survey, and all these too at his own expense. Such is the fascination of
royal grants. He was given three years to perform these wonders, in
which so many others had failed. He was to survey the coasts up to
Chesapeake Bay, explore inlets and find out the hidden straits to
Cathay. Thus armed and instructed this Spanish pioneer of Virginia
history and geography returned to his native Asturias, raised an army,
manned and fitted out a fleet with many soldiers and sailors, and 500
negro slaves. He embarked at Cadiz with eleven ships on the 29th of June
1565, a fortnight after Ribault with his seven ships had left
Portsmouth. From Porto Rico the Adelantado, in his hot haste to
forestall the French, took a new route north of StDomingo, through the
Lucayan islands and the Bahamas, to the coast of Florida at the River of
StJohn, on the 28th of August, the day after the arrival of the French a
few miles north. Here Menendez entered the inlet, landed his five
hundred African negro slaves, founded a town, the first in what is now
the United States, and named it StAugustine, because he made his
land-fall on the saint's-day of the great African bishop. Thus
StAugustine became the patron saint of this first town in the United
States. Here slavery struck root, and here the Spanish Papist and the
French Huguenot, brought out of civilized and Christianized Europe were
set down blindfolded on the wild and inhospitable shores of Florida,
like two game-cocks, to fight out their religious and implacable hatred.
It was here that these 'children of the sun' showed the red men of the
American forests that they too were human and mortal. Here, a few days
later, the Spaniards began that merciless cut-throat religious butchery
of Huguenots, to the astonishment of the savages of the primeval forests
of America which finds a parallel on the pages of history only in the
lesson which it taught in refined Paris just seven years later on
StBartholomew's day.