#11 Florida Man!

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode we venture back to Florida, and the first of several almost comically incompetent attempts by the Spanish to settle the area, including Ponce de Leon’s second expedition in 1521, and the very ephemeral settlement of San MIguel de Gualdape under the “leadership” of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón. We also explore the personal rivalry and indeed hatred among the leading players in the Spanish Caribbean of the early 1500s, and the implications for the Spanish exploration of the future United States.

Selected references for this episode

Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca

Douglas T. Peck, “Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón’s Doomed Colony of San Miguel de Gualdape,” The George Historical Quarterly

Samuel Turner, “Juan Ponce de León and the Discovery of Florida Reconsidered,” The Florida Historical Quarterly

Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 11.
0:08.3	I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this on March 4th, 2021, and now warm and beautiful springlike Austin, Texas.
0:17.6	Thank you again for listening, and please subscribe in your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode.
0:24.8	Also, we've had some really nice reviews on Apple. I don't think every last one of them is a friend of mine.
0:32.1	So please write one if you haven't. It's much appreciated and check out our new Facebook page, which should be easy enough to find by searching in Facebook for the History of the Americans podcast.
0:44.2	Enough with the pleasantries.
0:46.9	This episode is back to La Florida.
0:50.1	If you spend as much time looking at dumb stuff on the internet as I do, you've seen a lot of Florida man stories.
0:59.4	Florida man does all sorts of crazy things.
1:03.3	When I edited this paragraph last week, the lead headline on Bing, I do my bit to promote competition and search, was Florida
1:14.9	Man 83 shot neighbor in heated dispute about ducks and geese, which is pretty darn tame for Florida
1:22.6	Man.
1:24.1	Well, back in the day, Florida Man was so tough and crazy that it was more than 50 years after Ponce de Leon's official discovery of Florida in 1513 before the Spanish, who had dominated Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, and conquered the Aztecs and the Inca succeeded in establishing the first successful
1:46.9	permanent settlement at St. Augustine in 1565. And it wasn't for lack of trying. So maybe the true
1:55.6	roots of Florida man include the Spanish whose various screw-ups foreshadowed the most cringe-worthy Florida man's stories of the 21st century.
2:07.8	Regardless, this episode of the podcast is about some of the early failed attempts of the Spanish to settle Florida in the first half of the 1500s.
2:16.4	Following Ponce de Leon's voyage of official discovery
2:20.7	in 1513. These expeditions, though catastrophic failures, are nevertheless important for a bunch of
2:28.7	reasons, and three rise to the top. First, most Americans who know something about early American history
2:36.4	do not know very much about the early Spanish attempts to settle Florida.
2:42.3	The history we have taught most generations of Americans
2:45.3	is a bit too Anglo-centric even for me.
	...

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