Episode Details

In 1702 the governor of Carolina took an army south to seize the oldest city in America — and came home in disgrace, his ships burned, his name ruined, beaten by a fort made of seashell. Two years later James Moore went back to Spanish Florida with fifty Carolinians, a thousand Creek warriors, and a different kind of war in mind. This episode follows the assault on Florida: the failed siege of St. Augustine and the slaving raid that came after it — the morning at the mission town of Ayubale, where a Franciscan held a mud-walled church for nine hours against muskets, and what the column did when the arrows ran out. It is the story of a man who could not break a stone wall and so turned on the people who had none, of the report he sent home boasting that he had done it all “without one Penny charge to the Publick,” and of a slave trade that, having devoured the easy targets, was about to learn it had armed its next victims itself.