Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/269

Rh and on the 1st of August, arrived at a group of islands, at 59° 8' upon one of which the explorers landed and named the spot, "Nuestra Señora de Regla."

The expected assaults of the English in the Atlantic were not long withheld, for in this year, on the 20th of October, they seized Omoa in Guatemala, for the recovery of which the president, Don Matias Galvez, quitted the capital immediately and demanded succor from Mexico. The Indians, it is related, aided the British in this attack, but the assailants abandoned the captured port, after stripping it of its cannon and munitions of war, in consequence of the insalubrity of the climate. The British had established a post at a place then called Wallis, the centre of a region rich in dye-woods, and aptly situated so as to aid in the contraband trade which they carried on with Yucatan, Guatemala and Chiapas; and, accordingly Don Roberto Rivas Vetancourt attacked the settlement successfully, making prisoners of all the inhabitants, more than three hundred slaves, and capturing a number of small vessels. But just as hostilities ceased, two English frigates and another armed vessel, arrived to succor the settlement, and forced the Spanish governor to abandon his enterprise and depart with his flotilla. Nevertheless Vetancourt, burned more than forty different foreign establishments, and succeeded in capturing an English brigantine of forty-four guns. The commander believed that this signal devastation of the enemy's settlement and property would result in freeing the land from such dangerous neighbors.

About this period the Spanish government detached General Solano and a part of his squadron, with orders for America, to aid in the military enterprises designed against Florida, in which Mexico was to take a significant part. This commander was to cooperate with Don Bernardo de Galvez, and both these personages, in the years 1779, 1780 and 1781, making common cause with the French against the English, carried the war actively up the Mississippi and into various portions of Florida. The remaining period of Mayorga's viceroyalty was chiefly occupied with preparations in the neighborhood of Vera Cruz against an assault from the British, and in suppressing, by the aid of the alcalde Urizar, a trifling revolt among the Indians of Izucar. An unfortunate disaagreement arose between Mayorga and the Spanish minister Galvez, and he was finally, after many insults from the count, displaced, in order to make room for Don Matias Galvez. The un fortunate viceroy departed for Spain but never reached his native land. He died in sight of Cadiz, and his wife was indemnified for