by Various
ST. AUGUSTINE
BY FRANK R. STOCKTON
The city of St. Augustine, on the eastern coast of Florida, stands inone respect preeminent among all the cities of the United States--it istruly an old city. It has many other claims to consideration, but theseare shared with other cities. But in regard to age it is the one memberof its class.
Compared with the cities of the Old World, St. Augustine would be calledyoung; but in the United States a city whose buildings and monumentsconnect the Middle Ages with the present time, may be considered to havea good claim to be called ancient.
After visiting some of our great towns, where the noise and bustle oftraffic, the fire and din of manufactures, the long lines of buildingsstretching out in every direction, with all the other evidences ofactive enterprise, proclaim these cities creations of the present dayand hour, it is refreshing and restful to go down to quiet St.Augustine, where one may gaze into the dry moat of a fort of medievalarchitecture, walk over its drawbridges, pass under its portcullis, andgo down into its dungeons; and where in soft semi-tropical air thevisitor may wander through narrow streets resembling those of Spain andItaly, where the houses on each side lean over toward one another sothat neighbors might almost shake hands from their upper windows, andare surrounded by orange-groves and rose-gardens which blossom all theyear.
St. Augustine was founded in 1565 by Pedro Menendez de Aviles, who wasthen Governor of Florida. Here he built a wooden fort which wasafterward replaced by the massive edifice which still exists. St.Augustine needed defenses, for she passed through long periods of war,and many battles were fought for her possession. At first there werewars in Florida between the Spanish and the French; and when the townwas just twenty-one years old, Sir Francis Drake captured the fort,carrying off two thousand pounds in money, and burned half the buildingsin the town. Then the Indians frequently attacked the place andcommitted many atrocities; and, half a century after Drake, thecelebrated English buccaneer Captain John Davis captured and plunderedthe town.
Much later, General Moore, Governor of South Carolina, took the town andheld it for three months, but was never able to take the fort. In 1740General Oglethorpe, Governor of Georgia, attacked St. Augustine,planting batteries on the island opposite, and maintaining a siege forforty days; but he was obliged to withdraw. Three years later he madeanother attack, but succeeded no better. Even now one can see the dentsand holes made in the fort by the cannon-balls fired in these sieges.
In 1819 Florida was ceded to our Government, and St. Augustine became acity of the United States.
Approaching St. Augustine from the sea, the town looks as if it might bea port on the Mediterranean coast. The light-colored walls of its housesand gardens, masses of rich green foliage cropping up everywhere in thetown and about it, the stern old fortress to the north of it, and thewhite and glittering sands of the island which separates its harbor fromthe sea, make it very unlike the ordinary idea of an American town.
In the center of the city is a large open square called the Plaza de laConstitucion, surrounded by beautiful live-oaks and pride-of-Indiatrees, with their long, hanging-mosses and sweet-smelling blossoms.
Most of the streets are narrow, without sidewalks, and from thehigh-walled gardens comes the smell of orange-blossoms, while roses andother flowers bloom everywhere and all the time.
At the southern end of the town stands the old Convent of St. Francis,which is now used as barracks for United States soldiers.
The old palace of the governor still stands, but now contains thepost-office and other public buildings. There was once a wall around thetown, and one of the gates of this still remains. There is a tower oneach side of the gateway, and the sentry-boxes, and loopholes throughwhich the guards used to look out for Indians and other enemies, arestill there. Along the harbor edge of the town is a wall nearly a milelong, built at great expense by the United States Government as adefense against the encroachments of the sea. This is called the seawall, and its smooth top, four feet wide, is a favorite promenade.Walking northward on this wall, or on the street beside it, if you likethat better, we reach, a little outside of the town, what I consider themost interesting feature of St. Augustine. This is the old fort of SanMarco, which, since it came into the possession of our government, hasbeen renamed Fort Marion.
THE SPANISH COAT-OF-ARMS.]
The old fort is not a ruin, but is one of the best-preserved specimensof the style of fortification of the Middle Ages. We cross the moat andthe drawbridge, and over the stone door-way we see the Spanishcoat-of-arms, and under it an inscription stating that the fort wasbuilt during the reign of King Ferdinand VI of Spain, with the names andtitles of the dons who superintended the work. It took sixty years tobuild the fort, and nearly all the work was done by Indians who werecaptured and made slaves for the purpose. Passing through the solemnentrance, we come to an open square surrounded by the buildings andwalls of the fort, which, in all, cover about an acre of ground. On theright is an inclined plane which serves as a stairway to reach theramparts where the cannon were placed. The _terre-plein_, or wide, flatsurface of the ramparts, makes a fine walk around the four sides of thefort from which we can have views of land and sea. At each corner was awatch-tower, three of which remain; and into these one can mount, andthrough the narrow slits of windows get a view of what is going onoutside without being seen himself. At one end of the fort is the oldSpanish chapel, and all around the square are the rooms that used to beoccupied by the officers and the soldiers. Into the chapel the condemnedprisoners used to be taken to hear their last mass before being marchedup to the north rampart and shot.
Down in the foundations of the fort are dungeons into which no ray ofsunlight can enter. After the fort came into the possession of ourgovernment, a human skeleton was found in one of the dungeons, chainedto a staple in the wall; and in another dungeon, without door or windowand completely walled up, there were discovered two iron cages which hadhung from the walls, each containing a human skeleton. The supports ofone of the cages had rusted away, and it had fallen down, but the otherwas still in its place. A great many romantic stories were told aboutthese skeletons, and by some persons it was supposed that they were theremains of certain heirs to the Spanish throne whose existence it wasdesirable utterly to blot out. One of the skeletons was that of a womanor girl. The cages and skeletons have been removed, but we can go intothe dungeons if we take a lantern. Anything darker or blacker than theseunderground cells cannot be imagined. I have seen dungeons in Europe,but none of them were so hopelessly awful as these.
In another part of the fort is a cell in which Osceola, the celebratedIndian chief, was once imprisoned, in company with another chief namedWild Cat. There is a little window near the top of the cell, protectedby several iron bars; and it is said that Wild Cat starved himself untilhe was thin enough to squeeze between two of the bars, having firstmounted on the shoulders of Osceola in order to reach them. Whether thestarving part of the story is true or not, it is certain that he escapedthrough the window.
When I last visited San Marco, it was full of Indian prisoners who hadbeen captured in the far West. Some of them were notorious for theircruelties and crimes, but in the fort they were all peaceable enough. Itwas one of these Indians, a big, ugly fellow, who lighted me into thedungeon of the skeleton-cages.
This fort, which is in many respects like a great castle, is not builtof ordinary stone, but of coquina, a substance formed by theaccumulation of sea-shells which, in the course of ages, have unitedinto a mass like solid rock. On Anastasia Island, opposite St.Augustine, there are great quarries from which the coquina stone istaken, and of this material nearly the whole town is built. It isinteresting to visit one of these quarries, and observe how in theupper strata the shells are quite distinct, while the lower we look downthe more and more solid and stone-like the masses become.
The harbor of St. Augustine is a portion of the sea cut off by AnastasiaIsland. Southward, the Matanzas River extends from the harbor;
and inall these waters there is fine fishing. On the sea-beaches there is goodbathing, for the water is not too cold even in winter. St. Augustine isan attractive place at all seasons of the year, and its three superbhotels--the Ponce de Leon, the Alcazar, and the Cordova--are among themost celebrated in America. In winter people come down from the Northbecause its air is so warm and pleasant, and in summer people from theSouthern States visit it because its sea-breezes are so cool andrefreshing. It is a favorable resort for yachts, and in its wide, smoothharbor may often be seen some of the most beautiful vessels of thisclass.
St. Augustine is not only a delightful place in which to stay, but it iseasy to reach from there some points which are of great interest totravelers. The great St. John's River is only fourteen miles away, andis connected with the town by a little railroad. At Tocoi, the riverterminus of the railroad, people who wish to penetrate into the heart ofFlorida, with its great forests and lakes and beautiful streams, cantake a steamer and sail up the St. John's, which, by the way, flowsnorthward some two hundred miles. In some parts the river is six mileswide, resembling a lake, and in its narrow portions the shores are verybeautiful.
About forty miles above Tocoi the Ocklawaha River runs into the St.John's, and there are few visitors to St. Augustine who do not desire totake a trip up the little river which is in many respects the mostromantic and beautiful stream in the world. At Tocoi we take a smallsteamboat which looks like a very narrow two-story house mounted upon alittle canal-boat, and in this we go up the St. John's until we see onthe right an opening in the tree-covered banks. This is the mouth of theOcklawaha, and, entering it, we steam directly into the heart of one ofthe great forests of Florida. The stream is very narrow, and full ofturns and bends. Indeed, its name, which is Indian, signifies "crookedwater"; and sometimes the bow of the boat has even to be pushed aroundby men with long poles. Of course we go slowly, but no one objects tothat, for we do not wish to hurry through such scenery as this. On eachside we see green trees with their thick evergreen foliage, with vinesand moss hanging from many of them, and the ground beneath covered withthe luxuriant shrubbery which grows in these warm regions.
Sometimes we can see through the trees into the distant recesses of theforest, and then again we are shut in by walls of foliage. Now and thenwe may see an alligator sunning himself on a log, and as our boatapproaches he rolls over into the water and plumps out of sight.Water-turkeys, whose bodies are concealed in the bushes, run out theirlong necks to look at us, presenting the appearance of snakes dartingfrom between the leaves; while curlews, herons, and many other birds areseen on the banks and flying across the river. In some places the streamwidens, and in the shallower portions near the banks grow many kinds oflilies, beautiful reeds, and other water-plants. For long distancesthere is no solid ground on either side of the river, the waterpenetrating far into the forest and forming swamps. Near the edge of theriver we frequently see myriads of tree-roots bent almost at rightangles, giving the trees the appearance of standing on spider-legs inthe water.
Sometimes the forest opens overhead, but nearly all the way we arecovered by a roof of green, and at every turn appear new scenes ofbeauty and luxuriance. Occasionally the banks are moderately high, andwe see long stretches of solid ground covered with verdure. There is onespot where two large trees stand, one on each bank, close to the water,and the distance between the two is so small that as our boat glidesthrough this natural gateway there is scarcely a foot of room to spareon either side.
Although the river is such a little one that we are apt to think all thetime we are sailing on it that we must soon come to the end of itsnavigation, we go on more than a hundred miles before we come to theplace where we stop and turn back. The trip up the Ocklawaha requiresall the hours of a day and a great part of a night; and this night tripis like a journey through fairyland. On the highest part of the boat isa great iron basket, into which, as soon as it becomes dark, are thrownquantities of pine-knots. These are lighted in order that the pilot maysee how to steer. The blazing of the resinous fuel lights up the forestfor long distances in every direction, and, as may easily be imagined,the effect is wonderfully beautiful. When the fire blazes high the sceneis like an illuminated lacework of tree-trunks, vines, leaves, andtwigs, the smallest tendril shining out bright and distinct; whilethrough it all the river gleams like a band of glittering silver. Then,as the pine-knots gradually burn out, the illumination fades and fadesaway until we think the whole glorious scene is about to melt intonothing, when more sticks are thrown on, the light blazes up again, andwe have before us a new scene with different combinations of illuminatedfoliage and water.
It often happens that during the night our little steamer crowds itselfto one side of the river and stops. Then we may expect to see a splendidsight. Out of the dark depths of the forest comes a glowing, radiantapparition, small at first, but getting larger and larger until it movesdown upon us like a tangle of moon and stars drifting through the trees.
This is nothing but another little steamboat coming down the river withits lighted windows and decks, and its blazing basket of pine-knots.There is just room enough for her to squeeze past us, and then herradiance gradually fades away in the darkness behind us.
FORT MARION--VIEW FROM WATER-BATTERY.]
We travel thus, night and day, until we reach Silver Springs, which isthe end of our journey. This is a small lake so transparent that we cansee down to the very bottom of it, and watch the turtles and fishes asthey swim about. A silver coin or any small object thrown into the watermay be distinctly seen lying on the white sand far beneath us. The landis high and dry about Silver Springs, and the passengers generally go onshore and stroll through the woods for an hour or two. Then we reembarkand return to St. Augustine as we came.
It must not be supposed that St. Augustine contains nothing butbuildings of the olden time. Although many parts of the town are thesame as they were in the old Spanish days, and although we may even findthe descendants of the Minorcans who were once its principal citizens,the city now contains many handsome modern dwellings and hotels, some ofwhich are exceptionally large and grand. Hundreds of people from theNorth have come down to this city of orange-scented air, eternalverdure, and invigorating sea-breezes, and have built handsome houses;and during the winter there is a great deal of bustle and life in thenarrow streets, in the Plaza, and on the sunny front of the town. Manyof the shops are of a kind only to be found in semi-tropical towns bythe sea, and have for sale bright-colored sea-beans, ornaments made offish-scales of every variety of hue, corals, dried sea-ferns, and everso many curiosities of the kind. We may even buy, if we choose, somelittle black alligators, alive and brisk and about a foot long. As tofruit, we can get here the best oranges in the world, which come fromthe Indian River in the southern part of Florida, and many sorts oftropical fruits that are seldom brought to Northern cities.
If St. Augustine were like most American cities, and had been built byus or by our immediate ancestors, and presented an air of newness andprogress and business prosperity, its delightful climate and its naturalbeauties would make it a most charming place to visit. But if we add tothese attractions the fact that here alone we can see a bit of the oldworld without leaving our young Republic, and that in two or three daysfrom the newness and busy din of New York or Chicago we may sit upon theramparts of a medieval fort, and study the history of those olden dayswhen the history of Spain, England, and France was also the history ofthis portion of our own land,--we cannot fail to admit that this littletown of coquina walls and evergreen foliage and traditions of old-worldantiquity occupies a position which is unique in the United States.