El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  De Soto soon heard of Juan Ortiz, a man who had been captured during the Narvaéz expedition more than a decade earlier.144 He dispatched his men to find Ortiz, who they discovered could speak to the Uzita and Mocoso people of the area.145 Ortiz became de Soto’s translator, and the men spent the winter of 1539–40 relying on the goodwill of the people they encountered around today’s Tallahassee. De Soto saw large villages and temple mounds, and survived on corn, game, and fish. He was not on a cultural mission, however—he pillaged crops, enslaved Indians, and launched attacks. He and his men moved up through Florida, battling the Apalachee, then into Georgia and South Carolina, where he was lured into a hunt for the chiefdom of Cofitachequi.146 It is thought that de Soto crossed the southern Appalachian Mountains, encountering the Muskogean-speaking people. He moved into Alabama, meeting the Choctaw. At one point, lured by chief Tuscaluza, they reached Mabila, in central Alabama, where they were attacked and many Spaniards were killed.147 From there, they also spent time among prosperous and settled people, such as the Caddo and Creeks, in Mississippi. They met the Chickasaw and Tupelo and may have crossed the Mississippi River in 1541.

  Pushing on, de Soto was clearly searching for more than just a place to put a settlement—he wanted to find more wealth.148 He also was on the lookout for the still elusive shortcut to the east.149 Finding neither, he remains one of the first known Europeans to wander through great swaths of North America. During the course of his wanderings he drained much of his fortune and, perhaps, his sanity. He decided to turn back but fell ill and died, it is believed somewhere in Arkansas or Louisiana near the Mississippi River, around May or June 1542. The rest of his party turned south, hoping to return to New Spain, ending up spending the winter building boats near today’s Natchez, Mississippi. Finally, the three hundred men headed down the Mississippi River, reaching the Gulf of Mexico in September 1543; it is possible they were the first Europeans to sail on that river.150

  By the mid-1550s, claims began to circulate that the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who had been in the service of France’s king, had reached the northern part of La Florida, around modern North Carolina, in 1524. Now the French were planning some sort of venture to that area and Spain’s Council of the Indies was eager to prevent such an encroachment from taking place. In late 1557 it approved a plan to send a large fleet from Mexico to establish a settlement on the Gulf coast. The Spaniards would go overland to Santa Elena, which would be the site of another colony, and from there they could construct a road along which they could put missions and towns, in theory, connecting La Florida to New Spain.151

  In 1559, the expedition was put under the leadership of Tristán de Luna y Arellano, who had been appointed governor of Florida. Spanish-born Luna had come to New Spain, where his cousin, Antonio de Mendoza, was viceroy in the 1530s. By the time he left for Florida, Luis de Velasco had become viceroy and was heavily involved in the plan’s preparations. In June, fifteen hundred people, including five hundred soldiers, one hundred artisans, and six Dominican friars, departed from Veracruz.152 They landed around Pensacola Bay, on Florida’s western panhandle, in August.153 At first they saw only a few fishermen’s huts on the beach, and Luna sent men to further scout along the coastline.154 Then, on September 19, disaster struck as a hurricane roared into the harbor, destroying most of Luna’s fleet and ruining much of their year’s supply of provisions. Hunger set in among the settlers, and some members of the party searched for people who could help.155 The Spanish squabbled among themselves; most wanted to return to New Spain. By spring 1560, reinforcements had arrived from the capital, and they set up a makeshift camp among the Nanipacana, who soon fled, leaving the settlers subsisting on foraged food such as acorns. Luna continued to send scouting parties into the interior to find food, and other people who might help them, later encountering the Coosa.156 Another relief supply ship arrived that summer but by August the situation remained desperate, and Luna dispatched some of the men to sail around to the Atlantic coast to begin work on the Santa Elena colony. They first set off for Cuba to provision the ship, but it was destroyed in a hurricane.157 The viceroy was angered at the chaos in Florida, and he stripped Luna of his governorship, sending vessels to evacuate the settlers in early 1561 with Ángel de Villafañe now governor. Luna left for Spain, via Havana, in April, and Villafañe was also in Cuba, resupplying a ship on its way to Santa Elena. Villafañe never arrived, however, as storms destroyed many of his ships in June. He managed to survive and return to Pensacola to remove the remaining settlers. Such expeditions could be exercises in frustration for the viceroy, as so many factors—hurricanes or Indian attacks—could completely put an end to their efforts. It could also take quite some time to hear about why a mission had failed and, if need be, extract a more complete recounting of events through the judicial system.158

  For almost fifty years following Ponce’s initial 1513 voyage, no one from the Spanish empire had been able to make anything stick in La Florida. It was a very different world from the one Cortés found in Mexico. Though some people lived in settled villages, many of the natives of Florida were mobile, and implementing a tributary system like the encomienda would have been difficult if not impossible.159 In addition, the soil was sandy, and the weather veered from sweltering to freezing. Everything about La Florida seemed designed to foil the conquistadores. Mexico was fast becoming the hub of a wealthy empire, and the Caribbean islands were now strategic outposts after their gold supplies had been exhausted.160 A frustrated Felipe II decreed in 1561 that he would grant no further permissions for these expensive and embarrassing expeditions to colonize Florida. His ruling, however, meant nothing to the French.

  * She was later enshrined in history as Marina, her Spanish name, but also known as La Malinche.

  * Mexico’s population before the arrival of the Spanish was thought to be around ten million, though some estimates reach as high as twenty-five million; within a century, it would drop below one million.

  * His uncle Fernando took the title of Holy Roman emperor and ruled over the Habsburg lands in Austria and Germany.

  * Democrates Alter was not published until two centuries after Sepúlveda’s death.

  * It would take much longer than that—the manuscript, with its unflattering descriptions of Spanish imperialism, did not see the light of publication until 1875.

  * One of the difficulties in making sense of this period is that so much of what is known—and indeed often taken as historical truth—is legend or otherwise dubious. Accounts that attempt to explain the New World, such as Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (ca. 1569), Peter Martyr’s Of the New World (1530), or Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s General and Natural History of the Indies (ca. 1535), came out of a pre-Enlightenment tradition. Much as early maps were spiritual in nature, with Jerusalem at their center, these early accounts had crown and church at the core of their narratives. These accounts can at times read like tales of the supernatural. This is further complicated by official documents from this period that contain the writings of unreliable narrators—Cortés, for instance, had to polish his story to make his rule-breaking acceptable to the king.

  Chapter 2

  St. Johns River, Florida, ca. 1550–1700

  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 t
han 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 ther
e, 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