Early Spanish Explorations

Royal Commission — Ponce de León Authorized to Explore

Juan Ponce de León came to the Florida enterprise as a man in need of a new command. A veteran of Columbus's second voyage of 1493, he had made his reputation in the brutal subjugation of the Higüey province of Hispaniola, and had gone on to conquer and govern the island of San Juan Bautista — Puerto Rico — from 1509. That governorship was not his to keep. Diego Colón, Columbus's son, pressed a lawsuit asserting his father's hereditary rights over the Indies, and the courts found for him. Ponce lost the office in 1511. He was wealthy, experienced, well connected at court, and suddenly unemployed.

The remedy was a contract. In February 1512 Ferdinand II granted him exclusive rights to discover and settle the islands of Beniny — Bimini — for a term of three years, together with the governorship for life of whatever he found. The document is a capitulación, the standard instrument by which the Spanish crown financed its expansion at no cost to itself. The crown conferred titles, jurisdiction and a defined share of the proceeds; the recipient supplied the ships, the men, the provisions and the risk. Ponce would pay for the voyage out of his own fortune, and would keep his rank only so long as he produced results.

The terms are specific about what the crown expected to receive. They set out the division of gold and of the Indigenous people the expedition might take — the two commodities that made such ventures worth financing — and they impose the obligations of settlement and of instruction in the faith. They say nothing whatever about a fountain of rejuvenating water. That story attaches itself to Ponce only decades later, in the chronicles of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Antonio de Herrera, both written after his death and both with reasons of their own for making him look credulous. The contemporary record describes an ordinary colonial speculation: find land, claim it, extract what it holds.

Bimini itself was a rumour of the kind that circulated constantly through the Caribbean in those years, carried by Indigenous informants under questioning and embellished by Spaniards who wanted it to be true. Islands to the north of Cuba were reported to be populous and rich. What lay in that direction was in fact the Bahama bank and, beyond it, a peninsula no European had yet recorded — though the persistent hostility Ponce would later meet on the Florida coast suggests that unlicensed slave-raiders from Hispaniola and the Bahamas may already have been working those shores.

The commission matters less for what Ponce believed he was seeking than for what it authorised. It was the first royal licence to explore and settle in the direction of what is now the continental United States, and it establishes the pattern that would govern Spanish activity in La Florida for the next half-century: a private adventurer, self-financed, holding crown authority, gambling a personal fortune on the chance of another Mexico. Four such men would try in the fifty years that followed. All four would fail, and three would die in the attempt.

First European Contact — Juan Ponce de León Names La Florida

Ponce de León sailed from Puerto Rico in the first days of March 1513 with three caravels — the Santiago, the San Cristóbal and the Santa María de la Consolación — and roughly sixty-five people aboard, among them two free Africans and a number of enslaved Indigenous people from the islands. His pilot was Antón de Alaminos, who had sailed with Columbus and who would prove the most consequential member of the expedition.

The little fleet worked north-west through the Bahamas, island-hopping in search of Bimini, and on April 2, 1513 sighted a long green coast that was plainly not an island of the kind they had been looking for. Ponce named it La Florida, for its verdure and for the season: the Spaniards were then keeping Pascua Florida, the Feast of Flowers, their name for Eastertide. He went ashore the following day and took formal possession. Where exactly he landed is still argued — St. Augustine, Ponce Inlet near Daytona, and the Melbourne area all have their advocates, and the surviving navigational data are not precise enough to settle it.

Turning south along the Atlantic shore, the ships met something stranger than any coastline. Off the modern Palm Beaches the current running north was so strong that on April 8 the caravels, under full sail before a following wind, were carried backwards. Alaminos had found the Gulf Stream where it runs at maximum force between Florida and the Bahamas, and he understood what he had. It was the single most valuable discovery of the voyage. Within a decade Spanish navigators were using the stream as the return conveyor of the Indies trade, riding it up the Florida coast and out into the Atlantic; for the next two centuries the treasure fleets of the Carrera de Indias would follow that route home. Everything Spain subsequently did in Florida — every garrison, every mission, every subsidy paid out of Mexican silver — followed from the fact that this current ran along that shore.

The fleet rounded the reefs and islets Ponce called Los Mártires, the Martyrs, because from a distance they resembled men in torment, and turned north along the Gulf coast to the barrier islands near Charlotte Harbor. There, in late May, the expedition met the Calusa, and the reception was not that of a people encountering Europeans for the first time. The Calusa refused to trade, put out in war canoes in numbers, and drove the ships off with long bows; there were casualties on both sides across several days of skirmishing. The chiefdom was powerful, populous, and organised enough to mount a coordinated naval response, and its hostility was immediate and informed. Historians generally take this as evidence that unlicensed slaving voyages had already reached the southwest coast, and that the Calusa knew precisely what Spanish sails meant.

Ponce returned to Puerto Rico on October 19, 1513, having circumnavigated much of the peninsula without establishing that it was a peninsula at all; he and his contemporaries continued to regard La Florida as a very large island. He went to Spain to report, and was received well and knighted for the discovery.

The voyage yielded no gold, no populous tributary province, and no colony. It yielded a name, a coastline on the charts, and the sea road home — and it opened two centuries of contact between Spain and the peoples of the peninsula that would end with almost none of those peoples left alive.

Second Ponce Expedition — First Colonization Attempt; Ponce de León Dies

Ponce de León had held a royal patent to settle Florida since 1514, but seven years passed before he could use it. The crown first sent him against the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, a campaign that consumed years and produced little, and the Florida project waited. By 1521 the situation had changed and not in his favour: Hernán Cortés was in the middle of the conquest of Mexico, and every ambitious man in the Indies could see where the wealth and the reputations were now to be made. Ponce, in his late fifties, moved to secure the claim he had been sitting on.

This time the intent was settlement rather than reconnaissance. He sailed from Puerto Rico in February 1521 with two ships and roughly two hundred people — not soldiers alone but priests, farmers and artisans, the trades a permanent town requires — together with fifty horses, other livestock, tools and seed. It was a colony in transit, and it was aimed at the southwest coast, in the vicinity of Charlotte Harbor, where he had been driven off eight years earlier. That choice is difficult to explain except as a determination to finish unfinished business. He was returning to the one stretch of the Florida coast whose inhabitants had already demonstrated both the will and the capacity to fight him.

The Calusa did not wait for the Spaniards to establish themselves. The colonists went ashore and began building; the attack came before the work was done. In the fighting Ponce de León was struck in the thigh by an arrow. The wound was not immediately fatal, but it was serious, and the colony had neither the numbers nor the morale to hold ground once its commander was down. The settlers re-embarked, abandoned the site, and sailed for Cuba.

Ponce died at Havana in the first week of July 1521, almost certainly of infection in the wound. He was buried there; his remains were later carried to Puerto Rico and now lie in the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista in San Juan. He was the first European to record the Florida coast and the first to attempt to settle it, and he accomplished the second no more than the first.

The failure had consequences beyond the man. Spain had now tried to plant a colony in La Florida and had been thrown into the sea by an Indigenous polity that possessed no metal weapons and no horses. The Calusa were not a scattered band but a centralised chiefdom of some size, drawing tribute from much of south Florida, subsisting on the extraordinary richness of the estuaries rather than on agriculture, and capable of putting large numbers of men on the water at short notice. They had beaten Ponce twice, and they would remain effectively unconquered for another two centuries — outlasting the missions, and destroyed in the end not by Spanish arms but by English-sponsored slave raids and epidemic disease.

For the crown, 1521 was the first evidence that Florida might not repay what it cost. The lesson was not learned quickly. Three more large expeditions would sail before Spain concluded that the peninsula could not be taken by a private adventurer with a patent and a fortune, and each of the three would fail more expensively than the last.

The Narváez Expedition — Disaster on the Gulf Coast

Pánfilo de Narváez held a royal contract to conquer and settle the Gulf coast from Florida west to the Río de las Palmas in Mexico — on paper, the entire northern rim of the Gulf. He was an experienced and notably harsh conquistador who had helped subdue Cuba, and who had already failed once in spectacular fashion when Cortés defeated and captured him in Mexico in 1520. Florida was his second chance.

He sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on June 17, 1527 with five ships and about six hundred people. The expedition was badly mauled before it ever reached Florida: desertions in Hispaniola, then a hurricane off Cuba that destroyed two ships and killed some sixty men, then a winter's delay. When the fleet finally made the Florida coast on April 12, 1528, coming ashore near Boca Ciega Bay at the mouth of Tampa Bay, it was already diminished.

The fatal decision came three weeks later. On May 1, 1528 Narváez divided his force, marching some three hundred men inland while the ships coasted north to meet them at a harbour none of them could identify on any chart. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the royal treasurer and second in command, argued against it and was overruled. The two halves of the expedition never met again. The ships searched the coast for a year and then sailed for Mexico.

The land party marched north into country that had nothing they wanted. Local people, questioned under duress, spoke of a province called Apalachen where there was gold — the standard answer given to armed strangers by people who wished them to keep walking. The Spaniards reached Apalachee territory on June 25, 1528 and found a farming town of perhaps forty houses, ample maize and no metal at all. The Apalachee then began a campaign of harassment for which the Spaniards had no answer: bowmen shooting from cover, striking the column and withdrawing, day after day through swamp and pine woods. Spanish armour did not stop the arrows, and Spanish cavalry could not close with an enemy that would not stand.

Starving and pursued, the survivors fell back to the coast near Aute, on the bay by the mouth of the St. Marks River. There they did the only thing left to do. Having no shipwright, no iron and no rigging, they built five boats out of pine and palmetto, using their stirrups, spurs and crossbows melted into nails, their shirts sewn into sails, and hides for ropes and water bags. They ate the horses as they slaughtered them and named the place Bahía de los Caballos, the Bay of Horses. The work took six weeks and was finished by September 20, 1528. Two hundred and forty-two men were still alive to board.

They put to sea on September 22 and coasted west, drinking seawater and dying of it. The boats separated in heavy weather. Narváez, in the strongest boat, refused to hold his craft with the others, was blown offshore, and was never seen again. Of the roughly eighty men cast up on and around Galveston Island in November, fifteen survived the winter. By 1532 there were four: Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and Estevanico, an enslaved North African. It would be another four years before any of them saw a Spaniard again.

Of some six hundred who had left Spain, four came home. It remains one of the most complete disasters in the history of European exploration in North America, and the account one of the survivors wrote of it became the most valuable document Spain possessed about the interior of the continent.

Survivors of the Narváez Expedition Reach New Spain

In the spring of 1536, near the Río Petatlán in Sinaloa, a party of mounted Spanish slave-hunters under Diego de Alcaraz came upon four men walking south out of the desert at the head of several hundred Indigenous followers. Three of them were Spaniards and one was an African. They were nearly naked, they had no possessions, and one of them had considerable difficulty making himself understood in Castilian. They were Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado and Estevanico — the only survivors of the six hundred who had sailed with Pánfilo de Narváez nine years earlier.

The intervening years had taken them across the Gulf coast of Texas and the northern Mexican interior. Cast away on Galveston Island in November 1528, they had passed roughly four years among the Karankawa, Capoque and Han peoples of the coast in conditions ranging from grudging hospitality to outright captivity, doing hard labour and very nearly starving. Cabeza de Vaca eventually found a livelihood as an itinerant trader, carrying shells and hides inland and mesquite beans and ochre back to the coast, which gave him freedom of movement and a working knowledge of several languages.

What transformed their position was a reputation as healers. Pressed to treat the sick and unable to refuse, the four combined Catholic prayer with the laying on of hands and the practices they had observed around them, and were credited with cures. Their standing grew as they moved west. By the final stage of the journey they travelled as figures of religious authority, accompanied from one settlement to the next by crowds who called them children of the sun, and who fed and escorted them along a chain of communities that stretched for hundreds of miles.

The meeting with Alcaraz was therefore not a rescue so much as a collision. Alcaraz was in the field precisely to take slaves, and the several hundred people walking with Cabeza de Vaca were exactly what he had come for. Cabeza de Vaca negotiated what he believed were guarantees of safe conduct; Alcaraz ignored them and seized the party's followers. The quarrel that followed — carried on to the provincial authorities at Culiacán and then to Mexico City, which the four reached in the summer of 1536 — marks the beginning of Cabeza de Vaca's transformation into one of the sharpest critics of Spanish conduct in the Indies.

The account he wrote after returning to Spain, the Relación, was published in 1542. It is the first European book devoted wholly to North America. It describes the peoples of the Gulf coast and the interior in detail and, remarkably for its date, with sympathy, arguing that they could be brought into the Spanish orbit by fair dealing rather than by force. It also carried, in its reports of populous towns somewhere to the north, precisely the sort of rumour that Spain was constitutionally unable to ignore. Within three years it had helped launch two enormous expeditions: Hernando de Soto's into Florida, and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's into the Southwest. Estevanico went ahead of Coronado as guide to Fray Marcos de Niza and was killed in 1539 at the Zuni town of Hawikuh.

For Florida the significance is oblique but real. The expedition that entered the peninsula in 1528 produced no colony, no gold and no map — but it produced a book, and that book is the reason the peninsula was invaded again eleven years later.

Hernando de Soto — The Grand Entrada

Hernando de Soto came to Florida rich, and that was the problem. As a senior lieutenant to Francisco Pizarro he had taken a large share of the ransom of Atahualpa, and he returned to Spain one of the wealthiest men of his generation. What he wanted was not more money but a governorship of his own, and in 1537 Charles V gave him one: the right to conquer La Florida, with the governorship of Cuba attached and admission to the Order of Santiago. He was to colonise within four years, at his own expense.

He sailed from Havana in May 1539 with nine ships, more than six hundred men, upwards of two hundred horses, a herd of some two hundred pigs driven along as mobile rations, war dogs trained to hunt people, chains and collars for prisoners, and a company of priests. It was the largest and best-equipped European force yet to enter North America, and it was organised on the assumption that the Southeast would prove to be another Peru. The landing was made in late May on the west coast, at a bay De Soto named Espíritu Santo — generally identified with the southern reaches of Tampa Bay, though Charlotte Harbor and San Carlos Bay have been argued for.

Almost at once the expedition had a piece of extraordinary luck. A patrol encountered a naked, tattooed man among a party of Mocoso who threw himself in their path shouting an invocation to the Virgin, and was spared at the last moment from being ridden down. He was Juan Ortiz, a young Spaniard who had come out with the ships sent to search for Narváez a decade earlier, had been taken by the Uzita, had escaped a sentence of death and fled to the neighbouring Mocoso, and had lived among them ever since. He had so nearly forgotten Castilian that he could not at first explain himself. He became De Soto's interpreter and remained so until his death in the winter of 1541, and he was very probably the most valuable single asset the expedition possessed.

(Some published summaries of this year confuse Ortiz with Hernán Ponce de León, who was De Soto's business partner in Peru and never lived among the Florida peoples. The man rescued near Tampa Bay in 1539 was Juan Ortiz.)

From the landing the army marched north through Timucua country, seizing stored maize, taking men and boys in chains as porters, and holding chiefs as hostages against supply — a method De Soto had learned in Peru and applied without modification. Resistance was constant. At Napituca a planned Timucua ambush was pre-empted and roughly two hundred captives were executed, the first mass killing of the entry. By October the army had fought its way into Apalachee territory and taken Anhaica, the principal town, near modern Tallahassee. De Soto wintered there in 1539–40 amid the Apalachee food stores, under continual attack. The site was identified archaeologically in 1987 at the Governor Martin site in Tallahassee, and the recovered European material makes it the only securely located De Soto camp in the Southeast.

In the spring he marched north out of Florida and kept going: through Georgia, the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas, four thousand miles in four years, fighting a major battle at Mabila and finding nothing he had come for. He died of fever on the Mississippi in May 1542, and his men sank his body in the river so the peoples he had fought would not learn that he was mortal.

The entrada found no gold and founded no town. What it left behind was epidemic disease and shattered polities: the paramount chiefdoms of the Mississippian Southeast, which De Soto's chroniclers describe as populous and powerful, were substantially gone within two generations. When Frenchmen and Spaniards returned to the interior later in the century they walked through emptied country, and did not understand what had emptied it.

Tristán de Luna y Arellano — Colony at Pensacola Bay

The fourth Spanish attempt on Florida was the first mounted by the state rather than by a private adventurer, and it was the largest. Luís de Velasco, viceroy of New Spain, planned it as an instrument of policy: a settlement on the Gulf coast, a second on the Atlantic at Santa Elena in what is now South Carolina, and an overland road joining them. The strategic reasoning was sound. Spanish ships were wrecking regularly on the Florida coasts and their crews were being lost; French interest in the Atlantic seaboard was growing; and the Gulf Stream route that carried the treasure fleets home ran past a shore Spain did not control. Velasco chose Tristán de Luna y Arellano, a nobleman of proven service who had ridden with Coronado in the Southwest, to command.

The expedition sailed from Veracruz in June 1559 with eleven ships — some accounts say thirteen — carrying more than fifteen hundred people. It was not an army of conquest but a colony: six companies of cavalry and six of infantry, and with them settlers, women and children, servants, enslaved Africans, and a contingent of Aztec allies from Mexico, together with horses, tools and provisions for a year. In mid-August it entered the deep, sheltered bay at Pensacola, which Luna named Bahía Filipina del Puerto de Santa María and where he founded the settlement of Santa María de Ochuse. It was the first European attempt at settlement in what is now the Florida panhandle, and on any reasonable assessment it had every advantage the earlier ventures had lacked: numbers, official backing, a superb harbour and adequate supply.

It lasted five weeks. On the night of September 19, 1559 a hurricane came into the bay while most of the expedition's stores were still in the holds — the unloading had gone slowly, and the ships were riding at anchor fully laden. The storm destroyed five ships, a galleon and a bark, and drove a caravel so far inland that it was left sitting in a grove of trees. The great majority of the colony's food went down with them. Marine archaeologists working in Pensacola Bay have since located several of these wrecks, and in 2015 the associated shore settlement itself was found, making it the earliest multi-year European colony site excavated in the United States.

What followed was a long, disciplined, hopeless improvisation. The survivors were now a colony of fifteen hundred people with a few weeks' rations on a coast whose Indigenous population was thin and whose soil around the bay was poor. Luna sent detachments inland to find food and allies, first up the Escambia and then further, into the interior of what is now Alabama. They found villages, but not the surpluses fifteen hundred mouths required, and often found nothing at all: the country De Soto's chroniclers had described as thickly settled twenty years before had been hollowed out by the diseases his army carried, and the survivors had neither maize to spare nor any reason to be generous to Spaniards.

By the winter of 1559–60 the colonists were eating leather and acorns, and the relief ships from Mexico had not come.

Luna Colony Abandoned — Royal Debate on Florida's Value

The Pensacola colony took two years to die. In February 1560 Luna moved the bulk of the survivors inland to an Alabama River town called Nanipacana, renaming it Santa Cruz de Nanipacana in the hope that a farming district would feed them where the coast would not. The inhabitants withdrew and took their maize with them, and by June the Spaniards were back on the coast. A detachment of some two hundred men pushed much further north, to the Coosa chiefdom in what is now northwestern Georgia — a place De Soto's chroniclers had described in 1540 as rich and populous. They found it much reduced, stayed until November helping their hosts fight a neighbouring people, and came back with nothing that would feed a colony.

By then the expedition had begun to break apart from within. Officers who wanted to abandon the enterprise were opposed by a commander who would not, and Luna's own conduct — indecisive, then violent, and by the account of his own captains increasingly irrational — cost him what authority he had left. The quarrel reached the point of formal mutiny, and was patched up only when a priest sent from Mexico refused the sacrament to both parties until they were reconciled. The viceroy resolved it in April 1561 by removing Luna and appointing Ángel de Villafañe in his place.

Villafañe's instructions were to salvage the Atlantic half of the plan. He took most of the remaining colonists to Havana, then sailed north to found the settlement at Santa Elena — and lost several ships to a storm on the way. He returned to Mexico having established nothing. A garrison of fifty men held Pensacola until August 1561, and then they too were withdrawn. Spain would not occupy Pensacola Bay again for a hundred and thirty-seven years.

The failure prompted a genuine reckoning at court. Philip II convened his advisers, and in September 1561 the crown concluded that no further attempt should be made to settle La Florida. The reasoning was hard to fault on the evidence available. Four major expeditions had gone in over forty-nine years; all four had failed; two commanders were dead and one disgraced. The peninsula had produced no gold, no silver, and no dense sedentary population that could be set to work under the encomienda system as the peoples of Mexico and Peru had been. Its climate killed Europeans, its soils around the harbours were poor, and its inhabitants had proved consistently and effectively hostile. Measured as a colonial proposition, Florida did not pay.

Against that stood one argument, and it was not economic. The Gulf Stream ran up the Florida coast, and every ship carrying American silver to Seville rode it. A hostile power established on that shore could prey on the treasure fleets at their most vulnerable point, and shipwrecked Spanish crews would continue to be lost on beaches Spain did not control. Florida's value was not what could be taken out of it but what could be denied to somebody else — and on that ground the crown kept the file open even as it stopped spending.

The point was proved almost immediately. Within a year of the decision not to colonise, Jean Ribault landed on the Atlantic coast and claimed it for France. Within four, Philip II had commissioned Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to settle Florida permanently and destroy the French colony there. Spain returned to Florida in 1565 not because the peninsula had become worth having, but because somebody else had taken it.