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"I asked him," said Rectus. "Asked him!" I exclaimed. "You don't mean to say that you got up early and went around asking people if they were Mohicans!" "Minorcans, I said." "Well, it's bad enough, even if you got the name right. Did you ask the man plump to his face?" "Yes. But he first asked me what I was. He was an oldish man, and I met him just as I was coming out of the bath-house.
Why, he thought we used to be slaves; what put that in his head, I'd like to know? Did he reely think we ever was niggers?" "Oh, no!" I exclaimed. "He had merely heard the early history of the Minorcans in this country, their troubles and all that, and he " "But what difference did it make to him?" interrupted the old man.
They look a good deal like Spaniards, Mr. Cholott said, and many of them are very excellent people. Rectus took the greatest interest in these Minorcans, but we didn't take board with any of them. We went to the house of a lady who was a friend of Mr. Cholott, and she gave us a splendid room, that looked right out over the harbor.
But what are you going to do with your Minorcans, Rectus, when you catch them?" He laughed, but didn't mention his plans. "I didn't know how you got clams," he said. "I thought you caught them some way. It would never have entered my head to dig for them."
So they just rose up and rebelled, and left old Turnbull to run his colony by himself. Served him right, too. They started off on their own accounts, and most of them came to this town, where they settled, and have had a good time ever since. There are a great many of them here now, descendants of the original Minorcans, and they keep pretty much together and keep their old name, too.
A chap called Turnbull, more than a hundred years ago, brought over to Florida a lot of the natives of the island of Minorca, in the Mediterranean, and began a colony. But he was a mean sort of chap; he didn't care for anything but making money out of the Minorcans, and it wasn't long before they found it out, for he was really making slaves of them.
He said that board could be had with several families that he knew, and that some of the Minorcans took boarders in the winter. Of course, Rectus wanted to know, right away, what a Minorcan was. I didn't think it was exactly the place to ask questions which probably had long answers, but Mr. Cholott didn't seem to be in a hurry, and he just started off and told us about the Minorcans.
Although many parts of the town are the same as they were in the old Spanish days, and although we may even find the descendants of the Minorcans who were once its principal citizens, the city now contains many handsome modern dwellings and hotels, some of which are exceptionally large and grand.
The yellow old couple were slow-witted Minorcans, part pagan, part Catholic, and wholly ignorant: their minds rarely rose above the level of their orange trees and their fish-nets.
During her slave days she knew many of the slaves on plantations in the Saint Augustine vicinity. Several of these plantations, she says, were very large, and some of them had as many as 100 slaves. The ex-slave, who is now 84 years old, recalls that at least three of the plantations in the vicinity were owned or operated by Minorcans.
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