Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

In early April 1513, Juan Ponce de León waded onto a Florida beach, making him the first non-native individual to set foot on what would eventually be the United States of America. Beginning in 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano made three trips to North America, sailing up and down the Atlantic coast until he was eaten by Carib Indians in 1528. That’s also the year Pánfilo de Narváez organized the first—and, to this day, most catastrophic—overland expedition across the continent. It started near Tampa Bay with more than four hundred men and ended in present-day Arizona with four, including the Spanish nobelman Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and a Muslim slave named Estevanico—but not Narváez, who perished along the way. A decade later, fellow Spaniard Hernando de Soto led a six-hundred-man army from Florida to the Mississippi River, thinking he would do better. He would not. By 1542 half of his troops were dead, as was de Soto, and the rest had given up. And in 1565 the Spanish Navy’s Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, the oldest permanent European settlement in the States.