USA > Florida > Historical sketches of colonial Florida > Part 2
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Roberts says, the name was "that of an In- dian tribe inhabiting round the bay but which was destroyed." Mr. Fairbanks tells us it was "a name derived from the locality having been, formerly, that of the town of a tribe of Indians called Pencacolas, which had been entirely exterminated in conflicts with neighboring "tribes."
The first objection to this assigned origin of the name is, that it is evidently not Indian, such names in West Florida invariably terminating with a double e, as for examples, Apalachee, Choctawhatchee, Uchee, Ochusee, Escambee, Ochesee, Chattahoochee. The "cola " added to
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Apalachee, and "ia" substituted in Escambia for ee, indicate the difference between the ter- minations of Indian and Spanish names. .
Again, amongst savages, we should expect to find in the name of a place an indication of a natural object, the name being expressive of the object, and hence as lasting. But, that the accident of an encampment of savages upon a locality should stamp that locality with their tribal name, as a designation that should sur- vive not only the encampment, but the very existence of the tribe, is incredible. An extinct tribe would in a generation or two cease to have a place in the traditions of surviving tribes, because their extinction would be only an ordinary event amongst American savages.
The termination being Spanish, and no nat- ural object existing suggestive of the name, we naturally turn our search to a vocabulary of Spanish names, historical and geographical.
Perched upon a rock springing 240 feet high from the Mediterranean shore of Spain, con- nected with the mainland by a narrow strip of sand, is the fortified little seaport of Peniscola. Substitute "a" for "i," transpose "s" and we
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have the name for the original of which we seek. The seaports of Spain furnished the great body of Spanish adventurers to America in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries; and what more likely than that some native of the little town crowning with its vine-clad cottages the huge rock that looks out upon the "midland ocean," should have sought to honor his home by fixing' its name upon a spot in the new world ?
When and by whom the name was affixed to our shores is an interesting inquiry. Neither Roberts, nor Fairbanks, nor any other author- ity, informs us. It comes into history with the advent of d' Arriola, whose settlement will be the subject of a future page.
Three hypotheses furnish as many answers to the question: it was original with Arriola to the extent at least of a new application of a Spanish name; or he found the place already named in some chart or document now lost to us; or already fixed by an Indian tradition, according to Roberts and Fairbanks.
The first hypothesis requires no comment. The second rests upon the existence of a fact of
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which we can procure no evidence. The third is a tradition founded upon, or involving, a Span- ish name.
Very extraordinary events or striking objects only are the subjects of the traditions of savage tribes; and what event can be imagined more extraordinary and impressive to the savage mind than to be brought suddenly in contact, for the first time, with the white man under all the circumstances and conditions of de Luna's settlement ? It was one not likely to pass out of tradition in the lapse of one hundred and thirty-three years, for two long lives only would be required for its transmission. The settlers would be, in Indian terminology, a tribe ; their departure would be an extinction; and vanity would at last attribute its ending to the prowess of the Red man.
A name that identifies a locality and forms a feature of a purely Indian tradition, having no reference to or connection whatever with the white man, must be an Indian name. Here, however, the name under discussion is a Span- ish and not an Indian name. The conclusion is, therefore, irresistible, that as the name is
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Spanish the tradition relates to Spaniards, and that the former is a Spanish designation of the locality of the people to whom it relates.
The settlement of de Luna was the only Span- ish settlement with which the Indians could have come in contact before Arriola's. That settlement, therefore, must be the subject of the Indian tradition, and the Spanish name Pensa- cola must have been its name.
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CHAPTER III.
Don Andrés de Pes-Santa Maria de Galva-Don Andrés d' Arriola-The Resuscitation of Pensacola-Its Conse- quences.
Ix 1693, Don Andrés de Pes entered the Bay, but how long he remained, or why he came, whether for examination of its advantages, from curiosity, or necessity, to disturb its solitude and oblivion of one hundred and thirty-three years, history does not say. But as a memorial of his visit, he supplemented the name de Luna had given it with de Galva, in honor of the Viceroy of Mexico; and thus, it comes into colonial history with the long title of Santa Maria de Galva.
In 1696, three years after de Pes' visit, Don Andrés d' Arriola, with three hundred soldiers and settlers, took formal possession of the harbor and the surrounding country, which, to make effectual and permanent, he built a
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"square fort with bastions" at what is now called Barrancas, which he named San Carlos. As the beginning, or rather reconstruction of a town named Pensacola, he erected some houses adjacent to the fort. And there, too, was built a church, historically the first ever erected on the shores of Pensacola Bay, but presumptively the second; for it is hardly credible that the large settlement of de Luna, embracing so many ecclesiastics, should have failed to observe the universal custom of the Spaniards to build a church wherever they planted a colony. Irre- sistible, therefore, is the inference that the first notes of a church-bell heard within the limits of the United States were those which rolled over the waters of Pensacola Bay and the white hills of Santa Rosa from 1559 to 1562.
Having demonstrated that the settlement of de Luna was the original Pensacola, that of Arriola was apparently the second, though actually but a resuscitation of the colony of 1559; for the name, the people, though not the same generation, and the place being one, mere lapse of time should not be permitted to destroy
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the unity which may be so justly attributed to the two settlements.
The inhabitants of the town having been largely recruited by malefactors banished from Mexico, must be notched low in the scale of morals. But, perhaps, in some instances at least, actions were then adjudged crimes de- serving banishment which might be deemed
virtues in a more enlightened age, and under free institutions; for under the despotic colonial governments of Spanish America in that age to criticize the vices, or censure the lawless edicts of a satrap, was a heinous offence, for which transportation was but a mild punishment.
Originally, Spain's dominion was asserted over the entire circle of the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as over all the islands which they girdled. But upon the voyage of La Salle from the upper waters of the Mississippi to the sea, France asserted a claim, under the name of Louisiana, to the entire valley of the river from its spring-heads to the Gulf, making to the ex- tent of the southern limit of her claim, from east to west, a huge gap in Spain's North American empire.
;
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But where were the eastern boundary of Louisiana, and the western limit of Florida to be fixed ? Had the French expedition under Iberville reached Florida before Arriola's, Pen- sacola would have been included in Louisiana, and afterwards in the State of Alabama. But Arriola's settlement was first, in point of time; and it is to him must be attributed the estab- lishment of the Perdido as the boundary line between the French and Spanish colonies, and the consequent exclusion of Pensacola from the limits of the great State of Alabama, her politi- cal influence, her fostering care, and, compara- tively, from the vitalizing influence of her vast mineral and agricultural resources.
The interest of history consists not in the mere knowledge or contemplation of events as isolated facts, but in studying their inter- relations, and following their threads of con- nection through all the meshes of cause and effect. It is, therefore, an interesting reflection that the settlement of Arriola may not have been the absolute, though it was the apparent, cause of the consequences above pointed out. Behind it, in the shadow of a century and a
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third, may perchance be discerned the ultimate and final cause of those consequences in the settlement of de Luna. He planted the first colony, and because he so did, Arriola settled his on that spot upon which the lost chart and tradition probably coincided in fixing the Pen- sacola of 1559.
How illustrative of the truth that as one human life can have but one beginning, so it is with that aggregate of human lives which we call a people. "In the almighty hands of eternal God, a people's history is interrupted and recommenced-never."*
" The last sentence of Guizot's History of France.
1735207
ن
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CHAPTER IV.
Iberville's Expedition-Settlement at Biloxi and Mobile - Amicable Relations of the French and Spanish Colonies . from 1700-1719.
THE French expedition referred to in the previous chapter, the delay of which was so fateful to the growth and commercial future of Pensacola, appeared off the mouth of the har- bor in January, 1699. But, observing the Spanish flag flying from the mast-head of two war vessels lying in the Bay and from the flag- staff of Fort San Carlos, they did not enter the harbor, but cast anchor off the Island of Santa Rosa. Thence an application was made to the Spanish governor for permission to enter, which was promptly refused.
After that curt refusal of the Spaniards, the fleet, consisting of three vessels under the command of Lemoine d' Iberville, accom- panied by his brothers, Bienvielle and Sauville,
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which was taking out a colony with the neces- sary supplies to settle southern Louisiana, sailed westward and took formal possession of the country west of the Perdido river.
Iberville's first settlement was made at Biloxi on the twenty-seventh of February, 1699, but it was afterwards abandoned, in 1702, and re- moved to Mobile.
To the accession of Philip V., a Bourbon prince, to the Spanish crown, whilst Louis XIV. reigned in France, must be attributed the strangely peaceful settlement of the Perdido as the boundary line between Louisiana and Florida. For the politic, if not natural, harmony existing between two kings belonging to the same royal family, a grandfather and a grand- son, both the objects of jealousy and suspicion to the other nations of Europe, necessarily in- spired a like feeling in their respective colonial officers. Hence it was that we find that the ineffectual expedition of Governor Ravolli of Pensacola, in 1700, to expel the French from Ship Island, was the last instance of hostility between the Louisiana French and the Florida Spaniards for a period of nineteen years.
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Indeed, so intimate were the relations between the two colonies, that Iberville, coming from France, in 1702, with two war ships taking succor to the French colonists, terminated their voyage at Pensacola, and thence sent the sup- plies to Mobile in small vessels. Again, in 1703, he began a voyage to France by sailing from Pensacola.
The War of the Spanish Succession, in which England was the antagonist of Spain and France, tightened the bonds of amity between the colonies of the latter. In 1702, in antici- pation of an English expedition against Pensa- cola, Governor Martino readily procured from Bienville a needed supply of arms and ammuni- tion. On the other hand, in 1704, Governor Martino promptly furnished food from his stores at Pensacola to the famine-threatened colonists at Mobile; that kind office being a just requital of a like humanity which had been exercised by Bienville, in 1702, towards the starving garrison of San Carlos.
In 1706-7, eighteen Englishmen from Caro- lina, heading a large body of Indians, made inroads upon the Spanish settlements in Florida,
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and, strange as it may seem, extended their operations as far westward as Pensacola. In the latter year, Bienville was applied to by the Spanish governor to aid him in defending Pensa- cola from an impending attack by the English- men and their Indian allies. Prompt and bold in action, Bienville at once advanced from Mobile with one hundred and twenty Canadians 'to assist the Spaniards. But no conflict oc- curred, for after a few days of hostile demon- strations the enemy abandoned their enterprise, owing to the want of necessary supplies.
In other ways, too, the good feeling and inti- mate relations of the two colonies were mani- fested. We learn, from a letter of the mean, jealous, and growling Governor Condillac of Louisiana to Count Pontchartrain, that, in 1713, there existed a trade between Pensacola and Mobile, in which the former was supplied by the latter with lumber, poultry and vegeta- bles-a petty traffic, but not too small to excite the jealousy of the old grumbler.
Such were the friendly relations existing between the Florida Spaniards and the Louisi- ana French up to 1719, being the year after
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Bienville had founded the city of New Orleans; relations which must be borne in mind to enable us to form an enlightened judgment upon the actions of the men engaged in the bloody drama which was ushered in by the nineteen years of kind offices and good fellowship which have been mentioned.
Lemoine d' Iberville, a Canadian, esteemed the most skillful officer of the French navy brilliantly distinguished on many occasions, was selected to command the expedition to southern Louisiana, designed to perfect by colonization the claim France founded upon the voyage of La Salle. He and his brothers, Bienville, the founder of New Orleans, Sauville, Sevigny and Chateaugné presented a group of men seldom accorded to one family.
During a visit to Havana, d' Iberville died on the ninth of July, 1706, leaving to his brothers the task of perfecting the great enterprise to which the last seven years of his own life had been devoted.
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CHAPTER V.
War Declared by France against Spain-Bienville Surprises Metamoras-Metamoras Surprises Chateaugné- Bien- ville Attacks and Captures Pensacola-San Carlos and Pensacola Destroyed-Magazine Spared.
ON THE thirteenth of April, 1719, two French vessels brought to the French colony the intelli- gence that in the previous December, France had declared war against Spain; an event of which Don Juan Pedro Metamoras, governor of Pensacola, who had just succeded Don Gregorio de Salinas, had no information.
Bienville at once organized, with all possible secrecy, an expedition by land and water to capture Pensacola by surprise. The land force, consisting of four hundred Indians and a body of Canadians, was collected at Mobile. The naval force, composed of three vessels, two of them, the Philippe and the Toulouse, carrying twenty-four guns each, under the command of Sevigny, had its rendezvous at Dauphin Island.
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The movement of Bienville, who marched across the country with his land force, and that of the fleet were so well timed that on the fourteenth of May, at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, as the vessels presented their shotted broadsides to San Carlos, Bienville, his Canadians, and Indians, appeared on its land side. There was, of course, nothing for Metamoras to do but to order the chamade to be beaten and to settle the terms of capitulation. He surrendered the post and all public property within his jurisdic- tion. It was stipulated that he and his garrison should march out of the fort with the honors of war, retaining a cannon and three charges of powder, that they should be transported to Havana in French vessels, that the town should be protected from violence, and that the property of the soldiers and that of the inhabitants should be respected.
The victim of such a ruse, it was natural that Metamoras should have directed his thoughts toretaliation; and it is probable that during the voyage to Havana he meditated for his captors a surprise as complete and prompt as that which he had just suffered from them.
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After the French vessels, the Toulouse and the Mareschal de Villars had reached Cuba and landed their prisoners, they were seized by order of the governor of Havana, who had at once, upon learning of the disaster at Pensacola, determined upon its prompt reparation by a recapture. He accordingly prepared a fleet, con- sisting of a Spanish war ship, nine brigantines and the two French vessels. In this fleet Metamoras and his lately captured troops, besides others, embarked for Pensacola.
On the sixth of August, the Spanish fleet was off the harbor. The two French vessels, flying the French flag, first entered as decoys, to enable them to secure favorable positions for attacking San Carlos in the event of a refusal to surrender. Immediately after them came the Spanish war vessel. The ruse for position suc- ceeded, but the demand to surrender was peremptorily refused by Chateaugné, the com- mander of the fort. To an almost harmless cannonade there succeeded an armistice, which the French sought to haveextended to four, but which the Spaniards limited to two days.
After the expiration of the armistice, another
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ineffectual exchange of cannon shots was fol- lowed by the surrender of the fort; the terms being that the garrison of one hundred and sixty men should march out with the honors of war and be sent to Havana as prisoners. Chateaugné also was to be sent there and thence to Spain to await exchange. They were accordingly all taken to Havana. Chateaugné, however, instead of being sent from there to Spain, was imprisoned in Moro Castle, where he remained only a short time, in consequence of the energetic preparations which his brother, Bienville, was then making for his deliverance.
Metamoras, once again in command at Pensa- cola, fully realized that the stake for which he and Bienville had been playing was not to be finally won by such strategems, as each in turn had been the other's victim, and that the two which had been achieved were but preludes to a trial by battle. Appreciating, too, the bold, prompt and enterprising Bienville, he well calculated that his time for preparation would be short, and he accordingly improved it to the best of his abilities and resources.
Hle erected a battery on Point Seguenza, the
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western extremity of Santa Rosa Island, which he named Principe d' Asturias, to aid San Carlos and the Spanish fleet in resisting an attack by sea. To guard San Carlos from a land attack, he built a stockade in its rear. To man all his works he had a force of six hundred men.
The Fort was captured by Metamoras early in August, and on the eighteenth of the follow- ing September Bienville was ready to settle by arms his right to retain it.
The celerity of Bieneville's preparations was due, however, to the accidental arrival at Dauphin Island of a French fleet under Champ- meslin, who at once relieved him from the care and preparation of the seaward operations of his expedition.
The naval force of the French consisted of six vessels, under the command of Champmeslin, the Hercules of sixty-four guns, the Mars of sixty, the Triton of fifty, the Union of thirty-six, the - of thirty-six and the Philippe of twenty. The land force, commanded by Bienville in person, consisted of two hundred and fifty troops lately arrived from France, besides a large number of
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Canadian volunteers, which, when it reached Perdido, was joined by five hundred Indians under Longueville.
Whilst Bienville was moving towards Pensa- cola, Champmeslin, having sailed from Dauphin Island, entered the harbor on the eighteenth of September with five of his vessels, and was soon engaged in a fierce conflict with Principe d' Asturias, the Spanish fleet, and San Carlos. At the time the five vessels went into action, it was supposed that the Hercules was following them, but her commander hesitated to cross the bar, owing to her draught of twenty-one feet, a hesitation which almost proved fatal to her consorts, for, relying upon the support of her heavy batteries, they now found themselves without it, whilst they were under the concen- trated fire of the Spanish fleet and the two forts.
In that conjuncture, however, they were saved by one of those inspirations which sometimes come to a man in the supreme hour of trial, making him for the occasion the soul of a host. A Canadian pilot, being inspired himself, in- spired the commander of the Hercules with con- fidence in his ability to take her over the bar
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and into the action. With a cheer from her crew and all the canvas she could bear, the gallant ship sped under the guidance of the bold Canad- ian to the rescue of her consorts.
Speedily her sixty-four guns turned the tide of battle. Whilst her heavy broadside of thirty- two guns soon battered Principe d' Asturias into silence, her consorts poured their fire into the Spanish fleet, which, now short of powder, struck its colors.
After a conflict of two hours, San Carlos was the only point of defense left to the Spaniards, and that too, threatened by a new foe. Bienville was in its rear ready for an assault, which he soon boldly made. He was, however, so much impeded by the stockade that he withdrew his men until hecould be better prepared for another attack. In the assault, it is said, his Indian allies emulated the French soldiers in daring and in their efforts to tear away the impeding stockade. But their war-whoop was more effectual and decisive than their valor. Impress- ing the Spaniards, as it did, with visions of blood-dripping scalps, it disposed them to obviate by surrender the dire consequences of a
i
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successful assault, for they felt that Bienville, however so disposed, would be powerless to stay the Indian's scalping knife when his blood was at battle heat. Accordingly, before the assault was repeated, Metamoras signaled for a parley, which resulted not in a capitulation on terms which he asked for, but in a surrender at discretion.
Even after the cooling process of the time re- quired for the parley and arranging the sur- render, the Indians were so loath to forego their scalping pastime, the precious boon of victory, that it was necessary for Bienville to redeem the scalps of the Spaniards by bestowing one-half of their effects upon his allies, and reserving the other half only for his own soldiers.
When Don Alphonso, the commander of the Spanish fleet, surrendered his sword to Champineslin, the latter returned it with the complimentary assurance that the Don was worthy to wear it. But Bienville would not even condescend to accept that of Metamoras, but directed him to deliver it to a by-standing soldier.
But the real hero of this battle, like the real
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heroes of many other fields of glory, must be .unnamed, for though it is recorded that the pilot of the Hercules was rewarded with a patent of nobility for his skill and daring, there is no accessible record of his name.
Having won a surrender at discretion, it was Bienville's pleasure to send Metamoras and a sufficient number of Spanish troops to Havana, in a Spanish vessel, to be exchanged for the Frenchmen who had been sent there in August; and thus it was' that he worked the deliverance of his brother Chateaugné from his imprison- ment in Mora Castle. The rest of the Spaniards were sent to France as prisoners of war.
It was his will and pleasure likewise to burn the town of Pensacola, and to utterly destroy San Carlos by blowing it up with powder. The only structure left undestroyed was the maga- zine which stood about half a mile from the fort.
Upon the ruins of San Carlos there was fixed a tablet announcing: "In the year 1718, on the eighteenth day of September, Monsieur Des- nard de Champmeslin, Commander of His
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Most Christian Majesty, captured this place and the Island of Santa Rosa by force of arms."
Thus did the Pensacola of Arriola, after hav- ing been a shuttlecock in the cruel game of war -captured, recaptured and captured again within four months - perish utterly in the throes of a convulsion and the glare of a confla- gration; a fate which may be traced to the intrigues of Cardinal Alberoni, the ambitious and crafty minister of Philip V., resulting in a war in which Spain, without an ally, was con- fronted by the united arms of France, Great Britain, Holland and Austria. "I quickened a corpse " was the vain boast by which he ex- pressed the change he had effected in Spanish policy, one of the many disastrous consequences of which was the ending in fire and blood of a little settlement on the far-off shores of the new world.
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