Ajacan
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Ajacán – variants include Xacan, Jacan, Iacan, Axaca and Axacam – was a short-lived Spanish settlement, between 1570 and 1571, near Chesapeake Bay, in what would later become Virginia.
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The settlement was intended to be the capital of a larger Spanish colony, named the Province of Axacan, straddling the future Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. In his 1842 Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Nueva España, Alegre said Father Juan Bautista de Segura and his companions called the province Axacan.[1][2]
Some early 20th-century historians promoted the idea that the early Spanish explorers who made voyages into the Chesapeake Bay between 1565 and 1570 sailed up the Potomac River as far as Occoquan, Virginia, based on the similarity between "Axacan" of the Spanish missionary chronicles and the name of the Indian town and creek on the Potomac. The chronicles describe the failed Axacan mission in 1570, which included abandonment by their guide, and massacre of the party.[3]