Spanish Colonial Era in Sebastian, Florida

From the 1500s until 1821 the Sebastian coast was Ais country inside Spanish Florida, governed on paper from St. Augustine but never settled by Spain, apart from a British interval that ended in 1783.

The Roseland marker of the Florida Division of Historical Resources states that the Ays lived along the confluence of the St. Sebastian and Indian rivers when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. Spain's interest in this stretch was the water route along it: the Gulf Stream carried treasure fleets north past the barrier island, and the coast between Sebastian Inlet and Fort Pierce was a place ships wrecked rather than a place colonists stayed.

Spanish maps took their names from the people who lived here. The National Park Service notes that the Indian River was once called the Rio d' Ais by the Spanish, and the Eau Gallie marker records the Indian River Lagoon as the Great Bay of Ais. The name Sebastian survives from the same era in the St. Sebastian River, the waterway that gives the city its name.

Four episodes from these centuries left a record tied to Sebastian: the Mexia mission of 1605, the wreck of the 1715 fleet off the barrier island, the Fleming land grant of 1816 on the St. Sebastian River, and the cession of Florida to the United States.

Spain treated the Ais of the Indian River as a power to negotiate with, sending an envoy down the coast in 1605 and drawing on Ais warriors as allies.

The Florida Division of Historical Resources records that in 1605 Florida's Spanish governor, Pedro de Ybarra, sent Lt. Alvaro Mexia on a diplomatic mission to the Ais. Mexia traveled south from St. Augustine and recorded what he passed, including Ais towns along the lagoon above Sebastian. His account is one of the few written descriptions of the Indian River coast from the first Spanish period.

The alliance ran both ways. The St. Lucie Historical Society says the Ais were friendly with the Spanish and sent warriors in 1605 to assist them in their campaign against the French. Spain built no mission or fort on the Sebastian River, and the Ais remained the people on the ground until disease and later raids broke them apart in the 1700s, as the Ais page in this series describes.

On July 31, 1715, a hurricane wrecked eleven ships of a Spanish treasure fleet bound from Havana, eight of them on the coast between present-day Fort Pierce and Wabasso, south of Sebastian Inlet.

NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory gives the sequence. After long delays the fleet of twelve ships left Havana on July 27, 1715, well into hurricane season, and the storm overtook it early on July 31 as it cleared the Bahama Channel. Three ships sank in deep water and eight were driven onto the coast from present-day Fort Pierce to Wabasso, north of Vero Beach. Of about 2,500 sailors and passengers, 1,000 died, including the commander, Captain General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla.

Florida State Parks says Ubilla's flagship, the Capitana, guarded a cargo of more than 3.5 million pesos in treasure. The loss of that cargo along the barrier island east of Sebastian is the event that later gave the region its name, the Treasure Coast. The wreck sites, the salvage law and the twentieth century finds each have their own pages in this series; this section covers only what happened in 1715.

About 1,500 survivors camped on the barrier island south of Sebastian Inlet, at the site now occupied by the McLarty Treasure Museum in Sebastian Inlet State Park.

The 1974 state marker on Orchid Island south of Sebastian Inlet puts the number of people who reached shore at about 1,500 men, women and children, camped close to where the flagship went down. From St. Augustine, Governor General Corcoles dispatched help made up mostly of Indian auxiliaries, who brought food for the castaways and guarded the divers working the wrecks. Excavation at the camp points to temporary storehouses built for the gold and silver brought up from the seabed.

Word of the wrecks off the Sebastian coast spread to Jamaica. According to the marker, the English pirate Henry Jennings arrived, chased off the camp guards and sailed to Port Royal with a large share of the recovered coin, yet Spanish salvors still brought most of the treasure back to Havana. NOAA adds that Spain eventually gave up the salvage, English opportunists moved into the camps, and the site faded from memory until the early 1940s, when evidence of it was found in the dunes near Sebastian Inlet.

The site is public today. Florida State Parks says the camp location is now the McLarty Treasure Museum, and its hours and fees page lists the museum as open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with park entry of $8 per vehicle for two to eight people.

The dates below mark the Spanish centuries on the Sebastian coast, each tied to the federal, state or court record that documents it.

At the end of Spanish rule the land along the St. Sebastian River belonged to George Fleming, who received a 20,000 acre grant from Governor Coppinger on September 24, 1816.

The U.S. Supreme Court opinion in United States v. George Fleming's Heirs describes the claim as twenty thousand acres situated on the banks of the river St. Sebastian, south of Indian River, between the east coast and the St. Johns River. Chief Justice John Marshall's court, in its January Term of 1834, held that the title was valid and confirmed it to Fleming's heirs on the boundaries set out in the grant.

The Roseland marker describes Fleming as an Irishman who had served in the army of Spanish Florida and says the grant, covering both sides of the St. Sebastian River, was important in the growth of the area. It also records the grant's long tail: in 1910 the A.A. Berry Land Development Company bought the remnants of the old Fleming land grant, and the Berry Land Office building still stands in Roseland.

Spanish rule over the Sebastian coast ended when Spain ceded East Florida to the United States under the Onis-Adams Treaty, signed in 1819 and ratified in 1821.

The U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian explains how the Sebastian coast changed hands. East and West Florida had returned to Spanish control by the Treaty of Paris in 1783 after a period of British rule. Under the agreement reached by Minister Luis de Onis and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Spain ceded East Florida and renounced its claim to West Florida; Spain received no payment, but the United States agreed to assume liability for $5 million in damage claims.

For the St. Sebastian River, the change of flag meant Spanish titles had to be proven in American courts. The Fleming case reached the Supreme Court on appeal from the superior court of East Florida, and only after the 1834 ruling was the grant secure. Settlement of the Sebastian shore by homesteaders came decades later, in the 1870s and 1880s, under United States land law.