Early explorer’s death in dispute
Historian sheds new light on Ponce de León
ST. PETERSBURG — James MacDougald believes he has rewritten Florida history and added further intrigue to the early story of the Tampa Bay area.
St. Augustine, founded in 1565, is considered the first successful European settlement in what is now the United States. But it has long been assumed that, in 1521, Charlotte Harbor was where Juan Ponce de León, the Spanish explorer and supposed seeker of the Fountain of Youth, was mortally wounded while failing to establish the first European settlement.
Now, MacDougald contends that rare German reprints of 500-year-old Spanish maps point to Safety Harbor as the locale.
“These maps change everything,” MacDougald, a St. Petersburg resident, said.
MacDougald’s evidence is compiled in his book, titled The Maps that Changed Florida’s History, to be released either later this year or early next year.
The research was born out of his work authoring another history book, The Pánfilo de Narváez Expedition of 1528: Highlights of the Expedition and Determination of the Landing Place, released in 2018.
In 1528, Pánfilo de Narváez led a failed attempt to colonize Florida for the Spanish government. Around 300 men began the journey but Native American attacks, starvation, disease and other natural causes killed all but four.
“It was a disaster,” MacDougald said.
His book further solidified the belief that the Narváez expedition began in Boca Ciego Bay, off the shore of what is now St. Petersburg.
“In my research, I noticed that they had gone to Safety Harbor and found European artifacts and many boxes from Castile,” the northwestern region of Spain where Ponce de León was born, MacDougald said. “I thought ‘Gee, nobody’s ever really proven where Ponce de León attempted his 1521 settlement.”
The Charlotte Harbor area has been fingered as the location because it is where Ponce de León landed during his first expedition to Florida in 1513. Historians figured he returned there during his second visit in 1521.
“It pre-dated the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrim landings by nearly a century, and the establishment of St. Augustine by a quarter of a century,” a historic marker in Charlotte Harbor reads. But it also says the “exact location” of the settlement is amystery.
“There is really no evidence it was ever there,” MacDougald said. But perhaps Narváez found items in Safety Harbor that belonged to Ponce de León’s settlement.
The Tampa Bay History Center’s Rodney Kite Powell said the standing theory is that those items came from a Spanish shipwreck rather than a settlement.
Jerald Milanich, curator emeritus at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has seen MacDougald’s full research and is intrigued by the possible link to Ponce de León.
“Were they left behind by Ponce?” Milanich said of the boxes. “They well could have been. That is something not considered before.”