Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

WORLD—FLORIDA COQUINA

  And under Anastasia’s verdant sky,

  I saw St. Mark’s grim bastions, piles of stone.

  Planting their deep foundations in the sea,

  And speaking to the eye a thousand things,

  Of Spain, a thousand heavy histories.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “St. Augustine”

  HARDLY ANYONE THINKS that clams changed the world. Most are benign bivalves toiling away in the sand or resting quietly in the sea. If we do consider them, we are usually thinking about food, though perhaps the most famous mollusk in the world is the one that supports Venus in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Botticelli depicts the Roman goddess of beauty and love using the shell as a mode of transport as she arrives on land, blown there by the winds. Although unrealistic as a way to travel, Botticelli’s shell does fit the classic image of a clam, something trod underfoot.

  Thus some may find it odd that a bivalve, and one much smaller than the one that carried the lovely Venus, was seminal to the early colonization history of North America. Carolina governor James Moore was the first to discover the power of the clam when he lay siege to the Spanish colonial town of St. Augustine, in 1702.

  Ambitious and greedy, Moore had arrived in Charles Town (later shortened to Charleston) in 1700 to govern the southernmost of England’s American colonies. Founded in 1670, Charles Town had suffered smallpox, an earthquake, fire, and the yellow fever, but was a thriving town of four thousand when Moore arrived.1 He recognized, however, that in order for Carolina to survive and prosper, the English had to defeat Spain’s strongest North American colonial outpost, St. Augustine, in what is now Florida. In addition, he worried about the growing strength of France, which had established Louisiana in 1699 and had recently allied itself with Spain.

  A French-Spanish partnership had developed because of the death of Spanish monarch Charles II in November 1700. The childless Charles had named his great-nephew Philip of Anjou as his successor. Philip was also Louis XIV’s grandson, and Philip’s ascension would unite Spain and France and pose a significant threat to England. To counter Philip’s claim to the Spanish throne, England’s William III allied with Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I to support Leopold’s son as heir to the Spanish crown.

  At stake was domination of Europe and the New World. Spain controlled Mexico, southwestern North America, Central America, and Cuba. France laid claim to North America from the mouth of the Mississippi River north to Canada, and England dominated the eastern seaboard, Jamaica, and Barbados. In May 1702 fighting began in what is known in Europe as the War of the Spanish Succession and in America as Queen Anne’s War, after the queen who assumed the English throne following William’s death.

  When Moore learned of the fighting in August 1702 he recognized its significance and suggested to his Commons House of Assembly that “the takeing of St. Augustine before it be Strengthened with French forses opens to us an easie and plaine way to Remove the French (a no less dangerous Enemy in time of Peace than Warr).”2 The Assembly approved Moore’s plans and provided two thousand pounds sterling for expenses. His force of five hundred English and three hundred Indians sailed south from Charles Town in fourteen boats under the command of Moore and Colonel Robert Daniel.3

  About fifty miles north of St. Augustine, the Carolina army attacked their first Spanish outpost, a guardhouse and small village at the north end of Santa Maria Island, at midnight on November 3, 1702. Two additional villages on Spain’s northernmost Atlantic Coast settlement succumbed the next day. Moving south, by November 5 the English had destroyed the missions of San Juan del Puerto, Santa Cruz, and Piribiriba. Nothing now stood between eight hundred militia and St. Augustine. Three days later Moore reached St. Augustine with thirteen ships and many of his men. Daniel had taken the rest of the soldiers south overland.

  Two hundred and forty nine Spanish soldiers under the command of Governor Joseph de Zúñiga y Cerda defended St. Augustine. Zúñiga had recently told the town’s inhabitants of Moore’s successes to the north, warned them of attack from the sea and from Daniel’s land force, and finally ordered everyone inside the town’s fort. He did not inform them he had sent urgent pleas for help to Havana because St. Augustine was short of men and ammunition. Nor did he tell them that the infantry consisted partly of old men, invalids, and young boys and that the gunners “had no service record, lack discipline, and have only a slight knowledge of the [fort’s] bronze and iron guns.” With everyone crowded into the fort the townspeople probably surmised the situation.

  Despite the lack of manpower and firepower, and a fort overcrowded with fifteen hundred people and their farm animals, Zúñiga’s situation was not completely desperate. Well located, St. Augustine stretched for about one-half mile south of the fort along the Matanzas River. A marsh protected the land north of the fort. East of the river a barrier island, Anastasia Island, reduced coastal access. At Anastasia’s north end, hard-to-navigate sandbars created a treacherous entrance across the narrow inlet to St. Augustine’s harbor. The west offered the only easy route to town.

  Zúñiga’s fort also provided a significant advantage against invaders. Known as the Castillo de San Marcos, its construction had been completed only six years earlier, and it was the tenth fort in St. Augustine. The previous nine had succumbed to pirates, fire, and water. The castillo’s layout consisted of an open, 150-foot-wide square courtyard surrounded by storage rooms, living quarters, a jail, and a chapel. Arrowhead-shaped bastions with 90-foot-long sides jutted out from each corner. The white plastered stone walls were 16 feet thick at the base and rose 26 feet above a moat, which could be flooded with seawater. When the fort’s gates closed, the castillo was a secure island with three freshwater wells and enough food to last several months.

  What made the fort nearly perfect for Zúñiga’s situation was the stone used in the walls. Quarried from Anastasia Island and known as coquina (ko-kee-na), it looked like what you’d get if you took a mound of whole and broken shells, mixed in a dilute solution of Elmer’s glue, and let it dry. People liken coquina’s consistency to a Rice Krispies Treat or a granola bar with shells and shell fragments replacing the oats. Either way, the dominant component by far of coquina was a shell, from the clam that changed colonial history. These shells gave coquina a property found in no other rock. Instead of breaking or cracking when hit by cannon shells, the cavity-rich coquina absorbed or deflected the iron projectiles.

  Aerial view of Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, Florida.

  Zúñiga did not know of the unique qualities of coquina. No one did. No one had yet attacked the fort. And no other significant building in the world had been made of coquina.

  Moore began his siege on November 10 when Colonel Daniel arrived with his men after marching down the coast from Piribiriba. With the Spanish holed up in the castillo, the English took all of St. Augustine, but not before the Spaniards stampeded 160 cattle through Daniel’s men and into the dry moat. The English set up around the perimeter of the castillo and began to dig trenches to get closer. They also sailed their boats across the sandbars that protected the harbor and began to fire cannons from sea and land. The Spanish responded by burning strategically located houses where Moore’s men could hide and shoot anyone entering or leaving the fort.

  As the siege progressed,Moore’s circle tightened. By November 24, he had located four of his biggest guns only 750 feet from the castillo. At one point, a twenty-four-hour-long battle broke out with the British firing canisters, round shot, bar shot, and broken glass. The cannon fire could not break the walls of clamshell.

  Moore’s men continued to dig their trenches closer to the fort, supplemented by erecting rows of gabions, rock-filled cages that provided a protected shooting site for gunners. They also burned the southern end of St. Augustine. By December 19 they had advanced to within pistol shot of the castillo, and still their artillery did little damage to the massive, spongy walls. They would get no closer.

  Four Spanish man-
of-war gunships arrived the day after Christmas with supplies and men from Cuba. Moore realized the hopelessness of his situation, burned four of his ships, abandoned four others, set fire to the remaining houses in St. Augustine, and retreated north on foot to Charles Town.

  When the gates of the Castillo de San Marcos reopened on December 30, the Spaniards found little left of St. Augustine. The English had destroyed the main church, the governor’s palace, and all farms, fields, crops, and cattle. Only twenty houses remained in the desolate landscape. But St. Augustine was still Spanish, and Spain still retained control over Florida and its lucrative trade routes. The English would not attempt another attack on St. Augustine for thirty-eight years. All that had saved the Spanish was their castillo made of clamshells.

  Joe Brehm has been a National Park Service ranger at the Castillo de San Marcos for thirteen years. Usually he wears the typical green and gray NPS uniform, but on weekends he may wear a custom-made red and blue wool, cotton, and linen uniform of an eighteenth-century Spanish artilleryman. On those days Brehm gets to perform one of the favorite parts of his job, shooting a six-pound cannon. And it is a performance that he and his team solemnly reenact in Spanish: the soldiers’ ritually loading, lighting, and firing cannons from atop the fort.

  The six-pound cannons use three pounds of gunpowder to fire a three-inch-diameter solid iron ball one and a half miles. The reenactors at the castillo shoot bread wrapped in tinfoil instead of a ball. It makes a tremendous sound, provides food for birds in the harbor, and makes you wonder how many Spanish soldiers went deaf or ended up with hearing problems. At maximum firepower the castillo had seventy-seven cannons, the largest of which shot twenty-four-pound balls, three miles at six hundred miles per hour.

  “Hollywood gets it all wrong. Movies show cannons going boom-boom-boom-boom-boom all the time,” said Brehm.4 “In reality, they could shoot one shot every ten minutes. Plus, when these guys were holed up in the fort, they had to deal with how much gunpowder they had and not waste it.” In addition to firing cannons, soldiers protected the fort by pulling up the drawbridge that spanned the moat and connected the ravelin to the main fort. The ravelin is the triangular outbuilding that served as guardhouse. It is the only part of the castillo that was never finished.

  “One of the first questions most people ask after crossing the bridge,” Brehm said, is ‘Where’s the water?’ I always hate to disappoint them and tell them that once again Hollywood is misleading us. The moat was usually dry.” When necessary, the castillo’s moat could be filled as the tide rose and flowed through a pipe into the forty-foot-wide, eight-foot-deep space. After the United States acquired the castillo along with the rest of Florida in 1821, by treaty and not by battle—proving again that the pen is mightier than the sword—engineers filled in the eastern part of the moat and built up the sea wall to support cannons.5

  From 1938 to 1995 the National Park Service flooded the moat daily.6 The constant supply of water, however, weakened the west side of the fort, which was the last part of the construction and had been hastily erected. Wide vertical cracks began to appear in its two western bastions. The cracks are still visible, although mostly filled in with mortar.

  Walking along the base of the castillo, Brehm continued to dispel myths. During the battle with Moore, the Spanish supposedly snuck out of the fort at night and dug out the balls that had stuck in the walls and shot them back at the English the next day. “The Spanish had no such luck; a ball hitting a stone wall, even one made of coquina, would be useless by being flattened on one side,” he said.

  People also think that the holes in the fort’s walls are from those cannonballs or from a 1740 siege. Instead, pigeons probably made the bigger ones by enlarging weak spots in the coquina for nests. “They are the only birds that eat the fort. They look at it as one big cuttlefish bone and chip away at it and eat what they chip off,” Brehm said. The birds eat the shells for gastroliths or to provide extra calcium for females during breeding season.7

  Pointing to hundreds of small holes dotting the lower eight feet of several walls, Brehm said “Everyone thinks ‘Oh, firing squad.’ That’s not what happened. They are kind of brokenhearted to find that out, too.” During the Civil War, Union soldiers on guard duty would patrol from the upper level of the fort with live ammunition in their guns. Because explosive ordnance was stored in the fort, the soldiers couldn’t take their guns back downstairs, in case one accidentally discharged. They could either shoot their guns, often into the fort’s walls, or trade them for an unloaded gun with the next soldier on duty. Once a month a master armorer would pry out the balls and cast new ones. At least someone took advantage of the wall’s absorbing capacity.

  I wanted to chip off a piece of coquina or at least reach out and touch the bivalves, but park service rules forbid fondling. I had never seen any stone like coquina. Every block of the fort contains shells. Billions upon billions of shells, in particular a one-quarter-to-one-inch-long species called a coquina clam (Donax variabilis). Coquina means “little shell” in Spanish. Some blocks are pure Donax but most contain a mishmash of coquina, surf, ark, and Venus clams, along with cockles, bits of starfish, oyster, and quahog. Sort of a conchologist’s dream.

  Down in the moat were hanging gardens of ferns, grasses, and purple asters, which had taken root in the porous stone. The gardens covered the walls every thirty feet or so, wherever water drained scuppers from the courtyard roof. And the plants didn’t just grow outside. In one of the courtyard rooms in the 1930s, the park service used to maintain a “fern room” almost completely covered in maidenhair fern. Now only a few ferns grew in this room.

  The walls were plant rich because the coquina is shell rich. The heterogeneous mix of shells make a Swiss-cheese-like surface, where seeds can land and get established. Water accumulates in the cavities, further turning the coquina into a nursery. During a recent botanical survey, botanists found 153 plant species within the park, including 56, ranging from moss to elm, that had colonized the hanging gardens of the fort’s walls. Cyanobacteria, nematodes, fungi, and diatoms have also established themselves on the coquina.8 It is quite a cozy place.

  Despite the beauty of the flowers, maintenance workers at the castillo constantly pull out the plants by hand. They don’t want the roots to get established and do what cannonballs couldn’t—destroy the fort. Clearing the walls of plants takes about six months. At least the plants grow fast enough that you can still see this wonderful link between geology and botany.

  From the outside wall of the moat, Brehm crossed a twenty-foot-wide grassy area, called the covered way, to another coquina wall. This one rose another four feet; during the 1700s it would have been several feet higher. The wall provided a safe, or covert, zone in which soldiers could move around during battles. “No one could be seen. Guys would pop up out of the earth and shoot down the glacis. The wall created a human chain gun [or machine gun],” said Brehm.

  The glacis (glah-see) was the open field that surrounded the fort. It sloped down from the covered way at such an angle that cannons from the fort could be tilted at their lowest angle and hit any enemy soldiers ascending the glacis toward the fort. Because the cannons shot in a straight line, the cannonballs would clear the men in the covered way. “With men popping out of the covered way and the cannons on the fort, it turned the whole glacis into a killing field,” said Brehm. “The castillo really was the ultimate evolution of the military fort.”

  Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established Florida’s first permanent settlement, St. Augustine, on September 8, 1565. Before him had come Spaniards Juan Ponce de Leon, who sought youth and named Florida, and Hernando de Soto, who sought gold and introduced pigs to the New World, as well as Frenchman René de Laudonnière, who sought religious freedom and established a settlement, Fort Caroline, at the mouth of the St. John’s River, about forty miles north of St. Augustine.9 Menéndez simply wanted to rid Florida of the French.

  Within two weeks he met with success by de
stroying Laudonnière’s colony. The Spanish now ruled Florida, which was critical to the defense of Spain’s colonies in the New World. By extending so far south, Florida controlled access to Mexico and put Cuba and Spain’s other Caribbean colonies within easy reach by ship. Furthermore, the Florida Current, the beginning of the Gulf Stream, shoots north along the coast. The fast water was dangerous and sank many boats, but it also propelled Spanish ships and their gold along the fastest route back to Europe.

  Menéndez’s first act was to build a fort in a great lodge given to him by a native chief. Relations soured, however, and by April the natives had burned the fort to the ground.10 Seeking safer territory, Menéndez moved his men to nearby Anastasia Island, where they erected a triangular wooden fort surrounded by a moat. This time the sea felled the structure. Another fort followed but mutinous soldiers torched it. In 1572 the Spanish moved back across the harbor and began building another fort.

  Although they had probably encountered the widespread and abundant coquina on the island, the primary building materials there were rot-resistant cedar and cypress and tall, straight pines. Fort number four also succumbed to the sea. On the fifth attempt the Spanish tried to strengthen the fort by capping the high inner walls with mortar, made from lime (a binding agent) and sand. Six years later, though, it was “nothing more than a . . . storehouse for mice!”11

  Although the next fort had the honor of being the first one named— San Juan de Pinos—it also had the dubious honor of shortest life. In early June 1586 global circumnavigator and pirate Sir Francis Drake arrived at St. Augustine. He burned the village and the fort to the ground.

  With Drake’s razing of town and fort, St. Augustinians embarked upon colonial America’s first urban renewal.12 They rebuilt the town and the fort—number seven—which received its long-standing name San Marcos. Again wood was the building material of choice, although a new governor had written the king in 1583 and suggested that coquina would make a good fort.