text: In an announcement likely to rewrite the book on early colonization of the New World, two researchers today said they have discovered the oldest fortified settlement ever found in North America. 
   
   Speaking at an international conference on France at Florida State University, the pair announced that they have located Fort Caroline, a long-sought fort built by the French in 1564. 
   
   “This is the oldest fortified settlement in the present United States,” said historian and Florida State University alumnus Fletcher Crowe. “This fort is older than St. Augustine, considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in America. It’s older than the Lost Colony of Virginia by 21 years; older than the 1607 fort of Jamestown by 45 years; and predates the landing of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620 by 56 years.” 
   
   Announcement of the discovery of Fort Caroline was made during “La Floride Française: Florida, France, and the Francophone World,” a conference hosted by FSU’s Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and its Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution. The conference commemorates the cultural relations between France and Florida since the 16th century. 
   
   Researchers have been searching for actual remains of Fort Caroline for more than 150 years but had not found the actual site until now, Crowe said. The fort was long thought to be located east of downtown Jacksonville, Fla., on the south bank of the St. Johns River. The Fort Caroline National Memorial is located just east of Jacksonville’s Dames Point Bridge, which spans the river. 
   
   However, Crowe and his co-author, Anita Spring, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Florida, say that the legendary fort is actually located on an island at the mouth of the Altamaha River, two miles southeast of the city of Darien, Ga. Darien is located near the Georgia coast between Brunswick and Savannah, approximately 70 miles from the Jacksonville site. 
   
   “This really is a momentous finding, and what a great honor it is for it to be announced at a conference organized by the Winthrop-King Institute,” said Martin Munro, a professor in FSU’s Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics and director of the Winthrop-King Institute. “It demonstrates the pre-eminence of the institute and recognizes the work we do in promoting French and Francophone culture in Florida, the United States and internationally.” 
   
   Darrin McMahon, the Ben Weider Professor of History and a faculty member with the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, observed that Crowe and Spring’s finding — like the conference itself — highlights France’s longstanding presence in Florida and the Southeast. 
   
   “From the very beginning, down to the present day, French and Francophone peoples have played an important role in this part of the world,” McMahon said. “Our conference aims to draw attention to that fact.” 
   
   To make the discovery, Crowe, who received his Ph.D. in history from Florida State in 1973, flew to Paris and conducted research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the French equivalent of the U.S. Library of Congress. There he found a number of 16th-century maps that pinpointed the location of Fort Caroline. Some of the maps were in 16th-century French, some in Latin, some in Spanish, and some were even in English. 
   
   Francois Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, a professor of Christianity in the FSU Department of Religion and for 20 years the curator of rare books in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, underlines the fraternal attitude of French Protestant settlers in Fort Caroline toward native Americans, a rare occurrence among Western colonists, and the new perspectives opened by the discovery on the relationship between Huguenots and Indian tribes. 
   
   Crowe was able to match French maps from the 16th to 18th centuries of what is today the southeastern coast of the United States with coastal charts of the United States published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and with maps published by the U.S. Geological Survey. 
   
   One reason scholars claimed that Fort Caroline was located near Jacksonville is because, they believed, the local Indian tribes surrounding the fort spoke the Timucuan language, the Native American language of Northeast Florida. 
   
   “We proved that the Native Americans living near the fort spoke a language called Guale (pronounced “WAH-lay”),” Spring said. “The Guale speakers lived near Darien, Ga. They did not live in Northeast Florida, where Jacksonville is.” 
   
   The two scholars believe that Fort Caroline lies on Rhetts Island, southeast of Darien. 
   
   “The fort appears to be situated in an impoundment used for duck hunting in the fall,” said Crowe, “and thankfully, the site is protected by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.” 
   
   “The frustrating and often acrimonious quest to find the fort has become a sort of American quest for the Holy Grail by archaeologists, historians and other scholars,” he noted. “The inability to find the fort has made some wonder if it ever existed.” 
   
   In 1565, Spanish soldiers under Pedro Menéndez marched into Fort Caroline and slaughtered some 143 men and women who were living there at the time. After the massacre, Menéndez wrote the king of Spain that he had discovered the French fort at “31 degrees North latitude.” Using GoogleEarth, Crowe found the fort close to where the Spanish general had reported. 
   
   “The actual latitude of what we believe is Fort Caroline is well within the margin of error of 16th-century navigational instruments, about 17 miles,” Crowe said. 
   
   French colonists at Fort Caroline were astonished by the dazzling amounts of gold and silver worn by the Indians near the fort. These reports were dismissed as fiction by previous researchers, who argued that North Florida has no deposits of either precious metal. 
   
   “We studied the trade routes of the Guale Indians and found that they led directly to the gold and silver deposits near Dahlonega, Ga.,” Spring said. In 1828, Dahlonega became the site of America’s first mint, and over the years about $600 million worth of gold, in 2013 dollars, has been recovered there. 
   
   The site has not yet been excavated by archaeologists. 
   
   For 150 years, scholars have thought that “French Florida” meant Northeast Florida, including Jacksonville, Lake City and Gainesville. The Crowe and Spring study is expected to fundamentally redefine the term. 
   
   Crowe noted that “French Florida forms a great oval extending from the Santee River of South Carolina, down to the St. Marys River, which serves today as the border between Georgia and Florida. French Florida extends from Darien on the coast, up to Milledgeville, east of Macon.” 
   
   Contributing Source : Florida State University ||||| The mystery of Fort Caroline, the doomed French outpost in the New World, has been solved, two researchers claimed at an international conference of scholars Friday. 
   
   The fort vanished, seemingly forever, soon after the Spanish wiped it out 448 years ago. Its location has been the most enduring puzzle in Jacksonville, where for more than a century amateurs and professionals have searched for it in vain. 
   
   They could keep looking for another century and still never find it, say scholars Fletcher Crowe and Anita Spring, 
   
   That’s because the fort was not in Jacksonville. It wasn’t even in Florida. 
   
   Instead, they claim, it is 70 miles north, on the Altamaha River, south of Darien, Ga. 
   
   Crowe and Spring, who is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Florida, presented their findings at Florida State University. They spoke to academics from around the world, gathered for a conference called La Floride Francaise: Florida, France, and the Francophone World. 
   
   Robert “Buzz” Thunen, a University of North Florida archaeologist who’s been searching for Fort Caroline in Jacksonville, was at the conference. He was skeptical of their findings. 
   
   “It’s a provocative presentation,” he said. “I don’t think it’s enough of an argument for me to change my mind.” 
   
   However, if they are right, that means that everything we know about the first recorded history in the area is dead wrong. 
   
   If they are right, that means that everything named after Fort Caroline in Jacksonville is misnamed. 
   
   That anything named Mayport — from the French River of May, what was thought to be the St. Johns river — shouldn’t be. 
   
   That Ribault High School in Jacksonville is named after a French navigator who passed up this area in favor of Georgia. 
   
   That Jacksonville can no longer claim the glory of being the site of the first European effort to establish a fortified settlement in what would become America. 
   
   If they are right. 
   
   “We don’t have archaeological proof of the fort at this time,” Crowe said. “That’s not to say we don’t have just reams and reams of material, but having reams of 8 1/2-inch paper filled with words is far different from having a French cannonball.” 
   
   Added Spring: “We haven’t found [the fort], but we are pretty much closing in on the site. We have a pretty good idea where it is.” 
   
   She said she would have liked to have kept their findings secret for a few more months. But they decided the conference in Tallahassee on France and Florida was the perfect place to present their idea, in an hourlong presentation with 100 PowerPoint slides. 
   
   Crowe said their presentation Friday provoked many questions from the academics gathered there, as he expected with such an unconventional idea. 
   
   The purpose, he said, was to be challenged, and have those challenges help guide their future research. He said they remain confident, however, that they are correct. 
   
   Spring, the UF professor, has homes in Gainesville and St. Augustine. 
   
   It gives her no joy, she said, to claim that Georgia is home to the ancient settlement, which was founded before St. Augustine, before the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Jamestown or Plymouth. 
   
   “I wish it was in Florida,” she said. “This chagrins me, really.” 
   
   She said she and Crowe have a special-use permit from the state of Georgia to search where they believe Fort Caroline is. That permit does not allow them to pinpoint the location of the dig, to prevent looters from getting there first. 
   
   They’re getting additional funding and expect to begin digging within a few months, Spring said. 
   
   Crowe has a doctorate in history from FSU and can read ancient French. He put that skill to use in libraries in France, reading old documents related to the expedition. 
   
   There, he says, he found a poor translation from the French, a translation made more than 400 years ago. That led to confusion between the words “above” and “below” the line of 30 degrees of latitude, which is roughly where Jacksonville is. 
   
   Crowe claims that bad translation became accepted as fact, and flourished for centuries. 
   
   “We’re claiming that the whole myth that Fort Caroline is east of Jacksonville is based on poor translations,” he said. 
   
   Crowe and Spring say they also re-examined ancient maps, some of which had labeled the Altamaha as the River May, which has long been thought to be the French name for the St. Johns. 
   
   Various geographical puzzles in the early writings of the French suddenly make sense when one looks at the maps knowing that Fort Caroline was on the Altamaha, Spring said. 
   
   And linguistic evidence, looking at Indian words described by the French, shows that the language the natives were speaking was from Georgia, not Florida, Spring added. 
   
   Their theory that Fort Caroline is on the Altamaha is not new. A writer named Richard Thornton also made that claim in various postings on the Internet. 
   
   Crowe and Spring, though, say the evidence they’ve amassed will prove overwhelming. 
   
   “I predict this will be just as controversial as saying that gravity doesn’t exist,” Crowe said. “It’ll be just totally contradictory to what the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce says, to what historians say.” 
   
   Spring said the confusion is understandable, given the conventional wisdom that Fort Caroline was on the St. Johns. 
   
   “You’ve got the best people looking for it,” she said. “Some of those people are my colleagues, and others I know. And they are terrific archaeologists and they have worked on it for a long time.” 
   
   Thunen, the UNF archaeologist, presented a paper to the same conference, arguing that Fort Caroline is on the St. Johns — it just hasn’t been found yet. Thunen and his UNF colleague Keith Ashley have been searching for years. 
   
   He noted that this year is the 450th anniversary of the founding of the fort. 
   
   “That fuels the fascination of the general public. There are a lot of people who are interested in finding the fort. It is, for Floridians, a sort of anchor into the recorded past and, for Jacksonvillians, it is a source of civic pride.” 
   
   Thunen said that, without any physical evidence to prove otherwise, there’s not enough in Crowe and Springs’ report to change his mind on the fort’s location. 
   
   He believes they rely too heavily on maps that can be interpreted in different ways, and says their findings don’t seem to jibe with the “historical context” of European contact with the native people. 
   
   “It never hurts to question our assumptions,” he said. “And what it does for me is to help sharpen my resolve and focus, helps me to re-look at the documents.” 
   
   There is one key fact of history that indeed suggests Fort Caroline was in Jacksonville: the bloody end of the French fort in 1565. 
   
   That’s when Spanish troops marched overland to the fort from their newly founded camp at St. Augustine, slogging through a hurricane for several days. 
   
   If the fort were indeed in Georgia, how could that march have been made in that time? How could the Spanish have crossed the St. Johns? 
   
   Crowe acknowledged those questions. “Anyone who makes [our] claim has to establish how the Spanish were able to march overland to the fort,” he said. 
   
   Crowe and Spring say they believe they have an answer: The Spanish actually marched from a camp on the St. Marys River in Georgia, following Indian trails that led them to the fort on the Altamaha. 
   
   Once there, the slaughter began. 
   
   Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082
target: – No wonder historians haven't been able to find a historic but long-lost French fort in America: They were looking in the wrong state. Researchers from Florida State University say Fort Caroline—which one calls "the oldest fortified settlement in the present United States"—isn't near Jacksonville as long thought, reports Heritage Daily. The 1564 fort was actually on Rhetts Island near the mouth of the Altamaha River. That's about 70 miles away. In Georgia. The discovery would upend some long-held notions about the colonization of the New World and likely disappoint the Fort Caroline National Memorial—in Jacksonville. But there's a big caveat: "We don’t have archaeological proof of the fort at this time,” says FSU's Fletcher Crowe. Instead, the announcement at a conference is based in part on a detailed analysis of old French maps and coastal charts of the US. “We haven’t found [the fort], but we are pretty much closing in on the site," adds co-researcher Anita Spring." The pair also say they've amassed loads of circumstantial evidence. For instance, they say Native Americans near the fort spoke a language known as Guale, and those speakers lived around what is now Darien, Ga., near the newly proposed site. It's definitely "provocative," a University of North Florida archeologist in the Jacksonville camp tells the Florida Times-Union. But “I don’t think it’s enough of an argument for me to change my mind.” It's not clear when actual digging might start to resolve things. (Click to read about how historians are closer to learning why colonists on North Carolina's Roanoke Island disappeared.)