Chapter II: Part 2

Meanwhile, Castillo de San Marcos began to show signs of being 50 years old. The capable engineer and frontier diplomat Antonio de Arredondo came from Havana to inspect Florida’s defenses and make recommendations. Backed by Arredondo’s expertise, Gov. Manuel de Montiano wrote a frank letter to the governor of Cuba, who was now responsible for Florida’s security: “Your Excellency must know that this castle, the only defense here, has no bombproofs for the protection of the garrison, that the counterscarp is too low, that there is no covered way, that the curtains are without demilunes, that there are no other exterior works to give them time for a long defense; ... we are as bare outside as we are without life inside, for there are no guns that could last 24 hours and if there were, we have no artillery-men to serve them.”

Spanish-English Conflict, 1670-1748

Selected attacks Nationality

Charleston 1670, 1706 Spanish
″, 1706 French
Edisto Island, 1706 Spanish
Port Royal, 1686 Spanish
Santa Catalina Island, 1680 English
Fort Frederica, 1742 Spanish
St. Simons Island, 1742 Spanish
Santa Maria Island, 1683 English
San Juan de Puerto, 1683 English
Fort San Diego, 1740 English
St. Augustine, 1683, 1702, 1728, 1740 English
Matanzas Inlet, 1683, 1740, 1741, 1742, 1743 English
Little Matanzas Inlet, 1686 French
Mosquito Inlet, 1682 French
Santa Fe, 1702 English
Santa Catalina de Afuica, 1685 English
San Juan de Guacara, 1693 English
Ayubale, 1704 English
San Pedro de Patale, 1704 English
Apalache Fort, 1677, 1682 French
San Carlos, 1693 English

Defending the Fort

Cuba’s governor was a resourceful administrator eager to meet his responsibilities. He sent guns, soldiers, artisans, convicts, provisions, and money. The walls would be raised five feet and masonry vaults, to withstand English bombs, would replace the rotting beams of old rooms in the Castillo. Stronger outworks would be built, too. To supervise the project, Engineer Pedro Ruiz de Olano came from Venezuela. The work began in April 1738 rather inauspiciously. The master of construction, one Cantillo, was a syphilitic too sick to earn his 16-_real_ daily wage. Much of his work fell to his assistant, a 12-_real_ master mason. All six stonecutters were Negroes. One was an invalid, and none of them as yet had much skill with coquina. For moving stone, there was but one oxcart. The labor gang—52 convicts—was too small. Nevertheless, quarry and kiln hummed with activity, and in the Castillo the crash of demolition echoed as the convicts pulled down old structures and began trenching for the new bombproofs. They started on the east, because this side faced the inlet where enemy action was likely.

As usual, misfortunes beset the work. Cantillo’s illness worsened and Blas de Ortega came from Havana to replace him. Eight convicts working at the limekiln deserted. Engineer Ruiz moved a crew of carpenters, sawyers, and axemen from work on the Castillo to rebuild a blockhouse where the trail to Apalache crossed the St. Johns River.

The oxcart driver broke his arm. Quarrying and stonecutting dragged. The old quarry played out. Luckily, a new one was found and opened, even though farther away. And Havana sent two more carts and more stonecutters and convicts.

It was well into October before the carpenters began setting the forms for the vaults. The masons followed close on their heels and finished the first of the massive, round-arched bombproofs before the year ended. Just a year later all eight vaults, side by side along the east curtain, were done. Each one spanned a 17- by 34-foot area, and had its own door to the courtyard. Windows above and beside the door let in light and air.

Ordnance

Forts are often described with words like impregnable, unassailable,
grim, invulnerable, and redoubtable. These descriptions often came
about because of their armaments. A strategically positioned fort with
a full complement of weaponry would be a problem for any invader,
because the fortress, unlike naval ships, provided a stable platform
upon which guns could be mounted and trained on the enemy. Anyone
approaching within approximately 500 yards would be in great danger,
even though the artillery in those times was not always accurate and
aim was extremely difficult.

Tools for Guns

The tools used to operate the ordnance had a variety of functions. The wet sponge swabbed out the cannon to make sure all sparks were extinguished. The ladle dumped the exact amount of powder needed into the chamber. The scraper removed any powder residue. The worm removed unfired bits of cartridge and wadding. The point was to make sure the cannon was clean before it was loaded and fired.

These illustrations come from Tomás de Morla’s _A Treatise on
Artillery_

Basically all artillery falls into two categories: mortars and guns. Mortars were designed to fire the largest and heaviest projectiles on a curved trajectory. They could shoot over obstacles or fortifications, landing on, and perhaps piercing, the deck of a ship, or hitting a pile of powder kegs or other supplies behind fortified walls, or just wreaking havoc and demoralizing the people. Guns fired their projectiles in a flat trajectory, and their effectiveness in turn depended upon the weight of the shot: the greater the weight of the shot, the greater the muzzle velocity—the speed at which the shot exited the gun—and the farther the shot would go and the deadlier it would be.

The first artillery pieces were made of forged iron. The greatest concern was in producing a weapon that could contain the explosive force of the gunpowder, hurl the projectile at the enemy, and not blow up in the faces of the gun crew. Once guns could be cast in a single piece in either brass or bronze, great strides were made in the effectiveness of the artillery pieces. By the 18th century bronze seems to have been the metal of choice. The guns and mortars were highly decorated. All bore the coat of arms of the sovereign. Usually the maker was identified in some way; the name might be part of the base ring or shown in a cipher below the sovereign’s arms. Garlands of flowers, animals, and mythical creatures sometimes decorated the piece. All Spanish guns were named—_Vindicator_, _Invincible_, _Destroyer_ are a few examples—and the authorities made sure that each gun’s whereabouts was always known. This has been invaluable for present-day historians investigating what guns were used where and when. Guns were classified by the weight of the projectile: a 12-pounder gun shot a 12-pound ball. The kinds of projectiles varied greatly: solid shot, canister shot (a container full of bullets), grape shot (cloth container full of bullets), and bombs or grenades (hollow shot filled with gunpowder) fired from a mortar. Sometimes solid shot was heated until it was red hot. If it landed on a ship, hot shot could set a wooden ship afire. Ordnance enabled a fortification to meet the potential the military engineers had hoped for when they sited and built it.

The tops of the ponderous vaults were leveled off with a fill of coquina chips and sand. Tabby mortar was poured onto the surface, and tampers beat the mixture smooth. After the first layer set, others were added until the pavement was six inches thick. The whole roof was thus made into a gun deck, and cannon were no longer restricted to the bastions alone. For unlike the old raftered roof, the new terreplein was buttressed by construction that could take tremendous weight and terrific shock; and masonry four feet thick protected the rooms underneath from bombardment. In San Carlos bastion, by mid-January of 1740, they had finished the tall watchtower and the new parapet.

It was the English settlement of Georgia that had spurred all this activity. In fact, Spain’s plan for recovery of Georgia and other Spanish-claimed land was well past the first stages. Troops were assembling in Havana and reinforcements of 400 had already come to Florida. The situation came to a head when Spanish officials boarded Capt. Robert Jenkins’ ship _Rebecca_, believing the English mariners to be illegally carrying goods to Spanish settlements, an enterprise forbidden by Spanish law. In the ensuing scuffle, Jenkins’ ear was sliced off. Jenkins, back in London, reported to Parliament that the Spanish officer who handed him back his ear said: “Carry it to your King and tell his majesty that if he were present I would serve him in the same manner.”

Alexander Pope, the couplet maker, smiled and said: “The Spaniards did a waggish thing/Who cropped our ears and sent them to the King.” But others were not amused, and England and Spain declared war in 1739. It was called, of course, the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

England’s main target was the Caribbean, with Havana at center with Portobelo, Cartagena, and St. Augustine on the perimeter. Admiral Edward Vernon quickly won fame with his capture of Portobelo in 1739. Oglethorpe tried to imitate him in Florida. Already he had probed the St. Johns River approaches; St. Augustine would be next.

Governor Montiano, however, was fully aware of weaknesses. “Considering that 21 months have been spent on a bastion and eight arches,” he pointed out, “we need at least eight years for rehabilitation of the Castillo.”

How a Siege Works, Circa 1700

Military engineers built forts for several reasons: to protect cities, to protect strong points from falling into enemy hands, to be a visible symbol of governmental authority. If a fort could not be taken by surprise, an attacking party had to take the fort by force. The process of surrounding an enemy’s strong point and slowly cutting off all contact with the outside world is known as a siege. Sieges go back to Biblical times, but the principles were formulated by Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), a French military engineer who served in the armies of Louis XIV. He created a very formal, disciplined science, and his plan was maddeningly simple. First a trench parallel to the fort was dug out of gun range so the attackers could move in supplies and troops. Sappers—crews of trench diggers—then dug zigzag trenches toward the fort; the zigzag pattern made it more difficult for defenders to hit the trenches. Next the sappers dug a second parallel that included some batteries for shelling the fort. Additional zigzag trenches and parallels would be dug until the attackers were in a position to concentrate their fire at one point on the fortification to breach its walls. The fortress would then have no alternative but to surrender or be stormed. Conducting a textbook perfect siege did not always result in success, for the fort’s defenders would not have been idle. They would fire cannon at the sappers. Often they dug counter trenches out from the fortress and planted mines to blow up the work of the attackers. And they would send out nighttime raiding parties, too.

1st Parallel

Military engineers, called sappers, construct trenches and raise earthworks to protect the attacking forces.

_Line of attack_

Mortar fire destroys cannon and drives defenders to cover; siege lines prevent supplies from reaching the fort.

2nd Parallel

Siege guns destroy cannon and weaken fort walls.

3rd Parallel

Siege guns breach the walls, enabling attacking forces to enter the fort.]

Attackers
OUTER WORKS
Glacis
Covered Way
Moat
Ravelin
INNER FORT
Moat
Parapet
Scarp
Rampart
Magazine

His concerns were genuine, for work on the vaults had to stop as the war dried up construction funds. The fort was left in a strangely irregular shape. The east side, including San Carlos bastion, was at the new height, but all others were several feet lower. The old rooms still lined three sides of the courtyard.

On June 13, 1740, seven British warships dropped anchor outside the inlet. The long-expected siege of St. Augustine had begun. Montiano hastily sent the news to Havana and with it a plea for help. He had 750 soldiers and the 120 or more sailors who manned the galliots. Rations would last only until the end of June.

The attackers numbered almost 1,400, including sailors and Indian allies. While the warships blockaded the harbor on the east, William Palmer came in from the north with a company of Highlanders and occupied the deserted outpost called Fort Mose. Oglethorpe landed his men and guns on each side of the inlet and began building batteries across the bay from the Castillo.

Montiano saw at once that all the English positions were separated from each other by water and could not speedily reinforce one another. Fort Mose, at the village of the black runaways a couple of miles north of the Castillo, was the weakest. At dawn on June 26 a sortie from St. Augustine hit Fort Mose, and in the bloodiest action of the siege scattered the Highlanders and burned the palisaded fortification. Colonel Palmer, veteran of Florida campaigns, was among the dead.

As if in revenge, the siege guns at the inlet opened fire. Round shot whistled low over the bay and crashed into fort and town. Bombs from the mortars soared high—deadly dots against the bright summer sky—and fell swiftly to burst with terrific concussion. The townspeople fled, 2,000 of them, some to the woods, others to the covered way where Castillo walls screened them from the shelling.

For 27 nerve-shattering days the British batteries thundered. At the Castillo, newly laid stones in the east parapet scattered under the hits, but the weathered old walls held strong. As one Englishman observed, the native rock “will not splinter but will give way to cannon ball as though you would stick a knife into cheese.” One of the balls shot away a gunner’s leg, but only two men in the Castillo were killed during the bombardment.

The heavy guns of San Marcos and the long 9-pounders of the fast little galliots in the harbor kept the British back. Despite the bluster of the cannonades, the siege had stalemated. Astride the inlet, Oglethorpe and his men battled insects and shifting sand on barren, sun-baked shores, while Spanish soldiers in San Marcos, down to half rations themselves, saw their families and friends starving. On July 6 Montiano wrote, “My greatest anxiety is provisions. If these do not come, there is no doubt that we shall die in the hands of hunger.”

The very next day came news that supplies had reached a harbor down the coast south of Matanzas. Shallow-draft Spanish vessels went down the waterway behind Anastasia Island, fought their way out through Matanzas Inlet and, hugging the coast, went to fetch the provisions. Coming back into Matanzas that same night, they found the British blockade gone; they reached St. Augustine unopposed.

Oglethorpe made ready to assault the Castillo despite the low morale of his men. His naval commander, however, was nervous over the approach of the hurricane season and refused to cooperate. Without support from the warships, Oglethorpe had to withdraw. Daybreak on July 20—38 days since the British had arrived at St. Augustine—revealed that the redcoats were gone.

The End of an Era

This was why the Castillo had been built—to resist aggression, to stand firm through the darkest hour. Years of dogged labor and privations had brought the Castillo to the point where it could easily withstand a siege. Yet it remained unfinished, while in 1742 Spanish forces from Havana and St. Augustine tried unsuccessfully to take Oglethorpe’s settlement at Fort Frederica. The next year Oglethorpe moved unsuccessfully against St. Augustine.

Work still needed to be done on the vaults, but other projects were even more urgent. First, came repair of the bombardment damage. After that, the defenses around fort and town were strengthened and a strong new earth wall called the hornwork was thrown up across the land approach, half a mile north of town. And for a year or more a sizable crew was busy at Matanzas building a permanent tower and battery, since the events of 1740 had again shown the vital defensive importance of this inlet a few miles south of St. Augustine.

Several years slipped by with nothing being done to Castillo itself, the heart of the defense system. Termites and rot were in the old rafters, and in 1749 part of the roof collapsed.

The governor’s appeal to the crown eventually brought action. Engineer Pedro de Brozas y Garay came from Ceuta in Africa to replace Ruiz, who was returning to Spain. Having overseen the construction of the last fort rooms, it was Brozas who, with Governor Alonso Fernández de Heredia, stood under the royal coat of arms at the sally port, as the masons set in the inscription giving credit to the governor and himself for completion of the Castillo in 1756. The ceremony was a politic gesture, carried out on the name day of King Fernando VI; but in truth there was still a great deal to do.

The new bombproof vaults had raised the Castillo’s walls by five feet. Where once they had measured about 25 feet from foundation to crown of parapet, now they were more than 30. The little ravelin of 1682 could no longer shield the main gate, and as yet the covered way screened only the base of the high new walls. The glacis existed only on the plans.

So, having finished the vaults, the builders moved outside and worked until money ran out in the spring of 1758. The break lasted until 1762, by which time Britain and Spain were again at war. Spain, as an ally of France, got into the fracas just at the time when Britain had eliminated France as a factor in the control of North America and was quite ready to take on Spain. And this time the British would capture the pearl of the Antilles—Havana itself.

Havana was well fortified, and the general officers sitting there were perhaps more worried about St. Augustine than Havana. They released 10,000 pesos for strengthening the Florida fortifications and sent Engineer Pablo Castelló, who had been teaching mathematics at the military college in Havana, to assist the ailing Pedro Brozas.

St. Augustine had only 25 convicts for labor, but when work began on July 27, 1762, many soldiers and townspeople sensed the urgency, for Havana was already besieged, and volunteered to help. Since much of the project was a simple but strenuous task of digging and moving a mountain of sand from borrow pit to earthwork, all able-bodied people were welcome. The volunteers did, in fact, contribute labor worth more than 12,000 pesos. The only paid workers were the teamsters driving the 50 horses that hauled the fill. Each dray dumped 40 cubic feet of earth, and the hauling kept on until the covered way had been raised five more feet to its new height.

The masons soon finished a stone parapet, six feet high, for the new covered way. With this wall in place, the teamsters moved outside the covered way and began dumping fill for the glacis. This simple but important structure was a carefully designed slope from the field up to the parapet of the covered way. Not only would it screen the main walls and covered way, but its upward slope would lift attackers right into the sights of the fort cannon.

Meanwhile, to replace the 1682 ravelin, Castelló began a new one with room for five cannon and a powder magazine. He realigned the moat wall to accommodate the larger work and pushed the job along so that as December of 1762 ended, the masons laid the final stone of the cordon for the ravelin. They never started its parapet, for the close of the year brought the devastating news that Spain would give Florida to Great Britain.

So Spain’s work on the fort ended. And although ravelin and glacis were not finished, Castillo de San Marcos was a handsome structure. The main walls were finished with a hard, waterproofing, lime plaster, shining white in the sunlight with the brilliance of Spain’s olden glory. In the haste of building, engineers had not forgotten such niceties as classic molded cornices, pendants, and pilasters to cast relieving shadows on stark smooth walls. At the point of each bastion was color—the tile-red plaster of the sentry boxes. White and red. These were Spain’s symbolic colors, revealed again in the banner floating above the ramparts.

With walls high over the blue waters of the bay, its towers thrusting toward the clouds, and guns of bright bronze or iron pointed over turf and sweep of marsh toward the gloom of the forest or the distant surf breaking on the bar, San Marcos was properly the background for Florida’s capital. In the narrow streets that led to the citadel, military men and sailors mingled with tradesman and townsfolk. Indians, their nakedness smeared with beargrease against the bugs, were a strange contrast to the silken opulence of the governor’s lady. But this was St. Augustine—a town of contrasts, with a long past and an uncertain future.

The day of the transfer to British rule was July 21, 1763. At Castillo de San Marcos, Gov. Melchor de Feliú delivered the keys to Maj. John Hedges, at the moment the ranking representative of George III. The Spanish troops departed Florida, and with them went the entire Spanish population. The English were left with an empty city.

The defenses they found at St. Augustine were far stronger than the ones that had stopped Oglethorpe in 1740. The renovated Castillo, which the new owners called Fort St. Mark, was the citadel of a defense-in-depth system that began with fortified towers at St. Augustine and Matanzas inlets and blockhouses at the St. Johns River crossings. Since St. Augustine was on a small peninsula with Matanzas Bay on one side and the San Sebastián River on the other, there was only one way to reach the city by land; and Fort Mose, rebuilt and enlarged after 1740, guarded this lone access. In 1762 Mose also became the anchor for a mile-long defense line across the peninsula to a strong redoubt on the San Sebastián. This earthwork, planted at its base with prickly pear, protected the farmlands behind it. Just north of the Castillo, the hornwork spanned the narrowest part of the peninsula. A third line stretched from the Castillo to the San Sebastián, and this one was intersected by a fourth line that enclosed the town on west and south. Along the eastern shore was the stone seawall. One by one, these defenses had evolved in the years after 1702.

Such defensive precautions seemed outmoded, now that all eastern North America was under one sovereignty. Obviously the old enmities between Florida and the English colonies had departed with the Spaniards; Britain saw no need for concern about the fortifications. No need, that is, until the Thirteen Colonies showed disquieting signs of rebellion. And as rebellion flamed into revolution, St. Augustine entered a new role as capital of George III’s loyal province of East Florida.

In the summer of 1775, after Lexington and Concord, British concerns about the Castillo’s state of repair could be seen. The gate was repaired and the well in the courtyard, which had become brackish, was re-dug. In several of the high-arched bombproofs, the carpenters doubled the capacity by building a second floor, for St. Augustine was regimental headquarters and many redcoated troops were quartered in Fort St. Mark.

By October 1776 the British had renovated two of the three lines constructed north of the city by the Spaniards. In place of the old earthwork that hemmed in the town on the south and west, however, they depended on a pair of detached redoubts at the San Sebastián, one at the ford and the other at the ferry. Later they added five other redoubts in the same quadrant. Many improvements were made to the outer works as well.

Behind the thick walls of the fort were stored weapons and equipment that went to arm British forces for repeated use against the rebellious colonials to the north. The damp prison also held a number of these colonists.

Links to the Past

It is impossible to fully retrieve the past, to know what it was
actually like to live in another time, to understand the cadences of
another life. Some disciplines work at peeling back the layers of time
and attempt to explain those bygone days. Archeology is one of these
sciences. By retrieving the remains of the material culture, by seeing
a plate that held food, a bottle that held oil, a dish in which herbs
were ground to make medicine, the connection with those long gone
personages begins to be made. The objects on the next page are among
more than 1,000 items that have been retrieved from digs in and around
the Castillo and St. Augustine.

Even as the British were working to secure the Castillo against a possible attack, international events brought Spain back into the picture. In 1779 Spain declared war on Britain after France promised help in retrieving Florida, if the powers allied against Britain were victorious. One Spanish plan even had the Spaniards launching a surprise attack on the Castillo: Troops would sail upriver from Matanzas, land south of town, sweep north through St. Augustine, and take the Castillo by storm. If this failed they would settle in for a siege. At the last minute, practically, the authorities decided to attack Pensacola, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, instead. A Spanish attack on the British inside a fortress designed and built by Spanish engineers would have been full of irony.

In the settlement after the Revolution, the Spaniards did indeed recover Florida, and on July 12, 1784, the transfer took place.

The Spaniards returned to an impossible situation. The border problems of earlier times had multiplied as runaway slaves from Georgia found welcome among the Seminole Indians, and ruffians from both land and sea made Florida their habitat.

Bedeviled by these perversities and distracted by revolutionary unrest in Latin America, Spain nevertheless did what had to be done at the Castillo—repairs to the bridges, a new pine stairway for San Carlos tower, a bench for the criminals in the prison. In 1785 Mariano de la Rocque designed an attractive entrance in the neoclassic style for the chapel doorway. It was built, only to crumble slowly away like the Spanish hold on Florida.

Defense strategies had changed too, over the years. The British had built a few redoubts to cover vulnerable approaches on the west and south. The Spaniards on their return adapted the British works but also greatly strengthened the long wall from the Castillo to the San Sebastián River. They widened its moat to 40 feet, lined the entire length of the 9-foot-high earthwork with palm logs, and planted it with prickly pear. The three redoubts were armed with light cannon, and a new city gate was completed in 1808. Its twin towers of white masonry were trimmed with red plaster, and each roof was capped with a pomegranate, a symbol of fertility.

Even though San Marcos remained a bulwark against American advances, Florida had lost its former importance to Spain as independence movements sprang up in one South American Spanish colony after another. Constant pressure from the expanding United States finally resulted in Spain’s ceding Florida to the United States. Perhaps Spanish officials signed the papers with a sigh of relief, glad to be rid of a province so burdensome and unprofitable for 300 years. On July 10, 1821, the ensign of Spain fluttered down to the thunderous salute of Castillo cannon, and the 23-star flag of the United States of America was hauled aloft.

In this new era, the aging fort was already a relic. Fortunately for its preservation, the US. strategy for coastal defense did not require much alteration of the Castillo. U.S. Army engineers added only a water battery in the east moat, mounted a few new guns on the bastions, and improved the glacis during the 1840s.

The fort’s name was also changed, for the Americans chose to honor Gen. Francis Marion, Revolutionary leader and son of the very colony against whose possible aggression San Marcos had been built. Congress restored the original name in 1942, almost 20 years after the fort had been designated a national monument.

Heavy doors and iron bars that once protected precious stores of food and ammunition made the old fort a good prison, and the prison days soon obscured the olden times when Spain’s hold upon Florida depended upon the strength of these walls and the brave hearts that served here.

Now the echo of the Spanish tongue has faded and the scarred walls are silent. The records tell of the people who built and defended the Castillo—and those who attacked it, too. In the archives are countless instances of unselfish zeal and loyalty, the cases of Ransom, Collins, and Carr, the crown’s patriarchal protection of its Indian vassals, the unflagging work of the friars. The structure itself tells its own story. As William Cullen Bryant, 19th-century poet wrote: “The old fort of St. Mark is a noble work, frowning over the Matanzas, and it is worth making a long journey to see.”

Guide and Advisor

St. Augustine is the oldest, continuously inhabited city founded by Europeans in the present-day United States. It represents the beginnings of contact between Spanish settlers and the native inhabitants, the emergence of the Hispanic American, the struggle between Spanish, French, and English settlers for control of the southeastern Atlantic coast, and ultimately the birth of the United States.

Visiting St. Augustine

As well as being an old city, with many historic houses on quiet, narrow streets, St. Augustine is a bustling modern city with a range of facilities and accommodations to meet all expectations and travel budgets.

Begin your visit to the city at the Visitor Information Center on San Marco Avenue, opposite the Castillo. Here you can get free information, maps, and answers to your questions from the staff. The center is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Limited parking is available for patrons. You may write: Visitor Information Center, P.O. Drawer 210, St. Augustine, FL 32085; or call 904-825-1000. Additional information is available from the St. Augustine and St. Johns County Chamber of Commerce, 1 Ribera Street, St. Augustine, FL 320841 or call 904-829-5681.

St. Augustine is a wonderful city to walk in, for it is compact and easy to find your way around. Take time to leave the main streets and walk through residential areas to get a feel for the city and the way it was laid out. St. Augustine has its own personality and charm that distinguish it from such other colonial communities as Williamsburg, Charleston, and Santa Fe. Today’s St. Augustine bears the imprint of Henry Flagler (1830-1913), a close partner of John D. Rockefeller in the development of the Standard Oil Company and a railroad tycoon in Florida. Flagler bought several small railroads in Florida, consolidated them, and laid track that eventually ran from Jacksonville to Key West. Along with his railroad he built luxury hotels in Daytona, Palm Beach, Miami, and St. Augustine and helped to create the tourist industry that has played such an important role in Florida’s economy in the 20th century. Flagler’s legacy lives on in St. Augustine where Flagler College occupies the former Hotel Ponce de Leon at Cordova and King streets and in the Lightner Museum housed in the old Alcazar Hotel across the street from the college. The St. Johns County Courthouse and the St. Augustine City Hall also occupy Flagler buildings. Flagler is buried on the grounds of the Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church.

St. George Street, a pedestrian walkway between Castillo Drive and Cathedral Place, is lined with shops and restaurants of every type and description. The Spanish Quarter, a restored 18th-century portion of the city, is a living history museum operated by the state of Florida on the north end of St. George Street. Along this street a number of residences dating back more than two centuries have either been reconstructed or restored by the St. Augustine Restoration and Preservation Commission. Some of them may be open to the public. But do not assume that they are. Inquire at the Visitor Information Center for specific information about opening and closing times.

The Oldest House, located at the corner of St. Francis and Charlotte streets, is administered by the St. Augustine Historical Society. Guides give house tours, for which there is a charge. The adjacent museum tells the story of St. Augustine and of the people who lived here through the four centuries of the city’s history. In Government House, at the corner of St. George and King streets, the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board, an agency of the state of Florida, also runs a museum that tells a more inclusive story of Spanish Florida, including Fort Mose, the oldest free black settlement in the United States.

Visiting the Castillo

The Castillo de San Marcos is one of the oldest structures in North America built by Europeans. It is one of the few links on this continent to early modern Europe and a way of warfare that has become obsolete. Park interpreters give frequent programs at the fort telling its history and explaining its construction. They can answer questions you have about the history of the area and about related National Park System sites. You may wish to walk around the Castillo at your own pace; a free park folder available at the entrance station will help you find your way.

A sales outlet to the left of the guard rooms as you enter the Castillo offers books and pamphlets on the history of Florida and Spanish colonization. Some souvenirs and postcards are also available.

Parking is limited at the Castillo and in St. Augustine. Because of the limited parking, therefore, you may wish to take one of the sightseeing tours around the city. Information is available at the Visitor Information Center. For further information about the Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas, write: Superintendent, Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, 1 Castillo Drive East, St. Augustine, FL 32084.

Beaches

Florida A1A north or south takes you to some of the most beautiful beaches on the east coast. A fee buys a permit from county authorities to drive on county beaches during the summer months. There is also a charge for parking at Anastasia State Recreation Area.

Accommodations

St. Augustine has a variety of accommodations: national chains, locally owned hotels and motels, bed and breakfast inns, and vacation cottages and condominiums for rent by the day, week, or longer.

Other Areas Related to Spanish Florida

Besides Castillo de San Marcos, several other National Park System sites in Florida preserve and interpret aspects of Spanish colonial history. They are located on the map and described below.

Gulf Islands NS
De Soto N MEM
Fort Carolina N MEM
Castillo de San Marcos NM
Ft. Matanzas NM

De Soto National Memorial
_P.O. Box 16390_
_Bradenton, FL 34280-5390._

No one knows exactly where Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto landed on Florida’s west coast in 1539. This park at the entrance to Tampa Bay memorializes that landing and de Soto’s subsequent journeys of exploration throughout the southeastern United States.

Fort Caroline National Memorial
_12713 Fort Caroline Road_
_Jacksonville, FL 32225._

The establishment of a French colony here in 1564 directly challenged the Spaniards, who responded by establishing Saint Augustine the next year. After securing a firm base of operations, the Spaniards led by Pedro Menéndez marched to the French settlement and captured it, ending French interest in the area.

Fort Matanzas National Monument
_c/o Castillo de San Marcos National Monument_
_1 Castillo Drive_
_Saint Augustine, FL 32084._

On this site Spanish troops killed French soldiers who were part of the ill-fated attempt to establish a French settlement in Florida. In 1740, after the failed English attack on Saint Augustine, the Spaniards built a masonry fortification—Fort Matanzas—on Rattlesnake Island overlooking Matanzas Inlet to control the inlet permanently.

Gulf Islands National Seashore
_1801 Gulf Breeze Parkway_
_Gulf Breeze, FL 32561._

The ravelin of Fort Barrancas, located on the grounds of the Pensacola Naval Air Station, is another Spanish masonry fortification in Florida besides the Castillo and Fort Matanzas. It is called Battery San Antonio and dates from 1797. It was planned as part of a larger fortification never built by the Spaniards. Fort Barrancas, built by the U.S., dates from the early 19th century.

Besides these parks in Florida there is one in Georgia (not shown on the map) that bears importantly on the story of St. Augustine.

Fort Frederica National Monument
_Route 9, Box 286-C_
_Savannah, GA 31410._

It was at Fort Frederica that James Edward Oglethorpe established a settlement in 1736 only a few days march north of St. Augustine in territory that the Spaniards clearly believed to be their own.

★ GPO: 1993—342-396 80002

National Park Service

National Park Handbooks are published to support the National Park Service’s management programs and to promote understanding and enjoyment of the more than 360 National Park System sites that represent important examples of our country’s natural and cultural inheritance. Each handbook is intended to be informative reading and a useful guide before, during, and after a park visit. More than 100 titles are in print. They are sold at parks and can be purchased by mail from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402-9325.

The National Park Service expresses its appreciation to all those persons who made the preparation and production of this handbook possible. The original text for this handbook was written by Albert Manucy and Luis Arana and appeared as _The Building of the Castillo de San Marcos_. The vault construction, drawbridge, and siege illustrations on pages 33, 34, and 47 are based on artwork originally developed by Albert Manucy. The National Park Service also expresses its appreciation to Eastern National Park and Monument Association for its cooperation in this project. All photos and artwork not credited below come from the files of the Castillo de San Marcos or of the National Park Service.

Archivo General de Indias, Seville 18, 49
Michael Hampshire 31 (detail), 34
Karen Kasmauski 2-3
Ken Laffal cover, 12, 16, 24, 25, 26 (photographs), 29, 35, 36, 38,
42, 48, 50, 52, 55, 57, 58-59, 60
Library of Congress 4, 10, 26-27 (map), 49
National Geographic Society 14, 15, 22-23
Ken Townsend 30-31, 40-41

U.S. Department of the Interior

As the Nation’s principal conservation agency, the Department of the Interior has responsibility for most of our nationally-owned public lands and natural resources. This includes fostering sound use of our land and water resources; protecting our fish, wildlife, and biological diversity; preserving the environmental and cultural values of our national parks and historical places; and providing for the enjoyment of life through outdoor recreation. The Department assesses our energy and mineral resources and works to ensure that their development is in the best interest of all our people by encouraging stewardship and citizen participation in their care. The Department also has a major responsibility for American Indian reservation communities and for people who live in island territories under U.S. administration.

_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_

Castillo de San Marcos: a Guide to the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, Florida/produced by the Division of Publications, National Park Service. p. cm.—(National Park Handbook; 149)

1. Castillo de San Marcos National Monument (Saint Augustine,
Fla.)—Guidebooks.
2. Saint Augustine (Fla.)—Guidebooks.
3. Saint Augustine (Fla.)—History.
I. United States. National Park Service. Division of Publications.
II. Series: Handbook (United States, National Park Service, Division
of Publications); 149. F319.S2C37 1993. 917.59’ 18—dc20.
92-40413 CIP.

Transcriber’s Notes

—Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook
is public-domain in the country of publication.

—Relocated all image captions to be immediately under the corresponding
images, removing redundant references like ”preceding page”.

—Silently corrected a few palpable typos.

—In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by
_underscores_.

End of Project Gutenberg's Castillo de San Marcos, by National Park Service