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Indignant at the near approach of the
English, the
Spaniards of
Florida threatened opposition.
The messengers of
Oglethorpe were detained as prisoners, and
he resolved to claim their liberty.
The rumors of his intended expedition had reached the wilderness; and
the Uchees, all brilliantly painted, came down to form an alliance, and to grasp the hatchet.
Long speeches and the exchange of presents were followed by the war-dance.
Tomo-chichi appeared, also, with his war-
riors, ever ready to hunt the buffalo along the frontiers of
Florida, or to engage in warfare with the few planters on the peninsula; and an embarkation was made for the purpose of regulating the southern boundary of the
British colonies.
Oglethorpe knew his danger: the Spaniards had been tampering with his allies, and were willing to cut off the settlements in
Georgia at a blow; the promised succors, which he awaited from
England, had not ar rived.
But, in his enthusiasm, regardless of incessant toil, regardless of himself,—unlike Baltimore and
Penn, securing domains not to his family, but to emi grants,—unlike so many royal governors at the north, amassing no lands, and not even appropriating to himself permanently a cottage, or a single lot of fifty acres, —he resolved to assert the claims of
England, and preserve his colony as the bulwark of
English North Amer---ica.
‘To me,’ said he to
Charles Wesley, ‘death is
nothing.’
‘If separate spirits,’ he added, ‘regard our little concerns, they do it as men regard the follies of their childhood.’
The people at
Frederica declared to him their readiness to die in defence of the place, grieving only at his exposure to danger without them.
But, for that season, active hostilities were avoided by negotiation.
The
Spaniard did, indeed, claim peremptorily the whole country as far as St. Helena's
