Navajas are traditional Spanish folding knives. The one shown below is 16 1/4 inches long when open and weighs almost 10 ounces. It has a 7 1/2 inch steel blade and a 8 3/4 inch handle decorated with bone and brass. A spring under the blade locks it into place when open. The blade is marked Valero Jun and Zaragoza. Valero Jun was an important Spanish knife maker in the city of Zaragoza. The style of the makers mark indicates the knife was made at the beginning of the 19th century. According to some sources Valero Jun imported fine Navaja style knives like this one from Thiers France and resold them with their mark. This style of Navaja is sometimes called a "tail rattler" (cola de crotalo), because the tip of the handle resembles a rattlesnake's tail.
This dagger was unearthed near Tampa Bay in the early 1960s. The 7 7/8 inch needle-point blade has a shallow diamond cross-section. The crossguard has short down-turned quillons and is decorated with three deep accent grooves at its center. The pommel is round and decorated with grooves in an oblong curved pattern.
The bronze hilts of two daggers are shown at the right. They are almost identical, but it's likely that the one on the left side of the photo spent most of the last 450 years buried in South Carolina near Port Royal Sound. It was unearthed by Jack Williams in the early 1960s. The other he purchased from a private collection over a decade later. This second dagger still has its original scabbard. Williams believed that the excavated dagger came from the French settlement of Charlesfort, or from the Spanish occupation that followed called Santa Elena.
Both daggers have cast bronze hilts with steel blades. The period clothing and armor of the French officer that forms each hilt indicates their origin. The officer is leaning on matchlock, his left hand wrapped around its muzzle. His right hand rests on a dagger in a leather carry which was called a frog. Below the frog hangs a pouch to hold balls and cloth patches, a large flask to hold priming powder, and several small flasks to hold premesured single charges. The scabbard is also of cast bronze with classical motifs in high relief. Ornate designs like these would have been expensive, so the daggers must have belonged to men who were well off.
