Ajacan

Ajacán in the province of Axacan, variants include Xacan, Jacan, Iacan, Axaca, Axacam; was located in the Mid-Atlantic near and including the Chesapeake Bay and present day Virginia, United States. In his 1842 Historia de la Compania de Fesus en Nueva Espana, Alegre said Father Juan Bautista de Segura and his companions called the province Axacan.

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.

Francisco Fernández de Écija, chief pilot of Spaniards searching the Chesapeake Bay for English activities in 1609, asserted that Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's failed colony of 1526-27, San Miguel de Gualdape, had been located on the James River somewhere near Jamestown. While some historians accepted Écija's claim, more recent scholars believe Ayllón instead went southwest, and that the "River Guandalpe" was in Georgia.

Esteban Gómez named what may have been the Chesapeake Bay, "Immaculate Conception Bay", on his 1525 expedition. No record of the Spanish reaching a place called Axacan was made until 1559-60, the year Sacchini says Dominican missionaries took the Indian they named Don Luis from there. Don Luis was recorded in Viceroyalty of New Spain-Mexico in 1565.

In 1561, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés also held the belief of a passage by way of the tributaries flowing east from the Allegheny Mountains' gaps and the rivers flowing west on the other side to the Pacific, as told them by the Native Americans at the range of Axacan.

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