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.