Forts of the Americas

On the northwest shoulder of South America, looking out over the blue waters of the Caribbean, an ancient citadel stands guard above a Spanish city. Three thousand miles to the north, where the Gulf of St. Lawrence meets the gray rollers of the North Atlantic, the guns of another once-menacing fortress stare sullenly across a bleak, empty sea. The tropical city is Cartagena, Colombia. The northern bastion is Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, once called the “Gibraltar of the West.”

The story of Cartagena, Louisbourg, and a handful of similar strongholds is the story of the European conquest of America. Built far apart in time and distance, every one of them embodies the same reasoning: the attempts to preserve a colonial empire by hiding behind stone walls.

The discovery by Christopher Columbus and those who followed him at the dawn of the 16th century to a hitherto unknown land mass far to the west touched off a scramble among European states to carve out possessions in this New World. As the riches of the Western Hemisphere revealed themselves, the competition became hotter. A century and a half of warfare determined the winners.

Spain got there first. Within 50 years of Columbus’s landfall Spanish arms had explored and conquered Mexico, the Greater Antilles, the north coast of South America, Central America, Peru, and Chile. The Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico became a Spanish lake that outsiders entered at their peril. From settlements in Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Cuba, Mexico, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico poured an increasing flow of treasure into the coffers of the Spanish crown and aristocracy.

Not all the treasure got there. As early as 1522, French privateers intercepted two caravels carrying Hernando Cortez’s first shipment of Aztec loot from Mexico, most of which wound up in the hands of Francis I.

That capture occurred near the Azores, but the freebooters, often with the under-the-table connivance of the governments, were soon hunting in the Caribbean. Corsairs—the Spanish called them pirates—even amused themselves by capturing and sacking inadequately defended Spanish settlements. Before long, English ships had joined in, and Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach were inscribing their names in the lurid saga of the Spanish Main.

They lacked the staying power to shake Spain’s grip on the Caribbean, but their depredations demanded countermeasures. Gradually Spanish shippers and ship captains worked out a system of convoys for mutual protection.

It was only partially successful, however, until the crown turned the problem over to Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. A brilliant planner and cold-blooded character who could order and calmly watch the slaughter of between two hundred and three hundred helpless French prisoners on a Florida beach, Menéndez consolidated convoys into two annual fleets, one bound for Veracruz, Mexico, the other for Portobelo in Panama. After taking on the year’s accumulation of treasure from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela, the fleets wintered in Havana and Cartagena before combining at Havana for the voyage home under strong naval escort.

Menéndez further designated several settlements, among them Havana and Cartagena, as treasure depositories, safe ports of call, trading centers, and naval bases. These were to be heavily fortified.

Drawing plans and giving orders were one thing; getting them obeyed was another. Madrid could issue all the decrees it pleased, but Madrid was far away and the colonists were expert foot draggers. The projected fortifications took generations to complete.

The principal stumbling block was money. Although millions in treasure were extracted from Latin America annually, the Spanish government wasn’t inclined to disgorge any for protection, and the colonies were just as reluctant to pay the bill.

The settlements weren’t particularly cooperative among themselves either. In one crisis, Cartagena hijacked a shipment of gunpowder needed desperately in Havana. Havana retaliated by seizing a cargo of fuses and a lot of shells it didn’t need just to keep them from Cartagena. Nevertheless, after 250 years, the principal colonial cities of the Caribbean had become formidable fortresses.

By the early 1600s, both France and England had succeeded in planting their flags permanently in the New World, England at Jamestown in 1607 and France at Quebec in 1608. A century and a quarter later, a block of 13 English settlements stretched from New England to Georgia, where the founding of Savannah in 1733 put England on a collision course with Spain in Florida. Meanwhile, the French followed the St. Lawrence River into the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi. They established Mobile, Alabama, in 1711 and New Orleans seven years later.

If Spain measured the worth of its new empire in gold, silver, and precious stones, the French and English thought in terms of furs. By the 17th century, the demand for furs in Europe had outstripped the supply. Then, the shell of North America was cracked, and the continent was found to be the greatest source of fine furs the world had known.

Canada, particularly, teemed with the wild animals whose pelts were most prized—and Canada belonged to France. King Louis XIV and his successors fought four wars with England between 1689 and 1763, with North America a major prize.

Thinly stretched along a 3000-mile arc from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to New Orleans, the French had to fight defensively in the New World. Although they were greatly outnumbered, their position was stronger than it appears today to have been. The Canadians were better wilderness fighters and better led than the peaceful English settiers. Furthermore, from 1665 on, France kept regular troops in Canada, whereas the English didn’t send any until 1755.

Since the English weren’t ready to breach the Appalachian rampart, the French hold on the Mississippi Valley was safe. In any event the strategic heart of New France was Quebec, and the St. Lawrence River was its artery. Consequently the serious fighting occurred in the north, where the French launched periodic raids to keep the English off balance and the English tried to cut the St. Lawrence lifeline. There were two practical invasion routes. The first was directly up the river to take Quebec headon. The second went almost due north up the Hudson, through Lakes George and Champlain, then along the Richelieu River to the St. Lawrence between Montreal and Quebec. (“Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne followed this route south to disaster at Saratoga during the Revolution.)

Strong French positions guarded both approaches. The fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island flanked the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, while Quebec itself was probably the strongest natural fastness in North America. To block the Hudson-Lake Champlain route, Fort Ticonderoga straddled the narrow connection between Lakes George and Champlain.

A third important point was Niagara on the bluff overlooking the entrance of the Niagara River into Lake Ontario, about fourteen miles below the mighty cataract. As long as Niagara, Ticonderoga, and Louisbourg remained in French hands, New France was unassailable.

In the end, the French forts failed to bulwark their builder’s position in the New World, just as the Spanish forts had failed. France is gone and Spain is gone, but the forts remain to tell the story of their passing.

CARTAGENA

Three and a half centuries ago, Cartagena de Indias was renowned as the richest trading center and most beautiful city on the Spanish Main. It was the principal emporium for merchandise sent from Spain to its South American colonies and the shipping point for gold, silver, emeralds, and pearls mined in Colombia and Venezuela. Between 1544 and 1741, Spain’s enemies sacked the town five times.

Built on a narrow, low strip of land between the open Caribbean Sea to the north and a huge bay behind, Cartagena was hard to defend. The marshy soil made poor footing for the heavy stone fortifications required in the tropics, and in any case there was no stone to build them with. The only harbor entrance was miles to the south.

Lack of landing beaches, heavy surf, and shallow water that kept bombarding ships at a distance combined to make the direct northern approach quite secure. The back door, however, presented problems beyond the capacities of seventeenth-century weapons and tactics. Once inside the bay an attacker could easily close in from the south.

Over 200 years, as requirements and military tactics changed, Cartagena’s defenses expanded and contracted. From a small log stockade on the harbor side of the town and a small gun battery at Boca Grande the system grew into an elaborate series of six stone forts around the bay, two guarding the entrance, and a seven-mile-long seawall around the city bristling with more than two hundred cannons. The wall alone took more than two centuries to complete.

The core of the system was the citadel of San Felipe de Barajas, a hill slightly southeast of the city in the eighteenth century but now well within it. Initially only a small eight-gun redoubt some 135 feet above sea level, it gradually grew into a massive stone fortress whose ramparts could sweep the city with seventy big guns.

San Felipe was—and still is—an amazing network of tunnels and passageways connecting storage vaults, housing, magazines, and batteries. In the sheer mass of its battlements and in the ingenuity of its water and ventilation systems, the fortress is ranked by engineers as equal, if not superior, to Gibraltar. Today, it is a major tourist attraction.

Unfortunately the individual forts were too far apart to support one another. While they were formidable obstacles to direct attack, they could be cut off by landing parties and reduced one after the other. The gateway batteries, especially, never displayed much enthusiasm for a last-ditch defense.

ST. AUGUSTINE

St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest European settlement and the only walled city in the United States; its guardian, Castillo de San Marcos, is the oldest-standing fortification. Throughout most of the 16th and 17th centuries, though, few would have given a clipped doubloon for its survival. In fact, the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) would gladly have ignored its existence. Mexico had to foot the bills for the upkeep of the lonely outpost, which couldn’t even feed itself.

In the early 1560s, when Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés organized his system for convoying galleons loaded with New World treasure back to Spain, France planted at the mouth of the St. Johns River a colony from which privateers could sally to harass the homebound fleets as they beat up past the Bahamas.

Menéndez reacted ruthlessly. In 1565, he smashed the little French colony and ordered the massacre of some two hundred and fifty helpless prisoners. Then, he established St. Augustine and Fort San Marcos to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.

Militarily the site was excellent. Town and fort were located on a narrow, sandy peninsula with almost impassable marshes on three sides and the fourth side squeezed by a meandering stream. Fort San Marcos commanded the entrance to a long, narrow bay. A shallow sandbar across the harbor mouth kept out large enemy warships.

Before long coquina stone was discovered on nearby Anastasia Island. Coquina stone, a soft stone made of broken seashells cemented together in their own lime under tremendous geological pressure, is ideal for building fortifications. Menéndez immediately recommended a stone fort at St. Augustine, but nobody in Madrid or Mexico City would buy the idea.

For nearly a hundred years, the scraggly settlement lived from hand to mouth while nine wooden stockade forts fell victim, one after another, to time, fire, weather, and termites. Since nothing happened, faraway authorities were lulled into a false sense of security. Every suggestion for bringing San Marcos up to scratch was talked to death.

Then, in 1668, a privateer crew surprised and captured the town. The attackers were English, and they made it clear they meant to come back. The threat was driven home two years later, when England founded Charleston, South Carolina, on land claimed by Spain.

The Spanish government ordered an immediate reconstruction in stone of San Marcos, increased the garrison, and told the viceroy of Mexico to pay up. Construction finally got under way in 1672, but, after a fast start, the project slowed down, and the new Castillo de San Marcos wasn’t finished until 1695.

It was a square structure with triangular bastions at each corner and a ravelin covering the south curtain, which contained the only entrance via a drawbridge over the ditch. Walls of coquina mortared together with oyster-shell lime cement rose thirty-three feet from a 12-foot-thick base. Because the wooden firing deck wasn’t strong enough to withstand the shock of recoil, the fort’s 60 guns were concentrated at the bastions, which were filled in solidly with sand and rubble.

Between 1704 and 1762, a series of earthen outworks were built around the town. The one farthest out, called the Mosa Wall, blocked the only land route between a seaside swamp and the San Sebastian River. Other lines, known as the Cubo and Rosario walls and the Hornwork, completely encircled the citadel and town. These entrenchments were planted on their outward faces with Spanish bayonet, spiky plants whose needle-sharp points made extremely uncomfortable obstacles to infantry attacking under fire. Beginning in 1738, the fort itself was greatly strengthened, and its walls were raised another ten feet.

Reconstruction was nearly finished when Florida was ceded to England at the end of the French and Indian War. Except for Anglicizing the fort’s name to St. Mark, the British let well enough alone until 1783, when Florida was returned to Spain. In 1821 Florida went to the United States, and the fort’s name was changed to Fort Marion, honoring the Swamp Fox of Revolutionary War fame. Long after the obsolete little work had been abandoned as a military post and become a national monument, Congress, in 1942, restored the original title.

The spot, whose Indian name means “Place between Big Waters,” was recognized as one of the most strategic positions between New France and the British colonies long before anything was ever built there. Who held the rocky promontory controlled the easiest and most direct route between the Hudson and St. Lawrence river valleys.

At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, the French moved to secure it. Beginning in the fall of 1755 and continuing into 1758, the fort, with as many as 2000 men on the job, was rushed nearly to completion before the British marched against it.

A standard square with earth-filled stone walls and pointed bastions at the corners, the fort had, in addition, a low outer wall protecting the south side facing Lake Champlain. Two triangular outworks called “demilunes” guarded the north and west faces. (Incidentally, the difference between a demilune and the ravelins at St. Augustine and Niagara is strictly technical. If the outwork is outside the ditch surrounding the curtain walls, it’s a ravelin; if inside, it’s a demilune.)

The enclosure had stone barracks for a 400-man garrison, but during campaigning season an additional 15,000 could be encamped on level ground between the fort and the lake. The walls had embrasures for 90 cannons.

The first attempt to take Fort Carillon, a bungled 1758 assault, was a disaster for the British, but the following year a more careful approach succeeded. A small French delaying garrison held on until the British got within six hundred yards of the walls, then blew up the magazine and fled. The British repaired the damage and changed the name from the softer Carillon to Ticonderoga.

One night in 1775, at the outbreak of the American Revolution, Ethan Alien and his Green Mountain Boys surprised and captured the fort without firing a shot. Among the supplies scooped up were more than a hundred artillery pieces of various sizes, sixty of which Henry Knox later hauled down the Hudson and over the Berkshire Mountains in mid-winter to use in the siege of Boston.

Recaptured by John Burgoyne two years later, the fort repulsed another American attempt to retake it but was evacuated as part of the Burgoyne surrender agreement. The fort was never used again. In a life of slightly more than 25 years, Ticonderoga changed hands four times.

After the Revolution, the site was given by the state of New York to Columbia and Union colleges. In the early 1800s, it was acquired by William F. Pell, a New York merchant, who built a summer home nearby. By then, the fort was derelict, looted of everything that could be carried away, including much of the stone. Pell put a stop to the looting but left things pretty much as he found them.

In the 1880s, however, his great-great-grandson, Stephen Pell, fell in love with the place and vowed that he when he grew up, he would restore it. He began in 1908. When he died in 1950, the restoration was almost finished, and it continues under the guidance of his son, John H. G. Pell, as a family responsibility. In addition to the fortifications themselves, Fort Ticonderoga houses one of the finest small museums of its kind in the United States, depicting the history of the “Place between Big Waters.”