Part 2

The Indian peon was cheap labor—1 real (12½¢) per day, plus rations of maize—but he was not good labor, for by nature the Indian was unfit for heavy work on a European-style fortification. A brave might play the bone-breaking game of Indian ball for a full day, but he could not stand up under the “day-in, day-out,” grinding, back-straining labor of the quarries. Not all the Indians, however, were common laborers. A half dozen developed into carpenters, and though they did not receive the top wage of 10 to 12 reales, they seemed well pleased with their 8 reales—which was twice what apprentice carpenters earned.

In addition to Indian labor, there were a few Spanish peons who were paid 4 reales per day, a few of the Crown’s Negro slaves, and a number of convicts, either from the local presidio or sent from Caribbean ports. The convicts served terms of varying length, depending upon the nature of their crimes. A typical convict might have been the Spaniard caught smuggling English goods into the colony, and he was condemned to 6 years’ labor on the fortifications at St. Augustine. If he tried to escape, the term was doubled and he faced the grim prospect of being sent to a fever-infested African presidio to work it out.

Spanish skilled labor included the military engineer, Ignacio Daza, who was paid the top wage of 3 pesos per day. Daza died within a year of his arrival in Florida, so the Crown paid only the surprisingly small sum of 546 pesos (about $862) for engineering services in starting the greatest of Spanish Florida fortifications. Of the artisans, there were Lorenzo Lagones, master of construction, and a pair of master masons, each of whom received the master workman’s wage of 20 reales (about $2.50) per day. In addition there were 7 masons at 12 reales, 8 stonecutters at the same rate, and a dozen carpenters whose pay ranged from 6 to 12 reales per working day.

There were few men for the job in hand, and to speed the work along Governor Cendoya had to be ingenious and resourceful. Constantly on the lookout for labor, he seized the opportunity of using prisoners from the Carolina Colony, and, ironically enough, they were of exceptional help in building this defense against their own countrymen. Back in 1670, a vessel bound for Charleston Harbor accidentally put in at Santa Catalina Mission, the Spanish frontier post near the Savannah River. William Carr and John Rivers were captured. A rescue expedition set out from Charleston, and when the sloop arrived at the Mission, Joseph Bailey and John Collins took a blustering message ashore. For their pains, they were dispatched with Rivers and Carr to St. Augustine. There, from time to time, they were joined by other English prisoners.

The Governor did not long hesitate in putting them to work. Three of the prisoners turned out to be masons, and the Spanish form of their names—Bernardo Patricio (for Bernard Patrick), Juan Calens (for John Collins), and Guillermo Car (for William Carr)—appeared on the pay rolls. Some of the Englishmen entered into the life of the presidio as permanent residents. At least one of them took a Florida bride. Although the Spanish were cautious in depending too much upon the fealty of these Englishmen to the Spanish Crown, there was little occasion to denounce their unwillingness to serve.

John Collins especially pleased the Spanish officials. He could burn more lime in a week than Spanish workmen could in twice the time, and what was also to the point, as a prisoner he had to be paid only 8 reales instead of the 20 due a master workman. This Juan Calens appeared to like St. Augustine. He rose steadily in the Crown’s employ from master of the kilns to quarry master. Next he took charge of the dugouts, the provisions, and the convicts. Eventually he held even the important office of pilot from St. Augustine to Charleston. Royal recognition of his zeal and loyalty was the culmination of his 19 years or more of service in the presidio.

Another unusual case developed a few years later. Some leagues north of St. Augustine, 11 Englishmen were captured. All of them except one Ransom were committed to the galleys. Ransom was to be hanged. On the appointed day this man ascended the scaffold. The hangman put the noose about his neck. The trap opened. The rope jerked taut, then broke. Down tumbled Ransom, safe and sound. While the onlookers marveled, the friars took it as an act of God and led Ransom to sanctuary in the Convent of San Francisco. Word reached the Governor that this man was an ingenious fellow, an artillerist, a carpenter, and, what was most remarkable, a maker of “artificial fires.” Ransom was offered his life if he would leave sanctuary, live “protected” within the fort, and put his talents to use. He agreed and, like Collins, was exceedingly helpful, for none other in the presidio had such abilities.

All told, there were close to 150 men working in those first days of feverish preparations. They, along with about 500 other persons, including about 100 effective soldiers in the garrison, a few Franciscan friars, a dozen mariners, and the townspeople, had to be fed. When supplies from New Spain did not arrive, the problem of providing food was even more difficult than finding men to work on the fort, especially since the sandy soil around the presidio yielded poorly to the primitive agricultural practices of the seventeenth century.

Indian corn or maize was the staple, and most of the planting, cultivating, and harvesting of the extensive fields near the town was done by Indians brought from their provinces to do the work, so that at times there were as many as 300 Indians serving the Crown in the presidio, counting those at work on the fortification. The Indian peons were furnished rations of maize both while they were in St. Augustine and for their journey over the wilderness trails to their homes, and certain of the convicts were also given a ration of Indian corn. This native corn cost the Crown 7½ reales per arroba (25 pounds) and an arroba lasted the average Indian only 10 days. Flour was imported from New Spain at a cost of 10 reales per arroba, and the master workmen, the English masons, and the Spanish convicts were given rations from this store. In addition, these convicts received a ration of meat. Fresh meat was not plentiful, but the waters teemed with fish and there were plenty of shellfish. A paid fisherman kept the men supplied. There were few garden vegetables. Squash grew well in the sandy soil, and there were beans and sweetpotatoes, citron, pomegranates, and figs. The orange had already been introduced. And of course there were the favorite seasonings of onion and garlic. Withal, however, it must be remembered that St. Augustine was not a self-supporting settlement. After a century of existence, it still depended for its very life upon the subsidy from New Spain.

As the long, hot days of the second summer shortened into fall, Governor Cendoya saw that after a year spent in gathering men and materials he was ready to start construction.

No long-drawn-out survey and detailed study helped to locate the castillo, for the Spanish had learned their lessons by a century and more of experiment on the shores of Matanzas Bay. Engineer Daza and Governor Cendoya decided that the new fort should be erected on the west shore of the bay by the side of the old fort, a site which took into account every natural defense feature of the harbor. Here, the enemy would find it almost impossible to bring his heavy siege guns within range. A shallow bar at the channel entrance kept the bigger warships out to sea. Any other vessel entering the harbor had to pass under the fort guns. The town and the fort were on a narrow peninsula surrounded on three sides by water or impassable marsh; the fourth side—the northern neck where the old fort stood—was constricted by a meandering creek. Beyond the marshes was wilderness—the pine barrens and cypress swamps, palmetto scrubs, and oak groves. Roads were but Indian trails and the quickest passage from one coastal fortified post to the next was along the inland waterway in dugouts. Attackers might march quickly down the coast on the wide, hard beaches (provided they could cross the numerous estuaries on the way), but they were still faced with an advance over broad river and marsh before they could reach the fort.

Nor was it a problem to work out the plan for the castillo. Both Daza and the Governor liked the design of the old fort. They, meeting with the General Council, decided merely to build the castillo slightly larger in order to make room for quarters, guardroom, chapel, wells, ovens, powder magazine, and other essential rooms not included in the old fort. In line with the more recent ideas, Daza recommended a slight lengthening of the bastions. All around the castillo they planned to dig a broad, deep moat, and then surround the land sides with a high palisade.

It was a simple and unpretentious plan, but a good one. Daza was apparently schooled in the Italian-Spanish principles of fortification as developed from the sixteenth century designs of Franceso de Marchi, for Sébastien de Vauban, the great French engineer, was still but a young man in 1671. Little is known about Ignacio Daza, but if he were the typical military engineer, he was nothing if not practical. And Daza, if he were typical, was more than a draftsman. For a military engineer, it was “not sufficient to know how to draw plans, profils and landskips; to understand a few propositions in geometry, or to know how to build a wall or a house; on the contrary, he ought to be well grounded in all the most useful branches of the mathematics, and how to apply them to practice, natural philosophy, and architecture; have a good notion of all kind of handicraft works; and above all things, to be well versed in mechanics.”

THE YEARS OF CONSTRUCTION

So the actual construction finally began. It was indeed the occasion for a ceremony. About 4 o’clock Sunday afternoon, October 2, 1672, Governor Cendoya gathered together the official witnesses, and, to record the event for the information of Queen Mariana and for his own protection, he commanded the public scribe, Juan Moreno, to be present. Into his hands Cendoya took a spade. He walked to a likely looking spot between the strings marking out the lines of the new fortification, drove down his spade, and thus broke ground for the foundations of Castillo de San Marcos, worthy successor to the name that for almost 100 years had been used for the forts of the St. Augustine presidio. All this and more, Juan Moreno noted. Characteristically, he faithfully certified that not only was the work started that Sunday afternoon, but it continued, and that at most of it he, the notary, was present. Because he wrote the certification on ordinary paper, Juan explained that he was out of official stamped paper.

It was little more than a month later, on Wednesday, November 9, that Cendoya laid the first stone of the foundation. The people of St. Augustine must have wept for joy at these tangible signs of progress. All were glad and proud, the aged soldiers who had given a lifetime of service to the Crown, the four little orphans whose father died in the pirate raid a few years before, the widows and their children, the craftsmen, the workmen, the royal officials, some of whom served as their fathers had before them; but none could have been more pleased or proud than Don Manuel de Cendoya, who of all the Florida Governors had been the one chosen by Providence to have the honor of starting the first permanent Florida fortification of Her Catholic Majesty.

Laying the foundations of the mighty fort was no easy job, for not only was the soil sandy and low, but as the winter months came the Indian peons were struck by _El Contagio_—The Contagion—and the laboring force dwindled to nothing. The 30 Negro slaves to be sent from Havana had not yet come. Cendoya himself and his soldiers took to the shovels and as they dug a trench some 5 feet deep and 17 feet broad, the masons laid two courses of heavy stones directly on the hard-packed sand bottom. Slow work it was, for high tide flooded the trenches.

About a foot and a half inside the toe of this wide foundation, the masons stretched their line marking the scarp or curtain wall, which was to taper gradually from a 14-foot base to approximately 9 feet at its top, some 25 feet above the foundation. In the 12 months that followed, the north, south, and east walls rose steadily, but since the layout of the new fort overlapped the old wooden fort, no work could be done on the west until the old fort was torn down. By midsummer of 1673 the east side of the work was 12 feet high and the presidio was jubilant over the arrival of 10,000 pesos for carrying on.

This good news was tempered, however, by the Viceroy’s assertion that he would release no more money for the new St. Augustine fort without an express order from the Crown, and by the realization that the work was going too slowly. Cendoya had already appealed to Her Majesty to increase the allowance to 16,000 pesos annually so that the construction could be finished in 4 years, for, as he put it, the English menace at Charleston brooked no delay. There was already news that the English were outfitting ships for an invasion.

But slowly and more slowly the building went, especially after Cendoya left in 1673 and the leadership devolved upon Sgt. Maj. Nicolás Ponce, in whom the local Spaniards had little confidence. Events worked against Ponce. The Viceroy continued to exhibit a discouraging reluctance to part with money for the project, even in the face of evidence that English strength was daily increasing, especially among the Indians. The presidio was damaged by storms and high tides that undermined houses, polluted wells, and flooded fields and gardens. Sickness took its toll of peon and townsman alike. Then in the spring of 1675 another provision ship was lost and Ponce was forced to take all the peons from work on the castillo for the long march to Apalache, where he hoped to get provisions from the Indians. Only the handful of masons were left to carry on the work.

Not until May was half gone did the pall of discouragement lift, as the long-awaited ship from the Viceroy safely crossed the bar. There were supplies and a new Governor for Florida—Capt. Gen. Don Pablo de Hita Salazar—hard-bitten veteran of the Flanders campaigns, who tackled his new job with an energy and enthusiasm that would have done credit to a much younger man. Salazar’s career in the royal service had been “no other than the harquebus and the pike,” and evidently it was as a soldier of reputation that he was assigned to the Florida province, for in addition to carrying on the fortification work he was charged to “dislocate” the Charleston settlement. Led to believe that the Viceroy could be depended upon for assistance in the difficult task ahead, time and again during his short stay in Mexico City he outlined his problems, only to find that colonial official singularly reluctant to help. At last the old fellow left in disgust for St. Augustine. Here, in spite of the fact that the work had been dragging, he found things that pleased him: “Although I have seen many Castillos of consequence and reputation,” wrote he to the Crown, “in the form of its plan this one is not surpassed by any of those of greater character....”

Furthermore, the Governor endorsed the statement of the royal officials, who were eager to point out the brighter side of the picture: “It is certain, Señor, that according to the excellence of It and the plan of the Castillo in the form that is called for, if it had to be built in another place [than St. Augustine] it would cost a double Amount because there will not be the Advantage of having the peons, at a Real of Wages each day, With such tenuous sustenance As three pounds of maize, nor will the overseers and artisans work in other places With such Small Salaries.... Nor will there be Found the Stone, Lime, and Other materials so close at hand and with the Convenience that there is in the Pressidio.”

These citations of economies were timely, for 34,298 pesos had already been spent upon the new fort, and still it was no more protection than a haphazard pile of stone. Nor was the old fort any defense. If an artilleryman had the temerity to touch his match to a cannon, the sparks from the explosion might well set the timber walls afire. The enemy at Charleston was not 70 leagues away; his 200 fighting men outnumbered the effectives in the Spanish garrison, while, according to the reports of English deserters, Charleston was rather well defended by a stockade fort mounting about 20 guns. With characteristic realism Don Pablo set about making his own fortification defensible.

The bastion of San Carlos—the northeast salient of the castillo—was the nearest to completion. Salazar concentrated on finishing it, so that cannon could be mounted on its deck or terreplein. While the masons were busy at that work, the Governor took his soldiers and demolished the old wooden fort, using the best of its wood to build a palisade across the open west end of the castillo so that the garrison, if need be, would be surrounded by a protecting four walls. In the last half of 1675 building went ahead with remarkable rapidity. Not only did Salazar complete San Carlos (except for a section of parapet where building materials were hauled in), but he raised the three stone walls to their full height; and his wooden palisade on the west looked as strong as the other curtains or walls, for he built it with two half bastions, faced it with a veneer of stone, and dug a ditch in front of it.

Inside the fortification, both carpenters and masons worked on temporary buildings. A small, semicircular powder magazine was built near the north curtain. A long, narrow, wooden structure, partitioned into guardhouses, lieutenant’s quarters, armory, and provision magazine, soon took shape behind the western palisade. Only one permanent room had been started, and that was the powder magazine—later destined to become the “dungeon”—in the gorge of San Carlos. Salazar lost no time in completing this magazine and building a ramp over it to give access to the fighting deck above. At San Agustín bastion on the southeastern corner the peons dumped hundreds of baskets of sand and rubble between the enclosing walls to fill them up to the 25-foot level. Then a few of the guns from the old fort were mounted in San Carlos and San Agustín and along the palisade. After 5 years of work the castillo was a defense in fact as well as name, and the people of the presidio could breathe more freely.

Bit by bit the work went on, in spite of trouble with the Choctaws, in spite of the worrisome impossibility of driving out the Carolina settlers, in spite of the pirate destruction of the Apalache outpost in the west and the ever-present fear of invasion. But when the supply vessel carrying desperately needed provisions and clothing journeyed safely all the way from New Spain, only to be miserably lost on a sand bar within the very harbor of St. Augustine, it was a heartbreaking loss. Salazar became disconsolate. The help he begged from Havana never came; for 4 years he had missed no opportunity to write the Viceroy regarding the serious needs of the presidio, and for 4 long years he had not a single reply to his letters. Old, discouraged, sick, Salazar wrote to the Crown that in this remote province he was “without human recourse.” Opposition and contradictions from the royal officials on his staff added to his burdens.

Yet the old warrior did not give up. Finally the Viceroy released 5,000 pesos more for the work. As soon as Salazar got up from his sickbed he was back at the fort. The masons and stonecutters were leveling the tops of the curtains and the western bastions; the sweating laborers dumped their loads of rubble between the inner and outer courses of the massive walls. The Governor looked on, impatient with the snail’s pace of progress. Many of his artisans were gone. Some had died. With another 5,000 pesos and a few more masons from Havana, said the old Governor, “I promise to leave the work in very good condition....” Before he could make good that promise, he was replaced by Juan Cabrera, who arrived in the fall of 1680 to take over the reins of government.

Cabrera and his master of construction, Juan Marqués, carefully checked the construction. They found a number of mistakes and the blame had to be laid upon the now deceased construction master, Lorenzo Lagones. Either incompetent or careless, Lagones had started to put the cordon (on which the parapet was to be built) on the northwest bastion of San Pablo a good 3 feet below where it should have been. Some of his work elsewhere had to be torn out and rebuilt. This was the outcome of those long years without an engineer.

Half apologizing for his own little knowledge of “architecture and geometry,” Salazar left the trials and tribulations of this frontier province to his more youthful successor. Salazar had done a great deal. Within a short 6 months after his arrival he had made the castillo defensible against any but an overwhelming force, then during the remainder of his 5-year term, over one obstacle after another he slowly raised all the permanent walls so that there was now little left to build inside the fort—the rooms and Lagones’ mistakes excepted. San Carlos even had the firing steps for the musketeers and embrasures for the artillery—though that small gap for hauling materials was still there. The curtains were almost ready for the parapet builders, since in most places the core of fill was within a yard of the top. The only low part of the work was San Pablo, where the level had been miscalculated. The main doorway, its iron-bound door, and drawbridge—the work of a convict—was finished. Another heavy portal closed the emergency doorway in another curtain. There was a small temporary chapel in the shadow of the eastern wall.

Governor Cabrera found his hands full. The 1680’s were turbulent years. Already the English had struck at Santa Catalina, and that mission outpost was abandoned soon thereafter. Other raids by Englishman, Indian, and pirate drove the padres and their charges to the coastal islands south of the St. Marys River. Heathen Indians carried away their Christian cousins into English slavery. Cabrera bided his time. He had other worries. If spring marked the turn of a young man’s fancy, it was no less the season the corsairs chose to “run” the coasts of Florida. Each year the buccaneers grew bolder. In 1682, the year Cabrera finished the fort ravelin, there were a dozen or so pirate craft operating in the Bahama Channel, and they took a number of Spanish prizes, including the St. Augustine frigate on its way to Vera Cruz for the subsidy.