#161 Spanish Florida in the 1600s: Indian Wars, Yellow Fever, and Pirates!
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 31 August 2024
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We are back to Spanish Florida after a long hiatus, with the story of St. Augustine, La Florida after the founding of the city and the slaughter of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline until the construction of the Castillo de San Marcos in the 1670s. The city would almost fail, and in 1607 the Spanish Crown ordered that it be shut down and that Spain withdraw from Florida all together. That order would be promptly rescinded when the English landed at Jamestown.
It is a story of courageous Catholic evangelism, Indian wars, relentless epidemics, and pirates, climaxing in the raid of the dread pirate Robert Searles in 1668. That attack would, ironically, result in a renewed commitment by the Spanish government to sustaining the city which would ensure its long-term survival as the oldest continuing town in the United States.
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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)
Carrie Gibson, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America
Michael Gannon (ed), The History of Florida
Susan Richbourg Parker, “St. Augustine in the Seventeenth-Century: Capital of La Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014
Diana Reigelsperger, “Pirate, Priest, and Slave: Spanish Florida in the 1668 Searles Raid,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 161, a number that seems prime but actually isn't. |
| 0:15.3 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on August 30th, 2024 in New Orleans. We are telling the history |
| 0:23.5 | of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism. |
| 0:30.8 | A year ago, the beloved and I spent a couple of nights in St. Augustine, Florida, on the tail end of our |
| 0:37.4 | annual Great American |
| 0:38.7 | driveabout. If you have the chance to do the same, take it. There's a fair amount of interesting |
| 0:45.8 | stuff, and you can buy a pint glass with a cool drawing of the founder of the city, Pedro Menendez |
| 0:53.1 | de Alvilles, in the town's visitor center. |
| 0:57.5 | Since pint glasses with notorious mass murderers are good conversation starters, I naturally bought |
| 1:04.2 | one. I was a little disappointed that they didn't carry one of Sir Francis Drake, |
| 1:09.0 | St. Augustine being the only North American city he |
| 1:12.7 | visited. But since I strive to understand all sides of a situation, I got why the town |
| 1:20.4 | visitor center didn't sell Drake pint glasses. I bet they'd move a lot of them, though. |
| 1:26.8 | The biggest attraction in town is the Castillo to San Marcos National Monument. |
| 1:32.8 | A huge fortification built in the 1670s, after another English pirate privateer, Robert |
| 1:41.0 | Searle, raided the town in 1668, 82 years after Drake. |
| 1:47.1 | I've been wanting to tell that story for the last year, and now that we have definitively |
| 1:52.4 | reached the 1660s and the timeline of the podcast, this is my big chance. |
| 1:59.1 | And anyway, we've scarcely mentioned Florida since the Spanish on the Atlantic |
| 2:03.8 | coast and the strange story of Don Luis back in the first year of the podcast. And it's past time to |
| 2:10.6 | check back in. Before we get to Searles, let's do the context thing and run through the happenings in Spanish, Florida, |
| 2:19.2 | since those ugly first days in the 1560s. |
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