For Sale —American Paradise Read Online Free

ride fireballs into the heavens.
    Ponce de León went ashore for a few days; then, thinking that La Florida was an island, he sailed southward, intending to circumnavigate it.
    For about two months, Ponce de León’s ships hugged the coast of the peninsula. Legend has it that along the way he sailed into the mouth of the present-day St. Lucie River, about one hundred miles south of Cape Canaveral in present- day Martin County. He is said to have dropped a stone cross into the St. Lucie to claim the area for Spain.
    Ponce de León’s name is inextricably linked with his alleged search for a mystical fountain whose waters would restore youth to anyone who drank from it. But historians generally think that, like most Europeans who came to the New World four hundred or five hundred years ago, he was more interested in finding gold, slaves, and converts to Christianity.
    Ponce de León and his three ships continued their explorations in the waters around Florida into the summer of 1513. Then, leaving one ship to continue exploring, Ponce de León returned to Puerto Rico.
    He led another expedition to Florida in 1521, this time intent on establishing a Spanish colony. Ponce de León and about two hundred would-be colonists landed on the southwest coast of Florida, probably near present-day Charlotte Harbor. The Calusa Indians, however, wanted nothing to do with European settlers. They attacked the Spaniards and drove them off. Ponce de León received a nasty wound to the thigh from an arrow that may have been dipped in poison.
    The conquistador and his ships left Florida and sailed for Havana. But Ponce de León’s wound would not heal. Eventually infection set in. There was nothing Spanish doctors could do, and he died soon after arriving in Havana.
    Juan Ponce de León would not be the last person to come to Florida seeking a better life and be bitterly disappointed.
    In the summer of 1559, Spain sent another expedition to Florida, this time under the conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano, who led a company of men intent on planting a colony at what is now Pensacola, at the western tip of the Florida Panhandle. But it was a rough summer on the Gulf of Mexico. On September 19, 1559, a powerful hurricane swept in from the Gulf and devastated the settlement.
    The colonists hung on for a while after the hurricane, but when a Spanish ship arrived a year later and offered passage to Cuba to anyone who wanted to leave, most of the colonists left. The Spanish government soon abandoned the colony.
    A hurricane would deposit more visitors on a Florida beach in 1696. Jonathan Dickinson had been a planter in Jamaica until he converted to the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers.
    Dickinson and his family left Jamaica in August 1696. Accompanying him were Robert Barrow, an elderly leader of the Friends, and Dickinson’s slaves. They sailed on the Reformation for Philadelphia to join William Penn’s experiment in religious freedom in the colony of Pennsylvania.
    On the night of September 23, 1696, a hurricane tossed the Reformation aground on what is now Jupiter Island, in present-day Martin County.
    About two dozen castaways, including Dickinson’s party and the crew of the Reformation , were shipwrecked in a strange and savage land. Their impression of Florida was quite different from that of Juan Ponce de León’s Place of Flowers.
    Dickinson later wrote that “the wilderness country looked very dismal, having no trees, but only sand hills covered with shrubbery palmetto, the stalks of which were prickly, there was no walking among them.”
    The nearest outpost of European civilization was the Spanish settlement at St. Augustine, about 250 miles up the coast. Today the trip from Jupiter Island to St. Augustine can be driven in about four hours. In 1696, it was weeks away on foot.
    Nevertheless, Dickinson and his party trudged northward up the beach. Along the way