It was a sizeable defense problem and one not seriously considered until French pressure caused the establishment of St. Augustine in 1565. With this small fortified settlement on one side and growing Havana on the other side of the Bahama Channel, ships could normally pass safely from the ports of New Spain to those of the Old Country. Gradually a system of missions developed in Florida—fingers of civilization reaching out into the wilderness of the southeast. Since the missionaries had to be protected, both from hostile aborigine and European, defense became a matter of dual operation. The unceasing hunt of the coast guard for starving castaways, storm-wracked vessels, and pirates was paralleled on land by the rapid marches of the patrols along the Indian trails or the sailing of the piraguas through the coastal waterways. The presidio of St. Augustine was the base of operations, and here the strongest forts were built. A typical early fort was San Juan de Pinos, burned by the English freebooter Francis Drake in 1586, after being robbed of its bronze artillery and some 2,000 pounds sterling “by the treasurer’s value” in the most devastating raid St. Augustine ever suffered. Such a fort as San Juan consisted of a pine timber stockade around small buildings for gunpowder storage and quarters. Cannons were mounted atop a broad platform, called a caballero or cavalier, so that they could fire over the stockade. In the humid climate, these forts were a very temporary expedient. While they could be built cheaply and quickly, often they failed to last out the decade, exposed as they were to the fire arrows of the Indians and the ravages of the seasonal hurricanes. During the century before Castillo de San Marcos was started, nine wooden forts, one after another, were built at St. Augustine. Nor did Spain yet see the need for an impregnable fort in the Florida province. After the English record at Roanoke, the weakling settlement of Jamestown did not impress the powerful Council of the Indies at far away Madrid. Moreover, the activities of the Franciscans in extending the mission frontier into the western and northern Indian lands not only gave Spain actual possession of more territory than she ever again was to occupy in Florida, but apparently was a sure means of keeping out rival Europeans. The fallacy in this thinking lay both in disparaging the colonizing ability of the Anglo-Saxon and in believing that an Indian friendly to Spain would not, if given the opportunity, become friendly to England. The red man was restive under the strict teachings of the friar, and it turned out that the English fur trader equipped with glittering presents and shrewd promises found little difficulty in persuading his naïve customer to desert the mission and ally himself with the English cause. Not until the missions began to fall before the bloody onslaughts of the Carolinian and his native ally did the grim walls of Castillo de San Marcos arise.