The fort, the park, the whole place carries the name of a Spanish conquistador who, in all likelihood, never set foot on Mullet Key. Hernando de Soto landed somewhere on the lower shore of Tampa Bay in 1539 and marched off into the interior of a continent, and three and a half centuries later the United States Army borrowed his name for a coastal fort he never saw. The name is a tribute to an arrival, and a reminder of how thin the thread can be between a place and the name it bears.
De Soto was already rich and famous when he came to Florida. Born in the Extremadura region of Spain around 1500, he sailed to the Americas as a young man and made his name in the brutal conquest of Central America under the notorious governor Pedrarias Davila, in Panama and Nicaragua, where he grew wealthy in the slave trade and earned a reputation as a superb and ruthless cavalry commander. He then joined Francisco Pizarro's conquest of Peru, where he was among the men who seized the Inca emperor Atahualpa, and his share of the vast ransom paid for that captive emperor made him one of the wealthiest men in the Spanish world. Restless for a conquest of his own rather than a junior role in another man's, he returned to Spain, married well, and persuaded the crown to name him governor of Cuba and adelantado of Florida, with the right to conquer the vast, vague land north of the Gulf. He sank his fortune into the largest, best-equipped expedition yet sent into the region.
In May 1539 de Soto's fleet entered Tampa Bay and put ashore some six hundred soldiers, along with horses, war dogs, and herds of pigs driven as walking rations, on the bay's southern or lower shore, in the territory of the Uzita chiefdom. The exact landing site has been debated for generations, with the strongest candidates clustered on the lower and eastern bay near present-day Bradenton and Ruskin, and a national memorial marking one proposed spot. What is certain is that it was on the bay, not on Mullet Key itself, which lay at the bay's mouth.
At the landing the Spanish made an extraordinary discovery: a naked, tattooed man who cried out in broken Spanish. He was Juan Ortiz, a member of the earlier Narvaez expedition, who had been captured and held by the bay's peoples for some eleven years. Ortiz became de Soto's interpreter, a living link between the two great entradas, and a piece of luck without which the expedition would have been even blinder than it was.
From Tampa Bay, de Soto marched north and west on a four-year, roughly four-thousand-mile journey through what are now ten states of the American South, the first sustained European penetration of the interior. The expedition extorted food and labor from one Native nation after another, fought pitched battles such as the terrible fight at Mabila, and spread disease everywhere it went, helping to shatter the great chiefdoms of the Mississippian world. De Soto's men were the first Europeans to cross the Mississippi River. De Soto himself never came home: he died of fever on the banks of that river in May 1542, and his men sank his body in its waters so the Native peoples would not learn that the man who had claimed to be a deathless son of the sun was mortal after all. The survivors, now led by Luis de Moscoso, finally straggled into Spanish Mexico in 1543, fewer than half of those who had landed on the bay.
When the Army's new fort on Mullet Key needed a name in 1900, it took de Soto's, honoring the conquistador's 1539 arrival on the bay. There is a deep irony in commemorating, on a fort built to defend the United States, a man who came to conquer the land's first peoples and who likely never touched the island that now bears his name. The name endured all the same, and so the deadliest invader the bay ever saw is remembered in the gentlest of its places, a county park of beaches and birds.