Zamumo's Gifts. Joseph M. Hall, Jr.

relations. Spaniards would have done well to take lessons from the French Huguenots they had so ruthlessly dispatched in 1565. When Laudonnière arrived off of the coast of Florida in 1564 near the “River of Dolphins” (the harbor entrance to the future St. Augustine), he paid particular attention to Native forms of generosity, which at times exceeded French notions of propriety. “Though they endeavored by every means to make us trade with them and explained by signs that they wanted to give us some presents, nevertheless for various good reasons I decided not to stay.” Unwilling to accept (and potentially become beholden to) such largesse, Laudonnière continued north to the mouth of the St. Johns River, where the chief Satouriona welcomed the French commander with a deerskin painted with designs so beautiful “that no professional artist could find fault with them.” The engraver Theodor de Bry depicted both of these friendly encounters, perhaps with an eye to assuring prospective colonists of the friendly receptions that awaited them. Laudonnière appreciated them with a more practical eye. For him, accepting and reciprocating this Native American brand of Southern hospitality was critical “to keep[ing] [the] friendship alive.”¹⁷

      As de Soto had shown with Zamumo, Spaniards were capable participants in such political ceremonies, but Menéndez de Avilés preferred to put more stock in his military experience and the support of Europe’s most powerful monarch. He would learn soon enough that the colony would flourish or flounder less on the dreams of two great men and more on the very real and varied interests of the new colony’s numerous neighbors. With a combination of violence and apathy, Native southeasterners taught Spaniards some painful lessons in Mississippian politics. Menéndez de Avilés had many tutors. In lands stretching from the Atlantic to the Gulf coasts lived perhaps fifty thousand Timucuas whose chiefs exercised significant influence over the people of their towns and who in turn acknowledged the power of one of several leaders. These paramount chiefs struggled with one another for preeminence in the lands between the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Among these politically diverse and linguistically related peoples were the Mocamas of the coast just north of St. Augustine. Just to the north of the Mocamas lived the Guales. Unlike the more politically cohesive Timucuas, the Guale towns of the Georgia coast accorded a wavering allegiance to the paramount leaders of two or three towns and spoke a Muskogean language distinct from the Timucuas but related to the peoples of inland Georgia and Alabama. Northwest from Guale, the peoples of central Georgia’s Oconee Valley, including Zamumo’s town of Altamaha, inhabited dispersed towns that acknowledged the primacy of Ocute. The peoples of the Deep South—even those immediately adjacent to the fledgling colony—resisted a simple template.¹⁸

      Figure 3. Theodor de Bry, “The Promontory of Florida, at Which the French Touched; Named by them the French Promontory.” From La Floride Française: Scènes de la vie Indiennes, peintes en 1564 (facsimile of the 1564 original [Paris, 1928]). When de Bry showed Indians meeting Laudonnière’s landing party in 1564 near the future St. Augustine (alias “F. Delfinium,” or the River of Dolphins), he conveyed some sense of Europeans’ and Natives’ mutual interest in exchange even as he masked the disparate political interests that inspired both groups. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division. F314.L33.

      Map 2. La Florida and its neighbors, 1590–1620. St. Augustine’s relationships with Natives were not extensive, but Floridanos did have contact with the Oconee Valley by 1600 and with Apalachees by 1620.

      Spaniards nonetheless sought to impose one. In the five years following the establishment of St. Augustine, Spanish soldiers, missionaries, and colonists experienced breathtakingly rapid success and failure. After founding a string of posts along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and inland into South Carolina, Menéndez de Avilés watched helplessly as a series of Indian uprisings destroyed nearly everything. By 1570, Spaniards in St. Augustine and Santa Elena inhabited European islands in a sea of Indians who were at best mildly friendly and at worst openly hostile. Another revolt against the newly established Jesuit mission on the Chesapeake in 1571 convinced the religious order to abandon La Florida, and many colonists followed suit after Guales and their coastal allies drove their Spanish neighbors out of Santa Elena in 1576. The Spanish colonial template had been simple, but the consequences, for Menéndez de Avilés, were simply devastating.¹⁹

      In 1573 the increasingly frustrated governor requested permission to conduct a war that would crush the rebellious Natives and provide needed revenues from the sale of enslaved captives to Caribbean islands. The king refused, fearing that such retribution would only escalate the cycle of violence.²⁰ The historian Henry Kamen believes that Felipe II’s distress at the violence in La Florida may have inspired his Orders for New Discoveries. Issued in 1573, the regulations required colonists throughout the Americas to incorporate “unpacified” peoples into the empire through kindness rather than conquest.²¹ Menéndez de Avilés had two new resources to help him implement the new policy. Franciscans arrived in the colony in 1573 to resume the Jesuits’ proselytizing mission. Equally important, beginning in 1571, a new royal subsidy, or situado, ensured that the colonists did not have to live on Franciscan zeal alone. These developments did not erase the human and natural obstacles to extracting wealth from the colony, though, and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés had few reasons to expect a prosperous legacy when he died in Spain in 1574.

      In fact, it seemed that Spanish successes were best measured not by what Spaniards acquired but by what they gave away. De Soto was not the only Spaniard who recognized the power of gifts such as beads, feathers, metal tools, and cloth. As one missionary to La Florida explained in 1549, Indians’ “friendship and affection was obviously based on what they could get from us. This world is the route to the other,” he consoled himself, “. . . gifts can break rocks.”²² Not surprisingly, then, the colony’s brightest developments during its first violent decade frequently followed presentations of gifts to visiting leaders. Gifts convinced a number of Mocamas in the immediate environs of St. Augustine to accept missionaries in the early 1580s, and Spanish military support against the Mocamas’ inland enemies sealed these alliances by the middle of the decade. Southeastern Indians had compelled Spaniards to abandon the pike and harquebus for quieter means of conquest.²³

      Opportunity for more significant successes came in 1593, when the king provided La Florida’s governor with funds to purchase gifts for visiting friendly caciques. By offering the “clothes and tools and flour” that King Felipe II stipulated, the governor would demonstrate not only his kindness but also his power. The disbursement of three years of belated situado payments in 1594 provided officials with the resources to meet these regulations. By 1597, they were offering hatchets and hoes; cloth of wool, linen, and a little silk; shirts, stockings, hats, glass beads, and even a pair of shoes. The Native dignitaries who received these small quantities of goods recognized them as unusual new equivalents for the copper ornaments, finely dressed skins, and shell beads that confirmed their high status and spiritual power. The new goods even began joining more familiar ones in the burials of their dead possessors.²⁴

      If the gifts possessed an air of familiarity that encouraged Indian leaders to accept them, they also offered possible security against the diseases that were ravaging St. Augustine’s neighbors. The archaeologist Rebecca Saunders has found that by the end of the 1500s, inhabitants of one town near the Georgia coast began to decorate their pottery with an increasing number of ceremonial motifs in a much “sloppier” manner than their predecessors. Less experienced potters, apparently deprived of the benefits of their stricken elders, sought to confront these invisible scourges and sustain their societies as best as their crafts-womanship would allow.²⁵ While Guale potters reconceptualized their craft, chiefs had good reason to pursue remedies of a different sort. Chiefs in Guale and elsewhere sought Spanish goods with an interest that grew with Spanish generosity. They did so for reasons we can only imagine four centuries later, but two considerations likely figured prominently. Not only did Spaniards’ beads, metal tools, and cloth exhibit an unusual crafting of familiar objects, but the Franciscans who frequently accompanied these gifts exhibited a remarkable power of their own. Most obviously, they walked unarmed among unfamiliar