Some of the Huguenots in the woods decided to return and surrender rather than risk the terrors of the wilderness.  The Spaniards, they said, were at least men.  Six of them did return, and were cut down as they came.  Pierre Debre side by side with a few desperate men who had one of the two light cannon the fort possessed, was fighting like a tiger in defense of a corner where a group of women and children were crouching.

When Menendez could secure the attention of his maddened men he gave an order that women, children and boys under fifteen should be spared.  This order and the instant’s pause it gave came just as the last of the men in Pierre’s corner went down before the halberds of the Spaniards.  Pierre leaped the palisade and ran for the forest.  Looking back, he saw the trembling women and children herded into shelter, but not killed.  Fifteen of the captured Huguenots were presently hanged; a hundred and forty-two had been cut down and lay heaped together on the river bank.  Pierre plunged into the forest and after days of wandering reached a friendly Indian village.  The carpenter and the other fugitives who escaped were taken to France in the two small ships of Ribault’s fleet which had not gone to attack the Spanish settlement.  Menendez returned at leisure to San Augustin, where he knelt and thanked the Lord.

The fate of the men of Ribault’s fleet became known through the letters which the Spaniards themselves wrote in course of time to their friends at home, but chiefly through Menendez’s own report to the King.  Dominic de Gourgues heard of it from Coligny, and his eyes burned with the still anger of a naturally impetuous man who has learned in stern schools how to keep his temper.

“As I understand it,” he said grimly and quietly, “Menendez, in the disguise of a sailor, found Ribault and his men shipwrecked and starving, some in one place, some in another.  He promised them food and safety on condition that they should surrender and give up their arms and armor.  He separated them into lots of ten, each guarded by twenty Spaniards.  When each lot had been led out of sight of the rest he explained that on account of their great numbers and the fewness of his own followers he should be compelled to tie their hands before taking them into camp, for fear they might capture the camp.  At the end of the day, when all had reached a certain line which Menendez marked out with his cane in the sand, he gave the word to his murderers to butcher them.”

Coligny bowed his noble gray head.

“And he offered them life if they would renounce their religion, whereupon Ribault repeating in French the psalm, ’Lord, remember thou me,’ they died without other supplication to God or man.  On this account did Menendez write above the heads of those whom he hanged, ’I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to Lutherans.’  And no demand for redress has as yet been made?”

“One,” said the Admiral coolly.  “A demand was made by Philip of Spain.  He has required his brother of France to punish one Gaspe Coligny, sometimes known as Admiral, for sending out a Huguenot colony to settle in Florida.”