women to cover their breasts, so a local market grew for textiles. Indians,
often driven by fear of the murderous human predators left behind by the
explorers, began to flock into the settlements. At the peak of their activity,
thirty-eight Catholic missions had jurisdiction over 26,000 actual or
alleged Christian Indians.
Life in these mission communities was never easy. We now know from
archaeological studies that the health of the Indian inhabitants declined
drastically: instead of the varied diet they had obtained from hunting, fish-
ing, and farming, they were reduced to corn. Vitamin and mineral deficien-
cies in this diet were apparent in skeletons excavated in the 1990s at the
mission town of San Luis de Apalachee, where tribesmen from the Guale,
Apalachee, and Timucua lived. And instead of getting their drinking water
from running streams and springs, as they had done in times past, Indians
in the mission communities had to draw water from wells that were often
contaminated. As a result, bacterial infections were common.
Diet and drinking water were not the only sources of ill health. Skeletal
evidence of osteoarthritis indicates that the Indians were worked extremely
hard both by the priests and by caciques,or Spanish appointed headmen.
They had to work hard, since no Spaniard “comes to the Indies to plow or
sow,” as one of the Spanish viceroys remarked, “but only to eat and loaf.”
The Indians of La Florida thus became the helots of the New World.
In addition to the score of missions established in the northwestern
and northeastern parts of the modern state of Florida, the Spaniards sent
out missions to more remote places. In a remarkable coincidence, a group
of Jesuits briefly established themselves in 1570 within about five miles of
the Chesapeake site where the English colony of Jamestown would be
planted thirty-seven years later. The Jesuits had taken along with them an
Indian who had been kidnapped from the area. Having been “reduced”
during a long residence in Spain and Mexico, he not only wore Spanish
clothes and spoke Spanish but was, or pretended to be, a devout Christian.
No sooner was he home, however, than he “went native.” Having seen
Spain and Mexico, he must have had a clear idea of the real meaning of
reducion,and he hated it. So he assembled a group of Indians and killed
the missionaries. The Historian Carl Bridenbaugh speculated that this
man, known to the Spaniards as Luis de Velasco, may have been
50 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA