Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, Episode 31. I'm your host, Jack Henneman,

and I'm recording this week's history fun on July 22, 2021, from a secure undisclosed location just outside Tupper Lake, New York.

The Adirondacks are a great place to spend a bit of summer,

and the background noise that leaks through the do-it-myself editing will be a bit different than usual.

By the way, about that editing, I occasionally commit oral typos in which I garble or skip

or insert words when I record my script or go off script.

I usually pick them up in editing and then either fix them or decide they don't matter

enough to fix.

Last week, I had a bit of a doozy that somehow I did not hear while editing.

I said that Pedro Menendez offered the Jesuits going to the Chesapeake 100,000 soldiers.

I hope it was obvious to attentive listeners. That number was, well, a thousand times the mere 100

soldiers Menendez actually proposed.

Oh, well, you don't come here for our network quality production values.

At least not yet.

We've been mucking around with the Spanish and North America for some months now,

and I've reached the year 1572 when the Spanish Jesuits tried and failed to establish

a mission at the mouth of the Chesapeake. That was as far north as Spain tried to settle on

the Atlantic coast and very near the eventual site of the first sustained English colony at

Jamestown. By 1572, England was firmly in Protestant hands,

had its own ambitions for overseas expansion, and was increasingly working to constrain

Spanish power by formal and informal means, without starting a war it would probably lose.

Elizabeth I was on the throne and had been for 13 years, and she had surrounded herself with a group of advisors who were very much

...