Special Collections: Field Trip and Assignment

Thursday October 3
This session will take place in the Special Collections Reading Room on the second floor of Smathers East Library during your normal discussion session time.  Consider part of the assignment finding the room and showing up on time!  Try to come 5 to 10 minutes early as you will need to sign in.

Theme for the session
Violence in 16th-century Florida (and no, it is not the Florida-Georgia football game!)

We will be focusing on an infamous incident that took place in mid-sixteenth century Florida.  King Philip II of Spain was concerned about a French colony that had been established near St. Augustine and dispatched an expeditionary force to resolve the situation.  In 1565 the Spanish General Pedro Menéndez de Aviles arrived in this area and destroyed the settlement, imprisoned the women and children and massacred many of the men.

Read the following website from the National Park Service for a brief description of these tragic events.
http://www.nps.gov/foma/historyculture/the_massacre.htm

These events, however, may be more complicated and not so straightforward.
In the website below read the correspondence of the various actors in this tragedy.
http://earlyfloridalit.net/?page_id=9

Focus on
1) The correspondence of Pedro Menéndez to the Spanish king, which discloses in detail his attitude towards French incursions into the Spanish colonies and his treatment of French prisoners

2) The statements made by Nicholas de Challeux and those in the petition of French widows to King Charles IX of France

In a one-two page essay (double-spaced; 12 point font), compare these accounts by answering the following questions.

How do the reports by the winners (in this case Menéndez) differ from those of the losers (the French survivors and chroniclers)?
Where do the accounts differ?
Which ones do you find the most plausible?  Why?
What can we learn from the conflicting passages of these accounts?  What do they reveal about the individuals who wrote them?

Extra Credit  
Is there evidence in the primary sources to back up what is said in the National Park Service version of the massacre?
Do you think the Park Service did a good job summarizing the event from the sources available?  Why or why not?
 Where (if any place) do you think Park Service experts may have misinterpreted the sources?