Rosemary Beach on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Green scrub vegetation leading to a white sand beach and the placid waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
30 March 2022
The name Florida comes from Spanish. Juan Ponce de León arrived at the Florida peninsula at Easter on 2 April 1513, during Eastertide, and named it Pascua Florida (flowery Easter) after the lush vegetation there. Ponce de León was not the first European to visit the peninsula; his expedition was just the first public one.
Of course, the region we now know as Florida had multiple names prior to the arrival of Europeans. Over a hundred distinct Indigenous groups were recorded as living in what is now Florida in the early sixteenth century, the largest being the Apalachee people. Decimated by disease and war with the Spanish, their population had significantly decreased by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and other Indigenous groups, notably the Seminoles, moved into the region. These groups were later forcibly displaced. Today, there are two federally recognized tribes in the state, Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, but as it is in other states, Indigenous groups without official recognition also still dwell there.
The name Florida entered English-language discourse by the middle of the sixteenth century. Here is an early example from a 1555 translation of historian Peter Martyr d'Anghiera’s account of the early European explorations of the Americas that includes the myth that Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth:
The gouernour of the Ilande of Boriquena Iohn Ponce of Leon beinge discharged of his office and very ryche, furnysshed and sente foorth two caruels to seeke the Ilandes of Boyuca in the which the Indians affirmed to be a fontayne or springe whose water is of vertue to make owlde men younge. Whyle he trauayled syxe monethes with owtragious desyre amonge many Ilandes to fynde that he sought, and coulde fynde no token of any such fountayne, he entered into Bimini and discouered the lande of Florida in the yeare .1512. on Easter day which the Spanyardes caule the florysshyng day of Pascha, wherby they named that lande Florida.
Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1821 in exchange for settling the disputed boundary between the United States and the western Viceroyalty of New Spain. It became the twenty-seventh state in 1845.
Sources:
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
“Federal and State Recognized Tribes.” National Conference of State Legislatures, March 2020.
Martyr d'Anghiera, Peter. The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India. Richard Eden, trans. London: William Powell for Edward Sutton, 1555. 318–19.
Photo credit: Miamireader, 2019. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.