Medal with Compass Rose

1750-1777

Name(s) currently unknown

Gainesville, FL, USA, Florida Museum of Natural History (current location); La Isabela, DOM (find site); Saint Augustine, FL, USA (find site)

This small two-sided medal, bearing the image of a compass rose and, on its reverse, Saint Christopher, was found in Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, today known as Fort Mose, Florida. This community was founded by the Spanish for Africans fleeing slavery in the Carolinas. Travelers in hopes of otherworldly protection often wore medals like this one.

The design represents a compass rose, the device printed on maps and charts for determining the cardinal directions, an emblem familiar to travelers. With its connections to travel, the rose relates to the imagery of the reverse side of the medal, an image of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. This pierced hole allowed the medal to be hung by a cord or string around a person’s neck or waist.

This medal was found in archaeological excavations at Fort Mose, near Saint Augustine, the site of Spain’s first Florida settlement. About the size of a penny, it may have been struck from a silver coin.

The experience of black people in Fort Mose was shaped by international politics. The enmity between Spain and England led to the founding of the fort in 1738, near the Spanish town of Saint Augustine. Fort Mose thus functioned as a safe haven for black people escaping slavery in the English colonies. Those who made their home here were welcomed by the Spanish as allies, useful for protecting the border, but only after they accepted Catholicism. Dedication to Catholic saints may have been a very real part of daily life at Fort Mose as it was for other people across Spanish America. Nevertheless, given their own cultural histories and the wide variety of Catholic practice in the 18th century, Africans and African-Americans at Fort Mose would certainly have developed ways of worship distinct from other parts of the colony.

Reproduced courtesy of the Historical Archaeology College of the Florida Museum of Natural History

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Fort Mose: America's Black Colonial Fortress of Freedom.

Deagan, Kathleen and Darcie MacMahon. 1995. Ft. Mose, Colonial America’s Black Fortress of Freedom. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Fort Mose: America's Black Colonial Fortress of Freedom. Florida Museum of Natural History.

Landers, Jane. 1999. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.