34 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



expeditions following theirs not as yet thoroughly authenticated, 

 begins, then, with the voyage of John Cabot in the year 1497. Cabot 

 followed the coast south the next year, some think as far as Florida, 

 but this is improbable, and if he did so he left no records of the 

 Indians of that region. The alleged expedition of Vespucci in the 

 same year, during which he is supposed to have traced the entire 

 shore of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic as far north as Vir- 

 ginia, is probably apochryphal. In the discussions by various writers 

 this has been connected with a "mysterious" Portuguese expedition 

 which has left exasperatingly inconclusive traces of itself in cer- 

 tain documents. The most important of these is a map prepared 

 by some unknown cartographer in Lisbon, but bearing the name 

 of Alberto Cantino, who was an envoy of the Duke of Ferrara 

 at the Portuguese court and sent this map to his master from Rome 

 about November 19, 1502. Attempts have been made to identify 

 the land resembling Florida with Cuba or Yucatan, and Har- 

 risse and Lowery both concurred in the opinion that it must be 

 the Peninsula of Florida. The late Rudolf SchuUer informed the 

 writer that he believed the results of the expedition had been con- 

 cealed because the lands visited belonged to that half of the world 

 granted by Pope Alexander VI to Spain in his famous decision 

 of 1493. This data, Schuller thought, was obtained surreptitiously by 

 Cantino or his employee. However, Nunn seems to have disposed of 

 the whole question as a series of cartographers' errors, and in any 

 case the supposed discovery yields us no ethnological information. 

 (See Harrisse, 1892, pp. 77-109; Lowery, 1901, pp. 125-130; Fiske, 

 1901, vol. 2, pp. 70-83; Nunn, 1924, pp. 91-141.) 



In 1513 Ponce de Leon made what may be described as the official 

 discovery of Florida, but the significance of the extant narratives 

 of his expedition is in dispute. Although some commentators have 

 held that the natives with whom he dealt were the Apalachee, this 

 is improbable, for the Apalachee were mainly an inland tribe, and 

 if De Leon was in their neighborhood at all, as some maps indicate, 

 it is probable that he merely followed the coast without meeting the 

 inhabitants and that his principal dealings were with the Calusa, a 

 view championed by Lowery (1901, pp. 142, 446) and more recently 

 by Davis (1935, p. 41). It seems likely, indeed, that the south 

 Florida Indians were the only ones he met. This view is supported 

 by the statement that the arrows used by these Indians were pointed 

 with bones. The Apalachee Indians may well have used bone points 

 also, but the greater part of their arrows were probably tipped with 

 flint or made of cane. Furthermore, it is said that Ponce and his 

 companions traded a little with the Indians for gold and skins. 

 Now, there are few reports of the use of gold among the Indians 



