The presence of Florida in the colonial history of the coastal United States is never really ignored, although the importance of St. Augustine in that history is seldom described. Joyce Elizabeth Harman’s book is a historical essay which explores trade involvements of Spanish Florida and the English colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. Her primary conclusion is interesting.
St. Augustine had an obvious purpose as a fort for the protection of Spanish fleets which used the Bahama Channel, and as a stronghold to check foreign movement into the Gulf of Mexico and Spain’s mainland possessions. The Spanish were erratic in sending the subsidy by which, with the monopoly of Spanish trade, the post was supposed to survive, so the residents of the settlement necessarily sought other means of making money. Trade with the English was their most convenient outlet.
From the middle of the seventeenth century the Spanish in Florida feared the English, and the English of the Atlantic coast feared the Spanish. Yet trade between the two colonial areas existed and even flourished. The author sees the orange industry as a catalyst of this trade, and comments that “English traders stopping at Saint Augustine not only found a warm welcome for their goods, but frequently found produce to take back to the English colonies” (p. 81).
In the years prior to the War of Jenkins’ Ear, this illegal trade grew so much that Spanish colonial ships were not an uncommon sight in the port of Charleston, South Carolina. With the advent of the war, the Spanish suddenly realized the value of St. Augustine and increased the royal subsidy to the colony. But the colonists had become accustomed to English goods, and continued to receive them through privateering.
Miss Harman proves that the illicit trade was ironically profitable to both the English and the Spanish and even helped St. Augustine to survive. Her book might well have been illuminated by greater detail on specific places, shippers, and products. In the variety of her sources and the careful, clear construction of her essay, she is to be commended.
