Georgetown 500? Spanish hopes to settle new land foundered offshore – Coastal Observer

Georgetown 500? Spanish hopes to settle new land foundered offshore – Coastal Observer

After the celebrations around America’s 250th last month, this week’s 500th anniversary will appear as a footnote. That’s something researchers hope will change. “Maybe the 502nd,” said Jim Spirek, the state underwater archaeologist at the S.C. Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology. Sunday marked the anniversary of the arrival in 1526 of six Spanish ships off the South Carolina coast carrying an expedition to establish a settlement. The flagship, or “capitana,” of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón foundered at the entrance to the Jordan River. Vital supplies were lost. The expedition of about 600 people founded a settlement, San Miguel de Gualdape, but Ayllón died in October and the settlers returned to Spanish territories in the Caribbean the next month. The site of the settlement has never been found. “The key for me is where was the Jordan River,” said Paul Hoffmann, emeritus professor of history at Louisiana State University. His research, published in a book in 1990, identified the Jordan River as either the South Santee or Winyah Bay. That is what Spirek relied on in starting a state-funded search for the remains of the capitana in the shoals between the bay and the river in 2022. “Everything seems to be pointing to that location,” he said. “If we find this wreck on the Santee River, it will be a starting point.” After surveys by boat and a drone using magnetometers to locate metals, Spirek hopes to return next year to start diving on the most promising sites. An archaeological discovery will bring attention to the first Spanish effort to settle on the continent, Hoffman said. Before his work using maps made from reports of ship captains, the site of Ayllón’s landfall had been placed between Virgina and Georgia. Hoffman is confident that Spirek is looking in the right place because the same cartographer created maps of Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Central America.  “They’re absolutely spot-on,” he said. “The Spaniards made a point to know exactly where they were north and south and, to some degree, east and west.” Hoffman commends the efforts to find the capitana, but said it is a challenge. “The sea is a big place,” he said. “It’s a pretty small ship, and how much iron would there be in a ship like that that could be found by magnetometry?” Spirek estimates the ship, which remains unnamed, was 100 to 120 feet long with three masts. “It was a little early for being heavily armed” since there wasn’t much competition from other Europeans, he said. “It had a fair number of anchors.” Ayllón didn’t settle on this part of the coast. The expedition moved south, perhaps as far as Sapelo Sound in Georgia. Spirek thinks that any salvage on the capitana would have focused on supplies since there were still five other ships. There may also be other documentary evidence in the archives in Spain that could provide additional clues. “One always hopes,” Hoffman said. “It’s in the nature of this early period that an awful lot of what we would like to have isn’t there anymore.” One thing that did survive the expedition was the legend of a land known as Chicora, which Ayllón thought would be as fertile as regions in Spain. That and the hope of finding a new route to the orient led to other expeditions, including those that established the English colonies. What the Spanish did “was not strictly speaking the beginning of the United States,” Hoffman said. “Now, you talk about Europeans settling in America north of the Tropic of Cancer and east of the 100th meridian – essentially the United States – yeah, it has signficance.” Spirek will be the featured speaker at a program Aug. 13 sponsored by the institute’s Archaeological Research Trust and the Chamber of Commerce. It starts at 4 p.m. in the Winyah Auditorium. Admission is free.