<P> Alonzo Álvarez de Pineda continued his rough journey westward . On June 24, 1519, on the Roman Catholic Feast Day of Corpus Christi, he sailed into what he named Corpus Christi Bay . There is no reliable evidence that he ever disembarked on the shores of Texas, but he anchored off of Villa Rica de la Veracruz shortly after Hernán Cortés had departed . Cortés returned on hearing of Álvarez de Pineda's arrival . Álvarez de Pineda wished to establish a boundary between the lands he was claiming for Garay and those that Cortés had already claimed; Cortés was unwilling to bargain, and Álvarez de Pineda left to retrace his route northward . Shortly thereafter, he sailed up a river he named Las Palmas, where he spent over 40 days repairing his ships . The Las Palmas was most likely the Panuco River near present - day Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico . </P> <P> Although de Pineda was killed in a battle with the native Huastec people at the Panuco River, his map made it back to Governor Garay . </P> <P> The expedition established the remainder of the boundaries of the Gulf of Mexico, while disproving the idea of a sea passage to Asia . It also verified that Florida was a peninsula instead of an island, and allowed Álvarez de Pineda to be the first European to see the coastal areas of what is now western Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, lands he called "Amichel ." His map is the first known document of Texas history and was the first map of the Gulf Coast region of the United States and is stored at the Archivo General de Indias in Spain . </P> <Ol> <Li> ^ Jump up to: Weber (1992), p. 34 . </Li> <Li> ^ Jump up to: Diaz, B., 1963, The Conquest of New Spain, London: Penguin Books, ISBN 0140441239 </Li> <Li> ^ Jump up to: Chipman (1992), p. 24 . </Li> <Li> Jump up ^ Atkins, Leah Rawls (1994) "European Exploration and Colonization in Alabama" in William Warren Rogers, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins and Wayne Flint . Alabama: The History of a Deep South State . Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, p. 18 . </Li> <Li> Jump up ^ Chipman (1992), p. 26 . </Li> <Li> Jump up ^ Robert S. Weddle, "ALVAREZ DE PINEDA, ALONSO," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fal72), accessed February 26, 2013 . Published by the Texas State Historical Association . </Li> <Li> Jump up ^ Chipman (1992), p. 243 . </Li> </Ol>

He was the first spanish explorer to see and chart the texas coast
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