refusing to await the arrival of the rest of his squadron, he sailed for Florida. It had been his design to explore the coast; to select a favorable site for a settlement; and, after constructing fortifications, to attack the French. On the twenty-eighth of August, the day which the customs of Rome have consecrated to the memory of one of the most eloquent sons of Africa, and one of the most venerated of the fathers of the church, he came in sight of Florida. For four days he sailed along the coast, uncertain where the French were established; on the fifth day he landed, and gathered from the Indians accounts of the Huguenots. At the same time he discovered a fine haven and beautiful river; and, remembering the saint on whose day he neared the coast, he gave to the harbor and to the stream the name of St. Augustine. Sailing then to the north, he espied a portion of the French fleet, and observed the road where they were anchored. The French demanded his name and objects. "I am Melendez of Spain," replied he; "sent with strict orders from my king to gibbet and behead all the Protestants in these regions. The Frenchman who is a Catholic I will spare; every heretic shall die." The French fleet, unprepared for action, cut its cables; the Spaniards, for some time, continued an ineffectual chase.

At the hour of vespers, on the evening preceding the anniversary of the nativity of Mary, the Spaniards returned to the harbor of St. Augustine. At noonday of the festivalthat is, on the eighth of September-the governor went on shore to take possession of the continent in the name of his king. Philip II. was proclaimed monarch of all North America. The mass of Our Lady was performed, and the foundation of St. Augustine immediately laid. It is, by more than forty years, the oldest town in the union, east of the Mississippi.

Among the French it was debated whether they should improve their fortifications and await the approach of the Spaniards, or proceed to sea and attack their enemy. Against the advice of his officers, Ribault resolved upon the latter course. Hardly had he left the harbor for the open sea before there arose a fearful storm, which continued till October, and

wrecked every ship of the French fleet on the Florida coast. The vessels were dashed against the rocks about fifty leagues south of Fort Carolina; most of the men escaped with their lives.

The Spanish ships suffered, but not so severely; and the troops at St. Augustine were entirely safe. They knew that the French settlement was left in a defenceless state. Melendez led his men through the low land that divides the St. Augustine from the St. John's, and with a furious onset surprised the weak garrison, who had looked only toward the sea for the approach of danger. After a short contest, the Spaniards, on the twenty-first, became masters of the fort, and soldiers, women, children, the aged, the sick, were alike massacred. The Spanish account asserts that Melendez ordered women and young children to be spared; yet not till after the havoc had long been raging.

Nearly two hundred persons were killed. A few escaped into the woods, among them Laudonnière, Challus, and Le Moyne, who have related the horrors of the scene. But whither should they fly? Death met them in the woods; and the heavens, the earth, the sea, and men, all seemed conspired against them. Should they surrender, appealing to the sympathy of their conquerors? "Let us," said Challus, "trust in the mercy of God rather than of these men." A few gave themselves up, and were immediately put to death. The others, after the severest sufferings, found their way to the sea-side, and were received on board two small French vessels which had remained in the harbor.

The victory had been gained on the festival of St. Matthew; and hence the Spanish name of the river May. After the carnage, mass was said; a cross raised; and the site for a church selected, on ground still smoking with the blood of a peaceful colony.

The shipwrecked men were, in their turn, soon discovered. Melendez invited them to rely on his compassion; in a state of helpless weakness, wasted by their fatigues at sea, half famished, destitute of water and of food, they capitulated, and in successive divisions were ferried across the intervening river. As the captives stepped upon the opposite bank their hands

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were tied behind them; and in this way they were marched toward St. Augustine, like sheep to the slaughter-house. When they approached the fort, a signal was given; and, amid the sound of trumpets and drums, the Spaniards, sparing a few Catholics and reserving some mechanics as slaves, massacred the rest, "not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans." The whole number of victims here and at the fort is said, by the French, to have been about nine hundred; the Spanish accounts diminish the number of the slain, but not the atrocity of the deed.

In 1566 Melendez despatched a vessel from his squadron, with thirty soldiers and two Dominicans, to settle the lands on the Chesapeake bay, then known as St. Mary's, and convert its inhabitants; but, disheartened by contrary winds and the certain perils of the proposed colonization, they turned about before coming near the bay, and sailed for Seville, spreading the worst accounts of a country which none of them had seen.

Melendez returned to Spain, impoverished, but triumphant. The French government made not even a remonstrance on the ruin of a colony which, if it had been protected, would have given to France an empire in the south, before England had planted a single spot on the new continent.

The Huguenots and the French nation did not share the indifference of the court. Dominic de Gourgues-a bold soldier of Gascony, whose life had been a series of adventures, now employed in the army against Spain, now a prisoner and a galley-slave among the Spaniards, taken by the Turks with the vessel in which he rowed, and redeemed by the commander of the knights of Malta-burned with a desire to avenge his own wrongs and the honor of his country. The sale of his property and the contributions of his friends furnished the means of equipping three ships, in which, with one hundred and fifty men, he, on the twenty-second of August, 1567, embarked for Florida, to destroy and revenge. He surprised two forts near the mouth of the St. Matthew; and, as terror magnified the number of his followers, the consternation of the Spaniards enabled him to gain possession of the larger establishment, near the spot which the French colony had occupied. Too weak to maintain his position, he, in May,

1568, hastily weighed anchor for Europe, having first hanged his prisoners upon the trees, and placed over them the inscription: "I do not this as unto Spaniards or mariners, but as unto traitors, robbers, and murderers." The natives, who had been ill-treated both by the Spaniards and the French, enjoyed the consolation of seeing their enemies butcher one another.

The attack of the fiery Gascon was but a passing storm. France disavowed the expedition, and relinquished all pretension to Florida. Spain grasped at it as a portion of her dominions; and, if discovery could confer a right, her claim was founded in justice. In 1573, Pedro Melendez Marquez, nephew to the adelantado, Melendez de Aviles, pursued the explorations begun by his relative. Having traced the coast line from the southern cape of Florida, he sailed into the Chesapeake bay, estimated the distance between its headlands, took soundings of the water in its channel, and observed its many harbors and deep rivers, navigable for ships. His voyage may have extended a few miles north of the bay. The territory which he saw was held by Spain to be a part of her dominions, but was left by her in abeyance. Cuba remained the centre of her West Indian possessions, and everything around it was included within her empire. Her undisputed sovereignty was asserted not only over the archipelagoes within the tropics, but over the continent round the inner seas. From the remotest south-eastern cape of the Caribbean, along the continuous shore to the cape and Atlantic coast of Florida, all was hers. The Gulf of Mexico lay embosomed within her territories.

CHAPTER V.

THE ENGLISH ATTEMPT COLONIZATION.

ROBERT THORNE and Eliot, of Bristol, visited Newfoundland probably in 1502; in that year savages in their wild attire were exhibited to the king; but as yet the only intercourse between England and the New World was with its fisheries. In the conception of Europe the new continent was very slowly disengaged from the easternmost lands of Asia, and its colonization was not earnestly attempted till its separate existence was ascertained.

Besides, Henry VII., as a Catholic, could not wholly disregard the bull of the pope, which gave to Spain a paramount title to the North American world; and as a prince he sought a counterpoise to France in an intimate Spanish alliance, which he hoped to confirm by the successive marriage of one of his sons after the other to Catharine of Aragon, youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Henry VIII., on his accession, surrendered to his father-inlaw the services of Sebastian Cabot. To avoid interference with Spain, Thorne, who had long resided in Seville, proposed voyages to the east by way of the north; believing that there would be found an open sea near the pole, over which, during the arctic continuous day, Englishmen might reach the Indies.

In 1527 an expedition, favored by the king and Wolsey, sailed from Plymouth for the discovery of the north-west passage. But the larger ship was lost in July among icebergs, in a great storm; in August, accounts of the disaster were forwarded to the king and to the cardinal from the haven of St. John, in Newfoundland.