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 artillery man 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 guard-houses, 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 else where 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.

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.

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.

The royal arms of Spain. Erected over the entrance in 1756, commemorate completion of the castillo.

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.

The prison of the fort has a single entrance, which open's into a guardroom. Massive arch construction made the rooms of the fort "bomb" proof.

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.

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 corn field 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.

Last Modified: Thurs, Sep 11 2003 10:00:00 pm PST source/is1/is1c.htm