The recorded history of Florida begins with Juan Ponce de Leon, and so, in a sense, does the long catalog of violence between the Spanish and the peoples of this Gulf coast. He was the first European to reach Florida, the man who gave it its name, and the first of the would-be conquerors of this shore to die at the hands of the people who already lived here. He never quite reached Tampa Bay, but everything that did reach it, the explorers, the forts, the missions, followed in his wake.
Ponce de Leon was born of minor nobility in the Spanish kingdom of Leon around 1460 to 1474, and came to the Americas young, as a gentleman volunteer on Christopher Columbus's second voyage in 1493. He made his career in the brutal early conquest of the Caribbean, rising to high office on Hispaniola, where he helped crush a rebellion of the native Taino, and then conquering and settling the neighboring island of Puerto Rico, of which he became the first Spanish governor in 1509. He was, in the words of the archaeologist Jerald Milanich, a conquistador with a reputation for taking Native people as slaves, and that is the man, not the gentle seeker of legend, who sailed north in 1513.
Holding a royal charter to find and settle the rumored island of Bimini, Ponce de Leon sailed from Puerto Rico in March 1513 and, in the first days of April, made landfall on the Atlantic coast of the peninsula, somewhere between modern St. Augustine and Melbourne Beach. Because he arrived in the Easter season, the Spanish Pascua Florida or Feast of Flowers, and because the land was green and blossoming, he named it La Florida. He believed it an island. Coasting south, he rounded the Keys, named the turtle-crowded Dry Tortugas, and worked up the Gulf coast, and in the process he charted the powerful current of the Gulf Stream, the Bahama Channel that would become the homeward sea-road of the Spanish treasure fleets for centuries. His was the first sanctioned European voyage to touch the mainland of what is now the United States.
That first voyage carried him up the southwest Florida coast to about Charlotte Harbor, south of Tampa Bay, into the domain of the Calusa, the powerful fishing kingdom of the lower Gulf shore. The Calusa did not welcome him; they resisted, and he turned back. The detail that has haunted the record ever since is that somewhere on this coast in 1513 he met a Native man who already spoke some Spanish, a sign that slave-raiders from the islands had been here before any explorer wrote it down. Ponce returned to Spain, secured in 1514 the grand titles of military governor of Bimini and Florida and the right to colonize at his own expense, and bided his time.
In 1521 he came back to plant a colony. He landed on the southwest coast, again in the vicinity of Charlotte Harbor or the Caloosahatchee, with two ships and some two hundred men, priests, farmers, and artisans, with fifty horses and livestock and tools, everything needed to build a permanent Spanish settlement near the Calusa's principal town. The Calusa attacked before the colony could take root. An arrow struck Ponce de Leon in the thigh, and the wound festered. The expedition broke off and retreated across the straits to Havana, where he died in the first week of July 1521, probably of the infection, around sixty years old. He was buried in Cuba and later moved to the cathedral of San Juan in the Puerto Rico he had governed.
Ponce de Leon never set foot on Mullet Key or charted Tampa Bay; his coast was the Calusa shore to the south. But he belongs at the head of this archive all the same. He opened Florida to Europe, fixed its name, and charted the sea-lane that made the whole Gulf strategically valuable, the very fact that would one day put a fort at the mouth of Tampa Bay. He also set the pattern: a Spaniard arriving in arms, and the people of this coast driving him off and, in his case, killing him. The free African conquistador Juan Garrido sailed in his company; the Calusa who killed him would resist Spain for two more centuries. The popular legend that Ponce came chasing a Fountain of Youth is a later, romantic embroidery, of which his own contemporaries say almost nothing; the documented man came for land, gold, and souls to rule, and found, on this coast, his death.