Pedro Menéndez de Avilés is best known as the founder of St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously inhabited European town in what is now the United States. But in his time he was better known as an unusually energetic, entrepreneurial mariner and commander of various flotas and the Armada de la Guardia de la Carrera de las Indias. That fleet, originally of twelve- but soon of nine-galleyed galleons of his own design (based on prototypes already in existence), was built in 1567 for the purpose of escorting the convoys to their Caribbean destinations and then patrolling the coasts of Spain’s colonies—there to intercept smugglers and raiders. For a time in the 1560s, Menéndez was Philip II’s principal naval commander in the Atlantic and Caribbean theaters, although he lacked the noble title that was increasingly necessary for high command.
Prominent as he was, Menéndez has no scholarly biography. The late Albert...
