Name/Title
French Military Doublet Button Jean Rebault Fleet Matanzas Massacre Site #3 (111)Description
This button is from my personal collection and matches an example I sold in December 2019. There is no doubt that these buttons are French and from the massacre victims (note the French fleur de lis stippled design denoting royal service/connection to the Bourbon family of France). This button was cast in bronze alloy and then hand finished by the craftsman.
It is of the faceted-stippled type, which was in common use by both Spanish and French forces from the early 16th to mid-17th centuries.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 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).