Ephemera
Grazia Dura Bin and Levant new world connections
This is probably the oldest image of a Levantine woman, dating from the 18th century when the European populations in the Levant were still modest in numbers.
Gracia Maria Robin was the daughter of a wealthy French merchant, Jean Baptiste Robin, in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire. Her name has erroneously been recorded in places as Dura Bin, a mis-transcription of ‘du Robin’. She married in 1753 Dr. Andrew Turnbull (1718-1792), erroneously attributed to be a former British Consul at Smyrna, who organized the largest attempt at British colonization in the New World by founding New Smyrna, Florida, named in honour of Gracia’s birthplace. New Smyrna, Florida Colony, founded in 1768, encompassed some 101,400 acres.
One of Turnbull’s prospective partners in the venture was Francis Levett, an English factor working in Livorno for the Levant Company. From a powerful English mercantile family with extensive trading connections, Levett hoped to use his influence in the Levant to supply Greek laborers to Turnbull’s new colony. Levett then left London, where he had relocated, and settled in British East Florida, where he was granted a 10,000-acre (40 km2) plantation by Governor Grant. However his collaboration with Turnbull apparently came to naught.
Francis Levett was born in the Ottoman Empire, the son of Francis Levett, a Levant Company factor and tobacco merchant who as a descendant of the trading house built by two brothers, Sir Richard Levett, Lord Mayor of London, and his brother Francis Levett, planter Francis Levett was well-connected in the tight world of English trading overseas. Piggybacking on the exploding British Empire, these early English traders built juggernauts, trading everything from tobacco to indigo to textiles. The early Levett brothers, sons of a Puritan rector in Ashwell, Rutland, built their empire from scratch, intermarrying with other powerful merchant families. Francis Levett followed in their footsteps. The Levant was very much part of this nexus of this growing global trade network.
Amongst the founder population of New Smyrna besides the Greeks living in Ottoman Greece, and in Asia Minor, there were many Greeks settled in Menorca (British controlled at the time), and that the English felt the Turkish rulers of Greece would not object if the English enticed Greeks to leave their homeland for a new country and in hopes of a better life.
The colony had a rocky start and ultimately failed clearly not helped by the heavy-handed management of Turnbull perhaps reflecting his colonial mind-set. Although the colony produced relatively large amounts of processed indigo in its first few years of operation, it eventually collapsed after suffering major losses due to insect-borne diseases and Indian raids, and growing tensions caused by mistreatment of the colonists on the part of Turnbull and his overseers. It is not known if Turnbull and Grazia had offspring.
