The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Retrospective on Guale and Mocama ed. by John E. Worth (review)

BOOK REVIEWS133 and compel later generations? Is any ideaUzation an effort at restoration? Can those who seek to regain the primitive ever leave behind their own baggage? For insisting that students of American reUgion wrestle with these questions and for reminding us tiiat they have powerfully motivated many movements and traditions in American common Ufe, Richard Hughes deserves our thanks. Charles H. Ijppy University ofTennessee at Chattanooga The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Retrospective on Guale and Mocama. Translated and edited byJohn E. Worth. Introduction by David Hurst Thomas. [Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Number 75, issued May 18, 1995. Fourth monograph in a series entitled "The Archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale."] (Distributed by the University of Georgia Press, Athens. Pp. 222. $2395 paperback.) By order of don Manuel de Montiano, governor ofFlorida, at the command of King PhiUp V, the governmental notary Francisco de Castula assembled out of the governmental and Franciscan archives of the city of St. Augustine in 1739 a group of documents designed to substantiate Spain's prior claim to the territory between the colonies ofSouth Carolina and Florida,the area in which General James Oglethorpe had estabUshed the British colony of Georgia six years before. When the War ofJenkins' Ear broke out some months later, this packet was filed away, forgotten until the 1920's, when its contents were copied for both theJohn B. Stetson and theJeannette Thurber Connor coUections.John E. Worth, an anthropologist who came upon the Montiano packet in the Archivo General de Indias, has now translated these documents into EngUsh, with the support ofthe American Museum ofNatural History, and pubUshed them in this amply annotated, comprehensively indexed, and attractive pubUcation. Ranging in date from 1628 to 1739, die documents include representative examples of governmental and reUgious reports, both routine and extraordinary. The volume begins with a piece of soUd scholarship. Worth's "Overview: The Retreat of Guale and Mocama, 1655-1685," is a forty-six-page essay supported by numerous tables, a fine set of maps, and two appendices, one summarizing the locational data for fifteen Guale and Mocama mission sites in existence between 1655 and 1685 and the other compiling the eighteen known Guale and Mocama mission Usts produced between 1655 and 1701. A significant advance in the study of Southeastern Indians of the historic period, the essay includes a thesis about the Uttle-known Chichimecos and their connection to slaving and the firearms revolution. Unaccountably for an historical introduction to the struggle for the Georgia coast, the essay ends in 1685, nearly half a century before the British arrived to give the coast that name, although the period of its history so bUthely ignored is Uttle better known now than it was in 1925,when 134BOOK REVIEWS Herbert F. Bolton and Mary Ross pubUshed their introduction to Arredondo's Historical ProofofSpain's Title to Georgia, a secondary work written in 1742. Hard on the heels of his substantial Ph.D. dissertation on the Timucuan missions of Florida (1992), this volume on the Guale missions of Georgia estabUshes Worth as a scholar equaUy at home in anthropology, archaeology, and history. Most ethnohistorians and historical archaeologists working on the Spanish and Indian Southeast have to depend on die few historians in the field to find and interpret those Spanish documents which might be ofuse to them. Along with the translations pubUshed by the historianJohn H. Hann in Florida Archaeology, 2 (1986), and Missions to the Calusa (1991),Worth's translations open vistas to scholars untrained in early modern Spanish and palaeography; yet to those who have visited the riches beyond, they are not enough. A systematic document pubUcation program like Connor's long-abandoned Colonial Records ofSpanish Florida (1925, 1930), juxtaposing Spanish transcripts and EngUsh translations, would be truly invaluable. Amy Turner Bushnell College ofCharleston The Way of the Cross Leads Home. The Domestication ofAmerican Methodism . By A. Gregory Schneider. (Bloomington and IndianapoUs: Indiana University Press. 1993- Pp. xxx, 257. $2995.) Traditional histories of American Methodism abound. The movement began in eighteenth-century England with John Wesley. A handful of foUowers had moved to the colonies before the Revolution, and an...