William Augustus Bowles and the Wreck of HMS Fox

Part 1: Disaster on St. George Island

By Dale Cox

William Augustus Bowles marker at Dr. Julian G. Bruce
St. George Island State Park in Florida.

Editor's Note: This is Part 1 of a new series by historian Dale Cox the activities of William Augustus Bowles in 1799-1800. 

Fox Point is the name applied to the eastern end of Florida’s St. George Island. Time and the elements have moved the location of this landmark over the years. Its name is a lasting memorial to a disaster that may have shaped the future of the Southeastern United States.

HMS Fox was one of fourteen British warships honored with that name. She entered the service of the Royal Navy in 1799, a time when Great Britain was at war with France and Spain in the Anglo-Spanish and Napoleonic Wars. The 150-ton schooner was armed with 14-16 heavy cannon and on a secret mission when she sailed into the path of a hurricane and was wrecked off today’s Carrabelle, Florida.

The Fox was the spearhead of a British plan to seize control of Spanish Florida. Onboard was one of the most notorious and enigmatic adventurers and pirates ever to set foot on the white sand beaches of St. George Island.

Self-Portrait of William Augustus Bowles.

William Augustus Bowles was a controversial figure on the Southern frontier. A former Loyalist officer who fought on the side of Great Britain during the American Revolution, he settled among the Lower Creeks or Seminoles where he married the daughter of Chief Thomas Perryman. A bigamist, he also had a wife in the Chickamauga towns of the Cherokee. Spanish authorities captured the Maryland-born adventurer and exiled him to the Philippines, but he escaped their custody and made his way to England.

Bowles represented himself as the “emperor” of the combined Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee nations in meetings with British authorities, convincing them that he headed an army of Native American warriors. This force, he promised, would follow him in a scheme to seize Florida from Spain and hand it over to Great Britain. Then at war with Spain, the British went along.

HMS Fox was to be the instrument of Bowles’s delivery. Captained by Lt. James Woolridge, she sailed from Great Britain to the Bahamas in the summer of 1799, and from there the ship northwest across the Florida Straits and into the Gulf of Mexico. The ship’s mission was to set Bowles ashore near the mouths of the Apalachicola and Ochlockonee Rivers. Also, onboard was a force of nearly 100 mercenaries, arms, ammunition, rum, and an array of other goods intended for distribution to the warriors he expected to call into the service of Great Britain.

This section of a map by Andrew Ellicott shows the site of
the shipwreck at the east end of St. George Island.
Library of Congress

Disaster struck as the vessel entered Apalachee Bay and was hit by a severe September hurricane. High winds tore away the masts of the Fox, and the tidal surge threw her helpless hulk ashore on the east end of St. George Island.

The wreck took place on September 17, 1799. Woolridge, Bowles, and the crew and mercenaries fled to the highest nearby dunes where they stayed, exposed to the elements until spotting a small boat four days later. Woolridge took advantage of the opportunity to send a note to U.S. Commissioner of Limits Andrew Ellicott, who arrived at Apalachicola Bay that day:

On his Britainic Majesty’s Service.
Fox Point, September 22d, 1799.
Sir,
I beg leave to make known to you, that I am at present on a small island on this coast, which is well known to the bearers, with the crew of his Britainic Majesty’s schooner Fox, late under my command, but which was unfortunately wrecked five days since, on this coast. As there is no possibility of saving the schooner, I trust sir, your humanity will induce you to stop here, and devise with me, some means of removing those unfortunate men, who have nothing more than some provisions saved from the wreck to exist on; the island producing nothing; on the contrary, for two days, during the late gale, the sea made a break over it, so that for those two days, we were with nearly two feet of water on the ground. – Lt. James Woolridge, Royal Navy, to Col. Benjamin Hawkins, September 22, 1799.

Ellicott soon met with Wooldridge and Bowles. Caught between his duty to the United States, which was then an ally of Spain, and his humanitarian need to help the castaways, the American authority provided them with food. He declined, however, to help them escape the island.

Editor’s Note: The story of the wreck of HMS Fox and the future of the British effort to gain control of Florida continued to develop over coming days. Watch for the next article in this series on Saturday, September 28. We will post a link here as soon as it is available.

#54 The Ellicott Line (100 Great Things about Jackson County, Florida)

Ellicott Line marker on US 231 north of Campbellton
Although the marker is at the state line, the actual
Ellicott line is south of this point inside of Jackson County.

Just south of the Alabama state line and stretching from one side of Jackson County to the other can be found a line of unusual earthen mounds. These mounds are found at precise one-mile intervals and look so much like prehistoric Indian mounds that even professional archaeologists have mistaken their true origin.

They do not date from thousands of years ago nor do they contained artifacts associated with ancient American Indian burials. The mounds actually date from the late 1700s and were built by a team of American and Spanish surveyors. They form the eastern end of a survey known for more than 200 years as the Ellicott Line.

1826 survey plat showing the Ellicott Line in Jackson County

The Ellicott Line came about as a result of the Treaty of San Lorenzo, a friendship agreement signed between the United States and Spain on October 27, 1795. Among other things it established the line between Spanish West Florida and the lands of the United States as the 31st Parallel.

No one knew exactly where to find that parallel, so the two countries agreed to carry out a joint survey to locate and permanently mark their mutual border. Once the treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1796, President George Washington appointed Major Andrew Ellicott as Commissioner of Limits to represent the United States in the survey.

Ellicott was already a man of considerable note by the time of his appointment to survey the Florida

Andrew Ellicott

border. Even though he was a pacifist Quaker, he served in the Maryland militia and achieved the rank of major during the American Revolution. After the war he helped future President James Madison complete the survey of the Mason-Dixon Line, a boundary still recognized today as separating North from South.

An acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson, Major Ellicott was appointed in 1791 to survey the borders of the new District of Columbia. That task completed, he revised the original plans for and laid out the nation's capital city of Washington, D.C.

After his appointment as Commissioner of Limits by President Washington in 1796, Ellicott joined with his Spanish counterpart Stephen Minor to locate and mark the 31st Parallel (Latitude 31 North). The parallel remains the border between Florida and Alabama to this day.

One of the Ellicott Mounds in Jackson County

The two men headed a survey and military party that ran the line of the 31st Parallel from the Mississippi River east to the Chattahoochee River at the very northeast corner of what is now Jackson County. Most of the work was actually done by the men of the survey party and not by the two commissioners, who avoided the backbreaking and dangerous of hacking through the virgin wilderness and building a line of large earthen mounds, each one mile from the last, to mark the border. Ellicott and Minor determined starting and ending points, but otherwise traveled by boat to meet the surveyors each time they emerged on a major river.

Elliott's Jackson County observatory was at left on the
west bank of the Chattahoochee River north of Neal's Landing.

By the time the surveyors and their small military escort reached today's Jackson County in 1799, they were in serious danger of being wiped out by irate warriors from the Creek Nation. The Creeks had not given away their lands and did not like the idea of two other nations dividing it up. Only the intervention of Col. Benjamin Hawkins, the U.S. Agent for Indian Affairs, and some of the senior chiefs saved the lives of the surveyors.

Ellicott and Minor reached the eastern end of the line on July 25, 1799, and met the survey party on the bank of the Chattahoochee River just north of today's Neal's Landing Park. An observatory was set up there and astronomical and meteorological observations were carried out until mid-August.

Heavy rains, cloudy weather and even a tornado interfered with the work but a final mound was placed just west of the river and the line was ruled complete. The surveyors then dropped down the river to present-day Chattahoochee where they set up another observatory to begin marking the line that divides Florida from Georgia.

1855 survey plat showing the easternmost Ellicott mound.

The Ellicott Line does not actually mark the border between Florida and Georgia. The instruments used by the surveyors were not as accurate as modern equipment and they missed the actual 31st Parallel by a good distance. Troy University resurveyed the line about ten years ago and found Ellicott's mounds as much as one mile south of the actual border with Alabama. The ones in Jackson County are hundreds of yards south of Latitude 31 North.

Of the 30 or so mounds erected along the line in Jackson County, roughly one dozen can still be located today. The others were plowed away or otherwise destroyed long ago. The best preserved ones are along the eastern end of the line north of Neal's Landing.

The 215 year old Ellicott Line is #54 on our list of 100 Great Things about Jackson County, Florida. To read more items from the list, please visit: http://twoegg.blogspot.com/2014/03/100-great-things-about-jackson-county.html.

Florida's First Astronomical Observatory was in Jackson County

This is a view of Irwin's Mill Creek in the northeast corner of Jackson County. The location of the first astronomical observatory in the history of Florida was not far from this spot.

Neal’s Landing – It is a little known fact that the first scientific observatory in the history of Florida was established in what is now Jackson County in 1799.

Florida was still a Spanish possession at the time and the observatory was the result of a joint U.S. and Spanish expedition assigned to determine the exact boundary line dividing the two nations. Spain and the United States had ratified the Treaty of San Lorenzo in 1796 and the treaty established the 31st parallel as the official dividing line between the United States and Florida.

The problem was that no one knew exactly where the line ran. To find out, the two countries assigned teams of surveyors to hack their way through the wilderness and mark the new boundary. The U.S. team was headed by Andrew Ellicott, a veteran of the American Revolution and the man called on by President George Washington to survey the new District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.). The leader of the Spanish team was Stephen Minor, a Pennsylvania native that had served in the Spanish army during the American Revolution and then settled in what was then Spanish territory at Natchez, Mississippi.

The two men, accompanied by other surveyors and a detachment of Spanish cavalry, started their work on the line in what is now Alabama in 1799. After they determined the starting point, Ellicott and Minor traveled separately by ship to the mouth of the Apalachicola River while the other men of the survey party chopped their way due east through the wilderness, marking the line with a series of mounds of earth known today as “Ellicott Mounds.”

Most of the mounds can still be found, but although the surveyors did the best they could with the equipment of the time, the Ellicott Line was incorrectly located for virtually its entire length. The errors were corrected by later surveyors.

Severely blistered by poison ivy, Ellicott began his trip up the Apalachicola River on July 18, 1799. The wind did not cooperate, however, so he moved his equipment from his ship into a canoe and set up off stream. Pushing ashore at a Native American village in what is now Calhoun County, he purchased horses and crossed into present-day Jackson County on July 23rd.

Following an old trail along the route of today’s River Road, he made contact with the surveying party on the banks of the Chattahoochee River just north of Irwin’s Mill Creek on July 25, 1799. In his journal he noted that, “The observatory was finished on the 27th, and the instruments unpacked and set up; but the rain continued until the 30th, and prevented any observations from being made until that day.”

Ellicott was soon joined by Minor and the two officials spent a total of 28 days at their observatory in Jackson County, conducting astronomical observations to determine what they believed to be the precise location of the 31st parallel. In the process, they also recorded the first known weather observations in the history of Jackson County.

On July 28, 1799, for example, Ellicott noted that the day was “cloudy with rain all day” and that the temperature began at 82 degrees in the morning, but fell to 80 degrees at 10 a.m. On August 20th he reported that the morning began “remarkably fine and clear, wind from the east,” but that a severe storm blew up at around 9 a.m. At 1 p.m. he reported a “gust of rain accompanied by large hail stones from the S.W.”

The observatory was abandoned on August 23rd and the surveyors moved down to the present site of Chattahoochee in Gadsden County where they continued their work. Their Jackson County observatory, however, was the first known such scientific establishment in Florida.
The site, located on the Chattahoochee River just north of Neal’s Landing, is now overgrown and forgotten, with nothing more than one of Ellicott’s mounds remaining to mark this landmark event in the history of Jackson County, Florida, the United States and Spain.

Irwin's Mill Area of Jackson County

I have been enjoying a fascinating exchange of emails with Mr. William Ted McKenzie about the Irwin's Mill area of Jackson County (and Houston County, Alabama) and it has reminded of the fascinating history of the vicinity.

If you aren't familiar with Irwin's Mill, it was an old water powered grist mill that stood on Irwin's Mill Creek in the very northeast corner of Jackson County immediately on the Alabama line. The photo here shows the creek above the old mill site. The mill itself no longer stands, but its foundations can still be seen.

I've mentioned Irwin's Mill here before, along with the earlier history of the area as the site of the Native American village of Ekanachatte.

Another episode of the history of the Irwin's Mill area that is little known today is the presence there in 1799, when Florida was still a Spanish colony, of a surveyor's camp commanded by Col. Andrew Ellicott, the U.S. Commissioner of Limits and Capt. Stephen Minor, his Spanish counterpart.

The two officers came, along with a military escort, to meet here with a party of surveyors who had come across country from near Mobile, Alabama. They built a camp on the west bank of the Chattahoochee River near Irwin's Mill Creek and conducted astronomical observations to determine the exact site of the border between Florida and what is now Alabama. They marked what they believed to be the border with a series of earthen mounds, often confused today for "Indian Mounds."

Ellicott and Minor got it pretty close in some areas, but due to rough conditions and faulty instruments, they also got the line as much as one mile off in other areas. More recent surveys corrected the errors, but the Ellicott Line remains a fascinating aspect of Northwest Florida (and South Alabama) history.