A recent aerial photo of the area
August 9, 1526, 500 years ago: Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a Spanish magistrate, around 46 years old, founds the San Miguel de Gualdape colony. It was the first European settlement, as well as the first documented occurrence of enslavement of African peoples, in what would later become the continental United States.
Ayllón had previously served as an administrator in Hispaniola, in what would become the Dominican Republic. In 1521, he visited what would become the site of his colony, kidnapped 60 Native Americans living there, and took them back to Hispaniola as slaves.
He reported back to his superiors that the land he had found was not defended militarily, and could easily be taken. He received permission to establish himself as governor there, but only after he completed an audit of Spanish officials in Puerto Rico. It took him until 1526 to do that.
He named the settlement after St. Michael the Archangel, and the local Guale tribe. However, due to the similarity of the name to that of the Spanish city of Guadalupe, it is sometimes written as "San Miguel to Guadalupe."
When he got to his new colony, with some black slaves who had been brought first to Hispaniola, he found bad soil, making it hard to grow anything. And there weren't very many natives left, making trade next to impossible. His town survived less than 3 months, with settlers enduring exhaustion, cold, hunger, disease, and troubles with the local natives. When Ayllón died on October 18, from an unnamed illness, the entire enterprise fell apart. As my father would have said, "Served him right."
The surviving colonists broke into warring factions, including America's 1st slave rebellion. By mid-November, the colonists decided to give up and sail back to Hispaniola. Of the 600-700 people whom Ayllón had brought with him, only 150 survivors reached Hispaniola that winter.
Ayllón's account of the region inspired a number of later attempts by the Spanish and French governments to colonize the southeastern United States. In 1565, Spain would end all French attempts at colonizing the region, and establish St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously-occupied European settlement in what is now the U.S. England would follow with Virginia in 1607 and Massachusetts in 1620. France occupied what became Louisiana, the American Midwest, and eastern Canada.
Today, the place that Spain called San Miguel de Gualdape is called Winyah Bay, in Georgetown County, on the coast of South Carolina. Just to the south is the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center, on the site of a plantation once owned by Yawkey, as had been the Boston Red Sox, who turned out to be the last team in Major League Baseball to racially integrate. NCIS fans, take note: Some things are just coincidences.
