Source: Amy Notes (ID702)
Author: Howard, Amy (ID633)
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this is women and children
this is women and children
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Captain Fuentes accused the friar of Asao of abusing Indians
Date Created: 2023-10-12 20:56:17
Source: Situado and Sabana (ID 82)
Author: Bushnell, Amy (ID 32)
Content_id: 1654
THE GOVERNOR'S FILE ON FRIARS From Guale, Captain Francisco Fuentes continued to supply his superior with colorful stories for his file about Franciscan "abuses." Father Domingo Santos of Asao was too free with the whip, wrote Fuentes in a typical letter. "He publicly whipped the cacique Ventura in church for missing Mass one day AN200, because he had gone to the mainland along with some of his vassals (there being so few of them) to get stakes or saplings to fence in the convent so the animals cannot get in and dirty it. It seems they were making a raft. . . . The indios who left to go to [work for] Joseph Sanchez have complained to me-the ones he whipped for missing Mass . . . . "Some days ago he gave a Yuchi 40 lashes for missing Mass at daybreak because he overslept and for other grudges. The padre says it is because the Yuchi is running around with infiel women and does not want to learn the doctrine. AN201 The Yuchi has only been a Christian for one year. He says, and so do the other Indians, that nobody is teaching him, and that he [Santos] took him into the convent kitchen telling me that it was to teach him, when it was to dig and water." "The [same] friar went with his fiscal at midnight in a canoa to a place a musket shot away where the Indians have most of their little fields and plantings and whipped the indias and muchachos AN202 he found there because they were guarding the plantings from animals by shouting and it made him angry. When I asked the said padre what reason he had for whipping the poor people like that AN203, he answered that they were dancing forbidden dances. I asked: "And the indios, did you whip them?" He answered that there were none. "Well, then, padre," I said, "no dancing was going on, good or bad." "I told him to be a father with love, not whipping, especially to this Yuchi so he would not run off to the mainland and we lose his soul. He has stopped fighting and does not want to return to the war, although his parents and siblings weep for him, and he does not leave because he loves me. And the padre sent him to me and will not take him back, and [Santos] says he will leave and go to St. Augustine, for well he knows the road (Fuentes, 168lc). AN204 At the moment, doctrina discipline was probably not uppermost in the governor's mind. In the fall of 1681… (Bushnell SS)