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 murdered. The others, after the severest sufferings, found their way to the seaside, and were received on board two small French vessels which had remained in the harbor. The Spaniards, angry that any should have escaped, insulted the corpses of the dead with wanton barbarity.

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 1565. the site for a church selected, on ground still smoking with the blood of a peaceful colony.

Sept. 21.

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 were tied behind them; and in this way they were marched towards St. Augustine, like sheep to the slaughter-house. When they approached the fort, a signal was given; and, amidst the sound of trumpets and drums, the Spaniards fell upon the unhappy men, who could offer no resistance. A few Catholics were spared; some mechanics were reserved as slaves; the rest were massacred, "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.

1566.

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 heard of his outrage with apathy, and 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. History has been more faithful, and has assisted humanity by giving to the crime of Melendez an infamous notoriety. The first town in the United States sprung from the unrelenting bigotry of the Spanish king. We admire the rapid growth of our larger cities; the sudden transformation of portions of the wilderness into blooming states. St. Augustine presents a stronger contrast, in its transition from the bigoted policy of Philip II. to the American principle of religious liberty.

The Huguenots and the French nation did not share 1567. 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, Aug 22. to destroy and revenge. He surprised two forts near the mouth of the St. Matheo; 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,

1568.

May.

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 every thing 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 whole shore to the Cape of Florida, and beyond it, all was hers. The Gulf of Mexico lay embosomed within her territories.

CHAPTER III.

ENGLAND TAKES POSSESSION OF THE UNITED STATES.

1569 to

1575.

THE attempts of the French to colonize Florida, though unprotected and unsuccessful, were not without an important influence on succeeding events. About the time of the return of De Gourgues, Walter Raleigh, a young Englishman, had abruptly left the university of Oxford, to engage in the civil contests between the Huguenots and the Catholics in France, and with the Prince of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV., was learning the art of war under the veteran Coligny. The Protestant party was, at that time, strongly excited with indignation at the massacre which De Gourgues had avenged; and Raleigh could not but gather, from his associates and his commander, intelligence respecting Florida and the navigation to those regions. Some of the miserable men who escaped from the first expedition had been conducted to Elizabeth, and had kindled in the public mind in England a desire for the possession of the southern coast of our republic; the reports of Hawkins, who had been the benefactor of the French on the river May, increased the national interest; and De Morgues, the painter, who had sketched in Florida the most remarkable appearances of nature, ultimately found the opportunity of finishing his designs, through the munificence of Raleigh.

The expeditions of the Cabots, though they had revealed a continent of easy access, in a temperate zone, had failed to discover a passage to the Indies; and their fame was dimmed by that of Vasco da Gama, whose achievement made Lisbon the emporium of Europe. Thorne and Eliot, of Bristol, visited Newfoundland probably in 1502; in that year, savages in their wild attire were exhibited to the king; but North America as yet invited no colony, for it

promised no sudden wealth, while the Indies more and more inflamed commercial cupidity. In March, 1501, Henry VII. granted an exclusive privilege of trade to a company composed half of Englishmen, half of Portuguese, with leave to sail towards any point in the compass, and the incidental right to inhabit the regions which should be found; there is, however, no proof that a voyage was made under the authority of this commission. In December of the following year, a new grant in part to the same patentees promised a forty years' monopoly of trade, an equally wide scope for adventure, and larger favor to the alien associates; but even these great privileges seem not to have been followed by an expedition. The only connection which as yet existed between England and the New World was with Newfoundland and its fisheries.

The idea of planting agricultural colonies in the temperate regions of America was slowly developed, and could gain vigor only from a long succession of efforts and a better knowledge of the structure of the globe. The last voyage of Columbus still had for its purpose a western passage to India; with which he, to his dying hour, believed that the lands of his discovery were connected. 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 fatherin-law the services of Sebastian Cabot. Once, perhaps in 1517, the young king promoted a voyage of discovery, but it "tooke no full effect." To avoid interference with Spain, Robert Thorne, of Bristol, who had long resided in Seville, proposed voyages to the east by way of the north; believ