The Fray Andrés De San Miguel Account
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JOHN H. HANN COLLECTION AT UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA / COPYRIGHT 1999 JOHN H. HANN AN EARLY FLORIDA ADVENTURE STORY: THE FRAY ANDRÉS DE SAN MIGUEL ACCOUNT During the heyday of Spain’s establishment of its control over the major portion of the New World, numberless individuals’ lives were influenced dramatically by their early experiences with the realities of this “wondrous New World.” Unfortunately, far too few of those seekers of their fortunes have left us any account of their most memorable experiences or reflections on what they observed and experienced in that tumultuous enterprise. A notable exception is a relatively brief account from the year 1595 penned by a young Spaniard shipwrecked off the Spanish Florida coast of what is now the state of Georgia. That experience drastically altered the course of his life. At the height of the storm when it appeared that he and all his shipmates were lost, he made a vow that, if he survived, he would devote his life to the service of God. This teenage lad, who then bore the name of Andrés de Segura, is known to history as fray Andrés de San Miguel, a Carmelite lay brother who was responsible for the design and building of many of the major establishments of his order in early seventeenth century Mexico. A man of many talents, he also played an important role in the second stage of the drainage of the Valley of Mexico to rectify the errors of the first efforts linked to that enterprise. Modern inhabitants of Florida and Georgia can be grateful that he took the time to pen an account of the dramatic interludes of the shipwreck and his descriptions of the Indians he encountered along the coasts of Georgia and Florida. Historians and others will value the penetrating light his account throws on the spirit of the age as perceived by an idealistic youth, influenced undoubtedly by his adoption of a monastic vocation as a consequence of those early experiences. Fray Andrés presents a cold-eyed look at what the experiences of sailing could be in the late sixteenth century. He cites the example of the ship chosen as flagship of the official Fleet while sailing, experiencing a violent roll that threw six of its crew or passengers directly into the sea. They were allowed to drown “because they did not wish to swing the vessel around” to wait for the “swimmers or to put out the launch to pick them out.” He comments also on the shortcomings of the sailing arrangements by which the ships were chosen that formed part of the official Fleets and armadas that would carry the silver as they were careened in a great hurry at great cost. After those ships had attracted most of the experienced officers, the rest of the shipowners, desiring to get to Spain in order to return with the following year’s fleets, bought costly permissions to sail with the fleet. They then had insufficient time to prepare their ships adequately or to acquire experienced officers. He criticizes the fleet system sharply as well as the petty motives that guided those who were in charge that made it impossible for the fleet to sail on time. The result JOHN H. HANN COLLECTION AT UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA / COPYRIGHT 1999 JOHN H. HANN was an unplanned wintering over that added two million pesos to the fleets’ expenditures. He concluded this critique remarking: “Ordinarily, the disasters and losses that happen on the sea are of this sort, resulting from the greed or neglect of those who are in command.” His account gives us an introspective limning of the thought processes, concerns, ambitions, and religiosity of the age. Its apt reflection of the age’s Catholicism is epitomized in a remark that “in the midst of such great carelessness, some remembrance of God was not lacking and a great deal [of remembrance] of the Virgin Most Pure, and in particular of the one of Mercy, because that was the name of the ship, by whose intercession we believed all of us received such great mercies from God, ones such as we have never heard of from a shipwreck.” Although his account appears to have been written some years after the event (based on internal evidence), it presents a remarkable reflection on the undaunted spirit of the young people among the crew and passengers, who were largely immune to the discouragement and depression of those in charge and of those who, in normal times, boasted most about their courage and bravery and enterprise. As the threat represented by the storm became apparent, all the latter each crawled into holes of their own to await what they regarded as inevitable death except for the ship’s valiant purser. It was he who organized and, where necessary, bullied the young men into manning the pumps to keep the ship afloat through the storm. When those who had been in charge and their clique, coming out of their holes when the storm ended, commandeered the ship’s launch and took off with the ship’s carpenter and tools, leaving the rest behind to go down with the ship, the purser oversaw the building of an unstable makeshift sloop on which those who remained, who had the courage to board it, eventually reached land. Andrés de Segura set out for the New World from Spain in 1593 as a youth of about sixteen to seek his fortune on a newly built ship named Our Lady of Mercy. The experiences that he recounts in this narrative occurred in 1595 while he was returning to Spain on the same vessel. Five days out of Havana as the fleet was coming out of the Bahama Channel, a storm arose that damaged Our Lady of Mercy badly and left it leaking dangerously. The small clique who seized the ship’s launch not long after the storm ended, abandoned the 37 who were left on board, expecting that they would go down with the ship. Those left on board cajoled a depressed and mentally unstable caulker into attempting to build a vessel Andrés described as “a long box, tall and narrow,” using not very suitable pieces of lumber pulled from the ship’s superstructure. Thirty people, who represented its capacity, reached land with it on an island that probably was St. Simons Island just below the mouth of the Altamaha River. The other seven chose not to entrust their lives to such a makeshift vessel. 2 JOHN H. HANN COLLECTION AT UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA / COPYRIGHT 1999 JOHN H. HANN These survivors established contact eventually with Guale Indians from the village of Asao located on the lower Altamaha, who proved to be friendly, although the permanent mission among them had not yet been established. Assisted by the Indians, the shipwrecked Spaniards made their way southward to the San Pedro Mocama mission among the Timucua-speaking Mocama on Cumberland Island, then the northernmost of the missions. The Mocama’s fray Baltasar López was absent at the time, probably on one of his many missionary forays to Timucua-speaking villages on the adjacent mainland. After the survivors had spent about two weeks there, a Spanish vessel carried them on to St. Augustine. Andrés’s account of his experiences among the Indians of the Georgia coast is particularly rich in ethnographic details related to the native inhabitants’ structures, food, clothing, games, government, and the like. Andrés and most of his comrades were fortunate that the garrison at St. Augustine was not shorthanded when those survivors reached that port. He stated that the majority of its soldiers had reached there as shipwreck survivors and had been forced to remain there as soldiers. Only a couple of Flemish artillerymen from his group were pressed into service at St. Augustine along with one other young man who was a gunsmith because the existing one was already old. The governor ordered that the shipwreck survivors be given a daily ration at the king’s expense as though they were soldiers during their month-long stay as well as a special allowance of 25 pounds of flour and a good quantity of jerque for the trip to Havana. The vessel that carried them to Havana sailed very close to shore from point to point, providing them with many trading encounters with the Indians of that coast and, farther south, an opportunity to observe the natives’ technique for killing whales in the inshore waters. That leg of Andrés’s voyage did not lack for adventure either. In south Florida waters, two English vessels captured their small boat. After stripping them of their more valuable property, the Englishmen released them to go on to Havana, which they reached 111 days after having sailed from there on Our Lady of Mercy on March 11, 1595 headed for Spain. Andrés returned to Cádiz in 1596 just in time to witness the British attack on and capture and pillaging and destruction of that Spanish port city. He had set out for the New World from there in 1593. His account ends with his report on that episode of Spanish history, emphasizing again an abdication of leadership by those in charge of the city’s defense that facilitated the success of the invaders. Having made a promise to give his life to God should he survive the foundering of his ship, he returned to Mexico in 1598 to join the Carmelite Order as a simple lay brother. Prior to that, he had already had some training 3 JOHN H. HANN COLLECTION AT UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA / COPYRIGHT 1999 JOHN H.