previous next
[66] and he now displayed the most generous
Chap. II.} 1565
sympathy, not only furnishing a liberal supply of provisions, but relinquishing a vessel from his own fleet. Preparations were continued; the colony was on the point of embarking, when sails were descried. Ribault had arrived to assume the command; bringing with him supplies of every kind, emigrants with their families, garden seeds, implements of husbandry, and the various kinds of domestic animals. The French, now wild with joy, seemed about to acquire a home, and Calvinism to become fixed in the inviting regions of Florida.

But Spain had never relinquished her claim to that territory; where, if she had not planted colonies, she had buried many hundreds of her bravest sons. Should the proud Philip II. abandon a part of his dominions to France? Should he suffer his commercial monopoly to be endangered by a rival settlement in the vicinity of the West Indies? Should the bigoted Romanist permit the heresy of Calvinism to be planted in the neighborhood of his Catholic provinces? There had appeared at the Spanish court a bold commander, well fitted for acts of reckless hostility. Pedro Melendez de Aviles had, in a long career of military service, become accustomed to scenes of blood; and his natural ferocity had been confirmed by his course of life. Often, as a naval officer, encountering pirates, he had become inured to acts of prompt and unsparing vengeance. He had acquired wealth in Spanish America, which was no school of benevolence; and his conduct there had provoked an inquiry, which. after a long arrest, ended in his conviction. The nature of his offences is not apparent; the justice of

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
West Indies (1)
France (France) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
John Ribault (1)
Melendez Aviles (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: