03 Beauty and the Beast by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781612181912
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 1982-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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IN THE year 1621, Governor William Bradford of Massachusetts decreed that December 13 be set aside as a day of feasting and prayer to express the gratitude of the colonists for the bounty of the first corn harvest they’d had since landing at Plymouth Rock. The Indians invited to the feast brought gifts of venison and wild turkey, which the women served together with the fish, geese, and ducks the men of the colony had provided. There was cornmeal bread in abundance, of course, and journeycake and succotash and nuts and pumpkin stewed in maple sap. The colonists and their Indian guests spent three days in prayer, singing, and feasting. That was America’s first Thanksgiving.

In this part of Florida, the Calusa and Timucua tribes of Indians weren’t faring quite as well as their neighbors far to the north. The first white man they had ever seen was the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León, who came to the Gulf Coast in 1513, fresh from his exploration on the Atlantic side, where he had given Florida its name and claimed for Spain all the land upon which he’d set foot. Here on the western side, he met with fierce resistance from the Indians, and was forced to sail back to Puerto Rico without the gold he was seeking. He did not keep his promise to return until eight years later, in 1521, only to be welcomed by a poisoned Indian arrow that ended his life and his dreams of glittering riches and eternal youth. (If he’d still been alive today, he’d probably have joined my three investor-clients in their intended conquistadorial plundering of the natural riches of Sabal Key.)

But de León wasn’t to be the last of the Spaniards who came to Florida’s shores. In 1539, his countryman Hernando de Soto landed on what is now known as Stone Crab Key, looking for the same gold that had eluded his predecessor, a treasure the Indians seemed not to know existed. The fighting was fierce and bloody, causing a Spanish defeat so monumental that Spain thereafter called off any future gold-seeking Gulf Coast expeditions. Other white men, however, could not be dissuaded from coming to Florida again and again, bringing with them a delightful array of civilized treasures like smallpox and syphilis (the Spanish disease, the French disease, the English disease, depending on where you came from) and taking back with them a commodity more valuable than the elusive gold they constantly sought—the able young bodies of Calusan and Timucuan braves.

By 1621, when those Massachusetts white men and Indians were celebrating together at their outdoor tables laden with food and drink, the Calusans and Timucuans were well on their way to extinction. By the turn of the century, there were scarcely more than three hundred of them left on the coastline they had inhabited for two thousand years. To the north, in Georgia and Alabama, the formidable Creeks were having troubles of their own, with the British, who were desperately trying to free their territories of Indian claims.

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