16. Indian River

We are sailing up the long lagoon they call the ‘Indian River’. It runs from Jupiter through Vero Beach to past Cape Canaveral. There is a warm east wind; the water is flat; over there white pelicans are herding fish. (Did you know they summer in Manitoba?).

It is a gorgeous day.

But we have been reading about a much different trip.


In the morning, they salvaged what they could from the wreck but were immediately discovered by a rabble of Indians who attacked ‘foaming at the mouth.’ The Indians snatched everything, ripped off their clothes and shoes and were about to kill them. Being Quakers, the shipwrecked party sat calmly ‘… giving themselves to the Will of God…’ Nonplussed by this behavior the Indians held their knives and instead drove the strangers barefoot and naked back to their village.

Jonathan Dickenson with his wife, baby, and eleven slaves had chartered a barkentine (probably about the size of the Playfair) to take them from Jamaica to the Quaker colony of Philadelphia. In those days you sailed up the coast of North America, keeping it in sight, until the pole star was at the right elevation. In the night of the 23rd of September, a gale drove them onto the beach five miles north of Jupiter (near Hobe Sound). The boat broke up.

At that time, and this was 1696, the Spaniards claimed the lower half of North America but there were no European settlements in Florida except for the Spanish army post at St Augustine. The Indians in the peninsular lived in small, mutually hostile, villages at a Paleolithic level eating berries and fish.

Jonathan’s party pretended to be Spaniards (whom the Indians feared) not Englishmen (who could be killed with impunity). After several days they were allowed to leave and they set off without clothes, shoes, food or water for St Augustine 230 miles to the north. You have to see this country to imagine how difficult this trek would be. Inland there are lagoons lined with mangroves thickets, neither water nor land; at the coast, barrier islands covered in prickly palmettos and interrupted by fast tidal inlets.

And this was an early brutal winter.

Jonathan’s vivid journal has survived. In it he describes the cold and starvation, the deaths of the first five, but also, with cool objectivity, the behavior of the Indians and the nature of their villages.

We are following the same route but with, we hope, a sheltered anchorage and a hot meal every night and a cozy, dry V berth!