An Early Florida Adventure Story

A rare eyewitness account of a journey from Spain to the Americas during the Spanish colonial period

Among

documents of Florida's Spanish colonial period, few eyewitness accounts

exist. One of these, the 1595 narrative by Fray Andr?s de San Miguel,

expertly translated into English by John Hann, describes the two-year

odyssey of a teenager from Spain across the Atlantic to Mexico, Havana,

and Florida and finally back to Spain. The future friar's account of his

experiences as a young sailor brings to life the fleets of Spain and

reveals how his journeys would change his life forever. It also provides

vivid information about the Indigenous people of the Georgia and

Florida coast. After Andr?s's ship passed Cape Canaveral, it was

battered by a four-day storm and separated from the fleet. The officers

commandeered the only launch and escaped; the crew kept the ship afloat

and improvised a box-like vessel in which 30 survivors reached shore

near the mouth of the Altamaha River--more dead than alive for lack of

food and water. The author offers detailed descriptions of the Guale

Indians and of Mission San Pedro Mocama on Cumberland Island. He also

provides vignettes of life in St. Augustine and, on his way to Havana,

of encounters with South Florida Indians who came out to trade and with a

gentlemanly English pirate. The adventure closes with Fray Andr?s'

return to Cadiz, Spain, where he witnessed the 1596 British siege and

burning of that port. Only seventeen years old at the time of

the voyage, Fray Andr?s presents a cold-eyed view of the sailing

experience in the sixteenth century, trenchant observations of the

behavior of the ship's officers and the circumstances of the survival of

the crew, and insight into the ambitions, concerns, and religiosity of

the Spaniards. The book includes Hann's translation of a brief

introductory essay written by Fray Andr?s' Mexican publisher, telling of

the young man's entry into the Carmelites and his later life as a

church architect, builder, and hydrographic expert involved in the

drainage of the valley of Mexico City.