This cannon tube is typical of most 18th-century guns and bears the cipher of Carlos III, showing it to be Spanish.
The Castillo
This bird’s-eye view of Castillo de San Marcos shows how it is laid out and why. The fort was located at the north end of Saint Augustine and on the water for defensive reasons. The moat protected it on four sides, and the Matanzas River lent additional protection as well. The only entrance was at the point closest to the town, so the inhabitants could quickly go to the fort if danger threatened. The fort was designed, too, so that every wall could be seen from some vantage point inside the Castillo. No attacking force could sneak up to the very walls without the defenders seeing them. The original Castillo was simply the exterior walls. Parallel to them were the inner, or courtyard, walls, built also of stone. Beams spanned the space between exterior and inner walls and held up platforms upon which guns sat aimed at the surrounding countryside or out over the water. Such a structure offered scant bombproof defense against incoming projectiles. And the wooden beams were subject to rot in the humid, subtropical air.
Bastions
Each corner of the fort is protected by a diamond-shaped bastion. From the bastion the adjacent walls could be protected from an attacking force, and in conjunction with the neighboring bastions a deadly crossfire could be turned on any force that got so close.
Guard Rooms
St. Augustine was a garrison town and no one lived inside the Castillo. When soldiers were on guard duty—usually a period of 24 hours—they slept and prepared their meals in these rooms.
Storage Rooms
Most of the rooms around the central courtyard were used for storage. They were stockpiled with gunpowder, ammunition, weapons, lumber, tools, and food, such as beans, rice, flour, and corn, that could be used in time of siege.
Work began on stone vaults in 1738 to solve these problems. First, carpenters built wooden forms that supported the stone until all pieces of the arch were in place. As the form was removed, other workers began dumping sand, rubble, earth—anything to build up the level—into the spaces above the arches. Over this a cement-like mixture of sand and coquina was placed and tamped down and built up in stages until the desired height was reached. The result was a wide gun platform on top that would support the heaviest guns and provide bombproof spaces beneath.
Next they set course for Charleston but again, as had happened in 1670, a storm blew them away from the hated English colony. Leon’s vessel, the Rosario, was lost, and he along with it. Another ship was driven aground, and the last of the little armada limped back to St. Augustine.
Actually the real contest for the southeast was in the backcountry where English traders operated. Governor Márquez sent soldiers and missionaries from St. Augustine to the Apalachecola nation in western Georgia. For the Spaniards, however, it was a losing fight—an exciting, exasperating struggle of diplomacy and intrigue, trade and cupidity, war and religion, slavery and death.
Captain of cuirassiers Diego de Quiroga y Losada assumed the governorship on August 21, 1687, after Márquez fled to Cuba in April. That same day he stopped work on the Castillo because there was no way to feed the workers. These troubles and the certainty of reprisals from the Carolinians sent Capt. Juan de Ayala Escobar directly to Spain for help. He came back with 80 soldiers, the money for maintaining them, and even a Negro slave to help in the fields. The black man, 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 black labor for both fields and fortifications. From the Carolina plantations, an occasional slave would slip away and move southward along the waterways. In 1687 a small boat loaded with nine runaways made its way to St. Augustine. The men found work to do and the governor took the two women into his household as servants. It was a fairly happy arrangement: the slaves worked well and soon asked for Catholic baptism.
A few months later, William Dunlop came from Charleston in search of them. Governor Quiroga, reluctant to surrender converted slaves, offered to buy them for the Spanish crown. Dunlop agreed to the sale, even though the governor was as usual short of cash and had given him a promissory note. To seal the bargain, Dunlop gave one of the slaves, a baby girl, her freedom. Later the crown liberated the others.
This incident resulted in a knotty problem. First, commerce with Carolina, as an English colony, was illegal. Secondly, the crown could not buy freedom for every runaway that came to Florida, as more and more Carolina blacks left their English masters, seeking refuge. The slave issue made any hope of amicable relations between the Spanish and English colonists impossible. Eventually the Spaniards decreed freedom for all Carolina slaves coming to Florida, and the governor established a fortified village—Gracia Real de Mose—for them hardly more than a cannon shot from the Castillo.
Construction work on the Castillo resumed in the spring of 1688, after a shipment of corn came from Apalache. In Havana Governor Quiroga bought for 137 pesos a stone bearing the royal arms to be set into the wall over the gate. At this time, too, the little town entered its “stone age,” for as surplus materials from the crown quarries became available, masonry buildings gradually took the place of the board-and-thatch housing that had been traditional here since the founding.