page_title: Fort San Carlos
section_title: The French Corsair Luis Aury
hierarchical_section_title: Fort San Carlos / History / The French Corsair Luis Aury
context_page_description: Fort San Carlos was a military structure built in 1816 to defend the Spanish colonial town of Fernandina, Florida, now called Old Town, which occupied a peninsula on the northern end of Amelia Island. The fort, a lunette fortification, stood on the southwest side of the town next to the harbor, on a bluff overlooking the Amelia River. It was made of wood and earthworks, backed with a wooden palisade on the east side, and armed with an eight or ten gun battery. Two blockhouses protected access by land on the south, while the village was surrounded with military pickets. An 1821 map of Fernandina shows that the street plan, laid out in 1811 in a grid pattern by the newly appointed Surveyor General of Spanish East Florida, George J. F. Clarke, today preserves nearly the same layout as that of 1821. The fort occupied the area bounded by the streets Calle de Estrada, Calle de White, and Calle de Someruelos. The structure itself has disappeared and only traces remain in what is now Fernandina Plaza Historic State Park.
  The park contains the largest known undeveloped portion of the site of Spanish municipal and military activity on Amelia Island dating from the late 1780s.
context_section_description: On September 17, the French privateer Luis Aury, a previous acquaintance of MacGregor's who had served with him in Simon Bolívar's army in Venezuela and New Granada, sailed into the Port of Fernandina aboard his flagship, Mexican Congress, accompanied by two other privateering ships and holding prizes valued at $60,000. His ship mounted 12 long 18-pounders and had a crew of 300 American recruits and Haitian ex-slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes known as "Aury's blacks". Aury marched to Hubbard’s quarters with a body of armed men and demanded concessions from Hubbard and Irwin, who were short of troops and funds. They appealed for financial aid, but Aury refused, unless he have supreme command of both civil and military government. When Hubbard and Irwin protested his terms, Aury threatened to leave the island. Realizing they had nothing to gain by opposing him, a compromise was reached and they made an alliance with the Frenchman: Aury would be commander-in-chief of military and naval forces, Irwin his adjutant general, and Hubbard the civil governor of Amelia. The flag of the revolutionary Republic of Mexico was raised over Fort San Carlos on September 21, 1817, and thus Amelia Island was dubiously annexed to the Republic of Mexico.  Aury created an administrative body called the "Supreme Council of the Floridas", directed his secretaries Pedro Gual Escandón and Vicente Pazos Kanki to draw up a constitution, and invited all Florida people to unite in throwing off the Spanish yoke.
caption: Mexican insurgents' flag flown by privateer Louis Aury