Posted on 09/26/2008 4:25:26 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
It's an old story of a terrible storm that some believed was the hand of God. It scattered and sank a French fleet led by Jean Ribault as it bore down on a handful of Spanish ships sheltering with Pedro Menendez in a harbor at today's St. Augustine. Hundreds of Frenchmen, mostly Protestants, died either in the tempest, or of starvation and exposure, or at the hands of Catholic Spaniards who hunted down survivors in a bloody autumn genocide. Despite the passing of 443 years, archaeologists say the remains of those galleons still lie beneath the sand and water, a cultural holy grail waiting to be found...
John de Bry... director of the Center for Historical Archaeology in Melbourne... researched Ribault's fleet for the Lighthouse Archaeology Maritime Program based in St. Augustine, an institution dedicated to better understanding of the maritime history and archaeology of the city and this coast...
La Trinite, a 32-gun galleon, is believed to have been driven ashore on the north side of Cape Canaveral. Other ships, including the 29-gun royal galleon Emerillon, were wrecked along miles of coast north of La Trinite. French survivors struggled up the beach for weeks until they reached an inlet we know today as Matanzas -- which means slaughter or massacre in Spanish. Some 250 Frenchmen surrendered to the Spanish at the inlet. Almost every one was disarmed, bound and slain. Ribault died on the sand with his men. His red beard was sent to the Spanish king.
(Excerpt) Read more at news-journalonline.com ...
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Good read. Thanks.
Those bloody Spanish Amish!
Arnaud-Amaury would be proud.
In any case, I hope they can find and recover whatever remains.
Well if there is anywhere to start looking for a French fleet, the bottom of the ocean is always your best bet.
;’D
To this day, the sharks in that area prefer French cuisine.
Galleon was the style of war ships during that time, regardless if they were Spanish, French or English.
I tried to find info on google but no luck.
Wiki has a decent article on it. The French, English, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish pretty much always had the same kind of war ship. Each of course always tried to come up with something new, but once one of them did, the others would adopt it or even make it better. The Galleon was just an advancement on prior ship designs and a very good one. So other countries adopted it as there own. The English would be the next ones to advance, making their Galleons longer with lower poop decks, which made them faster.
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