The 1688 letter of the Timucua caciques to the king, written in Timucua

A letter written in the Timucua language at San Mateo in Florida on 28 January 1688, signed by Timucua chiefs, addressed to the king of Spain, and translated into Castilian by a Franciscan interpreter under notarial certification at San Agustín three weeks later. It asks the crown to keep the governor they have; it is the surviving example of the alphabetic literacy the missions introduced being turned by its own users into a political instrument directed at Madrid.