enemy did not perceive their approach until the very moment of the attack, because it was very early in the morning and had been raining heavily,” wrote Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, the chaplain later. of the expedition. “Most of the soldiers in the fort were still lying down. Some got up in their shirts, and others, quite naked, demanded quarters, but, despite this, more than 140 were killed.
The chaplain congratulated Menéndez for “his ardent desire to serve our Lord by destroying the Lutheran heretics, enemies of our holy Catholic religion”.
Matanzas Inlet nominated for slaughter
Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, 1519-1574.
Universal History Archives / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
When Menéndez returned to his camp in Saint-Augustin, Indians in the region told him of seeing white men walking on the beach south of Saint-Augustin. “Pedro Menéndez realizes that it is the French who have been swept away by the storm,” explains Arbesú.
Menéndez rushed to the scene and found survivors of the sinking, who had lost their weapons and food in the storm, according to a National Park Service report. Mendoza, the chaplain, asked permission to offer the French a chance to survive if he converted to Catholicism. Sixteen of them agreed and the remaining 111 were killed.
Two weeks later, French commander Jean Ribault and his surviving men also showed up on the beach. The Spanish force offered them the chance to surrender and the French accepted. Menéndez’s men then tied them up, and stabbed Ribault to death before executing the rest of their captives by beating them to death with clubs and hacking them with axes, like Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, a French artist who heard of the murders of a sailor who had somehow escaped, later wrote. The entrance where the murders took place was called Matanzas, the Spanish word for “massacres”.
“Without the hurricane, Pedro Menéndez’s expedition would probably have failed, like all the others before him, and Florida would have been a French colony,” Arbesú says.
Saint Augustine becomes the center of Spanish power in Florida
Instead, after the massacre, the Spaniards stayed in St. Augustine to establish a permanent colony to deter more French from settling. “Philip’s support for the effort and the successful establishment of a lasting settlement was in large part due to the French presence,” says Shane Mountjoy, provost of York College in Pennsylvania and author of St. Augustine, a 2007 history of the city.
The Spaniards soon realized that Saint Augustine offered a valuable base for rescuers to aid their merchant ships when they were battered by tropical storms, as well as for the warships needed to hunt pirates. As a result, the colony was heavily subsidized by the Spanish Crown. Another source of support was the Catholic Church, which saw an opportunity to convert the indigenous population, and sent missionaries to accompany the Spanish soldiers.
St. Augustine became a key center of Spanish power in Florida, making it a frequent target of attacks from the English and other enemies. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake attacked and burned St. Augustine, but the locals eventually returned and rebuilt it. In 1672 the Spaniards erected the Castillo de San Marcos – the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States – which still watches over the city.
