Historical Sketches of Colonial Florida

by Richard L. Campbell

Nearly twenty years passed away after Maldonado’s visit to Ochus before Europeans again looked upon its shores.

In 1556, the viceroy of Mexico, and the bishop of Cuba united in a memorial to the Emperor Charles V. representing Florida as an inviting field for conquest and religious work. Imperial sanction having been secured, an expedition was organized under the command of Don Tristram de Luna to effect the triple objects of bringing gold into the emperor’s treasury, extending his dominions, and enlarging the bounds of the spiritual kingdom by winning souls to the church. For the first two enterprises one thousand five hundred soldiers were provided, and for the last a host of ecclesiastics, friars, and other spiritual teachers. Puerta d’ Anchusi was selected as the place of the projected settlement, the base from which the cross and the sword were to advance to their respective conquests.

Accordingly, on the fourteenth day of August, 1559, de Luna’s fleet cast anchor within the harbor, which he named Santa Maria; the same year in which the monarch who authorized the expedition died, the month, and nearly the day on which he, a living man, was engaged in the paradoxical farce of participating in his own funeral ceremonies in the monastery of Yusté.

The population of two thousand souls, which the fleet brought, with the required supplies of every kind, having been landed, the work of settlement began. Of the place where the settlement was made there exists no historic information, and we are left to the inference that the local advantages which afterwards induced d’ Arriola to select what is now called Barrancas as the site of his town, governed the selection of de Luna’s, unless tradition enables us to identify the spot, as a future page will endeavor to do.

The destruction of the fleet by a hurricane within a week after its arrival threw a shadow over the infant settlement, aggravating the natural discontent incident to all colonizations, resulting from the contrast between the stern realities of experience and of expectations colored by the imagination of the colonist. Against that discontent, ever on the increase, de Luna manfully and successfully struggled until 1562; and thus it was, that for two years and more there existed a town of about two thousand inhabitants on the shores of Pensacola Bay, which antedated by four years St. Augustine, the oldest town of the United States.

Don Tristram de Luna sent expeditions into the interior, and finally led one in person. In these journeys the priest and the friar joined, and daily in a tabernacle of tree boughs the holy offices of the Catholic faith were performed, the morning chant and the evening hymn breaking the silence and awakening the echoes of the primeval forest.

Where they actually went, and how far north, it is impossible to say, owing to our inability to identify the sites of villages, rivers, and other land marks mentioned in the narratives of their journeys. The presumption is strong, however, that they took, and followed northward the Indian trail, on the ridge beginning at Pensacola Bay, forming the water shed between the Perdido and Escambia rivers, and beyond their headwaters uniting with the elevated country which throws off its springs and creeks eastward to the Chattahoochee and westward to the Alabama and Tallapoosa rivers. It continued northerly to the Tennessee river; a lateral trail diverging to where the city of Montgomery now stands, and thence to the site of Wetumpka; and still another leading to what is now Grey’s Ferry on the Tallapoosa.

That trail, according to tradition, was the one by which the Indians, from the earliest times, passed between the Coosa country and the sea, the one followed in later times by the Indian traders on their pack-ponies, and the line of march of General Jackson in his invasion of Florida in 1814.

That it was regarded and used as their guiding thread by de Luna’s expeditions in penetrating the unknown country north of Santa Maria they sought to explore, is evidenced by two facts. They came to a large river which, instead of crossing, they followed its course, undoubtedly by the ridge, and, therefore, not far from the trail. They also came to or crossed the line of de Soto’s march, which he had made ten years previously, as following the trail they would be compelled to do and found amongst the Indians a vivid recollection of the destruction and rapine of their people by white men, which they assigned as the cause of the then sparsity of population, and the abandonment of clearings formerly under cultivation.

So impressed was de Luna with the fertility and other attractive features of the beautiful region of Central Alabama, which he explored, that he determined to plant a colony there. But in that design he was eventually thwarted by the discontent and insubordination of his followers, the most of whom, from the first, seem to have had no other object in view than to break up the settlement, and to terminate their insupportable exile by returning to Mexico.