19 Saint Augustine

You probably know all the east coast towns we are going to pass through but they are new to us.

We walked along the narrow streets of the old Spanish town up to the Castillo de San Marco and looked out over the anchorage.

The Spaniards sent Menendez here in 1564 to stake out the northern extreme of their American holdings. What a posting! He had only fifty soldiers to keep the English and French at bay. Supplies had to come from Havana. That very year, the French fleet got wrecked on the coast. Menendez learned that 300 French soldiers were starving on the shore. He persuaded them to surrender, gave them a meal, and killed them all. You had to do that out here in the boonies if you were outnumbered.

The town he created was easy meat for raiders. Drake burst in in 1586. We watched this event reenacted by an enthusiastic group of pirates and defenders. Their authentic weapons made a great deal of noise and smoke but took for ever to reload. It was a slow motion battle. The pirates won. In the original version, Drake’s rabble looted everything and burned the wooden fort.


The new fort was made of ‘coquina’ (stones composed of beach shells that had been compressed and hardened over a quarter of a million years). It was just finished when Jonathan Dickinson arrived with his decimated party in 1696. The governor of the time gave them food and clothes and helped them on to Charleston. This was pretty gracious of him considering that the colonies were hostile. Only a few years later the brits were attacking the fort. Coquina turned out to have a remarkable ability to absorb cannon balls. The attack failed.

The fort is still good shape after 300 years.

Of course we had to see Flagler’s splendid Spanish-Gothic monster piece: the Hotel Ponce de Leon. Edison did the wiring Tiffany did the windows. It was a bit difficult for the guests to get to it 1885. No problem, Flagler built a railway.