ships were too swift for him. So at dawn he returned to the river's mouth. But, seeing 'the three other French vessels within the bar and soldiers massed on the bank, he withdrew and sailed back to St. Augustine. Here he began the fortification of a large Indian house, dug a trench about it, and bulwarked it with logs and earth. This converted Indian dwelling was the beginning of the settlement of St. Augustine. The work finished and the last of the colonists and supplies landed, Menéndez took formal possession. From a distance the French ships watched the landing of the Spanish troops; then made off to St. John's River.

On arrival at Fort Caroline Ribaut gathered his vessels together-except his son's, which had not returned and, taking aboard four hundred soldiers, set out again, to attack St. Augustine. He left only two hundred and forty men at Fort Caroline; and many of them were ill. His plans were made against the advice of Laudonnière, left in command of the fort, who urged the danger of his situation should contrary winds drive Ribaut's ships out to sea and the Spaniards make an attack by land. These forebodings were prophetic. A terrible wind arose which blew for days. And Menéndez, guided by Indians and a French

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prisoner he had picked up in the islands, marched overland upon Fort Caroline.

On the 20th of September just before daybreak Menéndez reached the fort. Most of the men inside were asleep. The trumpeter on the bastion had barely sounded the alarm before the Spaniards were inside the walls. The French had no time to don clothes or armor. In their shirts or naked they seized their swords and rushed out into the gray light of the court. Within an hour one hundred and thirty-two French had been killed, and half a dozen men and fifty women and children captured. The remaining French, many of them wounded, escaped to the woods; among them was Laudonnière. It was not a fight but a massacre. Even the very sick were dragged out and slain. One woman who escaped had a dagger wound in her breast; though Menéndez had given orders to spare the women and children, fearing "that our Lord would punish me, if I acted towards them with cruelty."

Twenty-six French, including Laudonnière, were rescued by the ships of Jacques Ribaut and ultimately reached France. Some twenty more, too badly hurt to travel fast, were discovered by the men sent out by Menéndez to beat the brush

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thoroughly for fugitives and run through with swords. One lone man, a belated Cabeza de Vaca, made his way across the country from tribe to tribe and came out at Pánuco. After a brief rest at the post, which he rechristened Fort San Mateo, Menéndez marched swiftly back to St. Augustine. He learned presently that one hundred and forty men from two French ships wrecked by the storm were nearby. They had lost two hundred of their comrades, drowned, killed, or captured by savages; they themselves were destitute. Menéndez made a quick march to the spot. When the castaways pleaded that their lives be spared until the arrival of a French ship to take them home, Menéndez answered that he was "waging a war of fire and blood against all who came to settle these parts and plant in them their evil Lutheran sect. . . . For this reason I would not grant them a safe passage, but would sooner follow them by sea and land until I had taken their lives."

An offer of five thousand ducats for their lives met with the ambiguous reply that mercy would be shown for its own sake and not for price. So read the Spanish reports of this event. French reports state that Menéndez, to induce the one * Ruidiaz, La Florida, vol. II, p. 89.

hundred and forty men to surrender themselves, their arms, and ammunition without a blow, gave his oath to spare their lives and to send them to France. However that may be, they surrendered. The chaplain discovered ten Catholics among them and these were set apart. The remaining one hundred and thirty were given food and drink and were then told that — as a precaution because of their numbers they must consent to have their hands bound behind them on the march to St. Augustine. Menéndez ordered a meal prepared for the prisoners, gave his final instructions regarding them to the officers in charge, and went on ahead. A gunshot's distance off, beyond a hummock, he paused long enough to draw a line with his spear in the white sand of the flat. Then he went on. The heavy dusk from the sea was massing swiftly behind the Frenchmen, and the last faint flush of the afterglow was fading from the western sky, when they came up abreast of the spearline in the sand. There the Spaniards fell upon them, slew, and decapitated them. The stain on the ground where this bloody scene was enacted is ineradicable, and after three and a half centuries the place is still known as Las Matanzas (The Massacre).

Shortly after Menéndez had reached St. Augustine, Indians informed him that Jean Ribaut and two hundred men were at Matanzas, having been cut off there, as the other Frenchmen had been, by the inlet, as they were attempting to reach Fort Caroline by land. Menéndez set out immediately. Once more were the same ceremonies repeated; and Ribaut and his two hundred men were induced to surrender. When, with their hands bound, they were halted at the spear-line, now more clearly indicated by the heap of corpses along it, they were asked: "Are you Catholics or Lutherans, and are there any who wish to confess?" Seventeen Catholics were found and set aside. But Ribaut, the staunch Huguenot mariner of Dieppe, had been too long familiar with the menace of death to recant because a dagger was poised over his entrails. He answered for himself and the rest, saying that a score of years of life were a small matter, for "from earth we came and unto earth we return." Then he recited passages from Psalm cxxxii. One of Menéndez's captains thrust his dagger into Ribaut's bowels, and Merás, the adelantado's brother-in-law, drove his pike through his breast; then they hacked off his head.

"I put Jean Ribaut and all the rest of them to the