Cherry picking from History

Tidal marsh at St. Marks, FL, looking south toward the Gulf of Mexico.

A novelist might wrap his/her story around some period and character in history for very personal reasons. For Alien Coast, I chose the time and person of a lesser-known and flawed Spanish conquistador. I wanted his failures to be the back story for a tale about an international conspiracy. As a teenager growing up on the bay in Panama City, FL, I stumbled on a treatise about then current knowledge of the Gulf of Mexico. The first chapter was a history of its "discovery" by Europeans in the 16th century. The first Spanish expedition to western Florida and the northern Gulf Coast, led by a mercurial guy, Pánfilo de Narváez, and part of their journey passed along the Gulf beaches near my house. I could picture those five boats full of ragged men rowing along just offshore. Over the years, I read the personal account of that expedition written by a survivor, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. It’s a simple but gripping story of discovery, danger, hardship, endurance, and ultimate disaster. And it’s a key episode in our national history that happened nearly five centuries ago in 1528. I wanted to shine some new light on it one way or another, and especially now that we’re nearing the expedition's 500th anniversary.