Jesse Fish

[7] In 1738, the year before the War of Jenkins' Ear began, the Spanish Bishop of Tricale, Francisco Menéndez Márquez, observed that all Englishmen had been banished from St. Augustine except for a teen-aged Jesse Fish, whose presence was deemed necessary for the procurement of flour and meat from New York.

[8] A petition made in 1747 for the return of Spanish prisoners from British incarceration lists Jesse Fish as master of the Walton's flag of truce vessel, the sloop Mary Magdalene.

[9] A major shift in colonial economic policy occurred when the Royal Havana Company was permitted to contract for goods with merchants in Charles Towne and New York, who could then ship directly to St. Augustine.

Records from the Presbyterian Church in Newtown, New York[11] show that three out of four of the transport captains were connected with the Fish family, thus linking the Long Island mariners with St.

The New York partnership won a contract to furnish Spanish Florida provisions and supplies when the Royal Havana Company of Cuba[10][17] was unable to meet the province's demand for trade goods.

When Florida was ceded to the British in 1763, almost the entire Spanish population of St. Augustine emigrated to Cuba and elsewhere in New Spain, being promised restitution, new grants of land and employment opportunities.

Substantial property in St. Augustine was purchased in the names of Jesse's uncle, Jacob Kip, William Walton,[26] and Enoc Barton, who had lived with Fish and his son as a youth.

Fish also acquired more than forty two acres of land outside the presidio, about one-fourth of the occupied area,[28] while a few English speculators secured the rest of the available property surrounding the town for future sale.

In the confidential arrangement with Puente,[31][32] Fish agreed to dispose of the unsold properties when immigration increased and after real estate prices recovered, even beyond the time constraints imposed by the Treaty of 1763.

Then in 1774–1778 when British Loyalists were moving south to Florida, and the Minorcans of New Smyrna fled Dr. Andrew Turnbull’s colony, St. Augustine was full of refugees in need of housing.

The shortage of housing increased property values, and Fish’s real estate office again thrived, but he apparently did not maintain proper accounts, and later regretted not having necessary records.

[36][27] This register, called "Accounts of Jesse Fish", and now part of the East Florida Papers,[37] contains entries of debits and credits, realty sales records, and lists of local proprietorships.

The secret compact with Puente had been made in order to prevent the properties from being forfeited to the crown at the expiration of the period allowed; however, the sale was not recognized as valid by the Spanish authorities upon their return in 1783.

Because the Spanish monarchy had proprietorship rights in the patronato real relationship of church and state,[42] those same prerogatives were claimed in the name of the English monarch, who had assumed sovereignty in Florida.

[43] Early attempts to colonize British East Florida were hindered, particularly in St. Augustine, the capital of the province, by speculators like Jesse Fish and John Gordon who held such great tracts of land in their possession.

[44][45][46] Fish and Gordon claimed ownership of a huge section of 4,600,000 acres on both banks of the St. Johns River,[47] as far south as Ponce de Leon Inlet and westward as far as Alachua, and including a considerable portion of the Tampa Bay area.

[55] In a letter dated August 10, 1830 and published in the Southern Agriculturist, George J. F. Clarke, a planter whose family had owned a plantation on the Matanzas River since 1770,[56] described the careful picking and handling of the oranges grown by Jesse Fish [57] and shipped safely to London, where they had found favor for their sweetness.

André Michaux, appointed royal botanist to King Louis XVI of France in 1785, was sent to North America the same year on a mission to make the first organized investigation of American trees and plants that could be of use to French building and carpentry, medicine and pasture forage.

On March 12, 1788, he began a botanizing trip on the east coast of Florida at El Vergel, having heard of its elaborate gardens with lemon and sweet orange trees, and of Fish's experiments with growing olives and dates.

[58] Fish depended on the labor of African slaves to work his plantation, owning seventeen of them in 1786-1787; by the beginning of the Second Spanish Period in Florida, Santa Anastasia Island had become a hacienda used for cattle ranching as well as the cultivation of sweet oranges, and hundreds of wild horses ran free there.

Zéspedes wanted to register all legitimate proprietorships purchased from such realtors as Fish during the British Period; by this means he hoped to forestall disruption of the traditional real estate system in St. Augustine.

Following the Spanish exodus of 1763, twenty years of British rule, and the retrocession of Florida to Spain in 1784, Zéspedes faced many problems concerning the disposition of property; his manner of addressing them was expeditious and suitable to the complex situation in St. Augustine.

He stated his reasons for choosing self-imposed exile from St. Augustine bluntly: "Oppressed by my debts to the Waltons and afflicted by separation and domestic infelicity, I retired to my present habitation."

His 1789 petition to the Spanish government stated that upon his retirement to El Vergel he had transferred most of the unsold real estate in trust to Kip, who was supposed to sell the property received from Puente and use the commissions to pay Fish's debts to the Walton Company.

[63] His wife and heir, Sarah, lived until 1824 and eventually became sole owner of the entire estate, but by this time her inheritance included little property outside Santa Anastasia Island.