From Ripley's Sightseeing Tour Book 2007
British attacks on St. Augustine began in 1702 and in only a few years, the economic, military and missionary development of the previous decades ended, never to resume again in Spanish Florida. From 1702 to 1704, Governor James Moore of British Carolina launched two onslaughts on the colony. St. Augustine, with its recently constructed stone fortress, resisted the first attack but the residential areas of the town were destroyed by both British and Spanish gunshot. Unable to breach the defenses of the Castillo de San Marcos, the Carolina governor abandoned his siege when four Spanish warships arrived to support the city’s garrison. Governor Moore burned his own fleet of eight smaller ships and fled overland to Charles Town. He then returned to Spanish Florida and irreparably destroyed the Franciscan mission system, burning tentative villages and dispersing the Christianized people throughout the peninsula.