Near Jacksonville, FL

South. Not far, only about 100 miles, but south, and 10 degrees or so warmer than Brunswick, Georgia as freezing night time temps chill Georgia to the bone.

Mona has already begun needing backrubs and novice massages from me. “ Ted Coffelt, we could put you up on our fold out couch for a while if you could give Mona a couple of your deep healing massages!”

We entered Florida and stopped for the free fresh squeezed OJ at their I-95 Welcome Center. When we went back outside we found the most interesting RV we’d ever seen parked near ours.

These folks are from France and, if we translated their website correctly, shipped their custom built Mercedes All Terrain Camper  to Halifax , Nova Scotia, Canada, and have been full time RVing for a couple of years through North America.

We waited to see them come back out but they must have had seconds on the OJ.  We finally left but tucked one of our cards in their driver’s door with a Bon Voyage note on the back.

 Later we passed them coming toward us on nearby Amelia Island as we were taking A1A south to Jacksonville.  We try to stay off those interstates all we                                                   can.

Our destination was another fort.  This one, however, had a connection to one we had visited earlier that we did not expect.

Fort Caroline had been built in 1563 by the same Huguenots under Jean Ribault who built Charlesfort on Parris Island (They called it St. Elena) south of Beaufort, South Carolina (see post of about a week ago). But Fort de la Caroline was built before Charlesfort, and it was built as a town and fort, not only a military outpost.

Here families built small homes, with the help of the Timucuan Indians, who like the Yamacraw , Guale, and the Yamasee  to the north, soon came to know their European friends were not to be trusted as true friends. But the Spanish to the south were these French settlers real fear.

The first shipload of settlers became quite unhappy with their lot after Ribault left them to go north and build Charlesfort. But by the time they were ready to build their own ship and return to France Ribault showed up with hundreds of new Huguenot settlers and supplies, so they stayed.

Then Ribault led a group of the soldiers to attack the Spanish at St. Augustine (the Spanish had not yet built a fort of any kind). Unfortunately for him a storm blew his ships farther south than the Spanish encampment and when the Spanish, under Pedro Menendez, heard of the botched attack they went north and found only the villagers at Fort de la Caroline. 

It was a massacre. Only about 60 women and children were spared and they were taken back to St. Augustine as Protestant heretics. Their fate has become lost to time.

As to the beached French and Ribault still south of St. Augustine, in an area called Matanzas, Pedro Menendez next sent his men south and killed every one of them where they stood.

Thus ended the forays into the new world’s Atlantic Coast by the French, for Charlesfort, you will remember, was deserted the following year when Jean Ribault never returned from Florida.

The Spanish never rebuilt the destroyed Caroline and town, for they were growing their own capital city at St. Augustine.  In fact, the entire site has been lost.

The fort at the national park is a ‘best guess’ reconstruction from drawings of the 1500’s. The size is about right, and they know that the bake ovens were located outside the fort away from the powder magazine.  That’s about it. I guess then we can sort of forgive the 1960’s builders for using telephone poles and nuts and bolts in the reconstruction.

Even the site of the Ribault Monument, A tall granite obelisk brought by him from France to mark this first French settlement in the new world is a guess.  Only the knowledge that it stood somewhere on a southern shore bluff overlooking the May River, which is now called the St. John, is sure. But a sort-of copy of it exists near the reconstructed fort.

We are living tonight on the edge of what became the capital city of La Florida, St. Augustine City, at another Home Depot.  The last had a Chick Fil-a.  This one has one too! And a Sonny’s Barbque AND a Steak and Shake, each within about 50 yards of the FROG’s door.

TY Home Depot!

-Ken