Upon discovering the Frenchmen,
Menéndez then executed Ribault and sev-
eral hundred Frenchmen as religious
heretics at a place now known as
Matanzas (“massacres”) Inlet. In 1568,
the French counterattacked and burned
the fort that the Spanish had built on the
site of Fort Caroline, but after the mas-
sacre of Ribault and his men, they made
no more attempts to colonize the Atlantic
seaboard of North America.
The city of St. Augustine, Florida
remains the oldest European-founded
settlement in North America. In 1566,
Martín de Argüelles became the first child
of European ancestry to be born in what
is now the continental United States. Its
Castillo de San Marcos, begun in 1672, is
the oldest masonry fort in the continental
United States. While the English priva-
teer Sir Francis Drake attacked and
burned the city 1586, and English pirates
plundered it and killed most of its inhab-
itants in 1668, it remained a Spanish set-
tlement until it was temporarily ceded to
Great Britain in 1763. Following the
American Revolution the city would
again become Spanish territory until it
was at last ceded, along with the rest of
Florida, to the United States.
Spain’s sense of what constituted La
Florida was vague at first: roughly the
Florida peninsula and anything north and
west of it, even as far north as
Newfoundland. Spain’s more extravagant
claims to distant northern lands were
challenged in the early 17th century as
European rivals at last established their
own enduring colonies, including
France’s Quebec in 1608, England’s
Plymouth in 1620, and Holland’s New
Amsterdam (later captured by the English
and renamed New York) in 1624. But
closer to the southern heartland of
Spanish America, Spain did what it could
to press its claims.SPAIN IN THE AMERICAS 49A street scene in St. Augustine in the early 17th century(Library of Congress)Spanish homes in St. Augustine,
such as this one, were sparsely
decorated. Chairs were usually
reserved for the men. (Media
Projects Inc./Photo by Pat Lods)