Yesterday was the 502nd anniversary of the
"discovery" of Florida by a European—the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon
(1474-1521). He was
searching for the mythic “Fountain of Youth,” but that’s another story.
De Leon trudged through the Florida sand in
1513, nearly 21 years after Columbus didn’t “discover" America. Columbus first "discovered" an inhabited island in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, most likely San
Salvador, and, in fact, he never set foot on the North American continent
during any of his four voyages.
The first European to make a North American landfall in the
Age of Discovery was the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto (c.1450-c.1499), who
claimed Newfoundland in 1497 for his sponsor, Henry VII of England (by the way,
he called his favorite explorer “John Cabot”).
This is a rather roundabout way of mentioning that, when the
Pilgrim Fathers went ashore in Plymouth Harbor in 1620, they very definitely
were not beginning the European exploration and colonization of North America….and
they probably didn’t step directly onto the “Plymouth Rock,” as our American
legend would have it, but that’s another story.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment