The name “Tampa” was first written down not by an explorer or a mapmaker but by a Spanish boy who had been shipwrecked on the Florida coast and held captive by the Calusa for the better part of two decades. Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda survived that long captivity, returned to the Spanish world, and set down a memoir of the Native Florida he had known from the inside, a document that remains one of the most valuable accounts of Indian life of its century and that contains, among much else, the oldest surviving spelling of the word that became the name of the bay and the city.
Fontaneda was born around 1536 in Cartagena, in present-day Colombia, the second son of Garcia de Escalante and Ana de Aldana; his father was a Spanish official in South America. In 1549, when he was about thirteen, he and his brother were sent by ship across the Atlantic to be educated at Salamanca in Spain. The ship never made it. It wrecked on the Florida coast, on the chain of islands the Spanish grimly called Los Martires, the Martyrs, and which we call the Florida Keys, possibly in a hurricane. The survivors were seized by the Calusa, the powerful fishing kingdom of southwest Florida, whose king the Spanish called Carlos.
The Calusa sacrificed most of the shipwrecked Spaniards, by Fontaneda's own account, including his brother. The boy was spared, he believed, because he correctly understood and obeyed their commands to sing and dance, an act of quick wit that saved his life. He then spent roughly seventeen years living among the Calusa and other Florida peoples, growing from a boy into a man inside a world no other European of his time knew so intimately. He learned several Native languages and traveled widely across the peninsula, accumulating the knowledge that would later make him valuable to Spain and invaluable to history. Around 1566 he was freed, ransomed or bargained loose from the Calusa by Pedro Menendez de Aviles, the founder of St. Augustine, who promptly put his hard-won fluency to use: Fontaneda served Menendez as an interpreter and guide among the Florida tribes for the next several years. He returned to Spain in 1569 to reclaim his late parents' property from the crown.
Around 1575 Fontaneda wrote the document that secured his place in history, the Memoria de las cosas y costa y indios de la Florida, a memoir only about eight folios long but packed with the lands, peoples, foods, customs, and geography of a Florida that was already vanishing. The original manuscript survives in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, and Fontaneda left in all some five documents describing Native Florida, including a list of its chiefs. It was used by the great Spanish chronicler Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas and is read still. It is the testimony of an insider, full of names of towns and chiefdoms that appear nowhere else, written with the authority of a man who had lived it and the biases of a former captive. He is, for all that, one of the essential primary sources on precontact and contact-era South Florida. His memoir also carries one of the earliest written mentions of Juan Ponce de Leon's search for healing waters in Florida, an early thread of the Fountain of Youth legend, though Fontaneda himself plainly did not believe the tale.
It is in Fontaneda's memoir that the word “Tampa,” in the form Tanpa, first appears in writing. He names twenty-two important Calusa towns, and Tanpa is the first of them. For that he is woven permanently into the bay's history, but careful scholarship adds a crucial caution. The Tanpa that Fontaneda named was, by the reckoning of the archaeologist Jerald Milanich, most likely not our Tampa Bay at all but a town to the south, around the mouth of Charlotte Harbor, the original “Bay of Tanpa,” deep in Calusa country. A later Spanish expedition, sailing north along the coast, failed to notice Charlotte Harbor and assumed that the next great bay, today's Tampa Bay, was the one the records meant. The name was carried north by mistake and settled, more or less by accident, on the bay we now call Tampa. So the earliest written “Tampa” is genuinely Fontaneda's, but the place he meant and the place we mean are probably not the same. It is a small, perfect lesson in how names drift across a map, and a caution this archive takes to heart.