 In the past month, the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology research vessel, C-Hawk, has surveyed 6 square miles of the ocean bottom outside the mouth of Winyah Bay, searching for the 500-year old flagship of the expedition that established America's first colony, San Miguel de Gualdape — on the Georgia coast.
In August 1526, as Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon's fleet of six ships plied these waters, depths were determined by dangling a lead weight overboard at the end of a line. The method had its limitations. Ayllon's flagship ran aground ˜ and the first European effort to colonize the mainland of North America began to go horribly awry.
American history brims with accounts of Jamestown, Plymouth Rock and Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony of Roanoke. But there isn't much said about Ayllon's effort to establish a colony of 600 people nearly a century earlier.
We tend to forget the great amount of time that the Spanish had almost complete control of the Western Hemisphere before the English arrived on the scene. It makes sense that there would have been other attempts at colonization but our English oriented history hasn't put much emphasis on that.
Cox News Link
|
