Fort Matanzas Courtesy National Park Service
People often ask me how history gets hidden. The answer is simple. It is all about the way we cover up the past to present a tidy version that makes for a nice travelogue. But that is how history gets buried in myth and misconception.
A perfect example is a current article at Smithsonian.com called “The Oldest City in the United States” — St. Augustine, Florida. St. Augustine was settled in September 1565, as the article points out, highlighting its 450th anniversary. But the article neglects –or obscures– the real reason that that Spanish came to Florida.
About a year earlier, French Protestants –or Huguenots– had started a colony called Fort Caroline, not far from present-day Jacksonville. The Spanish fleet sent to Florida was ordered to remove these “heretics” from territory that Spain claimed. The result was the massacre of the entire colony. Shipwrecked French sailors, caught in a hurricane, were later put to death at a spot now called “Matanzas” –the Spanish word for ‘slaughters.”
I told this story in my book America’s Hidden History –an excerpt from the book appeared in Smithsonian in 2008 as “America’s First True ‘Pilgrims'”
I like Smithsonian Magazine and have often contributed to the print and online editions in the past. But we have to expect more when we tell our history. Or else it is just another piece of “cherry tree” history.
Read the full account of the first “Pilgrims” in America’s Hidden History.
America’s Hidden History, includes tales of “Forgotten Founders”
