The Castillo de San Marcos was a typical example of European design
transplanted to the Western Hemisphere. It was a style of fortification
evolved from the medieval castle. There was no great change in
siegecraft and fortification until the gunpowder cannon came into use,
but when that weapon did make its appearance the military engineers
found themselves in a predicament. The towering walls of the ancient
castles were conspicuous targets for the skilled artillerist. Adamant
stone walls that had splintered the powerful crossbow shaft and resisted
for days on end the pounding of the catapults tumbled into rubble after
a roaring bombardment from heavy siege cannons. So the engineers lowered
their targetlike walls, and in front of them they piled thick and high
hills of earth to stop the cannonballs before they could hit the stone.
Yet, because those walls still had to be too high for the scaling
ladders, the surrounding moat was retained. Circular towers common to
the older castles eventually gave way to the more scientific bastion, an
angular salient from which the pikemen, harquebusiers, and artillerists
could see to defend every adjacent part of the fort walls. The ultimate
result was a rather complicated series of straight walls and angles—a
sort of defense-in-depth plan—and in the center of it could usually be
found the garrison quarters and the magazines.
Fortification was a remarkably exact science, and one that was
universally respected. “Many ... arguments,” wrote an eighteenth-century
expert, “might be alledged to prove the usefulness of fortified places,
were it not that all the world is convinced of it at present, and
therefore it would be needless to say any more about it.” A fort,
however, can never win a victory. Primarily a defensive weapon, it
protects vital points and delays the invader. It can also be, as was the
case with the historic fort in Florida, a citadel and a pivot of
maneuver for colonial troops.
For most defense problems, there was an answer in the book, though the
brilliance of the engineer might well be measured by his ingenious use
of natural defenses, as was the case at Castillo de San Marcos. There
were as many different kinds of forts as there were uses for them. They
promoted and protected trade, they guarded the pass into a country, or,
like San Marcos, they secured the country from invasion. The following
dogma, written three-quarters of a century after the castillo was
started, might have referred specifically to the fort at St. Augustine:
“In small states ... which cannot afford the expense of building many
fortresses, and are not able to provide them when built with sufficient
garrisons and other necessaries for their defence, or those whose chief
dependance consists in the protection of their allies; the best way is
to fortify their capital, which being made spacious, may serve as a
retreat to the inhabitants in time of danger, with their wealth and
cattle, till the succours of their allies arrive.”
To attack a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century fort, the enemy had first
to cross natural barriers, advance over level ground where he was
exposed to fire from almost every part of the fortification, drive the
defenders from the outer works, cross the moat, and then, if there were
any of him left, scale the main walls and fight the rest of the
defenders hand to hand. It was no easy job. His approach to within
striking distance generally involved the laborious digging of zigzag
trenches up to the outworks. Meanwhile, his artillerymen tried to get
their guns close enough to breach the walls.
Aside from the actual fighting, a serious problem was supplying
provisions for the large besieging force, since the invading army was
often far from its base and to some extent had to live off hostile
country. On the other hand, once the attacker brought his artillery to
bear, the garrison and refugees found themselves in the unpleasant
position of stationary targets, subjected to devastating fire,
particularly from the heavy mortars throwing 50- or 100-pound bombs
(exploding shells) into the close confines of the fortification. And if
the enemy isolated the fort, as he invariably tried to do, the length of
the siege was often proportionate to the amounts of food and water
inside the fort. For this reason, at least 5 of the 20 main rooms in
Castillo de San Marcos were given over to food storage, and three wells
were dug in the courtyard. As long as the provision magazines were well
filled, the citadel was strong.
The test of its strength was not long delayed, for the border squabbles
between Spaniard and Englishman soon flamed into open warfare. The
Florida Governor, Joseph de Zuñiga, a Flanders veteran well-versed in
the art of fortification, looked at the St. Augustine defenses with
jaundiced eye. True, the castillo was a bulwark, but its guns were not
only obsolete—many of them were unserviceable. The heavy powder supplied
from New Spain so fouled the gun barrels that after “four Shots, the
Ball would not go in the Cannon.” Harquebuses, muskets, powder, and shot
were sorely needed. Captain Ayala, again sailing to Spain for aid, was
racing against time; it was 1702 and James Moore, Governor of Carolina,
was already marching on St. Augustine.
At this critical hour, help came from Havana. Threescore skilled
Gallegos (Spanish soldiers native to Galicia) arrived in Florida and set
about reconditioning the ordnance, but before Spanish preparations were
completed Moore’s forces arrived, encircled the fort, and occupied the
houses of the townspeople, who could do nothing other than flee to the
shelter of San Marcos. On the south side of the fort where the outskirts
of the town crept near, the Spanish burned many of their houses which
might have given shelter to English troops advancing toward the fort.
Moore’s fighting forces of 800 Englishmen and Indians vastly outnumbered
the Spanish garrison, but he was ill-equipped to besiege the
fortification. Four cannons he had, and the Spanish boasted that a
continuous fire from the fort walls kept him out of range. Indeed the
Gallegos were useful! Moore settled down to await the arrival of more
artillery from Jamaica, and thus matters stood when a pair of Spanish
men-of-war sailed from the south and blocked the harbor entrance. With
little hesitation, Moore burned his eight vessels, left many of his
stores, and retreated overland to his province, leaving much of St.
Augustine in ashes.
The Spanish estimated that the damage to the town amounted to 20,000
pesos or more, and the ease with which the English had occupied and held
the town for almost 2 months made it clear that additional
fortifications had to be built. In the quarter century that followed,
out from the castillo went strong earthworks and palisades, strengthened
at strategic points with redoubts, and St. Augustine became a walled
town, secure against invasion as long as there were enough soldiers to
man the walls. The years of building these town defenses were lean
years. In 1712 came _la Gran Hambre_—the Great Hunger—and in those dark
days the starving people ate even the dogs and cats until the storms
isolating the colony finally abated.
But the work was done, and when in 1728 another South Carolinian,
Colonel Palmer, marched against the presidio, the sight of the grim
walls of the fort, the unwinking readiness of the heavy guns, and the
needle-sharp points of the yucca plants lining the town palisades were a
powerful deterrent. He “refrained” from taking the town. For their part,
the Spaniards set off their artillery, but they made no sorties.
Nevertheless, Palmer’s bold march to the very gates of St. Augustine
foreshadowed coming events, and the Spaniards again made ready, for the
castillo now began to show its half-century age and the wooden palisades
were rotting. That capable engineer and frontier diplomat, Don Antonio
de Arredondo, came from Havana to inspect the Florida fortifications and
make recommendations. Backed by Arredondo’s expert opinions, Governor
Manuel de Montiano put all the cards on the table in a letter to the
Havana Governor: “For 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; but that we are as bare outside
[the castle] as we are without life inside, for there are no guns that
could last 24 hours, and if there were, we have no artillerymen to serve
them.”
Unlike many of his predecessors, Montiano had the ear of the Cuban
Governor. Guns and men came from Havana. There was money to strengthen
the fortifications and in the summer of 1738 began the work of tearing
down the old rooms inside the fort and laying foundations for the 28
great arches that were to make the new rooms proof against English
bombs. While the carpenters were setting up the forms for the arches,
while the quarries and the limekilns were again the scenes of feverish
activity, James Oglethorpe in his buffer colony of Georgia was growing
stronger and stronger, pushing the Florida boundary ever closer to the
St. Johns River—a scant 35 miles north of the castillo.
Then the ponderous arches were finished and hurriedly leveled off with a
packed fill of coquina chippings, sand, and shell. Hundreds of bushels
of lime went into the tabby or mortar that was spread over the entire
roof of the renovated fort to make its terreplein. The tampers beat the
wet mixture smooth, and when the first layer was hardened, another and
another was added until there was a bed of tabby 6 inches deep. Upon
this smooth, hard surface the cannoneers could maneuver their heavy guns
and the rooms below were safe under 2½ feet or more of solid masonry; in
fact, on the eastern side, where heavy bombardment was most likely, the
engineer allowed a minimum thickness of 4 feet. Some of the parapets had
to be rebuilt for modernization. Outside the fort a new stockade was
erected to strengthen the covered way, and the walls enclosing the town
were reworked. Under Montiano’s dynamic leadership and the able
supervision of Engineer Pedro Ruíz de Olano, the work was practically
finished by 1740. There was no time to spare.
The War of Jenkins’ Ear precipitated Oglethorpe’s invasion of Florida.
When the first English warship appeared off the bar of St. Augustine in
June (by the Spanish calendar) of 1740, Montiano hastily sent the news
to Havana: here was the long-expected Siege of St. Augustine.
Reënforcements had brought the 350-man garrison up to about 750 against
General Oglethorpe’s force of about 900 soldiers, sailors, and Indians.
Oglethorpe landed his guns across the bay from the fort, and as British
shells began to burst over the town, the inhabitants, almost 2,000 of
them, fled to the fort. “It is impossible,” wrote Montiano to the
Governor of Cuba, “to express the confusion of this place ... though
nothing gives me anxiety but the want of provisions, and if Your
Excellency ... cannot send relief, we must all indubitably perish.”
There was no hint of surrender.
For 27 nerve-shattering days the English batteries thundered at the
castillo. Newly laid stones at the eastern parapet scattered under the
hits, but the weathered old walls of the curtains 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 an artilleryman’s leg, but only two of the
persons sheltered in the fort were killed in the bombardment. The heavy
guns of San Marcos and the long-range 9-pounders of the maneuverable
Spanish galleys in the harbor held the enemy at bay.
A league to the northward was Fort Mosa, abandoned outpost at the
village of run-away Negroes. Oglethorpe’s Highlanders occupied it. At
dawn, June 26, 1740, a sortie from the castillo surprised the Scotchmen
and in the bloodiest action of the entire siege the Spaniards drove out
the enemy and burned the palisaded fortification. After that blow, the
siege dragged along. While General Oglethorpe and his men battled
insects and shifting white sand on the barren, sun-parched shores across
the bay, the Spaniards in the cramped quarters of San Marcos watched
their supplies dwindle dangerously low. Before long, Montiano’s
effective troops were reduced by more than half. Nor were the refugees
in better shape. Just when the future looked darkest, news came that
provisions from Havana had reached a harbor south of Matanzas, far down
the coast. Skillfully avoiding the English blockade, Spanish seamen
began to bring the provisions along the inland waterway. Oglethorpe made
ready to assault the fort, then thought better of it, for the storm
season was approaching, his ships were in danger, and his men were
disheartened. To the wonderment of Montiano, the Georgia general
suddenly raised the siege on its 38th day and marched back to the north.