The French in Early Florida: In the Eye of the Hurricane (review)

French Admiral Gaspard de Coligny made two attempts between 1555 and 1565 to plant defensible outposts in the New World and contest the claims of Portugal and Spain: Nicolas de Villegagnon's France Antarctique in Guanabara Bay, Brazil, and Jean Ribault's Charlesfort and Fort Caroline on the east coast of Florida. Historians have portrayed these ventures as parallel Huguenot refuges. Reexamining the sources and the European milieu in his dissertation, a broadly Atlantic study of France in America, McGrath concluded that the main motives of Coligny and his royal sponsors were not religious but strategic and commercial, that both times the French came close to succeeding, and that their defeats not only affected European events and developments directly, but contributed to the outpouring of anti-Catholic literature after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres of 1572, and the increasingly anti-Spanish output of Protestant publishers in the Netherlands and England in the 1580s.

In this book, McGrath concentrates on the second of Coligny's attempts. The story opens with Jean Ribault, a Norman mariner who had resided in England and studied under Sebastian Cabot, making a reconnaissance voyage to Florida in 1562. News that a follow-up expedition commanded by René de Laudonnière had fortified a spot near the mouth of the St. Johns River prompted Philip II to engage Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, a tough Asturian corsair-fighter, to destroy the French outpost. When Menéndez learned that Ribault was sailing to relieve Laudonnière, he rushed across the Atlantic to preempt him. After a formal challenge and a brief chase, the Spaniards landed and made camp at St. Augustine, from which they marched forty miles north in a hurricane to surprise and capture Fort Caroline. Ribault's ships ran aground near Cape Canaveral in the same storm; many of the French drowned, and the survivors in two parties headed north up the coast. At the inlet of Matanzas, below St. Augustine, Menéndez met the castaways and by his own count executed 330 of them, including their leader, Ribault.

Spanish and French versions of events up to the capture of Fort Caroline are reconcilable; about subsequent events they differ wildly, and McGrath, flying in the face of four centuries of historiography, persuasively argues that the Spanish version is more reliable. In an appendix, "A Note on the Sources," he explains his method for dealing with contradictory accounts: first compare the sources and note their inconsistencies, then consider the publishing context. Five eyewitness accounts survive for the first phase of the Florida venture. On the French side are accounts by Nicolas Le Challeux, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, and Laudonnière; on the Spanish side are the letters of Menéndez and a chronicle by Gonzalo Solís de Merás. The only first-person accounts for the second phase are these two sources plus the letters of Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, who was present at the second massacre.

In the Spanish version of events, 100 to 150 Frenchmen managed to escape, 260 drowned, and 150 were captured, including 50 women and children. Among those who survived the attack on Fort Caroline and left Florida without waiting for Ribault were Le Challeux, Le Moyne, and Laudonnière. Although they were not present, Le Challeux, seconded by Le Moyne and twenty years later by Laudonnière, accused Menéndez of falsely making a promise of clemency, then of killing 900 men, women, and babies in a single massacre, complete with gory mutilations. "Only by emphasizing Spanish brutality and treachery," McGrath argues, could Le Challeux and his literary successors "make these dead Frenchmen into the heroic martyrs that the Calvinist cause required. These writers were not describing a colonial disaster. They were creating a myth" (p. 182).

The Spanish did not...