But the sacrifice offered could not satiate the thirst for blood which inflamed the desires of this persecutor, whose life had been steeped in atrocities. Perhaps he felt that a life of crime such as his, could have its guilt washed out only in the blood of poor innocents, who presumed to avow their purpose to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. The taste of Protestant blood he had just sipped seemed but to quicken his appetite. “Angry,” says Bancroft, “that any should have escaped, the Spaniards insulted the corpses of the dead with wanton barbarity;” and having celebrated mass, and reared a cross on the spot, and chosen for the site of a church the ground still smoking with the blood of a peaceful colony, Melendez went in pursuit of the shipwrecked fugitives, who were now the only survivors of the French Protestant settlement in East Florida. They had been cast upon the sands south of this city. In their wandering along the beach, they had reached the inlet of the Matanzas. Here they were found, a company of famished and forlorn men. To secure the destruction of these men more effectually, the cowardly assassin, Melendez, first contrived to obtain their confidence in his humanity, a virtue of which this creature in human shape was utterly incapable. They surrendered by capitulation, though a few, suspicious of treachery, distrusted the integrity of Melendez, and fled into the interior. The major part being secured, the captives, in successive bands, were ferried over the river and received among the Spaniards. On reaching the opposite shore, each man’s hands were pinioned behind him; and thus, like sheep to the slaughter, they were driven toward St. Augustine. But, as the company approached the fort, “a signal was made.”[7] Thereupon, the man in whose perfidious honor and humanity they had confided--(acting, it may be fairly presumed, on the principle that no faith was to be kept with heretics--a principle worthy of the Romish church, and which had been baptized and sanctified in oceans of Protestant blood)--this man, I say, amid a flourish of trumpets and drums, cut the throats of the whole company, not as “Frenchmen, but as heretics.”[8] Though the government of France looked on this thrilling scene of horror, in the destruction of her own peaceful subjects, unmoved, yet, adds the historian, “history has been more faithful, and has assisted humanity by giving to the crime of Melendez an infamous notoriety.” RETRIBUTION.