The Ais: the people of Palm Bay's stretch of the Indian River

The Ais were the people the Spanish found on Florida’s Atlantic coast between the Keys and St. Augustine, and their country took in the stretch of Indian River where Palm Bay now stands. The Smithsonian ethnologist John Swanton, compiling the Spanish records in 1922, called Ais the most important of the independent tribes on that coast, with its chief town near the Indian River Inlet and its territory said to reach north almost to Cape Canaveral. They didn’t farm. They lived on the river and the sea, and the only eyewitness account of their daily life comes from an English Quaker whose ship wrecked on their coast in 1696.

What the Spanish wrote down

The Spanish never conquered the Ais, so what survives is a scattering of visits, truces and complaints in colonial letters. Swanton’s survey lays them out:

• 1570. A treaty of peace with Ais after a war with the Spanish. Under its terms the Spanish paid gifts to the chiefs of two towns in “a land of the Cacique of Ays,” one of them Ulumay, at the northern edge of Ais country.
• 1597. Governor Méndez de Canzo, traveling from the head of the Keys to St. Augustine, was met by the chief of Ais with 15 canoes and more than 80 men. The governor wrote the next year 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 to offer his services to Governor Ibarra.
• 1609. The chief of Ais visited St. Augustine.
• 1703. A last recorded attempt to bring the Ais to the Catholic faith. Swanton found no evidence it worked, and says the Ais apparently stayed unconverted to the end of Spanish rule.

That’s thin for a people who held some 70 miles of coast through most of Spanish Florida’s history.

Dickinson at Jece, 1696

On the 23rd day of the Sixth Month, August, 1696, Jonathan Dickinson sailed from Port Royal, Jamaica, for Pennsylvania with his wife, their infant child, his household and the ship’s company. The ship wrecked on the Florida coast south of Ais country. Taken north from town to town, past the town the Spanish called Santa Lucia, the party was brought to a town Dickinson called Jece. Swanton wrote that there is “practically no doubt” it was the Ais of the Spanish.

Dickinson’s journal, printed in Philadelphia in 1699, is the closest thing to a view from inside. Some of what he saw at Jece:

• The chief’s reach. Baskets of dried berries came in from other towns as tribute to the king of Jece, “who is Chief of all the Towns from St. a Lucea to the Northward of this Town of Jece.” When the old chief returned from a trip south, he came in state on two canoes lashed together with a mat-covered platform, sitting cross-legged on a sea chest taken from Dickinson’s own wreck.
• The food. Fish, boiled “with the scales, heads, and gills,” and berries. Swanton, reading Dickinson, lists the Ais plant foods as palm berries, coco plums and sea grapes. The English liked the last two and couldn’t stomach the palm berries.
• The talk. After the old chief gave his account of the trip, the elders weighed in, and then they “drank Cassena and Smoaked until Evening.”
• The road north. The chief told them it was ten towns from Jece to St. Augustine, with places where canoes had to be dragged overland.

The party spent about a month at Jece before a Spanish patrol came for them and took them north toward St. Augustine.

And Turkey Creek?

Palm Bay sits inside the country Swanton assigns to the Ais. But neither Swanton’s survey nor Dickinson’s journal names a town at Turkey Creek or anywhere else on the bay at Palm Bay. Any claim about an Ais village at the creek’s mouth, how long it was lived in, or what lies in the ground there, has to come from archaeology rather than from the written record.

What the written record supports is regional. The people who fished this part of the river when the Spanish came lived in Ais country, under a chief whose towns, Dickinson was told, ran from Santa Lucia northward.

What came after

Swanton’s last dated mention of the Ais is the 1703 mission attempt. He records that when Spain handed Florida to Britain in 1763, the last of the Calusa, the Ais’s neighbors on the Gulf coast, were reported to have crossed to Havana, 80 families of them.

The sanctuary that protects the lower creek today is covered on our Turkey Creek Sanctuary page. For the Ais along the whole Brevard coast, from the Spanish sightings to the end, see the Old Space Coast account.

Further Reading

• The Seminoles of Florida by James W. Covington
• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce