SOURCE: “Colonization and the American Indian in Simms's ‘Lucas de Ayllon,’” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 37, Nos. 3-4, Spring, 1999, pp. 277-82.

[In the following essay, Murphy contends that although Simms's treatment of the Indian in his short story “Lucas de Ayllon” focuses primarily on physical characteristics, it should still be considered a positive representation of the Combahee people.]

William Gilmore Simms's fictional history “Lucas de Ayllon: A Historical Nouvellette” (1845) offers a unique and sympathetic perspective of the American Indian as a tragic victim of colonization. While utilizing a form of colonial language which treats the human subject as a body, Simms succeeds in bringing to light the admirable character of the Indian and the tragedy which marked the fate of many North American indigenous peoples. The use of language which focuses on the body can be interpreted as prejudicial in particular readings of colonial literature, for it treats the subaltern subject as a physical object more than as an authentic individual. In “Lucas de Ayllon,” however, this form of literary representation ironically has been used to express commendable qualities of the Indian which so often are not voiced. A characteristic treatment of the Indian as object might read as does a passage from John Archdale's narrative “The Indians and Their Quarrels” of 1707: “I believe, if managed discreetly, may many of them, in a few Years, become Civilized, and then very capable of the Gospel of Christ” (Milling 289). Contrarily, Simms's portrayals of the physical subject undermine a form of colonial language which otherwise degrades the Indian as an inferior species of human.

Through Simms's depictions of the native's body, injustices can be recognized by gestures, and values can be expressed by actions. Furthermore, the author's insightful view of the Indian permits us to look into their worldview. We find, for instance, that the native is uncompromising regarding spiritual values. Compared to the avaricious, manipulative colonizer Lucas de Ayllon and his pirates, the Combahee Indian possesses admirable principles and a strong character. Simms's “Lucas de Ayllon” effectually denounces the process of enslavement, reveres the Indian, and reveals admirable aspects of an indigenous culture normally ignored or suppressed.

Simms's short story has some historical basis:

In June, 1521, Francisco Gordillo, operating under orders from Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, anchored his caravel in the north of a river to which he gave the name of St. John the Baptist, identified by Swainton as the Pedee or one of the other streams entering Winyah Bay. Finding the natives friendly, Gordillo enticed a number of them on board his vessel. No sooner were they in his power, however, than he raised anchor and carried them off into slavery.

(Milling 65)

Having arrived in Santo Domingo, the government castigates Gordillo's actions, and the slaves are set free. However, they are not returned to their homeland of what is now southeastern South Carolina. De Ayllon's troops in South Carolina, having settled near the mouth of the Savannah River soon thereafter, disband in 1526, failing to conquer the indigenous people of this region.

Simms uses this information to create the fictional history entitled “Lucas de Ayllon.” In the short story, pirate-colonizer Lucas de Ayllon suppresses the Indian's voice as a strategy to gain control over his adversary. The conflict is based on the superior arms and cunning of the pirate against the weaker and initially naive Combahee Indians. The representative struggle between Lucas de Ayllon and the Indian queen Combahee (who takes the name of her people) is an attempted conquest of innocent people on virgin land. The values exhibited by the Indian show that the Indian is the more principled individual, even by occidental terms, in the conflict created by the quest to colonize. Instead of compromising a sacred ideology, the Indian will choose to die. Simms presents the pride of the Indian similarly in The Yemassee, A Romance of Carolina, although the time and circumstances contrast. Sanutee, a Yemassee chief, will not compromise the traditional values of his tribe even though his refusal to submit to the white colonizer entail the extinction of his people. But it is Matiwan, the chief's squaw, with whom the reader might sympathize most. It is she who has had to sacrifice the life of her morally and spiritually compromised son Occonestoga to save his soul. Like Combahee in the conclusion of “Lucas de Ayllon,” Matiwan also upholds the dignity of her native identity despite the inevitable extermination of her people.

Sequentially, and perhaps strategically, Simms leads us in “Lucas de Ayllon” from a view of the colonizer to a view of his victim. At the inception of the work one reads:

[Sebastian Cabot's] single look, according to the laws and morals of that day, in civilized Europe, conferred a sufficient right upon the nation by which he was employed, to all countries which he might discover, and to all people, worshipping at other than Christian altars, by whom they might be occupied.

(149)

It is Lucas de Ayllon who practices that right, to which the narrator adds the foreshadowing thought: “Just Providence had ordained that [Lucas de Ayllon's] crimes should there meet with that retribution which they were not likely to encounter any where else” (150). Not only is De Ayllon's role in the process of colonization condemned by Providence; moreover, retribution for his crimes will be at the hands of the Combahee Indians.

Simms casts the Spanish pirate-colonizer De Ayllon as a coastal predator. His principal interest is the capture and sale of Indians into slavery. The captain is a deceptive, manipulative man out to exploit the curiosity of the Indian through temptation. Of his strategy to lure the natives, we read:

De Ayllon shrewdly conjectured that if he could tempt these more important persons to visit his vessels, the great body of savages would follow. His object was numbers; and his grasping and calculating soul scanned the crowds which were in sight, and thought of the immense space in his hold, which it was his policy and wish to fill. To bring about his object, he spared none of the customary modes of temptation.

(152)

De Ayllon decorates the ship with bright ornaments and offers food and alcohol to the Indians. Foremost in mind as his first victim is Chiquola: although leader of the tribe, Chiquola is young and naive. And to De Ayllon, the natives are no more than physical bodies to exploit. He will deceive the Indian and entrap him into the hull of the ship as if he were luring an animal into a cage.

It is De Ayllon's treatment of the Indian as a physical commodity which Simms works toward undermining, and the author does so through his representations of the three main characters of the novellette. Chiquola, young and impressionable, is quickly seized after having been tempted to handle the captain's large, ornamented sword. This capture is emblematic, for it signifies the incarcerating and consequent silencing of the Indian. The native will no longer wish to communicate with the pirate-colonizer, for even the pirate-colonizer's gestures of friendship are deceptions. “Now mounts he the ocean wave, banished, forlorn, / Like a limb from his country cast bleeding and torn” (157) are the words which foreshadow doom for Chiquola and his people. But even in the control of the “stern, cold” De Ayllon, the narrator remarks that the natives are “of noble stature; graceful and strong of limb; of bright, dark flashing eyes, and of singularly advanced civilization” (151). Though the descriptions of the Indian continue to be of a physical nature, Simms portrays the natives as estimable people.

Although the leader of the Indians has been captured and silenced, the courage of the tribe is still represented in the escape of the Indian queen, Combahee. In this instance, even Lucas de Ayllon, who has looked upon the Indian as inferior, is left to esteem the woman who becomes the most dominant figure in the story.

[Lucas] saw the fearless courage of the man in all her movements, and never did Spaniard behold such exquisite artifice in swimming on the part of any of his race.

(157)

The body has become an object of admiration and a sight to behold, even for the oppressor. The narration continues, “But the vigorous savages of Combahee were a very different race. They belonged to the great family … of indomitable tribes” (159). Here, a distinguished heritage is acknowledged, and respect is bestowed upon this “very different race.”

“Body language” remains the predominant means through which the Indian's message is conveyed. The description of the body demonstrates what cannot be articulated by the Indian, and it has become the means through which the author has chosen to represent the indigenous people. Its sleekness, tone, and shape, for instance, tell us of its akinness to nature. The body is inscribed, as it were, with numerous messages, pieces of biographical information from which the observer ascertains an identity. Through Simms's representation, it is graceful and unintrusive.

While the arrival of foreign people has made the Indian curious, it is the effort to entrap, imprison, and enslave which causes change in the disposition and manner of the Indian: the “savage” comes out as a result of being threatened. Again, emotion is revealed through physical description. In expressing rebellion, for example, Combahee becomes stern and “erect”: her hair, her shoulders, and her form, even “the flashing of her eye [become] a voice to her warriors” (158). Despite the capture of Combahee's people, the narrator still continues to laud “her very intelligent and pleasing features,” her “symmetry,” and concludes, “the woman seemed altogether a superior person” (155).

Combahee is idolized as a woman of beauty and courage, and this idealistic characterization is achieved respectively through the sensual description of her body and her defiance of the superiorly armed pirate-colonizers. Through her bravery and dignity, she becomes her people's leader and De Ayllon's nemesis. Combahee's flight signals a cry to battle recognized by “the whole body of the people” who see in this act the oncoming of disaster, for they are not equally matched in weapons against the invaders. The flight is also symbolic for two reasons: first, it has denied de Ayllon the chance to possess Combahee, and second, it is a demonstration of the Indian's refusal to subject or compromise himself/herself to the will and intent of the aggressor. One sees the attempt to subjugate the Indian in the following passage:

[Lucas] advanced—his hand was stretched forth towards her person—when she drew up her queenly form to its fullest height; and, with a single word hurriedly spoken to the still struggling Chiquola, she turned, and when de Ayllon looked only to receive her submission, plunged suddenly through the stern windows of the cabin, and buried herself in the deep waters of the sea.

(157)

De Ayllon has assumed that the Indian woman will submit to him because of his position of control and his authoritative figure, which is reminiscent of Columbus who wrote as if the Caribbean natives would seek his friendship and offer their natural resources freely (Colon, “Carta”). This projected attitude relates to the dominant, paternalistic image of the colonizer which Columbus wanted to evoke. He cast himself as protector even though many of the same Indians were massacred. Other testimonies (such as Comentarios Reales de los Incas by El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla y Zuñiga) reveal that assumptions of native passiveness were mistaken. Indians did rebel and defend themselves against the process or methodology of colonization which often included genocide. Indians were slaughtered as an understood step toward the colonization of the Americas. Placed in this context, Simms's narrative reveals the true attitude of the Indian who was not willing to give in to compromise with the colonizer, nor submit to his rule, even at the risk of losing his/her life. Combahee's near suicidal plunge into the ocean is a testament to the Indian's refusal to surrender to the colonizer, and Simms's portrayal of Combahee's escape from De Ayllon helps to undermine the contention that the Indians were submissive and welcomed foreign domination.

The extension of De Ayllon's hand toward the “person” or body of Combahee indicates the colonizer's attempt to possess her and the Americas. Because De Ayllon has superior weapons, he, like many other colonizers, assumes a God-given right to take that which is “manifestly” his. This attitude assumes that the colonizer is of a superior ideology and religion, and therefore of a superior race and civilization. Such beliefs in superiority are not sustained, however, by the colonist through a demonstration of the inferiority of the Indian “race”; rather, they are achieved through the silencing of the religion, philosophy, and culture of the indigenous people.

While the anger of the Indian is depicted in “Lucas de Ayllon,” it is not presented as irrational anger and vengeance sought by a savage. The rebellion of the Indians is prompted by their realization of a tragic fate at the hands of the enemy. When the prisoner Chiquola is “dragged forward to the side of the vessel and presented to the eyes of the Queen and his people … for the first time, the proud spirit passed out of the eyes of Combahee, and her head sunk forward, with an air of helpless self-abandonment, upon her breast!” (161). Here again, though the representation is physical (through the description of eyes, head, and breast), the message conveyed is not of an inarticulate being, but rather of an individual realizing the tragic yet inevitable physical defeat of a people. While revenge is suggested as predominant on the minds of Chiquola and his people, Simms again reinforces the character of the Indian in a positive manner as noble warrior and authentic individual. “Indian of the North American continent, whatever his vices or weaknesses, was yet a man” (163). As if to reprimand the reader, another passage invokes, “We are apt to forget that these people are human” (169-70).

Perhaps the use of physical description becomes appropriate to the representation of the Indian. In the context of “Lucas de Ayllon,” the Combahee Indians have become a people who have lost value in the spoken word. They are confronted with a foreign language and strangers who do not honor what they say. The words of De Ayllon and his pirate-colonizers are used to deceive. Thus the body signals used by the Indians illustrate how honorable communication has been debased. Only the language of the body can be used in the presence of the colonizer. Words have lost reason and rationality; language of the body more adequately functions and is understood in violent conflict. Chiquola's voice ceases almost at the outset of the narrative, for he has no one with whom he can communicate in trust. His silence represents the will of an entire people whose voices go unheard to worthy listeners. Reminding us of Combahee's plunge into the depths of the sea, Chiquola begins to fix his eyes on the sky and the ocean. Though his plunge is fatal, he is reunited with nature, and only his physical being, in the eyes of the Indian, has been sacrificed. This last physical act is perhaps Chiquola's strongest statement.

Simms casts the Indian and nature in a harmonious and mysterious light. Soon after Chiquola's death, a great storm hits the coast where the initial entrapment of the Indians by De Ayllon had occurred. The disabled ships of De Ayllon then appear, as if an answer to a prophecy. Chiquola's soul cannot rest until he is “warmed” by the bones of his captors, and Combahee is sworn to carry out the task. De Ayllon's men are captured and burned alive in a human pyramid as revenge. Interestingly, De Ayllon is the last to be killed. In his naive pride, he believes he can convince the Indians to spare him. But he pleads in a foreign tongue which is not acknowledged by the Indian.

Through the introduction of Kiawah, the “venerable father” of Combahee, the portrayal of the Indian takes on a spiritual dimension. It is Kiawah who emphasizes the spiritual life to Combahee. When he reveals to her that “Chiquola is with the Great Spirit” (172), he is calling on her to recognize that she is part of a religious heritage. He accepts the death of Chiquola without seeking revenge because he believes in a greater life which transcends the physical. Kiawah's ideology also significantly avoids compromise with and submission to the colonizer. If there is a hierarchy of values in the Indian ideology to be considered in this representation, clearly sacred, spiritual values are revered above materialistic ones. In this sense, Chiquola's leap to his death is a testament to the uncompromised value of freedom to the Indian.

Physical life is subordinate to the Indian's spiritual ideals. Accordingly, Combahee succumbs to an unexplained attack in the end. The narrator relates that “the spasms of death—of a complete paralysis of mind and body” (183) overtake Combahee, and she leaves a world which will no longer be as her people had known it. The narrator pays tribute to her noble character and tragic death:

The spirit of the beautiful Princess presides over the place as some protecting Divinity, and even the white man, though confident in a loftier and nobler faith, still finds something in the spot which renders it mysterious, and makes him an involuntary worshipper! Ah! there are deities which are common to all human kind, whatever be the faith which they maintain. Love is of this sort, and truth, and devotion; and of these the desolate Combahee had a Christian share …

(184)

The noble, principle-oriented character of the Indian is honored in the end as “the perfidy” of the colonizer is “avenged” (183).

William Gilmore Simms's portrayal of the American Indian in “Lucas de Ayllon,” though ironically focused primarily on the physical characteristics of the Combahee natives, lends a positive voice to all Indians of the Americas who have lacked favorable representation and voice. In a time when multicultural understanding becomes increasingly important, an awareness of the various ways in which language can be used to express a subaltern voice otherwise ignored or suppressed merits attention. In this fictional history relating the process of colonization to the unvoiced Indian, Simms has succeeded in utilizing, to a positive end, a method of occidental representation often employed to silence or misrepresent the oppressed. He furthermore reveals an untold story about a noble people and an American tragedy.

Works Cited

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de la Vega, Garcilaso. Comentarios Reales. México: Espasa Calpe Mexicana, 1993.

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Simms, William Gilmore. “Lucas de Ayllon: A Historical Nouvellette.” The Wigman and the Cabin. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845.

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———. The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina. Ed. John C. Guilds. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1994.