The treaty of Versailles re-adjusted the broken circle of Spain’s empire on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, by restoring to it the segment taken from it by d’Iberville’s settlement, as well as that cut from it by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. But British West Florida was not in its entirety acquired by Spain. By the Treaty of Paris of the third day of September, 1783, acknowledging the independence of the United States, the 31° parallel of north latitude was made the southern limit of the latter from the Mississippi river to the Appalachicola. Thence the boundary line was that river up to the Flint, thence in a straight line to the head waters of the St. Mary’s and down that river to the Atlantic ocean. The Treaty of Versailles, on the other hand, made that line the northern boundary of the territory ceded to Spain. Those treaties therefore cut off a huge slice from British West Florida. But, even within that narrow strip of territory, Pensacola lost its primacy; for in the establishment of the Spanish colonial governments within it, the Perdido was made the western limit of West Florida. Pensacola was, therefore, by that arrangement placed geographically in reference to boundary lines as it stands to-day; the result, as before shown, of d’Arriola having made his settlement three years before the advent of d’Iberville to the gulf coast. Those territorial changes dealt a withering blow to Pensacola. Instead of being the capital of a province, bounded by the Mississippi and the Chattahoochee, and a line from one to the other some miles north of Montgomery, it became but the chief town of a narrow strip of wilderness between the Perdido and the Appalachicola rivers. Lately regarded and fostered as the future commercial base on the gulf of Britain’s North American empire, it now became a garrison town, valued by Spain as only an outpost to guard against encroachments by other powers on the shores of a sea over which she sought supremacy. Left to Spanish influences exclusively, it must have rapidly dwindled to the condition, commercially at least, in which Captain Wills found it in 1763. But from that fate it was saved by two men who have already been introduced to the reader.