Extracts translated from the Manuscript of the Commandant of St. Augustine, East Florida, Manuel de Montiano, deposited in the public archives at St. Augustine, describing the bombardment of the fort in 1740, by General Oglethorpe.

CASTLE MARCo, or St. Marks, now called Fort Marion, at St. Augustine, East Florida, is the oldest fort in the United States, and is in a remarkable state of preservation. Its gray moss-grown walls, turrets, and battlements, together with the Catholic chapel inside, give to the work a high degree of romance and interest. Soon after the cession of the Floridas to the United States, in 1821, a dungeon was accidentally discovered, fourteen feet square, immediately under the high turret represented in the view. man bones were found within, and other evidences of cruel imprisonment. It being some fourteen feet under ground, and the long, dark avenues leading to it, have induced many to believe it to be a remnant of the Inquisition, and that the punishment was a lingering death. Over the principal entrance of the fort, crossing the ditch by a draw-bridge, is the coat of arms of Spain, of which the following is a fac-simile :—

Beneath the coat of arms is the following inscription, now quite imperfect from exposure and age, many of the letters defaced, and others entirely gone.

Don Ferdinand the sixth being King of Spain, and the Field Marshal Don Alonzo Fernando Hereda being Governor and Captain General of this place, St. Augustine of Florida, and its province. This fort was finished in the year 1756. The works were directed by the Captain engineer Don Pedro de Brazas y Garay.

The work is a regular polygon of four equal curtains, and four ́equal bastions, surrounded by a ditch forty feet wide. Its situation is upon low ground, just at high-water mark. In 1737, the Spanish commandant of St. Augustine, Governor Montiano, completed the western curtain and the southwestern bastion. Then there were no outworks; merely the naked walls. Inside, there were a few temporary old buildings, and the ascents to the bastions were almost useless. With the labor of one hundred and sixty-eight convicts from Mexico, and some fifteen exiles, the commandant finished six casemates; there are now eighteen. At that period there was no outwork or glacis. In August, 1737, he was industriously engaged in putting the place in a proper state of defence, and finished the covered way. Two eighteen-pound shot-holes can now be seen, low down on the eastern curtain, thrown from the battery planted by General Oglethorpe, on Anastasia island, about a mile and a half distant, on the coast, a mile from the bar. The fort, for many years, has been used as a prison by the civil and military authorities.

The casemate in which Coacooche or Wild Cat was confined, and the embrasure through which he and his companion effected their escape, attract many visitors. The supposed traces of the Inquisition; the dungeon in which it is believed fellow beings lingered without a ray of light or hope, causes much interest and speculation regarding the characters, habits, and laws, of the former inhabitants of this ancient town. The correspondence of the commandant, written in the years 1737-8-9-40 and 41, now

to be seen in the public archives at St. Augustine, in the Spanish language, abound with interest.

The subjoined letters have been translated, as bearing particularly upon the besiegement of the fort by General Oglethorpe, in 1740, with a naval force from Georgia and South Carolina.

Connected with this subject, an Engligh writer, in the year 1762, in giving " an account of the Spanish settlements in America," says: "That the only towns or places of strength which the Spaniards are possessed of in Florida, are St. Augustine and St. Mattheo. As to the former, it is situated in north latitude, 29 deg. 48 min., about eighty leagues from the mouth of the Gulf of Florida, or channel of Bahama, thirty south of the river Alatamacha, and forty-seven from the town of Savannah, in Georgia. It is built along the shore at the bottom of a hill shaded with trees, in the form of an oblong square, and is divided into four streets, cutting each other at right angles. About a mile north from the town stands the castle, called St. John's (now Fort Marion), built of soft stone, with four bastions; it has a curtain of sixty yards long, a parapet of nine feet thick, and a rampart twenty feet high. The fort is mounted with fifty pieces of cannon, sixteen of which are brass, and some of them twenty-four pounders. The harbor is formed by an island, and a long point of land, divided from the continent by a river. The island, which is called Eustatia (Anastatia), is long and narrow; the northern part of it is due east from the castle, and extends about ten miles south along the coast, leaving a channel betwixt it and the main land, which at the southern extremity of the island is not over a mile over, but not so much at the northern. It is necessary to observe, that the sea on this coast is so shallow, that no ships of great force can come within three leagues either of the town or castle. In the year 1586, this place was taken by Sir Francis Drake, when the Spaniards fled, and left him fourteen brass cannon, besides a chest of 2000 pounds, and other booty. In 1665, it was again taken and plundered by Captain Davis, at the head of the buccaneers. In the year 1702, the people of Carolina formed a design of conquering what the Spaniards still held in Florida, and actually undertook it, under the command of Colonel Moor, their governor. He ruined the villages and farms in the open country, and besieged the town of St. Augustine for three months; but on the approach of some Spanish vessels to its relief, he raised the siege with precipitation, and marched back to Charleston, three hundred miles, by land. The last siege of this place was by General Oglethorpe, in 1740, when he marched to it with a considerable body of English forces, and a much larger of Indians, and took some advanced posts; but the Spanish governor (Montiano), it seems, was a man of great experience, and having early intelli