OLDEST CITY | Gov. Ibarra wanted better relations with Ais. (SAR)

Delightful column by Dr. Susan Parker, Ph.D. from the Sunday St. Augustine Record. We missed her column last week, fearing that those nameless witless clueless screwups at GateHouse's windowless Chain gang Journalism factory in Austin, Texas at the combined copy desk for 200 newspapers had run amuck, again. Fortunately, she's fine, having just returned from travels by airplane, supplying the lead for her column. Welcome home, Dr. Parker!

From The St. Augustine Record:


OLDEST CITY | Gov. Ibarra wanted better relations with Ais
By Susan Parker / Oldest City
Posted at 12:53 PM
Updated at 7:00 PM
St. Augustine Record


I could feel the person in the next seat lean ever so slightly toward me. His eyes glanced in my direction. This always happens.

With my laptop computer I had just staked out the 150 square inches allotted to me on the tray in front of seat 4D while on a flight earlier this week. As I was on board a Southwest flight with its egalitarian seating, the other 142 passengers all had same amount of space to use. The man to my right was looking at the picture on my screen.

No wonder he was curious. To most persons the handwriting on the screen looked to be of middle eastern origin. Finally, he had to ask what I was doing. I told him that I was working with a digital image of a report written in Spanish St. Augustine in 1605, and that the two-and-a-half hour flight was a good time to read through the report.

I pondered all the layers of this little scene on the airplane. Here I was at 30,000 feet or more above the ground looking at a document written more than 400 years ago in St. Augustine. The document had sailed from our city probably to Mexico, then headed northeast across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain. Today it is conserved in the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain. In the middle of the 1900s a photographic copy was made of the old document. I had converted the photographic image on microfilm to a digital image and had carried the image onto the airplane on a device that was only slightly larger than my thumbnail.

My neighboring passenger asked me what the report said, but I’m not so sure he believed what I told him. There were so many unfamiliar elements to the “story” that appeared on the screen.

The report dealt with Florida Gov. Pedro de Ibarra’s attempts to improve relations with the Indians living in the Cape Canaveral area — the Ais Indians. The Ais had been attacking Spanish soldiers sent from St. Augustine to their territory. The Ais were also providing information about the Spanish to the French and English on board ships that landed in the area where we now launch space flights.

In the document that I was reading the “Big Captain” of the Ais was warming a bit to the Spanish, or so it seemed. The Big Captain had sent his “ambassador” to speak with the governor in St. Augustine. At the time the reports was written, the Indian diplomat was waiting at the Inlet of Jean Ribault, wanting the Spanish to provide a canoe to take him to St. Augustine.

What a coincidence. Only a week before my flight I had written about the Inlet of Jean Ribault in this column (The Record, Sept. 22). The inlet was the name of the small body of water between today’s Summer Haven and Marineland from the 1560s until the late 1700s.

From the inlet, the Indian ambassador relayed some of his concerns via a Spanish messenger. The Big Captain proposed a common Indian practice: that he and the governor would exchange their sons as a symbol of goodwill so that each offspring could learn the language and ways of his “hosts.” Of course, they would also be hostages.


But a complexity had been added to the negotiations. Several enslaved blacks had deserted the Spanish in St. Augustine and taken refuge among the Ais. There was a rumor that one of the escapee men had married the daughter of chief. The governor feared that the fugitives would provide the Ais with logistical information to help in attacking St. Augustine. Even in 1605 this sort of information was called “intelligence.”

The governor wanted to “extract” the escapees, but did not want to alienate the Ais by invading their territory in order to capture them. This particular reports ends at that point.

As I said, I’m not so sure that my fellow passenger believed that what I was telling him was what was actually contained in the image on my computer. He could not read the old writing. Perhaps I should have omitted mentioning to him that all of this took place before the English settled Jamestown.



Susan R. Parker holds a doctorate in colonial history.