The History of Florida (74 page)

that compare with its quantities of water—wetlands, lakes, bays, ocean, and

gulf. Floridians have always organized their societies around natural dis-

tinctions. At the daybreak of modern Florida, to cite one example, the in-

firm and the retired elderly began flocking to the southernmost state. Credit

for this migration typical y goes to the railroad, automobile, Social Security,

proof

World War II, cheap living, and the state’s boosters. In truth, the newcomers

were pursuing soothing ocean breezes and healing sunshine. A consump-

tive Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Florida in the 1830s seeking restoration,

and he found it. “Yet much is here,” he wrote of the St. Augustine region in

1830s, “That can beguile the months of banishment / To the pale travelers

whom Disease hath sent / Hither for genial air from Northern homes.”3

Awareness of Florida’s genial offerings has typical y been a matter of

proximity. Those who dwel ed intimately with the land or water, or lived

more distantly in the past, seem to have been the most attentive to, and

more humble about, their place in nature.

The Calusa of pre-Spanish Florida were such a people. Although mighty

among indigenous groups, they were deferential toward the nonhuman

world. In studying the Calusa, anthropologists have had to learn much about

the ecology of their day and place. It was in fact ecology, specifical y tarpon

striking in the Gulf, that brought their lost civilization to the attention of

researchers. Still a frontier, south Florida in the late nineteenth century was

particularly attractive to rod-and-reel tourists spoiling for a good fight with

a big fish, an activity the
Washington
Post
called the “titanic sport.” Typical y

wealthy and well-connected men, they learned from locals about aboriginal

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 355

artifacts buried in sandy hummocks and swamplands. News of these ante-

diluvian finds eventual y reached Frank Hamilton Cushing of the Bureau of

American Ethnology in Washington, D.C. Not yet forty, the slight-of-build,

heavily mustached Cushing was a leading authority on aboriginal cultures

when he organized a Florida expedition in 1895. His time on the Gulf Coast

produced one of the most fruitful excavations in the history of U.S. archae-

ology. He uncovered thousands of artifacts, mostly carved wooden animals,

amazingly wel preserved in the anaerobic muck of a coastal pond on a

small shell key, then called Key Marco (which in the 1960s became a point

connected, courtesy of a dredge-and-fill project, to the north side of Marco

Island). What he learned from the artifacts, and from Spanish documents, is

that the Calusa were a sedentary people who flourished without agriculture.

This was remarkable. Rare was the hunter-gatherer society that settled

permanently. Cushing, who was foremost an ethnographer, looked at physi-

cal objects of a culture much as a historian looks at the archived documents

of a republic. In them he read the story of his subjects. He concluded that

the people whom he called the Key Dwellers had established a well-ordered

polity structured around numerous tribal chiefs and a superchief. Long af-

ter his time, other researchers confirmed his findings, determining that the

Calusa chiefdom—which included a paramount chief, religious chief, and

proof

military chief—ran the sandy coast from Charlotte Harbor to Cape Sable.

Its control reached to other primary Indian groups across the peninsula’s

southern quarter—the Ais, Tequesta, Myaimi, and Jeaga—who paid tribute

to the Calusa.

The Calusa demonstrated their power upon their first contact with the

Spanish. Recognizing the Europeans as hostile invaders of their sovereignty,

they attacked Juan Ponce de León’s exploratory party during its first sweep of

the southern coast in 1513. Eight years later, Florida’s original conquistador

died following a second encounter with the Calusa, succumbing to a wound

from an arrow poisoned with sap of the native manchineel tree. Bearing a

physical stature to match their defensive might, the Calusa commanded a

height that impressed their European visitors. The “stout old soldier” Bernal

Diaz, who was involved in a brief skirmish with Calusa in 1517, described

them as having “large powerful bodies.” Others recorded the Calusa men to

stand between five feet six and five feet ten inches. Their eventual conquer-

ors, an agrarian people, averaged around five feet four inches or less.4

What bound the Calusa to a single place was water. That flowing through

and around south Florida brimmed with a natural bounty. Hunter-gath-

erer societies on other parts of the continent suffered food shortages and

356 · Jack E. Davis

starvation in winter months, an uncertain time for the weak and elderly. Not

the Calusa. The coastal estuaries—now cal ed Charlotte Harbor, Pine Is-

land Sound, and Estero Bay—and the inner waterways—the modern Peace,

Myakka, and Caloosahatchee Rivers—were a constant source of protein. It

was self-generating, perpetual, no cultivation required. Although they sup-

ported the densest population in south Florida, the Calusa had no need for

agriculture. Big fish, little fish, shrimp, sea turtles, crabs, lobsters, manatees,

and even sharks, whales, and the West Indian seal were easily gathered with

spear, net, or quick hand. Bird meat, venison, and wild plant food (saw pal-

metto berries, cocoplums, seagrapes, coontie roots) contributed slightly to

the local diet; marine habitats supplied more than 90 percent. When adel-

antado Pedro Menéndez de Avilés dined with the Calusa six months after

founding St. Augustine, his hosts presented a feast of fish and oysters, the

latter served boiled, roasted, and raw. The honorary spread included no

plant foods.

Food sources were more than nourishment. Nearly all in some way had

a utilitarian purpose. As stone defined the age and culture of peoples else-

where, shell and bone were the stock of Calusa civilization. Shel s were used

as dippers, spoons, bowls, clubs, hammers, awls, and digging and hacking

tools. Few things were as important as nets. Individual fish were harvested

proof

with spears or harpoons made from alligator and fish bones and stingray

spines, which were also fashioned into cutting edges and gaffs. Nets—seine,

cast, and gill—were the more efficient means for catching fish. At the Key

Marco site, Cushing found several intact examples, which in their way were

objects of refined beauty. Busy hands had meticulously woven them from

cord equal y meticulously fabricated out of palm-fiber (cabbage palm or

saw palmetto) and Spanish moss. The net makers attached gourds—domes-

ticated papaya or
cucurbita
pepo
—to the upper course of cording (today

known as the cork line). To the lower course, they careful y wove in pierced

mol usk shel s for bottom weights, to stand the nets in the water vertical y.

Symbolic of the cultural importance of shel s were conspicuous mounds,

which had raised the curiosity of frontier dwellers, who had told the fishing

tourists about them, who got the word out to scientists, who came to study

them. Cushing eventual y recognized the shell heaps as more than midden,

or refuse piles. They were constructed sites that had supported houses and

temples. Many indigenous groups built mounds to elevate a place of wor-

ship or political honor. The Calusa did that, but they were also sensitive

to the weather. They responded to hurricanes and tidal surges by building

on higher ground, where they could also catch sea breezes to keep at bay

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 357

mosquitoes and biting midges, the latter of which frontier settlers of another

century called “no-see-ums.” Shell was an accessible substrate for high-and-

dry houses, and those not raised on a shell or natural mound usual y were

so on pilings. Palm and grass thatch was another important material in the

construction of dwellings, suitable for roofs and woven to make lattice wal s

and floor mats. The cacique who hosted Menéndez with a feast of fish did so

in a thatched council house that held 2,000 people.

The Spanish ultimately conquered the Calusa. Armed conflict and en-

slavement took their tol , but rampaging pathogens conveyed across the

Atlantic were the real scourge in the demise of indigenous populations. Be-

fore European contact, the worlds on either side of the ocean lived more

or less in ecological isolation. Compared with its hemispheric counterpart,

the New World had few domesticated animals, and outside the l ama and

canine, none ideal y suitable as beasts of burden or as draft animals. Europe-

ans consequently had been exposed to animal-borne diseases, such as cow-

pox, utterly foreign to Western Hemisphere natives, whose immune system

was ill-prepared for the viral assault, primarily in the form of smal pox and

measles. By the time the Spanish surrendered Florida to the British in 1763,

the Calusa were a people of the past.

The traditional narrative of Florida and the Americas attributes European

proof

conquest to the actions of men. In no small measure the strength of empire

relied on the ambitions and resolution, not to mention arrogance and brutal

ways, of conquistadors like Juan Ponce de León and Pedro Menéndez de

Avilés. But empire building also relied on nature—the ocean currents and

the wind that propelled and the stars that guided flotil as of sailing vessels,

the natural resources from which those vessels were constructed, and those

that paid dividends in exchange for risk taking in exploration. No conquis-

tadors were more closely in touch with nature than the pilots who navigated

ships, and one of the most knowledgeable was Anton Alaminos. He sailed

with Christopher Columbus on his fourth Indies voyage and piloted the first

recorded Spanish expedition to the Yucatán Peninsula (in 1517). Four years

earlier, he had guided Juan Ponce to La Florida, up the east coast (probably

no farther than Melbourne) and then back and around the curving end

of the peninsula, through the shipwrecking Florida Straits without mishap

(at least none recorded), and into the Gulf of Mexico, a nameless sea at

the time. The southbound journey coasting the eastern shore against the

current took twice as long as the northbound, with some days yielding no

headway. Alaminos took note, saw abetment rather than hindrance, and in

1519 used this novel and great ocean current for the first time to propel ships

358 · Jack E. Davis

of the Spanish treasure fleet back to Europe. Flowing up to seventy miles

per day, carrying a volume of water greater than all the rivers that pour into

the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf Stream revolutionized cross-Atlantic travel.

The Spanish, wrote geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer, converted this new ex-

peditious route into the “lifeline” of “empire.” No other Spanish discovery

in Florida was as important, aside from that of Florida itself. It in turn gave

urgency to Spanish settlement on the peninsula. Sailing along a coast con-

trolled by others would risk exposing the treasure fleet to freebooters.5

Sailing the Gulf Stream posed dangers beyond the human kind, too.

Ships had to navigate through the Florida Straits and the Bahama Channel,

gingerly around the coral reefs of the Florida Keys and the shoals of the

east coast. Given the obstacles, the Straits were a shipwreck alley. The word

Bahama derives from
baja
mar
, meaning shal ow sea; Juan Ponce referred to

the Keys as Los Martires, The Martyred; the Spanish name for Key West was

Cayo Hueso, Bone Island; and the name for the two Matecumbe keys appar-

ently derives from
mata
hombre
, kill man. Poorly charted, swirled by swift

currents and countercurrents, becalmed and windless on hot summer days,

routinely pummeled by storms, the area demanded an alert helmsman and

pilot, especial y those of gold- and silver-laden cargo ships that responded

sluggishly to commands at the helm.

proof

The hazards off the coast spurred an indigenous salvaging industry that

is older than European settlement in Florida. Local y known as shipwreck-

ing, the industry began with native coast dwellers, who by virtue of their

diet were expert free divers. As it turned out, the little precious metal that

conquistadors found in Florida was in the possession of natives. It came

from no natural deposits but from trade with other Indians and, quite often,

from wrecked cargo ships carrying the New World plunder of the Spanish

empire. By the nineteenth century, long after the treasure-ship era, salvaging

lost cargo routed from Apalachicola, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, the

Yucatan, Jamaica, and Cuba made Key West one of the country’s wealthi-

est cities. Captains of salvage schooners, wrote Douglas, “built ample two-

storied white houses with balconies and shutters against the heat, shaded

by mangoes, coconuts, sapodil as, limes and other tropical trees. . . . The