This is one of the subpages for the main Timeline page for The History of the Americans Podcast.
1504 – 1508 – Ponce de Leon is in command of a company of soldiers on Hispaniola. By 1506 he has heard rumors of gold on Puerto Rico, and crosses the Mona Passage to look for it. In 1508 he negotiates a license from King Ferdinand to mine gold for a share of the profits.
May 20, 1506 – Christopher Columbus dies, and his son Diego inherits his interests.
August 1509 – Diego Columbus arrives in Puerto Rico and tells Ponce de Leon that he owns the gold Ponce is mining. Litigation ensues, in which Diego successfully overturns King Ferdinand’s grant to Ponce, an example of the rule of law prevailing in an absolute monarchy. In recompense, Ferdinand grants Ponce a license to explore lands believed to lie in the north.
March 3, 1513 – Ponce de Leon leaves Puerto Rico in three ships, including a detachment of soldiers. On March 8 they spot the Bahamas, and on March 10 they anchor at Guanahani, the island at which Columbus first arrived on his First Voyage, to load water.
March 27, 1513 – The fleet of Ponce de Leon first sights the mainland of North America. It is Easter Sunday.
April 2-8, 1513 – The fleet anchors off the site of today’s St. Augustine in the evening, and the morning goes ashore and explores for a few days. Ponce names the land La Florida, because he had first seen the mainland on Easter, Pascua Florida in Spanish.
April 8, 1513 – Ponce de Leon’s fleet leaves the St. Augustine area and sails south along the Florida Atlantic coast.
April 20-21, 1513 – Ponce de Leon’s fleet spots Indians for the first time on the 20th, and on the 21st they go ashore near a village and are treated with great hostility. There were probably Tainos refugees from the Bahamas, which Spanish slavers had large depopulated. This was the first documented encounter between Indians and Europeans on North America’s mainland.
May 8, 1513 – Ponce de Leon’s fleet sails west along the southern side of the Florida Keys, which Spaniards called the Martyrs, eventually crossing into the Gulf of Mexico. It is not certain whether they sounded their way between islands or sailed around to the west of Key West.
May 24, 1513 – Ponce de Leon’s fleet anchors in a harbor on the west coast of Florida, probably Charlotte Harbor north of Sanibel, Island. There they gathered wood and fresh water and careened one of the caravels.
June 4, 1513 – Indians attack, killing one Spaniard. He may have been a ship’s master, Pedro Bello. Whatever his name, he is the first European to die at the hands of North American Indians.
June 14, 1513 – Ponce de Leon’s fleet leaves Charlotte Harbor, and sails to Cuba via the Tortugas, so named because they harvested tortoises to eat on the way back.
1514-1516 A slaver named Pedro de Salazar stumbled upon unknown coastline northwest of the Bahamas, perhaps the coast of today’s South Carolina or Georgia. He brought back Indians of “giant” stature, who commanded a high price in the Hispaniola slave market.
February 26, 1521 – Juan Ponce de Leon departs Puerto Rico with three or four ships to return to Florida. They would reach the west coast of Florida, and again fight Calusa Indians. Ponce was wounded with an arrow in the thigh, and would die after retreating to Havana in July 1521.
Spring 1521 – Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a wealthy judge on Cuba and political ally of Hernan Cortes, hearing of Salazar’s favorable report, sends Francisco Gordillo in search of this beautiful land of the giant Indians. Gordillo sailed north from Great Abaco Island about 400 statute miles to the Waccamaw River and Winyah Bay, near present-day Georgetown, South Carolina. Gordillo stayed in the area for nearly a month trading with the unusually tall Indians – and then they grabbed sixty of them as slaves and returned to Santo Domingo.
Summer 1523 – Ayllón obtains a patent to settle the coast north of today’s Florida, South Carolina and Georgia.
Fall 1523 – France enters the exploration game. King Francis I hires yet another Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verrazzano, to explore the coast of North America. Verrazzano commanded a fleet of four ships, and headed west from Normandy across the North Atlantic. An early winter storm sank two of the ships, and he returned to France. In late 1523, he proceeded south to Portuguese Madiera in La Dauphine.
January 17, 1524 – Verrazzano sails west from Madiera.
March 1, 1524 – La Dauphine makes landfall at Cape Fear in today’s North Carolina.
April 17, 1524 – After exploring the coast from northern Florida to New Jersey, La Dauphine enters lower New York Harbor.
Late April – May 6, 1524 – After spending only one day in New York, Verrazzano sails along the southern shore of Long Island, past Block Island, and into Narragansett Bay in today’s Rhode Island, where he spends almost two weeks exploring and getting to know the local tribes.
May – June 1524 – Verrazzano sails up the coast of New England and Nova Scotia, then for France.
July 8, 1524 – Verrazzano arrives back in France and the same day dispatches the journal of his voyage to Francis I.
Summer 1525 – Ayllón sends another pilot, Pedro de Quejo, up the coast of North America to take soundings and make a map and rutter. It is believed Quejo made it up to Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay and charted them for the first time.
July 1526 – Ayllón assembles a fleet of six ships, and six hundred people, including women, children, and black slaves, the last to become the first African slaves in the lands now constituting the United States. His objective is a permanent settlement on the Atlantic Coast of North America.
August 9, 1526 – Ayllón’s fleet reaches the sandbar at the entrance to Winyah Bay, South Carolina, roughly halfway between Charleston and Myrtle Beach. It does not go well. The flagship runs aground and goes down with most of the expedition’s supplies. After a month the settlers head south, by land and sea.
September 29, 1526 – The Ayllón expedition arrives on the South Carolina – Georgia line, roughly Tybee roads, and establishes the town of San Miguel de Gualdape.
October 18, 1526 – Ayllón dies of unknown causes. The aristocrats divide into opposing camps, and a mini-civil war breaks out. Indians attack after having been impressed for food, and Black slaves revolt, marking the first such rebellion within the borders of today’s United States. The colony was abandoned between late October and mid-November 1526.
December 1526 – Pánfilo de Narváez receives a patent from the king of Spain to explore and settle a vast territory from the Pacific to the Atlantic, south of a line running through Mobile, Alabama, and north of Rio Soto La Marina in Mexico.
Spring 1527 – Narváez organizes his expedition in Seville, and it would be there that he would have met the four ultimate survivors, Alonso del Castillo, Andres Dorantes, Esteban, a Black slave owned by Dorantes, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the royal treasurer for the expedition.
June 17, 1527 – The Narváez expedition, with around 600 men, leaves Spain for Santo Domingo on Hispaniola, arriving in late July after a quick crossing.
July – September 1527 – The Narváez expedition acquires more supplies on Hispaniola. Fatefully, it fails to recruit an experienced pilot. While there, 150 of the 600 men desert to see their fortune elsewhere in the New World.
Winter 1527-28 – After having been battered by a hurricane after leaving Hispaniola, the Narváez expedition spends the winter on the southern coast of Cuba. It hires a pilot. He would turn out to be incompetent.
February 1528 – The Narváez expedition leaves Cuba, but gets tied up in the shallow waters and islands in the south. It swings around the west coast of Cuba and reaches Havana in March 1528.
Late March 1528 – The Narváez expedition sails west from Havana under cloudy skies, aiming for Rio Soto La Marina on the east coast of Mexico. It gets caught in the Gulf Stream, which had not yet been mapped, and because of clouds had to navigate by dead-reckoning. The Gulf Stream pushed it east, but apparently nobody understood that.
April 12, 1528 – The Narváez expedition lands in Tampa Bay, more than 900 miles from its intended destination. Amazingly, it took a while for them to figure that out.
April 15, 1528 – Narváez makes the fateful decision to unload the settlers and the 42 surviving horses at Tampa Bay. They explore a quickly abandoned Indian village, and find a child’s rattle made of gold.
April – May 1528 – The Narváez expedition explores Tampa Bay and encounters the first Indians who do not shoot at them. These Indians send them north to “Appalachee,” in the vicinity of Tallahassee, where there was allegedly a lot of gold. Narváez decides that the men will march from Tampa Bay to Mexico, and the fleet will sail along off-shore. This was a bad idea anyway, but especially bad in the Gulf, where most of the mainland shore is screened from open water by barrier islands. The army and fleet were quickly separated. Forever.
August 1528 – The Narváez expedition reaches Appalachee, which is prosperous, agricultural, and populous but not possessed of gold. After a tense encounter turns south toward the Gulf. Of the original complement of 300 soldiers, 250 still survive. They make the beach, probably behind the barrier islands of Apalachicola Bay. To survive, they resolve to slaughter and eat one of their surviving horses every three days. They refer to their refuge as “the Bay of Horses.” They start to build five huge rafts to take them out past the barrier islands where they might see the fleet, and if necessary to Mexico.
Summer 1528 – The Narváez fleet, having returned to Cuba for more supplies, searches Tampa Bay for evidence of the now lost expedition. Local Indians capture Juan Ortiz. He would live as a slave among them for eleven years, only to be liberated when Hernando de Soto’s entrada would also land at Tampa Bay in 1539. Ortiz would then become Soto’s indispensable translator.
September 22, 1528 – The 240+ survivors of the Narváez expedition set sail on five immense rafts. They carry “fresh” water in immense canteens made from the skin from the hind legs of horses. Their food is a heap of corn looted from nearby villages in the middle of each raft. Their sails are made from old clothing. Seeing no ships beyond the barrier islands, they head west along the Gulf coast.
September – November 1528 – The rafts sail west, constantly battling thirst and starvation. They are scattered by the strong current at the mouth of the Mississippi – it is so strong, they can drink fresh water off the side of the rafts a couple of miles off the coast. Eventually, the five rafts land at different parts of the Texas Gulf Coast, scattered between Galveston and Corpus Christi.
Winter 1528-1529 – The vast majority of the 240+ men on the rafts die by various gruesome means, including Indian attack, starvation, and cannibalism. Panfilo de Narváez is one of the earliest to die. He slept on one of the rafts with a couple of aides, presumably to protect himself from Indians. One night, the raft was blown out to sea. He had no means to get back, and died of thirst and starvation. Other attempts to refloat the rafts fail. By the end of the very cold winter, only about 15 are still alive, including Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Esteban, but they are not in contact with each other.
Spring 1529 – Cabeza de Vaca has been taken in by local Indians, and he has been enslaved. He encounters survivors from the other raft that had landed on the back of Galveston Island, including Castillo, Dorantes, and Esteban, but they are living with another band and they are quickly separated again.
Winter 1529-1530 – Cabeza de Vaca contrives to escape his original tribe, and takes up with the Charrucos. For the next two years, he acts as an itinerant trader and intermediary among the tribes.
Spring 1532 – Cabeza de Vaca joins the Quevenes tribe, who were hunter gatherers. They traveled around south Texas seasonally. In the fall of 1532, Cabeza de Vaca was with them when they joined a gathering of small Indian bands on the southern Colorado River to eat the pecans that were in season then. There he ran into Dorantes, Castillo, and Esteban, whom he had not seen in 3 1/2 years. They compared notes, and believed they were by then the only survivors of the Narváez 300. Cabeza de Vaca also learned that the bands in the region would converge again the next summer west of Corpus Christi to eat prickly pears. When the tribes split up after pecan season, Castillo and Esteban left with the Yguases people. Dorantes was with a family of the Mariames tribe, who took on Cabeza de Vaca as a slave as well.
Summer 1533 – The tribes gather again and the four are reunited, but the Yguases and the Mariames get into a dispute “over a woman” and depart hastily, taking Castillo and Esteban and Dorantes and Cabeza de Vaca, respectively. Plans to escape are thereby foiled.
September 1534 – Now six years after they had left the Bay of Horses, most of it spent in servitude to the Indians, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Esteban are reunited and arrange to escape. Their plan is to walk south until they get to the northern reaches of Spanish settlement.
Late 1534 – Castillo performs his first act of faith-healing. Soon all four of the survivors are healing, and Indians begin following them. The four spend the winter of 1534-35 with the Avavares band in south Texas, this time as honored guests rather than slaves.
Spring 1535 – The four survivors start walking south, crossing the Rio Grande the first time. During this period they “got drunk on a certain smoke,” thought now to be peyote.
Summer and Fall 1535 – Walking south near the Gulf coast of Mexico, the survivors get within 200 miles of Panuco, the northernmost Spanish settlement on that coast. Then, for reasons unknown, they start walking to the west and north. For the rest of 1535 the final four and a growing army of three or four thousand Indians moved northwest, now toward west Texas, then back across the Rio Grande roughly at Presidio, Texas, then along the north bank of the Rio Grande for a bit more than a hundred miles to the northwest and then again across into Mexico, heading generally southwest until reaching the coastal plain between the Sierra Madre de Occidental and the Pacific Ocean in late 1535.
Christmas 1535 – In a village called Corazones in the Sierra Madre Occidental, Castillo saw an Indian wearing a Spanish buckle and horseshoe nail around his neck as jewelry. The four asked him where he got them. “They told us that some bearded men like us, with horses, lances and swords, had come there from heaven….” They knew they were close.
April 1536 – The four, followed by hundreds of Indians, reach a spot where Europeans had recently spent the night, evidenced by stakes for horses and other signs. Cabeza de Vaca, Esteban, and 11 Indians pursue, going on a forced march ahead of the main group, moving thirty miles in a day. The very next day, more than eight years after landing at Tampa Bay and almost seven years after landing at Galveston, Cabeza de Vaca and Esteban encounter Spanish soldiers on horses looking for Indians to enslave. They send for Dorantes and Castillo, who arrive with 900 Indians in tow. Cabeza de Vaca intervenes to prevent their enslavement.
Spring 1536 – Hernando de Soto returns to Spain at age 36, after 22 years in Central and South America accumulating a vast fortune.
Spring 1536 – Cabeza de Vaca and friends proceed to Culiacan, a Spanish settlement on the Pacific coast. There the apparently emotional mayor dissolved into tears on learning of their trials. After getting some new European clothes, which they now find scratchy and confining, they travel to Mexico City.
July 23, 1536 – The four survivors reach Mexico City, and are celebrated as heroes. Esteban spends a lot of time in local taverns, perhaps telling stories that exaggerate the prospects for gold north of the Rio Grande. He comes to the attention of ambitious officials.
Spring 1537 – Cabeza de Vaca returns to Spain.
April 20, 1537 – Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, issues the patent giving Soto permission to invade, conquer, and fortify La Florida, which was then defined as essentially all of North America, and including particularly the territories previously covered in the patents issued to Panfilo de Narváez and Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón.
Fall 1537 – Soto tries to recruit Cabeza de Vaca to join his entrada, but Cabeza de Vaca turns him down for an opportunity to run a settlement in today’s Uraguay. Soto believes that Cabeza de Vaca’s reticence is because he wants the gold of North America for himself.
Spring 1538 – The Soto expedition leaves Spain for Cuba, arriving in June. Soto has been made governor of Cuba and requisitions horses, pigs and other resources to support his invasion.
Late 1538 – Soto sends a small reconnaissance force to the west coast of Florida. They explore either Charlotte Harbor or Tampa Bay, and report back that the Indians had told them “by signs” that there was a lot of gold to the north. So begins one of the most fateful wild goose chases of all time.
Winter 1538-39 – Franciscan Friar Marcos de Niza and Esteban are escorted from Mexico City to Culiacan on the west coast by Francisco Vazquez de Coronado in command of 300 soldiers and 100 Indios amigos.
~1538-1540 Francis Drake is born in the West Country town of Tavistock. His father is Edmund Drake.
March 1539 – Fray Marcos and Esteban leave Culiacan with a small escort to scout north of the Rio Grande for a “lost city of gold.” Esteban would soon run ahead of Marcos, planting crosses at intervals to indicate his route.
May 1539 – Fray Marcos learns that Esteban has been killed in a Pueblo in Arizona. There are conflicting accounts of the reasons, but the leading theory is that a local chief called his bluff about there being a huge number of soldiers on the way.
May 18, 1539 – The Soto expedition, with 600 men and hundreds of horses and pigs sails from Havana for Florida, arriving May 25 in Tampa Bay, quite near the landing place of Narváez in 1528 and Ponce de Leon in 1521.
July 1539 – The Soto expedition marches north through the peninsula of Florida toward the panhandle. Near Ocala they rescue Juan Ortiz, a fifth survivor of the Narváez expedition who had been living with the Indians of the area since 1528. Ortiz becomes an essential translator for Soto.
September 2, 1539 – Fray Marcos de Niza returns to Mexico City from Arizona and, perhaps while drinking wine in Mexico City’s taverns, considerably exaggerates the economic opportunities north of Mexico. This report, which was a failure of intelligence, catalyzes the Coronado entrada.
Late 1539 – Searching for Apalachee, last encountered by the Narváez expedition in 1528, and after bloody fighting with the Indians of the area, Soto reaches Tallahassee on October 6, 1539. This is the only spot in the entire expedition that has been definitively confirmed.
November 17, 1539 – The Viceroy of Mexico sends Melchior Diaz and fifteen men on horses and the usual Indios amigos to revisit the route Marcos had taken to Cibola and give his take on Fray Marcos’ report. Diaz reaches Arizona, but his men take ill and he is unable to confirm or deny the friar’s report. Diaz returns to Mexico, and in March 1540 runs into an advance team from Coronado’s expedition.
Winter 1539-40 The Soto entrada spends five months in Tallahassee, sending reconnaissance squads on horseback both north and south. To the south, they discover the gruesome remnants of the “Bay of Horses.” The mission to the north, into Georgia, found no gold, but many densely populated Indian towns. The expedition moves north through Georgia into the Carolinas.
April 22, 1540 – Coronado, with Fray Marcos in tow, leads a vast expedition, including a couple of thousand Spanish and Indian men and a thousand horses, north toward Arizona. Coronado and Marcos detach and move in front with an advance group of 75 men on horses.
May 1, 1540 – In eastern South Carolina, Soto first encountered the queen of Cofitachequi, a high Mississippian society wealthier than even the Apalachee. She gave him blankets and clothing made of buffalo hide, and a strand of pearls which were, one of the chroniclers said, the size of hazelnuts. In her temple Soto found iron axes from the Bay of Biscay, Castilian axes for cutting wood, and beads that the Spanish explorers used to trade with the Indians. These must have come from the Ayllón disaster at Tybee Roads on 1526, roughly 90 miles away.
Spring 1540 – A maritime expedition under the command of Hernando de Alarcon departs May 9 and sails up the Gulf of California to the mouth of the Colorado River. His mission is to resupply the Coronado expedition. He does not do that, but in a conversation with a local chief confirms Esteban’s death.
June 17, 1540 – Coronado, Fray Marcos, and the advance group enter Arizona at Palominas.
Early July 1540 – Coronado and Marcos reach Cibola, a town about which Marcos had reported lavishly. This was the third or fourth time that Coronado had been disappointed in Fray Marcos’ reports, so he fired the friar and sent him back with a message to his main army, which was following along slowly.
Summer of 1540 – The Soto entrada moves through the Carolinas, then west into eastern Tennessee, probably near Knoxville, and then goes southwest into northern Alabama. At some point, “King Tascalusa” of the Atahachi is informed of the expedition, and starts to keep tabs on it. He knew about Europeans, because Don Teodoro, the Greek man sent ashore by the Narváez expedition as it sailed west along the Gulf coast, had lived with the Atahachi for some time thereafter.
August – October 1540 – Coronado dispatches Lopez de Cardenas and some horsemen to the northwest, they would meet the Hopis, and at some point during this period they would become the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon.
October 10, 1540 – Tascalusa sends his son as ambassador to greet Soto and welcome him. It is a ruse. He has been watching the Spanish for weeks, and has resolved to ambush them at a town called Mabila (after which Mobile, Alabama, well to the south of the actual spot, is named).
October 18, 1540 – Tascalusa entertains Soto and his officers inside Mabila, and then slips away to trigger the ambush. Brutal fighting ensues. Indian casualties may have numbered into the thousands, but they kill 20-40 Spanish soldiers, wound many more, kill or wound dozens of irreplaceable horses, and sack the Spanish baggage train. The result of the Battle of Mabila is disastrous for both sides. The Soto expedition remains in the area for a month to recover before pressing on to the west.
Fall of 1540 – Coronado’s main army catches up with Coronado at Tiguex, a well-watered pueblo in western New Mexico, and they all settle down for the winter. Coronado’s men meet an Indian who looked like he came from the Near East, so they nickname him “the Turk.” He tells the story of Quivira, a city of gold off to the northeast, across a vast desert of grass with many cows.
November 1540 – The Soto entrada moves northwest into northern Mississippi, into the territory of the Chicasa, an accomplished agricultural tribe with substantial food. They spend the winter there, enjoying friendly relations with the Chicasa. Soto lends the chief a horse so he can come and go in dignity.
Winter 1540-41 – The Tiguex War is fought between Coronado’s entrada and Pueblo Indians around the pueblo of Hawikuh and environs. This is the first “named war” within today’s United States, but only because nobody put a name on Soto’s war with the Atahachi in 1540.
March 5, 1541 – In northern Mississippi, the Chicasa attack Soto’s entrada, sneaking into the Spanish encampment and setting off incendiary devices. Eleven Spaniards, fifty-seven horses, and more than 400 of the 500 pigs (the herd having grown from 300 in the last three years) perish in the fire. In the confusion, the Chicasa break off the attack on the brink of victory. A few days later, the Spanish catch a big group of Chicasa warriors in the open and kill many of them. The Spanish are now down to fewer than 450 men of their original 600.
April 23, 1541 – August 1541 – The Turk leads Coronado and a big part of his army in search of Quivira, an alleged lost city of gold. It quickly becomes obvious that there isn’t enough food and water on the route to sustain the army, so Coronado sends it back. He continues on with thirty horsemen and the Turk.
May 1541 – In west Texas, one of Coronado’s scout teams meet Indians who had known Cabeza de Vaca and and his fellow survivors when they passed through in roughly 1535.
May 8, 1541 – The Soto entrada reaches a bluff over the Mississippi about 30 miles south of Memphis. This is the first European sighting of the central Mississippi river. There were heavily populated towns up and down the banks. Shortly after the entrada encamped on the eastern bank, there appeared an armada of Mississippian warships. Dispatched by a large kingdom call Aquixo on the western bank, the chroniclers claim the fleet was as big as two hundred vessels deployed in battle formation.
May – June 1541 – While under frequent arrow barrages, the Soto’s men build rafts to cross the river.
June 17, 1541 – At 3 am, to avoid an attack from the Indian navy, the entrada crosses the Mississippi into Arkansas. By 7:30 in the morning, all men, remaining equipment and supplies, and livestock have crossed into Arkansas.
June 1541 – May 1542 – The now declining army of Soto spent almost a year flailing about in Arkansas, chasing rumors of cities of gold. The historical record becomes thin during this period, but it suggests that Soto’s scouting parties may have come within 250 miles of the Coronado entrada.
August 1541 – Having traversed New Mexico, west Texas, and Oklahoma, Coronado and the Turk reach Quivera, in southeastern Kansas. There is no gold there, and Coronado orders “enhanced interrogation” of the Turk, who confesses that he has purposefully led the Spanish on a wild goose chase. He is garroted by one of the Spanish that night. Coronado returns to Tiguex in New Mexico, reaching it in early October 1541.
December 1541 – Coronado races another officer for fun, but his saddle girth breaks and he is thrown from his horse and trampled by the other. His injuries are severe. He determines to return to Mexico.
1542 (date unknown) – Cabeza de Vaca publishes his account of the ordeal of the survivors. It is the earliest work describing the tribes of the Texas Gulf coast, among other virtues.
May 21, 1542 – Hernando de Soto dies of an illness near the west bank of the Mississippi in southeast Arkansas or northeast Louisiana. Before he dies, he appoints Luis de Moscoso as his successor in command. Not wanting the Indians to learn that the legendary Soto had died, Moscoso and a small band of his friends weighed Soto’s body down with blankets filled with sand and sank it in the Mississippi.
June 5, 1542 – After deliberating with the surviving officers, Moscoso resolves to march through Texas and Mexico to reach New Spain. That summer they may have reached the Brazos River, but their scouts reported that there was little food and water.
July 2, 1542 – Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, exploring the Pacific coast, sees Baja California on his way north. It had been named the previous year by another explorer after a fictional island populated only by beautiful women from an early Spanish novel.
Summer 1542 – Somewhere in Texas, Moscoso’s men meet a “tattooed” Indian woman who had been held by Coronado’s men for a time the year before. She is the only known connection between the two expeditions while in the lands of today’s United States.
September 28, 1542 – Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sails into San Diego harbor, discovering it for Spain.
October 1542 – Moscoso turns the army around somewhere in Texas and returns to the Mississippi in Arkansas or Louisiana. Their plan is to build boats and hope that the Mississippi in fact flows to the Gulf of Mexico.
Late autumn 1542 – Coronado and his officers arrive home in Mexico City.
July 2, 1543 – To sail down the Mississippi, 322 Spaniards, roughly 100 of the remaining Indian porters, and 22 of the best horses embarked, the mounts in canoes lashed side by side.
Mid-July – Having survived Indian attacks for much of the voyage, the Moscoso “fleet” passes the site of the future New Orleans.
July 18, 1543 – The surviving expedition, still more than 300 strong, reaches the Gulf and sails for New Spain (Mexico).
September 10, 1543 – The 300 or so Soto survivors under Moscoso reach today’s Tampico, then the northernmost point of Spanish settlement in New Spain. The Soto entrada had spent 1570 days on its journey from Tampa Bay to Panuco, including 285 days in Florida, 61 days in Georgia, 21 days in South Carolina, 6 days in North Carolina, 27 days in Tennessee, 168 days in Alabama, 187 days in Mississippi, 103 days in Texas, and 443 days in Arkansas and Louisiana. Not counting mounted reconnaissance operations, the expedition spent approximately 255 days on the march and on those days averaged a bit more than ten miles a day. The balance of the 4000 or so miles were traveled in the pinnaces, down the Mississippi and along the Gulf coast. That roughly half the men who began the expedition survived it is quite astonishing, given the mortality rates in such projects at the time.
January 28, 1547 – England’s King Henry VIII dies, and his nine-year old son Edward VI becomes king under a regency.
June 6, 1549 – The Western Rising, also known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, starts in western England and Cornwall. Edmund Drake moves his family to Kent to get away from the violence. Young Francis grows up by the sea, and by the mid-1550s is apprenticed to the owner of a coastal trading bark.
June 1549 – The expedition of Fray Luis Cancer reaches the west coast of Florida, arriving at Tampa Bay on June 23. His translator, an Indian woman called Magdalena by the Christians, thought loyal to the Spanish, immediately leads Cancer and his party into an ambush. It would be nine more years before the Spanish would try again in North America.
Early 1550s – Geopolitical changes in Europe lead to a rapid decline in the export of English woolens, leading to an economic crisis. This catalyzes English interest in seeking a route to China (and its vast market) that does not depend upon the Spanish, Portuguese, or Arabs.
Late 1552 – A group of merchants, courtiers, and intellectuals, in consultation with Sebastian Cabot (John Cabot’s son), draw up plans for a new commercial venture and gave it a rather glorious name: “The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown.”
May 20, 1553 – The “Merchant Adventurers” dispatch an expedition of three ships to look for a northeast passage to China under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby. One of them, under Richard Chancellor, would reach Archangel. Chancellor traveled to Moscow and opened up diplomatic relations and signed a trade deal with Ivan the Terrible. This was the first official contact between Russia and England in more than 500 years.
July 6, 1553 – Edward VI dies, and after some back and forth “Bloody” Mary Tudor becomes Queen. She would marry Prince Philip of Spain, who would eventually become Philip II, and re-establish Catholicism in England.
1557 – The first of the Soto entrada narratives is published, “True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto and certain Portuguese Gentlemen During the Discovery of the Province of Florida, now newly set forth by a Gentleman of Elvas.”
November 17, 1558 – Mary I dies, and is succeeded by her half sister, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth would re-establish the Church of England as the state religion, and pass an “act of conformity” that required everybody to worship in accordance with its liturgy.
Late 1558 – Tristan de Luna y Arellano is named governor of a territory including today’s Florida and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, more or less, and is charged with establishing bases at Pensacola and Parris Island, South Carolina.
January 15, 1559 – Elizabeth I crowned Queen of England.
February 27, 1559 – Elizabeth’s Act of Conformity, which establishes the Church of England and makes Protestantism the state religion in England.
June 11, 1559 – Tristan de Luna y Arellano’s fleet of 11 to 13 ships leaves San Juan de Ulua in Mexico and sails for Pensacola with the purpose of establishing a permanent colony there. The fleet carried 1500 people in total, 240 horses, cattle for breeding, and supplies of corn, biscuit, bacon, dried beef, cheese, oil, vinegar, and wine. The ships carried materials to build an entire Spanish town at Pensacola, including a governor’s residence, storehouses, jail, and more than 100 houses. The fleet only arrives August 14, 1559, having taken an inexplicably long time to cross the Gulf of Mexico.
September 19, 1559 – A hurricane hits Pensacola, and sinks all but three of the ships in Tristan de Luna’s expedition, most of them taking down critical supplies. This would put his men in desperate straits.
February 1560 – Luna marches most of his men into the interior of Alabama, looking for food. They run into hostile Indians – who may have remembered the Soto entrada from 20 years before – and fail. They return to Pensacola by way of Mobile in the summer of 1560. A couple of small supply ships arrive.
April 1561 – Luna abandons his settlement and returns to New Spain. The survivors abandon the Pensacola area no later than July 1561.
Summer 1561 – The Spanish ship Santa Catalina, exploring the coast of North America at the behest of Luna’s successor Ángel de Villafañe, sails into the mouth of the Chesapeake in front of a storm. There they pick up two Indian teenagers, perhaps by consent and perhaps not. One of them, who goes by the name Paquiquineo, is perceived to be of noble rank. The Santa Catalina‘s master, Antonio Velazquez, perceives Paquiquineo’s value and takes him to court in Madrid.
1561-1562 Pacquiquineo stays at the court of Philip II, learns Spanish, and persuades Philip to send him back to the Chesapeake. Instead he is taken to New Spain (Mexico), and lives there until 1566. He is baptized Don Luis de Velasco, in honor of the governor of New Spain.
February – May 1562 – Jean Ribault sets sail from Le Havre with two ships and 150 French colonists, mostly Huguenots, for Florida. They reached the coast of Florida in the vicinity of Jacksonville by late April 1562, and on May 1 hold the first Protestant religious service in North America.
May-June 1562 – After erecting a stone marker at the Jacksonville site, Ribault and his men sail for Parris Island, South Carolina. There they build a strong-house, name it Charlesfort, and Ribault leaves a garrison of 27 men to hold it for France. Ribault heads back to France, but is caught up in the French wars of religion and imprisoned. The French at Parris Island never receive reinforcement.
June 1562 – Tristan de Luna’s successor, Angel de Villafane, leads three ships toward South Carolina, only to have a hurricane come along and wreck them. He would not see the French who were already working their way along the coast from Jacksonville to Parris Island.
Early 1560s – Francis Drake sells the bark he had inherited from his master and moves back to the West Country, where he connects with his cousins, William and John Hawkins, who were early pirates/privateers sailing against Spain and Portugal.
May 1564 – Having learned of the claims of the Huguenots at Jacksonville and Parris Island, King Philip II of Spain orders that the markers and any settlers be removed. Captain Hernando Manrique de Rojas sails up the coast with 25 soldiers. He finds nothing near Jacksonville, neither the marker nor Indians who would say they saw Europeans.
June 2 -11, 1564 – Manrique moves up the coast to the vicinity of Hilton Head Island. There they meet Indians, who report they have a single Frenchman in captivity. His name is Guillaume Rouffi, and he tells Manrique the story of how the other abandoned French built a twenty ton pinnace and tried to sail across the ocean to France in a small boat. Their fate would be ugly. Rouffi leads Manrique to Charlesfort, and he destroys it. In the summer of 1996, archeologists would find the foundation of the strong-house.
June 15, 1564 – Manrique sails for Cuba, with Rouffi as a captive. Rouffi disappears from history.
June 24, 1564 – Rene Laudonniere, veteran of Renault’s Charlesfort expedition, arrives at Jacksonville with 300 Huguenot settlers. Somehow, Manrique and Laudonniere miss each other along the coast of Florida. They build Fort Caroline.
Summer 1565 – The pirate John Hawkins visits Fort Caroline. This is why the sailors he later abandoned on the Gulf coast of Mexico or Texas, David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde, first walked all the way to Jacksonville.
August 28, 1565 – Jean Ribault, now released from prison, arrives at Fort Caroline with more than 600 additional settlers. Shortly after Ribault and his four ships arrive, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, acting on the same orders to roust the French from Florida, spots Ribault’s fleet. Ribault flees, so Aviles returns to the site of today’s and prepares for war. September 8, 1565 is regarded as the founding of St. Augustine.
September 19-20, 1565 – Aviles marches 400 soldiers overland to Fort Caroline. They attack at dawn, and kill 150 French. Aviles arrives and gives the order to spare women and children, of which about 70 survive.
Late September 1565 – Aviles leaves a garrison at Fort Caroline, which he renames San Mateo, and marches back to St. Augustine. Ribault’s fleet wrecks on the beach south of St. Augustine. Over the course of the next few days, Aviles kills groups of French, sometimes by execution after surrender. At least 470 Huguenots of approximately 800 French, including Ribault, were killed by Aviles in the two actions. Some professed Catholics were spared.
1566 – Pedro Menendez de Aviles spends much of the year exploring coastal Florida and building small forts. None of them, other than St. Augustine, would survive longer than five years. Along the way he rescues the surviving remnants of more than 200 Spanish who had been shipwrecked, believed lost, and held prisoner for more than 20 years by the Calusa Chief Carlos. Also, Aviles directs Captain Juan Pardo to explore the interiors of the Carolinas and Tennessee from St. Helena (Parris Island).
Summer 1566 – Paquiquineo/Don Luis helps Dominican friars and a company of soldiers from Havana look for the mouth of the Chesapeake. They fail to find it, perhaps because Paquiquineo does not want it found by Spanish soldiers, and instead of returning to Cuba they sail for Spain.
November 1566 – Francis Drake sails under John Lovell, who was one of the captains in the service of the Hawkins family, to Cape Verde and the Caribbean. Lovell captures a couple of Portuguese slave ships and attempts to sell them in the Caribbean, but fails to do and eventually releases them.
December 1, 1566 – Captain Juan Pardo departs St. Helena with 125 soldiers. They seem to have wended their way north through South Carolina into the province of the Cofitachequi, which in 1541 had been rich and led by a queen. No more. From there Pardo moved up into central North Carolina, all along the way building small forts and leaving behind a few soldiers to garrison them. Then at some point in January 1567, Pardo got a letter from Santa Elena calling him back to be on hand in case the French attacked in reprisal for their defeat at Fort Caroline. Pardo left behind a detachment of perhaps thirty men under the command of one Sargeant Moyano in central North Carolina, and returned to Santa Elena on March 7, 1567.
April 1567 – Moyano reports by letter that he has fought Chisca Indians, killed more than a thousand of them and burned 50 of their buildings. He pushes into Tennessee and encounters a series of fortified towns, which he says he destroyed, killing thousands of Indians. His furthest reach was probably a bit south of Knoxville.
May 25, 1567 – Aviles again ordered Pardo to go into the interior to pacify the Indians, take possession of the land, and find an overland route to the mines of San Martin in Zacatecas, Mexico, and then return to Santa Elena by the following March! This order betrayed an astonishing misunderstanding of North American geography.
September 1, 1567 – July 1568 – Pardo and roughly 120 armed men departed Santa Elena for a roundabout trip through the Carolinas and into eastern Tennessee in an attempt to follow his impossible orders. The expedition spends ten months in the Carolinas and Tennessee and sets up a series of small forts. Pardo’s account reveals a massive decline in the Indian population in the region when compared to the narratives of the Soto entrada only 26 years before.
October 1567 – January 1569 – John Hawkins takes his young cousin Francis Drake and several ships, including one owned by Elizabeth I, on a mission against Portuguese and Spanish shipping. In December 1567, they capture a couple of small Portuguese ships, and Hawkins puts Drake in command of one of them. It is his first blue ocean command.
May 3, 1568 – French nobleman Dominique de Gourgues raises the money to finance an expedition to San Mateo, the site of the former Fort Caroline, to exact revenge. De Gourgues’ men surprised the Spanish garrison lounging around after lunch, and slew most of them. De Gourgues tacked a sign up over their bodies that said simply “Not as Spaniards, but as murderers.”
September 15, 1568 – After successfully selling captured slaves and other goods in the Caribbean and carrying a big load of treasure, the Hawkins fleet limps into the New Spain port of San Juan d’Ulua after having been been severely damaged by a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Francis Drake is in command of the Judith. Hawkins takes control of the gun batteries protecting the entrance to the harbor.
September 17, 1568 – Thirteen Spanish warships arrive at San Juan d’Ulua conveying the new Viceroy of New Spain.
September 23, 1568 – After an tense standoff, the Spanish repudiate their pledge of safe conduct and attack the Hawkins fleet in the harbor. Only two of the Hawkins ships survive – Drake’s Judith, and the Minion, to which Hawkins transferred his flag. When the Minion gets out of the harbor, the Judith is nowhere to be seen.
Late September – early October 1568 – Hawkins sails along the Gulf Coast hoping to find food and water, and within two weeks puts more than 100 men ashore, because they have insufficient food and water for all the men to make it back to England. Thirty of them walk to Florida, hoping to connect with the Huguenots they had heard of. Three of them eventually make it to Nova Scotia, where they are picked up by a French ship. One of them, David Ingram, would give long testimony describing their overland trip.
January 1569 – The Judith, under Francis Drake, and the Minion, under John Hawkins, make it back to England months after the catastrophic battle of San Juan d’Ulua. Drake arrives five days before John Hawkins, and reports the disaster to William Hawkins.
Autumn 1569 – The Gargaryne, a French trader anchored off Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, picks up three English sailors, David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde. They had walked all the way from the Gulf coast of Mexico, having been dropped there by the English pirate John Hawkins.
1570 – Francis Drake takes two small ships, the Swan and the Dragon, and perhaps fifty men on his first raid to the Caribbean. Little is known of this voyage, except that he learned of the route of the Spanish treasure fleets and the location of Nombre de Dios, the port for loading silver and gold on the Caribbean coast of Panama.
August 1570 – Jesuit Father Juan Baptista de Segura leads three other brothers and some laymen to establish a mission on the Chesapeake. Don Luis is their guide. They bring no soldiers. The area had been experiencing six years of drought.
September 1570 – The Segura mission picks a spot in the area of Don Luis’ tribe, almost certainly the Pamunkey. They start building small shelters and a chapel. Within five days, Paquiquineo/Don Luis abandons the Jesuits and returns to his family’s village.
Late 1570 – Francis Drake makes a second voyage to the Caribbean in the Swan.
February 4, 1571 – The Jesuits in Pamunkey country, now desperate for food, approach the Indians for help. Their emissaries are killed, and a few days later Paquiquineo/Don Luis returns with other Pamunkeys and murders everybody else at the mission encampment. They spare a boy named Alonso and take him with them.
February 21, 1571 – Francis Drake captures two small Spanish ships off the northern coast of Panama and leaves a hilarious note behind.
February 22, 1571 – Drake sails into Panama’s Chagres River and explores as far as it is navigable.
Spring 1571 – A Jesuit resupply ship arrives from St. Elena (Parris Island). When the ship arrived at the mouth of the York River they were greeted with the “astonishing sight of Indians parading on the shore vested in cassocks and religious robes.” Because the Indians threatened to attack them, the Spanish did not land but returned to Santa Elena.
Spring 1571 – Francis Drake captures at least a dozen small Spanish ships along the Spanish Main in the Caribbean. The Spanish estimate total losses at an amount equal to 66,000 Elizabethan English pounds.
May 8, 1571 – Drake captures a frigate from Cartagena carrying Philip II’s correspondence for his officers in Panama and Peru. Drake allegedly tosses it overboard.
Summer 1571 – Philip II receives his first correspondence mentioning Drake and calling for stronger defenses in the West Indies. Also, while sailing back to England with his booty, Drake spots a small sheltering harbor on the coast of Panama, marks it as a potentially useful hideaway, and buries some supplies there for future use. He names it Port Pheasant.
May 24, 1572 – Francis Drake and his brother John leave Plymouth for a third raid on the Caribbean. Their ships are the Pasco and the Swan, and their crew is 73 men and boys. They sail for Port Pheasant.
July 12, 1572 – The Swan and Pasco reach Port Pheasant. There they found a note left only five days before from a fellow English pirate, warning that the Spanish had learned that Drake planned to use it as a refuge, probably from one of the Spanish sailors released by Drake the previous year. Nevertheless, he stays there long enough to assemble three pinnaces carried in parts in the holds of his two ships.
July 29, 1572 – Francis Drake and his men attack Nombre de Dios, the Caribbean depot for treasure from South America brought across the Isthmus from the Pacific coast of Panama. They discover a warehouse with a huge store of silver bars, but Drake is seriously injured and his crew breaks off the attack before they can cart it away. Also, Drake’s men free a Black slave named Diego, who attaches himself to Drake as his personal servant. Diego would remain with Drake until Diego’s death in 1579.
August 1572 – Pedro Menendez de Aviles, on his way back to Spain, stops by the Chesapeake to investigate what happened to the Jesuits. He extorts the Indians into returning Alonso, who relates what happened. The Indians refuse to surrender Paquiquineo. The Spanish retaliate with cannon fire against Indians on the shore, and then leave. No European would attempt to settle the Chesapeake for 35 years.
September 1572 – January 1573 – Diego, a Black slave freed by Francis Drake, tells Drake about the cimarrones, escaped slaves who have built their own society on the isthmus of Panama and are waging war on the Spanish. Drake spends these months capturing Spanish ships and preparing for a raid on the mule train bringing silver north from the Pacific coast of Panama to Nombre de Dios.
February 1573 – Diego connects Drake with Pedro, the leader of a band of cimarrones. Drake and thirteen of his men and Pedro and thirty cimarrones hike into the heart of Panama to scout the route and schedule of the Spanish mule train carrying treasure from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean coast. Pedro takes Drake to a lookout platform in a tree on the top of a mountain, from which Drake was able to see both the Caribbean sea and the Pacific (“South”) ocean. He has an idea.
March 23, 1573 – Drake encounters Guillaume Le Testu, a Huguenot privateer. They agree to team up against the Spanish.
April 1, 1573 – Drake, Le Testu, Pedro, and a combined force of their men ambushed a Spanish mule train as it approached Nombre de Dios. They take gold worth 100,000 pesos, and capture 15 tons of silver bars that they cannot transport in the jungle, so they bury it. Le Testu dies in the attack. Afterwards, in gratitude Drake presents Pedro with a jeweled sword that had belonged to the leader of the Huguenots.
August 9, 1573 – Francis Drake makes it back to Plymouth after the third expedition to the Caribbean, now extremely rich.
Fall 1575 – Francis Drake meets with Francis Walsingham, by then principal foreign policy advisor to Elizabeth I. Walsingham asks Drake where he proposes to go, and Drake points to the coast of Peru on a map. He will not agree to a plan in writing lest England ends up back in Catholic control. Drake begins planning to sail in the spring of 1576, but Elizabeth withdraws backing for the mission in favor of a voyage under Martin Frobisher to look for a northwest passage over Canada.
Early 1577 – John Dee, Elizabeth’s principal science advisor, concludes that it is pointless to keep looking for a northwest passage without knowing the western exit of it. This hypothesized exit becomes known as the Strait of Anian. This would become the secret objective of Drake’s next expedition.
July 9, 1577 – Francis Drake reports to the government that he has built at his expense a ship suitable for the voyage, the 150 ton Pelican of Plymouth. It looks like a typical merchant vessel, but is much studier and has a much bigger hold than ships with a similar silhouette. Elizabeth soon greenlights an expedition to the Pacific.
December 13, 1577 – The crew of the Drake fleet, having departed England on the pretense of going to Egypt, learns that its destination is the Strait of Magellan and the Pacific.
February 1578 – Drake’s fleet captures a Portuguese caravel and the 100 ton Santa Maria just south of Cape Verde. More importantly, he picks up Nuna de Silva, a Portuguese pilot familiar with the coast of South America. When Drake tells de Silva that he is aiming for the Strait of Magellan, de Silva says he wants to come along. The discovery of de Silva’s journal in Mexico City in the early 20th century would revolutionize Drake scholarship.
April 14, 1578 – The Drake fleet reaches the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, at the border of today’s Uruguay and Argentina.
June 20, 1578 – Drake reaches Port St. Julien, within 100 miles of the eastern entrance to the Strait of Magellan. They find the scaffold on which Magellan had executed mutineers more than 50 years before. Drake stays there for two months, waiting out the southern winter. There he executes Thomas Dougherty for mutiny, and his cooper makes tankards from the wood of Magellan’s scaffold, perhaps the coolest souvenir in history.
Summer 1578 – Elizabeth I grants Sir Humphrey Gilbert a patent to settle a vast area of North America. It has a six year term.
August 21, 1578 – The Drake fleet enters the Strait of Magellan. That evening, Drake renames the Pelican, now the Golden Hind, in honor of Sir Christopher Hatton, one of his principal investors.
September 1578 – Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Walter Ralegh, depart for North America with 500 men in eleven ships. The expedition is riven with delays and dissent, and turns back after getting into a big fight with the Spanish off Cape Verde.
September 6, 1578 – Drake reaches the Pacific exit of the Strait of Magellan.
September 8, 1578 – The fleet is hit by a huge storm in the southeastern Pacific. The now three ships, the Golden Hind, the Marigold, and the Elizabeth, are blown hundreds of miles to the southwest over the course of a week.
September 15, 1578 – The clouds part long enough for Drake to see a lunar eclipse predicted by John Dee before the expedition had left England. This allows Drake to fix longitude, and the news is not good. The fleet is now as far as 700 miles west by southwest of the Strait, truly the middle of nowhere.
September 28, 1578 – The Marigold disappears, never to be heard from again.
October 8, 1578 – The Golden Hind and the Elizabeth reach the far west coast of South America and anchor, and then another storm hits. Drake takes the Golden Hind to sea, believing it safer, but the Elizabeth stays at anchor.
Late October 1578 – The second storm drives the Golden Hind south of Tierra del Fuego, and Drake discovers that South America is not connected to a hypothesized southern continent. The stretch of water is still known as Drake’s Passage.
November 1, 1578 – After having failed to rendezvous, the Elizabeth sails back into the Strait, and reaches England after an arduous journey in the spring of 1579. The Golden Hind is now alone.
November 25, 1578 – Drake reaches the island of Mocha, off the coast of Chile. There they are ambushed by Indians. Drake and his servant Diego are wounded, Drake taking an arrow in the face. He rejects his crew’s demand to retaliate, because he believes the Indians only attacked because they had mistaken them for the Spanish.
December 5, 1578 – Drake captures the Capitana in the harbor of Valparaiso, Chile. The haul includes 300 pounds of gold and 1770 jars of wine. He puts the crew ashore, but takes on board the ship’s pilot, a Greek, who has sailed with the Spanish across the Pacific and knows the winds and currents.
December 1578 – January 1579 – Drake works the west coast of South America with the Capitana, now crewed by his men, and they grab several more Spanish ships but no big haul of treasure. In January, the pilot guides them to a secluded roadstead to careen the Golden Hind. Drake decides he’ll move faster without the now three Spanish ships, so he empties them, raises their sails, and lets them blow out to sea.
February 13, 1579 – Drake sails into the port of Lima, Peru, and grabs another Spanish ship, strips it of weapons and anything of value, and releases it.
February 28, 1579 – Drake captures a Spanish bark carrying 18,000 pesos in gold and silver. A Black slave on the ship tells Drake where the treasure is hidden.
March 1, 1579 – The Golden Hind crosses the equator, heading north hunting a rumored Spanish treasure ship, nicknamed Cacafuego. Shortly afternoon, young John Drake spots her 12 miles to leeward.
March 2, 1579 – Drake puts up all his sails and then slows the Golden Hind down by dragging wine casks behind, deceiving the Cacafuego‘s captain into believing she is a slow merchantman. Drake captures the Spanish ship by guile. The prize includes 26 tons of silver, and eighty pounds of gold.
March 20, 1579 – Drake captures the bark of Rodrigo Tello off the west coast of Costa Rica. It carries a cargo of sarsaparilla, lard, honey, and maize. More importantly, in a fantastic stroke of luck it is ferrying two pilots who had been sent by the Viceroy of New Spain to take the new governor of the Philippines to Manila. The pilots had the secret Spanish navigational charts and rutters to sail from Central America to the western Pacific. Drake retained the more senior of the two, Alonso Sanchez Colchero.
April 4, 1579 – Drake captures another small ship, the most notable passenger being Don Francisco de Zarate, who afterward wrote a long letter about the encounter to Spanish authorities. He trades the captured pilot Colchero for Zarate’s pilot. A Black woman named Maria on the Spanish ship moves from enslaved status to notionally free by joining the Golden Hind.
April 13, 1579 – Drake entered the harbor of Guatulco, on the southwestern coast of Mexico and captures a bark and frees three Black slaves, two of whom join his crew. The Spanish crew run away, and Drake’s men take the cargo but leave the bark. The next morning, the Golden Hind and her consort sailed off. When the crew of the bark returned that day, they discovered Drake’s Portuguese pilot, Nuno de Silva, whom he had conscripted off Cape Verde the year before, standing forlornly on the bark’s deck with his possessions. De Silva’s journal fell into Spanish hands and would only be discovered in a dusty archive in Mexico City in the early 1900s, more than 300 years later. It would upend history’s understanding of Drake and his voyage of 1578-79.
April – May 1579 – The Golden Hind and Tello’s bark follow the Spanish navigational charts and sail west into the Pacific, then north, then northeast, in a loop of more than 2000 miles. They arrive somewhere on the northwest coast of North America, probably about 48 degrees, near Olympic National Park, in late May. The search for the Strait of Anian, and encounter some very cold weather. The ships again needed careening, so they sailed south looking for a protected beach on which to do it.
June 17, 1579 – Drake finds a “fair and good bay” to careen the ships. This was long thought to be on the coast of California in the vicinity of San Francisco, but in the early 20th century documents were discovered that pointed toward a location in Oregon or Washington. Drake claims the area for Elizabeth I, and names it Novo Albion. The ships stay there between five and ten weeks, and enjoy friendly relations with the local Indians. No blood is shed, making Drake’s visit almost unique in the early documented encounters between Europeans and North American tribes.
Late July 1579 – The winds being favorable, Drake prepares to head west across the Pacific, the other routes home being too dangerous. He cannot carry enough food and water for everybody, so he leaves twenty men behind with a pinnace. We do not know what befell the twenty. The only thing we do know is that one of them, a Spanish speaking pilot named Morera, would end up walking to Mexico, where he surfaced in 1583, four years after the Golden Hind had sailed away from the Pacific northwest.
September 30, 1579 – After 68 days out of sight of land, they reach an island in the Caroline Islands, probably Palau. A trading encounter turns violent. Over the next few weeks the Golden Hind moves on to Mindanao in the Philippines and then the Moluccas.
October – November 1579 – The Golden Hind reaches Ternate and Drake meets Babu, the Sultan of the Moluccas, who has been at war with the Portuguese. Drake gave the Sultan a gold ring set with a precious stone, a coat of mail, and a fine helmet – and the Sultan gave Drake a trade deal, six tons of cloves, sugar cane, hens, rice, and fruit, which Drake would have wanted because scurvy was again setting in.
December 12, 1579 – The Golden Hind anchors at a small island off of Sulawesi. At some point in the run from the Moluccas, it is believed that Diego died.
January 9, 1580 – The Hind runs aground on a reef off the east coast of Sulawesi, and is almost lost. The crew tossed three tons of cloves, two cannons, and some cannonballs over the side in the hope of lightening the load and floating off, but to no avail. But the next day the wind shifted, and a surge of water pushed the Hind off the reef. She proceeds south and through a gap between the main Indonesian chain, sailing along the southern coast of Java.
March 26, 1580 – After provisioning and repairing the Hind, probably over a few weeks, Drake sails west across the Indian Ocean.
May 21, 1580 – Summer 1580 Drake sees the east coast of Africa after a run of almost two months. Not seeing a good place to land or perhaps worried about the Portuguese, they sail around the Cape of Africa and up the west coast, finally landing in Sierra Leone, north of the equator. This had been an extraordinary run of 9700 miles, and one of the greatest feats of seamanship in history to that point. Drake brought on a supply of lemons to ward off scurvy, still almost 200 years before Scottish physician James Lind would prove that citrus would prevent the disease.
September 26, 1580 – Francis Drake and the Golden Hind return to Plymouth after having circumnavigated the globe in 1018 days. He asks a passing fisherman if the Queen is still alive, and he reports that she is, but that a flu epidemic is raging through Plymouth and it would be a bad idea to come ashore.
March 18, 1581 – Parliament passes the Act against Reconciliation to Rome, which, among other things, made attendance at Church of England services mandatory. The resettlement of the Catholic population of England would, eventually, become a rationale for North American colonization.
April 1, 1581 – Elizabeth I knights Francis Drake on the deck of the Golden Hind, by then anchored just down the Thames from London. He is now Sir Francis Drake.
June 5, 1581 – The expedition of Captain Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado and the friar Agustin Rodriguez, amounting to 29 or 30 people – two or three friars, eight soldiers, and nineteen servants or slaves, leaves central Mexico to explore New Mexico, the first such expedition since Coronado’s return in 1542. They would see vast herds of buffalo in eastern New Mexico or the Oklahoma panhandle, and return to Mexico by the end of January 1582.
November 10, 1582 – The expedition of Antonio de Espejo, a party of 14 soldiers, one priest, perhaps 25 servants and 115 horses and mules headed north to New Mexico.
December 9, 1582 – The Espejo expedition reaches the Rio Grande, where they encounter Indians who still talked of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions almost fifty years later.
February 1, 1583 – The Espejo expedition reaches inhabited Pueblos for the first time.
May 1583 – Having explored west, the Espejo expedition reaches Winslow, Arizona. At the time, there were no corners to stand on.
Summer 1583 – Sir Humphrey Gilbert and a fleet of five ships sail for Nova Scotia and then New England with the intention of establishing a settlement for English Catholics. On August 20, 1582, Gilbert’s flagship breaks up off the coast of Nova Scotia and Gilbert is financially ruined.
September 9, 1583 – Gilbert dies when his small ship, the 8-ton Squirrel, goes down in a storm in the North Atlantic. He is last seen reading the novel Utopia. His half-brother, Walter Ralegh, inherits his patent.
September 10, 1583 – The Espejo expedition recrosses the Rio Grande into New Spain (Mexico). Its return through the Pueblo country had involved considerable ugliness.
April 27, 1584 – Walter Ralegh dispatches two ships to explore the Outer Banks of North Carolina as the possible site for a settlement. The master is Philip Amadas, and the navigator is Simon Fernandes. Arthur Barlowe commands the smaller ship, a pinnace. John White, an artist, and Thomas Harriott, a naturalist, are also along.
Early July, 1584 – The Amadas expedition arrives at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They drop anchor off Hatteras Island. The ships are under the observation of Wingina, a local chief. On July 4, 1584, he dispatches his brother, Granganimeo, to approach the English. Over the next few days, the English and the local Indians trade and establish diplomatic relations.
Summer 1584 – Arthur Barlowe takes the pinnace and a handful of men to explore the region and look for Granganimeo, and they find Roanoke Island. Meanwhile, Amadas picks up two Indians to bring back to England, Manteo and Wanchese. We do not know by what means these Indians were recruited, but it may be that they came voluntarily, or at the direction of their own chiefs. Manteo was from the Croatoan tribe, not the Roanoke, down near Hatteras, where his mother ruled over a tribal group still independent of Wingina and his brother. Manteo seems to have developed a genuine fascination with all things English, and he would return to England two more times in the coming years. Wanchese, one of Wingina’s subjects, was much more skeptical.
January 6, 1585 – Elizabeth I knighted Walter Ralegh, and granted him the right to name the land in his domain – up to 1800 miles of North American coastline and all that lay behind it – Virginia, in her honor.
April 9, 1585 – The first Roanoke expedition sets sail from Plymouth for the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The fleet was five ships and two pinnaces. There were more than 600 men along – including soldiers, tradesmen, and artisans – 300 of whom were intended to be left behind to start the colony. Key figures included Sir Richard Grenville as leader of the expedition, Philip Amadas and Thomas Cavendish as captains, and Ralph Lane in charge of the soldiers. John White and Thomas Harriott, who has learned some Algonquian from Manteo and Wanchese, come along as artists and naturalists.
Early May, 1585 – Philip II has lost patience with the English, and closes Spanish ports to English ships as a first step to war. It takes a while for England to learn that this has happened.
May 11 – May 19, 1585 – After a very fast crossing, various ships of the Roanoke fleet rendezvous as planned on the unoccupied southern coast of Puerto Rico. Other ships fail to make the rendezvous. By the end of May the ships leave Puerto Rico and head north.
June 20, 1585 – Ralegh’s second supply mission to North Carolina is diverted by Elizabeth I to attack Spanish fishing off Newfoundland. The goal is to cut off the Spanish supply of cod, which then was dried and used as protein on ships of war. The diversion is bad news for the men already arriving in North Carolina.
June 23, 1585 – The ships from the Puerto Rico rendezvous arrive on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and begin exploring. During July the other ships begin arriving at various points in the area. One of them dumps 30 men on one of the barrier islands and takes off for Newfoundland. The Tiger runs aground, and in the course of refloating her many of the expedition’s supplies are lost.
July 1, 1585 – Having learned of the Spanish closing their ports to English trade and of an attack on an English merchant ship, Elizabeth I gives Sir Francis Drake a commission to “visit” the ports of Spain to release impounded English ships. She also issued commissions of reprisal to merchants whose property had been lost in Spain, enabling them to recoup their losses by plunder. Under their color, Drake could hunt for Spanish prizes wherever he chose.
Mid July 1585 – Sir Richard Grenville and about sixty men explore Pamlico Sound and the barrier islands. In the course of trading, an Indian steals a silver cup owned by Grenville. He sends Ralph Lane to recover it, during the course of which he burns down a village and the fields around it. Lane’s overreaction spoils relations with many of the Indian groups in the area.
End of July 1585 – Grenville, confronting the shortage of supplies, decides to leave Ralph Lane with only around 100 men on Roanoke Island instead of the 300 originally planned. They still expect to be resupplied, but Elizabeth I has commandeered the ships that were to do it.
August – September 1585 – Having reached an agreement with the Indians via Manteo, the English unload the remaining supplies and began building a settlement on the northeastern tip of Roanoke Island. By September 8 all the ships have departed, leaving behind 109 men, including Thomas Harriot and John White.
September 14, 1585 – Sir Francis Drake’s expedition against Spain, consisting of 27 ships, eight pinnaces, and more than a thousand men, leaves Plymouth. It is by far the largest fleet to have left England up to that point.
November 3, 1585 – Drake’s fleet attacks the Canaries, but resistance is stiff. A cannon ball passes right between Drake’s legs, but he is untouched.
November 1585 – February 1586 – Philip Amadas, who has stayed with Ralph Lane and the other settlers on Roanoke Island, leads an expedition in the pinnace to the Chesapeake Bay, described as the “land of the Chesepians.” Thomas Harriot and John White come along. On their return they report friendly relations with the Indians, who tolerated their encampment for some weeks, and describe the great fertility of the region. They do not, however, mention Wahunsonacock or the Powhatans.
November 17, 1585 – Drake’s fleet attacks Santiago, the principal city of Cape Verde. They capture the town and attempt to ransom it, but the governor didn’t respond so Drake’s men burned the town to the ground. On leaving Cape Verde, an epidemic sweeps through the fleet and hundreds die.
December 1585 – Philip II orders his nephew, Duke of Parma, the general who had defeated the Dutch in Flanders, to plan an invasion of England from Holland.
Winter 1585 – 86 – Wingina, the chief of the Secotans, the tribe in the vicinity of Roanoke Island, sours on the English because they make continued demands for food. Then Secotans die in huge numbers from an unknown disease, probably carried by the English, who did not suffer from it.
January 1, 1586 – Drake’s fleet attacks and captures Santiago, Hispaniola, the administrative capital of Spain’s empire in the West Indies. The Drake fleet controls the city for a month, and burns down about a third of it before the Spanish pay a ransom. The fleet leaves for Catagena on February 1, 1586.
February 9, 1586 – Drake attacks and captures Cartagena. Drake collects a ransom from the city and the Catholic church of almost 400,000 pesos, and briefly considers holding the city for England. Then an epidemic sweeps the city, and Drake loses even more men. Drake embarks Blacks, Indians, and Turks who had been enslaved by the Spanish. He considers them free. The fleet leaves on April 10, heading for Cuba. The fleet stops briefly on the west coast of Cuba to embark fresh water, but passes on attacking Havana because of adverse winds.
Spring 1586 – Wingina tries to trick the English into going to war with a tribe to the north. Lane takes soldiers to confront the tribe, but with Manteo translating he decides they are not his enemies. On this trip the English first hear of Wahunsonacock. They also hear stories of gold, and explore deep upriver into North Carolina looking for it before returning to Roanoke on April 7, 1586.
May 1586 – Food running very low, Lane disperses his men into small groups so that they can live off the lane. He learns that Wingina is conspiring with other tribes to attack them, so Ralph Lane pre-emptively attacks his village on Roanoke Island.
May 27, 1586 – Sir Francis Drake sacks St. Augustine, Florida. The Spanish had evacuated, so Drake stripped it of everything valuable, including the hardware on doors, with an eye to re-supplying the English settlement at Roanoke in North Carolina. In response, the Spanish retreat from St. Elena (Parris Island, SC) and consolidate in St. Augustine.
Late May 1586 – A larger reinforcing fleet of at least six ships and four hundred sailors and colonists departed England for Roanoke under the command of Sir Richard Grenville.
June 1, 1586 – Lane crosses over to the mainland with a force of men and destroys Wingina’s “capital” village and decapitates Wingina.
June 8, 1586 – Drake’s fleet, hot off of burning St. Augustine to the ground, is spotted by one of the roving bands of English. On June 9, fleet anchors on the Atlantic side of the barrier islands next to Roanoke. This is said to be the first time an English fleet anchored at an English colony in North America. Drake offers to resupply the settlement and Lane agrees, but then a hurricane hits and does considerable damage. The settlers decide they want to leave and board Drake’s ships to return to England, arriving there at the end of July. Only four of the original 109 had died in the ten months since the original ships had departed, and another four or five were left behind, probably because they had gone too far in foraging for food.
Late July 1586 – Grenville’s resupply fleet arrives in North Carolina just as Drake and the settlers are approaching England. Grenville is baffled to find Roanoke abandoned, explores the area, and leaves 15 men, believed to be volunteers, behind with supplies.
February 19, 1587 – The English execute the Catholic, Mary, Queen of Scots, for conspiring against Elizabeth. This would offend Philip II of Spain.
March 25, 1587 – Elizabeth I greenlights Drake’s proposal to raid Spain directly with the purpose of preemptively disrupting the Spanish Armada. Drake proposed a fleet of 25 ships, and Elizabeth contributed four, including the 600 ton Elizabeth Bonaventure for Drake’s flagship.
April 19, 1587 – Drake’s fleet arrives off Cadiz, where the supply ships for the Armada are anchored in the harbor. With no flags or markings they nonchalantly sail into the harbor at night under the shore batteries. They start grabbing ships and unloading anything valuable, and then burning them down. Drake’s men destroy as many as 35 Spanish ships, and thousands of tons of supplies. They burn the 1500-ton galleon that was to be the flagship of the Spanish fleet.
May 8, 1587 – Another expedition to North Carolina, this time with families, departed England under the artist John White, with Simon Fernandes as pilot. This would become the “Lost Colony.” They are headed for the Chesapeake. Roughly May 15, one of the ships, a “flyboat” commanded by Edward Spicer carrying 50 settlers, would vanish.
May 14, 1587 – Drake’s fleet, fresh from its victory at Cadiz, takes Sagres Castle at Cape St. Vincent, on the southwestern coast of Portugal. Nearby fortifications surrender without a fight. Drake turns it into a base from which to raid Spanish shipping. Over the next two weeks he destroys more than 100 small boats and ships, wrecking the Spanish fishing industry and burning the staves for the thousands of barrels needed to supply the Armada. The ultimate effect is that Philip II postpones the sailing of the Armada for a year, until 1588.
June 1, 1587 – Drake’s fleet suddenly sets sail for the Azores. He has heard of a treasure-laden Portuguese nau (a “carrack”) sailing in the region.
June 18, 1587 – Drake’s fleet seizes the nau, the San Felipe, off the Azores. The value of the prize was estimated at 114,000 English pounds, at a time when a big warship could be built for less than 3000 pounds. It was Drake’s biggest prize since at least the capture of the “Cacafuego” in 1579 and perhaps the greatest of all time up to that point.
~July 20, 1587 – The two surviving ships of the third Roanoke expedition reach the Outer Banks of North Carolina. On July 22, John White goes to Roanoke Island in the pinnace, and discovers a few skeletons. There is no sign of the survivors left behind in 1586. The pilot Fernandes abandons them, so they cannot proceed to the Chesapeake. White makes the decision to stay at Roanoke temporarily. Then Spicer’s boat appears, bringing the population to 118.
July 28, 1587 – Secotans, naturally unhappy with the killing of Wingina, ambush George Howe and riddle him with arrows. White considers a retaliatory raid, but breaks it off when Manteo realizes the English have mistaken friendly Croatoans for Secotans.
August 13, 1587 – White presides over the christening of Manteo, the first indigenous American admitted to the Church of England.
August 18, 1587 – White’s daughter Elizabeth Dare gives birth to a daughter, who is named Virginia. Virginia Dare is the first person born of English parents in the lands now making up the United States.
August 28, 1587 – The Roanoke settlers, in close proximity to tribes made hostile by Ralph Lane two years before, send John White back to England to get more supplies and reinforcements. He would not see any of them again.
October 9, 1587 – Elizabeth I orders all ships in England to stay in port to support the defense of the realm against the looming Spanish invasion. One small consequence would be that John White would not be able to return to Roanoke until 1590.
May 1588 – Captain Vicente Gonzales, who had served as pilot on the voyage that dropped Paquiquineo and the Jesuits in the lower Chesapeake in 1570, takes 30 men in a bark to locate and destroy a rumored English colony in North Carolina or the Chesapeake.
Early July 1588 – Captain Vicente Gonzales sees evidence of English settlement on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but no actual English people.
July 19, 1588 – The Spanish Armada leaves its last port in Spain, Corunna, destined for the English Channel.
July 29, 1588 – The vanguard of the Spanish fleet is spotted off Cornwall. Sir Francis Drake and the Lord Admiral Howard were playing bowls when they heard the news. Drake famously, and supposedly, replied, “We have time enough to finish the game and beat the Spaniards, too.” Maybe it never happened.
July 31, 1588 – The English and Spanish fleets engage in the Channel. This is the first big battle between sailing ships using artillery, rather than by grappling, and would signify a revolution in naval warfare.
August 6, 1588 – After a week of inconclusive fighting in the English Channel, the Armada drops anchor off Calais, on the coast of France. They stop so quickly that the pursuing English scud past them and lose the “weather gauge.”
August 8, 1588 – In the wee hours, the English launch a fireship attack against the Spanish anchored in Calais. The Spanish fleet scattered, and the English pounced in the Battle of Gravelines. The wind shifted, and the Spanish fleet sailed into the North Sea. It would have to sail around the British Isles and through the Irish Sea to get home.
September 21, 1588 – Admiral Medina Sidonia finally reached Spain with the remnants of the Spanish fleet. Of the roughly 130 ships that had sailed for England in July, at least fifty had been sunk in combat or otherwise wrecked, and more than 12,000 Spanish sailors and soldiers had died.
Mid-August 1590 – John White is finally able to return to Roanoke. He finds the settlement abandoned, and he found the word “CROATOAN” carved on one of the main gateposts, without any cross or signs of distress that would have indicated the settlers had been in grave danger. A storm prevents White from investigating further, and he is never able to return. There were approximately 130 English people who had been left on that coast in three expeditions who remained (and remain) unaccounted for.
September 21, 1595 – Juan de Onate y Salazar signs a contract with the viceroy of Mexico to explore and settle New Mexico.
January 28, 1596 – Sir Francis Drake dies of illness just off the coast of Panama. His men bury him at sea in a lead coffin.
April 28, 1597 – The Hopewell and the Chancewell, carrying English “Separatists,” left Falmouth, in Cornwall, for the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They were “the first Pilgrims,” and hoped to settle on the Magdalens. They arrived at Newfoundland on May 18.
June 18, 1587 – After a series of mishaps and internal dissension that resulted in the loss of the Chancewell, the “first Pilgrims” on the Hopewell reach the Magdalen Islands. Sadly, the harbor was crowded, there were two Basque ships, two Breton ships, and hundreds of Micmac Indians who were there from Nova Scotia to fish. After a comic confrontation, the would-be first Pilgrims sailed away. They recovered the survivors of the Chancewell wreck off Cape Breton on June 28, and sailed for home.
March 19, 1590 – William Bradford is born in Austerfield, in Yorkshire.
Late winter, 1598 – Don Juan de Onate y Salazar leads his expedition north to New Mexico. It includes 600-700 settlers, 1900 head of cattle, 1012 goats, and 4,439 sheep and rams.
April 20, 1598 – The Onate expedition crosses the Rio Grande just south of El Paso. They were on the brink of dying of thirst, and drank out of the Rio Grande. They held a feast of thanksgiving, which, according to Texans, was the first “thanksgiving” in today’s United States.
September 8, 1598 – Having reached the Pueblo country of New Mexico during the summer, Onate dedicates the first permanent Spanish building north of today’s border with Mexico, a small church. The site is the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh, which Onate names San Juan Bautista.
September 13, 1598 – Philip II of Spain dies. His son, Philip III, continues to prosecute the war against England but without enthusiasm.
October 1598 – Onate sets off on the first of a series of explorations of the American southwest, reaching Acoma Pueblo on October 27, 1598. He then proceeds west in search of the “South Sea” (Pacific Ocean).
December 1, 1598 – Onate’s deputy, Juan de Zaldivar, following Onate toward the west, reaches Acoma Pueblo with about 30 men. The Pueblo Indians ambush them, killing 13 of the Spanish, including Zalvidar.
January 1599 – Onate tapped Vicente de Zaldivar, brother of the now dead Juan, to exact retribution against Acoma Pueblo. The resulting massacre was so brutal that when Spanish authorities heard about it years later they recalled Onate. He would nevertheless stay on until the spring of 1610.