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Florida census showed Florida's largest territory depopulated and open for drifters

Source: The Menendez Marquez Cattle Barony at La Chua and the Determinants of Economic Expansion in Seventeenth-Century Florida #163

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Meanwhile, as a result of another epidemic in 1672, and of the mortality rate among the natives working on the castillo, the Indians of the earliest converted provinces seemed to be disappearing. (Fr. Anto Somoza, May 2, 1673; Interim Governor Nicolas Ponce de Le6n II, n.d. [1674].) A census ordered by Governor Pablo de Hita y Salazar (1675-1680) showed that of the 10,766 Christian and heathen Indians subject to the Crown in 1675, there was a provincial distribution of 81% in Apalache, 13% in Timucua, and 6% in Guale. Potano, the largest territorial unit in Spanish Florida, had no more than 1.5% of the provincial population: 170 natives in the two towns of Santa Fe and San Francisco. The demographic vacuum was beginning to exert a pull on other Indians of the southeast. Representatives of various heathen tribes began drifting into the peninsula as early as 1650. [Note: The Bishop of Cuba confirmed 13,152 natives during his visit to Florida in 1674-1675. The reasons for this wide variance in figures invite further study.] Since they were neither tributary nor living in towns, they had not been counted in the census. Some attempt was made to redistribute the King's subjects. Ustaquan families were subsidized to form the new town of Ivitanayo on the road between San Francisco and Salamototo, but within a few years they had abandoned the place. (Leturiondo Visita of 1677-1678; Florencia Visita of 1694-1695.)
(Bushnell MM)