Thus StAugustine became the patron saint of this first town in the United States. Here slavery struck root, and here the Spanish Papist and the French Huguenot, brought out of civilized and Christianized Europe were set down blindfolded on the wild and inhospitable shores of Florida, like two game-cocks, to fight out their religious and implacable hatred. It was here that these ‘children of the sun’ showed the red men of the American forests that they too were human and mortal. Here, a few days later, the Spaniards began that merciless cut-throat religious butchery of Huguenots, to the astonishment of the savages of the primeval forests of America which finds a parallel on the pages of history only in the lesson which it taught in refined Paris just seven years later on St Bartholomew’s day. All the world knows how the swift vengeance of Pedro Menendez de Aviles descended upon the unfortunate colonists of Laudonnière and Ribault and destroyed them, with very few exceptions, in September 1565. On the other hand, every one has heard how the Spaniards, almost all except the absent leader, expiated their murderous cruelty in April 1568, under the retributive justice of De Gourgues. The Spanish settlers of Florida were thus as completely exterminated by the French as the French three years before had been exterminated by the Spaniards. After this till 1574, the Spaniards maintained possession of Florida, as far north as the Chesapeake Bay, under Menendez, who had been appointed at first Adelantado of Florida, and subsequently also Governor of Cuba. He caused an elaborate and official survey of the whole coast to be made and recorded, both in writing and in charts. Barcia tells the whole interesting story, but the charts seem to have been lost, though the description, or parts of it, remains. Menendez returned to Spain and died in 1574, just as he had been invested with the command of an ‘invincible’ armada of three hundred ships, and twenty thousand men to act against England and Flanders. All his North American acquisitions and surveys seem to have at once fallen into neglect. Not a Spanish town had been founded north of StAugustine. His Spanish missionaries sent among the Indians had gained no solid foot hold. Spain however still claimed possession, on paper, of the whole coast up to Newfoundland, though she could not boast of a single place of actual occupation.