Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 30.

I am your host, Jack Heneman, refreshing and raring to go after the week off.

This episode is the Spanish on the Atlantic coast and the strange story of Don Luis, which sets us up for

Francis Drake's exploration of the Pacific coast and the first English attempt to colonize

in North America at Roanoke Island. We are recording this episode on July 15th, 2021 in Austin, Texas.

Let us again set the table, since all of this conquistador stuff can get confusing.

Spain is the most powerful country in the Christian world.

Her king, the bookish, pious, and hardworking Philip II, concerns himself with the world.

In Europe, he has been at war off and on with and in France, Spain's most powerful geopolitical rival, in Italy, and with the Muslims of the rising Ottoman Empire.

The Protestant Reformation is in full swing, and Philip is the Pope's champion in the fight to

extinguish it. In the low countries, today's Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg,

which Philip's Habsburg family has ruled since the 1480s,

ethnic and religious resistance is rising. And the crowning of Elizabeth I in England,

where Philip had been king as recently as 1559, by virtue of marriage to Bloody Mary, has flipped

old blighty to apostasy. Philip is not yet at war with England,

but Elizabeth and her proxies and privateers are hitting Spain and the Catholics at every opportunity,

in the low countries in France and in the New World. Spain's economic lifeblood is the Western Hemisphere, which she dominates.

The gold and silver and cash crops from the New World pay for Spain's war machine.

Some of Mexico's silver goes from ports on the Pacific coast of Mexico to China,

in trade for which Spain gets valuable luxuries such as silk and porcelain.

More of it returns to Europe and huge convoys of treasure ships, which converge on Ivana,

and then sail up the eastern seaboard of today's United States until they catch the westerlies

...