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 Post subject: Fortress on the Bay
PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 6:20 pm 
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When I finally got to see a place I'd only read about as a child.

Fortress on the Bay

Saint Augustine, Florida, is the oldest European settlement in North America. Founded by Spain in the mid-16th century, it resisted repeated attacks from Spain’s enemies for some two hundred years. In the late 1600s the nearly bankrupt nation of Spain went to immense effort to protect the strategically-important seaport by building a powerful fortress out of local coquina beach rock. The Castillo de San Marcos proved its worth by holding out against several sieges and raids over the next few decades.

In 1976 a children’s author named Wilma Pitchford Hayes published Siege: The Story of Saint Augustine, 1702. This was a fictionalized but well-researched account of the 1702 British siege of the Spanish colony of Saint Augustine, as told from the point of view of some of the children involved. It was fitting that this account of one of the more dramatic events in colonial history should have been published during the Bicentennial year. Interest in colonial history was at an all-time high as part of the nation’s year-long celebration of its 200th birthday. I have vivid childhood memories of the media attention, the Parade of Tall Ships, the Freedom Train, and more. The Bicentennial more than anything else sparked what would become a lifelong love of history.

A couple of years later, in the latter part of my fourth-grade year, our teacher got in a batch of new books for her classroom. She gave me a copy of Siege. In it she wrote “For your love of reading.” I realized that for a teacher to give a student a book like this was a real honor. It has been a treasured book of mine ever since for that reason. I liked the story too, though it wasn’t one of my all-time favorites. When my brother went to Florida some years back and spent time in Saint Augustine I felt envious at the way he got to see where it actually happened. Then earlier this year I finally had a chance to visit Saint Augustine myself.

The Castillo de San Marcos is a classic early-modern artillery fort built around a neat square courtyard. Vaulted casement rooms built within the thick stone walls surround the courtyard. At each corner are massive bastions built of solid stone. Atop the casement rooms and bastions is a level “terreplain”, or combat deck on which cannons stood behind protective stone parapets. These commanded the strategic bay. The fort’s geometry of walls and bastions ensured that an attack from any direction would come under interlocking fields of fire. A broad moat surrounds the fortress.

You enter it today as you they would have in the old days, across a bridge and drawbridge that span the moat. Inside the casement rooms have been turned into exhibits representing different eras in the fort’s history, from the time of Spanish settlement, through British occupation, to the fort’s use as a military post by the young United States. There are cannon of different eras everywhere, many of them trophies from America’s nineteenth-century wars with Mexico and Spain. Each gun bears the name of its Spanish maker, the date and city where it was made, and the gun’s own individual name—the Spaniards were evidently fond of naming their artillery.

Looking through the fort, I started to visualize the story of the 1702 siege in a way I had not been able to before. I remembered as a child reading that some 1,500 people, almost all of them civilians, had crowded into the fort. Now I could see just how very crowded they must have been. As a child I had imagined the courtyard as being the size of a city block or a football field. In fact it is at most a hundred feet square. The courtyard and casement rooms would scarcely have provided enough room for everybody to lie down at once. Hundreds of people must have bivouacked instead up on the terreplain, or in the narrow outer ward by the sea wall. They would still have been crowded there, and would have been exposed to the November and December winds—even in northern Florida it can get nippy in those months.

There could not have been any great abundance of food available during the two-month siege. Mostly the people would have subsisted on rations of corn, cornmeal, and meat from cattle kept huddled in the semi-dry moat until time to slaughter them. The cattle would have been none too well fed themselves. Hayes describes how the men of the garrison had to brave enemy patrols and raiders to cut grass for the cattle in the surrounding swamps.

There was not much fresh water available either. The fort had three wells. People would barely have had enough to drink, with little or no water for washing unless they could catch rain water. The fort had only two latrines. Most of the refugees would have needed to answer the call of nature using pots and buckets. These could have been dumped no further away than the waters of the bay by the sea wall. Meanwhile the cattle were busily fouling most of the moat. The fort must have smelled like a cesspit much of the time.

And of course there was enemy action. Marauders threatened the parties that went out to cut fodder for the cattle. The garrison had to watch day by day as enemy trenches worked their way nearer, until they were forced to attack the earthworks in hand-to-hand fighting. Everybody in the fort would have been in a position to hear the battle. Mercifully they were at least spared bombardment, but for two months they never knew whether enemy reinforcements might arrive bringing siege guns. In the end the reinforcing fleet that arrived first turned out to be from Spain instead of Britain, bringing an end to the siege and the supplies they had so desperately needed. Even the lifting of the siege was not all joy; the British burned the whole town of Saint Augustine as they retreated.

As I walked the courtyard and terreplain of the Castillo de San Marcos, and later re-read the story of the siege, I developed a new appreciation for the courage and resilience of the defenders. As a child I’d had very little idea of everything those men, women, and children of old Saint Augustine had faced in the final months of 1702. It took a lot to hold out for those fifty-odd days of siege, privation, and squalor. Could we have done as much?

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 Post subject: Fortress on the Bay
PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 7:25 pm 
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I've been to St Augustine many times. It's a beautiful city.

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 Post subject: Fortress on the Bay
PostPosted: Thu Sep 15, 2011 12:27 pm 
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Bubbles wrote:
I've been to St Augustine many times. It's a beautiful city.


It certainly is. Wish I'd been able to see more of it.

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