Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon is credited with discovering the Florida peninsula on April 2, 1513. He thus became the first white man to meet up with the state’s large Indian population.
Although it is presumed that other European explorers reached the coast of Florida before him, history attributes Juan Ponce de Leon with the peninsula’s discovery on April 2, 1513, when he sailed south along its east coast. In veneration of the Spanish Easter feast of the same name he called this luxuriant new land La Pascua Florida—Flowery Easter. An account of this earliest voyage indicates that the explorer dropped anchor at some distance offshore from the first inhabited village he sighted. A landing was not attempted, and no contact was made. That would come later.
Historians generally agree that the location of this anchorage was somewhere along the east central coast of Florida, south of Cape Canaveral. During the next two centuries, so many Spanish galleons heavily laden with silver, gold and other precious pillage were wrecked along its shore that this spectacular stretch of coastline was given the romantic sobriquet, “Treasure Coast.” But when Ponce de Leon claimed Florida for the Spanish crown, the so-called New World was just barely 21 years into its exploration.
Read the entire article in the March 2008 issue
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