2 years, 3 months, 11 days to St. Augustine's 450th anniversary

Pedro Menendez' San Pelayo, a massive 650-ton galleon, was among the first ocean-going transports to be built as Spain turned its technology from smaller caravel exploratory ships in the first half of the 16th century to larger vessels for transporting goods, munitions, and settlers to and from the newly discovered Americas and trade routes to the Philippines and Asia.

Miguel, a volunteer crewman and media guide aboard the 495-ton El Galeón replica galleon docked at the Municipal Marina through June 9, noted El Galeón's draft (depth below water line) is actually 10 feet - not 19 feet as some accounts report.

"The shallow draft was necessary because the galleons had to be able to sail up rivers to some Spanish ports," Miguel says.

Even this shallow draft would have been too much for Menendez' San Pelayo to navigate through St. Augustine's earliest inlet (Menendez instead offloaded San Pelayo's cargo to smaller craft and sent his flagship back to Hispaniola), but it was that very drawback that established St. Augustine.

Chuck Meide, director of the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, noted comments recorded by a visitor in 1784: "It was Spanish wariness to fix the capital of a colony behind a sand-bank which cannot be crossed except at great peril."

Writes Meide in his Keeper's Blog: "Pedro Menendez was first and foremost a sailor, even an admiral. He was in charge of Spain's cross-Atlantic galleon convoy system and he certainly knew that the sand bar outside St. Augustine's inlet would prevent large ships from entering.

"... he knew that nothing could protect this nascent military port better than the inlet itself. Instead of changing his principle settlement to the deep-water port of Fort Caroline at modern-day Jacksonville, he chose to stay in St. Augustine. And that is why we are the oldest port in the nation!"

   Image: 16th century galleon being used as part of research by the Maritime Museum of Asturias to produce 1:30 scale models of the San Pelayo for Menendez' birthplace, Aviles, and for St. Augustine. 

   "There is no original plan for Pedro Menendez' San Pelayo," Fundación Nao Victoria's Guadalupe Fernández Morente writes."In the first years of the 16th century, the Indies' ships were built without plans, just following the rules of the naval construction of this era."