John E. Worth
© UWF Archaeology
Institute
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Unconserved copper crossbow bolt tips found at the Luna settlement site. |
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| Conserved copper crossbow bolt tips on display at the T.T. Wentworth, Jr. Museum. |
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| 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).
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| 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.
