The History of Florida (19 page)

Cuba was untaxed and unlawful and that foreign vessels were entering the

western ports did not trouble caciques or floridanos. Even the friars partici-

pated, raising hogs and increasing the size of their sabanas with the object

of adorning their churches and bringing comfort to their convents.

In the mid-seventeenth century, royal support for soldiers, friars, and

caciques became increasingly irregular. Deeply involved in European wars

and peninsular rebellions, Spain could barely maintain the centers, much

less the peripheries. The situado was stolen by pirates, lost at sea, swamped

in red tape, or sequestered by the king’s command for more urgent needs.

For years at a time it was not paid at al . Although eventual y most of the

funds would be replaced, their arrival was so unpredictable that the colo-

nists learned to rely less on the metropolis and more on their own devices.

During periods of wavering royal support, the demands on Christian

proof

Indians rose. When the situado failed to materialize, chiefs who had not re-

ceived the gifts that reinforced their authority were pressed all the more ur-

gently to have their vassals feed the Spanish. Secondary garrisons were sta-

tioned in the provincial capitals of San Luis de Apalache, San Francisco de

Potano (in Timucua), and Santa Catalina de Guale. Settlements of floridano

traders and ranchers grew up around these garrisons, and these settlers,

too, demanded an allotment of Indian labor. Natives in the provinces now

had not only caciques and friars to feed, but soldiers and “people of qual-

ity.” Juana Caterina de Florencia, wife of the deputy governor of Apalache,

expected to be supplied with fish, milk, and six women to grind maize.

Because the waters around the peninsula were dangerous and the jour-

ney by sea was long, and because cart roads were nonexistent and pack

animals scarce, most of the freight between St. Augustine and San Luis was

carried on Indian backs. The yearly ration for a Franciscan weighed no less

than 1,800 pounds. As the number of friars increased and the supply lines

to the western doctrinas lengthened to seventy leagues and longer, more

and more burdener-days were required to deliver religious rations, and the

packs did not travel back to St. Augustine empty but full of products from

the provinces. Two mid-seventeenth-century west coast Indian rebel ions

86 · Amy Turner Bushnel

would be blamed on burdening, with the friars pointing at the governors

and the governors at the friars.

Governor Benito Ruíz de Salazar y Val ecil a, who secured the gover-

norship of Florida in 1645 by promising to build a galleon, marshaled the

colony’s resources and embarked on a program of economic development.

While the king’s galleon took shape in the shipyards of Campeche, Yucatan,

Salazar y Val ecil a sent the soldiers of the San Luis garrison north into

Apalachicola with trade goods to exchange for deerskins. To remedy the

shortage of beasts of burden he began to breed mules, and on the border

between Yustaga and Apalache he started a wheat farm.

These enterprises received a series of setbacks. The first was the Apalache

Rebellion of 1647, a kind of civil war between Christian and non-Christian

chiefs. No sooner was that suppressed than the colony was stricken with the

yellow fever that was sweeping through Caribbean ports. The “black vomit”

killed indiscriminately—whites and blacks as well as Indians—and among

the many who died was the governor. Development was interrupted a third

time by the Timucua Rebel ion of 1656, triggered by Governor Diego de

Rebolledo’s mobilization of the Indian militia after the English capture of

Jamaica. Disease, famine, and fugitivism wreaked demographic havoc in

central Florida. Outside of Yustaga, Timucua Province had too few inhabit-

proof

ants even to service the transportation network.

St. Augustine itself was badly shaken in 1668 when the privateer Robert

Searles, with a patent issued by the Jamaican governor, sacked the city, re-

portedly killing more than a hundred people in the streets and rounding up

everyone who looked African or Indian to be sold as a slave. The colony was

too strategic to be abandoned to the English, as many thought that it must.

Queen Regent Mariana ordered the viceroy of New Spain to make Florida

a priority, bring its situado up to date, increase the Franciscan fund enough

to replace the forty-three friars on the rol s with soldiers, and begin sending

the Florida treasury an extra 10,000 pesos yearly with which to construct

a lasting fort of stone. In 1670, the founding of Charleston by settlers from

Barbados underscored the urgency of defense measures, and the queen in-

creased the garrison from 300 to 350 men.

Floridanos, who regarded militia service as something for Indians, ap-

propriated a tenth of the billets in the garrison as reserve officers, or
refor-

mados
, who received the pay of a soldier but were exempt from guard duty.

They had already naturalized the benefice and lesser positions of the parish,

the office of public notary, the two proprietary offices of the treasury—of-

fices so important that those who held them doubled as a municipal council,

Republic of Spaniards, Republic of Indians · 87

or
cabildo
, to advise the governor—and its clerkships, and the position of

defender of the Indians, which they were seeking to make permanent and

salaried.

Among Florida’s notable families, the Menéndez Marquezes stood out

for their able family strategy. Descended from Juan Menéndez Marquez and

María Menéndez y Posada, two close relatives of the sixteenth-century gov-

ernor Pedro Menéndez Marquez, himself a nephew of Pedro Menéndez de

Avilés, the family maintained its position and fortunes for 150 years through

marriage, treasury offices, military offices, Cuban commerce, unofficial

borrowing from the situado, and cattle ranching. Don Thomás Menéndez

Marquez was typical. From his ranch at La Chua in the depopulated savan-

nahs of central Florida, he shipped tallow, hides, and dried beef out the San

Martín and down to Havana. Although his brother, father, and grandfather

had all been royal officials of the treasury, and he, his son, and his grandson

would follow their lead, don Thomás had no compunction about avoiding

customs duties. Floridanos honored the king’s person, not his regulations.

Al told, the building of St. Augustine’s stone fort, the Castil o de San

Marcos, took twenty-four years and cost the Crown more than 138,000 pe-

sos, much of it going for Indian labor in the coquina quarries on Anas-

tasia Island. Twice as many native workmen were stationed at the capital

proof

as formerly; many brought their families and settled down. The influx of

money and people caused prices to rise, stimulating agriculture and ranches

like La Chua. Even so, there were times when the royal storehouses stood

empty and governors were forced to seize the stores of private individuals. It

was dangerous to do this to friars or priests, who could quickly close ranks

against anyone who threatened their prerogatives.

Governor Juan Marquez Cabrera alienated the religious establishment

throughout the course of his administration (1680–1687). In one typical

instance, he ordered Captain Francisco de Fuentes, lieutenant governor

of Guale, to requisition some maize belonging to Father Juan de Uzeda,

doctrinero of San José de Zapala, in order to provide rations for refugees

from Santa Catalina de Guale who had been asked to build a fort on Sapelo

Island. When, at last, no priest would give him the sacraments, the governor

deserted his post. Governor Diego de Quiroga y Losada similarly made an

enemy of parish priest Alonso de Leturiondo by exercising eminent domain

over his granary. The priest responded by padlocking the parish church on

the Feastday of St. Mark and doing his part to ruin Quiroga in the lengthy

judicial review, or
residencia
, that followed every governor’s term of office.

In the late seventeenth century, Florida regained its sixteenth-century

88 · Amy Turner Bushnel

reputation as a land of war. The provinces came under attack seasonal y

by pirates and by slave-raiding Indians armed with English firearms in the

southeastern version of the proxy war. Yet the new royal funds for fortifica-

tions were absorbed by the castillo, with little to spare for the defense of the

provinces. When the viceroy of New Spain sent an extra 6,000 pesos with

which to build a stone tower on Cumberland Island for the protection of

the Guale, Governor Laureano de Torres y Ayala spent it on a seawall for

St. Augustine, which ended up costing three-fourths as much as the castillo

itself.

North of Apalache, in the province of Apalachicola, traders from Charles-

ton were replacing the Spanish as buyers of deerskins. Although the Apala-

chicolos were not Christians, as allies and trading partners they had fallen

within the Spanish sphere of influence since the 1640s. Florida governors

tried to counter the Anglo advance with gifts, warnings, hastily founded

missions, and a blockhouse to serve as a trading post, but the lure of English

manufactures proved too strong. The Apalachicolos moved out of the Span-

ish orbit and into the English one, to reenter history as the Lower Creeks.

Between 1680 and 1706, a major part of the Indians in the provinces

also withdrew their al egiance, silently deserting their doctrinas for a life

of liberty without friars, soldiers, or chiefs who were more Spanish than

proof

Indian. The first to defect were the Guale, whose towns on the sea islands

had become magnets for pirates and other predators. The Guale’s declining

numbers were temporarily masked by a contrary influx of Yamasee moving

down the Atlantic coast. By 1696, when the Quaker Jonathan Dickinson

passed through Florida, three towns of refugees on Amelia Island were all

that remained of Guale province. The last to leave were the Apalaches, who

forsook their province after it was invaded by Creeks and Carolinians in

1704 during Queen Anne’s War. Some of them fled to Pensacola, refounded

in 1698 to counter French influence in the Gulf. Some, under don Patricio de

Hinachuba, chief of Ivitachuco, migrated to Timucua, then to the environs

of St. Augustine, where they hoped to find safety under the guns of the fort.

Others left Apalache for parts unknown, saying that they would not remain

to die with Spaniards.

The kings of Spain had seen themselves as patrons of the Florida Indians

and the Indians as wards of the Crown. Royal alms supported their mission-

aries, royal subsidies regaled their chiefs, and a royal defender of the Indians

represented their interests. But wars in Europe, spilling into the Americas,

strained the royal revenues and patrimony to the limit. The Spanish elite

survived the war years by demanding advances of goods and services from

Republic of Spaniards, Republic of Indians · 89

people who were in no position to refuse. At such times, the colony survived

because it was ideological y reinforced. The “cult of the king” threw a mantle

of duty about forced loans and labor, while the “divine cult” taught Indians

that they were natural inferiors.

To many Spaniards, Florida must have seemed a native Utopia. In this

maritime periphery of strategic rather than economic importance, the goals

of peaceful evangelism were largely met. Indians were not enslaved; their

lands were not alienated; their lives were not shortened in mines or work-

houses. Territorial expansion observed the forms of the Conquest by Con-

tract. The rulers of the Republic of Indians, mission-educated, channeled

the labor and products of Indian peasants to the priests, fighting men, and

merchants of the Republic of Spaniards. In exchange, the natives were of-

fered an afterlife in heaven, a sanctuary on earth, and useful tools, plants,

and animals.

But pacification, Spain’s idealistic design for the mastery of North Amer-

ica, depended on enduring hierarchies and exclusive relationships. The

isolation on which it depended was repeatedly breached, giving common

Indians a chance to show how little they cared for lords of any kind. When,

in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, increasing royal investments

and increasing demands on native commoners strengthened the colony’s

proof

center at the expense of its peripheries, the mission hinterland—source of

food, labor, and export products—sloughed away, and with it went the com-

paratively enlightened system of the Two Republics.

Bibliography

Arana, Luis Rafael, and Albert Manucy.
The
Building
of
Castil o
de
San
Marcos
. Eastern National Park & Monument Association, 1977.

Bushnel , Amy Turner. “Escape of the Nickaleers: European-Indian Relations on the Wild

Coast of Florida in 1696, from Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal.” In
Coastal
Encounters: