THE COAST ARTILLERY JOURNAL - Air Defense Artillery

COLONUL FORTS 245
square, about a hundred yards on a side, and with four bastions. For armament
it was equipped with a battery of sixteen guns.
The wisdom of increased Spanish activity in these regions becqille apparent
in the winter of 1698, when Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville arrived on the coast
with an expedition of two hundred men in two frigates, two smallel'-'Vessels,and
a fifty-gun ship which had joined him at San Domingo. This expedition had
been prepared by Louis XIV of France to plant a colony in Louisiana, to
which the French were setting np their claim. Iberville touched at Pensacola,
then occupied by about three hundred Spaniards, and sailed thence westward
to Biloxi Bay. Arriving at Ship Island in February, 1699, he built huts and
tentatively established his colony at that place, while he searched for a more
suitable location for permanent occupation. In April he moved most of the
colonists to the eastern extremity of the bay, where he built a palisaded fort
with four bastions, which was known as Fort Maurepas. Iberville says: "I
erected a wooden fort, with four bastions; two are made of hewn timber,
placed together, one foot and a half thick, and nine feet high; the other two of
double palisades. It is mounted with fifty-four pieces of cannon." By May
twelve guns had been mounted under the command of Sauvolle, Iberville's
brother. Bienville, another and younger brother, was appointed lieutenant
of the fort.
Towards the end of the year, Iberville learned that the English contemplated
the establishment of a colony on the Mississippi, so he determined to secure
the banks of that river for the French. Setting out in January, 1700, he chose
a site about seventeen miles below the site of New Orleans, near English Turn,
and began the erection of a fort which he named Fort La Boulaye. He also
built and garrisoned a fort on Dauphine Island, below Mobile, and distant
about forty miles from the Spaniards at Pensacola.
In 1701, having received instructions to remove his colony from Biloxi to
Mobile Bay, Bienville left twenty men at Fort Maurepas and sailed with the
rest of his establishment to the mouth of Dog River, where he built a fort in
the spring of 1702. The settlement received the name of Mobile, and the fort
became Fort St. Louis de la Mobile. This settlement suffered much from the
high spring floods, particularly in 1709, and was removed in 1711 to a spot
near the present site of Mobile. Here was built a wooden fort, which gave way
in a few years to an extensive fortress of brick, with bastions, demi-bastions,
half-moon, deep ditches, covered way and glacis, mounting sixteen guns, and
called by the French Fort Conde and later, by the English and the Spanish,
Fort Charlotte. A small garrison was left at the mouth of Dog River, and that
post continued to be manned for several years.
In 1708 an English privateer from Jamaica attacked Dauphine Island, the
chief depot of the French, and carried off a considerable amount of valuable
supplies.
In 1712 the French had six forts within the territories claimed by them:
Fort Boulaye upon the Mississippi River, a fort upon Ship Island, another upon
Dauphine Island, Fort Maurepas at Biloxi, Fort St. Louis de la Mobile at