Some twenty days after Menendez returned to St. Augustine, the Indians, enamored of carnage, and exulting to see their invaders mowed down, came to tell him that on the coast southward, near Cape Canaveral, a great number of Frenchmen were intrenching themselves.  They were those of Ribaut’s party who had refused to surrender.  Retreating to the spot where their ships had been cast ashore, they were endeavoring to build a vessel from the fragments of the wrecks.

In all haste Menendez despatched messengers to Fort Caroline,—­named by him San Mateo,—­ordering a reinforcement of a hundred and fifty men.  In a few days they came.  He added some of his own soldiers, and, with a united force of two hundred and fifty, set forth, as he tells us, on the second of November, pushing southward along the shore with such merciless energy that some of his men dropped dead with wading night and day through the loose sands.  When, from behind their frail defences, the French saw the Spanish pikes and partisans glittering into view, they fled in a panic, and took refuge among the hills.  Menendez sent a trumpet to summon them, pledging his honor for their safety.  The commander and several others told the messenger that they would sooner be eaten by the savages than trust themselves to Spaniards; and, escaping, they fled to the Indian towns.  The rest surrendered; and Menendez kept his word.  The comparative number of his own men made his prisoners no longer dangerous.  They were led back to St. Augustine, where, as the Spanish writer affirms, they were well treated.  Those of good birth sat at the Adelantado’s table, eating the bread of a homicide crimsoned with the slaughter of their comrades.  The priests essayed their pious efforts, and, under the gloomy menace of the Inquisition, some of the heretics renounced their errors.  The fate of the captives may be gathered from the indorsement, in the handwriting of the King, on the back of the despatch of Menendez of December twelfth.

“Say to him,” writes Philip II., “that, as to those he has killed, he has done well, and as for those he has saved, they shall be sent to the galleys.”

Thus did Spain make good her claim to North America, and crush the upas of heresy in its germ.  Within her bounds the tidings were hailed with acclamation, while in France a cry of horror and execration rose from the Huguenots, and found an echo even among the Catholics.  But the weak and ferocious son of Catherine de Medicis gave no response.  The victims were Huguenots, disturbers of the realm, followers of Coligny, the man above all others a thorn in his side.  True, the enterprise was a national enterprise, undertaken at the national charge, with royal commission, and under the royal standard.  True, it had been assailed in time of peace by a power professing the closest amity.  Yet Huguenot influence, had prompted and Huguenot hands executed it.  That influence had now ebbed low; Coligny’s power had waned; and the Spanish party was ascendant.  Charles IX., long vacillating, was fast subsiding into the deathly embrace of Spain, for whom, at last, on the bloody eve of St. Bartholomew, he was destined to become the assassin of his own best subjects.