William Panton

[10] With the recession of the Floridas to Spain on 20 February 1783, Panton was allowed to remain in the province by agreement between the British officers and Manuel de Zéspedes, the Spanish governor.

[11][12][13] They did a large mercantile business in St. Augustine, managed by John Leslie, and were generally employed by the Spaniards to furnish goods and lend funds.

[14] Later in 1783, Panton and William Alexander moved to Nassau in the Bahamas,[15][16] which then became the center of the firm's operations,[17] where it stored trade items in large warehouses.

[20] According to the Spanish census of 1786, Panton, Leslie and Company owned nineteen separate land grants, as well as 250 enslaved Africans, most of them working on its plantations and ranches.

[22][23] By 1795 the company monopolized trade with the Native American tribes in the southeast,[24][25] its presence reaching northward from Pensacola to Fort San Fernando (formerly known as Chickasaw Bluffs) on the site of present-day Memphis, and westward as far as New Orleans, with posts at Mobile and several locations in Florida, the Bahamas, and around the Caribbean.

McGillivray, an influential chief of the Upper Creek (Muscogee) towns,[28] was an intimate associate of Panton and is generally considered to have been a silent partner in the firm.

[30][31][32][33][34] The firm fixed prices to undersell its competitors in Georgia and South Carolina, dispatched agents throughout the Indian country, and carried Spanish government communiques among the tribes.

In January 1801, Panton came down with a serious illness at Pensacola, and acting on medical advice to seek a change of climate immediately, he sailed for Havana attended by his physician, Dr. Reeves Fowler, on the company schooner Shark.