Part 3 - Chapter 4

The Spanish in Florida. 

Historically, the published information concerning the Florida territory in the seventeenth century deals mostly with the Spanish form of government, the missions, and the rivalry between the three main European powers. Very little information is available about the material culture of the Indians.

The decline of Spain as a major power caused the French and English to gain a foothold on what had been Spanish territory. The English continued to expand southward while the French expanded eastward from the Mississippi. Mark Boyd, in his article, "Expedition of Marcos Delgado, 1686," stated that La Salle and his party were probably the first white men to penetrate into Central Alabama since De Soto and De Luna.1

The Spanish were more interested in the conversion of the Indians than in colonization or trade. They first started proselytizing in 1608 with the Timucua and then with the Apalachee in 1633. These two provinces became centers for the Christianized Indians.2

According to Hann in Apalachee, the Spanish were approached by many groups of Indians in the Florida and Georgia hinterland who expressed a desire to become Christians.3

However, Spanish Florida was beset with Indian revolts from within, Indian attacks generated by the English, and penetration by the French. In addition, the Indians of the lower Carolinas and Georgia continually expressed a preference for the English traders rather than the Spanish.

Even though the seventeenth century saw Indian uprisings and attacks, the Spanish missions caused a profound change in the lives of the Indians. These included changes in: "marriage patterns, inheritance, political organization, subsistence technology, and cultural values."4

An area of profound change was in the manner of dress of the Indians. The concept of modesty was very important to the Spanish Friars. In 1607 the Bishop of Cuba, who was in charge of the missions in the area of the Guale and Timucua Indians, paid a visit to his Bishopric. While visiting the Indians under the doctrine of Father Pareja, he was "filled with compassion" because "many of the natives were without clothing, even the women were scantily garbed."5 Before he would bestow confirmation on the Natives, he "summoned his attendants and ordered them to search through his equipment for apparel, wax, and bandages and such articles as fitting preparation for the sacrament of confirmation."6

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, 1675, another Bishop of Cuba, Calderón, claimed, in a letter, that he wrote about the Indians of the provinces of Guale, Timuqua, Apalache, and Apalachicola7 that there were 13,152 Christianized Indians who received the sacrament from him.8

He claimed that he found "four thousand and eighty-one women...naked from the waist up and knees down."9 He, then, caused them "to be clothed in this grass like the others."10 The grass, according to the article, was Spanish moss.11

Spanish moss is, also, mentioned as being used to cloth the Indians of St. Mary's River, which divides present day Florida from the state of Georgia.

"The women natives of these towns clothe themselves with the moss of trees, making gowns and petticoats thereof which at a distance or in the night look very neat."12

Unfortunately, the actual construction of the clothes is not mentioned.

In Calderón's letter, he described the dress of the male Indians, of which he, obviously, approved because he did not cause it to be modified.

"They [the men] go naked, with only the skin (of some animal) from the waist down, and, if anything more, a coat of serge without a lining, or a blanket. The women wear only a sort of tunic that wraps them from the neck to the feet, and which they make of the pearl-colored foliage of trees, which [refers to the type of tree] they call guano and which costs them nothing except to gather."13

The goods used by the Spanish to pay the Indians for work or for other goods were: tools, glass beads, small bells, scissors, hatchets, blankets, and, occasionally, fire-arms, cloth, clothing, sheet brass from Mexico, etc.14 The items that are significant to this discussion are: the brass sheets, the cloth, and the clothing.

The brass sheets were used to make gorgets and effigies, often in the shape of animals. Some of the gorgets were based on the copper prototype from the Atlantic seacoast.15

Cloth constituted the bulk of the trade goods brought into Apalachee by the Spaniards. Both cloth and clothing in the late seventeenth century were used as currency to pay the Indians for goods or labor.16

Through out the late seventeenth century, the friars tried to introduce the Indians to the weaving of cotton as it was done by the Indians of Campeche or Tlascalan. These latter Indians used the shuttle while those from the Southeast, according to authorities cited by Hann, "only possessed a rudimentary form of weaving."17

Not all of the Florida Indians had daily contact with the Spanish. In 1696 when Jonathan Dickinson was shipwrecked off the coast of central Florida, the Indians he encountered feared the Spanish, but had very little contact with them.18 Their dress was not affected by the Friars' sense of morality.

The first Indian men that Dickinson saw were:

"naked except [for] a small piece of platted work of straws which just hid their private parts, and fastened behind with a horse-tail in likeness made of a sort of silk-grass....They had their hair tied in a roll behind in which stuck two bones shaped one like a broad arrow, and the other a spearhead."19

This type of breech clout was described further when it was presented to Dickinson and the other men as a replacement for their ruined clothes. This breech clout was made from:

".....a Piece of platwork of straws wrought of divers colors and of a triangular figure, with a belt of four fingers broad of the same wrought together, which goeth about the waist and the angle of the other having a thing to it, coming between the legs, and strings to the end of the belt; all three meeting together are fasened behind with a horse tail, or a bunch of silk-grass resembling it, of a flaxen color, this being all the apparel or covering that the men wear."20

Previously, it has been mentioned many times that the Indians of the Southeast removed all bodily and facial hair. It was noted that Powhatan had a thin gray beard. Dickinson, also, saw a casique with a gray beard.21

By the eighteenth century, little was left of the Spanish stronghold in Florida and the influence of the Friars. The Spanish were forced to acknowledge that "the Southeastern Indians had become interested only in guns and gewgaws and that they gave their vassalage to no one."22


1. Mark Boyd, "Expedition of Marcos Delgado, 1686," p. 4.

2. Boyd, Smith, & Griffin, Here They Once Stood, pp. 1-6.

3. Hann, Apalachee, p. 9.

4. Milanich and Sturtevant, Confessario, pp. 3 & 4.

5. Ross, "Restoration of the Spanish Missions", pp. 196 & 197.

6. Ibid., p. 197.

7. Apalachicolas were later known as the Lower Creeks, Waselkov, "Seventeenth Century Trade", p. 118.

8. Wenhold, translation of "The Calderón Letter", p. 12.

9. Ibid., p. 12.

10. Ibid., p. 12.

11. Ibid., note 13, p. 12.

12. Dickinson, Jonathan Dickinson's Journal, p. 88.

13. Wenhold, translation of "The Calderón Letter", p. 12.

14. Hann, Apalachee, p. 148; Waselkov, "Seventeenth Century Trade", p. 123; Wenhold "The Calderon Letter", p. 13.

15. Waselkov, "Seventeenth Century Trade", p. 123.

16. Hann, Apalachee, pp. 148 & 262.

17. Ibid., p. 243.

18. Dickinson, Jonathan Dickinson's Journal, p. 14.

19. Ibid., p. 28.

20. Ibid., pp. 45-46.

21. Ibid., p. 50.

22. Wood, Powhatan's Mantle, p. 145.