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.
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