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St John’s River (near Jacksonville, Florida) among the Timucua
people. The French party explored north, stopping on an inlet
they named Port Royal (around Parris Island, South Carolina),
where they built a settlement they named Charlesfort. Some two
dozen men were left there with instructions to build a fort while
the others returned to France for reinforcements. Those men
soon ran out of food, abandoning the settlement in April 1563.
In the meantime, news of the Huguenot pioneers’ activity
had reached Spanish ears, and a ship was dispatched to destroy
the fort. By early 1564, a French convoy crossed the Atlantic; its
passengers decided to stay near the St John’s River, establishing
Fort Caroline on a nearby bluff. Spain had continued
to claim this entire territory, so this second fort was also slated
for destruction. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was charged with
the task, and also given permission to establish a settlement
in Florida. En route to the French fort, on 28 August 1565,
Menéndez sighted land at a spot on the Atlantic coast around
100 miles north of where Ponce de León had first landed, which
he would name St Augustine, after that saint’s feast day. The
following month, Menéndez led a violent and bloody massacre
of the French. For the moment, European rivals had been
repelled, leaving Florida for the Spanish to attempt to colonise.
Control of a continent
Though the Spanish held on to Florida, it never attracted many
settlers. And while Conquistadors travelled overland through
western Mexico during the same period, into what’s now Texas
and New Mexico, Native American resistance was fierce, and
the number of people from Spain willing to live in those regions
remained low. The Spanish crown did not have the resources
to police all its claimed land, and eventually capitulated to the
British and French in the continent’s north.
By the early 18th century, a strip of land along the Atlantic
seaboard was home to 13 British colonies, while France claimed
land around the Great Lakes and a vast tract west of the Mis-
sissippi river it named Louisiana. Spain, however, was still the
dominant power in the Americas, controlling territory from
Tierra del Fuego in distant South America to western Canada.
However, much of the land remained unpopulated by Spaniards,
though it was widely inhabited by various indigenous peoples.
It was not until the 1770s that Spain was forced to put military
garrisons along the California coast, in response to reports that
Russian and British fur traders were creeping into the region.
Spain’s substantial holdings had ballooned further with the
addition of Louisiana, secretly ceded to Spain during the Seven
Years’ War (1756–63) by the French to keep it out of British
hands. However, in the peace deal that ended the war, Spain
lost Florida to Britain, trading it for Havana, which the British
had successfully occupied in 1762. So when, just over a decade
later, the inhabitants of British colonies geared up to revolt, they
were surrounded by Spanish territory. The rebels thought that
animosity between Spain and Britain could be used to their ad-
vantage, and in 1776 their minister in Paris, Benjamin Frank-
lin, arranged a secret meeting with the Spanish ambassador to
France, the Count of Aranda, to obtain aid. Spain reluctantly
channelled arms and supplies through its traders in the 13 col-
onies, and declared war on Britain in 1779, a year after France.
That summer, the governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de
Gálvez, began making plans for a campaign in west Florida,
which was under British control. His eye was on Pensacola, an
advantageous port near Spanish New Orleans. On 13 February
1781, he left Havana with a fleet of 20 ships, entering Pensacola
Bay less than a month later. The town was soon under siege and
by 10 May the British surrendered. Gálvez’s victory would be-
come another factor leading to Britain conceding defeat in the
Revolutionary War that October. After three years back under
French control, in 1803 L ouisia na wa s sold to the United States.
During the early decades of the 19th century, Spain also faced
rebelling colonies, and by the 1820s a number of republics hadIn the early 18th century,
Spain was the dominant
power in the Americas,
controlling territory
from Tierra del Fuego
to western Canada
Divide and rule
A sign in west Texas in 1949. Racial segregation, which applied to African-
American and Hispanic people, was common in Texas from the 1890s