Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda ( – after 1575, dates uncertain) was a Spanish

shipwreck A shipwreck is the wreckage of a ship that is located either beached on land or sunken to the bottom of a body of water. Shipwrecking may be intentional or unintentional. Angela Croome reported in January 1999 that there were approximately ...

survivor who lived among the Native Americans of

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and ...

for 17 years. His c. 1575 memoir, ''Memoria de las cosas y costa y indios de la Florida'', is one of the most valuable contemporary accounts of American Indian life from that period. The manuscript can be found in the General Archive of the Indies. In all, he produced five documents describing the peoples of native Florida.

Biography

Escalante Fontaneda was the second son of Garcia de Escalante and Ana de Aldana. His father was a Spanish official in South America. Escalante Fontaneda was born in Cartagena, Colombia, around 1536. In 1549, when Escalante Fontaneda was thirteen, he and his brother were sailing to Spain, to study in Salamanca, when their ship wrecked on the coast of Florida. The surviving crew and passengers were captured by the

Calusa The Calusa ( ) were a Native American people of Florida's southwest coast. Calusa society developed from that of archaic peoples of the Everglades region. Previous indigenous cultures had lived in the area for thousands of years. At the time of ...

, who enslaved them and eventually sacrificed most of them, including Escalante Fontaneda's brother. Escalante Fontaneda apparently escaped death by correctly interpreting their commands to sing and dance for them. He spent the next seventeen years living among the Calusa and other tribes, learning several languages and travelling extensively through Florida. Around 1566 Escalante Fontaneda was rescued from his captivity by

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (; ast, Pedro (Menéndez) d'Avilés; 15 February 1519 – 17 September 1574) was a Spanish admiral, explorer and conquistador from Avilés, in Asturias, Spain. He is notable for planning the first regular trans-ocean ...

, Florida's first Spanish governor and founder of

St. Augustine Augustine of Hippo ( , ; la, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Afr ...

, who bargained for Fontaneda's freedom from the chief of the Calusa, who was called King

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by the Spanish. He served as an interpreter and guide for Menéndez on a number of missions for the next several years, and returned to Spain in 1569 to reclaim his parents' property from the Crown. In 1575 he wrote his memoir, which proved valuable to historians of the day such as Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, and remains so today. Besides the memoir (''memoria''), which is eight

folio The term "folio" (), has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book ma ...

s long, a memorandum, a list of

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s, and two fragments of text attributed to Fontaneda, each of one folio, have been identified. Escalante Fontaneda provides the city of Tampa's earliest written mention. He names 22 important villages of the Calusa, the first being "Tanpa". He gives no details concerning the exact location of Tanpa, but

archaeologist Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landsca ...

Jerald Milanich places the Calusa village of Tanpa at the mouth of Charlotte Harbor, the original "Bay of Tanpa". A later Spanish expedition did not notice Charlotte Harbor while sailing north along the west coast of Florida and assumed that the current Tampa Bay was the bay they sought. The name was accidentally transferred north.Milanich, Jerald T. 1995. ''Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe''. University Press of Florida. p. 40. His "Memoir" also proved instrumental in the development of the Fountain of Youth legend as an early mention of

Juan Ponce de León Juan Ponce de León (, , , ; 1474 – July 1521) was a Spanish explorer and ''conquistador'' known for leading the first official European expedition to Florida and for serving as the first governor of Puerto Rico. He was born in Santerv� ...

looking for the healing waters in Florida, a detail almost inseparable from the myth today. Though Escalante Fontaneda did not believe the story, later historians were less incredulous.

References

"Fontaneda's Memoir"
Translation by Buckingham Smith, 1854. From keyshistory.org. Retrieved July 31, 2005. * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Escalante Fontaneda, Hernando De 1530s births Writers of captivity narratives People of Spanish Florida Explorers of Florida Spanish explorers 16th-century Spanish historians 16th-century male writers Year of death unknown Shipwreck survivors

Biography

See also

References