Charles R. Ewen distinguished two kinds of periphery settlements: those that were commercial outposts on the economic fringes of empire, like Puerto Real, and those that were defensive outposts on the geographic fringes, like St. Augustine. Out of fiscal necessity, the Crown abandoned the former, and out of strategic necessity, maintained the latter. Reporting on an 18th-century settlement of fugitive slaves near St. Augustine, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, historian Jane Landers made the point that the Africans of the Spanish "borderlands" . . . often lived on the periphery of Spanish society-sometimes between the Spanish and their enemies. The interstitial location of settlements such as Mose paralleled the social position of their inhabitants-persons who straddled cultures, astutely pursued their own advantage, and in the process helped shape the colonial history of the circum-Caribbean. Approaching Florida as part of the "Negroid littoral" of the Caribbean basin clarified the colony's situation as a peripheral yet strategic component of the Spanish American empire (Landers, 1990: 324). "If there were parts of the new world which offered little or no returns on heavy expenditures and where, despite that fact, the Spaniard established and maintained himself," wrote Borderland historian Lansing S. Bloom long ago, "it would be . . . reasonable to recognize the presence of some motive very different from the lust for gold" (Bloom, 1944: 4). That motive may well have been evangelical in the landlocked borderland of New Mexico, as Bloom went on to conclude, but in the maritime peripheries another took precedence. "Defense of the realms was always more important than Christianization of natives," declared Spanish colonialist Howard F. Oine. (Bushnell SS)