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.
[Illustration: 1. DESIGN—2. DEFENSE—3. ASSAULT]
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.
[Illustration: THE LARGE CORNER FIREPLACES IN THE GUARDROOMS WERE USED
BOTH FOR HEATING AND COOKING.]
In this state of affairs, it was strange that Governor Cabrera found
time for construction work. But he was a man who put first things first.
From Havana, the nearest source, he asked help, and out of Havana came a
military engineer for an occasional look at the castillo. He did little
more than put Cabrera’s problems right back on Cabrera’s own capable
shoulders. In order to hasten the work, the Governor asked the local
curate for permission to work his men on holy days. There was ample
precedent for granting this concession, but Cabrera had never got on
well with the religious, and he was refused. As a result, the peons
could not bring in materials. Construction fell almost a year behind
schedule. Governor Cabrera appealed the decision to higher church
authorities, and the permission to work on Sundays and holidays was
eventually forthcoming, though it applied only to actual work on the
fort, and that only during emergencies. The dispensation, however, came
too late; Cabrera’s fear of attack had not been ill-founded.
[Illustration: THE ROYAL ARMS OF SPAIN, ERECTED OVER THE ENTRANCE IN
1756, COMMEMORATE COMPLETION OF THE CASTILLO.]
On March 30, 1683, English corsairs landed a few leagues south of the
_Centinela de Matanzas_, the watchtower at Matanzas Inlet, some 4
leagues from St. Augustine and near the south end of Anastasia Island.
Under cover of darkness, some of the invaders crept up behind the tower
and surprised the five sentries, who were either asleep or not on the
alert. The next day, the pirate march on St. Augustine began. To within
half a league they came. Fortunately for the presidio, an advanced
sentry chanced to see the motley band, and posthaste he went to Cabrera,
who dispatched Capt. Antonio de Argüelles with 30 musketeers to ambush
them. The pirates walked straight into a withering fire and after a few
exchange shots—one of which lodged in Captain Argüelles’ leg—they beat a
hasty retreat back down the island to their boats. Then they sailed to
St. Augustine bar and dropped anchor in plain sight of the unfinished
castillo.
Cabrera, his soldiers, the men and even the women of the town were
working day and night to strengthen the castillo. Missing parapets and
firing steps were improvised from dry stone. Expecting the worst, the
residents of the presidio crowded into the fortification, but the
corsairs, nursing their wounds and without even scouting the undefended
town, decided to sail northward on a hunt for easier prey.
After the excitement, work went forward with renewed zeal. Once again
danger had passed by, but luck would not hold much longer. The
portcullis or sliding grating at the fort’s entrance, the bridges, the
encircling palisade, the rooms surrounding the courtyard, all came
nearer and nearer to completion. This was progress made in the face of
poverty and hunger—want that made the people demand of Cabrera that he
buy supplies from a stray Dutch trader. It was unlawful, but people had
to eat. Imagine the joy in the presidio shortly thereafter when two
subsidy payments arrived at one time! Cabrera gave the soldiers 2 full
years’ back pay and had on hand enough provisions for 14 months; the 27
guns, from the little iron 2-pounder to the heavy 40-pounder bronze, all
were equipped with gunner’s ladles, rammers, sponges, and wormers; there
was plenty of powder and shot; and San Carlos bastion had its alarm
bell.
Still the work went on. There were continual distractions, such as the
pirate Agramont’s raids in the Guale country and even on Matanzas in
1686, but by the summer of that year the main part of the castillo was
essentially finished. Within the four curtains stood the thick courtyard
walls, and pine beams a foot thick and half again as wide spanned the 15
to 20 feet between. Laid over these great beams was a covering of pine
planking some 4 fingers thick, and under that heavy roof were more than
20 rooms for the quarters, the chapel of San Marcos, and the magazines
for powder, food, supplies, and equipment.
Even the doors and windows were practically done. Now, with the roof or
terreplein in place all around the castillo, the artillerymen no longer
had to climb down into the courtyard to get from one bastion to the
other, and the musketeers and pikemen had no trouble reaching their
stations along the walls. Only a few of the higher parts of the parapet
between the gun openings and firing steps for these defenders were still
lacking. Outside the walls, a ravelin guarded the main doorway. The moat
wall was from 6 to 8 feet high. The only major work yet to be done was
finishing the moat excavation and the shore defenses on the bay side of
the castillo.
With the fortification so far along, the Governor could afford to give
more attention to other business in the province. There was the matter
of Lord Cardross’ Scotch colony at Port Royal, S.C., a new and obnoxious
settlement that encouraged the savage raids on the mission Indians. It
existed in territory recognized as Spanish even by the English monarch.
Out from St. Augustine in the stormy month of September 1686, Cabrera
sent Tomás de León with three ships. León completely destroyed the
Cardross colony and sailed northward to sack and burn Governor Morton’s
plantation on Edisto Island. Then the Spaniards set their course for
Charleston. Again, as it had 16 years before, a storm came up to save
the hated and feared English colony. León’s vessel, the _Rosario_, was
lost, and he along with it. Another of the trio was beached, and the
last of the little armada limped slowly back to St. Augustine. Cabrera
had his revenge, but the Georgia country remained irrevocably lost to
Spain. And the contest for the hinterlands had begun.
The traders led the advance from Charleston; Cabrera sent soldiers and
missionaries from St. Augustine to western Florida to bolster the
Indians against them. For the Spanish, it was a losing fight—an
exciting, exasperating struggle of diplomacy and intrigue, trade and
cupidity, war and religion, slavery and death. The turn of affairs on
the frontier and the threat of reprisal by the Carolinians sent Capt.
Juan de Ayala directly to Spain for help, and he came back with 100
soldiers, the money for maintaining them, and even a Negro slave to help
cultivate the fields. The single Negro, 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 Negro labor for both fields and
fortifications.
From the Carolina plantations, an occasional Negro slave would slip
away, searching his way southward along the waterways. In 1688 a small
boat loaded with eight runaways and a baby girl found its way to St.
Augustine. The men went to work on the castillo at 4 reales a day and
the Governor took the two women into his household for servants. It was
a fairly happy arrangement, for the slaves worked well and soon asked to
become Catholic. A few months later, William Dunlop came from Charleston
in search of them. The Governor, reluctant to surrender these converted
slaves, offered to buy them for the Spanish Crown, and to this offer
Dunlop agreed, even though the Governor was short of cash and had to
promise to pay for them later. To seal the bargain, Dunlop gave the baby
girl her freedom.
Obviously this incident could set a precedent, especially since the
Spanish Crown eventually liberated the Negroes. Here was a basis for
profitable slave trade from the Carolinas had the Florida province been
richer and Spanish trade restrictions less severe; but since this
commerce was illegal and the Crown was hardly in a position to buy every
runaway coming to Florida, the 1680’s marked the beginning of an
apparently insoluble problem. Learning of the reception awaiting them to
the south, more and more of the Negroes left their English masters. Few
of them could be reclaimed. Eventually the Spanish decreed freedom for
any Carolina slave entering Florida, and a fortified village of the
runaways was established hardly more than a cannon shot from the
presidio. Meantime, growing more serious with each year, the slave
trouble eliminated any possibility of amicable relations between the
Spanish and English colonists.
Matters were brought momentarily to a focus with the Spanish declaration
of war on France in 1690. Cabrera’s successor, Diego Quiroga, at the
news of enemy vessels off both his northern and southern coasts, wrote a
letter reporting a strength far beyond what he had against the chance
that the enemy might capture the packet carrying the true news of
appalling weakness. For until the outworks could be finished, the
castillo was vulnerable to the siege guns and scaling ladders of any
large force. Worse, at this crucial time, Quiroga found himself out of
provisions. The heavy labor of quarrying, lumbering, and hauling had to
be discontinued. With the royal slaves and a few of the Indians, work on
the castillo went along in desultory fashion until finally there was
“not one pound of maize, meat nor any other thing” to feed the workmen.
Fortunate indeed was it that the English did not choose this moment to
attack. As fate would have it, England and Spain were for once on the
same side of the fence, fighting against France. There was a comparative
truce on the Florida border during the 10 years before the turn of the
century and on the surface, at least, friendly relations prevailed
between the St. Augustine and Charleston colonies. Actually the
combatants were girding themselves for the inevitable renewal of
hostilities.
[Illustration: THE PRISON OF THE FORT HAS A SINGLE ENTRANCE, WHICH OPENS
INTO A GUARDROOM. MASSIVE ARCH CONSTRUCTION MADE THE ROOMS OF THE FORT
“BOMB” PROOF.]
Relief came at last to St. Augustine in 1693, and with it came another
Governor, Don Laureano de Torres. To lessen the chances of famine in the
future, the Florida officials resolved to plant great crops of maize
nearby. They found men to plow the broad, field-like clearings around
the fort, and acres of waving corn soon extended almost up to the moat.
Proudly they reported this accomplishment to the Crown. The reaction was
not what they expected. On December 14, 1693, a royal order was
promulgated prohibiting thenceforward the sowing of maize within a
musket shot of the castillo. A very large army, said the War Council,
could hide in the cornfield and approach to the very bastions without
being seen by the sentries.
To Governor Torres belongs the credit for completing the seventeenth
century part of the castillo. Somehow he found the means for carrying on
Quiroga’s beginning, for putting in place the last stones of the water
defenses—bright, yellow rock that was in strange contrast to the
weathered gray of masonry already a quarter of a century old. This
monumental pile of stone, on which Cendoya planned to spend some 70,000
pesos and which Salazar estimated would cost a good 80,000 pesos were it
to be built elsewhere, by 1680 had already cost 75,000 pesos. When
Cabrera completed the main part of it 7 years later, expenditures had
reached 92,609 pesos. By the time Torres put on the finishing touches in
1696, the mounting costs of Castillo de San Marcos must have totaled
close to 100,000 pesos, or approximately $150,000.
And what did completion of this citadel mean? Only a year later, gaunt
Spanish soldiers slipped into the church and left an unsigned warning
for the Governor: If the enemy came, they intended to surrender, for
they were dying of hunger.