The Menorcans and the Datil Pepper
Near St. Augustine, Florida
Walk the old town and you will meet the word Minorcan again and again, on menus and on family names. It marks the descendants of one of the saddest and most stubborn migrations in Florida history. In seventeen sixty-eight a Scottish doctor named Andrew Turnbull sailed from the Mediterranean island of Menorca with more than fourteen hundred colonists, along with Greeks, Italians, and Corsicans, to grow indigo at a plantation south of here called New Smyrna.
The venture was a disaster. Disease, hunger, and harsh treatment killed close to a thousand of them within a decade. In seventeen seventy-seven the survivors, some six hundred souls, walked roughly seventy miles north to Saint Augustine and begged the British governor for refuge.
He granted it, and they settled in the northwest corner of the walled city. Their descendants number in the tens of thousands today, and their kitchens gave the region its flavor: Minorcan clam chowder, seasoned pilau rice, and above all the fiery little datil pepper. Tradition says they carried the datil from Menorca, though botanists doubt it, since the pepper is an American species.
However it arrived, the datil is now grown mostly right here, a small, sweet, blazing emblem of a people who refused to die.
