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.
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| Chart showing fluctuating population levels at the Luna Settlement, 1559-1561 |
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 200th 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.
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