I Bet You Did Not Know | 46

Before Plymouth Rock the traditional site of disembarkation of William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620, in what would become the United States of America there were earlier colonies.
Mavi Boncuk |

I Bet You Did Not Know that the first European settlement in the New World was Santa Elena [1] , South Carolina, established by the Spaniards in 1566. Many of the Santa Elena colonists were Berber Muslims and Sephardic Jews, recruited by the Portuguese Captain Joao Pardo from the heavily Berber Galician Mountains of northern Portugal. The colony thrived for more than twenty years until it was overrun by the English in 1587.

English historian David Beers Quinn [3] postulates that in 1586, after Sir Francis Drake-an English pirate, raided Spanish and Portuguese settlements on the coast of Brazil. Amongst his prisoners were 300 Moorish and Turkish galley slaves, and a smaller number of West African Muslims. When he stopped at Roanoke Island, he found the English colonists of Ralph B Lane had enough of the New World and wanted to go home. To make room for them he took only 100 Turks back to England. Drake left the remainder on the island. These castaways fearing for their safety from the pursuing Spanish or Portuguese they made their way the short distance to the mainland, probably utilizing the small boats left behind by the English. They then steadily moved inland, along the way intermarrying with Native Americans, mostly Powhatan, Pamunkey, Nansemond and Hatters. Within the next decade or so they encountered the remnant of the Santa Elena colony, many of whom shared their Muslim heritage.This is particularly intriguing when one considers that some sixteenth-century Turkish sailors were themselves of central Asian heritage, thus making them literal cousins to the Native Americans they would have encountered, if the purported Bering Strait-migration thesis is to be believed.

[1] Santa Elena was a Spanish colony on Parris Island in what is now South Carolina, established in 1566, the year after the military post of Saint Augustine. It was the capital of Spanish Florida and is one of the earliest established European colonies north of Mexico. Abandoned in 1587, the archaeological site was relocated and excavated beginning in 1979 by Stanley South.

1564: The second French voyage, headed by René de Laudonnière, brings soldiers, artisans and colonists to a settlement on the River May, today's St. Johns. They build Ft. Caroline, and begin exploration and trade upriver four decades before Jamestown and half a century before Plymouth Rock.

1565: On September 8, Pedro Menéndez de Aviles founds St. Augustine . It is today the oldest city in the United States. Menéndez challenges the French fleet, which disperses, only to be lost in a storm. He captures Fort Caroline and kills Jean Ribault and most of his men, who were shipwrecked along the coast. René de Laudonnière and about 25 others escape and return to France. Menéndez establishes a second Spanish town, Santa Elena, on the South Carolina coast where the French had been. When Spain decided to concentrate its colonies at a single defensible position, and San Augustine was chosen, being closer to the main Spanish colonies and supply routes in the Caribbean and Mexico, Santa Elena was evacuated in August 1587. Everything worth salvaging was loaded onto ships and the remainder burned. Santa Elena was never again reoccupied by Spanish colonists.

[3] David Beers Quinn (1909-2002) was an Irish historian who wrote extensively on the voyages of discovery and colonisation of America. Many of his publications appeared as volumes of the Hakluyt Society. He played a major role in assisting the presentation of the historical aspects during the quadricentennial celebrations (1984-1987) of the first establishment a colony at Roanoke Island.