We don’t know the location of the first European settlement in the land that would become the United States.
We know that Spanish colonists founded it in 1526. We know that they called it San Miguel de Guadalupe. We’re pretty confident that the site was in either what is now South Carolina or what is now Georgia. But we don’t know the exact location, because the people who didn’t die there cleared out in less than a year. Disease and hunger ripped through the town, the leaders took to fighting among themselves, there was a clash with the local Indians, and the settlement’s slaves revolted. Hundreds of colonists were dead within a few months, and the remainder fled to Hispaniola.
Well, some of the remainder fled to Hispaniola. The rebel slaves disappeared into the wilderness, where they are believed to have settled among the Indians. The formal colony failed; the underclass stuck around. The first arrivals from the Old World to stay here permanently were mutineers seizing that most essential of freedoms: the right to walk away, writes Jesse Walker.
from Hit & Run http://bit.ly/2ViYQ4o
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