Fake News and the Naming of Cape Romano

Recently a question came up on a Facebook group focused on local history as to how Cape Romano, a well-known geographical land mass, got its name. Posted in response was an extract from a Wikipedia article. It reads as follows: 

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“Cape Romano is a cape on the Gulf Coast of Florida, United States, below Naples, just beyond the southwestern tip of Marco Island and northwest of the Ten Thousand Islands in Collier County.Calusa Indians founded the settlement and called it Manataca. Juan Ponce de León briefly stopped at Manataca on his first trip from Puerto Rico to Florida, but the Indians tried to fight him off.There are two competing theories about why the island is called Cape Romano. One theory that Cape Romano got its name from the survivors of a Romanian shipwreck that colonized the island in 1834. Another undocumented theory is Cape Romano was named after it by British surveyor Bernard Roman who sailed by it in 1775.Cape Romano is also the location of the country's first Romanian Orthodox Church. Completed in 1837, the ruins can still be found on the island just off the beach. It was destroyed in 1897 by a fire after multiple hurricanes forced the inhabitants from the Island.”

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A common phrase these days is “fake news” or simply stated, “misinformation.” The above is an excellent example of fake news. Other than the first sentence, almost nothing else stated is true. Let’s examine this further:

“Calusa Indians founded a settlement called Manataca.”   

There is no Calusa village named Manataca or anything similar on a well-known list of Calusa settlements that had been preserved by the Spanish. This list has 30 plus names of Calusa villages extending from present day Charlotte harbor south through the 10,000 Islands and near Lake Okeechobee. This is not a big surprise as the correct spelling of this word is Matanca, or Matanza, a Spanish term, and Calusa didn’t give Spanish names to their villages. The name, Matanca, was not given to a settlement, but rather on the location where Juan Ponce de Leon, in his 1513 voyage, had fought the Calusa; the word means Killing or Massacre. In a written history of this battle, it was stated that it occurred in an area with fresh water and “they fought from morning until night without hurt to the Spanish, because the [Calusa] arrows did not reach whilst for the cross bows and artillery shots they dared not draw near, and in the end the Indians retired.” Later on this trip, and before returning to Cuba, Ponce de Leon stopped again for fresh water at this location and named it “Matanca.” Historians have debated where exactly this massacre by the Spanish occurred. The 1514 Freducci map seems to indicate that the battle could have been at Cape Romano, and also in support of this belief, a 1913 map reveals the “Route of Ponce de Leon in 1513,” which runs through Cape Romano. Another possible location is today’s Matanzas Pass in Lee County. 

“Another undocumented theory is Cape Romano was named after it by British surveyor Bernard Roman who sailed by it in 1775.”   

The problem with this statement is found in the first three words. This is not a theory in the technical sense of the term, nor is it undocumented, and lastly there are no correct alternative explanations. To explain, by 1762 the English had taken over Spain’s principal colonial city of Havana, its hub for its Caribbean holdings. The English quickly traded Havana back to Spain in 1763 in return for what they would rename as East Florida (now known as the Florida peninsula) and West Florida (now known as the Florida panhandle). Almost immediately, the British sent out surveyors to chart their newly acquired coasts, and in 1765 German surveyor William G. De Brahm started working his way around the Florida coast mapping it and routinely changing Spanish names to English ones. For instance, the old Juan Ponce de Leon Bay (stretching from today’s Coon Key to Cape Sable) soon became Chatham Bay with Gullivan’s River (now Blackwater River) in the Bay’s northeast corner. 

Employed in 1769 and working under De Brahm was Captain Bernard Romans, a Dutch surveyor. From September 1770 until August 1771 Romans led a surveying-exploring expedition charting the southern coast of Florida while working on his book titled, “A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida. ”The book was originally published in 1775, it is still in publication even today, and is considered to be the first book promoting moving to Florida! The last seven months of his voyage were spent on the west coast of Florida, making Romans one of the first of Britain’s navigators to explore and map our area of Southwest Florida. He asserted he was the first to map Charlotte Harbor as well as having named it, noting as he surveyed the plentiful natural harbors and sources of freshwater. 

Paul Revere, famous for his role in the American Revolution, was the engraver and did the copper plating for Romans’ maps. Romans was also an artist, and his illustration of the Battle of Bunker Hill was reprinted in many magazines. He participated directly in the American Revolution and fought on the side of the Americans, but after his death, his wife was denied a widower’s pension by the U.S. government. Her application for the pension stated that her husband had been captured by the English after the war and died as a prisoner in Montego Bay, Jamaica. 

Shortly after the end of the American Revolution in 1783, Spain once again acquired all of Florida back from the English who had controlled it for 20 years. Apparently, re-establishing the old Spanish names for rivers, places, and islands was not worth their trouble so for the most part, Spain simply left the English names intact, but in some cases, those names evolved to sound more Spanish – Cape Roman eventually became Cape Romano.

The above information is not difficult to retrieve, in fact for over a hundred years numerous historians have credited Bernard Romans and the British with Cape Romano’s namesake. Among them are John Lee Williams in his 1837 book called, “Territory of Florida” and Marjory Stoneman Douglass in her 1947 book titled, “River of Grass.”  

“Cape Romano got its name from the survivors of a Romanian shipwreck that colonized the island in 1834 and is the location of the country's first Romanian Orthodox Church. Completed in 1837 it was destroyed in 1897 by a fire after multiple hurricanes forced the inhabitants from the Island.”

So, some six decades after Bernard Romans’ map was published a boatload of Romanians happened to shipwreck on the same island he had surveyed and renamed, settling there in 1834, building their first Orthodox Church, and inhabited this island for approximately 63 years? This was a turbulent period in Florida’s history with numerous wars: the second Seminole War was fought between 1835 to 1842, the third Seminole War fought (primarily in Southwest Florida) between 1855 to 1858, and the Civil War fought between 1861 and 1865. 

During the third Seminole War there were numerous military expeditions from the coastline deep into the interior of the future Collier County by the U.S. army and naval forces looking for Seminole Indians. Detailed journals were kept of these expeditions. Later, during the Civil War, Key West was the Union Navy’s principal Florida base whose soldiers were tasked with patrolling the Florida coast. John J. Weeks, who relocated during the Civil War in 1862 to farm near present day Everglades City, has historically been recognized as the first permanent settler of the future Collier County. So, one must ask how a group of Europeans could, specifically Romanians, have a permanent settlement which existed for six decades on Cape Romano, without any records or historical references to them?

Furthermore, Roman Orthodox Church historians have no knowledge of the existence of a Romanian settlement in Collier County existing almost 30 years before Collier County’s first permanent settler. A review of their authorized history is that the first Romanian Orthodox Church in the U.S. was founded in Cleveland Ohio in 1904, and the first Eastern Orthodox Church founded in New Orleans in 1864, named the Holy Trinity Church by the Greeks. 

The bottom line appears to be that the only connection of Romanians to Cape Romano is the name similarity, which is probably how this tale was invented. 

Misinformation does not stop with this one story (although it has been widely repeated online), another website gives a different twist to the tale of Cape Romano’s namesake:  

“However, the first actual mention of "Romano" in the oldest surviving historical documents of the region came in 1878 after the founding of the famous cheese factory "Romano Cheese Corporation."   

My quick internet search for this Romano Cheese Corporation yielded no information, nor could I find anything on the existence of a cheese factory. I leave it to others to investigate how “famous” this factory was and how “cheese” relates to the naming of Cape Romano. But do note that there are more than one older “surviving historical documents” predating 1878, one being the 1846 State Map of Florida, which shows the name as Cape Romano.