Matanzas — How the City Was Born in Blood

Stay right here by the water, friend, and look out at this pretty bay — because I promised you the truth of how this city was born, and it is a hard truth. Name's Ranger Boone Merrick. The Spanish word for this bay is Matanzas, and it means 'the slaughters,' and I'm about to tell you why.

Wind all the way back to fifteen sixty-five. Spain owns this coast on paper, but the French have gone and planted a colony of their own just up the shore — a fort full of Huguenots, French Protestants, which to the Catholic king of Spain is a double insult: foreigners on his land, and heretics besides. So the king sends a hard, able, ferociously devout naval commander named Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to deal with it. Menéndez lands right here, and on the eighth of September, fifteen sixty-five, he founds a town and names it for Saint Augustine. That town is the one under your feet. That's the birthday of the oldest city in America.

But founding it was the small part of his job. The French were the real job. Now here's where the sea takes a hand. The French load their soldiers onto ships to come attack Menéndez — and a hurricane roars up the coast and wrecks the whole French fleet on the beaches to the south. Hundreds of French soldiers, shipwrecked, weaponless, starving, staggering up the sand trying to get back to their fort.

And they come to an inlet they cannot cross — right down the bay from here. And there, across the water, is Menéndez with his Spanish soldiers. The French, exhausted and helpless, surrender to him. They throw themselves on his mercy.

He shows them none. In two separate groups, over two terrible days, Menéndez has the surrendered Frenchmen's hands bound, and he puts them to the sword — near two hundred and fifty men, killed at the water's edge because they would not renounce their Protestant faith and, plainly, because it was easier than feeding prisoners. A handful who claimed to be Catholic, and a few craftsmen he had use for, he spared. The rest he left on the sand.

Remember that when you order your coffee on the plaza. Now follow the bayfront north — we're almost back to where we began.