All of Ribaut’s vessels having been wrecked along the coast between St. Augustine and Canaveral, although most of the people escaped with their lives, they had no means of regaining Fort Caroline or of leaving the coast for any point of refuge. Wrecked and wretched, they moved northward along the coast, and at Matanzas, an inlet twenty miles below St. Augustine, they were met by Menendez, who had returned from Fort Caroline, and was informed of their shipwreck and condition by natives living along the coast. Ribaut asked safe conduct, but Menendez refused all overtures for terms of surrender, requiring unconditional submission to his will or clemency. The result was that, as fast as the French were brought across the inlet in small parties, he directed that they should all be killed. This sad tragedy is commemorated by the name, still borne by the inlet, Matanzas, the place of slaughter. The French Huguenots thus disposed of, Menendez proceeded to lay out and build his proposed city. A castle and religious house were first constructed, the castle as a protection against the Indians, or the French, should others come. The castle or fort was built of the trunks of trees, in an octagonal shape, near the present fort, and the dwellings were located in the southern portion of the peninsula on which the present city stands. The shoalness of the water on the bar was a protection against an attack by sea, and the bay on one side, and the Maria Sanchez Creek and St. Sebastian River on the other made the town secure against an attack by land. [Illustration: OLD SPANISH FORT ON MATANZAS RIVER.] Menendez, having secured the safety of his settlement, returned to Spain, little dreaming of the retribution soon to fall upon his fortified posts on the St. John’s from the hand of Dominic de Gourgues, who, with a force of some two hundred and fifty men, left France in 1568, with the purpose of avenging the massacre of his countrymen. Arriving on the coast in April, he passed the mouth of the St. John’s and brought his three vessels into Cumberland Sound. Here, communicating with the Indians, whom he found very hostile to the Spaniards, he gathered a large force of Indian allies, attacked the Spanish forts at the mouth of the St. John’s River, captured them after but little resistance, and then marched against Fort Caroline, changed to San Matteo. Although the fort was well garrisoned, the Spanish commander, believing that he was surrounded by a superior force, fled, and De Gourgues captured the fort, meeting with little resistance. In retaliation for the massacre of the Huguenots, he hung his prisoners to the same trees, with the inscription, burned upon a plank, that he did this “not as to Spaniards, but as to traitors, thieves, and murderers.”