  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, This British musket dates from 1777-90 and is of the type that would have been used by the British forces stationed at the Castillo from 1763 to 1784. It is 4 feet, 8 inches long. 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 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 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
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.” The Spanish government constructed replicas of Christopher Columbus’ three ships to commemorate the 500th anniversary of his voyage to America. The ships followed Columbus’ route across the Atlantic and made calls at ports throughout the Americas. Here the Santa Maria, in the foreground, Pinta, and NiÑa visit St. Augustine in 1992. Soldiers crossing the moat
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