Massacre at Matanzas Inlet

Menéndez did not know that the French had already arrived in the area, and upon discovering the existence of Fort Caroline, he aggressively moved to expel those whom he considered heretics, pirates, and invaders.

Following along the shore in the direction of Fort Caroline, the easiest and most natural course to pursue, the survivors had soon found their further advance barred by the inlet, and by the lagoon or "river" to the west of them.

Menéndez replied that he would willingly have given them one had they been Catholics, and had he any vessels left; but that his own ships had sailed with artillery for Fort San Mateo and with the captured women and children for Santo Domingo, and a third was retained to carry dispatches to Spain.

The gentlemen carried back to their comrades the terms he had proposed, and two hours later Ribault's lieutenant returned and offered to surrender their arms and to give him five thousand ducats if he would spare their lives.

In companies of ten the Frenchmen were conducted to him behind the sand dune and out of sight of their companions, and to each party he addressed the same request: "Gentlemen, I have but a few soldiers with me, and you are many, and it would be an easy matter for you to overpower us and avenge yourselves upon us for your people which we killed in the fort; for this reason it is necessary that you should march to my camp four leagues from here with your hands tied behind your backs.

It was Saturday, 29 September, the feast of St. Michael; the sun had already set when the Frenchmen reached the mark drawn in the sand near the banks of the lagoon, and the orders of the Spanish admiral were executed.

Within an hour of Menéndez receiving this alarming report some Indians brought word that Jean Ribault with two hundred men was in the neighborhood of the place where the two French ships had been wrecked.

Le Challeux wrote that they had saved a small boat from the wreck; this they caulked with their shirts, and thirteen of the company had set out for Fort Caroline in search of assistance, and had not returned.

As Ribault and his companions made their way northward in the direction of the fort, they eventually found themselves in the same predicament as the previous party, cut off by Matanzas Inlet and river from the mainland, and unable to cross.

On receipt of the news Menéndez repeated the tactics of his previous exploit, and sent a party of soldiers by land, following them that same day in two boats with additional troops, one hundred and fifty in all.

He reached his destination on the shore of the Matanzas River at night, and the following morning, 11 October, discovered the French across the water where they had constructed a raft with which to attempt a crossing.

"[7] Then he offered Ribault the identical terms which he had extended to the first party and led the French officer to where, a few rods beyond, lay the dead bodies of the shipwrecked and defenseless men he had massacred twelve days before.

Then Ribault, pointing to the bodies of his comrades, which were visible from where he stood, said that they might have been tricked into the belief that Fort Caroline was taken, referring to a story he had heard from a barber who had survived the first massacre by feigning death when he was struck down, and had then escaped.

"[14] That same night Menéndez returned to St. Augustine; and when the event became known, there were some in that isolated garrison, living in constant apprehension of a counterattack by the French], who considered him cruel, an opinion which his brother-in-law, Merás, who helped to kill Ribault, did not hesitate to record.

Others among the settlers thought that he had acted as a good captain, because, with their small store of provisions, they considered that there would have been an imminent danger of their perishing by hunger had their numbers been increased by the Frenchmen, even had they been Catholics.

The position subsequently taken by the Spanish Government in its relations with France to justify the massacre turned on the large number of the French and the fewness of the Spaniards; the scarcity of provisions, and the absence of ships with which to transport them as prisoners.

It is probable that Menéndez clearly perceived the risk he would run in granting the Frenchmen their lives and in retaining so large a body of prisoners in the midst of his colonists: it would be a severe strain upon his supply of provisions and seriously hamper the dividing up of his troops into small garrisons for the forts which he contemplated erecting at different points along the coast.

Furthermore, the massacre should be considered the latest in an escalating cycle of both revenge killings and total war tactics between French and Spanish forces in both Europe and the New World.

This had resulted ever since in increasingly violent acts of piracy against the Spanish treasure fleets and settlements in both the Canary Islands and throughout the New World by Catholic and Huguenot French corsairs based at La Rochelle.

Furthermore, Ribault's colony at Fort Caroline was, according to historian Angus Konstam, "clearly designed to provide a base for Huguenot attacks against Spanish ports and shipping.

"[17][18] Even Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who had bankrolled the founding of Fort Caroline, admitted that the colony, "had no tillers of the soil, only adventurous gentlemen, reckless soldiers, discontented tradesmen, all keen for novelty and heated by dreams of wealth."

Also according to Angus Konstam, the primary legacy of the massacre at Matanzas Inlet was that, "Organized French resistance to Spain in the New World was broken, and it was left to the English sea rovers to disrupt the commerce of the Spanish Main.

"[20] In his official utterances in defense of the massacre, however, King Philip II laid far more stress on the theological contamination which Calvinism might have brought to the Indigenous population of La Florida than upon the repeated invasions and pirate attacks against his subjects and dominions.

On his return to St. Augustine, Menéndez wrote to the King a somewhat cursory account of the preceding events and summarized the results in the following language: The other people with Ribault, some seventy or eighty in all, took to the forest, refusing to surrender unless I grant them their lives.