"The Ancestral God's wind gently strokes the water. The children of sunrise walk upon the land of valor. The heartbeat of Earth Mother echoes amid the sound of the tide. Bay of the north, we drink you as we drink mother's milk~~"
The songs of the Taino recorded the past of Puerto Rico's North Bay, sung again and again by the sea, until all at once they fell into dead silence. And now, this Taino bay had been given a new name by the colonists who arrived: "San Juan Bay."
"May the Lord bless us! In sacred San Juan Bay, we have raised the queen's Fort Isabella! This fortress complex under construction is the very embodiment of our loyalty to the queen!"
The sound of prayer came from the ships by the shore. Vicente, captain of the Castilian navy, stood at the bow of a Caravel. He narrowed his eyes, gazing at the busy shore of San Juan Bay, at the small timber-and-stone fortress whose rough outline had already been built, and a satisfied smile appeared on his face. Relying on the brutal enslavement of the local Natives, this port was changing rapidly and already had something of the look of a small European town.
The planned Fort Queen Isabella, like the vast majority of European seaside fortress towns, would roughly be divided into three parts.
First, naturally, was the military fortress along the shore. It would begin as a small wooden fortress, then be built into a small stone fort. After that, a single fortress would become multiple small forts supporting one another. This would serve the most important military defensive function and was also where the nobles would move in.
Second was the commercial harbor where the fleet would berth. Berths for the ships had to be built,