Mobile AL

This week took me on a swing through the deep south!

Monday I flew to Pensacola FL, picked up my one way Hertz rental and drove to Orange Beach AL. Late Monday I drove to Semmes Al to visit a CVS night project via Mobile AL.

Mobile is steeped in history:

The area around Mobile Bay was settled by some Choctaw tribes before the European explorers arrived.
· Most of the early expeditions to La Florida sailed north from the ports of either Santo Domingo on Hispaniola or Havana, founded on Cuba in 1519

· 1519 Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, with four ships, sails from Jamaica to explore the northern Gulf Coast. Among his discoveries are the River and Bay of Espiritu Santo, without much question identifiable as Mobile River and Mobile Bay. Pineda remains forty days in a large Indian village at the mouth of the river, trading with the natives while repairing his ships.

· 1528 Panfilo de Narvaez leads an expedition of three hundred men was virtually wiped out by Indians, storms, and hunger as it made its way north into Florida from the Tampa Bay area. The survivors built boats out of horsehides and drifted across the mouth of Mobile Bay on their way to the Texas coast where the last of them would eventually wreck. One survivor, Cabeza de Vaca wrote a memoir in which he recalled entering what was most likely Mobile Bay.

· 1540 At the Battle of Mauvilla (Mobila) Hernando DeSoto was brought to the town of Mauvilla by the chief Tuskaloosa, where he and his men were ambushed and fought a battle where 20 of his men and hundreds of Indians were killed and the town destroyed.

· 1558 In advance of the colonial expedition of Tristan de Luna, Guido de las Bazares explores the northern Gulf Coast. He reports favorably of "Bahia Filipina", which was probably Mobile Bay. 1559 The government of New Spain (Mexico) sent over 1400 colonists from Veracruz under De Luna to establish a settlement in the area, called Ochuse bay. Some sources believe the settlement was further east, at Pensacola Bay. Due to hurricane damage, famine, and disputes with the native inhabitants, the Spanish settlements were abandoned in 1561, and the survivors left for Cuba or Veracruz

Foe more visit: http://www.flotte2.com/MobileHistory