Florida Time: Did Saint Augustine or Plymouth Rock come first?

Welcome to Florida Time, a weekly column about Florida history. Today, we discuss the two Floridas and set the record straight on who came first: Saint Augustine or Plymouth Rock. Let’s do this once and for all, shall we?

Q: Which came first: Saint Augustine or Plymouth Rock?

Northern transplants, prepare to have your feelings hurt. You weren’t first. The European appropriation of North America didn’t start with Plymouth Rock. It started 55 years earlier. In Florida.

In 1513, Juan Ponce de León had encountered the coast of what he would call La Florida, claimed it for Spain and promptly left. No doubt it was the swamps and mosquitoes and alligators, and the fact that air conditioning was more than three centuries off. And perhaps because people already were there who didn’t take kindly to invaders. It would be 1565 before the Spanish returned and formally occupied Florida.

What brought them back? Other Europeans, of course. In this case, an arch-rival.

France had established a colony at Fort Caroline, east of present-day downtown Jacksonville. When the king of Spain found out, he was furious that the French had claimed his land — the land he’d stolen from the indigenous people of Florida. On top of that, these were Protestants. Huguenots.

The French wouldn’t budge.

What did the king do? He called in the vicious Pedro Menendez de Aviles, a man who likely would be played in the movies by Anthony Hopkins. First, General Pedro, on Sept. 8, 1565, established a settlement and, in the tradition of Ponce de León and other explorers, named it for the feast day going on at the time back in Spain. In this case, it was the feast of the fourth-century philosopher Saint Augustine.

Menendez then traveled to the French colony at Fort Caroline. He killed many of the settlers there, while some escaped. He found 127 French colonists who’d shipwrecked. When most wouldn’t renounce their faith, 111 were slain. Two weeks later another 134, including colony founder Jean Ribault, were executed at a spot that later was called Matanzas Inlet, near the present-day Flagler County border. Matanzas is Spanish for “slaughter.”

Spain then began an ambitious expansion of La Florida. It sent explorers up the Atlantic coast, west across the Gulf of Mexico and as far into the interior as present-day Arkansas.

Eventually Spain established two separate territories: East Florida and West Florida. The first covered the peninsula south to the Keys, although the number of whites south of St. Augustine likely could be counted in the dozens, and went west to the Apalachicola River, which separates Alabama and Georgia and delineates the part of the Florida’s panhandle that’s in the Central Time Zone. West Florida spread west nearly to present-day New Orleans, and included what’s now much of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

St. Augustine was the natural spot for East Florida’s capital. For West Florida, the Spanish looked to Pensacola. In fact, they founded it in 1559, six years before St. Augustine, and it would have been North America’s “first city” except that a storm sank most of Spain’s ships and it was abandoned by 1561. It would not be resettled for another 140 years. And then would become capital of West Florida.

It was not until the start of the 19th century that the two territories became one, shrank to their present borders and became part of a new nation. More next week.

Eliot Kleinberg is a staff writer for the past three decades at GateHouse Media's Palm Beach Post and the author of 10 books about Florida (www.ekfla.com). Submit your questions to FloridaTime@Gatehouse.com, or in care of this newspaper. Include your full name and hometown. Sorry; no personal replies.