Santa María de Ochuse, Spain’s First Colonial Settlement on Pensacola Bay, Part 2: After the Hurricane

by John E. Worth

© UWF Division of Archaeology and Anthropology

The devastation wrought by the hurricane of September 19-20, 1559 was massive, wrecking all but three of Tristán de Luna’s ten ships still anchored in the water in front of the settlement, and doubtless wreaking havoc on land as well.  Documentary evidence indicates that loss of life seems to have been mostly limited to the sailors and passengers on the ships at anchor, but  what little progress had already been made on the settlement during previous weeks was certainly set back considerably.  And of course, the most impactful loss was that of the food stores that were still on the ships that sank in the bay, leaving far too few provisions for the combined population of Luna’s entire army as well as the surviving sailors who were now stranded in Santa María de Ochuse.

The entire orientation of life at the fledgling settlement had changed in an instant.  From September 20 onward, the primary concern of most of the colonists at the settlement was finding enough food to eat, though in the immediate aftermath of the storm there was also the added urgency of constructing shelter, along with cleaning up debris and scavenging supplies from the wrecked ships.  The colonists knew that help from New Spain was weeks if not months away, and so in addition to sending ships to Veracruz and Havana for immediate relief supplies, four companies (some 200 men) were dispatched inland to find Native American population centers with potential surplus food.  Two prior companies had been sent north before the hurricane to explore up the Escambia River, but they reported only sparse Native populations upon their return just after the storm, and so this second, larger detachment was directed to push even farther inland in search of the provinces reported by survivors of the Soto expedition twenty years earlier (several of whom were among Luna’s company captains).

In Ochuse, the rest of the army and other settlers continued constructing the new settlement.  Documents from the following year clearly indicate that the royal warehouse and church had been completed, along with houses for many of the expedition’s officials including Luna himself.  And while there is little evidence to say how most of the rest of the expedition members housed themselves, there seems little doubt that any initial “tent city” at the settlement would likely have been severely damaged or destroyed during the hurricane, and so survivors probably constructed at least temporary housing using materials at hand to protect them from the elements.  Apart from the 200-man detachment sent inland as well as the sailors and soldiers sent on relief ships, Luna’s entire army remained encamped on the terrace at Emanuel Point for just over five straight months following the hurricane, making it probable that considerable progress was made on the settlement’s basic infrastructure.  It is difficult to gauge whether the resulting community would have looked more like an incipient Spanish colonial port city or like an improvised shanty town, though it may have displayed characteristics of both, with the core area with its plaza and surrounding administrative district looking more like a formal town, and the surrounding area appearing more like a long-term army encampment.  How this would have manifested in the ground archaeologically is an open question at the moment, but given the coarse sandy soils underlying the high terrace on which the Luna Settlement sits, postholes from such improvised wooden structures may be very difficult to discern after 460 years.

At some point in mid-November, soldiers finally arrived with news from the detachment in the interior, which had discovered a large Native town called Nanipacana in a province called Piachi, situated along the Alabama River some 40 leagues north.  Tenuously friendly relations had been established with the inhabitants of the town, who had fled as the Spanish arrived, but who were still in communication with the soldiers and possessed surplus food.  Not only did this news reveal that Luna’s anticipated route to the Atlantic across the interior was actually on a different river system (the Alabama) than those which drained into Pensacola Bay (the Escambia), but it provided him with an option for feeding the increasingly hungry settlers at Ochuse.  Luna still had to wait for the promised relief fleet from New Spain, however, and in the meantime, he ordered the construction of two small shallow-draft sailing vessels called bergantines, to be used in transporting supplies and people between Pensacola and Mobile Bays and up the river to central Alabama.  The improvised shipyard where these vessels were built was likely on the low ground west of the main settlement, perhaps near the boat landing on the Bay or along Bayou Texar.  How much new wood was cut in the immediate vicinity for these new ships is unknown, but certainly there were plenty of fasteners, fittings, wood, and ballast available from the seven destroyed ships surrounding the settlement.

Chart showing fluctuating population levels at the
Luna Settlement, 1559-1561

When the two relief ships sent by the Viceroy arrived in December, it must have become clear that external resupply could not provide sufficient quantities of food for the starving colony to last long.  Luna waited until the end of February 1560, however, before ordering the bulk of his army to move by land and water to join the 200 soldiers who by that time had been living in Nanipacana for at least 4 months.  This process took weeks to complete, but the Pensacola Bay settlement was not abandoned, simply reduced to a complement of soldiers in guard of the port.  For the next five months, Santa María de Ochuse was home to just 50-70 soldiers and at least a few African slaves.  Where exactly they lived in the town during this period is undocumented, though it seems likely that they may have consolidated to the area around the town plaza near the landing, presumably also maintaining the sentinel posts at the site’s margins.

The travails of Luna’s army at Nanipacana are another story, but suffice it to say that documentary accounts indicate that as Native relations quickly worsened in the interior, many people sickened and died from malnourishment and even as a result of Native attacks.  The soldiers at the Pensacola Bay settlement maintained contact via the terrestrial road that had been opened to Nanipacana, and managed to preserve the settlement until most of Luna’s remaining army returned in July, coincidentally just before the second relief fleet arrived at Ochuse with fresh supplies.  A 200-man forward detachment had been sent far inland from Nanipacana toward the Native province of Coosa in April, and did not return to Pensacola Bay until November.

By the time they returned to Emanuel Point, the size of Luna’s fragmented army was already reduced, both as a result of death and because increasing numbers of the sick were evacuated on vessels bringing correspondence to the Viceroy in New Spain.  The second relief fleet resulted in a flurry of departures, including many of the infirm and others of little use to the expedition who evacuated directly to Veracruz, as well as some 55 soldiers dispatched to fulfil the original order to settle at Santa Elena by sea (whose ship ended up diverting from Havana to Veracruz anyway because of storms), and about a hundred more evacuees who sailed on another ship commandeered in overt defiance of Luna’s orders.  Exactly 362 people were reported to be living at Ochuse (also commonly referred to by the name “Polonza” during the latter part of the expedition) in September, but only around 100 soldiers remained by November, when the 200-man Coosa detachment finally returned to boost the population once again.   The third relief fleet took more evacuees in December of 1560, apparently including the remaining Aztec Indians whose families in Mexico had requested their return, and perhaps most of the remaining families.  By the time a replacement governor arrived the following April, there seem to have been a grand total of perhaps 160-200 men left at the Emanuel Point settlement.  It seems unlikely that during this period between July of 1560 and April of 1561 that any new construction was undertaken at the Luna Settlement other than any necessary repairs or refurbishment to buildings that had been built the previous winter in the aftermath of the 1559 hurricane.

The new governor, Angel de Villafañe, left just one company of 50-60 freshly-recruited men from New Spain under Captain Diego de Biedma to hold the port, and promptly evacuated the remainder of Luna’s men to Havana, where 90 of them volunteered to continue the expedition to reach Santa Elena by sea.  It seems likely that Santa María de Ochuse was once again reduced to a small garrison of soldiers who probably lived in only a small area of the original town, perhaps around the central plaza and the sentinel posts overlooking the bay.  By this time the settlement was but a shadow of its former self, and remained so for another 4 months until orders arrived for the soldiers to withdraw permanently.  When the remaining members of the original expedition arrived in Havana in August of 1561, having abandoned their short-lived effort to colonize Santa Elena on the Atlantic coast, they received word that Santa María de Ochuse had been abandoned, and returned to Veracruz directly via Campeche.

Ultimately, Santa María de Ochuse was inhabited for two continuous years, making it the earliest multi-year European settlement in the continental United States.  At the start, some 1,500 people lived and worked at the site, and well over a thousand continued to live there for 6 months.  But for 9 of its 24 total months, it was occupied by less than a hundred soldiers whose task was simply to hold the port.  After an initial post-hurricane period of continued construction, the town served as little more than a refuge for increasingly desperate soldiers and other colonists whose principal desire (apart from survival) was evacuation to their homes in New Spain.  In the end, only don Tristán de Luna seems to have maintained hope that the expedition could succeed in its original goal despite repeated setbacks, and he was deposed and replaced before the end.  But once the surviving leaders of the expedition gathered with the Viceroy in Mexico City in February of 1562, they unanimously agreed to abandon the plan.  Later account summaries reveal that nearly 435,000 pesos had been spent from the Veracruz and Mexico City treasuries on the Florida expedition between 1558 and 1561, all of which resulted in complete failure.  But just five years later, Santa Elena would indeed become a Spanish port city, twin to St. Augustine, established the year before in 1565 by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés.  Pensacola Bay would not be re-colonized by Spaniards until 1698, but the archaeological traces of the Luna Settlement still continue to fascinate and inform us even today, providing a critical window into a still poorly-understood era in American history.  On the 200^th anniversary of Pensacola’s delivery to the United States, it is worth reflecting on this earliest colonial attempt that set the stage for all that was to come centuries later.

Selected Bibliography

Priestly, Herbert Ingram

1928 Historical Introduction.  In The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561, xix-lxviii.  DeLand: Florida State Historical Society.  http://palmm.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/uwf:46938#page/spine/mode/2up

Hudson, Charles, Marvin T. Smith, Chester B. DePratter, and Emilia Kelley

1989 The Tristán de Luna Expedition, 1559-1561.  Southeastern Archaeology 8(1): 31-45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40712896

Worth, John E.

2009 Documenting Tristán de Luna’s Fleet, and the Storm that Destroyed It.  The Florida Anthropologist 62(3-4):83-92.  https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00027829/00207/9j

2018 Florida’s Forgotten Colony: Historical Background.  In Florida’s Lost Galleon: The Emanuel Point Shipwreck, ed. by Roger C. Smith, pp. 34-67.  University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Worth, John E., Elizabeth D. Benchley, Janet R. Lloyd, and Jennifer Melcher

2020   The Discovery and Exploration of Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561 Settlement on Pensacola Bay.  Historical Archaeology 54(2): 472-501.  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41636-020-00240-w

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Christina L. Bolte for editorial review.

Santa María de Ochuse, Spain’s First Colonial Settlement on Pensacola Bay, Part 1: Before the Hurricane

 by John E. Worth

© UWF Division of Archaeology and Anthropology

In the year that we recognize the 200^th anniversary of the formal delivery of Pensacola from Spain to the United States in 1821, it seems fitting to turn some of our attention to Spain’s first attempt to establish a port colony here some 262 years prior to that date.  Even though the settlement they established only lasted two years before its abandonment, leaving Pensacola Bay without any European residents for the next 137 years, the physical remains of that settlement were only identified in 2015, and have only recently begun to be explored by archaeologists from the University of West Florida.  After a year’s absence due to the pandemic, this summer will mark our fifth summer field school at the site.

Section of the 1587 map published by Abraham Ortelius, noted to have been
 authored by Jerónimo de Chaves,  son of Alonso de Chaves, both  Spanish
 geographers  during the 16th century (note arrows at "P[uerto] de S[anta] 
Maria"  on the Gulf coast and "P[unta] S[anta] Helena" on the Atlantic coast).

As I have explored in previous blog posts here and here (and see the selected bibliography below), the original plan formulated by the Viceroy of New Spain in response to King Phillip II’s mandate to establish a Spanish colony on the Atlantic coast was to found an initial port city on the Bay of Ochuse (Pensacola Bay) and then march inland to rejoin the same route Hernando de Soto’s army had used to traverse the Appalachian Mountains in 1540.  The first effort in this longer-term plan was the expedition of don Tristán de Luna y Arellano, the core of which was an army of some 500 infantry and cavalry soldiers, most of whom were destined to push quickly inland and across the interior to reach the geographic feature labeled as the “Punta de Santa Elena” on contemporary maps (but which was only vaguely understood based on brief visits by several Spanish ships in the 1520s).  Accompanying the army were up to 1,000 other people, however, including not just the servants and slaves of the more well-to-do officers and soldiers, but also the family members of at least several dozen of them, along with a parish priest and half a dozen Dominican missionaries, and assorted personnel including a doctor, financial and clerical officials, and a range of craftspeople presumably including one or more blacksmiths, armorers, carpenters, coopers, and others.  Many of these craftspeople were actually Aztec Indians native to present-day Mexico City and brought voluntarily on the expedition. Some 100 Aztec nobles were also part of a contingent of “Indian soldiers” who also accompanied the expedition.  And this list does not even include the ship’s officers and sailors of the small fleet of vessels that brought the expedition, some of whom would have remained on hand even had the hurricane of September 19-20, 1559 not left their fleet devastated (stranding most of the survivors).

Once the high terrace overlooking the heart of Pensacola Bay had been selected at some point after the fleet’s arrival in mid-August of 1559, most of Luna’s army and attached personnel would have immediately set about clearing the landscape where the new town of Santa María de Ochuse would be laid out on what we now call Emanuel Point.  The Viceroy had indicated in a letter to the King that the city would have 140 house lots, of which 40 would be reserved for the plaza and public buildings within an administrative district, the rest of which would be allocated to colonists who would settle in the new colonial town.  Based on typical hand-drawn plans submitted for new cities founded across the New World during the 16^th-century, Luna’s settlement would have had a grid of criss-crossing streets laid out around blocks of four individual house-lots, with several streets converging on a town plaza.  Surrounding the plaza would have been a church with an adjacent chaplain’s house, a royal warehouse and offices, and residences for the governor (Luna) and other high-ranking royal officials such as the treasurer, accountant, and factor.  Coastal towns normally had their plazas adjacent to the port itself, while towns in the interior would have had more centrally-located administrative districts.  Archaeological work at the site seems to indicate that the densest concentration of 16^th-century Spanish and Aztec debris is indeed consistent with the plaza and administrative district of Santa María de Ochuse being oriented toward the inferred landing site of the port (and not coincidentally near a small natural spring-fed pond below the terrace).

During the no more than five weeks that the members of Luna’s expedition had to work on clearing and building the new settlement, they doubtless focused initially on clearing the undergrowth and whatever trees they chose to remove within the projected lots and streets, and began the construction of at least temporary housing.  European armies during this period commonly used tents in temporary encampments, and since at least a third of the population were soldiers and officers of an army that would soon move inland, we might expect a typical “tent city” to have sprung up shortly after landing.  But since the goal was to establish a permanent colonial port town, from which the mobile army would be connected to and resupplied from New Spain across the Gulf of Mexico, work would quickly have shifted to building more substantial and durable structures.  Foremost among the public structures to be built was undoubtedly the royal warehouse, where equipment, supplies, and food provisions would be housed under lock and key, for the ongoing use of both the traveling army and the resident population at Ochuse.  A church would also have been among the first public buildings to be erected, providing a suitable space for celebrating Mass.  And residences for the highest-ranking officials would also likely have been begun, particularly those who had brought their own servants and slaves who could dedicate their attention to such structures.  Other public structures that might have been among the earliest constructed were probably a hospital, at least one smithy, one or more bread ovens for the wheat flour brought as provisions, and presumably corrals both for the 120 or so horses that survived the passage to Florida as well as the livestock that was brought for ranching.  Areas would also have been designated for making charcoal (used in braziers for cooking) and butchering animals for food, because these activities would have been needed very quickly after landing.

Since the goal of Luna’s expedition was to establish settlements that would avert anticipated French colonization efforts, some initial attention was likely also given to military preparedness, perhaps in the form of watch towers or sentinel posts, potentially also with artillery emplacements that could provide some resistance to enemy ships in the bay.  One might imagine that such locations might have been placed on either end of the settlement at the bluff overlooking the bay, and archaeologically we have indeed identified concentrations of 16^th-century debris that may reflect such positions.  And while it seems likely that the town might eventually have had a stockade wall constructed around it in order to defend against potential attack from land, the original intent and strategy of the expedition was to approach local Native groups peacefully, establish missions, and engage in trade, so terrestrial defenses may not initially have been a priority (nor are any such fortifications ever mentioned in the documentary record of Santa María de Ochuse).

Would individual houses have also been begun on the individual lots to be distributed to settlers who were planning to live at Santa María de Ochuse?  Perhaps construction would have begun on some of them, particularly for the officers and soldiers who brought their families on the expedition.  But since the majority of the army was comprised of unaccompanied soldiers who were intended to move quickly inland, it seems likely that many of the 1,500 people who initially landed at the settlement would have been living in temporary housing, probably tents or at best simple lean-tos or other temporary structures that could be erected quickly.  This probably would have included at least the 100 Aztec noble warriors, though the other 100 or so Aztec craftspeople might have been intended to remain at the port, and thus may have begun somewhat less temporary housing and/or workshops.  Where would all these temporary residents have encamped before moving inland?  While the documentary record is silent on this question, there is no reason to think that the army would have encamped anywhere other than within the town that was actively being cleared and gridded out in the first weeks.  Once they departed and moved inland, the streets and lots could have been further formalized for future distribution to settlers intending to become permanent residents as the town grew.

All of this planning and initial effort were underway but largely incomplete on the night of September 19, 1559, when “the Luna hurricane” struck Pensacola Bay.  The very fact that most of the food provisions had yet to be offloaded from the ships bears testimony to the as-yet incomplete nature of even the first and most important public buildings to be constructed.  Luna would not risk a years’ worth of provisions on a royal warehouse that had yet to be completed, and so he placed his faith in the ability of the ships and the bay itself to protect the food from storms.  As history would soon demonstrate, that faith was misplaced.  In Part II, we will explore the evolution and history of Luna’s settlement during the two years that followed the devastation wrought by the hurricane.

Selected Bibliography

Priestly, Herbert Ingram

1928 Historical Introduction.  In The Luna Papers: Documents Relating to the Expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano for the Conquest of La Florida in 1559-1561, xix-lxviii.  DeLand: Florida State Historical Society.  http://palmm.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/uwf:46938#page/spine/mode/2up

Hudson, Charles, Marvin T. Smith, Chester B. DePratter, and Emilia Kelley

1989 The Tristán de Luna Expedition, 1559-1561.  Southeastern Archaeology 8(1): 31-45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40712896

Worth, John E.

2009 Documenting Tristán de Luna’s Fleet, and the Storm that Destroyed It.  The Florida Anthropologist 62(3-4):83-92.  https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00027829/00207/9j

2018 Florida’s Forgotten Colony: Historical Background.  In Florida’s Lost Galleon: The Emanuel Point Shipwreck, ed. by Roger C. Smith, pp. 34-67.  University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Worth, John E., Elizabeth D. Benchley, Janet R. Lloyd, and Jennifer Melcher

2020   The Discovery and Exploration of Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561 Settlement on Pensacola Bay.  Historical Archaeology 54(2): 472-501.  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41636-020-00240-w

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Christina L. Bolte for editorial review.