Talk:Apalachee massacre

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Apalachee massacre/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Dana boomer (talk) 00:25, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi! I'll be reviewing this article for GA status, and should have a full review up shortly.

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

   • Raids before 1704, "News of the war's formal opening". I'm assuming you mean Queen Anne's War, but you may want to make this explicit. Clarified Magic♪piano 15:43, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
   • Raids before 1704, "opening arrived in 1702". Arrived where? Clarified Magic♪piano 15:43, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Good. However, per WP:SEASON you shouldn't use spring, summer, fall, winter as time periods, because they mean different times of the year in the north and south hemispheres. Fixed Magic♪piano 19:37, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Raids before 1704, "Missions in Mocama Province were consolidated south of the St. Johns River, and those in Timucua were consolidated at San Francisco de Potano." "Consolidated" makes it sound like the missions were moved to these places after the raids began. Is this the case? It might be good to make it more obvious that it was either a deliberate action to move the missions or this was just where they ended up being.

   • I thought it was clear from the preceding context (the previous sentence) that this took place after the St. Augustine expedition. Magic♪piano 15:43, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. I understand that they happened after the raids. My question is: Was it a deliberate Spanish choice to have the missions pick up and move (an order came down from the head of the religion?), or did it just happen organically? Clarified Magic♪piano 19:37, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Raids before 1704, "Creeks attacked San José de Ocuya and San Francisco de Potano, and either Patali or Piritiba; it is possible that as many as 500 Indians were enslaved as a result of these raids." A lot of "and"s in the first clause. In the second clause, is it known if any Indians were enslaved? Do we only suspect that any were enslaved, or do we know that some were enslaved and just don't know how many?

   • Alas, the source does not differentiate. I have rephrased to remove an "and". Magic♪piano 15:43, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Ayubale, "He released Miranda, Mexía and 4 other Spaniards to go to San Luis with the expectation that he would receive a ransom in exchange." A ransom for the men he released? Or the three that remained in his "care"? What happened to the remaining captured men when the garrison commander refused to pay?

   • The ransom was for the freed men (now clarified). The sources don't say what happened to the others. Magic♪piano 21:26, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

   • He released them and then asked for ransom? Isn't that a little backwards?

   • I think it was a sort of a "release of prisoners on parole" sort of thing that didn't work out. Magic♪piano 02:56, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Further raiding, "capturing, according to Moore, about 1,400 Apalachees." Did these include the ones that joined voluntarily? Clarified Magic♪piano 22:35, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Again, guess I needed to be more clear: In the preceeding paragraph you say "most of the population of seven villages joined his march voluntarily."; then say that Moore captured about 1,400 people. Are the people who joined voluntarily counted in the number that he captured?

   • I've rewritten this section to more directly quote Moore's report, which is then dissected by historians in the Historiography section.

   • Further raiding, "More than 4,300, mostly women and children, were "enslaved", In the previous sentence you say 1,400 were captured - where did the rest come from?

   • The population is described in the La Florida section. Magic♪piano 22:35, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Right. But he "captured" 1,400 people and "enslaved" 4,300 more people. What's the difference between these two things? Were the ones captured not turned into slaves? Or were the one enslaved not considered captives? (I find either scenario hard to believe, so there must be something in the wording that I'm missing here.)

   • Further raiding, "some 300 were "removed into exile"" What does this mean?

   • The terminology (which is from Moore's report) is unclear; this is one of the things that opens these events up to divergence of historical opinion. (Gallay, for example, appears to paint all of these groups as becoming "slaves", hence his high estimate. He doesn't show how he arrived at the estimate; my guess is he treats many of the exiled as slaves.)

   • Later raids, "2,000 Indians went into exile" Where did they go?

   • This is covered under "Consequences". Magic♪piano 22:35, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Later raids, "17 of whom were burned alive". I'm assuming by the Creeks? This seems rather uncivilized for the British.

   • Well, it does seem uncivilized, but the source (and presumably Bienville) does not differentiate on who the perpetrators were. I'd presume the Creeks as well, but that would be WP:OR. Magic♪piano 22:35, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Consequences, "resulting in some cases where protests were made to Carolina authorities over their status" What do you mean? Clarified Magic♪piano 21:26, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
   • Consequences, "Pensacola was twice besieged in 1707" By who? Clarified Magic♪piano 21:26, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
   • Consequences, "even raiding an Indian village near Mobile in 1709". You say earlier in the paragraph that they were never able to capture Mobile, which implies that they tried. If such is the case, how is a raid near Mobile in 1709 unique (implied by the use of "even")? Clarified Magic♪piano 21:26, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
   • Historiography, "Moore voluntarily resettled" Moore volunteered to resettle them, or they volunteered to be resettled? Clarified Magic♪piano 21:26, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
   • Title: Do any of your sources actually use "Apalachee massacre" as the name for this? It seems more like a series of raids than a single massacre.

   • The word "massacre" is sometimes used in scholarly sources to describe the major events of Moore's expedition. It is more widely used in popular references to these events. (I didn't choose the name, but I think it sufficiently apt to keep.) It is also the case that many summarized histories don't properly cover the fact that the destruction of the missions took years, focusing on 1704. Magic♪piano 15:43, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

   • Coverage: Do we have any references to what the Spanish thought of this? You say that they encouraged privateering raids, but did they do anything else? What were there thoughts on the almost complete depopulation of a fairly significant portion of their North American holdings? Did they try to more thoroughly arm their remaining Indian allies in order to help them stand against the later Creek raids?

   • I'll try to add some Spanish color; Florida was not a popular posting, and the Spanish were vastly outnumbered when the Creeks came in force, so they had little choice but to retreat. Magic♪piano 15:43, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   • Covington, 1968 is in References, but not Notes. Same for Oatis and Wasserman. Moved to Further reading.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   • See comments on coverage in prose section above.

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   • The map used as a lead image is of poor quality (it appears to have been marked with highlighters and states that it does not accurately represent the location of missions) but if there is no replacement I suppose it's better than nothing.

   • Maps of this period are notoriously inaccurate. Considering the grotesquely wrong shapes of places like Florida and Nova Scotia on early 18th century maps, the mislocation of what were to English cartographers Indian villages is a minor thing. 20th century research has reconstructed some of the mission locations, but many are still unknown. Magic♪piano 15:43, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

The prose needs a bit of work, and I found a couple minor issues with references. Overall looks nice, however, so I am placing it on hold until the above issues can be resolved. Dana boomer (talk) 01:02, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed commentary; I'll get right to work. Magic♪piano 15:43, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Clarified a few of my comments above. Almost there... Dana boomer (talk) 22:58, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

I think I've addressed all of the remaining issues; let me know if not. Magic♪piano 19:37, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Looks good! Thanks for all of the work. I'm passing the article to GA status now. Dana boomer (talk) 15:21, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Romanticism of the Florida missions

This tone of this article is biased to represent the history here in way that is quite different than the way those living at the time would have perceived it.

For one thing, so-called "missions" in Florida, were little more than slave barracoons. The local indians feared the Spanish far more than the English. The Spanish were involved in a systematic program of raping and enslaving the Florida indians on a huge scale that made the English settlements look like camp sites. Representing the English attacks on the missions as some kind of brutality against a "peaceful" population is really absurd. The Spanish conquistadores that ran these missions were vicious, heavily armed, professional soldiers who were maintaining harems of indian girls and wantonly destroying anything that stood in the way of making a few pesos. They were regularly exporting the slaves they were catching and breeding at the missions to a life of horror in Cuban and South American mines and cane plantations where the indians were worked to death. The Rousseauesque portrayal of the situation in this article is unrecognizable from the reality of those times. John Chamberlain (talk) 18:06, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Do you have sources that substantiate this, or are you just expressing an opinion? I'm all for correcting bias, but we can only go by what sources say. Magic♪piano 01:36, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

pacific population?

I was just reading the introduction and it says "against a largely pacific population of Apalachee Indians in northern Spanish Florida". Spanish Florida borders the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico so was wondering what is meant by this sentence. I presume the writer meant passive population but don't want to just change it as I'm just guessing.Dja1979 (talk) 18:08, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Think wikt:pacific, not Pacific. Magic♪piano 18:56, 25 January 2014 (UTC)