Part 4

Basically all artillery falls into two categories: mortars and guns. Mortars were designed to fire the largest and heaviest projectiles on a curved trajectory. They could shoot over obstacles or fortifications, landing on, and perhaps piercing, the deck of a ship, or hitting a pile of powder kegs or other supplies behind fortified walls, or just wreaking havoc and demoralizing the people. Guns fired their projectiles in a flat trajectory, and their effectiveness in turn depended upon the weight of the shot: the greater the weight of the shot, the greater the muzzle velocity—the speed at which the shot exited the gun—and the farther the shot would go and the deadlier it would be.

The first artillery pieces were made of forged iron. The greatest concern was in producing a weapon that could contain the explosive force of the gunpowder, hurl the projectile at the enemy, and not blow up in the faces of the gun crew. Once guns could be cast in a single piece in either brass or bronze, great strides were made in the effectiveness of the artillery pieces. By the 18th century bronze seems to have been the metal of choice. The guns and mortars were highly decorated. All bore the coat of arms of the sovereign. Usually the maker was identified in some way; the name might be part of the base ring or shown in a cipher below the sovereign’s arms. Garlands of flowers, animals, and mythical creatures sometimes decorated the piece. All Spanish guns were named—_Vindicator_, _Invincible_, _Destroyer_ are a few examples—and the authorities made sure that each gun’s whereabouts was always known. This has been invaluable for present-day historians investigating what guns were used where and when. Guns were classified by the weight of the projectile: a 12-pounder gun shot a 12-pound ball. The kinds of projectiles varied greatly: solid shot, canister shot (a container full of bullets), grape shot (cloth container full of bullets), and bombs or grenades (hollow shot filled with gunpowder) fired from a mortar. Sometimes solid shot was heated until it was red hot. If it landed on a ship, hot shot could set a wooden ship afire. Ordnance enabled a fortification to meet the potential the military engineers had hoped for when they sited and built it.

The tops of the ponderous vaults were leveled off with a fill of coquina chips and sand. Tabby mortar was poured onto the surface, and tampers beat the mixture smooth. After the first layer set, others were added until the pavement was six inches thick. The whole roof was thus made into a gun deck, and cannon were no longer restricted to the bastions alone. For unlike the old raftered roof, the new terreplein was buttressed by construction that could take tremendous weight and terrific shock; and masonry four feet thick protected the rooms underneath from bombardment. In San Carlos bastion, by mid-January of 1740, they had finished the tall watchtower and the new parapet.

It was the English settlement of Georgia that had spurred all this activity. In fact, Spain’s plan for recovery of Georgia and other Spanish-claimed land was well past the first stages. Troops were assembling in Havana and reinforcements of 400 had already come to Florida. The situation came to a head when Spanish officials boarded Capt. Robert Jenkins’ ship _Rebecca_, believing the English mariners to be illegally carrying goods to Spanish settlements, an enterprise forbidden by Spanish law. In the ensuing scuffle, Jenkins’ ear was sliced off. Jenkins, back in London, reported to Parliament that the Spanish officer who handed him back his ear said: “Carry it to your King and tell his majesty that if he were present I would serve him in the same manner.”

Alexander Pope, the couplet maker, smiled and said: “The Spaniards did a waggish thing/Who cropped our ears and sent them to the King.” But others were not amused, and England and Spain declared war in 1739. It was called, of course, the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

England’s main target was the Caribbean, with Havana at center with Portobelo, Cartagena, and St. Augustine on the perimeter. Admiral Edward Vernon quickly won fame with his capture of Portobelo in 1739. Oglethorpe tried to imitate him in Florida. Already he had probed the St. Johns River approaches; St. Augustine would be next.

Governor Montiano, however, was fully aware of weaknesses. “Considering that 21 months have been spent on a bastion and eight arches,” he pointed out, “we need at least eight years for rehabilitation of the Castillo.”

How a Siege Works, Circa 1700

Attackers OUTER WORKS Glacis Covered Way Moat Ravelin INNER FORT Moat Parapet Scarp Rampart Magazine

His concerns were genuine, for work on the vaults had to stop as the war dried up construction funds. The fort was left in a strangely irregular shape. The east side, including San Carlos bastion, was at the new height, but all others were several feet lower. The old rooms still lined three sides of the courtyard.

On June 13, 1740, seven British warships dropped anchor outside the inlet. The long-expected siege of St. Augustine had begun. Montiano hastily sent the news to Havana and with it a plea for help. He had 750 soldiers and the 120 or more sailors who manned the galliots. Rations would last only until the end of June.

The attackers numbered almost 1,400, including sailors and Indian allies. While the warships blockaded the harbor on the east, William Palmer came in from the north with a company of Highlanders and occupied the deserted outpost called Fort Mose. Oglethorpe landed his men and guns on each side of the inlet and began building batteries across the bay from the Castillo.

Montiano saw at once that all the English positions were separated from each other by water and could not speedily reinforce one another. Fort Mose, at the village of the black runaways a couple of miles north of the Castillo, was the weakest. At dawn on June 26 a sortie from St. Augustine hit Fort Mose, and in the bloodiest action of the siege scattered the Highlanders and burned the palisaded fortification. Colonel Palmer, veteran of Florida campaigns, was among the dead.

As if in revenge, the siege guns at the inlet opened fire. Round shot whistled low over the bay and crashed into fort and town. Bombs from the mortars soared high—deadly dots against the bright summer sky—and fell swiftly to burst with terrific concussion. The townspeople fled, 2,000 of them, some to the woods, others to the covered way where Castillo walls screened them from the shelling.

For 27 nerve-shattering days the British batteries thundered. At the Castillo, newly laid stones in the east parapet scattered under the hits, but the weathered old walls held strong. As one Englishman observed, the native rock “will not splinter but will give way to cannon ball as though you would stick a knife into cheese.” One of the balls shot away a gunner’s leg, but only two men in the Castillo were killed during the bombardment.

The heavy guns of San Marcos and the long 9-pounders of the fast little galliots in the harbor kept the British back. Despite the bluster of the cannonades, the siege had stalemated. Astride the inlet, Oglethorpe and his men battled insects and shifting sand on barren, sun-baked shores, while Spanish soldiers in San Marcos, down to half rations themselves, saw their families and friends starving. On July 6 Montiano wrote, “My greatest anxiety is provisions. If these do not come, there is no doubt that we shall die in the hands of hunger.”

The very next day came news that supplies had reached a harbor down the coast south of Matanzas. Shallow-draft Spanish vessels went down the waterway behind Anastasia Island, fought their way out through Matanzas Inlet and, hugging the coast, went to fetch the provisions. Coming back into Matanzas that same night, they found the British blockade gone; they reached St. Augustine unopposed.

Oglethorpe made ready to assault the Castillo despite the low morale of his men. His naval commander, however, was nervous over the approach of the hurricane season and refused to cooperate. Without support from the warships, Oglethorpe had to withdraw. Daybreak on July 20—38 days since the British had arrived at St. Augustine—revealed that the redcoats were gone.

The End of an Era

This was why the Castillo had been built—to resist aggression, to stand firm through the darkest hour. Years of dogged labor and privations had brought the Castillo to the point where it could easily withstand a siege. Yet it remained unfinished, while in 1742 Spanish forces from Havana and St. Augustine tried unsuccessfully to take Oglethorpe’s settlement at Fort Frederica. The next year Oglethorpe moved unsuccessfully against St. Augustine.

Work still needed to be done on the vaults, but other projects were even more urgent. First, came repair of the bombardment damage. After that, the defenses around fort and town were strengthened and a strong new earth wall called the hornwork was thrown up across the land approach, half a mile north of town. And for a year or more a sizable crew was busy at Matanzas building a permanent tower and battery, since the events of 1740 had again shown the vital defensive importance of this inlet a few miles south of St. Augustine.

Several years slipped by with nothing being done to Castillo itself, the heart of the defense system. Termites and rot were in the old rafters, and in 1749 part of the roof collapsed.

The governor’s appeal to the crown eventually brought action. Engineer Pedro de Brozas y Garay came from Ceuta in Africa to replace Ruiz, who was returning to Spain. Having overseen the construction of the last fort rooms, it was Brozas who, with Governor Alonso Fernández de Heredia, stood under the royal coat of arms at the sally port, as the masons set in the inscription giving credit to the governor and himself for completion of the Castillo in 1756. The ceremony was a politic gesture, carried out on the name day of King Fernando VI; but in truth there was still a great deal to do.

The new bombproof vaults had raised the Castillo’s walls by five feet. Where once they had measured about 25 feet from foundation to crown of parapet, now they were more than 30. The little ravelin of 1682 could no longer shield the main gate, and as yet the covered way screened only the base of the high new walls. The glacis existed only on the plans.

So, having finished the vaults, the builders moved outside and worked until money ran out in the spring of 1758. The break lasted until 1762, by which time Britain and Spain were again at war. Spain, as an ally of France, got into the fracas just at the time when Britain had eliminated France as a factor in the control of North America and was quite ready to take on Spain. And this time the British would capture the pearl of the Antilles—Havana itself.

Havana was well fortified, and the general officers sitting there were perhaps more worried about St. Augustine than Havana. They released 10,000 pesos for strengthening the Florida fortifications and sent Engineer Pablo Castelló, who had been teaching mathematics at the military college in Havana, to assist the ailing Pedro Brozas.

St. Augustine had only 25 convicts for labor, but when work began on July 27, 1762, many soldiers and townspeople sensed the urgency, for Havana was already besieged, and volunteered to help. Since much of the project was a simple but strenuous task of digging and moving a mountain of sand from borrow pit to earthwork, all able-bodied people were welcome. The volunteers did, in fact, contribute labor worth more than 12,000 pesos. The only paid workers were the teamsters driving the 50 horses that hauled the fill. Each dray dumped 40 cubic feet of earth, and the hauling kept on until the covered way had been raised five more feet to its new height.

The masons soon finished a stone parapet, six feet high, for the new covered way. With this wall in place, the teamsters moved outside the covered way and began dumping fill for the glacis. This simple but important structure was a carefully designed slope from the field up to the parapet of the covered way. Not only would it screen the main walls and covered way, but its upward slope would lift attackers right into the sights of the fort cannon.

Meanwhile, to replace the 1682 ravelin, Castelló began a new one with room for five cannon and a powder magazine. He realigned the moat wall to accommodate the larger work and pushed the job along so that as December of 1762 ended, the masons laid the final stone of the cordon for the ravelin. They never started its parapet, for the close of the year brought the devastating news that Spain would give Florida to Great Britain.

So Spain’s work on the fort ended. And although ravelin and glacis were not finished, Castillo de San Marcos was a handsome structure. The main walls were finished with a hard, waterproofing, lime plaster, shining white in the sunlight with the brilliance of Spain’s olden glory. In the haste of building, engineers had not forgotten such niceties as classic molded cornices, pendants, and pilasters to cast relieving shadows on stark smooth walls. At the point of each bastion was color—the tile-red plaster of the sentry boxes. White and red. These were Spain’s symbolic colors, revealed again in the banner floating above the ramparts.

With walls high over the blue waters of the bay, its towers thrusting toward the clouds, and guns of bright bronze or iron pointed over turf and sweep of marsh toward the gloom of the forest or the distant surf breaking on the bar, San Marcos was properly the background for Florida’s capital. In the narrow streets that led to the citadel, military men and sailors mingled with tradesman and townsfolk. Indians, their nakedness smeared with beargrease against the bugs, were a strange contrast to the silken opulence of the governor’s lady. But this was St. Augustine—a town of contrasts, with a long past and an uncertain future.

The day of the transfer to British rule was July 21, 1763. At Castillo de San Marcos, Gov. Melchor de Feliú delivered the keys to Maj. John Hedges, at the moment the ranking representative of George III. The Spanish troops departed Florida, and with them went the entire Spanish population. The English were left with an empty city.

The defenses they found at St. Augustine were far stronger than the ones that had stopped Oglethorpe in 1740. The renovated Castillo, which the new owners called Fort St. Mark, was the citadel of a defense-in-depth system that began with fortified towers at St. Augustine and Matanzas inlets and blockhouses at the St. Johns River crossings. Since St. Augustine was on a small peninsula with Matanzas Bay on one side and the San Sebastián River on the other, there was only one way to reach the city by land; and Fort Mose, rebuilt and enlarged after 1740, guarded this lone access. In 1762 Mose also became the anchor for a mile-long defense line across the peninsula to a strong redoubt on the San Sebastián. This earthwork, planted at its base with prickly pear, protected the farmlands behind it. Just north of the Castillo, the hornwork spanned the narrowest part of the peninsula. A third line stretched from the Castillo to the San Sebastián, and this one was intersected by a fourth line that enclosed the town on west and south. Along the eastern shore was the stone seawall. One by one, these defenses had evolved in the years after 1702.

Such defensive precautions seemed outmoded, now that all eastern North America was under one sovereignty. Obviously the old enmities between Florida and the English colonies had departed with the Spaniards; Britain saw no need for concern about the fortifications. No need, that is, until the Thirteen Colonies showed disquieting signs of rebellion. And as rebellion flamed into revolution, St. Augustine entered a new role as capital of George III’s loyal province of East Florida.

In the summer of 1775, after Lexington and Concord, British concerns about the Castillo’s state of repair could be seen. The gate was repaired and the well in the courtyard, which had become brackish, was re-dug. In several of the high-arched bombproofs, the carpenters doubled the capacity by building a second floor, for St. Augustine was regimental headquarters and many redcoated troops were quartered in Fort St. Mark.

By October 1776 the British had renovated two of the three lines constructed north of the city by the Spaniards. In place of the old earthwork that hemmed in the town on the south and west, however, they depended on a pair of detached redoubts at the San Sebastián, one at the ford and the other at the ferry. Later they added five other redoubts in the same quadrant. Many improvements were made to the outer works as well.

Behind the thick walls of the fort were stored weapons and equipment that went to arm British forces for repeated use against the rebellious colonials to the north. The damp prison also held a number of these colonists.

Links to the Past

It is impossible to fully retrieve the past, to know what it was actually like to live in another time, to understand the cadences of another life. Some disciplines work at peeling back the layers of time and attempt to explain those bygone days. Archeology is one of these sciences. By retrieving the remains of the material culture, by seeing a plate that held food, a bottle that held oil, a dish in which herbs were ground to make medicine, the connection with those long gone personages begins to be made. The objects on the next page are among more than 1,000 items that have been retrieved from digs in and around the Castillo and St. Augustine.

Even as the British were working to secure the Castillo against a possible attack, international events brought Spain back into the picture. In 1779 Spain declared war on Britain after France promised help in retrieving Florida, if the powers allied against Britain were victorious. One Spanish plan even had the Spaniards launching a surprise attack on the Castillo: Troops would sail upriver from Matanzas, land south of town, sweep north through St. Augustine, and take the Castillo by storm. If this failed they would settle in for a siege. At the last minute, practically, the authorities decided to attack Pensacola, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, instead. A Spanish attack on the British inside a fortress designed and built by Spanish engineers would have been full of irony.

In the settlement after the Revolution, the Spaniards did indeed recover Florida, and on July 12, 1784, the transfer took place.

The Spaniards returned to an impossible situation. The border problems of earlier times had multiplied as runaway slaves from Georgia found welcome among the Seminole Indians, and ruffians from both land and sea made Florida their habitat.

Bedeviled by these perversities and distracted by revolutionary unrest in Latin America, Spain nevertheless did what had to be done at the Castillo—repairs to the bridges, a new pine stairway for San Carlos tower, a bench for the criminals in the prison. In 1785 Mariano de la Rocque designed an attractive entrance in the neoclassic style for the chapel doorway. It was built, only to crumble slowly away like the Spanish hold on Florida.

Defense strategies had changed too, over the years. The British had built a few redoubts to cover vulnerable approaches on the west and south. The Spaniards on their return adapted the British works but also greatly strengthened the long wall from the Castillo to the San Sebastián River. They widened its moat to 40 feet, lined the entire length of the 9-foot-high earthwork with palm logs, and planted it with prickly pear. The three redoubts were armed with light cannon, and a new city gate was completed in 1808. Its twin towers of white masonry were trimmed with red plaster, and each roof was capped with a pomegranate, a symbol of fertility.