The History of Florida (16 page)

farms would be planted in West Florida. At Santa Elena, archaeologist Stan-

ley South has uncovered ditches from vineyards. Said one witness, “I have

planted with my own hands grapevines, pomegranates, orange trees and

figs, wheat, barley, onions, garlic and many vegetables that grow in Spain.”7

One Antonio de Carbajal, describing the richness of Guale and the easy

access to inland areas from there, said that “the land of Guale is as fertile as

the best land of Spain . . . because he has seen many fruits and plants pro-

duced in the said land, and livestock being produced, and the large number

proof

of grasslands for the raising of cattle and sheep.”8

In the cities, peddlers, shoemakers, moneylenders, tavernkeepers, fisher-

men and hunters, prostitutes, smiths, and carpenters plied their trades. Sol-

diers’ wives operated boardinghouses for unmarried men. Alonso de Olmos

made suits of padded cotton armor for the garrison; others worked to make

palmetto matchcord. Pedro Menéndez had two ships built in Florida, one

near St. Augustine and one at Santa Elena. Silk culture and sugar produc-

tion never succeeded, but there was substantial export of juniper, oak, and

laurel-wood, together with sassafras root bark for medicinal purposes. The

production of tar and pitch began. The fur trade with the Indians began, and

deerskin boots and jackets were local y made. Commercial documents the

very stuff of trade and business—abound in the Florida records.

In 1569 there occurred a general crisis in Menéndez’s finances, strained by

his efforts in Florida and worsened by the added costs of bringing in settlers.

The adelantado had already filed a suit seeking recompense from the Crown

for his ship losses in the Florida expedition and for additional expenses

above and beyond those foreseen in his royal contract. Now Menéndez went

to Madrid to make his plea before the Council of the Indies for a regular

subsidy to support the Florida garrisons. When no immediate action was

Settlement and Survival · 71

taken, Menéndez decided to force the issue. He ordered his lieutenants to

denude the Florida garrisons of all but 150 men, the number the Crown had

in principle agreed to support. In the meantime, difficulties arose with the

Jesuit order over Menéndez’s control over the missionaries.

Final y, Philip II convened four royal councils—State, Indies, War, and

Treasury—and put the Florida matter to them. From that meeting resulted a

royal decree, in November 1570, that established a subsidy to undergird the

Florida garrisons. Meanwhile, the Jesuits agreed to one more attempt at the

difficult Florida mission field: they sent Father Juan Bautista de Segura with

other missionaries to the Chesapeake, known to the Spaniards as the Bay

of Santa María. Pedro Menéndez Marqués had explored the coasts north of

there, all the way to Newfoundland.

For some years, Adelantado Menéndez had been largely absent from

Florida, carrying out various royal assignments. Because of stressful events,

two of his principal lieutenants, Esteban de las Alas and Pedro de Valdés,

had also left Florida. Moreover, after the murder of his favorite daughter,

Ana, in Asturias, the adelantado was forced to rethink the succession to his

Florida enterprise. His only son, Juan, had been lost at sea. Now Menéndez

reconciled with his daughter, Catalina, and the man she had married, Her-

nando de Miranda. Menéndez also arranged a marriage between his illegiti-

proof

mate daughter, Maria, and Don Diego de Velasco, the legitimized grandson

of the constable of Castile, a high nobleman, and made a dower contract

with Velasco to encourage him to serve in Florida.

The new royal subsidy stimulated fresh private efforts. For his part,

Menéndez moved his wife and ten other persons in his household to Santa

Elena. Velasco also came there as governor with his wife. A new group of

settlers came to augment the number of farmers. A list of the new colonists

includes “Lorenzo García, native of Puebla del Prior in Badajoz, who has

a thin face, is of medium stature, and is missing the little finger of his left

hand; he is forty-two years of age.”9

In February 1571, the Indians of Jacan kil ed the Jesuit missionaries at

the Chesapeake. After word of this reached Santa Elena, Menéndez led a

punitive expedition to the site, hanging several Jacan leaders and rescuing a

Spanish boy, the son of Alonso de Olmos, who had survived the massacre.

After he learned of the missionaries’ death, the general of the Society of

Jesus terminated their six-year Florida mission.

The tragic end of the Jesuits at the Chesapeake culminated a long list

of Indian difficulties that had faced the Spaniards in Florida since 1565. In

the Indian River area, at Tequesta, Carlos, and Tocobaga, and among the

72 · Eugene Lyon

Timucua peoples, there had been no sustained peace between the Native

Americans and the Spanish leaders, soldiers, and settlers. So incensed was

Menéndez at the failure of his Indian policies that in 1573 he asked the king’s

permission to capture rebellious Indians and to sell them as slaves. The king

refused the request, but it was apparent that Menéndez’s failure to reach a

settled peace with many of Florida’s indigenous people made it virtual y im-

possible for Spaniards to work the land. In fact, the continual disturbances

confined the settlers, and Menéndez himself, to the poorer coastal soils.

The Spaniards could not safely reside in the interior, where the land was

well suited to pastoral and agricultural enterprise. One by one, the inland

garrisons were abandoned.

Back in Spain, while on assignment from the king to assemble a great

fleet to reinforce Spanish forces in Flanders, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés fell

il , likely from a typhus outbreak which had swept his fleet. On 17 Septem-

ber 1574, at Santander, he died. His wil divided the Florida inheritance:

daughter Catalina received the title of adelantado, the Florida profits, and

his entail; daughter María inherited his land grant and the title of marquis.

Catalina’s husband hastened to claim his wife’s Florida privileges and set

sail from Spain late in 1575. Arriving at Santa Elena, Hernando de Miranda

deposed Velasco and set to work to ensure his own profits from the enter-

proof

prise. However, Miranda failed to attend properly to the Florida defenses,

and he neglected to give gifts to the natives. He also permitted his lieuten-

ants to abuse the Guale and Orista peoples. Angered, the Indians joined in

confederation; by mid-1576, they had killed a number of Spanish officials

and soldiers and surrounded Santa Elena itself. Miranda, no leader of men,

panicked, evacuated the city, and fled from Florida.

The Council of the Indies removed Miranda as governor and vacated his

title of adelantado; they appointed Pedro Menéndez Marqués as the new

governor. Henceforth Florida would no longer be a proprietary colony but a

Crown colony. Menéndez Marqués rebuilt Santa Elena, but after Sir Francis

Drake’s raid on St. Augustine in 1586 it was final y abandoned—ironical y,

just as John White, who led Sir Walter Raleigh’s third colonizing expedi-

tion, landed at Roanoke Island. Thus the Spaniards were poorly positioned

to forestall or to combat the English settlements that were later successful y

planted to the north of Florida. Pedro Menéndez’s dream of a viable colony

based on agriculture and commerce had vanished forever.

One man’s plaint summed up the experience in Spanish Florida since

1565. “I have served,” said Bartolomé Martínez, “in these provinces of Flor-

ida . . . since the Adelantado brought me as a soldier, and in this time I have

Settlement and Survival · 73

suffered hunger, nudity and much misery, not because the land is so bad as

they hold it to be, but due to the poor government it has had, and because

their resources were little to conquer so many people and such a great land.

I have seen the greater part of the coast of these provinces and thirty leagues

around the fort of Santa Elena. What I say to Your Majesty about this land

of which all the world says il , is that it is a marvel of good, because there are

most rich lands for til age and stock-farms, powerful rivers of sweet water,

great fertile plains and mountains. . . . And I wish to beg Your Majesty that

you might give me some land in it, where I might remain always.”10

Florida’s founding in 1565 was impel ed by Hapsburg dynastic strategy

and disputes among European powers. But it was also directly linked with

the settlement impulse that drove sixteenth-century Spaniards to implant

their rich and complex culture in the Americas. After an initial expansion,

Spanish Florida became a shrinking empire, struggling with powerful Eng-

land over the disputed lands to the north of the peninsula.

Only once was serious thought given to abandonment of the peninsula.

In 1602 an official inquiry conducted by an administrative investigator from

Cuba heard eighteen long-term residents of Florida on the question—sol-

diers, civilians, and Franciscan friars. Instead of dismantling St. Augustine

and transferring the center of Spanish activity farther north on the Atlantic

proof

coast, as some in Florida were urging, the official decision was made to keep

that center where it was.

The strong desire to settle the peninsula was never completely aban-

doned. It was revived in the eighteenth century, when farmers from the

Canary Islands came to Florida. And St. Augustine, that quintessential sur-

vivor city founded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, remains today the oldest

city of European origin in what is today the United States of America.

Notes

1. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to the king, no place, no date (probably late February–

early March, 1565), from Archives of the Indies, Sevil e (hereafter AGI),
Patronato
19;

reprinted in Eugenio Ruidíaz y Caravía,
La
Florida:
Su
conquista
per
Pedro
Menéndez
de
Avilés,
2 vols. (Madrid, 1893), 2:320–26.

2. Narrative of Juan de la Vandera, from Archives of the Counts of Revil agigedo,
Ca-

nalejas
46, reel 105 of microfilm at Flagler College, Center for Historic Research, image

561.3. Pedro Menéndez to the Crown, St. Augustine, 20 October 1566, AGI
Santo
Domingo

115.4. Ibid.

74 · Eugene Lyon

5. Ibid.

6. AGI
Escribanía
de
Cámara
154-A, fol. 471vto.

7. Bartolomé Martínez to Crown, 17 February 1577, AGI
Santo
Domingo
125.

8. AGI
Escribanía
de
Cámara
154-A, fol. 370.

9. Juan de Abalia to the Crown, 27 June 1573, AGI
Patronato
257.

10. Bartolomé Martínez to the Crown, Havana, 17 February 1577, from AGI Santo Do-

mingo 125.

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