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This chapter explores the changing fabric of community organization and identity during the late-precontact and early-historic periods (early eighteenth century) in Spanish Florida. Changes in population structure and demography are modelled through three time periods among three linguistic groups in northern Florida and southern Georgia. Results indicate an initial increase in between-group genetic variation, reflective of diminished biological integration and decreasing population size. After 1650, however, inter-group genetic variation declines rapidly, reflecting changes in patterns of mate exchange among Florida's indigenous converts. This temporal pattern is interpreted as the genesis of a novel “Spanish-Indian” identity in La Florida that was subjected to diaspora when the English destroyed Spain's colony in 1706. Ethnohistoric, archaeological, and settlement data, combined with these bioarchaeological data, suggest the Florida Seminole have ancestral roots in this nascent Spanish-Indian identity, despite the lack of recognition of this modern tribe for nearly 100 years.

This chapter combines early 16^th century documentary and cartographic evidence with modern information to reconstruct Juan Ponce de León’s 1513 voyage la Florida. Data suggest that Ponce’s landfall was just north of Cape Canaveral. His ships then traveled south along the coast of peninsular Florida, west through the Keys, then north to the realm of the Calusa Indians on the Gulf coast. There the Spaniards went to the main Calusa town (Stababa), which is certainly the Mound Key archaeological site in Estero Bay in Lee County. After leaving the Calusa, Ponce and his men fought a battle with Indians on Marco Island. They then sailed south to Cuba before returning home. The chapter also discusses Ponce’s return voyage in 1521 and the history of the Calusa until their demise as an ethnic group in the last half of the 18^th century.

This chapter describes how the mestizo author El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega concludes his account of Hernando de Soto's expedition to Florida with a tale of Floridians in Spain, whose displacement reflects the author's own distance from his Peruvian homeland since his early twenties. It traces La Florida's multiple crossings in order to explore the relationship between Garcilaso's strategies of self-authorization and his reworking of the motifs of captivity and exile. For Garcilaso, transplanted individuals such as captives and exiles are essential to transmitting accurate and useful knowledge across cultural borders, yet La Florida's final episode offers a negative example of such a mediating role. It becomes a narrative of a double crossing: a transatlantic round-trip and a duplicitous revenge.

The chapter unpacks statements about Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón’s 1526 colonizing expedition as a guide to how the ecologies of the Southeast’s coasts and interior, and the patterns of Native American settlement based on them, shaped Spanish colonial activities in La Florida, to 1600. It shows the generally negative views Spaniards expressed as they discovered the “secrets of the land.” The chapter concludes with the reasons Spanish settlements remained on the Atlantic coast after 1565, distant from the better soils and larger Native American populations of the piedmont.

This chapter begins with the account of a former captive of the Calusa Indians, Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, who served as a translator during the same period when Don Luis was also in La Florida. The ambiguous account of this strange interpreter – a Creole man who came of age among the Calusa – embodies a complex, juridical engagement with Spanish conquest that results in a narrative mode of unsettlement: discouraging future Spanish attempts to colonize La Florida. The chapter then turns to Relación de los trabajos, by the Carmelite friar Andrés de San Miguel, who presents a baroque chapter in the afterlife of Don Luis, resuscitating the translator and giving him a powerful written afterlife: engaged in a new strand of history, Don Luis sunders the early modern topos of interpretive transparency with an unsettling form of desengaño or disillusion.

This chapter tells the story of the ill-fated colonization attempt by Tristán de Luna to settle La Florida on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts for the Kingdom of Spain. Based on archival documentation, the history relates how 1,500 settlers and soldiers voyaged from Mexico to Pensacola with royal orders to build townsites, farm the land, and defend the new colony. This epic effort became doomed when, shortly after their arrival, the immigrants were struck by a hurricane that destroyed their supplies and foodstuffs. Despite several relief voyages and efforts to resettle elsewhere, the colony collapsed and became a forgotten chapter in Latin American history.

This chapter provides a newly discovered and translated account of the Pardo expedtions, written by interpreter Domingo Gonzales de León in 1584. León had arrived in La Florida with the adelantado Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565, helping to found both the colonies of St. Augustine and Santa Elena. He was a member of Pardo’s second expedition, so that he actually took part in the events that he describes in his account. Given that there are only four other existing accounts of Pardo’s journey, the discovery of the León document provides an invaluable primary source that offers information on towns and polities in the interior, including Joara, not contained in other the sources. Particularly important—and alone among the primary accounts of the expeditions—León’s recollections situate the social geography of towns and villages along Pardo’s path with the physical geography of the region, leaving no room for doubt as to the path of Pardo and his men into the deep interior. This chapter will mark the first publication of León’s account.