Historical Sketches of Colonial FloridaCampbell, Richard L.
History
Historical Sketches of Colonial Florida
Campbell, Richard L.
Florida -- History -- To 1821; Pensacola (Fla.) -- History
In that chamber on one occasion could have been seen a man in the prime
of life, partly in Indian dress, in earnest conversation with Governor
Chester and William Panton, the millionaire and merchant prince of the
Floridas. By the evident admixture of white and Indian blood in his
veins, his skin had lost several shades of the hue, his hair the
peculiar stiffness, and his cheek bones somewhat of the prominence of
those of his aboriginal ancestry. He was tall and slender; his eyes,
black and piercing, beamed with the light that belongs to those of the
cultured; the Indians said his high forehead was arched like a
horse-shoe; the fingers which hold the pen with which he is writing,
during a pause in the conversation, are long and slender; he speaks and
then reads what he has written; all is in the purest English, to which
he is capable of giving point by an apt classical quotation. On a future
occasion he will enter that chamber with the commission of a British
colonel. A few years later he will hold a like commission from the King
of Spain. A few years later still will find him a brigadier-general of
the United States. That man is Alexander McGillivray, of whom much is to
be written.
In that chamber three men were once seated at a table, attended by two
secretaries busily writing, one in English, the other in Spanish. One of
the three is Governor Chester, another is General John Campbell, a
distinguished English officer whom fortune has just deserted. The third,
a young-looking Spaniard, too young for his insignia of a Spanish
general, is Don Bernardo de Galvez, the governor and military commander
of Louisiana. Those three men are closing a drama and writing the last
paragraph of a chapter of history. The two papers the secretaries are
writing, when signed, will separate, one going to London, the other to
Madrid, to meet again at Versailles. At Versailles they will be copied
substantially into the duplicates of the treaty of 1783 between Spain
and Great Britain, and constitute its V Article.
A pigeon-hole on the side of that chamber once contained an order from
Lord Dartmouth, dated January, 1774, to the commander-in-chief of West
Florida, to forward a regiment from Pensacola to revolutionary Boston to
quell the tea-riots. This book is debtor to many documents which once
rested in other pigeon-holes of the chamber.
Fort George was a quadrangle with bastions at each corner. There were
within the fort a powder magazine and barracks for the garrison, besides
the chamber above mentioned. The woods north of it, for an eighth of a
mile, and within a curve bending around it to the bay, were felled, in
order to give play to its guns landward, whilst they could bear upon an
enemy in the bay by firing over the town. By a system of signals,
intercommunication was kept up with Tartar Point and thence with Red
Cliff.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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