Timucua

The Timucua were the largest Indigenous people of northeast and north-central Florida and southeast Georgia, spread across some 35 chiefdoms that never formed a single polity. Franciscan Francisco Pareja wrote a grammar and catechisms in their language in the seventeenth century.

Juan Ponce de León may have met Timucua groups in 1513, and in 1539 Hernando de Soto's army executed some 200 people at Napituca. French Huguenots built Fort Caroline in 1564, but the Spanish destroyed it the next year and founded St. Augustine, from which missions spread across the chiefdoms.

Eurasian epidemics cut the population from an estimated 200,000 at contact to about 50,000 by 1595 and roughly 1,000 by 1700. Carolinian slave raids in 1703 killed or enslaved hundreds more. When Spain ceded Florida to Britain in 1763 the fewer than 100 survivors were taken to Cuba.