Indigenous Fort Caroline: A Digital Walking Tour

More and more people, governments, institutions, and businesses are showing respect and awareness of Indigenous peoples today and their histories by creating land acknowledgments. These can be very detailed or quite short. Because this tour offers so much information about the Mocamas, we are…
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Use the following tour map to reference your location while you walk through the trails at the Fort Caroline National Memorial and the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, both managed by the National Park Service.
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Before you walk from the parking lot up the steps toward the visitor center, take a moment to look around. Everything you see was part of the Mocamas’ homelands. In fact, the present-day Memorial is in just a small part of their territory. The Mocamas owned, lived on, and used the coastal lands,…
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As you walk up the steps to the visitor center, you will see the entrance to a small museum with artifacts from the Mocamas, their ancestors, and also the French. We encourage you to visit this museum after we have taken you through the Mocama world. The museum is over twenty years old and…
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We invite you to go back in time to the 1560s as you walk onto the breezeway and the main trail. Everything you see around you was part of the Mocama nation. In fact you are in the middle of their utimile (territory). Just four miles southeast of where you are standing was the town of Saturiwa. The…
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“some chieftains approached our captain and gave him to understand that they were subjects of a certain powerful chief named Saturiwa, whose territory we were in, whose residence was near to us, and who could put into the field so many thousand men.” –Jacques LeMoyne, 1564
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The trees, bushes, and plants you see around you as you walk the trail down towards the replica fort are overgrown. In the 1560s this area would have looked more like a carefully landscaped park, with much less underbrush. The Mocamas shaped and designed their environment. Mocama women were the…
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You are looking at a replica of a Mocama paha (house). Most Mocama houses would have been smaller, but holatacare (chiefs) had houses similar in size to this one. Isocare (mothers) were the heads of these households, not itecare (fathers). Mocama children belonged to their mother’s haso (clan), or…
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The Mocamas used coastal waterways and the St. Johns River as their main highways. Traveling by tico (canoe) was much quicker than by foot. Mocamas built and cleared sand and dirt paths leading to these water highways. They left canoes along the banks for those who needed them. They used canoes for…
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Mocama means: the sea (ma+Moca). The Mocamas were the people of the sea, but it is even more accurate to call them the people of the yalu or marsh. The Mocamas built their homes near tidal salt and freshwater marshes for easy access to cuyu (fish), sicali (oyster), and other resources. Mocama men…
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“During those days, the Paracousi Satouriona, who was our closest neighbour and on whose lands we were building our fort, would come.” – René Goulaine de Laudonnière, 1564
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La Caroline was located in between the hica (town) of Saturiwa and another Mocama hica. The French were eager to settle in Saturiwa territory because they believed it had the best access to yereba nali (gold) and yereba nayo (silver) and also to hono (food). The Mocamas permitted the French to…
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Saturiwa “sent messengers to Laudonnière, not merely to confirm the treaty they had entered into between them, but also in order that the latter should stand by the terms of the agreement, specifically by proving that he was a friend of the chief’s friends and an enemy of his enemies.” – Jacques le Moyne, c. 1564
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“a great famine followed because the Indians, both those nearby and those farther away, cut themselves off from us….. things got so much worse that three or four miles had to be covered before any Indian could be found.” – Jacques Le Moyne, 1565
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Without Mocama alliance and support, the French had no hope of surviving in Mocama utimile (homelands). The French thought about moving north to Charlesfort on present-day Parris Island, South Carolina. They had briefly established a fort there in 1562. But, mostly they wanted to return to France.…
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The fate of Fort Caroline always rested in Mocama hands. Still, the French had wasted little time in breaking their treaty with the Mocamas. This betrayal and Mocama power over what happened in their territory contributed to the failure of the French colonial project. The final assaults by the…
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Today, a number of Indigenous nations claim the Mocamas (Creeks) as ancestors including the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Muscogee Nation (Oklahoma). Although scholars are still piecing together the history of the Mocamas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primary source evidence…
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The Mocamas never gave up their territory or political power - their sovereignty – to the French, the Spanish, or any other outside power. In the 1680s, for example, Parucusi Merenciana -the high chief of the Mocamas - informed the Spanish that Cumberland and Amelia islands belonged to her people…
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