The 1565 establishment of Saint Augustine and the Florida colony by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was unquestionably one of the pivotal events in the colonial history of the Americas, not just because it was the first successful European colonial settlement in southeastern North America but because of its important role in the eventual history of the United States, of which it still forms a part. Among the earliest and lengthiest narratives of the Florida colony's establishment by Menéndez de Avilés is that of Gonzalo Solís de Merás, whose sixteenth-century account was first transcribed and published in Spanish by Eugenio Ruidíaz y Caravia in 1893 and subsequently translated into English by Jeannette Thurber Connor in 1923. Though later transcriptions and translations have been made, these first two have without doubt been employed the most in recent historical analyses. Both these and all subsequent renditions were based on the same original manuscript...
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