A work on a contested land title, privately printed in London for the parties interested about the middle of this period,[79] might possess some little interest from the accompanying plan, but in other respects is probably valueless. There is a manuscript work by John Gerard Williams de Brahm, preserved in the library of Harvard College, which “contains some particulars of interest relative to Florida at the period of the English occupation.”[80] Extracts from it are given by Mr. Fairbanks, descriptive of the condition of St. Augustine from 1763 to 1771, and of the English in the province. This De Brahm was a government surveyor, and spent a number of years on the eastern coasts of the United States while a British province.
Among the many schemes set in motion for peopling the colony, that of Lord Rolls who proposed to transport to the banks of the St. Johns the _cypriennes_ and degraded _femmes du pave_ of London,[81] and that of Dr. Turnbull, are especially worthy of comment. The latter collected a colony from various parts of the Levant,--from Greece, from Southern Italy, and from the Minorcan Archipelago--and established his head quarters at New Smyrna. The heartless cruelty with which he treated these poor people, their birth-place and their fate, as well as the fact that from them most of the present inhabitants of St. Augustine receive their language, their character, and the general name of Minorcans, have from time to time attracted attention to their history. Besides notices in general works on Florida, Major Amos Stoddard in a work on Louisiana[82] sketches the colony’s rise and progress, but he is an inaccurate historian and impeachable authority. It is the only portion of his chapter on the Floridas of any value. In 1827, an article upon them was published in France by Mr. Mease,[83] which I have not consulted, and a specimen of their dialect, the Mahonese, as it existed in 1843, in the _Fromajardis_ or Easter Song, has been preserved by Bryant, and is a curious relic.[84]
§ 5.--THE SECOND SPANISH SUPREMACY. 1780-1821.
During this period few books were published on Florida and none whatever in the land of the regainers of the territory. The first traveller who has left an account of his visit thither is Johann David Schöpf,[85] a German physician who had come to America in 1777, attached to one of the Hessian regiments in the British service. At the close of the war he spent two years (1783-4) in travelling over the United States previous to returning home, a few weeks of which, in March, 1784, he passed in St. Augustine. He did not penetrate inland, and his observations are confined to a description of the town, its harbor and inhabitants, and some notices of the botany of the vicinity--for it was to natural history and especially medical botany that Schöpf devoted most of his attention during his travels. The difficulties of Spain with the United States in regard to boundaries gave occasion for some publications in the latter country. As early as 1797, the President addressed a message to Congress “relative to the proceedings of the Commissioner for running the Boundary Line between the United States and East and West Florida,” which contains a resumé of what had been done up to that date.
