Authors: David B. Williams
From 1938 to 1995 the National Park Service flooded the moat daily.
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The constant supply of water, however, weakened the west side of the fort, which was the last part of the construction and
had been hastily erected.
Wide vertical cracks began to appear in its two western bastions.
The cracks are still visible,
although mostly filled in with mortar.
Walking along the base of the castillo, Brehm continued to dispel myths.
During the battle with Moore, the Spanish supposedly
snuck out of the fort at night and dug out the balls that had stuck in the walls and shot them back at the English the next
day.
“The Spanish had no such luck; a ball hitting a stone wall, even one made of coquina, would be useless by being flattened
on one side,” he said.
People also think that the holes in the fort’s walls are from those cannonballs or from a 1740 siege.
Instead, pigeons probably
made the bigger ones by enlarging weak spots in the coquina for nests.
“They are the only birds that eat the fort.
They look
at it as one big cuttlefish bone and chip away at it and eat what they chip off,” Brehm said.
The birds eat the shells for
gastroliths or to provide extra calcium for females during breeding season.
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Pointing to hundreds of small holes dotting the lower eight feet of several walls, Brehm said “Everyone thinks ‘Oh, firing
squad.’ That’s not what happened.
They are kind of brokenhearted to find that out, too.” During the Civil War, Union soldiers
on guard duty would patrol from the upper level of the fort with live ammunition in their guns.
Because explosive ordnance
was stored in the fort, the soldiers couldn’t take their guns back downstairs, in case one accidentally discharged.
They could
either shoot their guns, often into the fort’s walls, or trade them for an unloaded gun with the next soldier on duty.
Once
a month a master armorer would pry out the balls and cast new ones.
At least someone took advantage of the wall’s absorbing
capacity.
I wanted to chip off a piece of coquina or at least reach out and touch the bivalves, but park service rules forbid fondling.
I had never seen any stone like coquina.
Every block of the fort contains shells.
Billions upon billions of shells, in particular
a one-quarter-to-one-inch-long species called a coquina clam (
Donax variabilis
).
Coquina means “little shell” in Spanish.
Some blocks are pure
Donax
but most contain a mishmash of coquina, surf, ark, and Venus clams, along with cockles, bits of starfish, oyster, and quahog.
Sort of a conchologist’s dream.
Down in the moat were hanging gardens of ferns, grasses, and purple asters, which had taken root in the porous stone.
The
gardens covered the walls every thirty feet or so, wherever water drained scuppers from the courtyard roof.
And the plants
didn’t just grow outside.
In one of the courtyard rooms in the 1930s, the park service used to maintain a “fern room” almost
completely covered in maidenhair fern.
Now only a few ferns grew in this room.
The walls were plant rich because the coquina is shell rich.
The heterogeneous mix of shells make a Swiss-cheese-like surface,
where seeds can land and get established.
Water accumulates in the cavities, further turning the coquina into a nursery.
During
a recent botanical survey, botanists found 153 plant species within the park, including 56, ranging from moss to elm, that
had colonized the hanging gardens of the fort’s walls.
Cyanobacteria, nematodes, fungi, and diatoms have also established
themselves on the coquina.
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It is quite a cozy place.
Despite the beauty of the flowers, maintenance workers at the castillo constantly pull out the plants by hand.
They don’t
want the roots to get established and do what cannonballs couldn’t—destroy the fort.
Clearing the walls of plants takes about
six months.
At least the plants grow fast enough that you can still see this wonderful link between geology and botany.
From the outside wall of the moat, Brehm crossed a twenty-foot-wide grassy area, called the covered way, to another coquina
wall.
This one rose another four feet; during the 1700s it would have been several feet higher.
The wall provided a safe,
or covert, zone in which soldiers could move around during battles.
“No one could be seen.
Guys would pop up out of the earth
and shoot down the glacis.
The wall created a human chain gun [or machine gun],” said Brehm.
The glacis (glah-
see
) was the open field that surrounded the fort.
It sloped down from the covered way at such an angle that cannons from the
fort could be tilted at their lowest angle and hit any enemy soldiers ascending the glacis toward the fort.
Because the cannons
shot in a straight line, the cannonballs would clear the men in the covered way.
“With men popping out of the covered way
and the cannons on the fort, it turned the whole glacis into a killing field,” said Brehm.
“The castillo really was the ultimate
evolution of the military fort.”
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established Florida’s first permanent settlement, St.
Augustine, on September 8, 1565.
Before him
had come Spaniards Juan Ponce de Leon, who sought youth and named Florida, and Hernando de Soto, who sought gold and introduced
pigs to the New World, as well as Frenchman René de Laudonnière, who sought religious freedom and established a settlement,
Fort Caroline, at the mouth of the St.
John’s River, about forty miles north of St.
Augustine.
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Menéndez simply wanted to rid Florida of the French.
Within two weeks he met with success by destroying Laudonnière’s colony.
The Spanish now ruled Florida, which was critical
to the defense of Spain’s colonies in the New World.
By extending so far south, Florida controlled access to Mexico and put
Cuba and Spain’s other Caribbean colonies within easy reach by ship.
Furthermore, the Florida Current, the beginning of the
Gulf Stream, shoots north along the coast.
The fast water was dangerous and sank many boats, but it also propelled Spanish
ships and their gold along the fastest route back to Europe.
Menéndez’s first act was to build a fort in a great lodge given to him by a native chief.
Relations soured, however, and by
April the natives had burned the fort to the ground.
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Seeking safer territory, Menéndez moved his men to nearby Anastasia Island, where they erected a triangular wooden fort surrounded
by a moat.
This time the sea felled the structure.
Another fort followed but mutinous soldiers torched it.
In 1572 the Spanish
moved back across the harbor and began building another fort.
Although they had probably encountered the widespread and abundant coquina on the island, the primary building materials there
were rot-resistant cedar and cypress and tall, straight pines.
Fort number four also succumbed to the sea.
On the fifth attempt
the Spanish tried to strengthen the fort by capping the high inner walls with mortar, made from lime (a binding agent) and
sand.
Six years later, though, it was “nothing more than a .
.
.
storehouse for mice!”
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Although the next fort had the honor of being the first one named— San Juan de Pinos—it also had the dubious honor of shortest
life.
In early June 1586 global circumnavigator and pirate Sir Francis Drake arrived at St.
Augustine.
He burned the village
and the fort to the ground.
With Drake’s razing of town and fort, St.
Augustinians embarked upon colonial America’s first urban renewal.
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They rebuilt the town and the fort—number seven—which received its long-standing name San Marcos.
Again wood was the building
material of choice, although a new governor had written the king in 1583 and suggested that coquina would make a good fort.
At long last recognizing that wood forts were unsafe and expensive to maintain, Spain approved a request for ten thousand
ducats and twenty-four slaves to build fort number eight of coquina in 1595.
Twenty slaves, one master stonecutter, one apprentice,
and three masons were to arrive from Cuba.
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On September 22, 1599, a storm surge tore away part of this new fort, which for reasons unknown had been built not of coquina
but of “wood, sand and flour sacks.”
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Uncharacteristically, the rebuilt fort—number eight—survived, perhaps because slaves and subjugated natives regularly repaired
and rebuilt the walls.
In addition to building with inadequate materials, Augustinians had to worry about a new potential threat when the English
landed at Jamestown Island in May 1607.
The new settlement’s success guaranteed that England would spread out along the East
Coast and eventually contend with Spain for dominion on the continent.
Fort number eight finally collapsed and St.
Augustine fell on hard times during the mid-1600s.
The garrison shrank to 150
soldiers, who had been reduced to foraging for roots.
On May 28, 1668, a supply ship arrived just outside the harbor and,
as was customary, signaled the harbor pilot to come out in his launch.
The pilot found his countrymen onboard and signaled
the good news to town with two gunshots.
Everyone relaxed and celebrated that food would soon arrive.
When the pilot boarded the supply ship, he discovered that pirates under the command of Robert Searles had overpowered the
crew.
Searles and his men overwhelmed the unprepared town and took what little they could find in St.
Augustine, though they
didn’t raze the town or the fort.
Instead, they vowed to return with more men and ships and use St.
Augustine as a base to
capture trade boats sailing the Florida Current.
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Searles’s action and proposed return scared the bejesus out of then Florida governor Guerra, who wrote out a request to Spain
for money and permission to build a stone fort.
Guerra had one problem: Searles had taken all the sails necessary to equip
a warship to sail to Cuba, the closest major Spanish port, so Guerra had to rely on the harbor launch to head out into the
Florida Current and hope to meet a Spanish ship bound for Cuba.
Captain Menéndez took the launch on July 8.
It sank the next
day and he walked back to town.
A month later, after borrowing every scrap of sail that could be found,Menéndez sailed out
in the lone warship.
He reached Havana on September 9.
Havana provided some money and food, but Menéndez had to travel to Mexico and the capital of New Spain to get more money and
permission to build a new fort.
He arrived in Mexico City in early November 1669.
Working with all diligent speed to defend
Spain’s most critical Florida settlement, the viceroy approved sending twelve thousand pesos and men from Cuba on December
16, 1670.
In the intervening year the Spanish government had appointed a new Florida governor, sent three royal decrees saying
that a fort should be built, heard rumors that St.
Augustine had been destroyed (which delayed a shipment of soldiers and
food), and debated whether the queen had expressly said to send money for the fort or merely thought it was a good idea.
The
queen’s attorney in Mexico raised this last point.
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Outside events again affected St.
Augustine.
In April 1670 English ships landed at the Ashley River and established a small
town, named in honor of their king, Charles II.
Charles Town was only two days’ sail from St.
Augustine and within Florida’s
territorial border.
In addition to pirates, the Spanish had to fear colonists.
Six months after the viceroy’s approval, Florida’s new governor, Manuel de Cendoya, sailed from Mexico and arrived in Havana
on June 29, 1671.
Havana would provide masons, stonecutters, and lime burners, plus military engineer Ignacio Daza, who would
be in charge of building and designing the new fort.
Cendoya finally reached St.
Augustine on July 6, 1671, over three years
after Searles had pillaged the town.
Luckily the pirate didn’t keep his word.
Cendoya arrived with money and fifteen stoneworkers,
but no Daza, who was not scheduled to come north until August 1672.
On July 12 Cendoya ordered work to begin on the fort.
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He wanted 150 Indian laborers (peons) to assist the fifteen Cubans.
Fifty men would quarry and transport coquina; fifty would
make lime; and fifty would cut stone and dig the foundation trench.
Blacksmiths made axes, pry bars, shovels, picks, and wedges.
Carpenters built baskets, boxes, buckets, and square-ended dugout canoes.
To make lime, the Spanish collected oyster shells
and burned them in kilns, which drove off carbon dioxide and left behind a white powder.