America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (5 page)

Philip II decided to remove the French Protestant menace there. This was no small matter. French “privateers” had been preying on Spanish treasure ships for nearly thirty years, and during an undeclared war in the 1550s they had cut in half the Spanish crown’s take in gold and silver from the Americas.

Philip selected his ablest naval commander, convicted smuggler Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, also a dutifully loyal Catholic, and directed him “to burn and hang the Lutheran French.”
Luteranos
was the Spanish term for all Protestants, despite the fact that these French Protestants, or Huguenots, were more accurately Calvinists.

Like his father, Charles I, Philip II was sworn to stamp out the heresies of the renegade German priest Martin Luther and his growing ranks of followers.

In October 1517, Luther had written his “Ninety-five Theses” (formally,
Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of
Indulgences
), a stinging rebuke of church practices, and supposedly nailed it to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The Wittenberg church possessed one of Europe’s largest collections of | 28 \

Isabella’s Pigs

Christian relics, which included purported vials of the Virgin Mary’s milk and straw from Jesus’ manger. By making a donation to preserve these sacred items, visitors to the Wittenberg church received an “indulgence” that effectively reduced their time in purgatory by more than five thousand years. Challenging such indulgences, and ultimately the authority of the Pope, Luther wrote, “It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone.”

Dismissed by Pope Leo X as the work of a “drunken German,”

Luther’s ideas quickly spread through Europe with the help of Gutenberg’s printing press. Excommunicated in January 1521, Luther was called to a civil hearing before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (King Charles I of Spain) at the Diet of Worms on April 17, 1521. Urged to retract his teachings, Luther refused, famously declaring: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves) . . . I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”

Unmoved, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V declared Luther a “notorious heretic” and an outlaw, banning his literature. Luther’s words and actions—he altered the communion sacrament and later married—did not set off a polite debate over how to say one’s prayers.

He had put the match to a powder keg of religious politics that exploded in sectarian wars across Europe. The Reformation and the holy wars it inspired transformed Western history and dominated European, and later American, statecraft for centuries, at enormous cost in lives and treasure.

| 29 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
z

i t wa s t o protect his nation’s treasure, as well as stamp out the heretical French
luteranos,
that Philip II had dispatched Menéndez, commander of the Caribbean fleet, to Florida. Arriving at the site of a marshy coastal Timucuan Indian village on September 8, 1565, Mené-

ndez established St. Augustine, the settlement he named in honor of the early church father whose name day is celebrated on August 28, the day that Menéndez had sighted Florida.

In present-day St. Augustine, the Mission of Nombre de Dios, with its 208-foot-tall stainless-steel cross and a small shrine to the Virgin Mary (Nuestra Señora de la Leche y Buen Parto, “Our Lady of the Milk and Happy Delivery”), marks the approximate spot where Admiral Menéndez landed and ordered the celebration of what is ac-claimed by local boosters as “the first parish mass in the future United States.” Another fact generally left out of the glowing arrival narrative in tourist brochures is that Menéndez also brought along Africans as “laborers,” which should properly give Spain—not the English in Jamestown in 1619—the distinction of introducing African slaves to what would become the United States.

Within days of the Spanish landing, the French captain Jean Ribault fatefully and foolishly sailed from Fort Caroline with his five hundred men, intent on destroying the Spanish before they could erect proper defenses. He left behind a mere twenty soldiers to guard the French settlement and its settlers.

This was not Ribault’s first disastrous decision in America. He had led the first French attempt to settle North America. Landing on Florida’s east coast on May 1, 1562, Ribault sailed up a river he named the River of May. Constructing a stone column there, he claimed the territory for France. He sailed further north and left thirty men at a | 30 \

Isabella’s Pigs

settlement called Charlesfort, on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina. Then Ribault sailed back for France, expecting to return with supplies and more colonists. With France engulfed in another religious war, Ribault was forced to England instead, where a suspicious Elizabeth had the Frenchman thrown in the Tower of London.

The men Ribault left behind at Charlesfort fared miserably. When the expected relief ships failed to arrive, their situation became desperate. Building an improvised boat, they set sail for France, but their meager food supplies ran out. Forced to eat shoe leather and dried animal skins and to drink their urine, the men were ultimately reduced to that most unthinkable act of desperation. “Finally it was suggested that it would be wiser that one die rather than all of them. The lot fell on . . . Larcher. He was killed and his flesh was equally divided among them. Then they drank his warm blood.”15

Undeterred by this disaster, French Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny won royal permission for a return to America. With Ribault languishing in an English prison, the new expedition was led by René de Laudonnière, Ribault’s second in command during the earlier voyage. With some three hundred colonists, men and women, aboard three ships, this was a large, well-organized venture, carrying livestock, seeds, and agricultural supplies. Also aboard was a force of soldiers, cannons, and other weapons to arm a fort. Landing in June 1564, the Huguenot colonists settled on the banks of the river where Ribault had left his stone marker. After assembling to give thanks to God— in essence, the true first American “Thanksgiving”—they set about constructing a wooden fort they called Fort Caroline, in honor of King Charles.

Initially far better equipped than the later English settlers would be, these Huguenot pilgrims added storehouses and wood-frame living | 31 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
quarters, along with a flour mill, bakery, and blacksmith. And in true Gallic fashion, they found some local grapes and made twenty barrels of wine. Relations with the Timucuans were reasonably good at first, and several French colonists took Indian women as wives. The settlers also learned the local Indian practice of smoking a local herb, and tobacco was soon very popular.

The Indians they encountered were eastern Timucuans, part of a larger grouping of at least fifteen different tribes scattered across what is now northern Florida and southern Georgia. Living inside palisaded circular towns with thatched-roof houses, the coastal-dwelling eastern Timucuans fished, hunted, and farmed, growing corn and beans as staples. The tribe near Fort Caroline was led by a chief named Utina, who enlisted the French in a series of attacks on a neighboring tribe, the Potano. Forging an alliance pitting one local tribe against another repeated the strategy that Cortés had successfully used in Mexico and would be employed by the English in Massachusetts as well.

Expecting resupply ships from France, the French quickly went through their food stores. Many of the colonists had been lured to America by visions of finding the earth littered with gold. Instead of planting crops, they spent far more time looking for gold and silver.

The friendly trade relations between the French and natives soured as the Indians began to experience the disastrous epidemics introduced by Europeans. When the supply of desirable French trade goods dwindled and the Indians jacked up prices on the desperate settlers, the French commander ordered the chief Utina taken hostage, leading to a brief standoff. 16

With the Timucuans unwilling to feed the French, tensions grew and discontent among the settlers spilled into outright mutiny. One | 32 \

Isabella’s Pigs

group of colonists commandeered a boat and sailed off to attack a Spanish outpost in Cuba, bringing swift Spanish retaliation. A second contingent did the same and was quickly captured. Since treasure ships bound for Spain had to sail past the Florida coast as they caught the Gulf Stream, these French attacks on Spanish shipping set the stage for King Philip’s order to Admiral Menéndez.

When the expected relief failed to appear, the dwindling French colonists contemplated a return home and set about building a ship.

Like good Calvinists, they probably prayed for deliverance, which unexpectedly arrived in the form of an English slave-trading pirate. In August 1565, several English ships under the command of Captain Sir John Hawkins put into the River of May seeking fresh water. Later to achieve fame as one of Queen Elizabeth’s “sea dogs,” John Hawkins had started out in the African slave trade. But he, like the French, had learned that there was far more profit to be gained from stealing Spanish gold. Hawkins and other famed English sailors, including Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, enriched themselves and Queen Elizabeth’s royal treasury by looting Spain’s treasure galleons.

Besides taking on supplies, Hawkins was willing to barter a seaworthy ship for some of the cannons and powder that protected Fort Caroline. With the English ship, Laudonnière and the remaining colonists prepared to return to France. But as they readied to sail, Captain Ribault and the promised relief from France arrived. Following his release from English prison, Ribault had returned and taken command of the fleet that arrived in late August 1565 with supplies and reinforcements. When he learned the Spaniards had arrived, Ribault set off on the fateful mission that cost his life and hundreds of others.

| 33 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
a Atermath z

Three years after the Fort Caroline massacre, the French exacted a measure of vengeance. A French naval force led by sea captain Dominique de Gourgues attacked the Spanish garrison at San Mateo in 1568 with the assistance of the Timucuans, who were now eager to turn on their Spanish conquerors. On the very spot where Admiral Mené-

ndez had once hanged the Frenchmen, Gourgues did the same with his Spanish prisoners. Above these men, the sign read, “This is done, not as unto Spaniards, but as unto liars, thieves, and murderers.”

But it did not end there. On August 23, 1572, nearly seven years after the Fort Caroline massacres, an assassin attempted to kill Admiral Coligny, the moving spirit behind the Fort Caroline expedition.

On the next day—St. Bartholomew’s Day—a coordinated attack on Protestants swept over France. Admiral Coligny was murdered in his bed, his corpse thrown from a window. In Paris and soon across the country, a paroxysm of one-sided sectarian violence exploded.

The precise number of Huguenots massacred during this anti-Protestant pogrom is uncertain. An estimated two thousand Protestants were killed in Paris, and as many as ten thousand died across France. Contemporary accounts describe bodies floating in French rivers for months afterward. In Rome, a jubilant Pope Gregory XIII ordered all the city’s bells to ring in a day of thanksgiving. It was also reported that the normally taciturn King Philip II actually smiled at the news.

The slaughter of Fort Caroline’s colonists and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre resolved one of King Philip’s chief problems. The Protestant threat in France had been crushed. But another danger loomed | 34 \

Isabella’s Pigs

with a troublesome distant relative, England’s Queen Elizabeth.

Unlike her predecessor, her half sister Queen Mary—a descendant of Isabella and a devout Catholic who purged Protestants, earned the nickname “Bloody Mary,” and then married Philip—Elizabeth was a Protestant. The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth had provided support to the Huguenots and sent troops to aid the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands, even though Spain and England were officially at peace. She also encouraged Francis Drake and others to raid Spanish ships and towns. During his voyage around the world in 1579, Drake had sailed into San Francisco Bay, claiming the region for Elizabeth and England, and freely attacked Spanish ships carrying gold from Peru as he completed the circumnavigation.

After Queen Mary’s death, Philip considered marriage to Elizabeth as the solution to his “Protestant problem.” But as ruler of an increasingly Protestant country, Elizabeth realized that such a prospect was impossible. Since Philip could not marry her, he concluded, why not kill her?

A series of Spanish-inspired plots to undermine and then assassinate Elizabeth all failed. Philip conspired with English Catholics to kill Elizabeth and place her Catholic cousin—Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots—on the throne. When that plot backfired, Mary was executed in February 1587. By then, Philip was already planning the “Enterprise of England,” an invasion of England intended to put an end to English piracy and restore Catholicism to England. Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution provided the catalyst for the launching of the enter-prise.

Construction of the Spanish Armada had begun in earnest in January 1586. Consisting of some 130 ships and carrying more than twenty-nine thousand men, the armada was brought together at Lisbon in | 35 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
May 1588. England had meanwhile armed many of its merchant vessels and added to its fleet of warships. When it sailed out to meet the Armada, Elizabeth’s navy had about two hundred ships and nearly sixteen thousand men, most of them experienced sailors, with squad-rons commanded by such accomplished privateers as John Hawkins, Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher.