Mythologies of the Guale Tribe

 

The Guale (pronounced “wally”) Indians of coastal Georgia were among the first indigenous peoples met by Europeans exploring north of Mexico. Beginning in the 1560s, the Guale were exposed to a long, intensive period of Spanish mission activity. Because the Spanish colonists were few in number, they employed the missions as an agency to occupy, hold, and settle the Georgian frontier. Mission Santa Catalina de Guale was established on St. Catherines Island off the Georgia coast sometime in the early 1590s. It was the northernmost base of the Spanish colony of La Florida. It survived until 1680, when Captain Francisco de Fuentes rallied his Spanish soldiers and Guale musketeers in a failed effort to protect the mission from attack by English raiders from Charleston, South Carolina. The fall and abandonment of Mission Santa Catalina signaled the waning of Spanish control in the American Southeast and set the stage for British domination of the American colonies. In 1680 Santa Catalina de Guale was a mission abandoned and, within a few decades, became a mission lost. For the next 300 years antiquarians, historians, and archaeologists speculated about the whereabouts of the mission. The combined French, English, and Spanish historical documentation available in the late 1970s supplied little more than general geographic clues. In 1977 the Edward John Noble Foundation, which owned St. Catherines Island, requested that the American Museum of Natural History attempt to find the site of Mission Santa Catalina. After a four-year program of field reconnaissance—combining randomized transect surveys with geophysical prospection—the archaeological team successfully located the long-lost Franciscan mission on St. Catherines Island in 1981.

The Guale lived between the Ogeechee and the Altamaha rivers on the coast of what is today Georgia. Most of the Guale were enslaved or wiped out by the English pirates who raided and destroyed the old Spanish Franciscan missions of Georgia. The surviving Guale moved south to St. Augustine and regrouped, building a new settlement named after their ancient lost high chieftain's ancestral village of Tolomato that the English had destroyed. When the English came to destroy St. Augustine, they burned the newer Tolomato to the ground, too. Consequently, some of the remaining Guale immigrated to Cuba and others moved west to what is today Mississippi. It was an ignominious end to these ancient people who had lived in this land for centuries, but while they were among the first to be driven out, they would not be the last. The policy of the Spanish was not to drive native people off their land, but to organize and draw them into the Church through a series of missions. The Guale invited the missionaries into their lands, and accepted baptism as so many ancient European tribes had in ages past. But their story was not unlike other stories.

Guale Tribe. Meaning unknown, though it resembles Muskogee wahali, “the south,” but it was originally applied to St. Catherines Island, or possibly to a chief living there. The last settlement of the Ayllon colony in 1526 was on or near the Guale country, as the name Gualdape suggests. When the French Huguenot colony was at Port Royal, South Carolina, in 1562, they heard of a chief called Ouadé and visited him several times for provisions. After the Spaniards had driven the French from Florida, they continued north to Guale and the Cusabo territory to expel several Frenchmen who had taken refuge there. In 1569 missionary work was undertaken by the Jesuits simultaneously among the Cusabo and Guale Indians and one of the missionaries, Domingo Augustin, wrote a grammar of the Guale language. But the spiritual labors of the missionaries proved unavailing, and they soon abandoned the country. In 1573 missionary work was resumed by the Franciscans and was increasingly successful when in 1597 there was a general insurrection in which all of the missionaries but one were killed. The governor of Florida shortly afterward burned very many of the Guale towns with their granaries, thereby reducing most of the Indians to submission, and by 1601 the rebellion was over. Missionary work was resumed soon afterward and continued uninterruptedly, in spite of sporadic insurrections in 1608 and 1645 and attacks of northern Indians in 1661, 1680, and even earlier. However, as a result of these attacks those of the Guale Indians who did not escape inland moved, or were moved, in 1686, to the islands of San Pedro, Santa Maria, and San Juan north of St. Augustine. Later another island called Santa Cruz was substituted for San Pedro. The Quaker, Dickenson, who was shipwrecked on the east coast of Florida in 1699, visited these missions on his way north. At the time of the removal some Guale Indians appear to have gone to South Carolina, and in 1702 a general insurrection of the remainder took place, and they joined their kinsmen on the outskirts of that colony under the leader-ship of the Yamasee. A few may have remained in Florida. In any event, all except those who had fled to the Creeks were united after the outbreak of the Yamasee in 1715 and continued to live in the neighborhood of St. Augustine until their virtual extinction. In 1726 there were two missions near St. Augustine occupied by Indians of the “Iguaja nation,” i. e., Guale, but that is the last we hear of them under any name but that of the Yamasee.

French explorers under Jean Ribault contacted the Guale whom they called the Oade after their chief, during their voyage to the Atlantic coast of North America in 1562. The Guale maintained good relations with the ephemeral French settlement known as Charlesfort on Parris Island in what is now South Carolina. When the Spanish later established themselves in St. Augustine in Spanish Florida, they also contacted the Guale, and soon tried to bring them into their mission system. The Guale territory became one of the four primary mission provinces of Spanish Florida; the Timcua, Mocama, and Apalachee Provinces, also named after the resident tribes of the territories, were the others. The boundaries of the Spanish Guale Province corresponded to the people's territory along the Atlantic coast and Sea Islands, north of the Altamaha River and south of the Savannah River. It included Sapelo, St. Catherine’s, Ossabaw, Wassaw, and Tybee islands, among others. By the mid-17th century, the Spanish had established six Catholic missions in Guale territory. Their largest settlements were probably on St. Catherine's Island. Guale was the least stable of the four major mission provinces. The Guale rebelled in 1597 and 1645, nearly shaking off the missions. They kept up a clandestine trade with French privateers, which provided them with alternate sources of goods.

Guale, Spanish province in the state of Georgia. The Guales were a semiagricultural Muskogean people, organized politically into paired chiefdoms, who lived in southeastern North America. At the time of their first contact with Europeans, their territory stretched from Saint Andrews Sound to Edisto Island on the coast, and their language was understood for 200 leagues inland. Sapelo Sound, which may hold the site of Lucas Vásquez De Ayllón's 1526 settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape, was an area of dense Guale population. Pedro Menéndez De Avilés visited the "Island of Guale" (Saint Catherines Island) in 1566 and was received as a rainmaker, but early Jesuit and Franciscan efforts at conversion were hindered by the demands of the Spanish garrison at Santa Elena on Parris Island and competition from French corsair traders. The Guale Rebellion of 1597, with its five Franciscan martyrs, was a civil war between Spanish and French factions that ended in the conquest by Spain of coastal Guale and its rebirth as a mission province. In the seventeenth century the Christian towns of Guale served the presidio of Saint Augustine as buffer zone, breadbasket, and labor enclave. The extent of population loss in the province due to disease and fugitivism was concealed by an influx of Yamasees, whom the Guales sent to do their labor service. In the 1680s the trade rivalry of Charleston and assaults by pirates and by Indians with English firearms caused the province to shrink: the northern border retreated from Saint Catherines Island to Sapelo, then to Amelia. After Amelia Island was overrun by the forces of Colonel James Moore of Carolina in 1702, the last of the Guales fled to the presidio. Their few descendants were evacuated to Cuba in 1763, under the terms that ended the Seven Years' War.

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