Second Mission Period 1587
- 1616
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25. SAN BUENA VENTURA DE GUADALQUTNI,
Located on Jekyl Island on Georgia's coast, the mission first appears on Geiger's suspect 1587 list. Equally suspect is Lanning's placement of one of the 1595-1597 missions on Jekyl Island. The name Guadaiquini does not appear in the accounts of the rebellion or the events subsequent to it down through 1606. Bolton and Lanning place Fray Francisco Dávila on the Island of Ospo, which they identified as Jekyl Island. It is probable that Dávila's mission was farther north than Jekyl Island and on the mainland among the coastal marshes. Suspect also is the traditional identification of the Guadaiquini mission's inhabitants as Guale. No Spanish source identifies them as Guale, while the 1677-1678 visitation record indicated clearly that San Buenaventura's residents then were Mocama. A 1648 document also links the inhabitants with Mocama. In passing from Santo Domingo de Asao on St. Simons Island to San Buenaventura, the visitor replaced his Guale interpreter with a Mocama interpreter. In 1648 one passed on from Guadalquini to the province of Guale. On moving southward in the 1680s, the Mocama were sufficiently attached to the native component of the mission name to take it with them, even while changing the mission's Christian name to Santa Cruz.'° In primary sources there is no identification of the tribal affinity of San Buenaventura's inhabitants prior to 1648. The association of Jekyl Island with the Guale seems to have arisen from Bolton and Lanning's suspect placement of Fray Dávila there in 1597. But Lanning did not link Dávila's Tulapo mission with the later San Buena- ventura de Guadalquini. Positing the establishment of the Guadalquini mission between 1606 and 1655, Lanning placed San Buenaventura on St. Simons Island in his textual reference to the Guadaiquini mission, but on his map, located it on the mainland near Brunswick, Georgia. Lanning's citation for that textual reference is not germane. The earliest possibly reliable reference to the Guadaiquini mission's existence is Geiger's 1609 listing of a convent of St. Bonaventure at Guadaiquini, followed by an other from "about 1610," naming Bartolomé Romero as the friar there. For 1616 Geiger placed a Fray Alonso de Nabos there. On the 1655 list the mission appeared as San Buenaventura de Boadalquivi, located thirty- two leagues from St. Augustine. In 1675 Arcos described it as having possibly forty people and located it one and one-half leagues from Ocotonico, a mission on the southern tip of St. Simons Island, and six leagues north of San Felipe. The mission was last mentioned under this name on the 1680 mission list. The Jekyl Island site was doubtless abandoned or destroyed in one of the forays by English pirates or English-allied natives in the early 1680's. The survivors settled on a site three leagues from St. Augustine to which they gave the name Santa Cruz de Guadalquini.
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REFERENCES Dr. John H. Hann
"Summary Guide to Spanish Florida Missions and Vistas with Churches in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries"
© Copyright. John P. Walsh. April 24, 2002