Jonathan Dickinson - Jece

Jece

At Jece (the chief town of the Ais), near present-day Vero Beach, they were welcomed and given some pieces of clothing. They met the survivors of the shipwreck they had passed, which was the Nantwitch, part of the convoy from Port Royal. The Nantwitch had been driven ashore by the same storm that wrecked the Reformation. Later that evening the stragglers caught up with the main group. Solomon Cresson said he had been detained at Santa Lucea, while John Hilliard and Ben had been asleep in another house when the party was driven out of town.

Upon hearing from the travelers what had been taken from them by the Cacique of Jobe, the Cacique of Jece, who appeared to be the paramount chief of the Ais, decided to go to Jobe to claim part of the plunder. While he was gone the town was hit by a severe storm, probably a hurricane, that flooded the town and nearly drowned the party. The cacique returned on October 11, bringing part of the goods plundered from the shipwreck, and the boy Caesar, who had been kept behind by the Cacique of Jobe. The cacique recognized that the goods from the Reformation were English, and now strongly doubted that the travelers were Spanish.

The cacique indicated that he planned to travel to Saint Augustine, and would take one of the shipwrecked party with him. They eventually decided to send Solomon Cresson, as they feared the Indians living closer to Saint Augustine would know enough Spanish to recognize that the other members of the shipwreck party were not Spanish. The cacique left for Saint Augustine on October 18, taking Solomon Cresson and much of the money that the Jobes had taken from the Reformation. The cacique told them it would be about a month before he returned.

The stranded party suffered while the cacique was gone. The Indians of this part of the Florida coast did not cultivate crops, but lived on fish, shellfish and palmetto, cocoplum and seagrape berries in season. The berries were gone by this time, and the Jeces seldom gave the stranded party fish. They were reduced to eating the gills and guts of fish taken from a "dung-hill", as Dickinson puts it. The party from the Reformation continued to worry about their fate. The Indians of Jece would alternately threaten the Reformation party and then tell them how they planned to kill the Nantwitch survivors.

Mary Dickinson's milk was failing. Some women of the town would occasionally nurse the Dickinson infant, but there were other mothers in the town with insufficient milk, so there was little to spare for him. When a woman who had recently given birth, but had no milk, gave her child to Mary Dickinson to nurse, Mary did so, although she had little milk herself. This turned out to be to her benefit, however, as the Indians started giving her fish to eat so that she could produce enough milk for the Indian new-born, as well as her own child.