Pensacola

Where was Pensacola in 1715?

The Pensacola of Silver & Sails is not today’s downtown. In 1715 the Spanish town was Presidio Santa María de Galve, a presidio, or fortified army post, on Pensacola Bay, near its entrance. Its site is now inside Naval Air Station Pensacola, near the later Fort Barrancas.

Spanish Pensacola stood on three main sites in turn. After 1722 it was on Santa Rosa Island, across the bay, and from the 1750s it was on the mainland, where the modern city grew. Archaeologists from the University of West Florida found the lost first fort between 1995 and 1998.

Who founded Pensacola, and when?

Spain tried first in 1559, when Tristán de Luna landed a large colony on the bay. A hurricane wrecked most of his ships within weeks, and the survivors gave up in 1561.

Interest returned in the 1680s, when Spain feared the French explorer La Salle was planting a colony on the Gulf. A Spanish expedition searching for La Salle’s colony visited the bay in 1686. Local people called it “Panzacola”. One historian suggests it came from a Choctaw phrase meaning “long-haired people”, though that is not certain. In April 1693 the Mexican scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora led a Spanish survey of the bay and mapped it. Sigüenza praised its tall pines as timber for ships.

In November 1698 Governor Andrés de Arriola and Captain Juan Jordán de Reina arrived with about 357 people and founded Santa María de Galve. Spain saw the bay as the one deep, empty harbour on the Gulf that an enemy fleet could use. It was right to worry: French ships appeared soon after and settled the coast to the west, at Biloxi and then Mobile.

What was life like in Santa María de Galve?

The town centred on a wooden fort, San Carlos de Austria, with a church, a hospital, a warehouse and barracks. The Museum of Florida History describes the place as part army post, part prison camp and part village.

Most people were soldiers and forzados, convicts sent from Mexico to work. Many were mestizos, people of mixed Spanish and Native ancestry. There were officers and officials, a few enslaved Black and Native workers brought from elsewhere, and only a handful of ordinary settlers. Sickness from poor food was constant, hurricanes and fires struck often, and many soldiers and convicts ran away. The sandy soil grew little, though a few farms worked along the Perdido River.

The sea could be cruel too. In September 1705 the Spanish frigate Rosario, part of the fleet that guarded the Gulf, was wrecked off Santa Rosa Island within sight of the fort.

How did Spanish Pensacola get its supplies?

Pensacola was run and supplied from New Spain, through the port of Veracruz, unlike St Augustine, which looked more to Havana and Spain. The crown was meant to send a situado, a yearly payment of money and supplies, but it often came late.

To survive, Pensacola traded with its French neighbours at Mobile, only a short sail away. A busy exchange grew up between Mexico, Pensacola and Mobile, even though Spanish law frowned on trade with foreigners. Archaeologists find that Native pottery makes up a large share of what was used at the Pensacola presidios, a sign of how much daily life depended on Native neighbours.

Who attacked Pensacola before 1719?

During the War of the Spanish Succession, Native warriors allied with the English of Carolina, among them Tallapoosa (Creek) fighters, raided the fort again and again. In August 1707 English and Tallapoosa forces burned the village, and they returned that November. The fort held, but its people had to live inside its walls for several years.

The pressure eased in 1715, the year the Yamasee War broke out against Carolina, when the Tallapoosa broke with the English and made friends with Spain.

What happened at Pensacola in 1719?

In 1719 France and Spain went to war, in what is called the War of the Quadruple Alliance. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the commander at Mobile, and his brother Joseph Le Moyne de Sérigny, just arrived from France, sailed against Pensacola with three ships and about 150 men. A 1904 history dates the attack to 14 May 1719. The weak garrison gave in with little fighting and was shipped to Havana.

The story did not end there. In August a larger Spanish force came back from Havana and made the small French garrison, under another brother, Châteauguay, surrender. Then in September a French naval squadron arrived, while Bienville came overland with soldiers and Native allies, and took Pensacola again. So in one summer the town changed hands three times. The fort was burned, and the Spanish garrison moved east to St Joseph Bay to wait for peace. Meanwhile Bienville’s colony was building a new town of its own, New Orleans.

When did Spain get Pensacola back?

After the peace, French officers handed the bay back to Spain in 1722. Before they left, the French burned what remained of the settlement. Spain did not rebuild on the old site. Between late 1722 and 1723 the garrison moved to Presidio Isla de Santa Rosa, at the western tip of Santa Rosa Island, beside the entrance to the bay.

It became the largest presidio settlement on the Gulf, but hurricanes battered it in 1741 and 1752. After the 1752 storms the people moved across the bay to the mainland, to the town that became modern Pensacola. In 1763 Spain gave Florida to Britain, and Pensacola became the capital of British West Florida.