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Our Nation's First Settlement
In 1559, Luis de Velasco, Viceroy of New Spain, chose the lands around Pensacola Bay as the place to begin the conquest and colonization of Florida. Known as Polonza or Ochuse on maps of the day, members of two Spanish expeditions had visited the site searching for mythical riches during the preceding thirty years. Chosen to command the enterprise was a seasoned explorer, Don Tristan de Luna y Arellano, a veteran of the expeditions in Mexico under Hernan Cortes and Coronado’s journeys through the American Southwest in search of the mystical city of gold, Cibola.
Plaza and Harbor
Given detailed instructions, de Luna was to construct a fortress large enough to contain 100 colonists at Ochuse (Pensacola). The fortress was to include storehouses, jails, inns, and a slaughterhouse. To establish and maintain order, the Viceroy told de Luna to appoint councilmen, judges, and bailiffs.
The armada assembled to transport the expedition from the Mexican port of Veracruz consisted of eleven ships. Since this was an expedition aimed at colonization, the band consisted of more than 1,000 colonists, including women, children, servants, and natives from New Spain, with the tools necessary for agriculture and construction.
Supporting the colonists were 540 soldiers with their arms and armor, and 240 horses. When they left for Florida, they were heavily laden with supplies of corn, hardtack biscuit, bacon, dried beef, cheese, oil, vinegar, wine, and live cattle to support the expedition for eighty days.
A half-century before the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the original residents of Escambia County—the Creek and Poarch Indians—were on hand for the first landing of Europeans anywhere on the American mainland. Over the course of the next 400 years, the flags of five nations flew over this area on one or more occasions.
Escambia County was created by the Territorial Legislature on July 22, 1821 to be Florida’s first county, a distinction it shares with St. John’s County.
Arriving on August 15, 1559, colonists went ashore from their anchorage in Pensacola Bay to pick a suitable place to build a town, and de Luna dispatched scouting parties to look for food and any sign of native villages. A mere thirty five days later, a hurricane passed over the area destroying all but three of the vessels, some still loaded with essential supplies. The heavy rains which accompanied the storm damaged many supplies that they had already deposited on shore and many colonists lost their lives. Despite the arrival of four relief voyages from the Spanish colonies in Cuba and Mexico, the colony could not recover from the calamity that had befallen them. Hunger and discord among the colonists quickly escalated into mutiny and, despite the arrival of a new governor, the colony failed and the remaining settlers returned to Mexico, abandoning the Gulf Coast of Florida.
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