Unwilling, however, to lose the object of this equipment, on the next day he sailed directly towards St. Augustine in pursuit of the ship.  On the 19th the Falcon sloop, being disabled, was sent back, with seventeen men of the regiment; and the General proceeded with the guard sloop and schooner.  On the 21st, by day-break, they discovered a ship and a sloop at anchor, about four or five leagues distant; and, it being a dead calm, they rowed, till they came up to them, about noon, when they found one to be the black Spanish privateer sloop, commanded by a French officer, Captain Destrade, who had made several prizes to the northward; and the other to be a three-mast ship; both lying at anchor outside of the bar of St. Augustine.  The General issued orders to board them, when the wind freshing up, and the English bearing down upon them, they began firing with great and small arms, and the English returning the fire, they immediately left their anchors, and run over the bar.  The sloop and schooner pursuing them; and, though they engaged them for an hour and a quarter, they could not get on board.  The Spanish vessels then run up towards the town; and as they were hulled, and seemed disabled, six half-galleys came down, and kept firing nine-pounders, but, by reason of the distance, the shot did not reach the sloop or schooner.  That night the General came to anchor within sight of the castle of St. Augustine, and the next day sailed for the Matanzas; but, finding no vessel there, cruised off the bar of St. Augustine, and nothing coming out, the whole coast being thus alarmed, he returned to Frederica.

There were three ships, and one two-mast vessel lying within the harbor at the time that the English engaged the sloop and ship.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Annals of Europe, page 404.]

This summer one of the Georgia boats off Tybee saved a three-mast vessel which the Spaniards had abandoned, leaving eighteen Englishmen on board, after having barbarously scuttled her, and choked the pumps, that the men might sink with the ship; but the boat’s men, getting on board in good time, saved the men and the ship.

It seems that the Creeks, in retaliation of some predatory and murderous outrages of the Florida outposts, made a descent upon them in return.  This is referred to in the following extract from a letter of General Oglethorpe to the Duke of Newcastle, dated

Frederica, 12th of December, 1741.

My Lord,

“Toonahowi, the Indian who had the honor of your Grace’s protection in England, with a party of Creek Indians, returned hither from making an incursion up to the walls of Augustine; near which they took Don Romualdo Ruiz del Moral, Lieutenant of Spanish horse, and nephew to the late Governor, and delivered him to me.

“The Governor of Augustine has sent the enclosed letter to me by some English prisoners; and, the prisoners there, the enclosed petition.  On which I fitted out the vessels, and am going myself, with a detachment of the regiment, off the bar of Augustine, to demand the prisoners, and restrain the privateers.”