My previous piece: Keys, Cays, and Cayos gave some history and definition to the names. All three have the same meaning: a coral reef that has accumulated enough sediment to become and island. The prerequisite is a coral reef, which limits the geographic area to warm, subtropical and tropical waters like Florida, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean.
After releasing that piece, we attended a presentation at the College of the Florida Keys in Stock Island. Brian Schmitt walked a large crowd through the the history of maps of the area as well as the Gulf Stream.
The first revelation of the presentation was a map dated 1510, which showed the southern tip of Florida and the Keys, three years before Ponce De Leon “discovered” Florida in 1513. The discovery should probably be credited to Sebastian Cabot who sailed the Eastern Seaboard of the current US in 1508 and 1509. His log claims that they sailed far enough south along the landmass that he was able to turn west. That would have been somewhere in the Keys.
Though De Leon might not have been the first European to land in Florida he did name the island chain the Martines, meaning martyrs. The common reason was that in profile the Keys looked like suffering men from a distance. Schmitt had a different theory. He thinks that the Keys were a battleground between the Calusa Indians based on the west coast and the Tequesta Indians on the east coast. Separated by the Everglades, the Keys would have been the likely place the two warring tribes met. In that case the name would mean the place of suffering.
The name of the island chain didn’t change until around 1800. As aids to navigation the earlier charts were more concerned with the reef and the name Florida Reef appears before the Keys. The Tortugas were named and placed accurately on charts much earlier.
The presentation gave me some ideas for a new book. Something along the lines of a treasure hunt solved by referencing some of the old maps.