CHAPTER XII.

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Can volume, pillar, pile, preserve thee great?
Or must these trust tradition’s simple tongue?

THE ancient fortress of Castle San Marco, the name of which has been improperly changed to Fort Marion, is considered one of the most attractive and interesting objects in St. Augustine. It was constructed in the style of the strong castles in Europe during the Middle Ages, after the design of military engineering employed by Vauban. In 1762 it was called St. John’s Fort, or San Juan de PiÑos, afterward San Marco, which name it retained until the change of flags in 1821, when it received the title of Fort Marion, in honor of General Marion, of Revolutionary fame. Its form is that of a quadrilateral, or trapezium, with bastions at each corner, the wall being twenty-one feet in height. Its extreme age, together with the durability of material employed, would be a subject of more interest to ancient architects, could they return, than to any of the present generation.

The battery is the boulevard of the city, where we can come and listen to the sea beating its great heart against the rocks, and see the snowy sails that glide so swiftly out to the solemn seas, while the white clouds float gracefully in their blue vault over our heads, like doves through the air, as the clear waters from the inlet flash in the bright sunlight, like burnished armor for a gala-day parade, and a pensiveness steals over our senses, which makes all earthly scenes vanish, like shadows in the distance at breaking of day.

We also find this a favored place for receiving serious impressions—this structure, formed by long-forgotten hands, which was a fortress of strength for the defenseless, a prison for treacherous captives, where they could pine and die far from the sound of human sympathy, with the gates of mercy forever sealed to them.

The mind embalms pleasant memories from this peculiar spot, when the skies are bright, bursting upon our vision like that day of which we read, whose “morning will dawn without clouds.”

This structure was commenced in 1565, by the Spaniards, as a defense against the Indians. In 1732 Don Manuel Montiano, being appointed Governor of Florida, made application to the Captain General of Cuba for means to strengthen the fort, also more artillerymen, which were granted, the work being done under the direction of Don Antonio de Arredonda, a competent engineering official. In response to his request, two hundred convicts from Mexico being furnished him, six casemates were finished, of which there are eighteen in all, the remainder having been completed in 1756.

The impress of two eighteen-pound shot, low down on the eastern curtain, are now to be seen,


Land Approach to Fort Marion.

Land Approach to Fort Marion.

made from a battery placed on Anastasia Island by General Oglethorpe, who attempted by a regular siege to take the city. The bombardment was continued twenty days; but, on account of the lightness of the guns, and the distance, little damage was done. The siege lasted thirty-eight days, when the Americans withdrew their troops, and returned to Georgia.

General Oglethorpe returned two years after this, taking Fort Moosa, four miles distant, upon a broad river flowing under the fort; then advanced to the gates of St. Augustine, where he gave the garrison an invitation to march out and fight, which they declined.

In 1740 the castle is described as “being built of soft stone, with four bastions, the curtains sixty yards in length, the parapet nine feet thick, the rampart twenty feet high, casemated underneath for lodgings, arched over and newly made bomb-proof; and they have for some time past been working on a new covert way, which is nearly finished. The ordnance consisted of fifty pieces of cannon, sixteen of which were brass twenty-four-pounders. Thirteen hundred regular troops composed the garrison, also militia and Spanish Indians. In addition to this, the town was intrenched with ten salient angles, on each of which were cannon.”

In 1769 it is again described as being completed “according to the modern taste of military architecture, and might be justly deemed the prettiest fort in the king’s domain. It is regularly fortified with bastions, half-bastions, and a ditch; has also several rows of Spanish bayonet along the ditch, forming so close a chevaux-de-frise with their pointed leaves as to be impregnable. The southern bastions were built of stone.”

The fort now, as then, is situated in the north-eastern extremity of the old town, directly fronting the entrance to the harbor. On the west side is a broad and deep trench, or moat, connected with the moat around the castle extending across the town to the St. Sebastian River. This trench was used to flood the moat around the fortress, from the St. Sebastian River, and also to be filled with water when required, in order to obstruct the approach of assailants from the southern direction. On the south side of this trench very strong earth-works were erected, continuous with portions of massive walls on each side the city gate, which is now the best relic that exists in Europe or America—thus acknowledged by tourists who have visited St. Augustine. The form of the work is a polygon, consisting of four equal curtains, on the salient angles, on three of which are bastions, or turrets, the one at the north-east corner having disappeared. The moat around the castle is inclosed by the internal barrier, a massive wall of coquina, which also extends around the barbacan, following its entrant and reËntrant angles. An outer barrier extends around the inner, following in parallel lines the various flexures. Although a mound of earth is now raised against this outer barrier, inclosing the fort, there is little doubt, from observation of the remains, that the approaches to the castle were guarded, as in the Middle Ages, by an abatis, scarp and counter-scarp, frise, and all the defenses then employed, the traces of which are still extant. The barbacan in front of the entrance—called in modern phraseology the sally-port—is the only remaining specimen of a defensive work of the kind in this country, and to the present time has been an enigma to all visitors, which some tourists have committed the blunder of calling a demi-lune. This particular will be recalled by a reference to Scott’s “Betrothed,” which describes the castle of the “Garde Douloreuse.” Traces of the “outer barrier gate” remain, also the draw-bridges, and machinery by which they were worked. Every thing is preserved but the “Warder’s Tower” over the gate; the steps remain to prove the former existence of the tower. The draw-bridge, and even the pulleys by which it was raised, are there; also the ponderous portcullis, as an illustrated monument of Sir Walter Scott’s description in regard to ancient castles.

The following Spanish inscription is to be seen over the sally-port in alto-rilievo:

REYNANDO EN ESPANA EL SENR
DON FERNANDO SEXTO Y SIENDO
GOVOR Y CAPN DE ESA CD SAN AUGN DE
LA FLORIDA Y SUS PROVA EL MARISCAL
DE CAMPO DN ALONZO FERNDO HEREDA
ASI CONCLUIO ESTE CASTILLO EL AN
OD 1756 DIRIGENDO LAS OBRAS EL
CAP. INGNRO DN PEDRO DE BROZAS
Y GARAY.

Translation.—Don Ferdinand VI. being King of Spain, and the Field Marshal Don Alonzo Fernando Hereda being Governor and Captain General of this place, St. Augustine, of Florida, and its Province. This fort was finished in the year 1756. The works were directed by the Captain Engineer, Don Pedro de Brazos y Garay.

Every year hundreds of visitors rush into Fort Marion, and then the dungeon, with an awe-stricken feeling, as though the imaginary groans which are said to have been uttered here centuries since were ready to burst through the rocks and echo again, like the words of Plato, which his friends said froze in the winter, but on the return of spring thawed out again.

Several years after the cession of Florida to the United States the north-east bastion of this fortress caved in, immediately under the highest tower, disclosing a dungeon fourteen feet square. On the same day was made the discovery of a square rock, cemented in an opening similar to those in the casemates, only much less, which was undoubtedly the entrance.

A tempest there you scarce could hear,
So massive were the walls.

Some human bones and hair were then discovered and seen by volunteers from the ship Dolphin—a published account of which was forwarded to Washington, and deposited in the Congressional Library. The Smithsonian Institute has no knowledge of these cages, bones, or any thing pertaining to them ever having been placed there—which forever silences all inquiries in that direction. They told us, while in Washington, that when visitors came to the Institute asking information about them, the Professors were at a loss to know what they implied by their interrogations.

It has long been a demonstrated fact that some of the St. Augustine natives have a way of answering questions asked about them in accordance with their impressions, regardless of dates or historic records. The following description of the old fort mysteries is a change from the iron cages—the writer having visited the dungeon before the cage tale had been invented: “We were taken into the ancient prisons of the fort-dungeons, one of which was dimly lighted by a grated window, the other entirely without light, and by the flame of a torch we were shown the half-obliterated inscriptions scratched on the walls long ago by prisoners. But in another corner of the fort we were taken to look at the secret cells which were discovered a few years since in consequence of the sinking of the earth over a narrow apartment between them. These cells are deep under ground, vaulted over head, and without windows. In one of them a wooden machine was found, which some supposed might have been a rack, and in the other a quantity of human bones. The doors of these cells had been walled up, and concealed with stucco, before the fort passed into the hands of the Americans.”

Many things, when related about it far away, sound tame, but have an awe-inspiring effect if surrounded by its grim walls, listening to the grating of rusty bolts, or the clanking of iron chains, and looking through the uncertain glare of the old sergeant’s candles as he finishes his well-learned tale of horrors, in subdued tones, with the final paragraph, “It may be so, or it may not; I cannot tell.”

That human bones have been discovered in the ruins of old churches and structures of various other kinds, placed there for sepulture, is a well-authenticated fact. While constructing the wall around the light-house at St. Mark’s, Florida, in tearing down the old Spanish fort, a tomb was found beneath a tablet, containing a single body of much greater size than any living in the country at the present day. In the walls of the State-house, at Nashville, Tennessee, a niche was planned by the architect to contain his body, where his bones are now sealed in.

The iron cages about which so much has been said and written have come before the public with the enormous cruelties of the Inquisition and the mysteries of an almost-forgotten past. Many statements have been made and published in regard to them, without the shadow of truth for a basis. There are old citizens now living in St. Augustine, between eighty and ninety years of age, who saw those cages when discovered, and heard their parents state where they first saw them.

The following is, no doubt, the true version of the man-cages, direct from a most authentic source: About sixty years since, while some workmen were engaged outside the city gates in making post-holes for a butcher-pen, when in the act of digging, they struck a hard substance resembling iron, which excited their curiosity. They continued working until they uncovered two cages, made of wrought iron, welded together in a manner somewhat resembling the human form, and containing a few decomposed human bones. None of the New Smyrna refugees were then living, but there are those alive now who remember having heard their parents say that “two cages containing the remains of some pirates were hanging outside the city gates when they came to St. Augustine from Smyrna, after the English left it, and buried them just in the manner they were found by the butchers.”

Although many inhuman acts have been committed by the Spaniards, they are not chargeable with all the atrocities perpetrated in the world. SeÑor B. Oliveros thus relates what he saw on the day they were dug out: “One evening, a little before sunset, I noticed a number of persons collected around the city gates, and proceeded there to ascertain the cause of so many people, when I spied the two cages standing against the city gate-posts.” He, being a gunsmith, succeeded in obtaining one, which he said was most excellent wrought iron, of which he made good use. The other cage was taken in charge by the Spanish officers, and locked in the fort for safe keeping until it could be sent to Spain as a relic, where old persons now living here saw it with feelings of terror—they then being children. Thus, instead of being exhibited as a relic of the Spanish Inquisition at Washington, as has been represented so frequently, it is retained in Madrid as a specimen of English barbarity. The cages were no worse punishment than that of the old English law for aggravated offenses: “That the perpetrator be drawn and quartered alive.” And who can number those that have perished in the English pillories?

No nation of people in the world can wash their hands entirely from cruel conduct, or show a clear record for the humane deportment of all its ancestry, remembering infallibility has left its impress nowhere except on the works and ways of God.

Some of those people usually designated as Indians, whose isolated existence is concealed in mystery, are here in Fort Marion, fettered with the forms of civilization, to which their adaptability of character conforms them with as good a grace as the circumstances will permit. That these tawny-skinned creatures have constitutions of iron there is no doubt, as their general appearance indicates a life of fatigue to which ease is a stranger. They are subjected to much exposure in pursuing the wild herds that rush with the precipitancy and speed of the mountain torrent, together with the days and weeks they spend with only the canopy of heaven for a covering, which increases their powers of endurance. Many times they retire supperless, and, when game is abundant, gorge themselves to gluttony, after which, like the stupid anaconda, they roll up for digestion, to supplant the place of more moderation. It is the testimony of all those who have lived among the Indians, that there exists a natural feeling of opposition to civilization, when not weakened by wars, or overpowered with superior numbers.

Did it ever occur to us highly enlightened people, while looking at the native dress of these savages, wrapped in their blankets, that clothing for the lower limbs was of but recent origin? Trousers were never worn by the Hebrews, Greeks, or Romans. The idea is said to have originated with the Gauls, the source from which our fashions are now received. The garment worn by the ancients was woven in one piece, about twelve feet in length and half the width, fastened on the right shoulder. It was secured with a girdle in folds at the waist when they started on long journeys, which was termed “girding the loins.” This seamless coat was never out of fashion, and worn, if no accident happened to it, for generations. Think of a young man now wearing his father’s coat, to say nothing of his great-grandfather’s! It would be regarded as a synonym of extreme poverty, however rich the fabric from which it was formed might be woven.

The locality from which these Indians were brought was formerly designated The American Desert, located beyond the Arkansas River; but, as no remarkable barren country has been found there, the name was changed to Plains. The aborigines first found on the discovery of America, and those roaming through the Western wilds, are of quite different material. Those on the Atlantic coast were planters—cultivators of the soil. The Western Indians range through an area of two thousand miles in extent, with no abiding-place but the camp-fires, around which they gather at night to rest, after shooting during the day the buffalo that supplies all their necessities—clothing, tent-covers, shoes, and strings for their bows; also an article of commerce for trafficking with the whites. An attempt at a treaty with these children of nature would have never been productive of any good. The most feasible plan for the present has been adopted—to capture a portion of them, which will have a tendency to awe the remainder. Force is the only weapon to be used. They are the Ishmaelites of the West. The names of the tribes represented here are the Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, and Arapahoes. The Comanches are the most numerous of any tribe now existing, and have for many years been a terror to Texas and frontier settlers. Entire districts have been depopulated by them. While they exert a sleepless vigilance over their own possessions, they are constantly making predatory incursions upon their neighbors. The Texas Rangers acquired the great skill, of which we saw such frequent exhibits during the war, in spending a portion of each day skirmishing with these Indians. They are bold and warlike, with a home on the grassy plains, whose kingdom is conquest, their throne a horse, upon which, when once seated, with their arrows and lasso, they acknowledge no umpire but death. More than three hundred years since, when first discovered, they had dogs for beasts of burden—horses never having been used among them. Plunder is what they live for, and trophies what they fight for—it is considered disgraceful for them to return to camps empty-handed: no glory then awaits them, or words of kindness.

The Cheyennes have a rude system of representing their ideas by picture-writing, which may be traced up to the highest type of communicating thought by letter-writing. In this manner they have preserved legends, written history, and recorded songs.

The pantomimic movements of these Indians are all the language of signs. Each yelp has its import, by which means they can converse with one another, although their dialect may differ. Riding with the tails of their ponies braided is a key-note to hostilities. It is a remarkable peculiarity, in regard to their language, that they have retained it, however much associated with other tribes, which is illustrated by the Arapahoes and Cheyennes living in close proximity, indulging in freaks of fighting and friendship, as their inclination dictates, communicating with each other only by gestures or interpreters. They inhabit the valley of the Platte River, always ready to receive presents, talk in good faith of peace, but hardly have the words ceased to echo from their lips before they are holding a council of war, and making preparations for a descent upon any thing of value they may have discovered during their parley. They eat the flesh of canines with a relish that places all Government rations at a discount. Their visitors are expected to partake with them as a mark of friendship.

The Kiowa and Arapahoe tribes appear to have oratorical powers not possessed by the others, and their native eloquence has never been improved by education. Sa-tan-ta, a former chief of the Kiowas, when taken by the Government for numberless depredations, pleaded his own cause with such powerful effect he was dubbed “The Orator of the Plains.” There is no doubt that the patriarchs among them prefer peace, but the young warriors are fond of fighting. With them it is an inborn instinct, like a bird for the air.

No life can be imagined fraught with greater dangers and privations than that of soldiers in search of Indians, to be found lurking with their missiles of destruction behind trees, grass-blades, or in any covert from which they can discharge these death-dealing weapons, in real or fancied security. The wild animals, driven by necessity, are always in readiness to pluck the bones of the first object they see, whether man or beast. Then the terrible thirst the poor soldiers endure, to be slaked with bitter waters, which destroy instead of refreshing them; the starving mules and horses of uncertain ages, whose flesh they have devoured like hungry dogs; the frosted limbs upon which they have limped until life seemed a burden. The fate of those who have preceded them is constantly in view; their companions are found lying near the last Indian trail with their bones bleaching, or their bodies filled with arrows, according to the number present when they were killed—no warrior is satisfied until he has pierced his bleeding, quivering flesh with a barbed point. Many of the arrows used have been poisoned by dipping them in the decayed hearts and livers of the buffaloes they have killed and then dried—a wound from one of them being equally as fatal in its effects as the virus from a dissecting knife.

During the stay of these red men efforts have been made to teach them the use of boots and breeches, but the practical utility of either is of little import to them. Their first movement on returning West will no doubt be to drop their Government clothes, and resume the blanket and leggins.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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