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.