Excerpt from The British Siege of St. Augustine in 1740: Castillo De San Marcos National Monument, Fla

This report fulfills the requirements of Resource Study Proposal H-14 for Castillo de San Marcos National Monument. As requested, the study traces the origin of the British attack on St. Augustine in 1740 and ascertains its objective, the strength of the combatants, existing defenses or the besieged town, routes and plans of the besiegers, tac tical dispositions and maneuvering, outcome of the siege and blockade, and reasons for the English failure to conquer Spanish Florida.

As far as operations are concerned, we have followed the day-to-day English accounts of this event. These accounts are in the form of numerous letters by British officers, abstracts from journals, and depositions of several key participants, most of them found in the Report of the South Carolina Assembly There is no complete day-to-day account of Spanish Operations because, as they were the besieged, they naturally pursued a passive resistance and just waited for events to happen on the British camps in order to act accordingly. While the British sources are enriched with the different and often conflicting opinions of many land and naval officers, what is known about the Spaniards during the siege comes from the pen of the Spanish governor. Although he wrote numerous letters to the governor of Cuba, on whom he depended for aid, practically nothing is said in them about the drama that took place inside the walls of the besieged Castillo. This kind of human interest information is undoubtedly found in the voluminous papers dealing with the residencia (administrative review) of the Spanish governor, not available for this report. Outside of the above limitation of sources, the study that follows covers the subject of the siege as exhaustively as was possible.

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