On the night of the nineteenth the tempest became a deluge. The officer of the night took pity on the drenched and gasping sentries and dismissed them. But on that night five hundred Spaniards were coming from San Augustin through almost impassable swamps, their provisions spoiled and their powder soaked, under the leadership of the pitiless Menendez. The storm had caught Ribault's fleet just as it was about to attack on the eleventh, and Menendez had determined to take a force of Spaniards overland and attack the fort while its defenders were away. With twenty Vizcayan axemen to clear the way and two Indians and a renegade Frenchman, François Jean, for a guide, he had bullied, threatened and exhorted them through eight days of wading through mud waist-deep, creeping around quagmires and pushing by main force through palmetto jungles, until two hours before daylight the panting, shivering, sullen men stood cursing the country and their commander, under their breath, in a pine wood less than a mile from Fort Caroline. It was all that Menendez could do to get them to go a rod further. All night, he said, he had prayed for help; their provisions and ammunition were gone; there was nothing to do but to go on and take the fort. They went on.
In the faint light of early morning a trumpeter saw them racing down the slope toward the fort and blew the alarm. "Santiago! Santiago!" sounded in the ears of the half-awakened French as the Spaniards came through the gaps in the defenses and over the ramparts. Fierce faces and stabbing pikes were everywhere. Laudonnière snatched sword and buckler, rallied his men to the point of greatest danger, fought desperately until there was no more hope, and with a single soldier of his guard escaped into the woods. Challeux, chisel in hand, on his way to his work, swung himself over the palisade and ran like a boy. In the edge of the forest he and a few other fugitives paused and looked down upon the enclosure of the fort. It was a butchery. Some of the Huguenots in the woods decided to return and surrender rather than risk the terrors of the wilderness. The Spaniards, they said, were at least men. Six of them did return, and were cut down as they came. Pierre Debré side by side with a few desperate men who had one of the two light cannon the fort possessed, was fighting like a tiger in defense of a corner where a group of women and children were crouching.