What happened to the Huguenots in St. Augustine, Florida?
Upon visiting St. Augustine, the history of the region indicates a strong presence of European settlers, including a small settlement of French Huguenots. When I was last there, the cemetery was not available to the public, so I did not get a glimpse of the burial dates!
North America, with the exception of Mexico, was not colonized by Europeans so early as the southern part of the Continent. The discoveries of Cabot, a. d. 1497, had given England a valid claim to the whole coast from Labrador to Florida; but the country presented none of the allurements that had incited and rewarded the Spanish adventurers. Fertile and well wooded, indeed, intersected by noble rivers, and inclosing safe and capacious harbors and bays, it seemed a promising region for permanent settlements and agricultural industry, but offered only a faint prospect of wealth to be obtained from gold and silver mines, or from plundering the native inhabitants.
A party of French Huguenots attempted to colonize Florida; but the Spaniards, who claimed the country, surprised the infant settlement, and massacred nearly all its inhabitants, not sparing even the women and children, a. d. 1564. Based upon the cemetery residents, there must have been some survivors!
This slaughter was soon avenged by Dominique de Gourgues, a French soldier and adventurer who had served in the French army in Italy. He was captured by the Spanish, then by the Turks and served as a galley slave under both. After his release, he led expeditions to Africa and South America.
When Dominique de Gourgues heard of the 1565 massacre by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, of the French Huguenot colony at Fort Caroline on the Florida coast, he fitted out three ships and, joining forces with the Native Americans of the region, captured the Spanish fort of San Mateo (formerly Fort Caroline). He ruthlessly put all the surviving garrison to death and nailed to a tree a sign saying, “Hanged, not as Spaniards, but as traitors, robbers, and murderers”; this was in reply to the Spanish claim that the French colonists were “hanged, not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans and heretics.” All prisoners were hanged!
Dominique de Gourgues made no attempt to form another colony, and did not even disturb the little Spanish city of St. Augustine, which remained as the only permanent settlement of Europeans on the coast north of the Gulf of Mexico during the sixteenth century.
Source: The American Encyclopedia of History, Biography and Travel Comprising Ancient and Modern History: the Biography of Eminent Men of Europe and America, and the Lives of Distinguished Travelers by Author: Thomas H. Prescott.