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.
WHY SPAIN BUILT THE FORT
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 naïve 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!