In the limekilns, oyster shells glowed white-hot and changed into fine quality, quicksetting lime. By spring of 1672, there were 4,000 fanegas (about 7,000 bushels) of lime in the two storehouses and great quantities of hewn and rough stone.
Although the real construction had not even started, great obstacles had already been overcome. Maintaining an adequate work force and skilled workers was a continual problem. When there should have been 150 men to keep the 15 artisans working at top speed—50 in the quarries and hauling stone, 50 for gathering oyster shells and helping at the kilns, and another 50 for digging foundation trenches, toting the excavation baskets, and mixing mortar—it was hard to get as many as 100 laborers on the job.
Indians from three nations, the Guale (coastal Georgia), Timucua (Florida east of the Aucilla River), and Apalache (between the Aucilla and the Apalachicola), were employed. True, they were paid labor, but some had to travel more than 200 miles to reach the presidio, and many served unwillingly. In theory each complement of Indian labor served only a certain length of time; in practice it was not uncommon for the men to be held long past their assigned time, either through necessity or carelessness.
Indians were used as unskilled laborers and paid the lowest wages—one real (about 20 cents) per day plus corn rations. Most labored at the monotonous, back-straining work in the quarries. A few were trained as carpenters and received correspondingly greater wages but never the equal of what the Europeans earned. One Indian was trained as a stonecutter and worked on the Castillo for 16 years.
Great numbers of local Indians carried out the many heavy-duty tasks that kept this labor-intensive project continually moving forward.
Besides Indian labor, there were a few Spanish workers paid 4 reales per day, and a number of convicts, either local or from Caribbean ports. Beginning in 1679 there were seven blacks and mulattoes among the convicts. Eighteen black slaves belonging to the crown joined the labor gang in 1687. Convicts and slaves received rations but no wage. A typical convict might have been a Spaniard caught smuggling English goods into the colony, who was condemned to six years’ labor on the fortifications. If he tried to escape, the term was doubled and he faced the grim prospect of being sent to a fever-infested African presidio to work.
The military engineer, Ignacio Daza, was paid the top wage of 3 pesos (about $4.75) per day. Daza died seven months after coming to Florida, so the crown paid only the surprisingly small sum of 546 pesos (about $862) for engineering services in starting the greatest of Spanish Florida fortifications.
Of the artisans, there were Lorenzo Lajones, master of construction, and two master masons, each of whom received the master workman’s wage of 20 reales (about $4). Seven masons and eight stonecutters at 12 reales, and 12 carpenters whose pay ranged from 6 to 12 reales, completed the ranks of the skilled workers. Later, some of these wages were reduced: Lajones’ successor as master of construction was paid only 17 reales, the master mason 13, and the stonecutters from 3 to 11 reales, with half of them at the 3- and 4-real level.
These were few men for the job at hand, and to speed the work along Governor Cendoya used any prisoner including neighboring Carolinians who fell into Spanish hands. In 1670, a vessel bound for Charleston, mistakenly put in at Santa Catalina Mission, the Spanish post near the Savannah River, and William Carr and John Rivers were taken. A rescue sloop sent from Charleston protested the Spaniards’ actions, with Joseph Bailey and John Collins carrying the message from the English. For their trouble, they were dispatched with Rivers and Carr to St. Augustine to labor on the fort.