It was little more than a month later, on Wednesday, November 9, that Cendoya laid the first stone of the foundation. The people of St. Augustine must have wept for joy at these tangible signs of progress. All were glad and proud, the aged soldiers who had given a lifetime of service to the Crown, the four little orphans whose father died in the pirate raid a few years before, the widows and their children, the craftsmen, the workmen, the royal officials, some of whom served as their fathers had before them; but none could have been more pleased or proud than Don Manuel de Cendoya, who of all the Florida Governors had been the one chosen by Providence to have the honor of starting the first permanent Florida fortification of Her Catholic Majesty. Laying the foundations of the mighty fort was no easy job, for not only was the soil sandy and low, but as the winter months came the Indian peons were struck by _El Contagio_—The Contagion—and the laboring force dwindled to nothing. The 30 Negro slaves to be sent from Havana had not yet come. Cendoya himself and his soldiers took to the shovels and as they dug a trench some 5 feet deep and 17 feet broad, the masons laid two courses of heavy stones directly on the hard-packed sand bottom. Slow work it was, for high tide flooded the trenches. About a foot and a half inside the toe of this wide foundation, the masons stretched their line marking the scarp or curtain wall, which was to taper gradually from a 14-foot base to approximately 9 feet at its top, some 25 feet above the foundation. In the 12 months that followed, the north, south, and east walls rose steadily, but since the layout of the new fort overlapped the old wooden fort, no work could be done on the west until the old fort was torn down. By midsummer of 1673 the east side of the work was 12 feet high and the presidio was jubilant over the arrival of 10,000 pesos for carrying on. This good news was tempered, however, by the Viceroy’s assertion that he would release no more money for the new St. Augustine fort without an express order from the Crown, and by the realization that the work was going too slowly. Cendoya had already appealed to Her Majesty to increase the allowance to 16,000 pesos annually so that the construction could be finished in 4 years, for, as he put it, the English menace at Charleston brooked no delay. There was already news that the English were outfitting ships for an invasion.