Antonia Paula de la Resurreccion Bonelly (c. 1786-1870), was a colonial woman of Spanish East Florida who was captured by Miccosukee Indians in 1802 and held captive for twenty-two months.
Her rescue and ransom involved many of the major power players that defined relations in this period between the Florida tribes and the nations of Britain, Spain, and the United States.
Turnbull's colony was abandoned after nine years of abusive conditions and the surviving colonists walked seventy miles to Saint Augustine seeking release from their indenture.
[1] Josef Bonelly was away from the property, and his son Tomas was murdered—by one account slain in the fields where he was working, by another, tied with cords, scalped, and burned at his father's house at the wharf.
Testifying in 1835, an old Saint Augustine citizen recalled seeing the dead body of Tomas Bonelly laid in the marketplace after being brought to town in a boat.
After twenty-four days of travel, they reached their eventual destination: the town of Miccosukee, located along the boundary of Spanish East and West Florida (about twenty miles northeast of present-day Tallahassee).
The partners used their influence with the tribes to both advance Spanish territorial claims against the United States, and to encourage the natives to resist new white settlements and US attempts to acquire land.
Antonia Paula Bonelly married Bartolome Leonardy in 1808—while her Miccosukee daughter was still living—and had a large family, about half of whom would become early settlers of Tampa.
The attack on the Bonelly plantation was not random, and it had political roots in the decades-long struggle between native, Spanish, British, and American interests in Florida.
Forrester and Payne's direct involvement in the Bonelly negotiations show that larger forces were at play in this event than simply the safety of a fifteen-year-old girl.
While William Augustus Bowles appealed to natives with a call for nationalism, Forrester was the key access point to essential European commodities: in particular, weapons and rum.