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00:44As English ships bore down on St. Augustine, the people of the town grabbed their valuables
00:50and fled.
00:51They realized that they could not hold him off.
00:54They didn't have the weaponry, they didn't have the personnel to hold him off.
00:58And so the best thing you can do is try to save yourself, that's why most of the townspeople
01:02run.
01:03We had 23 heavy ships, 19 auxiliary ships, 2,000 iron men.
01:09What did St. Augustine have?
01:11A couple of sloops and rowboats and a handful of soldiers in the fort.
01:19They were no match for Sir Francis Drake, the man known as the Dragon.
01:25They called him El Draco, the Dragon.
01:27It's a play on his name.
01:29And they feared him.
01:31They thought he was in league with the devil.
01:33Because he was this rampaging, fire-breathing, appalling monster of a man that they feared.
01:44Only about 80 soldiers stayed at the fort to prepare for the onslaught.
01:49The governor summons the three other royal officers in St. Augustine to his residence.
01:56And one of his real worries, one of his concerns was, what are we going to do with the treasury
02:00box?
02:02The treasury box contained the yearly allocation from the King of Spain.
02:06Any gold and silver would undoubtedly be the pirates' main target.
02:12Privateering is state-licensed piracy.
02:15The privateer has a piece of paper which says I am commissioned by the government of this
02:20country to do this against the ships and property of this country.
02:26The treasury box was moved to the fort.
02:37St. Augustine wasn't even in Drake's plans when he first sighted the fort.
02:42The town was hardly worth looting.
02:45But it did have strategic value, now that the English were trying to establish a colony
02:50in Roanoke.
02:51As soon as Drake saw that watchtower, realized St. Augustine was behind it, and realized that
02:58it was a threat to Roanoke, the writing was on the wall for it.
03:03Nobody was going to threaten Roanoke.
03:06Drake had been harboring a personal vendetta against Spain ever since he was a young man.
03:12It happened in 1568.
03:15His fleet had just seized a Spanish island when a storm forced them to seek refuge in
03:20its port.
03:23They negotiated a ceasefire, but the Spaniards went back on their word and attacked.
03:33Drake's ship escaped, but the others did not.
03:37That burned in the heart of Sir Francis Drake his entire life, that he was betrayed by the
03:43Spanish, and that he saw all of his friends die.
03:47He hated the Spanish with a passion from then on.
03:49It was personal.
03:50Drake's fury with anyone who crossed him was legendary.
03:55It's said he even once ordered the beheading of his own friend.
04:01Certainly there are examples of a fierce temper, particularly during his circumnavigation where
04:06he insisted on the execution of a mutineer, or a supposed mutineer.
04:11Queen Elizabeth capitalized on that anger, turning Drake into her personal weapon against Spain.
04:18Queen Elizabeth allowed him to do what he did best, which was plunder her enemies.
04:23This is politics.
04:25King Philip of Spain controlled most of the world.
04:28England saw great advantage in attacking the Spanish Empire, which was incredibly wealthy,
04:33but also incredibly vulnerable.
04:36When the Anglo-Spanish War broke out in 1585, this is exactly what Elizabeth first set about
04:42doing, ordering Drake to set off on a pillaging mission across the Atlantic.
04:47Which is how St. Augustine inadvertently became a pawn in that undeclared war between England
04:53and Spain.
04:55Drake and his men had been on their way home after looting several Spanish towns in the
05:00Caribbean when they spotted the fort.
05:04Drake knew that attacking Spain's first settlement in La Florida would deliver a crushing blow to
05:10King Philip and his legacy.
05:14Drake sent his men to scout the fort, but they didn't anticipate what was waiting for them.
05:27They killed some of his soldiers when they came on land on that island.
05:32A map published three years later depicts Drake's version of what happened.
05:37It was drawn by an Italian cartographer, Baptista Boasio, who accompanied Drake on the voyage.
05:43It's the first map of any city in the U.S.
05:47In the very back in the cornfield, there's a little murder taking place.
05:52And you have to look carefully.
05:54It's building the cornfield, and here's a man down on the ground with his hands like this.
05:59And there's another man with his sword raised.
06:01And it's the killing of a captain, Anthony Powell, who was Drake's kinsman as well as his best captain.
06:11Drake didn't really lose an assistant.
06:16He more lost a personal friend.
06:19He would be avenged.
06:21One of the accounts holds that that is what precipitated Drake's rage.
06:39Drake then landed and despoiled a city of anything of value.
06:48After two days, St. Augustine's garrison had completely run out of ammunition.
06:58A Spanish officer later described the attack in a letter to the king.
07:03He said, we fought valiantly under odds that almost had never been seen, and then they were forced to flee.
07:11And he said, we had to flee with such speed that we didn't even have time to carry the treasury
07:16box.
07:17And the next morning, Drake's forces took over the garrison.
07:35Drake and his men burned the entire town and the wooden fort.
07:41Everything went up in flames.
07:45Imagine what it was like for the community and the soldiers and the governor to behold what they saw when
07:53they emerged from the woods.
07:55It was a site of smoking ruin.
08:02I think we found the archaeological evidence for Drake's raid.
08:06St. Augustine archaeologist Carl Halbert believes the city imploded, collapsing into a thick layer of ash.
08:15We found a burned deposit that dates to the 16th century.
08:20And we're not talking just a little lens.
08:23We're talking about a lens about two inches thick of carbonaceous material.
08:28Within that carbonaceous material were just lots of broken pottery.
08:38But the reason why Drake burned St. Augustine is still a matter of debate.
08:43According to the governor's official account, Drake made off with the entire hoard of silver and gold from the treasury
08:50box.
08:53Or so the governor claimed.
08:55This was his story.
08:57And that was Drake's story as well.
08:59Two years after the Drake attack, a fascinating character, a guy by the name of Pablo Swan, who was a
09:05soldier in St. Augustine,
09:06he arrived in Seville and immediately sought an audience with the King of Spain, Philip II.
09:12And he said that the four royal officials took their keys and opened the box,
09:17took all of the money, the gold and silver, out of it and filled it with lead.
09:23He claims that the governor distributed the money amongst his cronies and their allies and bought off some of the
09:31other Spaniards who knew the story.
09:34Some believe that this was the real reason Drake burned down the town,
09:38that he became enraged when he found the treasury box empty.
09:47But we may never know because historians believe Drake would have never admitted he'd been tricked.
09:55The Boasio map, which Drake commissioned, greatly exaggerated his victory.
10:01Drake wanted to brag, you know, here's what I did.
10:04And so if you look at the town that's portrayed there, the buildings that are shown there are things that
10:10probably would never existed in St. Augustine.
10:13But of course, the grander the town that you raid, the grander and greater your accomplishments.
10:21In the meantime, Sir Francis Drake returned to England to his opulent estate,
10:26a former monastery known as Buckland Abbey, not far from the port of Plymouth from which he sailed.
10:33It was here he fashioned himself a legend, entertaining the elite in a mansion furnished by his ill-gotten gains.
10:42Drake sets himself up as a gentleman, which he hasn't been before,
10:47and makes himself into the iconic English hero of the 16th century.
10:52Yes, the pin-up boy, so to speak.
10:55He was the man you wanted to have to dinner.
10:58You know, he was the man that if he came through your village, you took the kids out to see.
11:04And certainly he was according almost godlike status down in Plymouth.
11:11His was the classic rags-to-riches story.
11:14A commoner who had earned the respect and favor of the queen.
11:19Try to picture a ruthless entrepreneur, a television personality, a gang boss,
11:28and sprinkle into that an occasional touch of revivalist preacher,
11:32and I think you can probably picture Francis Drake.
11:35The collateral damage left in his wake was overlooked back home,
11:41largely because these acts of piracy had not only been sanctioned by the queen,
11:46they had been funded by her as well.
11:50Documents in the National Archives at Kew, England,
11:53confirmed the extent to which Queen Elizabeth backed Drake's raids.
11:59Right, here's the name, Francis Drake, and the Elizabeth Bonaventure,
12:05and the aide, and the sum, £20,000.
12:09So the queen was a stakeholder in this adventure.
12:14She made a lot of money out of this.
12:17Just to give one example, during Drake's circumnavigation of the world,
12:20her share of the profits was £300,000.
12:23That was a huge amount of money.
12:25So he was a hot property.
12:28You don't throw away men like that, do you?
12:31The queen not only didn't punish Drake for his misdeeds,
12:35she had him knighted.
12:37It was unheard of to knight a commoner like Drake.
12:40She makes him kneel, and she gets the sword out,
12:43and then she hands it to the French ambassador.
12:45And it's classic Elizabeth.
12:47She wants to do something grand,
12:48but she knows the King of Spain would then say,
12:50well, of course, he's your pirate.
12:53So she gets the French ambassador to do it.
12:55So what she's saying to Spain is,
12:57look, I've got friends.
12:59If you don't like what I'm doing with Drake,
13:01well, let's go to war and see what happens.
13:09The sacking of St. Augustine was barely a notch in Drake's belt,
13:12in terms of monetary gain, but it was a huge strategic victory.
13:18Drake's attack caused the residents of another Spanish settlement,
13:22about 220 miles to the north, to fear that they would be next.
13:26The people in Santa Elena were so afraid afterwards
13:30that what happened to St. Augustine could happen to them,
13:33that they wanted out of there.
13:35They were exposed.
13:36And so the decision was to consolidate in St. Augustine.
13:40Some British historians say this was a pivotal moment
13:44when Spain began to lose its hold on La Florida.
13:48Spain was forced to withdraw from all its more northerly settlements,
13:55on the coast of Carolina.
13:56So Spain was never then a rival in what is now North America.
14:05The refugees from Santa Elena were pouring into St. Augustine.
14:10It nearly crippled the town, which was already struggling to survive.
14:22A stunning new archaeological discovery buried under the streets of modern-day St. Augustine,
14:28was recently unearthed when the city needed to lay underground utility lines on Charlotte Street.
14:34City archaeologist Carl Halbert and his team were called in to dig test holes before construction began.
14:42And what they found turned out to be one of the most significant discoveries made here in decades.
14:48There's the arm bones, the bones themselves, and there's the pelvis right there.
14:56And there's the vertebra, the lumbar vertebra right there.
15:01According to historical maps, these bones were buried inside the first parish church in America,
15:07known as Nuestra Señora de los Remedios.
15:11The church had been rebuilt after Drake burned everything to the ground.
15:18But the many natural disasters that followed took its toll on the population.
15:26The feet would be pointing toward the altar, and the head would be pointing toward the doorway.
15:32And then, at resurrection, the body would rise up and face the altar.
15:39Hey, what's this?
15:41Archaeologists have identified other burials farther away from the waterfront,
15:44but this one is believed to have been the floor of the church,
15:48where some of the oldest bones would have been buried.
15:52It's just right, you think that could be the floor?
15:56It's tabby.
15:57It's tabby.
15:57Yep.
15:59I mean, it's right on top of the bone.
16:03Los Remedios served as the parish church from 1572 to 1702.
16:10I've been here in St. Augustine for 25 years.
16:13You know, during that 25 years, we've literally uncovered hundreds of thousands of pieces of
16:18trash, pottery, broken glass, nails, hundreds of thousands if not millions of pieces of animal bone.
16:24You know, these are the items that people used every day.
16:27What we have now are the actual people who use those items.
16:32These are the people who enabled the city to survive.
16:35Yeah, so this is it.
16:37Now, I guess the question is, what should we do?
16:39You know, I mean, we could remove them, but they're in such bad condition,
16:42we'd end up destroying them.
16:46Ultimately, the decision was made to keep the bones buried and not disturb the final resting
16:52place of these early settlers.
16:56I'm excited.
16:57I'm, you know, it's, I don't think I'll ever have this experience again.
17:01If I was to rank this on a scale of one to ten, this would be a ten.
17:06Some of the bones buried on Charlotte Street could well date back to this period following Drake's raid.
17:15With his people barely able to survive, the governor of St. Augustine turned to a Timucuan tribe just outside of
17:23town for help.
17:24They were led by a chieftainess named Doña Maria, who was also a Catholic.
17:31Among the Timucua people, there were many women chiefs.
17:36And some scholars think that the number of women chiefs may have become greater once Catholicism was introduced,
17:47because apparently, among the Timucua at least, the women were the most receptive to conversion.
17:56So this is her signature.
17:59Doña Maria, chief of Nombre de Dios.
18:02She says, I might not look Christian, but I've been Christian ever since I was a little girl.
18:07Doña Maria was a member of the Timucuan noble class, whose mother had been converted by missionaries.
18:14Doña Maria provided enough corn to save the town from starvation.
18:20And she received all kinds of honors and privileges from the Spanish crown.
18:25She was an ally. She was a loyal ally.
18:29Back in Spain, King Philip was anxious to finally put an end to the English curse.
18:37Hold up in his bedroom above the altar at El Escorial, he hatched a plan to conquer England.
18:46Philip still held fast to his vision of bringing about the second coming of Christ.
18:51And Protestant England was standing in its way.
18:57In 1588, just two years after Drake's raid on St. Augustine,
19:03Philip sent his armada to claim England and return it to the Catholic Church.
19:10But the invincible armada was defeated.
19:13And one of the key leaders of the battle against Spain was none other than the Queen's pirate, Francis Drake.
19:23This gave rise to a myth of English sea power.
19:27This idea that England was wedded to the sea in a way that no other nation in the world was.
19:32Without Drake and the other Elizabethan seamen, England would have become a Spanish possession.
19:39The world would have been very different, America's world and England's world.
19:47But in 1595, Drake finally met defeat.
19:51And it was largely due to a Spanish admiral named Gonzalo Mendez de Cancio,
19:58who would soon become a key figure in the future of St. Augustine.
20:07He's my 12th grandfather on my father's side.
20:11Javier Cancio Don Lebum Balvé is a direct descendant of the Admiral.
20:19He had a brilliant military career, almost novel-esque.
20:22We know he crossed the Atlantic more than ten times and shipwrecked twice.
20:27And he fought the French and English pirates.
20:30In a trans-clash on the high seas, Cancio and his men captured a ship,
20:35which turned out to contain Drake's handwritten orders for an attack on Puerto Rico.
20:42This is a list of instructions captured on Francis Drake's ship, the original from 1595.
20:51The Spanish used the information to plan their defense.
20:55Cancio headed up the Spanish artillery.
20:59He fired the shot that killed the legendary John Hawkins on November 22nd, 1595.
21:06The man who Javier claims his ancestor killed was an infamous outlaw.
21:11He was also Drake's cousin and close comrade.
21:14Several hundred of Drake's men were also killed in the Battle of San Juan,
21:19and the cabin of Drake's flagship was hit by a cannonball.
21:24Drake survived, and his remaining fleet retreated off the coast of Panama.
21:30There, after two unsuccessful attempts to attack that territory, Drake fell ill to the fever.
21:37He died of dysentery and was buried at sea.
21:45This heroic deed was very popular in Spain,
21:48and even the great poet Lopa de Vega composed the poem based on this event.
21:55Gonzalo Mendez de Cancio was now Spain's iconic hero.
21:59He had defeated his country's arch enemy.
22:02The dragon was slain.
22:06Cancio was appointed governor of St. Augustine.
22:11But when Governor Cancio arrived in St. Augustine, he reported that the city was on the verge of ruin.
22:17Five Spanish shipwrecks had recently occurred off the coast in short order,
22:22and St. Augustine had absorbed the survivors.
22:25It really was probably like a refugee camp.
22:29About 500 people in St. Augustine are castaways.
22:32And, of course, with that many more mouths in town, there's a famine.
22:39Famine in a land that had always been barren and unproductive.
22:45One of the Jesuits in 1570, he said, basically, the East Coast is one long sandpile,
22:51the most miserable land ever discovered by man.
22:53St. Augustine couldn't grow enough food for itself.
22:56So they were always trying to tap the Indians for surplus.
23:01Cancio knew their only salvation was to form an alliance with the Indians.
23:05But that would not be easy.
23:12As far back as the late 1400s, slave traders from Spain, Portugal, and England
23:18had been capturing Indians in Mexico and the Caribbean and selling them,
23:23causing a deep mistrust of Europeans.
23:27Imagine what it must have been like for a native to see this huge example of European technology.
23:35This ship with its huge black hole, with its spread canvas,
23:41with various designs, possibly crosses on it and so forth.
23:47White bearded men.
23:49That might have been enough to scare anybody.
23:52It would be like an alien spaceship coming down in your backyard.
23:58So naturally, they fought it off in these places.
24:01They knew from being safe hearing people, trading with others,
24:05and these strange men with beards and who were always armed,
24:11that they did not come in peace.
24:13They came to enslave.
24:14They came to rob.
24:15Our people know these people as kidnappers, enslavers,
24:19you know, people who created great hardship for our people
24:23and changed our world as we know it.
24:26When we talk about the word civilized, I can't help but smile
24:29because in many ways indigenous people were far more civilized
24:33than the conquerors that forced their way into their lives.
24:41The brutality of the Spanish Inquisition only served to fuel natives' fears
24:46of Europeans even more.
24:49The Inquisition was a ferocious reign of terror
24:52in which thousands of non-Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Protestants
24:57were barbarically tortured and burned alive for their religious beliefs.
25:01Out of this period came the black legend,
25:05the belief that all Spaniards were ruthless murderers.
25:14Anfield Odenerviath came into Florida, marched north as far as Tallahassee,
25:19and there he made the mistake of seizing the food stores
25:23at the Apalachee encampment,
25:26and those natives gave him a 24-hour reign of arrows
25:31that made it impossible for him and his men to survive,
25:34and they had to go down to the coast, build rafts, and escape.
25:38So I think it's unfair to describe the natives as hostile.
25:42They were simply protecting their territory against foreign invaders,
25:45and that's clearly what the Europeans were.
25:50And while the explorers saw natives as savage,
25:53the Spanish seemed equally barbaric to the Indians.
25:57On these expeditions, when they're hungry, they eat shoes,
26:00and they eat horses, and they eat saddles.
26:06I mean, and they eat each other.
26:09And then you have Hernando de Soto, who was a moral monster
26:14in the way in which he treated Aboriginal peoples,
26:18and he maimed and killed his way north through Florida,
26:22cutting off Indians' ears and noses and sending them back,
26:26saying, this will happen to everybody unless you give me and my men safe passage.
26:31What was left behind?
26:34Collapsed native societies,
26:36all along this range of nine American states as we know them today.
26:414,000 miles of travel.
26:44And for what?
26:50But in 1542, King Carlos V issued new laws,
26:54ordering that native people who lived in the Americas
26:57were to be treated humanely.
26:59So by the time St. Augustine was founded,
27:02enslaving natives was prohibited.
27:03King Carlos V issued what were called the new laws,
27:09specifying that the native peoples possessed souls deserving of respect,
27:16just as white Spaniards did,
27:19saying that any abuse of the Indians would be punished by the king and his officers,
27:26and just laying it down that all natives had souls that were the equal of the souls of white persons.
27:35There's a period right about now when there's a shift from conquest by the sword to conquest by the gospel,
27:43and the king now wants pacification.
27:52If these people could show themselves that they were human and they would be respectful of their word,
27:57then that would determine if we went to war with them or if we considered them an ally.
28:06By the late 1500s, nearly two centuries before their famous missions in California,
28:11the Spanish had already built a system of missions throughout La Florida.
28:17The friars often lived in isolation in remote areas,
28:22several days or weeks from St. Augustine.
28:27Of course they're preaching, but they're also helping with any number of other things that they could offer,
28:33perhaps how to raise certain crops, how to domesticate some animals, things of that nature.
28:38The Franciscan friars embraced them as brothers and sisters.
28:43The problem is that nobody told the Indians, and they're not always ready for a conquest of any kind.
28:50If you're seeking people to convert them, there's still that superiority that my ways are better than your ways.
28:58Instead of engaging in the types of spiritual diplomacy that native people are used to,
29:03they're trying to sort of push them towards complete conversion.
29:06So that's where the gifts come in.
29:08The gifts were really important symbols of spiritual and political connections,
29:12to have networks, to have information, to have goods.
29:15These were things that helped leaders of native communities become more powerful themselves.
29:21You make alliances with Indians by doing what they do with each other, which is exchange gifts.
29:28So by 1597, when newly appointed Gonzalo Mendez de Cancio saw that St. Augustine was struggling,
29:36he immediately began brokering native alliances with gifts.
29:41You're going to say, yes, yes, we'll accept your king.
29:44But that's because the Spanish are accepting your chiefs.
29:49And so those chiefs are having their power strengthened.
29:54But not all tribal leaders were willing to accept the Spanish.
29:59In Wale territory, in modern-day Georgia, resistance to these Christian missionaries had grown.
30:07After a generation of people had been subjected to proselytization and conversion,
30:14some of the groups really became very hostile, particularly the Wale people.
30:22The Wale uprising happened just four months after Governor Cancio arrived.
30:27It was allegedly started by the heir apparent to the paramount chief of Tolomato.
30:33He was known as Don Juanillo, or Little John.
30:38Don Juanillo wanted to take a second wife.
30:41And the resident Franciscan friar at Tolomato said, I don't think so.
30:48You've been baptized, you're going to behave as a good Christian,
30:52and you'll be quite content with the one wife that you have.
30:56The friar threatened him with preventing his rise to chief of the tribe when his father died.
31:03And that angered the young man just as much as being told he could only have one wife.
31:09Don Juanillo did not appreciate this interference in his private affairs.
31:14So he ventured into the interior, gathered a force of infidels, the Spanish sources tell us.
31:22And he returned.
31:24And he ordered the friar decapitated.
31:29And then he put the severed head, he put the head on a pike,
31:33and placed that at Tolomato's boat launch as a warning.
31:38Don't interfere in local affairs in Tolomato.
31:43The war party then moved on to other Wale communities.
31:47And five more friars were attacked.
31:52Two of the friars to be executed asked to celebrate mass first.
31:58And the executioners sat around on the floor while he celebrated mass.
32:05And then when he finished, they killed him.
32:11Governor Cancio was concerned that the unrest could spread.
32:15Although he lacked any hard evidence about who led the massacre,
32:18he blamed the incident on Juanillo's decision to take a second wife.
32:23He also blamed the friars who were killed.
32:27It's a convenient story for him.
32:29So as he writes the letter, he concludes by saying the friars deserved it.
32:34They were interfering in political matters, in matters over which they had no jurisdiction.
32:40In fact, a new theory actually points to a different perpetrator.
32:46Witnesses claimed it wasn't Juanillo who led the war party.
32:50It was another Wale chief named Don Domingo, who then convinced the governor that Juanillo was to blame.
32:59Cancio asked him to bring Juanillo into face trial.
33:02But instead, Don Domingo served up his own brand of justice.
33:15When the battle ends, there on the ground deceased were Don Juanillo, the paramount chief Don Francisco,
33:24and every single male member of the ruling family of Tolomato, gone.
33:30Tolomato was wiped off the map.
33:35The death of the chief and all his heirs left Don Domingo the new successor.
33:42Some historians now believe that the uprising was nothing more than a takeover,
33:47and that little John was framed.
33:50That essentially the friars, when the hostilities began, kind of got in the way.
33:55But several still believe the friars were killed for standing by their beliefs.
34:01And the Vatican is now considering sainthood for the five martyrs of Georgia.
34:06These were apparently men of great Christian courage, and peacefully went about the celebration of the highest form of religious
34:16worship they knew, the mass,
34:18and then submitted themselves to the sword.
34:21And they were ready to give up their lives, if necessary, and did so without fighting back.
34:30Whatever the reason, there were no further challenges to the work of the missionaries, and peace was restored.
34:39The atmosphere in the coastal islands was Pacific.
34:44People went back to their ordinary tasks in life, the friars and the Indians together.
34:53And health was restored to the mission activity in the islands, and may even have profited.
35:04And new missionaries arrived, continuing to spread the gospel unharmed.
35:11One of the most famous of the Franciscan friars in the 16th and early 17th century was Francisco Pareja.
35:21He learned their language, eventually he wrote a grammar of the language, a dictionary of the language,
35:29and wrote out the prayers of the Catholic Church so that a typical Timucuan could read it.
35:37This is how the opening sentences of the Lord's Prayer sounded in Timucuan.
36:01It has a kind of musical charm to it, but this was the Timucuan language in sound,
36:08but written out in Spanish consonants and vowels.
36:11The Indians are using books, they're learning how to read and write,
36:16and this is a time when some children in great European cities don't even have books.
36:24A recent study of Timucuan manuscripts have led to the realization
36:28that not only did these natives read Spanish, but they also wrote in their native tongue.
36:33We have about a thousand pages of Timucua.
36:37Timucua is the first indigenous written grammatical language in the United States.
36:45Flagler College Distinguished Professor of Religion Dr. Timothy Johnson has been working with other scholars
36:51to compare the Spanish and Timucua versions of 17th century religious writings.
36:56And interestingly enough, sometimes the translations don't always match up.
37:01There's one story of a shepherdess where it's set in the mountains and reference to mountains is eliminated.
37:08Why? Because there's no mountains. People can't relate.
37:12They rewrite the story in such a way, like any great storyteller, right?
37:16Like any great preacher or teacher redoes the story so it resonates with the audience.
37:22Another example is from the Confessionario, a document written by Father Pareja to help friars decide whether someone had sinned
37:31in the eyes of the church.
37:33There is a whole series of what are called superstitions in the Confessionario.
37:39And the priest is supposed to ask the Timucua, are you doing this? Are you doing that?
37:43One, for example, says you take the antlers of the deer and praying believe that you will then be able
37:50to catch another deer as part of this devil's ceremony.
37:55So that's the Spanish, but the Timucua leaves out every reference to the devil.
38:01So when the Timucua person puts it into Timucua, he or she drops the whole demon part of the text.
38:11We understood the Creator the same way everyone understands the Creator, the breath giver.
38:17The conflict came amongst a lot of tribes when friars would try to define what the devil was.
38:26You might have ideas of gods who are evil, gods who are good, but to wrap it all up into
38:34one and say that anything that has to do with spirits that are malevolent is the devil is a big,
38:42big jump.
38:42This disagreeable spirit that has been identified as the devil could be that same spirit that have came into our
38:49village and protected us from a bear.
38:51You know, these are what they call good medicine.
38:55It's believed these Timucuan books were written in the late 1500s.
39:00They were published in the early 1600s.
39:04So we're talking about a level of literacy that simply up to this point in time has not really been
39:12recognized.
39:13Literacy among many of the indigenous peoples.
39:17But while culture and education flourished at the missions in the outlying countryside,
39:23the town of St. Augustine was still struggling to survive.
39:26It seemed every time the town managed to rebuild, it fell to the mercy of another disaster.
39:36In early 1599, another fire ravaged the town, destroying 14 houses and the Franciscan friary.
39:46And then just a few months later, a devastating hurricane struck.
39:55Basically, the water came up, passed right over the city.
39:58It was enough to inundate the whole city.
40:01They reported that the water was face high in the streets.
40:05One more raid, one more epidemic, one more hurricane, where it looked like the very survivability of St. Augustine was
40:16at stake.
40:18Governor Mendez de Cancio realized that the settlers would always be vulnerable as long as they had to rely on
40:25others for food.
40:28He brought in new groups of Timuquin and Wale Indians from the north and used them to cultivate the savannahs
40:35and make them arable.
40:40It was swampland, a mosquito-infested area that couldn't grow much of anything.
40:46According to documents in the archives of the Indies, corn production increased more than three times what it had been
40:52in the entire decade before he arrived.
40:57This is one of two wooden chests that survived the trip across the ocean with Governor Cancio when he sailed
41:04back to Spain, carrying maize seed from St. Augustine.
41:08Don Javier says it was Cancio who introduced corn to the northern part of Spain.
41:14The corn from St. Augustine would become the first export from what later would become the United States.
41:22One year before Jamestown was founded, the settlement of St. Augustine had already made a major contribution to Spain's economy.
41:34In the nearly half century that this colony had been in existence, it had finally become a viable city with
41:42many of the amenities of life back in Europe.
41:45It had established the first parish school and the first indigent hospital in what is now America.
41:55But by the early 1600s, Spain began to wonder if St. Augustine was worth keeping.
42:03The history of St. Augustine almost came to an end.
42:08King Philip II had died and his son had taken over.
42:15The Spanish empire radically changed from Philip II to Philip III, who wasn't a powerful king and didn't rule the
42:23empire in the personal way Philip II did.
42:26Philip III handed the empire over to the bureaucrats, who questioned the convenience of keeping garrisons like in St. Augustine.
42:37King Philip III and the missionaries of St. Augustine.
42:38Governor Mendez de Cancio and the missionaries pleaded that they had come too far to leave everything behind.
42:45The king deliberated for more than a year and finally agreed to keep St. Augustine as a Spanish colony.
42:52But by then it was 1608, a whole year after the English had brazenly staked a claim in Spanish territory
43:01at Jamestown.
43:03By the time it came into being, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal.
43:10The king's unwillingness to stop English encroachment would turn out to be a grave error.
43:17Unlike his father, who had routed out the French when they had violated Spanish sovereignty here 40 years earlier,
43:24Philip III decided not to challenge the establishment of Jamestown.
43:32It was a decision that would ultimately affect the battle for Spain's supremacy in America.
43:39King Philip III issued an edict that there was no more going up and down the coastline putting out fires.
43:47Concentrate on building up your own cities and defenses.
43:51And really, there never was any need to worry about Jamestown.
43:54It never had a military force.
43:57It was never a threat to Spanish Florida.
44:01The Jamestown colony may not have posed much of a threat by itself, but England did.
44:08Shortly after Jamestown, other settlements began.
44:12Spain could not put out all of those fires.
44:17For the next 50 years, Spain turned its energies largely to Latin America and the western part of what's now
44:24the United States.
44:26That allowed England to gain a foothold in the U.S. from Massachusetts to the Carolinas.
44:36By the mid-1600s, the vulnerability of the only Spanish settlement left on the East Coast was about to become
44:43tragically apparent.
44:47It was May 29th, 1668.
44:51A French physician named Pierre Piquet, who had recently been forced to leave St. Augustine in shame, was on a
44:59ship headed to Havana.
45:01He was about to get his revenge.
45:04And he and the governor have become very acrimonious towards each other.
45:11St. Augustine was now under the leadership of Governor Francisco de la Guerra y de la Vega, a reputed ladies'
45:18man.
45:19The governor apparently has a number of women that he is spending time with inappropriately, according to the records.
45:27Some of the governor's paramours had also shared confidences with Piquet.
45:34Piquet ends up insulting the governor.
45:37And the governor publicly insults him, slaps him, which of course in the 1660s was a terrible breach of honour.
45:46And actually orders him to leave the town.
45:51But before Piquet's ship reached Havana, it was captured at sea by a pirate ship led by the English sympathizer
45:58Robert Turles.
45:59Now he is a nasty pirate. He'd probably shoot his own people.
46:04Searles and his men boarded the ship and took his passengers captive.
46:10Piquet realized he had valuable information that could not only spare his life, but could also serve to retaliate against
46:17the governor.
46:18He asked for an audience with Searles.
46:20He told the pirates that a large quantity of silver bars had recently been recovered from the wreck of a
46:26treasure ship off the coast,
46:28and it was being held for safekeeping in St. Augustine.
46:33And he's feeling vengeful. And so he gives Searles all the information he has about how the best way to
46:40get into St. Augustine,
46:41what the timing would be, when the guards might be on alert and when they wouldn't be.
46:46And so he helps them get into the town.
46:49And you better not be lying.
46:53Searles knew that no one at the fort would suspect that this Spanish supply ship had pirates on board.
46:59And that was his Trojan horse. He came in on a different ship, not on a pirate ship, but on
47:04this treasury vessel under disguise.
47:11They attacked at midnight. People were asleep. They liked to catch them literally in their beds.
47:24There was chaos in the streets as people tried to escape.
47:29Official reports describe what happened to one 18-year-old girl and her baby sister.
47:35Remarkable because women and children were usually left out of the documentary records.
47:41One of the stories that probably grips us more than some of the others is the young girl, Estefania de
47:47Cigarroa,
47:48who runs out of her house and is carrying her sister with her.
47:52And one of the pirates shoots and the ball from his gun kills the child in her arms and actually
48:00lodges into Estefania's chest.
48:09Estefania survived.
48:15When the carnage ended, Searles' men had killed over 60 people and they'd taken about 70 men, women and children
48:23as hostages.
48:25The governor managed to negotiate a trade with Searles, giving the pirates wood and water in exchange for the release
48:33of the hostages.
48:34But Searles didn't release everyone. He kept the natives and Africans as his spoils, then headed to the Caribbean to
48:42sell them as slaves.
48:47When Spain heard of this, the crown realized it could no longer risk losing La Florida to foreign invaders and
48:54outlaws.
48:55It pushed the Spanish crown into appropriating more money to build a new fort.
49:04And that's why Castillo de San Marcos was built.
49:08It had now been more than a century since St. Augustine was founded.
49:13During that time, its residents had built nine wooden forts.
49:18None of them had lasted.
49:20But a unique kind of stone had begun to be quarried on Anastasia Island, known as Coquina.
49:27It was made of tiny shell fragments that had been compressed and fused together over centuries on the ocean floor.
49:35It wouldn't burn, it wouldn't rot, and it appeared to be impervious to gunfire.
49:43The structure is now the oldest masonry stone fort remaining in the U.S.
49:48It was a major turning point in the history of the Southeast, because this building of Castillo de San Marcos,
49:57this strong fortress, really scares off, I think, a lot of the tension.
50:04They were about to find out whether this new fortress would hold.
50:10In 1702, English colonists from South Carolina launched their first attack on Spanish Florida.
50:16As English troops marched through the Florida countryside, destroying Spanish missions along the way.
50:23The entire town of St. Augustine took shelter inside the Castillo.
50:36On November 10th, 1702, the gate is shut.
50:44And the 1,500 people are in there, and they don't know for how long.
50:49There was no way to know whether this new fort could actually hold off the British.
50:56Whether they had enough supplies to outlast the siege.
51:03Or whether they'd be taken captive or killed at the end of it all.
51:18All they could do was wait.
51:41And that the whole day, they've researched the first attack on the border.
51:41The first attack was in the end of the building, and even though the last attack was to be taken
51:42a long way.
51:42The second attack was in the important attack on Adam's way.
51:42All the action was taken of the conquered, and the most powerful attack did it.
51:43So they heard that they were the people of the soldiers.
51:44The second attack is a big stop.
51:51I could have consumed with the wolf's soldiers.
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