It began when an arc of volcanoes ruptured the floor of the ancient Iapetus Ocean south of Gondwana, where the continents of Africa and South America lay interlocked. The seabed explosions unleashed a cataclysm of lava and white-hot rocks. An island chain dubbed Avalonia rose at 60 degrees S. on a platform of volcanic rocks and granite.

Plate Tectonics

In tandem with the drifting continents, Avalonia moved north-north-west across the face of the earth. The archipelago converged with the landmass of Baltica carrying the bedrock of Western Europe. Four hundred million years ago, Avalonia and Baltica collided with Laurentia, the cradle of North America.

The Taconic and Acadian Orogenies

The ice sheet was the last and most recent glaciation of North America during two-and-a-half million years of the Pleistocene epoch. The big freeze reached from the Pacific to the Atlantic and flowed southward to 40 degrees N. blanketing the northern half of the continent.

Ice Age

Beringia, the land-bridge that spanned the Bering Straits between eastern-Siberia and Alaska, its connectivity fluctuating with the advance and retreat of the ice mass.

Beringia map, courtesy of Illinois State Museum

For fifteen millennia, the hardy people who will become the ancestors of Native Americans populate the far reaches of Beringia in growing isolation from their primeval Asian lineages.

Between 20,000 - 15,000 years ago, as the earth warms and the ice wall comes down, the long standstill ends. A swift migration of humans and beasts follows, perhaps five thousand people in all, crossing into the New World and moving down the western spine of the Americas as far south as Monte Verde in Chile.

Map courtesy Ripan Mahli, Mahli Molecular Anthropology Lab, University of Illinois

Cabeza de Vaca wandered the Southwest, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of three other survivors, including Esteban, a black Moroccan. On occasion brutally handled by his captors, Cabeza de Vaca rose to be an itinerant trader and healer, his cures making him a proto-type of the wandering miracle-worker evangelists of centuries to come.

Cabeza de Vaca’s seven-year-odyssey ended with a hero’s welcome in Mexico City in 1536.

Texas Beyond History map based on 2004 Alex Krieger chart

In February 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado left Compostela five hundred miles northwest of Mexico City, going to seek the Seven golden cities of Cibola. The expedition lasted two years and penetrated as far inland as the plains of modern Kansas.

Perry-Castenada Library Map Collection

From May 1539 until De Soto’s death from fever in the spring of 1542, his army marched from Florida north through Georgia and the Carolinas, west into Tennessee, back down through northwestern Georgia, and into Alabama. At Mabila in Alabama, Spaniards and Indians fought a battle in which as many as 2,500 natives may have perished. – From there, De Soto’s army headed northwest into Mississippi and Arkansas.

Heironymous Rowe, Wikipedia, based on 1997 Charles Hudson map.

On June 6, 1586, Francis Drake attacked St. Augustine with a fleet of 23 large and 19 small ships and 2,000 men, who looted the town for seven days before torching it. Reoccupying St. Augustine in August and reinforced by soldiers from Havana, the Spaniards prepared an attack against Roanoke the following June unaware that Drake had taken the first group of colonists back to England.

Given the extermination of French interlopers and the destruction of St. Augustine by Drake, the idea that the Roanoke colony was targeted by Governor Guiterrez de Miranda of Florida is not far-fetched. Miranda had been alcalde of the town of Santa Elena and commander of Fort Marcos (Parris Island,) where the French had originally established Port Royal.

16th century towns of Spanish Florida, map courtesy Chester B. DePratter, History of Santa Elena (see also Charlesfort/Santa Elena project)

John White's 1585 map of Roanoke Island and the adjacent mainland

courtesy Virtual Jamestown, licensed by the Trustees of the British Museum. ©British Museum

John White's 1585 map, engraved by DeBry, with annotations

courtesy, The Lost Colony Center for Science and Research