Historical Sketches of Colonial Florida

by Richard L. Campbell

There were amongst those composing the expedition two elements which proved fatal to its success. The gold-greedy soon found that the pine barrens of Florida, and the fertile valleys of Alabama were not the eldorado of which they had dreamed. To the friar, the spiritual outlook was not more promising, the Indians he encountered being more ready to scalp their would-be spiritual guide than to open their ears to his teachings.

Ostensibly, to procure supplies for the colony, two friars sailed for Havana and thence to Vera Cruz, to make known its necessities to the Viceroy of Mexico, and solicit the required succor. But, as soon as they could reach his ear they endeavored to persuade him of the futility of the expedition, and the unpromising character of the country as a field for colonization.

At first, his heart being in the enterprise, he was loathe to listen to reports so inconsistent with the glowing accounts which had prompted the expedition and enlisted his zealous support; but, at last, an impression was made upon him, and an inquiry resolved upon.

But the viceroyal investigation was forestalled by the visit to Santa Maria of Don Angel de Villafana, whom the Viceroy of Cuba had appointed governor of that, at that time undefined region called Florida, who permitted the dissatisfied colonists to embark in his vessels, and abandon the, to them, hateful country in which they had passed two miserable years.

Don Tristram de Luna, with a few followers only, remained, with the fixed resolution to maintain the settlement, provided he could secure the approbation and assistance of the Viceroy. But an application for that purpose, accompanied by representations of the inviting character of the interior for settlement, was met by a prompt recall of de Luna and an order for the abandonment of the enterprise.

Don Tristram, against whom history makes no accusations of cruelty or bloodshed during his expeditions into the interior, or his stay at Santa Maria, and who, animated by the spirit of legitimate colonization, sought only to found a new settlement, invites respect, if not admiration, as a character distinct and apart from the gold-seeking cut-throat adventurers that Spain sent in shoals to the Gulf shores during the sixteenth century. Sympathy with him in his trials and regret at his failure, induce the reflection that, perhaps, had he been burdened with fewer gold-seekers and only one-twentieth of the ecclesiastics who encumbered and leavened the colony with discontent, his settlement might have proved permanent.

The local results of de Luna’s expedition were fixing, for a time, the name of Santa Maria upon the Bay, and permanently stamping upon its shores the name Pensacola; and here narration must be suspended to determine the origin of the latter.

Roberts says, the name was “that of an Indian 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 Apalachee, and “ia” substituted in Escambia for ee, indicate the difference between the terminations 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 survive 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.