The History of Florida Read Online Free PDF

keys de-
    scending from it, have led some historians to speculate that it is a depiction of Florida,
    drawn from navigators’ reports, two years before the voyage of Juan Ponce de León.
    proof
    on Sunday, 27 March, when the crews and passengers observed the feast of
    Easter. That day, too, they sighted an island, which probably was Eleuthera.
    From that point, as indicated by a recent resailing of the route to test the pre-
    vailing winds and currents, Alaminos took a new heading of west-northwest
    through the New Providence Channel and passed well below the southern
    cape of Great Abaco and the whole of Grand Bahama. This course placed
    the vessels out of the sight of land for the next six days. When they crossed
    the three-knot Gulf Stream, the Spanish hul s were carried north faster than
    they shouldered west, with the result that on 2 April they made landfall on
    what turned out to be the Florida shoreline. The most recent study con-
    tends that they were at a point just south of Cape Canaveral, probably near
    Melbourne Beach, where they anchored in eight brazas (forty-four feet) of
    water.2
    Herrera describes what fol owed: “And thinking that this land was an
    island, they called it La Florida, because it was very pretty to behold with
    many and refreshing trees, and it was flat, and even: and also because they
    discovered it in the time of Flowery Easter [Pascua Florida], Juan Ponce
    wanted to agree in the name, with these two reasons.”3
    First European Contacts · 21
    Juan Ponce went ashore to take formal possession of the “island,” but
    there is no indication in the record that he encountered people indigenous
    to the site. After remaining in the region for six days, he raised anchor on
    8 April and sailed south along a featureless coastline. On 21 April, he made
    his second great discovery, though it is doubtful that he and Alaminos real-
    ized its dimensions at the time: the Florida Current, or Gulf Stream. That
    current had made itself felt when the three ships crossed it going west in the
    first days of April, but now, at a cape north of Lake Worth Inlet, which Juan
    Ponce named Cabo de las Corrientes (Cape of the Currents), it faced him
    head-on and with such force that his ships were propelled backward even
    though they had wind abaft the beam. One, the bergantina, was swept out
    to deep water. Anchoring north of the cape, Juan Ponce and some of his
    men rowed ashore in a longboat to make contact with natives they sighted
    on shore. The encounter did not go wel . The native party assaulted the
    Spaniards with clubs and arrows, rendering one seaman unconscious and
    wounding two others. Herrera states that Juan Ponce had not wished to do
    the natives harm but was forced to fight in order to save both his men’s lives
    and their boat, oars, and weapons, which their assailants sought to seize.
    No cause for the natives’ violence is given in the record, whether it was
    provoked by earlier visits of slaving expeditions, or by the natives’ own long
    proof
    tradition of intertribal warfare, or by simple fear of these strange creatures
    from another world.
    Regaining his ships, Juan Ponce put in at Jupiter Inlet to take on firewood
    and water, only to be attacked again by a larger party of sixty men. This
    time he seized a warrior for use as a guide. He would remain anchored in
    the river until rejoined by the bergantina. And somewhere along this river,
    which he named La Cruz (The Cross), he planted a quarry-stone cross, in-
    scribed, with what words we do not know, in the manner of other Spanish or
    Portuguese explorers of the period who erected a stone patrón , or standard,
    to identify their claims.
    Final y navigating the Cape of the Currents by hugging the shore, Alami-
    nos navigated southward to Key Biscayne, which Juan Ponce named Santa
    Marta, and, on Friday, 13 May, to one of the Keys, possibly Key Largo, which
    he named Pola, its derivation and meaning unclear. Rounding the Keys as
    a body,