1738, 1739.]

FOUNDATION OF GEORGIA.

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fortress were completed. Their ivy-mantled ruins are still standing; and the village, now almost a deserted. one, in the season of its greatest prosperity is said to have contained a thousand men.

At Savannah, he was welcomed by salutes and bonfires. But he refused any alteration in the titles of land. The request for the allowance of slaves he rejected sternly, declaring that, if negroes should be introduced into Georgia, "he would have no further concern with the colony;" and he used his nearly arbitrary power, as the civil and military head of the state, the founder and delegated legislator of Georgia, to interdict negro slavery. The trustees applauded this decision, and, notwithstanding "repeated applications," "persisted in denying the use of negroes,' even though many of the planters, believing success impossible with "white servants," prepared to desert the colony.

The openness and fidelity of Oglethorpe preserved the affection of the natives. Muskhogees and Chickasas came round him once more, to renew their covenants of friendship. The former had, from the first, regarded him as their father; and, as he had made some progress in their language, they appealed to him directly in every emergency.

Nor was this all. In the summer of 1739, the civil and war chiefs of the Muskhogees held a general council in Cowetas, and adjourned it to Cusitas, on the Chattahoochee; and Oglethorpe, making his way through solitary paths, fearless of the suns of summer, the night dews, or the treachery of some hireling Indian, came also into the large square of their council-place, to distribute presents to his red friends; to renew and explain their covenants; to address them in words of affection; to drink with the Creek warriors the sacred safkey, and smoke with their nations the pipe of peace. It was then agreed, that the ancient love of the tribes to the British king should remain unimpaired; that the lands from the St. John's to the Savannah, between the sea and the mountains, belonged, of ancient right, to the Muskho

gees. Their cession to the English of the land on the Savannah, as far as the Ogeechee, and along the coast to the St. John's, as far into the interior as the tide flows, was, with a few reservations, confirmed; and the entrance to the rest of their domains was barred forever against the Spaniards. The right of preemption was reserved for the trustees of Georgia alone; nor might they enlarge their possessions, except with the consent of the ancient proprietaries of the soil.

The news of this treaty could not have reached England before the negotiations with Spain were abruptly terminated. Walpole desired peace; he pleaded for it in the name of national honor, of justice, and of the true interests of commerce. But the active English mind, debauched by the hopes of sudden gains, had become soured by disappointment, and was now resolved on illicit commerce, or on plunder and conquest. A war was desired, not because England insisted on cutting logwood in the Bay of Honduras, where Spain claimed a jurisdiction, and had founded no settlements; nor because the South Sea company differed with the king of Spain as to the balances of their accounts; nor yet because the boundary between Carolina and Florida was still in dispute; - these differences could all have been adjusted; but because English "merchants were not permitted to smuggle with impunity."

In an ill hour for herself, in a happy one for America, England declared war against Spain. To acquire possession of the richest portions of Spanish America, Anson was sent, with a small squadron, into the Pacific; but disasters at sea compelled him to renounce the hope of conquest, and seek only booty.

In November, 1739, Edward Vernon, with six men-ofwar, appeared off Porto Bello. The attack on the feeble and ill-supplied garrison began on the twenty-first; and, on the next day, losing but seven men, he was in possession of the town and the castles. Vernon belonged to the opposition; and the enemies of Walpole exalted his praises, till his heroism was made a proverb, his birthday

1741.]

VERNON ATTACKS CARTHAGENA.

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signalized by lights and bonfires, and his head selected as the favorite ornament for signposts. Meantime he took and demolished Fort Chagre, on this side of the Isthmus of Darien; but without result; for the gales near Cape Horn had prevented the coöperation of Anson at Panama.

The victory, in its effects, was sad for the northern colonies. England prepared to send to the West Indies by far the largest fleet and army that had ever appeared in the Gulf of Mexico, and summoned the colonies north of Carolina to contribute four battalions to the armament. No colony refused its quota; even Pennsylvania voted a contribution of money, and thus enabled its governor to enlist troops for the occasion. The expedition from England reached Jamaica in the early part of 1741. Near the end of January, with a fleet of twenty-nine ships of the line, beside about eighty smaller vessels, with fifteen thousand sailors, with twelve thousand land forces, equipped with all sorts of warlike instruments, and every kind of convenience, Vernon weighed anchor, and, after vainly searching for the fleet of the French and Spaniards, he resolved to attack Carthagena, the strongest place in Spanish America. During the siege, the fever of the low country in the tropics began its rapid work; men perished in crowds; the dead were cast into the sea, sometimes without winding-sheet or sinkers; the hospital ships were crowded with miserable sufferers. In two days, the effective force on land dwindled from six thousand six hundred to three thousand two hundred. The English could only demolish the fortifications and retire.

In July, an attack on Santiago, in Cuba, was meditated, and abandoned almost as soon as attempted.

Such were the fruits of an expedition which was to have prepared the way for conquering Mexico and Peru. Of the recruits from the colonies, nine out of ten fell victims to the climate and the service. When the fleet returned to Jamaica, late in November, 1741, the entire loss of lives is estimated to have been about twenty thou

sand, of whom few fell by the enemy. England had made no acquisitions, and had inflicted on the Spanish West Indies far less evil than she herself had suffered.

The disasters in the West Indies prevented the conquest of Florida. Having, in September, 1739, received instructions from England of the approaching war with Spain, Oglethorpe hastened, before the close of the year, to extend the boundaries of Georgia once more to the St. John's, and immediately, in December, urged upon the province of South Carolina the reduction of the Spaniards at St. Augustine. 66 As soon as

the sea is free," he adds, "they will send a large body of troops from Cuba." His own intrepidity would brook no delay, and, in the first week of 1740, he entered Florida.

In March, Oglethorpe hurried to Charleston, to encourage the zeal of South Carolina; but the forces, which that province voted in April, were not ready till May; and when, on the second of June, the expedition, composed of six hundred regular troops, four hundred militia from Carolina, beside Indian auxiliaries, who were soon reduced to two hundred, advanced to the walls of St. Augustine, the garrison, commanded by Monteano, a man of courage and energy, had already received supplies. A vigorous sally was successful against a detached party, chiefly of Highlanders, at Fort Moosa. Yet, for nearly five weeks, Oglethorpe endeavored, in defiance of his own weakness and the strength of the place, to devise measures for victory, till the Carolina troops, enfeebled by the heat, dispirited by sickness, and fatigued by fruitless efforts, marched away in large bodies.' The small naval force also resolved, in council, "to take off all their men, and sail away," and thus " "put an end to the enterprise." Oglethorpe returned without molestation to Frederica.

The English still asserted their superiority on the southern frontier. St. Augustine had not fallen; the Spaniards had not been driven from Florida; but Ogle

1742.] THE SPANIARDS INVADE GEORGIA.

299

thorpe maintained the extended limits of Georgia; his Indian alliances gave him the superiority in the wilderness as far as the land of the Choctas.

At last, in 1742, to make good its pretensions, the Spanish government resolved on invading Georgia. It collected its forces from Cuba, and a large fleet, with an armament, of which the force has been greatly exaggerated, sailed towards the mouth of the St. Mary's. Fort William, which Oglethorpe had constructed at the southern extremity of Cumberland Island, defended the entrance successfully, till, fighting his way through Spanish vessels, which endeavored to intercept him, the general himself reënforced it. Then, promptly returning to St. Simon's, having no aid from Carolina, with less than a thousand men, he prepared for defence. "We are resolved not to suffer defeat;" such was his cheering message to Savannah; we will rather die, like Leonidas and his Spartans, if we can but protect Carolina and the rest of the Americans from desolation." And, going on board one of the little vessels that chanced to be at hand, he called on the seamen to stand by their liberties and country. "For myself," he added, "I am prepared for all dangers. I know the enemy are far more numerous than we; but I rely on the valor of our men, and, with the aid of God, I do not doubt we shall be victorious."

66

On the fifth of July, seven days after it first came to anchor off Simon's Bar, the Spanish fleet of thirty-six vessels, with the tide of flood and a brisk gale, entered St. Simon's Harbor, and succeeded in passing the English batteries on the southern point of the island. The general signaled his ships to run up to Frederica, and, spiking the guns of the lower fort, withdrew to the town, while the Spaniards landed at Gascoin's Bluff, and took possession of the camps which the English had abandoned. But, in constructing the road to Frederica, Oglethorpe had left a morass on the one side, and a dense oak wood on the other. On the seventh, a party of Spaniards advance; they are within a mile of the