Introduction

On August 28, 1706, the lorcha El Santo Rey David arrived to Santa María de Galve, a small Spanish presidio that for two decades (1698-1719) was perched atop a high bluff of red clay and sand that overlooked the entrance to Pensacola Bay (Figure 1). The Rey David had arrived from Veracruz to retrieve timber that had been prepared for shipment the previous year to supply the insatiable appetite of shipwrights in the coastal Mexican port for masts and spars (Figure 2). The first attempt to retrieve the timber, which lay on the largely barren Santa Rosa Island, had ended in disaster. Just off the protected shore of the barrier island rested the evidence of that disaster: the wreck of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario y Santiago Apostol, a large frigate and former flagship of the Spanish Windward Fleet, which had patrolled Gulf and Caribbean waters (Figure 3). Having arrived to Pensacola in September of the previous year, the Rosario was lost in a hurricane (Vinuessa, 1706). Its wreck lay in a bay that the Spanish once prized as the "jewel" of the northern Gulf coast.

Bibliography

Figure 1		Figure 2
Figure 3
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