![]() Slowed by knee-deep muck that sucked at their boots, they had been forced to cross rain-swollen rivers, home to the man-eating monsters and flying fish of legend. Augustine, their recently established settlement further down the coast. Guided by friendly Timucuan tribesmen, the Spanish assault force had spent two difficult days negotiating the treacherous 38-mile trek from St. Each man also carried a twelve-pound sack of bread and a bottle of wine. Lashed by hurricane winds and sheets of driving rain, these 16th-century Spanish shock troops slogged through the tropical downpour in their heavy armor, carrying pikes, broadswords and the "harquebus," a primitive, front-loading musket which had been used with devastating effect by the conquistador armies of Cortés and Pizarro in Mexico and Peru. It was a storm-dark night in late summer as Admiral Pedro Menéndez pressed his army of 500 infantrymen up Florida's Atlantic Coast with a Crusader's fervor. Now a national monument, the place reveals the "hidden history" behind America's true "first pilgrims," an episode that speaks volumes about the European arrival in the Americas and the most untidy religious struggles that shaped the nation. Augustine sits Fort Mantanzas (the word is Spanish for "slaughters"). It is a story of America's birth and baptism in a religious bloodbath. ![]() But they also wanted to attack Spanish treasure ships sailing back from the Americas.Their story is at the heart of the following excerpt from America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation. And like those later Pilgrims, they too wanted religious freedom and the chance for a new life. Like the later English Pilgrims, these Protestants were victims of religious wars, raging across France and much of Europe. Some fifty years before the Mayflower left port, a band of French colonists came to the New World. The first Pilgrims to reach America seeking religious freedom were English and settled in Massachusetts.
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