ANCIENT FLORIDA.
BY JOHN GILMARY SHEA, LL.D.
THE credit of being the first to explore our Atlantic coast has not yet been positively awarded by critical historians. Ramusio preserves the report of a person whom he does not name, which asserts that Sebastian Cabot claimed for his father and himself, in the summer of 1497, to have run down the whole coast, from Cape Breton to the latitude of Cuba; but the most recent and experienced writer on Cabot treats the claim as unfounded.[792]
The somewhat sceptical scholars of our day have shown little inclination to adopt the theory of Francisco Adolpho de Varnhagen, that Americus Vespucius on his first voyage reached Honduras in 1497, and during the ensuing year ran along the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, doubled the Florida cape, and then sailed northward along our Atlantic coast to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where he built a vessel and sailed to Cadiz.[793]
Although Columbus made his first landfall on one of the Bahamas, and Cuba was soon after occupied, no definite knowledge seems to have been obtained of the great mainland so near them. There is nothing in narrative or map to betray any suspicion of its existence prior to the year 1502, when a map executed in Lisbon at the order of Cantino, an Italian merchant, for Hercules d’Este, shows a mainland north of Cuba, terminating near that island in a peninsula resembling Florida. The tract of land thus shown has names of capes and rivers, but they can be referred to no known exploration. To some this has seemed to be but a confused idea of Cuba as mainland;[794] by others it is regarded as a vague idea of Yucatan. But Harrisse in his Corte-Real, where he reproduces the map, maintains that “between the end of 1500 and the summer of 1502 navigators, whose name and nationality are unknown, but whom we presume to be Spaniards, discovered, explored, and named the part of the shore of the United States which from the vicinity of Pensacola Bay runs along the Gulf of Mexico to the Cape of Florida, and, turning it, runs northward along the Atlantic coast to about the mouth of the Chesapeake or Hudson.”[795]
But leaving these three claims in the realm of conjecture and doubt, we come to a period of more certain knowledge.
The Lucayos of the Bahamas seem to have talked of a great land of Bimini not far from them. The Spaniards repeated the story; and in the edition of Peter Martyr’s Decades published in 1511 is a map on which a large island appears, named “Illa de Beimeni, parte.”[796]
Discovery had taken a more southerly route; no known Spanish vessel had passed through the Bahama channel or skirted the coast. But some ideas must have prevailed, picked up from natives of the islands, or adventurous pilots who had ventured farther than their instructions authorized. Stories of an island north of Hispaniola, with a fountain whose waters conferred perpetual youth, had reached Peter Martyr in Spain, for in the same edition of his Decades he alludes to the legends.
John Ponce de Leon, who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, and had since played his part bravely amid the greatest vicissitudes, resolved to explore and conquer Bimini. He had friends at Court, and seems to have been a personal favorite of the King, who expressed a wish for his advancement.[797] The patent he solicited was based on that originally issued to Columbus; but the King laughingly said, that it was one thing to grant boundless power when nothing was expected to come of it, and very different to do so when success was almost certain. Yet on the 23d of February, 1512, a royal grant empowered John Ponce de Leon “to proceed to discover and settle the Island of Bimini.”[798] The patent was subject to the condition that the island had not been already discovered. He was required to make the exploration within three years, liberty being granted to him to touch at any island or mainland not subject to the King of Portugal. If he succeeded in his expedition he was to be governor of Bimini for life, with the title of adelantado.[799]
The veteran immediately purchased a vessel, in order to go to Spain and make preparations for the conquest of Bimini. But the authorities in Porto Rico seized his vessel; and the King, finding his services necessary in controlling the Indians, sent orders to the Council of the Indies to defer the Bimini expedition, and gave Ponce de Leon command of the fort in Porto Rico.[800]