Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode number nine, one, Ponce de

Leone, and the official discovery of Florida. I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I've recorded

today's episode on February 17, 2021 2021 in blacked-out and very cold,

Austin, Texas. You'll be thrilled to know, however, that I was able to locate some power

at my wife's therapy office where I have decamped for the purpose of recording this episode

for release on Friday, February 19th.

If you're tuning in for the first time, we are telling the history of the people who inhabited

and inhabit the lands now constituting the United States.

To set up that history, we devoted two episodes to the Indians before 1492, and five to the story of Christopher Columbus through his first voyage.

The last episode was a very high altitude introduction to the Colombian exchange, the extraordinary transfer of diseases,

plants, people, animals, insects, and technology and culture between the two hemispheres

after 1492. It is therefore high time. We turn to the European exploration of North America.

And by the self-imposed boundaries of this podcast, that era began with Juan Ponce de Leon and his discovery of Florida in 1513.

Now, if you are anglophilic or merely a John Cabot fanboy, you might rise in high dudgeon over skipping over of his

discovery of Newfoundland in 1497 at the behest of English king Henry the 7th.

Well, Newfoundland is in Canada, not the United States. No offense, but outside of our subject area,

just as almost all of the discoveries of Columbus's second, third, and fourth voyages also are.

So by what feeble reasoning then do we justify studying Columbus's first voyage and not Cabot?

I need you to ask. There are at least two reasons. First, but for Columbus,

there would not have been a European exploration of North America, at least when it happened.

And if the Arabs of the Chinese had beaten the Europeans to the discovery in the usual air quotes,

there might never have been. Indeed,

...