San Agustín: Europeans Come to Stay

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Spanish Settlement. In 1565 Spain established the earliest permanent European settlement in North America at San Agustín (present-day St. Augustine) on the Atlantic coast of the Florida peninsula. The first order of business for the new colony and its leader, Pedro Menéndez de Aviles, consisted of routing a fledgling French colony that arrived in Florida at the same time. Marching overland to the French fort, La Caroline, while the French ships and forces lay stranded south of San Agustín because of a hurricane, Menéndez slaughtered the fort’s remaining defenders, including the leader of the colony, Jean Ribault. With the French threat crushed, Menéndez established a garrison system by rebuilding the fort of La Caroline (renamed San Mateo) and strengthening San Agustín.

Daily Life. As the founding of San Agustín suggests, it served as a military garrison and was staffed primarily by soldiers. Under Menéndez’s tutelage, however, the colony grew to include several garrisons strung along the coast north and south of San Agustín. Spain intended these fortifications to protect against French intrusion, though they also proved useful in limiting attacks by Indians. In the first few years single men made up the whole population at San Agustín. Later, soldiers sent for wives, and army families characterized life in the colony. Other people contacted the colony on a daily basis; these included Dominican and Jesuit friars, a smattering of African slaves employed in the administrators’ households, and various Indian peoples native to Florida. Although the Spanish found it impossible to work Indians as slaves because they ran away to rejoin their communities, they forced nearby Indian communities to pay tributes of corn and other foodstuffs or risk attack. Adequate supplies of all kinds remained a problem for the colony for years, because they depended on sporadic shipments from Spain or Mexico. To be a Spaniard, or African, living in San Agustín during the 1500s meant isolation from the outside world, inadequate supplies, constant threat of attack from Indians or the French (which occurred in 1568), and a lack of female companionship.

Source

Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995).