Wednesday, September 20, 2017
September 19, 1559: A Hurricane That Changed History (WUWF online article)
For this 458th anniversary of the Luna hurricane, see the online article at WUWF in Pensacola entitled "September 19, 1559: A Hurricane That Changed History."
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Establishing the Size of Luna’s Settlement
John E. Worth
©
UWF Archaeology Institute
The 2015 identification of Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561
terrestrial settlement on Pensacola Bay was based on substantial and
unprecedented archaeological evidence for mid-16th-century Spanish
and Aztec residential habitation across a landform that had already been long
suspected to be one of the best candidates for the site, both based on
documentary descriptions and the presence of two shipwrecks from Luna’s
colonial fleet just offshore. But this
was just the beginning of the story for UWF archaeologists, whose next
challenge was to explore the extent and nature of the archaeological deposits
at the site in greater detail. As I
described in a blog post last year, “How
large would Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561 settlement have been?,” documentary
accounts indicate that Luna’s settlement was initially sketched out to comprise
140 house lots, 40 of which were to be reserved for a plaza, church, warehouse,
and other public structures, with the remaiming 100 lots to be laid out for 100
families to remain at the port settlement once the expedition pushed north into
the interior. Projecting a 5 by 7
rectangular configuration of four-lot blocks, the initial town configuration
would have been laid out during the five weeks between arrival and the
hurricane that destroyed Luna’s fleet, and would have housed some 1,500
colonists and stranded sailors for the first six months, with only 362
remaining in the settlement a year later after several evacuations on relief
ships returning to Mexico, dwindling to less than 200 inhabitants by the spring
of 1561.
Since the site’s discovery in the fall of 2015,
archaeological survey and excavations have been conducted on an ongoing basis by
the University of West Florida Archaeology
Institute, with one of the principal goals of 2016 work focused on
“bounding” the site, or systematically determining how big of an area is
covered by the Spanish debris scatter resulting from the two-year occupation of
Santa María de Ochuse. To this end, more
than 900 shovel tests were excavated across the entire neighborhood surrounding
the initial find, each providing a 50 x 50 cm “snapshot” about a meter deep of
what artifacts were present and what the soil layers looked like in that
area. Shovel testing both within and
beyond the artifact scatter established a general boundary for the site’s
maximum extent, while simultaneously providing an important assemblage of
tightly-dated mid-16th-century artifacts that comprise the standard
“residential” material signature for the Luna expedition. The same basic assemblage of residential
debris is scattered from one end of the site to another, including numerous
sherds of assorted Spanish and Aztec ceramic vessels and wrought iron nails and
spikes, not to mention routinely-encountered fragments of basalt grinding
stones, a range of arms and armor parts such as crossbow bolt tips, lead shot
and sprue, fragments of mail, brigandine, and jack plate armor, and assorted
other personal items including copper-alloy straight pins, copper lacing
aglets, and other clothing fasteners and buckle fragments.
The results of the 2016 shovel test survey as well as the
2016 UWF summer field schools at the site, combined with subsequent laboratory
analysis of the artifacts discovered, has provided a much clearer picture of
the size and configuration of the Luna settlement site, as we reported in the
spring 2017 conference of the Florida Anthropological Society in the paper “The Discovery and
Exploration of Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561 Settlement on Pensacola Bay” (coauthored
by John E. Worth, Elizabeth D. Benchley, Janet R. Lloyd, and Jennifer Melcher,
but drawing on field and lab work undertaken by many additional staff and
students). The spatial distribution of
several categories of diagnostic Luna expedition artifacts overlap one another,
including 16th-century lead glazed redware, Columbia Plain majolica, Aztec
ceramics, and caret head nails, but the most abundant diagnostic is early
Spanish olive jar, which is distributed across a total area of roughly 12.7
hectares, or 31 acres. This includes 8.9
hectares on the level upper summit of the terrace overlooking Pensacola Bay,
with another somewhat lighter artifact scatter across 3.8 hectares extending
along the lower slope down close to the shore and surrounding a freshwater pond
draining to the west. If we overlay a
projected rectangular settlement grid based on the documentary accounts on top
of the archaeological distribution on the upper terrace (see schematic below),
the rectangle measures 375 meters by 290 meters, with a projected main site
area of roughly 11 hectares, or just over 27 acres (not counting the additional
area below the terrace, which appears to have been a secondary activity area
surrounding the freshwater spring drainage and boat landing along the lower
bluff).
 |
| Schematic Map of Luna Settlement Site |
Now that we have archaeological data revealing the Luna
settlement’s size to be somewhere between 12.7 and 14.8 hectares, we can
confirm that this is by far the largest mid-16th-century Spanish
residential site in the entire Southeastern United States, larger than both 16th-century
locations of St. Augustine (about 1 and 4 hectares) and the contemporaneous
location of Santa Elena in South Carolina (6 hectares). Since the Luna settlement originally housed
1,500 settlers, more than double the number of settlers living in 16th-century
St. Augustine and Santa Elena (with between 300-600 inhabitants in each), the
huge size of the archaeological site of Santa María de Ochuse is entirely consistent
with what we would expect, though its two-year duration was of course far
shorter than the later Spanish colonies to the east, leaving a somewhat lighter
trace on the landscape.
Apart from simply being a huge random scatter of Spanish
debris, or objects accumulated by local Native Americans (whose apparently
small seasonal camps at the edges of the site throughout much of prehistory are
concentrated along the bluff margins of the bay and bayou; see also the
previous blog post here),
we also now know that the site is accompanied by direct evidence of Spanish
structures, trashpits, hearths, and other activity areas. The 2017 UWF terrestrial archaeological field
school at the Luna settlement site has built upon previous fieldwork at the
site to open up even larger excavation units in search of intact evidence for Spanish
residential presence. Even though the
total area excavated between shovel tests and larger excavation units
represents only a fraction of a percent of the entire site area, examples of
all these feature types have already been found (see pictures below).
 |
| Profile of burned Spanish post, with inset showing olive jar sherds packed vertically along the posthole walls. |
 |
| Trashpit deposits in place. |
 |
| Spanish firepit deposits in plan view and profile (inset). |
Structural features include a deep, burned post found in
2016 with a charred post remnant and a wrought iron nail still in place and
with olive jar sherds in the posthole fill, and a second nearby post found this
year with the same depth and size (though not burned below ground like the
first one). Also this year we discovered
a straight line of three probable Luna-era postholes of equal depth within a
single 2x2 meter excavation unit. And in
2016, we excavated a large trashpit packed with 16th-century trash
such as broken barrel bands, Spanish pottery sherds, nails and spikes, wire, a
smashed Native American bowl, a few shells, and a complete deer antler. And on yet another end of the site,
mechanical stripping of topsoil in advance of house construction exposed a
firepit deposit containing Spanish olive jar sherds and a wrought iron nail
fragment amid shell and wood charcoal.
In addition to pit features, we also have good evidence for
routine on-site activities that would have been carried out by Spaniards while
living at the site. For example, several
areas have produced direct evidence of the on-site casting of lead arquebus
shot, including a number of unfinished and unfired lead balls with sprue
snipped off them with scissors (and sometimes still attached), along with a
good number of lead droplets and splatter (see below).
 |
| Evidence of on-site lead casting and the use of scissors. |
In sum, the broad distribution of mid-16th-century
Spanish artifacts at the Luna site are clearly a result of a large number of
Spaniards living on site, and the association of these artifacts with pit features resulting
from Spanish structures and the activities of daily life at the site is exactly
what we would expect for the short-lived occupation at Santa María de
Ochuse. Now that we have established the
site boundaries and begun a more thorough exploration of the subsurface
deposits, we look forward to continuing our exploration of this large and
important colonial site over coming years.
Thursday, July 20, 2017
Crossbows and the Luna Expedition
John E. Worth
© UWF Archaeology
Institute
 |
Unconserved copper crossbow bolt tips found at the Luna settlement site. |
 |
| Conserved copper crossbow bolt tips on display at the T.T. Wentworth, Jr. Museum. |
 |
| Conserved copper crossbow bolt tips on display at the UWF Archaeology Institute. |
These artifacts, while rare, provide a tangible link to a
piece of medieval weaponry, the crossbow (ballesta),
that would only last another decade or so as a part of typical Spanish military
equipment in the New World. The crossbow
would soon be completely replaced by firearms such as the match-lock arquebus (arcabuz) and musket (mosquete).
 |
| Image of 15th-century crossbowman from “Le Livre de chasse” (cited below), f. 96r. |
The Luna expedition carried both crossbows and arquebuses,
but while the arquebuses were among a list of items to be purchased directly
from Spain (Eguino 1560), the crossbows were evidently brought directly from
Mexico. Even though they receive
comparatively little direct mention in the correspondence and narratives of the
expedition (Priestley 1928; Dávila Padilla 1625), financial accounts of the
Luna expedition make direct reference to crossbows among 2,250 lbs. of diverse goods
transported by one drover from Mexico City to the ships at San Juan de Ulua,
and also among 1,900 lbs. of “weapons and munitions” transported by another
drover (Yugoyen 1569).
As a military weapon, the crossbow did not survive long past
the Luna expedition, though crossbows were still in use during the first years
of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés’ successful Florida settlements at St. Augustine
and Santa Elena in 1565 and 1566. This
was not simply a coincidence; Menéndez reported that the Florida Indians
learned quickly that Spanish matchlock arquebuses could not function well
during rainstorms, and adjusted their tactics accordingly. In 1566, Menéndez wrote to the king that
“arquebuses without crossbows in this land are useless weapons, and we cannot
defend ourselves from the Indians nor make war against them without crossbows,
since every day they kill us Christians without us being able to kill an Indian
if we do not have crossbows.” Menéndez further specified that “these savages
are so skillful that, trusting in their agility and strength, which they never
lose, they attack us when it rains when we cannot take advantage of the
arquebuses.”
Documentary records confirm that Menéndez’s soldiers used
both crossbows and firearms, and both types of weapons were included as part of
normal military equipment in Florida during the late 1560s, including during
the 1566-1568 Juan Pardo expeditions into the deep interior Southeast. Warehouse inventories provide evidence for
substantial numbers of these weapons; during the two years of Juan de Junco’s oversight
of the St. Augustine warehouse between 1567 and 1569, the warehouse was
recorded to have originally contained or received 394 crossbows and 10,368
bolts, of which 169 crossbows with 3,468 bolts were issued to soldiers, leaving
a balance of 225 crossbows and 6,900 bolts in the warehouse after his departure
late in 1569 (accounts found in Legajo 941, Contaduría, Archivo General de
Indias, Seville, Spain). During the same
period, however, only 161 arquebuses were recorded, of which 109 were issued to
soldiers, with just 52 remaining in 1569.
Nevertheless, inventories of 13 ships that arrived in St. Augustine with
supplies from Spain between 1568 and 1587 contain not a single crossbow, but
included some 44 arquebuses and 25 muskets along with lead and lead shot, match
cord, and gunpowder and powder flasks (Lyon 1992:37-50). Moreover, two decades later, by the time of
later and more continuous St. Augustine warehouse accounts covering the period
between 1592 and 1602 (in Legajos 947, 949, and 950, Contaduría, AGI), only
arquebuses and muskets and their associated equipment and munitions were
listed, with crossbows and bolts completely absent from the royal warehouse. Clearly, military crossbows had gone out of
use in Florida by no later than the early 1590s.
Pinning down the exact timing of this transition from
crossbows and firearms to only firearms is difficult using Florida records
alone, but Spanish ship manifests across this period show a far clearer
pattern. My own review of the
inventories of armaments, equipment, and supplies loaded on a diverse array of
Spanish ships between 1523 and 1615 (generally found in the Contratación
section of the AGI in Seville, many digitized and online) shows that both
crossbows and firearms (initially escopetas,
followed by arcabuzes) were included
as ship’s armament through 1570, after which only firearms (arcabuzes as well as the larger mosquetes) remained. At the same time as the abandonment of the
crossbow, thrown projectile weapons such as the javelin (gorguz) and dart (dardo)
also disappeared from the inventories, though polearms (pikes, halberds,
lances, etc.) persisted throughout the entire 16th-century. Though crossbows were and are still employed
in hunting game, their common military use seems to end after about 1570,
making crossbow bolts a reliable diagnostic marker of only the earliest Spanish
era in Florida.
Apart from the Luna settlement and Emanuel Point I wreck, archaeological
finds of crossbow bolt tips in Spanish Florida are extremely limited, including
one iron tip from the Governor Martin Site in Tallahassee (Hernando de Soto’s
1539-1540 winter encampment) and eight iron tips from the site of Menéndez’s
1566-1587 settlement of Santa Elena on Parris Island, South Carolina (Ewen and
Hann 1998:80; South et al. 1988:100-103).
Notably, all crossbow bolt tips from Spanish expeditions originating in
Spain seem to have been made from iron, while those from expeditions originating
in Mexico were almost exclusively made from copper, including not just the Luna
expedition but also the 1540-1542 expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, on
which Luna himself had been an officer (Gagné 2003). Another copper bolt tip virtually identical
to those from the Luna settlement and wrecks was found at the Poarch Farm site
in northwest Georgia (Langford and Smith 1990), and although both Soto and Luna
expeditions are believed to have passed through the site as part of the
chiefdom of Coosa, the copper bolt tip seems most likely to have been a product
of Mateo del Saúz’s stay there during the Luna expedition.
The production of copper crossbow bolt tips by Mexican
Indian craftsmen is in fact documented as early as 1521, when Hernando Cortés ordered
the native towns around Texcoco to produce more than 50,000 crossbow bolts and
helmets of indigenous copper using Spanish models within a space of eight days
before the seige of Tenochtitlán (Díaz del Castillo 1796:166-168). Early Spanish satisfaction with these results
seems to have translated into a longer-term local industry, likely accounting
for the clear dominance of copper bolt tips on both the Coronado and Luna
expeditions to the modern United States.
The eventual disappearance of these Mexican-made copper bolt tips from
the archaeological record seems less likely to have been a result of differences
in effectiveness in comparison to iron (since metal armor was not present among
American Indians), and much more likely to have simply been a result of the overall
decline in use of the military crossbow within half a century of the initial Mexican
production of copper bolt tips in the 1520s.
Nevertheless, the Luna settlement continues to reveal additional
evidence of this short-lived industry, highlighting the fusion of Old World and
New World technologies during the early colonial era.
Selected References
Bratten, John R.
2009 The
Mesoamerican Component of the Emanuel Point Ships: Obsidian, Ceramics, and
Projectile Points. The Florida
Anthropologist 62(3-4):109-114.
Dávila Padilla, Augustín
1625 Historia de la Fundación y Discurso de la
Provincia de Santiago de México de la Orden de Predicadores, por las vidas de
sus varones insignes y casos Notables de Nueva España (pp. 189-229 for the
Luna section). Online Here
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal
1796 Historia verdadera de la conquista de la
Nueva España, Vol. 3. Imprenta de
Don Benito Cano, Madrid. https://books.google.com/books?id=zUtqjTonOgEC&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false
Eguino, Antonio de
1560 Accounts of
weapons, munitions, trade goods, and other things that were bought to send to
the viceroy of New Spain by order of His Majesty. Legajo 283, Contaduría, Archivo General de
Indias, Seville, Spain.
Ewen, Charles R., and John H. Hann
1998 Hernando de Soto among the Apalachee: The
Archaeology of the First Winter Encampment.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Gagné, Frank R., Jr.
2003 Spanish
Crossbow Boltheads of Sixteenth-Century North America: A Comparative
Analysis. In The Coronado Expedition from the Distance of 460 Years, editors
Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, pp. 240-252. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Langford, James B., Jr., and Marvin T. Smith
1990 Recent
Investigations in the Core of the Coosa Province. In Lamar
Archaeology: Mississippian Chiefdoms in the Deep South, editors J. Mark Williams
and Gary Shapiro, pp. 104-116.
University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
Lyon, Eugene
1992 Richer Than We
Thought: The Material Culture of Sixteenth-Century St. Augustine. El
Escribano 29:1-117.
Menéndez de Avilés, Pedro
1566 Letter to the
Spanish Crown, October 15, 1566. Legajo
115, Santo Domingo, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain.
Phebus, Gaston
1401-1500 Le
Livre de chasse, que fist le comte PHEBUS DE FOYS, seigneur de Bearn. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département
des manuscrits, Français 617. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52506558z?rk=42918;4
Priestly, Herbert Ingram
1928 The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561. DeLand: Florida State Historical Society. Volume I online Volume II online
1928 The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561. DeLand: Florida State Historical Society. Volume I online Volume II online
South, Stanley, Russell K.
Skowronek, and Richard E. Johnson
1988 Spanish Artifacts from Santa Elena. Occasional Papers of the South Carolina
Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Anthropological Studies 7. Columbia, South Carolina. Online Here
Yugoyen, Martín de
1569 Audit of the accounts of Alonso Ortíz de
Urrutia, deputy treasurer of Veracruz, March 21, 1554–January 31, 1559 (and through November 4, 1559). Legajo
877, Contaduría, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain. Translations by R. Wayne Childers (1999) on
file, Archaeology Institute, University of West Florida, Pensacola.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Dominican Missionaries and the Luna Expedition
John E. Worth
© UWF Archaeology Institute
Though King Phillip II was principally focused on
establishing a successful Spanish colony in Florida in order to head off
rumored French colonization along the Atlantic coast there, and in so doing to
assure the safety of Spain’s New World treasure fleets on their return voyage,
the missionary potential of the Luna expedition was not far behind in Spanish
thinking. The possibility of
distributing missionaries among the native peoples of southeastern North
America in an effort to expand the reach of Christendom had long been a
concurrent objective of Spanish exploration and colonization efforts in
Florida, and not a single state-sanctioned expedition here lacked priests who
served both as ministers to Spanish explorers and as prospective missionaries
to the Indians they encountered.
Indeed, standard language in all royal contracts with
officially-sanctioned expedition leaders included statements underlining the
importance of both good treatment and conversion of native peoples. In one of the original December 1557 decrees
authorizing the Florida expedition that would eventually be led by Tristán de
Luna a year and a half later (transcribed in Legajo 1013, Justicia, Archivo
General de Indias, Seville, Spain), the Spanish crown specifically directed
that its leader should “bring the people of that land and provinces to the
understanding of our holy Catholic faith by way of preaching and good treatment,
and that among the people who might go [on the expedition] some missionaries
should be sent, so that by means of them and their preaching they should come
into knowledge of God our lord, and live in Christian order.”
 |
| Seal of the Order of Preachers, or Dominican Order, on the cover of Dávila Padilla (1625). |
In charge of the group was provincial vicar Fray Pedro de
Feria, accompanied by Frays Domingo de la Anunciación, Domingo de Salazar, Bartolomé
Matheos, Juan de Mazuelas, and Diego de Santo Domingo. A considerable amount of equipment
accompanied the Dominicans; expedition financial records reveal that some 5,000
lbs. of “the ornaments and vestments necessary for the divine liturgy” were
transported, along with some 2,000 lbs. of “goods and vestments” pertaining to
the friars themselves, along with 900 lbs. of goods belonging to “the Indians
who were going in the company of the missionaries who were going for the
conversion of the natives of the said province of Florida” (Yugoyen 1569). This latter group apparently included Southeastern
Indian women that had been brought out during the 1539-1543 expedition of
Hernando de Soto, who were serving as advisors to the Dominicans. It was in fact these women who urged the
Dominicans to insist that sufficient food be taken on the Luna expedition to
avoid colonists having to rely on local Indian food stores, since this had been
a serious cause of discord on previous Spanish expeditions (Feria et al. 1559).
Of the original Dominican party, Matheos drowned during the
hurricane while awaiting shipboard to bring news to Spain, and Feria, Mazuelas,
and Santo Domingo returned to New Spain after the main colony returned from
Nanipacana in central Alabama to Santa María de Ochuse on Pensacola Bay (the Luna
settlement). The remaining two friars,
Anunciación and Salazar, however, not only stayed throughout the rest of the
expedition, but in fact played prominent roles throughout the entire Luna
expedition, including having accompanied the detachment of 200 sent from
Nanipacana to the chiefdom of Coosa in Northwest Georgia between April and
November of 1560. The detailed
recollections of this thrust into the northern interior under Sergeant Major
Mateo del Sauz formed an important part of the only major published account of
the Luna expedition prior to the 20th century.
This account comprised a lengthy narrative almost certainly originally
authored by Fray Domingo de la Anunciación himself, and that was subsequently
embedded within the larger volume originally published in 1596 by Fray Augustín
Dávila Padilla (2nd edition from 1625 online, linked below). This narrative of the Luna expedition
provides what amounts to a Dominican’s perspective on the events of the
expedition, and gives amazing detail regarding the role of the missionaries within
the colony, up to and including their role in resolving bitter internal
disputes between Luna and his officers during the expedition’s second winter of
1560-1561, culminating in an emotional public reconciliation during Palm Sunday
Mass.
Even though the Dominicans were sent primarily as
missionaries tasked with initiating the conversion of the native peoples of
Florida, their missionary work at Ochuse was actually quite limited; documents
indicate that there was little interaction between the Luna settlers and scattered
local Indian groups in the Pensacola Bay region, whose habitations were
described as only consisting of “some few camps of Indians who appear to be
fishermen,” and who had only “few
possessions and roots” and were thus not seen as a reliable source of food that
the colonists could trade for (Velasco 1559; Priestley 1928: v.1:116-119,
v.2:274-275). In fact, Anunciación
himself reported only having baptized a single elderly Indian woman on her
deathbed in the chiefdom of Coosa more than a hundred leagues into the interior,
marveling at the irony that the entire expense and hardship of the Luna
expedition had only achieved a single conversion (Dávila Padilla 1625:221-222).
The actual role of the Dominicans on the expedition was much
broader, and included ministering to the spiritual needs of the Luna soldiers
and settlers themselves. Even though the
Dominicans were not the only clergy on the Luna expedition, the secular cleric Licenciado
Juan Pérez de Barandalla was described by Viceroy Luis de Velasco as being
opinionated and having a “rough” temperament (and apparently completely
illegible handwriting), and thus the viceroy suggested that if he could not get
along with the Dominicans he would be granted permission to leave, even though
his service was needed as a supplement to the Dominicans in administering
sacraments to so many Spaniards (Priestley 1928, v.1:110-111, 126-127). Barandalla did ultimately remain until the
April 1561 evacuation of most remaining settlers, but clearly occupied a
secondary position.
The Dominican friars thus played a prominent role in acting
as priests for the diverse members of the Luna expedition, leading daily Masses
and administering other routine sacraments throughout the duration of the
expedition. Catholicism was very much a
part of daily life for mid-16th-century Spaniards, and even the annual calendar
itself was framed in the Catholic liturgical cycle, and each day was commonly
known by its association with individual saints or religious feasts (see
overview online here). The importance of personal religiosity is
also evidenced by the common presence of strings of wooden rosary beads and Latin
prayer books among even the most ordinary sailor or soldier’s possessions
inventoried and documented upon death (many such documents, called “bienes de difuntos,” are found in the
Contratación section of the Archivo General de Indias in Seville). Amazingly, some of these wooden prayer beads
have even been recovered on the nearby Emanuel Point shipwrecks, along with a
fragmentary amber bead probably from one of the more expensive rosaries in use at the time, also
commonly made from jet, coral, bone, crystal, and jasper (see pictures below).
 |
| Field shot of wooden bead from Emanuel Point II wreck (courtesy of Dr. John Bratten). |
 |
| Amber bead fragment from Emanuel Point II shipwreck. |
Every Spanish colonial town had its principal church on the
main plaza, and the Luna settlement was no different; the Dávila Padilla
narrative describes the church at Santa María de Ochuse as “a poor ramada that
served as a church,” from which “the greater part of the people” processed
daily to and from a large cross erected on the beach while saying the Litanies. Though we have yet to find direct evidence of
the location or configuration of the church at the Luna settlement, it
doubtless would have been one of the largest structures on the site, fronting
on the plaza in the main public district of the town.
While the Dominicans who accompanied the Luna expedition
comprised only 6 out of the original population of 1,500 settlers, they
nonetheless generated a comparatively substantial documentary record of the
expedition as it unfolded on the ground, and played a pivotal role in the daily
life of the settlement and its inhabitants.
Although the archaeological signature of the religious component of the
expedition will likely be small in comparison to the more mundane realities of
subsistence, housing, and other daily activities on site, we hope we will
eventually be able to find some traces of the Dominican presence and the places
they lived and worked in at the Luna settlement.
Selected References
Dávila Padilla, Augustín
1625 Historia de la Fundación y Discurso de la
Provincia de Santiago de México de la Orden de Predicadores, por las vidas de
sus varones insignes y casos Notables de Nueva España (pp. 189-229 for the
Luna section). Online Here
Feria, Pedro de, Domingo de la Anunciación, and Domingo de
Salazar
1559 Letter to the
Spanish Crown, May 4, 1559. Legajo 280,
Mexico, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain.
Priestly, Herbert Ingram
1928 The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561. DeLand: Florida State Historical Society. Volume I online Volume II online
1928 The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561. DeLand: Florida State Historical Society. Volume I online Volume II online
Velasco, Luís de
1559 Letter to the
Spanish Crown, September 24, 1559.
Legajo 19, Ramo 9, Patronato, Archivo General de Indias, Seville,
Spain. Faulty transcription from Legajo
280, Mexico, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain, included in Priestley (1928,
v.2:268-277).
Worth, John E.
2014 Discovering Florida: First-Contact
Narratives of Spanish Expeditions along the Lower Gulf Coast. University Press of Florida, Gainesville
(ISBN: 978-0813049885).
Yugoyen, Martín de
1569 Audit of the accounts of Alonso Ortíz de
Urrutia, deputy treasurer of Veracruz, March 21, 1554–January 31, 1559. Legajo 877, Contaduría, Archivo
General de Indias, Seville, Spain. Translations
by R. Wayne Childers (1999) on file, Archaeology Institute, University of West
Florida, Pensacola.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
The Royal Warehouse at the Luna Settlement
John E. Worth
© UWF Archaeology
Institute
One of the first and most important public structures that
would have been erected at the Luna settlement was the royal warehouse, which
would have been the secure storage location for all the colony’s food,
supplies, equipment, and munitions.
Referred to by various names in Luna expedition documentation including
“Royal House” (casa real), “King’s
House” (casa del rey), “Supply House”
(casa del bastimento), and “Royal
Treasury House” (casa de la real hacienda),
the structure would have been located on the main town plaza and very likely
nearest the path to the port landing, where supplies would have been
offloaded. Documentary accounts of the
Luna expedition (many transcribed and translated in Priestley 1928, below) make
it abundantly clear that during the first five weeks after Luna’s fleet entered
Pensacola Bay, the settlers must have first set about exploring the bay and
deciding on the best location to found their first town, after which they
doubtless cleared the undergrowth and laid out the initial grid of streets and
house lots, simultaneously unloading the equipment and supplies needed to begin
constructing housing to shelter the 1,500 people that just disembarked. Since the ships remained at anchor not far
offshore, and could therefore be used as temporary floating warehouses to store
anything not needed for the initial construction effort, the vast stores of
food not immediately needed on land were left on board (Dávila Padilla 1625:194),
and Luna’s colonists seem to have focused initially on getting their own
residences erected. Apparently, even
this task was largely incomplete when the hurricane of September 19-20, 1559
arrived from the east (see Worth 2009), devastating most of the fleet and the
food on board, and probably flattening many half-built structures on land.
The completion of a formal royal warehouse and other public
structures probably post-dated the hurricane, but given the dire straits in
which Luna’s settlers found themselves after the loss of most of their food
stores and ships, its construction must have been a priority in the aftermath
of the storm. Correspondence between
Tristán de Luna and the viceroy Luis de Velasco indicates that not only would
such a warehouse be necessary to keep all remaining food and any relief
supplies that would arrive over coming months under lock and key, but it would also
be used to keep the sails, rudders, and oars of all vessels while anchored at
port, minimizing the possibility that any of the settlers or stranded sailors could
seize a vessel to escape Florida. A huge
amount of subsequent legal documentation generated in the Luna settlement
itself (found in Legajo 1013, Justicia, Archivo General de Indias, Seville,
Spain, folios 96r-161v; see also Priestley 1928,v.1:198-v.2:137) confirms that
the warehouse was kept locked and could only be opened by the royal officials Alonso
Velázquez Rodríguez (treasurer) and Alonso Pérez (accountant) for the
distribution of rations or anything else housed there. Even Luna himself was barred from entry
during 1560 disputes with his officers over the issuance of rations for an
ill-advised journey inland to Coosa, and over his order to release the sails of
a vessel to be sent to New Spain. In
those instances, the royal officials sided with the Maese de Campo Jorge Cerón
in his refusal to allow Luna to make unilateral decisions without consulting
all his company captains and other officers.
So what would this royal warehouse have looked like, and
what might it have contained? Like all
the structures at Santa María de Ochuse, the warehouse would have been
constructed of wood poles and planks, and probably roofed with either thatch or
perhaps cypress bark, possibly even with the use of some clay daubing. It would likely have been a substantial
structure, likely among the largest in the settlement with the possible
exception of the church.
No inventory of the contents of the royal warehouse at the
Luna settlement has yet been found, and unfortunately much of the equipment and
armaments shipped from Mexico City’s own armory for the expedition was transported
in uninventoried crates according to the records we do possess. So apart from a
few brief mentions in the documents, to some extent we are left with only the
archaeological traces of lost or broken items at the site of the warehouse as
direct evidence of its general contents.
Fortunately, however, we do have a few comparative inventories from
royal warehouses in Florida’s later settlements at St. Augustine and Santa
Elena, and these can provide us a rough “snapshot” of the kinds of things
normally stored in such a structure (see also Lyon 1992). A pair of 1569 inventories from the warehouse
at Pedro Menéndez’s settlement at Santa Elena (found in Legajo 941, Contaduría,
Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain) illustrate a diverse range of items,
including not just foodstuffs but also clothing, tools and supplies, a wide
range of containers, and an array of weapons, armor, and even artillery
(presumably mounted at the fort, but still under inventory control of the
quartermaster).
Santa
Elena Warehouse, 1569
Pedro Menendez Marquez and Juan de la Bandera
combined inventories (modernized quantities)
|
Food
35 casks of wheat flour with 775 lbs. of flour in each
one
18 casks of flour from New Spain, each one with 8 iron
hoops, full and in good condition.
3 casks of rotten flour
12,450 lbs. of corn
3,453 liters of wine in 11 casks
25 liters of olive oil in 4 olive jars
1.5 liters of honey in an olive jar
734 lbs. of salt at the amount of 140 lbs. per fanega, amounting to 5.25 fanegas
Clothing
18 pairs of stockings
7 felt hats with their thin cords
25 blankets, 20 all white and 5 striped
32 complete sword belts, and another 2 hangers without
belts
40 pairs of sandals
19 pairs of shoes
Tools and Supplies
2 steelyard scales, one weighing 378 lbs. with its
weight, and the other of 200 lbs. with its weight
2 balances of iron with copper pans
2 iron weights, one of 1 lb. and the other of ½ lb.
1 iron pick
5 shovels of iron
3 mattocks
9 pole hooks
1 small grindstone for grinding
2 pairs of shackles
1 set of prison stocks, old, broken, and without a lock
2 iron padlocks with keys and without screws
300 lbs. of scantling nails
175 lbs. of siding nails
150 lbs. of flooring nails
151 lbs. of bolts
2 large cauldrons for whaling
17 harpoons for whaling
10 lancets
3 spoons
1 basket with 20 whaling knives
Containers
1 large copper cauldron weighing 34 lbs.
1 large copper pot weighing 50 lbs.
1 copper pitcher with 7.5 liter capacity
2 wine bags with their nozzles
392 wooden bowls, small and large
90 wooden plates
8 ceramic olive jars of ½ arroba [6.28 liters]
88 casks that were received with wine and flour and
empty.
41 broken casks
360 iron barrel hoops
5 burlap sacks
3 crates without locks or keys
7 barrels in which the nails [above] were received
Weapons and Armor
17 complete crossbows
17 goats-foot levers
49 dozen crossbow bolts
17 cords, on each crossbow its own
7 crossbow stocks
17 quivers.
8 pikes with their tips
8 extra pike tips
117 bucklers of dragon-tree wood
65 escaupiles
(cotton padded armor)
Artillery
1 bronze cannon weighing 5,369 lbs.
1 bronze cannon weighing 5,250 lbs.
1 bronze half-saker
1 bronze half-saker weighing 385 lbs.
1 bronze half-saker weighing 1,414 lbs.
1 bronze half-culverin weighing __96 lbs.
1 bronze half-culverin weighing 3,140 lbs.
1 bronze saker weighing 2,021 lbs.
1 bronze saker weighing 1,200 lbs.
1 bronze piece weighing up to 900 lbs.
37 barrels of gunpowder, and in them are 3,515 lbs. of
cannon powder
175 lbs. of arquebus powder in 2 barrels
309 artillery balls
9 copper loaders for loading the said [artillery] pieces
_ ramrods
1 hoist for the service of the artillery
1 large iron hammer for the said [artillery]
8 pulleys of wood for the service of the artillery
36 loafs of lead that weighed 4,435 lbs.
3 molds for making shot for versos [small artillery]
|
To these comparative inventories from 16th-century east
Florida we may also add a 1559 list of munitions, tools, and trade goods
requested from Spain by Viceroy Luis de Velasco for the use of Luna’s Florida
expedition (found in Legajo 283, Contaduría, Archivo General de Indias,
Seville, Spain). Even though these goods
may never have actually been offloaded at the Luna settlement (the request was
not fulfilled in Spain until early 1560, and the shipment did not arrive in New
Spain until mid-year for dispatch on one of the relief expeditions), they
nonetheless provide an illustration of some of the kinds of items that may have
been included in uninventoried crates loaded on the first fleet, that eventually
ended up stored in the royal warehouse at Santa María de Ochuse.
Munitions, Tools,
and Trade Goods Requested by the Viceroy of New Spain for the Florida Colony,
1559
|
Tools and Supplies
50 [pieces of] canvas
50 barrels of tar
10,000 lbs. of pitch
600 lbs. of bolts, each 3/8 of a yard
long
600 lbs. of sharp half-foot nails, of
the longest that are found
6,000 lbs. of round bolts
1,000 lbs. of siding nails
1,000 lbs. of flooring nails
1,000 lbs. of half-size flooring
nails
50,000 tacks
100,000 pump tacks
2 pairs of bellows, some large and
others small
10,000 lbs. of sheet and bar iron
2,000 lbs. of steel
12 levers
12 iron mattocks and as many shovels
4 grapnel anchors for the shallops,
each one of 400 lbs.
2 grapnels for the skiffs
2 seine nets for fishing, each one 60
fathoms long, with their accessories
Trade Goods
2 boxes filled with glass beads of
all types
some little brass basins and red
buttons and knives from Flanders and scissors and cheap mirrors and hawk’s
bells, all of which should cost up to 200 ducats
400 yards of simple taffetas, yellow
and sunflower and red and blue and carmine
1 dozen pieces of linen from Calcutta
1 piece of blue cloth
1 yellow piece
2 red pieces
1 green piece
1 purple piece
Weapons and Armor
150 inexpensive arquebuses
50 breastplates
50 Biscayan corselets
100 morion helmets
50 round shields
1,000 javelins
200 light javelins
200 half-pikes
100 pikes
4,000 lbs. of gunpowder
1,000 lbs. of sulfer
12 goat’s foot levers
Artillery
2 bronze artillery pieces of 2,000
lbs., each one with 200 iron shot
2 bronze artillery pieces of 1,500
lbs. with 300 iron shot
4 bronze falconets with chambers of up to 800 or
1000 lbs., each one with 600 shot
|
Indeed, the 2015 discovery by UWF archaeologists of a
handful of glass trade beads along with hundreds of sherds of Spanish olive
jars and other ceramics, plus an array of wrought iron nails and diverse other materials,
and several small subsurface pits that might have been used for storage, would
seem to provide support for the idea that this particular location may well have
been the site of the settlement’s warehouse.
 |
| Trade beads from the Luna settlement site (left: Nueva Cadiz bead; right: Faceted 7-Layer Chevron beads) |
Further testing and analysis of artifact assemblages across
the Luna settlement site may eventually allow us to understand whether
residential areas and other specialized structures and activity areas had
different relative proportions of specific categories of material culture. In
addition, we will search for physical traces of the public and private
structures erected there more than 450 years ago, such as preserved posts or more
ephemeral traces of architectural features.
While this type of archaeological analysis and interpretation is by no
means an easy or quick affair, we look forward to making inroads into
understanding the internal configuration of the Luna settlement, and getting
better glimpses of the lives of its 16th-century inhabitants.
Selected References
Dávila Padilla, Augustín
1625 Historia de la Fundación y Discurso de la
Provincia de Santiago de México de la Orden de Predicadores, por las vidas de
sus varones insignes y casos Notables de Nueva España (pp. 189-229 for the
Luna section). Online Here
Lyon, Eugene
1992 Richer Than We
Thought: The Material Culture of Sixteenth-Century St. Augustine. El
Escribano 29:1-117.
Priestly, Herbert Ingram
1928 The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561. DeLand: Florida State Historical Society. Volume I online Volume II online
1928 The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561. DeLand: Florida State Historical Society. Volume I online Volume II online
Worth, John E.
2009 Documenting
Tristán de Luna’s Fleet, and the Storm that Destroyed It. The
Florida Anthropologist 62(3-4): 83-92.
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