AYLLON, LUCAS VASQUEZ DE (c. Span ish adventurer and colonizer in south-eastern North America, was born probably in Toledo, Spain, about 1475. He accompanied Nicolas Ovando to Hispaniola (Santo Domingo) in 1502, engaged with profit in various commercial enterprises, and became inter ested in a plan for the extension of the Spanish settlements to the 'Hist. of His Own Times, i. 556. Swift has appended a note, "an arrant rascal," but Finch's great offence with the dean was probably his advancement by George I. rather than his conduct of state trials as here described.
North American mainland. In 1521, he sent Francisco Gordillo on an exploring expedition which touched on the coast of the Florida peninsula at about 33° 3o' at the mouth of a river which Gordillo named the St. John Baptist, and of ter coasting north ward for some distance along a region known among the Indians as Chicora, returned to Hispaniola with a cargo of Indian slaves. Gordillo's report of the region, and the stories of one of the Indians, were so favourable, that Ayllon in 1523 obtained from Charles V. a charter for lands extending Boo leagues to the north, which named him adelantado and governor of the region, and included the right to plant colonies, instructions to seek for the strait to the Spice Islands, and provisions for the spiritual and temporal welfare of the natives. In 1525 he sent out another reconnoitering expedition, under Pedro de Quexos, which explored the coast for about 25o leagues. In July, 1526, he himself set forth with 500 colonists, including women and priests, about 1 oo African slaves and 89 horses. He landed near Cape Fear, in 4o', on a river which he called the Jordan, where he stopped long enough to replace a wrecked vessel—considered the first instance of ship-building on the North American continent—and to send scouting parties to explore the coast and the immediate interior. Then moving farther along the coast, he began the con struction of a town which he called San Miguel de Guadalupe, and which some writers hold was on the exact site of the later James town, Virginia. More probably, as Lowery contends, it was near the mouth of the Pedee river in South Carolina. The importation of African slaves here was undoubtedly the first instance of the sort in what was to be the United States. The colony was ill fated. Fever carried off many of the colonists. On Oct. 18, 1526, Ayllon himself died of it. Dissensions immediately broke out among the colonists. Some of the slaves rebelled and escaped into the forest, and the Indians grew hostile and audacious. In Decem ber the town was abandoned, and the remnant of the colonists embarked for Hispaniola. Less than 150 arrived safely. They took Ayllon's body with them, but on the way, it was consigned to "the sepulchre of the ocean-sea, where have been and shall be put other captains and governors." See J. G. Shea, History of the Catholic Church in the United States, vol. i. (i886) ; W. Lowery, The Spanish Settlements Within the Present Limits of the United States (i9oi) ; H. E. Bolton and T. M. Marshall, The Colonization of North America, 1492-1783 (1920) ; and H. E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderland (1921) .