Arriving to Santa María de Galve in early June
1705, Antonio de Landeche encountered an unimpressive settlement, by almost any
standard (Figure 5).Constructed entirely of wood, as there was no lime or stone
in the area, the fort and village, which together comprised the Presidio Santa
María de Galve, had been damaged by a fire the preceding year. In rebuilding
the presidio after the devastating fire of November 23, 1704, the Pensacola Spanish
built two small sheds of boards, with thatched roofs, to store supplies that the
Rosario delivered to Pensacola the following June. A larger, more permanent
warehouse was under construction at the time. The construction of these temporary
sheds took precedence over building quarters for the troops. Long-term plans called
for the dismantling of the two sheds and for the salvaged boards to be used to
build new quarters. When the hurricane hit in September 1705, however, the majority
of the garrison at Pensacola were still living in crude, makeshift huts outside
of the fort, much as they had in 1698-1699 when the fort was under construction
(Guzmán, 1705a).
The design of Presidio Santa María de Galve was based on a grid system
of town planning, the standard dictated in "The Royal Ordinances Concerning
the Laying Out of Towns" (1573). In the frontier environment, however, the
grid became skewed with the most important civil and religious buildings not at
the center of the presidio, but to the west of the village. Residents' efforts
to position their crude dwellings as close to the fort as possible further distorted
the grid system (Landeche, 1706a; Misc., 1707b).
Fort San Carlos de Austria, named after Charles of Austria (1685-1740), later
Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire (1705-1740), physically dominated the tiny
Presidio Santa María de Galve perched upon the Barranca de Santo Tomé,
the high bluff that overlooked the entrance to Pensacola Bay. That dominance,
however, did not extend beyond the bluff, as the fort was too far from the shipping
channel, which ran through the center of the bay's entrance, to be an effective
deterrent against foreign incursions (Arriola, 1699, 1706; Misc., 1707b).
