Hard times

These residents soon faced strange diseases such as smallpox, measles, influenza, and yellow fever. They were weakened by the effects of forced labor and warfare with invaders and  other tribes. Native people had inhabited Florida for 12,000 years before the newcomers appeared. Within 200 years of outside contact, virtually all the peninsula's natives were gone.

De Bry print from the New York Public Library
Rare Books Division

Though slavery was technically illegal in Spanish Florida, the conquerors regularly conscripted native people for hard labor, paying them little or nothing. In North Florida, a friar watched natives being forced to carry heavy loads over great distances. The survivors still were not allowed to return home. "This is the reason," he wrote, "according to commonly held opinion that they are being annihilated at such a rate."

Before European contact, chiefs had demanded tribute from other native people in the form of goods and work. Now the Spanish operated through village leaders to do the same, and the chiefs helped fill colonial labor quotas.

Adult males were required to carry corn and other loads on their backs from inland sites to the coast for shipment, or overland to St. Augustine. Native people also had to work on ranches, operate ferries at river crossings, maintain roads, cut timber, and mine coquina (a building stone formed of broken shells). Others became house servants for Spanish families or mission priests, and some were even called as reserve militiamen at St. Augustine.

More than once, the region's natives showed they'd had their fill of colonial demands. In 1656, the Timucuan people revolted against the Spanish. On one North Florida ranch and farm where natives had worked four years without pay, an Apalachee chief complained that the labor involved not a few adults, but "all the men and women, boys and girls." He added that "what we gained from all this work was solely fatigue and nothing else." Even hoes given to the people were taken away when the farm's owner died.

 

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