Pensacola Escambia Florida United States

Members of de Soto’s expedition have published details of Florida's natives, their lifestyles and behavior.

The French have began taking an interest in the area, leading the Spanish to accelerate their colonization plans. (According to scholarly research, French colonists had planted cotton in Florida in 1556.)

Spanish colonist Tristan de Luna y Arellano, dispatched in 1559 to Florida with some sixteen hundred men and women by the Viceroy, has attempted to establish a permanent colony on Pensacola Bay.

After a two-year effort capped by a violent hurricane, the would-be colonists abandon the settlement.

...Pensacola.

The French have begun dreaming of building a great empire by linking the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi basins and bottling up the English on the east coast.

This presents diplomatic problems because the Gulf coast is claimed, but not occupied, by Spain.

Montreal-born Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville is selected in 1698 to lead an expedition to establish a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

His younger brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, who has earned military honors during three years of naval campaigns against the English, accompanies him.

Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, the minister for naval affairs and colonies, has assigned Iberville the task of relocating the mouth of the Mississippi, which La Salle had failed to find on his last voyage, and to build a fort which will block the river to other nations.

Departing Brest with four ships in October 1698, Iberville sails along the Florida coast.

He seeks to establish a fortified post at Pensacola, but the Spaniards, having arrived just before Iberville’s ships sail into the harbor, have established their own garrison.

Iberville is thus forced down the coast to Massacre (modern Dauphin) Island in Biloxi Bay.

English and Spanish colonization efforts in southeastern North America had begun coming into conflict as early as the middle of the seventeenth century.

The English founding of the Province of Carolina in 1663 and Charles Town (present-day Charleston, South Carolina) in 1670 had significantly raised tensions with the Spanish who had long been established in Florida.

Traders and slavers from the new province have penetrated into Spanish Florida, leading to raiding and reprisal expeditions on both sides.

Carolina's governor, Joseph Blake, had in 1700 threatened the Spanish that English claims to Pensacola, established by the Spanish in 1698, would be enforced.

Carolina traders such as Anthony Dodsworth and Thomas Nairne have established alliances with Creeks in the upper watersheds of rivers draining into the Gulf of Mexico, who they supply with arms and from whom they purchase slaves and animal pelts.

The Spanish population of Florida at this time is fairly small.

Since its founding in the sixteenth century, the Spanish have set up a network of missions whose primary purpose is to pacify the local native population and convert them to Roman Catholicism.

In the Apalachee region (roughly present-day western Florida and southwestern Georgia), there were fourteen mission communities with a total population in 1680 of about eight thousand.

Many, but not all, of these communities are populated by the Apalachee; others are from different tribes that have migrated southward to the area.

The Spanish have a policy of not arming these natives with muskets, and the Apalachee missions have suffered from English and Creek raids in 1701.

Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, the French founder of Mobile in January 1702, warns the Spanish commander at Pensacola that he should properly arm the Apalachees and engage in a vigorous defense against English incursions into Spanish territory.

D'Iberville even offers equipment and supplies for the purpose.

Spanish Florida's Governor Joseph de Zúñiga y Zérda, following the destruction by raiders of the Timucuan mission of Santa Fé de Toloca in May 1702, authorizes an expedition into the Creek territories.

...Pensacola.

The French capture the Spanish settlement of Pensacola in Florida in May 1719, pre-empting a Spanish attack on South Carolina.

Spanish forces had retaken Pensacola in August 1719, but towards the end of the year it falls again again to the French, who destroy the town before withdrawing.

East Florida was originally a part of Spanish Florida.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763), which ended the Seven Years' War, Spain ceded all of its territory east and southeast of the Mississippi River to the Kingdom of Great Britain.

The British divided the territory into two parts, East Florida, with its capital at St. Augustine, and West Florida, with its capital at Pensacola.

The British had moved the northern boundary of West Florida in 1767 to a line extending from the mouth of the Yazoo River east to the Chattahoochee River (32° 28′north latitude), consisting of approximately the lower third of the present states of Mississippi and Alabama.

Muskogee people (Creek people), have migrated into Florida since this time and formed the Seminole tribe.

By the beginning of summer 1779, American Revolutionary War, the Spanish, allied with the French (who are actively at war with Britain), recover control of East Florida and most of West Florida, including Pensacola.

...West Florida, as well as Belize.