Pedro Menendez: From Avilés to Saint Augustine

In the autumn of 1565, a hard man from the Cantabrian coast knelt on a beach at the edge of the known world, kissed a wooden cross, and founded a city on the sand. He named it Saint Augustine. It would become the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded city in what is now the United States.This is the story of the man who planted it there: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Governor of Florida. Mariner, conqueror, and instrument of an empire. A captain whom the Ocean both made and unmade, who lost a son in its waters and his own freedom at the hands of his enemies' ink. A man of unwavering and terrible faith, capable in a single campaign of the most beautiful and the most atrocious acts.Narrated in the first person by his chaplain, the chronicler Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, this novel neither absolves nor condemns him, but tells his story in its entirety: the glory and the prison, the sand and the blood, the dream that burned and the empire that outlived him.A historical novel about the conquest of Florida, about faith and ashes, and about the city that started it all.