Notes on the Floridian Peninsula; its Literary History, Indian Tribes and Antiquities

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, at the time of the death of Aviles, a firm and extensive foundation had been laid for the Christian religion, though it was by no means professed, as has been asserted, “by all the tribes from Santa Helena, on the north, to Boca Rattones, on the south, and from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico.”268

After his death, under the rule of his nephew, Pedro Menendez Marquez, a bold soldier but a poor politician, the colony seems to have dwindled to a very insignificant point. Spanish historians speak vaguely of many nations reduced by him, but such accounts cannot be trusted. At the time of the destruction of St. Augustine by Drake, in 1586, this town was built of wood, and garrisoned by one hundred and fifty men.269 And if we may believe the assertions of the prisoners he brought to England, the whole number of souls, both at this place and at Santa Helena, did not exceed two hundred.270 Only six priests were in the colony; and as to the disposition of the Indians, it was so hostile and dangerous, that for some time subsequent the soldiers dared never leave the fort, even to hunt or fish.271 Yet it was just about this time (1584), that Williams,272 on the authority of his ancient manuscript, states that “the Spanish authorities were acknowledged as far west as the river Mississippi (Empalazada), and north one hundred and forty leagues to the mountains of Georgia!”

As early as 1566, fourteen women had been introduced by Sancho de Arminiega; but we read of no increase, and it is probable that for a long series of years the colony was mainly supported by fresh arrivals.

It was not till 1592, when, in pursuance of an ordinance of the Council of the Indies, twelve Franciscans were deputed to the territory, that the missions took a new start. They were immediately forwarded to various quarters of the province, and for a while seem to have been quite successful in their labors. It is said that in 1594 there were “no less than twenty mission houses.” One of these priests, Pedro de Corpa, superior of the mission of Tolemato (Tolemaro) near the mouth of the St. Marys river, by his unsparing and harsh rebukes, excited the anger of the natives to such a degree that, headed by the chief of Guale, they rose en masse, and murdered him at the foot of the altar. Nor did this glut their vengeance. Bearing his dissevered head upon a pole as a trophy and a standard, they crossed to the neighboring island of Guale, and there laid waste the missions Topiqui, Asao, Ospo, and Assopo. The governor of St. Augustine lost no time in hastening to the aid of the sufferers; and, though the perpetrators of the deeds could nowhere be found, by the destruction of their store-houses and grain fields, succeeded by a long drought, “which God visited upon them for their barbarity,” such a dreadful famine fell upon them that their tribe was nearly annihilated (1600).

In 1602, Juan Altimirano, bishop of Cuba, visited this portion of his diocess, and was much disheartened by the hopeless barbarity of the natives. So much so, indeed, that years afterwards, when holding discussion with the bishop of Guatemala concerning the query, “Is God known by the light of Nature?” and the latter pressing him cogently with Cicero, he retorted, “Ah, but Cicero had not visited Florida, or he would never have spoken thus.”

This discouraging anecdote to the contrary, the very next year, in the general assembly that met at Toledo, Florida, in conjunction with Havana and Bahama, was constituted a Custodia of eleven convents, and in 1612, they were elevated into an independent Provincia, under the name of Santa Helena, with the head convent at Havana, and Juan Capillas appointed first Provincial Bishop.273 An addition of thirty-two Franciscans, partly under Geronimo de Ore in 1612, and partly sent out by Philip III., the year after, sped the work of conversion, and for a long time subsequent, we find vague mention of nations baptized and churches erected.

About the middle of the century, (1649,) the priests had increased to fifty, and the episcopal revenue amounted to four hundred dollars. At this time St. Augustine numbered “more than three hundred inhabitants.” So great had been the success of the spiritual fathers, that in 1655, Diego de Rebolledo, then Governor and Captain-General, petitioned the king to erect the colony into a bishopric; a request which, though favorably viewed, was lost through delay and procrastination. Similar attempts, which were similarly frustrated, were made by his successors Juan Marquez in 1682, and Juan Ferro in 1689.

Notwithstanding these indications of a lively energy, a very different story is told by the traveller of Carthagena, François Coreal, who visited the peninsula in 1669. He mentions no settlements but San Augustine and San Matheo,—indeed, expressly states that there were none,274—and even these were in a sorry plight enough, (assez degarnies.) Either he must have been misinformed, or the work of conversion proceeded with great and sudden rapidity after his visit, as less than twenty years afterwards, (1687,) when by the attempts of Juan Marquez to remove the natives to the West India Islands, many forsook their homes for distant regions, they left a number of missions deserted, as San Felipe, San Simon, Sapola, Obaldiqui, and others. This marked increase was largely owing to a subsidy of twenty-four Franciscans under Alonzo de Moral in 1676, and the energetic action of the Bishop of Cuba, who spared no pains to facilitate the advent of missionaries to all parts.275

In pursuance of the advice of Pablo de Hita, Governor-General, attempts were renewed in 1679 to convert the nations of the southern extremity of the peninsula, and in 1698, there were fourteen Franciscans employed among them. These Indians are described as “idolaters and given to all abominable vices,” and not a few of the missionaries suffered martyrdom in their efforts to reclaim them.276

Towards the close of the century, (1696,) the condition of St. Augustine is described by Jonathan Dickinson277 as follows:—“It is about three-quarters of a mile in length, not regularly built, the houses not very thick, they having large orchards, in which are plenty of oranges, lemmons, pome-citrons, lymes, figgs, and peaches: the houses, most of them, are old buildings, and not half of them inhabited. The number of men that belong to government being about three hundred, and many of them are kept as sentinalls at their lookouts. At the north end of the town stands a large fortification, being a quadrangel with bastions. Each bastion will contain thirteen guns, but there is not passing two-thirds of fifty-two mounted.... The wall of the fortification is about thirty foot high, built of sandstone sawed [coquina rock].... The fort is moated round.”

The colony of Pensacola or Santa Maria de Galve, founded by Andres de Pes in 1693, gradually increasing in importance and maintaining an overland connection with St. Augustine, naturally gave rise to intermediate settlements, for which the fertile, wide-spread savannas of Alachua, the rich hammocks along the Suwannee, and the productive limestone soil of Middle Florida offered unrivalled advantages.

The tractable Apalaches and their neighbors received the missionaries with much favor, and it is said that almost all the former were converted;278 a statement which we must confine, however, to that small portion of the confederated tribes included under this title, that lived in Middle Florida. When Colonel Moore invaded their country in 1703-4, he found them living in villages, each having its parish church, subsisting principally by agriculture, and protected by a garrison of Spanish soldiers.279 The open well-cleared character of their country, and the marks of their civilized condition were long recalled in tradition by the later Indians.280 So strong a hold did Catholicism take upon them that more than a century subsequent, when the nation was reduced to an insignificant family on the Bayou Rapide, they still retained its forms, corrupted by admixture with their ancient heliolatry.281

On the Atlantic coast, there were besides St. Augustine the towns of San Matheo, Santa Cruce, San Juan, Santa Maria, and others. The Indians of these missions Dickinson282 describes as scrupulous in their observance of the Catholic rites, industrious and prosperous in their worldly relations, “having plenty of hogs and fowls, and large crops of corn;” and each hamlet presided over by “Fryars,” who gave regular instruction to the native children in school-houses built for the purpose. All these were north of St. Augustine; to the south the savages were more perverse, and in spite of the earnest labors of many pious priests, some of whom fell martyrs to their zeal, they clung tenaciously to heathendom.

Nothing definite is known regarding the settlements on and near the Gulf, but in all probability they were more extensive than those on the eastern shore, peopling the coast and inland plains with a race of civilized and Christian Indians. Cotemporary geographers speak of “the towns of Achalaque, Ossachile, Hirritiqua, Coluna, and some others of less note,”283 as founded and governed by Spaniards, while numerous churches and villages are designated on ancient charts, with whose size and history we are totally unacquainted. Many of these doubtless refer to native hamlets, while the Spanish names affixed to others point to settlements made by that nation. How much the Church of Rome had at heart the extension and well-being of this portion of her domain, may be judged from the fact that she herself bore half the expense of the military kept in the province for its protection.284

Such was the condition of the Spanish missions of Florida at their most flourishing period. Shortly after the commencement of the eighteenth century, foes from the north destroyed and drove out the colonists, demolishing in a few years all that the life, and the blood, and the toil of so many martyrs during two centuries had availed to construct. About the middle of the century we have a tolerably accurate knowledge of the country through English writers; and then so few and insignificant were the Spanish settlements, that only one occurred between St. Marks and St. Augustine, while, besides the latter, the only post on the Atlantic coast was a wretched “hut” on the south bank of the St. Johns at its mouth.285

Undoubtedly it is to the close of the seventeenth century therefore that we must refer those vestiges of an extensive and early inhabitation that occasionally meet our notice in various parts. Sometimes in the depth of forests of apparently primeval growth the traveller has been astonished to find rusting church bells, half buried brass cannon, mouldering walls, and the decaying ruins of once stately edifices. Especially numerous are these in middle Florida, along the old Spanish highway from St. Augustine to Pensacola, on the banks of the St. Johns, and on Amelia island. The Indians informed the younger Bartram286 that near the Suwannee, a few miles above Manatee Spring, the Spaniards formerly had “a rich, well cultivated, and populous settlement, and a strong fortified post, as they likewise had at the savanna and field of Capola,” east of the Suwannee, between it and the Alachua plains; but that these were far inferior to those on the Apalachian Old Fields “where yet remain vast works and buildings, fortifications, temples, &c.” The elder Bartram287 speaks of similar remarkable antiquities on the St. Johns, Bernard Romans288 in various parts of the interior, Williams,289 Brackenridge,290 and others291 in middle Florida, and I may add the numerous Spanish Old Fields which I observed throughout the peninsula, the extensive coquina quarries on Anastasia (St. Estaca, Fish’s) Island, and the deserted plantations on Musquito and Indian river Lagoons, as unequivocal proofs of a much denser population than is usually supposed to have existed in those regions.

The easy conquest these settlements offered to the English and the rapidity with which they melted away were partly owing to the insufficient force kept for their protection. Colonel Daniels, who led the land force of Governor Moore’s army in 1702, and took possession of St. Augustine, apparently met with no noticeable opposition on his march; while we have it on official authority that the year after there were only three hundred and fifty-three soldiers in the whole province of whom forty-five were in Apalache, seven in Timuqua, nineteen in Guale, and the rest in St. Augustine.

The incursion of the English in 1702-1706, and of the Creeks (Alibamons) in 1705, were very destructive to the monastic establishments of the north, and though Juan de Ayala, minister of the interior, devoted himself earnestly to restoring them, his labor was destined to yield small profit. The destruction of Pensacola by Bienville in 1719, the ravages of Colonel Palmer eight years later, the second demolition of the settlements in Apalache, between Tallahassie and St. Marks, by a marauding party of English and Indians in 1736, the inroad of Governor Oglethorpe four years subsequent, and another incursion of the English in 1745—these following in quick succession, it may be readily conceived rendered of no avail the efforts of the Franciscans to re-establish their missions on Floridian soil.

Previous to the cession to England the settlements had become reduced to St. Josephs, Pensacola, and St. Marks on the Gulf, Picolati on the St. Johns, and St. Augustine on the Atlantic. When the English took possession, the latter town numbered nine hundred houses and five thousand seven hundred inhabitants including a garrison of two thousand five hundred men.292 There was a well-built church here as also at Pensacola, while at St. Marks there were two convents, one of Jesuits the other of Franciscans.293 At this time but very few of the Indians, who are described as “bigotted idolators worshipping the sun and moon,” and “noted for a bold, subtile, and deceitful people,”294 seem to have been in the fold of the Catholic Church.

Harassed and worn out as the colony was by long wars, and apparently soon to die a natural death, it is not a matter of wonder that in the tripartite Definitive Treaty of Peace signed at Versailles, February 10th, 1763, Spain was glad to relinquish her right to its soil in consideration of the far superior island of Cuba.295 Though it was stipulated that all who desired to remain should enjoy their property-rights, and religion, very few availed themselves of the privilege, little loth to forsake a country that had been one continued scene of war and tumult for more than half a century.

With this closes the history of the conversion of the Indians as during the English regime they were lost sight of in other issues, and when the Spanish returned to power such a scene of unquiet turmoil and ceaseless wrangling awaited them as effectually to divert their attention from the moral condition of the aboriginal tribes.

CHAPTER VI.

ANTIQUITIES

Mounds.—Roads.—Shell Heaps.—Old Fields.

The descriptions left by the elder and younger Bartram of the magnitude and character of the Floridian antiquities, had impressed me with a high opinion of their perfection, and induced large expectations of the light they might throw on the civilization of the aborigines of the peninsula; but a personal examination has convinced me that they differ little from those common in other parts of our country, and are capable of a similar explanation. Chief among them are the mounds. These are not infrequent upon the rich lowlands that border the rivers and lakes; and so invariably did their builders choose this position, that during the long journeys I made in the prairies and flat pine woods east of the St. Johns as well as over the rolling and fertile country between this river and the Gulf, as far south as Manatee, I never saw one otherwise located. An enumeration and description of some of the most noteworthy will suffice to indicate their character and origin.

On Amelia island, some half a mile east of Fernandina new town, there is an open field, containing some thirty acres, in shape an isosceles triangle, clothed with long grass and briary vines, bounded on all sides by dense thickets of myrtle, live-oak, palmetto, yellow pine and cedar. About midway of the base of this triangle, stands a mound thrown up on the extremity of a natural ridge, which causes its height to vary from twenty to five-and-thirty feet on the different sides. It is composed of the common surface sand, obtained from the east side, close to the base, where an excavation is visible. A few live-oaks and pines grow upon it, the largest of which, at the time of my visit (1856), measured seventeen inches in diameter. There is a fine view from the summit, embracing on the west the vast marshes between Amelia island and the mainland, with a part of St. Mary’s sound, across which, northward, lie the woody shores of Cumberland island, projected in dark relief against the glittering surf of the Atlantic, which stretches away in a brilliant white line to the north-east, loosing itself in the broad expanse of ocean that bounds the eastern horizon. Hence, one of its uses was, doubtless, as a look-out or watch-tower; but from excavations, made by myself and others, it proved, like every similar mound I examined, or heard of as examined, in Florida, to be, in construction, a vast tomb. Human bones, stone axes, darts, and household utensils, were disinterred in abundance. Quantities of rudely marked fragments of pottery, and broken oyster, clam, and conch shells, were strewed over the field. I was informed of a second mound, smaller in size, somewhat south of Fernandina light-house; but owing to the brevity of my stay, and the incredible swarms of musquitoes that at that season infested the woods, I did not visit it. I could learn nothing of the two large tumuli on this island, known as the “Ogeechee Mounts,” mentioned by the younger Bartram.296

On Fleming’s Island, at the mouth of Black Creek, identified by Sparks with the “extremely beautiful, fertile, and thickly inhabited” Edelano of the French colonists, and on Murphy’s Island, eight miles above Pilatka, are found mounds of moderate size, and various other vestiges of their ancient owners. But far more remarkable than these are the large constructions on the shores and islands at the southern extremity of Lake George, first visited and described as follows, by John Bartram,297 in 1766: “About noon we landed at Mount Royal, and went to see an Indian tumulus, which was about one hundred yards in diameter, nearly round, and twenty foot high. Found some bones scattered on it. It must be very ancient, as live-oak are growing upon it three foot in diameter; directly south from the tumulus is an avenue, all the surface of which has been taken off and thrown on one side, which makes a bank of about a rood wide and a foot high, more or less, as the unevenness of the ground required, for the avenue is as level as a floor from bank to bank, and continues so for three quarters of a mile, to a pond of water about one hundred yards wide and one hundred and fifty long, north and south,—seemed to be an oblong square, and its banks four foot perpendicular, gradually sloping every way to the water, the depth of which we do not say, but do not imagine it deep, as the grass grows all over it; by its regularity it seems to be artificial; if so, perhaps the sand was carried from thence to raise the tumulus.”

A description of this mound is also given by Wm. Bartram, who visited it both with his father, and fifteen years later.298 In summing up the antiquities, he saw in Florida, this author says,299 “from the river St. Juans southerly to the point of the peninsula of Florida are to be seen high pyramidal mounts with spacious and extensive avenues leading from them out of the town to an artificial lake or pond of water. The great mounts, highways, and artificial lakes up St. Juans on the east shore, just at the entrance of the great Lake George; one on the opposite shore, on the bank of the Little lake, another on Dunn’s island, a little below Charlotteville, and one on the large beautiful island just without the Capes of Lake George, in sight of Mount Royal, and a spacious one on the West banks of Musquitoe river near New Smyrna, are the most remarkable of this sort that occurred to me.”

The artificial lakes in this account are the excavations made in obtaining material, since filled with water. The highways, which, in another passage, the above quoted writer describes as “about fifty yards wide, sunk a little below the common level, and the earth thrown up on each side, making a bank of about two feet high,”300 seem, from both French and Spanish accounts to have been not unusual among the natives. Laudonniére mentions one of great beauty that extended from the village of Edelano to the river some three hundred paces in length,301 and another still more considerable at the head quarters of the powerful chief Utina,302 which must have been very near if not identical with that at Mount Royal. La Vega, in his remarkable chapter on the construction of the native villages,303 speaks of such broad passages leading from the public square at the base to the house of the chief on the summit of the mound that the natives were accustomed to throw up for its site. What we are to understand by the royal highways, Caminos Reales, near Tampa Bay, that lead from one town to another, (que van de un Pueblo al otro,)304 an expression that would not be applicable to mere trails, is not very evident.

Six miles by water above Lake Monroe, near the shore of a small lagoon on the left bank of the river, stands an oval mound of surface soil filled with human bones of so great an age, and so entirely decomposed, that the instrument with which I was digging passed through them with as much ease as through the circumjacent earth. Yet, among these ancient skeletons, I discovered numerous small blue and large white glass beads, undoubtedly inhumed at the formation of the tumulus. The bodies were all of adults and no special order in their deposition seemed to have been observed. Previous to my visit, I was informed that small earthenware articles had been disinterred, some of which were simply pyramids of triangular bases, whose use had much puzzled the finder. We know that this form, sacred in the mythologies of the old world to the worship of the productive power, had also a strong religious significance among the Natchez, and many other aboriginal tribes,305 and probably in connection with the burial of the dead, it possessed among the Floridians, as it did among the ancients and orientals,306 a symbolical connection with the immortality of the soul and the life after death.

In the rich hammock half a mile below Lake Harney on the left bank of the St. Johns, is a large oval mound, its transverse diameter at base forty yards, and thirty feet in height. It is surrounded by a ditch whence the soil of which it is constructed was taken. An extremely luxuriant vegetation covers the whole hammock and the mound itself, though few of the trees indicate a great age. On the same side of the river twenty miles above the lake, is another similar mound. They are abundant on the rich lands of Marion and Alachua counties, and in the hammocks of the Suwannee, and are found at least as far south as Charlotte’s Harbor and the Miami river. There is one on the government reserve in Tampa, another at the head of Old Tampa Bay, and a third on Long Key, Sarasota Bay. A portion of the latter has been washed away by the waters of the gulf and vast numbers of skeletons exposed, some of which I was assured by an intelligent gentleman of Manatee, who had repeatedly visited the spot and examined the remains, were of astonishing size and must have belonged to men seven or eight feet in height. This statement is not so incredible as it may appear at first sight. Various authors report instances of equally gigantic stature among the aborigines of our country. The chiefs of the province of Chicora, a portion of what is now South Carolina, were famous for their height, which was supposed to prove their royal blood;307 some inhabitants of the province of Amichel on the Gulf of Mexico were not less remarkable in this respect;308 and Beverly found among certain human bones religiously preserved in a temple of the Virginian Indians an os femoris, measuring two feet nine inches in length;309 while in our own days, Schoolcraft saw a humerus at Fort Hill, New York,310 and Lanman, sundry bones in a cave in Virginia311 that must have belonged to men compared to whom ours is but a race of dwarfs.