On September 8, 1565, a group of about 800 Spanish sailors, soldiers, priests and colonists landed in Florida and celebrated what is called “the first parish mass” in America –the “beginning” of Christianity in the future United States of America, as St. Augustine’s boosters tell us. This is the founding day of what is called “America’s oldest permanent European settlement.”
According to the website of the shrine that marks this momentous date in history:
“Mass was said to hallow the land and draw down the blessing of heaven before the first step was taken to rear a human habitation.”
The Spanish colonists were led by Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Aviles. But just what were Menéndez and his 800-strong group doing in Florida?
In brief, it was a search-and-destroy mission and St. Augustine was established to mount a murderous offensive against the small, struggling French colony at Fort Caroline, near modern-day Jacksonville.
Menéndez had been dispatched by Spain’s King Philip II to wipe out the French colony, established about a year earlier. These French settlers had come to America, as the Mayflower Pilgrims would more than 50 years later, in search of a religious refuge. Huguenots, or French Protestants, they had been given permission by France’s King Charles to establish a colony in America.
Admiral Menéndez was sent to Florida with clear orders–wipe out the “heretic” French colony. After killing most of the inhabitants of Fort Caroline, Menéndez captured and put to the sword several hundred French sailors who had been shipwrecked in a hurricane and came ashore just south of St. Augustine before straggling north towards the Spanish outpost.
The spot where Menéndez did his “pious” work with such ruthless efficiency was known as Matanzas, Spanish for “slaughters.”
The site of these killings, Fort Matanzas, is now an off-the-beaten path national monument just south of St. Augustine:
I told the story of Fort Caroline, St. Augustine, and the fate of America’s true first pilgrims in “The French Connection,” an Op-ed in the New York Times
You can also read a more complete story of the bloody history of America’s true “first pilgrims” in a chapter called “Isabella’s Pigs” in America’s Hidden History.
