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 artilleryman 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 guardhouses, 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.