Existing comment:
THE GUNS OF ANASTASIA
42" X 66" Oil Painting
British Colonial artillery shell Spanish St. Augustine, 1740.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the old conflicts that dominated the fate of Europe spread to the colonial regions in the Americas. The encroachment of British colonists from the Carolinas into the frontier and coastal islands that separated them from Spanish Florida became the catalyst for an exchange of hostilities both on the Atlantic coast and inland.
In June of 1740, General James Oglethorpe, governor and military leader of the British colony of the Carolinas and the Georgia frontier, launched a siege on St. Augustine by land and sea.
This portrayal depicts one of the British batteries preparing to shell the Castillo De San Marcos in St. Augustine from the island of Anastasia. The assembly of invaders included red-coated soldiers of Oglethorpe's own 47th Regiment of Foot, Carolinian Militia volunteers, Scottish immigrant volunteers, naval crews, Royal artillerymen, and their allied Creek Indian scouts. Conscripted black slaves were brought to labor in the construction and the operation of the battery. Oglethorpe is seen in the center foreground observing the preparation of a gun position as other batteries fire upon the fort.
Resources depleted on the barren island, the English abandoned the siege after nearly a month of conflict. The Spanish defender's successful resistance to the cannonade insured the survival of their colony once more. |