SPANISH GARDENS 
19 
tures; and forthwith began his efforts to increase the 
city’s population and to induce the Indians to settle 
in its vicinity. Assistance was sent him from Havana 
and the work of rebuilding was earnestly advanced; 
and it was at this time presumably, that stone build¬ 
ings began to be the rule. One at least had been built 
before, however, for it is noted that at the time of the 
Spanish evacuation, in 1763, there stood an old stone 
house with the date 1571 upon its front. 
But notwithstanding the efforts of its governor, St. 
Augustine was sixty-five years in growing to a town 
of three hundred householders. At that time, how¬ 
ever,—1648—it had beside, “a flourishing Monastery 
of the Order of St. Francis, with fifty Franciscans: and 
in the city alone a vicar, a parochial curate, etc., at¬ 
tached to the Castle.” Thus was its prosperity gauged 
by pontifical measure. 
Sacked and plundered by a buccaneer, worried by 
the Indians, and harried by the English from their 
Colony on the north, successively from this date on, it 
yields nothing more about its gardens until nearly the 
end of the century. Then, from the pen of the devout 
and God-fearing Quaker, Jonathan Dickinson, who 
was shipwrecked on the coast below St. Augustine with 
his wife and small baby, as they were voyaging from 
Port Royal in Jamaica to “Pensilvania,” and with 
whom he reached the city after nearly three months 
