Indialantic

The Ais were one of many tribes that lived in Florida prior to first contact with Ponce de Leon and the Spanish in 1513. The Ais or Ays as they are sometimes referred as, were hunters and gathers, not farmers. This Native-American tribe gathered fruits and nuts including sea grapes, coco plums, sea oats and palm berries. The name Ais came from the name the Spanish used to reference their chief. The Spanish named the river the Rio de Ais or, Indian River. A fishing people, they controlled some 150 miles of the coast from modern-day Cape Canaveral in the north to the St. Lucie Inlet in the south. Early Spaniards recorded encountering them, but it was Englishman Jonathan Dickinson, shipwrecked off the coast by a hurricane in 1696, who gave firsthand accounts of the Ais, writing they lived in small collections of huts framed with sticks and covered on the sides with fronds. The Ais migrated seasonally, living in the summer on the mainland and the winter on the barrier islands. As many as 20,000 Ais lived on the coast when the first Europeans arrived, but disease, slavery and warfare wiped out their population by 1760. The Ais did not survive long after Dickinson's recount of the time he spent with them