Free Republic

Pottery in St. Augustine may provide clues Three years after St. Augustine was founded, Alvara de Mendana, nephew of the governor of Peru, set out with two ships and 150 soldiers and sailed west to find gold and a new trade route to China. Mendana's 1568 voyage found nothing, so he returned to Peru. But a relentless lust for gold pushed the Spanish to dispatch more colonizing fleets. And one founded a colony somewhere in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia. No one knows its exact location or why the colony disappeared, but Martin Gibbs of the University of Sydney's...

LABOR has accused John Howard of suffering from "post-Iraq war Francophobia", calling on the Government to accept a French offer to join an Australian-led multinational intervention force in the Solomon Islands. The attack from Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd came as the Solomons Islands cabinet yesterday approved the terms of the Australian-led deployment, paving the way for the formal request to be made to Canberra this weekend. Mr Rudd's attack follows first the Prime Minister and then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer offering a lukewarm response to French overtures to provide military and police support to the mission. "It's time...