§ 2 Civilization
The Floridians were physically a large, well proportioned race, of that light shade of brown termed by the French olivâtre. On the southern coast they were of a darker color, caused by exposure to the rays of the sun while fishing, and are described by Herrera as “of great stature and fearful to look upon,” (de grandes cuerpos y de espantosa vista). What rendered their aspect still more formidable to European eyes was the habit of tattooing their skin, practiced for the double purpose of increasing their beauty, and recording their warlike exploits. Though this is a perfectly natural custom, and common wherever a warm climate and public usage permits the uncivilized man to reject clothing a portion of the year, instances are not wanting where it has been made the basis of would-be profound ethnological hypotheses.
In their athletic sports they differed in no notable degree from other tribes. A favorite game was that of ball. In playing this they erected a pole about fifty feet in height in the centre of the public square; on the summit of this was a mark, which the winning party struck with the ball.210 The very remarkable “pillar” at the Creek town of Atasse on the Tallapoosa river, one day’s journey from the Coosa, which puzzled the botanist Bartram,211 and which a living antiquarian of high reputation has connected with phallic worship,212 was probably one of these solitary trunks, or else the “red painted great war-pole” of the southern Indians,213 usually about the same height.
In some parts they had rude musical instruments, drums, and a sort of flute fashioned from the wild cane,214 the hoarse screeching of which served to testify their joy on festive occasions. A primitive pipe of like construction, the earliest attempt at melody, but producing anything but sounds melodious, was common among the later Chicasaws215 and the Indians of Central America.216
Their agriculture was of that simple character common to most North American tribes. They planted twice in the year, in June or July and March, crops of maize, beans, and other vegetables, working the ground with such indifferent instruments as sticks pointed, or with fish bones and clam-shells adjusted to them.217 Yet such abundant return rewarded this slight toil that, says De Soto,218 the largest army could be supported without exhausting the resources of the land. In accordance with their monarchical government the harvests were deposited in public granaries, whence it was dispensed by the chief to every family proportionately to the number of its members. When the stock was exhausted before the succeeding crop was ripe, which was invariably the case, forsaking their fixed abodes, they betook themselves to the woods, where an abundance of game, quantities of fish and oysters, and the many esculent vegetables indigenous in that latitude, offered them an easy and not precarious subsistence.
Their dwellings were collected into a village, circular in form, and surrounded with posts twice the height of a man, set firmly in the ground, with interfolding entrance. If we may rely on the sketches of De Morgues, taken from memory, the houses were all round and the floors level with the ground, except that of the chief, which occupied the centre of the village, was in shape an oblong parallelogram, and the floor somewhat depressed below the surface level.219 In other parts the house for the ruler and his immediate attendants was built on an elevation either furnished by nature or else artificially constructed. Such was the “hie mount made with hands,” described by the Portuguese Gentleman at the spot where De Soto landed, and which is supposed by some to be the one still seen in the village of Tampa. Some of these were of sufficient size to accommodate twenty dwellings, with roads leading to the summits on one side, and quite inaccessible on all others.
Most of the houses were mere sheds or log huts thatched with the leaf of the palmetto, a plant subservient to almost as many purposes as the bread-fruit tree of the South Sea Islands. Occasionally, however, the whole of a village was comprised in a single enormous habitation, circular in form, from fifty to one hundred feet in diameter. Into its central area, which was sometimes only partially roofed, opened numerous cabins, from eight to twelve feet square, arranged around the circumference, each the abode of a separate family. Such was the edifice seen by Cabeza de Vaca “that could contain more than three hundred persons” (que cabrian mas de trecientas personas);220 such that found by De Soto in the town of Ochile on the frontiers of the province of Vitachuco; such those on the north-eastern coast of the peninsula described by Jonathan Dickinson.221
The agreeable temperature that prevails in those latitudes throughout the year did away with much of the need of clothing, and consequently their simple wardrobe seems to have included nothing beyond deerskins dressed and colored with vegetable dyes, and a light garment made of the long Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), the gloomy drapery of the cypress swamps, or of the leaves of the palmetto. A century and a half later Captain Nairn describes them with little or no clothing, “all painted,” and with no arms but spears, “harpoos,” pointed with fish bones.