Stories in Stone (19 page)

Ellers further discovered that they detect which waves to surf by feeling sound vibrations generated by the crashing waves.
“It’s analogous to the vibrations you feel when a large truck passes,” he says.
“Larger waves produce more vibrations.” The
coquina are so in tune with these sounds that Ellers learned to play a trick with them.
In his lab, he would fill a bucket
with bivalves and impress his friends by playing a sound and getting all of the clams to jump.
²⁴
Conchologists must be an easy group to impress.

When the Anastasia formed 110,000 years ago, Earth was in what is known as an interglacial period, one of a number that have
occurred during the past 2 million years.
We are in an interglacial at present, meaning that the planet is between ice ages,
the last of which ended about thirteen thousand years ago.
The big difference is that during Anastasia times, the climate
was warmer than it is at present, which melted more of the planet’s glaciers and made sea level as much as twenty-five feet
higher than it is today.

As temperatures cooled during the ice age following the Anastasia interglacial, sea level began to fall, eventually dropping
three hundred feet below modern sea level during the last ice age, as the glaciers tied up water that normally would have
been in the oceans.
Falling sea levels stranded the recently deposited shells far inland.
Freshwater soon mixed into the deposit
and began to cement the shells.
The Anastasia Formation was born.

In 1596 it became the first building stone used by European colonists in what would become the United States.
The Spanish
used coquina to erect a powder magazine, a building that housed gunpowder, in fort number eight.
²⁵
The oldest extant coquina structure is a well, built around 1614.
Nothing else appears to have been built from coquina until
the castillo.

What makes coquina more remarkable is where it outcrops.
If Pedro Menéndez de Avilés had decided to establish his base of
operations north of St.
Augustine in 1565, his late-seventeenth-century followers would have been in trouble.
No good port
with access to freshwater and good building stone occurs along the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina, or North Carolina.
Serendipitously,Menéndez
had chosen the one harbor with good stone.
Without those
Donax
clams, who knows what would have happened to the Spanish?

“The castillo was a fantastic deterrent.
Anyone sailing by sees this little harbor, little town, and great big hulking white
and red fortification, immediately knows this is a Spanish fort with lots of guns,” said Joe Brehm.
“It says, ‘Don’t mess
with us or we will hurt you.’ ”

The design was not unique.
After Ignacio Daza surveyed the site, he pulled out his military engineering books, which contained
a catalog of designs, and “literally found a fortification that would fit his needs but scaled it down,” said Brehm.
“The
castillo is essentially a one-fifth scale model of what was known as a ‘frontier fortification.’ If you looked at a map of
Paris and the surrounding area in the seventeenth century, you would find at least seven forts that look just like this one.”

Military engineers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based their designs on siege warfare, where the defenders hunkered
down in their fort and the attackers attempted to get inside.
Success depended on cutting off supplies to the hunkerers, destroying
the fort’s weapons, particularly cannons, and breaching or scaling the walls.
Sieges could take months and result in demoralizing
losses for the attackers.
“Frederick the Great normally had casualties of fifty-five to sixty-five percent in a siege.
There
just weren’t enough people in Florida to make a good siege,” said Brehm.

With a design in place, Daza began to supervise work on the castillo.
²⁶
Although illness weakened the Indian peons and forced Governor Cendoya and his soldiers to man the shovels, the north, south,
and east walls began to rise.
By early 1673, the east wall and two bastions stood eleven feet high.
Then Cendoya and Daza
died within days of each other, the viceroy in Mexico refused to send money until ordered by Spain, and a storm breached the
stone walls and wrecked the old wood fort.
Construction also slowed because a ship carrying provisions foundered and workers
had to go in search of food.

Despite the challenges, the fort grew.
In May 1675, when a new governor, Pablo de Hita Salazar arrived—with food, too—the
south wall and southeast bastion were up to a height of twelve feet, the north wall and northeast bastion to twenty feet,
and the east wall to fifteen feet.
The walls were thirteen feet thick at the base, tapering to nine feet at the top.
Recognizing
that he needed a defensible fort, Hita decided to erect a temporary, twelve-foot-high wall of dirt,wood, and stone veneer
on the west side between the half completed northwest and southwest bastions.
He also finished the three other curtain walls
and seaward bastions, and mounted cannons on the triangular structures.
St.
Augustine finally had its first real fort.

In a report back to Spain, the governor wrote of the castillo that “in the form of its plan this one is not surpassed by any
of those of greater character.” He also observed how little food and money he had to provide his workers.
“If it had to be
built in another place than St.
Augustine it would cost a double amount .
.
.”
²⁷

Governor Hita could make this observation because of the international—that is, mostly subjugated—nature of the workers.
Guale,
Timucua, and Apalache natives joined Spanish peons, African slaves, Caribbean convicts, and English prisoners, along with
Cuban and Mexican mestizos and St.
Augustinian creoles.
Wages ranged from zero pay and limited rations for slaves and convicts
through one real (twenty cents) per day and rations for Indians, to twenty reales for the master mason.
There was room for
advancement: English prisoner John Collins worked his way up to master of the kilns and eventually to quarrymaster.

Hita’s initial enthusiasm notwithstanding, fort construction halted on December 31, 1677.
The viceroy’s parsimony left no
money to pay workers; during the last months of 1677, work continued only because of gifts from town residents.
Work did not
begin again until August 29, 1679.
Ever so slowly the walls of the castillo rose, with periodic fixes on older sections that
had been poorly or incorrectly built.

The castillo’s first test came in spring 1683 when 230 pirates landed at Ponce de Leon inlet, sixty miles south of St.
Augustine,
and began to march north.
They easily overpowered a watchtower on the south end of Anastasia Island, but when they reached
the north end of the island the pirates realized the stone fort meant that taking the town would no longer be as easy as it
had been.
As Moore would do nineteen years later, they abandoned their nefarious plans and decided to retreat.

Flushed, or perhaps shocked, with St.
Augustine’s first victory, the castillo crews pushed harder to finish and by 1685 all
interior work was done.
This included the interior courtyard, now surrounded by more than twenty rooms with wood support beams
and a tabby (oyster shells and mortar) slab roof.
²⁸
All that remained was finishing the ravelin, the moat, the covered way, and the glacis.
Without these critical defensive
outworks, the fort was still vulnerable to a siege attack.
Furthermore, the wood-beamed rooms could not support the heavy
cannons, which could be used only on the thick, coquina-walled bastions.

International politics again affected St.
Augustine.
Taking time out from working on the fort, the Spanish tried to crush
the recently established colony of Charles Town, but a storm stopped them.
They also had to battle English advances in western
Florida and Georgia.
And then Spain declared war on France, which gave French corsairs more reason to attack Spanish supply
ships bringing food to St.
Augustine.
Food became so scarce that officials decided to plant corn on the glacis surrounding
the castillo.

Finally in August 1695, the castillo and its outer defensive works, except the ravelin, were completed.
Plastered a brilliant
white with red watchtower and garitas, little towers at the corner of each bastion, the castillo had cost 138,750 pesos, about
double what Governor Cendoya had estimated in 1672.
Seven years later, the new fort proved its worth during the defeat of
Moore.

Completion of the castillo and Moore’s razing of the town created the market for coquina during St.
Augustine’s second phase
of urban renewal.
Residents, at least the wealthier ones, used coquina for houses, wells, and garden walls.
The Catholic Church
also chose coquina, as did the Spanish government for their official buildings.

Despite the Spanish word, no Spaniards used the term coquina to describe their building stone.
They preferred
piedra
(stone),
canto
(quarry stone),
canteria
(hewn stone), or
mamposteria
(stone masonry).
When the English took control of St.
Augustine in 1763, they called the coquina “stone” or “shellstone.”
The earliest known reference to coquina is from 1819.
Not until the late 1830s did the term start to catch on.

Some early visitors to St.
Augustine didn’t dignify coquina with the term “stone.” An English traveler in 1817 wrote, “This
marine substance is superior to stone, not being liable to splinter from the effects of bombardment.”
²⁹
In 1831 John James Audubon wrote to his wife “an old Spanish Castle .
.
.
is built of .
.
.
a concrete of shells which hardens
by exposure to the Air and is curious to the Geologist.”
³⁰

The modern town of St.
Augustine has recognized the importance of coquina to its past and has worked extensively on preservation,
restoration, and upkeep of its historic structures.
It has also attempted to keep the spirit of the Spanish architecture,
at least downtown, with narrow streets overhung with second-story balconies.
Unfortunately, many merchants seem to miss the
point and use the historic aura as a means to sell cheesy tchotchkes.

Anastasia Island remained the primary source for quarries.
They spread in a narrow band along the center of the island.
None
were large and none were deep.
The Spanish government owned the quarries and controlled all access.
Except for the years 1763
to 1783, Spain retained ownership of the quarries until 1821, when the U.S.
government acquired Florida.
It also acquired
the quarries and surrounding land, which is how the land now run as Anastasia State Park stayed protected and undeveloped.

Thirty-eight years after Moore’s failure, the British tried another attack on St.
Augustine and the castillo.
On June 13,
1740, fourteen hundred men under the command of Georgia governor James Oglethorpe began to bombard the fort.
They were better
prepared with more men, bigger guns, and mortars, hollow shells lobbed high to explode over or on the grounds of the fort
(Francis Scott Key’s “bombs bursting in air”).
The coquina withstood the onslaught, leading one British soldier to express
“[it] will not splinter but will give way to cannon ball as though you would stick a knife into cheese.”
³¹
Oglethorpe and his men retreated on July 16.

With peace at hand, the Spanish began to beef up their defenses.
They built a new coquina structure, Fort Matanzas, at the
south inlet to the Matanzas River.
They rebuilt the coquina wall of the covered way; remodeled and finished the four defensive
lines that formed successive walls around St.
Augustine; and expanded and converted the rooms surrounding the castillo’s courtyard
by replacing the wood beams with coquina and tabby vaulted ceilings, which shrank the courtyard by fifty feet and raised the
castillo’s walls five feet to thirty feet above the moat bottom.
For the first time, the Spanish could place cannons anywhere
along the fort’s walls, not just atop the corner bastions.
By 1762 all except the ravelin was done, including a new coat of
plaster.

Ironically, a year later the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years’ War in Europe, ended with victory for England,
which acquired Canada from France and Florida from Spain.
St.
Augustine and the castillo, now called Fort St.
Mark, transferred
to British control on July 21, 1763.
The town became a British haven: the only one of the colonies to support the British
during the Revolutionary War.
³²
Twenty years later Florida reverted back to Spain as part of the treaties signed in Paris marking the end of the American
Revolution.