The War of Jenkins' Ear by Robert Gaudi

Author:Robert Gaudi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

11.

Accounts vary as to the composition and strength of Oglethorpe’s army as it left Georgia for the invasion of Florida in late May, 1740. Some historians say Oglethorpe commanded, in addition to his own regiment of roughly 600 regulars, about a thousand South Carolina militiamen, both mounted and afoot, under Colonel Vander Dussen, and perhaps 200 Creek Indians. Others that the Creeks sent 1100 braves to assist Oglethorpe in his siege of the Spanish fortress. Thus, estimates of his full strength vary from 900 to 2,000 effectives, not counting the men aboard eight Royal Navy vessels sent by Admiral Vernon from the Jamaica Station to blockade the port city. These sailors and marines serving under Commodore Vincent Pearce in Flamborough, arrived on the station June 1 to a nasty surprise.

The endless delays perpetrated by the South Carolina legislature had allowed Governor Montiano to assemble a small defensive fleet composed of six “half-galleys” (small maneuverable shallow draft vessels fitted out with sail and oars and nine-pound cannon). These half-galleys suddenly covered all water-borne approaches to the city through the shoals of the Matanzas inlet and across the St. Augustine bar, which drew only nine feet of water. They were also commanded by an able and ruthless Spanish officer: none other than Juan de Leon Fandiño, the notorious guarda costa captain who had cut off Jenkins’s ear. Pearce’s warships drawing more water than Fandiño’s half-galleys, might only cross the bar into the Matanzas with difficulty and unmolested; thus the presence of these little vessels effectively neutralized the Royal Navy’s threat to St. Augustine.

When Pearce dropped anchor off Anastasia Island, a sandy barrier between the Matanzas and the sea, the Spanish immediately abandoned the defensive batteries there. The Commodore interpreted this Spanish retreat in the face of a superior British force as an act of cowardice; in fact, it had been ordered by Montiano as part of a well-considered strategy. The governor had decided to concentrate all his forces and supplies behind the Castillo de San Marcos’s stout walls in preparation for a long siege. He planned to rely on Florida’s natural defenses (heat, hurricanes, malarial mosquitos) to defeat the British; all he had to do, he reasoned, was hold out through the summer.

Now, as seen through Pearce’s spyglass, the Castillo de San Marcos presented a formidable obstacle to British siege plans. The oldest masonry fort still standing in what is now the United States, the Castillo was then also the strongest, designed by noted Spanish military engineer Ignacio Diaz, and built over a period of twenty-three years, beginning in 1695. Its star-shaped layout and deep, water-filled moat followed all of Vauban’s defensive principles, with a Floridian twist. It had been constructed out of “coquina,” a peculiar local limestone, half stone-half shell and quite soft, but nevertheless known for its ability to endure a serious pounding: cannon balls, impact absorbed by the spongy coquina, would simply lodge in the huge, porous blocks of its glacis and hang there like boils on a pockmarked face.

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