“La Florida: Catholics, Conquistadores and Other American Origin Stories“
by Kevin Kokomoor (Pineapple Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot)
I grew up in Florida, so we learned about the Spanish exploration of our state centuries before any United States. But I still gained lots of cool information about the challenges faced by explorer/colonists and Native Americans as they ran into each other. The reason that we are talking about Florida this week is because the first Thanksgiving meal on the North American continent was not held in Massachusetts Bay in 1621 with pious Protestants and welcoming First Nations; rather, it was a half-century earlier in Florida (September in 1565) with pious Catholic and reluctant First Nations neighbors! We remember the English story because they ultimately prevailed on this continent, but the first explorers and colonizers spoke Spanish and were determined to convert the Indians to Catholicism. It was not wildly successful, and La Florida became the stone that broke many a conquistador’s dreams of wealth and power.
St. Augustine was founded as a Spanish measure to protect their treasure ships as they headed up the Gulf Stream past the East Coast toward Europe. It would be attacked several times and burned, despite it never being that big a settlement. (A century after its founding it finally got the impressive Castillo de San Markos, built from the same plans as castles in Havana, Cuba and Puerto Rico). The territory of La Florida was massive at first, stretching across what is now the entire southeastern US! Over time, parts of it were “civilized” with communities (as Pensacola and two other small towns joined St. Augustine. However, that was pretty much it for more than a century.) Over time, parts of it were carved away by other settlers from other nations.The Mississippian Native American political structure, destroyed by the Spanish colonizers, was eventually replaced with the tribes now recognized across the South (Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Seminole). Small groups from the major bands, including the original Alachua communities, spread themselves so thin in the Everglades that early 19th century Americans would quit looking for them. St. Augustine later became a destination for those escaping slavery in the Carolina colonies. Even though the Spanish imported slaves before Brits or Dutch did so, they were not as particular about people of different ethnicities living in close proximity as were the Brits. One more legacy from Spanish explorers: food! That includes barbeque, pork, beef, and orange juice!
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