Florida, to the Aucillia River. There is evidence that dozens of Timucuan
chiefs, perhaps more, occasionally confederated, rather like the Virginia
peoples called Powhatan. The phenomenon was boldly illustrated during
the Timucua Rebellion of , when chiefs of the northern Florida interior
mounted an attempt to throw off Spanish oppression. For a century, vari-
ous Timucuan peoples had resisted Europeans whenever and wherever they
had appeared. The rebellion failed, without doubt, because Spanish troops
brutally repressed it, but the revolt was probably doomed by a century’s ex-
posure to the Europeans’ invisible warriors: pathogens such as smallpox
and measles. The Timucua were a much-shrunken language group by the
middle of the seventeenth century. Many chiefdoms either disappeared or
were so diminished in numbers that survivors joined new or reconstituted
chiefdoms. At the time of the rebellion, there were only about , to ,
Timucuans. In hardly a few hundred survived, and by a census
reported but . In the entire population of Timucua——lived in a
single refugee camp near St. Augustine’s walls. A dozen years later, when
the Spanish left La Florida for the last time, one sole native boarded ship
for transport to Cuba.^5
During the terrible two centuries that Timucuans endured European
hegemony in northeastern Florida, both Europeans and natives were trans-
formed, particularly the natives. The French, Spanish, and British brought
with them not only pathogens but European plants and seeds, such as
wheat (which did not thrive), watermelons, peaches, figs, hazelnuts, gar-
banzos, and oranges, and animals, including horses, asses and mules,
cows, sheep, goats, swine, and large dogs. Nonnative fruits and vegetables
were incorporated into Timucuan diets. Oranges became ubiquitous, their
groves practically covering Anastasia Island by the eighteenth century, be-
fore a great freeze ended Spanish hopes of citrus plantations. Vast land-
scapes between the Matanzas and St. Johns became cattle ranches, too,
typically with Indian herdsmen and Spanish rancheros.
Colonial St. Augustine was never more than a military post with a fort.
There was little effort to capitalize on its potential as a fishery and fish pro-
cessor or to engage in transatlantic trade. Spanish occupiers were admin-
istrators and soldiers, seldom farmers or fisherman, and they were always
hungry. To ensure food supplies, then, the colonial administration entered
a partnership with the Franciscan Order, which established a mission for
every Timucuan chiefdom. The friars persuaded natives to give up their
pyramidal houses for board (or log) squares and rectangles and to accept
Jesus and Spanish protection. Now, too, the chiefs were to supply tributes