1600

1606: The Franciscans expand their mission efforts into the region of the Timucua Indians west and northwest of St. Augustine in northern Florida and southern Georgia.

1607: The English North American settlement of Jamestown is established.

1607: The Franciscans begin to push westward into the forested interior of the Florida peninsula.

1609: A twelve years' truce begins between Spain and the Netherlands.

1613: The bilingual Spanish and Timucua Confessionario written by Frey Francisco Pareja is published in Mexico. It is one of the earliest works to survive in any North American native language.

1620s: Nearly all of the existing Timucuan chiefdoms receive missions.

1621: The Dutch West India Company is formed when the truce between Spain and the Netherlands ends and war with Spain becomes a threat. The Dutch assault on the Caribbean begins.

1624: St. Christopher (St. Kitts) is founded in the Caribbean.

1627: Barbados is founded, far away from the areas patrolled by the Spanish naval fleet.

1628: The Dutch anchor their ships near Cape Canaveral, Florida, and a small but fierce naval battle takes place.

1628: The Dutch hijack an entire Spanish treasure fleet. Admiral Piet Heyn bottles up the New Spain fleet in the harbor of Matanzas, Cuba, takes the ships and declares extraordinary dividend from the captured silver for the West India Company.

1633: Spanish Florida expands across the north-central peninsula and the first missions are founded west of the Aucilla River in northwest Florida, the homeland of the Apalachee Indians.

1637: The first sugar cane is brought to the island of Barbados.

1638: The first Africans brought to New England are exchanged for Native Americans from Connecticut.

1647: An epidemic of Yellow Fever strikes Barbados, Guadeloupe and St. Kitts. The white population on Barbados, including the white indentured laborers, is greatly reduced.

1655: The English take Jamaica, which becomes an important military and naval base. The island is converted to a sugar and coffee plantation economy, and African slaves are imported as a labor force.

1655: 26,000 Christianized natives live in or around 38 mission compounds in Florida.

1665: An official French presence begins in the Caribbean when France appoints a governor of Tortuga and from that island begins to occupy the western half of Hispaniola, St. Domingue.

1670: The English settle Charleston, South Carolina.

1670: France, ruled by Louis XIV, remains hostile to the Spanish monarchy.

1670: As many as 300 conscripted native people provide labor for constructing the stone fort in St. Augustine.

1671: Sir Henry Morgan leads expeditions against Cuba and raids the mainland settlements of Porto Bello and Maracaibo, Venezuela. His greatest victory in Panama consists of nearly 1,500 combined French and English buccaneers who devastate the isthmus. For his service to the British crown he is knighted and rewarded with the governorship of Jamaica.

1693: Charles II of Spain decrees that all runaways to Florida, men and women, will be considered free if they converted to Catholicism.

1697: After King Philip's War, thousands of Wampanoag Indians, including Philip's son, are sent to the Caribbean in exchange for Africans. More than 10,000 Indians are shipped from Charleston to English colonies in the Caribbean in the course of a single year.

1697: In the Peace of Ryswyck, Spain cedes the western half of the island of Hispaniola to France, thus acknowledging that nation's right to occupy the New World also. Haiti is now called "Saint Domingue".