Just as the hunter masters the whale in “This Huge Leviathan” (Emblem 42), the Spanish attempted to master the Indigenous peoples of Florida, where the story of this whale hunt originates (see the Curation Whaling Legends). Conquistador Juan Ponce de León claimed Florida for Spain in 1513, christening it “La Florida” after the flowers in bloom there when he arrived in springtime. The colony stretched across a much broader territory than the U.S. state does today, encompassing parts of what are now Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Key to Spain’s strategy to govern this new colony was the establishment of missions, where Jesuit and later Franciscan priests were sent to convert the Indigenous peoples to what they considered the one true faith, Christianity. In total, there were over 100 missions, churches, or other sites where priests preached to an Indigenous audience in Florida in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 In Emblem 42, Pulter aligns the Indigenous hunter with the Devil, an attitude shared by Spanish explorers and missionaries; at best, the Indigenous inhabitants were seen as heathens, an uncivilized people requiring re-education in matters of spirituality, and at worst, instruments of the Devil. Philip IV, King of Spain, declared in a royal decree to the Spanish officials of Florida in 1651 that his “intent and only interest in Florida … was to further the work of holy conversion, … that the Indians willingly submit to the holy evangelical yoke2 without their being harassed or molested."3 Submission to the might of God was inextricably linked to acquiescence to Spanish rule. In actuality, missionaries were accompanied by bands of soldiers who evinced little compunction about using force against Indigenous peoples.

One of the first missions was established on the land of the Tequesta, on the Bay of Biscay at the mouth of the Miami River. It was here that the whale hunt on which Pulter’s poem is based was observed (see the Curation Whaling Legends). In 1567, Pedro Menéndez Márquez, an explorer later appointed governor of Florida, passed through the area and left thirty soldiers, some carpenters, and a Jesuit brother named Francisco Villareal to build a church there.4 A letter written by Brother Villareal to a fellow missionary on the west coast of Florida survives. He composed the letter on January 29, 1568, almost a year after his arrival. He corroborates stories of Tequesta whale-hunting, mentioning their consumption of whale meat. Villareal portrays himself as a teacher and the Tequesta people as students learning scripture through exercises in recitation.

The letter is also notable for Villareal’s description of the staging of two comedies, one of which he describes as a morality play. Morality plays were popular in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe and featured characters representative of virtue and vice designed to teach lessons about sin and salvation. The letter is ambiguous about the intended audience of the play; Villareal says that the soldiers “enjoyed” the play, but whether they were actors or audience members (or both) is unclear. It seems likely that the play was organized by Villareal with an eye to the religious education of a Tequesta audience as well as the entertainment of the soldiers. Perhaps he thought the visual medium of a play would help convey a message of faith to those who did not speak Spanish.

The letter mentions obstacles encountered by the Spanish men, including illness and insufficient food. Villareal’s mission would be cut short in just a few months. By spring, the soldiers’ number dropped to eighteen and they were ordered to retreat. Lack of food, strained relations with the Tequesta, and “the seeming fruitlessness of missionary work” all contributed to the abandonment of the mission. It appears that the lack of food caused a rift between the soldiers and the Tequesta people, which came to a head when the soldiers murdered the chief’s uncle.5 Attempts were made to re-establish the mission in 1568 and again in 1743, without success.6The Tequesta mission exhibited many of the problems that plagued later missions in Florida: Indigenous populations were devastated by European diseases like smallpox, measles, and typhus, as well as by the raids of the English colonizers and their Indigenous allies from Carolina.7 When Spain ceded Florida to England in 1763, the remaining Tequestan families, of which there were only eighty, were given passage to Havana, where they remained under Spanish rule.8

Footnotes