The governor hoped that Santa Catalina's stay on Sapelo would be temporary. "I have sent them a reinforcement of eight soldiers with munitions and instructed them to build a casafuerte [blockhouse], in case the enemy should return before I can get there to put [things] in defensive order, and if possible repopulate the island of Santa Catalina which they have abandoned, because it is fertile and abounding in provisions and the relief and succor of this presidio, as I am informed and as can be seen by experience, from the lack of it (Marquez Cabrera, 1680c). The Crown, he suggested, should send him 100 families of Canary Islanders supplied at royal expense with oxen and horses to "populate and cultivate" the island of Santa Catalina, doubly important because it faced the English settlement of San Jorge. The Junta de Guerra approved the idea, which Marquez Cabrera had borrowed without acknowledgment from a predecessor (Ponce de Leon, 1675), and ordered the president of the Canaries to embark some families to Havana and the governor of Havana to see that they proceeded to Florida (Junta de Guerra, 1681). Assigned on paper to Apalache Province, then reassigned on paper to Santa Catalina de Guale, these particular Canary Islanders never materialized, any more than the 24 families of master weavers that the governor of Yucatan was supposed to send from Campeche (Marquez Cabrera 1681f; 1683). Salvador de Cigarroa, acting contador, checked the "libro de acuerdos," or book of accords, and found no St. Augustine junta de guerra resolutions concerning "the port of Santa Catalina, frontera of the Province of Guale," other than a brief May 24, 1680, accord authorizing Hita Salazar to draw as needed against the royal treasury to restore it (Cigarroa, 1681). The king's Junta de Guerra tabled plans to populate and restore St. Catherines until they could see "a map with distances to scale, showing the situation of Florida and of that island." They also asked that someone explain to them why that particular island was so important. Did it produce the same fruits of the earth as the mainland, merely in greater abundance, or were they special ones that the presidio had to have to survive? Was Santa Catalina in an exposed location that was likely to be settled and fortified by foreigners? They asked the governor of Havana and the newly invested bishop of Santiago de Cuba whose diocese included Cuba, Florida, and Jamaica, in English hands since 1656 (Garcia de Palacios 1684)-to send them separate informes, or investigative reports, on the subject (Junta de Guerra, 1681). The Junta had several things to take into account. Charles II's minority had ended, and with it the influence of the Queen Mother. The new governor of Florida had informed them that much of the Castillo in St. Augustine which the queen had authorized would have to be torn down and redone; how his predecessors could have spent 55,926 pesos with so little to show for it, he could not fathom (Marquez Cabrera, 1680c). And for those who saw the Indies as a whole, news of the Great Northern Revolt which broke out in New Mexico in August 1680 must have eclipsed the plight of one small Indian outpost north of St. Augustine. For Guale, however, time was running out. The Spanish Crown had opted to favor the core of the colony above the peripheries, and that core was demanding more and more native support while offering less and less protection against enemies equipped with deadly English guns. Under the circumstances, the Atlantic buffer zone could not fail to fall in on itself, island by island, like a collapsing spyglass. (Bushnell SS)