"All of Us Will Have to Pay for These Activities": Colonial and Native Narratives of the 1704 Attack on Ayubale

Indians matter. Or to say it in a more historically precise way, the stories and struggles of Indian peoples were central to the development, creation, and growth of the colonial South. At first glance this statement does not seem particularly revelatory, because indigenous people have come to play a central role in the broader historiographies of colonial North America. The Haudenosaunee, for example, have rightfully become a cornerstone of understanding early French-English tensions in the Northeast. Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Pequots, and Mohegans are crucial to the making of New England. Further west, Elizabeth Fenn has reminded scholars that Mandans were "at the heart of the world."¹ Historiographies of the early historic period American South also have begun to pay more attention to Native peoples. Award-winning books and articles have discussed slavery, war, gender, and methodology through the experiences of Indian peoples.² But if the consensus is that Indians are part of the southern experience, they rarely are as fleshed-out as their European counterparts. This essay moves beyond merely reaffirming their centrality to show how and why Indians mattered. It focuses on a single event: the attack and destruction of the Apalachee mission town of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción de Ayubale. Ayubale was the first mission town targeted during the devastating slaving raids that began in 1704 and completely destroyed Apalachee.³ On January 24 of that year, Colonel James Moore, former governor of South Carolina, marched against Ayubale with a large group of Apalachicola, Creek, and Yama-see allies. In a matter of hours, the sizeable English-Indian force overwhelmed the poorly defended town and managed to capture and enslave several hundreds of people residing there and in its surroundings.⁴ The attack on Ayubale was only the beginning. Within a few months a prosperous and populous province of Spanish Florida had become a war zone, decimated and ravaged.

The attack on Ayubale was in many ways the continuation of a violent and bloody policy that encouraged Native allies of southern Carolina to enslave their neighbors and rivals, and then to trade these captives for guns and other European commodities.⁵ But it also signaled an important turning point in the story of Indian slavery in the colonial South. The scale and the brutality of slaving raids saw a drastic increase after Ayubale. As the violence spread, the alternatives afforded to Native peoples in Florida became increasingly limited and dire. By 1710 Apalachee was neither a missions center nor an asylum for refugee Indians fleeing enslavement. It was simply a graveyard.

This essay tells the story of Ayubale twice: once by focusing on European actions and desires, and the other by centering the voices and perspectives of Native peoples. Indians are present in both renditions—after all, this was an attack upon an Indian town by a primarily indigenous military force. The first version begins with English efforts to attack St. Augustine, the main Spanish hub in Florida, and ends with the abandonment of San Luís, the largest mission town in Apalachee. Though mostly situated in Indian country, this narrative privileges Spanish-English imperial rivalries over Native geopolitics. José Zúñiga y Cerda, governor of Florida, embodied this perspective. He was well aware that "Hostilities of the pagan Indians, led by the English have succeeded in depopulating the Province of Apalachee."⁶ He also knew that the attack targeted Native spaces and involved "hostilities of the pagan Indians." Even so, Zúñiga y Cerda could not conceptualize anything other than that Europeans "led" the charge and should frame the course of events. The second version works against Zúñiga y Cerda's narrative by making Indians the active subjects/agents of the actions. By centralizing Native peoples this retelling problematizes the chronology, geography, and actors prioritized by Spanish and English sources. In this version Ayubale is more than a colonial story taking place in Indian country. It is an Indian story that extensively shapes imperial interests in North America.

Many elements of the two narratives are...