by Tony Horwitz
The colony would give Huguenots an overseas haven and Catholics a way to get rid of them. But it also gave common cause to mercantile Protestants and a French Crown that had just emerged from a decade of war with Spain. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain had become bloated on American bullion, which came to Europe aboard galleons that followed the Gulf Stream, along the coast of Florida and the Carolinas. This shore was therefore highly strategic and potentially profitable: a base for maritime raiding, for salvaging the frequent wrecks, and for challenging Spain’s suzerainty over the Americas.
As leader of the expedition, Admiral Coligny chose a Huguenot sea captain, Jean Ribault. Accompanying him was the dandy René de Laudonnière and another 150 or so Protestants. On May Day, 1562, the French arrived at a wide river that Ribault christened Rivière de Mai in honor of his landing date. He erected a stone column engraved with the fleur-de-lis, then coasted north, naming the rivers he passed for those of his homeland: the Seine, the Somme, the Loire, and so on. The finest he called Port Royal; its mouth, near Beaufort, South Carolina, is still known as Port Royal Sound.
In contrast to the Spanish voyages that preceded it, Ribault’s was peaceful. The French, then as now, preferred conciliation to confrontation, and seemed to possess social graces that other Europeans lacked. Their accounts of meeting Indians are laced with phrases such as “wishing not to appear ungrateful,” “knowing their feelings,” and “we sought to appease them”—sentiments foreign to hard-handed conquistadors.
The French also conformed to national stereotype in their sensuous appreciation of natives. They admired “well-formed” women wearing skirts of moss; painted deerskins “so naturally charming and still so consistent with the rules of art”; and native cuisine such as alligator flesh, which one Frenchman likened to veal.
At Port Royal, Ribault chose a site for a fort and gave his men a stirring speech. Any who volunteered to stay would “always be revered as those who were the first to live in this strange land,” he said. “Your fame shall hereafter shine inextinguishably in the heart of France.” Thirty men heeded his call and Ribault sailed off, pledging to return in six months with supplies and reinforcements.
Instead, on reaching France, Ribault became caught up in the civil war between Catholics and Protestants that had erupted in his absence. Meanwhile, the colonists at Port Royal also fought among themselves, eventually murdering the officer whom Ribault had left in charge. After waiting in vain for relief from France, they built a small boat and set off for home.
Becalmed midway across the Atlantic, the French ran out of food and ate their shoes and jackets; “as for drink, some used sea water, others their urine.” Ever since Columbus’s landing in 1492, Europeans had expressed horror of cannibalism, which they believed to be rife among natives. Now they resorted to the practice themselves, selecting one man for slaughter so the others could live. “His flesh was equally divided among them. Then they drank his warm blood.”
The survivors were eventually rescued by an English ship. Ribault, by then, was also in English hands, having fled the strife in France and offered his services to Queen Elizabeth. Distrustful of the French captain, she threw him in the Tower of London. So when the fighting ceased in France, and the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny, renewed his colonizing plans, he chose René de Laudonnière as commander.
This time about three hundred Huguenots sailed, including women, artisans, an apothecary, and a painter. Returning to the River of May in the summer of 1564, they found the column Ribault had erected two years before. Indians had garlanded it with magnolias, and adorned the base with baskets of fruit, vases of perfumed oil, and bundles of corn. They also greeted the French by kissing the column and raising their arms, as if in prayer. The watercolor I’d seen, of a tall chief with his arm around Laudonnière, depicted this worshipful welcome.
“Being delighted by this good treatment,” Laudonnière chose the riverside as the site for a new settlement. “The place was so pleasant that melancholics would be forced to change their nature,” he wrote. A forest of cedar, palm, and magnolia “gave a fragrance so delightful that perfume could not improve upon it.” The riverside also abounded in vines laden with plump grapes. “On the request of my soldiers,” the captain claimed, he named the loveliest part of this landscape after himself: “the Vale of Laudonnière.”
The settlers built a fort called La Caroline, in honor of their king, and erected the birthright of every Frenchman: a bakery. They made wine and bartered with Indians for corn. Laudonnière kept a falcon as a pet. The French also shipped home sassafras, an alligator skin, and tobacco, which had just been introduced to France by an ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nicot, whose surname is the root of the word “nicotine.”
But the French at La Caroline, like so many early colonists in America, proved incapable of sustaining themselves. Few knew how to farm or to catch the region’s fish and game. In any event, they preferred to hunt for precious metal. Indians possessed small quantities of gold, which they claimed was abundant in the interior. In reality, the Indians’ gold plates and jewelry came from Spanish ships, many of which wrecked on Florida’s coast en route from Mexico and South America.
The French building a fort in Florida, based on the original by an artist on the expedition, Jacques le Moyne de Morgues
Before long, the French ran out of trade goods to barter for food. They started stealing native crops and kidnapped an Indian chief to ransom for corn. Laudonnière, a clumsy diplomat, played one chief against another until he squandered the goodwill of all of them. He also lost the confidence of the colonists, some of whom stole off by sea to raid Spanish ships and outposts in the Caribbean. When one group of pirates returned, Laudonnière had their ringleaders shot and hung on a gibbet. As colonists, French Protestants were proving just as greedy and violent as the Spanish Catholics they so despised.
By the summer of 1565, a year after their arrival, the French were living on acorns, berries, and roots. Some “ate privately the bodies of newborn puppies,” Laudonnière wrote. He decided to abandon the colony. But just as the French prepared to depart, three very different fleets appeared in the River of May, in rapid and unexpected succession.
The first was commanded by John Hawkins, an English privateer. Astonished that La Caroline’s colonists were starving in so lush a land, one of Hawkins’s men wrote scornfully of the lazy Gallic desire “to live by the sweat of other mens browes.” This was a richly ironic comment, given that the English were on their way home from a slave-trading expedition in the West Indies.
Hawkins, however, pitied his fellow Protestants, giving them food and exchanging one of his ships for cannons from the fort. After he left, Laudonnière again prepared to sail home—at which point, the second fleet arrived. This one brought Jean Ribault, who had led the earlier French voyage to Florida. Released from the Tower of London, he’d been sent by the French to resupply the colony and to remove Laudonnière. Reports had reached France that La Caroline’s commander was hoarding food and keeping his chambermaid as a mistress, while threatening to execute any of his men who cohabited with native women. Laudonnière denied the charges and then fell ill, “depressed by the false rumors that had been spread about me.”
It was at this juncture that the third fleet appeared in the river. The fleet’s flagship drew beside one of Ribault’s vessels and a man aboard the arriving ship called out, “What people?”
“From France,” replied an officer on Ribault’s ship, who then asked the identity of his interrogator. The answer must have stunned him.
“Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Captain-General of the King of Spain, who has come to hang all the Calvinists I find here.”
AS A FRENCHMAN with a finely tuned sense of aesthetics, René de Laudonnière would be appalled by the present-day surrounds of the colony he founded. The “large and beautiful river” that the French called Rivière de Mai now blooms with algae, sewage, and factory waste. Its banks, so aromatic that Laudonni�
�re thought perfume could not improve their fragrance, reeks of septic tanks and the industry of greater Jacksonville, a city mocked by its detractors as “an olfactory crime” and a “Dixie version of Newark.”
My expectations were therefore modest as I crawled through Jacksonville’s traffic in search of the fort at La Caroline, which lay near a spot marked on my map as Dredge Spoil Island. Navigating a sea of subdivisions, I reached a riverside park called the Fort Caroline National Memorial: no longer a Huguenot refuge, but a pleasing sanctuary from the sprawl and traffic of modern Florida.
The visitors center was empty, and I saw no one as I followed a trail to a triangular fort of log and sod, a few cannon poking over its ramparts. A park ranger sat nearby in a golf cart, smoking a cigarette. I asked him whether this was the historic La Caroline.
“You mean Fort Fake-ee?” he said, gesturing at the log stockade. “Park Service put it up in 1964.” No trace of the original fort had ever been found, he said; nor was anyone sure whether this was its location. The reconstruction was “an educated guess at best,” based on French descriptions of the fort and a drawing by the expedition’s artist.
The ranger, Craig Morris, was a bespectacled man with thinning sandy hair and an irreverent take on Fort Caroline’s history. “You gotta love the French,” he said, lighting a fresh Camel. “They write about how they filleted fish and seasoned it with bay leaves. And they made two thousand gallons of wine here. That’s a lot of hooch!” Even the names of French ships seemed characteristic: one was called the Trout, another Shoulder of Mutton.
Craig said few park visitors shared his appreciation of the French. Most arrived unaware of Fort Caroline’s history, and many were dismayed to learn that Huguenots, not English Pilgrims, were the first to seek religious freedom on U.S. soil. “Americans love to bash the French,” he said. This was particularly so during periods of French-American tension, such as had been sparked by war in Iraq.
“Jacksonville’s a military town, patriotic and conservative,” he said. “We’ve had people come here and realize it was a French site and turn around and go back to their cars in disgust. Some of them say things like ‘How can you memorialize the French? They’re always against us.’ Or ‘French are losers, they always surrender.’ ” Craig shook his head. “I tell them, ‘Ever heard of Lafayette?’ But they aren’t listening.”
Craig invited me into his golf cart for a tour of the rest of the park, mostly a maritime hummock of oak, hickory, pine, and palmetto. We ended atop a bluff crowned by a ten-foot concrete pillar: a replica of the column Ribault erected in 1562. The view stretched for miles toward the sea, a panorama of salt marshes and low islands. No ship could have approached La Caroline without being quickly spotted.
“I try to tell people that American history is incomplete unless you know what happened here,” Craig said. “We associate freedom with the Pilgrims, but the French tried first and almost succeeded.”
If they had, the continent’s history might have unfolded very differently. “You’d have had the French in Florida and Canada, squeezing the English from both sides. And Jacksonville today would be like New Orleans. We’d be eating beignets instead of barbecue.” He laughed. “And France would have been spared Euro Disney.”
We lingered until five o’clock, when Craig had to close the park gate. He’d grown up nearby and often came to the bluff as a teenager, when the park stayed open after dark. “This was Jacksonville’s lovers’ lane,” he explained. “Maybe it’s this phallic column, got everyone hot and bothered. If you weren’t here by six-thirty on a Saturday night you couldn’t get a parking spot.”
These days, Craig said, the park was a magnet of a very different kind. Jacksonville’s large evangelical community held prayer sessions there, honoring the French as the country’s first Protestants. Sometimes, they erected crosses by the river. “This is government property,” Craig said. “Church and state have to stay separate.” So rangers quietly took the crosses down. But this only strengthened the resolve of those who put them up. “They think Jacksonville is God’s chosen city and it all began at Fort Caroline.”
For the first time Craig became reticent. Through his church, he knew a woman who took a keen interest in the Huguenots, and he recommended I talk to her. “I was raised Southern Baptist, I thought I’d seen it all,” he said. “But these folks are serious. Real serious.”
PEDRO MENÉNDEZ, THE commander of the Spanish fleet that surprised the French at La Caroline, was an expert seaman, veteran soldier, and devout crusader of the Counter-Reformation. This made him the perfect agent for the mission he embarked on in the summer of 1565. Earlier that year, Menéndez had contracted with King Philip II to colonize and fortify Florida, and convert its inhabitants. Then, as news reached Spain of the growing French presence at La Caroline, the king strengthened Menéndez’s military force and commanded him to expel all interlopers: “Free those lands, and give no quarter to the enemy to take root in them.”
By the time Menéndez caught up with the French, Ribault’s newly landed fleet had turned La Caroline into a formidable bastion of eight hundred soldiers and settlers, about equal in number to the Spanish force. Ribault’s vessels were also nimbler than the heavy Spanish ships. After a brief engagement in the River of May, Menéndez retreated to an inlet he’d reconnoitered forty miles to the south. There, on a shore Menéndez christened St. Augustine, the Spanish set up camp.
Ribault, emboldened by his repulse of the Spanish, decided to give chase and defeat Menéndez before he could dig in or be reinforced. La Caroline’s deposed leader, Laudonnière, opposed the plan. He warned of the fickle weather—it was September, the height of hurricane season—and the danger of leaving the fort undermanned.
“Having more regard for his own opinion than for the advice that I had given,” Laudonnière wrote, Ribault sailed off with almost all the ships and soldiers at his disposal. He left the still ailing Laudonnière in command of only a few dozen men capable of bearing arms, as well as more than a hundred others, many of them women and children.
Ribault’s bold stroke almost succeeded. He surprised several Spanish ships just outside St. Augustine and was about to attack when the tide shifted, forcing the French back from the shallow inlet. Then a hurricane hit the coast, driving the French ships far out to sea.
Like Ribault, Menéndez was a daring tactician and a “friend of his own opinion,” his chaplain wrote. Gambling that the tempest would keep Ribault from resuming his attack or returning to La Caroline, Menéndez left St. Augustine undefended and took five hundred soldiers to seize the French fort, by land.
In coastal Florida, “land” is a relative term. The terrain Menéndez had to cross was swampy and swollen by rain. Toting muskets, pikes, swords, and ladders, the Spaniards slogged through stormy weather in water up to their waists. At dawn on the third day, they came within sight of the French fort and paused to pray for “victory over these Lutherans,” as the Spanish generally referred to all Protestants.
Most of the French were asleep. Even the officer in charge of sentry duty had retired, “thinking that the Spanish would not come in such unusual weather,” Laudonnière wrote. The Spanish quickly breached the fort and attacked men as they came from their beds.
Laudonnière rose from his sickbed and fought briefly before fleeing the fort, along with his chambermaid and several dozen others. They crept along the marshy shore and reached the few French ships left in the river. Seeing no other option, Laudionnière wrote, “we decided to return to France.” Six weeks later the refugees reached Europe. “During the passage we had nothing to eat but biscuits and water.”
Those left behind at La Caroline suffered a much worse fate. The few whom Laudonnière had judged capable of bearing arms included a cook, an aged carpenter, a beer maker, two shoemakers, a spinet player, and four youths “who served Captain Ribault in taking care of his dogs.” They didn’t put up much of a fight. “Some came out naked and others in shirts, saying ‘I surrender,’
” a Spanish priest wrote. “Notwithstanding this, there was a slaughter of 142.”
Menéndez needed only an hour to take the fort and didn’t lose a single man. A French survivor wrote that the Spanish “plucked out the eyes from the dead bodies, stuck them on their dagger points, and with exclamations and taunts” threw them at fleeing Huguenots.
Menéndez spared about fifty French, mostly women and children, though he did so reluctantly. “It causes me deep sorrow to see them among my people on account of their horrid religious sect,” he wrote. He was also disgusted by the material evidence of heresy he found in the fort: “Lutheran books,” playing cards “burlesquing things of the Church,” and “a thousand other bad things” belonging to a Protestant preacher. “All this was ransacked by the soldiers,” Menéndez wrote. “Nothing escaped them.”
Leaving a garrison to hold the fort, he marched back to his base at St. Augustine, where he was met by a priest who donned his best cassock and raised a cross to bless the returning conqueror. In an account titled Memoir of the Happy Result, the priest wrote of Menéndez: “The fire and desire he has to serve Our Lord in throwing down and destroying this Lutheran sect, enemy of our Holy Catholic Faith, does not allow him to feel weary.”
Menéndez’s indefatigability was about to be tested again. Within a few days of his return, he learned from Indians that hundreds of French from Ribault’s storm-wracked fleet had come ashore on the coast just south of St. Augustine.
THE DAY AFTER my visit to Fort Caroline I called Lyn Corley, the woman Craig Morris had told me was devoted to the Huguenots. “Have a Jesus-filled day,” her answering machine said, asking me to leave “a joyous message.” When Lyn called back, we arranged to meet at Fort Caroline. I found her at the park’s gift shop, buying plastic helmets for a play at her church about the slaughter of the French.