Transcriber’s Note

• Obvious spelling and punctuation errors corrected.
• Corrections noted by the printer in the ERRATA have been made to the text.
• Befrenings Kriege was changed to Befreiungskriege in reference “Die deutschen Hülfstruppen im Nordamerikanischen Befreiungskriege, 1776 bis 1783” to match that book’s title in other sources.
• If Vol. 11 was used to refer to a second volume of Von Elking, it was changed to Vol. II to be consistent with the majority of references.
• Other inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation and use of space after d’ (e.g. d’Iberville and d’ Iberville) have been left as in the original.
• The large illustration appeared across 2 full pages in the original. The image may be clicked on to see a larger version if the device used allows.
• The cover was created by the transcriber from elements in the book and placed in the public domain.

HISTORICAL SKETCHES
—OF—
Colonial Florida.

—BY—

RICHARD L. CAMPBELL.

Cleveland, Ohio:

THE WILLIAMS PUBLISHING CO.

1892.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in year 1892, by Richard L. Campbell, in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

PREFACE.

The inducement to write this book was to supply, in a slight measure, the want of any particular history of British rule in West Florida. With that inducement, however, the effort would not have been made but for the sources of original information existing in the Archives of the Dominion of Canada, as well as others, pointed out to me by Dr. William Kingsford of Ottawa, author of the ‘History of Canada;’ to whom I take this occasion of making my acknowledgments.

An account of British rule necessitated one of Spanish colonial annals, both before and after it.

If any apology be necessary for the space devoted to the Creeks, it will be found in the considerations that for twenty years the body of the nation was within the limits of British West Florida; that their relations with the British, formed during that period, influenced their conduct towards the United States until after the War of 1812; and above all, that the life of Alexander McGillivray forms a part of the history of West Florida, both under British and Spanish rule.

The prominence given to Pensacola is due to its having been the capital of both British and Spanish West Florida, and therefore the centre of provincial influence.

CONTENTS.

ERRATA.

CHAPTER I.

The Discovery of Pensacola Bay by Panfilo de Narvaez—The Visits of Maldonado, Captain of the Fleet of Hernando de Soto.

On one of the early days of October, 1528, there could have been seen, coasting westward along and afterwards landing on the south shore of Santa Rosa Island, five small, rudely-constructed vessels, having for sails a grotesque patchwork of masculine under and over-wear. That fleet was the fruit of the first effort at naval construction within the present limits of the United States. It was built of yellow pine and caulked with palmetto fibre and pitch. Horses’ tails and manes furnished the cordage, as did their hides its water vessels. Its freightage consisted of two hundred and forty human bodies, wasted and worn by fatigue and exposure, and as many hearts heavy and racked with disappointment. It was commanded by His Excellency Panfilo de Narvaez, Captain-general and Adelantado of Florida, a tall, big-limbed, red-haired, one-eyed man, “with a voice deep and sonorous as though it came from a cavern.”

These were the first white men to make footprints on the shores of Pensacola Bay and to look out upon its waters. Although they landed on the Island, there is no evidence that their vessels entered the harbor.

Narvaez, an Hidalgo, born at Valladolid about 1480, was a man capable of conceiving and undertaking great enterprises, but too rash and ill-starred for their successful execution, possessing the ambition and avarice which impelled the Spanish adventurers to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico during the sixteenth century, with whom Indian life was but a trifling sacrifice for a pearl or an ounce of gold.

Five years before his Florida expedition he had been appointed, with a large naval and land force under his command, by Velasquez, governor of Cuba, to supersede Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico, and to send him in chains to Havana, to answer charges of insubordination to the authority of Velasquez. But Cortez was not the man to be thus superseded. Never did his genius for great enterprises make a more striking display than by the measures he adopted and executed in this emergency. By them he converted that threatening expedition into one of succor for himself, embracing every supply, soldiers included, he required to complete his conquests. Of this great achievement the defeat of the incompetent Narvaez was only an incident.

No labored comparison of conqueror and vanquished could present a more striking contrast between them than that suggested by their first interview. “Esteem it,” said Narvaez, “great good fortune that you have taken me captive.” “It is the least of the things I have done in Mexico,” replied Cortez, a sarcasm aimed at the incapacity of Narvaez, apart from the gains of the victor.

The fruits of the expedition to Narvaez were the loss of his left eye, shackles, imprisonment, banishment, and the humiliation of kneeling to his conqueror and attempting to kiss his hand. To the Aztec the result was the introduction of a scourge that no surrender could placate, no submission, however absolute and abject, could stay, and, therefore, more pitiless than the sword of Cortez—the small-pox.

After leaving Mexico, Narvaez appeared before the Emperor Charles V., to accuse Cortez of treason, and to petition for a redress of his own wrongs, but the dazzling success of Cortez, to say nothing of his large remittances to the royal treasury, was an effectual answer to every charge. The emperor, however, healed the wounded pride, and silenced the complaints of the prosecutor by a commission with the aforementioned sonorous titles to organize an expedition for a new conquest, by which he might compensate himself for the loss of the treasures and empire of Montezuma, which he had so disastrously failed to snatch from the iron grasp of Cortez.

The preparations to execute this commission having been made by providing a fleet, a land force, consisting of men-at-arms and cavalry, as well as the necessary supplies, Narvaez, in April, 1528, sailed for the Florida coast, and landed at or near Tampa bay.

Having resolved on a westward movement, he ordered his fleet to sail along the coast, whilst he, by rather a circuitous march, would advance in the same direction. This parting was at once final and fatal. He again reached the Gulf, somewhere in the neighborhood of St. Marks, with his command woefully wasted and diminished by toil, battle and disease; and, as can well be imagined, with his dreams of avarice and dominion rudely dispelled.

No tidings of the fleet from which he had so lucklessly parted being obtainable, despair improvised that fleet with motley sails which we have seen mooring off the island of Santa Rosa in the early days of October, its destination being Mexico—a destination, however, which was but another delusion that the winds and the waves were to dispel.

Narvaez found a grave in the maw of the sea, as did most of the remnant of his followers. Famine swept off others, leaving only four to reach Mexico after a land journey requiring years, marked by perils and sufferings incident to such a journey through a vast forest bounded only by the sea, intersected by great rivers, inhabited by savages, and infested by wild beasts. One of the survivors was Cabeça de Vaca, the treasurer and historian of the expedition.

Twelve years elapsed after Narvaez discovered Pensacola Bay before the shadow of the white man’s sail again fell upon its waters. In January, 1540, Capitano Maldonado, who was the commander of the fleet which brought Fernando de Soto to the Florida coast, entered the harbor, gave it a careful examination, and bestowed upon it the name of Puerta d’ Anchusi, a name probably suggested by Ochus,[^[1]] which it bore at the time of his visit. In entering Ochus he ended a voyage westward, made in search of a good harbor, under the orders of Soto, who was at that time somewhere on the Florida coast to the westward of Apalachee.

Having returned to Soto, Maldonado made so favorable a report—the first official report—of the advantages of Puerta d’ Anchusi that Soto determined to make it his base of supply. He accordingly ordered Maldonado to proceed to Havana, and after having procured the required succors to sail to Puerta d’ Anchusi, where he intended to go himself, and there to await Maldonado’s return before he ventured into the interior; a prudent resolve, suggested possibly by the sight of the bones of Narvaez’s horses, which had been slain to furnish cordage and water-vessels for his fleet.

But the resolve was as brief as it was wise. A few days after Maldonado’s departure a captured Indian so beguiled Soto with tales of gold to be found far to the northeast of Apalachee, where he then was, that banishing all thoughts of Puerta d’ Anchusi from his mind, he began that circuitous march which carried him into South Carolina, northern Georgia, and Alabama, where he wandered in search of treasure until disappointment, wasted forces, and needed supplies again turned his march southward, and his thoughts to his rendezvous with Maldonado.

That rendezvous was to be in October, 1540. Faithful to instructions, Maldonado was at Puerta d’ Anchusi at the appointed time with a fleet bearing all the required supplies. But Soto did not keep the tryst. He was then at Mauvilla, or Maubila, supposed to be Choctaw Bluff, on the Alabama river, absorbed by difficulties and engaged in conflicts such as he had never before encountered. Through Indians they had communicated, and intense was the satisfaction of Soto and his command at the prospect of a relief of their wants, repose from their toils, and tidings of their friends and loved ones.

Soto, however, still ambitious of emulating the achievements of Cortez and Pizzaro, looked upon Puerta d’ Anchusi as only a base of supply and refuge for temporary repose, from which again to set out in search of his goal. But very different were the views of his followers. By eaves-dropping on a dark night behind their tents, he learned that to them Puerta d’ Anchusi was not to be a haven of temporary rest only, but the first stage of their journey homeward, where Soto and his fortunes were to be abandoned.

This information again banished Puerta d’ Anchusi from his thoughts under the promptings of pride, which impelled him to prefer death in the wilderness to the mockery and humiliation of failure. He at once resolved to march deeper into the heart of the continent, and, unconsciously, nearer to the mighty river in whose cold bosom he was to find a grave.

As in idea we go into the camp at Mauvilla, on the morning when the word of command was given for a westward march, we see depicted on the war-worn visages of that iron band naught but gloom and disappointment, as, constrained by the stern will of one man, they obediently fall into ranks without a murmur, much less a sign of revolt.

Again, if in fancy we stand on the deck of Maldonado’s ship at Puerta d’ Anchusi, we may realize the keen watchfulness and the deep anxiety with which day after day and night after night he scans the shore and hills beyond to catch a glint of spear or shield, or strains his ear to hear a bugle note announcing the approach of his brothers-in-arms. And only after long, weary months was the vigil ended, as he weighed anchor and sailed out of the harbor to go to other points on the Gulf shore where happily he might yet meet and succor his commander.

To this task did he devote himself for three years, scouring the Gulf coast from Florida to Vera Cruz, until the curtain of the drama was lifted for him, to find that seventeen months previously his long-sought chief had been lying in the depths of the Mississippi, and that a wretched remnant only of that proud host, which he had last seen in glittering armor on the coast of Florida, had reached Mexico after undergoing indescribable perils and privations.

CHAPTER II.

The Settlement of Don Tristram de Luna at Santa Maria—His Explorations—Abandonment of the Settlement—The First Pensacola.

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER III.

Don Andrés de Pes—Santa Maria de Galva—Don Andres d’ Arriola—The Resuscitation of Pensacola—Its Consequences.

In 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 “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. Irresistible, 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 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 deserving 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 extent of the southern limit of her claim, from east to west, a huge gap in Spain’s North American empire.

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, Pensacola 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 establishment 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 political influence, her fostering care, and, comparatively, 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 interrelations, and following their threads of connection 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 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 Pensacola 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.”[^[2]]

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 harbor in January, 1699. But, observing the Spanish flag flying from the mast-head of two war vessels lying in the Bay and from the flagstaff 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, accompanied by his brothers, Bienvielle and Sauville, which was taking out a colony with the necessary 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 removed 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 grandson, both the objects of jealousy and suspicion to the other nations of Europe, necessarily inspired 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.

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 supplies 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 anticipation of an English expedition against Pensacola, Governor Martino readily procured from Bienville a needed supply of arms and ammunition. 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 Carolina, heading a large body of Indians, made inroads upon the Spanish settlements in Florida, 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 Pensacola from an impending attack by the Englishmen 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 occurred, for after a few days of hostile demonstrations the enemy abandoned their enterprise, owing to the want of necessary supplies.

In other ways, too, the good feeling and intimate relations of the two colonies were manifested. 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 vegetables—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 Louisiana French up to 1719, being the year after 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.

CHAPTER V.

War Declared by France against Spain—Bienville Surprises Metamoras—Metamoras Surprises Chateaugné—Bienville 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 intelligence 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 succeeded 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.

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 jurisdiction. 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 to retaliation; 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.

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, consisting 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 succeeded, but the demand to surrender was peremptorily refused by Chateaugné, the commander of the fort. To an almost harmless cannonade there succeeded an armistice, which the French sought to have extended to four, but which the Spaniards limited to two days.

After the expiration of the armistice, another ineffectual exchange of cannon shots was followed 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 Pensacola, 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.

He erected a battery on Point Seguenza, the 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 following September Bienville was ready to settle by arms his right to retain it.

The celerity of Bienville’s preparations was due, however, to the accidental arrival at Dauphin Island of a French fleet under Champmeslin, 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 Canadian volunteers, which, when it reached Perdido, was joined by five hundred Indians under Longueville.

Whilst Bienville was moving towards Pensacola, 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 concentrated 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, inspired the commander of the Hercules with confidence in his ability to take her over the bar 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 Canadian 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 he could 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. Impressing the Spaniards, as it did, with visions of blood-dripping scalps, it disposed them to obviate by surrender the dire consequences of a 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 required for the parley and arranging the surrender, 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 Champmeslin, 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 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 imprisonment 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 magazine 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 Desnard de Champmeslin, Commander of His Most Christian Majesty, captured this place and the Island of Santa Rosa by force of arms.”

Thus did the Pensacola of Arriola, after having 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 conflagration; 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 confronted by the united arms of France, Great Britain, Holland and Austria. “I quickened a corpse” was the vain boast by which he expressed 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.

CHAPTER VI.

Sketch of Island Town—Its Destruction—The Third Pensacola—The Cession of Florida by Spain to Great Britain—Appearance of Town in 1763—Captain Wills’ Report—Catholic Church.

On February 17, 1720, five months after the destruction of Pensacola, a treaty of peace between France and Spain was signed. But it was not until early in January, 1723, that Bienville, under orders from the French government, formally restored Pensacola to the Spaniards, or rather its site and surroundings.

Of the first settlement of the Island town there exists no account, but it is probable it began immediately after the destruction of the Pensacola of Arriola. Its origin may be accounted for by the natural precaution of Governor Metamoras upon his recapture of that place and preparation for a struggle with the French, to remove the non-combatants to a place of safety, or rather the safest in the vicinity, and there was none possessing such great advantages as Santa Rosa island. It was a narrow, uninhabited strip of land, separated from the main land in its western portion by three miles of water, rendering a settlement there comparatively free from the danger of surprise by the Indians. The deepest water for landing on the bay-side, and a supply of fresh water obtainable by digging wells, would naturally determine the location of the settlement; and these conditions were met by a place about two miles from the western point of the island, not far from the present bay-wharf of the life-saving station.

The progress the settlement made in the course of a quarter of a century is presented by the annexed engraving, which is taken from a sketch made in 1743. The artist, Don Serres, who was a resident during that year, came there in the service of the Havana Company in a schooner with a cargo for the town.

A North View of Pensacola on the Island of Santa Rosa.—Drawn by Dom Serres.
1—The Fort. 2—The Church. 3—The Governor’s House. 4—The Commandant’s House. 5—A Well. 6—A Bungo.

He paid New Orleans a visit, and did some profitable trading there with six thousand dollars which he had at his command. He also secured a quantity of pitch and turpentine for his Company, as well as two pine spars, each eighty-four feet long, which he sent to Havana in the schooner. This was the beginning of the timber trade of Pensacola, its first known business transaction with New Orleans, and the last authenticated instance of one of its timber dealers engaging in the elegant pastime of sketching.

In vain has information been sought of its progress during the period between the time Don Serres made the sketch and 1754, which embraced the last eleven years of its existence, for in that year it was destroyed, together with many of its people, by a terrific hurricane. And thus it was that, as the Pensacola of Arriola perished in the conflict of human passions, its offspring was destroyed in a war of the elements.

The survivors, removing to the north shore of the Bay, settled upon a crescent-shaped body of dry land, about the eighth of a mile wide in its widest part, formed by the Bay and a titi swamp, which, extending from the mouth of an estuary on the west, curved landward to a marsh just below the outlet of another on the east. These estuaries, though seemingly the outlets of two, were in fact those of one and the same stream flowing through the swamp, and navigable by canoes for some distance from the bay. The bay-shore also curved deeply, the indentation being in fact the remnant of a cove, which, as old maps show, extended to and beyond the northern edge of the swamp.

That settlement was but a removal of Pensacola to its present site, like that by which it was removed to the island. Each settlement, in its order of time, like d’ Arriola’s town, being a continuation of the Pensacola founded by de Luna in 1559, four years before Menendez founded St. Augustine.

Of the history of the present Pensacola, beyond its bare existence, from 1754 to 1763, we have no information further than that its insignificance shielded it from the trials and sufferings of the seven years war ended by the treaty of Paris, February 10, 1763.

By that treaty Florida became a British colony. On July 6 of that year Captain Wills, in command of the third battery of Royal Artillery, then at Havana, forming a part of the British force which had captured the city during the late war, was ordered by General Keppel to proceed with his command to Pensacola for the purpose of taking possession of the place. Arriving thereon the seventh of August, Captain Wills having presented the order of the king of Spain to the Spanish commander for the surrender of the post, it was promptly obeyed.

It was the duty of Spain under the treaty to remove her troops from Pensacola. Her subjects, however, were, under the Nineteenth article, entitled to remain in the full enjoyment of their personal rights, religion and property; but, resolving to remove to Mexico, they applied to the Spanish government for transportation, which was promptly promised. Accordingly, on September 2, transports for the removal of the garrison and people arrived; and, on the third, the Spanish troops and the entire population, to the last man, woman and child, sailed for Vera Cruz, leaving Captain Wills and his command the only occupants of the town.

It is to a report written by him a few days after the Spanish exodus that we owe all the information we possess of the character and appearance of the town at that time.

It consisted of “40 huts, thatched with palmetto leaves, and barracks for a small garrison, the whole surrounded by a stockade of pine posts.”

The report says: “The country, from the insuperable laziness of the Spaniards, still remains uncultivated. The woods are still near the village, and a few paltry gardens show the only improvements. Stock, they have none, being entirely supplied by Mobile, which is pretty well cultivated and produces sufficient for export.”

Of the Indians we are presented with the following glimpse: “The Indians are numerous around. We had within a few days a visit from about two hundred of five different nations. I was sorry not to have it in my power of making them any presents. I only supplied them with some rum, with which they seemed satisfied, and went off assuring me of their peaceful intentions and promising to come down soon with some of their principal chiefs.”

The church, which is so hallowing a feature in the sketch of the Island Town, is suggestive of the persevering devotion of the Catholic Faith to the spiritual welfare of her children. In 1559, when de Luna raised his national flag upon the shores of Santa Maria, his spiritual mother raised her cross beside it. With that sacred symbol she followed him in his explorations through the limitless wilderness, beginning and ending each day with her holy rites. She returned with Arriola, and, as he built his fort, her children under her pious promptings built her church. As the drum beat the reveille to call the soldier to the activities of life, the notes of her bell reminded him of her presence to admonish and console him. The engraving presents the next effort of her zeal. Afterwards, when the wing of the hurricane and the wild fury of the waves had swept away her island sanctuary, and left her children houseless on a desolate shore, she followed them to that hamlet which has just been described, where, around a rude altar, sheltered by the frail thatch of the palmetto, they enjoyed her consoling offices. When, in 1763, their national flag fell from the staff and her people went into voluntary exile, her cross went with them as their guide and solace. She returned with Galvez, and never for a day since then has she been without her altar and her priest on these shores to perform her rites for the living and the dead. For many years after the establishment of American rule, that altar and that priest were the only means by which the Protestant mother, more obedient to the Divine word than sectarian prejudice, could obey the sacred mandate: “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not.”

CHAPTER VII.

British West Florida—Pensacola the Capital—Government Established—Johnstone first Governor—British Settlers—First Survey of the Town—Star Fort—Public Buildings—Resignation of Johnstone—His Successor, Monteforte Brown.

The little settlement, mentioned in the last chapter, soon attained an importance in striking contrast with its appearance and condition.

By the treaty of Paris, France had ceded to Great Britain Canada, and that part of Louisiana east of a line beginning at the source of the Mississippi river and running through its centre to the Iberville river, thence through the middle of this river, lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, to the Gulf. That acquisition, with Florida, extended the British North American empire from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Sea, bringing alike the Seminoles and Esquimaux under its dominion.

On the seventh of October, 1763, by a royal proclamation the limits of the governments of East and West Florida were established; the former extending from the Apalachicola river eastward; the latter embracing all the territory lately acquired from France and Spain south of the parallel of 31° from the Mississippi to the Chattahoochee river; and by another exercise of royal authority, in February, 1764, the northern boundary was pushed to 32°, 28´. This line was also the southern boundary of the territory of Illinois, and it brought Mobile and Natchez within the limits of West Florida.

Of that province, so extensive and so rich in natural resources, Pensacola became the established capital; a natural result of the high estimate placed by the British upon the advantages of the harbor. When Lord Bute’s ministry was assailed in the House of Commons for having procured Florida, by the surrender of Cuba, which Great Britain had conquered in the war ended by the treaty of Paris, the acquisition of the Bay of Pensacola figures as a prominent feature in the ministerial defense.

The first step towards the establishment of civil government in West Florida was taken upon the arrival, in February, 1764, at Pensacola, of Commodore George Johnstone of the Royal Navy, who came as the governor of the province; his first official act being a proclamation announcing his presence, powers, jurisdiction, as well as the laws which were to be in force. There came with him the Twenty-first British regiment as a garrison for the post, and also a number of civilians in search of fortune, or new homes; some as parasites, who are never absent where public money is to be distributed, and others attracted by the charms of the distant, under the delusive misrepresentations of which the immigrant is so often the victim.

In November, 1764, Governor Johnstone, under instructions from the British government—which from the first seems to have taken a deep interest in the development of its late acquisitions—published a description of the province for the purpose of attracting settlers. By efforts like this, a tide of immigration soon began to flow into West Florida, which, during the British dominion of nearly twenty years, it is estimated, brought into it a population of 25,000. In this inflow were observable a large number of Africans, imported under official encouragement, to clear the forests and till the fields of the province; the British conscience being, then, still enthralled by the greedy slave-traders of Bristol, Liverpool and London, was patiently awaiting the advent of Clarkson and Wilberforce, to quicken it into resistance to the cruel traffic.

In the early days of Governor Johnstone’s administration, Pensacola was surveyed and a plan established. The main street was named George, for King George III., and the second street eastward Charlotte, for Queen Charlotte. The area between those streets as far north as what is now Intendencia street was not surveyed into blocks and lots, but reserved as a public place or park. The lots south of Garden street had an area of 80 feet front and 170 in depth. North of that street they were 192 feet square, known as arpent or Garden lots, and numbered to correspond with those lying south of Garden street, which were, strictly speaking, town lots. In order to furnish each family with a garden spot, each grantee of a town lot was entitled, upon the condition of improvement, to receive a conveyance of an arpent lot of the same number as his town lot.

That plan, which was the work of Elias Durnford, appointed, on the twenty-sixth of July, 1764, civil engineer of the province, is still the plan of the old part of Pensacola, with some changes in what was the English park, or public place; and therefore the plan of the town is, strictly speaking, of English origin.

The park, however, though excluded from private ownership, was not intended to be vacant, but on the contrary, was devoted to public uses. In the centre of it was a star-shaped stockade fort, designed as a place of refuge for the population in case of an Indian attack. Near it were the officers’ quarters, barracks, guard house, ordnance store-house and laboratory, two powder magazines, the King’s bake-house, cooperage shelter, and government store-house. This park was, therefore, in the early days of Pensacola, the liveliest and busiest part of the town.

The star-shaped fort was, from 1764 until after 1772, the only fortification of the town, as may be inferred from the official report of Captain Thomas Sowers, engineer, on the fifth of April of the latter year.

The first street pushed through the crescent-shaped swamp, was George street, involving much labor in building a causeway and covering it with earth. It extended to the elevation, then named Gage Hill, in honor of General Gage, of Boston memory, and who, as the commander-in-chief of all the royal forces in the British North American colonies, had much to do with Pensacola in its early days. Upon the highest point of this hill was established a lookout from which the approaches of the town landward and seaward could be observed.

Governor Johnstone, who was a commodore in the royal navy, in the second year of his administration, found himself in jarring relations with the military, resulting from circumstances which, at this distance of time, seem to be trifles, but magnified, when they occurred, into importance by that jealous sensitiveness which appears to exist always between those two arms of the public service. As might be expected, whisperers, busybodies, and parasites, thronging the seat of patronage, ready to catch any stray crumb of official favor, aggravated the conflict, which at last became so bitter and widespread that we find it figuring in the records of the courts-martial of a major, a lieutenant, and even an ensign. Naturally, too, the colonists at length became partisans of the official strife, thereby contributing to bring about a condition of affairs rendering the governor’s further continuance in office so uninviting to himself and so unsatisfactory to the people that, in December, 1766, he resigned.

An incident which occurred shortly after his appointment, manifests his impatience of criticism—a weakness which may have been the cause of his troubles in Florida. He and Grant, governor of East Florida, were appointed at the same time by the Bute administration, when Scotch appointees to office were so ill-favored by the English. The announcement were made in the North Briton with a sarcastic allusion to them as a brace of Scotchmen. At this Johnstone was so much incensed that he sent to the publishers what was equivalent to a challenge. Moreover, on meeting with a Mr. Brooks, who was connected with the North Briton, Johnstone insisted on his stating whether he was the author of the article. Brooks refusing to answer, Johnstone drew his sword to use on him when by-standers interfered. Brooks instituted legal proceedings under which the governor was bound to keep the peace.

In after years, Johnstone became a member of Parliament, and attracted much attention by casting, in the House of Commons, one of the only two negative votes on the Boston Harbor Bill, Edmund Burke casting the other. His course on that memorable occasion secured him such consideration with the Americans as to induce the British government to select him as one of the five commissioners who were sent to America in 1778, under Lord North’s conciliatory bill, intended to concede to the colonies all, and even more, than they had demanded at the beginning of the controversy with the Mother country. But the sequel of his mission proved his unfitness for the position. Besides venturing to enter into correspondence with Robert Morris and Francis Dana, he attempted, through a lady, to bribe General Joseph Reed of Pennsylvania by an offer of £10,000 and the highest office within the gift of the crown in America in the event his efforts at conciliation proving successful. To that offer Reed made the memorable reply: “I am not worth purchasing, but such as I am the King of Great Britain is not rich enough to do it.”

The other commissioners, Mr. Eden, General Clinton, and Lord Carlisle, at least, disavowed all knowledge or connection with Johnstone’s course. His conduct became the subject of resolutions passed by Congress, in which it was declared: “That it is incompatible with the honor of Congress to hold any manner of intercourse with the said George Johnstone, especially to negotiate with him upon affairs in which the cause of liberty is interested.”

From that reflection he sought to vindicate himself by an ill-tempered address, which was followed by his resignation from the commission.

Though a Scotchman, he seems in this affair to have acted with more of the impulse of a Frenchman, like Genet, than with the cool deliberation characteristic of his race. Though he had been a commodore in the British navy, after his appointment of governor of West Florida his historical designation is “Governor Johnstone.”

By virtue of his being lieutenant-governor, Monteforte Brown became Johnstone’s successor.

The troops stationed at Pensacola during Governor Johnstone’s time were the Thirty-first regiment of infantry and the second battalion of Royal Artillery, under General Taylor. In 1765, these troops suffered from scurvy, as a remedy for which the governor undertook means to provide them with fresh meat, a provision which it would seem a thoughtful and considerate ruler would have employed as a preventive, instead of waiting until disease required it as a remedy.

The scourge, however, proved a blessing in the end, as our ills often do, by turning attention to the necessity of securing regular supplies of vegetable food, the acids of which science had determined to be the preventive of scorbutic affections. This led to the clearing, draining and cultivation of large bodies of the Titi Swamp, a process which, once begun, was continued throughout the period of English rule, until the town was surrounded by smiling gardens, extending westward almost to Bayou Chico, of which this generation has evidence in the absence of forest from the district and its meadow-like appearance, as well as its intersections of choked up ditches and drains.

In October, 1766, there was an exhibition in Pensacola of the cruelty with which the British soldier was treated in the last century. For absence without leave, James Baker Mattross of the Royal Artillery received 100 lashes under sentence of a court-martial. Harsh as this sentence may seem, it was mild and humane compared with what was inflicted in other instances at other military posts. Soldiers of the Royal American regiment, stationed at Detroit, were punished for rioting, as follows:[^[3]] James Wilkins, Derby McCaffny, and Sargeant Deck 1000 lashes each, whilst fortunate Corporal Saums escaped with only 500, but who, even in his luck, was yet five times less lucky than the royal artilleryman at Pensacola. These terrible inflictions provoke inquiry as to the dermal texture of the backs of the British soldiery of the eighteenth century.

With the possibility of such suffering before them, we can appreciate the joy with which Richard Harris of the Thirty-first regiment, charged with stealing chickens, and Lewis Crow on trial for selling liquor, who were tried by court-martial at the same time as Mattross, received their respective findings of not guilty.

CHAPTER VIII.

General Bouquet—General Haldimand.

Early in 1765 General Henry Bouquet having been assigned to the command of the southern military district of the colonies, of which Pensacola was the headquarters, sailed from Philadelphia in a small schooner for that place. He arrived there in the early spring, and on the following September died.[^[4]] Of the day and cause of his death nothing seems to be known. Of the fact that his grave was marked by a monument, there is the most conclusive proof.[^[5]]

Where is that monument? That time and the elements are responsible for its disappearance is improbable. That it is not even a subject of tradition suggests the painful suspicion that it was willfully destroyed; a suggestion which explains the absence of all memorials of the people who must have died in Pensacola during the nearly twenty years of the British dominion, and removes from their generation the reproach of having had no respect for the memory and ashes of their departed friends and comrades.

An exodus of the English occurred in 1783, as a future page will show, like that of the Spaniards in 1763 already mentioned. The town was filled by a new and strange population, whose needs for building material were urgent, and their reverence for the dead too feeble, perhaps, to resist the temptation of supplying their wants by plundering tombs deserted by their natural guardians.

Nature, too, conspired with man in the work of desecration. The necropolis of the English was at the western extremity of the town, extending southward and embracing a slight bluff on the Bay. From 1860 to 1870 the water abraded that place, washing out human bones, and thus compelled the earth to surrender its dead to the sport of the waves.

General Bouquet was born at Rolle, in the canton of Berne, Switzerland. That he attained so high a rank is evidence of his merit. His masterly campaign, in 1763, against the Ohio Indians, including the Delawares, the Shawnees, and Mingoes, as related by the classic pen of Dr. Kingsford, in his History of Canada,[^[6]] is a most interesting and striking chapter of our colonial annals. The result was the removal of a terrible scourge from the western borders of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the restoration to liberty and to friends of three hundred white men and women by a treaty, the terms of which were left to the discretion of General Bouquet by General Gage. So highly appreciated were his skill and courage at the time that both colonies honored him with votes of thanks for his “great services,” which were supplemented by a complimentary letter from the king.

But the royal letter and his promotion were only Dead Sea apples. Their result was a voyage in a small vessel to the distant shores of the Gulf of Mexico, where he was to die in a few months in a little garrison town with his laurels yet fresh on his brow, away from the friends and that admiring social circle he had left so recently at Philadelphia. Had he been the son, or cousin, whether first, second or third, would have mattered not, of a minister, he would have won a pension and obtained an enviable appointment.

General Bouquet was not only a distinguished soldier, but he also left behind him another claim to distinction in the thirty volumes of manuscript in the British museum, known as the “Bouquet Collection,” which now calendared is available to the historical student.

His monument has perished; his bones, perhaps, have been the sport of the unpitying waves; generations have unconsciously trampled on his dust; but, in “the Pantheon of history,” his name and his fame are as fresh as when on these shores he drew his last breath and heaved his last sigh.

A letter[^[7]] from his confidential friend Ourry inspires the suspicion that a romantic passion, nourished by exile and inaction, contributed to his early death. He was devoted to a Miss Willing of Philadelphia, and supposed to be her affianced. A Mr. Francis, a wealthy Londoner, wooed and won the lady whilst the soldier was winning laurels on the western frontier. But for vandal hands his tomb would be a shrine where disappointed love could make its votive offerings.

General Frederick Haldimand was the successor of General Bouquet in the command of the southern district. He, too, was a Swiss, and a native of the Canton of Berne. He had held important commands in Canada before he came to Florida. In 1773 he was appointed governor of New York. In the same year, during General Gage’s absence in England, he was commander-in-chief of the colonies. He was, from 1778 to 1784, governor-general of Canada. To the qualities of a distinguished soldier, he added ability for civil affairs and the statesmanlike qualities which great crises sometimes require in a military commander, as appears from Lord Dartmouth’s correspondence with him during Gage’s absence.[^[8]]

There is an interesting coincidence in the lives of Bouquet and Haldimand. Drawn to each other, doubtless, by the tie of nativity and profession, similarity of disposition, interests and fortunes, a life-long friendship was the natural consequence. They were associates in land investments. Bouquet bequeathed his entire estate to his native brother-in-arms, including the valuable collection before referred to. More fortunate than the former, the latter lived to be made a Knight of the Bath, and to die in his native town of Yverdun.[^[9]]

CHAPTER IX.

Governor Elliott—Social and Military Life in Pensacola—Gentlemen—Women—Fiddles—George Street—King’s Wharf on November 14, 1768.

There exists evidence in the Canadian archives that, in July, 1767, Mr. Elliot was appointed to succeed Governor Johnstone, but careful search has failed to discover any official act upon which to rest the conclusion that he ever came to the province.

In a note dated eighteenth of October, 1768, at Pensacola, General Haldimand tells Governor Brown that “assistance will be given to land Governor Elliot’s baggage, and put the garden in order,” in answer, evidently, to a request of Governor Brown, made in expectation of the new governor’s early arrival. But these preparations were manifestly made in vain, for in a letter written at Pensacola, in January, 1769, by the general to Mr. John Bradley of New Orleans, he says: “I hope that these matters will be settled on the arrival of Governor Elliot, daily expected.” And numerous papers in the Canadian archives, as well as documents in the American state papers, show that from the eighteenth of December, 1766, up to the appointment of Governor Peter Chester, in 1772, Brown was the acting governor of the province. The evidence is therefore conclusive that though Elliot was appointed, he either died or resigned without ever having gone to the province.

The coming of officers and others from the military posts of the province to headquarters, as well as the frequent courts-martial held there, especially numerous and exciting in 1766-7, enlivened military life at Pensacola.

Of the social life of the town during Johnstone’s and Brown’s administrations, we have but little information. If, however, the opinion of an official high in rank is to be accepted as evidence, gentlemen were not numerous up to 1767, as will be seen from an extract from a letter of his to a friend: “A ship lately arrived from London, has brought over the chief justice and the attorney-general of the province, and other gentlemen, who are very much wanted.” But who are and who are not gentlemen? Let the moralist, the sectarian, partisan, votary of sport or fashion, dude, friend, enemy, the prejudiced, the just, the harsh, and the charitable successively sit in judgment upon the same man; what a very chameleon in character will he not appear, as he is reviewed by each of his judges? Of this variety of judgments, an occurrence, at Pensacola during this period, is illustrative.

Major Farmer of the Thirty-fourth regiment of infantry, stationed at Fort Charlotte,[^[10]] was by the Johnstone party accused of embezzlement and fraud. But a court-martial which sat at Pensacola honorably acquitted him, and upon a review of the record the finding of the court was approved by the King.

Another letter, in 1770, gives the following uninviting picture of the civil as well as the social condition of the place: “Pensacola has been justly famed for vexatious law-suits. It is contrived, indeed, that if a poor man owes but five pounds, and has not got so much ready money, or if he disputes some dollars of imposition that may be in the account, or if he is guilty of shaking his fist at any rascal that has abused him, he is sure to be prosecuted, and the costs of every suit are about seven pounds sterling.... I have known this province for a little more than four years, yet I could name to you a set of men who may brag of one governor resigned, one horse-whipped and one whom they led by the nose and supported while it suited their purpose, and then betrayed him. What the next turn of affairs will be, God knows.”

Perhaps, however, the writer owed a shopkeeper who sued him; or he had been fined for offering violence to some other importunate creditor; and as to the costs of litigation, it is likely, that in this year of grace some luckless litigant, in the modern Pensacola, can be found who would heave a sympathetic sigh on reading the complaint which comes to us from a suitor in its early days.

Besides, the reference to the treatment received by three governors, in a letter written in 1770, is rather puzzling, for though three governors had been appointed for West Florida up to that time, but two, Johnstone and Brown, administered its government. Johnstone resigned and, therefore, Brown must have been the man, if any, who was horsewhipped and led by the nose. As “led by the nose,” however, is a metaphor, “horsewhipped” may, perhaps, be regarded as a figure of speech likewise.

Strange though it be, yet so it is, in the mass of Pensacola correspondence, from 1763 to 1770, we find mention made of military officers of every grade, governors, secretaries, surveyors, judges, male Indians, ships, boats, bricks, lumber, shingles, wine, swords, muskets, cheese, cannon and fiddles, but of a woman or any of her belongings, never, with only two exceptions.

One comes to us like an attractive mirage on the far-off horizon of this Sahara of masculinity and soulless things in the person of Mrs. Hugh Wallace of Philadelphia, a friend of General Haldimand, in respect to whom, in a letter to her husband, he says: “I beg my best respects may be acceptable to Mrs. Wallace.” The other is a nameless moral wreck, of whom the writer of a letter exclaims: “I wish I could make the mother of my children my wife!” forcing upon the imagination the shadow of a wronged wife, with one’s heart touched by the probable sorrows of a blighted life.

But, though excluded from men’s letters, we do not need their correspondence to inform us that wives, mothers, sisters and nurses formed no inconsiderable part of the population of Pensacola in those early days, for we know it as certainly, fully, and confidently as we know the town must have been blessed with air, light, food, and all the other vivifying conditions of human existence.

It has been intimated that fiddles were the subject of correspondence, and thuswise. It appears that General Haldimand was the owner of two fiddles. Whether fiddling was one of his accomplishments does not appear. But as ownership of one fiddle ordinarily creates the presumption that the owner is a performer in some one of the three degrees of good, bad or indifferent, the ownership of two would seem to be conclusive of the fact.

However that may be, it seems that Governor Thomas Penn of Pennsylvania had knowledge of the instruments, and, presumably, knowing their merits, coveted them to such a degree that the general induced him to pay $360 for them. As the bargain was made by letter, after the general and the fiddles had been in Pensacola for several years, we may infer that their dulcet tones must have made a deep and ineffaceable impression upon the governor, which no other fiddles could remove. By a vessel sailing from Pensacola to Philadelphia, the general sent a box containing the two fiddles to Mr. Joseph Shipping of that place, agent of Governor Penn, and also a letter to Hugh Ross, his own agent, whom he tells (evidently with the chuckle of a trader who has made a good bargain) of the $360 he is to collect from Shipping, closing the letter with the exclamation, “I wish I had more fiddles to sell!”

Correspondence in 1767 shows courtesies exchanged between Pensacola and Philadelphia. A Pensacolian sends a sea turtle, and the Philadelphian returns a cheese.

The town was accused of being hot and inhospitable. But the letter of complaint tells what a specific wine is for the prevention of all climatic diseases and the other ills of life. One gentleman, to be sure of a supply of the panacea, orders a pipe of old Madeira.

On November 14, 1768, we are walking down the east side of George street from the gardens to the Bay. After passing two blocks we find ourselves on the Public Square and in front of a large building. Going in and out of that building are many people, the most of them soldiers and Indians, and somewhere in or about it we find a Mr. Arthur Neil. Upon inquiry we are informed the building is the king’s store-house, and Mr. Neil its keeper. Leaving the store, a short walk brings us to the shore and afterwards to the king’s wharf, which we see covered with troops, some of them getting into boats, whilst others, already embarked, are going to a ship lying at anchor. That ship is the Pensacola bound for Charleston, South Carolina. The troops are the Thirty-first regiment, lately stationed at Mobile, whence they have just arrived, after an overland march, for the purpose of embarking in the Pensacola. Whether they shall remain at Charleston in winter quarters will, according to a letter of General Haldimand to Colonel Chisolm, “depend upon the conduct of the Bostonians.”[^[11]]

CHAPTER X.

Governor Peter Chester—Fort George of the British and St. Michael of the Spanish—Tartar Point—Red Cliff.

Peter Chester, having been commissioned governor of West Florida in 1772, came to Pensacola, the capital of the province, and entered upon the administration of the office. He was recognized and deferred to by General Haldimand as a man of capacity and experience, a reputation which was not impaired by his nine years’ rule in Florida.

The first days of his administration were marked by a determination to reform the public service, and to supersede the old star fort by more stable and efficient defenses for the town and harbor, and the spirit which animated him was at once communicated to the military commander of the province.

Early in his administration, after much discussion by engineers of several plans for the defense of the town, a fort was built, under orders from General Gage, on Gage Hill, and named Fort George for his majesty George III.[^[12]]

In the centre of the fortress was the council chamber of the province and the repository of its archives, where the office duties of the governor and the military commander were performed, where audience was given to Indian chiefs and delegations, and where really centered the government of West Florida, according to its English boundaries.

In that chamber on one occasion could have been seen a man in the prime of life, partly in Indian dress, in earnest conversation with Governor Chester and William Panton, the millionaire and merchant prince of the Floridas. By the evident admixture of white and Indian blood in his veins, his skin had lost several shades of the hue, his hair the peculiar stiffness, and his cheek bones somewhat of the prominence of those of his aboriginal ancestry. He was tall and slender; his eyes, black and piercing, beamed with the light that belongs to those of the cultured; the Indians said his high forehead was arched like a horse-shoe; the fingers which hold the pen with which he is writing, during a pause in the conversation, are long and slender; he speaks and then reads what he has written; all is in the purest English, to which he is capable of giving point by an apt classical quotation. On a future occasion he will enter that chamber with the commission of a British colonel. A few years later he will hold a like commission from the King of Spain. A few years later still will find him a brigadier-general of the United States. That man is Alexander McGillivray, of whom much is to be written.

In that chamber three men were once seated at a table, attended by two secretaries busily writing, one in English, the other in Spanish. One of the three is Governor Chester, another is General John Campbell, a distinguished English officer whom fortune has just deserted. The third, a young-looking Spaniard, too young for his insignia of a Spanish general, is Don Bernardo de Galvez, the governor and military commander of Louisiana. Those three men are closing a drama and writing the last paragraph of a chapter of history. The two papers the secretaries are writing, when signed, will separate, one going to London, the other to Madrid, to meet again at Versailles. At Versailles they will be copied substantially into the duplicates of the treaty of 1783 between Spain and Great Britain, and constitute its V Article.

A pigeon-hole on the side of that chamber once contained an order from Lord Dartmouth, dated January, 1774, to the commander-in-chief of West Florida, to forward a regiment from Pensacola to revolutionary Boston to quell the tea-riots. This book is debtor to many documents which once rested in other pigeon-holes of the chamber.

Fort George was a quadrangle with bastions at each corner. There were within the fort a powder magazine and barracks for the garrison, besides the chamber above mentioned. The woods north of it, for an eighth of a mile, and within a curve bending around it to the bay, were felled, in order to give play to its guns landward, whilst they could bear upon an enemy in the bay by firing over the town. By a system of signals, intercommunication was kept up with Tartar Point and thence with Red Cliff.

Tartar Point, now the site of the Navy Yard, where a battery and barracks were erected by the British, is the only existing name in this part of West Florida which carries one’s thoughts back to the days of British rule. The name of the point under the second Spanish dominion, which lasted about forty years, was Punta de la Asta Bandera—the Point of the Flagstaff. It seems strange that an English name which had been superseded for that period by a Spanish designation, should after that lapse of time be restored.

The locality of Red Cliff was for a time a puzzle. Such a name for a locality at once induced a search for a suggestive aspect. No red bluff, however, not too far eastward to serve as the site of a work for the defense of the town or harbor, could be found, and yet, no bluff westward of the former could be observed to suit the designation. But at length, a letter in the Canadian archives fixed Barrancas as the locality by stating that there was at about the distance of a half to a quarter of a mile from Red Cliff a powder magazine, built by the Spaniards, capable of holding 500 barrels of powder, which was then being used as the powder depôt of the province, evidently the relic of old San Carlos, destroyed by the French in 1719, and stood on the site of the present Fort Redoubt.

The defenses of Red Cliff consisted of two batteries, “one on the top and the other at the foot of the hill.” There were quarters for the officers and barracks for the soldiers in one building, so constructed as to be proof against musket balls and available as an ample defense against an Indian attack.[^[13]]

CHAPTER XI.

Representative Government.

When the governments of West and East Florida were established, as before related, their governors were, severally, vested with authority, their councils consenting and the condition of the provinces being favorable, to call for the election of general assemblies by the people.

In 1773, Governor Chester concluded that the time had arrived when it would be expedient for him to exercise this power. He, accordingly, issued writs authorizing an election, fixing the time it was to be held, the voting precincts, the qualifications of voters, and the number and qualifications of assemblymen to be chosen, as well as the day of the sitting of the general assembly at Pensacola.

But the writs, unhappily, fixed the terms of assemblymen at three years; a provision which proved fatal, not only to this first attempt, but likewise to all future efforts to establish representative government in West Florida. The election was held throughout the province, and the members of a full general assembly elected. But whilst the people went to the polls with alacrity, and hailed with pleasure the advent of popular government, they were opposed to the long tenure fixed by Governor Chester; and so determined was that opposition that they resolved that it should not receive the implied sanction of their votes. They accordingly cast ballots which declared that they were subject to the condition that the representative should hold for one year only. To that condition the governor refused to consent. The people, on the other hand, were equally unyielding in their opposition. Efforts were made, but in vain, to induce a concession by one side or the other; consequently, during the following years of English dominion, as before, the province knew no other civil government than that of the governor and his council.

It is difficult to understand the motives which prompted the people to so stubborn an opposition. The tenure of three years might, indeed, seem long to voters who had probably lived in colonies, where it was a third or two-thirds less. But still, if there was any value to a people in representative government, surely an assembly holding for three years was better than none; especially as it would have so concentrated the influence and power of the community as to enable it at some auspicious conjuncture to remove the one popular objection to the system.

On the other hand, we can better appreciate the conduct of Governor Chester. An Englishman with the Tory conservatism of that day, he would, naturally, fear the effect of short terms and frequent elections, aside from economical considerations. All the northern colonies were in a state of ferment bordering on revolution, and that consideration, doubtless, intensified his opposition to anything that savored of opposition to the wishes of the king or his representatives. Indeed, from his stand-point, to yield to the popular wishes in array against his own will and judgment, was to leaven the province with a pestilent political heresy which was seeking to substitute the power of the people for the authority of the crown.

Governor Chester seems to have possessed superior talents for government, the best evidence of which is found in the prosperity of the colony during his administration, the harmony that existed between him and the military, and the high respect and deference he received from General Haldimand.

Such a man, conscious of his rectitude and good intentions towards the province, evinced by his readiness to afford it the privilege of representative government, somewhat at the expense of his own authority, would naturally feel that the condition attached to the ballots, and adhered to with much insistance, manifested such a want of confidence in him as to justify his distrust of the people.

But what Governor Chester’s zealous endeavors could not accomplish in West Florida, the reluctant efforts of Governor Tonyn achieved in the eastern province. In 1780, the latter, against his own wishes, and solely at the suggestion of others, called for the election of a general assembly. The call having been promptly obeyed, the first popular representative body in Florida met at St. Augustine in January, 1781.[^[14]]

CHAPTER XII.

Growth of Pensacola—Panton, Leslie & Co.—A King and the Beaver—Governor Chester’s Palace and Chariot—The White House of the British, and Casa Blanca of the Spanish—General Gage—Commerce—Earthquake.

There is evidence of great improvement in the town within a few years from Governor Chester’s advent; a progress which was accelerated as the revolution in the Northern Colonies advanced. That great movement, ever widening its area, extended at last from the Gulf to Canada, leaving no repose or peace for those who, living within it, were resolute to remain loyal to their king.

Some entered the royal military service; multitudes left America, and others, to nurse their loyalty in quietude, removed to Florida. Though most of that emigration went to East Florida, yet West Florida, and especially Pensacola, received a large share. St. Augustine, however, was the tory paradise of the revolutionary era. She can, without question, supplement the glory of her antiquity with the boast of having once seen her streets lighted up by the blazing effigies of John Adams and John Hancock.[^[15]]

The most important commercial acquisition of Pensacola by that tory immigration was William Panton, the senior of the firm of Panton, Leslie & Co., a Scotch house of great wealth and extensive commercial relations. They had an establishment in London, with branches in the West India Islands. During the English dominion in Florida they established themselves in St. Augustine; later, during Governor Chester’s administration, at Pensacola, and afterwards, at Mobile. Other merchants also came to Pensacola about the same time, attracted principally by the heavy disbursements of the government. But these expenditures were not the attraction to the Scotchmen. Their object was to grasp the Indian trade of West Florida. A building which they erected with a wharf in front of it is still standing, or at least, its solid brick walls are now those of the hospital of Dr. James Herron, whose dwelling house stands on the site of the Council Chamber of Fort George.

In that building was carried on a business which grew steadily from year to year during the British dominion, and afterwards attained great magnitude under Spanish rule, as we shall have occasion to notice in a future page. In building up that business, Panton had a most able and influential coadjutor in General Alexander McGillivray, whom we lately saw in the Council Chamber of Fort George. Through him their business comprehended not only West Florida, but extended to and even beyond the Tennessee river. In perfect security, their long lines of pack horses went to and fro in that great stretch of country, carrying all the supplies the Indians needed, and bringing back skins, peltry, bees-wax, honey, dried venison, and whatever else their savage customers would provide for barter. Furs were a large item of that traffic, for the beaver in those days abounded throughout West Florida, and was found even in the vicinity of Pensacola.

One of their ponds, still existing on Carpenter’s Creek, four miles from the town, is suggestive of an instructive comparison between the fruits of the life-work of its humble constructors, and those of the twenty years rule, of a mighty monarch. Of the British dominion of his Majesty George III., in this part of Florida, the millions of treasure expended, and the thousands of lives sacrificed to establish and maintain it, there exists no memorial, or result, except a fast disappearing bank of sand on the site of Fort George. From that barren outcome of such a vast expenditure of human life and money, we turn with a blush for the vanity and folly of man, to contemplate that little pool fringed with fairy candles,[^[16]] where the water lilies bloom, and the trout and perch flash in the sunlight, as the memento of a perished race, whose humble labors have furnished pastime and food to successive generations of anglers.

An unsuccessful effort has been made to obtain reliable information as to the number and description of the houses Pensacola contained in its most thriving days during Governor Chester’s administration. But the only account we have, is that of William Bertram, who though reputed an eminent botanist is hardly reliable, for he describes Governor Chester’s residence as a “stone palace, with a cupola built by the Spaniards;”[^[17]] and yet, according to the description of the town in Captain Will’s report, at the close of Spanish rule, it consisted of “forty huts and barracks, surrounded by a stockade;” and he witnessed at that time, the exodus of the entire Spanish population. Besides, persons whose memories went back within thirty years of Governor Chester’s alleged palatial residence, neither saw, nor even heard, of the ruins of such a structure.

Upon the same authority rests the statement, that the Governor had a farm to which he took morning rides in “his chariot.”[^[18]] But a traveler whose fancy was equal to the transformation of a hut into a palace, may have transformed his excellency’s modest equipage into a more courtly vehicle.

It is probable, however, that although Governor Chester was not the occupant of a stone palace with a cupola, he lived in a sightly and comfortable dwelling built of brick or wood, or perhaps of both. One such dwelling of his time, that of William Panton, was familiar, forty years ago to the elders of this generation. It stood near the business house of Panton, Leslie & Co. Taking its style and solidity as a guide, there existed several houses in the town within the last half century that could be identified as belonging to Governor Chester’s day.

One of them was the scene of a tragedy; a husband cutting a wife’s throat fatally, his own more cautiously, or perhaps her cervical vertibrae had taken off the edge of the razor, for he survived. Thereafter, none would inhabit it, and consequently it rapidly went to ruin. It stood on the north side of Government street, a block and a half from Palafox. A jury acquitted him. Why? No one could conjecture, unless because she was his wife, and therefore his chattel, like the cow or sheep of a butcher.

In Governor Chester’s time there existed a large double story suburban residence, which was a distinguished feature in the landscape looking southwesterly from Fort George, or from any part of the Bay. It stood on the bluff between the now Perdido R. R. and Bayou Chico. Painted white, it became the “white house” of the English, and “Casa Blanca” of the Spanish dominion.

It was the home of a family of wealth and social standing, composed of three—husband, wife, and daughter, the latter a child. Gardens belonging to it covered much of the area of that meadow-like district already mentioned. That home was to be the scene of a drama in three acts; the death of a child, the death of a husband, and a struggle of strong, martyrlike womanhood in the toils of temptation, tried to the lowest depth of her being, but coming forth triumphant.

In examining the calendar of the Haldimand collection by Mr. Douglas Brymner, Archivest of the Dominion of Canada, we are impressed with the great and varied responsibility, labor, and care, attending the office of commander in chief of the American colonies, especially after Great Britain’s, Canada, Florida, and Louisiana acquisitions. His administration involved not merely general superintendence of the military department, but likewise embraced the minutest details requiring expenditures of public money. We accordingly find General Gage, during Governor Chester’s administration, dictating letters in respect to carpenter’s wages[^[19]] in Pensacola. Again we find him busy over a controversy which had sprung up there in respect to the employment of a Frenchman, Pierre Rochon,[^[20]] to do carpenter’s work, and furnish shingles, to the exclusion of Englishmen. Upon economical grounds his excellency decided in favor of Rochon. Pierre was evidently an active and enterprising man. Before he came to Pensacola to secure for himself all the public carpentering and shingle business there, he had enjoyed the like monopoly at Mobile.

Again we find the General engaged with a small matter at Red Cliff.[^[21]] Lieutenant Cambell, of the engineer department, had furnished some carpenters who were employed there with candles and firewood, doubtless because they could not otherwise be procured by the men. That act of kindness brought the benevolent lieutenant the following scorching reproof: “I am sorry to acquaint you that his excellency, General Gage, is greatly displeased at your giving of the carpenters candles and firewood; and he desires to know by what authority you assumed to give those allowances, or by what order they were given? For his excellency declares, that a shilling shall not be paid on that account.” New York, 16 Feb. 1773. S. Sowers, Captain of Engineers.

Even the quality of bricks used on the public works at Pensacola was a matter of interest to the commander in chief. In 1771, a brick manufactured by the British, and one by the Spaniards, nearly a century before, as General Haldimand says, were sent to headquarters at New York, for the judgment of his excellency as to their comparative merits.

These letters impress us the more with the cares of General Gage, when we reflect they were written at the time of the troublesome tea business at rebellious Boston; and when the flowing tide of the revolution, as may be discerned from almost every page of the calendar, was daily rising, and threatening to sweep away the supports of British authority in the colonies.

In a former page mention is made of a Philadelphia lady, whose name occurs in the Pensacola correspondence of an earlier day. It is but fair, therefore, that we should not leave unnoticed a New York lady who is mentioned in letters of Governor Chester’s time; the more so, because she seems to have been one of those thrifty housewives, who do not entirely depend upon the tin can, and green glass jar of the shop to supply their families with preserved fruits and vegetables; besides, there can be brought in with her extracts from letters, exemplary of the courtly style, with which in Governor Chester’s day, a gentleman returned, and a lady received his thanks for a small courtesy.[^[22]]

General Haldimand, at Pensacola, writes Captain S. Sowers, the husband of the lady, who is in New York:

“I most respectfully ask Mrs. Sowers, to permit me, through you, to tender to her my most grateful thanks for the three jars of pickels.”

The Captain replies: “Mrs. Sowers, with pleasure, accepts your thanks for the pickels, and when ye season comes for curing of them, she will send you another collection which she hopes will be acceptable.”

In this stirring, short-hand, type-writing age, the form of a like exchange of courtesies would probably be: “Pickels received. Thanks.”

Though there was no lack of lawyers and doctors, who it is said, lived in fine style, there was a sad want of clergymen or preachers in the province. There was but one of whom we have any account up to 1779, and he was stationed at Mobile. Stuernagel, the Waldeck Field Preacher, on his arrival in Pensacola, in that year, christened a boy whose parents had been waiting eight years to make him the subject of the holy office. He also baptized men who had been watching from their boyhood for an opportunity to make their baptismal vows. Nor can there be found a reference to church or chapel during the English dominion.[^[23]]

The most prosperous and promising days Pensacola ever saw, except those since the close of the civil war, were from 1772 to 1781. As the American revolution advanced, additions were made to the numbers, intelligence and wealth of its population, owing to causes already mentioned. It was the capital of a province rich in its forests, its agricultural and other resources. Its Bay was prized as the peerless harbor of the Gulf, which it was proposed by the British government to make a great naval station, a beginning in that direction having been made by selecting a site for a navy yard adjoining the town to the westward. Its commerce was daily on the increase; not only in consequence of the extension of Panton, Leslie & Co.’s trade with the Indians, but other enterprising merchants who had been added to the population, were engaged in an export trade, comprising pine timber and lumber, cedar, salt beef, raw hides, cattle, tallow, pitch, bear’s oil, staves, shingles, honey, beeswax, salt fish, myrtle wax[^[24]], deer skins, dried venison, furs and peltry. This trade, and the £200,000 annually extended by the British government, as well as the disbursements of the shipping, constituted the sources of the prosperity of the town.

This period, besides being a season of growth and prosperity to Pensacola, as well as the rest of the Province, was one of repose, undisturbed by the march of armies, battles, and the other cruel shocks of war that afflicted the northern colonies. But it was not to remain to the end a quiet spectator of the drama enacting on the continent. It, too, had an appointment with fate. Though not even a faint flash of the northern storm was seen on its horizon, yet there had been one for long brooding for it in the southwest.

The earthquake, too, that visited it on the night of February 6, 1780,[^[25]] was but a presage of that which on May 8, 1781, was to shake it to its center; and prove the signal of an exodus of the English almost as complete as was that of the Spanish population in 1763.

CHAPTER XIII.

Military Condition of West Florida in 1778—General John Campbell—The Waldecks—Spain at War with Britain—Bute, Baton Rouge and Fort Charlotte Capitulate to Galvez—French Town—Famine in Fort George—Galvez’s Expedition against Pensacola—Solana’s Fleet Enters the Harbor—Spaniards Effect a Landing—Spanish Entrenchment Surprised—The Fall of Charleston Celebrated in Fort George.

The military condition of West Florida was changed as the revolutionary war progressed. There were no longer seen two or more regiments at Pensacola, one or two at Mobile, and one at Fort Bute, Baton Rouge, and Panmure. The call for troops for service in the northern colonies had, by the latter part of 1778, reduced the entire effective force of the province to five hundred men.

That such a reduction was thought prudent, was due to the peaceful relations of the Spaniards and the British, as well as those of the latter with the Creek and Choctaw Indians, attributable to the influence of McGillivray, now a colonel in the British service.

In the latter part of 1778, however, the British government becoming suspicious of Spain, and anticipating her alliance with France, ordered General Clinton to reinforce West Florida. Accordingly, General John Campbell, a distinguished officer, was sent to Pensacola, with a force of 1,200 men, composed of a regiment of Waldecks, and parts of two regiments of Provincials from Maryland and Pennsylvania. They did not arrive, however, until the twenty-ninth of January, 1779.[^[26]]

Early in 1789, General Campbell sent two companies of Waldecks to reinforce Fort Bute, which brought its garrison up to about 500 men under the command of Lt. Colonel Dickson.

At length Spain threw off the mask, and adopted a course which justified the suspicions of the British Court as to her inimical intentions. On June 16, the Spanish minister, the Marquis d’ Almodovar, having delivered to Lord Weymouth a paper equivalent to a declaration of war, immediately departed from London without taking leave. Spain thereupon became an ally of France, but not of the United States. Nevertheless, under the influence of the Court of Versailles, Don Bernardo de Galvez, the Governor of Louisiana, on June 19, published, at New Orleans, the proclamation of the Spanish King, acknowledging the independence of the United States. The dates of these transactions furnish conclusive evidence of a pre-arrangement, designed to enable the Spaniards to assail the British posts in West Florida before they could be succored by the home government.

In pursuance of that policy, Galvez at once began his preparations for offensive operations against Forts Bute, Baton Rouge and Panmure, in the order in which they are mentioned. The great distance of Pensacola from them, as well as the want of facilities of communication, assured him that with an adequate force at his command, General Campbell’s first intimation of his operations would be the news of their capture.

In August, with a force of 2,000 men, Galvez began his advance on Fort Bute. As soon as Dickson was informed of his movement, he resolved to concentrate his forces at Baton Rouge, leaving at the former post a few men to man the guns, and to make such a show of resistance as would give him time to perfect the defenses of the latter.

On August 30, Galvez appeared before Bute. After a contest of some hours, its handful of defenders arrested his movements by the time consumed in an honorable capitulation. Bute having been secured, Galvez pushed on to Baton Rouge. In his first attack, he was repulsed with the heavy loss of 400 men killed and wounded, which was within 100 of Dickson’s entire force. In the next attack which was made on the following day, the Spanish loss was 150. Although the loss on his side was in both attacks only 50 men, Dickson realizing that he was cut off from all succor, and that he must either surrender, or see his command gradually waste away under the repeated attacks of an overwhelming enemy, capitulated upon the most honorable terms. The command was pledged not to fight against Spain for eighteen months unless sooner exchanged. With loaded guns and flags flying the garrison was to march to the beat of the drum 500 paces from the fort and there stack arms. The officers were to retain their swords and every one his private property. All were to be cared for and transported to a British harbor by the Spaniards.[^[27]] Fort Panmure, from which the garrison had been withdrawn for the defense of Baton Rouge, was included in the surrender.

It was not until the twentieth of October that a courier brought to Pensacola intelligence of the fall of the Mississippi Posts, although Baton Rouge had surrendered during the first days of September. When it was received it was not credited, but regarded as a false report coming from the Spaniards to entice the British commander from Pensacola in order that it might be captured in his absence. Even the report of a second courier coming, on the twenty-third, failed at first to work conviction; but at last all doubt was dispelled, and every effort directed to putting Pensacola in a defensive condition.

Why Galvez did not follow up his success at Baton Rouge by an immediate advance on Mobile, it is difficult to conceive, except upon the presumption of his ignorance of the weakness of the military forces there, and at Pensacola.

In December, 1779, Clinton’s expedition against Charleston sailed from New York; its destination veiled in such secrecy, that even General Washington, as well as the rest of the world outside of the British lines, was in the dark respecting it. Miralles, the Spanish agent, feared it was intended to recover the conquests of Galvez in West Florida, and signified so much in a letter to General Washington. By the time the letter was received, however, the General had become convinced “that the Carolinas were the objects,” and in reply so tells the Spanish agent.

It was during the interval of Galvez’s inaction between the capture of Baton Rouge, and his attack on Mobile, that Chevalier de la Luzerne had a conference with General Washington, on the fifteenth of September, 1779, at West Point, with the view of bringing about such concert of movement in the American forces in the Carolinas and Georgia, and the Spanish forces in Florida, as would be a check on the British in their movements against either.[^[28]] But with every disposition for such co-operation, the latter being without authority to that end, went no further than to show his sympathy with the Spaniards, and his readiness to afford advice and information, which he afterwards manifested in the letter to Miralles above mentioned.

In that letter, referring to the capture of Fort Bute and Baton Rouge, he says: “I am happy of the opportunity of congratulating you on the important success of His Majesty’s arms.” It is hardly probable, however, that General Washington would have been so ready to congratulate Miralles on those successes, had he known that in consequence of Galvez’s bad faith, their result would be to increase the ranks of the foe he was fighting.

In the beginning of March, 1780, Galvez again began military operations, by advancing against Fort Charlotte. On the twelfth, after his demand for a surrender had been refused by Captain Durnford, the British commander, the fort was assailed by six batteries.

By the fourteenth, after a conflict of ten days, a practicable breach having been made, Durnford capitulated upon the same terms which Dickson had exacted at Baton Rouge. Hunger had conspired with arms to make capitulation a necessity. For several days before that event the garrison had been comparatively without food. When the gallant Durnford marched out of the breach at the head of a handful of hunger-smitten men, Galvez is said to have manifested deep mortification at having granted such favorable terms to so feeble a foe. An effort was made by General Campbell to relieve Fort Charlotte, but it fell just as succor was at hand. The delay in rendering it was occasioned by rain storms, which, having flooded the country, greatly impeded the movements of the relieving force.[^[29]]

The gallant defense of Fort Charlotte by Durnford seems to have lead Galvez to reflections which ended in the conclusion that he was not, then, strong enough to attack Pensacola. He, accordingly, made no further movement, until he had procured from Havana a supply of heavy artillery, and a large additional force.

That it was a part of his plan to advance upon Pensacola immediately after the capture of Mobile, is evidenced by the Spanish Admiral Solana’s fleet appearing, and anchoring off the harbor, on March 27, hovering about as if in expectation of a signal from the land until the thirtieth, and then sailing away. The appearance of a scouting party of Spaniards about the same time, on the east side of the Perdido, likewise pointed to such a design.

Be that as it may, Galvez made no further movement in West Florida until February, 1781, the eventful year of the great American rally; the year that witnessed Morgan’s brilliant victory, on the seventeenth of January at the Cowpens; and Green’s masterly strategy, culminating on the fifteenth of March at Guildford Court House in an apparent defeat, but in sequence, a victory, for it sent Cornwallis to Yorktown for capture on the nineteenth of October.

As we contemplate that year, big with the fate of empire on this continent, the imagination is captivated by the spectacle of a line of battle extending from the northern limits of Maine to the mouth of the Mississippi; the intense points of action being Cowpens, Guildford Court House, Pensacola and Yorktown.

That no reinforcement was sent to General Campbell, although the fall of Fort Charlotte was a warning that Galvez’s next effort would be against Pensacola, manifests the strain which Britain’s contest with her colonies and France had brought upon both her naval and military resources. When, therefore, in February, 1781, Galvez was about to advance against the place with a large fleet and an army of 15,000 men, according to the lowest estimate, the British force numbered about 1,000[^[30]] regular troops, besides some provincials.

The British looked for some aid from the Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians. It was a body of the latter which drove the Spanish scouts across the Perdido shortly after the capture of Mobile.

The three tribes were loyal to their white allies, even when the latter were no longer able to furnish them with their customary supplies. The Spaniards, on the other hand, with everything to offer them, utterly failed to shake their British loyalty. As illustrative of their devotion, it is related when the Waldecks landed at Pensacola, the Indians, inferring from their strange language that they were enemies, inclined to attack them. They had the prudence, however, to call upon Governor Chester for an explanation. After he had satisfactorily answered the question “whether the men of strange speech were the friends or foes of their Great White Brother on the other side of the big water,” they manifested great joy and honored the strangers with a salute from their rifles.

When, however, the advance on Pensacola by the Spaniards was abandoned in the spring of 1780, and thence up to the following December General Campbell found his savage allies rather an encumbrance than a benefit. That time was devoted to strengthening Fort George and the defenses of the harbor, a labor in which no reward could induce them to assist. The exciting occupation of taking Spanish scalps, for which £3[^[31]] were paid, however, was one in which they could render a barbarous service to the British.

The Indians were under the command of a Marylander, formerly an ensign in the British army, who, whilst stationed at Pensacola, had been cashiered for misconduct. He afterwards went to the Creek Nation, where he married the daughter of a chief. Though vainly styling himself General William Augustus Bowles, he was content to accept restoration to his rank of ensign as a reward for the service, which, at the head of his band of Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws, he was expected to render to the British during Galvez’s operations in West Florida.

In the latter months of 1780, Pensacola and the garrison of Fort George were on the point of starvation. All the resources of the British government seem to have been required for the great struggle of 1781 on the Atlantic coast, and Galvez’s conquest had cut off the customary supplies from the rich country lying between Mobile Bay and the Mississippi.

Field-preacher Stuernagel says in his journal: “This morning we drank water and ate a piece of bread with it. At mid-day we had just nothing to drink but water. Our evening meal consists of a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water. A ham was sold for seven dollars. A pound of tobacco cost four dollars. A pound of coffee one dollar. The men have long been without rum. From hard service, and such want, diseases were more and more engendered.”[^[32]]

But that state of want was suddenly changed to superabundance. A British cruiser captured in the gulf a number of merchant vessels loaded with supplies, embracing “rum, meal, coffee, sugar and other welcome provisions,” and another exclusively with powder.[^[33]] Not long afterwards a more brilliant, although not as useful, a prize was captured. It contained $20,000 in coin, a large collection of silver-plate, fine wines, “all sorts of utensils for the kitchen and things of the same kind, being General Galvez’s outfit and requirements” for his intended campaign of 1781.[^[34]] Fortune thus feasted and gilded the victim for the coming sacrifice.

Having perfected the defenses of Fort George, General Campbell turned his attention to Red Cliff, in which, on November 19, he placed a small garrison of 50 Waldecks, under the command of Major Pentzel, at the same time providing it with some heavy artillery, which could be spared from Fort George.

Apparently, tired of waiting for Galvez’s attack, or presuming from his delay in making a movement that he had abandoned the intention of attacking Pensacola, General Campbell sent an expedition against a Spanish post, on or near the Mississippi, called French Town by the British. The force consisted of 100 infantry of the Sixtieth regiment, and 60 Waldeckers, besides 300 Indians, commanded by Colonel Hanxleden, the senior officer of the Waldecks, and next in command to General Campbell. It was an unfortunate enterprise, resulting in the death of the gallant Hanxleden, as well as other veteran officers and soldiers who were soon to be greatly needed at Pensacola. In the retreat, the body of their brave commander was borne by his men from the field of battle to a large oak in its vicinity under the shade of which it was buried. Gratefully did the Waldecks, on their return to Germany, remember and record the chivalric conduct of “the gallant Spaniards who honored fallen gallantry by enclosing the grave with a railing.”[^[35]] On January 9 the remnant of the expedition reached Fort George.

On the ninth of March General Campbell’s impatient waiting for Galvez was brought to a close. On that day a preconcerted signal of seven guns from the war-ship Mentor told the British that the Spaniards were at last approaching for the final struggle for mastery in West Florida.[^[36]] By 9 o’clock of the next morning, thirty-eight Spanish ships, under Admiral Solana, were lying off the harbor, or landing troops and artillery. During the night a British vessel glided out of the harbor with dispatches to the commandant of Jamaica, pleading for reinforcements, which however were not to be had, for the movements of de Grasse on the Atlantic coast required all the attention of the British navy, whilst Cornwallis and Clinton had drawn, or were drawing, there every available man to meet the great American rally.

On March 11, the Spaniards opened fire upon the Mentor, then lying in the harbor, from a battery on Santa Rosa island. She replied to the attack until she had received 28 shots from twenty-four pound guns, when she retired nearer the town.

After this affair there were no further movements by the Spaniards until the eighteenth, when a brig and two galleons, taking advantage of a very favorable wind, sailed past the batteries defending the mouth of the harbor, without receiving any perceptible injury. Thinking they might sail up to the town, and find cover from some structures on the beach, General Campbell caused them to be burned down.

On the nineteenth, the entire Spanish fleet, excepting a few vessels, sailed past the batteries, though subjected to a heavy fire from Red Cliff, which lasted for two hours.

Galvez, even after he found himself in possession of the harbor with a fleet of 38 vessels, and a large land force, consisting not only of troops brought directly from Havana, but those also with which he had captured the posts west of the Perdido, sent to Havana for reinforcements; and remained inactive until they reached him on April 16. The reinforcement consisted of eighteen more ships, and an additional land force, with heavy siege artillery.

Whilst awaiting that addition to his strength, a landing was attempted. The attempt was resisted by a body of Indians and a part of the garrison of Fort George with two field pieces of artillery. The Spaniards, taken by surprise, were driven to their boats. In the attack many were killed, and in the confusion of re-embarking others were drowned. On April 22, however, a second and successful attempt to land was made by the invaders, followed by the establishment of camps where batteries were to be erected.