F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Dan Spalinger
“I do this not unto French men but as unto Lutherans,” were the words hung by the Spanish beneath their fellow Europeans swinging in the Florida sun.
These and the surrounding corpses belonged to 250-odd French under the flag of naval commander and explorer Jean Ribeault. Overseeing that macabre scene, watching scores of bodies draining blood through the talcum sand, was conquistador Pedro Menendez de Aviles, a man no less clinical in his execution of orders of the Crown than his compatriots in Cortes or Pizarro. Aviles’ own letters back to King Phillip II of Spain recounted how he lured Ribeault’s hurricane-shipwrecked crews with promises of safe conduct and fair treatment, convincing them that tying their hands was done for his safety. Trussed up, Aviles asked the unknowing refugees if they were Catholic or Lutheran. All but a handful answered that they were “of the new religion.”
Martin Luther’s Papal excoriating “95 Theses,” detailing his view of Catholic excesses and hypocrisy, kickstarted the fracturing of Christendom less than 50 years earlier. Europe convulsed through civil war and internecine religious slaughter since. Aviles was merely bringing to this new world, what the old had already wrought, when he recalled that outside a handful of child drum and fife players and four among the bedraggled rabble claiming the Catholic faith, “all others were put to the knife.”
This was the end of Fort Caroline, the earliest sustained European attempt to establish a colony on mainland North America. Fifty-six years before the Pilgrims at Plymouth, 43 years before Jamestown, 21 years before the Lost Colony on Roanoke, and a full year before St. Augustine. Like others, it was founded by religious outcasts, here Huguenots of France looking for freedom out from under the ongoing Protestant purge and bloody conflict there. Fort Caroline was to be a lifeboat.
Sitting in France, as drabs of escapees from the massacre arrived back on the continent with tales of atrocity spreading across the land, was one ex-soldier turned private citizen, Dominique de Gourgues. With a burning hatred born having men under his command cut to pieces and himself captured and impressed into slavery aboard a Turkish galley due to Spanish handiwork, his eventual redemption allowed de Gourgues to bide his time, letting anger fester waiting for a spark. News of Fort Caroline was just that.
A French Catholic of deep conviction, de Gourgues detested the lack of action taken by feckless Charles IX. Maintaining cordial relationships between the kingdoms and between family relations (Charles IX’s mother, Catherine de Medici, was the mother-in-law of then King Phillip II of Spain) appeared more important than the honor of France. Having fought, bled, and been enslaved for his beloved country, Fort Caroline was an affront that could not go unavenged.
Liquidating his persona fortune and making the rounds to borrow against his name and reputation, de Gourgues plied lenders with tales of riches he intended to return with from the burgeoning West African slave trade. It was a story he held to with three mismatched ships and over 200 soldiers and sailors sallying forth believing they were destined for raids on Benin. Once off the western Sahara coast, de Gourgues put his true plan into action. Turning his sails to the New World, his little armada arrived off Cuba and paused for fresh water and resupply. There he finally revealed his true intent and appealed to his crew’s sense of honor and patriotism to take revenge their betters would not. Thousands of miles from home with no prospects for compensation or rescue, the crew agreed, choosing to face arrest and execution upon their return rather than let the disgrace to the homeland stand.
Sailing North and bypassing a reinforced St. Augustine, de Gourgues landed 15 miles from the multiple Spanish forts at the former site of Fort Caroline, now renamed San Mateo. Since taking the French site, the Spanish had not exactly made themselves welcome among the native population, who, under the command of local chiefs readily reinforced the French privateers, multiplying the count of fighting French. Awaiting favorable tides, fulfilling a particularly unappealing “black drink” ceremony (ritualized high caffeine swill made from local Yaupon Holly) and then attacking each fort in turn, the French and their native allies cut their feet on oyster beds coming ashore, faced down the entrenched, elevated, and canon bearing positions one by one, letting loose the dogs of war.
Hand-to-hand combat was the norm due to slow reloading times of smoothbore matchlock arquebuses used by both sides, and many a Spaniard was found impaled on a native spear or French pike. Gradually turning captured armament against the outnumbered but better positioned Iberians, a full venting of de Gourgues’ wrath found release. At one point, a large contingent of Spanish attempted flight into the Florida forests where a contingent of the local armed populace awaited. Turning back, the Spanish soldiers sought safety in surrender to their civilized brethren. No such comfort awaited. There would be no quarter given this day.
Of the 250 or so Spaniards at San Mateo, roughly 190 fell to the sword, pike, or arquebus. De Gourgues further satiated his native allies by having them put torch to the fortifications and firing the Spanish armory, resulting in a cataclysmic explosion. He was not done yet.
Fifteen of the conquistadors initially spared (the rest already run through) received special treatment. Paraded to the same tree from which de Aviles had hung the shipwrecked French Huguenots near three years earlier, it was now the remaining Spanish who were left swinging high over the warm Atlantic, this time with a different inscription. Seared with a hot iron into a pine board hung beneath the crooked necks read, in bloody response, “I do this not as to Spaniards, but as to traitors, robbers, and murderers.”
De Gourgues was no explorer, no religious dissident seeking new land, no commercial schemer. His country’s honor and pride restored through righteous vengeance, he turned his ships and men around and sailed back to France. Hailed as a hero among the Protestant community, he was sheltered there despite a Spanish bounty on his head and became welcome within Elizabethan England (enemy of my enemy after all). Eventually his good name was restored by Charles IX (less enthralled with keeping good relations with Spain than his mother) and passed on in Tours, France, far from battlefields, kingly courts, or colonies in 1593.
De Gourgues did himself what his crown and country cowered to contemplate and what no private European has done before or since. Here was a man unafraid to hoist the black flag, slit throats, and take back that loss to which lesser men had acquiesced.
The post Reprisal in Blood appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
“I do this not unto French men but as unto Lutherans,” were the words hung by the Spanish beneath their fellow Europeans swinging in the Florida sun.
These and the surrounding corpses belonged to 250-odd French under the flag of naval commander and explorer Jean Ribeault. Overseeing that macabre scene, watching scores of bodies draining blood through the talcum sand, was conquistador Pedro Menendez de Aviles, a man no less clinical in his execution of orders of the Crown than his compatriots in Cortes or Pizarro. Aviles’ own letters back to King Phillip II of Spain recounted how he lured Ribeault’s hurricane-shipwrecked crews with promises of safe conduct and fair treatment, convincing them that tying their hands was done for his safety. Trussed up, Aviles asked the unknowing refugees if they were Catholic or Lutheran. All but a handful answered that they were “of the new religion.”
Martin Luther’s Papal excoriating “95 Theses,” detailing his view of Catholic excesses and hypocrisy, kickstarted the fracturing of Christendom less than 50 years earlier. Europe convulsed through civil war and internecine religious slaughter since. Aviles was merely bringing to this new world, what the old had already wrought, when he recalled that outside a handful of child drum and fife players and four among the bedraggled rabble claiming the Catholic faith, “all others were put to the knife.”
This was the end of Fort Caroline, the earliest sustained European attempt to establish a colony on mainland North America. Fifty-six years before the Pilgrims at Plymouth, 43 years before Jamestown, 21 years before the Lost Colony on Roanoke, and a full year before St. Augustine. Like others, it was founded by religious outcasts, here Huguenots of France looking for freedom out from under the ongoing Protestant purge and bloody conflict there. Fort Caroline was to be a lifeboat.
Lighting the Fire
Sitting in France, as drabs of escapees from the massacre arrived back on the continent with tales of atrocity spreading across the land, was one ex-soldier turned private citizen, Dominique de Gourgues. With a burning hatred born having men under his command cut to pieces and himself captured and impressed into slavery aboard a Turkish galley due to Spanish handiwork, his eventual redemption allowed de Gourgues to bide his time, letting anger fester waiting for a spark. News of Fort Caroline was just that.
A French Catholic of deep conviction, de Gourgues detested the lack of action taken by feckless Charles IX. Maintaining cordial relationships between the kingdoms and between family relations (Charles IX’s mother, Catherine de Medici, was the mother-in-law of then King Phillip II of Spain) appeared more important than the honor of France. Having fought, bled, and been enslaved for his beloved country, Fort Caroline was an affront that could not go unavenged.
Liquidating his persona fortune and making the rounds to borrow against his name and reputation, de Gourgues plied lenders with tales of riches he intended to return with from the burgeoning West African slave trade. It was a story he held to with three mismatched ships and over 200 soldiers and sailors sallying forth believing they were destined for raids on Benin. Once off the western Sahara coast, de Gourgues put his true plan into action. Turning his sails to the New World, his little armada arrived off Cuba and paused for fresh water and resupply. There he finally revealed his true intent and appealed to his crew’s sense of honor and patriotism to take revenge their betters would not. Thousands of miles from home with no prospects for compensation or rescue, the crew agreed, choosing to face arrest and execution upon their return rather than let the disgrace to the homeland stand.
Sailing North and bypassing a reinforced St. Augustine, de Gourgues landed 15 miles from the multiple Spanish forts at the former site of Fort Caroline, now renamed San Mateo. Since taking the French site, the Spanish had not exactly made themselves welcome among the native population, who, under the command of local chiefs readily reinforced the French privateers, multiplying the count of fighting French. Awaiting favorable tides, fulfilling a particularly unappealing “black drink” ceremony (ritualized high caffeine swill made from local Yaupon Holly) and then attacking each fort in turn, the French and their native allies cut their feet on oyster beds coming ashore, faced down the entrenched, elevated, and canon bearing positions one by one, letting loose the dogs of war.
A Reprisal in Blood
Hand-to-hand combat was the norm due to slow reloading times of smoothbore matchlock arquebuses used by both sides, and many a Spaniard was found impaled on a native spear or French pike. Gradually turning captured armament against the outnumbered but better positioned Iberians, a full venting of de Gourgues’ wrath found release. At one point, a large contingent of Spanish attempted flight into the Florida forests where a contingent of the local armed populace awaited. Turning back, the Spanish soldiers sought safety in surrender to their civilized brethren. No such comfort awaited. There would be no quarter given this day.
Of the 250 or so Spaniards at San Mateo, roughly 190 fell to the sword, pike, or arquebus. De Gourgues further satiated his native allies by having them put torch to the fortifications and firing the Spanish armory, resulting in a cataclysmic explosion. He was not done yet.
Fifteen of the conquistadors initially spared (the rest already run through) received special treatment. Paraded to the same tree from which de Aviles had hung the shipwrecked French Huguenots near three years earlier, it was now the remaining Spanish who were left swinging high over the warm Atlantic, this time with a different inscription. Seared with a hot iron into a pine board hung beneath the crooked necks read, in bloody response, “I do this not as to Spaniards, but as to traitors, robbers, and murderers.”
De Gourgues was no explorer, no religious dissident seeking new land, no commercial schemer. His country’s honor and pride restored through righteous vengeance, he turned his ships and men around and sailed back to France. Hailed as a hero among the Protestant community, he was sheltered there despite a Spanish bounty on his head and became welcome within Elizabethan England (enemy of my enemy after all). Eventually his good name was restored by Charles IX (less enthralled with keeping good relations with Spain than his mother) and passed on in Tours, France, far from battlefields, kingly courts, or colonies in 1593.
De Gourgues did himself what his crown and country cowered to contemplate and what no private European has done before or since. Here was a man unafraid to hoist the black flag, slit throats, and take back that loss to which lesser men had acquiesced.
The post Reprisal in Blood appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
