The Night Sir Francis Drake Burned the Town

In the late spring of fifteen eighty-six, the English sea captain Sir Francis Drake appeared off Saint Augustine with twenty-three ships and some two thousand men. England and Spain were at war, and Drake had already sacked the Spanish cities of Santo Domingo and Cartagena. Saint Augustine was the northernmost outpost of Spain's New World empire, and Drake meant to erase it.

The Spanish governor, Pedro Menendez Marquez, had fewer than a hundred militiamen. He knew he could not hold the wooden fort, so he pulled his people inland before the English landed. Drake's men came ashore, found the fort of San Juan nearly deserted, and carried off fourteen bronze cannon and a chest holding some two thousand gold ducats meant to pay the garrison.

Then they burned everything. Every building in the small town of roughly two hundred and fifty settlers was put to the torch, the crops destroyed. When the English sailed away, Saint Augustine lay in ashes.

Spain rebuilt. It would rebuild again after the English burned the town a second time in seventeen oh two, and again after Oglethorpe's siege in seventeen forty. Drake's raid taught a hard lesson that led, in time, to the great coquina fort.

Each spring, reenactors still march Drake's route through the old streets to remember the night the town burned.