The First Florida Man?
The 400th Anniversary of Spanish ‘Discovery’ and the Truth in Historical Fiction The story of Pánfilo de Narváez (1478-1528), the Spanish conquistador who landed in Tampa Bay nearly 400 years ago this April, has made headlines before. And some of them read like a sixteenth century Florida Man: “Great One-Eyed Explorer Makes Unsuccessful Conquest of Mexico and Meets Tragic End When Crude Boat is Driven Ashore by Storm.” The part about the eye is true – Narváez lost an eye trying to overthrow another conquistador, Hernán Cortés, in Mexico in 1520 – and so is the tragic ending. In 1528, Narváez, with 300 men and 42 horses, trudged up the Nature Coast, searching for rich kingdoms to pillage and found nothing but swamp and native peoples who didn’t want them there. Somewhere near the St. Marks River, they gave up the march. They ate their horses, fashioned simple rafts, and tried to float their way to Mexico, which was much farther away than they thought. Only four of them, not including Narváez, would survive. But history isn’t always about the facts. Despite this evident failure, Tampanians celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Narváez mission in 1928 as, to quote Tampa Mayor Donald McKay, “an event of tremendous importance in the advance of civilization.” City boosters staged a
NEWSPAPERS.COM
By Amanda Hagood
It’s not a party until the debutantes in costumes arrive. Detail of a 1928 Tampa Tribune article describing the “Pageant of Progress” honoring the 300th anniversary of the Narváez landing.
week-long “Pageant of Progress” on the manicured riverbank of the old Tampa Bay Hotel (now the University of Tampa), where Narváez may or may not have actually landed, giving him pride of place next to the fabled De Soto Oak – an ancient giant under which De Soto may or may not have “parlayed with the Indians” in 1539. There were dedications, débutantes in costumes, a speech from the Spanish consul, and an extravagant 800-player reenactment of the
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reputed landing (and pretty much all American history after that point). Failure or not, Narváez was put forward as “the city’s oldest historical character” in a way that both reinforced the city’s important Hispanic heritage and solidified an even earlier place in American history than St. Augustine’s famous founding in 1565. Across the bay, St. Petersburg real estate developer Walter P. Fuller made ingenious use of the Narváez story to transform “the Jungle” – wil-
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theGabber.com | April 29, 2021 - May 5, 2021