THERE WAS ANOTHER route to Santa Elena, though it was forged not by Spanish Catholic conquistadores but by French Protestants. The roots of their enterprise stretch back to the small German town of Wittenberg, where the disgruntled Augustinian friar Martin Luther formulated his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. The religious controversies and conflicts that were part of the subsequent Protestant Reformation spread disorder throughout European Christianity, reaching as far as the nascent Spanish colonies. Many Protestant English, Dutch, and French nobles and explorers were, by the mid-1550s, no longer willing to abide by the rules of the papacy, including papal bulls supporting the new lands Spain and Portugal had claimed. They, like thousands of other Europeans, were enraptured by tales of great riches. This was a battle over more than just religious ideology; the Dutch, along with Protestants elsewhere in Europe, including the English and French Huguenots, were seeking to justify their own involvement in the Americas and their right to explore, conquer, plunder, and enslave. Such desires found expression in the works of prominent thinkers such as the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, who argued for free navigation of the seas, as the Dutch were trying to extend their trading networks throughout the globe, including North America and the West Indies.
Many enterprising mariners were well aware of the Spanish treasure fleet, ferrying gold and silver to Europe, and it did not take long for these “Lutheran corsairs,” as the Spanish called them, to descend on the Americas. With Protestant piracy on the rise, the Spanish islands turned to fort-building: in Puerto Rico, for instance, work on Castillo San Felipe del Morro began in 1539, along the north coast of the island, near the city of San Juan, which had been founded in 1521. Such forts were meant to protect the haul of empire on the ships that went to Spain and returned with European wares for the settlers. The flota would set off twice a year, leaving Seville (and, later, Cádiz once the river in Seville became too silted) for Veracruz, while another fleet, the Tierra Firme or galeones, sailed to Cartagena, Colombia, and onward to Portobelo, Panama. Goods from Peru would come up to Panama and be taken overland to Portobelo; the same would happen with silks and other luxury goods from the east that arrived in Acapulco and traveled overland to Veracruz.
Then, in the spring, the ships would return, uniting in Havana before crossing the Atlantic. Such a system had many vulnerabilities: shipwrecks around the Florida Keys were common, as were the hurricanes that wiped out whole fleets, but piracy was one of the most persistent problems.1 England, the Low Countries, and France at varying times were enemies of Spain and so these corsairs, often armed with letters of marque, granting permission from their respective monarchs, considered it legal to attack Spanish ships. Individual pirates, with no religious or political connection, were also willing to risk death to get their hands on just one of the treasure-laden vessels.
Other Protestants were seeking not riches but sanctuary from the religious wars erupting in Europe. One such eager group was the French Calvinists, known as Huguenots, who faced mounting persecution by the 1560s. They imagined these new lands might offer a peaceful place to live and worship. A scheme to place a settlement on the other side of the Atlantic won the backing of the crown, with Catherine de Médicis supporting the idea on behalf of her young son, Charles IX. It also was popular with Gaspard de Coligny, a French admiral and himself a Huguenot.2
The waterways that spread out like veins in the South Carolina lowlands could have guided the vessels of the first French expeditions from Port Royal Sound to a landing spot on the edge of Parris Island in May 1562, but this was not their initial stopping point. Farther to the south, they called instead at the mouth of the St. Johns River, in the north of Florida, which runs into the Atlantic Ocean not far from today’s Jacksonville. The French named it the Rivière de Mai, marking the month of their arrival.3 The two ships were led by Jean Ribault, and he erected a small column to mark France’s claim.
Ribault was an experienced sailor, born around 1515 in the port city of Dieppe, Normandy, to a family of minor nobility. For a time, he served England’s King Henry VIII, which was not unusual for Norman sailors in the 1540s, as the king was trying to bolster English maritime defenses.4 During this period, his experiences were wide-ranging, from a brief imprisonment for espionage charges to working under the navigator Sebastian Cabot. Ribault returned to France in the mid-1550s and fought in sea battles against the Flemish, Spanish, and English, securing his reputation as a skilled mariner.5
Once ashore, the French did not take long to make contact with the Timucua people near the coast and present them with gifts.6 Ribault’s second in command, René Goulaine de Laudonnière, later described their landing spot as a place “so pleasant it was beyond comparison.”7 However, Ribault wanted to explore farther to the north, arriving a couple of weeks later at an inlet that they named Port Royal. It was here that he established Charlesfort, named in honor of Charles IX.
It was not the most advantageous time of year to start such an enterprise, with the heat and humidity at a peak in July and August. In front of them stretched an endless yellow-green sea of tidal grass, a world of natural wonders from tiny mud-burrowing crabs to soaring ospreys and herons that fished for food in the creeks to unfamiliar flowers and plants all around. They built a rudimentary fort and began to make contact with the nearby Orista and Guale peoples. The Orista lived along the coast around the Edisto River valley, which forms its namesake island around forty miles south of Charleston, South Carolina, while the Guale were farther south, scattered around the coastal estuaries between the Ogeechee and Altamaha Rivers.8 The Guale territory was divided into about thirty or forty villages, each ruled by a chief, and the total population is estimated to have ranged from thirteen hundred to about four thousand.9
The entire Florida region Spain initially claimed was diverse in terms of its people, climate, and landscape, and distinct from the Caribbean and New Spain. Living near the shores and rivers were coastal communities, such as the Orista and Guale, that subsisted on fishing. Inland to the north and west were the people the Europeans would later call the Creeks, who were related to the wider Muskogean-speaking people of the region and whose nation covered parts of the modern states of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as Florida. Along today’s Florida panhandle were Apalachee people, while to the east, and into Florida’s peninsula, lived the Timucuan-speaking people, who were organized into about twenty-five different—and not always amicable—chiefdoms.10 Farther south, along the east coast, were the Ais, while on the west were the Tocobaga. Living in the southernmost part were the Calusa and the Tequesta, among other, smaller groups.11 Overall, the precontact population estimates of all Native Americans in Florida have a wide range, from as low as ten thousand to as high as four hundred thousand.12
Their settlements took a variety of forms, influenced by their environment. For instance, the Calusa of the south were sedentary and relied on fishing and, increasingly, trade with passing Europeans or scavenging from shipwrecks. The coastal Guale and Orista looked to the sea and rivers for their survival, though they did spend parts of the year hunting and growing crops. The Timucua also lived on a combination of hunting, gathering, and growing. Crops such as corn and squash made up a large part of their diet, but the soil in north Florida was not as fertile as in lands to the north, such as those where the Apalachee lived, which supported a greater reliance on agriculture.13
The Spanish had quickly learned that the Florida Indians’ communities were not suited to the encomienda system, in part because their villages often did not have enough people to use as a labor force, nor did their social structure lend them to it. Overall, these were not tributary societies as the members of the Mexica confederation had been, though it is thought the Calusa in the south may have exacted tribute from some of the other chiefdoms.14 In these early days, however, the challenge for the Spanish and French was simply to make sense of the relations between these groups and figure out how to gain their trust and assistance.15
Ribault did not stay long in Charlesfort, leaving for France by early June 1562 to stock up on supplies for the colony. The twenty-eight men he left behind were instructed to continue building the fort with logs and clay, backbreaking labor in the summer heat. They carried on, working with the expectation that reinforcements would soon appear, yet by January 1563 there were still no ships, and hunger was stalking the colony.16 The desperate colonists spent the winter building a sloop to take them back to France, and they left in April 1563. They were later picked up by an English ship, with many on board near death as their vessel had run out of food and water.17
Ribault, for his part, arrived in France at the start of what would become the long-running Wars of Religion between Catholic and Protestant. From there, he left for London, where he wrote about his experiences in Florida. A translated English version of his Whole and True Discoverye of Terra Florida surfaced, printed by Thomas Hacket around 1563. In his account, Ribault painted a vivid picture of what he referred to as the “land of Chicore [Chicora] whereof some have written.” Like some of the Spanish reports, his also noted that Florida was “a country full of havens, rivers and islandes of such frutefullnes as cannot with tonge be expressed,” no doubt described as such to entice backers to fund a larger expedition “where in shorte tyme great and precyous comodyties might be founde.”18 Ribault’s account helped secure him an audience with Queen Elizabeth I. Royal support looked promising at one point, but the plans collapsed. He was accused of being a spy and was even briefly imprisoned over claims that he was plotting to steal English ships and take them to France.19
While Ribault was in England, a Spanish ship had been dispatched from Havana in 1564, under the command of Captain Hernando Manrique de Rojas, to destroy the French settlement in Florida. After a number of stops along the coast, the Spaniards found two Indians who indicated “from their signs” that there had been “ships of Christians” in that harbor, but they could see no evidence of the fort.20 The Spaniards continued sailing along the coast and by June came across a “Christian, clothed like the Indians of that country, who declared himself to be a Frenchman.”21 Manrique de Rojas questioned the man, who said his name was Guillaume Rouffi and that he had not wanted to join the others on the makeshift sloop sailing back to France. He told them the location of the now abandoned fort, which the Spanish burned before returning to Havana.22
While Manrique de Rojas was exploring the area, another French expedition slipped past him. This group of around three hundred people was led by Laudonnière, who had joined Ribault on the return journey to France. Laudonnière had departed France in April 1564 with three ships: a three-hundred-ton galleon as the flagship, and two smaller vessels. They arrived in June at the St. Johns River.23 This time, Laudonnière decided not to return to Charlesfort, instead establishing Fort Caroline on a bluff overlooking the river. Laudonnière believed he was on good terms with the Timucuan people, which was crucial as he considered them good fighters who were “brave in spirit.”24
The French were under the misguided impression that the Timucua were growing plenty of food and so the colonists could simply trade to meet their own needs. Rather than plant, they set about building their new fort. It was a deadly misunderstanding; the Timucuan chiefdoms grew only what they needed and there was not enough to feed their villages as well as the French.25 It soon was too late to grow any more crops, and the food supply among the French began to dwindle, while tempers frayed, leading to a mutiny by the end of 1564. As Laudonnière tried to rein in angry settlers, a reprieve appeared on the horizon: the English slave trader and explorer John Hawkins called at the St. Johns River in August 1564, allowing them a chance to obtain provisions.26
By this point, Ribault had been released from prison in England, and he left Dieppe for Florida in May 1565.27 Following close behind in June was Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, a Spaniard from the mountainous Asturias, on Spain’s northern coast. Like many men from this region, he sought his fortune at sea, where, in his case, he established his reputation fighting French corsairs in the Bay of Biscay. Menéndez later commanded fleets to the Indies, entering the lucrative trade between the colonies and Spain.28 He profited, but his successes were not consistent. A hurricane in 1563 cost him more than his fortune when a vessel sank and his son was also lost in the storm, possibly shipwrecked somewhere near Florida. Later that year, the king summoned Menéndez to Spain, concerned about reports of French activity in Florida. While in Spain, Menéndez had a dispute with some merchants and found himself under house arrest in 1564 until the claims were settled.29 Eager to clear his name, Menéndez negotiated a contract with the crown to place a colony in Florida, and he left Spain. He had organized an expedition of nineteen ships, with some fifteen hundred soldiers and settlers. His plan was for some of the fleet to meet in the Canary Islands, with a few of the vessels following later.30 Menéndez had a troubled start, however, as some of the ships never arrived in the Canaries, and a hurricane destroyed most of the rest. One of his caravels was blown so far off course it was later captured by French corsairs. In the end, he managed to limp into San Juan, Puerto Rico, in his flagship, the San Pelayo.31
Despite the setbacks, Menéndez regrouped and managed to arrive somewhere near Cape Canaveral just after Ribault returned to the St. Johns River, in late August 1565. When Menéndez discovered the whereabouts of the French fleet, a brief skirmish broke out between the Spanish and French ships, the latter managing to block the entrance to the mouth of the river. Menéndez decided to head south to an inlet he had spotted earlier. Once he and his men reached shore, they claimed Florida—again—for the king, and named this stopping point St. Augustine, as they had first sighted land on August 28, the feast day of that saint.32 A sandbar lay across the inlet, and while this meant the flagship had to be anchored farther out, the harbor would help protect them from attack.33 As Menéndez and his men were setting up camp, Ribault sent four ships and most of his men at Fort Caroline to attack the Spanish. This plan was left in tatters after another hurricane struck. Ribault was not able to spot the Spanish ships, and this caused him to sail too far south. The ferocity of the storm left his own ships wrecked just below St. Augustine.34
Menéndez determined that rather than waiting for Ribault to return for a sea battle, the Spaniards should attack Fort Caroline by land. After almost four days of marching through heavy rains, Spanish troops reached it by September 20. They had no trouble capturing the fort, and around 140 of the French were killed, while 45 managed to escape. Another 50 women and children were taken captive.35 After securing the fort, Menéndez returned to St. Augustine to fight Ribault, not realizing what had happened to him until local Indians told him that French castaways had washed up in a nearby inlet, about fifteen miles south of St. Augustine. Menéndez found them, and they surrendered. He ordered his troops to kill them anyway, with the exception of any Catholics in their group. This bloody execution was the genesis of the name given to that site, which it bears to this day: Matanzas (Massacre) Inlet. A few weeks later, more survivors from the shipwreck arrived near the same spot, this time including Ribault, and they, too, met the same fate. One final group washed up that November. Some of them fled, though this time the captives’ lives were spared, and they were put in a small fort under Spanish guard, near Cape Canaveral.36
ONE MAN WHO managed to flee the Fort Caroline attack was Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, a cartographer and engraver who, upon returning to Europe, published an account of his experiences and provided illustrations of the Timucuan people, as well as the flora and fauna of the region. He lost most of his work during his escape but re-created it from memory; it was later reproduced and published by Theodore de Bry, who bought le Moyne’s images and written account from his widow in 1588. Laudonnière also escaped the attack on Fort Caroline, fleeing to the St. Johns River where he and other survivors sailed on two ships to France.37 He ended up in Swansea, Wales, where he began his Notable History of Florida, before returning to France, where it was published in 1586, with le Moyne’s work following in 1591. These two books were translated and read throughout Europe, showing many people for the first time images of Native American life. Laudonnière provided one of the earliest European accounts of the Timucuan people, describing the men as being “olive in colour, large of body, handsome, well proportioned, and without deformities,” and noting their deerskin loincloths and tattoos, which “ornament their bodies, arms, and thighs with handsome designs.”38 Le Moyne’s images reflected Laudonnière’s descriptions. His pictures show fierce, muscular, tattooed men, and women of similar stature, tall and strong, with long hair and bare breasts.
Now the Spanish would try to assert their authority in this part of Florida. They took control of Fort Caroline in 1565 and renamed it San Mateo.39 Later that year, Menéndez began to explore the rest of Florida from St. Augustine, attempting to make alliances with the Native Americans. He erected more forts, including San Antón de Carlos on the west coast in the Calusa territory of Mound Key (south of modern Fort Myers) and outposts in the Tocobaga and Tequesta lands, although none of these fortifications survived past 1569.40
Gonzalo Solís de Merás, Menéndez’s brother-in-law, joined in the adelantado’s exploits in Florida and later wrote about his experiences.41 Solís was with Menéndez when they encountered Calusa people in southwest Florida in 1566. Their party was searching for a rumored group of shipwrecked Spaniards who had been held captive for more than twenty years. They found some of them, and a meeting was arranged between Menéndez and the Calusa chief. At first there was an exchange of gifts and food and then, according to Solís, “the Adelantado told him that the King of Spain, his Lord, sent him for the Christian men and women that he had, and if he did not bring them to him, he would order him killed.”42 The captives were handed over and more gifts exchanged. The chief, for his part, apparently had earlier adopted the name Carlos after his captives told him that Emperor Carlos V was the king of all the Christians. In another display of respect, Carlos tried to give Menéndez his sister to marry. Solís recounted the exchange:
The chief told him that he should go sleep in a room that was there, with his sister, since he had given her to him as a wife, and that if he did not do so, that his Indians would be upset, saying that they were laughing at them and at her, and that he regarded her poorly. And there were more than 4,000 Indian men and women in the town. The Adelantado [Menéndez] showed a little perturbation, and told him through the interpreter that Christians could not sleep with women who weren’t Christian.43
Thrust into a complicated social situation, Menéndez tried to explain Christian practices; the chief said he would accept and even permitted his sister to be baptized. She became known as Doña Antonia.44 This “marriage”—even though Menéndez had a wife in Spain—would seal a sort of brotherhood between the two men, and a long, extravagant feast followed.
Tales of Indian women being “given” to the Spanish abound in reports from conquistadores from across the empire, presenting only one side of the story. These women, be they slaves or princesses, often functioned as linguistic and social translators. Few Spanish women had been taken to Florida, and so the men were left to seek relationships with indigenous women, sometimes by force. Many native women were used as domestic servants and concubines, entrapped in servitude and sexual slavery. This was not unique to Florida, and throughout Spanish America, the subsequent offspring of these relationships were known as mestizos. An elaborate casta (caste) system of racial hierarchy took shape, ranking the mixtures of people, with the most “Spanish” being at the top and the most indigenous or African at the bottom. These racialized ideas were connected to an older concept from the Iberian Peninsula—limpieza de sangre, or “purity of blood”—that was concerned with a person’s possible Jewish or Muslim ancestry. Since some of the Spanish who came to the Americas had converted Jewish (converso) or Muslim (morisco) ancestry, these preoccupations crossed the Atlantic as well.45 How deeply ingrained such racial ideas were in Spanish Florida in this period is difficult to ascertain; indigenous communities were too scattered, the Spanish colonists too few, and the records too scant to allow a detailed picture of the extent of mestizaje and the state of emerging casta hierarchies.
Menéndez and Carlos continued to spend time together, with Carlos later asking Menéndez to help him attack the Tocobaga people, who lived to the north of the Calusa. Menéndez declined to involve himself in the conflict, though he did broker a peace between the two groups.46 In his dealings with the Calusa, he met a captive, Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, who had been shipwrecked in south Florida and who knew of Menéndez’s son; it had transpired that he had not survived. Escalante served as an interpreter for the Spanish and later left for Cuba in 1569.47 He also wrote a Memoria of his experiences, a rare written record of a prolonged period spent with the indigenous people of Florida. Escalante’s work contains a mix of admiration and prejudice, and at times seems to make a negative assessment of the prospects in Florida—a sharp contrast to conquistadores’ letters to the crown extolling the virtues of this corner of empire. He might have been making, in a roundabout way, the case against further settlement in Florida, to spare the Indians any more European incursions, writing:48
As I have stated, they [Ais and Jeaga people] are rich from the sea, and not from the land. From Tocobaga up to Santa Elena, which will be about six hundred leagues of coastline, there is no gold or even less silver naturally from the land, but rather it is what I have said, from the sea. I do not wish to say if there is land to inhabit, since the Indians live in it. It is plentiful for livestock and for agriculture in their vicinity. … In all these provinces that I have declared about, from Tocobaga-chile up to Santa Elena, they are great fisherfolk … they are great archers, and traitors, and I hold it for very certain that they will never be at peace, and even less Christian.49
Yet such inferences were ignored. Menéndez’s efforts had finally allowed the Spanish to entrench themselves on the edge of Florida. Menéndez also discovered that if he hugged the eastern coastline rather than battling the Gulf Stream, a smoother journey could be made to Havana. Before long, the main settlement in Florida was St. Augustine, not Santa Elena, which was another two hundred miles up the coast.50 However, Felipe II wanted a presence in Santa Elena to forestall any future arrivals of the French, and so in April 1566, Menéndez and 150 soldiers went there and established Fort San Felipe close to the old Charlesfort location.51
After the fort was finished, Menéndez returned to St. Augustine, leaving the colony and around a hundred men under the supervision of Esteban de Las Alas. By the summer Santa Elena was in trouble: sixty of the men mutinied when a supply ship from St. Augustine stopped there, commandeering it to Cuba. Another twenty men disappeared into the interior, leaving about twenty-five, who were now forced to rely on the goodwill of Native Americans for survival.52
Not long after the runaways fled, Captain Juan Pardo arrived from Spain in July with supplies and around three hundred men. Las Alas and Pardo worked to improve the fort in time for Menéndez’s return in August 1566. Pleased at the result, Menéndez named Las Alas governor—Menéndez still held this power as the adelantado—and for a brief moment, Santa Elena appeared to have stabilized.53 At the end of 1566, Pardo left on an expedition into the interior, searching for the elusive overland path to link Florida with New Spain, which formed part of Menéndez’s instructions from the crown.54 Menéndez was optimistic enough to believe that he would also find a waterway to the Far East from Florida.55
Pardo headed west into North Carolina and went as far as Tennessee, meeting many Native Americans along the way and setting up two more forts, one of which was Fort San Juan near the Indian village of Joara (sometimes Joada), near modern Morganton, North Carolina. Pardo returned to Santa Elena a few months later, in 1567, and discovered that while he had been away, relations between his men and the local Indians had soured. Despite the tensions, he made plans to leave again later that year.56
Menéndez, for his part, had won the crown’s favor with his success in Florida and wanted to take advantage of the situation by returning to Spain to enjoy his accolades, leaving in May 1567. Pardo set out on his second expedition inland in September, returning to Santa Elena by March 1568. Once again, the colony had been beset by more problems in his absence, not least a lack of food, as well as continued Indian attacks.57
To complicate matters, French corsairs arrived in April 1568, intent on revenge. Reports from the few survivors who returned to France had begun to circulate, revealing the scale of France’s disaster in Florida.58 Dominique de Gourgues, who had earlier been imprisoned among the Spanish, organized a retaliatory expedition from Bordeaux. Aided on their arrival by about four hundred Timucua Indians, they headed to the site of the first large massacre, Fort Caroline (San Mateo), on the St. Johns River.59 Upon learning of their impending arrival, the hundred or so Spanish troops there tried to flee to St. Augustine, leaving Gourgues to destroy the fort before returning to France. Santa Elena, however, was left unharmed.
More colonists arrived in Santa Elena by 1568; at its peak some four hundred people lived there. By 1571, Menéndez secured for Florida a subsidy, known as the situado, to ensure its growth and protection.60 Other parts of the empire, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, which had little or no mineral wealth remaining but provided strategic importance, also received a share of silver, often delivered at erratic intervals.
Menéndez’s plan was to put soldiers, settlers, and missionaries along the length of Florida, which the Spanish considered to be from the tip of the peninsula up to around the Chesapeake Bay, or the Bahía de Santa María, as it was called.61 That bay was particularly important because it was thought to connect to the fabled Northwest Passage, which would link Spanish America to Asia.62 Menéndez had gone some way toward realizing this vision by the time of his death in 1574, which occurred in Spain while he prepared for another trip to Florida.
While Menéndez had managed to drive off the French and establish rudimentary garrisons during his time in Florida, the territory remained fragile for the Spanish. By 1576, Santa Elena was falling apart. The colony’s leaders turned violent, demanding tribute from the Orista and committing brutal acts, including the killing of two Guale chiefs, prompting an uprising of five hundred Orista and Guale, who attacked Fort San Felipe.63 The Spaniards decided to abandon it and retreated to St. Augustine.64
Assessing indigenous hostility or cooperation in regard to the Spanish and even among themselves is complicated in this period. Written accounts or testimonies from the Spanish about attacks or ambushes often come from judicial proceedings and reflect Spanish beliefs and prejudices.65 While there were also periods of calm around Santa Elena, this had not been the case along the coast near the St. Johns River, where the chiefdoms of Seloy and Saturiwa, both part of the larger community of Timucuan-speakers, were more consistently hostile to the Spanish. There had been skirmishes from the outset, as these chiefdoms tried to expel the Spanish from St. Augustine, with soldiers retaliating through the late 1560s.66
Efforts to bolster Santa Elena continued when, in 1577, Menéndez’s nephew, Pedro Menéndez Márquez, arrived with orders to rebuild it. Up went Fort San Marcos, with a garrison of fifty men and artillery that included three cannons.67 Menéndez Márquez tried to negotiate peace with the Guale and Orista, and he also discovered there were some French living among them on the coast.68 Clashes with the Native Americans and their French allies took place throughout the 1570s, but settlement also continued. The relationship with the Guale broke down once more, and in 1579 the Spanish burned some of their villages and maize fields. Menéndez Márquez managed to stop aggression from some of the chiefdoms around Santa Elena by 1580, though relations with the Guale and Orista remained troubled.69 Spanish officials, however, had decided to base themselves in St. Augustine, in part because they had finally brokered a peace with the hostile Timucua chiefdoms, as evidenced by records of Indians having been baptized around this time, as well as the establishment of two Indian villages near the town.70
In the end, it was neither Orista nor French attacks that ended Santa Elena, but those of the English. Francis Drake’s assault on St. Augustine in 1586 was an impetus for Menéndez Márquez to bring the Santa Elena settlers to that town to help rebuild it and shore up its defenses, even though Drake had been unable to find Santa Elena and so it was left unharmed. In the face of much protest, the governor forced the settlers to leave in 1587, and the fort was dismantled.
THE COMPLEX NEGOTIATIONS and often violent confrontations that took place over the course of establishing settlements in Florida constituted one part of the colonizing story. Running in parallel were the efforts of the religious orders, ready to build churches and convert the native peoples, creating conflict of a different nature. Evangelization in Florida presented basic but serious challenges. The first was the priests’ very survival. Like the conquistadores, the friars had numerous false starts, such as the ill-fated voyage of the Dominican friar Luis Cáncer in 1549.
Cáncer had met Bartolomé de Las Casas, who by this point was the bishop of Chiapas, in Mexico. Like Las Casas, Cáncer wanted to convert people in Florida by peaceful means. He arrived in the Tampa area in 1549, and some of the people there captured a few of the friars, forcing the remaining ones, including Cáncer, to sail on.71 When he stopped again, he was clubbed to death within a matter of minutes after stepping onshore.72
Nearly two decades passed before another concerted effort was made, and it came only after Menéndez drove out the French. He reached out to the new Society of Jesus (Jesuit) order, which had been founded in 1540; the Jesuits were dedicated to evangelization and education, and Menéndez wanted them to work among the Florida Indians.73 The Jesuit experience in the Americas was limited, with the order having gone only to Brazil in 1549, but they were enthusiastic. Like the Dominicans, they, too, were concerned about how the secular habits and worldly vices of soldiers and colonists were influencing the spiritual conquest of these lands. It would be up to the religious orders to provide a successful and lasting conversion to Christianity.74
In 1570 a small party of Jesuits and soldiers set forth from Santa Elena, sailing north to the Bahía de Santa María, to a land they believed to be named Ajacán or Axacán. Along with them was a man called Don Luis de Velasco, though he was not a Spaniard but a Native American whose original name was Paquiquineo. He claimed he was from Ajacán and in 1561 had been taken on board the Spanish ship Santa Catalina, which may have been on an exploratory mission around the area, or perhaps been blown off course.75 On board, he was baptized and given the name of the then viceroy of New Spain, going on to spend almost a decade in Cuba, New Spain, and Spain, where he attracted the favor of Felipe II.76 Velasco told many stories about his homeland and regaled the court with descriptions of its abundance, helping to reignite the king’s interest in La Florida.77
Around 1565–66 he and Menéndez finally met, and the two went on voyages between Cuba and La Florida. This was around the time when Menéndez wanted to put a settlement in the Bahía de Santa María, and his interest in Ajacán was intensified in part by his conversations with Velasco. Menéndez also mentioned the possibility of the existence of a waterway to the east in his correspondence with the king.78 Velasco, however, now having spent years among Spaniards, could not help noticing how they behaved in their American territories. Whatever he really thought, Velasco appeared to be enthusiastic about Christianity and plans for the expedition, which left in August 1566, taking Dominican friars and soldiers to Ajacán. As they sailed near the bay, Velasco tried to direct them, but he could not—or did not want to—find the proper entrance for Ajacán. They were forced to give up and turn back.79
Despite the suspicious circumstances surrounding Velasco’s failure to navigate what should have been familiar waters, another attempt was organized in 1570, this time with the Jesuits. There were no soldiers with them, only Velasco, eight priests, and a young boy named Alonso de Olmos, a Spaniard born in the Americas. This time, they arrived in Ajacán by September and were soon in Velasco’s village. His friends and family thought he had returned from the dead; yet it seemed to the priests that these people were half-alive themselves, as there were signs of food shortages, not the promised abundance.80 Velasco was meant to act as a translator for the Jesuits, but he soon abandoned them, leaving the priests to fend for themselves.
By the time a ship carrying supplies arrived in the spring of 1571, it was too late. The sailors noticed that the Indians near the shore were dressed in the clothing of priests, and they became alarmed. They took two hostages (one jumped overboard) and returned to Cuba to extract the full story. What they heard was that Velasco had left the priests, but the Jesuits were soon forced to return to his village because they could not find enough food to survive and they had trouble communicating with other Indians. When three priests arrived asking to speak to Velasco, he killed them and went on to murder the other five men who were waiting at an encampment.81
Menéndez, who was in Havana at that point, organized an immediate campaign of retaliation and to rescue the one survivor, young Alonso de Olmos. Menéndez sailed to Ajacán in 1572 and, luring some of the native people onto his ship, he ambushed them, killing twenty. He managed to have Olmos released from captivity. Menéndez also demanded that Velasco be brought to him, but in his absence Valasco hanged some of the Indian captives.82 After that, the Jesuit authorities decided that no more of their order should go to Florida. They were replaced by Franciscans, with Father Francisco del Castillo arriving in Santa Elena in 1573, and soon after him, Father Alonso Cavezas, who went to St. Augustine.83
The priests showed up just as Felipe II issued new legislation that aimed to change the nature of conquest across the Americas. Menéndez had written to him in 1573 asking permission to enslave Florida Indians if the circumstances of a just war arose against those who had “broken the peace many times, slaying many Christians.”84 A reply came that same year in the form of the king’s ordinances of discovery (Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias), stipulating that now “discoveries are not to be called conquests since we wish them to be carried out peacefully and charitably.”85 He ordered that the missionaries—not adelantados—lead this effort, with the military now charged with defending the missions.86
The second challenge for the priests—once they had ensured their own survival—was the actual task at hand: converting the native people to Christianity, a process that could be hindered by cultural misunderstanding and linguistic incomprehension. In the 1580s, the Franciscans began to place small missions—doctrinas—where the friars instructed the locals in Catholic doctrine. Because of what had happened in Ajacán, as well as the abandonment of Santa Elena in 1587, these missions reached only as far north as San Diego de Satuache, by the Ogeechee River, south of today’s Savannah.87 Others were dotted southward along the coast, in places such as St. Catherines Island, then known as Santa Catalina de Guale, all the way to St. Augustine. By 1596, there were nine doctrinas and a dozen friars, and they would continue to spread south and west.88 They had less success in south Florida, among the Calusa or Tequesta (near Miami).89 Where these missions had taken root, especially among the Timucua and Apalachee, conversion was received with some degree of enthusiasm. There was one known case of a Timucua chief even requesting that friars come to his village, a change of heart that may have had more to do with using an association with Spanish power to boost his authority than with a spiritual transformation.90
The priests were also forced to try to understand the people they wanted to convert. Francisco Pareja learned the Timucuan language to help with conversions at the San Pedro de Mocama mission, which had been set up in 1587 amid the Tacatacuru chiefdom on Cumberland Island.91 Pareja arrived in 1595 and his efforts to communicate have preserved what little was known about the Timucuan language and at least nine of its dialects. His method was straightforward: Pareja turned Timucuan into a written language, spelling out Timucuan words as they sounded. By doing this, he was able to translate religious doctrines into Timucuan, though this was only a sliver of the linguistic world of Florida. It included the Guale language and the inland Apalachee, both of them related to Muskogean, but Timucuan was distinct from them all.92
If peaceful relations could be established, followed by a willingness to submit to the practices of the Church, a third challenge remained: how to make a mission survive and even thrive. This often required trying to tie people to the land. The Guale and Orista people would go inland for part of the year, no doubt at times to be free of the missionaries, which worried the priests because it meant the Indians might go a long time without hearing Mass.93 As one Jesuit, Juan Rogel, wrote in a 1570 letter, this “wandering” was the core of the problem. “If we are to gather fruit, the Indians must join and live in settlements and cultivate the soil.”94 Yet not all the people subsisted solely on agriculture, in part because of the diverse environment of Florida. It was more complicated to plant crops in southern Florida, as the sandy soil and swamps were not suitable. Although St. Augustine and many of the early missions were near the coast, the assistance of Indians who lived farther inland and had more developed agriculture helped them survive.95
Even when crops were planted, mission life could be difficult. The structures were often basic. The friars in Florida had to contend with wattle-and-daub or oyster-shell tabby as a building material, palm thatching for roofs, and earthen floors. A typical mission had a chapel, a kitchen, and living quarters for the priests, built around a courtyard, with some including military garrisons for protection.96
Some of the Native Americans who had converted to Christianity worked for the religious orders as laborers or farmers, often living in small villages near the mission. For many groups, this was a lasting and significant transformation from their seasonal nomadic movements. With Christianity came settlement. Despite this change, the biggest threat to any sort of longevity was the possibility of an Indian revolt, which could destroy years of work. In 1597 the Guale uprising, also known as Juanillo’s Revolt after Don Juan, its leader, who was heir to a chieftaincy, set back the Franciscan effort. Although uprisings and rebellions could be triggered for many reasons, what is known about this particular incident from the remaining accounts is that both Indians and Spaniards experienced a wide range of challenges and frustrations.97 For instance, the accepted cause of the revolt, at Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Tolomato (near today’s Darien, Georgia), and the subsequent beheading of Father Pedro de Corpa, may have been the alleged attempts by the priest to curb Don Juan’s polygamous behavior; at the same time, underlying struggles among the chiefdoms also fed into these events.98
Corpa had been stationed in Tolomato, the Guale town with one of the most important chiefs, known to the Spanish as Don Francisco. The priests had managed the conversion of several thousand people, so it took Corpa by surprise when a group of warriors burst in on his morning prayers. The chief’s son, Juanillo, had Corpa killed on the spot. Juanillo then summoned other Guale chiefs to Tolomato, from which they raided other missions, including Santa Catalina de Guale and Santa Clara de Tupiqui, killing five more friars and setting buildings and chapels on fire.99 From there they planned to move south, toward the missions near San Pedro, among the Mocama people, but on the morning of October 4, 1597, they discovered an unexpected number of Spanish soldiers, whose brigantine happened to have called at the island. Many of the Guale turned back and, while a few struck anyway, neither of the two friars there was hurt.100 One of the surviving friars wrote to the governor in St. Augustine pleading for help, and men arrived by October 17.101 Once the attacks had been quelled, Governor Gonzalo Méndez de Canzo began to look for answers, interrogating people as well as conducting punitive raids. While the Spanish were concerned with their own safety, structures and property belonging to other chiefs were also attacked, indicating that wider power struggles may have been taking place.
The investigation took years. By 1600, Méndez began negotiating peace treaties with many of the caciques.102 He also sent the chief of the Asao village, Don Domingo, on a mission to capture Don Juan in 1601—this despite Don Domingo’s own involvement in the initial 1597 uprising. Méndez, however, was more interested in reestablishing alliances with Guale leaders, including Don Domingo, who now had considerable power.
Don Domingo had made a visit to St. Augustine and told Méndez who was behind the attacks. He also brought some laborers to work in the Spanish maize fields, and in exchange Méndez gave him some woolen cloth.103 After this, Don Domingo led a party of other chiefs and uncovered Don Juan at a fortification in Yfusinique. They killed Don Juan, as well as the male members of his family who were with him. Don Domingo sent Don Juan’s scalp to Méndez, who then considered the matter closed.104 Other chiefs now pledged or reaffirmed their loyalty and obedience to the Spanish crown. Don Domingo continued to stay in the governor’s good graces, and when the Franciscans returned to build a new mission, it was placed in Asao in 1606 and called Santo Domingo de Asao.105 The Guale uprising indicates how complex these overlapping relationships were, not only between the Spanish and Native Americans, but also among the Indian chiefdoms, where the balance of power was continually shifting.106
By the beginning of the 1600s, the Florida missions had been repaired, and in 1606 the bishop of Cuba, Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano, decided to inspect them. Within a few decades, the priests began to move inland, and the first Franciscan mission was placed among the Apalachee people of the Florida panhandle in 1633, taking advantage of the fertile terrain ideal for larger-scale agriculture, since St. Augustine needed a steady supply of basic foodstuffs.107 Overland trails soon connected the settlement to the missions, a journey that could take around two weeks.108 The Apalachee missions were mostly small, but some, such as San Luís de Talimali, in today’s Tallahassee, were substantial. San Luís, for instance, produced surplus wheat, cattle, and corn that could be distributed to St. Augustine or even exported elsewhere.109
It took more than half a century, but the Spanish managed to put a settlement in Florida, drive out the French, win Indian alliances, and even have thousands of converts by the early 1600s. The lands of Ayllón and Chicora did not yield hoped-for gold, but those initial explorers had been following mental maps, driven by imaginings as much as by navigational reality. Although by the early seventeenth century a small part of Florida was now firmly in Spain’s orbit, there were only a few hundred people living in St. Augustine, precariously positioned on the fringes of both the Spanish empire and a much larger indigenous world that they had barely penetrated and could scarcely imagine, which stretched west from Florida for thousands of miles.