Friday, June 26, 2026

"El Norte" (6) de Carrie Gibson - Cronología de acontecimientos clave: 1566 - 1577

 En pocas palabras. Javier J. Jaspe

Washington D.C.

 Esta es la sexta entrega de una serie relacionada con el interesante libro: “El Norte – La epopeya olvidada de la Norteamérica Hispana”, escrito por la destacada historiadora, Carrie Gibson. Editorial EDAF, 2022, 575 páginas. La edición original es en el idioma inglés y la traducción al español que usamos es de Pablo García Hervás.

Carrie Gibson obtuvo su “doctorado en la Universidad de Cambridge….Ha trabajado como periodista en The Guardian y como colaboradora en otras publicaciones, además de la BBC. Su investigación la ha llevado a México, el Caribe y los Estados Unidos. Reside en Londres”.

Sobre el libro se ha escrito:

"Durante mucho tiempo, los Estados Unidos se han preciado de su herencia anglosajona por encima de todas las demás. No obstante, tal como Carrie Gibson replica en El Norte, con gran profundidad y nitidez, la nación tiene unas raíces hispanas mucho más antiguas, las cuales han permanecido mucho tiempo ignoradas y marginadas. Este pasado hispánico precede en un siglo a la llegada del Mayflower, y es de todo punto igual de importante a la hora de dar forma a la nación tal como existe hoy en día.... (The New York Times Book Review)"

El propósito de la serie no es realizar un análisis del libro, sino publicar la cronología de los acontecimientos clave que allí se incluyen (páginas 462 – 470), ocurridos entre los años 1492 y 2017, a fin de acompañarlos con unos breves agregados que recogen principalmente textos encontrados en Internet, relacionados con los enunciados que se utilizan a lo largo de dicha cronología.

A efecto de diferenciar la cronología original transcrita en negrillas, los agregados se transcriben en itálicas, bien textualmente o resumidos y/o reordenados en su presentación, con las referencias a sus respectivos enlaces en Internet. Cuando la cronología original incluye diversos hechos en un mismo año, estos hechos son presentados separadamente bajo dicho año.

En esta sexta entrega se incluyen hechos históricos que van desde que los españoles levantan el fuerte de San Felipe en Santa Elena (1566) hasta que Pedro Menéndez Márquez recibe órdenes de fortificar Santa Elena. Veamos:

 1566: los españoles levantan el fuerte de San Felipe cerca del antiguo emplazamiento de Charlesfort, en Santa Elena.

Santa Elena The 1500s Capital of Spanish Florida in South Carolina

The town of Santa Elena on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina was the sixteenth-century capital of Spanish Florida. It was founded in 1566 by Pedro Menendez de Aviles (who had previously served the Spanish government as a privateer) to prevent the French from expanding their colonies into the area claimed by Spain as La Florida. From 1562 to 1563, the French had occupied the area in a settlement called Charlesfort, but lacking supplies, abandoned the area three years before Santa Elena was established. Several Spanish forts protected Santa Elena, including Fort San Salvador, Fort San Felipe (built directly on top of Charlesfort), and Fort San Marcos.

From Santa Elena, the Spanish expanded inland, building forts into the Appalachian Mountains and working to “pacify” the Native Americans through trade, violence, and conversion to Catholicism. Native Americans burned these forts, and Spain did not rebuild them. The Native Americans around Santa Elena also objected to the Spanish presence. In 1576, Native Americans from the nearby towns of Orista and Escamacu burned Santa Elena, which the Spanish rebuilt. In 1580, 2000 Native Americans again attacked the settlement, but were repelled. In 1587, the Spanish left Santa Elena, relocating to their settlement at St. Augustine, Florida to focus on colonizing other areas…..

https://www.nps.gov/articles/santa-elena-the-1500s-capital-of-spanish-florida.htm

También puede verse:

Fort San Felipe

Heritage Library

https://heritagelib.org/history-culture/military-installations/fort-san-felipe/

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History of Santa Elena

Coastal Discovery Museum

https://www.coastaldiscovery.org/santa-elena/history/

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The Hispanic-American History Timeline

!566 Santa Elena Built in South Carolina

HiddenHispanicHeritage By Miguel Pérez

https://www.hiddenhispanicheritage.com/timeline-1566---santa-elena-and-beyond.html

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San Felipe Fort

South Carolina

Britannica

https://www.britannica.com/place/San-Felipe-fort-South-Carolina

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Spanish Fort Site Is Believed Found at Parris Island

By John Noble Wilford. Special to the New York Times

July 13, 1979

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/13/archives/spanish-fort-site-is-believed-found-at-parris-island-early-spanish.html

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 1566: Juan Pardo emprende una expedición hacia el interior, atravesando parte de la actual Carolina del Norte.

Juan Pardo Expeditions

Written By Dr. Troy L. Kickler

 

Before Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition landed on the Outer Banks in 1585, French and Spanish explorers traveled across modern-day North Carolina and led the European powers in claiming American land.  By the mid-1500s, the Spanish, in particular, were winning the race of conquest.  Early Spanish explorers included Luis Vasquez de Allyan, who sailed the Cape Fear River in 1526; Hernando de Soto, who in 1540 traversed through the southern Appalachian mountains; and Juan Pardo, who led two expeditions from Santa Elena (Tybee Island, Georgia) into the Catawba Valley and then into the mountains of western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. 

During his first expedition, Pardo established good relationships with Indian tribes and searched primarily for food for the Santa Elena settlement. The second expedition’s mission was mainly to find a road to Zacatecas, Mexico (location of Spanish silver mines) and to claim land for Spain.  

The first expedition lasted from December 1, 1566 to March 7, 1567.  Pardo and 125 men traveled northward from Santa Elena to find Indian towns with food.  After traveling through the swampland of northeastern South Carolina, Pardo stopped at Yssa (near present-day Linville, North Carolina) and then later at Jaora, an Indian town near modern-day Morganton. There, the Spanish explorer and his men constructed Fort San Juan.  Pardo and his remaining men (Sergeant Hernando Moyano de Morales and thirty men garrisoned the fort) followed the Catawba River and visited the towns of Quinahaqui (near Catawba) and Guatari (near Salisbury).  Along the way, Pardo met with caciques (Spanish term for tribal leader) and through an interpreter informed Indians that they were Spanish subjects.  Pardo also left behind his chaplain and a few soldiers to evangelize the Indians…..

https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/juan-pardo-expeditions/

También puede verse:

Pardo Expeditions

By Moore, David G.

https://www.ncpedia.org/pardo-expeditions

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Earliest European settlement in US interior was in WNC

By Anne Chesky

https://www.ashevillehistory.org/earliest-european-settlement-in-us-interior-was-in-wnc/

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The Spanish Explore the Interior

https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2016/12/01/spanish-explore-interior

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1567: Juan Pardo emprende un segundo viaje por el interior, regresando en la primavera de 1568 tras haber alcanzado posiblemente la actual Tennesse.

Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

History: Explorer Juan Pardo

Charleston Currents· 07/17/2017 8:04 am·Comments Offon HISTORY:  Explorer Juan Pardo

S.C. Encyclopedia  |  Juan Pardo was born in Cuenca, Spain, in the first half of the sixteenth century. He traveled to Spanish Florida in the fleet of General Sancho de Archiniega in 1566 as the captain of one of the six military companies sent to reinforce the colony founded by Governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. Captain Pardo’s company was the only one from the Archiniega expedition posted to the Spanish town of Santa Elena, which was located on present-day Parris Island, South Carolina.

Pardo never reached the mines of Mexico, but his two expeditions—the last major Spanish military explorations of the interior of the Southeast—provide a valuable window to the peoples of these lands in the mid–sixteenth century. Pardo first departed from Santa Elena on December 1, 1566, with 125 men and headed northwest through the interior of South Carolina and into western North Carolina. He returned to Santa Elena on March 7, 1567, after receiving a summons to respond to an anticipated French attack.

Image….

Pardo set out on his second expedition from Santa Elena on September 1, 1567, and followed basically the same route, although this journey took him into eastern Tennessee. He visited several of the towns that Hernando De Soto had passed through more than twenty-five years before. Pardo’s notary recorded a high degree of compliance with the orders the captain had given on the first expedition, including having the Indians grow corn and construct buildings for the Spaniards. On his return from the second expedition, Pardo collected as much corn as he could and distributed his men among six forts in an attempt to strengthen the Spanish presence inland and force the Indian population to support the soldiers. Two of these forts were in present-day South Carolina—Fort Santo Tomás at Cofitachiqui, or Canos, near Camden and Fort Nuestra Señora at the native town of Orista on the coast. Within months of Pardo’s return to Santa Elena on March 2, 1568, Indians had destroyed the inland forts.

Pardo served as the lieutenant governor at Santa Elena until around April 1569. He departed the Florida colony for Spain during the summer of 1569, and further details about his life and death are unknown

Excerpted from an entry by Karen L. Paar.  This entry hasn’t been updated since 2006.

https://charlestoncurrents.com/2017/07/history-explorer-juan-pardo/

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También puede verse:

The Juan Pardo Expedition under a magnifying glass

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

https://apalacheresearch.com/2022/01/29/the-juan-pardo-expedition-under-a-magnifying-glass/

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The Route of Juan Pardo’s Explorations in the Interior Southeast 1566-1568

Florida Historical Quarterly

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol62/iss2/3/

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1568: Dominique de Gourgues llega desde Francia para vengar la muerte de sus compatriotas. Ataca a las tropas españolas en el fuerte de San Mateo (el antiguo Fort Caroline) y acaba con ellas, antes de regresar a Francia.

National Park Service

Fort Matanzas – National Monument Florida

The Massacre of the French

https://www.nps.gov/foma/learn/historyculture/the_massacre.htm

The European history of Fort Matanzas National Monument begins with an incident almost 200 years before the construction of the fort at Matanzas - the Spanish massacre of French forces in 1565. It took place near or possibly within the area which now makes up the monument. The incident initiated Spanish control of Florida for 235 years and led to the naming of the Matanzas River.

 When King Philip II of Spain learned that the Frenchman Rene de Laudonniére had established Fort Caroline in Florida (1 on map), he was incensed -- the colony sat on land belonging to the Spanish crown. Spanish treasure fleets sailed along the Florida coast on their way to Spain and Fort Caroline provided a perfect base for French attacks. Worst of all to the devoutly Catholic Philip, the settlers were Huguenots (French Protestants). Despite Philip's protests, Jean Ribault sailed from France in May 1565 with more than 600 soldiers and settlers to resupply Fort Caroline.

General Pedro Menéndez de Aviles, charged with removing the French, also sailed in May, arriving at the Saint Johns River in August with some 800 people, shortly after Ribault (2 on map). After a brief sea chase, the Spanish retired south to a site they had earlier reconnoitered, a Timucuan village called Seloy. The Spanish came ashore on September 8 and established and named their new village "St. Augustine" (3 on map) because land had first been sighted on the Feast Day of St. Augustine, August 28.

 Image of Map….See link at the end

 Jean Ribault sailed on September 10 to attack and wipe out the Spanish at St. Augustine, but a hurricane carried his ships far to the south, wrecking them on the Florida coast between present-day Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral (4 on map).


At the same time, Menéndez led a force to attack Fort Caroline. Since most of the soldiers were absent, Menéndez was easily able to capture the French settlement, killing most of the men in the battle. Some of the inhabitants, including de Laudonniére and the artist Jacques LeMoyne, were able to escape to ships and return to France. Menéndez spared the women and children and sent them by ship to Havana.

He then learned from Timucuan Indians that a group of white men were on the beach a few miles south of St. Augustine. He marched with 70 soldiers to where an inlet had blocked 127 of the shipwrecked Frenchmen trying to get back to Fort Caroline (5 on map)

With a captured Frenchman as translator, Menéndez described how Fort Caroline had been captured and urged the French to surrender. Rumors to the contrary, he made no promises as to sparing them. Having lost most of their food and weapons in the shipwreck, the French did surrender. Francisco Mendoza, the Chaplain accompaning Menéndez, requested the chance to offer survival for those found to be Catholics, most refused. 111 Frenchmen were killed. Only sixteen were spared - a few who professed being Catholic, some impressed Breton sailors, and four artisans needed at St. Augustine.

Two weeks later the sequence of events was repeated. More French survivors appeared at the inlet, including Jean Ribault. On October 12 Ribault and his men surrendered and met their fate. This time 134 were killed. From that time, the inlet was called Matanzas -- meaning "slaughters" in Spanish.

Was this a cruel, cold-hearted act by the Spanish? Was Pedro Menéndez blindly following orders to rid Florida of the interlopers? Was it a religious conflict? What would the French have done to the Spanish if the hurricane had not wrecked their ships? Maybe there is even more involved. With food already low and no chance for resupply until spring, would there have been food and shelter for all if the French had been brought back to the new village of St. Augustine? Perhaps, as leader of his people, Menéndez knew that survival of the French in October might have meant the starvation of everyone by May.

https://www.nps.gov/foma/learn/historyculture/the_massacre.htm

 También puede verse:

 The Atlantic

 The Vengeance of Dominic De Gourgues

By F Parkman
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1864/11/the-vengeance-of-dominic-de-gourgues/627928/

 En PDF:

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1864/11/14-85/132121327.pdf

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Guest column: History of revenge at Fort Caroline

Staff Writer

Florida Times-Union

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/opinion/columns/mike-clark/2014/06/06/guest-column-history-revenge-fort-caroline/15794451007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=true&gca-epti=z114102e003200v114102d--41--b--41--&gca-ft=110&gca-ds=sophi

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De Gourgues, Dominique

A History of Florida

1904

https://fcit.usf.edu/florida/docs/d/degour.htm

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De Gourges Florida Expedition en 1567

Fourth Expedition to Florida in 1567, Commanded By The Chevalier De Gourges

https://thenewworld.us/de-gourges-florida-expedition-in-1567/

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1577: Pedro Menéndez Márquez recibe órdenes de fortificar Santa Elena, lo que conduce a la construcción del fuerte de San Marcos.

440 year old Spanish Fort discovered after decades of searching

Beaufortsc/Atractions,Beaufort History+Culture

Elena Foundation has announced that after years of searching, Dr. Chester DePratter and Dr. Victor Thompson have located the long-lost Fort San Marcos, which was built on the Santa Elena site in 1577.

Located near Beaufort, South Carolina, Parris Island holds more than the dreams of future Marines—it contains the remains of a Spanish fort erected in 1577 in the Spanish town of Santa Elena. For decades, attempts to find it have failed, and Fort San Marcos stayed hidden until new technology brought it to light.

In a paper to be published this week in the Journal of Archeology Science Reports, a team of archaeologists led by University of South Carolina’s Chester DePratter and Victor Thompson of the University of Georgia, discuss how they uncovered Fort San Marcos without scooping a shovelful of soil.

San Marcos is one of five Spanish forts built sequentially at Santa Elena over its 21 year occupation.

DePratter and Thompson have conducted research at Santa Elena since 2014 to find the fort that was founded in 1577 by Pedro Menéndez Márquez, the governor of Spanish La Florida. Their discovery sheds new light on the oldest, most northern Spanish settlement in the Americas, built to thwart French exploration into the New World.

Márquez arrived in October 1577 at the abandoned town of Santa Elena with two ships carrying pre-fabricated posts and heavy planking. He erected fort San Marcos in six days in defense against a possible Native American attack such as the one that forced the abandonment of the town a year earlier. The town had flourished, nearing 400 residents, since its establishment more than a decade earlier in 1566 by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés who had founded Spanish La Florida and St. Augustine the year before. In 1571 it became the capital of Spanish Florida, and it remained the capital until 1576.

“I have been looking for San Marcos since 1993, and new techniques and technologies allowed for a fresh search,” says DePratter who conducts research through the university’s South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Pedro Menéndez didn’t leave us with a map of Santa Elena, so remote sensing is allowing us to create a town plan that will be important to interpreting what happened here 450 years ago and for planning future research.”

DePratter says the general location of fort San Marcos has been known for decades from documentary sources, which included a written description and drawing of the fort that are part of the Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain. Several early attempts to find the fort through excavation failed.

Image…

In early June, DePratter and Thompson returned to Santa Elena to employ a suite of new remote sensing technologies to look below the surface of the ground without actually digging. Using ground penetrating radar, soil resistivity and magnetometers, they sent radar pulses and electric currents into the ground and measured differences in local magnetic fields in search for the missing fort and to map the lost 15-acre landscape of Santa Elena and the buildings – a church, courts, shops, taverns and farms – that brought life to the early settlement.

“Santa Elena is providing once again an unprecedented view of the 16th landscape. This is one of the best sites for remote sensing that I’ve ever had the privilege to work on,” says Thompson who directs UGA’s Center for Archaeological Sciences….

https://www.eatstayplaybeaufort.com/fort-san-marcos-discovered/

También puede verse:Hort

https://www.abc.es/cultura/abci-hallan-carolina-fuerte-espanol-primera-capital-estados-unidos-201607281230_noticia.html

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Santa Elena: A Brief History of the Colony, 1566-1587 Eugene Lyon

https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1184&context=archanth_books

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés y Márquez Biografía

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The True Origin of Spanish Florida: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, St. Augustine and Holy War (1565)

 The Other States of America History Portal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ52wv9xd-0&t=14s

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SANTA ELENA: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COLONY, 1566-1587 by ~Eugene Lyon Research Manuscript Series 193

https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1184&context=archanth_books

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Coastal Discovery Museum

History of Santa Elena

https://www.coastaldiscovery.org/santa-elena/history/#:~:text=Spanish%20colonists%20founded%20Santa%20Elena,site%20during%20the%2016th%20century.

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"El Norte" (6) de Carrie Gibson - Cronología de acontecimientos clave: 1566 - 1577

  En pocas palabras. Javier J. Jaspe Washington D.C.  Esta es la sexta entrega de una serie relacionada con el interesante libro:  “El N...