The History of Florida (38 page)

2. Patrick,
Florida
Fiasco
, 302.

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proof

11

Free and Enslaved

Jane Landers

The African presence in the Americas and in Florida dates to the earliest

days of Spanish exploration, yet persons of African descent remain largely

“invisible” in the historical literature. This absence is due, in part, to the

difficulty of the sources (their locations are scattered and their language is

eighteenth-century Spanish) and in part to the lack of interest among earlier

scholars. But the Spaniards were meticulous bureaucrats, and the exception-

al y rich documentary evidence on Africans in Florida tells much about

their long-neglected history.

proof

Florida was part of the Spanish Caribbean world for more than 300 years

before it became an American territory in 1821, and the influence of Span-

ish legal traditions and race relations had a lasting impact on the African

experience in the region.

Like other areas in the Spanish Caribbean, Florida suffered from early

and dramatic Indian depopulation and a shortage of European manpower,

and this demographic imperative created a demand for the labor, artisanal,

and military skil s of blacks. Once Africans entered Florida they interacted

closely with the remaining Indian populations and, in effect, became culture

brokers on the frontier, moving between the Spanish and Indian worlds.

Florida’s first slaves came from southern Spain, where a significant Afri-

can population filled a variety of important functions—laboring in mines

and agriculture and in less onerous tasks as artisans, petty merchants, and

domestics. Although most Africans in Spain were slaves, not all were. Span-

ish law and custom granted slaves a moral and legal personality, as well as

certain rights and protections not found in other slave systems. They had

the right to personal security and legal mechanisms by which to escape a

cruel master. Further, slaves were permitted to hold and transfer property

and to initiate legal suits—a significant right that in the Americas evolved

· 179 ·

180 · Jane Landers

into the right of self-purchase. Social and religious values in Spanish society

promoted honor, charity, and paternalism toward “miserable classes,” which

often ameliorated the hardships slaves suffered and sometimes led owners

to manumit them. This is not to suggest that Spain or its New World colo-

nies were free of racial prejudice. Nevertheless, the emphasis on a slave’s hu-

manity and rights, and the lenient attitude toward manumission embodied

in Spanish slave codes and social practice, made it possible for a significant

free black class to exist, first in Spain, later in the Spanish Americas.

Africans, both free and enslaved, crossed the Atlantic on the early voy-

ages and participated in the conquest and settlement of the new territories

claimed by Spain. With the Europeans they formed a specialized pool of

human resources circulating throughout the circum-Caribbean in many

different expeditions. One member of this tightly knit group, a free African

named Juan Gárrido, sailed from Sevil e to Hispaniola, where he befriended

other blacks such as Juan González [Ponce] de León, an interpreter of the

Taíno language. The two adventurers took part in Juan Ponce de León’s

“pacification” campaigns against the native populations of Hispaniola, his

expedition to explore and conquer Puerto Rico (San Juan de Boriquen) in

1508, and in slaving raids against the Carib Indians on surrounding islands.

When Juan Ponce de León made his “discovery” in 1513 and initiated

proof

European exploration of the American Southeast, the free Africans Juan

Gárrido and Juan González [Ponce] de León accompanied him. Although

Juan Ponce de León’s first contact with the Florida natives was hostile, it

enabled Spain to claim exclusive sovereignty over the continent and led to

further attempts to explore its interior.

After a second trip to Florida proved fatal to Juan Ponce de León, another

Spanish adventurer (and slave raider), Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, attempted

a settlement on the Atlantic coast in 1526. The site, cal ed San Miguel de

Gualdape, is believed to be near present-day Sapelo Sound in Georgia (see

chapter 2). Ayl ón’s expedition included 600 Spanish men, women, and chil-

dren as well as the first-known contingent of African slaves brought to the

present-day United States. As historian Paul E. Hoffman has pointed out,

these were probably skilled artisans and domestics from Spain rather than

African-born field hands. Ayllón’s ambitious enterprise was undermined by

disease, starvation, and his own death. Mutiny ensued, African slaves set

fires to the compound, and the Guale Indians rebelled. The surviving Euro-

peans straggled back to the Caribbean, but ethnohistorians maintain that

the Africans took up residence among the Guales, becoming maroons, as

Free and Enslaved · 181

The free African Juan Gárrido participated in the early Spanish exploration in the Ca-

ribbean, in Ponce de León’s 1513 voyage to Florida and in the conquest of the Aztec

empire of México by Hernán Cortés. He is shown here as a spear carrier behind Cortés

in an illustration from Fray Diego Durán,
Historia
de
las
Indias
de
Nueva
España
y
islas
de
Tierra
Firme.

many of their counterparts were doing in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica,

proof

Cuba, and México.

Despite the slave arson at Gualdape, African slaves were included in

the next expedition to La Florida—that of Pánfilo de Narváez, who landed

somewhere near Tampa in 1528. Like Ayllón’s, his was a major colonization

effort involving approximately 600 persons and unknown numbers of Af-

ricans. This colony, too, proved a disastrous failure, undone by hurricanes,

supply losses, and separation of the forces. Of the four survivors who “came

back from the dead” after eight years of wandering along the Gulf coast and

westward to the Pacific Ocean, the most famous was the expedition’s trea-

surer, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who left a written account of his trials.

A less noted survivor was Estevan, the African slave of Andrés Dorantes,

who quickly learned the language and belief systems of indigenous groups

and whose skil s helped sustain his party.

Hernando de Soto next took up the chal enge of exploring the South-

east. Many of the men who accompanied de Soto to Florida in 1539 took

with them their African slaves. De Soto’s secretary wrote of Gómez, the

slave of André de Vasconcelos, who helped the chieftainess of Cofitachequi

to escape from the Spaniards and later became her husband. Other slaves

182 · Jane Landers

and Spaniards from the de Soto expedition also “went over” to the Indi-

ans, further blending the Indian, African, and European populations of the