Behind every famous first there is usually an overlooked one, and the celebrated 1757 survey of Tampa Bay by Francisco Maria Celi had a quiet prologue the year before. In 1756 a Spanish pilot named Juan Baptista Franco made the first reconnaissance of the bay, wrote a glowing report urging Spain to seize and settle it, and then came back the following year as the draftsman on Celi's expedition. He is the forgotten man who set the stage, and the record begins with him.
Spanish interest in Tampa Bay sharpened in the mid-eighteenth century. Spain's great shipyard at Havana hungered for timber, and in the fall of 1756 King Ferdinand VI granted permission to cut the royal pine and live oak of Florida for the Havana yards. The Gulf coast that Spain had claimed for two centuries but barely used suddenly had a strategic and practical value, and the crown wanted it examined. Franco's voyage in 1756 was that first examination, the scouting trip that the formal survey would follow.
Franco was a capable observer and a skilled draftsman, and his report did not hold back. He described the bay in detail and judged its forests excellent, the timber, he wrote, “most useful for the construction of vessels.” He grew frankly enthusiastic about the prospect of settlement, declaring that one “could not find a more delightful and comfortable place for everything.” And he sounded a warning that proved prophetic: if Spain did not take possession of so fine a harbor, foreign powers would, and that would be a serious blow to Spanish power in the Gulf of Mexico. Within a decade the British did take Florida, and a British surveyor, George Gauld, would chart this very bay and urge a fort upon it, exactly the loss Franco had foreseen.
Franco's report did its work: it helped prompt the full expedition of 1757, and Franco returned with it, this time as the skilled draftsman serving under the naval pilot Francisco Maria Celi. He helped produce the careful chart and survey of Tampa Bay that remains the first accurate European map of these waters. So Franco appears at both stages of Spain's serious attention to the bay, the scout who first reported it and the draftsman who helped map it, even though it is Celi's name that the famous chart carries.
Franco might have vanished entirely from the story, overshadowed by Celi's magnificent chart, had it not been for modern scholarship. The historian Charles W. Arnade studied the “Juan Baptista Franco Document of Tampa Bay, 1756” among the earliest Spanish records of the bay, and Captain John D. Ware, who did so much to recover the careers of the bay's eighteenth-century surveyors, brought Franco's reconnaissance back into the record. Franco is in this archive for the same reason every overlooked surveyor is: an honest history credits the scout as well as the mapmaker, and the documentary record of these waters begins a year earlier than the famous chart suggests.