The History of Florida (8 page)

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and headlands toward the Spanish settlement at Río Pánuco, where they

landed on 10 September 1543.

Ful y four years and four months since setting out from the port of Ha-

vana, and after 3,700 miles of travel by land and water, 311 survivors clam-

bered ashore to the embrace of their countrymen. Behind them, they had

left the whitened bones of half their original number, including de Soto’s;

all their horses and pigs; their only plunder, poor-quality freshwater pearls

they had found at Camden, South Carolina, but had lost to fire at Mabila;

and all their dreams of Incan gold and Mexican magnificence. None of the

chartered goals established by the king had been met: behind them stood

no settlement or hospital, no mine or farm, no presidio or mission, no flag,

no cross. The most significant practical result of what may be cal ed that

extended armed raid was the damage inflicted on the southeastern native

populations. Dozens of chiefdoms, overstressed and humiliated by de Soto,

went into decline or col apsed. And in the wake of the
entrada
, thousands

of native people lay dead and dying, not from the sword but from the in-

troduction of Old World pathogens against which the aborigines had no

acquired immunities—smal pox, measles, and typhoid fever, among others.

34 · Michael Gannon

That “microbial invasion” had begun many years before with the first slavers

or with the crews of Juan Ponce, but de Soto’s men unwittingly reinforced it

on their long, doubly tragic death march through the interior of La Florida.

Then, six years later, there came a Dominican friar’s brief humanitarian

intervention that startles with its courage and magnanimity. In the spring

of 1549, Fray Luis Cáncer de Barbastro set sail in an unarmed vessel from

Veracruz, México, bound for the same La Florida in order to win the friend-

ship of its native people by peaceful means alone. Cast in much the same

mold as Montesinos and the other, current, great Dominican “defender of

the Indians,” Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Cáncer had earlier participated

in the pacification and conversion of the seemingly intractable inhabitants

of Guatemala, causing that former “province of war” now to be called by his

Mexican countrymen the “province of true peace.” With Cáncer sailed three

other Dominican friars, a Spanish lay brother, a captured Florida native

woman interpreter named Magdalena, sailors, and a pilot, Juan de Arana,

who had been given strict orders to avoid any harbor where Spaniards had

earlier spread the terror of their arms. Whether through perversity or igno-

rance, Arana delivered his passengers to Tampa Bay.

Contact with the natives was almost immediate. Cáncer made several

friendly entreaties to them, and his touching references to the aborigines in

proof

a journal he kept on board ship display a genuine concern for their welfare.

But news soon arrived by the surprising agency of one Juan Muñoz, one of

de Soto’s soldiers who had been captured in that locale ten years before, that

one of the priests and the lay brother had been killed, that a ship’s sailor was

being held captive, and that Magdalena, having divested herself of Christian

clothing, had deserted to her people. On 26 June, Cáncer took a boat from

the ship to the beach where, with a crucifix in hand, he fel on his knees

in prayer. A group of natives approached. One of them took away his hat.

Another crushed his head with a club.

The province of Florida would remain for now a province of war. But at

one shining moment in 1549 it witnessed the spiritual gal antry of a guile-

less messenger of peace, whose name should be writ large in the pantheon

of Floridian and American heroes. Cultural y and political y what was most

significant about Cáncer’s sacrifice was that it demonstrated Spain’s com-

mitment in Florida to the New Laws of 1542, a commitment that would be

played out on a larger scale in the next Spanish undertaking.

After yet another decade passed without a permanent Iberian presence in

La Florida, which by that date was the name given to coastal territory that

ranged from the Florida Keys to Newfoundland, Spain was determined to

First European Contacts · 35

launch another settlement effort. The reasons were various. The Gulf shore

and the Atlantic coast of Spanish-claimed Florida were vulnerable to French

or English interlopers. Indeed France was advancing its own claim to the

Atlantic coast: French fishermen were already going ashore along the Caro-

lina coast to smoke their fish and mend their nets. And pirate ships, French

and English alike, were threatening the Gulf and Atlantic trade, particularly

the routes of the treasure ships, which departed Mexican ports twice each

year heavily laden with gold, silver, and gems and sailed via Havana up

the Canal de Bahama (Strait of Florida) as far as Bermuda, where they fol-

lowed the westerlies to Sevil a in Spain. For the protection of the plate fleets

it was decided that Spain needed effective occupation of two anchor sites,

Pensacola Bay, with its deep harbor, on the Gulf and what was then called

Punta de Santa Elena (Point of St. Helen, probably Tybee Island, Georgia),

on the Atlantic. The latter was to be the principal settlement, with town lots,

a plaza, church, and stronghouse.

Among the other concerns of Spain at the time were protection of ship-

wrecked sailors along the Gulf and Atlantic shores and missionary evangeli-

zation, now long delayed, of the aborigines. The bishop of Cuba weighed in

with still another concern: so few native Cuban women remained as eligible

wives for Spanish soldiers that a male on that island was lucky if he could

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find a wife eighty years old, and Florida, he argued, ought to be an excellent

source of young brides.

The new King Felipe II ordered a large Florida expedition to be mounted

out of México. To lead it, Luis de Velasco, viceroy of New Spain, chose an

army colonel, Don Tristán de Luna y Arel ano, veteran of the Francisco

Vázquez de Coronado expedition into the southwestern corner of the North

American continent that had been conducted contemporaneously with de

Soto’s entrada (the two expeditions being at one point only 300 miles apart

in the winter of 1541–42). Three Florida sites now were to be occupied: Pen-

sacola Bay, known as native Ochuse or Spanish Polanco; de Soto’s Coosa in

northwest Georgia; and Santa Elena, which was thought, erroneously, to

be only 120 miles east from Coosa overland. Eventual y, it was envisioned,

a string of Spanish settlements would link the three sites. Besides their pri-

mary mission of preempting French designs on the region, Velasco and

Luna hoped to convert the natives to Christianity—for which purpose five

Dominican priests and one lay brother joined the expedition—and to find

gold, silver, mercury, and precious gems, an aspiration never far from the

Spanish mind. To assist Luna in his travels, Velasco provided him with a

map of the de Soto march.

36 · Michael Gannon

On 11 June 1559, Luna departed San Juan de Ulúa on the Mexican Gulf

coast in thirteen ships of varying tonnage. His expedition numbered 200

foot soldiers, 200 cavalrymen with 240 horses in slings, 100 craftsmen and

tradesmen, a number of de Soto campaigners who knew the Florida inte-

rior, a native woman interpreter from Coosa whom the de Soto survivors

had brought to México with them, 100 Mexican warriors, and about 900

colonists, including married men, wives, and children. The last category of

passengers would prove to be more a burden than an advantage, since the

land toward which they headed had too little food and too much hardship

for untested civilians. The bishop of Cuba would later comment that, instead

of indolent and undisciplined men from New Spain, the expedition should

have recruited hardworking peasants from the mountains of León in Old

Spain.

After an unexpectedly long voyage, during which about 100 horses died,

and after several false sightings, the fleet entered Pensacola Bay (Ochuse)

on 14 August. Luna named the bay Bahía Filipina del Puerto Santa María,

after Felipe II and the Virgin Mary, and immediately set to work laying out

a settlement; exactly where it is not known, although two recent estimates

are Gulf Breeze or Tartar Point. We know that there were few natives in the

region, which meant few food crops, and that Luna dispatched two search

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parties, one by land and one by the Escambia River, to hunt for vil ages and

food to the north. The patrols returned empty-handed.

Disaster struck on 19 September in the form of a hurricane that, besides

killing an unknown number of colonists, sank or ran aground all but three

of the expedition’s ships. Half the supplies, including personal belongings,

were lost. Worse, most of the food was still on board one of the ships that

went down, and what food had already been unloaded was spoiled by the

storm’s downpour. The lot of nearly 1,500 people was now desperate.

In this extremity Luna had the wit to send two surviving frigates to Ha-

vana for food, and another overland patrol north for the same reason, be-

fore experiencing the first of a number of physical and mental breakdowns

that would afflict him throughout his Florida command. When he recov-

ered, he acted on a promising report from the northern patrol and, except

for fifty men, moved his starving coastal colony inland to the eighty-hut

native town of Nanipacana, about 100 miles up the Alabama River. There

the Spaniards found that the inhabitants had decamped with most of their

food stores. A 100-man patrol sent north from Nanipacana, to which Luna

appended the name Santa Cruz (Holy Cross), found no better prospects.

Meanwhile, the settlers were reduced to eating acorns, tree leaves, and wild

First European Contacts · 37

roots. Remembering the de Soto survivors’ tales of Coosa and its fertile

fields, Luna then dispatched 150 foot soldiers and 50 cavalrymen to find

that bountiful chiefdom. After three months, during which they subsisted

on blackberries, acorns, and the leather of their shoes, while their horses

became so famished they could hardly walk three miles a day, the travelers

came upon the principal town of Coosa.

It was not the Coosa described by de Soto’s men who were in the party.

Those men were astonished to find that the populous and wealthy society

they had encountered twenty years before had declined to a comparatively

few huts and fields. The demographic col apse was attributed to the dep-

redations of “a certain captain,” i.e., de Soto; even so, the natives who re-

mained willingly shared their food with the new invaders. During the three

months the Spanish detachment remained in the region, the Coosa asked

them to assist their forces in subjugating a nearby troublesome tribe, the

Napoochie. The Spaniards agreed to cooperate. Except for that single act of

warfare, the behavior of Luna’s men toward the aborigines of La Florida was

pacific and correct, in keeping with the spirit of the New Laws.

Meanwhile, three supply ships from México put in at Ochuse, and the

famished colonists at Nanipacana fled south to claim the provisions, leaving

behind a note to that effect for the Coosa command, which returned to Na-

proof

nipacana in October 1560. From Ochuse, a number of women, children, and

invalids returned to México on the supply ships. Besides food and clothing

those ships had brought urgent royal and viceregal orders for Luna to es-

tablish a presence at Santa Elena without further delay. Accordingly, in July

or August 1560, Luna directed sixty soldiers and three Dominicans to sail

around the peninsula to that Atlantic coastal site. On the voyage the ships

encountered foul weather, and the attempt was abandoned. At Ochuse the

remaining colonists soon exhausted their new rations and were reduced to

eating their leather, grass, and shellfish. Mutinous in mood, they engaged

in endless wrangling and insubordination, a situation that was aggravated

by Luna’s occasional mental seizures and deliriums. The inevitable rebellion

was averted by the skillful intervention of two Dominican friars and by the

arrival, in April 1561, of a new governor to relieve Luna, the alcalde mayor

of Veracruz, Ángel de Vil afañe. Luna sailed to Spain by way of Havana to

answer charges of dereliction. The commander of the fleet on which he took

passage was Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (see chapter 4).

Vil afañe bore orders identical to those last given to Luna: settle Santa

Elena at once. Leaving seventy or eighty men behind at Ochuse, he sailed

first to Havana to pick up horses and additional supplies. There, not

38 · Michael Gannon

surprisingly, about half his force deserted. With the remainder he followed

the Florida current north to what his pilots believed to be Santa Elena. The

four extant documents on the voyage are unclear, even contradictory, on

what happened at that site, wherever it was. They agree, however, in stating