In 1696, three years after de Pes’ visit, Don Andrés d’ Arriola, with three hundred soldiers and settlers, took formal possession of the harbor and the surrounding country, which, to make effectual and permanent, he built a “square fort with bastions” at what is now called Barrancas, which he named San Carlos. As the beginning, or rather reconstruction of a town named Pensacola, he erected some houses adjacent to the fort. And there, too, was built a church, historically the first ever erected on the shores of Pensacola Bay, but presumptively the second; for it is hardly credible that the large settlement of de Luna, embracing so many ecclesiastics, should have failed to observe the universal custom of the Spaniards to build a church wherever they planted a colony. Irresistible, therefore, is the inference that the first notes of a church-bell heard within the limits of the United States were those which rolled over the waters of Pensacola Bay and the white hills of Santa Rosa from 1559 to 1562. Having demonstrated that the settlement of de Luna was the original Pensacola, that of Arriola was apparently the second, though actually but a resuscitation of the colony of 1559; for the name, the people, though not the same generation, and the place being one, mere lapse of time should not be permitted to destroy the unity which may be so justly attributed to the two settlements. The inhabitants of the town having been largely recruited by malefactors banished from Mexico, must be notched low in the scale of morals. But, perhaps, in some instances at least, actions were then adjudged crimes deserving banishment which might be deemed virtues in a more enlightened age, and under free institutions; for under the despotic colonial governments of Spanish America in that age to criticize the vices, or censure the lawless edicts of a satrap, was a heinous offence, for which transportation was but a mild punishment. Originally, Spain’s dominion was asserted over the entire circle of the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as over all the islands which they girdled. But upon the voyage of La Salle from the upper waters of the Mississippi to the sea, France asserted a claim, under the name of Louisiana, to the entire valley of the river from its spring-heads to the Gulf, making to the extent of the southern limit of her claim, from east to west, a huge gap in Spain’s North American empire.