The Ais lived along coastal Florida, approximately what is now Cape Canaveral to St. Lucie Inlet, in the modern-day Brevard and St. Lucie County. They were first encountered in 1566 by Pedro Mendez de Aviles, the found of St. Augustine. He named the tribe Ais or Ays after a Cacique or chieftain of the name. The Spanish built a town called St. Lucia near an Ais village, but were forced by repeated attacks to give it up and head back to St. Augustine. After this rocky start, the Ais became allies of the Spaniards and learned to view other Europeans with hostility, perhaps because the Spanish did. In 1696, an English merchant and sea captain named Jonathan Dickinson set sail from Port Royal, Jamaica and became shipwrecked on the Florida coast, living several weeks with the Ais before being rescued. Much of modern-day knowledge about this people comes from his journal.
According to Dickinson, the Ais were a hunting and gathering people with a primary diet of fish, which they speared themselves from the various lakes and inlets in their territory. They had developed a thriving trading economy with the Spanish at St. Augustine, spoke Spanish and relied on trade goods such as mirrors, axes and knives. They dwelled in towns in which were large cabins made primarily of palmetto wood and thatched with leaves. The towns were headed by a Cacique or chief, and there were alliances between the various towns and other tribes in the area. Unfortunately, Dickinson recorded little of the Ais people's language and customs. Sources differ on whether they were related to the Muskogean tribes or Arawakan tribes such as the Caribe. As we've seen in other posts, English raids from what was then the Colony of Carolina decimated the Native population of Florida in the early 18th century. Sources also differ on whether Ais survivors may have joined with later migrants such as the Seminole.
No comments:
Post a Comment