CITYSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART CONTEST | Ponce

Europe, 15th century - The Crusades ended with a completely opposite effect - Islam invaded with all its barbarism and cruelty all the way to the suburbs of Vienna. One of the first and greatest kingdoms on the continent - the Eastern Roman Empire was wiped off the map of Europe under the blows of the scimitars of the Turkish jihadists. In central Europe, the Reformation had already laid the foundations for the Renaissance. In these troubled times, rumors of unknown lands across the Atlantic drifted along the western shores of the continent.

Whether in those days anyone kept a memory of the voyage of the Viking Leif Eriksson, son of Eric the Red-haired, and his thirty-four companions in 996, we still do not know for sure. Although Leif was the first European to set foot on the mainland, later called America, and his fellow countryman, the merchant Karlsefne, first met the so-called "Indians" in the lands of today's Canada in 1003-1004, it is not clear whether their travels were well known in the then emerging era of the Great Geographical Discoveries. Information about them was preserved only in the Icelandic sagas of the XIII century.

On March 5, 1496, Henry VII, King of England and Ruler of Ireland, granted the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto and his three sons letters patent for the right to sail under the English flag in all seas to discover lands unknown to Christendom. world so far. Giovanni, also known as John Cabot, made three voyages from England west across the Atlantic. On his second course, in 1497, he discovered the island of Newfoundland. During his third voyage, Cabot became the first European to see the eastern coast of North America - from Newfoundland all the way to the New Indies (Caribbean Islands) discovered by Columbus in 1492. According to reports from this voyage, the Cantabrian cartographer Juan De La Cosa made the first map of America in 1500. Giovanni's son - Sebastian Cabot, succeeded in 1508 to glimpse the Hudson and Chesapeake bays. This was the state of the exploration of America in 1513, when Juan Ponce De Leon embarked on his expedition. Juan Ponce De Leon was one of the participants in the second expedition of the famous Christopher Columbus. As we all know, the expeditions of the Genoese Columbus in favor of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile were long accepted as the so-called "discovery" of America.

As one of these pioneers, Ponce received land on the island of San Juan (now Puerto Rico) and was even appointed local governor. When he was replaced in this post, he was tired of discovering new lands and increased his already good fortune. On February 2, 1512, the King of Aragon, Ferdinand II, gave Ponce a document that allowed him to discover and enter the administration of the gold-rich island of Bimini, about which there were legends among the local Indians. The island of Bimini was said to be home to a spring that restores youth. Ponce's fleet consisted of three ships - Santiago, Santa Maria da la Consolacion and San Cristóbal. The captain was Anton de Alaminos - the most experienced of all in the Indies, who only five or six years later became even more famous as the captain of de Córdoba, de Grijalva and Cortes in the discovery of New Spain (Mexico).

On March 4, 1513, Ponce de Leon and the sailors he gathered set sail from the bay on the west coast of Puerto Rico, where the city of San Hermán is today. a strange impression is made by the fact that each of the islands visited by the expedition on their way to Florida already had a name, and that in Spanish. This is strange because it was Ponce's expedition that was the first Spanish-speaking expedition along this route. Another great curiosity is that, for all the perfect professionalism of Ponce's crew, he himself gave wrong geographical data - latitudes and longitudes of the islands and lands he visited. Could it be that he wanted to keep the information about the Source just for himself and his closest relatives? And finally - the most interesting: De Herrera claims that, according to Ponce himself, he decided to stop at the island of Bimini, given to him by the king, only ... on his way back from his big trip. Shortly before his flotilla returned to San Juan, he diverted one ship to the south where the island was located. His subordinates, at the head of this ship - Juan Pérez de Ortúbia and Anton de Alaminos, described the island as large and full of, notice, many springs!… Professional historians identify this island with the well-known Bahamian island of Andros. But why did Ponce so fleetingly and indirectly touch him?! We can assume that with all his actions in the style of "deceptive maneuvers", this remarkable Aragonese navigator made it so that he kept the information about his discovery of the Fountain of Eternal Youth - a real spring of water with special rejuvenating properties, only for your closest people.