History Lives in the Florida Keys

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Not long after Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492, adventurer Juan Ponce de Leon set sail toward Florida in search of the elusive island of Bimini. Instead, he discovered Florida, and then found the Florida Keys.

The day was May 13, 1513.

Here is precisely what Spanish chronicler Antonio de Herrera wrote many years later for posterity: "To all this line of islands and rock islets they gave the name of Los Martires [The Martyrs] because, seen from a distance, the rocks as they rose to view appeared like men who were suffering; and the name remained fitting because of the many that have been lost there since."

Experts have speculated that this name actually came from the Indians, as there was an Indian village named Cuchiyaga or "martyred place" during this early time. Like many parts of Florida, the original inhabitants of the Keys were the Native American Indians. Indian tribes such as the Matecumbe were living in the Keys when the Spanish discovered Florida in the 1500's.

Memoirs, dated around the middle 1500's from a shipwrecked Spaniard, Hernando d'Escalante Fontaneda, who lived in Florida, including the Keys amongst the Indians for 17 years, reported that there were deer, raccoons, manatees and bears. Their diet consisted of fish, turtle, snail, lobster, manatee and raccoon. By the 1800's, the Indian tribes had moved or died out.