The first person to map Tampa Bay accurately was a Spanish naval pilot who came looking for pine trees. In the spring of 1757 Francisco Maria Celi sailed in from Havana, spent weeks sounding and charting the bay, and produced the first true map of these waters along with a detailed journal of everything he saw. The names he wrote on that chart are the ancestors of names still on the map of Pinellas County today.
Celi was a pilot of the Spanish Royal Navy, and his expedition was a practical one. Spain's great shipyard at Havana needed tall, straight pine for masts and spars, and after King Ferdinand VI granted permission in 1756 to cut the royal timber of Florida, the navy moved to find it. The voyage was organized at Havana under the marine commissary Don Lorenzo de Montalvo and ordered by the rear admiral Don Blas de Barreda. Celi sailed the xebec San Francisco de Asis, a shallow-draft, three-masted, lateen-rigged craft commanded by the frigate lieutenant Don Joseph Ximenes, leaving Havana on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1757. He carried with him the draftsman Juan Baptista Franco, who had scouted the bay the year before. Celi was not the first European to see the bay, but he was the first to record it with the rigor of a trained naval surveyor.
Over April and May 1757, Celi carefully sounded the channels, mapped the shoals and shorelines, and kept a meticulous logbook. The chart he produced, the Plano de la gran bahia de Tampa nuevamente de San Fernando, was the first accurate map of Tampa Bay, a document of real navigational and historical value, fixing the bay's mouth at latitude 27 degrees 40 minutes north. His journal recorded the landscape, the timber, and the encounters of the voyage in detail. He sailed up the Hillsborough River, which he named the Rio de San Julian y Arriaga, camped ashore with a party of armed men to cut and test the pines, and erected a cross at a stand of pines he christened el Pinal de la Cruz de Santa Teresa, the pine forest of the Cross of Saint Theresa, at a spot now within Riverhills Park in Temple Terrace. For the first time, the great bay at whose entrance Mullet Key sits had been set down on paper as it actually was.
Celi named what he charted, in the Spanish fashion, and several of those names echo down to the present. He called the bay itself San Fernando, for the king. He labeled the island at the bay's entrance, the future Mullet Key, Cayo de San Luis y Velasco, the first recorded European name for the island. He named the southern point of the peninsula Punta Pinal de Jimenez, the point of pines, after his lieutenant and the pine groves he had come to harvest, and that name, the point of pines, is the direct root of Pinellas, the name of the entire county today. Celi's chart is a small monument: a Spanish pilot's 1757 survey, drawn for the prosaic purpose of finding ship masts, that quietly named the land we still live on.
The original of Celi's chart survives in the Museo Naval de Madrid, where his journal lay largely unstudied until 1965; a copy has since been brought to the Tampa Bay History Center, so the document can be examined on the very shore it depicts. The journal was translated and published by Captain John D. Ware and analyzed by the historian Charles W. Arnade, who together restored the 1757 expedition to its place as the foundation of the bay's recorded geography. Celi belongs in this archive as the first of the great surveyors of the bay, the man who did the formal work that Juan Baptista Franco had urged a year before him and that George Gauld would carry on for the British a decade later. The chain of navigation that the Tampa Bay pilots continue today begins, in any accurate accounting, with Celi in 1757.