Read the passage about the decline of the mission system in Georgia.The Spanish mission era began to decline by the middle and late 1600s, in part because the Indian population continued to decrease due to disease. Another problem for the Spanish, however, was the English settlement in what is now South Carolina in 1670. Indians in South Carolina raided villages in Georgia to capture Indians to sell to the English as slaves. By 1685, the missions in Georgia were gone as the Spanish retreated further to the south. The northern boundary of the Spanish empire in the southeast became today’s Florida.