Augustine-an area of roughly 1,000 square miles. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Spain’s reach in Florida extended from the mouth of the St. In 1586 English privateer Sir Francis Drake burned the wooden settlement of St. In the 1560s Spain expelled French Protestants, called Huguenots, from the area near modern-day Jacksonville in northeast Florida. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonizers fought frequently with Florida’s Native peoples as well as with other Europeans. European explorers, meanwhile, had hoped to find great wealth in Florida, but reality never aligned with their imaginations.ġ513 Atlantic map from cartographer Martin Waldseemuller.

But then two and a half centuries of contact with European and African peoples-whether through war, slave raids, or, most dramatically, foreign disease-decimated Florida’s Indigenous population. He found between 150,000 and 300,000 Native Americans. Juan Ponce de León arrived in the area named La Florida in 1513. Expeditions slowly began combing the continent and bringing Europeans into the modern-day United States in the hopes of establishing religious and economic dominance in a new territory.

Spain extended its reach in the Americas after reaping the benefits of its colonies in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America. An age of colonization had begun and, with it, a great collision of cultures commenced. New empires would emerge from these tenuous beginnings, and by the end of the seventeenth century, Spain would lose its privileged position to its rivals. Native peoples greeted the new visitors with responses ranging from welcoming cooperation to aggressive violence, but the ravages of disease and the possibility of new trading relationships enabled Europeans to create settlements all along the western rim of the Atlantic world. Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England all raced to the New World, eager to match the gains of the Spanish. Spain used its new riches to gain an advantage over other European nations, but this advantage was soon contested. Spain benefited most immediately as the wealth of the Aztec and Incan Empires strengthened the Spanish monarchy. New diseases wiped out entire civilizations in the Americas, while newly imported nutrient-rich foodstuffs enabled a European population boom. The Columbian Exchange transformed both sides of the Atlantic, but with dramatically disparate outcomes.

Hard-Boiled by Erin A. Smith