The History of Florida Read Online Free PDF Page A

Span-
    iards.” In any event, the historian can speculate what must have been the
    wonderment, perhaps terror, that passed through the original Floridians’
    minds when they beheld the ultimate artifact of European technology, the
    sailing ship, with its huge hul , masts and shrouds, spread canvas sails, and
    white, bearded seamen.
    Tantalizing suggestions of those first contacts appear in maps and charts
    as early as 1502, the date of a Portuguese world map known by the name of
    its owner, Italian nobleman Alberto Cantino. Where it depicted the Span-
    ish Caribbean discoveries, there appears a narrow landmass that is possibly
    the Florida peninsula but is more likely the coast of Central America. More
    striking, a map of the islands and shores of the New World was published in
    1511 by Peter Martyr (Pietro Martire d’Anghiera), an Italian priest-humanist
    in the Spanish court of Fernando II of Aragón. Drawn from oral and written
    · 18 ·
    First European Contacts · 19
    reports of navigators, this map shows a long shoreline “to the north” of Cuba
    which he labeled “Isla de beimeni parte” (Island of Bimini). With the Grand
    Bahama Bank directly abutting them, the land features of Bimini, and what
    appear to be keys descending from them, could be Florida.
    It was this island of Bimini that Juan Ponce de León was authorized to
    seek in an asiento (charter) issued him by the Spanish Crown on 23 Febru-
    ary 1512. Born to a noble family in Val adolid, Juan Ponce at age nineteen
    shipped to the Caribbean on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493, and, after
    New World seasoning, he conducted the conquest of Puerto Rico in 1506–7,
    becoming its governor in 1509. In 1512 he was deposed on a technicality by
    Columbus’s older son, Diego Colon, and, finding himself wealthy and with
    time on his hands, he accepted an asiento to discover and conquer the land
    “to the north” called Bimini. According to legend, Bimini contained a foun-
    tain of waters that rejuvenated old men, the so-called Fountain of Youth. It
    should be emphasized that those mythical waters were not mentioned in
    Juan Ponce’s charter from Fernando II, which was meticulously detailed
    in its specification of the expedition’s purpose and goals. Nor were they
    mentioned in any firsthand report or narrative, although the one extant de-
    tailed source for Juan Ponce’s voyage of 1513—historian Antonio de Herrera
    y Tordesil as, who in 1601–15 published a chronicle of Spanish New World
    proof
    explorations—states that on the return end of that voyage, Juan Ponce sent
    one of his ships into the Lucayan, or Bahama, chain to search for “that cel-
    ebrated fountain which the Indians said turned men from old men [into]
    youths.”1 This probably was a gloss by Herrera based on an unsubstantiated
    account by Peter Martyr. Probably more important to Juan Ponce were gold
    and the glory of conquest, the lust for which drove all conquistadors of the
    period.
    On 3 March 1513, Juan Ponce left Añasco Bay on the western side of
    Puerto Rico with two caravels and a bergantina. Notable among the crews
    and passenger list were thirty-eight-year-old Antón de Alaminos, the most
    experienced pilot in the islands; two women, Beatriz and Juana Jiménez,
    who probably were related; two African freemen, Juan Gárrido and Juan
    González [Ponce] de León; and two unnamed native Taíno seafarer-guides
    from Puerto Rico.
    Alaminos set a course of northwest a quarter by north that took the three
    ships seaward up the eastern edge of the Lucayans as far as the northernmost
    charted island of San Salvador (the Lucayan Guanahaní that was Colum-
    bus’s first landfall in 1492), which they reached after eleven days. They were
    at sea again on the same base compass heading, but in unknown waters,

    20 · Michael Gannon
    Map of the Caribbean published by Peter Martyr in 1511. The landmass to the north of
    Cuba is named isla de beimeni parte. Its placement, and what appear to be