Spanish explorer and first European colonizer of what is now South Carolina.

Going to the West Indies in 1502, he became a judge in the colonial administration of Hispaniola (Santo Domingo). In 1520 he went to Mexico to mediate the dispute between the Spanish commanders Hernán Cortés and Diego Velázquez. An expedition sent by him under the command of Francisco Gordillo made a landfall near Cape Fear, N.C., in 1522, and in 1523 Ayllón was authorized by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V (King Charles I of Spain) to explore that area, especially to find a strait to the Spice Islands. In the early summer of 1526 Ayllón sailed from Hispaniola to found a settlement called San Miguel de Guadalupe, probably at the mouth of the Pee Dee River (Winyah Bay), in South Carolina. (Little credence can be given to the claim that the settlement was made at Jamestown, Va., 81 years before the English arrived there.) The colony was abandoned a few months later, after Ayllón and many others had died in a fever epidemic.