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the command of Captain Sir John Hawkins put into the River of May seeking fresh water. Later to achieve fame as one of Queen Elizabeth’s “sea dogs,” John Hawkins had started out in the African slave trade. But he, like the French, had learned that there was far more profit to be gained from stealing Spanish gold. Hawkins and other famed English sailors, including Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, enriched themselves and Queen Elizabeth’s royal treasury by looting Spain’s treasure galleons.
    Besides taking on supplies, Hawkins was willing to barter a seaworthy ship for some of the cannons and powder that protected Fort Caroline. With the English ship, Laudonnière and the remaining colonists prepared to return to France. But as they readied to sail, Captain Ribault and the promised relief from France arrived. Following his release from English prison, Ribault had returned and taken command of the fleet that arrived in late August 1565 with supplies and reinforcements. When he learned the Spaniards had arrived, Ribault set off on the fateful mission that cost his life and hundreds of others.
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    America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory a Atermath z
    Three years after the Fort Caroline massacre, the French exacted a measure of vengeance. A French naval force led by sea captain Dominique de Gourgues attacked the Spanish garrison at San Mateo in 1568 with the assistance of the Timucuans, who were now eager to turn on their Spanish conquerors. On the very spot where Admiral Mené-
    ndez had once hanged the Frenchmen, Gourgues did the same with his Spanish prisoners. Above these men, the sign read, “This is done, not as unto Spaniards, but as unto liars, thieves, and murderers.”
    But it did not end there. On August 23, 1572, nearly seven years after the Fort Caroline massacres, an assassin attempted to kill Admiral Coligny, the moving spirit behind the Fort Caroline expedition.
    On the next day—St. Bartholomew’s Day—a coordinated attack on Protestants swept over France. Admiral Coligny was murdered in his bed, his corpse thrown from a window. In Paris and soon across the country, a paroxysm of one-sided sectarian violence exploded.
    The precise number of Huguenots massacred during this anti-Protestant pogrom is uncertain. An estimated two thousand Protestants were killed in Paris, and as many as ten thousand died across France. Contemporary accounts describe bodies floating in French rivers for months afterward. In Rome, a jubilant Pope Gregory XIII ordered all the city’s bells to ring in a day of thanksgiving. It was also reported that the normally taciturn King Philip II actually smiled at the news.
    The slaughter of Fort Caroline’s colonists and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre resolved one of King Philip’s chief problems. The Protestant threat in France had been crushed. But another danger loomed | 34 \
    Isabella’s Pigs
    with a troublesome distant relative, England’s Queen Elizabeth.
    Unlike her predecessor, her half sister Queen Mary—a descendant of Isabella and a devout Catholic who purged Protestants, earned the nickname “Bloody Mary,” and then married Philip—Elizabeth was a Protestant. The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth had provided support to the Huguenots and sent troops to aid the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands, even though Spain and England were officially at peace. She also encouraged Francis Drake and others to raid Spanish ships and towns. During his voyage around the world in 1579, Drake had sailed into San Francisco Bay, claiming the region for Elizabeth and England, and freely attacked Spanish ships carrying gold from Peru as he completed the circumnavigation.
    After Queen Mary’s death, Philip considered marriage to Elizabeth as the solution to his “Protestant problem.” But as ruler of an increasingly Protestant country, Elizabeth realized that such a prospect was impossible. Since Philip could not marry her, he concluded, why not kill her?
    A series