1500

1501: The Spanish Crown permitted export of slaves to America.

1502: The first permanent governor, Nicolás de Ovando, arrives on Hispaniola.

1502: Las Casas becomes a secular cleric and accompanies his father to Hispaniola. He will become the foremost advocate of humane treatment for the Indians.

1506: The first disease to affect the Caribbean is an upper respiratory disease, probably influenza.

1506: Columbus dies believing he had found islands and archipelagos off the coasts of Japan, Cathay, and India.

1508: Spaniards seek to colonize Puerto Rico led by Juan Ponce de Leon

1509: Only 60,000 of what had been several hundred thousand Tainos on the island survive, all are under Spanish control.

1509: Jamaica is conquered by the Spaniards and many Taino residents are enslaved and forced to work as pearl divers on Cubagua Island off the Venezuelan coast, and on newly founded plantations on the mainland of South and Central America.

1509: Cuba imports Indigenous slaves from islands off Honduras.

1511: One Spanish army moves eastward across Cuba from the west while another led by Pánfilo de Narváez newly arrived from the bloody conquest of Jamaica, marches west.

1511: The Dominican order of mendicant friars arrives in the New World. Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesinos, first argues for Indigenous rights

1511: On the island of Puerto Rico the Taíno Indians revolt against Spaniards with no success. Governor Juan Ponce de Leon orders 6,000 shot; survivors flee to mountains or leave the island.

1512: Juan Ponce de Leon contracts with the Spanish crown to explore the region north of the Bahamas.

1513: Ponce de Leon explores the coasts of the southern portion of the Florida peninsula landing on the middle east coast, likely near present-day Melbourne Beach.

1514: Indians on Hispaniola are divided among the Spaniards in repartimiento, becoming in effect the Spaniards' property.

1515: The conquest of Cuba is complete. Six Spanish towns are founded, including Santiago de Cuba.

1515: Few indigenous people survive in Jamaica.

1515: Las Casas becomes a priest and returns to Spain to petition the Crown to change Indian policies.

1517: King Carlos V of Spain authorized the importation of 4,000 slaves to the Caribbean.

1518: The first African slaves are brought to the Caribbean.

1519: Smallpox arrives in the Caribbean and becomes the most effective ally of Hernándo Cortés in the conquest of Mexico.

1519: Hernando Cortez brings six musicians with him to Mexico.

1520: The entire homeland of the Lucayans is depopulated and the Tainos of the Greater Antilles reduced nearly to nothing.

1520: Two slave-catchers, Pedro de Quejo and Francisco Gordillo, finding no remaining Taíno Indians in the Bahamas, sail northwestward to the continent. Landing near today's Winyah Bay, South Carolina, they pick up Indian captives and return to Santo Domingo.

1521: On his second voyage, Ponce de Leon lands again in the southwest peninsula intending to make settlement there. Instead, the Calusa Indians drive off the secular and regular clergy that accompany him and he is mortally by an arrow and later dies in Cuba.

1523: France seizes the first treasure ships in the Caribbean and Brazil, which stimulates enormous interest in the New World.

1523: Las Casas becomes a Dominican.

1524: There are more African than Indian slaves on Hispaniola.

1524: Hernando Cortez brings five musicians with him to Honduras.

1524: Cortés, a pious Christian, asks the king and receives twelve Franciscan friars who disembark at Vera Cruz and walk overland to Mexico City.

1524: Africans who arrive as slaves or freemen, having already spent several years in Spain, come as domestics, soldiers, clerks, and artisans.

1526: Vázquez de Ayllón establishes the first European town in today's United States, San Miguel de Gualdape, in the vicinity of Sapelo Sound in the Georgia sea-islands, on September 29. Cold weather, disease and mutiny disturb the new colony and, after the death of Vázquez Ayllón, the surviving colonists withdraw in disorder.

1526: A large party of Spaniards attempts to found a settlement in South Carolina and brings with them 100 African slaves to build it.

1526: Twelve Dominican friars arrive in the Mexican capital.

1526: Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón leads expeditions to the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.

1527: The Spanish king orders the red-bearded, one-eyed commander Panfilo de Narvaez "to conquer and govern the provinces... from the river of Palms to the Cape of Florida.

1528: Pánfilo de Narváez leads expeditions from Tampa Bay to the eastern Florida panhandle.

1528: Pánfilo de Narváez drowns attempting to escape from the Gulf coast after his rough-hewn barge sinks.

1530: Las Casas writes a Latin treatise entitled "The Only Way of Attracting All Unbelievers to the True Religion" that has great effect in propagating his views.

1533: The Augustinian order of mendicant friars arrives in the New World

1536: All the Bahamian people, some 80,000 in number, become extinct.

1537: Pope Paul III issues the papal bull Sublimis Deus, proclaiming the Indians to be truly human beings with full intellectual and moral capacity to become Christians.

1539: Hernando de Soto, one of Francisco Pizarro's lieutenants in the conquest of Peru, invests his profits intending to loot Florida, inspired by hope of finding another Cuzco or Mexico. He leads expeditions from Tampa Bay through, Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. Soto's hostage taking and demands for gold stimulates hostilities with Native Americans.

1539: Missionary efforts boast of Indian conversions in the thousands.

1540: Las Casas, returning to Spain, writes the powerful polemic Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which condemned Spain for its treatment of the Indians.

1542: The "New Laws," are issued by the Spanish Crown supporting the papal bull and forbidding all further enslavement of the Indians under any pretense whatever.

1542: The coconut tree is introduced on the island of Puerto Rico.

1546: In Santo Domingo it is estimated that there are 7,000 escaped or abandoned African slaves.

1549: The Dominican friar Luis Cáncer de Barbastro is cruelly slaughtered at Tampa Bay even before he can hold a crucifix in front of his native assailants.

1555: Las Casas and theologian Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, who argues for the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery based upon the unnatural practices of the Indian people, particularly cannibalism, hold a series of debates in the Spanish city of Valladolid. Although the Spanish monarch declares that conquest should be halted it does little to stop population decline.

1555: The French royal warship of Jacques Sores plunders and burns Havana.

1558: Protestant Elizabeth I ascends to the English throne undermining the alliance of England and Catholic Spain. An English extremist Protestant faction sees their challenge to Spain as a reforming religious crusade.

1559-1561: Philip II of Spain authorizes the Viceroy of Mexico, Tristán de Luna y Arellano, to make a settlement in Florida. He explores Pensacola, Florida and parts of Alabama.

1559: Father Pedro Martín de Feria, and four associate priests, are members of the Tristán de Luna y Arellano expedition. Father Martín, a lover of music and ceremonies of the church, assisted by his clergy, teaches these to the Indians. They are the first documented teachers of European music in the region.

1560: Tristán de Luna y Arellano fails in the eyes of both his men and his Viceroy. His thirteen ships with nine hundred colonists, several hundred soldiers and Indian warriors and interpreters lands in August 1559, just before a Gulf hurricane strikes Pensacola Bay. The storm sinks ten ships, and destroys supplies. From that point on, hunger and mutiny do their work.

1562 France sends an expedition under Jean Ribault to explore the coasts of northeast Florida and Georgia before establishing a short-lived fort on the South Carolina coast.

1562: Jean Ribault's voyage to Florida fails. He is not able to resupply his colony at Port Royal and the Frenchmen desert the town and fort he had built.

1564: The second French voyage, headed by René de Laudonnière, brings soldiers, artisans and colonists to a settlement on the River May, today's St. Johns. They build Ft. Caroline, and begin exploration and trade upriver.

1564: Laudonnière and Ribault report music by natives. Ribault calls it "howls, yelps, and lugubrious songs." Twenty native musicians "blowing hideous discord through pipes of reed" greet Laudonnière.

1564: The French artist, Jacques Le Moyne accompanies the explorer René de Laudonnière to paint watercolor scenes of America.

1565: This year is four decades before Jamestown and half a century before Plymouth Rock.

1565: On September 8, Pedro Menéndez de Aviles founds St. Augustine . It is today the oldest city in the United States

1565: Pedro Menéndez challenges the French fleet, which disperses, only to be lost in a storm. He captures Fort Caroline and kills Jean Ribault and most of his men, who were shipwrecked along the coast. René de Laudonnière and about 25 others escape and return to France.

1565: Menéndez establishes a second Spanish town, Santa Elena, on the South Carolina coast where the French had been.

1565: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés enlarges his chamber orchestra by saving the lives of French musicians while slaughtering other Frenchmen at Ft. Caroline

1565: Menéndez brings to St. Augustine: two clarino players, three trumpeters, two drummers, a harpist, a psaltery player, a vihuela de arco player, and a guitarist. With them were four to six trained gentlemen singers and a dwarf who both sang and danced.

1565: This is one year after the death of Michelangelo, and one year before the birth of William Shakespeare.

1567: The Netherlands, which had been a Spanish possession, breaks away from Spanish rule.

1568: Pedro de Menendez, in a new colonizing effort, supplies two hundred farmers with livestock, a shepherd boy, and one female and one male slave. The institution of slavery is established in Florida.

1568: Almost three hundred farmer-settlers come to Florida from Spain and settle at Santa Elena.

1570: Slaves revolt on the Portuguese colony of Sao Tomé off the west coast of Africa causing the Portuguese to transfer sugar production to Brazil. The institution of African slavery jumps the ocean and is transplanted into the Americas.

1571: A Jesuit mission is planted in Jacán near the mouth of the James River in Virginia.

1572: The Jesuits leave La Florida and the Friars Minor of the Regular Observance of St. Francis of Assisi, the Franciscans, are invited to assume responsibility for the conversion of Florida's Indians.

1572: The English privateer, Francis Drake, occupies Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama.

1573: Large-scale evangelization of the Florida nations and tribes begins with the arrival of Franciscan friars.

1574-75: marks the zenith of the mission century.

1574: Pedro Menéndez dies. South Florida fort-missions are all abandoned.

1574: Indians living along the coasts of Georgia and Florida include the Calusa on the southwest coast, the Tocobaga on Old Tampa Bay, and the Tequesta at modern Miami.

1577: Francis Drake sails into the Pacific harassing Spain's pacific cities before going on to circumnavigate the globe.

1586: Francis Drake returns to the Caribbean and plunders Cartagena, Santo Domingo and St. Augustine.

1587: The Spaniards evacuate Santa Elena but continue to hold mission stations along the Georgia sea-islands, in the land of the Guale Indians.

1588: Spain attempts a full-scale invasion of England, the famous Spanish Armada, which is destroyed off the English coast by a combination of bad weather and bad judgment.

1591: Theodore De Bry publishes engravings of the New World in Part II of his Great Voyages series. It contains the earliest published illustrations of Florida Indians, presumably the Timucua tribe of the northeast coast.

1595: Twelve Fransiscan friars arrive and missionary efforts begin in earnest. They are assigned to doctrinas, missions with churches whose friars instruct native people in Catholic religious doctrine.

1595: Fernando de Chozas teaches contrapuntal music to East Coast natives accompanying them on an imported organ.

1595: In Florida, 1,500 converts can be counted.

1595: Sir Francis Drake tries fruitlessly to conquer Puerto Rico setting San Juan city on fire.

1597: A number of Guale revolt against the friars' restrictions on polygamy and kill five of them.

1598: The death of Philip II marks the beginning of the decline of Spain.