[1] By his contract, or asiento, with Philip II, Menéndez was appointed adelantado and was responsible for implementing royal policies to build fortifications for the defense of conquered territories in La Florida and to establish Castilian governmental institutions in desirable areas.

In this ship, the young Menéndez won his first victory of command in an engagement with French corsairs who had attacked three slow Spanish freighters off the coast of Galicia.

He was affirmed in his belief of the strategic importance of the Bahama Channel and that Havana, on the island of Cuba, was the key port to conduct a rendezvous of the annual Flota of treasure galleons.

[8] He sailed for the Indies that October as captain general and commanded the galleons of the great Armada de la Carrera, or Spanish Treasure Fleet, on their return voyage from the Caribbean and Mexico to Spain.

Menéndez is credited as the chief planner of the formalized Spanish treasure fleet convoy system that became the main link between Spain and her overseas territories.

On 19 August 1563, Pedro Menéndez and his brother Bartolomé were imprisoned by the Casa de Contratación, accused of accepting bribes and smuggling silver into Spain.

In September, he received news that La Concepción, flagship of the New Spain fleet and commanded by his son Admiral Juan Menéndez, had disappeared off the coast of South Carolina, and was assumed to be dead.

[14] Menéndez conceived a plan for a voyage to La Florida to search for his son, who he believed might have reached there, but he was powerless to initiate it from prison, and his petitions to King Philip II went unanswered.

He also said that a large expedition of ships, soldiers and supplies was being fitted at Dieppe for a voyage to Florida: it was to have more than 500 arquebusiers, and many dismounted bronze cannons were loaded aboard the vessels.

Menéndez expected to make vast profits for himself and to increase the royal treasury with this Florida enterprise, as it was to include the development of agriculture, fisheries, and naval stores.

This ambitious venture was supported materially and politically by his kinship alliance of seventeen families from northern Spain, all tied by blood relations and marriage.

They pledged their persons and fortunes to the adelentado, hoping to enrich themselves later with large grants of lands and royal honors of civil and military offices in La Florida.

[18] Menéndez was commissioned to reconnoiter North America from the Florida Keys to present-day Canada, and report on its coastal features, with a view to establishing a permanent settlement for the defense of the Spanish treasure fleet.

[19] On 28 July 1565, Menéndez set sail from Cádiz with a fleet led by his 600-ton flagship, the San Pelayo, accompanied by several smaller ships, and carrying over 1,000 sailors, soldiers, and settlers.

[20] On the feast day of St. Augustine, 28 August, the fleet sighted land and anchored off the north inlet of the tidal channel that the French called the River of Dolphins.

On 6 September, he returned to his first landfall, naming the site it after the Catholic saint, disembarked his troops, and quickly constructed fortifications to protect his people and supplies.

[28] Informed by Indian allies that the French survivors were walking northward on the coast, Menéndez began to search for them, finding the party at the banks of the Matanzas River's south entrance.

In May 1566, as relations with the neighboring Timucua Indians deteriorated, Menéndez moved the Spanish settlement to a more defensible position on the north end of the barrier island between the mainland and the sea, building a wooden fort there.

He also commissioned the Juan Pardo expedition, to travel from Santa Elena, at Port Royal Sound in present-day South Carolina, into the interior of the Southeast.

[32] Confident that he had fulfilled his primary contract with the King, including construction of forts along the coast of La Florida, Menéndez returned to Spain in 1567.

[38] Menéndez later made contact with the less hostile Tequesta at their capital in El Portal (in what is now Miami) and was able to negotiate for three chieftains to accompany him to Cuba as translators to the Arawak.

Although Menéndez left behind Jesuit missionaries Brother Francisco de Villareal and Padre Rogel in an attempt to convert the Tequesta to Roman Catholicism, the tribe were indifferent to their teachings.

[13][39] In August 1572, Menéndez led a ship with thirty soldiers and sailors to take revenge for the killing of the Jesuits of the Ajacán Mission in present-day Virginia.