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.

 Return to Table of Contents