The first European fort on Tampa Bay was not Fort De Soto. It was a small wooden Spanish outpost built in 1567 by Pedro Menendez de Aviles, the formidable admiral who founded St. Augustine, at the capital town of the Tocobaga. That fort lasted less than a year before its entire garrison was killed. It stands, in this archive, as the dark bookend to the whole story: the first fort here was annihilated, and the last, Fort De Soto, never fired a shot.
Menendez was the ablest Spanish naval commander of his generation, born on 15 February 1519 at Aviles, in Asturias, who by his own account ran away to sea at fourteen. He rose through the navy of Philip II, was commissioned to clear pirates from the Spanish coasts, became captain-general of the Indies fleet, and is credited with organizing the first regular trans-Atlantic convoys that became the famous Spanish treasure fleet. He was energetic, loyal, and brutal in equal measure, a man who made enemies and was briefly imprisoned before royal favor freed him for the work that would define him. In 1565, by an agreement signed with King Philip II, he became adelantado and governor of La Florida, sworn to settle and pacify it largely at his own expense in exchange for titles, land, and trade.
His first task was war. A colony of French Protestants had taken root at Fort Caroline near present-day Jacksonville, and Spain meant to destroy it. Menendez sailed in July 1565 with eleven ships and some two thousand soldiers and settlers, and on 8 September 1565 he founded St. Augustine, which endures as the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in the United States. Within weeks he had stormed Fort Caroline and slaughtered most of its people, and shortly after he executed several hundred shipwrecked French survivors, including their commander Jean Ribault, at an inlet still called Matanzas, the slaughters, sparing only those who professed Catholicism and a few musicians. As adelantado he then set about trying to secure the entire peninsula with a string of forts and missions running up the Atlantic coast as far as Santa Elena, in present-day South Carolina.
Securing Florida meant dealing with its powerful Native kingdoms, and here Menendez overreached. He negotiated a peace with the Calusa king the Spanish called Carlos, sealing it by marrying the king's sister, who was baptized Dona Antonia and whom he used, in effect, as a hostage of the alliance. But he also opened relations with the Calusa's bitter enemies, the Tocobaga of Tampa Bay, and that double game helped poison his standing with both. The fragile peace with the Calusa decayed toward open war that would smolder for generations.
In 1567 that ambition brought Menendez into Tampa Bay. He went to the principal town of the Tocobaga, on the bay's northern shore near present-day Safety Harbor, brokered an uneasy arrangement, and did what a sixteenth-century Spanish commander did to make an alliance permanent: he built a fort in the middle of the town and left a garrison, on the order of thirty soldiers with Jesuit missionaries, to hold it and to convert its people. It was the first European fort on Tampa Bay, three hundred and thirty-one years before the United States would build Fort De Soto at the bay's mouth. Within a year it was gone. Relations collapsed, the Tocobaga rose, and by early 1568 the entire garrison had been killed. Spain's bid to hold Tampa Bay collapsed with it, and the Spanish would never again seriously fortify the bay.
Menendez left Florida and was made governor of Cuba late in 1567; he returned to the peninsula a final time in 1571 with hundreds of settlers and his own family. He died at Santander, in Spain, on 17 September 1574, of typhus, while assembling a great fleet meant for an invasion of England that never sailed. He was eventually interred in his birthplace of Aviles, and his original casket was given to the city of St. Augustine, where it survives. His 1567 garrison on Tampa Bay is easy to overlook, a footnote of perhaps thirty men in a single year, but it gives Fort De Soto its deepest historical frame. Six separate times across more than three centuries, surveyors and soldiers looked at this bay and concluded that it needed a fort: Menendez in 1567, the Spanish pilots Franco and Celi in the 1750s, George Gauld in 1765, Robert E. Lee's engineer board in 1849, and finally the engineers who built Fort De Soto in 1898. The first of those forts was wiped out to the last man. The last never fired at an enemy at all. Between those two facts lies the whole strange military history of Tampa Bay.