James Oglethorpe is revered as the founder of Georgia. His exploits to protect that colony by invading the Spanish to the south are not as highly regarded.

 

    Spain had for nearly 200 years claimed the entire eastern seaboard, but its only strong garrison was St. Augustine. Carolina seemed too distant to try to defend. Georgia, however, was much closer to home, and the Spanish government would not yield this debatable land to intruders.

   Sensing English intentions in the mid 1730s, Florida Governor Moral Sanchez strengthened his defenses to the north and laid plans to eventually attack the English in Georgia.

   Sanchez' successor in 1737, Manuel de Montiano, suspected the English might strike first, and focused on his St. Augustine defenses. Havana sent 400 fresh troops, new iron cannons, funds to build barracks and patrol boats, and 82 laborers including engineers, bricklayers and stonemasons.

   As war became real, the garrison had 613 fighting men, still no match for Oglethorpe's 1,600 men, seven warships and 40 dugouts for landing parties. But then, there was the invincible Castillo, too. 

   Early this year of 1740, Oglethorpe's troops ranged along the St. Johns River north and west of St. Augustine, taking smaller outposts. In April, they marched from the St. Johns and seized Fort Mose, a northern defense outpost created two years earlier two miles north of St. Augustine.

   By early June the English force had encircled the city. Oglethorpe's heavy ships could not pass the sandbar into the bay, so his siege guns were landed and dragged across Anastasia Island and along the southern point of Vilano, to pummel the Castillo and city.

   Rather than shattering solid stone walls, the traditional European siege strategy, the cannon balls were simply absorbed into the massive but soft coquina walls, which were quickly replastered overnight by the Spanish.

   This whole situation was new - and distasteful - to the English: weeks of staying in one position, under a blazing semi-tropical sun, being attacked by mosquitoes and sand fleas, and now the psychological impact of a fresh new target every day. The English troops were approaching mutiny.

   Perhaps to break the strangling encirclement, discourage the attackers or encourage his defenders, Montiano made a bold decision. On June 25th, he committed nearly half his force to counterattack Fort Mose. The move was totally unexpected, and the Spaniards retook the northern outpost, killing 87 of the English and 35 Indians in the process.

Two weeks later, July 6, Spanish relief ships slipped up the inland waterway through its garrison at Matanzas Inlet. The newly replenished garrison was too much for the English forces, and by July 20 the last of them had pulled out.

  Two decades later, by a Treaty of Paris, the British began a 21-year occupation of Florida, with St. Augustine and its Castillo, which was never to fall in battle.

 

   Excerpts from Oglethorpe in St. Augustine Bedtime Stories. Click for further information on this fascinating historic series