France Coloniale — Huguenot Brazil and Florida
Jean Ribault landed on the coast of what is now South Carolina in May 1562 and built Charlesfort, the first attempt at a French Protestant colony in North America. The project was Gaspard de Coligny's. As Admiral of France and leader of the Huguenot party, he wanted a refuge for French Protestants beyond the reach of the crown's religious policy, a base for privateering against Spanish treasure fleets, and a claim in a hemisphere the papacy had divided between Spain and Portugal. The first French Wars of Religion broke out in France the same year, which shaped everything that followed. Charlesfort failed within a year. Ribault returned to France for supplies, found the country at war and himself imprisoned in England, and the twenty-eight men left behind mutinied, killed their commander, built a boat, and resorted to cannibalism before an English ship picked up the survivors. René de Laudonnière tried again in 1564, founding Fort Caroline near the mouth of the St Johns River in Florida. Spain regarded the settlement as both a heretical outpost and a threat to the Bahama Channel through which its fleets returned. Philip II sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded St Augustine in 1565 and marched overland through a storm to take Fort Caroline by surprise. Most of the garrison were killed. Ribault's relief fleet was wrecked, and the survivors who surrendered were executed on a beach Menéndez named Matanzas — slaughters — with the reported explanation that it was done not as Frenchmen but as Lutherans.
- Year: 1555 CE
- Category: Military
