Seven Months Naked On The Beach

Tuesday Ginny felt well enough to return to work; I could have resumed work also, but instead I spent the day reading a book she gave me for my birthday—a reproduction of Jonathan Dickinson’s 1696 Journal.

Wow! What a great book!

Dickenson (or Dickinson, he spelled it both ways) was a 17^th Century Quaker merchant who sailed from Jamaica bound for Philadelphia. He kept a daily record of his adventures. His Journal was published in 1699 and went through numerous printings.

On September 23, 1696, a hurricane drove Dickinson’s barkentine, Reformation, aground near what is now Jupiter, Florida. Waves battered the ship to pieces. Dickinson, his wife and their six-month-old son along with about 25 other people survived the shipwreck.

But on shore, hostile Indians captured them and stripped them naked. The Indians stole all their clothes so that the cloth would not get bloody when they killed the shipwrecked people.

For seven months, the party, under hourly threat of death, was passed from one band of Indians to the next as the naked survivors struggled to walk along the beach 230 miles north to the Spanish colony of St. Augustine.

In his Journal, Dickinson recorded their faith and privations in broiling Florida sun, amid clouds of mosquitoes so thick the naked people buried themselves under beach sand to sleep and through the inch-thick ice of a winter Nor’Easter. Sharp shells shredded their bare feet and sawgrass sliced their legs as they trudged through deep mud of marsh and tangles of mangrove roots with Indians prodding them at spearpoint whenever they stumbled.

Though the Indians refused them food or water, clubbed them, or held knives to their throats, the Quakers refused to lift a hand against the savages; instead they relied on God to move the hearts of the savages—and He did.

Dickenson’s Journal records numerous incidents of the party being saved from savages intent on killing them.

“The hearts of all men are in the hands of God,” he wrote, “And He can turn them as He pleases. When these man-eaters’ fury was at height, their knives in one hand, and the poor shipwrecked people’s heads in the other; their knees upon the others’ shoulders, and their looks dismal; on a sudden, the savages were struck dumb, and their countenances changed that they looked like another people…”

Although shortly before, the Indians had killed, cooked, and eaten a party of shipwrecked Dutchmen, this time, for no apparent reason—except God’s hand—the savages abandoned the intended massacre of Dickenson’s group.

Twice in my own life I have seen the hearts of mobs intend on harming me turned aside from their purpose by the hand of God without my lifting a finger; That’s an awesome thing to have happen. Made me feel a bit eerie.

Five of the Dickenson party died of exposure on the trek north, but not a one fell to the “canibals”.

On another level, Dickinson’s Journal records details he observed about how the Florida Indians build houses, danced, brewed beer, smoked tobacco, treated the sick and weak among them (not good), and obtained food (few of them practiced agriculture).

Dickinson’s Journal is the best extant record of Florida Indian life during the late 1600s.

After being relieved of their sufferings by the Spanish governor of St. Augustine, the Dickenson party continued north to Charleston, South Carolina, by canoe. They crossed the mouth of St. Johns River between present-day Mayport and Fort George Island, just a few miles from our home. Ginny and I visited ruins on Fort George Island back on July 6^th (Our Fourth in my blog archives). Sawgrass marshes the Dickenson party crossed show up in some of the photos we snapped.

But at the time of our visit I didn’t associate Fort George Island with the Dickinson Journal.

Shows how much I know about local history..

Anyhow, Tuesday I read this wonderful book in one sitting, too fascinated to put it down.

Ginny certainly knows what it takes to spark my fires.