A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of April
The Scarf with Fringe
On April 2, 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon first sights land in what is now the United States state of Florida.
In September 1493, some 1200 sailors, colonists and soldiers joined Christopher Columbus for his second voyage to the New World. Ponce de León was a member of this expedition, one of two hundred ‘gentlemen volunteers’. The fleet reached the Caribbean in November of 1493, and their primary destination of Hispaniola, now Puerto Rico. In 1504 the appointed governor of Hispaniola, Nicolas de Ovando, assigned Ponce de León to crush the rebellion of the native Tainos people. For this service, he was awarded a land grant and became the frontier governor of the defeated province.
Urged by King Ferdinand of Spain, Ponce de León equipped three ships with at least 200 men at his own expense and set out from Puerto Rico on March 4, 1513 in search for new lands and riches. The fleet crossed open water until April 2, 1513, when they sighted land which Ponce de León believed was another island. He named it la Florida in recognition of the verdant landscape and because it was the Easter season, which the Spaniards called Pascua Florida (Festival of Flowers). The precise location of their landing on the Florida coast has been disputed for many years.
Although Ponce de León is widely credited with the discovery of Florida, he almost certainly was not the first European to reach the peninsula. Spanish slave expeditions had been regularly raiding the Bahamas since 1494 and there is some evidence that one or more of these slavers made it as far as the shores of Florida. Another piece of evidence that others came before Ponce de León is the Cantino Map from 1502, which shows a peninsula near Cuba that looks like Florida’s and includes characteristic place names.
In early 1521, Ponce de León organized a colonizing expedition consisting of some 200 men, including priests, farmers and artisans, 50 horses and other domestic animals, and farming implements carried on two ships. The expedition landed somewhere on the coast of southwest Florida likely in the vicinity of Charlotte Harbor or the Caloosahatchee River. Before the settlement could be established, the colonists were attacked by a large party of native Calusa warriors. Ponce de León was mortally wounded in the skirmish when, historians believe, an arrow poisoned with manchineel sap struck his thigh. The expedition immediately abandoned the colonization attempt and returned to Havana, Cuba, where Ponce de León soon died of his wounds.