The termination being Spanish, and no natural 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, connected with the mainland by a narrow strip of sand, is the fortified little seaport of Peniscola. Substitute “a” for “i,” transpose “s” and we 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 sixteenth 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 authority, 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 which we can procure no evidence. The third is a tradition founded upon, or involving, a Spanish 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 Spanish and not an Indian name. The conclusion is, therefore, irresistible, that as the name is 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 Spanish 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 Pensacola must have been its name.