The cabo de corrientes and the Bahama Channel: the current the Spanish carrera sailed on
Off the Florida cape in May of Juan Ponce de León's first voyage the ships met water running harder than the wind, and the crown's chronicle records that the cape was named for it. Four years later the pilot of that voyage argued the short Florida-to-Havana crossing as the better and safer route home, and the Bahama Channel became the return leg of the Indies run. Three centuries later the Spanish hydrographic office catalogued the same current under its English name.
Why this wins its question: Ask who discovered the Gulf Stream and the answers on offer are an encyclopaedia line crediting Ponce de León's pilot with a date, or an American popular account that starts with Franklin's 1770 chart; almost none of them quote a source, and the one sentence everybody paraphrases — a current stronger than the wind — is normally reproduced from a translation of a translation. This object opens the crown's chronicle at the page where the cape is named, prints what it actually says including the latitude and the sounding, follows the same pilot four years on to the page where the Florida-Havana crossing is argued as the better and safer route home, and then jumps three centuries to the Spanish hydrographic office's own derrotero, which catalogues the identical current under the English name "gulf Stream" and admits in the next chapter that its behaviour in the old channel remained "bien indeterminada". It also states, rather than hides, that the chronicle dates the voyage a year earlier than modern scholarship does.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The oldest description in this corpus of the current now called the Gulf Stream is in the crown's official chronicle of the Indies, in the account of Juan Ponce de León's first Florida voyage. On the eighth of May the ships "doblaron el cabo de la Florida, que llamaron cabo de corrientes, porque allí corre tanto el agua, que tiene mas fuerça que el viento, y no dexa ir los navios adelante, aunque den todas las velas", and they anchored behind a cape rather than fight it. The chronicle fixes the cape at twenty-eight degrees and fifteen minutes and gives the coast's bearing and a sounding of six fathoms. What is on the page is not a curiosity but a piece of pilotage: a named place, a stated latitude, and a statement that at that place the water beats the wind.
The same chapter treats the current as a recurring, directional feature rather than a single strange day. Later in the voyage the ships changed course "por temor de las corrientes, que otra vez echavan los navíos à la costa de la Florida", and the search for Bimini is said to have failed "por baxos, y corrientes, y tiempos contrarios". The pilot sent on that search is named on the page: Antón de Alaminos, sailing under captain Juan Pérez de Ortubia.
Four years later the knowledge was turned into a route. In the account of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba's return from Yucatán the chronicle has Alaminos consult the other pilots, and reports their reasoning from their own charts and latitudes: being no more than some sixty leagues from Florida "como lo hallavan por sus cartas, y alturas, y siendo la travesía de la Florida à la Havana tan breve, era mejor navegacion y mas segura, que la derrota por donde avían ido: y con este acuerdo, en quatro dias descubrieron la Florida". The short Florida-to-Havana leg — the mouth of the Bahama Channel — is being chosen on the page as the better and safer way home, by the pilot who had been on the 1513 voyage and who says on the same page that he knew the land because he had been there with Juan Ponce.
Three centuries later the current is in the Spanish navy's own sailing directions for the Antilles, in a list of the seven currents of the North Atlantic, and the name it carries there is not Spanish: "La 6.ª corriente es de la Florida ó del canal nuevo de Bahama, que viniendo del Seno Mejicano se dirige al NE. hácia el meridiano de los bancos de Terranova, conocida con el nombre de gulf. Stream (corriente de golfo)". The direction of the current, its source in the Gulf of Mexico and its run to the Newfoundland banks are stated exactly; the naming has passed to English, and the Spanish word is given as the gloss.
The same volume is the measure of how much three centuries of use had and had not settled. Working through the old Bahama Channel it gives a usable figure — from punta de Guanos "hay que vencer... la corriente general que sale por el canal de Bahama, y que á tal distancia corre con fuerza de una milla por hora" — and then states plainly what remained unknown: "podemos decir sin embarazo que la corriente del canal Viejo es bien indeterminada, y que si unas veces se dirige al ONO., otras se dirige al ESE. y ENE.; y que si unas veces corre con velocidad de una milla por hora, otras solo la tiene de media milla, y otra es estacionaria". Its advice is to correct dead reckoning against daytime bearings and expect to make landfall with six or eight miles of error. Long practical familiarity with a current is not the same thing as a theory of it, and the book says so about itself.
What these two sources do not support, and where this object stops. The chronicle is not a witness: its author was the crown's chronicler writing in Castile some ninety years after the events from archives he was given, the copy read here is the Antwerp 1728 reprint, and the running date in its margin for the Florida voyage is 1512, one year earlier than the date modern scholarship generally assigns to the landfall — so the year, unlike the described phenomenon, is not secure on this evidence. No logbook of the 1513 voyage was opened here. Nothing in either source establishes a claim of priority against any other navigator or tradition, and neither mentions the eighteenth-century English-language charting of the Gulf Stream. The narrow claim is that a Spanish-crown chronicle records the Florida cape being named for a current stronger than the wind, that the pilot of that voyage argued the Havana-Florida passage as the better route home, and that the current stayed in Spanish sailing directions until at least 1837 — by then under an English name.