Confusion reigned on every hand; scarcely a hundred men rallied to
defend the town; yet no one fled. The Spanish fleet consisted of
twenty-four vessels. For more than three weeks they felt their
uncertain way around the bends of the Mississippi, and on the
eighteenth of August, 1769, furled their canvas before the silent
batteries. Firing a single gun from the deck of his flag-ship, the
frigate "Santa Maria," Don Alexandro O'Reilly, accompanied by
twenty-six hundred chosen Spanish troops and fifty pieces of artillery,
landed, amid all the pomp of Continental war, taking formal possession
of the province. That night his soldiers patrolled the streets, and
his cannon swept the river front, while not a Frenchman ventured to
stray beyond the doorway of his home.

Within the narrow space of two days the iron hand of Spain's new
Captain-General had closed upon the leaders of the bloodless
insurrection, his judgments falling with such severity as to earn for
him in the annals of Louisiana the title of "Cruel O'Reilly." Among
those of the revolutionists before mentioned, Petit, Masan, Doucet,
Boisblanc, Jean Milhet, and Poupet were consigned to Moro Castle,
Havana, where they remained a year, and then were stripped of their
property and forbidden ever again to enter the province of Louisiana.
The younger Bienville escaped with the loss of his fortune. Foucault
met his fate resisting the guard on board the "Santa Maria," where he
was held prisoner; while Lafrénière, De Noyan, Caresse, Marquis, and
Joseph Milhet were condemned to be publicly hanged. The earnest
supplication, both of colonists and Spanish officials, shocked by the
unjust severity of this sentence, sufficed to save them from the
disgrace of the gallows, but fated them to fall before the volley of a
file of grenadiers.