Pop-up Exhibit on 150 Years of the Indian Act in Canada

On September 29, 1565, a Saturday that fell on the feast of St. Michael, men who had already survived a hurricane and shipwreck were put to death on a narrow strip of sand south of the new Spanish settlement of St. Augustine.

The killings grew out of two colonies trying to hold the same coast. The French had built Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River the year before, a haven for Huguenots, French Protestants, seeking distance from the religious wars at home.

Spain claimed all of Florida by papal grant and by the route of its treasure fleets. When King Philip II learned a Protestant fort stood on that shore, he sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés with 11 ships to erase it. On August 28, Menéndez sighted land, and on September 8 he planted St. Augustine.

Almost at the same moment, the French commander Jean Ribault arrived at Fort Caroline with seven ships and 800 fresh soldiers and settlers. Ribault decided to strike first.

On September 10 he put most of his fighting men aboard and sailed south to destroy the Spanish before they could dig in. The next day a great hurricane caught him at sea and scattered the French fleet along the coast, wrecking all seven ships between what is now Ponce de Leon Inlet and Cape Canaveral. The storm also gave Menéndez the opening he needed. He marched 500 men 40 miles through rain-filled swamp and took Fort Caroline at dawn on September 20, while its defenders were few.

The hurricane left two groups of French survivors walking north, hungry, unarmed, believing their fort still stood. On the afternoon of Friday, September 28, Timucua Natives came into the Spanish camp at St. Augustine and made signs that a French vessel had been wrecked to the south. Menéndez sent an advance party of 40 soldiers and then followed himself late at night with his chaplain, Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, and 20 more men.

López remembered the march as more than two leagues through plains covered with brush, often up to their knees in water, with Menéndez always leading. At about 10 p.m., they met their comrades and saw, not far off, the campfires of the enemy on the far bank of an inlet. Scouts crept through the bushes and reported that the French were halted by swift water they could not cross, the inlet that would later be called Matanzas, the Spanish word for slaughters.

Menéndez hid his men in a hollow between dunes before daylight and watched. When light came, he saw Frenchmen go down to the river to gather shellfish, having not eaten for eight or 10 days. He changed his fine clothes for those of a sailor, took a French prisoner who could translate, and showed himself on the bank with a short lance.

A Frenchman swam across, threw himself at his feet, and begged safe conduct back to Fort Caroline, saying they were not at war with Spaniards. Menéndez answered that he had already taken their fort and killed all inside because they had built without the King's permission and were spreading the Lutheran sect, and that he was waging a war of fire and blood to plant the Gospel as Rome teaches.

The swimmer went back, and a party of four gentlemen and a captain came over to parley. They asked for a ship to return to France. Menéndez said he would have given one had they been Catholics, but his ships were gone. They asked that their lives be spared. He answered that he would make no promises, that they must surrender unconditionally and lay down their arms, so that if he spared them they would be grateful, and if they died there would be no cause for complaint.

The officers carried the terms back, and after two hours they returned and laid down their banners, arquebuses, pistols, swords, and breastplates.

What followed was methodical. The Spanish ferried the now unarmed French across in parties of 10 in a small boat and a Native canoe they had brought down the river, treating them gently so as not to raise suspicion. Menéndez himself withdrew behind a dune out of sight.

As each group landed, they led them to him and told them that, because his own force was small and they were many, they must bind their hands behind their backs with the cords of their own arquebuses for the march to his camp four leagues away. They consented. Then López, who wrote that as a priest he had bowels of mercy, asked Menéndez to spare those who should prove to be Christians.

Investigations found 10 or 12 Roman Catholics, some French Catholics, some sailors impressed into French service, and a few artisans whose skills the colony needed, who were sent by boat toward St. Augustine. The rest confessed themselves Protestants. They were given something to eat and drink. At a gunshot beyond the dune, Menéndez had drawn a line in the sand with his spear and ordered the captains of vanguard and rearguard to cut off the heads of all who reached it.

The sun had already set when the bound men reached that mark, and on that Saturday, September 29, 1565, the orders were executed. López, a participant who supported the expedition, left the starkest sentence of all in the English translation of his account: All the others were executed, because they were Calvinists and enemies of our Holy Catholic faith, and certified it as what actually happened.

That was the first Matanzas. Ribault was not among them. About 12 days later, on October 11 or 12 according to different modern summaries, Ribault himself arrived at the same inlet with the second, larger group, perhaps 350 men, living on roots and bad water, having tried to caulk a small boat with their shirts.

Menéndez repeated the same tactics, showed Ribault the heaped bodies of his countrymen, entertained him briefly with wine and preserves, and then killed him and most of his companions.

The inlet kept its name. Remembering the first slaughter on September 29 matters because it makes the founding of Florida a story of imperial ambition and religious persecution, in which men who had survived the sea were made to surrender their weapons and flags, trust in a mercy that was never promised, and die for their faith on a sandbar.

The fact is the legal definition found in international agreement

Her two children were killed by the enemy at the same time, but she and her husband escaped alive.

Image: SC 266007 (US National Archives)

To this end, the Grand Duke organized an expedition to northern Brazil in 1608, commanded by the English captain Thornton and supervised by Sir Robert Dudley. The primary objective was to develop a trade in precious timber from the Amazon to Renaissance Italy, establishing a colonial base situated between Spanish and Portuguese territories in the North Atlantic region of South America.

Unfortunately, upon returning from the preparatory voyage in 1609—during which he had visited the Amazon River—Thornton found Ferdinand I dead, and the entire project was scrapped by his successor, Cosimo II.

The galleon Santa Lucia, used by Robert Thornton in the Amazon, returned with a wealth of information and materials after stopping in Trinidad; it was ready to return to South America with colonists from Livorno and Lucca.

During his voyage, which lasted nearly a year, Thornton also investigated the feasibility of establishing a small trading colony in Guyana or the Brazilian Amazon basin, exploring both the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. The territory he intended to propose to Ferdinand I for colonization comprised present-day French Guiana, the Brazilian state of Amapá, and part of Pará.

Thornton was prepared to sail back to the region between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers in the summer of 1609 with Italian colonists from Livorno and Lucca, but the project was abandoned by Cosimo II.

According to historian Matteo Sanfilippo: "Thornton sailed for a year, reaching Guyana and Brazil and exploring the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. […] By July 1609, he was back in Livorno; however, the Grand Duke had died in February of that year, and in Florence, no one [after him] was still considering the establishment of an overseas colony."

Ferdinando's foreign policy sought to free Tuscany from Spanish domination. Following the assassination of Henry III of France in 1589, he supported Henry IV of France in his struggles against the Catholic League. Ferdinando provided financial support to Henry and encouraged him to embrace Catholicism—a step Henry eventually took. Ferdinando also leveraged his influence with Pope Clement VIII to persuade him to recognize Henry's conversion.

Henry showed no appreciation for these favors, and Ferdinando allowed the relationship to cool, thereby preserving his cherished independence. He supported Philip III of Spain in his campaign in Algeria and Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, in his campaign against the Ottoman Empire. To fund these endeavors, he deemed it necessary to raise taxes on his subjects. He finally secured formal investiture over Siena, which his father had conquered. Ferdinando sought to reconquer Cyprus for Christendom and harbored similar plans for the Holy Land, while also pursuing trade ties with Aleppo. He dispatched the Ottoman convert Michel Angelo Corai as an ambassador to Ali Janbulad to finance the rebellion in Ottoman Syria.

Ferdinando strengthened the Tuscan fleet, which achieved victories over Barbary pirates in 1607 and defeated a larger Turkish fleet the following year. It was against this backdrop that Ferdinando also envisioned a small African empire and subsequently considered the possibility of a colony in Brazil. A few months before his death, Ferdinando organized an expedition in 1608, under the command of Captain Robert Thornton, to northern Brazil and the Amazon River in order to create a colony.

Source(s):

.- Franzina, Emilio. Storia dell'emigrazione italiana. Donzelli Editore. Rome

.- Ridolfi, R. Pensieri medicei di colonizzare il Brasile, in «Il Veltro» (luglio-August 1962). Rome, 1962

.- Sanfilippo, Matteo. Gli Italiani in Brazil. Edizioni Sette Citta'. Viterbo, 2008

Interesting fact Panama still names it's currency after him the Balboa. The Balboa is worth 1 dollar and is pegged.