Jonathan Dickinson: A shipwreck and survival during the last days of Spanish Florida

By James D. Snyder

Jonathan Dickinson's heroic tale of shipwreck survivors struggling amid "cannibals" and "savages" on Florida's east coast became a 17th century best seller, But Dickinson was also witness to the last days of Spanish Florida and its Native Americans.

In this revealing book, journalist-historian James D. Snyder narrates the journey in modern English then sheds light on some critical questions:

Why did the Spanish come to Florida? Why did they fail? Why did the Indian population literally disappear after thriving for over 5,000 years? Why were the English hated in Florida? Why did Dickinson, an abolitionist Quaker, own many slaves? What became of them - and of Dickinson himself?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781737097655

James D. Snyder

Jim Snyder lives along the Loxahatchee River in Tequesta, Florida and is active in organizations to conserve Florida's first Wild and Scenic River. He is also a former board chairman of the Loxahatchee River Historical Society. A graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Snyder spent over forty years as a Washington correspondent and magazine publisher before resettling in South Florida and continuing his love of writing as an author.

Book preview

Copyright © 2023 by James D. Snyder

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, except for brief quotations without the prior consent of the author.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948581

Paperback ISBN: 979-8-218-29451-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-737-09765-5

Front Cover illustration By Tim Quigley

Published By Florida Classics Library Publishing

Hobe Sound, Fl.

Table of Contents

PART I: Shipwreck and Survival

Chapter I: Tumultuous Port Royal

Chapter II: Dodging Pirates and Storms

Chapter III: Facing Death at Jupiter Inlet

Chapter IV: The Land of the Ais

Chapter V: Arrival at St. Augustine

Chapter VI: Homeward Bound at Last

PART II: The Rest of the Story

Chapter VII: On to Success

Chapter VIII: A Primer on Spanish Florida

Chapter IX: Reality

Chapter X: Re-enter Jonathan Dickinson

Chapter XI: The True Dickinson Legacy?

A Postscript

Sources for More on Spanish Florida

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Illustrations

Jamaica in the 1700s

Lithograph of buccaneer Morgan

Artist’s re-creation of thriving Port Royal before the 1692 earthquake

A typical English barkentine in the 17th century

The route taken by the Reformation from Jamaica to the Bahamas Channel

Indian middens along Jupiter Inlet early 20th century

Lower Florida with tribal spheres of domination

A typical pirogue (large canoe)

Route of Jonathan Dickinson from Florida to Carolina 1 & 2

El Castillo de San Marcos in St Augustine, Fl

Tribal areas in Northern Florida at the time of Jonathan Dickinson

The Philadelphia waterfront in mid-18th century

A page from the original Dickinson manuscript

Jonathan Dickinson’s signature

Title page from an early edition of Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal

Indian towns along the Camino Real in Upper Florida

Eula Clarke on the Hampton School Campus

Author’s Note

The epic struggle of Native Americans to survive is embedded in American history. Sitting Bull and the Lakota at the Battle of Wounded Knee. The victorious Sioux in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Geronimo and the Apache Wars. These and many others we read about in school and visit battlefields in national parks.

Indians had been living in Florida for centuries and numbered around 300,000 when the Spanish arrived in 1565. They fought no cataclysmic battles against cavalries with banners and bugles. They simply dwindled and disintegrated over the next two centuries. And the wooden, thatched roof structures they built withered away over centuries of soggy soil and muggy heat.

Piecing together how the Indians in Spanish Florida lived and died depends on three sources. First, the well documented accounts of Spanish governors and Catholic missionaries. Second, the tireless spadework of modern era archeologists and anthropologists. With the help of tools like global positioning systems and ground penetrating radar, they can, for example, locate a pottery shard and then project the size of the entire vessel and what it held.

Third, we have the Journal of Jonathan Dickinson, whose account of a perilous journey as a captive among hostile Indians lends an eyewitness account of the people and villages along his way.

But many questions remain – not so much about things (pottery, buildings, etc.) but about how people thought and acted as they did. Why did the Florida Indians hate the English? Why did so many accept the Catholic faith? Why did others rebel?

I believe a great many questions like these can be answered plausibly if you will share a bedrock belief of mine: people behave in similar, familiar ways regardless of where and when they live.

For example, the head of a command-and-control (autocratic) entity may be an emperor, king, general or Indian chief, but his/her priorities and worries are basically the same: protecting the group from harm, fending off challengers, placating factions, bestowing favors for loyalty, and so forth. One can predictably project the same universal behavior for soldiers, slaves, priests, carpenters, and cooks.

Thus, in this book you now have the perspective of a journalist/historian on the interwoven story of Jonathan Dickinson and the fate of Florida’s first inhabitants.

By the way, you’ll soon see that passages from Dickinson’s original journal will appear in a Calligraphy font with my editorial insertions [like this] intended when his Elizabethan English becomes cumbersome. Sometimes the translating gets tricky, such as when he calls an Indian chief a Casseekey and I use the more widespread Spanish term, cacique. In all such cases, the intent is always to preserve as much of the persona of Jonathan Dickinson as practical 300-plus years after he penned his journal.

PART I

Shipwreck and Survival

Chapter I: Tumultuous Port Royal

Jonathan Dickinson is best known for the Journal that tracks his shipwreck in southeast Florida and his perilous trek to safety. But the story really begins in Port Royal, a bustling, brawling Jamaican port town.

The first thing to know about Port Royal is to confront the man whose ghost still pervaded its steamy wharfs, warehouses, bars and bordellos eight years after his death.

His name was Henry Morgan. In 1655, when the twenty-year-old Welshman first arrived in Jamaica as a low-ranking naval officer, England had recently wrested the island from its arch-rival, Spain. Port Royal was a four-mile finger of seafront sand fifteen miles from the capital of Kingston, and settlers boasted that its large, protected harbor could accommodate 500 ships.

When young Morgan first set foot on Port Royal, roughly 600 persons had already settled there because its harbor was thirty feet deep and ships could glide directly into its wharfs for unloading. The narrow streets had already begun to teem with warehouses, merchant shops, taverns, brothels, and slave markets.

But the bigger Port Royal grew, the more its colonial governor worried about predators. England prized its new conquest because Jamaica was a poke in the eye to Spanish Cuba, a mere hundred or so miles to the north. Yet, London seemed to ignore his requests for naval ships to ward off a revenge attack from Havana.

What to do? The governor had no choice but to fall in line with the growing practice of privateering, or buccaneering.

An efficient system was already being refined in other English colonies. The governor would issue a commission, or a letter of marque, to any Englishman who could produce a ship full of armed men to ply the Caribbean and capture, sink, or plunder a Spanish vessel. When the spoils were tallied up, 15 percent would go to King Charles II and ten percent to the Lord Admiral to signal their official support. Owners of ships leased to buccaneers got 35 percent and captains five percent. Beyond these was a sliding scale of shares for carpenters, surgeons, navigators, deckhands, and even cabin boys.

So entrenched was this spoils system that it even included special stipends for various types of combat injuries: 1,000 pieces of eight for blindness, 500 pieces for loss of a limb and a 100 for losing an eye.

But sometimes the rules as to purpose and scope of such missions were conveniently hazy. A French or Dutch merchant ship might be plundered because a marauding English privateer merely suspected it just might be preparing to trade with a Spanish colony. And often raiders would stray from the terms of the royal commissions that confined their attacks to ships at sea. If circumstances led a privateer crew to attack a fort or town, the liberated loot needn’t be split with the king, lord admiral and ship owners if the terms of marque hadn’t mentioned what to do on enemy land.

Well, a gaggle of captains and ships lurching this way and that didn’t last long, and eventually the most dashing, bold, and fearless buccaneer of them all would emerge as Admiral in Chief of an organized, streamlined confederacy forged in the taverns of Port Royal.

Early Lithograph of buccaneer Henry Morgan

That man was 35-year-old Henry Morgan, who championed the royal vision that England was meant to rule the entire West Indies. In the next few years, he would lead flotillas of thirty to sixty ships in devastating attacks on places like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Tortuga, Granada, Panama City, and Puerto Bello. In just one daring raid on Puerto Bello, a Panamanian stronghold where the output from Spain’s South American mines was gathered and shipped homeward, Morgan’s buccaneers made off with 500,000 pieces of eight, 300 slaves, and a fortune in gold, silver, and jewels.

And nearly all of it was brought back to Port Royal. Before long, some 7,000 residents were clustered along its narrow streets in buildings as tall as four stories, rivaling Boston and New York as England’s most prosperous possessions in the New World. In 1685, 313 ships visited Port Royal compared to 226 for all the ports in New England. Some said that on a per capita basis, Port Royal was wealthier than London.

A bloviating barrister put it this way: The town of Port Royal, being the Store House and Treasury of the West Indies, is always like a central mart or fair where all sorts of choice merchandises are duly imported, not only to furnish the island, but vast quantities are again transported to supply the Spaniards, Indians, and other nations, who, in exchange, return us bases [pedestals] and cakes of gold, wedges and pigs of silver, pistoles, pieces of eight and silver with stores of wrought plate, jewels, rich pearl necklaces….

The same writer acknowledged that one of every four buildings in Port Royal are brothels, gaming houses, taverns or grog shops.

By 1680, Henry Morgan had become governor of Jamaica and was knighted by King Charles. But being called Sir Henry was probably not as important to him as official recognition that he was a commissioned agent of the crown and not the lawless pirate being excoriated in the king’s court by foreign ambassadors and shipowners.

An artist’s re-creation of thriving Port Royal before the 1692 earthquake

Along the way, Morgan had expanded Port Royal’s militia and supervised the building of six forts around the harbor. He had acquired sprawling plantations in the hills above Kingston and filled their houses with the finest furnishings from the holds of captured ships.

But Sir Henry’s ambitions and health were already being corroded by an accumulation of shipboard diseases and too many drinking bouts with his cronies in the rum pots of Port Royal. When he died in 1688 at age 53, commerce ceased for a day as bells tolled throughout Jamaica.

Port Royal continued to thrive until June 7, 1692, when it was all but swallowed up in a few minutes.

Just before noon, the earth shook throughout the length of the slender peninsula. Within the span of two minutes, cobbled streets cracked wide open and whole buildings toppled or sunk to their waists as the porous ground beneath them became a slurry of quicksand. An estimated 2,000 people had already perished when, in another quick spasm of time, an angry ocean tsunami swept through the town and carried another 2,000 victims to sea.

For days after the earthquake, the tides would wash bodies back and forth over the sunken town. There was no one to retrieve them from the swirls of sharks. Two weeks after the quake, Quaker John Pike wrote his brother in Philadelphia: If thou didst see those great persons that now lie dead upon the water, thou could never forget it. Great men who were so swelled with pride that a man could not be admitted to speak with them, and women whose top-knots seemed to reach the clouds, now lie stinking upon the water, and are meat for fish and fowls of the air.

About the same time, the Catholic James II had succeeded Charles on the throne of England and Spain had become an ally of sorts. Not that the two suddenly fell in love after decades of bitter rivalry. They simply needed each other’s help to resist a bold and boisterous band of French privateers who had begun marauding the Caribbean and boasting that they would soon be its master.

In 1694 the French fleet, with 25 ships and 1,200 men, tiptoed nautically past the swampy graveyard that was once Port Royal and landed unopposed on a beach to the west. They stormed inland to loot, burn, debase several plantations, destroy fifty sugar