Father Leturiondo presented his side of the conflict to the Crown in a letter full of telling arguments. From time immemorial, he said, it had been the custom in St. Augustine to ring the bells when the viaticum issued from the parish church so that the faithful could come out to accompany the Lord. The governor claimed that the signals of ship arrivals could not be heard over the bells, yet the bells had never before interfered with the signals. The larger bell weighed only four or five arrobas, and the smaller bell one arroba at the most, so their clamor was hardly overwhelming. The guardhouse had one sentry and the Castillo had four, one in each turret (Leturiondo 1700), in addition to the patrols who made the rounds of posts up to a quarter of a league from the city. The bells were unlikely to deafen all the sentries at once. In any case, the sentry at the guardhouse had a bell almost as big as the larger one at the church [Note: This may be the sizeable bell on the list of artillery and other military equipment turned over to Sergeant Major Juan de Ayala when he became warden of the Castillo (Inventory, 1683).] with which he rang the watch throughout the night, [Note: According to a spy's report in 1739, the man at the bell rang the watch every three or four minutes and the five sentries on the lines called out to each other all night long (Arana and Manucy, 1977: 46).] and he had no trouble hearing the shots fired. If the bells did not interfere with signals in the daytime, over the noises of gristmills and people and traffic, how could they do so in the silence of the night? Finally, when it came to pirates, the bells were a protection, for they showed that the town was awake.