A People Peculiar.
Twenty years or more ago, riding through the flat, palmetto-fringed pine woods of east Florida, before Standard Oil Flagler built his coast railroad to Miami, sundry lean, swarthy, active people of both sexes, were frequently to be met with, more especially in and about St. Augustine, and to the southward towards New Smyrna. They are doubtless to be found there yet, though the great influx of miscellaneous strangers renders their racial traits less noticeable than formerly.
Ask one of the large-framed Swedes, Germans, or other scions of a more pronounced North-of-Europe type, who and what these Latin looking peasantry are, the chance is you will be answered, or at least would have been at the time I alluded to above:
“When folks want to be civil they call them Minorcans; when they don’t they are mighty apt to say something about Doc. Turnbull’s niggers. So, there you are—take your choice.”
As a matter of fact, they are a really worthy and industrious element of our composite population, not unlike the descendants of Longfellow’s Acadians, the “Cajuns” of southern Louisiana. Though of a hybrid sort of Spanish ancestry, from the Balearic Isles in the Mediterranean Sea, they have Americanized themselves through several generations of quiet usefulness in an humble, unobtrusive way.
What is their history? How came they here?
That takes us back to the year 1767. The Floridas had only recently been ceded by Spain to England, when some fifteen hundred colonists, mostly from Minorca, one of the Balearic group, were landed at Musquito Inlet, one hundred miles south of St. Augustine.
Many think that the only people held as slaves in the South prior to the Civil War, were negroes, or possibly in very early colonial times, a few spiritless tribes of Indians. Yet these colonists (ancestors of the present Minorcans now strung along the lagoons and bayous of the east coast, intermittently for many leagues) were made, willy-nilly, for nine long, weary years, to toil amid the swamps and hammocks of what is now Volusia County, as the virtual slaves of a British Trading Company of that era, headed by Sir Wm. Duncan and a Dr. Andrew Turnbull, shrewd Scotchmen of wealth and social position, who operated their scheme from London; Sir William being the resident manager there, and a financial magnate on the Stock Exchange himself.
Turnbull, the immediate head of the colony in Florida, was hard-hearted, energetic, indomitable and persevering—one of that unconscionable, never-give-up sort of task masters, who worked the helpless peasants mercilessly in the malarious swamps embraced within the area of the immense land grant held by the Company’s charter.
Tradition avers that he founded the original town of New Smyrna, dug drainage canals, built stone warehouses, cleared several thousand acres of dense forest, and began to raise indigo on a large scale.
The contracts of the colonists, under which they were to receive allotments of land, proper wages and maintenance, were ruthlessly and systematically violated. The region was then remote and inaccessible, and the poor, ignorant peasantry, helpless to a degree hard to realize, in our own day, outside of, perhaps, Siberia, or Tibet, in far-off Asia.
So isolated was that section from all connection with the outside world that this sort of thing went on for years without its being known, even at St. Augustine. The lands were not divided, nor the wages paid. Instead the Minorcans were compelled to work like the Israelites in Egypt, under harsh overseers, amid all the discomforts of a semi-tropic wilderness, environed by savage tribes to the west and south, trailed by bloodhounds to prevent escape, punished like convicts, and wretchedly housed and fed. Guarded also by armed men, their condition was, indeed, most forlorn and miserable.
It was said that our own Revolution against Great Britain had been going on for a year or more, before these long suffering Minorcans heard that such a thing had been even considered by the more northerly colonies. Then, however, the worm turned. There was a great uprising, for such a life, now tinged with a ray of hope, was unendurable.
Harsh measures were resorted to by Turnbull, who also evoked the aid of the civil law, claiming that the Minorcans had violated their contracts as a sort of “Redemptioners,” bound to serve for a stipulated period, etc. Some of the ring leaders were taken to St. Augustine by soldiers, and five actually condemned to death. Of these, two were pardoned; one was reprieved, on condition that he act as executioner of the remaining two; a number of others were, for a time, imprisoned.
The wretched colonists, however, continued to run away in larger numbers, either defying or defeating recapture, so that Turnbull eventually found himself without labor. The town, the plantations, and the various public works were deserted, and the vast enterprises thus despotically inaugurated, were at last stranded.
In vain did he, in the name of the now semi-defunct London Trading Company, make most liberal offers of land and wages to his recalcitrant and vanishing slaves. They wanted no more of Turnbull, his methods, or his works. The entire scheme fell through; Dr. Andrew Turnbull went back to England a ruined man; the town crumbled into ruins, the indigo plantations lapsed into a second forest growth; the labyrinth of ditches filled up, until only the remains of the old canal, some crumbling coquina ruins, and the name of the chief despot himself, now given to the ancient land grant which was the scene of his cruelties, and known generally as Turnbull Hammock, are left as mementoes of one of the gloomiest pages of our by no means untroubled colonial annals.
Instead of a natural increase in numbers during ten years of bondage and escape, not more than seven or eight hundred of the immigrants were left. But they were naturally thrifty and economical. Once scattered out and doing for themselves, unburdened by the incubus of Turnbullism, their numbers and resources gradually increased. Probably several thousand of their descendants, more or less intermixed with alien blood, still occupy the land of their forefathers’ adoption. These are small farmers (engaged in truck, and semi-tropic fruit growing), fishermen, boat sailors, and petty traders. A few have risen to social and political eminence as well as wealth. But these cases are rather exceptional.
As a whole, they are patriotic American citizens. The late war with Spain, for the relief of Cuba, proved that. Many of the younger men volunteered for service. Some even went to the Philippines.
“Free America vur beeg contree,” said a returned soldier to one of his home folks who had never seen a hill higher than some of the great shell mounds on the eastern shore of the Matanzas River. “Mountains higher than clouds, lakes wide like sea. Minorcans vur small people. Room for ever’one here. Home best place after all.”
And so it is, even for the posterity of those so woefully misused by the British Trading Company’s George the Third methods, as to be miscalled five generations later by local detractors, “Turnbull’s slaves.”
Wm. Perry Brown.