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Abstract

In 1605, Pedro de Ybarra, Governor of Florida, sent a terse note to Fray Benito de Blasco, a missionary who had gone behind his back to send his own envoy to the wild coast south of St. Augustine. "These people are not conquered like those of New Spain," he warned him. "This is a new land."1 As the Spanish extended their influence over the New World, they encountered a broad range of environments and peoples, and how they related to them differed from place to place. The maritime periphery of Florida, which included parts of present-day South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, had non-agricultural Indians to the south, settled agriculturalists to the west, and seasonally mobile Indians to the north, center, and east. This article examines the chiefdom-presidio relationship that developed in Florida between 1565, when Spain first established a foothold on the east coast, and the early 1700s, when the presidio lost its hinterland. It addresses four fundamental questions: how the relationship came about, how it functioned, what the parties expected out ofit, and what conditions could sustain or undermine it. The Spanish have left us written sources. What the Indians thought must be gauged through their reported speech and their behavior.

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