Name/Title
French Military Doublet Button - Jean Rebault Fleet Matanzas Massacre Site (101)Description
This button matches another example that I have in my personal collection. This button was cast in bronze alloy and then hand finished by the craftsman. It is of the cast open-work type, which was in common use by both Spanish and French forces from the early 16th to mid-17th centuries. Originally, it would have been gilded in gold.Context
This button was recovered by a former colleague in the mid-1980s from a beach site near the Matanzas Inlet. While the exact massacre site of Jean Rebault's crew remains officially unknown (to state archaeologists), the site's exact location absolutely is known to a small group of local metal detectorists and historians (who are at still in a long-running dispute with state archaeologists and so will not share the site's location).