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Summary: A Saga Worth Telling -- A Tale Well-Told
Review: I devoured Patricia Griffin's well-illuminated history of the Minorcans in British East Florida's New Smyrna colony. Of all the materials written on this subject, her treatment is more comprehensive and more on-the-mark than any I've encountered, including Jane Quinn's Minorcans in Florida published a quarter century ago.In 1768, some 1,403 souls left the deep-water, sheltered port of Mahon, capital city of Minorca, second largest of Spain's Balearic Islands south and east of Barcelona in the Mediterranean Sea. Approximately one thousand were Minorcan peasants enticed to voluntary servitude that would last nine years in order to buy passage to the New World with the hope of escape from a multi-year famine in their homeland. The other 400 were comprised of Greeks, Italians sprinkled with a handful of Spanish, French and others, equally indentured. Their promised land turned out to be a mosquito swamp on Florida's east coast a few miles south of present-day Daytona Beach's hedonistic party place. Their new-found "paradise" turned out to be a reeking, stinking indigo plantation created by Scotsman Andrew Turnbull. (His smirking portrait appears on page 79.) Their nine years of slavery turned out to be a hell none of them could have imagined while standing on the wharf at Mahon that fateful spring of emigration. By the time the survivors of Turnbull's failed plantation straggled 75 miles north to St. Augustine after nine years of brutal servitude, fewer than half of them survived. The remnant swelled St. Augustine's populaton of 1,200 in 1777 by 50%. Over the intervening two centuries and a quarter, the Minorcans (including Greeks and Italians) have made their mark on America's oldest city. All in all, Mullet on the Beach is a gripping epic well-treated by a knowledgable author. It's an excellent glimpse into a true saga--another golden thread in the rich tapestry of America.
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