Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (15 February 1519 – 17 September 1574) was a Spanish admiral, explorer, and conquistador from Avilés, in Asturias, Spain. He is notable for planning the first regular trans-oceanic convoys, which became known as the Spanish treasure fleet, and for founding St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565. This was the first successful European settlement in Spanish Florida and the most significant city in the region for nearly three centuries.
St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited, European-established settlement in the continental United States. Menéndez de Avilés was the first governor of La Florida (1565–74). By his contract, or asiento, with Philip II, Menéndez was appointed adelantado and was responsible for implementing royal policies to build fortifications for the defense of conquered territories in La Florida and to establish Castilian governmental institutions in desirable areas.
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Early years
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was born to an old noble family in the kingdom of Asturias. He was one of the younger sons of Juan Alonso Sánchez de Avilés, who had served the Catholic Monarchs in the War of Granada, and María Alonso y Menéndez Arango. His parents had twenty children, and Pedro was still a child when his father died.
After his mother remarried, Pedro was sent to live with a relative who promised to oversee his education. Pedro and his guardian did not get along, and he ran away from home. He was found six months later in Valladolid and taken back to his foster home. Eventually Menéndez entered the military and went off to fight in one of the wars with France. He served at sea in a small armada against the French corsairs who harassed the maritime commerce of Spain.
Military career
After two years of fighting, Menéndez returned to his family, having conceived a plan to use part of his inheritance to build his own vessel. He built a patache, a small but fast row-sailer, suitable for patrolling the coast. He recruited a number of his relatives to sail with him in search of adventure.
In this ship, the young Menéndez won his first victory of command in an engagement with French corsairs who had attacked three slow Spanish freighters off the coast of Galicia. By effective captainship, he separated the two swift zabras (Biscayan frigates) that pursued him and captured them both, and drove away the third. The exploits of Pedro Menéndez soon became a topic of conversation on the waterfronts of Spain and France, and in the royal courts. Meanwhile, the Seville merchants and the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) were chagrined by Menéndez's success and his growing influence with the Crown.
Treasure fleet
Menéndez is credited as the Spanish leader who first surveyed and authorized the building of the royal fortresses at major Caribbean ports. He was appointed by the Crown in 1554 as Captain-General of the Fleet of the Indies, the Spanish treasure fleet; that year he departed with the fleet and brought it back safely to Spain. He was affirmed in his belief of the strategic importance of the Bahama Channel and that Havana, on the island of Cuba, was the key port to conduct a rendezvous of the annual Flota of treasure galleons. The appointment was highly prestigious, and it was unusual for the Crown to make the appointment. In the past the Casa de Contratación had controlled this position.
King Phillip II and Menéndez maintained a close relationship. The Crown invited him to be a part of the Royal Party when Phillip married Mary I, Queen of England.
In 1559, Philip II again appointed Menéndez as Captain General, and his brother Bartolomé Menéndez as Admiral, of the Fleet of the Indies. He sailed for the Indies that October as captain general and commanded the galleons of the great Armada de la Carrera, or Spanish Treasure Fleet, on their return voyage from the Caribbean and Mexico to Spain. Menéndez determined the route they followed, which led through the Florida Strait (Spanish: Estrecho de Florida) and up the east coast of Florida, taking advantage of the current of the Gulf Stream. In 1561, however, Menéndez was jailed by Casa officials for alleged smuggling, but he got his case transferred to court and won his release.
Menéndez is credited as the chief planner of the formalized Spanish treasure fleet convoy system that became the main link between Spain and her overseas territories. In 1561, he designed and built a twelve-ship flotilla of 230-ton galley-like galleons (galeones agalerados) inspired by the Atlantic galleasses built by Álvaro de Bazán the Elder. The ships were used to escort the treasure fleet, being soon known as the "Twelve Apostles" for their reliability and success at hunting down foreign piracy and privateering. They were also used in combination with two heavy, 800-ton galleasses built by Cristóbal de Barros. Furthermore, in partnership with Bazán the Younger, he helped design the great galleons that carried the trade between Cádiz in Spain and Vera Cruz in Spanish Mexico.
Later, in his capacity as adelantado, Menéndez was required to explore this vast territory, which extended from the Gulf coast of present-day western Florida around the Florida keys to Newfoundland. He also was commanded by the king to establish two or three fortified presidios and settle them with settlers and slaves, and to begin the conversion of the Indians to Catholicism.
Enterprise of La Florida
In 1562, a group of Huguenots led by Jean Ribault arrived in territory claimed by Spain and called La Florida. They explored the mouth of the St. Johns River in Florida, calling it la Rivière de Mai (the River May). The French sailed northward and established a settlement called Charlesfort at Port Royal Sound in present-day South Carolina.
On 19 August 1563, Pedro Menéndez and his brother Bartolomé were imprisoned by the Casa de Contratación, accused of accepting bribes and smuggling silver into Spain. In September, he received news that La Concepción, flagship of the New Spain fleet and commanded by his son Admiral Juan Menéndez, had disappeared off the coast of South Carolina, and Juan was assumed to be dead. The ship was lost in a hurricane that scattered the fleet as it was returning to Spain, at the latitude of Bermuda off the coast of South Carolina. Menéndez conceived a plan for a voyage to La Florida to search for his son, who he believed might have reached there, but he was powerless to initiate it from prison, and his petitions to King Philip II went unanswered.
Spain learned of the French expedition to Florida through its spies at ports on the Atlantic coast of France. Philip II was alarmed when Dr. Gabriel de Enveja reported that Jean Ribault had been appointed as "Captain-General and Viceroy of New France". He also said that a large expedition of ships, soldiers and supplies was being fitted at Dieppe for a voyage to Florida: it was to have more than 500 arquebusiers, and many dismounted bronze cannons were loaded aboard the vessels.
After his release from prison, Menéndez was available again to serve the king's purposes. He was appointed as adelantado of La Florida, with the promise of a large land grant and the title of marquis if he was successful. He advised the king of the strategic importance of exploring the Florida coast for discovery of trade passages to the riches of China and Molucca. There was the hope that such waterways might also lead to the mines of New Spain in central Mexico and to the Pacific. He proposed colonizing several areas to defend the territory against incursions by the Indians and foreign powers.
Menéndez expected to make vast profits for himself and to increase the royal treasury with this Florida enterprise, as it was to include the development of agriculture, fisheries, and naval stores. This ambitious venture was supported materially and politically by his kinship alliance of seventeen families from northern Spain, all tied by blood relations and marriage. They pledged their persons and fortunes to the adelentado, hoping to enrich themselves later with large grants of lands and royal honors of civil and military offices in La Florida. This support gave Menéndez a loyal cadre of lieutenants and officials who had blood connection to him, and had invested their own futures in his success.
Later years
Menéndez traveled to southwest Florida, looking for his son. There he made contact with the Calusa tribe, an advanced maritime people, at what is now known as Mound Key, in Estero Bay. He negotiated an initial peace with their leader, Carlos, which was solidified by Menéndez's marriage to Carlos's sister, who took the baptismal name Doña Antonia. The peace was uneasy, and Menéndez's use of his new wife as a hostage in negotiations with her people, as well as his negotiating with the Calusas' enemies, the Tocobagas, helped cause the decline of relations to all out war, which continued intermittently into the next century. Menéndez was unsuccessful in locating his son Juan.
Establishing a Spanish garrison of 200 men further up the coast, he sailed to what is today the Georgia coast making contact with the local Indians of St. Catherines Island before returning to Florida, where he expanded Spanish power throughout southeastern Florida. His position as governor now secure, Menéndez explored the area and built additional fortifications. In 1567, he marched south and encountered the Ais (Jece) as he reached the Indian River near present-day Vero Beach. He returned to Spain in 1567 and was appointed governor of Cuba, in October of that year.
In December 1571, Menéndez was sailing from Florida to Havana with two frigates when, as he tells it, "I was wrecked at Cape Canaveral because of a storm which came upon me, and the other boat was lost fifteen leagues further on in the Bahama Channel, in a river they call the Ais, because the cacique (chief) is so called. I, by a miracle reached the fort of St. Augustine with seventeen persons I was taking with me. Three times the Indians gave the order to attack me, and the way I escaped them was by ingenuity and arousing fear in them, telling them that behind me many Spaniards were coming who would slay them if they found them." The Ais, like the Tequesta and Calusa tribes, proved hostile to Spanish settlement as war continued on and off until 1670.
Menéndez later made contact with the less hostile Tequesta at their capital in El Portal (in what is now Miami) and was able to negotiate for three chieftains to accompany him to Cuba as translators to the Arawak. Although Menéndez left behind Jesuit missionaries Brother Francisco de Villareal and Padre Rogel in an attempt to convert the Tequesta to Roman Catholicism, the tribe were indifferent to their teachings. The Jesuits returned to St. Augustine after a year.
Legacy
Pedro Menendez High School on State Road 206 in Saint Johns County is named after him, as well as several streets in the area.
The World War II Liberty Ship SS Pedro Menendez was named in his honor.
A new F110-class frigate of the Armada will be named after him.