Spain was on the decline as a great power. The storm-scattering of her powerful armada in the English Channel was symbolic. On the other hand, the exploits of the English seamen in that fateful year of 1588 were but a prelude to Britannia’s career as mistress of the seas. For England, the seventeenth century opened an era of commercial and colonial expansions, when the great trading companies were active on the coasts of four continents and powerful English nobles strove for possessions beyond the seas. To this era belong the origins of the Carolinas, the Jerseys, Penn’s Colony, and the famous Hudson’s Bay Company. A vast, rich territory stretched from the James River region to the Spanish Florida settlements, and in 1665 the British Crown granted a patent for its occupation. By the terms of this patent, the boundaries of the new colony of Carolina brazenly included some hundred miles or more of Spanish occupied land—even St. Augustine itself! The trend was becoming clear. The fight for Florida was inevitable. In the middle 1600’s St. Augustine was practically defenseless. Where the masonry fort now stands, there was a wooden fort of almost the same size, but rotten—rotted into uselessness and so weakened by repairs that much of the original design was lost. Nor were there means for fixing it. A smallpox epidemic made Indian labor out of the question, so there were no peons to bear heavy timbers on their shoulders from the forests. No silver lay in the King’s chest: the Florida colony existed almost solely by means of a subsidy of money and provisions from New Spain, whose commerce it protected, and the reluctance of the New Spain Viceroy to pay that subsidy meant that the usual condition of St. Augustine was one of direst poverty and extreme want.