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.
[Illustration: This British musket dates from 1777-90 and is of the
type that would have been used by the British forces stationed at
the Castillo from 1763 to 1784. It is 4 feet, 8 inches long.]
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.