The History of Florida Read Online Free PDF Page B

Juan Ponce named them Los Mártires (Martyrs), “because viewed
    from afar the rocks as they rose up seemed like men who are suffering.”4
    From Key West he sailed west a short distance and then proceeded north
    to explore the reverse side of his “island,” making a Gulf coast landfal , it is
    thought, at San Carlos Bay, off the deep mouth of the Caloosahatchee River,
    22 · Michael Gannon
    and anchoring near the southeast tip of Sanibel Island. There he found fire-
    wood and freshwater, careened one of his ships, and had two bel igerent
    encounters with natives of the Calusa nation, whose chief, Carlos (as the
    Spaniards pronounced and wrote his name), resided on Estero Island. The
    Calusa attacked the anchored ships in canoes. One Spaniard and at least
    four natives died in these actions, leading Juan Ponce to give Sanibel its
    first European name, Matanzas (Massacre). After nine days in the vicinity,
    a decision was made to return to Puerto Rico. Accordingly, Alaminos laid a
    course that took the ships south-southwest, which caused them, on 21 June,
    to come upon waterless keys that Juan Ponce named Las Tortugas (Turtles),
    where the crews provisioned the vessels with, among other land and sea spe-
    cies, 160 loggerhead turtles. Following a brief reconnaissance of the Cuban
    coastline west of Havana, the expedition made for Puerto Rico. Two of the
    three ships reached it in mid-October. The third ship, with chief pilot Ala-
    minos aboard, Juan Ponce had dispatched into the Lucayans to search again
    for the elusive Bimini; that ship would arrive in Añasco Bay four months
    later.
    In 1514, Juan Ponce sailed to Spain, where he secured a revised royal
    asiento naming him adelantado (self-financing conqueror and direct rep-
    resentative of the king) and governor of the islands of Bimini and Florida.
    proof
    He was delayed for seven years in executing the contract by the death of his
    wife and his need to raise their two young daughters. During that interim,
    however, La Florida did not lack for Spanish visitors, including slavers, such
    as Pedro de Salazar during a voyage of 1514–16. In 1517, Alaminos, now chief
    pilot for Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, took refuge in San Carlos Bay
    when Córdoba’s expedition returned eastward from its voyage to Yuca-
    tán. And two years later, Alaminos again, this time for Alonzo Alvarez de
    Pineda, put into the same bay for its firewood and drinking water during
    an expedition that established that Florida was not an island after all but a
    peninsula attached to a huge continent. Pineda fixed its western juncture to
    the mainland at a feature he named after the Holy Spirit—Río de Espíritu
    Santo; this could have been either the Mobile River and Bay, the Mississippi
    River, or Vermillion Bay, Louisiana.
    His own interest in Florida no doubt requickened by news of Hernán
    Cortés’s astonishing discoveries in México, Juan Ponce wrote to the emperor
    Carlos V (Carlos I, king of Spain) on 10 February 1521 expressing his inten-
    tion to establish a permanent town, a fort, and missions in the Florida he
    still thought was an island. On 26 February, he sailed out of Puerto Rico in
    two ships loaded down with 200 male and female settlers, parish priests and

    First European Contacts · 23
    Juan Ponce de León (ca. 1460–1521). The left side of this seventeenth-century engrav-
    ing represents Juan Ponce and his expedition of 1521 in combat with the Calusa natives
    at Florida’s San Carlos Bay.
    missionary friars, horses and domestic animals, seeds, cuttings, and agricul-
    proof
    tural implements. The site of his landing in Florida is not known with any
    certainty, though it has been widely assumed it was in the same San Carlos
    Bay region that twice had brought back his former pilot, Alaminos. In any
    event, the natives of that site were no more receptive to strangers than were
    those Juan Ponce had encountered eight years before. They attacked the
    Spaniards as they debarked,