Maximo Point Park, Pinellas County, FL 2010

SURVIVAL

“By the twenty second of September we had eaten all but one of the horses.’’

To Spaniard Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, part of a 1527 expedition, Florida was the land “to which we had been brought by our sins, an awful country, so strange and so bad…’’

The locals were adapted to Florida; the arrivals, anything but. Ship-killing hurricanes, trees split top to bottom by lightning, mosquitoes—all was affliction.

Of 600 men, four lived. When Cabeza de Vaca wrote his account for Charles V he explained: “This is the only thing that a man who returned naked could bring back.”

Next: Pinellas Point Mound, Pinellas County, FL 2009