Part 3

Next they set course for Charleston but again, as had happened in 1670, a storm blew them away from the hated English colony. Leon’s vessel, the _Rosario_, was lost, and he along with it. Another ship was driven aground, and the last of the little armada limped back to St. Augustine.

Actually the real contest for the southeast was in the backcountry where English traders operated. Governor Márquez sent soldiers and missionaries from St. Augustine to the Apalachecola nation in western Georgia. For the Spaniards, however, it was a losing fight—an exciting, exasperating struggle of diplomacy and intrigue, trade and cupidity, war and religion, slavery and death.

Captain of cuirassiers Diego de Quiroga y Losada assumed the governorship on August 21, 1687, after Márquez fled to Cuba in April. That same day he stopped work on the Castillo because there was no way to feed the workers. These troubles and the certainty of reprisals from the Carolinians sent Capt. Juan de Ayala Escobar directly to Spain for help. He came back with 80 soldiers, the money for maintaining them, and even a Negro slave to help in the fields. The black man, one of a dozen Ayala had hoped to deliver, was a much-needed addition to the colony, and Captain Ayala was welcomed back to St. Augustine with rejoicing “for his good diligence.”

Soon there was more black labor for both fields and fortifications. From the Carolina plantations, an occasional slave would slip away and move southward along the waterways. In 1687 a small boat loaded with nine runaways made its way to St. Augustine. The men found work to do and the governor took the two women into his household as servants. It was a fairly happy arrangement: the slaves worked well and soon asked for Catholic baptism.

A few months later, William Dunlop came from Charleston in search of them. Governor Quiroga, reluctant to surrender converted slaves, offered to buy them for the Spanish crown. Dunlop agreed to the sale, even though the governor was as usual short of cash and had given him a promissory note. To seal the bargain, Dunlop gave one of the slaves, a baby girl, her freedom. Later the crown liberated the others.

This incident resulted in a knotty problem. First, commerce with Carolina, as an English colony, was illegal. Secondly, the crown could not buy freedom for every runaway that came to Florida, as more and more Carolina blacks left their English masters, seeking refuge. The slave issue made any hope of amicable relations between the Spanish and English colonists impossible. Eventually the Spaniards decreed freedom for all Carolina slaves coming to Florida, and the governor established a fortified village—Gracia Real de Mose—for them hardly more than a cannon shot from the Castillo.

Construction work on the Castillo resumed in the spring of 1688, after a shipment of corn came from Apalache. In Havana Governor Quiroga bought for 137 pesos a stone bearing the royal arms to be set into the wall over the gate. At this time, too, the little town entered its “stone age,” for as surplus materials from the crown quarries became available, masonry buildings gradually took the place of the board-and-thatch housing that had been traditional here since the founding.

Until the outworks could be finished, the Castillo was vulnerable to siege guns and scaling ladders. Nevertheless it was impossible to push the heavy work of quarrying, lumbering, and hauling at this crucial time. There were too many other pressures. Belatedly trying to counteract English gains and strengthen their own ties with the Indians, the Spaniards built a fort in the Apalachecola country. Unfortunately the soldiers had to be pulled back to St. Augustine when Spain declared war on France in 1689.

This time Spain and England were allies. Yet Governor Quiroga wondered at the presence of English vessels off both northern and southern coasts. As a bit of insurance he wrote a letter telling of a strength far beyond what he had, in the hope that if an English ship would capture the letter they would not know of St. Augustine’s weakness. For again the supply situation was critical, and swarms of French corsairs infested the waters between Florida and Havana. Two provision vessels were lost in the Keys and a third fell into French hands. Until food eventually came in from Havana and Campeche, the soldiers had to live on handouts from the townspeople.

The Drawbridge

To lessen the chances of famine in the future, Florida officials resolved to plant great fields of corn nearby. And where was better than the broad clearings around the fort? Acres of waving corn soon covered the land almost up to the moat. When the crown heard of these plantings, back to Florida came a royal order banning corn fields within a musket shot of the Castillo. A whole army could hide in the tall corn without being seen by the sentries!

A new governor, Don Laureano de Torres y Ayala, arrived in 1693. At the outset he had to deal with hostilities between St. Augustine and Charleston—hostilities that mocked the Spanish-English alliance in Europe.

More importantly, however, to Governor Torres belongs the credit for completing Castillo de San Marcos. Torres saw the last stones go into place for the water battery—bright yellow coquina that was in contrast to weathered masonry almost a quarter of a century old. In August 1695 the workmen finally moved out of the Castillo to another job: a seawall that would keep storm tides out of the city.

The pile of stone on which Cendoya had planned to spend some 70,000 pesos and which Hita had estimated would cost a good 80,000 if built elsewhere, ended up costing at least 138,375 pesos, a tremendous sum impossible to translate into today’s money. But more than the money, it was the blood, sweat, and hardship of the Florida soldier that paid the cost. For the funds came out of money never paid. Let the Castillo be his monument!

And what did completion of this citadel mean? Only a year later, soldiers gaunt with hunger slipped into the church and left an unsigned warning for the governor: If the enemy came, they intended to surrender, for they were starving.

Defending San Marcos

The test of the Castillo’s strength was not long in coming. Relations with France had become peaceful, but incursions by the English-led Indians kept the backcountry inflamed. As tensions increased, Gov. José de Zúñiga y Cerda looked at the St. Augustine defenses with an experienced eye. Zúñiga knew, after a military career spanning 28 years, that strong walls were not enough. The Castillo’s guns were ancient and obsolete—many of them unserviceable. The powder from México so fouled the gun barrels that after “four shots, the Ball would not go in the Cannon.” Arquebuses, muskets, powder, and shot were in short supply.

Once again Captain Ayala sailed directly to Spain to ask for aid. It was a race against time, for the War of the Spanish Succession with France and Spain allied against England had broken out. Gov. James Moore of Carolina lost no time moving against St. Augustine in 1702. If he could capture the Castillo, he would clap an English lock on the Straits of Florida and forestall a possible Spanish-French attack on Charleston.

On the way south, Moore’s forces destroyed the Franciscan missions in the Guale country. At St. Augustine they avoided the Castillo and occupied the town, whose inhabitants had fled to the fort. South and west of its walls, where the town approached the fort, the Spaniards burned many structures that could have hidden the enemy advance.

Moore’s 500 Englishmen and 300 Indians vastly outnumbered the 230 soldiers and 180 Indians and Negroes in the Castillo’s garrison, but Moore was ill-equipped to besiege the Castillo. He settled down to await the arrival of more artillery from Jamaica, and thus matters stood when four Spanish men-of-war arrived and blocked the harbor entrance, bottling up Moore’s fleet of eight small vessels. Moore burned his ships, left most of his supplies, and retreated overland to the St. Johns River. He left St. Augustine in ashes, but the Castillo and its people survived.

The ease with which the English had taken and held the city for almost two months made it clear that more defenses were needed. Moreover, English and Indian obliteration of the missions in Apalache, Timucua, and Guale had reduced Spanish control to the tiny area directly under the Castillo guns.

In the next two decades strong earthworks and palisades, buttressed at strategic points with redoubts, made St. Augustine a walled town, secure as long as there were enough soldiers to man the walls. But in those dark days who could be sure of tomorrow? In 1712 came _La Gran Hambre_—the Great Hunger—when starving people even ate the dogs and cats.

At last the war ended in 1714. The threat to St. Augustine lessened, but it was an uneasy kind of peace with many “incidents.” In 1728 Col. William Palmer of Carolina marched against the presidio. The grim walls of the fort, the readiness of the heavy guns, and the needle-sharp points of the yucca plants lining the palisades were a powerful deterrent. Palmer “refrained” from taking the town. For their part, the Spaniards fired their guns, but made no sorties.

Palmer’s bold foray to the very gates of St. Augustine foreshadowed a new move southward by the English, beginning with the settlement of Savannah in 1732. With his eye on Florida, James Oglethorpe landed at St. Simons Island in 1736, built Fort Frederica, and nurtured it into a strong military post. From Frederica he pushed his Georgia boundary southward all the way to the St. Johns River—a scant 35 miles from St Augustine.

Meanwhile, Castillo de San Marcos began to show signs of being 50 years old. The capable engineer and frontier diplomat Antonio de Arredondo came from Havana to inspect Florida’s defenses and make recommendations. Backed by Arredondo’s expertise, Gov. Manuel de Montiano wrote a frank letter to the governor of Cuba, who was now responsible for Florida’s security: “Your Excellency must know that this castle, the only defense here, has no bombproofs for the protection of the garrison, that the counterscarp is too low, that there is no covered way, that the curtains are without demilunes, that there are no other exterior works to give them time for a long defense; ... we are as bare outside as we are without life inside, for there are no guns that could last 24 hours and if there were, we have no artillery-men to serve them.”

Spanish-English Conflict, 1670-1748

Selected attacks Nationality

Charleston 1670, 1706 Spanish ″, 1706 French Edisto Island, 1706 Spanish Port Royal, 1686 Spanish Santa Catalina Island, 1680 English Fort Frederica, 1742 Spanish St. Simons Island, 1742 Spanish Santa Maria Island, 1683 English San Juan de Puerto, 1683 English Fort San Diego, 1740 English St. Augustine, 1683, 1702, 1728, 1740 English Matanzas Inlet, 1683, 1740, 1741, 1742, 1743 English Little Matanzas Inlet, 1686 French Mosquito Inlet, 1682 French Santa Fe, 1702 English Santa Catalina de Afuica, 1685 English San Juan de Guacara, 1693 English Ayubale, 1704 English San Pedro de Patale, 1704 English Apalache Fort, 1677, 1682 French San Carlos, 1693 English

Defending the Fort

Cuba’s governor was a resourceful administrator eager to meet his responsibilities. He sent guns, soldiers, artisans, convicts, provisions, and money. The walls would be raised five feet and masonry vaults, to withstand English bombs, would replace the rotting beams of old rooms in the Castillo. Stronger outworks would be built, too. To supervise the project, Engineer Pedro Ruiz de Olano came from Venezuela. The work began in April 1738 rather inauspiciously. The master of construction, one Cantillo, was a syphilitic too sick to earn his 16-_real_ daily wage. Much of his work fell to his assistant, a 12-_real_ master mason. All six stonecutters were Negroes. One was an invalid, and none of them as yet had much skill with coquina. For moving stone, there was but one oxcart. The labor gang—52 convicts—was too small. Nevertheless, quarry and kiln hummed with activity, and in the Castillo the crash of demolition echoed as the convicts pulled down old structures and began trenching for the new bombproofs. They started on the east, because this side faced the inlet where enemy action was likely.

As usual, misfortunes beset the work. Cantillo’s illness worsened and Blas de Ortega came from Havana to replace him. Eight convicts working at the limekiln deserted. Engineer Ruiz moved a crew of carpenters, sawyers, and axemen from work on the Castillo to rebuild a blockhouse where the trail to Apalache crossed the St. Johns River.

The oxcart driver broke his arm. Quarrying and stonecutting dragged. The old quarry played out. Luckily, a new one was found and opened, even though farther away. And Havana sent two more carts and more stonecutters and convicts.

It was well into October before the carpenters began setting the forms for the vaults. The masons followed close on their heels and finished the first of the massive, round-arched bombproofs before the year ended. Just a year later all eight vaults, side by side along the east curtain, were done. Each one spanned a 17- by 34-foot area, and had its own door to the courtyard. Windows above and beside the door let in light and air.

Ordnance

Forts are often described with words like impregnable, unassailable, grim, invulnerable, and redoubtable. These descriptions often came about because of their armaments. A strategically positioned fort with a full complement of weaponry would be a problem for any invader, because the fortress, unlike naval ships, provided a stable platform upon which guns could be mounted and trained on the enemy. Anyone approaching within approximately 500 yards would be in great danger, even though the artillery in those times was not always accurate and aim was extremely difficult.

Tools for Guns

The tools used to operate the ordnance had a variety of functions. The wet sponge swabbed out the cannon to make sure all sparks were extinguished. The ladle dumped the exact amount of powder needed into the chamber. The scraper removed any powder residue. The worm removed unfired bits of cartridge and wadding. The point was to make sure the cannon was clean before it was loaded and fired.

These illustrations come from Tomás de Morla’s _A Treatise on Artillery_