On his expedition to Florida in 1513, Juan Ponce de León sailed near Yucatán but never landed there. In 1517, while on an expedition to procure slaves, a Spanish conquistador named Francisco Hernández de Córdova arrived on the Peninsula and asked some of the indigenous people where he was. When they responded, “ Tetec dtan. Ma t natic a dtan” (“You speak very rapidly; we don’t understand your language”), he assumed they were answering his question. Having difficulty pronouncing their words, Córdova ultimately called the land Yucatán. In 1519, Hernán Cortés led an expedition that briefly stopped at Yucatán to rescue Jerónimo de Aguilar, a shipwrecked Franciscan priest, before continuing north to land in Veracruz.