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.”
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| 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).
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| Field shot of wooden bead from Emanuel Point II wreck (courtesy of Dr. John Bratten). |
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| 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.
