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00:13This is the story of America's past that never made it into textbooks.
00:21When most people were in school, you began American history at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.
00:28Jamestown narrative is viewed very much in isolation,
00:31that this was the first encounter between Europeans and Indians.
00:36If you really wanted to look at the Founding Fathers, you'd look a lot earlier and you'd look south.
00:43It starts nearly a half century before the Pilgrims landed.
00:48The children who stepped ashore probably had their own grandchildren by the time Jamestown was founded.
00:55Pedro Menendez and the people that went with him, they are really the fathers of the United States.
01:03The true fathers of the United States. They are.
01:05They arrived before, before Mayflower, Jamestown.
01:10It's a story that has taken archaeologists, marine scientists, and historians several centuries to uncover.
01:19I've always thought it was like having a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, but you don't know what the picture
01:26is supposed to look like.
01:28This stuff has not seen the light of day for 250 to 275 years.
01:36I could feel the lip to it and put my hands inside and then I realized what it was.
01:41This is one of the, maybe one of the most important documents in the United States history, no?
01:46If you read it, you go, it's a film, you can make a film out of it.
01:51What these discoveries reveal is a very different America.
01:56It's multicultural from day one.
01:57You had Africans, you had a few Italians, Germans, Irish priests.
02:03It really was America's first melting pot.
02:06How did this history become lost?
02:08And how does it change our thinking about race and immigration in this country to know what really happened?
02:15If you don't know your past, you can't understand who you are and where you're going.
02:21This is the rest of the story of America's birth.
02:26Is just as much a part of American history as Washington crossing the Delaware or Paul Revere's ride.
02:31If we took that as a beginning, I think we would have a very different picture of the United States.
02:39What makes you American?
02:40This is American History Revised.
03:14They had been walking night and day, struggling against fierce winds and rain that had already proven deadly.
03:22It's a massive storm. No matter how hard they tried to claw their way out, they kept on being pushed
03:29back.
03:30Five hundred of them, making their way through swamps in unfamiliar terrain, passing creatures they'd never seen before.
03:42They're marching through, in some cases, up to their waist, in some cases higher, up to their chest, through flooded
03:50swamp land.
03:52During the course of the march, about a hundred of his troops dropped out. They didn't make it.
03:57And waiting for them at the end of it all, a battle. They might not survive.
04:02And the stage is set for this really very rapid and a very bloody endgame.
04:08This wasn't the journey they had signed on for.
04:15It had started as a dream to settle a new territory, more than 4,000 miles across the ocean.
04:22A venture that first began in this modern day seaport town of Aviles, in northern Spain.
04:30450 years ago, Aviles was an important maritime center.
04:36And shipbuilding was its main industry.
04:40Hundreds of young men grew up learning how to navigate along these shores.
04:45One of them was Pedro Menendez, who became, over time, one of the king's most trusted men.
04:55The royal family trusted him for their most important missions.
04:59He spoke English, which was not very common for a Spaniard at the time.
05:04He was a renaissance man. He was a great seaman.
05:09He understood the winds, the waves and the weather better than almost anyone at the time.
05:17Little was known about Menendez or his influence on American history,
05:22until Dr. Eugene Lyon began combing through Spanish archives in the 1960s.
05:28Yo dicho Pedro Menendez de Aviles.
05:32Lyon spent six years in Spain, microfilming more than a million pages of material,
05:37and another decade translating and piecing these accounts together.
05:42Any new document is like finding a treasure.
05:46It's the only real treasure there is.
05:50What emerged is a story that radically changes our understanding of this country's roots.
05:59The year was 1565, and the entire east coast of what is now the United States was Spanish territory known
06:07as La Florida.
06:09It stretched north to Nova Scotia and all the way west to the Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast of
06:16Mexico to Texas.
06:18This had been Spanish territory ever since Juan Ponce de Leon had claimed it in 1513.
06:26King Philip II wanted to establish a strategic foothold here to prevent other countries from encroaching on Spanish land,
06:35and he wanted to deter attacks on his Spanish treasure fleets.
06:39One main reason was to protect the homebound Spanish fleets bearing the riches of the mines of Mexico and the
06:51great silver mountain in Peru.
06:54Pedro Menendez had once been a captain general of those treasure ships.
06:59These were dangerous waters, and ships often struck sandbars, and the survivors were taken captive.
07:08Some died in captivity. Some were made slaves.
07:12For several years, Menendez had been seeking permission to go to La Florida to search for survivors of one of
07:18those lost ships.
07:20His son had been a sea captain who had sailed one or two years earlier from Havana into a hurricane,
07:27and he was lost on the Florida coast.
07:29The Crown had repeatedly refused those requests, but Menendez was not easily discouraged.
07:36He was good at making decisions and taking quick action.
07:39Menendez was also an entrepreneur, and he saw the potential of developing the new world.
07:46Raising his own capital, he proposed an ambitious undertaking, one that was different than the conquistadors who had gone before.
07:54Menendez proposed to transplant thousands of people along with the infrastructure of an entire town to La Florida.
08:02He would create a colony that would be self-sustaining and produce its own goods for export.
08:10A venture that stood to add considerable wealth to Spain's coffers.
08:16But there was another reason the king wanted to start settling this new territory.
08:21And it went back more than half a century to Columbus's first voyage.
08:27For the Spaniards at this time, religion is the driving force.
08:30Christ can't come back until the whole world is evangelized.
08:33History books have focused on other motivations.
08:36The drive to explore the new world.
08:39The desire to plunder its riches.
08:41But Columbus was also a fervent Christian who believed his explorations could play a role in fulfilling biblical prophecies.
08:51So those prophecies are saying that Christ is coming back.
08:55We have to evangelize the world.
08:58And the monarchs of Spain will in fact be at the forefront of the apocalypse when they retake Jerusalem.
09:06Columbus was convinced that this would be the ultimate legacy of the Spanish crown.
09:12For the next 73 years, Spanish conquistadors would continue to explore the east coast of North America on behalf of
09:20the Spanish monarchy.
09:22Not all of them shared this spiritual quest, but Pedro Menendez did.
09:26When he spoke to the king at court, he said,
09:30Such grief seizes me when I behold those large communities of native peoples in Florida who are sunk in the
09:40thickest shades of infidelity,
09:42that I would give anything to be able to take Christianity to them and redeem their lives and souls.
09:51That resonated profoundly with King Philip, who was such a devout Catholic, he'd commissioned a basilica to be built inside
09:59his own palace.
10:00It was specially designed so that his bedroom overlooked the altar, allowing the king to hear mass recited daily, even
10:09years later, as he lay on his deathbed.
10:13He was certainly devout, almost a frenetic supporter of the Catholic Church everywhere.
10:22But there was little chance that religious missions would succeed in La Florida.
10:27So far, no one in Europe had been able to survive long term in this inhospitable land.
10:43Florida was a challenge. There had already been 10 to 12 crown sanctioned expeditions into Florida to establish permanence.
10:53From Ponce de Leon Ford, and no one had been able to do this.
11:03The rest had failed. They finally ran out of supplies and died, or were killed by the Indians, or they
11:09had to leave.
11:10When the last failed leader sailed home to Spain, Tristan de Luna y Arellano, he said to Menendez,
11:19Florida is not worth another try. There's nothing there. The land is not arable. The harbors are too barred with
11:29sandbars.
11:30It's a waste of men and resources to go back to that place.
11:34It was just too difficult living there, scratching out a living.
11:43The king offered several inducements. Menendez could claim 53,000 acres as his own. He would be made governor and
11:53adelantado.
11:55Which literally means, he who goes before others, and was a title of nobility, and that was granted to him
12:01in perpetuity.
12:03That he could pass on then to his heirs forever.
12:07And the crown offered other incentives for anyone else willing to go along.
12:12Menendez and all those associated with the Florida venture were exempt from taxes, and a series of taxes, for years.
12:21Ten years in some instances.
12:24They held out the promise that they would have their own land, and that was hard for an ordinary person
12:28sometimes to acquire in Spain.
12:30So this possibility would have lured a lot of people.
12:36The expedition would require eight ships, carrying more than 1,500 people, and enough provisions to sustain the colonists until
12:46they could produce their own food and supplies.
12:50You have tailors, cap makers, shoemakers, surgeons, and barbers. One of the last individuals on the list is a master
13:00beer brewer.
13:01There would be soldiers on board to protect the settlement. 26 families, seven priests, and a virtual melting pot of
13:09emigrants.
13:10There were Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French we see, Flemish, Germans, and Africans.
13:20There are some black translators that have been rescued as shipwreck victims from among the Indian villages, and so it's
13:27multicultural from day one.
13:30Once he'd gotten this new settlement started, Menendez hoped to finally be able to search for his son.
13:37He must have loved his son Juan very much to have undertaken this great effort as a means of finding
13:46Juan.
13:47But just before the journey began, there was troubling news.
13:52The French had established a fort smack in the middle of Spanish-claimed Florida.
13:58This was an insult to the king, and he became quite angry at this trespass because he had in place
14:05a treaty which recognized Spain's right to the whole Atlantic coast.
14:11Suddenly, overnight, the venture turned into a combat mission.
14:16You are to drive them out by whatever means you see fit.
14:21Fortified with hundreds more soldiers, Menendez was now in a race to beat the French captain, Jean Rabot, to Florida.
14:31Rabot was headed there with supply ships to fortify Fort Caroline, the small settlement that France had just set up
14:39near the mouth of the river known today as the St. John's.
14:44It's a matter of debate among historians how accurate the depictions of that time are.
14:49But what isn't in question are the accounts of how evenly matched these two rivals were.
14:56Jean Rabot was a formidable adversary.
14:59Sounds a lot like Menendez. Great danger to the Spaniards.
15:04French settlers were running out of food and adequate supplies.
15:08Fort Caroline was barely holding on.
15:10If Rabot did not reach there with reinforcements, the fort could be easily taken.
15:16But of course this venture does not unfold the way that Menendez expects it to unfold.
15:20His enterprise of Florida really went wrong from the get-go in many ways.
15:27Hurricane struck as soon as the Spanish ships got out to sea.
15:32About a quarter of the way across the Atlantic, all but five of those ships were either sunk at sea
15:38or driven back to port.
15:40Only five ships would reach Florida.
15:42One of his main supply ships, La Victoria, is wrecked on Guadalupe and all the supplies are lost and the
15:49whole crew is lost to drowning.
15:51Only about half of the original 1,500 passengers made it to La Florida.
15:56The ships headed directly to Fort Caroline, but they were too late.
16:01Jean Rabot had already beaten them there.
16:04So as Rabot is unloading his three smallest ships on the River of May or the St. John's River, the
16:11Spanish show up.
16:12They identify themselves, they fire shots.
16:15The four French ships that are offshore cut their anchor lines to escape.
16:20Menendez could not follow because his ships were laden with supplies and men.
16:25Menendez retreated to an inlet about 40 miles south of Fort Caroline, hoping it would provide safe harbor.
16:32But Menendez couldn't get his main supply ships past the shoal.
16:37They unloaded as much as they could into smaller boats and went ashore.
16:43And the first thing he did ashore was essentially went about the business of legally establishing the settlement of St.
16:50Augustine.
16:55Much of our knowledge about what happened next comes from a document that is housed here, in the archives of
17:02the Indies, in Sevilla, Spain.
17:13The fact that it survives is amazing. You know, the fact that it's even here.
17:19It is the original diary of one of the priests who accompanied Pedro Menendez on the voyage.
17:26For several centuries, American historians knew nothing of its contents, which is one of several reasons why the story has
17:34gone untold.
17:35It's only been in the past few decades that a small number of scholars have learned how to read this
17:41archaic script.
17:43Dr. Michael Francis, from the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, is one of them.
17:48I, Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, chaplain, give my word that everything said in this account is true. Fantastic.
18:08In vivid detail, Father Lopez described the great pageantry that marked the landing.
18:13There were trumpet salutes and the firing of cannon and flags waving everywhere.
18:23Father Lopez was there to greet each one.
18:29Menendez christened the new settlement San Agustin, or St. Augustine.
18:35It was September 8th, 1565.
18:40Traditionally, the Spanish representative of the king would go to the flag, plant the flag in the ground, and proclaim
18:47the land in the name of the king.
18:50He, however, went over to Father Lopez and knelt down and kissed the cross.
18:56So he proclaimed the land in nombre de Dios, in the name of God, before the name of his king.
19:04A little bit risky, maybe.
19:06As Menendez and those after him came up, those arrivals knelt and kissed the cross.
19:16And Lopez observed, the natives imitated all they saw done.
19:23Now there is a picture for you.
19:28Father Lopez then conducted a mass of thanksgiving.
19:35And Menendez ordered that a meal be prepared for everyone, including the natives.
19:41They were fed with what was on board Menendez's ship, so the Indians would have had European food.
19:49Garbanzas, garlic, olive oil, vinegar, maybe some sort of salted meat that they would have brought with them.
19:56This was 55 years before the pilgrims even arrived in Plymouth.
20:02Dr. Michael Gannon, one of the country's leading scholars of Florida history, drew fire a few years ago when he
20:10called this meal the true first thanksgiving.
20:14There was a guy who called me from WBZ in Boston.
20:19He said, while I'm talking, do you realize that there's an emergency meeting of select men at Plymouth to contend
20:29with this new information that there were Spaniards in Florida before there were Englishmen in Massachusetts?
20:34And then he said, well, you know how you've become known up here in New England?
20:39And I said, no, he said, the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.
20:46But while the Spanish were celebrating their new settlement, Jean Rabot was planning his next move.
20:55He says, we need to stage a preemptive strike.
20:58We need to hit the Spanish now as hard as we can before they entrench themselves.
21:03Rabot left a small number of men to guard Fort Caroline, then set out with the others on four ships
21:09looking for the Spanish camp.
21:13They had it in mind to kill everybody at St. Augustine.
21:17Cursed Spaniards, we will hang them from the halyards of their own ships.
21:22The French show up off the bar at St. Augustine and all of a sudden this huge storm bears down
21:31on them.
21:32Rabot's ships couldn't make it over the sandbar at St. Augustine and his surprise attack failed.
21:39He decided instead to chase after those large supply ships, which Menendez had just sent south to safety.
21:47But the Spanish vessels managed to elude the French.
21:51Rabot's ships were ravaged by the storm.
21:55And, of course, they were shipwrecked, all of those Frenchmen, from Daytona Beach to a point just north of Cape
22:02Canaveral.
22:03They probably lost most of their weapons, most of their food.
22:07They don't really know what to do except to try to march back and maybe get back to Fort Caroline.
22:13Now, unbeknownst to them, Menendez also makes a bold move.
22:16Menendez figured that the weather's nasty.
22:20I bet you that Rabot basically stripped the garrison at Fort Caroline to come down here.
22:26So that fort is probably undermanned right now.
22:31This is my chance. I need to go and I need to take this fort now.
22:36Some historians say it was a hurricane.
22:39Others believe it was a nor'easter.
22:41Either one could have proven lethal.
22:47Most of the accounts allege that few of the Spaniards wanted to go.
22:51Obviously, there's a terrible storm.
22:54The rain is pelting down and they don't think they can make it.
22:57And they don't quite know how far it is.
22:59And they think that they'll perish.
23:01And Menendez says, we're going.
23:02This was his best time to attack.
23:05And that was typical Menendez.
23:09It was September 18th.
23:11They had only been in this new land for 10 days.
23:15So he marched and he had squads of ax men who were in the vanguard
23:21and they would cut where it was necessary to get through.
23:25Because it wasn't very easy going.
23:30It must have been horrible.
23:32In full armor, carrying your weapons to march through Florida wilderness during a hurricane took a lot of determination.
23:41So when he came up on the fort, he had about 400 men.
23:45They were cold, no doubt. Hungry, ornery.
23:51It took them about two days to get there, walking throughout the night.
23:56Father Lopez wrote, they arrived within a quarter of a league of the enemy's fort,
24:01where they remained all night up to their waists in water.
24:06At the break of dawn, they essentially charged the gates and broke in and the French were mostly asleep.
24:18The sound of the rain somehow allowed the Spanish to get right up to the fort.
24:24It masked the sound of approaching soldiers.
24:28They really caught the fort completely by surprise.
24:31You know, the French never dreamed that they would face an enemy during this storm.
24:35They figured everyone would be battered down just like they were.
24:38The French were all asleep, some in their night clothes, some of them were completely naked, and the slaughter began.
24:44Only a few escaped into the woods.
24:50Menendez and his men collected the spoils of war, food, weapons, and a chest with the French king's orders for
24:58the fort,
24:59which violated Spain's claim to La Florida.
25:02They also found Lutheran texts, which the Spanish Catholics considered heresy.
25:08The French Huguenots were a real threat to Catholicism.
25:13The Huguenots, or the Protestant group, was obtaining a lot of power.
25:19It makes, in that world view, total sense to eliminate someone who is not only a political and economic challenge,
25:29but also a religious challenge to your very reason of being as a Catholic.
25:35The greatest triumph, Father Lopez wrote, will be the Holy Gospel being introduced into this country,
25:42a thing necessary to prevent the loss of many souls.
25:47We're dealing with people from a different era.
25:50This is what people thought, this is what they believed, this is what they hoped for,
25:55that all things would be made new in Christ, and suffering would come to an end,
25:59and there would be finally the peace that had been prophesized in the scriptures.
26:04Menendez provided a ship so the women and children that he spared could leave safely.
26:08He renamed the fort San Mateo, or St. Matthew.
26:13He left some of his soldiers there to guard the fort, and took the rest back to St. Augustine.
26:20A little more than a week later, about half of the Frenchmen who had survived the shipwrecks off the coast
26:26of Cape Canaveral
26:27were trying to make their way back to Fort Caroline on foot.
26:31Jean Rabot was not one of them.
26:36But when they got to Matanzas Inlet, they were unable to cross it.
26:41And native people in that region saw that these Frenchmen were stranded there,
26:47and ran up to St. Augustine to advise the Spaniards, and Menendez went down with 50 men.
26:55Menendez told the French that their fort had been destroyed.
26:58The French at this point would just be happy to surrender unconditionally,
27:02and be given a ship, and sail back to France.
27:05Menendez said, tell your commander that you can come over ten at a time in my boat,
27:13and I shall deal with you as a good captain should.
27:17That's the only promise he made to them.
27:19Your fate will be what God tells me in my good conscience.
27:25Menendez had his men bring the French across the Matanzas River by boat, ten at a time.
27:31When the Frenchmen disembarked on the other side of the water,
27:35the Spanish tied their hands behind their backs, and marched them to a point
27:40when Menendez had drawn a line in the sand.
27:44Menendez had situated his men behind the sand dunes with daggers and spears,
27:50and when each group of ten was brought over, Menendez's men sat upon them and killed them.
27:58And as soon as it was 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, the bodies piled up.
28:07Menendez spared a few of the French, mostly craftsmen, whose skills could be put to use building the new settlement.
28:15He says that the total number of Lutherans killed were 111 men,
28:23and that there were 14 or 15 that were taken captive.
28:29Father Lopez's account ends at this point.
28:36But another document continues the story even further.
28:41We kept these documents, and here they are.
28:46Don Álvaro Armada is the Count of Guaymes, and a descendant of Pedro Menendez.
28:52His family archive houses over a million pages of handwritten documents.
28:58One of them is a full account of the expedition, written by Gonzalo Solís de Meraz, who is Menendez's brother
29:06-in-law.
29:06This is one of the, maybe one of the most important documents in the United States history, no?
29:12It describes the fateful day two weeks after the slaughter of the first group of French shipwreck survivors,
29:18when Jean Rabot and about 200 of his remaining soldiers met face to face with Pedro Menendez.
29:26They met at the sand dunes about 14 miles south of St. Augustine.
29:31It was October 11, 1565.
29:36Menendez then informs Ribot, of course, that he's already captured Fort Caroline.
29:40There's nowhere for Ribot to go.
29:42The fort has fallen, and Ribot tries to negotiate safe passage back to France,
29:49and then offers a...
29:52An amount of money, no?
29:54Yeah, he offers a...
29:54An amount of money?
29:55Yeah, a lot.
29:56And Menendez said no.
29:57No.
29:58Jean Rabot then recited a psalm.
30:02He begins to say a prayer.
30:05And after he finishes,
30:08Dijo que de tierra eran, y que en tierra se habían devolver.
30:15So he's saying to them that we are all of this earth, and to this earth we shall return.
30:20He's saying goodbye.
30:21So that within, in 20 years, all of this will be a tale, a story, a legend.
30:30If you read it, you go, it's a film, you can make a film out of it, you know?
30:35It's amazing, it's amazing.
30:36And then he looks at Menendez and he says,
30:39Que lo hiciese de ellos mandando al adelantado.
30:44So he's telling the adelantado, Menendez, do with us as you will.
30:55Menendez is quite open about what happens.
31:00Menendez simply says, I could not risk keeping Ribot and the principal officers alive.
31:11When a war is a war, you kill everybody.
31:13But he didn't, he didn't kill or women or children.
31:18Las personas le notaron de cruel.
31:20So some of the residents in St. Augustine felt that what he had done was excessively cruel.
31:26So others saying that what he had done was the act of a great captain.
31:30It was a very calculated choice. He did not have the food that would be required to feed them.
31:38He did not have arms sufficient to guard them.
31:42These hordes of Frenchmen could overwhelm his forces at almost any time.
31:46So he made a calculated decision.
31:50And this was it. Either kill these people or be killed by them.
31:54So as many as 350 men were massacred, and that's how we got to get the name Matanzas Inlet, Matanzas
32:01River.
32:02That's massacre or slaughter in Spanish.
32:08Jean Rabot's last words, that someday this would all be legend, proved to be ironic.
32:15For centuries, the true story of America's beginnings went untold.
32:19American history textbooks do not even give it a mention.
32:25Pedro Menendez and the people that went with him, they are really the fathers of the United States.
32:33The true fathers of the United States. They are. They are.
32:37Because, very simple, they arrived before.
32:42Before Mayflower, Jamestown and all that.
32:45The story shouldn't be invented. It can't be invented.
32:47Because here are the documents. Here are the documents.
32:54The search for the missing pieces of this story continues today.
32:58A team of divers from the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program are off the coast of Cape Canaveral National Seashore.
33:07They are looking for those fateful shipwrecks that not only cost Jean Rabot and his men the conquest of the
33:14New World, but ultimately, their lives.
33:18We have, for example, a letter from Pedro Menendez to the King of Spain, reporting that he has taken Fort
33:26Caroline and that the French ships have wrecked, and he gives a very rough estimate of how many leagues away
33:32from St. Augustine they are. So that kind of puts us in the general area.
33:36They have honed in on an area near shore where small artifacts, believed to have belonged to Rabot's men, were
33:43found.
33:44Those shipwreck survivors who made it ashore had some kind of campsite there, and there's a lot of artifacts. There
33:51are coins dating 1550s, and there's actually one coin that is dated 1565. That's the magic number.
33:58Rabot's ships were carrying large quantities of iron, cannons, and ammunition. The team uses a high-powered metal detector that
34:07penetrates deep water.
34:09Oh, there we go, so another line. Oh, there we go. You can't miss that. There's definitely something there.
34:15But it's not what they're looking for.
34:18At night, the coast, all of the coastline south of us is just dark, and it really feels just like
34:25it must have felt 450 years ago.
34:27You can imagine the, I mean, there were bodies washing ashore. There was flotsam and debris from the shipwrecks all
34:34ashore.
34:35There was probably a horrible stench. I mean, you can really start to picture it in your mind.
34:39I mean, all of the hopes of these people who were really the first to come over to seek the
34:44American dream, and it all came down to this storm, this fateful storm that just dashed their hopes to pieces.
34:52More than a year later, a breakthrough just south of the area the team had been searching.
34:58Treasure hunters have apparently found the nearly 500-year-old remains of La Trinité.
35:04News programs reported that a private treasure hunting company had unearthed three bronze cannons believed to belong to Rabot's fleet.
35:13There really is no doubt to any of the archaeologists who have really looked at what has been found that
35:20this is the Trinité, or certainly one of Rabot's ships.
35:24So it's a very exciting find.
35:26So this is the cannon in question, and then here's the H with the crown above it for King Henry
35:32II.
35:32The biggest smoking gun that has been found was a stone pillar.
35:38It's a stone column like the one depicted in this 16th century etching.
35:43The columns were used to mark territory when the French arrived in the New World.
35:48We know a pillar very much like this one was established in the area of the River of May, where
35:55Fort Caroline is, so present-day Jacksonville.
35:58And we know that Rabot loaded six more of these stone pillars onto his fleet.
36:04And it's amazing. It's a striking image of the one that's in the Debray engraving.
36:08France has laid claim to the shipwreck and is in talks with archaeologists, including Chuck Mead's team, to assist with
36:16the excavation.
36:17Until someone invents a time machine, the best way to immerse ourselves in that life, that time period, that experience
36:24on a particular vessel, is through maritime archaeology.
36:28Ironically, these ships have been sitting at the bottom of the ocean, buried under rocket ship debris just a few
36:35miles from the place where modern day explorers are launched into space.
36:40They were the space shuttles of their time period. I mean, these were the ships that were launched to explore
36:45the great unknown.
36:49Mead expects it to take several years to excavate the ships and several more years to have some answers.
36:55What kind of preparations did Rabot make for his attack?
36:59Could he have outgunned the Spanish if it hadn't been for the storm?
37:11Back on land in St. Augustine, Dr. Kathleen Deegan and a team of archaeologists from the University of Florida have
37:19unearthed a major new find about what happened to those first settlers who came over with Pedro Menendez.
37:28I've always thought it was like having a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, but you don't know what the picture
37:35is supposed to look like.
37:37Deegan has already uncovered some of the most pivotal archaeological sites in this country's early history.
37:43It's really only through archaeology that we know what regular people did.
37:48I've always thought of archaeology as the most democratic form of history because it isn't just what the people who
37:58knew how to write say, and it isn't just what a more elite class of people left behind.
38:08After working at this site for several years, Deegan and her team found a well that was typical of European
38:15rather than Native American construction.
38:18Its contents led them to believe that this was the site of the first settlement where Menendez first came ashore.
38:26At first, we couldn't believe it. No, this couldn't have been here all this time. And here we've been working
38:32for over 30 years on and off at this site.
38:36They found the site while digging at the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, just north of downtown.
38:42It was enough mass to convince us even, after 30 years, that it really was the Menendez settlement.
38:52They found hundreds of artifacts, including Spanish beads, musket balls, belt loops, fragments of medicine vials, and uniform buttons.
39:03It really wasn't until some of the kind of smoking gun artifacts and archeological deposits showed up that you would
39:12really let yourself say, this is, this is it.
39:15It's real significance is that it's the first place in the United States that Europeans came and stayed.
39:23And there's evidence of the children who first came here as well.
39:27We found a little figa amulet, which is a little clenched fist with the thumb between the fig fingers.
39:36And Spanish women had many of these hanging around babies' necks to protect them against evil eye.
39:45And we just couldn't help imagining that this was associated with the first European child born in what's now the
39:53United States, Martinico de Arguelles.
39:55And we have references to children being born in St. Augustine, obviously soon after people arrived.
40:02Dr. Susan Parker scours parish records now housed in St. Augustine to reconstruct the lives of ordinary people.
40:11It's just whatever you can find to try to piece them together and give a voice and a face to
40:19many people that wouldn't have a voice and a face otherwise.
40:23Women and children are often missing from official accounts.
40:27But Parker has managed to breathe life into these first families through their letters back to Spain and vital records.
40:35I think we need to remember that it's 42 years between when St. Augustine was founded and when Jamestown is
40:43founded.
40:43If we look at that in a different way, that's almost two generations.
40:48In other words, the children who stepped ashore, however many children there were, with Pedro Menendez probably had their own
40:54grandchildren by the time Jamestown was founded.
40:58Another discovery, the important role Native women played in providing food for the new colony.
41:04We have found the remains of foods that they must have learned about the foods and how to fix them
41:12from the Native people in the area.
41:15And this, I think, is a real indication that Native American women, even though they were invisible in much of
41:25the documentary record,
41:26really shaped the actual life experiences of everyone in these colonies.
41:31At first, the relationship between the natives and Spanish settlers was a good one.
41:38It's said the Timuquan Indian chief named Saloy gave Pedro Menendez his own council house, big enough to hold hundreds
41:46of people.
41:48And this GIS map just happens to show where all the post molds and big pits are.
41:53It's believed that an archaeologist may have discovered this roundhouse in the 1950s, but his findings were never published.
42:02All of those records recently turned up in a garage in California, nearly 70 years later.
42:09Deegan and her team plan to search for that roundhouse, but in the meantime, they've made another discovery.
42:15Deegan believes they may have found the walls of this settlement's first fort.
42:23In 1565, the ground surface would have been somewhere in this area.
42:29And this is where, for example, if somebody was standing and dug this hole for a wall, their feet would
42:37have been.
42:39Menendez ordered a fort to be built just before he left to start up other fortified settlements along the East
42:46Coast.
42:48He was gone more than four months, but by winter, rations and supplies were becoming scarce.
42:57They complained of starvation and Indian attacks.
43:01And most of the people who came here with Menendez came because they assumed they would have a better life,
43:07they would have livestock, they might find gold and riches, they would have their own piece of land.
43:12But none of that ever happened.
43:15A group of discontented soldiers began plotting a mutiny.
43:20So within six months of arriving, most of the soldiers decided that they had had enough.
43:27They said, we're just going to capture a boat, we're going to get the supplies, we're going to get out
43:31of here.
43:32At midnight, revels marched with torches and guns, looting St. Augustine's storeroom and loading weapons on board a ship headed
43:41for Spain.
43:42They tied up the quartermaster and took off with the weaponry and some of the supplies on a ship.
43:49But the quartermaster was able to get himself free with the help of a few other loyal soldiers and he
43:57shot at the mutineers.
43:59He did quell the mutiny.
44:02The leader of the uprising was immediately hanged for treason.
44:10Pedro Menendez returned two weeks later with food and additional troops.
44:15He pardoned those willing to swear allegiance to him.
44:19Those who didn't could take their chances on their own, without a ship or provisions.
44:26He gave them a choice.
44:28They chose for the most part to go back to Menendez.
44:33But it wasn't just the soldiers who were unhappy.
44:37Evidence of burnt structures confirms another dark truth.
44:41That the goodwill with the natives lasted less than a year.
44:46The Timuqua, after nine months, attacked and burned part of the settlement and that's when it was abandoned.
44:53The settlers had overstayed their welcome.
45:02The settlers moved across the river to a small piece of land now known as Anastasia Island.
45:10The structure that used to be Fort Caroline remained to the north on the mainland, with just a small number
45:16of soldiers guarding it.
45:18Three years later, a Frenchman by the name of Dominique de Gorge brought his own band of men back to
45:25Florida to exact revenge.
45:27He claims, I arrived in Fort Caroline, what is our fort, that the Spanish had renamed Fort San Mateo and
45:36I surprised them and I killed all 200 soldiers, hanged them at the fort and burned the fort to the
45:43ground and stole all of their artillery and vengeance is ours.
45:49De Gorge claimed to have used a searing iron to burn a message for the Spanish into one of the
45:55tables.
45:56He said, I do not do this as unto Spaniards, but as unto traitors and robbers and murderers.
46:03But of course, there is no burn table at the fort.
46:07In fact, there are not 200 soldiers at the fort.
46:09There were 100 soldiers stationed at the fort when he arrived.
46:13And when they heard the cannon fire from the mouth of the St. Johns River, every single one of those
46:22soldiers packed their supplies and they left.
46:26And they all made it to St. Augustine.
46:28The fort was never rebuilt.
46:33Very little is known about life in St. Augustine during the years the settlers lived on Anastasia Island.
46:40No one has ever found remains of the settlement, which may be buried under water now.
46:47Around 1572, they returned to the other side of the river and took up residence where the city of St.
46:54Augustine's historical district is located today.
46:59As for Pedro Menendez, he had been traveling up and down the east coast during most of this time, establishing
47:06a second colony in South Carolina and 13 more forts.
47:10But by 1574, only the two settlements, Santa Elena and St. Augustine remained.
47:19In all that time, Menendez never found his son.
47:23He returned to Spain and was preparing to command another fleet for the king.
47:28But exactly nine years to the day, after he marched his troops through a deadly storm and captured Fort Caroline,
47:36Pedro Menendez died at home in Spain of typhus.
47:40He was 55.
47:43At the end, he's a romantic. He's not the person who's looking for the jewels. He doesn't care about that.
47:51When he died, he was ruined. No money. No money. He spent all the money on his adventures.
47:57He's not a materialist. He's an idealist. He catches my heart.
48:10Over the next decade, St. Augustine began to transform into the city that Menendez had envisioned.
48:17Residents built a town square patterned after the plazas in Spain.
48:23The plaza, I call it the heart and soul of St. Augustine. Just about everything important would take place there.
48:31The religious festivals would take place in the plaza. Any military parades or gatherings would take place in the plaza.
48:40The plaza also housed the marketplace.
48:42And because the market was there, we have the first known regulation of weights and measures.
48:50I kind of think of it as the first consumer protection laws in the nation.
48:57We found street deposits that date back to the late 1500s or early 1600s.
49:03Carl Halbert has overseen St. Augustine's archaeology program for more than 25 years.
49:10It's one of the few cities in the country that requires an archaeological dig be conducted before any new construction
49:17can begin.
49:19Avallee Street is the oldest documented European street in the United States.
49:26And Philadelphia said, oh, we have the oldest street.
49:30I said, ah, Philly can eat my dust. Clearly we beat them by a hundred years.
49:35Across from the plaza on Avallee Street stood the centerpiece of it all.
49:40The first parish church in the United States.
49:43It was the first building that one saw as one entered the inlet into the harbor.
49:52Picture yourself, you're on a ship. It takes a month, two months to come across the ocean.
49:57Terrible, deplorable conditions, food, sanitation, fright from storms, pirates.
50:03And you come to St. Augustine, and what do they see?
50:06They would see the church and the cross and know that their Christian home was just ahead of them.
50:14Religion really was an integral part of their very being.
50:19And you can't exaggerate the place it took in their lives.
50:23The church also played a role in the blending of cultures.
50:27Spanish soldiers began to marry native women.
50:31The main thing that had to happen first was that you be a Catholic, either you converted or you already
50:37were a Catholic.
50:38And so these men, you know, married women who converted, who became Catholics.
50:44Twenty to twenty-five percent of the marriages recorded were between a Spaniard and a Native American.
50:51There was a lot of intermarriage because they felt that these people were human beings just like them.
50:57There was such a huge difference in the acceptance of that in the Spanish colonies rather than in the British
51:06colonies.
51:07In fact, the artifacts discovered throughout the city reveal some startling truths about this country's roots.
51:15That the population in America's first colony was a mix of races and cultures more closely resembling the diversity of
51:22America's population today.
51:24Not the Anglo version that's been depicted in textbooks.
51:29Why did Spanish America emerge with such a different kind of society than English America?
51:37I believe that it has a great deal to do with the integration of other people into Spanish society and
51:43the exclusion of other people from Anglo-American society.
51:48If you really looked at the way people lived in colonial English America, you would only see English things, English
51:58traditions and English objects and food.
52:01Most of us look to that as our history, our origins. In the Spanish world, it looked very different. It
52:10was very multicultural and very integrated.
52:12You had people from the Canary Islands, you had Africans, you had some converted Jews, you had a few Italians,
52:21Germans, Irish priests.
52:24And it really was America's first melting pot.
52:27So it's very strange really that that whole part of the history was eliminated.
52:34I think that the United States is richer. Its history is richer because of the existence of St. Augustine, of
52:44the establishment of it.
52:46It demonstrated that African and European people could live together, could benefit from each other's skills.
52:58If we took that as a beginning for the United States, if we took that as a beginning, I think
53:05we would have a very different picture of the United States.
53:09Two decades after St. Augustine was founded, it had become a thriving 16th century town, complete with shops, inns and
53:18taverns.
53:19But all of this was about to be destroyed. Suddenly one day in June 1586, a foreboding sight appeared on
53:30the horizon.
53:31People looked out over the inlet and saw 23 heavily armed warships, 19 auxiliary vessels, which contained 2,000 armed
53:43men.
53:43This was the fleet of the notorious English pirate, Sir Francis Drake, known to the Spanish as a vicious foe.
53:51He had come to attack, seize, destroy, pillage the Spanish city of St. Augustine.
53:59To the Spanish, Drake was known as a monster.
54:03As a merciless man, as a power-hungry man, as an avaricious man, as an inhuman individual, really.
54:13The word Drake was, to the Spanish, he was a terrorist. He was an international terrorist.
54:18The citizens of St. Augustine were outmanned and outgunned.
54:24You're the enemy.
54:27How could they possibly survive?
54:30You're either with us or against us. If you're against us, you're gonna die.
54:57You're the enemy.
55:13You're the enemy.
55:17What we're about to 1951?
55:23You're the enemy.
55:23To our Dance Bo 탄 Soukarts, collegue T-Adminis,
55:25Please hold the fuhring of war.
55:25The kickstart Ivor Park was tentang,
55:25the military Crossroads National Rif級 of St. Augustine
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