The History of Florida (9 page)

that Vil afañe made no settlement there. Instead, he continued north by

ship exploring capes, inlets, and rivers as far as 35° north, or Cape Lookout,

North Carolina; he lost two smal ships and twenty-five men in a storm

and, discouraged, returned to Havana, where more of his men disappeared

into the local population. In the bitter denouement of the Luna-Vil afañe

undertaking, the detachment left at Ochuse was rescued and brought home

to México.

At the viceregal capital, a “pained and saddened” Velasco pondered a

communication from Felipe II reporting the opinion of Menéndez de Avilés

that La Florida’s shoreline was too low and sandy, her countryside too poor

in resources, and her harbors too barred and shallow to permit practicable

settlement. For that reason, the report concluded, there was no cause to

fear that the French would establish themselves there or attempt to take

possession.12

Notes

proof

1. Antonio de Herrera y Tordesil as,
Historia
general
de
los
hechos
de
los
Castel anos
en
las
Islas
y
tierra
firme
del
mar
Océano,
4 vols. in quarto (Madrid, 1601–15), 1:249. [
Note:
The diminutive form Juan Ponce was used by the first Spanish chroniclers of the period

of exploration.—M. G.]

2. Douglas T. Peck, “Reconstruction and Analysis of the 1513 Discovery Voyage of Juan

Ponce de León,”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
71, no. 2 (October 1992):133–54; Peck,
Ponce

de
León
and
the
Discovery
of
Florida:
The
Man,
the
Myth,
and
the
Truth
(St. Paul, Minn.: Pogo Press, 1993), pp. 36–39.

3. This is the translation by James E. Kelley Jr. in his “Juan Ponce de León’s Discovery

of Florida: Herrera’s Narrative Revisited,”
Revista
de
Historia
de
América
111 (January–June 1991):42. I have altered Kelley’s rendering of Pascua as “Passover” to “Easter.”

4. Ibid.

5. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,
La
“Relacíon”
o
“Naufragios”
de
Alvar
Núñez
Cabeza
de
Vaca
, ed. Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández (Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanística,

1986). See also new translations in Charles Hudson and Carmen McClendon, eds.,
Forgot-

ten
Centuries
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), and in John H. Hann, “Transla-

tion of the Florida Section of the Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca Accounts of the 1528 Trek

from South Florida to Apalachee led by Pánfilo de Narváez,” manuscript, Florida Bureau

of Archaeological Research, Tal ahassee.

6. John Francis Bannon, introduction to
The
Narrative
of
Alvar
Núñez
Cabeza
de
Vaca,
First European Contacts · 39

trans. Fanny Bandelier, with Oviedo’s version of the lost joint report translated by Gerald

Theisen (Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, 1972), p. 27.

7. Alonso de Chaves,
Quatri
Partitu
en
Cosmographia
practica,
y
por
otro
nombre
Es-pejo
de
Navegantes
(Madrid, 1537; reprint, Madrid, 1983); Luys Hernández de Biedma,

“Relation of the Island of Florida . . . 1539,” ed. and trans. John E. Worth, in Lawrence A.

Clayton, Vernon James Knight, Jr., and Edward C. Moore, eds.,
The
De
Soto
Chronicles:

The
Expedition
of
Hernando
De
Soto
to
North
America
in
1539–1543,
2 vols. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 1:225.

8. John R. Swanton, ed.,
Final
Report
of
the
United
States
De
Soto
Expedition
Commission,
U.S. House of Representatives Doc. 71, 76th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington: Govern-

ment Printing Office, 1939); reprint, with an introduction by Jeffrey P. Brain (Washington:

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

9. Louis D. Tesar, “The Case for Concluding that De Soto Landed Near Present-Day

Fort Myers, Florida: The Conclusions Presented by Warren H. Wilkinson Reviewed,”
Flor-

ida
Anthropologist
42, no. 4 (December 1989):276–79, and Lindsey Williams, “A Charlotte

Harbor Perspective on de Soto’s Landing Site,” ibid., 280–94. See also Rolfe F. Schel ,
De

Soto
Didn’t
Land
at
Tampa
(Ft. Myers Beach: Island Press, 1966).

10. Jerald T. Milanich and Charles Hudson,
Hernando
de
Soto
and
the
Indians
of
Florida
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).

11. Garcilaso de la Vega, the Inca,
La
Florida,
trans. Charmion Shelby, in
The
De
Soto
Chronicles
, ed. Clayton, Knight, Moore, 2:357–58.

12. See the transcript “Paracer que da a S.M. el Consejo de la Nueva España, en virtud

de su Real Cédula [fecha en Madrid a 23 de Septiembre de 1561] que sigue, sobre la forma

en que estava la costa de la Florida, y que no convenía aumentar la Población,” Bucking-

proof

ham Smith Collection (New York Public Library), vol. 1561–93, p. 11.

Bibliography

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Los
Sobrevivientes
de
la
Florida:
The
Survivors
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Soto
Expedition.
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Florida History, no. 2. Gainesville: University of Florida Libraries, 1990.

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Alabama
and
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The
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the Tristán de Luna Expedition.”
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95.

Devereux, Anthony Q.
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León,
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Ferdinand
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Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1993.

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Their
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40 · Michael Gannon

Gannon, Michael V.
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the
Sand:
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———.
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3

The Land They Found

Paul E. Hoffman

The ecology of the Floridas is the stage upon which the actors who figure in

the chapters of this
History of Florida
played out their stories. Ecology did

not
determine
those stories, it must be stressed, but it did influence them to

varying degrees over time and helped people determine where to build their

homes and economic enterprises. Until well into the twentieth century, the

topography, soils, flora and fauna, and weather of the region profoundly

shaped the livelihoods and thus lives of the Native Americans, Europeans,

and Africans who inhabited what was at first a vast, il -defined region in

proof

southeastern North America (La Florida) but which in time became just

the area of the modern state. The influences of the peninsula’s ecology on

the lives of Florida’s residents have become less pronounced since the mid-

twentieth century because the economy has shifted away from a near total

dependence on agriculture and because modern technologies have allowed

at least a limited reshaping of aspects of that ecology. For example, drainage

patterns and the characteristics of soils can be modified if not completely

overcome. Heat and humidity do not trouble individuals living and work-

ing in air-conditioning. Still other aspects of the region’s ecology—notably

floral and faunal diversity—have been profoundly altered when Old World

peoples introduced, and continue to introduce, what Alfred Crosby has

called their portmanteaux biota. Too, since Europeans and their enslaved,

and later freed, African companions arrived, the Floridas have never been

without trade with the world and thus means to overcome local ecologi-

cal y linked problems of subsistence and economic prosperity. Indeed, since

the late nineteenth century, peninsular Florida’s general y warm dry winters