Moore’s fighting forces of 800 Englishmen and Indians vastly outnumbered the Spanish garrison, but he was ill-equipped to besiege the fortification. Four cannons he had, and the Spanish boasted that a continuous fire from the fort walls kept him out of range. Indeed the Gallegos were useful! Moore settled down to await the arrival of more artillery from Jamaica, and thus matters stood when a pair of Spanish men-of-war sailed from the south and blocked the harbor entrance. With little hesitation, Moore burned his eight vessels, left many of his stores, and retreated overland to his province, leaving much of St. Augustine in ashes. The Spanish estimated that the damage to the town amounted to 20,000 pesos or more, and the ease with which the English had occupied and held the town for almost 2 months made it clear that additional fortifications had to be built. In the quarter century that followed, out from the castillo went strong earthworks and palisades, strengthened at strategic points with redoubts, and St. Augustine became a walled town, secure against invasion as long as there were enough soldiers to man the walls. The years of building these town defenses were lean years. In 1712 came _la Gran Hambre_—the Great Hunger—and in those dark days the starving people ate even the dogs and cats until the storms isolating the colony finally abated. But the work was done, and when in 1728 another South Carolinian, Colonel Palmer, marched against the presidio, the sight of the grim walls of the fort, the unwinking readiness of the heavy guns, and the needle-sharp points of the yucca plants lining the town palisades were a powerful deterrent. He “refrained” from taking the town. For their part, the Spaniards set off their artillery, but they made no sorties. Nevertheless, Palmer’s bold march to the very gates of St. Augustine foreshadowed coming events, and the Spaniards again made ready, for the castillo now began to show its half-century age and the wooden palisades were rotting. That capable engineer and frontier diplomat, Don Antonio de Arredondo, came from Havana to inspect the Florida fortifications and make recommendations. Backed by Arredondo’s expert opinions, Governor Manuel de Montiano put all the cards on the table in a letter to the Havana Governor: “For Your Excellency must know that this castle, the only defense here, has no bombproofs for the protection of the garrison, that the counterscarp is too low, that there is no covered way, that the curtains are without demilunes, that there are no other exterior works to give them time for a long defense; but that we are as bare outside [the castle] as we are without life inside, for there are no guns that could last 24 hours, and if there were, we have no artillerymen to serve them.”