A watercolor by Herbert Rudeen illustrates Tristán de Luna's historic landing at Pensacola Bay in August 1559. De Luna's failed plan to establish a Spanish presence along the lower Atlantic coast., the Gulf Coast, and the interior of the Southeastern included the colonization of Ochuse (Florida), Coosa (Georgia), and Santa Elena (South Carolina). (courtesy of Pensacola Historical Society, Pensacola)

In mid-August 1559, a Spanish fleet sailed into modern Pensacola Bay, carrying 1,500 colonists destined for an ambitious new colonial effort. Leading the expedition was Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano, Spanish-born veteran of the exploration and early settlement of New Spain, whose fame and fortune depended on the outcome of this most recent Spanish attempt to settle Florida. Just five weeks later, on the night of September 19, 1559, a violent hurricane descended on the fleet, devastating seven of the remaining ten Spanish sailing vessels anchored there, and ultimately dooming the expedition to failure.

De Luna’s venture was a carefully-planned expedition, substantially financed by the Spanish crown, organized in New Spain (present-day Mexico), and intended to become the first successful Spanish colony in what is now the Southeastern United States. It would have been a launching-point for overland expeditions to the Atlantic coast of modern-day South Carolina, and would have established a firm foothold for Spain in North America. When the colonial fleet sailed from Veracruz on June 11, 1559, the 500 soldiers and 1,000 civilian colonists were supplied not just with the equipment and supplies they would need to establish a new settlement on Pensacola Bay, but also with more than a year’s worth of food packed into the many large merchant vessels that formed part of the fleet.

During the course of the storm, most of the largest ships broke loose from their anchors and floated free, ultimately grounding or sinking with considerable loss of life. The contents of the vessels, many of which shattered and broke apart, were inundated and scattered in the storm waters. After the storm, only three ships remained afloat. Though de Luna’s colonists scavenged whatever they could from the remnants of the fleet, the damage was done; the food stores were ruined, the survivors were stranded, and the de Luna expedition was instantly transformed from a bold colonial venture into a rescue operation. Over the course of the next months, all subsequent ship traffic between Veracruz and Pensacola focused on sending food and other supplies to the hapless colonists. The members of the expedition became so hungry that they moved inland to the nearest large Native American town along the Alabama River, and were ultimately forced to send a detachment of soldiers hundreds of miles upriver to the edge of the Appalachian summit in northwest Georgia, trading whatever they owned in exchange for corn and other food supplies. When the remnants of the expedition were finally withdrawn in 1561, de Luna’s colony joined the ranks of all previous failures by Spanish adventurers in the southeastern U.S. Despite formal petitions to the Spanish crown, Tristán de Luna never recovered financially from the expedition’s failure, and died a pauper in Mexico City in 1573. Over the course of the next decades and centuries, the wrecks of de Luna’s seven ships sunk quietly into the sand and mud of Pensacola Bay, hidden from the modern world until the 1992 and 2006 discoveries of two of the vessels, which together represent Florida’s earliest known wrecks and the second oldest shipwrecks in North America.