A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  A tall woman in her fifties, with molasses-colored eyes, Lyn was an unlikely champion of the Huguenot story. She spoke no French, had hated history in school, and was raised as a Southern Baptist, a creed that differed from Calvinism on such doctrinal matters as predestination. She’d also lived in Jacksonville for almost twenty years before learning of Fort Caroline’s history. Her enlightenment occurred in 2001, when a visiting speaker at her church told of the Spanish massacre of the Protestants.

  “I just sat there and wept,” Lyn recalled, wet-eyed at the memory. “And I wondered, Why is this history hidden from us? These people died for their faith and we’ve forgotten them.”

  This wasn’t strictly true; we were sitting on a bench in a national park named for the French fort. But to Lyn, the park was part of the problem: it was a secular government site and its plaques and museum dealt very delicately with religious issues. Also, no one knew for sure whether the park occupied the true location of the original La Caroline.

  Lyn felt called to rectify this. “God asked me to claim a land so the city of Jacksonville could remember the Huguenots’ sacrifice,” she said. Then one day, escorting her grandchildren to a downtown playground, she’d gazed across the road and seen the spot she’d been guided to. “The land that God told me to claim was a power plant.”

  At first, Lyn thought she’d heard God wrong. A power plant? But then she learned that the plant occupied the site of Cow Ford, a nineteenth-century pioneer crossing that grew into Jacksonville. “In the Bible there are gateways to cities,” she said, “and this was the gateway to ours.”

  Soon after her vision, the plant was torn down, leaving a large vacant lot. So Lyn, an interior decorator, took on a second career, lobbying officials to create a park on the plant site to honor the city’s founders. She showed me a slick portfolio of photographs and sketches she’d assembled for this effort. “God told me how to do it.”

  The park was only part of Lyn’s mission. A few months before my visit, she’d also helped organize a ceremony called “identification repentance.” As she began telling me about the ceremony, using terms like “intercessors” and “blood covenants,” I confessed that I couldn’t picture the ritual she described.

  “We’ll watch it on video, then,” she said. Driving to her church, King of Kings, we were met by her husband, Ted Corley, a part-time pastor with combed-back silver hair. He led us to an audiovisual room and put in a video marked “Reconciliation.” On the TV screen appeared a woman in a long skirt, speaking from an altar about the horrors of Spanish conquest and “the darkness” it brought down on America.

  “That’s Ana Mendez,” Lyn said. “She’s a Spanish woman from a Jewish family who became a voodoo priestess in Mexico City and converted to Christianity while in a mental asylum. She’s led identification repentances all over the world.”

  The camera panned across the church to twenty people walking down the aisle, clutching Bibles and Huguenot flags. These were French Protestants who had come to Jacksonville for the ceremony. They were joined at the altar by Hispanics from the congregation. Ana Mendez knelt beside them and said, “I have a great pain in my heart, I come here, I cannot lift my head because of what we have done. We have killed dreams, we have killed this holy land.” Her voice rose, becoming a wail. “I cannot live with this anymore. Forgive us! Forgive us!”

  One of the French then spoke. “For all of you of Spanish heritage, we forgive. Jesus paid the price. We forgive like He forgave us, today we declare here on this land, forgiveness from French Huguenots to all those descendants of the Spanish in America.”

  Up to this point, the ceremony seemed an emotional act of repentance and absolution. Then it became something else, more akin to an exorcism. “Now we order them to leave,” Ana Mendez shouted. “All the powers of darkness the Spanish brought to this country, leave! All the religious spirits brought here to destroy the work of God, leave! Leave the shores of America!”

  As the congregants wept and waved their arms, Mendez brought the story to modern times. “Forty years ago, prayer was taken from the United States. The work of the devil against prayer, we declare it finished! We renounce those spirits and cast them out and welcome worship, we welcome the Holy Spirit as king. To be ruler of America!”

  Lyn turned off the tape. “That’s identification repentance,” she said. “To speak God’s word over the future, to redeem the land from what the enemy has seized so that we can take up what was cut off.”

  I wasn’t sure who “the enemy” referred to—Spain? Catholicism? The U.S. government?—or what, precisely, was to be “taken up.”

  Ted patiently explained. Jacksonville was part of a movement called “spiritual warfare” or “spiritual mapping,” which held that Christians should attack “territorial spirits” sent by Satan. Christians needed to locate the source of their community’s evil and cast it out, through prayer. I later read literature he recommended, which spoke of hitting “satanic command and control centers” with “smart bomb praying.” In some cities, prayer targeted a gang, or a non-Christian cult, or the teachings of a liberal college. In Jacksonville, it was aimed at the long-ago slaughter of French Protestants by Spanish Catholics.

  “The blood of martyrs for the Gospels was spilled here, long before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock,” Ted said. “The very fruit of our nation was sacrificed for what America is.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “A nation built on faith. The French wanted this to be Zion. They thought they were going to establish in the New World what they couldn’t in the Old.” Ted paused, beaming at me. “Isaiah 62 says Jerusalem is Zion. We add Jacksonville.”

  I’d been to Jerusalem; it didn’t much resemble Jacksonville. As a secular Jew, I also wasn’t sure where I fit into this picture. But mostly I felt like a bystander. In the 1560s, the religious wars of Europe had spilled across the Atlantic. Now they’d spilled forward in time, animating holy warriors in present-day Florida.

  “Philip II was the most evil man who ever lived,” Lyn said. “He wanted the Catholic Church to control the world, and it’s not over.”

  St. Augustine was about to hold an annual mass commemorating Menéndez’s founding of the Spanish city. A day later, Lyn’s church would hold its own remembrance, of Huguenots slaughtered by the Catholics.

  “I used to love going to St. Augustine, but that was before I knew its history,” Lyn said. “Now I stay away. That’s the enemy’s land.”

  WHEN PEDRO MENÉNDEZ learned that French sailors had come ashore near St. Augustine, he quickly marched off to meet them. Following the coast south, he found a French party huddled on the far side of a river too deep to ford. Menéndez hid his soldiers behind dunes and went to the water’s edge with an interpreter. One of the French swam across and said Ribault’s ships had been wrecked by the storm. He asked for safe passage so the 125 French castaways with him could return to La Caroline.

  Menéndez replied that he had taken the French fort and executed its Protestants. “I had to make war with fire and blood,” he said, “against all those who came to sow this hateful doctrine.” Nor would he promise safe passage to the castaways.

  The French offered their weapons—and, one account claims, a ransom—in exchange for their lives. Again, Menéndez demurred. The French should “give themselves up to my mercy,” he declared, “that I might do with them that which our Lord ordered.”

  Exhausted, half starved, and unaware that Spanish soldiers lay in wait, the French surrendered to Menéndez’s mercy. “Since they were all Lutherans,” wrote a priest in the Spanish party, “his Lordship decided to condemn them all to death.”

  The priest, however, prevailed on Menéndez to spare any French who declared themselves “Christian”—that is, Catholic. A dozen claimed to be so. Menéndez, in a letter to King Philip, said only that he spared “great big men” and carpenters and caulkers “for whom we have much need.” As for the rest, numbering about 110, “I had their hands tied behind t
hem and had them stabbed to death.”

  Twelve days later, at the same river and on the same terms, another group of French castaways surrendered, including the fleet commander, Jean Ribault. Again, they were ferried across the water, tied up, and asked whether they were “Catholics or Lutherans.” Jean Ribault replied “that all who were there were of the new religion,” and began intoning a psalm. He was stabbed with a knife, stuck with a pike, and then beheaded. More than a hundred others were executed in similar fashion.

  “He only spared the fifers, drummers and trumpeters,” a Spaniard wrote of Menéndez, “and four more who said that they were Catholics.” One French survivor later reported that the musicians were “kept alive to play for dancing.” The river where Menéndez slew the two parties of French became known as Matanzas, Spanish for “the Slaughters,” a name it still bears today.

  “He acted as an excellent inquisitor,” a Spanish historian wrote of Menéndez in 1567, lauding his execution of unabashed heretics. “He was very merciful in granting them a noble and honorable death, by cutting off their heads, when he could legally have burnt them alive.”

  Menéndez, in his own account, emphasized the practical value of his actions. “I think it is a very great fortune that this man be dead,” he wrote of Ribault. “He could do more in one year than another in ten, for he was the most experienced sailor and corsair known.”

  Lurid accounts of the Florida massacres soon circulated in France, inciting outrage and calls for revenge. In 1568, a French force attacked the Spanish garrison at the former La Caroline, surprising soldiers who “were still picking their teeth” after dinner. The French slaughtered hundreds of Spanish, hanging some of them from the same trees where Menéndez had hanged prisoners three years before.

  This massacre salved French anger and pride but did nothing to halt Spain’s reconquest of Florida. Menéndez, unlike De Soto, was as efficient a colonizer as he was a killer. He recruited Spanish farm families, paying their passage and furnishing them with land, livestock, and slaves—the first African slaves imported to a North American colony. He made peace with several of Florida’s warlike tribes, in one case accepting a chief’s sister as his wife, although he already had a wife in Spain. Within a few years, Menéndez had founded a string of fortified settlements along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and supported the establishment of missions as far north as the Chesapeake Bay, a few miles from the future Jamestown.

  Most of these beachheads were short-lived, as was Menéndez, who died in 1574 while readying an armada to attack northern Europe. But the camp he’d hastily erected at St. Augustine in 1565 grew into a substantial garrison. By the late 1500s, several decades before Plymouth’s founding, St. Augustine had a fortress, a church, a monastery, a hospital, shops, and more than a hundred dwellings, all laid out in strict accordance with Spanish town planning.

  Even so, it was a precarious outpost, beset by mutinies, pirate raids, plague, fires, Indian hostility, and other woes. Much the same was true of every early colony on the continent. Between Ponce de León’s “discovery” of Florida in 1513 and the founding of Jamestown in 1607, Europeans planted dozens of settlements across the future lower forty-eight states. Neither St. Augustine nor any of the others thrived. But alone among them all, the Florida city survived.

  ST. AUGUSTINE TODAY is almost an exurb of Jacksonville, with a population one one-hundredth the size of the sprawling metropolis. But the two communities’ very different histories have given St. Augustine a certain hauteur, and nouveau Jacksonville a degree of resentment. Since the early nineteenth century, St. Augustine has attracted artists, Gilded Age titans, and millions of tourists. Jacksonville got industry and a pro football team. Travel writers flocked to St. Augustine to extol the quaint charms of the country’s oldest European settlement. Sports writers visited Jacksonville for the Super Bowl and derided the host city as so devoid of charm that it “makes Tampa look like Paris.”

  As if this abuse weren’t cruel enough, it gave St. Augustine an undeserved historic primacy. As the park ranger Craig Morris pointed out, it was the French settlement at Fort Caroline that caused Menéndez to land at St. Augustine in the first place. And the colony that arose there was poorly sited, beside a harbor far inferior to Jacksonville’s.

  “If it wasn’t for the French coming here,” he said, “St. Augustine wouldn’t exist. It’d just be a Bubba inlet, a podunk fishing village on a lousy little entrance to the sea.” Craig also hated what the Spanish city had become. He called it “St. Tourist Trap.”

  On my first approach to St. Augustine, Craig’s nickname seemed sadly accurate. The stone walls that once girded the old city had mostly crumbled, giving way to a moat of tourist schlock: mini-golf, alligator farm, chocolate factory, wax museum, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! The traffic circling the historic quarter was slowed by choo-choo trains out of Thomas the Tank Engine and buses marked “Trolley of the Doomed,” one of twelve ghost tours on offer in St. Augustine. “We’ll Drive You to an Early Grave!”

  Breaching this gaudy perimeter, I entered a grid of narrow streets roughly a mile square. Architecturally, the Spanish quarter retained a pleasant Old World feel, its flat-fronted stone buildings painted in gay pastels and adorned with second-floor verandas—rather like the misnamed French Quarter of New Orleans, which was mostly built during a period of Spanish occupation in the late eighteenth century.

  But the street scene in the country’s oldest European city was indelibly modern American. The main colonial avenue, St. George, had become a pedestrian mall clotted with commerce that made a nonsense of the city’s history: Old Tyme Photo, the Pirate Haus hostel, Fountain of Youth smoothies, Heritage Walk (“21 Unique Shops”)—anything that evoked the past, no matter how anachronistically. Within minutes of stepping onto St. George, I found myself trapped in a scrum of shopping bags, boys in horned helmets waving plastic swords, and jostling tour guides dressed as Goths, Wild West sheriffs, and Cockney thugs.

  Finally breaking free, I fled to the old town plaza, with its tolling bells and cathedral. In a handsome stone building I found the office of Bill Adams, director of heritage tourism for the city. He took me on a walk through old St. Augustine, pointing out the many buildings that had been saved from the bulldozer and restored in recent years.

  “The preservation story here is a triumph,” he said, ending our tour at a rebuilt Spanish tavern on St. George. “But history—real history—is a loser in this town.” He gazed glumly at the horde crawling by on the street outside. “People don’t come here to learn about the past. All St. Augustine gives them is a historical ambience for shopping.”

  The tavern was part of a two-acre museum Bill oversaw called the Colonial Spanish Quarter, a collection of reconstructed buildings where men and women in period dress demonstrated crafts and cooking. “We Make History Every Day!” its motto proclaimed. Bill had mixed feelings about living history, but saw it as a way to attract tourist dollars for the upkeep of historic properties.

  “Unfortunately, it’s a loser too,” he said, as a woman in a long skirt and tight bodice served us beer from a cask. The colonial quarter attracted only a fraction of the 1.5 million people who crowded the shops along St. George each year, and a quarter the number who flocked to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

  Bill blamed this on Disney World and Epcot Center, which many tourists visited before coming to St. Augustine. “People expect history to be fast-paced and entertaining, which is the opposite of Spanish colonial life.” He drained his beer as reenactors came in for a break from weaving and blacksmithing. “Sometimes I think we should dress these people in leather masks and turn this into an Inquisition torture chamber. Then we’d have to beat tourists off with a stick.”

  Historic St. Augustine had another problem, which dated to 1821, when Spain ceded Florida to the United States. Americans started visiting the town, drawn by its warm climate and exoticism. Mostly Protestant New Englanders, they were shocked and titillated by St. Augustine’s “
popery,” describing masked carnivals and a Good Friday custom known as “shooting the Jews,” when locals hung effigies and peppered them with bullets. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who traveled to St. Augustine in 1827 to recover from tuberculosis, was one of many who relished the city’s “dim vestiges of a romantic past” and ancient stones redolent of “a thousand heavy histories.”

  Hucksters quickly learned to trade on this nostalgia by wreathing the city in hoary fictions. At one time, four different buildings laid claim to being the oldest city’s oldest house, including one allegedly built by Franciscan monks in 1565 (Florida had no Franciscans at that time, and no houses in St. Augustine survive from before 1700). Ponce de León’s “fountain of youth” also cropped up at competing sites, even though the conquistador didn’t land at St. Augustine, much less find a youth-restoring spring. The city started holding an annual commemoration of his “discovery,” and the oil baron Henry Flagler built the famous Hotel Ponce de Leon, a faux-Moorish pile with a replica of the fountain and murals of the conquistador.

  By 1930, St. Augustine’s past had become so obscured by legend that the city named a “historical fact-finding commission” to distinguish truth from fiction. But locals resisted the commission’s suggestions, leaving intact what a Florida Historical Society writer decried as rampant “flimflams” concocted “for the mercenary hoaxing of tourists.” Seven decades later, it was still hard to tell bona fide from counterfeit history. Old St. Augustine, in effect, was a buyer-beware attraction, a mile-square adjunct to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

  Buying a ticket for the sightseeing train’s “historic package,” I chugged by the “Oldest House,” the “Oldest Wooden School House,” and the “Authentic Oldest Drugstore,” then climbed off at “Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.” This was one of St. Augustine’s biggest draws and a mecca for school groups studying Florida history. A sign at the ticket booth billed the park as the place where Ponce de León discovered North America and drank from an ancient Indian spring.