Читать книгу Ponce de Leon and the Discovery of Florida - Sandra Wallus Sammons - Страница 7

Foreword

The first permanent colony by Europeans on Florida soil was at St. Augustine in 1565, but much led up to that settlement. More than fifty years before, another explorer from Spain set foot on a beautiful Florida beach and gave it the name “La Florida,” Land of the Flowers.

That explorer was Juan Ponce de Leon, a name well known in the Caribbean islands of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, as well as in Florida.

While writing this biography, I took a plane trip south from Virginia to Florida, and from the air, the eastern coastline of our Sunshine State is very clear. You can see all the rivers and inlets. Christopher Columbus and Juan Ponce de Leon did not have the ability to see the world from that point of view. Columbus and Ponce didn’t even know this land was here!

In the 1400s, most people just knew about their own little section of the world. For years people even thought the world was flat. If you sailed too far, they said, you would fall off the edge. By the end of the 1400s, however, most educated people knew that the earth was round. They just did not know the exact shape of the ball, or how large or small it was.

The European countries just 500 years ago did not look the same as they do today, either. In this biography, we call Ponce’s country “Spain,” but it was, at that time, two small kingdoms that had united, with a king of Aragon and a queen of Castile. Later, more kingdoms would come together to create the Spain we know now. There was trade with other countries, but trade routes, by land or sea, were very dangerous.

There were no books as we know them today until the printing press was invented sometime around 1450. Then many people in Spain read about Marco Polo’s fantastic trip to China in 1271 with his father and uncle. Many people started dreaming of traveling to far-off, exotic lands.

Dreaming changed to reality after 1492. Soon after the first look at land in what we now call the Americas, explorers would travel around the entire globe.

Let us look at Juan Ponce de Leon’s world.