The Location of Fort Caroline in Ancient Maps

Abstract

Fort Caroline was the French fort built on the southeast coast of North America in June 1564, under the command of René Goulaine de Laudonnière. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés attacked the fort on September 20, 1565 killing 134 men and scattering the rest, while the women and children of the Ribault expedition were captured and sent to Havana.1,2 The Fort was used again in 1566 by the Spanish under Stephan de las Alas, but was overrun on April 25, 1568 by French corsairs commanded by Dominique de Gourgues, after which it was partly burned and never found. Conventional understanding in Florida states that Fort Caroline was located on the south side of the St. Johns River, about six miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, northeast of Jacksonville at the St. Johns Bluff near where the Fort Caroline National Memorial is located today. However, repeated archaeological investigations have failed to locate the remains of Fort Caroline along the St. Johns River. The present study was begun to determine if ancient maps of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century could provide clues as to where the fort was located. This article uses information from the Bibliotèque nationale francaise (BNF), the Vatican Library in Rome, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the records of French corsair Dominique de Gourgues, to reconsider the fort’s location. This paper examines nine French maps (1563-1780); two Spanish maps (1566 and 1585); two English maps (1587 and 1684); and two German/French maps (1591 and 1763). These maps, in fact, might have been studied and subjected to scholarly analysis but it appears that they were not used by other researchers to locate Fort Caroline because they assumed that the Fort was on the St. Johns River. Significantly, not any of the fifteen early maps examined in this study depicts Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River.