African slaves in Florida before St. Augustine?

"Africans of unrecorded countries."

by Dale Cox

Fort Caroline National Memorial commemorates the ill-fated
French attempt to settle on Florida's St. Johns River.

Did France bring African slaves to Florida more than fifty years before the "first" slaves reached Virginia in 1619?

An enigmatic passage in the deposition of a settler who arrived in 1564 - one year before the founding of St. Augustine - suggests that slaves helped build a short-lived French settlement on the St. Johns River. The colony was called Fort Caroline, and it stood in present-day Jacksonville.

Slavery was not particularly new in North America when the French arrived on the Atlantic seaboard of today's United States. Hernando de Soto infamously enslaved hundreds of Native Americans during his brutal march through the Southeast, even using the weak as food for his dogs. Other Native Americans from the region were carried away as slaves by Spanish vessels that stopped along the coast to fish or trade. 

The first recorded European settlement in North America, in fact, was neither Pensacola nor St. Augustine and certainly not Jamestown or Plymouth. It was San Miguel de Guadalupe, a colony founded somewhere on the Georgia or South Carolina coast in 1526. Meager Spanish records verify that some African slaves accompanied the expedition and that its commander, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, intended to kidnap hundreds of Native Americans to send into slavery.

The St. Johns River, which the French called the River May.

San Miguel, like the first effort to settle Pensacola in 1559, failed, and the survivors sailed away.

The French came next, building Charlesfort at today's Marine Corps Training Base at Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1562. The colony lasted less than one year, but the French came back with a greater determination just two years later.

The site they selected this time was a low triangular island on what they called the River May. This early designation for the St. Johns River survives in today's community of Mayport and Naval Station Mayport, both located near the river's mouth. Led by Rene de Goulaine de Laudonniere, the settlers formed an alliance with local Timucua Indians and started building Fort Caroline.

Among the early French settlers was a man named Robert Melenche. He later gave a deposition about the founding of the colony:

A modern ship passes beneath the guns of Fort Caroline. A
recreation of the fort stands near the original site.

…In this armada they brought three ships; the General's ship was a galleon of over 200 tons, although it was not a vessel for mercantile traffic because it had been built for war. Another was a 120-ton ship, and still another, an 80-ton ship. Three hundred men went out in this armada, 110 sailors, 120 experienced soldiers, and the rest of them, officers of various rank. Besides these, there were many Africans of unrecorded countries. [1]

The last line of this excerpt is of particular note. Who were the "many Africans of unrecorded countries" put ashore in Florida by France in 1564? Not even one of their names is known, and Melenche says nothing more about them. France was engaged in the African slave trade by the time, and Melenche's failure to include the "many Africans" in his enumeration of the 300 men sent to America suggests they were slaves.

A gruesome fate awaited the colonists of Fort Caroline - and undoubtedly many of the Africans as well.

Many of the settlers died of sickness and malnutrition during the winter of 1564-1565. Others mutinied and sailed away. The survivors were about to give up when a relief expedition arrived in August 1565.

The earth and timber walls of the fort proved no match for
the Spanish soldiers that attacked on September 20, 1565.

At roughly the same time, however, the Spanish arrived just down the coast and founded St. Augustine. Determined to wipe out the French, who he regarded not only as interlopers but as heretics because they were Protestants, Spain's commander Pedro Menedez de Aviles led 500 men overland to Fort Caroline.

The Spanish soldiers advanced through rough terrain and torrents of rain, reaching a pond near the fort on September 19, 1565. They stormed Fort Caroline on the next morning, slaughtering virtually every man they found. Some forty or fifty of the French escaped over the walls and into the surrounding wilderness. Laudonniere was among them.

The only other survivors were in a group of 60 women and children spared by Menendez. Everyone else died, and Fort Caroline was no more.

The fate of the slaves of Fort Caroline is unknown. Most probably died in the massacre or in two subsequent slaughters carried out by Menendez against French shipwreck victims. A handful may have been among the survivors.

The site of the ill-fated French settlement has never been found, and many believe that it has been washed away by erosion. The story, however, is commemorated at Fort Caroline National Memorial in Jacksonville. It is a unit of the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve and is open to the public daily.

For more information, please visit the park's website:   https://www.nps.gov/timu/learn/historyculture/foca.htm.