Gourgues, Dominique De

Related Category: U.S. History: Biographies

(dômēnēk´ də grg), c.1530–1593, French soldier and adventurer. He served in the French army in Italy, was captured by the Spanish, then by the Turks, served as galley slave under both, and after his release led expeditions to Africa and South America. Stirred by the massacre (1565), by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, of the French Huguenot colony at Fort Caroline on the Florida coast, he fitted out three ships and, joining forces with the Native Americans of the region, captured the Spanish fort of San Mateo (formerly Fort Caroline). He ruthlessly put all the surviving garrison to death and nailed to a tree a sign saying, “Hanged, not as Spaniards, but as traitors, robbers, and murderers”; this was in reply to the Spanish claim that the French colonists were “hanged, not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans and heretics.”