San Pedro de Mocama

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San Pedro de Mocama was a Spanish Franciscan mission built in the late 16th century in the southeast of present-day U.S. state of Georgia. It was part of Spain's effort to colonize the region of Spanish Florida and convert the Timucua Native Americans to Catholicism.

The mission was among the first of Spanish Florida, established in 1587 in Tacatacuru, a town of the Timucuan chiefdom of Mocama. Its precise location remains unknown, but it was somewhere at the south end of Cumberland Island, one of Georgia's Sea Islands.

By 1595 some of the Timucuans living near the mission were fluent in Spanish and some were literate in a combination of Spanish, Latin, and a system of writing the Timucua language devised by Father Francisco Pareja of the nearby San Juan del Puetro mission.

[edit] See also

• Spanish missions in Florida
• Spanish missions in Georgia

[edit] References

• Milanich, Jerald T. (2000). "The Timucua Indians of Northern Florida and Southern Georgia", in Bonnie G. McEwan (ed.): Indians of the Greater Southeast: Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory. University Press of Florida. ISBN 0-8130-1778-5.