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Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 hurricane, made landfall in Florida’s Tampa Bay area on the night of October 9, 2024. Said to be the fourth strongest storm in the Atlantic, Milton has surprised even seasoned weather forecasters for its rapid intensification in a matter of days, courtesy climate change.
Milton is a proverbial ‘double whammy’ for Florida. Just days back, on September 26, Hurricane Helene slammed into the northern part of Florida, causing havoc in its wake.
Florida, along with the islands of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, annually play host to the Atlantic Hurricane Season, when these tropical storms (known as Cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Typhoons in the Pacific) regularly slam into land, causing widespread damage. The term ‘Hurricane’ is thought to derive variously from the name of a Taino (the original inhabitants of Hispaniola, where Christopher Columbus first landed in 1492) or Mayan (who inhabited the Yucatan Peninsula on the Gulf of Mexico’s coast) deity.
But ironically, the term ‘Florida’ is related to flowers. Today’s modern state was visited by a Spaniard in the early 1500s. He was no ordinary Spaniard though. Juan Ponce de Leon landed on the coast of what is today Florida in March 1513, not far from St Augustine, which may be the oldest European settlement in the continental United States.
It was Easter. Looking at the verdant landscape in front of him, de Leon was reminded of Pascua Florida (‘Festival of Flowers’) as Easter is observed in Spain. He accordingly claimed the land for Spain and named it ‘La Florida’, the place of flowers.
But who was Ponce de Leon? And why was he ‘discovering’ Florida?
De Leon was born in the 1470s in the province of Valladolid in what is now Spain. At the time though, it wasn’t. In 711 CE, the Moors (Muslim Arabs and Berbers from North Africa) had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) from the Christian Visigoths. Muslim Al Andalus (Andalusia) had flowered in the subsequent centuries.
But the Christians of Iberia had wanted to bring the entire Peninsula under Christian rule and had waged war for these 700 years. Finally, just a few years before de Leon’s birth, the monarchs of Iberia’s two biggest Catholic kingdoms — Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille — married on October 19, 1469.
The union energised the Christians of Iberia. On January 2, 1492, the last Muslim ruler of Iberia, Boabdil surrendered his kingdom Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella and left. The ‘Reconquista’ or Reconquest of Iberia was complete.
It was in these tumultuous years that de Leon grew up. He served in the court of Aragon and also took part in the war against Granada.
The end of the Reconquista coincided with the start of the ‘Age of Discovery’. Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor, had been able to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to finance his expedition west as he hoped to sail in that direction and find the ‘Indies’ or Asia, with the promise of lucrative trade in the offing.
The two monarchs agreed and on October 12, 1492, Columbus landed on San Salvador, somewhere in today’s Caribbean. It kickstarted a rush as more ‘Conquistadors’ (Conquerors) — soldiers and explorers — fanned out to explore new lands. De Leon was one of them.
De Leon explored and colonised the island of Puerto Rico, known as Borinquen by its Taino natives. It is one of the 4 islands that make up the ‘Greater Antilles’ Island group of the West Indies, with Cuba, Hispaniola and Jamaica being the other three.
The conquistador also served as governor of the island till he was removed and replaced by Diego Columbus, Christopher’s son, in 1511.
However, King Ferdinand was sympathetic and authorised de Leon to search for the islands of Bimini.
Author Douglas T Peck writes in Misconceptions and Myths Related to the Fountain of Youth and Juan Ponce de Leon’s 1513 Exploration Voyage that the origin or source of the Indian land named Beniny or Beimeni is unknown.
“…, but it was general knowledge among the conquistadors in the Islands. Bartolome Colon had petitioned the crown earlier to seek this land, but he was turned down in favor of Ponce de Leon. The Indians were ostensibly referring to the realm of the Maya on the Yucatan rather than the Bahamas or Florida. The logs of both Columbus and Ponce de Leon contain evidence that the Taino Indians in the islands and the Calusa in Florida had knowledge of the sophisticated Maya civilization on the Yucatan,” writes Peck.
Today, Ponce de Leon is often associated with the old European legend of the ‘Fountain of Youth’. But as Peck explains, Ponce de Leon was not trying to find a mythical spring bathing in which could lead to immortality.
“The fountain of youth appears in different accounts as a fountain, river, spring, or miraculous and rejuvenating waters. The fountain is primarily associated with sensual, erotic love, and either drinking or bathing in the waters could restore youthful sexual performance lost with age. And this is a powerful force for keeping an apocryphal myth alive, as witness the current multimillion dollar business of selling aphrodisiacs based entirely on myth,” he writes.
In fact, as another report notes, the tagging of de Leon with the Fountain of Youth legend may have been a device by a rival to make the conquistador appear foolish.
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, the author of Historia general y natural de las Indias and the scribe of the Spanish court, first wrote of how de Leon was told by the natives of the Caribbean about such a spring and went on a futile search to find it.
Sex, glory, power. Whatever was the intention of de Leon, one may never know. But as one article puts it brilliantly, de Leon ultimately found immortality. Today, he is associated with Florida, a bustling state that often plays host to hurricanes but is also the verdant land with abundant sunshine that the conquistador found that March day in 1513.
