Agua Dulce Erotic

The Agua Dulce were a Timucua-speaking people of the middle St. Johns River in northeast Florida. They lived around Lake George and the river country north of it until disease, mission upheaval and slave raids broke them apart in the 1600s and early 1700s. No community today traces an unbroken line back to them. Their name is Spanish for fresh water. It set these river and lake towns apart from the Mocama, the Timucua speakers of the Atlantic coast, whose own name meant the sea.

Their world was water. The St. Johns runs north, slow and wide, through swamp and hardwood hammock. The people on its banks ate fish, turtles, deer and huge quantities of freshwater snails, and the shell heaps they left still stand in places. Archaeologists group their ancestors under the St. Johns culture, known for a soft, chalky pottery made from clay full of freshwater sponge spicules. At Mount Royal, just north of Lake George, a large sand burial mound held hammered copper ornaments. The copper carried the imagery of the Mississippian world far to the north and west, a sign that these river towns were anything but isolated.

Their language, Timucua, is an isolate with no proven relatives, unlike the Muskogean tongue of the Apalachee to the west. The Franciscan friar Francisco Pareja, working in Spanish Florida in the early 1600s, named Agua Fresca among the Timucua dialects he knew, and that is how the dialect's name survives at all. Before the friars arrived, French and Spanish writers glimpsed Timucua priests and healers at work, along with a ceremonial black drink brewed from yaupon holly. Franciscan missions soon stood among the freshwater towns. Baptism, the church calendar and forced labor for St. Augustine reshaped ordinary life.

The first hard turn came in the 1560s, when the French built Fort Caroline near the river's mouth. Their accounts describe a powerful inland chief they called Outina. Many historians place his towns in or near this freshwater country, though the exact map is still argued. The French joined his war against the Potano, then ran short of food, seized him and held him for corn. Spain wiped out the French colony in 1565 and stayed. Epidemics hollowed out the towns over the next century, and English-backed Creek and Yamasee raids in the early 1700s scattered what remained. Timucua survivors from across the region gathered in shrinking settlements near St. Augustine, and the last handful left for Cuba with the Spanish in 1763. What endures is in the ground and the archives: the shell heaps, the mounds and a dialect name in a friar's list.