the venture was doomed from the start. Looting Spanish treasure ships was
what the colonists had signed on to do; they had not come to labor like peas-
ants in the fields. As the English pirate John Hawkins remarked of them,
“they being soldiers desired to live by the sweat of other men’s brows.” So
when they got hungry, as they quickly did, they looted the nearby Indians.
When Laudonnière tried to stop them, a group of rebels made off with
the colony’s two small boats to engage in piracy. When they returned,
Laudonnière, fearing that his renegades were likely to bring the Spaniards
down on him, had them hanged. But he was too late. The Spaniards had
learned what was afoot and reacted like bees whose hive had been attacked:
for them, Fort Caroline was not a colony but a pirate lair. Their fears seemed
confirmed when they learned that John Hawkins, fresh from a raid on
Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, had sailed in for a visit. That was the
last straw. Philip II ordered an attack.
Acting on Philip’s orders, his skilled and ambitious general Pedro
Menéndez surprised the French at Fort Caroline and killed all the 132 men
he caught; René Goulaine de Laudonnière and about fifty others managed
to escape. Menéndez caught up with them and tricked them into surrender.
He then “caused their hands to be tied behind them, and put them to the
knife.” They were killed, Menéndez reported to his government, not as
Frenchmen or as pirates but as Protestants. The war of religion had come
to ground in America. It would never again be far from men’s minds.
The Spanish knife effectively ended French activities in La Florida, but
the French would not give America up. Twenty-two years later they pre-
pared a new expedition. During the interval of peace between the two pow-
ers, the man who was to lead it had a chance to study the reasons for
Spain’s success. Sammuel de Champlain spent nearly two and a half years
in the Caribbean, where he commanded a French ship chartered to sail
with the Spanish flota.As the editor of Champlain’s Vo y a ge swrote, “He
alone of all the great leaders in the colonization of North America had the
privilege of observing and studying a European colony before he tried to
found one.”
Champlain was a good observer and writer. Ordered to report in writing
on all he saw, he published an account of his 1603 expedition to the Saint
Lawrence under the title Des Sauvages, ou, Voyage de Sammuel Champlain.
Fish, Fur, and Piracy 61