So the name is given by historians; but, to be consistent with the termination of other Indian names in West Florida, it should be written Ochee or Ochusee. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II. The Settlement of Don Tristram de Luna at Santa Maria—His Explorations— Abandonment of the Settlement—The First Pensacola. Nearly twenty years passed away after Maldonado’s visit to Ochus before Europeans again looked upon its shores. In 1556, the viceroy of Mexico, and the bishop of Cuba united in a memorial to the Emperor Charles V. representing Florida as an inviting field for conquest and religious work. Imperial sanction having been secured, an expedition was organized under the command of Don Tristram de Luna to effect the triple objects of bringing gold into the emperor’s treasury, extending his dominions, and enlarging the bounds of the spiritual kingdom by winning souls to the church. For the first two enterprises one thousand five hundred soldiers were provided, and for the last a host of ecclesiastics, friars, and other spiritual teachers. Puerta d’ Anchusi was selected as the place of the projected settlement, the base from which the cross and the sword were to advance to their respective conquests. Accordingly, on the fourteenth day of August, 1559, de Luna’s fleet cast anchor within the harbor, which he named Santa Maria; the same year in which the monarch who authorized the expedition died, the month, and nearly the day on which he, a living man, was engaged in the paradoxical farce of participating in his own funeral ceremonies in the monastery of Yusté. The population of two thousand souls, which the fleet brought, with the required supplies of every kind, having been landed, the work of settlement began. Of the place where the settlement was made there exists no historic information, and we are left to the inference that the local advantages which afterwards induced d’ Arriola to select what is now called Barrancas as the site of his town, governed the selection of de Luna’s, unless tradition enables us to identify the spot, as a future page will endeavor to do. The destruction of the fleet by a hurricane within a week after its arrival threw a shadow over the infant settlement, aggravating the natural discontent incident to all colonizations, resulting from the contrast between the stern realities of experience and of expectations colored by the imagination of the colonist. Against that discontent, ever on the increase, de Luna manfully and successfully struggled until 1562; and thus it was, that for two years and more there existed a town of about two thousand inhabitants on the shores of Pensacola Bay, which antedated by four years St. Augustine, the oldest town of the United States.