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.