Distinguished Speaker Series: Storms, Shipwrecks, and Saints’ Names | The Early Maritime History of the Florida Keys

This talk will focus on the dangers associated with early Caribbean and Gulf travel in the first generations of Spanish colonialism.  The Florida Keys were a late and important, but also particularly treacherous, final leg of a roundtrip journey from Spain, through the Caribbean, and back to Spain.  The journey took months, and brought ships through regions susceptible to storms that would destroy ships and condemn their survivors to deaths by exposure.  Storms influenced why Spanish authorities attempted the settlement of the coastline so frequently in the 16th century—settlements like Havanna and St. Augustine did not just establish claims to the region, they were important and necessary salvaging outposts.  They even explain the Saint names Spanish mariners gave islands and rivers in the region: their names usually reflected the late winter or Spring, out of hurricane season when travel was safest.  A maritime history of storms and how to survive them, in short, reveals the importance of exploring and maintaining a presence on La Florida for the Spanish.

About the Presenter:

Dr. Kevin Kokomoor earned his degrees at the University of South Florida and Florida State University, and has been teaching at Coastal Carolina University since 2012. He is an Early Americanist and an Ethnohistorian, whose primary research and teaching focuses on the Southeast and the Native Southeast, the Early Republican and Federalist Eras, and ideas of frontiers and borderlands.

Kevin’s recent publications deal primarily on the colonial and early American Southeast.  His first book, Of One Mind and Of One Government: The Rise and Fall of the Creek Nation in the Early Republic, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019, and represents a political history of the Creek people of modern-day Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.  His most recent publication with Pineapple Press, La Florida: Catholics, Conquistadores, and Other American Origin Stories, is a look at the earliest years and legacies of Spanish colonialism in the American Southeast, known for hundreds of years as ‘La Florida’.

Funding for this program was sponsored in part by Aloys & Carol Metty and The John & Marilyn Rintamaki Family Charitable Fund.