It’s easy to study early European settlement in what is now the United States. There are lots of historic documents out there – countless manuscripts, letters, maps and ships’ logs that provide priceless accounts of the Age of Exploration.

Really, the most difficult challenge that today’s scholars face is remembering to take their allergy medicine before poring through the moldering archives. A close second, of course, is trying to make sense of all that loopy handwriting.

Part of an ongoing series about the Lowcountry’s colonial history

San Miguel de Guadalpe was the first miserable failure of a European colony in what is now the United States.

Saint Augustine, Florida, gets more attention but that’s just because it was the first successful colony. Therefore it has a long, unbroken chain of civic boosterism that, over the past 500 years, has done much to bolster its Municipal Creation Myth.

Previously: Spanish sugar farmers in the Caribbean have depleted their supply of native slaves. They send their slavecatchers north to the Land of Giants – what is now the southeastern U.S. – and find a cheap labor pool in a place called Chicora. Luke de Ayllon, an influential Castillian planter, wants Chicora for himself. So he travels to Spain to meet with King Charles I (or II, III, IV or V, depending on the circumstances.)

Back in colonial times Spain was a franchise.