On Useppa

"Its jaws were working convulsively in quick bites against the hook and it pounded the bottom of the skiff with its long flat body, its tail and its head until he clubbed it across the shining golden head until it shivered and was still."  Old Man and the Sea








The youngest of the Calusa scouting party was the one who first understood why the great ship before them had been tied down onto its side in low tide.  The great Spanish Galleon, known in that native tongue as as El Capitan, part of the newly conceived Spanish Treasure Fleet, had been careened and

lay at something close to a 45 degree angle in shallow water.  The young Calusa could see that the foreign men had formed their supply camp on the white beach and that long ropes were tied to the masts and strapped to palm trees deeper into the shoreline.  Men were either crouched at the seam where the ship touched the lapping water or were suspended up on several rungs of hand made ladders.  The Calusa son, no older than fourteen years old, said out loud that "they are cleaning the great house on

the water." The old warriors, colored in all varieties of war paint, pikes in hand to stabilize their dugouts at a distance out of the way of the eyes of the Spanish, nodded that this was a possibility.  And if this was the sole purpose of these foreigners, than maybe they could make peaceful contact and offer some form of trade; their own great nation of peoples, with the support of the great sun and water and animal gods, ruled these blue waters and the house now sitting at a vulnerable tilt was not fierce looking at all considering the work they were doing.  The elders raised up large pouches of shells as if

in a weighing motion to consider what it would be that they could ask for in return.  They knew of other wrecks by the hands of the great southern winds and knew of the silver metals that these ships carried.  They also knew of other things that had become spectacularly mysterious in their knowledge-making for the tribe: pieces of rolled paper with lines drawn that looked, when considered for a great while, much like the contours of the very islands and rivers that they lived.  How these men of the sea came to possess such knowledge of the shapes and distances of things created such a phantom of mystery that the new comers, the Espanol as they called themselves, were both extremely feared and revered in the same moment, to such a degree that a Calusa, upon initial contact, might as easily attack as behold.  The young Calusa in the dugout pitched his pike down along the side of the dugout and heaved onward, lacking fear, as young men do who do not yet know the reality of true danger.  The others followed, knowing this was the right thing.  Above, the sun was Florida yellow and turned the water ahead to a bejeweled coloration that only the natives themselves could take for granted.  A sea turtle surfaced just ahead and the young tribesman made a gesture, picking up his pike, as if he were to throw it and impale the great creature rising from the shallow depths.  This was an arrogance that the elders did not allow and motioned for the youth to move back in the ranks of the dugouts, which forced a sour grimace on the young man's face.  "We will land on the other side of the island and some of us will approach the foreign visitors with our bags of the sea's jewels." Off in the distance, the

careened ship had just been released back up right. The voices of commands in a strange tongue could be heard traveling across the surface of the blue water.  None of the participants in this simple moment, when considered in context of the long perspective of ancient sea-time, could have understood, but this was the moment of the turning of the history of Florida and therefore the Americas, as the possession of this magical peninsula, called "The Land of Flowers" later by Spanish founder Ponce de Leon, slipped out of the hands of the native tribes of the old ocean world, to the new powers of this unknown seafaring world.