El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  THE COMPLEX NEGOTIATIONS and often violent confrontations that took place over the course of establishing settlements in Florida constituted one part of the colonizing story. Running in parallel were the efforts of the religious orders, ready to build churches and convert the native peoples, creating conflict of a different nature. Evangelization in Florida presented basic but serious challenges. The first was the priests’ very survival. Like the conquistadores, the friars had numerous false starts, such as the ill-fated voyage of the Dominican friar Luis Cáncer in 1549.

  Cáncer had met Bartolomé de Las Casas, who by this point was the bishop of Chiapas, in Mexico. Like Las Casas, Cáncer wanted to convert people in Florida by peaceful means. He arrived in the Tampa area in 1549, and some of the people there captured a few of the friars, forcing the remaining ones, including Cáncer, to sail on.71 When he stopped again, he was clubbed to death within a matter of minutes after stepping onshore.72

  Nearly two decades passed before another concerted effort was made, and it came only after Menéndez drove out the French. He reached out to the new Society of Jesus (Jesuit) order, which had been founded in 1540; the Jesuits were dedicated to evangelization and education, and Menéndez wanted them to work among the Florida Indians.73 The Jesuit experience in the Americas was limited, with the order having gone only to Brazil in 1549, but they were enthusiastic. Like the Dominicans, they, too, were concerned about how the secular habits and worldly vices of soldiers and colonists were influencing the spiritual conquest of these lands. It would be up to the religious orders to provide a successful and lasting conversion to Christianity.74

  In 1570 a small party of Jesuits and soldiers set forth from Santa Elena, sailing north to the Bahía de Santa María, to a land they believed to be named Ajacán or Axacán. Along with them was a man called Don Luis de Velasco, though he was not a Spaniard but a Native American whose original name was Paquiquineo. He claimed he was from Ajacán and in 1561 had been taken on board the Spanish ship Santa Catalina, which may have been on an exploratory mission around the area, or perhaps been blown off course.75 On board, he was baptized and given the name of the then viceroy of New Spain, going on to spend almost a decade in Cuba, New Spain, and Spain, where he attracted the favor of Felipe II.76 Velasco told many stories about his homeland and regaled the court with descriptions of its abundance, helping to reignite the king’s interest in La Florida.77

  Around 1565–66 he and Menéndez finally met, and the two went on voyages between Cuba and La Florida. This was around the time when Menéndez wanted to put a settlement in the Bahía de Santa María, and his interest in Ajacán was intensified in part by his conversations with Velasco. Menéndez also mentioned the possibility of the existence of a waterway to the east in his correspondence with the king.78 Velasco, however, now having spent years among Spaniards, could not help noticing how they behaved in their American territories. Whatever he really thought, Velasco appeared to be enthusiastic about Christianity and plans for the expedition, which left in August 1566, taking Dominican friars and soldiers to Ajacán. As they sailed near the bay, Velasco tried to direct them, but he could not—or did not want to—find the proper entrance for Ajacán. They were forced to give up and turn back.79

  Despite the suspicious circumstances surrounding Velasco’s failure to navigate what should have been familiar waters, another attempt was organized in 1570, this time with the Jesuits. There were no soldiers with them, only Velasco, eight priests, and a young boy named Alonso de Olmos, a Spaniard born in the Americas. This time, they arrived in Ajacán by September and were soon in Velasco’s village. His friends and family thought he had returned from the dead; yet it seemed to the priests that these people were half-alive themselves, as there were signs of food shortages, not the promised abundance.80 Velasco was meant to act as a translator for the Jesuits, but he soon abandoned them, leaving the priests to fend for themselves.

  By the time a ship carrying supplies arrived in the spring of 1571, it was too late. The sailors noticed that the Indians near the shore were dressed in the clothing of priests, and they became alarmed. They took two hostages (one jumped overboard) and returned to Cuba to extract the full story. What they heard was that Velasco had left the priests, but the Jesuits were soon forced to return to his village because they could not find enough food to survive and they had trouble communicating with other Indians. When three priests arrived asking to speak to Velasco, he killed them and went on to murder the other five men who were waiting at an encampment.81

  Menéndez, who was in Havana at that point, organized an immediate campaign of retaliation and to rescue the one survivor, young Alonso de Olmos. Menéndez sailed to Ajacán in 1572 and, luring some of the native people onto his ship, he ambushed them, killing twenty. He managed to have Olmos released from captivity. Menéndez also demanded that Velasco be brought to him, but in his absence Valasco hanged some of the Indian captives.82 After that, the Jesuit authorities decided that no more of their order should go to Florida. They were replaced by Franciscans, with Father Francisco del Castillo arriving in Santa Elena in 1573, and soon after him, Father Alonso Cavezas, who went to St. Augustine.83

  The priests showed up just as Felipe II issued new legislation that aimed to change the nature of conquest across the Americas. Menéndez had written to him in 1573 asking permission to enslave Florida Indians if the circumstances of a just war arose against those who had “broken the peace many times, slaying many Christians.”84 A reply came that same year in the form of the king’s ordinances of discovery (Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias), stipulating that now “discoveries are not to be called conquests since we wish them to be carried out peacefully and charitably.”85 He ordered that the missionaries—not adelantados—lead this effort, with the military now charged with defending the missions.86

  The second challenge for the priests—once they had ensured their own survival—was the actual task at hand: converting the native people to Christianity, a process that could be hindered by cultural misunderstanding and linguistic incomprehension. In the 1580s, the Franciscans began to place small missions—doctrinas—where the friars instructed the locals in Catholic doctrine. Because of what had happened in Ajacán, as well as the abandonment of Santa Elena in 1587, these missions reached only as far north as San Diego de Satuache, by the Ogeechee River, south of today’s Savannah.87 Others were dotted southward along the coast, in places such as St. Catherines Island, then known as Santa Catalina de Guale, all the way to St. Augustine. By 1596, there were nine doctrinas and a dozen friars, and they would continue to spread south and west.88 They had less success in south Florida, among the Calusa or Tequesta (near Miami).89 Where these missions had taken root, especially among the Timucua and Apalachee, conversion was received with some degree of enthusiasm. There was one known case of a Timucua chief even requesting that friars come to his village, a change of heart that may have had more to do with using an association with Spanish power to boost his authority than with a spiritual transformation.90

  The priests were also forced to try to understand the people they wanted to convert. Francisco Pareja learned the Timucuan language to help with conversions at the San Pedro de Mocama mission, which had been set up in 1587 amid the Tacatacuru chiefdom on Cumberland Island.91 Pareja arrived in 1595 and his efforts to communicate have preserved what little was known about the Timucuan language and at least nine of its dialects. His method was straightforward: Pareja turned Timucuan into a written language, spelling out Timucuan words as they sounded. By doing this, he was able to translate religious doctrines into Timucuan, though this was only a sliver of the linguistic world of Florida. It included the Guale language and the inland Apalachee, both of them related to Muskogean, but Timucuan was distinct from them all.92

  If peaceful relations could be established, followed by a willingness to submit to the practices of the Church, a third challenge remained: how to make a mission survive and even thrive.
This often required trying to tie people to the land. The Guale and Orista people would go inland for part of the year, no doubt at times to be free of the missionaries, which worried the priests because it meant the Indians might go a long time without hearing Mass.93 As one Jesuit, Juan Rogel, wrote in a 1570 letter, this “wandering” was the core of the problem. “If we are to gather fruit, the Indians must join and live in settlements and cultivate the soil.”94 Yet not all the people subsisted solely on agriculture, in part because of the diverse environment of Florida. It was more complicated to plant crops in southern Florida, as the sandy soil and swamps were not suitable. Although St. Augustine and many of the early missions were near the coast, the assistance of Indians who lived farther inland and had more developed agriculture helped them survive.95

  Even when crops were planted, mission life could be difficult. The structures were often basic. The friars in Florida had to contend with wattle-and-daub or oyster-shell tabby as a building material, palm thatching for roofs, and earthen floors. A typical mission had a chapel, a kitchen, and living quarters for the priests, built around a courtyard, with some including military garrisons for protection.96

  Some of the Native Americans who had converted to Christianity worked for the religious orders as laborers or farmers, often living in small villages near the mission. For many groups, this was a lasting and significant transformation from their seasonal nomadic movements. With Christianity came settlement. Despite this change, the biggest threat to any sort of longevity was the possibility of an Indian revolt, which could destroy years of work. In 1597 the Guale uprising, also known as Juanillo’s Revolt after Don Juan, its leader, who was heir to a chieftaincy, set back the Franciscan effort. Although uprisings and rebellions could be triggered for many reasons, what is known about this particular incident from the remaining accounts is that both Indians and Spaniards experienced a wide range of challenges and frustrations.97 For instance, the accepted cause of the revolt, at Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Tolomato (near today’s Darien, Georgia), and the subsequent beheading of Father Pedro de Corpa, may have been the alleged attempts by the priest to curb Don Juan’s polygamous behavior; at the same time, underlying struggles among the chiefdoms also fed into these events.98

  Corpa had been stationed in Tolomato, the Guale town with one of the most important chiefs, known to the Spanish as Don Francisco. The priests had managed the conversion of several thousand people, so it took Corpa by surprise when a group of warriors burst in on his morning prayers. The chief’s son, Juanillo, had Corpa killed on the spot. Juanillo then summoned other Guale chiefs to Tolomato, from which they raided other missions, including Santa Catalina de Guale and Santa Clara de Tupiqui, killing five more friars and setting buildings and chapels on fire.99 From there they planned to move south, toward the missions near San Pedro, among the Mocama people, but on the morning of October 4, 1597, they discovered an unexpected number of Spanish soldiers, whose brigantine happened to have called at the island. Many of the Guale turned back and, while a few struck anyway, neither of the two friars there was hurt.100 One of the surviving friars wrote to the governor in St. Augustine pleading for help, and men arrived by October 17.101 Once the attacks had been quelled, Governor Gonzalo Méndez de Canzo began to look for answers, interrogating people as well as conducting punitive raids. While the Spanish were concerned with their own safety, structures and property belonging to other chiefs were also attacked, indicating that wider power struggles may have been taking place.

  The investigation took years. By 1600, Méndez began negotiating peace treaties with many of the caciques.102 He also sent the chief of the Asao village, Don Domingo, on a mission to capture Don Juan in 1601—this despite Don Domingo’s own involvement in the initial 1597 uprising. Méndez, however, was more interested in reestablishing alliances with Guale leaders, including Don Domingo, who now had considerable power.

  Don Domingo had made a visit to St. Augustine and told Méndez who was behind the attacks. He also brought some laborers to work in the Spanish maize fields, and in exchange Méndez gave him some woolen cloth.103 After this, Don Domingo led a party of other chiefs and uncovered Don Juan at a fortification in Yfusinique. They killed Don Juan, as well as the male members of his family who were with him. Don Domingo sent Don Juan’s scalp to Méndez, who then considered the matter closed.104 Other chiefs now pledged or reaffirmed their loyalty and obedience to the Spanish crown. Don Domingo continued to stay in the governor’s good graces, and when the Franciscans returned to build a new mission, it was placed in Asao in 1606 and called Santo Domingo de Asao.105 The Guale uprising indicates how complex these overlapping relationships were, not only between the Spanish and Native Americans, but also among the Indian chiefdoms, where the balance of power was continually shifting.106

  By the beginning of the 1600s, the Florida missions had been repaired, and in 1606 the bishop of Cuba, Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano, decided to inspect them. Within a few decades, the priests began to move inland, and the first Franciscan mission was placed among the Apalachee people of the Florida panhandle in 1633, taking advantage of the fertile terrain ideal for larger-scale agriculture, since St. Augustine needed a steady supply of basic foodstuffs.107 Overland trails soon connected the settlement to the missions, a journey that could take around two weeks.108 The Apalachee missions were mostly small, but some, such as San Luís de Talimali, in today’s Tallahassee, were substantial. San Luís, for instance, produced surplus wheat, cattle, and corn that could be distributed to St. Augustine or even exported elsewhere.109

  It took more than half a century, but the Spanish managed to put a settlement in Florida, drive out the French, win Indian alliances, and even have thousands of converts by the early 1600s. The lands of Ayllón and Chicora did not yield hoped-for gold, but those initial explorers had been following mental maps, driven by imaginings as much as by navigational reality. Although by the early seventeenth century a small part of Florida was now firmly in Spain’s orbit, there were only a few hundred people living in St. Augustine, precariously positioned on the fringes of both the Spanish empire and a much larger indigenous world that they had barely penetrated and could scarcely imagine, which stretched west from Florida for thousands of miles.

  Chapter 3

  Alcalde, New Mexico, ca. 1540–1720

  FLORIDA PROVED TO be a mirage for the Spanish, but it was only half of their North American story. While Menéndez and others had come up from the Caribbean, conquistadores in the west were traveling through the unknown northern reaches of New Spain. They, too, were hunting for yet another mythical land, though in this region the search was necessarily conducted on foot and horseback, over miles of scrubland and desert, under an often hot and unforgiving sky. In such a vast space, legends could know no limits. Rather than a single island of riches, this territory was said to hold seven treasure-laden cities: the Seven Cities of Cíbola.1

  The legend of Cíbola was given some credence by the pen of Father Marcos de Niza, who had been sent on a mission in 1539 to explore the frontier by the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza. The viceroy, like many others, including Hernando Cortés, had heard the wild tales of Cabeza de Vaca’s adventures in the tierra adentro (inland) and wanted to believe there was another Tenochtitlán. Underneath this was an older story, the Seven Cities of Antilia, a legend involving seven Portuguese bishops who fled Muslim Spain long before the Reconquista. They supposedly crossed the ocean and established these cities. In some variations they did so on an island, in others they were far inland. Whatever the provenance, the fabled wealth of the cities grew exponentially over the decades.2 The vast areas unknown to European mapmakers allowed imaginations to run free, and Spanish explorers colored in the gaps with their desires.

  By 1531, Nuño de Guzmán—the head of the judicial audiencia and a conquistador—had forged a brutal and bloody extension of the Spanish frontier northwest toward the Pacific and up to Sinaloa, founding in 1531 the town of San Miguel de Cu
liacán, which would become a base for further expeditions to the north. It was also where Cabeza de Vaca and the other three survivors were taken after their epic wanderings. This region was still considered remote, and, unlike the settled Indians of southern Mexico, including those in and around the capital, the people of the north were mostly nomadic. These groups posed many problems for would-be conquistadores, on top of any resistance or attack: signs of their wealth might not be immediately evident, and their labor would be far more difficult to exact. Still, some Spaniards were willing to push north, though it would take decades, if not centuries, for settlement to happen at the northernmost edges of New Spain.3

  Father Marcos de Niza left from Culiacán with the now veteran explorer Estevánico—the African who had survived along with Cabeza de Vaca—as well as some indigenous scouts to look for these fabled seven cities.4 After weeks of slow travel from Culiacán, Estevánico and a few others went in advance of Niza. When they were about a day away from Hawikuh, one of the largest towns of the Zuni people (also Zuñi)—today just under two hundred miles west of Albuquerque—Estevánico relayed back a message encouraging the party to join him. Before they could, another messenger arrived with grim news: Estevánico had been killed.5 It is possible that he had been too demanding with these Native Americans in searching for valuables, or that they had mistaken him for a spy.6 Niza hurried back to New Spain, though he later claimed that he had seen the rich kingdom of Cíbola from a hilltop, declaring it “larger than the city of Mexico.”7 In another telling, it is possible that the name of Cíbola was just the name for Zuni in one of the local indigenous languages.8