Once the Spanish colonial empire had expanded into the West Indies following the voyages of Columbus, an interest arose in what might lie beyond. In response, the Spanish monarchy sponsored a series of expeditions to discover, explore, settle and exploit unknown lands north of Cuba. In 1512 the king of Spain gave Juan Ponce de Leon a patent to "discover and govern the island of Bimini and its people." On April 2 of the following year Ponce encountered, not Bimini, but the coast of an unknown land and, going ashore during the ensuing week, claimed his discovery for the Spanish crown. As it was the Easter season, Pascua Florida in Spanish, he named the land "La Florida." Subsequently he sailed southward around Florida and into the Gulf, but although he had also discovered the StraitsÊofÊFlorida, he did not attempt to found a settlement.
Over the next fifty years the Spanish reached Florida repeatedly, but they were to underestimate grossly the requirements for founding a permanent settlement there. Ponce himself died leading a second expedition to Florida in 1521, this time to colonize the new land. Upon landing he was mortally wounded in an Indian attack and the expedition returned to Cuba. In 1528 Panfilo de Narvaez and a company of 400 landed in Florida to establish a colony; eight years later only four survivors finally reached Mexico on foot.
The largest and most famous of the sixteenth century Spanish expeditions into the mainland of North America north of Cuba was that of Hernando de Soto. Many attempts have been made to plot the long and complex expedition route. The most comprehensive attempt was that of the U.S. de Soto Expedition Commission established by a congressional resolution in 1935. During the half century since the publication of that major effort in 1939, much new information has become available, including that from modern archaeology, allowing Hudson and associates to plot a new version of the de Soto route.
De Soto and a force of some 600 disembarked from nine vessels near the mouth of the Little Manatee River on September 25, 1539, and began a march that took them into virtually every present state in the Southeast. They went through relatively densely populated, strong and socially cohesive Indian chiefdoms such as the chiefdom of Coosa in northern Georgia, and through uninhabited "no-man's-land" between chiefdoms. Indian reactions ranged from friendship to hostility. The social impact of the expedition on the Indians was often harsh and even brutal. The expedition brought European diseases to which Indians had no immunity.
Upon the death of de Soto early in 1542 in southeastern Arkansas, Luis de Moscoso took command and a plan was formulated to march overland to Mexico. In the vicinity of the Trinity River, however, this plan was abrogated in the face of apparent declining Indian food supplies toward the southwest and the meeting with fundamentally different Indian languages which the expedition's Indian interpreters could not understand. The expedition returned to the Mississippi River, constructed a fleet of boats during the winter of 1542-43, and eventually reached Mexico by water. Of the original force of six hundred, 311 survived.
Some twenty years after de Soto another abortive attempt at mainland colonization was made, this time by Tristan de Luna through Pensacola Bay and then through the interior of Alabama and Georgia. Two further expeditions were lead by Juan Pardo.
The failure of the de Luna effort following fifty years of other fruitless colonization ventures appears to have discouraged the Spanish monarchy's colonial ambitions in La Florida, but this flagging interest was jolted abruptly in 1564 by news that the French had erected a fort at the mouth of the St. Johns River. The French move was prompted by colonial ambition and by the potential for attacking Spanish treasure fleets. Spain's response to this unwelcome news was swift and violent. The esteemed military leader Pedro Menendez de Aviles was dispatched to establish a settlement on Florida's east coast and to eliminate the French presence. Menendez in 1565 largely wiped out the French (although a few of them, including Jacques Le Moyne, the artist and mapmaker, escaped), and established St. Augustine. Spanish objectives at St. Augustine were primarily political and military. The new settlement served as an outer bastion of the Spanish empire, and it helped to protect Spanish treasure fleets from French and other corsairs.
The meteoric rise in Spanish merchant shipping for transporting silver and other valued cargoes from Mexico and Andean South America back to Spain understandably attracted corsairs, particularly at first the French, whose attacks became progressively more frequent. The Spanish response was the convoy, called flota (fleet) in which ten to fifty or more merchant vessels were accompanied by warships.
The Spanish Treasure Fleet map shows the approximate average routes followed by the two separate flotas or treasure fleets as they converged on Havana, one from Puerto Bello in Panama via Cartagena, the other from Veracruz. After 1565 the Veracruz convoy also carried oriental goods which reached Mexico via the trans-Pacific "Manila galleons". Upon leaving Havana the two treasure fleets, now sailing together, headed northward through the Straits of Florida and then northeastward past Bermuda. This route enabled ships to benefit from the westerlies of higher latitudes and from the Gulf Stream, both of which were well known before the middle of the sixteenth century. Moreover, along this route St. Augustine could assist in treasure fleet defense.
