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| God's Protecting Providence written by Jonathan Dickinson (1663–1722) wealthy Quaker merchant and first published by the Society of Friends in Philadelphia in 1699 recounts the experiences of Dickinson's travels with his wife ans son, a family member Benjamin Allen, and Quaker missionary Robert Barrow on the ship Reformation commanded by Captain Joseph Kirle. A journey from West Indies to Philadelphia ended up in a hurricane and Florida. "The diary gives one of the first and most detailed accounts of early Florida. It discusses seventeenth-century plants, animals, and Spanish missions or "churches". More importantly, the journal describes the now-extinct local tribes he encountered along Florida's east coast, including the local Jaega, Ais, and Timucua tribes in central and north Florida, and the Apalachee in the Panhandle." (John R. Reis, The Life and Times of Jonathan Dickinson) |
He was Member of the Colonial Assembly: Philadelphia County, 1710-1711, 1716-1717, 1718-1720; Philadelphia City, 1717-1718, 1720-1721. Affiliation: Quaker, Pro-Proprietary. And was elected Mayor.
As Speaker, Dickinson lead the Assembly as issues over Pennsylvania’s proprietorship were addressed after the death of William Penn. He owned one of the first carriages in the city.
As described by John R. Reis, in "The Life and Times of Jonathan Dickinson," "The mood of the natives changed constantly from friendship to hostility, keeping the crew of the Reformation on edge and fearing for their lives. One native shoved a fistful of sand into baby Jonathan's mouth when they first came ashore. But at another time, a native woman nursed baby Jonathan when his mother no longer had milk. At one point, the natives placed knives to the throats of the Dickinson party-but yet not long after, Jonathan was invited to the Indian chief's hut. There, he dined on boiled fish on a palmetto leaf. At times the natives were rough. At one point, they stripped the survivors of most of their clothes. But later, the natives would sit quietly listening to the Quakers read from the Bible."
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| Photo from Early Visions of Florida erected in 1961 by Florida Board of Parks and Historic Memorials with Jonathan Dickinson Chapter D.A.R. |
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| The Tampa Tribune Sunday May 8 1988 |
Florida's coast was a deadly place for seventeenth-century castaways. Amy Turner Bushnell HUMANITIES, January/February 2013, Volume 34, Number 1
Dickinson sailed from Port Royal, Jamaica, on September 2, 1696, on the barkentine Reformation, bound for Philadelphia. With him were his wife and baby son, a kinsman, a Quaker missionary, eleven slaves including a child named Cajoe, and nine mariners. The voyage was ill fated: The ship fell out of convoy, the shipmaster broke his leg, and an Indian slave girl fell ill and died.
After a month of waiting at sea, a storm caught them in the Bahama Channel. Hencoops blew open and filled with seabirds, sheep and hogs washed overboard, and early in the morning of October 3, the vessel ran aground. Dickinson got his people and baggage ashore and out of the rain under a tent of spars and sails. They were soon sighted. Two men in breechclouts of woven grass ran up, snatched the tobacco and pipes that Dickinson held out, and, “making a snuffing noise,” ran away.
Although only one of them spoke Spanish, the twenty-four castaways agreed to say that they were headed toward St. Augustine, 230 miles to the north. To reach the Spanish settlement, they had to cross the territories of four hunting and gathering peoples: the Jaega, Santaluz, Ais, and Surruque. The Wild Coast was not part of Spanish Florida.
The Jaega who came to salvage the wreck ordered the party to unlock their chests, trunks, and boxes. The chief took the money; the warriors divided the clothes, including some that the party was wearing. At the town of Jobe, several miles away, they were given a meal of fish and set to work repairing locks and mending tears, while the chief ’s wife dandled and nursed the Dickinsons’ baby, Jonathan. In the distance they could see the smoke of a great fire, the burning Reformation.
Although warned that the Santaluces would kill them, the group started northward. When night fell they built a fire on the beach and buried themselves in the sand to escape the sand flies and mosquitoes. At daybreak on the second morning, a group of Santaluces with bows and arrows fell upon them, crying “Nickaleer, Nickaleer,” their word for English people. Those in breeches were shaken out of them. Mary Dickinson had her clothes torn from her body and her hair-lace yanked from her head. The walk to the town of Santaluz was a gauntlet of stones, blows, and menacing weapons. At the council house, the castaways were ordered to lie on the floor, nasty with garbage and swarming with scorpions and large, hairy spiders. Unaccountably, an hour later they were brought Indian clothing and a meal of clams, fish, and palm berries. That night they were hurried along to Ais territory, past the wreck of a smaller ship, the Nantwich, lost in the same storm.
The old chief of Ais washed Mary Dickinson’s feet, injured by sunburn and the hot sand. He promised to take his Spanish “comrades” to St. Augustine as soon as he could collect his share of the salvaged cargo, but not the seven Nickaleers from the Nantwich. Food ran short in Ais while the old chief was away, and Jonathan later confessed that when he and Mary thought that they might die and their child be brought up a savage, “it wounded us deep.”
On the twelfth of November, a piragua came in sight and out stepped Captain Sebastián López with a squad of soldiers and the old chief, whom he had met along the way. No longer able to pretend that they were Spaniards, the Jamaicans begged López to escort them to St. Augustine. He agreed to see them as far as the Surruque border, but he had no extra rations. To feed themselves for a two-week trek they had nothing but a bagful of stolen berries.
The weather was turning cold, and they were without blankets or warm clothes. On one terrible day, November 23, five members of the party, including little Cajoe, died on the beach of exposure. As the survivors neared St. Augustine, they took shelter in three successive sentinel houses. The sentinels could not feed them and had no boats to spare, but once they were safely inside the capital, the townspeople lodged, clothed, and fed them, and the governor kindly arranged for them to travel up to Charleston, where they could take ship for Pennsylvania.
No one who experienced the wreck of the Reformation would ever forget it. So that others could profit from their sufferings, the Quaker Meeting in Philadelphia published Dickinson’s account as God’s Protecting Providence. In the next 170 years it would be reprinted sixteen times in English and three times each in Dutch and German, long after Creek and Carolinian slave raiders had depopulated the Wild Coast and the mission provinces of Spanish Florida.
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| Palm Beach 1965 DAR |
- Gillingham, Harrold E. “Notes and Documents: The Estate of Jonathan Dickinson (1663-1722).” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 59, no. 4, 1935, pp. 420–429. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20086941.
- University of Florida John Dickinson's Journal http://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/00/06/73/37/00001/dickinson_journal.pdf
- MAP https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/ReystogtJamaika-dickinson-1706
- A History of the People Called Quakers: From Their First Rise to the Present Time. Compiled from Authentic Records, and from the Writings of that People, Volume 3 John Gough
Robert Jackson, Meath Street., 1789 - Society of Friends - Early Visions of Florida
- “Suffering of the Shipwrecked Quakers,” by Frederik de Coste. In True Tales of Old St. Augustine, pp. 31-35, Great Outdoors Publishing Company, St. Petersburg, Fla., and the St. Augustine Historical Society, 1966.
