ring under its banner more than twenty-five hundred
persons, was soon prepared. After touching, with part of these forces,
on the Florida coast, in the neighborhood of the present river Matanzas,
the adventurer sailed in quest of the luckless Huguenots, whose vessels
were soon descried escaping seaward from a combat for which they were
unprepared. For a while, Melendez pursued them, but abandoning the
chase, steered south once more, and entering the harbor on the coast he
had just before visited, laid the foundations of that quaint old Spanish
town of ST. AUGUSTINE, which is the parent of civic civilization on our
continent. Ribault, meanwhile, who had put to sea with his craft, lost
most of his vessels in a sudden storm on the coast, though the greater
part of his companions escaped.

But Melendez, whose ships suffered slightly from this tempest, had no
sooner placed his colonists in security, at St. Augustine, than he set
forth with a resolute band across the marshy levels which intervened
between his post and the St. John's. With savage fury the reckless
Spaniard fell on the Huguenots. The carnage was dreadful. It seems to
have been rather slaughter than warfare. The Huguenots, unprepared for
battle, little dreamed that the wars of the old world would be
transferred to the new, and vainly imagined that human passion could
find victims enough for its malignity without crossing the dangerous
seas. Full two hundred fell. Many fled to the forest. A few surrendered,
and were slain. Some escaped in two French vessels that fortunately
still lingered in the harbor. The wretches who had been providentially
saved from the wreck, were next followed and found by this Castilian
monster. "Let them surrender their flags and arms," said he, "and thus
placing themselves at my discretion, I may do with them what God in his
mercy desires!" Yet, as soon as they yielded, they were bound and
marched through the forest to St. Augustine, and, as they approached the
fort which had been hastily raised on the level shores, the sudden blast
of a trumpet was the signal for the musketeers to pour into the crowd a
volley that laid them dead on the spot. It was asserted that these
victims of reliance on Spanish mercy, were massacred, "not as Frenchmen,
but as Lutherans;"--and thus, about nine hundred Protestant human
beings, were the first offering on the soil of our present Union to the
devilish fanaticism of the age.

But the bloody deed was not