>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
^M00:00:04 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:21

>> Georgette Dorn:  Good afternoon.  My name is Georgette Dorn and I'm the head of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress.  It is very, very nice to welcome everybody to the library which the home of the biggest Latin American collection in the world actually.  We have 170 million items of which 14 million pertain to Spain and Latin America in the Iberian world.  We also are the home of [inaudible] Latin American studies which is an online and in print bibliography published here since 1936.  Also the home of the [inaudible] tape where we have 750 recorded authors since 1943.  And as of two years ago we have 100 of them online available on the Hispanic Division's webpage.  It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Michael Francis.  He received his Ph.D. in history in 1998 from the University of Cambridge.  Between 1997 and 2012 he taught at the University of North Florida.  In '12 Dr. Francis was named the Hough Family Chair of Floridian studies at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg.  In 2016 he was appointed Chair of the Department of History and Politics at University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.  Dr. Francis has received more than two dozen national, international awards including a four year appointment as research fellow of the American Museum of Natural History, New York and the J. Kislak fellowship at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.  He served on the St. Augustine 450th commemoration commission and is curator of the traveling museum exhibit, Imagining La Florida on Ponce de Leon and the Quest for the Fountain of Youth.  Dr. Francis has written and edited five books and numerous book chapters and articles.  His most recent book published in 2015 is entitled, St. Augustine, America's First City.  With us, Dr. Francis.
^M00:02:22 [ Audience Applause ] ^M00:02:29

>> J. Michael Francis:  Thanks so much Georgette and thank you for coming on a beautiful day.  Walking over here and I thought it's a gorgeous spring day.  Everyone's going to want to be outside.  So we're going to do this indoors.  The last time I was here I think the discussion, the talk was really all about anniversaries and commemoration, historical commemorations because Florida went through a series of these commemoration moments really almost consistently since 2013.  There was one commemoration after another.  And so today I'm going to talk about a new project.  A project that we've been working on at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg and with partners in Spain and in other places in the United States that I'd like to share with you.  So thank you to the Hispanic Division, to [inaudible] and Georgette for inviting me here today and for the University of South Florida Foundation and Julie Gillespie and Julie Perrelli.  I'd really like to thank and point out this is a project that historical research is often a rather solitary affair.  We like to sit in archives by ourselves in quiet doing our research.  And this is really a project that from the very beginning has been a collaborative endeavor.  It's a project that has really brought in a team of scholars from different disciplines, different institutions and of course it's a way.  It has been a project that I've had wonderful success with some phenomenal graduate students at the University of South Florida who are working on this project with me, Rachael Sanderson, Hannah Tweet and Trevor Bryant in particular.  But we have a whole team of graduate students who have been working on this.  As I said Florida has experienced these commemoration moments since 2013.  The first of course centered around this individual.  What you see here is Juan Ponce de Leon's signature.  And in Florida in 2013 commemorated the 500 year anniversary of something related related to Juan Ponce de Leon.  It was still quite a mystery as the year unfolded, what is it that we're commemorating and what exactly did he do and why are we commemorating this?  And often the answer especially in the political sphere was well we need to tell everybody that we're old.  That we're first.  They love first's and oldest even when first aren't first's and oldest are not oldest.  And so there was this whole discussion.  I don't know if you followed the debate, sometimes a rather heated debate that unfolded in Florida over where did Ponce land?  And different communities fought.  There were newspaper articles, battles back and forth about where Ponce landed.  So I guess the real takeaway in 2013 was no one agreed where Ponce landed.  And he did something, we're old.  So that was the takeaway I suppose.  Two years later the City of St. Augustine commemorated its 450 year anniversary.  And of course you have to have cake I guess when you're celebrating historical anniversaries.  This is the day of the anniversary, September 8, 2015, marked the 450 year commemoration.  What was striking about that in a way when I reflect back on that moment, the highest ranking political official to attend the 450th, the actual day, the 450th was Florida's Secretary of State.  So it still didn't I guess generate a kind of national interest.  Now of course ten days later the Royal Majesties of Spain arrived, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia.  And then lots of people came to St. Augustine ten days after the actual anniversary.  He's, this is King Felipe VI.  He's 6'6".  I'm getting there I hope one day to be 6'6".  I'm standing behind him so it makes me look shorter.  In any case they came and of course that attracted a great deal of interest.  And I remember speaking with the city manager during that visit and shortly thereafter and he really posed this question.  Now that the anniversaries have passed, now that there's been national and international attention.  The Royal Majesties of Spain have come to commemorate this moment, where do we go?  What's next?  And sometimes it was a little disheartening.  I remember reviewing a national history textbook not long ago.  I won't mention the state.  It begins with M and ends with chusetts.  But it was a national history text that was going out to junior high school students around the country.  And one of the chapters was on the colonization of North America.  And the chapter began with Jamestown.  And I thought what are we doing wrong?  The first people of African descent in the textbook came to Virginia in 1619.  So that's only off by 106 years of the first recorded person of African descent, Juan Garrido who was part of Ponce de Leon's 1513 expedition.  So maybe there's something we can do a little bit differently.  And what we've, what we're starting and what we'll launch in the fall is a center, digital center for colonial Florida history.  And it's really built on projects.  A whole series of projects that preceded this one, that are working at the same time as this one.  Of course the Spanish website Pares, if you're not familiar with this site.  It's an absolutely remarkable website of documents and maps from a number of almost a dozen Spanish state archives, digitized.  There are millions of documents, maps, images, photographs from the Spanish civil war, documents from medieval Spain all the way up to the 20th century.  And this is something that the Spanish government's been doing since the 1980s.  They were really a pioneer in terms of digitization, making this material available.  It's not the most user friendly website.  Maybe that was a compromise.  We'll make the documents available but it'll be so difficult to navigate that nobody will find the documents.  And it's pretty close.  It's a challenging one if you have not used Pares in the past.  But of course it has some remarkable, remarkable documents in it.  Just some examples of some the characters who lived in colonial Florida who, about whom you can research through Pares, this is a letter written to King Philip III.  It dates to the 20th of February of 1600.  And it was written by this woman, Dona Maria who was a Cacica, Native American, a Timucua Indian Chief.  One of numerous letters that Dona Maria wrote to the King of Spain.  And there were responses.  She is a figure that outside of St. Augustine is not particularly well known.  My guess is if this letter were signed Pocahontas the letter would probably be in every textbook, fourth grade textbook in the country.  And yet we know quite a bit about her.  Documents like a very small trove of final wills and testaments.  We, it's rare to find final wills from Florida.  There are only that we've been able to locate, only about 40.  And there are reasons for that that I'm happy to discuss later.  But the oldest one that we've uncovered is a will from 1566, one year after St. Augustine was established in 1565.  Is that better?  There, okay, sorry.  And it's a will from a young man named Bernard Jansen who was from Bremen, Germany.  And poor, couldn't sign his name.  But it's a handful of wills that will part of this center.  When we finish we'll publish all of these wills with transcriptions and translations of these final wills from Florida.  And tales of people like this individual, whose real name was actually Darby Glavin, he's Irish.  And the Spanish had no patience with Darby as a name so they just called him David Glavid.  And David Glavid was, has a fascinating story.  I mean, know about him in the English historiography that he was one of the Roanoke settlers, that Francis Drake took him back to England.  He was sent back.  And somehow was captured by the Spanish and was sentenced to a life in the galleys.  That's the English version of the narrative.  The Spanish story is completely different.  David Glavid ends up living in St. Augustine.  He testifies that he was a fisherman off the coast of Ireland.  And the English kidnapped him.  Took him to Roanoke against his will, stole his boat.  And he ended up at Roanoke, went back to England with Drake.  And then Queen Elizabeth II sent him back.  When he arrived in Puerto Rico he ran away.  And he later joined the Spanish, lived in St. Augustine.  He was a merchant and a soldier in St. Augustine.  He was the guy you would go to to get stuff.  If you wanted textiles from Asia, you wanted some.  David Glavid was the merchant who could acquire those goods.  Or somebody like Luisa Menendez.  We know lots of stories like this from Mexico and Peru.  As a young girl she was taken captive by the Spanish.  She was probably at the time between the age of eight and ten.  She ended up living in a Spanish settlement in Florida called Santa Elena.  We call today Paris Island, South Carolina.  And she was a domestic servant in the home of St. Augustine, St. Augustine's founder's wife, Dona Maria de Solis.  She then ends up marrying a Spanish solider whose 20 years her senior.  And she lives certainly from what we can document well into the early 17th century.  Of course the AGI then contains all kinds of information about food stuffs and supplies that went from Spain to Florida or Cuba to Florida, other places with those supplies.  This is simply an inventory of food stuffs that went to Florida with the Menendez 1565 expedition.  So there's all this material available.  It's not material you would really publish by themselves.  And what I'm going to frame for you is the idea we have for this digital center.  For us it really began with a project that I did with a couple of graduate students at the University of North Florida and then at the University of South Florida to digitize the parish records in St. Augustine, Florida.  And these records date back to 1594.  They're the some of the oldest documents in the United States about the United States.  And they're parish records, baptisms, deaths, confirmations, marriages.  And we started a project to digitize 6,000 pages of the colonial parish records.  And this was the team.  We did it for, I think our budget was something like $5,500.  And we digitized all of these documents which are now available online.  You can see on the left that's Jane Landers from Vanderbilt University who's written extensively about Africans in Florida.  And then my two graduate students on the far right and Jane's team in between.  And this is what some of these records look like.  This is one of the early marriage records from 1594.  We do have the first recorded baptism of anybody of African descent.  And this was a record from 1595.  All right, this should be much more readily available to a broader audience than it has been.  And that's part of the idea.  And of course some of them look like this.  So desperate need of restoration some of these documents.  They were shrink wrapped in the 1920s, the early records which is not good for long term preservation.  But that's what they look like.  Now of course we've done this and we've put them up.  And one of the things I constantly hear from teachers is well wonderful that you did that but how are we supposed to use this?  How is it going to be more accessible?  How are people who maybe don't know much about that early Florida history, how are they going to use this?  And it makes perfect sense.  This is just a two line passage that appears on the very front page of a 17th century book of baptisms within those parish records.  Now the handwriting is not 17th century.  And before it was shrink wrapped somebody in his infinite wisdom took a black marker and wrote the year 1640 question mark on the original document.  But the handwriting's actually 18th century.  And when I first looked at it, you know, the first word that probably jumps out you is the word diablo, devil.  I thought why is somebody writing devil on the first opening page of 17th century book of baptisms?  And the text reads simply, my dear Lord, not even the devil could read this.  The writing is so bad I can't make out a single word in it.  So I teach Spanish, 16th century Spanish paleography program at the University South Florida, St. Petersburg.  So when students come in the first day I lock the door and then I show them this.  And even those who think it's paleontology then get really scared.  And when they realize no, it's paleography.  We're going to learn how to read 16th century Spanish handwriting.  And I say not even, I say look, bear with me for eight months and you will learn a skill that the devil himself does not possess.  And then they get excited.  Say all right, I'll stick with this Spanish paleography for the eight months.  And some do it for two or three years and become really quite accomplished paleographers for 16th century Spanish.  The projects we're going to launch in the fall, really the most important project at least in terms of the amount of work we put into it so far is the prosopography.  And if that word or that term's not familiar just think of it in terms of collective biography.  If you were to ask for example, take the [inaudible] expedition, if you were to ask well what could you say about the typical profile of one of the conquistador's Soto expedition?  What do we know about where they were from?  Their ages?  Marital status?  Previous military experience?  Have they been in the Indies before?  Do they come from certain parts or are they concentrated in certain parts of Spain?  In other words the study of figures about whom we don't know a great deal and many of them did not leave written records.  So for the last oh I guess seven or eight years I've been collecting data on every single person I come across who lived in Florida between 1513 and 1821.  Yes, that's as exciting as my social life is to be keeping this database.  And the database now has well over 10,000 people in it.  In the next five years we hope to double that number, have more than 20,000 people in that database.  And then some of the other projects I'll outline quickly for you as I go through.  We do hope to bring in as many institutional partners as we can with this project.  And of course my interest really is, although all of these are important, the research opportunities I think that this will bring for students and for other faculty I think is quite exceptional.  And then of course this collaborative endeavor, the nature of this.  And already we have some partners, some important partners.  Many in Spain and some here in the United States and Francisco Gitard [assumed spelling] is here from Madrid.  He works in Malaga for the Institute Onelta [phonetic].  And all of the technological things that we want to do I just drop at his door and say make this happen and he says okay.  We'll make that happen.  I started because I was intrigued when Pedro Menendez established St. Augustine in 1565 within the first three years he and the captains under his authority established 15 different garrisons in the southeast.  You can see really from the visual in fact one of his plans was to establish a garrison in the Chesapeake Bay area which failed.  But that was his ambition to have garrisons that ran up the Atlantic seaboard, a couple of strategic points in the Gulf.  And then what his vision was was to build a series of garrisons into the interior that eventually connected his deep water port around Hilton Head, present day Hilton Head, South Carolina, with Zacatecas, Mexico.  In other words the vision was to move that silver overland to a deep water port and Pedro Menendez [inaudible] of course would be governor of this region.  A very ambitious plan, obviously a plan that failed for a number of reasons but failed.  And so within by 1570 there are really only two garrisons left, Paris Island, South Carolina, the settlement at Santa Elena and St. Augustine, Florida.  And St. Augustine after 1587, St. Augustine's the only one that survives.  It's the only one of these early garrisons that survives until the late 17th century when the Spanish go back to Pensacola.  I was always interested in who were the people who went to these places.  Who were the people who joined the Menendez expedition after 50 years of failed expeditions into Florida beginning with Ponce de Leon?  One expedition after another with the same outcome.  Menendez knows perfectly well there isn't gold or silver or emeralds, maybe some pearls in Florida.  So how's he able to recruit people?  And in particular for his expedition he recruited over 2,000 individuals.  The expedition that followed him the following year also included more than 2,000 individuals.  These are two of the largest expeditions to leave Spain for any part of the Indies in the 16th century and they were expeditions to Florida.  So we wanted to get a sense of who these people were.  Especially when you look at the kinds of professions that you see in the manifest of professions that Menendez recruited for the expedition.  Twenty one tailors and ten shoemakers, a couple of rope makers and locksmiths and silversmiths, a hat maker, 117 laborers.  And then this one's my favorite, at one point I hope we find out exactly who he was [inaudible], a master beer brewer was on this expedition.  When you look at that list those are the people that in every single textbook refers to as conquistadors.  Those are the conquistadors, the hatmakers and shoemakers and tailors and all of the professions that in the end are required for permanence, for settlement.  And so we wanted to track those occupations and who these people were and what brought them to Florida.  So at present we have for the Hernando de Sota expedition we have about 845 people in the database for that.  The Pedro Menendez de Aviles we have almost 700 in that database.  The Sancho de Archiniega expedition, this is an expedition about which there's almost nothing written.  A few references in the secondary literature but there's almost nothing published on the Sancho de Archiniega expedition.  That was the expedition with over 2,000 people on it from 1566.  And we've now found almost all of them.  So that's the one we're going to use to launch the center site in the fall.  And then a couple of the settlements and eventually we'll catch up the Diasisin [phonetic] records and be able to include all of those Diasisin records in this project. So very briefly in terms of the Sancho de Archiniega at present we've identified 1833 people who went on that expedition.  We know the place of origin for 84% of those people.  We know that at least 85 were non-Spaniards.  This number will probably creep up to closer to 150 by the time I finish research in Spain this summer because most of mariners and the ship owners and ship captains were Flemish or Portuguese or German.  They're not Spanish.  So that number's going to increase quite dramatically.  We will have a whole series of infographics on this center site where you can see a breakdown in terms of the contemporary regions where people were from and be able to do this for all of the expeditions to see the differences between the regional breakdowns.  Infographics like this where you can see percentages of people who came from Andalucia and, you know, 3% of the Archiniega expedition was made up of Portuguese.  And the Portuguese are often overlooked in the story.  Again these kind of infographics where you can see different regions and, you know, who were the 12 Catalans?  And the 28 people from Valencia who came on this expedition in 1566?  And just for students to be able to see a contemporary map and see that the breakdown of individuals who participated in this expedition included Greeks, Northern Europeans, Flemish, Italians, French, Portuguese, North Africans.  One person from Florida who was a native chief, we don't know much about him, we don't know where he was from.  But he was taken at some point.  Was baptized with the name Pedro, was given honorific of Don which was standard for all Cacicas at the time.  And he was sent back to Spain likely lived a life with Franciscans or Jesuits, was taught Spanish.  And he went back on this expedition to serve as a translator and as a guide, breakdown of the foreigners.  What was really striking when we collected the data was that when you look at the makeup of this group they come from 665 different places.  And this was surprising.  We thought we'd find smaller networks of people who were well connected from childhood, who brought, came together to establish these companies.  And what we're finding is something strikingly different where almost 1/3rd of them represented the only individual from their town.  So it raises some really interesting questions about these networks and recruitment in Spain.  And now that we have the names and where people were from we can start to look at these questions form the Iberian side, from Spain and Portugal.  Greece is a little bit more difficult but other places and see what drew people to these expeditions in the 16th century.  And what were these networks that could quite quickly pull together 2,000 individuals to go on this expedition.  We know that most so far come from Seville.  But what I can do now with students who suffer through the paleography program is send a student for example to places like Samota [phonetic] and look through parish records and notary records in Somota to find out more about the individuals that we've identified from those locations.  This is something that keeps me up at night and did, and kept me up at night when I was working on it.  I didn't include Fernandez, now Fernandez and Hernandez were used interchangeably in the 16th century.  So if you add Hernandez and Fernandez there are probably about 105 people on the expedition with the last name Hernandez or Fernandez.  Many of them probably about 40 have the first name Juan.  So deciphering, trying to figure out do I have the right Juan Hernandez or when you see another one in a document how do you know which one Hernandez or Fernandez that is?  And you see that, you know, we have 52 Lopez's and 48 Martin's and this will something that will continue to be a challenge.  Occupations, we've identified 52 different occupations so far of the people who came on that expedition including 20 musicians and 7 priests.  We have the backgrounds of some of the priests who served on the expedition.  These six individuals in St. Augustine were contracted by the crown to service professional fishermen.  That was their job.  They were paid a salary.  They were given a great big fishing net and said your job is to fish for the crown and that's what you will do.  I don't know why you have a Garcia Mendez from Cordoba.  Cordoba doesn't strike me as the best place to recruit a professional fisherman but there he is, Garcia Mendez.  The barbers, those who performed minor surgeries in addition to tasks that barbers did.  We know the names of those individuals and where they were from, the carpenters.  Literacy rate is very difficult to track for this expedition but we're now at 11%.  We're getting closer.  It's still not statistically meaningful the way we hope it will be when we get closer to 30, 40, 50% literacy rates.  The image for 16th century Florida in the secondary literature is very much, well this is a marginal borderland of a borderland.  A place nobody really wanted to go and certainly a place nobody really wanted to stay.  And the people who went to Florida were often kind of dregs of Spanish society and they said well you go to Florida.  It's lovely.  You know, they're working on Disney, the beaches are perfect, weather's nice.  And so the sense was that you wouldn't find very many highly educated individuals, etc.  What's emerging from the prosopography is very much a profile that's similar to what we find elsewhere in the Indies where you get this kind of middling group of people, semi-literate with a combination of people who had a formal university education who stayed in Florida.  And then of course you look at ages.  And this is where things get really interesting.  And this is where as a historian and anybody who questions the nature of written documents and how should we read these documents?  When we first did the numbers I realized wow, the people who really colonized Florida are my students.  And then I thought sometimes, oh the people who colonized Florida are my students.  And no, it's good.  I trust them.  The number, look at the highest number here, 20 year old.  And of course one of the mandates in the documents, one of Archiniega's mandates from the crown was you must recruit 1,500 men, unmarried, and you cannot recruit anybody under the age of 20.  So I suspect that a number of these people fall into the 19, 18, 17, 16 year old category and are simply saying I'm 20.  Here's my ID.  And I'll show you what their ID is because we have for Florida about 400 physical descriptions of people from the 16th century which is extraordinary.  When you think of how rare it is to find physical descriptions for people, we have about 400 so far.  So you could be somebody like Pedro [inaudible], tall, dark and handsome with two scars on his face and forehead.  And one of the things that emerges out of these documents in the 16th century is that people were selling licenses under the table as you might expect.  So Pedro [inaudible] might stop in at a bar in Cordoba, find somebody who looks rather tall, dark and handsome and say have a few drinks because you're only missing a couple of scars and then you can be me.  And lots of these licenses were circulating under the table.  And people were coming to the Americas as somebody else.  And so then poor Antonio Garcia that shows up a little later and wants to be tall, dark and handsome gets to be round and fat with a big nose, unfortunately for him.  Francisco Marten [assumed spelling] would have a difficult time selling his license because he had one eye and a scar next to his left eye from a knife wound.  I expected to find a lot more evidence of people who had survived small pox.  And to date of all of the people for whom we have physical descriptions they're only five that we've identified who have any evidence of pox marks having survived an epidemic.  If you've been following the news in St. Augustine they've recently uncovered some human remains underneath the parish church, what was the parish church from 1572 into well more than a century of this [inaudible].  And with the database, they're doing DNA analysis on these bones.  They found 20 separate individuals in this recent, these recent excavations.  It is not outside of the realm of possibility that we could name these people by name.  When we connect the database where people were from, who they were with the DNA evidence.  We're also going to do a whole series of digital reconstructions for Florida.  This is magnificent map of St. Augustine from 1764.  After the Seven Years' War when Florida was transferred to British rule and the British controlled Florida for 21 years after this.  And this was a map that was commissioned by the crown basically to plot all of the properties in St. Augustine for compensation.  Because what happens in 1764 is every single person in St. Augustine except for four families, everybody else leaves.  The whole city's abandoned.  Most go to Cuba, some go to Campeche, some go to Vera Cruz, very few returned to Spain.  And the city's basically abandoned.  What this map, the originals in the Naval Museum in Madrid, what this map shows is the size of each property, who owned the property and the building material that was used to construct the residences of those properties.  So on this one for example what we can plot and it'll be much more, look a lot better than this.  This is just an idea of what we're trying to do.  All of those pink circles represent properties in 1763 that we're owned by women.  These are all female property owners from St. Augustine.  Here, well just the breakdown of the building materials.  And Tabby which is a vernacular concrete made from oyster shell, coquina stone and wooden board.  And we see that most the buildings were stone or cement constructions, tabby stone constructions in St. Augustine.  So the idea is to create this digital recreation of St. Augustine on the eve of abandonment.  All of these properties are properties that we've confirmed were owned by free blacks in St. Augustine.  And we know where a lot of them were from from the parish records.  We know that runaway slaves were moving from as far north as New York, Philadelphia, most obviously from the Carolinas, trying to make their way to Spanish Florida in the late 17th and 18th centuries.  For a lot of them we know their ethnic backgrounds for the people of African descent, those who were Congolese, Carabali, Mandinga.  With maps instead of simply putting maps on the center site we're going to do a lot more animation because again there's so much incredible detail that's lost to people who aren't familiar with the maps.  So this is a map of the southeast, the Gulf and Florida from 1544.  This is a map from right after the Hernando de Sota expedition.  And there's Tuscaloosa.  All of these are Indian towns.  It's the only map I know from the 16th century that plots Native settlements in North America.  I can't think of another one that plots all these settlements.  And you get some text that's lost.  This text here says [inaudible] which is in present day New Mexico, [inaudible].  From [inaudible] to this point there are great herds of cattle, 1544?  Great herds of cattle?  And of course this is what the Spanish are talking about.  For the Spanish the buffalo or bison was simple a hairy cow.  And Native Americans do exactly the same thing.  The horse in Mexico is not some magical mystical creature.  It's a deer from Castile.  It looks like a deer.  It's a little different.  And the Spanish do the same thing.  This early interaction with nouns is really fascinating.  So, all of these maps will have transcriptions, translations, explanations, annotations.  The technical team thinks that they can build a something like an OCR to read 16th century Spanish paleography.  I have my doubts but then Francisco looks at me and just says, oh bless your heart, you 16th century dweller you who we will be able to create something that will be able to read 16th century documents.  What we're thinking of it initially as something to use for museum visitors in Florida, children who can take 16th century letters from documents from Florida and write their names.  What would you name look like in 16th century Spanish?  And my evil plot is that eventually all of these students are going to start writing notes to each other in classrooms using 16th century paleography.  And I'll get hate mail from teachers.  But then the sinister plot that everyone will learn 16th century Spanish will slowly become realized.  And so that's the initial plan with this.  Last summer I found the provisions for the Archiniega expedition for every single day for every single person on that expedition.  So teachers who teach about nutrition and could compare for example the long term implications of a diet on a Spanish expedition versus what English or French, other expeditions look like in terms of food stuffs.  And my wife actually plated these.  These are the actual amounts.  We took the amounts and plated them except for the bread.  They did, we couldn't fit that in a picture.  It's, it'd be a big garbage can of your daily rations of hardtack.  They ate a lot of hardtack.  But this was the monthly ration for olive oil and vinegar.  Friday of course you got some rice.  And then garlic was only for the elite.  They said we'll give you some garlic but distribute it with great care.  In other words only the important people get garlic.  Does this look like a lot of wine?  

>> No.

>> Does it now?  This was the daily wine ration for every single person, every single day.  Now of course they have to careful with water and water spoiling and this is what they're drinking.  And this is what you would get for your daily ration of wine.  We're going to do all kinds of visuals associated with this.  The site hasn't been designed but this is kind of the general idea of what we want it to be able to do with the different areas of interest in terms of the research.  The tutorials for people to use it and the infographics, the list of collaborators and the advisory board that we'll put together.  And the last thing I want to show you is one of the ideas that we'd like to do is populate the site with a series of short videos.  These will be videos about men and women of different ethnic backgrounds who lived in Florida between 1513 and 1821.  Mainly stories about people who are not particularly well known.  And so we did one and I want to show that to you as an example of the kinds of productions that we will use to populate the site.  And this is a story that's really actually if I come back to this image here, this is a story that centers around this map.  It's a map that dates to about 1605.  And it was a map that was, the name of it was simply this is where we need to move the fort.  The plan, King Philip III's plan was get rid of the garrison in St. Augustine and move everyone closer to present day Miami.  And next to that fort on the map is just a couple of words.  It says Vocas de Miguel Mora, the mouths of Miguel Mora.  And I never knew who Miguel Mora was.  And it bothered me for years and years and years.  And then last summer I found him.  Not him exactly because he lived in the 16th century.  But I found his story.  And why this region ended up with his name.  And so we decided to tell this story of Miguel Mora which tells a little bit the early history of Spanish Florida and the story of Miguel Mora himself.
^M00:42:11 [ Music ] ^M00:42:24
In the year 1605 an anonymous mapmaker drafted a rather crude map of the Florida peninsula.  Of the maps many curious features.  Perhaps the most striking is a name that appears along the southeastern coastline next to purposed new Spanish fortress.  It reads Vocas de Miguel Mora, the mouths of Miguel Mora.  The fort was never built but for the next two centuries mariners and mapmakers continued to refer to the area by his name.  But who was Miguel Mora?  The story takes us back 40 years to the year 1565.  On March 15 of that year Pedro Menendez de Aviles signed a private contract or [inaudible] with Spain's King Philip II outlining the terms of a new conquest expedition to Florida.  An experienced mariner, merchant and military commander, Menendez quickly began to recruit colonists for his new venture.  While many of them came from Northern Spain, Menendez's forces included men and women from other parts of the Spanish peninsula as well as Portugal, Flanders, Greece, North Africa, France and Italy.  Almost 2,000 people joined the expedition including sailors and soldiers, artisans and craftsmen, slaves and free blacks and more than two dozen women.  One of the recruits was a young man from [inaudible] in Southern Spain.  His name was Miguel Mora.  But just 11 days after Menendez signed his contract, King Philip II learned that a French garrison had been established in La Florida under the command of Renee de Laudonniere.  Indeed Laudonniere's men had built a fortress along the southern banks of the River May, present day St. John's River.  They call it Fort Caroline.  Even more alarming for the Spanish crown were rumors that a large French fleet was about to set sail for Florida.  Menendez's colonization efforts would have to wait.  The French settlement would have to be destroyed first.  And men like Miguel Mora would have to fight for it.  On June 29, 1565 Menendez's fleet departed from Southern Spain.  Ten weeks later on September 8 Menendez stepped ashore 40 miles south of the French Fort Caroline.  There he established his first settlement which he named St. Augustine.  A week later Menendez assembled a force of 500 men to march overland to attack the French fort.  It was a bold decision.  A fierce storm, perhaps a hurricane battered Menendez's men as they made their way north through marshes and swamps.  Led by two Florida Indians the Spanish troops reached Fort Caroline in the early morning hours of September 20, 1565.  Among the first Spaniards to lead the assault on Fort Caroline was Miguel Mora.  The Spanish victory was swift and decisive.  And soon thereafter Menendez began his ambitious enterprise to colonize the American Southeast.  For Miguel Mora, his Florida adventure was about to take an unexpected turn.  In 1566 during one of his voyages along the Florida coast Miguel Mora's ship wrecked in a terrible storm.  He and several survivors were taken captive by the Tekesta Indians near present day Miami.  Mora spent 10 months in captivity.  

>> There I was, naked, no stockings and fearful for my life.  Worried that I would be sacrificed by those Indians.  Dying of hunger and a captive for a period of ten months.  Miguel Mora.

>> J. Michael Francis:  After 10 months in captivity Mora and several of his companions managed to escape.  He then joined Spanish expeditions to [inaudible] and Carlos.  Before returning once more to Tekesta, the site of his 10 month captivity.  In 1568 the Spanish abandoned the Takesta settlement along with many of the other early garrisons.  Miguel Mora sailed to Cuba and then to Spain.  He would never return to Florida.  Yet for more than two centuries after his departure the shoals and mouths near present day Biscayne Bay carried his name.  The name of a Spanish soldier in captive whose Florida experiences have long since been forgotten.
^M00:47:08 [ Music ] ^M00:47:20
So this fall we're going to launch our center for Colonial Florida digital history.  We're still playing with the name.  And the hope is that 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now we won't have national history textbooks that begin the whole story of colonization of the Americas and begin with Jamestown.  But instead cover this more than one century period that has been largely overlooked in the national narrative.  And with that I thank you for coming and I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any.  Thank you.
^M00:48:00 [ Audience Applause ] ^M00:48:05
Yes?

>> So in Florida do they teach the history?

>> J. Michael Francis:  In fourth grade.  In fourth grade.  Now there are some teachers in high school who find ways to weave Florida history into classes in language arts, social studies in general or world history.  But for the most part the history, the Florida history that students get in Florida is the history they get in fourth grade.  And so, you know, and it's not just in Florida.  I gave a talk a few years ago at Spain's equivalent of the National Geographic Society.  So an audience, a well-informed audience in fact and after the talk a gentleman came up to me and said thank you so much for that talk.  I had no idea that Florida was a Spanish colony.  So maybe there are other ways, you know, we can get people interested in this early history.  You know, we'll do, we'll have to do a lot of reconstructions.  Because of course the, for example the Franciscan Mission Trail in Florida predates the California Mission Trail by more than a century.  But the buildings themselves are not there.  So the only way to do those kinds of reconstructions is digitally.  And we, there's been some phenomenal, there's ongoing archeological work in Georgia and South Carolina, in Alabama, places that were part of these early expeditions and settlements and missions.  You know, the Jesuit mission at Chesapeake Bay, you know, these are things that I think the best way to present that material now is through digital media and not, I mean, people have been writing these stories.  They're not really new to historians.  That we've known about the missions and about this early history for well over a century of people writing about it.  Popularly it's not well known.  And we hope that this will be a way that through animations and infographics and video that people get onto the site and then find it a little bit like Alice in Wonderland's world.  And get into the rabbit hole and dig deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.  And that's the plan.  So we'll have transcriptions and, you know, learn more about Miguel Mora or the Franco Spanish struggle for Florida.  So it will be a combination of things that we'll assign to different PIs, experts in at certain archeological sites for example.  Other people interested in prosopography, we'll get them involved.  We'd love to do a section on Spain and the American Revolution in Florida where there were English colonies, East Florida and West Florida.  So there this 13 colony business is in fact not accurate.  And a lot of loyalists of course flee to East and West Florida.  So we'd like to have those elements in there with again all kinds of visuals.  And podcasting, we're going to do some podcasting for this as well.  Yes?

>> Why [inaudible] missions survive in Florida like they did in California?

>> J. Michael Francis:  Well because they built the missions from material that didn't survive over the test of time.  They were waddle and dob constructions with thatch roofs.  And then of course the main reason why so many of the missions don't exist were they were destroyed by the English and their allies as they came in from the Carolinas and Georgia.  The early 17th century, late 17th and early 18th centuries those missions were sites where of massive slave raiding expeditions from English settlements to the North.  So they were absolutely devastating.  And so when the Spanish left Florida in 1764 when they returned 21 years later the missions don't come with them.  That's it, that whole mission trail that existed starting from the earliest established mission which was 1587.  Just outside of St. Augustine.  What is now the Fountain of Youth Archeological Park.  And the mission grounds that are right next to it.  That is the oldest established Franciscan mission in the continental United States.  Places like Cumberland Island had Franciscan missions.  So the whole story really goes up the Atlantic seaboard and into North Carolina and what is now Tennessee.  And we think this is a good way to weave all those narratives together.  And eventually weave it into a Jamestown narrative.  Yes?

>> I'm very impressed with the quality of the visuals for example the last video.  Are you working with I don't know like the art department or?

>> J. Michael Francis:  Francisco [inaudible].  His team, his team.  But, and the thing to remember he was almost embarrassed to send me that.  He said this is, this is not what we can do.  When we really get going and we have the resources which we're building right now.  And so this was something they did in what, how many days? 

>> Five days.

>> J. Michael Francis:  Five days.

>> Do you have animators and artists and [inaudible].

>> J. Michael Francis:  So they're going to do that element to it.  They will be involved.  And they have, we have all these partners who are coming into works in Spain and Seville, Cordoba, [inaudible], Madrid, museums and other institutions.  Because this is a project that doesn't work with one person.  You know, it's a big, it's a massive team collaborative endeavor.  And Tampa Bay History Center has just donated the rights to use all of their colonial maps which include some manuscript maps from their collection, the Tom Touchton collection which is fabulous.  And so what we'll do is just simply add animation to those maps to make them more accessible.  Transcription, translation, in some cases we'll animate the maps themselves, you know, the Drake attack on St. Augustine is perfect for that.  The [inaudible] map is ideal for something like that.  

>> Will you [inaudible] digitize those maps or [inaudible]?

>> J. Michael Francis:  Yea, we've digitized a number of them.  So the Tampa Bay History Center, those are all digitized in very high resolution tiffs.  So we'll have all of those.  We are working with some archives, I can't really say until we get the MOUs in place for those.  But our team then would go in and redigitize their collection.  And in exchange for redigitizing the collection they'll let us use those maps on the site at no cost.  Which is wonderful.  It's a great deal for them and it's also a good deal for us. You know, it's saddens me, you know, when you see these incredible maps and then you show them say to a Florida teacher and they say I've never seen that map before.  I've never seen that one.  I've never seen that one.  I've never seen that one.  So they're making up maps from the Colonial period when they don't have to.  And many of them don't even bother to look at the incredible repository of maps here from, you know, low resolution jpegs to tiffs that they can just download.  And so, you know, we need to somehow get that word out a little bit better that this material is here and there's a lot of it.  And for Florida there are millions and millions and millions of pages of documents.  I mean, we're just scratching the surface.  Yes?

>> You know, I was sort of struck by the, by where non-Spaniards of the expedition came from.  And I get a sense or a hint that's an indication of Spain's global position because it seems to, a lot of it seems to coincide with the Holy Roman Emperor.  

>> J. Michael Francis:  Yes.

>> And I, the empire.  And I don't remember how many Spanish kings were in effect also Holy Roman Emperors.  

J. Michael Francis:  Well in this period it's just one.  It's just Carlos Jesus.  Charles I and then Charles IV Holy Roman Emperor.  And so from, Spain of course is present in Italy, is, you know, Italian merchants have been setting up, moving their merchandise from the Indian Ocean and Asia into Spanish ports like [inaudible].  So in [inaudible] for example in the 16th century there's a large Greek and Italian community of Florentines and Genoese and Venetians and Greeks living in [inaudible] at that time.  So that, the world of these mariners, so many of these non-Spaniards were people in the maritime world.  And they're circulating in ways that we'd love to plot.  You know, we want to start to see the movement of Flemish sea captains who then become commissioned by the Spanish crown to send provisions and captain ships to different parts of the Americas.  And so we want to build that database of those people.  And in fact do some geoplotting and plot the movements of people over time.  I've read and I don't know if this is true but certainly a number of historians have repeated it and I'm just as guilty of repeating it.  But the word is that Pedro Menendez Aviles who founded St. Augustine crossed the Atlantic Ocean 50 times.  Now this is, it's hard to fathom.  How many people really have crossed the Atlantic 50 times in an airplane?  Let alone in 16th century ships.  He once sailed from St. Augustine to the Canary Islands in a small chalupa and made that trip in 18 days.  So if we could plot them over time and Francisco's team would do a timeline, you could plot an individual's life and that movement.  And that's one of the things that we want to incorporate into this.  Because I think anybody who works on Colonial Latin American history one of the first things that is so striking is how much people moved.  People who were in Italy, in Flanders, in different parts of Spain, in New Spain, in Peru, Northern South America and had networks of people in the movement of that information.  And lots of people have written about this.  We'd like to try to find ways to visualize that movement so that it becomes very clear to those who look at it.  And say wow, I didn't realize there was this kind of movement.  And plot Menendez's movement over his life.  So.
^M00:59:35 [ Pause ] ^M00:59:39
Wonderful.  Thank you.  Yes.

>> Thank you Michael.  I'm sorry I missed part of the [inaudible].  I'm sure this was fascinating [inaudible] Spanish embassies.  I'd like to offer support [inaudible] should you need our assistance [inaudible].  And even enlarge it to other states because I understand this is restrained to Florida.

>> J. Michael Francis:  Well it's beginning with Florida.  What we hope is that this could be an example for a different way to do digital history and digital humanities.  And that other places would say yeah, we want to do something like this for Texas, California, New Spain, Cuba.  You know the prosopography it's one of the problems with doing prosopography is it's enormously, enormously time consuming.  And it's not something you'd really have a doctoral student do because unless you wanted that doctoral student to spend 15 years doing that project.  But if it were in smaller parts and we could farm out those smaller pieces then that could work.  I would love to see the kind of prosopography that we've done for Florida for other parts of Spanish America.  And right now it's really quite limited.  And especially if you were to compare it to the work they've done in England which is incredible, the prosopography for Anglo Saxon England.  They're all sorts of incredible sites on prosopography in England because they've spent so much time working on that.  And we just don't have the equivalent for Spanish America yet. 

>> I was going to say when you say Florida, what's your [inaudible] definition.  I understand West Florida ran all the way to the Mississippi. 

>> J. Michael Francis:  Yes and of course West Florida doesn't exist until after the British arrive.  So Florida in the 16th century, I'm taking the very loose definition of what the Spanish refer to as [inaudible] which extended all the way up the Atlantic seaboard.  You could make a case that it included even Newfoundland even though in many of the maps they start to refer to that area once you get up into New England as the Province of Cod [inaudible].  And you see the, this is the land of [inaudible] where they would cod fish.  But the Spanish saw that all as part of the provinces of Florida and it extended into the interior until you arrived at some unknown place that eventually marked what became New Spain. 

>> I was going to say when you mentioned cod, the fisheries attracted Spanish fishermen from an early, early period. 

>> J. Michael Francis:  Oh absolutely.

>> It was the cod.

>> J. Michael Francis:  Yea, absolutely.  In fact it would not be at all surprising if there were cod [inaudible] and French cod fishermen before Columbus fishing off those grand banks.  But, you know, we don't have the documents for it.  They were certainly fishing there in the late 15th century without a doubt.  And we have the documentation for that cod fishing in the 1490s.  So probably before then they were cod fishing there.  So yea, so that would be the definition in the 16th century.  And then that definition, those boundaries change over time.  And so you could do a timeline for Florida that would mark that.  You know, you could mark those geographical divisions. 

>> I have an announcement.

>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov.