By: Morgan Kacalek
Around 450 years ago, circa 1570, French captain Jean Ribault set sail to the New World on his three-masted ship “La Trinite,” with hopes of establishing Huguenot colonies. The Huguenots were French Protestants who were being persecuted in France by the Catholics. Ribault commanded the expedition to North America and eventually reached the coast of Florida at the mouth of the St. Johns river, where he claimed the land for France. He then fled to England to collect supplies but was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth I.
Two years after Ribault’s initial voyage to the New World, he made a secondary trip to return to the settlement and found that it had failed to prosper. Its inhabitants suffered food shortages and mutiny. Ribault and his crew took command of the colony but were maneuvered out by Spanish soldiers under command of Pedro Menendez de Aviles, who was given orders by King Philip II to seize the colony under interest of Spain. Ribault then set sail to attack the other Spanish settlements up north, when he and his men were struck with a hurricane. The crew was shipwrecked on the coast while Mendez’s army planned their attack. The French surrendered, but Mendez ordered Ribault and his men to be executed as Protestant heretics. Meanwhile, Jean Ribault’s ship, “La Trinite,” lay at the bottom of the ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral.
Centuries later, the wreckage of La Trinite was found in 2016 by a private underwater research company, Global Marine Exploration (GME), led by American Robert Pritchett. The ship rested 33 feet below the ocean’s surface and just a “stone’s throw” off the Cape Canaveral Coast. Because it had not been unloaded and still contains historical military weapons and large amounts of iron, the site is very promising for archaeological excavation.
The wreckage has been at the center of a legal battle between the French government and Robert Pritchett at the GME. On September 29, US Magistrate Judge Allen Winsor delivered a 24-page judgment going over the wreck’s extensive history with France and their colony in Florida. Among further surveys of the area, objects such as a bronze cannon decorated with the French fleur-de-lis and a marble cannon bearing the French coat of arms have been identified. The GME believes the discovery belongs to them, however, in 2004 President George W. Bush signed a law recognizing the sovereignty of a country over its former warships. This law would imply that the wreckage is the property of France, since La Trinite belonged to French explorer Jean Ribault who had claimed land in Florida for France.
In June of 2018, when a federal judge ruled that the ship belonged to Ribault and was indeed a French naval vessel, the GME argued that because the ship was carrying goods to colonies in the New World, it was not involved in military conflict, however, the court ruled that it was still considered a military vessel and turned the wreckage over to France.
beniciapaw.com 