On August 15, 1559, Spanish conquistador Don Tristan de Luna sailed into what is now Pensacola Bay, leading a fleet of twelve ships with 1,500 colonists on board. Their effort to establish a permanent settlement was thwarted by a violent hurricane, which devastated the fleet.
One of the shipwrecks was discovered by underwater archaeologists in 1992, and another in 2006, but until recently, the terrestrial site of the attempted Luna settlement remained a mystery.
“We’re fortunate that we have a letter that Luna wrote after the hurricane, to the King of Spain, describing the storm,” says Greg Cook, assistant professor of maritime archaeology at the University of West Florida. “He said that it raged for twenty-four hours, it hit during the night, with great loss of ships and lives and property, and we know that many of their supplies were destroyed.”
The Emmanuel Point I and Emmanuel Point II shipwrecks continue to provide archaeologists and archaeology students the opportunity to discover artifacts such as stone cannon balls, copper arrow tips to be used with crossbows, ceramics including olive jars, and the bones of livestock, rats, and pet cats.
“What I really like and get excited about are the items that have a personal touch, that tell something about the story,” says John Bratten, chair of the UWF anthropology department. “This is a wooden spoon, it’s probably made out of olive wood, but this would have been a sailor’s personal spoon that he would have carried with him and that he would use to eat. They didn’t have forks. They probably had a knife and a spoon, and that’s what they did.”
Bratten also points out the clear impression of a fingerprint left in a brick more than 450 years ago. The brick was aboard one of Luna’s sunken ships.
While the Luna shipwrecks have yielded fascinating artifacts for decades, it wasn’t until last fall that the exact location of the oldest multi-year European settlement in the United States was discovered in a Pensacola neighborhood.
Former UWF archaeology student Tom Garner was driving through the neighborhood when he saw a cleared lot where a house had been torn down. For 30 years, Garner made a practice of investigating such sites, just to see if any artifacts might have been uncovered.
This time, Garner’s curiosity was rewarded.
“The initial artifact that I found was an olive jar, a fragment, the neck from an olive jar,” says Garner. “These are large, ceramic storage jars for food. They’re very common, one of the most common artifacts on Spanish colonial sites. I understood that that could potentially be Luna, we’re in a spot close to the shipwrecks, but olive jars go as late as maybe 1800 or so, so it wasn’t necessarily Luna. I contacted the University of West Florida archaeology department, and they came and confirmed what it was.”
This summer, professional archaeologists and archaeology students have been working at selected sites throughout the Pensacola neighborhood, excavating artifacts from the Luna settlement.
“We’ve found lots of broken pots,” says Elizabeth Benchley, director of the UWF archaeology institute. “What we hope to be able to find, are areas where different groups of colonists lived together, after the hurricane.” Among the colonists were single soldiers, families, and Aztec Indians from Mexico. “We haven’t found the boundaries of the site yet. We’re still trying to find the edges of where these artifacts are distributed.”
After the 1559 hurricane, life was very difficult for the Luna colonists. The settlement was abandoned in 1561.
“We’re hoping that as we do archaeology here, we can actually see the trash pits, which may give us some evidence as to how they survived,” says UWF associate anthropology professor John Worth.
The exact location of the Luna settlement is being protected for now, but the archaeology work is difficult to miss if you drive through the neighborhood. Carefully dug trenches are apparent in the yards of residential properties.
“Tristan de Luna is this mythical figure in Pensacola,” says neighborhood liaison Tom Garner. “People are thrilled to be part of this project. The response has been tremendous. There’s some bragging going on these days about living in the oldest neighborhood in the United States.”
The land that the Spanish called La Florida encompassed the entire region that is now the southeastern United States. While several conquistadors had visited Florida prior to 1539, none were more intrepid explorers than Hernando de Soto.
“De Soto is an interesting character,” says Ben DiBiase, director of educational resources for the Florida Historical Society and archivist at the Library of Florida History in Cocoa. “He gained some notoriety serving with Pizarro in the Central and South American campaigns. He had spent some time in Peru, and became known for his somewhat brutal tactics when dealing with the native populations. He traveled back to Spain in the mid-1530s, and was given permission and a governorship to conquer the lands of what they then referred to as La Florida.”
Inspired by previous expeditions to Florida, including those by Juan Ponce de León and Pánfilo Narváez, de Soto prepared to establish a colony as his predecessors had failed to do. He recruited 620 volunteers to accompany him on a four year mission to search for gold and establish a settlement. Also aboard de Soto’s fleet of nine ships were 500 animals, including horses, cows, and pigs.
“In May of 1539, they landed somewhere near present day Tampa Bay, maybe a little further south, scholars disagree about the exact location, but what’s different from other expeditions is that they immediately started heading into the interior of Florida,” says DiBiase. “In fact, they actually headed north. There’s an archaeological site that was discovered in the 1980s, near present day Tallahassee, that confirms an encampment that they date back to the de Soto expedition.”
De Soto and his men traveled through present day Alabama and Georgia, as far north as Tennessee, across the Mississippi River, into Arkansas, and down into Texas. They were the first Europeans to encounter many of the native people of North America.
Three years into his four year expedition, de Soto contracted a fatal fever, without finding gold or establishing a colony.
“He died in May of 1542,” says DiBiase. “His burial plot is somewhere on the western edge of the Mississippi River. The few survivors, which at that time numbered somewhere between 300 and 350, decided to abandon the expedition and headed back down the Mississippi River, eventually making it to a Spanish colony in Mexico.”
There are four early written accounts of de Soto’s travels in La Florida. The first, published in 1557, was written by a member of the expedition known only as “the Gentleman of Elvas.” Luys Hernández de Biedma was with the expedition and wrote a report for the King of Spain that was filed in 1544, but not published until 1851. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who died in 1557, wrote a history of the expedition based upon the lost diary of de Soto’s secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel.
The fourth narrative describing the de Soto expedition was written by Garcilaso de la Vega. Published in 1605, the English translation of the title is “The Florida of the Inca.”
“De la Vega, known later in his life as El Inca or ‘the Inca,’ was culturally unique,” says DiBiase. “He was the son of a Spanish captain and an Incan princess. So he was descended from these noble families from both the European culture and the native Amerindian culture in present day Peru.”
“El Inca” based his narrative on oral history interviews conducted with an expedition survivor in Peru, and his research of historical documents in Spain. While the account does contain some historical inaccuracies, it is noteworthy for the author’s unique perspective on the interactions between the Spanish and the native people of North America.
The Library of Florida History archive contains an original, Spanish language, first edition copy of the 1605 book, carefully stored in a walk-in safe.
“When the Florida Historical Society reincorporated in 1905, and they formed a research library, the first donation to the library was this book, ‘La Florida del Ynca,’ and it was owned by non-other than Henry Flagler, the railroad magnate who was famous for building the Florida East Coast Railroad and developing Florida’s infrastructure,” says DiBiase. “This was his personal copy that he donated to the Florida Historical Society over a century ago.”
1565 – Pedro Menendez de Aviles received his “asiento” or settlement orders from the Spanish government to travel to La Florida on this date. Two years earlier, Don Juan Mendedez, Pedro Menendez’s only son was lost in a wreck near the Bahamas and Menendez was determined to find him. He was also instructed to reconnoiter the gulf and east coasts, making detailed observations about the ports, currents, hazards, etc., and settle the new territory. The Spanish government also tasked Menendez with driving the French settlers out of La Florida.
