The Ais, the Indian River's people in the Spanish record

The Ais were the people of the Indian River when the Spanish came to Florida. John Swanton, the Smithsonian ethnologist who compiled the Spanish records in 1922, called them the most important of the independent tribes on Florida’s southeast coast. Their chief town stood close to the Indian River Inlet, and their country was “said to have extended northward almost to Cape Canaveral,” which takes in most of what is now Brevard County. They didn’t farm. They lived on fish and on wild fruit: palm berries, coco plums and sea grapes.

The northern edge

At the north end of Ais country, Swanton places a province the Spanish called Ulumay, or Illumay. It shows up in the first surviving agreement between the two peoples. In 1570, after a war, the Spanish made a peace with the Ais, and under its terms they paid gifts to the chiefs of Colomas, which Swanton reads as Ulumay, a town in “a land of the Cacique of Ays,” and of a town called Rea.

North of the Cape the coast belonged to other people. Turtle Mound, the great shell heap on the Mosquito Lagoon near New Smyrna Beach, is the work of the Timucua, according to the National Park Service, not the Ais.

In the Spanish record

The Spanish never conquered the Ais, and what survives of them is a short list of visits and truces in colonial letters. After the 1570 peace, Swanton’s survey records:

• 1597. Governor Méndez de Canzo, traveling from the Keys to St. Augustine, was met by the chief of Ais with 15 canoes and more than 80 men. The governor wrote that this chief had more people than any other between those two points.
• 1605. An Ais leader the Spanish called Chico, “the Little Captain,” came to St. Augustine with 24 warriors.
• 1609. The chief of Ais visited St. Augustine.
• 1703. A last recorded attempt to convert the Ais. Swanton found no evidence that it succeeded.

Dickinson’s month at Jece

The one eyewitness account of Ais life comes from an Englishman who never meant to be there. Jonathan Dickinson, a Quaker merchant, sailed from Port Royal, Jamaica, in August 1696, bound for Pennsylvania with his wife, their infant and his household. The ship wrecked on the coast south of Ais country, and the survivors were passed north from town to town until they reached a town Dickinson called Jece. Swanton wrote that there is “practically no doubt” it was the Ais of the Spanish.

The king of Jece, Dickinson was told, was “Chief of all the Towns from St. a Lucea to the Northward of this Town of Jece,” and other towns sent him baskets of dried berries as tribute. The English ate what their hosts ate: fish, boiled “with the scales, heads, and gills,” and berries. The chief told them it was ten towns from Jece to St. Augustine. After about a month a Spanish patrol arrived and took the party north. Dickinson’s account was printed in Philadelphia in 1699; more of what he saw at Jece is on Old Palm Bay’s Ais page.

The end of the record

Swanton’s last dated mention of the Ais is the 1703 mission attempt. After that they drop out of the documents. The often-repeated story of Indians leaving for Havana when Spain gave Florida to Britain in 1763, 80 families of them, is in Swanton too, but it concerns the Calusa of the Gulf coast, not the Ais. Neither Swanton’s survey nor Dickinson’s journal records what became of the Ais themselves.

Further Reading

• The Seminoles of Florida by James W. Covington
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon