Huguenot in the gripe of Pedro Menendez!

But what was the scope of this enterprise, and the limits of the
Adelantado's authority? He was invested with power almost absolute, not
merely over the peninsula which now retains the name of Florida, but
over all North America, from Labrador to Mexico,--for this was the
Florida of the old Spanish geographers, and the Florida designated in
the commission of Menendez. It was a continent which he was to conquer
and occupy out of his own purse. The impoverished King contracted with
his daring and ambitious subject to win and hold for him the territory
of the future United States and British Provinces. His plan, as
subsequently developed and exposed at length in his unpublished letters
to Philip II., was, first, to plant a garrison at Port Royal, and next
to fortify strongly on Chesapeake Bay, called by him St. Mary's. He
believed that this bay was an arm of the sea, running northward and
eastward, and communicating with the Gulf of St. Lawrence, thus making
New England, with adjacent districts, an island. His proposed fort on
the Chesapeake, giving access, by this imaginary passage, to the seas of
Newfoundland, would enable the Spaniards to command the fisheries, on
which both the French and the English had long encroached, to the great
prejudice of Spanish rights. Doubtless, too, these inland waters gave
access to the South Sea, and their occupation was necessary to prevent
the French from penetrating thither; for that ambitious people, since
the time of Cartier, had never abandoned their schemes of seizing this
portion of the dominions of the King of Spain. Five hundred soldiers and
one hundred sailors must, he urges, take possession, without delay, of
Port Royal and the Chesapeake.

Preparation for his enterprise was pushed with a furious energy. His
force amounted to two thousand six hundred and forty-six persons, in