Francisco de Chicora

Last updated

Francisco de Chicora was the baptismal name given to a Native American kidnapped in 1521, along with 70 others, from near the mouth of the Pee Dee River by Spanish explorer Francisco Gordillo and slave trader Pedro de Quexos, based in Santo Domingo and the first Europeans to reach the area. From analysis of the account by Peter Martyr, court chronicler, the ethnographer John R. Swanton believed that Chicora was from a Catawban group.

Contents

In Hispaniola, where he and the other captives were taken, Chicora learned Spanish, was baptized a Catholic, and worked for Lucas Vasquez de Ayllón, a colonial official. Most of the natives died within two years. Accompanying Ayllón to Spain, de Chicora met with the chronicler Peter Martyr and told him much about his people. Martyr combined this information with accounts by explorers and recorded it as the "Testimony of Francisco de Chicora," published with his seventh Decade in 1525. In 1526 Chicora accompanied Ayllón on a major expedition to North America with 600 colonists. After they struck land at the Santee River and the party went ashore, Chicora escaped and returned to his people.

Spanish encounter with natives at the Pee Dee River

The Spanish had made repeated expeditions to the southeastern part of what is now the United States, where they explored areas around the Santee River in present-day South Carolina and Winyah Bay and other areas. [1] Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, oidor (judge) of the royal Audencia of Santa Domingo, [2] commissioned Francisco Gordillo to make an expedition to the continent in 1520. Gordillo sailed north from Hispaniola through the Bahamas, where near the island of Lucayoneque he fell in with a caravel commanded by the slave raider Pedro de Quexos (Pedro de Quejo), who was trying to capture Arawak to sell as slaves, without success. Quexos happened to be a relative of Gordillo's pilot Alonzo Fernandez Sotil, [3] and decided to join Gordilla's expedition, and in June 1521 the two struck land at what they called the River of San Juan Bautista (St. John the Baptist), probably the Pee Dee in present-day South Carolina. [1] A crowd of curious natives gathered on the shore to watch the strangers. The natives fled when the Spanish approached in shallops, but two were caught, taken aboard a ship, given Spanish clothes, and returned ashore. The natives again swarmed the beach, seeing their comrades' return and changed appearance as a wondrous sign, since they had worn only buckskins before. The chief ordered 50 of his subjects to bring food for the Spanish. Once ashore, the Spanish were given presents and a guided tour for several days. They claimed the land for their king, and invited the natives aboard to see their ships.

Gordillo had been ordered by de Ayllón to cultivate friendly relations with the people to prepare for later colonization. De Quexos, eager for slaves, persuaded him to trick the natives; the Spaniards suddenly raised anchor and set sail for Santo Domingo with 70 of the natives still aboard, including the man who would be named Francisco. When they arrived, Ayllón condemned the leaders for their treachery. He took the matter before a commission headed by Diego Columbus. The commission declared the captive natives to be free, and ordered them returned to the mainland, but such a trip never took place, as it was considered too costly. [1] As recounted by Peter Martyr the court chronicler, according to colonial reports, most of the natives died within two years; many wandered the streets of Santo Domingo as vagrants, and few survived. One who survived was baptized Francisco de Chicora; he learned Spanish and worked for Ayllón. [1]

Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón took the engaging young Indian to Spain and presented him to the royal court, where he told fantastical tales about his homeland of Chicora, [4] [5] and the neighboring provinces of what is now the Carolinas. "Chicora" (the name the Spanish gave to the area) was evidently one of several Siouan-speaking territories subject to the chief Datha of Duahe (also recorded in Spanish as Duhare). [6] Francisco de Chicora described the people of Duhare as "white" and having "blond hair to the heels", [7] and told of a gigantic Indian king called Datha [8] who ruled a race of giants [9] and of another race of men who grew long tails. [5] Chicora met the court chronicler, Italian historian Peter Martyr, and recounted to him much about the customs of his people in Chicora and about the neighboring provinces. [1]

After returning to the Caribbean, in 1526 Ayllón led an expedition to North America with three ships and 600 colonists, bringing de Chicora with him. After striking land at what Ayllón named the Jordan River (now the Santee River in South Carolina), one of his ships went aground. As the party went ashore, de Chicora immediately abandoned the Spanish and fled to rejoin his own people. He disappeared from the historical record.

Modern scholarship

Researchers have worked to identify the provinces and tribes described by Chicora. They have analyzed phonetics of 16th-century Spanish, as well as the many languages of the North American tribes in the area, to reach their conclusions.

The location and ethnicity of the actual people referred to in Chicora's tall tales of Duhare has been debated; candidates have included Catawban, Guale, and Cusabo. In 2004 Blair Rudes asserted that other linguistic evidence in Martyr's account points to the Iroquoian Tuscarora tribe, and specifically their town on the Neuse River called Teyurhèhtè. He suggests, for example, that Old Tuscaroran Teeth-ha (king) corresponded with the name "Datha", which he says may have been a title rather than proper name. He also notes close similarities between accounts of a religious ceremony as recounted by Francisco de Chicora, and one among the Tuscarora recounted by a European in the early eighteenth century. [1]

Other sources, such as Oviedo, Navarrete, Barcia, and Documentos Ineditos list additional provinces derived from Francisco de Chicora, some of which have been tentatively identified by Swanton and other researchers:

Related Research Articles

Iroquoian languages Native American language family

The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.

Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón

Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón was a Spanish magistrate and explorer who in 1526 established the short-lived San Miguel de Gualdape colony, one of the first European attempts at a settlement in what is now the United States. Ayllón's account of the region inspired a number of later attempts by the Spanish and French governments to colonize the southeastern United States.

The Waccamaw people are an indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, who lived in villages along the Waccamaw River and Pee Dee River in North and South Carolina in the 18th century.

The Cape Fear Indians were a small, coastal tribe of Native Americans who lived on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.

The Winyaw were a Native American tribe living near Winyah Bay, Black River, and the lower course of the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. The Winyaw people disappeared as a distinct entity after 1720 and are thought to have merged with the Waccamaw.

Pedee people

The Pee Dee people, also Pedee and Peedee, are American Indians of the Southeast United States. Historically, their population has been concentrated in the Piedmont of present-day South Carolina. In the 17th and 18th centuries, English colonists named the Pee Dee River and the Pee Dee region of South Carolina for the tribe.

Winyah Bay

Winyah Bay is a coastal estuary that is the confluence of the Waccamaw River, the Pee Dee River, the Black River, and the Sampit River in Georgetown County, in eastern South Carolina. Its name comes from the Winyaw, who used to inhabit the region during the eighteenth century. The historic port city of Georgetown is located on the bay, and the bay generally serves as the terminating point for the Grand Strand.

Manahoac

The Manahoac, also recorded as Mahock, were a small group of Siouan-language Native Americans in northern Virginia at the time of European contact. They numbered approximately 1,000 and lived primarily along the Rappahannock River west of modern Fredericksburg and the Fall Line, and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They united with the Monacan, the Occaneechi, the Saponi and the Tutelo. They disappeared from the historical record after 1728.

San Miguel de Gualdape

San Miguel de Gualdape, founded in 1526 by Spanish colonizer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, was the first European settlement in what became the continental United States, and the third in North America north of Mexico, after L’Anse aux Meadows and the colony of João Álvares Fagundes. De Ayllón established his first colony at Winyah Bay for a month, then moved to the coast of Georgia, where the colony lasted two months before it was overwhelmed by disease, hunger, a slave uprising, and a Native American population that responded in a hostile manner to the invading colonizers, whose earlier scouts had enslaved hundreds of Native Americans and taken them to Santo Domingo. Of the 600 persons who set out to establish the settlement, only about 150 returned home alive.

The Coree were a very small Native American tribe, who once occupied a coastal area south of the Neuse River in southeastern North Carolina in the area now covered by Carteret and Craven counties. Early 20th-century scholars were unsure of what language they spoke, but the coastal areas were mostly populated by Iroquois and Algonquian peoples.

Chicora was a legendary Native American kingdom or tribe sought during the 16th century by various European explorers in present-day South Carolina. The legend originated after Spanish slave traders captured an Indian they called Francisco de Chicora in 1521; afterward, they came to treat Francisco's home country as a land of abundant wealth and natural resources. The "Chicora Legend" influenced both the Spanish and the French in their attempts to colonize North America for the next 60 years.

Waccamaw Siouan Indians are one of eight state-recognized Native American tribal nations in North Carolina; they are also known as the "People of the Fallen Star". Historically Siouan-speaking, they are located predominantly in the southeastern North Carolina counties of Bladen and Columbus. They adopted this name in 1948, when their congressional representative introduced a bill for federal recognition.

Cheraw

The Cheraw people, also known as the Saraw or Saura, were a Siouan-speaking tribe of indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, in the Piedmont area of North Carolina near the Sauratown Mountains, east of Pilot Mountain and north of the Yadkin River. They lived in villages near the Catawba River. Their first European and African contact was with the Hernando De Soto Expedition in 1540. The early explorer John Lawson included them in the larger eastern-Siouan confederacy, which he called "the Esaw Nation."

The Wateree were a Native American tribe in the interior of the present-day Carolinas. They probably belonged to the Siouan-Catawba language family. First encountered by the Spanish in 1567 in Western North Carolina, they migrated to the southeast and what developed as South Carolina by 1700, where English colonists noted them.

Santa Elena, a Spanish settlement on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina, was the capital of Spanish Florida from 1566 to 1587. It was established under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the first governor of Spanish Florida. There had been a number of earlier attempts to establish colonies in the area by both the Spanish and the French, who had been inspired by the earlier accounts by Chicora and Hernando de Soto of rich territories in the interior. Menéndez's Santa Elena settlement was intended as the new capital of the Spanish colony of La Florida, shifting the focus of Spanish colonial efforts north from St. Augustine, which had been established in 1565 to oust the French from their colony of Fort Caroline. Santa Elena was ultimately built at the site of the abandoned French outpost of Charlesfort, founded in 1562 by Jean Ribault.

The Congaree were a group of Native Americans who lived in what is now central South Carolina of the United States, along the Congaree River. They spoke a dialect distinct from, and not intelligible by, Siouan language speakers; it is considered unclassified. This was the primary language family of Native Americans in the Piedmont, such as the Catawba. Some linguists, however, believe that the language was related to Catawban Siouan.

The Cusabo or Cosabo are a group of American Indian tribes who lived along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in what is now South Carolina, approximately between present-day Charleston and south to the Savannah River, at the time of European colonization. English colonists often referred to them as one of the Settlement Indians of South Carolina, tribes who "settled" among the colonists.

The Waxhaw was a tribe native to what are now the counties of Lancaster, in South Carolina; and Union and Mecklenburg in North Carolina, around the area of present-day Charlotte. The Waxhaw were related to other nearby Southeastern Siouian tribes, such as the Catawba and Sugeree. It is speculated that they were culturally influenced by the Mississippian culture.

Nottoway people

The Nottoway are a Native American tribe in Virginia. Historically, the Nottoway spoke an Iroquoian language, Nottoway, and were related to other Iroquoian speakers.

Cofitachequi

Cofitachequi was a paramount chiefdom founded about 1300 AD and encountered by the Hernando de Soto expedition in South Carolina in April 1540. Cofitachequi was later visited by Juan Pardo during his two expeditions (1566–1568) and by Henry Woodward in 1670. Cofitachequi ceased to exist as a political entity prior to 1701.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 First Descriptions of an Iroquoian People: Spaniards among the Tuscarora before 1522 (PDF), Coastal Carolina Indians Center, archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-08
  2. ↑ Jerald T. Milanich (14 August 1996). Timucua. VNR AG. p. 70. ISBN   978-1-55786-488-8.
  3. ↑ John Reed Swanton (1922). Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors. Government Printing Office. pp.  32.
  4. ↑ David J. Weber (14 May 2014). Spanish Frontier in North America. Yale University Press. p. 31. ISBN   978-0-300-15621-8.
  5. 1 2 Lawrence Sanders Rowland; Alexander Moore; George C. Rogers (1996). The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861. Univ of South Carolina Press. p. 17. ISBN   978-1-57003-090-1.
  6. ↑ Paul E. Hoffman (15 December 2015). A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century. LSU Press. p. 24. ISBN   978-0-8071-6474-7.
  7. ↑ Paul E. Hoffman (15 December 2015). A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century. LSU Press. p. 26. ISBN   978-0-8071-6474-7.
  8. ↑ Peter O. Koch (13 March 2009). Imaginary Cities of Gold: The Spanish Quest for Treasure in North America. McFarland. pp. 18–19. ISBN   978-0-7864-5310-8.
  9. ↑ Edward McCrady (1897). The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government, 1670-1719. I. Heritage Books. p. 42. ISBN   978-0-7884-4610-8.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.