French Colonial Presence

Jean Ribault Claims Florida for France — Charlesfort Founded

The French attempt on Florida was the project of one man. Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France and the most powerful Huguenot at court, wanted an American colony for two reasons that reinforced each other: it would give French Protestants a refuge from a country sliding into religious war, and it would put French ships on the flank of the Spanish treasure route. Spain claimed the whole Atlantic seaboard by papal donation and by right of discovery, and had settled none of it. Coligny proposed to test whether a claim unoccupied for fifty years was a claim at all.

He gave the command to Jean Ribault, a Dieppe navigator of Huguenot sympathies and considerable skill. Ribault sailed from Le Havre on February 18, 1562 with two vessels and roughly a hundred and fifty men, guided across the Atlantic by the Portuguese pilot Bartolomeu Borges. On April 30 the ships raised the northeast Florida coast, and on May 1, 1562 Ribault entered the mouth of a broad river and went ashore. He named it the River of May for the month — it is the St. Johns, at modern Jacksonville — and set up a stone column carved with the arms of Charles IX, claiming the country for France.

The reception was warm. The Timucua of the river mouth met the French with food and ceremony, and Ribault's published account of the coast is unusually admiring, describing a fertile and well-peopled land. That account, printed in London the following year, did as much as the voyage itself to fix Florida in the northern European imagination as something other than a Spanish possession.

Ribault coasted north through the Georgia and Carolina sea islands and into a deep sound he named Port Royal, on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina. There he built a small work called Charlesfort, again for Charles IX, and left twenty-seven or twenty-eight volunteers in it under Captain Albert de la Pierria while he returned to France for colonists and supplies. It was a placeholder, not a colony — too few men, too little food, and no farmers.

Everything then went wrong at once. In France the First War of Religion had broken out, and Coligny had no ships to spare. Ribault crossed to England to look for backing, published his narrative, was drawn into English schemes for a Florida venture of their own, and ended by being detained — suspected, with some justice, of intending to slip back to France with what he knew. He would not return to Florida for three years.

At Port Royal the garrison starved. A fire destroyed most of what stores they had; de la Pierria's discipline turned savage and his men killed him. The survivors then built a boat with almost no tools, caulked it with Spanish moss and resin, made sails of their shirts, and put out into the Atlantic without a compass. Becalmed and out of food, they drew lots and ate one of their own, a man named La Chère. An English ship found the wreck of a vessel and the handful still alive and carried them in. One man, Guillaume Rouffi, had refused to sail and stayed behind with the Timucua; the Spanish found him there two years later, and burned what was left of the fort.

France had claimed Florida, planted a garrison, and lost it inside a year. But the claim was now on the record in print, and in Madrid it was read as exactly what Coligny intended it to be.

Planning the Second French Expedition to Florida

Nothing happened in Florida in 1563, and that is the point: the year was spent in France, England and Spain deciding what would happen there next. It is the interval in which a failed outpost became a serious international question.

The First War of Religion ended with the Peace of Amboise in March 1563, and the truce gave Coligny room to move. He had lost Charlesfort, but he had not lost the argument. The survivors of the Port Royal garrison — those the English had picked up out of the Atlantic — reached France in the course of the year, and their account, appalling as it was, confirmed the essential claim: the country was habitable, the inhabitants were willing to trade, and the Spanish were nowhere near it. Ribault's own narrative of the 1562 voyage, published in London that same year, said the same thing in print and in English.

Coligny obtained royal authorisation for a second and much larger expedition, and this time designed it as a colony rather than a reconnaissance. Command went to René Goulaine de Laudonnière, a Poitevin gentleman who had sailed as Ribault's second in 1562 and who therefore knew the River of May at first hand — Ribault himself being unavailable, detained in England. Through the second half of 1563 Laudonnière assembled roughly three hundred people at Le Havre. The composition mattered and would prove to be the enterprise's undoing: soldiers, gentlemen adventurers, artisans, a handful of women and children, and Protestant ministers, but very few farmers. It was equipped to hold ground and to trade, not to feed itself.

One recruit deserves particular notice. Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues sailed as the expedition's artist, charged with mapping the coast and recording the country and its people. His drawings — surviving mainly through the engravings Theodor de Bry published in 1591 — are among the earliest European images of the Indigenous peoples of what is now the United States, and for the Timucua they are effectively the only pictorial record that exists. Whatever else the Florida venture failed to accomplish, it produced that.

Spain, meanwhile, was paying close attention. Philip II had protested French activity in Florida through his ambassador in Paris, on the settled principle that the entire Atlantic coast north of Cuba was Spanish by right and that no other Christian prince had any business there. The protests achieved nothing diplomatically, but they had an effect in Madrid: the crown that had formally resolved in 1561 to abandon La Florida began, within two years, to reconsider. Orders went out for a reconnaissance of the Carolina and Georgia coasts to find out exactly what the French had built and whether it was still occupied — the voyage Hernando de Manrique de Rojas would carry out in 1564, when he burned the empty Charlesfort and took off the one Frenchman living among the Indigenous people there.

So 1563 closes with both crowns committed and neither yet in motion: Coligny's colonists loading at Le Havre for a river they had seen once, and Philip II's officers beginning to assemble the case that would end, two years later, with Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and five hundred soldiers marching through the rain toward Fort Caroline.

Fort Caroline Established on the River of May

Laudonnière sailed from Le Havre on April 22, 1564 with three ships and about three hundred people, and raised the River of May on June 22. The Timucua of the river mouth remembered the French from two years before, and the stone column Ribault had planted was still standing — the Saturiwa had wreathed it in flowers and set offerings of maize before it, which the French took as homage to the arms of France and which was more probably a local accommodation of a conspicuous new object.

The Saturiwa chief received the newcomers well, and for a reason of his own. His chiefdom controlled the river mouth but was at war with the Utina, a larger Timucua confederacy upstream. A hundred and fifty armed Europeans with firearms were, from his position, a decisive military asset, and he assumed the alliance he was offering would be reciprocated. That misunderstanding — the French believing they had acquired a food supply, the Saturiwa believing they had acquired an army — governed everything that followed.

Laudonnière chose a site a few miles up the south bank and built there through July and August: a triangular work of earth and timber with a ditch, a central parade and thatched buildings, named Fort Caroline for Charles IX. It was the most substantial European settlement yet attempted in what is now the United States, and it was very badly conceived for the purpose. The colonists were soldiers, gentlemen, artisans and adventurers; almost none of them were farmers, and the expedition had been provisioned on the assumption that food could be bought from the Timucua indefinitely. It could not. Timucua towns held a season's maize, not a surplus for three hundred strangers, and by the winter the French were asking for what their hosts did not have.

The alliance then began to cost the French more than it returned. Drawn into Saturiwa's wars and then into intriguing with his enemies, Laudonnière ended by satisfying neither side and by seizing the Utina chief Outina as a hostage against grain — which produced a little maize, lasting hostility, and one pitched battle.

Discipline collapsed before the food did. In the winter of 1564–65 a faction seized two vessels and went off to the Caribbean to turn pirate on their own account. They took a Spanish prize or two, quarrelled, and some were recaptured and hanged by Laudonnière when they drifted back. The venture had two consequences, both fatal. It consumed vessels and men the colony could not spare, and it announced to the Spanish authorities in Havana, in the most direct possible way, that there was a French base somewhere on the Florida coast preying on Spanish shipping. Philip II now had not merely a territorial grievance but a naval one.

Through it all Jacques Le Moyne worked, mapping the coast and drawing the Timucua at their villages, their granaries, their ceremonies and their wars. Almost none of the originals survive; what does survive, in de Bry's engravings of 1591, is the fullest visual record of a people who would be effectively extinct within a hundred and fifty years.

By the summer of 1565 Fort Caroline had been standing a year, had grown almost nothing, and was preparing to abandon Florida. Relief and destruction were both already at sea.

French: Fall of Fort Caroline and the Matanzas Massacre

The year 1565 brought the dramatic and violent resolution of the Franco-Spanish contest for Florida. Fort Caroline had been established on the St. Johns River — the River of May — on June 22, 1564, when René Goulaine de Laudonnière landed some two hundred settlers and named the place for Charles IX of France. It was the second attempt of a project conceived by Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the French Huguenots, who intended a Protestant refuge that would also serve as a base against the Spanish treasure fleets running the Bahama Channel.

By the summer of 1565 the colony was close to collapse. Its first year had brought hunger, desertion and mutiny; the settlers had come equipped for reconnaissance and plunder rather than farming, and depended heavily on the surrounding Timucua for food. That dependence soured. French deserters turned to raiding, and Laudonnière eventually seized the chief Outina as a hostage against grain deliveries, provoking skirmishes and one pitched battle. On July 20, 1565, the English privateer John Hawkins put in for fresh water and found the colony ready to abandon Florida altogether; he traded them a small ship, four cannon and powder, and carried tobacco back to England for his trouble.

Relief arrived at almost the same moment as catastrophe. On August 28, 1565, Jean Ribault reached Fort Caroline with seven ships, roughly a thousand fresh colonists and soldiers, and substantial supplies. Within days a Spanish fleet under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés appeared off the coast. Ribault put to sea to attack it and was scattered by a hurricane far to the south.

Menéndez seized the opening. Leaving his new base at San Augustín, he marched about five hundred soldiers overland for four days through torrential rain and struck at dawn on September 20, 1565. The assault was swift and overwhelming. Roughly 132 Frenchmen were killed in the fort; some fifty women and children were taken prisoner and later shipped to Havana; a handful of survivors including Laudonnière reached waiting ships and escaped to France. Menéndez renamed the captured post San Mateo.

Ribault and his shipwrecked men, several hundred Huguenots, came ashore on the beaches south of St. Augustine. Menéndez took them in two groups and executed nearly all who would not renounce their faith — approximately 111 men on September 29, 1565, and approximately 134 more on October 12, at an inlet thereafter called Matanzas, the Spanish word for slaughters. Published figures vary between roughly 150 and 350; the two-incident total of about 245 is the best-supported count, and the older figure of 350 appears to be an overestimate. Only a few craftsmen useful to the colony, and those who professed Catholicism, were spared. The killings ended French colonial ambitions in Florida for the remainder of the sixteenth century.

Spanish: St. Augustine Founded — First Permanent European Settlement in the U.S.

Menéndez had come to Florida under an asiento signed by Philip II on March 20, 1565, which named him adelantado of Florida and granted him wide trading privileges, the power to distribute land, and licences to sell five hundred slaves. In return he undertook to plant a permanent settlement, secure the treasure route, and expel any non-Spanish intruders — a charge that had acquired urgency once Madrid learned of the Huguenot fort on the St. Johns. He sailed from Cádiz on July 28, 1565, with his 600-ton flagship San Pelayo and a company of more than a thousand sailors, soldiers and settlers.

The fleet sighted land on August 28 — the feast day of St. Augustine — and on September 8, eight days before the assault on Fort Caroline, Menéndez came ashore at a Timucua village called Seloy and formally took possession. He conducted a ceremony of possession, Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales celebrated Mass, and the local Seloy chief offered his own dwelling as the Spanish headquarters. Mission Nombre de Dios was established at the landing place and is generally considered the first mission in what is now the continental United States. The settlement took the saint's name: San Augustín, the oldest continuously inhabited European-established town in the continental United States.

Menéndez's twin achievement in the autumn of 1565 — founding St. Augustine and destroying Fort Caroline — secured Spanish dominance in the Southeast for nearly two centuries. He spent the following months planting small garrisons and missions along both Florida coasts, opening contact with the Calusa of the southwest, and beginning the long and difficult work of alliance-building among the peninsula's many indigenous peoples. Philip II named him Captain General of the Fleet of the Indies and governor of Cuba as well as adelantado of Florida.