When The Peacock Showed Its Feathers
When Master Commandant Lewis Warrington awoke on the morning of April 29, 1814, the first thing he would have noted was that his ship, the U.S.S. Peacock, was riding a few miles off the shore of the Spanish colony of East Florida. No doubt he observed the low-lying land mass through his telescope and made some remark about it. “A land full of mosquitoes and Indians,” he might have said to his second-in-command, First Lieutenant John Nicolson, echoing America’s current attitude towards Florida. “The Spanish are welcome to it.”