Fort Caroline was an attempted French colonial settlement in Florida, located on the banks of the St. Johns River in present-day Duval County.

It was established under the leadership of René Goulaine de Laudonnière on 22 June 1564, following King Charles IX's enlisting of Jean Ribault and his Huguenot settlers to stake a claim in French Florida ahead of Spain.

[7] Meanwhile, René Goulaine de Laudonnière, who had been Ribault's second-in-command on the 1562 expedition, led a contingent of around 200 new settlers back to Florida, where they founded Fort Caroline (or Fort de la Caroline) on 22 June, 1564; the site was on a small plain formed by the western slope of the high steep bank later called St. Johns Bluff.

For just over a year, this settlement was beset by hunger and desertion, and attracted the attention of Spanish authorities who considered it a challenge to their control over the area.

French soldiers also traveled across Timucuan territory, encountering the Yustaga people and unsuccessfully seeking gold and silver mines.

[9] In spring 1565, Outina rebuffed a third request for food and was taken hostage by the French, provoking open confrontation with the Timucua that included "two tense weeks of skirmishes and one all-out battle.

[11] On 20 July, 1565, the English adventurer John Hawkins arrived at the fort with his fleet looking for fresh water; there he exchanged his smallest ship for four cannons and a supply of powder and shot.

[15] In late August, Ribault, who had been released from English custody in June 1565 and sent by Coligny back to Florida, arrived at Fort Caroline with a large fleet and hundreds of soldiers and settlers, taking command of the colony.

However, the recently appointed Spanish Governor of Florida, Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, had simultaneously been dispatched from Spain with orders to remove the French outpost, and arrived within days of Ribault's landing.

This massacre ended France's attempts at colonization of the southeastern Atlantic coast of North America until 1577–1578 when Nicholas Strozzi and his crew built a fort after their ship, Le Prince, was wrecked at Port Royal Sound.

When the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez, who had black crew members in his fleet, founded St. Augustine in 1565, he wrote that his settlers had been preceded by free Africans in the French settlement at Fort Caroline.

[24][25] Today, the second replica, a near full-scale "interpretive model" of the original Fort de la Caroline, also constructed and maintained by the National Park Service, illustrates the modest defenses upon which the 16th-century French colonists depended.