In 1559, Spain's Tristán de Luna embarked on an expedition to establish a permanent settlement at Pensacola. He had a full complement of soldiers and settlers, but uncooperative weather left it to Pedro Menendez to found that first permanent settlement six years later, at St. Augustine. 

The motives behind Tristán de Luna's 1559 expedition were somewhat contradictory. One impulse was to establish a series of missions on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico which would both make it possible to convert the Indians to Christianity and give refuge to Spaniards who were shipwrecked on the coast.

De Luna could also satisfy the promptings of some of the survivors of the earlier De Soto expedition to establish a colony at Coosa in the interior, as well as the Dominicans who wanted a colony in the legendary land of Chicora, on the South Carolina coast.

Finally, such a colony would prevent the French from validating their claim to this land, and it would prevent other European states from establishing a claim.

De Luna's thirteen ships carried more than 1,500 soldiers and settlers under six captains of cavalry and six of infantry. The party anchored in Pensacola Bay and set up the encampment of Puerto de Santa Maria during the summer of 1559, at the site of the modern Naval Air Station Pensacola.

De Luna dispatched a galleon back to Vera Cruz to announce his safe arrival and plan for resupplying the site. He fitted two other vessels to sail to Spain after the return of two exploring parties sent inland to scout the area. Much of the colony's stores remained on the ships.

On the night of September 19, 1559, a hurricane swept through and destroyed most of the ships and cargo: five ships, a galleon and a bark, pushing one caravel and its cargo into a grove inland. 

With the colony in serious danger, most of the men traveled up the Alabama River to the village of Nanipacana, which they found abandoned. They renamed the town "Santa Cruz" and moved in for several months. Back in Mexico the Viceroy sent two relief ships in November, promising additional aid in the spring.

The relief got the colony through the winter, but the supplies expected in the spring had not arrived by September. A relief ship later arrived in Pensacola Bay and offered to take all who wished to leave on an expedition to Cuba and Santa Elena. De Luna relented and agreed to leave, eventually moving back to Mexico, where he died in 1571.

The Pensacola colony was inhabited for several more months by a detachment of fifty men left there in case further orders arrived from the Viceroy in Mexico, then they sailed away. The local area was not populated again by Europeans until 1698, when the Spanish founded the city of Pensacola.

In 1992 one of Tristan de Luna's ships was recovered from the water off Pensacola, ending speculation that de Luna's group may have landed elsewhere. A second ship was discovered in 2007.

Image: de Luna landing at Pensacola

 

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