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Content Enable editor Use plain text Code entry In 1565 a naval squadron under don Pedro Menendez de Aviles set out from Spain to destroy a colony that France had planted on the Georgia Bight. [Note: The Georgia Bight is a large embayment on the Atlantic Coast between Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.] The French, having failed to establish a colony at Guanabara Bay in Brazil under Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, had been testing the waters of the Northern Hemisphere with expeditions under Rene de Laudonnire and Jean Ribault. Philip II had already agreed to contract the exploration and settlement of the coast out to Menendez, latest in a series of private conquerors willing to advance the frontiers at their own expense, when reports of the French intrusion made the colonization of Florida an immediate priority. As the king threw his weight behind the project, the pace of preparations quickened and the number of men-at-arms and ships rose. Royal support of the Menendez expedition was an ad hoc response to an emergency situation. Ordinarily, royal behavior was more deliberate. The kings of Spain and their servants had had over 70 years in which to refine their views about how best to establish domain over New World frontiers, balancing the king's conscience against his coffers and the clamors of his Spanish subjects. What appear to be contradictions, reversals, and dissonances in the management of the Florida conquest and colony can be clarified by analyzing the separate royal policies that were in effect or being developed at the time the Florida enterprise commenced. To use a musical analogy, the imperial model was not harmony but counterpoint. Among the policies that the councilors of Church, State, and Empire elaborated or revived during the long reign of Philip II ( 1556- 1598), five were applicable to the conquest and evangelization of Florida: (1) the war on corsairs and their Indian and Maroon allies; (2) the use of private entrepreneurship as a means of advancing the frontier; (3) the secularizing of Indian parishes as a means of establishing authority over the Indian Church; (4) the pacifying of nonsedentary natives by means of gifts; and (5) the use of contracts with caciques to establish civil and religious control over native chiefdoms. Taken as a whole, the five policies were overlapping and contradictory, as befit a bureaucracy more organic than rationalized. The king did not take them as a whole, but applied them singly or in combination to fit the situation at hand, like a composer interweaving themes. (Bushnell SS)

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