Second Mission Period 1587
- 1616
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33. IBI
A mainland Timucua village in the coastal hinterland opposite Cumberland Island and apparently the name of a province as well, as Fray Pareja spoke of having visited five villages of the land of Iby. At the start of the 1597 Guale revolt Fray Pedro Ruiz was at Ibi to open a mission there but he was recalled to St. Augustine at news of the revolt. In 1 602 Fray Baltasar Lopez mentioned having spent some days preaching in this village fourteen leagues from San Pedro, in the wake of which its chief had gone to St. Augustine to ask for a doctrina there. The Ibi, known also as Yui, were not mentioned in 1604 or 1606. But it is probable that a mission was established among the Ibi shortly after the infusion of large numbers of new friars beginning in 1612. In a 1630 petition to the Crown by Fray Alonso de Jesus, a San Lorenzo de Ibiica mission was mentioned as one of seven hardship missions for which Fray Alonso was requesting horses to ease the workload for the friars who served them. Some, he noted, are ill, others old and tired, and the land swampy and colder than exists in the Indies. The name Ibiica is probably a corruption of Ibihica as in Tatiuiica and Utinahica. Hica means "village" in the Utina dialect of Timucua.
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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