"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