Professor Timothy Johnson of Fledgler College in St. Augustine, Florida found a book by a Catholic missionary that turned out to be a previously unknown source of information about the Timukua Indian language, which disappeared in the second half of the 18th century.
The Timukua people lived in a vast area that included the northern and central parts of what is now Florida and southern Georgia. Its number at the time of the first contact with Europeans is estimated at 200 thousand people. Timuqua were divided into about 35 chiefdoms and spoke several dialects that were closely related to each other. They suffered greatly from the infections brought by Europeans, and by the beginning of the 17th century their number had dropped to 50 thousand, and by 1700 - to only one thousand. By this time, Florida, which belonged to the Spaniards, was under constant attack from the north by the English colonists and their Indian allies: Shouts, Katoba and Yuchi. During these raids, many Timukua were killed and hundreds were captured. As a result, by 1726, only 167 timuqua lived in three villages under the protection of the Spaniards,and in 1759 there were only 6 adults and 5 half-blood children. When Spain handed over Florida to Great Britain in 1763, representatives of the Indian peoples, totaling less than a hundred people, were resettled to Cuba, among them were the last few Timuqua.
Scientists owe their knowledge of the Timukua language to Franciscan missionary Francisco Pareja, who arrived in Florida in 1595 and worked there for thirty-one years. He created a Latin script for Timuqua, wrote and published several books with parts of the catechism in Spanish and Timuqua, as well as a grammar of the language. Historians know that two editions of Francisco Parej's catechism have not survived to this day, and the Timukua dictionary he compiled has also been lost.
Timothy Johnson is a religious scholar who is studying the early Christianization of American Indians, especially Timuqua. In 2019, he took advantage of his right to paid annual leave to work in European libraries. In the catalog of the Codrington Library of the University of Oxford, he discovered a book by Francisco Parech, which was believed to be lost. It was published in 1628 and bears the title "The fourth part of the catechism in Timuc and Castilian languages, which examines the manner of listening to Mass and its ceremony." After Johnson was convinced that the book was actually available, the library posted a digitized copy of the unique book on the Internet.
For Johnson, the book has become an invaluable source of information about how Parech's father celebrated Mass with his Christian Indians. He is involved in the archaeological excavations of the 16th-17th century Nombre de Dios Catholic mission and hopes that detailed descriptions of the ritual will enable him and his colleagues to identify the remains of the building where the services were held. And for Johnson's close friend, University of Florida professor George Aaron Broadwel, she is valuable as another source of knowledge about the Timukua language.
Johnson now hopes that other lost books by Francisco Parej have survived somewhere.