Castillo de San Marcos, oldest existing masonry fort in the United States, is a typical European fortification of the late 1600's. It overlooks the entrance to St. Augustine Harbor, and from its watchtower the sentries looked out over the mighty Atlantic toward the treasure fleets on their way to Spain.

The Building of
Castillo de San Marcos

FLORIDA AND THE PIRATES

A PIRATE RAID forced the Queen of Spain to build Castillo de San Marcos in Florida. On May 28, 1668, a sailing vessel appeared off the shallow bar of St. Augustine Harbor. It was a ship from Vera Cruz, bringing a supply of flour from New Spain to feed the poverty-stricken soldiers and settlers in Spanish Florida. Out went the harbor launch to put the bar pilot aboard. The crew of the launch hailed the Spanish seamen lining the gunwale of the supply ship, and to the routine questions came the usual answers: Friends from New Spain—come aboard. The launch fired a prearranged two shots telling the Governor that the vessel was recognized, then she warped alongside and tied up. Not until then did a strange crew swarm out from hiding and level their guns at the chests of the men in the launch. There was nothing for them to do but surrender. Worst of all, the reassuring signal had already been given. No one in the fortified town of St. Augustine could suspect the presence of pirates.

The invaders waited until midnight, when the presidio was asleep. Quietly they rowed ashore in small boats. Scattering through the streets, shouting, cursing, firing their guns, the hundred of them made such an uproar that the bewildered Spaniards dashing out of their homes thought there were many more. Governor Guerra emerged from his house and with the pirates pounding at his heels, he joined the guard in the race for the old wooden fort. Behind those rotten walls with 33 men, he somehow beat off several assaults. By daybreak his little force was reduced to 28.

Defense of the town itself was the charge of Sgt. Maj. Nicolás Ponce de León and some 70 soldiers. In the darkness the pirates fired effectively at the burning matches of the Spanish harquebusiers (soldiers with match lock guns), and Ponce and his men fled to the woods. More than half a hundred Spaniards were killed as they ran from their homes into the confusion of the narrow streets. Many others were wounded on their way to the shelter of the forest. The pirates were left in complete possession of the settlement.

When daylight came, a previously hidden enemy warship put in an appearance and anchored with the captured supply boat just beyond range of the fort guns. Meanwhile, the pirates systematically sacked the town. No structure was neglected, from humble thatched dwelling to royal storehouse, hospital, and church, though the things carried off were worth but a few thousand pesos, for the town was poor. Powerless to do more, the Governor made the futile gesture of sending a sortie out from the fort. Those brave soldiers managed to get in a few shots at the already departing pirate boats.

The pirates left their prisoners at the presidio, and these unfortunates were able to explain the daring raid. It went back to the argument Governor Guerra had had with the presidio's French surgeon some time before. That disgruntled doctor was captured on his way to Havana by the pirates, who had already seized the supply ship from Vera Cruz. Seeing a chance for revenge on Guerra, the Frenchman conferred with his captors, apparently suggested the raid, and gave them the information they needed to work out a plan. Nor was this the only news from the prisoners. The invaders were the English. Furthermore, they had carefully sounded the bar, taken its latitude, and noted the landmarks with the avowed intent of returning in force to seize the fort and make it a base for their raids on commerce in the Bahama Channel. The fact that they did not leave the town in ashes lent credence to this report.

In Spanish eyes, the 1668 sack of San Agustín (St. Augustine) was far more than a daring pirate raid on a tiny colonial outpost. St. Augustine was the keystone in the defenses of Florida. And Florida was highly important to Spain, not as a land rich in natural resources, but as a way station on a great commercial route. Each year, galleons bearing the proud banners of Spain drove slowly past the coral keys and surf-pounded beaches of Florida, following the Gulf Stream on their way to Cádiz. In these galleons were millions of ducats worth of gold and silver from the mines of Peru and Mexico.

It was the year after Magellan's ships encircled the world that the Conquistador Cortés dispatched a shipload of treasure from conquered Mexico. The loot never reached the Spanish court, for a French corsair took it to Francis I. That incident opened a new age in the profitable profession of piracy. Daring pirates of all nationalities sailed for the shelter of the West Indies. Florida's position at the wayside of the life line connecting Spain with her colonies meant that this semitropical peninsula was of great strategic importance. Like the dog in the manger, Spain had to occupy the territory to prevent her enemies from using the marshy estuaries and natural harbors as ports from which to spread their sails against the commerce of her far-flung empire; and this same inhospitable country had to be made a refuge for the hundreds of mariners shipwrecked along the Florida reefs and the lee shores of the narrow channel.

It was a sizeable defense problem and one not seriously considered until French pressure caused the establishment of St. Augustine in 1565. With this small fortified settlement on one side and growing Havana on the other side of the Bahama Channel, ships could normally pass safely from the ports of New Spain to those of the Old Country. Gradually a system of missions developed in Florida—fingers of civilization reaching out into the wilderness of the southeast. Since the missionaries had to be protected, both from hostile aborigine and European, defense became a matter of dual operation. The unceasing hunt of the coast guard for starving castaways, storm-wracked vessels, and pirates was paralleled on land by the rapid marches of the patrols along the Indian trails or the sailing of the piraguas through the coastal waterways. The presidio of St. Augustine was the base of operations, and here the strongest forts were built.

A typical early fort was San Juan de Pinos, burned by the English freebooter Francis Drake in 1586, after being robbed of its bronze artillery and some 2,000 pounds sterling "by the treasurer's value" in the most devastating raid St. Augustine ever suffered. Such a fort as San Juan consisted of a pine timber stockade around small buildings for gunpowder storage and quarters. Cannons were mounted atop a broad platform, called a caballero or cavalier, so that they could fire over the stockade. In the humid climate, these forts were a very temporary expedient. While they could be built cheaply and quickly, often they failed to last out the decade, exposed as they were to the fire arrows of the Indians and the ravages of the seasonal hurricanes. During the century before Castillo de San Marcos was started, nine wooden forts, one after another, were built at St. Augustine.

Nor did Spain yet see the need for an impregnable fort in the Florida province. After the English record at Roanoke, the weakling settlement of Jamestown did not impress the powerful Council of the Indies at far away Madrid. Moreover, the activities of the Franciscans in extending the mission frontier into the western and northern Indian lands not only gave Spain actual possession of more territory than she ever again was to occupy in Florida, but apparently was a sure means of keeping out rival Europeans. The fallacy in this thinking lay both in disparaging the colonizing ability of the Anglo-Saxon and in believing that an Indian friendly to Spain would not, if given the opportunity, become friendly to England. The red man was restive under the strict teachings of the friar, and it turned out that the English fur trader equipped with glittering presents and shrewd promises found little difficulty in persuading his naive customer to desert the mission and ally himself with the English cause. Not until the missions began to fall before the bloody onslaughts of the Carolinian and his native ally did the grim walls of Castillo de San Marcos arise.

Spain was on the decline as a great power. The storm-scattering of her powerful armada in the English Channel was symbolic. On the other hand, the exploits of the English seamen in that fateful year of 1588 were but a prelude to Britannia's career as mistress of the seas. For England, the seventeenth century opened an era of commercial and colonial expansions, when the great trading companies were active on the coasts of four continents and powerful English nobles strove for possessions beyond the seas. To this era belong the origins of the Carolinas, the Jerseys, Penn's Colony, and the famous Hudson's Bay Company. A vast, rich territory stretched from the James River region to the Spanish Florida settlements, and in 1665 the British Crown granted a patent for its occupation. By the terms of this patent, the boundaries of the new colony of Carolina brazenly included some hundred miles or more of Spanish occupied land—even St. Augustine itself!

The trend was becoming clear. The fight for Florida was inevitable.

In the middle 1600's St. Augustine was practically defenseless. Where the masonry fort now stands, there was a wooden fort of almost the same size, but rotten—rotted into uselessness and so weakened by repairs that much of the original design was lost. Nor were there means for fixing it. A smallpox epidemic made Indian labor out of the question, so there were no peons to bear heavy timbers on their shoulders from the forests. No silver lay in the King's chest: the Florida colony existed almost solely by means of a subsidy of money and provisions from New Spain, whose commerce it protected, and the reluctance of the New Spain Viceroy to pay that subsidy meant that the usual condition of St. Augustine was one of direst poverty and extreme want.

With oxcarts in place of the trucks, this quarrying scene on Anastasia Island might have taken place almost 300 years ago.

Yet, if ever Florida needed a strong fort, it was now. Year by year the corsairs were becoming bolder. Without stronger defenses for the province, said one Governor, "the success of its defense would be doubtful in spite of the great valor with which we would resist. . ." The matter of building a permanent fort had been broached as early as 1586, soon after the discovery of the native shellrock called coquina, and before the turn of that century Governor Canço reported not only the successful construction of a stone powder magazine but a renewed enthusiasm for a masonry fort. The sandy, unstable coastal soil provided the engineers with a problem, but the real obstacles to accomplishment were the poverty of the presidio and the feeling of the Madrid officials that Florida did not require strong military defenses. Even when the Spanish Crown granted permission to build a stone fort (as happened more than once) circumstances proved that the time for the castillo had not yet come. Once a very practical Florida administrator cited the abundance of native materials, and even went so far as to claim that no additional funds would be needed for building a stone fort. All he wanted was the prompt payment of the subsidy from New Spain—a not unreasonable plea—and out of that money he would buy a dozen Negro slaves versed in stonecutting and masonry, slaves such as were available in any number of Caribbean towns, and to be sure the work was done right he wanted the engineer from Cartagena assigned to the job. At the very least, this Governor asked for the slaves: if nothing more, they could face the walls of the wooden fort with stone.

Even this well-considered project was tabled. One of Florida's royal officials in a letter unwittingly mentioned the old fort as being in fair condition, and the Council in Madrid decided to await more information before doing anything.

The Council appeared more concerned over other Florida problems, and for good reason. Even before fortification came the matter of keeping the St. Augustine people from starvation such as came in the spring of 1662. Expected provisions from New Spain failed to arrive; the frigate out of St. Augustine, bringing maize from the granaries of the Apalache Indians in western Florida, was long overdue and the people feared she was lost. The tiny garrison was more or less accustomed to being underclothed, underfed, and unpaid, but to make matters worse, the Royal Treasurer refused to pension several veterans—men who had spent 50 years in the service of the Crown. True, these soldiers were now too old even for ordinary guard duty. The Treasurer was within his rights in refusing to pay them when they did not work, but his refusal was a death knell for the old men. The Governor saw it as something worse—a damaging precedent. The younger soldiers would realize, argued the Governor, that "they were wasting their youth and hoarding up for themselves a sentence of death from starvation as the price of their services."

The Council of the Indies sided with the Governor in this routine instance of bleak poverty, and certainly the Treasurer was glad to relieve his own conscience. Yet the fact remained that while the officials in Spain recognized the shocking conditions of neglect, St. Augustine was still far from succor. To the Viceroy of New Spain went new orders to pay the subsidies. The royal commands were ignored. By 1668 more than 400,000 pesos—8 years' payments—were owing to the Florida presidio. Then came the midnight raid of 1668.

After that crippling blow, St. Augustine was left destitute. Once again the soldiers were faced with the prospect of digging roots by day and begging alms by night from the few more fortunate inhabitants of the presidio—or starvation. As for the old wooden fort—the one nominal defense of the colony—a gun platform had fallen under its artillery; there was a great breach in the timber wall; the sea had washed away part of the foundation.

Notwithstanding, the sack of St. Augustine proved to be a blessing in disguise, for the turn of events shocked the home officials into action. On October 30, 1669, Queen Regent Mariana commanded the Viceroy of New Spain to provide 12,000 pesos to start a new fort of stone, and 10,000 pesos each year to carry it to completion, amounts over and above the regular subsidy.

That year the Viceroy released more than 83,000 pesos for relief of the stricken settlement. It was 12 months of life for the colony. Out of it also came hire for mules that carried baggage from Mexico City to Vera Cruz—baggage for soldiers recruited for Florida. Trouble there was in finding even 75 men, and even more trouble in getting them aboard ship for the long voyage to the hardships of the frontier province. Strangely enough, the arrival of such reenforcements was not an occasion for unmixed rejoicing, for these soldiers were mostly mulattoes and mestizos who, reported Sgt. Maj. Nicolás Ponce, were not highly regarded for their courage in the Queen's cause.

To give impetus to the belated Spanish preparations for the defense of Florida, an English settlement that became Charleston, S. C., was founded in 1670. The Florida frontiersmen saw the need for vigorous action—for uprooting the new colony before it waxed too strong. Under the command of Juan Menéndez Marqués, a small St. Augustine fleet sailed northward. However, the winds blew stormy as they had for the French fleet before St. Augustine in 1565, the Spanish fleet was scattered, and the fledgling English colony was saved. Then Mariana's treaty with England forbade the disturbance of established English settlements, so with the English only a 2 days' sail from St. Augustine there was nothing left to do but prepare to defend Florida against certain invasion. To the frontier at Santa Catalina Mission on the Georgia coast a small garrison was sent. And construction of a Florida citadel, built of imperishable stone, was soon to begin.

Last Modified: Thurs, Sep 11 2003 10:00:00 pm PST source/is1/is1a.htm