Juan Ponce De León

Juan Ponce De León. Early Life and Arrival in the New World. , The Man , Five hundred years ago, a fleet of three small Spanish ships sighted the east coast of Florida on the 27th of March, 1513. They sailed along the coast to the north for a number of days and finally landed on the 3rd of April, naming this new land La Florida in honor of the Catholic Feast of Flowers. The fleet was under the command of a Spanish nobleman named Juan Ponce de León. , Ponce De León Comes to the New World , The year 1492 was also the year Christopher Columbus sailed on his great voyage of exploration to the New World. He presented his discoveries to the king and queen who provided funds for a second fleet to take settlers to the new land. The second Columbus fleet sailed in 1493. On board were over 1,000 settlers and crewmen including a nineteen year old Ponce de León. His participation in the wars against the Moors helped him win a place on one of these ships. The fleet and settlers sailed to the island of Espanola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean. There they landed and started the settlement of Isabela, establishing a permanent Spanish presence in the New World., Early Life in Spain , In northern Spain in 1474, a child was born to a noble father and a humble mother. The child's name was Juan Ponce de León. He was apprenticed as a page to a Spanish knight at about the age of ten. This is how Ponce de León learned the art of warfare and military campaigning, and he learned well. As a young man, Juan Ponce de León participated in the final great battles between the Christians and Moors during the re-conquest of Spain, which culminated in the fall of the great City of Granada to the Christian forces of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. This experience would help Ponce de Leon survive in the New World. , The Isabela Settlement on Española , After the settlement of Isabela on Española's northern coast, Spanish supplies soon began to spoil in the hot climate and food became scarce. Crops that grew well in Spain's climate did not do well in the humidity and heat of the Caribbean island. Hundreds of Spaniards, unaccustomed to the climate, became ill and many of them began to die. The collapse of good relations with the native Taino Indians came about as the Spanish consumed their supplies and enslaved the people. , [photo caption] , . The primary weapons used in fifteenth and early sixteenth century warfare in Europe were the sword, the pike, the matchlock rifle (arquebus) and the cannon. Pictured here is an early sixteenth century six-pound solid shot.