III. tack the Spaniards. But his vessels, overtaken by one CHAPTER of those violent storms common on the coast at that season of the year, were driven to the southward and cast 1564. on shore. The French, in their fort on the River of May, expected to be attacked by sea. But Menendez marched by land from St. Augustine, and took them entirely by surprise. A bloody massacre ensued, in which, according to the French account, not the men only, but even women and children, were slain. Laudonière and a few others escaped to the woods, and succeeded in getting on board two small vessels which Ribault had left. behind in the river. It was not as Frenchmen, but as heretics, that the colonists had been massacred; so, according to the French accounts, Menendez declared, and to commemorate his pious zeal, as soon as the carnage was over, a cross was erected, mass was said, and on that same bloody spot the site for a Christian church was marked out, the first within the limits of the United States. Such of the French as had escaped from the shipwrecked vessels were presently lured into the hands of the Spaniards, and put to death in a second massacre. Ribault was among the number; Laudonière and his few companions succeeded in escaping to France. The French court, itself Catholic, and lately at open war with the Huguenots, paid no attention to a supplicatory letter addressed to it by the widows and orphans of the slain. But they found an avenger in Dominic de Gourges, a French soldier of fortune, who, out of certain private griefs of his own, entertained a bitter hatred of the Spaniards. By the sale of his property and the aid of his friends, he equipped three ships, and, with a hundred and fifty men, under pretense of sailing for the coast of Guinea, secretly embarked for Florida. He surprised 1548. Fort Carolina, now occupied by the Spaniards, took it CHAPTER With the aid of the Indians, and hanged his prisoners, III. with this inscription-" Not as to Spaniards and mari 1564. ners, but as to robbers, traitors, and murderers." Sat 1580. isfied with this exploit, which made him an object of bitter hatred to the Spaniards, De Gourges returned to France, where civil war between the Protestants and Catholics was again raging. This war continued, with little intermission, for thirty years, during which colonization in America seems to have been hardly thought of. But the merchants of Normandy and Brittany still prosecuted the Newfoundland fishery, to which a profitable fur trade in the gulf and river of St. Lawrence began presently to be added. The settlement at St. Augustine was, by more than forty years, the earliest permanent European colony on the Atlantic coast, north of the Gulf of Mexico. But the narrow principles of Spanish colonial policy, establishing every where a perfect despotism, conspired with a sandy and barren soil to keep this early settlement poor and inconsiderable. Some sixteen years after the foundation of St. Augustine, an addition was made to Spanish knowledge of America, leading presently to a new conquest and a new settlement. Augustin Ruyz, a Franciscan friar, inflamed by that missionary spirit which animated the Spanish ecclesiastics, undertook an exploration of the interior regions north of Mexico. He set out from the neighborhood of the mines of Santa Barbara, on the borders of that arid desert which skirts the southeastern foot of the Mexican table land, and, with two or three companions, penetrated north till he struck the middle course of the Rio Grande, which river he ascended to its upper valley, explored forty years before by Vasquez Coronada. Ruyz 1581. was followed, the next year, by Antonio de Espejio, with III. a body of soldiers and Indians. He completed the ex- CHAPTER ploration, and gave to this country the name of NEW MEXICO. Santa Fé was presently built, next to St. 1582. Augustine the oldest town in the United States. The Indian inhabitants of that remote valley, in the very heart of the American continent, surrounded on all sides by rough mountains and arid deserts, received Spanish rulers and Spanish teachers cotemporaneously, as we shall presently see, with the first English attempts to colonize the Atlantic coast. In the interval since the discovery of America, the foreign commerce and navigation of England had made very decided progress. The English merchants even aspired to share in the lucrative traffic of the East Indies, still a monopoly in the hands of the Portuguese. A western passage to India not having been found, the idea had been broached of a northeastern passage through the Arctic Sea-an enterprise zealously entered into by Sebastian Cabot, who had returned to England in his old age, and had been rewarded for his merits and former 1548. services by a pension from the crown. An English expedition, fitted out under instructions drawn up by that 1549. veteran navigator, failed indeed of its main object, but one of the vessels entered the White Sea and discovered the port of Archangel, thus opening Russia to maritime commerce. The Russians, near a century before, had thrown off the yoke of the Mongols, under which they had long been crushed, but as yet they were hardly known in Western Europe. Presently the Russia Com- 1566. pany was incorporated, the first of those great English trading companies which have played so conspicuous a part in English affairs, and several of which were largely concerned in the colonization of North America. The hopes of a northeastern passage thus disappoint III. CHAPTER ed, the search for a northwest passage was again renewed. Martin Frobisher, with this object in view, 1576. penetrated into the entrance of Hudson's Bay. A stone from that desolate region, which the refiners declared to contain gold, excited a great ferment in London, and led 1577. to the fitting out of two expeditions, the last a fleet of 1578. fifteen sail, manned by many high-born volunteers, who eagerly adventured to search for mines on the frozen coast of Labrador. But these vessels brought home only worthless earth mistaken for precious ore. A new stimulus and a wider range was given to English maritime adventure by the hostilities already commencing between the English and Spaniards. Philip II., the wealthiest and most powerful monarch of that age, lately the husband of Bloody Mary, was the champion of the Catholic faith, the prince to whom Mary of Scotland and the Catholic nobles of England looked for support. Elizabeth, as head of the Protestant party in Europe, sent secret aid to the revolted Dutch; and though no war with Spain was yet formally declared, the English began to gratify their love of plunder, and, at the same time, to indulge their religious antipathies, by piratical expeditions, undertaken without any formal commissions, against Spanish commerce and the Spanish American colonies, whose wealth in gold and silver made them the admiration and envy of Europe. The attention of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a gentleman of Devonshire, was attracted to the slower but more certain and more honest wealth derived from the fisheries of Newfoundland, now annually visited by not less than a hundred and fifty French vessels, besides as many more from Spain, Portugal, and England. After serving with credit in the wars of France, Ireland, and the Low Countries, Sir Humphrey had turned his attention III. to maritime affairs, and had published a treatise on the CHAPTER northwest passage to India. Having lost much money by some speculations in alchemy, for the transmutation 1578. of iron into copper, fashionable in that age, he sought to recruit his finances by acquiring dominion and planting a colony in America. The recent dissolution of the English monasteries had deprived of their resources a large number of individuals, accustomed to be fed, in whole or in part, by the bounty of those institutions. The first compulsory English poor law had been lately enacted. The pressure of population was already felt, and there was likely to be no lack of colonists. Elizabeth granted a patent to Gilbert, conferring rights June 11. of jurisdiction and exclusive trade over a circuit of six hundred miles "not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people," to be described from any spot as a center where a settlement might be planted within six years. After some disappointments and delays, Gilbert at 1579. length put to sea; but an unsuccessful engagement with a Spanish squadron, and a violent storm, in which he lost one of his ships, compelled him to return without having crossed the Atlantic. Meanwhile the celebrated Sir Francis Drake, with a small squadron fitted out at private expense, having followed the track of Magellan, appeared in the Pacific Ocean, and enriched himself and his company by plundering the Spanish cities, taken wholly by surprise, and unprepared for such an attack. In hopes of discovering the long-sought western passage to India, and for himself some shorter course into the Atlantic, Drake ran along 1579. the western coast of North America, which he called New Albion, the same region to which the previous Spanish explorers had already given the name of Cali |