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Queen Regent Mariana ordered New Spain to beef up Florida
Source: Situado and Sabana #82
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BUILDING THE CASTILLO At the time, the Mexico City treasury had not paid a full year's situado to Florida in eight years and was in debt to its treasury for more than 400,000 pesos. Costly as the Searles raid was in lives and property, it did bring the colony back to royal notice. In 1669 and 1673 Queen Regent Mariana gave the viceroy of New Spain new instructions that spelled out his responsibilities to the maritime periphery. He was to pay up the arrears of Florida's past situados and in future to remit the situado fully and promptly. He was to add 50 plazas to the 300-man dotacion and thereafter to reserve all 350 plazas for soldiers, including the 43 plazas that had been going to friars. At the same time, he was to increase the Franciscan situado to cover all the religious. Finally, he was to allocate fortification funds to Florida for as many years as it took to build a stone fort in St. Augustine (Spanish Crown, 1677). Manuel de Cendoya, royal appointee to the post of governor, went straight from Spain to Mexico City to collect the funds, send supplies to Florida, and meet with military engineers. While he was in New Spain, news came that in the southern part of Carolina the English had founded and were fortifying a settlement called Charles Town, not at Santa Elena, but in a place the Spanish knew as "San Jorge," 10 or 12 leagues to the north of Santa Elena, in the old province of Escamacu. Left to itself, the English settlement would no doubt develop into a den of pirates like the infamous ports of Jamaica. In Mexico City, the viceroy and the governor-elect came to an agreement on funding the proposed fort: 12,000 pesos to begin with and 10,000 pesos a year thereafter until the work was finished. A complete defense system of the kind Cendoya wanted called for four smaller forts: two to guard the entrances to St. Augustine harbor, one at the port of San Marcos to guard the entrance to Apalache, and the other at Santa Catalina de la Frontera to protect the northern border. Spain's Junta de Guerra approved the secondary forts but did not ask the viceroy to fund them. (Bushnell SS)
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