THE LARGE CORNER FIREPLACES IN THE GUARDROOMS WERE USED BOTH FOR HEATING AND COOKING.THE LARGE CORNER FIREPLACES IN THE GUARDROOMS WERE USED BOTH FOR HEATING AND COOKING.
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.
THE ROYAL ARMS OF SPAIN, ERECTED OVER THE ENTRANCE IN 1756, COMMEMORATE COMPLETION OF THE CASTILLO.THE ROYAL ARMS OF SPAIN, ERECTED OVER THE ENTRANCE IN 1756, COMMEMORATE COMPLETION OF THE CASTILLO.
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 theCentinela 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. Onceagain 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, theRosario, 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 declarationof 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.
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.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.
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. Proudlythey 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.
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—asort 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 waterinside 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 camela Gran Hambre—the Great Hunger—and in those dark days the starving people ateeven 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 berebuilt 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.
This was why the castillo had been built—to resist even the highest tide of colonial aggression, to stand firm through the darkest hour. It was the climax, the culmination of years of dogged labor and lean hunger. But it was also the end of a chapter, the closing of an era, for the finis was in sight. The attempted Spanish reprisal in 1742, Oglethorpe’s foolish march on the castillo the year following—these were the clumsy joustings of provincials, not the telling thrusts of powerful governments and strong armies. And because to the colonials their destiny was not yet clear, amidst the futile hostilities of the next 20 years the work of improving Castillo de San Marcos went forward. The slight damage suffered during the Siege of 1740 was soon repaired. Montiano and his engineer were indignantly acquitted of malicious and anonymous charges that faulty workmanship—too much sand in the mortar—was responsible.
Long after the stonecutter’s hatchet fell silent, the scrape and swish of the plasterer’s trowel went on until in 1756 Governor Alonso Fernández stopped work on a new, never-to-be-finished ravelin and stood under the royal coat of arms at the sally port to watch the masons erect the inscription giving credit for completion of the mighty fort to himself and Engineer Don Pedro de Brozas y Garay. It was a politic gesture, for the ceremony was carried out on the name day of King Fernando VI.
This Florida citadel was a simple masterpiece of European military architecture, even though a few courses of stone were still lacking in the outworks. Its every wall covered with a hard, waterproofing, white lime plaster, the castillo reflected the semitropical sunlight with a brilliance reminiscent of the old-time glory of Spain. In the haste of building, the engineers had not neglected ornamentation to keep the structure from starkness and bareness, for well-designed cornices and pilasters threw sharp shadows to relieve the expanses of smooth, white wall. There was color—a strong, darkish red, probably achieved by mixing a clay with the plaster. This color was conspicuous on the sentry towers crowning each bastion.
San Marcos was properly the background for St. Augustine activity, with its white walls rising high above the blue waters of the bay, red-covered towers thrusting toward the clouds, and guns of green-coated bronze and pitted iron looking over the turf and the sweep of the marshes to the gloom of the nearby forests or the surf breaking on the bar. The colorful uniforms of the Spanish soldiers, the severe habit of the friars, the picturesquegarb of the stalwart Indians, no less than the silken magnificence of the Governor and his lady and the presence of an occasional foreign trader, gave this frontier post an interesting character.
The castillo was a busy place, and while in Spanish eyes much may have been lacking, the English looked at it with envy and respect, one Englishman reporting that: “there is 22 pieces of Cannon well mounted on the Bastions from 6 pound’rs to 36. They are very Cautious of the English & will not lett them go on the lines, there is a guard of a Lieutenant a Sergeant & 2 Corporals & 30 Soldiers here who is reliev’d Every Day. There is one Lieutenant a Sergeant & 12 Gunners who is reliev’d once a Week, the Castle is under ye Command of a Lieutenant who is always on it. the Riches of the Place is kept here as is the Privision w’ch is issued from the Town once a Week, there is 5 Centries on ye lines at a time all Night ye Man that is at the Bell Strikes it every 3. or 4. Minutes the Centry’s Calling from one to the other....
“There is a Mote Round it of 30. feet wide & a draw Bridge of about 15 feet long, they draw every Night & lett it down in the Morning....”
Ironically enough, before the eighth anniversary of the Fernández plaque, thealertaof the Spanish sentry was replaced by a challenge in English, for in 1763 the diplomats gave Florida and the castillo to England.
It was some years before the English put their ineffaceable mark on the fort, but in the summer after Lexington and Concord they went to work. The gates were repaired and the well in the courtyard, become brackish, was re-dug. A new palisade for the covered way was built and the glacis—the encircling earthwork—repaired. Several of the high arched rooms were given a second floor, in a sense a second story, in order to make more room for long bunkshelves, for St. Augustine was regimental headquarters and many red-coated troops were quartered in the Castle of St. Mark. Within the safety of the thick walls were stored the arms that went to ranger, regular, and Indian ally alike for repeated use against the rebellious colonials to the north. And a goodly number of those colonials and their friends languished in the damp prison of the castle.
Those were exciting times, but they were only an interlude. The Union Jack was not the flag for the fort. When the Spanish came back by the terms of the 1783 treaty, Florida had lost its old importance to the empire, even though San Marcos remained a bulwark that American advances never quite reached. For the Spanish, awaiting the manifest destiny that was to bring Florida into the union of the United States of America, there was little to do but maintenance work, such as repairs to the bridges, a new pine stairway for San Carlos tower, a bench for the criminals in the prison. In 1785 Mariano de la Rocque designed a beautiful entrance for the chapeldoorway. It was built, only to crumble slowly away like the Spanish hold on Florida.
When at last the red and gold ensign of Spain fluttered down under the thunderous salute of the old smoothbores, to be replaced by the 23-star flag of 1821, the aging fort was obsolete—already a historical relic. Fortunately for its preservation, the strategy of St. Augustine Harbor was gone. The young republic built powerful seacoast forts from Maine to Texas but the only concession to this one-time capital of the southeast was the building of a water battery in the moat east of the fort and the mounting of a few big guns on the bastions. The fort remained unchanged, except in name. For more than 150 years St. Mark had been the patron saint of this defense. The Americans chose to honor Gen. Francis Marion, the Revolutionary leader and son of the very colony against which San Marcos had been built. Spanish Castillo de San Marcos became American Fort Marion. (Legislation enacted by Congress in June 1942 restored the original name of Castillo de Marcos.)
Heavy doors and iron bars that once protected precious stores of food and ammunition made the old fort a good prison, and the prison days soon obscured the olden times that the structure had outlived. The scarred walls of the past would not release their story and the accidental discovery of the sealed-up powder magazine and the chance mention of mouldering bones only served to deepen the mystery of its real story. Out of the “dungeon” darkness into the Anglo-Saxon mind flocked all the tales suborned by centuries of hate and misunderstanding. Forgotten was the fact that boot and rack, pincers and bar were in London Tower as well as in the Inquisitorial Chamber. None stopped to think that torture was past when the castillo was built. None knew how these isolated subjects of a decadent empire labored through the long, hard years, mingling their own sweat with that of the peons to build this impregnable defense. The countless instances of unselfish zeal and loyalty, the cases of Ransom, Collins, and Carr, the Crown’s patriarchal protection of its Indian vassals, the unflagging work of the friar—these histories were not handed down to help the castillo tell its long story.
Yet, some saw past the blackness of the dungeon. “The old fort of St. Mark ... is a noble work, frowning over the Matanzas,” wrote William Cullen Bryant, “and it is worth making a long journey to see.” His words have become increasingly true.
Bibliographical Note:—This publication is based mainly upon material in the Spanish records of the North Carolina Historical Commission. The translation quoted on page 5 is from the Ruth Kuykendall translation of the records for the North Carolina Historical Records Survey.
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