Ponce de León and Florida Mythology

Based on last week’s commemoration, it’s been 500 years since Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida. The problem is, he didn’t discover Florida. And as Florida historian T.D. Allman points out in the New York Times: “He never did much of anything here except get himself killed.”

According to Allman’s article:

Florida probably was first sighted by Portuguese navigators, or perhaps by the Cabots sailing from England. Either way, it started appearing on maps as early as 1500. 

By 1510, its distinctive peninsular shape had emerged clearly on maps in Europe. By 1513, when Ponce de Léon first arrived, so many Europeans had visited Florida that some Indians greeted him in Spanish. 

Ponce never went anywhere near St. Augustine, the city where he is said to have discovered the Fountain of Youth. He was not an old man. That tale was concocted by Washington Irving more than 300 years later.

Ponce left and then returned on a second voyage.  

On that second voyage he achieved one real Florida first, albeit an inglorious one. In a skirmish with native inhabitants, Ponce fired the first shots in what would turn into a 300-year war of ethnic cleansing … Ponce himself was struck by an arrow. The wound wasn’t serious, but the Spaniards were as indifferent to sepsis as they were alert to heresy… he died of fever in Havana, having discovered nothing, founded nothing and achieved nothing.

Click here for the article.

Sinkhole Holds Ancient Florida Artifacts

Marker on sinkhole floor indicates a gourd used as an ancient canteen.

A 30-foot-deep sinkhole in southern Florida continues to yield artifacts now indicating the site ~ some 12,000 years ago, when it was dry land ~ may have been an ancient butcher shop.

"This is a warehouse of environmental, natural, historical, and archaeological remains in a very, very well preserved environment," Roger Smith, Florida's state underwater archaeologist, told National Geographic. "That's why it's a world-class site. I would call it a portal back into time."

Archaeologists have been recovering primitive relics from the spring ~ called Little Salt Spring ~ since 1977, when divers found the remains of a large, now extinct tortoise and a sharpened stake that may have been used by a hungry hunter to kill the animal 12,000 years ago. They found more from the tortoise this past July, along with the slaughtered remains of a giant ground sloth.

The discovery of the sloth's bones could indicate that Little Salt Spring was a sort of ancient butcher shop where hunters often killed and their prey and prepared meat when this was dry land. These remains come from the earliest known period of human activity in the Western Hemisphere.

Aerial view of sinkhole, about 12 miles south of Sarasota, Florida.

Click here for the complete National Geographic article.
Click here for a video about Ice Age people in Florida.