The succeeding season (1564), another colonizing expedition, made up of Protestants, headed by René Goulaine de Laudonnière, and aided by the king, sought Carolina. Avoiding Port Royal as ill-omened, they established themselves on St. John's River. The emigrants were a dissolute set, as emigrants were apt to be in an age when the sweepings of European jails and gutters were thought to furnish good colonizing material for America. Laudonnière hung some of his followers for piracy against Spanish vessels; others were captured in the act by the Spaniards, and sold into slavery in the West Indies. What remained of the colony soon lost, through dishonesty and severity, the respect of the Indians, who had at first received the intruders kindly. When, in August, 1565, Sir John Hawkins, the noted slaver and navigator, appeared with his fleet, he was able to render the now half-starved settlers most needed help. Ribaut soon came also, with recruits, provisions, seeds, domestic animals, and farming implements, greatly to the joy of the little colony. Sidenote: The Spanish massacre. But this happiness was not of long duration. The attention of Philip II. of Spain was at length called to this colony of French heretics which was gaining a foothold upon his domain of Florida. In August, 1565, his agent, Pedro Melendez de Aviles, appeared on the scene and announced his purpose to "gibbet and behead all the Protestants in these regions." Melendez established St. Augustine, which is thus the oldest town in the United States east of the Mississippi, and then with blood-thirsty deliberateness proceeded to wipe the French settlement out of existence. French writers claim that nine hundred persons were cruelly massacred; and the Spanish estimate is not far below that number. Sidenote: The Huguenots avenged. A Gascon soldier, Dominic de Gourgues, soon came over (1567) to avenge the wrong done his fellow-Huguenots. He captured all the Spanish establishments left by Melendez, except St. Augustine. When he found, the following year, that he could not hold his prizes, he hung the Spanish prisoners to trees and hastened back to France. His king, however, being under the influence of Spain, disavowed this act of reprisal, and relinquished all further claim to Florida. 13. The French in Canada (1589-1608). Sidenote: De la Roche's ill-fated venture.