When I first set foot in The Dry Tortugas. I was overcome with awe. Reaching the park requires a small journey. After a 2.5 hour sail by ferry, you start to see Garden Key appear in the periphery. The island is decorated by Fort Jefferson.
The imposing red-brick fortress is always surrounded by a great cloud of squawking noddies, turns, frigate birds and even boobies. As you drift closer and the crew prepares to dock, the deep blue water melts into an attractive aqua green. We are now close. You start to see shallow water lined with coral reefs and filled with tropical fish. Just past the fortress, in the horizon sits the lighthouse that guards this site. The landscape conjures questions. Who discovered The Tortugas? Why on earth was a fort built in this strange place? The answer to these questions uncovers a dark history of disease and anguish. It is curious to imagine such a tranquil place having such a dark history, because as a tourist, Fort Jefferson is truly a paradise, but this same fort would become a paradise lost for the 750+ prisoners that were held on the island during the worst of the Yellow Fever Epidemic.
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”
~Ishmeal, Moby Dick
In Moby Dick, the sailing epic to end all sailors’ epics, Ishmeal states that the sea calls out to those who need to escape. When their lives grow gloomy or are filled with despair look to the sea for absolution. You have to imagine famed explorer Juan Ponce De Leon knew this feeling well. Juan Ponce De Leon was, on three separate occasions, appointed by the Spanish crown the governor of Puerto Rico. Now, if you think politics is a dirty business today, the political arena of the Spanish ‘Indies’ would truly shock you. He was no stranger to the crazy world of spanish colonial politics. Ponce De Leon got his political start at just 19 years when he joined Columbus’s second voyage to the new world. At just 19, De Leon was party to this 2.5 year long voyage to a strange land. The conditions were terrible. At times, sailors had to survive off of nothing but salted fish, meat, and hardtack (a stale cracker, hard as a rock, that could last years or decades without spoiling). Yet amid the hardship, Ponce de León witnessed breathtaking beauty. Sailors during this voyage were the first Europeans to lay their eyes on islands like Guadeloupe and Dominica of the Lesser Antilles. At the time, these islands resembled Eden: jagged peaks rising suddenly from the ocean where the Caribbean meets the wild Atlantic; towering kapok trees, 200 feet tall and 70 feet wide, standing like sentinels over rugged valleys that led to volcanic beaches. When they made landfall, conquistadors saw rainforests filled with life. Parrots, including three species that have since become extinct, filled the islands with their playful noises. For men who had left cities choked with disease and sewage, the sweet air must have felt like paradise.
However, Juan Ponce De Leon was not just a witness of the new world’s beauty and richness. He was also a participant in horrific massacres and great tragedies. Notably, Juan Ponce De Leon was a commander in the Higüey and Jaragua massacres (1503). In Higüey, tensions escalated after a Spanish officer raped a Taíno woman. Governor Nicolás de Ovando seized upon the incident as a pretext to launch a full-scale assault on the Taíno city. Four hundred Spanish soldiers, including Ponce de León, descended upon the community, ransacking it with devastating force. Later that same year, Ovando turned his attention to Jaragua, one of the wealthiest and most influential regions in the Taíno world. Recognizing its political and cultural importance, the Spanish laid siege to the city. Bartolomé de las Casas—who was present during these campaigns and later became one of the most outspoken critics of Spanish colonial brutality—recorded the horrors in vivid detail. According to his accounts, the Spanish, including Ponce de León, burned and dismembered people alive. they killed children–even infants by smashing their heads against rocks. Higuey and Jaragua were the precursors to the worst instances of colonial violence. The massacres still haunt us to this day.
“The Spaniards with their Horses, their Spears and Lances, began to commit murders, and strange cruelties: they entered into Townes, Borowes, and Villages, sparing neither children nor old men, neither women with childe, neither them that lay in, but that they ripped their bellies, and cut them in pieces, as if they had been opening of Lambes shut up in their fold. They laid wagers with such as with one thrust of a sword would paunch or bowell a man in the middest, or with one blow of a sword would most readily and most delivery cut off his head, or that would berst pierce his entrails at one stroake. They tooke the little soules by the heeles, ramping them from the mothers dugges, and crushed their heads against the clifts. Others they cast into the Rivers laughing and mocking, and when they tumbled into the water, they said, now shift for themselves such a ones corpes. They put others, together with their mothers, and all that they met, to the edge of the sword. They made certain Gibbets long and low, in such sort, that the feete of the hanged on, touched in a manner the ground, every one enough for thirteen, in honour and worship of our Saviour and his twelve Apostles (as they used to speake) and setting to fire, burned them all quicke that were fastened. Unto all others, whom they used to take and reserve alive, cutting off their two hands as neere as might be, and so letting them hang, they said, Get you with these Letters, to carry tidings to those which are fled by the Mountaines. They murdered commonly the Lords and Nobility on this fashion: They made certaine grates of pearches laid on pickforkes, and made a little fire underneath, to the intent, that by little and little yelling and despairing in these torments, they might give up the Ghost.
~A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552).
After the massacres and Ponce de León’s appointment as governor, he soon found himself locked in a bitter political struggle with Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus. Diego believed he was entitled to the title “Governor of the Indies” simply by virtue of his lineage—after all, his father was Columbus. Although Spain was largely satisfied with Ponce de León’s performance, the royal courts ultimately ruled that Columbus’s heir was the rightful administrator of the islands. Ponce de León was dismissed. Furious at being removed from his post, he became determined to claw his way back into the Crown’s favor. To do that, he needed a discovery of his own—something grander than Columbus, something that would restore the prestige, respect, and admiration he felt he deserved. And like many men who feel they are lacking, he sought redemption in what Melville once called “the watery part of the world.” Fortuitously for him, the Taíno spoke of an island in the Bahamas said to be rich in gold and other treasures. They also described it as the home of the fabled Fountain of Youth, a miraculous spring that granted eternal life. In modern times, this same island has even been speculated—rather imaginatively—as a possible location of the lost city of Atlantis. Atlantis aside, Ponce de León fixed his ambitions on Bimini, the westernmost of the Bahamian islands and only about fifty nautical miles from the coast of Florida. Funding the expedition from his own pocket, he departed Puerto Rico in 1513 with two hundred men and three ships, setting out in pursuit of the legendary island of Bimini.
The Bimini islands are a grouping of small islets with two main islands. Straightforwardly named north and south Bimini. The other islets are numerous and small and are unable to support a small village because of their size and lack of resources. The ‘big islands’ were not much different. North and South Bimini had no gold, no resources, and certainly no fountain of youth. However, fortuitously for Leon, he did not land in Bimini. He sailed right past the islands and through the Bahama Channel. Later, this channel would become the major route for tourists travelling in ferries and monstrously large cruise ships and drug runners travelling in speed boats to shuttle cocaine and tchotchkes back and forth between Florida and the Bahamas. It is unclear if Juan Ponce De Leon saw the humble patches of sand graced with windswept Sea Grape Trees and dense mangroves and thought to himself “Hmm.. these islands are pretty small… probably no gold here” or if he simply missed the islands described to him in the Taino folklore and legends. Although historians debate exactly where Juan Ponce De Leon first landed, we know that by way of the Bahama Channel, the Gulf Stream eventually pushed him north where he eventually landed either around Melbourne, St. Augustine, or the eponymous Ponce De Leon Inlet. This debate aside, De Leon apparently discovered a new land that he could claim for Spain. He redeemed himself. He would be the apparent discoverer of ‘La Florida’ or ‘Flowery’. He would continue his journey into ‘La Florida”, and traveled south along the coast until he reached The Florida Keys. After that, he kept on sailing and he eventually reached the Dry Tortugas before looping around the peninsula of Florida where he made it as far north into the Gulf of Mexico as Charlotte Harbor . So, Juan Ponce De Leon by looking toward the landless discovered new lands and conquered his own opprobrious reputation.
Well… not quite. Outside of Florida, Juan Ponce De Leon’s name had not exactly been held in high esteem. When he arrived in Florida, of course there were hundreds of dozens of tribes and nations in Florida. However, Juan Ponce De Leon cannot lay claim to being the first European to set foot in Florida. Many indigenous Floridians already spoke Spanish. This proves that Indigenous nations such as the Tequesta and the mighty Calusa were already trading with Spanish merchants. Also, from time to time Spanish fishermen off the coast of Cuba may have been blown into Clausa territory in the Florida Keys. As the Juan Ponce De Leon example proves, humble fisherman and small traders do not get the same credit in textbooks and our popular imagination of history as ex-governors. However, there is even more to this story. Some circumstantial evidence indicates that on his famed voyage looking for passage to China, British explorer John Cabot visited the Keys and perhaps even the Dry Tortugas in 1497. This claim is seen as dubious by most historians, but a smoking gun proves that, in all likelihood, Juan Ponce De Leon was not the first European to set foot in Florida and like all great nautical mysteries the secret of Juan Ponce De Leon’s voyage was solved by a map. The 1511 Peter Martyr Map, created by Italian historian of the 16th century Peter Martyr d’Anghiera two years before Juan Ponce De Leons voyage, is the first map ever created that shows the entirety of the new world. Florida is charted on that map. Another map, dating back to 1502 called the Cantino Planisphere was discovered hanging up at a butcher shop. This map shows the peninsula of Florida with surprising accuracy and detail. Thus, proving Leon was not the first European to make contact in Florida. Therefore, Spain used Juan Ponce De Leon’s voyage as way to claim Florida for themselves, and were happy to corroborate Ponce de Leon’s legend if it meant bolstering there claim. However, it has been noted by a few historians that in the scramble for wealth, power, and prestige in the new world many cartographers, historians, and colonial agents forged records, documents, and maps by a few years in order to claim the maximum amount of land possible for their respective empires. So, some historians date these maps to around 1514 or so and, to be fair, Juan Ponce De Leon definitively made the first extensive and exhaustive exploration into Florida.
In 1521, Ponce de León returned to Florida with the intention of establishing a permanent Spanish settlement on behalf of the Crown. But before he could secure a foothold, his expedition clashed with the formidable Calusa. During one of these skirmishes, a Calusa warrior shot Ponce de León in the groin with a poison‑tipped arrow.
The arrow was likely coated in the sap of the manchineel tree—known to the Spanish as manzanilla de la muerte, the “little apple of death.” It is one of the most poisonous trees on Earth. Its sap can cause the skin to erupt in violent rashes, blister, peel, and burn with an intensity often compared to fire. Its deceptively sweet-looking fruit can induce uncontrollable vomiting and, in some cases, death.
Ponce de León writhed in agony for days. The poison contributed to a severe infection, and sepsis soon followed. In the sweltering heat of a Florida July, he felt cold and icy despite the oppressive humidity. His body convulsed as chills overtook him. He was taken to Havana, where he finally succumbed.
Given the excruciating nature of his death, it may feel uncomfortable to admit, but once you understand the massacres he helped orchestrate, it’s difficult not to experience a flicker of schadenfreude. And, frankly, the circumstances are undeniably strange and actually funny. He died, in part, from a poison apple, like in a Disney movie. Moreover, He was shot in the groin! That is hilarious.
To top it off, although Taino folklore did seem to mention some sort of fountain of youth, this legend did not have a big impact on De Leon’s journey. He was more concerned with securing mineral rights and territory for the Spanish crown. Juan Ponce De Leon’s biographer likely made the whole thing up about his quest for the fountain of youth in order to paint him as a fool. This strategy worked, as I would wager that most of you only know of Juan Ponce De Leon as the guy who was trying to find the fountain of youth and that I learned about the fountain of youth and Ponce De Leon some 500 years later.
So, Juan Ponce De Leon was called a murderer by Bartolome De Las Casas, lost his feud with Colombus’ son, stripped of his title as governor, was (probably) not the discoverer of Florida, got shot in the groin, and was made a fool by history. Well, one thing that he can still lay claim to is that he (probably) discovered the Tortugas. The Tortugas (named such by Ponce De Leon because of the abundance of Sea Turtles, a favorite food of mariners, sailors, pirates, and conquistadors) became an enigma for sailors travelling from Cuba to Florida for hundreds of years. On one hand, the Tortugas offered sailors a safe place to shelter from storms or to rest to break up the near 20 hour journey from Key West to Cuba. On the other hand, the island was barren. So, weary seafarers often were devastated to find out that ‘the tortugas’ had no water. Thus, cartographers added ‘Dry’ to the map a half century later sometime in the mid 1500s, and the name stuck.
The author, Elijah in the Dry Tortugas!
