This is a work-in-progress timeline of (almost) every date mentioned in episodes of The History of the Americans Podcast, with links to the respective episode or, in a few cases, other sources.
Dates are as reported in the podcast. Generally, the months and days are Old Style (when relevant), but with the New Style year. The Old Style year changed on March 25, which is very confusing, so this is the convention followed in most history books.
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Before 1492
The Americans Before Columbus Part 1
The Americans Before Columbus Part 2
1430s – 1450s – Prince Henry “the Navigator’s” incubator for explorers discovered the western Azores for Portugal in the 1430s, and by 1452 the Portuguese reached Corvo, the westernmost of the chain sitting only about a thousand miles from Labrador.
Summer 1451 (precise date uncertain) – Christopher Columbus born in Genoa.
1460s – 1480s – Portuguese explore the west coast of Africa and set up trading operations. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, suggesting a sea route to India bypassing Arab-Muslim traders in the Middle East and Central Asia.
1484 – Portuguese King John II established a scientific advisory board, the Junta dos Mathematicos, to study “matters of navigation and discovery.” This board of accomplished scholars was charged with developing improved tools and tables for navigation and assessing the value of proposals for exploration.
Late 1484 – Columbus pitches his “Enterprise of the Indies” to John II of Portugal for the first time. He is turned down for the first time.
May 1486 – Columbus pitches the Dual Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, for the first time. They turn him down in part because they are fully engaged prosecuting their war against the Muslims in Spain.
1488 – Columbus returns to Portugal at the invitation of John II, but is turned down a second time when Dias returns with the news that he had turned the Cape of Africa.
~1489 – Christopher Columbus dispatches his brother Bartholomew to pitch the deal to the King of England, Henry VII. Henry turns him down. Bartholomew heads to France.
1490 – Bartholomew Columbus is at the French court, trying to secure the backing of King Charles VIII. Charles doesn’t buy the deal, but his older sister, Anne de Beaujeu, promoted the expedition in court and gave Bartholomew a job and a bed at the palace.
Fall 1491 – Isabella sends Christopher Columbus, now back in Spain, money for clothes and a mule and summons him to court. Discussions resume while the Dual Monarchs wrap up the “reconquest” of Spain.
January 2, 1492 – Columbus joins the Spanish victory procession as it marches into Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold to fall. Then, Ferdinand and Isabella turn him down, supposedly in a final decision. Columbus gets on his mule and heads to France to join his brother.
Later in January, 1492 – Ferdinand’s close advisor, Luis de Santangel, the “keeper of the privy purse,” persuades Isabella that backing Columbus is a very inexpensive hedge against the risk that France backs him and he succeeds. She dispatches fast riders to bring him back to Seville. Negotiations on the terms of the “Great Enterprise” begin immediately.
April 17-30, 1492 – The key documents reflecting the investments to be made and equity compensation and other emoluments for Columbus in the even of success are finalized and signed by Columbus and for the Crown. Columbus is made an Admiral of Spain.
Summer 1492 – With the backing of Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus secures the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, crews and officers to man them, and supplies necessary for the voyage.
August 3, 1492 The little fleet departs for points west.
September 9, 1492 – The fleet leaves the Canaries with water, food, and wine enough to last a year.
October 7, 1492 – Columbus ordered the course changed from straight west to west-by-southwest because he saw great flocks of birds passing overhead in that direction.
October 12, 1492 – “Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on Pinta’s forecastle, sees something like a white sand cliff gleaming in the moonlight on the western horizon, then another, and a dark line of land connecting them. “Tierra! Tierra!” he shouts, and this time land it is.” – Samuel Eliot Morison. It was the Bahamian island the locals called Guanahani, and Columbus named San Salvador.
November 22, 1492 – The Pinta, under the command of Martin Alonso Pinzon, loses contact with Nina and Santa Maria off the coast of Cuba. Pinzon went on a frolic and detour looking for gold.
December 5, 1492 – Nina and Santa Maria reach the western end of Hispaniola, off the coast of today’s Haiti. On December 12 Columbus raises a “great cross” in a bay of the island.
December 25, 1492 – Santa Maria, the flagship, runs aground off the north coast of Hispaniola and cannot be refloated. Because Nina is a small caravel, she cannot carry most of Santa Maria‘s crew. Columbus picks 39 of them to remain behind in a fort built from lumber salvaged from Santa Maria. He names it La Navidad, in recognition of the day of wreck. It is the first European settlement in the New World. Columbus transfers his flag to Nina, along with indigenous peoples whom he had captured. Europeans would be left behind to a dire fate so that Columbus could bring Indians across the Atlantic.
January 4, 1493 – Nina departs for Europe carrying the greatest secret of all time. On January 6, her lookout spots Pinta sailing toward her. Columbus does not believe Pinzon’s explanation for the six-week separation, but lets it slide for practical reasons.
February 12-14, 1493 – A tremendous storm southwest of the Azores separates Nina and Pinta. On the 14th Columbus becomes so worried that Nina will go down and his secret will be lost he writes a short account of his discovery, seals it in a barrel, and tosses it overboard.
February 15-24, 1493 – The storm has pushed Nina to the Azores, which are under the control of the Portuguese. The governor assumes Columbus has been smuggling in Portuguese territory on the west coast of Africa, and imprisons some of Nina‘s crew when they go ashore. Columbus blusters his way out of the accusation, and the governor releases the prisoners. Nina resumes the voyage east on February 24.
February 26 – March 4, 1493 – Another massive storm hits Nina, and she is driven toward the rocky coast of Portugal at night. Columbus ordered the crew to pull the one remaining sail from storage, wind notwithstanding, and forced a tack to the northwest which the men struggled to maintain the rest of the night. At dawn on March 4th Columbus spotted the famous Rock of Sintra, which marks the entrance to the estuary leading to Lisbon. Nina turned and scudded up river in to the harbor and dropped anchor about four miles downstream from the center of Lisbon, again in the jurisdiction of Spain’s geopolitical rival following a storm.
March 4 -13, 1493 – After some back and forth with the Portuguese navy, King John II invites Columbus to visit him. Columbus brings along the Indians. The Indians make a map of the region on a table with dried beans, which persuades John II that Columbus has found previously unknown lands. He is mad, but perhaps mostly at himself, and releases Columbus who is, after all, an Admiral of Spain.
March 15, 1493 – Nina sails into Palos, Spain, with the disappeared Pinta a few hours behind on the same tide. Captain Pinzon was rowed ashore and taken to his house, where he promptly died.
April 7, 1493 – Columbus receives a letter of congratulations from the Dual Sovereigns, then sitting in Barcelona. Importantly, it commands the Second Voyage, which was important because after that there were always Europeans in the Western Hemisphere.
April 9, 1493 – Word of the discovery begins to spread. The earliest intact Italian letter discussing the discovery is dated April 9, 1493 from a Barcelona merchant to his brother in Milan, only two days after Columbus got his return letter from the Sovereigns.
July 12, 1493 – The date of The Nuremburg Chronicle. Notably, it includes no mention of Columbus’ voyage, Nuremburg being some distance from Spain.
November 1, 1493 – An Italian scholar in the service of Spain, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, refers to “that famous Columbus the discoverer of a New World,” the first known use of that phrase to describe the Western Hemisphere. Martyr thought the world was too big for Columbus to have found Asia, or lands proximate to it. The debate would rage until 1521, when the survivors of the Magellan expedition returned to Spain.
November 19, 1493 – On the Second Voyage, Columbus sees Puerto Rico for the first time. A young man named Juan Ponce de Leon is among the more than one thousand men of the Second Voyage.
November 23, 1493 – Columbus returns to La Navidad on the Second Voyage, and learns that every European had died.
1496 – With the fall of Tenerife, Spain completes the conquest of the Canary Islands, which has taken more than 90 years. During that long war, Spain had established a plantation economy based on enslaved labor.
1497 – The English King Henry VII hired the Italian Giovanni Caboto – known to Anglophones as John Cabot — to look for a northwest passage to Asia, and in search of that he discovered Newfoundland for the English. The English and northern Europeans would continue to search for a northwest passage for more than 130 years.
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 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 it La Florida, because he had first seen the mainland on Easter, Pascua Florida in the Spanish of the time.
April 8, 1513 – The fleet leaves St. Augustine and sails south along the Florida Atlantic coast.
April 20-21, 1513 – The 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 – The 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 – The 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.
Late February 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 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 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 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 – The party proceeds 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, 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. He meets with Hernando de Soto, who invites him along on his planned entrada into North America. Cabeza de Vaca declines.
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.
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.
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 the Rio Grande. 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 returns unable to confirm or deny the friar’s report. He 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 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 down south with a messenger 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 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 expedition builds 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. During this period, 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 entrada 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 of Mexico 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 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 Cancers 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 costs 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. The next attempt by Europeans to settle the Chesapeake would not be for 35 years.