Historical Background

Early Spanish Explorations

At Pensacola, the first European contact with local inhabitants was reported by the survivors of the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez who entered the bay in 1528 aboard five small makeshift boats to look for water and food (Leonard 1939: 2, 3). Narváez had begun his entrada into Florida in April, by landing four hundred persons and forty horses in the vicinity of Tampa Bay. He immediately sent a small ship northward to find a bay that his pilot, Diego de Miruelo, had recommended as a future rendezvous point for the army and the fleet. When the vessels did not return, Narváez decided to send the other ships to find the harbor (Apalachee Bay) and to wait for the soldiers to march overland to meet them. This decision, protested by expedition treasurer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who told the captain-general that they would never see the ships again, was to prove fateful. For a year, the ships searched the coast for Narváez and his men; at last they gave up and sailed for New Spain.

Marching northward toward Apalache territory, the army found no gold, only depopulated villages, and mosquito-filled lakes and swamps. By late July, with no sign of sails along the coast and a threat of mutiny from the horsemen, the officers decided to build boats and put to sea. Using arms and horse tack to make tools and nails on a makeshift forge, and killing a horse every third day for food, the men built five crude boats at a place they called Bahía de los Caballos (near Ochlockonee Bay). They set sail westward through the barrier islands in late September. Beyond Cape San Blas along the open Gulf coast, a storm temporarily marooned the boats on a waterless island near Santa Rosa Sound; several men died from drinking brackish water. Seeking shelter, the boats entered Pensacola Bay, where the natives who at first seemed friendly, soon killed three men and wounded all fifty soldiers who guarded their withdrawal (Weddle 1985:193). West of the Mississippi, the boats became scattered; the one commanded by Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca eventually was cast ashore on an island near Galveston. Eight years later, Nuñez and three other survivors of the expedition were found by Spanish slavers along the frontier of northern New Spain. Their story, however desperate, served to whet the appetites of other adventurers eager to attempt the conquest of Florida (Cabeza de Vaca 1964).

The next foray into Florida was commanded by Hernando de Soto, who landed his army of some 600 soldiers and servants, and over 200 horses, on the west coast in May 1539. After arriving at Apalache (modern-day Tallahassee) that winter, Soto ordered Captain Francisco de Maldonado and pilot Gómez Arías to sail west in two small vessels along the coast to investigate the entrance of every creek and river, and to find a suitable harbor where Soto expected to march his army (Biedma 1922: 8, 9). Sixty leagues distant in the winter of 1539-1540, they reached a province called Ochuse with a sheltered, deep harbor (Pensacola Bay) (Swanton 1985: 163, 169). According to Garcilaso de la Vega, the bay was sheltered from all winds, was capable of harboring many ships, and had such a good depth up to shore that Maldonado could bring his ships close to land and disembark “without putting out a gangplank” (Vega 1951: 247, 248).

The reconnaissance party returned to report their discovery, bringing with them an Indian chief of a village situated on the shore of the bay. Maldonado was put in charge of the ships and sent back to Havana for provisions to be brought to Ochuse. Should Soto’s men not meet up with the fleet there by the following summer, Maldonado was to return to Havana and attempt another rendezvous the next summer. The rendezvous never came about; Maldonado and Arías returned to Ochuse in the fall of 1540 and waited until winter set in (Weddle 1985: 225). For two years afterward, they searched the Gulf and Atlantic coasts to no avail; Soto’s army had marched elsewhere into history.

The Expedition of Tristan de Luna y Arellano

The failure of Soto’s entrada to actualize the riches of La Florida did nothing to cool Spanish determination to conquer and pacify the region. The northern frontier of New Spain required the establishment of military colonies, both on the Gulf and in the Atlantic, to prevent encroachment by European powers and to make the region secure for Spanish navigation. But unlike those of Mexico, Florida’s natives were semi-nomadic, disinclined to accept imposed labor, and not hesitant to fight intruders (as León, Narváez, and Soto found out). In addition, the region had unusual geographical limitations, with an interior full of swamps, no fields for farming and grazing, and dense forests. Offshore reefs, shoals, and sandbars had caused disastrous shipwrecks in 1545, 1551, and 1554; at least two thousand Spaniards had perished on the shores of La Florida before an attempt to occupy them was made (Priestley 1936: 51).

The very first attempt at Spanish colonization north of New Spain had occurred earlier along the Atlantic seaboard. The enterprise was a private venture undertaken by Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, a wealthy, slave-trading lawyer from Santo Domingo. In July 1526, his fleet of six ships, carrying 500 to 600 men, women, children, priests, soldiers, and slaves, set sail from Hispañiola for Chicora, a region (on the present-day Carolina coast) his slavers had visited five years before. While approaching land, the flagship grounded on a shoal at the mouth of a river called Jordan, and sank with most of the colonists’ supplies. After placing the remainder of the disheartened expedition ashore, Ayllón decided to move his colony down the coast until he came to a place (near St. Catherines Island, Georgia) that he christened San Miguel de Gualdape (Hoffman 1990:73). However, hunger, cold, disease, and attacks from natives caused the deaths of half the settlers, including Allyón himself, which prompted a murderous mutiny that effectively ended the first attempt to colonize the present-day United States. Of the would-be colonists, only about 150 people managed to return to tell the story four months later. Despite its failure, the episode fueled beliefs in legendary riches and put the region on the map, which now included a prominent cape called Santa Elena.

By 1555, no less a person than the archbishop of Mexico urged the pacification of Florida, writing Philip II to urge the salvation of souls there, “since we have it so near at hand, and know the numberless people which are lost therein from having none to preach to them the Holy Gospel” (Lowery 1901: 354). New Spain’s second viceroy, Luis de Velasco (1550-1556), wrote the following year, urging that the region be reduced to the faith. Dr. Pedro de Santander in 1557 avidly asserted to the King his scheme for colonizing the Florida coast at various points, by claiming that the land was promised to the faithful, who ought to put all its idolatrous inhabitants to the knife, “leaving no living thing save maidens and children, their cities robbed and sacked, their walls and houses leveled to the earth” (Lowery 1901: 355). Other advocates, such as mariner Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (whose plans would later become a crucial part of Spanish strategy) suggested to Philip that a fortress should be built “where ships damaged by storm in the Bahama Channel might take refuge from the Indians” (Weddle 1985: 251).

Late in 1557, Philip II ordered Velasco to appoint a governor for Florida and the Punta de Santa Elena and to carry out the establishment of strong settlements at both locations (Philip to Velasco, December 29, 1557. In Priestley 1928 1:46-52). The viceroy had already chosen a favorite, Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano, to become adelantado. Luna was not unknown in the colony of New Spain. He first came to Mexico in company with the famous conqueror Hernán Cortés in 1530. As a cavalry officer, Captain Luna was second in command and maestre de campo (major) to Francisco Vásquez de Coronado on the march for Cibola (Priestley 1936:43). Later, he put down native rebellions at Coatlán and Tetiepa in 1548. He was a cousin of the first viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, a cousin of the wife of Hernán Cortés, and a personal friend of the second viceroy Luís de Velasco, who kept Luna’s son in the viceroyal household. His wealthy wife Doña Isabel de Rojas had been twice widowed; she was previously married to conquistador Juan Velasquez, then to Francisco de Maldonado (Priestley 1936: 65). Doña Isabel died well before Luna’s expedition, leaving him her vast estates and encomiendas.

Velasco gave Luna authority extending eastward to the Atlantic Ocean from a north and south line 50 leagues west of the Rio del Espiritú Santo (Mississippi River); there was no northern boundary to his mandate for conquest and settlement. Detailed instructions had been drawn up to construct regular Spanish towns, and to appoint town councilmen, judges, and bailiffs. The first town at Ochuse was to have a fortress large enough to contain 100 settlers, and to include inns, storehouses, jails, and slaughterhouses (Instructions of the Viceroy to Don Tristán. In Priestley 1928 1: 18-33).

Velasco began to prepare for the expedition. He gathered 400 soldiers, half footmen and half horsemen, 100 craftsmen and tradesmen, and a contingent of friars and secular clergy (Hoffman 1990: 155). The viceroy then dispatched Guido de Lavazares from Veracruz with three small vessels and sixty soldiers and sailors to select a suitable harbor on the coast of Florida and to explore the vicinity of Cape Santa Elena (Lowery 1901: 356). During a three month voyage, the vessels touched along the Texas coast, discovering a bay, of which Lavazares took possession, calling it Bahía de San Francisco (Matagorda Bay). Attempting to sail eastward, the flotilla was plagued by contrary winds and eventually sighted the shallow coastline east of the Mississippi River. Ten leagues farther east they entered a large bay, which Lavazares named Bahía Filipina (Mobile Bay) after Philip II, calling it “the largest and most commodious in all that coast” (Hoffman 1990: 155). From there, the vessels attempted twice to continue eastward but were only able to reach the vicinity of Choctawhatchee Bay; bad weather prevented them from entering Pensacola Bay (Weddle 1985: 259).

The explorations of Lavazares, however, did not determine the site of Luna’s landing in Florida. A subsequent reconnaissance voyage in a single ship commanded by Juan de Rentería departed Veracruz sometime in 1558 to discover the Florida ports in advance of the Luna fleet. Historian Robert Weddle discovered previously unknown archival testimony of Gonzalo Gayón, who served as pilot for Rentería and later as chief pilot for Luna. According to Gayón, they discovered the port of Polonza [Pensacola], the port of Filipina [Mobile], the coast of Apalache, and the Costa de Médanos [Padre Island] (Weddle 1985: 259, 264).

The Luna expedition assembled at the Veracruz port of San Juan de Ulúa during April and May, 1559. Eleven ships were loaded with supplies of corn, hardtack biscuit, bacon, dried beef, cheese, oil, vinegar, wine, and live cattle, as well as arms, armor, and tools for construction and for agriculture. When the armada departed for Florida on June 11, it carried 540 soldiers (200 horsemen and the rest arquebus men, shield bearers, and crossbow men) and 240 horses, and more than 1,000 other colonists, including women and children, Negro servants, and Aztecs and Tlaxcalans. The latter were to serve as farmers. Compared with those who ventured to sea before them on the ships of Ayllón, Narváez, and Soto, Tristán de Luna and his people embarked with a certain knowledge of where they were going and what they were supposed to do.

For seventeen days, the ships sailed with a fair wind; on June 28 the pilots calculated their longitude as being the same as Rio del Espiritú Santo. From there, the ships were carried southwest to the reefs of Alacrán off the Yucatán peninsula, where they caught a fair wind to the northeast for eight days, sighting land (around Cape St. George or Cape San Blas) on July 12. After anchoring for five days to collect water, wood, and grass for the horses, the ships continued westward; a frigate was sent ahead to search for Ochuse. Evidently, the frigate’s pilot failed to recognize the port and led the fleet 20 leagues beyond to Lavazares’ Bahía Filipina (Mobile). Luna sent the frigate back eastward to find Ochuse and disembarked the horses (110 had not survived the voyage) and some soldiers to continue to their objective by land.

Figure 2: Map of Florida and Apalche, from Cornelius Wytfliet, Descriptiones Ptolemaicae augmentum, Louvian, 1597, showing the Bahía de Santa María

On August 15, the armada entered the sheltered waters of Maldonado’s Ochuse and Gayón’s Polonza. Luna quickly renamed the bay Santa María Filipina for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and in honor of King Philip. He and his pilots considered it to be one of the best ports yet discovered in America. As Velasco relayed Luna’s description of Pensacola Bay to Philip,

. . . the lowest water it has at the entrance is eleven cubits, and inside it has from seven to eight fathoms. It is a very spacious port and has a width of three leagues fronting the spot where the Spaniards now are. The entrance over the bar is half a league wide, and has very good marks at the entrance, there being a reddish ravine on the eastern side, dividing the bay. The ships can anchor in four to five fathoms a crossbow shot from land. The port is so secure that no wind can do them any damage at all. There were some Indian huts, which seemed to be for fishermen. The country is apparently very good. It has many walnuts, grapes, other trees, which bear fruit, and much forest, much game and wild fowl, and many fish of numerous varieties and good. They also found a cornfield (Velasco to Philip, September 24, 1559. In Priestly 1928 2:275).

Having come to anchor, the colonists went ashore to pick a suitable site to build a town for eighty to a hundred people, the remainder were to go inland toward Santa Elena. The town would have 140 house lots; forty of these were for the plaza, church and monastery, and the governor’s fortified residence and treasury, which was to be in the middle of the central plaza, and large enough to hold and to protect all of the town’s residents in case of attack. The town’s four gates were to be visible from the central plaza. The remaining hundred lots were for the same number of heads of families, who would be sufficient to defend the town (Velasco to Philip, May 22, 1559. In Priestley 1928 2:225). Luna reported to the King that he had chosen the town site on “a high point of land which slopes down to the bay where the ships come to anchor” (Luna to Philip, May 1, 1559 [erroneous date]. In Priestley 1928 2:212).

Luna dispatched the galleon San Juan back to Veracruz on August 25 with letters to notify the Viceroy of his safe arrival and ask for more horses and supplies. He then ordered scouting parties to look for food, since the fleet’s supplies were calculated to last only eighty days. One party went up the Escambia River by boat, the other made an entry by land. The captain of one party, Alvaro Nieto, had been a Soto veteran; he took with him as interpreter an Indian woman named Lacsohe, a native of the region who had been captured by Soto’s army (Weddle 1985: 268). The reconnoitering parties went up the river for twenty leagues, finding a small Indian village at a distance of ten leagues before returning to the anchorage after twenty days. There, they learned of a calamitous event that had occurred during their absence. As Luna reported in a letter to the King,

. . . on Monday, during the night of the nineteenth of this month of September, there came up from the north a fierce tempest, which, blowing for twenty-four hours from all directions until the same hour as it began, without stopping but increasing continuously, did irreparable damage to the ships of the fleet. [There was] great loss by many seamen and passengers, both of their lives as well as of their property. All the ships which were in this port went aground (although it is one of the best ports there are in the Indies), save only one caravel and two barks, which escaped. . . . we lost, on one of the ships which went aground, a great part of the supplies which were collected in it for the maintenance of this army, and what we had on land was damaged by the heavy rains . . . (Luna to Philip, September 24, 1559. In Priestly 1928:2:245).

When news of the disaster at Pensacola reached the Viceroy in Mexico, the first of four relief voyages to the Florida colony began. Meanwhile Luna sent soldiers up the Alabama River to search for food. They found an abandoned Indian village with corn and bean fields (Nanipacana), which had been largely destroyed by Soto’s army in 1540. Plans were made to move the colonists to Nanipacana, and then northward to Coosa, a larger native town also visited by Soto, in hopes that it could become a station on the way to Santa Elena. Leaving a small garrison at Pensacola to wait for relief ships, the settlers moved to Nanipacana in February 1560. An advance party reached Coosa, but found none of the fabled resources reported by the Soto veterans. Meanwhile, Luna had fallen ill with fever, his colonists were slowly starving, and discontent began to turn to mutiny in Nanipacana. Luna yielded to complaints and petitions; the Spaniards abandoned their camp in mid-summer and retreated to Mobile, then Pensacola, where eight days later, a fleet arrived, not to take them back to New Spain, but with a royal order for Luna to occupy Santa Elena at once to keep it from the French. Three small ships were sent to sea to sail around the peninsula and search for Santa Elena, but storms drove them back to Veracruz.

Reports of mutiny at Pensacola, and Luna’s inability to retain firm control of the Florida enterprise caused Viceroy Velasco to replace the ailing governor with Angel de Villafañe, who brought 50 men and fresh supplies to the port in March 1561. Villafañe discharged Luna and sailed toward Santa Elena with four ships and 60 people; however, the expedition failed to find a suitable landing place on the Atlantic coast and suffered a hurricane that sank two of the ships. The sea had defeated both Luna and Villafañe; the successful occupation of La Florida some four years later by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was made possible to a large extent by his experience as a mariner, but also the knowledge that had accumulated by the failures of two governors before him.

Later Spanish Explorations

The western portion of Florida, including the bay called Santa María de Ochuse, was forgotten by Spanish colonial strategists for over a century. In 1686 pilot Juan Jordán de Reina entered Pensacola Bay while searching for a rumored French colony in the Gulf. Natives, who called the place Panzacola, were hospitable, although suffering from recent warfare with tribes at nearby Mobile. Reports of Cavelier de La Salle’s explorations of the Mississippi in 1682 had caused panic in New Spain, prompting a recommendation to the King in 1689, by Captain Andrés de Pez, that Pensacola Bay be occupied to prevent the French from using it as a naval base to threaten Spanish commerce (McGovern 1974:18).

A scientific expedition, led by Pez in 1693, conducted a reconnaissance of the bay, which was renamed Santa María de Galve in honor of the new Viceroy of New Spain. Pez was accompanied by the Creole scientist, Carlos de Siguënza y Góngora, whose map of Pensacola Bay shows details of water depth, landmarks, and sites of native villages encountered by the survey party. Five years after this expedition, a royal decree required that Pensacola be occupied and fortified. A fleet led by pilot Jordán de la Reina, joined by ships of Andrés de Arriola, arrived in November 1698 to establish a presidio garrisoned by soldiers (McGovern 1974:29). A wooden fort with outlying huts, named San Carlos de Austria, was built along the shore at the site of the present-day Naval Air Station, which overlooks the bay entrance. The site’s reddish ravine had been identified as a prominent landmark by the pilots of the Luna expedition over 130 years previously as una barranca vermeja a la banda del Leste abriendo la bahía (Velasco to Philip, September 24, 1559. In Priestly 1928 2:274-275). This feature came to be known as las barrancas by the Spaniards who were stationed at the Pensacola outpost, hence the name of the American fort which occupies the site today.

Figure 3: Spanish map of Siguënza dated 1693 depicts Emanuel Point as Pta. de Vibero (Viper Point).

Luna’s Ships

Some confusion has existed about the number, types, and names of the ships that brought Luna’s colonists from Veracruz to Pensacola. However, a study of two collections of archival documents sheds some light on the composition of the fleet. The first source (Priestley 1928), is a collection of correspondence and testimonies that remains the only published transcription and translation of primary documents on the Luna expedition. The second is a series of accounting documents (Contaduría 877) collected by Dr. Paul Hoffman and partially transcribed and translated by John Hann (1993). Both sets of documents are from the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville.

The fleet that anchored in Pensacola Bay that summer day in 1559 included a strategic and multi-functioned array of vessels that had been established through trial and error on previous discovery voyages to serve as scouts, transports, suppliers, and defenders of newly found territories (Smith 1992b). The combination of large and small craft reflected in the nautical makeup of Luna’s fleet was formalized soon afterward in the official ordenanzas de poblaciones of 1563, in which the King of Spain required every discoverer to take at least two vessels of less than sixty tons each, in order to enter inlets, cross the bars of rivers, and pass over shoals (Swanton 1985:99). Larger ships, if employed by an expedition, were required to remain in a safe harbor until another secure port was found by the small craft. Thirty men and no more were to go in every ship, and the pilots must write down what they encountered for the benefit of other pilots.

Luna’s fleet was composed of vessels called galeones, naos, caravelas, frigatas, and barcas. The galleon was a new ship to appear in American waters, developed in the sixteenth-century in response to a need for transatlantic speed and security. Early galleons essentially were similar to merchant freighters, but more heavily armed. As carrying capacity of the ships increased, decks often were added to house additional artillery and passengers. Supporting large fore- and sterncastles, as well as three or four masts, mid sixteenth-century galleons tended to be top-heavy in rough seas, especially when overloaded, and were prone to capsize in storms (Smith 1986b).

The term nao has been considered by some writers to be a contraction of navio, (ship); but, in Spain and Portugal the nao was a well defined type of merchant vessel. Born of medieval Mediterranean origins, naos had become the preferred cargo carriers of the sixteenth century. Their beamy workhorse hulls, rigged with a combination of square and triangular sails on three masts carried colonists, arms, tools, and provisions in the wakes of smaller craft to build commercial maritime empires in the East and West Indies (Smith 1992a).

Caravels are known in literature as early as the thirteenth century in association with fishing, and river and coastal trade. The vessel as a distinctive type emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when it became the principal craft of oceanic exploration. Built for seaworthiness rather than cargo capacity, caravels were adapted from different regions by the Portuguese through seagoing trial and error to become an efficient sailing machine in deep water, yet nimble enough to venture into shallow bays and up narrow rivers (Smith 1986c). The most famous caravels, Columbus’s Niña and Pinta, were followed by others employed by many of the explorers who charted the Americas, such as Ponce de León, who first sighted Florida from the deck of his caravel Santiago in 1513.

Smallest member of the galley family, the fragata was an open, undecked longboat with six to twelve benches for oarsmen, and one or more masts (Manucy 1962). The early Spanish frigate is not to be confused with the later, larger warship that is known from colonial times until today. Fragatas probably were ideal for use by explorers in the Americas, and especially the Gulf of Mexico with its shallow bays and rivers. Equipped to carry more canvas, and square sails rather than triangular to catch following winds, these vessels undoubtedly were very fast, even under oars alone.

Sometimes a generic term for any small watercraft, barcas, as sixteenth-century exploratory vessels, were adapted from a class of open coastal commerce and fishing boats. The barca gavarra was the largest, with main- and foretopsails; the barco longo was the smallest, with a single square sail and a low freeboard that made the boat easy to row (Manucy 1983:101). Barcas were ideal watercraft for the transport and disembarcation of of soldiers and horses along protected shores and river banks.

There were, as nearly as can be determined from the sources above, eleven vessels in Luna’s fleet. They included a new galleon San Juan de Ulua, named after the port of Veracruz, where the vessel may have been built just prior to the expedition. Ten days after the fleet arrived at Ochuse, San Juan was sent back to Veracruz to announce the landing and collect more supplies. The hurricane of September 19 caught the remaining ships at anchor in the port. According to Luna all of the vessels went aground in the storm except one caravel and two barks (Luna to Philip, September 24, 1559. In Priestley 1928 2:245). Writing back to Luna, Velasco confirmed “that five ships with main topsails (navios de gavía), the galleon of Andonaguín, and one of the three barks were lost.” (Velasco to Luna, October 25, 1559. In Priestley 1928 1:61).

The “galleon of Andonaguín” is not mentioned in the Contaduría documents; however, there are five naos, which are named: San Antón, Sant Andrés, Santa María de Ayuda, Santiago, Santo Amaro. The terms navio and nao seem to have been used interchangeably in the documents as generic classifications for ships. Newly purchased for the King’s service, San Antón apparently was not in port when the hurricane struck, since she participated on later resupply missions to Pensacola.

A caravel named Espirítu Santo is also referred to as a nao and navio in the documents. This vessel may have been the caravel described as having been driven up into a clump of brushwood on shore with its cargo intact. Padre Augustín Dávila Padilla, who wrote of the expedition years later, related that the survivors went to see it as a wonder, and each recovered their belongings, “for not a pin was missing.” Dávila claimed that the phenomenon was the work of demons, because they were seen in the air during the storm (Priestley 1928 1:xxxvi).

While preparing for the Luna expedition, Velasco wrote to the King that he was having six large 100-ton barcas (barks) built, each to carry 100 men and four pieces of artillery. The vessels were designed to draw only four palmos (one meter) of water, so that they could enter the rivers and bays of Florida that he was told would be defended by Indians in canoes (Velasco to Philip, September 30, 1558. In Priestley 1928 2:257-261). Apparently only three barcas were sent with Luna; their names in the documents are San Luís, La Salbadora, and Corpus Cristi. The latter vessel probably was the one lost in the hurricane, since the petition of one of her crewmen states that he served on the barca until September 19, the date of the storm.

Alonso de Montalván, who was one of Luna’s soldiers, testified in 1561 that “all the ships that were anchored in the port were lost except two barks, one caravel and one frigate, which escaped in the said port . . . “ (Testimony and report given by certain soldiers . . . In Priestley 1928 2:285). The Contaduría documents mention an unnamed frigata associated with the expedition. Having escaped damage from the storm, this vessel may have been dispatched to Veracruz with Luna’s report of the disaster (Hoffman 1990:159). According to Montalván, one of the surviving barcas was sent back to New Spain with the news; it returned to Pensacola in consort with San Juan to bring supplies to the colonists (Testimony and report given by certain soldiers . . . In Priestley 1928 2:289).

Based on these primary sources, it appears that of the fleet of eleven vessels that arrived in Pensacola in August, 1559, six or seven were lost in the September storm: a galleon (Andonaguín’s), a barca, and either four or five navios. Study of additional archival documentation about the Luna expedition may further clarify the fates of these vessels, as well as particulars about their lading and resulting loss of cargos and equipment.

* Data complied from AGI Contaduría 877 documents gathered in Spain by Dr. Paul Hoffman, and partially translated by John Hann.