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]