62 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



Expeditions were sent among the surrounding tribes and quantities of 

 corn were obtained from them. In midsummer of 1565 they were 

 visited by Sir John Hawkins, who furnished them with provisions and 

 some other necessities and incidentally picked up from them informa- 

 tion regarding the customs of the Floridians. As is well known, this 

 French colony was destroyed soon afterward by a Spanish force under 

 Pedro Menendez de Aviles, who also continued up the coast to Port 

 Royal rooting out all of those Frenchmen living among the Indians 

 upon whom he could get his hands. (Laudonniere, 1586 ; Le Moyne, 

 1875; Lowery, 1901, pp. 2&-207.) 



St. Augustine was founded the same year and Spanish control of 

 the Florida Peninsula and the coast to the northward as far as the 

 lower part of South Carolina continued unchallenged, in spite of 

 the revenge expedition of Dominique de Gourgues in 1567, until the 

 successive settlements of South Carolina and Georgia rolled back 

 Spain's northern possessions, and the cession of Florida to England 

 in 1763 put a period for a time to all of her colonies in that region. 

 To the Laudonniere expedition, however, we owe more of our knowl- 

 edge of the ancient inhabitants of Florida than to the sum total of 

 Spanish sources. 



Spanish conquest of Florida extended slowly outward from St. 

 Augustine, but control of the south Florida tribes was never much 

 more than nominal and the missionaries made no headway among 

 them whatever. To the north, however, the Franciscans were very 

 successful and by the early part of the seventeenth century they had 

 brought all the Timucua Indians under their control. Mission sta- 

 tions were distributed, furthermore, along the Atlantic almost to 

 Charleston and, though native uprisings prevented complete conver- 

 sion of the inhabitants, the missionaries retained a foothold there 

 until the coming of the English. In 1633 missionary work was begun 

 among the Apalachee and, in spite of a rebellion in 1647, the tribe 

 was soon converted. In 1656 there came a great uprising among the 

 Timucua which spread to the Apalachee and, although it was soon 

 suppressed, it resulted in a considerable loss of population, not only 

 by death but through the emigration of many Indians from the 

 confines of Florida. In 1675 Bishop Calderon of Cuba visited the 

 Florida missions, then under his authority, and from his report it 

 appears that most of them were still flourishing. 



About 1680, missionaries began to push northward into the country 

 of the Lower Creeks, but two Franciscan friars sent that year (1679 

 according to Bolton) were ordered out of the country by the Coweta 

 chief. In 1685 Antonio Matheos, commander of the Spanish post 

 at Apalachee, advanced up the Chattahoochee to drive out a party 

 of English under Henry Woodward, and was obliged to repeat the 



