Spanish Eyewitness

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The Spanish eyewitness accounts of Florida made the first impression of the region as an untouched beauty, but it befitted the lives of the Native Americans. Historians held that Europeans believed that the natives symbolically represented the “purity” of the environment in resources and fertile land. Daniel Murphee suggest that the colonists actually inhabiting the peninsula and its hinterlands increasingly condemned natives whom, they believed, represented a bewildering environment responsible for European failures. The best description that Europeans gave to the native’s appearance is “barbaric” and “red savages”, which was significant in itself. After the first contact, Florida’s indigenous societies were suddenly thrust onto the universal

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