CALUSA, CANOES, AND COORDINATING CONFLICT IN CONTACT-ERA FLORIDA
Dr. Peter Ferdinando
Florida’s Native Americans have a long history with watercraft, with their dugout canoe use going back at least 6,000 years. Contact-era accounts from the 1500s to the early 1700s further reveal the inter-connected nature of the peninsula, with the regionally influential Calusa and their allies ranging hundreds of kilometers in canoes around and across Florida. They used canoes to establish and maintain alliances with other Indigenous groups and Europeans, for gift-giving and making exchanges, and crucially to wage war. From the Calusa sending “eighty canoes bulwarked with shields” to attack Juan Ponce de León in 1513 to them leading “more than three hundred canoes” to attack Spanish-aligned Mocoço villages in Tampa Bay in 1614, their ability to marshal and project force is particularly telling. The Calusan leadership’s coordination of such conflicts demonstrates their capacity to organize large-scale collective action across their allied communities.
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Peter J. Ferdinando is an Associate Teaching Professor and Director of Public History in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Florida International University and an M.A. in Anthropology from Florida Atlantic University. This dual focus on the historical and archaeological records serves Peter’s interests in erasing the pre-/post-contact boundary in telling Indigenous American history. His current book project, “Rich from the Sea”: Indigenous Wrecking and Maritime Trade in the Atlantic World, examines how Florida’s coastal Native Americans adapted their existing maritime skills as an effective strategy to exploit the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch vessels which were dashed on the rocks and reefs of Florida’s east coast from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.