Apalachee massacre

Battle of Ayubale

Detail from a 1733 map showing the Apalachee Province (roughly the eastern end of what is now called the Florida Panhandle). Ayubale is marked "Ayavalla"; the locations of many mission villages are of uncertain accuracy.

Date	25–26 January 1704
Location	Ayubale, Apalachee Province, Spanish Florida (near present-day Tallahassee, Florida)
Result	English-Creek victory

Belligerents

Pro-Bourbon Spain
Apalachee

England
Creek

Commanders and leaders

Father Angel de Miranda (killed or captured)
Juan Ruíz de Mexía (POW)

James Moore

Strength

30 Spanish cavalry
400 Apalachee warriors

50 English traders
1,000 Creek warriors

Casualties and losses

14 Spanish casualties
200 warriors killed or captured
many civilians taken prisoner

18 English casualties
15 Creek casualties

This battle was the major event of the campaigns by Moore and the Creek Indians against Spanish Florida.

The Apalachee massacre was a series of raids by English colonists from the Province of Carolina and their Indian allies against a largely pacific population of Apalachee Indians in northern Spanish Florida that took place during Queen Anne's War in 1704. Against limited Spanish and Indian resistance, a network of missions was destroyed; most of the population either was killed or captured, fled to larger Spanish and French outposts, or voluntarily joined the English.

The only major event of former Carolina Governor James Moore's expedition was the Battle of Ayubale, which marked the only large-scale resistance to the English raids. Significant numbers of the Apalachee, unhappy with the conditions they lived in under the Spanish, simply abandoned their towns and joined Moore's expedition. They were resettled near the Savannah and Ocmulgee Rivers, where conditions were only slightly better.

Moore's raiding expedition was preceded and followed by other raiding activity that was principally conducted by English-allied Creeks. The cumulative effect of these raids, conducted between 1702 and 1709, was to depopulate Spanish Florida beyond the immediate confines of Saint Augustine and Pensacola.

English and Spanish colonization efforts in southeastern North America began coming into conflict as early as the middle of the 17th century. The founding in 1670 by the English of Charles Town (present-day Charleston, South Carolina) in the recently established (1663) Province of Carolina heightened tensions with the Spanish in Florida. Traders, raiders, and slavers from the new province penetrated into Florida, leading to raiding and reprisal expeditions on both sides. In 1700, Carolina's governor, Joseph Blake, threatened the Spanish with assertions that English claims to Pensacola, established by the Spanish in 1698, would be enforced. Blake's death later that year interrupted these plans, and he was replaced in 1702 by James Moore.

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