Welcome to the history of the Americans podcast, episode 26.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and we are recording this once again, early in the morning, on June 18, 2021, in Austin, Texas.

This episode is Calamity at Pensacola.

It is 1559, 16 years after our last latest date on the timeline, which was the summer of 1543,

when the tattered remnants of the Soto Exped expedition sailed in penises down the Mississippi River,

past the future site of New Orleans, and across the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, the Spanish had all

but thrown in the towel on North America after the failures of the Soto and Coronado Entratas between 1539 and 1543,

which followed hot on the heels of the even uglier Aean and Narvaise expeditions.

There have been four major expeditions, no big conquests or discoveries, hundreds of dead

Spanish, thousands of dead Indians, and a huge pile

of pesos down the drain. Of those four-storied captain generals, only Coronado made it out alive,

and he just barely. La Florida, which in Spanish terminology meant essentially everything in North America that wasn't Mexico,

was the unrewarding tomb of the conquistadors.

In the interests of completeness, or maybe just because I'm obsessive,

I shall mention briefly two other probes into North America before we get to the calamity at Pensacola.

In 1542, as the Soto and Coronado Entratas were breathing their last, one wide Regis Cabrio led two ships up the Pacific coast.

Cabrillo discovered San Diego and the Channel Islands for the Spanish,

and may have gotten as far north as Point Arena, California. He seems to have missed San Francisco,

much as Verrazano, missed the Chesapeake. The records of the Cabrillo trip are scanned,

so we haven't learned much from it. And anyway, Cabrillo himself ran out of the Cabrillo trip are scant, so we haven't learned much from it.

And anyway, Cabrillo himself rather severely broke his leg going ashore and soon died of the resulting infection.

Cabrillo was at best of Verrazano of the West Coast, but we know much less about his trip, so I couldn't scrape together enough for its own

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