Georgia's Spanish Missions
Reid, Richard
GEORGIA'S SPANISH MISSIONS By RICHARD REID THE record of the Georgia missions is an inspiring story of the Franciscans, the Jesuits, the Dominicans, and the secular clergy. It links...
...The Spanish kept firearms away from their Indians...
...Indeed, it was the great Saint Francis Borgia himself who sent sons of Loyola to labor uAd Majorem Gloriam Dei" in the new country...
...In the meantime the English had settled Charleston...
...The Spanish frontier fell back from Santa Catalina to Sapelo and the Altamaha...
...At Guale, at St...
...Father Corpa's companions in death were Father Rodriquez of Torpiqui, whom the murderers allowed to say Mass before execution...
...Catherine's Island, near Savannah...
...Father Segura and his companions went to martyrs' deaths in Virginia...
...Augustine...
...The raids of Drake are an example...
...After considerable discouraging work among the fickle Indians the Jesuits withdrew...
...The English settled Georgia in 1733...
...In 1602 there were 1,200 Christian Indians among the Timuqua, who numbered perhaps 20,000...
...Enraged, the young brave gathered some kindred spirits around him, attacked Father Corpa in his chapel in the darkness of the night, stretching him lifeless with one blow and then, cowering the people, started out on a bloody expedition that gave the Church four other martyrs...
...Pictures of the ruins of the Altamaha mission and of Santa Maria mission, near St...
...Under the leadership of Father Alonzo Reynosa, the prototype of the renowned Junipero Serra, the sons of Saint Francis established missions in Georgia at Ossabaw, Santa Catalina, San Simon, San Buenventura and San Pedro Islands, at Tolomato on the mainland opposite Sapelo Island, at Santa Maria, and at other points...
...Elena, the Carolina Spanish post among the Oriste, and elsewhere, the Jesuits began their civilizing and Christianizing efforts...
...she entered the war, in 1761, on the side of the French...
...After the death of Father Martinez the province of Florida, including Georgia, became a Jesuit viceprovince with Father Segura as provincial...
...It would be pleasant to record that the Franciscan missions flourished from the beginning, extending their influence and increasing in prosperity with each succeeding generation, but it would not be true...
...six years later there were still 1,000 Catholic Indians in Georgia...
...Ponce de Leon and his Catholic companions discovered Florida on Easter morn of 1513, but their attempt to found a colony was abandoned eight years later...
...A young Yamassee chief, a cacique's son, after a short period of fervor plunged into scandalous excesses and was privately and later publicly reproved by Father Corpa of the Tolomata mission...
...One authority declares that in 1634 the province of St...
...Catherine's Island...
...The French changed his mind for him by settling Port Royal in 1562, and Fort Caroline, on the St...
...the Carolinians armed and incited theirs...
...It is common knowledge that the roots of Florida history are deeply imbedded in Catholic soil...
...The king dispatched Menendez de Aviles to eject the intruders and to colonize the threatened coast...
...Twelve additional Franciscans came to Georgia in 1593 to supplement their predecessors...
...and Father Velascola of Asao, now St...
...The missionaries also achieved gratifying success among the Apalache whose territory centered around the site of modern Valdosta, Georgia...
...Simon's Island, killed the missionaries, sacked other missions along the coast, and burned St...
...Georgia claims the first Jesuit martyr in the western hemisphere...
...the others were transferred to the more promising fields of Mexico and Cuba...
...What a wave of resentment such an act of "mercy" would arouse throughout the Christian world were it perpetrated today...
...Father Parej a published a Timuqua catechism in Mexico in 1612 and a grammar two years later...
...Thirty, forty, and even fifty was the usual corps of priests in the Florida province" at this period, Professor Bolton writes...
...the grant ended at the Altamaha river...
...This tribe was superior to its neighbors...
...It was the golden age of the Franciscan missions in the Old Southeast...
...He thought there were better lands in South America, and he decided to withdraw from the north country...
...By right of exploration the entire Southeast was April 14, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 629 Spain's...
...Bishop Cabeza made the confirmation tour previously referred to, administering the Sacrament to 1,070 at four Georgia missions...
...Yet there is no more brilliant page in the Catholic history of this continent than that which records the trials, the triumphs, and the reverses of these followers of Saint Francis in Georgia...
...Ten more Jesuits were assigned to the new field...
...The archives in Cuba, recently examined, indicated the site of the Franciscan establishment on the banks of the Altamaha...
...The owners of the property regarded the relics of the missions as the remains of slave cabins built before the war...
...An attack on Santa Catalina in 1680 by 300 Indians headed by the English was the first of a series of such troubles...
...Of the 7,000 Christian Apalache only 400 escaped...
...In the former year, the Atlantic coast was included in a new Franciscan missionary province, that of Santa Elena...
...Everything on the peaceful, flourishing missions was destroyed...
...He was Father Pedro Martinez, one of three missionaries sent to the Southeast by Saint Francis Borgia immediately after the settlement of Florida...
...At San Domingo they hanged two Franciscans who came to negotiate...
...the cells of the monks were being used as pigpens...
...It links us with the days of Saint Ignatius Loyola, Saint Francis Xavier, Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Philip Neri, Saint Peter Canisius...
...The English desired the territory between the Altamaha and the St...
...It is estimated that more than twenty stations were established along the Georgia coast and up into South Carolina by 1650, and in 1655 Georgia is credited with five main missions, San Pedro on Cumberland Island, San Buenaventura on Jekyl Island, Santo Domingo at Talaje on the mainland, San Jose on Sapelo Island, and Santa Catalina on St...
...In the meantime Carolina and Florida contended for the possession of inland Georgia, peaceably occupied by the Spanish for over a century...
...Indeed, the name Florida was applied equally to the present Georgia...
...The natives, when not hostile, were frequently fickle...
...630 THE COMMONWEAL April 14, 1926 eating what we could of the fresh beef and carrying the rest aboard our ships...
...in 1586 he and his followers destroyed the Dominican mission at St...
...The Yamassee, dissatisfied with their treatment at the hands of the Carolinians, made peace with the Spanish...
...The difficulties of Christianizing the Indians were many...
...the neutral territory between the Altamaha and the San Juan rivers, including practically all of what is now known as South Georgia, was lost to Florida...
...The results of their efforts and of those of the Dominicans, who had established a mission on St...
...Augustine colonized in 1565...
...Both were governed from St...
...The history of the Franciscan missions in Georgia was a closed book...
...The exact location of most of the old Franciscan missions is unknown, but occasionally ruins of them are revealed...
...The early history of Georgia is closely linked with that of Florida...
...Peter de Avila established the mission of San Buenventura at Ospo, now Jekyl Island, the present site of an ultraexclusive club...
...The great expanse of swamp land between the islands and coast-fringe and the Georgia back country did not prevent the zealous Franciscans from penetrating to the interior...
...Augustine...
...This Menendez did in very thorough fashion, blotting his otherwise admirable record by the massacre of the defenders of Fort Caroline...
...Simon's Island, were merely lying dormant, to blossom, after further cultivation by the Franciscans who succeeded them, in the early 1570's...
...The frontier again receded, this time to Santa Maria, San Juan, and Santa Cruz, now Amelia Island...
...With this expedition and that of Narvaez at least fifteen priests lost their lives in the Southeast...
...Augustine and colonized Georgia, their Catholic Majesties held practically undisputed sway over it...
...The Brown Robes soon came in contact with the powerful Apalache Indians, whose territory extended through southwestern Georgia from the banks of the Suwanee in Florida to the Alabama Apalachicola...
...The Yamassee changed their allegiance and with English buccaneers wrecked the Guale missions...
...there was no clear line of demarkation between them such as now exists...
...The labors of the Jesuits were not fruitless...
...The missions were also victims of fickleness on the part of the Indians along the coast in the dying days of the sixteenth century, long before Jamestown and Plymouth, when the friars were recovering from the raids of Drake and the other buccaneers...
...Father Aunon and Father de Badajoz of Santa Catalena, also killed at the end of Mass, and whom a friendly Indian chief tried in vain to save...
...Berkeley: University of California Press...
...The number of these Catholic Indians in the Southeast is variously estimated...
...To us was the good God most merciful and gracious," Drake wrote in 1593 to Queen Elizabeth, "in that He permitted us to kill eighteen Spanish, bitter enemies of your sweet Majesty...
...Unjust exactions of the governor created such discontent that in 1657 it became necessary to abandon eight prospering missions in the Apalache territory, but they were restored later by Bishop Gabriel Diaz Vara Calderon of Santiago de Cuba who, on a visitation of the Southeast, established several new foundations...
...The task of remaining neutral became too great for Spain...
...Augustine was developed...
...No longer are the Christians of Georgia Catholic, but that does not dim the lustre of the priestly ambassadors who first preached Christ Crucified along the placid Savannah, the historic Altamaha, and the storied Suwanee...
...evidence never has been discovered to show that it offered human sacrifice, a practice of even the intelligent Timuqua...
...John's river, two years later...
...a school for Indian boys was started at Havana...
...No other American state is more generously sowed with that priceless seed of the Church, the blood of martyrs...
...It was in Florida—at Tampa—that Luis Cancer de Barbastro, Apostle of Guatemala, was killed by the savage Catoosas—this a generation before the first permanent settlement on the North American continent, the Catholic St...
...The Spanish retaliated by attacking Port Royal...
...De Soto was accompanied on his historic march by "twelve priests, eight ecclesiastics, and four religious...
...More serious was the hostility of the English and the depredations of their buccaneers who repeatedly attacked and sacked the missions, undoing in a day the expenditure of years of unbelievable toil...
...It is certain that Hernando de So to crossed the state "from the Savannah to the Chattahoochee" on his ill-fated march (1539-1542) to his grave of running waters in the Mississippi...
...and Fray Juan de Capillos, a Georgia missionary, became first provincial, with headquarters at St...
...Mary's, Georgia, appear in the recently issued Debatable Land.* What an effect the reconstruction of the original missions would have on the minds of that numerous body in the Southeast which is convinced that this is a Protestant country, that Catholics are newcomers, and that as newcomers they should know their place and keep it...
...Yet one year before the first permanent English settlement, at Jamestown, and fourteen years before the Pilgrim Fathers "fell on their knees and then on the aborigines" in the Old Bay State, His Lordship, Cabeza de Altamirano, Bishop of Santiago de Cuba, administered the Sacrament of Confirmation in Georgia to 1,070 neophytes...
...The Catholic history of Georgia is hardly less ancient...
...At the present Jekyl Island the assassins found Father de Avila who, instead of being sent to eternity after his brother friars, was sold into slavery, and a year later was rescued...
...In 1733 Georgia was founded as a buffer colony between Carolina and the Spanish settlements...
...The failure of de Leon, Ayllon, de Luna, Villafane, Narvaez, de Soto, and other intrepid sons of Aragon and Castile to plant settlements which would take root, rather discouraged King Philip...
...A flourishing trade with St...
...Brother Baez compiled a dictionary and Brother Domingo a grammar and catechism, the first books written in an Indian tongue...
...Undaunted, the Franciscan missionaries soon were directing their energies to the task of restoring the ruins of their generations of work...
...Simon's Island, the most learned and most humble of the missionaries, struck down with clubs and axes by the murderous band which met him in an apparently friendly manner on his return from a visit to St...
...The king's officers, soldiers, traders, and adventurers in the new country at times made the work of the missionaries harder by bad example, a condition warned against in a letter from Pope Pius V to Menendez emphasizing the fact that "nothing is more important in the conversion of these Indians and idolaters than to endeavor by all means to prevent scandal being given by the vices and immorality of such as go to those western parts...
...The Potano tribe along the Suwanee was almost entirely Christianized...
...Miss Mary Ross, of the University of California, found the spot and the ruins...
...efforts among the lower Creeks were fruitful...
...The Spanish settlements in Georgia barred their way to Alabama, and conflict was inevitable...
...Previously Menendez had visited Georgia and established friendly relations with the Indians of Guale, now St...
...Augustine, disturbed, entered its stone age...
...Plymouth Rock was yet untouched by English settlers...
...Despite the efforts of the English government to maintain peace by forbidding the Georgians to settle below the Altamaha, the colonists often ignored the boundary...
...England refused ' to sanction a counter-attack, saying that Charleston had harbored pirates and that the Scotch in the Carolinas had abetted the Yamassee...
...This pioneer was martyred in 1566 by the Yamassee on Cumberland Island...
...After repeatedly petitioning for missionaries, their requests were answered in 1633 and in a few years the entire tribe from northwest Florida to eastern Alabama was Christianized...
...Spain, already dissipating her energies, was not in a position to give her colonies the assistance and defense they needed...
...Another mission is believed to have been established on the mainland north of the Altamaha river...
...The number of priests working in the Southeast was augmented by the arrival of twentyfour friars...
...Augustine, contained forty-four Indian missions, thirty-five missionaries, and 30,000 Catholic Indians...
...a troop of Christian Indians was carried off to be sold as slaves...
...England was engaged in a war with France at the time, and desired Spain's neutrality...
...The Spanish, however, were not particularly enthusiastic about prospects in this territory...
...Having in mind the merciful disposition of your gracious Majesty, we did not kill the women and children, but having destroyed their provisions and property and taken away all their weapons, we left them to starve...
...Augustine...
...A more conservative, although not necessarily more accurate estimate, states that in 1655 there were thirty-five Franciscan missions in Georgia and Florida with a Catholic Indian population of 26,000...
...John's to be regarded as a kind of no man's land...
...Elena, with the motherhouse at St...
...In South Carolina there was San Felipe on Parris Island, and Chatucache further north...
...Three years later seven more friars came and the Yamassee missions, destroyed by the young chief's band, were reestablished...
...We further wasted the country and brought it to utter ruin...
...By 1720 there were again six towns and seven missions of Catholic Indians in the devastated area inland...
...Augustine...
...We burned their houses and killed their few mules and cattle, * Debatable Land, by Herbert Bolt on and Mary Ross...
...For nearly a century and a half after the discovery of Florida by Ponce de Leon and for a century after Menendez settled St...
...The settlement of St...
...The subsequent victory of the English sealed the doom of the Georgia missions...
...The world does grow better...
...Augustine by Menendez at this time, 1565, was the beginning of the continued and heroic effort to evangelize the Indians which ended 200 years later when Georgia, and subsequently Florida, passed by treaty to English sovereignty...
...At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Moore, a former governor of Carolina, leading fifty English and 1,000 or more well-armed Creeks, Catawbas, and other un-Christianized savages, destroyed ten of the eleven Apalache missions, slaughtered hundreds of Christian Indians and Spaniards, four priests, including Father Pareja and Father Mirando—who were among the many burned at the stake—and carried off 1,400 Christian Indians to be sold as slaves in Carolina or to be distributed for adoption or torture...
...It is probable that Ayllon, who in 1526, but a score of years after the death of Columbus, planted a short-lived colony on the coast of South Carolina, trod Georgia soil...
...The Spanish, on the whole, fought a losing fight...
...Some of them, worn out by the hardships of battling their way through treacherous swamps and dangerous forests, found their final resting place in Georgia graves...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 23
