Juan de Miralles y Tizner (July 23, 1713, in Petrer, Province of Alicante, SpainApril 28, 1780 in Morristown, New Jersey) was a Spanish arms dealer who became friends with George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. He supported the American cause financially, and served as a liaison between the colonists and the Spanish Crown. Biography Juan de Miralles was born in Petrer, Alicante, Spain, on July 23, 1713. His parents were French émigreés; his father, Juan de Miralles (or Mirailles) y Tizner, was born in the city of Monein in the French province of Béarn, and served as a captain of infantry in the Royal Spanish Army under Philip V of Spain. His mother, Gracia Trailhon, was a native of the Kingdom of Navarre on the French side of the Pyrenees. Consequently he learned both French and Spanish as a child. Although there is little information about Miralles's early life, it is known that he was in Spain at age 19, and was employed in Cádiz by the Spanish firm Aguirre, Aristegui and Company, which traded with the British and Spanish colonies in the Americas, and held the monopoly on the slave trade of Cuba. It is likely that Miralles crossed the Atlantic Ocean on company business during this time, and learned the English language in the course of his duties. Miralles emigrated to Cuba still at a young age, and soon established himself as a merchant in Havana, then the center of Spanish maritime commerce in the Americas, and also of the intercolonial smuggling of contraband. Being by this time fluent in English, Miralles was one of the more active traders out of Havana doing business with the Thirteen Colonies. Given the possible threat represented by the British Royal Navy to the maritime commerce of the Spanish colonies, Spain took an officially neutral position in the American War of Independence. However, having lost Florida under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763) which ended the Seven Years' War, the American Revolution provided a potential opportunity to regain lost territory, or at least a measure of revenge. Diego José Navarro García de Valladares, Governor of Cuba, sent Miralles as an observer to the Continentals in the then capital of Philadelphia. He arrived from Havana early in 1778, allegedly having been on his way to Spain when some problem with the ship forced him to put in at Charleston, South