On his way to Florida, Cendoya stopped at Havana, looking for skilled workmen—masons and lime burners. There he found an engineer, Ignacio Daza. It was on August 8, 1671, that the first workman began to draw his pay. By the time the mosquitoes were sluggish in the cooler fall weather, the coquina pits on Anastasia Island were open, and two big limekilns were being built just north of the old fort. The carpenters put up a palm-thatched shelter at the quarries; they built a dozen large, square-end dugouts and laid rafts over them for hauling stone for the fortification and firewood and oyster shells for the limekilns; and they built boxes, handbarrows, and _carretas_ (long, narrow, hauling wagons). At his anvil, the blacksmith made a great noise, hammering out axes, picks, and stonecutters’ hatchets, and putting on their steel edges; drawing out the bars to the proper length and flattening their ends for crowbars; working shapeless masses of iron into shovels, spades, hoes, and wedges; and for lighter work, making nails of all kinds and sizes for the carpenters. The grindstone screeched as the cutting edges went on the tools. In the quarries 3 leagues from the presidio, Indian peons chopped out the dense thickets of scrub oak and palmetto, driving out the rattlesnakes and clearing the ground for the shovelers to uncover the top layer of coquina. Day after day Alonso Díaz, the quarry overseer, kept the picks and axes going, cutting deep grooves into the soft yellow stone, while with bar and wedge the peons broke loose and pried up the rough blocks—small pieces that a single man could shoulder, and tremendously heavy, waterlogged cubes 2 feet thick and twice as long that six strong men could hardly lift from the bed of sandy shell. As a layer of stone was removed, again the shovelmen came in, taking off the newly exposed bed of loose shell and uncovering yet another and deeper stratum of rock. Down and down the quarrymen went until their pits reached water and they could go no farther. Díaz watched his peons heave the finest stone on the wagons. He sent the oxen plodding to the wharf at the head of a marshy creek, and carefully balanced the load of rough stone on the rafts for ferrying across current to the building site. And on the opposite shore of the bay, next to the old fort, the pile of unhewn stone daily grew larger, while the stonecutters plied their squares and chopped unceasingly to shape the soft coquina for the masons. In the limekilns, oyster shells glowed white-hot and changed into fine quality, quick-setting lime. By spring of 1672, there were 4,000 _fanegas_ (some 7,000 bushels) of lime in the two storehouses, and the great piles of both hewn and rough stone were a welcome sight to the people of St. Augustine. [Illustration: MOST OF THE ROOMS OPEN INTO THE SQUARE COURTYARD OR PARADE OF THE FORT. THE WELL IN THIS CORNER FURNISHED THE ONLY PALATABLE WATER SUPPLY FOR REFUGEES INSIDE THE FORT DURING TIMES OF SIEGE.]