Daza and the governor decided to construct the Castillo on the west shore of the bay just north of the old fort. It was a site that would take advantage of every natural feature for the best possible defensive position. The new fort, they decided, would be similar, though somewhat larger. In line with the more recent ideas, Daza recommended a slight lengthening of the bastions. All around the castillo they planned a broad, deep moat and beyond the moat, a high palisade on the three land sides.
It was a simple and unpretentious plan, but a good one. Daza, schooled in the Italian-Spanish principles of fortification that grew out of the 16th-century designs of Franceso de Marchi, was clearly a practical man. His plan called for a “regular” fort—that is, a symmetrical structure. Basically it was a square with a bastion at each corner. Equally strong on all sides, this design was ideal for Florida’s low, flat terrain.
This document is the official report to government officials in Madrid that ground had been broken for the Castillo. “Today, Sunday, about four in the afternoon, the second of October 1672 ... Don Manuel de Cendoya, Governor and Captain General of these provinces for Her Majesty ... with spade in hand ... began the foundation trenches for construction of the Castillo,” the document states.
About four o’clock Sunday afternoon, October 2, 1672, Governor Cendoya walked to a likely looking spot between the strings marking out the lines of the new fortification and thrust a spade into the earth, as Juan Moreno y Segovia, reported the ground breaking ceremonies for Queen Mariana.
Little more than a month later on Wednesday, November 9, Cendoya laid the first stone of the foundation. The people of St. Augustine must have wept for joy. All were glad and proud, the aged soldiers who had given a lifetime of service to the crown, the four orphans whose father had died in the pirate raid a few years earlier, the widows and their children, the craftsmen, the workers, and the royal officials. But none could have been more pleased or proud than Don Manuel de Cendoya. He of all the Florida governors had the honor to begin the first permanent Florida fortification.
Laying the foundations was not easy, for the soil was sandy and low and as winter came the Indians were struck by El Contagio—a smallpox epidemic. The laboring force dwindled to nothing. The governor asked the crown to have Havana send 30 slaves. Meanwhile, Cendoya himself and his soldiers took to the shovels. As they dug a trench some 17 feet wide and 5 feet deep, the masons came in and laid two courses of heavy stones directly on the hard-packed sand bottom for the foundation. The work was slow, for high tide flooded the trenches.
About 1½ feet inside the toe of this broad 2-foot-high foundation, the masons stretched a line marking the scarp or curtain, a wall that would gradually taper upward from a 13-foot base to about 9 feet at its top, 20 feet above the foundation. In the 12 months that followed, the north, south, and east walls rose steadily. By midsummer of 1673 the east side was 12 feet high, and the presidio was jubilant over the news that the Viceroy was sending even more money.
This good news was tempered by the viceroy’s assertion that he would release no more money for the work without a direct order from the crown. Cendoya had already asked the queen to raise the allowance to 16,000 pesos a year so the construction could be finished in four years. For, as he put it, the English menace at Charleston brooked no delay. The English were said to be outfitting ships for an invasion.
Gradually, however, construction slowed. In 1673 Cendoya and Daza died within a few days of one another. The governor’s mantle fell upon Major Ponce, in whom the local Spaniards had little confidence.