Southwestern Historical Quarterly

In March 1778, deep in the Karankawas' territory on the Texas Gulf Coast, a Coapite Indian named Joseph María approached five armed European sailors.¹ The Coapite spoke perfect Castilian Spanish to a marine he recognized, Cristóbal Gómez, and inquired about their presence on his land.² Gómez had once endured a ten-year stint as a private at the nearby fort of Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía and knew the Indian leader well. He explained that he and his companions needed a guide. Their ship had run dangerously low on provisions, and they meant to travel to La Bahía to resupply. Gómez had no knowledge that the Spaniards had imprisoned Joseph María mere days earlier.³ The Indian had escaped and sought vengeance. [End Page 375]

For three days, cannons on Captain Luis Antonio Andry's vessel bellowed as a beacon for Gómez and the four other missing sailors. The men remained unresponsive.⁴ Two Karankawa brothers, however, appeared on the shore and approached the ship in a dug-out canoe. When Andry called out to the duo, one of the Indians answered back in fluent Castilian Spanish. He said that Don Luis Cazorla, the commander of La Bahía, had tasked them with aiding any endangered vessels on the coast. A relieved Andry welcomed the pair aboard.

Both Indians quickly endeared themselves to the crew by distributing fresh meat. They gave their names as Joseph María and Mateo and warned Andry that other Karankawas had become hostile toward Spaniards but that they would track down the missing sailors before they met harm. While entertaining the brothers, Captain Andry sent five men ashore to collect oysters. By nightfall, these men also disappeared. With ten mariners unaccounted for, only six sailors remained: Captain Andry, his teenage son, the ship's pilot, the navigator, an unnamed cadet, and a fourteen-year-old Maya crew member.⁵

On the morning of March 20, 1778, four days after Gómez and his compatriots went missing and around twelve hours after the sailors sent to collect oysters had vanished, Joseph María and Mateo canoed back to Andry's vessel accompanied by ten Karankawas. Joseph María promised Captain Andry that his men ashore were safe. In the midst of these reassurances, the other Karankawas went into the vessel's hold, seized the ship's weaponry, and shot everyone on board save for the young Maya mariner, Tomás de La Cruz, whom Joseph María enslaved. The Karankawas then threw the corpses into the water and looted the ship. They absconded with an abundance of supplies ranging from rafts to rifles and then ignited Andry's craft, turning it into a blackened husk on Matagorda Bay.

Known as the Andry massacre, this incident, when the Spaniards learned of it a year later, set off a decade of intense conflict between Karankawas and their would-be colonizers. This article is a narrative history of that conflict, the little-known Karankawa-Spanish War. It has two primary purposes. The first is to uncover and name the actions attempted by the Spaniards against the Karankawas as genocidal by documenting three major attempts of annihilation led by Athanase de Mézières, Domingo Cabello y Robles, and Nicholas de La Mathe. The second purpose is to show how this attempted annihilation acted as a mechanism for various [End Page 376] Karankawa tribes to consolidate into a more unified body.⁶ In the process of achieving these goals, this piece will also demonstrate how Native Americans familiar with the Spaniards' customs and language acquired advantages for themselves and their tribe and how shipwrecks served as a means of bypassing typical webs of trade for the Karankawas.⁷

By the end of the eighteenth century, raids such as the one on Captain Andry's vessel, were commonplace.⁸ Lacking a consistent and direct European trading presence, Karankawas viewed shipwrecks as valuable commodities.⁹ Obtaining goods in this way bypassed Indian middlemen who hawked their wares at exorbitant prices. The...