A Shot Across The Bow

Imagine this: it is 1630  hours on a bright sunny day in the Mantanzas River just inside the inlet from the Atlantic.  You are just waking up from a much needed sleep after an all night passage from elsewhere.  Just as you stumble topside with the idea that this is on very beautiful place, especially the fortress just two hundred yards to your west, the peace is shattered by a six pounder erupting in your direction.  You are showered by day old bread used for wadding in the cannon.  The National Park Service demonstrates the Spanish gun drill with all commands faithfully given according to the drill of the time in Spanish.  All commands in Spanish except for "cover your ears".  The six pounder  was most likely not used at this fortress since much larger siege guns were required, yet this little doozie would, according to the ranger, but a ball in the lighthouse some 1.5 miles away.  The crews of the time enlisted at age fifteen and the enlistment was for life.  Thus, they got pretty proficient at gunnery.  The twenty pounder would put a ball on target over three miles away. 

Inside the oldest house in the oldest town.

All Spanish houses were single story and had no street side doors.  One entered a courtyard then the house.  This one was built that way.  When the British took over, they added second stories and street side doors.  There are 31 such houses in St. Augustine which is all that is left after the British tried to burn the town down. 

We whipped by the Fountain Of Youth yesterday.  Had some of that water and today we are wrinkle free and thinking about a marathon this weekend.  The tour driver told us of a elderly lady he met sitting on the curb at this place holding a cute baby.  She was sobbing uncontrollably.  She told him that thirty minutes ago, after consuming the water, this was her husband.  The park has a planetarium that explained how the ancient mariners used the stars to navigate.  Briefly, they would mark the position of a constellation as it descended in the morning sky.  They used the astrolabe to fix its angle in the night sky.  They would keep the star at the same angle as they sailed east to west.  St. Augustine is at 29.59 degrees longitude.  Leaving Spain and keeping that star at that angle, they could hit this place fairly accurately.  If you consider that in the sixteenth century, they still were not sure about that flat earth thing and had no maps.  Talk about blind faith.