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Lost Spanish colony may be found

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Major Weatherly
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« on: January 22, 2010, 02:12:17 am »

Lost Spanish colony may be found
Pottery in St. Augustine may provide clues
Posted: January 19, 2010 - 12:12am


 By PETER GUINTA

Three years after St. Augustine was founded, Alvara de Mendana, nephew of the governor of Peru, set out with two ships and 150 soldiers and sailed west to find gold and a new trade route to China.

Mendana's 1568 voyage found nothing, so he returned to Peru.

But a relentless lust for gold pushed the Spanish to dispatch more colonizing fleets. And one founded a colony somewhere in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia.

No one knows its exact location or why the colony disappeared, but Martin Gibbs of the University of Sydney's Department of Archaeology has done extensive research and thinks he has a few clues. He came to St. Augustine last week to look for some clues in possible similar objects.

For 27 years after Mendana's first voyage, the Spanish remained obsessed by an Inca legend of an island of dark people where rivers ran with gold.

The second expedition in 1595 -- also led by Mendana -- consisted of four ships carrying three priests and 378 men, women and children. They got lost and spent five months at sea looking for a suitable place and eventually found a sloping area above a lagoon which looked like it might do.

During that long cross-Pacific voyage, one of the fleet's largest ships, a galleon called Santa Isabel carrying 180 colonists, vanished.

Mendana and the colonists built houses and a church.

Gibbs said, "The (Melanesians) were initially welcoming, but constant and increasingly aggressive Spanish demands for food, women and (religious) converts wore this out, while the Spanish tired of thefts in the camp."

They never found any gold.
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Major Weatherly
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« Reply #1 on: January 22, 2010, 02:13:02 am »

"The colonists named those islands the Solomons because they believed that was where King Solomon got his gold from," Gibbs said.

Tension between the Spanish and the indigenous people, and among the Spanish themselves, began to tear the colony apart. Sailors desiring to flee to Manila used violence against villagers to force a conflict they knew would require abandonment of the colony.

Even more brutally, Mendana began to execute dissenters, fearing revolt.

Then 47 colonists died of malaria and typhus in two months, Mendana included, with many others falling ill.

The weakened colonists finally left, but the remaining accounts by survivors don't tell its exact location.

Initial archeological work in the Solomons was started in the 1970s by professors Roger Green and Jim Allen, who suggested possible colony sites, but none were excavated.

Gibbs came to St. Augustine last week to compare pottery fragments found at one possible site with pottery made in St. Augustine during the 1500s.

"They are exactly the same," Gibbs said. "The difference is that our artifacts are made with reddish clay and are rougher in texture."

According to St. Augustine's City Archeologist Carl Halbirt, "You can really see the parallels with what he is finding in the Solomons to what we found here."

Gibbs said, "People really don't think of the Spanish being a really global empire. This is just one more piece of the puzzle."

He's also researching the initial interactions between the Melanesians and Spanish. Some Melanesian village tales say European bodies were found when a road was built. They were later reburied, the story goes.

"By looking at the archaeological sites and comparing them to other early settlements such as St Augustine, we can try to understand what went wrong. The fate of the lost (galleon) 'Santa Isabel' is one of the great mysteries in the early exploration of the Pacific, but now we have the chance of finding out what happened to them in the forests of a remote Pacific Island," Gibbs said.

He said the Spanish were also looking for the continent of Australia and would have found it 200 years before other Europeans if they'd taken a slightly more southern route.

At the site where he suspects the colony stood, Gibbs said his team used a magnetometer, which measures the tiny differences in magnetism between disturbed soil and undisturbed soil. The instruments found a 20-foot by 20-foot square that appears to have been some kind of structure. Excavation will determine what it is, he said.

"St. Augustine is a colonial success story," Gibbs said. "While we tend to recall the great successes of the Spanish in the Americas, this is all about how they also met with failure, hardship and death at the far reaches of the empire."

http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2010-01-19/lost-spanish-colony-may-be-found
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Major Weatherly
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« Reply #2 on: January 22, 2010, 02:14:44 am »



Australian archaeologist Martin Gibbs, right, talks about his work in the Solomon Islands as St. Augustine archaeologist Carl Halbirt organizes Spanish pottery fragments in the Government House on Thursday. By DARON DEAN, daron.dean@staugustine.com
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