Spain Colonizes South
Carolina, 1526
What
actually happened: In 1526, a wealthy Spanish accountant by the name of Ayallon decided
to found a Spanish colony on the coast of what is now South Carolina. This
wasn't your typical Spanish slash-through-looking-for-gold effort. Ayallon
wanted to build something permanent, and he planned carefully. He brought
provisions to see the colonists through until crops could be grown, black
slaves to help grow the crops, and a total of around 500 people for the
settlement.
Everything that
could go wrong went wrong. Most of the provisions were lost in a storm. Malaria
spread from the slaves to the Spaniards. There may have been a slave revolt as
the Spanish weakened from disease and hunger. The local Indians were initially
friendly and willing to share their corn or trade for it, but they were nomadic
part of the year, and didn't have corn to share after a certain point. Ayallon
died, probably from a combination of malaria and starvation, as did the
majority of the colonists. The survivors split into factions and may have even
fought a mini civil war before they finally abandoned the colony. The malaria
apparently burned itself out. The local Indian population probably wasn't dense
enough to sustain it and it apparently didn't travel inland to the more densely
populated areas where the Mississippian mound builders still survived. It is
impossible to know exactly when malaria did spread into the American southeast,
but it was apparently spreading into the area along the Mississippi River
around 1670 when the first French explorers came through. Some European
manufactured goods from the Ayallon colony did make it inland to the
Mississippian areas eventually, and were found by the Desoto Expedition over
ten years later.
What
might have happened: Well,
what if the supplies hadn't been ruined in the initial storm? The colony would
have still been hit with malaria, but with adequate food, more of the Spanish
might have been able to survive the disease. That would make them less
susceptible to a slave revolt. If the colony held on long enough, it would
probably make contact with the nearest Mississipian groups. The Mississippians
would have been happy to trade corn for manufactured goods, which would make
food less of a problem for the colonists. Would that be enough to keep the
colony going? Not by itself. South Carolina was not attractive territory for
the Spanish. There was no gold and no large groups of Indians to conquer. At
the same time, for strategic reasons Spain needed a foothold on this coast. A
rival European settlement in the area would threaten supply routes to Mexico.
Once the colony established itself, it might be kept as a small-scale military
base/center for missionary efforts. It would also be a center from which to
rescue shipwrecked Spaniards from further down the coast into Florida.
What
impact might that have? Let's say we end up with a poor ramshackled Spanish
settlement with maybe 250 European survivors of the malaria epidemic, 70 black
slaves, and a small garrison--20 or 30 soldiers. It's there about 40 years
before the first permanent Spanish settlement in Florida at St Augustine in our
time-line. It is also closer to the surviving Mississippian mound builders than
Spanish settlements in Florida were.
The colony follows
some of the same patterns that the St. Augustine settlement did in our
time-line. Some European crops spread rapidly to the Indians. Peach trees and
watermelons spread very quickly, just as they did in our time-line. Mexican
varieties of corn spread quickly too. Small amounts of metal goods are traded
to the Indians. That metal is very valuable to the Indians and is reshaped into
Indian products of various kinds. Chickens and pigs spread to the Indians,
though much slower than some of the plant foods.
There are some
differences between this time-line’s Ayallon colony and our time-line’s St.
Augustine colony though. The Ayalon settlement is in a position to trade inland
with the nearest Mississippians. Malaria can be a chronic disease--people carry
it without dying from it. That means that the settlers eventually spread the
disease to their trading partners. That in turn sets malaria loose in the
interior river systems of southern North America, with the spread coming at
least forty and probably as much as a hundred and twenty years before it did in
our time-line. That hastens the fall of the Mississippian Mound Builders,
though there are some countervailing factors, as we'll see later. The first
smallpox epidemic in the southeast hits Indian tribes in 1539. Many others
follow over the next 100 years, along with measles epidemics, and numerous
other epidemics of European disease.
Impact
on the Spanish Through 1560: The Ayallon colony is a poor backwater. It has little impact on
events outside of what is now the southeastern US for quite some time. With the
DeSoto expedition of 1539, changes from our time-line grow more major. The
Ayallon colony could have acted as a source of intelligence for DeSoto, but
leaders of the colony consider DeSoto a potential rival. As a result, DeSoto is
working without up-to-date information and his army blunders into areas that
had been depopulated by disease from the Ayallon colony. A depopulated,
malaria-infested southeastern US seems even less attractive to him than the
area did in our time-line. There are fewer Indians to feed the Spaniards and to
carry their baggage. Those Indians are more sophisticated in their responses to
the Spaniards, due to having had direct or indirect contact with the Ayallon
colony. The expedition is essentially destroyed early on as it encounters
malaria in conjunction with Indian attacks in northern Florida.
The Spanish mount a
major missionary effort based on the Ayallon colony, just as they did from St.
Augustine in our time-line. A belt of partly acculturated Christian Indian tribes
allied with the Spanish eventually surrounds the colony. Some of those Indians
flee to surrounding non-Christian tribes for one reason or another, bringing
some Spanish technology and ideas with them. Some inland survivors of the
Mississippians also become at least superficially Christian either in response
to the inability of their old religions to cope with the malaria, or for
political/trade reasons.
In our time-line,
the Spanish made a major effort to settle the southeastern US in 1559. The
DeLuna expedition landed over a thousand Spaniards and Mexican Indians along
the Gulf Coast. The DeLuna colony failed quickly and totally. Like the Ayallon
colony, it lost most of its initial supplies in a storm before they could be
put ashore. Also, DeLuna initially landed in an area near where the DeSoto
expedition fought the Mobile Indians and nearly destroyed them. Even twenty
years later the area was essentially deserted. The colony quickly found itself
starving. The leaders quarreled and eventually survivors withdrew.
In this time-line,
there is still an equivalent expedition. In our time-line, the DeLuna colony
grew out of two problems. In Mexico, there were a growing number of poor
Spaniards--people who got there too late to participate in the division of the
goodies after the conquest. At the same time, France was at war with Spain and
was taking an aggressive interest in the New World, especially in what became
the southeastern US. In our time-line, they actually tried to found colonies in
what is now South Carolina twice in the 1560's. The DeLuna colony was designed
to preempt the French.
Would the DeLuna
colony succeed in this time-line? Maybe. On the plus side, it is unlikely that the
timing of the weather and the expedition would be exactly the same thirty-three
years after the point of divergence. Chances are good that they could have
gotten their supplies ashore in this time-line. Also, the local Indians would
have been hit by malaria, but not by the DeSoto expedition. It is hard to be
sure, but I suspect that there would have been more survivors. It would have
been hard for there to have been less. Another plus would be that the Ayallon
colony would have created a demand for European trade goods among the Indians.
The local Indians would see the advantage of having a local source for those
goods instead of having to rely on a chain of middlemen. They would have been
willing to put up with quite a bit to get access to that trade. On the minus
side, the DeLuna colony would have had to cope with malaria, which they didn't
have to in our time-line.
I’m going to say
that the colony lodges after an initial time of troubles. It becomes another
backwater--maybe 400 Spanish survivors of the inevitable malaria epidemic and
the desertions that would follow, along with a few hundred Mexican Indians,
mostly Tlaxcalans, and a few soldiers and priests. It ekes out a precarious
existence based on trade with the Indians and subsidies from the Viceroy of New
Spain. It also becomes a second center for the Spanish missionary effort.
Impact
on the Indians through 1560: In order to know what the impact was, it is first
necessary to know what existed to begin with.
Southeastern
Indians In 1526: This is a really large oversimplification, but it is possible to
classify the Indians of the area that in our time-line became the Southeastern
US into three basic categories:
1.
Mississippian Mound Builders: Along the rivers in the interior of southern North
America, Mound Builders were still building their temple mounds in 1526. As a
matter of fact, they were still building temple mounds as late as 1630 in some
areas, maybe later along the Mississippi River. DeSoto saw this culture when it
was past its prime, but still functioning well in places. The Mississippians
weren't at all like the stereotypical American Indians. They lived in large,
(up to several thousand people) reasonably permanent towns and got most of
their food by farming. In some ways, they acted more like poor country cousins
of the Aztecs than like the stereotypical Indians. They carried their chiefs
around in litters, built large temple mounds (out of dirt instead of stone),
and were apparently very much into social hierarchies, and did very good
artwork in wood and copper. They didn't know how to smelt or cast copper, but
they could work it into designs that were almost as sophisticated as the stuff
other cultures cast. The Mississippians were apparently still expanding toward
the Atlantic Coast in some areas in the early 1500's. Mississippian cultures
were vulnerable even without European diseases or other pressures. Their
populations pushed the local ecology very hard, sometimes too hard. Mississippian
centers in several areas grew and collapsed, then sometimes grew again long
before European contact. They were particularly vulnerable when Europeans came.
They tended to congregate near the floodplains of rivers to plant their crops
in the fertile, easy to till soil. That made them very vulnerable to malaria
and yellow fever when those diseases got established. Their diet made them even
more vulnerable. As populations grew, game animals grew scarce near
Mississippian settlements. The Mississippians had no domestic animals except
for dogs, and as far as I know, they didn't develop special breeds of dogs to
eat like the Aztecs did. That left them with a diet of corn, beans, and squash.
That's nutritionally adequate for normal times, but apparently not totally
adequate for times of stress like pregnancy, nursing a child, or trying to
fight off a disease.
2.
Tribal Agriculturists: Mississippian culture often spread alongside
agriculture. It didn't always though. In some cases, tribes had reasonably intense
agriculture without the temple mounds and the powerful chiefs of the
Mississippians. The Appalachee Indians in northern Florida fit in this
category. They were more typical Mississippians at one time, but the hierarchy
collapsed and never redeveloped.
3.
Hunter/Gatherers With a Little Agriculture: These groups fit the
stereotypical view of American Indians. Most of them farmed to some extent, but
got most of their food by hunting, fishing, or gathering wild plants.
Agriculture expanded from the Mississippi and Ohio rivers out toward the coast,
so most of the intact Indian cultures that Europeans saw were in this category.
The Indians in coastal South Carolina and Georgia would have been.
How the Indians
change in this time-line through 1560: Malaria spreads to the Ayallon colony's
Mound-builder trading partners in about five years. By 1539 it has spread
widely along the rivers in the interior of the southeast. It hasn't reached all
the way to the Mississippi yet, but it is headed in that direction. Mississippian
groups lose large parts of their population over a period of years--often as
much as half. Some of those people flee to previously sparsely inhabited areas
away from the major rivers. Many of them simply die from the disease or from
starvation, as they become too weak to gather food. Some areas are lucky enough
to be outside the range of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In our time-line,
the Cherokees may have fit in that category. In those areas, Mississippian
culture keeps going strong for a while. In areas hit by malaria, settlements
often become more scattered. The top of the social hierarchy often dies out.
Where the high status people don't die out, they sometimes find themselves out
of power because the smaller population can no longer support them or doesn't
want to.
By 1560, malaria
has spread almost everywhere it can in the American southeast. In some
malaria-hit areas, Mississippian-style social hierarchies and mound building
still survive. Population levels are beginning to hit bottom and start back up
in some of the eastern areas, but they are still declining along the
Mississippi. New Indian cultures are developing away from the major waterways,
especially in Central South Carolina and Georgia. They adapt parts of
Mississippian culture to life away from the major rivers, while adding some new
crops from the Ayallon colony. Many of them have adopted the "easy"
domestic animals--usually pigs and chickens. These new cultures have also
adapted some parts of the Ayallon colony's religion--stories that resonate with
local culture, and symbolism which fits in with pre-existing religious ideas.
These new cultures also adopt traits from the Ayallon colony's black
population, and even some from Haustec Indians sold as slaves to Cuba, then
brought in to the Ayallon colony to supplement the labor force.
Escaped slaves
often live among the interior Indians and pass along culture and technology.
Horses are beginning to spread to the Indians near the Ayallon colony.
Christian Indians are often employed by the cattle ranches which are beginning
to develop on the outskirts of the colony, and they sometimes run away to
interior tribes, taking horses with them. Tribes with horses don't use them
particularly much. They are sometimes used as pack animals and sometimes
ridden, but they are rarely used in warfare. They don't seem particularly
valuable in wars in the forests and hills of southeastern North America.
Almost nothing is
known about any primitive writing systems the Mississippian mound builders may
have been developing in our time-line. There are reports of painted deerskins
and use of systems of knots to record information, but that's about it. The
Mississippians were at about the stage where some form of record keeping does
often start being useful. I'm going to assume that either some kind of
proto-writing existed, or it quickly developed once contact with the Ayallon
colony occurred and showed how useful it could be. Missionized Indians then
spread the actual techniques--either developing native systems from scratch or
speeding up the development of primitive existing systems.
Metal items are
still scarce and valuable, though some tribes on the frontier have learned how
to smelt and cast copper--probably from fugitive slaves. Most metal objects
still come from the Ayallon colony, though a few are starting to filter in from
trade with European fishing vessels along the coast of Maine.
Spanish weapons
like swords and guns are officially forbidden to the Indians, but in reality,
there is a slow trickle of such weapons into Indian hands. Access to Spanish
weapons plays a small but ever increasing role in Indian power politics. There
is a right distance to be away from the Spanish settlements. Tribes that are
too close to the Spanish settlements find it difficult to keep their autonomy.
They also find their numbers dwindling rapidly from European diseases. Tribes
close enough to trade, but far enough away to have some protection against
disease tend to grow stronger, especially if they are in areas away from the
malaria-infected flood-plains of the various rivers. Tribes too far away to
trade with one of the colonies tend to be at a military disadvantage against
even the trickle of Spanish weapons that flows from the Ayallon colony.
Several hundred
"half-breeds" now live around the Ayallon colony. Some are part
Spanish and part local Indian. Others are part Indian and part Black or part
Mexican Indian and part local Indian. Some Christianized local Indians see
themselves as more part of the Ayallon colony than part of their own tribes.
A
wild card--Tuscaloosa's kingdom: So far, this has been straightforward, predictable
stuff. That's not always the way history works though. Every on-in-a-while a
wild card comes up. Stalin and Hitler come to power. Genghis Khan unites the
Mongolian nomads. It's time for one of those wild cards, an Indian by the name
of Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa really existed. In our time-line the DeSoto
expedition met and destroyed him early in his rise to political power. The
Spanish describe Tuscaloosa as an enormous Indian--big enough that he made even
the biggest of their draft horses look like donkeys. He was also aggressive and
politically astute--almost a Conan the barbarian type of figure. He was in the
process of building a powerful chiefdom when he ran into Spanish. In this
time-line, the DeSoto expedition fails to encounter him. He has twenty years to
build up his power. That process is interrupted by the spread of malaria, but
he quickly uses even that to strengthen his power as he absorbs malaria-weakened
tribes into his political organization and moves the core of that political
organization into a relatively malaria-free area.
Tuscaloosa has
sporadic indirect contact with the Ayallon colony. He even asks for
missionaries at one point, then kills some of them and makes the rest prisoners
when he realizes that they can't teach his people militarily useful
technologies. He gives the survivors a considerable degree of freedom later
because he does find them useful in recording his victories once they learn the
local language and start recording things in it. Of course for that to be
useful, other people in the tribe need to learn to read.
By 1559, Tuscaloosa
is getting up in the years. His children died from malaria, but not before
leaving him several grandchildren. Those grandchildren have been to some extent
educated by surviving missionaries. They can read and write in their own
language. That sets the stage for the development of a new, militant religion.
One of the grandsons begins developing a syncretic religion based on what he
knows of Christianity mixed very strongly with the traditional religion. He
tests and refines his ideas using the surviving missionaries as foils.
As the DeLuna
colony develops, Tuscaloosa's chiefdom is at the right distance away from it to
gain even more military power. The fact that his grandchildren appear to be
potential converts helps to seal an alliance. The alliance is based primarily
on mutual interest. Tuscaloosa keeps Indians close to the colony in line. In
return, he gets access to Spanish trade goods, including a few swords and even
a musket or two. He is smart enough to be wary of becoming too dependent on the
Spaniards though, and immediately begins trying to get access to metal-working
and make his own versions of the militarily useful Spanish tools. The Mexican
Indians in the DeLuna colony may be a useful source for that kind of
technology. Being military allies of the DeLuna colonists also helps his
warriors gain access to Spanish military tactics, which proves very useful.
Other Indian groups
also take advantage of their location and access to Spanish help to do their
own empire-building. That becomes more pronounced after 1560, but the process
has already started by that year.
Ripples
spread both inside and outside North America—1560 to 1600: By 1560, the time-lines have
been subtly diverging for nearly 35 years. The impact on Europe has apparently
been slight. King Henry the second of France is not aware of any impact at all.
Neither does King Phillip of Spain. Neither of them knows that at least one
finely balanced, inherently unlikely event has been derailed by subtle effects
stemming indirectly from the survival of the Ayalon colony. In our time-line’s
1560, the king of France is dead, killed in a freak jousting accident. His
survival in this time-line will eventually have a huge, unpredictable impact.
However, those impacts are outside the scope of this scenario. I will try to
address the European issues in a later Point of Divergence.
The Spanish Viceroy
of Mexico probably doesn’t think that the survival of the Ayallon colony made
much difference in 1560. He doesn’t know that it led to the survival of the
DeLuna colony, which is still very much a pain in his neck, draining
much-needed resources away from other problems he would like to solve. One of
those problems is the growing hostility of the wild Chichemic Indians of
Northern Mexico toward Spanish silver miners and slave raiders who have invaded
their territory. He doesn’t know that resources devoted to supporting the
DeLuna colony will have a major impact on developments on the Mexican frontier.
I’ll try to address that in future POD also, if anyone is interested.
Where
do we go from here in North America? In the late 1560s and early 1570s, one of
Tuscaloosa's grandkids takes over his chiefdom and develops a critical mass of
military advantages over surrounding groups, along with a crusading ideology.
He gains organizational ideas from the Spaniards and Mexican Indians of DeLuna
colony. In the 1560's, 70's and 80's he launches a crusade for his religion and
also to form an empire. The Mississippians didn't have an organization too
dramatically opposed to empire, and the unsettled times stemming from the
spread of malaria would have left people grasping for new answers. He carves
out an empire, and pushes groups on his border to centralize in response. His
example inspires other would-be emperors and large states begin to form
whereever the surviving population is dense enough to support them.
Things diverge
further in North America when French Protestants found a colony in what became
Virginia in our time-line. In our time-line, that colony would have ended up in
what is now South Carolina. In this time-line, that is too close to the Ayallon
colony, and Virginia is chosen as a second-best site. Initially, both the
Spanish and French think that Virginia may be a site for the much-sought-after
Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. By the time that is proven not to be
the case, the French are heavily involved in Virginia.
The Spanish are
very wary of the new French settlement. They are at peace with France after
nearly 40 years of on-again off-again war that left both countries bankrupt by
1559. They don’t want to start another war, but the idea of Frenchmen,
especially Protestant Frenchmen, so close to the sea-lanes where Mexican
treasure flows to Spain is very close to intolerable. In our time-line, they
attacked the French, but in our time-line France was without a strong ruler and
the colony was more directly threatening. In this time-line, Spain keeps an eye
on the French colony, sometimes trying to stir up trouble among surrounding
Indians. It also reinforces garrisons at the Ayallon and DeLuna colonies.
French Protestants
(Huguenots) find themselves in an environment very close to a civil war in
France. In our time-line, hatred boiled over and resulted in nearly 30 years of
wars of religion in France. In this time-line, Henry struggles to keep a lid on
things. He encourages Huguenot migration, and by 1575 over 6000 Huguenots
settle in the area that would have become Virginia in our time-line. They
develop a variety of cash crops and become a part of a trading network with
French Protestant seaports. This is the same sort of thing that happened in New
England with Puritan settlers in our time-line. The French settlement comes
fifty years earlier than the large Puritan voyages of our time-line, but they
involve around one-third the number of people. The French lodge in an area that
has been largely depopulated by smallpox, which spread up the coast from the
Ayallon colony. The local tribes are mostly small and weak. They are also
divided. The Powhatan confederacy has not yet developed, and in this time-line,
it never will.
The French
Huguenots trade in every direction. They are attracted by the fur trade and are
soon trading up many of the rivers to the north of them. The area that would
have become New York is very attractive to them, and they eventually establish
trading posts both there and in what would have been New England. England has
pretty much stayed out of the Americas out of respect for their relationship
with Spain. The English and Spanish have been traditional allies against their
common French rival. As French Huguenot influence spreads, English fishermen
and roving fur traders also become more interested in what would have become
New England. Rival French and English trading posts are established on the
Connecticut River. With French energies focused further south, England also
attempts to colonize what would have become Canada in our time-line.
And
at this point we descend into chaos: There often comes a point in an AH, where it
diverges so far from our history that it is no longer has enough to do with our
history to maintain my interest. We are fast approaching that point. I will
make some general comments though. Indians would probably end up playing a more
major role in this time-line than they did in ours. Diseases would spread
faster, which would cut Indian population earlier, but populations would also
reach their lowest point and start back up sooner. If Indian populations in the
southeast reached their low point around 1630 or 1640, and started rising, then
the dynamics of European settlement become very different. Of course I also
have a much earlier French settlement, which would have given tribes somewhat
less time to recover if the French settlement grew as fast as say New England
or Virginia. I doubt that it would though. The infrastructure of trans-Atlantic
shipping and trade was less developed at that point, and Spain was much more
capable of fighting back against interlopers.
I suspect that
disease or internal strife would eventually destroy Tuscaloosa’s empire. I also
suspect though, that the Indians that Europeans eventually encountered in the
interior of the North American southeast would be influenced by that empire.
Once writing and metalworking got established, it wouldn’t go away. What in our
time-line became the United States might become a French-speaking version of
South Africa, with a majority population of various Indian tribes politically
or economically dominated by descendents of French settlers. It would probably
be a very different country in a very different world.
Any comments?Click to e-mail me.