page_title: Manuel de Cendoya
section_title: Castillo de San Marcos
hierarchical_section_title: Manuel de Cendoya / Government of Florida / Castillo de San Marcos
caption_attribution_description: St. Augustine, Florida: Spanish Coquina Quarries. Historical marker.
context_page_description: Manuel de Cendoya was a Spanish soldier who served as governor of Spanish Florida from mid-1671 to mid-1673. His administration is remembered primarily for initiating construction of the Castillo de San Marcos, a masonry fortress whose building had first been ordered by Cendoya's predecessor, Governor Francisco de la Guerra y de la Vega, after the destructive raid of the English privateer Robert Searle in 1668. Work proceeded in 1671, although the first stone was not laid until 1672.
context_section_description: Before assuming the governorship, Cendoya sailed to Mexico in November 1671 to receive the appropriated funds and consult with the Viceroy of New Spain, Sebastián de Toledo, and his military engineers about the construction of a new fort to defend the colony. The present one was a small structure with four bastions made of timbers that were being undermined by tidal waters. It was decided that Cendoya should build a second small wooden fort at the St. Augustine inlet of the Matanzas River (actually a tidal lagoon), and a third to prevent troop landings, as well as a large masonry fort to defend the capital of La Florida. To build all this would require thirty thousand pesos, but then news arrived of the establishment of Charles Town in the British colony of Carolina. Consequently, Cendoya suggested building a fourth fort at Santa Catalina de Guale as well to prevent British incursions southward.  Cendoya gave orders the same year for surveying the grounds where the new blockhouses and the fortress would be erected.
   In April 1671, Cendoya obtained 12,000 pesos in Mexico City to build the fort, as well as acquiring tradesmen, including fifteen masons, stonecutters, lime burners, and plasterers in Havana. The best of the plasterers was Lorenzo Lagunes, who had worked in France, Italy, and Havana, and may have been familiar with treatises on fortification published in Europe; he now served as master of the stonemasons and lime burners. Cendoya chose military engineer Ignacio Daza to supervise construction works on the Castillo; presumably he was responsible for drawing up its plans. To  these workers were added 17 soldiers, several Black slaves from Cuba and one hundred and fifty Native American peons to labor at the fort.
  On August 8, Cendoya opened the coquina quarries on Anastasia Island, where a sedimentary rock, called coquina by the Spanish and composed of the shells of tiny mollusks, was quarried to construct the Castillo. It was over a year, however, before construction began and the first trenches for the fort's foundations were dug. Native Americans hired as laborers cleared trees and brush from the quarry site and removed topsoil to expose the coquina beneath, working with picks, shovels, and tools forged by the town's blacksmith. Labor gangs of dozens of Indians working virtually as slaves transported the coquina on barges from la isla de la Cantera (Anastasia Island) to the construction site, where others carried firewood and shells to burn the lime for the mortar.
  Cendoya even suggested that the Spanish government build four small casemate fortresses: two to guard the entrance to the harbor of St. Augustine, one in Santa Catalina de la Frontera to the north, and another at San Marcos de Apalache to the west, on the Gulf of Mexico. Although the boards of War approved the project, funds were not appropriated.
caption: Spanish Coquina Quarries, on Anastasia Island. Blocks of coquina, a sedimentary rock, were quarried on Anastasia Island and transported on barges to the Castillo.
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