The existing fortifications of San Juan have all been added and extended at different periods.  Father Torres Vargas, in his chronicles of San Juan, says that the castle grounds of San Felipe del Morro were laid out in 1584.  The construction cost 2,000,000 ducats.[37] The Boqueron, or Santiago fort, the fort of the Canuelo, and the extensions of the Morro were constructed during the administration of Gabriel Royas (1599 to 1609).  Governor Henriquez began the circumvallation of the city in 1630, and his successor, Sarmiento, concluded it between the years 1635 and 1641.  Fort San Cristobal was begun in the eighteenth century and completed in 1771.  Some fortifications of less importance were added in the nineteenth century.

When Caraza reported, in 1555, that the first steps in the fortification of the capital had been taken, the West Indian seas swarmed with French privateers, and their depredations on Spanish commerce and ill-protected possessions continued till Philip II signed the treaty of peace at Vervins in 1598.

But before that, war with England had been declared, and a more formidable enemy than the French was soon to appear before the capital of this much-afflicted island.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 36:  The inscription on the upper front wall of the building is:  “During the reign of her Majesty, Dona Isabel II, the Count of Mirasol being Captain-General, Santos Cortijo, Colonel of Engineers, reconstructed this royal fort in 1846.”]

[Footnote 37:  Ducat, a coin struck by a duke, worth, in silver, about $1.15, in gold, twice as much.  It was also a nominal money worth eleven pesetas and one maravedi.]

CHAPTER XVII

DRAKE’S ATTACK ON SAN JUAN

1595

Of all the English freebooters that preyed upon Spain and her colonies from the commencement of the war in 1585 to the signing of peace in 1604, Francis Drake was the greatest scourge and the most feared.

Drake early distinguished himself among the fraternity of sea-rovers by the boldness of his enterprises and the intensity of his hatred of the Spaniards.  When still a young man, in 1567-’68, he was captain of a small ship, the Judith, one of a fleet of slavers running between the coast of Africa and the West Indies, under the command of John Hawkyns, another famous freebooter.  In the harbor of San Juan de Ulua the Spaniards took the fleet by stratagem; the Judith and the Minion, with Hawkyns on board, being the only vessels that escaped.  Young Drake’s experiences on that occasion fixed the character of his relations to the Dons forever afterward.  He vowed that they should pay for all he had suffered and all he had lost.

At that time the Spaniards were ostensibly still friends with England.  To Drake they were then and always treacherous and forsworn enemies.  In 1570 he made a voyage to the West Indies in a bark of forty tons with a private crew.  In the Chagres River, on the coast of Nombre de Dios, there happened to be sundry barks transporting velvets and taffetas to the value of 40,000 ducats, besides gold and silver.  They were all taken.