Conquistadors in Florida and the Carolinas
Throwback Thursdays with Carl Davidson #4: Battles between the Spanish crown and First Nation Americans
Enslaving Tainos, Invading Florida
Columbus and a cohort of enslavers and settler-colonialists didn’t visit the Caribbean for sightseeing. They wanted wealth, and lots of it, for themselves and the Spanish Court. Without much immediate gold or spices to be taken, Columbus enslaved and sent back people. First, he sends a few dozen, then a group of 400 or so, in horrific conditions on the ships. While the Court at first accepted them as curiosities, Queen Isabella didn’t like dealing with slaves herself, so she turned them out to be sold in the local markets.
Instead, she asked, where were the spices, gold, and jewels? The Spaniards on Hispaniola noticed some natives with tiny leaves of gold worn as earrings. Where did it come from? High up in the mountains, in the streams. They took a party to show them, including how to dig a trough in the water, sift the mud, and eventually, a speck or two of gold appeared. The Tainos liked the stuff, but not with anywhere near the madness that overtook the Spaniards.
Herein is the source of much evil and suffering. Native Tainos, by the thousands, were turned into a slave proletariat in hundreds of makeshift gold mines, squeezing a good deal of raw gold out of the hills. The human cost was significant. After a year in these conditions, the native workers were ‘walking corpses,’ according to one observer.
We’re told the Indians died from epidemic diseases to which they had little resistance. True, but only a partial truth. They were first beaten in warfare, then reduced to slave conditions and deprivations, then worked nearly to death, and then, significantly weakened, succumbed to Europe’s pathogens. So the disease theory of depopulation can often mask more than it reveals.
In any case, the Taino were dying in droves, and the Spaniards needed more slaves for digging gold and diving for pearls. They tried seizing a people called ‘Caribs’ on outlying islands, but they fought back too fiercely for the Spaniard taste. The tale was told that the Caribs sliced open their captives and ate their flesh. Whether true or not, it kept the Spaniards at bay. It also got back to the Queen, who was trying to write a law against slavery. She wanted the Indians to be her ‘free vassals’ and converted to Catholicism. But she allowed three exceptions: a native could be enslaved if 1. they were cannibals, 2. they were captured in a ‘just war,’ and 3. they were bought from other natives for whom they were already slaves.
The exceptions became the rule, with one departure. Natives brought to Spain and able to get a decent lawyer might win their freedom. But this was far from likely across the ocean. The mainland was said to have many people to enslave, so the pressure was on. The first to rise to the demands was Juan Ponce De Leon, who we all know as the guy who claimed Florida while searching for the ‘Fountain of Youth.’ The ‘fountain’ quest was all myth and hype. His real aim was to seize people, load them on his boats, and make them slaves on Hispaniola and other islands. He succeeded and returned to Spain to be made governor of Puerto Rico. He invaded Florida from the West Indies again, but this time he was seriously wounded in battle with the Calusa people. He made it back to Cuba, died there, and was later buried in Puerto Rico. There were two more invasions with vastly different outcomes.
The Apalachee and Spanish Carolina
The Apalachee were Native people who had made their home in the southern woodlands near the eastern edge of what is now called the Gulf of Mexico. They were mound-builders, erecting ceremonial earthworks in their major villages. This means they were also the southeasternmost part of what is now called the Mississippian culture of mound builders. This broader group covered the entire southern part of what is now the US, bordered by the Mississippi River on the west and the Ohio River to the north. Other native peoples lived there, too, but the mound-building made them unique1.
The Apalachee had a warrior caste to be feared. They first encountered the strange men of the ‘great canoes’ in an armed group headed by Ponce De Leon. The Spaniards were trying to seize the Apalachee and turn them into slave labor for Hispaniola, Cuba, and elsewhere. Still, as the Spaniards learned the hard way during the DeSoto expedition, it was not so easy.
The Apalachee lived in settled villages in homes made of palm branches and cypress moss for thousands of years. They grew several varieties of squash, maize and beans and smoked fish and other game for long-term storage. (One Spanish raid of one of their stores provided several hundred Spanish marauders with supplies lasting nearly six months). With their surpluses and networks, the Apalachee could build their mounds and trade for goods reaching the Great Lakes, the Great Plains, and down into Mexico.
The Apalachee were also known for a sport, a ball game with a small clay ball wrapped in animal skin and a goalpost. The ball had to be kicked to hit the post to score. Up to 40 or 50 men from rival villages took part, and the play could be as violent, or worse, than today’s hockey games.
Fierce as they might be, the Apalachee succumbed to the ‘invisible bullets’ of the Spaniards. After Desoto’s attacks and looting, their villages were ravaged by smallpox and other diseases. Many tribal remnants moved northward to merge with their cousins, the Muscogee Creek Confederacy. Those remaining were absorbed into the Florida Spanish missions as forced labor while being ‘converted’ to Catholicism.
At the time, the turn into the 1600s, Spain’s ‘La Florida’ meant more than the name suggests today. It stretched from New Orleans in the west to the Chesapeake Bay in the northeast and Tennessee to the north. The violent slave-raiding tour of Desoto around the Southeast is well-known and continued until he died on the Mississippi River shores. The Spanish founding of St Augustine on Florida’s Atlantic coast is also well known.
Less known is the founding of St Elena at Parris Island, SC, by the Spaniards,1566-1587, along with a string of forts reaching into the interior of the Carolinas, including one at Joara, a Cherokee town in what is now western North Carolina.
This was primarily the work of Juan Pardo, a Spanish explorer. He was tasked with finding an overland route to the silver mines of Mexico from the Atlantic coast. The Spanish at the time thought the Appalachian Mountains (later named for the Apalachee) were a continuous chain reaching into the far southwest and Mexico.
Save for St Elena, Pardo’s forts quickly collapsed once the native peoples around them discovered they were parasitic and had no regular supply of trade goods. Their fate underscored a point: many European settlements survived or failed at the sufferance of the native peoples around them. Europeans might stake out large swathes of ‘Turtle Island’ on a paper map. But they only held a few dozen forts and the small towns around them. The First Nation peoples dominated the vast surroundings until the 19th century.
In 1586, Sir Francis Drake, the ‘privateer,’ attacked and burned St Augustine, which caused Spain to pull back from the Carolinas and defend the smaller area of what we today call Florida.
The geography of what was called Carolina, at least its coastal area, sharply divides the northern half from the southern. The north has large bays and sounds, protected by a long string of barrier islands, the Outer Banks. The sound area was home to one group of native peoples, including the Pamlico, while the inland Piedmont was home to a larger grouping whose center was the Tuscarora people. The arrival of English settlers was soon to reshape them all.
Carl Davidson is a former student leader of the New Left of the 1960s, serving as a Vice President and National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. From 1968 to 1976, he worked on the Guardian newsweekly as a writer and news editor. He continues to write prolifically.
A key source: New Voyages to Carolina: Reinterpreting North Carolina History, edited by Larry E. Ise and Jeffrey J. Crow
the history(ies) within/behind/unseen in “HiStory”