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Antonia Paula de la Resurreccion Bonelly (1786-1870), was a colonial woman of Spanish East Florida who was captured by Miccosukee Indians in 1802 and held captive for twenty-two months. Her rescue and ransom involved many of the major power players that defined relations in this period between the Florida tribes and the nations of Britain, Spain, and the United States.
Bonelly was born in Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1786 during the Second Spanish Period. She was the daughter of Maria Moll and Josef Bonelly, who were Mediterraneans who immigrated to America with the Andrew Turnbull expedition at New Smyrna, Florida, in 1768. Turnbull's colony was abandoned after nine years of abusive conditions and the surviving colonists walked seventy miles to Saint Augustine seeking release from their indenture. They were welcomed to the city by Governor Patrick Tonyn, who was a rival of Turnbull, and most settled into the Minorcan Quarter where some families thrived for generations.
After the American Revolution, the British ceded the colony to Spain by the Treaty of Paris. British citizens were forced to sell or leave their homes in Saint Augustine, but the Minorcans—who spoke a form of Spanish, practiced Catholicism, and had suffered abuse by British overseers—had little difficulty publicly swearing allegiance to the Spanish crown. Whereas the British sought security through colonization and expansion, the Spanish viewed Saint Augustine as a military outpost. The population of the colony dropped from 17,000 to 3000 after the British evacuation and the Minorcans became the majority civilian population.
In 1796, Josef Bonelly was granted 600 acres by Spanish colonial Governor Enrique White near Matanzas Inlet, where he engaged in farming near the site of the original Turnbull colony. In January 1802, Antonia Paula Bonelly was fifteen years old and living on her father's plantation at Matanzas with her parents and five siblings: her adult brother Tomas (25), and four young children between 1 and 14 years of age. At around three o'clock in the afternoon of January 21, a war party of nine Miccosukee raiders attacked. [1] Josef Bonelly was away from the property, and his son Tomas was murdered—by one account slain in the fields where he was working, by another, tied with cords, scalped, and burned at his father's house at the wharf. Testifying in 1835, an old Saint Augustine citizen recalled seeing the dead body of Tomas Bonelly laid in the marketplace after being brought to town in a boat. [2]
The Miccosukee spared the mother and young children and claimed them as hostages. The party set out immediately with all the plunder that they and the prisoners could carry, and travelled by a circuitous route for the interior of the country. After twenty-four days of travel, they reached their eventual destination: the town of Miccosukee, located along the boundary of Spanish East and West Florida (about twenty miles northeast of present-day Tallahassee). Miccosukee was advantageously isolated. The Spanish considered this area west of the Suwannee River under West Florida jurisdiction, managed at Pensacola, but it was a day's journey from the Spanish outpost at Saint Marks and considerable distance still from Apalachicola.
Bonelly later testified that the Chief was named Ken-ha-jah, [3] but he was almost certainly Kinache, who was known by many names including Kinhega, Kinheja, and Kinhija. Born in 1750, Kinache was prominent among the Seminoles along the mouth of the Apalachicola River. He had allied with Britain during the Revolution and fought against the Spanish. Following Britain's defeat, Kinache moved to the village on the west side of Lake Miccosukee.
It took seven months before a trader trusted by the natives, named Jack Forrester, was sent to rescue the family. Forrester worked for the Scottish firm Panton, Leslie & Company, founded in 1783 for the purpose of trading with the tribes in Florida. Having established themselves in Florida and the Bahamas, Panton was able to continue operating in Florida after its return to Spanish rule because there were no Spanish traders established in trade with the natives. The partners used their influence with the tribes to both advance Spanish territorial claims against the United States, and to encourage the natives to resist new white settlements and US attempts to acquire land.
Acting as emissary in the summer of 1802, Forrester bought the freedom of the mother, Maria Bonelly, and her three youngest children for $300 (~$6,388 in 2023) ransom. But the sum was deemed insufficient for the teenagers, Antonia Paula and Josef, and they remained. Though her condition was undocumented, the ordeal may have shortened the life of eleven year-old Catherine Bonelly, who was released but died within the year. In the weeks that followed Forrester's mission, fourteen year-old Josef escaped the Miccosukee and hid in the surrounding woods and swamps. He made it to Saint Marks on the Gulf of Mexico where military commanders had him sent to Havana. There, he spotted a family friend and sea captain named Esteban Benét who was able to transport him home to Saint Augustine.
In 1803, the elder Josef Bonelly sold his Matanzas holdings and gathered the remaining ransom. Twenty-two months after the original attack, he sent his son-in-law Tomas Pacetty with $200 to gain freedom for Antonia Paula. Pacetty traveled with King Payne, a native interpreter, and an African slave. The venture was successful, and Pacetty returned the now seventeen year-old to her family, several months pregnant. Bonelly had been held by the Miccosukee medicine man as a mate, and weeks after returning to Saint Augustine, she gave birth to a girl that was baptized Maria Antonia Demecia Bonelly. The girl lived nine or ten years. She died around the same year as Antonia Paula's father, who passed in 1811 at the age of 54. Josef Bonelly was financially ruined by the raid on his property, and there is no evidence of how he supported himself after selling his farm.
Antonia Paula Bonelly married Bartolome Leonardy in 1808—while her Miccosukee daughter was still living—and had a large family, about half of whom would become early settlers of Tampa. Leonardy was the son of one of the most prominent Minorcan businessmen in colonial Saint Augustine, Don Roque Leonardy. Bonelly lived through the Civil War and had grandchildren and great grandchildren who fought for the Confederacy. She died in 1870 when she was 84 years old, and last lived at the house of her daughter Laurenna Leonardy at 56 Marine Street (the González-Jones House).
The attack on the Bonelly plantation was not random, and it had political roots in the decades-long struggle between native, Spanish, British, and American interests in Florida. King Payne told Jack Forrester that a small party of natives had set out with the intention of plundering the inhabitants of the coast. Forrester was concerned that the Spanish defenses along the Saint Johns were relaxed and that even small groups of raiders—like the nine-man Miccosukee war party—could not be repelled. Planters, like Bonelly, were increasingly anxious about their exposed position.
Forrester and Payne's direct involvement in the Bonelly negotiations show that larger forces were at play in this event than simply the safety of a fifteen-year-old girl. Panton had a robust commercial enterprise in Florida that had withstood the political change of authority from Britain to Spain, but was now at risk because of a lack of security. The balance of allegiances was complicated for the tribes. While William Augustus Bowles appealed to natives with a call for nationalism, Forrester was the key access point to essential European commodities: in particular, weapons and rum. Panton supported Indian resistance against Spanish incursions and the imminent invasion of the United States, but not if that resistance included the disruption of Panton's monopoly by insurgents like Bowles.
St. Augustine is a city in and the county seat of St. Johns County located 40 miles south of downtown Jacksonville. The city is on the Atlantic coast of northeastern Florida. Founded in 1565 by Spanish explorers, it is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in what is now the contiguous United States.
East Florida was a colony of Great Britain from 1763 to 1783 and a province of the Spanish Empire from 1783 to 1821. The British gained control over Spanish Florida in 1763 as part of the Treaty of Paris which ended the Seven Years' War. Deciding that the colony was too large to administer as a single unit, British officials divided Florida into two colonies separated by the Apalachicola River; the colony of East Florida, with its capital located in St. Augustine and West Florida with its capital located in Pensacola. East Florida was much larger and comprised the bulk of the former Spanish colony and most of the current state of Florida. It had also been the most populated region of Spanish Florida, but before control was transferred to Britain, most residents – including virtually everyone in St. Augustine – left the territory, with most migrating to Cuba.
Spanish Florida was the first major European land-claim and attempted settlement-area in northern America during the European Age of Discovery. La Florida formed part of the Captaincy General of Cuba, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and the Spanish Empire during Spanish colonization of the Americas. While its boundaries were never clearly or formally defined, the territory was initially much larger than the present-day state of Florida, extending over much of what is now the southeastern United States, including all of present-day Florida plus portions of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida Parishes of Louisiana. Spain based its claim to this vast area on several wide-ranging expeditions mounted during the 16th century. A number of missions, settlements, and small forts existed in the 16th and to a lesser extent in the 17th century; they were eventually abandoned due to pressure from the expanding English and French colonial settlements, the collapse of the native populations, and the general difficulty in becoming agriculturally or economically self-sufficient. By the 18th century, Spain's control over La Florida did not extend much beyond a handful of forts near St. Augustine, St. Marks, and Pensacola, all within the boundaries of present-day Florida.
Andrew Turnbull was a Scottish physician and diplomat who served as the British consul at Smyrna, Ottoman Empire. In 1768, he founded the colony of New Smyrna, Florida, named in honor of his wife's birthplace, the ancient Greek city of Smyrna on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Turnbull was married to Gracia Dura Bin, the daughter of a Greek merchant from Smyrna. His colony was located in the province of British East Florida, and encompassed some 101,400 acres (410 km2); it was nearly three times the size of the colony at Jamestown.
Joseph Marion Hernández was a slave-owning American planter, politician and military officer. He was the first delegate from the Florida Territory and the first Hispanic American to serve in the United States Congress. A member of the Democratic-Republican Party, he served from September 1822 to March 1823.
The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians is a federally recognized Native American tribe in the U.S. state of Florida. Together with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, it is one of three federally recognized Seminole entities.
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