Gertrudis de Morales It was the fall of 1684. She stared out across St. Augustine's choppy bay and out to the gray, fierce ocean. There would be no boats leaving the dock today to offload the ship that was forced to remain outside the harbor--too large to navigate the inlet. The equinoctial storm tossed the vessel in all directions. She imagined what it would be like to board a ship and sail away from St. Augustine and to see some other place. She recalled some background landscapes in paintings of saints, but Gertrudis de Morales was more entranced by the faraway places in the background than by the martyrs in the foreground. She often heard the new soldiers in town talking about where they were born and places where they had fought. Some spoke of Africa, others of the Netherlands. Some had been to Panama. Many had been to Mexico and almost all had seen at least Cuba. St. Augustine had been the birthplace of her first husband. Her second husband, to whom she was married only a short while before he died, had been born in Cuba. José Antonio Rodríguez, the new soldier who was flirting with her, came from Sevilla in Spain. She tried to picture the tall Moorish towers and huge churches that he described. She tried to imagine towns near Sevilla with blinding white buildings. She was becoming accustomed to Jose's style of speech. These days there were so many regional versions of Spanish heard on St. Augustine's streets that often Gertrudis could understand only a little of what she was able to overhear. Sometimes she could eavesdrop on the convicts as they walked the streets. Sentenced to years of hard labor for debts or minor thefts, convicts were relocated away from the venue of their crimes to serve their sentences. They too spoke of tropical places, such as Venezuela or the coast of Mexico. Some of them came from the mountains of Mexico. Slaves owned by the crown talked about many of the same places. Many of the convicts and slaves had arrived to work on building of the new fortress, a project going on now for a dozen years. Even the Indians who came in from the missions to the west and from the coast to the north had been farther and seen more than she had. And the governor was always talking about where he had been and what he had done. Gertrudis de Morales had never seen land higher than sand dunes and a few bluffs on the barrier islands. She was not quite sure what snow was and could only liken it to frost. Sometimes Gertrudis pouted that the only place she would probably ever see other than St. Augustine was Eternity and there was plenty of talk about the Hereafter in this Catholic town and colony. In 1684 Florida-born soldiers fretted about uncertain futures. "What if I am discharged because of the governor's order? Will I have to leave Florida to survive?" Lieutenant Francisco Bernal Castillo, a native of St. Augustine, might have worried over these matters, for Florida Governor Juan Marques Cabrera was mustering Florida-born men out the Spanish troops in the colony. This made the women of St. Augustine worry as well. "What if my husband loses his plaza with the troops? (A plaza was an authorized man-space in the troops.) What if I am widowed again? If that were to happen and if I"m smart, I will choose one of the new soldiers arriving here from Spain to be my next husband." Gertrudis de Morales might have tumbled these thoughts through her mind. For a century Florida-born men found employment with the Spanish military. Now Florida residents continued to watch the governor remove local men from the army and cast them into the world of the unemployed. Soldiers from Spain, Mexico and Cuba were arriving to staff the soldiery. One hundred thirty after its founding, St. Augustine’s received a renewal of Iberian traditions, dialects and culture with the replacement soldiers arriving for the garrison. The military companies would not again be staffed by those who knew only the Florida colony and who were complexly related by birth and by marriage to each other. (Parker RR)