2.29 America: a.d. 1501 to 1600  (Page 4/12)

St. Augustine was burned in 1586 by the English privateer, Sir Francis Drake and he also made an unsuccessful attempt to destroy Santa Elena. He then stopped by Roanoke Island and picked up some of Raleigh's distressed soldiers. The few colonists who remained had either been killed or absorbed by the Indians, when a relief ship finally arrived in 1590.

The Indians bartered skins and furs with the whites. Chief Powhatan reportedly had 4,000 deerskins in a single wardrobe. But the whites took many of the natives captives – Ayllon and DeSoto counting their take in the hundreds. (Ref. 267 )

In the southwest, Texas had been claimed for Spain by Alvarez de Pineda in 1519 and by the 1520s large quantities of horses, cattle and sheep had been brought into New Mexico. In the area of that state and Arizona, there were at that time about 40,000 Pueblo Indians. At about the same time that De Soto landed in Florida, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado had Friar Fray Marcos start north from Mexico on an exploration of what is now New Mexico. He used Esteban, the Moor who had wandered previously from Florida to New Spain, as a guide. Esteban's black color was accepted as a novelty by the Indians and some even thought he was a god. In the following year Coronado himself led an expedition searching for the "Seven Cities of Gold", reaching just south of Sante Fe and then back into the Texas Panhandle and on to the region of Independence, Kansas and the Nebraska border. He had 250 horsemen, 70 Spanish soldiers, 1,000 friendly Mexican Indians, baggage animals, sheep, goats and a train of priests. Others of the original party went around the north end of the Gulf of California and followed the Colorado River up to the Grand Canyon. On his way back to Mexico Coronado viciously attacked the Acoma

Acomas and imprisoned and enslaved that many more. But Spaniards fell, too, and Coronado returned with only 1/3 of his original 300 plus white men. That Acoma pueblo, originally built by Kersan Indians on top of a rock mesa with edifices 3 stories high, was already ancient and may have been the oldest inhabited site in the United States. In spite of that bloody fight, those Acomas were converted to Christianity some 30 years later by a barefoot and unarmed Franciscan priest, Father Ramirez. (Ref. 39 , 198 , 215 , 165 )

Beginning in 1596 Juan de Onate took an expedition from Mexico City to El Paso and then to Sante Fe and on to Quivera, Kansas and then returned via California, at the top of the Gulf. This was followed in 1598 by the arrival in the New Mexico area by 400 Spanish men, women and children with their 80 wagons and 7,000 head of live stock. Some 3,000 sheep were included. (Ref. 39 , 222 ) In the far west an Englishman did upstage the Spaniards, as Sir Francis Drake anchored in 1579 just north of San Francisco Bay, claiming the land for his queen, calling it Nova Albion (New England). (Ref. 198 )