
The Mystery of Florida’s Cannonball-Eating Spanish Fort - sohkamyung
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/coquina-fort-in-florida
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DuskStar
> It’s not clear whether the Spanish had known about coquina’s properties when
> they first built the walls, mining the stone from the nearby quarry within
> what is today Anastasia State Park. But they certainly learned to appreciate
> the material’s absorptive properties. When they realized coquina’s unique
> abilities, they used the fort walls for target practice.

You know you're confident in your fortifications when _you use them for target
practice_. That's just crazy!

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mieseratte
Interesting piece of history. Just up the coast in South Carolina they used
the palmetto tree for fort walls. This resulted in the opposite, cannonballs
failing to penetrate and instead bouncing off.

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danjc
I visited St Augustine this week and went on a trolley tour around the town
with my family (highly recommended). The guides mentioned Coquina and there's
actually a place where you can see a rusted cannon ball embedded in a wall of
Coquina, pretty unique material that was easy to quarry from nearby.

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coldcode
Yeah fun visit except in Florida summer. That stone is amazing stuff.

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danjc
Yeah I'm from South Africa and thought I knew heat but this week had been
insane!

Another fun fact - because the material absorbs shock so well, the Spanish
were able to dig undamaged cannon balls out of the wall. They'd etch messages
on them and fire them back at the English!

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swasheck
i grew up in orlando and had multiple "field trips" to st. augustine. this
cannonball fact was one of the more celebrated and (and funny) facts that
they'd share with us.

as we got older, our attention went from "cool fort" to "cool cannons" to
"dont want to go to prison" to "excellent and resourceful engineering."

unfortunately, as with so many other things, i didnt (or couldnt) fully
appreciate it at that age

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macdice
The article uses "English" and "British" interchangeably when describing
events in 1702. But the Acts of Union that united England and Scotland
creating Great Britain didn't happen until 1706 and 1707. I guess that means
you can't call them British yet (unless you mean to name the island they came
from, but not their nationality and identity, but that seems a stretch).

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rangibaby
That’s pretty common. Similar to people using Russian and Soviet
interchangeablely

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carlob
Yeah, but calling something from 1910 Soviet would be definitely wrong
(probably more so than in this example).

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heavenlyblue
They are all Romans, anyway.

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carlob
Not Scotland though :)

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benj111
2 questions

Why wasn't this picked up on and used more widely? I find it slightly boggling
that neither side seemed to investigate further.

2nd, I assume you could get a similar effect by covering the wall in turf? Why
did that not catch on?

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pjmorris
Coquina is pretty rare, occuring in only a few places in the world, and it's
pretty heavy. It was 'right down the street' in St. Augustine, so it made
sense to use it for the fort, but transporting it makes much less sense.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coquina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coquina)

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benj111
Sure, I get they wouldn't have been transporting the stone around the world,
but why was it not a stopping off point for further investigation, why did
they not experiment with different stone or materials.

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fuzzfactor
They're doing it as fast as they can, it's only been 300 years.

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benj111
Well Spain did invent the word Manana[1], it's just tardy from the British
though.

[1]
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ma%C3%B1ana](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ma%C3%B1ana)

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ukyrgf
I drive by this thing every day and didn't know that. Also didn't know coquina
was so rare.

