After Narvaez and de Soto had marched through Tampa Bay leaving torture, slavery, and disease behind them, one Spaniard came to the bay with the opposite intention. Father Luis de Cancer, a Dominican friar, sailed here in 1549 carrying no soldiers and no weapons, meaning to win the Native peoples to Christianity by kindness alone. He was clubbed to death on the beach within days. His killing is one of the most telling moments in the whole history of the bay: by 1549 the people of this coast had learned exactly what Spaniards meant, and would no longer wait to find out whether this one was different.
Cancer was a Dominican of real conviction, shaped by the movement around Bartolome de las Casas that argued the Indians of the New World should be brought to the faith by preaching and love rather than by the sword. He had put the idea into practice in the highlands of Guatemala, in the province the Spanish came to call Verapaz, the “true peace,” where Dominicans had converted Native communities without an army. Cancer believed Florida, soaked in the blood of the conquistadors who had come before, could be reached the same way, and he won royal and church approval to try.
In 1549 he sailed from Mexico with a few fellow friars and, crucially, an interpreter: a Christianized Native woman the Spanish called Magdalena, meant to be the bridge of language and trust. Cancer's instructions, and his own deepest wish, were to avoid the places the earlier expeditions had brutalized and to land where the people had not yet learned to hate the Spanish. It went wrong from the approach. The pilot brought the ships into the familiar, and now hostile, waters near the mouth of Tampa Bay, the Bahia de Espiritu Santo, the very region Narvaez and de Soto had ravaged. There the friars met Natives who seemed peaceful, and learned that a Spaniard from the de Soto expedition, a man named Juan Munoz who had been a captive for years, was being held nearby; he made his way out to them and warned, in effect, that the friendliness was a trap.
Cancer would not be turned. Believing that to show fear or force was to betray the entire premise of his mission, he went ashore again, unarmed, to preach. On the beach, in full view of his own ship and the horrified men aboard it, the Native warriors fell on him and clubbed him to death. It was June 1549, somewhere on the shore of present-day Pinellas County, within sight of the very waters that Mullet Key guards. Most of his small expedition was dead or scattered; the survivors sailed away, and the dream of a peaceful conversion of Florida died on the sand with him.
Father Cancer's martyrdom is more than a grim footnote. It is the clearest possible measure of what the conquistadors had already done. Twenty years of Spanish violence, Ponce de Leon's slave-raided coast, Narvaez's mutilations, de Soto's war dogs and chains, had taught the peoples of Tampa Bay a lesson they applied without hesitation: a Spaniard stepping ashore was a threat, whatever he carried or claimed. The kindest, least dangerous Spaniard who ever came to this bay was killed precisely because the cruelest ones had come first. When Pedro Menendez de Aviles finally planted a garrison among the Tocobaga in 1567, it too would be wiped out. The bay had made its judgment, and Luis de Cancer was among the first to pay for the sins of the men who had preceded him.