America's Hidden History

Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

Kenneth C. Davis

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780061118197
• eBook ISBN: 9780061801174
• Subtopic: American Civil War History

Part I

Isabella’s Pigs

1469 Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon are married.

1492 The Reconquest (la reconquista) forces the last Moors out of Spain.

As part of a revived Inquisition, all Jews are forced to convert or leave Spain.

Christopher Columbus arrives in the Caribbean; he names Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and founds the settlement of La Navidad.

1497 John Cabot, an Italian sailing for England, sights North America, probably around Newfoundland, and claims the territory for England.

1501 Amerigo Vespucci, sailing for Portugal, reaches the South American coast. Upon his return, he writes to his patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, that he has voyaged to a “new world.” A mapmaker attaches Amerigo’s name to the New World.

1509 Henry VIII is crowned king of England and marries Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella.

1516 King Ferdinand dies; Charles I, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, inherits the Spanish throne.

1528 Pánfilo de Narváez, accompanied by Cabeza de Vaca, leads a Spanish attempt to conquer Florida.

1531 King Henry VIII divorces Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn. In 1534, the Act of Supremacy declares the king to be the head of the Church of England, completing the break with Rome.

1536 John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is published, expanding the Protestant Reformation.

1539–1543 Hernando de Soto leads a Spanish army through the Southeast; de Soto dies on the banks of the Mississippi on May 21, 1542.

1553 Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, becomes queen of England. In 1554, she marries Philip II, the future king of Spain, but dies childless in 1558.

1556 Philip II becomes king of Spain.

1558 Queen Elizabeth I succeeds her half sister Queen Mary.

1564 French Huguenots establish Fort Caroline near the St. Johns River in Florida.

1565 St. Augustine, Florida, founded.

Fort Caroline massacre.

1588 The Spanish Armada is defeated by a smaller British fleet.

I have established warm friendship with the king of that land, so much so that he was proud to call me and treat me as a brother. But even should he change his attitude and attack the men of La Navidad, he and his people know nothing about arms and go naked, as I have already said; they are the most timorous people in the world.

—Christopher Columbus, letter written as he returned to Spain (1493)

Upon seeing the disaster we had suffered, our misery and distress, the Indians sat down with us and all began to weep out of compassion for our misfortune, and for more than half an hour they wept so loud and so sincerely that it could be heard far away.

—Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1555)

The pigs De Soto brought from Cuba may have been descendants of the pigs Queen Isabella enjoined Columbus to take with him on his second voyage.

—Charles Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun (1997)

St. Augustine, Florida—September 1565

IT WAS A STORM-DARK NIGHT in late summer as Admiral Pedro Menéndez pressed his army of five hundred infantrymen up Florida’s Atlantic Coast with a Crusader’s fervor. Lashed by hurricane winds and sheets of driving rain, these sixteenth-century Spanish shock troops slogged through the tropical downpour in their heavy armor, carrying pikes, broadswords, and harquebuses, primitive, front-loading muskets that had been used with devastating effect by the conquistador armies of Cortés and Pizarro in Mexico and Peru. Each man also carried a twelve-pound sack of bread and a bottle of wine.

Guided by local Timucuan tribesmen, the Spanish assault force had spent two difficult days negotiating the treacherous thirty-eight-mile trek from St. Augustine, their recently established settlement further down the coast. Slowed by knee-deep muck that sucked at their boots, they had been forced to cross rain-swollen rivers, home to the man-eating monsters and flying fish of legend. Wet, tired, and miserable, they were far from home in a land that had completely swallowed two previous Spanish armies—conquistadors who themselves had been conquered by tropical diseases, starvation, and hostile native warriors.

But Admiral Menéndez was undeterred. Far more at home at sea than leading infantry, Admiral Menéndez drove his men with such ferocity because he was gambling—throwing the dice that he could reach the enemy before they struck him. His objective was the French settlement of Fort Caroline, France’s first foothold in the Americas, located near present-day Jacksonville, on what the French called the River of May. On this pitch-black night, the small, triangular, wood-palisaded fort was occupied by a few hundred men, women, and children. They were France’s first colonists in the New World—and the true first pilgrims in America.

Attacking before dawn on September 20, 1565, with the frenzy of holy warriors, the Spanish easily overwhelmed Fort Caroline. With information provided by a French turncoat, the battle-tested Spanish soldiers used ladders to quickly mount the fort’s wooden walls. Inside the settlement, the sleeping Frenchmen—most of them farmers or laborers rather than soldiers—were caught off guard, convinced that no attack could possibly come in the midst of such a terrible storm. But they had fatally miscalculated. The veteran Spanish harquebusiers swept in on the nightshirt-clad or naked Frenchmen, who leapt from their beds and grabbed futilely for weapons. Their attempts to mount any real defense were hopeless. The battle lasted less than an hour.

Although some of the French defenders managed to escape the carnage, 132 soldiers and civilians were killed in the fighting in the small fort. The Spanish suffered no losses and only a single man was wounded. The forty or so French survivors fortunate enough to reach the safety of some boats anchored nearby watched helplessly as Spanish soldiers flicked the eyeballs of the French dead with the points of their daggers.¹ The shaken survivors then scuttled one of their boats and sailed the other two back to France.

The handful of Fort Caroline’s defenders who were not lucky enough to escape were quickly rounded up by the Spanish. About fifty women and children were also taken captive, later to be shipped to Puerto Rico. The men were hanged without hesitation. Above the dead men, the victorious Admiral Menéndez placed a sign reading, “I do this, not as to Frenchmen, but as to Lutherans.” Renaming the captured French settlement San Mateo (St. Matthew) and its river San Juan (St. John), Menéndez later reported to Spain’s King Philip II that he had taken care of the “evil Lutheran sect.”

A priest who accompanied the Spanish army as chaplain took special pleasure in recording the large number of “Lutheran” Bibles they had captured and destroyed, adding, “The greatest victory which I feel for this event is the victory which Our Lord has given us so that his Holy Gospel may be planted and preached in these parts.” Of Admiral Menéndez, the chaplain wrote, “The fire and desire he has to serve Our Lord in throwing down and destroying this Lutheran sect, enemy of our Holy Catholic Faith, does not allow him to feel weary in his work.”

Victims of the political and religious wars raging across Europe, the ill-fated inhabitants of Fort Caroline were not “Lutherans” at all. For the most part, they were Huguenots, French Protestants who followed the teachings of John Calvin, the French-born Protestant theologian. Having built and settled Fort Caroline more than a year earlier, these French colonists had been left all but defenseless by the questionable decision of one of their leaders, Jean Ribault. An experienced sea captain, Ribault had sailed off from Fort Caroline a few days earlier with between five hundred and six hundred men aboard his flagship, the Trinité, and three other galleons. Against the advice of René de Laudonnière, his fellow commander at Fort Caroline, Ribault planned to strike the new Spanish settlement before the recently arrived Spanish could establish their defenses. Unfortunately for Ribault and his shipmates, as well as those left behind at Fort Caroline, the hurricane that slowed Admiral Menéndez and his army also ripped into the small French flotilla, scattering and grounding most of the ships, sending hundreds of men to their deaths. According to René de Laudonnière, it was “the worst weather ever seen on this coast.”²

Unaware that Fort Caroline had fallen, groups of French survivors of the storm-savaged fleet came ashore near present-day Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral. Trudging north, they were spotted by Indians, who alerted Menéndez. The bedraggled Frenchmen were met and captured by Spanish troops at a coastal inlet about seventeen miles south of St. Augustine on September 29, 1565.

Expecting to be imprisoned or perhaps ransomed, the exhausted and hungry Frenchmen surrendered without a fight. They were ferried across the inlet to a group of dunes, where they were fed what proved to be a last meal. At the admiral’s orders, between 111 and 200 of the French captives—documents differ on the exact number—were put to death. In his own report to King Philip, Admiral Menéndez wrote matter-of-factly, if not proudly, “I caused their hands to be tied behind them, and put them to the knife.”³ Sixteen of the company were allowed to live—self-professed Catholics who were spared at the behest of the priest, who reported, “All the rest died for being Lutherans and against our Holy Catholic Faith.”

Twelve days later, on October 11, the remaining French survivors, including Captain Jean Ribault, whose Trinité had been beached further south, straggled north to the same inlet. Met by Menéndez and ignorant of their countrymen’s fate, they too surrendered to the Spanish. A handful escaped in the night, but on the next morning, 134 more French captives were ferried across the same inlet and executed; once again, approximately a dozen were spared. Those who escaped death had either professed to be Catholic, hastily agreed to convert, or possessed some skills that Admiral Menéndez thought might be useful in settling St. Augustine—the first permanent European settlement in the future United States, born and baptized in a religious bloodbath.

Although Jean Ribault offered Menéndez a large ransom to secure his safe return to France, the Spanish admiral refused. Ribault suffered the same fate as his men. Following Ribault’s execution, the French leader’s beard and a piece of his skin were sent to King Philip II. His head was cut into four parts, set on pikes, and displayed in St. Augustine.⁴ Reporting back to King Philip II, Admiral Menéndez wrote, “I think it great good fortune that this man be dead, for the King of France could accomplish more with him and fifty thousand ducats than with other men and five hundred thousand ducats; and he could do more in one year, than another in ten.”⁵

JUST SOUTH OF modern St. Augustine, hidden off the well-worn tourist path of T-shirt stands, sprawling condos, and beachfront hotels, stands a rather inconspicuous national monument called Fort Matanzas. Accessible by a short ferry ride across a small river, it was built by the Spanish in 1742 to protect St. Augustine from surprise attack. Fort Matanzas is more a large guardhouse than full-fledged fort. The modest structure, about fifty feet long on each side, was constructed of coquina, a local stone formed from clamshells and quarried from a nearby island. Tourists who come across the simple tower certainly find it far less impressive than the formidable Castillo de San Marco, the star-shaped citadel that dominates St. Augustine’s historic downtown.

Unlike other Spanish sites in Florida named for Catholic saints or holy days, the fort’s name comes from the Spanish word matanzas, meaning “killings” or “slaughters.” Fort Matanzas stands near the site of the grim massacre of the few hundred luckless French soldiers in an undeclared war of religious animosity. This largely unremarked atrocity from America’s distant past was one small piece of the much larger struggle for the future of North America among contending European powers.

The notion of Spaniards fighting Frenchmen in Florida four decades before England established its first permanent settlement in America, and half a century before the Pilgrims sailed, is an unexpected notion to those accustomed to the familiar legends of Jamestown and Plymouth. The fact that these first settlers were Huguenots dispatched to establish a colony in America in 1564, motivated by having suffered the same sort of religious persecution that later drove the Pilgrims from England, may be equally surprising. That the mass execution of hundreds of French Protestants by Spanish Catholics could be mostly overlooked may be more surprising still. But this salient story speaks volumes about the rapacious quest for new territory and brutal religious warfare that characterized the European arrival in the future America.

That history begins with the Spanish. It commences not with Columbus sailing in 1492 but in 1469, the year in which the teenage cousins Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were married. Isabella and Ferdinand were a remarkable couple whose successes in uniting several fractious small kingdoms into a nation, eliminating the last vestiges of Islamic power in Iberia, revving up the Inquisition, and setting Spain on a path of world domination were extraordinary by any measure. Far from bit players in the American drama, they changed the course of history with their vision of a united, Christian Spain with a vast overseas empire. In chronicling the rise of that empire, Hugh Thomas wrote, “The work of Isabel in the first ten years of her time as both heiress and Queen of Castile was…remarkable by any standard. No woman in history has exceeded her achievement.”⁶

Born in April 1451, Isabella was the daughter of Castile’s King Juan. She came of age in a Europe that had one foot in the medieval age of knights and castles and one in the blooming Renaissance. Gutenberg’s first books were printed two years after Isabella’s birth, and his first Bible was produced in 1456. Constantinople had fallen to the Islamic Ottoman Turks in 1453, sending many Greek scholars fleeing to Italy, where the classics were rediscovered, accelerating the rise of the Renaissance. The loss of Constantinople, a key crossroads in the Silk Road trade between Europe and Asia, forced Europeans to look for sea routes to the East, as the Ottomans imposed stiff tariffs on the Asian caravans bound for Europe.

The modern nation called Spain did not yet exist at Isabella’s birth. Instead, several small, warring kingdoms dominated the Iberian peninsula, with Castile among the most powerful of these. Isabella’s adolescence came during a time of tremendous intrigue and infighting, both within Castile and among the other Spanish kingdoms, as well as the emerging nations of Europe. These struggles were set, in turn, against the backdrop of the Moorish occupation of Granada, the southernmost region of Spain and the last bastion of Islamic power on the Iberian peninsula. Beginning in 711, the Moors—Arab and African Muslims from North Africa—had dominated Iberia, creating a culture rich in art, architecture, literature, and learning. For more than seven hundred years, the Moors had lived through shifting periods of coexistence and conflict with Christian Spain. With the rise of the Ottoman Empire threatening Europe from the east, the great conflict with Islam and the desire to recapture Jerusalem only grew more intense. In Isabella’s century, there was only one goal, one holy quest—la reconquista and the removal of the “heathens.”

Following her father’s death, the convent-educated Isabella was brought to the court of her older half brother, King Enrique IV, a notorious fop whose open homosexuality was noted by the court scribes. His inability to produce any offspring had inspired the derisive nickname “Enrique el Impotente.” Civil war among competing groups of nobles who questioned Enrique’s legitimacy as king and the likely poisoning of Isabella’s younger brother Alfonso by Enrique’s allies engulfed Castile in deadly intrigues. Striking a compromise, Isabella and her supporters acknowledged that Enriqu...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Isabella’s Pigs
• Part II: Hannah’s Escape
• Part III: Washington’s Confession
• Part IV: Warren’s Toga
• Part V: Arnold’s Boot
• Part VI: Lafayette’s Sword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Books by Kenneth C. Davis
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher