Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863

[In the August number of the "Atlantic," under the title of "The Fleur-de-Lis in Florida," will be found a narrative of the Huguenot attempts to occupy that country, which, exciting the jealousy of Spain, gave rise to the crusade whose history is recorded below.]

The monk, the inquisitor, the Jesuit, these were the lords of Spain,—sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed and fed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed and fed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to bigotry, dark, blind, inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man.

Day was breaking on the world. Light, hope, freedom, pierced with vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay and death. Kindled with new life, the nations teemed with a progeny of heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,—a monastic cell, an inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of the Church, against whose adamantine front the wrath of innovation beat in vain. In every country of Europe the party of freedom and reform was the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was the Spanish party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help. Above all, it was so in France; and while within her bounds there was a semblance of peace, the national and religious rage burst forth on a wilder theatre. Thither it is for us to follow it, where, on the shores of Florida, the Spaniard and the Frenchman, the bigot and the Huguenot, met in the grapple of death.

In a corridor of the Escurial, Philip II. was met by a man who had long stood waiting his approach, and who with proud reverence placed a petition in the hand of the pale and sombre King. The petitioner was Pedro Menendez de Aviles, one of the ablest and most distinguished officers of the Spanish marine. He was born of an ancient Asturian family. His boyhood had been wayward, ungovernable, and fierce. He ran off at eight years of age, and when, after a search of six months, he was found and brought back, he ran off again. This time he was more successful, escaping on board a fleet bound against the Barbary corsairs, when his precocious appetite for blood and blows had reasonable contentment. A few years later, he found means to build a small vessel in which he cruised against the corsairs and the French, and, though still little more than a boy, displayed a singular address and daring. The wonders of the New World now seized his imagination. He made a voyage thither, and the ships under his charge came back freighted with wealth. War with France was then at its height. As captain-general of the fleet, he was sent with troops to Flanders, and to their prompt arrival was due, it is said, the victory of St. Quentin, Two years later, he commanded the luckless armada which bore back Philip to his native shore, and nearly drowned him in a storm off the port of Laredo. This mischance, or his own violence and insubordination, wrought to the prejudice of Menendez. He complained that his services were ill repaid. Philip lent him a favoring ear, and despatched him to the Indies as general of the fleet and army. Here he found means to amass vast riches; and, in 1561, returning to Spain, charges were brought against him of a nature which his too friendly biographer does not explain. The Council of the Indies arrested him. He was imprisoned and sentenced to a heavy fine, but, gaining his release, hastened to Madrid to throw himself on the royal clemency.

His petition was most graciously received. Philip restored his command, but remitted only half his fine, a strong presumption of his guilt.

Menendez kissed the royal hand; he had still a petition in reserve. His son had been wrecked near the Bermudas, and he would fain go thither to find tidings of his fate. The pious King bade him trust in God, and promised that he should be despatched without delay to the Bermudas and to Florida with a commission to make an exact survey of those perilous seas for the profit of future voyagers; but Menendez was ill content with such an errand. He knew, he said, nothing of greater moment to His Majesty than the conquest and settlement of Florida. The climate was healthful, the soil fertile; and, worldly advantages aside, it was peopled by a race sunk in the thickest shades of infidelity. "Such grief," he pursued, "seizes me, when I behold this multitude of wretched Indians, that I should choose the conquest and settling of Florida above all commands, offices, and dignities which your Majesty might bestow." Those who think this hypocrisy do not know the Spaniard of the sixteenth century.

The King was edified by his zeal. An enterprise of such spiritual and temporal promise was not to be slighted, and Menendez was empowered to conquer and convert Florida at his own cost. The conquest was to be effected within three years. Menendez was to take with him five hundred men, and supply them with five hundred slaves, besides horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs. Villages were to be built, with forts to defend them; and sixteen ecclesiastics, of whom four should be Jesuits, were to form the nucleus of a Floridian church. The King, on his part, granted Menendez free trade with Hispaniola, Porto Rico, Cuba, and Spain, the office of Adelantado of Florida for life, joined to the right of naming his successor, and large emoluments to be drawn from the expected conquest.

The compact struck, Menendez hastened to his native Asturias to raise money among his relatives. Scarcely was he gone, when tidings for the first time reached Madrid that Florida was already occupied by a colony of French Protestants, and that a reinforcement, under Ribaut, was on the point of sailing thither. A French historian of high authority declares that these advices came from the Catholic party at the French court, in whom all sense of the national interest and honor was smothered under their hatred of Coligny and the Huguenots. Of this there can be little doubt, though information also came from the buccaneer Frenchmen captured in the West Indies.

Foreigners had invaded the territory of Spain. The trespassers, too, were heretics, foes of God and liegemen of the Devil. Their doom was fixed. But how would France endure an assault, in time of peace, on subjects who had gone forth on an enterprise sanctioned by the crown, undertaken in its name, and under its commission?

The throne of France, where the corruption of the nation seemed gathered to a head, was trembling between the two parties of the Catholics and the Huguenots, whose chiefs aimed at royalty. Flattering both, caressing both, betraying both, playing one against the other, Catherine de Médicis, by a thousand crafty arts and expedients of the moment, sought to retain the crown on the heads of her weak and vicious sons. Of late her crooked policy had drawn her towards the Catholic party, in other words, the party of Spain; and already she had given ear to the savage Duke of Alva, urging her to the course which, seven years later, led to the carnage of St. Bartholomew. In short, the Spanish policy was ascendant, and no thought of the national interest or honor could restrain that basest of courts from consigning by hundreds to the national enemy those whom, itself, it was meditating to immolate by thousands.

Menendez was summoned back in haste to the court. There was counsel, deep and ominous, in the chambers of the Escurial. His force must be strengthened. Three hundred and ninety-four men were added at the royal charge, and a corresponding number of transport and supply ships. It was a holy war, a crusade, and as such was preached by priest and monk along the western coasts of Spain. All the Biscayan ports flamed with zeal, and adventurers crowded to enroll themselves; since to plunder heretics is good for the soul as well as the purse, and broil and massacre have double attraction, when promoted to a means of salvation: a fervor, deep and hot, but not of celestial kindling; nor yet that buoyant and inspiring zeal, which, when the Middle Age was in its youth and prime, glowed in the soul of Tancred, Godfrey, and St. Louis, and which, when its day was long since past, could still find its home in the great heart of Columbus. A darker spirit urged the new crusade,—born, not of hope, but of fear, slavish in its nature, the creature and the tool of despotism. For the typical Spaniard of the sixteenth century was not in strictness a fanatic; he was bigotry incarnate.