to the king avows
his innocence, and he was finally discharged by the judges, but not until
they had received two peremptory orders from the king to come to a
decision.

On his release he prepared to sail to the Bermudas to seek for his son
Juan, who had been shipwrecked in the previous year. At that time the
French Huguenots were engaged in endeavouring to plant a colony in Florida.
As the country had been explored by the Spaniards they claimed it as
theirs, and its position on the track of the home-coming trade of Mexico
rendered its possession by any other power highly dangerous. Philip II.
endeavoured to avert the peril by making an "_asiento_" or contract with
Aviles, by which he advanced 15,000 ducats to the seaman, and constituted
him proprietor of any colony which he could establish in Florida, on
condition that the money was repaid. The contract was signed on the 20th of
March 1565. Aviles sailed on the 28th of July of the same year with one
vessel of 600 tons, ten sloops and 1500 men. On the 28th of August he
entered and named the Bay of St Augustine, and began a fort there. He took
the French post of Fort Caroline on the 20th of September 1565, and in
October exterminated a body of Frenchmen who, under the Huguenot Jean
Ribault, had arrived on the coast of Florida to relieve their colony. The
Spanish commander, after slaying nearly all his prisoners, hung their
bodies on trees, with the inscription, "Not as Frenchmen but as Lutherans."
A French sea-captain named Dominique de Gourgues revenged the massacre by
capturing in 1568 Fort San Mateo (as the Spanish had renamed Fort
Caroline), and hanging the garrison, with the inscription, "Not as
Spaniards but as murderers." Till 1567 Aviles remained in Florida, busy
with his colony. In that year he returned to Spain. He made one more voyage
to Florida, and died on the 17th of September 1574. Aviles married Maria de
Solis, when very young, and left three daughters. His letters prove him to
have been a pious and high-minded officer, who never imagined that he could
be supposed by any honest man to have gone too far in massacring the
Frenchmen, whom he regarded as pirates and heretics.

See _The Spanish Settlements within the Present Limits of the United
States, Florida, 1562-1574_, by Woodbury Lowery (New York, 1905).

(D. H.)

AVILES, or SAN NICOLAS DE AVILES (the Roman _Flavionavia_), a seaport of
northern Spain, in the province of Oviedo; on the Bay of Aviles, a