Juan Ponce de Leon and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto Rico and Florida.

By Robert H. Fuson. (Blacksburg, Va.: McDonald and Woodward Publishing Company, 2000. Pp. xvi, 268. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-939923-82-3; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-939923-84-X.)

Much remains unknown about the life of Juan Ponce de Leon, the Spanish explorer who named Florida in 1513. Now Robert Fuson has written the most complete biography of Juan Ponce yet.

Fuson's stated purpose is "to document, as much as possible, the life of Juan Ponce de Leon" (p. xi). To that end, the author introduces his young subject, who by 1493 had already served five years in the Granada wars. Although Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and Bartolome de las Casas have asserted that Juan Ponce sailed on Columbus's second voyage, Fuson admits that there is no hard proof of that.

At any rate, Juan Ponce, in Hispaniola by the early years of the sixteenth century, developed into a noted Indian fighter. Soon he obtained permission to explore the island that lay east across the Mona Passage, which had been named in honor of St. John the Baptist by Columbus and was called Boriquen by the Taino who populated it. Because of the disputed rights of the Columbus family to it, subsequent years witnessed seesaw control of Puerto Rico, as the island came to be called. When the Council of Castilla restored the Columbus family's rights, Juan Ponce de Leon had to seek new fields to conquer.

In February 1512 King Ferdinand granted Juan Ponce a contract "to discover and settle the Islands of Benimy [sic]" (p. 92). Bimini was known to lie northwest of the Bahamas, and Juan Ponce sailed from San Juan to seek it in early March 1513. There is no account of the journey extant except that of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, which was published more than eighty years later. Controversy still exists about Juan Ponce's route through the Bahamas and his landing place on the Florida peninsula. Fuson tracks Juan Ponce's ships north of the Bahamas to a landing place near Palm Coast, south of modern St. Augustine. (In contrast, Douglas T. Peck, who recently sailed the route in his boat, went south of the Abacos and Grand Bahama to touch the Florida coast at a point near Melbourne.)

After landing, taking possession of, and naming "La Florida," Juan Ponce de Leon sailed southward along the peninsula's east coast until his ships encountered a strong current. Here Fuson disabuses his readers of the myth of the Fountain of Youth while correctly identifying the discovery of the Gulf Stream as the "most important" result of the expedition (pp. 119-20). Juan Ponce continued around Florida to its west coast, encountered the Tortugas, and returned to Puerto Rico. After struggles with the Carib Indians, he returned to Florida in 1521 only to receive his death wound there at the hands of the Calusa.

Fuson errs, however, in his brief description of the expedition and fate of Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon (pp. 178-79). As Paul E. Hoffman convincingly describes in his recent book, Florida's Frontiers (Bloomington, 2002), Ayllon's 1526 expedition established a colony with 600 settlers near Sapelo Sound, where, after disputes erupted, Vazquez Ayllon died in October 1526. Nevertheless, Fuson has written a fine biography of Juan Ponce de Leon that surpasses those of Vicente Murga Sanz and Anthony Q. Devereux.

EUGENE LYON
Vero Beach, Florida